Crime does not pay

Back in September 2008, I briefly mentioned Crime Does Not Pay, a series of two-reelers made by MGM from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s, which look at more or less real crime. One of the shorts actually won an Oscar in the shorts category, and that winner, Torture Money, is airing at approximately 10:08 AM ET tomorrow morning. (It's after Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which begins at 8:15 AM and is listed as having a running time of 108 minutes. You do the math.)

The title is unfortunately slightly inaccurate, as the subject isn't really torture (the series got closer to torture with the way the illegal immigrants were treated in Forbidden Passage in 1941), but insurance fraud. A criminal racket is staging automobile accidents, and then ripping off the insurance companies and municipal governments. Warner Bros. actually made a full-length B movie around the same time on the same subject with Ronald Reagan's Accidents Will Happen. The short is good enough; the acting is a bunch of bit players. Instead, these shorts are a great look at America as it was (or as Hollywood thought it was) 70 or more years ago.

Torture Money doesn't seem to be on DVD, but several of the Crime Does Not Pay shorts have made it to DVD, notably on Warner Home Video's Film Noir Collection, Vol. 3.

Awards wrap-up

Perhaps the real winner at last night's Oscars was The Story of Alexander Graham Bell. After all, the Best Picture was won by a movie about a man who worked with someone with a speech impediment. And it beat out a movie about a bunch of inventors who are difficult people to work with.

What are the rules for being a lead actor as opposed to being a supporting actor? I've read a number of people who thought the girl from True Grit should have been nominated in the Best Actress category instead of Best Supporting Actress, and that this is why she lost in the Supporting Actress category. The theory also seems to go that she would have beaten out Natalie Portman for Best Actress, so I'm not quite certain the theory makes sense. Anyhow, in 1944, Barry Fitzgerald got nominated for both Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor in Going My Way, which caused the Academy to change the rules. My understanding is at the time it had something to do with the position in the credits, but that doesn't sound quite right. And especially with the way the credits are nowadays, it really doesn't make sense.

I'm beginning to think more and more that Elia Kazan shouldn't have named Communists; he should have raped girls. Everybody's favorite child rapist won the Best Director award at the Césars (the French equivalent of the Oscars), and was widely applauded for it. More interesting (or really more galling) is that much of the commentary seems to be how horrible it is that the Academy overlooked this man in its awards.

A WWII movie much different from Destination Gobi

The movie in question would be The Human Comedy, which is airing at 2:00 PM ET tomorrow on TCM.

The scene is the town of Ithaca, which could be a town almost anywhere in the US. Mickey Rooney gets top billing as Homer, the second son of the Macauley family. Dad died a few years back (which we learn from a voiceover at the very start of the movie), and Homer's older brother Marcus (Van Johnson in one of his earliest roles) has left home to enlist in the Army. There's a war on, after all. So, it's up to Homer to be the father figure of the family as best he can, even though he's just a high school student. To that end, Homer has taken an after-school job delivering telegrams, which is tough in a number of ways. First is the fact that the man who types of the telegrams (Frank Morgan) is a chronic drunk, and needs Homer to be a bit of his keeper: wake him up if he gets into the bottle too much, and ply him with coffee to sober him up. Worse is the content of those telegrams. With the war on, people die, and Homer has the difficult job of delivering one such telegram to a Mexican immigrant who is illiterate, but whose son has just died in the war.

Marcus, meanwhile, seems to be taking well to the army. He writes home telling that he's doing just fine, and has even taken another soldier under his wing, one who was an orphan and doesn't have a family -- and certainly not a family as wonderful as the Macauleys. That having been said, The Human Comedy is much more about Homer and the homefront. And because of that, you can probably see the ending coming from a mile away....

Despite the weakness of the ending, The Human Comedy is still a worthwhile movie. This, as long as you keep in mind that is was released in 1943, at the height of World War II when it was still uncertain that the Americans would be able to win the war. Folks on the homefront wanted something warm and comforting, and that's something The Human Comedy delivers in spades. The movie is also helped by a bunch of good performances from a fine ensemble cast. Mickey Rooney gets unfairly criticized, probably because of all the Andy Hardy movies and musicals with Judy Garland he did. In fact, Rooney was a capable actor, as this and A Midsummer Night's Dream both show. Johnson is good in a smaller role, and Morgan is wonderful. The rest of the cast has a lot of names you might recognize, either as character actors, or as people who would go on to much bigger things: Fay Bainter is Mrs. Macauley; Homer's kid sister is played by Donna Reed; and Homer's actual boss at the telegraph office is James Craig. Watch also for the seen in which Reed winds up going to the movies with a couple of soldiers: one of those soldiers is a young Robert Mitchum in one of his earliest roles.

The Human Comedy has gotten a DVD release as part of the Warner Archive collection.

Oscar questions

By now you probably know that there's some awards show coming up on TV tonight. I don't know how much of it I'm going to watch, if any. In part it's because I'm a fan of The Amazing Race, and in part because I'm not that big on the pageantry of the awards shows. Do we really need performances of all the Oscar-nominated songs? Maybe one of the performances will have a "wardrobe malfunction", but I doubt it.

The folks producing (or should it be directing?) the show never seem to have an idea of how to get the show to end within the allotted time. They've taken to trying to cut down the length of the speeches by having the house orchestra start playing to drown out the speaker, reminiscent of a scene in Glenn Ford's Trial. I'd propose a better way: if the speech gets too long, cut to commercial. That way you get your commercials in; you let the speakers speak longer, and you let the audience get out of hearing the boring parts of the speech. Perhaps industry insider care to hear about some assistant producer thanking his or her manicurist, but the folks at home don't.

Is Natalie Portman in The Black Swan better than Maureen O'Hara in The Black Swan? Is The Black Swan better than The Red Shoes?

How many gratuitous political references will there be?

Somehow I doubt it

If you thought the last Fox war movie I recommended, The Raid, was interesting, wait until you see the next one: Destination Gobi, tomorrow morning at 11:00 AM ET on the Fox Movie Channel.

The scene is World War II. American naval CPO Sam McHale (Richard Widmark) is ordered to go, of all places, to the Gobi Desert! The reason why is that the navy has set up a bunch of weather stations out in the Gobi, where they can forecast the weather that's going to go east to the Pacific a few days later, while hopefully staying far enough away from the Japanese. CPO McHale is none to happy about it, but takes up his post because, hey, orders are orders. While there, he meets a bunch of Mongols who may or may not be friendly, although they've set up camp next to the Americans. But, McHale tries to make friends with them, and asks the Navy to provision him with saddles for the Mongol horses. The Mongols are thankful, but look upon it as a gift, as when the Japanese finally come and try to bomb the Americans, the Mongols flee.

The Americans are left with the thankless task of trying to get somewhere to safety, but where? The only option seems to be to go across the Gobi, with the hope of getting to the sea, where they can finagle their way onto a boat that can take them to Okinawa, which by now has been liberated by the Americans. Now if you think this sounds like a bunch of nonsense, you might be right. The idea of crossing the Gobi sounds more like a Hollywood movie than real life, but we've got a movie to make here. Never mind that the producers couldn't make the movie in the actual Gobi Desert, since China had been taken over by the Communists by the time. Anyhow, the Americans get caught by the Japanese, but helped out by the Mongols just in time....

Destination Gobi is OK as entertainment, but nothing particularly spectacular; in short, it's the sort of movie you'd want to watch with a bowl of popcorn when you want to have a bit of fun as opposed to a serious evening of movies. Perhaps a bit more interesting is the rest of the cast in addition to Widmark. You've got Darryl Hickman in one of his adult roles; future Adam-12 star Martin Milner and future director Don Taylor are also among the Navy folks stuck out in the Gobi. The movie's director is Robert Wise during his earlier days at Fox, before he was able to choose where he worked and make such great movies as West Side Story.

Destination Gobi doesn't seem to be on DVD, so you'll have to record it off of Fox if you want to see it.

Tom Jones

Blogger's search function claims I haven't blogged about Tom Jones before. It's coming up late tonight at 12:15 AM ET.

Albert Finney stars as Tom Jones, foundling, who is discovered by the Squire Allworthy (George Devine) and raised at the Allworthy estate. Unfortunately, little Tom is a randy bastard, as he finds he likes all the girls, consequences be damned. He loves Sophie (Susannah York), who is the daughter of another Squire (Hugh Griffith), but doesn't get her since he's sleeping with the other women and gets caught out. Fast forward some time, and Jones makes his way to London, where Sophie is set to be betrothed to the legitimate heir of Squire Allworthy (David Warner). Tom rekindles his relationship with Sophie, but the loss of honor that he causes threatens to have him hanged, with only a seeming deus ex machina able to save him.

There's something about Tom Jones in which the plot isn't particularly special, but the telling of the story is. Finney gives a wonderful performance as the almost-hyper Tom, and everybody around him is either suitably enamored or suitably enraged as the situation warrants. The movie is helped as well by lovely cinematography making a country England of the mid-18th century look beautiful; much more so than the back lots that stood in for 1780s England in The Divine Lady a few days back. And then there's the music. It's original music, but composed to sound like the style that whould have been in vogue around 1750 in the UK, and is just as frenetic as good young Tom himself. Everybody looks as though they're having enormous fun making this movie.

And you'll have just as much fun watching it as they must have had making it.

It kills bugs, too!

Coming up at 7:00 AM ET tomorrow morning on the Fox Movie Channel is the interesting historical movie The Raid. What's interesting about it is that it's based on a real event.

The movie starts in September 1864 at a POW camp for Confederate soldiers located in northern New York. Confederate Major Benton (Van Heflin) leads his fellow POWs in a breakout which is successful and which enables them to get to neutral Canada where they can meet up with some of their Confederate sympathizers who have a plan hatched. That plan is to cross the border and raid the nearest moderately-sized town, St. Albans, VT. There, they'll rob all the banks to get the money necessary to buy arms for the Confederates still fighting in the South.

To that end, Benton goes to St. Albans with the view of finding a suitable farm where the Confederates can congregate in preparation for the raid. Posing as a Canadian, he puts up at the hotel run by the widow Mrs. Bishop (Anne Bancroft), who has good reason to hate Confederates, and no reason to suspect that her new boarder is one himself. Likewise her son (Tommy Rettig), who begins to look up to the new father figure in his life.

Benton eventually gets a place outside of town and begins to bring in some of the Confederates who will take part in the raid, but it's not so simple. Some of the soldiers, notably Lt. Keating (Lee Marvin), are rather more vocal in their defense of the Confederacy. That just won't do, since this is an operation where subtlety is called for, lest the townsfolk figure out what's going on. Eventually, the day of the raid comes....

The Raid is good enough, but not particularly great. The parts of the story embellished for Hollywood's purposes are fairly pedestrian and predictable, but don't do anything to take away from the real-life story that's quite interesting in its own right. The cast is competent, although you get the feeling at times that they've all been doing these character types for years, particularly Marvin and his mean bastard routine. Still, there are much worse ways to spend an hour and a half. Unfortunately, The Raid isn't available on DVD.

Two history points

I note that today is the birth anniversary of director Norman Taurog, who was born February 23, 1899. Taurog won the Best Director Oscar for Skippy -- which interestingly enough was programmed on TCM for yesterday afternoon. Now, I do realize that TCM has been programming 31 Days of Oscar around themes. But it does seem slightly odd to program a film for the day before one of the main crew members' birthdays.

Another of yesterday's movies was The Divine Lady, about the love affair between Admiral Horatio Nelson and Lady Hamilton, who were each married to other people while carrying on the affair. Early in the movie, the Lady Hamilton character, who at that point in the movie was not yet married to Hamilton, attneds a fair at Vauxhall. The scene is set in the early 1780s and the graphic for Vauxhall, which is presumably supposed to be some sort of entryway, is lighted in what look to be sparklers that I would have thought were much too recent for the 1780s. What I thought was even worse, however, was that the two ride what looks like a small Ferris wheel. I knew that George Ferris created the ride that bears his name for the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago. Besides, they didn't have motors to power a Ferris wheel-like device back in the 1780s. But apparently, if Wikipedia is accurate, there were primitive devices resembling Ferris wheels already in the 17th century. You learn something new every day.

In the news again

Like me, you probably woke up to news of another earthquake striking Christchurch, New Zealand. For some reason, it made me think of the 1940s MGM movie Green Dolphin Street, which is set in 1840s New Zealand, and which has a climax involving an earthquake. Now, I actually did a post on earthquakes just about a year ago, although Green Dolphin Street wasn't one of the movies I mentioned. It also doesn't seem to be on the TCM schedule anytime soon; nor is it on DVD yet.

A week ago, the Russian space agency made the news because their simulated Mission to Mars reached the point where the cosmonauts were going to get out of their simulated space capsule and walk on a simulated surface of Mars, before getting back into the craft and simulating a return to earth in eight months' time or so. (The mission began last June, and is being simulated so that scientists can determine what problems cosmonauts might face should there be a real mission to Mars.) A lot of people would think about the conspiracy theory that NASA faked the moon landings, but the real connection is Capricorn One, which involves the US government faking a mission to Mars when it's discovered there's a technical fault that would doom the real thing to failure. Unfortunately, they send the spacecraft minus the astronauts on its way, fake the mission, and have problems arise when the spacecraft burns up on the way back to Earth. Oops. What to do with the astronauts who have been sequestered for months at a remote military base? Capricorn One has gotten a DVD release, at least.

Save me!

Today's selection on TCM is a movie that won an Oscar which is no longer awarded: Two Arabian Knights, coming up at 2:45 AM ET.

William Boyd (later Hopalong Cassidy) and Louis Wolheim play a pair of doughboys in World War I who get captured an put in a German POW camp. They escape by disguising themselves in Ottoman costumes, but get captured and sent to an Ottoman prison camp. They escape again, and eventually make their way to a ship heading for the Arabian peninsula, where they meet the lovely princess Mirza (a young Mary Astor in one of her earliest starring roles). She helps them, except that it turns out she has to get off the ship early, as she has been betrothed to a prince in another Arab principality. Meanwhile, our two American heroes jump ship too, partly out of love and partly because they're being chased by half the ship's crew (watch for Boris Karloff as the purser).

Matters don't get any better for them on dry land, as they've got a prince chasing them since it was a big mistake to fall in love with Mirza when she was betrothed and veiled, no less. Meanwhile, they can't get any help from their home country, as the ship's captain has told the American consul what happened aboard ship, and the Consul probably wouldn't want to start a diplomatic incident with the Arabs, either.

Two Arabian Knights won an Oscar for its director, Lewis Milestone. However, back in those days, there were actually two directing Oscars given; one for comedy and one for drama. Two Arabian Knights won for comedy. Despite a lot of the material being culturally inaccurate, if not offensive, the comedy still holds up very well. That's the good news. The bad news is that the movie itself hasn't held up so well. Literally. For many years, Two Arabian Knights was considered to be a lost movie, but a copy was found about a decade ago in the archives of Howard Hughes, who produced the movie back when he was first getting into Hollywood at the end of the silent era. Although a copy was found, parts of the print were in very bad condition, as the nitrate in those scenes had nearly completely disintegrated. It's quite evident in the restored print where those scenes are. Just as the two heroes escape "just in time", so the film escaped its own destruction just in time. The movie hasn't been released to DVD either, so you're going to have to record the overnight TCM showing.