The Pirate

Next up on the list of movies that I have on my DVR that's coming up again soon on TCM is The Pirate, which TCM will be running tomorrow (June 6) at 8:00 AM.

The movie opens up with some title cards telling us about the legendary pirate Macoco, who preyed upon shipping in the Caribbean in the second half of the 18th century. Having read those tales is Manuela (Judy Garland), who lives on one of the Spanish islands in the caribbean with her aunt Inez (Gladys Cooper), who has raised her since her parents died. As Manuela is technically an orphan, aunt Inez wanted to marry her off, which she's about to do with Don Pedro Vargas (Walter Slezak), who has been shipped in by the Spanish authorities to be mayor of the provincial town where Manuela and Inez live.

Manuela, having been fascinated by the tales of Macoco, wants to see the Caribbean before she gets married, so she goes off to the port town serving the island, ostensibly because her trousseau should also be arriving and she can have alterations to her wedding dress made there if need be. Also arriving in port is an acting troupe led by Serafin (Gene Kelly), sporting a ridiculous moustache and wig, and in one of the dance numbers an extremely short tunic.

Part of the shtick of Serafin's show is mesmerism, at the time a sort of parlor trick since people didn't really understand hypnosis. Serafin hypnotizes Manuela, who does a musical number about loving Macoco. Since Serafin was struck by Manuela's beauty and that was the whole reason he put her under hypnosis in the first place, Serafin decides to pose as Macoco to try to win over Manuela, never mind that she's betrothed to Don Pedro.

And then Serafin has a run-in with Don Pedro. It turns out that this isn't the first time the two met, as Don Pedro is the real Macoco, and had at some point in the past taken Serafin and his acting troupe hostage off the coast of Africa. But nobody else knows the real Macoco. The Spanish want Macoco, and Don Pedro sees an opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. Except that this would violate the Prodcution Code, and besides, Gene Kelly is a much more romantic leading man than Walter Slezak, so you can guess who winds up with whom in the final reel.

The story in The Pirate isn't terribly original, but that's beside the point. The Pirate is a vehicle for its stars: Gene Kelly gets to do a lot of dancing, while Judy Garland gets to sing. They both get to show off their ample talents in that regard, and the song and dance numbers are all exceedingly well executed technically. The only thing for me, however, is that because the story is so week, all the musical numbers left me a bit cold, as if the movie just has no heart.

However, if you like either Judy Garland or Gene Kelly, chances are you'll be able to overlook the story weaknesses and really enjoy The Pirate.

Oh, right, musicals aren't my favorite genre

I've metioned before that musicals aren't my favorite genre, although I don't necessarily mind the backstage musicals or the musical biopics. So it's not a surprise that I didn't particularly care for this week's selection for the TCM Musical Matinee: Brigadoon, tomorrow (March 22) at noon.

Musical star Gene Kelly is the star here, as Tommy Albright, an American who's decided to go on a hunting trip to the Scottish highlands together with his best friend Jeff Douglas (Van Johnson). It's partly to get away from America for a while to try to figure out whether he really wants to marry his girlfriend back home, Jane Ashton (Elaine Stewart, fourth-billed in a surprisingly small role). While hunting, Tommy and Jeff get lost, and come to the crest of a hill overlooking a village that doesn't seem to be on their maps.

So, naturally, curiosity gets the better of them, as well as the idea that perhaps if you go into town the locals might be able to tell you where on the map you are and how to get back to where you were originally going. The town is called Brigadoon, and and it looks like it could pass for one of those places that's deliberately been restored for the historical purpose of showing the way things used to be.

But it's a real village, all right, and more than that, the place is about to celebrate. Young Jean Campbell is about to get married to Charlie Dalrymple, and the whole village is taking part, and willing to have Jeff and Tommy join them in the celebration. Jeff isn't terribly thrilled with the place, but Tommy takes to one of the locals, Jean's older sister Fiona (Cyd Charisse), which is of course a bit of a problem since he's got that girlfriend in America.

There are bigger problems, however. Not only do Jeff and Tommy wonder why the village wasn't on the map. When Tommy goes off with Fiona to pick heather, she's absolutely terrified when she gets to the bridge leading out of the village. And then Tommy and Jeff find the Campbell family bible, which has Fiona and Jane's dates of birth back in the 1730s, which makes no sense. The town elder, Mr. Lundie, then tells them that Brigadoon is a special place, saved by a miracle 200 years prior. When the villagers go to sleep, they'll wake up the next morning having only aged one night, while the rest of the world has spent 100 years. But the price is that none of them can leave the village. While outsiders can spend a day, if they want to stay it will have to be forever. If one villager leaves, the rest of the village will cease to exist.

This is a big issue because, as if you couldn't tell, Tommy falls in love with Fiona. Worse is that Jean had a suitor other than Charlie Dalrymple, that being one Harry Beaton. and he, having lost Jean, decides that no one else should have her and that he'll leave the village as a result.

One of the problems I have with Brigadoon, not having seen any stage version of the musical, is how it feels even more artificial than other movie musicals. I think that comes down to the fact that while Gene Kelly and director Vincente Minnelli wanted to do a location shoot, preferably in the Scottish higlands, MGM felt they needed to save money and really wanted it done on soundstages. That doesn't work here at all, although a secondary fact that only occured to me after watching is that I don't think the Scottish highlands are as forested as the film version of them. I get the impression that having to do the movie on a soundstage may also have taken Kelly's heart somewhat out of the picture. Van Johnson isn't really the right star for a movie musical, either, unless it were one of those biopic films where everyody else was doing the singing and dancing.

I guess tax day is Christmas for *some* people....

Another well-known movie that I'd never actually done a post on before is Meet Me in St. Louis. So, when TCM ran it during 31 Days of Oscar, I decided to record it so that I could rectify the omission of it from my reviews. With this being the 100th anniversary of MGM and TCM doing a retrospective of the studio every Monday, it's not a surprise that Meet Me in St. Louis is one of the films selected. That airing is coming up tomorrow, April 15, at 11:45 AM.

For good reason, Meet Me in St. Louis is thought of as a Christmas movie, that being the debut of the song that's now a Christmas standard, "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas". But two-thirds or more of the film is really not about Christmas. In fact, the movie is set in the run-up to the 1904 World's Fair held in St. Louis, and looks at the life of one family living in St. Louis, the Smiths.

Esther (Judy Garland) is the second oldest of four daughters of Anna (Mary Astor) and upper-middle-class lawyer Lon Sr. (Leon Ames); Lon Jr. is a fairly minor character in the story. As the film opens it's the summer of 1903. The family is thinking somewhat of the exposition coming to their growing city in the final year, but Esther and her elder sister Rose (Lucille Bremer) are both thinking about love. Rose has a beau currently in New York, Warren Sheffield, who is supposed to call long distance that night, which is a big deal for 1903. Rose and Esther are hoping Rose can get Warren to propose marriage to her during that call. Rose, for her part, loves the next-door neighbor, John Truett (Tom Drake), but he doesn't quite seem to notice it yet.

Fast-foward to the autumn, specifically Halloween. The two much younger daughters, Agnes (Joan Carroll) and Tootie (Margaret O'Brien), go out and engage in the sort of tricking that I suppose was done in the days before trick-or-treating. Tootie comes back claiming to have been beaten up by John, which threatens to put a crimp in the budding relationship between him and Esther. But putting a much bigger dent in those plans is one evening when Dad comes home and announces that the firm has given him a "promotion" that requires he transfer to New York. Everyone is going to have to start anew, which is a massive problem for the two eldest daughters. Not only that, but they'll miss the World's Fair!

We move again to winter, which means Christmas. There's a big formal ball coming up for Esther and Rose, but mishaps occur that may make the ball a disaster for the both of them. Also, with Christmas coming up, it means that the family's time in St. Louis is about to end, since the family is supposed to move to New York in the New Year. (I'd have thought they'd be closing up the house by Christmas, not leaving everything to literally the last week. Having moved my father a year ago from the house where he'd lived for almost 50 years, I know how arduous that is.) But, since we're getting to near the end of the TCM's allotted time slot for the movie, we know that a happy ending is about to come. The movie concludes with the spring of 1904, which is really a coda of the family at the exposition, lasting far shorter than the previous three seasons.

It's once again easy to see why audiences of 1944 when the movie was released loved it, flocking to it and making it a huge box-office hit. Released during World War II, it's a nostalgic look back much like some of the Fox musicals I've mentioned favorably here. The Technicolor is lovely, and the songs work for those who like musicals. I'm not the biggest fan of musicals in general or of Judy Garland's vocal stylings in particular; I'd much rather re-watch her in The Clock where she's excellent.

But just because Garland isn't to my personal taste doesn't mean the movie isn't good. A year or two earlier the Academy cut the number of Best Picture nominations from ten to five; if they hadn't I'm certain Meet Me in St. Louis would have been nominated. For anybody who's a fan of musicals, Meet Me in St. Louis should be highly appealing.

Bells Are Ringing

I've got way too many movies on my cloud DVR. A lot of the ones that I recorded off of FXM are coming up again in the FXM rotation, but there's a movie that I hadn't yet gotten around to doing a post on that's coming up on TCM. That movie is Bells Are Ringing, and you can see it tomorrow (January 24) at 5:45 PM on TCM.

The movie opens with an establishing scene about the wonders of something that will be an anachronism to any younger viewer who might happen to stumble across this movie: the professional telephone answering service, a service that could take messages especially for businesses that needed off-hours coverage, but also apparently for wealthy individuals. By the time I was a kid, the telephone answering machine was already coming into vogue, followed by the pager and then ubiquitous voice mail. Nowadays we have call centers that I suppose provide a similar service for large businesses, but this sort of answering service is a thing of the past, much like the party lines in Pillow Talk.

The answering service here is called "Susanswerphone", run by Sue (Jean Stapleton) with a few employees, among them Ella Peterson (Judy Holliday). Ella, in answering the phones, is supposed to be professional, but she's a little too professional, and in the wrong way, as she plays Santa for one client's young child, and tries to help various other clients solve their problems. This latter causes the company to be in a spot of trouble as the authorities think it might be a front for an escort service.

The company does become a front, although unwittingly. Otto Pranz (Eddie Foy, Jr.) is part of the bookie racket, taking bets on horse races. They need to increase volume, so he comes up with the brilliant idea of posing as a record label dealing in classical music, and using composers and works as code words for horses and race-tracks. So when Susanswerphone transmits those messages, the operators will think they're just giving messages about bulk record purchases. It isn't until one of Ella's friends hears her talking about Beethoven's Tenth Symphony -- any classical music fan would know he only wrote nine -- that things start to go wrong in that subplot.

Ella, meanwhile, has "friends", in the sense of the people whose lives she comes to know a bit about on the phone and whom she tries to help out. She gives a dentist the gumption to try his hand at songwriting and suggests a Marlon Brando wannabe (played rather hilariously by Frank Gorshin) dress better. The big one, however, is playwright Jeffrey Moss (Dean Martin). She gives him wake-up calls and disguises her voice as an older mother-type when talking on the phone to him. So when she shows up at his apartment he doesn't recognize her, never having seen her, and doesn't know these two are the same woman. He falls in love with the young Ella, but she doesn't fit into his world -- or so she thinks -- and disappears. Having not given her real name to him is going to make it difficult for him to find her again.

Bells Are Ringing is the sort of musical for people who like musicals. That sort of person is, sadly to say, not me. It's not that I hated Bells Are Ringing, however. It's more that I felt like I was seeing the flaws that come with trying to translate a stage musical to the screen. Most of the musical numbers seem way too artificial and stagebound, and there's nothing in this version of New York that feels like anything less than Hollywood soundstages and the MGM backlot. But, as I said, people who enjoy musicals will easily be able to overlook this stuff. The song "The Party's Over" has also become a standard in the 65 or so years since the stage musical premiered.

So, if I were trying to introduce movie musicals to people who aren't knowledgeable about the genre, I'd pick some other stuff first, likely one of the backstage musicals and/or something from Busby Berkeley. But for musical lovers, this version of Bells Are Ringing is definitely worth seeing.

The Band Wagon

Fred Astaire was another of the stars honored back in August in Summer Under the Stars. I recorded a couple of his movies that I haven't seen before, and one of them is coming up again on the TCM schedule: The Band Wagon, tomorrow (Dec. 6) at noon. With that in mind, I recently watched the movie in order to be able to do a review on it for the upcoming showing.

The movie starts off with an auction, with the auctioneer informing us that they're selling off props used in the films of movie musical star Tony Hunter (that's Fred Astaire, although we don't see him in the opening scene). Nobody really wants to buy the props, however, which is an indication that Tony's time in Hollywood is past. Tony had gotten his start on Broadway, so he heads back to New York, only to find that the place has changed almost beyond recognition in the time since he's left.

Tony has also changed, to the point that nobody much cares that he's coming back to New York, at least not the sort of people who would have been his fans when he left for New York. The only people who care about him, it seems, are a couple of old friends, Lester (Oscar Levant) and Lily Marton (Nanette Fabray). They're good enough friends, and have enough pity, that they've decided the new stage show they've written would be just perfect for Tony to make his return to Broadway. And they've gotten the best director in town, Jeffrey Cordova (Jack Buchanan), except that that's a name Tony doesn't recognize, having been away from New York for so long.

Jeffrey is currently doing an adaptation of Oedipus Rex, and when he finds out that the play the Martons have written is based on the Faust story, he's thrilled with the idea of acting in it, along with Tony. The first problem, however, is that Tony isn't so certain an adaptation of Faust can really work on Broadway. The problems get bigger, however, when Jeffrey does some script doctoring to turn things into a dramatic musical.

Even worse is that turning it into a musical more or less needs bringing in a leading lady, although at least he's able to get the best, in Gabrielle Gerard (Cyd Charisse). Her presence brings more problems, though. She's got a demanding boyfriend/managel, and Gabrielle and Tony are both uncertain whether they'll be able to jell together and whether the other one is better than them. It gets so bad that Tony comes to the conclusion that the show isn't going to work and that perhaps he should withdraw from the troubled production.

Things get even more complicated and nuttier when Tony and Gaby start falling in love with each other despite the age difference and the fact that Gaby already has a boyfriend. But everybody decides that the way to save the show is to turn it into some sort of revue and have a bunch of disconnected musical numbers that sure look nice on the big screen, but make no sense together in terms of plot.

And that's the big problem with The Band Wagon for me. There winds up being too little story, and way too many musical and dance numbers that, like Gene Kelly's cadenza in Singin' in the Rain, don't fit together. Now, to be fair, everybody working on the movie is extremely talented, and in isolation, the muscial numbers are mostly very well done. Fred Astaire even in his mid fifties is a darn talented dancer, helped by the fact that he aged well not having been quite as much a looker when he was making those movies with Ginger Rogers as some other musical stars (Gene Kelly) did in their youth.

The Band Wagon also introduces the song "That's Entertainment", written by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz, while also using a bunch of old songs from the pair. The musical number may not be the most memorable thing, but the song certainly is, and it's unsurprising the song became a standard.

Fans of the Freed Unit musicals from MGM will love The Band Wagon; for those who aren't the biggest fan of musicals, I'd certainly start with Singin' in the Rain instead.

I prefer coffee

Another of the movies that shows up reasonably often on TCM but that I had never seen before is Tea and Sympathy. So, the most recent time it showed up on TCM, I made a point to record it in order to be able to finally watch it and do a review on it here.

The movie starts off with Tom Lee (John Kerr) returning to the boarding school where he had studied several years earlier. For some people, such years were a happy time, but right from the beginning we get the sense that this wasn't the case for Tom. As he goes into his old room, we get the inevitable flashback....

Tom is a young man whose mother died some years back and whose father is one of those people seemingly more married to his work than to his now deceased wife, so Tom winds up getting raised by his maid, which has made him somewhat different from the rest of his classmates. Unsurprisingly, his classmates pick up on this, although he's not really helped in this regard by his father Herb (Edward Andrews), who consistently thinks the point of boarding school is to turn his son into a real man, whatever that means.

In the house where Tom lives, there's a housemaster and housemistress, the husband and wife pair of Bill Reynolds (Leif Erickson) and his wife Laura (Deborah Kerr, no relation to John). Bill is the sort of athletic, on the go man who seems just like the stereotype of someone you would expect to make a man out of a boy. Laura, however, is the only one who seems to have any real understanding of Tom. She sees him as bright and kind and sensitive, and thinks he's just as much of a man as the rest of the people at the school, thinking as well that it's absolutely cruel the way everybody else treats him.

Eventually, Tom decides that there's only one way to prove to everybody that yes, he is a real man, and that's to find a woman and bed her. To that end he sees the local prostitute, Ellie Martin (Norma Crane), but she treats him cruelly as well since he's clearly so naïve about sex. Tom's reaction to this sets the film's climax in motion before the flashback ends and we go back to the present day....

Tea and Sympathy was released in 1956, having been based on a play from a few years earlier, with all three of the film's leads reprising their roles. I haven't seen the stage play, but from what I've read -- it's obvious that where the movie version is dancing around the idea of Tom "being a man", that's really just dealing with the strictures of a Production Code that wouldn't allow the movie to deal with the question of homosexuality. The movie version doesn't dance around things so well, instead hitting the viewer over the head with the central conflict. The stereotypes are so crude that the movie becomes more tedious than sensitive or intelligent.

Some of the reviews I've read suggest that because of the handling of the topic to get around the Production Code, the movie has become dated, while others suggest that homosexuality and gender stereotyping is a timely topic even today. One thing that's decidedly not explored is the stereotypical expectations that gay men have for other gay men. I happen to know a handful of small-l libertarian gays who are extremely uncomfortable with the latter day movement focusing on Ts and Qs to the near exclusion of the LGB portion of the "community" (heck, I wouldn't be surprised if they don't like the idea of an LGBTQ "community" in the first place) or the idea that everything needs to be "queered", because to them "queer" in practice means fitting into a tediously restrictive political worldview.

So in that regard Tea and Sympathy probably is still relevant today, just not in the way a lot of people think. It's just too bad that the movie is too blunt in handling the issues.

The Reluctant Debutante

I've mentioned quite a few times recently about how the streaming movie channel thing has led to me discovering a bunch of movies I'd never heard of. With TCM, on the other hand, it's not surprising that there are movies that I've seen on the TCM schedule a bunch of times, but for one reason or another never got around to recording. Next up is a movie that falls into this second category: The Reluctant Debutante.

The titular reluctant debutante is Jane Broadbent, played by Sandra Dee. She's the daughter of a Brit, Lord James Broadbent (Rex Harrison) and his unseen American first wife. Jane has been living in America since her parents' divorce, but is now coming over to the UK to spend a summer as well as meet her father's new wife, Lady Sheila (Kay Kendall, Rex Harrison's real-life wife who died tragically young of leukemia a year after this movie was made). Dad has no intention of turning his daughter into a debutante, but then there's another woman....

Well, not another woman in that sense. The "other woman" is a friend of Sheila's named Mabel Claremont. Mabel has a daughter Clarissa who's about the same age as Jane, and Mable is about to put her daughter through the whole debutante thing, with coming out parties over the course of a "season" as apparently, it's the done thing for all the upper-crust British girls approaching 18 to go through this gauntlet. Mabel tells Sheila about Clarissa, and naturally expects Sheila and Jane will be doing the same thing. Sheila, apparently feeling class and social pressures, decides to make Jane a debutante without Jane's input into the matter.

Now, part of the point of these parties is to dress up and go to fancy parties in the hopes that the young woman will meet a nice man of the right social class. In this case, that means David Fenner (Peter Myers), a gentleman in every sense of the word, and one who would be able to provide well for whatever woman he marries. Both Sheila and Mabel think he would be perfect for their respective daughters, althogh Jane thinks he's a drip and Jim doesn't want to force his daughter into anything she doesn't really want.

And as you might guess, Jane meets a man more to her own liking. The parents organizing the series of balls have musical accompaniment for the dancing, and the same bands get hired over and over. David Parkson (John Saxon) is the percussionist for one of these bands, and as such he meets a lot of young eligible upper-class women. He and Jane meet and, since they both share a disdain to an extent for society, or at least the artifice that young women have to go through at these balls, they fall in love. This horrifies Sheila, of course. What a scandal it would be to have her stepdaughter marry the wrong guy!

The Reluctant Debutante is a comedy first and foremost, although the sort that has light drama. It's a genre that I think will play better to the sort of people who like the sort of comedy written for the stage, and not just because this is an adaptation of a stage comedy. It's just a bit more refined than a lot of Hollywood comedies, while at the same time not having some of the more artifical characters like the man Charles Boyer played in Barefoot in the Park. So with all that in mind, I have to say that I enjoyed The Reluctant Debutante more than Barefoot in the Park, although I can also understand why some people are going to be less amenable to this sort of comedy.

Rex Harrison unsurprisingly does well in this sort of British upper-crust comedy, while Angela Lansbury is a delight as the pompous antagonist, much like her walk-on part in Dear Heart. Kay Kendall glitters, and it's a huge shame that she died so young. Definitely look out for The Reluctant Debutante if you get the chance to watch it.

Madame Bovary (1949)

I hadn't intended to do posts on two late-1940s literary adaptations in such close proximity following the airing of the British Anna Karenina the other day. But I only realized last night, not having looked closely enough at the TCM schedule, that the 1949 version of Madame Bovary is on tomorrow morning at 8:00 AM. So I made it a point of watching it to do a post on here.

The movie starts off with an establishing story. Gustave Flaubert (James Mason) wrote the novel Madame Bovary in 1856, and the publication of the novel caused a scandal in France, at that time ruled by Napoleon III. Flaubert was put on trial for indecency, where he claimed that the Madame Bovary he was writing about was just the face for a real type of woman in French society. He proceeds to narrate that story....

Flash back to the early life of Emma (Jennifer Jones) before she met Bovary. She went to a convent school that she hated, and realized she wanted the better things in life. But when she grows up and leaves the school, she winds up in the provincial town of Yonville. One day, the town's new doctor, Charles Bovary (Van Heflin) shows up, and he immediately falls in love with Emma. She must think that a doctor will command a good salary, because she marries Charles.

As you can guess from everything that's happened up to this point, Emma and Charles don't live happily ever after. Charles is very much provincial, and thinks he's not particularly a good doctor, so the family isn't well to do. Emma meets the boy next door, Léon Dupuis (Alf Kjellin who was credited as Christopher Kent because MGM must have thought American audiences wouldn't be able to pronounce Kjellin), who is hoping to become a lawyer, a profession which will definitely be for financially rewarding than what Charles is bringing in. By now, Emma is already starting to rack up debts to keep a better lifestyle than Charles can provide her.

The doctor and Emma get invited to a society party in the nearest big city of Rouen, which is where they meet Boulanger (Louis Jourdan). Emma decides he's going to be her lover now that Dupuis has gone off to Paris and Boulange can dance with her the way that Charles definitely can't. Charles is understandably pissed when he sees what his wife's actions are doing to his reputation, but he's powerless to stop it. Emma goes into more debt in order that she may run off to Italy with Boulanger. But Boulanger plays a trick on Emma in that he leaves beforehand so on the appointed night they're supposed to go off together, he's already jilted her.

And now those debts are about to start catching up with her. L'hereux (Frank Allenby) had been lending Emma the money she needed, but he needs money himself, so he sells off the notes to another man who is going to sue if he can't collect. By this time, Emma and Charles have run into Dupuis again, now in Rouen, so Emma thinks she can go back to him to get him to pay off the debts. She doesn't realize that he's still not a lawyer at all, and there's no way he's going to be able to pay off those debts. What options does Emma have left?

Madame Bovary is an example of the sort of film that it was perfect for MGM to make, the period literary drama. MGM always had high production values and a sort of glitter that didn't work for certain genres of movies, as I've mentioned with Johnny Eager or East Side, West Side in the past. But, here, that sort of gloss is exactly what the movie needs in trying to show Emma's living above her means, especially, for example, with the ball where she meets Boulanger. She's wearing a fabulous gown/shawl combination, and there's something about Jourdan and Jones dancing together that looks surprisingly glamorous.

As for the acting, I'm not terribly enamored of the job that Jennifer Jones did, but I though Van Heflin was quite good as the country doctor who sinks into the bottle as the realization begins to dawn on him that he's got a wife he can't support in the way he wants. The supporting roles are handled well enough, although most of them are also relatively small.

I couldn't find a DVD release of Madame Bovary, which is a big surprise, since it was released by MGM, and as a prestige picture, should have been a prime candidate for either a standalone Warner Archive DVD or as part of a box set. It does, however, seem to be on a bunch of streaming services if you can do the streaming thing.

Not the sitcom in Atlanta

There are a couple of movies airing Thursday afternoon that I want to blog about, so I decided to start a day early and mention one of them today and the other tomorrow so that you have enough lead time to watch both. First up is Designing Woman, at 12:15 PM Thursday on TCM.

The movie uses a brief opening narration to introduce us to the dramatis personæ:
Gregory Peck as Mike Hagen, New York sportswriter;
Lauren Bacall as Marilla Brown, fashion designer who has some sort of difficult relationship with Mike;
Dolores Gray as Lori Shannon, Mike's former girlfriend;
Tom Helmore as Zachary, Marilla's ex-boyfriend; and
Mickey Shaughnessy as Maxie, a boxer who relates to all this somehow.

Flashback to how Mike met Marilla. Mike is one of those sportswriters who covers a lot of different sports; one week he gets sent out to Los Angeles to cover a golf tournament. He won big in the writers' betting pool on who would win, and uses that money to get extremely drunk, meeting Marilla the next morning and having no idea who she is. The two start one of those movie romances that you know is going to lead to a marriage much too soon, before they find out they might not be compatible for each other.

Sure enough, they get married, and upon returning home, Mike has to deal with ex-girlfriend Lori, who's been trying to break into the showbusiness world, with at least modest success. But the nature of Mike's telling Lori he's gotten married, followed by Marilla's meeting Mike just after Lori left, leads Marilla to worry about Mike possibly having had a former boyfriend.

The married couple is less-than compatible in other ways; Marilla has all sorts of friends in the hoity-toity theater world and gets hired to do the costumes for a big play. One night Mike tries to have the rotating poker night with his sportswriter friends at the couple's apartment while Marilla has her theater friends over. Needless to say, it doesn't go well.

Marilla also doesn't like Mike's coverage of boxing, since she sees it as a much too violent sport. It's also risky for Mike, as he's doing an exposé on boxing promoter Martin Daylor, who Mike says is in with the Mob and Mike is going to prove it. This prompts Martin to send a bunch of goons to Mike's apartment, led by Lucas McCain doing a Brooklyn accent (er, actually Chuck Connors), telling Mike to knock it off or he's going to get harmed. Mike goes into hiding without telling Marilla the truth, and Martin decides he's going to nab Marilla instead.

A good portion of the plot made me think of the Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn vehicle Woman of the Year, and I'm not the first. That one was a bit better, although I think both it and Designing Woman are not the best movies in any of the stars' catalogs. Dolores Gray is badly cast, while Bacall is not a favorite of mine and comes across a bit bland again. There's also some script problems in that I found it implausible that Marilla would consider a man having had a girlfriend in the past a deal-breaker. That and Mike's not telling Marilla the truth about the danger he faces.

Still, Designing Woman is more or less watchable, and if you're a fan of Lauren Bacall or the theater world, you'll probably like it more than I did. It did get a DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive, although the last time I checked, it's another of those movies that the TCM Shop oddly says is on backorder. Amazon has it on DVD and streaming, I believe.

The Story of Three Loves

One of the movies in the Kirk Douglas tribute on TCM tomorrow that I haven't blogged about before is The Story of Three Loves, which comes on at 10:00 AM.

Douglas doesn't come into the movie until the third act, but that's be design, since as you might have guessed from the title, this movie is an anthology of three love stories, with the hook tying the three together being that the men in the love stories are all traveling on the same transatlantic liner to the United States.

First up is James Mason, in a story called "The Jealous Lover". He plays Charles Coutray, a choreographer and producer. His love is a tragic one, being involved with ballerina Paula Woodward (Moira Shearer). Or maybe I should say ex-ballerina, since she has a heart condition that is supposed to keep her from dancing. But she's so desperate to dance that she runs off to Charles and does a tremendous dance for him. Too tremendous, in fact.

The scene then goes to young boy Ricky Nelson, playing Thomas Campbell. He had a French governess named Mademoiselle (played by Leslie Caron; "Mademoiselle" is also the title of this segment), who was taking care of him while his family was in Rome. He couldn't handle the French poetry and irregular verbs that Mademoiselle was trying to make him learn. On a dare from another American, he goes to see alleged witch Hazel (Ethel Barrymore), who gives him a special ribbon that turns him into an adult for one night (Farley Granger), a night on which he falls in love with Mademoiselle.

Finally, we get to Kirk Douglas, in a story called "Equilibrium". Kirk plays Pierre Narval, a French trapeze artist who is no longer doing his routine because it was an extremely daring one. Too daring, in fact, as it killed his previous partner. But then he meets Nina (Pier Angeli) and thinks she'd be perfect as his new partner. This even though she knows nothing about the trapeze and has a tragic past of her own, having lost her husband in World War II and having tried to commit suicide as a result. Still, Pierre trains Nina and the two fall in love along the way. But then the time comes for the two to do their most daring stunt without a net....

Anthology films are quite often uneven because each story is self-contained, and naturally some stories are going to be more interesting than others. For me, I found that The Story of Three Loves had a different problem. It was made in nice Technicolor at MGM, and all three stories are very competently filmed. But to me the movie kept having that MGM touch that I've described before where everything seems a little too perfect, winding up cold and sterile instead of full of vitality. Some point out that "The Jealous Lover" has an obvious comparison to The Red Shoes, and to be honest I've never been a fan of The Red Shoes either (not that it's bad, just that I find it a difficult watch). Leslie Caron isn't my favorite actress, so for me the Kirk Douglas story is the best of the three.

But I'm sure that other people will like The Story of Three Loves more than I did, considering how professionally made it is. The movie is available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, so if you can't catch the TCM showing, you can still watch and judge for yourself.

Yolanda and the Thief

Er, not that Yolanda....

Another of my recent movie watches was the Fred Astaire musical Yolanda and the Thief.

Fred is obviously not Yolanda; that honor goes to Lucile Bremer. She plays Yolanda Aquaviva, the daughter in a very rich family in the Latin American country of Patria, who is the heir to a fortune when she reaches her majority. That's just about to happen, as she's graduating from a convent school to go back and live with her Aunt Amarilla (Mildred Natwick) who has been the custodian of the fortune. Unfortunately, Yolanda has spent so much time in the convent school that she knows next to nothing about the big wide world out there.

Enter Astaire. He's Johnny Riggs, on a train in Patria together with his friend and partner-in-crime Victor Trout (Frank Morgan). He reads a newspaper about the newest head of the Aquaviva family, which of course gives him the idea of parting her from some of that fortune. Of course, every man in Patria knows the Aquavivas, it seems, and their wealth allows them to run it and be sort of above the law.

Johnny and Victor go to the front gate of the Aquaviva mansion and when Johnny is able to get on the grounds, he finds that Yolanda is having a crisis. She's obviously devoutly Catholic what with this being 1940s Latin America and her having spent all that time in the convent school, so she's praying to an angel statue, and that's where Johnny gets his idea: he's going to pretend to be Yolanda's guardian angel!

This being an MGM musical with Fred Astaire in the starring role, and thanks to the Production Code, you know that Johnny isn't going to get away with fleecing Yolanda, so there have to be complications. One is that Johnny finds himself beginning to like Yolanda, even though he's trying to get her to sign over power of attorney to him. The other complication is a Mr. Candle (Leon Ames), who takes the satchel containing Yolanda's stocks and bonds after Johnny drops it on Victor's head, knocking Victor out. He seems to know a lot more than he's letting on.

To be honest, the story in Yolanda and the Thief is a bit tedious and much too slow. The is made up for by the dance numbers, which are exceedingly colorful, especially the "Coffee Time" number near the end. There's another dance number in the middle that dance fans will like, but I felt went on much too long. And Bremer is miscast, being much too old for the role. Having the film depend on her naivete is also a mistake, as there certainly would have been a transition period before Yolanda was given full control over the family fortune.

Yolanda and the Thief is one of those movies you probably need to watch for yourself and come to your own opinion on. It wasn't my cup of tea, but it may be yours.

Goodbye Charlie

One of the movies in the current FXM rotation that I haven't blogged about before is Goodbye Charlie. It's going to be on again tomorrow at 11:15 AM and again at 7:45 AM Friday.

The movie starts off with Charlie, who isn't really seen as he's partying with a bunch of other people on the yacht of wealthy movie producer Sir Leopold Sartori (Walter Matthau). Eventually, Charles goes into Mrs. Sartori's cabin and starts putting the moves on her, leading Sir Leopold to go below decks and shoot Charlie, who falls out the porthole into the ocean, obviously dying in the process although since he's lost at sea his body isn't found.

George Tracy (Tony Curtis) was one of Charlie's best friends, and is now living in France as a writer. However, Charlie had named George as the executor of his will, and Charlie's manager Morton (Martin Gabel) wants George to speak at the memorial service, so George comes from nine time zones away to fulfill his solemn duty. Unfortunately, George was also one of Charlie's only friends, as there's only him and two women at the memorial service. Charlie, you see, was a real smooth operator who used and dumped women like tissue paper.

George is going to be in the Los Angeles area for some time settling the estate, which is a mess since Charlie was effectively broke, but George is able to live in Charlie's beach house. That night, after the memorial service, a man comes knocking with an obvious emergency. Bruce Minton (Pat Boone) is a wealthy heir living in another beach house up the coast, and as he was driving to see his mother he ran across a naked and incoherent woman. The most Bruce could make out is that the woman wanted to be dropped off at Charlie's house; presumably she was one of Charlie's many ex-girlfriends.

Except that she regains her identity overnight, and realizes she's not in fact one of Charlie's ex-girlfriends, but Charlie himself, reincarnated as a woman (played by Debbie Reynolds). Charlie is none too pleased at first, knowing how he treated women, and George doesn't believe it anyway until Charlie tells George too many personal things that only Charlie could have known. And eventually, Charlie, if he's not exactly comfortable being a woman, at least figures he can put his womanly body to good use, what with those breasts and sex appeal.

Although Charlie has been reincarnated as a woman, he obviously hasn't learned anything from the whole experience of getting shot, as his plans are to use the womanly form to get close to men and blackmail them, having Charlie's knowledge of everything he did to women. Charlie does need money, after all, even if this isn't a particularly honest way of going about getting it.

Complications arise, however, when Bruce shows up again, having been captivated by this woman that he doesn't realize is actually a former man. Bruce could even marry the new Charlie, and while Charlie might like Bruce's money, he still doesn't want to be a wife till death does them part. There's also Sartori and the question of what will happen to Charlie if Sartori ever learns the truth or the new Charlie releases any information about Sartori.

Goodbye Charlie is a movie with a very funny premise, but one with doesn't quite live up to the potential of its premise. I think the problem is that both of the leads are miscast. In a movie without a gender-bender premise, it would be Tony Curtis who's the unctuous manipulator, not the Reynolds character. Curtis doesn't work so well as the straight man to such an operator. Reynolds, for her part, is entirely the wrong actress to be playing manipulative; I'm not certain who had both the comic chops and the reputation to pull it off at that point in the 1960s. Goodbye Charlie also goes on too long at just a shade under two hours.

As always, however, it's the sort of movie where you may want to watch and judge for yourself. In addition to the upcoming FXM showings, it's available on DVD if you want to watch it that way.