The Young Stranger

The other day, TCM showed The Young Stranger, a movie which is certainly worth blogging about. Fortunately, it's gotten a release to DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive collection, so if you didn't see it when TCM last ran it, you can get your hands on a copy for a price.

James MacArthur, who would go on to play Dano on the Jack Lord version of Hawaii Five-O, stars in one of his first movie roles as Hat Ditmar, a teenage kid in Beverly Hills with an attitude problem. It doesn't help that his father Thomas (James Daly) is a big-shot movie producer who spends much more time with his clients than he does with his son, and his mother Helen (Kim Hunter) comes across as an aloof type. While Hal's parents are having an outdoor party at their home, Hal goes to visit his best friend Jerry (Jeffrey Silver). The two go to see a movie, but it's so boring that Hal basically starts being the sort of irritant you'd see in the Pete Smith Movie Pests short. It's the sort of behavior that's going to get Hal thrown out of the theater, and deservedly so. And to be honest, Hal is willing to leave the theater. But the manager (Whit Bissell) wants to talk to the two young ruffians in his office, and is willing to detain them to do so. When Hal rightfully doesn't want to be detained, he punches the manager, getting arrested for his trouble.

At this point, Hal's troubles multiply. He claims self-defense, and has a fair case, since after all he was prevented from leaving the theater. But the police won't believe him, and even worse, his father won't believe him either. (The movie has a gaping plot hole in that there were several witnesses to Hal's being prevented from leaving the theater. Presumably they would have pointed out that Hal was trying to leave the theater but was forcibly brought back in by one of the ushers.) And Daddy is worried more about how it's going to make him look, not any affect the whole incident has had on Hal. To that point, Mr. Ditmar is willing to use his influence in Hollywood to pressure the theater manager to drop the charges, something which only enrages Hal, since he still can't get anybody to believe him. What's a teenager got to do to get people to listen to him?

When I looked up this movie on IMDb, I was surprised to see it get much more glowing reviews than I'd be willing to get it. To me, the movie falls flat, something that I think is down largely to the writing. MacArthur does well enough portraying the kid nobody understands, although he comes across as a bit too unsympathetic to the viewer. I mean, he acts like an utter jerk in the movie theater. But his character also seems like a caricature of all the wanna-be relevant "why won't the adults listen to us troubled teens?" movies of the mid-to-late 1950s. This was made at RKO, and around the same time they produced a short called Teenagers on Trial that I've mentioned before. Both are earnest, perhaps too much so. At points, I was practically laughing at how hard The Young Stranger was making its point. That's not a good thing, since this wasn't supposed to be a comedy. Daly's father character is especially little more than an archetype. Kim Hunter also doesn't seem to know how sympathetic towards her son the character is supposed to be; these are flaws that are all down to the writing, I think. There are also the plot holes; in addition to the one I mentioned above, it seems as though somehow everybody in school learned about what happened to Hal the previous night. Gossip may travel fast, but how would this have become news for the other students to hear? Clearly the parents are too mortified to mention it, and Jerry wouldn't have done so either, since he had to spend half the night at the police station too.

One other thing to note is that this is one of hte very first movies directed by John Frankenheimer. In fact, while watching I was reminded of the piece Frankenheimer narrated on Burt Lancaster. Frankenheimer mentions doing The Young Savages with Burt Lancaster, and comments about how Lancaster found some of his choices in camera angles interesting. There are a couple of camera angles in The Young Stranger that definitely reminded me of that piece.

31 Days of Oscar begins tomorrow

Tomorrow being February 1, it's time for another edition of TCM's 31 Days of Oscar, with the regular features like Silent Sunday Nights and TCM Imports going on hiatus for the next several weeks. This year, TCM is grouping the movies by studio, with the first studio up being Warner Bros. The movies from WB are roughly in chronological order, starting with The Jazz Singer at 6:00 AM and continuing for four or five days, through to those movies that had the WB/Seven Arts logo.

The other thing with 31 Days of Oscar is that I've already blogged about a lot of the movies that show up. A case in point is 42nd Street, which will be airing tomorrow at noon. Not only did I do a post about it back in 2008, but in writing up this post I was thinking of some things I wouldn't have minded saying about Ruby Keeler's dancing. It turns out that I already mentioned that back in September 2011.

TCM's schedule lists two of tomorrow's movies as not being in print on DVD: Disraeli at 7:30 AM, and The Story of Louis Pasteur at 3:15 PM.

Cinerama restoration

A few days back, I got an email from one David Strohmaier, including a couple of Youtubue links to trailers for Cinerama restorations. David is the man behind the 2002 documentary Cinerama Adventure, which aired on TCM last October, and which he wrote an directed. Cinerama the company is apparently going through the process of restoring some of its old features, with Strohmaier a part of the project.



The above, as if you couldn't tell, is the trailer from the restored South Seas Adventure. I must say that the smileboxing doesn't look nearly as severe as it did on my TV screen when I watched Cinerama Adventure last October. Back then, I mentioned that I had seen some of the smileboxing in the Merian C. Cooper documentary that TCM ran several years earlier. (Strohmaier is, in fact, acknowledged in the credits for providing the smileboxing.) These Youtube trailers are much less problematic. That, and the seams where the prints from the three cameras meet up aren't quite as obvious either. To be fair to Strohmaier, though, ten years ago he wasn't working with a restoration print. I should also point out, since I don't think I did after watching Cinerama Adventuar last October, that it's a worthy documentary, and the portions about what the Cinerama creators were doing during World War II, years before the process was called Cinerama, was quite interesting.

I doubt if we're ever going to get home theaters with a ~150 degree radius of curvature and a multiple source setup so that we can all watch Cinerama at home the way it was meant to be seen in the theater, though.

It's my anniversary again

It's hard to believe, but I've been blogging now for five years. A few days ago, somebody rather rudely commented to one of my posts about how I get very few comments, so why blog? Well, why not blog? Blogging is more meaningful than something like Twitter, in that you're not constrained to 140 characters in which to make your statement. Indeed, if you wanted to write a ten-page post on a subject, you could. And how many people read the average Twitter message anyway?

I think it's also a good thing to get in the habit of writing every day, if you're going to try your hand at writing on a topic. That's why I try to put up a post every day, even if some of them are relatively meaningless in the sense that they're going to become out-of-date right away, like mentioning all the Guest Programmers. I find it keeps the old (well, not that old) noodle active as well, which isn't such a bad thing. There are a lot of blogs out there where people made a few interesting posts, and then never kept it up.

Third is that that it's nice to have an easily accessible archive of things that I've wanted to say about a bunch of movies, especially the lesser-known movies. If I want to make a reference in a blog comment or Internet forum someplace else about something like Forever Amber, I suppose I could just send people to the IMDb page. But that's impersonal, and doesn't particularly link to my own thoughts. I also find that sites like IMDb are generally a lot more bloated than most individual blogs.

Finally, why not blog? It's my own damn life, and if I want to make this my hobby, who's to boss me around and say no? There are a lot more harmful things out there one could do than just say nasty things about a movie where the lead actress has been dead for close to 40 years. It's not as if the professional critics are all sweetness and life, either; just look at any movie that allows them to make a political point. I make no claims about being a great writer, but I'm sure there are quite a few people out there who have interesting things to say about movies, but never got to be in the right place at the right time to get a professional gig writing about them. It's never ceased to amaze me that the man who wrote the screenplay to Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, for example, went on to become one of this country's most popular movie critics.

As seen on TCM

I know there are people out there who complain about the number of repeats on TCM. Sure, movies get more than one airing, and sometimes, because TCM only has the rights to a movie for a limited amount of time, the movie airs enough times in that short window to make it look as though TCM is running a movie into the ground. I'll have to look through my monthly schedules to see how long TCM had the broadcast rights to All About Eve, for example: it was in The Essentials one season, and seemed to get a good half dozen airings in all, including outside The Essentials. But I don't think it's shown up since. TCM also sometimes mis-schedules movies in that a film will show up at the end of one month and the beginning of the next, an oversight which I'd bet happens by programming movies on a month-to-month basis. It must be easy to firget about what you've done in previous months.

That having been said, I think I finally saw something that's been rerun to the point of making me almost yell at the TV asking TCM to stop. It's Marlo Thomas' remembrances of Star of the Month Loretta Young. Thankfully, it's only in heavy rotation for this month, while Loretta is still Star of the Month, and will then only show up occasionally when TCM wants to promo a movie starring Young. Think of Kurt Russell's piece on Elvis -- yeah, we know how Elvis wants to wear his hat in a western. That, or the Michael Caine piece on Cary Grant. You never do see a star in Hollywood, but you sure see them all the time on TCM. Anyhow, getting back to Loretta, I wasn't really planning on watching any of the movies in yesterday's lineup until the Hitchcock movies in prime time. I turned the TV on about 9:50 to watch the replay of the Australian Open tennis, and there was the piece on Loretta Young, filling out a two-hour time slot held by The Crimson Pirate. Later in the day, about 15 minutes before King's Solomon's Mines, I turned the TV back on to catch a sports score, and saw that TCM was running the end of the Loretta Young tribute again. And then when I turned on TCM to watch the Alfred Hitchcock films, there was Marlo Thomas a third time just before the first Hitchcock movie.

Speaking of King Solomon's Mines, TCM had enough time following the preceding movie to run not only the piece on Loretta Young, but what must have been a barter deal between MGM and Dodge/Chrysler (was Dodge a part of Chrysler back in 1950?). Apparently, MGM used Dodge trucks to get the cast and crew into the remote parts of Africa where they filmed King Solomon's Mines and darn it if they weren't going to let us know. I hope TCM got paid well for running this extended infomercial for Dodge. At least the piece had nice Technicolor. And, as a plus, it's available on Youtube:

Alfred Hitchcock is back

Well, Alfred Hithcock's movies never really went away from TCM, as there are a few to which they can get the rights to fairly easily. But it seems as though it's been quite some time since a lot of the movies have aired. It looks like TCM has regained the cable rights to some of them, at least, as they're running a night of his work in his native UK before he came over to the US to make Rebecca tonight. Unsurprisingly, I've recommended all three of TCM's selections before. But all three are worth another viewing.

The 39 Steps kicks the night off at 8:00 PM;
The Lady Vanishes follows at 9:30 PM.
Finally, at 11:15 PM, is Sabotage.

The latest set of briefs

TCM is showing Secret Service of the Air at 10:45 AM this morning. It's the last of the four Brass Bancroft movies. Presumably, another series will be starting up on Saturday, March 9, after the end of 31 Days of Oscar, but I haven't looked up the March schedule to see what TCM is going to be putting in that time slot.

Following Secret Service of the Air is Torchy Blane in Panama at noon. This is the first of a couple of Torchy movies that don't have Glenda Farrell playing Torchy. Farrell would return for Torchy Runs For Mayor, which I'm pretty certain will be running toward the end of March, as the Torchy Blane series will be continuing after 31 Days of Oscar.

In the wee hours of tomorrow morning, at 4:45 AM, TCM is showing Miss Robin Crusoe. You can probably guess the story, at least a bit. It's a retelling of the Robinson Crusoe story, only with a woman (Amanda Blake) as the castaway; complete with a female Friday and, eventually, a man to come between the two of them. I think this one first showed up on TCM when they were supposed to run Luis Buñuel's version of the Robinson Crusoe story starring Dan O'Herlihy. Some mix-up. Is there a good print of the Buñuel version available for TCM to run?

Finally, I came across a radio documentary on Herbert Selpin, the man who directed the Nazi version of Titanic, at least until his arrest and death under mysterious circumstances. However, as you can tell if you clicked on the link, it's in German, which means that most of the readers here won't be able to follow it. (I haven't tried running it through Google Translate to see how bad the translation is.) My German is good enough that I don't have much problem with the introduction page that I've linked to, but when it comes to actually listening to such documentaries, I'm usually doing other stuff on the computer, which means that I end up not paying quite enough attention to the radio program to understand it as well as I should. To be fair, though, that's also a bit of an issue with stuff in English. But for those who have a good enough command of German to listen, you can download the program here. It's 47MB and 51 minutes.

Mildred Dunnock, 1901-1991

Mildred Dunnock about to go downstairs in Kiss of Death

Today marks the birth anniversary of Mildred Dunnock, who was born on this day in 1901. (As if you couldn't tell from the title of the blog post.) Dunnock started her Hollywood career a bit later in life, although that's because she spent time on the Broadway stage before doing movies, her first film being a reprise of her stage role in The Corn Is Green. Interestingly enough, according to the Internet Broadway Database, her first stage role was in the stage version of Life Begins, which also had Glenda Farrell playing what I think is the same role she would go on to play in the movie version. The stage version ran all of a week, and Dunnock's stage career didn't really pick up until The Corn Is Green premiered, which rather more successfully ran for a year and a half.

Dunnock's role in Kiss of Death, which is pictured above, may be famous, but it's also quite brief. Dunnock had more substantial roles in Death of a Salesman playing Willy Loman's wife, or The Trouble With Harry, in which she played an old spinster who winds up falling in love with Edmund Gwenn. To be honest, most if not all of her roles are supporting, but Dunnock was one of those supporting actresses who's always worth watching: the high school teacher in Peyton Place, or one of the murdered maids in What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice?, or Liz Taylor's mother in Butterfield 8.

My but it's been a long time

I first mentioned when I blogged about Brighton Rock that is was one of those movies that I really liked, but it was hard to do a blog post about, since it had been some time since I saw it and didn't remember it all that well. An even more extreme example of this would be The Corpse came COD, which is airing tomorrow morning at 11:30 AM on TCM.

Adele Jergens plays movie star Mona Harrison, who at the start of the movie gets a crate from her studio that she's expcting to be filled with fabric samples. But no! It's filled with -- a corpse! (To be fair, with a title like The Corpse Came COD, the viewer should expect this.) So Mona calls her old friend, investigative journalist Joe Medford (George Brent) to investigate and find the murderer. Also getting involved in the murder investigation is lady journalist Rosemary (played by Joan Blondell). You can figure out what happens next, which is that Joe and Rosemary are going to fall for each other, although they're also going to be at blows constantly over the attempt to solve the murder mystery.

The Corpse Came COD is decidedly B stuff, and since it was made at Columbia, it's not something that will make its way to the Warner Archive. In fact, it's something that won't show up on TCM very often. (That's also the reason why I don't remember it perhaps as well as I should.) I couldn't remember the last time I saw it, so I did a search on my computer through all the monthly TCM schedules I've downloaded since I got the computer, which was in the beginning of July, 2007. Tomorrow's showing is the only match, which means that it hasn't been on TCM in over five and a half years.

The Catered Affair

I'm somewhat surprised to see that I haven't blogged about The Catered Affair before. It's showing up tomorrow morning at 9:45 AM as part of a salute to Ernest Borgnine, who would have turned 96 tomorrow.

Borgnine plays Tom Hurley, a working-class father of a family living in a cramped apartment in New York City. Tom is a taxi driver, and has been saving up money to get his own cab and license to run it -- something that takes a lot of money due to the limited number of cab licenses. (Don't get me started on the economics of taxi medallions.) It's taken a long time because being a cabby in a one-income family isn't exactly the road to wealth, and they've got a bachelor uncle Jack (Barry Fitzgerald) living with him, his wife Agnes (Bette Davis), and their daaughter Jane (Debbie Reynolds).

Jane's about to throw a monkey wrench into all of this, however. She approaches her parents one day and tells them that she's gotten engaged to her boyfriend Ralph (Rod Taylor). Ralph is a teacher and decidedly of a higher social class than Jane, and especially her parents. Now, this is no big deal for Jane. She's perfectly comfortable having a small wedding with a few friends, not wanting to cause problems for anybody and wanting to get on with life. Any sane groom-to-be ought to be happy with such an arrangement, too: if you can get a low-mainenance bride, take her! (OK, I apologize for the insults to any married women her who think I'm describing them as high-maintenance brides. But having seen both of my sisters get married, and having had to bury grandparents and multiple uncles and aunts, I've seen how stressful things can get when you've got a family member who wants things to be just right.)

The problem, it turns out, isn't so much Jane; it's mother Agnes. She's disappointed that she hasn't been able to provide as much in life for Jane as a mother thinks a daughter should be provided for, and dammit, she's determined to see that the last thing she does for Jane is a big thing. As Agnes keeps wanting to do more and more for Jane, Jane gets horrified. But even more than her, it's Tom who's aghast. He's the one who's going to have to pay for the wedding party, and there's only one source of money: the savings that Tom has been planning to use to get his own cab and medallion.

There's not much more to all of the plot than this, and yet The Catered Affair is a wonderful little movie. Borgnine is an underrated actor, I think. Sure, he won the Oscar for Marty, and yet in a lot of his roles he doesn't get the attention a lead actor should deserve. Indeed, The Catered Affair is much more Bette Davis' movie than it is anybody else's. And yet, Borgnine's father character here is eminently believable. The same holds true for Davis, who I think is clearly playing a woman who wants something she couldn't have when she got married. People like to mock the later careers of actresses who were big in the 1930s and had to suffer the ignominies of aging concurrent with the breakdown of the studio system in the 1950s, and point to Bette Davis' work in the 1950s and beyond as a good example of this. Whatever you can say about Davis in a movie like Hush, Hush, Sweet Charlotte, however, doesn't apply to The Catered Affair. Debbie Reynolds was good in those musicals she did, but in The Catered Affair, she's a surprise, as she more than capably plays the sincere daughter who doesn't want to burden her father, and can't get this point through her mother's thick skull. And even Barry Fitzgerald isn't quite as irritating as he normally is when he's playing the Lovable Irish Stereotype character.

The Catered Affair was based on a teleplay by Paddy Chayefsky, who also did Marty and Network, among others. The screenplay, however, was reworked for the movie version by Gore Vidal. I obviously don't quite know what working-class New York City was really like in the mid-1950s, but the depiction here certainly seems realistic. The Catered Affair is also available on DVD.