TCM Star of the Month May 2023: William Powell

William Powell (r.) and Myrna Loy; I think it's from Manhattan Melodrama (overnight tonight at 3:30 AM)

Now that we're in a new month, it's time for TCM to bring back some of the programming features. Among them is the Star of the Month, and this month TCM is giving the spotlight once again to William Powell, having done so back in December 2011. Powell, having done a lot of his work at MGM and before that at Warner Bros., has a lot of his movies in the "Turner library" of movies Ted Turner got the rights to back in 1986 so it's a lot cheaper for TCM to have such a star as their Star of the Month. (Sorry, but economics are an issue.) Powell's movies will be airing every Wednesday in prime time, and since he made a lot of movies, that means five nights of movies running into Thursday mornings in some cases.

Powell is probably best known for all the movies he made with Myrna Loy, most notably when the two played together as Nick and Nora Charles in six Thin Man movies. Once again, TCM is a bit unoriginal in its programming in that all of those movies show up together on May 10 into the wee hours of May 11. Didn't they just do this on New Year's Eve? But Powell and Loy made other movies together, such as Manhattan Melodrama (May 4, 3:30 AM), or the glittering comedy Libeled Lady (May 18, 6:30 AM).

Libeled Lady also stars Jean Harlow, who was involved in a tragic love affair with Powell that ended when she died at the age of 26. The two of them were also together in Reckless, which a search of the blog claims I haven't blogged about before. So surprisingly enough, there will be something new for me to do a post on. Powell's relationship with Harlow came after his marriage to Carole Lombard. Those two starred together in My Man Godfrey, which TCM will be showing at 8:00 PM on May 17.

TCM's Gina Lollobrigida tribute

Gina Lollobrigida with Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis in a promotional photo for Trapeze (not part of tonight's tribute)

Italian actress Gina Lollobrigida died back in January at the age of 95. Because of various programming bits such as 31 Days of Oscar in March and then the 100th anniversary salute to Warner Bros. last month, it took a while for TCM to get together a programming tribute to her. But that tribute is finally coming tonight, with a lineu of six of her movies leading into tomorrow morning, including at least one I hadn't heard of:

Come September, a romantic comedy with Rock Hudson that's as much an excuse to photograph a bunch of lovely European locations as anything else, kicks off the night at 8:00 PM;
Also made in Europe is the comedy Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell, at 10:00 PM;
I haven't heard of Fanfan la Tulipe, on at midnight, before; it's one of Lollobrigida's early pre-Hollywood movies;
Woman of Straw at 2:00 AM is another one I haven't seen, and looks like one of those 60s suspense movies that sounds better than it probably is;
The war drama Never So Few follows at 4:00 AM; and
Concluding the proceedings is Hotel Paradiso at 6:30 AM.

Jimmy Dolan's life

It's been over ten years since I recommended the pretty darn good John Garfield movie They Made Me a Criminal. It's going to be on TCM again tomorrow (May 2) at 11:15 AM. But I mention that more because the movie is a remake of another movie that I recently watched, The Life of Jimmy Dolan.

Obviously, having seen the remake, I pretty much knew the story, although there are some minor changes to the details since this one was made before the code really started cracking down. Douglas Fairbanks Jr. stars as Jimmy Dolan, a boxer who at the start of the movie is winning the light heavyweight championship of the world. Dolan has built a carefully crafted image of an erudite (at least for a boxer) man who loves his mother and lives as good and clean a life as you could expect from a boxer. Of course, none of that's true, as Jimmy goes up to see his floozie of a girlfriend and drink even though it's the Prohibition era.

Somehow, in addition to Jimmy's manager Doc (Lyle Talbot) and Doc's girlfriend Budgie showing up, a reporter shows up as well. That's the big problem, because while Doc will keep Jimmy's hypocrisy a secret, the reporter won't do so. In the heated discussion, Jimmy punches the reporter, who falls backward and hits his head, killing him immediately. Poor Jimmy, up for manslaughter if not worse.

Oh, and there's goin gto be worse. Jimmy is drunk and passes out, so Doc takes Jimmy's watch and girlfriend, and drives off. The police chase, and Doc crashes, killing him and the girlfriend, and burning them beyond recognition. The only issue is that watch, which doesn't get burned beyond recognition. This enables the authorities to make an identification, not having proper dental records, and declare that Jimmy died in the crash. And there's no good way he can come out and say that he's not really dead, because then he'll get arrested for killing the reporter.

Having been screwed over by his manager and his attorney, Jimmy becomes a tramp, heading west to parts unknown where his face won't be recognized and in theory he could get honest work, at least if there weren't a depression going on to go along with Prohibition. Eventually, having run out of money, Jimmy collapses at a small farm somewhere out west.

That farm is run by two women, Peggy (Loretta Young) and her aunt (Aline MacMahon). Peggy's aunt is a widow, having been married to a doctor who was doing charity work by taking custody of orphans who had some sort of paralytic disease (I don't think the disease is mentioned although I'd guess polio), fostering them and trying to show there are ways to nurse these children back to health. The doctor's death, however, means there's not much money left for the two women, and having another mouth to feed -- and and adult male at that -- is going to be an issue.

But at least Jimmy is able to do some of the work. And he might just be able to help the women out with their financial difficulties. A barnstorming boxer blows into town, running the scheme that dumb local schlubs put up entry fees and then get a substantial sum of money for each round they can complete against the heavyweight. Most of the amateurs aren't going to get through even one round, but of course Jimmy is a ringer, and surprisingly one that the barnstormer's manager doesn't recognize.

Still, Jimmy knows that if he goes into the ring there are bound to be people who do recognize him, especially Phlaxer (Guy Kibbee), a detective from back in New York who has been on the case because he knows there was something fishy about that car crash and is convinced it wasn't Jimmy who died in the crash.

The Life of Jimmy Dolan isn't a bad little early 1930s programmer, but I have to admit that I don't think it's quite as good as They Made Me a Criminal. I woud argue that this comes down to the casting for the lead role. As I mentioned back in 2012, John Garfield was exceedingly well cast for a role that requires some moral darkness. Fairbanks, on the other hand, was better suited to light romantic comedies, and comes across as a bit of a phony in the scenes where he's supposed to show his anger. I think the Dead End Kids in the latter film also work better than the too cute for their own good ragamuffins we have here.

Even so, The Life of Jimmy Dolan is definitely worth a watch, and you can see why Warner Bros. would want to trot this property out again for Garfield.

Runaway Train

A couple of years back when I watched the documentary Electric Boogaloo about Cannon Films, one of the movies that got a fair amount of attention in part because pretty much everyone involved with the documentary considered it one of the studio's best moves was Runaway Train. I noticed recently that it's available on TubiTV free with ads for streaming, so I recently sat down to watch it and do a post on it here.

As you can guess from the highly original title, there's a runaway train, but it takes a while before we get to the train. Instead, the movie starts at the Stonhaven maximum security federal prison in Alaska. One of the prisoners is Buck McGeehy (Eric Roberts), who seems to have a surprising amount of freedom to train as a boxer. Not only that, but there are boxing nights which seems like a bad idea because there are going to be prisoners who don't like each other and encouraging violence is bound to lead to violence outside the ring. But we're getting ahead of ourselves here.

One of the prisoners who has a lot less freedom is Oscar "Manny" Manheim (Jon Voight), who has escaped from the place on multiple occasions in the past, and has been kept in solitary confinement by the brutal warden, Rnken (John P. Ryan). The warden is so brutal that the solitary confinement is described as Manny being welded into his cell for three years, leading to a federal civil rights case, which Manny eventually wins, leading to his release back into the general population.

Manny, for his part, is violent enough to have enemies in the general population, and at the boxing matches, he gets stabbed. This causes him to bring forward his plans to escape, and needing help, brings Buck into the plan. Since you can't have a runaway train within the walls of the prison, you can probably guess that the escape is successful, at least in the short term.

Still, it's Alaska, and it's bitter cold and snowing, so the two men have to get to the safety of warmth quickly. They make their way to a train depot and overpower two of the workers there, exchanging clothing so the prisoners won't be seen in prison uniforms. They also hop a train, or at least a group of locomotives coupled together, with just one engineer on the train. He spots the men but is overpowered and suffers a fatal heart attack. Meanwhile, his attempt to stop the train has failed in that the brakes are burned out, which is what leads to the runaway train of the title.

Back in the dispatching station, we've got a couple of dispatchers much like Walter Matthau in The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three. They try to stop the train because, as far as they know, there's nobody on the train, the engineer having been found dead after falling off the train when he had his heart attack. Ranken doesn't know where his two fleeing prisoners are, but it's not going to take too long for him to put two and two together and determine that the prisoners are on the train.

And it just so happens that the prisoners aren't the only one on the train. Somebody blows the horn, and a young employee, Sara (Rebecca De Mornay) is also on the train. Her function is basically to serve as a sort of Greek chorus, informing the fugitives and the audience of the situation the two men face, and being a bit of moderation between them since they have divergent personalities. It also seems, as if the film is falling prey to one of the more common tropes, that Sara is falling in love with Buck....

When watching the opening credits of Runaway Train, one of the names you'll see is Japanese director Akira Kurosawa getting a writing credit. It turns out that he had read a news story back in the early 1960s about a runaway train, and wrote the genesis for the story we see here, but funding fell through and Kurosawa's movie was never made. Still, his name on the credits lends the movie a sensibility that's a bit different from other Hollywood action movies. In any case, the movie works, and it's easy to see why Runaway Train got a reputation as Cannon Films' finest hour.

Surprisingly to me, the movie also picked up Oscar nominations for both Voight and Roberts. The thing is, I didn't think of the roles as particularly demanding in the sense of Oscar-type acting. Physically yes; emotionally not so much. Not that this takes anything away from the film, which is highly entertaining and definitely extremely well-made. It's absolutely worth a watch if you haven't seen it before.

I've always wanted to see the Faroes

Every time I open up the Watch TCM app, I look for movies about to leave the app. With this past month being dedicated to Warner Bros.' 100th anniversary, there are quite a lot of movies that I've already blogged about, but even then I can still find a movie or two that I haven't seen before, much less blogged about. For today's post, I recently watched the epic Land of the Pharaohs.

The pharaoh in question is Khufu, also known as Cheops, and played by Jack Hawkins who is oh so obviously Egyptian. Khufu is one of the pharaohs known for having a great pyramid built in his honor, which also served as his burial place. Ancient Egyptian tradition had powerful figures like pharaohs buried with a substantial amount of their stuff to accompany them into the afterlife (or the "second life" as it's referred to in this movie). As a result, and from past experience, Khufu is terribly worried about the thought of grave robbers. That's part of the reason later pharaohs like Tutankhamen were buried in much more non-descript places, as it would be more difficult for grave robbers to find the graves.

Anyhow, the question for Khufu is just how to make that grave impregnable to would-be grave robbers. To that end, he asks his chief architect Vashtar (James Robertson Justice), who just happens to be a slave in addition to Khufu's architect. Vashtar had been captured in one of Khufu's many wars of conquest, prized for his skill. Vashtar might be willing to help Khufu, but at a price: he wants the group of slaves captured alongside him to be freed upon completion of the pyramid. Vashtar knows he's going to be killed anyway since Khufu isn't going to let anybody with the secret to the security measures remain alive, so what difference does it make if Khufu says no and kills him now, or kills him at the end? Besides, Khufu needs Vashtar's knolwedge.

The other problem is that it's pretty darn expensive to build a pyramid. Oh, Khufu seems to have enough slave labor for now, but it's sitll going to cost to get the stones, and there's all that stuff that he wants buried with him. He's already raised taxes on his subjects, and they're bristling at that, so he needs to go on more conquests to be able to spread the tax levy across more people. In one of those wars, in Cyprus, the defeated side decides to give their most beautiful princess away to become one of Khufu's queens. Khufu, obviously thinking with the wrong head, accepts, and Princess Nellifer (Joan Collins) goes to Egypt.

Nellifer immediately finds out about all the stuff Khufu is going to have buried with him and gets jealous, understandably wondering what the use of all that stuff is just buried underground, she obviously not believing in Egyptian religious traditions about the second life. But Khufu doesn't trust anybody, not even Nellifer, to go into the treasure room.

The other problem for Khufu is that with it taking so long to build the pyramid, Vashtar is getting old, and going blind. He may not be able to complete building the pyramid and overseeing the security measures before he goes blind, but that entails the danger of letting somebody else, such as his son Senta (Dewey Martin) in on the secret.

Parts of Land of the Pharaohs are lovely to look at, and there's certainly a fair bit of spectacle here. But other parts of the movie are bogged down by an uninspired story. It's another one of those movies where everybody does the best they can with the material they're given, except that it's subpar material. Jack Hawkins is the best of the actors here, although even he doesn't have all that much to do. It's as if Warner Bros. spent a ton of money going over to Italy and Egypt to get permission to do all the filming and so much on the would-be epic sets that they didn't have money left over to get a story that really works. Or if they did, they spent it on too many screenwriters. Three, including William Faulkner, are credited.

But if you want to see what Hollywood was doing in the mid-1950s to try to compete with television, a spectacle like Land of the Pharaohs is a good example of that.

Scarecrow

Another movie that I noticed was about to disappear from the Watch TCM app is another one that I had surprisingly never heard of before: Scarecrow. Thanks to the starpower and the interesting enough synopsis, I decided to give it a watch.

The two stars are Gene Hackman and Al Pacino, both relatively early in their careers. They're a couple of men who seem like they're down on their luck, as they're both on the side of the road trying to hitch a ride. (Fortunately neither of them uses Claudette Colbert's method of getting cars to stop.) They don't know each other yet, although they're about to get to know each other. Pacino plays Francis Delbuchi, but Hackman's character, Max, doesn't care for the name Francis, so asks Francis his middle name and, on finding out it's Lionel, starts calling him Lion. It's the start of a relationship that's an uneasy friendship, in part because of both of the men's personalities.

Max is a convict fresh out of prison having serve several years. He's got a sister in Denver, and is planning to stop and see her along the way, but he's really hoping to get to Pittsburgh. That's because the money that he's earned doing whatever low-paid work the prison has given him as resulted in a four-figure bankroll, which isn't a whole lot, but at least was more back in the early 1970s.

Lion is former merchant marine, having been recently demobbed. He joined the merchant marine becaue some years back he knocked up his wife but couldn't handle being a father and couldn't support her. So he went to sea nd has been sending the money to his wife in Detroit, where she and the now five-year-old kid are supposed to be living. Lion hasn't even seen the kid and doesn't know whether it's a boy or a girl.

The two travel together across the country, making the decision that both of them will go to Pittsburgh together and use Max's money to start a car wash, this still being the era before automatic car washes and franchises. It's a good reason to keep the two characters together over the course of the movie. Things don't always work out for them, however, as the two of them go out for a night on the town with Max's sister in Denver and her friends, which leads to a fight and Max and Lionel having to serve a month in the low-security prison work farm, and threatening to break up the friendship.

As for Lion, well, he does make it to Detroit and finds that his wife is still living at the address he has on file, and even has the same phone number. But he also finds that... well, I'm not really going to give that away, and what happens after Lionel meets his wife.

Scarecrow is, despite its two stars, a relatively little movie. It's also the sort of movie that I can see sharply dividing people's opinions on whether or not they like it. It's a movie that is a bit short of plot, being more about the characters' journey and the people they meet along the way instead. There are movies in that genre that are excellent, such as Harry and Tonto. On the other hand, I really found myself left cold by Scarecrow, as I could really feel the "whole lot of nothing going on" as it was going on. This even though it's not as though the actors do anything wrong in their performances. I guess it's more that the two are plaing characters not particularly likeable, unlike Art Carney in the aforementioned Harry and Tonto. The twist at the end was also maddening and didn't seem like a logical resolution to the plot to me.

But as I said, I can see why there are people who would really like Scarecrow, finding it quirky and enjoying the acting. So it's definitely one you should watch for yourself and draw your own conclusions.

Thursday Movie Picks for April 27, 2023: Lukewarm second season (TV Edition)

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. It's also the final Thursday of the month, so that means a TV-related edition. This time out, the theme is "lukewarm second seasons". That is, shows that had a good opening season followed by a not-so-good second season. This was a bit tough for me, so in the end I decided to pick three shows that I think all got canceled midway through the second season:

I'll Fly Away (1991-1993). Sam Waterston plays a widowed (technically the wife is in a sanatorium to start the series and dies midway through the first season) North Carolina district attorney dealing with the earlier years of the civil rights movement in the early 1960s. Regina Taylor plays the family's common-sense maid. As you might guess, the show touched on Important Issues, but in the second season it got even more blunt and preachy. After the show's cancellation, PBS produced a two-hour TV movie to wrap up the story arc.

The Mole (2001-2002). Anderson Cooper hosted this competition show in which the producers had one of the contestants be "the mole", a player who may or may not be sabotaging the other contestants, with the others having to figure out who the mole is and getting eliminated if they don't know enough. I don't think the second season was that much worse than the first, although for whatever reason it got pulled midway through the second season. Well, there was the twist about polling the remaining players about which fellow contestant they liked least, and then offering that contestant a cash payout to leave, which seems like a lousy twist. ABC eventually rebooted it, with celebrities, which is even worse.

Twin Peaks (1990-1991). Apparently, this may not have been cancelled during the second season, as the first season was a mini-season. I was a freshman in college when the show was on, and it was a huge deal among certain people, although I never got it, and it just seemed to keep getting weirder and weirder.

The Incredible Mr. Limpet

One of the movies that was about to expire on the Watch TCM app was The Incredible Mr. Limpet. Since I had never blogged about it here before, I decided to watch it so that I could do a post about it here.

Don Knotts plays Henry Limpet, although we only first see him in a photograph. That photo is in the archives of the Pentagon in the present day (well, 1964 when the movie was released) because the whole Henry Limpet case is top secret dating back to World War II. Now, however, thanks to the help of a flashback, we're able to learn the story of Henry Limpet....

It's the days just before World War II, and Henry Limpet is a mild-mannered man who seems more insterested in fish than anything else, even though he was able to pick up a wife Bessie (Carole Cook) somehow along the way. She's the sort of long-suffering wife, feeling herself playing second fiddle to all the fish that Henry keeps, and his feelings that fish must have a much better life than humans do. It's so bad that Henry's best friend, US Navy sailor George Stickel (Jack Weston) can see it and takes an interest in Bessie.

Everybody knows there's about to be a war on, and indeed the movie seems to indicate at first that the US is already at war although we see a newspaper headline about Pearl Harbor later in the movie. In any case, this is more plot exposition to point out that Henry can't serve in the navy even though he wanted to, thanks to his extreme nearsightedness that requires him to wear thick eyeglasses that make him look even more like a dork than you'd think if you think of the stereotype of Don Knotts as Barney Fife or from later seasons of Three's Company. Those glasses are going to become a plot point, although I'm getting ahead of myself a bit.

The Limpets and Stickel spend a day out on the town at Coney Island together, but tragedy strikes when Henry falls off the pier into the ocean. It's a tragedy for Bessie and George as Henry is never seen again. Surprisingly, however, it's not much of a tragedy for Henry. He has such a misperception about the life of a fish that he's practially taken to wishing he could be a fish himself. And when he falls off the pier, something magical happens, in that Limpet doesn't drown, but gets turned into a fish, with all following scenes of him being animated (and of course Knotts providing the voice of Mr. Limpet).

Limpet first runs into Crusty the Crab (Paul Frees), and then is met by a female fish who has no comprehension of a lot of the human things that Limpet talks about. She doesn't even understand the concept of a name, but is given the name Ladyfish (voiced by Elizabeth MacRae) by Limpet. As for Henry, in addition to having been turned into a fish, he's also been given a hellacious roar that can be useful in scaring away anything that would be scared by such a roar, or drawing attention from those whose attention he'd like.

And then Pearl Harbor happens. Mr. Limpet is still in the Atlantic, but the war is going on there as well with German U-boats attacking Allied shipping convoys crossing the Atlantic. Henry finally sees a way that he could be of use to the military. He can swim underwater and spot all the German submarines, which the Americans could then fire upon. Of course, there's a bit of a problem, which is how is he going to inform the Americans of all this? He tries, and understandably the naval authorities wonder what the hell is going on. Henry's memories of his best friend George, now in the navy, come in quite useful here....

The Incredible Mr. Limpet is an odd little movie, but one that actually works surprisingly well as light entertainment. Because of the animation it's easy enough to see why one would want to show it to kids. But there's also a lot grown-up going on. Not only are there the live-action scenes that might be a bit slow going for kids, especially because it takes a good half hour or so before we get to the animation. There's also some adult humor that might go over kids' heads, especially when it comes to Ladyfish's sex drive.

All in all, The Incredible Mr. Limpet is a fun enough movie even if it has some flaws, and is definitely worth a watch.

Harry Belafonte, 1927-2023

Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte in a publicity still from Carmen Jones

The death has been announced of singer and sometimes actor Harry Belafonte. Belafonte, who was in many ways responsible for the calypso craze of the late 1950s, was 96. That latter was also recorded on film, with such hilariously awful movies (that Belafonte had nothing to do with, it should be pointed out) as Bop Girl Goes Calypso.

Belafonte only made a handful of dramatic (ie. non-documentary movies), and all of the ones I've seen are interesting, although I have to say that they're generally interesting for reasons other than Belafonte's presence in the cast. It's Dorothy Dandrige and Pearl Bailey, for example, that give Carmen Jones its irrepressible energy, and child star Philip Hepburn in Bright Road. Belafonte was pleasant enough on screen, but everybody around him seemed to have more heft.

I think it's in part because of that that certainly Belafonte's singing career is going to be more mentioned in the obituaries, as well as his social activism. I haven't looked it up to see whether TCM is going to have a tribute to him in May or June, but he made a small enough number of movies that it would probably have to be limited to a Sunday night before Silent Sunday Nights double feature of probably two out of Bright Road, The World, The Flesh, and the Devil, and Odds Against Tomorrow.

Not the frequent Love Boat guest star

Another movie that I noticed was on one of the streaming services and had never seen before was the Elvis Presley western Charro! (exclamation point in the title). Never having seen it before, I decided to watch it so I could do a post on it here.

Elvis plays Jess Wade, who at the start of the movie is going to a small Mexican village because he's learned that his girlfriend Tracey Winters (Ina Balin) is there. He walks into the bar, no pun intended, and finds that instead of Tracey, he's got Billy Hackett, the younger brother of Vince Hackett (Victor French) waiting for him. Victor is the leader of a criminal gang, and Jess happened to be in that gang in the past before quitting his life of crime. (The movie was released after the disintegration of the Production Code, so you can have a darker past for the Jess Wade character and get away with it.) Victor wants Jess back for reasons that are soon to be revealed.

After Hackett disarms Jess in a putative shootout, no shots necessary since the Hackett gang badly outnumbers Jess, they take him more or less hostage and take him up into the mountains, where the gang has its hideout. It's there that Jess learns what the gang has been doing after he left. It seems they stole a Mexican cannon that Emperor Maximilian had used during the French occupation. In theory, that ought to be moderately bad, but this is a special cannon, in that it's been gold-plated. This seems highly inconvenient to me, in that the gold plating would wear off, but in any case that gold plating is worth a lot.

Worse for Jess is that the authorities have a wanted poster out, with the authorities knowing that one of the thieves is about Jess' height and has a very noticeable scar on his neck from the shootout when the cannon was stolen. Now, Jess doesn't have that scar, so he should be in the clear. But obviously Vince Hackett thought of that, having his men hold Jess down and brand Jess so that it will look just like the scar the putative thief is supposed to have. He's able to get a horse and get back to town, but his troubles are not over by any stretch of the imagination.

He's able to befriend the sheriff and the sheriff's daughter, especially once he arrests Vince's little brother, being named a deputy in the process, but the arrest of the kid brother is really going to bring problems as Vince wants his brother back, and has the cannon to use against the town should they not accede to his blackmail demands. And then the town learns about Jess' past, and that he has that scar that makes him look lie the description of the man in the wanted poster....

Charro! is different than most of Elvis' movies in that he does very little singing here, singing just the title song, and certainly not having any of the sort of musical numbers he did in his other movies. That said, he's very competent in what is a relatively serious western. Charro! received bad reviews at the time, but I don't see why. Granted, it's more in tone with the programmer westerns of the 1950s and 1960s instead of the post-Code westerns, but it does what it does well enough. I've always thought from some of Elvis' earlier movies that if Col. Tom Parker hadn't put Elvis in all those cookie-cutter musicals, Elvis could have had a solid career as an actor, if not remembered as a great. Charro! is more evidence of that, and is definitely worth watching.