Kim

The British Raj era of India is one that shows up a lot in the movies in part because it's a ripe source for action and adventure (never mind what Indians of today think of the portrayals), thanks in no small part to the writings of Rudyard Kipling. An excellent example of a movie that fits into this genre is, unsurprisingly, one based on a Kipling novel, Kim.

The movie is set in the 1880s, a time when Britain ruled India with the help of a lot of local bigwigs. Beyond India was the Khyber Pass in the northwest leading to Afghanistan, and beyond that Russian central Asia. Britain was constantly worried about the idea that Russia was trying to gain access to a warm-water port, and agitating rebellious locals to bog the British down to that end. Indeed, the Russians figure into the movie's finale.

But the story is really about Kim (Dean Stockwell). Kim, as we leater learn, is really Kimball O'Hara, son of an Anglo-Irish soldier who served in Europe up until his death. Mom died in childbirth, and somehow there's no other family to take care of Kim and the British army was unable or unwilling to do anything. So Kim, having been left an orphan, darkens his skin and passes himself off as a begging urchin. But his excellent knowledge of English enables him to move in British circles as well. Kim is a bit of a friend to Mahbub Ali (Errol Flynn, top-billed although Stockwell is the star here), who has information about the Russians that he wants passed to the British army in the person of Col. Creighton (Robert Douglas).

To get that information to Creighton, Ali has Kim fall in with a lama (Paul Lukas) who is liable to be unsuspected and so can travel freely. However, along the way Kim sees a regimental flag that he believes is an important sign, so he goes into the British encampment. The Brits capture him, which is where they find his birth certificate and so learn of his provenance. They send him to a prestigious boarding school for the sons of the British. But he's not quite happy there. And, because of his past, it's determined by the military that he could be trained to be a spy. Since he's already shown he can pass as a local, and because he's an adolescent urchin, who's going to suspect him, just like the lama?

Kim's undergoes a lot of training, and then gets sent on his first assignment, which is to go to a village in the northwest and find out from a local there named Chunder (Cecil Kellaway) what he's learned about the Russians in the area. They're officially there to survey the Khyber Pass, but it's obvious to the British that in fact they're using surveying as a cover for spying. Kim goes there, and finds... Chunder has been killed. Kim's instructions were to get the information from Chunder and bring it back, but with Chunder dead and his place ransacked, there's no intelligence to deliver to Creighton. Kim more or less violates orders to head to the Khyber Pass himself to complete the mission. Somehow, his old lama and Mahbub Ali have also made their way there.

Kim is the sort of movie that adolescent boys are going to love. It's got exactly the right mix of adventure and daring-do that will appeal to just that demographic. For everybody else, well, it's not a bad movie, although it could have been a bit more tightly edited. Stockwell does well with his role. All the Hollywood types playing Indian do as well as they can, and boys of the target age aren't going to care about the racial inaccuracies. A fair bit of location work for the establishing shots was done in the newly independent India, which adds to the quality cinematography. On the other hand, experienced viewers will notice the projection photography; younger viewers probably won't care.

Ultimately, Kim stands the test of time as a great example of the sort of action movie Hollywood could make in the decade after the end of World War II.

Little Women (1933)

I seem to have copies of a surprising number of movies in Summer Under the Stars this year that I haven't blogged about before. Another one coming up, for Katharine Hepburn's day, is the 1933 version of Little Women, tomorrow (August 18) at 9:30 AM.

Now, I have to admit that before doing this post, I had not read the novel by Louisa May Alcott on which this and the other movie versions is based. Nor had I watched any of the movie versions all the way through, although I had seen parts of at least the 1949 version that has Elizabeth Taylor and Peter Lawford in the cast. But I did know vaguely of the plot, namely that it deals with the struggles of the four March sisters in Massachusetts during the Civil War while their father is off serving the Union Army.

The sisters are Jo (short for Josephine, played by Katharine Hepburn), Meg (Frances Dee), Beth (Jean Parker) and Amy (Joan Bennett). Meg, the eldest, is making some extra money for the family by working as a seamstress. Jo is a bit of a tomboy and dreams of becoming a professional writer. Amy is the youngest and just finishing her education, while Beth is musically inclined. They live with their mother (Spring Byington), while also having an Aunt (Edna May Oliver) who is better off and exerts a bit of control on the family although she's not the villain of the piece by any means. There's really no villain here.

The Marches live next door to Mr. Laurence (Henry Stephenson) but aren't all that close to him. The relationship is about to change, however, when his grandson Laurie (Douglass Montgomery) arrives from Europe and spends some time with grandfather. All the girls are taken by this handsome young man, but obviously, no more than one of the girls can have him. Laurie also has a tutor, John Brooke, which gives another man for the girls to go gaga over.

The war hits home for the family when news reaches them that Dad has been injured and is at an army hospital in Washington; eventually he comes home although he's never a major character. Beth has gotten sick by this time and there's some fear that she's going to die. Jo eventually goes off to New York to try to make it as a writer, where she meets German professor Baer (Paul Lukas), and those two may or may not wind up becoming romantically involved if Jo can't have Laurie.

Little Women is more episodic than having an overriding plot, and this telling of the tale really puts the emphasis on Jo since it's Katharine Hepburn in that part. Hepburn is, unsurprisingly, a force of nature here, and to me that force is not always appropriate. At times it works quite well, but sometimes it's just too much.

The movie has production values that are quite good for 1933, although this sort of period material is stuff that modern productions can do without making it look quite so backlot-bound. Still, for a 1930s literary adaptation, this version of Little Women does quite well.

Rockabye

Back in August, Constance Bennett was selected for Summer Under the Stars, and I pointed out that I had watched one of her movies scheduled that day, Rockabye, some time back, with the plan of watching it again for the next time it showed up on TCM. Well, it's on again tomorrow (Feb. 6) at 9:00 AM as part of a day of Joel McCrea's movies, so now is a good time to do a longer post on it.

Constance Bennett is clearly the star here, not McCrea. She plays Judy Carroll, a stage actress with a complicated personal life. She's hoping to adopt a child, but she's made the mistake of having an affair with a corrupt politician, Al Howard (Walter Pidgeon in an early role). He's now on trial, and her testifying against him causes her to lose custody of the child she was hoping to adopt. Her manager, Antonie (Paul Lukas, also in an early role), suggests that she go off to Europe for a while until the scandal dies down. She's got a public that will forgive her, an dafter a suitable absence she can go back on the stage. Another of the complications in Judy's personal life is that Antoine has always held a flame for Judy, even though Judy has apparently seen the relationship as professional, not personal.

While in Europe, Judy reads a play called Rockabye, and thinks it would be perfect for her, although Antoine doesn't really hold the same opinion. Judy gets the reasonable idea of contacting the playwright, Jacob van Riker Pell (Joel McCrea); perhaps he can help convince Antoine that Judy is right for the part. Jacob is hesitant at first, although as more of Judy's back story is revealed, he begins to realize that perhaps Judy might be right for the part after all.

But we need some more personal complications for Judy, and the obvious one is that Judy is going to begin to fall in love with Jacob, and this time, the feeling is mutual. Here, though, there's another catch. Jacob is married, although it's a loveless marriage, and Jacob is trying to get a divorce. Perhaps once the divorce is final, Judy and Jacob can get married, and then they'll have a nice respectable relationship.

In any case, rehearsals for the play Rockabye go on, and eventually the play has its premiere on Broadway, even though Jacob doesn't show up for the after-show party. That's because there are yet more complications in Jacob's relationship....

Rockabye the movie is one of those movies that to me feels like a decided product of its time. Not so much 1932 as part of the pre-Code era, but 1932 as before even World War II started liberating women, never mind the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. The film's central conceit, that Judy's personal life is somehow career-ending scandalous, seems a bit quaint 90 years on. Nowadays, I don't think people would care that much if a Judy-like actress had a complicated personal life and then fell in love with a married playwright.

Having said that, however, the performances are adequate, and Rockabye is certainly an interesting look at a time that was completely different. As they like to say, the past is like a different country.

Uncertain Glory (1944)

Errol Flynn was Star of the Month back in April, and that gave me the chance to record some of his movies that I hadn't seen before. One of those was Uncertain Glory. As Flynn was at Warner Bros. for many years, it's unsurprising that a lot of his movies have gotten DVD releases courtesy of the Warner Archive.

It's sometime in 1943 in France, which if you know your history you will know is smack dab in the middle of World War II, and more specifically, the Nazi occupation of France. Something not commonly mentioned is that even in wartime, and in countries occupied by a foreign power, there's still your standard-issue crime that has nothing to do with the war situation going on. Flynn plays Jean Picard, a man who's sentenced to the guillotine for having committed a murder. However, with the war on, the prison gets bombed and Picard is able to escape just in time!

The authorities, who seem to permit a surprisingly free press, have police inspector Marcel Bonet (Paul Lukas) try to track down Picard so that Picard can be brought back to justice and executed. (There's no intimation that Picard might actually be innocent, just that his crime doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the war.) Fortunately for Bonet, whose job depends on it, he's able to find Picard fairly quickly, Picard having been ratted out. Bonet starts to bring Picard back to Paris, and they all lived happily ever after, except of course for Picard who's supposed to be beheaded.

Well, naturally that's not how it happens, since Picard is recaptured fairly early in the movie. What does happen is that, with the war on, Bonet and Picard's journey back to Paris is delayed thanks to sabotage from the Underground. They've bombed a bridge in a rural area of France, and Bonet and Picard are forced to stay in a small town while a way around the detour is worked out.

This gives Picard a chance to change his fate. The Nazis haven't been able to find the saboteurs, so they do what Nazis are always depicted as doing -- and to be fair, they did it for real after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich: they announce that if the saboteurs aren't ratted out, they'll round up a hundred innocent men and kill them. Picard decides to see if he can get Bonet to agree to the idea that Picard turn himself in as the saboteur, instead of as the real murderer Picard. After all, since Picard would die in either case, it doesn't have to matter to Bonet, who could claim Picard was shot dead trying to escape.

Bonet is skeptical, and for good reason. Any sane person would think that Picard was simply trying to come up with a way to delay the inevitable in the hopes that another avenue of escape might open up, and indeed, Picard does try again to escape. But there's also the personal and professional risk for Bonet: if Picard is found out as not being the real saboteur, how will that affect Bonet who will have perverted the course of justice? But Bonet does eventually go along with the idea.

Things get much more complicated, however. One is that Picard falls in love with a local girl, Marianne (Jean Sullivan). And then Bonet gets a bad cold that forces him into bed rest, preventing him from the travel that might be necessary to keep Picard around and to deliver Picard to the Germans as the saboteur.

Uncertain Glory is another of those movies with an interesting premise, but a movie that has a whole lot of reasons why it can never truly become great. Part of it is the Production Code. Since Picard is a real murderer, and not a combatant in the war, he technically has to pay for his crime, so there's pretty much only two options: Picard gets guillotined as the murderer, or he goes through with admitting he's the saboteur so that he can pay with his life for that murder. Also, Warner Bros. doesn't seem to have given this movie as much attention as some of their others. It's not a straight-up programmer, but it's also not to the level of a prestige film or even an A-list movie. There's a sense that the leads here are doing this movie to get through it and be able to start on the next movie. And, of course, the movie having been released in 1944, there has to be an undercurrent of propraganda. No morally ambiguous characters among the Nazis or the Underground here.

Still, Flynn gives a good performance in an otherwise uneven movie, and as a time capsule from World War II, it's definitely worth a watch.

Hedy Lamarr stars in Gaslight

TCM ran the movie Experiment Perilous during 31 Days of Oscar because it earned a nomination for its art direction. So I DVRed it and sat down to watch it recently.

George Brent plays Dr. Huntington Bailey, who gives a voiceover at the beginning about some days back in 1903 being the strangest days of his life. we then see Bailey on a train during a terrible rain storm, which is where he meets Cissie Bederaux (Olive Blakeney). They're both going back to New York where they live, although Cissie hasn't been there for five years which she spent at a sanitarium where she may or may not have had a heart problem. She vows to move out of her brother Nick's (Paul Lukas) house and asks Bailey to find a good apartment hotel for her. She then asks him to visit the Bederaux place where they'll be having high tea for her birthday.

Bailey shows up, but too late, as it turns out that Cissie has died of some heart condition. But Bailey meets Nick and his lovely wife Allida (Hedy Lamarr). Nick, on finding out that Bailey is a doctor with apparently some research in the then-new field of psychology, asks Bailey to examine Allida surreptitiously to find out what's wrong with her. Since Allida is so beautiful, Bailey naturally accepts.

But there's more going on. Bailey suggested Cissie stay at his apartment hotel, so she had her baggage delivered there. But thanks to a mix-up, she received one of Bailey's bags while he got one of hers. Bailey finds hers, which contains some diaries and research material for a biography she's writing on Nick's life. Apparently they had a tough childhood in Europe, with Mom dying giving birth to Nick and Dad committing suicide. As Bailey reads on, he gets the sinking suspicion that Nick is trying to do something to Allida and their kid, who's constantly kept away from everybody else in the top floor of the house. Allida has been complaining of being followed and Bailey realized he's being followed, too.

Bailey also realizes that he's probably in some trouble, since he knows that Nick will have received his bag. Then he'll put two and two together to determine that Bailey has Cissie's bag and has read the diaries. This probably has something to do with why Nick wanted Bailey to examine Allida too. The fact that Bailey is falling in love with Allida isn't helping, either.

As you can probably guess from the title of this post, I couldn't help but think of Gaslight as I was watching Experiment Perilous. I also couldn't help but think that Gaslight was rather the better movie. I think that a lot of it comes down to the casting of George Brent as the male lead. Brent was at his best at Warner Bros. playing the nominal male lead who was clearly second fiddle to the female lead, often someone like Bette Davis. Here, despite Lamarr's top billing, Brent is just as much a lead as Lamarr. It doesn't work to the movie's benefit. I also didn't find Lukas and Lamarr as good as Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman from Gaslight

Still, the movie is lovely to look at, and the story is interesting enough to make it worth at least one watch. It's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive Collection.

Return to Sender

Earlier this year, I purchased Volume 1 of the Noir Archive Collection. Among the movies in the collection that I hadn't watched or blogged about before is Address Unknown, so I recently watched it to do a post on here.

The movie starts off with a pair of friends who are also business associates, running an art gallery in San Francisco. Martin Schulz (Paul Lukas) is telling Max Eisenstein (Morris Carnovsky) that he's going to be going back to their native Germany to look at acquiring artwork. This surprised me, since the movie was released in 1944, at the height of World War II, and how could anybody get back to Germany, much less want to live with the Nazis. But it turns out that the movie begins sometime around 1931 or 1932, so just before the Nazis complete their rise to power.

The two men, in addition to being friends, are about to become related by marriage. Martin's oldest son Heinrich (Peter van Eyck) is in love with Max's daughter Griselle (K.T. Stevens), and plans to marry her. There's only one problem, which is that she's an actress, and wants to pursue her dream of being successful on the stage before settling down to marry. So perhaps if Heinrich could wait a year while Griselle goes off to Germany with Martin and his family. Well, there's another problem, which is that the Eisensteins are Jewish and going back to Germany when the Nazis are about to take over is not particularly advised.

When the Schulzes get to their new house in Munich, Martin is approached by a mysterious Baron von Friesche (Carl Esmond), who seems to serve the sole purpose of trying to infect Martin with Nazi ideology. Why Martin would have believed this stuff is beyond me, but he begins to fall under the Nazi spell, at least far enough to keep his job and position in society, something that alarms everybody around him, especially the Eisensteins. Griselle has even taken on the stage name Stone to hide her Jewish identity. She's even more rebellious, including the New Testament Beatitudes in a stage soliloquy even though Nazi censors ordered the director to remove this line. For this, and the Nazis finding out she's Jewish, she's going to die.

Martin's relationship with her and her father back in America is going to start causing a problem for him, especially when Max starts sending letters that have dimensions of paintings, something the Nazis insist is a secret code. It's thoroughly illegal for coded messages to be sent in Nazi Germany. So Martin writes to Max and tells Max to stop writing, something that the Nazis ought to know if they're opening the letters and reading them to find out that there's a code in them. But Martin keeps getting letters from Max. What's going to happen to poor Martin?

Address Unknown is a movie that I found a bit odd, mostly because I felt like the plot was unrealistic and full of holes. To be fair, part of that is because with the war still going at the time the movie was made, there was bound to be propaganda and a plot that had to be adjusted to fit the propaganda. But everything from Martin's going back to Germany in the first place to his downfall seemed slightly odd to me.

To be fair, however, Lukas does quite a good job with his character study, while the other actors all do a creditable job. I didn't really think of it as a noir, but the look of the movie, with cameraman Rudolph Maté and director William Cameron Menzies, does have a lot of interesting camera angles and shadows to suggest noir.

Overall, I think I'd give a qualified positive review to Address Unknown. But since it's on a box set, I'd give it a higher recommendation than if it were on a higher-priced standalone DVD. One issue, however, is that there are only two spindles, so two of the Blu-ray discs are going to be on one spindle -- there are three discs with three movies each; it's easier to fit three movies on one Blu-ray than one DVD.