Gallant Lucy

TCM had a spotlight some months back on working women. One of the movies they picked that was new to me in spite of the big-name cast was Lucy Gallant. Since the cast sounded interesting, I decided to record the movie and recently got around to watching it.

The movie, which was released in 1955, opens up after the opening credits with a title card reading "Texas, 1941". Now, you might guess that this means the US is about to be pushed into World War II with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and that this is important for the plot of the movie. You'll be half right. War does come and a main male character does fight, but the movie isn't really a war movie, which you also might have guessed considering the movie was on TCM for a "women at work" spotlight.

Specifically, the movie takes place in a place called White Sage Junction, TX, the sort of place that in a western would be a cattle town. And it was at one time. But showing up at the whistle-stop train station is cattleman Casey Cole (Charlton Heston). He's there mostly to complain to the stationmaster (Jay Adler in a bit part) about how oil has been discovered and that with this, everybody else has switched from ranching to drilling for oil or otherwise servicing the people who drill for oil. They are, however, interrupted by an emergency dispatch over the telegraph informing the stationmaster that the bridge ahead is out due to a rainstorm.

Of course, there's a train coming that has to stop suddenly. On that train is the titular Lucy Gallant (Jane Wyman). She was on her way to Mexico after her wedding was called off, and she's got her entire trousseau with her. Casey helps her off the train, and eventually takes her to a house in town where Casey stays from time to time, owned by his friend Mrs. Basserman (Thelma Ritter). It doesn't take much to figure out the two are going to fall in love.

Meanwhile, Lucy being a jilted bride (there's a back story about her dad's financial issues leading to his suicide and her unseen fiancé not wanting any part of Lucy thereafter) from New York, she's got a lot of fancy clothes with her. And when she wears them in town, all the wives of the men who have suddenly gotten money hitting oil wish they could wear something like what Lucy is wearing. So she gets the brilliant idea to stay in town and open a couturier selling the finest of big-city fashion to the other women. She's going to need capital however, so she takes out a loan from banker Charles Madden (William Demarest), and runs the store out of the building that used to house the house of ill repute, run by a Lady MacBeth (Claire Trevor).

The store becomes a success, but Casey wants to marry Lucy and raise a family, and being nine months pregnant isn't really going to do for a businesswoman. So in Casey's mind, Lucy should sell up shop. Fortunately, however, World War II intervenes. Casey goes off to fight, and after the war gives up cattle for the oil business himself. But the store is still there, and despite Casey's having been engaged during the war, you know that the two still carry torches for one another. Casey just might be able to come to the rescue when Lucy's business winds up in danger....

Lucy Gallant is one of those competently-made movies the studio system churned out one after another back in the day, but to be honest it's not exactly a great movie. I think part of that is that despite having been released in 1955, it really feels stuck in the 1930s with a very antiquated attitude toward married women working. And Casey is a bit of a jerk toward Lucy. Plus, romance isn't exactly Charlton Heston's strong point. There's also the odd presence of an ex-governor of Texas playing himself. On the bright side, Lucy hosts a fashion show and present at that show is Edith Head, playing herself as the host of the show.

So Lucy Gallant is an interesting movie, even if it is a bit of a misfire.

I'm not the only person who thought of From Here to Eternity

Last year on Veteran's Day, TCM ran a lineup of war movies, with prime time being a special look at the role of the American Red Cross during various wars, with Ben co-presenting together with a bigwig from the American Red Cross. One of the movies presented was new to me, The Proud and Profane. Not having heard of it and with the movie having an interesting-sounding plot, I decided to record it and eventually watch it.

The movie opens in 1943, in Nouméa, which is the capital of French New Caledonia. This is the height of World War II in the Pacific, and since France itself had been occupied by the Nazis, overseas territories the Nazis couldn't get to might be used by the allies for their own war-staging efforts, at least when such islands weren't taken by the Japanese. Coming to New Caledonia on the latest transport is new Red Cross worker Lee Ashley (Deborah Kerr).

Lee is met at the airport by the head of the Red Cross mission, sympathetic but no-nonsense Kate Connors (Thelma Ritter), who also knows a thing or two about operating with the limited supplies that the various military and adjunct groups have to deal with. The Red Cross' role here is partly like the USO on the home front, to entertain the men who get rotated out of theater here, as well as to do what they can to minister to those who are brought here injured. It's tough work, and Kate isn't so certain Lee is up to it in part because her husband died some time back on Guadalcanal.

Coming into all of this is a platoon of marines commanded by Lt. Col. Black (William Holden, with a ridiculous mustache that I'd have thought wouldn't conform to USMC regulations). He demands perfection out of his men, in part because there's a war on out there and he has to keep his man alive; at the same time, it's also the Marine way and that's the only like Black knows. Lee is a bit put off by this at first, as is Kate, and the platoon's chaplain Holmes.

Also in the platoon is Pvt. Eddie Wlodcik (Dewey Martin). He and Kate have a relationship together, but it's not a romantic one. Kate was Eddie's foster mother stateside and before the war, and they still have the sort of relationship that a mother and son have, at least among families that aren't dysfunctional.

As for romantic relationships, there's about to be one between Lt. Col. Black and Lee. He starts taking her around the island, and it begins to grow into something as Lee begins to realize that there's more to him than just the taskmaster. It also grows into more, once Lee realizes she's gotten knocked up by the lieutenant colonel. She's thinking of marrying him, the Code really requiring that, but that would also mean her getting sent back to the States.

In the opening that Ben and the Red Cross executive recorded, it was mentioned that the movie is a lot soap opera. And to be honest, once we learn of Lee's pregnancy, the movie really does veer into soap opera territory. We learn more about Black, as well as Lee's journey to find her husband's grave on Guadalcanal, which also leads to more revelations. The movie becomes faintly ridiculous.

As I said in the title, I couldn't help but think of From Here to Eternity as I was watching The Proud and Profane. Part of that is the presence of Deborah Kerr. That, and a scene she and Holden have on the beach were I almost expected them to do the Kerr/Lancaster thing. And of course, there's Kerr in the earlier movie mentioning her now infertility. This is also a movie that, although it's theoretically a war movie, is a lot less about the war itself much like From Here to Eternity isn't really a war movie.

All that said, The Proud and Profane is an inferior movie in every way, although that's not terribly surprising considering how good From Here to Eternity is. The Proud and Profane isn't terribly by any standard, however. It's just that it's the sort of movie that really could have been a good deal better.

How the West Was Won

I mentioned at the start of the week in conjunction with Debbie Reynolds being TCM's Star of the Month for March that there was was at least one of her movies that I've got on my DVR and haven't done a post on before. That movie is the epic How the West Was Won. It's coming up early tomorrow morning (March 30) at 4:30 AM, so now we get the post on it.

Spencer Tracy narrates this movie that at times feels like an anthology, but is really more of an episodic movie since some of the characters appear in multiple segments, and many of the characters who are only in one segment are all part of the same family. Anyhow, Tracy informs us that it hasn't been all that long since the American frontier was conquered, and that in the early days of trying to move west it was particularly difficult, at least until the construction of the Erie Canal (completed in 1825) really made it a good deal easier to get to at least western Missouri. We then cut to 1839 for the first segment....

The first segment, called "The River" deals with one family trying to migrate west in search of more fertile land, although west here more or less means the Ohio Valley, which I'd have though was fairly comprehensively settled by 1839; Wikipedia suggests Cincinnati had already been incorprated for a generation and had a population in the mid-five-figure range. In any case, the family, the Prescotts, consists of father Zebulan (Karl Malden), mom Rebecca (Agnes Moorehead) and daughters Eve (Carroll Baker) and Lilith (Debbie Reynolds). They meet trapper Linus (James Stewart) before all of them get waylaid by some dubious pirates of the river (their leader is played by Walter Brennan). An accident in river rapids kills Mom and Dad; Eve marries Linus and Lilith heads for greener pastures.

Those pastures take her to Saint Louis in 1850, where she's workin as an enterainer who finds out that she's somehow inherited a gold mine out in California. So as with Westward the Women mentioned recently, she has to go west to California to take possession of the mine. She's followed by some suitors, notably professional gambler Cleve Van Valen (Gregory Peck).

Back to Eve's side of the story, when the Civil War comes she's got an adult son Zeb (George Peppard). Linus and Zeb both go off to fight, but when Zeb sees the hell that war truly is, a confederate he meets (Russ Tamblyn) suggests the two of them desert and go off somewhere together. But there's a lot more tragedy to come.

After the Civil War, the Transcontinental Railroad gets built. Zeb is still in the Army, now in the cavalry, trying to keep the peace with the various Indian tribes despite the fact that Mr. King (Richard Widmark), the man from the railroad, wants to get the track laid and who cares what the Indians think.

Finally, after leaving the Army, there's one last segment that reunites the two branches of the Prescott family. Lilith is forced to sell her home in San Francisco, deciding to retire to a ranch in the Arizona territory. But she's old, so she invites her nephew Zeb, by now married (Carolyn Jones playing his wife) to come along and run the place. When they get to Arizona, Zeb runs into Gant (Eli Wallach), an outlaw who's there to try to steal one of the shipments of gold.

It's easy on watching How the West Was Won to see why it was such a massive commercial success when it was released. The story is actually fairly pedestrian, but the movie was made in Cinerama, so I can only imagine how spectacular it must have been to see the movie as it was intended to be seen in the original Cinerama.

Unfortunately, however, most people don't have the sort of curved screen necessary to see Cinerama in its original aspect ratio and presentation format. In days past, this meant that TV presentations would be cut down, and there would be severe crease-like lines where the various segments of the print were supposed to meet up. Nowadays, restorers have tried to solve that problem through the use of the "smilebox" format that attempts to replicate the experience one would have had in the theater where the left and right edges of the screen are closer to the viewer than the middle.

I'm sorry to say that this doesn't quite work. First, I get the impression that the smilebox format is really more curved than it needs to be. Some of the photos I've seen of Cinerama screens do show a clearly evident curve, but not as much as the smilebox format has. The bigger problem, however, is how translating Cinerama to the smilebox distorts motion. I've always felt like there was something off in Cinemascope backgrounds when there are scenes with long panning in that the motion in parts of the background don't look quite right. In the smilebox format, this is much more severe, almost like what you'd see if you were moving around a sphere with stuff being reflected off of it.

But if you're the sort of person who doesn't tend to notice such distortion, or if you ever get the chance to see it in the original Cinerama (I don't know how many Cinerama screens still exist; would it be possible to translate Cinerama to an IMAX screen?), give How the West Was Won a chance. It's certainly a spectacle.

The Second Time Around

Not quite, but it's a damn good song

One of the few movies currently in the FXM rotation that I haven't blogged about before is The Second Time Around. With that in mind, I made a point of recording one of the recent showings so that when it came up again I could watch it and do a post on it here. Well, that next showing is finally here, as FXM will be showing it tomorrow (July 5) at 7:55 AM.

Debbie Reynolds plays Lu Rogers, a widowed mother of two living with her mother-in-law in New York circa 1911. An establishing scene at the opening shows her going into a shop, and that evening she tells her mother-in-law that she pawned her ring in order to get the money to... go west, young girl, and grow up with the country. Or, more specifially, her husband had a friend who went west to Arizona and opened up a store in one of those little towns that pop up in western movies like this. Said friend is offering Lu a job at the store, and one can guess that the friend might be willing to marry Lu and help take care of the children. But Lu only got the money for one ticket, so the children will have to stay behind until she can get enough money to wire back train fare.

Lu goes west, and arrives at a pretty bad time. It turns out that her husband's friend has literally just been killed in a hold-up, which means that that job Lu was hoping to get has just evaporated. The least the sheriff (Ken Scott) can do is figure out who killed the guy and bring the killer to justice.

It's not as if the sheriff has a job for Lu. The only person who has one is a rancher who happens to be a widow herself, Aggie Gates (Thelma Ritter). And that job is only on a trial basis since Aggie doesn't know if she can make a going concern of her ranch, let alone pay the salary of a mother with two children. And never mind that Lu at first doesn't know the first thing about ranching. But she's a fairly quick learner, and Aggie is willing to keep her on after the month is up.

The real reason, however, is that Aggie wants to find Lu a husband, and she knows just the man, neighboring rancher Pat Collins (Andy Griffith). Meanwhile, the man who really wants Lu's hand is Dan Jones (Steve Forrest), a gambler back in town. Unfortunately for him, he's done enough to keep ticking Lu off and generally making life difficult for her.

Not only that, but he may be in cahoots with the sheriff, who seems curiously unable to solve that shopkeeper's murder. It gets bad enough that Lu decides to start a recall campaign against the sheriff. That gets the real bad guys in a tizzy, since the sheriff has more or less been protecting them.

The Second Time Around isn't the world's greatest movie, but it's amiable enough thanks to Debbie Reynolds still being appealing and some nice supporting work from most of the rest of the cast. The plot, however, is a bit of a mess because much of the story has Pat unwilling to marry Lu for no good reason. And the finale is a bit too slapstick and strains credulity. Despite its flaws, however, The Second Time Around is definitely worth a watch.

Fred Astaire robs the cradle

Another of the movies that's been in the FXM rotation for a little while, but that I haven't blogged about before, is Daddy Long Legs. It's got another airing tomorrow (Jan. 14) at 6:00 AM, so recently I watched it to write a post on here.

Fred Astaire plays Jarvis Pendleton III, the latest in a family of extremely wealthy businessmen. There's that old phrase of "shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations", and it seems as though the current Jarvis may be living up to it since he seems more into jazz drumming and dancing than actually running the business. He's also got a niece Linda (Terry Moore) who's in college now, but whom he hasn't seen since she was six months old, much to the consternation of her mother.

Anyhow, part of Jarvis' business involves going over to France to deal with some post-war restructuring/Marshall Plan-type stuff. It's not made exactly clear what all the business entails, but the only real point of it is to get Jarvis over to France. On the windy country roads outside of Paris, the car Jarvis and his entourage are in has to run off the road to avoid a cart and gets stuck in the mud. Jarvis goes off to look for help, and the nearest residence he can find is a small orphanage.

The orphanage seems to have a lot of young orphans and, like The Cider House Rules one who is to the point that she could start making her own way in life. That elder orphan is 18-year-old Julie Andre (Leslie Caron). She's so beautiful that Jarvis decides he'd like to adopt her. However, adopting an 18-year-old seems like a bit of a problem, something icky enough that Ambassador Williamson (Larry Keating) advises against it. So instead Jarvis comes up with the idea that one of his foundations will sponsor Julie to go to college in New England where Linda goes to school, on a scholarship, without Julie knowing who her benefactor is.

Julie is understandably interested in her benefactor, whom she calls "Daddy Long Legs" because the younger orphans saw his shadow when he first came to the orphanage, and thought it looked like that sort of spider. However, the letters go not to Jarvis, but to his executive assistant Griggs (Fred Clark) and Griggs' secretary Alicia Pritchard (Thelma Ritter). Griggs tells Alicia to file the letters away, and Jarvis never sees them, so he doesn't know what Julie is thinking about him, if he even remembers her. Julie, meanwhile, begins to feel a bunch of emotional hurt over not hearing from Daddy Long Legs.

Eventually, Alicia insists one of the letters be answered, so Jarvis comes up with the idea of going up to the college, since after all his niece Linda attends and it will give Jarvis the chance to see her for the first time since Linda was an infant. It'll also give him a chance to see Julie at least from afar, and possibly even talk to her to get a read of what's going on with "Daddy Long Legs". However, what happens is that Jarvis and Julie begin to fall in love. There's that creepiness the ambassador warned about. And, amazingly, the ambassador comes to New York by coincidence on the one weekend Julie comes down to New York to see Jarvis, with the two getting hotel suites next to each other. So of course the ambassador is going to find out what's going on.

Daddy Long Legs is an appealing enough story that it's been made into a movie on several occasions, starting with a Mary Pickford silent over a hundred years ago. This one, being a vehicle for Fred Astaire and Leslie Caron, adds songs and dances since the dancing is where they were both really talented. As such, that's going to make the movie one that might hold a bit less appeal to some people. The big problem with the dance numbers is that some of them, especially Caron's big climax, go on too long and bring the movie to a screeching halt, even if Caron is quite a fine dancer. These also pad the movie out to a little over two hours when it's the sort of material that would have been perfect for a 90-minute programmer back in the 1930s.

Still, there's a lot worse music and dancing out there, and Daddy Long Legs is definitely going to please a lot of fans of musicals.

The Birdman of Leavenworth

During Summer Under the Stars, TCM ran The Birdman of Alcatraz; not having done a blog post on it before, I decided to DVR it. It's going to be on again tomorrow (Sept. 12) at 2:00 PM, so I watched it to do a post on here.

Burt Lancaster plays Robert Stroud, a man who was sent to federal prison for manslaughter in 1909 because he had the great bad luck of being from the Alaska Territory, which didn't have its own judicial system at the time. In 1912 he was transferred to the Leavenworth penitentiary in Kansas, which is where the story in the movie opens.

Stroud, under warden Harvey Shoemaker (Karl Malden), isn't exactly rehabilitating, instead being a constant irritation. This culminates in an incident with a prison guard during one of the meal times when Stroud stabs the guard to death, which is declared murder. He's sentenced to death, but his mother Elizabeth (Thelma Ritter) comes to Stroud's aid, eventually going to Washington DC to try to get an audience with President Wilson, who unfortunately had suffered his stroke, so Elizabeth could only be seen by Mrs. Wilson.

Still, Elizabeth is able to get somebody in the administration to have sympathy, such that the sentence is commuted to life in prison. But there's a catch, which is that like all people awaiting execution, Stroud was in a form of solitary confinement that, although unlike the stereotypical dark cell of the movies, mean he was in his cell 23 hours a day and had almost no contact with other prisoners. The commutation said that Stroud was to remain in solitary confinement until his sentence could be carried out, which is technically never. Shoemaker sees to it that Stroud isn't going to get out of solitary.

One day, during one of Stroud's exercise hours in the courtyard, a storm comes up breaking several tree branches. One of those branches hass a bird's nest with a baby sparrow in it. Stroud takes that orphaned bird back to his cell and nurses the bird back to health. This leads to Stroud getting a couple of canaries, with other prisoners (including one played by Telly Savalas who earned an Oscar nomination for his role) getting canaries too. But an avian illness strikes, and the birds start dying. Stroud has to do what research he can on the illness and guess at remedies, eventually finding one.

This brings him some notoriety outside of the walls of the penitentiary, as he's been writing letters and articles to a bird lovers' magazine. One of his readers wonders about this mysterious Stroud, eventually writing and finding out that Stroud is in fact a prisoner at Leavenworth. A new federal Bureau of Prisons is formed, threatening to take away Stroud's birds, and this woman, Stella Johnson (Betty Field) and Elizabeth start another publicity campaign to save Stroud's birds. As part of the campaign, Stella marries Robert, which absolutely pisses Elizabeth off (one wonders what sort of relationship mother and son had in real life, as apparently Mrs. Stroud really did cut off all relations with her son after this marriage).

The denouement of it all is that Stroud does lose his birds when he gets transferred to Alcatraz (Wikipedia claims it's because some of the scientific equipment he'd been allowed to procure was being used as a distillery, something the movie obviously completely overlooks), where he meets warden Shoemaker again. No birds here, although Stroud would eventually be called the "Birdman of Alcatraz" when a writer named Tom Gaddis (Edmond O'Brien) wrote the book by that title.

In some ways, there's not a whole lot going o in The Birdman of Alcatraz, which shouldn't be surprising, since Robert Stroud spent 40-some years in solitary confinement of one form or another. So we get a lot of confined sets in which not a whole lot can happen. Instead, this is a movie for the performances, which are uniformly quite good. Lancaster is excellent as Stroud, and Thelma Ritter earned her sixth and final Supporting Actress in a much darker role than normal as Stroud's mother. Malden is also quite good.

The movie's only drawback is that it runs right around two and a half hours; considering the relatively limited subject material, a script clocking in at about two hours probably could have been written. Even then, the movie doesn't really feel like it's going on a long time, which is down to the strong performances.

The Birdman of Alcatraz did get a DVD release, although the TCM Shop claims it's on backorder.

The Model and the Marriage Broker

A movie that's been back in the FXM rotation for a little while now is The Model and the Marriage Broker. It's going to be on again Monday at 6:00 AM.

Thelma Ritter gets third billing, but she's really the star here. She plays the "marriage broker", since you didn't expect her to play the model, did you? She's Mae Swasey, who's running a sort of dating service plus for shy, homely, and otherwise not particularly marriageable people. An example of this is Hazel Gingras (Nancy Kulp), brought in by her sister, who wants to marry her off. After some thought, Mae gets the idea that perhaps the optometrist George Wixted (Zero Mostel) would be right for her. Another client is the Kuschner family, who are about to marry their daughter off to X-ray technician Matt Hornbeck (Scott Brady), but are trying to stiff Mae on the marriage fee part of the contract.

Anyhow, Mae goes to see Mr. Wixted, which is how she comes into contact with the model. Mae winds up with the wrong purse from her visit to Wixted's office, and in trying to figure out whom it belongs to, she reads a letter from the model's boyfriend, a married man having an affair who is clearly wrong for the model. The model, Kitty Bennett (Jeanne Crain), finds Mae's contact information in her purse and shows up at the office to return it, not knowing quite what Mae does since the door to her office only reads contacts and contracts.

Kitty doesn't like that Mae read the letter, but Kitty also doesn't have the courage to break off the affair on her own, so she shows up to Mae's house at a mixer for Wixted, Hazel, and some others, having asked the married boyfriend to show up so she can break off the relationship with moral support from Mae. Mae realizes Kitty doesn't have the courage to break off the relationship on her own, so she sends the man away, and lets Kitty spend the night. It also gives Mae an inspiration. Matt the X-ray operator stiffed the Kuschner girl at the altar, but he'd be right for Kitty. So she decides to set those two up, free of charge, without Kitty knowing what Mae is doing.

Matt is smarter than that, but despite thinking he's a confirmed bachelor, falls in love with Kitty anyway. But it's not going to be a smooth path to love, because Kitty is bound to find out exactly what it is that Mae does. Mae, meanwhile, has personal problems of her own, as her first husband ran off with another woman and that other woman shows up now that the husband has died.

The Model and the Marriage Broker is a movie that I didn't find particularly great, although Thelma Ritter delivers another nice performance and other people like this a lot more than I did. I think the big problem I had is that I found it difficult to imagine anybody in New York City circa 1950 using Mae's services; maybe in a smaller town or an earlier time it might have worked better. I also didn't care for some of the supporting performances from Mae's clients who came across as terrible stereotypes, particularly a Swedish immigrant. And the second Mrs. Swasey (Helen Ford) way overacted in her role.

Still, this is probably one that you should watch and judge for yourself. Amazon lists it as available on DVD from Fox's MOD scheme, as well as digital through Prime Video.

Not part of Kirk Douglas day

This last day of TCM's Summer Under the Stars is dedicated to actor Kirk Douglas, still alive at 102 unless he's died very recently and the death hasn't been announced yet. I should mention that among the movies airing is Town Without Pity at 6:15 PM. It's one that I haven't seen in many years, and seems to be out of print on DVD. Douglas plays a lawyer for the US Army who gets the task of defending some soldiers stationed in Germany who are being brought up on rape charges, accused of having raped one of the locals. The thing I remember most about the movie was the way translation of German was handled, in a very heavy-handed voiceover that didn't work well.

Anyhow, not having looked far enough forward on the TCM schedule to see that Douglas was going to be honored today, a few weeks back I decided to pop in one of the DVDs from the Kirk Douglas box set I picked up a few months back and watch For Love or Money, a 1963 film which shares its title with several other movies. So that's the Douglas movie you're getting a post on today, even though it's not airing on TCM.

Douglas plays Deke Gentry, a San Francisco lawyer and best friend of wealthy playboy businessman Sonny Smith (Gig Young). They're out on their yacht one day when a helicopter shows up overhead, with the equally wealthy Chloe Brasher (Thelma Ritter) as the passenger. She needs to see Deke about an urgent matter involving her daughters.

Chloe is a widow, and provisions were made in her husband's will regarding the three daughters, who are all very headstrong and not about to follow their mother's advice. According to the will, they've got trust funds set up for them, but the daughters will be cut off from the trust funds if they don't get married to people Mom considers acceptable. So Mom wants Deke to convince the daughters to accept him as the new trustee on the fund, and to marry the husbands she's selected for them.

That's not going to be easy. Daughter Bonnie (Julie Newmar) is what nowadays would probably be a social media influencer, except that they didn't have social media back in 1963. She's a fitness/beauty geek who's got $1/month subscribers the accounting of which is bringing her into trouble with the IRS. Agent Harvey Wofford (Dick Sargent) is assigned to the case, and he just happens to be the man Mom has selected for her! Jan (Leslie Parrish) is into beatnik artist types, and Mom thinks she should marry old friend Sam (William Windom). The biggest hurdle, however, is with eldest daughter Kate (Mitzi Gaynor). Mom's pick for her is... Sonny Smith. Finally to make certain things go as planned, Mom has a private detective Joe (William Bendix) assigned to watch everything.

Unsurprisingly, things don't go as planned, and you can probbly guess how. Getting Sonny to meet Kate hits a bunch of snags, and Deke realizes he's beginning to fall in love with Kate. Meanwhile, Jan sees Sonny, and perhaps she's going to fall in love with him instead of Sam. Now, I'd think that Mom should OK with Kate marrying a nice staid lawyer. And if she picked out Sonny as a husband for one of the daughters, why is it a bad thing if it turns out that another of the daughters were to marry him. But that would ruin the premise of the movie.

For Love or Money is formulaic, but it's a formula that works well enough for undemanding entertainment. Kirk Douglas didn't make very many comedies in his career, but he handles the material just fine. The three daughters are nice to look at, and the older stars (Ritter, Young, and Bendix) all fit their roles like a hand in a glove. There's nothing special here, but also nothing wrong.

The Douglas centennial box set isn't overly expensive, and with as many movies as you get, spending a few bucks for a formulaic trifle like this is no waste.