The face that launched a thousand ships

A movie that for some reason I thought I may have watched ages ago, before I even started this blog, was the 1950s version of Helen of Troy. I had never blogged about it, and having watched it, am not 100% certain that I even had seen it before; perhaps I may have watched the 1950s version of Alexander the Great on TCM instead. In any case, Helen of Troy is getting an airing on TCM tomorrow, May, 3, at 7:45 AM, so now's the time for me to watch it and write up a review of it.

The movie is based on Homer's Iliad, although liberties are taken. We're introduced to Troy as the city that guarded the entrance to the Dardanelles between what is now the Turkish Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Troy grew wealthy by charging a toll for safe passage through the straits, although this ticked off other civilizations and mean that Troy didn't have ships of its own. Particularly the Greeks, led by Spartan King Menelaus (Niall MacGinnis), were unhappy.

Meanwhile, in Troy, there's debate over what to do, with King Priam's (Cedric Hardwicke) son Hector wanting to go on the offensive and attack the Spartans first, while younger son Paris (Jacques Sernas, credited as Jack) disagrees and thinks they should offer peace. You can always try war later, so Paris gets on a boat bound for one of the Greek harbors. Except that the ship is overcome by a storm, with Paris going up to fix the mast and going overboard when the mast snaps. He washes ashore and is rescued by a gorgeous woman who turns out to be Helen (Rossana Podestà) although she doesn't reveal her true identity who is AWOL from the palace with an old governess and her slave servant Andraste (Brigitte Bardot in one of her first international roles). Unsurprisingly, Paris falls for this lovely woman, although everybody realizes there's a problem if the Greeks were to find the guy.

Paris does make his way to the Spartan council, where Menelaus is meeting with Agamemnon (Robert Douglas), Achilles (Stanley Baker), Odysseus (Torin Thatcher), and others. Paris proves who he is by being good at combat, but then who should show up to the council but Helen? Menelaus is no dummy, and realizes that Paris and Helen have already met somewhere before. Menelaus is also insanely jealous because Helen doesn't really care for him on the grounds that she's been basically forced into a marriage and he tries to keep her captive in a gilded cage. So although Menelaus feigns talking peace, he actually plans to keep Paris hostage and ransom him to Troy.

Helen's servants inform Paris of this and effect an escape, leading to Menelaus getting even angrier, and sending soldiers to find Paris and kill him. They do find him, but there's a problem in that Helen has escaped the palace to make certain Paris gets to the Phoenician boat that's supposed to take him back to Troy. Whether the soldiers can kill Helen along with Paris is an open question, but one that Paris obviates by taking Helen in his arms and jumping off a cliff to the ocean below much like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Paris takes Helen back to Troy.

When Menelaus learns of this, he vows to go to war with Troy, using Helen as the reasonable excuse, but with as much of an intention to loot Troy and let a bunch of people bring the treasures of war back to Greece with them. Unfortunately Troy is in an easily-defensible place, and has a bunch of land behind it that's going to make it hard to surround. So instead, after the first attack is repulsed, the war becomes a largely frozen war of attrtition. Can the Greeks wait out the Trojan subjects' increasingly poor morale? Well, as anybody who knows their history will remember, the Greeks eventually came up with the Trojan horse that had a couple of commandos inside who could open up the city gates while the Trojans, drunk having thought they won a big battle, are hung over.

This version of Helen of Troy is pretty impressive to watch from the point of view of all the technical parts of the production; it was filmed largely in Italy with wide-screen color photography and what generally look like very high production values. The story and the acting, however, leave a bit less to be desired, in part because the two leads were not native English speakers. Still, I think the good parts of the spectacle ultimately outweigh the shortcomings of the story.

Julie Andrews at 90

Today marks the 90th birthday of actress Julie Andrews. As such, it's not a surprise that TCM is spending the evening with a night of her films. Not too many: just four, since all of the movies are over two hours. The night kicks off with a movie that premiered on TCM only a few months ago: The Sound of Music, at 8:00 PM.

Now, this isn't going to be the biggest of synopses, since I presume most people know the basic story of The Sound of Music. Maria (Julie Andrews) is supposed to be a student and possible novitiate at a convent in Salzburg, Austria, but she's a flighty young woman who would rather go up in the mountains and sing. Indeed, I don't think we have a line of regular dialogue until about 15 minutes into the movie as we get the title song followed the nuns singing about how to solve a problem like Maria. They decide to solve that problem by sending her off to be the governess of the von Trapp children. They're a wealthy family of seven children whose mother died some time back but who have a way of scaring off would-be governesses.

Part of that is the children's pranks, but just as much of it is because of the father, Captain Georg von Trapp (Christopher Plummer, for whose Summer Under the Stars day the movie got its TCM premiere). He's humorless, runs the family like clockwork, and doesn't expect the kids to do such normal kid stuff like play or, God forbid, sing. Meanwhile, he's on-again, off-again seeing a baroness (Eleanor Parker), and there's an expectation that Georg is going to marry her since she seems like she'd be a good stepmother to the children. They do genuinely seem to like her, as well has her producer friend who comes from Vienna, Max Detweiler (Richard Haydn).

Of course, the viewer knows that Maria winds up a von Trapp. Her presence fairly quickly brightens the children's lives as she's willing to take them out for a day on the town to play, as well as hike up mountains and sing. This is also going to piss off Dad. But Max likes their singing, and Maria is just so damn nice that Georg starts to warm to her. However, there are going to be many complications along the way.

One of them is the class difference and the expectation that George should marry a woman of the Baroness' social standing. But the Baroness eventually realizes Georg and Maria are meant to be together. The bigger problem is the political situation. The Nazis had been putting all sorts of political pressure on Austria, with the eventual result being the Anschluss, when Germany annexed Austria in March 1938. George was not pleased with the Nazis, and this was obviously going to be difficult for him. In the movie, he receives a telegram from Berlin informing him that he's being voluntold to go to Bremerhaven to join the German navy and take up his old job as a ship's captain. This is what convinces him that he and the rest of the family have to escape.

I am not, as I have stated here quite a few times over the course of the years, the biggest fan of musicals. To me they're incredibly artificial. The Sound of Music is no different. It also goes on incredibly long, lasting a shade under three hours. But I can't deny that the movie is extremely well made from a technical point of view, with a fine performance from Andrews and a lot of lovely cinematography. Not that it's difficult to make the Austrian Alps look good on screen. So for anybody who likes musicals, they're going to love The Sound of Music. Granted, such people have probably already seen it. But if anybody who likes musicals has not yet seen The Sound of Music, do yourself a favor and watch it tonight.

No relation to Kevin McCarthy

TCM is doing a morning and part of the afternoon of Val Lewton's films tomorrow, April 8. I happen to have one of those on my DVR, so I'll put up a post on it now: The Body Snatcher, at 1:30 PM.

The scene is Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1831. Donald Fettes (Russell Wade) is a medical student who had been studying with Dr. MacFarlane (Henry Daniell), this being an era when dedicated medical schools weren't a thing. But he's going to have to give up those studies for monetary reasons. He's stopped by a cemetery for no other reason than to come up with an expository scene mentioning body snatching, which is digging up the grave for the body therein, not for any valuables that might have been buried. Body snatchers were a thing back in those days because the anatomist-doctors teaching the next generation of doctors needed bodies to do that teaching, and they couldn't get enough legally, say from people who would othewise be buried in potters' field.

Fettes goes to see Dr. MacFarlane at the same time a difficult paralysis case shows up: Mrs. Marsh is bringing her daughter Georgina, hoping that MacFarlane can operate on her. MacFarlane has no bedside manner to get Georgina to explain exactly what the pain is like which would help diagnose exactly where and what the injury is. Fettes, however, does have a bedside manner, so MacFarlane makes him his assistant.

Meanwhile, the Marshes were brought to MacFarlane in a cab driven by John Gray (Boris Karloff). What Fettes doesn't (yet) know is that John is in fact a body snatcher, bringing the bodies to MacFarlane. Fettes is disturbed by this, but MacFarlane explains that the bodies are absolutely necessary for the advancement of science.

This, however, is also where that opening scene at the cemetery comes back into play. While at the cemetery, Fettes met a woman whose son died and whose dog is mourning at the grave 24/7. Gray knows about the boy having died, but when he goes to the cemetery and gets confronted by the poor dog, Gray hits the dog over the head with a shovel, killing it. Good like getting bodies from the cemetery, now that all of them will be given police protection.

So what does Gray do? Why, turn to murder! Unfortunately, he decides to murder a woman who was trying to eke out a living by singing on the street in exchange for coins. He brings this body to MacFarlane but Fettes recognizes it and realizes that Gray is now murdering people and MacFarlane is complicit in it. (Granted, Fettes has his own problems by not going straight to the police.) This sets the denouement of the film into motion.

The Body Snatcher is based on a story by Robert Louis Stevenson, which explains why Val Lewton wound up making a movie set in 19th century Scotland. It's not quite in the same vein as the straight-up horror movies Lewton produced like Cat People or The Seventh Victim. Since we know who's doing the killing, it's more of a horror-tinged melodrama. That's not to say that The Body Snatcher is bad, although once again the fact that the ending is going to have to satisfy the Production Code office does raise some issues with the film.

Still, Karloff and the rest of the cast are effective enough for what was only ever meant to be a programmer and not some sort of prestige film. In that light, The Body Snatcher works quite well and is definitely worth a watch.

Criminal Court

Someone whom I haven't given much attention to over the many years that I've done this blog is Tom Conway, brother of more prominent supporting actor George Sanders. But Conway was more than capable of doing a good job and bringing energy to an otherwise pedestrian movie. A good example of this would be the RKO B movie Criminal Court.

Conway plays Steve Barnes, a defense attorney who has a reputation for producing theatrics and gimmicks in the courtroom. He's currently defending a man who is accused of a gangland killing. This defendant isn't so important; what is important is the fact that the defendant has run afoul of underworld king Vic Wright (Robert Armstrong). Barnes is hoping to use this case as a jumping-off point in his campaign to become the new district attorney, running on a clean government campaign since the current DA is using "witnesses" paid for by Wright.

Complicating things is the fact that Barnes has a girlfriend, Georgia (Martha O'Driscoll), who is an aspiring nightclub singer. She's about to get an interview for a job... at a nightclub owned by Vic Wright. Steve isn't particularly thrilled with this, although he also realizes that he can't really get in the way of his girlfriend's career. She makes it past the first test and gets an interview with Wright himself later that evening.

But she's not the only person who's going to be seeing Wright at his club in the evening. Barnes has come across some pictures of Wright's kid brother Frankie (Steve Brodie) that will put a big dent in Vic's career. Not only that, but he plans on showing them at a campaign event. Vic tries to bribe him, and when that doesn't work, claims that he's got some sort of incriminating evidence of his own that Barnes really ought to come over and see.

The meeting doesn't go well, and devolves into a struggle between Vic and Steve, although it's also witnessed by Steve's secretary Joan since she's also on Vic's payroll to feed information from Barnes' office to him. She slips out the back way just as Steve comes in to Vic's office, but stays to listen. She knows that durin the struggle, Vic pulls out a gun, and the two men try to grab it since it's now clearly a matter of life and death. The gun goes off in such a way that Steve isn't really guilty but that could destroy his campaign. Vic gets shot and killed.

Worse, after Steve leaves, who should show up but Georgia? She sees the dead body and rather stupidly panics, picking up the gun. Dumb, dumb, dumb, although I suppose you can't fault her for panicking. But with her having been seen in Vic's office and having been seen by Frankie with the gun, she's an obvious suspect. Steve could get her off for reasons the audience knows why, but of course nobody in the film but Steve knows what those reasons are. Well, almost nobody.

Criminal Court is a B movie that doesn't cover any new ground. It was actually released in 1946, but has the feel of something that would have been right at home in the 1930s. This doesn't mean it's bad; instead, I'd say it feels overly familiar. We've seen all these plot devices before, but thanks to Tom Conway and director Robert Wise early in his career, the material is still entertaining enough.

Moon Under the Blood

I mentioned last week that Robert Mitchum is the TCM Star of the Month for January 2024. I happened to have one of his movies that I hadn't seen before on my DVR, and that movie is now on the TCM schedule: Blood on the Moon, early tomorrow at 3:30 AM Jan. 10 (or overnight tonight if you prefer to look at it that way).

The movie opens with Mitchum as a lone man on his horse riding somewhere through the old west. It's raining quite hard and getting dark, so the man sets up a makeshift camp for the night. However, not long after that, he hears sounds which he realizes are those of a cattle stampede. He climbs a tree for safety before the cattle come through, destroying his camp. And when the man who owns the heard shows up, he's none too pleased. That man is John Lufton (Tom Tully), who seems to own the entire region, or at least that part of the region that's not part of the Ute reservation. The interloper (Mitchum's character) is Jim Garry, who had been a cattle driver down in Texas before he lost his own herd.

This is one of those regions where homesteaders are beginning to show up, and Lufton is not pleased about that either. He offers Jim a choice, which is either to work for him or to leave the region. No joining in with the homesteaders. When Jim chooses to keep drifting, Lufton gives him a note and asks him to take it to his home in the valley. But before Jim can get to the Lufton spread, he's accosted by a gunman. Well, actually, a gunwoman, who turns out to be Lufton's daughter Amy (Barbara Bel Geddes). Amy is hot-headed, but has an older sister Carol (Phyllis Thaxter) who seems to be more level-headed.

Jim rides on into town, where he learn that he's not exactly a drifter. He had an old friend in the cattle driving business, Tate Riling (Robert Preston), who wrote him to come because he had a business proposition for Jim. Ostensibly, Tate wants Jim to help out the homesteaders, salt of the earth people like Kris Barden (Walter Brennan). To do this involves taking Lufton down a peg, which Jim can do by helping force Lufton to sell his herd. Tate has been working with the local Indian agent, Pindalest, to get Lufton's cattle off the reservation.

Now, Tate and Pindalest are going to play hardball. Pindalest has the power to declare it illegal for Lufton to have his cattle on the reservation, and use the military to get rid of the cattle if necessary. Riling also wants to manipulate the homesteaders into preventing Lufton from driving his cattle off the reservation. That would in theory force Lufton to sell the cattle at an artificially low price. But Lufton hates Riling, and would never sell to Riling. That's where Jim comes in. Lufton might well sell to Jim, who would then resell to the US government as represented by Pindalest, with the three of them pocketing the profits.

Once Jim learns the full extent of what's going on, he's horrified. This is complicated by the fact that Amy eventually starts falling in love with Jim after he informs her of what's going on and his possible willingness to side with Lufton. But can Jim get anybody to trust him?

Blood on the Moon is the sort of more complicated western that was beginning to show up in the years after World War II, and part of that is having someone not normally thought of as a direcor of westerns behind the camera: Robert Wise. Wise takes this complex and grown-up story and does quite a good job with it, helped by the fact that he and star Mitchum were both able to handle the noir-adjacent elements of the story. The supporting cast also mostly does a good job, although I have to say Walter Brennan isn't a particular favorite of mine. He's nowhere near as obnoxious here as he is in some other movies, however.

If you want a movie that's both intelligent and has action, you could do a lot worse than to watch Blood on the Moon.

A three-hour tour

I've had The Sand Pebbles on my DVR for quite some time, but I've been a bit reluctant to sit down and watch three-hour movies. Recently, I finally made the time to sit down and watch it to do a review on here.

Steve McQueen plays Jake Holman, a Petty officer in the US Navy in 1926. It's a time when there's no real war going on, but there's still enough adventure abroad for people who want it, and Holman didn't have much choice, having been given the choice of the military or reform school when he was about 18. Being from an interior part of the States, he picked the Navy, and has now wound up being transferred to a ship called the USS San Pablo, whose job it is to assist with the defense of American citizens in China, which is in tumultuous days.

This is still five or so years before the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, but there's still the sort of civil war and warlords things going on that were a staple of 1930s movies that tried to be exotic, like Shanghai Express or The Bitter Tea of General Yen, with the big difference here being that it's a movie about the Navy and not the Marines or even really about the locals. Anyhow, among the Americans are an older missionary, Jameson (Larry Gates), as well as a young woman about to do the missionary thing herself, Shirley Eckert (Candice Bergen). Holman meets both of them just before boarding the San Pablo, and they're going to go up river to where their mission is.

On the San Pablo, the captain, Lt. Collins (Richard Crenna), has a bit of a hard time of it because there's not much of a navy out on the Yangtze River and there are a lot of Chinese to deal with. Indeed, there's a sort of symbiotic, if definitely not by-the-book relationship between the men on the ship and some of the Chinese in that they do a bunch of the jobs that would normally be done by the crew, with this being easier for the crew but also probably making it less likely that the Nationalist army would attack them. Holman sees all this and is horrified by it since it's probably the sort of thing that would lead the San Pablo to become the rickety boat that it is.

One of the few people on the San Pablo who becomes a friend of Holman's is Frenchy (Richard Attenborough). He's met a Chinese prostitute, Maily, and has fallen in love with her. But she's in debt to her pimp, and when Frenchy tries to pay off those debts, he finds there's a civilian westerner who wants Maily too.

Along the way, the San Pablo gets involved in multiple skirmishes with the Chinese, who at one point besiege the boat during the winter season, before a climax of having to go to that mission and save Jameson and Eckert, who don't really want to be saved despite what the Nationalists are going to do to them.

As I said at the top, The Sand Pebbles runs just about three hours, and boy does that show. It's a well-acted movie, and in terms of the technical production it's the sort of high-quality movie that you can see why it got so many Oscar nominations, but at the same time, why id din't win any of those. It's extremely leisurely, and there's really not a whole lot going on as it feels as much episodic as it does a fully-plotted movie.

Still, there are definitely going to be people who like The Sand Pebbles for its performances, so it's definitely worth a watch, if you're willing to sit down and watch a three-hour movie.

You like me! You really like me!

Another movie that I finally got around to watching after having it on my DVR for a couple of months is the movie that made Paul Newman a star, Somebody Up There Likes Me

After an absolutely terrible opening song by Perry Como, we're introduced to Rocco Barbella (Paul Newman). He's a street criminal in the slums of New York just not long before World War II, comming petty robberies with a gang of friends including Romolo (Sal Mineo), and generally causing all sorts of heartache for his mom (Eileen Heckart). His Dad (Harold J. Stone) doesn't seem to care much for him.

Eventually, Rocco's crimes get him put into the reformatory, where he punches his way out of any problem he has. Then after being released, the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor, sending the US into World War II. Rocco, despite his criminal record, is drafted, but the military life just isn't for him, so he punches a commanding officer and goes AWOL!

He winds up at a gym, where in order to make a quick $10, decides to become a sparring partner. He's good at it, and it gets him fights under the tutelage of manager/trainer Irving Cohen (Everett Sloane) where he can make more. But, unfortunately, the military eventually finds him, and since he deserted, he gets a year in Fort Leavenworth. There, he really learns how to fight, and when he gets out, he becomes a true professional boxer, taking the name Rocky Graziano so nobody will learn of his past.

He also meets Norma (Pier Angeli), who would become his wife, although she doesn't exactly like being married to a boxer, especially because the scars and bandages frighten their daughter. He rises up the middleweight ranks, and eventually gets his first title fight, which he loses, getting knocked out.

Rocky is going to get a rematch, with a warm-up fight in between. But on the eve of that warm-up bout, his past comes back to haunt him, forcing him to fake an injury and back out, costing him his New York boxing license and moving the title fight rematch to Chicago. Now, since Rocky Graziano is a real person, we know how the story is going to end, but there are still some twists and turns along the way.

There's some quite good stuff in Somebody Up There Likes Me, but also some not-so-good stuff. Paul Newman, of course, is one of the good things, delivering a fine performance that deservedly made him a star. The cinematography of the second title fight is also excellent, reminiscent of Raging Bull two dozen years later and cementing in my mind that the latter movie doesn't quite deserve its reputation as one of the greatest movies of all time.

As for the bad, I already mentioned the Perry Como song. There's also the formulaic script and writing that requires people to be too shrill at times. There's also a climactic emotional scene between father and son that really reminded me of the one in another early Newman film, The Rack, both scenes were overwrought.

Somebody Up There Likes Me did get a DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive. For some reason, the TCM Shop has it on backorder, although the last time I checked the DVD was available at Amazon. I believe .you can also watch it on Prime Video if you do the streaming thing.

Starch Wreck

Epix has been running some of the first-generation Star Trek movies, and during one of the free preview weekends, I had the chance to record the first, 1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture, so I could rewatch it and do a review here.

The movie starts off with a group of Klingon ships coming up against a cloud-like phenomenon. Like any good spacefaring civilization, they send out probes to try to determine what's in the cloud. The cloud responds by engulfing and destroying the ships. The cloud continues on its merry way, reaching an English-speaking United Federation of Planets space staion Epsilon-9. The same fate befalls the station. Worse for mankind, the cloud is heading straight for Earth, and is going to reach the planet in three days!

The only starship in the area that's close enough to intercept the cloud and figure out what danger the cloud presents and neutralize the threat if possible is the Enterprise. So Starfleet, the Federation's military (and probably Earth's dictatorship although what's really going on with Earth's governance is never mentioned anywhere in the Star Trek canon as far as I'm aware) orders the Enterprise to go intercept the cloud, even though the Enterprise is currently undergoing retrofitting and refurbishing.

Since humans get old, Starfleet had planned for a new crew, and some of them are aboard, such as Capt. Decker (Stephen Collins) and Lt. Ilia (Persis Khambatta). But Starfleet needs experience too, which means all of the crew from the previous incarnation of the Enterprise that we saw on the TV series show up: Capt. Kirk (William Shatner), now a Commander; Dr. "Bones" McCoy (DeForest Kelley); Science Officer Spock (Leonard Nimoy); and the rest, who don't seem to have gotten much in the way of promotions. (And why you need an old, say, communications officer, is beyond me.)

The Enterprise heads off to intercept the cloud, and sure enough, they face as much danger as all the other ships did. The cloud sends out probes that search the various crew members, eventually killing Lt. Ilia because she's not needed for any sequels. Well, that and the fact that the cloud needs some sort of carbon-based interface to communicate more effectively with the carbon life forms on the Enterprise.

Ilia, now in machine form, lets on that she's from something called V'GER, and that V'GER wants information from the carbon-based forms, specifically from its Creator. The Enterprise would be happy to comply, except that they don't know what sort of information V'GER wants or who (or what) the Creator is. V'GER and the cloud have been destroying anybody who can't help it on its information gathering mission, although you can probably guess that Kirk and Co. ultimately figure out what's going on just in time to save mankind.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture was the first major entry into the franchise in about a decade following the cancellation of the TV series, so the producers and writers apparently believed there would be people who didn't know enough about the TV series that they needed to reintroduce everybody to the cast. This causes the first half of the movie to move at a fairly glacial pace, and I think is one of the reasons why this first movie gets lower ratings than some of the later movies in the series. Once they get into the action, it's really not a bad movie. There are some flaws, especially in the effects which at times look like bad green-screen and no advancement on what had been seen in the old rear-projection days. (They're not just poor compared to today; I'd call them off at times for 1970s standards. The former I can handle.) One particularly apt example comes when the Enterprise enters a wormhole and it's supposed to be shaking the ship or something.

The story isn't bad; in fact, it feels like it would fit right in with the TV series albeit with production values that are appropriately updated. (Except for fashion, which is badly out of date.) The bad news is that it could easily have fit into an hour episode of the TV series, while the movie with all the recharacterization and whatnot runs three times as long as a TV episode (about 130 minutes with all the credits, while an hour TV show of those days ran about 44 minutes after commercials). So while it's a worthy enough movie, it is a bit long.

Still, I can certainly recommend Star Trek: The Motion Picture, even for people who aren't necessarily fans of any of the incarnations of the TV series. It's available on DVD should you wish to watch for yourself.

This may or may not be the night

I've stated before that there's something about the gloss of the MGM production values that, while they're professionally and competently produced, often has a tendency of making them seem like there's something not quite right about them. A good example of this is This Could Be the Night.

Jean Simmons stars as Anne Leeds, a new teacher in the big city who's come from small-town New England and is not quite wise to the ways of the world as a result. Teaching doesn't pay enough, so she decides she's going to get a second job to help pay the bills. She finds this working as a secretary at the Tonic, a nightclub run by Rocco (Paul Douglas).

Now, with a name like Rocco, you might think this is a joint run by mobsters, and you might be right, except for the fact that there's that pesky Production Code and Rocco is clearly supposed to be a good guy here. Rocco shows Anne her duties, which Anne takes to fairly well, to the point that Rocco not only likes her in a fatherly way, but almost considers her indispensible.

However, Rocco has a junior partner in Tony (Anthony Franciosa), who gives off greater vibes of being connected to the Mob in some way, and when faced with Anne's virginal nature and honesty, doesn't think she's right for the type of place that the Tonic is. If I had to guess, I would guess that Rocco and Tony may have had some sort of gangster relationships in the past, much like James Cagney's character in Picture Snatcher, but that they're going straight now. This, I think, is bolstered by the fact that one of their guests one night is Waxie (Murvyn Vye), who recently got out of prison and is thinking of opening his own place.

Along the way, Anne helps everybody who works at the Tonic, including Hussein (Rafael Campos), son of Arab immigrants who wants to become fully American, even by changing his name; and the St. Clairs, Mom Crystal (Joan Blondell) and daughter Patsy (Nelle Adams), the younger wanting a stove of her own for their apartment. Also along the way, Tony begins to find himself falling in love with Anne, despite having relations with a lot of women, including showgirl Ivy (Julie Wilson).

There are a lot of good ideas here, yet I found that the movie felt a bit flat and not quite having the bite is should. It's a comedy, in a vein that goes a long way back to movies like the aforementioned Picture Snatcher and continued through any number of Paul Douglas movies like Love That Brute. Douglas is well cast, but I think it's the other two leads that cause problems for the movie. Jean Simmons isn't quite believable in what is supposed to be her naïveté, while Franciosa is too wooden and lightweight. It also doesn't help that they don't seem to have much romantic chemistry together.

Still, This Could Be the Night could have been a lot worse. It's just that there are other movies in the genre that are a lot better. The movie is available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive Collection should you wish to watch for yourself.

Until They Sail

I recorded quite a few of the movies TCM ran during the salute to Star of the Month Paul Newman, so it's time to start getting through them. First up is Until They Sail.

Newman plays Capt. Jack Harding, a US Marine who at the start of the movie is testifying in a criminal trial in Christchurch, New Zealand, in November 1945. If you guessed that he was involved in World War II, you'd be right. The US stationed a lot of men in New Zealand as part of the staging to send them north to fight the Japanese, and many of them wanted to take on local women as wives, what with all the Kiwi men being away fighting the war. Harding's job was to investigate to make certain the women wouldn't be "undesirables" in America.

Flash back to the events that necessitated Harding's testimony. Well, actually, let's go back further than that. The Leslies are a family of four sisters -- both parents are deceased -- in Christchurch, with second-oldest sister Barbara (Jean Simmons) having a husband off fighting in North Africa. Eldest sister Anne (Joan Fontaine) seems to have something against men, while youngest sister Evelyn (Sandra Dee in her movie debut) is too young for that stuff yet.

Then there's third sister Delia (Piper Laurie). She seems desperate for any man. The only adult male of marriageable age is Phil, nicknamed Shiner (Wally Cassell). Anne and Barbara think he's terrible for Delia, but she doesn't care; she wants a man. So she marries him, and when he gets called to fight, she decamps to Wellington. Ostensibly, it's to do her part for the war effort; really, though, it's because there's a greater number of US soldiers stationed there.

Barbara goes up to Wellington to see Delia and learns the truth of what Delia is doing. But also there, she meets Harding. They strike up a bit of a friendship, but it's clearly nothing more than that because she's married and he's been through an emotionally difficult divorce that led to him taking up heavy drinking. But all sorts of events are going to turn Barbara against the Americans the way Anne seems to be.

I say seems, because eventually Anne meets a soldier of her own, Capt. Bates (Charles Drake), with whom she eventually falls in love and could get married if the authorities (with Harding investigating) approve. As you can see, in life things have a way of turning out differently than one might expect.

But back to the beginning of the movie, and Harding's appearance in court. Why is he testifying? Well, all that cavorting with American servicemen Delia did causes her to realize she made a dumb move in marrying Shiner. When he finally gets released from a POW camp after the war, she plans to tell him that she's going to get a divorce from him. He's going to contest it and never let her get it, which leads to... well, that's why Harding is testifying.

Until They Sail is a well-made drama, although if there's one flaw, it's that most of the characters' story lines are wrapped up a bit too neatly. Life isn't always so straightforward. But the road there is a bit twistier, like real life. And the performances are mostly quite good. It's an interesting look at a part of World War II that's probably not quite so well known to Americans.

Until They Sail is available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive collection.

Born to Kill

Every now and then TCM runs a movie at the end of one month and then early in the next month. Some Like it Hot was one recent example; the same is happening with Born to Kill. It was on this past Sunday as part of Noir Alley, and will be on again at 8:00 PM tonight as part of Claire Trevor's day in Summer Under the Stars.

Trevor plays Helen, a woman from San Francisco who is in Reno getting her divorce. She's been staying in the rooming house of Mrs. Kraft (Esther Howard), a woman who spends a lot of time drinking with next-door neighbor Laury. Laury is about to dump her current boyfriend for a new guy. Anyhow, Helen spends her last night in Reno gambling, where she meets Sam (Lawrence Tierney), a hard man who immediately excites her. She also runs into Laury and her current boyfriend, and Sam sees them. Helen doesn't realize that Sam is the new guy in Laury's life.

Sam, of course, knows, and he's insanely jealous. So when Laury and the old guy return home Sam is waiting in the kitchen. A scuffle ensues, and Sam winds up killing both of them! Some time later Helen returns to the boarding house, where Laury's dog is waiting to be let back into Laury's house. Helen opens the door, finding the bodies. So what does she do? Absolutely nothing. And what happens at the train station? Helen meets Sam again. She doesn't realize he's the killer, and he has no idea she's seen the bodies.

The pair get to San Francisco, where Helen is going to be married to Fred (Philip Terry). Meanwhile, Helen has a foster sister Georgia (Audrey Long) who is ridiculously wealthy, having inherited the money from Dad -- who just happens not to be Helen's biological father, which is why Georgia has the money and Helen doesn't. Sam works his way in to Georgia's life, seeing an opportunity for that money, but of course he'd still rather be with Helen.

Meanwhile, things aren't going well back in Reno. Sam's friend Marty (Elisha Cook Jr.) had sent him off to Frisco until things blew over, but in the meantime, Mrs. Kraft has hired the private investigator Arnett (Walter Slezak) to figure out what the police couldn't. Arnett shows up in San Francisco, and suspects both Sam and Helen.

Born to Kill is a surprisingly amoral movie, up until the point where the Production Code kicks in and gives us the ending we all know we're going to get. Lawrence Tierney made a living playing nasty guys like this, and he's as good as ever. Trevor, whom we most recently saw in Baby, Take a Bow, is quite different here, but she also does a great job. Audrey Long and Philip Terry are theoretically supposed to be the biggest support, but their characters pale in comparison to their love interests.

More interesting are Mrs. Kraft, Arnett, and Marty. Marty, you should probably have realized since it's another Elisha Cook role, and he seems to bring something unsettling to everything I've seen him in. Slezak is good although the way his Arnett implies he's a drunk and shiftless makes you wonder how he could ever get anything done. And Esther Howard's Mrs. Kraft is a surprise. I didn't know much about this actress, mostly because she did a lot of shorts, B movies, and bit parts. But here she gets a bigger part, and runs with it for all it's worth.

Born to Kill is an absolute treat, and if you haven't seen it before I can highly recommend it. It's also available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive.