Sister Carrie

Jennifer Jones was honored last August in Summer Under the Stars, which once again gave me the opportunity to record some movies I hadn't seen before. One of those was Carrie, the adaptation of the Theodore Dreiser novel Sister Carrie.

Jones stars as Carrie Meeber, daughter in a small-town Missouri family at the turn of the century who have already had one daughter go off to Chicago for better economic opportunities. It's Carrie's turn, as her parents buy her a one-way ticket to Chicago. One the train, she's keeping to herself, except that she's pestered by one of the male passengers, Charles Drouet (Eddie Albert). Charles is a traveling salesman and is immediately taken by Carrie although he's really much too forward about it, especially for circa 1900. And he doesn't seem too happy when Carrie gets off the train in South Chicago, since that's considered the slum area.

Life with her sister isn't the greatest, since money is tight and Carrie's brother-in-law is tough in a sensible way: you have to be a bit strict to survive in such conditions. Carrie has a job as a seamstress in what is essentially a sweatshop, but injures her hand in an industrial accident and gets fired, this being the days before workers' comp and other such benefits. Carrie goes to see Charles, who takes her to Fitzgerald's, an upscale restaurant managed by George Hurstwood (Laurence Olivier).

Carrie, having lost her job, winds up moving in with Charles, which is rather scandalous. Just as scandalous is the idea that Hurstwood is also smitten with Carrie. The thing is, Hurstwood already has a wife Julia (Miriam Hopkins) and two teenaged kids. The restaurant manager job is a good one that puts the Hurstwoods on the cusp of being upper-middle-class, with the prospect of marrying off the kids to people of better economic status. But if it were to be found out that George is lusting after someone young enough to be his daughter, well that might be a problem.

And then George does something profoundly stupid. At the end of the day at Fitzgerald's, George makes a mistake with the time lock on the restaurant's safe, leaving him with about $10,000 that he can't get in the safe. Now, the right thing to do would be to contact the owner of the restaurant, although that would have been a bit time consuming for 1900. Instead, George decides he's going to run off with the money, but not before picking up Carrie and bringing the two of them to New York. George also rather stupidly blows through the money in double-quick time. Sure enough, Fitzgerald sends men to New York to look for Hurstwood, who can't really keep a job in the restaurant business once his past is discovered.

Things get even worse when George's son is about to get married. Julia wants to sell the house, but George has to co-sign to sell. The thing is, he's still married to Julia, despite having told Carrie that he'd gotten a divorce. And by this time Carrie has gotten knocked up. But while George keeps going downhill, there's a third act for Carrie. She lies about her past and says she's been on the stage in Chicago, which gets her a job as a chorus girl with the opportunity to move up in the world. She splits from George hoping that George's son will forgive him, and eventually becomes reasonably big in the theater world, big enough to have a name in noticeable letters on the posters. Both Charles and George see that name, and show up (at different times) at Carrie's dressing room....

I haven't read Sister Carrie, so I can't be specific on what was changed from the book to the movie, although when Alicia Malone presented Carrie on TCM she mentioned that the book had floated around Hollywood for quite some time while people tried to figure out how to make it conform to the Production Code. The movie was not a success at the box office, and having seen it, I think I can understand why. This was supposed to be a prestige production, and the leads all give good enough performances. But at the same time, it feels like there's something a bit off with the movie, like the various characters don't really have the appropriate emotional connection with each other. There's just something flat about the final product.

But give Carrie a try and see for yourself if you like it.

The movie isn't exactly a comedy

In the latest of the musical biopics that I wanted to make certain I watched before it expired from my DVR, it's time for Funny Girl. It's finally coming up again on TCM, tomorrow, March 24, at 5:15 PM, as part of another day of musical biopics, so now's the time to put up this post.

Funny Girl is story of the earlier years of stage actress and singer Fanny Brice, played here by Barbara Streisand. As the movie opens, it's a bit before World War I, and although the second half of the movie covers events that are in Brice's real life after the war, I don't think the war itself is ever mentioned. Fanny was born to a Jewish immigrant family in New York, although the only family member we see is her mom, played by Kay Meford. Mom runs a pub/restaurant and plays poker with lady friends, while all the neighborhood cares about Fanny because that's the way this sort of neighborhood is.

Fanny, after the roadshow opening music, shows up at the New Amsterdam Theater that hosted the Ziegfeld Follies, where she hopes to get a job as a chorus girl in the follies run by Florenz Ziegfeld (Walter Pidgeon). But she's going to have to make her way up the ladder first, which includes doing a vaudeville act on roller skates, even though she can't really skate. However, she can sing, and the combination of singing that appeals to the audience combined with the comedic value of not being able to skate, makes her a hit. In the audience is Nicky Arnstein (Omar Sharif), who comes backstage and is so charmed by Fanny that he negotiates a salary increase for her right on the spot even though he has no real job in any theatrical production company.

Eventually, the Ziegfeld Follies does come calling, putting Fanny in a musical finale that will have her dressed as a bride while singing to a bunch of men. Fanny isn't comfortable with the number, so she changes things by having the costume altered to imply that the bride is already pregnant. Once again, Nicky is in the audience. It turns out that he's a professional gambler, but he's so taken by Fanny that when he goes to her mom's place after the show, he lets the old ladies beat him at very low-stakes poker. Fanny and Nicky run into each other again in Maryland when he's buying a race horse that he eventually loses betting on a race. He has to go back to the ungentlemanly routine of playing the cruise ship trade, playing cards against the rich gentlement to earn more than his passage. Nicky wants Fanny to pursue her dream, but she loves him so much that she gets on the boat and accompanies him to Europe.

In the next scene, they've just gotten married, although in real life that didn't happen until 1918 so puts a major hole in the timeline considering World War I was raging. (The real life Fanny and Nicky were romantically involved for several years but couldn't get married until Nicky's divorce from a previous marriage went through.) Fanny is a big star, and the house they buy could just as easily have been purchased by either of them. But things start to go south for Nicky when his gambling stops paying off, and he starts racking up debt to everyone in town save Fanny, who is totally oblivious to it all. One of the people to whom Nicky is in debt offers a chance to pay it off by taking part in a "bond deal" that's clearly fraudulent, while Fanny secretly tries to use her husband's name to help open a new high-class casino with Nicky as promoter. Nicky figures out what's going on, doesn't want to be beholden to Fanny in that way, and goes for the bond deal, which is going to land him in prison eventually.

The movie ends when Nicky gets out of prison, which was in December 1925 in real life, although the movie seems to imply it's earlier. The movie doesn't mention the less-than-happy ending of Fanny and Nicky's marriage crumbling, although at least Fanny would go on to have a fairly successful third act playing a character named Baby Snooks on radio before her untimely death at the age of 59.

Somewhat surprisingly, despite the well-known musical talents of Barbra Streisand, the material is something that I think would have worked better as a non-musical, or limiting musical numbers to scenes from when Fanny was on stage. Yeah, I know this would mean ditching a song like "People" which Streisand sings just after the evening with Nicky at her mom's place, and that people went to the movie to see the songs from the Broadway show from which this is adapted. But keeping the songs from the musical turns this into an overlong slog lasting right around 150 minutes, which is a good half hour too long, I think.

Streisand, of course, does well, even though I'm not the biggest fan of her style of singing. She tied in the Best Actress Oscar race that year with Katharine Hepburn for The Lion in Winter, and was deserving of that Oscar win. But for me that wasn't quite enough to make Funny Girl as worth watching as some of the other musical biopics out there.

Oh, tomorrow is Easter

Tomorrow, April 20, is Easter Sunday, at least for those who follow western strands of Christianity. There's a set of Hollywood films dealing with the biblical tellings of Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection that seem to get trotted out every year, one of which is the 1959 sound version of Ben-Hur, which kicks the day off at 6:00 AM.

This version of the story runs something like 3½ hours, depending on how you want to count the overture and intermission. Judah Ben-Hur (Charlton Heston) is a reasonably well-off man in Jersualem during the era when Pontius Pilate was the Roman governor and that famous carpenter was roaming around Judea preaching the gospel. He lives with his mom and sister, as well as servant to whose daughter Esther (Haya Harareet) Judah has been betrothed. Judah learns that his childhood friend and Roman citizen Messala (Stephen Boyd) is coming back to Judea. Unfortunately, Messala wants to exploit his friendship with Judah to get Judah to betray rebellious Jews, which Judah refuses to do, knowing fully well this will mean trouble should things go any more sour.

Of course they will, as a good 50 minutes into the movie the Romans are parading past Judah's villa when his sister knocks a roofing tile off, falling just inches from the governor. That's unforgivable, so Messala makes Judah a galley slave and imprisons Mom and sister, who eventually get leprosy, although that story line is at least another 90 minutes away. Judah is put on the ship captained by consul Quintus Arrius (Jack Hawkins), eventually saves Arrius' life, and gets freed and made Arrius' adopted son as a result, enabling him to go back to Judea to look for his family. Esther, rather than telling Judah his mom and sister are lepers, tells him they died, which leads Judah to seek vengeance on Messala.

That desire for vengeance is why Judah finally decides to take part in the famous chariot race, which we know he'll win, and spend the last 50 minutes or so looking for Mom and Sis since Messala tells him the truth. Along the way at several key points, Jesus shows up, filmed only from the back, and has a profound effect on the various characters in the story, including ultimately Judah.

I said at the beginning that this version runs long, and I do mean long. It's a good hour longer than the Ramon Novarro silent, as I mentioned in a brief post in 2013. I stand by the comments I made in that post. The 1959 version of Ben-Hur won a ton of Oscars, and the technical categories it won are probably mostly deserved, since I can't really be bothered to look through the entire list of Oscar nominations to determine whether some other movie had better costume design. The music, art direction, cinematography, and all that stuff are indeed of a very high standard.

But the acting and screenplay? I think they take a back seat to the much tighter Novarro version. A lot of the scenes feel like they go on way too long, notably for me being the time between being sentenced to the galleys to actually winding up rowing a boat. And then there's Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Hugh Griffith playing an Arab sheik and the financial backer of Judah in the chariot race. I'm surprised I didn't come across a bunch of modern reviews arguing he was a bad stereotype.

My criticisms aside, Ben-Hur is considered an epic, and for understandable reasons. Becuase of that, it's one that should definitely be on any film buff's list of "Essentials", even if you only watch it once.

Mrs. Miniver

Another of those movies that I'd seen bits and pieces of over the years, but had never seen all the way through, was the Best Picture Oscar winner for 1942, Mrs. Miniver. I put it on my DVR the last time it showed up on TCM. Now, it's getting another airing, tonight at midnight (well, with the intro, a few minutes into March 5, or still late in the evening of March 4 in more westerly time zones). With that in mind, I made certain I could watch my DVR copy in order to do a post for the upcoming airing.

The movie starts off in the summer of 1939, looking at a supposedly middle-class (really, more upper-middle-class at the very least) family in Belham, a village in one of the Home Counties just south of London: the Minivers. Kay (Greer Garson), the matriarch of the family, lives a relatively carefree life, going to London to do some "extravagant" shopping, which means buying a new hat. And how is she going to tell her husband about it? Of course, her husband Clem (Walter Pidgeon), an architect, has decided on a big-ticket purchase of his own: a new car.

Kay returns home on the train, where the station-master, Ballard (Henry Travers), has been breeding roses. He's even come up with a beautiful rose he wants to name after Mrs. Miniver and enter in the local horticultural contest. But this is where the class issues of pre-war Britain start to rear their ugly head. Lady Beldon (Dame May Whitty) also breeds roses, and she wins the trophy every year simply because she's "Lady" Beldon. Heaven forfend somebody on the class level of a station-master should win.

At dinner that night, Lady Beldon's granddaughter Carol (Teresa Wright) stops by the Miniver place, presumably not prompted by Grandma, asking Mrs. Miniver to do what she can not to get the Miniver rose entered in the competition since Grandma wins every year and it would kill her not to win. Not that Kay can do much about it. But even more miffed is Kay and Clem's adult son Vincent (Richard Ney), a student at Oxford. He's gotten some "radical", at least by 1930s standards, ideas on class and is none too pleased with Carol's showing up. But it's obvious that the two are soon going to fall in love.

Soon is darn right, because September 1, 1939 is about to come up. Germany invaded Poland that day, and on the following Sunday, September 3, the UK declared war on Germany, with everybody in the village learning of the declaration as they're at church from their local vicar (Henry Wilcoxon). Clem, being in his 40s, with an adult kid and two younger children at home, isn't going to be asked to fight, but Vin probably is, so he preempts this by trying to get into the RAF, which eventually does happen with him getting stationed at an airbase near Belham.

At this point Mrs. Miniver becomes a sort of pastiche of all the things that would befall a family on the home front during the early stages of the European theater of World War II between the UK and Germany. There's the Battle of Britain, with the Nazis trying to bomb the UK, leading to the requisite air-raid scenes. France would fall, resulting in the evacuation from Dunkirk. Since Clem has a boat, he's asked to set out on his boat to help evacuate Dunkirk. Vin and Carol have a quickie wedding, with Lady Beldon finally relenting. One of the Nazi pilots is shot down but survives, winding up injured in the Minivers' garden, with Kay finding him. And on and on, leading to the climax set against Belham trying to hold their garden show while the war is going on....

Mrs. Miniver is, like Boys Town yesterday, one of those movies where it's easy to see why it was such a huge success upon its release in the summer of 1942. The movie had been conceived earlier, while the US was still not in the war, with the aim of engendering sympathy among US audiences for the plight of the fellow English speakers on the other side of the Atlantic. But then Pearl Harbor happened, and now American audiences could see themselves facing the same issues as the Minivers and other cast members of the movie.

This being MGM, you can also the see the sentimentality that some critics, out of step with the public as always, would criticize. But there were British movies such as Millions Like Us that dealt with a lot of the same themes, just with a more hard-nosed look. In the drive to build morale, I think both approaches are needed, and with MGM behind it, the more sentimental approach makes the scenes of destruction a bit more surprising. That, combined with the high production values MGM always had, makes for a very well-crafted movie.

Best Picture of 1942? I'm not so certain; I think that if Yankee Doodle Dandy had been done in Technicolor it might well have won. But it's easy to see why Mrs. Miniver did ultimately win. It's also a movie that you should definitely watch if you haven't seen it before.

Me and Mrs. Jones

One of the "stars" that TCM put the spotlight on in the 2023 edition of Summer Under the Stars was the Nicholas Brothers. They weren't really stars per se, being mostly a dance act. One dramatic movie in which only one of the two brothers, Fayard, appeared, was The Liberation of L.B. Jones, so naturally TCM included this as part of the brothers' day. I finally watched it and can now do a review on it here.

The movie opens up with a pre-credits sequence of train going down the tracks, with the camera highlighting three people on the train. Those are the newlywed couple of Steve and Nella Mundine (Lee Majors and Barbara Hershey respectively), and a black man who looks rather nervous: "Sonny Boy" Mosby (Yaphet Kotto). Sonny Boy jumps off the train not long before it gets to its destination. A police car is stopped at the crosing, and they spot Sonny Boy, harassing him because this is 1960s Tennessee, they're white, and he's black.

The Mundines are also getting off in the town of Somerton. They're met at the station by Steve's uncle, Oman Hedgepath (Lee J. Cobb). Hedgepath is the big white lawyer in town, and Steve, having recently graduated from law school and having passed the bar exam, is being given the position of partner in the newly-named Hedgepath and Mundine. At the law offices is L.B. Jones (Roscoe Lee Browne). He's the undertaker for the town's black population, which seems like about the closest thing to a black middle class Somerton is going to have. Jones is there looking for Hedgepath to represent him as he's looking for a divorce from his adulterous wife Emma (Lola Falana).

Hedgepath turns Jones down, which clearly has something to do with the racial politics of the small-town South of the late 1960s. Mundine doesn't understand why his uncle doesn't want to take the case, having spent a bunch of time in the bigger city at law school and obviously having developed more modern attitudes on race relations, and even offers to take Jones' case himself. Hedgepath doesn't want those attitudes to take over, so when Mundine offers to take on the case, he has a sudden change of heart and takes the case himself.

The reason Hedgepath decides he wants to take the case after all is because Emma has decided to contest the divorce. Emma has been having an affair Willie Joe (Anthony Zerbe), one of the cops in town, and more importantly, a white guy. Hedgepath understands that a white judge and jury in a divorce case isn't going to belive L.B. Worse for him, however, is when Willie Joe goes to see Emma. She tries to get money out of him, and he badly beats her and frames L.B. for it.

As for Sonny Boy, he had left town years earlier after being brutalized by the white cops. Where L.B. Jones is clearly a symbol of the Booker T. Washington and Martin Luther King school of thought of integration by being peaceful and virtuous, Sonny Boy is part of the W.E.B DuBois and Malcom X strand that thought "by any means necessary". Sonny Boy doesn't want to get in more legal trouble than what forced him to leave town in the first place, but when he sees what the white man is doing to poor L.B., he might feel forced to go back to any means necessary....

As I watched The Liberation of L.B. Jones, I couldn't help but think of MGM, even though this movie was made at Columbia. What made me think of MGM is how they made a lot of stuff back in their heyday that was glossy but unadventurous, something that I even think I mentioned in regards to the Spencer Tracy movie Fury which dealt with mob justice. The Liberation of L.B. Jones is another of thse movies that feels like it was made a decade or two too late. It wants to say Important Things, but the Important Things have passed the movie by and instead we get a warmed-over set of pulled punches.

That's unfair to the cast, however. They all do the best they can with the material, and the performances are mostly pretty good. (I will say that Cobb feels like he's done this sort of character enough that he's not really putting as much effort into it as he did in, say, On the Waterfront.) The Liberation of L.B. Jones is another of those movies that's definitely worth one watch, but feels like it could have been a lot better.

The country of size

Gregory Peck was honored in TCM's Summer Under the Stars last August. That gave me the opportunity to record one of his films that I hadn't blogged about before, The Big Country. Actor Burl Ives picked up a Supporting Actor Oscar for his role, so TCM can use it during 31 Days of Oscar as well. Indeed, it shows up again this year, getting its airing tomorrow (March 30) at 11:15 AM. So as always, I made a point of watching it with an eye to doing a review on it here.

Gregory Peck stars as Jim McKay (but would not go on to host Wide World of Sports), a man who had worked as a captain in his family's shipping company but is now going west. That's because in port one of those times, he met Pat Terrill (Carroll Baker), who was going east for some reason not specified, since all of that took place before the action depicted in the movie. The two fell in love and McKay proposed to her, so now he's coming out to marry her since her father Maj. Henry Terrill (Charles Bickford) owns a substantial ranch.

McKay meets Pat in town, where Pat is staying with friend Julie Maragon (Jean Simmons). Julie is the local schoolteacher, but she owns a spread of her own that is fallow since the death of her father. The big thing about her spread, however, is the "Big Muddy", a lake which has a good deal of water on it that's important for watering one's cattle. Julie is intent on letting everybody water their cattle, but for obvious reasons various landowners want the lake for themselves.

On their way out to Maj. Henry's ranch house, Jim and Pat run into the Hannassey brothers, whose father Rufus (Burl Ives) is one of the ranchers who wants Big Muddy and has been trying for years, obviously unsuccessfully, to get Julie to sell. Rufus at heart does have a sense of honor, as we'll see in the finale, but he's raised his kids badly as eldest brother Buck (future Rifleman Chuck Connors, getting to play one of his bad-guy roles) leads the rest of the brothers in trying to waylay Jim and Pat. Indeed, there's long been a feud between the Hannasseys and the Terrills.

Further complicating matters is the presence of Maj. Terrill's ranch foreman, Steve Leech (Charlton Heston). He has a feeling his position is going to be in jeopardy once Pat marries Jim, since the major has no sons to take over the ranch. Steve also isn't so sure an easterner who spent a lot of time on the ocean is one to know much about ranching, so he doesn't have much respect for Jim.

Things get more complicated for Jim as he begins to learn about all the things that have been going on in the time before he got to the area. Things get even worse when the major decides he's going to try to prevent the Hannasseys from watering their cattle, resorting to force if necessary. As mentioned earlier, Rufus Hannassey has been trying to get Julie to sell, and she hasn't. But Jim, unsurprising for a character played by Gregory Peck, has an uncompromising and unerring sense of right and wrong. After seeing first-hand the conflict between the major and Rufus, Jim decides to buy Julie's ranch, with the proviso that he's going to let everybody water their cattle there.

When Pat finds out about that wrinkle and that the ranch isn't a wedding present to her, she gets furious. Rufus understandably thinks that if Jim has bought the ranch, it's going to screw him over since everybody knows Jim and Pat are supposed to get married. (Well, nobody knows yet that the engagement has been broken off.) It leads to the final battle between the Hannasseys and the Terrills.

The Big Country is a big movie, running 166 minutes. And frankly, that's the one big problem with the movie. It's unsurprisingly well acted, with very nice cinematography. But at its heart it's a fairly simple western story that had no need to be expanded to 166 minutes. The writers could easily have distilled this down to around two hours and come up with something just as good. Still, the quality of the other parts of the movie is good enough that its length is less of a flaw than in some other movies.

So definitely give The Big Country a go. Just be aware that you're in for the long haul.