ONE IN A MILLION (1936)

My first (and maybe last) Sonja Henie movie. Henie, a Norwegian skater, had just won her third Olympic gold medal in 1936 when she decided to go professional and head to Hollywood. 20th Century Fox signed her and had some success with her in a short string of films over the next ten years. Based on this one, my guess is that, while a pleasant enough personality, she couldn't have made the leap to non-skating roles. An all-girl band led by Adolphe Menjou and his wife (Arline Judge) is on a bus tour of Switzerland. Their hotel burns down just before they arrive, so they wind up taking over most of the rooms at a small inn run by Jean Hersholt and his daughter (Henie). Years before, Hersholt had won a gold medal in skating but had it taken away because of some doubts about his amateur standing. He has been training Henie to compete in the current Olympics, and when Menjou sees her practicing, he asks her to join the band as a specialty act. She says she can't get paid for her work until after the Olympics, but she does join them in an "exhibition" performance. The problem is that Menjou and the band have gotten paid for the show, so when competition time comes around, Henie wins, but the question of whether or not the show was "professional" work raises its ugly head. Don Ameche, a reporter who is convinced that a mysterious guest (Montagu Love) may be a dangerous anarchist, gets involved with Henie and her problems and helps to save the day. The skating routines are well shot, but Henie's moves are not nearly as elaborate as those of modern-day skaters. There are a few songs (none sung by Henie) and a couple of novelty bits by the Ritz Brothers, most notably "The Horror Boys of Hollywood" in which they caricature Charles Laughton (as Mutiny on the Bounty's Bligh), Peter Lorre, and Boris Karloff. Russian harmonica player Borrah Minevitch does his own little comic novelty bit. Good old dour, dry Ned Sparks is fun as Ameche's sidekick. Ameche hadn't yet settled into a persona and seems a little shrill here, and Henie isn't required to do much more than skate and look pretty; overall the movie is harmless fun but I don't know that I need to see another Henie vehicle. [FMC]

THREE SMART GIRLS (1936)
SOMETHING IN THE WIND (1947)

Until this week, I used to confuse Deanna Durbin with Sonja Henie, imagining both of them as little 30's-era, skating Hilary Duffs. Now I know the difference: Henie was the cute skater and Durbin was the cute actress. A chapter in Jeanine Basinger's excellent book "The Star Machine" got me interested in seeing some of Durbin's films (previously, I'd only seen her adult turn late in her career in the noir CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY in which she plays the next thing to a hooker, decidedly not representative of her earlier films). THREE SMART GIRLS was Durbin's first movie; it feels like a mash-up of Andy Hardy, Heidi, and Disney's Parent Trap. Three teenage daughters live in Switzerland with their mother (Nella Walker), whose ex-husband, Charles Winninger, is a rich businessman in New York City. Walker still harbors the hope that they will get back together again, and the sisters, who haven't seen Dad in ten years, impulsively decide to go to New York with their accommodating housekeeper (Lucille Watson) to play matchmaker. Winninger is engaged to the gold digging Binnie Barnes (with her meddling mother, Alice Brady, always present), and most of his acquaintances don't like her, so they're only too happy to help the girls. A scheme is cooked up in which a business associate (John King) pays a drunken, down-on-his-luck Russian count (Mischa Auer) to show up at a nightclub and woo Barnes, making her think he's a better match, but signals get crossed and a real British lord with real money to burn (Ray Milland) is mistaken for Auer. One of the sisters (Barbara Read) falls for Milland, another (Nan Grey) falls for King, and that leaves the younger Durbin, too young to hang out in nightclubs, to right all wrongs and give everyone (except Barnes and Brady) a happy ending. Durbin is a great singer, getting not only a couple of pop tunes, but a little opera aria as well. She's lovely and perky; she's sometimes compared to Shirley Temple--older, less syrupy--but I think a more apt comparison is to Judy Garland. The movie is great fun, with good acting and strong production values, though the script is a little weak at times.

SOMETHING IN THE WIND comes eleven years later and is one of her last movies. When the rich patriarch of the Read family dies, it's discovered that he's been sending a monthly allowance to a mystery woman named Mary Collins. We find out Mary (Jean Adair) was Read's first love, but the family disapproved of her, so he married someone else (Margaret Wycherly) and, when Adair had to raise her late sister's child, also named Mary (Deanna Durbin), Read started sending her money to help out. Son John Dall investigates and assumes that Durbin was Read's mistress. Durbin, pissed off by being essentially kidnapped by Dall and Wycherly, plays along (and pretends to have a baby by Read) and says she wants a million dollars to keep quiet. Of course, even though Dall is engaged to someone else, he and Durbin fall in love. Durbin is still attractive and peppy, and gets to do some singing, most notably the semi-novelty "The Turntable Song," but she and the neurotic Dall have no chemistry at all--he would put that high-strung persona to better use the next year as a hedonistic gay killer in Hitchcock's ROPE. The real star of much of the show is the young Donald O'Connor as Dall's whimsical third cousin who is in love with Dall's fiancée; he and Durbin bond as they plot to get what they want, but at the end, I was disappointed that she and O'Connor didn't wind up together. O'Connor has a hyperkinetic number, "I Love a Mystery," which was clearly an inspiration for his even more spectacular "Make 'Em Laugh" a few years later in SINGIN' IN THE RAIN. Charles Winninger is here again as a mildly crazy uncle. It's watchable but it feels just a little off. I'd be open to watching some more Durbin movies in the future, and I'll get around to Sonja Henie tomorrow. [DVD]

KID GLOVE KILLER (1942)

Samuel S. Hinds is elected mayor on a law-and-order platform, and when the DA is murdered, Lee Bowman, the head of Hinds' election campaign and a fiercely anti-crime radio host, is appointed special prosecutor to look into the case and continue to clean up the city. Bowman's buddy, Van Heflin, is head of the police forensics lab who is working on some evidence found at the murder scene, and Heflin and Bowman are both sweet on Heflin's assistant, Marsha Hunt. What Heflin and Hunt don't know is that Bowman is in league with the bad guys. A suspect is killed, but when the mayor expresses concerns about how much money Bowman is throwing around, a car bomb kills the mayor. A disgruntled restaurant owner (Eddie Quillan), who was seen hanging around the mayor's house to complain that he was still getting harassed by mobsters, is arrested and it's up to Heflin, Hunt, and the CSI technology (such as it was in the 40's) to clear Quillan and put the finger on Bowman. This is basically a run-of-the-mill B-detective film with a moderately interesting focus on crime scene science. There is a nice bantering chemistry between Heflin, Hunt, and Bowman, with Bowman in particular giving a good performance as a villain hiding behind a good guy's face. Also with John Litel as a bad guy and, according to IMDb, Ava Gardner as a car hop. I never figured out what the title meant. [TCM]

THE TESTAMENT OF DR. MABUSE (1933)

Dark, stylish crime melodrama from Fritz Lang featuring what may be the first modern "supervillain" in pop culture history. We see Hofmeister, a disgraced policeman, on the run from a gang of counterfeiters who attack him with barrels of chemicals which create a huge fireball; he escapes and calls his former boss, Inspector Lohmann, to rat out the criminals, but just as he's about to talk, the lights go out and something awful happens to make Hofmeister turn into a lunatic. However, he does manage to scratch the name "Mabuse" into a window. Lohmann learns of a Dr. Mabuse, a former crime lord, who has spent the last several years in the local asylum completely mute, spending most of his waking moments filling notepads with indecipherable scrawls about an "endless empire of crime" that would disrupt society on every level. Soon the asylum's Dr. Baum discovers that among his writings is a detailed description of a recent unsolved robbery. How could Mabuse be running a crime ring from his isolated cell? Meanwhile, we meet Thomas Kent, a man who joined the counterfeiters (who are also into blackmail and dope) out of desperation when he was unemployed; now that he has the love of a good woman, Lilli, he wants to get out, but the gang wants him to prove his mettle by committing a murder. The boss of the gang is an unseen figure who sits behind a curtain in an otherwise empty and dilapidated room, giving orders through a microphone. When Kent and Lilli are captured and brought into the boss's room, they discover that the figure behind the curtain is just a cardboard cutout. They are locked in the room and told they will die in three hours when a bomb will go off. Back at the asylum, Mabuse is found dead, but suddenly Dr. Baum begins acting strangely. Has he been possessed by the dead crime lord?

This is a striking film from start to finish: the opening chase with guns and barrels has a loud clanking industrial sound in the background that prefigures the feel of a David Lynch film, the ending is creepy and irrational, and much in the middle is unsettling. The sets (which alternate between cluttered and stark) and visuals are always interesting. The film partakes of several genres: crime film, romance, supernatural thriller, comedy (there is some comic relief, mostly involving Inspector Lohmann), and social commentary--many critics see the powerful madman Mabuse as a Hitler figure, though I'm not sure that parallel really holds up to scrutiny. Rudolf Klein-Rogge, who plays Mabuse (and Rotwang the mad inventor in METROPOLIS) doesn't have much to do but he certainly looks appropriately mad and creepy. Gustav Diessl, star of several of the German Mountain films of the era, gets the showiest part as Kent, and does a fine job with it. Much of the film has the feel of a serial, but the somewhat open-ended conclusion ends things with a more modern touch. Lang made an earlier film with the Mabuse character, and others have been made since. A must-see for film buffs. [TCM]

BLONDE ICE (1948)

An obscure Poverty-Row noir gem; it's not terribly well made, but it moves quickly, is full of incident, and winds up being great femme fatale fun. Claire (Leslie Brooks) is a former society reporter who, as the film begins, is juggling three men: 1) rich man Carl (John Holland) whom she's just married; 2) ex-flame Les (Robert Paige) whom she kisses passionately while still wearing her wedding gown; and 3) weaselly Al (James Griffith), a reporter from her past. On their honeymoon, Carl (in a clumsily staged scene) finds Claire writing a love letter to Les and demands a divorce. Wanting to keep her hands on Carl's money, Claire gets a pilot named Blackie (Russ Vincent, doing a low-rent Bogart) to help her in a scheme to kill Carl and make it look like a suicide done while she was out of town. Because the circumstances are deemed suspicious, Al finds himself investigating the death, and it's Les who falls under suspicion. Meanwhile, as Claire has to deal with the return of Blackie who is trying to blackmail her, she gets her paws on a lawyer named Stanley who's running for Congress. After Stanley wins the election, he comes upon Claire cozying up to Les, and, on the advice of a psychiatrist who thinks Claire is a bad marriage prospect, dumps her. In her usual reaction to being dumped, she kills him, but this time she may not get away with it so easily.

It's the crazy narrative, chugging along like a locomotive, that makes this movie transcend its low budget and second-string cast. Claire is a wonderful creation and it would have been great fun to see someone like Barbara Stanwyck or Mary Astor or even DETOUR's Ann Savage in this part. Brooks is OK, but it never feels like she's settled into the role. She's a cross between Jean Heather, who played Stanwyck's daughter in DOUBLE INDEMNITY, and June Lockhart, neither one a femme fatale type. The men are totally interchangeable except for Russ Vincent (who, BTW, eventually married Brooks in real life). The film's style is more cheap than noir until near the end when the camera work gets a little interesting. There are rumors that famous B-director Edgar G. Ulmer had a hand in the screenplay, and indeed, it's the screenplay that is the best part of the movie. At one point, someone delivers a line that sounds an awful lot like "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows," which I've always assumed was a Bob Dylan quote. There's also a great last summation of the character of Claire: "She wasn't even a good newspaperwoman." Not a timeless classic, but a good one to screen for your noir night. [DVD]

PRETTY POISON (1968)

Anthony Perkins, playing a slightly less crazy variation on Norman Bates, is a young man just released from an institution; he burned down his aunt's house when he was 15, causing her accidental death. He is placed in a small town and gets work at a chemical plant; his parole officer warns him about the dangers of an overactive fantasy life, but soon Perkins is pretending to himself that he's a CIA agent on the trail of a plot to poison the town's water supply. He develops a crush on high-school senior Tuesday Weld and gets her to believe his story. However, the innocent-seeming Weld actually has a sociopathic bent that put Perkins's problems in the shade. For a while, it seems like the pair will turn into a modern-day Bonnie and Clyde, but the film's final twists take it in a different direction to a BODY HEAT-like ending. This film from first-time director Noel Black is a small masterpiece of black comedy; the story has a distinct noir feel, though the style isn't noir at all. Perkins and Weld have a remarkable chemistry (which carried over to their later film PLAY IT AS IT LAYS, less successful but still worth seeing) and both give excellent performances. Both are also attractive--they could easily have been the leads in a quirky romantic comedy--and Weld is an utter knockout, both in looks and talent. It's a damned shame her career never quite fulfilled its early promise. The same could be said about director Black who followed this up with the poorly-received COVER ME BABE and then turned to TV movies. B-movie queen Beverly Garland is very good as Weld's bitch of a mother, and you'll recognize John Randolph (the parole officer) and Dick O'Neill (Perkins' boss) from lots of TV supporting roles. A must-see. [DVD]

DAUGHTER OF SHANGHAI (1937)

Federal agents are working on busting a ring of crooks smuggling illegal aliens from Asia. In one case, when the Feds get too close to a plane with human cargo, the smugglers don't hesitate to dump an entire family out over the ocean to their deaths. When smuggler J. Carroll Naish tries to bully a renowned Chinese art dealer into giving jobs to some of the aliens, he refuses; in retaliation, the dealer and his daughter (Anna May Wong) are kidnapped, shot, and dumped at the docks. Wong manages to escape and goes to the rich and respected society matron Cecil Cunningham for help, not realizing that Cunningham is actually the big boss of the smuggling ring. Chinese federal agent Philip Ahn is working on the case, but Wong decides to work on her own and tracks down the other end of the ring to a Central American island where Charles Bickford, owner of a sleazy nightclub, rounds up the illegals to send north. Wong takes a job as a dancer there and finds incriminating evidence; she also finds Ahn who is working undercover with the smugglers. Together, they get on the boat for San Francisco, but are discovered mid-trip. They manage to escape only to wind up at Cunningham's house where they discover the truth about the nice old lady and tables get turned a couple of times before a happy ending for Wong and Ahn, who get engaged after the ring is broken. This hour-long B-thriller was part of TCM's Asian Images in Film series, and is one of the few studio movies of the era to feature two Asian leads played by Asian actors, though oddly, Anna May Wong is billed first and Ahn, who is clearly the male lead, is billed ninth! Otherwise, aside from the shocking opening scene of the family dumped to their deaths (which perhaps inspired a similar scene in a Ronald Reagan B-film a couple of years later), this movie is strictly routine. The bad guys include Buster Crabbe (who also played Tarzan and Flash Gordon) and Anthony Quinn, and Frank Sully has a small but crucial role as Cunningham's Irish chauffeur. [TCM]

DAUGHTER OF THE DRAGON (1931)

Exotic dancer Princess Ling Moy (Anna May Wong) is the toast of London; her manager Morloff lives next door to Sir John Petrie of Scotland Yard, who was the arch-foe of the villainous Fu Manchu (Warner Oland). Scotland Yard has assumed that Fu is dead, but Chinese detective Ah Kee (Sessue Hayakawa) arrives with news that Fu is alive and in London, and out to get the remaining living Petries. Sure enough, Sir John's tobacco gets laced with poison and he falls down a staircase to his death. Fu himself is shot and escapes through a secret passage to Morloff's house where he reveals to Ling Moy that she is his daughter. As Fu dies, she vows to steel herself against her feminine nature to become his "son" and complete his revenge by killing Sir John's son Ronald (Bramwell Fletcher). Even though Ronald has a fiancée, he falls for Ling Moy and she for him. She tries to kill him in his sleep but can't bring herself to do it. With help from Morloff and his servant Lu Chow, she rededicates herself to revenge, pretending to fall for Ah Kee to keep him off-guard, then a scheme involving kidnapping and torture plays out rather predictably, coming to a solid, action-filled climax.

This is about average for a B-thriller of its day, but it makes for interesting viewing for a few reasons: 1) as a Paramount vault movie, it doesn't see the light of day very often; 2) though the action scenes are few and far between, there are some very stylish directorial touches; 3) it's one of the few early Fu Manchu movies that still exists; 4) it's one of Anna May Wong's rare starring roles. But for me, it was most interesting as a vision of a Hollywood "road not taken." This is one of the few classic-era films I've seen to have leading Asian characters actually played by Asian actors. I've always bought the argument that the big studios needed to have Caucasian actors play Asian roles in "yellowface" because there was no pool of Asian actors who could guarantee good box office returns. But both Hayawaka and Wong were popular in their day, and they work well in their limited time together—she is actually rather wooden through most of the film, but he's fine, if a little low-key. [Of course, the main romance in the film is between the Chinese Wong and the blond (and bland) British Fletcher; that kind of "exotic" romance was titillating to audiences of the day, but the censors would never have allowed such an interracial relationship to be consummated in a film.] Based on the evidence here, it seems obvious that studios could have groomed Asian actors as stars if they'd wanted to. I'll still enjoy watching Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto movies, but I'm sorry that Hollywood never allowed such potential talents to flower. [TCM]

THE DRAGON PAINTER (1919)

Tatsu (Sessue Hayakawa) is a tormented artist and wild mountain man who is obsessed by the idea that his "princess" was turned into a dragon a thousand years ago, and he incessantly paints landscapes with dragons visible only to him; when an observer asks where the dragon is in one drawing, he replies that it's sleeping under the lake. Meanwhile, in Tokyo, respected but aging artist Kano Indara (Edward Peil Sr.) is sad because he has no son or other suitable heir to mentor in the ways of art—his daughter Ume-Ko (Tsuru Aoki, Hayakawa's wife), being a woman, is apparently not eligible. When a surveyor discovers some of Tatsu's work, he gets the artist to come to Tokyo and work with Indara; as bait, they tell him that Ume-Ko is his missing princess. Soon, Tatsu is fully tamed (nice haircut and modern civilized clothes), tutored, and married, but his contentment gives him "artist's block"; since he now has his princess/muse, he is no longer inspired to create. Ume-Ko vanishes, leaving a note saying she has killed herself in order in inspire him once again, and sure enough, in his grief, he starts producing paintings again, enough for a successful exhibition. He begins seeing haunting visions of Ume-Ko; is it possible he can somehow get her back?

The Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa is best known as the war camp commandant in BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI, but back in the teens, he was an "exotic" Hollywood matinee idol, rivaling Valentino. He had his own production company which made almost 20 films between 1918 and 1922, most of which are apparently lost. If you only know him from KWAI, he will be a revelation here: young, attractive, and charismatic. He is especially effective as the "untamed" artist. The acting is fine, generally more subtle than we think of most silent-movie emoting. There is a lovely nighttime garden scene which was shot day-for-night but is tinted blue. It's a shame that more of Hayakawa's films of this era haven't survived. [TCM]

THE STORY ON PAGE ONE (1959)

Anthony Franciosa is a small-time lawyer who agrees to take the potentially explosive case of a housewife (Rita Hayworth) accused of conspiring with her lover (Gig Young) to murder her husband. The case has already made headlines, and when Hayworth's mother (Katherine Squire) comes to Franciosa, he suggests she get a high-powered attorney, but Squire has very little money, so he reluctantly takes the case. In flashback, we see the circumstances that led to the death: Hayworth's husband, a cop (Alfred Ryder), is a mean drunk and afraid of getting kicked off the force because of a hearing problem. He comes close to being abusive to Hayworth and their little daughter. Hayworth becomes friendly with their widowed accountant (Young). Both of them seem battered down by life--Young lives in fear of his domineering mother (Mildred Dunnock)--and Squire actually encourages Hayworth to have an affair. The two have a sad little one-night stand, and Dunnock, who has figured out what's going on, threatens to expose them unless she gives him up. Young flies in from a business trip to talk things out with Hayworth, but Ryder overhears them talking and confronts them with a gun. The men grapple and the gun goes off accidentally, killing Ryder. Franciosa believes her story, though the D.A. (Sanford Meisner) tries to build a case that the death was premeditated because Hayworth wanted to get Ryder's insurance money. The last half of the film is set in the courtroom as Franciosa and Meisner spar back and forth, each getting the upper hand at various times, until the verdict is announced.

This movie was released the same year as ANATOMY OF A MURDER, and it seems to be an attempt to reproduce that film's success, even to using some sensational sex-related language and innuendo now and then; when Meisner notes that Squire, who lived with her daughter and son-in-law, pushed Hayworth toward adultery, he proclaims, "Madam, what kind of house were you running?" This film has problems in pacing, especially during the courtroom half, but the acting is solid. Hayworth is good in a completely non-glamorous role; Young's performance builds slowly and we gradually see him as a passive neurotic, and both come off as basically decent people stuck in sad, pathetic situations. Dunnock's fine as a monster mom (also a slow-building part), though Squire is just as good in a much less showy role. Meisner, a famous acting teacher and co-founder of the influential Group Theater, goes a bit over the top on occasion but is generally fun to watch. The Welsh actor Hugh Griffith is almost unrecognizable as the judge. But the real honors here go to Franciosa, an intense and sexy man who sets off sparks in every scene he's in. The character, about whom we learn very little, is set up as a down-on-his-luck heavy drinker, but once he gets on his feet and commits to the case, his character isn't developed any further. Frankly, I think he does Oscar-caliber work here, and the film makes me want to hunt down more of his movies. The scene in which he tears Dunnock apart on the stand is spectacular. The movie is a little long, but well worth catching, even if it all seems rather old hat nowadays when sordid trials like this can be seen every day on TV. [FMC]

Coming Up Soon:

TCM is doing a series in June on Asian Images in Film. It looks like a fair amount of work went into the programming (some rarely seen silents) and the licensing of films (they'll be including a couple of Charlie Chans and one Mr. Moto, all of which are Fox films, and even a couple of public domain Mr. Wong films with Boris Karloff). I'm excited about DAUGHTER OF THE DRAGON, a 1931 Fu Manchu film with Charlie Chan himself, Warner Oland, as Fu and Anna May Wong as his daughter. It airs tonight at 12:45 a.m EDT. I'm too late to suggest THE BITTER TEA OF GENERAL YEN and THE MASK OF FU MANCHU which ran earlier this week, but I do recommend FIRST YANK INTO TOKYO (Tom Neal, tough-guy B-movie star gets plastic surgery to become a spy) on June 12th, and the night of Asian detective films, June 10th. They'll be showing THE GOOD EARTH and DRAGON SEED on the 12th, but I don't know if I can stand to watch so many hours of Caucasians like Katharine Hepburn and Paul Muni in painfully dignified "yellowface," even if it was done with the best intentions. Do catch the Chans, Wongs, and Motos, with pre-film context established by Robert Osbourne and film scholar Peter Feng.

I don't see much else on TCM's schedule during the next week or so to point out except the very fun Hitchcock thriller THE 39 STEPS which is on this Friday at midnight. Over on Fox Movie Channel, the solid anthology film TALES OF MANHATTAN is on Sunday the 8th at 8 a.m.; on Fox Monday morning is the fun fantasy adventure CHANDU THE MAGICIAN at 6 a.m. followed by the Tyrone Power's creepy noir NIGHTMARE ALLEY at 7:30. Tuesday at 6 a.m is MAN HUNT, with Walter Pidgeon as a man who gets the chance to shoot Hitler. The Sundance Channel has the Beatles' HELP! Monday the 9th at 10 a.m and GIMMIE SHELTER, the documentary about the notorious Rolling Stones show at Altamont, that evening at 7.

ALEXANDER HAMILTON (1931)

Another one of George Arliss's somewhat stagy but spirited historical impersonations; these films may not be the absolute truth but Arliss is always fun to watch. The film begins in 1783 with George Washington's farewell to his troops; Hamilton notes that with the unifying factor of the war over, the states will begin squabbling and he talks Washington into taking on the job of President in 1789. Hamilton himself becomes Secretary of the Treasury; he realizes that many American troops still have not been paid and that the government owes heavy foreign debts, so he pushes for a strong centralized government to assume the war debts of the States. He is opposed by Thomas Jefferson and others who fear the threat of monarchy. In the midst of various political conflicts, the married Hamilton is set up to be seduced by Mariah Reynolds, who fakes a fainting spell at his house and takes money from Hamilton, supposedly to leave her husband. The two do indeed have an affair (though the movie is discreet about it, it seems to be at least a one-night stand), and Reynolds' husband than tries to blackmail Hamilton out of pushing through his "assumption of debts" bill. However, Hamilton bravely goes public, believing that his private affairs are no one else's business. His wife forgives him, Washington arrives to express his continuing confidence, and his bill gets passed. The film is based on a play which was a Broadway vehicle for Arliss (and which he co-wrote) and while it may not be terribly accurate, it has been opened up and has just the right mix of political intrigue and personal melodrama. Arliss was apparently way too old to be playing Hamilton (the actor was in his 60's, while Hamilton was in his 30's), but has the necessary gravitas for the part, though he is less credible as a dallying lover. Familiar faces in the cast include Alan Mowbray as Washington, Montagu Love as Jefferson, and Dudley Digges as a skirmishing senator. I'm sure it's asking too much for a George Arliss DVD boxed set, but maybe when the well runs dry, Warners will look into it. [TCM]

A word on Sydney Pollack:

Director Sydney Pollack, who died last week, didn't start making movies until the mid-60's, so he's not exactly a classic-era filmmaker, but he always seemed to have more in common with the studio wizards of the 30's and 40's than with his contemporaries like Altman, Kubrick, or Coppola. Like Michael Curtiz (Casablanca, Adventures of Robin Hood, Mildred Pierce), Pollack didn't have a distinctive personal style or stamp, but he made well-crafted, entertaining films. In my book, his strongest films are Tootsie, Three Days of the Condor, The Firm, and the remake of Sabrina--not as good as the original but a solidly-made comedy. I'm not as crazy about Out of Africa or The Way We Were, which both could have used doses of interesting style in the storytelling or the visuals.

But I'll miss Pollack more as an actor. He was good at playing friendly but authoritative father figures. I guess I'm mostly thinking of his recurring role as Will's father in Will & Grace, but I also liked him in Tootsie, Husbands and Wives, and in last year's Michael Clayton (in which he was not friendly, but sinister). He only acted in a handful of movies, but he was making acting a bigger part of his career as time went by and I'm sorry for all the grandfatherly (good or sinister) roles he won't get to do.

SMASH-UP: THE STORY OF A WOMAN (1947)

I'm not a fan of Susan Hayward's overwrought performances in the string of 50's women's melodramas that made her a star, but this one, her first starring vehicle, is a little less bombastic than the others and is fairly enjoyable, especially when you're watching for the real-life context. Hayward plays a nightclub singer named Angelica Evans who was supposedly modeled after singer and actress Dixie Lee; in the beginning, her career is on the rise, but she lets it take a backseat to her life as wife to crooner Ken Conway (Lee Bowman), based on Bing Crosby, who has just gotten a job as a singing cowboy on the radio. He adopts a twangy style of singing and, scheduled at 6 in the morning, isn't having much success until Hayward gives birth; because he's on the air while she's having her baby, he sings a song he wrote for her, in his normal singing voice, and he's a smash hit. His show is moved to 6 in the evening, he develops a fan base, and he begins touring. The emotionally insecure Hayward, who always needed a drink before she went on stage, starts drinking again to face the crowds of fans and business people who are suddenly part of their lives. As Bowman's career becomes more and more of a priority, her drinking becomes more obvious; a doctor (Carl Esmond) advises Bowman to give her more attention, but when Hayward suspects that Bowman and his assistant (Marsha Hunt) are having an affair, things spiral downward quickly. After she physically attacks Hunt at a party, Bowman initiates a divorce and seeks custody of their daughter. Hayward tries to restart her singing career, but she gets drunk opening night and misses the show. She kidnaps her little girl, leading to a climactic scene involving a fire, but also to a too-abrupt redemption for all, including Bowman who suddenly decides it’s time to make time for Hayward.

I like Hayward here, a whirlwind but not as over-the-top as she could get later in films like I WANT TO LIVE!; she was nominated for an Oscar for this film. Bowman, usually a supporting player, does a fine job as the Crosby stand-in; it also helps that the man who dubs his songs (Hal Derwin) has a bit of the Crosby lilt in his voice. Eddie Albert is likeable as a songwriter buddy of Bowman's. I especially liked Hunt as the potential "other woman" and the way her relationship with Bowman remains ambiguous until the end. Dorothy Parker co-wrote the original story. In real life, Crosby was quite a drinker early in his career, and as he gained fame (and control over his drinking), his wife slipped into alcoholism which led to her early death a few years after this film was released. This is shot in a murky noir style which fits its mood. The song Bowman sings for Hayward, "Life Can Be Beautiful," is quite nice, if overused by the end. [TCM]

THUNDER BIRDS (1942)

This average WWII propaganda programmer is notable primarily for its stunning Technicolor, rare for a relatively short film that was probably intended as a second feature, though its production values are generally high. The film is set at a real place, Thunderbird Field in Arizona, where, according to John Gunther’s opening narration, the Army was using civilians to train British and Chinese pilots for their respective air forces, probably before the U.S. was officially in the war--Gunther mentions American pilots, but the story doesn’t feature any, so I assume it was filmed and/or written before Pearl Harbor. Preston Foster (the hero of THE LAST DAYS OF POMPEII) is a veteran pilot who offers his services at Thunderbird. One of his most promising British students is John Sutton, the son of a pilot Foster knew and admired in WWI, but he suffers from an extreme form of vertigo which causes him to get sick every time he goes up in a plane. The commander, Jack Holt, wants to wash Sutton out and replace him with a likelier candidate, but Sutton assures Foster that he can overcome his problem and Foster goes to bat for him. Their relationship is strained when Sutton falls for lovely Gene Tierney, granddaughter of local rancher George Barbier, before he realizes that Foster has carried a torch for her for quite a while--though Tierney seems to think of Foster as more like an uncle (and frankly, that's what he seems like).

That’s pretty much it for the narrative; if you’ve seen any of these wartime buddy pictures, you’ll know from the start that Sutton will eventually, thanks to the noble Foster, overcome his weakness and make a sterling pilot, saving Foster’s life and bagging Tierney in the process. Sutton wisely underplays his part, though it takes a while to warm up to him; Tierney's acting talents aren't strained, though she is beautiful; Dame May Whitty has a small role as Sutton's grandmother in a flashback scene; a very young Richard Haydn (best known as Max in THE SOUND OF MUSIC) has a comic relief role as another British pilot; Reginald Denny is the head of British forces at the field. The use of Technicolor makes this beautiful to watch; particularly striking are the desert vistas and the bright blue and yellow planes the students fly. The film is clearly what some critics call a "preparedness" film (getting the public ready for our participation in the war and boosting a particular branch of the military), as there are no war scenes and very little talk of war, but with that in mind, it's entertaining enough. [DVD]

STAKEOUT ON DOPE STREET (1958)

Thanks to crime writer James Ellroy's perverse obsession with 1958, the year in which his mother was murdered, I was able to see this odd little juvenile delinquent/noir which would probably otherwise have never seen the light of day on Turner Classic Movies. Ellroy was a guest programmer one night and picked all fairly obscure crime movies from '58. This one was the most obscure so it's the one I watched. Two cops bust in on a drug deal but are shot at by two other crooks who were keeping watch. A briefcase which contains a can filled with heroin winds up in the tall weeds to be found by grocery delivery boy Jonathan Haze. He and his buddies, aspiring artist Yale Wexler and bodybuilding jock Steven Marlo, don't know what they have at first, but when they do, they decide to sell it to raise some money, with some help from drooling junkie Allen Kramer, but soon both the cops and the crooks are searching for the heroin. There's a long scene of Kramer describing the horrors of withdrawal before the poor guy gets worked over by the bad guys. Marlo also gets a fierce ass-whooping in a well-shot scene before the cops corner the baddies, save the day, and teach the boys a lesson. The movie has a very low-rent feel, but it has a nice jazzy score by Richard Markowitz who later wrote the score for the Murder She Wrote series; the director, Irvin Kershner, is best known for helming THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK. The cinematography is by the famous Haskell Wexler (under the pseudonym Mark Jeffrey) and lead actor Yale Wexler is his brother. Though the buddies are all dating girls, there is an odd homoerotic tension in an early scene in which the artist is sketching the bodybuilder during his sweaty workout. Haze is best remembered as Seymour in the original LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS. [TCM]

SHOPWORN (1932)

Poor Barbara Stanwyck! Her father, working on a blasting crew, is killed in an accident; left all alone, she finds work at a campus diner run by her aunt (Zasu Pitts), but has to put up with blowhard frat guys hitting on her. Studious student and rich boy Regis Toomey thinks she's a bit on the trampy side, but they hit it off. However, Stanwyck proves too rough for Toomey's nasty meddling mother (Clara Blandick) who schemes to get her son away from her by faking a heart condition and insisting that Toomey accompany her to Europe for her treatment. Toomey, to his credit, insists on taking Stanwyck with him and he plans their wedding, but Blandick, with some help from her friend, a judge (Oscar Apfel), tries to pay Stanwyck to go away. When that doesn't work, they get her committed to the State Home for the Regeneration of Females on trumped-up morals charges. In a 20-second montage sequence which covers six years, we see Stanwyck leave the Home, become a chorus girl, then an actress, and finally a star of the stage (with Pitts as her maid). When Toomey and Stanwyck meet again, she thinks that he OK'd her heist to the reform school, and he thinks that she took money to leave him. The rest of the film follows their eventual reconciliation, despite Blandick's continued meddling (even the judge counsels Blandick to get psychiatric help). The plot contrivances get more outrageous until the last scene in which Blandick actually pulls a pistol on Stanwyck. Sadly, the happy ending is rushed and awkward, but until then, this is a fun over-the-top mother-love melodrama.

The title is misleading, as Stanwyck isn't really "shopworn"; in the last half, we see that she has made headlines as the third party in a divorce case, and the townsfolk refer to her as "notorious," but we never know how much of this reputation is deserved. Toomey is a bit too bland, but Stanwyck is fine. Even better is Clara Blandick, mostly known as Aunt Em in OZ. She gives a full-blooded performance as a bitch you love to hate. Stanwyck gets a couple of good pre-Code lines: She tells Toomey about her rough-and-tumble upbringing in construction camps, "I could cuss when I was 6 and say no when I was 14." In a discussion about discussing sex, she says, "In this country, we call sex anything but." And this film must mark the first use of the word "ejaculate" in a Hollywood movie--even though it's in the context of a dictionary-browsing session, it's still rather startling. [TCM]

LORD JIM (1965)

It's been a few years since I read Joseph Conrad's "Lord Jim"; I liked it a great deal, but I remember it as a relatively dense novel of ideas buried in an obliquely told narrative, with a central character who remains a cipher. Custom made for Hollywood, eh? Peter O'Toole is Jim, an officer in the Merchant Marine on board the S. S. Patna. The narrator Marlow (Jack Hawkins) tells us that O'Toole had big dreams of glory, of being someone important, but all that is scuttled when the ship, carrying 800 Muslims to Mecca, is overcome by a storm at sea. O'Toole lets his fear get the best of him and imagines he sees the hold flooding. He and some of the other men abandon the ship in a lifeboat, leaving the pilgrims to a watery fate, but it turns out that the ship was only damaged, and it and its passengers survived. An inquiry is held and O'Toole confesses to desertion. Instead of a life of fame, he hides in anonymity and takes any job he can get. When he saves a small boat's cargo from fire, its owner (Paul Lukas) hires him to go upriver in the Malay jungle, with weapons and supplies, to help the natives of Patusan free themselves from a vicious warlord (Eli Wallach). The natives accept O'Toole as a leader and after a prolonged battle, Wallach is defeated, but a group of his cronies, led by Curt Jurgens, escape. With the help of the notorious Gentleman Brown (James Mason), they return to get hold of some precious jewels and O'Toole leads the villagers' defense. After the defeat of the crooks, O'Toole lets himself be talked into allowing them to leave unharmed, but Mason has a trick up his sleeve, leading to a final deadly and tragic conflict, with O'Toole sealing his own fate.

Made in the model of the David Lean period epics of the day (by Richard Brooks who also directed In Cold Blood and Looking for Mr. Goodbar), the movie does a nice job of condensing the action of the story as well as conflating characters, but it can't make up for the fact that the central character remains an enigma (as he does in the book). O'Toole was probably not the right actor for the part—I saw someone with a bit more physical bulk—but he's OK, though it often seems like he's still playing T.E. Lawrence, in the jungle rather than the desert. Wallach never seems as menacing as he should. The exotic Dahlia Lavi is wasted in a useless role as O'Toole's native love interest, and the usually reliable Mason is ill-used here. I did like Jurgens and Akim Tamiroff as villains, and Lukas, in his last major film role, is excellent. Most of the film looks very good, especially the scene toward the end of O'Toole and Mason meeting in the middle of a foggy river near dawn. I also like the sound of the wind chimes as O'Toole faces his fate at the very end. The story deals with the themes of fate, guilt, heroism, redemption, and responsibility, maybe a few too many things for what was marketed as an adventure film. It's also too long, with the first battle and its preparations in particular going on at tedious length. Not a bad movie, but if you have to choose between the movie and the book, read the book. [DVD]

How I Operate:

Someone recently asked me if I could post the movies I'm going to review in advance so readers of this blog could catch them. Unfortunately, that's not terribly feasible given the way I operate here. Each day or two I scan the TCM schedule via my cable provider's on-screen program guide and I set the DVR to record the movies I want to see. I then watch them at my leisure, and sometimes they stay on the DVR for months before I get around to them. I eventually watch them, taking notes along the way, then write up my review as a Word document and store it on my computer or hard drive for retrieval when I post the review here, which might be months later. However, I sometimes wait quite a while before I write my review--hence the note-taking so I don't forget key details--so ultimately, I may not post a review of a movie for six months to a year after it actually aired on Turner Classic or Fox Movie Channel. I currently have over 100 reviews backed up on my computer, and probably about 40 movie notes stuck away in a folder which I haven't turned into reviews yet.

But what I can do is scan the TCM schedule a week or two ahead of time and post here periodically a list of movies that 1) I'm planning on catching for review, and 2) movies I've reviewed in the past or have enjoyed without reviewing which are coming up. Below is my first such list (all air times Eastern):

* On TCM's Jimmy Stewart day, Tuesday, 5/20, three of my favorite Stewart films are airing: SHOP AROUND THE CORNER (9:45 a.m.), PHILADELPHIA STORY (11:30 a.m.), and VERTIGO (5:45 p.m.)

* I may try to catch MISS SADIE THOMPSON (5/22, 7:15 a.m.), Rita Hayworth's take on the famous prostitute from Somerset Maugham's "Rain," though I'm sure the movie won't be better than the Joan Crawford early 30's version.

* The lovely young John Payne is on display in the amusing boxing movie KID NIGHTINGALE (5/23, 9:15 a.m) which also has the always reliable Jane Wyman in her early B-movie days when she was fun.

* BREAKER MORANT, an excellent Australian military courtroom drama from 1980 is on Saturday night, 5/24, at 11:15 p.m.

* TCM's Memorial Day war movie schedule (5/26) has THE LOST PATROL (8:30 a.m.) which served as a template for many later war films in which a small group of soldiers is being picked off one by one in an isolated location. It's a good one. Also SINCE YOU WENT AWAY (2:00 p.m.), a solid WWII homefront film, better than MRS. MINIVER.

* On 5/27 at 6:00 a.m., I'll be recording ATLANTIC ADVENTURE, a mid-30's B-movie I know nothing about except it has Lloyd Nolan, who was always good in those kinds of films.

DIRIGIBLE (1931)

This adventure film breaks down neatly into two halves. Part 1: Navy commander Jack Holt, anxious to drum up support for the Navy's dirigible (airship) fleet, talks Hobart Bosworth, leader of an expedition to the South Pole, into using a dirigible to get there instead of planes. Holt asks his buddy, ace pilot Ralph Graves, to fly along in his plane, but Graves' wife (Fay Wray), whom Holt has feelings for, asks Holt not to take Graves away from home again, so without telling him why, Holt dismisses Graves from his team. On its way south, the airship runs into a huge storm and breaks apart over the ocean. Graves leads the rescue team, then takes a leave of absence from the Navy to become a full partner in Bosworth's expedition. Part 2: The unhappy Wray writes Graves a letter to be opened when he gets to the Pole, telling him she's getting a divorce (she's "tired of being married to a headline") and will be begging Holt to marry her. The group sets up a base camp on Antarctica, but when Graves flies a handful of men to the Pole, they crash and the plane burns up. A harrowing sequence follows, showing the men planting a flag, then trying to make the long trek back to base camp in harsh conditions, with the gravely injured Bosworth strapped to a sled. Holt and his crew take an airship to the Pole to attempt a rescue, but not everyone survives.

Last year, Turner Classic Movies showcased films involving aviation and this little-seen early effort by Frank Capra was included. It feels like one of the military preparedness films of the late 30's, though in this case, it's not about getting ready for war, but for selling the public on the Navy's use of dirigibles--by WWII, only a few such airships were being used by the U.S and the fleet was soon phased out altogether. Actually, the film, with its "man vs. natural phenomena" setpieces, feels more related to the German Mountain films, especially SOS ICEBERG. The relationship subplot is tedious and predictable, but the two big disaster scenes are well done and involving, especially the airship crack-up at sea. Capra's usual themes, such as the championing of the little guy, and his sentimental streak are not in evidence here, but there is an interesting modern feeling to the direction, with some use of casual overlapping dialogue. Neither Holt nor Graves would have been my first choice for their roles--maybe the young Spencer Tracy and Douglas Fairbanks--but they're OK, better than Wray who doesn't have much to work with. I don't know where the location footage was done, but I didn't have to suspend much disbelief to imagine they were near Antarctica. Roscoe Karns does a nice job as one of the potentially doomed members of the Pole expedition. Worth seeing, especially for a different take on Capra. [TCM]

WAIKIKI WEDDING (1937)

I recently read the first volume of Gary Giddins' masterful biography of Bing Crosby, "A Pocketful of Dreams," which covers the man and his career up to 1940, and I've been anxious to see more of Crosby's early, that is, pre-"Road," films. A recent 5-film DVD set from Universal includes this little gem, a big moneymaker for Paramount (as most of his movies were). It's as fluffy and insubstantial as cotton candy but it has a certain charm, and has the added plus of imaginative production numbers. The film, set entirely on the Hawaiian Islands, begins with a nicely shot native wedding scene with Crosby as best man, serenading the couple in a surprisingly deep voice. He plays a PR man for a pineapple company who has to deal with a promotion gone bad: a contest winner (Shirley Ross) who is supposed to be writing a series of newspaper articles about her wonderful paradise vacation is having a miserable time and wants to leave. The head of the company (George Barbier) wants Crosby to make sure that she changes her mind. He gets off on the wrong foot when he accidentally dunks her in the water. The next day, as she's about to leave the islands, a man asks her to wear a necklace for him so he can smuggle it past customs. She agrees, but is waylaid by a group of Hawaiian men who tell her that the necklace has a stolen pearl in it that she must return to its proper place to placate the volcano gods. Crosby accompanies her on her adventure, along with his sidekick Bob Burns and her pal Martha Raye. About halfway through the movie, we learn that the entire escapade, even the threatening volcano, has been arranged by Crosby to give Ross the time of her life, but along the way, she starts to fall for him, and he for her. Just as her cocky fiance (Leif Erickson) flies out to see her, she learns that not only did Crosby fake her adventure, but he's also been publishing newspaper articles about her trip under her name. Which of the suitors will she wind up with? Um, duh, but as in most romantic comedies like this, it's not the conclusion but the getting there that's the point.

Crosby is his usual mellow, charming self, and sings two great songs, the Oscar-winning lullaby "Sweet Leilani" and the lovely "Blue Hawaii," which is sung once as a duet with Ross in which Crosby is supposed to be teaching her the song, a scene that may have influenced his performance of "White Christmas" with Marjorie Reynolds in HOLIDAY INN. There's also a very fun dance number, "Hula Heaven" which involves some sexy dancing on top of giant drums, and a man doing a wild knife dance. Ross, who sang "Thanks for the Memory" with Bob Hope in THE BIG BROADCAST OF 1938, is OK but doesn’t exactly burn up the screen. Raye's over-the-top mugging gets a bit obnoxious, and I could have done with a bit less of Burns and the pig he carries everywhere. Even though we are clearly meant to find Erickson immensely unlikable, he is sort of hot. Also in the supporting cast is Grady Sutton as Barbier's piggy son, Granville Bates as Erickson's uncle, and Anthony Quinn in one of his earliest credited roles as one of the native men who helps Crosby out with his charade. Though most of it was obviously shot in the studio, the tropical sets are nice and it looks like there is some location footage in the background on occasion. Quite fun; as I noted earlier, fluffy but charming. [DVD]

A PLACE OF ONE'S OWN (1945)

A mild but effective modern-day ghost story which plays out like a British version of THE UNINVITED. James Mason and Barbara Mullen, an elderly couple, buy a house which has been empty for 40 years since the previous tenant, a sickly girl named Elizabeth, died of an overdose, having been spurned by a local doctor. The house may be haunted--they hear a strange voice on a speaking tube "intercom"--but they vow to stay on with their young hired companion (Margaret Lockwood). There are snatches of ghostly conversations, breezes of unknown origin, and a spooky storm, and Lockwood, who can't play the piano, can suddenly play it like an expert. When Lockwood collapses and takes to her sickbed, Mason and Mullen believe she's been possessed by the dead girl and their only hope is to find the doctor from Elizabeth's past. Mason, even with old-age makeup, seems too young for the part, but Mullen is nicely sly. Dennis Price plays a young doctor who helps out, and Ernest Thesiger has a small but crucial role in the climax. Though not a comedy, there is a light tone throughout, as in THE UNINVITED; things lag a bit in the middle, but for an old-fashioned ghost story, this is solid entertainment. [TCM]

THE BACHELOR PARTY (1957)

Don Murray is a young married bookkeeper who is taking night classes in hopes of advancement, but his wife's announcement that she's pregnant throws him for a loop. With his wife already complaining about the number of nights she has to spend alone, he thinks about quitting school and vents his general frustration with his buddies at an informal bachelor party one night. During the course of the evening, the guys go to dinner, watch some stag films (which put them to sleep), go out for drinks, and wind up at a wild Greenwich Village party. Along the way, lots of other problems bubble to the surface. The groom-to-be (Philip Abbott) is a 30-something virgin who still lives with his mother and is having second thoughts about his "arranged" marriage to a distant cousin whom he likes but for whom he feels no passion; Jack Warden, a bachelor, keeps pushing the guys to keep the party going until the wee hours, and secures the services of a hooker for Abbott; Larry Blyden, closest to Murray in age and circumstances, isn't able to give Murray much advice about his situation, and confesses to an extramarital fling a few years ago. When Murray asks if he loves his wife, Blyden replies with a string of the obligations he's gotten into in the name of family and ends with, "I'd better love her!"; E.G. Marshall, the oldest of the group and typically an easygoing fellow, gets drunk and admits that his doctor has told him he's a very sick man and needs to move to Arizona, but he can't face leaving the big city and starting a career from scratch. Murray himself is tempted to stray with a beatnick nympho (Carolyn Jones), and when he does head home, he and his wife argue over their options: Should he quit school? Should she get an abortion (which was illegal back then)? As in most 50's Hollywood films, the complex issues brought up are all banished far too easily in the final moments by the mouthing of banal platitudes about love.

Having said that, I should note that I am all for love and fidelity, but this film's happy ending (at least for Murray) feels fake and unearned. Up until that point, I liked this look at 50's middle-class male angst a lot, mostly for the acting. Warden and Marshall are fine as one would expect, and Blyden is good enough to make me sorry he didn't do more film acting--he wound up mostly in TV, known best today for game show appearances. Jones was nominated for an Oscar even though she's only on screen for about five minutes; nevertheless, she makes a strong impression, and the climax of the narrative occurs when she gets Murray in a clinch and says desperately, "Just say you love me--you don't have to mean it!" Patricia Smith is OK in the thankless role of the passive-aggressive wife who brings up the issue of abortion only because she's sure that Murray would be against it, and she's shocked when he's not. Nancy Marchand (Tony's mom on The Sopranos) is very good in a small role as Smith's sister-in-law who confesses her own unhappiness with her philandering husband. Best of all is Murray, who is not only excellent in the lead role (and is in almost every scene) but handsome and sexy as hell, in that 50's button-down way. He inhabits his role so well, I was disappointed that we didn't get to see him work out his frustrations in an explosive tryst with Jones. He has a leading man face--and here, often looks like an intense, depressed puppy dog--but a sidekick voice and persona; after a strong start in his first few films, he never quite made it to star status, but he has continued acting right up to the present day. He's probably best known now for a continuing role in Knot's Landing in the early 80's, though I remember him as the Congressman with a hidden gay past in ADVISE AND CONSENT. I'll have to keep my eye out for more Murray. [TCM]

THE LADY IN QUESTION (1940)

An odd duck of a movie, especially for 1940--essentially, it's half a black comedy involving a woman accused of murder, and half a romantic comedy with much of the romance erased and replaced by familial love. Brian Aherne and his wife, Irene Rich, run a bicycle/music shop (yeah, that seemed like a strange combo to me, too) in Paris, and live in the building with their son (Glenn Ford) and daughter (Evelyn Keyes). Aherne, excited to be called to jury duty, sits on the case of a lovely young woman (Rita Hayworth) accused of murdering her benefactor. First, he's convinced she's guilty, but soon he comes around to thinking that she couldn't be, and by asking a question about the timing of events on the night of the murder, he raises just enough doubt among the jurors that she's acquitted. After the trial, Aherne discovers that Hayworth is homeless and he offers her a job and a place to stay. He doesn't tell his family who Hayworth is, and, though at first his wife suspects he has a romantic interest in the girl, Hayworth is soon accepted by the family. Ford, an astronomy buff who has a telescope and huge models of the planets in his work room, knows who she is but becomes smitten with her anyway until he overhears one of Aherne's fellow jurors (Curt Bois) visiting and raising doubts about Hayworth's innocence. There are two running subplots; the major one involves Keyes' finace (Robert Norris), a dance teacher--always a suspect occupation in the classic movie era--who begins a flirtation on the side with Hayworth. The lesser comic-relief plot involves a pudgy man who keeps trading single bikes for tandem ones when he gets engaged, then returns for the single bike when his girl dumps him. All the plot strands come together on a near-tragic Christmas Eve which turns into a happy Christmas Day for most everyone.

Aherne, not quite 40 at the time, is made up fairly well to look older and does a nice job in a part that could have stood a bit more development; in the original French film GRIBOUILLE, there is apparently more ambiguity in the feelings the father has for the girl (father figure vs. lover), though in this version, that possibility is left pretty far in the background, and Aherne's paternalistic relationship with Hayworth is stressed much more than Ford's romantic one. Hayworth is fine, though her character is even less well defined. Ford is very young and boyish and is maybe the best actor in the bunch, though he's not around for a big chunk of the middle of the film. Keyes has a couple of scenes in which she sounds just like the whining Suellen she played in GONE WITH THE WIND. George Coulouris is Hayworth's lawyer and Frank Reicher (who looks a bit like Harry Davenport) is a judge. Even though the story wasn't based on a play, it sometimes feels stagy (not necessarily a bad thing), and I loved the set of the large multilevel house with its many windows from one room into another. [TCM]

DETOUR (1945)

Tom Neal is an unshaven hitchhiker at a roadside diner who freaks out when a song from his past plays on the jukebox. In a flashback, we see that Neal was once a promising pianist in New York City (at a club called the Break O' Dawn), but when his girlfriend, a singer at the club, leaves to make a name out in California, he becomes dejected, sadly plunking out rather avant-garde pastiches which drive away customers. Even big tips don't make him happy--when one patron gives him ten dollars, he says to himself, "What's a 10-spot? A piece of paper crawling with germs." Neal decides to hitchhike out west to be with his gal and winds up riding for a while with a chatty businessman (Edmund McDonald). As fate would have it, the man drops dead of a heart attack while Neal is driving. Not sure what to do, Neal dumps the body and takes his ID, money, and car, and soon discovers that the man was out to cheat his rich father, whom McDonald hadn't seen in years. He picks up a hot bimbo (Ann Savage) who sees through Neal's deception. She threatens to turn him in to the cops and say he murdered McDonald, so he lets her take control of their relationship. Savage basically imprisons him in a cheap motel room, and when they find out that McDonald's dying father is looking for his son, they figure Neal could pose as the son and get some dough out of the old man. But before they can even get out of the motel room, fate takes another hand and trips them both up, and Neal gets up back on the road, with the law just a step or two behind.

This is the movie that critics and film buffs point to as the ultimate example of how a Poverty-Row studio could occasionally create a movie as entertaining and memorable as any big-studio product. You do have to adjust your expectations a bit--after all, the movie was made in a week with B-level actors--but it's one of the best film noirs ever. Neal, who never got past B-movie lead status, is excellent as the sweaty, passive, pathetic guy who may or may not be telling us the truth. Some critics have made some grandiose claims about this movie's use of the unreliable narrator (since it's all in flashback, how do we know Neal is really as innocent and abused as he claims?). I think these critics are mostly just trying to cover up ambiguities and gaps caused not so much by intention as by speed and cheapness of execution, but it is fun to "read" the narrative that way. Savage is just as good as Neal, looking so hard and ugly that she's sexy, and spitting out her lines in a raspy voice. Without a doubt, these are two of noir's greatest characters. The cheapness of the production, directed by Edgar G. Ulmer, the Orson Welles of B-movies, gives everything an almost surreal feeling; the road scenes are all blatantly shot in a studio in front of a rear projection screen, and a New York City street scene consists of a street sign in darkness and mist. There are no pristine copies of this public domain film around, though some DVDs are better than others. Still, this is one to catch no matter what shape the print is in, and certainly not to be missed if you are a noir fan. [TCM]

RED HEADED WOMAN (1932)

[Spoilers follow!!]
It's been years since I'd seen this, one of my favorite pre-Code movies, and I'm happy to review it on the occasion of its DVD debut last year as part of Warner’s first Forbidden Hollywood set. The focus of the story, set in a fictional Ohio town, is Jean Harlow as Lil, the title character, a brassy gold digger who works as a secretary for Chester Morris, a married man from a prominent family. She's decided that she'll snag him, come hell or high water, and she gets all dolled up to deliver some papers to him at his home while his wife's away. It takes some doing on her part, but eventually he succumbs to her charms; there is a gap in the narrative here which makes it unclear exactly how far things go between them, but whatever happens, it doesn't completely satisfy Harlow. However, just as she seems ready to go to bat again, the wife (Leila Hyams) comes home and chases her out (Harlow tells her roomie, Una Merkel, “There we were like an uncensored movie…”). Morris's father (Lewis Stone) tries to transfer Harlow to Cleveland, but she won't budge and continues to pester Morris. He goes to her apartment for a showdown, even slapping her, but when Harlow moans, “Do it again, I like it!” he gives up, and winds up getting a divorce and marrying Harlow. She has grand plans for crashing high society (or what passes for it in an Ohio town), but the socialites shun her so she seduces a rich businessman (Henry Stephenson) who's visiting Morris and blackmails him into bringing important folks to her house for a party. The plan works briefly, but when she finds out that her guests left early to attend a "better" party, she throws a fit and leaves town. For a time, she shacks up with Stephenson, but sleeps on the sly with his chauffeur (Charles Boyer in what amounts to a bit part) and when Morris gives Stephenson photos of Harlow and Boyer, she's given the heave-ho. Things come to a head when Harlow comes back to Ohio with a gun, looking for Morris. She shoots him, he recovers, and the shocker is that after all this "immoral" behavior, everybody winds up with a relatively happy ending: Morris remarries Hyams, and Harlow's free and easy in Paris, scamming rich old men with Boyer’s help. Morris and Harlow are in fine form and their scenes together crackle with sexual energy. The supporting cast is strong (though I wish the wonderful Una Merkel had more to do) and includes May Robson in a small role. Highly recommended, especially as a starting point for viewers unfamiliar with the pleasures of pre-Code movies. [DVD]

THE MAN WHO FOUND HIMSELF (1937)

John Beal is a young man who is following in his father's footsteps and becoming a physician. He's engaged to be married to Jane Walsh, who complains that Beal hasn't quite found himself yet--his father thinks his problem is that he has too much youthful exhilaration, as evidenced by the hot-dogging flights he takes in his private plane. One stormy night, Beal gives a young lady a ride to Philadelphia in his plane, but he crashes. He survives but she dies and a love tryst is assumed. Beal is put on probation by the medical board, and Walsh won't leave the big city as Beal wants to, so Beal sets out alone to find himself. He changes his name, rides the rails, works on a road crew, and, out in L.A. where he's befriended by old pal Phillip Huston, gets a job as an airplane mechanic. He starts a flirtatious relationship with ambulance corps nurse Joan Fontaine and, despite his reluctance, she gets him to fly an emergency run (with hysterical patient Dwight Frye). When he's hired as a pilot, she discovers his true identity, as does a reporter named Nosey (Jimmy Conlin). Fontaine tries to arrange a reconciliation between Beal and his father, and things climax with a train wreck in which Beal proves he still has his doctoring skills, and perhaps has finally found himself. That's about all there is to this predictable melodrama, which is a perfectly acceptable way to pass an hour. The biggest surprise is seeing roly-poly comic actor Billy Gilbert (Pettibone in HIS GIRL FRIDAY) in a small but serious role as a train-riding hobo. [TCM]

SOMETHING WILD (1961)

Wild, this movie isn't. Creepy and disturbing, maybe, but in a bland way. Carroll Baker is a college student living with her parents in New York City. One night, on her way home, she's attacked and raped. She cuts up the clothes she was wearing and flushes them down the toilet, then withdraws, dropping out of school, leaving home and getting a small apartment in a tenement (without telling her parents where she's gone) and taking a job as a cashier at Woolworth's. She doesn't fit in with her neighbors and co-workers, can't cut the job, and has a breakdown. As she's about to jump off a bridge, she is saved by working class mechanic Ralph Meeker. Without knowing anything about her, he takes her home to his apartment (which isn't in much better shape than hers) and tells her to stay and recover while he goes to work. That night, he comes home stumbling drunk and tries to assault her. She kicks him in the eye which knocks him out cold. The next day, he can't remember what happened and thinks his eye injury (which winds up being permanent, requiring him to wear an eye patch) was the result of a bar fight. But though he feeds her and seems to think he's treating her well, he keeps her a prisoner in his apartment, for no reason he can articulate except that she's his "last chance." Eventually, these two damaged souls do forge something of a "normal" relationship, though I was not convinced that it would last.

This material might have worked better as a play, as practically all of the last half takes place in Meeker's apartment, though that is also the part of the movie that grows tedious. Neither Meeker not Baker inhabit characters who are all that interesting. We know a little bit about Baker, and the part of the film that focuses on her decline is good, but we know virtually nothing about Meeker's unpleasant character, and we have to accept on faith that he's a nice guy at heart. I did like the fact that much of the first half was shot on the streets of New York, giving the film a kind of neo-realist feel. It was also great fun to see Jean Stapleton, who I know mostly as Edith Bunker, as a hooker who, in a bizarre scene, manhandles a shirtless drunken sailor. A very young Doris Roberts also has a small role as a Woolworth's worker, and Mildred Dunnock is good as Baker's neurotic mother. For Ralph Meeker completists only. [TCM]

BAGDAD (1949)

Maureen O'Hara, of the fiery red hair and fiery Irish temperament, is Marjan, a Bedouin princess who was raised in England and has returned to her homeland to see her father. Sadly, just before she arrives, he is killed in a raid by the Black Robes, a rebel tribe. The Pasha (Vincent Price) tells her that the notorious Prince Ahmed is the leader of the Robes and she vows revenge. She finds herself attracted to Hassan (Paul Christian), a lowly camel driver, but we soon find out that he is actually Ahmed, trying to clear his name of any connection with the Black Robes--even Ahmed's cousin Raizul (John Sutton) thinks he's guilty. O'Hara, in a ridiculous plot contrivance, sings at a café (with very bad lip syncing), and soon finds out that Hassan is Ahmed. She has an altercation with the Pasha, whom she discovers is in league with the leader of the Robes, who is in fact not Ahmed but Raizul, and she learns that the Robes are planning to kill some visiting nobility. Marjan and Ahmed soon join forces to set things right. This feels very much like a typical "exotic" B-movie of its era, except it's in bright Technicolor, which is a big plus. I've decided that, as much as I like Maureen O'Hara in MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET, she's really not a great actress. She is lovely and can express disdain, but most other emotions seem beyond her. Price does his usual shtick, and I noticed halfway through that he keeps his right eye shut throughout the entire film; I have no idea why. Swiss actor Christian (who later went by Paul Hubschmid) makes a fetching leading man. This is passable 40's escapist fare, done no better than it had to be. [TCM]

THE CORSICAN BROTHERS (1941)

In 19th century Corsica, the Franchi family is holding a huge feast in celebration of the birth of an heir; because of a blood feud, Colonna (Akim Tamiroff) and his men invade the party and slaughter as many members of the Franchi family as they can. The doctor (H.B. Warner) attending the birth delivers Siamese twins and manages to escape with them along with the loyal Lorenzo (J. Carroll Naish). The doc separates the twins and to ensure their safety, they are split up; Mario (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) is left with the Dupree family and grows up privileged in Paris; Lucien (also Fairbanks) stays with Lorenzo in the Corsican woods and becomes a Robin Hood-type bandit, stealing mostly from the Colonnas. They can feel each others pains and ecstasies even though they aren't aware of each other's existence. When they turn 21, they are brought together by the doctor. They vow revenge against Colonna but their budding relationship is strained when they both develop a crush on the lovely Countess Gravini (Ruth Warrick) whom Mario knew previously in Paris. When Colonna tries to force her to become his wife, the brothers go to her aid, but Lucien becomes jealous when he senses that she and Mario are in love. A plot involving a disguise and a death-simulating drug is carried out, and swordfights and gunplay follow to a satisfying ending.

I tend to think of Douglas Fairbanks Jr. as a star of swashbuckler epics like his father had been, but according to Robert Osborne on TCM, this was his first swashbuckling role, and it came over 15 years into his acting career; as far as I can tell, he only did one other similar role (in 1947's SINBAD THE SAILOR). Still, he's very good here, charming and handsome and athletic, and he does a nice job of giving the two brothers different personalities. There is some fine split-screen work, though I suspect much of the "twinning" is done with a stand-in. Still, it's effective. Warrick, who didn't specialize in glamour parts, is very good, as are Warner and Naish. Tamiroff isn't bad, but he sounded a little too much like Boris Badenov from Rocky & Bullwinkle for me to take him seriously. Henry Wilcoxon has a small role as the Franchi patriarch who gets killed off in the first few minutes, and Gloria Holden (of DRACULA'S DAUGHTER fame) is the mother of the twins. Solid classic-era adventure, lacking the bells and whistles (and color) of Errol Flynn's Robin Hood, but still quite fun. [TCM]

THE STERILE CUCKOO (1969)

This film contains Liza Minnelli's breakthrough performance; in only her second film role, she was nominated for an Oscar. What's striking to me is how much Liza's character of Pookie Adams is like Liza's character of Sally Bowles in CABARET three years later. We first see Pookie waiting quietly with her father for the bus that will take her from her small town to her freshman year at a New England college. On the bus, she meets up with Jerry (Wendell Burton), another freshman heading off to his all-boy's college not far from hers. She comes off as a total free-spirited kook and Jerry tries to keep his distance, but she forces him to pay attention to her and soon, thanks to the used, sun-roofed VW she buys, she is visiting him on weekends and they begin a relationship. His reserves are worn down eventually (after frolics in a cemetery, a cow field, and an overcrowded campus bar), and they begin renting a cabin regularly on weekends for sex. They tell each other they're in love, but when Jerry tells her that he's going to spend a chunk of his Christmas break helping his beer-swilling jock roommate Charlie (Tim McIntire) with his studies instead of taking her home to meet his folks, she accuses him of being gay. When that doesn't change his mind, she claims to be pregnant. He suggests an abortion, then offers to marry her, but still doesn't change his break plans. In January, she says the baby "went away" (we assume she was never really pregnant) and they carry on as before. At a drunken (but still fairly innocent) dorm bacchanal, she bonds with Charlie and makes a fool of herself. When Jerry stays at his dorm, all alone, during spring break to catch up on classwork, Pookie comes to stay with him. She gives him some space, but grudgingly, and soon he tells her they need a break. Later, when Jerry decides to look her up, he finds out she'd dropped out of school and seemingly vanished off the face of the earth, but they do wind up having one more sad little encounter.

Like Sally Bowles, Pookie Adams appears to be a strong-willed individual, but is actually rather fragile and insecure. They both seem flighty, but are also single-minded in getting what they think they want. Both have romances with men who are overwhelmed by them--unlike Brian in CABARET, Jerry isn't presented as gay, just inexperienced (their first lovemaking session is awkward and amusing, and realistic), though the seed of doubt that Pookie plants is never exactly proven wrong; Charlie admits to Jerry that, despite his persona, he's a virgin, assuming that Jerry is, too, which he's not, but that's as much as we see of their holiday week together. Minnelli uses many of the same mannerisms that she does in CABARET, and honestly, I was a little disappointed to see this, as it makes her performance in the later movie seem more like she was dipping into a used back of tricks. (She even references an old friend named Elsie here, just as she does in the song "Cabaret.") Burton is very good handling the potentially awkward role of passive observing male. This is really a two-person show; except for McIntire, no one else has any significant dialogue (and no one else gets screen credit), and as such, it held my attention fairly well. The song "Come Saturday Morning," which I like, is played a little too often as background music for romantic frolics (and for some of the sad scenes later). The production seems fairly cheap--though set against a "fall to winter to spring" seasonal arc, virtually all the exteriors were obviously shot in the fall, and the colleges both seem more like small boarding schools. Interesting mostly as a snapshot of Minnelli just before she hit full bloom. [TCM]

CHARLEY'S AUNT (1941)

This is the the third version I've seen of the famous cross-dressing farce. The plot, in a nutshell, has two Oxford students getting an older student to dress up as a visiting aunt in order to be a chaperone when their two young ladies visit. The "aunt" winds up romantically pursued by two older men, and things come to a head when the real aunt shows up. This is the most famous version, though it was hard to come by for years until Fox recently issued it on DVD. Jack Benny is Lord Babberley, the guy who dresses up, and he's fine with the physical humor; when dressed as the aunt, Benny moves a bit like Robert Preston did his his drag number "The Shady Dame from Seville" in VICTOR/VICTORIA. But his attempt at a British accent is pathetic (basically, he pronounces "can't" as "cawn't" and calls it a day), and he comes nowhere near pulling off a female voice--perhaps he was afraid to camp it up in an exaggerated fashion, but that would have been funnier than what he does here, which is speak in his normal register and make his voice crack periodically. James Ellison and Richard Haydn are OK as the young men (though Ellison has the same accent problem; Haydn doesn't because he's a genuine Brit), Kay Francis is fine as the real aunt, and Anne Baxter has a thankless role as one of the young women. However, the film is well worth watching for three supporting actors: Laird Cregar, best known for villainous roles (THE LODGER, HANGOVER SQUARE), displays fine comic finesse as Haydn's father; the always wonderful Edmund Gwenn is excellent as the girls' guardian; Reginald Owen is great fun in the smaller role of an Oxford don who pops up to comic effect now and then. I liked the scenes in which Benny, dressed as the aunt, kisses the young ladies full on their mouths. Overall, I'd say Charlie Ruggles in the 1930 version is the best screen Aunt I've seen. The commentary track on this DVD is one of the most tedious I've run across. The commentator goes along at a nice clip, but spends almost all his time simply giving biographical details about everyone right down to the visual effects artist; mostly he simply rattles off their credits, as though he just sat down at IMDb moments before he recorded his track. [DVD]

WOMEN IN THE WIND (1939)

A variation on the Warner Brothers pilot-buddy films of the 30's. This stars William Gargan as famous pilot Ace Boreman who is treated to an NYC ticker-tape parade (strictly B-movie scale) for setting a flying record. Next on his plate is judging in an all-female flight derby from California to Cleveland; hoping to win that derby is Kay Francis, a woman who was taught to fly by her brother, an old friend of Gargan's who is now a cripple. She wants to win the cash prize to pay for an operation for him which her family doctor (Victor Jory, in a rare good-guy part) is certain will help him. Francis, without telling Gargan who she really is, sweet talks her way into a plane and pulls some showboating moves in the air, and an impressed Gargan loans her a plane to use in the derby. They also begin a flirtation, though she overhears him tell his pal Maxie Rosenbloom that his motto is, "Feed 'em, fly 'em, forget 'em!" Meanwhile, the woman Gargan assumed was his ex-wife (Sheila Bromley) returns with the news that their Mexican divorce wasn't legal, and she enters the derby, claiming Gargan's plane. He manages to get Francis a different plane, but at the halfway point in the race, a mechanic friend of Bromley's (Frank Faylen) tinkers with Francis' plane, putting her in mortal danger in the air. Now it's not just a matter of winning, but of surviving a gas leak and the loss of a landing wheel. After hogging most of the first half of the movie, Gargan becomes second fiddle to Francis and her adventures. At this point in their careers, he was still more or less on the way up, getting an Oscar nomination the very next year for They Knew What They Wanted, and she was on the way down, but she gives the more impressive performance, though the two don't have much romantic chemistry. Eve Arden is good as Francis' flying sidekick, as is Eddie Foy Jr. doing the same for Gargan. The flying scenes are mostly quite well done, and there was apparently some location shooting done at a real Cleveland air derby. At 63 minutes, it's just the right length for a breezy second feature. [TCM]

THE SECRET OF MADAME BLANCHE (1933)

Irene Dunne is a singer who marries a rich but weak and vapid lad (Phillips Holmes) against his father's wishes. When Dad (Lionel Atwill) finds out, he threatens to cut the boy off; Holmes, having no money or inner resources of his own, goes back home, leaving Dunne alone--and, unknown to him, pregnant. Atwill refuses to change his mind and Holmes kills himself. Dunne has her baby and takes some rather unsavory jobs to survive, but Atwill has the baby taken away from her. Twenty years later, her son (Douglas Walton), now a WWI solider, behaves like a cad and creates a scene at the French cafe that Dunne runs. She discovers his identity and, when he accidentally shoots the angry father of a girl he had dallied with, Dunne tries to take the blame (without telling him she's his mother). A fairly straightforward "mother love" melodrama, like STELLA DALLAS or THE SIN OF MADELON CLAUDET. It's apparently very much like the more well-known MADAME X, though I've never seen that film. Dunne is good, though she is aged a bit too much, looking much older than 45 or 50 in the last half. Also with Una Merkel and C. Henry Gordon. [TCM]

BILLY BUDD (1962)

In 1797, during wartime, a young merchant sailor, Billy Budd (Terence Stamp), is taken off of his ship by the Royal Navy and impressed into service under Captain Vere (Peter Ustinov). Stamp is blond, handsome, and always smiling, though he does have a stammering problem. Soon he is a crew favorite (personality-wise; issues of lust or love or even close friendship are never touched upon), beloved by all except for the sadistic master-at-arms, Claggart (Robert Ryan), who actively enjoys the floggings he dishes out, sometimes, Stamp is told, for no reason at all. The men say that Ryan is an important "force for order," but they also believe that he finds "perfection" to be a disease. When Ryan refuses to let a sailor in obvious distress (Ronald Lewis) out of his turn up in the foretop, the sailor falls to his death and Stamp makes it clear that he blames Ryan for the man's death. In a well done night scene, Stamp tries to make friends with the master-at-arms, but Ryan believes that he is being artificially "charmed" by the lad and he goes to the captain with a blatantly false story implicating Stamp in an attempted mutiny. When confronted with Ryan's story, Stamp is struck dumb and the only way he can react is to punch Ryan in the head. Ryan falls, grins at Stamp, and dies. The officers on board vote to acquit Stamp, but Ustinov, though sympathetic to the boy's plight, feels they must let military law take its course, and the punishment for striking an officer, much less killing him, is death.

The Herman Melville story this is based on is a work, like Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice," that always seemed to me to be full of homoerotic subtext waiting to be examined in English classes, but my teachers back in the 70's never went there. "Venice," they said, is about art, or aging, or death. "Billy," they said, is about good and evil, or the law, or Jesus Christ. Well, that may be, but I think both works can be also be fruitfully (no pun intended) examined as stories about thwarted male-male attraction. Ustinov, the director and co-screenwriter of this film, doesn't do much interpretation, settling for a realistic surface rendering of the narrative. If this version is about anything, it's about law vs. justice; even though the officers all believe that Stamp was telling the truth and that Ryan was a twisted bastard, they conclude, "We do not deal with justice but with the law," and the law says Stamp must die. Stamp is indeed lovely and angelic, and he received an Oscar nomination for this, his first movie role. Ustinov is excellent in a difficult role; Ryan has the dark glowering look for his part, and does a fine job in a chilling scene in which his body language makes it clear that he wants a flogging to continue at much greater length but cannot disobey his captain's orders. But he just never feels as evil or perverse as he should--and the hat he wears, a tall black one with a big brass buckle in the middle, kinda makes him look like an annoyed, if very tall, leprechaun. Melvyn Douglas, David McCallum, and John Neville (The Well Manicured Man on "X-Files") are also in the cast. Much of the film was shot aboard a real ship at sea which adds to the atmosphere, though this story really seems to call more for melodrama and symbolism than stark realism. [DVD]

THE POWER AND THE GLORY (1933)

This little-seen movie is known by film buffs primarily as an inspiration for the narrative structure of Orson Welles' CITIZEN KANE; its "unstuck in time" chronology keeps things interesting, and the cinematography by James Wong Howe is always fine, but the movie has nowhere near the fully fleshed-out characters or thematic and emotional force of KANE, though both do seem to be stories of how a man becomes rich and powerful, then unmoored and miserable. We begin at the funeral of rich and powerful railroad magnate Spencer Tracy, but the narrative unfolds as a long flashback conversation between Ralph Morgan, Tracy's loyal friend and business partner, and Morgan's wife (Sara Padden) who seems not terribly unhappy that Tracy is dead. The anecdotes play out along two chronological levels: The first story level is of Tracy growing up from a backwoods boy to an illiterate railroad "track walker" to become an educated and ambitious engineer, a husband and father, and soon head of a railroad. This story keeps getting interrupted by a second one, which follows Tracy's fall from his peak after his company becomes a conglomerate. His son is kicked out of college and Tracy reluctantly gives him a junior bookkeeping position at the railroad. Tracy begins a long-term affair with Helen Vinson, the daughter of another railroad owner, and he has to deal with a nasty strike during which hundreds of workers are killed. The clincher comes in a superbly done scene in which Tracy discovers that Vinson has been having an affair with his son, and that her baby may well be the son's and not Tracy's.

At 75 minutes, this doesn't have the time to develop its characters or situations as well as it needs to. Tracy is quite believable as both the illiterate but happy bumpkin and the powerful but unhappy businessman. Silent movie star Colleen Moore is fine as the schoolteacher who inspires Tracy to better himself and who winds up marrying him, but Vinson outshines her as the scheming mistress. Morgan, never a favorite of mine, is fairly weak, but as his role is that of a passive observer, he doesn't hurt the film too much. The non-linear narrative structure is never confusing--if everyone looks young and poor, it's storyline 1, and if they look older and put-upon, it's storyline 2. Contemporary reviews of the film mention a device called "narratage," in which Morgan, the off-camera narrator, speaks the lines that the characters we see are supposed to be saying, but I only noticed this once, in a cute scene involving Tracy nervously proposing to Moore. Preston Sturges wrote the screenplay; in the hands of a more creative director, the movie might have been more effective, but William K. Howard directs in a rather journeyman fashion--though as I noted earlier, Howe's camerawork is often striking. [FMC]

PRESTIGE (1932)

No, not the so-so magician movie from 2006, but a so-so tropical melodrama from the heyday of that genre (RED DUST, CHINA SEAS, KONGO) with a chunk of Devil’s Island drama tossed in. Melvyn Douglas is an officer in the French Army, stationed in Paris; we see him reprimand an officer for failure of duty back at a penal camp at Lao Bao in Vietnam. Then, on the eve of his wedding to Ann Harding, Douglas is assigned to the same camp. She keeps a stiff upper lip, delays the wedding, and decides not to accompany him, but when one year later his stay is extended indefinitely, she opts to go live with him. Her father (Ian MacLaren) warns her that her "prestige" as a white person is the only tool she will have to fight the dangers of the jungle (and, it's implied, the physical lure of the dusky races--this in an era when even the appearance of "miscegenation" was strictly against the Production Code). In Lao Bao, she finds Douglas has become a shambling, sweaty, drunken wreck--there’s a great shot of Douglas drinking and collapsing in the shadows just before she arrives. They get married in a native ceremony but Douglas' decline continues; Harding tries to go over Douglas' superiors heads in requesting a transfer, but it is denied, and the messenger of that news is an officer stationed in Saigon (Adolphe Menjou) who has always loved Harding. Harding tries some "tough love" and tells Douglas he needs to get some backbone and quit drinking, but it doesn't work and when Harding decides to leave with Menjou, things come to a head and the climax involves a murder, restless natives, and Douglas trying to regain control over his life and his career. What's most notable about this film isn't the plot (predictable) or the acting (OK), but the cinematography; director Tay Garnett's camera is restless, constantly on the prowl, climaxing in a great crane shot at the end. Clarence Muse has the small but crucial role of Douglas' servant. [TCM]

THE GREAT GATSBY (1974)

It's the height of the bootlegging 20's; Nick (Sam Waterston), approaching 30 and just making his way in the business of bond selling, is spending the summer on Long Island, in a small cottage on West Egg, across from the palatial home of the rich, mysterious Jay Gatsby (Robert Redford), who throws parties which are well attended by the local high-class folks, even though most of them never even meet him. Nick frequently visits his rich cousin Daisy (Mia Farrow) who lives with her brutal, fascistic husband Tom (Bruce Dern) across the bay in East Egg. Nick discovers that Gatsby was snubbed by Daisy in the past because he was poor, and Gatsby has amassed a fortune in order to get a second chance with her. Gatsby seems truly interested in being friends with Nick, but he's not above using Nick to rekindle a relationship with Daisy. It is common knowledge that Tom is having an affair with Myrtle (Karen Black), the slatternly wife of poor schlemiel George (Scott Wilson) who runs a gas station in a desolate industrial area nicknamed "The Valley of Ashes," but when Tom suspects that Daisy is having a fling with Gatsby, tensions among the whole group, including tennis playing beauty Jordan (Lois Chiles) who is half-heartedly pursuing a fling with Nick, escalate. It ends badly for all concerned.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" is my favorite novel of all time. For that reason, I have avoided watching this movie, which has gotten almost universally bad reviews, until now, when I was fairly certain that nothing could spoil any future enjoyment I might get from the novel. It is, in fact, not a particularly good movie, but it's not exactly a bad movie, either. Much of the book derives its power from its symbols, such as a sign with a giant pair of eyes gazing down over the Valley of Ashes like, in the words of George, "the eyes of God," the profusion of colored shirts in Gatsby's bedroom, and the green light at the end of Daisy's dock which figures prominently in the book's conclusion. The symbols are all here in the movie, but when they're made so literal, they don't work as well--actually, I rather liked the eyes sign, but most of the rest of the symbols just get in the way of the narrative. The performances are problematic, but I think the real problem is the screenplay, by Francis Ford Coppola, which adheres too slavishly to the novel. It gets almost all the major plot lines in (and the production design gets the rich 20's atmosphere right), but the elegiac tone about the impossibility of recapturing the past and the criticism of the American dream are both lacking here, and the characters are not fleshed out enough, leaving the actors at sea. I don't care much for Farrow, but I think she gives the part her best. At times, as in her very first scene, she almost gets it, but Daisy is a tough character to inhabit; she's supposed to be attractive enough to have held someone like Gatsby in thrall for years, but by the end (if not before) we know she's not worth all the trouble. Farrow makes her too easy to see through, too early on, so we never know what he saw in her. Redford is so very golden-boy handsome, but there is little chemistry between him and Farrow, and the character is not written terribly well.

The best performances come from the supporting players: Black, who wisely underplays for once, Wilson, who makes his cardboard character quite sympathetic (I almost felt worse about his fate than Gatsby's), and especially Waterston who does Nick so well despite the limited characterization provided. I'd love to see the 1949 Alan Ladd version, but that seems to have vanished into limbo. Oddly, the director of this film, Jack Clayton, also directed the film version of my second favorite book of all time, "Something Wicked This Way Comes," and also did a mediocre job. Maybe they should just never have been translated to the screen at all. The DVD is letterboxed, but there is a lot of awkward zooming in and out and around, which makes me wonder if the film is presented at its correct aspect ratio. I've also recently seen the 2000 A&E television version of GATSBY, and despite less star power and a smaller budget, it is in most ways superior to the Redford film, though still falling awfully short. Paul Rudd is excellent as Nick and Martin Donovan is a better Tom, though Toby Stephens and Mira Sorvino are at sea as Gatsby and Daisy. [DVD]

I WAS AN ADVENTURESS (1940)

At an art exhibit, a countess (Vera Zorina) shows off a stunning necklace which she says is a worthless copy of a valuable original. However, Fritz Feld, told by an expert that it's worth hundreds of thousands of francs, offers to buy it from her for a large sum, despite her continuing protestations that it's worth nothing. After the sale, Feld tries to sell it and finds that it is, indeed, worthless. It turns out that Zorina is a former ballerina turned con woman who has been working this particular con, using an actual valuable necklace and its copy, with her pals Erich von Stroheim and Peter Lorre. They go across France making a nice living bilking folks until Zorina falls in love with their latest mark, Richard Greene. She doesn't tell Greene about her past, they get married, and she tries to leave the racket, but Stroheim and Lorre keep trying to drag her back in. She pulls a nicely twisty con to get rid of them, which works briefly, but soon they're back to get revenge by robbing all the weekend guests at Greene's estate. Zorina comes clean with her husband, but how will they catch the burglars, who are on their way out of the country?

This is a little confection which feels like it wants to be a fluffy, harmless version of the Lubitsch pre-Code classic TROUBLE IN PARADISE with a hint of Dietrich's DESIRE tossed in. It starts out well enough, and the two con games we see in full (the first one, and the one that Zorina pulls on Stroheim and Lorre) are fun, but other parts of the film lag a bit. The biggest problems are a sloppy script and lackluster romantic leads. Stroheim and Lorre wind up stealing the show. Lorre's character is actually the most interesting in the film; he's a con man who seems to genuinely want to leave the business (and has a real affection for Zorina) but knows he's good at it and can't quite get away. Stroheim is not exactly known for comedy, but he displays a nice light touch here, all the more effective because he goes against type. Though there seems to be no particular degree of eroticism in the men's relationship, they are compared explicitly to a married couple (they're said to be together "for richer or poorer"). Worth seeing as a novelty. [FMC]