Margie

Tomorrow on TCM is a morning and afternoon of movies with screenplays written by F. Hugh Herbert, not to be confused with character actor Hugh Herbert. However, there's a movie airing on TCM on Saturday, April 5, that I'm planning on doing a blog post about tomorrow, so F. Hugh Herbert gets a mention today. As it turns out, I have one of his movies on my DVR, although it's not one of the movies that TCM is showing tomorrow. That movie is Margie.

The credits are done as something that wasn't uncommon for book adptations, which is the turning of pages with another batch of credits on each page. However, in this set of opening credits the pages are pages of a scrapbook with old photos on the pages accompanying the credits. After the credits, the camera pans into the attic of the house where Margie (Jeanne Crain) lives, together with teenage daughter Joyce (Ann E. Tood, not the same person as Ann Todd despite the middle initial E not being in the opening credits). Joyce finds some of Mom's old stuff from the 1920s when Margie herself was a teenager in the same small Ohio town where they still live, such as a scrapbook, and an old pair of bloomers. Joyce asks Mom to tell her about when she was in high school, so we get the requisite flashback....

The flashback is to 1928, since Herbert Hoover is running for President, although this seems a bit off since the movie was released in November 1946 which means Margie would have had to get married immediately out of high school and been knocked un her wedding night to satisfy the Production Code and have a 16-year-old daughter. Margie is in high school, living with her grandmother (Esther Dale) since Mom is dead and Dad (Hobart Cavanaugh) has to travel a lot for business. Margie has a best friend in Marybelle (Barbara Lawrence) who has a boyfriend Johnnie while Margie doesn't (yet) have one.

That pair of bloomers Joyce found is about to play a part in the plot. The elastic is no longer holding as it used to, and since is the 1920s, it's not as if you can go to your local big-box department store and buy a half dozen pairs of underpants cheaply, which is why the same pair of bloomers keeps falling down and causing all sorts of trouble for poor Margie. She escapes into the library, just as the school's new French teacher, Mr. Fontayne (Glenn Langan) comes in. Margie claims she's doing research for the upcoming debate, but she's as taken with the hot (by the standards of 1940s teens as Hollywood saw them) Fontayne; indeed, all the girls are talking about him.

Margie thinks she's in love with Fontayne, even though he's entirely the wrong age for her. Perhaps one of her fellow classmates would be better, even though she thinks they're all immature. She does have a crush on Marybelle's boyfriend, while pursuing her is nice but inept Roy (Alan Young). Over the course of the movie, Margie prepares for the big debate, on the topic of whether the US should have troops in Nicaragua; goes ice skating with her fellow students; and worries about who's going to take her to the big dance. It all leads up to the reveal at the end of the movie of which of the men she wound up marrying.

I've mentioned in the past that the post-war years at Fox saw a series of nostalgic musicals that were either straight-up biopics, or biopic-like movies. Margie isn't really a musical, although one might be forgiven for thinking you're getting into a musical. Fox probably didn't mind the confusion back in the day since those musicals seemed to be successes and I think audiences of the day liked the nostalgia value of a simpler time. If you're up for nostalgia, Margie certainly fits the bill. However, at the same time I have to say it's dated and definitely not the sort of movie that's going to be for everybody. It's not bad by any means; it's one of those things where I think there are other movies from the era that would be easier for people not necessarily fans of old-time stuff to get into. (For Jeanne Crain, Leave Her to Heaven immediately comes to mind.)

Thirty Minus Eight

The second of the movies that are on my DVR and coming up on TCM is one that they showed in August as part of Jeanne Crain's day in Summer Under the Stars: Twenty Plus Two. That airing comes up tomorrow, September 22, at 6:00 AM.

Crain isn't the star here although I think she's the highest-billed woman in the cast. The lead is David Janssen, playing Tom Alder. But we don't see him for a few minutes. The movie opens up with a scene at the apartment/office of one Julia Joliet. She runs a service which handles fan mail for movie stars; I assume fans would write to a postal drop and then a service like this would pick up the mail and do whatever the agent and star want done with it. But Joliet's real purpose in the movie is to get murdered.

That's where Alder comes in. He's not the murderer; instead, he's called by one of his police detective friends to look at the case (this rather seems like a plot hole to me). Surprisingly, the place looks like the police haven't gone over it yet. And Alder isn't a police detective. Indeed, he doesn't even like to think of himself as a private detective. Instead, he's the sort of person who goes out and finds missing heirs, which really is detective work but sounds classier. All of this is likely to keep the name of one of Joliet's clients, Leroy Dane (Brad Dexter), out of the papers. And when Alder goes through Joliet's files, he finds some things that he thinks would pertain to a famous missing persons case from a dozen years earler, that of wealthy Doris Delaney.

Indeed, it was reading about the Delaney case years back in a magazine article that gave Alder the idea to become this sort of investigator. And he's about to get another case, as one Jacques Pleschette (Jacques Aubuchon), son of a French-Canadian farmer who emigrated to North Dakota, wants Alder to look for his kid brother Auguste. Searches of military records reveal that there's some weird stuff going on, and one or multiple people is being highly dishonest.

Now if you're still wondering how Jeanne Crain comes into all of this, that's a good question. She doesn't really; instead she plays Linda Foster, a woman Alder had met as she was starting as an undergrad at UCLA and he was about to start law school. Alder didn't become a lawyer because the US got involved in Korea and Alder got his letter from Uncle Sam. That's part of where the closest to a female lead also gets involved. Dina Merrill plays Nicki Kovacs. We first see her as Alder is flying to New York and she's a passenger on the same plane as him. Alder thinks she looks familiar, and he's right. A decade earlier, after he got demobbed and was in Tokyo awaiting transport back to the States, he spent an evening at a taxi dance-type place where Nicki was working, having wanted to get away from the States because.... Well, they spent the evening together and Nicki was a perfect lady to Alder, who had no interest in anything sexual.

Everything eventually comes together for a finale, but before that I should probably mention a couple of cameos. Agnes Moorehead gets one scene as Doris Delaney's mother, who has remained out of the public eye all those years Doris has been missing, but for whatever reason lets this one private investigator talk to her. And William Demarest shows up as an alcoholic journalist. Both of them steal their scenes, unsurprisingly. Oh, there's a third cameo, but not from someone who succeeded as an actor. When Alder is at the taxi dance place, an obnoxious sailor with a bunch of tickets around his neck wants to dance all night with Nicki. IMDb suggests this is a young Robert Osborne, but the voice didn't sound right. Judge for yourself.

Twenty Plus Two isn't a terrible movie, but because of the convoluted plot it certainly isn't great either. To be honest, to me it felt more like the sort of thing that in the 1970s or 1980s would have been maybe a TV movie of the week. Or, possibly more likely, one of those two-hour movies designed to be a test pilot for a possible TV series. (I'm reminded of the one-season TV series Finder of Lost Loves that I used in the February 2020 TV edition of the old Thursday Movie Picks blogathon.) Such a TV show would have been sponsored by United Airlines, considering how many shots show their planes taking off and landing.

David Janssen does OK; Dina Merrill and especially Jeanne Crain are misused; and, as I mentioned, Moorehead and Demarest steal the show. But even with all that, Twenty Plus Two deserves one watch.

Timberland guns

Another movie that I had on my DVR for a little while was Guns of the Timberland. TCM ran it I think in July, and then ran it again in August for Jeanne Crain's day in Summer Under the Stars. But I had enough other stuff to post about that I didn't get around to posting about it then. Besides, I noticed that it was coming up again in September, for a daytime of movies starring Alan Ladd. That showing is coming up tomorrow, September 3, at 1:00 PM.

Alan Ladd plays Jim Hadley, and as the movie opens, he and a bunch of other men are on a seeming freight train, no passenger cars, heading to parts unknown. Or, more specifically, a place called Deep Well. Ladd and his business partner, Monty Welker (Gilbert Roland), have a contract from the government to do a lot of logging in the area because the train line that's getting built needs more wood for rail ties. Ladd is bringing a bunch of men with him, and a bunch of money to provision the men, which seems like it should be a good thing for the townsfolk. Yet all of them seem unhappy when Jim reveals that they're loggers.

The deeper reasoning behind their antipathy is revealed by Laura Riley (Jeanne Crain). She owns a ranch and a bunch of horses that Jim is hoping to rent for his men. But when she finds out that he's a logger, she's fearful, for an understandable enough reason. Her, and everybody else's cattle, need land to graze on, and that land needs topsoil to grow the grass. The trees up in the mountains lock in that topsoil, and if somebody clear-cuts the trees, which is pretty much what Jim is going to do, the ranchers think the land below will become much less nutrient-rich.

Jim takes his men up in to the forest, which is in part an excuse for the moviemakers to show scenery, although this movie was made in 1960. If this were one of the early Technicolor forestry movies from the late 1930s, the scenery might have worked better here. In any case, the weekend comes, and the men want to go back into town to blow off some steam, or at least to have a few drinks. They get to the saloon while the townsfolk are holding a dance in a different building, which is also an excuse for Warner Bros. to show off its new star, Frankie Avalon, singing a very out of place song. Avalon plays Bert Harvey, one of Riley's ranch hands, but winds up having a more substantial role.

The townsfolk learn of the loggers' entry into town, which gives them an idea to come up with some way to try to delay the loggers' progress. They eventually do this by dynamiting the access road back to where the loggers are working. They can walk back, but getting the logs out of the forest is going to be tough. There's another approach, but it goes over the Riley spread.

So the rest of the movie plays out like the sort of western that saw the relatively common theme of the rancher who wanted an open range versus the homesteade who wanted to fence in the land, only with ranchers versus loggers this time. Guns of the Timberland is one of the many movies where it's again easy enough to see why people were interested in the source material (a Louis L'Amour novel) that would give them the chance to film in some very pretty locations. But the plot winds up being a fairly tepid affair and slow going despite the film's putative action and shortish running time of only 91 minutes.

Ultimately to me, Guns of the Timberland felt more like the sort of thing that would in later years be made as a TV movie of the week.

The Joker Is Wild

Er, not quite....

Another movie which was sitting on my DVR for quite some time is The Joker Is Wild, which got a TCM airing back in September 2021 in honor of Mitzi Gaynor's 90th birthday. In a very nice move, they even aired the interstitials Gaynor did with Robert Osborne back in 2014, which were a hell of a lot more worthwhile than Ben Mankiewicz's "insights", but that's a topic for another day.

The movie tells the story of the story of Joe E. Lewis (Frank Sinatra), not the heavyweight boxer but a singer-turned-comedian (and part-time actor) whose career started in the 1920s in Chicago. Now, as you can probably guess from the place and date, that's during Prohibition, and the Mob is involved in some way. In Joe's case, that means the club where he's performing is owned by the Mob, and the contract he's signed is one that it's going to be difficult to get out of unless his bosses explicitly send him away.

Those bosses have no such desire, while Joe wants to go off on his own, so since his contract is coming to an end, he decides to take another offer despite the bosses' plans to renew the contract whether he likes it or not. When Joe doesn't get the hint, the boss sends a couple of thugs to rough up Joe, which they do by beating him and slashing him, scarring his face and severing his vocal cords in the attack. I thought it was surprising that all of this would happen in the first 30 minutes of what would be an over two-hour movie, but in looking up the real story Lewis was slashed in the late 1920s and his career success would in fact come many years later.

In the real world, Lewis wound up with a gravelly voice, but that wouldn't do when your star is Frank Sinatra, so the movie doesn't have Sinatra change his voice all that much. Instead, it focuses more on his journey to burlesque, doing what would basically have been the bottom rung of vaudeville back in the 1920s. In burlesque, he's discovered by Sophie Tucker (playing herself uncredited), and that gets him into a career doing the nightclub circuit.

Seeing him in burlesque is a slumming socialite, Letty Page (Jeanne Crain). She meets Joe after the show, and the two start an on-again, off-again relationship. Meanwhile, Joe rises through the ranks, thanks to a show that involves dancers and a piano accompanist, Austin Mack (Eddie Albert). The show also involves a lot of drinking, something to which Joe turned in much higher quantities to deal with the physical and emotional scars of having been attacked. Joe thinks of marrying Letty, but he can never quite bring himself to pull the trigger. World War II decides the issue for him, as Letty goes to Washington where her father has taken one of those dollar-a-year jobs, while Joe and Austin go on a USO tour.

One of Joe's dancers is Martha Stewart (the actress, not the domestic lifestyle expert), who is played by Mitzi Gaynor, thus the showing of this movie to honor Mitzi. Martha had become a slightly larger part of the act than the other dancers when she shows herself adept at comedy, but that's the extent of the relationship. That is, until Joe decides he's finally going to pull that trigger with Letty, only to learn she's already gotten married. So after the war he marries Martha, but they each have their own careers and Joe's drinking is getting progressively worse.

The Joker Is Wild is another challenging performance from the 1950s for Sinatra, who had wanted to change his image leading to take the role of Maggio in From Here to Eternity back in 1953 and jump-starting his career. It gives Sinatra some chance to sing -- he even sings an Oscar-winning song, "All the Way" -- but it's much more of an uncomfortable character study at the same time it's a biopic. Synopses that refer to The Joker Is Wild as a musical are, I think, not quite accurate.

In any case, Sinatra is up to the task and gives another good performance. Gaynor and Albert are also pretty good in support. The only thing that would be nice would be to have color; it also doesn't help that Paramount provided TCM with a panned-and-scanned print. Still, The Joker Is Wild is definitely worth a watch.

State Fair (1945)

Another of the movies that started showing up in the FXM rotation in the last few months is the 1945 version of State Fair. It's going to be on again tomorrow at 8:50 AM, with another airing on Saturday, and probably more in the not-too-distant future.

I had seen the original 1933 version of State Fair, which Fox produced as a vehicle for star Will Rogers, and knew that the 1945 and later 1962 remakes were both musicals. Although Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein wrote the songs, as far as I can tell the musical was in fact an original for the silver screen and not a Broadway musical, at least not until much later. In any case, the 1945 film is roughly the same story as the Will Rogers movie, plus the music and minus some of the pre-Code elements.

State Fair tells the story of the Frake family, who are going to be visiting the Iowa State Fair in the upcoming weekend. Father Abel (Charles Winninger) is planning to show off his prize pig in the hopes of winning the big prize, while mom Melissa (Fay Bainter) is entering her pickles and her mince pie in the cooking contests. There are also two adult children who have varying levels of enthusiasm about going to the fair. Wayne (Dick Haymes) has a girlfriend Eleanor who has to beg off going thanks to an illness in the family, while Margy (Jeanne Crain) has a drip of a boyfriend. After all this expository introduction and a lot of singing, we're finally off to the fair.

One reason Wayne wanted to go to the fair is that the previous year, he got cheated by the ring-toss barker (Harry Morgan in a role so early he's still being called "Henry" in the credits). Wayne's been practicing, and he finally gets his revenge on the barker fairly early on. Afterwards, he meets lovely singer Emily Edwards (Vivian Blaine) and has a whirlwind romance with her. This even though he should see the warning signs when she lies about being a policeman's daughter. He also runs into McGee, a song hawker who gets Wayne to promote a song for payola.

Margy has a more complicated time. She decides to go on the roller coaster, and in order to fill up the seats, another passenger, journalist Pat Gilbert (Dana Andrews), there to cover the fair. As you can guess, those two also fall in love, and their love is much more real than the romance between Wayne and Emily. But there's a problem in that at the film's climax, Pat gets a job offer he really can't refuse, that of a columnist in Chicago. He'd have to accept almost right away, which would mean stiffing Margy.

There are also extended scenes of the judging of Ma's pie and pickles, along with the judging of Pa's boar. Unfortunately, these feel more like they're bringing the movie to a halt. I'm guessing I got those feelings because Winninger and Bainter are decided supporting players, and not stars who could carry a movie the way Will Rogers could. There's also a lot of music, and when I say a lot, it seems to be more than most musicals if not to the level of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

And ultimately, I think, it's whether or not you like the muisc and the whole musical genre that will determine how much you like State Fair. It's the sort of musical that Fox was quite adept at producing in the 1940s, and I can see why audiences of the day would have flocked to it, wanting something homespun and comforting in the aftermath of World War II.

I'm not the biggest fan of musicals, and to be honest, I prefer Fox's biopic musicals from the same era. But people who like musicals will probably really like State Fair.

Skyjacked

Charlton Heston was one of the stars in TCM's Summer Under the Stars back in August. One of the movies that I recorded, not having done a review on it before, was the all-star disaster movie Skyjacked. Having been released by MGM, it's one of those movies that got a DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive.

Charlton Heston plays Hank O'Hara, pilot of a Global Airways flight to Minneapolis that is carrying a disparate group of passengers consisting of Holywood newcomers and veterans looking for one more paycheck. There's a US Senator, Arne Lindner (Walter Pidgeon), hoping to go on a fishing trip; a pregnant woman Harriet (Mariette Hartley) so you know she's going to go into labor later on in the movie; and older couple the Shaws where the wife is played by Jeanne Crain; and a jazz cellist Gary Brown, played by football player Rosie Grier.

Hank has a backstory involving the woman who gets assigned to be chief flight attendant on this flight, Angela (Yvette Mimieux). As Hank is at the counter talking to the folks from the airline, an army officer, Lt. Jerome Weber (James Brolin), comes up, trying to get a ticket on the flight because he's got to get to his sister's wedding. They're out of tickets in coach but there's room in first class; Gary, who normally travels with his cello in the seat next to him, graciously offers to let Weber have the seat if there's enough room for the cello elsewhere in first class storage.

Of course, you can probably guess that Weber is up to no good, although that will only be revealed later in the movie. One of the passnegers, Elly (Susan Dey who at that time was still on The Partridge Family), goes to use the lavatory and finds that there's been a message written in lipstick that there's a bomb aboard the plane. She's obviously distressed. Gary figures out that it's Weber behind this, because he's been getting Weber drunk and Weber lets slip that he doesn't have a sister or a wedding to go to.

Somehow, Weber sobers up enough to hijack the airplane and demand that it be flown to Anchorage. He has flashbacks about getting honors for his military service in Vietnam which suggest he's got some sort of PTSD or other mental illness as a result of his time in the military. He's got some sort of remote control device that could easily detonate that bomb, if Hank doesn't do Weber's bidding. So they're on their way to Anchorage.

While there, Hank tries to come up with a plan to get some feds onto the plane, and also get all the passengers off. Not that Weber wants the passengers to deplane. His plan, however, is not to have a standoff, but to have the plane refuelled so that he can have Hank fly him to... Moscow, where he plans to defect, because he knows the Soviets need his military prowess!

Yes, Weber's plan is nutty, but all of Skyjacked is nutty. It scrapes the bottom of the barrel of disaster movies, but unfortunately doesn't get to be as consistently entertainingly bad as some of the others (The Concorde: Airport '79 comes to mind here). Jeanne Crain in particular is underused. Grier actually doesn't do badly for a football player with limited acting experience, while Brolin goes way over the top. There is stuff to laugh at in Skyjacked, but like a lot of MGM in the era just before That's Entertainment, there's also an extremely threadbare feel of a studio that's completely lost its luster.

If you want to laugh at something that's a mess, you'll certainly have a chance to do that with Skyjacked. But you'll have more chances to do it with some other movies out there.

The Model and the Marriage Broker

A movie that's been back in the FXM rotation for a little while now is The Model and the Marriage Broker. It's going to be on again Monday at 6:00 AM.

Thelma Ritter gets third billing, but she's really the star here. She plays the "marriage broker", since you didn't expect her to play the model, did you? She's Mae Swasey, who's running a sort of dating service plus for shy, homely, and otherwise not particularly marriageable people. An example of this is Hazel Gingras (Nancy Kulp), brought in by her sister, who wants to marry her off. After some thought, Mae gets the idea that perhaps the optometrist George Wixted (Zero Mostel) would be right for her. Another client is the Kuschner family, who are about to marry their daughter off to X-ray technician Matt Hornbeck (Scott Brady), but are trying to stiff Mae on the marriage fee part of the contract.

Anyhow, Mae goes to see Mr. Wixted, which is how she comes into contact with the model. Mae winds up with the wrong purse from her visit to Wixted's office, and in trying to figure out whom it belongs to, she reads a letter from the model's boyfriend, a married man having an affair who is clearly wrong for the model. The model, Kitty Bennett (Jeanne Crain), finds Mae's contact information in her purse and shows up at the office to return it, not knowing quite what Mae does since the door to her office only reads contacts and contracts.

Kitty doesn't like that Mae read the letter, but Kitty also doesn't have the courage to break off the affair on her own, so she shows up to Mae's house at a mixer for Wixted, Hazel, and some others, having asked the married boyfriend to show up so she can break off the relationship with moral support from Mae. Mae realizes Kitty doesn't have the courage to break off the relationship on her own, so she sends the man away, and lets Kitty spend the night. It also gives Mae an inspiration. Matt the X-ray operator stiffed the Kuschner girl at the altar, but he'd be right for Kitty. So she decides to set those two up, free of charge, without Kitty knowing what Mae is doing.

Matt is smarter than that, but despite thinking he's a confirmed bachelor, falls in love with Kitty anyway. But it's not going to be a smooth path to love, because Kitty is bound to find out exactly what it is that Mae does. Mae, meanwhile, has personal problems of her own, as her first husband ran off with another woman and that other woman shows up now that the husband has died.

The Model and the Marriage Broker is a movie that I didn't find particularly great, although Thelma Ritter delivers another nice performance and other people like this a lot more than I did. I think the big problem I had is that I found it difficult to imagine anybody in New York City circa 1950 using Mae's services; maybe in a smaller town or an earlier time it might have worked better. I also didn't care for some of the supporting performances from Mae's clients who came across as terrible stereotypes, particularly a Swedish immigrant. And the second Mrs. Swasey (Helen Ford) way overacted in her role.

Still, this is probably one that you should watch and judge for yourself. Amazon lists it as available on DVD from Fox's MOD scheme, as well as digital through Prime Video.

Starless man

With Kirk Douglas' death a few days ago, I went through the box sets I have looking for one of his movies that I haven't blogged about before. I wanted to so a post on Before I Forget, which is on the TCM four-movie box set, but it turns out that that box set is now out of print, so I was going to have to pick something else. With that in mind, I picked out Man Without a Star, a new-to-me western.

Douglas plays Dempsey Ray, who is riding the rails heading north from Texas to Wyoming in search of wide opwn spaces. Joining him on on the freight train is Jeff Jimson (William Campbell), a naïve young man who is conisistently in need of Dempsey's protection, as Dempsey saves him after a fight with a railroad guard and then gets him off a murder accusation.

Eventually the two wind up in Wyoming, where Dempsey meets old flame Idonee (Claire Trevor) and eventually gets a job working for Reed Bowman, who is coming from out east to run a giant spread with over 10,000 had of cattle. Wyoming is still open range, but some of the cattlemen have decided to put up barbed wire because they need to fence off some of the grass to save it for winter.

Although Dempsey doesn't like these ranchers for fening in land, they're really not bad guys because of their good reasoning for putting up the wire. It also doesn't help that Reed turns out to be a cattle queen (played by Jeanne Crain), who simply plans to bring in as many cattle as possible, before the land is no longer fit to support those cattle whereupon she'll move on to greener pastures. It's somewhere between slash-and-burn agriculture and the tragedy of the commons.

Dempsey gets named formean despite his skepticism for Reed's plans, and when Jimson gets in a scuffle with the ranchers putting up the barbed wire, there are people other than Dempsey to protect Reed's interests, those being the group of cowboys led by Steve Miles (Richard Boone) who brought another herd north.

Man Without a Star is a competent western, albeit one that isn't breaking any new ground. Douglas is good, of course, with the exception of his hairdo which seems all wrong. Campbell does his best despite being badly miscast; he made me think of Robert Walker Jr. for some reason. The supporting cast is good although Claire Trevor is underused.

All in all, Man Without a Star certainly isn't a bad way to spend a Saturday matinee, although I'm gladd I was able to get it in a box set. The set I picked up is now listed as being on backorder at the TCM Shop, although there's also a pricey standalone Blu-ray available.

People Should Shut Up

Tomorrow morning at 6:00 AM, FXM is running People Will Talk.

The movie starts off with Dr. Elwell (Hume Cronyn), a professor at a university teaching medicine, talking to an older lady sent to him by a private investigator. Elwell seems to be trying to get some sort of dirt on one of his colleagues, Dr. Pretorius (Cary Grant), and this woman used to know Pretorius when he was practicing medicine in a small town in the southern part of the state ages ago.

As for Dr. Pretorius, he's lecturing to what is supposed to be Elwell's class, when one of the students, Deborah Higgins (Jeanne Crain), faints. After some discussion, Pretorius takes Higgins to his private hospital, where tests are run to determine that Higgins is pregnant (and that word is actually used in the movie)! Higgins is unmarried and the father of the child is not in the picture and probably a one-night stand, so she tries to kill herself.

Pretorius decides that the best thing to do for Higgins is to marry her, which seems like a rather severe violation of ethics since she's one of the students at the same university where he teaches. But this isn't why Elwell is going after Pretorius. Instead, Elwell seems worried that Pretorius is bringing disrepute on the medical profession through supposedly unorthodox practices. More worrying to Elwell is the presence of Pretorius' mysterious factotum, Mr. Shunderson (Finlay Currie), who has a past that's finally explained at a professional ethics hearing.

People Will Talk is a movie that has a lot going on, and frankly I thought that it didn't handle the clash of styles particularly well. There's no good reason given for Elwell's zeal in going after Pretorius; Shunderson's back story is unrealistic; and the Higgins plot line isn't really resolved. In addition to all of these subplot, there's a fourth involving Pretorius being the conductor of the "student" orchestra whch inexplicably also has a professor on it in the form of Barker (Walter Slezak), who seems there more for comic relief. Cary Grant is either miscast or misdirected, too.

Still, some of you will probably like People Will Talk, so check it out. It doesn't seem to be in print on DVD, so you're going to have to catch the FXM showings.

The new hucksters

Another movie that's back on the FXM Retro schedule after a long absence is Madison Avenue. It's going to be on again early tomorrow morning at 3:00 AM if you haven't seen it before.

Dana Andrews plays Clint Lorimer, who at the beginning of the movie is working for the Jocelyn ad agency, run by JD Jocelyn (Howard St. John). The agency has as its biggest account the Associated Dairy Company, a conglomerate of dairies from across the country. Brock, the head of the company, suggests that Lorimer is a real up-and-comer. But unfortunately, Lorimer is going to be away from the agency for a few months, while he works on a special campaign for the Defense Department, learning about America's missile bases for a public relations campaign that's going to do... something or other.

It turns out that PR campaign is a macguffin. After the opening scene among Lorimer, Jocelyn, and Brock, the action switches to Wsahington DC, which we figure is going to be Lorimer starting that work with the Pentagon. But when he comes to the Filibuster Bar (yeah, what a dumb name for a bar, but it is Washington DC), we can tell from the cinematography that there's somebody else at the bar who's going to be important. That person is a lady reporter named Peggy Shannon (Jeanne Crain). She reminds Clint that he stood her up three months ago, which is our first indication that this action is at the end of Clint's time in Washington, not the beginning. The next clue is that when Lorimer complains that Jocelyn shafted him on his ideas for the PR campaign. In fact, that's precisely what Jocelyn did, since he was worried that Lorimer was going to take the Associated Dairies contract out from under him. He's firing Lorimer, to boot.

So Lorimer does get the idea to try to take the Associated contract, although that's going to be difficult since he hasn't even got a job. But he just happens to see a milk truck from the Cloverleaf Dairy, on which it's printed that Cloverleaf is a subsidiary of Associated. Lorimer finds out who has the ad campaign for Cloverleaf, and discovers it's the Tremaine agency, so he goes there with his ideas. Sadly for him, he learns that the founder of the agency has died, and it's now being run by the founder's daughter Anne (Eleanor Parker), and has been going to the dogs since Dad died. Lorimer sets out to make over the business, and make over Anne.

The Cloverleaf contract involves two people. Stipe is the guy who's really managing the company, mostly because the man who has the title of preisdent, Ames (Eddie Albert) is flaky. Ames dives a milk route himself and flies remot controlled helicopters. Interestingly, he gets one interesting line when he suggests that in the future, milk will be delivered by larger versions of such helicopters. In real life, drone technology has advanced to the point where companies like Amazon are thinking about delivering things by drone. But this nutcase is the man Lorimer has to build up.

Lorimer sets out to work, and eventually things start going right for him, when Ames becomes an unexpected hit giving a speech at the business. This sets Ames on his rise, eventually to take over Brock's job at Associated when Brock is kicked upstairs. This is just what Lorimer wanted, because it means that now he's sure to get the Associated contract. Or maybe not. Along the way, everybody has started stabbing everybody else in the back, once once Ames leaves for the head office, the plot really gets complicated.

Unfortunately, Madison Avenue fizzles out at the end, giving an ending that just doesn't fit. Everybody tries their best, though, and you can't really fault the acting. But Dana Andrews is already looking a bit haggard, and Jeanne Crain is given some horrendous outfits and hairstyles to wear. Combined with the writing, the result is a movie that's sadly less than the sum of its parts. Still, you should probably give it a watch, if only to judge for yourself. And the good thing is that it only runs 90 minutes. If it were made nowadays, it'd probably be bloated to over two hours.

I'm not certain if Madison Avenue is available on DVD, so you're going to have to catch the FXM showings.

The Fastest Gun Alive

One of the Jeanne Crain movies that TCM ran in Summer Under the Stars today that wasn't a premiere is The Fastest Gun Alive. This one she made at MGM, so if you missed it this morning, it's still avilable to purchase on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive. I would have blogged about it earlier, but there were other movies to blog about yesterday, as well as the passing of Julie Harris. (Heck, I kind of wanted to comment about It Happened One Night being included in Essentials Jr. too.)

The movie starts off with a gunfight involving Arizona gang leader Vinnie Harold (Broderick Crawford). He thinks he's the fastest gun alive, and he's not going to take any nonsense from anybody else who claims that they are faster. Well, in this particular town there's somebody else who gets involved in a gunfight with Vinnie, and loses. Cut to the town of Cross Creek. News travels fast, and word of this particular gunfight has reached Cross Creek, with everybody talking about the gunfight. For whatever reason, this really bothers George (Glenn Ford). He's the owner of the town's dry-goods store, and he refuses to carry a gun or drink, which of course brings other people in town to question his manhood.

It turns out there's a good reason George doesn't pack heat. In a past life, he was the fastest gun alive. It made him famous, but also made him an object for other people who wanted to challenge him, reminiscent of Gregory Peck in The Gunsfighter. In fact, George is in Cross Creek with a different name because he's trying to put his past behind him, at the behest of his wife Dora (Jeanne Crain). But with everybody needling George, and with people making up nonsense about fastest guns alive, George finally snaps. He walks into the bar, orders a drink, and shows off how he is, in fact, the real fastest gun out there.

This presents a problem. As I said earlier, news travels fast, so word of George's latest exploits are bound to get out to other towns. In fact, at least one of the town's citizens wrote a letter to somebody back east talking about the exploits. However, it's a Sunday morning, and the mail hasn't gone out, what with Cross Creek being in the middle of nowhere. Although it's George's intent to leave Cross Creek and try to set up a new life with another new identity, the townsfolk like him and are willing to "forget" anything ever happened, and, like a sitcom with no continuity, never again make mention that anything happened.

But, there's a complication. Vinnie has robbed a bank, and he and his gang have made it to Cross Creek on their escape. Although most of the town's citizens are in church, the bartender is being waylaid by Vinnie, and one young boy walks into the bar, which is not the start of a bad joke. Well, maybe it is; the kid accidentally lets slip about George's exploits, and Vinnie wants to know who this guy is who claims to be faster on the draw than he is. And if the townsfolk won't reveal who among them that is, Vinnie is willing to burn the whole town down.

I've stated several times that westerns aren't my favorite genre, but The Fastest Gun Alive isn't a bad movie. Glenn Ford is good enough as the morally conflicted man, while Broderick Crawford brings the same bluster he had in All the King's Men and Born Yesterday to the Old West. The story is good, although it feels a bit slow at times. One scene pads the running time by having Russ Tamblyn, at a town party, do a dance involving shovels among other props. Tamblyn is a good dancer, but the whole dance scene seems incongruous with the rest of the movie. There's also some exposition involving George having daddy issues that I didn't think it was particularly necessary to drive the plot along. The story actually has a logical ending, except that it doesn't seem like something that would have happened in real life. All in all, The Fastest Gun Alive provides a solid 90 minutes of entertainment.