The Young Lovers

Another of the movies that I got the chance to see thanks to its being available on demand on Tubi (granted with a few ad breaks) is an early directorial effort for Ida Lupino, Never Fear. Lupino also co-wrote the screenplay with her then husband Collier Young, and the two also produced it with their production company The Filmakers.

After an opening title card informing us that as much of the movie as possible was filmed at the real locations, we get into the action, such as it is. Guy Richards (Keefe Brasselle) is a dancer who is probably better as a choreographer, but in any case is supposed to be someone who can go a good ways in that field. As the movie opens, he's trying to break in to the big time together with his dance partner Carol Williams (Sally Forrest), who is also his girlfriend and soon to become fiancée, at least when Guy can finally bring in a little more money.

The two get some successful reviews at the nightclub where they're performing, but as Guy is devising the next routine, Carol starts to feel a fever coming on that's ultimately enough for her to collapse. Guy takes Carol to the best doctor he can afford, and the diagnosis isn't a pleasant one: polio, which of course was still a thing when the movie was made in late 1949. Guy wants to do the best he can for Carol, and fortunately, Carol has a father who seems to have a bit of money too, so they can afford to put her in the private Kabat-Kaiser Institute (a real place that ultimately became part of what is now Kaiser Permanente) and get her a single room.

Carol thankfully has the use of her arms but sadly not her legs, and worries she'll never walk again. Her days are filled with physical therapy and socializing with the other patients, especially Len Randall (Hugh O'Brian), who you wonder whether he's trying to put the moves on her because he consistently seems a little too friendly, even though he certainly must know about Guy's presence in her life. Then again, Carol seems more than willing to dump Guy now that she can't walk any more, and doesn't want anyone else in her life either, choosing instead to feel sorry for herself and a miserable person to be around.

Guy, on the other hand, is a saint, and is even willing to put dancing aside to take on a job selling new tract housing to make ends meet, not that he's any good at that. He wants to stand by Carol -- even though they're not married, he's already taking the "in sickness and in health" part of the marriage vows seriously. But at the same time, he gets to the point where he just wants to shake some sense into his girlfriend.

Lupino would go on to better things behind the camera, but Never Fear is decidedly uneven. Now, part of that is down to the screenplay, which makes Sally Forrest have to play an unsympathetic character for much of the running time. The screenplay is also strictly by-the-numbers. There's also the presence of Keefe Brasselle, who was never much of an actor. On the other hand, Lupino already shows some good camera work, notably when she directs a wheelchair square dance (apparently the polio victims really did such square dancing on wheels), which is the most interesting part of the movie.

Sydney Greenstreet is in the army now

Another of the movies that's been sitting on my DVR for a bit that's getting another showing on TCM is Pillow to Post. That next TCM showing is tomorrow, October 23, at 6:00 AM, so as always I made the point of watching it now so that I could schedule this post on the movie in conjunction with the upcoming airing.

The movie was released right at the tail end of World War II, and presumably set a bit since it's based on a play produced in 1943. With the war on, there's a need for men to fight and a consequent shortage of men in regular industry. This hits J.R. Howard (Paul Harvey), who runs a company producing oil rig supplies, which you'd think would be a key industry. Well, maybe so, but the salesmen aren't quite so key, and Howard has lost most of his salesmen. His daughter Jean (Ida Lupino), who for whatever reason hasn't been able to do anything for the war effort -- she says she's even been told the Red Cross doesn't want her blood -- overhears Dad having a talk with one of the draft boards. She suggests that perhaps she could take over the job, even though she's never done this sort of work.

She goes around the country with not much success, until she hears of a possible lead just outside San Diego, Slim Clark (Johnny Mitchell). The job is going to keep her there a couple of days, which is however an issue. When she gets to Travelers' Aid at the train station, she learns once again how there's a war on. And because San Diego is an important port of departure what with Camp Pendleton (not named) and other military installations, there are constantly people traveling in and out of town such that all of the hotels are booked solid and there's no way Jean is getting a place to stay. However, thanks to a misunderstood comment, the woman at the help desk thinks Jean is an Army bride. There's an opening at the Colonial Auto Court, which is for military couples with no children.

Jean, I suppose, could tell a little white lie since she's only going to be there a couple of days maximum. But the manager, Mrs. Wingate (Ruth Donnelly), kind of expects both halves of the couple to sign the register. Jean needs a fake husband, and for whatever reason thinks she needs a lieutenant specifically. On her way back from talking to Clark, who says he needs time to think things over, she flags down a couple of cars looking for a lieutenant who can pretend to be a husband and who can come up with an excuse not to have to stay the night. One car has a colonel, Otley (Sydney Greenstreet, whose shape is a plot point), but eventually she stops Lt. Mallory (William Prince), who goes along with it although it's more because he feels he doesn't have much choice.

And it's unsurprising why Lt. Mallory would be uncomfortable about doing this. Clark wants to take Jean out for the day to discuss the business deal, and all of the other women at the motor court get all the wrong ideas. Never mind that dinner with Clark goes badly enough that it comes to blows between Clark and Mallory. Worse for Mallory is that Col. Otley is staying at the motor court with his wife, and when he hears about Mallory's surprise marriage, he wants to do all the right things in terms of getting paperwork and whatnot done. It will cause substantial discipline problems if it comes to light that Mallory is in fact not married to Jean. And then Mallory's mom and Jean's dad both learn about the sudden marriage and show up for the climax.

Now, since this is a wartime movie and a decided comedy, you know that it's going to have to have a happy ending; Lt. Mallory ending up in prison just isn't going to do. So how are they going to resolve the plot problems? You'll just have to watch Pillow to Post to find out.

To be honest, Pillow to Post isn't quite my favorite, I think for several reasons. One is the fact that the plot is going to have to get itself into contortions to resolve things. Another is that it's another of those movies where a little white lie snowballs into bigger lies, and as I've said a lot, that's a type of movie I don't generally care for. There's also the supporting characters, with several quirky subplots that are just too quirky for the good of the movie. Those plot issues serve to make it feel like everybody's trying just a bit too hard. It's not so much that Pillow to Post is bad; it's more that it's another of those movies that could have been better than the finished product is.

Woman in Hiding

I mentioned at the beginning of the month how Ida Lupino was one of the people spotlighted in this year's Summer Under the Stars for whom I had a movie on my DVR that wasn't airing as part of her day. I've finally gotten to the point in my library where that movie is at the top of the list for movies I've watched but haven't blogged about yet: Woman in Hiding.

The movie starts off in a really interesting manner. Lupino's character is driving a car down a windy mountain road as the opening credits play, complete with dramatic music that implies she's racing away from... something. As the credits reach their end, she fails to navigate a curve, and the car crashes through a guardrail into the river down below.

Next up is the police having pulled the car up from the river, with it hanging from a bridge, without a body to show for it. We then hear the voice of Ida Lupino, informing us that it's her body that the police are dredging the river for, the voice of one Deborah Chandler. The camera then shows a man on the bridge with the police, at which point Deborah informs us she's Deborah Chandler Clark; the man on the bridge is Selden Clark IV (Stephen McNally).

As you might guess, the movie then goes into a flashback. Deborah Chandler is the daughter of John Chandler (John Litel), who owns the factory that's the big employer in the North Carolina town where they live. John has hired on Selden Clark IV as the factory's general manager, largely because the Clarks were the big family in town; in fact, the town, Clarksville, is named after one of Selden's ancestors. Selden and Deborah have fallen in love, but Dad really disapproves of the romance, largely because he considers the last couple generations of Clarks to be really terrible people.

And then Dad dies suddenly in an accident at the mill, freeing the way for Selden to marry Deborah, while Deborah becomes the owner of the mill. It would seem a match made in heaven, but Selden is extremely anxious for the match to go through, and Voiceover Deborah says she should have seen things for what they were much earlier considering how Selden made the wedding proposal on the day of her father's funeral. Still, she goes through with the wedding.

It's then that things really get nasty. Selden takes Deborah up to a cabin in the mountains for their honeymoon, and when they get there, waiting for them is one Patricia Monahan (Peggy Dow) of Raleigh. Patricia is equally nasty, only to Selden, but then she has good reason to be nasty. She was -- and may still be -- Selden's other woman, and she has no qualms about letting the married couple know about it. Indeed, she points out that Selden had told her that he was finished with Deborah a year ago, so we know he's lying about that half of the relationship.

Selden responds by kicking Patricia out, and then trying to keep Deborah cooped up in the cabin. Obviously, now that she knows the full truth of the matter -- well she really learns the full truth when she concludes that her father's death was no accident -- she decides she's going to make a break for it. But we're only about a half hour into a 90-minute movie, which means that the flashback doesn't take up the full movie.

As you might guess, Deborah is giving the voiceover because she did not in fact die in the car crash, which would also explain why they can't find the body. Selden is also convinced that Deborah didn't die, and is obsessive about finding her. Deborah heads off to Raleigh to try to find Patricia. At one of the bus stations, a demobbed soldier, Keith Ramsey (Howard Duff), is manning the newsstand. He's quite taken with Deborah, not realizing who she is, but eventually decides to help her. He doesn't understand just how much danger she's in, of course.

When Eddie Muller presented Woman in Hiding in Noir Alley, he commented that it was a movie that Ida Lupino didn't really want to make, implying that she was taking a paycheck to be able to do the stuff she really wanted to do. That's a bit harsh, since Woman in Hiding is an effective enough little movie. In writing this post, I suddenly found myself thinking of Sleeping With the Enemy, which has a fairly similar plot of a wife running away and the obsessive husband going to the ends of the earth to find her, although in that one the husband is even more over the top in the way he treats his wife.

The cast does well enough here, and the movie is certainly reasonably entertaining, even if it isn't the best movie any of the people involved made. It's definitely worth a watch the next time it shows up.

Christmas in the summer

When TCM had their annual Christmas marathon last year, they included a bunch of movis that were only tangentially Christmas movies because there were one or more scenes set at Christmas time. I recorded several of them, and now that I'm up to those movies on my DVR, I'm blogging about them even though it's the height of summer. One of those movies was The Man I Love.

After the opening credits, the camera pans in on The 39 Club, in New York City. It's closed for the evening, but a bunch of the musicians are still in the club, including singer Petey Brown (Ida Lupino). After she sings an old Gershwin standard, the musicians talk about the past, bringing up a pianist named San Thomas, wondering what happened to him.

Meanwhile, Petey has a sister living on the other coast, in Long Beach CA. Petey is tired of the New York life, so she decides she's going to travel out to Los Angeles and spend some time with her sister Sally (Andrea King), especially since Christmas is coming up. Sally works as a waitress, not in a cocktail bar, but in a restaurant run by Nicky Toresca (Robert Alda) as a front. He's also interested in Sally romantically, even though the feeling is not mutual. But he's got a lot of pull, even having gotten her brother Joe a job in one of his places. Sally has another sister besides Petey, as well as a son and a husband who served in World War II but wound up in an Army mental hospital with PTSD or somesuch. So when Petey shows up, she has no idea what she's about to get into.

With that in mind, Petey decides that she's going to stay a while to try to help her kid siblings out. Meanwhile, Joe bring Sally a dress for Christmas. Except that it's actually a gift from Toresca, and Sally clearly doesn't want. Petey's already heard Sally's tale of woe about Toresca, so she decides she's going to figure out what's going on by wearing Sally's dress to Toresca's place, since that will clearly get his attention. She even gets a job at Toresca's place as a nightclub singer.

And then the plot really starts getting melodramatically out of control. Joe gets arrested for fighting, and when Petey goes to bail him out, it turns out that he's been fighting with... San Thomas (Bruce Bennett). And if that's not enough, there's a whole lot more going on, including lots of affairs and one of the characters getting killed.

The Man I Love was based on a novel, and I get the impression that the studio folks who read the novel thought that it would make good material for a movie. But something went wrong, I'd guess with the script, in that there's just way too much here, and the script just keeps piling more and more melodrama on. It's way too much for a 90-minute movie. I suppose I should add here, however, that the movie was originally 96 minutes. Supposedly, the Warner Archive has restored it and made the 96-minute movie available as of this year, but the print TCM showed last Christmas was the 90-minute version.

Ida Lupino tries her best, and is generally good with this sort of material. But even Lupino can't really save The Man I Love.

The Gentle People

A movie that I think I'd seen part of at one time several years ago is Out of the Fog. It showed up some months back as part of TCM's Noir Alley even thought it isn't really a noir. So I recorded it in order to be able to watch it in full and do a review on it here.

After the opening credits, we get a fog-shrouded pier somewhere in Brooklyn. A man walks down to where the boats are moored, and flicks a match into one of the boats, starting a fire. He then walks into Caroline's bar and restaurant, run by Caroline (Odette Myrtil) who is in love with her short-order cook Olaf (John Qualen). Olaf feels she's a bit smothering, and would rather spend time with his best friend Jonah (Thomas Mitchell), a tailor who owns the place next door. The two of them have a boat and like to go fishing together.

The man who set the fire, Goff (John Garfield) goes back into the kitchen where he starts talkin to Olaf and then Jonah when he comes in. Eventually they hear the sirens of a fire engine. Goff, having set the fire, knows fully well that the boat is on fire and whose boat it is, so he knows it's not the one that Olaf and Jonah co-own; of course, nobody else knows any of this yet or what Goff's true nature is, although for a discerning viewer it shouldn't be too difficult to guess. And it's going to be revealed anyway.

We still have a few key characters to be revealed, however. Stella (Ida Lupino) is Jonah's adult daughter. The family live together in an apartment above the tailor's shop, and Stella is getting a bit sick of this kind of life because she wants something better. She's got a nice boyfriend in George (Eddie Albert), but she wants something better. So when Goff shows up, she realizes she's going to get that excitement she's always been craving.

Not that the excitement is going to be good for her. Goff, if you hadn't figured it out, does an extortion racket on the pier, and starts extorting Olaf and Jonah for what little money they have in exchange for not destroying their boat. It gets worse when Goff discovers that Olaf and Jonah have saved a bit of money. And then Jonah realizes that Goff is trying to put the moves on his daughter and that she seems to be OK with it, which really frightens him. Eventually, Jonah and Olaf figure that the only way to save themselves from the extortion, and to save Stella from Goff, is to kill Goff. The problem is that there's that pesky Production Code, and Olaf and Jonah are clearly supposed to be the good guys in this piece.

With the cast I've mentioned, and add in Aline MacMahon as Jonah's wife, it should be no surprise that Out of the Fog is well-acted, and definitely worth watching for the performances. It has a few problems, however, that are down to the time in which it was made. One, as I already alluded to, is the Production Code, which severely constrained how Hollywood could resolve all the dramatic conflicts that Olaf and Jonah have. The other thing is that the whole production looks clearly like it was done on the studio backlot and nowhere near the Brooklyn piers where the movie is supposed to be set. (It's based on a New York stage play.)

Out of the Fog may not be a noir despite the title or Eddie Muller's showing it in Noir Alley, but it's still one to watch.

What happened to the first 35 hells?

The FAST services have a lot of stuff that I'd have to guess has fallen into the public domain, or else is extremely cheap to get the rights to. And because it's fairly old and/or British stuff, it's things I've never heard of. One example that sounded interesting was Private Hell 36, so I sat down to watch it in order to be able to do a review here.

The movie starts with a pre-credits sequence of an elevator door in a New York apartment building opening up, to reveal that somebody's been murdered, and the murderer is trying to get away. A voiceover informs us that the motive for the murder was money, as some $300,000 in cash was stolen. A year has gone by, and that money hasn't shown up. But now, some of it is beginning to show up all over the country.

Cal Bruner (Steve Cochran) is a sergeant with the LAPD. One night, he foils a crime at a drugstore. The police investigate, and find out that one of the prescriptions was paid for with a $50 bill, which isn't that ridiculous, except that a trace of the bill reveals that it's one of the bills stolen in that elevator murder/robbery a year ago. In some ways that's good, but in other ways it's bad, because Bruner's commander, Capt. Michaels (Dean Jagger), sends Bruner and his partner, Sgt. Jack Farnham (Howard Duff) out to do the boring legwork of finding out who originally passed the bill in Los Angeles.

The two wind up at a bar where the bartender claimed to get the bill from lounge singer Lilli Marlowe (Ida Lupino). She can't remember who gave her the $50 tip, not so much because she doesn't like the police. In fact, in one of those common Hollywood tropes, she's going to wind up falling for Bruner, and the feeling gets mutual. At least Farnham has a wife (Dorothy Malone). Anyhow, she gets roped into going with Bruner and Farnham to the racetrack every day since that's where the suspect is most likely to try to pass off the bills, considering how much cash goes through a racetrack.

Eventually Lilli recognizes a face, and that eventually leads to a chase through the hills above Los Angeles. However, the guy they're chasing loses control of his car, crashing down the mountain and getting killed in the fall. The two detectives investigate, and find a box containing something like $80,000 of the money from the robbery. But there's a lot of wind, and that begins to blow the bills out of the box and into the surrounding canyon. Bruner, now having a girlfriend with expensive tastes, decides he's going to pocket some of the money. After all, he and Farnham are the only ones who might know how much money was in that box.

Of course, there's a Production Code, so we know that Bruner is never going to get away with it. But how exactly is he going to get caught, and how is Farnham going to deal with things? For those answers, you'll just have to watch Private Hell 36.

Private Hell 36 is a movie that was independently produced by Ida Lupino's company The Filmakers, together with her then-husband Collier Young. That may be why I hadn't heard of it before. It's a fairly low budget affair, which probably limits just how truly great it could become. But for what it does, it's quite successful, which probably shouldn't be a surprise considering the level of talent on offer. In addition to the cast, there's a dialogue coach named David Peckinpah, who would eventually start using his middle name Sam. There's also fine direction from Don Siegel, who would go on to much bigger and better things.

Private Hell 36 is still available, with ads, on TubiTV, and is definitely worth watching.

Ladies in Retirement

One of the new-to-me movies that I had the chance to record during 31 Days of Oscar back in April was Ladies in Retirement. Recently, I sat down to watch it and do a review of it here.

Ida Lupino plays Ellen Creed. She's a single woman in mid-1880s England who works for Leonora Fiske (Isobel Elsom). Fiske is a former actress who apparently could afford to retire fairly well, as she's got a nice house in a rural part of County Kent, and not just Ellen living with her but maid Lucy (Evelyn Keyes). However, things aren't going so well for Ellen as she gets a letter from London.

In that letter, a landlady informs Ellen about Ellen's two sisters, Emily (Elsa Lanchester) and Louisa (Edith Barrett). Both of them are apparently "dotty", more than the aunts in Arsenic and Old Lace but not quite as insane as the aunts' nephew who thinks he's Teddy Roosevelt. In any case, Ellen seems to be the only one who can take care of her two sisters as they cause problems everywhere else they go and the landlady is threatening to call the police and have the sisters sent to an asylum.

Another problem for Ellen shows up, although she doesn't know about this one yet. A man from Gravesend not too far away shows up, and rather rudley asks Leonora if he could borrow £12. Tha man is Albert (Louis Hayward), who claims to be Ellen's nephew, which would be by a fourth, unseen sibling who must apparently be dead or else that sibling should be helping to take care of Emily and Louisa. But enough thinking of possible plot holes. Albert leaves before Ellen sees him, although he's going to come back later on and we learn that he's in much deeper financial difficulties and embezzled from the bank's till to get the money so the police are after him.

The police might be about to be after Ellen, too. Not because of the two sisters, at least not directly. Ellen asks Leonora if the two sisters can come to visit, Leonora not knowing about the sisters' mental state. Leonora would be thrilled to have more guests, at least until she finds out the truth about them and wants to be rid of them while Ellen is scheming to come up with a way to get them to stay on permanently.

Ellen's ultimate plan is to send everybody away from the house for a day and, while alone with Leonora, kill her and claim that Leonora sold the house to her. Of course, it's a scheme that wouldn't work in real life, and definitely isn't going to work here since the Production Code would never allow it. Oh, it does seem to work for a while, but Albert returns, romances Lucy, and together the two of them start snooping and guess the truth about Ellen. Not that Albert can do much about it since he's got his own legal problems, of coures.

Ladies in Retirement was originally a stage play, something which is fairly obvious considering how much of the movie is set inside the house. But director Charles Vidor does a good job of opening up the action, and plays aren't necessarily a bad thing, especially if they're not stagey. Unsurprisingly, Lupino gives a good performance, and the movie is mostly about her character. The ending may be a bit of a problem for some, but then they had to come up with something that would placate the Production Code office. (I couldn't find what differences there are between the movie and the play.) Definitely worth a watch.

If you're wondering why TCM was able to show Ladies in Retirement in 31 Days of Oscar, it's because the movie got an unsurprising nomination for its black-and-white art direction as well as a more surprising one for the score.

Devotion (1946)

I had two movies on my DVR titled Devotion, with different stories. The early talkie version doesn't seem to be on DVD, but the 1946-released movie titled Devotion is, so I watched that recently to do a review on here.

The Brontës are a family living in Yorkshire near the moors in the 1830s, where their father (Montagu Love) is a reverend in the Anglican chuch. There are four surviving children, daughters Charlotte (Olivia de Havilland), Emily (Ida Lupino), and Anne (Nancy Coleman), along with son Branwell (Arthur Kennedy). (In real life there were two older daughters but they, like all of the siblings, died young.)

As you probably know, all three of the surviving daughters liked to write, while Branwell liked to paint, as well as drink. Charlotte and Anne are set to go off to become governesses, while Emily stays to look after Branwell. He gets drunk one night at the local inn just as a new curate, Rev. Arthur Nicholls (Paul Henried) shows up to work alongside the overworked Rev. Brontë in the parish. Rev. Nicholls brings Branwell home, but Emily thinks Nicholls is one of Branwell's drunkard friends.

Emily has on again-off again feelings toward Arthur, until Charlotte shows up back home. The three sisters finally think about publishing some of their poetry, although they do it under male pseudonyms since apparently the thought of women writers, at least from outside the gentry, was somewhat scandalous. Not as scandalous as Branwell's behavior, mind you, but scandalous nonetheless.

Emily and Charlotte go off to Brussels to teach in a school there, where they meet married headmaster Constantin Heger (Victor Francen). Charlotte is portrayed as having a crush on Heger while Emily has more muted feelings for him, although this is probably just Hollywood hogwash from what I've read. Branwell has another bout of illness that forces the sisters to return home, just in time for him to die.

As you know from real life, Emily became famous for writing Wuthering Heights and Charlotte for Jane Eyre. Charlotte goes to London after Jane Eyre has been published under the pseudonym Currer Bell. There she meets William Thackeray (Sydney Greenstreet), author of successful books like Vanity Fair. He learns the secret of the Bells which is that they're actually women, and thinks that Emily's writing is more powerful than Charlotte's, not that he dislikes Charlotte. And then Emily gets sick too....

As with most Hollywood biopics, from what I read, there's a lot in Devotion that's exaggeration at best and made up out of whole cloth at worst. As a movie, however, Devotion is an interesting jumping-off point if you want to learn more about the Brontës. Arthur Kennedy looks like he's channeling MGM contract player Van Heflin here, although since the movie was made at Warner Bros. they probably couldn't get Heflin. In fact, although the movie was released in 1946, it was actually made early in 1943 and shelved for a couple of years, possibly because of de Havilland's lawsuit against Warner Bros. (Indeed, Montagu Love died in 1943, long before the movie was released.)

De Havilland and Lupino both do reasonably well, although some people might find the material a little beneath them what with Hollywood's changing biographies around for dramatic effect. It all winds up feeling like material that should have been handled by MGM since they still had the gloss necessary to put this kind of movie over. Devotion isn't bad by any means, but it feels like it could have been so much more.

Deep Valley

Another of the movies that I recently watched off the DVR thanks to its being on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive is Deep Valley.

Ida Lupino, really much too old for the part, plays Libby Saul. She's the adult daughter living on an isolated northern California farm together with her parents Cliff (Henry Hull) and Ellie (Fay Bainter). Ellie has some sort of illness which has her spending a lot of time in bed upstairs, while Libby's problem is that she stutters, which really ticks off Dad. Well, that, and the fact that she doesn't seem to want to do her share of the work around the house. Instead, she'd rather go off to an abandoned cabin in the forest which borders on their farm.

It's on one of those sojourns to the cabin that she sees something the presumably hasn't seen before owing to her family's isolation and her speech impediment. It's a prison work gang building a new road along the coast down the hill from the cabin. And these being prisoners and with the hot weather, a lot of them have stripped down to the waist and aren't wearing shirts. No wonder Libby's heart is set all aflutter despite her not having much prospects for a man.

The head of the work gang, Jeff Barker (Wayne Morris), shows up at the house one night, to talk about purchasing some land for the road project, and is immediately taken with Libby, not yet knowing about her speech problem, and certainly not knowing she's seen all those prisoners. Later that night, a fierce storm comes through, shaking the Sauls' house violently, and causing a landslide on the hill where they're building the road.

The landslide killed several prisoners and left a couple missing and presumed dead, including Barry Burnette (Dane Clark). He had gotten in trouble with the guards and put in the tool shed as a sort of makeshift sweatbox, and when the landslide came, it knocked over the shed. The logical thought might be that he died in the landslide too, except that his dead body is not found in the shed, so Barker thinks Burnette has escaped, and sure enough he has.

As you can probably guess, Barry makes his way through the woods, and finding that abandoned cabin, thinks that's not a bad place to stop for a bit while he tries to plan his next movie to figure out how to escape. You can also probably guess that Libby is going to go back there and find Barry. And then, on top of all that, you can fairly easily figure out that naïve Libby is going to fall in love with Barry, and the feeling will be mutual. Libby hasn't had a man, and here's Barry, fit from all that work and good enough looking. Barry hasn't had a woman in years, being a 10-year manslaughter sentence, and he wants Libby, filling her head with all sorts of nonsense of how they're going to live together in the big city, never mind from films like Dust Be My Destiny that fugitives are always going to feel themselves the prey.

So with all that story in mind, it's not surprising that there isn't much new in Deep Valley. There are shades of lots of other movies here, some earlier, like the aforementioned Dust Be My Destiny and also High Sierra, and some later, like Johnny Belinda (although of course here Barry has no intention of committing rape). The actors do the best they can with the material, and the acting isn't bad at all. But the material is trite and, in this case, also has any number of plot holes. There was also the extremely obvious rear-projection photography in the climax. And the Production Code means there's only one possible ending.

Overall, however, Deep Valley is definitely woth a watch the next time it shows up on TCM. I'm not certain I'd pay standalone DVD prices for it, but some people probably would.

Outrage

After the introduction of the Code in 1934, certain topics just couldn't be talked about. An interesting movie that tries to broach one of those untouchable subjects is Outrage, which will be on TCM tomorrow (November 7) at 2:45 PM.

Mala Powers plays nice working girl Ann Walton who, being single, still lives with her loving parents. However, she's not going to be single much longer, as she's got a boyfriend in Jim (Robert Clarke). Unfortunately, at work she has to deal with a creep who mans the food stand at the facility where Ann works. He seems interested in her, but she's not interested in him. Things go well for Ann until one night when she works late. On her way home, that guy from the stand starts following her until he traps her in a corner and....

Well, you can probably guess that Ann was raped, although of course movies of that time couldn't talk about it. Johnny Belinda was probably slightly more open, but only because she ended up pregnant. Everybody tries to be supportive of Ann, but she doesn't want to be around a man so she thinks there's no way she can marry Jim. And she just knows that everybody's looking at her as though there's something fundamentally and irrevocably flawed with her.

So Ann decides to run away by hopping on a bus for the big city. However, at one of the stops, Ann hears a radio report that her parents are looking for her, a report that goes into too much detail about what happened to her. Now everybody is going to know the dirty truth about her. So she flees the bus and just starts walking, until she collapses from exhaustion.

She's found in that state by the kindly Reverend Bruce Ferguson (Tod Andrews), who obviously knows that there's something wrong with her, but takes an interest in her well-being. Or is he possibly interested in her -- he's not Catholic, so he could have a girlfriend if he wanted. The good reverend helps Ann get a job in the local agribusiness, and even gets Ann a place to stay. Ann, for her part, seems to be doing her best to make herself a part of the community.

Until, that is, the big local party when one of the partygoers shows a decided interest in her. Nobody in this little town knows Ann's true past, and while this guy is probably sincere, he's also way too forward for Ann, who knowing nothing better to do, clubs the guy with a wrench in self-defense! Of course, she's going to have to stand trial for that, and the whole sordid past may come out....

Outrage isn't a bad movie, although the dirty little fingers of the Production Code cause some serious problems. Everything is way too guarded, and the ending is a bit too pat even if it isn't a straightforward happy Hollywood ending. The whole movie felt to me like it was better suited to be a TV movie of the week. Not that anybody's bad in it, but everything feels ever so slightly off.

Direction was handled by Ida Lupino, one of the rare women directors at that time. She shows some interesting ideas with camera movement, and also handles the material (which she co-wrote) about as well as one can considering the constraints of the Production Code.

The movie doesn't seem to be available at all on DVD, which I'd guess is because it was independently produced with distribution handled by RKO. If it were a full RKO movie, it probably would have gotten a Warner Archive release by now.

The Sea Wolf

During the month of Michael Curtiz movies, one that I recorded because I hadn't seen it in ages is The Sea Wolf.

The action begins in San Francisco in 1900. George Leach (John Garfield) is a man on the run from the law who is looking for a way to escape the city. Being a port city, getting a job on a ship going to sea seems like an obvious way to escape. A guy alongside George at the bar offers him a job on a ship, but George sees the bartender slip him a mickey. Still, George takes the job!

Meanwhile, Ruth (Ida Lupino) is on the run from the law and gets on a different ship, along with the writer Julius (Alexander Knox). That ship runs into the ferry, leading to people getting thrown overboard. Ruth and Julius are recovered, on the same ship where George is working.

Not that either of them would want it that way. The captain "Wolf" Larsen (Edward G. Robinson) is running a sealing boat, and the plan is to go to sea, catch those seals, and only then return to San Francisco. And it's not as if they're going to be in the normal shipping lanes. Making matters worse is that Wolf is a no-nonsense taskmaster as captain.

Actually, that's a bit of an understatement. OK, more than a bit of understatement. Wolf believes the bit from Milton's Paradise Lost that it's "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven", and boy is he reigning in Hell! The thing is, pretty much everybody on board is there because they're escaping a criminal past, so the alternative to not taking orders from Wolf is obviously pretty bad. The one guy who might think about a bit of rebellion is the doctor Prescott (Gene Lockhart), but he'd be happy with a bit of respect.

Ultimately, George decides to lead a rebellion, although the ship's cook Cooky (Barry Fitzgerald) is an all-watching eye who finds being a stool pigeon for Wolf is the least bad option. How the hell is anybody going to escape this ship?

The Sea Wolf is a well-made movie with good acting performances, particularly from Knox and Robinson. Knox is an actor you'd probably best remember from Wilson in 1944, since Knox's portrayal of the president probably should have brought him an Academy Award, he was that far above every other performance that year. Knox for whatever reason never really got plum roles after Wilson, which is a shame because he already shows here how much potential he has. Robinson's performance should come as no surprise. He plays a man who, although brutal, is probably also going mad, I'd guess from a brain tumor of some sort since he's got some condition that causes temporary blindness. It's a difficult role to make anything but a caricature, and Robinson does it with aplomb.

The print of The Sea Wolf that TCM ran was about 87 minutes. I was wondering what would happen since I saw that the Blu-ray is 100 minutes. It turns out that when The Sea Wolf was re-released in the late 1940s, about 13 minutes of footage were cut. That footage was only rediscovered in the last few years, and a restored print was made. That restoration got its Blu-ray release earlier this year, but I'd assume that the terms of the release prevent TCM from running that print for some period of time. I don't know what footage was cut, but even the cut version is quite good.

They Drive By Night

They Drive By Night showed up on TCM several months ago; surprisingly enough, it was one of those movies that I had never seen before. It's more than enjoyable enough, and so I waited for it to show up again on TCM so that I could do a full-length blog post on it. That TCM airing is tomorrow morning at 8:00 AM.

George Raft gets top billing as Joe Fabrini, who, together with his brother Paul (Humphrey Bogart, a year before success in High Sierra made him always be top-billed), runs an independent trucking operation. Well, it's only one truck, which the two of them drive together so that they can spend more hours of the day on the road as they ferry fruit between San Francisco and Los Angeles. Trucking that many hours a day can be dangerous, as one could fall asleep at the wheel, causing an accident. Indeed, we'll see a couple of accidents, but more on that in a bit. There's also the eternal struggle to stay one step ahead of the financing company in making the payments. Anyhow, at one of the vintage 1940 truck stops -- remember, there was no interstate highway system with divided highways and fancy rest areas at this point -- they meet a hash slinger who wants to get away from it all. So Cassie (Ann Sheridan) gets in the truck with our two brothers. She begins to fall in love with Joe, while Paul already has a wife down in Los Angeles.

As I said earlier, we're going to see a couple of accidents. The first is witnessed by the Fabrinis, and kills a fellow trucker. The second, however, involves the Fabrinis, and changes the plot of the movie, as Paul loses an arm. This makes him unfit to drive, and there goes the business. So Joe goes to work for the Carlsen trucking operation. It's run by Ed Carlsen (Alan Hale), a man who was a small-time trucker like the Fabrinis but made good and now has a fleet of trucks. He's also got a trophy wife named Lana (Ida Lupino). And therein lies another problem. Although Ed has made good financially, with a nice house including a detached garage with automatic opening and closing by electric eye, he hasn't made good socially. Oh, he tries, but he can be quite the drunken fool. Not a bad person; just one with no social graces. The irritates Lana no end, and when she sees what a good worker Joe is, she hatches a plan.

Lana has fallen in love with Joe, and she intends to get Ed drunk, have him park the car in the garage, and then have it close on him with the car's motor still running, which will lead Ed passed out drunk in the car to die of carbon monoxide poisoning! Oh, Ed does die all right, and Lana really starts putting the moves on Joe, who had no desire whatsoever to see Ed die and doesn't particularly have any romantic feelings for Lana either. But this being a movie in the Code era, you know Lana isn't going to be able to get away with all of this.

They Drive By Night is, for the most part, a darn entertaining movie. George Raft, who generally wasn't the most talented actor, does OK here. Ann Sheridan gets to deliver a lot of zesty lines. Bogart is underused, but the studio didn't know he was on the cusp of stardom. Alan Hale is playing the same garrulous, gregarious figure he did in a whole bunch of character roles, from It Happened One Night to The Adventures of Robin Hood and beyond. Ida Lupino, however, really gets to chew the scenery. At times, it's a problem, as the Code forces her to pay for her sins, making her veer nearly into territory plumbed by Bette Davis in Now, Voyager while doing it. It's laughable in that it's rather over the top, and not quite fitting in to an otherwise solid drama. But it doesn't sink the movie, which overall succeeds in entertaining, even if it falls a bit short of greatness.

The TCM Shop lists They Drive By Night as being part of one of those four movie box sets, this one of Humphrey Bogart movies.

While the City Sleeps

A couple of weeks back, I mentioned that While the City Sleeps would be coming up twice on TCM in October, with the second time being on October 17 as part of Vincent Price's turn as Star of the Month. Well, October 17 is here, and so it's on again tonight at 8:00 PM.

Vincent Price isn't actually the star of the movie; he's billed behind several other players starting with Dana Andrews, who really is the star in addition to being top-billed. Andrews playd Edward Mobley, a TV jounralist with a nightly commentary on a TV station owned by magnate Amos Kyne (Robert Warwick). Mobley is one of Kyne's favorites in a sprawling organization that includes not only the TV station, but also newspapers, a wire service, and a tabloid photo service. And the Kyne organization is going to need all of those: there's a killer on the loose, and Amos wants Mobley to use the various branches of the Kyne news services to find that killer. Or, at least, that's Amos' plan for Mobley, whom he wants to become the managing director of the whole organization eventually. Unfortunately, things don't work out that way: Amos is a sick man, and he drops dead before Mobley can put any of his plans into motion.

It's at this point that Vincent Price comes in. He plays Walter Kyne, Amos' son, who has spent his adult life doing everything but learning the family business. However, Amos' will bequeathed the business to his son, and so Walter owns the joint now. And he's got much different ideas than his father. He doesn't know anything about who should be managing director, so he comes up with a deviously brilliant idea: set the various divisions of the Kyne organization against each other as they try to solve the murder mystery, which by this point has been dubbed the "Lipstick Killer". The head of whichever branch solves the mystery is the man who will get the big job of managing director.

With this, the varoius grasping candidates are set against one another: John Day Griffith (Thomas Mitchell) is the editor of the Sentinel newspaper; Mark Loving (George Sanders) is in charge of the wire service; and Harry Kritzer (James Craig) runs the photo service. Mobley is seemingly left out of the running for the top job, but Mobley seems OK with that. The three division heads are all more than willing to resort to underhanded methods, most of which involve the various women in and around the organization. For Loving, that involves his girlfriend, fashion columnist Mildred Donner (Ida Lupino), who Loving hopes can get information unobtrusively because who would suspect a fashion columnist. Kritzer, for his part, tries to get his girlfriend Dorothy (Rhonda Fleming) to use her influence. The only problem is that Dorothy is Mrs. Walter Kyne. Mobley also has a girlfriend Nancy (Sally Liggett) who seems on the sidelines, but Ed turns out to be perhaps the most amoral of all the characters, as he realizes he can catch the Lipstick Killer by using his girlfriend as bait!

While the City Sleeps is one cynical movie -- it's only too bad Lee Tracy doesn't get to show up. There aren't any virtuous, crusading Torchy Blanes here. There are a few flaws: if anything, I think the movie is a bit too unralistically cynical. There's also the continuity problem that a corporate empire as big as the own Amos Kyne built would be much too big for one building, and the various heads of the divisions wouldn't be working cheek-by-jowl. That, of course, would take away from all of the backstabbing and alliance-forming. But those are minor minuses. While the City Sleeps is more than outweighed by its plusses. Pretty much all of the male characters hae plausible motivations, and having the presumptive good guy Ed Mobley turn out to be just as amoral as the rest of them, only in pursuit of "journalism" instead of the top job, is an excellent plot point. The acting is good, with an heretofore unmentioned John Drew Barrymore deserving attention as the psychotic killer. (This doesn't give much away; the movie isn't so much about the mystery as to who can solve it and how theye can solve it.)

While the City Sleeps is another of the many movies that has been released to DVD by the Warner Archive Collection.

The Bigamist

TCM is marking the birth anniversary of Ida Lupino today, so it's unsurprising that TCM is spending the day with a bunch of her movies. I've mentioned a few times in the past that Lupino became a director, but what I didn't realize is that she was actually only credited as the director of six films. To be fair, though, this doesn't count On Dangerous Ground, and she did a lot of directing for television as well. TCM is showing the movies in which Lupino is one of the stars, but that does happen to include one movie which she also directed: The Bigamist, at 4:45 PM.

At the start of the movie, our bigamist, Harrison Graham (played by Edmond O'Brien), is living in San Francisco with his wife Eve (Joan Fontaine). He's a successful salesman of commercial freezers and she's his secretary, but his work constantly takes him to Los Angeles so the two rarely see each other. They don't have any children and she seems to have trouble conceiving, so they decide to adopt. Here comes Mr. Jordan (played Edmund Gwenn, and the lousy pun was intended), the adoption agency investigator. What he discovers shocks him, although it shouldn't shock any of us since we know from the title what's coming.

Harrison Graham, is, in fact, a bigamist! How could such a thing happen? Well, let the movie tell you. As I said earlier, Harrison travels a lot for business, which has made him lonely. One day in Los Angeles, he takes a tour of the stars' houses, which is where he meets Phyllis (Ida Lupino), a waitress at a local café. (Her being on the tour is about as realistic as Priscilla Lane's character prtending to be a department store salesgirl and winding up in the Statue of Liberty for the climax of Saboteur, but that's another point.) At first it's just friendship, but you know that things are going to get more serious than that. Eventually, Phyllis tells Harrison that he's knocked her up. Well, she doesn't use that sort of language; the Production Code would never allow it. So he proposes to her, even though he's married to another woman. Since I mentioned the Production Code, you also know that it means Harrison is bound to be caught, and since Mr. Jordan has found out about the bigamy, Harrison is going to face a court trial.

If you're looking to see why people talk about Ida Lupino as a director, I don't think this is the movie to start with; something like The Hitch-Hiker would be better. The problem with this movie is, I think, not really Lupino's fault; to me it seems more a problem with the script. The whole movie is just kind of there. It comes and goes like one of those old TV movies trying to highlight an important issue. Lupino as director and actress does a capable job, and to be fair to the rest of the actors, they do as well. But they're doing their jobs in the service of mediocre material. The ending is also left hanging, but again that's a script problem.

I believe The Bigamist hasn't gotten a DVD release. It's worth a watch, but everybody involved with the film has done much better.