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May 28 movie: Strangers May Kiss. Note to self: I hate this movie. Hate. Norma Shearer and Robert Montgomery are not enough. Self, don't ever let me watch this movie again.

May 27 movie: Duffy. James Coburn stars as an aging hippie living in Tangiers who gets involved with a piracy caper with two upper-class twits. The opening credits were outstanding, and the payoff at the end, while not much of a surprise, was enjoyable. In between ... meh.

I'm not that surprised actually. We really dig James Coburn, and if this movie was as bizarrely cool as it sounded, we would have heard of it before. I probably wouldn't watch this again, but I'd go out of my way to watch the opening credits.

May 26 movie: Marriage on the Rocks. This one wasn't deliriously awful; just awful. Frank Sinatra and Deborah Kerr are an older married couple who are completely sick of each other, and Dean Martin is their best friend. They go to Mexico for a second honeymoon, and in a snit get a quickie divorce. Then they decide to get remarried, but through circumstances too wacky to describe she ends up accidently marrying Dino instead.

At this point everyone in the movie stops acting like a lovably annoying jerk, and starts acting like a repulsive asshole. Sinatra, Kerr, Dino, their kids, Kerr's mother: everyone is a complete tool. You might be able to tell that I didn't much care for Marriage on the Rocks. In the introduction Nancy Sinatra said that the government of Mexico was so offended by this movie that Frank was banned from the country after its release. He had a house in Acapulco that he was no longer able to visit. When she said that Georg and I were like, what the??? Then they got to the scenes set in Mexico, and Georg turned to me and said "Gee, I wonder why the Mexican government found this offensive?"

May 26 movie: The Kissing Bandit. Deliriously awful movie starring Frank Sinatra as a Mexican-American -- why yes, that is the first problem with this movie. Slap a dark wig on Old Blue Eyes and call him Mexican? Why not? -- anyway Frank Sinatra stars as a Mexican-American "milquetoast" (that according to the info screen) who visits Mexico and somehow gets roped into being The Kissing Bandit. Kathryn Grayson costars as his love interest, the governor's daughter.

May 25 movie: Pork Chop Hill. Really good, intense, gritty movie set in the Korean War. Gregory Peck stars as a lieutenant required to capture a hill with no strategic value, at tremendous loss to his men. The cast is full of future stars: George Peppard, Rip Torn, Martin Landau, Robert Blake, Normal Fell among others.

May 25 movie: Stalag 17. Once again, I cannot miss an opportunity to watch this movie.

May 25 movie: Nazi Interrogation Techniques. This was an Air Forces training film made during WWII. A downed flight crew are manipulated in various ways by their Nazi captors, who gradually tease enough information out of them to piece together the facts about a vital Allied attack in time to ambush it. The first time I saw this, I missed the beginning and didn't realize it was a training film. I just thought it was a B movie. Then at the end, when the base commander turns to the camera and starts explaining in detail what each airman did wrong, I was like "huh?"

We also watched a 20 minute Air Forces recruitment film starring Lt. James Stewart. The movie starts with Stewart climbing out of a North American Harvard plane, which I recognized because I had just been looking at photos of it for my dad's radio show. Stewart spends most of the movie talking about how much money you'll make if you get this job or that job, and trumpeting the fact that a college education is no longer required to join the Air Forces. There's one scene where a guy working at a gas station dreams of being a pilot, though it seems to me that someone with years of experience pumping gas into cars would probably end up ... pumping gas into airplanes.

May 24 movie: Their Own Desire. I really enjoyed this 1929 melodrama. Norma Shearer stars as a girl whose father (Lewis Stone) leaves her mother for another woman. Norma falls in love with Robert Montgomery, a boy whose mother turns out to be the new fling of her father. Confused? It makes sense while you're watching it.

The weird thing about this movie is the attitude towards divorce. Norma has a righteous scene condemning her father when she finds out about the divorce, but then the movie does a 180 and seems to suggest that it was the right thing to do. The father and his new girlfriend behave maturely and seem to be sincere about building a new life together. While the mother is so perfectly awful I couldn't blame Stone for walking out on her. Maybe I wasn't supposed to see it that way though.

May 22 movie: No More Ladies. I love this movie. Robert Montgomery and Joan Crawford star as a couple of socialites in a trainwreck of a marriage. They should never have gotten married, spend the movie humiliating each other, and seem destined for divorce at the end. And yet, somehow it's a sparkling comedy. Costars Franchot Tone as the ex-husband of one of Montgomery's previous flings, Arthur Treacher as the previous fling's new husband, Gail Patrick as Montgomery's current fling, Charlie Ruggles as Montgomery's drunken brother, and the fabulous Edna May Oliver as Crawford's cantankerous grandma. (And I almost forgot to mention the dress Crawford wears in the second half of the movie: it has this huge, weird collar that looks like a nun's wimple fell off her head and landed on her chest!)

May 12 movie: The Seventh Cross. Spencer Tracy stars as one of seven escapees from a concentration camp, who are recaptured and killed one by one, except Tracy, because he's the star. That makes it sound grim, and it kind of is. It's also a pretty inspiring story about the innate goodness of ordinary people.

Things I didn't love about this movie:
-I could really, really have done without the plot device of narration from the ghost of the first escapee to die. The ghost sort of hovers over the story mumbling platitudes about the strength of the human spirit. Ugh.
-Tracy was a terrific actor, but no acting could make his stocky build any less ridiculous as a recent inmate of a concentration camp. He looked like someone who should lay off the ham sandwiches, not someone who had been starved by the Nazis for three years. It required a suspension of disbelief that I wasn't able to muster.

Things I did love about this movie:
-Tracy's acting was genuinely tremendous. He conveys a character who starts out embittered, desperate and half-dead, and ends up inspired and inspiring. And he does it without dialogue for the first part of the movie.
-The surprise joy of the movie was Hume Cronyn as a likeable joe who shows unexpected heroism. I just looked up this movie on IMDB and found out that Cronyn's wife was played by Jessica Tandy, who was his wife in real-life!

May 12 movie: The Great Lie. I love this movie. Mary Astor is the perfect foil to Bette Davis. Oh yeah, and George Brent is in it too. And Hattie McDaniel, as the maid in some strange alternate universe where 1930s Maryland is exactly the same as the antebellum deep South (down to the live oaks and Spanish moss). Was McDaniel ever in a movie where she didn't play the maid? She was a great actress and someday I would like to see her get to do something besides wait on the stars.

May 1 movie: Dancing Lady. Fred Astaire's first movie! He plays himself and is only in it for a few minutes. The stars of the movie are Joan Crawford as the titular dancing lady, and Clark Gable and Franchot Tone as two guys vying for her.

The plot is that Crawford gets a job starring in a Broadway show, and it's kind of ridiculous to have everyone falling all over themselves about what a brilliant dancer she is (for one thing, she looks at her own feet almost continually), but it allows her to do two numbers with "Freddy" Astaire, who costars in her show. Unfortunately Astaire doesn't get to do much; like Eleanor Powell dancing with Jimmy Stewart in Born to Dance, he has to tone it way down so Crawford can keep up. The best part is they do a dance number where they ride a magic carpet to Bavaria and sing about beer. Fred Astaire seems like the unlikeliest person in show business to sing a song about beer: he's better suited to evening jackets and champagne cocktails. And yet, I always love the beer songs. The one in The Bandwagon has Oscar Levant bellowing "More beer!" and somehow pronouncing "more" with four syllables, but this one has Astaire wearing lederhosen. That's a tough call.

May 1 movie: Tunnel of Love. This movie, starring Doris Day and Richard Widmark as a young couple trying to adopt a baby, was a seething mass of ugly gender stereotypes. Ten minutes in I was so offended I wanted to put my foot through the screen. After half an hour it was just hilarious.

I recommend this movie if you're a huge Doris Day fan, you're intrigued by the sheer weirdness of Richard Widmark as a neurotic, weak-spirited husband, or if you're amused by the ugly gender stereotypes of the late 50s.

April 30 movie: Born to Dance. Another outing for Eleanor Powell and Buddy Ebsen. This one costars Jimmy Stewart, Virginia Bruce, Una Merkel and Sid Silvers, and includes music by Cole Porter and a really ridiculous plot. Stewart, Ebsen and Silvers play Navy men, which leads to a scene where Virginia Bruce's pomeranian dog falls over the side of a battleship, then two hundred sailors leap in after it, and somehow it isn't hurt.

Ebsen doesn't have any dance numbers as inspired as "Sing Before Breakfast," but he does get some nice moves in this ensemble number to a very, very lesser Cole Porter song:

Skip to about 2:30 to see Ebsen sing to and dance with Frances Langford, or watch the whole thing to see Eleanor Powell dancing (sort of -- she has to tone it way down so Stewart can keep up) and some charmingly terrible singing by Stewart. In the intro Robert Osborne said this movie was painful for Stewart to watch because of his singing voice. I'd probably also be horrified if I had to sing in public, much less in a movie, and my singing voice can't be as bad as his was. I really felt for him doing "Easy to Love." Not an easy song even for a talented singer. They had intended to dub his singing, as was commonly done at the time -- Powell is dubbed by Marjorie Lane in this movie. But the dubbing sounded really fake because Stewart's speaking voice is so distinctive. So they had Stewart do his own singing.

You can really tell Powell had ballet training by some of her dance moves. She does this one thing (in another number not on Youtube) where she kicks up until her foot touches her head -- ankle actually, she had long legs -- and then she bends over backward with her foot still in the air. Simply amazing.