Out of the Blue (Bryan Foy Productions, Eagle-Lion Pictures, 1947)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

TCM followed that with a series of movies featuring George Brent, who according to Bette Davis was so drop-dead gorgeous in person that just about every woman who met him (including Davis herself) immediately wanted him – but unlike Rudolph Valentino and Marilyn Monroe, who according to people who knew them were no more than ordinarily attractive in person but who dazzled them on screen, Brent’s charisma didn’t reproduce well on film and he was never all that great an actor, either. The film of his I watched last night was made relatively late in his career – 1947 – and was called Out of the Blue, directed by Leigh Jason and an attempt to revive the screwball comedy genre in a moviemaking (and moviegoing) world that had pretty much passed it by. Brent plays Arthur Earthleigh, a married man who lives in a swanky apartment overlooking Washington Square Park in New York (the film starts with a shot of the famous arch, a copy of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, and it takes a while for us to realize that this is the New York version, not the Paris original). His wife Mae (Carole Landis, in her third from last film before her suicide in 1948 at age 29) is a stuffy woman who thoroughly dominates him and insists that their neighbor David Galleo (Turhan Bey) get rid of his dog Rabelais because he’s buried a bone in the zinnias she’s grown on her balcony. Arthur is able to use his connections with the city and the landlord to get Galleo a notice: either he gets rid of his dog in the next 24 hours or he’ll be evicted.


Galleo is a commercial artist who draws and paints women in swimsuits, and when Deborah Tyler (Virginia Mayo, second-billed and quite effective in a sexy comedy role) visits him, he assumes she’s his latest model and immediately tells her, “Take off your clothes.” He adds that if she didn’t bring a swimsuit she can fetch one from his closet. Eventually it develops that she saw Galleo’s dog Rabelais win a best-of-show contest and decided that she wanted her bitch, Xantippe, to mate with him and produce puppies for sale. Needless to say, Galleo and Tyler decide over time that they’re attracted to each other – only both their relationship and the Earthleighs’ marriage are nearly derailed by Olive Jensen (Ann Dvorak), a “party girl” who inveigles her way into Arthur’s life while his wife is out of town for the weekend. She works as an interior designer with a roommate and immediately insists, once she gets into Arthur’s apartment, on redecorating the whole place. She previously steered Arthur into a nightclub where he drank alcoholic beverages for what we’re apparently supposed to be the first time (this part of the plot sounds like The Blue Gardenia with the genders reversed), and they hang out there while the great Black boogie-woogie pianist and singer Hadda Brooks entertains with the film’s title song, “Out of the Blue,” by Will Jason and Henry Nemo. It’s not much of a song – hardly at the level of “The Blue Gardenia,” performed in the film of that title by Nat “King” Cole (and also recorded by Dinah Washington) – and I was sorry that Brooks didn’t get to do either one of her boogie specialties or “That’s My Desire,” which she recorded for Modern Music Records in 1946, a year before Frankie Laine covered it and it became his star-making hit.

Nonetheless, Olive invites herself to Arthur’s apartment, polishes off a bottle of brandy he seems to have been saving for special guests and people he needs to entertain for his business, since supposedly he doesn’t (or didn’t) drink himself. While all this is happening, both Arthur and Galleo are being spied on by two old women whose deck overlooks theirs, Miss Spring (Elizabeth Patterson) and Miss Ritchie (Julia Dean), and also there’s a serial killer preying on women out alone at night in Greenwich Village. When Olive passes out on Arthur’s balcony, Miss Spring and Miss Ritchie immediately jump to the wrong conclusion and Arthur at first thinks she’s dead and he’ll be suspected not only of having an affair with her but being the Greenwich Village killer. So he dumps the body on Galleo’s deck next door, whereupon the old busybodies call the police and the officer who answers, Detective Noonan (Richard Lane, irascible as usual), discovers that Olive is alive and chews out Galleo for filing a false police report. Galleo decides to get revenge on Arthur by setting him up to believe that Olive is really dead, and he’ll be accused of her murder if they don’t actively dispose of her body. For a “body” Galleo uses an old posing model mannequin and makes it up to look like Olive (so this was the second movie in a row on TCM’s schedule that used a life-sized replica of a real woman to embarrass a man.) Galleo dumps the body into a trunk and persuades Arthur to help him bury it – with Deborah insisting on coming along. Of course there’s a driving rainstorm at their chosen burial ground (right behind the Best Friends Kennel where Galleo has temporarily stored Rabelais) as Arthur rather haplessly digs enough of a grave to accommodate the trunk.

Once they get home the real Olive has come to and is walking around, and Arthur is understandably convinced he’s seeing a ghost, while Deborah sees her and is convinced Galleo has returned to his old bed-’em–and-leave-’em ways towards women and breaks up with him … only temporarily, of course, as Arthur’s wife returns from her vacation, hopping mad that Arthur was two minutes late meeting her at the train station and even madder when she finds Olive. Arthur assures her that nothing illicit happened – of course, in a Production Code movie nothing illicit could have happened – and he “grows a pair,” as the saying goes, telling his wife that all the ugly shit she’s accumulated in their apartment is going and he’s hiring Olive’s firm to redecorate. He also insists that he actually likes dogs and he’s going to get himself one – the pick of the first litter Rabelais and Xantippe are going to have now that both they and their owners are permanently together as couples – though, oddly, while we’ve never seen Xantippe we’ve been told that they’re both purebreds, yet the dog Arthur finally ends up with is a whole different breed and doesn’t look like Rabelais at all. Directed by Leigh Jason from a script by a weirdly assorted trio of writers – Laura author Vera Caspary, who wrote the original story, and her collaborators on the actual script, Walter Bullock and Edward Eliscu (I don’t know who Bullock was or what else he did, but Eliscu was mostly a lyric writer who worked with Vincent Youmans on the songs for the first Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers film, Flying Down to Rio), Out of the Blue (not to be confused with two much better movies from the same era, the well-known film noir Out of the Past and the quite interesting and little-known Out of the Night, an engaging reworking of Hamlet in modern dress written by Adele Commandini, directed by Edgar G. Ulmer and made at PRC) was a production of Eagle-Lion Pictures, the studio formed after J. Arthur Rank bought PRC to ensure himself a guaranteed American outlet for his British productions instead of having to sell them catch-as-catch-can to U.S. studios.

In addition to using Eagle-Lion as an outlet for high-prestige Rank productions like Michael Powell’s and Emeric Pressburger’s ballet movie The Red Shoes (1948), Rank also put more money into PRC’s own films and raised their budgets enough so they could now afford “B”-list stars instead of the “C”-list (or below) from which PRC’s old management had had to cast. Alas, the “A”-list still remained out of reach for him financially and contractually – through much of Out of the Blue I was thinking of how much funnier it would have been with David Niven in George Brent’s role and Cary Grant in Turhan Bey’s – though Bey, who came surprisingly close to breaking the limits of roles usually open to people of color in classic Hollywood, is personable and quite effective in the part. (In some of the early scenes he’s wearing a pair of white shorts and nothing else below the waist but shoes, and he had quite a nice ass.) Indeed, with Brent and Dvorak in front of the cameras and co-producer Bryan Foy (former head of the Warner Bros. “B” unit) behind them, Out of the Blue sometimes seems like a Warners picture in exile. Out of the Blue is a nicely done movie, though it’s hardly at the level of the great screwball comedies of the 1930’s – and at least part of its problem is Ann Dvorak. In a role one of the great screwball queens of the previous decade – Stanwyck, Colbert, Hepburn, Lombard – could have played superbly, Dvorak is just annoying. She never quite made up her mind whether her character should be immature or bitchy, so she tried to do both. Her best films from the early 1930’s, like Three on a Match and the original Scarface, hardly prepared her for a role in a loony comedy that cast her as the free spirit who lights a fire under the stolid George Brent and gets him to take charge of his life – though an imdb.com reviewer who signed themselves “mystery” had totally the opposite opinion from mine: “Once she was introduced to the story the movie picked up... and she stole every scene.” If she did, it was only because the other actors were ganging up on her and forcing her to give it back!