To Thine Own Celt Be True

Aye and begorrah! If it isn't everyone's favorite swashbuckler* Tyrone Power playing the part of one Stephen Fitzgerald in the 1948 film The Luck of the Irish. And is not it just great that Fitzgerald just happens to be an Irish-American freelance journalist -- not to be confused with one F. Scott Fitzgerald -- who has gone back to the old sod on his way back to New York from Europe? And who should he come across in this odd enchanted land save a not so wee member of the wee folk (played by Cecil Kellaway). A leprechaun, that is, who looks uncannily like the guy who played Veronica Lake's father in I Married a Witch.

Fortunately, Power's adventures with the supernatural prove a lot more benign in this movie than Fredric March's were in I Married a Witch. If anything, one may say they prove too benign. Fitzgerald wins over the trust and affection of a centuries-old shoemaker so quickly that one might be tempted to dismiss the whole affair as a load of cobblers.

But then Fitzgerald meets Nora (played by Anne Baxter), a local colleen whose charm is such that she may be a supernatural being as well. Unfortunately, Fitzgerald is also engaged to a rich American girl named Frances (played by Jayne Meadows) and has promised to take a job with her father David Augur (played by Lee J. Cobb), a powerful newspaperman seeking to make a run for the Senate. Fitzgerald does not agree with many of David Augur's political stands but he finds the combination of Frances' glamour and her father's money to be a powerful temptation.

Of course, one does not have to have seen many American movies to guess whom Fitzgerald will choose when he is forced to decide between the poor and humble Nora and the not-so-poor and not-so-humble Frances. But I must admit I found the way to that decision to be quite interesting. However, I did find it unusual to see a movie made in the Yankee Doodle Dandy era which actually encouraged the audience to cheer on a fellow who ultimately chose to emigrate back to his ancestral homeland rather than to stay and make a go of it in America -- moreover, one which encouraged the audience to applaud his decision to pass over a nice red-blooded American girl in favor of some foreigner.

Then again, if I had a certain bright-eyed colleen waiting for me in the Emerald Isle, I would be tempted to make the same choices Stephen Fitzgerald ultimately made -- and I would not need any supernatural intervention to help me make up my mind.

* Apart from Errol Flynn, natch.

Trailer of the Week: Miracle on 34th Street (1947)

I always thought this was a good movie. However, if Anne Baxter likes it, it must be a great one...

Hades Can Wait

Wow! Apparently I’m in the mood for a Paul Muni film festival this week. How else to explain the way I went from one movie in which Muni played a gangster (1932’s Scarface) to yet another movie in which he plays a gangster (1946’s Angel on My Shoulder).

The premise of Angel on My Shoulder seems at first glance so silly I am surprised it worked. Paul Muni plays a Scarface-like gangster -- surprise, surprise -- named Eddie Kagle who gets out of prison only to be murdered by his own henchman. He immediately goes to Hell where he proves remarkably short on the uptake for such a streetsmart guy. Although he is in a region full of fire and brimstone, it does not occur to him where he might be until after he talks to just not one but two fellow inmates -- a brash young woman who was run over by a car and a talkative old man who admits to having poisoned his young wife.

Kagle prides himself on being an expert on prison breaks and he immediately plots to break out of Hell despite facing formidable odds. Fortunately, he catches the eye of the Devil (played by Claude Rains in a bit of diabolically inspired casting). The Devil has a grudge against an American judge who is steadily reducing the number of potential candidates for Hell, and since Kagle is a physical match for said judge and since the Devil hates judicial do-gooders almost as much as he hates cold temperatures, he plots to use Kagle against the judge.

The Devil talks Kagle into volunteering to escape from Hell in return for agreeing to possess the judge’s body. Kagle goes along in the hope of getting a chance to avenge himself on his murderer only to find himself falling for the judge’s girlfriend Barbara Foster (played by Anne Baxter). Complications arise and Kagle not only ends up foiling the Devil’s best made plans, but gets persuaded to join the other team, so to speak.

Is there a happy ending? Not quite. But the ending is not quite sad either. Some bad people get their just desserts, the judge’s reputation avoids ruin and Kagle even manages to pull one over on the Prince of Lies.

Is his victory a permanent one? Well, no one involved with this film ever saw fit to make a sequel so I guess we will never find out. But it would be quite heavenly to think so.