24 Hours to Kill

Mickey Rooney was TCM's Star of the Month back in December 2024, and as I've mentioned I recorded several of his movies. One that I failed to record, or else I would have recorded it then and written up a post for a subsequent airing that I did in fact record, was 24 Hours to Kill. At any rate, having watched what I'd recorded from the Star of the Month tribute, I eventually got around to watching this one to to write up this review.

Mickey Rooney plays Norman Jones, who works as part of the crew for an airline that flies between Europe and Asia, although notably not having any flights to Beirut for reasons that will become clear not too far into the movie. The current flight is piloted by Jamie Faulker (Lex Barker), who has a back story of his own in that he's got a wife, is carrying on an affair with one of the stewardesses, and the stewardess isn't certain whether the relationship should continue.

One of the engines in the plane goes out, which sucks, but airplanes in the jet era have been designed to work with one of the engines going out. However, a second engine goes out as well, which is going to necessitate an emergency landing. This landing is in... Beirut, and is also going to require a 24-hour stopover so that the plane can be repaired and the flight can continue. Remember, the airline doesn't fly to Beirut so it's not as if they've got another plane there that can take off instead and require less flight juggling.

Now here is one of the first plot holes: the bad guys seem to figure out almost immediately that Jones is on the flight as they start following him to the hotel. Malouf (Walter Slezak) has sent them to the airport to figure out where the crew is going to be staying during the stopover. As you might well guess, Jones and Malouf have a past together, one that Jones has been trying to escape. You'd think he should just hole up in the hotel room, but no. Worse, he's dishonest with Jamie as to what that past entailed.

Jones had worked for a different airline in the past that did in fact fly to and from Beirut, and he worked with Malouf to smuggle stuff into and out of Lebanon. Norman claims that Malouf tried to double cross him, which is why he quit the airline and started working for one that expressly didn't fly to Beirut. (Another plot hole: couldn't Malouf have someone go after Norman outside of Lebanon?) In fact, Norman is the one who double-crossed Malouf. So Malouf wants his henchmen to force Norman to pay up. They're also willing to go after other members of the crew in order to put pressure on Norman, leading to an abduction and the climax....

The big drawing card for 24 Hours to Kill is that it was filmed mostly on location in Beirut as it was back in the mid-1960s when it was a relative oasis in a dreary Arab world, before the civil war that started in 1975 destroyed the country. The locations are relatively nice, except that the film used the Techniscope process that isn't quite as crisp as some other formats. Much worse, however, is the plot which is slow and full of plot holes, making 24 Hours to Kill rather a disappointment.

The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm

Tomorrow, February 13 is the start of this year's 31 Days of Oscar on TCM, with the schedule looking like it's being done by themes this year. The first morning starts off with several fantasy-type movies, with different types of fantasic material. Among the movies is The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, at 7:45 AM.

Now, as you probably know, brothers Wilhelm (played here by Laurence Harvey) and Jakob (played by Karlheinz Böhm) Grimm were a pair of brothers in the German-speaking lands in the first half of the 19th century who today are best known for their compilations of fairy tales from various parts of the German-language area. (Remember also that Germany was not a unified country at this time.) They did more, however, such as write books on German grammar and start an etymological dictionary of German, in part because it took a while for the fairy tale books to sell. The original versions of the tales, after all, were decidedly dark and not quite for children.

In this version of their lives, the two are working for a duke (Oscar Homolka) who is interested in having a biography of his family line written because the duke wishes to impress the king of Prussia. This at least gives the two brothers and Wilhelm's wife Dorothea (Claire Bloom) a place to stay while they're trying to sell their other books at Stossel's (Walter Slezak) book store. Meanwhile, a wealthier family from closer to Berlin comes to visit with adult daughter Greta (Barbara Eden), who falls in love with Jakob except that Jakob and especially Wilhelm are too much into those fairy tales.

That backstory takes up about half of the movie, with the other half consisting of three fairy tales -- lesser-known ones, which was a deliberate choice on the part of the moviemakers because they wanted stories the audience would be less likely to know the ending to, as well as many of the better-known ones already having been done by Disney. This also enabled the moviemakers to have a cast with a lot of guest stars if you will, each of whom only appeared in one of the stories. The first one, which Wilhelm tells to his own children, is The Dancing Princess. Jim Backus plays a king with a daughter (Yvette Mimieux) who loves to dance at night. Russ Tamblyn plays a man who, with the help of an invisibility cloak, is abble to discover the daughter's secret.

Later, Wilhelm wants to convince his publisher that there are people out there who would buy the books, so he brings in a bunch of kids and tells them the story of The Cobbler and the Elves about a cobbler (Harvey himself) whose elves come to life at night, aided by the special effects of George Pal.

Finally, as part of a plot point that has the brothers traveling to get information on an obscure branch of the family, Wilhelm runs into an old lady in the middle of the woods (Martita Hunt) who tells the story of The Singing Bone. Nobleman Sir Ludwig (Terry-Thomas) and his servant Hans (Buddy Hackett) find a magical dragon in a cave, with Hans killing the dragon. Ludwig tries to take credit for it, but the titular singing bone tells the real truth of what happened.

The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm was filmed in Cinerama, and the print TCM ran is in the "smilebox" format which is supposed to simulate the curved screen that the Cinerama movies were originally projected onto. To me, it's always seemed as though the smilebox is a bit too exaggerated. Yes, there was some curvature, and people would mostly be farthest away from the middle section (considering vertical sections) of the screen, but the photographs I've seen don't look as curved as what the smilebox gives us. Cinerama also had serious issues where panoramas looked good -- and the location photography here is quite good -- but not suited to the sorts of closeups needed for traditional narrative storytelling. The "real life" sequences here are by far the weakest part of the movie. Ultimately, we get a bit too much of the back-story to be really interesting to children. That's a shame, because the three fairy tales aren't that bad.

So overall, I think The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm is an ambitious project that falls a bit short of its intended goal, but a movie that's still worth watching if you haven't seen it before.

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.

The Yellow Cab Man

Tonight's final night of TCM's Star of the Month salute to Red Skelton includes a pair of movies that are already on my DVR, although I'm only doing a post on one of them today. That movie is The Yellow Cab Man, which you can see at 9:45 PM.

The opening credits are done somewhat differently, with the names of the cast printed on, well, plaster casts. Those casts are worn by a character named Red Pirdy (Red Skelton) who, as you might guess, is accident-prone, to the point that insurance companies don't want to insure him. After the credits, he's trying to carry an oversized cuckoo clock down the sidewalks, when he accidentally starts crossing the street when the traffic has the right of way, not the pedestrians. This causes him to get hit by a taxicab from the Yellow Cab Co.

Now, Red is an honest, and inconceivably stupid man, so he's open about the accident being entirely his fault. Ellen Goodrich (Gloria De Haven) works for the cab company's insurer, an she tries to get Red to sign a waiver. Also showing up is a lawyer, Martin Creavy (Edward Arnold), who seems to have a way of committing insurance fraud and realizes he can use Red to make a ton of money, or so he thinks. Well, he will have that chance, but in a completely different way.

As part of Red's seeing Ellen and Creavy, Red reveals that not only is he one of those tinkering inventors who nowadays would be the target of those scammy commercials about getting a patent for your invention. But because of Red's stupidity, he also mentions that he's invented, but not yet patented, something called Elastiglass, which I suppose isn't that much of an invention since things like Plexiglas/Perspex and Lucite had been invented a good decade before the movie was released. Elastiglass is, like those other acrylics, shatter-proof and therefore much safer than traditional glass.

Ellen, and the executives at Yellow Cab, think that installing safer glass would be a good thing for the cab company's insurance bills, and hiring Red wouldn't be a bad PR move either. Martin, for his part, sees dollar signs if he can get the formula out of Red's mind. To that end, Martin hires a quack psychiatrist named Dokstedder (Walter Slezak) who uses drugs and hypnosis to try to obtain the formula. Murder is also involved, leading to a madcap climax.

I'm guessing that The Yellow Cab Man was conceived as a way for MGM to use Red Skelton's brand of physical comedy and sight gags. There's certainly a lot of that in the movie. Unfortunately, they didn't bother to come up with an intelligent enough script. Red is just way too stupid, to the point that you wonder how he's been able to live independently as an adult, never mind the concussions. The bad guys are cartoonishly bad, although I suppose that befits the cartoonish nature of the whole film. But to me it often came across more as grating than as working well.

Once Upon a Honeymoon

When the US entered World War II in December 1941, Hollywood joined the war effort, and there were a lot of films from 1942 that give the feeling of either being rushed into production or as though events of the day overtook the events of the film. One such movie that made a bit more sense to me as I was thinking about people in Hollywood wanting to do their part for the war effort is Once Upon a Honeymoon.

The story opens in Vienna in early 1938. As always, if you know your history this was the time when Austria "decided" (not that they had much choice) to merge with Nazi Germany in what is known as the Anschluß. The movie begins just before Austria voted itself out of existence, and surprisingly there are ex-pats who seem oblivious to what's going on. Namely, that's Kathie O'Hara (Ginger Rogers), a showgirl from Philadelphia who wound up in Vienna and fell in love with a German Baron, von Luber (Walter Slezak) and is planning to marry him in spite of the political situation.

Someone more clued in to the political situation is American correspondent Patrick O'Toole (Cary Grant), and his nominal job is to get an interview with O'Hara because of the wedding. Kathie is famously not giving any interviews, so O'Toole has to get up to all sorts of ruses. The baron, however, is wise to all of this. Meanwhile, the political merger is completed, and the baron is called off to business in Prague, capital of the then still independent Czechoslovakia. Kathie obviously goes with him, while O'Toole follows.

History tells us that the Czech part of Czechoslovakia was the next to fall, with the Sudetenland being annexed outright in the fall of 1938 and the rest of Bohemia and Moravia becoming a protectorate in early 1939 with Slovakia being a nominally independent puppet state. After all these events, von Luber goes off to... Poland! Baroness von Luber and O'Toole follow, with O'Toole finally having figured out that wherever the Baron goes, another country is bound to fall, and that the Baron is obviously a no-good Nazi. But can O'Toole get Kathie to become a good American and turn on the Baron?

Obviously, since the movie was released in 1942, you know that Kathie is going to wise up and do her part for her country, although with the number of countries that fall to the Nazis, she's also going to have to do quite a bit of moving around Europe with her husband. O'Toole, meanwhile, is trying to figure out how to expose the true nature of the shadowy Baron. Along the way, O'Toole and O'Hara get mistaken for Jews and sent to the Warsaw ghetto, and then get directly get clued in to American intelligence when they're in Paris.

I read quite a few negative reviews of Once Upon a Honeymoon, and it's easy enough to see why somebody would draw that conclusion about the movie. Much in the same way that the characters have to wing it in moving around Europe, so it feels tht the screenwriters were writing as events dictated, even though everything that happened in the movie would have been a good two years before the movie actually started filming (IMDb says filming started in June 1942, which is a good six months after Pearl Harbor).

It's also definitely not the best film any of the principals involved with the movie made, although I'd also say it's decidedly not the worst. It's just a bit of a mess because it feels like the morale boost is the thing here, above and beyond any story line, which is a bit of a shame, because there are movies out there which do a much better job of giving a great story first and then the morale boost (To Be or Not to Be comes to mind).