Oxford around a Yank

The past, wrote L.P. Hartley in The Go-Between, is a foreign country. I certainly couldn't help but think of the past as a very different place when I watched the late 1930s film A Yank at Oxford.

Lakedale College is another one of those small liberal-arts schools that dotted Hollywood pictures in the first half of the 20th century, located in one of those Hollywood-style small cities. Dan Sheridan (Lionel Barrymore) is the publisher of the local paper, but you wonder how the paper makes any money considering how it keeps missing the deadline while Dan waits for news about the latest athletic exploits of his son Lee (Robert Taylor), a star on the college's track team.

Lee's done well enough in athletics that it's giving him a swelled head, although the fawning headline press he gets from his father's paper isn't helping either. In part because of this and becaue he really is the biggest thing the town has going for it. So he's awarded a scholarship to one of the colleges at Oxford University, which you know he's going to accept because with a title like A Yank at Oxford, he kind of has to. So fairly quickly we get Lee sent over to Europe and then on a train to Oxford.

Except that Lee keeps being just as much an arrogant blankety-blank before he even gets to Oxford, pissing off his fellow train passengers Paul Beaumont (Griffith Jones), Ramsey (Peter Croft), and Wavertree (Robert Coote) without realising that these are going to be some of his fellow students. So they respond with a practical joke that gets Lee in trouble with the Dean of the college (Edmund Gwenn). And it's not the last bit of trouble that Lee gets himself into.

Lee more or less take's Paul's place on the track team, and then also starts dating Paul's sister Molly (Maureen O'Sullivan). As for Paul, he's busy seeing Elsa Craddock (Viven Leigh), who works at a local bookstore and often goes to London to hunt down rarer books for the customers. The only thing is, Elsa is Mrs. Craddock, wife of the bookstore owner. And as for Wavertree, he gets in even more ridiculous trouble. Apparently, he's got a rich uncle who got himself expelled from Oxford. If Wavertree can get himself expelled from Oxford, too, he'll be in line for a bigger inheritance.

More of the dew-eyed American look at olde England comes in the form of rowing. Not just small boats on ponds, but crew, as Lee gets himself on the team for the big Oxford v. Cambridge boat race. But things could go disastrous for everybody when Elsa decides to go see Paul on campus and Mr. Craddock gets suspicious. Having that sort of relationship is decidedly frowned upon and could get you expelled. Unfortunately the plot solution is not to pass of a relationship between Elsa and Wavertree, which would satisfy all of the students.

A Yank at Oxford might have been what audiences of 1938 wanted, but oh my goodness was this one full of The Quiet Man-style tropes for me, where everybody takes a sentimental look at a place as they think from far away it exists but in reality probably never was anything close to that. Normally I like that the past is different, and that's not really the problem here as the lazy stereotypes. Still, watch and judge for yourself.

Pride and Prejudice (1940)

One of the prestige movies that I had not actually seen before is MGM's 1940 adaption of the Jane Austen novel Pride and Prejudice. So the last time that it showed up on TCM a few months back, I made a point of recording it so that I could finally get around to watching it and doing a full-length post on it.

The first thing to note is that the movie is based on a stage adaptation of the novel and that other changes were made to the novel in part to get it to run in a reasonable amount of time and in part because the Production Code would have had problems in a few places. I haven't read the original book, so I can't judge how much the changes affect what Jane Austen was trying to achieve with her work. But from what I've read, the main basic plot is still there.

Mr. Bennet (Edmund Gwenn) is the father in a family that doesn't quite have the means or the social standing to be truly members of the British upper classes of the Regency era. Not that the family is poor, mind you; it's more that their situation is best described as modest. Worse is that Bennet and his wife (Mary Boland) produced five daughters, and this is an era when property couldn't really be bequeathed to unmarried women like the daughters. So the parents are desperate to find suitably men to marry their daughters off to, starting with eldest daughter Elizabeth (Gree Garson). Otherwise, a cousin they don't like, Collins (Melville Cooper) will inherit the house.

Meanwhile, even without having read the novel I know that it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. Into the small town where the Bennets live comes Mr. Bingley, a wealthy bachelor renting one of the manor houses in the area, along with his good friend Mr. Darcy (Laurence Olivier). Mrs. Bennett immediately gets the idea of introducing her daughters to these two in the hopes that one or both of them will decide to marry a Bennet daughter.

But there are a bunch of catches along the way. One is Mr. Collins, who wants to marry Elizabeth. There's also the fact that Darcy is not really of the same social stratum as the Bennets. And then there's Lady Catherine (Edna May Oliver), who has been helping out Darcy. She's set up an allowance for Darcy, and can remove it if he marries someone she disapproves of. There are further complications involving the other sisters, one of whom is being pursued by a man named Wickham who has a bit of a past that's all kept mysterious.

It's fairly obvious, however, that Darcy and Elizabeth are going to meet and fall in love, and eventually get married at the end of the story so that audiences can have their happy ending, which was particularly important with war clouds on the horizon.

Will fans of the original novel, especially if they've seen later adaptations that are more faithful to the source material, enjoy this 1940 version? I don't know. But I can say that for people who enjoy the sort of literary adaptation that Hollywood studios made in the pre-war era, they'll probably enjoy it quite a bit. MGM, as I've said, was probably the prestige studio in Hollywood, and their production values are the kind that work exceedingly well for a period piece like this even if it's not quite the same period as in the book. They've also got a lot of stars and character actors; Ann Rutherford and Maureen O'Sullivan play two of Elizabeth's sisters, for example.

So I'd say there's a lot worth recommending in this adaptation of Pride and Prejudice.

The Flame Within

I've got an acquaintance on a non-movie internet forum I frequent who's a psychiatrist of some reknown. One time, I accidentally compared him to a psychologist, and a fair bit of humor ensued over the idea that anybody would do something so scandalous as referring to the guy as a psychologist. Anyhow, I bring this up because I couldn't help but think of that acquaintance as I was watching the movie The Flame Within.

Ann Harding plays the psychiatrist in question, one named Dr. Mary White, although she really does seem closer to the popular perception of a psychologist, and the amount of stuff that could have passed for pop psychology decades later surprised me. There's a fellow doctor, Dr. Gordon Phillips (Herbert Marshall), who loves her and wants to marry her, but the movie was released in 1935 and everybody thinks marriage means Mary would have to give up her career which she's reluctant to do because psychiatry is a cutting-edge field and she wants to be a pioneer. (Who can blame her?)

Into this comes a patient, which ought not be surprising since these people are after all doctors. That patient is the idle rich young woman Lillian Belton (Maureen O'Sullivan), who has just tried to commit suicide, which is a decided no-no under the Production Code. Only evil people would do that. Lillian is brought to Dr. White's posh upper-story apartment/office, and in the course of one session tries to commit suicide again by jumping out the window! It turns out that Lillian was in Paris last season, and met another idle rich man, Jack Kerry (Louis Hayward). She immediately fell in love with him, although he only saw her as a friend at most. His true love is alcohol. Lillian thinks she can reform Jack and wants him to be with her instead of the bottle.

So Drs. White and Phillips get in touch with Jack and get him to have a session with Dr. White. And over the course of several sessions, Dr. White finally convinces Jack to stop drinking and to try to get a job, in this case in airplane design although the job seems to have more to do with the passenger cabin than what we traditionally think of as aerospace.

The only cath is what in pop psychology would be called, if memory serves, transference. Dr. White having helped Jack, he thinks she's the right woman for him, not Lillian! And so naturally he starts gettin the hots for Dr. White and that makes Lillian unhappy. Now perhaps if Dr. White had been a psychologist she would have understood all this. But she's supposed to be a psychiatrist, so she doesn't see any of this. And while she doesn't actively try to take Jack away from Lillian, she doesn't actively try to stop his pursuing her while being married to Lillian. At least, not until Dr. Phillips has an intervention with her.

I suppose there might have been an interesting idea at the core of The Flame Within. But boy is that brought down by the script. On the bright side, it all comes crashing down so hard that the movie is unintenionally funny at times. The ending is pure Production Code and might enrage some people, but I saw it as just another symptom of how much of a mess the movie is. All of the actors try their best, but the can't overcome the turkey of a script.

Thankfully, The Flame Within is programmer-length, so watching it crash and burn won't take too much of your time. And it really is worth one watch if you're in the mood to watch the sort of movie that crashes and burns.

The Voice of Bugle Ann

With all that's been going on in my life, I haven't had so much time or energy to watch enough movies to keep the blog going on a daily basis. Recently, however, I did watch a pair of movies off of my DVR that just happen to be coming up this week on TCM as part of Summer Under the Stars. First up is The Voice of Bugle Ann, on TCM tomorrow, August 8, at 12:15 PM as part of a day of the films of Maureen O'Sullivan.

The nominal star here is Lionel Barrymore, playing Spring Davis, an old farmer in a rural part of Missouri who hunts foxes and raccoons together with his fellow farmers, using their dogs to track the prey. Spring has a long-time wife (Spring Byington), and an adult son Benjy (Eric Linden) who also works the farm. One of Spring's dogs has a littler, and Spring winds up taking care of the runt of the litter, a dog he names Bugle Ann because it grows up to have the perfect call for hunting.

Meanwhile, on an older farm in the area, a new man arrives, Jacob Terry (Dudley Digges). He's planning to raise sheep, which means fencing that will be dangerous to the dogs that roam the country. He's got an adult daughter Camden (Maureen O'Sullivan), who lives with Dad even though she has reason to think he's a mean guy. She and Benjy unsurprisingly fall in love, while nobody loves Jacob. Jacob, in fact, threatens to shoot dogs that trespass on his property.

This leads to a confrontation when Bugle Ann goes missing and presumed dead somewhere near the Terry property, and despite Jacob's protestations, every other farmer in the area is convinced that Terry shot an innocent dog. Jacob and Spring get into it, with Spring shooting Jacob dead when it looks like Jacob is about to draw his gun on Spring. Now, this is where the movie develops a bit of a problem, in that you'd think all the other witnesses around would say that Spring was shooting in self defense (even it it wasn't so clear). There's nobody who would support Jacob over Spring, so there ought to be insufficient evidence to convict. But Spring gets convicted and sent to a long prison sentence. Camden leaves, but refuses to sell the farm.

Things get really weird about a year later when everybody swears they could hear Bugle Ann's call again one night, even though they know she's dead because they eventually find her collar. And then Spring gets a mysterious pardon from the governor even though his is a case the governor really should take no interest in. What really happened that fateful night?

The Voice of Bugle Ann is the sort of movie that to me made me think of the famous Variety headline "Stix Nix Hick Pix" that had appeared about a year before the movie. It's not a bad movie; it's more that everything seems somewhat off. I don't know that Hollywood ever got the farm right, at least not in the days when they were mostly bound to the back lot. Now, there are stronger stories that overcome this, such as the lovely Hide-Out from a few years earlier. But The Voice of Bugle Ann really feels like it's missing something that I just can't put my finger on.

Still, it's worth a watch for the odd plot twist, and it doesn't show up all that often, so catch its rare TCM airing.

Woman Wanted

It just so happens that two movies that I have on my DVR are both on the TCM lineup for the daytime on Friday. Since tomorrow is also Thursday Movie Picks, it means that I'm going to blog about one of the movies tomorrow and the other one today, a good 36-plus hours before its airing. That first movie is Woman Wanted.

Maureen O'Sullivan plays Ann Gray, a woman on trial for murder where the case has just gone to the jury. While waiting for the verdict, through the window her eyes catch those of lawyer Tony Baxter (Joel McCrea), who isn't involved in the case and doesn't recognize her at all, which seems mildly odd since this is apparently a prominent murder trial that would have been in all the papers. Tony pantomimes asking Ann to dinner, although for obvious reasons she's not available.

The jury comes back, and Ann is found... guilty! As she's being remanded into custody, some gangsters deliberately crash into the police car, allowing her the opportunity to escape. She naturally takes it, and winds up running into Baxter outside the entrance to his apartment hotel, so she takes him up on that offer for a meal, following him up to his apartment.

However, there are all sorts of problems, as you can guess with a woman who's a fugitive from justice, even if she insists she's not guilty, and the movie lets us know that this is in fact the case. Ann's picture is in all the papers so certainly somebody will recognize her; sure enough, that happens as the house detective and a policeman come up to Baxter's apartment looking for her. But that's not the only problem as far as Tony's side of the story is concerned. He's got a fiancée of sorts in Betty Randolph (Adrienne Ames), and she recognizes that there's another woman in the apartment, which needless to say displeases her.

As for Ann, her problems are with the gangsters who facilitated her escape. They weren't doing it for altruistic reasons. They know that Ann is not guilty. But the murder involved $250,000 in bonds that have gone missing. The gangsters think that Ann knows something about where those bonds are, and want her to tell them, even though she doesn't know where they are.

With that in mind, Tony and Ann set out and leave the city partly to escape the police, partly to stay one step ahead of the gangsters, led by Smiley (Louis Calhern), and partly to try to prove Ann's innocence. The action shifts fairly quickly to a road-house, then a boat house, and finally to Smiley's nightclub, where Ann seems to be in danger. But we know this is the sort of movie that's going to have a happy ending, even if the Production Code hadn't required the guilty party to get what's coming to him.

Woman Wanted is a perfectly acceptable B movie, surprisingly good in fact considering that it's an MGM movie released at a time (1935) when it was really Warner Bros. that was cranking out the great Bs and programmers like Fog Over Frisco, which came out about a year before Woman Wanted. In Woman Wanted, we have two appealing leads in O'Sullivan and McCrea, and a story that really zips along in its running time of 67 minutes.

Woman Wanted is definitely worth a watch, and is also available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive Collection.

Hannah's sisters and her

A couple of months back, TCM had a tribute to the late actor Max von Sydow. One of his films they ran is one in which he's got a supporting role is Hannah and Her Sisters. It's going to be on again, early tomorrow morning at 4:00 AM (or, I suppose, overnight tonight depending on what time zone you're in).

Mia Farrow plays Hannah, one of three daughters in an acting family which is getting together for another Thanksgiving dinner. Patriarch Evan (Lloyd Nolan in his final film) and Mom Norma (Maureen O'Sullivan) do love each other even though they have their squabbles. Hannah is married to Elliot (Michael Caine), not an actor by any means, with a couple of kids. Hannah used to be married to Mickey (Woody Allen), a writer for a sketch comedy TV show.

Hannah's life seems the most in order, as each of her sisters seems to have bigger problems. Lee (Barbara Hershey) is unemployed and living in a sparse studio with her much older artist boyfriend Frederick (that's von Sydow, not that you couldn't figure out which role he was playing since he had a very distinctive look). The other sister, Holly (Dianne Wiest), is trying to get gigs on Broadway or in commercials or anything acting-related, but to shis point she's been rather less than successful, and is reduced to working as a caterer with her friend April (Carrie Fisher).

One Day, Elliot is in a different part of Manhattan for a business meeting but arrives early and has time to kill, so he decides to look for an independent bookstore to browse in. Who should he run into, however, but Lee, who claims to be on her way to her AA meeting? She knows where there's a good bookstore, and after spending some time browsing together, Elliot buys Lee a book of e.e. cummings poetry. The two wind up having an affair, meeting in out of the way hotel rooms.

Holly sees a couple of guys, too, but the relationships don't go so well. Hannah, after her divorce from Mickey, decides to help Mickey and Holly both out by setting the two of them up on a date, but that first date goes disastrously. Then there's an architect whom Holly and April meet at one of their catering gigs. He takes them out to show them the architecture of Manhattan, and Holly even thinks of going out with him, but he can't really decide between the two women.

This being a Woody Allen movie, we also have to talk about his character in more detail. This is another of Allen's nebbish, neurotic types, thinking both that he's got a deadly tumor in his ear and realizing that, as a non-observant Jew, he's got a crisis of faith in wondering what will be after he dies. So he considers joining other religions.

There's quite a lot going on in Hannah and Her Sisters, some of which is quite good, and some of it not as good. Nolan and O'Sullivan shine as the elderly parents in their Thanksgiving scenes together. The Hannah-Elliot-Lee triangle also works well, with all three actors doing a good job and Caine picking up a Supporting Actor Oscar for his part. And as with any Woody Allen movie, people who like New York City will like the photography of New York as it was circa 1985.

Ironically, however, for me, it's the presence of Allen that's one of the weak spots for me. I have to admit I'm not a huge fan of his neurotic shtick from about Annie Hall on, so I tend to be a bit biased against him as an actor. But the contrast in Hannah and Her Sisters was for me even starker than in some of his other movies. We get it, Woody, and it's not as funny as you might think it is.

Allen and Farrow were a couple at the time the movie was made, and some of their children get small roles as Hannah's children. (IMDb also says that Mia Farrow's own apartment was used as one of the sets.) Considering what eventually happened in the Allen/Farrow relationship, some people might find it a bit off-putting. But I didn't find myself thinking about that at all.

When I checked, Hannah and Her Sisters seemed to be out of print on DVD, although it is on Amazon Prime streaming. That's a shame, since the movie is really worth a watch for the performances of pretty much everybody but Woody Allen.

Anna Karenina (1935)

During the TCM Spotlight on remakes back in December, they included a day of literary adaptations, which seems like a slight cheat since it's so easy to do adaptations and, since all of them are remaking a book or play, they're not necesarily remaking a movie. But it gave TCM a chance to run two versions of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. Recently, I sat down to watch the 1935 version.

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. So begins the book, and the first of the unhappy families to be presented is the Oblonskys, with husband Stepan (Reginald Owen) having an affair with the children's governess, much to the consternation of Stepan's wife Dolly (Phoebe Foster). Dolly has a sister Kitty (Maureen O'Sullivan), who is going to be part of the general unhappiness, while Stepan has a sister Anna Karenina (Greta Garbo), who will be part of the major unhappiness of the movie.

Anna has visited Moscow to smooth things over between Stepan and Kitty, and while there she meets the dashing cavalry officer Count Vronsky (Fredric March). Vronsky has been toying with Kitty, who in her turn thinks Vronsky really loves her. The one who really does love Kitty is Levin, who lives out in the country which Kitty really doesn't want but winds up marrying him because there's nobody else for her.

Vronsky and Anna meet at a ball although they kind of know each other since Anna and his mother met on the train down to Moscow. Anna, you see, has a husband (Basil Rathbone) and son (Freddie Bartholomew) back in St. Petersburg. Still, Anna and Vronsky fall in love, even though it's bound to be a doomed relationship.

Thanks to Tolstoy's radical Orthodox Christianity, he's going to present a morality tale about how evil it is for a woman to step out on her husband; this is a perfect coupling for Hollywood's moralistic Production Code. There isn't any way Anna's husband Alexei is going to grant a divorce, even if Tsarist Russia had been as open about it as 1930s Hollywood (in real life) was. So Alexei says no, you can't have a divorce, and if you're not going to stop seeing Vronsky, you're out of the house and don't even get to see our son Sergei.

So Anna leaves to think it over and spend more time with Vronsky, who's got problems of his own. There's a war going on between Serbia (part of the fractious area between Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire at the time) and the Ottomans. Russia ought to remain neutral, and the Tsar hasn't joined the war. But there are a lot of folks in the military who see the Serbs as their Slavic brethren against those heathen Mohammedans, so they want to form a volunteer regiment and fight in Serbia because reasons. Vronsky at first wants to spend time with Anna (although I don't understand how he was able to get enough of a leave of absence to go off to Italy with her), but pressure mounts on him to join that volunteer regiment.

You probably know how the story ends although I'm not going to reveal it here. This isn't a bad retelling of Tolstoy's sprawling novel. Tolstoy's novel, depending on the translation, clocks in somewhere between 800 and 1,000 pages, meaning that for any movie, there's a lot that's going to have to be left out. Thankfully, when MGM made this version a big portion of what was left out was Levin, who serves even more than all the other characters as a vehicle for Tolstoy to expound upon his views not just on Christianity, but on treatment of the peasant classes. It makes the novel a slog at times, and not having much of it in the movie makes the movie move at a much brisker pace.

This is also the sort of material that was right up MGM's alley in an era when they still had Irving Thalberg. The lush MGM style works here instead of causing the problems it would in other genres, although I did at times find the movie trying a bit too hard to dollop on Russianness and not always succeeding. Still, it's an entertaining primer to Tolstoy's source material, if you don't want to deal with all of Tolstoy's philosophy.

Several of the versions of Anna Karenina are on DVD, including this one which got a release courtesy of the Warner Archive.

The Tall T

I recorded all four of the movies aired last night in the TCM salute to Randolph Scott. I think all four are available on DVD, so I'll start off with a post on the first one aired, The Tall T.

Scott plays Pat Brennan, whom we see at the film's opening riding up to the local stagecoach line station. Pat knows the station-master and his son, and Pat is becoming a sort of neighbor to them as he's taken a nearby ranch which he plans to operate and build up. To do that, however, he's going to need a bull to inseminate whatever cows he has, and to get that, he's going to have to see his old boss, Tenvoorde.

Tenvoorde drives a hard bargain and would franly like Brennan back as a ranch foreman since Brennan was the best one he ever had. Instead, he engages in a bet with Brennan, his bull for Brennan's horse, which is just a set up for Brennan to lose his horse and get to the next piece of action. While Brennan was in town before going to see Tenvoorde, he met stagecoach driver Rintoon (Arthur Hunnicutt), who was getting badgered by bookkeeper Mims (John Hubbard) about hiring a private coach to take him and his new wife to Bisbee for their honeymoon. It turns out that the new Mrs. Doretta Mims (Maureen O'Sullivan) is the daughter of the man with the biggest copper claim in the territory, and so fabulously wealthy as a result. No wonder Mims would want the plain spinster when nobody else seemed to.

Anyhow, Brennan had to walk back to his ranch having lost his horse, which is how he meets up with Rintoon driving the private coach hired by Mr. Mims. They stop at the station where Brennan is hoping to borrow a horse, and find that the station is deserted. Or, at least, the station master and his son don't respond to calls. It turns out that there are three men there, led by outlaw Frank Usher (Richard Boone), and Usher had planned to hijack the stagecoach. He just didn't realize that there was going to be a private coach stopping at the station before the regularly scheduled coach.

So now he's got four hostages he doesn't know what to do with. Thankfully, it's about to become three since Rintoon plays the hero and gets himself shot for it. However, Usher also has a pair of accomplices in Billy Jack (Skip Homeier) and Chink (Henry Silva) he doesn't particularly like. Usher doesn't like to kill, while the other two are gun happy and talk incessantly about women. But Usher is in a bit of luck when he learns about Doretta's rich father....

The Tall T is a taut, well-made little western. Pretty much everybody in the movie does a good job with their role, although I didn't particularly care for the fact that Rintoon was on the irritating side. I don't know whether that was Hunnicutt's fault, or the way the character was written. The story is also well-plotted, being based on a story by Elmore Leonard. The cinematography on the print TCM ran seemed slightly uneven to me: excellent on the long shots, but a bit off on both some of the close shots and the credits, where the background scenes behind the credits seemed a bit grainy. Perhaps that was just my eyes.

All in all, I can recommend The Tall T to any fan of westerns, and am happy to see that the prices on the DVDs are good (although that may mean the prints aren't as good).