February 8

Happy Birthday to James Dean, Lana Turner, Jack Lemmon, Lyle Talbot and Charles Ruggles.

I decided to watch films for Lyle Talbot. He has been in a variety of films during his career. TCM has shown his films where he is the leading actor with the great Kay Francis to the mob like villain in Bowery Boys films. No matter what age he is in films I find him very handsome.

The first film I watched was Strange Impersonation. Brenda Marshall plays a female scientist in love with a fellow male scientist. One evening she accidentally backs her car into a woman walking along the sidewalk. The woman was drunk and unhurt. Brenda gives her a ride home to make sure she is ok. That night Brenda performs an experiment on herself of a synthetic anesthesia that she created. While she is under, her assistant mixes the formula and causes an explosion. The male scientist comes back for something he left and puts out the fire. Brenda is burned and stays in the hospital for several months. When she is back home the women she hit comes to her house looking for money and pulls a gun from her purse and takes Brenda's ring and money. Brenda knocks the gun out of her hands and the women chase after the gun. They fight, the woman gets shot and falls off the balcony. The woman had Brenda's purse and ring so the police assume it is Brenda. Brenda realizes this and runs away, taking the identity of the woman who died. She goes to California where she has several surgeries over a year and gets a new face. She comes across an article where her fiancee has married her assistant and she becomes hysterical. The doctor realizes that the pictures of the woman he was given was not the same face he operated on. He said “You can change your face...but you cannot change yourself. You cannot escape the person you are.” When she can finally leave the hospital she goes back to New York to get her job and money back while still under an assumed identity a friend of the female scientist. She tries to find out what really happened. The male scientist notices that she moves and acts like his former fiancee but cannot make the connection. He asks her to go to France to be his assistant and she accepts. The wife visits her as she is packing and Brenda ends up telling her that she is the woman that everyone thinks is dead. Brenda pulls a gun to scare the woman, but she lets her leave. The ending is an overdone clique, but I won't give it away. I had to watch the film twice to see Lyle Talbot. I think that he was a cop that identified the dead woman. He had a few lines, but his face was obscured by his hat so I could not tell for sure if it was him. The film is a bit slow but it has some interesting moments.

Since it is still early I have time to watch another film, so I go through my Kay Francis collection and decide to watch Mandalay. Kay falls in love with Ricardo Cortez in Rangoon. Ricardo leaves Kay to the mercy of a night club owner Warner Oland, he dares to hit her when she complains about the situation. The singer that she is replacing states “you find out it is easier to make men do what you want them to do than it is to fall in love and have them make a fool of you. Make the most of it” which she does. She is outfitted in the best of clothing to entertain the men. There is one scene where she is in a beautiful gold gown, I wished I look that good. Every man in the place looked at her with lust in their eyes. There is a great montage where there is a circle in the middle of the screen with Kay entertains the men with drinks and dancing and they give her jewels. She gets called into the police station where the Police Captain states that he has had more complaints about her than any other woman in town, two police officers were court marshaled because of her and she is to be deported. On the boat to Mandalay she meets Lyle Talbot who is a physician going to help people deal with an epidemic. Lyle gets drunk and is unable to get to an ill baby on board and the baby dies. Turns out he was in the army and when he was drunk he operated on a cadet and the cadet died. He resigned from the army and ran away a coward, but he can't run away from himself. That is why he is going to help because he needs to do something decent. Lyle starts to get sober and falls in love with Kay. Ricardo shows up on the boat and wants to pick up with Kay where they left off. She has become her own person and does not want to get mixed up with Ricardo. She goes to find Lyle but he is drinking with other passengers. Ricardo gets word the authorities are coming for him and he hides and pretends to have committed suicide. The Captain goes to arrest Ricardo and cannot find him. The Captain is not sure if Kay killed him or if he committed suicide. The Captain tells the authorities that he committed suicide and jumped off the boat. Kay wants to go with Lyle to help with the epidemic “We are two wrecked people who need each other.” Ricardo comes out of hiding not only to pick up things again with Kay but to make her be the same type of woman she was in Rangoon. She decides to poison him because she can't go back to that kind of life. When Ricardo realizes what has happened he fights her but he looses strength and ends up falling out of the window he climbed out of the night before and falling into the sea. Kay and Lyle leave the boat the next day to begin life a new.