SHORT TAKES (7/5/24)

FLY-AWAY BABY (1937)

The marriage of reporter Torchy Blane (Glenda Farrell) to policeman Steve McBride (Barton MacLane) is delayed when a jeweler named Deveraux is shot and killed at his place of business and $250,000 worth of gems are stolen. Torchy gets mad when competing reporter Lucien Croy (Gordon Oliver), son of her newspaper's editor, is allowed into the crime scene before she is. It turns out that Croy was one of the last people to see Deveraux alive. Croy, deep in debt, wanted to borrow money from Deveraux; the two argued and Deverauz not only wouldn't give him money but threatened to tell Croy's father about his situation. Croy has alibis for the time of the murder, but when he announces that he is leaving on a round-the-world air trip, racing another reporter, Torchy decides to get in on the race action, thinking that Croy might be considering selling the stolen gems overseas. This is the second in a series of B-movies featuring Torchy Blane. It moves quickly, privileging pace over plotting—my biggest problem was, if this was a race around the world, why were the three reporters on the same vehicle so often? The last part of the race is set on a zeppelin and works up some thrills. Farrell is fun, though I find MacLane too stodgy to be much fun as her romantic partner (to be fair, there isn't much romance in the movie). I always like Gordon Oliver, a solid B-movie secondary player, and here he plays against type a bit as an unlikable character. There's a silly subplot about McBride's somewhat dim comic-relief associate, played by Tom Kennedy, quitting his job but constantly showing up anyway. A-movie character actor Harry Davenport has a small role near the end. If you're already a fan of Torchy or of Farrell, you'll like this, but others should probably steer clear. [TCM]

WOMAN IN THE DARK (1934)

Ralph Bellamy has just been released from prison after accidentally killing a man in a bar fight while defending the honor of his girlfriend (Nell O'Day). He has returned to his hometown to live in a cabin in relative isolation, though the sheriff, O'Day’s father, is not happy he's back. O'Day, however, is, and she goes to visit him one night to rekindle old sparks. Unfortunately, fancily attired Fay Wray shows up a bit worse for the wear and on the run from playboy gangster Melvyn Douglas, who has been her "keeper." When Douglas arrives, all hell breaks loose: Douglas calls the sheriff to tell him where his daughter is, Douglas' associate Brown shoots Bellamy's dog, and Bellamy punches Brown who falls and winds up with a life-threatening skull fracture. Certain to be wanted by the police, Bellamy takes Wray and heads to the big city even as Douglas tells the police that Wray has stolen jewels from him. When it looks like Brown may recover, Douglas plots to kill him to hang another murder charge on Bellamy. At 68 minutes, there is an awful lot of plot here (based on a short story by Dashiell Hammett) presented at a pretty good clip, but things never get too confusing. Though it missed being a pre-Code movie by a few months, it remains clear that Wray is Douglas' mistress, and her character is not punished at the end. Bellamy is not the most dynamic lead, though Wray and Nell O'Day are fine. Roscoe Ates does his usual comic relief part as the ex-con in the city. The reason to watch this is to see Melvyn Douglas as a bad guy. He's charming on the surface but pretty rough underneath, and it's a very good performance. [DVD]

NEW MOON (1931)

Sailing on the Caspian Sea, the ocean liner New Moon is headed for Krasnov. Cocky Russian soldier Michael Petrov (Lawrence Tibbett) flirts with Princess Tanya (Grace Moore) while she plays cards. When he feels dismissed by her, he goes out on deck and sings a vulgar song about a farmer's daughter to the delight of the peasants. Tanya follows him then asks him to translate the song for her. In doing so, he censors some of the rougher language, but then she reveals that she is well aware of the song's content by singing it in its original language. They do a bit of canoodling back in her stateroom—her father (Roland Young) spies through her keyhole and when his wife asks him if their daughter is in bed, he replies slyly, "Not yet." In Krasnov, Michael is upset to see Tanya heading off to the home of the governor, Boris Bursiloff (Adolpne Menjou), the stuffy but rich man she is to marry. She admits she's marrying for money, and tells him that he was just a shipboard fling. When he insults her, Boris assigns Michael to Fort Darvaz, a dangerous outpost where the ragtag soldiers are inclined to shoot any leader they don't like. However, Michael shoots first, showing the men he means business and gets them on his side. Tanya and her father visit, and the first thing she does is smack Michael several times in the face—Dad: "Is the customary horse-whipping over?" But when the fort comes under siege, the men are not so willing to fight until Michael rouses them with the song "Stouthearted Men" (have I mentioned this is based on an operetta?). Boris arrives, certain that Michael is marching to his death, but is he?

This is in theory based on a 1927 operetta by Sigmund Romberg and Oscar Hammerstein II, but except for a handful of songs and the basic melodramatic romance plot, this is nothing like the original, which was set in New Orleans and more faithfully adapted in 1940 with Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. But this is still pre-Code fun: it's silly and a bit campy and not at all to be taken seriously. The two leads are a little problematic. Tibbett and Moore (pictured) were both Metropolitan Opera stars and when they're singing, they're fine. But as screen actors, neither one had a long career. They're not awful but they don’t really inhabit their characters. Tibbett has a kind of goofy boyishness that eventually grew on me (he looks a little like Jack Black), but Moore is unappealing in almost every movie star way; she comes off more as the heroine's best friend rather than the romantic lead. The script doesn't help—we don't see their relationship develop into love, and we have to take it on faith that they're really attracted to each other. Menjou does a cold fish martinet type well, and the secret weapon of the movie is Roland Young, contributing welcome comic relief here and there. I liked it OK but couldn't help wishing that a different actress had played the princess. [TCM]

TRY AND GET ME! (1950)

Shots of a blind street preacher (which will get a callback at the end of the film) are followed by the credits rolling over a scene of Frank Lovejoy hitching a ride with a trucker. Lovejoy, with a pregnant and son at home, has been traveling around looking for a job and is headed back to the town of Santa Sierra, still jobless. At a bowling alley, Lovejoy chats with a brash young man (Lloyd Bridges) who offers him a job; unfortunately, that job is as a driver to help Bridges pull off small-scale robberies. Meanwhile, gung-ho reporter Richard Carlson, whom we also meet at that bowling alley, is writing exaggerated stories about a crime wave in the town, despite his socialist friend telling him that sensationalism in journalism is a social problem just like crime. Lovejoy and Bridges have a successful run of small robberies, and Lovejoy's wife thinks he's working at a legit job, but eventually Lovejoy decides to leave crime behind. Bridges talks him into one last job—kidnapping the son of a wealthy businessman—but it all goes rather brutally wrong. The son winds up dead and it's only a matter of time before Lovejoy and Bridges are arrested. With Carlson stoking the town's flames with his articles about their "crime wave," eventually a mob seeking their own brand of justice forms at the jailhouse with tragic results.

For most of its running time, this is a fairly average noir melodrama about a good guy whose moral compass quits working, leading him to get in over his head in a bad situation with a villainous psycho. In the last fifteen minutes, it takes a sharp violent turn that is fairly shocking for a 1950 movie. No spoiler here, but Bridges gives a balls-out performance that verges on over-the-top, like he's been waiting for the whole movie for this chance to show off. The furor of the townspeople is also presented well. Lovejoy, an underrated actor, is good, and his fairly placid exterior makes a good balance with Bridges' twitchy antics. He makes a solid, archetypal film noir lead, a good man led astray (though there is no femme fatale) through desperation. The attempt to target yellow journalism is not as strong as it could be, partly because they make the reporter (Richard Carlson) too nice, though perhaps it's appropriate for a film noir that, with a misguided anti-hero in the person of Lovejoy, there is a sort of misguided anti-villain in Carlson. Kathleen Ryan is low-key as the wife, and Katherine Locke is OK as a would-be femme fatale, though too vanilla to really be a bad girl, who sets her sights on Lovejoy. Renzo Cesana is the socialist friend who expresses the film's (somewhat grandiose) message: understanding, not hate, will lead us to the moral center of the universe. The story is based loosely on a real event. A rare film marketed as noir that actually is. Its original title, THE SOUND OF FURY is a better match than the current title. Pictured are Bridges and Lovejoy. [Criterion Channel]