Distress Around a Damsel

I'm not the biggest fan of musicals, but there are any number that I should probably watch because they're famous for one reason or another. Among these is one of George Gershwin's final works, doing the songs in the musical A Damsel in Distress. So the last time it was on TCM, I watched it with a view to getting around to doing a post on it.

The movie starts off at Totleigh, an estate in the English countryside. Lady Alyce, the adult daughter in the family, is in love and it's thought that she's about to be betrothed to somebody, but nobody really knows who that somebody is. To that end, the head of the house staff, Keggs (Reginald Gardiner) starts a betting pool among the staff members. Each one antes up and picks from among the men who are known to be known to Alyce and could possibly be the suitor. However, there are more staff members than suitors, so a young boy says that he'll put his money on a "Mr. X", an unknown American.

Cut to an office in London, where American stage actor Jerry Halliday (Fred Astaire) has an office where he can keep his PR guy George (George Burns) together with George's secretary Gracie (Gracie Allen) while Jerry is performing on the London stage. Jerry is certainly not Mr. X, and Alyce doesn't even know him. At least, she doesn't know him yet. Jerry exits his office one day and gets into a taxicab, and wouldn't you know it, but Alyce (Joan Fontaine) is in London too to meet an actual American suitor. Sure enough, she gets into the same cab as Jerry even though he's not the suitor. However, it suits both of them to take the cab together for a while since Alyce is trying to get away from her handlers.

Albert, the young boy who's got The American in the betting pool, sets the cat among the pigeons by writing a phony letter to Jerry as he was in London along with Keggs when Alyce got in the cab with Jerry. The fake letter suggests that Alyce needs help that Jerry can somehow provide. He can come under the pretense that Totleigh is open for guided tours one day a week, and if Jerry comes on that day....

However, Keggs recognizes Jerry and won't let him in the house, but Albert helps him get in courtesy of a visiting choir of madrigal singers. When he gets in, Albert takes him up to Alyce's chambers. The two talk about the "help" Alyce needs in seeing her American suitor, and both of them wind up talking at cross purposes in the sort of way that would lead to the sort of confusion you'd see in a TV sitcom of a later era.

It doesn't take much to guess that Jerry and Alice wind up developing feelings for each other, and that various people are going to try to hinder the relationship or help it out for their own purposes. That, and the sort of misunderstanding you'd get in any of Fred Astaire's musicals with Ginger Rogers. And you can probably guess where everything is heading in the final reel.

As I said at the start, I'm not the biggest fan of musicals, so the material isn't quite my favorite. However, it's easy to see why fans of musicals and the Astaire/Rogers pairings would like this even if it's Joan Fontaine standing in for Rogers. The music having been written by George and Ira Gershwin, it's not surprising that multiple songs have since become standards, notably "Nice Work if You Can Get It".

A Damsel in Distress is inoffensive enough and will probably delight fans of musicals. Definitely worth watching.

The Mob

Last week, I talked about the movie Murder by Contract regarding movies that were leaving Tubi at the end of April 2024. I recently watched another movie that's leaving at the end of the month, an early 1950s crime movie called The Mob. (Apparently, both movies did get video releases on Columbia noir box sets, even tough The Mob is to me a straight-up crime movie and not a noir. Just in case you don't get the chance to see either before the end of the month.)

Broderick Crawford is the star of the movie, and considering his pedigree to this point, you'd think he's the mobster. Except that he isn't. He's police detective Johnny Damico, and as the movie opens he's at a pawn shop one night looking for a diamond ring to buy for the girlfriend he's planning to pop the question to! Alas, this conversation is disrupted by a shooting. Damico stops the shooter, who shows Damico his police badge. Apparently, it was much more common in those days for lone policemen to shoot fleeing suspects without a bunch of other people around.

Except, as it turns out, this guy wasn't a police officer. He had shot someone who was a police officer, and then stole that guy's badge to be able to get away with murder, with the victim of the shooting Damico heard being a witness to a grand jury case about waterfront corruption. (Note that The Mob was made three years before On the Waterfront.) Damico's bosses are none too pleased about his letting a murderer get away with it, so they suspend him from the force for 60 days, appparently not caring what the union thinks.

Then again, they aren't really suspending him. They need a way to get him out of town for a bit and into some undercover work. So they get a fake photo of Damico and then send Damico to New Orleans, where he'll be given a union card for a longshoreman. He's to come back from New Orleans with the the fake identity Tim Flynn on the pretense that he's got a criminal record there (the authorities there are creating a fake record in case anyone questions him). When he returns, he's going to get a job on the waterfront and figure out who the "Blackie Clegg" is who is running the corrupt longshoremen's union.

Damico, now posing as Flynn, shows up at the hiring office and the dive bars that service the waterfront, asking way too many questions. The only person who shows anything close to friendship is a fellow longshoreman, Tom Clancy (Richard Kiley). But when Flynn starts asking questions of the guy who hands out the jobs and refers to "Castro", the gangsters are none too pleased. Flynn is taken to meet Castro (Ernest Borgnine in a very early role) to try to find out what the deal is with this mouthy newcomer.

Of course, we know the deal, and we also know that because there's a Production Code, crime is not going to pay. But how we get from where we are to where the movie is going to end is something you're going to have to watch for yourself. There's murder, kidnapping, and the real Clegg being unmaksed.

Apparently The Mob got great reviews when it was released back in 1951. Having watched it, I'd have to say that it's a decidedly competent movie. It's not one I'd give the sort of high praise it got in 1951, but at the same time I'd point out there's nothing terribly wrong with it. Broderick gives a good performance, although I do wonder if the script makes him too curious for his own good. That's not Crawford's fault, of course.

There are any number of familiar faces in the supporting roles, such as Neville Brand as a henchman or an uncredited Charles Bronson whose face and voice are immediately recognizable. It all works, even if it is following a formula. The Mob does what it does more than well enough to entertain.

No Escape

A few days back, someone on one of the movie boards I frequent mentioned watching a B movie from Monogram on TCM: I Escaped from the Gestapo. The poster's description made it sound interesting, so I looked to see it was available on the Watch TCM app, so I hadn't saved it to my DVR. In fact, it's still available for viewing until April 27, so I'm writing up a post now to give everyone the chance to catch it.

The first thing to note is that the movie got a re-release under the title No Escape, and that's the title on the print TCM ran, although when searching for the movie within the app it the listings had it as I Escaped from the Gestapo. The person who may or may not escape is a man named Torgut Lane, played by Dean Jagger who at this time either still had a full head or hair or else was wearing a toupee, as his more recognizable bald self is not to be seen. A brief opening animation turns the anti-Semitic octopus trope on its head, depicting Nazi Germany as an octopus with its tentacles in everything. We then cut to a prison in the US, where Lane is serving time as a counterfeiter. A fellow prisoner is about to be broken out, and takes Lane along for the ride, helped by people on the outside who have a few conveniently dead bodies to throw under a train to put the cops off the trail.

Now, since we know the title of the movie the viewers can guess who this gang that helped Lane is, but for understandable reasons he doesn't have much idea, beyond the common sense knowledge that it's not uncommon for prisoners to turn on each other. The breakout gang takes Lane to the California coast, where they tell him they'd like him to do some counterfeiting for them. They then proceed to put him in a locked room, which immediately raises his suspicion. Martin (John Carradine) informs him that this is their way of checking his loyalty.

Their first job for him is a simple one that they don't really need him for: merchant marine working permits and boarding passes for a certain ship. Meanwhile, we discover that the gang is using a boardwalk arcade as a front for their activities, all the better for them since it gives them access to the coast. Among the attractions at their business is one of those "record your voice" things, and the men, in the Gestapo if you hadn't figured that out yet, use that to get information on ships and things. (This seems like a huge plot hole to me, since merchant sailors wouldn't have committed information about their movements to recording.)

Lane figures out a way to jimmy the lock on his door, at least to open it enough to be able to eavesdrop on his captors. Knowing that he's been asked to counterfeit stuff for the merchant marine, and then hearing about the explosion aboard the ship with which he was technically involved, he's able to put two and two together. But how is he going to be able to fight against his captors? After all, they're holding him hostage and they're the ones with guns.

I Escaped from the Gestapo was made at the height of World War II, so you know that you're going to get a morale-booster here in which even a criminal like Lane is still willing to help America against the wicked Nazis. You also know that the Nazis are going to get what's coming to them in the end. And, since it's just a B movie, you know that you're going to get all of it on the cheap. The result is a movie that's more worth seeing as a product of its time than as cinematic art, much like all the episodic 1970s television that's on the various digital subchannels. I Escaped from the Gestapo will probably entertain you, but isn't terribly memorable.

Tough to review

Many years ago, well before I would have been old enough to see it and comprehend what it was about, I heard about the movie My Dinner with Andre. Indeed, I might well have heard about it when it was originally released, because I would have been eight or nine years old at the time. Probably most people know what the movie is about. But because I'd actually never seen it, I decided to record it when it finally showed up on TCM.

If there's anybody who doesn't know what My Dinner With Andre is about, the short answer is that it is indeed about a dinner with a man named Andre (French-American theater director Andre Gregory kinda-sorta playing himself, although he's insisted he isn't really playing himself). The man whose dinner it is with Andre is Wallace Shawn, also sort of playing himself, but then not playing himself. Also, as you may know, most of the movie is set in a restaurant with the two having dinner.

But before that, there's some opening monologue from Wally, who here is a struggling actor with a girlfriend. He had been good friends with Andre before Andre more or less dropped out of life some years back. Andre has returned, and an unseen friend has set the two up for dinner. At the dinner, Andre talks about things that in any other movie would be a monologue set up to introduce a flashback, as we see the stories he's telling us actually acted out. But that's where My Dinner With Andre is different. Instead, we just get Andre relating these incidents, with a bit of interjection from Wally to discuss philosophy.

That structure is why, for me, the movie didn't really work. We don't know these people, and we're not really given enough of an establishing story to make us care about the two men. Nor is there any action given to draw the viewer into the story. When I've been to parties where I meet old friends I haven't seen in a while and they talk about what's up with them, that's different. So you can see why Wally would be interested in Andre (Shawn and Gregory were longtime friends in real life).

It also didn't help for me that Andre comes across as a bit of a phony, telling things that are supposedly deep but instead come across as tall tales. Again, if it's someone you already know talking like this, maybe that would work. And maybe even if you're more intimately involved with the arts than someone like me who just enjoys watching old movies, but doesn't actually do any performing, it might also work.

TCM's Glynis Johns tribute

Glynis Johns died at the beginning of the year at the age of 100, and I figured that with the odd scheduling of 31 Days of Oscar this year, TCM wouldn't be able to get around to having a programming tribute to her until after the Oscars. It turns out I was right, and we're not finally going to get to their salute to Johns. This will be five movies tonight (April 23) in prime time.

Those movies are:
8:00 PM The Sundowners
10:30 PM All Mine to Give
12:30 AM The Card
2:15 AM Vacation from Marriage
4:00 AM 49th Parallel

I apologize for not including any image with this post. I figured that I had an image or two that I would have used when I posted the obituary post on Johns, but it turned out that I used a couple of Youtube Clips instead. The only image I had is a small one from Miranda that is not part of tonight's salute.

I'm particularly looking forward to The Card. The last time I recorded it on TCM some years back, it was on my old DVR that I had to give up when Dad and I moved to the new place and ditched DirecTV for the less-expensive YouTubeTV. I had never gotten around to watching The Card before the move, and am happy at the possibility of recording it again.

Nothing to do with Hugh Hefner

Somehow, for two straight days I have a movie that's been sitting on my DVR that I haven't blogged about before and that is coming up soon on TCM. This time, the movie in question is one called Playmates, and will appear on TCM tomorrow (April 23) at 6:00 AM.

The movie starts off with a man renting records from a service that pipes in music for businesses sort of like a precursor to Muzak. That man, Peter Lindsay (Peter Lind Hayes) is the press agent for bandleader Kay Kyser (obviously playing himself), who at the time in addition to being a bandleader also hosted a radio show.

In one of the restaurants for which Peter ordered the music, he runs into Lulu Monahan (Patsy Kelly). She's also a press agent, but for actor John Barrymore (again playing himself, in his final film role). Lulu is talking to a local sponsor, trying to get the sponsor to sign up for Barrymore's show in part because, as we'll eventually learn, Barrymore is in serious financial trouble. The sponsor sees Kyser's press agent and realizes that Kyser now has a much bigger audience. With that in mind, Lulu comes up with an audacious idea. Barrymore is (or was) a serious Shakespearean actor, so why not have the two team up with a shtick that Barrymore is going to teach Kyser how to do Shakespeare? Kyser already had a movie or two under his belt by this time, and the way he presented his band was a bit more oriented toward theatrics.

But this being a movie, you know that the two aren't particularly interested in working with each other at first, in part because Barrymore thinks Kay isn't up to Shakespeare, while Kyser is fully willing to accept the fact, what with his North Carolina accent and all. And certainly on the side of Kay's not being suited for Shakespeare is his grandmother (May Robson, 83 years young and still going strong).

And then old flame, female bullfighter Carmen Del Toro (Lupe Velez) shows up, and this gives Barrymore an idea. He still doesn't really want to do the show, so he tries to get Carmen to go after Kay and put a monkey wrench into the works. But Kay finds out what's going on and thinks he's going to come up with a way to get Barrymore off the project. Along the way, there's a lot of music from Kay's orchestra, culminating with a swing music-inspired version of Romeo and Juliet.

Playmates is an absolute mess, in part because of Barrymore's condition at the time he made this very near the end of his life. However, it's also one of those movies where it's easy to see why RKO would take a chance on the material. Kay Kyser was a popular bandleader at the time, and spoof material like this seems like it would work well. Kyser, however, is even less charismatic than Glenn Miller, and the plot is really too unbelievable.

But as always, you should judge for yourself, and there are a few glimpses of the old John Barrymore. That, and May Robson elevates pretty much anything she's in, even in those cases where she was miscast.

Long Live the Meadows!

Another movie that's been sitting on my DVR that I haven't blogged about before is coming up on TCM. This time, it's the Elvis Presley musical Viva Las Vegas, and the next airing on TCM will be tomorrow, April 22, at 4:30 PM. So once again, I sat down to watch it in order to be able to do a post on it in time for the next TCM showing.

Elvis Presley plays Lucky Jackson, a racecar mechanic who also owns his own racecar and dreams of competing in the upcoming Grand Prix race in Las Vegas. The only thing is, he needs a better engine for the car, and for that he needs money. Lucky winds up trying various ways in Las Vegas to get that money.

Meanwhile, in a garage in the desert somewhere between Vegas and Los Angeles, Lucky isn't the only one working on a car to enter in the race. The much wealthier Count Elmo Mancini (Cesare Danova) is working on two cars, and is even offering Lucky the chance to ride one of the cars in the race. That offer, unsurprisingly, comes with strings attached, which would be that Lucky is the #2 on the team and drive in a way to help Mancini win the race. No dice, says Lucky. But the negotations are interrupted by a shapely pair of legs the two see while they're under the car looking that the undercarriage.

Those legs are attached to Rusty Martin (Ann-Margret), who is also looking to get to Las Vegas for reasons of her own. She wants to break into entertainment, and also works for a time as a swim instructor for one of the hotels. It should go without saying that both men show no small attraction for Rusty as the look for her and then find her. But it's more difficult for Lucky, since he seems to keep making things go wrong. This being an Elvis movie, you know it's not going to be a straightforward relationship, but that he's quite likely to wind up with The Girl in the last reel.

This being an Elvis movie, you also know that there are going to be quite a few musical numbers. However, this time, there aren't just songs for Elvis; there's quite a bit on stage for Ann-Margret to do as well, in an attempt to accelerate her career. Not that she needed much help, of course.

Eventually, we get to the final auto race, and Elvis is able to compete in his own car, although a lot of the shots look like rear-projection process photography. I can't imagine Col. Tom Parker wanting to risk Elvis driving a real racecar on a real race course at speed.

Viva Las Vegas is fairly typical for the sort of movie that Col. Tom was putting Elvis in: not particularly demanding, and it has a formula, but one that's well-executed. Part of that is down to Elvis' abilities as an entertainer, part of that is the presence of Ann-Margret, and part of it is that the Las Vegas strip looks quite photogenic in the movies. You'll not how movies like this don't go off-strip to the seedier parts of the city.

So while none of Elvis' movies are going to wind up in lists of the greatest movies of all time, Viva Las Vegas is eminently watchable and fun, and a good vehicle to see what Elvis was all about.

Murder by Contract

It's been a while since I looked through the movies that are about to leave Tubi. One that looked interesting and is leaving at the end of April is Murder by Contract, so I sat down to watch it in order that I could give you a review and time to watch it before it leaves Tubi.

Vince Edwards, about the only name in the cast I recognize, plays Claude, a man who's hoping to buy a home of his own some day. So he decides that the best way to earn the money to do it is to get work as a contract killer! He gets in touch with a Mr. Moon, representative of an unseen Mr. Brink, some sort of mobster who wants people killed. Eventually, Moon calls up Claude with a killing Brink wants done. Brink does quite a good job at it, even killing Moon for Brink.

This gets Claude sent out to Los Angeles, because Brink has a special job where he doesn't want the authorities to recognize the usual sort of people who did contract killings. Claude goes west by train, which kind of ticks off the two men who are supposed to contact him in Los Angeles, Marc and George. They inform Claude that Brink wants dead a Billy Williams, who is supposed to testify in a two weeks' time in the tax evasion trial of someone high up in the organization.

Claude responds by doing next to nothing for a week other than asking Marc and George to ferry him around town doing various things that don't seem at all involved with planning a contract killing. It turns out, however, the Claude is quite clever as this is a ruse. He's really trying to figure out if anybody has a tail on Marc and George, and therefore by extension him. He has to get away from the two somehow and then follow them to see if anybody else is also following. It's only then that Claude is willing to start planning the form of murder.

This is a bit difficult, if you will, in the Claude is also not your normal contract killer, in that other than the killings he's always been scrupulously law-abiding: never in jail, not even in reform school, and he'd prefer not to use a gun because that'll be found if anybody is ever searched. But that's not the real problem.

What really makes things a mess is that Claude learns the intended victim is actually a Billie Williams, not Billy -- it's the ex-girlfriend of the defendant, and Claude is unsure about killing women since they're more unpredictable. Billy is staying at her house out in the hills around Los Angeles, guarded by a whole host of policemen, so getting to the house is also going to be tough.

Murder by Contract is a really interesting premise for a low-budget movie, although the movie does have some problems. Surprisingly, I don't think the problems are the result of the low budget. One problem is that the Production Code was still well in force, which means that we know going in to the movie that Claude isn't going to get away with murder, since this wasn't an independent production. But there are also plot holes. Claude's first plot to kill Billie doesn't work, yet the police don't move Billie to an undisclosed safe house!

Murder by Contract is also interesting stylistically. Some would put it in the noir box, although I saw it as closer to something I once described as a post-noir, I think when I was writing about another Edwards film, City of Fear. That one was also set in a Los Angeles that looks much brighter than a traditional noir. Two other style points didn't quite work for me in the sense that I found myself focusing on technical aspects of the movie rather than the story itself. One was that the direction seemed closer to a foreign arthouse movie. The other is that the score, mostly solo guitar by Perry Botkin Sr. (father of Perry Jr. who co-wrote the Young and the Restless theme), which sounded like Botkin was trying to channel Anton Karas' zither score for The Third Man. Botkin's guitar works at times, but at other times it sounds jarringly wrong.

Still, despite the fact that Murder by Contract has some decided flaws, it's also most definitely worth watching, as it comes across as just different enough to be memorable.

Lake Around the Lady

I've mentioned the Blind Spot blogathon before, where a blogger picks a dozen well-known movies they've not actually seen before and blogs about them over the course of the year. I haven't participated, largely because I don't know what movies I'm going to be watching over an entire year. But one of the movies that would have been a blind spot for me until now was the 1940s version of Lady in the Lake. I finally recorded it it last time it was on TCM, and since it's going to be on TCM again tomorrow, April 20, at 4:30 PM, I recently watched it in order to do a post on it.

Lady in the Lake is a hard movie to do a synopsis on, largely because the plot is so convoluted, thank you very much Raymond Chandler. Raymond Chandler's detective Phillip Marlowe is played here by Robert Montgomery, at least the few times you see him. We do see Marlowe giving the audience a bit of a prologue right at the top of the film, and then he tells us about how he wrote a story based on a case of a lady who drowned in a lake that may have been suicide, but was more likely murder.

As part of trying to flog the story, Marlowe goes to see Adrienne Fromsett (Audrey Totter), a publisher at a company run by Mr. Kingsby (Leon Ames). However, Adrienne's interest isn't really in Marlowe's story, but about his day job as a private investigator. Kingsby's wife has left him, ostensibly going to Mexico to seek a divorce, with some suggestion that Mrs. Kingsby is going to marry some guy named Lavery. Could Marlowe find out what's really going on?

The first indication that there's a problem comes at Lavery's place when, after a brief conversation in which Lavery insists he knows nothing about what's going on, he asks Marlowe if he has the time, despite there being a mantel clock in the room. This is really just an excuse to punch Marlowe out and pour alcohol on him, making him appear drunk like they do to Cary Grant in North by Northwest. That brings Marlowe into contact with the police, notably Lt. DeGarmot (Lloyd Nolan), who is investigating a bunch of the same people, but for a totally different reason.

Apparently, there really was a lady in a lake, with that lake being on a property owned by none other than Kingsby. There's some thought that the dead body might be the wife of Kingsby's caretaker, and Marlowe gets caught up in a murder investigation alongside the cops, who seem decidedly unhappy to have him on the case as well. Likewise, none of the people being investigated seem happy either. But who killed whom?

Part of the problem with Lady in the Lake is that the movie is pretty convoluted, although at least that's not as severe a problem as with another famous movie filmed from a Chandler book, The Big Sleep, which is notorious for how its plot makes little sense. The much bigger problem is the reason the movie is still so well-known today, and that's its direction. Robert Montgomery came up with the intriguing idea of having the entire movie be told from Marlowe's point of view. And I don't just mean narration here; I mean that for almost the entire movie, it's shot as though we're looking through Marlowe's eyes.

Unfortunately, that doesn't work here, in part because the movie cameras in use in the 1940s weren't really capable of pulling off such a thing. Nowadays, when we have cheap GoPros and similar small camera that can be worn to give off a POV, it might work. And if the technique were being used as a brief diversion, especially if this were for comic effect, it might not be so bad. But 100 minutes of a very slow, clunky camera trying to do POV? Oh heavens no.

Still, Lady in the Lake is another one of those movies you probably need to see for yourself to see just why the movie goes wrong.

Briefs for April 18, 2024

It looks like there were actually a couple of movies on FXM overnight that I haven't blogged about before, Kiss Me Goodbye followed by On the Sunny Side. I think I might have planned to record Kiss Me Goodbye on my old DVR the last time it was in the rotation, but never got around to it. Right now, YouTube TV's "Scheduled Recordings" section doesn't show another recording, so I'm not certain exactly when the blog posts on either of them are going to be.

OJ Simpson died last week, and his was a more famous obituary than a lot of the star types I post about for fairly obvious reasons. None of the Naked Gun movies seem to be streaming for free (well, with ads) anywhere, but when I checked on first hearing the news of Simpson's death a few days back, I noticed that The Cassandra Crossing is currently available on TubiTV.

Speaking of TubiTV, some time recently they added some channels and made it easier for those of use not signed in to scroll through the channels. The channels include the Cinevault channels that have a bunch of movies from the Columbia library, as well as a Warner Bros. classic channel. The couple of times I checked, movies that were about to show or where showing as I checked included White Heat and Jezebel, so yes, actual classics. And it seems to be at least the old "Turner library", if you will, in that after first writing this post I checked in again to see Dinner at Eight being shown, which is an MGM movie.

There's also a Universal Monsters channel that I've come across as part of the offering on both the Roku Channel app and Pluto TV, although the Roku Channel didn't seem to list it in the "movies" section. This one was also showing vintage stuff like Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy, and one of the Invisible Man movies.