How many in favor

Next up on the list of movies that I recorded off of TCM because it had an interesting synopsis is 5 Against the House. Recently, I finally got around to watching it; as always, that means you're getting a review of it written here and scheduled for some time in the future after I've written this.

A group of Korean War veteran friends, who are now studying law at a law school in the midwest thanks to the GI Bill, have decided to take a trip out to Nevada for a weekend or so -- the exact amount of time isn't quite made clear and I'd guess it's an end-of-summer trip before the next semester begins -- to do a bit of gambling. They have a bit of fun although, since they're at a casino, one of them, Ronnie (Kerwin Matthews), runs out of money and needs to cash a check at the cashier's. Unfortunately, they approach the cashier just at the same time somebody else is trying robbing it, getting Ronnie and his friends Roy (Alvy Moore), Al (Guy Madison), and Brick (Brian Keith) in a bit of hot water before they can prove they weren't involved with the robbers.

However, this gives Ronnie an idiotic idea. He starts coming up with an idea for the "perfect crime", a way to rob the casino nobody at the casino thinks is possible because they have such good security. And, like Walter Pidgeon at the start of Man Hunt, he's going to go back to Reno just so he can show everybody the proof of concept. However, the plan that he comes up with is not one that he can carry out by himself. He'd need some accomplices, and you can just guess who those accomplices are going to be.

At this point, we start learning a bit more about the group of friends. Ronnie comes from a well-to-do family of the sort that expect their son to go to law school. So in any case he wouldn't need the sort of money that comes from holding up a casino. Al, for his part, has been pursuing a woman while in law school. That woman, Kay (Kim Novak), is a nightclub singer, which seems like rather an odd person for a law student to be chasing after, but there you are. Al is definitely the one person who wouldn't want to take part in such a charade, especially after he finally convinces Kay to marry him.

But then there's Brick. Brick saved Al's life over in Korea, which is part of why Al is such good friends with Brick and trying to help him through law school although he's not really suited for it. Worse, Brick's experiences in Korea left him with a nasty case of PTSD for which he spent some time in an Army hospital after getting back from Korea. Al thinks that perhaps Brick could benefit from going back into the hospital and getting more psychiatric treatment, but Brick wants none of that. If anthing, he's become the movie trope of the sociopathic criminal. So when he learns of Ronnie's idea, he takes to it. Worse, he plans to go through with the plot for real and not just Ronnie's idea of proof of concept. And he'll use force to get Al and Kay to take part in the heist as well. So it's a very tense group of friends who make their way to Reno to try to rob a casino....

The idea behind 5 Against the House is quite good, but again, it's another of those movies where it's fairly easy to see why it's not so well remembered today. In addition to a cast of B actors and one A actress, the movie suffers a bit from having a pretty far-fetched plot in that it's not the sort of thing that could possibly work in real life. The cast does a good job with the material and certainly makes it worth watching even if the whole ides sems unrealistic.

The Notorious Landlady

A few weeks ago, I did a post on The Velvet Touch. I was thinking about that movie a I watched another movie that for some reason I though was coming up on the TCM schedule soon, The Notorious Landlady.

The movie starts off with a bit of a prologue in a fashionable part of London where the residents include elderly Mrs. Dunhill (Estelle Winwood). On her travels in and out of the neighborhood, she has to deal with one of those bratty kids who keeps popping up to be bratty whenever that's what's needed for the plot. As the movie opens he likes to terrorize people by pointing his cap gun at them. Everybody hears a shot, except that this time it's not from the cap gun but from one of the other houses on the square.

Fast forward several months. Carly Hardwicke (Kim Novak) lives in one of the houses on the square, and has offered a flat to let, preferably to a couple. One family does show up, but they realize that this is Carly Hardwicke, and walk away, which means that she has a past. It doesn't take much to guess what that past is, since we saw the prologue. So we know what the "notorious" in the title is referring to.

Not knowing is Bill Gridley (Jack Lemmon). Bill is an American, working in the Foreign Service and having just been transferred to London from Saudi Arabia. So of course he wouldn't know what happened six months previously. He cottons on fairly quickly that Carly, dressed as the maid of the house, is in fact not a maid but the lady of the house, and that she's alone. Carly had wanted a couple to rent, but she's hard up for money, so she relents and rents the entire second story to Bill.

The next day at work, Bill mentions where he found a place to rent, and the name sounds very familiar to Bill's boss, Franklyn Ambruster (Fred Astaire). Ambruster does a bit of research, and realizes that Hardwicke is presumed to be the one who fired that shot that everybody heard in the prologue. The belief is that it killed her husband, who has been missing ever since that shot, and that Carly is therefore the obvious suspect in a murder case. The only thing is, nobody's been able to find Mr. Hardwicke's body, which is kind of important if you're going to try someone for murder.

Having an officer in the foreign service be involved in a case like this wouldn't do for the Americans, but they don't have much choice since Bill is renting that flat. So Ambruster brings in Scotland Yard and they impress on Bill the idea that he should help them in getting information by more or less spying on his landlady and getting whatever information he can that will either help prove her guilt or exonerate her.

It's not too hard to guess where things are going to go for much of the rest of the movie, since this is a more comedic mystery. Bill is going to fall in love with Carly, but there's going to be one misunderstanding after another that makes Bill think perhaps Carly really is a murderess. However, since it's a lighter movie, the viewer can presume that she is in fact not the killer. And indeed, Mr. Hardwicke does eventually show up.

The Notorious Landlady is another of those movies that doesn't quite work, in large part because it has to hew to so many of the tropes of the genre that we know where it's going to be going. If it were a noir, we'd know Mrs. Hardwicke is bad news; here, we know that some coincidence is going to come to exonerate her. The script is also a bit unoriginal, making unnecessary homages to some classic films. The Notorious Landlady was filmed in 1961 and has one scene of Jack Lemmon tell Kim Novak he "adores" her that felt like it came straight out of the final scene of The Apartment. And there's a scene of a shower drain that looked like it could have been taken from the editing room of Psycho. The Notorious Landlady also runs 123 minutes, which is a good half hour too long for material like this.

So I'd say it's with reason that The Notorious Landlady is not the best-remembered movie for any of its stars.

Pal Joey

I've said on several occasions that musicals are not my favorite genre. One of the movies that's a good example of my thoughts on the genre is Pal Joey.

Frank Sinatra stars as the titular Joey, that being Joey Evans, a man who got booted out of San Francisco's Barbary Coast nightclub scene for, well, reasons. Some time later, he shows up back in San Francisco, in need of a job. Fortunately for him, his old friend Ned Galvin (Bobby Sherwood) plays piano for the band at the club Joey walks into. The MC has failed to show up for the evening's show, probably for having drunk too much. So Joey decides to be assertive, going up on stage and taking the part of the MC, singing a song and even dancing with the chorus girls in one of the numbers!

One of those chorus girls is Linda English (Kim Novak), he immediately develops feelings for her, although those feelings are not exactly mutual. Indeed, Joey wangles his way into getting a room next to Linda's at her rooming house, and continuing to pursue her.

The band is asked to do a show at a party put on by wealthy widow Vera Simpson (Rita Hayworth). Joey recognizes her as a former chorus girl who did a striptease act on stage. Joey even blackmails her into doing the act under the guise of raising money for the charity auction that Vera has been holding at her party. But Joey realizes Vera has two things he could use: class, and money. Joey has dreamed of opening up his own nightclub, and here's a woman who could help him achieve that goal.

So Joey is trying to pursue two different women, and neither one is particularly happy about Joey's relationship with the other woman. It gets to the point that Vera agrees to fund the club, but when she learns about Joey's relationship with Linda, she says she won't let the club open unless Linda is sent packing.

Pal Joey is filled with the songs of Rodgers and Hart, and some of the songs are quite good. However, they aren't from the original Broadway musical of Pal Joey; I immediately knew that "I Didn't Know What Time it Was" comes from Too Many Girls. Some of the songs slow the proceedings down way too much. And then there's the ending, which really struck me as untrue.

On the other hand, a lot of people will like Frank Sinatra's singing (Hayworth and Novak, of course, were dubbed), and the songs as a whole. It's just that they're in the service of an inane plot that doesn't quite work. Still, as alwys, judge for yourself.

Boys' Night Out

I've mentioned a few times in the past that I always enjoy watching those 60s color comedies at least for the set design, even if the movies aren't always particularly good. Another example of such a movie that came up short for me was Boys' Night Out.

Fred (James Garner) is a man from suburban Connecticut who works in New York City, taking the train in with three of his friends: George Drayton (Tony Randall), Doug Jackson (Howard Duff) and Howard McIllenny (Howard Morris). The four man, in addition to commuting together, also spend every Thursday evening staying in the city for a night out. Except that over time, the nights out haven't been particularly exciting, with them just drinking in a bar.

And then one night, Fred sees his boss Mr. Bingham (Larry Keating) walk in with a lovely lady who Fred knows is not Mrs. Bingham. Bingham is obviously wealthy enough that he can keep an apartment in town and have his girlfriend in it, not having to rely on an employee like C.C. Baxter to lend him an apartment for his assignations. Our four commuters start thinking about the idea of being able to have such an affair, although it is of course much too expense for middle-level workers such as themselves.

However, one of them gets the idea that perhaps they could rent an apartment together to put up a woman, and each of them could use it one night a week. At first, the math on this doesn't work out, as the good apartments are still too expensive. This is much to Fred's relief, as he doesn't like the idea since it implies they're all sharing the same women. The other three all have wives, and while Fred doesn't, he has his mother (Jessie Royce Landis) living with him. So he goes for an apartment that's obviously going to be out of their price range. But because of a scandal that happened there, the landlord is willing to rent it out cheap.

Meanwhile, they need a woman, and Fred is shocked that he's able to get one to respond so quickly. That woman is Cathy (Kim Novak). What she doesn't tell Fred is that she's a graduate student in sociology, working on her dissertation, on the sexual fantasies of the suburban male. So when she figures out what Fred and his friends have in mind, she's actually thrilled with the prospect, since it's perfect for the thesis. Her doctoral adviser, Prof. Prokosch (Oskar Homolka), however, thinks it won't work.

And to be fair, it doesn't quite work out the way Cathy or any of the guys plan it. Cathy starts to fall in love with Fred, and he with her, although they're not certain they realize it. The other three guys come to the apartment for their one night a week, and all three wind up being less than romantic, more getting companionship out of Cathy than they could at home with their harried wives and families.

As for those wives -- and Fred's mom -- they suspect something is up, but they can't quite figure it out, hiring a detective and then ultimately heading into New York to find out for themselves what's going on. They're going to find out just in time for the big comedic finale.

One of the big problems I had with Boys' Night Out is that that big finale was for me more grating than comedic. It also didn't help that Fred's three friends all come across as more obnoxious than funny, too. Even Tony Randall, who's normally quite good at material like this.

I did mention the set design, which is certainly worth a look, as in this view of the main room of the apartment Cathy is billeted in:



There's also the foam kitchen appliances in the apartment, with other pastels in the houses in Connecticut. It wasn't enough to make the movie fully worthwhile for me, but I'm sure there are other people who are going to like Boys' Night Out a lot more than I did. This is definitely one you should watch and judge for yourself.

The art of Kim Novak

As I've stated quite a few times before, I like to listen to the international broadcasters that used to be on shortwave radio back in the days when that was the technology to use since Internet audio hadn't been developed yet. Anyhow, Thursday's edition of Radio Prague had the feature story 1950’s Hollywood actress Kim Novak exhibits her paintings in Prague.

There's text and a couple of photos at the link above. If you want to listen to the audio, there's an MP3 available for download here. The audio is just over 10 minutes, which means the file should be either about 5 or 10 MB; I can't remember offhand whether Radio Pragues individual features are 64 or 128 kbit/s. (The full-length program including news and current affairs is definitely 64 kbit/s, making Thursday's broadcast 10.5 MB for a program about 23 minutes.) The article states that the exhibit will be running for another two weeks, so if you're near Prague, you still have a chance to see the paintings. Some of Novak's work can also be seen at her website.

Middle of the Night

The Essentials returns tonight, with Drew Barrymore sitting down with Robert Osborne for a third season of discussing movies that are apparently considered "essential" for a well-rounded film fan to have seen. Tonight's first essential is Marty at 8:00 PM, which leads off half a night of movies written by Paddy Chayefsky and directed by Delbert Mann. The second of them is Middle of the Night, at 9:$5 PM.

Fredric March stars as Jerry Kingsley, a widower who works in New York's garment industry by day, and goes home to a lovely apartment with his spinster sister Evelyn (Edith Meiser) by night. He's also got an adult daughter Marilyn (Lee Grant), but she's got a life of her own, married to Jack (Martin Balsom) with a kid on the way. Jerry had a good life, with the emphasis on had; now, he's a bit of a lonely old man.

Of course, you know that's going to change. Enter Betty Preisser (Kim Novak). She's a secretary working in the receiving office in the dingy ground level of the clothier that Kingsley and his business partner run. She's also a divorcée, having left the instability of her musician husband George (Lee Philips) and living with her mother, Torchy Blane. Well, actually, it's not Torchy Blane; it's Glenda Farrel playing a decidedly olded-up and less energetic woman than Torchy ever was. Now, you'd think that this nice woman would be just right for Jerry, but that's not what's going to happen. Betty gets sick and has to leave early, and when Jerry stops by her place to see how she's doing, the two feel a spark between them.

Or at least, they think they feel a spark between them. They're both lonely souls in need of a companion, so perhaps they might just be loving the one they're with rather than being with the one they'd truly love. They also recognize that other people are going to have uncomfortable questions about this new relationship. This was the 1950s, though, so the questions have nothing to do with a boss dating the secretary and any "sexual harassment" issues that might bring up. Instead, once everybody finds out about the relationship, the objections are that Jerry is too old for Betty, and besides, they're really of mismatched backgrounds. They need to find partners more compatible for themselves.

And so, everybody talks at each other about the relationship, or more like talking past each other, which is one of the places that for me the movie really starts to lose steam. The whole time I was watching the movie I felt like the two protagonists would be better off with companionship than love, so I didn't care too much about their relationship. I also couldn't bring myself to care that much about everybody around Jerry and Betty, who to me generally wound up seeming rather nondescript. It's a bit of a shame, since the acting by everybody is quite competent, and the production design is a very nice look at New York City as it was in the late 1950s. Ultimately, if I were going to recommend one of Chayefsky's movies from this period, I'd suggest Marty or The Catered Affair.

But, I'm blogging about Middle of the Night in part because I'm sure that there are other people who are going to like it despite my mixed review. That, and the fact that it seems to be out of print on DVD.

The Legend of Lylah Clare

Tonight is the last night of Kim Novak's turn as TCM's Star of the Month. Among the movies is a bizarre mess that needs to be seen to be believed: The Legend of Lylah Clare, at midnight (ET; it's earlier Thursday evening in the rest of the US).

Peter Finch plays Lewis Zarken, a formerly-successful Hollywood director whose claim to fame was the discovery of the 1930s actress Lylah Clare (Kim Novak). However, Clare died in mysterious circumstances in the late 1930s, and has been a legend ever since; much, I suppose, in the way that a Marilyn Monroe is a real-life legend because of her early death. Since Lylah's death, Lewis hasn't had a particularly stellar career. So what's a director to do? How about making a biopic of the woman he made a star? There's a great idea!

There's the problem of finding an actress suitable to play Lylah, but that's solved when the filmmakers meet Elsa Brinkmann, a struggling Vicki Lester-type actress. The thing is, she looks amazingly like the deceased Lylah Clare. To be honest, it's really not that amazing, when you consider that Elsa, like Lylah, is being played by Kim Novak. Elsa agrees to do the movie, and everybody lives happily ever after.

Oh, heavens no. You wouldn't have a real-life movie here if the movie-within-a-movie went off without a hitch, and this one has a whole bunch of hitches. Lewis begins to fall in love with Elsa, except that one has to wonder whether Lewis is falling in love with Elsa, or the fact that she's another Lylah Clare: part of the old Lylah Clare mystique is that she had been engaged to Lewis before her tragic death. Elsa, for her part, is really getting into the Lylah Clare role, enough so it's to the point that you begin to wonder whether she's being taken over by Lylah the way Norman Bates is taken over by his mother in Psycho.

As I said, The Legend of Lylah Clare is one strange movie. Making things even stranger, or perhaps just messier, is the fact that part of Lylah Clare's story is told in a series of flashbacks, with the movie switching back and forth from the flashbacks and Elsa, to the present day. Meanwhile, back in the present day, they're having trouble getting the movie made: Elsa has figured out that it's Lylah that Lewis still loves, and not her, so she makes life difficult for him, and everybody else in Hollywood who remembers the old Lylah Clare.

The Legend of Lylah Clare is one of those movies that leave you thinking, "What were the movie makers thinking of when they made this?" The plot is baffling at times; the acting uneven, ranging from wooden to over the top; and the sets and costumes are thoroughly overblown. At times, though, the movie has the feel of watching a train wreck: fascinating for what a disaster it is. The only problem is that there are other movies which are even more entertaining disasters than this one. The Oscar. Skidoo. Some of those bad horror or sci-fi B-movies from the 1960s. But as regarding disasters, The Legend of Lylah Clare is still miles ahead of something like Dondi.

The Legend of Lylah Clare has received a release to DVD from the Warner Archive collection, and is apparently part of a Novak box set too.

Jack Lemmon and Kim Novak

Tonight is TCM's third night of Kim Novak movies in her turn as Star of the Month. They'll be showing three of the movies she did with Jack Lemmon, as well as another showing of the interview she did with Robert Osborne at the TCM Film Festival at 10:00 PM. The night begins with Bell, Book, and Candle at 8:00 PM, a movie that I've briefly mentioned in passing a few times and one that I've said doesn't quite tickle my fancy the way I'm sure it will tickle other people's fancies. Another film with Lemmon and Novak about which I feel the same way is Phffft!, which is airing at 3:30 AM.

The title Phffft! comes from an onomatopoetic word used by gossip columnist Walter Winchell. Sounding somewhat lie the sound of all the air rushing out of a deflating balloon, the word was used to signify a celebrity marriage that was about to break up. In this case, that marriage involves Lemmon, but not Novak: the wife is played by Judy Holliday, who had recently starred alongside Lemmon in It Should Happen to You. Holliday plays Nina Tracey, who writes a soap opera in the days when soap opera were only making their move from radio to television. Lemmon plays her husband Robert, who served in the Navy in World War II and after the war became a successful tax attorney. Well, they've been married eight years, and things have hit one of those lulls. On an impulse, both parties think that the marriage isn't working, and decide to get a divorce.

Nina goes off to Reno to get the divorce, and when she returns, it's back to the dating game for both of them. Especially Robert. He moves in with his friend Charles (Jack Carson), who immediately starts setting up Robert on blind dates. One of those blind dates is with Janis (Kim Novak), and they begin to start a relatoinship. Meanwhile, Charles decides to try to put the moves on Nina, which would certainly create an awkward situation for all three of them. As for Nina, her mother Edith (Luella Gear) is also around, trying to help out Nina in the romance department.

You can probably guess where all of this is leading. Something is going to happen to make Nina and Robert meet not only by coincidence, but in a way that makes both of them wonder whether or not the two would have been better off not getting that divorce in the first place. It's a them that Hollywood visited earlier in The Awful Truth, which is coming on after Phffft! at 5:00 AM, ans which was only remade as Let's Do It Again a few years before Phffft! There's also Divorce, American Style, which came out in the 1960s and explored similar themes. Of the various movies, I think I like The Awful Truth the best, because Cary Grant (especially), Ralph Bellamy, and Irene Dunne simply glitter in this sort of romantic comedy. Divorce, American Style has the interesting angle of being able to explore things as far as comedies go from a more grown-up attitude thanks to the loosening strictures of the Production Code by the late 60s. (I suppose drama could have done a good job of being intelligent about the issue back in the 1950s, suddenly being reminded of Judy Holliday's own The Marrying Kind.) As for Phffft!, it's OK, but there's something about it that I find a bit bland. It's not a bad movie, mind you, but it's not one of my particular favorites.

Phffft! got a DVD release a couple of years back, although I don't know if it's still in print, since the TCM shop claims it's not available.

The Man With the Golden Arm

Another movie I thought I had done a blog post about before, but apparently haven't, is The Man With the Golden Arm. It airing tonight at 12:15 AM as part of the first night in the salute to Star of the Month Kim Novak.

The star of the movie isn't Novak, but Frank Sinatra. He plays Frankie Machine, a man who has just gotten out from a six-month stint in a federal prison/hospital. Frankie was a dealer for an illegal card game that was raided, but got only the punishment that he did because of his heroin addiction. His time at the federal facility was supposed to detox him, as well as giving him a new skill so that he could start a new life and leave the old, drug-filled lifestyle behind. That skill is playing the drums, and Frankie is hoping he can get his card from the musicians' guild so that he can join a band. (As if there were no drugs in the world of jazz, but that's another story.)

Anyhow, we quickly see why Frankie was a user in the first place: he's got a lot of problems, and that's putting it mildly. Perhaps chief among these is his wife Zosh (Eleanor Parker). She's confined to a wheelchair, thanks to a car accident suffered when Frankie was driving drunk. And dammit, Zosh isn't about to let Frankie forget what happened, although to be fair, being crippled by your spouse probably would change your outlook on life and that spouse rather significantly. There's also Schwiefka (Robert Strauss), the man who organizes the card game for which Frankie deals. Finally, perhaps as important as Zosh is Loiue (Darren McGavin). He's the man who sold Frankie his heroin, and he would love to get a good customer back.

Trying to help Frankie are two people. First is his good friend Sparrow (Arnold Stang). Sparrow, however, lives on the fringes of the law, and this presents a problem straight off when Sparrow tries to help out Frankie by getting a suit for Frankie to wear to auditions. That suit is shoplifted, and getting Frankie in trouble with the law again is what enables Schwiefka and Louie to sink their claws back into Frankie. The other good person is Frankie's old flame, Molly (Star of the Month Novak). Frankie would be with her if it weren't for what he did to Zosh, and Molly would be willing to be with him if she could be sure that Frankie has really kicked his drug habit. At the same time, Zosh is worried that Frankie is going to leave her for Molly -- not without reason.

The Man With the Golden Arm is about as gritty as you could get for a movie in the mid-1950s, and as far as I can tell is well-acted. I have no idea what heroin addiction is really like, not even second-hand, so I can't really speak to how accurate everything is. But Sinatra's scenes of the effects of the herois use, and especially the withdrawal symptoms, are disquieting. I have a feeling Molly is a bit too perfect, while Sparrow is also a bit too clean-cut for a man in his position. He looks more like the romanticized characters in Damon Runyon stories than a gritty petty criminal, who would probably look old before his time. Those criticisms aside, the story is quite good, although the ending is a bit convenient.

The Man With the Golden Arm is another of those movies that got a DVD release in the past, but seems to be out of print, as it's only available from Amazon, and not the TCM Shop.

The idiot should have learned from Double Indemnity

Back in August, 2008, I briefly mentioned the movie Pushover. It's finally back on the TCM schedule, very early tomorrow morning at 5:00 AM ET. (Or, I suppose, it's in the middle of the night overnight for those of you in more westerly time zones.)

Fred MacMurray plays Paul Sheridan, whom we see at the start of the movie helping gorgeous Lona McLane (Kim Novak in one of her earliest performances) when she has car problems. We quickly learn that Sheridan is a police detective, and that he deliberately sabotaged Lona's car: she's the moll of a bank robber, and he's trying to get to the bank robber through her.

In theory, this is supposed to lead to him and his partner. But Lona's got better ideas. She quickly realizes that Paul is a copper, and that this might be a way out of her predicament. Perhaps the two of them can double-cross her boyfriend, and run off with the very large amount of money. You'd think that Fred MacMurray would have learned from Double Indemnity ten years earlier that double crossing the authorities and hooking up with a hot blonde to do it can lead to no good end. Besides, he should have known the Production Code would never let him get away with it. Still, we wouldn't have a movie had he learned from his mistakes, so he goes along, and he and his partner stake out her apartment trying to get the bad guy, while he's really trying to get to a time when the two can make their escape unseen....

Pushover is in many ways a formulaic part of the film noir genre, and having been made years after the great orginial movies of the genre, you'd think it's a lesser movie. To be honest, I don't think Columbia, the studio that produced this movie, gave it quite the treatment they would give more prestigious films from the era. But none of that should be taken to imply the movie isn't good. Even though we know exactly where it's going, the ride is still enjoyable. And as with a movie like Juggernaut, part of the fun is seeing what ingenious device the writers will come up with to get the evil plot to fail.

When I mentioned Pushover back in 2008, I said I was disappointed that it hadn't gotten a DVD relase. Since then, it has, as part of a box set of Columbia noirs. That set also includes Nightfall, another movie I blogged about ages ago that at the time hadn't gotten a DVD release. I see the set also has City of Fear, which I should perhaps blog about some time.