Who is Annette Kellerman and why is she saying those horrible things about me?

I've got several movies on my DVR that are coming up on TCM. Two of them are in conjunction with prime-time programming, and I figured it would be better to do posts on those on the following two days. So my next post is on a movie that TCM isn't showing for a good three days yet: Million Dollar Mermaid, Nov. 6 at 2:15 PM.

After a brief title card sequence about the old Hippodrome in New York, the action switched to Australia in the 1890s. Frederick Kellerman (Walter Pidgeon) is a widowed musician who runs a conservatory in the Sydney area and lives with his young daughter Annette (Donna Corcoran playing her as a juvenile). Annette suffered a polio-like disease as a child that weakened her legs; since then she's taken to swimming as a form of physical therapy. Fast forward several years and Annette is all grown up (played by Esther Williams) and winning swimming competitions. Unfortunately, she only wins trophies because the sport is completely amateur.

The Kellermans could use the money as the conservatory can no longer support them. Dad gets a job in London, and Annette follows him. On board, they meet James Sullivan (Victor Mature), who is promoting some sort of act involving a kangaroo, which would have been really exotic in the first decade of the 20th century. James is taken with Annette, and this being a movie based on a real person, James and Annette married and would remain married until his death 60 years later, although his death was 20 years after the movie. At this point of the movie, James wants to manage Annette's career, having her dress up as a mermaid and doing aquatic acts, somthing of which Dad decidedly does not approve.

The Kellermans get to London and find that the man who had offered Dad a job has died in the meantime, so his conservatory is now closed. This gives Jimmy the idea to promote Annette in a marathon swim in the Thames. It doesn't exactly make a whole lot of money, although at this point the point is to get Annette's name in the news, which the stunt does in spades. Eventually, everybody goes over to America to try to make it big there. As you can guess from the opening, Kellerman will eventually perform at the Hippodrome, but not the first time she approaches the manager. She's going to have to go through more struggle to make it to the top. Part of that includes promoting a new line of swimwear, which is a scandalous for the early 1910s one-piece relatively tight-fitting ladies' swimming gown, a lot like the one-piece outfits of today. 110 years ago, it would get her arrested (in the movie and in the real-life Kellerman's claims; from what I've read there's no surviving record of the arrest).

Annette does of course get to be the star attraction at the Hippodrome, and this gives MGM a chance to stage some of those spectacular aquacades that were the point of an Esther Williams movie. Kellerman would try her luck in Hollywood as well.

Million Dollar Mermaid is a Hollywood biopic, so often playing fast and loose with the facts, but this time the story generally does fairly well dramatically. Victor Mature is a bit handicapped in that the script often asks him to be a bit of a cad, but then the movie was a vehicle for Williams and her swimming numbers, not Mature. In that regard, the swimming numbers are worth the price of admission.

After the Fox

Another person who was honored in Summer Under the Stars this past August was Peter Sellers, which gave me the chance to record a couple of his movies that I had not seen before. Among these is After the Fox, which I recently watched.

After an opening credits sequence that confirmed my suspicion that the titles were designed by Maurice Binder, we get into an establishing scene to set up the main part of the story. Among the great heists ever committed is an Egyptian bullion robbery, masterminded by a man named Okra (Akim Tamiroff). However, having robbed the bullion, there's a problem: How do they actually move it so they can get the money that it's worth? Interpol is on the case, and they know that the robber is going to need somebody to get it into Europe. The criminal who would seem to have the greatest capacity to do it is Aldo Vanucci (Peter Sellers), nicknamed "The Fox", but he's currently in prison.

Not for long, His gang breaks him out, and he goes home to his mother and his sister Gins (Britt Ekland, who was Sellers' real-life wife at the time). There, he finds out that his sister has a scandalous job -- she's an actress, horror of horrors! However, this and another event helps give Aldo an idea.

Aldo has decided to take on the job of smugling the bullion into Europe because he wants to give his sister a respectable job, yet doesn't know how to do it until he sees another actor, Tony Powell (Victor Mature). Tony is the stereotype of the American who is better known for his name than being a truly good actor, and going to Europe for the big pay check. When Tony goes out on the streets of Rome, he's mobbed by Italians who are fans of old Hollywood movies and have seen Powell's work. (The movie actually uses snippets of one of Mature's old movies, Easy Living to show Powell's old work.)

Aldo, having seen this, realizes that he can smuggle the bullion into Italy under the guise of making a movie about smuggling gold! Everybody else involved will think that they're acting out a scene from a movie, not knowing that what they're handling is real gold and not prop gold. Posing under the name of Federico Fabrizi, Aldo goes to a small seaside fishing village where the boat carrying the bullion can anchor offshore, and gets pretty much the entire population of the town to play extras in the movie. After all, they're so star-struck that they want to be in the movie. Likewise does Tony Powell, who thinks it will be great to be in something so avant-garde.

The only person who realizes the obvious is Tony's agent, Harry Granoff (Martin Balsam). You'd think that the residents of this little Italian town would have heard of a "Federico Fabrizi" if there were an actual famous director by this name and recognize that this is an impostor. But for whatever reason they go along with the con, with only Harry suspecting Fabrizi might not be real. The question then becomes whether those Italian authorities from outside the village, not involved with the fake movie, will find out what's going on and catch Aldo before he can get away with robbery.

I've long felt that from Dr. Strangelove on, a little bit of Peter Sellers goes a long, long way. That's certainly the case here. The comedy is designed to be mostly a farce, with a bit of social commentary courtesy of director Vittorio De Sica (who even appears as himself) about greed messing up "art". But Sellers has a tendency to be too forceful in his comedy to the point that for me at least, it can become grating and obnxious. Martin Balsam follows along in this line. Perhaps surprisingly, the acting honors go to Mature, parodying his own image. Like Broderick Crawford a decade later in A Little Romance, Mature looks like he's having a blast skewering the idea of the Hollywood star.

After the Fox may not be for everybody, especially if, like me, you're not the biggest fan of Peter Sellers. But if you do like Sellers' work, then I think you'll enjoy After the Fox.

The Big Circus

Some months back, the TCM spotlight was movies about the circus. This gave me the chance to record The Big Circus, which I hadn't seen in ages, and do a post on it now.

Victor Mature is the star, playing Hank Whirling, the proprietor of one of those traveling circuses that sets up a real big top and goes from town to town by train. However, he just lost his partner, Jules Borman, who was bigger and better financed, so the Whirling Circus is in a parlous state. Indiied, in order to go on the next tour, the bank is only going to provide a loan if they can send one of their employees, Randy Sherman (Red Buttons) on the tour to see that the money is being managed properly.

Actually, they send two people, as Randy brings along Helen Harrison (Rhonda Fleming). Her job is as a press agent, which miffs Whirling in part because nobody told him about this, and in part because she's a woman, and he doesn't know whether lady press agents can handle the difficult circus world if they're not the talent or born into it.

One who was born into it was Hank's kid sister Jeannie (Kathryn Grant). In fact, she has just enough talent that she could start practicing with the trapeze act, which includes Zach (Gilbert Roland), who also does the high wire, and Zach's spotter Tommy (David Nelson). But Hank doesn't want Jeannie doing the acts, especially not a dangerous one like the trapeze. Rounding out the major members of this circus are Skeeter the Clown (Peter Lorre in his fat period) and ringmaster Hans Hagenfeld (Vincent Price).

There's a fair amount of conflict since Randy and Helen are all business, and Hank thinks they don't understand the circus business. But there's going to be more conflict. One involves Jeannie's practicing with Zach, and another involves Skeeter getting too drunk to perform. Indeed, in one scene, Randy realizes the show must goes on and takes Skeeter's place in the performance of the clowns, even though he doesn't know the routine.

The biggest problem, however, comes when somebody decides to sabotage the circus, with half the train crashing and killing, among others, Zach's wife. This sends him into a deep funk. That's really a problem since the way for Whirling to save the circus is to get a performance in New York. For the publicity, Whirling's plan was to have Zach to a tightrope walk across Niagara Falls, which was actually performed for the first time a century before The Big Circus, by Charles Blondin. Needless to say, one needs to have all one's faculties and be in the right mental state to do something so dangerous....

There have been a lot of circus movies released, and as with submarine movies there aren't too many distinct plots one can do. So in that regard, The Big Circus isn't terribly original. It's competently made, and the circus performances are nice, but the movie as a whole isn't terribly memorable. It'll certainly entertain you for one watch, however.

Sometimes lousy, sometimes fun

Victor Mature famously said something to the effect of, "I'm not a very good actor, and I've got 68 movies to prove it!" I may have gotten the number wrong, as I think I've seen different numbers cited; in any case, it's the sentiment that counts. I can't help but think one of the movies Mature might have had in mind when he made the comment was The Tartars.

Mature plays Oleg, leader a band of Vikings somehwere in what would probably be northwest Russia around the end of the first milennium AD. They've been living in peace, and consider the local Slavs (technically not yet Russians at the time) their friends. The Tartars, however, don't like the Slavs. Togrul (Folco Lulli; you probably won't recognize the names of a lot of the cast because they're Italians in what was an international co-production; more on that later), chief of one small band of the Tartars, meets with Oleg trying to convince Oleg to join with the Tartars against the Slavs. Oleg refuses, leading to a battle in which Togrul is killed and his daughter Samia (Bella Cortez) is taken hostage.

Togrul's brother Burundai (Orson Welles) is understandably pissed off. Samia was betrothed to Togrul and Burundai's lord, the big leader of the Tartars, who we can guess isn't going to be happy either with losing a potential wife. Burundai responds by attacking a Viking ship, kidnapping Oleg's wife Helga (Liana Orfei). The obvious solution is a hostage exchange, after which everybody can live happily ever after.

Yeah, right. While lovely Samia has been in captivity with the Vikings, she hasn't particularly liked them. However, Oleg's kid brother Eric (Luciano Marin) has taken a liking to Samia. And after a while, he's able to break down her resistance. So when the time comes for the hostage exchange, Samia and especially Eric say no dice. The fact that Eric has knocked up Samia certainly doesn't help.

Meanwhile, back at Burundai's palace, he's been trying to extract information from Helga about the Viking's manpower, since, if they're not going to help him attack the Slavs, he might as well just annihilate the Vikings, too. Helga refuses; when the time comes for the hostage exchange, it's botched and poor Helga falls to her death.

There's still the matter of Eric and Samia; the Vikings hold a vote on whether to let them get married or kill them, but before the vote can be decided, the Tartars attack, setting up the climax.

Hoo-boy is The Tartars a silly movie. Poor Victor Mature has to wear that ridiculously skimpy outfit that he's much too old for. As for Orson Welles, I can't help but think that the only reason he made this movie is for the paycheck. He was probably tying to get one or another of his movies made; based on the date The Tartars was released, I'm guessing it would be funding for The Trial. He's well into the Fat Orson phase, sleepwalking through a terrible role.

The two Americans don't mesh well with the Italian cast, but at least the location work (in Yugoslavia, another of those co-productions of the early 1960s) is nice. The movie is only 83 minutes, yet it feels longer because of an extended dance sequence and a bunch of shots of the Tartars chasing the Vikings or vice versa which look like they're there to pad the running time.

Although The Tartars is from a technical standpoint a fairly lousy film, it's fun for one watch because of what a mess it is. It got a release in the US courtesy of MGM, which is how it's ended up on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive.

My Gal Sal

I've been recording a bunch of movies that have recently started showing up in the FXM rotation. One of them is My Gal Sal. It's going to be on FXM again tomorrow (August 3) at 11:25 AM and again Tuesday at 7:30 AM.

Victor Mature plays Paul Dresser, born Dreiser and, yes, the older (by about 14 years) brother of writer Theodore Dreiser (who has a writing credit on this movie having written about his elder brother). At the start of the movie, Dresser is living in Indiana with his parents and younger siblings, about the right age to go off to seminary, which is something his father wants him to do, but something in which he has no interest. So Paul decides he's going to run off and try to make a name for himself.

He winds up as an unwitting prop in the medicine show run by Col. Truckee (Walter Catlett), who also bilks people in small towns in other ways. One of those small towns results in Paul's being tarred and feathered, only to be Mae Collins (Carole Landis), another member of the show. This gets Paul a full-time job in the show, doing novelty piano numbers playing songs he's written.

At one of these shows, a carriage shows up at the edges of the show. In the carriage are actress Sally Elliott (Rita Hayworth), and her boyfriend/manager Fred Haviland (John Sutton). Sally is the more respectable type of actress, who would be in New York if she could make it there but is instead doing a national tour; she and Fred are pretty clearly slumming by watching this small town show during a break in her Chicago performance. But she likes Paul's piano playing, so she gives him two tickets to the Chicago show.

Paul and Mae attend, and they've obviously never been to such a show, as the laugh at all the wrong times, this being a musical revue and not a comedy. Their overly loud laughing and otherwise uncouth manners enrage poor Sally, who decides that she hates Paul. Of course, the movie to this point has been set up such that we know that attitude is ultimately going to change by the last reel. But at this point, Sally hates Paul enough that she's perfectly OK stealing one of his songs.

Paul eventually leaves the medicine show and makes his way to New York, where he meets music publisher Pat Hawley (James Gleason). He's heard the big hit from Sally's new show, she now being in New York as well. And Paul realizes that it's the melody he wrote back in Indiana, with her having set new words to it! Paul is pissed, but thankfully, he's got the manuscript to prove that he wrote the song. So Sally is forced to join forces with Paul and put her face on the sheet music, along with both of their names.

Paul has by this time fallen in love with Sally, not realizing that Fred has already planned to propse marriage to her. Paul is also so obnoxiously forward with Sally that it's no wonder that Sally doesn't particularly respond well to his advances. It doesn't help that there's a Countess (Mona Maris) apparently trying to pursue Paul even though she's married. Along the way we get a bunch of musical numbers, on the way to Paul and Sally winding up together at the end.

My Gal Sal was released in early 1942, a couple of months after the US entered World War II. The movie is sentimental and old fashioned, considering that Dresser was at his peak of success in the Gay Nineties, but with a nation at war, you can understand why a certain segment of the population would love this sort of nostalgia. It fits in well with the sort of musical Fox was producing in the 1940s, although it's not quite as good as the musicals that featured Betty Grable. It's also not particularly true to history; as far as I could tell, there was no such actress as the Sally Elliott character in Dresser's life. (Dresser's life also ended badly once his brand of music fell out of style. That, of course, is not shown.)

My Gal Sal is available on DVD on two different Fox box sets if you don't have FXM.

Every Little Crook and Nanny

Another of my recent movie viewings to try to clear some space off the DVR was Every Little Crook and Nanny.

Lynn Redgrave plays Miss Poole, who runs a school that teaches children to be good little ladies and gentlemen, teaching them dance especially, but also comportment and other sundry stuff. One day in the middle of class, a bunch of goons walk in and start dismantling the place! They're from the Ganucci organization, which a Mafia family, but don't you dare say that the Mafia exists. The head of the family, Carmine Ganucci (Victor Mature), has bought the buiding to use for running local numbers games, and poor Miss Poole is out of luck even though she has a lease.

Carmine is planning on going back to the old country with his wife to do some business, and he wants to leave his son Lewis (Phillip Graves) behind since he's been raising Lewis not to know that his dad is part of the Mafia that we all know doesn't exist anyway (this is a running joke throughout the movie). His lawyers Azzecca (Dom DeLuise) and Garbugli (John Astin) are helping him find a nanny. So far, none of the nannies are to Carmine's liking.

That is, until Miss Poole comes storming into the office. She's not a nanny, mind you. It's just that she's pissed about what Ganucci did, ruining her office and injuring her pianist Luther (Austin Pendleton). She wants to be compensated for this, and is out for blood. Carmine sees Miss Poole and, in a case of mistaken identity, immediately thinks she'd make a great nanny for Lewis.

Miss Poole takes the job, if only because it allows her to come up with a ridiculous plan. She'll stage a kidnapping of Lewis, and set a ransom high enough to cover her losses from the school and to be able to start a new life. Of course, she knows nothing about kidnapping, but that's beside the point. She and Luther plan it, and after it goes off seemingly without a hitch, Poole turns to one of Ganucci's low-level gangsters, Barry Napkins (Paul Sand), to help get the ransom.

It's here that problems begin to show up. Benny isn't particularly competent, while nobody else wants Carmine to know what really happened, so they -- especially Garbugli and Azzecca -- try to get the money in a roundabout way. Carmine wants a money transfer for his business deal in Italy and Benny is engaging in petty larceny to raise the money, so there are multiple sets of money in the amount of the ransom going around. Luther is the one holding Lewis, and his wife Ida decides she'd really like a kid.

Every Little Crook and Nanny is a movie that sounds like it has a really good premis, but which winds up not quite working. I'm assuming Redgrave wanted to do a comedy, and she looks like she's having a lot of fun doing it. But the movie is supposed to be a relatively light comedy, at least light for the sort of material it's covering, so something like The Trouble With Harry or Too Many Crooks; not something heavy like a Paddy Chayefsky satire. Every Little Crook and Nanny, however, descends into a much too complex plot to save it as a light comedy.

Every Little Crook and Nanny is available on DVD if you want to judge for yourself.

Demetrius and the Gladiators

We've got one more movie showing up on FXM Retro to recommend this week: Demetrius and the Gladiators, which will be on at 11:40 AM tomorrow.

The action in the movie begins about where the action in The Robe left off. You may recall from that movie that the two main characters played by Richard Burton and Jean Simmons (Marcellus and Diana), were executed at the end for their Christian beliefs, with the titular robe referring to the garment that Jesus was wearing on the way to his crucifixion. The robe is given to an elderly Christian witness to the Marcellus/Diana crucifixon for safekeeping, until that guy can give it to "the fisherman", referring to Peter (Michael Rennie), the closest the earliest Christians had to a leader since he wasn't Pope yet.

Emperor Caligula (Jay Robinson) hears about the robe, and the rumore that it confers its owner life everlasting. It may, in the Christian sense of the afterlife, but not in the biological sense. But that's another story. Caligula wants that robe, and he'll stop at nothing to get it. Why can't he be more sensible, like his uncle Claudius (Barry Jones) and aunt Messalina (Susan Hayward)? Caligula sends a Roman legion out to the provinces to find that robe.

Demetrius (Victor Mature) and his girlfriend Lucia (Debra Paget) live in the town where the robe is temporarily secreted until Peter can get it. Demetrius was Marcellus' slave, but a free man now. Not for long, though, because the Romans come through looking for the robe and treat Lucia like dirt, so Demetrius defends her honor. Oh, you don't do that to a Roman legion. Demetrius is taken to Rome, where he'll be made a gladiator.

Although Demetrius as a Christian is supposed to be non-violent, there is some self-defense instinct when Caligula decides to send multiple tigers after Demetrius in the arena. Demetrius slays them all, leading the crowd to want to save him, even though Caligula would rather he died. Messalina in particular takes notice of Demetrius, and tries to tempt him with her love. But Demetrius is a good Christian.

At least until Lucia shows up. She wants to see Demetrius, but the other gladiators get to her first and the way they treat her results in her having a nervous breakdown, not that anybody in ancient Rome knew what that was at the time. Demetrius is powerless to stop it, and God certainly isn't going to do anything about it, so Demetrius abandons his faith and starts taking up with Messalina. At least, until Caligula sends him out to get that robe....

The biggest disappointment for me with the movie is that FXM's print was both letterboxed and pillarboxed. This wasn't the case with Thunder Island, which I mentioned yesterday. The story is OK; there's nothing particularly wrong with it but nothing particularly standing out either. If you like the sword and sandal movies of the 1950s, you'll probably enjoy Demetrius and the Gladiators. I just wish it were a bigger print.

Both the TCM Shop and Amazon claim to have the movie available on DVD, although it's on different box sets.

Le salaire de la peur noire

Some months back TCM ran a night of movies featuring British actress Diana Dors. One that is currently available on DVD is The Long Haul.

Victor Mature plays Harry Miller, an American GI stationed in Germany who married an English woman Connie (Gene Anderson). His hitch is almost up, and he's got an offer from one of his best friends Art to go work at Art's company back in America. However, Connie doesn't want to uproot herself and son Butch to go to America, so it's back to Connie's old home of Liverpool. Harry doesn't exactly have much in the way of talent, but he's able to get a job as a truck driver since that apparently doesn't take too much work.

Harry starts driving on the Liverpool-Glasgow route, but he finds that he's unable to get a load to take back to Liverpool because Joe Easy (Patrick Allen), the transport man in Glasgow, only seems to want to give work to people he already trusts. Indeed, when Harry tries to press the issue, he's met with violence. This, to the horror of Joe's assistant Frank (Peter Reynolds) and Frank's sister (and also Joe's girlfriend) Lynn (Diana Dors).

Eventually, Harry gets a special job from his boss in Liverpool handling one of Joes's loads that's supposed to go to Glasgow; apparently, the trucker originally supposed to take it, the man Joe would have hand-picked, showed up late. There's a good reason Joe picked that particular trucker: Joe is engaging in insurance fraud, and is planning on robbing this particular shipment. So he's going to have to stop the shipment from going through, by hook or by crook.

It results in Harry meeting Lynn again, and this time the two beginning to fall in love as they wind up spending a night together in what passes for the British version of a motel. But that's also an opportunity for Joe to waylay Harry and steal the shipment. The police wind up investigating which puts some heat on Harry, and a whole lot of strain on Harry and Connie's marriage.

The result is that Harry wants to get back to America, but to do so he's ging to have to accompany a shipment of stolen furs first by trucking it to port through the middle of nowhere, and then on the ship. Joe is along for the ride, and is rather more willing to use force to make certain the shipment gets there, and to make sure Lynn doesn't do anything untoward.

I mentioned The Wages of Fear in the title to the post because the scenes of Harry, Joe, and Lynn having to transport the furs over a mountain really reminded me of that earlier trucking film. The rest of it isn't very alike, which isnot meant in either a good way or a bad way. As a whole, I found the movie a bit perfunctory, as if it was conceived as a second-tier production. I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case, since it was filmed in the UK but used an American actor in Mature to have somebody relatively bankable for distribution to the US. Agood portion of the movie feels a bit rushed, and some threads could, I thought, have been handled better.

The overall result is that The Long Haul is moderately entertaining, and one I'm glad I saw. I don't feel as though I wasted my time having seen it. But I've seen better and would recommend other films in the genre first.

Easy Living (1949)

TCM is running a night of Victor Mature movies tonight, ending at 4:30 AM with Easy Living.

Mature plays Pete Wilson, who is the quarterback for the New York Chiefs, in an era when professional football was not king and the players didn't make all that much. That having been said, Wilson has done about as well as one possibly could out of football at the time, with a trophy wife Liza (Lizabeth Scott) who has become interior decorator to the smart set, and a presumptive offer to become the next coach at his old alma mater. That latter is apparently a big deal considering that college football was still a bigger thing than the pro game back then.

But there's a problem. Wilson isn't feeling well, and when he goes to a private doctor, it's discovered that he's been carrying a heart murmur all these years. Nowadays, they could probably do surgery to correct the problem, although the player would have to miss the remainder of the season. In 1949, however, medicine wasn't quite so advanced, and the diagnosis would have meant retire from playing football forthwith or else risk death. Well, it would be fairly easy to retire mid-season, especially considering that the ailment has already degraded his play to the point that the team is thinking of replacing him as the starting quarterback.

Again, however, there's a problem. Liza has liked living the good life in New York getting to meet all those high-class people when she does their redecorating for them. This even though she's really not all that good at it and is only getting the jobs because of her name. At any rate, however, she doesn't want to leave New York City for the life of a coach's wife at a midwestern state university. And dammit, she's going to do whatever it takes to make certain her husband is still living the good life for her sake, never mind what his sake involves!

There's even more going on with all of this. Lloyd Nolan plays Lenahan, the team's hands-on owner who sees Wilson's play degrading and is one of the people who wants to switch quarterbacks. His daughter-in-law Anne (Lucille Ball) is what seems to be a sort of executive assistant to him. She's a widow, and not certain she'd want to fall in love with another football player. But she is falling in love with Pete even though he's already married.

If you're a football fan, there's a lot interesting here to see how Hollywood looked at professional football before television (and then especially the Sabols and NFL Films) came along and revolutionized the game and made it a big money affair. I don't know how realistic it all is -- probably not very. I also found most of the performances apart from Mature's to be quite good. Scott turns out to be nasty as the grasping wife; Nolan is as good as ever playing his tough but ultimately sympathetic authority figure; and Lucille Ball in a drama is always something nice to see. Ball didn't get enough chances to show off her acting chops, but she really coud act.

It looks as though Easy Living is available from the Warner Archive collection. But make certain you're getting the 1949 film. There's also a 1937 screwball comedy called Easy Living. While it's a really good movie, it has nothing to do with the 1949 movie other than sharing a title.

Sinuhe egyptiläinen

If you've already got copies of everything that TCM is running tonight, you could switch over to the Fox Movie Channel and catch The Egyptian at 3:30 AM. Or, this being FMC, you could wait for the repeat, which is going to be tomorrow afternoon at 12:35 PM.

Edmund Purdom plays Sinuhe, the title character in the original novel by Finnish writer Mika Waltari; the "Sinuhe" was removed from the title when translated to English. Sinuhe is, at the beginning of the movie, writing his memoirs at the end of his life sometime around 1350 BC, where he's in exile somewhere near the shores of the Red Sea. Flash back to the early part of his life....

Sinuhe was abandanoned by his birth parents, being sent down the Nile on a reed boat ostensibly to die, but being discovered by foster parents who raised him. Sinuhe's foster father was a physician, such as they were in the ancient world, but regardless of the quality of doctors back then Sinuhe follows in Dad's footsteps and becomes a doctor himself. One day, together with his friend Horemheb (Victor Mature), who wants to be in the military, he goes hunting for lions but instead saves the life of a man attacked by a lion. Horemheb and Sinuhe are arrested because hunting lions is only for royals, but what is only discovered later is that the man they saved was the new Pharaoh, Akhenaton (Michael Wilding). Sinuhe become the Royal Physician, while Horemheb gets a plum posting in the army.

This gets Sinuhe into the ancient Egyptian version of the smart set, which is where he meets Nefer (Bella Darvi), who seems to be ancient Egypt's equivalent of a socialite who's famous for being famous, or something. Sinuhe falls for her, hard, even though he'd be much better off with tavern owner Merit (Jean Simmons). Merit loves him, but he doesn't return the favor, instead sacrificing all his worldly good for Nefer, eventually being forced to go into his first exile as a result. In this first exile, Sinuhe meets the Hittites, who have developed a new metal that's tougher than any of the metals they have in Egypt, and which the Hittites are turning into swords with which they're going to conquer the known world! Sinuhe has to warn his people.

So he goes back to Egypt, only to discover that the place has changed. Akhenaton, despite being Pharaoh, is also somewhat of an apostate, at least in that he only believes in one god, as opposed to the plethora of gods that made up Egyptian theology. The military doesn't like this, and they plan to stage a palace coup with the help of Akhenaton's sister Baketamon (Gene Tierney). However, in the meantime, there is a portion of the regular population that has taken up Akhenaton's monotheism, and the military is going to have to deal with them, too. And this includes Merit -- that's also not her only secret....

Sinuhe has the chance to take part in the palace coup by poisoning Akhenaton, who for his part is perfectly ready to die. And, in fact, we know that whatever action Sinuhe takes, it's going to lead to his eventual exile, since that's where he was at the start of the movie. But since we're getting close to the climax of the movie, I'll spare the plot details so as not to give everything away.

The Egyptian isn't the world's greatest movie, but it's not terrible either. There are nice sets and nice cinematography, although it's too bad Fox couldn't come up with more location shooting, at least for establishing shots. The ancient Egyptian monuments would probably look good in Cinemascope. The plot is meandering and a bit of a mess at times. For example, I don't see exactly what Sinuhe sees in Nefer, and the palace coup section goes on a bit too long. As for the acting, everybody is ostensibly playing ancient Egyptians although they could just as easily be playing archetypes, as the story could almost be set in Rome or possibly Henry VIII's England or any of a number of other places and times. Nobody is terrible -- not even Bella Darvi -- but nobody particularly shines, either. All in all, The Egyptian is certainly worth a viewing. It's no worse than most of the other ancient epics that Hollywood was making in the mid-1950s.

Amazon suggests that The Egyptian has been released to DVD, but it's either imports or out-of-print stuff.