ATHENA (1954)

One of MGM's minor musicals from a fallow period for the Hollywood musical, between SINGIN' IN THE RAIN ('52) and WEST SIDE STORY ('60). Adam Shaw (Edmund Purdom) is a young, blandly handsome lawyer who is running for Congress (despite having not a shred of charisma); his handlers want him to get married to be more palatable to the voters and to seem less youthful (one says, "Nothing ages a man like marriage"). Shaw has a rich but blah fiancée, but when he meets the eccentric but wholesome and charming Athena Mulvain (Jane Powell), we know she'll be the one, because in the movies, 1) wholesome always beats rich, and 2) opposites attract. The Mulvains (Ulysses, his wife Salome, and their seven granddaughters) run a health food company and are fanatics about vegetarianism and exercise, and Ulysses, despite being in his 70's, still does gymnastics and is training men (including Steve Reeves) for the Mr. Universe contest. Along with the Adam/Athena romance, we get supporting cast love between Shaw's army buddy Johnny, a Sinatra-ish singer (Vic Damone) and Minerva Mulvain (Debbie Reynolds). All ends well, of course, though the obstacles in the way of true love seem particularly far-fetched and forced. The songs and production number stagings are unmemorable, but the look is glossy and the supporting performances carry the picture: Purdom is a big, handsome block of wood, and Powell seems to be trying too hard to be bubbly and kooky; Reynolds and Damone are far better--and probably should have had the leads. Louis Calhern does a nice job as the nutty patriarch. Another plus is the presence of lots of muscle boys, often shirtless. A cute movie with miscast leads. [TCM]

SLATTERY’S HURRICANE (1949)

The Slattery of the title is played by Richard Widmark; he's a pilot who, during the war, single-handedly shot down a number of Japanese forces during a battle, saving many Americans, including his buddy John Russell. However, because his actions couldn't be officially verified, he was never recognized as a hero. Years later, Widmark is working in Miami as a private pilot for the shady boss of a candy company, flying him on drug smuggling trips, and he is carrying on an affair with the boss's secretary (Veronica Lake), who has become an addict. When Widmark runs into Russell, he starts an affair with Russell's wife (Linda Darnell) who was an old flame of Widmark's. Things start to fall apart when the smuggling candy-maker dies of a heart attack, Lake collapses and needs rehab, and Russell takes to drinking. In the middle of a hurricane which may be heading toward Miami, Russell, who works for the Weather Service, gets a call to fly into the eye to gather important information on the hurricane's path. Because Russell is drunk and could get court-martialed, Widmark knocks him out and takes his place, using his own un-stormworthy plane. Did I mention that the Navy suddenly decided it had the evidence it needed to belatedly award Widmark the Navy Cross?

This heavily plotted melodrama, co-written and later novelized by Herman Wouk, is more complex than the above summary shows, as the bulk of the story is told in flashback, with many of the details emerging slowly over the film’s running time; the movie begins with Widmark flying into the hurricane, and as his plane is battered about, he remembers the past events of his life. The scenes of the storm are impressive, and the acting is generally good. Widmark is fine as usual, Russell is as handsome and stoic as he needs to be, and Darnell, never a critic's darling, is solid, though Lake is rather lifeless, which makes the revelation that she's a hophead especially surprising. Gary Merrill appears in one of his first credited film roles. Despite being made during the Production Code years, the movie seems unusually lax in its moral messages: no bones are made of Widmark and Lake's relationship (I had assumed for the first part of the film that they were married), nor of Widmark and Darnell's; the drug addiction aspect of the plot, a fairly strict no-no under the Code, is somewhat veiled for a while (the viewer has to catch the word "pharmacopsychosis" on a diagnosis pad to figure out why Lake collapses) though we do see Widmark find a package of heroin on his dead boss. Most surprisingly, no one really "pays" for his or her bad behavior; in fact, the ending is rather too nicely wrapped up considering all the mess that's gone before. Not a bad way to spend 90 minutes for fans of melodrama. [FMC]

A NIGHT TO REMEMBER (1942)

Not the British Titanic movie from the 50's, but a B-movie comedy/mystery with a screwball tone from Columbia, harmless but hardly essential viewing. Mystery novelist Brian Aherne (left) and his wife Loretta Young move into a quaint little Greenwich Village basement apartment at 13 Gay Street, not realizing that they weren’t expected for another week, and that the apartment used to be a speakeasy in the bad old days. One night, at a restaurant, Aherne overhears a fat man say he's meeting someone in the basement of 13 Gay Street, and despite a case of nerves, the night seems to pass uneventfully for our couple, but the next morning, the fat man winds up naked and dead in their courtyard. Of course, this sets Aherne and Young on the case; it turns out that all the building's tenants were being blackmailed by the dead man. But could it be that the wrong fat man is dead, and the blackmailer is still around? Aherne comes off as a befuddled passive male--perhaps his role model was Cary Grant in BRINGING UP BABY, though he doesn’t have Grant's charisma--but he and Young work up some nice chemistry. The generally solid supporting cast includes Lee Patrick, Sidney Toler (as a cop not unlike Charlie Chan, who Toler was playing over at Fox), Jeff Donnell, and Gale Sondergaard doing her usual sinister lady with regal bearing. Available in the boxed set Icons of Screwball Comedy, Vol. 2. Not quite a screwball, but perfectly acceptable late-show viewing, and I love the cozy apartment set where most of the action takes place. [DVD]

VICTIM (1961)

Young Peter McEnery (at right) has been embezzling money from his employer in order to pay off a blackmailer who has photos of him in a compromising position with another man. He contacts a number of people for help, but is caught by the police and hangs himself in his jail cell. The other man in the photos is married lawyer Dirk Bogarde, one of the men who turned away McEnery's calls; he discovers there’s a blackmailing ring preying on gay men (in a country, England, and at a time, the early 60s, when homosexual acts were illegal) and is determined to bring those responsible to justice. None of the other men being threatened are willing to go to the police so despite the potential harm to his reputation and career, Bogarde's on his own.

This is reportedly the first movie to use the word "homosexual" in its dialogue, and it's certainly the first to make a sympathetic argument along the lines of "live and let live" for the treatment of gay people. For its time, it was really rather daring, not so much in terms of sexual content (no nudity, no sex talk, and the compromising photos, which we never see, are simply of Bogarde and McEnery talking together, with McEnery in tears) but in characterization. None of the men are played with stereotypical mannerisms (though one is a hairdresser), and Bogarde (at left) gets to play a three-dimensional character. We learn that Bogarde has had yearnings for other men all his life, including a past romance that led to the other man's suicide. His wife (Sylvia Syms) knows about all this and has stuck with him as he has fought his inclinations, though there is a hint that their relationship is no longer physical. The emotional climax of the film is when Bogarde forcefully tells Syms that, even though nothing happened between he and McEnery, he "wanted" the man.

I don’t mean to make this movie sound like it's all just pleading propaganda for the most basic of gay rights. Most of it plays out like a typical urban crime film of the era, with cops and thugs and violence and dark streets. There's even a red herring plotline concerning a blind man and his friend who we assume for a while are the blackmailers. The real crook is described by his assistant as "a cross between an avenging angel and a peeping Tom," though that interesting description is never expanded upon. Bogarde, who was gay but closeted for most of his career, is excellent as a man who has tamped down his feelings for years but who still seems full of passion under the surface. McEnery (who later was Hayley Mills' co-star in Disney’s THE MOON-SPINNERS) is very good in his short amount of screen time, as are Dennis Price and Charles Lloyd-Pack as blackmail victims. Syms doesn't have a lot to do, but holds her own with Bogarde in their climactic confrontation. [TCM]

FEDERAL MAN (1950)

A narcotics agent named Palmer gets a phone call in the middle of the night from an informant, but when he leaves his house, he is gunned down, and the informant is stabbed to death in an elevator in the Frazee building. Following a lead from the informant’s girlfriend, agent William Henry heads to Tijuana to discover a smuggling operation in which drugs are stashed in the cars of innocent drivers; when the drivers get back to the States, the dealers extract the dope with no one the wiser. Meanwhile, at the Frazee building, an elevator operator who thinks she can identify the killers is the victim of a hit-and-run accident. When the agents suspect that someone with an office in the building is involved, a hidden camera is placed in the elevator and Palmer’s wife (Pamela Blake) volunteers to help by posing as an elevator operator. Sure enough, businessman George Eldredge, who runs a car rental company, is the head of the drug ring. Cat-and-mouse games follow between the agents and the dope dealers.

This Poverty-Row indie is nothing special, but it moves along nicely, and if approached more as a 50’s TV crime show, is moderately entertaining. The agents, including Henry, Robert Shayne, and Lyle Talbot, are a colorless lot, but the bad guys, including Joe Turkel and Bill Edwards, keep things interesting. William Leicester (above) has a memorable moment as a cocky drug dealer who smarts off to Eldredge and pays for it. Also in the cast is Movita, who plays the dead informant’s girlfriend, a singer at a (rather desultory) Tijuana café—she was married for a short time in the 1960’s to Marlon Brando. [TCM]

PRIVATE DETECTIVE 62 (1933)

In a "Mission: Impossible"-style opening, diplomat William Powell is caught stealing secret papers from the French government; the State Department must disavow any knowledge of his actions, so he is deported (on a cattle boat). He takes a job with the desperate, drunken detective Arthur Hohl, who has specialized in low-rent divorce cases. They become "dog stealers," nabbing dogs off the street and returning them to their owners, as though found by chance, for a small reward, but soon Hohl agrees to front for gangster Gordon Westcott and business begins booming. Society woman Margaret Lindsay has been winning too much at Westcott's gambling den and he wants to dig up some dirt on her, so Powell tries to, without quite knowing why, but he falls in love with her. Westcott sets Lindsay up to force her to shoot him in self-defense, though he has the gun loaded with blanks, but Hohl then has Westcott killed for real (by a nervous coke addict). Powell steps in and solves the case, gets his career back on track, and, of course, rights things with Lindsay. This crime caper has some wild plot twists here and there, but is otherwise par for the course. Powell gives the proceedings a touch of class; Lindsay is fine. The references to cocaine use clearly mark this as a pre-Code effort: the word "snowbird" is used to refer to the killer, and Hohl tells his thugs to "lay off that snow." The always amusing Ruth Donnelly has a small role. [TCM]

THE YOUNGER GENERATION (1929)

I guess the generation gap wasn't invented in the 60's for us baby-boomers; this Frank Capra family melodrama (his first talkie, though technically, it's a hybrid with alternating sound and silent sequences) starts with the premise that the younger generation will always try to escape the ways of the older generation, though this film argues that's not always a good thing. At the center of the story is the Goldfish family: Pa, who operates a junk & trinkets cart on the Lower East Side, Ma, their daughter Birdie (who has a crush on the musically talented neighbor boy Eddie) and their son Morris, the one who will exemplify the film's thesis. The prologue, set when the kids are young, shows a resourceful Morris saving the family's meager possessions from a fire for which he was partly responsible. Several years later, Morris (Ricardo Cortez, at right) has established Goldfish & Son, an upscale antique store; his family lives with him in comfort on Fifth Avenue, but Ma (Rosa Rosanova) and Pa (Jean Hersholt) are not happy about Morris's assimilationist ways, especially when he changes his last name to Fish. Birdie (Lina Basquette) and Eddie (Rex Lease) are still an item; Eddie falls in with thieves and becomes a front man for a robbery. He agrees to give himself up, but he marries Birdie first. Morris kicks Birdie out; she has a child and manages to save some money so, when Eddie when is released, they buy a small music store. Ma and Pa don't know what's become of Birdie because Morris won't let them see any of her letters, but Pa soon finds out where she is and goes to find her. In the melodramatic final sequence, Morris, ashamed of his parents looks and ways, refers to them as his servants in front of some of his hoity-toity friends; the two leave the house in the pouring rain vowing not to return, and Pa becomes seriously ill. There is a family reconciliation at Pa's deathbed, but it's too little, too late, and in the last scene, Ma goes to live with Birdie and Eddie, and Morris is left, rich but alone, in his fancy apartment.

Despite the title, this isn't really about young/old generational problems (the young Eddie and Birdie always side with the older generation), but specifically about assimilation and loss of identity, social issues which are still with us. The film would have been more powerful if it had a larger canvas; the focus remains tightly on the five main characters and we rarely see anyone else of consequence. Therefore, both Morris's attempts to rise above his past (and his ethnic background) and Ma & Pa's attempts to escape the future that Morris wants for them remain two-dimensional stories. Though Morris has the most screen time, it is Eddie who winds up the more fleshed-out character; his hopes and failures are clearer and more keenly felt. Still, Cortez commands the screen here and does a good job with an unsympathetic role; he's not evil, just too single-minded in his pursuit of the American dream. Lease (pictured at left) went on to have a substantial career as a supporting player in B-westerns. The switches from silent to sound throughout the film aren't too jarring and the film remains quite watchable today. [TCM]

THE HOUSE ACROSS THE BAY (1940)

George Raft owns an upscale saloon with a private gambling room in the rear. Joan Bennett is a former chorus girl who has a whirlwind romance with Raft. Lloyd Nolan is Raft's lawyer who falls hard for Bennett. After Raft and Bennett get married, Raft becomes a bigwig in the quasi-legal underworld : he owns businesses, gets a stable of race horses, and even does a little gun-running. A gangster orders a hit on Raft for muscling in on his territory, and Raft barely dodges a bullet in a drive-by shooting. Bennett, afraid for her man's life, talks to Nolan and carries out a rather bizarre plan: she rats on him (anonymously) for income-tax evasion, hoping to get him sent to jail for a year, by which time the heat will be off. Nolan, however, double-crosses them both by handling his case so badly that Raft gets ten years instead of one. Bennett takes an apartment in a house across the bay from Alcatraz, becoming one of a group of gangster wives who live near their husbands, but she soon catches the eye of handsome airplane manufacturer Walter Pidgeon. Nolan tells Raft what Bennett's done, so Raft breaks out of Alcatraz, intending to kill Bennett.

Poor George Raft has a reputation as the man who could have been Bogart; not long after this movie came out, Raft began making a series of bad career choices by turning down the leads in HIGH SIERRA, THE MALTESE FALCON, and most notoriously, CASABLANCA, all films that helped make Humphrey Bogart a superstar. I don't think Raft had the talent or charisma that Bogart had, so it's surely not accurate to say that he could have been the kind of star Bogart was, but it's true that, after signing a Warner Bros. contract in 1939, then turning down the choice roles offered to him, his career went on a slow downward slide, and today he is probably best known for his coin-flipping tic in 1932's SCARFACE (he parodied his own image many years later in SOME LIKE IT HOT). Raft is fine here, not nearly as one-note as he often was, and he works well with Bennett. Pidgeon is wooden, leaving Nolan to give the best performance here, though weak writing leaves some big plotholes and hurts his character--unless I missed something, we never see that Nolan has a crush on Bennett, we're just told about it in retrospect. Gladys George plays a sympathetic Alcatraz wife, but her role is carefully set up only to have no payoff (maybe some of her scenes were cut?). An independent production from Walter Wanger, its relatively low budget shows at times, but there is the minor pleasure of seeing Raft give a strong performance. [TCM]

THUNDER ROCK (1942)

A unique and interesting film, though more engrossing intellectually than as a moviegoing experience. Michael Redgrave is a lighthouse keeper on Lake Michigan; his work record is perfect, he doesn't cash his paychecks, and he is resisting going on a month-long leave mandated by management. We discover that he has taken this solitary job as a way of escaping the world; a few years ago, he was a British journalist who was trying to warn an apathetic public and an appeasing government about the dark storms of fascism he saw gathering over Europe. His editor censored his pieces, so he turned to writing books and giving lectures, but the "it won't happen here" mood overwhelmed him and he took this job in America as a way of withdrawing from the horrors he predicted. The lighthouse is near the spot where a ship full of immigrants sank in 1849, with all hands lost. When Redgrave's old friend (James Mason) visits and asks what he does with his time, Redgrave says he found a passenger log for the ship and has been reconstructing their lives in his mind. When Mason leaves, we see the six "characters" interacting around him in storylines he's imagined. Eventually, however, the ship's captain (Finlay Currie) scolds the writer for his mild imaginings and, like Marley's Ghost does with Scrooge in "A Chistmas Carol," Currie takes Redgrave on a ghostly visit to the actual past lives of the immigrants: a working-class man with more children than he can support, a feminist who broke her engagement in order to lead women's rights marches (and who spent time in prison because of the accompanying riots), and the family of a Viennese doctor whose experiments with a new anesthesia have lost him his license. The link Currie points out: all of them went to America to escape their problems, just as Redgrave did. When Redgrave says that they all gave up too soon, they point out to him that he has given up too soon as well. The movie ends with Redgrave alone on the beach, apparently deciding to get back in the fray after all.

Many critics call this a ghost story fantasy, and I guess it does wind up being that, but it's really a WWII anti-isolationist propaganda film, seemingly aimed at American audiences since the British had, by 1942, been fighting Germany for three years and would not seem to need such a philosophical anti-fascist kick in the pants. (The fact that it wasn't released in the U.S. until 1944 would have made its lesson a moot point here as well.) The ghostly element is ambiguous since the characters don't start out as ghosts, but as figments of Redgrave's imagination. In fact, one could interpret almost the entire movie as taking place inside Redgrave's head. But much of the movie does have a moody look, if not exactly ghostly, and in looking backward to "A Christmas Carol" and forward to IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE, it fits squarely into the genre of story about a person whose life in changed by what seems to be supernatural intervention. Based on a play, much of this feels setbound, though the film is opened up with the visits to the immigrants' homes, and there's a fast-paced montage flashback sequence which shows us Redgrave's backstory which climaxes with Redgrave sitting in a theater watching a newsreel warning about the fascists, then watching the reactions of the audience members who variously sleep or neck or stuff popcorn into their mouths until the Popeye cartoon comes on. Redgrave is excellent, and quite striking looking; Mason is good in a fairly small role; among the "ghosts," the standout is Barbara Mullen as the feminist. The content, tone, and look of this film are all quite different from other movies of the era, though in some ways, it does wind up feeling like a long Twilight Zone episode. Still, I would heartily recommend this film for buffs of WWII propaganda films or fantasies. And, once again, thank you, Turner Classic, for showing this, and thanks to Tivoplex (under "columns" at Box Office Prophets) for alerting me to it. [TCM]

FIVE STEPS TO DANGER (1957)

Sterling Hayden is driving through the desert minding his own business when his car breaks down. At the mechanic's, he meets Ruth Roman who offers to take him on as a driving companion to Santa Fe. When they stop for food, Helen, a woman who has been following them, takes Hayden aside and tells him that Roman has just recently been released from a sanitarium after having had a nervous breakdown. Her doctor (Werner Klemperer) wants Hayden to continue riding with Roman and get her safely to Santa Fe. But soon, when they're stopped by police, Hayden finds out that Roman is wanted for questioning in connection with a murder in California. The cop handcuffs the two together, but Hayden overpowers him and they escape. Roman then tells Hayden all: after the war, when she went back to her native Germany to find her long-lost brother, she was drawn into a plot to smuggle important missile secrets into the U.S. to give to a Prof. Kissel, now teaching at a university in New Mexico. Commies from East Berlin are after her, as are the police and, as it develops, so are the FBI and the CIA. When they get to Santa Fe, the dean of the university disavows any knowledge of Kissel’s presence, despite a newspaper clipping Roman has noting the scientist's recent hiring. As Roman begins to doubt her sanity, Klemperer shows up to take control. Who can we trust? Roman? Klemperer? The CIA? Kissel?

The title of this adequate thriller is, as far as I can tell, a reference not to anything in the film, but to Hitchcock's THE 39 STEPS which had a similar plot (innocent man caught up in spy chase while handcuffed to a woman). Hayden and Roman, pictured above, would never get prizes for their acting, but they're believable enough here, especially Hayden (a little bit tough like Robert Mitchum, a little bit laconic like Gary Cooper). In the last half, as plot twists come fast and furious, we are kept nicely off-balance, though if you stop to ask too many questions, plot loopholes galore will crop up, most of which are not wrapped up in the pat ending. [TCM]

THE WAY TO THE STARS (1945)

Like the 1942 British war drama WENT THE DAY WELL?, this British war drama has a brief opening set after the war even though the war hadn't ended when the film was shot. Also like the 1942 film which was set in a small village, this is largely about a group of people confined to a place: an airfield at Halfpenny Field, from which daily bombing missions into France are run, and a nearby village inn. In 1940, we meet the characters we will follow over the span of the war: Michael Redgrave is an experienced pilot, handsome and dashing, and a bit of a poet; Rosamund John is the innkeeper of the inn whom Redgrave is sweet on; John Mills is a younger pilot whom Redgrave takes under his wing; Renee Asherson is the young girl Mills falls for, but keeps his distance from because of the ever-growing possibility that he'll wind up just another casualty; Joyce Carey is Asherson's snooty, complaining, unlikable aunt who is tolerated by everyone because they feel sorry for Asherson; Trevor Howard is a squadron leader who, a few years on, has to deal with some conflicts between the British men and the American pilots who are stationed there in 1942 and who essentially take command of the field. Redgrave marries John and then is killed, leaving his wife with a new daughter. Married American pilot Douglass Montgomery becomes friendly with John; their relationship is portrayed as almost flirtatious, and when he's told he's going to be sent back to the States to teach new pilots, he has a touching farewell scene with her. Afterward, he decides he wants to stay in England, but soon fate takes a hand and makes his decision for him.

At first, this movie feels like a DAWN PATROL retread, with the pilots heading off on dangerous missions every day, facing the certainty that some of them won't return. But instead of a fatalistic doom-and-gloom mood, this one has a stiff-upper-lip tone of acceptance and perseverance. The characters, their relationships, and their conflicts all feel real, without too much in the way of exaggerated melodrama, and the low-key acting, especially by Mills and John, is superb. The only one who's a little off is the American Montgomery, who seem a little too artificial compared with his British counterparts. The film also features Stanley Holloway, David Tomlinson, and Jean Simmons in a small role as a nightclub singer. The wonderful Basil Radford, known mostly as a comic actor (part of the Caldecott/Charters duo in THE LADY VANISHES and other films) is excellent in a serious role. For a wartime movie, there is surprisingly little "propaganda" present, and there are almost no flying scenes except for some takeoffs and one heroic moment in the sky near the end. An excellent film, too little known and seen. (aka JOHNNY IN THE CLOUDS) [TCM]

THE NORTH STAR (1943)

This film was produced during wartime as relatively undisguised propaganda for our allies, the Russians, and was released during some of their fiercest fighting against the Germans. Years later, during the McCarthy anti-Commie era, the movie was disowned by its producer and was sold and re-edited with most of the overt propaganda taken out. Frankly, that might have helped it since the first half-hour is a bit hard to swallow, no matter what your political beliefs. The film begins by setting up a kind of MGM-Andy Hardy version of life in a village of collectivist farmers. We get a handful of remarkably artificial musical numbers featuring everyone singing faux-folksongs (written by Aaron Copland) to celebrate their communal life and the coming of summer. With school letting out, young folks Farley Granger and Anne Baxter hike with some friends to Kiev for vacation, despite rumors of German troop movements, but soon the Nazi air attacks begin. The villagers send their healthiest men up to the hills to engage in guerilla activities, and the rest of the adults stay to defend the town; Granger gets blinded, and Baxter becomes a Russian Paul Revere, riding to the village and yelling, "Burn your houses! The Germans are coming!!" The last half is largely made up of sad but inspiring stories of personal heroism and spectacular warfare scenes.

The first part is pretty dreadful, with the mindlessly happy singing Russian farmers being portrayed like mindlessly happy singing slaves in old Hollywood movies about the South--even old-timers Walter Brennan and Walter Huston have to croak out a song or two. The first invasion sequence is well shot, and Huston mostly keeps his dignity as the village doctor who engages in some interesting philosophical debates with Nazi doctor Erich von Stroheim, leading to a satisfying, if not terribly plausible, ending. Most of the other actors aren't called upon to act so much as smile, suffer, and make speeches, with Brennan and Dana Andrews coming off worst. Baxter and Granger (pictured) just seem like amateurs (and indeed this was Granger's first movie). Jane Withers, coming out of her child-star phase, does a nice job in a scene in which she struggles to find the fortitude to carry out a guerilla attack. Also with Ann Harding, Dean Jagger, and Martin Kosleck. As period propaganda, this is endlessly fascinating, but as entertainment, it's quite dated. [TCM]

HEAVEN ONLY KNOWS (1947)

A run-of-the-mill "angel visitation" movie; its main claim to being different is that it is set in the old West. Up in a high-toned bureaucratic Heaven, it is discovered that Duke Byron's name is missing from the Book of Life, meaning the man has no soul (not in a James Brown way, but in an everlasting spirit way), and his proper fate as recorded in the Book of Destiny, and involving marriage to Drusilla, a schoolteacher, may not come to pass. An angel named Mike is sent down to set Duke, a cocky, nasty big shot in a small mining town, on the path to righteousness by getting him together with Drusilla, though he's told he can’t perform any miracles. When Mike first appears, he is mistaken for The Kansas City Kid, a hired assassin, but when he saves Duke's life after the real Kid attacks, Duke takes Mike under his wing and soon the angel is fixing Duke up with Drusilla and attending to a sickly young boy who worships Duke.

This film suffers in comparison to two other angel movies released in the same twelve-month period, IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE and THE BISHOP'S WIFE. This one is more earthbound, less whimsical and imaginative. The bland Robert Cummings, as Mike, is no match for either Henry Travers or Cary Grant, the angels in the other two films. Brian Donlevy brings some spark to his role as Duke, and makes his gradual transformation to good guy fairly believable. Marjorie Reynolds (the co-singer of "White Christmas" in HOLIDAY INN) matches Cummings for blandness as a supposedly saucy chorus girl. Definitely a lesser, non-essential fantasy film [FMC]

FIVE GRAVES TO CAIRO (1943)

This WWII spy thriller, directed by Billy Wilder and set in a hotel in the middle of a North African desert, is famous for its opening scene: a tank, with a dead soldier protruding from the top, is rolling up and down the dunes. We soon see a few more bodies in the belly of the tank, but it turns out that one of them, British soldier Franchot Tone, is still alive. He manages to get out of the tank and stumble, barely conscious, to the above-mentioned hotel, called the Empress of Britain, where he collapses in the lobby in the presence of the only people left in the hotel (in advance of the German invasion by Rommel): Egyptian hotelkeeper Akim Tamiroff and French chambermaid Anne Baxter, who holds a grudge against the British for the capture of her brother at Dunkirk. Tamiroff hides Tone just as Rommel's men arrive to prepare the hotel to be their headquarters. When Tone decides he wants to stay to assassinate Rommel, he takes on the identity of a hotel waiter who died during a bombing, and whose dead body is still under some rubble in the basement (so of course, we know that body will soon come to light and cause problems). The twist: Tone soon finds out that the man he’s impersonating was actually a German spy, so he has to pretend to be helpful to the Nazis holed up in the hotel while he plots their downfall.

The rest of the film, based on a stage play, consists of the cat-and-mouse games that Tone plays with Rommel (Erich von Stroheim, who steals every scene he's in); instead of killing Rommel, Tone decides to crack the code of the location of the "Five Graves to Cairo," five buried supply sites crucial to the success of the Germans in North Africa. Baxter plays her own little game, flirting with a German officer (Peter Van Eyck, pictured) in hopes that he will free her brother. Would Baxter go so far as to betray Tone? Or will the waiter's semi-buried body betray him first? This is a fun little thriller which would be better known if it had a different lead actor; Tone is OK in light romantic parts, but rises to his level of incompetence here--he is no Bogart, nor an Errol Flynn, and in fact, even a B-actor like James Craig or William Lundigan might have given the role more life. Luckily, the script is strong, and the other actors are fine, not just Stroheim, but the under-rated Tamiroff (who always played swarthy foreigners), the young--only 20--and beautiful Baxter, and the slimy but handsome Van Eyck. This movie has an early version of one of my favorite Billy Wilder lines: In ONE, TWO, THREE, James Cagney says, "I wish I was in hell with my back broken"; here, Tamiroff says the same thing, except wishing he was in a black pit rather than hell. Overall, well worth seeing. [TCM]

CROONER (1932)

David Manners is the leader of a competent but unexciting dance band who is told that his group doesn't have the "novelty" it takes to break through to big success. One night at the Golden Slipper Café, Manners, who normally plays sax, has to take over singing duties; when his quiet voice can barely be heard above the band, a drunken patron (Guy Kibbee) jokingly hands him a megaphone. When Manners sings through it, the men in the club can't stand him but the women go crazy, and a star is born. Ann Dvorak, Manners' girlfriend, brings her boss, press agent Ken Murray, to the club one night and he agrees to manage the band, getting them a new contract at the Golden Slipper for a lot more money. However, after a short period of success, Manners becomes egotistical and obnoxious; he spends the night with socialite Claire Dodd on her boat, irritating Dvorak, and later in a drunken huff, attacks a heckler who turns out to be a crippled war veteran. Manners hits bottom, leaves the band, and winds up a sax player in a dive club. He soon hears that Dvorak is going to marry Murray; has he learned enough of a lesson to win her back? (If you don't know the answer to that question, you haven't seen enough movies.)

The rise-and-fall story is an old one, but the "crooner" aspect is a relative novelty. A crooner sang popular romantic ballads in a soft, mannered fashion. Bing Crosby was one, and it could be argued that Harry Connick Jr. and Michael Bublé have carried on the tradition, but the megaphone bit is based directly on Rudy Vallée (though Vallée's career, as a singer and an actor, lasted for almost fifty years). I usually like Manners, but he didn’t have a lot of "oomph" and was better in more passive roles; here, he never evinces the energy and drive that his character is clearly supposed to have. Dvorak is also relatively colorless, leaving Murray and Dodd as the most interesting folks on screen. Also noticeable are Hattie McDaniel as a washroom attendant, Miki Morita as a valet Manners acquires during his rise, and J. Carroll Naish as the club owner. [TCM]

LADIES OF LEISURE (1930)

Party girl Barbara Stanwyck, on the run at 4 in the morning from a rowdy admirer, meets rich playboy artist Ralph Graves, himself on the run from his own wild party with which he's become bored. He takes her home and wants to paint her as the personification of "Hope," telling her to "look through the ceiling" to the stars, but it isn't until they're actually on his penthouse balcony looking at that stars that she finds the look he wants. They fall in love but Graves' family objects to her and his mother tries to pay her to leave. After a teary scene, Stanwyck agrees to run off to Havana with Lowell Sherman, an older friend of Graves' but fate intervenes with some help from Stanwyck's roomie (Marie Prevost) and a reasonably happy ending seems in store. This early Frank Capra melodrama has some stylish directorial touches here and there, and Stanwyck and Graves work well together. A rainy night scene in which Graves, to Stanwyck's surprise, does not press his advantage plays out nicely. Prevost provides some snappy comic relief--when Stanwyck tells her she's eating too much, she replies, "You can’t weigh sex appeal." Ironically, in real life Prevost died a few years later of malnutrition after trying to lose weight. [TCM]

MISTER 880 (1950)

This is one of those movies I'd see listed in TV Guide all the time when I was a kid. The title was different enough to stick in my mind (like SCUDDA-HOO, SCUDDA HAY or PHFFFT) but the plot description didn't make it sound interesting enough to watch. This wound up being pleasant, innocuous, and cute, but nothing to go out of your way to see. On the surface, it sounds like MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET: Edmund Gwenn plays a friendly but eccentric old man who lives in New York and winds up in trouble with the law; a handsome man and attractive woman get mixed up with him; all three are present in a climactic courtroom scene. Here, Gwenn is a junk dealer and counterfeiter who has been getting away with passing ineptly-made one dollar bills (Washington is spelled "Wahsington" on the bill) for years. He's a sweet old man who only does this occasionally when he needs a little cash, but still the Feds want to nail him, and for agent Burt Lancaster, the search becomes an obsession. A break in the case comes when lovely young Dorothy McGuire, a U.N translator who lives in the same apartment building as Gwenn, passes a bill (that, unbeknownst to her, was stuffed in her purse as change by Gwenn) and gets tailed by Lancaster. The two begin dating, and when she finds out what he's up to, she strings him along for a while (referring to a wad of bills as a "boodle of queer") until he fesses up. They begin to work together until she suddenly realizes that the legendary Mister 880 (the number assigned to the case by the Secret Service) is the sweet old geezer who lives upstairs. This is based on a real case which was profiled in the New Yorker, so the realistic ending (there's no magical resolution as when Gwenn played Santa in MIRACLE) is a bit of a bummer. Gwenn is the reason to watch this; his character is almost as spry and sly as his Kris Kringle, though here he looks and acts older and more worn down by life. Lancaster and McGuire strike some nice sparks, though the last 20 minutes or so feel rushed with the characterizations getting short shrift in the end. (Picture from Film Noir Photos) [FMC]

NIGHT FLIGHT (1933)

This interesting, rarely-shown MGM film doesn't exactly feel like a big-studio effort. In narrative structure, it's a bit like a GRAND HOTEL of the air, weaving together the stories of a handful of characters during one night, but dramatically, it's more akin to a play, being largely a series of monologues and two-character conversations with some aerial action scenes scattered throughout. Based on a work by "Little Prince" author Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the film is set in the main office of the Trans-Andean European Air Mail Company in Buenos Aires, with all the action taking place on the night that the airline is attempting its first night-flying schedule over the treacherous Andes and through the unpredictable weather along the coast of Brazil. John Barrymore is the tough-as-nails airline director who insists on sticking to the schedules despite reports of fog and storms. He is criticized for his stance, threatening the lives of his pilots just so, in the words of one character, a postcard can get to Paris on Tuesday rather than Thursday, but we know that, at least in one instance, there is more at stake in keeping the delivery timely: a hospital in Rio de Janeiro is desperately waiting for polio serum to arrive from Santiago, Chile to help a very sick child. Playboy Robert Montgomery is the pilot who flies across the Andes from Chile to Argentina. When asked by a young lady why he dresses up to fly, he says, "A gentleman should always be prepared to meet his maker," to which she replies, "You mean whoever makes you in Buenos Aires!" Clark Gable is a pilot whom we never really see outside of his plane and his flight goggles; he and his radio operator run into some very bad weather, unbeknownst to Gable's wife (Helen Hayes), whom we mostly see making dinner for, and fretting over, Gable, who winds up way behind schedule. She tries to get some information, but Barrymore stonewalls her.

The third pilot we follow is happy-go-lucky William Gargan, married to Myrna Loy, though since nothing much happens to him, they both have largely thankless roles. Lionel Barrymore is a plane inspector who serves as a conversational foil for John; C. Henry Gordon is the head of the airline board who does not see eye to with the director. At an hour into the 90-minute movie, it still feels like the plot hasn't quite kicked in, although we have had several ripely poetic speeches. It's not boring, but it does feel self-consciously arty, with all the good and bad things that label can entail: some big "acting" moments (mostly involving the Barrymores and Helen Hayes), some interesting camerawork (in this case, some very nice shots of planes in the mountains), and a self-important tone. For some reason, this is not on video and as far as I know, has never cropped up on TCM even though as an MGM film, it must be part of their library. It's worth seeing if you get a chance.

THREE GIRLS ABOUT TOWN (1941)

Though not a conventional "screwball comedy," as it lacks serious romance, verbal wit, or the upper class, this B-move is still an enjoyable knockabout farce filled with screwball characters. Joan Blondell and Binnie Barnes are sisters (named Hope and Faith) who work as convention hostesses at a big city hotel. I’m not certain what their duties are, above and beyond making sure that conventioneers have a good time, but they seem to be looked upon with some condemnation by the press, being called a threat to public decency. Just as airline strike negotiations are beginning in a hotel conference room, the arbitrator is discovered dead in his room. Afraid the discovery of the body will spell disaster for the hotel’s reputation, Blondell and Barnes take on the task of hiding it for the time being. Meanwhile, reporter John Howard (who is sweet on Blondell) finds out about the body and, knowing he has the potential for a good story under his nose, tries to outwit the girls and get the body out in the open. To complicate matters: 1) the girls' sister (of course named Charity, played by Janet Blair), who is supposed to be in college, arrives looking for fun and adventure and falls for Howard; 2) the cops, egged on by a high society women's group out to stop any immoral activity on the part of the hostesses, are sniffing around; 3) Eric Blore, a drunken magician from an earlier convention, is roaming the floors looking for someone named Charlie.

I’ve never seen Weekend at Bernie’s but this movie is based on a similar foundation: the locomotion of a dead body by people trying to keep the existence of the corpse a secret. It moves along at a good clip with very little (pardon the pun) dead air between gags. The Blondell/Blair/Howard triangle gets a little old—it's clear that Howard doesn't care a bit for Blair, so we just have to wait for Blondell to realize that in the film's last few minutes—but most everything else works. Blondell (pictured with Howard) bears the brunt of the movie on her capable shoulders. Howard, best known as Katherine Hepburn's stick-in-the-mud fiancé in THE PHILADELPHIA STORY, is OK but doesn’t have much spark with Blondell. Robert Benchley shines as the hotel manager, Una O'Connor is a washer woman, and you might recognize Lloyd Bridges and Larry Parks in bits as reporters. Blore doesn’t have much to do, but his character winds up being crucial to the wrap-up. Could be sharper, but overall a fun little surprise from the Columbia Pictures vault. [TCM]

THE MAGIC BOX (1952)

This film, a biopic about William Friese-Greene, a largely forgotten figure in the development of moving pictures, was produced for the Festival of Britian, a sort of World's Fair exhibition intended in part as a post-war pick-me-up for the British. Almost every working actor of any repute in England at the time appears in the film, mostly in cameos. Robert Donat plays Friese-Greene, a photographer who becomes an absent-minded inventor, tinkering in color photography and in the very early stages of moving pictures. Throughout his life, he goes into great debt and ignores the needs of his family. His first wife (Maria Schell) leaves him, and his second wife (Margaret Johnston), with whom he has an amicable separation, complains that his "real life" happened before she met him. He insists on claiming that he invented moving pictures, though because he's not mentioned in any textbooks, his son gets beat up at school for repeating that claim. The man's story is a downbeat one, and to its credit, the movie doesn’t seem to try to sugarcoat it much; it begins on the last day of his life, when, as an ailing and lonely old man, he is about to speak his mind at a British film industry meeting, and the rest of the narrative is comprised of two major flashbacks, the first covering his later years with Johnston and the second of his earlier, slightly happier days which includes his breakthrough in getting a short sequence of moving pictures projected in his basement; he's so excited, he races out into the night streets, dragging a policeman (Laurence Olivier) in to witness his triumph. Sadly, that’s about the peak of his life, as he ignores his photography business, which goes bankrupt, and he loses his family, slowly sliding into obscurity. The character isn't one that the audience can really admire or warm up to, and the whole thing feels too reverent and too trivial at the same time. It is fun to spot the star cameos, which include Richard Attenborough, Glynis Johns, Margaret Rutherford, David Thomlinson, and Peter Ustinov, but overall, it's a rather drab affair. [TCM]