Janie

One of the things that World War II did was give audiences a taste for movies that would boost their morale, even if there was no actual fighting in the movies. I think I've mentioned Fox's more homespun musicals, but for something that was more contemporary, you could watch a Warner Bros. family movie like Janie.

Janie Conway (Joyce Reynolds, who didn't go on to have that much of a career) plays Janie, a high school student in Hortonville, one of those small to medium-sized cities that populated Hollywood movies back in those days. She's typical of the middle class teens who were the focus of a lot of such movies, since Hollywood generally didn't want to show movies about the dirt poor for fairly obvious reasons. Janie has a boyfriend in Scooper (Richard Erdman), but things are about to get a lot more complicated for the two of them.

Janie's father Charles (Edward Arnold) is editor of the local newspaper, who also has a lot on his hands. Professionally, he needs a new printing press, but with the war on the government get to control which businesses get which goods. And at home, Dad has to deal with Janie. She, being a typical teenager, makes life difficult for him in all sorts of ways, from constantly hogging the telephone to having an interest in boys. This latter causes a big issue when she and her friends go to a "blanket party" with a bunch of boys, a party that gets published in Life magazine.

And then there's the war coming to their hometown. A bunch of servicemen get stationed at a base near Hortonville either on their way out to the European or Pacific theaters, or on their way back. So a bunch of young men who are still older than the high school boys and consequently a lot more mature are in town, cutting a fine picture in their uniforms. So of course the girls start falling for these men, even though I'd think the solderis would want an adult instead of a 16-year-old girl. In any case, Janie meets Pfc. Dick Lawrence (Robert Hutton), and the sparks start to fly between the two of them, much to Scooper's consternation.

But how to meet Dick alone? There's the rub. The other girls have the same problem, although in some ways even bigger because of the editorials that Janie's father has published. As a result, none of the other girls' fathers will let them fraternize with the servicemen. They get the bright idea to do so surreptitiously, at Janie's house, one even when Janie's parents go out to a grown-up function and Janie thinks she'll have the house more or less to herself. One thing leads to another, and it seems like the entire base is at Janie's house.

Janie is the sort of movie where you can see why audiences of the day would have liked it, but looking back on it 80 years later, boy is it dated. It doesn't help that most of the characters are unappealing. Janie is selfish, Mom (Ann Harding) is too ditzy, and Dad is close to the stereotypical out-of-touch dad. And then there's kid sister Elspeth, who is given the sort of role Virginia Weidler had in The Philadelphia Story, only turned up to 11 and made much more obnoxious. I wanted Bette Davis to come in and shake her the same way she did to Miriam Hopkins in Old Acquaintance.

So while Janie is a curio that will appeal to some people, I don't think it will appeal to everybody.

The Male Animal

After all off the kerfuffle over the schedule for the end of Daylight Savings Time dies down, you can sit down to watch The Male Animal, at 8:00 AM Sunday, Nov. 5.

The inventively-named Midwestern University is one of those big state schools out in the US midwest where college football is just as important as academics, and the movie starts off on the day before the big game, oddly enough against a real school, the University of Michigan. Tommy Turner (Henry Fonda) is an assistant professor of English at the university who is up for a full professorship, which would please him since he'd like to be able to support his wife Ellen (Olivia de Havilland) better. But there are going to be a couple of problems along the way.

Both are ultimately based on the fact that Turner seems to be more interested in academics than anything else. Definitely he's cares less about football. Joe Ferguson (Jack Carson) was the big star of the team a decade ago, and he's back in town to watch the big game, living in Pittsburg with a marrige that doesn't seem to be going so well. Back in the day, Joe had at least a bit of interest in Ellen, and he was actually able to dance with her, something Tommy doesn't seem to care so much about. Tommy worries that Joe would be more appropriate for Ellen than he is, and that the two are going to wind up together.

And then there's Tommy's lack of interest in office politics. One of the students, Michael Barnes (Herbert Anderson), has written an article for one of the student magazines about what a bunch of fuddy-duddies the trustees, led by Mr. Keller (Eugene Pallette) are. And Michael specifically singles out Turner for tweaking the trustees, as Turner's freshman composition class is going to be reading a letter written by anarchist Bartolomeo Vanzetti (of the Sacco and Vanzetti trial) as an example of good composition by someone who wasn't a professional writer, or even writing in his native language. In theory this shouldn't be a big deal, but free speech and academic independence have always been a big issue on college campuses. Heck, they still are today, just with a different set of views that will get you in hot water. The trustees decidedly want "American" values, in an era when that clearly didn't include socialists and anarchists.

Rounding out the movie is the existence of a second love triangle among the present-day students. Michael is interested in fellow student Patricia Stanley (Joan Leslie), but she seems more interested in the jocks, enjoying the temporary presence of Joe but really desiring present-day football hero Wally (Don De Fore).

As I was watching the movie, I couldn't help but think the presentation looked a lot like a play that hadn't been opened up enough for the screen which doesn't have the limitations that the stage does. Sure enough, The Male Animal had been a Broadway play by James Thurber and former movie actor Elliott Nugent, who took the Henry Fonda role in the play and actually directs the movie. But the much bigger problem is that the characters all seem like unrealistic caricatures, given unbelievable dialog. They're also generally not terribly likable. So it made the movie quite a slog for me.

That's a bit of a shame since the stars all do a professional job with the material they're given; it's just that for me it's decidedly sub-par material. As always, however, you may want to watch and judge for yourself.

They Died With Their Boots On

I mentioned at the beginning of the month when I posted about Star of the Month Sydney Greeenstreet that one of his movies I hadn't blogged about before, They Died With Their Boots On, would be running at 6:00 AM on Nov. 25. That's tomorrow morning, and since I have the movie on DVD as part of an Errol Flynn box set, I made a point of watching it to have it fresh in my mind for a post on the movie.

Errol Flynn plays George Armstrong Custer, who at the start of the movie is entering West Point as a plebe in the summer of 1857. Custer, as presented here, doesn't seem to care much for rules, naïvely thinking that he'll be able to bring his hunting dogs with him and get the biggest suite in the barracks, egged on by upperclassman cadet Ned Sharp (Arthur Kennedy). This is just the first of many, many incidents in which Custer will pick up demerits, he being constantly wary of authority.

One of those incidents results in his having to march guard, basically marching back and forth and having to keep his mouth shut. Elizabeth Bacon (Olivia de Havilland) is a young woman from the same town as George, Monroe, MI. But she comes from the well-to-do part of town while George was a blacksmith's son, so there's a class difference that her father may not approve of. Of course, it's going to take a while for George and Elizabeth to meet each other again.

1861 comes, and this of course means the start of the Civil War. All of the cadets from the South leave West Point, while those in Custer's class are still a year away from graduating (at the time, West Point was a five-year school). The Union was badly in need of junior officers, so they took the West Point cadets and graduated them a year early. Custer fights in his own iconoclastic way, eventually rising to the rank of brevet general, although that's not a full general but only a temporary rank. So when the Civil War ended, he was returned to his regular rank of Captain and sent back to Michigan with the thanks of a kind nation.

Having married Elizabeth, who father died soon after the war, Custer is in need of a good job, even though the military is all he really knows. Ned Sharp shows up looking to trade on Custer's name to have it behind a development company looking to develop the Dakota Territory. Custer rightly doesn't trust Sharp one bit, and refuses, instead looking to get put back into regular service.

Custer does, in fact, get promoted to Lieutenant Colonel and sent as a cavalry commander west... to Fort Lincoln, which is in the Dakota Territory and where Ned Sharp just happens to be. Custer finds all sorts of chicanery going on, including with the Indian agent for the region, which causes him to try to take his case to Washington. Ned and the agent are trying to get the treaty with the Sioux and other tribes abrogated so they can bring more white settlers onto the land, from which they hope to make a hefty profit. Custer's patrols eventually take him to the Little Big Horn in eastern Montana, and his unorthodox command style finally does him in.

Pretty much anybody who has a good knolwedge of history and who has seen They Died With Their Boots On will tell you that the movie is more or less a whitewashing of history, along with a hefty dollop of Hollywood tropes deemed necessary to entertain the viewers. I can certainly say that the tropes are laid on in grand style, from the romance between Flynn and de Havilland to Hattie McDaniel as the Bacons' servant, to the whole military gallantry.

From what I've read, the real life Custer was indeed a discipline problem and unorthodox. There might actually be room for an interesting movie about the question of unorthodox command when the battle is actually raging and the communication lines break down. It's generally presented in World War II movies that Nazi generals were fairly rigid, with American initiative and ingenuity winning the day. But when is it right to take that initiative, and when not?

Also, in later years there were a lot more westerns about how the Bureau of Indian Affairs was cheating the Indians blind, something we wouldn't get in pre World War II days. The real-life story of Custer seems interesting in that the corruption apparently ran all the way up to the Secretary of War (nowadays Secretary of Defense) and President Grant's brother; Custer was a witness in the impeachment proceedings of the Secretary of War and arrested when he wanted to return back to his post out west instead of staying around to testify when he thought his written testimony was enough. There's material for a Tennessee Johnson type movie there, but nobody in Hollywood ever thought to make it.

What we do get, however, is more than worth watching as examples of what Flynn and de Havilland could do, and on the whole an example of what the studio system could put out. Just don't expect real history from They Died With Their Boots On.

You'll note that I haven't brought up Star of the Month Sydney Greenstreet once. That's because he's got a smaller role as General Winfield Scott, fighting the war from central command in Washington. He has a few scenes during the portion of the movie covering the Civil War, but once the war ends, he's pretty much out of the picture.