MY YEAR IN MOVIES

The best classic movies that I saw for the first time this year, in alphabetical order:

BEN-HUR (1925): The silent version of the Biblical epic, with Ramon Novarro. I'm trying to decide if it's worth getting the overblown Heston version on DVD just to get this as an 'extra.' (Mar.)

BORN TO BE BAD (1934): Loretta Young and Cary Grant in one of the last of the naughty pre-Code melodramas; struggling mother Young (in her best bad-girl performance) tries to seduce rich Grant away from his bride-to-be. (Feb.)

CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY (1944): Not really a holiday film, but a good noir with two stars playing against type: Deanna Durbin as a fallen woman and Gene Kelly as the murderous mother-loving thug she married. (Dec.)

DON'T TURN 'EM LOOSE (1936): Perhaps the only anti-parole propaganda film ever made. It's a little B-movie gem with Bruce Cabot doing a fine job as a paroled thug who acts like a golden boy in front of his family (including Lewis Stone as his father). (Nov.)

THE GENERAL DIED AT DAWN (1936): The best Marlene Dietrich movie that Dietrich never made. It's a lot like her SHANGHAI EXPRESS but with Madeleine Carroll as the good/bad lady and Gary Cooper as the hero. Funny, sexy, exciting. (July)

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO ST. MATTHEW (1965): Pasolini's bare-bones, documentary-style take on the life of Jesus. Compelling and at times beautiful. (Mar.)

MILL OF THE STONE WOMEN (1960): A low budget French/Italian horror film with a plot that is a cross between HOUSE OF WAX and EYES WITHOUT A FACE. Acting and atmosphere make this stand out above the run-of-the-mill horror film of the time. (Oct.)

THE MODEL AND THE MARRIAGE BROKER (1951): The wonderful Thelma Ritter gets to play a lead role here as a marriage broker who comes to question her life's work, and it's a wonderful, underrated film, a comedy with some serious overtones. (Dec.)

THREE ON A MATCH (1932): Archetypal pre-Code movie with sex and crime and scandal; three former schoolmates (Bette Davis, Ann Dvorak, and Joan Blondell) meet up a few years later and get involved in each other's lives. It's short, fast-paced, and lots of fun. (Technically, I'd seen this before, but remembered little about it) (Apr.)

THE WIND (1928): Silent film with Lillian Gish as a young woman stuck in a marriage of convenience fighting for survival in a barren, wind-swept part of Texas. Melodramatic, but powerful. (Apr.)

THE WOMAN ON PIER 13 (aka I MARRIED A COMMUNIST--1949): Good cross of noir thriller and anti-Communist propaganda. Stars Robert Ryan and Laraine Day are fine, but the real gem is Janis Carter as the icy blonde bad girl. (May)

I saw some good WWII movies, such as GUADALCANAL DIARY, BATAAN, SO PROUDLY WE HAIL, and THE AMERICANIZATION OF EMILY. I was pleasantly surprised by a couple of Shirley Temple films (BRIGHT EYES and REBECCA OF SUNNYBROOK FARM) and I had fun seeing the 60's camp thriller DANGER: DIABOLIK. Other highlights included Maurice Chevalier in FOLIES-BERGERE, a fun B-movie with Gloria Stuart called WANTED: JANE TURNER, and Errol Flynn in SANTA FE TRAIL. My disappointments seemed few and far between this year, so I won't dwell on those this time. As far as recent films, it was a dry year for me. I didn't see many, and the few I genuinely liked included MYSTERIOUS SKIN, FANTASTIC FOUR, THE ARISTOCRATS, DOWNFALL, and SERENITY. CAPOTE and GOOD NIGHT AND GOOD LUCK had great acting but fell down in other areas. I haven't seen the new KING KONG yet but I have high hopes for it. The DVD release of the 1933 original was yet another wonderful package from Warner Home Video.

TENTH AVENUE ANGEL (1948)
CHRISTMAS IN BOSTON (2005)

I'm usually a sucker for Christmas-themed films, but this year, my cinema stocking was rather bare. My annual holiday TV-movie, CHRISTMAS IN BOSTON, on ABC Family, was pretty lame. The plot device had potential: a man and woman who have never met but have been pen-pals for years finally arrange to meet, but then chicken out and each has a friend pose as him or her. The friends wind up falling in love, and so do the pen-pals, without knowing each other's real identities until the end. The acting was OK; Patrick J. Admas fit the bill nicely as the requisite blandly handsome leading man, though I can't say much for Marla Sokoloff as his pen-pal. As an average TV-movie romance, this is pretty average; the real problem for me is that the holiday element is completely beside the point. This could have been set on Labor Day or Arbor Day or June 8th, and the film totally wastes any possibility for using holiday cheer, charm, and magic.

The Christmassy TENTH AVENUE ANGEL is a movie I've avoided watching in the past, mostly because the movie guide critics really hate it and give it one star or less. The "civilian" reviewers on IMDb, however, tend to love it and give it all the stars they can, so I broke down and watched it this year. It's not quite as bad as the professional critics say (Halliwell calls it "icky" and Maltin gives it a Bomb rating), but it's not one I'd rush to watch again. Ten-year-old Margaret O'Brien plays the title character, a whimsical Pollyanna-type who lives in the tenements and zips around on her roller skates, brightening the lives of the neighborhood residents. Her mother (Phyllis Thaxter) and father (Warner Anderson), though loving parents, are secondary characters next to her aunt (Angela Lansbury) and Lansbury's boyfriend (George Murphy). Murphy has just returned home from prison (O'Brien was told he was traveling the globe) and is trying to put his life back together; his buddy at the taxi company where he used to work (Barry Nelson, with an unbecoming pencil-thin mustache) gives him a job washing cabs and promises him that, after his 6-month parole period is over and he can hold a driver's license again, he'll be back in as a driver. However, Murphy finds it hard to escape his past and decides that he shouldn't marry Lansbury and plans to leave town after parole. Meanwhile, O'Brien becomes disillusioned when she finds out that everything adults say isn't necessarily true and she starts moping around, losing her whimsical charm. At Christmas, Anderson is low on money, Thaxter is pregnant, and Murphy is tempted to join up with his crime buddies for one last heist. When Thaxter collapses, gives premature birth, and seems on the verge of death, O'Brien decides that finding a Christmas miracle will somehow help so she goes hunting for a cow at midnight on Christmas Eve to see if it will kneel like the legends say. Guess what? It does, and somehow all the other situations come to uplifting resolutions in the last 5 minutes of the movie. The folks on IMDb who love this movie are mostly Margaret O'Brien fans, and certainly O'Brien is pretty good here, doing the best she can with some artlessly sappy situations and dialogue. Murphy also does a good job, very believable as a nice guy who's trying hard to stay out of trouble and live up to the expectations of others. Rhys Williams does a decent job as a blind news seller who figures in a major subplot. Still, overall, it does lay the sentiment on a little heavily, and the Miracle of the Cow just comes off as silly. [TCM]

STRAIGHT, PLACE AND SHOW (1938)

Yikes! I sat through another Ritz Brothers movie and lived! (see THE GORILLA). It's not a terrible movie exactly, but the Brothers look like they're having much more fun than the audience. The main reason I watched it was to see Ethel Merman in one of her rare screen appearances, but she doesn't have much to do. The Ritzes work at a side show, giving pony rides to kids. At a horse race, they accidentally bet on Playboy, a horse which comes out of nowhere to win. The horse belongs to heiress Phyllis Brooks, but her boyfriend, Richard Arlen, tired of her all-consuming interest in the horse and convinced that the win was a fluke, bets her that if Playboy doesn't win again in three months time, he gets the horse and her. The horse does prove a loser and Arlen sells the horse to the Ritzes with the stipulation that they cannot re-sell it (a lame plot device so that Brooks can't just buy it back). The brothers discover that the horse is better at steeplechase jumping than racing, and Brooks helps them to train the horse and enter it in a big race. Many plot improbabilities later, the Ritzes wind up taking the place of three Russian jockeys who are out to sabotage the race. Arlen gives in and rides Playboy to victory, with the predictable happy ending for all, except perhaps Merman, who plays a brassy babe who loves Arlen but is clearly not quite dainty and feminine enough to compete with Brooks. The Ritzes showiest bit aside from the horse race is a silly wrestling match with the Terrible Turk. One big problem with the Ritz Brothers is that they all look alike and more or less act alike; Harry is usually the Groucho figure, but he only barely stands out from the other two (Al & Jimmy). Arlen and Brooks are a fairly bland couple, though Arlen tries hard. Also featured are George Barbier as Brooks' father, Sidney Blackmer as a gambler, and Lon Chaney Jr. in a tiny part as a chauffeur. Merman sings OK, but the songs are undistinguished. [TCM]

CHRISTMAS HOLIDAY (1944)

This well-regarded but hard-to-find movie is most assuredly not feel-good holiday fare. It's a downbeat film noir which begins on a miserable, stormy Christmas Eve and ends on a less stormy but quite grim Christmas night. Despite the many Christmas trappings during the film's first 20 minutes, it has an appropriately dark look throughout, even in a scene set at a cathedral during Midnight Mass. Even more so than in the average 40's Production Code film, an awful lot of the narrative and characterizations are oblique and reading (or seeing) between the lines is needed for it all to make sense. We begin as new military school graduate Dean Harens, heading off to San Francisco on Christmas furlough to get married, receives a telegram from his intended telling him she's up and married someone else. Harens decides to go on to SF, seemingly to wreck some kind of revenge, but during a ferocious storm, his plane is waylaid to New Orleans where he has to stay the night. A friendly reporter (Richard Whorf) takes the hurt and lonely kid to a night spot which is probably supposed to do double duty as a whorehouse, though of course they could not have made that crystal clear back then. The madam (Gladys George) sets the kid up with Deanna Durbin, a sad-eyed singer, and she asks him to go to Midnight Mass with her. She breaks down crying during "Adeste Fideles" and afterwards, at a late-night diner (and later in his hotel room), she tells him her sad story. In flashback, we see Durbin meet fellow music buff Gene Kelly at a symphony concert. They hit it off and soon he takes her home to meet mother, Gale Sondergaard, a former aristocrat who has hit some bad times. The mother is almost desperately happy that Kelly has shown an interest in Durbin--it seems he's "weak" and irresponsible, and she hopes that between them, they can straighten him out. After they marry, things work for a while, but one night, he kills a bookie and, despite the mother's best attempts, Kelly is caught and sent to jail, which is where he is now. Durbin and Harens part Christmas morning, and Harens decides to leave well enough alone and not confront his former finacee, but just as he is set to leave New Orleans that night, he hears that Kelly has escaped prison. He heads out to the club and is a witness to the final scene with Kelly, waving a gun at Durbin as the police close in.

Durbin is known primarily as a frothy teen star of middling musicals for Universal and many critics say she didn't have the chops for the lead here. I have never seen her in any other film, so I have no preconceptions; I think she seems a bit lightweight for a noir femme fatale, but her casting was certainly not a fatal mistake. In the beginning, she does look appropriately beaten down by life, though she comes off more like a sad waitress than a hooker. Kelly is good playing against type as a smiling, neurotic bad guy, and Sondergaard is even better as a mother from hell. Some critics note the undertones of incest and homosexuality that are present; I certainly caught the weird incestuous tinges in the reciprocated mother-son fixation, but the gay subtext is not as obvious; the only reference I caught was the mentioning of his "weakness" and the mother telling Durbin that, "between us, we will make him strong." The narrative structure is unnecessarily convoluted: the first flashback at the diner shows Kelly coming home to Durbin the night of the murder, and the rest of their story, beginning and end, is told in a second flashback. The shots of the cathedral during Midnight Mass are impressive, and are echoed in the later shots of the concert hall where Kelly and Durbin meet. Harens is OK in what is essentially the role of a passive listener, and Whorf is even better as the reporter who winds up playing a surprisingly large role in the narrative. Based on a Somerset Maugham story, though apparently the details of the characters have been changed greatly for the film. For some reason, this has never been officially released on video which is a shame, especially for noir fans.

WINTER LIGHT (1963)

This is my favorite Ingmar Bergman film, and possibly his bleakest. I think it's his most beautiful looking one, with the possible exception of CRIES AND WHISPERS. In this day and age, a brief plot description for this movie might sound like a Bergman parody: on one cold, overcast winter afternoon in a stark Swedish landscape, a minister (Gunnar Bjornstrand) has a crisis of faith when he: 1) is unable to give solace to a suicidal parishioner, and 2) gives the heave-ho to his long-suffering mistress. The movie takes place in an approximation of real time, from the end of his sparsely-attended Sunday morning service to the beginning of an almost completely deserted afternoon service. During the service, the minister notes the "consolation and bliss" that his parishioners should leave with, but no one there looks happy or consoled. Afterward, a farmer (Max von Sydow) comes to Bjornstrand worried that because China has the bomb, the end of the world may be upon us. Instead of offering help, the minister expresses his own doubts about the meaning of life, and a while later, the farmer is found dead from a self-inflicted gun wound. The pastor is also forced to deal with his rather mousy mistress (Ingrid Thulin); their relationship has been dying for some time, and when she writes him a long confrontational letter (which, in a scene with startlingly intimate power, we see read by her directly to the camera), he replies by lashing out at her, agreeing with all of her comments and saying that it's time they broke it off because, basically, she's ugly and he never really liked her much anyway. The film ends as Bjornstrand prepares for an afternoon service to which no one shows up but Thulin. He questions whether or not to go on, and the movie climaxes with a conversation with another suffering individual, the hunchbacked church sexton (Allan Edwall) who talks about physical pain, loneliness, and the suffering of Jesus Christ. The movie ends with the minister beginning the service, but it does not feel like a "happy" ending for anyone. I choose to interpret it in a kind of Samuel Beckett manner: he'll go on, he can't go on, he'll go on. The movie is acted superbly by its entire small cast, which also includes Gunnel Lindblom as Sydow's wife/widow, and the black and white cinematography by Sven Nykvist is never less than stunning, even though the sets are threadbare and the landscape largely empty and forbidding. Maybe not the best Bergman film to start with if you're not already familiar with his work, but certainly one of his great films. [DVD]

THE GREAT LOVER (1931)

Another movie that doesn't get written up in the reference books, but which is solidly entertaining and worth watching. Adolphe Menjou is a noted opera singer and notorious ladies man, just back from Europe and about to appear in a production of "Don Giovanni." On the ship, he hears a woman sing a snatch of an aria and discovers later that it was Irene Dunne, an aspiring singer. He agrees to tutor her and soon feels she is good enough to open opposite him, which irritates diva (and former lover) Olga Baclanova. He falls in love with Dunne and, ready to renounce his philandering ways, proposes to her; she accepts even though she still has feelings for her ex, Neil Hamilton, Menjou's understudy. On opening night, their first act is an unqualified triumph, but Menjou gets an attack of laryngitis at intermission and she has to go on with Hamilton. We discover later that he is graciously stepping out of the way so she and the understudy can find true love together. It looks like Dunne does her own singing; if not, they've done a very good job with dubbing. She and Menjou are both wonderful; even though he does seem a tad too old for her and would probably wind up making her unhappy, he is still more likeable than the passive Hamilton, so the "happy" ending feels a bit perverse. Cliff Edwards is fun as the opera company's press agent and Roscoe Ates does his usual stuttering shtick as his sidekick. Ernest Torrence is a standout as Menjou's butler, who is given to talking about his boss in the first person plural; he refers to one of Menjou's past lovers as "the red-haired lady who swooned when we kissed her." There is an amusing subplot about a love/hate relationship between an older diva and a male singer whose singing always causes her dog to start barking (she says it's because the dog hates Wagner). Not necessarily a movie to hunt for, but if it shows up again on Turner Classic (perhaps on Irene Dunne's birthday), it's worth catching. [TCM]

THE YOUNGER BROTHERS (1949)

Run-of-the-mill Western which shows handsome B-leading man Wayne Morris starting to go to seed. He plays Cole Younger, one of a number of celebrated outlaws from American history. In real life, Cole and his brothers drifted into lives of crime after Union soldiers burned down his family's home and killed his father; they eventually got a kind of Robin Hood/Bonnie & Clyde reputation before they were captured during a bloody bank robbery in Minnesota. Their real story might have made an interesting movie, but this one is essentially total fiction, another in a long line of Hollywood narratives of the era in which a handsome outlaw tries to go straight, is betrayed by old companions, almost put back in jail, but redeemed at the last minute. Here, Morris and his brothers are waiting out their parole time; if they can stay out of trouble a few more weeks, they will be free for good. Unfortunately, as they ride into Cedar Creek, their reputation precedes them and they are run out of town. The chief instigator of bad feelings against the Youngers is ex-Pinkerton Fred Clark, who helped get them behind bars in the first place and resents their freedom. His wife eventually leaves him because he can't put his obsessions behind him, and Clark winds up going to Kate (Janis Paige), the sister of a former compadre of the brothers who herself now heads up a gang of small-time crooks, and gets her to try and tempt the Youngers into pulling off a robbery. Though Morris has the hots for Paige, he resists returning to his old ways, so Kate's gang goes through with the crime, with the Youngers as kidnapped scapegoats. Our boys still prevail and the pardon goes through, so Clark makes one last attempt to stop them with a lynch gang. Unlike in real life, in which the Youngers all wound up dead or in prison, here they escape in a truncated, almost comic ending. Bruce Bennett and Robert Hutton are fine as two of the brothers, Geraldine Brooks has a rather thankless role as Bennett's wife, and Alan Hale is a sheriff who is fairly sympathetic to the brothers. Morris is OK, but getting old and fleshy before his time (at 35, he looks over 40) and isn't as dashing a figure as the part calls for. [TCM]

BARBARELLA (1968)

I saw this in college in the mid-70's at a revival house and remember being quite disappointed. Seeing its stylistic cousin DANGER: DIABOLIK recently made me want to revisit this 60's pop-art comic book film. Though it's not quite a disaster, it's also not as much fun as DIABOLIK; it's not even as much fun as its posters. The movie is set thousands of years in the future when the cosmos has become a peaceful place; war and violence have somehow been banished (the very idea of conflict seems to exist only in the Museum of Conflict), and, as the Beatles once hoped, all you need is love, at least until some nut goes and ruins it all by inventing the deadly Positronic Ray. Jane Fonda is Barbarella, an intergalactic super-heroine who is called upon by the President of Earth to find the renegade scientist Durand Durand (Milo O'Shea) who invented the weapon. Her sketchy, episodic adventures take her first to a planet of odd children who threaten her with mechanical dolls with razor-sharp teeth--they're a little like the scary African fetish doll that goes after Karen Black in the notorious 70's TV-movie "Trilogy of Terror." She has sex with various partners (usually consensually, but rarely with much joy) including the very hairy man who resuces her from the dolls (Ugo Tognazzi) and a nutty inventor (David Hemmings) named Dildano (with a name like that, you just *know* that sex is in the offing). She is flown about by a blind angel (the hunky John Philip Law, star of DIABOLIK) and trapped by an Evil Queen (model Anita Pallenberg, mostly famous at the time as Keith Richards' girlfriend) on a planet which has a core of molten evil, named the Mathmos. She gets tortured on a keyboard-like machine which is supposed to pleasure her to death, but her innocence defies the device. The Mathmos swallows her up, but her innocence causes it to vomit her up, and the angel flies her and the Evil Queen to safety, a somewhat ambigiously happy ending, I guess. The above description may make it sound like trashy, campy SF fun, but it's really kinda draggy. Law is nice to look at, as is Fonda, and the colorful sets and light-show effects may help keep you awake, but otherwise this movie's reputation is quite overblown. [DVD]

WAR-GODS OF THE DEEP (1965)

I just finished reading a fairly good book about Vincent Price and his horror movie career ("Vincent Price: The Art of Fear"), and next up on my reading list is the Tab Hunter autobiography, so the arrival of this movie, which co-stars Price and Hunter, from Netflix was fortuitous, though sadly it came too late to include in my October horror-themed blog entries. Technically, this is one of American International's Poe movies, based loosely on, or more accurately, inspired by a poem called "City in the Sea," a lush description of a dead undersea city. The movie is set in a Cornish seaside village; when a girl (Susan Hart) is kidnapped, American engineer Tab Hunter and British artist David Tomlinson go in search of her and wind up sucked down through a small whirlpool into an undersea castle, part of a mostly abandoned city on the sea floor which is currently being lived in by Vincent Price and his band of smugglers. They have been there for over one hundred years, their lives extended through an odd mix of elements in the air (pretty lame reasoning for a plot gimmick which isn't even really necessary to the narrative). Some "gill-men," decayed, Lovecraftian descendents of the city's original occupants, also live there, and one of them was responsible for kidnapping Hart, whom Price believes is a reincarnation of his dead wife. However, a nearby undersea volcano threatens the existence of the city and Price gets Hunter to try and find a way to stave off the inevitable. Naturally, the volcano explodes and our intrepid trio manages to escape at the last minute. The low-budget film looks pretty good--the cityscape, though obviously a miniature or a matte painting, is very cool, the sets are fine, and the color scheme of saturated reds and greens works nicely. Price, playing a Captain Nemo type, isn't at the top of his game, and Hunter, handsome as he is, doesn't give a single line reading that rings true (for that matter, neither does Hart). Most critics don't care for Tomlinson's work here (he's best known as Mr. Banks in MARY POPPINS), but given that it's a comic relief role and nothing else, he throws himself admirably into the part and I think he's actually one of few bright spots in the film, though I did get tired of him carting around his pet chicken. The gill-men are shabby cut-rate versions of the famous Creature from the Black Lagoon and aren't really scary for a second. Nevertheless, the movie does work up some occasionally interesting atmosphere, and the print on the MGM disc is in great shape. The last feature film credit for great genre director Jacques Tourneur. [DVD]

BOYS' RANCH (1946)

This MGM programmer seems largely inspired by their own earlier BOYS TOWN, and taken as as a B-movie version, it isn't bad, though the prime era for this kind of film was past by 1946 and it feels a little tired, like everyone's just going through the paces. Still, I guess I have a thing for B-lead James Craig who carries the day here as a smalltime baseball player who, knowing he'll never make first string, retires and heads off with his wife, Dorothy Patrick, to make a living on their Texas ranch. After his last game, two of his teenage fans, Skip Homeier and Darryl Hickman, get busted for delinquency and, rather than see them sent off to reform school, Craig takes legal custody of them and attempts to get them jobs on a nearby ranch. When that doesn't work out, and the boys are about to fall in with a local gang of delinquents, he works out a deal with a landowner (Ray Collins) to set up a ranch for wayward boys that he and his wife will run. They agree to operate it for a one-year trial period before Collins will permanently donate the land; things go well for most of the time, though Skip is a constant pain in the ass to both the adults and the other boys, and soon turns into an accomplished thief. Near the end of the trial period, the boys hold a community rodeo to show how successful the enterprise has been, but when a good chunk of prize money is stolen, all signs point to Homeier and the future of the ranch is in doubt. Hickman, who has been doing double duty to cover up for Homeier's slacking, winds up unconscious in the desert during a heavy rainstorm and Homeier, ready to hit the road with his loot, redeems himself by returning to help save his buddy. Craig and Hickman are particularly good, though Homeier doesn't quite cut it, sounding whiny and childish rather than tough and truly threatening. However, the weakest cast member is the top-billed child actor Jackie "Butch" Jenkins who hit it big as a 6-year-old playing Mickey Rooney's little brother in THE HUMAN COMEDY. At 9, his sleepy-eyed, slow-tongued shtick doesn't wear well and, though he improves has the film goes along, he still slows things down and the film would have played better if his part had been trimmed a bit. Craig grows a mustache halfway through the movie, supposedly to look more authoritative to the boys, but I suspect it had more to do with other films he was shooting. According to IMDb, the concept for the story was based on a real place, Cal Farley's Boys Ranch near Amarillo, which still exists. [TCM]

THE MODEL AND THE MARRIAGE BROKER (1951)

This is a delightful little gem, directed by the great George Cukor and co-written by Charles Brackett (SUNSET BLVD., BALL OF FIRE), which has gone quite underrated and should be out on DVD along with most of the rest of the films of its star, Thelma Ritter. Here Ritter plays the marriage broker of the title, eking out a living in the Flatiron Building in New York City by attempting, without the help of today's computers, to match up desperate single people by inviting pairs who might hit it off to sedate Sunday afternoon tea parties at her home. The folks who come to Ritter tend to be homely and lonely, and though the matchmaking is seen humorously, the people themselves are treated sympathetically. The lonely singles include the tall, gawky Nancy Kulp (10 years before she became Miss Hathaway on "The Beverly Hillbillies"), Frank Fontaine doing a slow-witted character very much like his drunken Crazy Guggenheim on "The Jackie Gleaon Show," and Zero Mostel. One subplot involves a woman (Helen Ford) who stole Ritter's husband from her years ago. Now that he's died, she's rich but lonely, she comes to Ritter for help, and they strike up an unlikely alliance. The focus of the plot, however, is on the model of the title (Jeanne Crain) who happens upon Ritter by accident; she's getting out of a relationship with a married man and Ritter, out of the goodness of her heart, tries surreptitiously to hook her up with doctor Scott Brady, who has just stood up the bride with whom Ritter fixed him up. Things go well for a while, but when Crain finds out what's been happening, she resents Ritter's meddling and tells her off, which leads Ritter to question her entire enterprise. There is a happy ending which involves Crain herself becoming a matchmaker for Ritter, but much of the film has a subtle tinge of sadness which makes it stand out from the typical romantic comedy of the era. Ritter is excellent, as she always is, and this is one of the few films in which she has the central role rather than a juicy supporting part. Brady and Crain are attractive and fine in their roles; Brady especially is just quirky enough to be interesting. There are choice bits from character actors Jay C. Flippen and Dennie Moore. This is well worth poring over the schedule of Fox Movie Channel to catch. [FMC]

PURSUIT (1935)

Tight, fast-paced film which provides a nice showcase for one of my favorite B-leads, Chester Morris. He plays a pilot who is being paid to deliver 6-year-old Scotty Beckett (one of the Little Rascals), a child in the middle of a nasty custody battle, to Mexico to stay with his birth mother. Along with Beckett for the ride is Sally Eilers, who is working for middleman C. Henry Gordon, but they never make it up in the air after the prop plane takes off with the kid in it alone and Morris has to jump in and crash it into a barn to save the kid. The three take off in a car for Tijuana and have a series of mostly comical misadventures, some of which involve getting handcuffed to each other and being followed by snoopy Henry Travers, who is out for some reward money. They dress the boy up as a girl to throw Travers off the track, and a pregnant dog named Perfume provides other diversions. Once they get near the border to meet Gordon and the mother (Dorothy Peterson), Gordon tries to pull a double cross to get the reward money, which is substantially more than he'll get from Peterson, but there's a happy ending in store involving the trio dressing in blackface and driving across the border in an old jalopy in full view of Gordon. Normally, I prefer some decent characterization and backstory, but here the fact that we are given very little background about the characters works well with the short timeframe (the hour-long movie takes place over just 2 days time). Morris and Eilers work up some good B-level chemistry, the kid is fine, and Erville Alderson does a nice comic turn as a befuddled cop. [TCM]

DAVID AND BATHSHEBA (1951)

As Biblical epics go, this one is too serious to be campy fun like Cecil B. DeMille's renowned films, and it's not "epic" enough to be compared to THE ROBE, so it winds up occupying a not terribly interesting middle ground. The narrative begins with King David (Gregory Peck) and the Israelites at war with the Ammonites. After a successful battle, David returns home, leaving his trusted captain Uriah (Kieron Moore) at the front; despite having a number of wives, David lusts for Uriah's wife Bathsheba (Susan Hayward) after he sees her bathing from his balcony. Soon they are in the midst of a heated affair and Bathsheba gets pregnant, which is a problem since her husband has been gone for over a year. Since the penalty for adultery is stoning the woman to death (the man appears to get away scot-free), David devises a plan to get Uriah back for at least one night so that her condition will not be suspicious. However, despite a kind of consciousness-raising talk from David about keeping his wife happy, Uriah instead spends the night sitting up and waiting for his next battleground orders. David then issues secret plans to have Uriah isolated in the forefront of the fighting so he'll be killed, then David can marry his widow. The plan works, but when sandstorms and drought hit Israel (and Bathsheba's baby dies soon after its delivery), holy man Nathan (Raymond Massey) interprets the events as signs of God's displeasure with David's sins, and the people rise up to demand the death of Bathsheba. In the climax, David spends a dark night of the soul communing with God before the Ark of the Covenant, and we see flashbacks to some of his legendary deeds, including the defeat of Goliath. Finally, David leans forward to touch the sacred Ark--an act that we have seen can cause death--and instead of David being struck down, drenching rains bring an end to Israel's suffering, and David and Bathsheba live happily ever after, one assumes. Peck is handsome and, when he appears toward the end in a scruffy beard and sackcloth, he's actually kinda sexy. Hayward is appealing, Massey has an appropriate fire-and-brimstone attitude, and Jayne Meadows, whom I know mostly from her appearances on "What's My Line?" does a surprisingly good job as one of David's conniving wives. George Zucco and Francis X. Bushman have small roles. The production, though not exactly opulent, is satisfactory; the print I saw on Fox Movie Channel was murky and in need of restoration. [FMC]

DON'T TURN 'EM LOOSE (1936)

Just a few days ago, I dissed Bruce Cabot as the leading man in SINNER TAKE ALL. Now I have to note how much I liked him as the lead in this B-crime movie with a unique propaganda twist: it's basically an anti-parole movie. The film opens at a parole hearing for convict Cabot. His sad-looking wife shows up with a baby in tow and helps convince the board to free him, but we find out that the woman is an actress and the baby is rented. Cabot is whisked off to his mistress (Grace Bradley) and continues his life of crime by robbing a dairy company and killing a guard in the process. Then he spends a few weeks visiting his small-town family who think he's an important traveling businessman (Cabot has his henchman Frank Jenks send them postcards from foreign countries to strengthen the illusion). While visiting, he pulls off a jewelry store robbery to get a bracelet for Bradley, and cop James Gleason, who has been after Cabot all along, figures out what's what. He finds Bradley and blackmails her (with incriminating phone calls to another lover) into helping catch him. Cabot winds up behind bars again for possessing a gun while on parole, but pulls off a clever escape, just long enough to gun down Bradley in cold blood, then sneaks back to prison where eventually he comes up for parole again. The twist this time is that his father, Lewis Stone, is now a member of the parole board. When his son comes before him (under an assumed name), he is shocked. Cabot gets Stone to agree to let him off in exchange for never contacting the family again, but the son returns to town for one last heist, on the eve of his sister's wedding. The finale is appropriately vicious and satisfying. Cabot is convincing both as a brutal thug and as a nice all-American boy. Stone and Gleason are fine as usual. Betty Grable is Cabot's sister, Louise Latimer is his almost homely small-town girlfriend, John Arledge is Grable's fiance, and Nella Walker is Stone's wife. This little B-gem has been ignored by Maltin and Halliwell, but it's worth catching the next time it crops up on Turner Classic. [TCM]

BILLY THE KID (1941)

An almost completely fictionalized version of the last days of notorious outlaw William Bonney, a.k.a. Billy the Kid. The real-life Kid was only 21 when he was killed, and Robert Taylor, who plays him here, was 30 at the time, and looked even older, but if you put out of your head any idea that this movie has anything in common with history, you can enjoy it. It's established early on that Billy's father died from being shot in the back, and Billy now has a something of a mania about that. We first see the Kid break his Mexican buddy Pedro (Frank Puglia) out of jail in a small frontier town. The two wind up in the middle of a local brouhaha. Town big shot Gene Lockhart runs not just the saloon and the general store, but also the puppet sherrif (Cy Kendall) and judges, and he is trying to stop British cattleman Ian Hunter from selling his cattle to the Army and undercutting his own prices. First, Lockhart hires Billy on his side, but during a nighttime cattle stampede, Billy runs into Brian Donlevy, a childhood friend, who is working for Hunter and soon Billy is, too. This doesn't sit well with Lockhart and his men, who kill Pedro to prod Billy into a rash act. Donlevy talks him into acting with caution, but when Hunter, who has just been named marshal, is shot to death (and in the back), the Kid can't be stopped, leading to a predictably sad ending. Most critics think Taylor was too old and too glossy for the part, but if you take this as just a movie about an outlaw anti-hero and forget that it's supposed to be based on fact, I think Taylor is fine, as is Donlevy, and neither of them is usually a favorite of mine. The supporting cast standout is Lockhart, as he so often is. Also present are Henry O'Neill (fine as a reporter who stands with Hunter and Taylor) and Mary Howard (colorless as Hunter's sister, and briefly, Taylor's love interest). Familiar faces in smaller roles include Chill Wills, Ethel Griffes, Lon Chaney Jr., Joe Yule, and Grant Withers. The film was nominated for an Oscar for color cinematography, and it does indeed often look ravishing, with some scenes shot on location in Utah's Monument Valley. Even though the studio scenes can't match that, as a whole the movie looks quite good. [TCM]

LADY OF SCANDAL (1930)

Although the title promises a titillating pre-Code movie, this is really a tame drawing room comedy of manners which is quite fun until it takes a turn toward rather drippy melodrama in its last 15 minutes. A British family of lords and ladies is thrown into disarray when they read in the papers that young son Ralph Forbes plans on marrying musical comedy star Ruth Chatterton. It's already bad enough that a cousin, Basil Rathbone, has been carrying on with a married woman who feels she can't leave her invalid husband, but this latest development threatens to send Lord Willie (Herbert Bunston) and assorted relatives through the roof. The family meets Chatterton and, assuming she's a gold digger who has tricked Forbes into a proposal, decides to test her: they say they will OK the marriage if she retires from the stage and comes to live with them for a few months, hoping that Forbes will tire of her during that time. What they don't know is that Forbes is the one who forced the marriage issue by planting an item in the press; Chatterton herself isn't as gung-ho as the family thinks, and even her own father doesn't want her to leave the stage. Over a few weeks' time, she wins most of the family members over, even Lord Willie, but also finds herself falling for Rathbone. The two plan to run off together, but when Rathbone's mistress's husband dies, plans change for everyone.

This has all the strengths (nice set, good writing) and weaknesses (awkward scene transitions, flubbed lines left in) of the early sound MGM movies. The cast is especially good here, even the usually weak Forbes. Bunston (Dr. Seward in the 1931 DRACULA) does a nice job as a pompous fuddy-duddy who slowly warms to Chatterton's charms, even doing an ass-slapping dance to a jazzy gramophone record. Fredrick Kerr is quite funny as Lord Trench, the most snobbish but also the funniest of the family, especially when he gets drunk on "gully washers." His best line (among many candidates) is when someone suggests that, when Chatterton enters, "we all look horrified," to which he replies, "That won't be hard with my wife in the room." McKenzie Ward is the effete cousin Ernest whose breathing exercises are always bothering someone. Though not a musical, the movie does begin and end with Chatterton in a fancy production number. This film is more evidence that Chatterton has been unfairly forgotten by today's audiences. [TCM]

SINNER TAKE ALL (1936)

An MGM B-mystery without much to recommend it aside from a rare screen appearance by real-life reporter (and "What's My Line" panelist) Dorothy Kilgallen, who has about 2-1/2 lines as a "girl reporter" who lends a hand to our hero at the climax. The plot involves a former reporter (Bruce Cabot) who now works as an assistant to lawyer George Zucco, who himself works for the Lampier family, who own the paper for which Cabot used to work. When the family starts getting death threats, the editor of the paper (Stanley Ridges) re-hires Cabot, leaving him working on the case from two perspectives. Two of the sons are killed, one by poison and one in a car crash (though at least one of them may still be alive but in hiding), and suspicion falls on the daughter (Margaret Lindsay) who seems to have the most to gain financially with the others out of the way. Another suspect is Joseph Calleia, shady owner of the Green Lantern night club, who may be having an affair with the editor's wife. If that's true, then the editor is also a suspect. And the final suspect is Zucco, who is almost always a suspect in any movie he's in. The outcome of the mystery plays out nicely, but the film's effectiveness is undercut by the wooden performance of Cabot. Lindsay, Zucco, and Calleia are fine, and it's interesting to see Charley Grapewin, kindly Uncle Henry in WIZARD OF OZ, playing a rich old man with a nasty disposition. The highlight of the movie is a scene near the end in which we see a shadowy figure hiding on top of an elevator in order to sneak into Grapewin's room and throw the old man off a balcony. Not a bad movie, but one that would have been much better with a more charismatic male lead. [TCM]

BLACK NARCISSUS (1947)

This is often cited as one of the most beautiful looking films of all time, and it definitely is a feast for the eyes. As a drama, it has its moments, though the story of repressed passions is not far removed from typical Hollywood psychological melodrama. Deborah Kerr is a young nun who is made Mother Superior of a new nunnery in the Himalayas, in a small castle high up on a cliff overlooking a village. The property has been donated by an Indian general so that the sisters will run a school and hospital, and we find out early on that the place was once a palace for royal courtesans and that a previous group of priests that had been stationed there didn't last long. The British agent in the area (David Farrar) predicts that Kerr's nuns won't last, either. The building is filled with huge open windows and a chilly wind is constantly blowing through, day and night. Things start off well when the natives show up en masse, the adults at the hospital and the youngsters at school, but Kerr is disappointed to find out that they have been paid to do so by the general. Over time, the nuns become more or less undone by the various distractions of the sensual atmosphere. Flora Robson, in charge of the garden, winds up planting lovely flowers rather than the utilitarian vegetables that were planned. Both Kerr and the younger Kathleen Byron are attracted to Farrar (who frequently dresses in skimpy khaki shorts and a shirt open to his stomach) which leads to tensions between the two. A young native woman (Jean Simmons) who is in danger of getting a reputation as a harlot is brought to the sisters by Farrar, and she begins a romance with the Young General (Sabu), who is taking classes with the children. The natives turn hostile after one nun attends to a sick child who dies soon after. Eventually, Byron goes a little mad from her repressed desires, leading to a climax that, in use of sound, music, and visuals is very much like the climax to Hitchcock's VERTIGO.

As most critics note, the movie looks ravishing from first moment to last, and it's all the more astonishing when you realize that it was all shot on studio sets. It never looks studio-bound, and it achieves its atmospheric effects with more artistry than today's computer-generated tricks. The characters are a little underdeveloped; of the nuns, only Kerr gets any kind of backstory, and what’s there is slight--we learn through a handful of flashbacks that she came to her vocation after being jilted by a man whom she had loved for years. Farrar looks nice without a shirt, but the character suffers from a lack of background or a consistent personality. Byron wins acting honors for her descent into madness, but Kerr is good as well. I especially like her in the beginning, when her Mother Superior tells her she is getting charge of the new nunnery--we can't tell if she's happy or angry or excited or frightened; we get a strong sense of a woman trying very hard to repress her feelings. May Hallatt provides some weird comic relief as the native caretaker, but her acting style is overblown and her dialogue sounds dubbed in by someone else, which is a bit distracting. I've only seen this movie twice, and I suspect it's the kind of film that would richly reward repeated viewings. There are some bad video prints out there, so try to get the Criterion DVD or see it on Turner Classic Movies. [TCM]

MYSTERY STREEET (1950)

You could say that this movie was 50 years ahead of its time, as it plays out a little like "CSI: Boston," or as my partner put it when he saw me watching this on Turner Classic Movies, "CSI: TCM." It does a nice job of balancing the genres of police procedural and film noir. The opening segment is pure noir: a blonde bad girl comes to no good end. Trampy Jan Sterling is in a jam with her rent money (and, as we find out later, she's also pregnant) and after she calls her married lover to arrange a meeting to get some money, she promises nosy landlady Elsa Lanchester she'll get the money the next day. However, at the Grass Skirt bar, the lover doesn't show, so Sterling picks up drunken Marshall Thompson, a poor slob whose sick wife is in the hospital having just lost her baby. He takes her out to Hyannis where she ditches him, stealing his car to confront her lover (Edmon Ryan) who promptly shoots her dead and dumps her and the car into the water. Some time later, Sterling's skeleton washes up at Cape Cod and police detective Ricardo Montalban has to find out who she is and who killed her. He solicits the help of Harvard forensics professor Bruce Bennett who uncovers clues from the bones of the victim. A web of circumstantial evidence begins to tighten around Thompson, who is arrested on suspicion of murder, but landlady Lanchester puts 2 and 2 together first and tries to blackmail the real killer. All this leads to an exciting chase at a train station with justice prevailing in the end. Montalban is quite good in the lead, and Lanchester steals all her scenes playing against her usual dithering type as a greedy and fairly cold-blooded schemer. Sally Forrest, second billed as Thompson's wife, doesn't have much to do until toward the end. Willard Waterman has an amusing bit as a mortician and old pal of the deceased. The issues of race and class are brought up briefly when the rich blueblood Ryan casts aspersions on the "upstart" Hispanic Montalban; it's a short and subtle but effective scene. I have no idea how the title fits in. Recommended. [TCM]

SON OF THE GODS (1930)

A strange example of the "exotic" romantic melodrama, quite popular back in the day. When it was released, it was probably seen as a lesson in tolerance, but now its message comes off as somewhat offensive, though it does make for an interesting viewing experience. Richard Barthelmess, an actor without a drop of exotic "otherness" in him, plays Sam Lee, a young Chinese man who can pass for Caucasian. After getting dissed by some college girls when they find out that he is Chinese, he leaves school and goes back home to San Francisco and his father, successful businessman Lee Ying (E. Alyn Warren), who counsels him that only tolerance can combat prejudice. Sam goes out on his own, works below deck on an ocean liner, is befriended by author Claude King, and winds up assisting him on a book. Living a relatively high life in France, he meets soap heiress Allana (Constance Bennett) who takes a shine to him, until she finds out he's Chinese, when she whips him across the face with a riding crop in public at the Casino Royale (a scene similar to one in Clara Bow's CALL HER SAVAGE. Sam winds up back in San Francisco to take over the family business when his father dies. Allana wants him back but he'll have nothing to do with her, so she drowns her sorrows in a life of dissolution. Eventually Sam finds out that he was actually a Caucasian foundling who was adopted by a Chinese couple. That leads to a theoretically happy ending for the two, though the resolution--as long as he's white, he's alright--will leave a bad taste in modern viewers' mouths. There's a flashback scene which was filmed in Technicolor, but in the Turner Classic print, it looks like it's tinted pink. Frank Albertson plays the potentially interesting character of Ticker, Sam's college buddy, though he vanishes after the first 15 minutes. Mildred Van Dorn, as the father's secretary, gives Sam a Catholic scapula (saying it can't hurt to mix religions) and uses the worst come-and-go Irish accent ever. As far as I can tell, there is precisely one Asian actor with a speaking role (King Ho Chang as Sam's assistant) though the experience must have traumatized him as he never appeared in another movie. The direction is stagy and awkward though some of the sets are cool, especially a huge round door in Sam's house. Neither lead is at his or her best: Barthelmess is way too old to play a college-age boy and Bennett is rather lackluster except for her brief whipping scene. [TCM]