No, I don't mean Martha Ivers

Thanks to the Warner Archive, there are movies available on DVD that I can blog about a few days after seeing them for the first time that I otherwise wouldn't like to mention: I only feel comfortable recommending movies if they're either available on DVD or are coming up on TV soon. Tuesday was my first viewing of The Strange Love of Molly Louvain, a really fun little pre-Code.

Molly Louvain is played by Ann Dvorak; she's a young woman working a cigar counter in a small-city hotel who would really like to get more out of life. Fortunately she's got a way out, in the form of a wealthy young man from the right side of the tracks, who is going to tell his mother that they're getting engaged at a party that night. Or maybe not. Molly goes to the "party", only to find out that the son suddenly left, presumably never to be seen again. So, Molly is left with two boyfriends pursuing her: first is Jimmy, a bellboy at the hotel (Richard Cromwell). He's portrayed as obviously the good guy; the one Mother would want you to be with, but who is almost hopelessly in love with Molly since it seems as though he's never going to rise above being a bellboy. The other choice is Nick (Leslie Fenton), a traveling salesman currently selling silk stockings who has a lecherous eye on Molly. He may be a lecher, but at least he goes places, so Molly winds up splitting town with him.

Fast forward three years. Molly's got a kid, which if not explicitly stated is clearly the illegitimate result of the relationship with the rich guy who only appears in the first reel of the film. Molly's also discovered that while Nick goes places, he does so by stealing, and that's not the sort of life she wants for her son. So she leaves the kid with what is effectively a foster mother and runs away from Nick to take a job at a Chicago dance hall playing the same sort of dime-a-dance girl Lucille Ball played in Lured. And who does she meet there? Why, Jimmy, the old bellboy she knew. He's now a college student. Unfortunately, she also meets Nick, who has discovered where she's working. Nick tries to take Molly for a ride, and Jimmy joins her to try to protect her. And then they discover Nick stole the car, and get in a shootout with the police.

So Molly and Jimmy rent a cheap apartment for a week to lie low in, until they can escape. The only problem is who they have for a neighbor. It's journalist Scotty (Lee Tracy), who's a piece of work. Scotty is the sort of fixer who would make some of Jack Carson's characters look like pikers. Scotty knows it all (or thinks he does), and knows he's going to find Molly Louvain, all the while never having a clue that Molly is living right across the hall from him! Scotty does have a good idea, however, that Molly and Jimmy's story about being married is a lie, and Scotty offers to take Molly away with him, since he's either going to write the Great American Novel or go to Hollywood, and he knows she wants to go places.

The Strange Love of Molly Louvain tells a story of a love that isn't all that strange, although the movie itself is a bit odd in that it goes from one part of the plot to the next extremely abruptly, and then ends just as abruptly. Ann Dvorak is the sort of actress who was hard boiled enough to play a character like Molly Louvain in one of these pre-Codes. Molly has the sort of hardness that Aline MacMahon's character in Heat Lightning (where, incidentally, Dvorak played MacMahon's kid sister) has. Fenton is sleazy, and Cromwell is more an ornament in service of Dvorak. The revelation, however, is Tracy. His character as the agent to John Barrymore in Dinner at Eight is tough, if only because he's learned he's got a man who's killing himself and is never going to get any better as a client. Tracy would go on to play some other great roles of hard people, especially in The Best Man. But the character in The Strange Love of Molly Louvain tops them all. It's got the hardness we see in The Best Man, but the life that we see in Dinner at Eight. Dvorak is top-billed and the title character, but this is really Tracy's movie.

TV vs. movie remakes

What's left of the Fox Movie Channel showed something called Too Good to Be True this morning. Loni Anderson and Patrick Duffy star in this TV movie remake of... Leave Her to Heaven. Oh dear. To be fair, though, the original movie Leave Her to Heaven is adapted from a book. And it's not as though this was the first time TV stole from the movies, something that I've commented on in the past. Quite a few popular TV shows were adapted from movies, something I mentioned just two months ago.

Also, it needs to be mentioned as well if I haven't done so in the past that it's not as if the movie makers are any more original. They aren't now -- look at how many successful TV shows have been turned into movies over the past decade or so, which is what drove the post I linked to above. More interestingly are the movies that were taken from teleplays. Back in the 1950s there were some prominent anthology TV shows that introduced one-hour (or longer) plays which were broadcast live. Rod Serling wrote Requiem For a Heavyweight for one such show, Playhouse 90 in 1956; that was turned into an outstanding movie in 1962. TCM recently aired Charly, which was also broadcast earlier as a teleplay, although that one was based on a short story.

As for Too Good to Be True, it's going to be on again in April, while the original movie Leave Her to Heaven shows up this Sunday at 11:00 AM ET.

Ruby Gentry

I've said of some movies before -- I think the first one I said it about was Violent Saturday -- that they're not very good, but they're a hell of a lot of fun. TCM is kicking off its salute to Star of the Month Karl Malden with just such a movie: Ruby Gentry, at 8:00 PM tonight.

Ruby Gentry is played by Jennifer Jones. But we'll get to her in a few minutes, since this is one of those movies that's told in flashback. The movie starts with an outsider, the northerner Dr. Saul (Barney Phillips) showing up in a small town in the tidal region of North Carolina. The doctor has come to take care of the wife of Jim Gentry (Karl Malden), one of the town's richest and most prominent citizens. As for Ruby, she's not the wife; she's a much younger woman from the wrong side of the tracks who spent some time in high school looking after Mrs. Gentry, and who is now living in the backwoods area with "her type" of people. Ruby, though, is a bit of a wild woman who has her eyes on every man out there, or so it seems.

One such man was Boake (Charlton Heston), a young engineer from the right side of the tracks. He had been in love with Ruby, but because of the social difference, he had to marry somebody from his class. Besides, Boake is a big man with big ideas. His family's ancestral land was flooded by brackish tidal waters decades earlier, and he's studied civil engineering so that he can drain the land and make it fit for agriculture again. He spent a few years doing civil engineering in South America, and has returned home to make his dream cume true.

And then Mrs. Gentry dies. What does this have to do with a bunch of flooded land? Well, it turns out that Mr. Gentry holds the loan on the land, and on a lot of the other stuff in town. But again, I'm getting ahead of myself. In the meantime, Ruby marries Mr. Gentry, which is how she becomes the titular Ruby Gentry. But the rest of the town doesn't like her horning in on classy society. It's a scene really quite reminiscent of Jean Harlow in Red-Headed Woman. When Jim dies in a boating accident, the rest of the town naturally accuses Ruby of murder. But she's inherited all the loans Jim had control over, and that gives her a lot of financial power. And Ruby, not wanting to be a woman scorned, has no qualms about using that power....

Oh boy is Ruby Gentry a melodramatic potboiler. Jennifer Jones isn't my favorite actress, and she's almost insanely manic here. The best that can be said about Charlton Heston is that he was a "sturdy" actor. He's not as good as, say, a Glenn Ford, but at least he's better than a John Lund. Karl Malden is the best thing here, but he dies two-thirds of the way through the movie, leaving us with an over-the-top finale. Then again, perhaps that over-the-top presentation might be the best thing about this movie. It was based on a lurid, popular book of the day, much like Mildred Pierce or The Postman Always Rings Twice, but never hits the highs that either of those two do; where those movies sing, Ruby Gentry screams and wails. But like a good Bette Davis rant, it can be fun to watch wailing.

In the final analysis, Ruby Gentry is about as well-presented as a paragrpah full of bad metaphors such as the preceding paragraph of this post. Fun for one viewing, but if you've seen it already you might be frustrated on watching it again.

Robert Sherman, 1925-2012

I'll admit that I'd never heard of Robert Sherman, who died yesterday at the age of 86. But then, I think almost all of us have heard his songs. Robert, together with his brother Richard, were hired by Walt Disney to be on the staff of songwriters at the Disney studios aroiund 1960 and would go on to write music for some of the more memorable Disney movies of the next few decades. The Sherman brothers won a pair of Oscars in 1965 for the film Mary Poppins: one for the score, and one for the song "Chim Chim Cheree".

That wasn't Sherman's only work in movies, however; Sherman also wrote a number of screenplays, most notably for Tom Sawyer in 1973. Granted, the Shermans also wrote the music for that version.

And then there are the songs that aren't for movies. I wouldn't have figured that the same person who wrote those songs for Mary Poppins would also have written something like You're Sixteen. On the other hand, something like "It's a Small World", the monstrously irritating song that features on the Disney ride of the same name is something that would fit in more with the same man who wrote the Mary Poppins music.

Girl Missing

It's been five or six years since TCM last showed the movie Girl Missing. At least, I know it hasn't aired since I started this blog since it's a movie I would have wanted to recommend to all of you. It had been on the schedule once for star Glenda Farrell's birthday, but it got pulled at some point after the original monthly schedule. But, it's finally on the schedule for tomorrow afternoon (March 6) at 12:30 PM, and it's a hell of a lot of fun.

Glenda Farrell plays Kay, one of a pair of show girl/gold diggers, the other being June (played by Mary Brian). They're in ritzy Palm Beach together with their sugar daddy Kenneth, played by Warner Bros.' perpetual dirty old man of the era, Guy Kibbee. Unfortunately for the two women, Kenneth comes to realize that they don't really love him; they're just after him for his money. And so, he dumps them, sticking them with a hotel tab of about $700 in 1933 dollars. What's a showgirl to do? It turns out that they've met an old friend of theirs down in Palm Beach, Daisy (Peggy Shannon). She's also been doing some gold digging, but she's been successful, having snagged a millionaire husband (Ben Lyon). However, she goes missing on her wedding night....

This is actually an opportunity for Kay and June, as there's a reward for her safe return, and that money would pay off their hotel bill. And so begins a comic mystery. It's the sort of genre at which Farrell excelled. She would later go on to play journalist Torchy Blaine, who solved similar mysteries while delivering zesty one-liners. As in those later movies, Glenda's character seems to be the only one with any chutzpah, putting the detectives (led by Edward Ellis) to shame. And boy does she get to deliver some zesty lines. There's one when she discovers she and June have been dumped, reading a letter addressed "to the GD sisters". And later in the film, she shockingly uses the word "jailbait". Yes, I know this is 1933, which means we're still in the pre-Code era, but still it surprised me. As for the mystery, that part of the movie isn't quite as entertaining as, say, The Thin Man. But this movie is more of a second feature, and it seems almost designed to showcase Glenda, who is as always a real treat.

March 2012 spotlight: British New Wave

TCM is putting the spotlight on the British New Wave films of the 1960s. To me, calling the British films "new wave" seems like a bit of a misnomer, as I get a different feel watching them than I do watching the French New Wave films like Breathless. Perhaps something like The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner comes closer, especially if you compare it not to Breathless, but to something like The 400 Blows. I could certainly see the kid in Truffaut's film growing up into the Tom Courtenay character.

Then again, there's also the term "kitchen sink" films for the British movies of the time, and that's a term that seems closer to the mark for me, at least as far as my knowledge of Britain as it was in the early 1960s goes. I commented when I blogged about the movie A Hatful of Rain that there's something about the locations, especially the apartment block, that seems so much more realistic than the studio-bound movies that Hollywood had been making a decade earlier. By the same token, I get the sense that a movie like The Entertainer has a more real look to the apartment scenes than, say, the house in The Ladykillers.

Tonight's schedule starts off with Room at the Top at 8;00 PM, followed by the aforementioned The Entertainer at 10:15 PM.

Paula Prentiss turns 74

It's hard to believe that an actress like Paula Prentiss is celebrating her 74th birthday today. Then again, Prentiss did start her Hollywood career back in 1960 with Where the Boys Are. I have vague memories of her being in th1 1962 film The Horizontal Lieutenant, when it showed up decades ago as one of the movies in the SFM Holiday Network, which of course wasn't really a network. I'm trying to remember some of the other films that I would have seen as part of that movie package. I think they had Danny Kaye's Hans Christian Andersen, but it's a long time ago for me to remember and it's not as though I was paying attention to those movies.

The picture above is one I'm pretty certain is from The Stepford Wives, where she played the best friend of Katharine Ross. Prentiss gets one of the great scenes in the movie when, after Ross stabs her, she just keeps trying to fill the coffee filter with more coffee, oblivious to what's happened to her. (Of course, if you've seen the movie, you know why she's oblivious.) Prentiss also had a smallish role in another movie with a conspiracy theory theme, that being The Parallax View, in which she plays a journalist who saw an assassination several years back and is now certain that people are out to get her. She's hysterical in the movie, but just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that there aren't people out to get you.

A new season of The Essentials

As I mentioned yesterday, 31 Days of Oscar has come to an end for another year. Today being a Saturday, it means the return of The Essentials. Alec Baldwin is no longer co-hosting (and I doubt it had anything to do with his well-publicized rants); for this year, TCM has brought in Drew Barrymore to sit down with Osborne. She's the granddaughter of John Barrymore, and John and his brother (ie. Drew's great-uncle) Lionel both appear in Dinner at Eight, which is part of this year's Essentials on May 26 and November 10. I don't think I saw any of the movies of Drew's father, John Drew Barrymore, in the list. Probably not much of a surprise, since John Drew never really made any truly great movies, unless you want to count High School Confidential! in that list. A bit more surprising is that great-aunt Ethel doesn't seem to show up, either; you'd think Portrait of Jennie or None But the Lonely Heart might be deserving of a mention.

As for this first week of The Essentials, we get the classic comedy Some Like It Hot at 8:00 PM, with a special late-night second feature, This is Spinal Tap, overnight at 2:00 AM.

Also, I highly doubt Drew Barrymore will be flashing Robert Osborne they way she did to David Letterman.

The end of 31 Days of Oscar

I know that some people will be thrilled to see that today is the final day of TCM's annual 31 Days of Oscar. There are people out there who complain about TCM's playing the "same old" movies during February, and not the obscure stuff they want. For the record, TCM winds up going out into outer space tonight, with the final movie of them all being Forbidden Planet at 4:15 AM. As you can probably guess, its nomination was not for Leslie Nielsen as Best Actor, but for its special effects.

Saturday morning brings another airing of the Raquel Welch version of One Million Years BC at 7:30 AM, a movie that I first mentioned back in February of 2009. That's followed at 9:15 AM by Have Rocket, Will Travel, which is a feature starring... the Three Stooges. It's not one that I've seen before, so I can't really comment on it.

As for 31 Days of Oscar, which movie was your highlight? I'd already seen Harry and Tonto and The Firemen's Ball before, but it was nice to see those films get their TCM premieres. It was also nice to get my own first viewing of Robinson Crusoe and The Entertainer.

This Woman Is Dangerous

Sometime not long before TCM's 31 Days of Oscar, they showed This Woman Is Dangerous. At the end of the film they ran the blurb about the movie being available at the TCM shop, having been released by the Warner Archive. It's a movie that's fun at times even if it's a bit (or a lot) overcooked; in fact, it's one of those movies that's probably more fun because it's overcooked.

Joan Crawford, now well into her post-MGM days, plays Elizabeth Austin, a woman with a past and with problems. First we see her problems: she's been having trouble with her eyesight, and is visiting an eye doctor, who tells her that she's going to go blind, except that there's a doctor who can perform an experimental operation which might restore her eyesight. Her past, if you will, is also part of her present. She's the head of a criminal gang that goes around pulling off big money stick-ups, and is in town to rob a casino.

Miss Austin's partner in crime, Matt Jackson (played by David Brian), isn't too happy with her actions, largely because she hasn't been telling him about her eye problems. He's also in love with her, and is insanely jealous, so he thinks that her being away means that she's seeing somebody else. With that background, the gang robs the casino, and makes off with the big bucks, at which point Elizabeth heads off to Indianapolis to get that operation.

Matt doesn't believe her, but what's a man to do? He leaves town with his brother Will (Philip Carey) and Will's wife Ann (Mari Aldon), only to get pulled over by the cops when Matt, in a fit of rage, throws a bottle at Will which goes through the window of the trailer in which the two are hiding. It's bad enough that they get pulled over by a cop; Matt decides to shoot the cop because the cop could be a witness against them. (I told you the guy was insanely jealous.)

Meanwhile, back in Indianapolis, Elizabeth's operation seems to have gone off fairly well. She eventually regains her eyesight, and along the way, also falls in love with her doctor (Dennis Morgan), who obviously has no idea about Elizabeth's past and that the police are looking for her. He also obviously doesn't know about Matt, and the fact that Matt is looking for her too....

This Woman Is Dangerous is a potboiler, to be sure. There are times when you'll be groaning (God, could the Dennis Morgan character be more stupid? You'd think he would have learned about women from In This Our Life a decade earlier), and times you'll be laughing even though the filmmakers didn't intend it (a lot of the earlier scenes with Matt). The movie has a big problem, which is the presence of the Production Code. Elizabeth Austin is a crook, and the Code suggests that she has to be subjected to justice. And yet, she's in love with the good doctor, seemingly wnating to do right by him. The writers have to come up with a way to resolve this conflict, and the Code means that there's not really any satisfying way to do so; any resolution is going to seem forced. Still, the journey there is fun.