LADY IN A CAGE

Trapped but determined: Olivia de Havilland

LADY IN A CAGE (1964). Director: Walter Grauman.

Cornelia Hilyard (Olivia de Havilland of Not as a Stranger) is a determined lady who has apparently been rather stifling towards her probably gay son, Malcolm (William Swan).  Malcolm goes off for a few days, leaving a letter basically telling his "darling" to let him live his own life, while Cornelia -- who has broken a hip -- gets trapped in her home elevator when there is a power failure. Her attempts to draw attention with an alarm system fail, and in short order she is "visited" by everyone from a wino (Jeff Corey of Bright Leaf) and a sluttish friend of his named Sade (Ann Sothern of A Letter to Three Wives) to three young mentally-defective "troglodytes" -- Randall (James Caan), Essie (Rafael Campos) and Elaine (Jennifer Billinsley) -- all of whom are looking for booty. Then Randall gets the idea that the wino, Sade, and Cornelia should all be done away with ...

Billingsley, Caan and Campos

Lady in a Cage is a decidedly repellent film on many levels, but it is also well-directed and well-made, and has many effective and suspenseful moments. The acting is a little more problematic, with virtually everyone seeming stagy and obvious at times as if they thought they were in a play. In spite of this, de Havilland is generally good, and Corey and Sothern are mostly on-target as well. Caan and Billingsley, who were "introduced" in this film (both had previous TV credits), are less impressive, as is Campos as the decidedly weird Essie, as probably none of them had a clue as to what their characters were all about. William Swan, who is fine, mostly had television credits.

Slattern and wino: Sothern and Corey

This pre-Stonewall film tries to suggest that this dominant mother figure "turned" her son into a homosexual, a dated notion to be certain. Arguing that Malcolm is not gay, Cornelia mentions all of his "charming women friends," to which Essie -- who may have sexual identity issues himself -- responds "'women' friends he met in public shower rooms!" When this film played on television years ago, that line, among others, was excised, as was the shot of a certain individual's head after being crushed under the wheels of a motor car.

Verdict: Whatever you think of the movie it gets points for being unpredictable. ***. 

PANAMA HATTIE

Ann Sothern

PANAMA HATTIE (1942). Director: Norman Z. McLeod.

Down in Panama a singing dancer named Hattie (Ann Sothern of Fast and Furious) has fallen for a wealthy Army man named Dick (Dan Dailey of It's Always Fair Weather), This is bad news for three sailors -- Red (Red Skelton), Rags (Rags Ragland) and Rowdy (Ben Blue) -- who are smitten with the gal and whom she relies on for emotional support. Hattie has some problems with her man when she meets his eight-year-old daughter and a woman named Leila Tree (Marsha Hunt of Smash Up), who is convinced she is more suitable for Dick. Reluctantly, Hattie agrees, at least for awhile ...

Virginia O'Brien with Skelton, Ragland and Blue

Based on an old Broadway show, Panama Hattie is as insubstantial as lint. The only real thing is has going for it, aside from some spirited performers, is the music, which consists of such Cole Porter tunes as "Just One of Those Things: (sung by Lena Horne) and other songs by Edens and Harburg ("Let's Be Buddies"). Sothern at least appears to be dubbed (although she could sing), but we hear the real voice of snappy Virginia O'Brien, who employs her deadpan style in some numbers ("Boy, Did I Get Stinkin' at the Club Savoy") and actually smiles during others ("I'm in Love"). Another highlight is a great dance number by a trio of talented black guys

Virginia O'Brien and Alan Mowbray

In the "slob vs snob" sub-plot, Leila is made as affected and unpleasant as possible, but Hattie really doesn't have much class. When Dick's little girl laughs, not unkindly, at Hattie's over- elaborate outfit, the adult practically calls the child a bitch! More fun is provided by O'Brien, whose character unaccountably develops a hankering for Dick's disdainful butler, amusingly played by Alan Mowbray. There is some tiresome, mildly comical business at the end when the three sailors make like lesser case Stooges, go into a haunted house, and uncover a nest of dangerous spies. Skelton delivers a tasteless gag about having his legs shot off. Ragland was in the Broadway show, wherein Ethel Merman played Hattie. Ben Blue was a comic who started in silent pictures.

Verdict: Easy to forget but with likable players and some good numbers. **1/2. 

FAST AND FURIOUS

Ann Sothern and Franchot Tone

FAST AND FURIOUS (1939). Director: Busby Berkeley.

When Gerda Sloane (Ann Sothern), the wife of bookseller and amateur sleuth Joel Sloane (Franchot Tone), is told by him that the two are taking a vacation, she doesn't know that he's put money in a bathing beauty contest occurring in the resort town of Seaside City (read: Atlantic City). As Gerda runs interference for the occasionally amorous beauties, Joel investigates the murder of the contest's promoter, Eric Bartell (John Miljan). The suspects include his girlfriend, Lily (Ruth Hussey of The Uninvited); his other girlfriend, Jerry (Mary Beth Hughes of Men On Her Mind); Sloane's old friend, Mike Stevens (Lee Bowman of Up in Mabel's Room); and others. Fast and Furious was the debut and apparently the one and only entry in this bid for an aborted mystery series a la The Thin Man, but it's mediocre enough that there were never any sequels. Sothern and Tone make good leads -- Tone is somewhat better and has more aplomb at this than his co-star does -- but even Tone, good as he is, can't compete with William Powell. The business about a wife getting all hot and bothered because her husband is judging a beauty contest was to be repeated ad nauseum in various movies and TV shows, and had probably been done even before 1939. Harry Kurnitz' script has few laughs aside from a very funny bit involving some lions, and there is at least one very suspenseful scene when our couple are caught underneath a descending stage elevator, nearly crushing them. Otherwise, this is forgettable.

Verdict: Not one of the classics of 1939. **.

WORDS AND MUSIC

Mickey as Lorenz Hart and Judy as herself

WORDS AND MUSIC (1948). Director: Norman Taurog.

"... strange places with strange people ..."

Richard Rodgers (Tom Drake) and Lorenz Hart (Mickey Rooney) become a highly popular song-writing duo and a theatrical force to be reckoned with. This is a heavily fictionalized biography that completely suppresses Hart's homosexuality and alcoholism, and instead makes the man unlucky in love. The highlights of the film are the musical interludes: Judy Garland, playing herself, singing "I Wish I Were In Love Again" with Mickey; and doing a solo on "Johnny One-Note." Lena Horne scores with "Where or When? " and "The Lady is a Tramp,"  and Mel Torme does "Blue Moon." Then there's the excellent "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue" from On Your Toes with Gene Kelly at the top of his game. Rooney is as superb as ever, Drake [Betrayed Women] is fine as Rodgers, and Marshall Thompson plays associate Herbert Fields. Perry Como plays a fictional character in the film, and while his acting isn't bad, his singing style (at that time) apes Bing Crosby shamelessly. Janet Leigh has a nice turn as Rodgers' wife, as does Ann Sothern as Joyce, but the best one can say about Betty Garrett is that she's utterly unexciting. The picture is very handsomely produced, but the narration is unnecessary. To cap it all off we've got "With a Song in My Heart," one of Rodgers most beautiful melodies.

Verdict: Not the real story but colorful and entertaining. ***.

SYLVIA

SYLVIA (1965). Director: Gordon Douglas.

"Before you can save the soul, you gotta feed the body."

Frederic Summers (Peter Lawford) hires private eye Alan "Mack" Macklin (George Maharis) to investigate the background of his fiancee, Sylvia (Carroll Baker). As Mack tracks down the woman's past, he learns about how she was raped by her stepfather, became a prostitute, then a poet, and has favorably impressed many of the people she met along her journey. This includes the librarian, Irma (Viveca Lindfors) and a former "hostess" named Jane (Joanne Dru), whose hospital bills were paid by Sylvia. Mack finally catches up with Sylvia herself, and is drawn to her -- but what will happen when she discovers the truth about him? At first Sylvia seems that it might have serious possibilities, and doesn't just seem like a tawdry exercise despite the subject matter, but as the film proceeds it's clear that it's pretty much junk that isn't lurid enough. The two leads are okay, but small-scale, and hardly give great performances. There is better acting from Lindfors (whose character has often been considered a lesbian although there's nothing in this to indicate it); Dru; and especially Ann Sothern [A Letter to Three Wives] as a slatternly former co-worker of Sylvia's. There are also nice turns by Nancy Kovack as a stripper, Jay Novello as a priest, Edmond O'Brian [Backfire] as a former client of Sylvia's, Connie Gilchrist as a madame, and especially Paul Gilbert [So This is Paris] as a drag queen entertainer/club owner known as "Lola." Lawford is actually quite good and there are appearances by Aldo Ray, Lloyd Bochner, and Majel Barrett, among other familiar faces, as well. Although the story bounces around from Mexico to New York and other places, there is never any sense of time or location, as if everything exists in that certain soap opera void that only Hollywood could produce.

Verdict: There's a reason why certain movies are completely forgotten. **.

SHADOW ON THE WALL

SHADOW ON THE WALL (1950). Director: Patrick Jackson.

Early in Shadow On the Wall we learn that Celia (Kristine Miller), the wife of David Starrling (Zachary Scott), is having an affair with her own sister's fiance, Crane Weymouth (Tom Helmore). When sister Dell (Ann Sothern) learns of this ultimate betrayal, all of her pent-up sibling rage spills out and she shoots her sister dead; she then lets David take the rap. When she learns that David's young daughter Susan (Gigi Perreau) might have seen her commit the murder, she comes to the conclusion that the child must follow her stepmother into the grave. In the hands of a Hitchcock or any superior director, Shadow on the Wall might have been a nail-biting suspense item, but not only is it flaccid but it never quite recovers from its many improbabilities. For instance, little Susan is not an idiot and she's not that young, so she probably would have known her aunt Dell was responsible for the murder all along. And it's hard to believe that David would get the death penalty for a crime of passion that most likely would have been pled out as voluntary manslaughter. But at least the story holds your attention and the performances are good, including Nancy Davis-Reagan [East Side, West Side] as a child psychologist whose methods are bizarre to say the least, and John McIntire as her associate. Little Jimmy Hunt [Pitfall] has an amusing scene with Perreau [Journey to the Center of Time] where he covets a glass of chocolate milk she refuses to drink.A bathtub resuscitation sequence that is shot strictly from the victim's point of view in two shots and closeups is one of the more effective moments in the picture.

Verdict: Psychologically dubious. **.

THE MANITOU

Michael Ansara and Tony Curtis confront the Unknown

THE MANITOU (1978). Director: William Girdler.

Fake San Francisco spiritualist Harry Erskine (Tony Curtis) learns that an old girlfriend of his, Karen Tandy (Susan Strasberg), has a little bit of a problem. She has a tumor growing on her back, it's getting larger, and it appears to be a fetus! Erskine discovers that the fetus is the reborn spirit of a nasty Indian medicine man, and enlists the aid of a modern-day equivalent, John Singing Rock (Michael Ansara), to fight the medicine man and the evil gods it conjures. Their only allies are the spirits -- or "manitous" -- of the objects around them. Before long the hospital has become a battle zone as they fight for Karen Tandy's soul amidst corpses turned inside out, frozen, decapitated nurses, and other signs of murder and mayhem. The movie, based on a novel by Graham Masterton, has an interesting cast: Besides the aforementioned actors we've got Ann Sothern (a medium), Stella Stevens, Burgess Meredith (anthropologist Dr, Snow), Lurene Tuttle (a client of Erskine's who takes a tumble) and even Jeanette Nolan. Jon Cedar, who associate-produced and worked on the screenplay, plays Dr. Hughes. Curtis' pants are almost as tight as the ones worn by Robert Conrad in The Wild, Wild West! There are a lot of interesting elements to this movie, and it holds the attention, but somehow it doesn't completely jell. Cedar was also in Girdler's Day of the Animals.

Verdict: Not without interest, but somehow less than the sum of its parts. **1/2.

THE LUCY SHOW Season 3

Ball and Vance with bird

THE LUCY SHOW Season 3. 1964. CBS.

"Her hair's dyed -- and her brain isn't too long for this world, either."

After I Love Lucy wrapped up and Lucy divorced Desi -- the two remained involved with Desilu Studios -- Ball importuned Vivian Vance, who only wanted to stay on the east coast with her husband, to co-star with her in a new vehicle. Supposedly based on a book called "Life Without George," The Lucy Show basically had Lucy (now the widowed Lucy Carmichael with two children) and Ethel (reborn as the divorced Vivian Bagley with one son) sharing a house and expenses and a lot of misadventures. The network kept wooing Lucy and Lucy kept wooing Vance, so she returned for a third season of silly episodes. Vance did not appear in every episode -- one condition for her doing the show -- so she was occasionally replaced by special guest-stars, including Ann Sothern, who isn't bad as a widowed countess who returns to the town where she was born. However, the episodes with Ball and Vance are generally the most memorable. Arguably the best third season episode has Lucy and Viv vying for Charles Drake as Lucy shows up at a dance on roller skates, ensuring pandemonium. Other reasonably good shows have Jack Benny playing a plumber, Lucy and Viv acting as camp cooks, and a wacky trip to Las Vegas. Lucy loses a contact lens in chocolate icing but doesn't know which cake, and she accidentally sucks a rare valuable stamp into a vacuum cleaner she's trying to sell. And so on.

Lucy and Viv can still be very funny,-- and occasionally overbearing, especially the former --  but the scripts weren't always up to their standards. Gale Gordon makes an excellent foil as irritable banker Mr. Mooney; he's especially good in a sequence wherein he tries to teach Lucy how to ski. The episode where Lucy tries to get tickets to a Danny Kaye performance is fairly wretched, as are the episodes where she becomes a traffic and undercover cop. Guest-stars and supporting players include a very funny Harvey Korman, Reta Shaw, Byron Foulger, Keith Andes, John Williams, Kathleen Freeman, Jim Davis, Carole Cook, Nestor Paiva, Mabel Albertson, Jack Kelly, Steven Geray and Norma Varden. The children haven't got much to do but they are appealing and do it well.

Verdict: No I Love Lucy, but a certain amount of laughs and clever comic antics. **1/2.

A LETTER TO THREE WIVES

A LETTER TO THREE WIVES (1949). Writer/Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz.

An unseen woman (voiced by Celeste Holm), Addie Ross, sends a letter to three different women telling them that she's run off with one of their husbands. This extremely interesting comedy-drama is one of those infrequent pictures that somehow has more to it than meets the eye, even though it's neither a major drama nor a side-splitting comedy. Somehow it call comes together beautifully (despite some missteps and superficial, sitcom-like aspects); the fine acting from the entire cast really helps put it over. Jeanne Crain, who worries that she's plain and awkward, remembers that her husband gave Addie her first kiss. Ann Sothern recalls that Addie remembered her husband Kirk Douglas' birthday when she did not. And snappy Linda Darnell, in perhaps her most memorable performance, wonders if her rich husband and former boss (Paul Douglas) ran off with Addie because he thinks she, Darnell, only wants him for his money. The Darnell/Douglas section of the story is the best and most amusing. One might wonder why someone as “wonderful” as Addie Ross didn't marry one of those three men, or someone else, long before.

Verdict: Very entertaining stuff. ***.