Ronald Colman does comedy

Another of the movies that's been sitting on my DVR for quite some time was My Life With Caroline. Recently I finally got around to watching it so that I could write up a review before it expired.

Although Ronald Colman is the star, or at least the male lead, we meet several of the other characters first, at a ski resort in Idaho that's running some sort of charity function. Argentine rancher Paco Del Valle (Gilbert Roland) is at the charity kissing booth with Caroline Mason (Anna Lee) making money for charity. After this, Paco wants to talk to Caroline's father Bliss (Charles Winninger), to tell him that he plans to ask for Caroline's hand in marriage, but that since this is the era when it was common to ask a father for that, well, Dad ought to know.

Of course, there's a minor complication. Caroline is already married, to Anthony (Ronald Colman), a successful publisher in New York City. Obviously the only way Caroline would be able to marry Paco is if her first marriage were dissolved, and Anthony has to be consulted on that matter. So a telegram is sent to Anthony, who has his own plane and is able to get to Idaho. You can see the sort of rich set this movie is about. Anthony gets to Idaho, but doesn't tell any of the other main characters that he's arrived, instead preferring to watch the three surreptitiously. Anthony then breaks the fourth wall, telling us in the audience that he's seen this all before. Caroline is just such a lovely person that other men can't help but fall in love with her. Anthony, however, understands that it's him who Caroline truly loves. And, to that end, Anthony tells us he's going to relate a very similar story that happened a few years back....

Flash back a couple of years, and Anthony is returning from another business trip. His wife and father-in-law introduce him to Paul Martindale (Reginald Gardiner), a sculptor who is "struggling" on $100K a year, and not from the earning of what his sculptures bring in. It's already implied at this first introduction that the relationship between Caroline and Martindale has progressed far enough that he's going to ask her to marry him and that the two might just run off together. And the way the story continues, you get the impression that this one wasn't the first time some guy showed interest in Caroline as Mrs. Mason either.

Eventually, Anthony figures out that Paul and Caroline are going to go off on the same train together, so Anthony maneuvers things so that at least one of them misses the train, which will give Caroline the chance to realize that yes, it truly is Anthony that she loves. And in the final scene, we'll go back to Idaho to see that Caroline and Anthony will live happily ever after, for some values of "happily ever after".

I have the feeling that a director like Preston Sturges would have had a field day with the material. Instead, this being co-produced by RKO, directorial duties were given to Lewis Milestone. The result is a movie that feels off somehow, as though it's all a bunch of conventions that somehow don't work together in the final product. What's supposed to be funny is mostly exasperating, and the characters don't feel like real people.

I guess I can see why somebody like Ronald Colman might want to try his hand at comedy, but My Life With Caroline doesn't do him justice.

Another pirate movie

Some time back I did a post on one of the MGM historical mystery shorts, Captain Kidd's Treasure. I mentioned at the time that I had a different movie Captain Kidd, on my DVR, uncertain whether I had seen it before. I watched it, and in fact had not seen it, so now we get a post on it.

Charles Laughton stars as the famed pirate William Kidd. As the movie opens, it's 1699, and Kidd is on a ship not far off the coast of Madagascar, having turned to piracy because his privateer work has come to naught leaving him heavily in debt. (At least, that's the real-life William Kidd, the movie legends play fast and loose with the facts.) Kidd and his men sink a British ship called the Twelve Apostles, and bury the treasure on one of the islands off of Madagascar. However, one of Kidd's men chafes a bit under Kidd's leadership, and gets shot for his trouble simply because Kidd is that brutal of a man.

Kidd returns to London, with a crew including Orange Povy (John Carradine) and Jose Lorenzo (Gilbert Roland). Kidd's plan is to ingratiate himself with the king, William III, in the hopes of getting a new ship and going out ostensibly in the King's service, but with the real intention of returning to piracy as well as getting to that island to get the booty from the Twelve Apostles. To that end, he needs to pass himself off as a gentleman, hiring the valet Shadwell (Reginald Owen).

The King buys Kidd's assertion that the captain of the Twevle Apostles was an actual pirate, and grants a commission to Kidd. Kidd goes to various prisons to round up a crew, seeing as most other men wouldn't want to go to sea if they could avoid it and condemned prisoners would be more likely to take up the job with the prospect of a pardon coming at the end of the tour at sea. They've got nothing to lose, after all. However, one of the prisoners seems a bit odd. Adam Mercy (Randolph Scott) is, among other things, able to write, and doesn't talk like the people of the social classes that make up the rest of the crew.

Out at sea, Mercy both ingratiates himself to Kidd and tries to spy, telling Kidd when he's caught out that His Majesty obviously wanted a representative on board to make certain everything is on the up and up. If something were to happen to Mercy, it could be bad news for Kidd. How much of that story is true is, well, something you'll have to watch to the end of the movie to find out. Meanwhile, Kidd is already plotting to kill the other men who were with him when they buried the treasure off of Madagascar.

In the Indian Ocean, Kidd's men destroy another British ship, although this one comes with more booty than just the traditional treasure. There's a good looking woman, Lady Anne (Barbara Britton), whose father was on board as the ambassador to one of the rajes in India looking to curry favor with King William. Lady Anne has the feeling she's seen Mercy before, while Kidd gets a stronger feeling Adam isn't what he seems or has claimed to be. Now, we know that the real-life Captain Kidd was hanged for his crims, so he's likely not going to get away with his perfidy here.

I have no idea how much of this version of Captain Kidd is real. From what I've read of Kidd's life, some names from Kidd's real life are used here, but that seems to be the extent of the basis in reality. But regardless of that lack of reality, Captain Kidd is entertaining enough, thanks to a production that knows how to get a lot out of a little, along with a pretty good cast. Laughton overacts, although that works here because Kidd is in many ways a larger-than-life figure. Scott isn't exactly British, but is OK with what he's asked to do here.

There are higher quality seafaring movies out there, but if you're looking to be entertained, Captain Kidd will fill the bill.

Glory Alley

I've stated two different general thoughts on MGM over the years. One is that, as probably the most prestigious Hollywood studio, they brought a lot of gloss to movies that would have benefitied from having no gloss. The other is that, once the Freed Unit musicals really got going, it was the other stuff made that's really a lot more interesting. Both of those thought came to mind as I was watching Glory Alley.

The movie is ostensibly set in New Orleans, although it's the MGM backlot's version of New Orleans, which has all the connotations you can think of. Working for one of the newspapers, although about to retire, is columnist Gabe Jordan (John McIntire), who tells his editor that he's never told the full story of boxer Socks Barbararossa (Ralph Meeker). So, as you can guess, we're about to get a flashback that tells us... the rest of the story. Wait, this isn't Paul Harvey, either the radio man or the character actor.

Some time in the past, before the Korean War (the movie was released in June 1952), Socks is about to fight a title bout. But as he's in the ring, he looks up at the very bright ring lights, and realizes... he can't go ahead with the fight! So he just gets out of the ring right then and there and goes to his dressing room in the basement to hide from everyone. Not quite everyone; there's his manager Peppi (Gilbert Roland), trainer of sorts Shadow (Louis Armstrong), girlfriend Angela (Leslie Caron), and Angela's blind father The Judge (Kurt Kasznar). Now, since Leslie Caron had a French accent, she and her dad are portrayed as having fled France when the Nazis occupied it, with Dad hoping to get the family assets back and Angela training to become a nurse to get the money for Dad to have an operation. Except that that last bit is only what Dad thinks; Angela in fact dances in one of the dive nightclubs which brings in rather more money. Anyhow, why did Socks just up and leave the ring? The full reason isn't explained until the end of the movie, but Socks looks at himself in the mirror and sees some of the toll boxing has already taken from him.

Peppi buys a bar of his own while Socks lets himself go, drinking heavily to the point that he's going to have to accept a pity job at Peppi's place. Peppi holds the contract of one other fighter, "Newsboy", which he gives to Socks. Socks intends to raffle off the contract to get some money and to get out of the boxing game for good, but he and Newsboy both get drafted to serve over in Korea. Then, in a truly nutty twist, Socks is able to show some real bravery and win the Congressional Medal of Honor, except that's an award he doesn't really want although he can't really sell it legally to make money.

Socks returns from Korea, and eventually tells Angela the real reason why he left the ring just as he was about to fight for the title, and... everyone lives happily ever after? Yes, basically that's what happens, and the "official" reason Socks gives for running away from that previous title fight is one that makes no sense.

In fact, the movie as a whole doesn't make much sense, seeing as how it veers wildly from one genre to the next. The characterizations are also all wrong. Ralph Meeker is asked to play something much too gentlemanly for a boxer who came up from poverty. Leslie Caron was most likely cast here because it was just after An American in Paris made her big. With her French accent, the studio had to make her character French, necessitating that back story. The melodrama with Dad's operation is an odd thing to shoehorn in here. Even worse is how the movie suddenly switches to the Korean War, looking like a cheap B movie at the same time it's doing this.

So Glory Alley goes wrong in so many ways, and yet that's something that actually makes the movie interesting, to watch how it goes so badly wrong. Not good, mind you, but interesting nevertheless.

Timberland guns

Another movie that I had on my DVR for a little while was Guns of the Timberland. TCM ran it I think in July, and then ran it again in August for Jeanne Crain's day in Summer Under the Stars. But I had enough other stuff to post about that I didn't get around to posting about it then. Besides, I noticed that it was coming up again in September, for a daytime of movies starring Alan Ladd. That showing is coming up tomorrow, September 3, at 1:00 PM.

Alan Ladd plays Jim Hadley, and as the movie opens, he and a bunch of other men are on a seeming freight train, no passenger cars, heading to parts unknown. Or, more specifically, a place called Deep Well. Ladd and his business partner, Monty Welker (Gilbert Roland), have a contract from the government to do a lot of logging in the area because the train line that's getting built needs more wood for rail ties. Ladd is bringing a bunch of men with him, and a bunch of money to provision the men, which seems like it should be a good thing for the townsfolk. Yet all of them seem unhappy when Jim reveals that they're loggers.

The deeper reasoning behind their antipathy is revealed by Laura Riley (Jeanne Crain). She owns a ranch and a bunch of horses that Jim is hoping to rent for his men. But when she finds out that he's a logger, she's fearful, for an understandable enough reason. Her, and everybody else's cattle, need land to graze on, and that land needs topsoil to grow the grass. The trees up in the mountains lock in that topsoil, and if somebody clear-cuts the trees, which is pretty much what Jim is going to do, the ranchers think the land below will become much less nutrient-rich.

Jim takes his men up in to the forest, which is in part an excuse for the moviemakers to show scenery, although this movie was made in 1960. If this were one of the early Technicolor forestry movies from the late 1930s, the scenery might have worked better here. In any case, the weekend comes, and the men want to go back into town to blow off some steam, or at least to have a few drinks. They get to the saloon while the townsfolk are holding a dance in a different building, which is also an excuse for Warner Bros. to show off its new star, Frankie Avalon, singing a very out of place song. Avalon plays Bert Harvey, one of Riley's ranch hands, but winds up having a more substantial role.

The townsfolk learn of the loggers' entry into town, which gives them an idea to come up with some way to try to delay the loggers' progress. They eventually do this by dynamiting the access road back to where the loggers are working. They can walk back, but getting the logs out of the forest is going to be tough. There's another approach, but it goes over the Riley spread.

So the rest of the movie plays out like the sort of western that saw the relatively common theme of the rancher who wanted an open range versus the homesteade who wanted to fence in the land, only with ranchers versus loggers this time. Guns of the Timberland is one of the many movies where it's again easy enough to see why people were interested in the source material (a Louis L'Amour novel) that would give them the chance to film in some very pretty locations. But the plot winds up being a fairly tepid affair and slow going despite the film's putative action and shortish running time of only 91 minutes.

Ultimately to me, Guns of the Timberland felt more like the sort of thing that would in later years be made as a TV movie of the week.

The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima

Tomorrow (August 25) in Summer Under the Stars, TCM is honoring Luis Antonio Dámaso de Alonso, better known by his stage name of Gilbert Roland. One of his movies that I hadn't seen before is The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima, airing at 4:00 PM. With that in mind, I recently watched it in order to be able to do a post on it here.

Catholics are probably aware of Fatima becoming one of the major Catholic pilgrimage sights, much like Lourdes in the French Pyrenees did after young Bernadette claimed to have had a vision of the Virgin Mary, something which was also turned into a major Hollywood movie, The Song of Bernadette. Fatima is a village in central Portugal where, in 1917, three children claimed to see a lady they referred to as the Lady of the Rosary, who told them to come back every month, which resulted in thousands if not tens or hundreds of thousands of Portuguese peasants going to Fatima with the children in the hopes they too could have the vision and be saved by the Virgin Mary's grace, she being the person Catholics pray to when they pray the rosary.

That much I knew, but there's more of a back story to the events in Fatima. In October, 1910, Portugal had a revolution that resulted in the young king being forced to abdicate. The parties who deposed the king were also extremely anti-clerical, in part because the Catholic Church had a lot of influence in the running of the country under the monarchy. (By the same token, the Spanish republicans of the 1930s were also highly anti-clerical, something usually downplayed in most retellings of the Spanish Civil War.) Portuguese rurals were, like a lot of peasants, much stronger believers of Catholicism than the ruling classes, leading to conflict. In the movie, the republican government is clearly portrayed as analogous to Marxists, since the movie was made during the anti-Communist era of the early 1950s; the fact that one of the pronouncements of the Lady of the Rosary had to do with consecrating Russia to the western version of Christ.

One day in May, 1917, young Lucia dos Santos (Susan Whitney) and her cousins Jacinta (Sherry Jackson) and Francisco (Sammy Ogg), had that fateful vision and told their families about it. This caused all sorts of problems since most people weren't going to see a vision, even if they had a lot of faith. But when you add in the fact the the government was trying to suppress the Church, you can imagine how dangerous it would be for the villagers in Fatima to have all those pilgrims coming. The kids, however, keep insisting that they saw the Lady of the Rosary no matter how much pressure the local government officials try to put on them.

As for Gilbert Roland, he plays a completely fictional character, Hugo da Silva, the sort of lovable rogue who shows up a lot in "kids in danger" pictures. He keeps having run-ins with the law, isn't particularly religious. Not out of the sort of anti-clericism the government has, mind you, but since the petty crimes he and the other rough male prisoners commit are usually things the Church would find sinful, how often would you see such men in church? But the kids are so pure, and Hugo is such a good guy at heart, the he eventually helps the kids out, even if he tries to find a way to make a buck off the pilgrims.

Eventually, the kids have one final mass gathering, which results, as it did in real life, in what's known as the Miracle of the Sun, in which many of the pilgrims claimed the sun danced across the sky and not only stopped a cloudburst but dried their clothes impossibly quickly, as well as other similar things. The way it's presented in this movie, however, is faintly ridiculous, leading the movie to have less power then the earlier The Song of Bernadette.

There is a plus, however; the movie has an epilogue showing color documentary footage of the 1951 pilgrimage which was addressed by a papal legate. The film itself won't make anybody believers, but it's certainly an interesting example of an era when Hollywood had much more reverence for religion than it does today.

Our Worses

Some time back, TCM ran the film adaptation of the W. Somerset Maugham play Our Betters. Not having seen it before, I decided to record it and eventually watch it to do a review on here.

Constance Bennett plays Pearl Saunders, an American heiress who marries Lord Grayston (Alan Mowbray, seen only at the beginning of the movie), in part for his title; he's married her for her money because he's one of those British nobles who have lost most of their money (see Gosford Park for an example). Pearl, now Lady Grayston, decides that she's going to shake up the joint, so to speak, by doing her own thing and causing a general scandal among the members of Britain's smart set nobility

Some years later, Lady Grayston is in the same position as her husband as he's spent most of the money. She's also taken on a paramour in the form of Arthur Fenwick (Minor Watson). She decides to introduce her kid sister Bessie (Anita Louise), who's come over from America, to her new social circle and possibly marry Bessie off into the circle. Bessie, for her part, had a fiancé back in America in the form of Fleming Harvey (Charles Starrett).

So Lady Grayston hosts one of those weekend-long parties (again, see Gosford Park) for a couple of her friends and the men in their lives. The Duchess Minnie (Violet Kemble-Cooper) is being pursued by Pepi (a very young Gilbert Roland); Lord Harry (Hugh Sinclair) is there for Lady Grayston to introduce to Bessie; there's a princess (Phoebe Foster) and an American businessman Thornton Clay (Grant Mitchell).

Pepi winds up wooing Lady Grayston and the two go off for a tryst in the teahouse; Minnie is unsurprisingly pissed and sends Bessie to go off and find her sister with Pepi, which understandably pisses off Bessie, who no longer wants any part of this lifestyle. Lady Grayston and Minnie are generally bitches to each other for reasons that I couldn't quite fathom.

The big problem that I had with Our Betters is that it's way too talky, and complicated enough that it could use a second viewing to figure out everything that's going on. The fact that few of the characters are very sympathetic doesn't help either. One high spot is the final scene, with the dance instructor brought from London, who is played as the sort of incredibly stereotypical gay that you wonder how it could have gotten done even in the pre-Code days of 1933.

Our Betters is another of those movies that would probably benefit from being on a box set; I think there are enough adaptations of Maugham's work in the Turner Library (after all, they have The Letter from Warner Bros. and The Painted Veil from MGM) to pull it off. Instead, I could only find it on a standalone DVD from the Warner Archive.

The Big Circus

Some months back, the TCM spotlight was movies about the circus. This gave me the chance to record The Big Circus, which I hadn't seen in ages, and do a post on it now.

Victor Mature is the star, playing Hank Whirling, the proprietor of one of those traveling circuses that sets up a real big top and goes from town to town by train. However, he just lost his partner, Jules Borman, who was bigger and better financed, so the Whirling Circus is in a parlous state. Indiied, in order to go on the next tour, the bank is only going to provide a loan if they can send one of their employees, Randy Sherman (Red Buttons) on the tour to see that the money is being managed properly.

Actually, they send two people, as Randy brings along Helen Harrison (Rhonda Fleming). Her job is as a press agent, which miffs Whirling in part because nobody told him about this, and in part because she's a woman, and he doesn't know whether lady press agents can handle the difficult circus world if they're not the talent or born into it.

One who was born into it was Hank's kid sister Jeannie (Kathryn Grant). In fact, she has just enough talent that she could start practicing with the trapeze act, which includes Zach (Gilbert Roland), who also does the high wire, and Zach's spotter Tommy (David Nelson). But Hank doesn't want Jeannie doing the acts, especially not a dangerous one like the trapeze. Rounding out the major members of this circus are Skeeter the Clown (Peter Lorre in his fat period) and ringmaster Hans Hagenfeld (Vincent Price).

There's a fair amount of conflict since Randy and Helen are all business, and Hank thinks they don't understand the circus business. But there's going to be more conflict. One involves Jeannie's practicing with Zach, and another involves Skeeter getting too drunk to perform. Indeed, in one scene, Randy realizes the show must goes on and takes Skeeter's place in the performance of the clowns, even though he doesn't know the routine.

The biggest problem, however, comes when somebody decides to sabotage the circus, with half the train crashing and killing, among others, Zach's wife. This sends him into a deep funk. That's really a problem since the way for Whirling to save the circus is to get a performance in New York. For the publicity, Whirling's plan was to have Zach to a tightrope walk across Niagara Falls, which was actually performed for the first time a century before The Big Circus, by Charles Blondin. Needless to say, one needs to have all one's faculties and be in the right mental state to do something so dangerous....

There have been a lot of circus movies released, and as with submarine movies there aren't too many distinct plots one can do. So in that regard, The Big Circus isn't terribly original. It's competently made, and the circus performances are nice, but the movie as a whole isn't terribly memorable. It'll certainly entertain you for one watch, however.

Presented with no apologies to our Canadian readers

One of my recent viewings on TCM was the early talkie Men of the North. It's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, so you get a blog post on it now.

Gilbert Roland plays Louis La Bey, also known as "Le Fox", a French-Canadian trapper working out of a trading post village somewhere in a northerly part of the country that has mountains. But before we're introduced to him, we see an unidentified person riding on a dogsled and get attacked by another unidentified person. Louis shows up at the post, just in time for a party.

Meanwhile, it's determined that somebody is attacking people and stealing gold, as a gold shipment to the post from a nearby mine has fewer bags of gold dust than it should. The mine owner himself, Mr. Ruskin (Arnold Korff) is about to show up with his lovely adult daughter Nedra (Barbara Leonard). She's interested in seeing the real north, not that she's going to get it in this movie.

Louis falls hard for Nedra, which pisses off his more or less current girlfriend Woolie-Woolie (Nina Quartero). She spies on Louis once he's alone in his cabin, and sees... he's removing a stone from his fireplace, behind which there's a secret drawer in which he stores gold dust! So he's obviously behind the gold robberies.

Once Woolie-Woolie figures this out and realizes she's being jilted by Louis, she's going to go to the Mounties at the base, who always get their man. Well, maybe not this time. Louis sets off even though there's about to be a blizzard coming up. The Ruskins also head out for their mine, but unlike Louis, they don't have experience with the sort of snow they get here, and they're going to need to be rescued. The Mounties go chasing Louis, and one of them is going to need rescuing, too....

Oh boy is Men of the North a silly movie. There's not much of a story here, and what there is seems disjointed and more worthy of a two-reeler than an early talkie. There's also a whole bunch of the tropes about the Canadian north that you'd expect from a movie like this: the heavily accented Quebecker, the Mounties, and the snow. Something tells me Canadian viewers are going to be screaming in horror at the stereotypes.

The acting isn't much to write home about with a young but recognizable Roland being the only familiar name. Thankfully, he already had an accent not being a native English speaker, and it's not as much of a riot as the one Laurence Olivier essays in 49th Parallel. Everybody else is no better than unmemorable.

If you remember Men of the North at all, it'll be for being a particularly big artistic failure. It really should be on a Warner box set with some other early talkie B movies, instead of a pricey standalone.