Darby's Rangers

Another of the movies that will be airing as part of this year's TCM Memorial Day weekend marathon of war movies is Darby's Rangers. It shows up tomorrow, May 23, at 3:45 PM.

Darby's Rangers is based on a real person, Maj. (later promoted to colonel) William O. Darby (James Garner in his first starring role). As the movie opens, Darby is stuck in an office in Washington with his adjutant, Master Sgt. Saul Rosen (Jack Warden, who also narrates the movie). There's a war going on, this being 1942, and Darby as a West Point graduate wants to fight. However, as Gen. Truscott informs him, Darby has excellent skills as a planner, and planning is in fact something that the war effort needs just as much as people who can do the actual fighting. Darby's idea is to have the army have its own form of Rangers, who would do much the same sorts of commando work that the Marines do. They can't use the Marines in Europe because the Marines are stretched too thin in the Pacific theater.

So Darby suggests his idea to another general, and is able to convince that general to give him the role of commander of the first batch of Rangers, who are going to go off to Scotland to train with the British since at the time it was considered that the British had the best commandos going. This also gives us the opportunity to meet some of the supporting characters. Hank Bishop (Stuart Whitman) meets bus conductor Wendy Hollister (Joan Elan) in London; she just knows she's going to get Hank to propose to her even though he doesn't know it yet. There's also Sutherland, who beds a girl in every port, or the army equivalent; Rollo Burns (Peter Brown); and some others. They all wind up in Scotland, and since the base where they'll be doing their training is short of barracks, the men are billeted with local families which also provides a couple to meet women they're going to fall in love with, notably Burns meeting the daughter of the Scot training them.

Eventually the training is done, and it's time for the Rangers to go off and do actual fighting, which starts in French North Africa in what is now Algeria. The Rangers serve with distinction, which puts them at the forefront of the next phase of the war, the invasion of Italy. As you may recall from your history or from having seen enough other war movies, the invasion started in Sicily as that's the closest point in Italy to Africa. After taking Sicily they established a beachhead in the southwestern most part of the boot of Italy, only to get bottled up by the Germans. So the Allies decided they were going to try to jump ahead of the German position by doing an amphibious invasion at Anzio.

This being a war movie, some of the Rangers die, which is the opportunity to bring in another character, Lt. Dittman (Edd Byrnes), a commander who's come straight from West Point and is just as by the books and humorless as you'd expect somebody who hasn't experienced combat and the stresses of having killed people and lost friends. As part of a delousing operation, he meets local girl Angelina (Etchika Choureau) and falls in love with her, which becomes another sub-plot in the movie.

If you read carefully, you might have noticed that I didn't talk all that much about the war action in Darby's Rangers. That's because there's not a whole lot of it, with a copious amount of military footage from the Army subbed in. The portions of the movie dealing with the training and then the romantic subplots take up a lot more of the film, which is fairly formulaic anyway. Darby's Rangers apparently didn't get the best reviews at the time it was released, and having watched it, it's not too hard to see why.

Ruth's Story

One of the movies that's been in the FXM rotation for the last few months that I hadn't blogged about before is the biblical movie The Story of Ruth. So I recorded it, and since it's got a couple of airings coming up starting with tomorrow (May 17) at 12:45 PM, I made a point of sitting down now to watch it to be able to do a review on it here.

The movie is based in part on the Old Testament book of Ruth (played here by newcomer Elana Eden). I didn't know much of the details of that book of the Bible, and reading through the synopses, it seems that much of the first half of the movie is giving Ruth a backstory that's not in the Bible. Ruth is a young girl in Moab, a non-Jewish civilization, who is being raised to become a priestess and possibly a human sacrifice, something decidedly non-Jewish. Moab has wound up with some conquered Jews in its population, notably Naomi (Peggy Wood) and her sons Mahlon (Tom Tryon) and Chilion. Mahlon has grown up to become a stonemason and, since the Moabite religion worships stone representations of its main god, the king brings in Mahlon to do some work on one of those statues.

This, as you can guess, is how Mahlon meets Ruth. Mahlon starts talking not-so-casually about how the Hebrew conception of God is rather different than what the Moabites believe, and that the Hebrews most certainly don't believe in idols. Ruth seems to like Mahlon, and his talk about religion gets her to thinking, which is a dangerous thing to do since the Hebrew tribes' religion is so different from the Moabites'. Ultimately, when Ruth is supposed to take part in one of the ritual child sacrifices, she's had enough and tries to stop the proceedings, which gets both her and Mahlon in trouble.

At least for Ruth, the king seems to have the hots for her and wants her in the royal household, but for Mahlon it's off to the mines to do some good old-fashions life-shortening slave labor. Ruth, having fallen in love with Mahlon, is a bit dangerous in that she's liable to try to walk out on the king so that she can go free Mahlon. Of course, doing so is going to get her banished from Moab and forcing her to make an escape back to Judea. Never mind that Mahlon gets fatally wounded in the escape attempt. At least he lives long enough to marry Ruth, albeit not long enough to consummate the marriage or impregnate Ruth in a way that would satisfy the Production Code.

So Mahlon dies as his brother did before him, and Naomi is left with two widowed daughters-in-law. Orpah stays behind in Moab while Naomi and Ruth head off to Judea, where they find that life isn't quite so good as it was when they left because the rains haven't been coming as much as they should.

Boaz (Stuart Whitman) is a powerful distant cousin who could help Naomi and Ruth, and even possibly marry Ruth in accordance with Jewish law about the next-of-kin marrying a widow. But there's another man who's an even closer relation to Ruth's late husband, Tob (Jeff Morrow), and he's willing to marry Ruth if only to keep Boaz from marrying her. There's also the issue of Ruth's having been a high priestess back in Moab, and whether that's in violation of any Jewish laws. (It shouldn't be, if the religion believes in sincere conversions, but the question of valid conversions is still a vexing one today, especially in a relatively non-hierarchical religion.)

The Story of Ruth is a surprisingly low-key affair by the standards of the other biblical epics that were being released around this time. It doesn't have the spectacle of movies like King of Kings or Ben-Hur, or the tittilation of something like Joan Collins in Esther and the King. But the modest nature of the movie mostly works, with the exception that the movie runs a bit long. Putting in spectacle helps make a long movie seem not so long, and without that spectacle, a movie like The Story of Ruth really ought to run under two hours instead of the 130 or so minutes we get here.

The other unfortunate thing is that FXM has panned-and-scanned the print down from the Cinemascope ratio (which we get to see for the opening minute and then again briefly at the end) to 16:9. I don't know if there's a full Cinemascope print available.

The Great Air Race

It's time for another of those movies that recently started showing up in the FXM rotation and is going to be on again tomorrow. This time, it's Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines. It's got two airings tomorrow, at 3:30 AM and 9:30 AM.

A brief opening segment that reminded me of Conquest of the Air tells us of the difficulties man had in learning how to fly. But the movie is set in 1910, which is seven years after the Wright Brothers' famous flight at Kitty Hawk, and now man can fly, although it's nowhere near as safe as it would become in more recent years.

One of those "birdmen", as the movie calls them, is British military man Richard Mays (James Fox). He's in love with Patricia Rawnsley (Sarah Miles), daughter of press baron Lord Rawnsley (Robert Morley), although Dad flatly forbids his daughter from flying considering how dangerous it is. However, Mays comes up with the idea of having an air race from London to Paris in order to show the superiority of British aviation. Lord Rawnsley realizes this would be excellent advertising for his newspaper, and agrees to sponsor just such a race.

News gets out, and people from all over the world want to join in the race, since it's got a fairly substantial prize. There's Frenchman Pierre Dubois (Jean-Pierre Cassel); Italian Count Ponticelli (Alberto Sordi); American cowboy Orvil Newton (Stewart Whitman); and an entire team commanded by Count Manfred Von Holstein (Gert Fröbe), although the Count is not supposed to be the pilot. There's also another Brit, underhanded Sir Percy (Terry-Thomas), who plans to cheat his way to victory. Just before the race is set to start, a member of the Japanese navy shows up.

Most of the characters are gentle stereotypes. As I mentioned, Orvil is a cowboy; Pierre is a lover who is part of a running joke about a woman he romanced whom he should know (several characters with different names, all played by Irina Demick); the Germans are the model of officious efficiency; and so on. It's all meant to be in reasonably good taste and reasonably suitable even for children, although they'd probably prefer the aerial stunts once the race actually gets going, which isn't until two-thirds of the way through the picture. One big sub-plot has Orvil falling for Patricia, which creates a fair deal of conflict between Orvil and Richard, although it all comes out right in the end.

The movie runs a bit long, although not as long as The Great Race, a movie from the same year which was about a car race at the beginning of motoring. Including the intermission, the print FXM ran was about 139 minutes. This means that things take a while to get going, and I don't just mean the race itself. The comedy more or less works, but there's also not as much comedy as you'd expect. Not that there's really drama; it's more that all the scenes are slow to develop. Of the two movies, however, I did prefer Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines.

The Fiercest Heart

We've got yet another movie that was new to me when it showed up in the FXM rotation a few months back. That film is The Fiercest Heart. It will be on again, tomorrow at 10:15 AM.

The FXM recording I got started off a bit inauspiciously, with the opening credits both pillarboxed and letterboxed, leading me to wonder whether we wouldn't get a 4:3 panned-and-scanned print after the credits. Sure enough, that was the case, although the movie is enough of a rarity that I think this is the only way we'll get it. Anyhow, after those credits, we're informed that we're in South Africa in the 1830s. At a British fort, Steve Bates (Stuart Whitman) is being flogged before sentenced to the stockade, for having slept with the wife of an officer. But with a little help from his African friend Nzobe (Rafer Johnson), Bates is busted out of prison, along with another prisoner, Harry Carter (Ken Scott).

The three escapees hole up in a hay loft. That happens to be on the farm of one of the Boers, Willem Prinsloo (Raymond Massey). With the Brits showing up, there's not a lot of love between the Boers and the British, with the Boers planning their big trek northeastward to points more interior, looking for good farm land. Unfortunately, it's a dangerous trip, as William has already lost his son in a previous trek, and he now being extremely protective of his granddaughter Francina (Juliet Prowse), who is engaged to Barent.

Eventually the Boers find the three fugitives, but decide not to turn them over to the British because of their hatred for the British soldiers. Bates is also smart enough to try to pass Nzobe off as a Zulu who knows the way through the mountains, as well as being one of them so the other Zulus won't attack. Nzobe isn't a Zulu, of course, but the fugitives will deal with that when the time comes. In fact, they're planning to take the Boers just to their destination before leaving to wherever they can find freedom.

The journey is arduous; so arduous, in fact, that they couldn't film much of it and had to use stock footage from an earlier Fox South Africa-themed movie, Untamed. OK, joke aside, it's always tough for pioneers, who unsurprisingly face attacks from the Zulus among the other hardships. (Willem had everybody burn down their houses so they couldn't turn back.) One of those attacks results in Willem getting his by an arrow, with an infection that ultimately kills him.

On his deathbed, Willem decided to name Bates the new leader of the group, not that anybody wanted it. Francina's fiancé and a lot of the younger Boer men didn't, and Bates sure didn't. Also not wanting it is Harry. He found that Willem brought an entire sack full of cash on the trek. I'm assuming it had to be gold coins that could be freely convertible based on their weight, because what other use would the cash have? He'd like that money for himself, and after the men come across an ivory-trading slaver, Harry thinks he'll be able to get the men to get the Boers' wagons along with the gold for himself.

The Fiercest Heart plays like a very Disneyfied version of history, although of course it was made at Fox. If you want stock animal footage, nice color, and a silly story of love and redemption among the pioneers, well, this is your chance. (Oh, and don't forget the obligatory lovable moppet.) If you want real history, I highly doubt this has anything to do with it. Massey tries to bring class to the proceedings although I think he's miscast, as is Whitman, who doesn't seem British at all. Everybody else is decidedly second rate.

There's a reason The Fiercest Heart isn't very well known. Watch for yourself and see why.

The Decks Ran Red

Dorothy Dandridge was TCM's Star of the Month back in September. She didn't make all that many movies so TCM didn't run many, but there was one that I hadn't seen before and recorded: The Decks Ran Red. It's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, so I recently sat down to watch it and do a post on it here.

The SS Berwind is a ship docked in a small port in New Zealand, owned by an American shipping company based out of Los Angeles. The ship's captain has recently died suddenly, which causes some dissension in the crew's ranks, with the cook and chief steward jumping ship, and other crew members thinking the captain didn't just die of a heart attack. Henry Scott (Broderick Crawford), in particular, seems to have it in for the management and already seems to be planning a mutiny with his friend and crewmate Leory Martin (Stuart Whitman).

Meanwhile, back in Los Angeles, Edwin Rummell (James Mason) is the first mate aboard a cruise ship whose home port is Los Angeles and which is owned by the same company that owns the Berwind. The shipping line decides to promote Rummell to take over the Berwind even though this means flying him all the way across the Pacific, and also overlooking Moody, the Berwind's own first mate, because he's too old and probably should have been pushed into retirement anyway.

So Rummell arrives on board the Berwind to find a tense situation. This is exacerbated by the fact that the ship had to find a cook at very short notice, since getting crappy food is one of the things that will make a crew even more likely to become malcontents and mutiny. The cook that the get is a Māori named Vic, who has agreed to be the ship's cook only on the condition that he's allowed to bring his wife Mahia (Dorothy Dandridge) aboard with him; she effectively gets to be the ship's steward.

Needless to say, the presence of Mahia really gets the crew's hormones flowing, resulting in more dissension. And we also learn what Henry's real intention is. He doesn't want to mutiny; instead, he's found an obscure bit of maritime law that someone who finds a derelict ship and rescues it is entitled to half the value of the ship and its cargo. So his plan is to waterlog the ship but not enough to sink it, and then claim to find the derelict ship. I'd think this wouldn't work since he was one of the crew members and certainly the shipping line would know this, but run with the story anyway. Henry and Leroy plan to pull off the nefarious scheme at some point. The bring in a third party, Mace, becaue he's got a gun. But he talks in his sleep, and that forces Henry and Leroy to kill him!

The disappearance of Mace raises one more alarm among the crew, together with the death of Moody and Henry's trying to incite a mutiny which is of course not really what he wants, but is an excuse to get rid of the officers before he can get rid of the unsuspecting crew. Eventually, Henry and Leroy kill the four men on watch in the engine room, and that sets off the "mutiny" and the climactic struggle for Rummill to regain control of the Berwind.

In terms of storytelling and visual style, The Decks Ran Red made me think of another Mason movie I blogged about recently, Cry Terror! This shouldn't be surprising, since both movies were directed by Andrew Stone and made by him and his wife Virginia. It's a no-nonsense style that plays out more like a programmer than a big-budget movie, and frankly, it's something that works well for both movies. Mason and Dandridge are both quite competent if unspectacular. Whitman does OK with an early role, while Crawford has fallen into his bombastic style that isn't necessarily bad here, but makes you wonder why anybody would follow him as a leader.

I somewhat wish the movie had been made in color (there's a brief splash of red on the word "RED" in the title card), but that's a minor quibble. While nobody will think of The Decks Ran Red as the highlight in the career of anybody who made it, it's a definitely effective little film, and not a bad way to spend 84 minutes.

See You in Hell, Darling

There are some movies that aren't very good, but that received an Oscar nomination in the Best Original Song category, so TCM could run them in 31 Days of Oscar. A good example of this is An American Dream.

Stuart Whitman plays Stephen Rojack, a war hero who came home and got a TV talk show in Los Angeles, which is a crazy sort of show that has him ranting to a couple of guests who don't seem allowed to get a word in edgewise, while taking phone calls from the home audience. But he never actually puts the viewers' voices on air, just throwing out rapid-fire rejoinders based on what the viewers are supposedly saying.

One of those viewers is Deborah (Eleanor Parker), who just happens to be Stephen's estranged wife. She's waching from her bedroom in a penthouse apartment in a building her father Barney Kelly (Lloyd Nolan) built for her, while carrying on an affair with a guy who's in bed with her. She calls in not to talk about tonight's topic, which is police corruption and how they're letting the mobster Ganucci get away with mayhem; instead, she calls to taunt Stephen, she just having returned from Europe.

Stephen has decided that he's going to file for divorce since this is clearly a loveless marriage, and goes to Deborah's penthouse after the show. She absolutely does not want to grant a divorce, and tells Stephen this most histrionically, continuing to taunt him, throw things at him, and even break a liquor bottle and threaten him with that.

The struggle continues from Deborah's bedroom out to the balcony after Stephen stupidly tries to wash his face in the fountain out there rather then just getting the hell out of the apartment. She throws more stuff at him, and in the struggle, Deborah ends up on the railing. Eventually she goes over, falling to her death 30 stories below, in an incident that looks as though it might have been an accident Stephen could have prevented, or possibly getting pushed by Stephen -- make your own judgment.

Up to this point, An American Dream has been spectularly, hilarity-inducingly awful. Unfortunately once Deborah falls off the balcony the movie switches to being just tediously bad. Stephen gets down to street level where Deborah's body has been run over by a car... containing Ganucci (Joe De Santis), who for whatever reason returned to California despite having a subpoena to testify before the grand jury hanging over his head. Also in the car is Ganucci's nephew Nicky (Les Crane), and Nicky's girlfriend Cherry (Janet Leigh), who just happened to be Stephen's old girlfriend before he knocked her up and left her for Deborah and her fabulously wealthy father.

The police investigate and think that Stephen murdered Deborah, while he bizarrely claims suicide, and bizarrely doesn't clam up and request a lawyer the moment he's brought in for questioning. Stephen tries to ask Deborah for help, but her mob boyfriend and his friends are pissed with Stephen first for railing against Ganucci and then being the reason why Ganucci got brought in for questioning as well.

This material was based on a novel by Norman Mailer that I haven't read. In theory there's some interesting stuff here, but somehow it went way off the rails, which is a surprise considering the cast. Now, if it had been Skidoo or Valley of the Dolls-level bad, it would be fun. But as I said, it doesn't keep up that level once Eleanor Parker's character dies, and that's a shame. The movie understandably bombed at the box office, thanks in part to scathing criticism. Warner Bros. responded by renaming the movie See You in Hell, Darling, but that didn't help.

You can now watch An American Dream on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive.

Signpost to Murder

Many years back, I watched a movie that had a very distinctive water wheel in it, but in more recent years I had forgotten the title, forcing me to look it up with IMDb's keyword search. It turned out the movie in question was Signpost to Murder. It was on TCM again recently, so I watched it to do a post on here.

Stuart Whitman plays Alex Forrester, who is locked up in a criminal insane asylum in a small English town, and has been for the last five years after murder his wife and kids. He thinks he's finally sane enough to be released, although that's going to be difficult, despite some support from the psychiatrist managing his case, Dr. Fleming (Edward Mulhare).

Unsurprisingly, at the competency hearing, Alex's application is turned down, leaving him wondering what to do next. That is, until Dr. Fleming rather stupidly drops a hint that the laws on criminal insanity in the UK have only been haphazardly updated, such that there's still a Victorian-era provision on the books that if someone escapes from the insane asylum and isn't caught for fourteen days, that person by law has the right to another competency hearing. So of course you know Alex is going to start thinking about escaping.

That night, he conks Fleming over the head and takes Fleming's coat, helping him to escape into the woods around the asylum. Except that in his haste to run to freedom, he accidentally runs into a branch, temporarily dazing him and giving a convenient excuse for him to not be certain if he really remembered something later in the movie. After a fair amount of running, he winds up at this isolated house with the water wheel, although why it's attached to a residential building I don't know.

Alex breaks into the house, and it turns out that there's currently only one occupant, Mrs. Molly Thomas (Joanne Woodward). Her husband goes on frequent business trips to the Continent as a diamond dealer, and he's away right now, although he's supposed to be back later in the evening. It's a bit of serendipity for Alex, who takes Molly hostage.

The hostage situation that would give rise to the term "Stockholm Syndrome" wouldn't occur for another decade, but Molly seems to begin to develop a bit of a relationship with Alex as the night goes on. In any case, it's clear that her marriage isn't all that it's cracked up to be, once she calls the airport and finds that there was no plane at the time she said her husband was supposed to be arriving.

Perhaps he took an earlier plane, but that would be just as worrying, since then he should be at the house by now. Things take a much more alarming turn when Alex sees a dead body on the water wheel, slashed across the throat just like he had done to his wife all those years ago. And it was supposedly the habit of Molly's husband to take the same lonely forest path back home that Alex was running on, so perhaps that could be Molly's husband and Alex killed him? Not that Molly saw the body, and she naturally begins to wonder whether Alex really is still insane.

Signpost to Murder is an interesting little programmer. It's got a surprisingly star-powered cast for a 1960s movie that runs a little under 80 minutes. Having been made in England, I'm wondering whether MGM had funds they had to use in the UK, or whether Woodward followed her husband over to Europe when he made Lady L and spent her time making this little film instead. The movie is based on a stage play, and the scenes at the house with the water wheel strongly imply that. However, the asylum scenes and some other stuff in town do open up the movie fairly well.

Unsurprisingly, Whitman is good here, although underrated as always. Woodward is good as well, and the supporting cast of British actors make Signpost to Murder a fairly good movie that's well worth a watch. It's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive collection.