That final night of Roger Corman

I mentioned two weeks ago that TCM was going to be running three nights of movies involving Roger Corman, who died earlier this year. The first two nights were a bunch of movies that he directed, while the final evening, which is tonight, is different in that he was the producer. It's an interesting night as well in that we get to see Corman giving several young directors an early shot at becoming big-time directors. There are five movies, and I've blogged about the first three before. So I'm looking forward to seeing the latter two:

The night kicks off at 8:00 PM with Boxcar Bertha, directed by a young Martin Scorsese. It's a fake biopic, in that it's based on a book that purported to be an "as told to" memoir although in fact the person doing the telling didn't really exist. The movie is set in the 1930s and tells of Bertha (Barbara Hershey), who gets involved with Depression-era union agitators on the run.

That's followed by Targets at 9:45 PM. This really underrated film, directed by Peter Bogdanovich, stars Boris Karloff in one of his final roles (he really does look like death warmed over), as an again actor on his way to a drive-in that's going to be doing a retrospective of his work and using him as the main attraction. Unbeknownst to him, a sniper who's killed his family is going to converge on the drive-in.

Then, at 11:30 PM, is Dementia 13, which gave Francis Ford Coppola an early start. A family gets together in Ireland for a memorial service for a member of the family who died several years ago. The matriarch of the family is going to be leaving behind a substantial inheritance when she finally dies, and that leads somebody -- but who -- to try to speed things up.

One that I thought I might have seen is Caged Heat, at 1:00 AM. Directed by Jonathan Demme, Caged Heat is another of those 1970s prison movies. But I think the ones I've seen are the American International prison films from the early 1970s co-starring Pam Greer.

The night concludes with Piranha at 2:30 AM, which as you might guess is a horror movie involving the titular steretoypically ultra-vicious fish. The director, Joe Dante, did have a reasonable career, but not as big as the other four directors.

On an Island With You

Tonight's lineup on TCM is a bunch of movies set on tropical islands. This includes one that's been on my DVR for a little while now and that I've never reviewed before: On an Island With You, overnight tonight at 12:45 AM (so technically July 17 in the Eastern time zone but late in the evening of July 16 in the more westerly time zones of the US).

The movie opens in lovely Technicolor with a Pacific-sounding song that sounds like it could be a stand-in for "Aloha Oe". At the end of the opening and credits, a woman dives from one of the trees into the lagoon below, that woman being Rosalind Reynolds (Esther Williams). The scene, however, is one that's part of a movie-within-a-movie, as Reynolds is an actress making a movie in the islands together with her fiancé, Ricardo Montez (Ricardo Montalbán). Montez is playing a character who is a navy officer, which seems like miscasting considering Montez's accent. The character is loved by Reynolds' character, but also by another character played by Yvonne Toro (Cyd Charisse). What nobody knows yet is that Yvonne Toro is also in love with Ricardo Montez.

Since the movie-within-a-movie is about the US Navy, the studio has brought in a technical advisor whose job it is is to make certain that everything is done the way it would be done in the real US Navy. That advisor is Lt. Kingslee (Peter Lawford). But Kingslee has some rather odd ideas about how to be an advisor, which are down in part to the fact that some years back (I'd assume during World War II, as the war had been over for less than three years when On an Island With You was released) Kingslee had seen Reynolds in the flesh when she was doing one of her USO tours. She even invited a serviceman on stage for one of her routines, and that serviceman was Kingslee. This is also why Kingslee seems vaguely familiar to Reynolds, although she can't place him. This is actually logical; the non-famous person would remember the meeting with the famous movie star, while the movie star would likely only remember having invited a ton of servicemen on stage over the course of a slew of USO shows.

Kingslee is still infatuated with Reynolds despite the fact that she's engaged, and he decides to show it first by suggesting that Montez is handling a navy romance all wrong, offering to step in for one scene and how Montez how to do it, if only as an excuse for Kingslee to be able to kiss Reynolds. Later that evening, when Xavier Cugat (obviously playing himself) is the bandleader at the hotel floor show, Kingslee asks Reynolds for a dance, and is a total dick about it when Reynolds politely but firmly declines. So much a dick that he keeps insisting she dance with him, to the point that the assistant director Buckley (Jimmy Durante, mostly there to provide comic relief) offers to dance with Kingslee.

But Kingslee isn't done being a jerk. One scene involves flying over the set. Since Kingslee is a Navy pilot (which one would guess is how he got the dual job to be technical advisor), he flies Reynolds over the set, but then flies off with her to an island several hundred miles away so that he can have some alone time with her. This to me seems like kidnapping and going AWOL, both of which would be offenses deserving of a court-martial. And indeed, when Kingslee and Reynolds are finally rescued, his commanding officer is extremely displeased.

But the worst of all things is that Peter Lawford is billed above Ricardo Montalbán, which implies that Lawford's character is the one that's supposed to end up with Williams in the final reel. Cyd Charisse's character having the hots for Montalbán is, then, obviously in the script so that Montalbán can end up with her as the "right" match. But Lawford's character is just such a total jerk, and he's so violating the Hollywood Production Code, never mind military law, that you wonder how he's going to get away with it in the final reel.

As you might guess, the huge problem for me with On an Island With You is the plot that just doesn't work. None of this is Williams' fault. Once again, she gets to do aquacade numbers that are well choreographed and look lovely on screen. Jimmy Durante is the same sort of character he usually is, while Xavier Cugat as himself is as much of an acquired taste as is Durante's humor. Some people will like them, some won't.

So, if I were to recommend Esther Williams to people, I'd start with something else before On an Island With You. But there's enough here that people are going to like the visuals.

Brewster McCloud

When Shelley Duvall died the other day, I think I might have mentioned I didn't think she was in anything upcoming on TCM. I was wrong, as one of the movies in TCM's Friday night series looking at films of the 1970s was the one in which she got an "Introducing" credit, Brewster McCloud. Thanks to an internet outage I didn't get to record it, but fortunately it's on Watch TCM through the beginning of August so I was able to watch it.

The movie starts off with a rather obsessive ornithology lecturer (only named as "Lecturer" and played by Rene Auberjonois) giving a lecture about birds; several times during the movie the scene cuts back to him and each time he seems more and more birdlike as well as more and more unhinged. Meanwhile, the action shifts to the old Houston Astrodome, where an old woman named Daphne (Margaret Hamilton is practicing the national anthem with a marching band.

Also in the Astrodome is the titular Brewster McCloud (Bud Cort). He's a strange bird, pun intended, as he lives in the fallout shelter underneath the stadium and somehow nobody has discovered that he lives there. Well, that's not quite true as he's got a couple of women in his life, but nobody who really matters knows that he lives there. Brewster works a chauffeur to an extremely old man, at least until the old guy dies in a freak wheelchair accident.

Meanwhile, around Houston, people are dying an a bizarre series of murders in which all of the victims are found with strategically-placed bird droppings. The Houston police have no idea who could be doing this, so they call for help from a San Francisco police detective, Frank Shaft (Michael Murphy).

Brewster also has an interest in birds, being one of those nutjobs with an obsession about human-powered flight. Indeed, part of the reason he lives under the Astrodome is so that he can work on building a set of wings for himself without being bothered by anybody. The only people who bother him, as I alluded to above, are one groupie, as well as a guardian angel type named Louise (Sally Kellerman) who may have had wings herself at one time, as she's got scars where wings would be if one had had wings removed at some point.

Brewster meets a third woman, Suzanne (that's Shelley Duvall, unmistakable with that expressive face of hers), who works as a tour guide at the Astrodome. Brewster tries to steal her car, and when she sees him, she seems OK with it, getting into the car with him and eventually becoming his girlfriend. However, she has an old boyfriend who works for a political bigwig, and that connection might be able to help her break the case of all the murders, as the multiple plot streams eventually come together for a climax.

I'm sorry to say that I really didn't care for Brewster McCloud, as the various plot streams aren't all that well handled. I also didn't have any real sympathy for any of the characters, who to me were mostly written as almost obnoxiously unrealistic, playing into gross stereotypes, such as the gross incompetence of the authorities. Then again, it was directed by Robert Altman, and having seen several of his films I haven't been the biggest fan of them for the most part.

If you are a fan of Altman and you haven't seen Brewster McCloud before, however, you might well like it more than I did.

I Wouldn't Be in Your Shoes

I think I mentiones some weeks back how Eddie Muller mentioned in Noir Alley that Cornell Woolrich's stories don't always make sense; I think in conjunction with Black Angel. I mentioned that I had another movie based on a Woolrich story sitting on my DVR. That movie is I Wouldn't Be in Your Shoes.

The movie starts off in a prison, where a man named Tom Quinn (Don Castle) is on death row. He's not very talkative and more or less resigned to dying. The other prisoners wonder how he got here and what made him as closed off as he is. As you might imagine, this is the cue for a flashback, although a lot of the story involves stuff that Tom couldn't possibly know even if he were narrating it.

Tom is married to Ann (Elyse Knox); the two of them are struggling dancers living in one room of a rooming house. Tom doesn't get much work, while Ann is supporting the both of them by working as a taxi dance and getting big tips from one particular client, working until the wee hours of the morning. That latter fact unsurprisingly makes Tom a bit jealous, and also keeps him up nights.

One night, Tom hears a cat mewling in the courtyard behind the building they live in. It's too much for him, so he throws one of his old shoes at the poor cat. Except that when Ann gets home, she informs him that she had actually gotten rid of those old shoes, so that all he had left was his good shoes with the built-in taps. He really should go out and fetch the shoe before somebody else takes it.

Tom doesn't, but surprisingly a good Samaritan leaves the shoes by the door to their room the next morning. At the same time, they learn about the death of a guy in the building on the other side of the courtyard. Otis, the dead man, was murdered, presumably because everybody in the area thought he was some sort of miser who paid for his purchases with old currency in denominations too high for someone of his putative lot in life. Obviously, he must have a lot more of those notes somewhere, which would naturally make somebody want to murder him.

The two story lines come together in a number of ways. One is that Tom finds a missing wallet which had belonged to Otis; Tom doesn't want to spend any of the money in the wallet which is actually a smart move because the police are tracking Otis' money. The other thing is that there's a shoe-print at the murder scene that matches Tom's spiffy new tap shoes. So when everything is put together it's only logical that Tom should be thought of as a natural suspect. He's arrested, put on trial, and found guilty, although one should be able to figure that out considering that at the start of the movie he's on death row.

At this point, we learn that Ann's rich benefactor from the dance hall is none other than Clint Judd (Regis Toomey), a police detective. Ann knows that her husband just has to be innocent, and that whoever it was who returned the shoes to Tom has to have been the person who murdered Otis. Perhaps Clint could help Ann investigate and figure out who really killed Otis?

Eddie Muller said, and I'd have to agree, that with some of these Cornell Woolrich stories you just have to sit back and enjoy the ride. I Wouldn't Be in Your Shoes is definitely a good example of that. The story is full of plot holes, and yet it's surprisingly entertaining. I guess some of that is down to the fact that it's just a B movie, so it comes in with very low expectations. I don't think you can call it great by any stretch of the imagination, but it certainly succeeds at keeping an audience entertained for the 70 or so minutes it's on the screen.

To be honest, there's not much blushing

Looking through the movies on my DVR, and seeing that the 1930s have been slightly overlooked in the last few weeks of posts, I decided to watch Our Blushing Brides, an early Joan Crawford talkie.

If the title sounds familiar, it's because the movie is the third in a sort of unofficial trilogy with two silents also starring Crawford (and, in fact, a couple of the other female stars), Our Dancing Daughters and Our Modern Maidens. I know I've seen at least one, if not both, of those, but don't quite remember them well enough to do a full post on; in any case the women don't actually play the same characters in the three movies. Here, Crawford stars as Jerry, working in a New York department store together with her friends Connie (Anita Page) and Frankie (Dorothy Sebastian). The three also share an apartment in order to cut down on costs.

All three are single working girls, but this being 1930, it's the era when most women would be expected to stop doing work out in the wider world certainly once they became mothers, and often simply once they got married. Connie and Frankie seem to be OK doing what it takes to snag a richer man so they can live a life of more leisure, while Jerry wants virtue and not a man pushing her to be a trophy wife. Meanwhile, she's already getting approached at the department store by co-worker Joe Munsey (Edward Brophy) in a recurring comic sub-plot. This being 1930, many screen personas of actors in the sound era had not yet been set, but even in 1930, the idea of Edward Brophy as a romantic suitor is somehow rather humorous.

But as with the other two young women, Jerry also has a rich guy interested in her, partly because part of her job is to model dresses, something which implies that she's going to be seen by a lot of fabulously wealthy people, because who else can afford to buy the sort of clothes where you go and watch people model them. For Jerry, however, the rich man isn't one of the guys buying for his girlfriend; it's Tony Jardine (Robert Montgomery), the son of the store's owner. Tony has a kid brother David (Raymond Hackett), who happens to be pursuing Connie. Frankie also gets a rich guy who is interested in her, Martin Sanderson (John Miljan), who comes in looking for $500 worth of fabric. This being John Miljan, alarm bells probably should have gone off for Frankie; as it turns out, he's the mastermind behind gangs working the department store robbery racket, Frankie being totally ignorant of this.

Frankie goes off with Martin, while one evening, Jerry returns home to find a note from Connie telling her to call Connie at a certain phone number. Connie has been given an apartment by David, to live as a kept woman. Connie thinks David is going to marry him, but the second half of the movie turns to melodrama and Jerry learns that David has a girlfriend from the upper crust and is in fact going to marry that girlfriend. Jerry's also had some melodrama of her own with Tony, who has in her view trying to put the moves on her too fast in a fabulous (by the standards of 1930) treehouse.

Our Blushing Brides works best as a time capsule, now that it's well over 90 years old. Since the movie has three women's stories to tell, it has a tendency to veer rather sharply in tone when it goes from one subplot to another. As a result, there's some unintended comedy here. The movie is fairly slow in the first half, for me especially due to the fashion show aspect of it, but those as well as the set designs in general are part of the time capsule feel of the movie. And then there's that one scene where Joan Crawford has to wear a blonde wig and heavy makeup that makes her look ghoulish.

If I'm going to introduce people to early sound movies, there are other things I'd pick well before Our Blushing Brides. But for people who have already seen those other films, Our Blushing Brides is certainly an interesting, if mixed, glimpse into the past.

Also tough to review

A few months back, I did a post on My Dinner With Andre pointing out it was tough to review because of the well-known subject material and lack of a plot. Another movie that for me somewhat defies review, albeit for different reasons, is the 1970 version of The Boys in the Band, which has another airing on TCM tonight (July 12) at 8:00 PM.

I'm sure the main plot point is known already to a lot of readers, and the reasons why it's well known. Michael (Kenneth Nelson) is going through lower Manhattan running errands in advance of a birthday he's hosting for Harold (Leonard Frey) and several mutual friends. After he gets back to his apartment, a couple of things happen. One is that his friend Donald (Frederick Combs) shows up early, his session with his analyst having been called off. It's made quite clear from the conversation, if you didn't already know the plot, that both of them, as well as all of the guests at the party, are gay men, and that Michael and Donald are in some stage of a relationship.

The other thing that happens is that Michael's college roommate Alan (Peter White) calls up, looking to meet with Michael for dinner or something because he has something very important of a personal nature to discuss. Now, Alan has come up from Washington, and is not a guest at the party because Alan is straight with a wife. The play having been first staged in 1968 and the movie being from 1970, it's easy to see the potential problems this causes. All the guests are comfortable being open about being gay in front of each other, but not necessarily with certain straight people they know well. Michael tries to push off a meeting with Alan until the next day, but Alan at least eventually does call off the meeting.

The various guests start to arrive, although Harold is going to show up fashionably late. Playwright Mart Crowley, who was openly gay and wrote both the play and screenplay, populates the guests with a bunch of different character types who might seem like archetypes. But one presumes that Crowley really did know gay men like each of the characters. The most important of the guests for plot purposes is not the guest of honor, but Emory (Cliff Gorman), who fills the stereotype of the flamboyant and combative gay man, but one who can also be seen as obnoxious.

The gay men, free to be themselves, enjoy the party when there's another knock on the door. Everybody expects it to be Harold who hasn't shown up yet. But it is in fact Alan. And it wasn't Michael who opened the door; if he had, he probably could have kept everybody out on the terrace while he talks about that "important" thing Alan wanted to discuss. But with somebody else answering the door, Alan realizes that everybody at the party is gay, which obviously includes his friend and former roommate Alan.

All hell breaks loose, especially with Emory, who decides the right thing to do is to taunt Alan and suggest that Alan is acutally gay himself but severely repressed. Emory, in fact, is the reason why I found myself having trouble coming up with a good review of The Boys in the Band. Ultimately, it hit me what made me dislike his character so much: I couldn't help but think of Emory as being like the obnoxious jerk antagonist stereotype from a 1980s teen movie, except that the character in the 1980s movie would be straight. Emory also comes across as the sort of character who would immediately jump to screaming homophobia if anybody objected to his obnoxiousness, even though we all know similarly annoying straight people.

Reading reviews on IMDb, however, brought up another insight that I didn't think of. Several reviewers made comparisons between The Boys and the Band and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf in that the parties spiral out of control in much the same way. As you may recall, I really disliked Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf because of the nonstop bickering and unlikeability of any of the characters. In the case of The Boys in the Band, though, it was really more just Emory that I really didn't like and wanted to smack.

A lot of the reviewers also discuss whether The Boys in the Band is dated. In some ways, it probably is, but at the same time, all the character types portrayed here still exist (both the gay and straight equivalents), and many of the themes are timeless.

Briefs for July 11-12, 2024

I hadn't intended to write up a briefs post today, but then I saw the news that Shelley Duvall died at the age of 75. Duvall is best known for her performance in The Shining, one of those movies that I have to admit I have never actually seen before. Duvall's career didn't really go anywhere after that, in part because she wound up in some disastrous films like Popeye, and in part because of personal health issues. I don't know that any of her movies are coming up on TCM soon.

As for movies that are coming up, I've got more this week that are on my DVR and that I haven't blogged about until now. One of them is The Swan, which actually has a pair of airings on TCM in fairly close proximity this week, one earlier and one at 6:00 PM tomorrow. I had other stuff to blog about so I didn't do a full-length post on it, but then, it's airing in August since Grace Kelly is being honored in Summer Under the Stars. (I've also got The Country Girl sitting on my DVR from when TCM ran it during 31 Days of Oscar, so I guess you're getting two Grace Kelly posts in quick succession.)

Before The Swan, however, there's The King and the Chorus Girl, which I mentioned several months back; that one shows up July 12 at 12:15 PM. And then, at 2:00 PM Saturday (July 13) is The Password is Courage, which I recorde when Dirk Bogarde was Star of the Month last September. So it's currently expired on my YouTube TV cloud DVR, but because their system remembers what movies you recorded in the past, it catches new airings of stuff.

Raintree County

Eva Marie Saint is TCM's Star of the Month for July 2024, and one of her movies that's been on my DVR and that I haven't posted about before is Raintree County. It's on TCM again tonight at 10:00 PM, so I made a point to watch the movie to do a review on it now for the upcoming showing.

Once again, Eva Marie Saint is only a supporting actress here, although she shows up a lot earlier than the actual lead actress. The movie opens up in 1859 in Raintree County, Indiana, which is partly a sign that the Civil War is about to hit the US and change everybody's life. Everybody is about to graduate high school, and this being 1859, it's a huge deal that the class is going to be... photographed. Head of the class is John Shawnessy (Montgomery Clift), who is a bit of a dreamer. He's kinda-sort going steady, at least by 1859 standards, with fellow student Nell (that's Eva Marie Saint if you couldn't tell), and everyone expects them to get married relatively soon since younger marriages were much more common in those days.

Except that one of their teachers, Prof. Stiles (Nigel Patrick), tells the class the legend Johnny Appleseed, He went through the midwest planting trees, and supposedly he planted on specific raintree after which the county is named, somewhere in the county's forbidding swamp. Find the tree, and you'll find the secret of life. It's a ridiculous idea, but this is the 1850s when there was more ignorance in the world, and young John is impressionable. So he blows off his girlfriend to go into the swamp looking for the tree.

Visiting the county for some reason is southern belle Susanna Drake (Elizabeth Taylor). Johnny is immediately taken with her looks, and continues to blow off Nell in order to spend time with Susanna. Enough time alone with each other, in fact that there might be the opportunity for Johnny to knock up Susanna before she leaves to go back home. Indeed, they must have had sex because some time later Susanna shows up back in town to tell Johnny that she's with child and he's the father of the child. I'd guess Johnny knew enough about sex to know that if he hadn't done it with Susanna, there's no way she could be bearing his child.

Johnny does the honorable thing and marries Susanna before heading south with her to live in her part of the country. The two stop in a plantation where Susanna grew up, at least before the place burned down in a fire. Johnny, in talking to the people who still live there, learns that Susanna's mom went insane, and Susanna may in fact be inheriting her mom's mental state, not that they quite understood genetics at the time. But it's the reason for the insanity that's a problem: The woman who went insane might not have been Susanna's biological mother, and that Susanna is in fact the product of a relationship between Dad and one of the family's slaves!

Oh, the movie is going to get a lot more ridiculous. John and Susanna move back north, and the Civil War breaks out. Johnny doesn't volunteer, at least not until Susanna runs off with their child to someplace in the south, leaving Johnny to join the Union Army just so he can spend all his time looking for Susanna, which I'd think might involve a bit of desertion. Meanwhile, Nell is still around, and still pining away for poor Johnny.

Raintree County was based on a novel publised a few years after World War II that was a commercial success. It's not hard to see why MGM would want to buy the rights and think that this sort of melodramatic material that has shades of Gone With the Wind would be a big hit. But the movie wound up in production hell in part because the novel's writer killed himself. And then when it finally did get made, nobody seemed to undertand just how wacky the material is. It also didn't help that this is the movie Clift was making when he had the very serious car crash that nearly killed him and delayed production for months.

Raintree County is certainly not the best film for anybody involved in the production, I'm sorry to say.

Invitation to the Dance

Some years back when Gene Kelly was TCM's Star of the Month, they ran a documentary on his career; unsurprisingly the documentary spent some time discussing one of his more ambitious projects: Invitation to the Dance. I had never seen the movie, so the most recent time that TCM ran it, I finally got around to putting it on my DVR. It has another airing coming up, tomorrow (July 11) at 11:30 AM, so now is the time for the review.

Invitation to the Dance is an anthology movie, which in and of itself is not unusual. But this is Gene Kelly, so he had a daring idea, which was to make a movie using only dance. Well, not only dance, but music of course. The bigger point, however, is that there's no dialog, not even like in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg where there is dialogue but it's all sung. Kelly appears in three stories told through dance, directing himself and a lot of people who are as I understand it better known as dancers than traditional actors.

The first story is called "Circus", which is set among the characters in an old-fashioned traveling circus. Kelly plays a clown, while there's a male aerialist and a woman. Kelly's clown loves the woman, but she and the aerialist are already in love with each other. So the clown decides he's going to try to win the woman over, but....

That's followed by the most complex of the three stories, "Ring Around the Rosy". This one starts off with a sort of opening credits scene that introduces us to 10 different characters. A man gives a bracelet to his wife, only for him then to learn that his wife may not be quite faithful to him. The wife then gives the bracelet to one of her friends, after which it goes through a series of people, including Kelly as a married marine. In the end, I couldn't help but think of the Jacques Tourneur short The Grand Bounce, about a bad check that gets passed among a bunch of different people to pay off a debt.

Finally is "Sinbad the Sailor". Kelly plays Sinbad, although this one looks more like a US Navy man who is in port somewhere in the stereotypical storybook Arab world. He buys a lantern and, because everyone knows the genie myth, rubs the lantern. Only, this one actually does have a genie in it, who takes Sinbad into a cartoon world where he falls in love with an animated odalisque protected by two animated guards. This segment is reminiscent of Anchors Aweigh for its combination of live action and animation.

Invitation to the Dance was released in theaters by MGM a good two years after it was made. It's easy to see why the studio sat on it, as they had no idea what to do with it. Critics of the time were not kind to it, and again, it's easy to see why. The dancing feels way too unnatural and stylized, and if anything the dancing really gets in the way of the story for the most part, although the last segment is a bit of an exception.

More recent reviewers have been less unkind to the movie, although I have to say I'm not one of those less unkind people. I can understand why Kelly would want to try something daring like this, but Invitation to the Dance just doesn't work.

House of the Seven Gables (1940)

Some months back, I mentioned the horror anthology Twice-Told Tales, based on three stories by mid-19th century American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne. The last of the stories is an adaptation of Hawthorne's novel The House of the Seven Gables. There was a full-length movie version of The House of the Seven Gables made in 1940, which TCM also ran last October even though it's not quite a horror movie in the sense that the version in the anthology movie is. Not having seen it (and, I should add, I haven't read Hawthorne's original book either), I recorded it to be able to watch it and do a review.

The movie opens with the device of showing pages from a book to give us establishing information since, after all, the movie is based on a book. In 17th century Massachusetts, Jaffrey Pyncheon engaged in some subterfuge to get some land from a Matthew Maule, and as a result, the Pyncheon house is thought by everybody else in town to be cursed, even though the Pyncheon descendants still live there.

Fast forward 150 years. Another Jaffrey Pyncheon (George Sanders) is a lawyer in Boston, and rising in the legal world. But he's been summoned home by his father. Also living in the house is Jaffrey's brother Clifford (Vincent Price) and their cousin Hepzibah (Margaret Lindsay), who is in a relationship with Clifford, since cousin marriage isn't quite the taboo it might be today. Clifford is a musician, a profession that Jaffrey looks down on, and you suspect that the brothers have disliked each other for years.

Dad called Jaffrey home because he's planning on finally selling the house. Not that he wants to; it's more that Dad and Jaffrey have been borrowing against the house to make risky investments that haven't paid off, and now they finally have to pay off the debts, with selling the house being the only way to do so. Clifford doesn't care so much since he's planning on going to New York to pursue his career in songwriting. Jaffrey, on the other hand, is deeply unhappy, since he believes in the family legend that there's some sort of hidden fortune in the house.

Clifford and his father get into an argument over selling the house, and in the course of that argument Dad suffers a fatal heart attack. This gives Jaffrey an idea. He accuses Clifford of having done something to cause Dad's death, with the result that Clifford is put on trial, convicted, and sentenced to a harsh prison sentence; the house is never sold.

Hepzibah pines for her cousin, and works on getting the governor to commute Clifford's sentence. He returns home, but he's not out of the woods yet. All these years, Jaffrey has been continuing to make risky investments, and Clifford's presence throws a monkey wrench into those plans. So Jaffrey comes up with a dastardly scheme to get Clifford out of the way once and for all.

As I said at the beginning, I haven't read Nathaniel Hawthorne's original book, so I can't compare this movie to the book. Supposedly, there are substantial differences between the two, but I can only judge the movie on its own merits. In that regard, it's not a bad little movie. Vincent Price unsurprisingly gives a good performance, as does Sanders as the villain of the piece. The production, however, feels like Universal, where it was produced, could have given it a little more TLC. This is the sort of material that probably should have been more of a prestige picture, but as produced, it has more of the look and feel of a programmer. Not that it's bad by any means, however. It's definitely worth a watch.