Play-Girl

TCM's second night of Star of the Month Loretta Young's movies includes a bunch of pre-Codes that are more or less typical of what she was doing in the early 1930s. Among the movies is Play-Girl, airing early tomorrow morning at 4:30 AM.

Play-Girl is a movie that starts off with a bang, and never quite reaches that level again. The opening scene is in one of those old department stores where you asked the shop assistant behind the counter to get the stuff on shelves behind the counter. An older man wanting to see something that's up on one of those shelves asks the female shop assistant. It turns out he wants to see something else: as the young woman climbs a ladder to reach the top shelf, the camera (and presumably the customer) takes a good long look at the woman's legs. "I'm sorry," the man says after the shop assistant comes down from the ladder. "You don't have exactly what I'm looking for." Indeed.

In fact, there are two shop assistants the story focuses on at first. Bus (Loretta Young) and Georgine (Winnie Lightner) are co-workers and roommates trying to make it in the big city by working at the department store. Bus wants to earn an honest living instead of snagging a rich man: her mother died delivering her, and Bus doesn't want to suffer the same fate Mom did. Georgine, however, convinces bus to go on a double date, and the date changes Bus's life. Bus is introduced to Wally (Norman Foster), and the two hit it off, eventually getting married!

Unfortunately for Bus, Wally isn't the sort of man Bus thought he was when she first met him. In fact, he makes his living, such as it is, by gambling! And of course, this wasn't like now when you have professional poker tournaments and if you win the big one you could be set for quite a long time. No, gambling back in those days of the sort practiced by Wally was quite illegal. Wally promises to Bus that he's going to change his ways and earn an honest living, but it's really just to shut Bus up. Eventually, she finds out that he's been dishonest, but by this time, she's already pregnant.

What's a pregnant woman with a bounder of a husband to do? Unfortunately, this is where the movie starts to fall down. Bus decides that the best way to make a living is to take up gambling herself! And wouldn't you know it, but there's a strange set of coincidences that results in gambling working for Bus, with her earning some money and being reunited with a reformed (more or less) Wally, with the two of them presumably living happily ever after. It's a shame, because the movie starts off with an interesting premise before copping out, much like Week-End Marriage (airing in two weeks from now), which also starred Young and Foster in a similar relationship.

The three leads all do well enough, ably supported by Guy Kibbee who plays the immediate boss of Young and Lightner. He's interested in Lightner, and tries to put her in departments where she won't be seen by men better than Kibbee. Guy Kibbee sure did play a lot of those lecherous older man roles. TCM's schedule lists Play-Girl as being available on DVD, but closer inspection reveals a problem with their database, as it's a different movie with the same title that they're selling.

David R. Ellis, 1952-2013

The death was announced yesterday of director David R. Ellis, who was found dead in his hotel room in South Africa where he was working on a remake of a Japanese anime movie. He was 60. Ellis was one of those names that I have to admit I didn't recognize at first. That's because he worked his way up to becoming a director, and didn't have the directing duties on that many movies. Of the ones he did, they weren't my type. And besides, as a classic movie blogger I generally watch movies made before I was born. That having been said, Ellis directed one movie I think we'd all recognize, that being Snakes on a Plane.

Before Ellis got to direct on his own, he started off as a stuntman and then stunt coordinator, which is one of those important parts of filmmaking that doesn't get quite the attention it deserves. Ellis did the stunts on quite a few recognizable movies from the 1980s, actually going back a few years before that with 1976's Bound For Glory being one of his first. In the 1980s there's National Lampoon's Vacation, Lethal Weapon, and Fatal Attraction, although I don't remember Fatal Attraction having stunts per se, unless you're going to count having to use doubles in the bathtub scene. Then again, it's been quite some time since I've seen Fatal Attraction.

Ellis should also be remembered as an assistant director or second unit director, which like stunts is a part of the moviemaking business that is important and doesn't get recognition. In fact, it might get less attention than the stunts. Ellis served as a second unit director on some well-known movies in the 1990s and early 200s, from Clear and Present Danger to one of the Matrix sequels, a Harry Poter sequel, and Master and Commander. It's a bit sad to think that Eliis would have gotten even less mention in death than he did if he hadn't directed Snakes on a Plane, since he clearly did quite a bit of quality work.

TCM Guest Programmer: Bill Paxton

Tonight sees this month's Guest Programmer on TCM: actor Bill Paxton, whose movies include Apollo 13, in which he played Fred Haise, one of the three astronauts who successfully returns to Earth after a technical glitch causes the moon mission to go disastrously wrong. (Oh dear, I've given away the ending.) Paxton has an interesting set of selections, starting at 8:00 PM with Federico Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits. I don't think I've actually seen this one all the way through, because the last time it was on TCM, it was part of a night of Fellini's movies and came on second, after 8-1/2 (which I think is a bit overrated in that to me it never really seemed to go anywhere). So it began around 10:30 PM, and after a half hour of nothing much happening, I didn't feel like staying up until 1:00 AM for the ending.

The rest of Paxton's selections are as follows:

Spirit of the Beehinve at 10:30 PM, about to girls who try to find Frankenstein's monster after seeing the classic movie;
California Split at 12:30 AM, Robert Altman's film about a gambling road trip to Tijuana; and
The Last Detail at 2:30 AM, in which two MPs take a sailor on a road trip to show him a good time before the sailor has to go to military prison.

The Cheat

This week's Silent Sunday Nights feature on TCM, airing just after midnight tonight as usual, is The Cheat.

Sessue Hayakawa stars as Haka Araaku, a Burmese dealer in ivory who will be showing up a bit later in the story. The movie really begins with Fannie Ward as Mrs. Edith Harvey. Edith is the wife of a wealthy banker, and this being the teens of the last century, a woman like Edith would live the life of a socialite, wearing fancy clothes, going to parties and organizing charity benefits. Since the movie was made at a time there was war raging in Europe, that charity is for war relief. But Edith is also a spendthrift. This causes some consternation with her husband Richard (Jack Dean), who wants her to spend less, especially because business isn't going as well as she's thought and they're not quite so wealthy. What's a woman to do? Why, embezzle the charity money and wager it on a sure thing get-rich-quick scheme! Of course, everybody can figure out what's going to happen next, which is that the sure thing wasn't so sure, and Edith loses the money, making her desperate to get $10,000.

This is where Haka Arakau comes back in. He's made quite a bit of money with that ivory dealing, and he's willing to help out Edith by refunding the money. But this is going to come at a price. Despite being an ivory dealer, Haka Arakau isn't 99.44% pure, not by a long shot. He's a stereotypical Movie Asian, alluring, exotic, and dangerous all in one; further, he wants to be seen respectably by white society His price for helping out Edith is her sexual humiliation. In the meantime, business fortunes turn around for Richard, so Edith decides to embezzle the money from him (really, it shoud be embezzlement even if it is just a wife spending her husband's money like a drunken sailor) to pay back Haka. But Haka will have none of that: he really wants to see Edith suffer. Edith shoots him in the shoulder, partly in self defense.

Amazingly, due to 1915-era moral values, Richard decides to take the rap and stand trial for the attempted murder, claiming that he was defending his wife's honor. And for all you know, he could get away with it: after all, everybody knew back in the day that those Asians were scheming, dishonest lechers, readily willing to deflower our pretty white women. Will the truth come out at the trial? And if so, just how will the people react to a relationship that, to be fair, is rather bizarre?

The Cheat is quite the interesting movie. Since it was made in 1915, many of the film techniques look primitive, although for the time they were quite advanced. The acting is also stagy and florid, although that's due in part to the melodramatic nature of the story. Hayakawa is a treat as the Burmese ivory dealer, and there's a story in that in and of itself. When the movie was first released in 1915, Hayakawa was playing a Japanese man. Japanese-Americans, however, complained about the racist stereotyping of Japanese. Since there were a fair number of Japanese-Americans, and relations with Japan were still good in 1915, the movie got a change when it was re-released, which was to make the Hayakawa character Burmese. After all, there were a lot fewer Burmese around to complain, and audiences wouldn't notice, since all those weird exotic Asians are alike.

If I were looking to introduce people who have seen almost no silents to the genre, I'm not certain if I'd pick The Cheat, only because it's so different from even the movies of the classic studio era. But for people who are already comfortable with silents, I can heartily recommend The Cheat. It has gotten DVD releases, and probably should even be in the public domain since it was released in 1915. The DVDs might be out of print, however, since TCM doesn't have it available for purchase in its web store.

Added to the blogroll

Yesterday I briefly mentioned the blog Movie Classics, written by Judy (kindly imagine that in Cary Grant's dulcet tones, not my lousy voice), a British woman with a taste for 1930s and 40s movies as well as British literary adaptations. Having mentioned her, I figure now is a good time to add her blog to the blogroll.

Two more returnees

I did a post on Ronald Reagan's four Brass Bancroft films back in March 2009 when Reagan was Star of the Month. TCM is running the series again, this time starting tomorrow morning at 10:45 AM with Secret Service of the Air. Brass Bancroft joins up for the Service when another agent is killed in action and they need a man with skills as a pilot. Although the Service's real task was to investigate counterfeiting, in this movie Bancroft winds up investigating illegal immigration because the two crimes intersect. There's also a surprising scene of how the human traffickers prevent the authorities from finding out just what they're doing. The other three movies in the series will be airing on subsequent Saturday mornings at 10:45 AM, with the series ending conveniently just in time for 31 Days of Oscar to run in February and a new series to begin in March.

Also back on TCM is Now Playing: the Show. We're already four days in to January, and the show is on the schedule for early Saturday morning at 5:15 AM, which doesn't seem like a particularly opportune time as this isn't the sort of thing I think people would set their DVR for. But the bigger thing is that Now Playing: the Show is back at all. I would have thought that with Robert Osborne's reduced hosting duties that the show might have been gone for good.

Awards Season, Part 2

As I mentioned yesterday, Livius over at Riding the High Country named me not only for the Versatile Blogger award, but also a "Blog of the Year". That award also requests a hat tip, with the following rules:

1. Select the blog(s) you think deserve the ‘Blog of the Year 2012’ Award
2. Write a blog post and tell us about the blog(s) you have chosen – there’s no minimum or maximum number of blogs required – and ‘present’ them with their award.
3. Please include a link back to this page ‘Blog of the Year 2012’ Award – http://thethoughtpalette.co.uk/our-awards/blog-of-the-year-2012-award/ and include these ‘rules’ in your post (please don’t alter the rules or the badges!)
4. Let the blog(s) you have chosen know that you have given them this award and share the ‘rules’ with them
5. You can now also join our Facebook group – click ‘like’ on this page ‘Blog of the Year 2012’ Award Facebook group and then you can share your blog with an even wider audience
6. As a winner of the award – please add a link back to the blog that presented you with the award – and then proudly display the award on your blog and sidebar … and start collecting stars…

Since I mentioned earlier today that having to pass awards on to other people gives me the feeling of responding ot a chain letter -- although at least this time, you only have to mention one post -- is something I find a bit off-putting, if only since I'm generally far enough down the list on these things that I'm liable to pick a blogger who's already been selected. So rather than actually handing out an award, I'll just mention a post that reminded me of something I'd wanted to post.

One of the blogs Livius selected in his 15 for the Versatile Blogger awards is Movie Classics, which is one I hadn't read before. It includes quite a few posts about British movies, with one of the more recent ones being about Scrooge, also known as the 1951 version of A Christmas Carol. It was directed by Brian Desmond Hurst, a name that jumped out at me. Looking at his filmography on IMDb, I don't know that I recognize any of Hurst's other movies. But some time last year when I was going through RTÉ's documentary archives, I noticed one called An Irishman Chained to the Truth, which first aired in August 2011. According to the brief synopsis:

Brian Desmond Hurst was the most prolific Irish film director of the 20th century - Allan Smith delves into his family history to find out more about his great great uncle Brian's adventures in Hollywood.

Most of RTÉ's documentaries are available for download, and this one is here, a 17.5MB download of a radio documentary running about 38 minutes. I'm surprised I didn't blog about it when I first ran across it.

Awards Season, Part 1

I noticed a day or two ago that Livius over at Riding the High Country nominated me for a pair of awards, a "Blog of the Year" award and a "Versatile Blogger" award. The rules say that winners are supposed to write a blog post about it, but I wasn't certain whether Livius had actually named me a winner per the rules of the contest. Looking through my Gmail account, though, it seems he did in fact notify me, so I get to write an oh-so-exciting post about the awards. I don't know whether I should react like Sally Field when she won her second Oscar for Places in the Heart (the "You like me, you really like me!") comment, or Jane Wyman upon winning for Johnny Belinda (which is coming up tomorrow evening at 6:00 PM on TCM), who commented that she won the Oscar for not saying a word, so she should just shut up and accept her award. The "Blog of the Year" post will be coming up separately later today, since the "Versatile Blogger" post is getting a bit long.

Anyhow, the rules for the "Versatile Blogger" award are aw follows:

Versatile Blogger

Display the award certificate on your website.
Announce your win with a post and include a link to whoever presented your award.
Present 15 awards to deserving bloggers.
Create a post linking to them and drop them a comment to tip them off.
Post 7 interesting facts about yourself.

I think the "15 awards to deserving bloggers" is going to be a bit of a challenge. The problem, of course, is that doing so will quickly turn into a chain letter/pyramid scheme thing, where the right move is really to pass it on to the people above you on the list, otherwise, you're going to run out of people to award. There are a few blogs I'd like to mention without actually awarding and obligating them to write a post about, though.

, a blog that I first noticed when Livius linked to the post on the title sequence of Experiment in Terror, a movie that I think is both visually and aurally interesting and doesn't get the attention it deserves. Obviously, I can't give Michael an award since he's already got one!

Cinematic Paradox. Stevee Taylor is a high school student in New Zealand whom I first learned about back in November thanks to a report from Radio New Zealand. I prefer classic movies and her blog tends to discuss much more recent stuff, but she's still quite a capable blogger who deserves a mention.

I'm also supposed to mention seven "interesting" facts about myself. I'm not the most interesting person, but here goes, in no particular order and the first things that came to my mind:

1. I live next to 1000 acres of state forest, quite literally. New York State has two big preserves, the Adirondack Park Preserve and the Catskill Park Preserve, within which they own a fair amount of the forested land. My driveway is set in from the road, with the property bordering state land. In fact, just yesterday I had 20 wild turkeys in my driveway, watching them from the front window.

2. I was an avid listener of short-wave radio from back in the days when the international broadcasters still used that medium, if they even still have English-language programs. Most of the content has migrated to the internet, however. However, I still have a lot of promotional stuff. I'll see if I can find my Radio Prague sponge and post a photo of it.

3. My first real drinking experience was on board an overnight train in Latvia. I was a Russian major in college, and spent a study abroad semester in 1992 in Sankt-Peterburg. One weekend, we took the overnight train to Riga, Latvia, and on the train back I had my first shot of vodka, from a bottle called "Russkaya Vodka" (yes, that was literally the brand name). The only thing the other students had as a chaser was Pepsi, and I don't like carbonated beverages, so I wound up chasing it with Latvian sausage!

4. Я еще знаю русский язык, но к сожалению у меня нет так много шансов говорить по-русский. (I can still speak the language more or less, but don't have many opportunities to do so.)

5. Russian is my third language; German is my second. My grandfather emigrated from Germany, and I still have a ton of relatives in the Passau area. I should mention the movie The Nasty Girl, which is based on a true story of a young woman who for a school projected investigated the history of her town (Passau) during the war, and found a lot of stuff that angered the city fathers.

6. I'm an avid player of the Oriental board game Go, and the western board game Scrabble, and play both online at servers dedicated to the games, although I'm not particularly good at either. (I don't do "Words With Friends" on Facebook; in fact, I don't care about racking up a high number of Facebook non-enemies at all.)

7. I'm a bit of a minimalist. I drink my coffee black with no sugar and couldn't be bothered to spend big bucks on Starbucks coffee or the similar brands. I don't mind a somewhat more drab blog design if that means it's not full of stuff that will hog the computer's memory and eat up bandwidth. That'a a big part of the reason why I have a plain gray background for this blog.

TCM January 13 Star of the Month: Loretta Young

This month marks the centenary of the birth of actress Loretta Young, who wa born January 6, 1913. January 6 is a Sunday, and TCM rarely does its Star of the Month tributes on the weekend. Frank Sinatra in 2008 is the only one I can think of, and he had two nights each week, with Sunday being one of them. Anyhow, TCM is honoring Young on Wednesday nights in January so that they can run her films over five nights instead of four: they've got enough movies that they can run to cover five nights of prime time. As it is, the movies continue into Thursday mornings.

Tonight kicks off at 8:00 PM with Laugh, Cluwn, Laugh, a movie I briefly mentioned on Young's birthday back in 2009, and is a good one for anybody who enjoys silent movies. I've also briefly mentioned Life Begins (overnight at 12:30 AM) before. Loretta Young is, as most Hollywood actresses were, too glamorous to play a prisoner. Hollywood also makes preganacy look like far more of a breeze than it apparently is -- I'm a childless man, so I wouldn't know. For whatever realism flaws it has, though, it's a fun movie; in fact, part of the fun is the time capsule nature of the movie.

I don't think I've ever seen The Show of Shows (3:45 AM) before. This is a movie similar to The Hollywood Revue in that it's an all-star movie with no plot. Instead, Warner Bros. used a lot of its contract players in what was essentially a sound test for them, putting them in discrete scenes to show off their talents while at the same time seeing how well their voices worked with the new sound technology. Loretta Young appears with her real-life sister, Sally Blane, in a scene called "Meet My Sister". Everything I've read (which admittedly isn't much) suggests that the entire movie was filmed in two-strip Technicolor, but that only the finale survives in color, something which isn't unusual for the time.

Still not on DVD

TCM's prime time lineup for New Year's night is heist movies of various types. There's a comedy to kick things off in the form of The Pink Panther at 8:00 PM, followed by a decidedly non-comic film in The Asphalt Jungle 10:00 PM. Both of those are available on DVD, though. The last movie of the night, Jack of Diamonds, is one that I blogged about back in December 2008, which I think is when Cotten was Star of the Month on TCM. (I really should keep a list of TCM's Stars of the Month.) I mentioned in the 2008 post that Jack of Diamonds was not available on DVD, and it still seems not to have gotten a DVD release.

Wednesday morning and afternoon are given over to movies about ghosts, mostly comedies and romances. I'm very surprised to see that A Guy Named Joe (7:30 AM) doesn't seem to be on DVD either, at least not in print. In this one, Spencer Tracy plays a World War II pilot in love with Irene Dunne who gets killed in action when his plane gets shot down. However, he returns as a ghost to help fellow pilot Van Johnson win Dunne's hand in romance. Worth seeing if you haven't seen it before. Frankly, I'm surprised this one hasn't gotten a release from the Warner Archive, or as one of those four-film sets focused on Spencer Tracy, seeing as it was released by MGM and would be in the Warner Bros. library now.