reviews

James Cagney: One of the most versatile actors of the Golden Age

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 6 Comments

When people think of the actor James Cagney, many might think of his roles as gangsters, bad guys, and double-crossers. He was much more than that, though, in his acting roles and in his life.

This month I am watching James Cagney movies as part of my Winter of Cagney movie event.

To kick it off, I thought it might be good to share a little about the actor’s life.

Cagney was born to an Irish bartender father (James Francis Cagney) in the rough lower east side of New York City. His father, who Cagney says was an alcoholic, was also an accomplished boxer and at the age of 14 Cagney followed his footsteps and became one of Yorkville’s best fighters. James’ mother was Carolyn Elizabeth Cagney (my mom’s name is ironically Carolyn Elizabeth..but not Cagney).

“My childhood was surrounded by trouble, illness, and my dad’s alcoholism,” Cagney wrote in his autobiography, Cagney on Cagney. “But as I said, we just didn’t have the time to be impressed by all those misfortunes. I have an idea that the Irish possess a built-in don’t-give-a-damn that helps them through all the stress.”

While in high school, Cagney worked wrapping packages at Wanamaker’s Department Store, for $16 a week. His introduction into entertainment came when a fellow employee at Wanamaker’s told him a vaudeville troupe paid its players $35 a week. When Cagney auditioned, he told them he could sing and dance. He couldn’t do either, but he still had a successful audition. It was while working in Vaudeville that he met Frances Willard. They married in 1922 and remained married until his death 64 years later. She lived until 1994.

Cagney’s big break on the stage came in 1929 when he acted opposite Joan Blondell in Penny Arcade.

His big screen debut came in 1930 with Sinner’s Holiday, and he made four more films that year. Public Enemy (1931) and Taxi (1931) are two movies where the world was introduced to him as a gangster.

Growing up, I heard a lot of impressions of Cagney and those always claimed he said, “You dirty rat….” Or “All right, you guys.”

For the record, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica website, Cagney never actually said the words “You dirty rat,” or “All right, you guys” in any of his movies. Wow. Talk about a disappointing revelation there. Ha!

He did, however, say, “Come out here and take it, you dirty yellow-bellied rat or I’ll give it to you through the door,” in the 1931 movieTaxi.

According to The Kennedy Center website (he was honored there in 1980), “The unforgettable ‘fruit facial’ scene, in which he rams a grapefruit into Mae Clarke’s nose is exemplary of Cagney’s spontaneity, for the script called for him to slap Clarke with an omelet.”

Eventually, though, Cagney would tire of “packing guns and beating up women,” as he said in his autobiography, and after a string of movies where he played a gangster type figure, he did try some different roles, including the one he won an Oscar for — playing George M. Cohan in Yankee Doodle Dandy.

“No matter the genre of the film he was in, James Cagney always brought unique, riveting energy to the screen,” writes Jeremy Arnold for TCM.com. “Known best for his tough-guy and gangster roles, a persona cemented by his fourth picture, The Public Enemy (1931), Cagney had actually started his showbiz career in 1920s vaudeville as a song and dance man, and to the end of his life he thought of himself primarily as a hoofer. Hollywood didn’t give him a chance to show off those talents until his fourteenth film, Footlight Parade (1933), and even after that movie’s success, Cagney went on to make surprisingly few musicals.”

In 1934 and 1940, Cagney was accused of being a communist sympathizer and many say this is why he took the part in Yankee Doodle Dandy  — to attempt to clear his name and show that he really was a true patriot. His brother, in fact, urged him to take the part for that very reason.

Information online from various sources also suggests Cagney once had a hit on him by the mafia for work he did against the Chicago Outfit and the Mafia because they were extorting money from Hollywood studios by threatening to strikes by a mob-controlled labor union.

Cagney once shared that a hitman was sent and a heavy light was dropped on his head but it didn’t kill him, and the hit was eventually dropped when actor George Raft made a call to have the contract canceled. Raft was an American actor who played mobsters in movies and was (apparently) connected to the mob as well.

Some of Cagney’s most famous movies, besides the ones already mentioned, include:

White Heat (1949), Come Fill the Cup (1951), Love Me or Leave Me (1955), Mister Roberts (1955), and Man of a Thousand Faces (1957).

White Heat is one film that Cagney enthusiasts say you have to watch (and I will be). One reason is for the scene where Cagney breaks down after finding out his mother has been killed. The scene was shot with 300 extras in a prison cafeteria and none of the men knew what Cagney was going to do. Many of the men in the scene actually thought he had lost his mind which is why their reactions in the background are so real.

“I didn’t have to psych myself up for the scene in which I go berserk on learning of my mother’s death,” he wrote in his autobiography Cagney by Cagney. “You don’t psych yourself up for those things. You do them. I knew what deranged people sounded like. As a youngster I had visited Ward’s Island. A pal’s uncle was in the hospital for the insane. My God, what an education that was. The shrieks. The screams of those people under restraint. I remembered those cries. I saw that they fit the scene. I called on my memory to do as required. No need to ‘psych up.’”

White Heat is also where Cagney uttered one of his most famous lines, “On top of the world, Ma!”

After playing the manic Coca-Cola executive in Billy Wilder’s One Two Three in 1961, Cagney retired from acting and moved to an 800-acre farm in Dutchess County, NY with his wife where he relaxed, read, played tennis, raised horses, swam, and wrote some poetry.

It was on that farm where he died on Easter Sunday, 1986, of a heart attack at the age of 86.

I was saddened to read from a couple of sources that he did have adopted children, but the relationships with them fell apart, and his adopted son died of a heart attack when Cagney was 84, without them really speaking to each other for years..

Many actors and famous people have commented on Cagney, his acting, his movies, and his life in general.

One of those actors was George C. Scott who never worked with him but met him toward the end of Cagney’s life and borrowed a quote about General Robert E. Lee that Scott said fit Cagney as well: “What he seemed he was, a wholly human gentleman. The essential elements of whose positive character were two and only two — simplicity and spirituality.”

Scott said he was “perfectly himself” and “he was what he seemed to be.”

I will be watching the following movies for my Winter of Cagney:

 Yankee Doodle Dandy

The Man of A Thousand Faces

Taxi

The Strawberry Blonde

Mister Roberts

Angels With Dirty Faces

Public Enemy

Love Me or Leave Me

White Heat

Bonus: The Seven Little Foys

What Cagney movies have you watched?

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Cagney

https://www.kennedy-center.org/artists/c/ca-cn/james-cagney/

https://www.tcm.com/articles/021761/wb100-james-cagney

https://www.britannica.com/biography/James-Cagney

If you want to find clips and thoughts about vintage movies and TV, you can visit me on Instagram on my Nostalgically Thinking Account https://www.instagram.com/nostalgically_thinking/ or on my YouTube account Nostalgically and Bookishly Thinking here: https://www.youtube.com/@nostaglicandbookish

Classic Movie Impression: It Happened On Fifth Avenue

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 5 Comments

I’ve been watching less popular Christmas-themed movies around Christmas for the last couple of years. One of those movies was It Happened on Fifth Avenue (1947).

I truly thought I’d written about this movie in previous years, but I can’t find it when I search so I am writing about it now.

The movie is about a group of people who are sort of thrown together but it starts with a man named Alyosius T. McKeever (Victor Moore) who sneaks in the mansion of businessman Michael O’Connor (Charlie Ruggles) in New York City early in November when O’Connor goes to his home in Virginia for the winter.

McKeever is a “vagabond” or homeless man.

He lives in the home, wearing O’Connor’s clothes, and eating any food left at the house in the pantry.

The movie opens with him sneaking inside through the back fence and will later learn that he’s been doing this for some twenty years.

I, of course, am surprised that no one has ever seen him or seen the lights on in the house but, it’s a movie. Let’s suspend belief.

There are police who patrol the grounds, but McKeever has a system where he hides in the icebox (or a room they call the icebox) until the police have passed by. He also has the lights hooked up so they will shut off as soon as someone opens the front door.

One day McKeever meets Jim Bullock played by Don DeFore, sleeping on a park bench. Jim, a veteran, has been evicted from his apartment building because it is being torn down. Michael O’Connor is putting up an 80-story building in its place.

When Jim gets to the mansion and is settling in, he sees an award shaped like a boat with the name Michael O’Connor on it and accuses McKeever of taking over homes of people who can’t afford to live in family homes like his.

McKeever tells Jim he’s not really O’Connor, but a friend of his. Jim accepts this explanation easily

Jim isn’t sure what to think of this arrangement, but he needs a place to stay so he accepts it.

Soon we see Michael O’Connor, who is in Virgina having a board meeting. During the board meeting he gets a call from his daughter Trudy’s school and been told that it’s possible she’s run away.

Michael looks at a photo of two women and asks his assistant if he thinks that she has run off to her mother in Florida.

The man doesn’t know so Michael orders him to hire a private investigator and find his daughter (played by … get this name…Gale Storm).

His daughter, though, is already found for us viewers. She is at her father’s mansion looking for her clothes when Jim finds her. He demands to know what she’s doing there and suggests she is stealing from the mansion. He threatens to call the police.

Trudy, apparently smitten with Jim merely based on his appearance, decides not to tell him who she really is and tells him to go ahead and call the police.

McKeever pulls Jim aside and confesses all. He is not a friend of O’Connor, but is, instead, simply someone who takes advantage of the home being empty for a few months out of the year. When O’Connor leaves, he moves in and when O’Connor leaves Virginia, McKeever hitches his way to Virginia and moves in that house until it’s time to come back to New York.

(Again…suspend belief).

Jim isn’t sure what to make of the arrangement, but is amused and impressed that McKeever hasn’t been caught yet.

Trudy listens in and overhears what McKeever has been doing and smiles in an amused way. She decides she will find a way to stay on with the men since it will be a way to hide from her father for a while. She tells the men the truth, which is that she’s going to get a job at a music store so she can get back on her feet again. She then says she only broke into the house because she was hungry and desperate and then does a lovely fake faint to add to her story.

The men agree that she can stay. From here the movie will start to get a bit more complicated as more people are invited to stay at the mansion, including a family with small children. What could make all of this even more chaotic? Add in Michael O’Connor returning to New York to try to find his daughter and planning to return to the mansion.

One little thing that bothered me about this movie was how young Gale Storm looked and was supposed to be. She was supposed to be 18 but a romance develops between her and Jim and he seems considerably older than her. That was…awkward at times. However, I’m not sure how old Jim is actually supposed to be so maybe it isn’t so awkward. Gale was 22 at the time the film was made.

The screenplay for this movie was written by Everett Freeman. The original story was created by Herbert Clyde Lewis and Frederick Stephani.

Harry Revel wrote the songs “It’s A Wonderful, Wonderful Feeling.” “That’s What Christmas Means to Me” and “Speak My Heart” for the movie, according to the opening credits, but I wouldn’t call this movie a musical. One of the main characters simply sings a bit.

Gale Storm thought she’d be singing the parts in the film, but, unfortunately, she was told her voice would be dubbed over.

She later wrote in her memoir: “I couldn’t believe it. I thought that maybe the director didn’t know I’d been singing and dancing in films, and that if I spoke to him he’d let me do my own numbers. Well, I asked him, and he said no. I asked him to look at some of my musicals, and he said no. I asked him if I could sing for him, and he said no. His theory was that if you were a dancer, you didn’t sing; if you were a singer, you didn’t dance; and if you were an actor, you didn’t sing or dance. It was humiliating.”

Another song in the movie is “You’re Everywhere” sung by The King’s Men at 1930s/1940s barbershop quartet.

According to TCM.com, Frank Capra originally acquired the rights to the movie but passed it on to Allied Artists, a new subsidiary of Monogram Pictures, which used to develop B movies. It Happened on Fifth Avenue was the companies first major motion picture and was developed by Roy Del Ruth.

Not only was Gale upset about not being able to sing in the film, but she also was disappointed Capra didn’t direct it, according to the TCM.com article. She felt the movie was decidedly “Capra-esque” — “a warmhearted human story about the little guy with underlying social and political commetary. She said that she felt Del Ruth didn’t make the most of the story’s potential, but she may have been holding a grudge since he didn’t let her do her own singing.

Gale said Del Ruth wasn’t easy on anyone.

“I wasn’t the only one Del Ruth humiliated,” continued Storm in her biography. “Victor Moore was a dear, sweet old man who was kind to everyone; we all loved him. Except Del Ruth. Whatever Victor did, the director made him redo it — again and again. And Del Ruth never told the old man what he might have been doing wrong.”

Despite these complaints from Gale, the movie did well when it was released, with the actors receiving praise by reviewers and critics. It has now become a beloved classic as well.

Is this one you’ve ever seen? What did you think about it?

This post is part of the Comfy, Cozy Christmas feature hosted by me and Erin at Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs. If you have a blog post that you would like to share as part of this annual link-up, please find out more here.

If you write book reviews or book-related blog posts, don’t forget that Erin and I host the A Good Book and A Cup of Tea Monthly Bookish Blog Party. You can learn more about it here.

Comfy, Cozy Cinema: The Young In Heart

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 7 Comments

Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs and I are hosting Comfy, Cozy Cinema again this year and up this week was The Young In Heart.

And, yes, that title is the actual title: The Young IN Heart.

I feel like I cheated a little bit this week because not only have I watched this movie, but I also wrote about it when I watched it for the Winter of Douglas Fairbanks Jr. That means   I had an advantage to Erin when it came to writing this week’s post because I am going to quote a lot of my original post.

 This is part of what I wrote in that post: “I absolutely loved Douglas in this one. He played a more prominent role than in Gunga Din and was simply … shall I sound completely cheesy? Yes, I shall. He was completely delightful.

At one point, I texted my friend Erin that a drunk Douglas is adorable.”

Yes, I did text Erin this past January to tell her he was adorable. Yes, I am weird.

Before I forget, I found this one for free on YouTube.

So, let’s get to the movie.

The Carlton family, of which Douglas is a part of in this movie, are not a family you would want to know in real life. They are swindlers and grifters. They mooch off and manipulate people to scrape by in life.

We open the movie in the French Riviera with Douglas’s character (Rick) ready to marry a young woman whose father is rich.

Everything falls apart, though, when the police find out about the family and reveal their conniving ways to the family of Rick’s future wife. The family is told to get out of France and end up on a train where they meet a ridiculously sweet woman (Minnie Dupree) who has only recently come into a great sum of money.

Ironically, her last name is Fortune. George-Anne sets out to swindle the woman out of paying for their lunch, but the plan expands as the woman explains she lives alone in a big mansion left to her by a former suitor. She is saying how lovely it would be if all of them came to stay with her when there is a train derailment. Their car tips and at first Rick and George-Anne believe the old woman has died. She’s still breathing so the siblings carry her from the car and George-Anne covers her with her own coat.

We begin to wonder if the family is rotten through and through and are still playing things up as the woman later recovers and invites the family to come live with her.

George-Anne suggests to the family that if Miss Fortune believes they are a respectable family she will be more willing to let them live there and maybe even leave them money when she leaves. To play up this ruse she suggests the men get actual jobs and she and her mother act like caretakers and women who don’t swindle people out of money.

This is all very baffling to the family who has always cheated and stole for a living. When the men decide George-Anne’s plan might work and go to look for jobs, the scenes that follow are some of the most hilarious tongue-in-cheek moments I’ve seen in a movie.

Spinning around in the background of the family’s drama is the romance between George-Anne and Duncan Macrae (Richard Carlson), who she originally considered marrying when she thought he was rich. Duncan learned she was a con-artist along with everyone else and was shattered but still ends up chasing her down on the train back to London to tell her he still loves her.

The rest of Rick’s family — father, Col. Anthony “Sahib” Carleton (Roland Young), mother Marmey Carlton (Billie Burke), and daughter George-Anne (Janet Gaynor) — are thrilled with this plan because they know it will also set them all up for a rich life. George Anne might be even more thrilled because then she can marry a poor Scottish man who she’s fallen in love with, and the rest of her family will support her financially.

She tells him to get lost, believing he’s much too good for her and . . . well, you’ll have to see where all that ends up.

Rick is also having his own romance with Leslie Saunders (Paulette Goddard), a secretary and the engineering business he applies at for a job.

This is the second – or shall I say third – movie I’ve watched in recent months with Billie Burke and there is no mistaking that voice if you have seen The Wizard of Oz.

Yes, she is Glenda the Good Witch.

The screenplay for this movie was written by Paul Osborn and adapted by Charles Bennett from the serialized novel, The Gay Banditti by I. A. R. Wylie. That title certainly would have had a different connotation in the modern day, eh?

Anyhow, the novel appeared in parts in The Saturday Evening Post from February 26 to March 26, 1938.

The movie was released in November of the same year. They certainly worked fast back then.

I found it interesting when I read that Broadway actresses Maude Adams and Laurette Taylor screen-tested for the role of Miss Fortune and that the footage is the only audio-visual samples that existed of both of them.

The movie was produced by – can you guess? Because it feels like every movie I write about lately is produced by him.

Yes. David Selznick. The man who produced what is considered one of the biggest movie triumphs in the world — Gone with the Wind.

This movie was one of many he produced leading up to Gone With The Wind. The Prisoner of Zenda, which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, was another. Goddard was actually rumored to be being considered to play Scarlet O’Hara in Gone With The Wind, which later, of course, went to Vivien Leigh.

While I was watching the part of the movie where Mr. Carleton goes to apply for a job, I was fascinated by the fancy car they showed. It was spinning like a pig on a spit at the front of the building and it was a very modern looking car and a very modern looking set up altogether.

According to Ultimate Car Page and Wikipedia,  https://www.ultimatecarpage.com/car/1905/Phantom-Corsair.html

The six-passenger 2-door sedan Flying Wombat featured in that scene was actually the one-of-a-kind prototype Phantom Corsair. The Phantom Corsair concept car was built in 1938 and designed by Rust Heinz of the H. J. Heinz family and Maurice Schwartz of the Bohman & Schwartz coachbuilding company in Pasadena, California.”

I also found it interesting that this was Gaynor’s last movie before retiring while she was at the top of her career. She made one last movie in 1957 called Bernardine.

Like I said above, I loved this movie. It was just what I needed to watch this week with so much sadness going on in the world. There was a lot of humor from all the cast, but Douglas really had me smiling throughout. Not only because he is my latest old Hollywood star crush (watch out Paul Newman!).

Have you seen this one? What did you think of it?

You can read Erin’s impression of the movie on her blog.

Next week we will move into a bit of spooky with Coraline.

The rest of our movie list can be found on this graphic:

Comfy, Cozy Cinema: The Five Year Engagement

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 11 Comments

Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs and I are hosting Comfy, Cozy Cinema again this year and up this week was The Five-Year Engagement.

I am going to share right off the bat that this was not the movie for me. Erin enjoys it (though she had not watched in a long time and forgot some of the aspects of it) and you can find a more positive view of it on her blog.

Disclaimer: The fact I did not enjoy it is NOT an attack on anyone who did enjoy it. All views expressed here are my own opinions on the movie only. I don’t think anyone is awful for enjoying it. It simply was not my cup of tea. Everyone has different tastes.

I probably should have researched this one a little more when I agreed to watch it because it really wasn’t a movie I’d normally watch. It also was not cozy at all to me personally, but it probably has some sentimental value to others.

For my regular readers who know I usually recommend books and shows without a ton of swearing and crude “jokes” or references, you can know I don’t recommend this one because that’s the majority it.

When I did finally look up the movie this morning, I learned that it featured “more than 205 obscenities and profanities and lots of verbal sexual humor.”

Yeah. I really need to look this stuff up before I go into a movie. *wince*

I am  not going to sit here and say that I do not swear. I certainly do. I wish I didn’t, but I do. I’m in a deep depression this week and have sworn about ten times already today (and asked God to forgive me).

Despite that personal flaw confessional moment, movies that throw swear words in for no reason aren’t my thing. 

Here is a bit of a description of the movie from online:

“On their one-year anniversary, sous chef Tom Solomon (Jason Segel) plans to surprise his girlfriend, Violet Barnes (Emily Blunt), with an engagement ring. The lovers do end up engaged, but the fact that the proposal does not go exactly as planned proves to be a harbinger of things to come. Each time they try to set a date, various obstacles stand in their way. As more and more time passes, Tom and Violet begin to wonder if perhaps their marriage is not meant to be.”

The movie is rated R, so a lot of it the languag and sex scenes are to be expected but I just wasn’t comfortable with the level of crudeness or how many times I had to see Jason Segel having sex. Eek.

Also, Jason Segel plays pretty much the same character in every movie or TV show he has ever been in so if you like him in other movies or TV shows you should like this – just add a few more penis jokes, f-words, and views of his naked butt.

Again, Erin has more positive reasons she enjoyed the film (and I totally get her reasons!) so you can check out her views and more information on her blog here:


Next week we are writing about The Young In Heart (1938), starring Douglas Fairbanks Jr.

The other movies we will be watching are on this list:

Classic Movie Impressions: The Talk of the Town (1942)

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 7 Comments

This past weekend I watched the movie The Talk of the Town with Cary Grant, Jean Arthur, and Ronald Colman. I found this movie, among many other good ones, free on Tubi. It is also currently free on YouTube.

I had seen it before as a suggested move but ignored it, thinking it was a drama. After watching it, I asked myself, “What took me so long to watch this one?!”

I loved this movie and while I always love Cary Grant, I once again loved Ronald Colman who I first saw in The Prisoner of Zenda earlier this year.

This movie starts with a fire at a factory where a man dies. Cary, portraying Leopold Dilg, is arrested for arson and murder.

Soon he’s breaking out of jail and escaping through the woods on a rainy night. He makes his way in the dark toward a small house while dogs hunt him down. The name of the house is Sweetbrook and there is a woman inside getting it ready — maybe for a guest.

Leopold breaks in the door, startling the woman.

“Miss Shelley,” he says. “Please…let me…” And then he faints and falls down the stairs.

Miss Shelley wakes him up with a bucket full of water and he asks if she can stay at the house, which he knows is a rental. She tells him he can’t stay because she knows he has escaped jail. There is a knock on the door before she can finish explaining and she tells him to run upstairs and hide.

There is a Professor Michael Lightcap at the door and he’s standing in the rain. He reminds her that he’s rented the house out and he’s here to stay. Miss Shelley, whose first name is Nora, panics because Leopold is hiding upstairs and she doesn’t want the professor to find him.

Things will get more complicated as she makes up an excuse to stay in the house overnight to make sure the professor doesn’t find Leopold.

Complications just keep arising as Nora offers to become the professor’s secretary and housekeeper during his stay, a senator arrives to tell Professor Lightcap he’s up for nomination to the United States Supreme Court, and Leopold walks down one morning to argue about the role of the law in society and Nora has to introduce him as the gardener.

This is a non-stop movie full of hilarious mix-ups, near misses, and a love-triangle that won’t be resolved until the very last minute, literally, of the movie.

As I said above, I loved this movie.

It was engaging, funny, witty, and captivating. Mixed in all the lighthearted moments were a few philosophical moments about law and justice.

Jean Arthur was delightful as Nora Shelley, always quickly rescuing the day just at the last moment, taking care of both Leopold and the professor.

Ronald Colman pulled off the staunch, uptight professor well and it was fun to see him “let down  his hair” a bit later in the film. He didn’t let down his hair. It’s just a saying, of course.

Cary walked the line between an aggressive rebel and a falsely accused victim, putting his usual romantic charm on the backburner for most of the film and bringing it out in more subtle moments. This was a movie where he wasn’t a pursuing a woman as much as he was his own freedom and justice.

I spent much of the last half of the movie wondering which one of the men Nora was actually falling for and I think she was doing the same thing. She’d gathered affection for both of them but wasn’t sure if either of them had for her.

This movie was nominated for seven Oscars but it was about the same time that America started the war so more “patriotic” movies got the nod that year. Ironically the best picture went to Mrs. Minier, which was set in England, however.

According to TCM, even without the wins, The Talk of the Town “still marked an important moment in the careers of its stars Cary Grant and Ronald Colman.”

For Cary, it was a new movie after not working for a year and he was nominated for an Oscar as well. He didn’t win the Oscar but he did have his name legally changed  his name from Archibald Alexander Leach, became an American citizen and married heiress Barbara Hutton.

Colman was 51 at the time and needed a spark to reinvent his career. The Talk of the Town worked and he went on to star in Random Harvest, which earned him another Oscar nomination. He lost that to James Cagney in Yankee Doodle Dandy, but still kept him at a high point in his career. Films such as Kismet (1944) and Champagne for Caesar (1950).  He also finally earned his Oscar for portraying the delusional Shakespearean actor in A Double Life (1947).

I found it interesting to read that there was tension between Grant and Colman since both were used to being the lead actor and that tension was written into the script as they aggressively bantered back and forth with each other.

I also was fascinated to learn that two endings were filmed — one with Jean Arthur choosing Cary and the other with Colman. The director allowed the preview audiences to choose who she ended up with.

Trivia:

  • filming was to begin on January 17, 1942, the day Hollywood learned the sad news of Carole Lombard’s death in a plane crash. Stevens halted work on the set and sent both cast and crew home.
  •  
  • Screenwriter Sidney Buchman (who co-wrote the script with Irwin Shaw) was blacklisted in the 1950s. Consequently, Buchman, one of the men who penned Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), left the U.S. and began working in Fox’s European division. Buchman would remain in France until his death in 1975.

When the professor is unconscious on the floor, Tilney (Rex Ingram) asks Sam if he is a doctor. Ironically, Rex Ingram was himself a trained physician in real life.

Cary Grant and Ronald Colman were both paid at least $100,000 for their work in the film. Jean Arthur, who was in Harry Cohn’s doghouse and just coming off suspension, was only paid $50,000.


Whilst many characters find Leopold Dilg’s penchant for adding an egg to his borscht unique (so much so that it becomes a means of determining his whereabouts), it was not an uncommon practice to add an egg to borscht in Poland and in Mennonite communities in Eastern Europe.

A radio theatre presentation of The Talk of the Town (1942) was broadcast on CBS radio on the Lux Radio Theatre on 5/17/1943 with Cary Grant, Ronald Colman, and Jean Arthur recreating their roles from the movie. It’s a 60-minute adaptation of the movie.

Nora tells the professor that he is, “as whiskered as the Smith Brothers.” This refers to a brand of cough drops with an illustration of the Smith Brothers on the front, both of whom have a beard. First introduced in 1852, they remained the most popular brand for a century.


Memorable quotes:

Well, it’s a form of self-expression. Some people write books. Some people write music. I make speeches on street corners.

– Leopold Dilg

What is the law? It’s a gun pointed at somebody’s head. All depends upon which end of the gun you stand, whether the law is just or not.

– Leopold Dilg

Stop saying “Leopold” like that, tenderly. It sounds funny. You can’t do it with a name like Leopold.

– Leopold Dilg

This is your law and your finest possession – it makes you free men in a free country. Why have you come here to destroy it? If you know what’s good for you, take those weapons home and burn them! And then think… think of this country and of the law that makes it what it is. Think of a world crying for this very law! And maybe you’ll understand why you ought to guard it.  – Michael Lightcap

He’s the only honest man I’ve come across in this town in 20 years. Naturally, they want to hang him. – Sam Yates

Sources:

TCM.com https://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/92288/the-talk-of-the-town#articles-reviews?articleId=187407

Summer of Angela: The Long Hot Summer

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 6 Comments

This summer I am watching Angela Lansbury movies for the Summer of Angela.

This week I dropped the movie with Angela and Warren Beatty that seemed super dark and replaced it with The Long Hot Summer, which I actually watched in 2022 during my first ever movie marathon called The Summer of Paul (Newman that is). For the life of me, though, I could not find that I wrote a blog post about the movie, so I am starting from scratch here.

The Long Hot Summer is not an Angela Lansbury focused movie, but she is in it and fills the screen with her personality when she is on it. The main stars are, of course, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, but Angela provides some comic relief as Orson Welles’ mistress, Minnie Littlejohn.

First, a bit of background/description of the movie with the Google description:

Handsome vagabond Ben Quick (Paul Newman) returns to the Mississippi town his late father called home, but rumors of his dad’s pyromaniac tendencies follow him as soon as he sets foot there. The proud young man’s determination eventually wins over civic leader Will Varner (Orson Welles), who decides Ben might be just the man for his daughter, Clara (Joanne Woodward) — much to the displeasure of Will’s gutless son (Anthony Franciosa) and Clara’s society boyfriend (Richard Anderson).

The movie’s main focus is the sexual tension between Paul and Joan’s characters, which worked out fine since the two were having an affair before this and were on the cusp of being able to announce that since Paul Newman’s divorce was essentially final. Yes, I have always been a fan of Paul, but, no, I don’t like that part of his and Joanne’s story, and I have a feeling there were times they didn’t like it either.

Paul was always good at playing loners, sad men who don’t know who they are or what they want in life except the woman they set their sights on.

It’s the same in this movie, where Paul seems to want prestige but really just wants Clara to like him as much as he likes her. Clara is uptight, though. She does everything proper and never lets her guard down, especially around Ben Quick. She seems to have a feeling if she does let her guard down all of those feelings she’s been trying to protect all  her life will spill out.

It’s no surprise since her daddy (Welles), is also pretty uptight and fights for control over everything in his life. That’s why he won’t marry Minnie, who desperately wants to be married.

The movie opens with Ben Quick being told to get out of a county because he is charged with burning a man’s barn because he got mad at the man. There was no proof, though, so instead of jailing him, the town tosses him out.

He rides a couple of steamers down the river to his family’s old town and when he’s hitch-hiking he’s picked up by sour Clara and her bubbly friend.

We find out how sour she is when he asks, “So you girls just take your fun wherever you can find it?” And Clara responds with, “Don’t jump to conclusions, young man, we’re giving you a ride and that’s all we’re giving you.”

The sparring between Clara and Ben kick off right from there and continue on in the movie.

The first sign we see is a welcome sign to Fishermen’s Bend, home to – well, everything owned by someone named Varner.

Ben tells the girls that it sounds like Varner is the man to see about work in that town and the bubbly girl says that he can see Mr. Varner every night at their house. He asks if they are connected to Varner and the girl giggles that they are indeed and then drive off and leave him there at the town hall.

Back at the Varner house, Eula, Clara’s sister-in-law, is gushing to her husband Jody about all the clothes she bought, and Clara is on the terrace sipping lemonade with her friend Agnes when Ben shows up again.

The ladies were talking about how they are single and lonely before Ben showed up. Agnes mentions how he might be an option and Clara quips that they haven’t gotten so desperate as to be turning to strangers.

Ben asks Jody about working one of the tenant farms to make some money off of. Jody agrees before running back upstairs to make out with Eula. The servant comments when he sees muddy footprints on the rug after Ben leaves, “Mister, you sure do leave your calling card.”

That’s a bit of foreshadowing and an understatement.

As the movie goes on Ben will work his way into the family in more ways than one, upsetting the apple cart, so to speak.

Clara walks the carpet back to Ben’s tenant house with a little black boy (yep, another servant down here in the South) and tells him you dirty it, you clean it.

What follows is some great dialogue, which continues throughout the movie.

“A lot of fuss to be making about a rug lady, if it’s the rug that’s bothering you.”

Clara tips her chin up. “What else would it be?”

Ben spits out a watermelon seed. “Well now you correct me if I’m wrong but I have a feeling I rile ya’. I mean me being so mean and dirty and all.”

“Mr. Quick, you being personal with me, I’ll be personal with you. I spent my whole life around men who push and shove and shout and think they can make anything happen just by being aggressive and I’m not anxious of ‘nother one around the place.”

Ben smirks. “Miss Clara, you slam a door in a man’s face before he even knocks on it.”

All Clara says is for him to have the rug at the house by 6.

It shows how bigger than life Varner is when he comes back into town in an ambulance or police car (not sure which ) with the sirens blaring. The people in town who watch him drive through talk about how he was in the hospital and had something cut out of him.

Then it’s time for Angela, the point of this here Summer marathon. She comes running out of the Littlejohn Boarding House and Hotel as soon as he pulls up, wearing a tight and tiny white dress, and throws her arms around him. Her Southern accent is so jarring being familiar with her original accent and the American one she ended up developing as the years went on.

He laughs and declares she seems to be getting fatter and blonder on him.

Oh yeah…Didn’t I mention what a charmer he is?

He tells her he will be back…later. *wink* *wink*

He greets his family at home, with a clear critical eye on his son who seems desperate to please his father. That will come to play in a big way in the movie.

Orson Welles’ color is so horrible in this film, and I don’t know if that is because he is supposed to look sick or if it was bad makeup or if Orson Wells was that color back then. Then again, a couple of the other men had that weird color to their skin too. Maybe it was just bad makeup or the film itself.

Despite his color, Minnie wants to marry Daddy Varner, and she lets him know that. He avoids her as much as possible, preferring to keep control of his world.

What Angela said about the movie:

Angela’s plays a playful flirt in this film, not a dark femme fatale like A Life At Stake and she credited the director, Martin Ritt, for bringing that playfulness out in her.

“Martin Ritt had a wonderful enthusiasm and earthy sexy quality himself,” she said. “He loved the idea of the dirtiness of the carryings on, and he certainly brought every bit of kind of naughty sexuality out of me in that role.”

As for Orson Welles, Angela agreed with others who said he was used to getting his own way because he normally had control of his own projects. This project wasn’t his though.

“He was always nudging and pushing for things and wanted to change lines,” said Angela. “But had to be carefully handled so that he didn’t always get his way because his way wasn’t necessarily the best way for everybody else in the scene.”

Welles would irritate his co-stars by overlapping his own lines with their dialogue, ad-libbing, and mumbling to the point where his lines were barely comprehensible, she added.

Despite him being annoying, Angela also said of him: “There was something you couldn’t resist about Orson.”

In a 2001 interview, quoted on TCM.com, Angela said of Paul and Joan: “They seemed to have such a total understanding of each other that they were able to work in scenes where they were at each other’s throats or falling under each other’s spell.”

My thoughts on the movie:

I like the Southern feel of this movie, the acting, the complex relationships. I love watching Ben try to break through Clara’s hard exterior. No matter how hard she tries to resists him or how many times she pushes him away he keeps trying.

I love how the women are very strong in the movie but not so strong that they are outright disrespectful, even though they probably should be in some cases.

Paul’s smirk works well in just about every movie he’s in but it really works in this one. It’s hard to read what his real motives are sometimes, but deep down I feel like he does want something better than what he’s had. I feel like he does want a family and to be successful on his own merit.

This movie has a Tennessee Williams feel to it even though it is based on one main story and other stories by William Faulkner. It did not have a Tennesse Williams’ ending, at least.

On a more shallow level, I don’t know what they were thinking with Joanne’s big eyebrows and those way too short bangs. Despite how much I didn’t like the look they went for, I really enjoyed watching her character develop and blossom and reveal herself to be different than who we think she is for the first half of the movie.

Watching the jealousy unfold in Jody as he desperately tried to be what his father wanted him to be was difficult to see. The poor guy has no idea how to be a man of his own and is always trying to be what he thinks his daddy wants him to be.

Orson really wasn’t good in this movie. He really wasn’t. I don’t know what happened to him or why he performed so awful but from what I read online it was flat out jealousy over his younger counterparts who were associated with the Actor’s Studio. I also read he was only 10 years older than Paul in this film – 42 years old – but he looks terrible! He wore a prosthetic nose which I can not figure out the point of.

As for Angela, she pulled off her part well and it was fun to watch her with a thick Louisiana accent. Every time I see her in one of her early movies, I really do find myself forgetting she was Jessica Fletcher. She would have been so much better in this one if she hadn’t had to act across from Orson who was way over acting.

Trivia and Facts:

  • Orson Welles always wore a fake nose when he worked, so when he would sweat on this film, his fake nose would slip. Make-up people had to keep applying material to keep the fake nose from falling. (source TCM.com)
  • The director was Marty Ritt and Paul filmed five other films with him including Hombre, Paris Blues, The Outrage, Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man, and Hud. (source, excerpt from Paul Newman biography on Lit Hub)
  • In his biography Paul Newman wrote of Orson: “Orson couldn’t understand screen generosity, where one actor allows another player in his scene to deservedly get the best camera shots. Screen generosity was not part of Orson’s vocabulary. After a number of retakes on a scene he did with me, Orson asked Marty if he could have a private word with him. They stepped away together, and seemed to be discussing something rather serious. When they came back, we did another take, and afterwards, I asked Marty what was going on.

“Orson thought you were submarining him,” he said; it was an actor’s way of saying someone was stealing his screen time.” (source, excerpt from Paul Newman biography on Lit Hub)

  • The director, ‘Martin Ritt’ , was forever known after this movie as the man who tamed Orson Welles. During filming Ritt drove Wells into the middle of a swamp, kicked him out of the car and forced him to find his own way back in the hot Louisiana heat. (various/several sources)
  • Joan and Paul were married in January 1958 and the movie released in March. (TCM.com)
  • When the movie was complete, the director and others watched it and noticed they could barely here Orson at times. The director felt sure Orson had purposely mumbled his lines to make the sound more difficult because he was unhappy with not having control.
  • From TCM.com: “The success of The Long, Hot Summer helped Martin Ritt reestablish himself as a major director following his 5-year blacklisting from Hollywood. It also showcased the talents of young up-and-comers Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman, who won Best Actor that year at the Cannes Film Festival for his portrayal of Ben Quick. It marked both the beginning of long and distinguished careers for the talented couple as well as the beginning of one of Hollywood’s longest and happiest marriages.”
  • The Long, Hot Summer was based on the works of southern writer William Faulkner, most notably his 1940 novel The Hamlet. (source: TCM.com)
  • The movie was turned into a television series in 1965. It starred Roy Thinnes as Ben Quick, Nancy Malone as Clara, and Edmond O’Brien as Will Varner. O’Brien eventually left the show and was replaced with Dan O’Herlihy. Legendary director Robert Altman directed the pilot. (source: TCM.com)
  • Copied directly from TCM.com’s article because I thought it was interesting and I didn’t want to summarize it: Although William Faulkner was best known as a novelist and short story writer, he did work as a screenwriter in Hollywood for 20th-Century-Fox during the thirties and forties. A good deal of his work went uncredited and he was never successful in adapting any of his own work for the screen (although he did do a screen treatment for “Barn Burning” but it was never produced). He did, however, receive credit for the screenplay adaptations of Ernest Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not (1944), Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep (1946) and a few other scripts such as Submarine Patrol (1938) for director John Ford and The Road to Glory (1936) for director Howard Hawks.

    Other William Faulkner film adaptations include The Story of Temple Drake (1933, based on his novel Sanctuary), Intruder in the Dust (1949), The Tarnished Angels (1958, based on his novel Pylon), The Sound and the Fury (1959), Sanctuary (1961), The Reivers (1969), Tomorrow (1972, based on his story), and an uncredited Russian adaptation of Sanctuary entitled Cargo 200 (2007, aka Gruz 200).

Have you ever seen this one?

My last Angela movie will be Something for Everyone. I don’t know anything about it so I’m going into it blind.

If you want to read about some of the other movies I watched, you can find them here:

Bedknobs and Broomsticks

The Manchurian Candidate

National Velvet

The Pirates of Penzance

Gaslight

The Pirates of Penzance

Gaslight

Please Murder Me

Death on The Nile

The Court Jester

The Picture of Dorian Gray

A Life At Stake

Sources:

Paul Newman on the Lusty Time He Had Filming The Long Hot Summer with Joanne Woodward

https://lithub.com/paul-newman-on-the-lusty-time-he-had-filming-the-long-hot-summer-with-joanne-woodward/

Behind the Camera, The Long Hot Summer: https://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/308663/the-long-hot-summer#articles-reviews

The Long Hot Summer and The Newmans: https://vanguardofhollywood.com/the-long-hot-summer/

Lisa R. Howeler is a blogger, homeschool mom, and writes cozy mysteries.

You can find her Gladwynn Grant Mystery series HERE.

You can also find her on Instagram and YouTube.

Summer of Angela Summer of Angela: Please Murder Me (with tiny spoilers but not big ones)

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 16 Comments

This summer I am watching Angela Lansbury movies for the Summer of Angela.

I switched some things up a couple of weeks ago and slid The Pirates of the Penzance and this week’s movie, Please Murder Me, in place of a couple of TV movies Angela was in. I do have an interest now in watching one of the ones I replaced, so I may do that on my own.

This week’s movie starred Angela with Raymond Burr. It was short, sweet, and to the point, and very good. My husband watched it with me and said this movie would be considered a “B-movie” back in the day, but it was a very good B-movie to me.

I have been remiss in sharing where I have found these movies to watch so I do want to share that this one is free on Tubi and YouTube. The reproduction quality isn’t the best because it is a “b movie” and is now in the public domain. This means people can put this movie up wherever they want and not get hit with a copyright claim. I’ve found a lot of cool movies that way through YouTube and Tubi.

The movie seems to show, no matter where you find it, lines down the middle and sides from the old film. I am not sure if there are cleaner copies out there or not.

The description of this movie is that Raymond Burr portrays a lawyer who finds out his client, who he just got off for murder, is actually guilty. There is a lot more to it than that, but that’s the bottom line.

According to TCM.com, the movie’s screenplay was based on a teleplay by E. A. Dupont and David Chantler on Big Town (CBS, 1954).

It was directed by Peter Godfrey.

The movie starts with Raymond walking down a street, going into an office, and then speaking into a tape recorder (reel-to-reel) telling whoever hears the recording that in 55 minutes he will be dead.

We then have a flashback that will encompass the bulk of the movie.

That flashback consists of us learning that Burr’s character, Craig Carlson, is in love with his best friend’s wife Myra Leeds (Angela). We find this out because Craig tells Joe Leeds (Dick Foran) and says that he and Myra are going to be married and Craig would like Joe to divorce her.

Joe is oddly calm about this and as he leaves Craig’s law office, says he needs some time to think.

Before long we are in the Leeds’ apartment and Joe Leeds has met his maker. He’s under a sheet and Myra is being questioned by a plain-clothes cop who clearly thinks her self-defense story is absolutely garbage.

Myra says that Joe lunged at her, furious that she told him she wanted a divorce, and that she, terrified that he was going to kill her, shot him.

Uh-huh. Are we, the viewers, buying this?

Well, yes, I was because I hadn’t read the synopsis of this film before I watched it so I thought she might actually be telling the truth but…..not really sure.

Craig has, of course, volunteered to be Myra’s defense attorney.

It isn’t too much of a spoiler to say (since all the descriptions online already say this) that after the trial Craig discovers that Myra wasn’t being very truthful.

The problem is that in the United States a defendant can’t be tried twice because of the concept of “double jeopardy.”

Now Craig has to figure out how to make Myra pay for what she did to her husband and his best friend. Craig already felt guilty about having an affair and now the guilt is insurmountable and has a hefty helping of betrayal piled on.

I have only seen Raymond Burr in the old Perry Mason episodes and Rear Window but have enjoyed his acting in both and I enjoyed his acting in this movie as well.

He mainly played villains in the beginning of his career.

Here he portrayed a bit of a darker Perry Mason or as the author at Heart of Noir stated “a three-dimensional, complex lead role” who is “both a home wrecker and a cuckold, which demands of him quite a balancing act of emotions.”

Overall, I liked this movie and I enjoyed both Raymond and Angela’s performance.

I read a piece of trivia that I will share below that involves Angela taking the job because she needed the money and she may have only done it for the money, but she seemed to put her all in it.

I really enjoyed her performance, even if it was toned down from what she would show in films such as The Manchurian Candidate. One might say this role was a good preparation Eleanor Shaw.

I loved the use of light and shadow in the film. I am a huge fan of black and white photography and films that use shadow and light to highlight what the photographer or director wants the viewer to focus on.

In this one, there was a lot of shadow around the subjects with light hitting their eyes or whole face during tense scenes when a secret was about to be revealed or a confrontation was had.

My husband and I agree on some points about the movie.

There could have been more explanation of the plot. There was some missing information throughout which led to rushed scenes.

“Instead of being only an hour and 14 minutes it could have been an hour and 45 minutes,” my husband said.

This would have given us time for a bit more background and exposition.  We both agree that these minor issues didn’t take away from the overall story, however.

I like what Heart of Noir said about the movie: “From the pre-credits opening scene of an unidentified man walking the city sidewalk past scummy-looking bars and peep shows, the film oozes with economy, bland interiors and soupy darkness combining with overhead shots and Dutch angles to disorient the viewer and create an occasional dream-like feeling.”

I also enjoyed this assessment by PopOptiq: “The picture earns its fatalistic conclusion with a gut-punch plot resolution to Craig’s tireless mission to expose Myra. If anything, the film is yet another reminder of the range both Raymond Burr and Angela Lansbury had as actors. Both became legends through very different projects on television, making this reunion, before their popularity erupted, all the more interesting a time capsule.”

Trivia or facts:

  • According to Angela Lansbury’s authorized biography, this movie was filmed in an abandoned supermarket near Yucca and Franklin Streets in Los Angeles. Lansbury and her husband Peter Shaw were at a low financial point in their marriage and they needed the money. After the film was finished, she applied for unemployment insurance. (source IMdB) (An insert by me here: her husband was Peter Shaw and she played Eleanor Shaw in a movie? Like…weird!)
  • The film was made the same year that Raymond Burr auditioned for the role of Perry Mason.
  • Lamont Johnson’s who plays . . . well, I’m not going to tell you so I don’t spoil anymore of the story …. Is in this movie and this was his last movie as an actor before he became a full-time director. He mainly directed stage and television productions.
  • The opening credits featured the cast, writers, director and producers. The crew appeared in the closing credits.  (source TCM.com)
  • Please Murder Me was the first film made by Gross-Krasne, Inc., which was run by executive producers Jack J. Gross and Philip N. Krasne. (source TCM.com)

A quote from the movie that I liked, “My whole life has meant just meant three things,  my love for Joe, my work, and my love for you. You destroyed them all. How much more is left of me?”

Have you ever seen this one? If so, what did you think?

Cat from Cat’s Wire also watched the movie this past week and wrote about it on her blog here.
For next week, I am switching The Mirror Cracked, based on an Agatha Christie book, for Death on the Nile, based on another Agatha Christie book. I’ve been reading that Death on the Nile is better than The Mirror Cracked..

Here is the full list of movies left to watch for this feature:

July 25: Death on the Nile

August 1 – The Court Jester

August 8 – The Picture of Dorian Gray

August 15 – A Life At Stake

August 22 – All Fall Down

August 29 – Something for Everyone

If you want to read about some of the other movies I watched you can find them here:

Bedknobs and Broomsticks

The Manchurian Candidate

National Velvet

The Pirates of Penzance

Gaslight

The Pirates of Penzance

Sources and additional resources:

Please Murder Me: https://heartofnoir.com/film/please-murder-me-1956/

Please Murder Me IBdB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049621/trivia/?ref_=tt_dyk_trv

TCM.com: https://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/86833/please-murder-me/#overview

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Please_Murder_Me!

‘Please Murder Me’ sees underrated greats Lansbury and Burr go head-to-head: https://www.popoptiq.com/please-murder-me/

Hardy Boys Episode Recap: Wipe Out (Did the Hardy Boys just rob the hotel?!)

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 8 Comments

Here I am with another recap of an episode from The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries show from 1977.

As I’ve mentioned before, in the first season of this series, the episodes switched back and forth from Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew episodes and in the next season, they started to join together. Eventually, they began to phase out the Nancy episodes and focus more on The Hardy Boys. A new actress also started as Nancy when Pamela Sue Martin became disenchanted with the parts that were being written for her character.

This week I watched a Hardy Boys centered episode called Wipe Out.

This episode was one of the better ones, which I seem to be writing a lot more as I continue through the show. It seems the show got a lot better as it went on. Episodes still have some cheesy moments, sure, but the mysteries are better than in the beginning.

I spent the entire first half of this episode thinking our boys might have gone rogue and had become criminals. Luckily, things started to make sense at the halfway point.

We open this episode with a surfing competition underway and soon learn that Frank is in the competition and the boys are in Hawaii.

They aren’t only in Hawaii, they have found two girls who are hanging all over them and going to luaus with them. Of course Joe (Shaun Cassidy) is asked to sing at one of them and of course Frank wanders off to investigate something while Joe is singing. Frank’s wandering off continues a series-long inside joke.

After Frank’s competing, which brings him accolades and a chance to compete for a bigger prize, the boys head back to their hotel room and find out they’ve been robbed. This sends them to the police station where a cop sort of brushes them off because he says their stuff is long gone by now.

This will mean the boys will to call their dad, Fenton Hardy, and see if he can wire them some money for the rest of their trip. Joe says Frank has to call him because he’s the one that wanted to come and be in the surfing competition.

Frank has a better idea and the next thing we now the guys are breaking into a room after swiping the key of a couple at the hotel. I watched in horror as our heroes started loading up bags with the jewelry and money of the people and even more horror as they went to dinner and ordered big ticket items, telling the waitress they were fine on money.

She knew they’d been robbed, though, so she was pretty horrified like me, suspicious of how they got the money to pay for their meal.

This episode did a very good job of keeping us guessing what was going to happen next and tossing in characters we thought were going to bust the boys somehow.

We had hotel cops and town cops coming after them and suspecting them of theft. Then we eventually discover there is a burglary ring, and we wonder how the boys got themselves wrapped up in it. Or did they? What is going on?

Even the girls they are seeing are starting to ask questions, like why they have a pair of fancy binoculars that look like some stolen by a couple at the hotel.

Usually I give spoilers in these posts but today I won’t because it might be fun if you want to watch it later on your own and find out what was really going on.

If you like listening to Shaun Cassidy sing you’ll get your chance a few times in this episode, especially at the beginning and end when he is singing Beach Boys songs.

The joke about Frank never hearing Joe sing continues on as Joe keeps trying to play a cassette for Frank so he can finally hear the performance. That was  a fun gag but less fun was having to see Shaun’s short-shorts and hair leg every single time they focused on the cassette player in his hand.

The surfing scenes were a lot of fun to watch and I have a feeling that young ladies back then just loved to see Parker Stevenson running in and out of the waves. I will say that they kept the show very chaste because he always wore a shirt. There was one scene where Shaun was shirtless while he was rescuing Parker …er.. Frank and I’m guessing the young ladies would have liked that.

You can find the posts I’ve written about other Hard Boys Nancy Drew Mysteries shows by searching on the search bar to the right.

Up next I’ll be watching a Nancy Drew centered mystery, The Mystery of the Ghostwriter’s Cruise.

Summer of Angela: The Pirates of Penzance (1983)

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 16 Comments

This summer I am watching Angela Lansbury movies for the Summer of Angela. Up this week we have The Pirates of Penzance, which is a bit of a switch up from my original list. You can read more about that below, but first just a quick note —  Last week, Cat from Cat’s Wire watched Gaslight and talked about it on her blog. You can read her thoughts here. She compared the British and American movie versions and a German televised version of the original play, and I think the post is so much fun!

And now on to this week’s movie, which I switched around from my original plan. I was going to watch the TV movie, The Shell Seekers, but instead, I thought that I would watch one of Angela’s Broadway/musical performances for fun — The Pirates of Penzance with her and Kevin Kline. The movie is a reproduction of the Joseph Papp’s Broadway production.

I will tell you upfront that halfway through the movie, I had to check that I wasn’t having a fever dream. I also realized I’m very old and my ears are in even worse condition than I thought because I had no idea what was being said in any of the songs. I even tried close captioning but because I watched it for free on YouTube, it didn’t work so well.

I also couldn’t figure out what was happening most of the time.  Still, I pushed forward and ended up enjoying it in places and being utterly baffled in other places.

A description from Google:

“Frederic (Rex Smith), who has spent his formative years as a junior pirate, plans to mark his 21st birthday by breaking free from the Pirate King (Kevin Kline) and beginning his courtship of Mabel (Linda Ronstadt). But because he was born on Feb. 29, a date that only arrives every fourth year, Frederic isn’t technically 21 — and the Pirate King is still his master. Unless something gives, Frederic will soon be on a collision course with the Pirate King’s new nemesis: Mabel’s father.”

 The movie starts with the people in town coming out of church, seeing the pirate ship off shore, and locking up all their doors.

Then we are on the pirate ship with Frederic and the Pirate King and the rest of the crew celebrating Frederic’s birthday. It is after all the singing that Frederic announces that now that he is 21 he can leave the ship and his service with the Pirate King.

This is when Ruth (Angela), Frederic’s nursemaid, tells him that all those years ago when his father wanted him to apprentice with a pilot and she heard “pirate” instead.

Frederic has a strong sense of duty, which is why he stayed with the pirates and committed crimes with them all those years. But now that he is no longer bound to them, he vows that when he leaves the ship, he will fight against the pirate and the criminal acts he and his crew try to commit.

“Individually, I love you all, with affection unspeakable. But collectively, I look upon you with a disgust that amounts to absolute detestation.”

Frederic sees pirates as scum but if they are going to be actual pirates, he does wish they would attack people stronger than them instead of pretending they just don’t want to hurt anyone. Instead, they just don’t want to get beaten. There is also a whole song about how they won’t attack anyone who says they are an “orphan” because they are also orphans.

This word said in a British accent becomes important later in the movie when there is a whole hilarious debate about if they are saying “orphan” or “often.”

Anyhow, Ruth wants to leave with Frederic and marry him, but Frederic isn’t so sure about it. He’s never really met other women and wants to know if Ruth is attractive. The pirate and crew assure him that she is, simply because they would like to get rid of her too.

Frederic agrees to take Ruth with him but discovers, when he sees a group of women frolicking together near a small pond, that she is not actually attractive and is instead just old.

He sends Ruth away and approaches the women, who turn out to be sisters, and asks which one of them would like to marry him.

Yeah….this musical is weird.

What follows is a song where he hits an incredible note and does a little impression of Elvis.

A lot of silliness follows all this including the singing of the famous song “I Am The Very Model of a Modern Major General.” That was a lot of fun. I always wondered what the song came from. The speed which the nonsense for this song is spit out is insane.

Fun is the key word for this movie. The songs are fun – though I still don’t know what they were saying in half of them. Wait. I’ve mentioned it like ten times now that I didn’t know what they were saying half the time, didn’t I? Okay, I’ll stop doing that.

Also, I did finally look up the lyrics so I could follow along. They didn’t make much more sense that way, but, hey, at least I knew what was being said.

I should note that I did read that a lot of this musical is satire and making fun of some elements of British society during the time the original comedic opera was written in 1879, which is why it seems ridiculous at times.

One thing I can say after seeing this is that Angela was so talented — it seems like there wasn’t anything she couldn’t do — acting, singing, dancing, producing, writing… wow. I’m still trying to figure out if she actually hit the high note in the one song but if she did…wow again!

I am a huge fan of some musicals — Fiddler on the Roof, Singing in the Rain, South Pacific, etc., but this one? I didn’t know what to make of it at first, and from what I am reading, that is a bit of the point of Gilbert and Sullivan musicals.

Their musicals are, I guess, nonsensical at times, and that’s what makes them fun. After reading more about the musical/movie, I understood it more, watched parts again, and liked it more than I did with my first run through.

At first, I decided I’d never watch the movie or musical again, but it grew on me on the second time around — especially Kevin Kline and his unbuttoned shirt. I mean.. his musical and acting talent.

Rex Smith (who I’d never heard of before) was amazing. The pipes on him. WOW.

The resolution on this video is not great but the singing….sheesh!



I had to look him up to see if he had been in anything else and apparently, besides his stage work, he’s most well-known for starring in a show called Street Hawke in the 1980s as well as for being a popular singer in the late 70s with his song You Take My Breath Away.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Linda Ronsdadt. I really don’t think I had a clue she sang this amazingly. I don’t know a lot about her at all so her voice totally shocked me! I thought she was just a pop singer . . . I feel embarassed I didn’t realize her range.

The Pirates of Penzance was released on Pay TV at the same time it was released in the theater, which made it a flop at the box office because theater owners boycotted it as a form of protest. Boy, if the theater owners from back then could only see what’s going on these days with movie releases!

Because of the boycott, the film ended up making less than a $1 million total during it’s entire time in the theaters.

It also received mix reviews from critics, but over the years it has become a type  of cult classic among musical theater fans.

Those who have seen it over the years, especially when they were young, hold a special place in their heart for it.

Cat Smith of Film Obsessive had this to say about Angela replacing Estelle Parsons, who was in the original Broadway production:

“The movie version of the Papp production came out in 1983. It’s pretty much the same experience as the stage. The biggest differences are some superfluous cuts to the score and the upgrading of the character Ruth. No offense to Estelle Parsons (we love her), but let’s face it—Angela Lansbury would be an upgrade of pretty much anyone.”

Of when Ruth and the Pirate King return to find Frederic she writes: “Apparently, once officially rejected by Frederic, Ruth went back to the pirates who not only welcomed her, they got her a fabulous makeover to boot. Not going to lie, my boyfriend and I have this head canon in which the Pirate King and Ruth wind up together since he knows better than to be prejudiced against a hot older woman. They do their best to frump her up for Act 1 but let’s face it—Queen Angela. Need I say more?”

(Aside: I had considered watching Angela in Sweeney Todd for this movie-watching event, but — wince — that really isn’t my type of movie/Broadway musical. Maybe I’ll watch it at some point, though.)

In past posts I have shared with Angela thought of the movie she was in, but….I couldn’t find any interviews with her about this one so I don’t have that. I do, however, have some trivia/facts.

Trivia or facts:

  • Kevin Kline won the 1981 Tony Award (New York City) for Best Actor in a Musical for “The Pirates of Penzance” Broadway 1981 to 1982 production and re-created his role in this cinema movie. It was Kline’s second Tony Award after having won one for “On the Twentieth Century”. Kline also starred in the precursor New York Central Park stage production and that park production’s subsequent made-for-television movie, The Pirates of Penzance (1980).
  • Linda Ronstadt loved the musical so much when she read about it that she played the part of Mable first in Central Park and then on Broadway for $400 a week. She then played it in the movie. It was her only movie role. She was nominated for a Tony when she played it on Broadway.
  • In Act II, there is an extra song (“My Eyes Are Fully Open”) that is not originally from “The Pirates of Penzance.” It’s a modified version of a song from Sir W.S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan‘s “Ruddigore”. The inclusion of this song required Kevin Kline, Dame Angela Lansbury, and Rex Smith to sing one of most dizzyingly rapid songs in the entire Gilbert and Sullivan catalogue. (source IMdB)
  • The source Broadway stage production was preceded by a 1980 Joseph Papp production of “Pirates of Penzance”, which was part of a “Shakespeare in the Park” series of free plays in New York City’s Central Park, which had the same cast of principals as the movie and the Broadway stage production (except for Ruth). (source IMdB)
  • Writer and Director Wilford Leach, with this movie, knew what kind of movie he wanted to make. Leach wanted to create an “illusion of reality” which actually was “reality askew”. Leach, according to the January-February 1983 edition of Coming Attractions Magazine, “tried to delineate a colorful and comic world that is always true to its own logic.” (source IMdB)

Have you seen this version of the musical or the musical itself anywhere?

Cat from Cat’s Wire shared her thoughts about the movie here.

Up next in my movie watching journey, I have switched things up again and have replaced the Murder She Wrote two-part movie with Please, Murder Me from 1951, starring Angela with Raymond Burr.

The rest of the list remains the same:

July 25 – The Mirror Cracked

August 1 – The Court Jester

August 8 The Picture of Dorian Gray

August 15 – A Life At Stake

August 22 – All Fall Down

August 29 – Something for Everyone

Additional resources:

The Pirates of Penzance: For Some Ridiculous Reason…

https://filmobsessive.com/film/film-analysis/film-genres/comedy-films/the-pirates-of-penzance-for-some-ridiculous-reason/

Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirates_of_Penzance_(film)

IBdB trivia: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086112/trivia/