Sister Carrie

Jennifer Jones was honored last August in Summer Under the Stars, which once again gave me the opportunity to record some movies I hadn't seen before. One of those was Carrie, the adaptation of the Theodore Dreiser novel Sister Carrie.

Jones stars as Carrie Meeber, daughter in a small-town Missouri family at the turn of the century who have already had one daughter go off to Chicago for better economic opportunities. It's Carrie's turn, as her parents buy her a one-way ticket to Chicago. One the train, she's keeping to herself, except that she's pestered by one of the male passengers, Charles Drouet (Eddie Albert). Charles is a traveling salesman and is immediately taken by Carrie although he's really much too forward about it, especially for circa 1900. And he doesn't seem too happy when Carrie gets off the train in South Chicago, since that's considered the slum area.

Life with her sister isn't the greatest, since money is tight and Carrie's brother-in-law is tough in a sensible way: you have to be a bit strict to survive in such conditions. Carrie has a job as a seamstress in what is essentially a sweatshop, but injures her hand in an industrial accident and gets fired, this being the days before workers' comp and other such benefits. Carrie goes to see Charles, who takes her to Fitzgerald's, an upscale restaurant managed by George Hurstwood (Laurence Olivier).

Carrie, having lost her job, winds up moving in with Charles, which is rather scandalous. Just as scandalous is the idea that Hurstwood is also smitten with Carrie. The thing is, Hurstwood already has a wife Julia (Miriam Hopkins) and two teenaged kids. The restaurant manager job is a good one that puts the Hurstwoods on the cusp of being upper-middle-class, with the prospect of marrying off the kids to people of better economic status. But if it were to be found out that George is lusting after someone young enough to be his daughter, well that might be a problem.

And then George does something profoundly stupid. At the end of the day at Fitzgerald's, George makes a mistake with the time lock on the restaurant's safe, leaving him with about $10,000 that he can't get in the safe. Now, the right thing to do would be to contact the owner of the restaurant, although that would have been a bit time consuming for 1900. Instead, George decides he's going to run off with the money, but not before picking up Carrie and bringing the two of them to New York. George also rather stupidly blows through the money in double-quick time. Sure enough, Fitzgerald sends men to New York to look for Hurstwood, who can't really keep a job in the restaurant business once his past is discovered.

Things get even worse when George's son is about to get married. Julia wants to sell the house, but George has to co-sign to sell. The thing is, he's still married to Julia, despite having told Carrie that he'd gotten a divorce. And by this time Carrie has gotten knocked up. But while George keeps going downhill, there's a third act for Carrie. She lies about her past and says she's been on the stage in Chicago, which gets her a job as a chorus girl with the opportunity to move up in the world. She splits from George hoping that George's son will forgive him, and eventually becomes reasonably big in the theater world, big enough to have a name in noticeable letters on the posters. Both Charles and George see that name, and show up (at different times) at Carrie's dressing room....

I haven't read Sister Carrie, so I can't be specific on what was changed from the book to the movie, although when Alicia Malone presented Carrie on TCM she mentioned that the book had floated around Hollywood for quite some time while people tried to figure out how to make it conform to the Production Code. The movie was not a success at the box office, and having seen it, I think I can understand why. This was supposed to be a prestige production, and the leads all give good enough performances. But at the same time, it feels like there's something a bit off with the movie, like the various characters don't really have the appropriate emotional connection with each other. There's just something flat about the final product.

But give Carrie a try and see for yourself if you like it.

Ayn Rand does Cyrano de Bergerac

One of those old movies I'd seen show up several times on the TCM schedule but never got around to recording or watching was the 1945 film Love Letters. With that in mind, the last time it ran on TCM, I made a point to put it on my DVR to get around to watch later. I've finally watched it, so now you get the review.

The movie starts off in Italy in World War II. Serving near enough to the front to hear the bombs are Alan Quinton (Joseph Cotten) and his friend Roger Morland. Roger has a girlfriend back in England named Victoria (Jennifer Jones), but Roger isn't much of a romantic, so he has Alan write the love letters to Victoria on behalf, which seems like nonsense since surely Victoria would recognize this as not her fiancé's writing. Worse, however, is that Alan realizes he's falling in love with Victoria even though he's never met her, while Victoria is in love with the letters, not with Roger.

At any rate, the letters are about to stop in part because Alan doesn't want to write any more, while Roger is going to be going back to England anyhow to train as a paratrooper. And on top of that, Alan gets injured in combat too and faces a lengthy recuperation before going back to England, no longer having to fight in the war. Roger visits Alan's parents, and has them tell Alan that he's married Victoria.

Some months later, Alan finally returns to England and visits his parents. He's had an aunt die in the meantime and bequeath him a place in County Essex, which is good because he knows that's near Longreach, which is the place where Victoria lived. However, Victoria isn't going to be around since Roger died in an accident before Alan got back to England. Meanwhile, Alan also has a fiancée himself, except that he's come to learn that since writing all those letters to Victoria, he's no longer in love with his fiancée.

Unfortunately, by this time Roger has died in an accident. Alan's brother tries to cheer him up by taking him to a party, wher he meets a woman named Dilly who happens to know Victoria and realizes that a drunken Alan is talking about Victoria when he talks about having written those letters for Roger in Italy. Alan finally goes to Longreach, only to learn that Victoria is dead too, which is not actually the case. The real truth is that Dilly is Victoria's cargiver, and that Victoria stabbed Roger to death, only to immediately develop a case of amnesia, taking the name Singleton. Dilly is terrified of what's going to happen should Singleton remember that she's really Victoria and especially if Victoria figures out she's talking to the guy who actually wrote those love letters for Roger.

Love Letters has what to me is a fairly ridiculous premise, but one that I suppose will appeal to people who like a certain type of romantic movie, such as Random Harvest. Not that I liked Random Harvest, although for me Love Letters didn't sink to being quite as mawkish as Random Harvest. Still, Love Letters is definitely another of those movies where you're going to need to watch and draw your own conclusions.

Madame Bovary (1949)

I hadn't intended to do posts on two late-1940s literary adaptations in such close proximity following the airing of the British Anna Karenina the other day. But I only realized last night, not having looked closely enough at the TCM schedule, that the 1949 version of Madame Bovary is on tomorrow morning at 8:00 AM. So I made it a point of watching it to do a post on here.

The movie starts off with an establishing story. Gustave Flaubert (James Mason) wrote the novel Madame Bovary in 1856, and the publication of the novel caused a scandal in France, at that time ruled by Napoleon III. Flaubert was put on trial for indecency, where he claimed that the Madame Bovary he was writing about was just the face for a real type of woman in French society. He proceeds to narrate that story....

Flash back to the early life of Emma (Jennifer Jones) before she met Bovary. She went to a convent school that she hated, and realized she wanted the better things in life. But when she grows up and leaves the school, she winds up in the provincial town of Yonville. One day, the town's new doctor, Charles Bovary (Van Heflin) shows up, and he immediately falls in love with Emma. She must think that a doctor will command a good salary, because she marries Charles.

As you can guess from everything that's happened up to this point, Emma and Charles don't live happily ever after. Charles is very much provincial, and thinks he's not particularly a good doctor, so the family isn't well to do. Emma meets the boy next door, Léon Dupuis (Alf Kjellin who was credited as Christopher Kent because MGM must have thought American audiences wouldn't be able to pronounce Kjellin), who is hoping to become a lawyer, a profession which will definitely be for financially rewarding than what Charles is bringing in. By now, Emma is already starting to rack up debts to keep a better lifestyle than Charles can provide her.

The doctor and Emma get invited to a society party in the nearest big city of Rouen, which is where they meet Boulanger (Louis Jourdan). Emma decides he's going to be her lover now that Dupuis has gone off to Paris and Boulange can dance with her the way that Charles definitely can't. Charles is understandably pissed when he sees what his wife's actions are doing to his reputation, but he's powerless to stop it. Emma goes into more debt in order that she may run off to Italy with Boulanger. But Boulanger plays a trick on Emma in that he leaves beforehand so on the appointed night they're supposed to go off together, he's already jilted her.

And now those debts are about to start catching up with her. L'hereux (Frank Allenby) had been lending Emma the money she needed, but he needs money himself, so he sells off the notes to another man who is going to sue if he can't collect. By this time, Emma and Charles have run into Dupuis again, now in Rouen, so Emma thinks she can go back to him to get him to pay off the debts. She doesn't realize that he's still not a lawyer at all, and there's no way he's going to be able to pay off those debts. What options does Emma have left?

Madame Bovary is an example of the sort of film that it was perfect for MGM to make, the period literary drama. MGM always had high production values and a sort of glitter that didn't work for certain genres of movies, as I've mentioned with Johnny Eager or East Side, West Side in the past. But, here, that sort of gloss is exactly what the movie needs in trying to show Emma's living above her means, especially, for example, with the ball where she meets Boulanger. She's wearing a fabulous gown/shawl combination, and there's something about Jourdan and Jones dancing together that looks surprisingly glamorous.

As for the acting, I'm not terribly enamored of the job that Jennifer Jones did, but I though Van Heflin was quite good as the country doctor who sinks into the bottle as the realization begins to dawn on him that he's got a wife he can't support in the way he wants. The supporting roles are handled well enough, although most of them are also relatively small.

I couldn't find a DVD release of Madame Bovary, which is a big surprise, since it was released by MGM, and as a prestige picture, should have been a prime candidate for either a standalone Warner Archive DVD or as part of a box set. It does, however, seem to be on a bunch of streaming services if you can do the streaming thing.

The Song of Bernadette

Er, not that song of Bernadette

One of the movies that started showing up in the FXM rotation a few months back is The Song of Bernadette. It's going to be on FXM again tomorrow morning at 3:10 AM (or overnight tonight depending on what time zone you're in).

I have a feeling that the basic story is already reasonably well known. Bernadette Soubirous (Jennifer Jones) is an adolescent girl living with her siblings and poor parents (Anne Revere and Roman Bohnen) in the town of Lourdes in southwest France in the mid-19th century. Bernadette goes with a couple of her sisters to go fetch some firewood, something which requires crossing a creek. Because she's sickly, she has to stay behind while the others cross the creek. It's there that she sees an apparition of a lady that doesn't identify itself.

She doesn't want to tell her sisters, but they saw Bernadette acting strangely when they returned, so they know something's up and get her to tell about the vision, which they promptely report to Mom, Way to keep a secret, girls. And unsurpisingly, word is going to get out to the rest of the town.

Meanwhile, the apparition, which of course only Bernadette can see, has told her to keep coming back to the grotto where she first saw it because the apparition is going to appear again every day for the next 14 days. Bernadette goes, and others start following her.

However, there are people who don't like this, notably the local prosecutor Dutour (Vincent Price). As for the Catholic Church, well, let's just say that figuring out whether something is a miracle is highly political as well as religious. When it comes to a powerful person the Church wants to canonize, such as recent Pope John Paul II, they'll come up with a way to declare the existence of a miracle come hell or high water. But if some dumb schlub like Bernadette claims to see something, the Church is going to drag its heels and try to come up with every possible scientific explanation for the supposed miracle because they don't want the skeptics proving them wrong. And this puts local priest Fr. Peyramale (Charles Bickford) in a bind.

Of course, we know what happened, which is that the Church eventually declared the events miraculous and that Lourdes would go on to become one of the major Catholic pilgrimage sites. Bernadette would go on to become a novitiate and die young thanks to her chronic asthma (in the movie, it's changed to a combination of tuberculosis and a tumor that's probably cancerous).

The movie states openly at both the beginning and the end that if you believe, no explanation is necessary, and that if you don't, no explanation is possible. As for the movie, it's clearly on the side of the believer; after all, the movie lets us in on the apparition, which reminded me of the dream sequence in Sparrows. But while the movie is reverent, I didn't find it obnoxiously so.

Jennifer Jones won the Oscar for Best Actress, but to be honest I felt like she didn't have a particularly difficult role to play. Multiple people received supporting acting nominations and frankly they all deserved it. Best among these is Gladys Cooper as Sr. Marie-Thérèse, a local nun teaching Bernadette at the beginning who shows up at the convent at the end. She's clearly deeply envious of Bernadette to the point that I was going to comment on her being a jerk. But she gets her comeuppance at the end of the scene and has a powerful resolution. Bickford and Revere also received nominations.

The Song of Bernadette is a well-made movie in the style of pre-TV era Hollywood biopics, and is certainly worth a watch. The TCM Shop lists it as available on what looks like a dodgy DVD, while Amazon has it available on streaming video.

Terminal Station

One of the movies that TCM ran during the "Short and Sweet" spotlight back in October was Indiscretion of an American Wife. Not having done a post on it before, I decided to DVR it and watch.

Jennifer Jones plays Mary, an American in Rome who's apparently been visiting relatives there or something. At the start of the movie, she's writing a note saying that she can't see someone any longer -- but chickens out on delivering it. Instead, she goes to the central train station in Rome, looking for the earliest train out of the country to Paris. She's obviously escaping something. But what?

Before the train leaves, two people show up. One is her nephew Paul (a very young Richard Beymer). The other is Giovanni (Montgomery Clift), who was the intended recipient of that letter that Mary never delivered. The two were having a love affair, but Mary is maried with a husband back in Philadelphia. One would think Giovanni should have known about this and that the affair could never last, but he doesn't care or is stupid or something, because he keeps pressuring Mary to stay with her.

They talk about it in the station's restaurant, in a section that's closed so that they deservedly get kicked out. Then they talk about it in the corridors. Then they go outside and into one of the stopped train cars, where they have the sort of romantic tryst that we saw Bette Davis having in Now, Voyager in the flashback to what brought on her nervous breakdown, only the scene in Indiscretion of an American Wife isn't a flashback.

The two lovers get caught out and brought to the train station's police department, where they're going to have to face justice which is going to cause Mary to miss her train. Not that Giovanni cares, probably, since he still seems to want Mary to stay in Rome with him.

Indiscretion of an American Wife is a movie that has a bad reputation from the critics, and frankly, now that I've watched it I understand way. It's talky and tedious even though it runs barely over an hour. The movie was directed on location in Rome by Vittorio De Sica, and the locations are the film's one bright spot. De Sica's original work ran 89 minutes, and American producer David O. Selznick edited it down to about 63 or 64 for distribution in America. Some people suggest it's Selznick's ham-fisted handling of the movie that's the problem, but I can't help but think another 216 minutes of the stuff we do have wouldn't make it much better.

That having been said, it is possible to get that longer edit, called Terminal Station. Both edits (more or less) are on pricey a Criterion Collection release. (Note that the Criterion site says the American version is 72 minutes, including an overture by Patti Page that wasn't on the 63/64-minute print that TCM ran.)

The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1957)

For whatever reason, TCM shows the 1934 Fredric March version of The Barretts of Wimpole Street relatively regularly, while the 1957 remake shows up rather rarely. The TCM schedule lists the remake for tomorrow at noon, so now is your chance to watch.

Jennifer Jones plays Elizabeth Barrett, a name you probably recognize because of her marriage to Robert Browning and her sonnet beginning "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways" which is used, along with several other poems, during the course of the movie. Anyhow, in this movie, Elizabeth has yet to marry Robert. She's still an invalid living at home with her widowed father Edward (John Gielgud), her passel of siblings, and her beloved dog Flush in a fashionable London home in 1845.

Dad, for whatever reason, seems to have it in for all his children, specifically doing everything he can to keep his daughters from marrying, which seems nuts because what are they going to do once he dies? Elizabeth's kid sister Henrietta (Virginia McKenna) has a lover in army captain Surtees Cook (Vernon Gray), but she can only see him in brief trysts whenever she's able to escape the house; Cook for his part stands around outside the house pining after Henrietta.

Elizabeth has been writing those poems, reading the poems of Robert Browning (Bill Travers), and even corresponding by letter with Browning. Eventually, Robert gets so curious that he goes to see Elizabeth. Fortunately, her father is away on business, because boy will he be pissed when he finds out! Indeed, Dad is so controlling that when he learns of both Elizabeth's and Henrietta's boyfriends, he buys a house out in the country so that he can move his daughters there and keep suitors and friends from seeing them.

This version of The Barretts of Wimpole Street is helped by its British provenance, using almost entirely a British cast aside from Jones. Gielgud is excellent as the father from hell, although I never quite figured out just why he became such an embittered, nasty man. He says Elizabeth was the only child born of love, but I wonder whether the other siblings weren't actually his and they couldn't say that because of the Production Code. Jones and Travers are a bit weak, with Jones overacting and Travers not having the heft for the part of Browning. Production values are uniformly lovely thanks especially with the color and widescreen cinematography.

I was surprised to see the MGM logo show up, since the movie isn't on DVD. I would have figured that an MGM movie would have gotten released courtesy of the Warner Archive Collection, much as the 1934 version did. I'm guessing that being produced by MGM's British unit might have had something to do with this. So tomorrow's TCM showing will be your rare chance to see it.

TCM Star of the month September 2017: Jennifer Jones

Jennifer Jones in Portrait of Jennie (1948); Sept. 12 at 8:00 PM

Now that we're in the first full week of a new month, it's time for a new Star of the Month. This time, it's Jennifer Jones, and her movies will be airing on Tuesdays in prime time. The picture above is from Portrait of Jennie; that's going to be on next week. This week starts off with Jones' Oscar-winning role in The Song of Bernadette at 8:00 PM, which isn't one of my favorite movies, but you can understand why TCM would run it right at 8:00 PM.

I'm not a fan of Cluny Brown, but I know a lot of people are fans of Ernst Lubitsch in general, so they may like this one too. (Not that I dislike Lubitsh; I just didn't care for this one. But I'm not quite as much of a Jennifer Jones fan.) Cluny Brown will be on overnight at 1:00 AM.

If I were going to mention one movie in tonight's lineup for its quality, it would probably be Since You Went Away, early tomorrow at 5:30 AM.

Thursday Movie Picks #134: Artists/Painters

This being Thursday, it's time for another Thursday Movie Picks, run by the Wandering Through the Shelves blog. This week's theme is movies about artists or painters, and as a fan of old movies, I've naturally picked three older ones.

First up is The Moon and Sixpence (1942). George Sanders plays an artist who is based more or less on Paul Gauguin. He starts the film as a middle-class businessman with a wife and family, but that passion for art consumes him, to the point where he leaves his family and London first for Paris, and then for the South Seas. Herbert Marshall plays the friend of the family (played by Herbert Marshall and apparently based on Somerset Maugham, who wrote the story) who tries to find Sanders.

Next up is Scarlet Street (1945). Edward G. Robinson plays a cashier/bookkeeper for a small business whose passion on the side is art. This even though he's not very good at it and has a wife who treats him like dirt for it. So when he runs into a beautiful woman (Joan Bennett) who tells him he's good, he falls for the woman. He doesn't realize that this is supposed to be a noir and he's the victim of the femme fatale. Dan Duryea plays Bennett's partner in crime. Robinson is as good as ever here.

Portrait of Jennie (1948). Joseph Cotten plays the artist here, a Depression-era man who is struggling because, while he has passion, he can't get anybody to buy any of his work. One day in Central Park, he runs into a young girl (Jennifer Jones) who seems like she's from out of the past. And then the next time he runs into her a few days later, she seems to have aged months if not years. Cotten has to learn what happened to this girl, as he paints her portrait. Ethel Barrymore is excellent as an art dealer who supports Cotten's passion; Cecil Kellaway is her business partner.

Beat the Devil

We're in the first Friday of a new month, which means we get a new Friday Night Spotlight. On the first four Fridays of this month (Friday October 31 being Halloween, TCM will be skipping the Friday Night Spotlight for a bunch of horror movies), quiz show host Alex Trebek will be doing the intros for movies set in Africa. This first Friday in Africa sees a night of movies starring Humphrey Bogart, including Beat the Devil at midnight.

Humphrey Bogart plays Bill, an American in some decrepit port city in Italy who at the beginning of the movie is witnessing several people being taken into custody. It turns out that Bill knew these people, so he's going to tell us their story, as we go into that most original film device of the flashback.

Bill was the representative for the four, who were businessmen of a sort: Peterson (Robet Morley), Julius (Peter Lorre), the Major (Ivor Barnard), and Ravello (Marco Tulli). The four of them know about a region in British East Africa that's mineral-rich, specifically in uranium. These guys want to acquire the rights to the minerals, and make a killing off of it. However, they need to buy the title to the land, which they apparently have to do in Africa itself. They've got tickets on the next boat to AFrica, but unfortunately the boat has developed problems so the people are going to be dealyed in port for a couple of days while the boat is being fixed.

At the same time, the group meets a British couple who are also travelling to Africa. Harry Chelm (Edward Underdown) has inherited some land, and is going there with his wife Gwendolen (Jennifer Jones) to manage that land. Bill has a wife of his own, the lovely local girl Maria (Gina Lollobrigida). So the two couples go out together, with the thoroughly original plot twist that Bill and Gwendolen begin to develop some feelings for each other, while Harry and Maria do as well.

After a series of twists and turns, this whole gang of whack jobs winds up on the ship, but their attempts to get to Africa are all for naught as the ship breaks down again. Of course, you knew the scheme wouldn't work, since the four protagonists in it get arrested at the beginning of the movie.

Many of the IMDb reviewers say that to really enjoy this movie, you have to look at it as a very dry comedy poking fun at the phony characters as well as the genre of movie they're in. That may be, but I have to admit that I still found the movie a bit of a slog. I think that's mostly because I found the characters so thoroughly unappealing. Everybody's constantly lying to everybody else, and not in an entertaining Jack Carson is schmoozing you way. No; these characters come across as a bunch of jerks you wouldn't want to spend time with in real life. Robert Morley, in particular, is nearly as annoying as a Peter Ustinov in Topkapi.

But, you should probaly watch Beat the Devil and judge for yourself. A lot of the reviewers really like it.

A salute to mawkish tripe

If you like the sort of sentimental, romanitcized view of small-town America that's su sugary it'll eat out the insides of mere mortals, FXM/FMC has just the movie for you: Good Morning, Miss Dove, tomorrow morning at 6:00 AM.

Jennifer Jones plays the titular Miss Dove, a teacher in Liberty Hill, a small New England town that looks as picturesque as Peyton Place but which doesn't have the scandal going on underneath the surface; or, if it does, everybody's decided to repress it. Miss Dove is an irritating scold who expects all of her students to act just so, and when I say "all of her students", I could just as easily say the whole town, since this is one of those towns where nobody new seems to move in and everybody who lives there seems to have had Miss Dove for a teacher. That may be about to change, though, as Miss Dove's life is in mortal peril! This is not a joke. Miss Dove has kept one student after school because he wasn't acting just so, and while looking after him, Miss Dove feels a sharp pain. Would you oh-so-kindly fetch your father the doctor (Robert Stack), Miss Dove tells the young lad.

With Miss Dove's health in a possibly parlous state, what's a woman who's spent her entire life in this little town as a teacher to do, other than to look back on her life? So, we get a series of flashbacks, which is a groundbreaking technique since no moviemaker had ever thought to do something so radical before. In the first flashback, we learn why Miss Dove became a teacher in the first place. Miss Dove came from one of the town's well-to-do families, as her father was a banker. Dad was apparently well enough off that she could run off with an archaeologist to get married and escape Liberty Hill. The only problem is, Dad drops dead, at which point it's been discovered that he's been embezzling from the bank! Now, any sane person would just sell off the house and assets, which probably ought to cover the $11,000 that Dad embezzled. But not Miss Dove. She's got some bizarre sens of duty, which tells her to dump her fiancé and try to repay the debt by becoming a teacher and teaching the children of Liberty Hill.

Once Miss Dove goes off to hospital, where she's going to get an operation that will supposedly save her life (or at least prolong it; she probably had cancer which would have had a terrible prognosis at the time although I don't think the script ever mentions precisely what's wrong with her). The nurse at the hospital was of course one of her students, so Miss Dove thinks back to the influence she had on the nurse. The nurse's boyfriend Bill (Chuck Connors), the town cop, was also one of her students. Indeed, Miss Dove's influence on the town's children was so great that former students come from far away just to see her. Yeah, we get the point already.

Good Morning, Miss Dove way overdoes it with the sentimentality. Even though everybody is doing the best they can, they're working with a script that drags all of them down. In watching Good Morning, Miss Dove, I found myslef thinking of Goodbye, Mr. Chips, and why that's such a great movie while Good Morning, Miss Dove founders on the rocks of sentiment. I think one of the big reasons is that Goodbye, Mr. Chips focuses almost solely on Mr. Chips; the students are almost an afterthought. Indeed, the passage of time is shown by using montages of the same children to note historical events and technological advances. Where Mr. Chips leaves it to the viewers to imagine the impact he's had on the lives of his students, Miss Dove takes us by the shoulders and shakes us, screaming "God dammit you're going to realize the impact this teacher had!" Well, Miss Dove herself wouldn't do that, as it would be ever so improper.

I'm not certain if Good Morning, Miss Dove is on DVD, so you're going to have to catch the rare FXM/FMC showing.

Since You Went Away

I've briefly mentioned Since You Went Away several times in comparison to other moviews about World War II. It's airing again tonight at 10:15 PM on TCM as part of Cher's look at studio-era movies with strong portrayals of women; this week's theme being women during wartime.

Claudette Colbert stars as Anne Hilton, a wife and mother of two. There's a war on, of course, and Mr. Hilton has gone off to fight, leaving Anne alone to raise two young adult daughters. Jane, the elder of the two, is played by Jennifer Jones, while Bridget, the younger, is played by Shirley Temple. The family was at least middle-class before the war, and probably higher on the economic ladder than that considering how big their house is and the fact they used to have a maid they had to let go because they could no longer afford to keep her on, what with the husband's salary being replaced by allotment checks. What's a mother to do? Well, she decides to advertise for roomers for the last bedroom, with a preference for military personnel. What they get is Col. William Smollett (Monty Woolley). He's military, all right -- a colonel from the first World War! But he's no dummy, either, and points out that he is military, which is what they wanted, so they really have to take him.

Col. Smollett proceeds to turn everybody's life upside down. He's a difficult, exacting person who expects everything to be run his way, and that forces the three women to change the way the house is run. However, it turns out he's also got a grandson, William II (Robert Walker). The young William is an enlisted man, and one who seemingly can do nothing right by his grandfather, which understandably frustrates him. Jane feels sympathy for him and eventually he begins to pursue her romantically. This is also an issue for Jane as she's had her eyes on a much older man, Lt. Tony Willett (Joseph Cotten). He's an old friend of Anne's who's in the military on business that I don't think is ever quite made specific. The movie is sprawling and there's a lot of detail that's easy to miss.

Eventually, the war starts to turn personal for all the women, at least in the sense that it begins to hit home and makes them make real sacrifices and suffer far more than just having to share a bedroom. Young William is called off to war; young men on the periphery of the Hiltons' lives get killed in action; and a telegram arrives containing the sad news that Mr. Hilton is missing in action. Where the first half of the movie is a bit slow, the second half picks up and becomes rather more forceful.

The bad news is that forceful doesn't always mean powerful in a good sense. Since You Went Away was released in 1944, and as such had to provide a sense of morale on the home front. So there are some scenes that are almost obvious in the way they're trying to deliver their message. There's one with an immigrant, and one where Anne tells off a gossipy woman (Agnes Moorehead) about "doing one's part" for the war effort. And some of the action is telegraphed. But there are also some quite excellent sequences, such as when young William gets on the train to go off to war, leaving Jane behind. The performances are also quite good, with Colbert being strong in the lead and Monty Woolley providing very good light relief.

I don't know that Since You Went Away is the best of the movies about the home front. It was compared in its time to Mrs. Miniver, a movie that audiences back in the day loved but which I find interminable at times. It could also be thought of as a bookend to The Best Years of Our Lives, seeing as how both of them run about 170 minutes and deal with the way war affected people: the former with the women and how they handled things during the war, and the latter with the men having to adjust to the end of the war. The Best Years of Our Lives never feels too long despite its 170 minutes; Since You Went Away does feel too long at times. And I've also mentioned a few foreign films that look at the homefront, in places where the war came much closer; In Which We Serve and The Cranes Are Flying come to mind. Still, Since You Went Away is a worthy movie, both on its own and as a contemporary look at how America was handling the homefront back in 1944.

Since You Went Away got a DVD release years ago, but I don't know if it's in print. The movie is available for purchase on Amazon, but not at the TCM shop.

Ruby Gentry

I've said of some movies before -- I think the first one I said it about was Violent Saturday -- that they're not very good, but they're a hell of a lot of fun. TCM is kicking off its salute to Star of the Month Karl Malden with just such a movie: Ruby Gentry, at 8:00 PM tonight.

Ruby Gentry is played by Jennifer Jones. But we'll get to her in a few minutes, since this is one of those movies that's told in flashback. The movie starts with an outsider, the northerner Dr. Saul (Barney Phillips) showing up in a small town in the tidal region of North Carolina. The doctor has come to take care of the wife of Jim Gentry (Karl Malden), one of the town's richest and most prominent citizens. As for Ruby, she's not the wife; she's a much younger woman from the wrong side of the tracks who spent some time in high school looking after Mrs. Gentry, and who is now living in the backwoods area with "her type" of people. Ruby, though, is a bit of a wild woman who has her eyes on every man out there, or so it seems.

One such man was Boake (Charlton Heston), a young engineer from the right side of the tracks. He had been in love with Ruby, but because of the social difference, he had to marry somebody from his class. Besides, Boake is a big man with big ideas. His family's ancestral land was flooded by brackish tidal waters decades earlier, and he's studied civil engineering so that he can drain the land and make it fit for agriculture again. He spent a few years doing civil engineering in South America, and has returned home to make his dream cume true.

And then Mrs. Gentry dies. What does this have to do with a bunch of flooded land? Well, it turns out that Mr. Gentry holds the loan on the land, and on a lot of the other stuff in town. But again, I'm getting ahead of myself. In the meantime, Ruby marries Mr. Gentry, which is how she becomes the titular Ruby Gentry. But the rest of the town doesn't like her horning in on classy society. It's a scene really quite reminiscent of Jean Harlow in Red-Headed Woman. When Jim dies in a boating accident, the rest of the town naturally accuses Ruby of murder. But she's inherited all the loans Jim had control over, and that gives her a lot of financial power. And Ruby, not wanting to be a woman scorned, has no qualms about using that power....

Oh boy is Ruby Gentry a melodramatic potboiler. Jennifer Jones isn't my favorite actress, and she's almost insanely manic here. The best that can be said about Charlton Heston is that he was a "sturdy" actor. He's not as good as, say, a Glenn Ford, but at least he's better than a John Lund. Karl Malden is the best thing here, but he dies two-thirds of the way through the movie, leaving us with an over-the-top finale. Then again, perhaps that over-the-top presentation might be the best thing about this movie. It was based on a lurid, popular book of the day, much like Mildred Pierce or The Postman Always Rings Twice, but never hits the highs that either of those two do; where those movies sing, Ruby Gentry screams and wails. But like a good Bette Davis rant, it can be fun to watch wailing.

In the final analysis, Ruby Gentry is about as well-presented as a paragrpah full of bad metaphors such as the preceding paragraph of this post. Fun for one viewing, but if you've seen it already you might be frustrated on watching it again.

Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing

It's not exactly my sort of film, but TCM is showing Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing tonight at 8:00 PM. Those of you who like the sort of romantic melodrama that today would probably be made for the Lifetime Channel instead of the big screen will probably love this stuff.

The scene is Hong Kong, during the latter stages of the Chinese Civil War, which would be won by the Communists in October 1949. Han Suyin (Jennifer Jones) is a doctor working at one of the hospitals. She's had a difficult life. She's of mixed Chinese and British descent, which causes problems, and her husband recently died in the war. So to deal with that she's thrown herself into her career Into this walks Mark Elliot (William Holden), an American newspaper correspondent. It's fairly obvious what's going to happen next: the two are going to fall in love! (Would that all doctors look as radiant as Jennifer Jones.) And you know that it's not going to be a bed of roses, either, because if it were there wouldn't be a movie! Ah, but it's not just because of Ms. Han's being a widow that there are problems. Nor is the racial and cultural difference al there is to it. Mark is trapped in a loveless marriage, and he's found that his wife just won't give him a divorce.

Still, the two try to carry on a love affair while having all sorts of realities intrude upon their lives. Ms. Han has to deal with matters involving the ancestral estate back on the mainland; the Communists have taken it over having won the civil war. And then there's Mark's job, which is about to involve events a bit further away. If you noticed the date above, we're not that far away from June, 1950, which is when the North Korean Communists would invade the South and start what would become the Korean War, something that clearly Mark was going to have to cover, which leads to our two romantic leads being separated. When will they get to see each other again, and will their love be able to survive the separation? And can I keep my dinner down while watching this treacle?

I'm sorry, but I just can't bring myself to like Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing. Sure, it's competently made, but this is a movie I would put in a class with Dark Victory or the even more irritating Random Harvest: It screams "Chick flick!", and won't shut the hell up. Even the music gets in on the obnoxious act, with the strings swelling up to play the title tune which was a big hit back in the day, but nowadays is as bad as elevator music. I know there was a market for this sort of stuff, or else it wouldn't have been made. (That, and it was based on a book which was apparently quite popular when it was published.) If you're part of what would have been that target demographic, I bet you'll love Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing.