Swing High, Swing Low

Fred MacMurray was honored in the 2024 edition of TCM's Summer Under the Stars, and that gave me the opportunity to record another movie that I had seen the title show up a number of times, but had never actually seen the movie: Swing High, Swing Low. Now, having actually seen it, I can finally do a post on it.

Fred MacMurray is the male lead, although since the movie was made in the late 1930s, the real star is the female lead, played by Carole Lombard. Her character, Maggie King, is working her passage as a beautician on board a cruise ship that goes from the US Atlantic coast to the Pacific and back through the Panama Canal in the days when the US still controlled the Panama Canal and had a strip of land on either side. On this passage through the Zone, she sees a soldier patrolling the shore, and he sees her. His name is Skid Johnson (that's MacMurray as if you couldn't tell), and although he's in the army, he says it's his last day as he's being demobbed tomorrow.

Maggie isn't really interested in SKid, but the next day he's driving a taxi showing Maggie and her friend through Balboa, the city that served as the Pacific terminus of the Canal Zone although today it's part of Panama City. Maggie misses her boat as a result of Skid and his friend/roommate Harry's (Charles Butterworth) showing her around town. Worse, they go to a club where Skid reveals that he's a trumpet player and Maggie reveals she hates trumpet music. But at the bar a man hits on Maggie and Skid, obviously already in love with Maggie, gets in a fight with the man, to the point that Skid gets arrested and Maggie has to bail him out. So now she also doesn't have the money to get a ticket back to America.

So Maggie gets herself and Skid jobs at Murphy's (Cecil Cunningham, a woman even though she has the name Cecil) club in Balboa, Maggie claiming that she's married to Skid. Also workin at the club is Anita Alvarez (Dorothy Lamour), who at some point in Skid's past was his girlfriend, which introduces that romantic tension that's going to drive the rest of the plot. Skid gets famous enough that he's able to get enough money to go back to New York, although it's apparently only enough money for him, not both him and Maggie. This even though by this time Maggie and Skid have gotten married for real.

Back in New York, Skid works at a club where Anita just happens also to be on the payroll. And Anita has no qualms about trying to win Skid back for herslef. Doing this, however, leads to Skid's screwing up his marriage to Maggie, and when she files for divorce, he responds by turning to drink, which threatens to ruin his career, at least until she shows up again.

My being a fan of older movies is part of why I'd always been interested in seeing this one, but I have to say that it doesn't quite work for some reason. I think it's that at times it's too serious a drama for its own good, while at the times it tries to be lighter, it's not really a comedy either. It also doesn't help that despite being about musicians, and not fully developing the characters, it doesn't have particularly memorable music either.

Swing High, Swing Low isn't a terrible movie, but if I were going to introduce people to Fred MacMurray or Carole Lombard, there are other movies I'd pick for that job.

No Time for Love

Many years back, TCM ran the movie No Time for Love. I watched it, but a search of the blog claims I never did a post on it. Anyhow, a few years back I bought a box set of Claudette Colbert movies, and No Time for Love was on it. I remembered the plot, although not the title; now that I've watched it again recently, it's a good time to do a post on it.

Colbert plays Katherine Grant, a photographer who works for one of those Life-type magazines: human interest photojournalism and the like. She's a very good photographer, if unorthodox in her shot and framing selections, and that quality is why her publisher Fulton (Paul McGrath) has kept her around and fallen in love with her to the point that they're thinking of getting married.

Katherine's next assignment is to go underground, where a tunnel is being built and photograph the blue-collar men making that tunnel. It's difficult work, as the tunnelers have to go through a compression chamber on the way in and out to help keep mud from seeping in to the works while they're underway. (Washington Roebling, who designed the Brooklyn Bridge, got a serious case of the bends when an emergency forced him to leave one of these chambers early.) Anyhow, these men, led by Jim Ryan (Fred MacMurray), are the sort of rough-and-tumble men you'd expect at a worksite like this.

Indeed, their manners seem quite coarse to Katherine, who eventually tells Jim she's got a bedroom chair with more character than him. But when their work hard, play hard attitude results in letting off some steam with fisticuffs. Katherine takes a picture of it, thinking it would be a visually arresting addition to the magazine story. Jim objects, since getting in a fight like this will likely get him suspended from his job.

Katherine agrees not to publish it, but she doesn't destroy the negatives, and somehow a copy of the photo makes its way to the editors, who understandably like it and publish it not realizing the consequences. Poor Jim gets suspended, and Katherine feels bad about it, even though the two supposedly don't like each other.

I say supposedly, because Katherine is clearly taken by Jim's masculinity, as we see in what is probably the movie's highlight, a ridiculous dream sequence in which Katherine imagines Jim as some sort of superhero. She's falling in love with Jim but doesn't want to admit it. To try to disabuse herself of the notion, she decides to hire Jim as an assistant, telling herself that she's doing him a favor by giving him a job during his suspension.

It's fairly predictable where No Time for Love is going to end up, but it's certainly a well-enough made movie from all involved. It's only programmer length at about 83 minutes, so it doesn't overstay its welcome. But Colbert and MacMurray are appealin together, while the supporting cast does OK, including Ilka Chase as Colbert's sister and June Havoc as a chorus girl who seems more like the social class of person the MacMurray character would be interested in.

I'm glad that a movie like No Time for Love wound up on a box set. It's definitely a nice little romantic comedy.

Midnight (1939)

A search of the blog reveals that I've never blogged about the Claudette Colbert film Midnight before. It was on TCM not too long ago, so I recorded it in order that I could do a review of it, not having seen it in ages.

Colbert plays Eve Peabody, who at the start of the movie shows up in Paris on a train from Monte Carlo and Nice. She's asleep in third class when the train stops, and the railyard worker who checks to make certain all the passengers have gotten off has to roust her to get her off the train. She also doesn't have any luggage with her, just the very fine gown on her back. Eve, you see, is a chorus girl who likes to gamble, and lost everything she had in Monte Carlo, to the point that she had to pawn her belongings to get to Paris.

Tibor Czerny (Don Ameche) is a Hungarian émigré living in Paris and working as a taxi driver. Eve sees him, and makes him an offer. He'll drive her around to all the nightclubs listed in the want ads as looking for singers, and if she gets a job, she'll pay him double the fare; otherwise, he'll have to eat the fare since she doesn't have any money. We get a montage of nighclub neon signs, as Eve finds herself unable to procure employment. But Tibor is already smitten with her, as he buys her dinner and offers her a place to crash for the night as he works the night shift.

Eve has other plans. She escapes to a hoity-toity classical music recital that's by invitation only. Well, she escapes to the outside of it, as she doesn't have an invitation, of course. So when she gets in line to enter, she presents her ticket from the pawn shop, since the guy handling admittance isn't checking the invitations so quickly. They check after everybody is in, and Stephanie, the woman running the concert (Hedda Hopper in a small role) spots the deception, asking if anybody is Eve Peabody, or knows her. The real Eve, of course, says nothing, but another man spots her trying to leave, and takes her into another room.

These are actually several people who would prefer to play bridge than listen to this classical music, among them Marcel, who brought Eve into the room; Georges Flammarion (John Barrymore); Georges' husband Helene (Mary Astor); and Helene's lover Jacques Picot (Francis Lederer). George knows fully well that Helene and Jacques are lovers, but he's not going to grant his wife a divorce, instead looking for a way to break up the relationship. Meanwhile, Eve loses 4000 francs playing bridge, money she doesn't have. Eve, of course, hasn't told these people she's Eve Peabody; instead she claims to be the Baroness Czerny, taking Tibor's name.

Georges, however, does have many, and slips some into Eve's pocketbook. He even books a suite for her at the Ritz so that Jacques won't discover the deception. Of course, he's got a plan for her, and my synopsis giving a bit too much away, you might have figured it out, which is that Georges wants Eve to get Jacques to fall in love with her so that Georges will be able to get Helene back for himself. Eve accepts the offer, because she doesn't really have much choice.

Complicating things is that Tibor would like to find Eve. And he's got the power of thousands of Parisian taxicab drivers on his side, having put up a pool wherein everybody who antes up can get the whole pool by finding Eve. Eventually, he learns that Eve has gone to the Flammarion place out in the country for one of those weekend-long parties in a movie like Gosford Park. And when he goes out there, and finds that Eve is using his name....

If Midnight suffers from one problem, it's one that's not of its own making, but of having been released in 1939. Old movie buffs tend to consider 1939 Hollywood's greatest year, and there are a lot of movies from that year that are better remembered than Midnight, with probably the most notable one for the purposes of this blog post being another Paris-set movie, Ninotchka. It's a bit of a shame, because Midnight is generally a fine movie, although at times the production values feel just slightly less glittering than Ninotchka.

But, in general, the actors all do quite well for themselves, including Monty Woolley as a judge in a divorce-court finale, and the script is excellent too. This later even though the screenwriters, the pair of Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett, apparently had some problems with Mitchell Leisen's direction -- not that I found anyhing notably wrong with it.

In short, Midnight is one of the underrated films of 1939, and if you haven't seen it, definitely do yourself a favor and watch it.