Another "I thought I recognized that name" birthday

Mona Freeman is still alive, and is turning 84 today. I thought the name looked familiar, and sure enough, I was right: she played Robert Mitchum's girlfriend in Angel Face, which I just mentioned about three weeks ago.

I didn't realize, though, that Freeman pretty much retired from movies in the mid-1950s, although she appeared quite a bit on television for about a decade after that. IMDb says that she's been married to her second husband for 49 years.

Many happy birthday wishes to Mona Freeman!

TCM's Dennis Hopper tribute

As is often the case when a famous star of older movies dies, TCM sets aside some time in the schedule, preempting their originally scheduled movies to show several starring the recently deceased star. Tonight, that tribute goes to the late Dennis Hopper. TCM is showing five of his movies:

The Sons of Katie Elder at 8:00 PM,
True Grit at 10:15 PM,
Rebel Without a Cause at 12:30 AM Wednesday,
Easy Rider at 2:30 AM, and
Night Tide at 4:15 AM.

This preempts a night of Saint movies, several starring George Sanders as Simon Templar, long before Roger Moore played the role. To be honest, I'm a bit disappointed, but then, TCM plays the Saint movies quite a bit.

Tomorrow is Forever

Tonight kicks off the first night for TCM's June Star of the Month, Natalie Wood. Wood is one of the rare child stars who also had quite a bit of success as an adult actress. This first Monday in June sees several of her younger roles, kicking off with Tomorrow is Forever at 8:00 PM ET.

Wood is by no means the star; that honor goes to Claudette Colbert. She plays a woman in World War I whose husband (Orson Welles) goes off to fight. Unfortunately, Welles doesn't return, and Colbert gets word that he's been killed in the war. End of story.

Er, maybe not. Welles knocked up Colbert before going off to fight, leaving Colbert either to raise the son alone, or else get married to a nice man like George Brent who will help raise a stepson. And that's not all. Fast forward to 1939. Coming over from Nazi Germany to escape is the mysterious Mr. Kessler with adopted daughter Margaret (Natalie Wood); a man who looks somewhat like Colbert's first husband. But he's dead of course. Or is he?

To be honest, I find this sort of movie to be the typical horribly melodramatic stuff that constituted a lot of the "women's pictures" of the day. There are good love stories out there from that time period, even good stories that have Natalie Wood playing the precocious kid. (See The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.) Tomorrow is Forever, hoewver, isn't to my taste.

That isn't to say that it won't be to anybody's taste. There are a lot of people out there who like those "women's pictures". And, there are also a lot of people out there who enjoy Orson Welles more than I do. There might even be some people who like George Brent. There's nothing in Tomorrow is Forever to say that the acting is bad, so if you like those actors, there might well be no reason why you wouldn't like the movie.

Tomorrow is Forever doesn't seem to have been released to DVD, though, so if you want to watch it, you'll have to catch the rare TCM showing.

Essentials Jr. returns

This being the first Sunday of the summer holiday season, TCM brings back its series Essentials Jr. for a fourth season. John Lithgow returns for a second stint as host, presenting famous classic movies which are suitable for the entire family. The proceedings kick off tonight at 8:00 PM ET with the Disney classic Old Yeller, about a young boy and his dog. Of course, if you're not one of the kids that this series is designed for, you probably already know the story. But then, that's the point of Essentials Jr.

Fr. Gregory Peck

TCM is showing one of Gregory Peck's earliest movies tomorrow at noon ET: The Keys of the Kingdom.

This is one of those movies told in the flashback style: at the beginning of the movie, Peck's Catholic Fr. Chisholm is an old man with unorthodox views in a backwater parish in Scotland. Somebody further up the Church hierarchy wants to pension him off, and sent to investigate is Msgr. Cedric Hardwicke. It turns out that Fr. Chisholm had spent a good 50 years working as a missionary in China, and kept a journal all those years. Hardwicke's monsignor finds the journal and reads it, and we flash back to Chisholm's youth....

Chisholm didn't exactly have an easy time of it, having been orphaned as a boy (the young Chisholm is played by Roddy McDowall) and grown up with relatives. Not having any real family, he decides to take Holy Orders when he grows up, to the dismay of the daughter in the family he grew up with, as well as doctor-in-training Thomas Mitchell, who is a devout atheist, cynic, and drinker. (Apparently, he's reprising his role from Stagecoach or something.) Already as a young priest Chisholm had unorthodox views, so his superior, Fr. Mealey (Vincent Price) decides the best thing to do would be to shunt his career by making him a missionary in China.

Chisholm takes up the role and tries his hardest to be a good priest, although he quickly finds that honestly converting souls isn't very easy, especially when the other denominations are using rice to more or less buy souls. But it's also in China that the movie really picks up. Chisholm's mission is set against the backdrop of China's turbulent history of the early 20th century, with almost every disaster known to man, as rebellions come, the mission burns to the ground, and then some. (The movie was made before the Communist takeover, so at least Chisholm didn't have to put up with that.) Along the way, Mitchell comes to work at the mission, as do a group of German nuns who have different ideas than Chisholm but gain mutual respect, and Price's Fr. Mealey becomes a surprisingly unchristian bishop.

The Keys of the Kingdom is an excellent movie that, despite being about an obviously religious subject, comes across as much less preachy than other Catholic movies such as Going My Way, which was released the same year. Instead, it's more of an ecumenical picture in that the message is that this is what Christianity is supposed to be about regardless of denomination. Peck, despite appearing in only his second starring role, does a superb job here, and earned an Oscar nomination for it. Price is good too; by this time he was more or less constantly getting cast as Fox's smarmy equivalent of Jack Carson over at Warner's. Mitchell and Hardwicke make the movie better for their appearances; and watch out for James Gleason as a Protestant missionary whom Peck befriends. The Gleason character is married to one played by Anne Revere.

The Keys of the Kingdom has been released to DVD and is well worth watching, regardless of your religion or lack of it.

Judge for yourself

I've said several times before that I'm not much of a fan of Marlon Brando. That having been said, I know there are a lot of people out there who do love his work, so they might enjoy watching the 1962 remake of Mutiny on the Bounty tonight, in which Brando plays the Fletcher Christian role that had been so memorably portrayed a quarter century earlier by Clark Gable. It's this week's TCM Essential, at 8:00 PM ET.

It should go without saying that I prefer the 1935 version, but to be fair, the later version has some advantages, namely in the technical areas. By 1962 color photography and, more importantly, the wide-screen cinema processes, were much easier to execute than anything that could have been done in the 1930s. On a movie like Mutiny on the Bounty that goes around that South Pacific, that's quite a plus. Unfortunately, it still has Brando....

But even when there's a movie I don't care for, I only think it's fair to tell people to judge for themselves. After all, there are some movies out there which are pretty bad, but which are actually fun precisely because they're so bad. Also, as I said earlier, I'm sure this version of Mutiny on the Bounty will appeal to a lot of the Brando fans out there.

Silly Hollywood photo of the day

This month, TCM is showing a bunch of underwater-themed movies on Fridays in prime time. One of tonight's movies is the Disney version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, airing at 10:00 PM ET. I'm sure you know the story, with it having been based upon the popular novel by Jules Verne. James Mason plays Captain Nemo; Paul Lukas the professor who leads the search for the elusive Nautilus; Peter Lorre plays Lukas' assistant; and Kirk Douglas gets the role of Ned Land, one of the sailors on the ship commissioned by Lukas, and the only one of those sailors to survive its collision with the Nautilus.

One of the seeming tropes from the Disney movies is the popular animal characters, especially the anthropomorphic animals of later animated movies. Here, the animal with get is Esmeralda, Nemo's seal who takes a liking to Ned Land, including (if memory serves) a singing scene with him. Not having seen the movie in a while, my memory is that Douglas definitely sings; I think Esmeralda barks along with him. In any case, it's one of the more interesting Hollywood screen pairings.

What women want

Last night saw a number of John Huston movies on TCM; tonight sees two movies starring his father, Walter. The first of these is the interesting pre-Code Ann Vickers at 9:30 PM ET.

Irene Dunne gets top billing in the title role. At the beginning of the movie, she's a social worker dealing with veterans returning from World War I. One of these veterans, Bruce Cabot, tries to woo her, but at first she refuses, wanting to maintain her career. He's a cad, though, and eventually convinces her to have sex with him, since she winds up pregnant and he runs off leaving her more or less alone to raise the coming baby.

Unfortunately, the baby is still-born, although that allows Miss Vickers the opportunity to keep working, going inside a women's prison to observe conditions and write an award-winning book describing the scandalous way the women prisoners are treated. This gains her influence and eventually she gets put in charge of a women's prison of her own, where presumably more progressive conditions will be afforded the prisoners.

This rise in status also brings her to the attention of Judge Barney Dolphin (Walter Huston). He falls in love with her, but also knows he can never really have her. The problem is, he's trapped in a loveless marriage with a woman who won't grant him a divorce, instead traveling around Europe. At least the wife's being away gives the good judge the chance to have his dalliances on the side.

Then again, the good judge isn't a good judge, but a corrupt bastard. Eventually he gets arrested for the corruption, but not before having knocked up Ann Vickers. He goes off to prison, and she works lesser jobs waiting for him to get out of jail....

It's fascinating stuff, based on a novel by Sinclair Lewis. Ann Vickers is supposed to be a strong powerful woman -- after all, she's able to write a scathing book about women's prisons. But every time she meets a bad boy she gets weak in the knees. (On the other hand, the one good man in the movie, lawyer Conrad Nagel, leaves her completely cold.) That having been said, what Vickers does isn't portrayed as particularly immoral, at least, nowhere near the way it would be portrayed in movies released once the enforcement of the Production Code became strict. Further, there's some relatively lurid (at least for 1933 standards) stuff here, in the form of the treatment Vickers witnesses in the women's prison, and how her face is superimposed over those images with a hardened expression. Also in the cast is Edna May Oliver as Vickers' mentor, a role that becomes distinctly too small after Vickers' first baby is stillborn.

Ann Vickers veers from one part of the plot to the next so quickly that it sometimes feels disjointed, which is certainly a drawback. All the same, it's still quite an interesting movie. Sadly, it's never been released to DVD.

One man's terrorist....

TCM is showing a night of movies directed by John Huston tonight. I've mentioned Bette Davis' wonderful rant in In This Our Life before; that movie airs in the wee hours of the morning at 3:15 AM ET. The movie airing before that, at 1:15 AM, is one I haven't recommended before: We Were Strangers.

Set in Cuba during a dictatorship of the early 1930s, We Were Strangers stars Jennifer Jones as China Valdés, an employee at a local export bank. She's not very politically active until one day when her innocent brother is gunned down at the university by the forces of the evil dictator. At the same time, American Tony Fenner (John Garfield) enters Cuba. He's actually there on a missoin to help out the revolutionaries who are plotting to overthrow the dictator. Needless to say, their lives are about to cross in a bunch of ways. Fenner and his gang of Cuban exiles have been using the bank where she works to funnel money between the US and Cuba. But, more imporantly, China has a nice house that Tony thinks the revolutionaries can use in one of their plots. The house is right next to a cemetery where families of some of the prominent members of the government are buried. Tony figures that if the revolutionaries can assassinate one of the members of the government, the rest will show up at the funeral, and the revolutionaries can bomb the government from below. That, of course, involves tunneling, with the beginning of the tunnel being in the Valdés house.

China agrees and sends the rest of her family to the countryside, while she stays and continues working at the bank. The tunneling commences, and as it goes on, she and Tony fall in love. And, in true Hollywood fashion, there's also a love triangle. The third member of that triangle is Pedro Armendáriz playing Armando Ariete. Ariete is the head of the secret police and as such, has a lot of reason to be inspecting the bank where China works. What he doesn't know is that her brother is the man that was killed by him at the university all those months ago. He also doesn't know that she's become the hostess for those revolutionaries, including Fenner. Still, he falls in love with her.

In some ways, it's fairly formulaic stuff, but We Were Strangers isn't that bad a movie. Jennifer Jones isn't my favorite, and certainly isn't a convincing Cuban, but since this could be a dictatorship anywhere, the miscasting isn't such a big deal. John Garfield is fine as always, the handsome man with a dark and troubled past. And Armendáriz is superbly sinister as the head of the secret police. The supporting cast includes Gilbert Roland and Ramon Novarro as two of Garfield's fellow revolutionaries, and both add quite a bit to the proceedings. The movie has also been released to DVD, so you can watch it any time you like, not just 1:15 in the morning.

TCM Guest Programmer: Rich Eisen

NFL Network host Rich Eisen joins Robert Osborne tonight as TCM's Guest Programmer for June. I mentioned in the Dennis Hopper obituary that TCM is showing Hoosiers tonight at 8:00 PM ET as the first of Eisen's picks. Eisen, being a sports broadcaster, has selected three more sports movies:

Rocky at 10:00 PM, in which Sylvester Stallone likes Talia Shire without a hat;
The Natural at 12:15 AM, in which Robert Redford breaks light bulbs by hitting them with baseballs; and
Caddyshack at 2:30 AM, the quintessential low-rent golf comedy.

Interestingly, Eisen didn't select a movie about the NFL, of which the best would probably be the Billy Wilder comedy The Fortune Cookie.