I know -- let's put on a minstrel show!

Continuing to go through the movies that I recorded when Mickey Rooney was TCM's Star of the Month in December 2024, this time it's another of the musicals he did with Judy Garland, Babes on Broadway. This is, of course, not to be confused with Babes in Arms which is another musical that Rooney and Garland did together although they play different characters.

This time around, Mickey Rooney is playing a young man named Tommy Williams, who is apparently all grown up since he doesn't have any parents around. That, and he's part of a trio calling themsleves the "Three Balls of Fire" together with Ray (Ray McDonald) and Hammy (future director Richard Quine when he was still in front of the camera). They have dreams of fame, but of course those dreams don't seem to be going anywhere in part because it's tough to make it in New York, and more generally tough to get noticed period. On their last night performing as the entertainment at an Italian restaurant, they get a big tip from a Miss Jones (Fay Bainter). It turns out that Jones is actually the executive assistant Thurston Reed (James Gleason), and she is able to get the Three Balls of Fire an audition with Reed.

Of course, Tommy is a bit stupid in that he tries to use this to get all his other friends auditions too, which is not what Reed would want. And the friends is a new one, Penny Morris (Judy Garland). She is the daughter of a music teacher, and works at a settlement house with underprivileged children. The settlement house is looking to do the fresh air thing; that is, get city kids out of the city for a couple of weeks and up to a camp in the Catskills or out in New Jersey or some such). Tommy and Penny both get the brilliant idea to set up a charity fundraiser of having the young people perform, except that Tommy intends to use it to raise the money to rent a real theater instead of helping the poor city kids.

That threatens to put the kibosh on what is also going to be a budding relationship between him and Penny, as you might guess since these musicals are nothing if not formulaic. But a wrinkle gets put in those plans thanks to World War II on the other side of the Atlantic. (The movie was released a few weeks after Pearl Harbor, although surely most of the filming must have been before December 7, making it interesting that this plot line is in the movie.) As a result of the war, British children were being evacuated to Canada and the US (as in On the Sunny Side which shows up from time to time on FXM), and they need help more than the settlement house kids. Also, Tommy has more sympathy for them and probably wants to bed Penny too, so he decides to be honest.

This gives Jones the idea of letting the kids use one of Reed's old, disused theaters if they can refurbish it (where are they going to get the money for that) to put on the show. The refurbishment offers the opportunity for probably the best sequence in the movie, as Penny and Tommy imagine the performers who played here in previous generations and do their impressions of what such performances might have been like. However, there are legal issues with the show going forward, combined with the fact that Reed doesn't exactly know his old theater is being reused. But, since it's a Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland musical, we know that it's going to have a happy ending.

That happy ending is where the minstrel show comes in, and is the thing that pretty much everybody else brings up in discussing Babes on Broadway, because this is a long blackface sequence, much longer than there were in some other movies. And modern-day people have to point out how terrible it is that this stuff was popular back in the day. (Some might say still is, except that it's now womanface and men who don't look like convincing women calling themselves "trans" so they can get off on getting into what are supposed to be private spaces for women.)

In any case, Garland and Rooney give their typical rousing performances, and it's easy to see how the movie taken as a whole would have lifted the spirits of audiences on the homefront who had a lot going on in their lives by the time the movie was released. So Babes on Broadway is actually worth a watch.

The Notorious Landlady

A few weeks ago, I did a post on The Velvet Touch. I was thinking about that movie a I watched another movie that for some reason I though was coming up on the TCM schedule soon, The Notorious Landlady.

The movie starts off with a bit of a prologue in a fashionable part of London where the residents include elderly Mrs. Dunhill (Estelle Winwood). On her travels in and out of the neighborhood, she has to deal with one of those bratty kids who keeps popping up to be bratty whenever that's what's needed for the plot. As the movie opens he likes to terrorize people by pointing his cap gun at them. Everybody hears a shot, except that this time it's not from the cap gun but from one of the other houses on the square.

Fast forward several months. Carly Hardwicke (Kim Novak) lives in one of the houses on the square, and has offered a flat to let, preferably to a couple. One family does show up, but they realize that this is Carly Hardwicke, and walk away, which means that she has a past. It doesn't take much to guess what that past is, since we saw the prologue. So we know what the "notorious" in the title is referring to.

Not knowing is Bill Gridley (Jack Lemmon). Bill is an American, working in the Foreign Service and having just been transferred to London from Saudi Arabia. So of course he wouldn't know what happened six months previously. He cottons on fairly quickly that Carly, dressed as the maid of the house, is in fact not a maid but the lady of the house, and that she's alone. Carly had wanted a couple to rent, but she's hard up for money, so she relents and rents the entire second story to Bill.

The next day at work, Bill mentions where he found a place to rent, and the name sounds very familiar to Bill's boss, Franklyn Ambruster (Fred Astaire). Ambruster does a bit of research, and realizes that Hardwicke is presumed to be the one who fired that shot that everybody heard in the prologue. The belief is that it killed her husband, who has been missing ever since that shot, and that Carly is therefore the obvious suspect in a murder case. The only thing is, nobody's been able to find Mr. Hardwicke's body, which is kind of important if you're going to try someone for murder.

Having an officer in the foreign service be involved in a case like this wouldn't do for the Americans, but they don't have much choice since Bill is renting that flat. So Ambruster brings in Scotland Yard and they impress on Bill the idea that he should help them in getting information by more or less spying on his landlady and getting whatever information he can that will either help prove her guilt or exonerate her.

It's not too hard to guess where things are going to go for much of the rest of the movie, since this is a more comedic mystery. Bill is going to fall in love with Carly, but there's going to be one misunderstanding after another that makes Bill think perhaps Carly really is a murderess. However, since it's a lighter movie, the viewer can presume that she is in fact not the killer. And indeed, Mr. Hardwicke does eventually show up.

The Notorious Landlady is another of those movies that doesn't quite work, in large part because it has to hew to so many of the tropes of the genre that we know where it's going to be going. If it were a noir, we'd know Mrs. Hardwicke is bad news; here, we know that some coincidence is going to come to exonerate her. The script is also a bit unoriginal, making unnecessary homages to some classic films. The Notorious Landlady was filmed in 1961 and has one scene of Jack Lemmon tell Kim Novak he "adores" her that felt like it came straight out of the final scene of The Apartment. And there's a scene of a shower drain that looked like it could have been taken from the editing room of Psycho. The Notorious Landlady also runs 123 minutes, which is a good half hour too long for material like this.

So I'd say it's with reason that The Notorious Landlady is not the best-remembered movie for any of its stars.

The Cockeyed Miracle

I've mentioned before in conjunction with quite a few movies how the Production Code can be a problem with forcing a certain plot resolution on the film, with the only question being how the movie actually gets there. I couldn't help but have similar thoughts as I was watching the 1946 film The Cockeyed Miracle.

The plot deals with the Griggs family that has two adult children, led by patriarch Sam Griggs (Frank Morgan). He's a shipbulider, but getting up there in years and beginning to suffer some age-related health problems. His wife Amy (Gladys Cooper) loves him, and isn't worried about the prospect of illness forcing Sam to retire, since they've saved up some money. Unfortunately, she doesn't know that he's put it in a real estate investment that may or may not pay off, but in any case even if it pays off later, the money is still in an illiquid asset. Sam gave the savings to his best friend Tom Carter (Cecil Kellaway) to buy a plot of land, but the only possible investor wants to see that the land will stand up to the storms that hit the coast.

As for the adult children, Jennifer (Audrey Totter) is in love with an assistant professor at the local college, Howard (Richard Quine before he became an director). He's got a chance at a full professorship, but it's at a school out west, and there's the question of whether she should leave and split up the family with a sickly father, or wait for Howard to come back in a few years. The son, however, is the more immediate problem.

Jim Griggs (Marshall Thompson) would like to be a shipbuilder like his father, but economic circumstances have so far required him to work at his father's fish-packing plant. But on the day that the action in the movie opens, he comes running home with a letter from a shipbulider over in London in the UK. They've got a prospect for a job, but he's going to have to set out for England in fairly short order, and to do that he needs the money for the transatlantic passage. In theory, the family has the money, but that's because Sam is the only one who knows that the money has been invested in a still-illiquid land deal. He can't get the money right now.

Things really change when he goes up to bed. He comes down and sees... his father Ben (Keenan Wynn). This is a problem because Ben has been dead since Sam was a young man, and for Sam to see Ben now means that Sam is really quite dead too, not that the rest of the family is aware of it just yet. Ben has appeared as a sort of ghost, but really with the intention of taking Sam to the next world.

As a ghost, he does have the sort of supernatural powers that allow him to do the sort of things that those of us on this side of life to attribute to ghosts or other phenomena of which we're not yet aware. One thing that Ben might just be able to do is to conjure up a storm, so that the prospective buyer of the land will see his question answered of how the land will stand up. Ben, having done that, satisfies the buyer, who writes a check for the purchase price of the land. All of the Griggs' money problems will be solved!

Except that Tom has a change of heart. Since there was no actual contract signed between Tom and Sam, there would be no theoretical legal recourse for Sam to get the money back even if he were still alive. With him being dead and Tom being the only one to know about the agreement he and Sam had, it would be easy for Tom to be evil and take all of the money from the land deal. There is, however, the question of whether the Production Code would allow that....

The Cockeyed Miracle is based on a stage play, and it's extremely easy to see the stage origins watching the movie. A lot of it is based in the parlor/living room of the Griggs house. However, since the story deals with ghosts, it's a lot easier for a movie to deal with the technical problems of trying to portray ghosts than one can do on the stage.

That having been said, the cast does a pretty good job with the material, led by Frank Morgan who is clearly the star here. With a star like Morgan and not anybody bigger, it's obvious that this is more programmer material than prestige movie, and the movie often feels like it has the production values of something more limited. That's not to say it's a bad movie; it does well with its limited aims. At the same time, though, it's also not the sort of movie I'd recommend to people who aren't necessarily fans of old movies: the production values seem thoroughly stuck in the 1940s when the movie was made. It's the sort of thing that could probably stand a remake.

Judy Holliday's dud

I've argued before that pretty much any star who was around long enough will have made enough movies to have at least one serious dud in their filmography. Recently, I watched a film that I think would qualify as a dud for Judy Holliday: Full of Life.

Holliday plays Emily Rocco, married to writer Nick (Richard Conte) and pregnant with the couple's first child. Of course, the couple is married; the Production Code would never allow for them to be unmarried. But the marriage was only a civil ceremoney, which is going to be a serious plot point later in the movie. For now, suffice it to say that Emily wasn't born Catholic and isn't particularly into any religious tradition.

Being a writer isn't hugely remunerative, but Nick was able to save enough money to buy a house for the couple. It's just that it's an older house, which means that it's reaching the point where repairs are needed. That becomes much more obvious one day when Emily falls through the kitchen floor! She and Nick bring in a couple of construction guys for estimates, but all of them tell the couple that it's going to cost more money than the couple can really afford.

However, Nick's father Vittorio (Salvatore Baccaloni, who I presume was being groomed for being an older character actor by Columbia), was a stonemason who has since retired to northern California to do a bit of farming together with Mama Rocco (Esther Minciotti). In theory, Dad could do the work for just the cost of materials as well as putting Dad up in the house for a while, but there's a serious catch. Nick and Vittorio have serious differences of opinion on a whole bunch of subjects, including Nick's only having gotten a civil wedding. But it's not as if the young couple has much choice, so they invite him down to southern California to do the work.

As you might guess, Vittorio proceeds to turn the place upside-down. Some of those ways are the tropes that seem like good ways, with a bohemian outlook on life that serves to make people around him a little less strait-laced. But there are other things, like completely coming up with a different plan for the home renovation than what Nick and Emily want, or can even afford in terms of materials. And then there's Vittorio trying to get Emily to consider converting to Catholicism....

Full of Life is one of those movies that on the surface sounds like it has a really good premise, but under the surface it rather fails thanks to a bad handling of the premise. In this case, it's part that I found the tone to be really uneven. The movie isn't certain whether it wants to be a broad comedy or a serious drama. Part of the comedy is supposed to come from Vittorio being the stereotypical Italian-American immigrant, but it comes across as a lot closer to insulting than charming. The whole religious conversion aspect feels heavy-handed. And then there's a subplot about Mama getting up there in years to the point that everybody worries about her health. And then everybody just leaves her alone up at that farm while Dad goes south, effectively writing her out of the movie.

Full of Life is a giant mess that doesn't serve anybody well, least of all the usually quite good Judy Holliday.

It Happened to Jane

Doris Day was TCM's Star of the Month back in March, and I hadn't gotten through all of her movies that I DVRed during the tribute. Recently I watched another of the movies, It Happened to Jane.

Doris plays Jane, a widow in Cape Anne, ME, one of those old-fashioned New England towns that still has a town meeting and enough of a civic spirit that everybody in town attends the meeting. George Denham (Jack Lemmon) is an attorney in town who runs for First Selectman at every meeting and keeps losing; he's also in love with Jane and would love for her to marry him now that she's a widow. (The movie doesn't say how long she's been a widow, but implies that it's been long enough for her to consider dating and marriage again even though she has two kids.)

Jane supports her family by fishing for lobster, which she ships off to various hoity-toity places in New England and beyond courtesy of the Eastern and Portland Railroad, which is headed by Harry Foster Malone (Ernie Kovacs). However, due to staffing cuts at the railroad, one of her shipments was not able to be signed for by anybody at the station, with the result that it sat around for a couple of days and the live lobsters wound up dead, which defeats the point of having lobster. Jane is pissed, rightly so, and since she's out a good deal of money, George writes a threatening letter to the railroad.

Malone sends two lawyers up to Maine to meet with Jane and George. They know that the company is in the wrong, and offer her to settle for the value of the shipment, which is probably all they're legally liable for. However, Jane thinks she's lost more than just the value of the lobsters; there's a cost to her reuptation of being able to provide a good product. So she wants more, and sues the railroad.

Since the suit is held in a local court, Jane is able to win, but there's a problem with collecting the money. For Malone, there's the principal of the matter, even though he doesn't realize that trying to dick over a small businesswoman like this is going to be much worse for his business in the long run. So he has his lawyers take the case to the next higher court, meaning Jane doesn't get her money yet.

In the meantime, Jane learns that it's possible to attach somebody's property to get the money one is owed, and Jane has George do this to one of the railroad's trains, which I'd think is worth for more than the value in dispute in the case. Malone escalates further, and the case become a national cause célèbre, with Jane getting invited down to New York to do a round of all the New York-based shows. It's here that she meets reporter Larry Hall (Steve Forrest), who quickly falls in love with Jane too.

Eventually Malone decides to play hardball by just closing the line servicing Cape Anne. This would prevent Jane from shipping her product entirely, at least in a way that's not cost prohibitive, but would also make life difficult for the rest of the townsfolk since the town has a better rail connection than road connections. Jane could use that locomotive to ship the lobster, but she needs fuel and access to the tracks, and Malone is going to make that difficult, too....

As a game show fan, I knew that It Happened to Jane has some of the only color footage of the set to I've Got a Secret, as Jane appears on the show (with the actual host and regular panelists) with her secret being that she's in a legal fight against the meanest man in the world. But that and the other cameos might be the highlight of what is very much a lesser Doris Day vehicle. Cape Anne is just too stereotypically New England, replete with quirky characters. Malone is too one-dimensionally mean, and the humor overall feels too forced. I'd recommend one or another of Doris' movies with Rock Hudson or James Garner to those who don't know much about Doris Day rom-coms.