The Thin Man Goes Home

Myrna Loy is the Star of the Month on TCM for October, presumably because of her well-known association with the horror genre that's appropriate for Halloween. Or maybe not. Anyhow, six of her movies were part of the Thin Man series with Willam Powell, and unsurprisingly TCM are showing all six of them in a row, tonight in prime time. The fifth movie in the series, The Thin Man Goes Home, comes up overnight at 3:30 AM.

Nick Charles (William Powell again) grew up in a typical-for-Hollywood small town called Sycamore Springs, where his father Bertram (Harry Davenport) is a prominent research doctor hoping to get the money to build a new hospital with more laboratory space for him. You'd think Dr. Bertram would be old enough to retire, but he still works and his wife (Lucile Watson) is alive, the two of them living with maid Hilda who seems obnoxiously nervous all the time.

Nick and Nora (Myrna Loy, again) are returning with Asta, but not with their son who was conceived at the end of the second or third movie, the excuse being that the son is in kindergarten and Nick and Nora don't want to disturb that. Just running off and leaving him with the hired help, is, however, perfectly OK apparently. Nick has father issues, or perhaps it's Dad who has Nick issues, as Dad isn't too happy about Nick's drinking and being a police detective. But in one of this film's running jokes, Nick has given up drinking for the duration, since the film was made in 1944 at the height of World War II.

And with the war on, it's unsurprising that the murder that Nick winds up investigating is going to involve the war effort, although that's not totally revealed until the end of the film. The first night Nick and Nora are in Sycamore Springs, a man shows up at the house and wants to see Nick, only to get shot for his troubles. Obviously not by Nick, although that might make for a more interesting movie. The man in question is Peter Berton, a young but not very talented artist. In fact, Nora buys one of Berton's paintings not knowing it's by the guy who got shot in Dr. Charles' living room.

As you might guess, there are several suspects. Berton was seeing a young woman, Laura Ronson (Gloria DeHaven) although Laura's father Sam (Minor Watson) doesn't exactly like Peter as a suitable romantic match for Laura. Meanwhile, when Nick goes to the auto camp where Peter is staying to investigate Peter's death, he gets hit over the head by Crazy Mary (Anne Revere). He doesn't seem to suffer much of a concussion, however. Then there's Crump (Donald Meek), the art store owner who deals Berton's paintings, as well as the Draques, who had purchased one of Berton's paintings. There's a fairly convoluted mystery that Nick solves, bringing together all of the suspects for the final reveal that this time is a bit self-referential as Nora explains to the local police how Nick brings everyone together and how these reveals generally go.

I found The Thin Man Goes Home a rather weak entry in the series. Part of it is that the murder doesn't happen until a third of the way into the movie, and it seems unlikely that anybody would be able to put all the pieces together to solve this one. The humor isn't as funny as you might expect from a Thin Man movie, with the portion before Nick and Nora arrive in Sycamore Springs as well as every scene involving Hilda being particular weak points.

Still, the movie was a success because fans were so happy to see Nick and Nora Charles back together, and it is still William Powell and Myrna Loy.

Reckless

Another of the movies that TCM ran during Mickey Rooney's turn as TCM's Star of the Month because it had a small juvenile role for Rooney is Reckless.

Rooney is obviously not the star here; he only gets about one scene. The male lead is William Powell. Powell plays Ned Riley, a professional gambler and promoter. As the movie opens, an old lady is coming out of his office. That's Granny (May Robson), who is not Ned's grandmother but the grandmother of Broadway star Mona Leslie (Jean Harlow), who at this point is as well known for the antics she's getting into off-stage as well as what she does on stage. Granny is there to ask for Ned's help in getting Mona bailed out of jail. We also learn that Ned has known Mona since she was a kid, and has done some behind-the-scenes help in making Mona famous.

Ned is able to get Mona out of jail under extenuating circumstances, which is that she leave to go to a theater where she's going to perform a charity function. That's a ruse, but not on Ned's part. Insted, the "charity" in question is the "Society for the Admiration of Mona Leslie", which has one member: Bob Harrison (Franchot Tone). Bob is one of those idle rich playboys whose using his wealth in all the wrong ways, much to the consternation of his father (Henry Stephenson). Even though Ned has secretly always loved Mona, he's not going to try to stop Bob from pursuing Mona. Bob keeps taking Mona out on his yacht, and the two have nice times together. Ned finally works up the courage to tell Mona how he really feels about her, only to find out that she's fallen asleep.

And then Bob and Mona get incredibly drunk and run out of town to get married somewhere where nobody will find them, except that of course the press does find them as well as a bunch of Bob's friends and family who send them telegrams, including one from a Jo. The new couple rushes back to the Harrison home, where Mona meets Jo (Rosalind Russell). Jo has been Bob's nominal fiancée for quite some time, but it feels like another of those upper-crust relationships where the older generation just knows which families should be brought together for the next marriage. Bob likes Jo as a friend, and Jo is a decent person who likes Mona. (Mona, for her part, is trying to be a decent person, although her reputation precedes her.)

At this point, the movie really starts taking a turn. Jo gets married, Bob gets drunk enough to start thinking that perhaps he should have married Jo all along, and Mona finds out that Bob's been letting this on to Jo. She's also gotten pregnant with Bob's kid. Eventually, a drunk Bob winds up in Ned's hotel apartment, finds Ned's gun, and shoots himself in a way that everybody in the public thinks Mona is responsible, to the point that she should be forced to give custody of the kid to the Harrisons.

Reckless is an odd little movie because of the way it changes tone in the middle of the movie from what seems like a light romantic triangle comedy into a fairly ridiculous melodrama. A lot of people have criticized the casting of Jean Harlow as not being right for the role, and Harlow herself wasn't sure. Harlow does her best, as do everybody else. And the problems with Reckless aren't really because of the casting of Harlow. Instead, I think the problems it has are down to the script, which really is a mess as it veers from one act of the plot to the next. The comic parts are better than the melodrama, with May Robson shining.

Still, Reckless is interesting to watch to see as the sort of misfire a studio could have when it used its contract players in the wrong way.

Shadow of the Thin Man

TCM has certain marathons they like to do in conjunction with New Year's, either New Year's Eve or New Year's Day. One of those marathons is to run all six of the Thin Man movies in succession. This time, that marathon is on the morning and afternoon of January 1, together with two more William Powell/Myrna Loy movies that are not Thin Man movies. Seeing this, and seeing one of the movies in the series showing up not too long ago, I recorded that movie: Shadow of the Thin Man, so that I could do a post for the upcoming airing. That airing is tomorrow (Jan. 1) at 2:45 PM.

Shadow of the Thin Man is the fourth film in the series, so after Nick Charles (William Powell) get Nora (Myrna Loy) pregnant which, if memory serves, happened at the end of the second film. The kid, Nicky (Dickie Hall), is now three our four years old, and living in San Francisco with is parents in the sort of house that I wonder how the heck a retired police detective could afford. (If memory serves, the excuse is that Nora comes from money.) Nick takes little Nicky to the park and instead of reading a fairy tale reads from the Racing Form. It's a sign that Nick is still into betting on the ponies. He's also still into drinking, as we'll see later in the film although it's exactly a big plot point.

The Charles family is planning on going to the racetrack, but on the way they get passed by a phalanx of police motorcycles accompanying somebody. That somebody turns out to be a police ambulance, as there's been a murder at the racetrack. Not only that, but the murder victim is one of the jockeys. As you might guess, police lieutenant Abrams (Sam Levene) would like Nick to help, but Nick is reluctant. Also as you might guess, Nick eventually does get involved, and everybody winds up being a suspect -- well, not quite everybody as Nora and little Nicky certainly aren't suspects.

The murder of a jockey is presumed to be because of corruption in horse racing, some sort of corruption that the jockey might have been about to reveal or some other such shenanigans. Link Stephens is behind the west coast syndicate, and one of his underlings, Whitey Barrow (Alan Baxter). Working for Stephens and not realizing what he's really doing is secretary Molly (Donna Reed). She's engaged to crusading reporter Paul Clark (Barry Nelson), and when part of the investigation involves a record book and a possible list of some sort, Molly gives Paul her key to the office so he can do some surreptitious investigation. However, he's caught out, and the person who catches him gets murdered by an unseen third party. Paul is understandably the prime suspect in this murder even though we know he's innocent of the killing.

There are other suspects, such as Claire (Stella Adler), the sugar baby who is being blackmailed, and a third killing along the way. As for who's doing the killing and why, Nick brings all the suspects to Lt. Abrams' office for the finale, where he reveals who the killer is. Or, should we say, the killer outs himself as is a trope in these movies.

Shadow of the Thin Man is entertaining enough. It's not quite as good as the original Thin Man movie, but audiences of the day probably didn't care since they didn't have access to the previous movies the way we do today. For them, the continuing antics of Nick, Nora, and Asta were worth the price of admission while the mystery is, if not beside the point, almost a bit of a macguffin. That said, the mystery is, like a Murder, She Wrote episode, adequate, with the rest of the movie providing sufficient entertainment.

Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid

William Powell was selected as part of TCM's Summer Under the Stars last August, and there aren't quite as many of his movies that I haven't seen before, in large part because he did a lot of work at Warner Bros. before moving to MGM in 1934, and the movies from both of those studios show up on TCM a lot. (However, I don't think I've done posts on the last four Thin Man movies.) A movie Powell made at Universal after World War II was one of the movies TCM ran, so I recorded that: Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid.

The movie opens at the office of psychiatrist Dr. Harvey. Mrs. Peabody (Irene Hervey) is in the office, but she's not the one in need of psychiatric help. That would be her husband, Mr. Peabody (William Powell), who's sitting out in the waiting room. Mrs. Peabody tells the good doctor that her husband fell in love with a mermaid. Unsurprisingly, the doctor thinks that sort of delusion is a reason in and of itself for a man to see a psychiatrist: there is no such thing as a mermaid, and if a man thinks he's fallen in love with one, well that's a sign something's wrong with him. So bring Mr. Peabody into the office and let him tell the story, which of course is also the cue for one more highly original flashback....

Mr. Peabody has just turned 50 and is going through a mid-life crisis, although I don't know if they used that term back in the day. Not only that, but being a New Englander and winter coming on, Mr. Peabody got sick and was laid up in bed for quite some time with a bad case of influenza. Since the Peabodys are wealthy enough that they can just go to down to the Caribbean for the entire winter at the drop of a hat, they do precisely this, on an island called St. Hilda that isn't yet the site of much tourism, even though there's a resort there (character actor Clinton Sundberg plays the PR man for the resort).

On one of Peabody's first days in the place they've rented, he looks out over the sea where there's a little cay just across the way where nobody lives. However, Mr. Peabody is surprised to hear music. A subplot includes a singer Cathy (Andrea King) who is also vacationing on the island, and Mrs. Peabody thinking her husband may be having an affair with her. But it's not Cathy doing the singing, so Mr. Peabody rents a boat and heads over to the island, which is where he finds the music coming from a mermaid, whom he names Lenore (Ann Blyth). Mr. Peabody brings Lenore back to the place he's renting.

But as with most mermaid movies, you have to keep the fish part of the mermaid wet or else the mermaid is going to wind up in a very bad way. Mr. Peabody first puts Lenore in the bathtub, but of course Mrs. Peabody sees the mermaid's tail (although not the human half of Lenore). This causes all sorts of complications to ensue, although as we know the Peabodys wind up back home in New England to meet with the psychiatrist.

Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid isn't exactly a bad movie, but it doesn't feel as good as other mermaid movies, notably Miranda. Something is missing, but I can't exactly put my finger on what that something is. Still, it's the sort of movie that's definitely worth one watch at least.

The Heavenly Body

I've got another bunch of movies that are on my DVR coming up in fairly rapid succession on TCM. Thankfully, this time the first one gets an early morning airing while the other two are in prime time, so I don't have to start blogging about them too far in advance. The first one is part of a day of the films of Hedy Lamarr: The Heavenly Body, at 8:00 AM tomorrow (Nov. 8).

You could say that the title is a play on words, as Hedy Lamarr herself was one of the beauties of Hollywood. But the title also refers to an actual body up in the firmament. William Powell is the male lead here, playing William Whitley, an astronomer whose work, as makes sense, keeps him up at night since you can't really go to an observatory and make astronomical observations while the sun is shining. So he gets home from work and has his dinner just as everybody else is getting up and having their breakfast.

This everybody else includes William's long-suffering wife Vicki (that's Hedy Lamarr, as if you couldn't tell). She really wants her husband to take a vacation from work (never mind that there's a war going on; the movie was released in early 1944 and the war will become a plot point). He can't however, because he's got something big coming up. He's discovered a new comet, and if he's done the calculations correctly the comet is going to smash into the Moon -- as the Moon has no atmosphere even smaller meteors aren't going to burn up the way they might when they're approaching Earth. That impact is coming up soon, and William has to go to the observatory to do a presentation on it at the exact moment the comet is going to hit. (In reality, I don't think we had powerful enough telescopes at the time to see such an impact, but I could certainly be wrong on that.)

Worse for William is that his wife gets his astronomy mixed up with astrology. Astronomy is, of course, real science, while astrology is anything but. And if it got out that an astronomer was married to a woman who actually believed that nonsense, well, imagine the embarrassment for poor William. But this was the 1940s, when women were still mostly housewives and passed their days gossiping over the back fence, or at least that's what Hollywood would have us believe. And Vicki's neighbor, the widow Potter (Spring Byington), believes in astrology. She takes Vicki to her personal astrologer, Miss Sibyll (Fay Bainter), who gives Vicki the horoscope that she's going to meet a romantic stranger.

And wouldn't you know it, but a strange man stops by the Whitley place the next night while William is at work. That man is Lloyd Hunter (James Craig), who is the local air-raid warden. He looks fit, but he was a war correspondent who covered stories in all sorts of exotic places before getting injured and being reduced to supporting the war effort on the home front. Unsurprisingly, Vicki thinks this is the exotic stranger she was destined to meet, while William is understandably jealous.

Of course, the Production Code rather dictates the outcome of a movie like The Heavenly Body, and that's part of the problem with the movie. With a film like Grandma's Boy that I blogged about yesterday, you also know who's going to wind up with the girl at the end. But in that case, there's a clearly designed bad guy to root against. Lloyd isn't really a bad guy, and there's no good reason for Vicki to have a true dilemma. It also doesn't help that the humor tries too hard to be zany, and really shows that.

The Heavenly Body isn't exactly a bad movie, but it's another one where it definitely wouldn't be the sort of movie I'd show to non-movie buffs to try to get them intrested in any of the film's stars.

The first Academy Awards

If you've ever looked at lists of Academy Award winners, you may recall that the first winner of the Best Actor Oscar is listed as Emil Jannings, usually for The Way of All Flesh. Unfortunately, The Way of All Flesh is presumed lost with the exception of one scene. However, in that first edition of the awards, the acting awards were technically supposed to be for an actor's body of work over that "season", the "seasons" running from August through July much like later TV seasons. (Note also that up until 1934, the lists give two years, eg. 1927-1928, for the period in question.) Jannings was also the lead in another movie that helped him win that Oscar, and that movie survives: The Last Command.

Jannings plays Sergius Alexander, who at the start of the movie is a Russian émigré in Hollywood taking work as an extra. Director Leo Andreyev (William Powell in an early role, unmistakable since he already has that moustache) is also an émigré, and is looking for someone to play the part of a Russian general. He sees Sergius, and realizes that Sergius would be perfect for the role, in part because Sergius was a general before the Revolution. Indeed, we're about to get that back story....

In one of Hollywood's most original plot devices, we get Yet Another Flashback, this time to the era of the Russian Revolution. Sergius isn't just a general; he's a Grand Duke and a cousin of tsar Nicholas II who of course would be executed a few months after the action of the flashback, so Sergius wouldn't exactly be liked by the communists. But he's not near Saint Petersburg with the tsar and his family; instead, he's out in the field commanding troops. An acting troupe is also traveling around Russia to entertain the troops, but a couple of Sergius' men inform him that two of the troupe at least are revolutionaries: the aforementioned Leo, and Leo's companion Natasha (Evelyn Brent).

With a revolution on, Sergius should probably have the two killed, but he makes the serious mistake of letting them live, in part to torment them and in part because Natasha is pretty. It's a big mistake, because they're not going to return the favor of leniency. Well, at least Leo isn't. Natasha finds herself falling in love with Sergius, so she keeps looking for reasons to keep Sergius alive even as the Bolsheviks close in. Now, of course we know that Sergius survives since he has to wind up in Hollywood (as does Leo), but how do the stories of these three characters play out?

Reading up on the reviews of The Last Command, it seems that it has acclaim from those in the know as a masterpiece. I personally wouldn't rate it quite so high, although it's definitely a darn good movie and one that's worth a watch. The story may be a bit unrealistic, but that doesn't take away from the fine acting.

The Key (1934)

Another of the box sets that I picked up some time back is a four-film set of William Powell at Warner Bros., films he made before going over to MGM in 1934 and becoming a really big star with Myrna Loy and The Thin Man. At any rate, the last of the movies Powell made at Warner Bros, and the last of the four I watched off the set, is The Key.

The movie is set in Dublin in 1920, which if you know your history you'll know was during Ireland's war of independence from the United Kingdom. The British Army was brought in to try to quell the uprising, and Powell plays Capt. Tennant, a career officer in the British army. The British are looking for a man named Peadar Conlan (Donald Crisp), a leader of the rebels more in the political leader mold rather than the military leader mold, that is, somebody who would be an option to become the country's president after independence. It's no surprise the British want custody of Conlan.

To that end, the British have resorted to a curfew, hoping that if they can control the people's movement at night they might be more effective in their search for Conlan. One of the other officers who will be involved in enforcing that curfew is Capt. Kerr (Colin Clive), who is also an old friend of Tennant's and seems more like a spy than a military officer, in that he's got an apartment in Dublin where he lives with his wife Norah (Edna Best), and seems to spend a lot of time on patrol by himself.

Wouldn't you know it, but Capt. Tennant gets billeted in the apartment just below the Kerrs' place. Then again, it seems likely that the British would own the building and put a bunch of officers up in it, although it's much more glamorous than the officers' quarters you'd see in most movies. It's nice that Tennant will get to meet his old friend again, but there's a catch. Tennant also knows Mrs. Kerr, as they had a torrid affair before she married her husband. But she and Capt. Tennant still hold a torch for each other, and one night when Capt. Kerr goes out on patrol, Tennant and Mrs. Kerr rekindle their relationship.

Capt. Kerr finds out, and he's none too pleased, so he goes running out into the night all by himself and in plain clothes. This is especially problematic because the British have finally captured Conlan and sentenced him to death, so you know the Sinn Fein are going to be looking for reprisals. And having a British officer like Kerr running around town in a state of despondence is the the sort of person the Sinn Fein would have no difficulty picking up and using as a political pawn.

I have know idea if Warner Bros. already knew that Powell was going to be leaving for MGM, or whether they just never knew what they had in Powell. But The Key is yet another of his pre-MGM movies that has the feeling of being little more than a programmer. Not that it's a bad programmer by any means, but Warner Bros. didn't really give Powell the prestige treatment that he would get almost immediately at MGM being cast opposite Clark Gable in a movie like Manhattan Melodrama the same year this one came out.

Powell does well with the material he's given, although the Dublin portrayed doesn't seem anywhere as dangerous as the Dublin of later movies set during the Irish war of independence, even John Ford's The Informer just the next year. Unsurprisingly for Hollywood movies of this era, there's also a nice set of charactor actors in the supporting roles. All in all, The Key isn't Powell's greatest movie by a long shot -- those would come later when he moved to MGM -- or even his best movie at Warner Bros. But it's still an eminently watchable programmer.

Fashions of 1934

My posts here have been a bit more about more recent movies for a little while now, which is mostly because I've been seeing some of the more recent stuff that I have on my DVR showing up on one movie channel or another, leading me to want to do a post on it. Something rather older that I had on my DVR that got a Warner Archive release is Fashions of 1934. As always, I made a point of sitting down to watch it and do a post on here.

William Powell, nearing the end of his time at Warner Bros. before going to MGM to make The Thin Man, plays Sherwood Nash. As the film opens, Sherwood is one of those 1930s stockbrokers that were common in movies of the day, the sort who thinks he's got a deal for you but is really just trying to pull the wool over your eyes. He doesn't have a deal, however, as his phones are being repossessed, forcing Sherwood and his partner Snap (Frank McHugh) to go into another line of business.

Fortunately for them, they run into Lynn Mason (Bette Davis, stuck in a platinum blonde wig for the first time in her career). She's a fashion sketch artist, one who clearly has a lot of talent, but unfortunately doesn't have a job. International copyright protections weren't quite as well honored as they are nowadays, so Sherwood comes up with the idea of getting the designs for high fashion straight from Paris, before the people who actually paid big bucks for the right to use them in the US can get them. Obviously, when the knockoffs show up on the market, the legitimate licensees are pissed off.

Sherwood is forced to decamp to Paris along with Snap and Lynn, with a plan to institute some scheme or another to get them involved in the world of high fashion, but the big idea only hits them when they pass one of those street vendors selling vintage books. One of them has historical drawings, and Lynn, having an eye for drawings since she's a sketch artist herself, realizes that it's drawings like this that have been the inspiration for Paris designer Oscar Baroque (Reginald Owen).

Lynn starts creating such imitation drawings herself, but complicating matters by stamping the established designers' names on such images. Sherwood discovers that Baroque's girlfriend, the Grand Duchess Alix (Verree Teasdale), is an impostor, and somebody he new back in Hoboken in the 1930s. Sherwood uses this first to get Baroque to make the designs for a fashion revue, and then to get out of trouble once Baroque discovers that Lynn has been forging his signature.

Fashions of 1934 came across to me as much the sort of movie William Powell was making a lot of during his time at Warner Bros.: Powell as the suave man who may not be quite so honest, getting himself into a range of situations that may not be quite so legal. (I doubt it was deliberate that Powell switched studios just as the Production Code was going into strict enforcement, but it does seem like a very lucky move on his part.) This time, however, the Powell story has a bit of a musical grafted on it, at least in the form of a big production number choreographed by Busby Berkeley. It's an interesting pairing that doesn't quite always mesh.

I also felt like it was easy to see why Powell might want more of a challenge than being typecast at Warner Bros. Also, you can see from roles like this why Bette Davis would go on to stand up to the studio and flee to London. There's a fair bit here to like, but also a fair bit that feels like it's running out of steam. Still, despite the flaws, Fashions of 1934 is definitely worth a watch.

The Emperor's Candlesticks

I've argued before that certain studios back in the Golden Age of Hollywood made certain types of films better than others. Warner Bros., for example, was so good at the gangster and social commentary movies in the 1930s. MGM, on the other hand, was more suited to high-class stuff. A good example of this is The Emperor's Candlesticks.

The movie opens in Vienna sometime during the late 19th century. Russia still had a tsar, and the Tsar's son Peter (Robert Young) is on a secret visit to Vienna for a masked costume ball, togther with his adjutant Baron Suroff (Frank Morgan). A group of rebels are looking for Peter, and when they see him enter dressed as Romeo, they send a young woman dressed as Juliet (Maureen O'Sullivan) over to Peter's box. She captivates him, and he goes off with her.

But it's a trap. She's really Orlich, the daughter of a prominent Polish opposition figure, Poland having been completely divided and eaten up in the early 1790s, not to regain its independence until after World War I. She takes Peter to a safe house where the other conspirators hold him and Suroff hostage. Orlich's father is in prison in Russia, scheduled to be executed in a few weeks, and the Poles want him pardoned. So they force Peter to write a letter to his father telling of the captivity and asked the tsar to pardon Orlich.

But what does any of that have to do with the candlesticks, and the two stars who are credited above Robert Young? One of those stars is William Powell, playing Baron Wolensky. It's going to be his job to smuggle the letter into Russia and get it to the Tsar. Thankfully, he's given the perfect hiding place to keep that letter from getting noticed. He had a visit scheduled with his friend Prince Johann (Henry Stephenson), who would like Wolensky to deliver a pair of candlesticks to Johann's girlfriend in Russia. The candlesticks, dating back to French King Louis XV, have a hidden compartment that would be perfect for hiding the letter where nobody will find it.

The other star is Luise Rainer, playing Countess Mironova. Like Wolensky, she's a secret agent, but in the service of the Tsar. She's been given information that Wolensky is actually a particular agent whose identity the Tsarist secret police had previously not known, and she's given a letter to bring to Russia to tell that to the police. She, too, visits Johann, and Johann determines, not knowing anything about either of his two guests being secret agents, that it might be better to have a woman deliver those candlesticks. There goes Wolensky's hiding place.

Ah, but the Countess' maid is corrupt. She's got a boyfriend who is a thief, and plans to steal the Countess' jewels. He does steal them, but they're found rather quickly. However, he also steals the candlesticks, and gives them to the maid to fence. She takes them to Budapest, and thus begins a cross-continent hunt by Wolensky and Mironova to find the candlesticks. Unsurprisingly, they also develop romantic feelings for one another along the way.

The Emperor's Candlesticks is one of those period pieces that was perfect for MGM's sense of style, with the prop and costume departments making the movie look more lavish than it really is. It's too bad, however, that the source material from which the movie comes is rather threadbare. Robert Young and Frank Morgan are underused, while there's really less going on between Powell and Rainer than first meets the eye. However, Powell especially is so charming, and Rainer suitably exotic, that it's easy to overlook all of this and just see a movie that is an eminently watchable programmer.

One wonders what happened to the first 61 detectives

Some time back, I purchased a box set of William Powell at Warner Bros., since I hadn't actually seen any of the four movies in the set. Recently, I watched another film off the set, Private Detective 62.

The film starts off with a prologue in France, as Powell plays Donald Free, a spy with a cover as a newspaper correspondent. His current job is to steal some French secrets, but he gets caught and declared persona non grata, and the US government can't really defend him since that would give the game away. So he's deported back to America, but just before the cargo ship is about to dock, the captain gets a radiogram that the French government wants him back in France in order to investigate him more fully.

Don jumps ship and swims to shore, ending up at some sort of beach house that he breaks into in order to dry off. Except that he's not alone, as there's a couple having a tryst: the woman in the relationship is married to another man. A shady detective, Dan Hogan (Arthur Hohl) comes in more or less unnanounced, with his secretary Amy Moran (Ruth Donnelly) as a witness. Don provides the couple with a cover story about this being his house, and he wants Hogan to pay for the damage Hogan did! Don even gets some money out of it.

However, there's a depression on, the movie having been released in 1933, and Don finds himself unable to get a job -- you'd think the feds or whoever was paying him to do his spying in France would have another job lined up for him, but that's not quite fully explained. After a long, futil attempt to find employment, he decides he's going to debase himself and look for a job with Hogan's detective agency, Don still having the business card.

Hogan is asleep (and probably drunk) in his office, so when one Harcourt Burns (Hobart Cavanaugh) comes in looking for somebody to investigate his wife, Don has an idea. Hogan has a license and no clients, while Don has a client but no license, so the two should form a partnership together. It's the only way they'll both survive.

Not that Hogan is particularly competent at doing regular detective work. But he is able to get a wealthy backer in the form of casino owner Tony Bandor (Gordon Westcott). Bandor bankrolls the place, which moves uptown and starts getting all sorts of wealthy clients, although a lot of what they're doing makes Don a bit queasy in terms of ethics, with Amy beginning to take his side.

Don gets a big-time job in the form of investigating Janet Reynolds (Margaret Lindsay). She's been gambling at Bandor's club, and somehow winning a ton of money at roulette. She's already taken Bandor (and by extension the detective agency, which is technically a partner in the casino although Hogan hasn't told Don this) for over $40,000, a very large sum in the early 1930s, and Bandor wants to find out how she's cheating. Don starts to investigate, but he falls in love with her and one of Janet's friends recognizes Don as a detective from a previous case. There goes Don's cover.

So Don decides he's going to help Janet from the other end as he's beginning to discover just how corrupt Hogan is. Janet has reached the point that she wants to cash in and go to Europe. But Bandor claims he doesn't have the cash at the casino, an excuse to try to buy time to stiff Janet. The scheme that he and Hogan come up with will have her go to Bandor's apartment alone the next day, where Bandor will cause a scene that will get Janet to shoot him with her gun. Except that Bandor has replaced the bullets with blanks, so while he'll play dead, he won't be injured but Janet will think she's killed him.

Hogan, however, is much slimier, realizing he can use this to double-cross Bandor, and have somebody else actually shoot Bandor after Janet leaves. Can Don unravel the mystery?

Well, with the sort of movie this is, you can probably figure out that William Powell is going to come out all right in the end, although the fun of it is seeing how he gets there. The movie is little more than a programmer, running a little over 66 minutes, but Powell does his usual consummate job and makes the movie well worth watching. The story more or less works, not being either a negative or anything particularly noteworthy. Ruth Donnelly probably comes off second-best among the cast and deserved a slightly bigger part, but she's not the romantic female lead. Hohl kept working in Hollywood for another 15 years although he understandably never became a star.

I'm glad that a movie like Private Detective 62 is on a box set. It's definitely worth seeing for anybody who likes either 1930s programmers or William Powell, but it's not big enough to merit the higher price of a standalone.

The part of Nora Charles is now being played by Ginger Rogers

I was looking for movies on my DVR that are available on DVD, and one of them is Star of Midnight, which is unsurpisingly available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive.

A brief introductory scene has Tim Winthrop (Leslie Fenton) talking with his girlfriend Alice Markham, with the agreement that they'll meet mid-evening. Cut to a shot of a clock showing a time much later when they were supposed to meet; a phone call to where Alice is supposed to be reveals that she's skipped town to head to New York.

Clay Dalzell (William Powell) is a lawyer in New York who has a young woman chasing him in the form of Donna Mantin (Ginger Rogers). Tim has reason to belive that Alice came to New York, and wants Clay to help find Alice. They do find her, playing the lead actress in a weird show called Midnight, where she's wearing a mask and performing under the name Mary Smith. When Tim calls her Alice, she leaves the stage and disappears, much to everybody's consternation. On leaving the theatre, Clay meets Jerry, an old flame who has been married several times and is now married to Roger (Ralph Morgan).

Meanwhile, Tommy Tennant is a newspaper gossip columnist who has been writing about Clay and Donna in ways that are quite unflattering to Clay. But he also has information on why Alice bolted from the show she was performing in, and he comes over to Clay's apartment to discuss it. However, before he can reveal what he knows, a mysterious hand holding a gun appears, firing the gun and shooting Tennant dead and grazing Clay before throwing the gun down near the two men.

Stupidly, Clay picks up the gun to chase the gunman, leaving his fingerprints all over it such that when the police come, Clay is going to be an obvious suspect. Clay realizes that he's going to have to do an investigation of his own to try to find both Alice and whoever it is that killed Tennant. (We of course already know that Clay is innocent.) Inspector Doremus (J. Farrell MacDonald) is on the case, and one suspect we haven't mentioned yet is shady lawyer Kinland (Paul Kelly).

William Powell investigates a murder, and he and his love interest drink a lot, so Star of Midnight brings up obvious resemblances to The Thin Man. This one was made at RKO as opposed to The Thin Man at MGM. so the whole production looks a little less polished than what we get over at MGM. The story itself is also a little more convoluted and doesn't work the way The Thin Man did, although to be fair the story is only part of the reason you watch a movie like this.

The other main reason is the chemistry between the two leads, and both of them shine here. Ginger Rogers holds her own as much as Myrna Loy did in the Thin Man movies. The movie is pretty much about the two of them even more than other "couples investigate a murder" movies are, as the rest of the characters are surprisingly unmemorable.

Star of Midnight is certainly worth a watch, although this is another of those movies that would be better served being on a four-film box set of the sort that Warner Home Video used to put out in conjunction with TCM.

High Pressure

I mentioned some time back that I picked up a box set of William Powell at Warner Bros. since I hadn't ctually seen any of the movies on it. I recently sat down and watched another selection off of it, High Pressure.

Powell plays a man named Gar Evans doesn't show up at first; instead, his friend Mike Donahey (Frank McHugh) is looking for him on behalf of another man, "Colonel" Ginsburg (George Sidney). It seems as though Gar has been on the bender to end all benders, and nobody knows where he is, especially not his long-suffering girlfriend Francine (Evelyn Brent).

The "Colonel" wants to find Gar because Gar is a business promoter, and Ginsburg has come across a great invention that just needs venture capital: an inventor has figured out a way to take sewage and turn it into synthetic rubber. It's an idea that's guaranteed to make millions, if it will pan out. And one of the catches is that the inventor has gone missing. But more importantly right not, the first thing is setting up a business and making it look as though there's a lot going on.

You see, Gar is a rather less than honest promoter, skirting the edge of illegal activity. As part of that skirting, he does like Warren William in Lady For a Day and hires a bunch of Runyanesque characters to work in executive positions under him, most notably Clifford Gray (Guy Kibbee) to be the president of the new company. There's also a secretary (Evalyn Knapp) who's secretly engaged to a man Gar takes on as a salesman; these of course were the days when women commonly quit working once they got married. As for Francine, she's Gar's good luck charm, but she's finally decided to leave Gar for good and marry another man -- if Gar can't sweet-talk her out of that.

As I said earlier, the inventor is nowhere to be found, so the folks from the natural rubber companies don't believe this ridiculous scheme is real. (To be fair, the movie was made before the invention of nylon, so synthetics outside of the hard plastics weren't quite so well known.) And if they can't get proof, they're going to go to the authorities and have Gar's stock float be stopped as fraudulent.

High Pressure is a movie that's firmly a product of the early 30s, with the Depression going on and get-rich quick schemes and shady stock schemes being things. For me, the movie barely worked, almost entirely thanks to the energetic performance of Powell. This is the sort of material that I'm often not a fan of since Gar is such a shady character. It's not quite what I call the comedy of lies, but it's close. Also, Ginsburg and the inventor (once he's found) are irritating characters. Finally, I would have liked a different ending.

Still, High Pressure is part of a box set, and some of you will probably like it more than I did, so I'd certainly recommend giving the movie a try.

I hope you're not looking for Crosby and Hope

Among my recent purchases from Amazon was this four-film William Powell box set. Not having posted about any of the four movies in the set, I decided to start off by watching The Road to Singapore.

The movie starts off by informing us that Hugh Dawltry is some sort of a jerk, having had his house under a lien for non-payment of taxes, as well as getting expelled from his club in Khota, one of those British enclaves in Malaya of the sort where Somerset Maugham set The Letter. We learn all of this without actually seeing him in the opening scenes. He's actually in Ceylon, where he (played by Powell) meets Philippa (Doris Kenyon). She's getting ready to marry Dr. March (Louis Calhern), whom she had met when he was in medical school. Now he's living in Khota, so Philippa and Hugh are going to be taking the same boat to Khota.

Now, part of the reason Hugh is considered to be a jerk by the polite society of Khota is that he caused a scandal by wooing a married woman and leading her to get a divorce. Put two and two together, and you can guess where this movie is going. And it doesn't take all that long to get there either, since the movie is only 69 minutes. However, there's something to be said in Hugh's defense, which is that Philippa is going into things with her eyes open. It dawns on her fairly quickly that her husband has become more married to his job than to her; he's also a bit of a drip.

Complicating things is that Dr. March has a teenage sister Rene (Marian Marsh) living with him in Khota. She sees Dawltry, and she's immediately smitten with him. She's also willing to be quite forward about it, since this is a pre-Code Dr. March begins to figure out what's going on, and he is none too pleased; to be fair, this is the one thing you can't blame him for considering Hugh's reputation.

The Road to Singapore is a reasonably mid-level pre-code. There's nothing particularly wrong with it, but it also doesn't stand out like some of the other movies in the genre. Powell gives a professional performance, as does Calhern and the supporting cast.

If I were introducing people to pre-codes, I would pick some other movies. But for people who like them, I can certainly recommend The Road to Singapore.

The Baroness and the Butler

For those of you with FXM, you'll have a chance to catch The Baroness and the Butler, tomorrow morning at 7:10 AM.

Johann Porok (William Powell) is the butler, working in the castle of Count Sandor (Henry Stepehenson) and his wife the Countess (Helen Westley) some miles south of Budapest. The movie opens up on election day, and the Count is also the Prime Minister. Also spending an inordinate time at the castle is the Baroness Katrina (Annabella, Fox's attempt to bring another European star to Hollywood). She's the daughter of the Count and Countess, so in many ways it would make sense that she's at the castle. But she's also married to a Baron (Joseph Schildkraut), and they have a nice residence together in Budapest. The Baron is also a member of Parliament in the PM's coalition, hoping to snag a Cabinet post.

Anyhow, the election brings some surprises, as the opposition makes gains, even electing six members in the PM's region, with the sixth member being... Johann Porok. Now, to me it's the height of absurdity that the PM wouldn't realize that his own butler was one of of the names on the ballot, but apparently, the butler kept it a secret from his boss, and nobody ever noticed. Even nuttier is the idea that Johann wants to continue being the Count's butler, despite having all those duties in parliament and never mind the fact that he's part of the opposition.

Then, in parliament, Johann starts zinging one-liners and trite platitudes, and everybody starts eating them up, making Johann the de facto leader of the opposition. It further complicates Johann's relationship with his boss, as well as putting a wrench in the Baron's political aspirations. And if that's not bad enough, Johann has always been in love with the Baroness who is as taken with Johann's slogans as everybody else.

The only saving grace in all of this is that the Baron sees a chance to get what he wants by catching Johann in a compromising situation with the Baroness. And yet throughout it all the Baron is seen as the bad guy in all of this!

As you can tell, I had a lot of problems with The Baroness and the Butler, mostly down to script that expects us to believe a whole bunch of idiotic things. The actors do the best they can with the material, which is sort of a bottom-shelf comedy of the sort that they could have done in their sleep. (None of my objections have anything to do with any political views expressed in the movie, since both Porok and the Count are portrayed as good people despite their political opposition.) This sort of material has been written much better in any number of other movies of the era.

The Baroness and the Butler is available on DVD courtesy of Fox's MOD scheme, but I wouldn't pay those prices for it.

Life With Father

A search of the blog suggests that I have never done a full-length post on Life With Father before. It's airing tomorrow morning at 11:00 AM on TCM, so now is a good time to write that post.

The "Father" in the title is Clarence Day, Sr., played by William Powell. He's a banker in Manhattan in the 1880s living in one of those fine brownstones of the day with his wife Vinnie (Irene Dunne) and their four children. Eldest of these is Clarence, Jr., played by Jimmy Lydon. In real life, Clarence Jr. would grow up to write the book Life With Father and two others about his experiences growing up; those books were turned into a very popular Broadway play and then into this movie. Father rules the house with an iron fist. Or, at least he thinks he runs the house with an iron fist; in fact, Vinnie knows more about what's going on and continually maneuvers things skillfully to get her way, while having her husband think he's getting his way. However they're doing it, their marriage seems to be working. Or, if it wasn't working, Clarence Jr. wasn't about to let on that it was a failing marriage.

That's the basic synopsis of the household, but there are a couple of subplots running throughout the movie. One of these involves Mary (Elizabeth Taylor), who comes to the house for a visit. She's the travelling companion of Vinnie's cousin Cora (Zasu Pitts) She and Clarence Jr. are just getting to that age where they start thinking about sex, or whatever their late Victorian minds conceived of sex and romance as being. So they play songs on the piano and sing to each other and do other innocent first love things.

However, when the topic switches to religion, it turns out that Clarence Jr. and Mary belong to different Protestant denominations. Worse, the conversation reveals that Clarence Sr. has never been baptized at all! So another story in the movie involves Vinnie and her minister, Rev. Lloyd (Edmund Gwenn) trying to get Clarence Sr. to agree to be baptized. It's another of those things that seems quaint in 2013, but 125 years ago, it would have been a big deal.

Third is the desire of Clarence Jr. and younger brother John (Martin Milner; yes that Martin Milner), who are trying to make a litle money: Clarence to buy a suit and John to buy supplies for his junior science experiments. They sell patent medicine, which of course is a quack, but at least they could only go house to house instead of sending out millions of emails claiming to be able to enlarge certain body parts. Not that putting the subplot that way would have made it past the Production Code, of course. Anyhow, the patent medicine makes Vinnie ill, tying together this subplot with the baptism subplot.

Life With Father is one of those movies that's great for the whole family, at least if the family is OK watching old movies. If you want action, you're not going to get it from this one. William Powell and Irene Dunne are both excellent in their late Victorian parent roles, with the various subplots being charming in their old-fashionedness The movie also feels much more natural than the aritificial musical numbers of another period piece like Meet Me In St. Louis. The bad news is that every time I've seen it on TV, it's a print that's sorely in need of restoration. The color was terrible and the focus not crisp enough. I don't know if there's a better print that TCM will be airing, or what prints have made it to any of the DVD releases. (Well, the older DVD releases would all have bad prints; I don't know about the DVD available from the TCM shop.)

The return of Robert Osborne!

Today is the day when TCM host Robert Osborne finally returns from his long break due to surgery and a well-deserved vacation. Osborne returns just in time to present the films of a new Star of the Month, William Powell. Powell made enough films during his two-decade career that TCM is showing the films on all five Thursday nights this month, a good ways into Friday morning. This week sees quite a few movies that I've blogged about in the past:

Jewel Robbery kicks things off at 8:00 PM;
Powell switches from being a criminal to investigating crime as Philo Vance in The Kennel Murder Case at 9:30 PM
The Ex-Mrs. Bradford follows at 11:00 PM;
Powell gets cast with Angela Lansbury and Esther Williams in The Hoodlum Saint at 12:30 AM; and
Crossroads, at 8:30 AM tomorrow morning.

One Powell film that I haven't recommended before is Lawyer Man overnight at 4:00 AM; in this one, Powell plays a lawyer from the lower-class part of Manhattan who has the chance to move on to bigger and better things when he learns that being a sleazy lawyer can pay off big. Moving up in class brings him the attentions of the lovely Helen Vinson and Claire Dodd, much to the consternation of his long-suffering secretary Joan Blondell. Lawyer Man is a movie that has an interesting premise, but doesn't quite go anywhere, which is a bit of a shame.

William Powell, Detective

I hadn't heard of the movie Star of Midnight until I saw it on tomorrow morning's TCM schedule: 6:30 AM, to be precise. Powell plays -- surprise surprise -- a detective, and one who drinks and trades quips with a woman (Ginger Rogers). Sounds a lot like The Thin Man, which was released a year earlier and at another studio. But then, studios have never been original.

Not that The Thin Man marked Powell's debut as a screen detective. He had played Philo Vance in films like The Kennel Murder Case in the early 1930s. There are also other detective roles for Powell, such as The Ex-Mrs. Bradford, where his ex-wife (a mystery writer played by Jean Arthur) ropes him into playing detective with her.

Esther Williams without the bathing suit

For this last night of Esther Williams' turn as TCM's Star of the Month, TCM is showing some of the movies Williams made in which she doesn't have any elaborate musical numbers in the water. This includes one later role; two early movies with supporting roles; and one movie in which she gets second billing just before she started making all those water movies: The Hoodlum Saint, airing overnight at 2:00 AM ET. It's a strange movie in a whole lot of ways, not least for Williams' part in it. But more on that later.

The movie was made in 1946, just after the end of World War II, but the movie is about a veteran returning from World War I, a journalist named Terry O'Neill (played by a quinquagenarian William Powell). In theory, soldiers were supposed to get their old jobs back, but many of them wanted new horizons, and the home front had changed too, and O'Neill finds it difficult to get work. This is until he meets socialite Kay Lorrison (Williams) at a wedding, and she helps him get a job at another newspaper. O'Neill works on exposés of the world of high finance, but to be honest, he was always more comfortable working the crime beat, and when he sees the financiers making money hand over fist, he figures he can too.

O'Neill wants to look respectable, though, and when he's apparently been helped by the intercession of one "St. Dismas", the patron saint of thieves, he decides to build a shrine to them and a charity, which enables him to mix in both the high-class world, and the world of crime and dark nightclubs, which is where he meets singer Dusty Millard (Angela Lansbury). She loves him, but he's not too sure. O'Neill continues to make money, but you know the crash of October 1929 is coming up....

The Hoodlum Saint is one of those movies I watched once years ago, found a bit odd and not quite up to snuff, and haven't stopped to watch any of the other times since that TCM has shown it. For all its odd casting and dated feel, it's well worth at least one viewing. It doesn't seem to be available on DVD, not even from the Warner Archive Collection.

Kay Francis birthday tomorrow

Normally, I prefer to mark birthdays on the day they occur, unless TCM is showing a movie starring the birthday person early in the morning, and I'd like to recommend it. Such is the case with One Way Passage, airing at 8:30 AM ET tomorrow on TCM.

William Powell plays Dan, a murderer wanted by the authorities in California for having escaped prison; having committed murder, he's doomed to be sent to the gas chamber. He's been caught in Hong Kong and, this being the days before transoceanic plane travel, he gets to take a slow boat back to his death. On the boat, he meets Joan (Kay Francis). She's a wealthy socialite who has no idea about Dan's past, or that he's on the boat going back to his death. It turns out, though, that she too is facing death, having been diagnosed with some fatal illness, the details of which we're never really given.

The two fall in love, but each of them has a dilemma: tell the other that this can only be a brief relationship, or keep that a secret and just enjoy the brief relationship for what it is. (Of course, if each knew both of them were going to die, that would change things....) Both of them choose secrecy, and proceed to have a doomed romance aboard the ship.

That's about all there is to the plot, except for the things that we viewers know that the two dying passengers don't; and the fact that as the boat makes its way across the Pacific, we know the two lovers' time together is growing shorter and shorter. It's a story that doesn't sound like much, but One Way Passage is actually quite a fine movie. Not only do Powell and Francis do well; they're helped by a supporting cast that includes Frank McHugh as a conman friend of Powell's, and Aline MacMahon as another con passing herself off as wealthy, reminiscent of Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve.

Sadly, One Way Passage has made it to DVD as part of the Warner Archive Collection, so you're either going to have to pay a bit more, or catch one of the infrequent TCM showings.

A William Powell movie that didn't air on his birthday

Last Thursday was the anniversary of William Powell's birth, and as I mentioned, TCM marked the occasion by showing a bunch of his movies. Of course, Powell made far too many movies to show in just one day, so they couldn't all be shown on his birthday. One that didn't get shown then is Crossroads, which is airing tomorrow morning at 8:00 AM ET on TCM.

Powell plays David Talbot, a prominent French diplomat with a lovely wife Lucienne (Hedy Lamarr). He's about to celebrate his anniversary with her, but the party is disturbed by a strange letter. A man is asking for one million francs, obviously implying that he knows a secret about Talbot's past. Talbot and the police set up a plan to catch the extortionist, but that's not the end of the story. The extortionist claims that Talbot is in fact the famous criminal Jean Pelletier from a dozen years ago! Talbot doesn't have a good way of disproving this, as Talbot and Pelletier were both involved in a train crash shortly after the celebrated crime, in which one of them died, and the now-Talbot suffered a curious case of amnesia that prevents him from remembering anything that happened before the crash. Doctors debate the nature of amnesia and memory, but the case is only resolved when a man named Sarrou (Basil Rathbone) testifies that he was with Pelletier at his death several years later.

The extortionist is duly convicted, but this of course is not the end of the problem for Talbot. Sarrou and his girlfriend Michelle (Claire Trevor) inform Talbot that Sarrou lied on the stand: Talbot is in fact not Talbot, but Pelletier! And Sarrou was involved in the crime with Pelletier! And Sarrou wants that one million francs the extortionist tried to get, since it is in fact Sarrou's share of the proceeds from the crime. If the now Talbot doesn't pay off, Sarrou threatens to go to the police, even though it will mean prison for him as well. At least the police will be more lenient on somebody who turns state's evidence. Is Talbot who he claims to be? Well, he can't remember who the hell he is, so maybe not. And Sarrou and Michelle have more than enough evidence that Talbot may in fact be Pelletier.

It goes without saying that I won't give away the ending to the movie. Let's just say that it's entertaining enough, although it comes across as a bit formulaic. It's also a movie that would work a bit better as a true noir; instead, the movie was made at MGM, the studio that had too much glitz back in 1942 to make anything really approaching noir. The performances are all just fine though; in addition to those I've named I should add character actors Felix Bressart as Talbot's personal physician; Sig Ruman as a doctor who testifies against Bressart at the opening trial; and Margaret Wycherly as an elderly lady who says she's Jean Pelletier's mother.

Fans of classic cinema will certainly enjoy Crossroads, although if I were trying to introduce people to the good mysteries of that era I'd pick something better. Crossroads has gotten a DVD release, although it's as part of the Warner Archive collection.