CURTAIN CALL (1940): Broadway producer Jeff Crandall and director Donald Avery want to get even with actress Charlotte Morley, who's leaving their employ at the end of her contract, by demanding she star in a terrible play written by the young, first-time writer Helen Middleton. Crandall and Avery believe Morley will refuse the part, thus allowing them to sue her. Unfortunately, she loves the play, forcing Avery to woo Middleton in order to let him rewrite it into a farce in order to save his and Crandall's reputation.
The idea of a middle-aged guy faking love with an innocent woman barely out of her teens sounds iffy today, but is played so absurdly that only the usual hair-trigger Twitter crowd would take offense. And while Helen Middleton proudly stands up for herself by refusing any rewrites, it's also made quite clear that her play really does stink from here to Sunday. (Avery's fast-talking press agent describes it as "a hangover on paper.") While it wouldn't necessarily work as a movie today, a smart Broadway producer could turn Curtain Call into a crowd-pleasing stage farce without having to pretend to fall in love with the writer.
BLUES IN THE NIGHT (1941): Anticipating Syncopation by a year, Blues in the Night is the story of a New Orleans-inspired band led by Jigger Pine. Only here, the musicians are playing in a New Jersey gin joint run by Sam Payras, who, along with the club's thrush Kay Grant, two-timed their cohort Del Davis after a bank robbery years earlier. Davis has returned with the band in order to open an illegal gambling room upstairs. Jigger finds himself falling hard for the no-good Kay, and takes off with her to join a money-making orchestra. After a stint in the psych ward (playing dopey music for Manhattan swells literally drives him crazy) Jigger returns to his old band in Jersey, where a showdown involving him, Del, Kay, and the bar's clean-up guy Brad Ames, turns fatal for three of them.
Jack Warner probably panicked when he saw this defiantly non-box office crew and insisted on tossing in audience favorites Jack Carson and singer/starlet Priscilla Lane as trumpet player Leo Powell and his wife named Character. (I bet ten bucks this was an in-joke by writer Robert Rossen.) While just missing the designation of "classic" by a G-major chord, Blues in the Night is definitely worth its $2.99 price on streaming services. And yes, the legendary title number was written for the movie. It lost the Academy Award for Best Song to "The Last Time I Saw Paris", which nobody sings anymore. Not-so fun fact: A decade after Blues in the Night's release, Elia Kazan, Howard da Silva, and Robert Rossen were caught up in the HUAC red scare investigation.
STOLEN FACE (1952): Take a jigger of Hitchcock's Vertigo, mix with a shot of Steve
Martin's The Man with Two Brains. Shake well and pour yourself a tangy Stolen Face. Dr. Phillip Ritter falls in love with concert pianist Alice Brent. Learning that she's engaged to another man, Ritter returns home and performs plastic surgery on Lily Conover -- a prisoner whose crime wave started after an accident left her face badly scarred -- to make her look like Alice. Of course, marriage immediately follows because, well, he's a doctor, he knows what he's doing, even when he chooses her wardrobe. But Ritter learns the hard way it takes more than a pretty face and a nice dress to change a sociopathic criminal. Oh, and guess what concert pianist returns to Ritter's life after her engagement breaks up?
The double role of Alice/Lily goes to Lizabeth Scott, who was created herself by Warner Brothers as a Lauren Bacall substitute, right down to the throaty delivery. But while she never really got the same acclaim, Scott pulls off a performance that Bacall couldn't have matched; even though her "Lily" voice was dubbed by someone else, Scott looks different in both roles even while, of course, identical. You can tell, however, Stolen Face's modest budget when, at the climactic showdown between the two women, Scott is never seen as both women in the same shot. No matter -- one of them gets what she deserves.
MACHINE GUN MCCAIN (1969): Freshly sprung from prison after 12 years, armed robber Hank McCain is offered a lucrative "job" by his 20 year-old son Jack: clean out the safe from the Royal Casino in Las Vegas. What Hank doesn't know is that Jack is working for Charlie Adamo, a Mafia lieutenant trying to take over the Royal without the permission of his bosses. But Hank has his own plans for what he's going to do with the money, while "the boys" back East are going to deal with these jokers their own way.
There's plenty in Machine Gun McCain that wouldn't fly today, like a typical boy-meets-girl scene of the time where McCain's attempted rape of Irene actually turns her on and leads to marriage the next day. McCain's plan to set off several bombs throughout Vegas to distract cops from the robbery would be condemned for inciting a round of homegrown terrorism. Probably the most interesting thing in the movie is how the Mob, still controlling Vegas in 1969, has more or less the entire population on their payroll, as everybody from cab drivers to college students are given photos of McCain and Tucker after the couple pull off the robbery.
Unlike dramas or gangster pictures, B-comedies tend to be a tough watch. But Curtain Call is the rare exception that, with 15 extra minutes and a bigger budget, could easily have passed for an A release. Barbara Read, as the clueless playwright, happily allows the rest of the cast chew the scenery as if they hadn't eaten in weeks, with Donald MacBride and Alan Mowbray (Crandall and Avery) having the biggest appetite of all. Dalton Trumbo's dialogue is so sophisticated and often hilarious that the quieter scenes with Helen Middleton and her hometown suitor John Archer seem like they were written by someone else.
BONUS POINTS: The always-welcome Frank Faylen (Dobie Gillis' father on TV) from Natzy Nuisance and Address Unknown plays the press agent, while Alan Mowbray portrayed Satan in The Devil with Hitler.
Just one of countless examples of a poster promising one thing and the movie delivering another, the semi-noir/musical Blues in the Night should have a better reputation. Director Anatole Litvak (City for Conquest) does a great job with the camera, whether using it as the keyboard's point-of-view for Jigger's hands as he plays piano, or his bizarre mental breakdown. Litvak also cast the movie with plenty of interestingly unattractive character actors: Richard Whorf as the hot-tempered Jigger; Lloyd Nolan as the slimy Del Davis; Howard da Silva as Sam Payras (who makes the mistake of wanting to drop a dime on Del); Billy Hallop, Peter Whitney, and Elia Kazan as members of the band; and, perhaps best of all, Wallace Ford as Brad, described more than once as Kay's "crippled stooge." Once an annoyingly comedic actor, Ford's talent grew as he eased into dramatic supporting roles. He gives the most subdued performance here, not exactly stealing the movie but being the most grounded in reality.
BONUS POINTS: Don Siegel, credited with the movie's montages, would later become a director, best known for Dirty Harry 30 years later.
A UK production from Hammer, and something of a preview of their later horror movies, Stolen Face makes sure we know early on that Ritter isn't some crazy doctor because... um... he doesn't charge poor patients! Therefore, it's perfectly understandable that the lovesick guy wants to physically recreate the woman he loves onto someone else's face. And he's played by Paul Henreid, the heroic fighter of Nazis in Casablanca, which only increases our sympathy, especially when Alice takes on the habit of shoplifting furs and jewelry, turning their home into her own private dance hall, and taking up with a new lover. Come to think of it, this doc is too stupid to deserve anybody's sympathy.
BONUS POINTS: A bit of production sloppiness occurs when Henreid is walking in front of a back projection of Picadilly Circus. A movie theater in the background is running Joan of Arc starring Ingrid Bergman, which was released five years earlier. And no, I don't know why this is a bonus, other than it shows what a smarty-pants I am.
If B-movies were still a thing 1969, Machine Gun McCain would have been one of them. It's one of those European productions -- in this case, Italian -- where the producers hired a couple of recognizable American actors as the leads in order to make gullible Yanks think it was a Hollywood movie. John Cassavetes (McCain) probably took the job to finance Husbands, while telling Peter Falk (Adamo), "What the hell, it's easy money and we spend a few weeks in Vegas shooting guns." They, Britt Ekland and "guest star" Gena Rowlands (Mrs. Cassavetes) pretend to take it seriously, and are probably the only actors who dubbed in their own dialogue, typical on Italian movies where it always seems like the voices are coming from somewhere other than the set.
Machine Gun McCain is no Godfather, but fits the bill if, like me, your wife is away and you're in the mood for some entertaining trash made by professionals who can at least keep the camera in focus. (By the way, if you're interested in seeing a movie that shows the genuinely ugly gangster life, watch the 1971 Michael Caine release Get Carter. It's too good for this blog.)
BONUS POINTS: Machine Gun McCain is the only movie I've ever seen where the credits admit it was "freely adapted from" rather than "based on" a novel, while the cinematographer is listed under the old school appellation of "cameraman". In fact, I don't think I've ever seen that word in any other movie.
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