Between Two Worlds

Many years ago, I did a post on the early sound film Outward Bound which I found interesting for the way in which I felt it actually tried to use sound as a character in the movie. Outward Bound was remade as a somewhat bigger movie during World War II and given the title Between Two Worlds. I'd been meaning to get around to watching it, so the last time TCM ran it I finally recorded it and eventually watched it, wrote up this post, and saved it in drafts for you to get this post today.

The movie starts off at a travel agency in some British seaside port, presumably Southampton although I don't know that the movie makes this explicit. Various people are trying to get passage to America, something which is difficult considering the war going on. Among them Henry Bergner (Paul Henried), a former concert pianist who joined the anti-Nazi resistance in his home country but had to flee to England. He's not allowed to board, and heads home to commit suicide. As he's going through the streets, we see the car that's carrying the other passengers about to set sail get bombed in a Nazi air raid.

Cut to a shot of Henry'a apartment, where we find him having turned on the gas to off himself. His distraught wife Ann (Eleanor Parker) enters the apartment, and decides that if Henry is going to kill himself, she's going to join him because she'll have nothing to live for. Henry, for his part, tries to keep Ann from joining him, but she's insistent.

And wouldn't you know it, the next thing they know is that they're on the boat that Henry had been trying to get a ticket for, which doesn't seem to make sense at first unless of course you've seen Outward Bound before. And in any case, it's explained much earlier in Between Two Worlds than in Outward Bound what's happened. Henry and Ann are dead, as are all of the other passengers on board, although they're being carried to a sort of purgatory where they'll be judged by the "Examiner" before it's to be determined where and how they spend eternity.

The next passenger to figure out what's happened in Thomas Prior (John Garfield). He's the sort of cynical reporter who always seems to have a sharp word for everybody else but has set up such a shield around himself that he claims not to feel anything. And he's more than willing to spill the beans on what's happening even though the ship's purser, Scrubby (Edmund Gwenn), wants everybody to figure it out for themselves that they're already dead.

Among the other passengers are Pete (George Tobias), a sailor reminscent of the William Bendix character in Lifeboat; a wealthy older couple; a local vicar who winds up helping the "Examiner"; gold-digger actress Maxine Russell (Faye Emerson); housemaid Mrs. Midget (Sara Allgood); and war profiteer Lingley (George Coulouris). Eventually the Examiner (Sydney Greenstreet) shows up to deliver judgment on each of the passengers.

I think I personally preferred Outward Bound in part because I have a thing for early talkies and in part because it's a much more compact little picture at almost 30 minutes shorter than Between Two Worlds. However, even I have to admit that Between Two Worlds has much better production values. Ultimately, however, I think a lot of which version are going to prefer is going to come down to their preconceived notions of the stars playing the various characters. The role played by John Garfield is much changed for Garfield's screen persona, the role having been essayed in Outward Bound by Leslie Howard. A little bit of Garfield can go a long way, and here I think he's a bit too cynical. Somewhat like his character in Four Daughters in that regard.

Sydney Greenstreet, on the other hand is excellent in his role, as is Allgood. So it's not without reason that many fans are going to prefer Between Two Worlds. Watch both and judge for yourself.

Sydney Greenstreet is in the army now

Another of the movies that's been sitting on my DVR for a bit that's getting another showing on TCM is Pillow to Post. That next TCM showing is tomorrow, October 23, at 6:00 AM, so as always I made the point of watching it now so that I could schedule this post on the movie in conjunction with the upcoming airing.

The movie was released right at the tail end of World War II, and presumably set a bit since it's based on a play produced in 1943. With the war on, there's a need for men to fight and a consequent shortage of men in regular industry. This hits J.R. Howard (Paul Harvey), who runs a company producing oil rig supplies, which you'd think would be a key industry. Well, maybe so, but the salesmen aren't quite so key, and Howard has lost most of his salesmen. His daughter Jean (Ida Lupino), who for whatever reason hasn't been able to do anything for the war effort -- she says she's even been told the Red Cross doesn't want her blood -- overhears Dad having a talk with one of the draft boards. She suggests that perhaps she could take over the job, even though she's never done this sort of work.

She goes around the country with not much success, until she hears of a possible lead just outside San Diego, Slim Clark (Johnny Mitchell). The job is going to keep her there a couple of days, which is however an issue. When she gets to Travelers' Aid at the train station, she learns once again how there's a war on. And because San Diego is an important port of departure what with Camp Pendleton (not named) and other military installations, there are constantly people traveling in and out of town such that all of the hotels are booked solid and there's no way Jean is getting a place to stay. However, thanks to a misunderstood comment, the woman at the help desk thinks Jean is an Army bride. There's an opening at the Colonial Auto Court, which is for military couples with no children.

Jean, I suppose, could tell a little white lie since she's only going to be there a couple of days maximum. But the manager, Mrs. Wingate (Ruth Donnelly), kind of expects both halves of the couple to sign the register. Jean needs a fake husband, and for whatever reason thinks she needs a lieutenant specifically. On her way back from talking to Clark, who says he needs time to think things over, she flags down a couple of cars looking for a lieutenant who can pretend to be a husband and who can come up with an excuse not to have to stay the night. One car has a colonel, Otley (Sydney Greenstreet, whose shape is a plot point), but eventually she stops Lt. Mallory (William Prince), who goes along with it although it's more because he feels he doesn't have much choice.

And it's unsurprising why Lt. Mallory would be uncomfortable about doing this. Clark wants to take Jean out for the day to discuss the business deal, and all of the other women at the motor court get all the wrong ideas. Never mind that dinner with Clark goes badly enough that it comes to blows between Clark and Mallory. Worse for Mallory is that Col. Otley is staying at the motor court with his wife, and when he hears about Mallory's surprise marriage, he wants to do all the right things in terms of getting paperwork and whatnot done. It will cause substantial discipline problems if it comes to light that Mallory is in fact not married to Jean. And then Mallory's mom and Jean's dad both learn about the sudden marriage and show up for the climax.

Now, since this is a wartime movie and a decided comedy, you know that it's going to have to have a happy ending; Lt. Mallory ending up in prison just isn't going to do. So how are they going to resolve the plot problems? You'll just have to watch Pillow to Post to find out.

To be honest, Pillow to Post isn't quite my favorite, I think for several reasons. One is the fact that the plot is going to have to get itself into contortions to resolve things. Another is that it's another of those movies where a little white lie snowballs into bigger lies, and as I've said a lot, that's a type of movie I don't generally care for. There's also the supporting characters, with several quirky subplots that are just too quirky for the good of the movie. Those plot issues serve to make it feel like everybody's trying just a bit too hard. It's not so much that Pillow to Post is bad; it's more that it's another of those movies that could have been better than the finished product is.

Background to Danger

George Raft is TCM's Star of the Month, and it turns out that I've got a film on my DVR that is part of the tribute and that a search of the blog claims I haven't blogged about before. (And, having watched the movie for this post, I don't think I'd seen it before.) That movie, Background to Danger, airs tonight (January 21) at 8:00 PM on TCM.

Although George Raft is the nominal star here, we don't see him for several minutes. Instead, we're transported to Ankara, capital of Turkey. The movie was released in 1943, the middle of World War II, and Turkey was one of the few countries in the region that managed to stay neutral, meaning that both Axis and Allied powers had embassies in the country and there was all sorts of opportunity for espionage hijinks to ensue. One such example in the movie, that actually did occur in real life, was a failed attempt on the life of the German ambassador to Turkey. In the movie, the attempt is portrayed as a false flag operation by the Nazis to attempt to stoke fear in Turkey that the Soviets are going to invade and get Turkey to join the Axis powers. German involvement is quickly determined, and the Nazi behind the scenes, a Colonel Robinson (Sydney Greenstreet) is seen in Berlin very annoyed at the failure of the scheme.

Cut to Aleppo, in northern Syria. It's a main stop on board the rail line from Istanbul to Baghdad. Getting on the train in the same car are American businessman Joe Barton (George Raft) and a mysterious woman named Ana Remzi (Osa Massen) who comes across as though she's clearly lying about who she is. She's also being followed by a slightly burly guy of vaguely not-quite western European appearance with a big bushy moustache. So she asks Joe to hold on to an envelope so that the authorities don't get it when the train crosses the border.

Joe, being a curious sort, rifles through the envelope when he gets to his hotel room, and finds what appears to be photostats of documents that would suggest someone is about to do something to Turkey, but who and why? In any case, Joe goes to return the envelope to Ana at her hotel, where he finds that she's been killed and he's been spotted at the scene such that he's a logical suspect. The police notify him of this, but these aren't real Turkish police. Instead, they're some of Robinson's men who take Joe to a secret location and rough him up to the extent that you'd think he'd have a pretty serious concussion and be out of commission for as long as it takes the events in the rest of the movie to transpire. But they didn't worry about concussions in those days.

Joe is magically saved by a man claiming to be Nikolia Zaleshoff (Peter Lorre), who is coy at first about who he is but then claims to be working for the Soviets, who were nominal allies of the US in the war leading to all sorts of hideous propaganda from Hollywood movies about the virtues of Soviet anti-fascists. He's in Turkey with his purported sister Tamara (Brenda Marshall), and they want that envelope too. As it turns out, Robinson wants the envelope because the documents are propaganda claiming that the Soviets are planning an invasion of Turkey, although again you'd think the Nazis could just draw up some more forgeries to have printed in the Turkish press. But are the Zaleshoffs really who they claim they are? And who was that man following Ana?

Background to Danger was apparently put into production after the success of Casablanca, and based on a novel from the interwar period by Eric Ambler. That would probably explain why when I came across this movie and the plot summary I couldn't help but wonder if I was getting it confused with Journey Into Fear, a Joseph Cotten film about war intrigue in Turkey. Background to Danger is moderately entertaining, at least in the way that a TV show like Columbo was entertaining 30 years later: you knew what you were going to get and that the bad guy was going to get his comeuppance, but the whole production has a perfunctory by-the-numbers feel to it. Background to Danger isn't terrible, but it's no surprise why so many other World War II movies are better remembered today.

The Velvet Touch

Some months back, TCM aired a couple of Rosalind Russell movies in quick succession. I'd heard about Mourning Becomes Electra before, but don't think I've ever watched it, so I'm hoping to get around to doing that at some point. The other film was a new to me movie called The Velvet Touch. Not having heard of it, I decided to watch that one first.

The movie opens with one of those panning shots of New York City from above which, as is so often the case, winds up focusing on midtown Manhattan. Also unsurprising is that the focus goes to the Great White Way, because studio-era Hollywood loved itself movies about the theater. The theater is the Dunning Theater, where producer Gordon Dunning (Leon Ames) has been putting on the latest in a series of comedies starring Valerie Stanton (Rosalind Russell).

After the performance, Valerie goes upstairs to Gordon's office to have a serious talk with him. Comedies have made Stanton a star, but she wants to prove that she can really act, and so is looking to do a drama like a revival of Hedda Gabler. So when the newspaper reports have come out saying that she's going to do another comedy, reports fed to the papers by Gordon, she's pissed. Not only that, but Valerie has fallen in love with one Michael Morrell (Leo Genn) and is planning to marry him. It turns out that Valerie and Gordon previously had a romantic relationship of their own, and that Gordon is extremely jealous over the idea of Valerie's breaking that off. So jealous, in fact, that he says he'll tell Michael all sorts of nasty gossip that will make Michael never want to see Valerie again. When she tries to leave and Gordon tries to restrain her, she picks up a statuette and hits Gordon over the head with it. He falls to the floor, very much dead.

Now, this is where The Velvet Touch has a big problem. The Production Code is out there, and this isn't one of those cases where there's a struggle for a gun and the victim shoots himself. Valerie could try to claim self-defense, but good luck getting a jury to believe that. More likely is a manslaughter conviction ruining her career, and the Production Code says the killer must be punished. Plus, we're only a couple of minutes into the film. But in any case, Valerie is able to get out of the theater undetected and get home. It's up to Valerie's estranged costar in the play, Marian Webster (Claire Trevor), to find the body.

The papers have the reports of Dunning's death the next morning, and even though Valerie already knows about it, she acts hysterically (well, she is an actress) and has a flashback about everything that led up to the killing. And that's the second problem with the movie, that the flashback is an overused device and in this case only runs about a third of the movie before we catch up to the present.

Back on the morning after the killing, police detective Danbury (Sydney Greenstreet) shows up at the theater to interview everybody. In a group, not separately, which I'd think is a big mistake because this lets the suspects conspire to prevent Danbury from finding out the truth if that's what the suspects want to do. The only person who doesn't show up is Marian, and that's because she's gone into hysterics herself and has been hospitalized. She's also the obvious suspect to Danbury, but we know what really happened. The one bright spot here, I suppose, is that at the theater Danbury is given a very small wooden folding chair to sit in, and the joke is whether or not it's going to support his rather ample weight.

The Velvet Touch is another of those movies where you can see why the people involved in making it would have wanted to be involved, as the story has so much potential. But unfortunately, it winds up being a lot less than the sum of its parts.

They Died With Their Boots On

I mentioned at the beginning of the month when I posted about Star of the Month Sydney Greeenstreet that one of his movies I hadn't blogged about before, They Died With Their Boots On, would be running at 6:00 AM on Nov. 25. That's tomorrow morning, and since I have the movie on DVD as part of an Errol Flynn box set, I made a point of watching it to have it fresh in my mind for a post on the movie.

Errol Flynn plays George Armstrong Custer, who at the start of the movie is entering West Point as a plebe in the summer of 1857. Custer, as presented here, doesn't seem to care much for rules, naïvely thinking that he'll be able to bring his hunting dogs with him and get the biggest suite in the barracks, egged on by upperclassman cadet Ned Sharp (Arthur Kennedy). This is just the first of many, many incidents in which Custer will pick up demerits, he being constantly wary of authority.

One of those incidents results in his having to march guard, basically marching back and forth and having to keep his mouth shut. Elizabeth Bacon (Olivia de Havilland) is a young woman from the same town as George, Monroe, MI. But she comes from the well-to-do part of town while George was a blacksmith's son, so there's a class difference that her father may not approve of. Of course, it's going to take a while for George and Elizabeth to meet each other again.

1861 comes, and this of course means the start of the Civil War. All of the cadets from the South leave West Point, while those in Custer's class are still a year away from graduating (at the time, West Point was a five-year school). The Union was badly in need of junior officers, so they took the West Point cadets and graduated them a year early. Custer fights in his own iconoclastic way, eventually rising to the rank of brevet general, although that's not a full general but only a temporary rank. So when the Civil War ended, he was returned to his regular rank of Captain and sent back to Michigan with the thanks of a kind nation.

Having married Elizabeth, who father died soon after the war, Custer is in need of a good job, even though the military is all he really knows. Ned Sharp shows up looking to trade on Custer's name to have it behind a development company looking to develop the Dakota Territory. Custer rightly doesn't trust Sharp one bit, and refuses, instead looking to get put back into regular service.

Custer does, in fact, get promoted to Lieutenant Colonel and sent as a cavalry commander west... to Fort Lincoln, which is in the Dakota Territory and where Ned Sharp just happens to be. Custer finds all sorts of chicanery going on, including with the Indian agent for the region, which causes him to try to take his case to Washington. Ned and the agent are trying to get the treaty with the Sioux and other tribes abrogated so they can bring more white settlers onto the land, from which they hope to make a hefty profit. Custer's patrols eventually take him to the Little Big Horn in eastern Montana, and his unorthodox command style finally does him in.

Pretty much anybody who has a good knolwedge of history and who has seen They Died With Their Boots On will tell you that the movie is more or less a whitewashing of history, along with a hefty dollop of Hollywood tropes deemed necessary to entertain the viewers. I can certainly say that the tropes are laid on in grand style, from the romance between Flynn and de Havilland to Hattie McDaniel as the Bacons' servant, to the whole military gallantry.

From what I've read, the real life Custer was indeed a discipline problem and unorthodox. There might actually be room for an interesting movie about the question of unorthodox command when the battle is actually raging and the communication lines break down. It's generally presented in World War II movies that Nazi generals were fairly rigid, with American initiative and ingenuity winning the day. But when is it right to take that initiative, and when not?

Also, in later years there were a lot more westerns about how the Bureau of Indian Affairs was cheating the Indians blind, something we wouldn't get in pre World War II days. The real-life story of Custer seems interesting in that the corruption apparently ran all the way up to the Secretary of War (nowadays Secretary of Defense) and President Grant's brother; Custer was a witness in the impeachment proceedings of the Secretary of War and arrested when he wanted to return back to his post out west instead of staying around to testify when he thought his written testimony was enough. There's material for a Tennessee Johnson type movie there, but nobody in Hollywood ever thought to make it.

What we do get, however, is more than worth watching as examples of what Flynn and de Havilland could do, and on the whole an example of what the studio system could put out. Just don't expect real history from They Died With Their Boots On.

You'll note that I haven't brought up Star of the Month Sydney Greenstreet once. That's because he's got a smaller role as General Winfield Scott, fighting the war from central command in Washington. He has a few scenes during the portion of the movie covering the Civil War, but once the war ends, he's pretty much out of the picture.

TCM Star of the Month November 2021: Sydney Greenstreet

Sydney Greenstreet in Casablanca (Nov. 24, 8:00 PM)

We're into the first full week of a new month on TCM, which means that it's time for a new Star of the Month on TCM. This month, that's going to be Sydney Greenstreet, whose movies will be airing every Wednesday night in prime time on TCM. Greenstreet was really more of a supporting actor than a star, but he memorably brightened up almost every move he was in. That started with his very first movie, The Maltese Falcon (Nov. 3, 8:00 PM), in which he plays one of the merry nuts looking for the jewel-encrusted statue that is the stuff dreams are made of. Greenstreet was 61 when he made this movie, having before that had an entire career on stage.

While The Maltese Falcon might be Greenstreet's best-known performace, the other one that comes really close is in Casablanca (Nov. 24, 8:00 PM) as a local who won't particularly help people get those letters of transit. I didn't realize that Greenstreet was in They Died With Their Boots On (Nov. 25, 6:00 AM). I've got that one on DVD as part of an Errol Flynn box set, so it looks like this month I'll finally get around to doing a post on it.

TCM says that Greenstreet had roles (ie. not playing himself in a cameo or reused footage) in 22 movies. Most of those were made at Warner Bros. and are part of the old library that Ted Turner got back in the 1980s, which is why TCM is going to be able to show all 22 of those films. There were a few loan-outs to MGM, and one movie that TCM says is a premiere.

One other movie airing on that Wednesday before Thanksgiving is Christmas in Connecticut (Nov. 24, 10:00 PM), which would be a perfect way to start off the Christmas season.

Devotion (1946)

I had two movies on my DVR titled Devotion, with different stories. The early talkie version doesn't seem to be on DVD, but the 1946-released movie titled Devotion is, so I watched that recently to do a review on here.

The Brontës are a family living in Yorkshire near the moors in the 1830s, where their father (Montagu Love) is a reverend in the Anglican chuch. There are four surviving children, daughters Charlotte (Olivia de Havilland), Emily (Ida Lupino), and Anne (Nancy Coleman), along with son Branwell (Arthur Kennedy). (In real life there were two older daughters but they, like all of the siblings, died young.)

As you probably know, all three of the surviving daughters liked to write, while Branwell liked to paint, as well as drink. Charlotte and Anne are set to go off to become governesses, while Emily stays to look after Branwell. He gets drunk one night at the local inn just as a new curate, Rev. Arthur Nicholls (Paul Henried) shows up to work alongside the overworked Rev. Brontë in the parish. Rev. Nicholls brings Branwell home, but Emily thinks Nicholls is one of Branwell's drunkard friends.

Emily has on again-off again feelings toward Arthur, until Charlotte shows up back home. The three sisters finally think about publishing some of their poetry, although they do it under male pseudonyms since apparently the thought of women writers, at least from outside the gentry, was somewhat scandalous. Not as scandalous as Branwell's behavior, mind you, but scandalous nonetheless.

Emily and Charlotte go off to Brussels to teach in a school there, where they meet married headmaster Constantin Heger (Victor Francen). Charlotte is portrayed as having a crush on Heger while Emily has more muted feelings for him, although this is probably just Hollywood hogwash from what I've read. Branwell has another bout of illness that forces the sisters to return home, just in time for him to die.

As you know from real life, Emily became famous for writing Wuthering Heights and Charlotte for Jane Eyre. Charlotte goes to London after Jane Eyre has been published under the pseudonym Currer Bell. There she meets William Thackeray (Sydney Greenstreet), author of successful books like Vanity Fair. He learns the secret of the Bells which is that they're actually women, and thinks that Emily's writing is more powerful than Charlotte's, not that he dislikes Charlotte. And then Emily gets sick too....

As with most Hollywood biopics, from what I read, there's a lot in Devotion that's exaggeration at best and made up out of whole cloth at worst. As a movie, however, Devotion is an interesting jumping-off point if you want to learn more about the Brontës. Arthur Kennedy looks like he's channeling MGM contract player Van Heflin here, although since the movie was made at Warner Bros. they probably couldn't get Heflin. In fact, although the movie was released in 1946, it was actually made early in 1943 and shelved for a couple of years, possibly because of de Havilland's lawsuit against Warner Bros. (Indeed, Montagu Love died in 1943, long before the movie was released.)

De Havilland and Lupino both do reasonably well, although some people might find the material a little beneath them what with Hollywood's changing biographies around for dramatic effect. It all winds up feeling like material that should have been handled by MGM since they still had the gloss necessary to put this kind of movie over. Devotion isn't bad by any means, but it feels like it could have been so much more.

Why don't I see Paul Newman?

Another recent movie watch was the 1946 movie The Verdict which, having been made at Warner Bros., has unsurprisingly made its way to DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive scheme.

Sydney Greenstreet plays Grodman, Superintendent of Scotland Yard in the late Victorian era. His involvement in a recent case has sent yet another man to the gallows. But, it turns out that the man was innocent, as a witness proving the man's innocence returns from Australia. Oops. Poor Grodman has to resign, and his job is taken over by his great rival Buckley (George Coulouris).

Of course, crime goes on, and soon enough it looks like there might be more crime. Kendall (Morton Lowry) has a girlfriend on the side in the form of music hall singer Lottie (Joan Lorring), and a rival in an MP, Russell (Cavanagh). One morning, nothing is heard from Russell's room, and when his landlady Benson (Rosalind Ivan) tries to get him up, she gets worried enough to call Grodman, who lives across the street. Grodman breaks down the door, and the Benson recoils in horror as she sees a man dead!

He's obviously been murdered, since he was stabbed and there's no weapon nearby. But in a locked room with no way out? OK, obviously there had to be a way out, but there are no secret passages or anything. The new superintendent Buckley is brought in, and he's as perplexed by the case as everybody else.

Grodman, for his part, has an artist friend who lives in the same building as the murder victom, Emmric (Peter Lorre). The two see a way to conspire to embarrass Buckley publicly, since after all Buckley had embarrassed Grodman and cost him his job.

There should be a lot to like about The Verdict, but I think the reason this one is less well-known than some of the other Lorre-Greenstreet movies is deserved. The whole thing seems overly complex and like nobody truly had their heart in it. It's competent, and not exactly bad, considering the help from first-time feature director Don Siegel who would go on to much bigger things. It's worth a watch, but not the sort of movie I'd spend Warner Archive prices on.

Three Strangers

I've mentioned any number of anthology movies, and movies will all-star casts and intertwining stories. A movie that combines elements of the two is Three Strangers.

Geraldine Fitzgerald plays Crystal Shackleford, a woman living in London in 1938. (The film was released in 1946, but was presumably set before the war so as not to deal with it and its aftermath, and because the original story was conceived in the late 1930s.) It's Chinese New Year, and she goes out on the street looking for a stranger, which she finds in the form of Jerome Arbutny (Sydney Greenstreet). She takes him back to her flat, where it turns out there's another stranger, Johnny West (Peter Lorre). Crystal brought the two men there because of a superstition. She's got a statue of a Chinese idol, and legend has it that if three strangers all make the same wish in front of it at midnight on Chinese New Year's, that wish will come true. Johnny has an Irish Sweepstakes lottery ticket, so the other two buy a one-third share and then they wish for the ticket to win.

If the ticket does win, each of them will come into £2,000, which was quite the sum back in 1938. And each of them needs the money. Crystal's estranged husband David (Alan Napier) is in Canada, and if Crystal can show she's got some independent money of her own, she thinks she can win him back. Jerome is a solicitor who would like to become a barrister, but there's a character exam, and right now there's no way Jerome can pass it. He's been embezzling a client's money to speculate on the stock market, and the £2,000 would cover the money he embezzled. As for Johnny, he's got some legal issues.

And so the movie goes back and forth between the three stories. Johnny is trying to stay one step ahead of the law: he's been implicated in a murder committed while he was too drunk to remember what really happened, and he and another witness are in hiding. That money could get him out of the country. But the one who needs the money right now is Jerome, and he becomes increasingly desirous of selling off the ticket after it's picked but before the race.

Three Strangers is a movie with an interesting idea, but one that I found had a big flaw for me. An idea like this is something that could work well as a traditional anthology movie, along the lines of If I Had a Million. Having the movie be an anthology with discrete stories would also help since none of the main characters knows each other. In, say, Phone Call From a Stranger, the characters spend the first half of the movie getting to know each other, but the susperstition is expressly supposed to disallow that here. And the stories really don't intertwine the way the plots of Grand Hotel or Dinner at Eight do. Something like The VIPs had all the strangers be trapped (more or less) together for a night, like the later disaster movies, so a device like that can also make the disparate stories work.

Three Strangers, however, has nothing like that. It goes back and forth between plot lines the way that a Dinner at Eight does, except that none of the characters ever winds up becoming part of another character's story in a way that would make the movie come together as a coherent whole. Which is why, I think, the movie really needed to be written as a traditional anthology. Each of the three strangers could talk in flashback about what happened that makes them need the money now, although again the constriction on the strangers being supposed to not know each other makes that difficult, too.

All in all, there's a fair bit to recommend about Three Strangers, especially the performances from the three leads. But there was something about the script that left me wanting something different.

Three Strangers is available on DVD from the Warner Archive collection.