Once Upon a Honeymoon

When the US entered World War II in December 1941, Hollywood joined the war effort, and there were a lot of films from 1942 that give the feeling of either being rushed into production or as though events of the day overtook the events of the film. One such movie that made a bit more sense to me as I was thinking about people in Hollywood wanting to do their part for the war effort is Once Upon a Honeymoon.

The story opens in Vienna in early 1938. As always, if you know your history this was the time when Austria "decided" (not that they had much choice) to merge with Nazi Germany in what is known as the Anschluß. The movie begins just before Austria voted itself out of existence, and surprisingly there are ex-pats who seem oblivious to what's going on. Namely, that's Kathie O'Hara (Ginger Rogers), a showgirl from Philadelphia who wound up in Vienna and fell in love with a German Baron, von Luber (Walter Slezak) and is planning to marry him in spite of the political situation.

Someone more clued in to the political situation is American correspondent Patrick O'Toole (Cary Grant), and his nominal job is to get an interview with O'Hara because of the wedding. Kathie is famously not giving any interviews, so O'Toole has to get up to all sorts of ruses. The baron, however, is wise to all of this. Meanwhile, the political merger is completed, and the baron is called off to business in Prague, capital of the then still independent Czechoslovakia. Kathie obviously goes with him, while O'Toole follows.

History tells us that the Czech part of Czechoslovakia was the next to fall, with the Sudetenland being annexed outright in the fall of 1938 and the rest of Bohemia and Moravia becoming a protectorate in early 1939 with Slovakia being a nominally independent puppet state. After all these events, von Luber goes off to... Poland! Baroness von Luber and O'Toole follow, with O'Toole finally having figured out that wherever the Baron goes, another country is bound to fall, and that the Baron is obviously a no-good Nazi. But can O'Toole get Kathie to become a good American and turn on the Baron?

Obviously, since the movie was released in 1942, you know that Kathie is going to wise up and do her part for her country, although with the number of countries that fall to the Nazis, she's also going to have to do quite a bit of moving around Europe with her husband. O'Toole, meanwhile, is trying to figure out how to expose the true nature of the shadowy Baron. Along the way, O'Toole and O'Hara get mistaken for Jews and sent to the Warsaw ghetto, and then get directly get clued in to American intelligence when they're in Paris.

I read quite a few negative reviews of Once Upon a Honeymoon, and it's easy enough to see why somebody would draw that conclusion about the movie. Much in the same way that the characters have to wing it in moving around Europe, so it feels tht the screenwriters were writing as events dictated, even though everything that happened in the movie would have been a good two years before the movie actually started filming (IMDb says filming started in June 1942, which is a good six months after Pearl Harbor).

It's also definitely not the best film any of the principals involved with the movie made, although I'd also say it's decidedly not the worst. It's just a bit of a mess because it feels like the morale boost is the thing here, above and beyond any story line, which is a bit of a shame, because there are movies out there which do a much better job of giving a great story first and then the morale boost (To Be or Not to Be comes to mind).

Thursday Movie Picks, June 8, 2023: Seasons in the title

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This time out, the theme is a fairly easy one, and one that really calls for doing four movies: Movies with a season in the title. In the end, I decided on three movies, with a sort of cheat for the fourth season:

The Lion in Winter (1968). Katharine Hepburn won her third Oscar playing Eleanor of Aquitaine, the estranged wife of Henry II of England (Peter O'Toole). Over Christmas in 1183, the two and their surviving sons have a family reunion which devolves into a heated debate over who should succeed Henry II as king: Richard the Lionheart (Anthony Hopkins) is Mom's choice (and Anthony Hopkins did a great Star of the Month piece on Hepburn for TCM some years back, discussing this movie quite a bit as it was Hopkins' first big role), while John (Nigel Terry) is Dad's choice.

Autumn Sonata (1978). I think I've picked this movie before, but it's Ingrid Bergman's final feature film and earned her one final Oscar nomination. She plays a concert pianist, widowed for the second time, who decides that she's going to take a break from performing by visiting her daughter (Liv Ullmann). Her daughter, however, isn't a particularly good musician which dismays Mom, having decided to give up any attempt at a musical career to marry a country priest as well as take care of her sister since the two siblings have been estranged from Mom. It doesn't take long to understand why the daughters became estranged from Mom.

Summer Holiday (1948). A musical version of Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness!, this movie stars 27-year-old Mickey Rooney as a young man at the turn of the century about to graduate high school and go off into the big wide world, even though he doesn't know that much about greater world out there or about being an adult. In the 1935 version of Ah, Wilderness!, Rooney played the kid brother.

Finally, I'd like to mention, The Devil and Miss Jones (1941). That's because of the presence of character actress Spring Byington. Charles Coburn stars as a wealthy businessman who learns of labor unrest in a forgotten corner of his business empire, a department store, and decides to go undercover in the shoe department to learn for himself what's going on. Byington plays one of the clerks who winds up becoming a love interest to Coburn not realizing his true identity. The real star is Jean Arthur as another clerk; she's got a love interest in the form of union agitator Robert Cummings.

The Friends

Another movie that was on the Watch TCM app that I hadn't heard of before was a spaghetti western that got distributed in the US largely because of the presence of Anthony Quinn in the cast. That movie is Deaf Smith and Johnny Ears.

Apparently, the movie is based on real events, as Erastus Smith (played by Quinn) was a real person and, like "Deaf" Smith in the movie, was a deaf mute. The movie is set in 1836, not long after the Americans who streamed into Texas from points further east (ie. from the southern US) had gained Texas' independence from Mexico. However, there are a still people in Texas who don't care for the new regime, and some of them are apparently plotting a coup against president Sam Houston. So Houston calls upon Smith, and his interpreter nicknamed Johnny Ears (Franco Nero) to go south and investigate.

What they find is that an envoy from somewhere in the German-speaking lands -- the movie says Germany although it would still be a couple more decades before Germany was unified -- is trying to agree with the rebels on the importation of materiel for the rebels, led by Gen. Morton, to use against Houston. Meanwhile, Gen. Morton has killed the people he thinks are the spies giving Houston the information about the possible rebellion, and this includes his own father-in-law. This makes his wife interested in helping out Smith and Johnny Ears when they show up trying to find out what Morton's plans really are.

It wouldn't be a western without a love interest, and that is provided by a prostitute named Susie (Pamela Tiffin), who is bedded by Johnny Ears and eventually runs away with Deaf and Johnny after they defeat Morton. Or at least, that seems to be what happens, as the action is fairly muddled.

And that's the big problem with the movie, that it seems like there's a whole lot of nothing going on, without much in the way of character development. The print TCM showed was dubbed into English, although I'd guess that it was the production company's intention to have all the dialog redone in both Italian and English versions in post since that was not uncommon for spaghetti westerns.

I didn't much care for Deaf Smith and Johnny Ears, but perhaps people who like other spaghetti westerns will like it.

The File on Madeleine Stowe

In looking through the streaming service movie channels, I find quite a few movies I've never heard of, although a lot of them are more recent and not necessarily of the greatest interest to me. One that's already about 30 years old that sounded like it had an interesting premise was China Moon, so I recently sat down to watch it.

Ed Harris plays Kyle Bodine, a police detective in a Florida city that seems about the same size as whichever Florida city William Hurt inhabited in Body Heat. Kyle doesn't have an exciting life, living quietly apart from investigating cases with his partner on the force Lamar (Benicio Del Toro).

Rupert Munro (Charles Dance) is a wealthy businessman married to Rachel (Madeleine Stowe) and insanely jealous, worried that his wife is cheating on him and trying to get pictures of her in compromising positions to prove it. It's a loveless marriage, giving Rachel good reason to cheat on her controlling husband. He abuses her, which leads her to call the police. As Kyle and Lamar happen to be the closest police car, they drive over to investigate.

Kyle is immediately taken with Rachel, which he ought to realize is a huge no-no especially if he's seen any noir movies, because god knows there are a whole bunch of noir movies where a guy who would be violating professional ethics to get involved with a particular woman still gets involved with her any way. The two start seeing each other secretly; he because it's a bad look to be seen in a relationship with somebody who was the subject of a domestic violence call, and she because she's got that jealous husband.

Things get bad enough for Rachel that she decides to leave the house for a weekend to go down to Miami and get away from Rupert. She then decides during the weekend to go back to the house to grab some belongings in preparation for a permanent break from Rupert. He's supposed to be out at some function, but he returns home and gets in a heated argument with Rachel. She's already bought a gun for self-defense that nobody else knows about, and now she pulls that gun out, leading to Rupert being shot twice.

Rachel doesn't know what to do, figuring she'll be subject to a murder trial even if it is self-defense. So she calls Kyle. As I said earlier, Kyle obviously hasn't seen any noir movies, because he makes the thoroughly stupid decision to tell Rachel what would be the best way to cover up the killing and make it look like somebody other than her shot Rupert. Of course, this means that there are going to be discrepancies, and those discrepancies are going to start leading to Kyle. Worse, it's not so much the cover-up as the apparent twist that it was actually his gun that fired the bullets that killed Rupert.

I've mentioned twice now that Kyle doesn't seem to be that familiar with noir. If you too aren't familiar with noir, or you're trying to introduce somebody who doesn't care so much for black-and-white cinema to noir (or more technically neo-noir), China Moon really isn't a bad movie. The problem, however, is for all of us who are film buffs and have seen at least a reasonable amount of noir. In that case, China Moon comes across as a pastiche of the genre, with so many plot points that seem like they're lifted straight from other movies. It's why I mentioned Body Heat and The File on Thelma Jordon already, and why I could easily have mentioned movies like Fred MacMurray's Pushover or Van Heflin in The Prowler or any of a dozen other similar movies.

Still, the three leads all give professional performances, and the movie is entertaining enough even if not quite original. If you're looking for something that's likely new to you for a lazy movie night with friends, China Moon wouldn't be a bad choice. Just don't expect anything groundbreaking or truly classic.

The Flame Within

I've got an acquaintance on a non-movie internet forum I frequent who's a psychiatrist of some reknown. One time, I accidentally compared him to a psychologist, and a fair bit of humor ensued over the idea that anybody would do something so scandalous as referring to the guy as a psychologist. Anyhow, I bring this up because I couldn't help but think of that acquaintance as I was watching the movie The Flame Within.

Ann Harding plays the psychiatrist in question, one named Dr. Mary White, although she really does seem closer to the popular perception of a psychologist, and the amount of stuff that could have passed for pop psychology decades later surprised me. There's a fellow doctor, Dr. Gordon Phillips (Herbert Marshall), who loves her and wants to marry her, but the movie was released in 1935 and everybody thinks marriage means Mary would have to give up her career which she's reluctant to do because psychiatry is a cutting-edge field and she wants to be a pioneer. (Who can blame her?)

Into this comes a patient, which ought not be surprising since these people are after all doctors. That patient is the idle rich young woman Lillian Belton (Maureen O'Sullivan), who has just tried to commit suicide, which is a decided no-no under the Production Code. Only evil people would do that. Lillian is brought to Dr. White's posh upper-story apartment/office, and in the course of one session tries to commit suicide again by jumping out the window! It turns out that Lillian was in Paris last season, and met another idle rich man, Jack Kerry (Louis Hayward). She immediately fell in love with him, although he only saw her as a friend at most. His true love is alcohol. Lillian thinks she can reform Jack and wants him to be with her instead of the bottle.

So Drs. White and Phillips get in touch with Jack and get him to have a session with Dr. White. And over the course of several sessions, Dr. White finally convinces Jack to stop drinking and to try to get a job, in this case in airplane design although the job seems to have more to do with the passenger cabin than what we traditionally think of as aerospace.

The only cath is what in pop psychology would be called, if memory serves, transference. Dr. White having helped Jack, he thinks she's the right woman for him, not Lillian! And so naturally he starts gettin the hots for Dr. White and that makes Lillian unhappy. Now perhaps if Dr. White had been a psychologist she would have understood all this. But she's supposed to be a psychiatrist, so she doesn't see any of this. And while she doesn't actively try to take Jack away from Lillian, she doesn't actively try to stop his pursuing her while being married to Lillian. At least, not until Dr. Phillips has an intervention with her.

I suppose there might have been an interesting idea at the core of The Flame Within. But boy is that brought down by the script. On the bright side, it all comes crashing down so hard that the movie is unintenionally funny at times. The ending is pure Production Code and might enrage some people, but I saw it as just another symptom of how much of a mess the movie is. All of the actors try their best, but the can't overcome the turkey of a script.

Thankfully, The Flame Within is programmer-length, so watching it crash and burn won't take too much of your time. And it really is worth one watch if you're in the mood to watch the sort of movie that crashes and burns.

Rollover

Another of the movies that I watched because it was about to leave the Watch TCM app was one that sounded like it had an interesting premise, and turned out to have a far more interesting, if flawed ending than the rest of the movie: Rollover.

The movie is set in the world of high finance, with the opening credits over shots of one of the trading floors at Boro National Bank in New York at night, when there's no trading going on. Boro National Bank is in a spot of financial difficulty, as they've got a bunch of international accounts, and the holders of their accounts want to repatriate their holdings, leading to a sort of run on the bank. Meanwhile, over at competing First New York Bank, the executive Maxwell Emery (Hume Cronyn) seems to be OK with this, as it will allow his bank to purchase a distressed asset at rock-bottom prices, much like buying a foreclosed house.

Also worried about the state of Boro National is Charlie Winters, head of a petrochemical company and one of the biggest American accounts at the bank, one that has no need of repatriating its accounts. Charlie is doing a bit of financial digging, and determines that money is being moved from places like Boro National to a mysterious account #21214 at First New York. But that's as far as he gets, because he's murdered.

Charlie leaves behind a widow, Lee (Jane Fonda) who, like Joan Crawford before her, was a Hollywood actress. Unlike Joan, however, Lee doesn't go back to acting and putting product placement of petrochemicals in her movies. Like Joan, however, she gets named to the board of the company, in fact becoming head of the company. She's no dummy, either, and has found a Spanish company whose assets would be perfect for her company, except that she's going to need financing through Boro National.

Maxwell, of course, is trying to get control of Boro National, and to that end sends executive Hub Smith (Kris Kristofferson) to work there to investigate the soundness of the underlying assets. Hub isn't so sure, and as he investigates of course he too is going to learn about that account #21214. Lee is going to discover it too, although in her case it's because she serendipitously finds a surreptitious recording her late husband had made talking about the account.

Eventually, it's discovered that the account is for another repatriation account, this one for Arab oil producers. They've been putting mid-seven-figure amounts of dollars into the account on a monthly basis, which is fairly substantial by early 1980s standards but not enough to cause bank runs. However, the Arabs have enough money that it could cause a run if they all decide to pull out their dollars in one fell swoop, and even Emery doesn't want that.

It's all an interesting premise, but one problem that a movie like Rollover faces is trying to present the world of high fiance in a way that's cinematically interesting, while also being intelligent and entertaining. One of the things Rollover does that doesn't work is to create a love interest between Lee Winters and Hub Smith. Rollover also posits an outcome of a liquidity crisis that to me didn't seem quite so realistic. Some might look at the politics of Jane Fonda and director Alan Pakula and blame this for the movie's conclusion, although I think that's a bit harsh.

Still, Rollover is interesting, at least as speculation and a look at how people saw the world of high finance circa 1980. It apparently got a DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive, and can be streamed on at least Amazon Prime Video.

Upcoming programming alerts, June 4-6, 2023

I was looking through the TCM schedule for stuff to put on the DVR, since there's a movie or two I missed that didn't show up on the Watch TCM app. (And, I learned the hard way that if you try recording something partway through it on Youtube TV, there doesn't seem to be a way to record from the start.) I noticed that one of this week's TCM Imports is Before the Rain, which I blogged about in 2017 and which is still in print from the Criterion Collection. It will be on overnight tonight at 2:00 AM. The other import, at 4:00 AM, is Three Colors: White. I have to admit that so far I've only seen Blue out of the Three Colors trilogy.

Tomorrow morning and afternoon on TCM brings up a bunch of wedding-related movies. As I scrolled quickly through the schedule, I saw that the picture associated with Father of the Bride at 4:00 PM was of Steve Martin, which suprised me until I looked closer. It seems that both versions of Father of the Bride will be on TCM tomorrow: the original with Spencer Tracy at 10:00 AM and the Steve Martin remake at 4:00 PM. I always enjoy The Bride Came C.O.D., which shows up at 2:00 PM.

It's not that long ago that I blogged about The Life of Jimmy Dolan. That one comes up again soon, at 7:30 AM on Tuesday.

I looked through the FXM lineup, and it doesn't seem that any of the stuff that I recorded but haven't yet blogged about is coming up soon. So I guess I won't be watching those off the DVR for a little while longer yet.

There should be a full-length review coming up in the afternoon, and I've got enough of a backlog of stuff that I should really be writing multiple reviews a day and putting some of them in draft.

Where There's a Will (1955)

If you look up Tod Slaughter on this blog, you'll see that I got two of his movies in one of the box sets of British B movies that I picked up some years back. I've bought a couple more sets from the same outfit: one or two sets of British noirs from the 1950s, and a second set of British B movies. Off of that second set of British B's, I watched another completely new to me movie: Where There's a Will.

The movie starts off amusingly enough, with a farmer in Devonshire, in the southwest of England, walking in his field and getting blown to smithereens when he accidentally steps on an unexploded land bomb from World War II. The guy died, which is bad enough, but worse is that he didn't have any direct descendants. This is a much bigger problem for his devoted housekeeper, Annie Yeo, who figured she was going to inherit the place, except that there's no will that can be found. So the search is on for any other relatives, who are ahead of poor Annie in the line to inherit.

It turns out that the old guy had a sibling who had kids, who are now all grown up and will be inheriting the farm. There's two nieces, Amy who's married Fred and Maud who is a widow with an adult daughter June. There's also nephew Alfie. All of them live in London and travel down to Devon to see the old farm and look to sell it since, even splitting the property three ways, it should bring them enough to give them a somewhat more comfortable standard of living than what they all currently have.

Unfortunately, Alfie decides that he likes the fresh air and being out of London, and decides that perhaps he'd like to take up farming. There's the question of how he's going to get the money to get his sisters' other two shares of the farm, as well as the question of whether he knows enough about farming to make the place a going concern. Meanwhile, there are neighboring farmers, the Stokes father and son, who could use the land. Young Ralph Stokes takes a liking to young June and thinks she shouldn't be tied down to the drudgery of a London typing pool girl doting on her mother.

And then there's the mortgage on the farm, and the government man who thinks the government knows better how to run farming and would be willing to put in its own manager. This is all light comedy, however, so eventually everything works out well for the right people. If they don't live happily ever after, at least they get the life of farm labor they choose for themselves.

You'll not that I didn't put the names of any of the stars in the cast. That's because as I was watching the opening credits, all of these were a bunch of names I had never heard of before, and some of them don't even have head shots on IMDb. But then, near the bottom of the credits, there was one name that looked familiar, as Ralph Stokes was played by a man named Edward Woodward. Sure enough, it's that Edward Woodward, known for movies like The Wicker Man and Breaker Morant, and, in the US< the TV series The Equalizer.

Where There's a Will is a mildly pleasant B comedy, and the sort of thing that would have been perfect for the old days when you had a full evening's entertainment at the movies including shorts, a newsreel, a B movie, and the feature. At the same time, it's not surprising that it's fallen into obscurity and shows up on the sort of cheap box set I got. Perhaps in the new world of free, ad-supported streaming, somebody will get the rights to a bunch of movies like this and put them out there that way, the same way I saw Death Goes to School several weeks back.

Southern Gothic all'Italiano, part 1

A bit by chance, I've happened to watch pairs of movies recently that have something in common with each other: two with Cleavon Little in the cast; two with Lauren Hutton; and a pair of sports movies come to mind. And then I happened to watch a pair of movies based on works by Tennessee Williams in which Italians play a key part, not realizing until I started watching the second that Tennessee Williams was responsible for both. The first one I watched was The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, although it's the later of the two movies. In the near future, depending on the order in which I decide to put up the blog posts on the various movies I've watched recently, you'll get the other movie, The Rose Tattoo.

Mrs. Karen Stone is played by Vivien Leigh. She's a stage actress who does Shakespearean stuff, but she's getting up there in years and still seems to insist on playing the roles written for younger women. The public and the critics are noticing it, so Karen decides a break would be in order. Besides, she's got a wealthy industrialist husband who has health issues, and some time off from his equally stressful job would be just the thing for the two of them. With that in mind, they decide to go to Rome for a break, since it's such a romantic city.

Unfortunately for the two of them, Mr. Stone suffers a heart attack mid-flight, and even if they had been over land and been able to divert, it wouldn't have been any health as the heart attack kills him almost instantly. Mrs. Stone is now a widow, but one who's inherited a substantial sum of money from her husband, meaning that she can take a break from going back to work instead of having to flog Pepsi like Joan Crawford. Mrs. Stone takes an apartment overlooking the Spanish Steps, which are apparently considered romantic by tourists and ex-pats. We can also see that there's some shady young man at the bottom of the steps who keeps looking up at Mrs. Stone's apartment.

Meanwhile, there are a lot of other younger men out there who are perfectly willing to debase themselves for an older lady's fortune much the way that sugar babies do with older men. Paolo di Leo (Warren Beatty) is one of those men, and he works for the Contessa (Lotte Lenya), who is basically a pimp although they don't use such language thanks to the presence of the Production Code. If anything, it's presented as being more like Gigi only with the sex of the two protagonists switched. The Contessa arranges for Paolo and Mrs. Stone to meet.

Mrs. Stone is happy to have companionship at first, although the relationship slowly turns into love, at least from her perspective. For Paolo it's just a job, and when he meets Barbara (Jill St. John), an American actress closer to his age, he starts pursuing her. The doesn't happen until about the final quarter of the movie, however, after a long, slow build-up between Stone and Paolo.

And when I say long and slow, it really is long and slow. That's one of the two big weaknesses of the film, the other being Warren Beatty, who isn't Italian at all. On the more surprising front, and for me a bit of a plus, is that the characters aren't anywhere near as obnoxiously shouty and over the top as they are in some of Tennessee Williams' other works that are set in the southern US.

The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone is definitely the sort of movie where I can see why it would appeal to other people more than it did to me, so it's another one where I would strongly suggest watching for yourself and making your own conclusions.

TCM Star of the Month June 2023: Katharine Hepburn

Katharine Hepburn (r.) with Peter O'Toole in The Lion in Winter (June 15, 10:00 PM)

We've reached the start of a new month, and that means that it's time for a new Star of the Month on TCM. This time out, that star is Katharine Hepburn, who was last Star of the Month in conjunction with her 100th birthday in May 2007. That time was a bit different since John Wayne was also born in May 2007; both stars got seven straight days of their movies at different points of the month. This time there's more traditional scheduling, with a night of Hepburn's films every Thursday in prime time. That having said, we get surprisingly few of Hepburn's movies as the nights don't really continue into Friday mornings.

The Lion in Winter, pictured above, earned Hepburn her third Oscar, and all four of her Oscar-winning performances will air in prime time on June 15, although not in order. June 29 is a night of some of her films with Spencer Tracy on June 29, although it's only five of the nine. Woman on the Year will also be airing outside of this, at 3:00 AM on June 9, in addition to Guess Who's Coming to Dinner being used for Hepburn's Oscars night rather than Hepburn with Spencer Tracy.

Doing a search of the blog revealed that I've got only two other photos of Katharine Hepburn that I've used to illustrate posts before, which surprises me a bit, although my posting of images has really tailed off in the past few years. One of the is with Fred MacMurray in Alice Adams, which comes on at 5:00 AM on June 9, or immediately after Woman of the Year. And, wouldn't you know it, but the other of the photos comes from The Philadelphia Story, which just so happens to bookend Woman of the Year, getting an airing at 12:45 AM on June 9. (Note that this will still be late in the evening of June 8 in time zones west of mine.)

Among the Hepburn films not airing are two with Spencer Tracy: State of the Union, which is not that surprising because director Frank Capra regained the rights to it, which eventually wound up with Universal. The other one is more surpising, Sea of Grass, since as far as I know that one wound up in the Turner Library. Also apparently not on the schedule is Rooster Cogburn, Hepburn's pairing with John Wayne.