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.

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.

Not quite Tallulah Bankhead in Faithless

Zachary Scott, Ann Sheridan, and Lew Ayres (from left to right) in The Unfaithful

A couple of months back, Ann Sheridan was TCM's Star of the Month, which gave me the chance to record a bunch of movie available on DVD from the Warner Archive but that I hadn't blogged about before. Among them is The Unfaithful. So I recently rectified that situation and watched it to do a post on here.

Sheridan plays Chris Hunter, who married her husband Bob (Zachary Scott) just before he went off to World War II. The war is over and he's been back, working as a builder and flying to various places on the west coast supervising the construction of suburban housing developments. While he's away this time, Chris is invited to a party held by Chris' cousin Paula (Eve Arden) to celebrate her divorce.

Chris returns home from the party to find a man waiting outside her house. He forces her into the house, and in silhouette we see what appears to be a struggle between them before Chris kills the man. Bob returns from Oregon the next morning to find the police at his house, with bad news for him.

With the help of the family lawyer, Larry Hannaford (Lew Ayres), Chris gives a statement about the killing that clearly makes it out to be self-defense. But if that were the case, we wouldn't have much of a movie, would we? So we know that something more is going to happen. Eventually, we hear from Martin Barrow (Steven Geray). He's an art dealer who has... a really bad bust of Chris' head. (Unfortunately, I don't have the movie on DVD, and I couldn't find an image of the bust online.) That in and of itself would be no big deal, but it turns out that the bust was sculpted by... the guy she killed!

There, as you can see, is the problem. The idea that the guy she killed in "self-defense" now has some holes in it, and any bright and ambitious prosecutor should be able to find this out in the investigation into the man's death. To make matters even worse, Barrow and the dead guy's wife want to blackmail Chris for a substantial sum of money not to have the information be made public.

But it's not just the public Chris would like to keep the information a secret from. The thing is, Chris really did have an affair with the dead guy while Bob was away fighting the war. In her defense, it was a whirlwind romance that Chris and Bob had before he left, something that was not uncommon in 1941/2, and just as a fair number of servicemen picked up war romances or even war brides, the women back home still had physical needs.

Now, if a lot of this sounds like The Letter, that's not by coincidence. Warner Bros. wanted to revisit the material, although in this case the screenwriters changed enough of it to avoid having it be a full remake of The Letter. Still, anybody who watches is can't help but make the comparisons, and judge the movie in that light.

That's a bit unfair to The Unfaithful, because while it's not quite as good as either version of The Letter, it's not exactly a bad movie in its own right. If it has flaws, it's that it runs too long (it should probably have been written to clock in at about 90 minutes instead of close to 110), and, surprisingly, Eve Arden. I think she's supposed to be playing the same sort of sounding board she did in Mildred Pierce, but where it worked well in Mildred Pierce to break up the tension, The Unfaithful is more of a straight drama instead of a melodrama, and Arden just doesn't work quite as well here.

Still, The Unfaithful is absolutely worth watching for the performances from the other three leads, and for its all around solid production, especially for people not particularly familiar with Ann Sheridan.