Monsieur Verdoux

I've mentioned a bunch of times how there are movies that I've heard of and that keep showing up on TCM, but that I haven't actually paid attention to watching before for whatever reason. One such example is the later Charlie Chaplin movie Monsieur Verdoux, which I'll admit that one of the big reasons for my not having watched it is that I've never considered myself the biggest fan of Chaplin's work. But I figured that at some point, considering Chaplin's reputation, I ought to watch it. With that in mind, the last time TCM ran it, I recorded it, and finally got around to watching the recording and doing a post that I put in the queue to show up here. Now that it's back on TCM, tonight (Sept. 4) at 8:00, it seems like a good time to move this post out of the queue.

The movie opens up with a shot of a grave marker reading "Henri Verdoux 1880-1937" and the voiceover of Verdoux (played by Charlie Chaplin) telling the audience how he had worked for 30 years at a bank in Paris, only to be summarily dismissed when the Depression hit, at which point he turned to murder to make ends meet. Now, somewhat like Arsenic and Old Lace but with more drama and less zany comedy, Verdoux tends toward killing widows or other people who have a reasonable amount of money and no close relatives.

But we then switch to the relatives of a woman close enough have cousins. The Couvais family are cousins to Vilma (never seen because she's already been killed off) who emptied her bank account and went off to live with a Monsieu Varnay, although she did send along a photo, which is important as it will allow them to show up later in the movie and identify Verdoux; after all, there is that Production Code that will require Verdoux to pay for his murder. Verdoux, for his part, is trying to sell off the house he and Vilma lived in to Mme. Grosnay (Isobel Elsom), another widow, from Paris. The only problem is that Henri also tries to put the moves on Grosnay, which she decidedly doesn't want.

Verdoux returns to Paris and eventually finds out where Grosnay lives, at which point he starts wooing her with flowers until she gives in. But he needs more money for his investments which are supposed to support his legitimate, invalided wife and their son, so he fleeces another of his illicit spouses. When he brings the money to that actual Mme. Verdoux, he learns from an old friend about a formula the friend was working on to kill animals with a limited amount of pain and suffering. He then tries that formula on another of his wives, Mme. Bonheur (Martha Raye), only to find that she's the wife who seems unkillable for some reason.

Back in Paris, Mme. Grosnay gives in to Verdoux's advances, and is all set to marry him, except that Mme. Bonheur shows up at the wedding, causing Verdoux to flee and start living in severely reduced circumstances, at least until the law finally catches up with him, as we all know it must thanks to the Production Code.

I can see why fans of Charlie Chaplin would enjoy Monsieur Verdoux. But I can also see why the film was not successful at the box office on its original release. One of those reasons is that audiences back in the day did not see material like this coming from Chaplin, especially since there's none of the Tramp character here. I don't think Monsieur Verdoux quite hits the right mix of comedy and drama On top of that, the movie runs a shade over two hours, which is too long for material like this. And then to top it off, while Chaplin was subtly making points about the economics of human dignity, those points become unsubtle and jarring during the courtroom scene.

So watch Monsieur Verdoux, but know in advance that it has some substantial flaws.

Never Say Die

Since I'm not certain how many movies I'm going to be able to watch off my DVR before the big move, I also put in a DVD to watch, and selected from my big Bob Hope box set a film called Never Say Die.

Hope plays John Kidley, who's at one of those Swiss mountain resorts because he thinks he's quite sick. Indeed, he's a hyopchondriac, and while me may or may not really be sick, he's actually going to have good reason to believe he's sick. But I'm getting ahead of myself here. Kidley also came to this resort to get away from a woman he'd met earlier on his travels to Switzerland, Juno Marko (Gale Sondergaard). She's a widow, and has decided she's fallen in love with Kidley and thinks that he loves her, too. And she's not going to take no for an answer.

Meanwhile, at the resort, another patron isn't sick himself, but has a dog who is sick. The guy being rich, he's getting all sorts of lab tests performed on the dog, which will eventually indicate that the dog is in perfectly normal health for a dog. The problem is that what's normal for a dog is not normal for a human. And somehow, the lab report on the dog doesn't seem to indicate that it's for a dog, or even the name of the patient in an obvious enough place to obviate the next part of the story. As you might be able to guess from what I've written, Kidley's doctor winds up with the report for the dog thinking that it's actually for Kidley, which leads him to believe that Kidley has some sort of acid condition that's basically going to eat away Kidley's body and kill him within a month or so.

Meanwhile, at the resort but apparently not sick is Texan Mickey Hawkins (Martha Raye, who worked with Hope on several films early in his career). She's here trying to get away from Prince Smirnov (Alan Mowbray), a Russian émigré who has fallen in love with Mickey and is fully expecting her to marry him, even though she doesn't want that at all. And he's been hunting her to the ends of the earth. So since she's about to get trapped into a marriage she doesn't want, and Kidley is trying to avoid a marriage he doesn't want, he comes up with a brilliant idea. As he has good reason to believe he's terminally ill, why not have a quickie marriage between him and Mickey which will obviously dissolve, pun fully intended, when he dies.

Of course, we know that Kidley isn't really sick. And further messing things up is the entry of an old flame of Mickey's from back in Texas, Henry Munch (Andy Devine). He's hoping Mickey can marry him, and is understandably miffed to find that Mickey's gone and gotten herself married to someone else. Also, Juno and Smirnov are still around, with Smirnov trying to hasten Kidley's death by challenging him to a duel, leading up to the inevitably conclusion....

The more I get to watch Paramount programmers, which isn't as often as I'd like since TCM doesn't get to show as many of them thanks to Universal holding the rights, the more I find how much I tend to enjoy them. Bob Hope isn't always my cup of tea, but he works well with Martha Raye and the script is fairly good. (I wasn't paying attention and missed Preston Sturges' name as one of the co-writers.) They've also got good production values for the sorts of programmers they were making, without looking inappropriately polished the way certain MGM films do.

In short, Never Say Die is the sort of movie that's great to have on a box set and one that probably deserves more attention, both for Hope, and for Raye when she was younger before she really became known as the "big mouth".

The broadcast of size

About a year ago, I mentioned picking up a cheap Bob Hope box set with a whole bunch of movies I hadn't blogged about before. Recently, I got it back out and put the DVD containing The Big Broadcast of 1938 in the DVD player since I hadn't mentioned a Bob Hope movie in several months.

This was Hope's first feature film, although he had made half a dozen shorts, so he's technically not the star here, although he shows up right at the beginning of the movie. He's Buzz Fielding, a radio announcer who is supposed to be on the S.S. Gigantic, which is going on a transatlantic boat race with the S.S. Colossal, the former having a new radio-powered propeller. But Buzz is currently in jail, because he's got three ex-wives: Cleo (Shirley Ross), Grace (Grace Bradley), and Joan (Dorothy Howe), who are all looking for their alimony. He's also got a fiancée in Dorothy Wyndham (Dorothy Lamour), who bails him out by hocking the engagement ring. Of course, that ring isn't paid for. And Buzz has a $50,000 bet on the Gigantic winning the race.

As for the nominal star of the movie, that's W.C. Fields, playing two characters. T. Frothinghill Bellows owns the Gigantic, and has a brother S.B., also played by Fields. Frothinghill wants his brother to be on the Colossal, as S.B. has a reputation for extremely bad luck, and putting him on the competing ship means it a certainty Bellows' ship will win the race. However, after a golfing scene that has nothing to do with the plot, such as it is, S.B. flies off and lands on the Gigantic.

Buzz and his ex-wives all wind up on the ship, as does Dorothy, along with S.B.'s daughter Martha (Martha Raye, who already has her big mouth in the opening credits). Bob Hayes (Leif Erickson) is the engineer behind the radio propeller, which he may or may not be able to use for various reasons.

But the real point of the movie is for a series of variety numbers. First up is bandleader Shep Fields, whose shtick was "rippling rhythm", whatever that was; he conducts a song with an animated backdrop of an anthropomorphic drop of water. There's a male Mexican singer, and a female opera singer who does Wagner. Some of the stars also get to sing, most notably Hope and Ross doing "Thanks for the Memories", which of course would become Hope's signature song. Fields gets to do a couple more routines.

The Big Broadcast of 1938 was the third (I think) movie Paramount released in the Big Broadcast series, and wasn't really meant to be watched for the plot, more for the musical interludes and comic sequences, making me think of Hollywood Party. I have to admit that I wasn't a huge fan of the variety numbers, and Fields was relatively irritating here. Why, for example, would he stop to play golf (and be obnoxious to everybody around him) instead of getting on the ship? Surely his brother would have made certain he got on the right ship. The movie also ends rather abruptly, as if the writers didn't know how to come up with a real resolution.

Some people may like the variety numbers, as well as Fields' comedy, more than I do. Those people will probably like The Big Broadcast of 1938. For the rest of us, it's more of a time capsule of what audiences might have wanted back in 1938.