Better than only being inhuman

There was a movie I saw many years ago that involved a particular plot point and, if memory served, starred Jane Wyatt. Not too long ago, the movie We're Only Human showed up on TCM, and the plot synopsis and presence of Jane Wyatt made it sound familiar. Sure enough, I had seen it an age ago and never blogged about it. So now that I've watched it again and it's fresh in my mind, I can give you a post on it.

Jane Wyatt plays lady reporter Sally Rogers, who would not go on to work on the Alan Brady Show, but that's another story. Rogers shows up outside a joint where policeman Pete McCaffrey (Preston Foster) is casing the joint across the street. A hearse shows up and carries up a wicker body bag, but McCaffrey knows this is a ruse, so when they come back out, he confronts them, finding out that Lefty Berger is in the not-a-coffin. Burger is a wanted gangster, so McCaffrey thinks he's done a great job. Sally is naïve, so she thinks Pete has done a great job, too, writing a glowing story about what she saw and even falling in love with Pete.

However, Pete's boss is ticked off, because the rest of the gang is going to be spooked, and the police department was doing a bigger investigation that was hopefully going to bring down the whole gang. Worse, Pete is the sort of police detective who insists on doing things his own way, because he just knows the rules as they currently stand aren't always right and need to be broken. Worse for him, however, is when he is given the assignment to take Lefty up to prison on the train, Lefty escapes! That, and Lefty starts taunting McCaffrey about his inability to bring Lefty back to justice.

Things get even worse for McCaffrey when his regular detective partner and housemate, Det. Walsh (James Gleason), radios for backup outside a bank. A subplot involves the fact that McCaffrey lives with Walsh and his wife (Jane Darwell), and Mrs. Walsh keeps trying to see that McCaffrey gets a suitable wife. Anyhow, when McCaffrey winds up at the bank, he and Walsh go in to try to catch the gangsters who go in, only for Walsh to be fatally shot. It's getting harder and harder to find Lefty.

Meanwhile, there's a lawyer inside Lefty's organization, Martin (Arthur Hohl), who is terribly displeased with the fact that Lefty has been escaped, the reasoning being that Lefty has to know somebody tipped off the police to the fact he was going to be in that coffin escorted out by the fake funeral workers. Martin not illogically expects that Berger will conclude it was he who fed information to the cops, and will want revenge. Sure enough, Martin gets shot in a drive-by shooting. But then, and this is the plot point I remember because of how unbelievably stupid it was, Sally is with McCaffrey at the shooting and, in getting the story, prints the address of a couple of eyewitnesses along with their picture.

So, of course, the eyewitnesses get harassed by Berger's men, and McCaffrey seems to be back to square one with Berger arrogantly taunting him. But, since this is a Code-era movie, you know that Berger is going to be caught, and that the cop and reporter are going to live happily ever after, more or less.

The big problem with We're Only Human is that the plot has the main characters be inordinately stupid, climaxing in that scene where Sally interviews the eyewitnesses. Indeed, none of this bears much resemblance to reality. To be fair, however, the movie was only intended to be a B movie, and another of those films where probably nobody expected viewers 90 years later to be watching and giving their critique. So sit back and watch just to see where all the faults are. And thankfully, it'll all be over fairly quickly.

House by the River

Another movie that I saw pop up on one of the FAST services that sounded interesting was the Fritz Lang movie House by the River. Because it sounded interesting, I decided to watch it and, having done so, can now do a post on it here.

The movie is set around 1900, although that's not made explicity clear at the beginning. In a house by one of thos dangerous-looking rivers in that it has a faster-than normal current and all sort of stuff floating in it lives the writer Stephen Byrne (Louis Hayward). Apparently he makes enough money to have a maid, young Emily (Dorothy Patrick in a small role). One day while Stephen's wife Marjorie (Jane Wyatt) goes out to town for the day, Emily uses the bath since nobody else is there to use it. She comes down the stairs, where Stephen is at the foot of the stairs attracted to her as she's underdressed and he's had a bit to drink. Stephen starts putting the moves on Emily, who clearly doesn't want the moves put on her and tries to get Stephen to stop. She starts screaming for help, and in trying to get her not to scream, accidentally strangles poor Emily to death!

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Now, Stephen has a dead body in the house, and that presents a big problem of how to get rid of the body since nobody will believe that Stephen is only guilty of manslaughter and not murder. But Stephen has a brother, John (Lee Bowman), with whom he has some sort of dysfunctional relationship. Stephen claims that Emily fell down the stairs, which we all know to be a complete lie, and that nobody would believe this, which makes sense since there's no broken bones or even bruising. But one would have to guess, even though it's not well explained, that Stephen has some sort of blackmail he can hold over John's head, as John eventually agrees to go through with helping Stephen dispose of the body.

The two put Emily's dead body in a sack and dump it in the river, with the hope that either the body will decompose or that the sack will make it all the way to the ocean, the opening shots of the river making it look like some sort of delta area close enough to the sea to make this a possibilty. Or course, none of that happens since this is the era of the Production Code and there's no way Stephen is going to get away with what he's done. So as you might guess, the body is eventually found.

But, in a stroke of good luck for Stephen, the sack in which he and John put Emily's body contains markings that implicate John and not Stephen in having killed poor Emily. Not that John is actually sent to prison as that would be too conventional a move. This also makes Stephen notorious enough that it draws interest in his novels, which become best sellers. But Stephen, being too arrogant for his own good, sets out to write another novel. This one is a thinly-veiled account of the murder of Emily, and written by Stephen in such a way that somebody who has inside information could put two and two together and recognize that it was Stephen and not John who killed Emily. John obviously knows all this but can't say anything since he's an accessory after the fact. Marjorie, however, is able to figure it all out and realize that Stephen is the real killer.

There are more twists and turns, but as I said in previous paragraphs there's also the Production Code, which requires the guily to expiate their since, which will result in an ending that involves Stephen getting what's coming to him.

It's the Production Code requirements that make House by the River another of those movies that could probably be really good if the writers weren't constrained in how they could end the movie. That, and the fact that House by the River was made at Republic, which gives it more the feel of a B movie. Still, even in spite of all those issues, House by the River is not a bad movie and is certainly entertaining enough. It just could have been better.

The Navy Comes Through

As I mentioned at the start of Summer Under the Stars, I've been watching movies either as they're about to expire from the Watch TCM app, or going through them on my DVR. As such, there's a few movies that aired a few months ago on TCM and are about to run again during Summer Under the Stars, my having watched them without realizing they're going to be on this month. The first movie to fall into this category is The Navy Comes Through, which is airing tomorrow (August 4) at 5:00 PM as part of a day of movies with Jackie Cooper in the cast.

Now, Jackie Cooper was more of a child star who kept working as an adult, but who was not as big an adult star. So he's not the star here; instead, the two stars are Pat O'Brien and George Murphy. Murphy plays Lt. Sands of the US Navy, and as the movie opens, it's 1940. Sands has been brought before a board of inquiry because of an accident on the ship he was on. Unfortunately, his good friend and fellow serviceman Mike Mallory (that's Pat O'Brien) testifies against Sands, with this testimony causing Sands to lose his rank and him deciding to resign from the force. It doesn't help the two men's relationship that Sands was in a romantic relationship with Mike's sister Myra (Jane Wyatt).

Fast forward to 1942, as the movie was released that year. Obviously the fast forward means that Pearl Harbor has already been attacked and the US is now a part of World War II. Mallory has been promoted in rank to Chief, about to be put on a ship that's convoying the merchant marine across the Atlantic and providing protection from U-boat attacks. Myra does her part for the war effor by becoming a naval nurse, and even Sands does his part by re-enlisting.

Now, you just know that Sands is going to wind up under Mallory's command, and that this is going to cause all sorts of problems. Meanwhile, everybody, and I mean everybody, does their part for the war effort, including immigrants like Cuban-American Pat Tarriba (Desi Arnaz, who was climbing the ladder at RKO at the time), and violinst Richard "Dutch" Croner (Carl Esmond), who fled Austria when the Nazis came in and is now fighting for America. Cooper plays Babe, who is one of the radiomen or something, as he has a radio and is able to adjust for the sideband phase shifting, revealing a plaintext transmission in German that the Nazis are sending. Now do you see why Dutch is aboard the ship? Never mind the existence of both the Enigma cipher as well as the existence of numbers stations. We really are expected to believe the Nazis are this stupid.

Sands wants to deal with the Germans in one way, while Mallory wants to complete the mission they were sent on. But togther, the whole crew saves the day after some tribulations, and Sands is able to get back together with Myra.

As you can guess, The Navy Comes Through is the sort of pure propaganda designed to maintain morale on the home front and show the US Navy being heroic. Nothing like In Which We Serve here. As such, the story is hokey and dated, but the sort of thing that audiences of the day would have liked. It's the sort of movie that should be seen as a sort of artifact of its time, and not as any sort of great cinema.