Anthony Mann, 1906-1967

Today marks the birth anniversary of film director Anthony Mann. I've mentioned quite a few times that TCM doesn't seem to do very many birthday tributes on the weekends, and such is the case today.

Mann started his career making noirs and crime films in the late 1940s, with movies such as Border Incident and Side Street.

In 1950, Mann directed Winchester '73 which starred James Stewart. It was the first of several westerns the two men made together. These westerns brought a touch of noir to the genre, as Stewart's characters were much darker than the heroes that had generally populated Westerns; certainly more so than the singing cowboys who were popular in the 1940s. One of the westerns that I've recommended in the past is The Naked Spur.

Mann's last completed film is The Heroes of Telemark (now on DVD); Mann would suffer a fatal heart attack during the filming of his next movie, A Dandy in Aspic.

The Bribe

I mentioned The Bribe a few weeks back when it was getting an overnight airing on TCM. It's airing again this evening at 6:15 PM, and deserves a viewing if you didn't watch or record the last showing.

Robert Taylor plays Rigby, a US agent investigating an international smuggling ring that's taken him to some God-forsaken Central American banana republic, where he's fallen in love with another of the expats, Elizabeth (played by Ava Gardner). The only thing is, she's married, and Rigby is investigating her husband. Not only is an illicit affair a big problem; she just might be guilty too. How did Rigby get himself into this? Well, a flashback will tell us all.

As I said, Rigby is investigating smuggling, specifically smuggling surplus US Army gear that's no longer needed now that World War II is over, but which presumably any number of groups in Latin America would love to have. Rigby was sent to meet Elizabeth precisely because the US government suspected her husband, Tug, played by John Hodiak. (They presumably didn't expect their agent to fall in love with the guy's wife. They should have watched Notorious first.) Anyhow, Rigby goes down to Central America where he meets Elizabeth, but also gets waylaid by the mysterious Mr. Bealer (Charles Laughton). Somehow, Bealer knows the real reason Rigby is down there, and offers Rigby a cool $10,000 to stop the investigation -- that was a lot of money back in the late 1940s, especially in some banana republic.

Obviously, there has to be somebody else in on this whole thing. But who? One obvious place to look would be at the other expats, which is where the businessman Carwood (Vincent Price) comes in. Rigby suspects him and, posing as a vacationer here for some serious sport fishing, goes out on a boat trip with Carwood. Carwood rather dumbly tries to knock Rigby overboard "accidentally", which is a sure sign that he must be guilty of something else. And I don't think we'd get this movie over with in under two hours if that something weren't the same arms racket that Tug is involved in.

Alfred Hitchcock said that the "uranium ore" that Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman were investigating in Notorious was really just a macguffin -- they could have been investigating anything, as long as there was some excuse to use her as a spy to get at Claude Rains. To be honest, a lot of what happens in The Bribe feels the same way to me. Investigating arms smuggling is really a pretext to have a movie about... well, I'm not quite certain what it's about. Forbidden love, of the sort that Dana Andrews felt toward Gene Tierney in Laura? Or maybe it's a character study. Or perhaps my feelings about there being a macguffin in The Bribe are simply wrong, and MGM was trying to make a crime movie without any ulterior motives.

As far as crime stories go, The Bribe is moderately entertaining. Robert Taylor feels mildly miscast here, much the way he was as Johnny Eager several years earlier. I supose that could just be a problem with the fact that The Bribe is MGM's attempt to make a high-minded crime picture. Ava Gardner and John Hodiak are also OK. I've never really thought of Hodiak as the greatest of actors, so his being just serviceable is not a problem. Gardner, I suppose, should have been better. Vincent Price is always enjoyable to watch, and Charles Laughton is the real treat. His character is somewhat reminiscent of the one played by Sydney Greenstreet in Flamingo Road, only with a little more vitality. As you can see from my constant mentioning of other movies, The Bribe feels a lot like something that's been done a dozen times before, but is done reasonably well.

The Bribe got a release to DVD as part of the Warner Archive collection, so you can still see it if you miss today'showing.

More fun with movie trailers

Yesterday evening, TCM showed the trailer for what's going to be this week's selection for Essentials Jr.: Lassie Come Home, Sunday at 8:00 PM. If you haven't seen the trailer, TCM have rather helpfully placed it in their Media Room and allowed people to embed it.

I like how MGM get some plugs in for some of their recent product when they mention that Mrs. Miniver has been turned into movies. More fun is the refeence to movies about to be released by MGM: if IMDb is accurate Madame Curie had its national release two months after Lassie Come Home (February 1944 vs. December 1943), while The White Cliffs of Dover would have been in production at the time, I believe. (Normally, the TCM database has good information on the dates of production, but that's not mentioned for The White Cliffs of Dover, which got its New York premiere in May 1944.)

One other interesting thing is the way MGM promoted Roddy McDowall, by mentioning his appearances in How Green Was My Valley and My Friend Flicka. Both of those movies were made at Fox, so why would MGM want to promote them? Then again, they both would have been out of the theaters for quite some time.

Foreign sci-fi

I probably should have posted last night, but TCM's schedule for this morning and afternoon is a bunch of 1960s sci-fi movies made outside the US; some of them were made in the UK and others in countries where English isn't the first language, but they got some Z-list US actors and some domestic actors dubbed into English to make up the cast. Two of them I recommended back in the summer of 2010: War of the Planets at 12:30 PM, followed by The Wild, Wild Planet at 2:15 PM. Thankfully, the lateness of this post doesn't have to prevent you fro missing these two, since they're on DVD. They ought to be part of a box set, since there was a four-film series that came out of Italy of which these two are a part, but they only seem to be available for individual purchase. I'm also getting a kick out of what TCM says I might also enjoy: Fox's mid-1960s adaptation of The Bible.

One movie I recommended before which doesn't seem to be on DVD is Five Million Years to Earth, which is also known as Quatermass and the Pit; that's airing at 4:00 PM.

An addition to the blogroll

I was reading another blog recently, and one of the commenters linked to his blog, The Stalking Moon. The post at the top of the blog there was to a movie I'd never heard of before, Phase IV. It sounds like an interesting movie, and the writing makes me want to see the movie. It would probably make a good double feature with The Hellstrom Chronicle.

The rest of the posts look interesting too, and chock full of photos, which may be either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your point of view. Personally, while it's always great to have screenshots from a movie to illustrate the blog post, I find that picture-heavy blogs can be slow to load, so it's a bit of a trade-off. I should say The Stalking Moon didn't seem to be too slow in loading, however.

At any rate, I've added the blog to my blog roll, so go check it out.

We're in the Money question

One of the Ross Alexander films I watched last night, We're in the Money, isn't on DVD, so this isn't a full-length blog post on the film. The quick verdict is that Joan Blondell and Glenda Farrell are fun as process servers, but the movie bogs down in the final third.

This post, however, is a question about some of the things that happen once the movie begins to bog down. The two ladies' boss, Hugh Herbert steals a car and drives it maniacally, and then has similar problems with a small boat with an outboard motor. These scenes are very obviously (and understandably) done with rear-projection photography of previously filmed material. The footage in the boat scenes looked quite familiar, though. The only other motorboat scene I can think of that might fit the bill wsa one involving Joe E. Brown, and a quick look through Brown's IMDb filmography shows Top Speed from 1930, in which Brown also had to drive a speedboat for which he was thoroughly unqualified.

How long would a studio have kept the sort of file footage used for rear-projection photography? Top Speed came out five years before We're in the Money, and I have to wonder whether the studio heads would remember such an obscure movie. Then again, they did remake obscure stuff, so the movie would obviously have been in their records; not that these two movies share anything in common other than the boats out of control. I also seem to remember Marie Dressler in an out-of-control boat or car, but she worked at MGM, so that wouldn't be the same footage.

Ross Alexander night

I've commented before that one of the great things TCM does is to put the spotlight on lesser-known people. Another example of this is TCM's salute to actor Ross Alexander, who died by his own hand at the age of 29 in 1937. He's the sort of actor about whom I will admit I don't know much about. I've seen him before in Flirtation Walk, but that's not airing tonight. He also played the navigator to Errol Flynn's Captain Blood, another very good movie which is also not part of tonight's tribute.

Instead, tonight's TCM lineup has several B-movies and the sort of not-quite-screwball comedies for which Alexander was apparently well-suited: I say "apparently" only because I don't think I've see any of the movies in tonight's lineup. TCM has helpfully provided an article about Alexander, which includes tonight's schedule. I know I'll be watching at least the first two, although after that is a bit late for me on the east coast.

Ballet on film

TCM showed The Mysterious House of Dr. C. this morning. I didn't know anything about the movie beforehand, other than seeing its title in the TCM listings during one of the previous showings several months back. It turns out there's quite a bit interesting about the movie, although it's not available on DVD.

"Dr. C." refers to Dr. Coppelius, played by Walter Slezak. And if the name Coppelius sounds familiar, that's because he's one of the lead characters in the ballet Coppelia with music by Léo Delibes, which in turn is based on stories by ETA Hoffmann, whom movie buffs might recognize from the British movie Tales of Hoffmann. One odd thing I noticed at the beginning of the film is that the copyright date didn't look consistent with the date TCM gave, which might be because there were two versions of the movie made. The first was a straight-up ballet, while the second added voiceover narration and a couple of dream sequences. TCM, in fact, showed the second version.

I have to admit I'm not the biggest fan of ballet. Oh, ballet dancers are incredibly talented, so there's no way I'm going to say that ballet-themed movies aren't good just because I might not like dancing. But as with science fiction movies, you need a good story to go with either the dancing or special effects, as the case may be. I had precisely this problem with The Turning Point. In the same vein, I'm always put off by The Red Shoes, although I have to admit it's a masterpiece of color cinematography and direction. In the case of Coppelia, I suppose the story isn't terrible, so fans of ballet may enjoy the movie. I should also add that the set design is garish and reminiscent of The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T., which is a plus.

Unfortunately, the movie doesn't have anothe appearance on TCM in the next few months, so I have no idea how you'll get a copy of this. If you like ballet it's worth the while.

Sylvia Sidney, slum girl

I finally saw Street Scene last night. Sylvia Sidney plays the adult daughter in one of several families living in a lower-class New York City apartment builidng. It struck me that Sidney would go on to play similar roles, although all grown up, in a couple of other films in the 1930s, those being Dead End and One-Third of a Nation. If memory serves, in both of them she's looking after a younger brother and not a son. That's also the case in Sabotage.

Sabotage is unlike the other three movies in a whole bunch of ways, and I find it interesting that Sidney would end up in several such roles. Some actors of course were typecast, but I don't think that's the case with Sidney. I don't know anything about her political beliefs, but it wouldn't surprise me if she wanted to appear in social commentary movies: she also appeared in Fury. And we know there were stars out there whose political views would draw them to such roles; I think John Garfield fits that description.

The other interesting (to me, at least) thing about the cast of Street Scene is the movie debut of John Qualen, who is credited here as "John M. Qualen", as if he needed to differentiate himself from all the other John Qualens playing ethnic characters in Hollywood. In Black Fury, which I recommended earlier this month, he's credited as "John T. Qualen". Go figure.

Yamekraw

I have to admit that there's a lot about shorts that I'm woefully deficient in my knowledge of. To be a bit fair to myself, however, I should point out that the TCM schedule page (which I believe relies on the AFI database for its synopses) has little to no information on many of the shorts that show up in the schedule.

A case in point is Yamekraw, which is airing a little after 7:45 PM tonight. Even the IMDb doesn't have anything for a "plot". Never mind whether or not there's an actual plot. Even a Traveltalks short like Around the World in California has a "plot" listing stating it's an entry in the Traveltalks series. According to the two IMDb reviews, however, Yamekraw is an all-black musical short from Vitaphone about a man leaving his rural village for the big city. They also claim it's told in a visually interesting style.

I had never heard of Yamekraw before seeing it show up on the schedule for today, so I can't say anything more about it. But it certainly sounds interesting.