365 Films in 365 Days

January 26, 2021
Murder on the Blackboard (1934) ***
TCM
Free
Wildcard

Murder on the Blackboard is the first sequel to The Penguin Pool Murder, with the wonderful Edna May Oliver and James Gleason reprising their roles of Miss Witherspoon and Inspector Piper, though they pretend the end of the last film didn’t happen, which I both find annoying and also get it. You can’t change entirely the whole premise of a series of detective stories right on the very first one.

It takes place right after Prohibition ended, but there’s a lot of mischievous stuff about liquor in it, often emphasizing that it’s bonded liquor. It kind of makes me wonder if the script was written before Repeal Day.  It’s pre-Code, after all.

So Miss Witherspoon stumbles across to another dead body, this time at the school where she works, so of course Inspector Piper comes in to investigate, and she insists on helping out, and they solve the case together, because they are the perfect team!

I’m very much looking forward to seeing the rest of the films in the series, but those are coming in the mail, TCM is not showing them.

January 25, 2021
Penguin Pool Murder (1932) ***
TCM
Free
Wildcard

I saw this movie in November 2019, which was the first time I got obsessed with TCM, and reviewed it then on Letterboxd. I do not feel the need to re-review it, since I think I did it pretty well the first time. So I’m cutting and pasting it here, thanks, past me!

I said at the time I would try and see the rest of the Miss Withers series, which I did not, but now in the present, the next one is on the app, but also the whole series is available on DVD from Warner Archives, so I will fulfill that promise to myself after all.

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Here is what I love about TCM and why I have taken to filling up the DVR with its output: TCM loves showing extremely random movies, not just classics that you’ve heard of, or movies that you always meant to see, but movies you had no idea ever existed. Have you ever heard of Penguin Pool Murder? Did you know that the glorious Edna May Oliver did a series of movies about teacher and amateur sleuth, Miss Hildegarde Withers? Of course not, who ever heard of such a thing! But I know now, and so do you. 

Gerald Parker is a stockbroker, and given that this movie is from 1932, that means that he is an extreme villain who ruins people without a care, aka a deserving murder victim to be. His wife meets up with her ex at the aquarium, he follows, the ex pushes him so lightly that it wouldn’t even wake a sleeping infant, but he is knocked out instantly. The ex drags him behind the scenes where penguins react indignantly, later, he drops into the penguin tank, stone dead. 

Miss Withers has a fantastic entrance, in that a miscreant snatches a purse and tries to run away, evading capture, until Our Heroine, whilst shepherding her class through the aquarium, trips him handily with her umbrella. We instantly understand that the killer, whether it turns out to be the ex or not (seems a little easy if it is), will have no chance against her. 

Miss Withers teams up with the inspector on the case, and goes off to interrogate the dead man’s secretary. She finds the secretary putting on what she considers to be an excessive amount of makeup, and we get this sneakily hilarious pre-code exchange. 

“Now, if you will answer my questions, you can go right back to your artwork.”
“Sure I remember the call, it was a man. He said Mrs. Parker was in trouble, so I put him right through.”
“Are you sure it was a man?”
“Well, it ain’t likely a woman would be calling me baby, is it?”
“No, not so far downtown as this. Now baby, I mean…”

Edna May Oliver was 49 when she made this movie, and the inspector, played by James Gleason, whom she calls “young man,” is 50. Age was a much different thing in the 1930s!

In looking it up, I see that there were six Miss Withers movies made in the 1930s, three with Edna May Oliver, (one of which is already on the DVR), one with Helen Broderick, and two with ZaSu Pitts. I think I know what I’m doing with my time in future, and it’s running down these movies if it kills me.

January 23, 2021
That’s Entertainment! (1974) ****
TCM
Free
Wildcard

They have all three That’s Entertainment movies plus That’s Dancing on the TCM app at the moment, but only through the 31st, so I’m going to try to blow through them this weekend.

I remember very clearly seeing this movie when it was released in 1974, I was nine years old. Of course I had seen and loved plenty of old movies by then, since it was the olden days with fewer channels and no videos, so we watched what was on after school and on the weekends, which was old movies. However, I have no doubt that a lot of these numbers I was seeing for the first time. I have a feeling that a lot of people my age who grew up loving old musicals were introduced to them by That’s Entertainment.

It was made and released to celebrate the 50th anniversary of MGM. Watching it now, I realize that we are only a few years off from the 100th anniversary, and then I crumble into dust. I’m pretty sure that, other than Liza Minelli, who was the only host who hadn’t been a golden age MGM star, every single person you see onscreen is now dead, either hosts, or in the clips. Not only is the time they are talking about long gone, so is 1974. Well, now I’m thoroughly depressed. Let me cheer myself up by thinking of the outfits Mickey Rooney and Peter Lawford chose to wear for their hosting bits. Very groove-tastic!

This is an absolutely wonderful movie, with great numbers and wonderful performances, and one bit of Unfortunate Blackface, in the Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney section, from the movie Babes on Broadway. Just goes to show you, there are parts of the past that stayed in the present way longer than they should have. 

Fortunately, to make up for that, they include the wonderful number from The Pirate with Gene Kelly and the Nicholas Brothers.

January 21, 2021
Hang ‘Em High (1968) ****
TCM
Free
Wildcard

One very nice thing indeed about having actors for parents is how sometimes movies or TV shows they were in just sort of pop up out of nowhere. A couple of weeks ago, Hang ‘Em High and The Trouble With Girls popped up on the TCM app, both with my father in them, what a treat!

The movie is about a man who gets lynched for cattle rustling, when he actually had bought the cattle from the real rustler and murderer. They weren’t very good at lynching, because Clint and his iron neck didn’t die, but was cut down and rescued, sworn in as Marshall, and then went off in his vengeance to catch all those bad men. 

I have seen Hang ‘Em High many times, but not for quite a while and had forgotten a great deal of it. Not my dad’s part, though! He plays the first sheriff that Clint Eastwood comes across after becoming a Marshall, when he goes to pick up the Swede. he is very good, and does not have nearly a big enough part, not in my estimation.

The movie is quite a good western in the categories of being a 1960’s Clint Eastwood western made in America, meaning that it is not exactly a classic, but it gets 4 stars from me, and that is that!

January 22, 2021
Charade (1963) ****
TCM
Free
Wildcard

What can one say about Charade? If you’ve seen it, you know that it is a practically perfect movie, and if you haven’t seen it, what are you waiting for? It’s a practically perfect movie!

As Ben Mankiewicz says every time the film is on TMC, it’s the best Hitchcock film that Hitchcock never made, which is really true! Audrey Hepburn plays a woman whose husband, whom she doesn’t like very much, is killed and then several mysterious character actors start chasing after her to find the half $1 million that the dead husband had, but seems to have vanished.

Cary Grant is either a good guy or bad guy, but whichever one he is, Audrey Hepburn can’t help falling in love with him, because, well, he is Cary Grant after all.

Apparently, Cary Grant was very uncomfortable with their massive age difference, so would only do the film if she chased him, which is exactly what makes it work so beautifully.

Charade is like The Maltese Falcon, or The African Queen, in that when you have the opportunity you watch it, you watch it.

January 20, 2021
Murder By Death (1976) **
TCM
Free
Wildcard

Here’s the thing, this movie is one of my favorite movies when I was a kid. I didn’t get all of the jokes and references at the time, I had never seen Nick and Nora Charles, for example, but I knew Sam Spade and Poirot, and I loved Neil Simon. This was 100% my kind of movie. Truman Capote was hilarious! There was an old Elsa Lanchester and a very young James Cromwell! Maggie Smith and David Niven! (this month ended up being an accidental Maggie Smith in Mysteries in the 1970s Fest) Peter Falk and Eileen Brennan! Alec Guinness! I mean, what a terrific movie.

But I forgot one thing. Peter Sellers in yellowface as the Charlie Chan spoof character, Sidney Wang. It is remarkably hard to watch. It is incredibly unfunny and awful. It is so hard to believe that even after blackface was pretty much gone, yellowface was still around even through the 1980s, see Joel Grey in Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins (1985). Of course, now we have yellowface where white actors are cast in roles that are supposed to be Asian without putting the makeup on them, but is that much better?

Now, you could look at it in a couple of ways. Charlie Chan was always played by a white guy in yellowface, so in doing a spoof of it, having it be a white guy is traditional. If they had actually made that a part of the plot, unmasking him as being secretly white, you could have gotten by with that. Also, there were no Asian stars as big as the rest of the stars in the picture, so who could have been cast? Keye Luke being the obvious choice, but he wasn’t as big a name as Peter Sellers, who was famous for doing big makeup roles like this. But the reason there were no big Asian stars was because if there was a starring Asian role, it didn’t go to an Asian person, so that was a never-ending problem.

I wondered what actual Asian-American actor, Richard Narita, playing Wang’s son, thought about it. I mean, he also did three episodes of Kung Fu, so it was not particularly new to his career. Was he glad to be working? Was he excited to be in a movie with all these big stars? Almost all of his scenes were with Peter Sellers, who was a great talent, did he think he was lucky? Or did he also wonder why he had to stand next to a white actor made up to look like him, speaking pigeon English, and pretend that wasn’t insulting?

With some problematic films, you can look at it as being a trope of the time, and maybe it’s only in a little bit of the movie and you can watch the rest of it and judge the parts that don’t have a racist stereotype in it, but in this movie, it’s in the whole movie, and it’s 1976, not 1936. We really should have known better. 

I’m sorry to say, this movie that I used to love, is almost unwatchable in 2021.

January 19, 2021
Bulldog Drummond’s Secret Police (1939) ** 1/2
TCM
Free
Wildcard

This was another one of those “it’s the middle of the night and I need to find something short” movies, I never would have watched it otherwise.

I’m no fan of Bulldog Drummond, as a rule. I dislike the radio show to such an extent that whenever I’m listening to old time radio and an episode comes on, I skipped past it without even listening to a little bit of it, though that is partially because they made the radio version American and Bulldog Drummond is British, see: Bulldog.

I really love these old mysteries and detective stories of the ’30s and ’40s, but Bulldog Drummond has never been on my list. But it’s an hour long, so I watched it, and it wasn’t terrible! (pull-quote for the poster, “Not terrible! – Kymm Zuckert”) Now, it’s not actually so much good, either, but I stayed awake, and Leo G. Carroll is in it, and he’s always fun to watch.

Bulldog Drummond is a detective who has postponed his wedding five times due to mysteries popping up, but this time the wedding will really happen! Until some dude pops up claiming there is a fortune hidden in the secret passages of Drummond’s ancestral home, and there is much knocking down walls and people getting killed and stuff, which puts a pall on any wedding.

I’d say I don’t actually recommend it, but on the other hand, there are two more of these movies on the TCM app, and I just might watch them, so I guess I don’t not recommend it.