Daddy's Dipsomania

Another of the movies that had been sitting on my DVR for a while that I needed to watch before it expired was Papa's Delicate Condition. Once again, having finally gotten around to watching it, it's time to write up a review and schedule it on the blog.

Jackie Gleason stars as Jack Griffith, who works as a railroad superintendent in a small town in northeast Texas in the early part of the 20th century. (The movie is based on the memoirs of silent screen star Corinne Griffith, born in 1894, but the sets look closer to a pastiche of small-town American between about 1900 and 1915.) Jack has a wife Ambolyn (Glynis Johns), and two daughters: younger daughter Corinne (Linda Bruhl) and Augusta (Laurel Goodwin). Corinne is a bit of a mischief-maker, but also unfailingly honest. Dad, for his part, eschews church, which is mildly scandalous for the early 1900s. But that's not the real focus of the movie.

Instead, the main plot driver is what's referred to as the titular "delicate condition". Dad has a tendency to drink "medicinal" alcohol, which is of course not medicinal but just to get Dad good and sloshed. And when Dad does drink, he also gets rather irresponsible with the family's money. Now, he's trying to do good-hearted things with the money, but what he does is still not fiscally imprudent, to the point that you wonder how the family can afford to live in the nice house they have. One would think Dad's spendthrift ways had been going on for years and that Mom would have taken the kids home to her father. After all, her father Mr. Ghio (Charlie Ruggles) is the mayor of Texarkana.

The first time we see Dad spending the family money unwisely, it's to "help" a man who's painted his house in a garish color that Ambolyn doesn't like get the house repainted in white. Sure, it's dumb to see Jack do this, but you can understand him wanting to make his wife happy. Next up, however, Jack stops by a drug store where the guy behind the counter has a wife who's going into labor and can't get the time off bcause of nasty boss Mr. Cosgrove (Charles Lane). Jack takes over for an hour and gets into big trouble by service a kid a banana split. To get out of his trouble, Jack comes up with a plan to have a "syndicate" of his friends buy the place. He then blackmails his friends into co-funding the scheme!

And then the circus comes to town. Corinne like the pony and wishes she could have one. Unfortunately, the only way Jack can buy the pony is if he buys the whole damn circus. And, of course, he's stupid enough to pay the two crooked proprietors cash. They run off, leaving Jack owning a circus that's heavily in debt and has lots of process servers chasing them. Yeah, he really is that dumb. It's here that Ambolyn finally has the good sense to go off to Texarkana to be with her father. Jack, having screwed things up badly, realizes that he has to go where they can't find him, and takes a job as a railroad superintendent with a railroad in Louisiana. But this is also the sort of movie that you know is going to have a happy ending. So how is it going to get there?

I can see why people think a movie like Papa's Delicate Condition has its charms. For me, however, it had a bunch of problems, which are mostly down to the script. Jack Griffiths is, if not a nasty character, one for whom it's hard to have sympathy. He's causing all his own problems, and you keep wanting Ambolyn or perhaps her father to knock some sense into Jack. The other big issue is that Jackie Gleason is miscast for a period piece like this. It's as though he's still playing Ralph Kramden and not Jack Griffith.

The Promoter

A movie that I think I briefly mentioned a couple of times in conjunction with planning to record it on my DVR is an early Alec Guinness movie from his native UK called The Card. IMDb and Wikipedia both say it was retitled The Promoter for its first American release, but the print TCM ran was titled The Card. The last time TCM ran it, I finally got the chance to record it, and recently watched it.

Alec Guinness plays Denry Machin, although as the movie opens we don't see Guinness because the opening scenes are with Denry as a child. Young Denry is an average at best student, but he's able to get access to the report cards to change his grade to something much better. This allows him to get accepted to the sort of school when where the scions of better families attend, although obviously not actual upper-class Britons since the movie is set at the turn of the last century when Britain's class structure was even more rigid than it is today. Poor Denry is the son of a washerwoman, and worse, one who seems happy with her lot in life and has no desire to have a life of luxury and convenience In any case, once Denry graduates from school, he gets a job working as a clerk for the solicitor Duncalf, which is where we first meet Guinness as the adult Denry.

On one of his first days at the job, the Countess of Chell (Valerie Hobson) comes in. She's engaged Duncalf for the job of sending out admissions to the big charity ball, something which is strictly by invitation only and something to which a man of Denry's station is never going to receive an invite. However, Duncalf has Denry fill in and address all the invitations, a job that should keep him up half the night. Denry ends up with several invitation blanks, and decides to use one to send himself an invitation. Since it's an invitation ball, he's going to need learn how to dance, and goes to the dance school run by Ruth Earp (Glynis Johns), albeit not successfully. However, the two begin to develop a romantic relationship.

Denry gets fired from his job with Duncalf for his stunt, but taking this sort of initiative gives him ideas, as he gets himself hired into one job after another that requires a person with the sort of go-getter attitude that I get the impression was decidedly frowned upon in the Britain of the era. Denry eventually becomes reasonably wealthy and offers some of his money to his mother, but she feels like it's somewhat ill-gotten, and besides, she couldn't stop working as that would be immoral. The relationship with Ruth begins to go a bit sour, but she's got a lady's companion in Nellie (Petula Clark), who also likes Denry, although she too isn't from the highest class of family.

The Card is yet another of those movies where you see the basic idea and the source material (it's based upon a novel from 1911 that I haven't read), and you can obviously understand why filmmakers would believe there's a good story here. However, something in the making of The Card doesn't go quite right. I think it's that the screenplay makes Alec Guinness' character out to be a bit too much of a grasper when the material really calls for lighter comedy. I'm not quite certain, however, how the screenplay could square that circle.

Still, all of the cast do a a professional job, and it's nice to see all the location shooting, even if it's all in black and white. The Card isn't a bad movie; it's just a bit of a shame that it's not quite up to the level of some of Guinness' other work from this era.

Another Time, Another Place

I've commented in the past about how British studios, or the British production arms of American studios, in the 1950s would make movies with one Hollywood star in the cast so as to try to make it something that would appeal to audiences on both sides of the Atlantic and to make it easier to get distribution in the US. Lana Turner did one of those movies, and it's one I hadn't heard of it until I noticed it on one of the streaming services: Another Time, Another Place.

The setting is London, in early 1945. So World War II is still going on, but it's clear that the Nazis are going to be defeated even though they're still trying to fire V-rockets at England. Lana plays Sara Scott, an American newspaper columnist working for the London branch of a syndicate under boss Carter Reynolds (Barry Sullivan), who is also trying to romance Sara. For the British, the war is hitting closer to home, as we see when British reporter Mark Trevor (Sean Connery) goes to do a radio report on British bomb disposal experts trying to defuse one of the V-rockets the Nazis have sent London's way.

Of course, the real reason we see Mark is because he's been carrying on an affair with Sara, which is a bit of a problem for both of them. I already mentioned that Sara's nominal boss has been trying to get her to marry him. But Mark also has a wife and kid back home in Cornwall, and Mark has finally come to the difficult decision that he's going to go back to them which means having to break off the relationship with Sara. Thankfully, Sara learns this before she breaks off the relationship with Carter, which would be embarrassing if she had broken off that relationship first.

In any case, Sara and Mark's relationship was about to be broken off anyway. Mark has been called to go down to Rome to cover the final capitulation of Italy, with a stopover in Paris first. But in Paris, his plane crashes, killing all the passengers and leaving his wife a widow. Sara more or less has a nervous breakdown over it, forcing Carter to put her in a British sanatarium for several weeks before she can take the ship back to the US.

And then Sara gets out, and decides she's going to do something fairly idiotic: she wants to see Mark's home town in Cornwall before getting on the boat, just to get Mark out of her system. With the war in Europe having come to an end and travel being a bit more common, all the lodgings in Mark's small town are taken, until a nice young boy stops her. It's not difficult to guess that that young boy is Mark's son Brian, who takes her to meet his widowed mom Kay (Glynis Johns). Kay would like to put together a bunch of Mark's scripts for a book in his memory, but hasn't had the emotional energy to do so, especially because she felt like something was wrong for the last month of Mark's life as his letters didn't have as much passion as they had before he met Sara. Not that Kay knows anything about Sara's true identity....

I can see why the producers would think a story like this is a great idea. Unfortunately, the execution is off just enough that there are too many times where instead of serious drama we get unintentionally funny. I can't really imagine Lana Turner's character acting like this in real life, or the Glynis Johns character being that pure. There has to be a reason Mark thought about straying in the first place.

Still, it's interesting to see Sean Connery this early in his career, and playing someone all the way on the opposite side of Britain from his native Scotland. So give it a go and see what you think.

Let's talk about sex during the Production Code!

Shelley Winters was TCM's Star of the Month a few months back. One of her movies that I hadn't seen before is The Chapman Report, so I recorded that and recently sat down to watch it.

Dr. George Chapman (Andrew Duggan) and his assistant Paul Radford (Efrem Zimbalist Jr.) are flying from the east coast out to Los Angeles in order to continue their scientific research, which is on the subject of human sexuality. Specifically, they want to do research into the sex lives of women, somthing which would have been a fairly controversial subject back in the early 1960s (and, you'd think -- rightly, in my view -- difficult to discuss with the Production Code still in effect).

Cut to a series of suburban women, all of whom plan to go to a lecture Chapman is giving about his research. This lecture is also a forum to call for volunteers, who are being handled in a very discreet way, or at least that's the intention. They'll all get ID numbers that aren't tied to their names in any way (indeed, they're not supposed to sign the cards they fill out); they'll do the interviews behind screens so that the researchers interviewing them won't be able to see them, and the like. The four women who form the main part of the movie are:

Kathleen Barclay (Jane Fonda). She was married to a test pilot who unfortunately died in an accident, leaving her a widow for the past three years. She's moved back in with Dad, and the two are busy editing her late husband's memoir, trying to turn it into a book in some way that might possibly sell. She's frigid because she was a virgin when she got married, and then when she didn't perform well for her husband, he treated her less than admirably.

Sarah Garnell (Shelley Winters). She's in a conventional marriage to Frank (Harold Stone) with two children, but one that's hit a rut with her being bored by the relative lack of sex. So she's started getting romantically involved with Fred (Ray Danton), a director who works at the community theater that middle-aged housewives like Sarah were wont to take part in.

Naomi Shields (Claire Bloom). She's a divorcée, who suffers from an extremely high libido. As such, she started having sex at a relatively young age, and having it with a succession of guys. She got married (we never see her ex-husband), and had a series of affairs. Indeed, one of the first times we see her, she meets the bottled-water man (a young Chad Everett) delivering to her house; not long after that, a musician brings her some mail that was mistakenly delivered to him; this starts a disastrous relationship.

Teresa Harnish (Glynis Johns). She's happily married to Geoffrey (John Dehner), working with him to put out an audiobook of recorded poetry or somesuch. She starts recording her interview, which seems like a huge no-no, and gets the distinct impression that, while she's happily married as far as she knows, the interviewers are going to find it boring. So when a group of football players led by Ed Kraski (Ty Hardin) accidentally cross her path at the beach, she decides to start pursuing Ed, although things don't wind up the way she imagines.

While Naomi's story winds up in melodramatic disaster, as though she could have been one of the characters in a movie like The Best of Everything; Teresa's goes more humorously wrong. And frankly, this dichotomy is part of the problem with the movie. If everything had been handled as more of a light drama or a comedy in the sense that the later Sex and the Single Girl was, the movie might not be such a mess. However, director George Cukor and the writers wanted this to be a serious drama.

As I mentioned, back in the early 1960s you still couldn't really talk that openly about sex. So trying to talk about the serious issues that the Bloom and Fonda characters have is very difficult if not impossible. Well, maybe only impossible to make something good out of the material. In Fonda's case, it doesn't help that there's a serious violation of scientific research ethics that drives the plot. What works better is Winters' storyline, and even more so the more comic Johns storyline. She comes off as the best of the bunch.

I suppose, not having even been born back when The Chapman Report was made, that it should be viewed as a product of its time. It's just a product that's doomed by the constraints of the time.

Perfect Strangers

Another recent movie watch was the British film Vacation from Marriage (original title Perfect Strangers), which, due to its interesting provenance, is actually available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive.

Robert Donat plays Robert Wilson, a bookkeeper married to Cathy (Deborah Kerr) in London in April, 1940. This is of course during World War II and the time of the Nazi blitz on London. Robert has decided he's going to do his part for the war by joining the Royal Navy, but he's a bit meek, having the same routine day after day and being a bit afraid to ask his boss to make up the pay difference since he's a few weeks short of the five-year tenure to get that. However, Robert feels that he has to be the protector of Cathy, who is even more fragile than he is.

Robert goes off and shows he's go no experience with naval life, although he does slowly begin to take to it. Cathy has been left in their London flat, a place that she really didn't like even though she never told Robert this because she thought Robert needed the stability thanks to his meekness. So now that he's gone, she decides that she too is going to do her part by joining up with the WRENs (the Women's Royal Naval Service), the UK equivalent of the WAVEs.

Cathy quickly makes a friend in Dizzy (Glynis Johns), but like Robert she too is not ready for the women's equivalent of naval life. However, also like Robert, she does slowly being to open up in the WRENs, especially when she gets the chance to do something slightly heroic by taking a message to headquarters by boat, the road and telephone both being out. She even gets over her constant colds.

Time goes on, and both halves of the couple become more changed persons, even meeting a person who might be falling in love with them. Neither one is certain about having anything more than a friendly relationship with the new person who loves them, but both of them are uncertain that they want to go back to their old relationship after the war, having seen what life can really be like.

So after three years apart, the two each get ten days' leave at the same time, and each decides that they're going to bring up the idea of divorce. They don't realize, of course, that the other partner has changed, and that divorce might not actually be necessary.

Director Alexander Korda and his London Films signed a contract with MGM that was supposed to lead to three pictures, although this turned out to be the only one. The movie works out well, mostly thanks to a really strong supporting performance by Glynis Johns. I'm not the biggest fan of Donat, and at times his character seems off to the point of dislikeability. Kerr is much more sympathetic here.

If you like little pictures that work, then Vacation from Marriage is certainly one worth watching.