Have I never blogged about My Man Godfrey?

Well, not a full post, although I've mentioned it in passing once or twice. However, the classic screwball comedy My Man Godfrey is airing tonight at 11:15 PM ET on TCM.

Carole Lombard stars as a ditzy socialite who's involved in a scavenger hunt for charity. One of the things she needs to win is a "forgotten man", and at the city dump, she and her sister meet the perfect forgotten man: William Powell Lombard takes Powell back to the headquarters of the scavenger hunt, wins the hunt, and then, after the hunt, gets him a job as the butler in her family's posh estate.

Unfortunately for Powell, this is one nutty family for which he'll be working. Not only is daughter Lombard flighty; the other daughter (Gail Patrick) is a terrible snob who hates Powell; and Mother (Alice Brady) is busy funding her protégé (Mischa Auer), a Russian immigrant who really can't sing. Powell has to put up with all this, as does the poor father (Eugene Pallette), who also has to deal with serious financial problems, as it looks like his business might go under. There is a Depression on, after all.

Fortunately for Father Pallette, though, Powell is there to help save the day, not only as a sympathetic ear for Pallette's personal problems, but also with a plan to save the business. Powell, it seems, is not a "forgotten man" but a man with a past, trying to hide that past from both the family for which he's working, and the wealthy Boston family into which he was born.

My Man Godfrey is zany an incredibly fast-paced, filled with non-stop laughs. It's got two great stars in the leads, and a bunch of good second-tier actors playing the supporting roles. If actors back in the Studio Era had egos like the stars of today do, at least they were better about hiding those egos on the screen. Movies like this were "escapist" comedy for the people having to deal with that Depression, and I can certainly imagine people being entertained for an hour and a half. You will be, too.

Life imitates art

TCM is showing Cactus Flower again, at midnight ET tonight. I've recommended it before, but found out something interesting in the year since that does pertain to the movie.

As I mentioned a year ago, there's a scene in a chic 60s nightspot in which the Ingrid Bergman character is getting drunk on "Idaho champagne". It turns out that in the past few decades, Idaho has been getting into the wine business, to the point that you can even get an Idaho-produced sparkling wine. (Technically, they can't call it "champagne" since that's reserved for sparkling wines from the Champagne region of France.) Who would have foreseen this back in 1969?

Gratuitous photo thread

TCM is promoting a new DVD box set of Esther Williams movies tonight in prime time, with five of the six movies in the set being shown. I'm not personally a fan of the water musical movies, but they're inoffensive enough, and I can certainly understand why other people might be a fan of such movies. TCM can't program for me or any other viewer alone, and so of course there are going to be days with movies for which I don't particularly care. That having been said, a night of Esther Williams is a good excuse for posting a photo of her in those skimpy bathing suits.

Today also marks the 67th birthday of actress Britt Ekland. Probably her most famous role is as Goodnight, the CIA agent and love interest of James Bond, in the movie The Man With the Golden Gun. It's an excuse to show another photo of a scantily-clad woman, although I could just as easily have mentioned another of Ekland's movies: Scandal. This out-of-print movie deals with the Profumo Affair, an incident in the early 1960s when the British Minister of War, John Profumo, was discovered to have been sleeping with a showgirl. That's somewhat problematic, but the bigger problem is that the woman, Christine Keeler, had also been sleeping with a military attaché from the Soviet embassy. Oops. Scandal is an interesting but very racy look at London when it was at the beginning of the Swingin' 60s.

'In' is not 'At'

Tomorrow morning at 6:15 AM, TCM is showing the movie The Young in Heart. Pay attention to the title carefully; this is a completely different movie from Young at Heart and has a totally different plot.

Janet Gaynor gets top billing as the daughter of a family of professional moochers, playing their trade along the French Riviera. However, they're found out, and forced to leave the country for England. They have barely a sou to their collective names, but fortune smiles upon them, literally, in the form of a rich lonely old lady named Ellen Fortune (played by Minnie Dupree). She lets them sit in her compartment, and when they all get back to London, she's so taken by the family that, not realizing they're phonies, decides to bequeath her considerable estate to them, since she doesn't have any natural heirs. Her solicitor isn't so sure, though, and to convince him that they're honest people, they actually have to start working, which produces a profound change in them: they (especially the daughter) start to become more honest people.

The Young in Heart is a too-rarely seen movie with a surprisingly good cast. Gaynor's brother is played by Douglas Fairbanks Jr., while the parents are played by Roland Young and Billie Burke, playing a couple as they did a year earlier in Topper. The job that Fairbanks takes is as a car salesman, leading to some humorous scenes with cars being driven much too fast for the good of the people in the cars. As for the humor, the movie is supposed to be a comedy and for the most part is, although with a story revolving around a lonely old lady, there's also more than a fair bit of sentimentality. Watch also for Paulette Goddard and Richard Carlson as the love interests of Fairbanks and Gaynor.

The Young in Heart is a movie that is not without its flaws, but is nevertheless quite enjoyable. It also seems to have made its way to DVD already.

Whistler's Mother

TCM is showing several of the movies in the Whistler series tomorrow morning, starting off with The Whistler at 6:00 AM ET.

Richard Dix starred in much of the series, although it was based on a radio mystery/anthology series, which means that Dix is actually playing different characters in the movies. In The Whistler, he plays a man who's lost his wife. Despondent over that, he pays somebody to go find a hitman and have that hitman kill him (obviously, he didn't want to know who the hitman was, so that he wouldn't know when he was going to be killed). However, before the hitman can carry out the hit, Dix gets a telegram informing him that his wife has been found, and that the two will be reunited shortly. So, Dix goes to find the middleman he paid -- only to find that the guy has died!

Formulaic? Sure. After all, these movie series were B stuff for the most part. But, the movies are atmospheric, and perfectly entertaining. This was also directed by William Castle, a dozen years before he started getting schlocky.

It shouldn't be a surprise, however, that a B movie series like this hasn't made its way to DVD, so you'll have to catch TCM's showings.

I thought the name sounded familiar!

When I can't think of a subject for a blog post, I look through the IMDb's list of birthdays. Today is the birth anniversary of Buster Keaton, but I mentioned him just a few weeks back. However, it's also the 77th birthday of actress Felicia Farr. I knew I had seen that name before, but I couldn't remember where. The answer, it turns out, is the western 3:10 to Yuma (the Glenn Ford version, not the recent remake). It's airing this coming Saturday, and if I remember, I'll write a lengthier post on that movie in time for the Saturday showing.

I also didn't know that Farr was married to Jack Lemmon for almost 40 years, until his death.

Two unrelated repeats

Overnight tonight, at 2:15 AM ET, TCM will be showing the 1974 thriller Juggernaut, in which Richard Harris plays a bomb-squad man called in to defuse a series of bombs on a luxury liner in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean.

Later on Sunday morning on TCM, at 7:45 AM, is the 1935 horror flick Mad Love, in which Peter Lorre plays a mad doctor who grafts a knife-thrower's hands onto the gnarled arms of concert pianist Colin Clive, who suddenly develops an uncontrollable urge to throw knives himself.

I have a confession

I'm just not that big a fan of the Marx Brothers. To be honest, they're certainly talented, and nowhere as near as irritating as the Ritz Brothers. And yet, there's something about their features that I find grating after a while. I don't know that it's a matter of the movies being more a series of vignettes than having a coherent plot. After all, I've commented quite favorably on similar movies, such as Jerry Lewis' The Bellboy, or Jacques Tati's Mr. Hulot's Holiday.

Perhaps it's because Lewis and Tati were almost silent in their movies, while Groucho Marx is all about the puns and insults? Perhaps: I can certainly understand why people find Red Skelton annoying in a lot of his movies. But, that wouldn't explain Harpo.

Maybe it;s that the Marx Brothers would just work better in short doses, and I'd find them more enjoyable if they had done two-reelers. Indeed, some of the Laurel and Hardy stuff, like Sons of the Desert, when they first started making features, doesn't really work all that well, while the two reelers they did just before, such as The Music Box, are outstanding. Then again, there are short comedies, even from the sound era, that don't work so well, even those that have high-quality stars in them.

So it could just be another case of the old adage de gustibus non disputandam.

Making gossip easier

One of tomorrow's better movies is The Story of Alexander Graham Bell, airing at 6:00 AM ET October 2 on the Fox Movie Channel.

Now, you should recognize Bell's name as that of the inventor of the telephone, which is more or less what the movie covers -- well, that, and all the ancillary events that led up to it and the effects; just the famous discovery with Dr. Watson wouldn't make for a particularly exciting movie. Bell is played by Don Ameche, one of the Fox studio's top male actors of the late 1930s. The real life Bell was a Scottish-born Canadian who worked with deaf children, trying to figure out a way to get them to be able to hear again. This led to a natural interest in sound-transmission devices, which led to the ultimate invention of the telephone. Along the way, Bell met the young deaf woman who would become his wife (played here by Loretta Young).

Eventually, Bell spilled acid on himself, yelling for Watson (played in the movie by Henry Fonda) to come and help him. When Watson came, claiming he heard the call for help over the apparatus, they had an invention. But, of course, it wasn't all clear sailing for Bell. On the same day Bell filed his American patent application, a rival inventor, Elisha Gray, also filed an application to patent a device for the elctric transmision of sound. This resulted in a protracted court case to determine who should really hold the patent, a case which would have bankrupted Bell and his backers had it gone against them.

As best as I can tell, not being an expert on the history of inventions, The Story of Alexander Graham Bell seems surprisingly accurate. All of the main events in the telephone invention timeline seem to be there: notably, the work with the deaf; the difficulty in inventing the telephone; the scene with Watson; Bell's demonstrations of the phone; and the trial. A lot of the scenes with Ameche and Fonda seem to turn him into a bit too much of a "starving artist" who altough starving is happy; I can't believe Bell was really like that. That having been said, the movie is one that's filled with enjoyable performances, and tells a good story that, for the most part, is quite true. In addition to Ameche, Fonda, and Young, the cast also includes Charles Coburn as Bell's father-in-law and one financial backer; Gene Lockhart as another financial backer; and Spring Byington as Coburn's wife.

I find it very surprising that The Story of Alexander Graham Bell has not made its way to DVD. It was also omitted in TCM's look at the great films of 1939 back in July, which was another sad omission.

TCM's October Spotlight: The Great Depression

This month marks 80 years since the stock market crash of 1929, one of the events which led to the Great Depression. (Seeing stockbrokers on window ledges is much more visually dramatic than watching legislators pass the Smoot-Hawley tariff.) So, every Thursday in prime time this month, TCM is showing Depresion-themed movies.

Tonight's line-up includes two movies that I've recommended previously: Our Daily Bread airs at 10:45 PM ET, and will be followed at 12:15 AM Friday (that's still Thursday evening in more westerly time zones) by Heroes for Sale. (The second link also references Wild Boys of the Road, which will be coming up later in October.)