I survived Hurricane Irene

So Hurricane Irene came through Saturday night and Sunday morning. The power went out around 10:45 AM Sunday, but thankfully, I've got a generator to run the essentials, like the fridge to keep food fresh, the sump pump for the basement, and a few lights. I wasn't going to be able to watch the Carole Lombard movies, but that was the least of my worries.

It took a good 46 hours, but the power finally came back on. I'm one of the lucky ones, though, since some people are going to be waiting several more days to get their power back. That, and I didn't suffer very much damage. There were a lot of branches down, especially the smaller oak tree branches that are maybe the width of an index finger, but have a lot of stuff branching out from them such that while they're thin, they're also about as long as an arm. Unsurprisingly, a lot of already dead trees also fell over finally. The thing that surprised me is that there were rather few mature trees either knocked over at the trunk or uprooted entirely. Not too far from me, though, there was a lot more damage. Places like Windham in Greene County, and Schoharie County to the west, were hit particularly hard. And then there are the isolated towns in Vermont.

The Scarlett Empress

The final star in this month's Summer Under the Stars is Marlene Dietrich, and prime time has one of her most visually impressive films: The Scarlett Empress, at 8:00 PM.

Dietrich plays the Empress, who is specifically Catherine II of Russia, commonly called Catherine the Great. Catherine was actually born Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst, a principality in what is now eastern Germany. When she was a teenager, she was married off to her second cousin, Paul (aka Pavel), who was the Grand Duke of Russia, a position equivalent to the Crown Prince in other monarchies. (Paul is played by Sam Jaffe.) Paul continued as Grand Duke and Sophia took to making herself liked among the Russian people, learning the language and converting to Orthodox Christianity. Thankfully for her, she had a good 15 years before her mother-in-law, Empress Elizaveta, died. It turned out she needed those 15 years to become palatable to the Russian people, or more importantly, the Russian nobility. Pavel, it turned out, was spectacularly unfit to be Russian Emperor. He was erratic and preferred to play with his toy soldiers more than dealing with real matters of war, and having him in command would have been a disaster. So the nobility more or less convinced Catherine to take over in a coup, although they probably thought with a woman on the throne, they'd be the real power behind the throne. Catherine was, one would assume, happy with this, as she quickly found she didn't care much for Paul and would rather have lover after lover after lover, much like Elizabeth I of England (who was in love with far more than Essex).

I wouldn't say that history is portrayed in The Scarlet Empress with notable accuracy, although it doesn't have the horrible inaccuracy that many Hollywood has. In fact, the portrayal here is interesting for entirely different reasons. Although the movie was released in 1934, there are a lot of times where it plays out almost as if it had been conceived as a silent. There are a lot of fascinating visuals here, which make the movie look as much like a fantasy as it is a biopic. It's for these visuals, and not so much the acting or dialog that the movie should be watched. Visually, it's gorgeous: from a shot of Dietrich on a swing, to the use of candles, veils, and diffusion, there's always something visually stunning going on.

Howard Keel Day

Another musical star gets his day on TCM in the form of Howard Keel. To be honest, my first memory of Keel is seeing him play the second husband of Barbara Bel Geddes on Dallas, after the actor who played the first one died. In fact my first memories of Barbara Bel Geddes are from Dallas, too; I was just a kid at the time and would have been much too young for Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. Looking through the Wikipedia page on Dallas, it says that Donna Reed substituted for Bel Geddes for a season in the mid-1980s. I didn't know about Larry Hagman's appearances in films such as Fail-Safe, but then, he probably would have been better-known at the time he was tapped for Dallas for his starring role in I Dream of Jeannie. And then of course there was Charlene Tilton's ample bust.

But Howard Keel could sing, and that's what got him on Broadway first, and then noticed by Hollywood, where he appeared in musicals such as Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (9:45 PM). I think that showed up on one of the independent channels back in the day, and at the time I found it very boring. (I also remember it getting turned into a TV series for a season in the early 1980s.) I stil don't care that much for it

As for a Keel movie without music, I've blogged about Callaway Went Thataway (1:30 AM) before, and it's a fairly entertaining B-movie. And it's got another supporting player most of us would first remember from TV, that being Natalie Schaefer, who played Lovie Howell on Gilligan's Island.

Preston Sturges, 1898-1959

Today marks the birth anniversary of Preston Sturges, who had a glorious, if all too brief, career as a director from 1940-1945. I've recommended several of the glittering comedies he directed in those years, such as 1944's Hail the Conquering Hero, or The Miracle of Morgan's Creek. I love The Palm Beach Story, although some would argue that The Lady Eve is an even better comedy. (Personally, they're both great; I just happen to prefer The Palm Beach Story.)

Sturges' career ended prematurely because, like many in Hollywood, he liked to drink, something which apparently caused problems with the studio bosses -- I wonder why. But his career didn't begin as a director. As with many directors, he got his start in other behind the scenes capacities, notably as a writer. (Billy Wilder had a similar start to his Hollywood career.) Sturges worked on the screenplays of some two dozen movies before his directorial debut in The Great McGinty in 1940. Among the ones I've recommended before are Remember the Night, The Power and the Glory, and Easy Living.

Alfred Hitchcock does a screwball comedy

Really. As part of Carole Lombard's day in TCM's Summer Under the Stars, you can watch Mr. and Mrs. Smith overnight tonight at 1:00 AM.

Carole Lombard and Robert Montgomery star as Ann and David, an upper-class married couple in New York who like to throw the sort of barbs at each other that you could imagine William Powell and Myrna Loy doing. In one of their mock arguments, David tells Ann that, yes, if he had to do it all over again, he'd marry her again. Little does he know that he's going to have to. Into each of their lives that morning walks Mr. Deever, a justice of the peace from Ann's hometown out west. He has the sad news of telling each of them that, due to a technicality, their marriage is not actually legal, and that they're going to have to have another ceremony. David, having been apprised of this news at his office, decides to play a bit of a practical joke on Ann, but he doesn't realize that she's been told until it's too late. Ann knows they're not legally married, and that he's not trying to get her to marry him the way he said he would.

So Ann acts as though the two never even thought they were legally married, and threatens to go off with David's law partner Jeff (Gene Raymond). It's up to David to try to win Ann back. But this being a comedy, you know that all of the attempts are going to go wrong, such as when David takes Ann to the hole-in-the-wall restaurant where they went on their first date all those years ago, only to find that things have changed.

Alfred Hitchcock was great at black comedy. Mr. and Mrs. Smith isn't black comedy, but a straight-up screwball comedy. I don't think that screwball comedy best suited Hitchcock's abilities, although that doesn't mean that this is at all a bad movie. In fact, if you didn't know that this had been directed by Alfred Hitchcock, it would come across more as a perfectly good movie, and not one of a great director's lesser efforts. Carole Lombard and Robert Montgomery were both well-suited to this sort of elegant comedy, and it shows. So don't think about Hitchcock, sit back, and enjoy this good movie.

Hurricane Irene

It's Thursday morning as I write this, but Hurricane Irene is barrelling down on the Northeast (or maybe that should be barrelling up the east coast), possibly hitting sometime on Sunday -- depending on exactly where it hits. I'm in the Catskill Mountains, a good 90 miles south and a bit west of New York City, but hurricanes are a big thing, and the forecasters still aren't quite certain about where this one is going to hit. The last one that came close to the Catskills was Tropical Storm Floyd back in 1999, and since I'm in a super-secret bunker in the part of the Catskills that's in the middle of nowhere (well, not quite, but I'm not in the middle of town either), I was left without electric for three days.

So I'm posting in advance: in case Irene does leave me without power, there will be a couple of blog posts still coming up while I'm off line. Also, it's a way of letting all of you know why there might be a lack of posts if the outage is prolonged. Perhaps I should post a photo of Irene Dunne, but I don't have many on my computer, and just did so two weeks ago in conjunction with The Awful Truth. Either that, or movies about hurricanes. One of these days, I'll have to get around to watching the mid-1930s movie The Hurricane. TCM has shown it a bunch of times, but somehow, I've always missed it. As long as I don't have a bunch of gangsters show up just before the storm like in Key Largo.

Fallen Angel

As part of Linda Darnell's day in TCM's Summer Under the Stars is a movie that I haven't seen in years, thanks to Darnell's having worked mostly at Fox: Fallen Angel, airing at 6:00 PM.

The nominal lead is Dana Andrews, playing Eric Stanton, a drifter who winds up at a greasy spoon joint where Stella (Darnell) is waitressing. This being Hollywood, you know the two are going to hit it off immediately. But there's a catch: Stella wnts the better things in life, which means she wants a man with money. And a drifter like Eric doesn't exactly have that. What's a man to do? Find a wealthy woman like June Mills (Alice Faye) and marry her for her money. All that's left to do is to figure out a way to separate girl from money, then separate boy from girl, and voilà, Eric and Stella can get married and have all that money. This being Hollywood, it really is that easy.

Well, this being Hollywood, you know that there's going to be a complication or two along the way. First off, June has a sister named Clara (Anne Revere) who thinks that Eric isn't all he's cracked up to be. The second complication is that Stella winds up murdered. (Yeah, that is a complication.) Detective Judd (Charles Bickford) investigates, and for obvious reasons thinks that Eric has a good chance of being guilty: he was with Stella on the night she was killed, and their relationship wasn't exactly a secret. On the other hand, June would be an equally good candidate for the murderer. After all, if she found out about Eric's relationship with Stella and knew that Stella wanted her money, why wouldn't she feel threatened?

If you've seen the promos that TCM runs for The Essentials, you'll see Alec Baldwin saying something to the effect that if it's been a few years since you've seen a movie, it's almost like watching it all over again for the first time. I know that I've said the same thing before in my comments on Brighton Rock. So the upshot of all this is that my memory of Fallen Angel is also a bit hazy. It's a movie I enjoyed back when I saw it years ago, and one I'm looking forward to enjoying again.

Oh dear, Peter Lawford

I'm sorry to say I'm not that much of a fan of Peter Lawford. Maybe it's just that he doesn't come across as such a good actor to me. Or it could be his Rat Pack connections; I think I've mentioned several times before how I, having been born in 1972, don't care that much for the latter-day mythologizing of 50s and 60s icons such as the Rat Pack. Lawford was married to one of the Kennedys -- another connection to a 60s icon.

Worse, TCM is kicking off prime time with Good News, a fairly dire Freed Unit in which Lawford plays a college football player who falls in love with his French tutor (June Allyson). Lawford doesn't look like a college football player, and certainly doesn't sound like one. And the movie doesn't look any more like college than any other Hollywood depiction of college down the years.

It's a shame that the much better It Should Happen to You! is pushed back to 10:00 for stuff like Good News.

Judy Garland, actress

TCM's honoree today for Summer Under the Stars is Burt Lancaster. But in the movie I'm blogging about today, the person to watch isn't Lancaster, but his co-star Judy Garland. That movie is A Child Is Waiting, airing at 6:00 PM on TCM.

Garland plays Jean, a woman looking for meaning in her life, who has decided that the way to achieve it is to work with retarded children. The movie was released in 1963, so the language isn't quite what we'd use today. Also, 1963 was still in the era when such children were put in institutions instead of "mainstreaming", or slowing things down for people of normal intelligence and vastly increasing the amount spent on education with little overall benefit. But I digress. Anyhow, Jean has no real experience working with the mentally retarded, but she has energy. Dr. Clark (Burt Lancaster) knows that you need more, and this sets the stage for a series of clashes between the two as Clark, who is in charge of running the institution, tries to do things by the book, and Jean tries to do things by feel and usually against the wishes and better judgement of the equally well-meaning Dr. Clark.

Part of A Child Is Waiting plays out like a series of vignettes, much like a number of other institutionally-set movies, such as To Sir, With Love or Captain Newman, MD. But there's also one plot line working its way throughout the movie in the form of one particular student. We see that student, Reuben, getting dumped off at the institution at the beginning of the movie, after having been lied to about where he's being taken, and obviously quite displeased about being lied to. Jean takes a shining to Reuben, and Dr. Clark naturally thinks she's getting too close. If you get too close, you're going to get burned. Clark warns Jean, but she just won't listen. Anyhow, Reubin is the child who is waiting in the title, as all the other kids see their parents visit each week during the visiting hours, while poor Reuben is left alone. Jean tries to write to Reuben's parents to explain the situation and get them to visit, but as in Our Very Own a few weeks back, the visit doesn't go so well.

A Child Is Waiting is, as I mentioned, somewhat conventional, at least when it comes to the convention of movies that are vignettes instead of having one overarching plot. But that's not to say it isn't a good movie. I'm not a particularly big fan of Garland, and especially not her singing. She helps run the music therapy and plans the Thanksgiving recital, so she does get a chance to sing. But once again, Garland shows that, given a chance not to sing, she can actually act. Burt Lancaster is professional as always, and the rest of the cast is good, notably the children. A Child Is Waiting doesn't seem to be available on DVD, however.

Sinners' Holiday

TCM is honoring Joan Blondell today in Summer Under the Stars, and prime time is kicking off with one of her earliest movies, Sinners' Holiday, at 8:00 PM. Although it's Blondell's day on TCM, this is really a movie to watch for another of the supporting players, James Cagney.

Cagney and Blondell are both a ways down the credits, as the leads are small-time conman and handyman Angel Harrigan (Grant Withers) and his girlfriend Jennie Delano (Evalyn Knapp). Cagney plays Jennie's brother Harry, and Blondell plays Harry's girlfriend Myrtle. The Delanos are a family running one of the concessions at an amusement park that seems a lot like Coney Island. (Unfortunately, I haven't seen the movie since Cagney was TCM's Star of the Month years back, so I don't remember whether the place is actually named.) It's 1930, which means the Prohibition era, and Harry is part of a booze-running racket run by Mitch (Warren Hymer), although Harry is rapidly moving up the ladder. There's a dispute over where the money the racket is bringing in is going, and when you either have to shoot somebody or get shot yourself, Harry decides that it's better to do the shooting.

Thankfully for Harry, he's got a family willing to stand up for him. Mother (Lucille La Verne) never liked the idea of her kids getting involved in running alcohol. But she'll be damned if any of her kids is going to prison. So she needs a fall guy, and Angel would be the perfect man for the job. Poor Jennie, but Ma thinks Angel is no good for her, and she can do better. However, Jennie also witnessed the crime, and knows fully well her brother is guilty....

Sinners' Holiday was based on a Broadway play that failed thanks to having been released just as the Depression was hitting. As such, and because this was also still pretty early in the talking picture era, Sinners' Holiday has the look of a filmed stage play. But Cagney and Blondell (who were both in the original stage play) are both quite good in what was the first film either of them made. It's creaky, but if you like Cagney or Blondell, I think you'll like this picture. It doesn't seem to be released on DVD, however, so tonight's TCM showing is one of your rare chances to catch it.