Let's all go to the lobby and have ourselves a snake

I had to bring the plants into the sun room the other day because the first frost was about to come. This morning, I'm out in the sun room, and what do I see? A nice little garter snake! Thankfully, I'm not particularly afraid of snakes, so I was able to pick this one up with my bare hands nd throw it outside so that it can go off to wherever it is snakes go to hibernate. For some reason, I couldn't help but think of the circus freaks in Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur. As you'll recall, they take in Bob Cummings and Priscilla Lane as the train of circus trucks passes in the middle of nowhere. When the police inspect their truck, they spot Lane and ask what she's doing, since she doesn't look like one of the freaks. The bearded lady responds, "She's our snake charmer! She's sitting on a box of snakes so they don't get lonesome!" The joke, of course, is that we've already learned that Lane's character is frightened of snakes. It's just one more example of Alfred Hitchcock's wonderful black humor.

It's one of the more whimsical uses of snakes in a movie plot, with one of the only others I can think of being the animated snake in the opening credits of The Lady Eve. Snakes show up in all sorts of other places, largely because they're frightening to a lot of people and good for shock or horror. Probably the best known example of this would be Snakes on a Plane, which isn't exactly a classic, although it may become a cult classic a half century from now. Frankly, I prefer to think of it as a loose remake of The Narrow Margin.

And then there are the rattlesnakes that show up to threaten characters in westerns. I distinctly recall Robert Ryan having to kill one in Inferno, while rattlesnakes also show up in the John Wayne version of True Grit, as well as the non-western Capricorn One. Thankfully, there aren't any rattle snakes in this portion of the US.

Desire in the Dust

If you want to see a very overboiled potboiler, you could do far worse than to watch the southern family melodrama Desire in the Dust, which is airing tomorrow morning at 9:00 AM on the Fox Movie Channel. (Even the title sounds fun.)

The movie starts off with a bunch of people waiting for the next train into town, which we know means that Somebody Important to the Plot is about to get off. That's followed by a cut to a shot of the town's doyenne, Mrs. Marquand (Joan Bennett), celebrating her son's birthday, only for the camera to pull out and reveal the birthday is at his grave: the kid has been dead for six years and that death has pushed Mrs. Marquand off her rocker. These two items are going to come together, and thankfully, the movie does this for us fairly quickly. The man getting off the train is Lonnie (Ken Scott), who has just spent six years in the state penitentiary for the vehicular homicide conviction of the little boy.

But there's so much more going on. Lonnie is the son of a sharecropper, and it turns out that the sharecropper family has many more connections to the noble Marquands. Lonnie, before going to prison, had a thing of Melinda (Martha Hyer), the daugher of the Marquand family. And Peter, the other Marquand brother, has fallen in love with one of the sharecropper girls, a fact that irritates the father, Col. Ben, to no end. The Colonel is played by Perry Mason. Er, make that Raymond Burr; watching Burr ham it up as he tries to play a southern patriarch is part of the fun of this movie. Our Colonel is a domineering man, to put it mildly. He's got ambitions to hold higher elective office, and when his son died six years earlier, he realized the circumstances behind it could be problematic for him. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. We're not supposed to know the details of this; all we know at first is that the editor of the local newspaper suspects something.

Anyhow, Lonnie had been in love with Melinda, and when he gets out, he still wants her all for himself. The only problem is that in the meantime, she got married to Dr. Ned (Brett Halsey), the doctor looking after Mrs. Marquand. It's good for the Colonel, who wants Melinda married to somebody respectable, but bad for Lonnie, who is determined to get Melinda back all for himself. She'll go with anybody she can, it seems, tempting Lonnie by wearing a series of dresses that do things to her breasts that should violate all of the laws of physics, and then not paying off. And then there's Daddy's relationship with her, which at times seems to imply that there's been some incest going on!

As I said at the beginning, Desire in the Dust is a potboiler that includes a little of everything as it goes way over the top. I haven't even include The Corrupt Sheriff or the shootings, the trope of The Reporter Willing to Break the Law to Prove the Truth, or the Colonel's treatment of his wife and his son Peter. Poor Joan Bennett has fairly little to do other than to provide seeming comic relief by breaking all of the breakable set pieces every time somebody has the nerve to tell her her younger son is actually dead. Until the finale when we know she's finally going to accept the truth, much like Katharine Hepburn in Suddenly Last Summer The Colonel is also still treating Peter like a little boy.

All in all, Desire in the Dust is one of those films that isn't all that good, but is a hell of a lot of fun.

Summer Holiday

For some reason, I've never mentioned the movie Summer Holiday. The reason it should have gotten a mention is that it's a remake of Ah, Wilderness!, a movie that I blogged about when Mickey Rooney was TCM's Star of the Month last December. Mickey Rooney plays the lead in Summer Holiday after playing the kid brother in Ah, Wilderness!. Summer Holiday aired when Mickey Rooney was Star of the Month, and has aired a number of times since then, so I would have thought that I'd mention the relationship at least one of the times that Summer Holiday was on the schedule.

I thought it was on the schedule tonight at 8:00 PM, but no, I was wrong. If you look carefully, it's a completely different movie also titled Summer Holiday, from 1963 and starring Cliff Richard, who is probably best known for his singing. He's been singing since the 1950s and is an icon in the UK. I'm not certain which song he'd be best known for here in the US, but there's "Devil Woman" from the 1970s and "Suddenly" from the movie Xanadu, a duet with Olivia Newton-John, from 1980.

Not everybody is like us

A lot of times when it comes to the programming of the TCM schedule, I'll see people complaining that the prime time schedule doesn't have sufficiently obscure movies. And yet, there are a lot of people out there who don't know the "well-known" classics very well. Last night on Jeopardy!, the Final Jeopardy category was "Oscar Nominations", and the clue was something like, "The only time three actors received Best Actor nominations for the same movie was for this high-seas adventure." Now, those of us who are fans of old movies should know this one right away. And, to be fair, since it's only about nominations and not very directly about the plot of a film (as with, say Casablanca, it's not as easy a clue as us film buffs might be.

So it wasn't that much of a surprise that only one of the contestants came up with the correct response. That having been said, I was surprised to see somebody guess Down Periscope. No Titanic? Still, it should be a reminder to us classic movie fans that not everybody shares our interests. The more interesting question of course for people like the programmers at TCM is how to keep the TCM brand growing in the longer term. After all, they do need to reach out to new fans, or else us current fans are going to die off. I obviously don't know how to do it, or I'd be in charge of programming cable channels.

In case you didn't know, the correct response to the Final Jeopardy clue was "What is Mutiny on the Bounty?" I wonder, though, what the Jeopardy! contestants were thinking when Alex Trebek mentioned Franchot Tone.

The slightly seamy side of sports

Ah, for the "good old days" when the Olympics were played out against the backdrop of the Cold War. If you miss those days, you can have fun reliving them by watching the movie The Games this afternoon at 3:30 PM on the Fox Movie Channel.

The movie, released in 1970 tells the story of four men who are in training to compete in the marathon at the 1960 Rome Olympics. (This means that we should know who wins, but as far as I know none of the characters are named after real people who actually ran.) Representing the US is Ryan O'Neal, playing Scott Reynolds, an upper-class college graduate who a generation earlier would have fit in perfectly with the Brits who competed in 1924 and were presented in Chariots of Fire. In fact, though, Reynolds is closer to the stereotype of today's high-profile college athlete of a drinker who sleeps with as many groupies as he can. Reynolds doesn't need to run through the tidal flats.

Two of the four profiled men would be more likely to train in such a manner. One is in fact British; that's Harry Hayes (played by Michael Crawford, who would go on to fame in The Phantom of the Opera on Broadway). He's a dairyman and clearly a working-class person. He shows a flair for running and can beat all the public school boys, but he seems to run for his own reasons, which constantly puts him at odds with his coach (Bill Oliver), who is clearly living vicariously through his prodigy. Not too dissimilar is the Australian runner Sunny (Athol Compton), an Aboriginal who is discovered at a beach race by two White Australians who figure they can make a bundle of money wagering on Sunny, and take that all the way to the Olympics, which were still theoretically an amateur event at the time.

Last but not least is the Czechoslovak runner Pavel (Charles Aznavour). He's clearly based on Emil Zátopek, the Czechoslovak winner of the 5,000- and 10,000-meter races at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, who has been prodded by his superiors to run the marathon for the glory of Communism. (In fact, Zátopek ran the marathon in Helsinki signing up at the last minute.)

The first two-thirds or so of the movie present the four men's preparation for the Games, and in the final third we get the actual race, which is a bit of a laugh riot. The race is presented with commentary by Rafer Johnson, the real-life winner of the decathlon in Rome who here is playing a TV sportscaster in a role that's probably technically inaccurate. The TV presentation implies that it's live to tape with Johnson in the back of a car, but with no satellite broadcasting technology and relatively little interest in sports broadcasting back in 1960, I'd think the marathon would have been heavily edited for broadcast. But that's not exactly what I'd complain about. First off, Harry takes off at an impossibly fast pace, completing the half-marathon in just under an hour. Considering that 50 years on, the record for the full marathon is about 2:06, running a half-marathon in under an hour would have been impossible back then. You can't help but think he's going to hit the wall. In fact, two of the profiled athletes hit the wall, presented in very different ways, each hilarious in its own right.

The Games is a movie with a fairly interesting premise that doesn't quite live up to that premise; it's nowhere near as good as Chariots of Fire. Still, there are parts that are well worth watching. It doesn't seem to be on DVD, however, and the last time the Fox Movie Channel showed it, it was a pan-and-scan print.

Jean Louis Berthault, 1907-1997

Today marks the birth anniversary of Jean Louis Berthault. You probably wouldn't recognize the last name, largely because today's birthday boy didn't use his last name when working professionally. Under the name "Jean Louis", however, you probably do recognize him, as he showed up in the credits of dozens and dozens of movies from the 1940s through to about 1970, mostly as a gown designer Jean Louis was nominated about a dozen times, from Born Yesterday in 1950 to Thoroughly Modern Millie in 1967. But of all the famous movies he did, it's interesting that Jean Louis won his only Oscar for a movie that's not as well known today: Solid Gold Cadillac. (Readers here will of course remember it as it's a movie I find delightful.)

One of the most famous non-nominated movies for which Jean Louis designed gowns is Gilda, with that black dress Rita Hayworth wore; in the Academy's defense, however, Costume Design was not yet a category at the time, only becoming a category in 1948. It's somewhat surprising that costume design wasn't honored before that since it really is an important part of the movies. Jean Louis also designed the dresses for Marilyn Monroe in The Misfits, and famously designed the dress Monroe wore when she sang "Happy Birthday" to John Kennedy in an event that we get crammed down our throats to this day because of the media's love for all things Kennedy.

Jean Louis was married three times, becoming a widower after the first two marriages and then marrying actress Loretta Young, for whose 1950s TV show he had designed dresses, in 1993. That marriage lasted until his death in 1997.

Nicholas Ray "centenary"

TCM is honoring director Nicholas Ray on the 100th anniversary of his birth with a retrospective. Every Tuesday night in October, TCM will be showing the films of Ray. In fact, Ray was born in August 1911, but since August is Summer Under the Stars on TCM, they had to delay the tribute. Among the films showing up on the first night of the salute, there are two that I would recommend, although it's been quite a few years since I've seen either of them.

At 10:00 PM is In a Lonely Place, in which Humphrey Bogart stars as a screenwriter with a violent temper who gets accused of murder. Gloria Grahame, a woman who lives in the same apartment complex, can provide an alibi, and this leads to her falling in love with Bogart. Until she learns of his violent temper, which leads her to wonder whether of not he's innocent after all....

In a Lonely Place is followed at 11:45 PM by They Live By Night, a movie I think I very briefly mentioned by title only back when Farley Granger died earlier this year. Granger stars as a man who got sent to prison for a relatively minor crime, which results in his becoming hardened by the fellow inmates he meets who really do deserve to be in prison. They more violent prisoners break out and help Granger to do so, but it's a price that's rather high for him to pay. They Live By Night is one that has a lot of people who were B-actors at the time and one that I remember as being quite good.

I have not actually seen Knock on Any Door, the movie that kicks off the night at 8:00 PM, before.

October is for horror

We're into October, which means that Halloween is exactly four weeks from today. Halloween always means classic and not so classic horror film shows up all over the place. TCM is unsurprisingly no exception; every Monday in prime time TCM is showing films from the genre. This week starts with a look at the genre from the silent era through to about the mid-1930s; future weeks will get us up to about the late 1960s. There's also a TCM documentary called The Horrors of Steven King which will be premiering tonight at 8:00 PM, followed by several airings throughout the month. According to the TCM article, this isn't about King's own horror output, but about the films that influenced King.

As for tonight's actual movies, you could do far worse than to watch Frankenstein at 9:00 PM; Boris Karloff gets the role that made him a star and a fixture in the horror genre for the rest of his life. Bela Lugosi shows up in a supporting role in Mark of the Vampire overnight at 2:15 AM, and Lon Chaney appears in The Phantom of the Opera, tomorrow morning at 6:15 AM.

Star of the Month: Buster Keaton

It's quite rare that TCM honors a Star of the Month on the weekend, but this month, we have a star who did a lot of his work during the silent era. So, I suppose TCM decided to combine Silent Sunday Nights with the Star of the Month and bring us a bunch of Buster Keaton movies on all five Sunday nights in October. The salute kicks off with The General at 8:00 PM, which will be followed by a bunch of two-reelers. Back in the late teens and early 20s, actors made a lot of two-reelers.

There's one other feature which I've already blogged about, that being The Navigator at midnight. I don't think I've seen Our Hospitality (10:00 PM) before. And to be honest, I'm rather more looking forward to the shorts tonight.

Vivacious Lady

TCM is showing the movie Vivacious Lady this evening at 10:00 PM, and I don't believe that I have ever blogged about it before. Despite the fact that it has two fairly substantial stars in James Stewart and Ginger Rogers, it's one that's relatively little-seen. To be fair, Stewart wasn't quite yet the big star he was to become; Vivacious Lady was released in 1938 and it was movies like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington a year later that made him a much bigger star. But Rogers was already quite big.

But enough of that, and on to the plot. Stewart plays Peter Morgan, Jr., a professor at a college in some unnamed middle American city where his father (Charles Coburn) is the president. The good professor starts off the film in the big city on a trip with his cousin Keith (James Ellison), who is rather the playboy, and obviously not the family member of which the rest of the family would be proud. In fact, we first meet Keith in a nightclub, where he's enjoying the singer (Ginger Rogers) despite the fact that staying at the club is going to make him miss his train home. It's Peter Jr.'s job to fetch Keith and bring him home, but Peter himself gets waylaid... by that singer. That singer, of course, is Ginger Rogers, playing a character named Francey. When Peter sees Francey, it's love at first sight, and the two get a quickie marriage before taking the train home.

This, unsurprisingly, causes serious problems. First, Dad is bound not to approve of the marriage. Could you imagine a college professor getting married to a nightclub singer? (Sure, in a Hollywood movie.) The trustees are certain not to like the idea either. So at first Peter Jr. keeps the marriage a secret, putting Francey up in a women-only apartment house while he works up the courage to tell Dad the truth. Dad isn't the only person who needs to learn the uncomfortable truth: Peter Jr. was engaged to Helen (Frances Mercer) before going off to pick up his cousin. Mom (Beulah Bondi) would be more accepting, but unfortunately she, like her son, has been too cowed by Dad to stand up to him.

Now, Vivacious Lady is a comedy, so all of this is handled very lightly. And it's quite an enjoyable little comedy, too. It doesn't seem to be trying to anything too big; we just have a bunch of professional actors going about their jobs and doing a darn good job of it.