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