Within the Law

I've been going through all the B movies I recorded during TCM's salute to B movies last summer, and I think I've finally gotten to the last of the movies I recorded. That would be Within the Law, which has some similarities to the previous one I blogged about, Convicted Women. In any case, having watched Within the Law, now I can do the post on it.

Ruth Hussey, early in her career before she had her breakout role in The Philadelpha Story, plays Mary Turner, working as a shopgirl in Gilder's (Samuel S. Hinds) department store, in the jewelry department. She's dumb enough to leave some of the items on the counter and telling another clerk to watch them. A third clerk takes one of the pieces, intending to store it in her locker until closing time. However, some detectives come into the locker room, forcing this mystery clerk to look for somebody else's unlocked locker to hide the stolen piece. That locker just happens to be the one belonging to Mary. Gilder decides to make a lesson of Mary, with her ultimately getting a three-year sentence.

In prison, she meets Agnes (Rita Johnson) who's been working con games with her boyfriend Garson (Paul Kelly), only to be the one to get caught this last time. Mary and Agnes become friends, but while Agnes intends to go back to Garson once she gets out, Mary looks for a way to get revenge on Gilder. But, because she's got so much time on her hands in prison, she takes books out of the prison library, specifically law books. Her revenge on Gilder is going to be strictly legal.

Eventually, she and Agnes get out of the slammer, and Agnes puts Mary up in part because Mary could use a place to live, while Agnes likes the idea that Mary knows enough about the law to be able to help her and her boyfriend's gang con people in a perfectly legal way. And Mary is surprisingly clever for someone who isn't really a lawyer.

But Mary's plan for revenge on Gilder is to find Gilder's son Richard (Tom Neal) and "con" him into marrying her, although this con is only immoral, not illegal. Richard falls in love with Mary, and because he's a licensed pilot, is able to take a plane to another jurisdiction to elope with Mary before his father can learn what's going on. But complications arise when Mary finds herself falling in love with Richard. He, for his part, fairly stupidly believes that Mary can't possibly be guilty of shoplifting. (The fact that he's right is immaterial; he's still fairly naïve.) A much bigger complication is that Garson decides that with Mary in the Gilder place, he might be able to worm his way into the place and get his gang to steal some of Gilder's artworks.

Within the Law is based on a play that was first staged in 1912, which may be why the plot seems so unbelievable even for a movie from the 1930s. But despite how much the material strains credulity, it's still surprisingly entertaining, thanks to a good performance from Ruth Hussey, and all the sheen that MGM could put on a movie. Within the Law is one of the surprise cases where MGM's gloss actually helps a movie by getting a fine cast for the material. It's definitely worth a watch if it shows up anywhere.

Well, technically not *my* wife

I was looking through the streaming services recently, and noticed that the Roku Channel's Cinevault Classics channel (which is mostly, if not entirely, the Columbia library) had a new-to-me movie called Our Wife coming up, so I sat down to watch it. Unfortunately, the sub-channels on the Roku Channel don't seem to have schedule listings that go out more than a day in advance, so I don't know when it's going to show up again.

The Drakes -- a college-professor father (Charles Coburn), his adult son Tom (John Hubbard) and adult daughter Susan (Ruth Hussey) are on vacation taking a cruise down to Cuba and nearby Caribbean islands in the days before World War II when Americans could still get to Cuba easily. They meet composer/musician Jerome "Jerry" Marvin (Melvyn Douglas) on board, and then meet him again later on the island, drunk and looking like he's about to miss getting back on the boat. So they do the human thing, which is to look after him enough to get him back on the boat.

Except that they find his cabin is now occupied by someone else. Apparently, Jerry had a one-way ticket and the possibility of a job he was only going to take because he needed the money. Susan keeps trying to come up with a way to get Jerry to take one of the rooms in the suite the Drakes booked; as you might guess, along the way she's going to begin to fall in love with him, although that takes a little while longer than expected. Jerry repays the Drakes by letting them stay in his place in Westchester when they get back to the States.

Jerry, it turns, out, is in the middle of getting a divorce from first wife Babe (Ellen Drew), one of those divorces like in The Awful Truth where the judge has more or less signed off on it but it won't become legal until after a cooling-off period. That period still hasn't passed. And wouldn't you know it, but Babe shows up again, thinking that perhaps there's still a spark left.

Jerry comes up with an idea, which is to have Susan pretend that she and Jerry are engaged, since Jerry's divorce is going to happen anyway, what with it just not being finalized yet. This only serves to make Babe more jealous, and more desirous to win Jerry back. And she sees the perfect opportunity to do so when she suffers a fall on the stairs in Jerry's house, winding up with leg paralysis and having to stay in bed for several weeks. Susan, however, is convinced that Babe is just faking it. And Susan is going to start trying to prove it....

Our Wife is one of those movies from just before World War II (it was released in August 1941) that, had it been made a few years earlier, would have been written as a screwball comedy in the vein of something like The Awful Truth that I mentioned earlier in the post. Columbia may have tried to bill it as a comedy, but it's really more of a light drama than a comedy.

Unfortunately, the main flaw of Our Wife is that it develops slowly, with not a whole lot happening and being way too talky. Reading up on it, the movie was based on an early 1930s play, and the second half of it really belies the stage origins of the material. The material might have worked better on the live stage, and the stars here do the best they can with the material, but the whole time it feels like there's something missing. And then, the movie doesn't know how to resolve the conflict, doing so in a wacky way that I didn't think fit the rest of the movie.

Still, Our Wife isn't terrible, and fans of Melvyn Douglas will find it a mild diversion. I just wish I could point out when the next airing would be to give you all a heads-up.

You take the good, you take the bad...

Bob Hope is known for his brand of humor that was going out of date by the time the 1960s rolled around. He kept making movies, however, and a surprising one in his output is The Facts of Life.

Lucille Ball plays Kitty Weaver, who at the opening of the movie tells us that she's arriving at an airport to meet a man who's not her husband. That man is Larry Gilbert (Bob Hope). Kitty is surprised with herself for doing this, but what brought it about? Well, as you can guess, we're going to get a flashback.

Kitty and Larry are suburbanites each married, although not to each other, and with children. Kitty's husband Jack (Don DeFore) likes to gamble and often has to go away on business, while Larry's wife Mary (Ruth Hussey) spends a lot of time with the children. None of them are bad people; each half of each couple could just do with spending a little more time together. The Weavers and Gilberts are friends with each other and a third couple, the Masons (Philip Ober and Marianne Stewart), to the point that they all belong to the same country club and take vacations together since it's cheaper that way and the only way they can afford it. But Kitty doesn't have any great love for Larry and his bad dad jokes (not that the term was used in the early 1960s).

The three couples have another vacation in Acapulco scheduled, but a couple of things happen. One is that Jack has a business meeting up in San Francisco that suddenly comes up, delaying his trip to Acapulco by a couple of days. But Kitty should go ahead and enjoy herself. Meanwhile, an emergency with one of the kids will delay Mary, who doesn't think Grandma might be able to handle this emergency. So for the time being it's just Kitty, Larry, and the Masons. Larry rents a fishing boat to do some deep-sea fishing, but on the morning the four are supposed to go out, the Masons have gotten sick and in no condition to go out.

So Larry figures that since he's already paid for the boat and can't get the money back, perhaps he and Kitty should go out by themselves and the crew. Kitty even catches a big fish, and the two find out that they're not as bad as they might have thought about each other. Perhaps that will make things go smoother at the country club when they get home. But then they also begin to think that perhaps they might be falling in love. This is a big no-no, and not necessarily what they want.

When they get back to the US, the put it behind them, figuring it was just a vacation fling that will never happen again. But somehow, since they belong to the same country club and run in the same circle of friends, fate keeps conspiring to leave the two of them alone together, and they find out that they still have those feeling from the vacation.

In fact, things begin to go downhill between Kitty and Jack go downhill in part because of Jack's gambling habit, to the point that Kitty and Larry plan another vacation together and Kitty is even thinking of filing for divorce. What will they decide when they rent a cabin up near Monterey?

Although both Hope and Ball are both known for comedy, Ball had rather more of a career outside of comedy, even putting in fine performances in films like Lured and The Dark Corner. In the case of Bob Hope, I can't think of much non-comedy he did. The Facts of Life might be closest, as much of the film is a relatively light drama, with a bit more comedy in the second half after everybody gets back from Mexico.

Ball unsurprisingly does well. Hope doesn't do too badly, although I think the mish-mash of styles doesn't particularly help him. The movie starts to lose a bit of its steam in the second half even though Hope is more suited to comedy. The bright side is that the two characters' motivations seem quite real and plausible, which really helps the movie.

The Facts of Life is an interesting period piece and look at societal norms back in the early 1960s, as well as an interesting movie in the careers of both Bob Hope and Lucille Ball. It's not the greatest movie for either of them, by a long shot, but it's definitely worth a watch.

H.M. Pulham, Esq.

Another of the movies that I've had on my DVR for a while that I finally got around to watching because it's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive (or at least was last I checked) is H.M. Pulham, Esq.

Robert Young plays Harry Moulson Pulham, who at the start of the movie is in his late 40s and, one can guess, a lawyer in private practice in Boston. He comes from the upper-crust of Boston society and lives the sort of "proper" life you expect from Bostonians of that era; think the Vales in Now, Voyager before Bette Davis insists on having that nervous breakdon. Mr. Pulham has a wife Kay (Ruth Hussey) and two children, and walks the dog every morning before walking to the office.

On this particular day, however, a couple of things shake up his routine. One is a call from Rodney Brown, nicknamed "Bo-Jo" (Leif Ericson). Brown was one of Pulham's friends from Harvard back in the day, and with their 25th class reunion coming up, wants to get together with all the friends and do some capsule bios of their lives in the quarter-century following graduation. The other is a message from a then young woman that Pulham knew from working with her in New York a few years after graduation, Marvin Myles (Hedy Lamarr). She's up in Boston, and invites Harry to see her at a partciular hotel. He goes, and looks at her, but can't brin himself to actually talk to her again....

Flash back to early in Harry's life, long before even meeting Marvin. He had a wealthy father in John Pulham (Charles Coburn) married to Mrs. Pulham (no first name given and played by Fay Holden from the Andy Hardy movies), and went to the right schools, even knowing Kay from a fairly early age but not caring for her because she, like a lot of the Boston families, are from stuffy stock. Then he goes off to Harvard and, after graduation, goes off to fight in World War I (the movie was actually released the week before Pearl Harbor; do the math).

World War I changed a lot of people, and Pulham seems to be one of them. He's not so certain he wants to go back to Boston, and one of his more liberal friends from Harvard, Bill King (Van Heflin), gets Pulham a job in advertising in New York, something that would scandalize the family, as this isn't exactly the most respectable job out there. Marvin is a copyrwiter at the agency, and Marvin and Harry seem to work a lot together.

Unsurprisingly, they fall in love too, although we know at the very beginning that they don't wind up together in the final reel since Harry and Kay are married in 1941. It turns out that Harry brings Bill and Marvin up to Boston to meet the family one weekend. Harry's kid sister Mary (Bonita Granville) likes Marvin, and Mom professes to, but Marvin understands that the whole familiy is so tradition-bound and stuffy that this could never be the place for her. But don't Marvin and Harry love each other?

H.M. Pulham, Esq. is one of those movies that MGM made well, much like Madame Bovary which I mentioned several weeks ago. Unfortunately, in the case of H.M. Pulham, Esq., the plot is a bit maddening. Harry and Marvin's reasons for breaking up just make me shrug my head and wonder why either of them thought they'd go on to live happily ever after snubbing each other.

So, while H.M. Pulham, Esq. is a stylish and well-acted movie, it's in service of a script that definitely has its problems. But, as always, judge for yourself.

Northwest Passage

Another of my recent DVR watches was Northwest Passage.

Robert Young plays Langdon Towne, who is returning to his hometown of Portsmouth, NH in the late 1750s after having been expelled from Harvard. He and town drunk "Hunk" Marriner (Walter Brennan) decide the best way to deal with their troubles is to drink them away, so the two get good and drunk, saying some insulting things to a couple of British soldiers that requires the pair to beat a hasty retreat.

The two go out into the wilderness, Langdon being a budding artist who wants to do sketches of the Indians. But if you'll remember your history, this is during the French and Indian War, when the British and French (who still owned Quebec) were using various tribal groups as proxies to attack each other. Langdon and Hunk run into Robert Rogers, who had been given the task by one of the British generals of training a raiding force, eventually known as Rogers' Rangers, to help deal with the Indian raids. The big problem is that they'll be going into fairly inhospitable territory in what is now the Lake Champlain region as well as northern Vermont.

Eventually the plan is to raid a settlement at St. Francis, on the St. Lawrence River downstream of Montreal, which is probably supposed to be more of a psychological victory than a real military victory. Langdon and Hunk, having joined the Rangers, set out with Rogers on the dangerous march north. They have to watch out for both the Abenaki tribe as well as any French in the area, while also having to deal with a lack of food. Indeed, part of the plan for the mission is to raid the fort at St. Francis to get food for the return voyage.

In what is probably the high point of the movie, Rogers' men raid St. Francis and rout the inhabitants, also freeing some English settlers who had been taken prisoner. But they find that there's almost no food to take with them. And Langdon has been shot in the belly. Rogers' plan is to go overland to Fort Wentworth, in what is now northern New Hampshire, a march of about 150 miles. But can the men, who are growing increasingly disaffected thanks to the lack of food and what they see as Rogers' dictatorial ways, handle the march?

Northwest Passage is based on a 1936 book of the same title that deals both with this campaign and Rogers' later time out west looking for the Northwest Passage, hence the full title of the movie, Northwest Passage (Book I - Rogers' Rangers). The movie only deals with the French and Indian War, with a closing scene in which he tells his men they're going to be going out west (in real life, Rogers did go west to quell the Indians in the area around what is now Detroit). Apparently there were plans to make a second movie that never materializes, probably due to the intervention of World War II.

As for the movie we have, Northwest Passage isn't a bad movie, but one that I felt could have been a lot better. The big problem I have is that it runs 128 minutes, with a lot of nothing happening since the soldiers have to make a long march north to St. Francis, followed by one back to New Hampshire. The march back goes on and on, and still relatively little happens. I can't help but think they could have come up with a way to make this 20 to 30 minutes shorter which would suit the movie artistically. Of course, the location shooting and Technicolor probably demanded a longer movie to make a spectacle the public would want to go see.

Northwest Passage has been released to DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive Collection. The TCM Shop claims it's on backorder, which has never made sense to me with the MOD titles; it seems to be readily available at Amazon.