Latin Lovers

Tonight's second night of Ricardo Montalbán's turn as TCM's Star of the Month kicks off with a movie of his that I had never gotten around to watching before, but was on my DVR: Latin Lovers, tonight at 8:00 PM.

Although Montalbán is Star of the Month and the male lead here, we don't actually see him for a good half hour or so. Instead, the movie kicks off with female lead Lana Turner. She plays Nora Taylor, a woman who went from rags to riches when he struck oil during Nora's childhood, before dying fairly young. Nora manages the money -- all $37 million of it -- by figuring the best way to keep your money from drying up is work and investment. Deep down inside, however, she's worried that men are only going to be interested in her for her money, and is seeing a psychologist about it (Eduard Franz, whose scenes with the character's wife are the comic relief in the film). This, even though he current boyfriend Paul Chevron (John Lund) is also worth eight figures.

Paul is planning to tell Nora he's going to marry her, but his hangup is being too forward, so after going to an analyst of his own (Beulah Bondi in a cameo), he decides instead that he's going to give Nora time to consider the proposal while he goes down to Brazil to look at polo ponies, since that's what rich people do. Now, all of this happens before we meet the Montalbán character, so we know that Paul isn't going to return from Brazil to a Nora who says yes and they live happily ever after.

Instead, Nora hears that it's apparently a thing for rich guys to go to Latin America and fall in love with the beautiful Latin ladies, a fate that Nora doesn't want to have happen. So she decides she's going to take her secretary Anne (Jean Hagen) and go down to Rio and get a suite of rooms on the same floor as Paul, who has no idea about any of this. The other question of who's running their respective businesses also never gets adequately answered.

Here is where Ricardo Montalbán comes in. He plays a rancher named Roberto Santos, living on the old family ranch with his impossibly young grandfather (Louis Calhern). Paul goes out to the ranch for business; Nora goes with him; she meets Roberto and immediately falls head over heels for his Latin good looks. Since Montalbán is billed above John Lund and he's not a wooden drip like John Lund, we know who's going to end up with whom at the end of the movie. The question, of course, is how we get there.

And there are a lot of complications considering that Nora is this close to being engaged to Paul. She's also worried about what's going to happen when Roberto finds out about her wealth. Then there's his stereotypical Latin attitude toward gender roles. At least in this case, part of his defense is that Nora was stupid enough to show up way late to a meeting at the Santos ranch and then expect him to drop everything for her. She deserved some of the treatment she got.

Latin Lovers is a competently made film that's not exactly bad so much as it is predictable and modest in its aims. It's the sort of thing that would have entertained audiences in the days before television, although by 1953 when this one was made I can't help but think audiences might have been interested in authentic location shooting. Think Three Coins in the Fountain from a year later. Latin Lovers is OK, but ultimately unmemorable.

Strange Western on TCM

TCM's lineup tomorrow (Apr. 3) morning and afternoon is a bunch of mid-1950s widescreen stuff that I think is all from Warner Bros. One of the movies is one that I hadn't blogged about before and was on my DVR from the last time TCM ran it. That movie is Strange Lady in Town, airing at 4:00 PM, so as is my way around here I watched the movie in order to be able to put up this post for the upcoming showing.

After the credits, a title card informs us that the scene is the New Mexico territory in 1880, not far from Santa Fe. A wagon is going over the landscape, only to crash, fortunately near a bunch of ranchers. The lady passenger on the wagon is Julia Garth (Greer Garson) from Boston. She's a doctor in an era when lady doctors were uncommon, and out west even less common. But one of the ranchers has some pains so she treats the guy much to their surprise.

The military adjutant coming to pick her up arrives, but the two get waylaid on the way to what's going to be Julia's new house. Several bandit types ask about the military court of inquiry being held, although the adjutant knows knowing, not having been there. The adjutant in question, Martinez-Martinez, is working for Lt. David Garth (Cameron Mitchell), who happens to be Julia's brother, and one of the reasons Julia is coming out to New Mexico. His is also one of the two main plot strands going through the movie.

The other plot strand includes the doctor currently in town, Dr. O'Brien (Dana Andrews). He's got an adolescent niece Spurs (Lois Smith) who is quite the tomboy, and who has a thing for Lt. Garth even though he isn't right for Spurs. Getting back to Dr. O'Brien, he's one of those old-fashioned people who thinks it's not proper for ladies to be doctors, which is going to be an even bigger problem considering that she knows the latest advances in medicine from back east which are going to show her to be right in a bunch of situations Dr. O'Brien wrong. But at some point along the way Dr. O'Brien is going to fall in love with Julia.

As for Lt. Garth, I mentioned that he's not quite right for Spurs, even though she doesn't get that yet. He likes to gamble and is quick-tempered, which are traits liable to get an officer in trouble. There's also that court of inquiry mentioned in the opening. Lt. Garth tells his sister that the court of inquiry is being held because somebody sold the army a bunch of cattle that turned out not to have been owned by the person doing the selling, which equates to cattle rustling and a serious crime. As you can guess, especially considering a comment when Julia mentions not being able to buy a place for her on an officer's salary, Lt. Garth might know more about the rustling than he's letting on.

Finally, for a movie set in 1880 New Mexico, the studio had to insert a couple of historial tropes: Dr. Garth meets Billy the Kid (Nick Adams) when he and another man come in because of a toothache. Later in the movie, Garth treats Civil War general, and by this time territorial governor, Lew Wallace.

Strange Lady in Town combines a lot of different plot stuff into what is in many ways a pastiche of the Old West. It's a movie that's definitely competently made, although it's also one that's rather old-fashioned, in a way that reminds me of another Garson movie Blossoms in the Dust. It's certainly not the first film I'd think to recommend regarding any of the people in the movie, but it's also one that there's not anything particularly wrong with. It just doesn't do anything new. In the days before TV, this would have been enough, but having been made later, it's easy to see why this one has become little remembered.

Catholic boy meets Catholic girl

Another of the movies that I have on my DVR which is getting another airing soon on TCM is A Majority of One. That next airing comes up tomorrow, December 3, at 10:00 AM.

In late 1950s brooklyn, Bertha Jacoby (Rosalind Russell) is a Jewish widow living in Brooklyn and displaying all of the stereotypes Hollywood had about Jewish mothers in those days. Her husband died some time back while her adult son was killed in action in the Pacific theater of World War II. She's got an adult daughter, Alice (Madlyn Rhue), who is married to Jerry Black (Ray Danton); he works for the US Foreign Service.

Jerry's job has the young couple moving from country to country as US foreign service officers do, and he's just about to get a new posting: to Japan, where he's going to be serving as a junior member of a committee negotiating a major trade deal with Japanese industrialists. Now that Jerry's mother-in-law is getting up in years, he and Alice suggest that she come along to the young couple with Japan. In the 2020s this would make no sense since Bertha can clearly support herself, but the past is, as they say, a foreign country.

The three fly to the west coast and then take a boat for the voyage across the Pacific. Among the fellow passengers on the boat is Koichi Asano (Alec Guinness). He's a Japanese businessman who meets Bertha and her family, and enjoys Bertha's company. Except that there's a catch, which is that Bertha still has a major issue with the Japanese, what with them being responsible in her mind for her son's death. Then again, Koichi lost his daughter when the Americans dropped that atomic bomb on Hiroshima, so the two are equal, in a way. A bigger problem, however, is for Jerry and Alice. Bertha doesn't work for the foreign service, so she may not be aware of how taking gifts from someone you'll be doing business with might be an issue. Bertha doesn't think anything of Koichi's kindess, but Jerry sees the possibility of Koichi trying to influence the negotations as Koichi is one of Japan's bigger industrialists.

So Bertha drops all contact with Koichi and arrives to Japan a very lonely woman since she doesn't know the language or the culture, and has no reason to be going out to diplomatic functions the way Alice would at least. And then things get far worse when the negotiations on that trade treaty go south and Koichi intimates that Jerry is responsible for the failure of this. Eventually, Bertha realizes that she has to try to put things right again in the name of international frienship.

Her gesture works in one way, but in another produces an even bigger personal problem. Koichi and Bertha like each other enough that Koichi is willing to suggest that the two "keep company" together, which is a euphemism for the first steps toward a marriage proposal. That seems utterly out of the blue, and Jerry and Alice are shocked, because this sort of cross-cultural relationship just isn't going to work, is it?

A lot will have been written in more recent reviews of A Majority of One of the utter horror of having a British man like Alec Guinness playing a Japanese man: yellowface, and all that. Perhaps the screenwriter (Leonard Spiegelglass, based on his stage play) could have written Koichi as the son of a Japanese diplomat who married a western while posted abroad; think Carroll Baker in Bridge to the Sun, which was based on a true story. Surprisingly, much less mention -- and certainly not offense -- is given to one of Hollywood's old arch-Catholics playing the Jewish mother.

In any case, the problems I had with A Majority of One weren't because of the casting, but more down to the writing. The issue that causes the whole diplomatic rift between Koichi and Jerry turns out to be something unrealistically petty. And Koichi and Bertha fall for each other much too quickly. Another problem is that the movie is much too long at 148 minutes; it probably should have been trimmed by a good 40 minutes or so as it's way too slow.

A Majority of One may be interesting as a period piece, but it's not a terribly great movie.

Flight Test Center

I'm always surprised at how many new-to-me movies there still are on TCM, even from the studio era. I don't just mean movies that I'd already heard of the title but have never gotten around to watching; I mean things that I didn't know existed until they showed up on the TCM schedule. Another such movie that I recorded some months back is Toward the Unknown.

The opening credits as well as a card on screen thanking the US Air Force clearly give away, if you will, that this is going to be a movie about avaiation, and specifically test piloting. After all those credits, a man drives up to Edwards Air Force base, getting waved through the guard house, where the two men on duty identify the man as Maj. Lincoln Bond (William Holden) and wondering what he's up to know, which implies that he has a past.

We then hear radio chatter from the pilot to the ground about the difficulties one of the planes is having; that plane eventually crashes and burns, while Maj. Bond watches from the ground. At the officers' club, Maj. Bond hears from a fellow officer, Maj. Lee (Murray Hamilton), that the plan was being flown by Gen. Banner (Lloyd Nolan), who still likes to do test piloting even though you'd think as a general he's far too important for that as well a far too old. But this is also foreshadowing for what's to come later in the movie.

Maj. Bond then meets with Col. McKee (Charles McGraw), in a scene to provide character exposition and plot advancement. Bond has returned from Washington, and would like to start test flights. He had piloted planes in the past, but then the Korean War came. Bond was shot down and taken POW by the North Koreans, who tortured him until he broke. As a result, nobody really wants to trust him or let him fly planes again.

But one of the defense contractors is trying to sell the Air Force on a new plane, and that means lots of test flights as well as people to fly support behind the plane being tested. Maj. Bond does a test flight of the plane being marketed, and comes to the conclusion that the plane has fundamental engineering flaws that are going to make it unfit for purpose. Nobody wants to believe him thanks to his past in North Korea, and because other, lesser pilots don't spot any flaws.

Further complicating matters are two other subplots. One has been referenced before, which is Gen. Banner's advancing age. Maj. Bond sees him come close to collapse after a flight, but Banner still wants to conduct test flights. Worse is that Gen. Banner has as a secrtary and love interest Connie Mitchell (Virginia Leith). Connie is also the ex-girlfriend of Maj. Bond, from the days before he was taken prisoner in Korea.

Toward the Unknown doesn't tread any new ground -- or should I say airspace since this is an aviation moive. But what it does it does competently enough. And for the people into aviation is has a lot of footage that they'll like. It also has a fair number of good supporting performances. In addition to the aforementioned Nolan and McGraw, Paul Fix shows up as another general, while James Garner has one of his earliest roles as another test pilot. Toward the Unkown is certainly worth a watch for aviation buffs.

Who is Annette Kellerman and why is she saying those horrible things about me?

I've got several movies on my DVR that are coming up on TCM. Two of them are in conjunction with prime-time programming, and I figured it would be better to do posts on those on the following two days. So my next post is on a movie that TCM isn't showing for a good three days yet: Million Dollar Mermaid, Nov. 6 at 2:15 PM.

After a brief title card sequence about the old Hippodrome in New York, the action switched to Australia in the 1890s. Frederick Kellerman (Walter Pidgeon) is a widowed musician who runs a conservatory in the Sydney area and lives with his young daughter Annette (Donna Corcoran playing her as a juvenile). Annette suffered a polio-like disease as a child that weakened her legs; since then she's taken to swimming as a form of physical therapy. Fast forward several years and Annette is all grown up (played by Esther Williams) and winning swimming competitions. Unfortunately, she only wins trophies because the sport is completely amateur.

The Kellermans could use the money as the conservatory can no longer support them. Dad gets a job in London, and Annette follows him. On board, they meet James Sullivan (Victor Mature), who is promoting some sort of act involving a kangaroo, which would have been really exotic in the first decade of the 20th century. James is taken with Annette, and this being a movie based on a real person, James and Annette married and would remain married until his death 60 years later, although his death was 20 years after the movie. At this point of the movie, James wants to manage Annette's career, having her dress up as a mermaid and doing aquatic acts, somthing of which Dad decidedly does not approve.

The Kellermans get to London and find that the man who had offered Dad a job has died in the meantime, so his conservatory is now closed. This gives Jimmy the idea to promote Annette in a marathon swim in the Thames. It doesn't exactly make a whole lot of money, although at this point the point is to get Annette's name in the news, which the stunt does in spades. Eventually, everybody goes over to America to try to make it big there. As you can guess from the opening, Kellerman will eventually perform at the Hippodrome, but not the first time she approaches the manager. She's going to have to go through more struggle to make it to the top. Part of that includes promoting a new line of swimwear, which is a scandalous for the early 1910s one-piece relatively tight-fitting ladies' swimming gown, a lot like the one-piece outfits of today. 110 years ago, it would get her arrested (in the movie and in the real-life Kellerman's claims; from what I've read there's no surviving record of the arrest).

Annette does of course get to be the star attraction at the Hippodrome, and this gives MGM a chance to stage some of those spectacular aquacades that were the point of an Esther Williams movie. Kellerman would try her luck in Hollywood as well.

Million Dollar Mermaid is a Hollywood biopic, so often playing fast and loose with the facts, but this time the story generally does fairly well dramatically. Victor Mature is a bit handicapped in that the script often asks him to be a bit of a cad, but then the movie was a vehicle for Williams and her swimming numbers, not Mature. In that regard, the swimming numbers are worth the price of admission.

The King and the Chorus Girl

Some months back, TCM ran another of those surprisingly new-to-me movies, surprising considering how long I've had TCM and this is one of those movies that should be in the Turner Library so ought to get a few more showings on TCM: The King and the Chorus Girl. I recorded it so that I could watch it later and do a review on it here.

After the opening credits, a camera pans over a series of portraits of kings, from Alfred I through to Alfred VII, who looks quite contemporary. Cut to Alfred's apartment in Paris, although we don't see him at first. Alfred VII is the deposed king of one of those made-up central/eastern European countries that were a big thing in movies made before World War II. A doctor is visiting, and talking to Alfred's last two attendants, Count Humbert (Edward Everett Horton) and Duchess Anna (Mary Nash). Alfred's been on another bender; the benders last three days and sleeping them off lasts another three, with Alfred being in the sleeping it off stage. The doctor informs the Count and Duchess that Alfred has an acute case of apathy.

Alfred (played by Fernand Gravey) finally wakes up, seemingly sober, and we see that he's not exactly a likable character, self-centered and still expecting the trappings of power. He feels like he's done everything there is to do in Paris, and is bored with life. The Count and Duchess suggest some ideas that might lull him back to sleep out of his boredom, and eventually everybody agrees to try another night at the Folies Bergère, even though they've heard all the jokes from the vaudeville-style comedy pair before.

But this night turns out a bit differently. One of the musical numbers has a bunch of chorus girls, and one of the chorus girls, American-born Dorothy Ellis (Joan Blondell) keeps shining her mirror where the light is going to reflect right in Alfred's eyes. Alfred notices this, and decides she's impudent enough that he'd like to invite her over to his apartment for dinner after the show, before getting up and leaving. Not that she knows anything about ex-king Alfred, but she agrees to go, because who wouldn't want to meet a king. And he might even have a tidy sum of money still.

As for the Count and Duchess, they realize that bringing Miss Ellis over isn't such a bad idea, because it might help Alfred deal with that apathy. Unfortunately, Dorothy, the Count, and Duchess return to the apartment to find that Alfred went home and right to sleep, apparently having forgotten that he'd invited a chorus girl over for dinner, or perhaps just joking about the idea of inviting a chorus girl over. Dorothy is unsurprisingly displeased and walks out, not even seeing Alfred.

The Count and Duchess decide that a woman who would walk out on Alfred is just what he needs, so they decide to try to bring the two together. Based on the sort of movie this is, we know that they will mostly likely wind up together in the final reel, although there are going to be quite a few complications along the way.

The King and the Chorus Girl is a bit of an odd movie, for a couple of reasons. One is the casting; although Joan Blondell had played chorus girl types in the early 1930s, but 1937 when this one was made Blondell as an American in Paris feels a bit off. It feels more like the sort of story that MGM would have made with Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald. That, and the story doesn't feel like a typically Warner Bros. story; instead, it feels like something more suited to MGM as I said, or maybe the Korda brothers over in the UK.

Not that The King and the Chorus Girl is a bad movie. It's definitely formulaic, and something that won't appeal to everybody, but for the people who like 1930s romantic comedies, they'll definitely like it.

The FBI Story

Another of those movies that has been sitting on my DVR for some time is the James Stewart movie The FBI Story. Recently, I sat down to watch it and do a review on it here.

As you can probably guess, this movie is a story about the US Federal Bureau of Investigations. James Stewart plays Chip Hardesty, a career FBI agent who at the start of the movie is giving a lecture to a bunch of FBI agents about the history of the agency, starting from a relatively recent case in which a disgruntled man (Nick Adams) plants a bomb in his mother's luggage for her to take on a plane, with him taking out one of those airport insurance policies on her. The plane explodes, killing everybody on board, but the diligent FBI puts all the evidence together and captures the bomber.

It's only at ths point that we finally meet Chip in the flesh, as he takes the story back to 1924, and the time that J. Edgar Hoover (briefly playing himself) is named to head the agency. Hoover wasn't the first head; he was just the extremely long-serving head who eventually used the agency for his own political aims, just like other heads before him did, and heads after him, continuing right up to this day. But in 1959 when the movie was released, there was no way a Hollywood movie would say one cross word about Hoover or the FBI as a whole. Chip is working in the agency's office in Knoxville, TN, together with his friend Sam Crandall (Murry Hamilton) when they get word to head off to Washington where they find out about the reorganization of the agency along more professional lines.

Chip already has a girlfriend in local librarian Lucy (Vera Miles), and not being certain about what he's going to do with his career, he decides to get married to her before they have to go off to Washington, at which time he's already thinking about giving up his career. However, he's convinced to stay on, something which should have been obvious since the opening scene had him late in his career giving that lecture. Along the way, Chip and Lucy have a son and two daughters, and parts of their personal story are interspersed with Chip's professional life.

The professional life is episodic, with another five crime stories being told:
First, Chip and Sam get sent down south to deal with the Ku Klux Klan, although the Klan as seen here only threatens a white newspaper publisher rather than threatening any bloack people.
After that, Chip goes to 1920s Oklahoma, where somebody's killing a bunch of Indians who hold oil royalties. We see how the FBI has a bunch of records on various types of typewriters, something that would become a staple in later movies like Jagged Edge or Misery.
By the time we get to the 1930s, the gangsters are a big thing, and the fact that FBI agents are not armed is a problem. Some, like Lucy, however, worry that arming them will make them a bigger target, as the gangsters will be more likely to shoot instead of getting shot by an armed agent. Indeed, poor Sam gets killed.
Then we get to 1941, when Chip's daughter has an Honor Society meeting around noon on a Sunday, telegraphing things that this is December 7 and the US is going to get into World War II. Chip's son joins the Marines, while Chip goes to South America to check on those agents who are spying on the Nazis, the OSS (forerunner to the CIA) not yet being a thing. One of those agents is Sam's son George.
Finally, after the war, the Communists become the bad guys and Chip solves the case of a half-dollar that has some microfilm inside.

The FBI Story, having been personally approved by J. Edgar Hoover, is pure propaganda, and a lot of people will probably be quick to pan the movie because of what we now know about J. Edgar Hoover. However, it should be remembered that the FBI, along with the spy agencies that would be formed out of World War II and later, have always been inherently political, as all government is. And a lot of the people who hate J. Edgar Hoover would probably praise the FBI and the other three-letter agencies for their actions over the past five years going after the Trump admistration stemming from the obviously bullshit Christopher Steele dossier. (This isn't to speak well of the Trump administraion, but more to point out the incredible number of Will Ropers who are happy to set up government agencies that are going to spin out of control because they think some individual is evil.)

Being a mostly episodic movie, at least in terms of the crimes presented, it becomes a lot easier to look at The FBI Story in the same light that one might look at any police show, be it from the 1950s or still from today, and how much deference the police are still given in shows like the Law & Order franchise. (But dammit, they're going after the right people! Not people who allow us to turn policing into a racial issue!) The various episodes presented in The FBI Story could in fact fit in with almost any police show from the past 60-plus years, in that they're not badly executed, even if they are in service of propaganda. With a star like James Stewart and a director like Mervyn LeRoy, should one expect any less?

So The FBI Story is an interesting historical document if you will, albeit one that will probably frustrate a lot of people. One only wishes it would lead people to become frustrated with journalism's propagandistic treatment of the three-letter agencies of today.

Gypsy

A couple of months back, TCM ran the movie musical Gypsy. Realizing that I had never done a blog post on it, I made a point of recording it so that some day I could get around to watching it and doing a post on it. I finally did watch it, so here's the post.

The title Gypsy, of course, refers to Gypsy Rose Lee (1911-1970; played as an adult by Natalie Wood), famous for he striptease act. But we don't get any of that until almost the end of the movie. She was born Rose Louise Hovick (called Louise for most of the movie), with a sister June (who in real life became June Havoc). Her mother Rose (Rosalind Russell) had worked vaudeville and was now a single mother with a bunch of ex-husbands, so she's trying to push her two kids into vaudeville. Well, mostly Baby June since she's the one Mom thinks has talent.

An audition run by Herbie Sommers (Karl Malden) goes badly, with Herbie basically walking out on the producer and taking the show on the road, as it were, with the Hovicks. Mom comes up with an idea that has them and a bunch of boys be a child act, but of course they're all going to grow up and the depression is going to come, which is what ultimately kills vaudeville. Mom tries every trick in the book to get bookings for the act, and is also an incredibly pushy stage mother, who seems to care more about the kids' performing than the kids themselves do.

Eventually, they reach the end of the line. The boys are grown up and haven't been paid regularly. One of them has fallen in love with June and the two elope, planning to quit the act, leaving just Rose, Louise, and Herbie. Mom starts all over again, hiring a bunch of no-talent girls to be the new act, and putting Louise in the starring role, even though she doesn't seem to have anywhere near the talent that June had.

Louise's transition to Gypsy comes when Herbie gets the act a booking in Wichita. Only, it's not a vaudeville house but a burlesque house, with the Hovick act, now the Hollywood Blondes, being booked to be the "clean" entertainment between acts, much like Maureen O'Hara in Dance, Girl, Dance or the Britt Ekland character in The Night They Raided Minsky's (in fact, Minsky's Burlesque does get a brief mention in Gypsy). However, Mom is extremely unhappy with this. When circumstances conspire such that the owner needs somebody to do the "striptease" in a pinch, Louise volunteers and becomes Gypsy Rose Lee.

In a montage of her doing her number in a bunch of places, Gypsy becomes successful, enough so that Mom decides to look her up, although that might cause quite a bit of tension.

I think that fans of musicals will probably enjoy Gypsy, while other people will enjoy it somewhat less. Rosalind Russell plays Mama Rose as so obnoxiously pushy that for me she became grating. Wood does well, and Malden provides pretty good support in what I found to be a relatively thankless role. But for me it was the musical numbers, which are of course old-fashioned since the movie is set in the 1920s and 30s, that didn't work for me. I also felt the whole striptease montage was a copout. (I've never seen the stage musical, so I don't know how it's handled there.)

Still, Gypsy shows all the pizzazz that Hollywood studios would try to bring in the 1960s to what was becoming a dying genre, which also makes it a bit of an interesting artifact. It's just one that can be a bit of a slog at times.

Broadway Babies

Musicals from before 42nd Street can often be a difficult slog to get through. But I'm always interested in an early talkie I haven't seen before, so when I saw the 1929 film Broadway Babies on the TCM schedule, I made it a point to record it and watch it.

Although there are a couple of musical numbers, Broadway Babies isn't as much of a musical as other movies calling themselves musicals. Alice White plays Dee Foster one of three "Broadway Musketeers" living together in a rooming house with Florian (Marion Byron) and Navarre (Sally Eilers). Their motto is to do things their own way, all for one and one for all. Dee has a boyfriend in Billy Buvanny (Charles Delaney), who is a stage manager for the show in which the three women are chorines, and thinks he can get Dee a starring role.

The theater where the cast rehearses is across the alley from a hotel where Perc Gessant (Fred Kohler) and his entourage are staying. Perc is a bootlegger from Detroit distributing alcohol to New York. The men look into the windows of the theater with their binoculars, and see those lovely leggy ladies, and want to meet them. With that in mind, the producer of the show brings them backstage and introduces them to Dee and her friends, asking them to show Perc and his friends a nice evening out.

Dee is of course reluctant to do so at first, since by now she's engaged to Billy. But she sees Billy talking to Blossom, another woman in the cast, and gets the wrong impression that perhaps Billy doesn't really care about her. So she decides she's going to spend some time with Perc after all.

Perc, for his part, is that rare good-hearted bootlegger, not really telling naïve Dee what he really is. But the two fall in love, with Perc getting Dee a starring role in a nightclub show which really causes a lot of friction between her and Billy.

Perc, meanwhile, has been spending his spare time playing high-stakes poker with some locals. Of course those locals are out to fleece Perc, which they do with a rigged game, except that Perc, being no dummy himself, figures it out and turns the tables, which leads to gunplay and a really ridiculous chance of character from Perc.

I'm not certain exactly how original Broadway Babies is. While there's a lot that seems old hat and trite to somebody watching 90 years on from when the movie was made, I wonder how much it was unoriginal even by the standards of 1929. The story is engaging enough and the camera and sound aren't as primitive as some 1929 movies, although of course movie sound and camerawork would advance greatly over the next few years.

Alice White is an appealing star, and it's a shame her career petered out. Everybody else is adequate at best, with stuttering Tom Dugan being obnoxiously cast as Billy's friend. The musical numbers are very much of the pre-Busby Berkeley era, although one with African shields is moderately interesting.

Broadway Babies has been released as a standalone DVD by the Warner Archive collection, but it's really the sort of movie that needs to be in a cheap box set. Worth a watch, but I wouldn't pay standalone prices for it.

Big City Blues

It's been a while since I blogged about a pre-Code film. With that in mind, I fired up the DVR to watch the entertaining if imperfect Big City Blues.

Eric Linden plays Bud Reeves, who at the start of the movie is racing to catch the train from his home town of Hoopersville, IN, to go to New York City and make it big there. He was to wait for the next train out of town long enough to have a good talk with the station agent (Grant Mitchell), who himself had gone off to make a fortune in the big city 25-plus years earlier and came back, having done a bunch of different jobs and never making it big. Bud swears things are going to be different, but with a title like Big City Blues, one wonders whether that will be the case.

Bud has a cousin in New York named Gibby (Walter Catless), who frankly seems like the sort of schmoozer everybody ought to be able to see right through. For some reason, however, Bud doesn't see through him, and Gibby starts using Bud's $1100 bankroll to try to set both of them up. Gibby claims to know everybody who matters, but that is of course a load of hogwash, with all he really knows being some bootleggers and some second-rate chorus girls.

Among those chorus girls is Vida Fleet (Joan Blondell), whom Bud first meets in the lobby of the hotel where he's going to be staying. (Doesn't cousin Gibby have an apartment?) Vida has lived in New York for several years, but it turns out she too is from a small town, that being Oneida, NY. As such she understands Bud better than anybody else and even has a lot of sympathy for him, which Gibby clearly doesn't. Bud, for his part immediately falls in love with Vida and is lucky she isn't looking to exploit him.

Gibby wants to introduce Bud to more people, so he organizes a party which will be held in Bud's room. There's bootleg liquor there and a bunch of chorus girls and guys of ill repute there. (Humphrey Bogart is there, uncredited, in an early role as Shep, with his unmistakable voice.) Things get out of hand and punches are thrown, before somebody breaks a bottle of bathtub gin to throw and that kills one of the chorus girls. Everybody beats a hasty escape, with Gibby not bothering to help Bud.

Everybody who was in that room (well, except for the dead girl) is now a fugitive from justice, but Bud is the biggest one. He realizes he can't escape by bus or train, and so he goes lookin for Vida, who still has sympathy for him. Of course, the police eventually find everybody in that room, while hotel detective Hummell (Guy Kibbee) is also trying to solve the case.

Big City Blues is one of those movies that packs a lot into its brief running time of just over 60 minutes. With so many recognizable names as well as Warner Bros.' penchant for making punchy movies, it's unsurprising that the movie is elevated from being strictly a B movie. I shudder to think, for example, of what MGM would have done with the material.

That's not to say the movie is without its flaws. I mentioned early on that Gibby is so obnoxious that I couldn't imagine how anybody would be bamboozled by him, and that's what drives the movie's plot. Everything happening lickety-split also moves the film, even if that too is highly unrealistic. But overall, Big City Blues is definitely worth a watch.

Big City Blues got a DVD release on one of the Forbidden Hollywood sets.

Hard to Handle

Er, not quite this

Another of the movies that I had the chance to wtach off my DVR recently is the pre-code Hard to Handle. This one got a DVD release on one of Warner Home Video's Forbidden Hollywood collections, and last I checked is available for streaming at Amazon Prime.

The movie stars off at a dance marathon that has been going on for weeks, with just two couples left vying for the $1,000 prize. One is a married couple with an uncredited Sterling Holloway as the husband; the other is a platonic couple with Ruth Waters (Mary Brian) as the female half. The contest is being run by PR man Lefty Merrill (James Cagney). Lefty has become enamored of Ruth over the course of the marathon, but has to deal with Ruth's mother Lil (Ruth Donnelly).

Eventually Ruth and her partner win the contest, but when Lefty goes to the office to get the prize money, he finds that his associate has stiffed him, running off with all the proceeds from the contest, including the prize money. Lefty has to beat a hasty escape, although he goes to meet Ruth later. At this point we find that Lil is just as much a chiseler as Lefty, and will do anything to make certain that her daughter marries into wealth.

After some more failed schemes, Lefty decides he'd do best to get out of California, and high-tails it to New York, where he runs into Ruth again; she's now working for a famous studio photographer. Lefty hopes to win back Ruth, while Lil vacillates between suggesting Ruth marry the photographer or Lefty, depending on how well Lefty is doing financially.

Lefty tries some more schemes, one for a reducing creme, one promoting a college, and then one for the sort of land deal that was a stereotypical scam back in those days. That one bring him into contact with Miss Reeves (Claire Dodd), who could also be a romantic rival for Ruth. But perhaps the law may also catch up with Lefty.

As I was watching Hard to Handle, I couldn't help but think of a Warner Bros. movie from the previous year, High Pressure; that one has William Powell as a similar PR man whose schemes are of dubious legality. I think of the two, I liked Hard to Handle less, largely because the script requires Cagney to be even more of an obnoxious con artist than Powell was asked to be. I found it quite hard to have any sympathy for him. Cagney tries the best he can, and the script certainly isn't his fault. Ruth Donnelly plays quite well off of him, and gets a bunch of great lines.

Overall, Hard to Handle certainly isn't the first movie I'd recommend in any of the categories it could be put into -- pre-Codes, Cagney, looks at the Depression, or so on. But I'm glad it's available as part of a box set.

Dust Around the Blossoms

I mentioned this morning not having seen any of this years Best Actress nominations. So instead, I'll mention a movie that garnered a Best Actress Oscar nomination ages ago: Blossoms in the Dust.

Greer Garson plays Edna, née Kahly, a young woman living in Wisconsin with her parents and sister Charlotte at the turn of the last century. She's set to get married, as is her sister, but two things happen. One is that bank teller Sam Gladney (Walter Pidgeon) meets her and vows to marry her, even though he's not her fiancé. The other is that Charlotte's past as an adoptee, making her -- [whispers] -- illegitimate -- and certain her fiancé won't marry her.

Sam is planning to start a business milling wheat in Texas, and starts writing to Edna, a correspondence that turns mutual and results in her getting married to him and leaving for Texas, and they live happily ever after.

Well, no they don't because all this happens in the first 20 minutes of the movie. Edna has a kid, but the kid dies aged about 4, leaving the couple childless. A woman is going to have to give up her kid for adoption, but Edna is so moved by the possibility of this that the decides to do what she can to turn the Gladney house into a day-care center for those women who have lost their husbands or never had husbands, making them able to work at the mill.

But the mill goes bust, forcing the Gladneys to move from rural Texas up to Fort Worth. Sam is working his ass off to pay his debts and try to come up with a new process of milling wheat that would be more efficient an profitable. He sends Edna to the courthouse with the papers to file for a patent. While there, she passes by the juvenile court, which has so many cases of childless children that the State has to tag them to keep track of the kids. This bothers Edna, who decides to take two of them in.

From there, two grows and grows, until Edna is running a moderate-sized adoption agency. But she knows, in part from her own step-sister, the stigma that children born out of wedlock faced at that time, so she also starts a cruse of getting the word "illegitimate" stricken from birth certificates. The old biddies hate the idea, when they really should have been fighting against the subsidies from the biggest sugar daddy of them all, the state, that have since the implementation of the Great Society enabled multiple generations of families to have no fathers whatsoever, with all the concomitant social problems.

But I digress. Edna continues her work, and even leads to a fair amount of destigmatization of children born out of wedlock. But she's still always wanted children of her own, and is even beginning to think about adopting one child, shutting down her adoption agency, and moving back north....

Blossoms in the Dust is based on a true story, as Gladney was a real person, but as is always the case in Hollywood biopics, facts are changed and moved around for dramatic effect. The movie is competently made and in nice Technicolor, but one thing you do have to know is that the stars are Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon, and this is MGM. That means there's a certain style, that, combined with the sort of "family-friendly" material we're dealing with, may come across as too syrupy at times for many viewers (myself included). Felix Bressart is quite good in his supporting role as a pediatrician, but this is Garson's movie all the way, especially after Pidgeon's character dies.

The TCM Shop lists Blossoms in the Dust as being available on a four-movie box set but not a standalone DVD. Amazon has the same box set, and has the movie available streaming if you can do that.

Whoa, Nellie!

Paul Muni was the Star of the Month some months back, before my old DVR died. But TCM ran another day of Muni's movies last month, which gave me the chance to watch Hi, Nellie!, which is available on DVD courtesy of one of Warner Bros. "Forbidden Hollywood" box sets.

I knew the story of Hi, Nellie! already, mostly because this is the first version of a movie Warner Bros. made four times betwen 1934 and 1949, and I'd already seen two of the remakes. Muni stars as Brad, which you'd think isn't a name somebody who looks like Muni would have, until it's revealed that "Brad" is short for his surname Bradshaw. Brad is managing editor at a big city newspaper, who has a bit of a maverick way of doing things that's going to get in trouble.

One of the big stories going on involves the failure of the Labor Bank -- after all, there is a depression going on. Canfield, one of the bank managers, has disappeared, as has a large amount of the bank deposits. So everybody naturally puts two and two together and fiures that Canfield has absconded with the money. Well, everybody but Brad, who believes that Canfield is an honest guy and that something else must have gone wrong what with all the political corruption in the city. However, news eventually comes out that there were illicit withdrawals made with the money going to Canfield. Game, set, and match.

Brad's boss, the publisher, is pissed with Brad for making his newspaper a laughingstock, and wants to demote Brad. Brad would rather just quit, until he realizes that there's a clause in his contract that if he quits, he doesn't get to keep the nice big paycheck. So Brad comes back and reluctantly decides to keep his job, except that his position is no longer going to be as managing editor, but as... the writer of the "Heartthrobs" column, an advice to the lovelorn column whose writer has always gone under the nom de plume Nellie.

The current Nellie, Gerry Krale (Glenda Farrell) is thrilled to be off the beat and back to serious reporting, while Brad is pissed. He's got one ally in Shammy (Ned Sparks), who is feeding him information from other parts of the newsroom, but there's no real way for Brad to do real journalism.

Things perk up, however, when a young woman comes in looking for help in patching up a dispute between her fiancé and her father. Shammy has come up with an address where Canfield had supposedly been seen, while the address that this young woman gives Nellie is the same address. So now Brad can legitimately go there and do some poking around into the Canfield case, while pretending to try to patch up a love match. Brad discovers that there's some sort of money laundering going on for phony funerals, and that might just have something to do with the Canfield disappearance. The game is back on!

A lot of sources list Hi, Nellie! as a comedy, but I found it to be more of a programmer drama with some comic elements, with the two remakes I've seen being lighter. Not that this is a heavy drama, mind you, since its 75-minute programmer length doesn't allow for a prestige level of depth. Still, everybody comes off as quite professional. The story and performances both work, and the movie most definitely succeeds in entertaining as much as other Warner Bros. programmers of the era.

Hi, Nellie is definitely worth a watch.

High Pressure

I mentioned some time back that I picked up a box set of William Powell at Warner Bros. since I hadn't ctually seen any of the movies on it. I recently sat down and watched another selection off of it, High Pressure.

Powell plays a man named Gar Evans doesn't show up at first; instead, his friend Mike Donahey (Frank McHugh) is looking for him on behalf of another man, "Colonel" Ginsburg (George Sidney). It seems as though Gar has been on the bender to end all benders, and nobody knows where he is, especially not his long-suffering girlfriend Francine (Evelyn Brent).

The "Colonel" wants to find Gar because Gar is a business promoter, and Ginsburg has come across a great invention that just needs venture capital: an inventor has figured out a way to take sewage and turn it into synthetic rubber. It's an idea that's guaranteed to make millions, if it will pan out. And one of the catches is that the inventor has gone missing. But more importantly right not, the first thing is setting up a business and making it look as though there's a lot going on.

You see, Gar is a rather less than honest promoter, skirting the edge of illegal activity. As part of that skirting, he does like Warren William in Lady For a Day and hires a bunch of Runyanesque characters to work in executive positions under him, most notably Clifford Gray (Guy Kibbee) to be the president of the new company. There's also a secretary (Evalyn Knapp) who's secretly engaged to a man Gar takes on as a salesman; these of course were the days when women commonly quit working once they got married. As for Francine, she's Gar's good luck charm, but she's finally decided to leave Gar for good and marry another man -- if Gar can't sweet-talk her out of that.

As I said earlier, the inventor is nowhere to be found, so the folks from the natural rubber companies don't believe this ridiculous scheme is real. (To be fair, the movie was made before the invention of nylon, so synthetics outside of the hard plastics weren't quite so well known.) And if they can't get proof, they're going to go to the authorities and have Gar's stock float be stopped as fraudulent.

High Pressure is a movie that's firmly a product of the early 30s, with the Depression going on and get-rich quick schemes and shady stock schemes being things. For me, the movie barely worked, almost entirely thanks to the energetic performance of Powell. This is the sort of material that I'm often not a fan of since Gar is such a shady character. It's not quite what I call the comedy of lies, but it's close. Also, Ginsburg and the inventor (once he's found) are irritating characters. Finally, I would have liked a different ending.

Still, High Pressure is part of a box set, and some of you will probably like it more than I did, so I'd certainly recommend giving the movie a try.

An MGM melodrama

I mentioned many years back when I blogged about Johnny Eager that there's something about the gloss that MGM pictures had that comes with a side effect of making certain pictures look not quite right. Another good example of this is East Side, West Side.

Barbara Stanwyck plays Jessie Bourne, who has lived in New York all her life and tells us in a prologue that the city isn't quite as glamorous as outsiders might think; after all, the people in New York have day-to-day lives, too. In Jessie's case, that means marriage to investment advisor Brandon (James Mason), and weekly trips to her parents' place every Thursday night for dinner. At one of those dinners, Brandon gets a call that his business colleague needs to see him before a board meeting the next day, so he's going to have to leave early while Jessie goes home to wait up for him.

Brandon doesn't get in until 4:00 AM. He's spent some time at a swanky nightclub after the meeting, which involved talking to a woman Rosa (Cyd Charisse). Rosa has other guys pursuing her, and one of them eventually took a slug at Brandon. Since Brandon is well-known in his field, and a playboy, and the fight happened outside, it made it into the paper, which ought to be much to Jessie's consternation. Except that she's seen this sort of thing before. She knows that Brandon has had difficulty staying faithful, especially in the case of a former flame Isabel (Ava Gardner).

Well, formerly former. Isabel has come back to town with the intention of taking Brandon away from Jessie! As for Jessie, she meets Rosa, whose boyfriend Mark (Van Heflin) is about to get back from Italy having done government business in the post-war transition. Except that for Mark, this is really only a relationship of friends; he likes Rosa as a friend but not as a girlfriend. But when he meets Jessie, he could fall in love with her if only she weren't already married to Brandon.

This love quadrangle results in Isabel getting murdered, Jessie and Brandon being considered suspects, and Mark (a policeman before going off to World War II and Italy) solving the crime, all in the space of one reel. Now that Isabel is out of the way, what will happen to Jessie and Brandon's relationship?

The problem I had with East Side, West Side is that it all seems too pat and sterile. There's a long lead-up to the murder which occurs less than a half hour before the end of the movie. And as I said, it's amazing that Mark is able to solve it so quickly. Brandon seems to be almost a cardboard cutout and not a real character, with James Mason practically sleepwalking his way through the role.

And yet, through all this the movie is very pretty to watch. It's photographed in nice black-and-white, with attention paid to the details of the Bournes' luxurious duplex apartment, as well as the nightclub and Brandon's office. Even the poor side of New York, where Mark and Jessie's characters grew up, looks too nice. Compare it to the place on the wrong side of the tracks when Dana Andrews' character returns home to his parents in The Best Years of Our Lives, which seems much more real. All of this sheen is hiding a by-the-numbers, pedestrian film.

East Side, West Side is available from the Warner Archive. But it's really one of those movies that would be better off in a box set.