Reckless

Another of the movies that TCM ran during Mickey Rooney's turn as TCM's Star of the Month because it had a small juvenile role for Rooney is Reckless.

Rooney is obviously not the star here; he only gets about one scene. The male lead is William Powell. Powell plays Ned Riley, a professional gambler and promoter. As the movie opens, an old lady is coming out of his office. That's Granny (May Robson), who is not Ned's grandmother but the grandmother of Broadway star Mona Leslie (Jean Harlow), who at this point is as well known for the antics she's getting into off-stage as well as what she does on stage. Granny is there to ask for Ned's help in getting Mona bailed out of jail. We also learn that Ned has known Mona since she was a kid, and has done some behind-the-scenes help in making Mona famous.

Ned is able to get Mona out of jail under extenuating circumstances, which is that she leave to go to a theater where she's going to perform a charity function. That's a ruse, but not on Ned's part. Insted, the "charity" in question is the "Society for the Admiration of Mona Leslie", which has one member: Bob Harrison (Franchot Tone). Bob is one of those idle rich playboys whose using his wealth in all the wrong ways, much to the consternation of his father (Henry Stephenson). Even though Ned has secretly always loved Mona, he's not going to try to stop Bob from pursuing Mona. Bob keeps taking Mona out on his yacht, and the two have nice times together. Ned finally works up the courage to tell Mona how he really feels about her, only to find out that she's fallen asleep.

And then Bob and Mona get incredibly drunk and run out of town to get married somewhere where nobody will find them, except that of course the press does find them as well as a bunch of Bob's friends and family who send them telegrams, including one from a Jo. The new couple rushes back to the Harrison home, where Mona meets Jo (Rosalind Russell). Jo has been Bob's nominal fiancée for quite some time, but it feels like another of those upper-crust relationships where the older generation just knows which families should be brought together for the next marriage. Bob likes Jo as a friend, and Jo is a decent person who likes Mona. (Mona, for her part, is trying to be a decent person, although her reputation precedes her.)

At this point, the movie really starts taking a turn. Jo gets married, Bob gets drunk enough to start thinking that perhaps he should have married Jo all along, and Mona finds out that Bob's been letting this on to Jo. She's also gotten pregnant with Bob's kid. Eventually, a drunk Bob winds up in Ned's hotel apartment, finds Ned's gun, and shoots himself in a way that everybody in the public thinks Mona is responsible, to the point that she should be forced to give custody of the kid to the Harrisons.

Reckless is an odd little movie because of the way it changes tone in the middle of the movie from what seems like a light romantic triangle comedy into a fairly ridiculous melodrama. A lot of people have criticized the casting of Jean Harlow as not being right for the role, and Harlow herself wasn't sure. Harlow does her best, as do everybody else. And the problems with Reckless aren't really because of the casting of Harlow. Instead, I think the problems it has are down to the script, which really is a mess as it veers from one act of the plot to the next. The comic parts are better than the melodrama, with May Robson shining.

Still, Reckless is interesting to watch to see as the sort of misfire a studio could have when it used its contract players in the wrong way.

Broadway to Hollywood

Mickey Rooney was TCM's Star of the Month last December, and I suppose I should probably start getting through some of the movies that I recorded not having blogged about before. First up will be one of his juvenile roles which is actually fairly brief, in the movie Broadway to Hollywood.

Rooney is, as I mentioned above, not the star here; that honor goes to Frank Morgan and to a slightly lesser extent Alice Brady. They play Ted and Lulu Hackett respectively, and as the movie opens it's probably some time in the 1880s, although I don't think everything quite fits in terms of the movie's timeline. Ted and Lulu are stars on the vaudeville circuit, which as I understand it would be the early days of vaudeville at least in the US. Ted and Lulu love each other, although Ted has difficulties being faithful, sometimes cavorting with women and sometimes cavorting with the bottle.

Eventually they have a son together, Ted Jr. (played by Jackie Cooper as a juvenile and Russell Hardie as an adult) and bring him up in the world of vaudeville, training him to become part of the act and turn it into a true family act instead of a double. Unfortunately, Ted Sr. and Lulu don't really do anything to innovate or keep the act up with the changing times, with the result that the parents become a bit less successful over time while Ted Jr. grows up to be a success on his own and having the clout to get his parents bit parts in a revue which will star him.

One generation follows the other, and Ted Jr. meets a nice woman in the show named Anne Ainsley (Madge Evans), falls in love with her, and eventually marries her, although she gets the distinct feeling tht Ted's parents don't really approve of the relationship. Perhaps she should be worrying about her husband, though, as the Hackett and Ainsley partnership seems to be going the way of the relationshp Ted Sr. and his parents had. Ted Jr. takes to both drink and women, which causes Anne all sorts of anguish, even though they have a kid of their own, Ted III (Mickey Rooney as a juvenile and Eddie Quillan as an adult). Eventually, Anne confronts Ted Jr., leading to tragedy. Ted Jr. deals with it by leaving Ted III with his parents while going off to fight in the Great War and getting himself killed in action.

Another decade or more passes, with movies taking over for vaudeville. Ted III grows up and is discovered by Hollywood to have great talent, although there's not much use for his parents. Ted III becomes successful enough that he can bring his parents out to Hollywood and give them a comfortable retirement. But, like his father and grandfather before him, Ted III lets success go to his head, having problems with both drink and women that threaten to derail his career too.

Broadway to Hollywood was released in 1933, and the first thing that I noticed is that the musical numbers in the movie are all badly filmed, as though they didn't know of the influence of Busby Berkeley and 42nd Street which came out early in 1933. Apparently, the bigger production numbers were archive footage: MGM had planned to make a sequel to The Hollywood Revue of 1929 in 1930 but never released it. Eventually, they used some of that footage in Broadway to Hollywood, which would explain what those musical numbers are so creaky. They're actually from 1930.

That fact, combined with Broadway to Hollywood being a decided programmer instead of a prestige picture, give the film an atmosphere of being not quite up to snuff in terms of production values. That's a bit of a shame, since even though the idea isn't terribly original, is one that could have wound up much better instead of a dated time capsule. Broadway to Hollywood is still worth one watch, but is definitely just a pedestrian movie in the end. Watch also for some famous names in small parts, and see if you spot Curly and Moe Howard without looking up their roles in the credits first.

Nothing to do with Hugh Hefner

Somehow, for two straight days I have a movie that's been sitting on my DVR that I haven't blogged about before and that is coming up soon on TCM. This time, the movie in question is one called Playmates, and will appear on TCM tomorrow (April 23) at 6:00 AM.

The movie starts off with a man renting records from a service that pipes in music for businesses sort of like a precursor to Muzak. That man, Peter Lindsay (Peter Lind Hayes) is the press agent for bandleader Kay Kyser (obviously playing himself), who at the time in addition to being a bandleader also hosted a radio show.

In one of the restaurants for which Peter ordered the music, he runs into Lulu Monahan (Patsy Kelly). She's also a press agent, but for actor John Barrymore (again playing himself, in his final film role). Lulu is talking to a local sponsor, trying to get the sponsor to sign up for Barrymore's show in part because, as we'll eventually learn, Barrymore is in serious financial trouble. The sponsor sees Kyser's press agent and realizes that Kyser now has a much bigger audience. With that in mind, Lulu comes up with an audacious idea. Barrymore is (or was) a serious Shakespearean actor, so why not have the two team up with a shtick that Barrymore is going to teach Kyser how to do Shakespeare? Kyser already had a movie or two under his belt by this time, and the way he presented his band was a bit more oriented toward theatrics.

But this being a movie, you know that the two aren't particularly interested in working with each other at first, in part because Barrymore thinks Kay isn't up to Shakespeare, while Kyser is fully willing to accept the fact, what with his North Carolina accent and all. And certainly on the side of Kay's not being suited for Shakespeare is his grandmother (May Robson, 83 years young and still going strong).

And then old flame, female bullfighter Carmen Del Toro (Lupe Velez) shows up, and this gives Barrymore an idea. He still doesn't really want to do the show, so he tries to get Carmen to go after Kay and put a monkey wrench into the works. But Kay finds out what's going on and thinks he's going to come up with a way to get Barrymore off the project. Along the way, there's a lot of music from Kay's orchestra, culminating with a swing music-inspired version of Romeo and Juliet.

Playmates is an absolute mess, in part because of Barrymore's condition at the time he made this very near the end of his life. However, it's also one of those movies where it's easy to see why RKO would take a chance on the material. Kay Kyser was a popular bandleader at the time, and spoof material like this seems like it would work well. Kyser, however, is even less charismatic than Glenn Miller, and the plot is really too unbelievable.

But as always, you should judge for yourself, and there are a few glimpses of the old John Barrymore. That, and May Robson elevates pretty much anything she's in, even in those cases where she was miscast.

I'd like to buy a vowel

I tend to be up for watching movies from the 1930s, and especially if they star certain actors above others. One person I'm always willing to see is May Robson, so when TCM ran a movie of hers that was new to me, You Can't Buy Everything, I made a point to record it so that I could watch later. Recently, I finally got around to watching it off my DVR.

The movie starts with an opening scene set in 1893, with May Robson playing Hannah Bell, claiming to be the mother of a young child, Donny, which seems ridiculous considering that Robson would have been about 75 at the time. Now, if the movie concluded as something contemporary, ie. she'd have a kid pushing fifty, using her in this establishing sequence would make more sense. But.... In any case, I'm getting ahead of myself here.

Hannah is taking Donny to the charity clinic under an assumed name, he having hurt his knee because Hannah wasn't able to care for him properly. After arranging for charity care, she reads a newspaper article about the Knickerbocker Bank, which has just elevated someone to the office of vice-president, John Burton (Lewis Stone). This absolutely enrages Hannah, who goes down to the bank.

There, we learn that Hannah is not in fact poor at all. She's quite rich, having married a who did well enough in business to leave Hannah seed money when he died, money which Hannah has grown into something quite substantial. But when she was less well off before her marriage, she apparently was in love with Burton, whose parents nixed the marriage. So Hannah has hated Burton ever since, and decides that she's not going to have one cent of her money in a Burton bank. She withdraws everything and takes it to a new bank, where she's more or less the boss because she's got the largest deposit.

Fast forward to 1906. Donny is now all grown up and about to graduate from Princeton, head of his class. Hannah is even richer than ever, and proud of Donny, expecting him to be able to run the bank now that he's a college graduate. Donny, however, doesn't want to go into banking; he'd rather be a writer. Hannah seems like even more of a miser than ever, so a mutual friend of her and Burton decides he's going to try to figure out what the heck made Hannah such a bitter blankety-blank.

Unfortunately, the planned meeting between Hannah and Burton doesn't happen. What does happen, however, is that Hannah and Burton's children meet. Donny (William Bakewell) meets Burton's daughter Elizabeth (Jean Parker) on the friend's yacht, and they fall in love. Of course, they learn about the difficult relationship between their respective parents, and that may prevent them from getting married, especially when Hannah thinks Elizabeth is only after Donny's money.

Move ahead one more year, to 1907. Donny and Elizabeth did indeed get married, and went off to Europe. While they're away, a bank panic hits. Banks like the Knickerbocker bank are in serious difficulty, while Hannah, who has always been more willing to invest only in safer schemes even if they don't bring in high interest. She sees this as her big chance to get back at Burton. They get back to news of the financial panic as well as what Donny's mom did to Elizabeth's dad....

As soon as I saw the opening scene in the charity hospital, I couldn't help but think of a woman named Hetty Green, who was in the old almanac-style Guinness Book of World Records as the biggest miser or some-such. That's a bit unfair to her; Hetty was closer to thrifty than miserly. But the legend of Green's miserliness was well-known in those days, and this story turns that up to 11, not using her real name probably out of fear of getting sued by her children (Hetty died a good 15 years before the movie was made).

The story in You Can't Buy Everything isn't bad, although it does feel like a bit of a cop-out at the end. Robson, for her part, does quite well playing the villainess who has a change of heart just in time, even if she is way too old for the opening scenes and probably a few years too old even for the bank panic era. There's nothing spectacular here, but You Can't Buy Everything is a good example of the sort of programmer MGM was putting out in the mid-1930s. It's definitely worth a watch.

If I Had a Million

I had a post on a different movie scheduled to go up today, when I noticed that the anthology movie If I Had a Million was on the TCM schedule overnight tonight, or the early hours of Tuesday (July 18) at 2:15 AM. Note that this is still late Monday evening on the west coast. A search of the blog, however, claims that while I used the movie once for a Thursday Movie Picks, I've never actually done a full-length post on it. So, since the movie is definitely worth a watch, today's the day to do a more-or-less full-length review.

I say "more or less" because, this being an anthology, the most natural thing to do is to have a one- or two-sentence synopsis of each segment. The framing story involves a wealthy man, John Glidden (Richard Bennett), who is on his deathbed. He's worth at least eight figures, which is a lot today but a huge sum back in 1932, and he's got a lot of grasping relatives he doesn't like. So he decides to give away a million bucks to several random strangers before he dies, by picking names out of the phone book. This leads to eight segments:

• Henry Peabody (Charlie Ruggles) works in a china shop and has a boss he doesn't like, so you can probably guess what he does with his million.
• Violet (Wynne Gibson) is a prostitute working at a bar on the docks. When she gets her million, she makes her way uptown, and....
• Eddie Jackson (George Raft) is a notorious forger who, having gotten a check from Glidden, realizes that no bank will accept it because they'll naturally believe it's a forgery.
• Emily La Rue (Alison Skipworth) is continuously vexed by bad drivers, so her husband Rollo (W.C. Fields) uses the money to buy cars and....
• Gene Raymond plays John Wallace, who is on death row and thinks the million dollars can buy him a new defense so he can be exonerated and go back to his wife Mary (Frances Dee).
• In what is probably the weakest segment, and surprising considering the star, Charles Laughton plays an office clerk who sees the million as what we would today call "fuck you" money.
• Steve Gallagher (Gary Cooper) is a marine in the stockade. He thinks the check is an April Fools joke, which has consequences when he gets out of the stockade.
• Finally, Mary Walker (May Robson) is a resident of an old folks' home where the administrators basically want to warehouse the residents until they die. Mary, however, wants the residents to be able to live, and now that she's got a million, she may be able to make it happen.

As with any anthology movie, different people are going to have different segments that they think are the best, and others which they think are weak. For me, the Wynne Gibson segment is surprisingly profound. Fields and Skipworth unsurprisingly do well with what is little more than zany comedy, but of the sort that was tailor-made for them. Laughton gets a shocking weak script to work with, although it's realistic because in real life all of us have people we'd like to be able to tell off, and having $1 million in 1932 dollars would certainly give one the money to do it.

If you haven't seen If I Had a Million before, by all means make it a point to watch or record this TCM airing. It doesn't show up all that often.

Four Wives

John Garfield was TCM's Star of the Month back in February, which gave me the opportunity to blog about the movie Four Daughters. That movie was popular enough that two sequels were made, the first of which was Four Wives.

In the first movie, Garfield played Mickey Borden, a hard-luck case who married one of the four Lemp daughters, Ann (Priscilla Lane), only to commit suicide because he couldn't support Ann. Now, Warner Bros. didn't realize at the time that John Garfield was going to become a star, since Four Daughters was his first movie, which presented a bit of a problem since they killed off his character in the first movie. So Mickey appears here briefly as a ghost in a couple of scenes.

Ann is disconsolate at having lost her husband, and composer Felix Deitz (Jeffrey Lynn) has returned from a work engagement to propose to Ann. But there's a pretty big complication, which is that Mickey got Ann pregnant before killing himself. The movie actually handles the material pretty tastefully for a 1930s movie, without the plot devices that seem like they were introduced to deal with the Production Code.

Meanwhile, sister Emma Lemp (Gale Page) married florist Ernest Talbot (Dick Foran). The two were hoping to have a baby, but it turns out that Emma is unable to get pregnant. That fact and Ann's pregnancy are discovered at the doctors' offices of the Forrests, Clinton Sr. and Clinton Jr. (Eddie Albert). Clinton Jr. talks to sister Kay (Rosemary Lane) about Ann's pregnancy and the need to handle Ann with care. She needs a psychologist, but not somebody who's obviously trying to treat her, so Forrest is brought in to handle those duties. It's fairly obvious from the beginning that he and Kay are going to fall in love.

The fourth sister is Thea (Lola Lane), who, as you may recall from the first movie, married banker Ben Crowley (Frank McHugh). Thea decides, seemingly with no input from her husband, to adopt a child, something that I woudn't have thought possible if the husband hadn't known is wife was planning it -- wouldn't they need both parents' signatures on the application?

But the movie focuses most on Ann, with Felix trying to make a success of it as a composer and conductor. He gets a very lucrative job offer, but it's going to require his going off to New York while his pregnant wife stays behind. Ann wants him to go since she's still thinking about Mickey, while Felix is willing to forgo career advancement for the sake of his wife.

Claude Rains reprises his role as Adam, the patriarch of the Lemp family, with May Robson around as well as Aunt Etta.

Four Wives works well as a sequel, at least if you've seen Four Daughters already. If you haven't, you might be confused by some of what's going on and think that some stuff is explained too quickly. A lot of people in current-day audiences will probably find the movie old-fashioned, and to be honest, even back in 1939 when the movie was released I don't think it would have been considered anything groundbreaking, just a feel-good movie for the audiences of the day. In that regard it definitely succeeds.

Four Wives is more drama than comedy, but it's a fairly light drama with a fair amount of comedy mixed in, especially in scenes dealing with the students at the music school Adam runs. Claude Rains is given a lot less to do here than in a lot of his movies, but looks like he could have done the role in his sleep. Frank McHugh looks ridiculous with a moustache, and May Robson adds energy as the octogenarian who just won't quit.

People who like classic Studio Era movies will really like Four Wives.

Four Daughters

John Garfield is the Star of the Month on TCM for February, and that's given me a chance to watch one of his movies that I've had on the DVR for a while, Four Daughters. It's going to be on in tomorrow's prime time lineup, at 12:15 AM Wednesday Feb. 17 (or still Feb. 16 in more westerly time zones).

Garfield isn't the official star here, since this was just his first feature film. The nominal star is Claude Rains. He's Adam Lemp, a widower who teaches at a school of music and has the titular four daughters, in whom he's tried to instill his love of and ability for music. He's done this with varying degrees of success. Daughter Key (Rosemary Lane) has dreams of getting a music scholarship in Philadelphia, while the other three: Thea (Lola Lane), Ann (Priscilla Lane) and Emma (Gale Page) are strictly amateurs.

Thea is being pursued by Ben Crowley (Frank McHugh with a ridiculous mustache), a well-to-do banker who could provide her security. Emma has a suitor in local florist Erniest (Dick Foran), while Ann being the youngest doesn't have anybody quite yet. But a man is about to come into everybody's lives.

That man is Felix Deitz (Jeffrey Lynn), an up-and-coming composer/conductor who is going to be living with the Lemps while he's working on a composition for a contest that, if he wins, would earn him a nice stipend. Ann and Emma both fall in love with him, although neither Ann nor Felix seem to realizes that Emma has any feelings for him.

And then another man comes into the movie, which shouldn't be surprising since we know this is being run for John Garfield's turn as Star of the Month. Garfield plays Mickey Borden, a friend of Felix's, an arranger responsible for creating good orchestrations for Felix. Unlike Dana Andrews in Night Song, he doesn't seem to have any interest in composing, or at least any expectation that he's going to be successful, since he thinks everything in life is stacked against him.

Despite Mickey's non-stop snarkiness, Ann seems to become friends with him. So much so that on what is supposed to be her wedding day to Felix, once she's found out the true depth of Emma's feelings for Felix, she decides to run off with Mickey and leave Felix at the altar! Ann and Mickey run off to New York and find out that life in the big city isn't a bed of roses, but don't want to let the rest of the family know that there's anything going wrong. This leads to the movie's dramatic climax, on Christmas Eve no less.

Watching Four Daughters, I found it easy to see why Garfield became a star, even though I wanted somebody to put some sense in his character. It's also easy to see why the movie was a big hit, as it's the sort of material that would have been homey and comforting to audiences in the second half of the Depression. (Warner Bros. didn't intend Four Daughters as a prestige picture, but it wound up with several Oscar nominations, including Best Picture.)

That having been said, the nature of Garfield's character, combined with the sudden plot twist, do create some problems with Four Daughters that made it a bit less to my taste than some other people will probably find it. Even with its flaws, however, Four Daughters is definitely worth a watch.

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.