The Working Man

TCM's schedule for tomorrow, July 8, is a series of films directed by John G. Adolfi. One of them happened to be on my DVR, so once again I decided that I would watch that upcoming movie in order to be able to write up this post. That film is The Working Man, and you can see it at 5:15 PM.

The titular working man is played by George Arliss, as a man named John Reeves. As the movie opens, he's the head of the Reeves Shoe Company, headquartered in Buffalo, NY. There's a Depression on, of course, since the movie was released in 1933, but Reeves is a hard worker and sound businessman, so his company is doing moderately well. Not that his nephew Benjamin (Hardie Albright) would have you believe. He believes his uncle is getting past his prime and that perhaps it would be time to take a well-deserved retirement. After all, Benjamin has been groomed to run the company since Reeves doesn't have any kids of his own.

So Reeves goes on a vacation to Maine with old friend Davis (J. Farrell MacDonald). There, their smaller fishing boat gets boarded by a couple of swimmers from the yacht nearby. Those swimmers happen to be a brother and sister, Tommy (Theodore Newton) and Jenny (Bette Davis) Hartland, children of Reeves' rival who has recently died. Reeves doesn't tell them his true identity, but claims to be a bookkeeper named Walton. Tommy and Jenny are trust-fund babies who know nothing about the business, and when Reeves hurts his hand aboard their yacht, they give him a job at the shoe factory just to keep him quiet.

What Reeves finds shocks him. The manager Tommy has installed, Fred Pettison (Gordon Westcott), has been running the factory into the ground. Meanwhile, the siblings have been spending like there's no tomorrow, so if they're not careful they're going to go bankrupt. Meanwhile, it's revealed that the reason Reeves has no family of his own is that Hartland was once Reeves' romantic rival and won the girl they were both wooing. So Reeves begins to see Tommy and Jenny almost as foster children of his own.

Reeves finds out that one of the Hartland trustees is permanently in Europe, which would in theory give the remaining trustees the right to replace him with somebody else. Reeves reveals his true identity to the trustees, but not to the Hartland siblings, and comes up with a way to get them to have him become one of the trustees thinking it was their idea all along. Of course, this is all part of Reeves' plot to show his nephew that he can still run a business: Benjamin still thinks his uncle is in Maine with Davis.

Reeves' time as trustee starts out badly, since he dumps all their bootleg liquor down the drain and fires most of the servants, the two kids not being able to afford all this. Jenny has a bit more sense in her head than Tommy, so she's willing to try to get a job at the Reeves shoe factory to find out how things are run efficiently. That, and when the two kids see just how badly in debt they've gotten, she's able to help convince Tommy to go back to the factory to do the director's job that he's been neglecting.

Now, as you might guess, everything works out all right in the end. So a lot of the fun is in seeing how it works out, because frankly the plot is kind of nonsensical. But with George Arliss as the protagonist, you also know you're going to get a good performance that by itself makes such material worth watching. I think I've more or less mentioned the same thing regarding two other Arliss movies that are on tomorrow's schedule: The Millionaire (9:30 AM) and A Successful Calamity (1:45 PM). Indeed, I see in my post on The Millionaire that I made a comparison to A Successful Calamity.

So regardless of how grounded in reality it is or isn't, The Working Man is another good reason to see just what an entertaining actor George Arliss was.

For the George Arliss fans

I notice that Voltaire is on TCM tomorrow morning at 6:00 AM. A search of the blog suggested I mentioned it once before, when it was part of a TCM Bastille Day line-up many years ago. I think I watched it more recently than that post, but it's still been at least a couple of years, so the movie isn't quite so fresh in my mind.

As you can probably guess from the title of the post, George Arliss plays Voltaire, the French writer from the reign of King Louis XV (Reginald Owen) who has views that were relatively radical for the time although I wouldn't be surprised if there are idiots somewhere who think he should be canceled. In this movie version, Voltaire has some support from the King's mistress, Madame de Pompadour (Doris Kenyon), she of the hairdo, but is opposed by the King's chief advisor, the Count de Sarnac (Alan Mowbray).

Voltaire writes some controversial stuff calling for one M. Calas to be spared the death penalty, but that doesn't happen, and part of the punishment is also to be dispossessed, which is a problem for Calas' daughter Nanette (Margaret Lindsay). She, looking for help, runs off to Voltaire, but for him to hide her in his house is legally problematic for both of them.

How to save himself? Well, Voltaire wrote a lot, so in this movie, he extricates himself from the situation by writing a new play which is an allegory for the situation he is in, with a King of some other country in a more exotic part of the world doing the things Louis did. It ought to be a fairly obvious reference, but this Voltaire, and of course George Arliss, are so darn charming that the King can't help but have sympathy for Voltaire.

The plot may be a bit frustrating at times and some might suggest that Arliss could be prone to mugging to the camera. I think I'd say that's a bit more true in the historical dramas like Voltaire, and less in the contemporary dramas, where Arliss is usually quite good, raising mediocre material to something worth watching. As with those, Arliss is the big reason to see Voltaire, as he really is that charming.

I don't think Voltaire has ever gotten a DVD release; it probably should have one one of those four-film box sets that TCM and Warner Home Video used to release. There are quite a few Arliss movies that would be better at the box-set price point.

The Millionaire (1931)

TCM is running a bunch of James Cagney movies tomorrow morning and afternoon. Most of them are fairly early in his career, and in some he's only got a small role. A good example of this is The Millionaire, which is on at 8:15 AM.

The star here is George Arliss. He plays James Alden, an industrialist who has been forced into retirement for health reasons. Not that he's happy about it, as he finds retirement frightfully boring. So, being bored silly, he decides to do something about it, and go back into business, only without telling anybody. He finds an ad in the paper to buy a half share of a service station, and takes it. The other half is owned by Bill Merrick (David Manners), an aspiring architect who is running the gas station so he can raise the money to go into business as an architect. While in college, he met Alden's daughter Barbara (Evalyn Knapp) briefly, not knowing that Barbara's father is his business partner in disguise.

As for the business itself, it's not going so well. That's because the man who sold it, Mr. Peterson, had a good reason for selling it. He knew that a new highway was going to be built and that this new bypass road would make the station he sold obsolete. Indeed, Peterson is opening a new service station alongside that bypass road. Poor Bill.

Except of course that Bill's business partner isn't poor. James decides to use some of his fortune to buy a service station across from Peterson's new station, and go into competition with Peterson, helping Bill along the way. James certainly has enough of a fortune to undercut poor Peterson, who doesn't know what's hitting him. But will James be discovered for who he really is before he can succeed in all his plans?

The Millionaire may not be the first thing you think of when you think of George Arliss, but then again, it's a film with a similar tone to something like A Successful Calamity, which coincidentally also has Evalyn Knapp as George Arliss' daughter. (The part of James Alden's wife is played by Arliss' real-life wife Florence.) Anyway, in The Millionaire, Arliss once again looks like he's having a blast as he puts one over on his opponents and does a good deed for those around him. He's marvelously entertaining, to the point that you half expect him to be a bit of an imp or something.

As for James Cagney, whom I mentioned at the beginning of the post, he plays an insurance salesman from whom Alden wants to buy some life insurance. It's the agent's suggestion that retired people are a bad insurance risk that gives Alden the idea to go back into business. Cagney is the one person who isn't overshadowed by Arliss, but then Cagney had a way of overshadowing his screen partners himself. It was seeing this and the first days' rushes of The Public Enemy that gave director William Wellman the idea of giving Cagney the starring role in the latter movie instead of the supporting role. The rest, as they say, is history.

The Millionaire is, as far as I know, not available on DVD, not even from the Warner Archive. So you'll have to catch the rare TCM showing.

The Man Who Played God (1932)

A few weeks back I had the chance to record The Man Who Played God when it showed up on TCM. It's apparently available from the Warner Archive (more on that later), so I feel OK doing a full-length post on the film.

George Arliss as Montgomery Royle, a prominent pianist who is currently performing in Paris. He's got a lot of adoring fans, to the point that his sister Florence (Louise Closser Hale) has to deal with all the letters and flowers as his secretary. Among his two biggest fans would be the widow Mildred (Violet Heming) who thinks Montgomery should settle down, and somebody like her would be a good woman to do it with; and Grace (Bette Davis). Grace has been Montgomery's student, and she has a crush on him even though he's more than twice her age. Still, he says to her to give the relationship six months and, if she still holds a flame for him, then he'll marry her.

Meanwhile, back to that concert. Montgomery informs everybody that he heard that there's a European king who plans to be in attendance incognito -- and no, he's not going to say which country's king it is. That's a good thing, because it's the king of one of those countries that likes to have revolutions of the sort that took place from time to time in the Hollywood movies of the day. There are, in fact, terrorists waiting for the king to show up at the concert hall so that they can assassinate him. Except it turns out that the king's car develops mechanical problems, leading to his missing the entire concert! But he shows up at the after-show party, and gets Montgomery to play something for him. Unfortunately those terrorists have spotted the king, for they throw a bomb just outside the window of the room where everybody is enjoying themselves. The king is OK, but the shock from the blast destroys Montgomery's eardrums or something, because the result is that he winds up stone deaf.

What's a deaf pianist to do? Well, Montgomery doesn't want to live life any longer even though he's got a lot of money, a nice overlooking Central Park, and a lot of friends. What good is life without music? And why would any God do a thing like this to him? So Montgomery goes out on the balcony and plans to jump off! Thankfully, his butler stops him, and gives him the idea to learn how to read lips.

Montgomery becomes a very adept lip reader. So adept, in fact, that he's able to take a pair of binoculars and look down into the park below and watch the people sitting on the benches there. It's a pretty darn powerful pair of binoculars, because he's able to read the lips of the people in the park which is how he learns about their problems. And Montgomery decides that he's got a new mission in life, which is to help those poor people down there with their problems.

The only thing is, it turns out that one of those people is Grace. She spent the months after the bombing out in California with Harold (Donald Cook) and his smart set friends. Harold has always loved Grace, and thinks that somebody like himself would be more appropriate for Grace than an old man like Montgomery; never mind the fact that Montgomery is now deaf. And during those months out in California, Grace comes to realize that she loves Harold. Oh, she still likes Montgomery since he's such a nice man, but she doesn't have the feelings for him that she used to. But she feels she has to go through with the marriage to Montgomery, because to let him down would break his heart and kill him.

It's all reasonably interesting stuff. George Arliss is fun to watch as always, brightening up pretty much every movie that I've seen him in, even something like this that should be melodramatic piffle but isn't. (Compare it to something like Magnificent Obsession.) This was near the beginning of Bette Davis' career, and the chance to work with Arliss, who was a fairly big star at the time, gave her an opportunity at her first big role. (This even though she's credited behind Heming). Bette hasn't yet become the Bette of Now, Voyager and other histrionic roles, and she shows why she would ultimately become a legendary actress. The rest of the cast is serviceable, but it's Arliss especially, and to a lesser extent Davis, that you watch this movie for.

It's a bit surprising that even with the presence of Bette Davis and an early Best Actor Oscar winner, this movie isn't very well known. It has been released to DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, but oddly, IMDb suggests you can't get it at Amazon. However, it is available from the TCM Shop, as well as slightly less pricey (for the time being) from the Warner Bros. shop. I wonder if Amazon has lost the rights to Warner Archive DVDs?

A Successful Calamity

TCM's Star of the Month Mary Astor had a long career, lasting some 40 years from the silent era to 1964's Hush, Hush... Sweet Charlotte. Her career crossed genres as well as eras, with this week's look at Astor covering 25 years, and comedies, dramas, and a mystery in there. One surprisingly good movie in the lineup is the early talkie A Successful Calamity, at 6:45 AM tomorrow.

Astor is second-billed, playng Emmy Wilton, the second wife of banker Henry Wilton (George Arliss, the star of the proceedings). Henry is returning from Europe, where he's been negotiating on behalf of the US government to provide loans to various European countries after World War I. Henry's banking work has helped make the family wealthy, and after a year in Europe, he's almost anxious to return home to see the family. Unfortunately, they not as anxious to see him as he is to see them. Not because they're bad people; it's just that the kids are all grown up and have lives of their own, while Emmy has been keeping herself busy while Henry was away too. Emmy has become patron to a musician Pietro (Fortunio Bonanova) whose music Henry really doesn't care for. Son Eddie (William Janney) has become a moderately successful polo player under coach Larry Rivers (a very young Randolph Scott), and goes from polo match to date, barely noticing Dad has come home. Daughter Peggy (Evalyn Knapp) has romantic problems of her own: secretly, she loves Larry, but he wouldn't be a right fit to marry a yound socialite of Peggy's standing, so she has to feign a romantic attachment to Struthers, somebody more suitably wealthy (Hale Hamilton), even though he's a drip and we know he's not right for her. About the only person who still pays attention to Henry is his faithful valet Connors (Grant Mitchell).

So what's a neglected father to do? Connors tells him that because the servants and others of their social standing aren't well-to-do, they have to come up with ways to entertain themselves, rather than going to soirées or polo matches or whatnot. In short, they spend more time together, even if we've seen in a lot of other movies from the early 1930s that the working classes didn't have a home life that was as idyllic as Connors seems to portray it. But it gives Henry an idea! He finally gets everybody together at dinner and tells them that while he was away in Europe, the business apparently suffered some financial reverses, and this has left the Wiltons flat broke. Now, as I said at the beginning, Henry's family are supposed to be at heart good people; it's just that they had their own lives to lead. So when they hear that Dad is broke, they immediately do a 180, as opposed to the family in something like My Man Godfrey where the family members remain just as screwed up. Emmy tries to sell some of her jewelry to raise money, while Eddie tries to get honest work. Some of Wilton's business rivals even try to get the better of him when he's "broke", but they play right into his hands. Eventually Dad tells the family they aren't really broke, and everybody more or less lives happily ever after, except possibly Struthers.

A Successful Calamity is, to be honest, a fairly wispy trifle. It moves along breezily running about 70 minutes, and not all that much really happens. And yet it's a lovely little trifle. This, I think, is almost entirely down to having George Arliss in the lead. The cast around Arliss is all reasonably good, but they pale in comparion to Arliss every time he's on screen. Arliss imbues the Henry Wilton character with a vitality that makes you care what happens to him, even if you don't care all that much about the rest of the family or remember them very much after the end of the film. In fact, Arliss got put in multiple trifling movies like this one and made them a joy to watch. A Successful Calamity isn't the best plot out there, but George Arliss takes what little there is and makes a lot of entertainment value out of it.

A Successful Calamity did get a DVD release as part of a George Arliss box set that can be purchased from the TCM Shop.

George Arliss

TCM's theme for 31 Days of Oscar this year is based on the "6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon" game, in that each pair of movies has at least one person in common. This means that TCM is showing a pair of George Arliss movies back-to-back in the early hours of tomorrow morning, starting with his Oscar-winning performance in Disraeli.

Arliss plays the title role, that being Victorian-era British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. Based on a stage play, the movie deals with Disraeli's plan to buy the Suez Canal for Britain, despite there being machinations from Russia and its spies in London trying to prevent him from getting the canal. Along the way, Disraeli plays matchmaker to a pair of young lovers, played by the reasonably well-known Joan Bennett (the mother in the 1950 version of Father of the Bride, and the not-so-well-known Anthony Bushell. Also appearing is George's real-life wife Florence, playing Mrs. Disraeli.

The movie was made in 1929, at a time when the studios were figuring out how to adjust to the new process of talking pictures, which as always means that the production values an be uneven, as well as the acting. The one exception to this is Arliss, who shines above everybody else, and makes the movie worth watching despite all its technical problems. Of course, the role wasn't difficult for him, since he had created the role on the stage and already done it on screen once before in the silent era.

Disraeli has, as far as I'm aware, not been released to DVD yet.