WHO WAS THAT LADY? Columbia, 1960. Tony Curtis, Janet Leigh, Dean Martin, James Whitmore, John McIntire, Barbara Nichols, Joi Lansing, Simon Oakland, Larry Storch. Screenplay: Norman Krasna, based on his play. Director: George Sidney.

   Some days nothing goes right.

   It’s one of those days for Tony Curtis, who teaches chemistry at Columbia in New York. A beautiful student waltzes in to thank him for a make-up test, and gets a little over enthusiastic just as his wife, Janet Leigh comes in. Janet stomps out, and Tony is in hot water. All over a make-up test.

   All this is shown in the opening titles without a word of dialogue. It doesn’t really need dialogue. We get the point immediately, and the title song, catchily sung by Dean Martin fills us in on anything else we don’t know.

   This is a sex farce, American screwball style.

   So what would you do? Well, you probably wouldn’t call your overly imaginative bachelor buddy Dean Martin who writes for television and has a wonderfully twisted imagination.

   How does Curtis explain his innocent kiss? Why of course, tell your wife you are a an FBI agent and the student was a foreign exchange student and a spy. You even go to CBS where Dean works and have FBI badges made and guns from the prop department.

   Just what any sensible husband would do.

   Of course, whenever the prop department at CBS makes a phony FBI badge, they notify the Bureau so it lands on local agent-in-charge John McIntire’s desk, and he passes it on to weary James Whitmore.

   Meanwhile Dean and Tony have sprung the story on Janet, who is one of her less bright moments buys the story. (In fairness almost no one in this film is an intellectual giant.) Dean, though, has plans. He has a date with a sister act of exotic dancers — Barbara Nichols and Joi Lansing — and he needs a wingman. Tony is elected. And Janet even pushes him to go — it’s his duty.

   Whitmore shows up at Tony and Janet’s apartment just as a panicked Janet discovers Tony had gone on his mission without his gun. Whitmore sees his daughter in her and decides to throw a scare in the boys without arresting them or revealing the truth to her.

   That’s going to cost him.

   Before the evening is over, Whitmore has taken a bullet and Leigh has blabbed to the press how her husband was hunting spies.

   It’s been one of those days. And it’s about to get worse.

   Because the CIA, more than a little miffed that the FBI is running a spy op without them, shows up. Seems the boys have drawn out an actual KGB cell. Now the FBI has to keep quiet and use the boys to draw out the real spies.

   They should have known better.

   Which is how the boys end up kidnapped by Russian spies Simon Oakland and Larry Storch, drugged, and locked in the sub basement of the Empire State Building — which they mistake for a Russian sub and proceed to sink while singing patriotic songs.

   Which explains why it is snowing on some floors of the building and sweltering on others, not to mention the geyser spouting from the roof. And they thought the cleanup after King Kong was rough.

   In the wrong hands, this kind of froth can go horribly wrong, but when everyone involved is a seasoned pro, and sheer charm and skill compete with fast quips and sheer nonsense, the result is a souffle of a movie, smart, silly, and great fun.

   Don’t tune this one in looking for great art, but if belly laughs are the mood you are in, this is the perfect film. When you watch today’s latest comedy fall flat on its face at the mall and see ham-handed performances and obvious direction, you can appreciate how hard this is to do, and wonder that in this period it was done so well so often.

   At the time this must have seemed just another playful comedy from a team of pros. Today it seems like art.

   Dying is easy, comedy is hard. But if you do it right, it looks easy. And isn’t that the trick in farce, not to let the audience see how hard the actors are working to make it all seamless and easy?

   On that level, this one is the highest of art.

TCM Alert:    Monday, July 6.   6:00 PM.    Who Was That Lady? (1960)
   A cheating husband convinces his wife his flirtations are actually spy missions. Cast: Tony Curtis, Janet Leigh, Dean Martin. Dir: George Sidney. BW-114 mins, TV-G, Letterbox Format.

RINGS ON HER FINGERS. 20th Century-Fox, 1942. Gene Tierney, Henry Fonda, Laird Cregar, Spring Byington, John Shepperd (Shepperd Strudwick), Frank Orth, Henry Stephenson. Director: Rouben Mamoulian.

   Gene Tierney was as beautiful an actress as Hollywood ever produced, wasn’t she?

   In the scene in this mostly light-hearted movie in which she’s trying to attract Henry Fonda’s attention, dressed in a single piece bathing suit and stretched out on a blanket along the shore, he’s so distracted he can hardly talk, and who can blame him?

   Over the span of her career, Gene Tierney didn’t do too many romantic comedies – most of her films seems to be straight dramas (Dragonwyck, The Razor’s Edge) or crime films with a strong noirish flavor (Laura, of course, and Night and the City) – but she acquits herself well in Rings on Her Fingers, making me wish she’d done more movies in the same vein.

   Looking through her list of films, I see only That Wonderful Urge (1948), a remake of Love Is News (1937), with Tyrone Power in both, as a movie that’s in any sense comparable to Rings on Her Fingers.

   In a way, you might call this film a “re-imagining” of The Lady Eve (1941), in which Henry Fonda played against Barbara Stanwyck. The gimmick here is that Henry Fonda’s character is poor, not rich, and when Gene Tierney’s character is part of a flim-flam which fleeces him of $15,000 hard-earned dollars, it’s easy to see that the two of them will get together, but how will she keep her part of the swindle a secret from him?

   Not that she’s a bad girl, only a shop girl easily tempted by glamor and easy riches, and taken in by the real pair of crooks, Laird Cregar and (believe it or not) Spring Byington. And what a mis-matched pair they are: Cregar was a giant of a man in size (but nimble enough on his feet), and Byington was tiny and nearly swallowed up on the screen in comparison.

   Is this a screwball comedy? I’ve asked myself that, and when I did, I didn’t get an immediate response, mostly because, like “noir film,” I don’t know that I have an exact definition of screwball comedy in mind.

   But I guess I know one when I see one, and at the moment I’m inclined to say No as far as Rings on Her Fingers is concerned. The romantic problems are a little too real, with too much of an edge to them (how does she keep him finding out that she was part of the con game that took him in?), and there doesn’t seem to be the kind of goofy wackiness that I associate with other screwball comedies of the 1940s.

   As for Henry Fonda, he’s perfect for the part, naive but noble, and what a way to make a living: kissing Gene Tierney.

CAPTAIN APPLEJACK. Warner Brothers, 1931. Mary Brian, John Halliday, Kay Strozzi, Alec B. Francis, Louise Closser Hale. Based on the play of the same title by Walter C. Hackett. Director: Hobart Henley.

   As a play, Captain Applejack opened on Broadway at the Cort Theatre on December 30, 1921, and ran for 195 performances.

   The story was soon thereafter the basis for a silent film, although why they changed the name to Strangers of the Night (Louis B. Meyer, 1923) I do not know. The main players in the cast were Matt Moore as Ambrose Applejohn, Enid Bennett as his ward Poppy, and Barbara La Marr as the vampish Anna Valeska, who in one evening gives Ambrose the thrill of several lifetimes.

   None of the actors’ names in the paragraph above mean anything to me, I apologize for saying, and in fact, the first three names I’ve listed for this 1931 sound remake meant just about as little when I started watching this movie last night. I’ll get back to them shortly.

   It’s one of those old British mansion movies, built upon the edge of the cliff – the mansion, that is – and the one night that the owner Ambrose Applejohn (John Halliday) will remember forever is a dark and stormy one.

   It begins with Ambrose telling his Aunt Agatha (Louise Closser Hale) and his ward Poppy (Mary Brian) that he’s selling the house and striking out on a tour of the world on a quest for adventure and excitement.

   Little does he know … there’s a knock on the door. Enter the beautifully exotic Madame Anna Valeska (Kay Strozzi), seeking not only shelter from the storm, but from the villain of the piece, a chap by the name of Ivan Borolsky. Adventure has fallen into Ambrose’s lap, and he doesn’t even have to leave home.

   Of course he is neither as brave and stalwart as he says he is, or would like to be, and if I haven’t told you that this is a comedy, I am right now, and even alone in the room I was in, I laughed out loud several times.

   Any movie with a butler named Lush (Alec B. Francis) has to be a comedy, wouldn’t you agree? Nor is Madame Valeska the only one to knock on the door. Soon there is a whole household full of guests, some welcome, some not. Did I mention that Polly is jealous of Madame Valeska? I have now.

   Without telling you more than I should, there is a reason for all of the guests and intruders, and the reason has to do with the fact that Ambrose Applejohn is a direct descendant of a cruel pirate named Captain Applejack. There is also a map of sorts.

   This is a very entertaining film, albeit noticeably stagey, with a bit of advice that anyone younger than 40 or 50 will probably be bored to abstract fidgetry. That this is a pre-Code film should also be mentioned, with blouses cut lower than they might have been a few years later, and a pair of male hands that do not always stay out of bounds where they belong.

   The photo of John Halliday may have come from the film. If not, it’s very close. His career extended from 1911 to 1941, with perhaps his best-remembered role being that of Katharine Hepburn’s father in The Philadelphia Story (1940).

   Mary Brian’s wholesome good looks once graced the cover of Picture Play, as you’ve already seen somewhere up above. She started her film-making days playing Wendy Darling in a 1924 silent version of Peter Pan; her final performances were as Corliss Archer’s mother in the 1954 TV sitcom series.

   As for Kay Strozzi, in spite of her beautifully exotic appearance (early 1930s style), she made only one other movie, a Bette Davis film called Ex-Wife (1933). Otherwise she seems to have been a Broadway performer, which I can understand, and a soap opera star on the radio, which I don’t.

LOUISIANA HAYRIDE. Columbia, 1944. Judy Canova, Judy Canova, Ross Hunter, Richard Lane, George McKay, Minerva Urecal, Lloyd Bridges, Matt Willis, Hobart Cavanaugh. Director: Charles Barton.

    Let me start out by saying that is indeed a crime movie, no matter what you may have deduced to the contrary, based on the title of the film and who the leading star is.

    Judy Canova plays a country bumpkin in this movie – no surprise there, right? – who’s swindled out of her farm’s oil option money by two rambling grifters – two rambles ahead of the law – who promise her a career in Hollywood. The leading role, in fact, in a movie called — you guessed it — Louisiana Hayride.

    Little do these guys know what they’re in for. You’re probably one step ahead of me, and for that matter, I’ll let you stay there.

   Canova made an entire career of looking homely, with pigtails and Hee Haw costumes long before Hee Haw came along and gave hillbilly music a bad name. But her brand of youthful innocence, combined with a good-natured honesty and a strong sense of humor, usually at the expense of city slickers like the pair of crooks in this movie, made her a star in the 1940s, at least in small town America.

   I wonder if her movies ever played in Boston or New York City. They did in Cadillac, that small town in Michigan’s upper lower peninsula where I grew up, although this particular one is almost as old as I am.

   In spite of her incessant mugging for the cameras, Canova really did have a good singing voice, which is on display to great advantage several times in Louisiana Hayride. A pair of songs I recognized immediately were “Shortnin’ Bread” and “Put Your Arms Around Me, Honey,” which probably tells you more about me than you want to know.

   Besides being a better than average belter of southern fried song hits, Judy Canova was also not quite as homely as the characters she played on the screen. I found this photo of her taken when she was older, and to me, she’s quite a handsome looking lady.

   There are jokes being cracked and funny business going on continuously in this movie, in between the songs, that is, and I have to tell you I enjoyed them all, still being a small town kind of guy at heart.

PostScript. I nearly forgot to mention that Judy Canova was also a hit on radio, with her self-named series running on NBC from 1945 to 1953, which is essentially when her movie career came to a close as well.

   You can listen to four episodes online here, and with a little searching, I’m sure you can find more.

   Among the group of regulars in the cast were Hans Conreid, Mel Blanc and Sheldon Leonard. (One of these fellows came up for discussion not too long ago, as regular readers of this blog will quickly recall.)

SIREN OF BAGDAD. Columbia Pictures, 1953. Paul Henreid, Patricia Medina, Hans Conried, Charlie Lung. Director: Robert Quine.

    Turner Classic Movies had a salute to Hans Conreid the other day, which was kind of a surprise, as I don’t think anyone would consider him one of the great movie stars of the day, to put it frankly.

    He began his career in radio — think Professor Kropotkin on My Friend Irma (1949), for example, a role he carried over to the film version, as did Marie Wilson in the title role, but most people remember the movie as the debut of a comedy team named Martin and Lewis — and he also did a lot of work on TV on up through the early 1980s.

    But movies? Not really, that wasn’t his metier, but I taped the ones that TCM showed, and my reviews of them will show up here eventually. (Assuming that you don’t mind, I’ll exclude The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T from 1953, which I’ve seen before and I decided I’d pass on watching again.) Conreid was perfect for radio and TV sitcoms, though — he was also Uncle Tonoose on Danny Thomas’s Make Room for Daddy — loud, sneeringly brash and willing to do anything for a gag.

    A role not unlike the one he plays in Siren of Bagdad, too. There’s a small amount of adventurous derring-do in the movie, but very little. The movie’s played for laughs all the way, and on the level of a mediocre radio show, much less TV, although the sets could have come from the same warehouse.

    Samples:

    Trying to distract a palace guard: “I beg your pardon. I realize they haven’t been invented yet, but have you got a match?”

    Making his way with his boss, the magician Kazah the Great (Paul Henreid), to Bagdad: “The sands of the desert have barbecued my bunions.”

    At a time when things are looking dark for the pair: “Where can I catch the next camel to Basra?”

    Story line: When the dancing girls in his entourage are kidnapped by desert bandits and taken to Bagdad to be sold as slaves, Kazah the Great and Ben Ali (Conried) follow and fall in with some revolutionaries. The Great Kazah also falls in love with the leader’s daughter (Patricia Medina), and you can take it from there.

    There is also a large magic trunk into which people are put, only to disappear, among other uses, including changing Ben Ali into a beautiful dancing girl (with Ben Ali’s voice, both unfortunately and amusingly), the better to infiltrate the Sultan’s harem. (Along this line of thinking, there is much to see in this movie.)

    One would think that’s a long way down for Paul Henreid, from Now, Voyager and Casablanca to Siren of Bagdad, but to his credit, and this is the honest truth, he seems to be having a great time.

    As for the director, Robert Quine, you may not be able to tell from this film, but he was on his way up — to films like My Sister Eileen (1955), The Solid Gold Cadillac (1955) and The World of Suzie Wong (1960), among a number of others.

LIBELED LADY. MGM, 1936. Jean Harlow, William Powell, Myrna Loy, Spencer Tracy, Walter Connolly. Screenplay: Maurine Watkins, Howard Emmett Rogers and George Oppenheimer. Director: Jack Conway.

   A movie with four lead stars in it was quite the thing in 1936, and it still is today, especially if the four stars are the first four listed just above. Jean Harlow, alas, was to make only two more movies after this one (or is it one and a half?). She died way too young – only 26 years old.

   She was engaged to William Powell at the time of her death, but in the movies that seemingly semi-sozzled but always debonair leading man will be forever linked with the supremely beautiful Myrna Loy. One arched glance my way, if it were ever to have happened, would have made me putty in her hands, as it did audiences from her time to now.

   Spencer Tracy, as Haggerty, the beleaguered editor of the newspaper that jet set debutante Connie Allenbury (Loy) is suing for libel, is teamed up with Jean Harlow in this one.

   Her role is that of Gladys, the girl he always keeps waiting at the altar, but in a magnificent but totally grandiose plan to even the odds, he marries her off instead to Bill Chandler (Powell) whose job is to woo Connie as a “married man” with a private eye with a handy camera in attendance.

   So that’s the story. The delight is in the telling, and I’ve given full credit to the screenwriters who came up with some of the wittiest dialogue I can recall listening to in recent weeks. Samples, courtesy of IMDB:

   As always, I suppose you have to be there, and I recommend most heartedly that you do. The only displeasure that I might pass along to you is the ending, which wraps itself up far more quickly than I would have liked, with one major scene taking place off-screen, plus a couple of other events that are brought up in fast-paced fashion with nary a hint to the audience ahead of time that small gimmicks like this are going to be sprung upon them.

   Otherwise, as I’ve previously suggested, a pure joy and delight.

THE MIGHTY BARNUM. 20th Century, 1934. Wallace Beery, Adolphe Menjou, Virginia Bruce, Rochelle Hudson, Janet Beecher, George Brasno, Olive Brasno. Screenwriter, based on his play: Gene Fowler; director: Walter Lang.

   I ordered some Edgar Wallace movies on DVD from an online dealer, and he sent me a packet of Wallace Beery instead. Not good, as I have never been a Wallace Beery fan, but the dealer said to keep them and said he’d send me the Wallace movies anyway.

   To make a long story short, I never did get the Edgar Wallace movies. He sent another set of DVDs entirely, but these were ones I didn’t have and didn’t mind having, so I let things be. I won’t order from this fellow again, though.

   I’ve looked up Wallace Beery on the Internet to learn, as I knew in general but not in specific, that he was a very bankable star in the silent film era — and into the 1930s as well, having only a small difficulty in the transition. He spoke in a slow, drawling voice and had a mild propensity for mugging while on camera. (Keep in mind I’m using only The Mighty Barnum to gauge from, but many of the sources I found online say much the same thing.)

   In any case, he’s likeable enough, and unless you require accuracy in your biographical movie watching, The Mighty Barnum is entirely acceptable as light entertainment. If there ever was a man whose life could be played for laughs, without being a comedian himself, it would have been P. T. Barnum.

   Mentioned (and seen) in the film, among others, are Madame Zorro, the Bearded Lady; Jumbo the Elephant; Col. Tom Thumb and his wife Livinia (played by George Brasno, a midget himself, and his sister Olive); and Jenny Lind (the lovely Virginia Bruce), the source of Barnum’s greatest triumph, and (according to the movie, at least) his greatest disaster. (I wonder if Virginia Bruce did her own singing. I’ve yet to find a source that says whether or not, definitively.)

   Everything is all scrambled around chronologically, from all accounts, and not even the name of Barnum’s partner in the Barnum & Bailey Circus, which came along later than the events in the movie, is given correctly.

GIFT OF GAB. Universal, 1934; Karl Freund, director; Edmund Lowe, Gloria Stuart, Ruth Etting, Gene Austin, Alice White, Victor Moore, Ethel Waters, Chester Morris, Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Phil Baker, Gus Arnheim and his orchestra. Shown at Cinecon 41, September 2005.

   Don’t let the cast list get your hopes up. This is an anthology film, and the most interesting cast members make very brief appearances, so brief in some instances that when several of us talked about the film later we couldn’t agree on which actors actually appeared in the film and in what capacity.

   Edmund Lowe is a street huckster who worms his way into radio and up the corporate ladder to become, albeit briefly, an airwaves star. This may have been heavily edited. The story line doesn’t really hang together and some of the guest stars should have fired their agents for letting them get involved in such a lame enterprise.

THE BOOGIE MAN WILL GET YOU. Columbia, 1942. Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, ‘Slapsie’ Maxie Rosenbloom, Larry Parks, (Miss) Jeff Donnell, Don Beddoe. Director: Lew Landers.

   This movie came before the filmed version of Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), but from all accounts, there’s no coincidence involved in the fact that the plot of Boogie Man so closely resembles that of Arsenic. Boris Karloff was still in the Broadway run of the latter, and from what I’ve read, the movie was done to cash in on its popularity.

   (For some reason that’s not entirely clear, Karloff wasn’t offered his Arsenic role in the movie; Raymond Massey played the part, but Peter Lorre, on the other hand, was in the Arsenic film. You tell me.)

   The main concept of Boogie Man is that Boris Karloff, as mildly befuddled and bemused Professor Nathaniel Billings, a role he could have played in his sleep but never did, is trying to create a legion of super-powered zombies in his basement laboratory.

   Unfortunately all of the door-to-door peddlers he tries his invention on fall out of the machine as corpses – and no super-powers. That’s delightfully dimwitted powderpuff salesman Maxie Rosenblum as one of the subjects right here on the left.

   Some reviewers whose comments I’ve happened to read have complained that nothing in this film is very scary. It is to laugh. In spite of the title, this is not a horror film at all. It is a comedy. And while I don’t think I laughed out loud, I may have giggled to myself a few times. I know I smiled a lot.

   Playing against Mr. Karloff is Peter Lorre as Dr. Lorencz, the local sheriff, undertaker, and justice of the peace, along with a few other titles. The good doctor favors a wide-brimmed black hat and a long black coat with a Siamese kitten with a nose for crime and corruption in one of the inside pockets.

   I got the feeling that Boris Karloff was playing it straight (or as straight as he could be, knowing full well that it was a comedy) and Peter Lorre, whose comedic skills are much greater than you may ever have realized, was doing his best in a droll, expressive deadpan way (not a contradiction) to throw his fellow thespian off-balance.

   They make a good team, and after this movie they made a two or three other horror films together that were also really comedies, including The Raven (1963) and The Comedy Of Terrors (1964).

   Here’s a clip from YouTube to demonstrate them in action in this movie, and here’s another, beginning with Dr. Lorencz being called in on the case and running over seven minutes long.

   Also in the cast are Jeff Donnell, later to become George Gobel’s wife Alice on his TV show in the mid-1950s, and Larry Parks, later to become Al Jolson.

   As the blissfully unaware divorcee Winnie Shaw, who oohs and aahs over every decrepit aspect of the rundown country inn the professor is more than willing to sell to her, as long as he can keep working in the basement, Miss Donnell made more of an impression on me than he did.

   One warning. I said that this was a comedy, not a horror movie. Before wrapping up this review I went to IMDB to read what the commenters there had to say, and sadly to say, some of the humor went right over their heads. They’re too young, I guess, but I have to admit that some of the funny stuff was awfully corny. It’s part of the charm, that’s all I can say.

THE BAND WAGON. MGM, 1953; Vincente Minnelli, director. Screenplay by Betty Comden & Adolph Green; Sol Polito, cinematographer. Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, Nanette Fabray, Oscar Levant, Jack Buchanan, James Mitchell, Thurston Hall, Robert Gist. Shown at Cinecon 41, September 2005.

   This dazzling musical was programmed to introduce Nanette Fabray’s guest appearance. In his introductory remarks, Broadway and film musical historian Miles Kreuger tried to make a case for the film as the best of the MGM musicals for being “truest” to the theatrical experiences of Comden & Green, but even Fabray objected to this downgrading of Singing in the Rain.

   (I think that Swing Time and Meet Me in St. Louis are both at least as good as the Astaire/O’Connor miraculous pairing, but I won’t press this point.)

   Where The Band Wagon suffers is in the obligatory ballet, ‘The Girl Hunt,’ clever in its apparent references to Mickey Spillane (thanks, Jim) but with none of the ebullient vitality of the big ‘Broadway Melody’ number in Singing in the Rain.

   Still, it’s one of MGM’s best musicals. The ‘Dancing in the Dark’ duet of Astaire and Charisse is arguably the dance highlight of the film, with Astaire’s opening number in the game arcade not far behind. Then there’s Thurston Hall, who as the show’s major backer still breaks me up in his brief scene outside the theater after the disastrous first night of the Oedipal musical.

   Fabray shared memories of her work on the ‘Triplets’ number, and she proved to be still as attractive and spirited as she was over a half-century ago.

   Certainly not the discovery of a lost masterpiece, but a reminder that the genre is better defined by its high spots rather than the lesser films we often see revived.

[EDITORIAL COMMENT.]   The links I’ve added to Walter’s review lead to clips from the film I discovered on YouTube.    — Steve