George C. Scott plays a retired mob guy in Spain. It’s a beautiful, sleepy coastal town, and he’s got a fishing boat and a warily sentimental yet hardbitten prostitute (Colleen Dewhurst) for regular assignations. He’s not happy. His marriage ended with the death of their child. He’s got nothing to live for and feels he’s only pretending, just going through the motions and waiting to die, so he accepts a job that of course goes wrong—springing a young punk (Tony Musante) from prison who stops to pick up a girlfriend (Trish Van Devere). Her calculating, sympathetic, ambiguous character is a piece of work. The sizing-up that goes on between Van Devere and Scott is of course acting required by the story, but we can’t help imagining we see the electricity that would quickly make them a real-life couple with several more shared credits.

This is a film of doomed characters with the weight of imagined yet largely unexplained backstories, brought to life by good actors and spiced with excitingly staged violence that bursts into carefully paced setpieces. The young criminal is unlikable yet gradually opens up, gaining some respect for the old man while always considering him useful and expendable. It’s a road movie, and a “driver” movie (like The Driver a few years later) as opposed to a “hitman” movie (like The Mechanic, which I mention out of the million others because it has a kind of mentor/apprentice thing), and it’s kind of a Hemingway movie. Sven Nykvist shot it with an eye for placing people in limpid landscapes. Jerry Goldsmith’s moody score features a lush yet melancholy piano theme for Scott’s character.

“Crazy” and “nonsensical” would be reasonable words to describe the story of Hitting a New High, a musical comedy created as a showcase for Metropolitan Opera star Lily Pons. It’s the third and last of her RKO vehicles, all of which are unnecessary yet reveal her as a game trouper. Now available on demand from Warner Archive, this one’s directed by Raoul Walsh, a highly respected veteran best known for masculine adventures. Non-opera buffs should stay away, but Walsh’s fans will appreciate his ability to bring the right tone and pace to what could easily be a foolish mess.

The wilfully absurd story surrounds Pons with well-oiled comic characters. It begins with eccentric millionaire Lucius B. Blynn (Edward Everett Horton), who finances the Manhattan Opera (that would be the Met in disguise). He fancies himself another Frank Buck and wants to wants to bring exotic animals back alive from African safaris. Pons plays Suzette, a French nightclub singer who has a successful gig singing jazz with her domineering bandleader boyfriend (John Howard) but who yearns to star in opera. In a parody on Rima the bird-girl in the novel Green Mansions (not that anybody mentions this), she lets Blynn “discover” her in the jungle as a chirping, befeathered orphan who was raised by birds.

Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon co-starred in eight pictures at MGM, most famously Mrs. Miniver, which forever epitomized Garson as a strong, classy, stiff-upper-lip type to Pidgeon’s reliably stodgy husband. As David Shipman puts it in The Great Movie Stars: The Golden Years, “to millions of war-weary women she represented an ideal of nobility and matronhood, clear-browed, capable and unruffled: you really felt she could do her own marketing if called upon to do so.” This was a great career boon for a few years but ultimately limiting, as both actors were capable of more. They tried to prove it in Julia Misbehaves, their fifth teaming and the only comedy.

Letting her hair down, Greer Garson plays a wacky actress estranged from rich hubby Pidgeon (a Canadian who always played Englishmen). She returns to the family estate for the wedding of their daughter, played by a radiant Elizabeth Taylor, so profoundly different in her debutante era than she would be in her matron era that she doesn’t seem the same actress. It turns out the girl is marrying some reliable duffer instead of the poor but insufferable artist (Peter Lawford) who’s really meant for her. Oh well, maybe mama can encourage her to go wild by falling into lakes and suchlike antics, and maybe daughter can play “parent trap” by transparently manipulating her estranged elders.

The Red House has floated around in fuzzy public-domain prints as long as I can remember. I caught one many years ago and was convinced I’d seen a masterpiece, although it’s been hard to find sources that agree. Perhaps it will be clear to all now that one company has taken it upon itself to do a digital restoration and offer a Blu-Ray/DVD combo pack. Revisiting it in such clarity, I’m knocked out all over again.

I think the source of disappointment comes from people looking for a noir film, which it is, but only as a bucolic, romantic hybrid, like Deep Valley with Ida Lupino, or Frank Borzage’s brilliant Moonrise, all from the same period.

Seemingly shot back to back, these are snappy one-hour larks that couldn’t be more inconsequential. Fortunately, their strong working-women’s roles have kept them watchable.

In Traveling Saleslady, Joan Blondell feels enervated as the rich daughter of a toothpaste tycoon. Since daddy is a fuddy-duddy who refuses to give her a job and says women shouldn’t work, she hooks up with his chief rival. Her secret weapon is an alchohol-flavored line developed by a wacky scatterbrain (Hugh Herbert). Soon Cocktail Toothpaste is a smash, and why wouldn’t it be? Meanwhile she flirts with her father’s chief salesman (William Gargan), whom she out-maneuvers at every turn until she finally brokers two mergers at once and proposes to him. Her charms are obvious, his less so, but you couldn’t have a successful businesswoman in the movies who doesn’t fall for some chump eventually to prove she’s a real woman. The implication is that she’s going to turn domestic now, though that’s the hardest detail to swallow. She claims to know how to cook, but she surely never boiled water in her life.