A Ticklish Affair

Another of those movies that I had seen show up on TCM several times in the past, but had never actually watched beyond a few small snippets, was the family romantic comedy A Ticklish Affair. So with that in mind, the last time it showed up on TCM I recorded it, and only recently finally got around to watching that recording. It's showing up on TCM tomorrow, August 25, at 8:00 AM as part of a Summer Under the Stars day of movies dedicated to Shirley Jones, so with that in mind I've schedule the post for today.

A bunch of sailors from the Coronado Naval Air Station in the San Diego area are on an excercise in the Pacific Ocean just off land. Looking off to shore, one of the sailors sees coming from some place on shore the same sort of blinking light that ships use to communicate to one another in Morse code. (Technically these lights aren't blinking, of course; it's that the venetian blind-like slats that obscure the light make it look like it's blinking.) The only thing is, this light is blinking "SOS", which unsurprisingly gets their attention. The Navy sends a couple of people out to investigate, and find that it looks like the signal is coming from a regular house.

A group led by Cmdr. Key Weedon (Gig Young) walks right in, thinking it's a real emergency, and find a woman under the sink. That woman is Amy Martin (Shirley Jones), a widowed mother with three sons who are a bit of a handful since they have a knack for getting into trouble even when they don't mean to. The kids, not having a father, immediately like Weedon and Weedon, for his part, likes Amy. Amy would be perfectly willing to consider Weedon a friend, but she absolutely doesn't want to go any farther than that. Her husband was in the navy and died in service, which would explain why she doesn't want to get involved with another Navy man. That and having to move around, since she feels, not without reason, that the young boys need a stable home.

As for the Morse code light, that was given to the boys by their uncle Simon (Red Buttons), a pilot who has a bit of an eccentric streak himself, since who would give young boys that sort of blinker as a present. His next gift for them is even more eccentric: a canister of helium and the sort of weather balloons that the navy used in those days. He then explains to the boys that such balloons are used in astronaut training: gravity on the moon is lower than that on earth, so putting a bunch of balloons on men with a ground harness supposedly simulates what walking on the moon would be like.

Meanwhile, Key keeps pursuing Amy, and would like to propose marriage, but he gets a transfer to Italy, which is really going to make Amy hesitant to accept. But the romantic relationship between Key and Amy gets interrupted by another SOS signal coming from the house. Grover, is trying out the helium balloon thing when he slips the tether and starts floating off, although he seems blithely unware of the danger. Somehow the phone line at the Martin house is out, so Key is going to have to go over to the Martin house to find out what's going on. This leads to the climax as the entire naval base is put into action to save Grover.

A Ticklish Affair starts off as a relatively conventional, if inoffensive, family rom-com. Indeed, just a few months earlier, Jones appeared in The Courtship of Eddie's father, only as the woman gaining a family as the next-door widower is pushed into a relationship with here character. But then that climax comes, and that really takes the movie in a direction that doesn't suit it was as it makes for a finale that's supposed to be zany but is more tedious. Even without such a mishandled climax, however, A Ticklish Affair wouldn't have been as good as The Courtship of Eddie's Father. So you might want to watch this one once just to see how a reasonably premise can go wrong.

Cornelius Ryan

Today is June 6, which is of course the anniversary of the D-Day invasion in Normandy, and this year it's an exact number of decades. So TCM is running a day full of films about the invasion. One that was sitting on my DVR was The Longest Day, airing at 11:00 PM. So with that in mind I watched it to do a post in conjunction with tonight's showing.

The Longest Day is based upon the book by military historian Cornelius Ryan, a man who wrote sprawling epics trying to cover World War II battles from a multitude of angles, his other famous book turned into a movie being A Bridge Too Far (that one is also on my DVR because it has former Star of the Month Dirk Bogarde in the cast). But Ryan's books tried to present things in as factual a way as possible; they're not historical or military fiction.

As a result, the film version of The Longest Day is also mostly a docudrama on an extremely grand scale. A very large cast (named only at the end) portrays the invasion from the point of view of the Americans, British, French, and the Germans. In fact, it starts off a few days or weeks before the invasion. The Nazis knew full well that the Allies were going to be invading on the western front, although the key question was where. The most obvious place to invade would be across the Pas-de-Calais/Strait of Dover as that's the closest point on the Continent to England. With that in mind, the Allies knew that this was also going to be the most heavily fortified area, which is why they thought about invading somewhere farther west despite the English Channel being wider there.

The preparations for the invasion were meticulous and complicated. Soldiers were getting antsy having to sit around in the UK and wait. But at the same time, there was the question of whether to invade in bad weather; rough seas seems like a major no-no for an amphibious invasion and the Nazis knew this. Indeed the Nazis as portrayed here all seemed surprised that the Allies hadn't invaded in May.

Additionally, the invasion is personalized somewhat by having some of the smaller parts of the invasion focused on, such as the need to take and hold a particular bridge or how paratroopers were dropped in on the night between June 5 and 6 before the beach landings at dawn. And then when the landing does come, the Americans under Brig. Gen. Cota (Robert Mitchum) get bogged down on Omaha; it's vital that they break through for the invasion as a whole to succeed.

As we know from history, the invasion did succeed. But does the movie succeed? For the most part, I'd say yes. The screenplay does a good job of explaining everything that's going on without being too dry or didactic. Not having opening credits apart from one title card showing the title of the picture is also a big plus; there are so many big-name actors here that looking for them all from the credits would be a bit distracting. Coming off best is probably John Wayne, who I think has the biggest role as a commander of paratroopers. The wordless look of horror on his face when he sees those paratroopers who died because they were off course and parachuted right into town says more than any dialogue (and John Wayne's delivery isn't the most helpful in that regard) does.

Others who have smaller roles are Henry Fonda and Edmond O'Brien as American generals; Richard Burton as an RAF man; Curd Jürgens as a German chief of staff; and many many more. A lot of the Americans only get one or two scenes, while there are fewer Germans so all those actors get more screen time.

Where The Longest Day doesn't always work, however, is in the pacing. The subject is sprawling, and there's not really enough done either with the subplots or anything to narrow it down. The result is that of a relentless slowness. I understand that the invasion itself took a long time, but cinematically it feels like a whole lot of the same thing happening and not ending, especially once we hit June 6.

Overall, however, The Longest Day is a very well-made movie and one that, if you haven't seen before, you really should.

The Big Circus

Some months back, the TCM spotlight was movies about the circus. This gave me the chance to record The Big Circus, which I hadn't seen in ages, and do a post on it now.

Victor Mature is the star, playing Hank Whirling, the proprietor of one of those traveling circuses that sets up a real big top and goes from town to town by train. However, he just lost his partner, Jules Borman, who was bigger and better financed, so the Whirling Circus is in a parlous state. Indiied, in order to go on the next tour, the bank is only going to provide a loan if they can send one of their employees, Randy Sherman (Red Buttons) on the tour to see that the money is being managed properly.

Actually, they send two people, as Randy brings along Helen Harrison (Rhonda Fleming). Her job is as a press agent, which miffs Whirling in part because nobody told him about this, and in part because she's a woman, and he doesn't know whether lady press agents can handle the difficult circus world if they're not the talent or born into it.

One who was born into it was Hank's kid sister Jeannie (Kathryn Grant). In fact, she has just enough talent that she could start practicing with the trapeze act, which includes Zach (Gilbert Roland), who also does the high wire, and Zach's spotter Tommy (David Nelson). But Hank doesn't want Jeannie doing the acts, especially not a dangerous one like the trapeze. Rounding out the major members of this circus are Skeeter the Clown (Peter Lorre in his fat period) and ringmaster Hans Hagenfeld (Vincent Price).

There's a fair amount of conflict since Randy and Helen are all business, and Hank thinks they don't understand the circus business. But there's going to be more conflict. One involves Jeannie's practicing with Zach, and another involves Skeeter getting too drunk to perform. Indeed, in one scene, Randy realizes the show must goes on and takes Skeeter's place in the performance of the clowns, even though he doesn't know the routine.

The biggest problem, however, comes when somebody decides to sabotage the circus, with half the train crashing and killing, among others, Zach's wife. This sends him into a deep funk. That's really a problem since the way for Whirling to save the circus is to get a performance in New York. For the publicity, Whirling's plan was to have Zach to a tightrope walk across Niagara Falls, which was actually performed for the first time a century before The Big Circus, by Charles Blondin. Needless to say, one needs to have all one's faculties and be in the right mental state to do something so dangerous....

There have been a lot of circus movies released, and as with submarine movies there aren't too many distinct plots one can do. So in that regard, The Big Circus isn't terribly original. It's competently made, and the circus performances are nice, but the movie as a whole isn't terribly memorable. It'll certainly entertain you for one watch, however.