Bachelor Bait

I'm always up for Hollywood's B movies of the 1930s, even if they often turn out to be no great shakes. One that's interesting if uneven that I recorded off of TCM and recently watched off my DVR is Bachelor Bait.

The movie starts off with a prologue of sorts: Stuart Eriwn stars as William Watts, heading to his job as a clerk in the marriage license bureau of a typical-for-Hollywood big city of the early 1930s. A young couple who will have no further importance to the plot (the bride is played by Anne Shirley) are there before hours to elope, while William is right on time, because the boss is supposedly going to fire anyone who shows up to work late. Wouldn't you know it, but William's image-conscious colleague shows up an hour late, and when William tries on his co-worker's hat and cane, William is the one who gets fired for tardiness, which also makes no logical sense other than we need a way for William to be out of a job for the main plot.

Having been fired, William goes back to his apartment where his unemployed neighbor Cynthia (Rochelle Hudson) is mending his shirts. William decides he's going to go into business for himself as a sort of dating service, which is eventually going to be called "Romance Inc." With a little help from Cynthia, William takes out an ad in the paper: men, send me $5, and I'll find you a wife. When William goes to his post office box to get the mail, he finds he's been deluged with enough mail and $5 bills that he can open a swanky office. His taxi driver Van Dusen (Skeets Gallagher) is an out-of-work lawyer who goes to work for William, with Cynthia taking on the job of front-office secretary.

The business somehow immediately becomes a massive hit, which again makes no sense from a logical point of view but this is a depression-era fantasy of sorts so just roll with it. Showing up to Romance Inc. among others is the local political boss, Barney Nolan (Berton Churchill), who wants a piece of the action and is also certain this is a racket. So when William says no, he's not letting a political fixer in on the business, Barney sets about getting his hand-picked DA to trump up a crime. Also showing up is Allie (Pert Kelton), who is the former Mrs. Van Dusen from a brief marriage and now looking for five years' worth of alimony. But since she's an unmarried woman, she'd be a good candidate for Romance Inc. to marry off.

This point becomes important when an Oklahoma oil millionaire, Don Belden (Grady Sutton), writes in looking for a wife. Allie would be perfect for this, while the description of an ideal woman that William describes just happens to fit Cynthia. Apparently William is too stupid to realize how much Cynthia has the hots for him, so it's going to take the rest of the movie for the right people to wind up romantically paired with each other, as well as wrapping up the other plot points in a way that satisfies the Production Code.

Bachelor Bait has all the makings of a fun, zippy little B movie, but as I said at the beginning it's rather uneven. I think that's because the movie really should be a straight-up comedy, while large portions of it feel too much like a drama. The cast is workmanlike if not terribly memorable here. I suppose back in 1934 the audiences would have enjoyed this as a second feature for the few weeks it was in the feature, before going on to the next set of movies to come to their local picture palace. But there's a reason why Bachelor Bait is another of the largely forgotten movies.

Distress Around a Damsel

I'm not the biggest fan of musicals, but there are any number that I should probably watch because they're famous for one reason or another. Among these is one of George Gershwin's final works, doing the songs in the musical A Damsel in Distress. So the last time it was on TCM, I watched it with a view to getting around to doing a post on it.

The movie starts off at Totleigh, an estate in the English countryside. Lady Alyce, the adult daughter in the family, is in love and it's thought that she's about to be betrothed to somebody, but nobody really knows who that somebody is. To that end, the head of the house staff, Keggs (Reginald Gardiner) starts a betting pool among the staff members. Each one antes up and picks from among the men who are known to be known to Alyce and could possibly be the suitor. However, there are more staff members than suitors, so a young boy says that he'll put his money on a "Mr. X", an unknown American.

Cut to an office in London, where American stage actor Jerry Halliday (Fred Astaire) has an office where he can keep his PR guy George (George Burns) together with George's secretary Gracie (Gracie Allen) while Jerry is performing on the London stage. Jerry is certainly not Mr. X, and Alyce doesn't even know him. At least, she doesn't know him yet. Jerry exits his office one day and gets into a taxicab, and wouldn't you know it, but Alyce (Joan Fontaine) is in London too to meet an actual American suitor. Sure enough, she gets into the same cab as Jerry even though he's not the suitor. However, it suits both of them to take the cab together for a while since Alyce is trying to get away from her handlers.

Albert, the young boy who's got The American in the betting pool, sets the cat among the pigeons by writing a phony letter to Jerry as he was in London along with Keggs when Alyce got in the cab with Jerry. The fake letter suggests that Alyce needs help that Jerry can somehow provide. He can come under the pretense that Totleigh is open for guided tours one day a week, and if Jerry comes on that day....

However, Keggs recognizes Jerry and won't let him in the house, but Albert helps him get in courtesy of a visiting choir of madrigal singers. When he gets in, Albert takes him up to Alyce's chambers. The two talk about the "help" Alyce needs in seeing her American suitor, and both of them wind up talking at cross purposes in the sort of way that would lead to the sort of confusion you'd see in a TV sitcom of a later era.

It doesn't take much to guess that Jerry and Alice wind up developing feelings for each other, and that various people are going to try to hinder the relationship or help it out for their own purposes. That, and the sort of misunderstanding you'd get in any of Fred Astaire's musicals with Ginger Rogers. And you can probably guess where everything is heading in the final reel.

As I said at the start, I'm not the biggest fan of musicals, so the material isn't quite my favorite. However, it's easy to see why fans of musicals and the Astaire/Rogers pairings would like this even if it's Joan Fontaine standing in for Rogers. The music having been written by George and Ira Gershwin, it's not surprising that multiple songs have since become standards, notably "Nice Work if You Can Get It".

A Damsel in Distress is inoffensive enough and will probably delight fans of musicals. Definitely worth watching.

Night Around the Vigil

I've mentioned British author A.J. Cronin before, and his medical novels from the era just before World War II in the UK. One of the movies based on a Cronin novel that I hadn't seen before shows up on TCM a few months back: Vigil in the Night. Since the cast sounded interesting, I decided to record it to do a review on it here.

The movie starts out with a camera panning over an establishing reference sign of a Shereham County Hospital, in Shereham, somewhere in England, and the hospital's isolation ward. The attending nurse on duty is Anne Lee (Carole Lombard), working a bit past her shift at 6:10 AM tending to diphtheria patients for whom the most important thing is that their tube not becoming blocked. As I said, she's working a bit past the end of the shift because the nurse who is supposed to come on at 6:00 is late, presumably again. That nurse is Lucy Lee (Anne Shirley), a trainee nurse who doesn't yet have her "certficate". She also just happens to be Anne's sister, and definitely not as good a nurse as Anne.

Sure enough, after showing up those ten minutes late, Lucy promptly goes into the ward kitchen to make herself some tea, and the ominous music playing over the screen makes it quite clear that Something Very Bad is about to happen. That something is the kid's tube getting blocked, and the kid's arm movements make it clear that he's dying thanks to Lucy's negligence. Lucy returns to the wart to find the kid dead, which brings in all the staff. When the doctor asks when the tube became blocked, Anne lies and says five minutes to six. With that she's taking the blame for her sister, in part because she wants Lucy to get that nursing certificate, even though Lucy is insistent that she's never going to become a good nurse like Anne is.

Anne is able to get another job at a hospital in Manchester. She's happy for the work despite the matron (Ethel Griffies) being brutally honest about the working conditions. Her work takes her into the office of Dr. Prescott (Brian Aherne), chief of surgery, and Anne realizes she want to be a nurse in the surgery ward. She even sits in the gallery when the chairman of the hospital board, Matthew Bowley, is operated on, and takes a risk by suggesting that the nurses actually attending have not counted the cotton bandages properly. She turns out to be right, but Bowley's giving her a check is also a huge breach of ethcs.. Still, it brings her even closer to Dr. Prescott. As you can guess, Prescott and Anne begin to fall in love.

Meanwhile, Lucy is finally getting her certificate, and matron needs more nurses, so offers Anne a day off to bring Lucy back. The bus crashes just before another nurse can tell matron what happened at Shereham, but it also serves to give scenes of Anne having to do more dedicated nursing. Heaven knows there's going to be more of that over the course of the movie. If diphtheria, surgery, and bus crashes aren't enough, the climax deals with a meningitis outbreak.

A.J. Cronin was a doctor as well as a writer, and he had decided ideas on how the profession should be run. Indeed, watching Vigil in the Night, it sometimes feels as if "the message" is getting in the way of the story, much like with Stanley Kramer and Not as a Stranger. That's a bit of a shame, because Carole Lombard does a very fine job here. She had spent most of the second half of the 1930s doing all those screwball comedies, and wanted to show that she could really be a serious actress, which is why she made movies like this one. And she (and the film) mostly succeeds.

So if you can take that there's going to be a message practically hitting you over the head at times, I think you'll like Vigil in the Night.

Edna Ferber movies Cimarron down to Texas

Another of the movies that would have been on my "Blind Spot" list if I were taking part in that blogathon is Giant. It was on TCM during Summer Under the Stars as part of a day of Elizabeth Taylor movies, and I recorded it then. It will be on again tomorrow at 4:30 PM, so I recently sat down to watch it and do a post on it here.

Rock Hudson plays Joradn "Bick" Benedict Jr., who inherited a giant ranch from his father in Texas. However, at the start of the movie he's on a train to Maryland because he's looking to buy some horses from one of those southern gentlemen of a type, Dr. Lynnton (Paul Fix). Dr. Lynnton has two daughters, but for the purposes of our story the important one is Leslie (Elizabeth Taylor). She's being pursued by a young Britsh diplomat (Rod Taylor in a small role), but when she sees Bick, she immediately falls in love with him. She's also quite open about speaking her mind. The feeling between the two winds up being mutual, so Leslie marries Bick and goes back to Texas with him on the train.

There's shades of The Sea of Grass here, as Leslie has never been on a ranch, and doesn't yet know how to run it even if she is now technically the mistress of the ranch. Heretofore, running the ranch house and working well with Bick has been his elder sister Luz (Mercedes McCambridge). Unsurprisingly, it's going to be a rough adjustment for both of the women, although thankfully for Leslie Luz dies off about a third of the way through the movie.

Working for Bick on the ranch is Jett Rink (James Dean), the sort of person polite society sees as uncouth and who bristles at being looked down upon. When Luz dies, she's bequeathed a small plot of land to Jett. Bick doesn't want Jett anywhere near the ranch, and offers to buy Jett out, but this is only going to make Jett angrier and determined to become a success as he prospects for oil on that small plot of land. This really ticks off Bick as the land is supposed to be for cattle, not oil. Eventually, of course, Jett does find that oil, and vows to show everybody just how big a guy he really is.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, Bick and Leslie have obviously been busy having sex because Leslie first has twins who grow up to be Luz II (Carroll Baker) and Jordan "Jordy" Benedict III (Dennis Hopper), followed by a third child. Bick loves Jordy and doesn't really care for Luz, but that turns out to be better for Luz: Bick is raising Jordy to inherit the ranch, and Jordy would much rather become a doctor than a rancher. In fact, it's the third child, Judy, who would rather get into farming, although when she marries young ranch hand Bob, they would rather work their own land. This being a sprawling epic, World War II intervenes about here.

After the war is when Jett really becomes fabulously wealthy and, Charles Foster Kane-style, wants to use it. Young Luz, meanwhile, has fallen in love with Jett, because women apparently think James Dean is gorgeous, even when he has a horrible pencil moustache. Bick and Leslie don't know about this relationship, and are horrified when they learn about it.

For me, the big problem with Giant is that it veers too wildly from one plot line to the next, being the sort of story that probably would have worked better as a TV miniseries rather than a movie that, at 200 minutes without any sort of roadshow presentation like an overture or intermission, is way too long. I didn't even mention the racial tolerance part of the plot that's especially tacked on at the end: Leslie has been trying to help the poor Mexicans living in a shantytown on the ranch throughout the movie, while Jordy marries a young Mexican woman.

Even with the flaws, Giant is a memorable movie, thanks to excellent production design and good performances from all of the members of the elder generation. Among those I haven't mentioned in smaller roles in that generation are Jane Withers and Chill Wills; Sal Mineo plays a Mexican of about Jordy's age who gets killed in action in World War II. And I'm sure there are a lot of people out there who will like the movie more than I did. So definitely give it a watch.

George Stevens' World War II footage

Tonight is the final night of the Five Came Back spotlight on TCM, looking at five directors who served in World War II. This last installment looks at George Stevens, who after the war would make such classics as A Place in the Sun and Shane.

During World War II, Stevens had access to a home movie camera and a bunch of color film stock, which he used to good effect to film documentary footage of the war in color, with a lot of it being mostly candid. The footage went unknown for decades until after the director's death. When his son George Jr. cleaned out the attic, he found all that footage and made a documentary about his father. (Actually, there are two documentaries: a relatively standard one which does include some of the war footage, and one looking specifically at the war footage.)

TCM is, as far as I know, not showing any of the color footage, since it was more or less Stevens' "personal" films and not the stuff he was doing as part of the war effort. (They have shown George Jr.'s "standard" documentary in the past.) So here is some of that footage: