Under the bluebirds

June Lockhart died last year at the age of 100. For some reason I thought I mentioned the programming tribute TCM gave to her a some months back, but a search of the blog says I didn't. In any case, I had a movie with her in it on my DVR which TCM ran before she died, but which I didn't get around to watching until rather more recently, largely because I didn't realize she had a role in it: The White Cliffs of Dover.

The star here is Irene Dunne, and as the movie opens she's working as a nurse in Britain named Susan Ashwood, tending to the soldiers who are returning home from wherever it is they were bravely fighting World War II. (The movie was released a few weeks before the D-Day invasion, so perhaps these were bomber crews or people evacuated from North Africa.) Once again, as you might guess, she's about to have a flashback as to how she wound up in the situation she's in....

Let's go back to the spring of 1914. Obviously, if you know your history, you'll know that this would be shortly before World War I began in Europe, although of course it would be a good three years before that piece of shit Woodrow Wilson got the US involved in the war. Susan, at the time Susan Dunn, is traveling on an ocean liner with her father Hiram Dunn (Frank Morgan) over to England to spend a couple of months on vacation where they'll be staying with Col. Forsythe (C. Aubrey Smith) and his family. While there, Forsythe introduces Susan to a nice youngish nobleman, Sir John Ashwood (Alan Marshal). The two have a bit of a romance, although there's the question of whether it can work out since Hiram expects his daughter to return to America with him.

Susan eventually decides more or less to elope with Sir John instead of going back to America, but she has the great bad luck of marrying John just as war is being declared between Britain and Germany. Sir John comes from a long line of men who did military service, so of course he gets mobilized, and it's off to those horrid trenches of France for him to fight.

Lots of time passes, and Sir John gets brief leave as part of a program to reunite men in service with their wives, which brings Susan to Normandy for an all-too-brief weekend together. And wouldn't you know it, but a) Susan gets knocked up that weekend, and b) it's the same time that the US announces its entry into the Great War. Sadly, Sir John won't survive the war, leaving Susan a widow and mother, but a wealthy one.

Susan's son, John II (played by Roddy McDowall as a boy and Peter Lawford as an adult), grows up on the estate next to that of the Kenneys, who have a daughter his age named Betsy (played by Elizabeth Taylor as an adolescent and June Lockhart as an adult). They're going to fall in love but, as the 1930s go on Susan understands that there's another war coming and dammit, she doesn't want her son to be involved. She already gave up one man for Britain and she's not about to give up a second. Young John, however, intends to uphold the family tradition of going into military service. Since this movie was released in the spring of 1944, and since the story is told in flashback, you know whether mother or son is going to be the one to get their way.

To me The White Cliffs of Dover was one of those obvious message movies where the point of it is to show Americans at home why the US is fighting in Europe, and why they were making the sacrifices that they were. There's nothing subtle about this one at all, and that may affect your opinion on how good the movie is or isn't. It's almost as though Mrs. Miniver wasn't enough for MGM and they had to come up with more pro-Britain stuff.

Because I'm always up for pre-Codes

Some time back I came across another pre-Code on TCM that I thought (correctly) I hadn't seen before. At least, I hadn't done a post on it; if I had seen it, it would have been ages ago. That movie is Bachelor Apartment. Having watched it, I can finally do the review on it.

The movie starts off with the bachelor, a wealthy businessman named Wayne Carter and played by Lowell Sherman. He's interested in lovely ladies, and there certainly seems to be some interested in him, such as married Agatha Carraway (silent star Mae Murray in a supporting role). But Wayne is decidedly not interested in marriage, despite causing a crash between his chauffered car and a taxi just becaues he's seen the female passenger in the car just as an excuse to get the woman to his apartment for lunch.

The scene then shifts from the lunch table at Carter's park avenue apartment to a lunch table in a much more modest apartment. In that apartment, we see two women having lunch. They're sisters, Helene (Irene Dunne) and Lita (Claudia Dell) Andrews, who have come to New York to try to make a better life for themselves in the early days of the Depression. Lita is a would-be chorus girl, although work is hard to come by. However, she claims to have been invited to eat with one Wayne Carter, even mentioning Carter's address before heading off to meet Carter.

Just after Lita leaves, Helene gets a telegram that's addressed to Lita, informing Lita that there's an audition coming up that afternoon. At least Lita had the good sense to leave Carter's address. Helene goes there and finds Carter, but with the woman from the taxi we met a few scenes earlier. However, Lita is there, having lunch with the butler who has apparently been passing himself off as Carter. But Carter himself, being ever the ladies' man, tries to put the moves on Helene and asks her to stay for dinner. Fat chance.

Helen finally gets a job in her preferred work as a stenographer, for the Retrac Investment Agency, which should be an incredibly obvious sign as to where the movie is going, since "Retrac" is simply "Carter" spelled backward. Carter needed a stenographer, and Helene needed a job, so Carter explicitly offers her a job. Helene once again has the perfectly reasonable view that Carter selected her just to be able to put the moves on her. Not only that, but Carter works behind the scenes to try to get Lita a job in a show that one of his friends is backing.

Again, it's not too difficult to figure out where the movie is going to go, which is that Carter finds that he's honestly in love with Helene in a way that he hasn't been in love with all those other women he's pursued. But every time he tries to prove it, something goes wrong to give Helene the impression that really he's still just after her for sex, not that they could talk about it that way even in a pre-Code movie. Eventually, the movie is going to get to its happy ending, although there are a lot of twists and turns along the way.

Bachelor Apartment is one of those movies that might have been interesting to audiences in the early 1930s, but to a lot of people watching today is going to seem incredibly dated and based on sex roles that have undergone a lot of change in the past 95 years. It's not that Bachelor Apartment is a bad movie; instead, it's more that it's an acquired taste. There are other pre-Codes out there that are more adventurous and more likely to be of interest to people who aren't necessarily into pre-Codes.

If I Were Free

In the early days of talking pictures, it wasn't uncommon for Hollywood to obtain the rights to plays that had recently been on the stage since those were a ready-made source of material that a lot of the movie-going public hadn't seen. Also, since the stuff had been designed for the stage, the fact that sound cameras were more limited at the time than silent movies had been wasn't such a big problem. Recently, I watched another one of those creaky old plays-turned-into-a-movie: If I Were Free.

The movie opens up in Paris in the early 1930s. Gordon Evers (Clive Brook) is a British barrister apparently on vacation, talking to his friend Hector (Henry Stephenson) about his bordeom with life as well as revealing that he's got a war wound from the Great War, that being bullet fragments still in his chest. To top things off, he's in one of those proverbial loveless marriages with a wife who's waffling over whether to grant him a divorce. At first she says yes, then no.

Hector has some other friends, the Franco-American couple the Casenoves. Wife Sarah (Irene Dunne) was a decorator/antiques dealer before her marriage to Tono (Nils Asther). Tono is a drinker and a womanizer, and is about to head off to the south of France with his latest mistress, leaving Sarah in the lurch. Since you've got two people each in a marriage without love, and since one's a man and the other a woman, it doesn't take too much to figure out what happens next, which that they commiserate about their respectively similar plights and fall in love along the way.

So Gordon suggests that Sarah follow him back to England and set up an antiques dealership there. That will get her some money, and allow the two of them to be able to continue their "friendship". As you might expect, however, the relationship does not come without all sorts of baggage attached. The two would be willing to get married, but there's the question of whether both of them will be able to get out of their marriages. And then there's the perceived class difference which nowadays wouldn't be such a big deal and frankly looking at it as an American is something I don't see as that big of a class difference anyway. But for the people in Gordon's social circle it would have been an issue. And that's even not taking into account the other spouses part. Gordon is up for a judgeship, and if news of his relationship with Sarah were to become too public, there goes his chances at becoming a judge. With that in mind, Hector suggests to Sarah that she write Gordon a break-up note because it would be the best for Gordon's career.

At this point the movie takes a sudden and frankly ridiculous veer into the melodramatic. That old war wound Gordon has starts acting up, and like Bette Davis in Dark Victory, it's "prognosis negative". Well, almost negative, in that there's a very risky operation that has maybe a one percent chance of success. But it doesn't take much to figure out where the rest of the movie is going.

If I Were Free is based on a play by John Van Druten, a name you might recognize since he also turned the stories that became I Remember Mama into a stage play, along with turning some of Christoper Isherwood's stories into the play I Am a Camera that would later get adapted to Cabaret. If I Were Free has all the feel of a stage play, and it has a very dated 1930s feel to it. This is material that I can see audiences back in the day liking. And, to be fair to the cast and crew, they do a very professional job taking the material they're given and turning it into a programmer. But boy is it something else 90 years later.

To be honest, if I were introducing people to early sound movies, If I Were Free wouldn't be my first choice by a mile. But people who are already big fans of early 1930s movies probably won't mind watching the cast go through their paces on this one.

Ralph Bellamy is not the "other" man

If you've watched enough romantic comedies from before World War II, you'll probably have seen Ralph Bellamy as the man who repeatedly winds up second-best in the end, with the leading man and woman ending the movie (back) togehter. Recently, I saw a movie that had two women fighting over Bellamy, although it's a drama, not a romantic comedy: This Man Is Mine.

Bellamy plays Jim Dunlap, who has been married for several years to Tony (Irene Dunne) and seems to be in a happy marriage and independently wealthy: nobody seems to work, while Tony is able to indulge her hobby of painting landscapes by putting up a new canvas for Jim's birthday. (I immediately thought of Chekhov's gun, but the picture does become a real plot point later in the movie.) Tony's best friend Bee McCrae (Kay Johnson) pops in with some bad news: Bee's sister in law Francesca (Constance Cummings) is going to be coming back to town having secured a divorce in Reno, this being the days before no-fault divorce where that was the jurisdiction for one party to a divorce to head to get dissolve the marriage.

This is bad news because before Jim married Tony, he was engaged to be married to Francesca. She jilted him at the altar for reasons that aren't quite made clear, although it seems that Francesca has a habit of pursuing one rich guy after another. But Jim being left at the altar was a big scandal at the time, and even though it's been six years, the sort of set the Dunlaps and McCraes hand out with are certain to remember it. There's also the question of whether Jim still has any feelings for Francesca. But they can't stop Francesca from showing up, and she is supposedly family to Bee.

Francesca comes along, and sure enough, she starts trying to put the moves on Jim. And Jim seems OK with all of this, which frankly makes no sense. Jim goes off on a car ride with Francesca; their car breaks down; and when they show up together later everybody thinks Jim is going to leave Tony for Francesca. This despite Francesca's claims that she only wants Jim for one night to prove to everybody that she could still have him.

Jim and Tony bicker about it, with Jim eventually leaving to stay at his club, one would guess. Tony, however, comes up with a brilliant idea. Instead of going to Reno to obtain a divorce, she says at first that she's not going to do anything for six months to see if Jim and Francesca are still going to be an item. Then, she come up with an even more brilliant plan, which is to file for divorce, but in their current residence, which means she can only file on grounds of infidelity and get a ton of money from Jim and Francesca as alimony.

So how is all of this going to be resolved? Unfortunately, the ending the screenwriters pick isn't a particularly satisfying one. Even though the movie was released in April 1934, a couple of months before Joe Breen started really cracking down, the ending in This Man Is Mine feels like the sort of cop-out that writers would have had to come up with in the second half of the 1930s. This Man Is Mine is also based on a stage play, and it feels like the screenwriters did nothing to try to open the play up. (OK, there is one garden scene.) Maybe in 1930 that would have worked, but by now it doesn't. The only highlights are future B western star Charles Starrett as Bee's husband, and Sidney Blackmer in a small role as another wealthy man being pursued by Francesca.

Love Affair

There are two movies airing back-to-back on TCM that are currently on my DVR and that I haven't blogged about before, which is why the first one is getting a mention a day and a half or more before it actually airs. That one is the 1939 version of Love Affair, which closes out what TCM considers its September 21 schedule at 4:30 AM September 22.

The movie opens with a bunch of radio broadcasters doing news reports on how a famous French artist, Michel Marnet (Charles Boyer), has gotten on a boat out of Naples heading for the US. There, the artist and playboy is finally going to settle down, as he's set to marry socialite Lois Clark. Also on the boat is an American nightclub singer, Terry McKay (Irene Dunne), although what she was doing in Europe is a bit of a question. She too is engaged to be married back in the US, to Kenneth Bradley (Lee Bowman).

As you can guess even if you haven't seen the famous remake An Affair to Remember, Terry and Michel are going to meet on the boat. This happens when Terry accidentally winds up with a radiogram that was addressed to him. She feigns not knowing him, and since the two are traveling alone, they decide to dine together. They even begin to fall in love, which is of course a big problem since they're both engaged to other people and because of how well-known Michel is; anything that could be seen as not being faithful could present huge problems for him once he gets to the States.

They do have a chance to spend some time alone, however, when the ship stops for an afternoon in Madeira, a Portuguese possession in the mid-Atlantic. There, Michel's grandmother Janou (Maria Ouspenskaya) lives, she having decided to remain there because her French diplomate husband died while serving in the French diplomatic corps. Janou and Terry talk, and the implication from the talk is that Terry and Michael are obviously right for each other, despite being engaged to other people. Grandma knows best, even when she knows nothing of outside pop culture.

But, of course, the two young ones are engaged to other people, so instead of breaking off their engagements forthwith they make an agreement to wait six months, and then meet each other on the observation deck of the Empire State Building to see if they're still in love. They are, but as Michel is on the observation deck, Terry finds herself unable to make the appointment because she gets hit by a car and seriously injured, with no way to contact Michel. She gets noticed singing while in a sanatarium recovering, which gets her work teaching music to children, and a bit of a life of her own. But of course she and Michel are going to run into each other again, aren't they?

The only real problem with Love Affair is the fact that it's one of those movies where pretty much everyone already knows what's going to happen because the movie itself is well-known, and has an even better-known remake, An Affair to Remember. I have a feeling that the movie would have carried a lot more emotional impact in 1939 when it was first released, both because of the relative originality and because the world was in a lot of tension with the run-up to World War II about to break out in Europe.

In any case, Love Affair is anchored by fine performances from both Boyer, who's excellent at romance, and Dunne, who could play either elegant or comedic. The supporting performance from Ousepenskaya is quite good too, and director Leo McCarey handles the material deftly. So despite the fact that Love Affair may suffer a bit from the weight of expectations, it's still an extremely good movie.

Life joy

Another movie that I watched off of the Watch TCM app was the 1938 romantic comedy Joy of Living.

Irene Dunne stars as Maggie Garret, the elder daughter in a family of actors. Mom and Dad (Alice Brady and Guy Kibbee respectively) spent years toiling in vaudeville, while Maggie's kid sister Selina (Lucille Ball) unfortunately doesn't have quite as much talent as Maggie, although the parents would like her to go into showbiz too. Maggie's the one who's successful, having made it into the starring role of a musical. (Irene Dunne being a singer, it's unsurprising the script would give her a bunch of opportunities to sing.)

Maggie is so successful, in fact, that she routinely has throngs of adoring fans waiting for her outside the theater every night. In that crowd is Dan Webster (Douglas Fairbanks Jr. doing is best Melvyn Douglas impersonation), who is frankly forward enough that it frightens Maggie into thinking he might be a stalker, although apparently in the late 1930s they used the word "masher" instead. But we're getting ahead of ourselves here, as there's one other issue. Despite the fact that Maggie is successful, everybody else in the family has been preying upon her success, to the point that her large even for 2023 salary is about to get attached to pay off all the debts that the family has accrued.

And boy are they an annoying family, in the mold of any number of screwball comedies like My Man Godfrey. That obnoxiousness makes Maggie's next actions nearly plausible. Dan keeps showing up and making life a bit of a pain for Maggie, to the point that she finally decides to press charges. She figures that he's going to get a nominal fine and maybe a restraining order. But the judge shows no mercy and gives Dan a six-month sentence, horrifying poor Maggie. She pleads with the judge, who comes up with the only-in-the-movies scheme to have Maggie serve as a sort of probation officer, keeping Dan responsible in exchange for Dan getting a suspended sentence.

It's fairly obvious where the movie is going to go from here, as Dan and Maggie fall in love, and the movie reaches the climax in which Maggie's relationship with Dan is going to come in conflict with the relationship she has with the rest of her family. It's also fairly obvious which relationship she's going to put first in the finale.

And that's the big problem I had with Joy of Living. The cast is all appealing enough and certainly talented, but they're let down by material that's been done too many times. That, and the script felt like it had scenes that went on much too long so there was even less there than the programmer-length running time would have you believe.

Ultimately, Joy of Living isn't a bad movie; it's just that it's well down the list for all the main players as well as being down the list of screwball comedies. There's just so much better out that that you could show to introduce people to any of the stars or genre.

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes

Another movie sitting on my DVR was the 1935 Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers musical Roberta, so I recently watched it to do a post on here. Interestingly enough, even though the pairing of Rogers and Astaire had become successful already, and they had starred together in The Gay Divorcee, they're not the stars here.

That honor goes to Irene Dunne, and to a lesser extent Randolph Scott, even though he gets biling below the other three. But the movie starts off with Fred, here playing a man named Huck Haines, leader of a band called the Wabash Indianans. They've made their way to Le Havre, the port that serves Paris, because they've been booked by the owners of one of the nightclubs. However, that owner (character actor Luis Alberni) that he was going to be getting Indians (as in feather and all the other stereotypes), not Indianians, so he cancels the contract on the spot.

Huck's friend John Kent (Randolph Scott) was going to go to Paris anyway to see his aunt Minnie, who goes by the pseudonym Robert (Helen Westley) because she runs a fashion house in Paris that apparently would be more successful under the Robert name than under the Minnie brand. Working for Roberta is Stephanie (Irene Dunne), who also does the designs and likely has an option to buy the business should Roberta retire. Unsurprisingly in a movie like this, John falls in love with Stephanie, even though he has an old flame Sophie (Claire Dodd) who is going to be coming over to Paris to join the fun.

I haven't mentioned Ginger Rogers yet. At one of the nightclubs John and Roberta are trying to get Huck and his band a gig at, one of the singers is the Russian émigrée Countess Schwarenka (Rogers). Except, Huck knows that's an act because he knows the alleged countess, real name Lizzie, from back in the States. The two wind up having a relationship a lot like the one that James Cagney and Joan Blondell had in their movies over at Warner Bros., and not one complicated by misunderstandings.

Those misunderstandings are for John and Stephanie. Sadly for all involved, Roberta suddenly drops dead; without a will, the fashion house goes to the nearest relative, which happens to be John. This even though he knows nothing about fashion design or this sort of business. Sophie, having heard about the inheritance, shows up, and it's up to Huck to make certain that John ends up with the right woman.

Among the interesting things here is that Fred and Ginger (and decidedly more so Ginger) are not the stars of the show, although they certainly get some dance numbers. And Randolph Scott gets the girl rather than playing the second banana in all those other romantic comedies.

And then there's the music. Roberta was based on a stage show with songs by Jerome Kern, including a tune that's gone on to become a standard, "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes". The bad news is that the script has Irene Dunne's character sing it, and her Jeanette MacDonald-like voice is, I think, entirely wrong for the song. That may, of course, be because like a lot of younger people, I would have heard the Platters' 1950s version on one of the oldies stations my parents would have listened to before seeing the movie. Other songs in the movie have also become standards, such as "Lovely to Look At".

Roberta, being stuck squarely in the 1930s, may not be for everybody, and certainly younger viewers are most likely not to appreciate something seemingly old-fashioned. But for anybody who likes the 1930s style of musical, Roberta should be right up your alley, and definitely worth a watch.

The Silver Cord

I mentioned in this morning's post on Ingrid Bergman that there are a couple of movies coming up in the Thursday evening into Friday morning lineup on TCM that I wanted to blog about, so one of them would get a post today and the other one tomorrow. The first of the movies is The Silver Cord, which will be on overnight between Thursday and Friday (Dec. 3) at 3:30 PM (which is early Friday everywhere in the contiguous 48 states).

Christina (Irene Dunne) is a biology student studying under a prestigious researcher in Heidelberg. Just as she thinks she might have made an interesting discovery, who should walk into the room but David Phelps (Joel McCrea)? David is an architect who was in Europe for reasons not quite mentioned but aren't really important because the movie is about to go back to America anyway. David is also Christina's husband. He has a job offer with a prestigious architect in New York and wants to head back to America as a result. Christina, thankfully, had an offer from a research institute in New York that she may still be able to take up, so they'll both be able to work in New York and live happily ever after.

Not so fast, of course. David says to Christina that he'd like to introduce her to the rest of his family, now headed by his mother (Laura Hope Crews) since Dad died many years ago. It's a natural thing to do, but since they leave for America just a few minutes into the movie, you know that the visit is not going to go without a hitch. Sure enough, Ma Phelps seems stunned that Christina is actually a scientist -- why, women just didn't do such things back in her day! They were good mothers to their children and produced a generation of responsible adults.

Not that all of Mrs. Phelps' chlidren are responsible adults. David is, but there might be a question about his kid brother Robert (Eric Linden). Robert has fallen in love with a young woman, Hester (Frances Dee), and Mom thinks Hester isn't quite right for Robert. Worse, she fears that Robert and Hester might move away, leaving her all alone, and that's something she can't countenance. So she works on getting Robert to see the "error" of his ways and dumping poor Hester.

She also goes to work on David, since she doesn't want him to live in New York, especially if he's only goin gto be working his way up from the relative bottom. The family has a nice plot of land that could be developed as new housing, something which would both enable David to live nearby, and allow him to start a lot closer to the top of the architecture business. Of course, David and Christina would have to give up their dreams, but Mrs. Phelps doesn't care about those, only how she can keep her sons close to her.

If David and Robert have been raised by their mother so long and inculcated into this warped view of what a mother's love is to the point they can't see through it, Christina certainly isn't. She gets fairly quickly what's going on, and definitely takes Hester's side over the way Robert and especially Ma Phelps treat her. But it also means that there's going to be a lot of conflict between Christina and David before we get to the inevitable climax: who's it going to be, her or me?

The Silver Cord was based on a 1926 stage play, which explains why so much of the action is kept to a few rooms of the house, and also why a big housing development could be a thing in a movie that was made at the height of the Depression. In any case, all of the cast give very good performances, and while the script sometimes goes over the top by today's standards, that's not the actors' fault. One mild plot hole for me was thinking that the boat David and Christina took back to America would dock at New York, letting them set up house there before going to see Mom (the exact location of the Phelps manor is not mentioned); this would give David and Christina no good reason to stay with Mom. Also unanswered is why Mom let David go over to Europe alone in the first place.

But these are minor quibbles for what is a pretty darn interesting movie, and one that you should definitely watch.

My Favorite Wife

A search of the blog suggests that I haven't done a full-length review on My Favorite Wife before. I see that it's coming up on the TCM schedule, at 4:30 AM tomorrow (although since TCM's broadcast day generally begins at 6:00 AM, they'd say it's on tonight at 4:30 AM). Since I've got a copy of it on DVD as part of a TCM Cary Grant box set, I decided to put that DVD into the player and watch the movie to do a review on it here.

Grant plays Nick Arden, a lawyer who at the beginning of the movie is appearing before Judge Bryson (Granville Bates). It seems as though Nick's first wife Ellen was shipwrecked seven years ago and has been presumed missing ever since. Seven years is (or at least was back in those days) the amount of time somebody had to be missing before you could declare them legally dead, so Nick is now going through the motions of having Ellen declared dead. It's something that should be straightforward enough, but somehow, it's turned into fodder for comic relief here.

The reason why Nick is filing the paperwork to have Ellen declared dead is that, while searching for Ellen, he met another woman, Bianca Bates (Gail Patrick). She'd be a good mother to the two Arden children, so Nick wants to marry her, something he can't do if his first wife is still legally alive. Eventually, the judge figures out what's going on and performs the marriage ceremony, leaving the couple to go off on their honeymoon at a resort in the mountains where Nick and Ellen went on their honeymoon back in the day.

After Nick and Bianca leave for their honeymoon, a woman shows up at the Arden house looking for Nick. She's a stranger to the two children, although she seems to have some idea who they are. It's only when she goes inside the house that we learn that this woman is one Ellen Wagstaff (Irene Dunne), who married Nick all those years ago. She went on a scientific expedition in the Pacific when the ship sank and she wound up on a deserted island for seven years. Now, you'd think that news would have gotten out about her rescue from the ship that picked her up, and that would have been some weeks before she shows up at her old home. But no, nobody seems to know anything about her having been rescued.

When her mom tells her about Nick's new wife and where they went on honeymoon, Ellen immediately heads up there herself, surprising Nick. Nick, for some reason, can't bring himself to tell Bianca the truth about who this woman is, even though again, you'd think Bianca might have seen photos of Ellen. Ellen, for her part, isn't telling Bianca who she is, because reasons that make no sense to the plot.

Meanwhile, Nick learns from Ellen that she wasn't alone on the island, but that one other passenger survived on the same raft and washed ashore on the island, one Stephen Burkett (Randolph Scott). He, having spent seven years alone with Ellen, has fallen in love with her, and would like to marry her. Now, the fact that she's legally dead ought to mean that her marriage to Nick has been dissolved, leaving Stephen free to marry Ellen. Somehow, however, Nick is declared a bigamist.

There's an interesting dilemma at the heart of My Favorite Wife, one that naturally presents a bunch of opportunities for comedy. But as I was watching, I couldn't help but think of all the plot holes. Also, I found myself thinking of what I've often called the "comedy of lies", where a character has to tell a little white lie for some reason and is thereafter unable to bring himself to tell the truth, resorting to ever bigger lies. My Favorite Wife has that in spades, and I just wanted somebody to smack some sense into Cary Grant's character and have him tell his second wife the truth. For me, the movie grew increasingly less funny and more grating.

Other people, however, have rated My Favorite Wife much more highly, so it's definitely another movie you should watch and judge for yourself.

Mongkut and I

Among the movies that has recently started running in the FXM rotation is Anna and the King of Siam. It's going to be on again tomorrow morning at 7:30 AM, and again Friday morning, so I made it a point to watch this weekend to do a post on it.

Irene Dunne plays Anna Owens, a British woman who, as the opening titles inform us, traveled to Siam (now Thailand) to take on the job of teaching the English language and Western knowledge to the children of King Mongkut (Rex Harrison), all 67 of them. Mongkut has seen what was happening in other parts of Asia, with Western countries coming in and turning the places into colonies, and he absolutely doesn't want that to happen to him and his people. So to that end he's trying to modernize and has brought in a Western tutor for that purpose.

Now, as I mentioned, the King has 67 children, and a bunch of wives, all of whom live in a harem within the palace. It's just one of the many vast cultural differences between Siam and the West, something that goes both ways as Mongkut doesn't always get western traditions and Anna and her son certainly don't understand the Siamese. Indeed, Anna gaffes on her first day in Bangkok, when she meets Mongkut's chief advisor Kralahome (Lee J. Cobb).

When Anna is housed in separate quarters within the palace, she begins to learn what she's up against. She meets the king's first wife, Lady Thiang (Gale Sondergaard), who is also the mother of the Crown Prince. However, the king has taken many other wives since then, including his current favorite, Tuptim (Linda Darnell). Thiang has reached the point thta she just wants what's best for her son, since she knows she's not going to get what she needs from the king.

With that many wives, there's all sorts of palace intrigue going on, and adding a western woman into the mix isn't going to make things easier for anybody. Whether Anna was that much of a fighter for women's equality by western standards might be up for debate, but compared to the king's harem, she absolutely was, being horrified by the treatment of the wives and how everybody is expected to prostrate themselves before the king. But at the same time, Anna fails to understand that sudden social upheaval causes all sorts of problems of its own.

By this time, Mongkut has learned that the western powers are looking on Siam as backward, and he is desparate to dispel that image, so he decides to invite a bunch of representatives from various European countries to show them that Siam can be just as western as Europe, and convince them to have equal diplomatic relations with Siam rather than to try to colonize the place. History tells us that this more or less worked, as Siam (and Japan) were much closer to equals with Europe than any other place in Asia; Siam wouldn't really be colonized until the Japanese came along in World War II.

Anybody looking back at Anna and the King of Siam 75 years after it was released is going to have issues with it, I think. As with any Hollywood historical movie or biopic, there's the question of how much the movie is playing fast and loose with history. The fact that this movie is based on a fictional novelization of Anna Leonowens, who had published a memoir back in the 1870s, doesn't help. Others will point out the yellowface, although I'm not certain how much of a Southeast Asian population there was in the US in 1946, even if the studio had wanted to strive for as much accuracy as possible. In the years just after World War II, having Japanese-Americans or Chinese-Americans play Southeast Asians really wouldn't have been any better, I think.

One thing I think the movie is at least trying to be conscientious about is the difficulty King Mongkut finds himself facing in having an outside world encroaching on him. It made me think of The Barbarian and the Geisha, about Japan's being forced open to the world after 250 years of being almost entirely shut off. Of course some of Mongkut's attempts are going to look silly and foolish, but he also didn't have too many options.

As for the acting, Irene Dunne is unsurprisingly good, since she gets to play a westerner. Everybody else faces the difficulty of being white people playing Asian. Sondergaard and Darnell both do reasonably well, since it's easy enough to compare them to the wives and ladies-in-waiting behind any western throne. Lee J. Cobb is surprisingly sympathetic, even if he looks terribly miscast and it's hard to shake off roles like Johnny Friendly in On the Waterfront as you're watching. Rex Harrison, unfortunately, came off as a bit of a buffoon, and was for me the weak spot of the movie.

Anna and the King of Siam, for all its flaws, is still an interesting movie, in part for its look at how Hollywood tried to navigate a complex and to them exotic history back in the mid-1940s.

Ooh, Fannie Hurst again

Author Fannie Hurst wrotesome works that got turned into rather melodramatic movies. I've blogged about the 1960s version of Back Street before, as well as both versions of Imitation of Life. Recently I had the chance to watch another movie based on a work by Hurst, Symphony of Six Million.

The movie starts off at some time in the past when the Jewish immigration was congregated in Manhattan's Lower East Side. One immigrant family is the Klaubers with parents Meyer (Gregory Ratoff) and Hannah (Anna Appel) and three kids. Felix is the middle kid, a bookish boy who's got an interest in medicine, while his older brother Magnus is more interested in moving up the socioeconomic ladder.

Fast forward twenty years or so. Felix (Ricardo Cortez) has in fact become a doctor, interested in ministering to the poor people still living in the tenements. He's also got a potential girlfriend in Jessica (Irene Dunne), someone with a decidedly non-Jewish name but who also works with the poor, in her case the blind children. She's got a handicap of her own thanks to a spinal deformity. Meanwhile, Magnus (Noel Madison) has become somewhat financially successful, and wants Felix, who is in a prestigious profession, to move uptown to treat wealthier patients and get their parents out of the tenements. And to be fair, the parents would like some more leisure.

It works, and Felix goes uptown with the rest of the family, although Felix does still have some misgivings. Life is financially rewarding but not spiritually fulfilling, and things are about to get worse. At a religious ceremony for Felix's young nephew, Meyer collapses, and somehow, Felix is the only one who can perform the brain surgery to save Dad. (Didn't they have specialists back then?) Dad dies on the operating table, and then Jessica needs an operation too even though she's down in the ghetto.

Symphony of Six Million is a decided melodrama, and as I was watching it, I couldn't help but think of another movie whose title I couldn't remember. Thankfully I recalled it was a Frank Capra film, and looking it up I knew I was thinking of The Younger Generation, surprised that is also starred Ricardo Cortez.

Cortez does a good job in Symphony of Six Million while Dunne is miscast. The material, to be honest, is a bit of an acquired taste, and certainly won't be for everybody. I think I liked The Younger Generation a bit more, but Symphony of Six Million is certainly worth a watch.

Symphony of Six Million is available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive collection.

Consolation Marriage

An interesting and little-known pre-Code is coming up on TCM tomorrow morning at 6:15 AM: Consolation Marriage. It deserves a viewing and a blog post.

Irene Dunne plays Mary, a working girl trying to make her way through the late 1920s with her boyfriend Aubrey (Lester Vail). Unfortunately, he decides that he would be happier marrying into wealth. So he runs off with a rich girl and leaves poor Mary alone. While Mary is licking her wounds, she runs into Steve (Pat O'Brien). He's a newspaperman who has just suffered the same fate as his girl Elaine (a young Myrna Loy) has left him for a better-off partner. There's an obvious solution for these two jilted lovers that you should be able to figure out.

Ah, but there's a twist. Mary and Steve do decide to get married, but they have an agreement that it's going to be a more or less "open" marriage. Not so much in the sense that they're going to be sleeping around, but more that if either of them decides they don't want to be in the marriage any longer, they can just up and end the marriage. Seems like a pretty daring idea for the early 1930s, even taking into account that Hollywood movies probably had more divorces in them than America as a whole. That having been said, the marriage seems to be a reasonably happy one, and one that obviously includes sex, since Mary ultimately has a baby. (I suppose that in true Hollywood tradition, they could have had sex exactly once and that's what produced the baby.)

For a movie like this to be interesting, however, there's going to have to be some dramatic conflict. In Penny Serenade, that conflict involved killing off the poor little child. Consolation Marriage isn't going to be so mean here. And, in fact, it comes up with a more interesting dilemma. Aubrey and Elaine both return to announce that they're not happy with their marriages, and both of them would be happy running off with their old lovers. A fun solution would be for Aubrey and Elaine to marry each other and then live together with Mary and Steve, but the cinema of the early 1930s couldn't be that daring. Instead, what we get is a dramatic conflict over whether Mary, Steve, or both of them will go back to their old lovers. And who's going to take custody of the baby?

Consolation Marriage is an interesting idea, even if the execution isn't always perfect. But it's that idea that makes it so well worth watching, at least once. Most of us who are into old movies know well about Joe Breen's enforcement of the Production Code in 1934 and how, before then, movies could do things that were more daring. But even then, a lot of what was done is pretty tame compared to what you can show on screen today. The sort of marriage practiced by Mary and Steve, however, is different, and that's one of the things that makes the movie worth a watch.

I don't think Consolation Marriage has been released to DVD here in North America, so you'll have to catch the rare TCM showing.

The Mudlark

FXM Retro showed The Mudlark this morning. It's going to be on again early tomorrow morning at 3:00 AM in case you missed any of the previous showings.

The movie starts off by telling us that there's a legend of an event that supposedly had an effect on Britain in the 39th year of Queen Victoria's reign, so that places us at 1875. Cut to a shot of the London waterfront, where there are a lot of docks as well as muddy shorelines. It's those muddy shorelines that give rise to the term "mudlark", referring to orphans who would scroung through the muck, looking for whatever they could trade for food, I suppose. Wheeler (Andrew Ray) is one such mudlark, and he finds a medallion with a nice picture on it. So nice, in fact, that he's willing to dive back into the Thames to find it, that's how interested he is in this thing. Anyhow, one of the older men along the waterfront tells Wheeler that the woman depicted on the medallion is none other than Queen Victoria, and that she is figuratively the mother of the country. So Wheeler wants to see this mothre, since he doesn't have a mother of his own. He's told that Victoria lives in Windsor Castle, which is 20 miles or so upstream from where they all are. Wheeler sets out for Windsor Castle, and almost in the next shot he's outside the gates, looking at one of the palace guards standing at attention in front of the gates.

Wheeler of course doesn't have a way to get in, but Benjamin Disraeli (Alec Guinness) certainly does. Disraeli is, after all, the Prime Minister, and has to see the queen on a regular basis. But it's more than just the regular laws that need royal assent that have brought Disraeli to see Her Majesty on this particular occasion. Victoria (Irene Dunne) has been mourning the death of her husband, Prince Albert. People mourn when they become widows or widowers, but Victoria has been in mourning for something like 15 years, which is thoroughly abnormal. She's decided that because Albert loved Windsor Castle, she's going to honor him by spending the rest of her life there. Her subjects haven't seen her in public, and they're beginning to get restless. You can see why Disraeli would like Victoria to make a public appearance.

But back to the title character. Somehow the gate didn't get properly locked after Disraeli was admitted, and Wheeler just pushes the gate open and walks into the palace grounds! He walks through the grounds on a foggy night, until he falls into a hole that must be the open door of the coal chute, for the next thing we see, Wheeler is in the basement dirty from coal. He makes his way upstairs, amazingly escaping detection for the longest time. Eventually, though, he gets caught under the table in the queen's dining room by an Irish maid and then her boyfriend, who makes jokes about how easy it would be to burn down the castle. The more senior servants show up, so they have to hide the kid quickly, which they do behind a curtain. He falls asleep, and his snoring catches Victoria's attention at dinner, leading to Wheeler's being found. Wheeler mentions an adult man who said something about burning down the castle, and that leads everybody to think that there's n Irish plot about.

The Queen has problems, Wheeler has problems, and Disraeli has problems. And yet there are even more characters with problems. The script tacks on a story about Emily, one of Victoria's ladies-in-waiting (Beatrice Campbell), and her military boyfriend (Anthony Steel) who isn't appropriate for a daughter of the nobility. Rounding out the cast is Finlay Currie as John Brown, Prince Albert's old manservant who is still in service of the Queen. (He's the Mr. Brown who is referred to in the title of the Judi Dench movie Mrs. Brown, about Victoria's relatoinship with Brown.)

There's a lot going on in The Mudlark, and none of it really gets resolved satisfyingly. Emily and her boyfriend presumably elope as she tries to do that on multiple occasions, and then Victoria drops a hint about Emily's mother sometimes being a handful herself. Currie's John Brown is a lovable Scottish drunk, as opposed to the stereotypical lovable Irish drunk that somebody like Barry Fitzgerald might have played in movies set in America. Victoria is a frigid jerk for most of the movie, and then suddenly has a change of heart when she meets Wheeler? Disreali makes a speech in the House of Commons, but we don't really care much about the other events that are going on in Britain. As for Wheeler himself, it's ludictous to believe that he could have gotten as far as he did. Everybody tries, and the movie is mildly entertaining, but it's nowhere near greatness.

I'm not certain whether The Mudlark has ever received a DVD release, so you'll have to catch the FXM Retro showings.

Life With Father

A search of the blog suggests that I have never done a full-length post on Life With Father before. It's airing tomorrow morning at 11:00 AM on TCM, so now is a good time to write that post.

The "Father" in the title is Clarence Day, Sr., played by William Powell. He's a banker in Manhattan in the 1880s living in one of those fine brownstones of the day with his wife Vinnie (Irene Dunne) and their four children. Eldest of these is Clarence, Jr., played by Jimmy Lydon. In real life, Clarence Jr. would grow up to write the book Life With Father and two others about his experiences growing up; those books were turned into a very popular Broadway play and then into this movie. Father rules the house with an iron fist. Or, at least he thinks he runs the house with an iron fist; in fact, Vinnie knows more about what's going on and continually maneuvers things skillfully to get her way, while having her husband think he's getting his way. However they're doing it, their marriage seems to be working. Or, if it wasn't working, Clarence Jr. wasn't about to let on that it was a failing marriage.

That's the basic synopsis of the household, but there are a couple of subplots running throughout the movie. One of these involves Mary (Elizabeth Taylor), who comes to the house for a visit. She's the travelling companion of Vinnie's cousin Cora (Zasu Pitts) She and Clarence Jr. are just getting to that age where they start thinking about sex, or whatever their late Victorian minds conceived of sex and romance as being. So they play songs on the piano and sing to each other and do other innocent first love things.

However, when the topic switches to religion, it turns out that Clarence Jr. and Mary belong to different Protestant denominations. Worse, the conversation reveals that Clarence Sr. has never been baptized at all! So another story in the movie involves Vinnie and her minister, Rev. Lloyd (Edmund Gwenn) trying to get Clarence Sr. to agree to be baptized. It's another of those things that seems quaint in 2013, but 125 years ago, it would have been a big deal.

Third is the desire of Clarence Jr. and younger brother John (Martin Milner; yes that Martin Milner), who are trying to make a litle money: Clarence to buy a suit and John to buy supplies for his junior science experiments. They sell patent medicine, which of course is a quack, but at least they could only go house to house instead of sending out millions of emails claiming to be able to enlarge certain body parts. Not that putting the subplot that way would have made it past the Production Code, of course. Anyhow, the patent medicine makes Vinnie ill, tying together this subplot with the baptism subplot.

Life With Father is one of those movies that's great for the whole family, at least if the family is OK watching old movies. If you want action, you're not going to get it from this one. William Powell and Irene Dunne are both excellent in their late Victorian parent roles, with the various subplots being charming in their old-fashionedness The movie also feels much more natural than the aritificial musical numbers of another period piece like Meet Me In St. Louis. The bad news is that every time I've seen it on TV, it's a print that's sorely in need of restoration. The color was terrible and the focus not crisp enough. I don't know if there's a better print that TCM will be airing, or what prints have made it to any of the DVD releases. (Well, the older DVD releases would all have bad prints; I don't know about the DVD available from the TCM shop.)

Madame Blanche

Back in February 2009, I very briefly mentioned the movie The Secret of Madame Blanche. It's airing tomorrow morning at 9:30 AM on TCM, and if you like movies like Madame X, you'll probably like this one, too.

Irene Dunne plays the lead role, this time as a showgirl in the 1890s instead of the married woman of Madame X. She falls in love with Phillips Holmes, and even gets knocked up by him. But Daddy (Lionel Atwill) doesn't approve of the relationship, cutting his son off which leads the son to commit suicide. At this point, Grandfather takes custody of his grandson (ie. the child of Dunne's and Holmes' relationship).

Fast forward 20 years. Dunne has been working as a barkeep in France to make a living, and it's now World War I. What British soldiers should wind up in the place where Dunne is working but the son she gave birth to all those years ago? Naturally, there's no good way she can tell him the truth. At this point, things get either interesting or melodramatic, depending upon your opinion of this sort of movie. The son is seeing a girl whose father doesn't like him, and there's a scuffle in which the son kills his girlfriend's father. And what does Madame Blanche do? She tries to take the rap for it!

As I said, it's the sort of movie that 80 years on can be a bit tough because the plot is just so unlike the stuff we're used to nowadays. Dunne does a reasonably good job, though, and this is a movie worth watching either for the people who are fans of Madame X, as I've already mentioned, or those who haven't seen any movies in this genre. As for the rest of you? Well, you've been warned.

The Secret of Madame Blanche has, as far as I'm aware, not received a release to DVD.

Pair it with Under 18

I don't think I've ever mentioned the movie Over 21 before. It's airing tomorrow afternoon at 1:00 PM and is worth a viewing.

First, about the title. There's nothing risqué or even particularly adult about it; it's just a reference to a line one of the characters has about the humban brain not being able to absorb new knowledge when you're "over 21". That new knowledge comes in the form of the US Army's Officer Training School. Over 21, you see, is a World War II movie. The officer-in-training is Max Wharton, played by Alexander Knox. His day job is as a newspaper editor, but he realizes that his editorials about the war will be meaningless unless he can actually experience some of the real thing, he is why he enrolls in OTS. This presents problems for a couple of people. One is his wife Polly (Irene Dunne). She's got a day job as a novelist-turned-screenwriter, but she loves her husband and plans to follow him to the base if at all possible. The other person with a big problem is Max's boss, publisher Robert Gow (Charles Coburn). Max is the one person who can edit the paper well, and if Max is going to leave, well, he'd better sell the paper.

Polly gets a brilliant idea. She wants her husband to be able to dedicate all his time and energy to passing the officer's exams, but also wants him to be able to keep his job. So she decides to write his editorials for him, using his name as the byline and not telling either Max or Mr. Gow. They say honesty is the best policy, so you know that Polly's keeping this a secret is going to cause a problem eventually. But she's got other problems of her own. As a famous novelist in the big city, she was used to a much more glamorous life than that of an army officer's wife. To make matters worse, her accommodations are a crappy bungalow where the appliances doesn't work. And, like Barbara Stanwyck's character in Christmas in Connecticut, Polly isn't much use around the house.

Over 21 is based on a play written by Ruth Gordon, who is responsible for several screenplays to classic films, including Adam's Rib. She based the play on her own experience from when her husband Garson Kanin entered the military during World War II. I don't know quite how accurate the movie is, since I wasn't around for World War II. That having been said, it's intelligent at times, as well as entertaining. Like Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious, I would think of it as the sort of movie that doesn't exactly contain material objectionable for children, but one which isn't suitable for children just because I think they'd find it boring. The movie is also available on DVD.

What's so awful about the truth, anyway?

I've briefly mentioned the movie The Awful Truth several times, but never done a full length post about it. It's airing again tonight on TCM at 9:45 PM, so now is a good time to do so.

Irene Dunne and Cary Grant play Lucy and Jerry Warriner, a married couple who find that each of them have been telling little white lies to the other. Well, not so little; Jerry was supposed to be in Florida on a business trip but stayed in New York. When Lucy and Jerry figure out that the other's lies aren't so little, they wind up rushing into divorce court to end their marriage. The judge naturally grants the divorce, but by law, it won't be finalized for 60 days, no trip to Reno here. So, each of the two starts to date other people, but also realizes they're getting jealous of their former spouse for the people they're dating. Perhaps the two would have been better off not getting a divorce in the first place....

If they really would have been better off remaining married, they at least remember that they are still technically married, since the divorce decree still has a few weeks before it becomes final. And so this gives both of them the brilliant idea to try to break up any other relationship their former spouse might be having. Irene Dunne has started a relationship with Middle American businessman Dan (Ralph Bellamy), and you know that with a supporting character being played by Ralph Bellamy, that's not the man who's going to end up with the woman. But you probably could have figured that out already. Grant takes up with a nightclub singer to try to show his ex-wife that he's still got it, only to find out the singer is thoroughly incompetent. And then Grant tries to crash his wife's music recital, which let's just say doesn't go as expected.

The Awful Truth is one of those elegant comedies that don't seem to get made any more these days, or at least if they do, they don't get advertised to the extent of more lowbrow things like Hut Tub Time Machine (although I suppose the movie would have been quite different if the two leads could have just gotten in a hot tub and undone their divorce) or The Hangover -- even the characters' drinking back then was funnier. Bellamy is good as always in his supporting role, and the Warriners' dog is played by the same dog that played Asta in the Thin Man movies (at least the earlier ones; I don't know how many different Astas were used).

More fan sites

In looking for a photo of today's birthday boy Richard Dix, I tried searching on Dix in Cimarron, since it's the one that got him his Oscar nomination. This obviously turned up a lot of photos of Dix, but some of them naturally also had his co-star, Irene Dunne. One of those photos comes from the interesting fan site The Irene Dunne Site, which seems to have more information about Dunne than you can shake a stick at.

I probably ought to start a blog roll one of these days.

One of those Merian Cooper movies

I mentioned earlier today that TCM will be showing a number of movies from Merian Cooper's time as head of production at RKO tomorrow. An interesting one that I don't think I've ever mentioned before is Stingaree, coming up at 10:15 AM ET tomorrow.

In 1870s Australia, Irene Dunne plays Hilda, a servant for some wealthy sheep ranchers who spends her spare time singing, and has a very nice operatic voice. Opera critic Sir Julian is coming for a visit, and Hilda is excited about this. But he's coming to see the boss's wife (Mary Boland), who can't sing, and the boss is planning to bundle Hilda off somewhere. Along the way, however, Sir Julian is waylaid by the notorious criminal "Stingaree" (Richard Dix), who kidnaps him, leaves him with his assistant Howie (Andy Devine), and tries to take Sir Julian's place. Stingaree falls in love with Hilda's voice, and Hilda falls in love with Stingaree, possibly in part because he can offer her a way out of her situation.

Time passes, and Stingaree gets arrested, while his intervention with Sir Julian has led him to discover Hilda's talents. So while Stingaree is rotting in prison in Australia, Hilda is going off to Europe to get opera training and becoming a wildly successful opera singer. She eventually undertakes a tour of Australia, and, well, you can probably guess what happens next.

Stingaree is interesting, although to be honest it's rather flawed. The plot can never really decide what it wants to be, and Richard Dix is pretty badly miscast for this role. One thing about the movie that's noteworthy is that it was out of circulation for a good 50 years. When Cooper left RKO, part of the severance settlement left him with the rights to six RKO movies, of which this was one. The movies apparently showed up once on New York City TV back in the 1950s, but then not again until TCM worked out the rights situation and got them back in 2007. TCM later released the six as part of a DVD box set. So, you can find this one on DVD, although it's quite pricey.

(Rafter Romance, which I recommended back in June 2008, is another one, as is One Man's Journey. Each of these was remade, and the two remakes are airing on TCM tomorrow as well: Living on Love at 2:15 PM is a remake of Rafter Romance, while A Man to Remember at 6:30 is a remake of One Man's Journey.)

What women want

Last night saw a number of John Huston movies on TCM; tonight sees two movies starring his father, Walter. The first of these is the interesting pre-Code Ann Vickers at 9:30 PM ET.

Irene Dunne gets top billing in the title role. At the beginning of the movie, she's a social worker dealing with veterans returning from World War I. One of these veterans, Bruce Cabot, tries to woo her, but at first she refuses, wanting to maintain her career. He's a cad, though, and eventually convinces her to have sex with him, since she winds up pregnant and he runs off leaving her more or less alone to raise the coming baby.

Unfortunately, the baby is still-born, although that allows Miss Vickers the opportunity to keep working, going inside a women's prison to observe conditions and write an award-winning book describing the scandalous way the women prisoners are treated. This gains her influence and eventually she gets put in charge of a women's prison of her own, where presumably more progressive conditions will be afforded the prisoners.

This rise in status also brings her to the attention of Judge Barney Dolphin (Walter Huston). He falls in love with her, but also knows he can never really have her. The problem is, he's trapped in a loveless marriage with a woman who won't grant him a divorce, instead traveling around Europe. At least the wife's being away gives the good judge the chance to have his dalliances on the side.

Then again, the good judge isn't a good judge, but a corrupt bastard. Eventually he gets arrested for the corruption, but not before having knocked up Ann Vickers. He goes off to prison, and she works lesser jobs waiting for him to get out of jail....

It's fascinating stuff, based on a novel by Sinclair Lewis. Ann Vickers is supposed to be a strong powerful woman -- after all, she's able to write a scathing book about women's prisons. But every time she meets a bad boy she gets weak in the knees. (On the other hand, the one good man in the movie, lawyer Conrad Nagel, leaves her completely cold.) That having been said, what Vickers does isn't portrayed as particularly immoral, at least, nowhere near the way it would be portrayed in movies released once the enforcement of the Production Code became strict. Further, there's some relatively lurid (at least for 1933 standards) stuff here, in the form of the treatment Vickers witnesses in the women's prison, and how her face is superimposed over those images with a hardened expression. Also in the cast is Edna May Oliver as Vickers' mentor, a role that becomes distinctly too small after Vickers' first baby is stillborn.

Ann Vickers veers from one part of the plot to the next so quickly that it sometimes feels disjointed, which is certainly a drawback. All the same, it's still quite an interesting movie. Sadly, it's never been released to DVD.