Battle of the Century

Because I had a post to do already today on Rock Hudson's being TCM's Star of the Month, I wanted to do a short of some sort. I had a couple from when TCM did a day of movies on the UCLA Film and TV archive, and from that I selected the Laurel and Hardy short Battle of the Century.

Information before the short begins informs us that most of this was for decades considered lost, but most of it is now extant, with a few production stills used to finish a transitional scene involving Eugene Pallette. In the first reel, Stan is a boxer and Ollie his manager/trainer. Stan seems to be going up quite a ways in terms of weight classes, but somehow his first punch manages to knock out his opponent. Except that Stan isn't bright enough to go to a neutral corner so the referee can start the 10-count. Stan later gets knocked out, meaning a very small purse for him and Ollie.

The first reel ends with the missing bit involving Pallette. Pallette is an insurance agent who sells Ollie a policy that will pay out big... if Stan gets injured. So of course, Ollie spends the second half trying to get poor Stan injured, by buying a banana and dropping the peel for Stan to slip on. Stan, unsurprisingly, doesn't slip on it, while other people do.

The climax of the movie comes when a pie maker slips on it and cream pie goes all over the place. As you can guess, this is an opportunity to have a huge pie fight, since pie fights were considered funny back in the day, and that pie fight takes up the final third or so of the short, although since it's a two-reeler that's only about six minutes of pie fighting.

Even then, I felt the pie fight went on too long. And Stan is asked to be too stupid during the boxing scene. Battle of the Century isn't terrible, but there's definitely better Laurel and Hardy stuff out there.

TCM Star of the Month November 2025: Rock Hudson

Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor in a production still from Giant (Nov. 4, 9:45 PM)

Now that we've gotten through October and are into a new month, it's once again time for a new Star of the Month on TCM. This time out, that star is Rock Hudson, and his movies will be airing every Tuesday night in prime time on TCM. For this tribute, the movies are grouped somewhat thematically. The first Tuesday, or tonight, sees a couple of movies that are decidedly westerns, along with Giant (9:45 PM tonight) which isn't quite a traditional western, but because of the setting involving Texas cattle and oil country, and the movie's starting some decades in the past, you can see why TCM would group it in amongst westerns.

The cast of Ice Station Zebra (Nov. 11, 10:00 PM)

Nov. 11 is Veterans' Day in the US, which TCM normally spends on military themed movies, and are indeed doing during the morning and afternoon of November 11 as well. But then, it also turns out that Rock Hudson was in enough military-themed movies that TCM could group all of those together on Veterans' Day, including Ice Station Zebra at 10:00 PM. I've got a post about another of the movies lined up for Nov. 11, although it turns out Hudson has a bit part in the movie.

Nov. 18 is mostly Rock Hudson as he was directed by Douglas Sirk, which means these aren't quite my favorite movies. However, that's not quite enough to run an entire night of films, so the night also includes A Fine Pair, which co-stars Claudia Cardinale who died not too long ago.

Rock Hudson and Doris Day in Pillow Talk (Nov. 25, 8:00 PM)

Finally, on November 25, the night kicks off with three films in which Hudson co-starred with Doris Day, starting with Pillow Talk at 8:00 PM. Then comes a movie in a similar vein albeit without Doris Day: Man's Favorite Sport? at 2:00 AM November 26, which I haven't yet seen so plan on recording.

Carney and Brown again

RKO had the popular comedy team of Wheeler and Woolsey in the 1930s, at least until Robert Woolsey up and died. With tastes changing from Laurel and Hardy to Abbott and Costello, RKO decided they needed another comedy pairing of their own and came up with the bargain-basement partnership of Wally Brown and Alan Carney, as can be seen in movies like Seven Days Ashore.

Brown and Carney get top billing here, although they're really in service to the other characters. And we first see a couple of those other characaters. The movie was made smack in the middle of World War II, a time in which a bunch of men were away and women took on many roles that men had had, including the musicians in nightclub big bands. Two such women, Carol (a young Virginia Mayo) and Lucy, play in San Francisco, and also try to keep the servicemen's morale up by dancing with them. Except that both of them tell their dance partners that things can't go any further, because each of them is engaged to be married. Except that each of them, unbeknownst to the other, claims to be engaged to San Francisco scion Dan Arland Jr. (Gordon Oliver).

Dan is away because he's doing his part for the war effort by being in the merchant marine, somewhere in the middle of nowhere because the security situation tries to give the crews as little information as necessary. Dan has made a couple of friends among the crew in the form of Monty (Wally Brown) and Orval (Alan Carney), who has gotten the nickname "Handsome" for obvious reasons. The crew finds out that their next destination is actually stateside, in San Francisco, where the ship will be provisioning giving the men the titular week's leave.

This will give the crew a chance to see their families, which is of course an issue for Dan, since he's got two girlfriends. Well, technically three. Before going off to war his parents were trying to get him engaged to someone of his social class, Annabell Rogers. Officially, the engagement is broken off, but Annabelle still lives with Dan's parents because they're on her side, considering Dan a bit irresponsible. Dan worries about which of his two musician "fiancées" to tell about his presence, writing a letter to each and having only one delivered at random. Except when the other letter gets thrown away, the ship's captain finds it and, thinking that it fell out of the mailbox or something, does his good dead by posting it for delivery. So when the ship reaches shore Dan has multiple girlfriends all expecting him.

Dan tries to remedy the situation by... setting Monty and Handsome up with Carol and Lucy, lying to the women that these are fellow millionaires. Meanwhile, the women all figure out what's going on, and Annabelle decides that she's going to teach Dan a lesson. She enlists the help of Carol and Lucy in this scheme, and they're only too happy to help considering the way Dan's treated them. But it's a wartime movie, so everyone is going to come out happy in the end.

As I suggested above, Seven Days Ashore, having been made during World War II and dealing with timely war topics, is the sort of movie that was conceived as a homefront morale booster. The comedy is supposed to be gentle; also, since the movie revolves in part around a big band, there are going to be musical numbers. The only problem is, Carney and Brown are slightly more irritating than comedic, while Gordon Olvier is a drip. It's easy enough to see the studio's intentions here; it's just that those intentions don't always succeed.

Still, I always like to suggest that people judge for themselves, so once again watch Seven Days Ashore and draw your own conclusions.

Ooh, goody, another revisionist western

I've stated a bunch of times, especially when it comes to foreign films, how my taste in films differs from that of the professional movie critics. Another good example of that came when I watched one of the movies that TCM ran in honor of the late Kris Kristofferson some months back: Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.

Pat Garrett was shot to death in 1908, although the movie gets this slightly wrong by opening up the action with an expository scene near Las Cruces, NM, in 1909. Pat (James Coburn) is riding with some of his partners, at least until the group is ambushed and Garrett is killed, which did happen in real life. Now since this is just the opening scene and we haven't met Billy the Kid yet, it's obvious that there's going to be a flashback.

Indeed, we flash back to 1891. Billy Bonney (Kris Kristofferson) has been depredating parts of the New Mexico territory, and unsurprisingly the locals are tired of it. Garrett is about to be named sheriff of the county where Billy is based, charged with the responsibility of getting Bonney to move on or else face arrest. Billy scoffs at that idea, so once Garrett becomes sheriff, Billy is indeed arrested and faces the death penalty. Except that he's helped to escape.

Garrett goes to Santa Fe, the territorial capital, and meets with the territorial governor, Lew Wallace (Jason Robards, and yes that's the same Lew Wallace who wrote Ben-Hur) who, with some help from the rich cattleman types, put a bounty on Billy's head. Meanwhile back at Billy's hideout, he finds that there are people other than the authorities who would like him dead, and they show up at the old hideout where he and his gang used to stay where Billy went back to. They're going to try to kill him, but Billy is able to defeat them in a shootout, together with some help from a stranger named Alias (Bob Dylan, yes the singer).

The authorities learn that Billy has moved to the area where John Chisum (Barry Sullivan, and Chisum was the subject of a different Billy the Kid movie) has his cattle, so Garrett and some of the cattlemen's ring that also want Billy dead go there. The chase continues, and continues, until as we know from real life Billy is killed by Garrett, so I'm not giving away much here. It would be like saying the Japanese attack in the climax of From Here to Eternity.

As you might guess from my opening paragraph, I didn't much care for Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. It's slow, filled with those pointless zooms and pans that were a thing in movies of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and director Sam Peckinpah uses his signature style for filming violence -- of which there's a lot in this movie. Not that I have a thing against violence, but the Peckinpah style is tediously stylized, like watching everybody overact in an old silent movie or the deaths of the people from killer bees in The Swarm.

On the other hand, critics just seem to love love love this movie for reasons I totally can't fathom. I just don't see anything in it that makes it rise above other respected westerns. But since they do love it, it's the sort of movie you're going to want to watch and judge for yourself.

Gerard Dennis

Tonight's edition of Noir Alley, coming up at midnight and on only once because of tomorrow's 24-hour programming salute to Robert Redford, is a movie that's not really a noir, but the sort of noir-adjacent crime movie that's still fairly well up Eddie Muller's alley: The Great Jewel Robber, at midnight tonight, so still late evening Saturday in more westerly time zones.

A "ripped from the headlines" pre-title sequence tells us about a man known as the "Raffles of Hollywood" among other things, a jewel robber to the stars who apparently took quite a few people for a lot of money before he was sentenced to prison. As you might guess, the movie tells us the story of this man and how he started, although at least this time I wouldn't argue that it's a flashback in the traditional sense of the word.

Gerard Dennis (David Brian) lives in a rooming house in Toronto. There's been a series of robberies of furs and jewels that have baffled the police. That is, until a man comes in to one of the police stations. Not to confess, mind you, since this isn't the thief. But to tell the police they can catch him. It turns out that this man, a Mr. Blaine, owns the house where Gerard is renting a room, and has seen the stuff Gerard is hiding. Sure enough, they go over to the house and find the goods, and when Gerard gets back that night, arrest him.

Gerard told Mr. Blaine's daughter he was in love with her and hoping to marry her, much to her father's objections. But since they're not married, Gerard isn't allowed to write letters to her, something you'd think the prison would have told him before he tried writing any letters. When he finds out they're trashing those letters, he's pissed, and plots his escape from a prison work detail. He then goes to young Miss Blaine and gets money from her for fake passports and whatnot. Except that he's been lying to her, and goes to his real girlfriend Peggy, who knows of a safe-cracking job in Buffalo.

So Gerard and Peggy make it over the border, but when it comes time to do the job, Gerard learns that Peggy and the hotel bartender who set up this job are even bigger double-crossers than Gerard is. A dispute over it leads to Gerard getting hit and suffering several broken ribs for which he spends a couple of weeks in hospital. There, he falls in love with nurse Martha (Marjorie Reynolds), marrying her after he gets out of the hospital and taking her back to New Rochelle, where she got her first nursing job back in the day. It's also a place for him to find new territory where he isn't known and where he can steal more jewels, fencing and re-setting them.

But Martha isn't pleased with his being a thief and wants him to stop. He claims he will, but once again he's lying, so she too goes to the police to get them to capture him. This time, Gerard gets on a train cross-country and goes to Hollywood. On the train, he meets Mrs. Vinson (Jacqueline de Wit), who has lost a brooch. Gerard may have stolen it, but in any case he "finds" it and returns it to Mrs. Vinson, which is more of a way for him to get an in with the Beverly Hills and Hollywood crowds who are of course loaded and offer more opportunity for jewels and furs to steal.

The plot of The Great Jewel Robber is a fairly straightforward one, and frankly feels a bit boring in writing up the synopsis. That's grossly unfair to the movie. While it's not an all-time great, it's certainly serviceable and never less than interesting. David Brian does a good job as the charming heavy, and the docudrama style of storytelling works. Modern viewers may wonder how police never seemed to catch on to Gerard, although communication between various jurisdictions wasn't quite as good back in the late 1940s.

I hadn't heard of The Great Jewel Robber before the last time it was on TCM, but I'm glad they showed it and I got the chance to watch it.

TCM's Robert Redford tribute

Robert Redford and Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (8:00 PM)

Actor-turned director Robert Redford died back in September at the age of 89. Now it's time for the TCM programming tribute, which is a 24-hour salute all day and night tomorrow, Nov. 2. The salute includes eight movies in which Redford was the star; one at the beginning of his career in which he had a small role; one in which he has what it bascially a cameo; and one movie Redford directed but did not star in. The line-up is as follows:

6:00 AM A Bridge Too Far in which Redford like a lot of people has a small role;
9:00 AM Barefoot in the Park with Redford as a lawyer newly-married to Jane Fonda;
11:00 AM Downhill Racer featuring Redford as a hot-shot skier;
1:00 PM The Candidate, starring Redford as a young Senate candidate taking on an established senator;
3:00 PM All the President's Men in which Redford and Dustin Hoffman investigate the Watergate break-in and eventually bring down Richard Nixon;
5:30 PM The Sting, reuniting Redford and Paul Newman;
8:00 PM Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid;
10:00 PM The Way We Were where Redford has a tumultuous relationship with Barbra Streisand;
12:15 AM A Riber Runs Through It, the movie Redford directed about a family in early 20th century Montana;
2:30 AM The Hot Rock, a not very good movie about a jewel robbery; and
4:30 AM War Hunt,, a Korean War film from the beginning of Redford's career

Two by Popeye

I think I mentioned some time back that I started recording the Popeye cartoons that TCM has been running in the Saturday matinee block so that I could have something short to blog about when I had a second post lined up on a day for some reason for another. Recently, I watched a pair of Popeye shorts from 1940, Wimmin Hadn't Oughta Drive and Puttin on the Act.

A couple of things about these two shorts are interesting. One is that Bluto, who had been introduced to the print comic strip back in 1932, does not appear in either short. There's also the fact that the shorts are still in black and white, even though the Fleischer brothers had made full-length shorts in color, so one would guess that they would have the contractual right to use color here. Mae Questel is also not providing the voice of Olive Oyl, this being the period of about half a dozen years where Questel was not involved before coming back.

In Wimmin Hadn't Oughta Drive, Popeye gets a new car and of course wants to show it off to Olive. She wants to learn how to drive, but Popeye, instead of teaching her, basically just lets her take the wheel. This leads to all sorts of predictable consequences, especially when you consider the old stereotype about women drivers. (I suppose back in the earliest days of cars when the engines had to be cranked and people wore goggles and overalls because of the muddy roads and topless cars, women might have less of a desire to drive, but those days were long gone by 1940.) Some of the sight gags work, although I have a feeling most people will find this short even more dated than other Popeye shorts.

Puttin on the Act involves Olive Oyl finding a newspaper headling saying that vaudeville is coming back; as you'll know from my mention of lots of 1930s movies about the performing arts, vaudeville had been dying for years. Apparently in this timeline of the Popeye universe, he and Olive had done a vaudeville double act back in the day. So they decide that they're going to restart it. This again gives the opportunity for sight gags thanks to Olive's rather elastic limbs and Popeye's use of Olive as a baton. But there's also the chance to lampoon other Hollywood types as Popeye does a series of impersonations. Those are the funniest bit of this short.

Both shorts last a shade over six minutes, and thankfully my DVR got the timing on these correct so that neither the beginning nor the ending was cut off.

Note to Eddie Muller: the movie is not called Noir

Eddie Muller, in his Noir Alley wraparounds, mentions from time to time that some of the movies he picks are things that some people will only consider noir-adjacent, if that. I think a good example of a movie he selected but that I would not call noir myself was Suspense.

Barry Sullivan stars as Joe Morgan, a drifter who has moved west from Chicago, leaving behind a girlfriend named Ronnie (Bonita Granville) who is going to show up later to cause trobule. He's got an acquaintance out west who might be able to offer him a job, but that acquaintance says sorry. Perhaps Joe should try the theater across the street; such a big going concern probably always needs a new staff member.

That theater is an ice palace putting on a show with star Roberta Elva (Belita; a former Olympic figure skater in real life). Harry Wheeler (Eugene Pallette) is the assistant manager to theater owner Frank Leonard (Albert Dekker). Unfortunately, the only job available for Joe is in concessions. It doesn't exactly pay well but gives Joe the chance to watch Roberta skate, and she's good-looking enough to turn any man's head. So of course Joe starts lusting after her. The only thing is, she's already married -- and to Frank Leonard of all people. Oops.

So Joe has to come up with some other way to get closer to Roberta. He comes up with an idea when he sees that the box office isn't all that hot because, frankly, the show is getting boring as there's only so much that can be done in such an act. Joe is smart enough to know that there's is more that one can put into an act, and has the idea of coming up not with a ring of fire for Roberta to jump through, but a ring of knives. These will be allegedly sharp knives that are secured to the ring in such a way that Roberta has a small area to jump through. The new act is such a hit that Frank promotes Joe to another assistant position.

Joe continues, rather stupidly, to pursue Roberta, leading Frank to take Roberta off to the mountains while the show is on hiatus. Joe follows along with some papers only Frank can sign, which really ticks Frank off. Frank decides he's going to shoot Joe, but the plan doesn't go to plan. Frank misses, and the loud echo of the gun disturbs the large amount of snow, causing an avalance that kills Frank. But at least with Frank dead Joe and Roberta can marry and live happily ever after.

Yeah right, since the movie isn't anywhere near its running time. In fact, Frank's body is never found, and soon enough, back in Los Angeles, Joe gets the distinct feeling that Frank did not die in the avalanche but is happy enough for everybody to think he's still dead so that he can do whatever to Joe and get away with it, at least until the snow melts and there's no body where there should be one. And wouldn't the authorities have noticed where Frank dug his way out of the snow if it's really him?

Suspense is certainly a good idea for a movie, but the execution here is slightly subpar, I think in part because this was made at Monogram who didn't normally have the highest budgets. Suspense did get a bigger budget than normal, but it still comes across as a movie on a tight budget, with skating scenes feeling like they're padding things out and a surprisingly slow pace. It's not that Suspense is a bad movie so much as it feels like there's something that would make it a much better movie missing.

Missouri loves company

In looking through the offerings on Tubi to see what was available, I came across a movie I had never heard of with a halfway prominent cast and a premise that sounded interesting enough. At the very least, there was one member of the cast who would go on to win an Oscar some years later in the form of Lee Marvin. That movie was The Missouri Traveler.

Unfortunately, the print that Tubi ran had washed-out color and was panned-and-scanned from the original 1.85:1 aspect ratio down to 4:3, since the movie has apparently fallen into the public domain and got lots of video releases in the days before TVs went to 16:9. Brandon De Wilde is the nominal star here, and he too seemed destined to go onto big things before the car accident that killed him at the age of 30. De Wilde plays Biarn Turner, who as the movie opens is walking through rural Missouri circa 1911. He's picked up at the side of the road by Tobias Brown (Lee Marvin), a local farmer with a lot of land. Biarn, it turns out, is an orphan who claims to want to get to Florida, but goes to the town of Delphi instead because there's no marshall to capture him and return him to the reform school or wherever he came from.

In town, Tobias shows himself to be not particularly popular, as he parks his carriage next to the statue of the town's founding father and that brings out seemingly everybody in town, played by a whole bunch of character actors, with a couple of exceptions. One is Doyle Magee (Garry Merrill), who publishes the local newspaper and has a past of his own that we're going to learn about as the movie goes on. The other is local socialite and granddaughter of the town's founder, Anne Price. She's played by Mary Hosford, who didn't go on to become a successful actress but instead married extremely well and became Marylou Whitney, the eventual doyenne of the Saratoga racing scene. These two are going to be somewhat against Tobias for the rest of the movie, and try to give Biarn a better shot at life.

Not that Biarn wants their help that much. He wants to be independent and self-sufficient, and figures that the only way he can do it is to become a farmer, just like Tobias is. However, Biarn doesn't have any money of his own to get a start, or any land. He wants to learn from Tobias, but Tobias isn't exactly going to be generous. At least, not in the way one normally thinks of when one thinks generosity. Tobias is one of those tough people who knows how tough life can be and figures Biarn is going to need to learn that lesson. As an example, one of the running plot points in the movie is how Biarn should always make certain to get everything in writing.

Over a series of episodes, Biarn learns to plow land, is allowed to raise crops on it by Tobias, and then eventually wins the town's hearts over in the run-up to the big finale set on the Fourth of July. The Missouri Traveler is another of those movies where I can see why the people who made it would have wanted to make it. However, it's also another of those movies that comes across as less than the sum of its parts. The movie was distributed by Buena Vista, a company set up by Disney in the early 1950s to distribute live-action movies. As such, the movie comes across very much like a lot of the other Disney family-friendly movies of that era, both for good and bad. Families of today with younger children, especially boys, may still enjoy it. But The Missouri Traveler comes across as awfully saccharine too.

Tarawa Beachhead

TCM did a night of Julie Adams movies some time back. I could have sworn that I recently did a post on one of the other movies that night, although as it turns out that movie is going to be coming up some time later, on the Elvis Presley movie Tickle Me. I've got a different Elvis movie to do a post on since it's coming up on TCM later in the month. In any case, today's post is on a movie I hadn't heard of until TCM ran it the last time: Tarawa Beachhead.

Julie Adams is nominally the female lead here, although she's got a smaller role and doesn't show up until later in the movie since, as you might have guessed from the title, men are the main characters here. The movie opens with the battle for Guadalcanal back in 1942. A platoon of American marines under the command of Lt. Joel Brady (Ray Danton) is storming the island, although they face stiff resistance since the Japanese are hiding in caves on the island. Sgt. Tom Sloan (Kerwin Mathews) thinks a frontal attack on the Japanese is ill-advised, and he's right. When Brady tries just such an attack, the platoon is devastated, with only Brady, Sloan, and one other soldier, Pvt. Campbell, surviving. Worse, Brady shoots Campbell dead, in the back no less, when Campbell runs in horror.

Brady, for obvious reasons, doesn't want news of this to get out, and tries to threaten Sloan not to say anything about it. Back at base, when it's time for the debriefing, Brady tries a different tactic, suggesting that Sloan should be promoted for heroism. Sloan does indeed get promoted and gets sent to a different outfit under a general down in New Zealand away from the action. He doesn't get the chance to tell the truth about what happened, and since he didn't do it immediately, there are going to be questions about it if he does come clean later. But he's still planning on trying to make certain that the truth comes out and Lt. Brady gets what's coming to him.

This is where Julie Adams comes in. Sloan found that Pvt. Campbell had been writing letters to his wife Ruth (that's Julie Adams), and that Ruth lives close to where Sloan is now stationed. So he can go see her in order to deliver the letters, but also to find out more about what's going on in order to get justice for her husband's killing. Ruth lives on a ranch with her sister Paula (Karen Sharpe) and their father. But Sloan has another shock coming to him. Lt. Brady, as part of his duties, went to see the Mrs. Campbell (née Nelson) and the rest of the family to offer his "condolences", not that he's going to tell them the truth about how Campbell died. But Brady took the opportunity to start putting the moves on Paula. This only makes Sloan more determined to take Brady down, and also causes each of them to hate the other even more.

So you can guess what's going to happen next, which is that the two are going to be tasked with going on another mission together, this time on Tarawa atoll hence the title of the movie. The mission might just give Brady the chance to issue orders to Sloan that would lead to Sloan's death. Then again, there's still a Production Code in force....

Tarawa Beachhead is decidedly a B movie, although it's certainly a surprisingly dark idea for such a film. It's not bad, but it is certainly still a B and, as with a lot of these movies, there's a reason why it's not well remembered all these years later.