Red Hot Tires

I've mentioned on a number of occasions how much I enjoy the Warner Bros. B movies and programmers, which always have something really zippy about them. A good example of a movie that's more fun than it has any right being is Red Hot Tires.

Lyle Talbot plays Wallace "Wally" Storm, chief mechanic for Sanford Motors, a company that makes race cars led by dad Martin (Henry Kolker) and his daughter Patricia (Mary Astor), who has a surpisingly big part in the racing business for a woman of those days. Wally carries on a platonic relationship with Patricia, and also dreams of becoming a driver in the big league himself. But the Sanfords' current driver Bob (Gavin Gordon) also has the hots for Patricia and is none too pleased that Wally is getting ideas above his station. Eventually, Bob gets Wally fired, much to the consternation of Wally's mechanic Bud (Roscoe Karns) and protege Johnny (Frankie Darro).

Wally gets to ride in a big race against Bob, but Bob has a trick up his sleeve involving something in the tires that is supposed to doom anybody who gets too close to his tires, apparently a common tactic in racing in those days. Sure enough, Wally gets too close to Bob's tires, but it backfires, as Bob is the one who goes off the track and down a ravine, killing him. Based on vague threats Wally had spoken about, he's put on trial for the murder of Bob, and convicted!

Johnny saw but couldn't hear Bob's plan to get Wally, and when he and Patricia investigate they're able to get a pardon for Wally. (Really, at most a new trial would be in order.) But on the evening that the pardon is to be delivered, Bud springs Wally from prison! The two friends go down to South America to escape extradition, and Wally becomes the famous American race car driver Bulldog. Patricia puts two and two togehter....

Red Hot Tires has all sorts of continuity problems and veers from one part of the plot to another overly quickly, getting everything done in a little over an hour. And yet, all along the way it's a lot of fun, thanks to professional performances from all the main stars. There's nothing great here, but you'll be entertained for an hour.

Red Hot Tires has been released to DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive collection.

TCM's Doris Day Tribute

Doris Day and James Garner; Move Over, Darling will be on at midnight between Sunday and Monday

Doris Day died back in May, and TCM is finally getting around to its programming tribute to Day. As befits a star of her stature, TCM is airing an entire 24 hours of Day's movies, starting at 6:00 AM Sunday, along with her appearance on The Tonight Show:

6:00 AM Romance on the High Seas
8:00 AM My Dream Is Yours
10:00 AM Tea For Two
11:45 AM On Moonlight Bay
1:30 PM Carson on TCM: Doris Day
1:45 PM Love Me or Leave Me
6:00 PM Please Don't Eat the Daisies
8:00 PM Pillow Talk
10:00 PM Lover Come Back
Midnight Move Over, Darling
2:00 AM The Glass Bottom Boat
4:00 AM Julie

They Met in Bombay

One of the movies TCM ran in the "meet cutes" romantic comedy spotlight last month was They Met in Bombay. It's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, so I decided to DVR it and watch later to do a post on it.

Clark Gable plays Gerald Meldrick, whom we see right off the bat is a less-than-honest man. He's having a replica of a famous jewel, the Star of India, made for him. That jewel is owned by the Duchess of Beltravers (Jessie Ralph) who is going to be in Bombay for Empire Day and wearing that jewel. Meldrick passes himself off as an agent of Lloyd's of London who have insured the Star of India, and presents himself at the Duchess' hotel, which is obviously all part of a plot to replace the original jewel with the fake.

Also showing up at the hotel is Anya Von Duren (Rosalind Russell), whom we see reading a book about the Beltravers nobility and trying to memorize it. This is a sign that she's a con artist who is going to use that knowledge to get into the Duchess' confidence and then steal the Star of India. You can probably guess that Anya and Meldrick wind up meeting and have a friendly rivalry over the jewel that lasts for the rest of the movie.

You'd be half right. They steal the Star of India about a third of the way into the movie and are about to get on a boat out of India when the authorities discover what has happened and start going after Meldrick and Anya, who have to team up out of necessity only since they're both implicated in the heist. But they can't get on a regular ocean liner because they'll be caught, so they have to beg passage with cargo ship captain Chang (Peter Lorre). He's going to Hong Kong.

Of course, Chang cares more about money than anything else. He wouldn't care whether he's got two jewel thieves on board if they pay him enough for the passage. But the authorities are offering a much bigger reward, and the venal Chang is more than willing to turn them over for that reward. Meldrick and Anya, under fake names, have to beat a hasty escape into a dinghy and hope they won't get noticed in Hong Kong.

Meldrick has a good plan to get the two of them out of Hong Kong, too. Posing as a Captain Houston, a Canadian soldier in the British Army, he plans to commandeer some men on leave to steal the contents of a safe at a company under criminal investigation by the authorities: evidence, don't you know. And he would have gotten away with it, too, if it were for those meddling... Japanese? Well, this is a 1941 movie, and the Japanese had already invaded China proper and were ready to take Hong Kong. All military officers are pressed into emergency duty, including "Captain Houston".

They Met in Bombay is three movies in one, and an odd little mix at that. The jewel heist plot does get resolved, but other than that, the parts of the movie don't quite mesh. Still, the movie was professionally made, another example of the way studios churned out movies at the time. Gable and Russell are appealing individually and as a pair. The supporting cast is generally good too, and the production values are quite good as befits an MGM movie. There's nothing spectacularly memorable here, however, unless you count the odd mixture of story lines.

If you just want to sit back and be entertained, you could do worse than to watch They Met in Bombay.

Blood and Steel

A movie that showed up in the FXM rotation in May is Blood and Steel. I don't know how long it's going to stay in the FXM rotation, but it seems to be available on DVD courtesy of Fox's MOD scheme. Since I hadn't heard of the movie before, I decided to DVR it and watch to do a review here.

The setting is Gizo Island, somewhere in the South Pacific. A small rubber boat pulls up to the island, and four men get out. This is the 1940s, so it's obviously World War II, and the men are obviously Americans surreptitously landing on a Japanese-held island. Lt. Jenson (John Lupton) is the leader of the four, a group of Seabees on a mission to determine whether the island will make a useful air base once the Americans capture it. Along with Jenson are Jim (Brett Halsey), Cip (John Brinkley), and George (James Edwards).

Of course, the island is still Japanese held, so the men have to stay in hiding to try to avoid the Japanese. Soon enough, the Japanese find them and a fire fight ensues, with George getting shot and having to be left behind because doing anything else will jeopardize the mission.

So the three remaining men soldier on, and George is eventually approached by a native (non-Japanese) of the island (Ziva Rodann, who was born in British Palestine and nowhere near Polynesia). She's frightened, but doesn't reveal the secret to the Japanese, who have set up a headquarters nearby.

The other men wind up engaging in more firefights with the Japanese, who are presented more as bored than inept, which is why they don't seem to be as diligent as they could in killing these four Americans, what with their massive numeric superiority. Amazingly enough, the Americans complete their mission in time. And nothing else happens.

Blood and Steel was (or at least looks like it was) and ultra-low budget B movie. It only runs a little over an hour, and as I was watching I kept thinking that it was playing out more like a TV episode of some World War II-themed TV show. Sure enough, one of the commenters on IMDb had the same thought, and the director, Bernard L. Kowalski, did most of his work in TV.

There's very little going on in Blood and Steel, and its biggets sin is that it's just boring. It's not horrendously bad, but it's the epitome of a movie that's not very good, either. I noticed it was available from Fox's MOD scheme, but at those prices, I'd wait for the next FXM showing.

Thursday Movie Picks #256: Nannies or Baby-Sitters

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This time, the theme is nannies and/or baby-sitters. I was able to come up with any number of movies relatively quickly; I just had to figure out whether I'd used them before. In the end, here are three that a search of the blog claims I haven't used:

Sitting Pretty (1948). Robert Young and Maureen O'Hara play a married couple with three sons, and a desperate need of somebody to keep them in line. Answering the ad for a live-in baby-sitter is Clifton Webb, playing Lynn Belvedere. His unorthodox methods produce a remarkable change in the kids, but gossip threatens to break up that relationship. The movie, based on a book, was popular enough that two sequels were made, and the book was later adapted into the 1980s sitcom Mr. Belvedere with Christopher Hewitt in the lead role.

The Innocents (1961). Deborah Kerr gets the job of being nanny/governess to a pair of orphaned children living in one of those English manor houses in the late 19th century. Strange things start happening, and Kerr begins to believe that perhaps the kids are possessed by the ghosts of a pair of lovers who died tragically on the grounds. This one is based on Henry James' story "The Turn of the Screw".

The Nanny (1965). Bette Davis is the nanny of an emotionally disturbed English boy who just got out of an institution for behavior including causing the drowning of his younger sister. Things start happening, and when Mom gets poisoned, the boy starts accusing the nanny of being the one who did it! You have to love later-era Bette Davis.

TCM Star of the Month June 2019: Jane Powell

Now that we're in the first full week of a new month, it's time for a new Star of the Month on TCM. This time out, it's Jane Powell, who made a bunch of light musical comedies at MGM in the 1940s and 1950s. Powell turned 90 this year, but because her birthday was in April, and TCM celebrated its 25th anniversary that month, they have her tribute now. Powell's movies will be airing every Wednesday in prime time in June.

This first night sees some of her early movies starting with Holiday in Mexico at 8:00 PM, seeing Powell play the daughter of the US Ambassador to Mexico (Walter Pidgeon) who falls in love with a Mexican pianist (Jose Iturbi, who for some reason I thought was Brazilian but was in fact Spanish).



Having run one movie with Powell and Iturbi, it shouldn't be surprising that there's another one. That one, Three Daring Daughters, follows at 10:15 PM.

I have to admit that Jane Powell isn't my favorite, but that's more because the type of movie she was cast in.

Untamed Frontier

For those of you who have the StarzEncore pagkage of movies, you have a chance to catch Untamed Frontier tomorrow morning at 6:19 AM.

Joseph Cotten plays Kirk Denbow, one member of a family who owns a whole bunch of land in the Arizona territory. However, there's also a bunch of land owned by the federal government, and under the Homestead Act they intend to parcel that land out to settlers. The problem is, the land is surrounded on all American sides by the Denbows' land. They use their own land and the Federal land to graze their cattle, and they're not about to give any settlers right-of-way across the Denbow land to settle since it would ultimately mean the loss of free grazing land that the Denbows are using.

Kirk is the most pragmatic member of the family. He's got a cousin in Glenn (Scott Brady) who is much more of a hothead. Indeed, he's currently in town raising a ruckus as well as seeing his girlfriend Jane (Shelley Winters), who, while she loves him, also has sympathy for the settlers. Eventually, Glenn gets in a gunfight with somebody who, it turns out, is not armed, so the legal system is going to come after him, and by association the Denbows.

Matt Denbow (Minor Watson), patriarch of the family, comes up with the idea to spirit Jane away to Texas since she's the one witness who could convict Glenn. She's too honest to do that. So Matt and Glenn come up with another idea, which is to have Glenn marry Jane! That way she'll be his wife and can't be forced to testify against Glenn. (Couldn't she choose to testify?) Since she does like Glenn, she marries him and starts living at the ranch.

She soon realizes the mistake she made. Glenn has another girlfriend in Lottie (Suzan Ball), and Jane starts becoming friends with Kirk. Meanwhile, the settlers are massing for an invasion of the strip of land they'd have to cross to get to the federal land....

Universal made a whole bunch of programmer westerns in the 1950s, of which this is one. They're short (Untamed Frontier clocks in at 78 minutes) and capably produced if nothing spectacular. Untamed Frontier fits in perfectly in that mold. Everybody does an adequate job, but the story feels as though it could be interchangeable with the cast of whatever other western was being produced at the time. You'll likely be entertained, but it won't linger in your memory like the great westerns.

Untamed Frontier does not seem ever to have gotten a DVD release in the US, so you're going to have to catch the rare cable showing.

Die Büchse der Pandora

One of TCM's spotlights this month is on interesting hair in the movies, or as they call it, the Hollywood Hair Hall of Fame. It'll be on every Monday night in June, starting tonight at 8:00 with Pandora's Box.

Louise Brooks plays Lulu, a former dancer who at the start of the movie is now the kept lover of newspaper publisher Dr. Schön (Fritz Kortner) in a fashionable apartment in Berlin. One day after Schön heads off to work, another man shows up, Schigolch (Carl Goetz), who is presumably a former lover, but one who could never give her the comforts that Schön can. When Schön finds Schigolch in the apartment, she points out that he used to be her "patron".

Meanwhile, it seems almost every man wants Lulu romantically, with the exception of Schön's adult son Alwa (Franz Lederer, who was born in Bohemia with the name František and would later flee Germany for Hollywood, taking the name Francis and appearing in a bunch of films, most notably Confessions of a Nazi Spy), a composer. Although he doesn't seem to want love from her, he's writing material that would be perfect for her to go back to the stage.

Eventually, she takes him and a promoter Schigolch introduces her to up on that offer. But she's also driven to it by the fact that Dr. Schön has decided to turn her out and marry a respectable woman of his class -- he could never marry her because everybody's been talking about their relationship.

Lulu gets pissed off when she meets Schön's fiancée at the theater where she's performing, and refuses to go on, eventually using her feminine ways to get Dr. Schön to agree to marry her! But on their wedding night he realizes (or thinks he does) what sort of woman he's married, and tries to force Lulu to commit suicide. In the struggle, Lulu winds up shooting Schön to death. If only there were witnesses she could get off on a self-defense argument, but there aren't, so the court sentences her to five years in prison.

She still has a bunch of people lusting after her, and when the verdict is handed down, they decide to set off the fire alarm, giving her a chance to escape! Unfortunately, she's going to be found out in Germany, so she, Alwa, and Schigolch have to flee the country, eventually winding up in London and a much crappier existence than Lulu ever had as a kept woman.

Pandora's Box is an interesting movie, with a lot of wonderful cinematography courtesy of director G. W. Pabst. It's a silent, coming at the very end of the silent era after Hollywood had nearly completed its conversion to sound film, so that meant the audiences weren't as big as the German filmmakers had hoped. This also led to Brooks eventually growing tired of the movie business and retiring fairly young. It's a bit of a shame, since she gives quite a good performance.

The one problem I had with the movie, however, is that I felt it slowed down quite a bit in the second half. I also had a problem with the idea that they were going to be completely unable to find work in London. Surely a performer like Lulu at least could have gotten work as a chorus girl. But then that wouldn't fit in with the story, I suppose. Even with the movie having problems, it's still well worth watching for the visuals.

Pandora's Box got a DVD release courtesy of the Criterion Collection many years ago, but that release seems to be out of print, so you're going to have to catch the rare TCM showing.

The Prince and the Showgirl

I haven't done a post on The Prince and the Showgirl before, so when it showed up on the TCM schedule recently I made a point of DVRing it to watch and do a post here.

The scene is London, 1911. Edward VII had died the previous year, leaving George V to become the new monarch. But the official coronation with all the pageantry isn't held right when the old monarch dies, as it takes time to bring in all the other crowned heads of state to attend the coronation. Among them is the royal family of Carpathia (not of course a real state, but part of modern-day Romania and Hungary in the northern part of the Balkans). They have a king in Nicholas VIII (Jeremy Spenser), but he's still only 16 so he won't ascend to the throne until he's 18, with his father the Grand Duke (Laurence Olivier) being regent, not being king himself because he only married into the family. The British Foreign Office sends envoy Northbrook (Richard Wattis) to make certain the Regent's stay in London is pleasant, because there's a dicey political situation in Carpathia.

The Regent having been in a marriage of convenience and now being a widower is perfectly comfortable seeing women, at least insofar as royal protocal will let him. In London, he plans to meet the star of an American revue, The Coconut Girl. But when he meets the cast, it's actually one of the chorus girls he winds up desiring, young Elsie from Milwaukee (Marilyn Monroe). He invites her back to the embassy for dinner, and Northbrook reluctantly goes along despite Elsie being American (the European disdain for American bluntness being on display here) and her not knowing anything about royal protocol.

The Regent plans to have dinner alone with Elsie, which is not what she expected at all. While the two are alone, the Regent starts discussing the Carpathian political situation on the phone, not realizing Elsie is really smarter than you'd think at first site. The Regent is of Hungarian descent, so not much of a fan of the Kaiser. Nicholas, however, is of German descent, and is thinking seriously of moving Carpathia closer to Germany politically when he takes the throne. He also cavorts with reformers whom his father doesn't like and even imprisons. To secure his hold, Dad has told the switchboard operator at the embassy not to let Nicholas receive or make any phone calls.

None of this should really matter to Elsie, but she winds up getting more involved in the Carpathian situation mainly because everybody in the royal family seems to like her. The Queen Dowager (Sybil Thorndike) lets her stay as a temporary lady-in-waiting, allowing her to attend the coronation and events surrounding it. It also lets her get involved in the spat between father and son, and she decides to try to patch things up as a family affair as much as a political matter.

The Prince and the Showgirl wasn't an easy production, as documented in the film My Week With Marilyn from the beginning of this decade. Olivier directed as well as starred, and he was none too happy with Monroe. To be fair, she did have a reputation for being difficult. But to be fair, a bigger problem is with Olivier's performance, making the Regent look like a man you'd wonder what anybody would see in him. Instead of trying to rein in Marilyn, he should have been rening himself in.

The movie certainly looks nice in terms of sets and costumes, with the mockup of Westminster Abbey looking particularly good. However, that scene looks out of place with the action of the rest of the movie.

All in all, The Prince and the Showgirl isn't a bad movie, but it's also not the first thing I'd suggest to introduce people to either Olivier or Monroe. It's available on DVD too.

Blondie Johnson

My latest movie viewing was the pre-code Blondie Johnson.

Joan Blondell plays the title role, a woman who at the beginning of the movie is suffering from the effects of the Depression having hit her in just about every way possible. She's at a relief agency looking for help because she hasn't worked in four months; her sister died tragically; and her mom is deathly ill with the owner of the building possibly about to evict them because Mom might be contagious. But because she wasn't fired, instead having quit her job because her boss was trying to use her for sexual favors, the guy at the relief agency says no help for you.

When Mom dies, Blondie realizes she has to make money in a different way. With the help of very small-time grifter Red (Sterling Holloway), a cabbie when he's making money honestly. The two combine in a scam that has richer guys paying for an emergency taxi ride across town; he only takes her around the block and pocket the difference. They shouldn't keep trying it in the same area, because when she's in a diner at the end of the meeting, one of the guys she scammed runs into her.

That man is Danny (Chester Morris), a middle-level gangster, and he tries to convince her to go in with him. She wants to take down the bigger bosses, and do it on her own terms, so although she likes Danny, she has no intentions of being subordinate to him. Eventually she does make it to something resembling the top, but her group has some indiscretions in the past that threaten to bring her down.

Blondie Johnson feels likes a slew of the other pre-Code Joan Blondell and gangster movies that Warner Bros. was churning out like an assembly line in the early 1930s. In many regards, it's not bad at all. But it also feels as though something is missing, as you might have inferred from my perfunctory synopsis.

It didn't take me too long to realize that the something that was missing is James Cagney. Morris is adequate as a guy who is really a second banana, but in all those Cagney/Blondell movies, the two had a zest that just jumped off the screen. There's very little of that in Blondie Johnson, which is why the whole thing feels routine and just not quite right.

Blondie Johnson is available on DVD from the Warner Archive, but it's really one of those movies that should have been put on those old four-film TCM-branded box sets that Warner Home Video was putting out. As a standalone, I'd look for a lot of other things first.