Your Cheatin' Heart

Another of those movies that shows up on TCM often enough, having been made at MGM, is the Hank Williams biopic (for some values of biopic) Your Cheatin' Heart. So the last time it was on TCM I recorded it, and recently watched it to do a post on it for the next airing, which is on tomorrow (September 25) at 8:00 AM as part of a morning and afternoon of the films of George Hamilton.

George Hamilton plays the adult Hank Williams, but before the opening credits there's a scene of a juvenile Williams, shining shoes during the Depression in Alabama and singing with local blues singer Rufus "Teetot" Payne (a small role for Rex Ingram) before Teetot dies right in front of little Hank. (In reality, Hank did know Teetot in childhood and did receive some music lessons from him, but lost contact before Teetot's death.)

After the credits, we see an adult Hank William trying to hawk a tonic at a medicine show. He concludes the show by singing a song he wrote, and it's already quite clear that Hank has a tremendous amount of talent. And wouldn't you know it, but showing up at that day's installment of the medical show is a professional musician, Audrey Sheppard (Susan Oliver), together with manager Shorty Younger (Red Buttons) and some backup singers. Audrey sees a meal ticket and gets Hank to join her and the rest of the band on tour, eventually getting him to marry her.

Audrey keeps pushing Hank's career, including sending one of the songs Hank has written to music publisher Fred Rose (Arthur O'Connell) in Nashville. The song is "Your Cheatin' Heart", although in the real world Hank only wrote that in 1952. Rose likes the song, but wants Hank to prove he can write something original. Hank does that to Rose's satisfaction, and Rose gets Hank a job on the Louisiana Hayride radio show out of Shreveport, LA. Audrey keeps pushing Hank's career, but he is for whatever reason not always comfortable with the limelight and turns to drink.

Somewhat surprisingly, not only is that not the likely reason the real-life Hank turned to drink, but the real reason is one that I think would have had no issue getting past the Production Code which still had not fully disintegrated by the time the movie was made. Hank Williams was born with spina bifida, which left him with back pain all his life, exacerbated by various injuries. (The movie does show Hank falling off a horse at one point.) Being of poor Depression-era stock and with medicine not being quite so advanced, Hank basically self-medicated, even if the long-term result was going to be that it destroyed the marriage to Audrey as well as ultimately his life. I presume most American music fans know Hank Williams died aged 29 in the back seat of the car he was being driven in to his next concert.

Your Cheatin' Heart as a movie is in large part typical of the sort of biopic that studios put out in the Golden Age that was by 1964 decidedly waning. It's full of hokum, backlot work, and stuff that just didn't happen at all the way it did in real life. But the movie is also partially an attempt by Audrey Williams, who was credited as an advisor, to burnish Hank's image and bascially make herself look better. That's partly because Hank remarried a few months before he died but there was a serious question as to whether that marriage was valid. In fact, the movie doesn't even mention this second marriage. There's also the casting of George Hamilton as Williams, which will probably really put some people off. The one really bright spot is the music; George Hamilton only lip-synched the songs which are actually cover versions by Hank Williams Jr. who was all of 15 at the time and already showing his phenomenal talent.

Introducing George Hamilton

Another of the movies that I recorded off of TCM because it sounded interesting was Crime and Punishment, USA. I finally got around to watching it, and now you get the review.

When you seem the title, you might think of Fyodor Dostoevsky's classic novel Crime and Punishment. You'd be right, as the opening credits state it's based on the novel. Those opening credits also give a credit "Introducing George Hamilton", getting a screen all to himself. Hamilton plays Robert Cole, the renamed version of the Raskolnikov character from the book. Also, the action is moved from Saint Petersburg to then-contemporary (the movie was released in 1959) Los Angeles and makes the Raskolnikov character a sort of beatnik.

If you don't know the story of Crime and Punishment, at least it's one that's easy to put into a one- or two-sentence synopsis. Raskolnikov/Cole (to be referred to as Cole for the rest of the post since that's the character name in the movie) kills an elderly pawnbroker woman in part because he believes in a philosophy that says killing can be morally acceptable when it's for some higher moral good. (Somewhat like Alfred Hitchcock's Rope in that manner.) But Cole has a conscience, and the police are able to use that against him to get him to confess.

Indeed, we see foreshadowing of that conscience at the very beginning of the movie. The police are coming to arrest the pawnbroker's killer, except that they've got the wrong man. This draws a crowd of people, of whom Cole is one. But Cole collapses at the sight of the wrong man being taken away, and is brought back to his beach-adjacent apartment by his friend Rafe.

Cole had pawned some of his stuff with the murder victim, and is dumb enough to go straight away to the police to ask for them back, when Lt. Porter (Frank Silvera) tells him they would have given im the evidence when it was no longer evidence. Porter is a dogged investigator, and figures out pretty quickly that Cole killed the woman, but how to get Cole to confess?

Another subplot involves Cole's sister Debbie. She's recently gotten engaged to a much older lawyer, mostly so she can have a comfortable life, but this really ticks off Robert. And then Debbie's former employer Fred Swanson, now a widower, comes looking for Debbie because the man's late wife bequathed a nice sum to Debbie. However, Fred also propositioned Debbie which is why she left and is also something that ticks off Robert. Fred is another one who talks a lot to Robert about the subject of murder, something Robert can never seem to get away from....

I, having majored in Russian back in college, read the book Crime and Punishment ages ago and never really revisited it before seeing this movie version. The book is quite talky because of how it deals with philosophy and the idea of moral superiority. It's something that's difficult to translate to the screen, especially Hollywood of the 1950s. The idea to set it amongst a beatnik-adjacent community is a daring one, although one that doesn't always work. (Hitchcock, of course, got around the idea of philosophizing by having the gimmick of one location and extremely long takes.)

George Hamilton is not normally thought of as a "serious" actor, but to be honest, he doesn't do badly with the material. The supporting cast, however, is nothing special or memorable. Ultimately, Crime and Punishment, USA winds up as an intriguing experiment that doesn't quite succeed but is definitely worth a watch for what the moviemakers tried to do.

Humor? You've Got to Be Kidding!

I've mentioned the comedies of the 1960s, especially the "generation gap" comedies where older Hollywood was trying to keep being "with it" with the younger audiences of the day. A lot of such movies are ones that I don't find very good, because they come across as terribly dated, and probably weren't very funny at the time. Another one that really fits that description is Doctor, You've Got to Be Kidding!.

The movie opens up with a sequence during the credits of a red VW Beetle leading people on a chase through one of the suburbs of Los Angeles, with a couple of motorcycle cops leading the way. The car finally comes to a stop, revealing that it was driving to a hospital. Three men are bickering in the car, and then out comes an older woman, followed by a much younger woman. It doesn't take long to figure out that the younger woman, Heather Halloran (Sandra Dee) is the daughter of the older woman, Louise (Celeste Holm), and that Heather has gone into labor. However, at the hospital, Louise announces Heather has "Miss Halloran. For 'professional' reasons." The implication is that Heather got pregnant out of wedlock, which was a much bigger thing back in the days of the generation gap movie.

At this point, Heather does one of those scenes where we hear her thoughts over the action, and she's wondering how she got herself into this. Unfortunately, she doesn't mean how she got herself into this turkey of a movie, but how she got pregnant without a husband and three young men chasing her to the hospital. Cue the inevitable flashback....

Heather never seems to have had a father in her life, while Mom is the pushy stage mother right out of Gypsy. Mom thinks little Heather can sing, and Mom took the juvenile Heather to appear before various talent agents. Heather would rather just be the regular all-American girl, go off to college, get a job, and then a husband at some point down the road. Eventually she does graduate and becomes a secretary to young executive Harlan Wycliff (George Hamilton).

But Mom is still trying to get Heather into the entertainment business. To that end, she's brought in a songwriter, Pat Murad (Dick Kallman), to write some songs for Heather. Also showing up at the house is their next-door neighbor since Heather's childhood days, Dick Bender (Bill Bixby). He's held a torch for Heather since what one would guess were their high school days. Finally, there's Hank Judson (Dwayne Hickman). He's trying to break in as an actor, and has even gotten some work as an extra and a body double, but for the most part he's reduced to being a shoe salesman. When Heather buys a pair of shoes from him, he falls for her so shows up at the Halloran house unannounced.

Eventually, Mom actually does find Heather a singing job at a nightclub, not that she really wants to take it. So she claims she's going to get into a relationship with her boss Harlan. That doesn't quite work out, but by the time it doesn't work out, she finds out that she's pregnant. One would think Harlan is the father, but Heather doesn't seem to want him. At least there are three other guys who want her even if none of them is the biological father.

You can see why somebody would look at the premise behind Doctor, You've Got to Be Kidding!, and think that there's a great movie to be made here. But none of it works, at least not in my opinion. I think part of it is how the boundary-pushing is so stuck in the 1960s. But in addition, none of the characters outside of the one played by Sandra Dee is very appealing. I didn't want any of these guys to wind up with her at the end.

Still, as always, this is the sort of movie you should probably watch and judge for yourself. Some people, after all, do like this sort of 1960s movie.

Jenny Angel

At the beginning of the month, TCM aired a double feature (maybe more; I didn't look at the schedule that closely) of Mercedes McCambridge movies. I had intended to put them on the DVR but forgot to, so I watched a pair of movies off of Watch TCM, where I think they're available until the end of the month. So you're going to get a pair of McCambridge's movies in relatively quick succession this month. The first post is on a movie called Angel Baby.

Jennifer Angel (listed in the credits as "Introducing Miss Salomé Jens) is a naïve young woman from the south who somehow lost her ability to speak as a child. So, as one of the reviews I read joked, she literally couldn't say no when boys would come on to her. Her alcoholic father catching her in one of those trysts led to a beating and her mom taking her to a faith-healing revival led by Brother Paul Strand (George Hamilton).

Somehow, Paul's faith in Jesus cures Jenny's inability to speak, and she's able to say the word "God". With practice, she's going to be able to learn a lot more, as she starts traveling with Brother Paul's road show, which includes his much older wife Sister Sarah (Mercedes McCambridge) and another couple, Mollie (Joan Blondell) and Ben (Henry Jones) Hays. Jenny shows a deft ability at delivering the Lord's message, so she becomes a part of the show. She's also grateful enough to Paul that she begins to fall in love with him, even though Mollie warns her about this since Paul is of course married to Sarah, creepy as that sounds. (In fact, that creepiness becomes a part of the plot.)

Jenny is also quite fetching, so that there are a lot of young men out there who do know of her "sinful" past and still lust after her. One of them, Hoke Adams (Burt Reynolds), basically tries to rape her, so when she screams for help, Brother Paul comes running and gets into a fight that results in Hoke ripping off Paul's shirt. This enrages Sarah, who thinks Paul is filled with lust and that Jenny is still sinful. So Sarah casts Jenny out because Sarah thinks she's the only pure one left. Mollie and Ben Hays go with Jenny and start their own road show.

The show isn't particularly successful. Never mind the extent to which such shows are scams, Jenny's show barely brings in enough "donations" for the three of them to afford to eat much more than canned sardines. That is, until a businessman who makes patent medicines, Sam Wilcox (Roger Clark), sees the show and decides that what the two need is a business partnership. He'll sponsor the show and in exchange he gets to use Jenny's name and likeness for his medicines. He is, after all -- or so he claims -- interested in doing the Lord's work. But of course it's going to take more to do the Lord's work than that, so he rigs things by paying off a shill to be "healed" by Jenny, leading to a bunch of gullible dupes crashing the next show thinking they'll really get cured. Mollie and Ben saw Wilcox paying off the shill, so they know it's a fraud, but how can they stop it? This brings in Paul and Sarah for the climax....

Angel Baby is an odd little movie, but one that's compelling despite its flaws. I think it's down in part to all of the evangelist characters being portrayed as sincere, with the exception of McCambridge's character. This gives her an opportunity to give a thoroughly over-the-top performance as she goes off the deep end for the finale; she's also increasingly controlling. The black-and-white cinematography, from a young Haskell Wexler, is also quite striking. So while it's not a great movie by any stretch of the imagination, Angel Baby is definitely worth watching.

Mr. Kitty Carlisle

Another of the movies I recently watched that's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive is Act One.

The movie is based on the memoir by celebrated playwright Moss Hart (played here by George Hamilton), a man I first knew of as the late husband of To Tell the Truth panelist Kitty Carlisle Hart and her pearls, because I was the right age to see that show and not any of Hart's plays. (Kitty is not a character in the movie, for the record.) Obviously, later on I learned about Hart and his plays such as You Can't Take It With You which were wildly successful both on the stage and the screen.

But Act One tells the story of Hart before he became famous, or at least part of the story. (Hart died before he could write an Act Two.) The action starts in September 1929, when Hart is in his mid 20s. He had dreams of making it as a writer, and wrote several plays of the sort he thought a serious playwright like Eugene O'Neill would have written. His agent Maxwell (Sam Levene) and his friend Joe Hyman (Jack Klugman) both like the plays, but they also know that dramas won't sell as they're a dime a dozen. If you want to hit it big, you have to write a comedy.

Mossy doesn't know what to write about, and comedy is hard, anyway. But he reads an article in Variety about how the advent of talking pictures has caused all sorts of upheaval in Hollywood. So he thinks he can write a comedy about the behind-the-scenes part of the stage and movies. Eventually, he finishes it, and even gets an appointment with Broadway producer Warren Stone (Eli Wallach). Stone makes Moss wait days for that appointment, and then sits on the play for weeks.

In the meantime, one of his friends knows another producer, Harris, and Harris is able to get Moss a meeting with the already successful playwright George S. Kaufman (Jason Robards, who was still using the "Jr." in his name at this point in his career). Now, we know that Kaufman and Hart went on to write You Can't Take It With You, so we know it will ultimately become a successful partnership, but the movie ends before the big successes.

Kaufman reads the play, and likes the idea, but also knows that as it is, it's going to die on the stage because it just isn't funny enough. So he tells Moss that they're going to have to rewrite the whole darn thing. And even then, it's still not a sure thing that the play is going to become a success....

I haven't read the book on which the movie was based, but the reviews of the movie I've read from people who have read the book say that a lot was lost in the translation from page to screen. I don't have nearly as low an opinion as some of these reviewers, but I can understand why people might consider it a disappointment. The movie is OK as far as it goes, but there's always the feeling that there could be something more here. This is probably most notable at a tea party where Moss meets most of the Algonquin Round Table, but that's all we see of those celebrated wits.

Robards comes off best as Kaufman, and there are some interesting faces with recurring roles as Moss' friends who meet at a deli as a sort of round table of their own. There's future game show host Bert Convy as Archie Leach (yes, that Archie Leach, and surprisingly there's a plot point about his going to Paramount in Hollywood -- Act One was distributed by Warner Bros.). A young George Segal plays the friend who gets Moss the meeting with Kaufman, and David Doyle, a man I only knew from reruns of Match Game which mentioned he was a star Charlie's Angels, plays the last member of the group of friends.

You could do worse than Act One, but you could also do better. Still, I'd say it's worth a watch.