Down to the Sea in Ships (1922)

One of the TCM spotlights this month is remakes. Every Monday they'll be running an older version of a movie followed by the remake. This first Monday has been seeing pairs where the first movie is a silent, followed by a talkie remake. (Well, technically, at least one of them isn't quite a remake, just a movie with the same title since the Errol Flynn Sea Hawk is not the same as the silent version.)

With that in mind, I noticed that FXM has the 1949 Richard Widmark version of Down to the Sea in Ships running tomorrow at 6:00 AM. I blogged about that earlier this year, and mentioned that it shared its title with a 1922 silent Down to the Sea in Ships that has a completely different story. (The title is a Biblical reference, to the Book of Psalms.) The silent version is in the public domain and has been available on Youtube, and is also on a DVD release, so I recently watched it to do a post here on it.

Marguerite Courtot plays Patience Morgan, a young woman in New Bedford, MA in the mid-19th century who is the son of Quaker and retired whaler Charles Morgan (William Walcott). She's in love with Thomas Dexter (Raymond McKee), a college graduate, who is opening up a factory in town. He wants to marry her, but Dad says no. His daughter is going to marry a Quaker, which is no matter to Dexter since he can convert. But more importantly, Dad wants his daughter to marry a whaler, which Morgan definitely isn't.

Meanwhile, nasty Siggs has a scheme to bilk Morgan and use the ships to search for gold rather than whales. And when he sees Patience, he falls in love with her and vows he's going to marry her. Of course, Dexter is still in the way, so Siggs has his underlings get Dexter good and drunk and then put him on the next whaling boat out of New Bedford. Also winding up on the board is Morgan's granddaughter and Patience's niece Dot dressed as a boy (Clara Bow in an early role), and her friend Jimmie. Dexter and Dot's disapperances are explained by saying they tok the Oregon Trail west, which might be plausible for the other characters in the movie, but we know better.

Dexter isn't exactly happy about being shanghaied, but he sees that he might have an opportunity to become a true whaler such that when he gets back he can ask for Patience's hand in marriage. Of course, Siggs might get there first. The ship is captained by a fairly bas man, so one of Siggs' henchmen who is also on board leads a mutiny which is part of the plot of getting the ship in order to go looking for gold....

Down to the Sea in Ships is an interesting movie, aided by the fact that apparently some of the whaling footage is about as real as they were going to be able to get at the time. Whaling was dying but hadn't died out completely which made the footage possible; of course, that footage may be uncomfortable to some viewers. For a silent action movie it's quite good, although since silents can be an acquired taste it might not be everyone's cup of tea. Bow is also immensely enjoyable as the one cast member likely to be remembered today.

I should have blogged about this one last Wednesday

One of my recent DVD purchases was this six-movie science fiction set. I think I've already blogged about The Night the World Exploded, but don't think I've seen the other five. So I put one of the discs in my DVD player and watched The 27th Day.

Eve Wingate (Valerie French) is a British woman spending a nice day on the southwest coast along with her painter boyfriend. She goes off to towel off, and hears a stentorian voice telling her to come with him, followed by a blinding flash of light. Jonathan Clark (Gene Barry) is a reporter for a Los Angeles newspaper, covering the night shift, and he hears a similar voice. The same thing happens to Pvt. Godofsky, a sentry at the Kremlin; West German scientist Prof. Bechner (George Voskovec); and a woman from a war-torn(?!) part of China.

It turns out the five have been brought on board an alien spaceship somewhere in outer space. The Alien (Arnold Moss) informs them that he's a representative of an alien race from a planet far away, one whose sun is about to go nova, destroying the planet and their civilization with it. The need a new planet to live on, and see that Earth fits the bill quite nicely and has several hundred million years before life is going to die out, so they're going to settle Earth.

Of course, Earth already has sentient life forms on it, and these aliens have just enough morals that prevent them from simply destroying Earth life as we know it and replacing it with their own civilization. Instead, they come up with a rather devious idea, which is to take earthlings' naturally self-destructive tribal tendencies and exploit those to get us humans to destroy ourselves. Because that's obviously so much more moral.

To achieve this, the Alien gives our five humans a compact-like case with three capsules that are something like the supposed neutron bomb, that is, something that was designed to kill humans while leaving the rest of the infrastructure intact, although neutron bombs were designed to kill over a much smaller radius. These cases could only be opened by the thoughts of the five people given the cases, each person being able to open only his or her own case. No other power on earth could open it, although once open, anybody can use the weapons. If mankind can avoid using these weapons for 27 days, the aliens won't invade, but the aliens are confident they won't need the full 27 days. After explaining how the weapon is operated, the Alien sends the five humans back to Earth.

Now, my first thought is that the five people given these weapons could simply dispose of them by burial or whatnot, with nobody finding the weapons and nobody but the five being able to open the cases. Besides, only these five know about the weapons, so there's no reason to use them. Indeed, Eve is smart enough to take her case and throw it into the English Channel. But the aliens aren't so stupid. In a gambit reminiscent of The Next Voice You Hear, they're able to take over all TV and radio broadcasts, and give out the names of the five people who have these weapons! So now, everybody wants access to these weapons, possibly to stop them from being used, or most definitely in the case of the Soviets, to gain a tactical advantage over the Americans by using theirs first.

I didn't name the Chinese woman because she kills herself, which causes her weapon to disintegrate just as the Alien said. Eve, after throwing hers away, flies off to Los Angeles to find Jonathan. (How she evades passport control is not answered.) Jonathan picks her up and the two go into hiding at a race track that is currently out of season. The Soviets put pressure on Godofsky to explain and then use the weapon, while Prof. Bechner is picked up at the airport in the US leading the Feds to try to examine his weapon and figure out what to do.

The 27th Day is another of those movies with a really great premise that ultimately winds up having some problems with it that might mitigate your enjoyment of it. For me, the big problem was the resolution, which involved Bechner trying to figure out mathematically how the weapon works and coming up with a bit of a deus ex machina. I also mentioned the problem of Eve being able to get into the US. Some potential problems were actually covered, with a mention of relativity accounting for time dilation. There's also the broadcast naming the five possessors of the weapons, which solved what would otherwise have become a big problem for me. I also really liked how thought-provoking the movie is.

All in all, The 27th Day is quite good for a low-budget sci-fi movie, even with some of the problems it has. The box set is quite inexpensive, making The 27th Day more than worth the low price.

As soon as December comes....

We're in the first day of a new month, and with that month being December, it means Christmas on the 25. And Christmas movies throughout the month. Some places started well before Thanksgiving, but I'm not really into Christmas before Thanksgiving. (Other than the fact that I've done all my Christmas shopping on Amazon already, except for the bottle of wine for Dad.)

TCM claims that it's running Christmas double features in prime time on Sundays, and that's true as far as it goes. Tonight sees the 1951 (Alastair Sim) version of Scrooge tonight at 8:00 PM, followed by The Bishop's Wife at 10:00 PM. They're both often shown, but to be fair they're movies that deserve that many showings because of how good they both are.

In fact, however, it's not just prime time double features on TCM. The Christmas movies are starting in the afternoon. If memory serves, The Lady in the Lake at noon is set around Christmas, while Little Women (the 1949 color version with Elizabeth Taylor and others) definitely has Christmas scenes. And the following two movies, Holiday Affair at 4:00 PM and The Shop Around the Corner at 6:00 PM are most definitely Christmas films.

One could also argue that the prime-time lineup isn't just a double feature, since there's time after Scrooge for the 1945 two-reeler Star in the Night, a retelling of the Three Wise Men story.

It's Love I'm After

One of the movies that TCM ran during Bette Davis' turn as Star of the Month that I had not seen before is It's Love I'm After. Since it's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, I sat down to watch it and do a review here.

Bette Davis is nominally the female lead here, but the story is really about the male lead, Leslie Howard. He plays Basil Underwood, a Shakespearean actor who has had a long love-hate relationship, both personally and professionally, with Joyce Arden (that's Bette Davis). She plays the female leads in Basil's stage productions, and shares a hotel suite with him as they travel on the road. She's a bit tired of this in that she wants him finally to propose marriage to her.

But before that can happen, another woman shows up. That's young Marcia West (Olivia de Havilland), a star-struck young woman who for whatever reason thinks the world of Basil and shows up at his dressing room one night after a performance and carries on a conversation with him while Basil and Joyce are zinging insults at each other through the wall that separates their dressing rooms. Never mind that Marcia is already engaged to be married. Unsurprisingly, Joyce catches a glimpse of Marcia as she's leaving the theater, although she can't be certain Marcia was in Basil's dressing room.

The one person (well, other than Basil and Marcia themselves) who is certain of it is Marcia's fiancé Henry (Patric Knowles). He loves Marcia and doesn't want to lose her to Marcia's fantasy view of Basil, so he goes to Basil's hotel suite to see him after Marcia goes home. By this time, Basil has finally proposed to Joyce, but Henry has a big favor to ask: could Basil show up at Marcia's mansion and show himself to be such a jerk that Marcia's image of him will change? Joyce is certain to be unhappy about it, but Basil knew Henry's father and is certain this is only going to take a couple of hours, so he reluctantly accepts.

Of course, things don't go as planned. No matter what Basil tries, it only seems to solidify Marcia's image of him. And she's also got a batty screwball comedy family, notably bratty eavesdropping kid sister Gracie (Bonita Granville). Further complicating matters is that Joyce shows up at the house, alternatively claiming to be married to Basil already, and being totally willing to give him up to Marcia.

How is everybody going to extricate themselves from the sticky situation? Well, you can probably guess that the movie is set up so that Basil and Joyce are together at the end, as are Henry and Marcia. So the fun is supposed to be in how the two get there. In that regard, however, It's Love I'm After seems slightly off, even moreso than the Warner Bros. screwball comedy I previously recommended, Four's a Crowd. I think that a lot of it comes down to the Marcia character, who is written as a bit of a jerk. (Well, OK, I found her more than a bit of a jerk.) Add to that that none of the four were normally screwball actors, and the problems mount.

Still, everybody tries, and the leads all being professionals, it not any of their faults that the movie has the problems it does. One standout is Eric Blore as Digges, Basil's valet, playing the sort of role he could play in his sleep.

Even though It's Love I'm After was definitely not one of my favorites, you might want to give it a try since it's definitely the sort of movie some people are going to like more than I did.

Civil War fantasy

Some time back I picked up a DVD of Shenandoah. With my previous DVR having died, forcing me to watch some of my DVDs, I finally put this one in the player and watched.

James Stewart plays Charlie, the patriarch of the Anderson family in western Virginia's Shenandoah Valley in 1864. Now, if you know your history you should know that this is over three years into the US Civil War, and in the Confederacy. By this time the war was already effectively lost for the South. But dammit, it looks as if the war hasn't touched the Anderson place at all. None of his six sons has gone off to fight the war, and they somehow grow or make everything they need, as all the oil lamps stay lit. Indeed, Charlie is pissed that Confederate procurement agents want his horses. (To be fair, I'd be pissed too about it. But you'd think at least one of the sons would have gone off to fight.)

In addition to having six sons, he's got a daughter Jennie (Rosemary Forsyth) and daughter-in-law Ann (Katharine Ross in her movie debut), the latter of whom is married to son James (Patrick Wayne) and pregnant. Somehow, all of these people are able to live a fairly idyllic life with the only real tragedy seeming to be that the matriarch died in childbirth with youngest son Boy (Philip Alford).

But we wouldn't have much of a movie if this idyllic life just kept going on. A couple of things happen. One is that Jennie gets married to Confederate officer Sam (Doug McClure) who has to go almost straight from the wedding back to the front. And then one day while Boy is out hunting, he runs into a Union ambush. Since he had stupidly put on a Confederate cap that he had found, he gets taken prisoner by the Union.

Charlie finds out, and he decides that he's just going to get up from the farm and form a search party to find Boy come hell or high water! And he and most of the remaining children are just able to go off and do the searching, barely being troubled by any of the soldiers from either army going around the area. They find a Union officer (George Kennedy) who doesn't have Boy and suggests a rail transport; there they find Sam but not Boy. Meanwhile, things aren't particularly safe back at the farm....

Shenandoah goes on like this for the entirety of its 105-minute running time. Most of that time I found maddening, since the plot not only strains credulity, it breaks it, stomps on its carcass, and demands that we respect it for having done so. OK, I'm being a bit hyperbolic. But not much. Stewart gives a good performance, and frankly there's nothing wrong with the acting from the supporting players either. It's just that plot.

Well, one other technical problem I had was that Shenandoah uses some battle footage from Raintree County. In and of itself that's no big deal, but Raintree County was in a 2:35:1 aspect ratio, while by the time of Shenandoah the 1.85:1 ratio was much more standard, so all that Raintree County footage looks grainy and out of place.

Still, many of you will probably like Shenandoah much more than I did, so get a copy and judge for yourself.

Heaven of Color

While starting to fill up my new DVR with movies to post about here, I actually watched one or two as they were actually airing, the horror. One of those movies was the Fox musical My Blue Heaven.

Betty Grable plays Kitty Moran, happily married to Jack (Dan Dailey). They're an entertainment couple that started in vaudeville and worked their way up into radio, where they've been fairly successful. That's about to change, as Kitty has found out she's pregnant! It's a happy occasion, at least for a little while. What makes it less happy is that as the two celebrate one evening, Kitty is the designated driver since she's not drinking during pregnancy and Jack is more than happy to drink for himself, Kitty, and the baby. But while driving on Fox's backlot, Kitty immediately gets in a car accident.

She's going to be OK, but the baby isn't. And her uterus probably isn't going to be OK either, since the doctors tell her she's likely never going to be able to have children. Unsurprisingly she's extremely unhappy about it. But the couple has friends the Pringles (David Wayne and Jane Wyatt), who have adopted three of their six children, and they suggest to the Morans that adoption is a good option.

So they do go to an agency, where they find a frankly nasty boss who doesn't like entertainers, thinking they never have time to take care of the children properly. It's nonsense because a successful couple, whether on radio or heading to the then-new medium of television to which Jack decides to decamp on the grounds that it's wide open, would have the money to hire help, and because the schedule doesn't have to be that much worse than your typical 9-5 job. Jack and Kitty aren't helped either by the fact that the Pringles organize a big party when the Morans finally get the baby. You'd think they would have known that the head of the agency wouldn't like such a loud party. So the head of the agency takes the baby back right then and there.

Mr. Pringle's next idea is to go through with what seems like a rather skeezy private adoption, which is presented almost as if the Morans are just buying their baby. But they get their baby. Kitty takes maternity leave to look after the baby, and her understudy Gloria (Mitzi Gaynor) starts putting the moves on Jack! Further problems arise when Kitty decides to go back to work and confront Gloria, and the mother who gave up her baby for adoption gets second thoughts.

My Blue Heaven is a movie that takes a bunch of nice ideas and puts them together in a way that's unfortunately less than the sum of its parts. I think a large part of it is due to the talents of Grable and Dailey. They were a nice screen couple, and suited to the sort of musical Fox was making in the 1940s, but in this one, there's enough of a plot that it didn't need to have musical numbers. It does, and practically every one of them makes the movie come to a screeching halt. I also found several of the plot points logic-defying.

Still, the performances are nice, and it's an amiable enough movie. It's just not one of Grable's greats. It's available on a Betty Grable box set, so you may like some of the other movies on the set as well. Note that there's a 1990 movie also titled My Blue Heaven, starring Steve Martin and telling an entirely different story.

Thursday Movie Picks #281: Dystopia/Apocolypse (TV Edition)

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. Now that we're at the final Thursday of the month, it's time for another TV edition. And with it being Thanksgiving here in the US, what better theme than dystopia! Now, of course, I look at dystopia a bit differently from the rest of you, so I'm sure my selections are going to be rather different. In fact, I probably could have used the same selections I used for the "Horror" theme last month, but am not going with those.



Cops (1989-). Long-running TV show in which the police run roughshod over people stupid enough to sign the release forms to be used on TV, and one of the many police shows over the decades that have inculcated in people the idea that the cops can do no wrong and that the "obey or die" mentality is a good thing, one that got ramped up after September 11, 2001: look at all the people traveling for Thanksgiving who meekly submit to the useless TSA.



Sports Night (1998-2000). Tedious "comedy" about a late-night cable sports show and its behind the scenes workings, which had the idea that sports shows should be about shoving the proper political opinions down people's throats, an idea that ESPN has run with increasingly over the past several years. It also inflicted Aaron Sorkin on the world.



Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? (2000). One-off special in which 50 women competed to win the right to marry a multi-millionaire whom they did not see until the end of the show. Because that's how I want to find a partner. Needless to say, the marriage did not last.

And with that, have a happy Thanksgiving!

In the Mood for Love

We've got one Wednesday of movies left in the TCM spotlight on cinematography, and a movie that's part of that spotlight is In the Mood for Love, which will be on at 6:15 PM.

The scene is Hong Kong, 1962. Mr. Chow (Tony Leung) shows up at a cramped apartment in a high rise looking to take a sublet that has been advertised by Mrs. Suen (Rebecca Pan). She informs him that she's just rented the sublet to Mrs. Su (Maggie Cheung), but that there's another sublet next door. Chow is able to get that one.

Chow is a journalist whose wife is away on business a lot, while Su works as a secretary at an import/export firm; her husband is also away a lot on business trips. This, combined with Mrs. Suen spending more time with her mahjong-playing friends, mean that Chow and Su keep running into each other. As they talk about their respective spouses absences, two things happen.

First, they get the distinct feeling that perhaps Mrs. Chow is going off and having an affair with Mr. Su! Second is that Chow and Su start to develop an emotional attachment to each other. Chow dreams of writing a martial arts serial, and perhaps Su can help him. But there's also a problem in that a relationship like theirs is bound to garner attention, this being a fairly conservative society.

Eventually, Chow takes an efficiency so that Su can visit him without being noticed by anybody who is going to know them in the rest of their lives. But then Chow gets a job at a newspaper in Singapore, and asks Su to leave her spouse and join him in Singapore, which seems like it would be rather scandalous. After some consideration, she leaves. Can our two secret lovers be happy together?

I think it's with good reason that In the Mood for Love is in TCM's cinematography spotlight. The camerawork is excellent, deftly showing the cramped spaces of a Hong Kong apartment and how these two lovers have almost no privacy. Also of note is the production design, notably the vintage dresses that the women wear. There's also a lot to be said for the score, including instrumental string music and any number of contemporary songs, notably by Nat King Cole.

You may note that I haven't commented on the actual story, and that's because it can be a bit sparse and tough to follow if you're not paying close attention. I think that's by design, but it won't necessarily be to everybody's liking. The ending, which takes place at Angkor Wat in Cambodia, is something that you can probably see coming a mile away; at least I could, although that's not a neagtive.

All in all, In the Mood for Love is a movie that's absolutely worth a watch. It's gotten a release to DVD and Blu-ray, but from the pricey Criterion Collection.

Time for the full-length post on Désirée

At the beginning of the month, I mentioned that the movie Désirée showed up on FXM, but that I didn't have the time to do a full-length post on it for various reasons. It's going to be on FXM again, tomorrow at 10:50 AM and then again at 8:00 AM Thanksgiving, so now's the time to do that full-length post.

Jean Simmons plays Désirée Clary, a young woman living with her family and working at the family's millinery in Marseilles, France in 1794. If you know your history, you'll recognize the date as toward the end of the French Revolution. So who should show up in the Clarys' milieu but Napoleon Bonaparte (Marlon Brando), together with his brother Joseph (Cameron Mitchell)? Napoleon has plans of going to Paris to do great things, and gets more or less betrothed to Désirée in Marseilles. Désirée has a sister Julie (Elizabeth Sellars) who gets engaged to Joseph.

Napoleon does go to Paris, and some time passes. Sadly, Désirée receives no word from Napoleon. So she rather impulsively goes to Paris in order to look for Napoleon. She finds that he's at a party, but it's one of those swanky invitation-only things held by high society, and not only does Désirée not have an invitation; who's going to let her in anyway. Thankfully for her, one of the guests, General Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte (Michael Rennie), shows up without a companion. He's so taken by Désirée's beauty and her ardent desire to get into the party that he makes her his guest.

Désirée, of course, is going to find that Napoleon has met Josephine (Merle Oberon), who is of much higher upbringing than the Clarys and so better for Napoleon to have politically. In theory he still could have loved Désirée -- and in some ways he still does. But he needs a marriage that can help him obtain his ultimate desire, which is power. Josephine can provide that; Désirée can't.

Désirée settles by marrying Bernadotte, and it turns into a marriage of love, which is more than can be said for Napoleon and Josephine. Napoleon also has the problem that Josephine is barren, and he needs an heir once he's crowned himself emperor. But Désirée already has children by Bernadotte, so she's out of the question.

Political events become more heated as Napoleon is trying to take over all of Europe. He's installed his brother Joseph on the throne of Spain, and then it turns out that Sweden needs a new monarch as well. So they call on Bernadotte, offering to make him King because their current royal house has no heirs. He accepts despite Désirée knowing no Swedish.

She's unhappy in Sweden with the austere court life and her lack of Swedish, so she eventually decides to return to France, just in time for Napoleon's disastrous 1812 campaign. This leaves her effectively a prisoner in France under house arrest. And after that comes Waterloo and Napoleon's refusal to abdicate. The other powers all think Désirée is the only one who can get Napoleon to go to St. Helena....

Désirée is a nice enough Hollywood look at history, with the House of Bernadotte being one of the parts of the Napoleonic era not to get much mention in any other Hollywood movie. I don't have much idea how inaccurate the movie is, of course. Still, it's nice to look at, and the main actors all do reasonably well. The one big problem is with the print FXM is running, which was letterboxed and pillarboxed. So if you've got a smaller TV screen, this one is going to look pretty darn tiny. It also doesn't seem to be on DVD, which is a shame.

That time Warner Bros. remade Libeled Lady

Some weeks back TCM ran a day of movies starring Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland. One that I hadn't reviewed before was Four's a Crowd, so I watched it to do a post here.

The opening reminded me a bit of Libeled Lady, with the four main characters all walking down the street together. As for the real action, we don't see Flynn or de Havilland first. That honor goes to Rosalind Russell, playing reporter Jean Christy. She's got a great story, but it's not going to be printed, because her publisher, Patterson Buckley (Patric Knowles), is planning on shutting down the newspaper. Jean knows just the editor the paper needs to keep it going, but that's a former editor: Jean's on-again, off-again boyfriend Bob Lansford (Errol Flynn).

Bob, no longer at the paper, made the switch to public relations, handling the affairs of rich people and making them look better in the eyes of a public that didn't necessarily like them during the Depression. He's currently trying to get the biggest target of them all, John P. Dillingwell (Walter Connolly), but Dillingwell has the good sense not to get involved with PR firms.

Bob sees a chance to get a contract with Dillingwell once Jean informs him of what's going on at the paper. He'll have the paper publish a series of nasty stories about Dillingwell, which Bob can then use to get that contract, after which Bob will use the paper to make Dillingwell look good. Of course, that's if he can even get to see Dillingwell in the first place.

When he gets to the Dillingwell place, he mees John's granddaughter Lorri (Olivia de Havilland), and is immediately taken with her. There's only one minor problem: Lorri is currently in a relationship with Buckley! And God only knows what's going to happen if Lorri were to figure out that the PR campaign is solely for the purpose of enriching Bob.

I mentioned in the title of this post, and early on about the opening credits, that the movie kept reminding me of MGM's Libeled Lady from a few years earlier. Unfortunately, Four's a Crowd comes off like the poor cousin of Libeled Lady in any comparison. I can think of a couple of possible reasons for this.

First is that I think Rosalind Russell is really the only one of the four leads who was a natural for the screwball comedy. Everybody else tries, but seems better suited to other genres. Second is the fact that this was made at Warner Bros. Certainly there has to be at least one good screwball comedy to come out of Warner Bros. (maybe The Bride Came C.O.D.?), but Warner Bros. really seemed more adept at social dramas and action, while a glittering comedy like this was more in MGM's wheelhouse.

Still, everybody tries their hardest, and it's not as though Four's a Crowd is a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination. It's just that you get the feeling it could have been so much better. Four's a Crowd is available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, so you can watch and judge for yourself any time you want.