The Match King

Hollywood movies from the Depression era on business are certainly an interesting watch, as the impression given of the way big business was done back then is much different from what we'd think of today. That, and the stock market, although at least back then a very small percentage of the population was invested in the stock market and it wasn't really something one could do for oneself. One such movie, loosely based on a real person, is The Match King, which I recorded the last time it came on TCM.

Warren William stars as Paul Kroll, who as the movie starts is a Swedish immigrant in Chicago who is making a living as a sanitation worker. He's written to his family back home that he's made it in businesses, although that's a lie. The best he's been able to do is start a no-show scam that has a bunch of non-existent people on a payroll which allows Kroll to rake off a bunch of payroll.

However, word comes from his native Sweden that the old business in his home town, a match factory, is in financial difficulty. Since Paul has made it in America, at least according to his letters, the townsfolk would like to know if he could come back and help save the match factory. Of course Paul isn't really in a position to do this. So he engages in another lie. He's been cheating on his best friend by having a relationship with Babe (Glenda Farrell in a brief performance), so he decides now is the time to tell Babe they should run off together. Except that he runs off with Babe's money, which he uses to get over to Sweden.

Paul, of course, doesn't know how to run a match factory or how to save it from its financial difficulties, so he has to continue resorting to confidence schemes. He's able to convince Swedish banks to extend him credit to keep the current match factory open as well as to acquire another in an attempt to corner the market on safety matches. The one person who has any inkling things might not be on the up and up is assistant Erik Borg (Hardie Albright).

Unfortunately, Paul's scheme turn out to have some of the qualities of a pyramid scheme in the sense that he has to keep going because, once the merry-go-round stops, the whole thing is going to come crashing down. So he turns to foreign countries, like Germany, where he finds a girlfriend Ilse (Claire Dodd) and then the one love of his life, actress Marta Molnar (Lili Damita). He keeps pursuing her, to the point that he puts off all sorts of important match-factory business. It's not that the feeling isn't mutual, although what Marta really likes is a violinist named Trino. So Marta decides to run off from Berlin to Salzburg, with Paul eventually figuring out where she's gone and following her.

But there's still that pesky match factory, and all sorts of notes are going to come due. There's also a man who's invented a match you can strike over and over, which would seem to violate the laws of physics. In any case, Paul has to resort to increasing ruthless things to keep his schemes going and the creditors at bay. As you might guess, there's only so far all of this is going to be able to go before the walls come crashing down.

The Match King is an interesting if not great movie. One problem for me is that Warren William's character is rutless to the point that it's fairly unsympathetic. He has one man committed to an insane asylum and lets another man die. That's certainly shocking enough to make the movie worth watching, but damn if you don't want to beat the crap out of William. One other issue is that, despite the number of interesting character actors and actresses in the movie, most of them only get a few scenes because of the way the movie is plotted. Still, the plusses of The Match King outweigh the minuses.

Carter didn't go over there

Another person who was honored in Summer Under the Stars in 2025 was Glenda Farrell. I've seen a lot of her movies since I like 30s films and she worked at Warner Bros. to whose films TCM can more easily get the rights. One I hadn't seen was the B movie Here Comes Carter.

Glenda Farrell is nominally the female lead here although we don't see her about 10 minutes in to a movie that only runs an hour. Also, she's not the love interest for the lead male. The lead male is played the titular Kent Carter, played by Ross Alexander. Carter works in the promotions department for Premier Studios, and has a personal secretary Linda Warren (Anne Nagel, Alexander's real-life wife). She's an aspiring singer, but wants to get to the big time on her own and not have Carter push her.

One of the stars Carter is expected to promote is Rex Marchbanks (Craig Reynolds), a man Carter doesn't like for some reason. So when Carter is informed that waiting outside his office is Rex's ex-wife, accompanied by a policeman who is looking for the alimony payments Rex has stiffed her on, Carter doesn't do what is supposed to be his job of smoothing over scandals like this. Instead, he lets the case go to court, and for that the studio quite rightly fires him.

It takes a little while for Carter to find new work, until he's outside the studios of radio station KLA. Their Hollywood reporter Mel Winter (Hobart Cavanaugh) is a drunkard who doesn't exactly have a successful show, so Carter offers to make the show a success. Winter's secretary is Verna Kennedy (Glenda Farrell). Carter is able to make the show a success, but it's by getting Winter off the show and replaced by Carter himself, who has an extremely obnoxious delivery.

Now, a lot of this sort of show, which I guess was in those days a sort of precursor to Entertainment Tonight, was to run puff pieces on celebrities based on what the studio press agents fed to the "gossip" columnists. Carter, having been a press agent himself, has no desire to do a show like that, and instead has that contratrian attitude, even talking about gangsters and seemingly trying to paint Marchbanks as having an in with the gangsters. Linda doesn't like Carter for this, even though she does get an audition not knowing Carter has arranged it for her.

Marchbanks goes to the gang leader, Moran, and gets Moran's henchmen to rough Carter up in an attempt to stop Carter. But Carter continues his potentially libellous broadcasts about Marchbanks. The stuff wouldn't be libellous if Carter can prove it to be the truth. But can he?

Well, of course he can, considering that he's the hero and this is one of those light Warner's B movies. Tragic Ross Alexander has no difficulty with the material here, and neither does Glenda Farrell. Anne Nagel, on the other hand, is rather bland. There's nothing particularly new going on here, just the sort of stuff you'd expect from the days when a studio had to keep churning out new stuff to keep supplying the theaters. It entertains well enough for what it is, however.

The Keyhole

George Brent was TCM's Star of the Month last month, and one of the movies that they ran is showing up on TCM again, although this time it's as part of a night of movies starring Brent's co-star in tonight's movie, that star being Kay Francis. The movie in question is The Keyhole, which comes up overnight tonight, or in the wee hours of tomorrow, at 3:15 AM.

Kay Francis plays Anne Brooks, née Vallee. As the movie opens up, she's reading a note from a man named Maurice (Monroe Owsley) that is a suicide letter. Anne is married to a wealthy man, so she has her chauffeur drive her over to the apartment where Maurice is staying. It turns out that Maurice and Anne danced together in Europe as one of those Vernon and Irene Castle-like couples who demonstrated new dances in the ballrooms of nightspots where the wealthy gathered. Anne was young and naïve, stupid enough to marry Maurice, and when she learned what a jerk he really was, she left for America leaving Maurice to complete the no-fault divorce proceedings since he was intending to marry another woman. However, Maurice never married that other woman and never got the divorce. Anne married her second husband Schuyler Brooks (Henry Kolker) thinking it was a valid marriage and that she'd never need to tell Schuyler about her past. But it's not a valid marriage, and Maurice is blackmailing Anne over it because she's got money, or at least assets that theoretically can be converted to money although Schuyler is bound to start noticing at some point.

Schuyler has kinda-sorta noticed in that Anne comes home at odd hours, and doesn't seem to wear some of her jewelry any more. But the servants have no idea what's really going on. The one person who does know what's going on is Schuyler's sister Portia (Helen Ware), who is good at discreetly breaking up such unwanted relationships. She learns from Anne that Maurice is not an American citizen. So Anne should take a cruise somehwere to the Carribean, like Havana. Maurice is certain to follow her, and Portia can use her influence to get Maurice's visa cancelled. Voilà: Maurice won't be able to blackmail Anne in the US anymore, and Schuyler need not learn anything about what went on between Anne and Maurice.

However, since Schuyler knows nothing of this, he has some reason to worry that Anne might be up to no good when she suddenly declares that she'd like to go to Havana. So he goes to a detective agency to have one of their discreet, high-class private eyes get on the same boat and see if he can find out who Anne is seeing on the sly. That man is Neil Davis (George Brent), who is accompanied by a second detective, Hank (Allen Jenkins), who will be traveling under the guise of being Neil's valet.

Neil and Anne meet, and the two eventually become friends, although Neil notes that Anne seems to be a more or less perfect wife, never looking for another man and trying to get away from Maurice who, sure enough, has followed Anne on the boat. The things Neil and Anne do together are completely platonic, although eventually Neil finds himself beginning to fall in love with Anne. This presents problems when Schuyler learns the truth from his siter and goes down to Havana himself so that Anne should not find out that her husband has been spying on her.

The Keyhole is an entertaining enough movie, although I have to wonder how much bearing to reality it bears. One plus is that the conflict is set up in a good enough way that it makes Anne's reasoning for why she did the things she did believable. She was on a separate continent in the early 1930s, and expected the divorce was going to go through, so what resaon is there to tell any of this stuff to her second husband? And she's acting mysteriously enough, in part to protect her husband, so he has a logical reason to suspect something is wrong. I do have to say, on the other hand, that the resolution of the film's conflict doesn't quite work for me.

One other fun thing to mention is the subplot. Glenda Farrell is inserted into the movie as Dot, a gold-digger who is clearly looking for a rich guy to fleece. She falls for Hank, not realizing he's not what he's presenting himself as, while Hank is blowing through all the expense money to keep Dot in the lifestyle she's become accustomed to. They both handle their roles well and provide a bit of needed comic relief.

People who want a look at early 1930s values will probably enjoy The Keyhole, as will the fans of the movie's stars, although there are better films out there for all of them.

The Secret Bride

Barbara Stanwyck was the TCM Star of the month back in early 2025, and surprisingly there were some of her films that I hadn't seen before. So I recorded a couple, and I think I'm getting to the last of the films from the tribute that I recorded. The movie in question is The Secret Bride.

Now, the marriage isn't a secret to the viewer, as it happens right at the beginning of the movie. Robert Sheldon (Warren William) is the Attorney General of an unnamed state, and he's run off to get eloped to Ruth Vincent (Barbara Stanwyck) right at the beginning of the movie. Part of the reason for the elopement is that Ruth is the adult daughter of the governor. After the wedding in front of a justice of the peace, Robert calls his office to tell them he'll be back soon. Picking up the phone is Robert's secretary/assistant Hazel Normandie (Glenda Farrell). She hands the phone to Dave Breeden (Douglass Dumbrille), who is Robert's chief investigator as well as Hazel's boyfriend. Dave tells Robert he's going to pick up somebody on a tip, but can't go into details over the phone.

Cut to a bank just as it's opening up. Being let in by the security guard is Willis Martin (Grant Mitchell). Willis is making a deposit of $10,000 in cash, but it's to the personal account that's not his, as we soon learn because he's picked up by the authorities -- that tip Dave mentioned obviously is about this deposit and both who it's from, and whose account is getting it. Willis is the executive assistant to one J.F. Holdstock, a businessman who was sent to prison on fiancial fraud crimes but was pardoned by the current governor. The clear implication is that the deposit will be seen as Holdstock having bribed the governor for the pardon. Worse is that not long after this, Holdstock is found dead of a suicide, which is an implicit admission of guilt.

Now, Sheldon is loyal to the governor, and knows that the governor didn't really engage in any wrongdoing. But there's a problem, which is that marriage to the governor's daughter. If that comes out, then nobody will believe the Attorney General is acting independently. Nowadays, a special prosecutor would be appointed and people would act like the special prosecutor is independent and unbiased. But they didn't have things like that back in the day.

It gets worse when Breeden comes to see Sheldon that evening. Sheldon has brought Ruth back to his place, and Hazel is working there as well. So when Breeden comes, Hazel goes out to the courtyard to meet him. In the courtyard, Breeden gets shot and killed! Now, we know that the angle he was shot from should exonerate Hazel, never mind the fact that we've seen it. I'd have thought that Breeden was shot from far enough away that Hazel wouldn't have had time to get into the position from which the shooter took the shot. But a small handgun that Hazel had purchased is found at the scene and is determined to be the murder weapon. So for these obvious reasons she's put on trial. Ruth saw what happened, too. But, if she were to testify, it would reveal that she's married to Robert, which would likely end his and the governor's careers because of that controversy over the apparent cash-for-pardon scheme.

The Secret Bride was released in December 1934, a few months after the Production Code really took effect, so you can guess that the good guys are going to win in the end. And the Ruth Vincent and Robert Sheldon characters are never portrayed as anything less than good. Maybe they're a bit naïve in the way they're acting, but they're clearly not on the take. So that's part of the flaw that The Secret Bride has. The movie has to get to a certain end, and the way it gets there and resolves all the plot issues is a bit too convoluted for its own good.

However, if you don't pay too close attention to the plot, you'll find that The Secret Bride is a fine example of the Warner Bros. programmer as it was in the mid-1930s. It's a brisk 64 minutes, and never stops moving -- and frankly never stops being entertaining either. It moves so fast that I can easily see audiences of the day not particularly caring about the plot holes, and remains worth a watch 90 years on.

We're not quite in the money

Another of those classic movies that TCM shows often enough because it's part of the old Turner library, but that I'd never actually seen before, is Gold Diggers of 1935. So, the last time it showed up on TCM I made the point of recording it so that I could do a post on it eventually.

The movie opens up with a ridiculous number of staff members making final preparations for what seems to be the grand opening of a new hotel, except that it's not new but only open for the summer which is why you wonder how it can support such a large staff. Among the staff are desk clerk Dick Curtis (Dick Powell), who is taking on this summer job in his years between college, as he's really hoping to complete his studies to become a doctor and marry his girlfriend Arline (Dorothy Dare).

Coming to the resort are the ultra-wealthy who have decamped from New York or Boston, one supposes, since this is mentioned as being New Hampshire. One such family is the Prentiss family, led by a matriarch widow (Alice Brady) with two adult children: Humbolt (Frank McHugh) and Ann (Gloria Stuart). Humbolt is a playboy who has already been through four wives and cost Mom a ton of money to get out of the marriages as a result. Ann is set to be married to T. Mosley Thorpe (Hugh Herbert), which is in many ways more of a marriage of convenience since Thorpe is even more fabulously wealthy than the Prentiss family. Ann certainly doesn't seem thrilled with the idea of this marriage.

And then we see why. Thorpe will also be spending the summer at this resort, working on his book, a monograph on snuff boxes. He has the hotel send up a secretary to take dictation, getting sent young Betty (Glenda Farrell) who falls for him and also sees dollar signs. You can already guess how part of the romantic conflict is going to be solved. The other half comes when Mrs. Prentiss hires Dick as a chaperone for Ann. Those two fall in love, which seems a bit mean to Arline but things are going to turn out OK for her in the end too.

Mrs. Prentiss is asked to put on a charity show, something the family has apparently been asked to do every year, and it's at this point that we learn that she's no longer as fabulously wealthy as she used to be, thanks to the Depression cutting the dividends her late husband's business interests yield. Stage producer Nicoleff (Adolphe Menjou) shows up; he's heavily in debt and gets the idea of taking Prentiss for as much as he can while putting on that show. The show is, of course, the big excuse for all the musical numbers the movie has around the wafer-thin plot, with the highlight musical number being "The Lullaby of Broadway".

The plot of Gold Diggers of 1935 is even sillier than some of the previous musicals Dick Powell had made, although again one doesn't watch a Busby Berkeley musical for the scintillating plots. Hugh Herbert is playing such a drip that it's only logical the only thing anybody really sees in him is his money. Dick Powell is appealing, although he doesn't have much to do. It's no wonder he wanted to do a movie like Murder, My Sweet so that he could be considered a more "serious" actor.

Having finally seen Gold Diggers of 1935, I understand why it's not as well known as its predecessor Gold Diggers of 1933. It's watchable, and the "Lullabye of Broadway" number is worth the price of admission, but it's not an all-time great either.

Gotta love how the Code treated women

I always enjoy the Warner Bros. B movies, so when one that I haven't done a post on before shows up on TCM, I try to make certain to record it so I can watch it. One such movie that I only recently got around to watching despite it having been on my DVR for some time is The Law in Her Hands.

The main "her" in the title of the movie is Mary Wentworth, played by Margaret Lindsay. As the movie opens, she and her friend Dot Davis (Glenda Farrell) are getting sworn into the New York State bar, having passed the bar exam. They had been working at a restaurant to pay their way through law school, and plan to start their own law firm together. After the bar ceremony, they go back to their old restaurant to celebrate. A man shows up there, obviously from a protection racket, and trying to induce the boss to join the "benevolent association" voluntarily. When that doesn't work, the guy sets off a smoke bomb.

Frank Gordon (Lyle Talbot) runs the protection rackets in New York, and he's none too pleased about the violence his underling used. Now he's going to have to get the witnesses to find a reason not to show up at the trial. He's almost successful enough that ADA Robert Mitchell (Warren Hull) is unable to prosecute, at least until Mary, who also happens to be Mitchell's girlfriend, shows up with a photograph taken with the defendant in the background, convicting the defendant.

Mary and Dot's law practice isn't particularly successful, although a process server who is only in the movie for comic relief tries to help them. Mitchell tells Mary that perhaps she should give up practicing law and just marry him and start a family together, as all good women were supposed to do back in the 1930s. Gordon, for his part, has a different way of dealing with Mary, which is to try to get her on a very highly-paid retainer.

Of course, working for the man behind the protection rackets is bound to cause problems, and that eventually becomes the case. Mary is successful enough, but the way she gets acquittals challenges judicial ethics, jokes about the idea that lawyers actually care about ethics aside. The breaking point comes when Mary learns that in trying to spoil the milk of people who didn't want to join the dairy protection racket, Gordon's men actually poisoned it. Mary doesn't want to defend Gordon, but how can she get him convicted without violating attorney-client privilege?

The Law in Her Hands is entertaining enough for a B movie, which is to say that it does entertain although it won't be well-remembered after watching and doesn't bear much resemblance to reality. But then there's a coda at the end which I have a feeling would have dissatisfied a lot of women even in the 1930s. Glenda Farrell doesn't get as much to do as I would have liked, and Eddie Acuff as the comic relief isn't the most relieving person. But then again, The Law in Her Hands, being a B movie, is the sort of thing that the studio probably had no expectation that people 90 years in the future would be watching.

The shakedown of size

I've mentioned the TCM Saturday Matinee block on several occasions, although for the most part I haven't done posts on many of the movies. Part of that is that the timing on some of them isn't always accurate, as I noticed when I recorded The Big Shakedown. The recording missed the opening credits, but the recording started early enough that I didn't miss any key action.

Bette Davis plays Norma Nelson, who works at one of those big-city full-service drug stores from the era when pharmacists actually compounded the drugs themselves and the stores did a lot more. However, it's not a particularly successful store. Norma is in business with her boyfriend the pharmacist, Jimmy Morrell (Charles Farrell), and they'd get married if only he had enough money to support her. Why they couldn't keep working together until Norma got pregnant isn't mentioned; it's just assumed that Norma would stop working upon marriage since it's the early 1930s.

One day, Dutch Barnes (Ricardo Cortez) comes into the drugstore. He's a bootlegger, or at least was a bootlegger. Prohibition has recently been repealed, putting a crimp in the lifestyles of a bunch of makers of illicit booze. Dutch starts talking with Jimmy about his job, and how the chemical makeup of some of the products they sell isn't all that complicated. It's just expensive because the stuff has a brand name. Well, that's not the only reason, but brand reputation is a thing, and the capital needed for mass production is substantial.

But Dutch has some of that capital, having made a substantial bit of money during Prohibition. So he gets the idea of piggybacking off the established brands, making knockoff counterfeit goods! And Jimmy is dumb enough that at first he doesn't get that this is what he's doing for Dutch. At least he's honest enough about it, however, to have some moral qualms when he learns what Dutch is really up to. He also tells Dutch that he can't quite copy some products, since schlub pharmacists like him can't get all the materials. Dutch basically bribes Jimmy: here's enough money to marry Norma!

One person who isn't happy with any of this is Lily (Glenda Farrell), Dutch's former girlfriend. She learns what's going on, and goes to the authorities, getting murdered by Dutch's henchmen for her troubles. The plot spirals from there, with Jimmy having to make ever faker drugs, which is a much bigger problem than just counterfeit cold cream. Fake antibiotics, for example, could get patients killed. And, of course, you know that one of those patients is going to be Norma.

The Big Shakedown is a good example of the sort of B movie that Warner Bros. churned out in the early to mid-1930s, once they got the sound quality up to a level where the camera could be somewhat more fluid. It's nothing more than a B movie, but it moves swiftly and has some surprisingly shocking moments. Sure, you can see why someone like Bette Davis would grow tired of the roles Warner Bros. was giving her, and a movie like this could be seen as an example of it. But for the most part, The Big Shakedown does everything the studio could ask a B movie to do.

I've Got Your Number

In the latest installment of movies I've got in my Youtube TV library that happen to be coming up again soon on TCM, I noticed a breezy little movie called I've Got Your Number. It's going to be on again tomorrow (Sept. 19) at 11:30 AM, so I made a point of watching it to be able to do a review here to give you all a chance to watch it too.

Joan Blondell is nominally the star here as she gets top billing, but the real star of the proceedings is Pat O'Brien. He plays Terry, a linemen for the phone company. He's good at what he does, as we see when he goes up on the roof of a building to cut some wires in order to prevent more serious problems in the building next door that's on fire. In that incident, Terry saves the life of Schulyer (Henry O'Neill), a wealthy broker in stocks and bonds. But Terry also grates on his boss Mr. Flood (Eugene Pallette) by doing things that bring in customer complaints, especially from the female customers.

Joan Blondell plays Marie, who is a switchboard operator at an apartment hotel. Nicky (Gordon Westcott) shows an interest in her, and gets her to play what she thinks is a practical joke by switching a call intended for someone else to him. That call is in fact the result of a horse race that earns Nicky a ton of money instead of the legitimate target of the call. The hotel manager calls the phone company to check whether the lines could have been tapped, and Flood sends Terry and his partner John (Allen Jenkins).

Terry wastes no time in putting the moves on Marie, basically harassing her until she gives in and agrees to go on a date with him. In some ways, it's a bit fortuitous, since Terry has connections with the phone company that could get her a job as an operator for them, or, if that falls through, calling in a favor from Schuyler. So at least Marie will have a job working for Schuyler. Except that she spills the beans about some bonds to Nicky, who is able to come up with a scheme to get those bonds off of Schulyer. Marie is arrested, and it's up to Terry to try to exonerate Marie, with a little help from his lineman skills.

I've Got Your Number is exactly the sort of programmer-length rapid-fire film that was perfect for the lower half of a bill back in the early 1930s. The plot goes from one point to the next extremely quickly and doesn't always quite make sense, although it never stops entertaining. Warner Bros. also threw in several of its supporting stars, notably a scene with Glenda Farrell as a phony psychic and Louise Beavers as her assistant phoning things in from another room. Ninety years on, of course, people will look at Pat O'Brien's character and be a bit horrified, because he really is nasty in the way he goes after women. As an example, he knocks over Marie's dining table, destroying her dinner and a good portion of her dishes, just so she'll go out for dinner with him.

Still, I've Got Your Number is a fun enough ride for fans of movies from the early 1930s.

Franchot Tone loves trouble

Another movie that was sitting on my DVR for a few months was one I hadn't heard of before Eddie Muller plucked it out of obscurity for a showing on Noir Alley: a 1948 movie called I Love Trouble, not to be confused with the 1990s movie that has the same title but a completely different plot.

Franchot Tone stars as Stu Bailey, a Los Angeles private eye who one day gets a visit from an up-and-coming politician named Ralph Johnston (Tom Powers). Johnston has a wife, but she's gotten a blackmail letter and subsequently gone missing. So Johnston wants Stu to figure out what it is in Jane's past that would cause somebody to blackmail her, as well as to find who's doing the blackmailing and where Mrs. Johnston is.

That sounds simple enough, but it all gets a lot more complicated. Before the war, Mrs. Johnston was working at nightclubs under the stage name Janie Joy, and that she was originally from Portland, Oregon. One of the nightclubs is run by Keller (Steven Geray), who has a couple of henchmen working for him in the form of Herb (Raymond Burr) and Reno (John Ireland). Keller is suitably odious and dangerous for Bailey, but he's not the only possible suspect in what's going on.

There's also Buffin, who knew Jane before she left Portland, and who is now running a restaurant that's even more out of the way than the one near the climax of 99 River Street. Who on earth would ever visit a place like this to eat. Thankfully, we can deduce fairly quickly that Buffin is in fact not a suspect, but that's only because he gets shot and killed.

And then there are the women. One, Norma (Janet Blair) claims to be Jane's sister, although the camerawork makes it ridiculously obvious that she isn't since her monogram doesn't match Jane's last name. There's also Boots (Adele Jergens), who married into money and is involved somehow, as well as a mysterious third woman I won't go into too much detail about lest I give away too much about the plot, other than to say Bailey figures out someone's trying to frame him.

Well, it's in part that I don't want to reveal plot twists, and partly because I Love Trouble is a fairly confusing movie, with an origin that Eddie Muller very helpfully explained in his intro and outro to the movie. The writer, Roy Huggins (who would go on to a very successful career writing and producing for TV), wanted to hone his writing skill by writing a character that emulated private eye Philip Marlowe very closely. To this. Huggins also added a lot of cynical humor. This humor was tailor made for Glenda Farrell, who plays the part of Bailey's secretary/girl Friday. Unsurprisingly, she runs with it.

I Love Trouble is decidedly lesser noir, but it's definitely watchable.

The Disorderly Orderly

It's been a couple of months since I opened up my Jerry Lewis box set, so recently, I took out one of the DVDs and watched The Disorderly Orderly.

Jerry Lewis plays Jerome Littlefield, a man who wanted to be a doctor but flunked out of medical school and wound up as an orderly at a private sanitarium instead. Now, there's a reason why he flunked out of medical school, and that does drive the portion of the movie that has a paper-thin plot, but most of the movie is episodic, as with a lot of Lewis' movies from The Bellboy on. Littlefield is, unsurprisingly, not particularly competent at his job, right from the first scene at the sanitarium where he's supposed to strait-jacket a TV celebrity who is a high-paying patient, but who winds up putting the straitjacket on Littlefield instead!

All of this is much to the consternation of Littlefield's nominal supervisor, head of nurses Maggie Higgins (Kathleen Freeman). The thing that drives her absolutely nuts about him is that he doesn't just try without succeeding, he tries too hard because he simply cares too much. Someone who would agree with this statement is the chief of staff at the sanitarium, Dr. Jean Howard (Glenda Farrell). Dr. Howard was in fact in love with Littlefield's father, and sees that Littlefield's problem is that he's got some sort of neurotic empathy. Probably the best example of this is when Jerome is supposed to be pushing the wheelchair in which hypochondriac patient Mrs. Fuzzibee (Alice Pearce) is sitting. She talks cheerfully with all the other patients about the plethora of diseases she's had. But it's Jerome who winds up displaying all the symptoms, a scene which shows Lewis' prowess for physical comedy.

The neurotic empathy plot also involves another nurse, Julie Blair (Karen Sharpe), who is in love with Jerome. Jerome, for his part, keeps screwing up the relationship, but not out of any sort of malice. Things get more complicated when an emergency patient is brought to the sanitarium after a suicide attempt. Nobody knows who she really is, except for Jerome. It's Susan Andrews (Susan Oliver), a woman who went to high school with Jerome. Jerome was in love with her, but she was in love with someone else, and this destroyed Jerome. Now that she's back, he's going to try to make it right. However, this is a private hospital, and if she can't pay for the bed, she's going to be have to be transfered to the public hospital.

It all results in a manic car chase between Jerome in one ambulance, Dr. Howard and Nurse Higgins in another, and the chairman of the sanitarium, Mr. Tuffington (Everett Sloane) on a gurney in the back of Jerome's ambulance. Tuffington has wanted to fire Jerome, and also wants to fire Dr. Howard for not bringing in enough revenue.

As always with Jerry Lewis' solo work, how much you like The Disorderly Orderly is going to depend on how much you like Lewis' brand of comedy. For me, that's a bit of a mixed bag, depending somewhat on how much the movie has a coherent plot. Cinderfella, for example, does have a better plot, while The Bellboy is one of the few movies where the sketches almost entirely work. In The Disorderly Orderly, some of the scenes work better than others, but it's definitely more hit than The Errand Boy or The Ladies' Man. The scene with Mrs. Fizzibee is one of the highlights, as is one where Lewis is asked to play TV repairman because a patient has a snowy picture (remember that from analog TV days?). Lewis opens up the TV -- and a blizzard of real snow comes pouring out, complete with wind that messes up everything in the patient's room!

The Disorderly Orderly is one of those movies that's nice to have on a box set, although I wouldn't pay standalone DVD prices for it. Jerry Lewis fans will probably like it, while others should start with a Lewis movie like The Bellboy.

Breakfast for Two

Herbert Marshall isn't particularly remembered for comedy. I think a good portion of the reason for that is that when he did get to do comedies, they were programmers at best. A good example of this is Breakfast for Two, which is going to be on TCM at 2:00 PM tomorrow.

Herbert Marshall plays Jonathan Blair, a wealthy businessman who has a butler named Butch (Eric Blore). One morning, Butch finds a woman named Valentine Ransome (Barbara Stanwyck) in Blair's house. It turns out that Blair went out for a night on the town, met Valentine, and got incredibly drunk; when Valentine brought him home, the dog wouldn't let her back out. So here we are.

Blair, although owning a shipping company, is the latest in what is a line Blairs in a family-owned business. And Jonathan has always seemed to be more interested in being a playboy than actually running the company, much to the consternation of the board. Valentine learns about this, so she maneuvers to take control of the company, not because she wants to be mean to Blair and take over the company through underhanded means a la Wallace Beery in Dinner at Eight; instead, she's concerned for Jonathan and doesn't want to see the company go under.

The thing is, Valentine kind of likes Jonathan. However, he already has a girlfriend in the form of actress Carol (Glenda Farrell), and indeed is even planning to marry her. Valentine thinks that too would be bad for the family business, so she has to maneuver to stop the wedding as well as keep the company afloat.

Now, we know that since Stanwyck is top-billed here, she's liable to end up with Herbert Marshall's character at the end, and the bigger reason for watching (or not watching) a movie like this is to see how the characters get to the inevitable wedding. In this case, it involves Valentine and Butch working together, much to the consternation of the Justice of the Peace (Donald Meek) who has been hired to preside over the wedding, and has to do so on multiple occasions because it keeps getting interrupted.

But for the most part, Breakfast for Two turns out to be rather lesser comedy, even in the œuvre of Herbert Marshall. In his case, I think I'd recommend Trouble in Paradise or maybe If You Could Only Cook first. Stanwyck, of course, made glittering comedies like Ball of Fire and The Lady Eve. Blore, and to a lesser extent Meek, are the best things in this one.

Breakfast for Two is one of those movies that probably should have wound up in a box set of either Marshall's or Stanwyck's movies, but instead has wound up on a standalone DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive collection.

Whoa, Nellie!

Paul Muni was the Star of the Month some months back, before my old DVR died. But TCM ran another day of Muni's movies last month, which gave me the chance to watch Hi, Nellie!, which is available on DVD courtesy of one of Warner Bros. "Forbidden Hollywood" box sets.

I knew the story of Hi, Nellie! already, mostly because this is the first version of a movie Warner Bros. made four times betwen 1934 and 1949, and I'd already seen two of the remakes. Muni stars as Brad, which you'd think isn't a name somebody who looks like Muni would have, until it's revealed that "Brad" is short for his surname Bradshaw. Brad is managing editor at a big city newspaper, who has a bit of a maverick way of doing things that's going to get in trouble.

One of the big stories going on involves the failure of the Labor Bank -- after all, there is a depression going on. Canfield, one of the bank managers, has disappeared, as has a large amount of the bank deposits. So everybody naturally puts two and two together and fiures that Canfield has absconded with the money. Well, everybody but Brad, who believes that Canfield is an honest guy and that something else must have gone wrong what with all the political corruption in the city. However, news eventually comes out that there were illicit withdrawals made with the money going to Canfield. Game, set, and match.

Brad's boss, the publisher, is pissed with Brad for making his newspaper a laughingstock, and wants to demote Brad. Brad would rather just quit, until he realizes that there's a clause in his contract that if he quits, he doesn't get to keep the nice big paycheck. So Brad comes back and reluctantly decides to keep his job, except that his position is no longer going to be as managing editor, but as... the writer of the "Heartthrobs" column, an advice to the lovelorn column whose writer has always gone under the nom de plume Nellie.

The current Nellie, Gerry Krale (Glenda Farrell) is thrilled to be off the beat and back to serious reporting, while Brad is pissed. He's got one ally in Shammy (Ned Sparks), who is feeding him information from other parts of the newsroom, but there's no real way for Brad to do real journalism.

Things perk up, however, when a young woman comes in looking for help in patching up a dispute between her fiancé and her father. Shammy has come up with an address where Canfield had supposedly been seen, while the address that this young woman gives Nellie is the same address. So now Brad can legitimately go there and do some poking around into the Canfield case, while pretending to try to patch up a love match. Brad discovers that there's some sort of money laundering going on for phony funerals, and that might just have something to do with the Canfield disappearance. The game is back on!

A lot of sources list Hi, Nellie! as a comedy, but I found it to be more of a programmer drama with some comic elements, with the two remakes I've seen being lighter. Not that this is a heavy drama, mind you, since its 75-minute programmer length doesn't allow for a prestige level of depth. Still, everybody comes off as quite professional. The story and performances both work, and the movie most definitely succeeds in entertaining as much as other Warner Bros. programmers of the era.

Hi, Nellie is definitely worth a watch.

Snowed Under

There are several interesting movies coming up in the next day or so, but there's one that I'd prefer to mention because it doesn't currently seem to be on DVD: Snowed Under, which is on TCM at 1:00 PM tomorrow (April 7).

George Brent plays Alan Tanner, a formerly successful playwright who has fallen on a bit of hard times. That is, he's got two acts of a play written, but he's unable to come up with a third act for that play. And that's a problem, since the play is supposed to open in a week's time! So Alan's agent gets a place out in the country for Alan to go for a weekend where he'll have the peace and quiet necessary to come up with that third act. Unbeknwonst to Alan, the agent is also sending somebody else to that cabin out in the country: Alan's first wife Alice (Genevieve Tobin). They had collaborated on his plays back when she was the first Mrs. Tanner, and that's how Alan became successful. Plus, she still holds a candle for Alan. So getting Alan to finish the play, and to spend some time with the first Mrs. Tanner, might not be a bad thing.

That's because there's a problem with the second Mrs. Tanner, Daisy (Glenda Farrell). That marriage hasn't been successful either, and it resulted in a divorce that required Alan to pay Daisy a substantial amount of alimony. But without any hit plays, Alan isn't able to scrouge up the money to make the alimony payments, and has fallen behind. Daisy wants those alimony payments, to the point that she's willing to have a court order enforced on her ex-husband. As if that's going to help Alan finish up the play. But, sure enouhg, Daisy shows up with the local sheriff's deputy Rowe (Frank McHugh), with that court order.

If you thought things were complicated for Alan before, they're about to get a whole lot more complicated. There's actually a third woman in the house, Pat (Patricia Ellis). She's supposed to be Alan's typist, but claims that she and Alan are engaged, and that she's going to become the third Mrs. Tanner. Having one woman after you is bad enough, but having three? Yikes. And there's still the matter of finishing that play.... As for the title, Snowed Under, it comes from the fact that a snowstorm is coming, threatening to strand everybody at each other's throats in that small cottage.

Thankfully, Snowed Under was conceived at Warner Bros. as a programmer for George Brent. He's not exactly the best comic actor out there, but was good at being the man whose purpose in the plot was to let the women around him (often Bette Davis) sturt their stuff. When it came to these shorter movies that were clearly designed to be second-billing to Warners' prestige films, though, Brent isn't that bad. (See a movie like Front Page Woman for an example.) And with the short running times, these movies don't wear out their welcome, being over quickly if you think they're going to drag. Snowed Under is nothing spectacular, but it's reasonably entertaining.

Middle of the Night

The Essentials returns tonight, with Drew Barrymore sitting down with Robert Osborne for a third season of discussing movies that are apparently considered "essential" for a well-rounded film fan to have seen. Tonight's first essential is Marty at 8:00 PM, which leads off half a night of movies written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Delbert Mann. The second of them is Middle of the Night, at 9:$5 PM.

Fredric March stars as Jerry Kingsley, a widower who works in New York's garment industry by day, and goes home to a lovely apartment with his spinster sister Evelyn (Edith Meiser) by night. He's also got an adult daughter Marilyn (Lee Grant), but she's got a life of her own, married to Jack (Martin Balsom) with a kid on the way. Jerry had a good life, with the emphasis on had; now, he's a bit of a lonely old man.

Of course, you know that's going to change. Enter Betty Preisser (Kim Novak). She's a secretary working in the receiving office in the dingy ground level of the clothier that Kingsley and his business partner run. She's also a divorcée, having left the instability of her musician husband George (Lee Philips) and living with her mother, Torchy Blane. Well, actually, it's not Torchy Blane; it's Glenda Farrel playing a decidedly olded-up and less energetic woman than Torchy ever was. Now, you'd think that this nice woman would be just right for Jerry, but that's not what's going to happen. Betty gets sick and has to leave early, and when Jerry stops by her place to see how she's doing, the two feel a spark between them.

Or at least, they think they feel a spark between them. They're both lonely souls in need of a companion, so perhaps they might just be loving the one they're with rather than being with the one they'd truly love. They also recognize that other people are going to have uncomfortable questions about this new relationship. This was the 1950s, though, so the questions have nothing to do with a boss dating the secretary and any "sexual harassment" issues that might bring up. Instead, once everybody finds out about the relationship, the objections are that Jerry is too old for Betty, and besides, they're really of mismatched backgrounds. They need to find partners more compatible for themselves.

And so, everybody talks at each other about the relationship, or more like talking past each other, which is one of the places that for me the movie really starts to lose steam. The whole time I was watching the movie I felt like the two protagonists would be better off with companionship than love, so I didn't care too much about their relationship. I also couldn't bring myself to care that much about everybody around Jerry and Betty, who to me generally wound up seeming rather nondescript. It's a bit of a shame, since the acting by everybody is quite competent, and the production design is a very nice look at New York City as it was in the late 1950s. Ultimately, if I were going to recommend one of Chayefsky's movies from this period, I'd suggest Marty or The Catered Affair.

But, I'm blogging about Middle of the Night in part because I'm sure that there are other people who are going to like it despite my mixed review. That, and the fact that it seems to be out of print on DVD.