The Pride of the Yankees

We're into the baseball playoffs now, and I don't think that I've done a post on a baseball movie in a while, so it's time to watch one that I recorded during 31 Days of Oscar: The Pride of the Yankees.

The Pride of the Yankees is, actually, a bit tough to do a good full-length post on, in part because most people are already going to know the story. Lou Gehrig (played here by Gary Cooper) was the son of German immigrants who found baseball as a kid and played professionally after college, eventually making it to the big leagues on the big team of the day, the New York Yankees. When he made it into the lineup, he didn't give up his spot, playing every game for nearly 14 seasons, until... he was diagnosed with ALS, which is still commonly referred to in the US as "Lou Gehrig's disease".

Complicating matters is that apparently Gehrig wasn't the most exciting person. Not that I mean this in a bad way; it's more that he was clean enough that he didn't get himself involved in the sorts of things that made, say, his teammate Babe Ruth (who plays himself) a larger-than-life figure. (Or, in a later Yankees generation, someone like Mickey Mantle.) In short, Gehrig's life seems relatively cinematically boring. There's no real plot conflict here of the sort that might drive other Hollywood biopics.

So the scriptwriters have to try to create something, which here is a conflict between baseball and family, if you will. A young Gehrig is seen finding a sandlot game at the opening of the film, and we pretty quickly get to Gehrig's college days at Columbia. His parents (played by Elsa Janssen and Ludwig Stossel), like a lot of immigrant parents, want him to go into something professional, much like his unseen uncle Otto did, becoming an engineer. Mom for the longest time can't understand why her son loves baseball.

There's another conflict, which isn't really that much of one, involving Gehrig's devotion to his mother and the fact that, well, he's going to grow up and find a woman to be his wife. That woman is Eleanor Twitchell (Teresa Wright), a Chicago socialite who first sees Gehrig when he's in town to play the White Sox. He trips over a bat and she calls him "Tanglefoot". They eventually meet again and ultimately get married, with Eleanor scrapbooking Lou's career. After his retirement and young death, she would preserve and safeguard his legacy until her own death; she never had children and never remarried.

If you haven't noticed, there's actually precious little baseball action in the movie, as a lot of it is done with montages and shots of pennants with the different American League cities on them. There's also a subplot about two sportswriters with opposite views of how to cover the players. Sam (Walter Brennan) is more protective of Lou and one of his best non-baseball friends, while Hank (Dan Duryea), while not an iconoclast, doesn't seem to want to be a hagiographer.

The acting in The Pride of the Yankees is all well done; the problem with the movie is that there's just not a dynamic story to be told from the material. And certainly not one that runs over two hours. Still, The Pride of the Yankees is a beloved movie, probably in part because of Gehrig's tragic story. So definitely it's worth a watch.

A Night in Cairo

Ramon Novarro was honored in Summer Under the Stars last August. One of this movies that TCM ran that I hadn't done a post on before was The Barbarian, so I recorded it and only recently finally got around to watching it.

Myrna Loy plays Diana Standing, one of those idle rich types who's able to travel around the world even when there's a depression on, as she and her companion Powers (Louise Closser Hale) travel to Egypt, where she apparently has some ancestry. But the real reason she's there is because she's got a fiancé in Gerald Hume (Reginald Denny), some sort of engineer who is currently working in Egypt. The wedding isn't quite scheduled yet, as they could get married in England, or perhaps even here in Egypt.

Meeting Diana at the train station in Cairo is her uncle Cecil (C. Aubrey Smith), as well as Jamil (Ramon Novarro), a dragoman, which basically means somebody who is able to assist travelers who don't speak the language in various parts of the Middle East. He, unsurprisingly, is taken by Diana's beauty, and we know the two are going to meet again beacuse they're the stars of the movie. Also falling for Diana the first time he sees her, sometime later in the movie, is the Pasha (Edward Arnold), who has a much higher status than a mere factotum like Jamil.

Jamil also turns out to be a bit of a jerk, as he comes up with a ruse to see Diana again. Diana is traveling with her lapdog as well, and said dog is lost by the time they get to the hotel. Ah, but Jamil was able to find it -- or did he snatch it before Diana could get it as an excuse to go to Diana's hotel room? Diana gives him a monetary reward, and that ought to be the last time the two meet.

Except that Jamil keeps coming up with excuses to see Diana again and try to make things "convenient" for her, which includes making all sorts of trouble for Diana by showing up in the bedroom of her hotel suite unannounced, while Diana is still in bed! It should be clear to every viewer that Jamil is simply trying to put the moves on Diana, and won't take "no" for an answer, and gets increasinly forward about it. Yet another character who deserves to be smacked. Thankfully she does finally dismiss him.

But things get even worse when Diana decides to go for an excursion by camel to see Gerald, who has been called away by his work on an aqueduct. Jamil finds out about it, and gets the guide to leave so that he can take the other guide's place! Jamil then basically kidnaps Diana and takes her across the desert, still trying to woo her. She gets away, but it's only to Pasha's desert place, and Jamil, manipulative bastard that he is, gets Pasha to believe that Diana is lying about having been kidnapped.

The big problem with The Barbarian is that all of this is supposed to taken as a love story! Maybe in the days of silent movies, when the first film version of the story was made, people might have been less offended by exotic passions. And from a friend of mine who has some romance novels published to her pseudonym, I know that there are women who have some sexual desires involving some fairly taboo subjects. (Men do too, of course, but we have different taboo desires.) So I suppose some people would be turned on by the thought of Jamil ravishing Diana. But I know that there are a lot of people who wouldn't, and I'm in that group.

But if this sort of stuff is up your alley, have at it.

Casanova not of color

Gary Cooper was pretty good at comedy, as can be seen in movies like Ball of Fire. But like many other actors, there are movies where his comedy doesn't quite work. In Cooper's case, that movie is Casanova Brown.

Cooper plays the title character (nicknamed Cass), a professor of English who, at the start of the movie is returning home to his small town in Illinois from New York City after having done research for a book on his namesake, the famous lover. However, he's apparently returning home an unhappy man.

Some time later, he's about to get engaged to Madge Ferris (Anita Louise), the daughter in a family where the wealth apparently goes from one daughter to the next, as she and her mom have control of the family wealth, much to the chagrin of Madge's father (Frank Morgan), who has been trying to get money out of them to no avail other than a small weekly allowance. Cass claims to have no need of the money and can support Madge on his professor's salary.

But something comes up. Mr. Ferris is at Cass' house shortly before the weding, and when Cass' mail is delivered, Ferris looks through the mail for Cass should there be anything important. Of course there is; a cryptic message from a maternity hospital up in Chicago, telling him he really needs to get his ass up there and see one of the doctors. Cass says at first that it's probably some sort of bizarre advertising campaign to intimidate people into contributing, before eventually he tells the true story.

Back in New York, he made the acquaintance of one Isabel Drury (Teresa Wright), also the daughter of wealthy parents, and fell in love with her. The two get married right away, somethinmg Isabel's astrology-believing mother (Patricia Collinge) thinks is a disaster. Worse for Cass, Isabel's mom hates smokers, and Cass smokes. He decides to hide his cigarette, and when he does it, the foreshadowing is pretty obvious. The cigarette butt in his pocket is going to ignite to comedic effect. Except that in this case the cigarette butt burns the entire house down, leading the Drurys to get Isabel to annul the marriage.

No wonder Cass was unhappy when he returned home. But apparently Cass and Isabel were married long enough for them to have sex, and just that one time having sex would have been enough for Isabel to get knocked up in a way that the Production Code would approve of. But why would Cass be getting a letter from a maternity hospital in Chicago, when the Drurys are from New York? In any case, Cass is going to have to go up to Chicago to resolve the situation before he can get married to Madge.

What Cass finds is that, indeed, Isabel had a baby; her rationale in having it in Chicago is that it was much more likely Cass would come up to deal with the situation. The hospital wants Cass' medical information as a formailty in putting the baby up for adoption. When Cass finds that out, he's horrified: this is our baby, Isabel, not just yours.

In order to keep the baby from being adopted, what does Cass do? Why, kidnap the baby and take it to a hotel, something that I thought would have violated the Production Code and required Cass to spend time in jail, even if he is the little girl's father. But he insists on being a good father, even though this being a movie from the mid-1940s, a single man knows nothing about parenthood.

It's an interesting premise, and one that's based on a play from 15 years earlier that had already been turned into a movie. But in Casanova Brown, the premise winds up falling flat. I think that's because I found the film rather uneven in tone. There's a fairly slow and long buildup to Cass kidnapping the baby, and then the movie becomes much wackier, giving the hotel maid (Mary Treen) and bellhop (Emory Parnell) who help Cass take care of the baby no realistic character motivations for why they'd help Cass in a scheme that at first glance looks criminal.

Gary Cooper does about as well with the material as one could hope for, not being helped that his character too turns on a dime. Teresa Wright is underused, and Patricia Collinge is just irritating. It all adds up to a movie that in my mind is a bit of a misfire. Casanova Brown really needed somebody like Preston Sturges to make the material work. But, as always, you should probably watch and judge for yourself.