Glory Alley

I've stated two different general thoughts on MGM over the years. One is that, as probably the most prestigious Hollywood studio, they brought a lot of gloss to movies that would have benefitied from having no gloss. The other is that, once the Freed Unit musicals really got going, it was the other stuff made that's really a lot more interesting. Both of those thought came to mind as I was watching Glory Alley.

The movie is ostensibly set in New Orleans, although it's the MGM backlot's version of New Orleans, which has all the connotations you can think of. Working for one of the newspapers, although about to retire, is columnist Gabe Jordan (John McIntire), who tells his editor that he's never told the full story of boxer Socks Barbararossa (Ralph Meeker). So, as you can guess, we're about to get a flashback that tells us... the rest of the story. Wait, this isn't Paul Harvey, either the radio man or the character actor.

Some time in the past, before the Korean War (the movie was released in June 1952), Socks is about to fight a title bout. But as he's in the ring, he looks up at the very bright ring lights, and realizes... he can't go ahead with the fight! So he just gets out of the ring right then and there and goes to his dressing room in the basement to hide from everyone. Not quite everyone; there's his manager Peppi (Gilbert Roland), trainer of sorts Shadow (Louis Armstrong), girlfriend Angela (Leslie Caron), and Angela's blind father The Judge (Kurt Kasznar). Now, since Leslie Caron had a French accent, she and her dad are portrayed as having fled France when the Nazis occupied it, with Dad hoping to get the family assets back and Angela training to become a nurse to get the money for Dad to have an operation. Except that that last bit is only what Dad thinks; Angela in fact dances in one of the dive nightclubs which brings in rather more money. Anyhow, why did Socks just up and leave the ring? The full reason isn't explained until the end of the movie, but Socks looks at himself in the mirror and sees some of the toll boxing has already taken from him.

Peppi buys a bar of his own while Socks lets himself go, drinking heavily to the point that he's going to have to accept a pity job at Peppi's place. Peppi holds the contract of one other fighter, "Newsboy", which he gives to Socks. Socks intends to raffle off the contract to get some money and to get out of the boxing game for good, but he and Newsboy both get drafted to serve over in Korea. Then, in a truly nutty twist, Socks is able to show some real bravery and win the Congressional Medal of Honor, except that's an award he doesn't really want although he can't really sell it legally to make money.

Socks returns from Korea, and eventually tells Angela the real reason why he left the ring just as he was about to fight for the title, and... everyone lives happily ever after? Yes, basically that's what happens, and the "official" reason Socks gives for running away from that previous title fight is one that makes no sense.

In fact, the movie as a whole doesn't make much sense, seeing as how it veers wildly from one genre to the next. The characterizations are also all wrong. Ralph Meeker is asked to play something much too gentlemanly for a boxer who came up from poverty. Leslie Caron was most likely cast here because it was just after An American in Paris made her big. With her French accent, the studio had to make her character French, necessitating that back story. The melodrama with Dad's operation is an odd thing to shoehorn in here. Even worse is how the movie suddenly switches to the Korean War, looking like a cheap B movie at the same time it's doing this.

So Glory Alley goes wrong in so many ways, and yet that's something that actually makes the movie interesting, to watch how it goes so badly wrong. Not good, mind you, but interesting nevertheless.

Fighter Squadron

As I mentioned last week, Rock Hudson is TCM's Star of the Month for November, and his movies are airing every Tuesday in prime time. This includes today, which happens to be Veterans' Day in the US, a time when TCM normally airs a bunch of military-themed movies in honor of the day. As it turns out, TCM has enough military movies with Hudson in the cast to use for tonight's prime time lineup, although the last one is Hudson's debut where he only has an uncredited bit part with just a few lines: Fighter Squadron, which is on at 5:15 AM tomorrow (Nov. 12), or the end of the prime-time lineup.

It's 1943, and war is raging in Europe. Since the western side of the Allies haven't been able to start their land invasion quite yet, at least not across the English Channel, much of the action is air raids over targets in Germany, which comes with a fairly heavy price. The planes are supposed to provide support flying in formation, and stay at a high altitude to avoide the German surface-to-air missiles. One pilot, Maj. Hardin (Edmond O'Brien), thinks these orders are the wrong ones, and that the pilots need more flexible measures for dealing with the Germans. Indeed, he had flown over China wiht the Flying Tigers, so he's already been exposed to that greater flexibility. The problem, however, is that he engages in that flexibility in direct violation of those orders.

This goes up the chain of command, from Maj. Hardin's commanding officer Col. Brickley (John Rodney), to the generals, Maj. Gen McCready (Henry Hull), and above him Brig. Gen. Gilbert (Sheppard Strudwick). McCready has some sympathy, but others point out that the flexibility also comes with a short-term cost of more planes and pilots being damaged or lost. Brickley needs to think about keeping the men under his command safe to fly the next mission. Meanwhile, the other men in Hardin's squadron, notably best friend Capt. Hamilton (Robert Stack), like Hardin.

So the higher-ups decide to teach Hardin a lesson. Col. Brickley gets a promotion, and suggests that Hardin be promoted to take his place. Now that he'll be more or less grounded and have to have these other men now under his command, perhaps he'll understand why Brickley was the way he was with Hardin. Hardin tries to be nice to his men as the bombing raids continue, but there's one catch. He still believes in the idea that the men under his command shouldn't be married, because then pilots will think about their wives and not do some of the risk-your-life things necessary to carry out the mission. Hamilton just happens to be engaged, so he heads back to America when he gets leave and gets married, although he does return to the unit much to Hardin's consternation. More raids follow up to the unit's provision of air cover for the D-Day invasion.

Fighter Squadron is nothing if not formulaic, and decidedly a product of Hollywood. There's even a daft subplot about a pilot who has a series of girlfriends, and is able to get off base to see them through the ruse of obtaining a bunch of black cats. The other pilots don't like seeing black cats and ask him to take the cats away, which gives him a chance to go off base. It's supposed to be funny, but to me it was just irritating. Fighter Squadron is well-enough made, however, and I can see why audiences back in the day might have been entertained. Better and more inventive war movies, however, have come out in the intervening years.

Background to Danger

George Raft is TCM's Star of the Month, and it turns out that I've got a film on my DVR that is part of the tribute and that a search of the blog claims I haven't blogged about before. (And, having watched the movie for this post, I don't think I'd seen it before.) That movie, Background to Danger, airs tonight (January 21) at 8:00 PM on TCM.

Although George Raft is the nominal star here, we don't see him for several minutes. Instead, we're transported to Ankara, capital of Turkey. The movie was released in 1943, the middle of World War II, and Turkey was one of the few countries in the region that managed to stay neutral, meaning that both Axis and Allied powers had embassies in the country and there was all sorts of opportunity for espionage hijinks to ensue. One such example in the movie, that actually did occur in real life, was a failed attempt on the life of the German ambassador to Turkey. In the movie, the attempt is portrayed as a false flag operation by the Nazis to attempt to stoke fear in Turkey that the Soviets are going to invade and get Turkey to join the Axis powers. German involvement is quickly determined, and the Nazi behind the scenes, a Colonel Robinson (Sydney Greenstreet) is seen in Berlin very annoyed at the failure of the scheme.

Cut to Aleppo, in northern Syria. It's a main stop on board the rail line from Istanbul to Baghdad. Getting on the train in the same car are American businessman Joe Barton (George Raft) and a mysterious woman named Ana Remzi (Osa Massen) who comes across as though she's clearly lying about who she is. She's also being followed by a slightly burly guy of vaguely not-quite western European appearance with a big bushy moustache. So she asks Joe to hold on to an envelope so that the authorities don't get it when the train crosses the border.

Joe, being a curious sort, rifles through the envelope when he gets to his hotel room, and finds what appears to be photostats of documents that would suggest someone is about to do something to Turkey, but who and why? In any case, Joe goes to return the envelope to Ana at her hotel, where he finds that she's been killed and he's been spotted at the scene such that he's a logical suspect. The police notify him of this, but these aren't real Turkish police. Instead, they're some of Robinson's men who take Joe to a secret location and rough him up to the extent that you'd think he'd have a pretty serious concussion and be out of commission for as long as it takes the events in the rest of the movie to transpire. But they didn't worry about concussions in those days.

Joe is magically saved by a man claiming to be Nikolia Zaleshoff (Peter Lorre), who is coy at first about who he is but then claims to be working for the Soviets, who were nominal allies of the US in the war leading to all sorts of hideous propaganda from Hollywood movies about the virtues of Soviet anti-fascists. He's in Turkey with his purported sister Tamara (Brenda Marshall), and they want that envelope too. As it turns out, Robinson wants the envelope because the documents are propaganda claiming that the Soviets are planning an invasion of Turkey, although again you'd think the Nazis could just draw up some more forgeries to have printed in the Turkish press. But are the Zaleshoffs really who they claim they are? And who was that man following Ana?

Background to Danger was apparently put into production after the success of Casablanca, and based on a novel from the interwar period by Eric Ambler. That would probably explain why when I came across this movie and the plot summary I couldn't help but wonder if I was getting it confused with Journey Into Fear, a Joseph Cotten film about war intrigue in Turkey. Background to Danger is moderately entertaining, at least in the way that a TV show like Columbo was entertaining 30 years later: you knew what you were going to get and that the bad guy was going to get his comeuppance, but the whole production has a perfunctory by-the-numbers feel to it. Background to Danger isn't terrible, but it's no surprise why so many other World War II movies are better remembered today.

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.

The Roaring Twenties

I'm pretty certain I had already seen the movie The Roaring Twenties once before, and I even thought that I had blogged about it here. But a search of the blog suggests that while I've mentioned the movie in passing a couple of times in conjunction with either Humphrey Bogart or James Cagney, and even posted the trailer. But apparently I'd never done a full-length post. That's why, when TCM ran the movie again recently, I made it a point to record it so that I could finally rewatch it to do an appropriate review here.

As you can guess, Cagney and Bogart are the two lead stars, with Cagney being the lead since this was released in 1939 and Cagney hadn't been eclipsed by Bogart movies like The Maltese Falcon and then the changing public tastes with World War II. And since the movie was released in 1939, there's no mention of any upcoming war, instead starting off with a scene set toward the end of the Great War. Cagney plays Eddie Bartlett, serving alongside George Hally (Bogart) with whom he's become a bit of a friend. The third friend in the group is Lloyd Hart (Jeffrey Lynn). All of them talk about what they're going to do when they get home from the war, with Eddie talking about a girl he's corresponded with, actress Jean Sherman.

The war ends in November 1918, but it takes until 1919 to get all the soldiers home. Eddie returns to his best friend from the pre-war days Danny Green (Frank McHugh), working as a taxi driver. Eddie plans to return to his job as a mechanic, and hopes to open his own garage, but when he returns to the business he finds his job has been given away. You can't really blame the manager for not being financially able to hold a job open for two years. Worse, 1920 was a year of an economic downturn, making it hard for Eddie to get a job in general and forcing him to drive second shift on Danny's taxi. Worst of all is that Eddie mees Jean (Priscilla Lane), who exaggerated her talents and is little more than a recent high-school graduate working girl.

In addition to the economic crisis I mentioned, 1920 also brought Prohibition to the US, along with the rampant attempts to get around the law. Eddie gets caught up in it when he's asked to deliver a package not realizing that it's liquor. But the club owner to whom he delivers it, Panama Smith (Gladys George), befriends him, and the two wind up going into business together. Eddie has been trying to open his own taxi business, and realizes that using the taxis to deliver hooch would be a good way to make money on the side.

Unsurprisingly, he gets hubris. He meets Jean again and still carries a torch for her, getting her a job singing in Panama's club even though she's really not much of a singer. And he steals a shipment of booze from Nick Brown (Paul Kelly), a competing gangster. This brings George back into a business partnership with Eddie, and George is eventually going to stab him in the back. Eddie brings in the one lawyer he knows, Lloyd Hart, to keep him "clean", but Lloyd is eventually going to chafe at that, falling in love with Jean along the way.

The Roaring Twenties is a very good film, but it was released in 1939, Hollywood's annus mirabilis in which so many all-time classics were made that it's so easy to overlook the movies that were only very good. I think it also doesn't help that with the US not too far from entering World War II, this sort of gangster movie was soon to go out of fashion with the viewing public. That's a shame, because Warner Bros. knew how to make a good 1930s gangster movie and had absolutely no difficulty churning out a top-notch movie with its big stars like Cagney. The Roaring Twenties is definitely a film that should be better known, and one that you should absolutely watch if you get the chance.

Captain Horatio Hornblower

Another of the movies that I hadn't blogged about before but showed up during TCM's salute to Warner Bros. was the naval adventure Captain Horatio Hornblower. So, I recently sat down to watch it so that I could do a review on it here.

Gregory Peck plays Capt. Hornblower, captaining a relatively small ship, the HMS Lydia for England during the Napoleonic era, specifically during the era of the Peninsular War. For those who don't know their history, Napoleon had his brother Joseph installed as the king of Spain to make them a more pliant ally, although the Spanish ultimately revolted. If memory serves, it's also the backdrop for the Cary Grant movie The Pride and the Passion. Anyhow, at the time the movie starts, Spain is still an ally of France and still has all its colonies in the New World. But there are people in the Spanish colonies who aren't so thrilled with Napoleon's occupation of Spain, and perhaps the British could use that to their advantage.

To that end, the Lydia has been sent to the New World to get help from one of those restive Spanish local bigwigs. It's extremely stressful for the crew, as they have to go all the way around Cape Horn without knowing what their mission is and having to stay away from being sighted, since they are technically the enemy. And as it turns out, the Spanish commander they're supposed to meet is only in it for himself, which means that he may be a danger to the English as well.

The voyage to the New World is a long one; long enough that by the time they get there, Spain, or at least a significant portion of it, is nominally on the side of England, so that the commander the Lydia helped is actually no longer on the side of the English. To make matters worse, Hornblower gets himself involved in a battle with a Spanish ship that is really on his side, although he has know whay of knowing the political situation back in Europe changed since he was incommunicado.

The Spanish ship he attacked was fleeing Panama, where there was a yellow fever epidemic. They also had some English captives who were being removed from Panama because of their value as hostages. Specifically, that's Lady Barbara (Virginia Mayo), who happens to be the sister of the Duke of Wellington. No wonder she's so important. She and Hornblower, being at sea for months, fall in love, although there's a problem there as well in that Lady Barbara had been betrothed to another man back in the UK and Hornblower is going to have to keep his feelings for Lady Barbara a secret. But at least she's useful as a nurse tending to the sailors, until she gets sick herself.

After Hornblower gets back to England, having gained a son but lost a wife in childbirth, he has to go back to sea to help in a blockade of France. This provides the movie's third act, which is many ways really isn't related to the first two acts, although the action it provides is satisfying enough.

Captain Horatio Hornblower is an enjoyable enough movie, and certainly well made thanks to the Technicolor photography and the capable performace from Peck. But it also feels more like a bunch of set pieces with only a relatively bare plot on which to hook all those pieces. The connection between the first two acts at least is vaguely plausible, while the third act in France feels like it comes out of nowhere. So if you want a great story, you won't really get it here. If you just want to sit back, relax, and watch Gregory Peck do the adventure movie thing, however, I think you'll definitely be entertained.

Gentleman Jim

Errol Flynn was Star of the Month last year if memory serves; I recorded several of his movies to watch later. Among them was Gentleman Jim, which is back on TCM tomorrow (Feb. 9) at 6:00 AM.

The Jim in question is James J. Corbett, a name you might recognize as one of the early heavyweight boxing champions of the world. In many ways he was the first modern heavyweight champion, as this was the time the Marquess of Queensbury was codifying new rules to make the sport less unsafe. Also, Corbett was one of the first boxers to train the way modern boxers do. As you can probably surmise, Flynn is playing Corbett, since it's tough to imagine Flynn not being in a starring role at this stage of his career.

The movie opens up in San Francisco circa 1887, which was before Corbett's boxing career. In fact, with no standardized boxing rules and bare-knuckles boxing being the thing, the sport was illegal in a lot of places in much the same way that it took a long time for certain jurisdictions to legalized mixed martial arts. San Francisco was one of the places, at least according to the movie, an Corbett, who works as a bank teller when that was considered a moderately good job for people who want to move up in the world, goes to an illegal fight together with his best friend Walter Lowrie (Jack Carson). The fight gets raided by the police and a bunch of the spectators arrested; this even includes a judge. Corbett's quick thinking when everybody's in custody together gets them off as the judge plans to institute amateur boxing at the Olympic Club.

The judge is also on the board of the bank, so Corbett thinks he's going to get fired, but no. Indeed, the judge and another Olympic Club member help Corbett get a membership too. Buck Ware's daughter Virginia (Alexis Smith) comes to the bank to get some silver currency for Dad's poker game, which Corbett takes over to the bank. There, he sees the gym and gives an impromptu training session to some of the would-be boxers. It's also the start of a love Corbett has for Ware that takes a long time to be requited, but since Flynn and Smith are the two leads, you can expect them to wind up together at the end of a movie like this.

Corbett's boxing skill takes him places, as does his drinking. He and Walter wake up one morning in Salt Lake City seemingly not remembering how they got there. Corbett meets boxing manager Delaney (William Frawley), who gets Jim a fight in order for Jim to be able to pay his way back to San Francisco. Corbett wins, and this among other fights turns him from a banker to a professional boxer.

Corbett rises through the ranks, and when the more-or-less recognized champion of the world at the time, John L. Sullivan (Ward Bond) shows up in America, you know that Corbett is going to fight Sullivan. (Of course, this happened in real life.) But negotiations between the camps were difficult then as now, perhaps even more so then since the challenger had to come up with financial banking. It's not as if they could expect a windfall from pay-per view as that simply didn't exist in the early 1890s.

I have no idea how much of Gentleman Jim is based on the truth. Supposedly, it's based on a serialized autobiagrphy Corbett wrote at the height of his fame in the 1890s, although who knows how much of that is true, either. (I haven't read the autobiography.) It's definitely got all of the hallmarks of a studio-era biopic, with as much if not more emphasis on a good dramatic story than on the unvarnished truth.

But Gentleman Jim also has all the character actors Warner Bros. could bring to a movie like this, and that only serves to add to the entertainment value. It also calls for the sort of bravado and charisma that Errol Flynn was quite adept at displaying; I can't imagine anybody else in Hollywood at the time taking on the role.

So despite any issues with accuracy, Gentleman Jim is a fine example of early-1940s Hollywood entertainment.

Another one of our aircraft is missing, somewhere north of the 49th parallel

Errol Flynn was TCM's star of the Month earlier this year, which gave me the chance to record a couple of movies that I hadn't blogged about before. Among those movies is Desperate Journey. Recently I watched it, so now you get a post on it.

A multinational crew is given the task of bombing an important railway junction in what, before the war, was the very eastern part of Germany near the border with Poland. Among them are Brits Lt. Forbes (Errol Flynn) and Sgt. Hollis (Ronald Sinclair), and American Johnny Hammond (Ronald Reagan). Two other members of the crew are presumably American, Sgt. Edwards (Alan Hale Sr.) and Officer Forrest (Arthur Kennedy). (From doing a bit of reading, it sounds like the script was written before the US entered World War II, so the Americans were presumably intended to be the sort of volunteer like the ones who went to Europe in 1916 to fly in World War I.)

The bomber goes on its run, but the weather is bad and the cloud ceiling is low, so to complete the mission, they have to fly low enough that it gives the Germans a good shot at knocking the plane out of the sky, which they summarily do, or else we wouldn't have a movie. All five of the men survive, although Hollis is substantially injured, which isn't surprising since he's the one played by the least-known of the actors, at least by Hollywood standards. The others don't want to leave Hollis behind to die, or worse, to get picked up by the Nazis and tortured for information. In any case, the result is that the Nazis pick them up as a group, and it's up to Maj. Baumeister (Raymond Massey) to interrogate them.

The major is a bit of an idiot in that he doesn't have anybody aruond him for the interrogations. This allows Lt. Forbes to get in a fight with him and win it, allowing the men the time to search the office and then escape. Of course, they now have to figure out how to get the hell out of Nazi Germany, even though they don't really know anybody and have the entire might of the Nazi state gunning for them.

Amazingly, however, they're able to get first on a railcar heading for Berlin with a lot of wounded German soldiers. And once in Berlin, they actually meet Käthe Brahms (Nancy Coleman), who is part of the relatively passive resistance. She works for a doctor who also opposes the Nazis, and that gives the flyboys another chance to escape when the Nazis come calling. Käthe has parents in Münster, which is rather further west, and would allow them to get closer to England. Somehow they make it to Münster, and as part of the Nazis catching up to them in Münster, they steal Maj. Baumeister's car, which allows them to get to the Netherlands. That was of course occupied by the Nazis at the time, but at least theoretically had a lot more people who hated the Nazis than Germany proper did. Not that we meet many of these people. Instead, the plot deals with the Germans having repaired a downed British bomber which they're hoping to fix and then use on a bombing raid since the RAF wo't notice until too late that it's not the Brits flying this plane.

While watching Desperate Journey, it was hard to escape the similarities to a couple of British movies, One of Our Aircraft Is Missing and 49th Parallel. Unfortunately, I think both of those movies are superior because they go for intelligence, while Desperate Journey goes for entertainment and the sort of dehumanizing the enemy propaganda. The coincidences in Desperate Journey also seem more far-fetched than the other movies. Still, it does entertain well enough, and fans of old Hollywood World War II movies will certainly enjoy it.

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.

They Died With Their Boots On

I mentioned at the beginning of the month when I posted about Star of the Month Sydney Greeenstreet that one of his movies I hadn't blogged about before, They Died With Their Boots On, would be running at 6:00 AM on Nov. 25. That's tomorrow morning, and since I have the movie on DVD as part of an Errol Flynn box set, I made a point of watching it to have it fresh in my mind for a post on the movie.

Errol Flynn plays George Armstrong Custer, who at the start of the movie is entering West Point as a plebe in the summer of 1857. Custer, as presented here, doesn't seem to care much for rules, naïvely thinking that he'll be able to bring his hunting dogs with him and get the biggest suite in the barracks, egged on by upperclassman cadet Ned Sharp (Arthur Kennedy). This is just the first of many, many incidents in which Custer will pick up demerits, he being constantly wary of authority.

One of those incidents results in his having to march guard, basically marching back and forth and having to keep his mouth shut. Elizabeth Bacon (Olivia de Havilland) is a young woman from the same town as George, Monroe, MI. But she comes from the well-to-do part of town while George was a blacksmith's son, so there's a class difference that her father may not approve of. Of course, it's going to take a while for George and Elizabeth to meet each other again.

1861 comes, and this of course means the start of the Civil War. All of the cadets from the South leave West Point, while those in Custer's class are still a year away from graduating (at the time, West Point was a five-year school). The Union was badly in need of junior officers, so they took the West Point cadets and graduated them a year early. Custer fights in his own iconoclastic way, eventually rising to the rank of brevet general, although that's not a full general but only a temporary rank. So when the Civil War ended, he was returned to his regular rank of Captain and sent back to Michigan with the thanks of a kind nation.

Having married Elizabeth, who father died soon after the war, Custer is in need of a good job, even though the military is all he really knows. Ned Sharp shows up looking to trade on Custer's name to have it behind a development company looking to develop the Dakota Territory. Custer rightly doesn't trust Sharp one bit, and refuses, instead looking to get put back into regular service.

Custer does, in fact, get promoted to Lieutenant Colonel and sent as a cavalry commander west... to Fort Lincoln, which is in the Dakota Territory and where Ned Sharp just happens to be. Custer finds all sorts of chicanery going on, including with the Indian agent for the region, which causes him to try to take his case to Washington. Ned and the agent are trying to get the treaty with the Sioux and other tribes abrogated so they can bring more white settlers onto the land, from which they hope to make a hefty profit. Custer's patrols eventually take him to the Little Big Horn in eastern Montana, and his unorthodox command style finally does him in.

Pretty much anybody who has a good knolwedge of history and who has seen They Died With Their Boots On will tell you that the movie is more or less a whitewashing of history, along with a hefty dollop of Hollywood tropes deemed necessary to entertain the viewers. I can certainly say that the tropes are laid on in grand style, from the romance between Flynn and de Havilland to Hattie McDaniel as the Bacons' servant, to the whole military gallantry.

From what I've read, the real life Custer was indeed a discipline problem and unorthodox. There might actually be room for an interesting movie about the question of unorthodox command when the battle is actually raging and the communication lines break down. It's generally presented in World War II movies that Nazi generals were fairly rigid, with American initiative and ingenuity winning the day. But when is it right to take that initiative, and when not?

Also, in later years there were a lot more westerns about how the Bureau of Indian Affairs was cheating the Indians blind, something we wouldn't get in pre World War II days. The real-life story of Custer seems interesting in that the corruption apparently ran all the way up to the Secretary of War (nowadays Secretary of Defense) and President Grant's brother; Custer was a witness in the impeachment proceedings of the Secretary of War and arrested when he wanted to return back to his post out west instead of staying around to testify when he thought his written testimony was enough. There's material for a Tennessee Johnson type movie there, but nobody in Hollywood ever thought to make it.

What we do get, however, is more than worth watching as examples of what Flynn and de Havilland could do, and on the whole an example of what the studio system could put out. Just don't expect real history from They Died With Their Boots On.

You'll note that I haven't brought up Star of the Month Sydney Greenstreet once. That's because he's got a smaller role as General Winfield Scott, fighting the war from central command in Washington. He has a few scenes during the portion of the movie covering the Civil War, but once the war ends, he's pretty much out of the picture.

Gone With the Bayou

Some months back, TCM ran a one-night spotlight on some of the films of actress Yvonne De Carlo. One that I hadn't seen before is Band of Angels, so I DVRed it and recently watched it to do a post on here.

Yvonne De Carlo plays Amantha Starr, daughter of the owner of a plantation in 1850s Kentucky (however, the opening act has Amantha as a child). Mom died years ago, and Dad has doted on Amantha ever since, mortgaging the plantation to send Amantha to a good boarding school up in Cincinnati where she meets northerners like Ethan Sears (Efrem Zimbalist Jr.) who are firmly opposed to slavery.

Bad news comes when Amantha learns that her father has fallen ill; she can't get home soon enough and Dad is quite dead. It's at Dad's burial that Amantha learns about Dad's having mortgaged the farm. But worse, she learns that Dad had consorted with some of the slaves, and that Amantha is the daughter of one of the slaves. Now, you'd think a doting Dad would have provided for Amantha in his will, at least by setting her free, or doing it much earlier in her life. But somehow Dad never got around to it, and Amantha is somehow still technically a slave. With that giant plot hole, the movie immediately began to go off the rails for me.

As a black person who could pass for white, Amantha can obviously command a much higher price at the slave auction, and Rhett Butler shows up to buy her for the princely sum of $5000. OK, it's not Rhett Butler, but you can be forgiven for comparing Band of Angels to Gone With the Wind. It is Clark Gable, 20 years older and playing a character named Hamish Bond. Hamish takes Amantha to New Orleans, where he makes her his new mistress.

I say "new mistress" because Hamish apparently had a previous slave mistress. He's also got a slave who serves as his factotum, Rau-Ru (Sidney Poitier). Hamish had Rau-Ru educated at great personal risk, since black slaves weren't supposed to be educated as they might get ideas above their station. Indeed, Rau-Ru resents Hamish even more than if he hadn't gotten an education and other "good" treatment from Hamish. After all, Rau-Ru is still a slave.

As the movie opened in the early 1850s and Amantha was just a girl then, you know what's coming up in American history. One of Hamish's friends from his days sailing the oceans brings up the secession of Louisiana, although it's not until after Hamish decamps from New Orleans to a plantation upriver that the attack of Fort Sumter occurs and the Civil War begins in earnest.

The North wins the Civil War, of course, and as they're subjugating Louisiana all of the plantation owners decide to burn their cotton crops so as not to give the North anything useful. This even though it's against martial law and makes Hamish and the other plantation owners outlaws. There's also a subplot about another of the owners, Charles de Marigny (Patric Knowles), trying to put the moves on Amantha.

Band of Angels is one big mess. It's an interesting mess, mind you, but a mess nonetheless. It veers from one plot point to another, having some wildly implausible character motivations. There's also all the tropes that Hollywood had in those days of the Romantic South, as well as an impossible ending. So while I didn't hate Band of Angels, I certainly didn't love it either.

Band of Angels is available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, should you wish to watch for yourself.

The Horn Blows at Midnight

Another of the movies that I finally got around to watching in order to do a post on here is The Horn Blows at Midnight, another of those movies that's on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive collection.

Jack Benny plays the third trumpet in an orchestra that plays for the Paradise Coffee radio show. The shtick of this show is that it's bedtime music, with an announcer hypnotically droning that Paradise is the coffee that puts you to sleep. As you can probably guess, this idiotic announcer puts everybody in the orchestra to sleep, and our third trumpeter starts having a dream sequence.

He's now in heaven, where his real-life girlfriend down on Earth, Elizabeth (Alexis Smith) is a harp-playing angel. One of the functionaries in heaven, the "Chief" (Guy Kibbee) has been looking at earth with a jaundiced eye. The planet hasn't been doing so well, what with all the war and destruction going on (the movie was released in 1945, a week after Franklin Roosevelt died). So heaven has decided that earth is going to be destroyed, by way of a horn being blown at exactly midnight.

However, the two guys who were sent down to destroy it decided they'd rather be human. Elizabeth just knows that her boyfriend (named Athanael up in heaven) is up to the job and it would give him a boost in status in heaven. So he gets sent down to earth to do it.

Naturally, problems ensue. He gets involved in an attempted robbery which, through a series of circumstances, results in a woman named Fran (Dolores Moran) trying to commit suicide. Our angel tries to prevent this and is successful, but in doing so, midnight passes.

Worse, the two guys who were sent down the previous night, the first trumpeter Doremus (John Alexander) and second trumpeter Osidro (Allyn Joslyn) decided that they wanted to stay on earth instead of destroying the planet. They've learned of Athanael's presence, and are determined to stop it by getting a hold of that trumpet.

Up in heaven, they know everything that's going on, and that earth has not been destroyed. Elizabeth offers to go down and help Athanael, and further complications ensue. Of course, as we already know, this is an obvious dream sequence running almost the entire length of the movie, so we know that the earth isn't really going to be destroyed.

Apparently the movie bombed at the box office, leading Jack Benny to joke about it on his radio and TV shows, much the way Johnny Carson would make fun of Bedtime for Bonzo because his Tonight Show director, Fred de Cordova, directed the movie. Benny joked that it was a terrible movie. But in reality, it's not as bad as he made it out to be. Sure, it's a bit of an acquired taste, and I think Benny really needs to be more of a supporting star with stronger leads around him. But it's no worse than a lot of silly plots for 1940s movies.

For people not so familiar with Benny, I'd start off with To Be or Not to Be, and then maybe go on to George Washington Slept Here. But for fans of 1940s movies, certainly give The Horn Blows at Midnight a shot

Colorado Territory

I briefly mentioned Colorado Territory back in 2015 when it was airing on TCM in honor of the birthday salute to one of its stars, Virginia Mayo. It ran again last December as part of TCM's spotlight on remakes. I recently got around to watching it, so now we get a review.

While Mayo may be the female lead, the real star is Joel McCrea, playing Wes McQueen. At the start of the movie he's in prison in Missouri in 1871, but he's sprung by friends. The first thing he does is go to the farm where his old flame lived, but he finds that she died while he was in prison. So he goes west, out to Colorado where his old friend Rickard (Basil Ruysdael) has a job for him.

Along the way to Colorado, however, on the stagecoach he meets the Winslows, father Fred (Henry Hull) and daughter Julie (Dorothy Malone), whom Dad is bringing west because they're of too low a social class to marry her beau, and he wants to start a farm. Wes takes a liking to the two of them, and even thwarts a would-be gang of robbers from taking the coach's money box. The Winslows don't know Wes' true identity.

About that job that Rickard had for Wes? It's a criminal matter, of course, involving the robbery of a payroll from the Denver and Rio Grande railroad. While preparing for the robbery, he is to hide out at an abandoned mission, where he's going to meet the two other guys in the robbery, Reno and Duke (John Archer and James Mitchell, respectively). They're bad news, as should be seen by the fact that they've brought a woman with them to the hideout, Colorado Carson (that's Virginia Mayo). They treat her like crap, and fight amongst themselves, so it's unsurprising that Colorado takes a liking to Wes and eschews the other two guys.

The day of the robbery arrives, and it doesn't go off without a hitch. Reno and Duke try to double-cross Wes, even sicking the railroad police on Wes and Colorado; they get away although Wes gets shot in the shoulder during the escape. But there's a Production Code, so you know that Wes isn't really going to be able to get away. (Not that Reno and Duke do; we see their legs dangling after their necks have been stretched.)

Colorado Territory is a remake of High Sierra, and if there's a problem with the movie, I think it's surprisingly in the casting of Joel McCrea. Humphrey Bogart is tough enough to play the part where, while still engendering a bit of sympathy, we know he deserves to die as the Production Code warrants. This is especially true because Bogart had been mostly playing bad guys at the time he made High Sierra; it was only that same year starting with The Maltese Falcon that he really began to play good guys. McCrea comes across as too nice, not having the hardened edges that Bogart's reputation brought. I think the writing doesn't quite help McCrea; nor does his reputation up until that time which involved a lot more good guys.

That doesn't mean that Colorado Territory is at all bad, however. It's a serviceable western, and a solid retelling of High Sierra moved out to the old west. It's more that the movie could have been so much better. Colorado Territory is available on DVD from the Warner Archive should you care to watch for yourself.

Along the Great Divide

Walter Brennan was one of the stars TCM spotlighted in this year's 31 Days of Summer. However, one of his movies that I recorded was actually run for a different star's day: Along the Great Divide, honoring Kirk Douglas.

Kirk Douglas plays Len Merrick, a US Marshal out on his new assignment. He shows up just in time, as a bunch of cattlemen led by Ed Roden (Morris Ankrum) are about to lynch homesteader Pop Keith (that's Brennan), on the grounds that he rustled cattle and murdered Ed's son. Keith may well be guilty, but the marshal points out that this is for a court and jury to decide. As the marshal, it's his job to bring the accused into town for a trial.

However, it's going to be a difficult journey, as they're all out in a desert area relatively far away from the town and justice. More important, however, is that Roden and his son Dan (James Anderson) are pissed. They want "justice", which for them means hanging Keith right now. Since they can't really start the journey to town at night, Keith offers to let Merrick and his deputies stay at their place before heading off across the desert to town.

It's partly a ruse, of course; Pop has a daughter there in Ann (Virginia Mayo). If she can do anything about it, she's not about to let the marshal bring her dad into town. But of course there's also Roden and his men, and she's not about to let them kill her father, either. It helps that she's at least halfway capable with a shot.

So, there's an uneasy alliance heading off across the desert, with the Keiths going only for their own survival against Roden's men. Eventually, they get ambushed by the Rodens, but they're able to take Dan hostage, making Ed withdraw until the party gets to town -- if they can.

At this point, the movie turns from more action to more of a psychological drama. In the ambush, the marshal and his party lost their water packs that the spare horse was carrying, so there's a darn good chance of running out of water. And now with one of the Rodens in the group, there's even more people working against the marshal.

Along the Great Divide is a pretty good movie that probably would have benefited from Technicolor photography. I'm not certain if Douglas had done any westerns before this one, but he already shows an adeptness for the genre. Mayo, as with almost all Hollywood star actresses, still looks a bit too glamorous for the harsh west, but this isn't her fault. Brennan is an actor I generally find irritating, but at least here that character trait is a plot point as he's deliberately wheedling the marshal, something that's understandable since Pop doesn't want to have to face justice (which he expects to be a miscarriage of justice anyway).

Along the Great Divide is availalbe on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive collection, and is one that I think western fans will really like.