A younger acquaintance

Another of the movies that had been sitting on my DVR for quite some time that I kind of knew a bit about going into it was Rich and Famous, which is not to be confused with the Alfred Hitchcock movie Rich and Strange. Instead, it's based on the same stage play as the Bette Davis movie Old Acquaintance, although the two versions have some differences between them.

The movie opens up at Smith College in 1959. Liz (Jacqueline Bisset) and Merry (Candice Bergen) are best friends and roommates, although Merry is about to drop out in order to elope with Doug (David Selby), which causes a bit of tension as it's implied that Doug and Liz may have dated in the past. In any case, Merry and Doug do run off, and since this is still the first reel, you know that happily ever after isn't going to be a thing. You also know that the movie is going to move quite a bit ahead in the future or else we wouldn't have that mention of 1959.

Sure enough, 10 years pass as Liz shows up on a college campus in Los Angeles to do a speaking engagement. Liz has become a famous writer thanks to her one novel as well as a bunch of essays of the sort that wind up in magazines for the smart set, or the people who think they're the smart set. Merry lives in Malibu with Doug and their daughter, and know a bunch of Hollywood types. Indeed, Merry, inspired by Liz's success as a writer, decided that she too should try her hand at writing. But where Liz wrote a critically-acclaimed and award-winning book, Merry writes something that Liz considers not very good writing, and incredibly trashy subject material about all of Merry and Doug's thinly-disguised Hollywood friends. Merry gets Liz to present the novel to her agent Jules Levi (Steven Hill).

As you can guess, Merry's novel becomes a trashy hit, while Liz is still suffering from writers' block as she tries to complete that second novel. On the other hand, Merry and Doug's marriage is falling apart and Doug loves Liz, something that's really going to piss off Merry when she finds out about it, which she's going to in the mid-1970s when she's in New York to do a TV appearance with Merv Griffin.

The final segment of the film comes in 1981 when Merry has finally written a novel that not only gets some critical acclaim, but short-listed for the same award that Liz won all the way back in the 1960s. Liz is on the committee to select this year's winner, and unsurprisingly Merry tries to use her friendship with Liz to get Liz to select her book as the winner. Liz's personal life, meanwhile, is going down the tubes. She's supposed to do an interview with Chris (Hart Bochner), a writer for Rolling Stone, but they end up having a bit of a romantic relationship that's complicated by the fact that Merry's daugher Debby (Meg Ryan) wants to leave home and spends some nights first on the couch in Liz's hotel suite followed by the couch in Chris' suite.

Rich and Famous is a mess of a movie, and it's easy to see why it was neither a critical nor box-office success when it was originally released. Parts of it rise to the level of trashy fun, notably Bergen's horrendous accent in the more melodramatic scenes. But it doesn't rise to the final scene of the original Bette Davis/Miriam Hopkins version.

Daisy Kenyon

One of those movies that I had seen part of somewhere along the way but never got around to seeing all of -- probably on the old Fox Movie Channel since it's a Fox movie and I can't remember the last time they ran it -- is Daisy Kenyon. So when TCM showed it as part of a night dedicated to director Otto Preminger, I recorded it in order to be able finally to watch it and write up a review. Tomorrow being Dana Andrews day in Summer Under the Stars, and with my realizing that the movie in tomorrow's schedule I was going to do a post on is one that I actually blogged about four years ago (Brainstorm, Aug. 24 at 6:00 PM), I figure that now is a good time to put up this post on Daisy Kenyon even though it's not airing on TCM tomorrow.

Dan O'Mara (Dana Andrews) is a lawyer at a prestigious firm who takes a taxi to what is probably supposed to be Greenwich Village to see fashion artist Daisy Kenyon (Joan Crawford). It fairly quickly transpires that Dan is carrying on a romantic affair with Daisy. There is, however, a fairly serious issue with this in that Dan is married to Lucille (Ruth Warrick) with two kids about to become teenagers. Not only that, but Lucille is the daughter and granddaughter of the founders of the law firm. So, because of family obligations, Dan has to break off the date he had hoped to have with Daisy.

As Dan is leaving the apartment building, he runs into another man who is about to ring to be let in, Peter Lapham (Henry Fonda). Peter is also seeing Daisy, which is possibly a response from Daisy to the less-than-stellar treatment she's been getting from Dan, although to be fair, Daisy really ought to know she's going to get that sort of treatment from a man who's cheating on his wife. Peter isn't cheating on his wife, because his wife is already really quite dead, having died in a car accident some years back. That's one of the things that prompted Peter to leave his Cape Cod home and serve in the US Army during the recently concluded war. Peter is thinking of going back to Europe to serve in the occupation army. So, as we can see, Daisy is going to have to choose between two men.

But then things get more complicated. Dan is approached by a man who wants to hire O'Mara to represent a man in an important legal case: that of a Japanese-American man who served in the army in Europe with some distinction, only to return home and find he had been dispossessed of his farm Bad Day at Black Rock-style. It's important, but not exactly remunerative. It's going to take Dan away from the clients who are paying him the big money; it's going to take him away from his wife and kids; and it's going to take him away from Daisy.

So eventually Dan returns from doing some research work on this case and finds that Daisy has suddenly gotten married to Peter! Dan probably ought to admit defeat and go back to his wife and the kids he really does love despite the way he treats their mom (who, to be fair, does have enough issues where one can understand why Dan might start looking at other women). Instead, he continues to pursue Daisy, to the point that he stupidly calls Daisy from the house and Lucille listens in on the call. She decides to file for divorce and try to get custody of the kids. In theory, this would have left Dan free to marry Daisy if she hadn't already gotten married. It's also a lot more complicated because Daisy could be the co-respondent in the divorce case.

Ben Mankiewicz, in his comments after the movie, commented that the movie didn't have much of a reputation for a long time, to the point that Otto Preminger claimed many years later not to have remembered much about it. Having watched it, I can see the reason for the lack of reputation. Everything about Daisy Kenyon is competent, and definitely not anything that the cast and crew should want to forget about having made. But, at the same time, the plot is a fairly ridiculous melodrama. It's not as extreme in having to jump through hoops to satisfy the Production Code as something like The Great Lie, but there's a lot here that strains credulity. That, and it feels competent, not an all-time great. Also to be fair, there are quite a few other 40s prestige movies that aren't that well-remembered 80 years on.

So definitely give Daisy Kenyon a watch. It's certainly interesting.

The Story of Esther Costello

Another actor who has several movies that wound up on my DVR without being part of any particular tribute is Italian actor Rossano Brazzi. This time, the movie that features him is The Story of Esther Costello.

As you might guess, Brazzi does not in fact play Esther Costello. Nor does the female lead, Joan Crawford, although we get to see Crawford quite a bit before we get to see Brazzi. We first get to see Esther herself. In a prologue scene, it's 1948 Ireland in one of those dirt-poor villages, and Esther is playing with a couple of boys. Esther has found a cellar where a cache of explosives from either the war of independence from Britain or perhaps the civil war that followed remains hidden a quarter century on. The kids must be too young to read, or else they'd know that these are dangerous explosives and not toys to be played with. But they're stupid, and one of them pulls the pin on one of the grenades. In the resulting explosion, Esther's mother is killed as, presumably, are the two boys.

Fast forward to 1953. Margaret Landi (Joan Crawford) is a childless American woman who is apparently rich enough to travel to the village where she grew up, and even buy chocolates for the village children. The parish priest, Fr. Devlin (Denis O'Dea), informs her there's one more child, which is how Margaret gets introduced to Esther (Heather Sears). In the accident, Esther became deaf-blind, and is living in squalor with an alcoholic granny. Margaret is horrified, and decides that she's willing to become the child's guardian and take her over to England and then the US, where there are schools that teach the deaf-blind how to use their sense of touch to learn Braille as well as finger-spell and things like that.

It's a lot of work, but Esther is a good student and eventually reaches the point where Margaret it willing to bring her to a school assembly at a school for children with all five senses for a talk about overcoming hardships. One of the girls is overcome by emotion, and it's there that the idea is born, in part with help from newspaper reporter Harry Grant (Lee Patterson) who has already met Esther. Esther's could be an inspiring story, and that inspiration could be used to raise money for other deaf-blind people. Those schools need quite a bit of money, after all.

Margaret decides it's a good idea, and has good intentions, so she takes Esther around and parades her to large audiences as the donations start pouring in. And then Margaret sees a check she'd rather not see: it's signed by one Carlo Landi (that's Rossano Brazzi). Carlo is Margaret's estranged husband, the sort of man who cheated on Margaret and likely cheated his clients in whatever work he did, to the point that for the first half of the movie I was expecting Margaret's husband to be in prison.

Carlo works his way back into Margaret's life, although it's also a bit of a ruse. Carlo sees all that money coming in, and figures it's a good way for all of them to live a life with at least some luxury in it. Or, at least, a good way for Carlo. He has the idea of bringing Esther back to Europe and going on an extended engagement tour, lying as well about how much money is coming in so that he can skim some of it off. You'd think Margaret might have figured this out by now.

She eventually does figure it out, as does Harry, who wants to rescue Esther from all this because he thinks he's in love with her. But there's the question of what it would do to Esther if she found out that people around her whom she trusted are basically scamming her. And if that's not enough, the story takes a plot twist just in time for the finale....

The main idea of The Story of Esther Costello dealing with charities scamming gullible people, isn't a bad one. And for the most part The Story of Esther Costello really isn't a bad movie. But it does have some plot holes that do bring it down a peg or two. One is the plot's requiring that Margaret be a bit too dim to figure out that her husband just wants to scam people again. She's incredibly quick to bring him back into her life. And really would a charity of that size be run by only one or two people, especially someone like Margaret who had no experience doing such things?

Still, overall, The Story of Esther Costello is definitely one that's worth watching.

A century before noir

Hedy Lamarr was honored in last year's edition of Summer Under the Stars, which allowed me to record a movie that I hadn't seen before, largely because it was an independent production that has fallen into the public domain: The Strange Woman.

We don't see Hedy Lamarr for a bit, because the movie opens up when her character is a kid in 1820s Bangor, Maine. Jenny Hager is the daughter of alcoholic widower Tim Hager, who is a scandal in town as he tries to get drinks off of shopkeeper Isaiah Poster (Gene Lockhart). Isaiah, for his part, is a widower himself with a son Ephraim. Out at the river, a bunch of kids are standing on the bridge when Jenny dares Ephraim to jump into the river, even though Ephraim can't swim and is afraid of the water. So Jenny pushes him in. When an adult, Judge Saladine (Alan Napier), shows up, Jenny drags Ephraim out of the water and claims she saved Jenny.

Jenny is already a wanton kid, and she's going to be a wanton woman, looking to marry rich. Matters come to a head one night when the now adult Jenny (that's Hedy Lamarr) pursues the sort of man Dad doesn't like. Dad tries to beat Jenny, so she beats him to death and runs off to Isaiah's house looking for help, in part because he's the richest man in town, and in part because this is a scheme. She claims Dad has suffered some sort of attack while trying to beat her, winning the sympathy of Isaiah and the Reverend Thatcher (Moroni Olsen) who both know Jenny needs to be married off. The only man around seems to be Isaiah, now that Ephraim is off to college, so Jenny marries Isaiah, which was sort of her plan all along because she wants that money.

Of course, Ephraim returns, and things get awkward because Jenny also has feelings for Ephraim that are mutual, not that Dad knows any of this. Dad by now owns not just a bunch of ships, but also forest inland, and has to deal with the lumberjacks who get rowdy when they come to town because they're in need of women. Isaiah is so concerned with the running of the town that he basically works himself to a heart attack, although this doesn't kill him as much as Jenny would be happy that it does. Jenny is looking for a way to inherit Isaiah's property, so when Isaiah decides to go up to the lumber camps, Jenny manipulates Ephraim into doing the same sort of thing Montgomery Clift may or may not have done to Shelley Winters in A Place in the Sun. And then Jenny, having inherited Isaiah's property, throws Ephraim out of the house!

Jenny then starts to seduce her business manager John Evered (George Sanders), who is also in love with Jenny's best friend Meg. Meanwhile, Ephraim has become a terrible drunk and confesses to Evered what he did to his father. Whether or not Evered truly believes this is a good question, considering how completely drunk Ephraim is.

Now, the movie was made in 1946, which means there's the little matter of the Production Code. Jenny isn't going to be able to get away with what she's done up to this point, so there's the question of how she's going to expiate her sins and how the rest of the movie is resolved. The screenwriters have sort of painted themselves into a corner by this point, and there's not really a good way to get out of it.

I knew The Strange Woman was going to be interesting when I saw in the opening credits that it was based on a book by Ben Ames Williams, who might be best known for Leave Her to Heaven. Sure enough, the movie is never less than interesting, although the plot is wildly implausible at times. There's also the question of whether the movie is truly noir. Hedy Lamarr's Jenny certainly is the sort of femme fatale who would appear in a noir, although I don't quite think the historical setting is a noir setting. It's perhaps closer to the historic melodrama of a movie like Forever Amber. In any case, it's definitely worth watching.

Fun with dysfunctional Canadians

Another of those movies with a title I'd seen show up on TCM on several occasions, but had never actually watched, was Jalna. Once again, with that in mind, the last time it showed up on TCM I finally recorded it. Having finally watched it, I can see why it doesn't show up more often.

Jalna is subtitled "A Drama of Canadian Life", and is based on a series of novels that were apparently incredibly popular back in the day. Jalna is the name of a farm somewhere in Ontario, one of those farms that in an old Hollywood western movie would be the big ranch whose proprietor is the big man in the region. In this case, it's three generations of the Whiteoak family, led by matriarch Granny (Jessie Ralph) who's about to turn 100 and who does not get to have a death scene as a dramatic plot point; instead her centenary is the coda to the action of the movie. The family is about to sit down to Sunday dinner: Gran, Uncles Nicholas (C. Aubrey Smith) and Ernest (Halliwell Hobbes), and adult kids Renny (Ian Hunter), Eden (David Manners), Piers (Theodore Newton), and Meg (Peggy Wood). There's one other adult who doesn't get much to do, and a bratty child who has an incredibly obnoxious scene where he plays evil pranks on pretty much everyone else in the house.

Renny is the son who's more or less managing the farm now. Piers is late to dinner because, as the little kid reveals, he's down at the next farm over seeing Pheasant Vaughan (Molly Lamont), daughter of owner Maurice Vaughan (Nigel Bruce). This pisses Meg off to no end: apparently 20 years ago Meg was set to marry Maurice in what was supposed to be a marriage that would unite the two farms and be a big deal. But then it turned out that Maurice had fathered Pheasant by another woman some time back and Pheasant was dropped off there; who knows what happened to Pheasant's mother? Meg suffered a broken heart that she's still nursing, and doesn't want any other Whiteoak to have anything to do with any Vaughan.

And then there's Eden, who doesn't want to be a farmer at all, but a poet. It should go without saying that poetry isn't exactly a lucrative occupation unless you can write things that can be used as popular song lyrics, which isn't what Eden is doing. But he gets word from a publisher in New York that they're accepting one of his books! So the family raises the money for him to go to New York, never mind the internal squabbling about this. There, Eden meets Alayne (Kay Johnson), the reader who read Eden's manuscript and got the publisher to approve it. They meet and immediately fall in love and marry, shocking the rest of the Whiteoak family. But they plan to come back to Jalna.

Equally shocking is that on the day Eden and Alayne come back, Piers has decided that he's going to go elope with Pheasant, and bring her back to Jalna too as his bride. Naturally, as you might guess, this causes certain members of the family to go ballistic. Things get worse as Eden can't really come up with a second volume of poetry, while Renny finds himself falling in love with Alayne, which is a big no-no. There's a whole lot more melodrama to come, even though the movie is only 78 minutes.

I found myself laughing at Jalna quite a few times, which is not a good thing since, for the most part, Jalna is not supposed to be a comedy. (The one exception is Gran's cantankerousness and her parrot.) The family dynamic is ridiculously dysfuctional, to the point that you wonder how they've stayed together so long. There are other questions, like why Renny never got married, and why none of them ever think of getting some sort of white collar job to make ends meet. The Whiteoaks, after all, seem closer to gentry farmers than, say the families in As the Earth Turns which is also a farming saga but looks much more at the more difficult side of farming.

I guess I can see why the original book might have pleased audiences in the 1920s when it was released. But the film adaptation didn't work for me.

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.

Love Story meets Barefoot in the Park meets the 1920s

Richard Chamberlain died last year and TCM eventually got around to running a night of his movies as a tribute. One that I hadn't seen before was Joy in the Morning, so as always I recorded it in order to be able to watch it later and do the obligatory post on it. Having finally seen it, I can now write up that post.

The movie starts off with a pre-credits sequence, set against a backdrop of the radio broadcast of the Gene Tunney/Jack Dempsey title fight, which places things around 1927. Carl Brown (Richard Chamberlain) is making out with his girlfriend Annie McGairy (Yvette Mimieux) beneath the stairs of one of those old New York tenement buildings. This is the sort of thing that's scandalous if they get caught, and on top of that, Annie has an unseen stepfather who treats her badly, so Annie decides to run off and elope with Carl.

Carl is a law student at one of those smaller schools that certainly populated movies of a previous era. For college students of the 1920s to be married was just as scandalous as making out under the staircase, so Carl takes a job as a caretaker at the school to help defray expenses, with he and Annie living in a caretaker's cottage on campus. But the dean of the school, Dean Darwent (Sidney Blackmer), isn't so sure Carl can make things work. And besides, one of the student loan programs they have set up isn't for married students, which puts a crimp in the Browns' finances. Things get much worse when Dad (Arthur Kennedy) finds out not only about the marriage, but to whom Carl has gotten married. Apparently the Browns and McGairys had a history back in the old country, so when Dad learns what his son is doing, he withdraws his financial support. Carl's mother also writes a nasty letter about what type of woman she thinks Annie is.

To help further defray expenses, Annie gets a job doing babysitting work for single mother Mrs. Karter (Joan Tetzel), who is carrying on with a much older married man Mr. Pulaski (Oscar Homolka), one more thing that's scandalous. But Pulaski's Christmas present to the young married couple is to offer Carl a job as night watchman, although he's going to have to sleep away from Annie, which puts a further strain on the marriage. Annie seeks companionship with the local florist, who fortunately for the marriage is gay and has no designs on Annie. But being gay in the 1920s was also scandalous, and all the busybodies in town learn of a life for the married couple that's not quite conventional in a way that the busybodies think they should be able to gossip about.

Finally, Annie gets pregnant, which ought to be perfectly respectable considering that she's married, and there's no suggestion that anybody other than Carl is the father. It's just that he's got so much financial difficulty, and there's the possibility that he might flunk out of law school, that could push the marriage over the edge.

Joy in the Morning is one of those 1960s melodramas that the producers at the time probably thought was mildly daring as it pushed the limits of the Production Code. In retrospect, however, it's just one of those movies that's funny when it isn't supposed to be. It's turgid, trying to shoehorn a whole bunch of social issues into the plot, while at the same time laughably acted by the two leads. And the music (by Bernard Herrmann, with a bad MOR title song sung by Chamberlain) totally doesn't fit the movie. Joy in the Morning turns out to be a howler, with that badness possibly being the only real reason to watch.

Actually making a story about Salome might have been better

Another of those movies where I'd seen the title show up on TCM on a number of occasions, but had never actually watched it, was The Seventh Veil. So the last time it showed up on TCM, I finally got around to putting it on my DVR and watching it before it expired, so that I could do a post on it now.

Ann Todd plays Francesca Cunningham. As the movie opens, she's in a hospital late one evening, looking for a way to escape the hospital, as she looks around rather furtively when she's out in the hallway. She does get out, and goes to a bridge, where she jumps in the river in an obvious attempt to commit suicide. She fails, thankfully, since if she had succeeded we wouldn't have a movie. But she winds up in some sort of catatonic state where she won't talk to anybody who can help her. So the hospital brings in a psychiatrist, Dr. Larsen (Herbert Lom), who proceeds to drug Francesca up and bring about a state of narcotic-induced hypnosis, because this sort of psychiatric mumbo-jumbo was the hotness especially in Hollywood. (The title of the movie makes sense here, as Dr. Larsen says the narcotics will make Francesca remove her seventh veil, the way Salome voluntarily did.)

At least Gregory Peck got a Salvador Dali-designed dream sequence in Spellbound. Here, Francesca Cunningham suddenly becomes clear enough to understand and is able to remember everything perfectly in her hypnotic flashback sequence that lasts for most of the movie. Well, actually, there are multiple such scenes since the damn drugs keep wearing off. Francesca begins to talk about when she was a young girl of 14, at an all girls' boarding school, and getting into trouble for collecting specimens from the pond. She's got some musical aptitude as a piano player, but for getting into trouble, she gets caned, which causes her to miss out on a possible music scholarship. It's tough to play with sore hands.

Francesca's dad dies, Mom already having been dead for some years. Her closest relative is one of Dad's cousins, Nicholas (James Mason), who is old enough for Francesca to consider an uncle, although he hates that. Indeed, he is for whatever reason someone who doesn't want to be around women that much. But he's a failed pianist himself and sees the talent inherent in Francesca, and decides to start training her himself. And indeed, Francesca gets to the point where perhaps she could perform in public. She's also got a mind of her own, and meets American Peter Gay (Hugh McDermott) who has an interest in swing music that absolutely pisses off Nicholas. Nicholas is so controlling of Francesca and so wants her to have a professional career in music that he takes Francesca off to the Continent lest she run off with Peter. After all, she is still just 17 and Nicholas' ward.

You can see, however, why she wound up with psychiatric problems. Things are about to get worse, however. She spends years on the Continent, returns to the UK and finds Peter's gotten married, and then falls in love with Max, an artist Nicholas hires to paint Francesca's portrait. She's finally grown up, and in theory can choose whomever she wants as a romantic partner. So when she chooses Max, this drives Nicholas around the bend and forces Max to try to elope with her, leading to a car crash as they race away from Nicholas' London mansion.

Ah, this is all melodramatic and psychological silliness, wrapped up in a stylish package. And I will say that all of the technical parts of the film as well as the acting are very well done. But in addition to the story (the screenplay surprisingly won an Oscar), for me there was another big issue, which was the politics of the time in which the movie was released. Its British premiere was October 1945, which is obviously just after the end of World War II. No biggie there, but then you see the flashbacks take place over a series of years, and the present seems to be in a time that hasn't been affected by the war at all! No Italian Fascism, no mention of the encroaching Nazi menace during the montage of Vienna, none of that. It made things tough to believe for me.

But there are a lot of people who are going to love a movie like The Seventh Veil, so watch and judge for yourself.

Another of those "Not best suited to MGM" movies

I've mentioned before how MGM was one of the top studios in the pre-TV era of Hollywood, but also how certain types of movies didn't really work at MGM because the studio seemed incapabale of making a movie not be glossy. Another movie that I think fits into that mold is the melodrama A Life of Her Own.

The movie starts off with Lily Brannel James (Lana Turner) taking a taxi in her small city (I'd call it a small town, but the buildings are too big for that) to the train station to catch a train to New York City where she's bound to make it big, and everybody in town knows it. Or at least, that's the sort of town it is. In the next scene, Lily is already in New York, sitting in the waiting room of the modeling agency run by Tom Caraway (Tom Ewell). She has to wait a while to get Tom's attention, but he does hire. Coming into the office at the same time is veteran model Mary Ashlon (Ann Dvorak), whose career has passed its peak.

The two wind up going out on the town together that night, making it a double date with lawyer Jim (Louis Calhern) and ad exec Lee (Barry Sullivan). Mary has too much to drink and winds up back in her upper-floor apartment with Lily, chewing Lily out on the grounds that Mary thinks Lily is trying to take her boyfriend away from her. The next morning, Lily walks into the office to hear all the other models talking about the news that Mary has killed herself by jumping out of her apartment window!

Since Lana Turner is the star of the movie, we know that she's going to make it as a model; as she starts to climb the ladder of success, she's accompanied by Jim, who sort of takes Lily under his wing. Meanwhile, he has a client, Steve Harleigh (Ray Milland), who is a copper miner from Montana and visiting New York on business reasons. Steve and Lily spend time together on a purely platonic basis since he's already married and realize that they can never have a real relationship even though they do start developing feelings for each other. So they part as friend when Steve goes back home.

Except that business is going to bring Steve back to New York, and this time he's even unhappier than he was the first time he was in New York. Steve may have fallen out of love with his wife Nora (Margaret Phillips), but then we learn what really happened between Steve and Nora: the two of them got in a car accident that was Steve's fault but it was Nora who wound up an invalid. To make matters worse, Nora decides to come out to New York since she hasn't seen him in a while and his birthday is coming up. Lily is the one who's going to be left out. Or will she make Steve and Nora confront the truth?

Part of the problem with A Life of Her Own is that it's the sort of melodrama that would have been better suited to Warner Bros. instead of MGM, where everyone can't help but be a bit too high-class for the material. But another part of the problem with the movie is that it was made while the Production Code was still utterly in effect. The material here really needed to be handled differently, but any of the ways to make it work better would have run up against the Code Office. (Indeed, reading up on the movie, the Office had issues with earlier drafts of the screenplay.) The cast tries hard, and it's not as if the movie is bad by any means. It's more that it's not quite right.

Still, A Life of Her Own probably deserves being seen in part to see how the Production Code could screw up a movie and in part for the professionalism of all involved.

House of the Seven Gables (1940)

Some months back, I mentioned the horror anthology Twice-Told Tales, based on three stories by mid-19th century American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne. The last of the stories is an adaptation of Hawthorne's novel The House of the Seven Gables. There was a full-length movie version of The House of the Seven Gables made in 1940, which TCM also ran last October even though it's not quite a horror movie in the sense that the version in the anthology movie is. Not having seen it (and, I should add, I haven't read Hawthorne's original book either), I recorded it to be able to watch it and do a review.

The movie opens with the device of showing pages from a book to give us establishing information since, after all, the movie is based on a book. In 17th century Massachusetts, Jaffrey Pyncheon engaged in some subterfuge to get some land from a Matthew Maule, and as a result, the Pyncheon house is thought by everybody else in town to be cursed, even though the Pyncheon descendants still live there.

Fast forward 150 years. Another Jaffrey Pyncheon (George Sanders) is a lawyer in Boston, and rising in the legal world. But he's been summoned home by his father. Also living in the house is Jaffrey's brother Clifford (Vincent Price) and their cousin Hepzibah (Margaret Lindsay), who is in a relationship with Clifford, since cousin marriage isn't quite the taboo it might be today. Clifford is a musician, a profession that Jaffrey looks down on, and you suspect that the brothers have disliked each other for years.

Dad called Jaffrey home because he's planning on finally selling the house. Not that he wants to; it's more that Dad and Jaffrey have been borrowing against the house to make risky investments that haven't paid off, and now they finally have to pay off the debts, with selling the house being the only way to do so. Clifford doesn't care so much since he's planning on going to New York to pursue his career in songwriting. Jaffrey, on the other hand, is deeply unhappy, since he believes in the family legend that there's some sort of hidden fortune in the house.

Clifford and his father get into an argument over selling the house, and in the course of that argument Dad suffers a fatal heart attack. This gives Jaffrey an idea. He accuses Clifford of having done something to cause Dad's death, with the result that Clifford is put on trial, convicted, and sentenced to a harsh prison sentence; the house is never sold.

Hepzibah pines for her cousin, and works on getting the governor to commute Clifford's sentence. He returns home, but he's not out of the woods yet. All these years, Jaffrey has been continuing to make risky investments, and Clifford's presence throws a monkey wrench into those plans. So Jaffrey comes up with a dastardly scheme to get Clifford out of the way once and for all.

As I said at the beginning, I haven't read Nathaniel Hawthorne's original book, so I can't compare this movie to the book. Supposedly, there are substantial differences between the two, but I can only judge the movie on its own merits. In that regard, it's not a bad little movie. Vincent Price unsurprisingly gives a good performance, as does Sanders as the villain of the piece. The production, however, feels like Universal, where it was produced, could have given it a little more TLC. This is the sort of material that probably should have been more of a prestige picture, but as produced, it has more of the look and feel of a programmer. Not that it's bad by any means, however. It's definitely worth a watch.

Christmas in the summer

When TCM had their annual Christmas marathon last year, they included a bunch of movis that were only tangentially Christmas movies because there were one or more scenes set at Christmas time. I recorded several of them, and now that I'm up to those movies on my DVR, I'm blogging about them even though it's the height of summer. One of those movies was The Man I Love.

After the opening credits, the camera pans in on The 39 Club, in New York City. It's closed for the evening, but a bunch of the musicians are still in the club, including singer Petey Brown (Ida Lupino). After she sings an old Gershwin standard, the musicians talk about the past, bringing up a pianist named San Thomas, wondering what happened to him.

Meanwhile, Petey has a sister living on the other coast, in Long Beach CA. Petey is tired of the New York life, so she decides she's going to travel out to Los Angeles and spend some time with her sister Sally (Andrea King), especially since Christmas is coming up. Sally works as a waitress, not in a cocktail bar, but in a restaurant run by Nicky Toresca (Robert Alda) as a front. He's also interested in Sally romantically, even though the feeling is not mutual. But he's got a lot of pull, even having gotten her brother Joe a job in one of his places. Sally has another sister besides Petey, as well as a son and a husband who served in World War II but wound up in an Army mental hospital with PTSD or somesuch. So when Petey shows up, she has no idea what she's about to get into.

With that in mind, Petey decides that she's going to stay a while to try to help her kid siblings out. Meanwhile, Joe bring Sally a dress for Christmas. Except that it's actually a gift from Toresca, and Sally clearly doesn't want. Petey's already heard Sally's tale of woe about Toresca, so she decides she's going to figure out what's going on by wearing Sally's dress to Toresca's place, since that will clearly get his attention. She even gets a job at Toresca's place as a nightclub singer.

And then the plot really starts getting melodramatically out of control. Joe gets arrested for fighting, and when Petey goes to bail him out, it turns out that he's been fighting with... San Thomas (Bruce Bennett). And if that's not enough, there's a whole lot more going on, including lots of affairs and one of the characters getting killed.

The Man I Love was based on a novel, and I get the impression that the studio folks who read the novel thought that it would make good material for a movie. But something went wrong, I'd guess with the script, in that there's just way too much here, and the script just keeps piling more and more melodrama on. It's way too much for a 90-minute movie. I suppose I should add here, however, that the movie was originally 96 minutes. Supposedly, the Warner Archive has restored it and made the 96-minute movie available as of this year, but the print TCM showed last Christmas was the 90-minute version.

Ida Lupino tries her best, and is generally good with this sort of material. But even Lupino can't really save The Man I Love.

Paddy Chayefsky channels Tennessee Williams

Some months back, TCM ran a night of movies with screenplays by Paddy Chayefsky. One that I hadn't seen before was The Goddess, so I recorded it and only recently finally got around to watching it.

The movie starts off in 1930, in the non-urban part of Maryland. Laureen Faulkner is a woman who got married much too young, and had a daughter not long after getting married. She feels herself unable to take care of the daughter, so she basically fobs the little girl, Emily, off on relatives who are strict Seventh Day Adventists. Emily can't get any love from them, in a scene where we see the juvenile Emily (Patty Duke in a one-scene role) tell the cat she got a promotion to the next grade.

We soon move to 1942. Emily is now about 16 years old and, still having no love from her family, prefers the fantasy world of Hollywood as well as going to the movie theater with boys who at least pay her some attention. And then, one night, she and some other high school kids run into a group of GIs, this being World War II after all. One of the GIs is a guy named John Tower (Steven Hill), who is the son of a famous Hollywood star but a man who couldn't handle the fame of having a famous Hollywood father. Emily doesn't much care; she's just taken with somebody who has a proximity to fame. She immediately falls for John, and the two quickly get married.

Unfortunately, Emily learns that she's way too much like her own mother. Emily gets pregnant and has the kid, but being a mother at such a young age is putting a decided crimp in the lifestyle of partying that she really wants. She doesn't want to be stuck in a small town. So one day she pretty much leaves the kid with her husband and leaves for Hollywood, because that's where the action is supposed to be.

Emily starts working her way up the ladder, having taken on the stage name of Rita Shawn. She's getting roles, and hopes to be able to impress her mother. Meanwhile, hanging on in Hollywood is retired boxer Dutch Seymour (Lloyd Bridges). He and Emily meet, and the two fall in love and get married. But he has the idea of going back to his home town to work in the family business, which is something Emily doesn't want to do since she still wants the fame and to be the center of attention.

So the two divorce, and Emily stays in Hollywood, where she does become a star, only to find that fame isn't all it's cracked up to be. She turns to drinking, becoming the sort of star all the producers worry can no longer do what's necessary to get a movie done on time and under budget.

You can be forgiven for thinking that The Goddess is the sort of movie that doesn't have much original to it. You can also be forgiven for thinking that The Goddess is the sort of material that could have been written by Tennessee Williams, if he moved his action out of the South. As such, The Goddess isn't really a movie that you watch for the story. Instead, it's more of a vehicle for Kim Stanley, who had been big on Broadway but didn't make a whole lot of movies. Even in spite of the trite material, Stanley is someone you can't really take your eyes off of, giving a ridiculous and memorable performance.

As a coherent whole, The Goddess isn't the greatest movie. Yet there's still something compelling about it.

Melodramatic 1930s love triangle #58347205723806

Merle Oberon was one of the stars honored in Summer Under the Stars last year, which gave me the chance to DVR a movie I hadn't blogged about before, The Dark Angel. I probably should have watched it in March since it was shown again for 31 Days of Oscar thanks in part to Oberon's nomination, but I only got to it recently.

Oberon plays Kitty Vane, who lives in one of those English manor houses in the early part of the 20th century. She's got two best friends who have all known each other since childhood, Alan Trent (Fredric March) and Gerald Shannon (Herbert Marshall). With these three knowing each other more or less all their lives, it's unsurprising that they would wind up having romantic feelings for one another, or at least heterosexual romantic feelings, since there's no way they could have depicted Alan and Gerald being in love with each other. But while both guys like Kitty, Kitty loves Alan and only considers Gerald a close platonic friend.

And then the Great War comes, sending both of the guys off to fight. Both of them get leave at the same time, and when they get home, Alan decides he's going to propose to Kitty. Gerald accepts this, and Alan and Kitty think about having the marriage be as soon as possible. This would be doable with the ten days' leave he and Gerald have. But unfortunately, all leave gets cancelled just as Alan is going to get the marriage license. No vicar is going to be able to perform the ceremony before Alan has to go back to the front.

So at the other end of the railway line where the soldiers are going to depart for France, Alan and Kitty decide that they're going to spend the night together anyway, despite not being married. Lawrence, another soldier who knows Alan, Kitty, and Gerald, happens to see Alan in a compromising situation, and is a bit of a dick to Alan about it. You'd think Alan could just tell Lawrence that he's having dinner with Kitty, but the idea of an unmarried couple sharing a hotel room together is something their class of society would consider scandalous back in those days (see the later Merle Oberon movie The Divorce of Lady X).

Lawrence is enough of a dick that he lets Gerald in on the fact that Alan had somebody in his room with him, which leads to problems out on the front. Alan tries to put in for leave, but Gerald won't approve it because he thinks Alan has been dishonorable to Kitty. Instead, Alan winds up on one of those dangerous missions that could lead to his death, one that he in fact doesn't return from.

Gerald eventually returns to England and Kitty feeling responsible for Alan's death, more so when Kitty reveals it was she who was in the hotel with Alan that night. Worse, it turns out that Alan didn't die at all. He was only blinded by an explosion in the field and taken to a German hospital under a different name. After some time and with the war over, Alan is as well as he's ever going to be but still blind, and free to go back to England.

He takes the train to Kitty's home town, but decides not to get off because he doesn't want to be a burden. Instead, he goes to another town where he stays at an inn where the kids have never seen a blind person before. Alan treats the kids to some children's stories, which get written down and published under that different name. But you just know that eventually Alan's path is going to cross with the path that Gerald and Kitty are on. They've decided to marry, since Gerald always loved Kitty and they just know that Alan is dead.

If you like sappy 1930s melodramas, you're going to love The Dark Angel. It's well acted and the story certainly pours on the melodrama. If melodramas aren't your thing, then you probably won't care so much for it, since the characters make some pretty dumb (and dated) choices in their lives. Indeed, I don't think The Dark Angel is the sort of movie I'd pick if I were trying to get people not so interested in old movies into 1930s films. Better to pick a comedy or a drama with more of a payoff at the end like San Francisco with its depiction of the earthquake. But it's easy to see why audiences of the day would have flocked to The Dark Angel.

The Silver Cord

I mentioned in this morning's post on Ingrid Bergman that there are a couple of movies coming up in the Thursday evening into Friday morning lineup on TCM that I wanted to blog about, so one of them would get a post today and the other one tomorrow. The first of the movies is The Silver Cord, which will be on overnight between Thursday and Friday (Dec. 3) at 3:30 PM (which is early Friday everywhere in the contiguous 48 states).

Christina (Irene Dunne) is a biology student studying under a prestigious researcher in Heidelberg. Just as she thinks she might have made an interesting discovery, who should walk into the room but David Phelps (Joel McCrea)? David is an architect who was in Europe for reasons not quite mentioned but aren't really important because the movie is about to go back to America anyway. David is also Christina's husband. He has a job offer with a prestigious architect in New York and wants to head back to America as a result. Christina, thankfully, had an offer from a research institute in New York that she may still be able to take up, so they'll both be able to work in New York and live happily ever after.

Not so fast, of course. David says to Christina that he'd like to introduce her to the rest of his family, now headed by his mother (Laura Hope Crews) since Dad died many years ago. It's a natural thing to do, but since they leave for America just a few minutes into the movie, you know that the visit is not going to go without a hitch. Sure enough, Ma Phelps seems stunned that Christina is actually a scientist -- why, women just didn't do such things back in her day! They were good mothers to their children and produced a generation of responsible adults.

Not that all of Mrs. Phelps' chlidren are responsible adults. David is, but there might be a question about his kid brother Robert (Eric Linden). Robert has fallen in love with a young woman, Hester (Frances Dee), and Mom thinks Hester isn't quite right for Robert. Worse, she fears that Robert and Hester might move away, leaving her all alone, and that's something she can't countenance. So she works on getting Robert to see the "error" of his ways and dumping poor Hester.

She also goes to work on David, since she doesn't want him to live in New York, especially if he's only goin gto be working his way up from the relative bottom. The family has a nice plot of land that could be developed as new housing, something which would both enable David to live nearby, and allow him to start a lot closer to the top of the architecture business. Of course, David and Christina would have to give up their dreams, but Mrs. Phelps doesn't care about those, only how she can keep her sons close to her.

If David and Robert have been raised by their mother so long and inculcated into this warped view of what a mother's love is to the point they can't see through it, Christina certainly isn't. She gets fairly quickly what's going on, and definitely takes Hester's side over the way Robert and especially Ma Phelps treat her. But it also means that there's going to be a lot of conflict between Christina and David before we get to the inevitable climax: who's it going to be, her or me?

The Silver Cord was based on a 1926 stage play, which explains why so much of the action is kept to a few rooms of the house, and also why a big housing development could be a thing in a movie that was made at the height of the Depression. In any case, all of the cast give very good performances, and while the script sometimes goes over the top by today's standards, that's not the actors' fault. One mild plot hole for me was thinking that the boat David and Christina took back to America would dock at New York, letting them set up house there before going to see Mom (the exact location of the Phelps manor is not mentioned); this would give David and Christina no good reason to stay with Mom. Also unanswered is why Mom let David go over to Europe alone in the first place.

But these are minor quibbles for what is a pretty darn interesting movie, and one that you should definitely watch.

Claudelle Inglish

I've come to realize that one of the genres of movies that I really enjoy is the overheated potboiler, if only because there's often so much to laugh at that the producers didn't intend to have be laughed at. An excellent example of this is the movie Claudelle Inglish.

Diane McBain plays Claudelle, a high school senior in some small town in the rural south, this being based on a book by Erskine Caldwell of Tobacco Road fame. Claudell lives with her parents, tenant farmers Clyde (Arthur Kennedy) and Jessie (Constance Ford), who, having been jilted by their respective spouses in A Summer Place, apparently decided to head south and impose their presence on this movie. Clyde, despite his best intentions, isn't able to provide much of a good life for his wife and daughter, and this has left the wife perpetually resentful.

One of Claudelle's classmates is Linn Varner (Chad Everett), whose parents are also tenant farmers like Claudelle's, both families renting land from the county's biggest and wealthiest land owner, S.T. Crawford (Claude Akins). Linn falls in love with Claudelle, and asks for her hand in marriage, with the caveat that she's going to wait until after Linn serves his hitch in the Army, this being the days of the peacetime draft. You'd think an 18-year-old who gets off the farm for his Army hitch and sees a bit of life would like something better, but Linn thinks he's going to become a father just like his father, and needless to say Claudelle's mom doesn't like this.

Claudelle writes to Linn pretty much every day, but eventually, replies stop coming, until one day she gets a letter from Linn saying that he's found another girl and is going to marry her instead. So Linn would like something better, just not with Claudelle. Claudelle, having been jilted, decides that like Miss Havisham, she's going to spend her life hurting men, which here means letting every man in the county date her just for the presents they can give her, but with no plans on the relationships going anywhere. And not telling anybody Linn has jilted her.

When I said every man, that's not quite correct. If the movie hasn't gone around the bend enough, it's about to get a whole lot crazier. S.T. Crawford decides that, like the men in Baby Doll, what he'd really like to replace his late wife is a girl who's barely of legal age, and he's picked out Claudelle, because she's making him really horny, not that he put it that way since the Production Code would never have allowed it. He comes to the Inglish house looking to take Claudelle out on a date, and Jessie thinks this is a good idea because it will allow Claudelle to escape the life of a tenant farmer's life. Never mind what Claudelle might like.

Claudelle Inglish continues on like this until the the unsurprising and logical plot development of some of the men in town beginning to fight over which one of them is going to get Claudelle. But there are some other twists as well involving Jessie and Clyde.

Watching Claudelle Inglish, it's easy to see why this one was a box-office failure back in the day and the critics savaged it. And to be fair, simply taken on an objective level it's not very good. But it's also easy to see why people consider it so much fun despite the bad critical repuation. Just when you think it's gone all the way over the top, it suddenly goes further, like the plot twist of sleazy Crawford deciding he wants Claudelle.

If there are flaws that could make the movie even more of a guilty pleasure, I can think of two. One is that the movie is in black-and-white, when it could really benefit from garish color. The other is that Claudelle doesn't get pregnant; the movie could have used a pregnancy like Susan Slade and The Best of Everything to be that much more ridiculous.

So get together with a bunch of friends and have a blast watching Claudelle Inglish.

A Streetcar Named Desire

Another of the classic movies that I surprisingly haven't blogged about yet is A Streetcar Named Desire. (Well, maybe not that surprising considering that I'm not the biggest Tennessee Williams fan.) It got an airing on TCM during 31 Days of Oscar, so I recorded it then. It's going to be on again tonight at 8:00 PM as part of the Teacher Guest Programmer spotlight, so I watched it to do a post on here.

I assume a lot of people already know the story. Vivien Leigh plays Blanche Dubois, who always depends on the kindness of strangers (although, surprisingly, that line comes at the end of the movie and, I'm presuming, the end of the play too). She arrives at the train station and asks a stranger from the Navy how to get to a certain address where her sister Stella (Kim Hunter) lives, married to Stanley Kowalski (Marlon Brando). The stranger tells her to take the streetcar named "Desire", which is about the only time we see the titular streetcar.

Blanche arrives to find that Stella and Stanley are living in a crappy little ground-floor apartment with only two rooms; obviously, the couple isn't in a very good financial situation. Then again, Blanche isn't, either. She had been taking care of the family "estate", Belle Rive, up in Mississippi, but the place has been mortgaged to the hilt, necesitating Blanche's leaving to come to New Orleans. That, and she's left her job as a teacher for... reasons.

Stanley is a loud, brutish blowhard, and damn if he doesn't know that Louisiana is governed under a different legal structure from the rest of the United States, civil law based on the Napoleonic Code, with Stanley bringing up "the Napoleonic Code" as though it were a magic incantation. What belongs to a wife belongs to a husband, and somehow this should mean part of Belle Rive is his. He keeps claiming to know people who can fix this sort of stuff or something.

Stanley and the other guys play poker, with one of those guys being Mitch (Karl Malden). The guys can get loud, and Stanley can be nasty to both Stella and Blanche, leading Stella on occasion to hide out in the apartment one floor above theirs and Stanley to cry out "Stella!" much the same way Jerry Lewis would say "Hey Lady!" At any rate, Mitch has a sickly mother who's probably terminally ill, and Mitch thinks Mom wants him to be settled before she dies. So he's willing to settle with Blanche.

At least, that is, until he begins to learn a little bit more about Blanche. She'a an alcoholic, probably propositioned one of her students which led to her having to leave her teaching position, and is probably about as sane as Norma Desmond in Sunset Blvd. When Mitch starts to put two and two together, he dumps Blanche because he actually has some sense. And despite Stanley's being a blowhard, he has some sense too, figuring out what she's really like. Eventually Blanche's close-up comes for her too, albeit in a different way.

You can tell I didn't have as high an opinion of A Streetcar Named Desire as other people are going to have. That's partly because, as I said at the top, I'm not a huge fan of Tennessee Williams or this sort of overheated Southern gothic in general. (Remember I didn't particularly care for Wise Blood either.) But it's also down to the fact that the characters are mostly loud, obnoxious, and unsympathetic. Maybe I should go a bit lighter on Mitch and Stella, but all of these are the sort of people you want to take and shake some sense into the way Bette Davis does to Miriam Hopkins at the end of Old Acquaintance.

Still, all the actors play the parts they're given well, and the movie is definitely atmospheric. So those of you who like Southern gothic will definitely like A Streetcar Named Desire. As always, watch and judge for yourself.

But nobody actually goes naked

The other day, I commented on MGM's smaller movies from the 1950s when I did a post on Cry Terror!. When one of the "bigger" movies is interesting, it's as much because it's a mess as anything else. A good example is Go Naked in the World.

Anthony Franciosa plays Nick Stratton, a man who's just gotten out of the military after a stint, and hasn't decided whether or not he's going to re-enlist. He's in his hometown of San Francisco, but hasn't met his family yet, instead going to a club where he meets Guilietta Cameron (Gina Lollobrigida). She's lovely, and unsurprisingly Nick falls in love with her. Guilietta, however, seems very unsure about taking the relationship anywhere even though she does like Nick.

Eventually, Nick's father Pete (Ernest Borgnine) finds him at the hotel where he's staying. Nick is a Greek immigrant, and a big deal in San Francisco's Greek-American community. He owns a construction firm, and has even offered Pete a job in the firm. Pete isn't so certain he wants it, because it comes with strings attached.

Those strings are that Dad is the head of the family, and dammit, he's going to let everybody know it. The rest of the family sees it as controlling, and they're all beginning to get fed up with it. That is why, for example, Pete might not want to take the job. Pete's younger sister Yvonne (Luana Patten) decides she's going to rebel by staying out all night with a boyfriend, which really pisses Dad off. Mom's been the Edith Bunker type of housewife, but she might finally be beginning to show some independence.

But the story is mostly about Pete, Dad, and Guilietta. Pete keeps seeing her, and gets the brilliant idea of bringing her as his guest to his parents' anniversary party. This turns out to be a big mistake, as we learn that Guilietta is a former "escort" (well, she did more, except that the studios weren't going to go into detail in the early 1960s). That would be bad enough, except that Dad points out that a lot of the people at his party have availed themselves of her services.

This causes Guilietta to break things off with Pete, but he's insistent on continuing to see her again. So he finds out what her new address is, and meets her at a hotel. But Dad finds out what Pete is up to, and sends the vice squad after Guilietta! No wonder everybody thinks he's controlling! Pete figures that the only way he can get out from under Dad's thumb is to elope with Guilietta. They go off to Acapulco, but everywhere they go Pete finds people who had been Guilietta's clients back in San Francisco....

Oh boy is Go Naked in the World a stinker. The one redeeming quality is that it's a stinker in a really fun way. The movie is clearly trying to be lurid and test the constraints of the Production Code, but it's too glossy to be anything other than phony. The dialog is roundly horrible and overripe, and Borgnine is given free rein to overract, which he unsurprisingly takes. His Fred Sanford-style heart palpitations are hilarious.

As I implied in the title of the post, nobody really goes naked either, with the closest being distance shots of Franciosa water-skiing in one of those early 60s square-cut pair of swimming trunks. OK, I think Lollobrigida might have a scene in a negligee or something too. But it's not as if you should have expected any nudity. One other interesting thing was with the set of the Stratton's house. That staircase made me think of a nother equally "lurid" and silly movie that MGM put out around the same time, All Fall Down. I wouldn't be surprised if the set pieces were reused, even though All Fall Down was released a full year after Go Naked in the World.

Go Naked in the World got a DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive. But it's one I'd only watch the next time it shows up on TCM.

Old Acquaintance

Another of the movies that's been sitting on my DVR for a couple of months is Old Acquaintance. I don't think this one is coming up soon, but it's on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, which is why I sat down to watch it recently and do a post on it.

Bette Davis plays Kit Morrow, a woman who's written a critically successful novel in 1924. She's returning to her smallish home town to be fêted and do a presentation on the novel, and her childhood best friend Millie Drake (Miriam Hopkins) is going to pick her up at the train station. Millie stayed behind to marry Preston (John Loder) and do the wealthy bored housewife thing -- and she's clearly jealous of Kit. She decides that she's going to start writing novels herself, although she has different ideas about what to write than Kit.

Fast forward eight or nine years. Kit lives a nice life doing the New York writer thing, currently having a play about to open while her latest "serious" novel is on the back burner. Millie's first, trashy novel was a big success, and she's been cranking out similar trashy stuff on a roughly annual basis like Sidney Sheldon or Danielle Steel in more recent times. She's also got a young daughter Deirdre (nicknamed Deedee), while Kit has remained unmarried and childless.

But Millie is still somehow jealous of Kit, something that's always bothered Preston, who has remained somewhat of a background figure while his wife has become the successful one in the family. He's resentful of this and has fallen in love with Kit, but while Kit is certainly a friend of his, she knows that it wouldn't do any good to start a relationship with Preston. So Preston decides that he's just going to walk out on Millie and file for divorce. This sends Millie over the deep end.

Or should I say it sends Miriam Hopkins over the deep end. Fast forward another nine or so years, and it's about 1942 (the movie was released in 1943). World War II is on, and Kit is on a fund-raising drive for the American Red Cross, while Millie is still a successful author. Kit has a guy who's interested in her, Rudd Kendall (Gig Young), but Kit isn't quite interested mostly because of the age difference, since she doesn't want to be a burden on a younger guy.

Who should hear the latest radio benefit drive but Preston, who's now a major in the Army? Having heard it, he decides that he wants to see Kit again, which gives Kit the opportunity to bring an adult Deedee (Dolores Moran) into her father's life. Millie finds out about all this, and starts engaging in hilarious histrionics.

Old Acquaintance is one of those "women's pictures" which were a big thing in Hollywood back in the 1930s and 1940s, with melodramatic story lines that might make a lot of guys crings. Indeed, as drama, I didn't find myself caring for it all that much. It's not exactly bad, but I didn't think of it as anything special.

What does make this movie a must-see is the performance of Miriam Hopkins. She and Davis had starred together in The Old Maid four years earlier, and supposedly that absolutely hated each other. So Hopkins must have wanted to upstage Davis or something, which would explain why she's so hilariously over the top, especially in the third act. That, or she saw some of Davis' rants and decided to emulate them. It results in a famous scene of Davis grabbing Hopkins and literally shaking some sense into her. It wasn't the intent that people find this stuff funny, but I certainly was laughing at it.

Old Acquaintance doesn't necessariy succeed in doing what it set out to do, but boy is it still a fun ride.

Don't you cry for me

Another of the stars who got a day in this year's Summer Under the Stars is Dorothy McGuire. One of her films that I haven't blogged about before is Susan Slade, so I sat down to watch that one to do a post on it here.

McGuire is not Susan, but Susan's mother Leah; the part of Susan is played by up-and-comer Connie Stevens. Susan and Leah have been living in Chile's Atacama Desert for the past ten years together with the father in the family, Roger (Lloyd Nolan), who was a mining engineer for wealthy Stanton Corbett (Brian Aherne). They're about to go home to the California coast.

One thing Mom is especially worried about is how Susan is going to handle young men, since she didn't have much chance to deal with men of her social class what with her isolated upbringing in Chile. On the boat home, she meets Conn White (Grant Williams), who is the son of a wealthy man but who spends all his time being a mountaineer. Mom isn't so certain Conn is right for Susan, and is especially aghast when Susan comes back to their stateroom with smudged lipstick: obviously, she's been kissing, horror of horrors.

Back at home, we meet Corbett and his family, wife Marion (Natalie Schafer) and son Wells (Bert Convy), the latter being somebody all the old farts think would be perfect for Susan. The last member of the complicated relationships is Hoyt (Troy Donahue), a struggling writer whose father worked for Corbett but who was arrested for embezzlement and hanged himself in prison. Polite society shuns Hoyt, although Susan doesn't dislike him mostly because she's never been in polite society.

Still, Susan is waiting for Conn to return from his latest expedition, at which point she knows he's going to propose. The only problem is, he dies in a mountaineering accident on Mt. McKinley, which makes him rather unable to propose. Worse, he apparently knocked her up on the boat, which would explain that smudged lipstick. So Susan is pregnant out of wedlock, which would be an absolute scandal in her stratum of society.

So Mom and Dad get a brilliant idea. Dad, despite having foreshadowed that he's got a heart condition that could kill him, decides to take another engineering job in Guatemala. Mom and Susan will go along, which means Susan will be able to have the baby down there. Mom, meanwhile, has been dropping extremely unsubtle hints that she's pregnant. Not that she is; instead, she's going to act as though it's her baby when they get back from Guatemala, and nobody will know the difference.

But then Dad dies of a heart attack, leaving mother and daughter to return home alone. Well, with the baby, which Mom has increasingly decided is mine mine mine, and dammit Susan, I'm never going to let you have it! Susan, understandably, grows increasingly resentful.

Susan Slade is one of those lush potboilers that were quite common in the 50s and 60s, with upper class people going through all sorts of tribulations for us common people to point at and make fun of. Susan Slade does not disappoint in that manner. It's a mess at times, in no small part due to the acting of Donahue and Stevens, but it's never less than fun. As with All That Heaven Allows, there's some pretty blatant foreshadowing here. A real plus is the cinematography, helped out by being in the Big Sur area, making the movie look lovely even if the story is risible at times.

Susan Slade is available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive collection.

Back Street (1961)

Douglas Sirk left Hollywood after making Imitation of Life. Thankfully, producer Ross Hunter stayed, giving us overheated movies like the 1961 version of Back Street.

Susan Hayward stars as Rae Smith, a woman living with her widowed sister Janey (Virginia Grey) in a house in Omaha, NE, working as a buyer of some sort for the family's old department store which is all hers now. One night while she's going to see a client in a hotel, the client tries to accost her. Thankfully, US Marine Paul Saxon (John Gavin), just back in the States after World War II, had met Rae in the lobby and is in the room next door, so he comes to her rescue.

The two start a relationshp while Paul is waiting to get back home (you may remember demobbed military having to wait for transit planes in the opening of The Best Years of Our Lives). There's one catch, which is that Paul already has another woman, so trying to keep the relationship going is going to be difficult, and Rae isn't certain she wants to do it. Finally, Paul buys Rae a plane ticket to go with him, and she ultimately accepts, but just too late to get to the airport on time.

So Rae moves to New York and starts working in the garment district, having dreams like Mahogany of becoming a designer. Her boss Dalian (Reginald Gardiner) is less than sanguine about the prospect, but Rae is so forward about getting what she wants that she eventually becomes Dalian's partner. Meanwhile, one day, what should happen but she runs into Paul again?

Fast forward a few more years, and Rae is transferred to Rome, running a glamorous European operation there. Eventually, Paul shows up to handle the European operations of his family's department store. It's here that we finally see the other woman, Mrs. Liz Saxon (Vera Miles). And boy is she nasty. She's an inveterate drunk, and they have two children, but she vows she's never going to leave him or let him have any happiness. Paul doesn't care, and starts seeing Rae again.

Somehow, both Rae and the Saxons wind up moving to Paris, and the same exact pattern that had gone on in Rome continues here, except that it's gone even further in Paul's having bought Rae a place out in the country. Liz, for her part, finally comes up with a way to get back at Rae....

Back Street is overheated, and the whole time I was watching it, I couldn't help but feel like there was something terribly wrong with the movie. Like all the Douglas Sirk movies (some of which Hunter produced), this one is funny, but not intentionally. The dialog is overripe, and a lot in the movie made me think of other movies. I mentioned Mahogany; there's also Vera Miles' over the top alcoholism that made me think of Deborah Kerr in Edward, My Son. As for the fashion, I couldn't help but think this was the sort of movie being parodied in What a Way to Go! when Shirley MacLaine talks about one of her marriages being like a "Lush Budgett" production.

So sit back, watch with amazement, and laugh and talk back at the screen as you watch Back Street.