Old Acquaintance (1943)

Old Acquaintance (1943) is a tour de force for both stars Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins. It shouldn’t be a surprise that a film could be this good with two terrific actresses and a witty, literate script by John Van Druten. Somehow, though, the movie can still astonish, in large part because much of it seems like a lighthearted romp, even though we get splashed with soap opera elements and Miriam’s personality disorder that hammers us like a hangover.

Perhaps because it flows something like a concerto with different movements. The soap opera quality to the plot involves the complicated relationship between two old friends who face, together and separately, the “passing parade of years” (which should be a movie genre unto itself), but there are also elements of screwball comedy, and social commentary.

The film, something in the manner of the play on which it is based, is presented in three acts. First, we come upon a young and triumphant first-time author, Bette Davis, returning to her hometown. It is 1924, and she arrives as the guest of her girlhood chum, Miriam Hopkins, now a housewife expecting a baby.

Davis breezes into town, spirited, somewhat hoydenish, exuding good-natured self effacing humor, when she is carried away by a flock of serious co-eds who make her their heroine. Davis laughs off their attention, but Miriam Hopkins is furious when her plans to lead the welcoming committee are derailed. Miss Hopkins gets into a minor car accident with a farmer’s truck loaded with cages of chickens. Seems to be a mainstay of old movies, doesn’t it? Car crashes with chicken cages. You don’t hear things like that happening these days, but apparently in the 1930s you couldn’t back out of your own driveway without smashing eggs, or plowing into squawking chickens.


Miss Davis meets Hopkins’ good-natured husband, played by John Loder, and they become fast pals. Look for Roscoe Karns as the annoying local newspaper editor. We saw him as the annoying traveling salesman in It Happened One Night. If only we could all make a living just being annoying, what a wonderful world it would be.

Miss Hopkins returns, furious at her grand welcome being foiled, especially since she is chafing in the mundane life of the housewife. She envies Davis’ fame. She confides to Davis that she herself has literary ambitions and has written a romance novel. We have a few flippant, but spot on, observations on the monetary success of genre fiction as opposed to what is called literary fiction, the kind that Davis writes that gets applause from the critics but that doesn’t sell well. Not much has changed in the publishing world, though it would be interesting to see what the future has in store for “eBooks” and the literary market.


Getting ready for bed, Miss Davis shocks Miss Hopkins by appearing in only the pajama top and not the bottoms, exposing her legs to us as she strolls to her bed. Even before he says goodnight to her, we see that swell guy husband John Loder is charmed by Bette Davis, a hint for what will follow.

This first “act,” so to speak, is screwball comedy, but the tone changes in the next act when we find ourselves in the mid-1930s. Davis, who plods carefully along in her writing, still critically successful but still not rich, is nervously preparing for the opening night of her first play. Meanwhile Hopkins, ever confident and prolific, has by this time dashed off one potboiler after another, making buckets of money.

Miss Hopkins is no longer the homey housewife, but has morphed into a career woman with all the charm of a steamroller. Society columnist Anne Revere has come to interview her in her New York City hotel digs. Anne Revere as a gussied up Manhattan sophisticate is treat, a 180-degree turn from her usual earth mother type roles. Perc Westmore must have slapped the pancake makeup on with a trowel to cover up those peasant freckles of hers.

Miss Revere asks about the progress of Bette Davis’ new novel, to which Davis modestly replies, “Well, I write and re-write, and I still don’t like it.”

Revere encouragingly replies, “Well, at least when you do turn one out it’s a gem. None of this grinding them out like sausage.” Miss Revere suddenly realizes the indirect insult to romance novelist Hopkins and offers, “I suppose I could cut my throat.”

“There’s a knife on the table,” Hopkins replies.

We see by now that Miss Hopkins’ swell guy husband is still full of comic asides, but there is a note of sarcasm now. He drinks a good deal, is neglected by his wife for the sake of her career, just as she neglects their young daughter. He puts up with it gallantly, without seeming jealousy for her success, but becomes angry only when Hopkins flings one too many cruel barbs at her old pal Davis. Hopkins’ irritation has grown with her income. No matter how successful she has become, she is still insecure and jealous over Davis. Davis, perhaps because of her quiet seriousness about her work, appears to have grown more introverted in contrast to her friend’s more explosive personality. Davis also chain smokes through the movie, and I lost count after a while.

John Loder’s fondness for Davis has evolved into infatuation, which Davis will not return, holding him off out of loyalty for Hopkins. She recounts for him her lonely childhood when Hopkins was her only friend. When she was orphaned, Hopkins’ parents took her in. Another actress could take the speech and make it maudlin, but Bette Davis has that quality of hard unblinking honesty that makes it work. This section of the movie has become a soap opera, but the pace is not slowed. There is poignancy to the growing resignation and sadness of the Bette Davis character, after having appeared so resilient and devil-may-care in the preceding act when she was a younger woman.

At the end of this “act,” John Loder gets fed up with walking the tightrope of Miriam Hopkins’ moods, and leaves her.

Act three brings us to the 1940s and the solemn urgency of wartime. Davis, appearing in a Red Cross volunteer’s uniform, makes a plea for support during a radio broadcast rally. We see she has entered middle age by the heavy glasses she wears to read her script, and that artistic streak of gray in her hair that, like driving your car into a chicken-filled truck, was a movie cliché.


Miriam Hopkins’ daughter is now grown up, dating a gigolo, and Bette Davis is dating Gig Young, a man ten years her junior. She is sensitive about this, and hesitant to marry him because of it. Now, nearly twenty years after we first met her, she is bedeviled with insecurities and regrets, but still steadfast in her loyalty to Hopkins, and by extension, to Hopkins’ daughter.


She is also, delightfully, still wearing only pajama tops and still giving us a glimpse of her legs as she strides across her bedroom. We see that despite the gray streak in her hair, despite the fear of aging alone, she still has a tiny bit of that careless young Jazz Age writer in her. It’s a nice bit of continuity.

We have a bit more soap opera with the reappearance of John Loder, a fuming Hopkins who seems to destroy Davis’ one last chance at happiness, and the romantic troubles of the daughter, but here again, the pace never slows. This act contains one of the funniest Bette Davis scenes ever, where she finally gets fed up with Hopkins, shakes her nearly to death, shoves her on the couch, and mutters a perfunctory, “Sorry.” We are back to screwball comedy.

Other nice touches that reflect the war period are the way when Davis, needing time to think, tells the cab driver to just drive around and he replies he is not allowed to because of gas rationing. Also, John Loder, now in uniform, appears to have something of a military haircut, which is realistic detail we don’t often see in Hollywood films of this period, despite their intention to reflect what was happening in the country at this time.

Miriam Hopkins is the engine that drives much of the conflict, and though one might accuse her of overacting, I would guess many of us actually know people like this character she plays, over-sensitive, quick to accuse, where almost any conversation turns into high melodrama.

The film’s final moments with Davis and Hopkins drinking flat champagne in a tribute to their cockeyed friendship, and especially to the passing parade of years, is another astonishing scene, made so by the unexpected sudden camera pan back from behind and above them. It seems they will age together, as their characters did in their previous film The Old Maid (1939). In films of later decades, two women aging without romantic partners might be depicted either as a sad failure, or else not depicted at all. Here, there is almost a note of triumph that they have weathered the years and the ups and downs of their relationship.

Inevitably, one of the guilty pleasures of watching the film is doing so with the knowledge that Hopkins and Davis disliked each other in real life. You don’t see it in this film, where both actresses are deeply engaged in the dynamics of their characters’ relationship, like two old warhorses charging out of the gate.

Well, maybe you see that dislike in one scene. Have a look at the famous shaking scene from Old Acquaintance.

Hollywood Steps Out (1941)

“Hollywood Steps Out” (1941), directed by Tex Avery, takes us to Ciro’s and give us one last, highly caricatured glimpse at frivolous Hollywood glamour before the dark war years. How many stars can you name?

A Blueprint for Murder (1953)

“A Blueprint for Murder” (1953) is a murder mystery that some six months after its release in the theaters was performed as a radio broadcast on the Lux Radio Theater program. This review is the tale of two productions, and what happens to a suspense story in two different worlds.

In the film, Joseph Cotten plays a rather lonely bachelor who travels a good deal in his employment as an engineer. His only family is his late brother’s son and daughter, and their stepmother, the second wife of his late brother. Joseph Cotten is called to their side for a family emergency when his little niece is hospitalized with a mysterious illness. She dies.


Mr. Cotten stays with his sister-in-law, played by Jean Peters, to comfort her and his young nephew. Visiting his old friend and family attorney played by Gary Merrill, they discuss the upsetting tragedy, and Merrill’s mystery novel author wife, played by Catherine McLeod, puzzles over the sick child’s odd symptoms. (Both Merrill and McLeod are strong as supporting players in this film.) It occurs to her, through her writing research, that the little girl may have died of strychnine poisoning.

There is a lot of back and forth about how outlandish this idea is. Eventually, there is enough conjecture about the possibility of poisoning, and his brother’s will in which both Jean Peters and Joseph Cotten stand to inherit his brother’s fortune if both children are dead, and how such a crime could have been committed, all of which lead Mr. Cotten to putting off going back to work. He sticks around to learn more about poisons, about hospital procedures, and about his sister-in-law.

Eventually, Jean Peters becomes the main suspect, and the film becomes a detective story on how to prove she murdered the child. The story, in itself, has some intriguing aspects to it. First, there is obviously the hideous notion of a woman murdering a child in her care. Trailing behind this but complimenting the suspense story is the nuance of the reticent, workaholic bachelor brother always a little bit in love with his brother’s glamorous new wife. He is also, due to the travel required by his work, a man without a home, and suddenly he becomes an important figure to the grieving widowed stepmother and his grieving, fatherless nephew. He suddenly has the family he always wanted.

The character played by Joseph Cotten, despite whatever suspicions his friends are touting about the possibility of Jean Peters being a murderer, wants nothing to do with any kind of talk like that. He refuses to believe she could be guilty. In his eyes, she can do no wrong. Finally, when he begins to himself suspect her, his infatuation for her painfully drains away. Then he becomes determined to know the truth. Yet, at the end of the story, in order to gain her confidence to trick her into confessing, he now has to pretend to love her and to make her love him. That’s a lot going on, but it’s not action. Perhaps for this reason, the film, which requires action, handles it awkwardly.

The film also strays briefly into a police story when we are shown several scenes of the police doing their investigation. This removes the focus off of Joseph Cotten and Jean Peters, and makes the police detectives, which up until now had been secondary characters, into the main characters. The film is weakened when the focus is off the two most important characters.

However, the suspicion and/or sexual tension between the two characters is also weakened by the actors. Joseph Cotten played contemplative characters very well, but his style was usually so low-key that he played better off actresses, and actors, who were not low-key themselves. Consider his four pairings with Jennifer Jones, an actress who could be intensely emotional. Her energy complimented his more reserved acting style and vice versa. Jean Peters in this role, however, is so low-key herself that there is nothing to distinguish Mr. Cotten’s subtleties.

Jean Peters plays the part of a glamorous, cultured second wife of a wealthy man, who is now in sole guardianship of his children. She is cool and refined. She appears friendly with her stepson but there is a dignified reserve, and in brief scenes with her servants, her manner seems somewhat dismissive and haughty. While this all might be appropriate and realistic for a character of her place and position, it does nothing to throw off our suspicions of her guilt. She seems guilty the minute we first see her, despite the reality that a person looking archly is not necessarily guilty of anything, but that is the human nature of the audience, to assign guilt and favoritism. (Cotten also asks Catherine McLeod why she doesn’t like Peters, and that brief remark also adds to our prejudice.) That assumption of her guilt solely by her somewhat femme fatale manner is unfortunate, particularly when we consider the powerful radio version.

The Lux Radio Theater version of this story, broadcast on March 29, 1954, starred Dorothy McGuire and Dan Dailey. Because this is an hour-long show, the script was cut to conform to time constraints, but what is left is essentially word-for-word. Cutting the script actually helps to speed up the story and make it more suspenseful. The police investigation is truncated as well, but yet not diminished in importance. The focus never strays from the drama of the couple.

The very fact of being radio means we must imagine what is happening, so we do not see close-ups of guilty expressions or suspicious smirks. The camera tips us off so many times in the film, but the radio microphone never does. As a result, we don’t really know, for sure, whodunnit until the very last few minutes of the show. It is a far more suspenseful telling of the story.

Most especially, the work of the actors makes a huge difference in this version. Dorothy McGuire, who possessed one of the most natural and pleasant speaking voices in film at the time, was a natural for radio, where she displays in a variety of vocal textures the character’s distress over the death of the child, her weariness over the strain, her gratitude to her brother-in-law for his emotional support, her growing attraction for him, and especially her warmth and affection for her stepson. She never becomes a suspect, not in the story, and not in our minds, until later in the program. Even then, her attitude of graciousness makes it difficult to believe her guilt. We only accept she is a suspect because the facts logically make her one, and that is the punch of a good mystery, our minds not necessarily following our hearts, as the Joseph Cotten/Dan Dailey character must learn for himself. We identify with Dan Dailey more because we are going through the same roller coaster emotions. We are not just passive observers, the way we are when watching the film.

Dan Dailey does very well portraying the lonely, workaholic bachelor, growing closer to his sister-in-law in the aftermath of the tragedy, and then later agonized to admit she is a suspect. In the final moments of the story his character takes an outlandish and dangerous (and criminal, if you think about it) action to force a confession, and he fails in a shocking ending. While Joseph Cotten plays the character as tense and worried, Dan Dailey becomes absolutely unglued with the pressure.

There are a couple of interesting scenes to note in the story: one is another in our collection of Unbelievable Medical Practices when the child is poisoned in the hospital because the hospital pharmacy was closed and so the medical staff actually let an outsider run the errand of filling a prescription at another pharmacy down the street. The medication bottle was tampered with, especially as it was never sealed. Call in the FDA on this one.

The other scene of note in the film (not the radio version) is when Joseph Cotten and his young nephew play “Monopoly”. Usually brand name products were avoided in films at that time so as not to appear to endorse them. “Monopoly” had been around since the early 1930s, so perhaps it was considered venerable enough by 1953 for this not to matter.

Bacardi cocktails seem get a prominent “endorsement” as well.

Follow this link to have a listen to the Lux Radio Theater broadcast of “A Blueprint for Murder,” now in public domain from the Internet Archive website. Or you can visit the website for Lux programs of 1954 and download this program to your computer.

Now Playing at Springfield's Broadway Theater, 1916

Above is the program for the lineup at the Broadway Theater in Springfield, Massachusetts, probably about 1916. The theater was located on Bridge Street, and for more details on the theater, please have a look at this page on the Cinema Treasures website.For more on the evolution of Bridge Street, its theaters, businesses and residents, have a look at this essay posted on my New England Travels blog on Bridge Street in Springfield, Mass.

Photos of the old Broadway Theater, built in 1913, torn down in the 1950s are scarce, but we have this program to illustrate the evolution in the presentation of the performing arts. The bill is presented in a manner very similar to a vaudeville program. The Broadway also showed vaudeville acts until its gradual phasing out to all movies.

The first films on the bill are likely one or two-reelers, that is films that lasted ten or 20 minutes. Dorothy Bernard stars in “The Girl and Her Trust” produced at the Biograph studio, and “Breaking the Shackles” was an Edison studio film.

We note the Broadway Concert Orchestra was on hand to accompany these silent films.

“Adventure in the Woods” or “Adventure in the Autumn Woods” with Mae Marsh was from 1913, and the Francis Bushman, billed also as Francis X. Bushman (last seen here in "The Flag" - 1927)in “Blood Will Tell” was from 1914, so this movie house showed films from varying studios and the older films were more or less fillers, like lesser vaudeville acts.

The main features, both new films from 1916, were the two Paramount movies “The Spider” with Pauline Frederick, and “The Ragamuffin” with Blanche Sweet, both billed as “5-Act” films, which would have run about 50 minutes. Films were regarded as photo-plays then and it looks as if we were weaning ourselves off live entertainment by using the familiar vaudeville lineup and the suggestion that the multiple reels of film were “acts” in the drama.

We may sometimes indulge in the mistaken belief that technology changing our popular entertainment almost too fast for us to keep up is a modern phenomenon, but I wonder if anything could have seemed so fantastic and out of this world than the flickers flashed on a screen pulled down to cover the stage, leaving only the orchestra pit exposed (though only for another decade), and the astonished gaze of the downsized vaudevillian wondering how he could get in on the “act.”

3 Bad Men - 1925

“3 Bad Men” (1925) is notable for the lovely union of 1920s filmmaking and present day film scoring. This John Ford directed silent Western was restored, with a new musical soundtrack added in 2007. The modern music composed by Dana Kaproff is extraordinarily evocative of American Western themes, and deeply moving in the way it re-interprets this old silent movie for a new audience.

(We recently discussed modern scoring of silents in the comments section of this post on “The Freshman” - see here.)

There are the traditional feathery piano chord plunking, standard for silent movies, to be sure, but this score soars with the use of guitar and fiddle. One particular musical theme which is repeated throughout the film is used to illustrate the feelings of the main character, Bull Stanley (played with great sensitivity by Tom Santchi.) He is one of the three bad men, and his loneliness, his sadness, and his redemption are all carried to us effortlessly through music.

The film takes us to the 1877 land rush. John Ford sets the scene with proclamations by President Ulysses S. Grant, shots of a three-masted bark carrying immigrants over the ocean to the new country. There are a few ethic slurs throughout this film, which Ford seems to attempt to balance out with a tribute to the diverse ethnic groups that come to settle the Midwest. This is not a pontificating film, however, in the style of perhaps D. W. Griffith. On the contrary, the film is actually very funny, with title cards that convey the same kind of dry wit Ford’s actors will speak in his later films.

We see American Indians also, and though they thankfully are not treated with the same kind of ethnic ribbing the newcomers get, still they are not fleshed out as human beings. They are used here seemingly only as symbols of a presumably dying culture, signposts to show us we are in the West, and the West is still wild but not for long.


Dan O’Malley, played by George O’Brien, is a devil-may-care Irish immigrant who encounters Miss Lee Carleton and her father, former Confederate Major Carleton crossing the prairie in their enormous Conestoga wagon, leading a small heard of thoroughbred racehorses. Miss Lee, played by Olive Borden is a lady by birth, even though the only time we ever see her out of trousers, boots, and cowboy hat is when she takes a bath. She is flashing-eyed beauty, independent, and sassy.


Bull, and his pardners Spade and Mike, played by J. Farrell MacDonald (who, like Santchi, played in over 300 films, last seen here in “My Darling Clementine” - 1946), are desperados, horse thieves, and overall ne’er do wells. But these old no-account saddle tramps have a lovable quality of humor that throws the audience for a loop and makes them reconsider what is “bad”. Bull, it will be slowly revealed throughout the film, has a sorrowful back story, wherein his beloved little sister ran off with a man who “promised” to marry her. Bull is looking for her, and for the man who took her away.


The man is Layne Hunter, a dishonest sheriff in a ramshackle gold mining town. He and his gang attack Lee and her father to steal their horses, just when Bull and his boys wanted to steal them. Bull and his boys counter-attack and chase off the horse thieves, but Lee’s father is killed. When Lee buries her face on Bull’s chest in tears, we see the beginning of a transformation for Bull, who is reminded of his failure to protect his younger sister. He and his boys, become Lee’s guardian angels for the rest of the film.

What is interesting is that Ford never makes these scenes too maudlin. There is a bit of overplaying here and there, as was the acting style in silents, but from the director’s point of view there is occasionally a startling cynicism to the film. The bad sheriff wears a white hat, and one senses this was Ford’s way of twisting our film Western iconic imagery. When Bull first comes up behind Lee, he thinks she is a man and intends to rob her at gunpoint, only lowering his gun in astonishment when she removes her hat and her hair falls to her shoulders. Dan O’Malley, who will eventually be Lee’s romantic interest, at first displays no interest in being her hero. In a muddy gold camp where cutthroats and dandies cross paths with prostitutes, only the new Protestant minister, whom an immigrant clothier with all due respect comically refers to as “Rabbi”, is all good, and the sheriff in the white hat, is all bad. Everybody else is drawn in shades of gray.

There are impressive long shots of a massive expanse of prairie filled with wagon trains and cattle. The scenes of the land rush look so familiar, perhaps because they have been duplicated many times elsewhere. There are shots of charging wagons, toppling over each other, axels breaking, wagon wheels falling off, wagons charging right over the camera, and a shot of a man on a large-wheeled bicycle being towed by a horse. Many of these images you might also recognize in a similar land rush in “Far and Away” (1992) with Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.


Bull, Mike, and Spade drive Lee’s wagon and horses into the gold camp, and when Lee is approached by the flirtatious Sheriff Hunter, Bull gets protective and stands between them. The smarmy sheriff announces the unsavory reputations of Bull and his boys, unmasking them and hoping to shock Lee, who was ignorant that her protectors are desperadoes. What follows is another unusual scene, when Lee shows her tolerance as well as her moxie by cavalierly shrugging this off, “Come my three bad men, it’s time we were making camp.” She is a trooper, and when they agree to work for her for nothing, she asks with wonder, “Then you’ll be my men?”

They remove their hats with hesitant gallantry and nod, consenting to be owned. Seeing her holding another woman’s baby, Bull gets another pang of protectiveness, his slow guitar waltz plays, and we seem to see into his troubled soul.


Deciding she needs a better family than they, her men decide to go husband hunting for her. Spade and Mike, who are the more comic relief of the trio, tackle this, and their thirst, at the saloon, but Dan O’Malley eventually arrives in the gold camp, and resumes his attentions to Lee. He has Bull’s approval, because Bull has seen him punch his way out of the saloon. Therefore, he is a good man.

Conversely, we see here, and in other Ford Westerns, that women are depicted as the civilizing influence over the men and the bringers of civilization to the West. It is a romantic notion, but Ford, for all his macho movie fist-fighting, was really a romantic.

Bull is eventually reunited with his lost younger sister, Millie, who was shunted away by Sheriff Hunter among his prostitutes. Hunter’s gang tries to put down a revolt led by Bull against his abuse of power, and in the melee, Millie is shot. Their reunion is brief, and tragic. When Bull realizes that Sheriff Hunter was the man who led her astray, he punches through several doors trying to get to him.

When the minister, Bull, Mike, and Spade attend Millie’s grave the next morning, the wind whips their clothing, and it dawns on June 25, 1877, the day the land rush will begin at noon with the booming of Army cannon.

Life does not stand still, even for the grieving. Bull, Mike, and Spade, who have no personal interest in the land rush, continue to assist Lee and Dan to their promised land, and score revenge on Hunter, who is after them.


Each of the men, in separate acts of bravery, gives his life for the future of Lee and Dan, and so the three bad men are redeemed. In the final shot, a lump in your throat moment when we see their ghosts on horseback on the dim horizon are forever watching out for “our gal.”

The stunning action sequences are enhanced by a spirited fiddle reel, but the real soul of this film is so beautifully displayed in Bull’s theme of the slow guitar waltz. The classic Western is ironically made more classic with a modern touch. Despite Ford’s imprint and some laudable camera work, I can’t believe this film could have as much emotional impact without this lovely music.

Trivia Emergency

We interrupt this blog for a trivia emergency. I recently had an email from a reader named Pam who asks for the name of the movie which has this scene:

“I was wondering if you know of a movie, probably from the 40's or 50's where a man and a woman swim across a body of water and there are gold or silver amulets below them (like faces, maybe on necklaces) at the bottom of the shallow water. I think there may be drum beats in the background. I think it's a jungle like setting. They enter the water, swim towards the camera and get out. Thank you so much if you DO know.”

I admit, I do not know, though I wondered if it might be “Pagan Love Song” (1950) with Esther Williams. If you know the answer to this one, please let us know. Thanks.

ADDENDUM: Okay, so this really isn't an emergency. But we need to practice these drills so that we'll be ready if we ever have a real trivia emergency.

The Point of No Return - Zero Hour! - 1957

“Zero Hour!” (1957) has a legacy that ironically may represent a great change in our culture with respect to humor. The movie is a drama, but its famous parody, “Airplane!” (1980) is an off-the-wall comedy that points to how ridicule has overtaken silliness and slapstick as comedic expression. To be sure, “Airplane!” is very silly, too, but the joke is on the writer and the actors of “Zero Hour!”

The writer was Arthur Hailey, who gave us the iconic “Airport” (1970), which was followed by several sequels. Movies about airplane disasters obviously tend to be formulaic, and this is the chief source of humor for “Airplane!” In almost any plane disaster movie we have the passenger who shrieks with panic and must be subdued, the ill passenger needing emergency medical treatment, the thwarted romance of some member of the flight crew, and maybe throw in a nun if you’ve got one. “Airplane!” most pointedly uses the same name for its main character (though changes the spelling), and blatantly throws in (as gently as a javelin) the astoundingly stupid line from “Zero Hour!” about finding someone who can fly the plane and who did not have fish for dinner.

Peel back the years to the 1950s and you have plane disaster movies that focused on another aspect, one that the 1970s movies did not have to worry about: the point of no return.

This aspect, and used as a line in “Zero Hour!”, “The High and the Mighty” (1954), and “No Highway in the Sky” (1951) - see previous post, was a factor in aviation at the time when propeller planes like DC4s and DC6s had a limited flying range, and once past the reckoned “point of no return” a plane in trouble could not turn around and return to its original taking off point without running out of fuel. It had to keep going no matter what the problem. This was most seriously creepy in “The High and the Mighty” in which the plane crossed the Pacific Ocean, and also happened in “No Highway in the Sky” in which the plane crossed the Atlantic.

There is another meaning to “the point of no return” of course that is allegorical, in that the characters must face not only the challenge of survival before them, but must face their own fears, shortcomings, sins, or a combination of all three, to earn new lives for themselves.

The notion of a “point of no return” seems archaic as flights serving full meals with china and cutlery, pilots that cheerfully greet visitors to the cockpit, and the tracking of air traffic not with computers, but by pinning little toy airplanes to a paper wall map.

“Zero Hour!” begins with a flashback, where Ted Stryker, played by Dana Andrews, a fighter pilot with the Canadian forces during World War II, leads his squadron into a disastrous raid in which some of them are killed. Long after the war Dana Andrews still carries the guilt on his shoulders, and with his wife, Linda Darnell, and son, moves from job to job and town to town, unable to settle down to anything. He shirks any responsibility like the plague.

Linda Darnell has had enough, takes their boy, and boards a plane to leave her husband. Andrews follows, gets a seat on the same plane. When it takes off, we see the sickening fear in his face as he relives another war flashback, and he takes himself to the restroom. He could still be his character Fred Derry from “The Best Years of Our Lives” (1946) whose famous post-traumatic stress incident was something he had to face before he could move on. There is a genuine quality of misery about Dana Andrews in this role, and certainly some other roles he played, that conveys some vague but deep, private hell.

The plane is full, but beyond brief cameo types of appearances, we don’t really get a back story on most of the other passengers. The only standout among them is Jerry Paris, who later became known as the neighbor on “The Dick Van Dyke Show”. He has the floundering relationship with the stewardess, and once they have faced danger together, they will patch things up. He proves himself adept at entertaining children with a glove puppet like Señor Wences.



The matronly woman scornful of the whiskey-drinking Scotsman you might recognize as Hope Summers, who played Millie the store owner on the TV western “The Rifleman”.



More famous than any of these at the time was probably the pilot, played by Elroy “Crazylegs” Hirsch, who had just finished his last season with the Los Angeles Rams, and who some years later would be inducted in the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Crazylegs, with his blond wavy hair and cleft in his rugged chin, has that hero quality about him that reminds one of Dudley Do-right.

Mr. Andrews pleads with his wife to come back to him, but Miss Darnell lets him have it between the eyes with the weary request that he stop running and “make a stand somewhere.” She gently but firmly tells him, “I can’t live with a man I don’t respect.”

This is only one in a string of hard knocks Dana gets this awful day. The only good thing about this rotten day is he didn’t have fish for dinner.


The uniformed perky stewardess gives everyone a choice of halibut or lamb for their meal. Everybody who eats the fish, including the whiskey-drinking Scotsman, Dana Andrews’ little son, and both the pilot and co-pilot, are going to be violently ill. Infected with a deadly bacteria, the halibut is causing everybody severe bellyaches, and eventual unconsciousness. But Dana Andrews, who had the lamb, is left with a huge headache. He’s only one with flying experience. He has to fly the plane.

Sterling Hayden is brought in to give Dana Andrews instructions over the radio on how to fly this big plane and most importantly, how to land it. With his constant barking of orders, and his chain-smoking (he has the funniest line of the movie when he remarks, “Looks like I picked the wrong week to stop smoking,”) Hayden has kind of a maniacal quality to him that is just ripe for parody.

This trans-Canada flight has passed the point of no return. They must push on to Vancouver, but the airport is fogged in and they must wait until the weather clears. There are a lot of realistic shots of the plane in flight, close-ups on the control panel, and outdoor shots of the airport and tower where the plane will eventually come down.

The doctor, one of those professorial, noble types who speaks very proper stage English, is the one with the awful line, “The life of everybody on board depends on just one thing: finding somebody who can not only fly this plane but who didn’t have fish for dinner!”

He passes pills to the sick passengers and plugs Crazylegs with morphine. Though the morphine is intended to relieve his stomach pain, a guy loaded with narcotics probably shouldn’t be flying a plane, so one wonders about this doctor. But regardless, Crazylegs is down for the count, and neither he, nor his co-pilot who was such a pig he asked for two helpings of the halibut, are able to fly the plane.


Dana Andrews (Thank heavens for a meat eater!) is brought to the cockpit most unwillingly. This is not a case of a man deciding to save the day and prove to his wife he’s a hero. Dana would rather be having a root canal than fly this plane. What’s interesting is that he needs another pair of hands to work the radio, and his wife is drafted for the job. It’s a refreshing change not to have the woman sitting in terror and anticipation, twisting a hanky in her hands, but rather flying the plane with him. However Miss Darnell is unaccountably calm through the entire adventure. She shows very little of Mr. Andrews’ acute (and entirely appropriate) anxiety.


Pretty soon Dana and everybody in the tower control room are sweating buckets. Sterling Hayden has no confidence in Andrews, believing he will “fold up” under the pressure. Dana comes close to folding, but he slowly manages to get a grip on himself and the plane. There is a really scary sequence when they nearly crash into mountain peaks and they lose radio contact, and another very exciting sequence when he brings the plane in for a landing. Sterling Hayden wants him to keep the plane up in the air another couple of hours until the weather clears, but Dana makes a command decision to bring the plane down because the bellyachers are dying.

Some newspaper editor shows us two possible headlines, one announcing all dead, the other announcing all safe. It is succinctly gruesome.

The landing is horrific, but when the dust clears, we see Dana Andrews has regained his wife’s respect, and his own courage.

Another aspect to these airplane movies that eventually became so formulaic a couple of decades later is the illustration of our sense of interdependence on each other in times of crisis. How do come out of yourself and your own problems to help people who need your help? How do you help yourself if you’re the only one who can?

Dilemmas not necessarily worth laughing at. I make no complaints against “Airplane!”, but it belongs to another era. Parts of it are very funny, but its parody is based on sarcasm, a kind of self-superior mockery. Such “humor” is rampant these days. Check out the dismally arrogant tone of stand-up comedy, the 101 put-downs that comprise the average TV sitcom script. When did humor rely almost solely on sarcasm and ridicule rather than the original and creative, open-hearted silly playing out of human foibles? When did we cross that point of no return?

But this may be a very old debate. In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the defensive Mr. Darcy observes, “The wisest and the best of men, nay, the wisest and best of their actions, may be rendered ridiculous by a person whose first object in life is a joke.”

“Certainly,'' Elizabeth Bennett retorts, “there are such people, but I hope I am not one of them. I hope I never ridicule what is wise or good. Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies do divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can.”

I can laugh at Sterling Hayden, but never Dana Andrews.

Off Blog, But Not Off Topic

Today we go off blog, but not off topic, to visit a blog called “The File on Esther Zidel.” This blog is comprised of scrapbook photos taken by a young woman named Esther Zidel in the late 1930s and 1940s. The photos are of actors and actresses (stage and screen) she seems to have accosted outside the stage doors of Boston, Massachusetts area theaters. Some dressed to the nines; some, like one of Bette Davis, devil-may-care casual. The more famous actors are easily recognizable, but many others are not. See if you can help identify some of these actors, and fill in the blanks.

Ready to go? I’ve got my keys. Last one out, lock the door.

The Freshman - 1925

“The Freshman” (1925) sends an eager Harold Lloyd to college. Harold’s main goal is to fit in and be popular. His biggest handicap is himself and his sweet, heartbreaking desire to be liked.

We meet Harold first in his room at home, practicing college cheerleading yells and preening in his freshman beanie and sweater before a mirror. There is a movie poster for a film called “The College Hero”, the actor of which Harold idolizes. Apparently there is no freshman orientation at his school, because most of Harold’s knowledge about being a college student comes from his favorite movie and a boy’s book, “Jack Merivale at College.” The college annual has a photo of the football captain, who is the Most Popular Man on campus, and Harold wants to emulate his new hero so that he can be a hero himself.

He learns a snappy little jig from the movie he has seen, which the hero does just before he extends his hand to shake upon meeting new people. It’s hysterical, and Harold’s poor father bemoans to his mother, “They’ll either break his heart or his neck.” There is thinly veiled poignancy in this sarcasm, because both turn out to be true.

Harold is off to Tate University (not the same name used for the college in “Good News” -1947, discussed here, which was Tait.)

Harold’s utterly without guile enthusiasm for all things collegiate lead him into mishaps with the dean, making a fool of himself when he finds himself accidentally on stage for a student assembly, and nearly getting killed being the tackle dummy for football practice. Harold starts off on the wrong foot and stays there, but in his idealism for being a college man, he has no idea that everything has gone wrong. The in-crowd hazes him mercilessly without his knowing it, and makes him jump through hoops just to see if he will. Harold mistakenly believes he is the most popular man on campus.


The only genuine element of Harold’s college success lies in Peggy, played by Jobyna Ralston, a co-ed he met on the train. She is, as the title card tells us, “the kind of girl your mother must have been,” in short, true blue and sweet. Peggy is a poor but honest lass who will work her way through school at the Hotel Tate as a check room girl and maid. The scene on the train is cute, when he helps her do a crossword puzzle, the clue for one word which requires them to think of suitable endearments that will fit the number of blocks, like “sweetheart” and “darling”, and the elderly couple behind them suspect they are lovers.

Harold repeats his how-do-you-do jig every time he meets someone new, and for a repetitious gag, it really gets funnier each time we see it. At a school dance, where Harold thinks he is the admiration of all, Harold defends Peggy’s honor when a masher tries to take liberties. When Harold slugs the brute, the resentful fellow lets the cat out of the bag that nobody really likes Harold, that he has been made a fool, and everyone is laughing at him. Harold discovers this is true, and the agonized facial expression depicting his realization is moving. Lloyd was not just a fantastic physical clown and athlete, he could really act.


His pain and embarrassment are acute, and we see Peggy’s heart breaking to see it. Wordlessly (yeah, I know it’s a silent movie anyway), she holds her arms out to him, and he cries in her lap. So sweet and sad, you want to shove your arms through the TV and hold him yourself. Well, all right. Maybe it’s just me.



She encourages Harold to just be himself, not to try to be kind of the campus hero for friends who are false. How much he takes in we don’t know because he still wants to be football hero.




The climax of the film takes place at the Big Game. There is footage here used from an actual stadium packed to the gills. According to the IMDb site, the football scenes were shot at Memorial Stadium in Berkeley, California between the first and second quarters of the East-West game of 1924-25. Members of the University of Southern California football team played both teams. The entire film, incidentally, was shot in sequence, which of course was unusual.



The football game of course goes wrong for dear old Tate, and when Harold the water boy at last gets to play in the final moments, he messes up in some very funny faux pas, but his pluck and his refusal to quit actually puts him in a spot where he can save the day. He does.



Now everyone on campus, all the in-crowd, all the bullies, even the crusty old football coach are imitating Harold’s how-do-you-do jig. But all Harold can think of as they ride him out of the stadium on their shoulders is his best girl.




There’s not a lot of studying or class time at dear old Tate or Tait, however you spell it. Maybe that’s why everyone from June Allyson, Peter Lawford, and Harold Lloyd went there.



Here is an interesting clip from YouTube analyzing how the famous jig was shot by means of undercranking to make it look a little faster and a lot sillier:

Bored of Education - 1936

We’re going back to school over the next two posts. First, the Little Rascals and their elementary school woes, and on Thursday, Harold Lloyd’s college hijinks.

“Bored of Education” (1936), pits the Little Rascals, known before TV serialization as Our Gang, against the First Day of School. Darla brings a shiny apple for the teacher, Porky eats it, Buckwheat is just plain funny sitting there, but the plot focuses on our heroes Alfalfa and Spanky, who are loathe to suffer The New Teacher.

They decide to get out of class by Alfalfa faking a toothache, and Spanky charged with the mercy mission bringing him home. There are suitable histrionics, slow burns, double takes, a rather nauseating sequence of misadventures with a balloon shoved into Alfalfa’s mouth to make his cheek appear swollen, and an enormous kerchief wrapped under his chin and tied over to his head to indicate he is suffering. We had this discussion once before the comments section of the “Shadow on the Wall” (1950) post about the old movie use of kerchiefs to indicate toothache.


However, The New Teacher turns out to be very pretty and buys the kids off with ice cream, so Alfalfa and Spanky worm their way back into class. Alfalfa, told he must sing before he gets his ice cream, manfully girds his loins and screeches out a tortuous rendition of “Believe Me if All Those Endearing Young Charms.”


The funniest thing about this short is that it won an Oscar. Beating out “Moscow Moods” and “Wanted-A Master” (which had to do with a dog needing to find an owner before 3 o’clock when he is scheduled to be exterminated), we can see the competition was probably not too steep. Sounds like a cakewalk, actually.

Civilian Conservation Corps Movie Fan

Above we have a photo of Priscilla Lane pasted on the inside cover of a young man’s footlocker. The footlocker was part of his equipment as a member of the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression. This particular footlocker is on exhibit at the Civilian Conservation Corps Museum in Stafford Springs, Connecticut. See my post on New England Travels for more on this museum.

It brings to mind something we discussed a month ago in this post about there being few old movies that dealt with the subject of polio. Not addressing the treatment of polio and the frantic search for a vaccine in the years in which it was so rampant and so frightening, to me is like cranking out a slew of movies during the early 1940s and hardly mentioning World War II.

Seeing the pretty young face of movie ingénue Priscilla Lane on the inside of this CCC boy’s footlocker brings another realization. I don’t believe I have seen the Civilian Conservation Corps even mentioned in a movie from the 1930s.

The film industry covered a lot that was topical back in the day, as we know, even if sometimes to gloss over issues. But to never bring up the CCC is amazing. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt initiated many programs during the Great Depression, and most were fairly controversial among Republicans in Congress, but we’ve all seen many films with the “blue eagle” logo of the NRA (National Recovery Act) plastered like an imprimatur on the end of the film. That the very controversial NRA was afterward nullified does not erase it from the history of American film of this period. Young people can still notice it, and ask what that meant.

Conversely, the CCC, though not supported by Republicans as much as by Democrats, nevertheless achieved a slight majority in favor even among Republicans. It was easily FDR’s most highly regarded program. If representing the CCC might seem too political for some studios, one would think that Warner Bros. at least would have a take on it, being more apt to present more gritty films during the Depression and stances supportive of the then current administration. They gave us “Wild Boys of the Road” (1933). There would have been a lot more wild boys of the road if not for the CCC.

The Civilian Conservation Corps put thousands of young men into thousands of outdoor camps to work in forestry, the establishing of state and national parks, conservation, public works projects, and even helped out communities during floods and fires. The money they earned that was sent home supported thousands of families during the bleakest years of the Depression and kept them from starving.

The boy who pasted Priscilla Lane’s picture in his footlocker is unknown to us. The only thing we know about him is he loved Priscilla Lane. He probably went to the movies on his pass to go to town. Maybe he went to see “Four Daughters” with Priscilla Lane, discussed here in this post.

If you know of any old movies where the CCC was depicted or even mentioned, please let us know. I’d love to know if there were any.