Rudolph Friml, Jr.

Warner Bros. liked to make a lot of musical shorts, both two-reelers telling a bare-bones story and one-reelers that were more of a spotlight for a singer or a band. One that showed up recently was Six Hits and a Miss.

The opening credits are interesting for a couple of reasons. One is that they mention director Jean Negulesco, who was still at the stage of his career where he was directing shorts; he wouldn't graduate to features until a few years later with The Mask of Dimitrios followed by a string of interesting movies first at Warner Bros. and then at Fox. The other is that the band here is conducted by Rudolph Friml, Jr. That of course implies that Friml Sr. was someone of enough renown that there would be a need -- or have been a need back in the day -- to differentiate between the two. Sure enough, the original Rudolf Friml was a Czech composer of light operettas; you might know a couple of his works for having been turned into the Jeanette MacDonald movies The Firefly and Rose Marie.

As for the short, it involves Friml and his band, accompanied by a singing group called the titular Six Hits and a Miss for having a female lead and six men providing harmony, at least until the group was broken up by the wartime draft. They sing a song called "You've Got to Know How to Dance". And herein lies another interesting thing about this short. The song was earlier used in the 1936 movie Colleen, and here Warner Bros. reuses footage from the dance number that accompanied the song in Colleen to intercut the new footage. Now, it wasn't uncommon for such footage to be resued, or even movies to be re-released, as that was in 1942 the only way the stuff would get back out in the public and make a few bucks for the studio again. There was no television yet to have a late late show showing old movies.

As for the quality of this particular short, it's OK if not great. I'm not the biggest fan of these one-reel musical shorts since for the most part there's not all that much that was done beyond putting the camera in front of the band and maybe having a pair of dancers or more. So it's everything else going on with Six Hits and a Miss that makes the short worth mentioning.

Another movie that feels like a 1930s exile

A couple of weeks back, I did a post on The Main Event, mentioning how it came across to me as the sort of movie that, with a bit of script doctoring, could have fit right in in the late 1930s. Recently, I watched another movie that has the feel of something that could have been done in the 1930s, although this one came out in the late 1950s. This time, the movie is Count Your Blessings.

The credits are done over a backdrop of the Houses of Parliament in London, with those old air raid searchlights you'd see in films set in either of the World Wars, along with explosions. It's a sign that the movie is set in London and during World War II. Or, at least, it opens up then. After the credits, Grace Allingham (Deborah Kerr) is returning home from her job as the sort of secretary at military headquarters that had her wearing a uniform. Not long after getting home, a visitor comes who is a friend of her kinda-sorta boyfriend Hugh. That man is Charles de Valhubert (Rossano Brazzi), who is working with the Free French.

Charles sees Grace and immediately falls in love with her and says he's going to marry her, which seems like nonsense except that this is a movie so you know that the two are eventually going to get married. The two go on a honeymoon somewhere in the picturesque English countryside, but it's a brief honeymoon in that Charles gets called back to London to be part of some sort of military operation. The honeymoon, however, was enough time for Charles to get Grace pregnant.

Some time later Grace gets news that Charles has been taken POW, which means that he's at least not dead. But somehow the war ends, and Charles never gets demobbed, instead getting sent on one tour of duty after another until it's around early 1954, since Charles is in Indochina at Dien Bien Phu. But finally he makes it out of Indochina and is able to return home, or at least to his wife and the son who's now about nine years old but whom he's never actually seen.

Needless to say, the reunion isn't going to be an easy one, not only for husband and wife but also for the son who now has a father in the flesh. Charles decides he's going to make things so much worse for all of them by packing everybody up -- after all, Grace has been living with her father at his fashionable London house -- and moving the whole family to France just because he says so!

Grace isn't particularly happy with this, especially when she learns that Charles has been seeing other women the entire time he's been in the military! Charles' uncle the Duc de St. Cloud (Maurice Chevalier) explains to Grace that this is the way French men are, except that since they're French, they all clearly care most about their wife and not all those other women. As if all of this should somehow mollify Grace. Grace thinks about taking the boy back with her to England, and eventually the boy gets his own ideas about how to resolve the conflict.

It's the boy's resolution of things at the end that made me think of one of those 1930s movies where the adolescent children figure out some crazy scheme to bring their divorced/widowed parent together with the right person. Most of those are wacky comedies, while Count Your Blessings feels like it's supposed to be more of a light drama, at least until the finale. But up until that finale, it's both extremely slow going and frankly maddening to anybody with common sense that the main characters have any logical motivation to act the way they do. After having watched it I looked it up, and noted both that it was a money loser and that the IMDb reviews are fairly negative. I'd have to agree.

I'd make the joke that you should Count Your Blessings that I watched the movie for you, but as always I have to say that you should watch for yourself and make your own conclusions.

Fred Astaire robs the cradle

Another of the movies that's been in the FXM rotation for a little while, but that I haven't blogged about before, is Daddy Long Legs. It's got another airing tomorrow (Jan. 14) at 6:00 AM, so recently I watched it to write a post on here.

Fred Astaire plays Jarvis Pendleton III, the latest in a family of extremely wealthy businessmen. There's that old phrase of "shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations", and it seems as though the current Jarvis may be living up to it since he seems more into jazz drumming and dancing than actually running the business. He's also got a niece Linda (Terry Moore) who's in college now, but whom he hasn't seen since she was six months old, much to the consternation of her mother.

Anyhow, part of Jarvis' business involves going over to France to deal with some post-war restructuring/Marshall Plan-type stuff. It's not made exactly clear what all the business entails, but the only real point of it is to get Jarvis over to France. On the windy country roads outside of Paris, the car Jarvis and his entourage are in has to run off the road to avoid a cart and gets stuck in the mud. Jarvis goes off to look for help, and the nearest residence he can find is a small orphanage.

The orphanage seems to have a lot of young orphans and, like The Cider House Rules one who is to the point that she could start making her own way in life. That elder orphan is 18-year-old Julie Andre (Leslie Caron). She's so beautiful that Jarvis decides he'd like to adopt her. However, adopting an 18-year-old seems like a bit of a problem, something icky enough that Ambassador Williamson (Larry Keating) advises against it. So instead Jarvis comes up with the idea that one of his foundations will sponsor Julie to go to college in New England where Linda goes to school, on a scholarship, without Julie knowing who her benefactor is.

Julie is understandably interested in her benefactor, whom she calls "Daddy Long Legs" because the younger orphans saw his shadow when he first came to the orphanage, and thought it looked like that sort of spider. However, the letters go not to Jarvis, but to his executive assistant Griggs (Fred Clark) and Griggs' secretary Alicia Pritchard (Thelma Ritter). Griggs tells Alicia to file the letters away, and Jarvis never sees them, so he doesn't know what Julie is thinking about him, if he even remembers her. Julie, meanwhile, begins to feel a bunch of emotional hurt over not hearing from Daddy Long Legs.

Eventually, Alicia insists one of the letters be answered, so Jarvis comes up with the idea of going up to the college, since after all his niece Linda attends and it will give Jarvis the chance to see her for the first time since Linda was an infant. It'll also give him a chance to see Julie at least from afar, and possibly even talk to her to get a read of what's going on with "Daddy Long Legs". However, what happens is that Jarvis and Julie begin to fall in love. There's that creepiness the ambassador warned about. And, amazingly, the ambassador comes to New York by coincidence on the one weekend Julie comes down to New York to see Jarvis, with the two getting hotel suites next to each other. So of course the ambassador is going to find out what's going on.

Daddy Long Legs is an appealing enough story that it's been made into a movie on several occasions, starting with a Mary Pickford silent over a hundred years ago. This one, being a vehicle for Fred Astaire and Leslie Caron, adds songs and dances since the dancing is where they were both really talented. As such, that's going to make the movie one that might hold a bit less appeal to some people. The big problem with the dance numbers is that some of them, especially Caron's big climax, go on too long and bring the movie to a screeching halt, even if Caron is quite a fine dancer. These also pad the movie out to a little over two hours when it's the sort of material that would have been perfect for a 90-minute programmer back in the 1930s.

Still, there's a lot worse music and dancing out there, and Daddy Long Legs is definitely going to please a lot of fans of musicals.

Deep Valley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take a Roman holiday in Technicolor and Cinemascope!

Another of the movies that's been in the FXM rotation for a few months and I haven't blogged about before is Three Coins in the Fountain. It's got another airing coming up tomorrow (Jan. 2) at 7:45 AM, with another couple of airings next week.

After a nice couple minute's travelogue through Rome with Frank Sinatra singing the title song, we get the opening credits which put Clifton Webb first, although I don't know that his part in the movie is the biggest. That probably belongs to Maggie McNamara, who plays Maria Williams. She's a newcomer to Rome, flying in to take a new job at the US Distribution Agency (I presume handling the Marshall Plan although I don't think this was explicitly mentioned). This is a Rome that's strangely devoid of traffic, as her roomate and co-worker Anita (Jean Peters) is able to park at the train station just by pulling in to the spot, something which happens at several other locations.

Maria and Anita share a ridiculously large villa (the excuse given is that "the exchange rate is in their favor") with Miss Frances (Dorothy McGuire), who has for 15 years been the secretary to expat writer John Shadwell (that's Clifton Webb), who jokes that everybody thinks he's already dead since he hasn't been in America for decades (what he did during the war is left strangely unmentioned). Frances secretly loves Shadwell, and she and Maria throw coins in the Trevi fountain wishing for love. Anita claims she's heading back to the States to get married, so she doesn't.

Anita's claim is actually a lie. On Maria's first day of work, she and Anita are invited by their boss to a cocktail party. Also invited is their co-worker Giorgio (Rossano Brazzi), a translator for the agency. Giorgio and Anita fall in love even though there's a strict policy against fraternization between the female secretaries and the Italian men who work at the agency. Maria sees a lovely prince, Dino (Louis Jourdan), and immediately falls for him, although he doesn't know it at first because really, a prince is going to fall in love with a secretary who isn't his secretary?

So Maria decides she's going to pursue Dino by figuring out what all of his interests are and pretending that she shares the same interests , even though this is a complete lie. But it does eventually work in hooking Dino, at least until she has to admit what she did, threatening the relationship.

Romantic complications also happen for the other two pairings. Anita and Giorgio go up to meet his family in South Tirol, before Maria makes comments to her and Anita's boss about Anita's relationship that get Giorgio fired. This also is going to make it more difficult for Giorgio to fulfill his dream of becoming a lawyer.

As for Frances and Shadwell, he finally makes some comments that can be seen as a marriage proposal, which is of course what Frances has always wanted. But that very same day, Shadwell goes to his doctor and discovers he's got a tumor that's going to kill him. So he breaks off the engagement and plans for his death, absolutely pissing off Frances.

Of course, you can make an educatied guess that these relationships are going to wind up with a relatively happy ending, considering the sort of movie Three Coins in the Fountain is. It's undemanding fluff, which was made more to showcase Rome and how beautiful the place was than to tax the viewers. (The movie was made on location, which would have been exotic for audiences of 1954 when transatlantic travel was not something engaged in by people of average wealth unless you were drafted to go off and fight an overseas war.) As such, the story won't be for everybody, but the color photography looks a damn sight better than all those Traveltalks shorts that are badly in need of a restoration.

Just don't mention the plot holes, because God knows there are a lot of them, some of which I've already mentioned. Go with the flow and let all of those lovely images of Rome flow over you, and you'll probably like the movie. It is available on DVD is you miss the FXM showings before it goes back in the vault.

Valley of the Dolls meets the world of publishing

One of the movies that's come out of the vaults to run on FXM is The Best of Everything. It's going to be on FXM tomorrow afternoon at 12:55 PM, and again Friday at 9:55 AM.

Hope Lange plays Caroline Bender, who at the start of the movie is on her first day at her new job in the secretarial pool of Fabian Publishing, a New York publishing house with its fingers in a lot of different things. She's got a fiancé Eddie (Brett Halsey) who has gone off to England to study for a year, and whom she's going to marry when he gets back. She also has dreams of moving up the ladder to become a reader and possibly even an editor, but that would be well down the line.

But before that, there's getting used to the new job, her colleagues and her bosses. Among the fellow secretaries is Gregg (Suzy Parker), who has dreams of becoming an actress on Broadway and who probably should have been fired by now considering how many absences she has for auditions and what not. There's also virginal, naïve Apirl (Diane Baker). The two of them need a third for their apartment, so they invite Caroline in.

And then there are the bosses. Mike (Stephen Boyd) is the "good cop", if you will, in that he takes a professional interest in Caroline but other than that drinks too much. Mr. Shalimar (Brian Aherne) is of a piece with the bosses in The Apartment a year later, who probably would have used one of his employees' apartments for his assignations if he had male employees and had thought of the idea. As it is, he just pursues all the nice-looking secretaries. And then there's miss Farrow (Joan Crawford), who's a bitch and a half, treating the secretaries like dirt for getting even the tiniest little thing wrong.

There's lots of sexual tension, at least 1950s Production Code style, going on, Caroline's two new best friends try to navigate the world they're in. April meets Dexter (Robert Evans), who seems nice until something happens to April, while Gregg has her eyes on stage director David Savage (Louis Jourdan), who is about as bad as Mr. Shalimar at going through women. The fact that Gregg can't really act doesn't help her cause either, and she becomes more and more paranoid about David. Caroline is doing fine until she hears from Eddie that he got married to a rich girl who's dad owns oil wells.

It goes on like this for a good two hours, with the movie being in some ways a whole lot of silliness. Not that it's bad; it's just that it's very much a product of the late 1950s and stuck there so fabulously. There are the cultural norms of the time; there's Joan Crawford who is a hoot every time she's on; and there's the progression of poor Gregg, which might be the most hilarious. As for Lange, she gets to play the same sort of role that Barbara Parkins does in Valley of the Dolls, that of the bemused observer who occassionally gets too close to things.

Unfortunately, the print that FXM is running is screwed up, in that it's both letterboxed and pillarboxed, so if you don't have a big TV (and mine's only 32", I think), it's going to look pretty tiny. Thankfully, The Best of Everything is available on DVD. It's not exactly a great movie, but it's a hell of a lot of fun.