Always Leave Them Laughing

I've got several films from Ruth Roman's time as TCM's Star of the Month that I didn't get to until just before they expired from the DVR. Now, she wasn't exactly the star in all of them; in some she played a supporting role such as in Always Leave Them Laughing.

The star here is Milton Berle, playing a man named Kip Cooper who, as the movie opens, has a successful thing going in the very new medium of television (the movie was released in 1949, and it's a bit surprising to see a movie studio talk openly about television this early in the game). A young man who thinks he's got the goods to become a star himself shows up at the studio, hoping to audition for Kip or his agent, or at least get the agent's advice. As you might guess, this leads to the inevitable flashback.

Kip is a vaudeville-type performer, although these are the days when vaudeville is beginning to die and the idea of comedians taking their show to the Borscht Belt or nightclubs in other vacation results isn't going to be that far behind, not that they quite realized it in the 1940s. Kip has talent, but he doesn't have material. Instead, he recycles old stuff without actually doing impressions. It's the sort of thing that's part of the reason why Kip is stuck in crummy third-rate theaters.

One day, Kip meets Fay (that's Ruth Roman), whose parents had been in vaudeville, and whose act Kip remembers and can more or less do from memory. He keeps auditioning for shows, and eventually gets a job that should well suit him. He was hoping for the lead, but doesn't get it due to nepotism; instead, his ability to learn everybody else's shtick makes him a perfect understudy. But it's also a part that's going to take him out on the road, keeping him away from Fay. And his continued insistence on not coming up with original material is never going to help his career.

Fay, meanwhile, is able to get a job in a show with a real star as a headliner, Eddie Egan (Bert Lahr). The show goes well until poor Eddie suffers a massive heart attack. But! Kip actually knows Eddie's old material to the point that he could have been an understudy to Eddie all along. It's because of this that he's able to fill in for Eddie, and make the show a success. But there are two problems. One is that Eddie is planning on returning at some point. The other is that Eddie has a wife Nancy (Virginia Mayo) who has a financial interest in making certain that the show must go on.

Still, we know that Kip is going to wind up with a TV show of his own, so how do we get there from here? For that, you're going to have to see the rest of Always Leave Them Laughing.

Milton Berle isn't exactly my favorite, and once again, Always Leave Them Laughing is the sort of material that feels like it would have been dated even when the movie was released back in 1949. Still, when Berle is called upon not to be the comic, he actually does have some acting ability in him. For me, it isn't quite enough to save the movie. Always Leave Them Laughing isn't terrible, but it's not memorable either.

Three Faces East

A year or so ago, when TCM had a festival of B movies, one of the selections was a 1940 movie called British Intelligence, based on a World War I-era play called Three Faces East. The play was made into a silent film, and then again at the beginning of the sound era with the same title as the play Three Faces East, so when TCM ran the 1930 version, I recorded it and recently got around to watching it.

The movie opens up on the Western Front during World War I. In Belgium, a man named Valdar (Erich von Stroheim) is getting a medal from the Belgian Army. At about the same time as this, we're transferred behind the German lines. They've captured a nurse to be a POW, but it turns out that despite her being British, she's really working as a double agent, with the code name Z-1 (Constance Bennett). Being in field hospitals enables her to gather intelligence, and eventually she's able to convince her "captors" of her identity as Z-1.

The Germans have an idea for her. One of their former POWs was a man named Robert Chamblerain, son of one of the Lords of the Admiralty, Sir Winston Chamberlain (the original William Holden, not the one who worked with von Stroheim on Sunset Blvd.). Robert is dead, and the Germans will send Z-1, taking on the name Frances Hawtree, to visit the Chamberlains under the ruse that, as a field hospital nurse, she too was taken POW and became the lover of Robert before she died. Of course, her real job is to get inside the Chamberlain house and gather intelligence which she'll pass on to the unseen Blecher.

Surprisingly, Frances' ruse works, although that's in part because the Germans collected a bunch of Robert's personal effects for Frances to bring to London to give to the Chamberlains. Still, a bunch of the military types are suspicious of anybody and everybody. Heck, they're even suspicious of Valdar whom they know has German ancestry even though he's Belgian. (There's still a small German-speaking minority in Belgium, in the southeast along the German and Luxembourg borders.) They're right to be suspicious, since Frances' contact between herself and Blecher turns out to be Valdar.

So we now have the British military on one side, and a known nest of German spies under the same roof as the British. This being a movie from 1930, and since we know that the English won the war, we can assume that the Germans are not going to win this skirmish in the war. And if you saw the remake British Intelligence you'll know that too. But how this happens is something you'll have to see.

This version of Three Faces East is pretty well done, at least within the context of the early sound technology of the era and the story's provenance as a stage play. There are better movies out there, but the studios were in need of material in 1930, so an adapted stage play like Three Faces East adequately fit the bill.

On Moonlight Bay

Although there's a lot in TCM's Christmas marathon that I've both seen and blogged about before, there are surprisingly a few films that I hadn't yet seen. One of those is on my DVR from a previous airing, so I watched it in conjunction with the upcoming TCM airing. That movie is On Moonlight Bay, and you can see it tomorrow (Dec. 21) at noon.

The movie opens sometime in about the summer of 1916. War is raging in Europe, but in the small towns of the American midwest that, like New England, populated the movies of old Hollywood, everything was still peaceful. George Winfield (Leon Ames) is the vice-president of a bank in a small Indiana city, but he's moving on up, if not to a deluxe apartment in the sky, at least to a nice big house in a better part of town together with his wife Alice (Rosemary DeCamp), tomboyish adult daughter Marjorie (Doris Day), bratty son Wesley (Billy Gray), and maid Stella (Mary Wickes). Everybody else isn't thrilled with the move because even though it's just across town, it will take them away from all their friends. (Seriously, how long of a bike ride would it be?)

The two kids, being none too pleased moving into a new house, decide to go engage in a bit of trouble-making, culminating in trying some sort of target practice with a gun. However, they nearly hit neighbor William Sherman (Gordon MacRae). He's just finished up is junior year in college at Indiana University, and as is not uncommon for college students, is quite the radical. He claims not to believe in marriage, certainly doesn't like the sort of popular music that's playing when he and Marjorie go to the local fairground, and even ticks off Marjorie's dad with his comments on modern banking. Dad has a sensible (at least for this point in the movie) idea that Marjorie would be better off with somebody like piano teacher Hubert Wakely (Jack Smith).

Now, we know from Doris Day and Gordon MacRae's names being at the head of the cast that they're going to be right for each other, never mind the fact that Hubert is portrayed as an utter drip, that Marjorie ought to wind up with William at the end of the movie. But we're only about a quarter of the way through, so we know everybody's going to have to go through a lot before we get there. The first comes when Marjorie sprains her ankle just before the big Christmas charity ball, and Marjorie can't be bothered to tell William the truth about what actually happened. Instead, nasty Wesley makes up a story from having seen a silent film that Dad has taken to drinking and beating his wife and daughter. Nowadays, the teacher would be required to go straight to the police, but in those days, it was just gossip, but gossip that William hears when he arrives back in town.

By the time William graduates with the Class of 1917, Woodrow Wilson got the US into the Great War, and William decides he's going to enlist. He'd like to marry Marjorie before heading off to Europe, but her dad still clearly doesn't approve of any of this. How is this going to change?

On Moonlight Bay is one of those nostalgic movies that were quite popular during the years of World War II, and remained popular into the early 1950s, with this being toward the end of the cycle. It's filled with old songs for Day and MacRae to sing, and was a big hit at the box office, which resulted in a sequel, By the Light of the Silvery Moon (which I have on my DVR and will review at a later date). It's a nice little slice-of-life movie, and one that's easy to see why it was so successful. The one issue I had with it was the kid brother character, who is written to be particularly nasty; the bit about claiming Dad was drunk and beating Mom made me think of These Three. But a lot of people think his character provides great comic relief.

I prefer some of the other movies airing in this year's Christmas marathon, but I know a lot of people will enjoy On Moonlight Bay.

The First Auto

I've got several silent films still to get through on my DVR, although not as many as I've got foreign films. One that I saw many years back during a TCM airing but never did a post on, at least not according to a search of the blog, is The First Auto.

The movie opens in 1895, which was already a generation in the past when the movie was released in 1927. Hank Armstrong (Russell Simpson) owns a livery stable in small-town Michigan (although the mountains of southern California are prominently in the background of several scenes). He also has the best harness racing horse in the entire county, and these two facts put together make him one of the town's more prominent citizens. Indeed, one of the tragedies of the early part of the story is when Armstrong's horse dies giving birth to a foal.

The mayor is probably the most prominent citizen, although not particularly a major character. He's just necessary to be able to have someone who can meet and bring to his small town the tinkerers who were working on the great new invention of the day, the horseless carriage. Those early horseless carriages weren't always technologically reliable, so Hank scoffs on them, but on some level he has to realize that the arrival of this new technology is going to change his business for the worse. However, he organizes a race between car and horse to show the superiority of the horse.

Hank's adult son, Bob (Charles Emmett Mack), on the other hand, being young, has no great romantic attachment to horses the way his father, and indeed takes to the new technology, much to the consternation of his father. Bob becomes interested in building cars and making them go faster. Already by this time there's a nascent car industry in Detroit, so Bob heads off there and even is able to get one of the great early racecar drivers, Barney Oldfield (playing himself although I don't know enough about car racing to recognize the name), to join his outfit and set a new speed record.

Eventually, Bob does well enough for himself that he's going to come back to town with one of the auto races that's being held at the county race track. He informs his girlfriend, Rose (Patsy Ruth Miller), who is also the mayor's daughter, although he asks her not to tell his father as he wants to surprise Dad. Ruth has another man pursuing her, and that man wants Hank to sabotage one of the cars so that it can put Ruth off the idea of the automobile. Hank is happy to do this, since the car has already put his livery stable out of business. Whe he doesn't realize until too late, however, is that the car he sabotages is being driven by Bob.

The First Auto is, more than many other silent pictures, an interesting historical curiosity for the way it looks at vintage cars and the idea of early car racing. But there are other historical reasons for wanting to see The First Auto. It was made at Warner Bros., who by this time were already using the Vitaphone process, although in a film like this that was mostly for a synchronized score and sound effects. It would be a few more months before The Jazz Singer would be released. Then there's the casting of a very young William Demarest in a comic relief role. Finally is the tragic fate of Charles Emmett Mack. One day near the end of filming, Mack was struck and killed by another car as he was driving in to filming. That probably affected the film's final scene, in which Mack obviously does not appear.

Somebody or other's past

With TCM showing only movies from Warner Bros. and its subsidiaries this month, that meant that the beginning of the month included several lesser-known movies. Now, I've been blogging long enough that I've actually done posts on most of those movies, but one I hadn't done was My Past. With that in mind, I sat down to watch it and do a post on it here.

Nominally, the character who is supposed to have a past is Doree Macy, played by Bebe Daniels. She's a Broadway actress, in an era when the trope was that a lot of young ladies in that profession were looking to snag a rich husband. She's still not married, although she's had a well-to-do -- and single -- businessman named John Thornley (Lewis Stone) eying her and even inviting her on to his yacht, in a group of both his and her friends. However, she doesn't particularly love Thornley. Not that she's got anything against him; he's a nice enough older man, but she just doesn't love him.

One of Thornley's friends is actually his co-worker, Bob Byrne (Ben Lyon). One day after getting off Thornley's yacht, she steps into Byrne's limo instead of Thornley's, and the two share a ride together. These two immediately fall in love. There's a problem, however, with is that Bob is married. His wife Consuela is off in Paris, and with the two spouses traveling separately, the assumption is that the marriage is on the rocks and the right think to do would be to get a divorce, especially if Consuela falls in love with somebody in Paris.

Doree's best friend Marion (Joan Blondell) that however nice a guy like Bob is, he's never really going to get that divorce once Consuela comes back. And what if Consuela isn't willing to grant Bob a divorce anyway? There wouldn't me as much of a movie is Doree listened to Marion's advice, so she keeps seeing Bob even though it's obvious Consuela is eventually going to return from Paris.

Sure enough, Consuela comes back, and earlier than expected, which forces Bob to break things off suddenly. He's not necessarily happy about it, but there are appearances to be kept up. Worse, Bob realizes he should have been more faithful to Consuela and decides that he's not going to talk about divorce after all.

With this in mind, Doree decides to settle for Thornley. But there's a catch in that Thornley has figured out that Doree doesn't really love him. Worse, he's learned over the course of her relationship with Bob that he no longer loves Doree either. They could be platonic friends even in spite of the age difference, but a marriage is going to be a disaster.

My Past is the sort of movie that probably appealed to a certain demographic back when it was released in 1931. Ninety-plus years on, however, the movie comes across as dated, both in terms of the storyline and in terms of the acting. This isn't to say that the movie is bad; instead, it's more that it's another of those movies that is going to be hard for people not really into old movies to get into. If you were trying to introduce such a person to pre-Code dramas, there are a lot more interesting movies out there to do it with.

The Korean War All-Star Morale Booster

Doris Day was TCM's Star of the Month for March, which gave me the opportunity to record a couple of her movies that I hadn't blogged about before. Among them was Starlift.

Sgt. Mike Nolan (Dick Wesson) and Cpl. Rick Williams (Ron Hagerthy) are a couple of Air Force men from Travis AFB out in California, on a bit of leave in Los Angeles. They're not engaged in combat in the war over in Korea, but instead fly the combatants over the Pacific, returning with the injured getting sent stateside. In front of one of the theaters, they see a cardboard cutout of Warner Bros.' newest star, Nell Wayne (Janice Rule). Nell just happens to be from Williams' hometown of Youngstown, OH, and the two were even vaguely acquainted as Williams' dad was Nell's dentist.

Ruth Roman (playing herself) shows up, as does Doris Day (also playing herself). When they hear about Rick's being from the same town as Nell, the two actresses decide to bring him and Mike to their hotel to meet Nell (and James Cagney in another cameo). Unfortunately, Mike is a bit of a jerk, and leads the actresses to believe that the two are actually about to go off to combat, and that Rick and Nell are much closer thank they are in real life. But the actresses agree to go up to Travis AFB to see some of the men before they go off to Korea, in the sort of morale-booster that had been common in World War II.

Ruth Roman gets more into it, sort of the way Kay Francis did in Four Jills in a Jeep, and starts something called "Operation Starlift", to try to get all of the Warner Bros.' contract players to go up to Travis to see the men and perform for them. Meanwhile, Louella Parsons has been handed Mike's line of guff about Rick and Nell, and has made it into a really big story.

Nell keeps going up to Travis as part of Operation Starlift and, as you can guess, on one of those trips she's going to see Rick on the plane that's come back from Honolulu. Rick probably should have told Mike off and then told Nell the truth about what a jerk Mike was. But there's the problem of keeping up appearances for the sake of Nell's career. Worse, Rick's parents wind up in Los Angeles and meet Nell's parents.

The plot of Starlift isn't much to write about. But that's because the plot wasn't supposed to be the point of the story. Instead, Starlift was designed as the sort of morale-booster that every Hollywood studio had made the previous decade during World War II. Unfortunately, public opinion had changed in the intervening half-dozen years, and there wasn't the unanimity of purpose that there was in the 1940s.

Instead, the main reason to watch Starlift is for the cameo performances. Some of them are quite good. Doris Day, as you can expect, does very well with her songs. Gary Cooper shows up for one of the variety shows, playing a Texas Ranger who has to deal with Frank Lovejoy. These two do quite well also. On the minus side, Gordon MacRae's singing style is an acquired taste, and I definitely haven't acquired it. Peter Marshall and Tommy Noonan show up, unrecognizable, spoofing an Italian chef radio show. It doesn't work.

Starlift is an interesting historical curiosity, but not particularly great as a standalone film. It is available on DVD, however, if you want to watch for yourself.