THE EMPEROR WALTZ (1948)

Charming and good-natured Bing Crosby musical, much more fun than most critics allow. Perhaps they expected too much since Billy Wilder directed and co-wrote it; it's certainly not in the same league as other Wilder romantic comedies, such as SOME LIKE IT HOT or THE APARTMENT, but as a Crosby vehicle, it works quite nicely. In an operetta-like European setting, Crosby plays an American phonograph salesman trying to get the emperor of Austria (Richard Haydn) to endorse his product (he even has his dog along to strike the famous RCA "His Master's Voice" pose). He falls in love with countess Joan Fontaine, whose scoundrel of a father (Roland Culver) is trying to curry the emperor's favor by mating Fontaine's dog with one of the royal dogs. Of course, things get sticky for both the people and the dogs before the happy ending. The colorful sets and beautiful backgrounds (with a national park in Canada doubling rather nicely for the mountains of Austria) are definite pluses, as are the performances: Fontaine is relaxed, Culver is wickedly sly, and Crosby is at the peak of his leading man appeal. The bulk of the movie is told in flashback at a huge ball the emperor is throwing (Crosby calls it a "clambake") and Lucile Watson is loads of fun as a gossipy dowager relating the ups and downs of Fontaine's romance to party guests. Another plus: some good songs, including a yodeling number that Crosby sings on a mountain pass with his own echo. A couple of relatively minor minuses: the dog stuff takes center stage for too long and the mood of frothy whimsy is eventually flattened out by the end--at 106 minutes, it's maybe 15 minutes too long. But if you're in the mood for an old-fashioned romantic musical, this will satisfy you. [DVD]

HITLER--DEAD OR ALIVE (1942)

Bizarre B-movie propaganda film, ultra cheap but watchable. Ward Bond is a gangster, just out of Alcatraz after a 10-year stretch. He and his buddies (Warren Hymer and Paul Fix) visit a scientist who is offering a million dollars to anyone who can kill Hitler or bring him to justice--his brother was killed by the Nazis and he wants personal revenge. Bond and friends go to Canada, join the Royal Canadian Air Force (the story is set before the United States officially entered the war), hijack a plane and its pilot (Bruce Edwards), and head to Germany. They are caught and wind up in Dachau (presented as essentially just a prison), and claim to be spies with an important message for Hitler. Meanwhile, the Countess von Brandt (Dorothy Tree), mistress to a Nazi colonel, takes an interest in the fliers--she turns out to be the legendary Rosebud, a Resistance worker who helps to free prisoners of the Nazis. They escape (with Fix sacrificing his life for the rest) and Tree gives them a hiding place; though she's against Bond's murder plot because of possible retaliation by the Nazis against innocent women and children, she is forced to allow them to pose as musicians who accompany her to a social date with the Fuhrer. Joining them is an old acquaintance of Hitler's who, while saving his life from an assassination attempt years ago, accidentally gave Hitler a disfiguring scare on his lip, which is the reason he wears his distinctive mustache. In the climax, Bond gets Hitler (Bob Watson), and shaves off his mustache to make sure he's got the right man and not a double; when the Nazis catch up with them, they don't recognize their cowardly leader and they shoot him dead. Bond is killed by firing squad, but Edwards and Tree escape to the States to spread the message they've learned that it's not just one man but an entire evil movement that needs to be destroyed.

The above description makes the movie sound more interesting than it really is. As a scrappy pulp-fiction anti-Nazi adventure story, Warner's DESPERATE JOURNEY with Errol Flynn is far more enjoyable. The extremely low budget leads to cheap-looking sets and a terrible music score. The actors aren't bad, especially Dorothy Tree (who got her start in talkies in a wordless role as one of Lugosi's undead brides in DRACULA), although Bond gives a weak one-note, over-the-top performance. I like him a lot in supporting parts (GONE WITH THE WIND, IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, MALTESE FALCON) but maybe he just wasn't cut out for lead roles. The tone of the movie, if not quite comic, is light, but a scene near the climax of crying children being lined up against a wall and shot feels startlingly out of place. Watson is OK as a comic-book version of Hitler, and there is something satisfying in seeing him turn squealing coward when captured by Bond. [DVD]

FOLIES BERGERE (1935)

In the past, I have found myself immune to the charms of Maurice Chevalier, but I must admit he is quite good in this frothy musical, the best Astaire/Rogers musical that Astaire and Rogers never made. Chevalier seems to be playing a version of himself, a French music-hall entertainer named Charlier. He happens to be the spitting image of the famous financier Baron Cassini and so has worked an impression of the Baron into his act. One night, the Baron (also Chevalier) and his wife (Merle Oberon) come see Charlier's act, but before the two men can meet, Cassini is given the bad news that an land deal into which he has sunk a great deal of his bank's money has soured and he leaves, planning a secret trip to London in order to secure some loans before news of the potential crash can leak out. After he's left, his business partners decide to hire Charlier to impersonate Cassini at a social function the next night, which might be attended by the Minister of Finance. For no good reason except that it suits the plot, Charlier doesn't want the baroness to know about the impersonation, but the partners tell her anyway, so she knows but he doesn't know she knows. In the middle of the party, Charlier's jealous wife (Ann Sothern) arrives, which begins a string of improbable occurrences leading to the last half-hour becoming much like the Lunt-Fontanne comedy THE GUARDSMAN, with the Baroness being unsure if she spent the night with her husband or with the music-hall singer. (In the dialogue, everyone is much concerned about the two having kissed after the party, but the plotting really makes no sense unless the audience translates "kissing" to "having sex.") Of course, everything works out for everyone in the end.

I usually find Chevalier insufferable, but here, he has a light touch that works nicely, and he does an excellent job making his Cassini different from his Charlier--the two never meet, so no special effects are required. Oberon, another performer I've never liked much, is quite good here in her first Hollywood film; she's lovely and sexy and has a nice comic touch. Sothern is fine, but doesn't really get much screen time. There is strong support from such reliables as Eric Blore, doing his flustered butler bit to perfection, Robert Grieg, and Halliwell Hobbes. Early in the movie, there is the very modern touch of having the Baron and Baroness declare themselves as having an "open" marriage (with Walter Byron playing the somewhat effete admirer of the Baroness), but this makes the outrage over Oberon supposedly having an affair with Charlier seem blown way out of proportion. I'm guessing the foolish figure of the not-quite-lover (also found in Astaire/Rogers films and the 1939 screwball comedy MIDNIGHT) was a way to get around the strictures of the Code. I also need to mention the fine production numbers by Dave Gould, who won an Oscar for this movie; there are lots of Busby Berkeley touches, like neon lightning bolts, aerial shots of elaborate dance patterns, and dozens of dancing girls with props. The numbers are clustered at the beginning, with one last "Straw Hat" number at the end, and they are every bit as fun as any of the Warners' "Gold Diggers" routines. Highly recommended. [FMC]

FLIGHT ANGELS (1940)

Since the last two movies I wrote up involved airplane pilots, this one will complete the trilogy. The title refers to stewardesses, but they are really just background for the real story of a male pilot, his gal, his pal, and his ego. Dennis Morgan is a playboy pilot, Virginia Bruce is his long-suffering girlfriend, and Wayne Morris is the friend. Doctor John Litel discovers that Morgan's eyes are giving out and airline boss Ralph Bellamy reassigns him to teaching stewardesses a class on the basics of flying. Naturally, Morgan is frustrated staying on the ground and, when a new "stratosphere ship" that he and Morris have been working on is ready for a test, Morgan punches out Morris and takes the plane up himself, with almost tragic results. There is a subplot involving Morris's girl Jane Wyman, who gets into a knockdown catfight with snotty Margot Stevenson. The leads in this B-movie are all fine, with Wyman especially fun in her scenes in the stewardesses' lounge, where the man-hungry angels chatter endlessly. Rather dated, but solid in that breezy Warners way. Also with John Ridgely, Jan Clayton (later the mom in the original Lassie show), and Dorothea Kent. Best line, from Wyman: "The stork that brought you should have been arrested for smuggling dope!" [TCM]

CENTRAL AIRPORT (1933)

This doesn't seem to be a remake, nor has it been officially remade, but the plot is very familiar: two men, related by blood and/or in the same profession, fight for the love of a woman. In this case, the two men are brothers and pilots, and this specific set-up has distinct echoes of an earlier Warners film, THE CROWD ROARS in which the brothers were car racers. Richard Barthelmess is the older brother, an airline pilot who crashes in a storm and is fired for recklessness. He takes a job at a bank, replacing his kid brother Tom Brown who has a job as a test pilot. Barthelmess meets up with Sally Eilers, a stunt parachutist, and when her flying partner (also her brother) is killed in a crash, Barthelmess takes his place. The two travel around the country doing their act, and become lovers in the process, but when he balks at marriage (in his words, "Just because you're hungry, you don't have to buy a restaurant"), she leaves him. Of course, it being such a small world and all, doesn't she wind up pairing off with Brown, who *does* marry her. Barthelmess takes any flying job he can, and when we see him next, he's got a limp and an eyepatch, and there is still some spark between him and Eilers. Brown, now an airline pilot, crashes and Barthelmess flies out in a storm to save him. Will Barthelmess make it back in thick fog? Who will Eilers stick with? 

The movie has some good flying scenes--the director, William Wellman, was a pilot and directed the Oscar-winning WINGS--and some nice pre-Code touches. I especially like fact that there is no pussyfooting around in letting us know that Barthelmess and Eilers are sleeping together; this wouldn't have been possible in the movies a year later. The movie's main liability is Barthelmess who had been a big silent star, but whose career was fading fast in the early 30s. He's stiff and, at 38, seems a bit too old for the part; conversely, the 23-year-old Brown looks about 18 and seems a smidge too young. Still, Brown and Eilers are good, and the sexual tension between the three is well played. Fans of character actors will recognize Grant Mitchell, Charles Lane, and James Murray. Predictable but fun, with a less predictable and satisfying ending. [TCM]

BRIGHT EYES (1934)

I don't quite know how I got to be 40-something without ever having seen a Shirley Temple movie. Strictly speaking, that's not quite true since I've seen two movies from the mid-1940s in which she played supporting roles (SINCE YOU WENT AWAY and I'LL BE SEEING YOU), but I had never seen any of her child star movies of the 30s until now. This, featuring one of her first starring roles, is famous for her rendition of her signature song, "On the Good Ship Lollipop," and who knew that the ship in question was actually not a boat, but an airplane? Temple is the daughter of Lois Wilson, maid to the wealthy, snooty Smythe family. Temple's father was a pilot who died in a crack-up some years ago and the little girl has become something of a mascot to the local pilots ever since; she especially idolizes James Dunn, who treats Temple like a daughter. The Smythes don't like the pilots hanging around the house and decide, after Christmas, to fire Wilson. However, on Christmas day, Wilson is hit and killed in a car accident. The family agrees to keep Temple briefly, but plan on shipping her out to an orphanage as soon as possible. Dunn wants to adopt her, but so does Uncle Ned (Charles Sellon), a grumpy old man who is tolerated by the Smythes only because they stand to inherit a bundle from him, and who is happy only in the presence of Temple (and who insists on puncturing the family's pretensions by pronouncing their last name "Smith"). Entering this custody battle is Judith Allen, a visiting socialite who had been engaged at one time to Dunn; gee, if only she and Dunn could patch things up and make a traditional family for Temple! There is virtually no suspense as to the outcome, so a scene in which Temple stows away on Dunn's plane during a terrible storm is thrown in to give some tension to the last half of the film. It's not a bad movie--Temple is good and not nearly as syrupy as I had been led to expect. She has a fine antagonist in Jane Withers, playing the bratty daughter of the Smythes, who steals most of the scenes she's in. Dunn, best known as the alcoholic father in A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN, is also fine, and Jane Darwell has a small role as the family cook. The "Lollipop" number is a bit strange, occurring as it does in a passenger plane with a dozen or so butch pilots crooning along. I was rather hoping that Temple would wind up living with the hunky single pilots at the airport, though I suppose that unorthodox family situation would have been way too subversive for the time. [FMC]

THE GORILLA (1939)

An incredibly derivative comedy-thriller which shows why the Ritz Brothers are no longer fondly remembered in the collective pop culture consciousness. A killer known as the Gorilla is terrorizing the town; reporters seem to think that an actual gorilla is doing the killings, but notes are left at the scenes of the crimes. Lionel Atwill receives a note warning him that he is next and will be murdered at midnight, so he hires three detectives (the Ritz Brothers) to protect him. Unfortunately, they are totally inept at their job and at midnight, the lights go out and Atwill vanishes. The brothers stay on the case, investigating the houseful of suspects, including niece Anita Louise, her boyfriend Edward Norris, the creepy butler (Bela Lugosi) and a mysterious stranger (Joseph Calleia) who claims to be another detective. It turns out (Spoiler Alert!!!) that Atwill faked his own disappearance and that Calleia is the real killer. As a comedy team, the Ritzes fall somewhere between the Marx Brothers and the Three Stooges, much closer to the Stooge style of slapstick. They're not really my cup of tea, but I did laugh at their antics more often than I expected to. The screenplay, filled with "old dark house" elements from THE BAT WHISPERS and THE CAT AND THE CANARY, is based on a play by Ralph Spence which had been made into a movie twice before, but the plot specifics are also very reminiscent of a 1933 Chester Morris B-film called TOMORROW AT SEVEN which Spence wrote, apparently plagiarizing himself. Patsy Kelly is fun as a skittish maid, and Lugosi, who doesn't have much to do, winds up being a good guy. Not a great movie, but it's so good-natured that it's difficult to dislike. [TCM]

ADVENTURE IN IRAQ (1943)

A B-movie remake of the George Arliss film THE GREEN GODDESS. The sets are not as opulent, and the actors are all of the second rank, but it's a fairly strong Warner Brothers second feature. Pilot Warren Douglas is flying a husband and wife (John Loder and Ruth Ford) across Iraq when his plane runs out of gas and he has to land in the middle of the Iraqi desert. Loder is a dissolute fellow and his marriage seems on the verge of breaking up, so of course some mild sparks fly between the wife and the pilot, but that matter must take a back seat to survival. Luckily, they are found and taken in by Paul Cavanagh, the sheik of the village of Ghatsi. However, he has dark plans afoot, holding them hostage in hopes that his three brothers, who are about to be executed by the British as Nazi spies, will be freed. The only other major character is Cavanagh's British butler, Barry Bernard, who may or may not be sympathetic to his fellow countrymen. The plot and even individual scenes follow the original movie very closely, even down to the same closing line. Cavanagh is fine, but will not erase memories of Arliss, who was more charmingly eccentric in his take on the character. As a supporting actor in A-movies, Loder almost always seems out of his element, but he is fine here and does a nice job as the creep whom you know will redeem himself through sacrifice by the end. Ford is good, as is the handsome Douglas. The WWII atmosphere is handled lightly: there is a reference to Douglas having been a Flying Tiger earlier in the war (though nothing is done with that), and the Nazi collaboration charges against the brothers does not extend to Cavanagh, which allows him to escape relatively unpunished at the end, as Arliss does in the original. At just under an hour, it moves along nicely. Even though this is a Warners film, it must be out of copyright because I saw it on an Alpha Video DVD; the print condition is great, which is rare for Alpha. [DVD]

THE UNFAITHFUL (1947)

Interesting reworking of the 1940 Bette Davis classic THE LETTER. Ann Sheridan is the wife of an architect (Zachary Scott) who is rebuilding his business after returning from duty overseas during the war. The night before her husband comes back from a business trip, Sheridan is surprised by an intruder; after a violent struggle, she kills him with a knife and claims self-defense. But there's more to the case than meets the eye: it turns out that the intruder was an artist with whom Sheridan had carried on an affair while Scott was away in the war. Sheridan doesn't tell the police or her attorney friend (Lew Ayers) about this until a sexy bust that the artist made of Sheridan crops up and an art dealer (Steven Geray) and the artist's widow (Marta Mitrovich) try to blackmail her; after all the facts come out, Sheridan winds up on trial for murder. In the 1940 version, Davis is a conniving bitch; here, Sheridan is a misunderstood war wife who married in a hurry, then didn't see her husband for years, and the murder actually *is* done in self-defense, which allows Sheridan to escape Davis's punishment. Sheridan is at her best, discarding the rather wooden mannerisms that mar some of her earlier performances; Scott, whom I've never thought much of, is also quite good. Eve Arden provides great fun, as usual, in the supporting part of a gossipy friend of the family who starts out as unsympathetic but winds up being a voice of reason. The power of malicious gossip briefly becomes a thematic element, but not much is done with it. Though the plotting is a bit loose, there is some amusing dialogue. My favorite exchange comes when one gossiping society lady says, "If I came home to a strange man in my house, I just don't know what I'd do," and another lady replies, "You'd give him 48 hours to leave." Other cast members, all of whom do good work, include John Hoyt as a cop, Jerome Cowan as the prosecuting attorney, and Jane Harker as a friend of Arden's. Not as steamy or atmospheric as the 1940 movie, but it does manage to stand alone in its own right and is well worth watching. [TCM]

THREE ON A MATCH (1932)

To see what all the fuss is about concerning the pre-Code era, this is the movie to see, maybe on a double bill with BABY FACE. It's short (64 minutes, too short to really do the material justice, but it does move at a lightning pace), has crime, violence, sex, and debauchery, features three standout performances, and is loads of fun. The movie begins in 1919 and moves forward a few years at a time, with newsreel footage and period music to set each scene; we follow the paths of three young women from their playground days through their late 20's. Mary (Joan Blondell) is the school tramp, showing off her bloomers and skipping class to go smoking with the boys; she winds up spending some time in a reform school before becoming a chorus girl. Ruth (Bette Davis) is the valedictorian who goes to business school and winds up as a secretary. Vivian (Ann Dvorak), pretty and popular, gets married to a lawyer (Warren William) and has a son, but finds the pampered life boring. In 1930, the three meet up for lunch and use one match to light three cigarettes, defying a legend that says one of the three will meet with an early death. Soon, Dvorak has left her family to hang out with no-good but handsome Lyle Talbot; she becomes an alcoholic and a drug addict and, when Talbot can't repay a big gambling debt, she arranges to have her son kidnapped to ransom for cash. In the meantime, Blondell has married William and Davis is their governess, but the last half of the movie is pretty much focused on the tragic Dvorak, leading to a wild and woolly climax with a truly shocking last scene for Dvorak.

Dvorak is the standout here, doing a great job going from mild to restless to slutty to debauched. Blondell is fine, but Davis has very little to do--in fact, after the three meet up for their fateful lunch, she's barely involved in the proceedings at all. Talbot is excellent, almost as good as Dvorak as a guy who's slick and charming on the outside, but who falls apart quickly when the going gets rough--though he went on to appear in dozens of movies, he was rarely able to show the kind of spark he does here. Humphrey Bogart and Allen Jenkins are thugs, and Edward Arnold has a small but important part as the gangster boss--we first see him in a distorted close-up mirror, plucking his nose hairs, and it's a creepy moment. The three young actresses who play the trio as girls (Anne Shirley, Virginia Davis, and Betty Carse) are good, and one of my favorite child actors, Frankie Darro, plays one of the smoking boys in the schoolyard scene. Glenda Farrell, Clara Blandick, and Grant Mitchell also appear. A must-see for anyone interested in the minor masterpieces of pre-Code Hollywood. [TCM]

THE BEGINNING OR THE END (1947)

This docudrama about the development of the atomic bomb is problematic because the writers and director seem to have been unable to decide how to tell its story and wound up torn between two different and basically contradictory impulses: a dry documentary and an intimate tale of the people involved. The movie jerks back and forth between these two approaches and winds up feeling stagy and dishonest. For most of the film, we see the growth of the Manhattan Project filtered through three characters with differing viewpoints: Army General Brian Donlevy represents the military, recent college graduate Tom Drake stands in for the community of scientists, and Donlevy's assistant Robert Walker bridges the two: he's an army colonel but he's also much closer in age and outlook to Drake. The story begins with a group of research scientists, headed by Robert Oppenheimer (Hume Cronyn), getting Albert Einstein on their side to give their experiments with atomic fission some credibility. President Roosevelt signs off on their project and the race is on to develop a useable atomic weapon before the Nazis do. Fairly dry scenes showing the research alternate with somewhat more emotional and philosophical moments between Drake and Walker. Both men have female love interests, but they seem far more interested in their work (and, occasionally, each other) than in anything as mundane as home and family. I have no idea how much of what passes for scientific fact in this movie is real, but the scenes of experimentation are actually the most interesting. Other actors include Richard Haydn, Joseph Calleia, Hurd Hatfield, John Litel, and Jonathan Hale; they each get at least one big scene, but they all (military and scientists alike) tend to blur together behind the starring trio. To its credit, the movie, released just two years after Hiroshima, does deal with the discomfort that some of the principals felt about what they were doing and where it could lead (and one character does die from an accident involving radioactive material), but that is kept in the background, and the military view that the bomb was a necessity for ending the war is never seriously questioned. The opening, a fake newsreel showing a copy of the movie being put in a time capsule, is ludicrous, but it's mostly uphill from there. Interesting, if a bit long and rarely as compelling as it wants to be. [TCM]

THE WIND (1928)

Classic film from the late silent period. Lillian Gish is a young woman who has come to the barren wastes of Texas from Virginia to live with her cousin (Edward Earle) and his jealous wife (Dorothy Cumming). The land is constantly scoured by hot winds and making a go of it there is tough for anyone--the families of the small settlement are sometimes reduced to eating horse guts. The rather soft and vulnerable Gish, who is a bit high strung and is often unnerved by the sound of the wind, is a hit with Earle and his kids, so the wife forces Gish to take a rough and tumble cowboy (Lars Hanson) up on his proposal of marriage to get her out of the house. Actually, a slimy salesman (Montague Love) whom Gish met on the train also wants her, and Gish considers this option, but when she finds out that Love is married and only wants her as his mistress, she decides to marry Hanson. All the evidence we see suggests it's a sexless marriage of convenience for both of them (she gets a place to stay, he gets a housekeeper). During a particularly nasty cyclone, Love is found unconscious out in the elements and Hanson brings him to his house to recover; while the rest of the men go back out in the storm, Love rapes Gish and the next morning, she shoots him dead and throws his body outside. Hanson returns just as Gish seems to have completely lost her senses; he is able to comfort her and we are left to believe that Gish has at last adjusted to her surroundings and the two will live happily ever after.

The constant wind is a plus, though it is so very constant that I had a hard time believing that anyone in his or her right mind would actually choose to remain living in such a place; I know that it serves a somewhat symbolic purpose, and a case could be made that our over-the-top experience of the wind is a mirror of how Gish sees it, not necessarily how the rest of the characters do, but still, my willing suspension of disbelief was stretched a bit. Most of the actors are good--the florid silent style of acting is pretty much absent from this movie, except for some figurative mustache-twirling from villain Love. Though she's overshadowed by Gish and Hanson, Cumming is very good, giving the most "modern" performance in the movie. Apparently, the original ending had Gish, after killing Love, going mad and wandering in the storm to her certain death. I'd like to see that ending, but I still think that the current happy ending works just fine. The scenes of the wind and sand beginning to break the house apart are well done, as is a creepy scene of Love's body getting buried, by nature itself if you will, by the wind and sand. Overall, not quite as great a film as its reputation suggests, largely because of some plotholes attributable to a lack of backstory--Gish and Hanson's characters could use some fleshing-out--but certainly worth watching. [TCM]

THE MIND READER (1933)

Minor, fairly predictable melodrama with only Warren William to recommend it. I like William when he plays a total shit (as in EMPLOYEE'S ENTRANCE) or a detective (his Perry Mason movies); here, he's on shakier ground as an oily con man who falls in love and tries to give up his grifting ways, but is sucked back in anyway. We see him in a series of con jobs: operating as a "painless dentist," selling hair tonic, and working as a carny for a flagpole sitter (his sidekick Allen Jenkins). Soon, William sets himself up as Chandra the Great, a mind-reader. His gimmick is that he has the audience write questions on small pieces of paper, burns them in a bowl, then "reads" the messages from the great beyond and answers them--actually, the questions are dumped from the bottom of the bowl to Jenkins, sitting under the stage, who transmits the questions to William, wearing earphones in his turban. This is fun to watch for a while, especially when they trick a small-town sheriff who wants to run them out but ends up a big fan. But soon, William falls for young Constance Cummings and she forces him to go straight. Life as a door-to-door salesman doesn't work out and, behind Cummings' back, William goes back to the mind-reading biz, getting some high society women as clients. When distraught Mayo Methot throws herself down an elevator shaft as a result of William's doings, everything goes downhill until William winds up on the run from a murder charge. William is at his best in an onstage drunken breakdown late in the film. Jenkins is good, as is Clarence Muse as another assistant. Clara Blandick (OZ's Auntie Em) has a small role. Jenkins has the movie's final line, a humorous reference to the end of Prohibition. [TCM]

DANGEROUSLY THEY LIVE (1942)

This wartime propaganda thriller is OK, but it feels like a rehash of 3 or 4 other movies of its kind with nothing new added to make it stand out. Actually, I had some fun imagining it as a Nurse Sara Keate movie (see MYSTERY HOUSE, my April 2 review), only instead of Ann Sheridan, we get John Garfield. The movie opens with Nancy Coleman, a British spy, heading off in a cab to deliver important information to her superiors. The cab driver, working for a ring of Nazis, attempts to kidnap her, but instead they get into an accident and she is taken to a hospital where she comes under the care of intern John Garfield. She has temporary amnesia, recovers quickly, but decides to keep up the act when one of the Nazis (Moroni Olsen) arrives at the hospital claiming to be her father. She agrees to go off to Olsen's estate, taking Garfield with her. She confides in Garfield and, though he is skeptical at first, he is soon convinced that they are in fact being held prisoner in the house until the Nazis can figure out if she's faking or not. A former teacher of Garfield's, notable psychiatrist Raymond Massey, is called in on the case--Coleman assumes he's a spy too, but Garfield can't believe it. Of course, Massey is too sinister looking *not* to be a spy, and soon Garfield and Coleman fear for their lives. The story builds nicely, although too much screen time is spent establishing the prisoner status of the two leads. There must have been a fair amount of pre-release editing; John Ridgely gets seventh billing but is only seen fleetingly in the first few minutes of the film. Another actor, Matthew Boulton, is given screen credit but never seen at all. The "old dark house" elements that might have given this movie more atmosphere are spoiled as the house is not nearly as old or dark as it should have been. Still, it's worth watching for Garfield and Massey, and to see how the amnesia plotline works out. Also with Lee Patrick as a nurse and Frank Reicher as a creepy butler. [TCM]

THREE COINS IN THE FOUNTAIN (1954)

How this piece of drippy romantic pap ever got nominated for an Academy Award for best picture is beyond me. It won an Oscar for cinematography, which is at least vaguely understandable since the Cinemascope compositions, many of which were shot on location, are lovely to look at. But what you have to watch and listen to while enjoying the scenery is pretty dreadful. Maggie McNamara plays a young woman newly arrived in Rome to take a job as a secretary, replacing Jean Peters, who will be going back to the States in a few days. The two room with the slightly older and wiser Dorothy McGuire, herself a secretary to a famous writer (Clifton Webb)--think of the relationship between Bette Davis and Monty Woolley in THE MAN WHO CAME TO DINNER, but with virtually no charm, chemistry, or wit. We follow the women's romantic complications as they play out over several days. Peters defies company policy and dates local translator Rosanno Brazzi, leading to his dismissal; they live "in sin" for a day and a half or so, but Brazzi won't commit to her because he's lost his job and cannot support her. McNamara gets an itch for a handsome playboy prince (Louis Jourdan) and pretends to have lots in common with him in order to get him interested in her. McGuire, supposedly a drab old maid, but looking only a couple of years older and just a tiny bit less lovely than Peters, has pined away for Webb for years and her decision to leave him to go back the U.S. pushes the effete Webb, who discovers he only has a short while left to live, into proposing a marriage of friendship (the character is not officially "gay," but, c'mon, it's Clifton Webb!). All three relationships seem headed for disaster, but in a truly dopey and completely unexplained ending, all three women get the men they want, and apparently get to stay in photogenic Rome as a bonus. The acting is OK, with McGuire and Jourdan taking top honors, but it's the slipshod writing that sinks the movie. Almost nothing that happens rings true to life, and the "fairy tale" aspects of McNamara's story are particularly badly handled. When they all meet at the famous fountain of Trevi in the last scene, we have no idea why everything is suddenly working out for them, when just a few hours before, they were all practically ready to throw themselves off of balconies. Good looking, but empty headed, and a waste of the talented McGuire and the sexy Jourdan. [FMC]

MYSTERY HOUSE (1938)

The fourth and final B-mystery featuring nurse Sarah Keate, creation of writer Mignon Eberhart, played here by Ann Sheridan. This is the weakest of the batch, though it has a promising set-up. During a getaway weekend at his hunting lodge, businessman Eric Stanley breaks the news to his partners that he will need to use their personal securities to shore up the company; this news doesn't sit well with a couple of the younger partners (William Hopper and Anthony Averill) and that night, Stanley is found dead in his room, apparently a suicide--though we know that he was shot by someone else and the gun planted in his hand later. Sheridan, present at the lodge as nurse to Stanley's aged aunt (Elspeth Dudgeon), is asked by Stanley's niece to call in her detective boyfriend, Lance O'Leary (Dick Purcell). When all the relatives and guests are gathered at the lodge again, Purcell and Sheridan do some sleuthing and, during a snowstorm that keeps everyone from leaving the property, they discover who the guilty party is, but not before the body count rises. The snowbound element has some potential, but is mostly wasted, and a needed mood of gloom and doom is never developed very well--the lighting is much too bright and the sets too sparse. Purcell is the weakest male lead of the four (in previous movies, the boyfriend was played by Guy Kibbee, Patric Knowles, and Lyle Talbot) and one of the biggest reasons this short hour-long film feels too long. Sheridan is fine but doesn't have enough to do. Dudgeon is good but the rest are merely serviceable. Only true-blue Nurse Sarah fans will need to see this one: the others are mentioned in my review of WHILE THE PATIENT SLEPT. [TCM]

THEY MADE ME A CRIMINAL (1939)

It was startling enough to discover that John Garfield's first starring role was in a movie with the Dead End Kids, but I was even more surprised to find that it's quite an enjoyable little movie. Garfield is a boxer who has the public persona of a pure and innocent mama's boy but in reality is something of a low-life who drinks and hangs out with thugs and sluts. After celebrating a win in the ring, Garfield gets in a drunken fight, passes out, and wakes up the next morning believing he is responsible for a killing. He is presumed dead in a car wreck and hightails it out of the big city, changing his name and winding up as a drifter out West on a "reform school" farm run by Gloria Dickson and her aging mother, May Robson. Dickson's kid brother (Billy Halop) and his fellow ruffians (the Dead End Kids) idolize Garfield as he becomes a stabilizing older-brother figure to them. Garfield enters an amateur boxing event to win money so Dickson can buy a gas station to supplement the income from her struggling farm, but a picture of him is published in the newspapers and a cop from back East (Claude Rains) who all along never believed that Garfield was really dead comes nosing around, ready to nab him on murder charges if he steps into the ring. Will Garfield skip out on the kids and a chance to be a good guy, or will he do the noble self-sacrificing thing and risk arrest? From the above plot outline, you can easily see the potential for cliche situations, but the characters are given interesting shades by the writers and actors and the film keeps moving along nicely. As the leading lady, Dickson is a bit of a letdown, but Garfield is sexy, as is Ann Sheridan who has a criminally small role as Garfield's tart in the opening scenes. Halop and the other kids (including Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall) are all quite convincing and Robson is her usual fun "spunky old lady" self. Bizarrely, the weak link in the proceedings is the usually top-notch Claude Rains--he is terribly miscast in his relatively small role as a rumpled cop and seems to have just given up on trying to give any color at all to his character. Also with Ward Bond and Warners' supporting stalwarts John Ridegly and Louis Jean Heydt. Highlight scenes include a strip poker game aimed at getting money out of a rich kid and a long sequence in which Garfield and the kids, who have gone swimming in a giant irrigating water tank, are stranded when the water level falls. [TCM]

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW (1965)

As a lapsed Catholic boy, I am still driven now and then to religious movies, especially at Easter. I enjoy the high camp of DeMille's THE TEN COMMANDMENTS (I know it's a Passover film, but can I help it if the networks confused me as a child by always running it at Easter?) and the more serious, austere, and ambiguous films of directors like Ingmar Bergman and Robert Bresson, and I even have a soft spot for those impossibly reverent, usually lifeless spectacles like KING OF KINGS. This film by gay Catholic Marxist director Pier Paolo Pasolini is unique in the canon of Jesus movies. It is reverent to the extent that the narrative is straight out of the Gospel of Matthew, but it is filmed in the Italian "Neorealist" style, almost as though a documentary or reality show crew is following Jesus around. The actors are almost all amateurs and the sets are (I assume) found locations in the hills of Italy, which double fairly well for the Holy Land. The upshot is that this movie brings Jesus to life more than any other film I've seen. There is surely no need here for a detailed plot summary; the film covers most of the highlights of the Christ story including His birth, the visit by the Wise Men, Herod's Slaughter of the Innocents, Christ's temptation by Satan, His encounter with John the Baptist (and John's later encounter with Salome), and on to the Crucifixion and Resurrection. Pasolini's non-pro actors don't have much dialogue, but they have faces ranging from lovely (Christ, played by Enrique Irazoqui, and the young Virgin Mary, played by Margherita Caruso) to frat-boyish (the soldiers who carry out Herod's slaughter) to grotesque (lepers and various onlookers), and much of the story is told through close-ups of the characters. The best example of this is the opening: Joseph, discovering that Mary is pregnant (and apparently not by him) walks away from her in anger and confusion, but is met by an angel (a rather scruffy young woman in plain white robes) who tells him what to do. Neither Mary nor Joseph has any dialogue, but their faces (and body language) express their feelings. There are a couple of nicely done montages of Christ preaching, and the intense Irazoqui varies between loving concern and angry passion. His Christ is the most interesting portrayal I've seen yet. The social messages of Jesus are made clear, but so are His fiercer concerns about the soul. The eclectic musical score ranges from Bach to the blues (folk singer Odetta singing "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child"). A superbly made film, accessible to the religious and the agnostic alike. The Water Bearer DVD is OK--it is letterboxed, but the print is not in great shape and the subtitles are occasionally hard to see. This cries out for a restored Criterion edition. [DVD]

BEN-HUR (1925)

Not the award-winning Charlton Heston movie, but the silent film on which the 1959 remake was based. It's been a long time since I've seen the later film so I can't really do much direct comparison except to say that both cost a lot of money to make and both were big box-office hits. It's subtitled "A Tale of the Christ," and is indeed bookended by the Nativity and the Crucifixion, but it's really the tale of Judah Ben-Hur, the latest in a long line of Jewish princes. With Roman tyranny worsening, the Hur family riches are spirited away by the loyal slave Simonides. Judah (Ramon Novarro) meets up with boyhood pal Messala (Francis X. Bushman); at first, their reunion is friendly, but it becomes clear that Messala has become a ruthless Roman through and through, and when a stone falls from the Hur balcony and injures the new Roman governor, Messala has Judah, his mother, and his sister arrested. The women languish forgotten in prison, becoming lepers, and Judah becomes a galley slave on a Roman ship. His bravery during a pirate raid leads his "boss" to adopt him and he becomes renowned as a great athlete, but is still a tortured soul as he searches for not only his family but also his missing fortune. Along the way, he rides in a chariot race against Messala, finds his family, falls in love with Esther (May McAvoy), daughter of Simonides, and becomes a follower of Jesus Christ. The first half of the movie is fast-moving and mostly great fun; the last half is slower going, and the ending, after the Crucifixion, is rather anti-climactic. Most of the acting is a little less stagy than the usual silent acting type, though Novarro and the women who play his family members do have their overboard moments. It helps that Novarro is handsome and that the sets are spectacular. The big setpieces--the sea battle and the chariot race--are impressive, as are the Technicolor scenes inserted periodically, and the opening Nativity scene is also nicely done, looking like a procession of animated religious postcards. It's a little odd that we never actually see Christ, just his hand or his feet or his glow. Good Easter season viewing, and a great opportunity to see a famous silent star at the peak of his powers and popularity. [TCM]

CLIVE OF INDIA (1935)

Almost everything wrong with this undernourished historical epic can be summoned up by imagining LAWRENCE OF ARABIA remade as a 90-minute TV movie with Tom Selleck in the title role. Selleck is fine when he sticks to his strengths (light adventure and romantic comedy), but he would be quite at sea as Lawrence; similarly, Ronald Colman, excellent as a man of quiet authority in movies like LOST HORIZON and THE LATE GEORGE APLEY, has no business playing the real-life Baron Robert Clive, an impetuous, eccentric empire builder. At the start, we see him as a common clerk with the East India Company in 1748, and, over the following decades, he rises in the company by joining its militia and helping to bring about major victories against the French (and, I assume, the natives) in colonizing India for the British Empire. After one particularly important victory, he installs a "puppet" ruler (Cesar Romero, playing the kind of ruler that George Bush would undoubtedly like to have in Iraq); in gratitude, Romero gives Colman a small fortune and this leads to a scandal back home in which Parliament votes to censure him, casting a shadow over his twilight years. Colman never comes across realistically as the kind of feisty oddball that Clive is written to be. Loretta Young does fine as his long-suffering wife, who seems a bit happy with his disgrace, since it means he'll be retiring and not journeying off to India whenever he feels adventurous. Mischa Auer, Colin Clive and Leo G. Carroll play supporting roles. Aside from Colman's miscasting, the other big problem is the production, or lack thereof. Though there are a couple of interesting set pieces, including a brief look at the infamous "Black Hole of Calcutta" incident, most of the action is kept offscreen. There are long scenes of dialogue in which characters explain things to us and each other, then, over a montage of indistinct action scenes, we get title cards which tell us about the exciting events we don't actually get to see. The climactic battle of Plessey comes off looking like a tableau of Washington crossing the Delaware. Potentially exciting material that never comes fully to life. [FMC]

MARRIED BACHELOR (1941)

Silly romantic comedy made bearable mostly by its amiable cast. Robert Young is a charming young man who has gotten by for years on small-potatoes schemes and scams; his wife Ruth Hussey is ready for some stability. Young promises Hussey he'll go respectable, but he winds up in a partnership with a small-time bookie (Sam Levene). When Young takes a long-shot bet on a horse race from thuggish Sheldon Leonard, the horse wins and they owe Leonard $17,000, which is about $16,000 more than they have. In an attempt to get some money owed to them, Young and Levene go to penniless professor Felix Bressart, who gives them a manuscript on modern marriage; if they get it published, they might be able to pay Leonard. Young finagles his way into the office of publisher Lee Bowman, presenting the book as a bachelor's jaded view of married life; Bowman takes the book and when it's promoted into a bestseller, Young has to appear in public as a bachelor, which understandably irritates his wife, who gets back at him by posing as an unmarried woman and flirting with Bowman. Of course, a happy ending is never in doubt. The screenplay, by future MGM studio head Dore Schary, has a screwballish feel and some good ideas, but the movie is never able to transcend its B-movie feel. The actors are all fine, with Leonard especially funny (though not at all threatening) as a slang-talking hoodlum who has to have all his conversations translated for Bressart by Young. Connie Gilchrist has an amusing moment at the very end. [TCM]


THE KID FROM TEXAS (1939)

Dennis O'Keefe plays a Texas cowboy who has somehow developed a taste for polo out on the range. Members of a rich Eastern family come out to O'Keefe's ranch to buy polo horses; when they decide to take Lone Star, O'Keefe's favorite horse, he heads back with them to help train the horse. Of course, he's also fallen in love with the daughter (Florence Rice) and we know it's just a matter of time before she figures out that she's in love with him, despite his crude galumphing ways. Rice's brother (Anthony Allan) and fiance (Robert Wilcox) allow O'Keefe to join them on their ritzy polo field, but his hot-dogging ways cause him to be thrown off the team, so he joins up with a Wild West show and develops a hit novelty act with a "cowboys vs. Indians" polo team. O'Keefe and Rice try to forget each other, but things are righted by the end. This lightweight second feature has some bright moments and a decent supporting cast including Buddy Ebsen as O'Keefe's sidekick, Jessie Ralph as Rice's wise old Aunt Minnie, and Jack Carson as a reporter who becomes O'Keefe's PR man. O'Keefe makes a handsome and charming lead, though Rice is a bit colorless. As comedies about cowboys and polo go, this is near the top of the heap. [TCM]

SCARFACE (1932)

This is a historically important pre-Code movie: in its day, it was considered extremely violent and for that reason, and because it supposedly glorified the gangster lifestyle, it was a frequently censored film. It also helped to establish the gangster movie genre as we know it today--even THE GODFATHER, which is often thought of as the, well, "godfather" of the modern gangster movie, owes much to SCARFACE. Nevertheless, the movie is rather slow going for much of its running time. Paul Muni plays Tony, a two-bit hood who acts on his aspirations to be rich and powerful; he gets in good with crime boss Johnny Lovo (Osgood Perkins), killing off betrayers and rivals, but he eventually goes too far for Lovo's comfort so Tony kills Lovo and anyone else who stands in his way. Contrasted with his rise in power is his messy private life; he is interested in Poppy (Karen Morley), Lovo's girl, but she plays hard to get. Clearly, his real feelings lie with his sister Cesca (Ann Dvorak); he's overly protective of her (perhaps with some reason, since she seems headed into a rather "loose" lifestyle), but his protection seems to spring mostly from his own unacknowledged physical lust for her. Tony's trusted right-hand man Rinaldo (George Raft) falls for Cesca and while Tony is gone in hiding for a while, Rinaldo marries Cesca. When Tony returns, he finds the two living together and, not realizing they are husband and wife, kills Rinaldo. The climax has a horde of cops closing in on Tony; Cesca wants to kill him, but can't bring herself to do so, so she winds up helping him to fend off the cops. They both end up dead.

Relationships between characters are not always clear, and some of the acting is weak. Muni and Dvorak are very good, as is Raft (he seems fresh here, but he got stuck in an acting rut for most of the rest of his career). Morley is a weak link--she seems totally disengaged from her character, though I can't help but think that this is partly a fault of the direction (by Howard Hawks). Osgood Perkins (the father of Anthony Perkins) is not a commanding enough presence to be a believable crime boss--he seems like he should be a whiny underling. Some of the cinematography is quite good, especially the long tracking shots that start the movie, when we see Muni make his first hit after an all-night party. Critics have noticed the preponderance of "X" shapes, mostly in shadows and usually related to the foreshadowing of death scenes. This is the second time I've seen the movie and I think it's more worth seeing as a historical example than has a fully-engrossing movie. The 1983 remake with Al Pacino isn't a particularly good movie, but it does highlight the undercurrent of incest which is only hinted at in the original, and it also has a hell of an ending, closely modeled after the 1932 ending but again much more explicit. [TCM]

GOVERNMENT GIRL (1943)

It's true that I'm not the world's biggest Olivia de Havilland fan but I have grown to like her over the years; however, it seems she did her weakest work in 1943, with PRINCESS O'ROURKE (horribly bad) and this movie (not horrible but not all that good). The narrative is set in the same context as George Stevens's classic THE MORE THE MERRIER (which came out several months before this movie), with events playing out against the background of a crowded wartime Washington filled with love-starved females. Sonny Tufts is an auto executive who patriotically comes to D.C. to do his wartime duty by setting up plane manufacturing plants. Olivia de Havilland is a pool secretary who meets Tufts in a hotel lobby and takes an instant dislike to him; of course, she winds up assigned to work for him. She has two other admirers, but one (Paul Stewart) isn't true-love material--if this had been made in the 80's, his character would be gay--and the other (Jess Barker) is an opportunistic fink, so eventually she and Tufts fall in love. The climax is a weakly-done Capraesque courtroom scene in which she comes to the rescue of Tufts, who is about to be drummed out of government service for shaking up the bureaucracy too much. The tone of the movie is that of screwball comedy, with lots of frantic motion and some slapstick moments, but the writing generally isn't as witty as it needs to be. I liked Tufts in SO PROUDLY WE HAIL, but he's not very successful here as he seems to be going for a Gary Cooper vibe and not hitting the mark. De Havilland tries, working full steam at her physical comedy scenes, but she can't carry the movie alone. A couple of supporting players are good (in addition to Stewart, who played Kane's butler in CITIZEN KANE, Agnes Moorehead and Una O'Connor are fine in small roles) but all the franticness gets tiring after a while. It was interesting seeing James Dunn, whom I know mostly from his very serious Oscar-winning role in A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN, doing some light comedy as a newly-married soldier who is cheated out of his honeymoon by the housing shortage in the nation's capital. Not a total waste of time, but not top-drawer comedy. [TCM]

THE FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE (1964)

Based on the criticism I've read of this movie, I need to present two disclaimers. First, the 2000 sword-and-sandals epic GLADIATOR apparently covers the same ground and has some of the same characters as this movie, though I haven't seen the later movie so I can't compare them. Second, this movie has been accused of playing quite fast and loose with historical fact; here again, I cannot be a judge since most of what I know about ancient history comes from the movies in the first place. What I can tell you is that this film has some wonderfully shot scenes, gorgeous landscapes, and spectacular sets and costumes, but falls down woefully in the acting department. GLADIATOR may have stolen from this film, but this film's set-up is right out of THE TEN COMMANDMENTS. Alec Guinness plays Marcus Aurelius, the dying Roman emperor who must name a successor (just as Sethi had to in the DeMille film); his son, Commodus (Christopher Plummer) should be heir, but, like Yul Brynner in TEN COMMANDMENTS, he is not considered worthy; Stephen Boyd plays Livius, the Moses figure who wants to free many of the Roman slaves (particularly the noble but primitive Barbarians) and is in love with the emperor's daughter (Sophia Loren). After Guinness's death, a power struggle ensues between close friends Plummer and Boyd, leading to war and decadence and disloyalty, and supposedly the fall of the Empire, though the somewhat mistitled movie ends before that occurs. The spectacular look of the movie is all the more impressive when you consider that the crowds of extras, the elaborate sets, and the lovely natural scenery (especially an early scene set at dawn and later scenes in the snow) are all real, not the work of digital effects technicians. Guinness and Plummer are very good, and a handful of supporting players manage to make their marks (James Mason, Anthony Quayle, Omar Sharif), but Boyd and Loren are quite weak and have zero chemistry--I was desperate for some Anne Baxter-like writhing ("Oh, Livius, Livius, Livius, you stubborn, splendid, adorable fool!!") to liven up the proceedings, but to no avail. I haven't seen much of either actor, and this movie makes me think that I'm not missing much. At over three hours, it's much too long, but if you decide to watch it for its impressive production and cinematography, be sure to see it letterboxed. [TCM]

SING AND LIKE IT (1934)

As TCM host Robert Osborne has pointed out, this little-known second-feature comedy may have been an influence on Woody Allen's BULLETS OVER BROADWAY. Nat Pendleton, usually a supporting actor, gets a chance to star as a rich but dumb gangster who heads up a kidnapping and safecracking ring. While robbing a bank office, he overhears a little theater troupe rehearsing a musical revue and is overcome by awe and sentiment when he hears Zasu Pitts singing a sappy ode to mothers. Thinking that Pitts is a great singing talent (we know she's not), Pendleton strongarms Broadway producer Edward Everett Horton into hiring her to star in his latest show. The gangster and his gang ride roughshod over the production, eventually rewriting (badly) much of it, but on opening night, thanks to some handgun persuasion, the town's chief critic seems to love the show, and since all the rest of the critics (and much of the audience) take their cues from him, the show is a hit. The movie is quite fun in its first half-hour as we get to know the characters; the last half is a little too plot-heavy and shoddily constructed. A couple of the supporting players outshine the stars: Pert Kelton, who, 30 years later, played Ron Howard's mother in THE MUSIC MAN, is quite funny as Pendleton's moll, who has been angling for some time to be a musical star herself. John Qualen has a few nice moments as Pitts' milquetoast boyfriend. But best of all is deadpan Ned Sparks as Pendleton's sidekick who has to translate any multi-syllable vocabulary down to its earthiest essence for the gangster. It's a pre-Code movie so there are a few nicely risque zingers, but some of my favorite lines, thanks to their delivery, are throwaways, like when Pendleton first hears Pitts singing and claims he hears an angel; Sparks' dry reply: "Somebody must be plucking the feathers out of her wings." I also like hearing Pendleton call the tough and sleazy Kelton "Snugglepups." A scene where Pendleton gives Kelton two black eyes is potentially offensive, but earlier in the movie, we see that she is generally capable of holding her own with the big lug. Not a classic, but consistently amusing. Biggest flaw: we have to sit through Pitts' complete rendition of the "Mother" song three times. [TCM]

BLACK SHEEP (1935)

Average shipboard melodrama with a fairly light touch. On the S.S. Olympus, we follow four characters whose lives get entangled. Edmund Lowe is a professional card sharp who fleeces passengers; Claire Trevor is apparently a "fallen" woman, constantly trying to light a cigarette with an empty lighter as a way to cozy up to men; Adrienne Ames is a rich woman who steals for kicks--she has stolen some jewels and needs to find a way to smuggle them past customs; Tom Brown is a naive young man who has lost a lot of money gambling--Ames loans him the cash to pay off his debts, but then blackmails him into carrying the jewels for her. Lowe and Trevor circle each other warily at first, sneaking onto the first class deck and flirting a bit, and soon find common ground when they see Brown getting taken at cards by practical joker Eugene Pallette. When Brown sets out to kill himself by jumping off the ship, Trevor and Lowe befriend him and Lowe soon finds out that Brown is actually his son, from a failed marriage, whom he has never seen. The rest of the movie consists of watching Lowe and Trevor stick it to both Ames and Pallette. Trevor's quite attractive and does a nice job with a role that is a little different from the cynical rough-edged dames she would become famous for. Lowe is a bit too old and tired for the part of the dashing anti-hero--William Powell could have done better in his sleep. Brown is fine, and Ames is quite good as the scheming bitch with no redeeming qualities. Overall, nothing special, but there is some fun watching it all work out in the last 10 minutes. [FMC]

DAMN YANKEES (1958)

Despite the presence of two Broadway legends (Gwen Verdon and Bob Fosse), this film version of the hit musical never really takes off. One problem is the plot, which manages to be both too thin and too convoluted: a middle-aged baseball fan (Robert Shafer), frustrated because his team, the Washington Senators, is behind again, sells his soul to the devil (Ray Walston) to help the team get to the World Series. The catch: Walston transforms Shafer into a young athlete (Tab Hunter) with a powerhouse hitting talent. Shafer leaves his wife (with no explanation), joins the team (as Hunter), and provides the spark for a winning season. Hunter has an "escape clause" with Walston, which must be activated on the day before the pennant will be clinched. Naturally, there are complications. The devil conjures up the sexy but demonic Lola (Verdon) with which to tempt Hunter into forgetting about his escape clause, and Hunter/Shafer struggles to remain true to his wife, and to keep his escape route open while still making sure that the Senators win the championship.

That sounds rather complicated in the telling, but somehow, all those plot strands never really take off to keep the narrative compelling. The acting is bland--poor Hunter is usually criticized for his cardboard line readings, but no one else around him is especially good, either. At least Hunter looks the part: handsome looks and an athletic build. Walston is just OK, not really having the devilish spark needed for the part, and Verdon's character is underwritten. The supporting cast, mostly from the original show, is singularly unexciting, except for Jean Stapleton who provides a couple of fun moments. But the production numbers do redeem the experience somewhat. The best numbers are the ones with the most participants, such as "Shoeless Joe" (performed by the baseball team and assorted hangers-on) and "Two Lost Souls," with Verdon, Hunter, and the denizens of a crowded nightspot. Bob Fosse, who did the choreography, also dances a mambo onscreen with Verdon in "Who's Got the Pain," and they're good but not really sizzling hot. "Good but not sizzling" is an apt phrase for the movie as a whole. If you've only seen this in a pan & scan TV print, you should see it again letterboxed. [DVD]

DESTINATION GOBI (1953)

Routine wartime thriller made vaguely interesting by its situation: Instead of soldiers in combat or families on the homefront, this focuses on a group of Navy weathermen stationed in Inner Mongolia on a secret mission to collect meteorological data to help the troops in the Pacific. Richard Widmark, the only real combat sailor in the group, is the reluctant leader of, or as he sees it, "wet nurse" to, the men after their commanding officer is killed in a Japanese air raid. Alone in the desert with no orders to follow and no relief in sight, the men bond with a group of traveling Mongols. Their trust in each other ebbs and flows until Widmark requisitions dozens of saddles for the Mongols to use on their horses in exchange for their help. However, the fragile trust is broken when, after a rift between two of the Mongol leaders, the Mongols leave, apparently reluctant to risk battling the Japanese. Widmark and his men, with supplies running low, make an agonizing trek across the desert, heading for the sea, and before it's all over, they discover the Mongols are mostly still faithful friends, even getting dubbed the First Mongolian Cavalry. Among the Navy men are Don Taylor, Darryl Hickman, Martin Milner, and Ross Bagdasarian, later better known as the voice of Alvin & the Chipmunks. The beginning of the film, with its unusual premise, shows great promise, but by the middle, it becomes a by-the-numbers story of desperate flight across a barren terrain. The color is nice, especially the blue of the desert night scenes. There are cute references to Tarzan and Harpo Marx, and the frequent shirtlessness of the men is a bonus. Supposedly based on an actual wartime incident. [FMC]

CALL OF THE WILD (1935)

This adventure/romance set during the Klondike Gold Rush has little to do with the famous Jack London dog story it's named after, and it's one of Clark Gable's weaker efforts from the 30's, but it's also the movie during which Gable and Loretta Young consummated their affair, leading to a out-of-wedlock child whom Young later claimed to have adopted in Europe. Gable is Jack Thornton, a Yukon prospector; he and his buddy, Jack Oakie, get on the trail of a map which is alleged to show the location of a rich gold strike. They don't actually have the map, but Oakie has memorized most of it. In the wild, they discover Loretta Young, whose husband has disappeared and is presumed dead; they befriend her and find out that she has the original map, so the three join forces to find the property. Out to snatch it away from them is Reginald Owen, who follows along with his thugs, and Young's husband (Frank Conroy) who was only injured. Oh, yeah, there's a dog here, too, a St. Bernard named Buck, though unlike in the novel, he is not at the center of the story. Gable buys him, even though he's not broken as a sled dog, to keep him out of the clutches of the abusive Owen. Gable and the dog form a bond which is tested a couple of times, most famously in the scene (which is right out of the book) where Gable bets that Buck can haul 1,000 pounds 100 yards by himself. Unlike the book, there's a happy ending in store for all, and even Buck's reversion to the wild is presented in a Disneyish fashion when we see him with his happy "wife" and "kids." Gable and Young have some chemistry, but neither is at the top of their game. Owen makes for a grandly hissable villain (with a highly twirlable mustache, although I don't think he actually does any such twirling) and Oakie, whom I don't usually like, is pretty good as the comic sidekick. Sidney Toler (the Charlie Chan of the 40's) has a small role as an animal dealer. The last 10 minutes of the movie are oddly anti-climactic. If you have to write a book report on the London story, don't cheat by watching this instead! [FMC]

THE SIGN OF THE CROSS (1932)

The archetypal DeMille concoction of sex and religion, not as fun or as spectacular as his later THE TEN COMMANDMENTS, but much naughtier, filled with flesh and sadism and decadence. Set in 64 A.D., the movie opens with Charles Laughton as Nero, lolling about like a huge baby, fiddling while Rome burns (and, by implication, fiddling around with some young paramours, including at least one scantily clad boy). The rest of the film is concerned with the clash between the powerful pagans (like Laughton and his wife, Claudette Colbert) and the oppressed Christians (like the lovely and pious Elissa Landi). Marcus, the Prefect of Rome (Fredric March) is loyal to the state until he gets hot and bothered by Landi and is persuaded that Christians are people, too. Alas, March cannot stop the feeding of the Christians to the lions, so he winds up throwing in with them and getting sacrificed with Landi in the final arena slaughter. Although there are lots of titillating scenes of almost-naked women and lusty men, the overall mood of the movie is somewhat depressing. The Christians, doomed from the start, seem too passive; the decadent Romans are having fun but none of them except March are sympathetic. This is a movie to see for its parade of set pieces: Colbert flashing a bit of nipple in a bath of cow's milk; a lesbian seduction dance by Joyzelle Joyner (which is interrupted by praying Christians, perhaps an influence on Steven Spielberg in a similar scene in THE COLOR PURPLE); the torture and carnage in the arena. Nat Pendleton has a small role as a man who hunts Christians for money; Ian Keith is one of Nero's troublemakers, spreading rumors that the Christians started Nero's fire; Tommy Conlon has a nice bit as a young Christian who accidentally betrays his fellows. Definitely worth at least one viewing. [TCM]

BORN TO BE BAD (1934)

One of the last of the Hollywood sex melodramas to be released before the Hays Code kicked in during the summer of 1934, this is a nice little gem, almost an archetypal pre-Code movie. Loretta Young is the "bad" woman referred to in the title, an unwed mother who works as a whore for businessmen who want a little entertainment for the night. She's raising her 7-year-old son (Jackie Kelk) to survive by disrespecting authority, being tough, and getting whatever you can by whatever means necessary. Kelk is hit by a milk truck and, although his injuries are slight, Young (in collusion with a crooked doctor and lawyer) sues the milk company and has her son fake serious injuries. She is exposed in court, her son is taken away from her, and the guy who drove the milk truck (Cary Grant) adopts the boy. Of course, Grant isn't just a milkman, he's the president of the company (who just happened to be driving a truck that day!), so Kelk gets used to the soft life, living in a mansion with Grant and his wife (Marion Burns, a rather bland Mary Astor-type). Meantime, Young keeps up her crooked schemes, first trying to get the kid to steal some booty and run away with her, and when that fails, conning her way (via the old fainting trick) into spending a couple of days at the mansion and seducing Grant. Using a hidden phonograph recorder, she tricks Grant into sex and threatens to use the recording to regain custody of her son, but Grant is nobler than she thought: he has already told his wife that he plans to leave her and go off with Young. This forces a crisis: will Young actually break up the home, even though she doesn't really love Grant, or will she do the right thing for the first time in her life?

The movie is just an hour long, so the event-packed narrative doesn't do much with character development, which is a problem when Grant suddenly, with little motivation (except a little friction against the thighs), falls for Young's scheming. Otherwise, the movie is quite fun. Young gives a full-tilt performance as one of the "baddest" of the pre-Code dames. Kelk does a great job as the kid, and it seems strange that he basically gave up movies after this, though he did some TV many years later. Henry Travers plays a kindly old bookstore owner who gave Young a job and a place to live when she was a pregnant 15-year-old collapsed on his doorstep (in a rainstorm, of course) and continues to look after her, even though he is horrified by her philosophy of life. Russell Hopton is Steve, Young's boss/pimp, and Paul Harvey is Young's shyster lawyer--presented as an outrageous anti-Semitic stereotype. Grant isn't terribly impressive, mostly because he's steamrollered by the smoldering and conniving Young. Definitely worth seeing, especially for fans of the pre-Codes. [FMC]

MIDNIGHT ALIBI (1934)

This second feature crime thriller is based on a Damon Runyon story, which helps it stand out a bit from most of the other crime movies of the time; it's not a great movie, but it is a little different. Richard Barthelmess plays a small-time gambler returning to New York from overseas; on the ship, he falls in love with Ann Dvorak, and he offers to go straight for her, but it turns out she is the sister of Robert Barrat, a powerful mobster, and the two men are on the outs. On the run from an underworld hit, Barthelmess ducks into the mansion of "old doll" Helen Lowell, a rich spinster who always leaves her back door unlocked. She tells him the tragic story of her own youthful romance, which was ended when her father (Henry O'Neill) shot and killed her boyfriend when he was trying to get into the house through the door, which was locked; O'Neill didn’t like the boy and took the opportunity to shoot, claiming he thought the boy was an intruder. She has left the door unlocked ever since. Barthelmess tells Lowell about his own romantic troubles and she counsels him to do whatever it takes to win Dvorak. Barthelmess visits Barrat to ask for his sister's hand, but they get into a fight; a henchman of Barthelmess's stumbles in and shoots and kills Barrat, but Barthelmess is arrested for the killing. As anyone can figure out from the title, the stories of the old doll and the gambler converge at the trial when she lies in the courtroom to give Barthelmess an alibi so he can be freed and live happily ever after with Dvorak--but in a final O. Henry twist, it turns out the alibi isn't really a lie after all.

In the old lady's flashback, Helen Chandler is the Lowell character and Barthelmess plays the doomed boyfriend. Barthelmess, toward the end of his career, is fine in the role, as is everyone else except Dvorak, who, to be fair, has little to do. In addition to the "old doll" terminology, other Runyon touches include characters named Angie the Ox and Babe the Butcher, and a passing appearance by a grifter posing as a blind man. At just under an hour, it's painless entertainment, and better than the single-star ratings it receives from some critics. BTW, All Movie Guide and TV Guide get an important plot point wrong (as they frequently do in their summaries of B-movies) when they say that Barthelmess and Barrat are brothers. [TCM]

SHINE ON HARVEST MOON (1944)

Competent show biz musical about the real-life performing and songwriting team of Bayes and Norworth, who wrote the title song. Apparently, as with most movie bios, there is little truth in this one, but the story moves along nicely and the performances are solid. Dennis Morgan is Jack Norworth, a vaudeville performer and songwriter who hits the big time as the composer of "Take Me Out to the Ball Game." He discovers singer Nora Bayes (Ann Sheridan) in a dive singing one of his songs and soon he helps her on to bigger and better things; along the way they alienate a couple of folks: Morgan refuses to do a duo act with singer Irene Manning, and Sheridan makes a fool of club owner Robert Shayne. After Morgan and Sheridan marry, they find themselves blacklisted from vaudeville houses by Shayne; Manning, by now Shayne's mistress, agrees to help Morgan but only without Sheridan. Eventually, the couple part with her career rising as his falls, but a happy ending is in store. Most of the numbers are performed on stages, with "Shine On Harvest Moon" getting the grand Technicolor treatment as the finale (the rest of the film is in black & white) although there is one fun number, "It Looks Like a Big Night Tonight," that breaks out in a police station, with the cops joining in with the singing and dancing. Jack Carson and Marie Wilson provide strong support as buddies to Morgan and Sheridan, and S.Z. Sakall is his usual befuddled self as an agent. Pleasant, with lots of songs and period atmosphere. [TCM]

YOU CAN'T ESCAPE FOREVER (1942)

Breezy, well-paced second feature which is a fairly successful combination of crime thriller, newspaper story, romance, war propaganda, and comic relief. The opening segment is memorable: reporter Brenda Marshall, assigned to an execution, falls asleep and misses the pardon that arrives at the last minute, so she calls in a story saying the execution went on as scheduled. She winds up in hot water, as does her boss (George Brent), who is trying to get the goods on black marketeer Eduardo Ciannelli. Brent winds up demoted to writing the lovelorn column (a job no one wants), but he, Marshall, and sidekick Roscoe Karns get on Ciannelli's trail and discover that a lonely hearts club is a front for smuggling rubber, sugar, and other items which have been rationed in wartime. There are a couple of nice setpieces: the first is a lively brawl in the lonely hearts hall, and the second is a climactic car/truck chase. I've grown to like Marshall in her B movies and she carries this one quite well. Brent and Karnes are both good, and there is some standout support from Gene Lockhart, Erville Alderson, and Dick Elliott (the mayor on the Andy Griffith Show) who gets in a good line complaining about his assignment: "What a world! My wife makes battleships and I write lovelorn columns!" The title is meaningless (unless if refers to the future marriage of Brent and Marshall). [TCM]

PENNIES FROM HEAVEN (1936)

Disappointing Bing Crosby musical from the days before he hit his stride at Paramount in GOING MY WAY and the Road movies with Bob Hope. Crosby is fine; the real problem is the screenplay, a hodge-podge of vaguely interesting ideas that don't get developed very well. We first see Crosby in prison, finishing up a sentence for smuggling and playing the lute (!) from his cell. A man headed for the electric chair asks Crosby to deliver a letter for him when he gets out and Crosby, a restless traveler (otherwise known as a hobo), agrees. The killer tries to make amends to the family of the man he killed by giving them a house he used as a hideaway, and for the family (teenager Edith Fellows and grandpa Donald Meek), the "gift" comes just as a social worker (Madge Evans) is about to send the girl to an orphanage. Fellows gets a crush on Crosby and he feels obliged to stick around to help them get on their feet. The dilapidated house they move into is supposedly haunted, so Crosby manages to get some backing to turn it into the Haunted House Cafe, but those plans go awry, and the rest of the movie consists of Crosby trying to help Meek and Fellows gain a financial foothold so the girl won't become a ward of the state. Of course, an improbable romance develops between Crosby and Evans, and despite a daredevil accident, a hospital stay, and a brush with the law, there's a happy ending for all. If the movie had stuck with the restaurant idea (which may have provided some inspiration for the set-up of the later Crosby classic HOLIDAY INN), it might have worked, but there are just too many disparate plot strands which are rushed through in the last half hour. Fellows is appealing as a tomboyish teen and Louis Armstrong has a small role as a musician who helps out at the ill-fated opening of the cafe. The title song, sung twice, is fine, and the first ten minutes is interestingly moody for what becomes a run-of-the-mill musical romance. The DVD from Columbia is one of their better looking efforts, though it's not as clean-looking as the Crosby Paramount movies from the 40's that Universal has issued. Aside from the title song and the depression setting, this has nothing in common with the much more interesting 1981 Steve Martin musical. [DVD]

GARDEN OF THE MOON (1938)

Busby Berkeley was a great choreographer but rather surprisingly, for all his style and innovation with dance numbers, he was not a great director. His movies tend to be either solid but drab, assembly-line products (FOR ME AND MY GAL, GOLD DIGGERS OF 1937) or hyperactive fantasias which, after their high points, tend to get irritating (THE GANG'S ALL HERE, BABES IN ARMS). The good news here is that GARDEN OF THE MOON, while not a classic, is a well-paced, fun little B-musical. Pat O'Brien is the manager of the fancy title nightclub, located in a Los Angeles hotel. He's a bully who'll stop at nothing to get what he wants; when bluster and threats don't work, fake sentiment does. Margaret Lindsay is his assistant. She doesn't care for his methods and it's unclear why she's stayed with him all this time; there are hints that he feels romantic toward her, but nothing serious ever happens. When Rudy Vallee's band has a bus accident and can't keep their engagement, Lindsay suggests a struggling big band led by John Payne. O'Brien reluctantly agrees to try them out and they become a smash success. Payne and the boys feel this is their shot at the big time, but O'Brien only wants them until Vallee returns, so he actively tries to sabotage their PR attempts. The rest of the movie consists of Payne and O'Brien playing a nasty game of one-upmanship, punctuated by some small-scale but clever and tuneful musical numbers. Payne handles the songs quite nicely and is handsome and charming, though Lindsay is rather colorless. A good supporting cast includes jive-talking Johnnie Davis (who originated "Hooray for Hollywood" in Berkeley's HOLLYWOOD HOTEL), double-talking Jerry Colonna, and befuddled maitre'd Melville Cooper. Real-life gossip columnist Jimmie Fidler plays himself. The best songs are "The Lady on the Two Cent Stamp" and "Girlfriend of the Whirling Dervish" by Harry Warren, Al Dubin, and Johnny Mercer. Light and amusing, one of Berkeley's more satisfying movies as director. [TCM]

SO PROUDLY WE HAIL! (1943)

By coincidence, here's another Bataan movie, this one from a different point of view. Most WWII movies with female characters front and center are set on the homefront (MRS. MINIVER, SINCE YOU WENT AWAY). There are, however, a handful of films about women in the armed services and this is the best of the small bunch I've seen so far (including CRY HAVOC and KEEP YOUR POWDER DRY). It's based on the real story of eight Army nurses who were among the last to leave Corregidor after the fall of Bataan. We first see them after their evacuation, on a ship headed for San Francisco, and their story is told in flashback. Claudette Colbert is the head of a group of nurses on its way to Pearl Harbor in early December 1941. After the Japanese attack, they are routed to the Philippines and spend several grueling months tending to the wounded and dying soldiers as the Army retreats down the Bataan peninsula to a last stand on the small island of Corregidor. In addition to a surface portrayal of their medical duties, we see them bond as a group and we also get some standard Hollywood-style romance, with Colbert falling for medical technician George Reeves (quite handsome, and doing the best acting of his career, I think) and Paulette Goddard getting involved with soldier Sonny Tufts (who does a nice job with the "Kansas dumb lug" stereotype he's stuck with). Colbert and Goddard are the central characters and both are quite good, especially Goddard who was nominated for an Oscar for this role. Veronica Lake, with her long hair up and out of her eyes, has third billing but a fairly small role as a woman out for revenge against the Japanese because of her sweetheart's death at Pearl Harbor. The climax of her story, halfway through the movie, is effective and satisfying.

Critic James Agee, writing at the time of the film's release, said the movie was a good illustration of "what war looks like through the lenses of a housewives' magazine romance," and though that is somewhat true, especially during the first half, there is still some idea conveyed of what these non-combatants would have gone through during the early and very dark days of the Pacific war. There are several effective scenes, including a sentimental sermon that chaplain Walter Abel gives at Christmas. Reeves gives Colbert a "To His Coy Mistress" seduction speech, suggesting that since they don't know how much time they'll have together, they should make every minute count--it works, leading to Colbert and Reeves spending an unauthorized night together in a foxhole (later, against regulations, they get married, a sure sign that Reeves won't survive the retreat). Though we don't see the men in combat, there are a number of well-staged bombing scenes. Given the presence of the future TV Superman (Reeves), there is an ironic reference to the superhero in a scene in which Goddard tells a Superman story to some Filipino kids who then ask why Superman isn't there to help them. One of the best of the WWII movies made during the conflict, well worth seeking out. [TCM]

BATAAN (1943)

There is no critical consensus on this film; some critics call it the first gritty, realistic portrayal of American action in WWII, while others attack it for its staginess and stereotypes. It's probably fairer to approach it in terms of its cinematic pedigree since it is an unofficial remake of John Ford's classic 30's movie THE LOST PATROL about a small group of soldiers stuck in one location, getting picked off one by one by enemy snipers. In the Ford movie, there are twelve British men facing Arabs in the desert during WWI; here, we have thirteen American men facing Japanese in the jungles of Bataan during WWII. As a remake, it works quite well. The group of soldiers is the usual Hollywood mix of types: a Jew (Thomas Mitchell, who could play almost anything *except* a Jew), a Hispanic (Desi Arnaz), an African-American (Kenneth Spencer, who doesn't get to do much except be quiet and efficient), a naive Midwestern boy who becomes a man (Robert Walker), a grouser with a shady past (Lloyd Nolan), and a commanding officer (Lee Bowman) who gets killed off early so that our hero, handsome, non-ethnic Robert Taylor, can prove himself a leader of men. George Murphy, Barry Nelson and Philip Terry do nice jobs in smaller roles. In fact, except for the rather wooden Taylor and the miscast Mitchell, all of the performances are good, with Arnaz a standout as a jive-talking kid who loves Tommy Dorsey and gets a showy death scene--not once in the movie did I think of Ricky Ricardo. The men's mission is to blow up a bridge to slow the Japanese invaders, then stay behind and keep it secure, which means blowing it up a couple more times, most spectacularly when a mortally wounded Murphy does a kamikaze bit with his plane. Most of their losses are due to snipers, but there is a spectacular scene near the end of hand-to-hand combat, involving swords and bayonets, that is quite graphic for its time. Unlike LOST PATROL, in which the leader survives, here all the men die, with Taylor digging his own grave and firing his machine gun up to his last breath (which we don't see--instead, we get an inspiring message about the big-picture importance of sacrifice, a message which the government probably felt was very important at that low point in the war, but a message which is the polar opposite of the 30's film). The studio look of the jungle and the miniature work involved in some of the bridge scenes are obvious but do not detract from the overall feel of the movie. Recommended, but don't expect "Private Ryan"-type realism. [TCM]

THE SILK EXPRESS (1933)

A rather ho-hum thriller with a good setting (a cross-country train) and plot but lackluster acting. The fashion world is just agog for silk, and prices are being artificially driven up by a business consortium led by bad guy Arthur Hohl. To avoid middleman price gouging, good guy businessman Neil Hamilton arranges for a large shipment of silk directly from Japan to be sent by train from Seattle to New York, but Hohl and his men are determined to stop it, and may even resort to murder to do so. The bulk of the film takes place on the train, which Hamilton has managed to commandeer for his shipment because it must make it to his buyers in 72 hours. Complicating things are two passengers who Hamilton allows to remain on the train: an ailing professor (Dudley Digges) and his daughter (Sheila Terry); he is dying of some disease that is rapidly paralyzing him, bit by bit, and time is of the essence if he is to get to New York to see a specialist who can save him before he dies. Familiar supporting faces include Guy Kibbee and Robert Barrat; Allen Jenkins has a rare non-comic relief role as a mysterious figure who might be a deadly assassin working for Hohl; Jenkins is totally deadpan, perhaps for the only time in his career. Hamilton can't quite shoulder the burden of the heroic lead, which should have gone to someone spunkier, like James Cagney. It's short and energetic, and it's fun seeing Jenkins in a serious role. [TCM]

KNUTE ROCKNE, ALL AMERICAN (1940)

One of the most famous biopics of all time. Even movie fans who've never seen this know the quote, "Win just one for the Gipper." The movie doesn’t live up to its reputation but it is an almost archetypal example of the Hollywood biography, with all its strengths and weaknesses. Pat O'Brien is Rockne, the son of Norwegian immigrants, who saves his money and eventually goes off to college at Notre Dame. In his mid-20's, he's a little older than his classmates but he fits in well and shines in both athletics and academics. When he graduates, he takes a job at the school as a assistant to a chemistry professor and helps coach the football team, but coaching quickly becomes his career and he leads Notre Dame to historic greatness on the field. The movie does show us a bit of his family life, but it concentrates on his coaching: his introduction of the forward pass; his molding of George Gipp, a legendary halfback who died just days after his last football game (the movie is maddeningly unclear as to his ailment, but apparently he had a severe strain of strep throat that turned into pneumonia); his creation of the "Four Horsemen" and their backfield shift. Rockne keeps promising his wife and kids a Florida holiday, and when they finally do get away, he is called to California for some matter, takes a plane (against his wife's intuitional advice), and is killed when the small plane crashes in bad weather in Kansas.

O'Brien is heavily made up to resemble the real Rockne, and he comes off a bit like Van Johnson trying to look like Spencer Tracy. He's very good in the part, but in his early scenes, he looks way too old for a college freshman in his mid-20's, looking more like the father of his teammates than a slightly older contemporary. Ronald Reagan is Gipp, better known as the Gipper; he's only in the movie for about ten minutes, but he does show some star quality in his brief time on screen, and his deathbed scene, even though it’s a chiche by now, is effective. The only other actor to get much screen time is Donald Crisp who is fine as Father Callahan, president of Notre Dame. Gale Page, as Rockne's wife, doesn't get a chance to do much of anything; John Qualen, Hollywood's go-to man for Nordic types, is Rockne's dad; Albert Basserman, known best as the kidnapped diplomat at the center of Hitchcock's FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT, is Rockne's chemistry professor. There is an interesting scene near the end in which Rockne testifies before a committee investigating some scandalous accusations against college football (imagine, a school giving a star athlete some breaks in the classroom!); he makes a speech defending sports as a justifiable collegiate activity, explaining it as a healthy way for young men to work out their natural urge for conflict. The movie's main weakness (and the weakness of most Hollywood biopics) is its rote recitation of the highlights of Rockne's life at the expense of deeper character development; its strength is that you find out just enough to make you want to look for more. [TCM]

FALLEN ANGEL (1945)

A so-so film noir that falls short if seen as a follow-up to the classic LAURA; this film came from the same studio (Twentieth Century Fox) and director (Otto Preminger), and has the same leading man (Dana Andrews) and cinematographer (Joseph LaShelle, who did even better work on HANGOVER SQUARE). Andrews is a drifter who winds up in a small California town. At Pop's Diner, he becomes obsessed with the town tramp (Linda Darnell) who is also being lusted after by many other men, even her fatherly boss (Percy Kilbride). To get a little money, Andrews helps phony spiritualist John Carradine get a big audience for his show and winds up involved with Alice Faye, a sheltered woman with a big sister (Anne Revere) who looks out for her, and an inheritance that Andrews would like to get his hands on so he can run away with Darnell. He marries Faye, but on their wedding night, goes out for an ill-fated rendezvous with Darnell, who winds up dead the next morning. Was Andrews the killer? Or was it Bruce Cabot, the guy she was meeting that night? Was it Revere, who followed Andrews to the meeting place? A detective (Charles Bickford) uses some rough tactics to get results, and in the end, there is an improbably happy ending for Andrews and Faye. Many critics contend that Faye was miscast as the innocent spinster, but I think she does fine, as do most of the other actors. Kilbride, mostly known as Pa Kettle, has a crucial role and shines in it, and Revere is wonderful, as usual, and not given enough to do (also as usual). The film has the archetypal noir look, most of it taking place at night or in shadowy rooms. The writing could have been stronger: Andrews' change of heart about Faye is unmotivated, except that he's the leading man. The Carradine subplot is fun while it lasts, but feels dropped in from another movie. [FMC]

OBLIGING YOUNG LADY (1942)

Screwball comedies on a "B" budget don't generally work since they need top-notch writing and acting to come off well, but this one from RKO is better than most; even if it doesn't quite hold together, individual moments are very funny. The parents of 10-year-old Joan Carroll are seeking a divorce (for the third time) and they're squabbling over custody; the judge decides she should be kept by a neutral party until the parents sort things out, so legal secretary Ruth Warrick gets the girl. The rich parents are adamant about keeping the issue from the press, who are snooping around the courtroom, so Warrick takes Carroll off to an isolated lakeside resort. However, a detective follows and starts to piece things together. Also complicating matters is Edmund O'Brien, a reporter who, with no encouragement, has fallen head over heels for Warrick at first sight (just as these things happen in these kinds of comedies). He figures out what's going on and heads out to the lodge to try to help, followed by Warrick's jealous boyfriend (Robert Smith). Disguises, mistaken identities, and car chases lead to the predictable happy ending. O'Brien and Warrick aren't exactly known for their comedy work, but they do alright. Carroll (Agnes in MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS) is quite good, as is Eve Arden as a reporter who follows O'Brien out to the lodge and passes herself off as Warrick's Southern sister, Swannee Rivers. Smith, who has very few credited roles aside from this, comes off well as a handsomer Eddie Bracken. However, Franklin Pangborn and his birdwatching group almost steal the movie, especially in the scene where they perform a birdsong symphony for O'Brien, whom they believe is Dr. Stanley, the famous African explorer. There are a number of running gags, some better than others. The resort desk bell that doesn't ring (except when no one expects it to) is fun; Carroll's penchant for putting tacks on chairs wears less well; the movie opens and closes on a train where O'Brien irritates everyone by chanting the name of a famous baseball player over and over again in rhythm with the train (Heinie Menush, Heinie Menush, Heinie Menush...). Actors that will be recognized by classic movie buffs include Charles Lane, John Miljan, George Cleveland, George Chandler, and Almira Sessions, all of whom get at least one good bit of funny business. [TCM]

SPEED (1936)

Perhaps the worst movie James Stewart ever made. Actually, for a B-level second feature, I guess it's about average, but the presence of Stewart raises expectations, unrealistically as it turns out. Stewart works for Emery Motors as a mechanic and test driver who is also working, with his buddy Ted Healy, on a new-fangled carburetor. Wendy Barrie is a newly hired publicist whom Stewart takes a shine to as he shows her around the plant. Class conflicts arise when white collar engineer Weldon Heyburn whisks her away to his offices and Stewart is barred from following. Una Merkel plays against type as a smart female executive who is sweet on Heyburn but is concerned that her new status has damaged her relationship with him--she actually wonders out loud if women should be climbing so far up the business ladder! To complete the romantic shenanigans, Healy makes time with an addle-headed secretary (Patricia Wilder). When the first test of the carburetor (at the Indy 500) is ruined by an accident (which puts Healy in a wheelchair for the rest of the movie), Stewart is forced to work with Heyburn on getting the carburetor in shape for another test at the Utah salt flats. This time, it's Stewart who is put in mortal danger through an accident and Heyburn gets to show that he's an OK guy by getting Stewart to a hospital in the nick of time. All the romances work out in the end, with an added bonus when it’s revealed that Barrie is actually the niece of the car company's owner (Ralph Morgan). Silly, obvious, and badly edited to boot, with several awkward fade-out scenes. Some of the racing footage is quite good, especially the shots of the almost futuristic car as it zips through crowds of onlookers at the salt flats. [TCM]

THE TIME OF THEIR LIVES (1946)

Full disclosure: I loved Abbott & Costello movies when I was a kid; for the most part, I can't stand them now. I've tried re-watching some and usually wind up bailing out about 15 minutes in--particularly disappointing was JACK AND THE BEANSTALK, a horrible piece of junk which was one of my favorites when I was 9. This one, however, is one I had never seen before and I found it quite tolerable, perhaps because it's different from most of their films in a couple major ways: it is unusually plot-heavy and Abbott and Costello actually play relatively fleshed-out characters. In 1780, during a party at an estate, Costello (playing a tinker) and Marjorie Reynolds are mistakenly accused of being traitors, even though Costello has a letter from George Washington noting his loyalty and bravery. They are shot and killed and their bodies dumped down a well, and they are cursed to remain restless spirits unless their innocence is established. We see them return as ghosts who cannot leave the estate. In the present day, a group of folks come to stay at the restored house. The ghosts try their best to "haunt" the group in hopes that they will discover Washington's letter and allow them to get on to the afterlife. After some haunted house shenanigans, a seance, and a car chase with cops, the letter is found and the ghosts are freed.

Several sources claim that Abbott and Costello weren't on speaking terms during the making of this film, and it's true that the two have almost no scenes together as a team. Costello is clearly the main character; Abbott has a dual role, as a butler in the past, and as the butler's descendent, a psychiatrist, in the present, and he's surprisingly good in both parts, actually allowed to do a little acting rather than just reacting. Costello still mostly does his usual shtick, in slightly subdued form. Reynolds, Crosby's sidekick in HOLIDAY INN, is good, as is Gale Sondergaard as a psychic who presides at the seance. Also notable are Binnie Barnes and Donald MacBride. B-movie actor John Shelton, as a nervous man on the verge of a breakdown, shows why he never broke out of B-movies. The plot is interesting--one writer at IMDb notes that this is a ghost story told from the point of view of the ghosts rather than the haunted--and some fun is had with the attempted haunting (though the "rules" about what the ghosts can and can't do are inconsistent). The seance scene is effective, and the special effects in the last scene, as Costello and Reynolds go off to their heavenly rewards, are nice. Barnes gets one of the best lines, saying, upon meeting a severe Sondergaard, "Didn't I see you in Rebecca?" I can add this to the short list of A&C movies that I can, as an adult, make it all the way through, the others being HOLD THAT GHOST and A&C MEET FRANKENSTEIN. [TCM]