Dated "edgy" 1960s comedy #95258672804678437580276

When Ted Turner bought the rights to the films that became the so-called "Turner Library" that formed the backbone of the programming in the early days of TCM, I think the Warner Bros. movies only went through about 1950; in any case the 1950s and 1960s Warner Bros. stuff always seemed to show up rather less frequently. That's been changing in recent years, giving me the chance to catch a lot of new-to-me stuff. One such movie was the 1966 sex comedy Any Wednesday.

Jane Fonda stars as Ellen Gordon, who lives in a Lower East Side ground floor apartment with a couple of friends. She works at an art gallery, in charge of some rented artworks at a swanky party. There, she's impressed into service by John Cleves (Jason Robards). He's just called his wife, and for reasons that will soon become obvious needs to make it sound as though he's calling from out of town, which is why Ellen has to play the part of the long-distance operator. (Nowadays, of course, John would just call his wife on the cell phone and caller ID would identify the number regardless of where in America John was calling from.)

As it turns out, John is stepping out on his wife Dorothy (Rosemary Clooney), claiming to be on business trips while he really stays in New York every Wednesday evening for his assignations. He immediately falls for Ellen, who is smart enough to say hell no to John's ideas. But circumstances change for her as she gets appendicitis, while both of her roommates move out because the apartment building is turning to co-ops and none of them can afford the price of the new co-op.

This gives John his in. He'll buy the co-op for Ellen, or at least have the conglomerate he runs buy it so that he can claim it's an "executive suite" and get a tax write-off. Ellen can live there, and John can visit every Wednesday evening for those assignations with nobody being any the wiser. Except, of course, that this arrangement is going to be found out eventually, or else we wouldn't have much of a movie.

That discovery is courtesy of John's secretary Miss Linsley (Ann Prentiss long before she screwed up her life). A man with whom John is doing a business deal, Cass Henderson (Dean Jones), is coming in to town and can't get a hotel room. So Miss Linsley helpfully offers Cass the executive suite, since logically it should be used for things like this. But we all know that there's a woman there, and boy isn't everybody going to be surprised when Cass shows up and finds Ellen. He gets the not-quite-right idea about what Ellen is, since he has no way of knowing that Ellen lived there before John turned the place into the executive suite.

And, as you can also guess, Dorothy is going to find out about the suite and walk in on Cass, Ellen, and John. So Cass and Ellen have to play the part of a married couple to keep the ruse going. Dorothy, meanwhile, hears Ellen's voice and knows she can recognize it from somewhere, although not yet from the fake telephone operator. All sorts of complications are going to ensue before the film reaches an ending that may or may not be happy for each of the characters.

Any Wednesday is based on a Broadway play, and it's again the sort of material that I can kind of see being popular with the self-styled urbane theater-goers of the mid-1960s. On the big screen, however, it's fairly stagey, and 60 years on it's decidedly dated. It also doesn't help that Jason Robards is playing a sort of character I don't much care for, that being the man who lies his way through everything, with the lies having to get bigger and bigger to maintain the ruse.

People who like this sort of look at New York City as it was in the 1960s may enjoy Any Wednesday, but I was glad to see the end of it.

Ooh, goody, another revisionist western

I've stated a bunch of times, especially when it comes to foreign films, how my taste in films differs from that of the professional movie critics. Another good example of that came when I watched one of the movies that TCM ran in honor of the late Kris Kristofferson some months back: Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.

Pat Garrett was shot to death in 1908, although the movie gets this slightly wrong by opening up the action with an expository scene near Las Cruces, NM, in 1909. Pat (James Coburn) is riding with some of his partners, at least until the group is ambushed and Garrett is killed, which did happen in real life. Now since this is just the opening scene and we haven't met Billy the Kid yet, it's obvious that there's going to be a flashback.

Indeed, we flash back to 1891. Billy Bonney (Kris Kristofferson) has been depredating parts of the New Mexico territory, and unsurprisingly the locals are tired of it. Garrett is about to be named sheriff of the county where Billy is based, charged with the responsibility of getting Bonney to move on or else face arrest. Billy scoffs at that idea, so once Garrett becomes sheriff, Billy is indeed arrested and faces the death penalty. Except that he's helped to escape.

Garrett goes to Santa Fe, the territorial capital, and meets with the territorial governor, Lew Wallace (Jason Robards, and yes that's the same Lew Wallace who wrote Ben-Hur) who, with some help from the rich cattleman types, put a bounty on Billy's head. Meanwhile back at Billy's hideout, he finds that there are people other than the authorities who would like him dead, and they show up at the old hideout where he and his gang used to stay where Billy went back to. They're going to try to kill him, but Billy is able to defeat them in a shootout, together with some help from a stranger named Alias (Bob Dylan, yes the singer).

The authorities learn that Billy has moved to the area where John Chisum (Barry Sullivan, and Chisum was the subject of a different Billy the Kid movie) has his cattle, so Garrett and some of the cattlemen's ring that also want Billy dead go there. The chase continues, and continues, until as we know from real life Billy is killed by Garrett, so I'm not giving away much here. It would be like saying the Japanese attack in the climax of From Here to Eternity.

As you might guess from my opening paragraph, I didn't much care for Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. It's slow, filled with those pointless zooms and pans that were a thing in movies of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and director Sam Peckinpah uses his signature style for filming violence -- of which there's a lot in this movie. Not that I have a thing against violence, but the Peckinpah style is tediously stylized, like watching everybody overact in an old silent movie or the deaths of the people from killer bees in The Swarm.

On the other hand, critics just seem to love love love this movie for reasons I totally can't fathom. I just don't see anything in it that makes it rise above other respected westerns. But since they do love it, it's the sort of movie you're going to want to watch and judge for yourself.

The Journey

Another of those movies that shows up on TCM regularly enough but that for whatever reason I had never actually watched in its entirety, is The Journey. With that in mind, the last time it ran on TCM I recorded it so that I could later watch it and write up a review to post here.

The opening credits play out over scenes at the exterior of an airport. We then are taken to the inside of Budapest Airport early in November 1956. For those who don't know, at the end of October student protests led to a new, somewhat less Communist government in Budapets, something which the Soviets couldn't tolerate, so they sent in tanks. The authorities also closed the airport, with a whole bunch of passengers stranded.

Among them is Hugh Deverill (Robert Morley), a British television representative who represents the worst of the British stereotypes about Brits who think they can just dictate terms to everybody around them and get their way. There's also an American family, the Rhinelanders (E.G. Marshall and Anne Jackson, with a very young Ron Howard as their younger son), and various people from other countries, all wondering how they're going to get out of the country.

Into all of this walks Lady Ashmore (Deborah Kerr), accompanied by a man calling himself Flemyng (Jason Robards) who is feeling rather unwell. It's also obvious that Flemyng isn't who he seems to be. Worse is that Ashmore has met Deverill in the past back in England. And Deverill is an absolute prick about it, constantly not wanting to give Lady Ashmore any privacy. He also knows she's married, so shouldn't be traveling in dangerous Communist Hungary alone, and certainly not with a sick man who isn't her husband.

The stranded passengers get put on a bus traveling to Vienna, since it's the closest airport in a non-Communist country, and get stopped at a couple of roadblocks, with Flemyng fainting at one of them and it being revealed that he's traveling under a false identity. They then get to the last major town before the border with Austria. There, the passengers are forced to stop, and wait at the hotel that has been commandeered for just this purpose.

At the hotel is a Soviet Red Army officer, Major Surov (Yul Brynner). He suspects something is up, and demands everyone surrender their passports so that he can interview them individually before letting them go through. This is going to be a particular problem for Flemyng, since he's not actually Flemyng but a Hungarian freedom fighter named Kedes. Not only that, but his physical situation is getting worse to the point that it's fairly obvious to everyone, even Surov, that something is badly wrong.

Further complicating matters is that Surov finds himself taken with Ashmore, or at least acting like he is. You could get the impression that Surov is going to ask for sexual favors in exchange for letting Kedes go, or something similar. But then, this is a movie from the late 1950s released by MGM, so most likely something like that isn't going to show up in a film subject to the Production Code.

Still, The Journey isn't a bad movie, although it's one that's not without its flaws. It runs a bit over two hours, which is a bit too long. It also feels a bit too pat, with the ending being somewhat unrealistic. Then again, I think it's less about the plot and more about the characters and their dealings with each other, with the various stars giving capable performances. The Journey is not, I think, the best movie for anybody involved with it, but is also something not to be ashamed of.

A Big Hand for the Little Lady

As I've mentioned on a reasonable number of occasions, I've got a bunch of movies on my DVR that I need to get around to watching before they expire from the DVR. With that in mind, I've got movie posts scheduled a good three weeks in advance, along with several left in draft form either so I don't have a bunch of movies in the same genre or with the same star coming up in rapid succession. Some draft posts then get re-edited if I seem them on the TCM schedule only after I write the first draft, so things might look a bit off. Such is the case with our next movie, A Big Hand for the Little Lady. I had written a post some time back and scheduled it, and then saw the Summer Under the Stars schedule release. Henry Fonda is being honored tomorrow, August 24, and A Big Hand for the Little Lady shows up at 2:00 PM.

It's sometime in the late 19th century, possibly in the New Mexico Territory or west Texas, although there's reference to a "Laredo Territory" which I don't think ever existed. Benson Tropp (Charles Bickford) is driving his hearse as the town's undertaker, picking people up, although he's not picking up the dead, and the people he's picking up seem to want to be picked up. The other men he picks up are Drummond (Jason Robrds), a cattleman whose daughter is about to get married; and prominent attorney Habershaw (Kevin McCarthy); another rancher named Wilcox is already in town as is storekeeper Buford (John Qualen). They all gather in the back room of Sam Rhine's saloon, and everyboy in town seems interested in their presence.

The reason for this gathering is that it's that time again for the annual high-stakes poker game, which seems to have as its only rules that they'll play a marathon session until one person has all the money, and that if you can't call the current bet, you're out. This, combined with no mention being made of a maximum bet, is something that I'd think would cause a problem if one person could just bet everyone else out of the game, but then maybe their game doesn't work like this. You get the impression that these men have been coming together for years, and budgeting to take part in the match.

Into town comes Meredith (Henry Fonda). He's got a wife Mary (Joanne Woodward) and son Jackie. They're traveling through Texas to San Antonio, where Meredith is intending to buy a plot of land for the family to make a new start in life. That also means that Meredith has the money for that plot of land on hand, in cash since this wasn't an era of electronic funds transfers. And he's going to be in town for a night because the wheel on their wagon needs to be repaired before the family can get back on the road. Everybody else in town is interested in the poker game, so it seems natural for Meredith to be interested in what's going on too. But he also has more interest as he's an inveterate gambler, with the assumption that the family is moving in part to escape Meredith's past gambling losses.

As you can guess, Meredith gets really interested in the poker game. The others have never really been interested in bringing somebody new into the game, but they get the feeling that Meredith might make a good mark: if you don't know who the mark at the table is, it's probably you. So they do let him into their game, and he predictably starts losing money, up until it comes time to make the big wager, at which point he suffers a medical issue that will force him out of the game and giving him no more chance to win back the family money he lost. At that point, Mary makes the insane request that she should be allowed to finish the game for her husband, even though she doesn't even know how to play poker.

A Big Hand for the Little Lady is another of those movies where you can see why the people involved would read the script and think it's the sort of material they could have a lot of fun making. And to be fair to all of them they do a reasonable job with the film, while looking like they're enjoying making this one. The only thing is that the material is pretty darn thin, the sort of thing that in the generation before World War II probably would have been written to be a two-reel short instead of a feature-length movie. So A Big Hand for the Little Lady will probably appeal more to other people than it did to me. Not that it's not worth watching, however.

All the President's Men

Today being January 20, which is inauguration day here in the US in years that follow a presidential election, I figured today would be the right time to put up a post on a movie that I had on my DVR for several months: All the President's Men.

The movie starts off with a shot of a typewriter typing the date of June 17, 1972. For those who know their history, this is the date on which a security guard at the Watergate complex in Washington DC found a door with the bolt taped so that the door wouldn't lock. Five men are arrested in the break-in, which happened to be the Washington headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. The men are found to be carrying surveillance equipment, which would lead some people to question whether or not the burglars were trying to bug the Democrats.

Ben Bradlee (Jason Robards), an editor at the Washington Post newspaper, sends reporter Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) to cover the arraignment, which seems an odd affair since there's a lawyer there who claims not to be representing them and these nobodies have a "country club" lawyer. Some time after the hearing, Woodward gets a call from an FBI agent who tells him that the found some papers on the suspects that linked an "HH" at the White House. Obviously that's a reference to Howard Hunt, who was working for White House Counsel Charles Colson. Woodward later learns that Hunt had previously worked at the CIA.

Then, Bradley tells Woodward that he's puting a second reporter on the case with him, one Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman). They work well together, but as the investigate it seems to be an increasingly sprawling case with so much to try to figure out. It seems to point at president Richard Nixon, busy running for re-election, in some way, and Nixon's campaign committee, but they can't come up with anything firm in part because nobody really wants to speak on the record. And the movie version of Ben Bradlee is one of a man who only wants to print confirmable facts, a massive difference from the news organizations of today.

Indeed, one interesting thing is how, when Woodward and Bernstein are trying to get some background on Hunt, they go to the White House library and the Library of Congress trying to get library records. After the events of September 11, 2001, when the Patriot Act was first up for passage, there were howls of protest that the law might allow the FBI and CIA to spy on what books Americans were taking out of the library. Here, however, going after people's library records is portrayed as virtuous because they're going after those icky Nixon administration types.

As such, as I was watching All the President's Men, I couldn't help but think of another movie, the 1944 biopic Wilson about one of America's nastiest presidents who is whitewashed in a rather hagiographic portrayal. Both movies are extremely well made, while at the same time being utterly self-congratulatory. It's also ironic how Woodward's most famous source, "Deep Throat" (played by Hal Holbrook) turned out to be a former deputy director of the FBI who want to Woodward in large part because he was passed over for a promotion after J. Edgar Hoover's death and wanted to get back at the new boss.

So how much you like All the President's Men may depend on how much you can stomach the journalistic love fest. Considering how much it's become obvious journalism, and even more so the FBI, only investigates based on political affiliation, that love fest may be a bit much for some people to handle.

Raise the Titanic

With the Titan submersible accident being in the news, I found myself thinking of movies that might be relevant. If I wanted to be dark bordering on offensive, I'd probably suggest "The Morning After" from The Poseidon Adventure as the theme song. There's also The Neptune Factor, which I blogged about five years ago. But then I noticed that Raise the Titanic is on some of the streaming services, so I decided to watch that and do a review on it here.

The movie has a bit of a prologue with a man someplace in the Arctic who, in a cave, finds a dead body that's been saved because it's been frozen for 65 years and undisturbed. That body was of a US Army officer, surprisingly enough. And then as the man coms out of the cave, is pursued by another man who shoots him before a third man rescues him.

Cut to Washington DC, where we learn about exactly why everybody was on that island. Apparently, there are places in that part of the Arctic that are disputed territory, with the strongest current (at least in the view of the movie, which was released in 1980) claim being that of the Soviets. The Americans are trying to build a defense system that would make them invulnerable to nuclear missiles, but need a big power source for that. The only source that could do it would need some mineral called "Byzanium" (totally made up for the purposes of the movie), and the man who was shot was trying to determine whether there was any Byzanium on the island.

Now, where that dead American comes in is interesting. Apparently, he was part of an expedition all those years ago that was looking for Byzanium, a mineral little known even to scientists in the movie's world. More importantly, they apparently found it, although it's no longer on the island. Some research determines that they got it off the island and down to Britain, where they were pursued by the Russians, the Soviet Union not yet being a thing back in 1912. And as you can guess from the title of the movie, they got all the way to Southampton, where they put the mineral in shipping crates bound for America. They put those crates on a ship called... the RMS Titanic.

Jason Robards plays Admiral James Sandecker, who is part of the Navy's plan to build that defense system, together with defense contractors like Gene Seagram (David Selby). When they learn what happened to the Byzanium, they realize that the option is not to look for a new source of Byzanium, but to get the one that they already more or less know the location to... on the bottom of the Atlantic where the Titanic sank all those 70 years ago. Unfortunately, because of the depth at which the Titanic rests, they can't send divers to get the Byzanium. They also don't have submersibles that can use a mechanical arm or whatnot to retrieve it from the ship. So their ridiculous plan is... to raise the ship all the way off the seabed and then tow it to the US where they'll salvage the Byzanium.

Even though they're the Navy, they're going to need somebody who knows about complex salvage operations, and that someone is Dirk Pitt (Richard Jordan). He eventually agrees to the mission, and everybody heads to roughly where the Titanic was last known to be (apparently, the two ships that rescued the survivors and the Titanic itself in its distress calls all reported slightly different positions that are a few dozen miles apart, making finding the ship even more complex). Meanwhile, it's pretty damn obvious what the Americans are looking for when they send a flotilla out to that particular location, and the Soviets, being no dummies send a ship to monitor the situation. They don't want the Americans to get that Byzanium....

Raise The Titanic presents a scenario that's interesting, but wildly implausible. At the time the movie was made, it was still a half dozen years before researchers found the exact location of the Titanic on the seabed, at which point it was conclusively determined that the ship did not go down quietly, but broke up into a pretty large debris field, making raising the ship an impossibility. But author Clive Cussler, who wrote the book, and the filmmakers, had no way of knowing this. But even if the ship hadn't broken up in the sinking, raising it two and a half miles is highly unlikely.

The bigger problem the movie has, however, is that the script is unbelievably slow. The start of the movie presents a reasonably good espionage thriller idea, but then the movie gets bogged down in the technical details of trying to salvage a ship. And it goes on, and on. Eventually they do get back to the Cold War thriller aspect, but the way that's handled is perfunctory at best.

So it's easy to see while watching it why Raise the Titanic was panned by critics and a box-office bomb in its day. However, there still are things to recommend it. The visuals are surprisingly good for a movie from 1980, and if you're interested in the idea of the deep ocean and salvage, there's that. But Raise the Titanic really gives off the vibe of being a movie that could have been so much better than what we actually have on screen.

Northern gothic

Katharine Hepburn has been TCM's Star of the Month this month, which gave me the chance to record one or two of her movies that I hadn't seen before. One of these was the adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's play Long Day's Journey Into Night.

The play deals with the Tyrone family, and one day in their life in the summer of 1912. The story is loosely based on Eugene O'Neill's own family, and set at a time when he would have been in his mid 20s. Here, that character is the younger brother Edmund, played by Dean Stockwell. Edmund has spent his adult life trying to escape the long shadow of his family, mostly doing so by becoming a merchant marine. He's recently returned home to the family's summer place in Connecticut, and there's some worry that his persistent cough is in fact tuberculosis, often referred to in those days as consumption.

Hepburn plays Edmund's mother Mary; she doesn't want to hear of her son having consumption. Understanding this and trying to protect Mary is dad James Sr. (Ralph Richardson). He was a stage actor who's reaching the age where he should retire and try to live off his savings. Not as though an actor can have that much savings, so he's always trying to save a few dollars wherever he can. This is another source of rancor between various pairs of family members, as it also leads to Dad's distrust of doctors that may have consequences for Edmund, and definitely already did for Mary.

Part of Mary's backstory is that she had a difficult pregnancy with Edmund and the postpartum issues nearly killed her; as a result she was prescribed morphine. The only thing is that she got herself addicted to the morphine, and the rest of the family is dancing around that fact trying to keep her off the drug while she thinks (not entirely wrongly) that the rest of the family is spying on her.

And then there's elder brother Jamie (Jason Robards), who is enough older than Edmund that he's had a much more mature look at the breakdown of the family and how each parent's different view of the two sons has also caused all sorts of problems with the brothers' relationships with their parents along with the two brothers' relationship with each other. So there's a lot of pent-up resentment here and opportunity for them finally to get all that resentment off their chests.

And boy do they spend a lot of time getting that resentment off their chests. They talk, and talk and talk some more, and when they're done talking, well, they're never done talking and getting to -- and going past -- the point of no longer caring whether they piss off the rest of the family by revealing uncomfortable truths.

It's that talkiness -- and director Sidney Lumet decidedly felt that the original play should be edited as little as possible for the movie -- that may make the movie a tough slog for many viewers. It goes on for well over two and a half hours, and the characters are, like the ones in Sweetie, not particularly sympathetic. If you know that going in, and you're up for a movie that's more of a master-class in acting, then you'll probably highly enjoy this adaptation of Long Day's Journey Into Night. If that's not your thing, then consider this review a warning.

Cable Hogue's Ballad

Another of the movies that I recorded the last time it showed up on TCM is The Ballad of Cable Hogue. Recently, I sat down to watch it and do a post on it here.

The movie starts off somewhere in the desert of eastern Nevada, at the beginning of the 20th century. Cable Hogue (Jason Robards) is propsecting for water, something even more important than gold, with two of his friends, Bowen (Strother Martin) and Taggart (L.Q. Jones). The only thing is, these two aren't really his friends. They realize that the men no longer have enough water for three, but still do for two, so they basically attack Cable, take his water, and leave him for dead.

Amazingly, however, Cable is able to find the one watering hole in the area just before he's about to die of thirst. He sets about to develop it, and realizes that he might be able to make money by charging stagecoaches and other travelers going through this desolate area for the water. And it's not long before he gets his first paying customer, the self-styled minister of a church of his own revelation, the Rev. Joshua Sloan (David Warner). Sloan points out to Cable that if he hasn't staked an official claim at the land office, it's not going to be long before a whole bunch of people from town are going to find out about the water and make their own claims on the land.

With that in mind, Cable goes into town, although he's only got enough money to put a legal claim on two acres. That, however, is enough, as apparently the watering hole is very localized and nobody outside those two acres is going to be able to find water. In town, Cable decides he's going to cavort with one of the women of ill repute, Hildy (Stella Stevens). She's eventually going to follow Cable back to his place, now dubbed Cable Springs, although she really wants the life in a big city married to a wealthy man.

Cable is relatively successful running Cable Springs, but in a fairly obvious plot turn, who should show up looking for water but... Bowen and Taggart? They think Cable must have a bunch of money on the premises somewhere, and are out to find it and screw Cable over again, but this time Cable has a trick or two up his sleeve.

The Ballad of Cable Hogue is the sort of early 1970s western that has a differentl look at the genre than a lot of the older westerns, instead looking at a frontier that's closing, as horseless carriages show up for the movie's climax. It's a fairly gentle western, certainly by the standards of its director, Sam Peckinpah, who was known for his more violent films like his previous one, The Wild Bunch. There's certainly violence here, although the overall tone is somewhat lighter and more comedic.

That having been said, it's also way too leisurely. It's the sort of material that would make a nice 90-minute film, but unfortunately has been stretched out to a shade over two hours, thanks in part to some bad songs that look like Peckinpah had "learned" from the "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" sequence in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. That sequence was a bit out of place, but in this movie those songs are even more out of place.

If a good screenwriter could figure out how to tighten the material up to a 90-minute movie, there could be a pretty good remake to be made. As it is, The Ballad of Cable Hogue is a bit of a mixed bag.

Stacks of Max

Neil Simon is generally thought of with all those New York City plays that he did, and as I mentioned before he had rather less success with California Suite. It's not the only time one of his works went to the west coast, however, as you can see in Max Dugan Returns, which will be on FXM tomorrow at 11:35 AM.

A very young Matthew Broderick plays Michael McPhee, a high school student in southern California who gets up one morning and wakes up his mom Nora (Marsha Mason). She was up most of the night grading exams as an English teacher at the same high school Michael attends. She's grossly underpaid, considering the crappy bungalow she and Michael live in, and how she can't afford anything better than a car that's almost 20 years old and barely starts. And even that gets stolen because she leaves the key in the ignition. This leads her to meet Brian Costello (Donald Sutherland), a police detective who gets the call to investigate the stolen car.

Brian takes an immediate liking to Nora, even lending her a motor scooter he picked up cheap at a police auction (although, in a running joke, that will get stolen too). Brian even asks Nora out to dinner, which is pretty quick considering he's only known her for a few hours and is supposed to have a professional relationship with her.

Later that evening, Nora gets a phone call from a mysterious voice who seems to know a lot about Nora. That voice belongs to Max Dugan (Jason Robards), who was Nora's father at least until he abandoned the family when he was very young. He wants to see Nora and the grandson he never knew he had, in part to make amends for all the wrong he's done, and in part because he's probably terminally ill with a bad heart. In the intervening years, Max had done a stretch in prison for embezzlement, got out and invested in real estate in the Las Vegas area only for one of the casinos to use government chicanery to get the land without having to pay Max anything, which seems grossly unconstitutional.

That led Max to get a job at said casino, so that he could skim money from them equal to the amount that Max feels he was bilked by the casino. And he shows up at the house with a satchel full of that money in cold, hard cash. Nora is understandably uncomfortable, and can't bring herself to bring the truth about this man to Michael. She certainly can't be truthful about Max to Brian, since that will mean certain arrest which would kill Max. Can't he just spend his last few months on earth peacefully?

Well, Max doesn't necessarily want to spend the time quite that peacefully. Instead, he's decided that he's going to make amends by buying Nora and Michael all the things that they haven't been able to have up to this point. This, unsurprisingly, causes big problems since Brian will see everything and know that something isn't right, and fairly easily put two and two together.

Max Dugan Returns certainly has plot holes that will require you to suspend belief, such as how Max would be able to embezzle from the casino considering all the cameras they've got to try to catch cheats. And Marsha Mason's character having to lie constantly gets old pretty fast. But for the most part the movie succeeds, and is definitely a whole lot better than California Suite. Robards is fun in the deadpan role, doing the sort of thing George Burns did in The Sunshine Boys several years earlier. And Donald Sutherland shows he's surprisingly good at reacting to everybody else around him being nuts, although then again he'd already been in M*A*S*H and Kelly's Heroes so he'd had some experience with comedy.

In the end, Max Dugan Returns is a charming, if unrealistic picture, and one that's definitely worth a watch.

Mr. Kitty Carlisle

Another of the movies I recently watched that's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive is Act One.

The movie is based on the memoir by celebrated playwright Moss Hart (played here by George Hamilton), a man I first knew of as the late husband of To Tell the Truth panelist Kitty Carlisle Hart and her pearls, because I was the right age to see that show and not any of Hart's plays. (Kitty is not a character in the movie, for the record.) Obviously, later on I learned about Hart and his plays such as You Can't Take It With You which were wildly successful both on the stage and the screen.

But Act One tells the story of Hart before he became famous, or at least part of the story. (Hart died before he could write an Act Two.) The action starts in September 1929, when Hart is in his mid 20s. He had dreams of making it as a writer, and wrote several plays of the sort he thought a serious playwright like Eugene O'Neill would have written. His agent Maxwell (Sam Levene) and his friend Joe Hyman (Jack Klugman) both like the plays, but they also know that dramas won't sell as they're a dime a dozen. If you want to hit it big, you have to write a comedy.

Mossy doesn't know what to write about, and comedy is hard, anyway. But he reads an article in Variety about how the advent of talking pictures has caused all sorts of upheaval in Hollywood. So he thinks he can write a comedy about the behind-the-scenes part of the stage and movies. Eventually, he finishes it, and even gets an appointment with Broadway producer Warren Stone (Eli Wallach). Stone makes Moss wait days for that appointment, and then sits on the play for weeks.

In the meantime, one of his friends knows another producer, Harris, and Harris is able to get Moss a meeting with the already successful playwright George S. Kaufman (Jason Robards, who was still using the "Jr." in his name at this point in his career). Now, we know that Kaufman and Hart went on to write You Can't Take It With You, so we know it will ultimately become a successful partnership, but the movie ends before the big successes.

Kaufman reads the play, and likes the idea, but also knows that as it is, it's going to die on the stage because it just isn't funny enough. So he tells Moss that they're going to have to rewrite the whole darn thing. And even then, it's still not a sure thing that the play is going to become a success....

I haven't read the book on which the movie was based, but the reviews of the movie I've read from people who have read the book say that a lot was lost in the translation from page to screen. I don't have nearly as low an opinion as some of these reviewers, but I can understand why people might consider it a disappointment. The movie is OK as far as it goes, but there's always the feeling that there could be something more here. This is probably most notable at a tea party where Moss meets most of the Algonquin Round Table, but that's all we see of those celebrated wits.

Robards comes off best as Kaufman, and there are some interesting faces with recurring roles as Moss' friends who meet at a deli as a sort of round table of their own. There's future game show host Bert Convy as Archie Leach (yes, that Archie Leach, and surprisingly there's a plot point about his going to Paramount in Hollywood -- Act One was distributed by Warner Bros.). A young George Segal plays the friend who gets Moss the meeting with Kaufman, and David Doyle, a man I only knew from reruns of Match Game which mentioned he was a star Charlie's Angels, plays the last member of the group of friends.

You could do worse than Act One, but you could also do better. Still, I'd say it's worth a watch.

Divorce American Style

About a month ago, TCM ran Divorce American Style as part of a salute to actor Dick Van Dyke on getting the Screen Actors' Guild (I think) lifetime achievement award. The movie has received a DVD release, but it seems to be out of print based on the ridiculous price Amazon is asking, as well as TCM's on-line schedule not listing it as available for purchase from their online shop. It's receiving another airing on TCM tomorrow morning at 6:30 AM.

The movie starts off with a montage of couples bickering in their suburban tract housing, because, well, that's what American middle-class married couples do. Cut to one particular couple, Richard and Barbara Harmon, played by Dick Van Dyke and Debbie Reynolds. They hold a dinner party for their friends one night, but things don't go well, because afterwards, the two wind up at each other's throats as they clean up and then get ready to go to bed. Their adolescent son Mark (Tim Matheson in his movie debut) has obviously heard this all before, as when he hears the argument through the ventilation ducts, he's got a checklist of the things Mom and Dad use against each other.

What's a bored housewife to do? Barbara goes to her therapist, who has gotten Richard to agree to come in to one of the appointments in an effort to patch up the relationship, but that doesn't work, at which point Barbara calls her lawyer cousin who suggests a separation. Separation turns into divorce, with Barbara getting the house and everything in alimony, leaving Richard with the princely sum of $87.50 a week. Trying to put together the pieces of his life, Richard meets divorcée Nancy Downes (Jean Simmons). She's on relatively good terms with her ex-husband Nelson (Jason Robards), and likes Richard. This is wonderful for Nelson, since he'd love to see Nancy get remarried: there go his alimony payments. Of course, there's a problem wih the fact that even if Richard gets remarried, he still has to pay alimony. The only way he can get out of alimony is if Barbara remarries.

So, Nelson and Nancy immediately proceed to try to find a suitable husband for Barbara. Eventually the see an advertisement from used-car dealer Al Yearling (Van Johnson), whom Nelson had tried to hook up with Nancy, except that Al had a mother he was looking after. Mom has since died, so that means Al would quite possibly be good for Barbara, if the two can hit it of together. So, it looks as though everybody is going to live happily ever after: Richard with Nancy; Barbara with Al; and Nelson with his fiancée. Or will something come about to prevent the various couples from hooking up this way?

Divorce American Style has some potential. Parts of it come across as reminiscent of The Awful Truth, as you -- and Barbara and Richard -- wonder whether it was such a good idea for the two of them to get divorced in the first place. But this is not meant to be a screwball comedy; instead, it's trying to be more like a Paddy Chayefsky dark comedy. And there are times where that works too, as in the opening montage. There's also a very well choreographed sequence in the bank, when both Richard and Barbara have been advised by friends to clean out the joint bank account and remove the contents of their safety deposit box. Both go to the bank at the same time, with one going to empty the safety deposit box and the other going for the bank account, neither ever noticing the other.

Ultimately, though, Divorce American Style comes across as a bit of a mess; not quite sure of what it really wants to be. There's also something about the movie that seems firmly dated in the 1960s as opposed to The Awful Truth or Chayefsky's The Hospital or Network, all of which come closer to timeless. Debbie Reynolds comes across as a bit unappealing; the relationship between Nelson and Nancy seems a bit hard to believe; and the movie resolves its problems in a way that seems decidedly like a deus ex machina. It's a bit odd that the movie winds up as a mess, considering how much talent there is in it. In addition to all the actors, the screenplay was written by Norman Lear, while the director is Bud Yorkin: two men who went on to achieve great success together with the TV show All in the Family.