Larceny, Inc.

If I told you that TCM is showing an Edward G. Robinson comedy tonight, you might be surprised. But that would be because you haven't read this blog carefully enough. In the past, I've recommended Robinson in the somewhat comedic The Whole Town's Talking, and also in the straight-up comedy A Slight Case of Murder. So it shouldn't be a surprise that Robinson did a movie like Larceny, Inc., which is airing tonight at 8:00 PM on TCM.

Robinson plays "Pressure", a career criminal who, along with his partner "Jug" (Broderick Crawford), is just about to get paroled. He needs to have something honest to do in life so that he doesn't wind up back behind bars again, and he's a bit lucky in that he's got a niece Denny (Jane Wyman) looking out for his best interests. She and her boyfriend Jeff (Jack Carson) help Pressure and Jug buy a luggage store when they show an interest in it, and use their business acumen to try to help the business become a success.

Of course, the real reason Pressure and Jug took an interest in the luggage store isn't because they wanted to go straight; it's because the store is located right next to a bank. They figure this gives them the perfect opportunity for another heist: tunnel from the basement storeroom of the luggage shop to the bank next door, and rob the vault from below which, in theory, wouldn't set off the alarm. (The massive evidence of tunneling might be a problem, and I'm not talking about the dirt that they could presumably get rid of in the luggage.) Not that Denny and Jeff quite realize this -- and that causes the first of Pressure and Jug's problems, as they constantly have to deal with honest business that takes time away from their real business.

And then there's a second problem, when fellow criminal Leo (Anthony Quinn) gets out of jail. He's heard of what Pressure and Jug are doing, and wants a piece of the action. Will Pressure and Jug be able to turn good guys and foil Leo, while remaining on the right side of the law?

I've suggested a few times before that I think Edward G. Robinson is a very underrated actor, and Larceny, Inc. is another example of that. True, the movie isn't quite as good as A Slight Case of Murder, and doesn't have any of the biting commentary that The Whole Town's Talking did. I don't think any of that is Robinson's fault; instead, the production feels a bit rushed. Broderick Crawford is fairly good in his typical role of a man with more bluster than brains; Jack Carson once again plays a bit of a schemer, something which he always did well; and Anthony Quinn is enjoyable in one of his earlier roles. Sure, there are better movies out there, but Larceny, Inc. does a fine job of entertaining the viewer -- and that, after all, is one of the main jobs a movie should do.

Meanwhile, back in Sweden

This is the week that the Nobel Prizes are being awarded, as happens every year on the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel. So why am I mentioning this in a blog about classic movies? Well, it's because TCM is using this as an opportunity to show The Prize this afternoon (December 8) at 3:15 PM.

Paul Newman stars as Andrew Craig, the reclusive American writer who is being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. However, Craig has a problem: he's got a bad case of writers' block, and hasn't been able to come up with any of the sort of literature that the Nobel committee would award for the past five years. During that time, he's been making his living by writing detective stories under an assumed name. But, he's not the only Nobelist to have problems. All of them do. The winners in chemistry are a husband and wife who are at each other's throats, to the point that the husband has brought his mistress to the prize ceremony in the guise of his "secretary". And then there are the medicine winners, Sergio Fantoni and Kevin McCarthy. These two play an Italian and American doctor respectively, each of whom thinks the other pilfered his work in coming up with the discovery that joint won them the Nobel.

The biggest problem of them all is had by the physics prize winner, Dr. Stratman (Edward G. Robinson). He doesn't know it, but he's about to be kidnapped, abducted to East Germany, and replaced by a lookalike (who is unsurprisingly also played by Edward G. Robinson) who is going to announce his defection to East Germany. Dr. Stratman does have one good thing going for him, however, which is that he bumped into Craig before getting kidnapped. The reason this is a good thing is that Craig sees Stratman again at a mixer held after the kidnapping, and when "Stratman" doesn't recognize him, suspects that there's something up. Craig, having written a bunch of detective stories, immediately begins to investigate.

At the point the plot begins to break down a bit, if only because it's a bit unrealistic. It is, however, rather entertaining. Craig's investigation causes problems not only for the people trying to spirit Stratman away, but also for the Swedish authorities, who have this crazy American going nuts in the streets of Stockholm. (One of the more interesting escapades has Craig winding up in a meeting of nudists. Women will be disappointed that we only see Paul Newman from the waist up.) This is especially bothersome to the young Elke Sommer, who has been assigned the task of being Craig's minder, and winds up falling for him along the way. Eventually the other prize winners get involved as well, and help solve the disappearance in a satisfying way.

As I said, it's unrealistic, but fun. A lot of that fun comes from screenwriter Ernest Lehman, who had previously done the screenplay to North by Northwest. So, as you can probably figure, The Prize has a lot that looks as though it would be right at home in a Hitchcock movie. In fact, it was directed by Mark Robson, whose work ranges from Val Lewton's The Seventh Victim to fun dreck like Valley of the Dolls. (Along the Hitchcock lines, Stratman's niece is played by Diane Baker, who would appear a year later in Marnie as Sean Connery's sister-in-law.) There's both humor and suspense, and Swedish scenery that's lovely to look at. Edward G. Robinson doesn't have a particularly challenging role here, but he was always professional. The same is true for Paul Newman.

If you want great groundbreaking cinema, The Prize is not the movie for you. But if you just want to sit back, relax, and watch something that's not too taxing, The Prize is more than perfect for that. It's gotten a release to DVD as part of the Warner Archive.

Harry Morgan, 1915-2011

Harry Morgan in a supporting role in Somehwere in the Night

The death has been announced of actor Harry Morgan at the age of 96. Morgan is probably best remembered to younger people for having played Col. Sherman Potter on the TV series M*A*S*H, although it's been almost 30 years since the show went off the air. Morgan also played Jack Webb's sidekick on the TV police show Dragnet. But before all this, he had quite a substantial career in movies starting in the early 1940s, when he was usually credited as Henry Morgan instead of Harry. He worked at Fox at the start of his career, so a lot of his movies don't show off all that often on TCM, but they either show up from time to time on the Fox Movie Channel, or are available on DVD. One example of the latter is Somewhere in the Night, where Morgan plays a smaller role as an attendant at a bath house, and from which the photo above is taken.

Morgan actually had a broad range in his movie roles. The most recent time I recommended one of his movies, he played a killer, in the film Red Light. Or, I suppose I could mention that he worked the other side of the law in Strange Bargain, in which he plays a police detective. And for something completely different, you could watch him in a western like Yellow Sky.

I don't know that TCM will be pre-empting any of their programming to do a tribute for him, but he is the sort of actor who would merit a night of films sometime in the future, and would of even if he hadn't just died.

filmarkivet.se

I mentioned the other day that I like to listen to international broadcasters. Yesterday, Radio Sweden had an interesting piece on the Swedish Film Institute's on-line archive. Now, there aren't any classic Swedish films there, at least not in the sense that we'd think of when we think "classic" cinema. All the feature films have the obvious problems with copyright issues. Instead, what we get is about 500 mostly short films that look a lot like the sort of American industrial films of the 1950s, plus a bunch of documentaries. The other thing, of course, is that almost everything is in Swedish, so it's difficult to figure out quite what's going on unless you speak Swedish, which I don't.

Still, there are some interesting things in the archive. One is a document of the 1897 visit of the King of Siam to Sweden, which shouldn't be too difficult to follow since they didn't have talking movies back then so you don't have to deal with Swedish dialogue.

Then, there was the American cruise line that tried to get people to visit Stockholm. They did so by making the advertising film Stockholm, Queen of the Baltic back in 1932. Looks a lot like one of James A. FitzPatrick's Traveltalks movies. (Fitzpatrick himself actually did visit Sweden, making Stockholm, Pride of Sweden in 1937 and Rural Sweden in 1938.)

Another TCM original documentary

TCM is bringing us another installment in its Night at the Movies series, this time looking at Christmas movies. The documentary is getting its first airing at 8:00 PM tongiht and, like most TCM documentaries, will be getting a bunch of airings throught the month.

The documentary is obviously also a starting point for a night of Christmas movies. Some of them are movies I don't particularly care for, such as Tenth Avenue Angel at 4:00 AM. Then again, that's probably because I have a tendency to get irritated by the films of Margaret O'Brien. It's particularly bad when she's paired with Judy Garland in Meet Me In St. Louis, which precedes Tenth Avenue Angel at 2:00 AM.

On the other hand, TCM is also airing the short Star in the Night, which comes on around 10:35 PM after A Christmas Story. I can't believe it's been two years since I blogged on Star of the Night, but then, there are only so many Christmas movies for TCM to air.

Dev Anand, 1923-2011

If you're reading this in the United States, you might well have missed the news of the passing of actor Dev Anand on Saturday, at the age of 88. I only heard it because I like to listen to international broadcasters and heard the report on All-India Radio's English service. The obvious reason that Anand would be almost completely unknown to American audiences is because he was a prominent actor in Bollywood.

Bollywood is a subject I don't know that much about other than the stereotypes of Indian cinemagoers loving lavish musical numbers in places of their movies where American audiences wouldn't expect one. I think my first exposure to a Bollywood movie came many years ago back when the local PBS channel was airing classic films from around the world in the late slot on Saturday nights. (I think that would be the same place where I saw The Cranes Are Flying and Ikiru.) I didn't stay up for the end of the particular Indian movie they were showing, largely because it didn't seem to make much sense to me. Granted, I was too young to get what was going on, and certainly too young to appreciate the musical numbers -- although, as I think I've said elsewhere, I'm still not the biggest fan of musicals.

The other aspect of foreign film I'd like to learn a bit more about is "Nollywood", which is the nickname given to the collect movie production of Nigeria. As I understand it, the most common means of distribution is direct-to-video, with movies having a shelf life of only a few weeks before pirated copies start to take over the market. This means that the movies have to be produced on a shoestring budget to recoup the production costs, and a large number of movies are produced. (I think the established production capabilities of Bollywood and Nollywood both produce more normal films than Hollywood does these days, although Hollywood's total likely doesn't include adult films, which are probably the biggest genre of movies produced.)

Fragments

TCM is doing something a bit different with its Silent Sunday Nights slot this week. Instead of one silent film, or a couple of shorts, they're airing a documentary called Fragments that first ran on TCM earlier this year. It's coming up at midnight tonight.

It's sad how many silent films have been lost as there's no known surviving footage. There are other movies, however, for which some portion of the movie survives, but much of it is missing. I mentioned Alfred Hitchcock's The White Shadow back in August and September as an example of this. In the case of The White Shadow, the movie was found in New Zealand in part because that was apparently the last stop on the distibution tour for a movie print, which makes sense if you consider how far out of the way New Zealand would have been back in the 1920s when there were no transoceanic flights. The documentary was obviously made before the re-showing of The White Shadow, but there are still a lot of other interesting things in this documentary.

Apparently, back in the day, you could get copyright on a movie by leaving part of it with the Library of Congress. One of the results is that filmmakers would take a minute or two of footage, have the individual frams reproduced as more substantially-sized phootgraphs, and have those photographs copied as a series. In theory, the rest of the movie wasn't copyrighted, but you couldn't show a movie without showing the copyrighted footage. Today, such footage can be turned back into film by treating the photographs as a sort of flip-book along the lines of the way animation was done.

Other movies have surviving footage as a result of the promotional trailers made to advertise upcoming films. These trailers would have been distributed differently from the films themselves, so they wouldn't necessarily have been destroyed at the same time the films were.

But perhaps the best footage here is the surviving footage from The Way of All Flesh. Emil Jannings won the first Best Actor Oscar for this movie, but only about five minutes of the movie survives. It's one of the only lost films left that won an Oscar, since the rediscovery a few years back of Two Arabian Knights.

Christmas movies are here again

Now that we're in December, we begin to get a lot of Christmas movies. Some of them I've recommended in Decembers past, but one that I only saw for the first time last December is Fitzwilly. It's airing tomorrow morning at 8:00 AM on TCM.

Dick Van Dyke plays Claude Fitzwilliam, who with a name like that unsurprisingly gets the nickname Fitzwilly. Fitzwilly is the head butler to the wealthy old spinster Victoria Woodworth (Edith Evans). Or, Miss Woodworth used to be wealthy. She's burned through all her inheritance, to the point that Fitzwilly has to watch her financial situation very carefully. This is a big problem, since the grand old lady likes to donate money to every charity case under the sun. So to keep Woodworth solvent, Fitzwilly and the rest of the staff do two things. First is to try to prevent checks from going out in the first place; if a check doesn't go out you don't need the funds to make it good. Second is to get Mis Victoria's staff to engage in con artist schemes to bilk people of money when she does sign a check and get it past Fitzwilly.

So far so good, with the exception of Fitzwilly technically being a criminal. His situation is about to get a little more complicated. Miss Victoria wants to write the story of her life, and to that end, she's hired young journalism student Juliet (Barbara Feldon) to interview her and cobble those interviews together into an autobiography. Juliet suspects that there's something odd going on in the Woodworth household, and those suspicions are confirmed when she catches Fitzwilly trying to keep a five-figure check from leaving the house. Needless to say, this causes multiple problems for Fitzwilly, who not only is about to get caught, but is about to see his boss be humiliated when her insolvency comes to light.

Eventually, Juliet finds herself beginning to sympathize with Fitzwilly's plight and falls in love with him, although she'd rather that his next scheme be his last one: in order to pay for that big check that Juliet let go out of the house, Fitzwilly has to concoct an elaborate plot to rob one of the department stores of all its cash on Christmas Eve....

Fitzwilly is a comedy and, despite the themes of robbery, it's actually a fairly light comedy. It's certainly the sort of light comedy that Dick Van Dyke could do well. Edith Evans is reminiscent of Margaret Rutherford in The VIPs, and is a delight to watch as the dotty old lady. Feldon is lovely and capable, and there's a supporting cast of a lot of familiar names. All in all, I think you'll find it quite enjoyable. Sadly, Fitzwilly doesn't seem to be available for purchase on DVD.

The title implies it's a kids' film

TCM is airing a bunch of pre-Codes after the William Powell movies finish up, several of which I haven't seen. One that I have seen and is available to purchase from the Warner Archive in case you miss today's showing is Under 18, at 3:15 PM.

Released at the beginning of 1932, Under 18 is naturally set during the Depression when jobs were at a premium and everybody wanted to get rich quick to escape the financial situation they were in. Marian Marsh is Margie, one such woman. She's got a job as a seamstress in one of the fashion houses in New York's fashion district, and a boyfriend named Jimmie (Regis Toomey) who's trying to get her to marry him. Jimmie is a delivery boy, but has dreams of getting a truck of his own and starting an independent delivery operation. Margie would like more than that, but this being the Depression, it's not as though there's much opportunity out there. A good example of this lack of opportunity can be seen in Margie's sister Sophie (Anita Page). Sophie is already married to Alf (Norman Foster) with one kid, and a second on the way. That in itself doesn't look so appealing to Margie at this point in her life. But to make matters worse, Alf has lost his job, and is constantly spending money on his version of get-rich-quick schemes, which for him means entering pool contests, where he thinks he can win the top prize. Needless to say he doesn't, and it's to the point where Sophie and Alf have had to move back in with the rest of the family and Sophie would like a divorce. If only there were the money for a lawyer.

Margie, to her credit, thinks she sees a way out of this. Although she's only a seamstress at the fashion house, she gets to see the models on a regular basis as they're showing off the designs to buyers, socialites, and playboys who would buy the dresses for their girlfriends. One of the trips out into the showroom brings Margie into contact with one of those playboys, Raymond (Warren William). There's an obvious choice for Margie: abandon the dreary future of being a deliveryman's wife, and spend time being a sugar baby! This would also allow her not only to live on Easy Street, but also to get the money for Sophie's divorce. All it really requires is going up to Raymond's fabulous penthouse and, well, being his....

For me it's that penthouse that's the highlight of Under 18. A lot of the penthouses you'll see in movies from this era are almost impossibly luxurious, which makes for fun set design. The one inhabited here by Warren William is no different in terms of set design, but a bit different in terms of what's going on. When Margie gets there, she arrives at what looks for all the world like the early 1930s version of a swingers' party. (Or at least what I think a swingers' party would have looked like 80 years ago; I don't go to swingers' parties.) It's suitably decadent for the viewer, but for poor Margie, it's enough to give her second thoughts. And to be honest, those second thoughts are one of the things that makes the rest of the movie not so interesting, as Margie resolves the situation in a way that's not quite satisfying for a pre-Code. (Compare this to, say, the end of Jean Harlow's Red-Headed Woman.) Still, Under 18 is a bit of a treat. (But unlike the title implies, not really a treat for kids.)

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.