Caesar's Wife

Somerset Maugham was an exceedingly prolific writer. Or at least it seems that way; maybe it's more that his works are the sort of things that were considered suitable for turning into movies. Some of the famous ones include The Letter and The Razor's Edge, but there's a ton more out there. A movie that I didn't realize was based on a Maugham play until I sat down to watch it is Another Dawn.

Errol Flynn is the star here, playing Denny Roark. He's a pilot with the British military in one of their possessions in Arabia, serving under Col. Wister (Ian Hunter). For some reason, Denny's sister Grace (Frieda Inescort) also lives in the area, which I'd have thought unlikely. In any case, as Denny returns from a mission having survived by the sking of his teeth, he gets some good news from Wister who, in addition to being his commanding officer, is also a friend. Wister has to take two months' leave for reasons, and is going to be going home to England for the time. Denny is getting a temporary promotion to commander, which is good career advancement for him.

On the same boat as Wister is Julia Ashton (Kay Francis). She's an American going to England for reasons, and is being pursued on board ship by a businessman in whom she has absolutely no interest. Wister saves Julia from this guy's advances, and the two become friends, although this being prim and proper England under George V, it's not going to go any further just yet. Wouldn't you know it, however, but Julia is staying with the same friends in England that Wister is staying with, so they keep seeing each other.

Wister immediately falls in love with Julia, but the feeling isn't mutual. It's not that Julia has anything against Wister; instead, she was engaged to the sort of pilot who in those days would have been considered an explorer. He went out one evening on an experimental flight and never returned, with no evidence of his plane ever having been found. Presumably, he crashed into the Irish Sea and the plane sank with him drowning. But Julia is still in mourning for her late boyfriend and can't love anybody else. However, since Wister is so nice, and she knows she can never love anybody, she agrees to make Wister happy by marrying him. She does consider him a friend, after all.

Wister and his new wife get back to the Arab sheikdom where he and Denny are stationed. Julia gets off the train and Denny sees her, treating her like a perfect gentleman because he doesn't realize who she is: Wister hasn't seen any need to wire ahead that he's returning with a wife. Denny, like his commanding officer, falls in love with Julia, which is obviously going to be quite awkward when he finds out that this woman is married to his commanding officer. But how is the love triangle going to be resolved?

One subplot in Another Dawn, which is frankly not well handled, involves Wister's manservant Wilkins (Herbert Mundin). Wilkins goes back to England with Wister, and is given a give by some of his fellow soldiers. That gift is a box of white feathers which, if you've seen the movie The Four Feathers, you'll know means his fellow soldiers consider him a coward. It's so obvious that this is foreshadowing for something that happens later in the movie, and frankly, it's a subplot that doesn't do very much to advance the movie.

As for the rest of Another Dawn, it's the sort of drama where you can see why one of the studios of the 1930s would want to acquire it and turn it into a movie. There's a fairly good love triangle story at its heart, and the sort of story that would have given a studio ample opportunity to open up the action what with the exotic setting (not that there would have been any location shooting, of course). The cast does a good job with their roles, although the movie is ultimately just a programmer. A competent programmer, but a programmer nevertheless. I think that's why Another Dawn is not as well remembered as some of the other movies based on stories by Somerset Maugham.

Stolen Holiday

I think I mentioned a while back having a string of Kay Francis movies that I hadn't seen before on my DVR, and writing up posts on them and leaving them in draft to space out when the posts show up here. The next of the Kay Francis movies is from her later years at Warner Bros. after Bette Davis started taking over the role of queen of the Warner Bros. lot: Stolen Holiday.

Francis stars as Nicole Picot, an American model who has made her way over to Paris in 1931, and is successful showing off the clothes others pay her to wear, although she'd really rather own her own business, confiding in her friend Suzanne (Alison Skipworth). One day at work, Nicole is approached by Russian émigré Stefan Orloff (Claude Rains), who is willing to put up Nicole at a fashionable mansion for a night in exchange for posing as his wife. Nicole agrees for the money, and although she quickly discovers the ruse, she remains friends with Orloff.

The thing is, Stefan needed to look fashionable because he's running a chain of pawn shops with some of his friends, on the grounds that France is the only country where one can issue bonds on the assets of what's been pawned. Stefan is the head of this scheme, although it's not quite honest, and it's his partners who seem to be taking more of a risk as their names are the ones on the documentation. But Nicole doesn't know any of this. She gets the money she needs to open the Maison Picot, which eventually becomes successfull.

When it looks like Orloff might be in trouble and it's suggested Picot get out of town until the thing blows over -- after all, Orloff doesn't really want to hurt Picot -- she goes to Geneva, which is where she meets Anthony Wayne (Ian Hunter). Wayne is a British diplomat who can travel wherever on his diplomatic passport. He immediately falls in love with Nicole, and the two become platonic friends much in the same way that Picot is friends with Orloff. In fact, it's that friendship with Orloff that leads Picot to decide she's not going to marry Wayne.

Meanwhile, the walls are beginning to close in on Orloff again, so he asks Picot to marry him! He's got ulterior motives. If he can invite all the people he's scamming to the wedding, who are basically the highest of high society, they won't be able to turn on him for fear of the public scandal they'll have to face when the fiscal chicanery comes to light. Or at least that's the theory. One of Orloff's business partners is taken away from the wedding by the police for questioning, which really begins to put the heat on Orloff and lead to the finale.

Stolen Holiday is little more than a programmer from Warner Bros., although unsurprisingly they do a good job making it look like a million bucks. The plot, however, is a bit of a mess. Then again, this is the sort of material where everything looks so glossy that you won't really notice how little the plot resembles any sort of reality. Claude Rains is as pleasant to listen too as always; Kay Francis looks good in all those fashions; and everybody should have listened to Alison Skipworth's advice.

The Keyhole

George Brent was TCM's Star of the Month last month, and one of the movies that they ran is showing up on TCM again, although this time it's as part of a night of movies starring Brent's co-star in tonight's movie, that star being Kay Francis. The movie in question is The Keyhole, which comes up overnight tonight, or in the wee hours of tomorrow, at 3:15 AM.

Kay Francis plays Anne Brooks, née Vallee. As the movie opens up, she's reading a note from a man named Maurice (Monroe Owsley) that is a suicide letter. Anne is married to a wealthy man, so she has her chauffeur drive her over to the apartment where Maurice is staying. It turns out that Maurice and Anne danced together in Europe as one of those Vernon and Irene Castle-like couples who demonstrated new dances in the ballrooms of nightspots where the wealthy gathered. Anne was young and naïve, stupid enough to marry Maurice, and when she learned what a jerk he really was, she left for America leaving Maurice to complete the no-fault divorce proceedings since he was intending to marry another woman. However, Maurice never married that other woman and never got the divorce. Anne married her second husband Schuyler Brooks (Henry Kolker) thinking it was a valid marriage and that she'd never need to tell Schuyler about her past. But it's not a valid marriage, and Maurice is blackmailing Anne over it because she's got money, or at least assets that theoretically can be converted to money although Schuyler is bound to start noticing at some point.

Schuyler has kinda-sorta noticed in that Anne comes home at odd hours, and doesn't seem to wear some of her jewelry any more. But the servants have no idea what's really going on. The one person who does know what's going on is Schuyler's sister Portia (Helen Ware), who is good at discreetly breaking up such unwanted relationships. She learns from Anne that Maurice is not an American citizen. So Anne should take a cruise somehwere to the Carribean, like Havana. Maurice is certain to follow her, and Portia can use her influence to get Maurice's visa cancelled. Voilà: Maurice won't be able to blackmail Anne in the US anymore, and Schuyler need not learn anything about what went on between Anne and Maurice.

However, since Schuyler knows nothing of this, he has some reason to worry that Anne might be up to no good when she suddenly declares that she'd like to go to Havana. So he goes to a detective agency to have one of their discreet, high-class private eyes get on the same boat and see if he can find out who Anne is seeing on the sly. That man is Neil Davis (George Brent), who is accompanied by a second detective, Hank (Allen Jenkins), who will be traveling under the guise of being Neil's valet.

Neil and Anne meet, and the two eventually become friends, although Neil notes that Anne seems to be a more or less perfect wife, never looking for another man and trying to get away from Maurice who, sure enough, has followed Anne on the boat. The things Neil and Anne do together are completely platonic, although eventually Neil finds himself beginning to fall in love with Anne. This presents problems when Schuyler learns the truth from his siter and goes down to Havana himself so that Anne should not find out that her husband has been spying on her.

The Keyhole is an entertaining enough movie, although I have to wonder how much bearing to reality it bears. One plus is that the conflict is set up in a good enough way that it makes Anne's reasoning for why she did the things she did believable. She was on a separate continent in the early 1930s, and expected the divorce was going to go through, so what resaon is there to tell any of this stuff to her second husband? And she's acting mysteriously enough, in part to protect her husband, so he has a logical reason to suspect something is wrong. I do have to say, on the other hand, that the resolution of the film's conflict doesn't quite work for me.

One other fun thing to mention is the subplot. Glenda Farrell is inserted into the movie as Dot, a gold-digger who is clearly looking for a rich guy to fleece. She falls for Hank, not realizing he's not what he's presenting himself as, while Hank is blowing through all the expense money to keep Dot in the lifestyle she's become accustomed to. They both handle their roles well and provide a bit of needed comic relief.

People who want a look at early 1930s values will probably enjoy The Keyhole, as will the fans of the movie's stars, although there are better films out there for all of them.

Not to be confused with Sayonara

Another one of those movies that shows up on TCM from time to time where I recognized the title, but never watched it, is Cynara. With that in mind, the last time it showed up on TCM I made the point of recording it so that I could watch it and do a post on it here. Eventually, I got around to watching it, writing this post, and scheduling it in the queue of movies to blog about.

The movie opens in Naples, Italy. Jim Warlock (Ronald Colman) is talking to his wife Clemency (Kay Francis), about his desire to get on a boat to South Africa (at the time still part of the British Empire, with the apartheid system still a good 15 years away) since he's badly screwed up his life and relationship with Clemency and needs to leave his native England to put his life back together. But what did he do that's so bad, and why is Clemency seemingly OK with his desire to go to South Africa? As you might guess, we're about to get yet another flashback, as though that's never ever been done in the movies before....

In his native Britain, Jim is a barrister working with his freind John Tring (Henry Stephenson) and married to Clemency coming up on seven years. Theirs is an impossibly happy marriage, and Jim is planning to celebrate their seventh anniversary by buying his wife the sort of jewelry that you only see in the movies that nobody in real life could possibly afford. But when he gets home to give his wife the gift, he finds that things aren't going so well, albeit not through any fault of his or Clemency's. Instead, she's got an idiot sister who chases after men, this time the sort of parachute jumper who might have been a character in the Bette Davis movie Parachute Jumper. Clemency needs to abscond with her sister to get said sister away from this man, and is planning to do so by taking the sister to Venice.

Jim and John are both baching it, so one night they go out to dinner at the sort of restaurant people went to in 1930s movies when they wanted to go slumming, if they were in the class of people who could afford to go slumming. Of course, other patrons are not slumming, like the pair of girlfriends in the next booth, Doris (Phyllis Barry) and Milly (Viva Tattersall). They're sitting in booth next to the one in which Jim and John are sitting, and Doris decides to take Jim's hat on a lark and try it on. So the two pairs are introduced to each other.

Now, as you might guess considering where the movie started, there's going to be a sort of illicit love affair during the time while Clemency is still away in Venice. Jim takes Doris and Milly back to their apartment, where Doris gives Jim their address as well as where they work. Now, Jim should probably have told Doris here that he's already married and that his wife is away for reasons, but he can't be bothered to do that, instead ripping up Doris' address in the taxi. John, for his part, decides to have Jim be the judge in a swimsuit contest where Doris is one of the contestants.

Finally, Jim tells Doris about his wife, but while she claims she can handle it and knows she can never really have Jim, she eventually reacts very badly when Clemency returns from Italy -- by committing suicide. Because of this death under adverse circumstances, there's going to be a coroner's inquest, and the relationship between Doris and Jim is going to come to light. And while it could theoretically be seen as innocent, Jim is a barrister and there is the whole matter of legal ethics....

Cynara is a well-enough made movie, but it's one of those early 1930s movies that, looking back on it 90-plus years on, is badly dated because of how much morals have changed in the intervening 90 years. Colman does a fine job with his role, but for the audiences of 2025, it's a role that we're probably going to find difficult to identify with. Still, for anybody who's a fan of old movies, if Cynara is one you haven't seen before, it's definitely one that's worth watching.

Mandalay

In the early days of the movies, it was really expensive to go to exotic locations to film stories, even if the movie-going audiences wanted the escapism of stories in faraway places. So we get a few establishing shots and a lot of either backlot stuff or California locations being asked to double for someplace else in the world. Such is the case with the pre-Code movie Mandalay.

Mandalay is the second-largest city in Burma, which at the time the movie was made was under British colonial rule. It was also the former royal capital, while the British moved the capital to Rangoon (now Yangon) much closer to the coast along the Irawaddy River that flows between the two cities. So almost all of the action in the movie takes place in either Rangoon or on the river. Tony Evans (Ricardo Cortez) has been plying his trade along the river, returning to Rangoon where he has a girlfriend in Tanya (Kay Francis) who fled the Russian Revolution.

But Tony is more or less persona non grata with the British authorities, so he has to beat a hasty escape, leaving Tanya alone in Rangoon and having to work at a nightclub run by Nick (Warner Oland) that seems to serve everybody in much the same way that Rick's café did in Casablanca. The authorities have their eye on the place and even more so on Tanya, eventually deciding that she should be deported because she's a cause for trouble and not British.

Tanya beats the authorities to the punch, getting a fake identity and getting on a boat going upstream to Mandalay. On that boat, she meets Dr. Burton (Lyle Talbot), who's got problems of his own, committing some sort of medical malpractice that he feels compelled to punish himself for, in this case by going upstream into the hinterlands of Burma where there's a disease outbreak and as with The Painted Veil. The two of them eventually begin to fall in love.

But of course Tony is going to show up again, and wouldn't you know that he wants Tanya back. The authorities are still after him, so he comes up with a devious scheme. Tanya has some medicine that's for external use only, and Tony decides to make it look like he's taken some of it internally which would kill him; then he goes and hides in the hold of the ship. Of course, this also makes it look like Tanya may have killed him, leaving her open to a murder rap.

As I said at the beginning, I think that viewers 90 years ago liked exotic locations since the world was much less accessible then. But the story in Mandalay isn't that much, and could have been set pretty much anywhere. It's not bad, but it feels like the sort of thing that's not overly original and that one's seen before if one watches a lot of 1930s films.

Having said that, Francis and Cortez put the slight material over and make Mandalay a movie that's worth watching even if it's not great. Worth a watch if you can find it.

Man Wanted

I'm always up for watching another Kay Francis movie. One that I hadn't seen before and showed up on TCM a little while back was a pre-Code film called Man Wanted, so I made a point of recording it and watching it.

Francis obviously doesn't play the man, but the woman who more or less winds up wanting the man. She plays Lois Ames, a woman who is actually in the world of business, editing a high society magazine called The 400. Perhaps more surprisingly is that she's married, although her huband Fred (Kenneth Thomson) seems more interested in living the good life and being a bit of a playboy, including stepping out on his wife. Lois, for her part, seems more married to her job, but that's probably as much Hollywood making a moral judgment about women that high up in the working world as it is the truth. It's to the part that her long-suffering secretary is sick of having to work nights.

Enter Tommy Sherman (David Manners). He's a salesman working for an exercise equipment company in the days when exercise equipment was quite expensive. He actually goes off to clients' homes and offices to demonstrate the equipment, which is how he's about to meet Lois. Tommy, meanwhile, has a best friend in Andy (Andy Devine), and is engaged to Ruthie (Una Merkel), the perfect working-to-middle-class couple. At least, until Tommy meets Lois. It just happens to be on the very same day when Lois' secretary has finally gotten fed up with all those nights working, and quits right then and there. Tommy decides to offer himself up for the job, at least on an emergency basis.

Surprisingly, Tommy shows himself to be adept at the job of executive assistant, quickly making himself indispensible to Lois. This, as you can guess, causes all sorts of problems. Lois, after all, still has a husband, even if he is cheating on her and she's about to find that out once and for all. And now Ruthie is about to become similarly suffering. Worse for Tommy is that when Andy consoles Ruthie, he starts to fall in love with Ruthie and thinks about putting the moves on Ruthie himself!

Man Wanted is a movie that has a lot of potential, but one that I felt unfortunately couldn't figure out a good way to resolve all the plot developments it had built up. It's a pre-Code, so it doesn't have to adhere to the strictures that a post-1934 movie would, but the ending still seemed a bit anodyne to me. Worse is that it all comes across as so old hat and not particularly memorable compared to other pre-Codes, and I don't mean old-hat and dated simply because it's from over 90 years ago.

Still, fans of any of the principal stars here will probably find something to like about Man Wanted.

Lady No. 1

Lucy Chase Wayne (that's Kay Francis if you couldn't guess) is one of those women. She's married to the current Secretary of State Stephen Wayne (Preston Foster), and the solons that run the party -- this being the days before widespread primary elections, days when nominations were routinely decided in back rooms -- might possibly accept him in nomination. Indeed, Lucy has the gravitas to be First Lady, being a wonderful Washington hostess and coming from a long line of family that has been in politics.

But of course Stephen isn't going to get that nomination unopposed. Not when there are other women out there who would like to be First Lady. One of them is Irene Hibbard (Verree Teasdale). The only problem is, she's married to a Supreme Court justice (Walter Connolly) who's not right for the job of President and the party bosses know that. Instead, Irene has her eyes on a hot young Senator, Gordon Keane (Victor Jory). He might be just right for the party's nomination, although he's apparently not married, which is why all the women, including married ones like Irene, want him.

And then there are the people who are the power behind the scenes. One is Lavinia Creevey (Louise Fazenda), the head of a national women's organization that has a lot of pull in the less urban parts of the country, and remember that back in the 1930s there was a lot of the country that was a lot less urban than today. There's also newspaper publisher Banning (Grant Mitchell); it's easy to see why somebody would want to get the seal of approval from the man who publishes a nationwide chain of newspapers.

As in a lot of other vintage movies about politics, there's a lot of back-room intrigue, although in this case it's the women engaging in it. Lucy decides to use some reverse psychology in suggesting Justice Hibbard for the nomination, thinking that there's no way the party bosses can take it seriously -- until the outside kingmakers like the idea. Lucy has to think quickly on her feet, although thankfully somebody presents her with an obscure technicality that might solve all Lucy's problems.

First Lady is based on a play by George S. Kaufman, and the stage origins really show in watching the movie. It's the sort of material that probably works well on stage in a live performance where you have all the right pauses that the actors can take when the audience laughs at the right lines. But when transferred to the big screen, it feels like one of those early talkies when producers decided instead of throwing everything on film and see what sticks (a la the recently reviewed Soup to Nuts), they'd just take a play and film it as is. That might have worked in 1930, and I do mean might. But here it feels like the material wasn't opened up at all. I found myself wondering during the movie whether the producers at Warner Bros. were deliberately giving Kay Francis poor material as her star was waning.

The other issue is historical, in a couple of ways. One is that the play premiered in the middle of Franklin Roosevelt's first term, and I don't think there was any way anybody could possibly have beaten him when he was running for a second term. And then the movie was made in 1937, one year after a presidential election. I can't imagine any of this seeming realistic to an audience under the overwhelming figure of Franklin Roosevelt. And for viewers today, there's the issue that none of this stuff is relevant when everything is decided in the primaries, ostensibly by the voters.

So First Lady is a curious little historical artifact, but not a particularly great movie.

Dr. Monica

It's been a while since I've posted to the blog because, as I mentioned in my previous post, life has been busy and a bit of a mess in the past month and a half. But I noticed that TCM is running a movie that I recorded during Kay Francis' turn as Star of the Month at the beginning of the year, and one that I don't think is on DVD: Dr. Monica, tomorrow at 10:00 AM.

Kay plays the titular Dr. Monica, an obstetrician married to John (Warren William) who is unable to have a baby of her own. She doesn't know it yet, but John has been stepping out on her with one of her two best friends, pilot Mary (Jean Muir). The other best friend, Anna (Verree Teasdale), seems to serve the purpose somebody like Eve Arden would serve in 1940s movies, of the good friend who has a level head, although unsurprisingly Teasdale isn't nearly as funny as Arden.

Unfortunately, Mary gets knocked up, which presents a problem as she's not married. She even thinks about getting an abortion, although that scene is cut since the movie was released about a week before the Production Code went in to full effect. But Mary makes it quite clear that she doesn't want the baby. Worse, in her delirium during labor, she tries to get in touch with John, who knows nothing about the baby, having broken off the relationship with Mary before she could tell him. Monica overhears this, and comes to the bizarre conclusion that she's not just going to leave John (understandable), but make certain he marries Mary so the baby won't be a bastard (well, they couldn't use that word.

But, if you think Monica's motivations are a mess, just wait until the end of the movie when you discover Mary's solution to the conflict! That's one of the two problems that Dr. Monica has: a script that's screwed up, and does no favors to any of the four stars (William being in a surprisingly small role here when you consider his importance to the story). But it's the other flaw that probably accounts for the script problems. It seems fairly obvious that the movie was cut at Joe Breen's insistence; the suriving print runs about 52 to 53 minutes while IMDb says that contemporary sources in 1934 originally advertised a 65-minute movie that never got released in that form. I wouldn't be surprised if Warner Bros.' original intentions for the mil at least made somewhat more sense.

However, for all the problems that Dr. Monica has, it's certainly an interesting mess. And at under an hour, you haven't wasted too much of your time, especially if you know going in that it's a mess.

Living on Velveeta

I mentioned last month when Kay Francis was TCM's Star of the Month that at some point in the past, possibly even before I started this blog, I had seen the movie Living on Velvet that was airing as part of the tribute, but that I had never blogged about it. So I made it a point to record that movie, and then sit down to watch it and do a post on it here.

Kay Francis gets top billing, but the real lead here is played by George Brent, whose role at Warner Bros. was to make his female leads look good, first Kay Francis, and then by the late 1930s Bette Davis. Brent plays Terry Parker, a professional airplaine pilot back in the days when the profession was rather more dangerous than it is now. Indeed, Terry is at the controls of his plane in the opening scene when it crashes, killing his parents and sister but not him, since otherwise he couldn't really be the lead in the movie. Terry then goes overseas to fly as we learn from a series of newspaper articles, first to the Far East and then Venezuela where he keeps getting in trouble because of hs desire to live the sort of life he wants to.

After a year of this, he's returned home to New York where he flies in an air show, in a plane that's owned by his friend "Gibraltar" (Warren William). Gibraltar is one of those gentlemen pilots, one of those idle rich who has his own plane more to impress the society types than to be truly adventurous. Gibraltar invites Terry to one of those society parties of the sort we saw at the beginning of One More Tomorrow, this one hosted by Amy Prentiss (Kay Francis) and her aunt Martha.

Amy and Terry meet, and she's taken by him, not minding that he was a pilot even if he doesn't want his past reputation to precede him. She's so taken by him that she leaves the party to go out for a night on the town. This, even though she's supposed to be Gibraltar's girlfriend. It only takes that one night for Amy and Terry to realize they want to marry each other, and Gibraltar is even generous enough to let the couple live in his house out on Long Island for a ridiculously low rent even by 1930s standards.

Of course, part of the implied agreement of living out on Long Island is that Terry will settle down and get the sort of job where people commute to and from Manhattan by train and play bridge on the way in and out since they all take the same train in and out every day. Terry has never even played bridge, and still has dreams of going back to being a pilot, even though he doesn't have the money for a plane and there's no way he can support Amy on that sort of income.

Amy, wackily enough, continues to support her husband despite her desire for him to get a more regular job. It's only when he sells some stock and uses the proceeds to try to start that airline business rather than renovating the house and saving for a rainy day that she finally thinks of leaving him. But you just know that the first time there's an emergency, she's going to go running right back to him....

Living on Velvet was released in 1935, and feels like the sort of movie that Warner Bros. would try to force upon Kay Francis to try to get her to ask out of her contract since they knew they were soon to have a new queen of the lot in the form of Bette Davis. Kay, unlike Bette or Olivia de Havilland, didn't rebel much, so she got stuck in some lesser movies, as well as this one with ridiculous character motivations.

However, there are definitely things worth watching in Living on Velvet. Kay Francis was known as a clotheshorse, and at the final party, she's wearing a dress that's extremely backless. It's possibly even more backless than the one that Jean Harlow wore in Dinner at Eight where she tells the joke about not being able to expose her skin, only to turn around and show that backless dress. The other highlight is when Kay and George Brent have that night on the town. Kay recites the "30 days hath September" poem, and when she gets to April, George's character notices the speech impediment and comments on it. The fact that Kay Francis would be willing to do such a scene is a bit surprising.

Living on Velvet is a typical lower-tier programmer from the era. It's certainly not terrible, but there's not all that much special about it.

Allotment Wives

I mentioned at the start of the month when I did the first post on Kay Francis being this month's Star of the Month on TCM that she had been featured in Summer Under the Stars back in August, and I had recorded the movie Allotment Wives. That movie is finally showing up in Francis' spotlight, tonight at 12:45 AM (so technically early Tuesday in the east, and Monday night in every other time zone).

The movie was released in late 1945, but presumably conceived at the start of the year, before both Germany and Japan surrendered in World War II. A docudrama-style voiceover at the beginning informs us about the Office of Dependency Benefits, which aided families on the home front during the War. When the men would go off to fight, they would surrender some of their pay, since they presumably didn't need it at the front (although of course when they had leave they could certainly use it). The ODB would match this money and give it to the wives/families of the soldiers, a practice called "allotment checks". Naturally, this huge pot of money was ripe for scams, especially with all those quickie marriages before the soldiers went off to fight. Supposedly, crime syndicates were getting women to sign up for bigamous marriages in order to get multiple allotment checks, with the syndicate raking off some of the money. General Gilbert (Jonathan Hale) asks Col. Martin (Paul Kelly), who had been a reporter before the war, to do some undercover investigating to find the people running the syndicates, not the women at the bottom cashing the checks.

Sheila Seymour (Kay Francis) runs a swanky beauty salon by day, and operates a charity canteen for soldiers about to go off to war by night. But we see right away that this isn't all she's doing. She's got a neat revolving wall in her salon office which is a secret entrance to the syndicate office. There, she and her right-hand man Whitey Colton (Otto Kruger) are running one of the allotment check scams, and doing it fairly ruthlessly as they have someone bumped off early on.

However, thanks to the presence of the Production Code, we know that poor Sheila is going to get her comeuppance by the end of the movie. Two things cause this to happen. First is Sheila's daughter Connie (Teala Loring). Connie doesn't know what her mom really does; at least, she only knows about the legitimate businesses. Connie is supposed to be off at an exclusive boarding school. But she's rebelling, showing up at a restaurant Mom visits and getting quite drunk. This understandably displeases Mom to no end.

The other problem comes at the canteen. One of the volunteers, Gladys Smith (Gertrude Michael), thinks she recognizes Sheila as some other women, making things mildly awkward for Sheila at the canteen. Of course, we know that Gladys is right. Sheila grew up poor and was determined never to be poor again, changing her name after getting out of the reform school she and Gladys were in together, and making a new life for herself. But Gladys is here, and working for another syndicate. She's able to blackmail Sheila in the worst possible way.

Allotment Wives is an interesting little movie, even if it never really rises above B movie status. This was several years after Francis left Warner Bros., and her movie career was nearly at an end, being reduced to working on Poverty Row. But she still had enough influence that she was able to get a producer's credit, and we get some folks here who were never stars of A movies, but solid supporting actors like Kruger. And the plot is pretty good for a B movie. One thing that did amuse me was a scene of Sheila slapping Connie that seemed as though it could have been lifted straight from Mildred Pierce, although Mildred Pierce only premiered a few weeks before Allotment Wives.

If you want an interesting example of the way in which B movies could be pretty good, you could do a lot worse than to watch Allotment Wives.

TCM Star of the Month January 2022: Kay Francis

Now that we're into the first full week of a new month, it's time for another Star of the Month on TCM. This time out, that star is Kay Francis, who was the queen of the Warner Bros. lot before Bette Davis took over that title. Francis was also know for her fashion sense and her difficulty with the letter R. Francis' films will be shown on TCM on four of the five Mondays this month, with a break for Martin Luther King Day on January 17.

If memory serves, the bit about her speech impediment is actually lampooned by co-star George Brent in the movie Living on Velvet, which TCM is showing at 1:45 AM on January 11. I've seen it before, and a search of the blog claims I haven't done a post on it before, which makes me wonder whether or not Blogger's search function is acting up again. Unfortunately, I don't have Living on Velvet on my DVR, so I don't think I'll be doing a post on it this month.

One of Francis' movies that I do plan on blogging about in January is Allotment Wives, which comes up on January 25 at 12:45 AM, or still on Monday, January 24 in more westerly time zones. I recorded that one back during Summer Under the Stars, so barring any technical issues with the recording, I'll finally get around to watching it.

As for this first night of her tribute, there are a couple that I don't think I've seen before, as well as ones I think I've seen but haven't blogged about before. So First Lady (12:30 AM tonight) is going on the DVR assuming there's space, and maybe one or two of the others. Before that, there's Jewel Robbery, a really fun pre-Code from the days when William Powell was still at Warner Bros., at 8:00 PM; followed by Trouble in Paradise at 9:30 PM.

The Goose and the Gander

I've mentioned in the past how much I tend to enjoy Warner Bros. programmers and B movies from the 1930s. Another good example of that output is The Goose and the Gander.

Kay Francis plays Georgiana Summers, who's vacationing at the sort of beach resort where the well-to-do go for their vacations. Also there is Betty Summers (Genevieve Tobin), who is only related to Georgiana by marriage, in that both of them have been married to Ralph Summers (Ralph Forbes). Georgiana was the first wife, before Betty came into the picture and took Ralph away while Georgiana was doing one of those rich people's vacations in Europe, which would explain why Georgiana hasn't seen Betty before.

Ralph is there as well but pre-occupied with business, so accompanying Betty at the beach is Ralph's brother Arthur. Showing up is Bob McNear (George Brent), who's clearly in the movie to wind up with the lead actress in the final reel and make her look good the rest of the time. But right now he's carrying on a fling with Betsy that seems innocent enough on the surface and which Ralph suspects not a jot.

Georgiana, having seen the interaction between Betty and Bob, upon learing that Betty is the second Mrs. Ralph Summers, hatches a plan to have Ralph catch Betty in flagrante delicto. Bob mentioned in passing to Georgiana that he has to go away on business on the night train, but is really intending to get off that train and head back to the beach to surprise Betty. And since Betty and Bob are each planning to go up to the mountains for some alone time, Georgiana bribes the one service station along that road to come up with a ruse that will force the two of them to spend the night at Georgiana's place in the hills, at which point Ralph will show up. She's gotten the license plate numbers of Betty's and Bob's cars, which is how only those two will wind up at Georgiana's place.

But of course things don't quite work out that way. When Betty takes Ralph to the train station to see him off, Bob follows, and after Ralph leaves, the two of them get in Bob's car, with a guy from the garage coming to pick up Betty's car. Except that he's going to show up late. There's been a couple of jewel thieves at the hotel, Lawrence (John Eldredge) and Connie (Claire Dodd). They need to make a quick getaway, and when they see the keys still in Betty's car (this was the 1930s, after all; nobody would do that today), they steal Betty's car and head off for the mountains.

So Bob and Betty, claiming to be married, show up at Georgiana's place, followed by Lawrence and Connie, and then eventually Ralph and the cops. The thieves still have the jewels on them too, including one of Georgiana's that she didn't notice had been missing. It gets complicated from there.

Never mind the complications, however; The Goose and the Gander is a silly little piece of fluff that works for the most part on the strength of its cast. It's not terribly memorable and will never be considered a great in the careers of any of the cast members, but then that's not what the studio was looking for. They just wanted to keep their stars in the public eye, and a movie like The Goose and the Gander does that perfectly well while entertaining movie goers for an hour and change.

The last I checked The Goose and the Gander has a standalone DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, but it really another of those movies that really should have been included in one of those four-film TCM-branded box sets Warner Home Video used to put out.

Stella, without Dallas

A search of the blog archives suggests that I have not done a post on the 1935 film I Found Stella Parish before. It's on TCM tonight at 10:45 PM as part of a night of movies featuring Kay Francis. It's par for the course for Kay Francis movies, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

Kay, naturally, plays Stella Parish. Stella, at the beginning of the movie, is an American actress working on the stage in London, where she's fairly successful. Her producer, Stephen Norman (Paul Lukas) would like to marry her, but she says no. She's got a good reason for saying no, too. She was previously married, and has a six-year-old daughter as a result of that marriage named Gloria (Sybil Jason). Gloria lives out in the country with a nanny (Jessie Ralph); Stella is keeping all of this a secret because she fears that if the secret comes out, it's going to ruin her career.

Stella has good reason to fear what will happen to her career, mostly because there's more to her secret than just having been previously married. That more comes to light when her former husband, Clifton Jeffords (Barton MacLane) comes on to the scene. He had committed a murder and gotten Stella sent up for it, and Gloria wsa actually born in prison! But the conviction was overturned and now Stells is in England making her way as an actress, with her American past not known to the folks in the UK. But now pesky little Clifton is here, and with the mother of his child being successful, he wants a piece of the action!

Stella makes a quick getaway back to the US, but her secret is about to be uncovered anyway. Stephen has a friend named Keith Lockridge (Ian Hunter), who is a journalist. Needless to say, you know in a movie like this that when a male journalist meets a lady with a secret, two things are going to happen: the journlist is going to fall in love with the woman, and the secret is going to get printed. Sure enough both of those things happen, and it causes all sorts of problems for Stella and the folks around her.

I Found Stella Parish is a melodramatic potboiler of the sort that Warner Bros. was making a lot of with its leading ladies -- and this was just before Kay Francis was about to be eclipsed by Bette Davis. That's both good and bad. Kay Francis always did her best in roles like this, but the plot is the sort of thing we've seen a dozen times before, and parts of it really srain credulity. It's moderately entertaining, but not quite as entertaining as pre-Code stuff.

I Found Stella Parish is as far as I know not on DVD. It would be a perfect candidate for a Kay Francis box set from the Warner Archive.

Guilty Hands

I mentioned the movie Guilty Hands back in April, saying that it wasn't available on DVD and that I didn't know when it would be airing again. It's still not on DVD, but it's on tonight at 8:00 PM as part of TCM's salute to Kay Francis in Summer Under the Stars.

The comments that I wrote back in April still hold, I think:

And then there's Guilty Hands, which ran this morning. It sounded like an interesting premise -- former district attorney Lionel Barrymore commits murder and tries to pin it on Kay Francis -- but the execution was off. That having been said, the execution was off in a way that makes parts of the movie really interesting.

A few things I didn't mention in April: Barrymore commits the murder thinking that he's doing the right thing for his daughter (Madge Evans), by protecting her from the man she thinks she loves (Alan Mowbray) but that Dad knows would be wrong for her. There's also no mystery in this movie, or at least not the traditional mystery. We know from the start who the killer is, so Hitchcock would probably classify this as suspense: will the killer get away with it? Since the movie dates to 1931, there is a reasonable chance that the killer could well get away with it, which is another thing that makes the movie worth one watch. If it were a movie made after they started enforcing the Production Code, the point of the movie would have to be seeing how the plot goes wrong. Not that you can't make a good movie along those lines; Double Indemnity springs immediately to mind. It's just that pre-Code movies allow for the possibility of something different.

Overall, I think Guilty Hands is the sort of movie that's worth one watching. Not the greatest thing by any stretch, but an enjoyable enough little curiosity, and a window to 1930s values.

Mary Stevens, MD

For those of you who like pre-Code films, Kay Francis is in the spotlight tomorrow as part of Summer Under the Stars on TCM. That means several pre-Codes. One that I don't think I've recommended before is Mary Stevens, MD, which comes on at 7:00 AM

Francis plays the title character, doctor Mary Stevens, who has a thriving practice working with nurse Glenda Carroll (somebody in the script department wasn't very imaginative, as the character is played by Glenda Farrell). She also likes Dr. Donald Andrews (Lyle Talbot), but he's in love with Lois (Thelma Todd), who is the daughter of a wealthy politician. Dr. Andrews marries Lois, while Mary becomes a successful pediatrician. Time passes, and Dr. Andrews, finding he's in a loveless marriage, starts committing embezzlement. But he can't get out of the marriage because it would hurt his father-in-law's political career.

Drs. Andrews and Stevens meet again and he promises her that he'll get a divorce from Lois, but you know that's never going to happen. Dr. Andrews has to agree to remain married to Lois or else he'll get in trouble for his embezzlement Mary, however, is apparently stupid enough to believe that he's going to be able to get a divorce, as she has sex with Dr. Andrews. Now, of course, we don't actually see anything approaching a sex act. They couldn't get away with that even in a pre-Code. But we know there has to have been a sex act, since we soon discover that Mary Stevens is pregnant! It's not like they had test-tube babies back in those days, either (well, only in a movie set in the future like Just Imagine). At this point the movie starts to get strange and take an odd turn.

Mary Stevens decides to go off to Europe to have her baby. I'd guess she was doing the same thing Loretta Young would do a few years later in real life: go off into seclusion, have the baby, and then claim you've adopted a child! Yeah, nobody's going to figure out what really happened. After having the baby, she gets back on a ship to return to the US, but there's an outbreak of "infantile paralysis" (the old-fashioned name they used for polio back in the day), and while she's saving two of the children on board, her own child gets infected! The movie quickly follows the rest of its plot to a strangely happy and conventional ending, which I won't give away here.

Mary Stevens, MD is an interesting idea that I think gets weighed down by a subpar script. Mary ought to be a smart woman, and there's no good reason for her to sleep with Dr. Andrews and get knocked up. The ending also feels tacked on, as if the writers had no idea how they were going to resolve the problems they had. Perhaps is Mary had poisoned a patient like George Bailey stopped Dr. Gower from (accidentally) doing in It's a Wondreful Life when Gower learned his child had died of influenza, there would be a more interesting ending. On the bright side, Mary Stevens, MD didn't get into the territory that Madame X and a whole bunch of imitators did.

Mary Stevens, MD doesn't seem to be out on DVD, not even from the Warner Archive.

Kay Francis birthday tomorrow

Normally, I prefer to mark birthdays on the day they occur, unless TCM is showing a movie starring the birthday person early in the morning, and I'd like to recommend it. Such is the case with One Way Passage, airing at 8:30 AM ET tomorrow on TCM.

William Powell plays Dan, a murderer wanted by the authorities in California for having escaped prison; having committed murder, he's doomed to be sent to the gas chamber. He's been caught in Hong Kong and, this being the days before transoceanic plane travel, he gets to take a slow boat back to his death. On the boat, he meets Joan (Kay Francis). She's a wealthy socialite who has no idea about Dan's past, or that he's on the boat going back to his death. It turns out, though, that she too is facing death, having been diagnosed with some fatal illness, the details of which we're never really given.

The two fall in love, but each of them has a dilemma: tell the other that this can only be a brief relationship, or keep that a secret and just enjoy the brief relationship for what it is. (Of course, if each knew both of them were going to die, that would change things....) Both of them choose secrecy, and proceed to have a doomed romance aboard the ship.

That's about all there is to the plot, except for the things that we viewers know that the two dying passengers don't; and the fact that as the boat makes its way across the Pacific, we know the two lovers' time together is growing shorter and shorter. It's a story that doesn't sound like much, but One Way Passage is actually quite a fine movie. Not only do Powell and Francis do well; they're helped by a supporting cast that includes Frank McHugh as a conman friend of Powell's, and Aline MacMahon as another con passing herself off as wealthy, reminiscent of Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve.

Sadly, One Way Passage has made it to DVD as part of the Warner Archive Collection, so you're either going to have to pay a bit more, or catch one of the infrequent TCM showings.

Four Jills in a Jeep

I can't belive that it's been two years since Kay Francis was TCM's Star of the Month, in September 2008. One of the Francis movies that TCM didn't show is Four Jills in a Jeep, which was made at Fox in 1944. Being a Fox film, it's subject to the Fox Movie Channel's wonderful programming strategy of keeping films in the vault for a long time, and them taking them out for a whole bunch of showings in a short period. Four Jills in a Jeep has just come out of the vault: it's scheduled to air tomorrow morning at 8:00 AM ET on FMC. And if you miss tomorrow's showing, it's got another airing in August, and two in September.

TCM's William Powell birthday salute, part 1

Born the day after Joe E. Brown was William Powell. TCM will be spending all morning and afternoon on July 29 showing Powell's movies. The morning kicks off at 6:00 AM ET with One Way Passage, which I mentioned briefly back in June 2009. The plot involves Powell, an escaped criminal, who gets caught in Hong Kong and put on a boat back for California where he'll be executed. He meets and falls in love with Kay Francis, a woman who looks healthy but is in fact terminally ill. Each tries to keep their secret from the other.... Also in the cast are character actors Frank McHugh playing a petty thief, and Aline MacMahon playing a confidence woman who passes herself off as somebody of high class, much like Charles Coburn and Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve. McHugh and MacMahon end up falling in love with each other. I mentioned back in 2009 that One Way Passage was not available on DVD. It seems as if it still hasn't even been released via the Warner Archive collection

One Way Passage is a brief movie, lasting just shy of 70 minutes, and will be followed by some more Powell movies I've already blogged about. At 7:15 AM is The Kennel Murder Case, in which Powell plays a detective other than Nick Charles.
Following The Kennel Murder Case, at 8:30 AM ET, you can see Manhattan Melodrama.

Trouble in Paradise

Tonight's TCM selection is Trouble In Paradise, airing at 9:45 PM ET.

Today's honoree in TCM's Summer Under the Stars, Miriam Hopkins, plays Lily, a pickpocket making her way through Europe. She meets and falls in love with gentleman thief Gaston (Herbert Marshall), and they start scamming people together. This would work, except that they have to keep moving from place to place to stay one step ahead of the law. Eventually, though, Gaston gets an idea. The two of them will go to work for Parisian perfume executive Marie Colet (Kay Francis), worming their way into positions of trust so they can later scam her.

At first, their scheme seems to be going to plan. That is, until Gaston starts to fall in love with Colet. Worse, one of Colet's former suitors (Edward Everett Horton) shows up. Not only does he want the girl back; he thinks he recognizes Gaston, having been one of Gaston's previous victims! From there, it's a frantic denouement as Gaston tries to stay one step ahead of the law, and get the girl.

Ernst Lubitsch directed this movie all the way back in 1932. Lubitsch was one of the earliest of the "elegant" comic directors, preceding people like Mitchell Leisen or Billy Wilder by several years, and even working his magic before the era of the screwball comedy. In some ways, it's amazing that a movie like this got made as early as it did. I think that it wasn't until the advent of Busby Berkeley a year later that Hollywood finally worked out all the kinks in converting to sound, and the possibilities of what could be done with the new medium of talking pictures. Before then, a lot of the feature-length comedies were either filmed stage plays -- with the stagy look (although Trouble in Paradise is based on a play, there's nothing stagy about it) -- or static drawing-room comedies of manners, movies which look incredibly dated today. Lubitsch's work, however, is a giant step forward.

Trouble in Paradise has been released to DVD, but it's part of the more expensive Criterion Collection.

Jewel Robbery

One of the movies that TCM showed in September as part of the Star of the Month salute to Kay Francis is Jewel Robbery. I hadn't seen it before, so I couldn't recommend it at the time. But having seen it, I can say that it's a hoot. And it's showing again tomorrow at 6:15 AM ET.

Kay Francis plays the female lead, as a woman married to a Viennese baron but feeling trapped in a loveless marriage. She wants some excitement in her marriage, and gets it when one day, while shopping a jewelry shop, in walks a notorious jewel thief played by William Powell. Immediately, she feels smitten by Powell, and wants to be with him instead of her crummy husband.

The movie was made in 1932, and as such the plot is both a bit old-fashioned and influenced by the fact the Production Code was not yet being enforced. It doesn't take long at all for the police to figure out who their man is, and get him into a stake-out, which is typical for the shorter movies of the early 1930s. On the other hand, there's also the intimation that crime does pay.

More interesting, however, is the actual jewel robbery. Powell gives his victims cigaretts that are filled with wacky tabacky, although the script never actually uses any words to describe it that way -- and espcially not the word marijuana. The cigarettes make their smokers giddy, to the point that Powell leaves a pack with the police, and when they smoke them, the police start making prank phone calls! One of the victims gets sleepy, and Powell tells that victim that when he wakes up, he'll be hungry!

Jewel Robbery is the sort of movie that they don't make any more, and probably can't make any more, largely because for all the shock it would have caused in 1932, it would be seen as quite tame today. The other consequence of this is that Jewel Robbery isn't available on DVD, either. Perhaps with TCM's Star of the Month treatment of Kay Francis, Warner Home Video will finally get their act together and release more of her movies to DVD.