TCM "Star" of the Month June 2024

Now that we're into the first full week of a new month, it's time for a new Star of the Month on TCM. This time, we don't get one star. Instead, TCM is putting the spotlight on Fox and a bunch of the contract players who became stars. Every Tuesday in prime time, TCM will be highlighting them, a whole bunch of stars with most of them getting one or maybe two films.

I'm sorry to say I'm not the biggest fan of this, as I feel it would be better if some of them could get a real tribute. But I wouldn't be surprised if that was more difficult for TCM to get the rights to a bunch of films from one star, since some of those would be rather lesser-known movies.

Anyhow, looking at the lineup, Shirley Temple kicks things off tonight with Bright Eyes, which is a movie that I love although it's more for the presence of Jane Withers who's tremendous as the child villain of the piece. There's also The Gang's All Here, which has Carmen Miranda and some absolutely ridiculous musical numbers from Busby Berkeley.

Linda Darnell is one of the people who gets a pair of movies, both of those coming on June 11. Even Marilyn Monroe only gets one (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes on June 18). On June 25, there's the 1933 version of State Fair, which is listed for Janet Gaynor, although it's as much of a vehicle for Will Rogers, who really deserves to be mentioned more as one of Fox's early stars. (And speaking of Rogers, I still have that box set that I'll finally start getting through the rest of now that I've got the upstairs Blu-ray player and can watch movies any time without being disturbed.

Indián történet

I finally purched a larger TV for my upstairs bedroom several weeks back, and then a week or two ago got around to picking up a Blu-ray player to plug into it. No 4K player yet; I don't have any discs in that format. Anyhow, one of the Blu-ray box sets I picked up recently is a four-disc set of some of the films of Hungarian director Miklós Jancsó, a name that I have to admit was completely new to me. I took out one of the discs and popped it in the player, ready to watch a short so that I'd have a quick review in the hopper for one of those days where there's also something else worth mentioning. That short was Indian Story.

As I said, I didn't know anything about Jancsó going into this, so I had no idea what to expect. The short has the visual look of a Ken Burns miniseries: much of the visuals are of stills that the camera pans over to give the illusion of motion, first of New York City and then of the Old (American) West, since the "Indian" of the title does in fact refer to American Indians/Native Americans. The movie was made in 1961 and is also referred to as a newsreel; apparently Jancsó made a bunch of newsreel-like movies at the beginning of his career. Of course, 1961 was not only during the Communist era, but also not long after the failed uprising of 1956 that was a reference of a couple of Hollywood movies, most notably The Journey which I don't think I've ever actually blogged about.

That date means there's definitely some propaganda. The short basically tells how Europeans went west, encountering the various Indian tribes who at first tried to consider the white man friendly. But as we know, the white man took over the whole continent, leaving the various tribes to reservations where they feel subjugated, nearly wiped out, and unable to hold on to their traditional culture. Jancsó definitely makes clear in the narration (I don't know whether it's his voice or a professional voiceover person and I don't think the credits mention it) that the western Europeans are the villain here, although there's not anything mentioned about Communism. So I can't help but think something like this was a "safe" subject for a director early in his career to do a short on. There aren't much in the way of non-Hungarian minorities in Hungary, so I don't think it could have been seen as an allegory to any sort of Communist mistreatment of ethnic minorities either.

Does it say anything about Jancsó as a director? I haven't watched any of the narrative films yet, so I can't comment on that. Eventually, I'll get around to the other movies in the set, at which point I'll have more to say. As for the physical nature of the set, something I like to discuss whenver I mention a new-to-me box set, it's in a traditionally sized Blu-ray case with separate spindles for each disc (four in all), although it's two inserts with spindles on either side of the insert. There are also brief liner notes courtesy of Martin Scorsese, and commentary audio for the features; again not having watched any of the features yet I haven't heard those and so can't comment on them.

Ill Met By Moonlight

Dirk Bogarde was TCM's Star of the Month last September, and it's taken me a while for me to get around to all of his movies that I put on the DVR. But we're getting close to the end of them, with one that I haven't mentioned yet being the World War II movie Ill Met By Moonlight. (TCM had it on the schedule as Night Ambush, but that was the title on the original American relese and, according to Wikipedia, the original US release was cut by about 10 minutes. The print TCM ran was the running time of the British version, and had the title card Ill Met By Moonlight.)

A bit of opening narration tells us how Crete is an ancient island in the Mediterranean Sea, but that in World War II it was occupied by the Nazis. Some of the Cretans joined the underground, but they were also joined by some other islanders, those being from the island of Britain. One of the Brits is a man named Maj. Patrick Leigh Fermor (Dirk Bogarde). Fermor was a real pesron, as was W. Stanley Moss (David Oxley), who wrote the book on which the movie was based. Fermor is also known by the code name Filedem. He could speak Greek, well enough to fool the Nazis, although he believes he's got enough of an accent that it would give the game away if the Nazis' Greek collaborators heard him.

Fermor tells Moss about German general Kreipe (Marius Goring), who is the head of the German paratroopers stationed on the island, presumably for running operations all over the eastern Mediterranean and disrupting the British who were still in control of Egypt at the time. Fermor has heard that the plan is to ambush Kreipe, kidnapping him and taking him to a cove where a small British ship is set to anchor, taking Kreipe to Egypt. It sounds like a daft plan but then there were a lot of odd schemes that actually did happen during the war. And this is one of them.

In any movie, there is a buildup to the actual operation, as the people carrying it out prepare a meticulous plan. In Ill Met By Moonlight, however, that planning stage seems a bit shorter compared to some other movies in the war movie, or the heist genres. Eventually, the time comes for the operation. The kidnapping seems to go OK, but then they have to get him out of the mountains to where they're supposed to rendezvous with the ship. There are a ton of Nazis looking for Kreipe. And he's got an injured arm to boot, making the operation more complicated.

Ill Met By Moonlight was the final film together for Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and unfortunately it's not quite as good as their earlier works. To be fair, however, many of their earlier collaborations are widely considered outstanding films such as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp or The Red Shoes. Ill Met By Moonlight is competent enough, but something about it feels like it could have been better. I can't help but wonder whether Powel and Pressburger didn't have as much of a budget as they would have liked.

Not that Ill Met By Moonlight is a bad movie by any means; it's just that it's another of those movies that isn't as good as it might have been.

Miracle Mile

Recently I was flipping through PlutoTV to see what movies they had on. One on their 80s channel that had an interesting plot synopsis was Miracle Mile. Based on the synopsis, I decided to give it a watch.

Anthony Edwards, later of the TV show ER, plays Harry, a young man living in Los Angeles. One day, he visits the museum at the La Brea tar pits, and sees a woman he's intrigued with. The two run into each other outside, where he finds that her name is Julie (Mare Winningham). They hit it off, and decide they'll meet again later that evening at the all-night diner where Julie works.

Unfortunately, Harry falls asleep, and when he wakes up, he finds that his alarm never went off and that it's four in the morning. So he goes down to the diner, hoping to find Julie still on her shift. She's gone home, of course, so Harry decides to call her and apologize. He gets her answering machine, and is about to go back into the diner when the phone rings again. Now, this is the late 1980s, so Julie wouldn't have had caller ID to tell her what number the call came from. And obviously, almost nobody has a cell phone unless they're rich (indeed, one character later on will have a brick-sized cell phone). But Harry picks up the receiver anyway.

On the other end of the line is a man claiming to be named Chip. Chip thinks he's called his father tells Harry how sorry he is, and that the missiles have been fired from the silo in North Dakota where Chip is stationed, and that, as a result, Dad only has about 70 mintues until the incoming Soviet missiles hit. Harry naturally figures that this is a prank, and tries to get Chip to admit to this. Eventually, Chip realizes he's dialed the wrong area code, while somebody on Chip's end of the line does something that might possibly be shooting Chip, before that guy gets on the phone to tell Harry to forget everything he heard.

Of course Harry can't forget it. He goes back into the diner, asking the other diners if they have a son named Chip and other questions about things he heard in the phone call. Eventually, one of the diners does recognize something Harry says. That diner is the well-dressed Landa (Denise Crosby, Tasha Yar from the first season of Star Trek: TNG), and she believes Harry has identified some of the launch codes from nuclear missiles! She, being a power player, gets on her cell phone and starts calling people she knows in Washington, only to find that they've supposedly all decamped for Antarctica, which is a sure sign that nuclear war is on the way!

Landa tries to arrange for a helicopter to get the folks in the diner to LAX from where they can fly... somewhere; who knows what part of the world won't be affected by the nuclear war if there really is one. And it's not as if there are any commercial flights to Antarctica. In any case, Landa and the rest of the patrons in the diner get into the cook's catering van for the drive to the nearest helicopter landing pad.

Unfortunately, Harry decides that he can't face the possible end of the world without Julie, so he begs Landa and the cook to make a detour to Julie's apartment. They rather sagely point out there isn't time, so Harry gets out of the van to try to make his way to Julie's place and then, hopefully, to the landing pad before Landa's helicoper takes off. But he's going to have to get through a city where word has begun to filter in about the possibility of a nuclear attack....

After watching Miracle Mile, I read some of the reviews on IMDb, and have to agree with one of them that stated that the first portion of the movie feels like it's going into bad TV Movie of the Week territory. But then Harry gets that phone call, and things start going in completely different directions. Some of the reviewers think this make the movie great, while others argued that the movie as a whole doesn't work at all. It really came across to me as a movie that sharply divdes opinion among the relatively limited segment of people who have actually seen it.

I think I'm actually somewhere in the middle. I can see why people might not like Miracle Mile. There's a whole lot of suspension of disbelief required, with plot holes that I don't think would happen in real life, not that I've ever been anywhere about to be hit by nuclear missiles. On the other hand, the movie feels like an extended-length episode of one of those sci-fi anthology shows of the early 60s like The Twilight Zone. It's always different enough that you don't really know where it's going to go next; unlike, say, Ladybug, Ladybug it's not clear fairly early on whether the alarm is a false alarm or whether something more ominous is going to happen.

So Miracle Mile is definitely an uneven movie. But for me it was one that was more worth watching that it was a miss.

Zowie!

Another movie that's coming up on TV that I have on my DVR is Our Man Flint, the first of the two Derek Flint movies. (The sequel, In Like Flint, was the subject of a January 2022 post.) Our Man Flint is on FXM tomorrow, June 2, at 11:10 AM.

Unfortunately, the movie, outside of the credits, is panned and scanned, as although the opening says it's a Cinemascope movie, the print FXM aired was in 16:9 and not the 2.35:1 Cinemascope ratio. That card is followed by a pre-credits sequence showing a bunch of weather-related disasters happening all over the world, and a bunch of international spy bosses led by Cramden (Lee J. Cobb) discussing what to do. They program their supercomputer, for some values of super since this was almost 60 years ago and the computer was probably no better than today's smartphones if that, which spits out a punchcard with the name Derek Flint.

Derek Flint, played by James Coburn, is a retired spy, now with a bevy of women he presumably collected from his spy days the way James Bond had one conquest after another. Cramden, and the rest of his spy organization ZOWIE (Zonal Organization World Intelligence Espionage), want Flint to investigate and figure out the source of all the disasters, and stop whoever is behind it since this clearly isn't natural. But already, whatever organization is behind it is also aware that ZOWIE is trying to bring Flint out of retirement. Two Marines outside Cramden's office are in fact enemy agents, which Flint could somehow tell just because one patch on their uniform is bogus. Yeah right.

The next clue Flint gets is even nuttier. At a restaurant, the enemy woman Gila (Gila Golan) -- because a movie like this always has to have one -- has infiltrated the restaurant's band, where she takes the part of the harpist and plans to use one of the harp strings as a bow with a poisoned arrow she'll shoot at Flint. But she hits Cramden who is able to get the poison out of Cramden and determine from residue on it that whoever fired the arrow must have been in Marseilles, France. Really.

The next clue takes him to Rome, looking for cold cream, and he finally finds Gila's company at a place called Exotica. This is, of course, a front, which is eventually going to lead to Galaxy Island, the secret lair of the evil organization Galaxy. There, a team of scientists (Benson Fong, Rhys Williams, and Peter Brocco) has learned how to control the weather. They claim to wish to use this for good, but they need to stop the governments of the world that have militaries and, horror of horrors, are using nuclear power. So they use their climate control device to cause disasters and ransom the governments of the world.

After the success of the James Bond movies, especially Goldfinger, studios wanted to come up with special agents of their own, replete with gadges, exotic locations, and pretty women. Most of the movies, however, were conceived as spoofs of the Bond phenomenon. Some of the spoofs work better than others. But for me, Our Man Flint was not one of them. The bad guys are just too stupid to have gotten where they did, and the spoof aspect isn't particularly funny here. The production also looks a lot cheaper than the James Bond movies. But, as always, watch and judge for yourself.

Random movie stills

The daily remains

I've got another pair of movies on my DVR that are coming up on traditional cable in close proximity. This time, the first of them is The Remains of the Day, which shows up on TCM in the wee hours of June 2, at 2:00 AM. (In other words, that's still 11:00 PM on June 1 out on the west coast.)

The movie starts of some years after the end of World War II. Darlington Hall was one of those grand old manor houses that I'd normally compare to the ones you see in Merchant Ivory pictures, except that this time, it actually is a Merchant Ivory picture. The old owner, Lord Darlington, has died, and the estate is on the chopping block, at least until it's bought by Jack Lewis (Christopher Reeve), a retired US congressman who had visited once back in the 1930s; more on that later.

Lewis takes on the house's aging butler, Mr. Stevens (Anthony Hopkins), who was the butler to old Lord Darlington. And then Stevens gets a letter from Miss Kenton (Emma Thompson), who was the housekeeper at Darlington Hall at the time of Lewis' visit. Kenton hasn't seen Stevens in yers, but still thinks about him; not that they're all older, she finds that she has much better memories of her time in service at Darlington Hall. With the place having been threated with destruction and that making the news, Kenton decides that now is the time to get in touch with Stevens again and reminisce about old times if he can get a few days off to visit her.

This, of course, is the cue for the flashback. We go back to the 1930s, and Darlington Hall is a consistently busy place with an army of servants led by butler Stevens. The place needs a new housekeeper, which is how Kenton gets hired on. But immediately she and Stevens begin to clash. Stevens seems to have spent his whole life in service, and is extremely good at what he does. But he's also extremely formal. Kenton isn't bad by any means; she's just a bit more modern in her approach to running the day-to-day managment of the home economics, as it were. She even goes so far as to refer to Stevens' elderly father, now reduced to being an under-butler, by his given name to distinguish him from the younger Stevens, something which horrifies the younger Stevens.

Anyhow, the whole house is in a flurry of activity because Lord Darlington (James Fox) is organizing a conference on trying to maintain peace with Germany. This is obviously well before World War II started in Europe, although I couldn't tell that any specific date was given for the first conference. (Later in the movie I think we do see a copy of The Times dated mid-October 1938.) It's clear that Darlington is on the side of opinion that thinks Germany and Hitler can be handled without having to go to war. Most of the guests at this conference share that view, with the exception of Lewis and a French representative, Dupont D'Ivry (Michael Lonsdale).

Kenton is horrified by all of this, and asks Stevens how this can go on. Stevens makes it clear, however, that his job is to serve, not to get involved in politics. He more or less continues to make it clear in a couple of scenes when the movie comes out of flashback while Stevens is on his way for the latter-day meeting with Kenton. It becomes clearer later in the picture just how much of an appeasenik Darlington really is, and that's going to have tragic consequences for him after the war.

Back in the 1930s, Kenton also finds herself developing some sort of feelings for Stevens. This is a bit of a problem because at Darlington Hall it's not necessary considered acceptable for servants to get involved in romantic relationships. But more complicated is the fact that while Stevens may be developing similar feelings for Kenton, he is exceedingly good at repressing such feelings. Eventually, Kenton can't take any more, and when she gets a marriage proposal from outside Darlington Hall, she accepts it.

As I mentioned early on, The Remains of the Day was directed by James Ivory and produced by his and Ismail Merchant's production company. This means you know you're going to get exception production values of interwar England, along with a fine script. You also get excellent acting performances, which really isn't much of a surprise considering the cast involved here. The script by Merchant and Ivory's collaborator Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, is also quite good. If the movie has one flaw, however, it's that it feels like it runs a bit slow, and the pace feels like it gets even slower in the second half of the movie. It's "only" 134 minutes which includes the end credits, and that's a fair bit shorter than a lot of prestige movies today, but at times there's a sense of are they ever going to get to the action.

Still, The Remains of the Day is a fine movie, and definitely one not to be missed.

Tame Rovers

When TCM had its programming tribute to actor Ryan O'Neal a few months back, one of the movies I hadn't seen before was Wild Rovers. It's airing again tomorrow, May 31, at 8:00 AM, so I made a point of watching it before the upcoming airing to do a report on it.

Out in Montana in the days of the Old West, Walter Buckman (Karl Malden) runs a large cattle ranch together with his two sons (played by Tom Skerritt and Joe Don Baker), and a bunch of ranch hands. A ridiculously large number of ranch hands, I'd think, but that's not the point of the movie. One somewhat minor subplot is a conflict between Buckman and the neighboring sheep farmer over who can graze where. The bigger plot, however, is going to involve two of the ranch hands, the young Frank Post (Ryan O'Neal) and the too old to be doing this anymore hand, Ross Bodine (William Holden).

One day, a bunch of the hands are breaking horses, and one of the hands gets thrown off a horse to his death, necessitating the shooting of the horse. Frank and Ross go into town, presumably to deal with some of the necessities for the funeral, and get to talking. Frank is a bit surprised that Ross doesn't seem to have much money saved up, while Ross points out that pretty much every ranch hand lives his life in such a way that it's pretty much impossible to save up money. That is a bit of a shame, as Ross has always dreamed of going to Mexico where the American dollar goes much farther and it would be easier to start a ranch. With that in mind, Frank suggests that perhaps the only way to get the money to start one's own spread would be to rob a bank. It's just a joke, right?

While in town, Ross and Frank stop at the saloon to waste some of the money that they could be saving toward that ranch in Mexico, getting good and drunk on overpriced whiskey. The run into some of the men who work the sheepman's ranch, which results in a fight that causes a heck of a lot of damage to the saloon. This leaves Buckman mighty ticked off, and he plans to dock Ross and Frank their pay in order to pay off the damage on the saloon. So now perhaps the only way the two can get enough money to survive is to actually rob that bank.

The two do rob the bank, although they leave enough money behind for Buckman to make payroll in an attempt to get the bank owner not to aleart the authorities. They then set off for Mexico. It goes without saying, however, that Buckman learns about the robbery (and well, Frank and Ross would have stopped showing up for work, which would have been a huge red flag), so he sends a posse after them including his two sons. Bring Frank and Ross back, dead or alive. One son wants them back alive, the other seems itching to shoot them.

The movie was released after the demise of the Production Code, so at least it's not an absolute requirement that Frank and Ross get what's coming to them for breaking the law. It's possible they might actually get away with it. But they've got a long way to go, and they are going to have to deal with civilization along the way. That's where things go wrong, when Frank decides he's going to play poker with the locals one night and causes a gunfight....

The plot of Wild Rovers is serviceable, and the acting is certainly professional. And yet there's something seriously wrong with the movie. Well, two things. The first, which was quite evident, was the direction, by Blake Edwards, a director who was thoroughly out of his element making a western. Edwards decided to go for a whole bunch of early 1970s touches in his camerawork. Since there are gunfights, some people die, but the death scenes are done in a sort of slow-motion that some say is an homage to Sam Peckinpah, but to me seemed almost as amateurish as the deaths from bee sting in The Swarm. There's also a wild horses scene halfway through the movie that's handled with a whole bunch of double exposures and kills the movie harder than the bicycle scene set to "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head" in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

It wasn't until after I watched Wild Rovers and read up on it that I learned that the movie was heavily edited, against Edwards' wishes. Supposedly, his vision would have had the movie run three hours, while the movie we have here, with overture, intermission, and exit music, is 136 minutes. Perhaps the subplot with the sheep rancher was more important in Edwards' original vision, but here it feels like an afterthought.

I could see what Blake Edwards was going for when he wrote the screenplay, but the Wild Rovers we get on the screen is sadly, an absolute mess.

Not a reference to anyone in the current or previous administration

Marlon Brando was TCM's Star of the Month back in April, and one of the movies that I recorded during that salute is coming up again soon on the TCM schedule. That movie, The Ugly American, will be on tomorrow (May 30) at 5:45 PM.

The Ugly American was filmed in part in Thailand, but the movie makes pains to inform us right at the beginning that any resemblance to real people or events is strictly coincidental. The movie is not actually set in Thailand, but a fictional Southeast Asian country called Sarkan, which is an obvious stand-in for Vietnam, which was divided at the time the movie was made (1962; released in 1963). The Americans are helping the anti-Communist government of the day, by helping them build a paved highway called the "Freedom Road" from the more cosmopolitan capital into the hinterlands. However, many of the locals worry that having such a highway will facilitate bringing in both American troops as well as Communist troops on the other side of the border who are agitating against the western-backed goverment. To that end, locals waylay and kill one of the American truck drivers working on the project.

This is a debacle for the current ambassador, who was just about to finish his tenure in Sarkan anyway. To that end the US Senate is going through the confirmation hearings for a new ambassador. That nominee, Harrison MacWhite (Marlon Brando), has some experiece in Sarkan. He served in World War II and wound up behind the lines with the Sarkanian resistance, which is how he met Deong (Eiji Okada), who is still highly influential with any would-be revolutionaries, not having gone into government after the post-war independence. The Senators are worried that Deong might be aligning himself with the Communists, given his presence at the Bandung Conference. MacWhite doesn't think Deong is a Communist, and he does get confirmed by the Senate.

MacWhite arrives to Sarkan in a very volatile situation, with the arrival at the airport being met by a bunch of demonstrators who then storm the new ambassador's limousine. It's clear that the question of what to do about the Freedom Road is going to be important, and is also serving as a metaphor about what to do about the broader foreign policy in general.

MacWhite tries to talk to everybody about it: Deong, the King, and the Prime Minister, a man who is not without corruption as he's installed a bunch of relatives to important positions; that unsurprisingly being another bone of contention between the government and those who oppose it. There's also Homer Atkins (Pat Hingle), the American engineer who is in charge of getting the Freedom Road built. Atkins has the most logical take on the road. He, having worked with the locals, understands that they really want a hospital built. Atkins says that if the Americans were to fund that hospital and put it where the US wants the Freedom Road to go, the locals will eagerly build the road.

Meanwhile, Deong is trying to play both sides off the other, meeting with the Soviet ambassador, who brings the Chinese ambassador (this is before the fallout between the two countries in the early 1960s). The Communist countries are happy to work at stopping the Freedom Road from being built, and otherwise sowing discord in Sarkan. Deong, however, wants all of this to be done non-violently, while the Communists may be more than willing to stab Deong in the back to get what they want.

In watching The Ugly American, I couldn't help but think of a couple of other movies. One was Crisis, where the revolutionaries may have been sincere at one point but wind up being overtaken by their own desire to remain in power under the thinking that the opponent is just so bad that the alternative must be stopped by any means necessary. Deong, in the end, may not really be either a Communist nor that committed a pro-Westerner; instead, he's someone who wants peace and true independence for the locals, but has to dance with multiple devils to obtain this. There's also shades of King Monkut in all the versions of Anna and the King of Siam, somebody who knows he's up against forces much bigger than he is and can't really do much about it.

How all this is executed on screen, however, feels a bit dated in its treatment. It's way too talky for its own good, and Marlon Brando is I think not the right person to be playing the ambassador. Eiji Okada and Pat Hingle come off much better here in my opinion. Ultimately, The Ugly American is intriguing and thought-provoking, but not quite as good as it might have been.

Paddy Chayefsky channels Tennessee Williams

Some months back, TCM ran a night of movies with screenplays by Paddy Chayefsky. One that I hadn't seen before was The Goddess, so I recorded it and only recently finally got around to watching it.

The movie starts off in 1930, in the non-urban part of Maryland. Laureen Faulkner is a woman who got married much too young, and had a daughter not long after getting married. She feels herself unable to take care of the daughter, so she basically fobs the little girl, Emily, off on relatives who are strict Seventh Day Adventists. Emily can't get any love from them, in a scene where we see the juvenile Emily (Patty Duke in a one-scene role) tell the cat she got a promotion to the next grade.

We soon move to 1942. Emily is now about 16 years old and, still having no love from her family, prefers the fantasy world of Hollywood as well as going to the movie theater with boys who at least pay her some attention. And then, one night, she and some other high school kids run into a group of GIs, this being World War II after all. One of the GIs is a guy named John Tower (Steven Hill), who is the son of a famous Hollywood star but a man who couldn't handle the fame of having a famous Hollywood father. Emily doesn't much care; she's just taken with somebody who has a proximity to fame. She immediately falls for John, and the two quickly get married.

Unfortunately, Emily learns that she's way too much like her own mother. Emily gets pregnant and has the kid, but being a mother at such a young age is putting a decided crimp in the lifestyle of partying that she really wants. She doesn't want to be stuck in a small town. So one day she pretty much leaves the kid with her husband and leaves for Hollywood, because that's where the action is supposed to be.

Emily starts working her way up the ladder, having taken on the stage name of Rita Shawn. She's getting roles, and hopes to be able to impress her mother. Meanwhile, hanging on in Hollywood is retired boxer Dutch Seymour (Lloyd Bridges). He and Emily meet, and the two fall in love and get married. But he has the idea of going back to his home town to work in the family business, which is something Emily doesn't want to do since she still wants the fame and to be the center of attention.

So the two divorce, and Emily stays in Hollywood, where she does become a star, only to find that fame isn't all it's cracked up to be. She turns to drinking, becoming the sort of star all the producers worry can no longer do what's necessary to get a movie done on time and under budget.

You can be forgiven for thinking that The Goddess is the sort of movie that doesn't have much original to it. You can also be forgiven for thinking that The Goddess is the sort of material that could have been written by Tennessee Williams, if he moved his action out of the South. As such, The Goddess isn't really a movie that you watch for the story. Instead, it's more of a vehicle for Kim Stanley, who had been big on Broadway but didn't make a whole lot of movies. Even in spite of the trite material, Stanley is someone you can't really take your eyes off of, giving a ridiculous and memorable performance.

As a coherent whole, The Goddess isn't the greatest movie. Yet there's still something compelling about it.