Do Exactly As I Say (Champlain Media, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, August 24) my husband Charles and I watched a Lifetime movie called Do Exactly As I Say, woefully inadequately represented on imdb.com that gives much of the crew – including director Wendy Ord and writer Joy Nicole Fox – but only two actors, and neither is listed by the character names (though after you’ve seen the film it’s not hard to figure out who they are). Helen (Erin Karpluk) is a young organic chef who’s won a job as a private cook for Roman Durant, who runs a high-tech green energy company that has just developed a new technology called Palermo that is expected to transform the world. Durant has an equally glossy wife named Ardanelle, or something like that, and Helen’s direct supervisor on Durant’s household staff is a woman named Tiffany. The film opens with a chilling scene in which a blonde woman is driving at night when suddenly all the controls on her car stop working. Unable to get the car to move, she’s hit and killed by a passing fire truck. When the authorities investigate, they find nothing wrong with the car and assume she committed suicide. The scene then cuts to Helen, a widow, giving a 10th birthday party for her daughter Poppy, who confesses that for her last birthday wish she wished that her mom find a job. (The actress playing Poppy looks more like 13 or 14 than 10, but that’s a common enough movie failing we’ll let that pass.) Poppy walks home from school one afternoon and forgets to lock the door behind her, and when Helen returns home from work she finds that Poppy is gone and her stuffed giraffe is gone with her. Helen suspects that Poppy has been kidnapped, and she gets confirmation of that when a mysterious and heavily filtered voice phones her and tells her she will have to do three tasks to get her daughter back alive, sort of like the legendary 12 labors of Hercules. Helen pleads with the kidnapper at least to be given the whole list of tasks at once, but she’s told no, they will be doled out one by one. Of course, Helen also gets the standard-issue kidnappers’ warnings not to call the police or to tell anyone.

It turns out all the instructions relate to Durant’s personal and professional secrets. The first one is to hack his computer (fortunately the mystery voice has all his passwords, which alone should have let Helen know it’s a job from inside Durant’s household) and download a file containing all the extant photos of Durant in flagrante delicto with all his extra-relational partners. The second is similarly to download, this time onto a thumb drive (which leads to the same sort of silly high-tech suspense sequence that ended John Grisham’s The Firm: will she get all the files copied before the bad guys catch her?), a set of published reports indicating that the Durant company, belying its self-created image as environmental saviors, is actually generating massive amounts of toxic waste and dumping them in poor neighborhoods. (Once again, I found myself wondering why this was being portrayed as some deep, dark secret that would ruin Durant’s company when all the articles seem to have come from already published sources.) Meanwhile, we’ve seen Helen’s boss Tiffany on her car phone actually giving Helen the instructions through a heavily filtered voice – until her car stops working the same way the anonymous victim’s (whom we’ve since learned is a former Durant employee named Julie) did in the first act. Ultimately Tiffany’s car veers off a side road into a ravine below, killing her. But that doesn’t stop the instructions from the kidnapper. Helen’s third task is to murder Roman Durant – which she has no intention of doing until the kidnapper leaves Poppy’s stuffed giraffe on her car with a note attached saying, “Roman or Poppy. You decide.” Accordingly she takes an herb and inserts it into Roman’s ice cubes while they have a steak dinner with servings of whiskey. Helen gives Roman a preposterous excuse that she’s always been trained to drink “straight,” so Roman throws the ice cubes from her glass and gives her a straight shot instead. Roman collapses during the dinner and Helen takes a photo of him and sends it to the kidnapper to prove that Roman is dead.

Then Helen learns that Poppy has been in the Durants’ home all this time and the real mastermind behind the plot was [spoiler alert!] Roman’s wife Ardanelle, who was determined first to destroy Roman’s company and his reputation and then get rid of him and frame Helen to take the fall. Only Roman isn’t dead – whatever it was Helen gave him merely incapacitated him instead of killing him – and there’s the predictable final confrontation during which Roman sneaks up behind Ardanelle and grabs her gun, she draws a knife on him, the two kill each other and then the police (previously called by Ardanelle on 911 as part of her plot to frame Helen for Roman’s murder) arrive and take both Helen and Poppy (who begs them for an ambulance ride) out of the situation. There’s a finale in which Helen has sold her house and is moving to Portland (the whole story takes place in Oregon, but it’s not clear where Durant’s home and offices were, though Eugene seems likely), where Helen has lined up a job at an actual restaurant instead of a private home. David (Philip Prajoux), Roman’s original right-hand man and old college buddy until Roman fired him for reasons director Ord and writer Fox kept ambiguous (though they did a pretty good job of setting David up as a red herring), comes up to them as they’re moving out. He confesses that he’s long been romantically interested in Helen and also informs her that the board of directors of the Durant company has hired him as the new CEO, now that Mr. and Mrs. Durant have eliminated each other and he’s got the best chance of anybody to rehabilitate the company’s destroyed reputation, and there’s a hint of a future relationship between them.

Aside from the ultra-limited information online about it, Do Exactly As I Say is a frustrating movie given how many plot holes it contains. There are some neat things about it, including Helen’s rather futile struggle for privacy as she takes the phone calls from the kidnapper while alone – just about everyone in Roman’s inner circle keeps walking in on her just as she’s in the middle of a high-stakes conversation with the kidnapper – and the whole gimmick of the car being operated by remote control so the driver no longer has command of it is just a higher-tech version of the separate set of pedals villain Steve Cochran had in the back seat of his car in the 1946 film The Chase through which he could take command from the nominal driver and control how fast the car would go, though not in which direction. Do Exactly As I Say had the makings of a first-rate thriller (and the writing of Roman as something of an Elon Musk clone is nicely done even though, with the Trump counter-revolution in full swing, the idea that a major ultra-rich oligarch would be seeking his fortune in alternative energy and presenting himself as the environment’s ultimate savior seems horrendously dated), but much of Fox’s script literally makes no sense. The film’s biggest improbability is why Ardanelle would be working so hard to destroy her husband’s reputation when even if she did kill him and get away with it, her investment would be worth a lot less than it would have been if her husband’s dirty secrets had stayed secret. Also, it’s hard to get worked up about these people when we’re given so little information about who they are and what their motives are, either for good or ill.

Arson, Inc. (Lippert Pictures, Exclusive Films, 1949)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After we watched the Lifetime movie Do Exactly As I Say on Sunday, August 24 my husband Charles and I watched another late-1940’s “B” cheapie on YouTube: Arson, Inc., a 1949 Lippert production directed by William Berke from an “original” story by Arthur Caesar and a script by William Tombragel. William Berke had an interesting career arc: he began in independent films (mostly cheap Westerns) in the 1930’s, won an RKO contract in the 1940’s and did most of the later Falcon-series films with Tom Conway, ended up working on TV series in the 1950’s and did a quick indie comeback with the first two Ed McBain 92nd Precinct novels, Cop Hater and The Mugger (both 1958) before his sudden death on February 15, 1958 at age 54. From the YouTube synopsis I’d assumed Arson, Inc. would be a film about a wide-ranging syndicate who hired itself out to start fires for people who wanted to commit insurance fraud, but the intrigue turned out to be considerably smaller-scaled than that. It was introduced in a narration by an authority figure sitting at a desk just like the old MGM Crime Does Not Pay shorts. Said authority figure is the Los Angeles Fire Department chief (William Forrest), who in the opening gives us some statistics about the value of property lost to fire every year and stresses the importance of the fire department’s arson squad. Then he introduces the film’s lead, firefighter Joe Martin (Robert Lowery, a year after he became the screen’s second Batman in the 1948 Spencer Gordon Bennet serial Batman and Robin), who’s just risen through the fire department and is being offered a chance to join the arson squad.

He got the job largely because he was on the crew that fought a fire in a fur warehouse whose owner, Thomas Peyson (Byron Foulger, who was a specialist at playing oily small-time villainy, as he does here), claimed to have lost $50,000 work of mink pelts – only Martin discovered scraps of fur that turned out to be just rabbit and muskrat. Deducing that Peyson first moved all his truly valuable furs somewhere else and then set the fire and filed a false claim, Martin is assigned to surveil Peyson’s insurance agent, Frederick P. Fender (Douglas Fowley, who usually played gangsters but turned in a marvelous performance as the male lead in Steve Sekely’s Lady in the Death House and got to be in a major movie as the harried director in Singin’ in the Rain). Later Martin discovers that Peyson filed another insurance claim for a fire, this one in his apartment, that supposedly destroyed his wife’s $30,000 fur coat. Martin goes to Peyson’s apartment and the Peysons are out, but their baby-sitter Jane Jennings (Anne Gwynne) greets him guardedly at the door and makes him show his firefighter’s I.D. before she’ll let him in. Of course, once they see each other it’s love at first sight, complicated by the fact that she rooms with her grandmother (Maude Eburne) and the first time Martin goes to see her at her place he runs into grandma instead and kisses and hugs her. Martin notices that Fender has assigned one of his gang, Pete Purdy (Ed Brophy), to tail him. Seeking to go undercover and ingratiate himself with the gang,

Martin befriends Purdy and they go to an underground bookie joint where horse races are broadcast on TV (still a relative novelty in 1949; the TV is a Stromberg-Carlson and I wondered if the company paid a product placement fee, a practice that was just starting in 1949). Martin is lamenting at how little he makes as a firefighter, and just then the joint is raided and Martin punches out the police officer who tries to arrest him. The incident is recorded by a newspaper photographer and published on the front page, which leads the chief to fire Martin – though, as anyone who’s seen the 1936 film Bullets or Ballots (or any ot the others who ripped off this gimmick, including
Across the Pacific and Desperate Journey) can guess, it’s all a ruse to make it look like Martin is disgraced and open to criminal employment. Fender offers him a heist job that involves stripping a warehouse of its valuables and then setting it on fire, but fortunately Martin is able to get word to both the police and fire departments in time. There’s a shootout in which the bad guys shoot and kill Martin’s contact on the police force, but in the end Fender and his vampy secretary Bobby (Marcia Mae Jones) are killed in a car crash on a darkened road with a police car chasing them, while the fire department successfully puts out the blaze and arrests the remaining bad guys. Though Arson, Inc. is a hardly original story – both the plot and the cast list seem like compendia of things that were already annoyingly clichéd in the 1930’s – it’s at least a coolly efficient one and quite a bit better than Fingerprints Don’t Lie, also a Lippert film. And at least it has an orchestral score instead of the dippy organ accompaniment of Fingerprints Don’t Lie; Raoul Kraushaar is credited with the score with our old PRC friend David Chudnow gets a credit as “music director.”

Girl in the Cellar (PF Maple Productions, Studio TF1 America, Lifetime, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, August 23) Lifetime ran a “world premiere” TV-movie called Girl in the Cellar, which unlike their other “Girl in the … ” movies did not appear to be based on a true story. Directed by Robert Adetuyi from a script by Eva Gonzalez Szigriszt (alas, imdb.com has no biographical information about her and therefore I don’t have a clue as to where that tongue-twisting name comes from), it begins with a Black woman named Rebecca West (Kyla Pratt) looking down at her daughter Lory (Kelcey Mawema), whom she’s locked in the titular cellar for six months because on the evening of the high-school prom Lory sneaked out of Rebecca’s house to attend the 18th birthday party of her sort-of boyfriend Austin (a great hunk of man-meat named Kyle Clark). Rebecca is looking down at Lory from the entrance to the cellar and telling her that Lory has to die so Rebecca can survive. Then we flash back six months earlier, and though for the first act Rebecca simply looks like your garden-variety overprotective mother, she quickly turns into the Psycho Bitch from Hell. First she gets mad at Lory for not telling her she’s been kicked out of her assignment as captain of the school’s women’s track team, then she gets even angrier when she finds that Austin has asked Lory to be his date at the prom (for which Lory was on the organizing committee and mom was also involved as one of the chaperones), and she gets angrier still when Lory returns from Austin’s 18th birthday party even though she’s sober (naturally the party was full of red plastic cups, which in a Lifetime movie is usually a sign that underage drinking is going on) and still has her virginity. (Austin is white, but it’s nice that whatever objections Rebecca has to him, the fact that they’d be an interracial couple is not one of them.) Also Lory hopes that if she does well enough in her final school track meets she’ll get a full-ride scholarship to UCLA, but Rebecca is dead set against that because it’ll mean Lory leaving their home in Michigan and going to school halfway across the country.

So Rebecca forces Lory to take a ride with her to an old abandoned house on the outskirts of town. She tells Lory she just needs some help going through old things in the cellar, which was built by Rebecca’s parents as a fallout shelter in the early 1960’s (when fallout shelters were briefly a “thing”), but when they get there Rebecca literally locks her daughter in and tells her she’s going to keep her there at least until the prom is over. One of the things that sparked this was that Rebecca confiscated Lory’s phone and saw a text on it from Austin suggesting that the two run away to California together. Austin is an industrious kid who’s been working as a landscape gardener for two years, and Rebecca at first threatens to call the police on him when he starts turning up at the Wests’ home. Rebecca adds Munchhausen’s syndrome by proxy to her other mental illnesses when she goes to the media and becomes a crusader for herself and other parents of children who’ve gone missing. She cries a lot of crocodile tears on various TV interviews about how Lory was literally her dream child – for years she and her husband had tried to have a baby, only her husband died while Rebecca was still pregnant with Lory and she decided to raise Lory as a single parent and give her the advantages Rebecca herself had never had from her own abusive parents. Rebecca even went back to church to thank God for bringing her Lory (at different times in the film, both Kyla Pratt and Kelcey Mawema sing “This Little Light of Mine” in church services). The film expertly cuts between Rebecca’s public persona as the grieving mother and her private reality as her daughter’s tormentor. She’s mounted a red security camera on the wall of the cellar, through which she can not only spy on Lory at any time but speak to her in almost godlike tones.

At first Rebecca tells the attendees at the prom that Lory caught sick at the last minute and couldn’t go. Instead Rebecca shows up at the prom for her chaperone gig in the same red dress she bought for Lory to attend, and Austin sneaks up behind her and taps her on the shoulder thinking she’s Lory. (I’d been questioning the casting of two such similar-looking actresses as Kyla Pratt and Kelcey Mawema as mother and daughter – Pratt looked more like Mawema’s older sister than her mother – but the visual similarity between the two becomes an important plot point later on.) At one point Rebecca lowers a pen and paper to Lory and forces her to write a note reading that she ran away from home but is tired and wants to come back, and Lori does so in hopes that will get her mom to let her out. But no sooner does Rebecca have the note that she gets an invitation to speak at a mayor’s luncheon on the subject of missing children, and she crumples the note and throws it away because it’s no longer needed. While they’re working together on the search for Lory (of course, mom knows exactly where she is!) Rebecca and Austin form a modus vivendi. Austin shows up one morning to start mowing Rebecca’s lawn, and we get some nice look-sees of Kyle Clark’s shirtless (and, alas, hairless – you can’t have everything) body as he works. Eventually Rebecca invites him in for iced tea, and just when you’re thinking, “Oh, no, they’re not going to have Rebecca seduce Austin,” they have Rebecca seduce Austin. (It’s an interesting inversion of the central premise of Lolita: instead of the older partner romancing the mother to get close to the underage daughter he really has the hots for, it’s the younger man screwing his missing girlfriend’s mother to get closer to her.)

Unfortunately, the next morning Rebecca’s scheme starts to unravel when, getting ready to leave Rebecca’s home after their tryst, Austin spots Rebecca’s laptop and sees a scene of someone who looks like Lory being held prisoner in a cellar. He reports this to the police, only the woman detective on the case (Heather Doerksen) tells him they need more evidence and Austin needs to keep hanging around Rebecca’s place to get some. Meanwhile, Lory has hooked up a storage battery in the cellar to some lights so she can read, and she finds [spoiler alert!] an old diary Rebecca kept when she was being held prisoner in that same cellar by her own abusive parents. After finding no online presence for “Rebecca West” anywhere in the cloud, the detective finally realizes that Rebecca might have been using another name before her marriage to Lory’s father, and she finds a copy of the marriage certificate that gives Rebecca’s maiden name: Johnson. Then she traces news reports of a fire at the house where the cellar is located, which Rebecca had never bothered to have rebuilt even though she owned it after the deaths of her parents. The report explains that the fire was arson and Rebecca was the prime suspect; obviously she burned her parents alive to escape their maniacal control. While all this is happening, Rebecca has decided that she needs Lory to die, so she stops sending in the food packets (designed for astronauts) that are the only things she’s been giving Lory to eat, intending to starve her. The woman detective and a squad of police ultimately go to the old address and rescue Lory in the proverbial nick of time.

Girl in the Cellar is a rather odd movie, powerful and moving in some aspects and pretty silly in others. The biggest mystery about it is why Rebecca suddenly turns from mother to monster, from declaring her love for Lory to abusing her in this extravagant fashion; the revelation that her own parents similarly abused her offers a partial but not totally fulfilling explanation. (It also comes a bit too close for my comfort to what I call the vampire theory of child abuse: that abused kids become abusers themselves when they grow up and have children of their own.) Where the film really scores is in Kyla Pratt’s performance. She expertly captures the character in all her moods: the psychopathic monster she is underneath, the grieving-mother façade she puts on in public, even the seductress taking advantage of Austin’s combination of lovestruck boyfriend (that’s the real reason casting director Lindsay Chag had to pick two strikingly similar-looking actresses for the leads; they had to look close enough in age that Austin’s willingness to fuck Rebecca because he really wants to fuck Lory would be believable) and horny teenage straight boy. Girl in the Cellar isn’t a great movie even by Lifetime standards, but Kyle Pratt’s incredible acting skills make Rebecca a believable character even though through much of it she looks and acts so much like a wicked witch we could think she’s auditioning to play Elphaba in Wicked. It’s also the sort of movie that ends just when it’s beginning to get interesting: one would like to know how the rescued Lory would adjust after having lost six months of her life at her mother’s hands, and whether she and Austin got back together or whether the trauma of knowing Austin had sex with Lory’s ultra-abusive mom would destroy their subsequent chances at a relationship.

Fingerprints Don't Lie (Sigmund Neufeld Productions, Spartan Productions, Lippert Pictures, 1951)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles came home about midway through last night’s (Saturday, August 23) Lifetime movie and later we watched a film together from YouTube: Fingerprints Don’t Lie (1951), a sort of PRC production in exile since the producer, Sigmund Neufeld; the director, Sam Newfield (they were brothers, but Sam “Anglicized” the name and Sigmund didn’t); and the cinematographer, Jack Greenhalgh, were all PRC stalwarts. Having been cut adrift when J. Arthur Rank took over PRC in 1947 and changed its name to Eagle-Lion to symbolize the union of American and British interests (Rank wanted a guaranteed U.S. distributor for his British films and had an enormous hit off the bat with the 1948 ballet melodrama The Red Shoes), the Newfields (including Sigmund’s son Stanley Neufeld, who gets a credit as second-unit or assistant director) set off to make movies for whatever cheap-jack producer would have them. Fingerprints Don’t Lie begins in the middle of the murder trial of Paul Moody (Richard Emory) for allegedly killing the city’s reform mayor, Wendell Palmer (Ferris Taylor), by clubbing him to death with a telephone. (The earliest example I know of with a telephone as a murder weapon was Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel, written in 1928, filmed in 1932, and apparently based on a real-life case Baum had read about.)

The chief witness against him is forensic expert James Stover (Richard Travis, top-billed), who reports and testifies in court that he lifted five perfect fingerprints off the phone that were an obvious match to Moody’s. After the trial, a reporter comes up to Stover and asks how it feels for him to have killed another person, perfectly legally. Stover starts to have second thoughts about the case when he’s lobbied to reopen it by Carolyn Palmer (Sheila Ryan), the late Mayor’s daughter. But he’s torn between his personal doubts that Moody, an artist with a growing reputation for cheesecake (we see him with two models, including one played by an actress billed merely as Syra – her full name was Syra Marty – with a thick but nationalistically unclassifiable accent) who allegedly lost the contract to paint a new mural at City Hall because Mayor Palmer didn’t approve of his daughter dating him. Fortunately, there’s another suspect: Frank Kelso (Michael Whalen), police chief under the former administration aligned with political boss King Sullivan (George Eldredge). Carolyn Palmer suspects that Kelso either killed her dad personally or had a hand in it because he was upset that Mayor Palmer was determined to fire him after he caught him taking bribes from liquor interests and casino owners. There’s also a really disgusting so-called “comic relief” character named Hypo Dorton (Sid Melton, amazingly billed third), a newspaper photographer who keeps trying to take action shots of the principals and whose flashbulbs never work. (I can remember when cameras had to have separate flashbulbs for indoor shots; Charles, nine years younger, remembered the flash cubes that replaced them and gave you four shots before you needed to change them. Later, of course, film cameras started coming with built-in flash units, and still later digital photography took over and flashes were no longer needed since digital could record nearly as well in indoor light levels as it could in daylight.)

Ultimately Stover realizes that in his days as a police detective, Kelso had done an in-depth study of fingerprint technology, and if anybody could forge a set of fake fingerprints and plant them on a murder scene, he could. Kelso catches on to the way his scheme is unraveling and plans to flee to Mexico with his mistress, hard-boiled dame type Connie Duval (Dee Tatum, easily the strongest actor in the piece and the one person who truly gets to play a multidimensional character), only Connie refuses to run away with Kelso because she’s been Sullivan’s love (or at least lust) interest all along and she just seduced Kelso because Sullivan wanted to compromise him so he could get the department to leave Sullivan’s illegal enterprises alone. The confrontation takes place in Connie’s apartment, where Sullivan orders his henchman Rod Barenger (an actor with the appropriate nickname, at least for this role, of Karl “Killer” Davis) to kill Kelso, The two of them move the body from Connie’s place to Kelso’s to make it look like he committed suicide by filling his apartment with gas, but in nothing flat Stover notices the strangulation marks on Kelso’s neck and says he was murdered. In the end Sullivan takes a header off an open window to his death on the ground below, Rod is arrested, and the finale takes place at a restaurant/nightclub with Paul Moody and Carolyn Palmer reunited, while Stover is there with Moody’s other model, Nadine Connell (Margia Dean). Sid Melton’s unfunny “comic relief” scenes really drag this movie down, though at least we get some fascinating glimpses of Stover’s lab work that make this movie seem like a CSI episode nearly 50 years early.

Greenhalgh shoots it plainly and in full light when the story could have used some of the visual trappings of film noir even though it doesn’t qualify morally (it’s either all-good good guys or all-bad bad guys, except for Connie, who doesn’t seem to have had a hand in Sullivan’s sordid manipulations besides seducing Kelso on Sullivan’s orders and who walks away scot-free at the end). It’s a perfectly decent movie (except for Melton, who just gets so annoying one wishes someone would kill him before the end), but also a quite ordinary product of the Neufeld family with little to recommend it besides a fairly audacious premise (and how did Kelso get his phony fingerprints onto the phone? He certainly had access to Moody’s prints since Rod had broken into his art studio and stolen them, but how he got them on the phone and fooled a fingerprint expert like Stover at least temporarily is beyond me). And I also wondered about the really cheesy organ score that accompanied the movie (the credited composer was Dudley Chambers and imdb.com lists Bert Shefter as well), sometimes with a piano or chorus but usually with no other instruments at all. These kinds of organ accompaniments were fairly common in radio shows, especially really cheap ones from stations that couldn’t afford full orchestras (or even partial ones), but really? Couldn’t they at least have got a rent-a-score from somewhere? The only really good music in this movie is a solo jazz piano piece that signals the introduction of Connie Duval into the action – the sleaziest character would get the best music – which reminded me vaguely of Duke Ellington’s “Black Beauty.”

People on Sunday (Film Studio 1929, Filmstudio Berlin, 1929, released 1930)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night from 11 p.m. to 12:30 a.m. my husband Charles and I watched a DVD of a film I’ve literally been curious about for decades: Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday), an independent silent film from 1929 (though it wasn’t released until 1930) featuring a lot of people who ended up in the U.S. and had either important or at least semi-important careers here. The officially listed directors are Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer, with Siodmak’s brother Curt, Fred Zinnemann, and Rochus Gliese listed on imdb.com as uncredited co-directors. The writing credits list Billy Wilder for the screenplay based on “reportage” by Curt Siodmak, and imdb.com lists Robert Siodmak and Ulmer as uncredited co-writers. The cinematographer is Eugen Schüfftan, the special-effects wizard behind such legendary films as Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen and Metropolis, and Zinnemann and Ernst Kunstmann are listed on imdb.com as uncredited members of the camera crew. People on Sunday is an example of a sort of al fresco filmmaking that was actually fairly common in the silent era, though when sound came in it pretty much disappeared. It only became technically possible again in the 1960’s, when cameras became smaller and Nagra and others developed more compact and sophisticated tape recorders with which you could do synchronized sound on location. Billy Wilder had fond memories of this movie when Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg interviewed him for their 1969 book The Celluloid Muse: “In 1927 I ran into a group of young guys who were interested in making movies. I wrote a script and – my God! – somehow we turned it into a film, People on Sunday. We borrowed money from the uncle of Robert Siodmak, the director. And Robert was the director for a very simple reason: when kids play football on a meadow the one who owns the football is the captain, and he owned the camera.” (One wonders how Ulmer got a co-director credit; did he own a second camera?) While some of the people, including Ulmer and Schüfftan, had had professional film credits before, most of the people involved in the film were newbies, some of whom scored major contracts with UFA, the largest studio in Germany, after it became a surprise hit.

The makers of People on Sunday worked with nonprofessional actors who actually worked the sorts of jobs the script tells us the characters worked: taxi driver Erwin Splettstößer, record seller Brigitte Borchert, wine seller Wolfgang von Waltershausen, movie extra Christi Ehlers, and fashion model Annie Schreyer. The film opens on a Saturday, when Erwin and Annie, who live together, have an argument which results in their tearing down the photos of movie stars they’ve put up on their wall, him putting up women like Greta Garbo and she putting up men like Willy Fritsch (best known as the male leads in Fritz Lang’s Spies and Woman in the Moon). Erwin was planning an outing to a local beach on Sunday, but Annie begs off. Erwin ends up picking up a woman named Christi, who tags along on the Sunday picnic with Wolfgang and his girlfriend Brigitte. The four of them have a pretty ordinary day during which they take a ride on the lake in a preposterously driven rental boat they have to pedal (naturally the men do the pedaling while the women sit in front). They have their pictures taken by a professional photographer who, according to the German titles (this print had English subtitles under the original German intertitles), tells his subjects, “Bitte recht freundlich!” The official translation we’re given is “Smile, please!” but the literal meaning is “Please be friendly.” (Google Translate rendered it as “Please be kind.”)

There are cuts back and forth between the photographer working with the subjects and freeze-frames of the resulting pictures. There’s also a scene in which Erwin and Christi are listening to a record on a portable phonograph of the kind Christi sells at her workplace, and one of the records breaks as they make love. (Charles joked about all the movies in which a relative of one-half of a couple has to die, or at least get injured or sick, so they can have sex. At least, this time, it’s only a record.) Things start to unravel between the four when the two men spot two young women in a rowboat. They’ve dropped one of their oars into the water, and one of Our Heroes rescues it from the water and hands it back to them. Then he writes something, presumably his phone number, on a piece of paper, which he crumples up and throws at the rowboat. Naturally Brigitte and Christi are not happy about how blatantly their dates are flirting with other women. They get a sort of revenge when the men come up a mark short of the boat rental and have to borrow it from one of the women. In the end, Erwin returns to Annie – who’s spent the day sleeping in. Monday rolls around and there’s a dramatic montage scene of not only the principals but everyone in Berlin returning to work after their Sunday afternoon off.

People on Sunday is a lovely pastoral that’s considered a representative of the “New Objectivity” in German art that was challenging Expressionism. It’s also a heartbreaking look at Berlin in the later days of the Weimar Republic just before the Nazi takeover in January 1933; one can’t help but look at the children in the film and wonder how many of them survived World War II and the Holocaust, and in what shape. It’s a haunting movie in its sheer ordinariness, and yet it’s nowhere near as innovative as the German critics of the time thought it was. Much of it reminded me of the 1928 U.S. film Lonesome, which was cast with professional actors and was more tightly scripted than this one, but also featured a plot line of ordinary people enjoying themselves on a beach resort for the weekend. Lonesome had some sequences in two-strip Technicolor, including at least one that contained synchronized dialogue – and I suspect that was the first time a film sequence had both sound and color. People on Sunday was an estimable way for some major talents (Wilder, Zinnemann, Ulmer, Schüfftan, and both Siodmak brothers) to start their film careers, and through much of it I wondered why Christi Ehlers in particular didn’t have more of a movie career. Not only does she have the most arresting face of anybody in this film, as an extra she was already used to working in movies, and she can act. It turns out that that’s just one more missed opportunity you can blame on the Nazis: Ehlers’s father was Jewish and the moment the Nazis took power, they skedaddled out of Germany, first to the British-held island of Mallorca off the coast of Spain, then to Britain itself and briefly to the U.S., where she played a minor role in an anti-Nazi movie called Escape (1940). The two men in People on Sunday went on to at least minor careers in German films, many of them with Siodmak as director; among Waltershausen’s other credits is Der Mann, der seinen Mörder schucht (“The Man Who Hides His Murderer”) (1931), the Siodmak-directed original for the 1949 and 2022 versions of D.O.A., in which a man who’s been given a slow-acting poison has to find who gave it to him and why in the few days he has left.

Suspense (radio series): "Donovan's Brain" (CBS, Roma Wines, aired May 18 and 25, 1944)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, August 18) my husband Charles and I rushed home from the Monday night organ-and-orchestra concert in Balboa Park (see https://musicmagg.blogspot.com/2025/08/san-diego-civic-organist-raul-prieto.html) and ultimately ended up listening to a quite effective radio version of Donovan’s Brain aired on the CBS show Suspense in two parts on May 18 and 25, 1944. The only people credited on the program were producer-director William Spier and the star, Orson Welles, who played the central role of Dr. Patrick Cory. I had seen this program mentioned on the Wikipedia page for Donovan’s Brain and, since I’d already downloaded all the extant episodes of Suspense from archive.org, I decided to dig them out. The basic story is familiar: Dr. Patrick Cory, a research scientist, lives in a remote community in the Arizona desert with his wife Janice and – in this version – their son David. He runs a lab where he experiments on keeping monkey brains alive by submerging them in an artificial solution, running a synthetic artery into them, and connecting them to electrodes to keep them alive without their bodies still being attached. He gets the chance to take his experiment to the next level when a private plane crashes near his home. The entire crew of the plane dies in the crash but their passenger, William H. Donovan (he’s called “Warren Donovan” in the other versions, Curt Siodmak’s 1942 novel and the two major films, 1944’s The Lady and the Monster and the 1953 film Charles and I had watched), is alive, though barely. His legs are so badly injured they would have to be amputated and his other bodily functions are so incapacitated he would die within hours anyway, so Dr. Cory and his sometimes assistant Dr. Schratt extract Donovan’s brain and plug it into his apparatus. Only Donovan’s brain keeps growing stronger and more powerful, especially without the encumbrance of a physical body to cart around, and it starts taking over more and more of Dr. Cory’s will.

The story is narrated by Dr. Cory via a journal he’d been keeping all along detailing his experiments, and it begins with an announcement that this is the last entry he will ever make in his lifetime because … Then it flashes back to his early failed experiment with the capuchin monkey, his decision that the reason he’d failed to keep the monkey’s brain alive was that he’d killed the monkey first, and his determination not to make that same mistake again but to extract Donovan’s brain while he was still alive, albeit barely. His wife Janice tries to stop him, saying that it’s murder, but he goes ahead anyway. Only Donovan’s brain keeps taking more and more control over Cory, and at one point under Donovan’s influence he literally has his wife committed to a mental hospital for fear she would interfere with his great experiment. I don’t know who wrote this radio adaptation, but I give him or her a lot of credit for cleverly adapting Curt Siodmak’s story for radio. The writer(s) gave Donovan a recurring phrase – “Sure, sure, sure” – which the pre-mortem Donovan was fond of uttering so we can tell whether Cory is thinking his own thoughts or Donovan’s, imposed on him by the sheer will power of Donovan’s disembodied brain. In this version Donovan hypnotizes Cory into murdering his own son so he can implant Donovan’s brain inside David Cory’s body, and once he’s regained a body Donovan can continue with his plan to become a dictator and eventually rule the world. The writer(s) seemed to be evoking memories of Welles’s similar performance as Professor Pierson in his infamous October 30, 1938 broadcast of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, likewise looking out on an apocalypse and pondering his own responsibility for it.

The writing also powerfully evokes both Frankenstein (particularly Colin Clive’s tortured performance as Frankenstein in the 1931 film, especially the scene in which he says, “I made it with my own hands, and with my own hands I shall have to destroy it”) and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (particularly the tortured ending of Robert Louis Stevenson’s original novel, in which Dr. Henry Jekyll recounts his own history and the experiment that went terribly wrong on the eve of his own suicide). There’s a nice touch towards the end as Dr. Cory literally sacrifices his own son to make him a suitable habitat for Donovan’s brain (though Charles said that, at least as depicted in the 1953 film, Donovan’s brain grew so much in size during the experiment that it’s hard to imagine it fitting inside any human cranium). In his final monologue he compares himself to the Biblical Abraham, who was told by God to sacrifice his son Isaac on the Mount of Olives and laments that God didn’t stop him from sacrificing his son as he did with Abraham. We then get a postlude informing us that the remains of Dr. Cory and his son were buried in the Mount of Olives cemetery, and Janice Cory, who was previously unjustly committed to a mental institution, has now gone genuinely crazy and legitimately been committed to the same institution after the mysterious deaths of her husband and their son. And in its concept of a psychopathic egomaniac seeking to use a young, attractive body as his vehicle in a plot literally to conquer the world, Donovan’s Brain not only evokes such real-life dictators as Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin (both of whom were alive, well, and pretty much at the peak of their powers when Curt Siodmak wrote the novel) but it can’t help but bring to mind such modern-day dictators or wanna-be dictators as Vladimir Putin and his good buddy, Donald Trump. (Well, you didn’t think I could write two blog posts on successive days about a story about an evil financier with ambitions for world domination and not mention Donald Trump, did you?)

Donovan's Brain (Allan Dowling Productions, United Artists, 1953)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, August 17) at about 10 p.m. I dug out an old home-recorded DVD I’d made off Turner Classic Movies in 2013, three years before Cox Cable and the media industry in general lowered the boom on home recordings off cable or on-air channels by making them “all-digital” and ensuring that VCR’s and home DVD recorders could no longer work with the new technology. It contained four movies, three of which we’d already watched together – Pirates of Tripoli, The Beast of Hollow Mountain, and Miami Exposé – but the one I wanted to run last night was the first film on the disc, the 1953 version of Curt Siodmak’s 1942 science-fiction novel Donovan’s Brain. It was produced by Allen Downing and directed by Felix E. Feist (whose only other claim to fame was making the 1936 one-reel musical Every Sunday, a classical-vs.-jazz musical battle with Deanna Durbin representing classical and Judy Garland trying her best to represent jazz; as great as she was Judy was never really a jazz singer, and when she was platonically dating Artie Shaw in 1938 when Billie Holiday was his band singer, Judy was flamingly jealous of Billie and wished she could sing like her), who also wrote the screenplay based on an adaptation by Hugh Brooke. Donovan’s Brain had previously been filmed by Republic in 1944 as The Lady and the Monster, a truly schizoid film in which the central character of Siodmak’s book, Dr. Patrick Cory (Richard Arlen in The Lady and the Monster, Lew Ayres here), is merely the assistant to a floridly mad scientist, Dr. Franz Mueller (Erich von Stroheim).

One difference between the two films is that where Dr. Mueller conducted his experiments in an old-dark-house style castle located in the middle of the Arizona desert, Dr. Cory performs his in a typical suburban ranch-style house, though similarly remotely located. The remote location is essential to the story, since it enables Dr. Cory and his friend and assistant Dr. Frank Schratt (Gene Evans), who’s being threatened with losing his job as the official county doctor because he’s an alcoholic and also because the head of the local board of supervisors has a brother-in-law he’d like to hire in Schratt’s place, to perform the sinister experiment at the heart of the plot in an out-of-the-way place free from prying eyes. Well, free from all but one set of prying eyes – more on that later. Dr. Cory has developed a method for removing an organism’s brain and keeping it alive in a solution by connecting electrodes to it and keeping it electronically stimulated, while the liquid in the fish tank he’s keeping it in will supply it with nutrients. He’s already tried this unsuccessfully on three monkeys, and when we meet him he’s driving home with a fourth monkey in tow while his wife Janice (Nancy Davis, born Anne Frances Robbins, later given the name of her stepfather Dr. Loyal Davis, and ultimately known as Nancy Reagan after she married Ronald Reagan in 1952) tries to comfort the monkey and asks her husband if they can keep it as a pet. (This film is already unintentionally weird enough politically – Mr. Conscientious Objector co-starring with Mrs. Ronald Reagan – but it gets even odder when Nancy’s character is portrayed as an animal-rights activist at least two decades early.)

Dr. Cory’s experiment with the fourth monkey is a success, and just then he’s called out of his home on a medical emergency to tend to multimillionaire Warren H. Donovan, whose private plane has crashed in the middle of the Arizona desert. Since there isn’t time to take Donovan’s body to a fully equipped hospital, Dr. Cory offers to operate on him at his home, which has an operating table and surgical supplies, but Dr. Cory soon realizes Donovan is too far gone to be revivable. Instead he and Dr. Schratt harvest Donovan’s brain and keep it alive in the fish tank, only of course the experiment works too well: given an unending supply of nutrients and no longer encumbered by the limitations of an attached body, Donovan’s brain gets more and more powerful over time and gradually takes over Dr. Cory’s body. Already Dr. Cory, Janice, and Dr. Schratt have grabbed hold of every publication they can find about the living Warren H. Donovan and have researched him. They’ve found, not too surprisingly, that the living Donovan was a self-made man who hated labor, hated charities, and above all hated the Internal Revenue Service. (In other words, he was your typical asshole Libertarian.) In fact, he set up at least five fake bank accounts to shield as much of his fortune as possible from the IRS, and through his growing telepathic contact with Donovan, Dr. Cory learns where those accounts are and in whose names they’re in so he can drain the money from them. The one person who gets suspicious of what Dr. Cory is doing is Herbie Yocum (Steve Brodie), a free-lance reporter and paparazzo who invades the Corys’ home, ostensibly to take a photo of the operating table on which Donovan died, though he also takes a shot of Donovan’s brain in its aquarium-like tank. Yocum threatens to expose the story to the whole world, but Donovan is able to send a pure beam of thought energy to Yocum so he crashes his car, gets killed, and is no longer a threat to Donovan, alive or dead.

Cory gives the money from Donovan’s secret accounts to Donovan’s former legal advisor, with instructions to use it to build an elaborate mausoleum for Donovan with the idea that the brain will be housed there permanently, taken care of by a round-the-clock team of medical specialists, and with its pure psychic energy will be able to dominate the world’s financial affairs and essentially have unlimited power. (Remember that when Curt Siodmak wrote it, Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin were both alive and at the peaks of their powers, so a malevolent intelligence capable of ruling the world and turning it into a hellhole wasn’t altogether the stuff of science fiction.) Ultimately, in Dr. Cory’s absence, Dr. Schratt figures out a way to use the energy from a lightning storm to annihilate Donovan’s brain once and for all. In the book, he sacrifices his own life in the process of doing this; in the 1953 film, he survives. Alas, Brooke and Feist omitted one of the most fascinating subplots of Siodmak’s original: Donovan was ardently seeking a pardon and freedom for convicted murder Roger Collins (played by Bill Henry in The Lady and the Monster) for reasons that remained mysterious. A lot of people assumed it was because Collins was Donovan’s illegitimate son, but it turns out in the book that Donovan simply wanted Collins freed to show the extent of his power. (In Dane Lussier’s and Frederick Kohner’s script for The Lady and the Monster, the murder Collins had been convicted of and was scheduled to be executed for was actually committed by Donovan himself; the victim was a former secretary of his who was planning to publish a book exposing him and his crimes. In Siodmak’s novel, Collins was actually guilty, and after the death of Donovan’s brain Dr. Cory, who narrates the novel, laconically states that Collins has been executed, as he richly deserved to be.)

Both films of Donovan’s Brain were major frustrations for Curt Siodmak, because he wanted to direct the screen version of his novel but never got to do so. Curt was ferociously jealous of his brother, Robert Siodmak, for having got to direct films while Curt was still stuck as just a writer. Eventually Curt got to direct Bride of the Gorilla in 1951 – a surprisingly good horror cheapie with Lon Chaney, Jr. and Raymond Burr – and followed it with seven “B” movies and 12 episodes of a 1959 TV series called 13 Demon Street, but he never gained the reputation brother Robert had as a director (including Phantom Lady, The Spiral Staircase, Christmas Holiday – from the title and the stars, Deanna Durbin and Gene Kelly, you’d expect a Christmas-themed musical but it’s really a film noir – and Burt Lancaster’s first film, The Killers). I remember reading Curt Siodmak’s novel and thinking it was better than either of the films (there was a third version in 1970 called simply The Brain, but I’ve never seen it), and Charles read the above and said he thought that a disembodied brain without any senses or any capability to feel anything would literally go crazy and show all the symptoms of paranoia. That would be an interesting remix of the story in case anyone out there wants to take a crack at a fourth version!