Portrait in Black

A genre that's often fun even if the movies aren't necessarily very good is the potboiler of the 1950s and 1960s. Recently, I had the opportunity to see another of those movies: Portrait in Black.

Lana Turner is the star here, and she plays Sheila Cabot, the second wife of shipping magnate Matthew Cabot (Lloyd Nolan). Matthew is an extremely tough businessman, and that toughness is driving him to an early grave as he seems to need a series of injections from his doctor, Dr. David Rivera (Anthony Quinn). However, Matthew is tough in his personal life as well as his business life; as one example he seems quite ticked that Sheila has decided to get a learner's permit to be able to drive for herself. This, after, would mean she'd no longer be forced to use the chauffeur Cobb (Ray Walston) to go anywhere.

And goodness knows she's got places to go. She's secretly carrying on an affair with Dr. Rivera! Both of them have had the thought that they could hasten Matthew's death through an air-bubble induced embolism, although that would of course be unethical malpractice, and there's a reasonable chance somebody might figure things out since there are signs that Sheila is less than fully honest about where she's taking the car. Cathy (Sandra Dee), Matthew's adult daughter from his first marriage, notices that Sheila often goes "shopping" but comes home having bought nothing.

Of course, Cathy's relationship with her dad isn't much better. Cathy's boyfriend is Blake Richards (John Saxon), who runs one of the tugboat concessions in the San Francisco harbor. But, thanks in part to Dad, as well as Dad's second-in-commmand Howard Mason (Richard Basehart), Blake's dad was driven out of business, giving Blake good reason to hate Mr. Cabot. Worse, Mr. Cabot and Mason screw Blake over in awarding the new contract to deal with the Cabot Line.

And then Matthew dies suddenly, although it's not because of any untoward doings on anybody's part. However, a few days letter Sheila receives an hand-printed letter with no return address but a postmark from Carmel congratulating her on doing away with her husband! Sheila and David are convinced that somebody knows about their affair and is going to try to blackmail them. Suspicion eventually falls on Howard Mason's shoulders, and Dr. Rivera comes up with a ridiculous plan to bump off Howard in a shooting that could easily be blamed on a disgruntled longshoreman since there a labor dispute brewing. Except that the killing doesn't quite go to plan. Oh, Howard gets killed all right, but it takes two attempts and then Cathy starts trying to put two and two together....

Portrait in Black got scathing reviews at the time of its release in 1960, and it's not hard to see why. However, 65-plus years on, it's easier to sit back and have fun at how delightfully overwrought and bad this one is. It goes from one ridiculously over-the-top scene to the next, leading up the a climax where you know Anthony Quinn's character is going to get it if only because the Production Code was still in effect and demanded it. But the movie generally swims in a sea of hatred that's brewing just under the surface, with all the characters delivering bad dialogue.

Portrait in Black is definitely recommended, but not for the reasons the filmmakers at the time would have wanted you to see it.

Humor? You've Got to Be Kidding!

I've mentioned the comedies of the 1960s, especially the "generation gap" comedies where older Hollywood was trying to keep being "with it" with the younger audiences of the day. A lot of such movies are ones that I don't find very good, because they come across as terribly dated, and probably weren't very funny at the time. Another one that really fits that description is Doctor, You've Got to Be Kidding!.

The movie opens up with a sequence during the credits of a red VW Beetle leading people on a chase through one of the suburbs of Los Angeles, with a couple of motorcycle cops leading the way. The car finally comes to a stop, revealing that it was driving to a hospital. Three men are bickering in the car, and then out comes an older woman, followed by a much younger woman. It doesn't take long to figure out that the younger woman, Heather Halloran (Sandra Dee) is the daughter of the older woman, Louise (Celeste Holm), and that Heather has gone into labor. However, at the hospital, Louise announces Heather has "Miss Halloran. For 'professional' reasons." The implication is that Heather got pregnant out of wedlock, which was a much bigger thing back in the days of the generation gap movie.

At this point, Heather does one of those scenes where we hear her thoughts over the action, and she's wondering how she got herself into this. Unfortunately, she doesn't mean how she got herself into this turkey of a movie, but how she got pregnant without a husband and three young men chasing her to the hospital. Cue the inevitable flashback....

Heather never seems to have had a father in her life, while Mom is the pushy stage mother right out of Gypsy. Mom thinks little Heather can sing, and Mom took the juvenile Heather to appear before various talent agents. Heather would rather just be the regular all-American girl, go off to college, get a job, and then a husband at some point down the road. Eventually she does graduate and becomes a secretary to young executive Harlan Wycliff (George Hamilton).

But Mom is still trying to get Heather into the entertainment business. To that end, she's brought in a songwriter, Pat Murad (Dick Kallman), to write some songs for Heather. Also showing up at the house is their next-door neighbor since Heather's childhood days, Dick Bender (Bill Bixby). He's held a torch for Heather since what one would guess were their high school days. Finally, there's Hank Judson (Dwayne Hickman). He's trying to break in as an actor, and has even gotten some work as an extra and a body double, but for the most part he's reduced to being a shoe salesman. When Heather buys a pair of shoes from him, he falls for her so shows up at the Halloran house unannounced.

Eventually, Mom actually does find Heather a singing job at a nightclub, not that she really wants to take it. So she claims she's going to get into a relationship with her boss Harlan. That doesn't quite work out, but by the time it doesn't work out, she finds out that she's pregnant. One would think Harlan is the father, but Heather doesn't seem to want him. At least there are three other guys who want her even if none of them is the biological father.

You can see why somebody would look at the premise behind Doctor, You've Got to Be Kidding!, and think that there's a great movie to be made here. But none of it works, at least not in my opinion. I think part of it is how the boundary-pushing is so stuck in the 1960s. But in addition, none of the characters outside of the one played by Sandra Dee is very appealing. I didn't want any of these guys to wind up with her at the end.

Still, as always, this is the sort of movie you should probably watch and judge for yourself. Some people, after all, do like this sort of 1960s movie.

The Reluctant Debutante

I've mentioned quite a few times recently about how the streaming movie channel thing has led to me discovering a bunch of movies I'd never heard of. With TCM, on the other hand, it's not surprising that there are movies that I've seen on the TCM schedule a bunch of times, but for one reason or another never got around to recording. Next up is a movie that falls into this second category: The Reluctant Debutante.

The titular reluctant debutante is Jane Broadbent, played by Sandra Dee. She's the daughter of a Brit, Lord James Broadbent (Rex Harrison) and his unseen American first wife. Jane has been living in America since her parents' divorce, but is now coming over to the UK to spend a summer as well as meet her father's new wife, Lady Sheila (Kay Kendall, Rex Harrison's real-life wife who died tragically young of leukemia a year after this movie was made). Dad has no intention of turning his daughter into a debutante, but then there's another woman....

Well, not another woman in that sense. The "other woman" is a friend of Sheila's named Mabel Claremont. Mabel has a daughter Clarissa who's about the same age as Jane, and Mable is about to put her daughter through the whole debutante thing, with coming out parties over the course of a "season" as apparently, it's the done thing for all the upper-crust British girls approaching 18 to go through this gauntlet. Mabel tells Sheila about Clarissa, and naturally expects Sheila and Jane will be doing the same thing. Sheila, apparently feeling class and social pressures, decides to make Jane a debutante without Jane's input into the matter.

Now, part of the point of these parties is to dress up and go to fancy parties in the hopes that the young woman will meet a nice man of the right social class. In this case, that means David Fenner (Peter Myers), a gentleman in every sense of the word, and one who would be able to provide well for whatever woman he marries. Both Sheila and Mabel think he would be perfect for their respective daughters, althogh Jane thinks he's a drip and Jim doesn't want to force his daughter into anything she doesn't really want.

And as you might guess, Jane meets a man more to her own liking. The parents organizing the series of balls have musical accompaniment for the dancing, and the same bands get hired over and over. David Parkson (John Saxon) is the percussionist for one of these bands, and as such he meets a lot of young eligible upper-class women. He and Jane meet and, since they both share a disdain to an extent for society, or at least the artifice that young women have to go through at these balls, they fall in love. This horrifies Sheila, of course. What a scandal it would be to have her stepdaughter marry the wrong guy!

The Reluctant Debutante is a comedy first and foremost, although the sort that has light drama. It's a genre that I think will play better to the sort of people who like the sort of comedy written for the stage, and not just because this is an adaptation of a stage comedy. It's just a bit more refined than a lot of Hollywood comedies, while at the same time not having some of the more artifical characters like the man Charles Boyer played in Barefoot in the Park. So with all that in mind, I have to say that I enjoyed The Reluctant Debutante more than Barefoot in the Park, although I can also understand why some people are going to be less amenable to this sort of comedy.

Rex Harrison unsurprisingly does well in this sort of British upper-crust comedy, while Angela Lansbury is a delight as the pompous antagonist, much like her walk-on part in Dear Heart. Kay Kendall glitters, and it's a huge shame that she died so young. Definitely look out for The Reluctant Debutante if you get the chance to watch it.

There's a reason I didn't wait another two months to post this

Gina Lollobrigida died earlier this year, and TCM was eventually able to do a programming tribute to her after 31 Days of Oscar and the centenary salute to Warner Bros. I recorded several of the movies, with the first one I watched being Come September.

Rock Hudson plays Robert Talbot, a wealthy American businessman. At the start of the movie he's in Milan, one of the big industrial centers of the country, finalizing a deal with an Italian company. It's July, which is significant for the plot because what Talbot is about to do is a break from his usual habit. Talbot was able to buy a villa on the Italian Riviera after the war, and he's had a tradition of spending every September at the villa. However, since he's in Italy on business, he's decided to start his vacation a bit early after finishing up his business.

Talbot isn't spending that month at the villa alone. He's got a sort of Italian girlfriend, Lisa Fellini (Gina Lollobrigida). It's the sort of relationship where, if they spent more than a month out of the year in the same country, they would have already progressed to being engaged if not married. But because Talbot always goes back to the States, Lisa isn't certain whether he's ready for a long-term commitment, so she's accepted a proposal from a British man who's brought his two sisters down from the UK to meet Lisa. So when Lisa finds out that Talbot is back two months early, she isn't certain what to do.

Of course, since we know who the two stars of the movie are, we know Lisa is going to go to Talbot's villa. But she's not going to be the only one. Since Talbot is normally only there one month out of the year, he has a property manager, Maurice Clavell (Walter Slezak) look after the place. And Maurice has been a bit dishonest. Maurice knows that Talbot isn't going to show up until September 1, so he's been running the villa as a seasonal hotel, La Dolce Vista, until mid-August or so in order that he can make a little extra money. And with Talbot on the other side of the ocean, who's going to find out? It's not as if they had AirBnb or Vrbo in 1961, or even any internet for Talbot to find out about Maurice's deception.

But now Talbot is showing up. And Maurice has a group of young women, chaperoned by Margaret Allison (Brenda De Banzie) staying at the place. Talbot is bound to find out, and boy is he going to be ticked. Not only that, but those young women aren't the only ones about to be guests at La Dolce Vista. During his travel down the Italian coast, Talbot kept running into a group of American college men on vacation for the summer and led by Tony (Bobby Darin). Wouldn't you know it, but they have reservations at La Dolce Vista. And Tony is going to meet one of the young women there, Sandy Stevens (Sandra Dee), and fall in love.

Come September is the sort of movie that has an obvious formula to it, and you know exactly where the movie is going to end up in the final reel. But that's what audiences in 1961 wanted. Hudson shows himself once again to be adept at romantic comedy, and Lollobrigida is a suitable (and beautiful) romantic partner for him. Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee would go on to get married in real life. And the movie was shot on location, giving American audiences another thing they would have wanted in the era when traveling to Europe was a lot less common than it is these days.

Sixty years on, the plot of Come September may have worn around the edges, but to criticize a movie for that is a bit unfair. It entertains when a romantic comedy is the sort of movie you're looking for, and it's lovely to look at on multiple levels.

Take Her, She's Mine

I mentioned yesterday that Designing Woman is airing tomorrow afternoon on TCM. Up against it over on FXM is Take Her, She's Mine, which starts at 1:20 PM Thursday.

James Stewart plays Frank Michaelson, a California lawyer who is in trouble with some board he's on, as the chairman, Ivor (John McGiver) produces a bunch of embarrassing newspaper stories complete with pictures. Frank has a chance to defend himself, which means cue the flashback....

Frank is married to Anne (Audrey Meadows), with two daughters, the elder of whom, Mollie (Sandra Dee) is graduating high school, which means she's of an age to go away to college, and the age where she's noticing boys, the latter of which is far more concerning to Frank because he doesn't want his sweet young virginial daughter to get into trouble.

Good luck with that Frank. Mollie goes to an all-woman's college in the Boston area where Harvard men and others are always nearby. Mollie starts to rebel, singing bad 1960s folk music in a beatnik bar attended by Gilligan (er, Bob Denver), and protesting the injustices of the world. It's the latter that gets her in trouble, and sends Frank off to Boston to find out what exactly is going on. The college students are involved in a sit-in over a banned novel, and Frank winds up being a sort of defense lawyer to them during the sit-in, which gets him arrested and the first headline.

Mollie gets expelled from college for her activities, but is lucky enough to get an art scholarship to study in Paris! This will also give her an opportunity to spend more time with Henri (Philippe Fourquet), whom she met at college and who is of course French. Of course, it's going to mean more trouble for Frank. The heartburn escalates when Mollie says she's in Life magazine, for a radical painting she did.

So Frank goes off to France, where he finds that Mollie and Henri are really in love, but that there's also a problem in that Henri's parents aren't so certain they want the marriage to go forward. Also in Paris, Frank meets Mr. Pope-Jones (Robert Morley), a British expat who has adult children of his own and who tells Frank to forget about trying to reform Mollie. Pope-Jones also gets Frank into some more trouble at a big arts party....

Take Her, She's Mine is one of the earlier of what I'd call the "generation gap" movies, having been released just before the shooting of President Kennedy really changed America, a fact that's evidenced by the beatnik club which I always though was really a think from the end of the 1950s. It's also gentler and not trying to pander as hard as many of the later generation gap movies.

But it's still not without its problems, as not all that much really happens and poor James Stewart gets embarrassed by all those antics he has to go through. Audrey Meadows is underused, and Morley's know-it-all Brit is just irritating. One thing the movie has going for it is the epilogue, although of course you have to wait until the end of the movie to get there. I'm glad I watched this, but it's not the first James Stewart movie I'd recommend to be people by a long shot.

Take Her, She's Mine is available on DVD both as a standalone and as part of a three-film collection of Stewart's movies at Fox.