A Husband to Die For: The Lisa Aguilar Story (1Department Entertainment Services, Lighthouse Pictures, Wishing Floor Films, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Last night (Sunday, September 14) I wanted to watch a couple of Lifetime movies. My husband Charles decided not to join me for them, and quite frankly he didn’t miss much since both were in the mediocre-to-terrible department. The first one was called A Husband to Die For: The Lisa Aguilar Story, based on a true case from 1994 about Lisa Aguilar West (Keana Lyn Bastidas) and her scapegrace husband, golf pro Darren West (Jon McLaren). As the film opens she’s just learned that she’s pregnant with his first child, a boy (they test in advance via ultrasound) they decide to name Darren, Jr. Alas, Darren, Sr. also starts an extramarital affair with Michelle Morris (Cassandra Potenza), who works the snack bar at one of the golf clubs where he plays. By the time Lisa’s pregnancy is into its fifth month, Michelle suddenly discovers (writer Walter Klenhard wasn’t too clear how) that her new boyfriend is married to someone else. Naturally she’s put out by this, but he pleads with her to wait for him to divorce his legal spouse so they can get married. We’re already starting to hate Darren for screwing another woman while his wife is pregnant (sort of like Donald Trump with Stormy Daniels), and when Lisa is just two weeks away from her due date (which her doctors miscalculated so the baby is actually arriving two weeks ahead of schedule), Darren decides to dump Lisa permanently. He orders a gorilla mask from a costume shop and, as Lisa is coming home from a grocery run, attacks her with a knife and leaves her for dead. Fortunately, Lisa comes to after Darren leaves and punches 911 on her landline (the fact that her phone is a landline dates this movie, as does the pay phone on which Darren calls Michelle and tries to make a date with her while his wife is still in intensive care – quite rightly, she turns him down). She’s rescued and brought back to a semblance of life, though Darren’s attempts to cut her throat three times have left two permanent scars.

At first Lisa is utterly convinced that Darren is innocent and someone else was her attacker, but the cops gradually wear her down and make the case against him. She moves in with her parents, John (Jorge Molina, probably no relation to Alfred even though the two look similar) and Julie (Katie Griffin), along with Lisa’s grandmother (Marilu Henner, giving an air of gravitas to the proceedings until her sudden incapacitation midway through adds just one more stressor to Lisa’s already overburdened life), in San Diego. (The whole story takes place in California, and one of the giveaways to Lisa that her husband is seeing another woman is a lot of calls on his phone bill to Redding.) Ultimately she testifies against him at his trial, but before his attorney can cross-examine her she gets word that she won’t have to testify again because he and his attorney have decided to cop a plea and admit guilt in exchange for a lighter sentence: life imprisonment with the possibility of parole. The prosecutor, Angela Backers (Cynthia Preston), persuades the reluctant Lisa – who earlier actually contemplated suicide by driving her car off a cliff, only luckily for her the car lost traction and wouldn’t move when she put it in gear – to attend Darren’s first parole hearing and give a victim’s impact statement. During that, she takes off the scarf she usually wears and shows off the scars on her neck left there by Darren’s assault. A few where-are-they-now credits at the end explain what happened after that: Darren’s parole was rejected and he served 22 years in prison, and Lisa remarried and had two more kids by her new husband. She also changed Darren, Jr.’s first name to Connor, for understandable reasons.

A Husband to Die For was a major disappointment for a number of reasons, not least because Lifetime’s true-crime stories usually put Lifetime’s writers and directors (there were two directors credited, Colleen Rush and David Weaver) on their best behavior, but this was an exception. Also Lifetime usually casts genuinely hot and sexy men as their villains, but not this time: Jon McLaren is so wimpy, the kind of man who looks like they baked him out of Wonder Bread, one wonders what Lisa ever saw in him in the first place. It’s also not clear why Darren didn’t decide to divorce Lisa rather than trying to kill her; yes, it would have looked bad for him to dump a woman who was about to make him a father, but obviously attempted murder looked even worse. A Husband to Die For was a surprisingly blah telling of a story that had a lot more potential for genuine suspense and thrills.

Murder at the Hotel (Petre NL, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Lifetime’s next movie, Murder at the Hotel, which doesn’t have an imdb.com page yet – I’ve gleaned what information I could from taking notes during the credits and bits and pieces from other online sites – was, if anything, even worse than A Husband to Die For: The Lisa Aguilar Story, shown just before it on September 14. It opens at an airport heaven knows where – my guess was New York City but it might have been Denver, a major “hub” in American air travel’s hub-and-spokes system of routing – in which the planes are all grounded by a massive snowstorm. (We get a few shots of the planes and runways buried in snow.) A middle-aged man named Evan insists that he must be in San Francisco the next morning for an all-important meeting that could literally be a life-or-death matter for him. He chews out Jen, the airline’s ticket clerk, only to be put in his place by the lead character, district attorney Megan Maris (Samora Smallwood). Megan tells Evan to stop harassing Jen over weather issues that are way beyond her control. Megan is traveling back to San Francisco with her husband Jeff and their daughter Lisa, and Megan is clearly African-American while Jeff is white and Lisa is mixed-race and strongly resembles her mom. (Kudos to casting director Anna Weller for finding a young woman who resembles Samora Smallwood enough she’s believable as her daughter.) This reminded me of my rather grim comments during the Biden administration that the two most powerful and influential Black women in the U.S., then-Vice President Kamala Harris and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, were both married to white men. I wondered what message that sent to Black men that they had no hope of meeting and marrying powerful and influential Black women. Eventually the airport and airline give up on attempting any departures that night and offer to put up all the stranded passengers at the Montpelier Hotel and get buses to take them there.

Among the people there are Brad (Matt Wills), Megan’s ex from her college days, who makes it clear pretty early on that he’d like to delete that “ex” from his status in her life; and Nicole Wallen, a tall, statuesque blonde woman who seems to be cruising Megan’s husband Jeff. Jen, the woman ticket agent at the airport, is having an affair with Rick Walk, head of security at the Montpelier Hotel, though she doesn’t want anybody to know about that. (Why not? Unless either or both of them are married to other people, there’d be no reason to conceal their affair. Also Rick is white and Jen is Black, but in a movie like this where the heroine is Black but both the men in her life are white, that’s no big deal either.) There’s also Landon, a quite boyishly handsome young man (he reminded me of Tim Wayne, an old friend and fellow Gay activist my husband Charles and I knew in the mid-1990’s when we’d just started dating) of whom we get some choice topless glimpses when he and Lisa sneak into the hotel’s hot tub. We see a security guard for the hotel electrocuted with a stun gun and pushed into the hotel pool by an unseen assailant, so we know there’s going to be – pardon the pun – murder at the hotel. Nicole asks Jeff to walk her to her room in the hotel, and shortly thereafter Megan goes to the room she and Jeff are supposed to be sharing. Jeff isn’t there, and neither is Lisa, who has a room of her own. Megan makes ever more frantic attempts to reach both of them. Megan’s search for her husband and daughter leads her to a storage closet, where she finds the body of her ex Brad knifed to death.

She’s fled there not only to find her family but also because Evan, her nemesis from the airport, has mobilized the hotel staff to make a citizen’s arrest of her for murdering Brad. Alas, Megan is locked in the storage room by her unknown assailant, and has to flee by sliding down a chute into the laundry room. Landon dropped a key clue when he was with Lisa in the hot tub; he told her he had a sister (he doesn’t say whether she was older or younger) who died. Megan doesn’t know that, of course, but we do. We’ve also seen brief cut-ins of exactly where Jeff and Lisa are; they’re tied up in room 429 of the hotel and are clearly being held hostage. The culprit turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Nicole Wallen, who was the wife of a particularly notorious financial scam artist and pedophile (think Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein as the same person) whom Megan successfully prosecuted. (Obviously in Lifetime movies, unlike in real life, scumbags like that actually face the consequences of their actions.) Nicole’s scheme was to force Megan to record a video admitting that the witnesses against her husband were all lying and Megan had suborned perjury to do it. But Landon, Nicole’s son, didn’t think his mom’s scheme went far enough. He decided to knock off Brad and frame Megan for the crime, so she’d be exposed not only as an unethical prosecutor but a murderess. During the inevitable final confrontation in room 429, Jeff manages to work himself free from his bonds and attack Landon, and ultimately both bad guys are subdued and the cops – the real cops – arrest them. As partial payment for their ordeal, Jen upgrades Megan’s, Jeff’s, and Lisa’s tickets for the return flight to San Francisco (once the weather is clear enough they can leave at last), and Evan the asshole businessman has to wait and stew as they’re let on the plane before he is. Also Megan has arranged for Evan to be seated next to an overweight mother and her two bratty kids as her revenge against him.

Murder at the Hotel is pretty thin gruel, and it doesn’t help that though Jeff is considerably more grounded than Brad as a character, we’re given so many crotch shots of Brad flashing a really nice basket that we get the impression that, at least physically, Megan traded down. Murder at the Hotel was from the atelier of the Johnson Production Group (Timothy O. Johnson was one of the plethora of producers listed), and it was made by two old Johnson hands: Alexander Carrière (director) and Chris Sivertson (writer). Carrière manages to get a few nicely Gothic shots even within the unpromising confines of a modern hotel, but Sivertson’s rather silly script defeats him. My husband Charles sat out both A Husband to Die For: The Lisa Aguilar Story and Murder at the Hotel, spending his time doing work for an online course at the computer, and frankly he didn’t miss much from either movie!

Sudden Fear (Joseph Kaufman Productions, RKO, 1952)

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

Last night (Saturday, September 13) my husband Charles and I watched the latest entry in Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” series on Turner Classic Movies: Sudden Fear, a 1952 film which featured Joan Crawford as both executive producer (uncredited) and star. Sudden Fear was made at a key juncture in Crawford’s career because for all 27 previous years of her film career she’d had the protection of a long-term contract with a major studio: MGM from 1925 to 1942 and Warner Bros. from 1942 to 1952. When Warners fired her after the box-office failures of gone-to-the-well-too-often movies like The Damned Don’t Cry (1950) and This Woman Is Dangerous (1952), Crawford was well and truly on her own for the first time in her career. She responded by buying the rights to a story by Edna Sherry called “Sudden Fear” about a wealthy woman who realizes that her new husband is actually a money-hungry psychopath who plans to murder her for her money. Though there was a nominal producer, Joseph Kaufman, Crawford was in complete control: she hired the director, David Miller; the writers, Lenore Coffee (who’d started her film career in 1919 as writer for Clara Kimball Young) and Robert Smith; the cinematographer, Charles Lang; and the composer, Elmer Bernstein. It was his third film credit; previously he’d composed for two movies about teenage athletes, Saturday’s Hero and Boots Malone, and later he’d gone on to write for dreck like Robot Monster and Cat-Women of the Moon before making it to the “A”-list full-time with his big, expansive Academy Award-winning score for Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956). (I’m a bit embarrassed because I’d previously cited Cat-Women as Bernstein’s first film credit.) Crawford also picked most of the supporting cast, including the male lead (Jack Palance) and second female lead (Gloria Grahame).

Crawford cast herself as Myra Hudson, sensationally successful playwright who doesn’t need to work since her late father was fabulously rich (he got his money from oil). The opening scene takes place at a New York theatre where her latest play is in rehearsal. Lester Blaine (Jack Palance) auditions for the leading male role and thinks he has it, until Myra vetoes him and says she doesn’t consider him sexy enough for the part. Myra then takes a cross-country train to her home in San Francisco, but Lester buys a ticket on the same train and “accidentally” runs into her. The two have a fun time in Chicago (though none of it is actually shown) and Lester buys an extra ticket so he can stay on the train until it gets to San Francisco. By the time the trip is over she’s madly in love with him. The two spend a lot of time together until one night, when Myra is throwing a party to show off Lester to her old friends, Lester blows her off and she goes to his old apartment and corrals him to attend her party. While there Lester runs into an ex-girlfriend of his named Irene Neves (a marvelously hard-bitten performance by Gloria Grahame, who apparently was as amoral in real life as she was in her movies: one night director Nicholas Ray, who was then married to Grahame, caught her in flagrante delicto with Tony Ray, his son by his previous wife; and years later, long after she’d divorced Nick, she married Tony). The two plot to kill Myra, who meanwhile has married Lester, so Lester can inherit her fortune and he and Irene can live out their lives together. Part of their plot is that they have to make her death look like an accident so they won’t be suspected of knocking her off. Conveniently, one of the homes Myra inherited from her father is a beach house up a long flight of stairs from the beach, and the stairs don’t have rails or any other sort of protection.

Myra stumbles onto their plot in an intriguing way. She has her writing room wired with a dictation machine called a “SoundScriber” and has five microphones for it so she can walk anywhere in the room and her dictation will be captured by one of the mikes and end up on a record. One night Lester and Irene just happen to go into her study after Myra has inadvertently left the machine on, and when her maid alerts her to this the next morning, Myra plays back the disc and hears Lester and Irene calmly plotting her death. She takes the record off the machine, intending to hide it amidst her book collection, but she slips and drops the record, breaking it. So she’s in the quandary of knowing her husband and his lover plan to kill her but not having any evidence of that. To pump him for information about Myra’s plans, Irene starts dating Junior Kearney (Mike Connors, then still using the name “Touch Conners”), son of Myra’s attorney, Steve Kearney (Bruce Bennett, reuniting with Crawford from the cast of her 1945 comeback, Mildred Pierce), though when he tries to have sex with her she puts him off with the old “Not tonight, I have a headache” excuse. Irene learns that the next Monday, just two days later, Myra plans to sign documents transferring all the money her father left her to a foundation for heart disease (which is how the old man died). Also, Steve Kearney has drafted a will for her that gives the royalties from her plays to him, but only until he remarries after her death. Myra had actually asked Steve to redraft that clause so the royalties would go to Lester in perpetuity, but Lester and Irene don’t know that and that was part of the record that Myra accidentally broke when she heard them plotting against her on it. So Lester and Irene have to kill Myra that weekend before the transfer goes through. There’s a great dream sequence, which for some reason was cut from some prints of the film but blessedly restored by the Cohen Media Group, current owners of the rights, in which Myra dreams of various ways Lester could kill her, including pushing her out of the window of a tall building and him strangling her.

Sudden Fear ends with a nearly half-hour long stalking sequence, taking place at night through the San Francisco streets and looking very much like Crawford, David Miller and those involved had learned from the great nocturnal climaxes of Val Lewton’s horror films. Myra realizes that Lester means to kill her that very evening, and so she walks down the mean streets of San Francisco and barely misses Lester, who’s driving a Buick Roadmaster (the same car she was driving when they started dating). Lester is with Irene, and she takes the wheel for part of their homicidal smack-down, only after 20 minutes of great escape-and-pursuit filmmaking (at one point Myra knocks on someone’s door and the someone just thinks she’s a nut and won’t let her in, lending a Kafka-esque aspect to her predicament and providing the only bit of dialogue in this otherwise wordless sequence) Lester and Irene conveniently lose control of their car. Both are killed, and Myra is liberated from the danger they posed her but also probably ends up with PTSD big-time. Sudden Fear was a first-rate entrée for Crawford to the world of independent filmmaking – RKO distributed it and it went out under their logo, but they had nothing to do with the actual production – and though the rest of Crawford’s career would have both highs (Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?) and lows (Trog), it was a good start and also a huge hit at the box office. It also changed Jack Palance’s typecasting; though he was still portraying a villain, it showed he could play a debonair character with a certain degree of charm. And I liked the uncertainty writers Coffee and Smith carefully cultivated as to whether Lester was ever really in love with Myra and just got sidetracked by Irene’s appearance into a plot to kill her for her money, whether that was his intent all along, or whether he just intended to live off her money as a kept husband and it was Irene’s sudden reappearance in his life that led him off into a murderous direction.

Over-Exposed (Columbia,. 1956)

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

Last night (Friday, September 12) my husband Charles and I watched an intriguing movie from Columbia in 1956: Over-Exposed (that’s how the official credits spell the title), directed by Lewis Seiler from a committee-written script: Richard Sale and Mary Loos (then husband and wife, and a writing team Raymond Chandler had some kind words about), “original” story; and James Gunn and Gil Orlovitz, screenplay. The film opens in a police station where a sleazy bar has just been raided by the police. Our heroine, Lily Krenshka (Cleo Moore), had just started work there the night before and had had no idea it was a clip joint. She’s ordered by an officious cop to leave town, but she’s taken in by Max West (Raymond Greenleaf), a once prestigious photographer who burned out his career with alcohol. Max offers her a job as a swimsuit model after reassuring her he’s not interested in her That Way, and eventually he teaches her the basics of photography, including the ins and outs of portrait lighting as well as retouching and colorization (it was actually fairly common in those days for professional photographers to hand-paint their pictures with watercolors to give the illusion of color) to make the middle-aged dowagers he’s hired to photograph look convincingly younger. When she’s learned enough about photography to be capable of a career at it, she moves to New York City, changes her name to “Lila Crane” at West’s suggestion (by coincidence “Lila Crane” is also the name of Vera Miles’s character in the original 1960 Psycho), and tries for a job at the Allied Press Service. As she’s coming out of their offices she literally bumps into one of their star reporters, Russell Bassett (a young Richard Crenna). As he helps pick up the photos from her portfolio he tells her to find a big news story somewhere and photograph it.

The big news story duly arrives in the form of an enormous fire (obviously filled in from stock footage of a real one) at which Lila takes spectacular photos even at the risk of her own life. Russell rescues her just in time from a falling wall in the burning building. Instead of taking a low-paying job at Allied, Lila gets hired by Les Bauer (a young and uncredited Jack Albertson) to photograph the guests at his club. She’s also accosted by an unscrupulous gossip columnist, Roy Carver (James O’Rear), to sell him copies of any pictures she takes that catch celebrities or prominent people in compromising positions. He offers her $5 for any such photo but she bids him up to $10. Ultimately she wangles a job at a more prestigious club, Coco’s, ostensibly owned and managed by Coco Fields (played as a Clifton Webb-style screaming queen by Donald Randolph) but really run by a gangster. (One wonders if the writers were thinking of the Stork Club, ostensibly run by Sherman Billingsley but actually owned by the Mafia.) She rises in prominence not only as a nightclub photographer but also as an advertising and fashion photographer, and even gets an interview with a prestigious TV show in which the host ostensibly calls someone on the telephone for a random interview but really the whole thing is set up well in advance. (I suspect the writers were thinking of Edward R. Murrow’s Person to Person here, or maybe Ralph Edwards’s This Is Your Life.) There’s a major mistake in that the call letters for the station broadcasting the interview are KXIW, which would indicate a West Coast or Midwest location (all East Coast stations have call letters beginning with W).

Russell Bassett continues to date her and one weekend, when they’re on vacation together in Maine, he proposes to her and asks her to join him in both a personal and professional partnership. He suggests the two of them go to Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the world’s other hot spots, with him reporting on the events there and her photographing them. She turns him down because she’s worked too hard for what she’s achieved, but fate intervenes. Mrs. Payton Grange (Isobel Elsom), an old friend and photographic client of Max West’s in the small town where all this started, shows up at Coco’s and dances a mambo with a much younger partner. Then she suddenly has a heart attack and dies in the middle of the dance floor. Lila takes a picture of it but then thinks better of it and tears up the print – only her slimeball columnist partner Roy Carver steals the negative out of her darkroom and ultimately sells the photo to a magazine called Sensational (read: the real-life Confidential, a 1950’s scandal sheet). The scandal caused by the publication of Lila’s “death photo” of Mrs. Grange causes her entire career to evaporate (something that really dates this movie: today not only would a photo like that be considered fair game, it would be all over the Internet in no time, the way the video of Right-wing activist Charlie Kirk getting shot at Utah Valley College “went viral” and appeared all over the Net with no apparent qualms from anyone involved).

She tries to salvage her career by fishing out of her discard pile a photo she accidentally took of the gangster who actually ran Coco’s, which would have blown his alibi for a killing near the club. Alas, the gangster and two of his henchmen kidnap Lila and torture her to get the information on where she’s hidden the photo. Russell crashes her studio and finds one of the gangsters there, and in the film’s most spectacular scene he throws a tray of developing fluid in the gangster’s face, at least temporarily blinding him. Then, despite the three-against-one odds, Russell goes to where Lila is being held and rescues her. Ultimately she accepts Russell’s marriage proposal even though it doesn’t entail anything more than being a housewife and ultimately mother to his kids. While Over-Exposed’s ending is the sort of sexism typical of its time – the ambitious career woman who reached for financial and emotional independence has to be taken down several pegs and publicly humiliated for defying the so-called “natural order” of male dominance – there’s one thing about this movie that holds up very well today. It’s Cleo Moore’s attitude; throughout the movie she’s understandably wary of men who offer to “help” her and turning them down pretty regularly for fear they have something else in mind other than just being “nice” to her.

Cleo Moore had a frustrating career in that it only lasted nine years – she was spotted by a talent scout at RKO and her first film was Congo Bill (1948), in which she played a minor role. She alternated between tiny parts in important films like On Dangerous Ground (1951) and leads in “B” features like this one. Her imdb.com biographer, Denny Jackson, laments, “To her legions of fans, she remains their favorite sex symbol of the 1950’s, and others languish knowing that her talent could have sent her to loftier heights instead of being wasted in minor roles in substandard ‘B’ films.” After just one more feature film and one TV appearance after Over-Exposed, she retired to marry real-estate tycoon Herbert Heftier in 1957 and stayed with him until her death in 1973 at the age of just 48. I suspect what kept her from the brass ring of stardom was Moore’s attitude: fiercely independent and unwilling to play the double game of sexuality and innocence that made Marilyn Monroe a star. In Over-Exposed she plays a character who knows exactly what the men in her life want from her – either money, sex, or both – and her fierce independence probably put off 1950’s movie audiences even though it also makes her seem “modern” today!

The Letter (Warner Bros., First National, 1940)

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

Last night (Thursday, September 11) I got tired of the MS-NBC coverage of the killing of Right-wing activist Charlie Kirk and put on one of my all-time favorite films on Turner Classic Movies: The Letter (1940), directed by William Wyler from a screenplay by Howard Koch based on a 1927 play by W. Somerset Maugham. The Letter had begun life as a short story Maugham published in 1926 as part of a collection called The Casuarina Tree, and in 1927 it was produced on stage in London with Gladys Cooper as the adulterous Leslie Crosbie, wife of a rubber plantation manager in Singapore, who kills her lover and then claims that she did so in self-defense when he tried to rape her. Nigel Bruce played the cuckolded husband, Robert Crosbie, and the play was later produced on Broadway, also in 1927, with Katharine Cornell as Leslie, J. W. Austin as Robert, and Allan Jeayes as Howard Joyce, an attorney and family friend of the Crosbies who agrees to represent her at trial. The Letter was first filmed as an early talkie by Paramount in 1929 with Jeanne Eagels as Leslie, Reginald Owen as Robert, and Herbert Marshall as Geoff Hammond (Leslie’s extra-relational partner until she kills him). My husband Charles watched both the Jeanne Eagels version of 1929 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-letter-paramount-1929.html) and the Bette Davis version of 1940 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-letter-warner-bros-1940.html) back to back on January 11, 2013, and I was quite impressed with the Eagels version.

The careers of Jeanne Eagels and Bette Davis track rather closely. Both got their big breaks from the veteran British actor George Arliss, Eagels in the U.S. stage premiere of Arliss’s vehicle Disraeli (1927) and Davis in the film The Man Who Played God (1932). Both of Eagels’s two sound films, The Letter and Jealousy (1929), were remade with Davis (though Davis’s version of Jealousy was retitled Deception), and Davis won her first Academy Award for the 1935 film Dangerous, directed by Alfred E. Green from a script by Laird Doyle, in which she played a character loosely based on Eagels. TCM showed the 1940 The Letter as part of a night in which they were paying tribute to William Wyler during which they also showed her earlier film with Davis, Jezebel (1938), as well as the 1939 film of Wuthering Heights, based on Emily Brontë’s novel, starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon. For the Davis version of The Letter Herbert Marshall got promoted to the role of her husband, and while the confrontation between Leslie and her lover was played on-screen in 1929, in 1940 we just saw a shadowy figure on the Crosbies’ veranda as Leslie plugged him with all six shots in her revolver. The 1940 The Letter was also listed in The Film Noir Encyclopedia (Davis’s only other listing was for Beyond the Forest, made in 1950 and a film Davis particularly disliked; it was her last movie as a Warner Bros. contract player and she was anxious to leave the studio and go through what she called a “professional divorce”), and it qualifies both thematically and visually. Certainly Leslie Crosbie counts as a femme fatale in the most literal sense, and the slithery atmospherics created by Wyler and his cinematographer, Tony Gaudio, have the so-called “German look” that came to define film noir.

This time around I was particularly concentrating on the quite good supporting players. Attorney Howard Joyce was played by James Stephenson, a former British stage actor who’d got his start in films in middle age, making his screen debut in a British “quota quickie” called The Perfect Crime (1937) for Warner Bros.’ British studio at Teddington. These were ultra-cheap movie made on the quick because British law specified that any company seeking to import American films into their country had to release a certain percentage of British product as well – so the studios, some of which were subsidiaries of U.S. companies and some of which were independent, made especially cheap movies to meet the quota to get the legal right to show American films in Britain. In 1938 Jack Warner saw potential in Stephenson and brought him to America to work for the parent company, and Warner gave Stephenson a careful build-up including putting him in two earlier Bette Davis movies, The Old Maid (1938) and The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939). In 1940 they gave Stephenson the plum role of Howard Joyce in The Letter, which won him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor, and also cast him in a lead as Philo Vance in Calling Philo Vance, a remake of The Kennel Murder Case (1933). Alas, in 1941 Stephenson suddenly died of a heart attack at age 48. Gale Sondergaard turns in an excellent performance as the widow of Geoff Hammond, the guy Leslie killed in the opening scene because having found true love in the half-Chinese woman he’d married, he no longer wanted anything to do with Leslie anymore. Stephenson is excellent as the attorney wracked not only by professional fear but personal guilt as he becomes part of Leslie’s scheme to buy back the incriminating letter she wrote Hammond the night of his murder imploring him to come see her at once. He’s all too aware that he’s breaking the law himself, and by suborning Leslie’s willingness to pay Mrs. Hammond for the letter he’s risking not only disbarment but prison.

Also unusually good in the supporting cast is Victor Sen Yung as Ong Chi Seng, Mrs. Hammond’s go-between in the negotiations over the letter and also her interpreter, since she speaks only Chinese and Malay. Most of the time Sen Yung was wasted in the thoroughly silly part of Charlie Chan’s Number Two Son, forced to act like a comic-relief doofus compared to Sidney Toler’s Chan (when Warner Oland died in 1938, Keye Luke, who’d played Number One Son in Oland’s Chan movies, quit the part rather than play it opposite a different actor as Chan). In The Letter he got the part of his life and he was clearly eating it up. From his appearance on the scene bearing a hand-written copy of the letter and announcing that unless Joyce buys it for Leslie he will turn it over to the prosecution and it will sink Leslie’s self-defense claim to the great scene in which Leslie actually journeys to the Chinese part of town to buy the letter and Mrs. Hammond makes clear her utter contempt for this white woman who knocked off her husband and seems like she’s going to get away with it, Sen Yung is utterly marvelous. The Letter does suffer from a Production Code-mandated ending which quite takes the edge off Leslie’s final line in the play (and in the 1929 film) in which she confesses to her husband, “With all my heart, I still love the man I killed!” In his outro, TCM host Ben Mankiewicz said that Davis and Wyler had argued about this line: Davis had wanted to speak it looking away from Herbert Marshall, but Wyler pulled rank and insisted that she say it to his face. Once Leslie and Robert have their final confrontation, Howard Joyce and his wife Dorothy (Frieda Inescort) host a big party for the Crosbies with a large dance floor and an orchestra playing the era’s pop music. Leslie gets bored and goes for a walk – and as she leaves she finds a dagger has been left at her front door. Later she’s mugged by one of Mrs. Hammond’s assistants (someone we previously saw in the background of the blackmail scenes) and Mrs. Hammond stabs her with the ceremonial dagger. Wyler and Koch appropriately played this scene without any dialogue, just Max Steiner’s superbly atmospheric music and Gaudio’s rich chiaroscuro visuals (The Letter is one of those films that makes you wonder why anybody thought the movies ever needed color), but Wyler’s virtuoso filmmaking can’t make up for the absurdity of the closing scene and its overall irrelevance. It’s just there because the movie censors had decreed that Leslie Crosbie had to be punished for her crime, and her own lingering sense of guilt and frustration weren’t punishment enough for what she’d done.

Phantoms, Inc. (MGM, 1945)

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

After the 1940 The Letter on September 11, 2025, Turner Classic Movies followed it up with an unusually good entry in MGM’s Crime Does Not Pay series, a 1945 film called Phantoms, Inc. This was about confidence men in general and phony “spiritualists” in particular. The principal villain is Dr. Rupert Trykel (Arthur Shields, the go-to guy for blarney-filled Irishmen just then if you couldn’t get Barry Fitzgerald), who runs a fake psychic operation. His main pigeons in the part of the story we see are Philip Kenneson, Sr. (Frank Reicher) and his wife Martha (Ann Shoemaker), who are anxious about the fate of their son Philip Kenneson, Jr. (Wally Cassell – we never see him as a living character but he appears in enough still photos and flashbacks they needed an actor to play him). Philip was serving as a private in the South Pacific in World War II, and to his parents he’s just dropped off the radar screen. They don’t know if he’s alive or dead, and whether he’s in a Japanese prisoner of war camp being tortured or has met some equally sinister and unpleasant fate. So they go to Dr. Trykel, whose séances are surprisingly un-elaborate. I’ve often complained to my husband Charles that I miss the old-fashioned gimmicks phony psychics of old used to pull on their marks in the movies about them, including either actors or dummies made to look like ghosts and toy trumpets suspended by wires in mid-air representing the voices of the dead speaking from the spirit world. Charles pointed out that most of the phony psychics of today are trying to land gigs on TV, and the lighting needed for a TV show would expose such blatant fakery. Instead they rely on so-called “cold readings,” the sort of thing where the alleged psychic says things like, “I see a red dress … no, it was a blue dress,” and the mark says, “You’re right! It was a blue dress!”

Dr. Trykel and all the other people at the séance, who are all part of his gang, extensively research the life of Philip Kenneson, Jr. and find out that he was a star student and he had a girlfriend named Enid. In the pre-Internet age they do this by researching the morgues of the local newspaper and interviewing people who knew him, including his former high-school principal, ostensibly for a story they’re doing on the local boys who are off fighting the war. When the Kennesons try to give him money for his services, Dr. Trykel at first makes a show of refusing any more than $10, his customary fee for a séance, but later he says they can donate to our foundation (the payee on the check is actually “Our Foundation”!). Mr. Kenneson makes a one-time donation of $200 to “Our Foundation” and then stops giving Trykel money, but Mrs. Kenneson is hooked big-time and gives Trykel their entire life savings. We see how far they’ve gone into debt from a pile of past-due notices on bills they’ve received. Then, when the Kennesons no longer have any money he can extract from them, Trykel cuts them off completely – only Mrs. Kenneson won’t take no for an answer. At first she tries to report Trykel to the police, but the cops tell her that Trykel has been careful to stay within the bounds of the law and therefore there’s nothing they can do to help her or get her money back. Then she goes to Trykel’s live-work space with a gun and demands to see him, only in the end Trykel kills her and her husband finally reports him to the police and they arrest him. Quite well directed by Harold Young (whom I’ve previously faulted for having made potentially great movies like The Scarlet Pimpernel considerably less entertaining than they could have been, but this time he’s just fine) from an “original” story by Brainerd Duffield and a script by Edward Bock, and well photographed by Jackson Rose, Phantoms, Inc. is a well-done entry in this quite lengthy (1935 to 1947) series and blessedly avoided much of the blatant moralism that afflicted many entries and was inherent in the very title.

42nd Annual MTV Music Awards (CBS-TV, Paramount, Viacom, MTV, aired September 7, 2025)

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

Last night (Sunday, September 7) I watched the live telecast of the 2025 MTV Video Music Awards. They didn’t announce it as the “ … Annual” but the awards show began in 1984, which would have made last night’s the 42nd (assuming the shows continued every year). It was the typical lumbering beast of a modern awards show, in which the performances by various nominated artists were more important than the rather perfunctory presentations of the actual awards. My B.S. Detector went off big-time when I heard the announcer hyping the contents of the upcoming show and say they were honoring the “genius” of rapper Busta Rhymes. I’m sorry, but I can’t stand rap and I think it’s a contradiction in terms to call any rapper a “genius.” As I’ve said before, rock ‘n’ roll evolved in its first 20 years from the simplicity of early Elvis and the Black artists he was imitating to the sophistication of works like The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, while rap has turned 50 and is still mired in the garbage from which it started. It’s all about glorifying murder, rape, Queer-bashing, drug dealing and collecting the outrageously tasteless jewelry colloquially known as “bling.” The hints of progressive social commentary in early rap (The Last Poets – the unacknowledged pioneers of the form – Grandmaster Flash and Public Enemy) have long since disappeared and been replaced by the criminal pretensions of the “gangstas.” The show opened with Doja Cat’s “Jealous Type,” a decent enough song marred by the thinness of her voice. All too many of the women divas today (though it’s nice to see how strongly women dominate the pop music scene today – seven of the 16 songs performed last night were by women artists and women dominated the awards: Ariana Grande won Video of the Year and Song of the Year, and Lady Gaga was Artist of the Year) have thin, scratchy little voices that couldn’t carry across a closet without amplification and AutoTune. I’ll never forget a previous music awards show during which three baby divas took turns singing choruses of Patti Labelle’s hit “Lady Marmalade” – and then Patti Labelle herself came out with a gesture that said, “Move over, little girls, and let the old pro show you how it’s done.”

The next singer was Lala Young, whose song was called “Messy” and which I’ve had liked a lot better if her voice weren’t afflicted with a peculiar gargling sound in its lower register. When the song took her high, she sounded fine in a neo-Janis Joplin sort of way (though Idina Menzel and especially Maren Morris have come closer to recapturing Janis’s spirit). Then came the first-ever “Latino Icon” award presented to singer Ricky Martin, who sang “Livin’ La Vida Loca,” his star-making hit. If they’d just left it at that, it would have been fine – the song was one of those infectious guilty pleasures and I quite enjoyed it. But then, like all too many performers on last night’s show, that was just the start of an interminable medley that also included “Pégate,” “Baila Conmigo,” “María,” and “The Cup of Life.” Then came the modern singer Tate McRae (another woman) doing a medley of her own with “Revolving Door” and “Sports Car.” Once again I wish she’d stopped at “Revolving Door” – it was by far the better of her two songs. After that they gave the Song of the Year award to Bruno Mars (who luckily did not perform last night: his popularity continues to elude me and every time I’ve seen him he looked like he was auditioning for a biopic of Michael Jackson) and someone named Rosé for a song called “Apt.” Then the “genius” of Busta Rhymes was showcased in yet another interminable medley: I missed the first two “songs” but the titles I got (Google’s song-search app got quite a workout from me last night!) were “Gimme Some More,” “Scenario,” “Touch It,” and “Pass the Courvoisier.” Rhymes’s presentation was so maniacally hectoring, even by rap standards, that I was doing the Nazi salute and thinking, “If there were a Black Hitler, this is what he would look and sound like.” Busta Rhymes got an honorary “Rock the Bells Visionary” award, of all things.

The next song was by Sabrina Carpenter and was called “Tears.” She came out on stage with choristers enacting non-violent protesters carrying signs with slogans like “If You Hate You Won’t Get Laid” (Donald Trump would no doubt beg to differ!) and “Protect Trans Rights.” I liked the sentiments and especially liked their flagrant violation of the edict laid down by the evening’s host, L. L. Cool J., who for me has transcended his rapper origins with a recurring role in law enforcement on NCIS Los Angeles, who’d begun the show with an order to all participants to check their politics at the stage door. What I didn’t care for so much was the extent to which her song was overproduced; it was yet another record whose potential beauty was submerged under too many instruments. After that came an odd pairing: Post Malone and Jelly Roll, shown from the stage of a concert they were giving together in Germany, doing a song called “Losers,” and then someone called the Kid LAROI (that’s how he spells his stage name; his birth name is Charles Kenneth Jeffrey Howard, which puts him just one first name short of Reginald Kenneth Dwight a.k.a. Elton John, the rock star with five first names) doing a song called “Lost.” Then Mariah Carey was presented with something called “The Vanguard Award,” and the pre-commercial announcer hyping her upcoming appearance said we’d hear her sing “anthems.” My heart sank at the plural, since that meant we were in for yet another interminable medley. The songs were “Sugar Sweet,” “Fantasy,” “Heartbreaker,” “Obsessed,” “It’s Like That,” and “We Belong Together.” There was nothing from her early years – no “Vision of Love,” “Butterfly” (my all-time favorite Mariah Carey song), or “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” My favorite Mariah Carey story is about her abrupt departure from Columbia, where she’d had her early hits, to EMI’s Virgin label in April 2001. The deal included a film project called Glitter, and both the album and the film were such total flops that when the September 11, 2001 attacks happened, Jay Leno joked, “They say that terrorists hide where no one else goes. So they should be looking for Osama bin Laden in the theatres showing Mariah Carey’s movie Glitter.”

After that the young male singer Alex Warren, who won Best New Artist, did a mini-medley of his hits “Eternity” and “Ordinary.” Calling your song “Ordinary” seemingly invites all too many “you said it, we didn’t” jokes, but it was actually pretty good if … well, ordinary. That was followed by a tribute to the late Ozzy Osbourne featuring Steven Tyler and Joe Perry from the bad Aerosmith in yet another medley, this time of Osbourne-associated songs: “Crazy Train,” “Changes,” and “Mama, I’m Coming Home.” I was never a fan of Ozzy Osbourne, either with Black Sabbath or on his own, though I bought a CD copy of his first solo album, Blizzard of Ozz, on a cheap reissue label because I’d just read the true-crime book Say You Love Satan, about a group of adolescents who formed a cult around their made-up version of Satanism and ultimately killed one of their number, and the author had mentioned that the cultists were particular fans of Osbourne’s song “Bark at the Moon.” I have a certain admiration for Osbourne, however, in that he cleaned up his extensive drug and alcohol problems in the early 2010’s and that he made it to 76. I remember the documentary The Decline of Western Civilization, Part 2: The Metal Years, in which the filmmakers shot an interview with Osbourne while he was in his kitchen pouring himself a glass of orange juice – only he was so drunk and/or stoned he missed the glass completely and poured orange juice all over the floor. Anyone who thinks of Osbourne as the avatar of heavy metal was in for a surprise last night; the third song, “Mama, I’m Coming Home,” was actually a quite good blues pastiche in which at least one of the guitars was acoustic.

The next number after the Osbourne tribute was a nod to reggaetón, the Puerto Rican genre that’s a mixture of reggae, Latin, and rap (and I find the rap parts more tolerable than usual because they’re blessedly in a language I don’t understand). The artists were J. Balvin, Justin Quiles, Lenny Tavarez, and D. J. Snake, and the songs (once again, there were two) were “Zum Zum” and “Noventa.” After Sabrina Carpenter was presented with Best Album for Short ‘n’ Sweet, the show presented modern-day country artist Megan Moroney for one of the most pleasant songs on the program, “6 Months Later.” (The numeral is part of the official title.) The next artist was a tall, slender young man named Sombr (he was born Shane Michael Boose) doing yet another medley, “Back to Friends” (as in the person whom he’s just had sex with wants to go back to being just his friend) and “12 to 12.” As with many of the two-song mini-medleys during the evening, the first song was better than the second and quite frankly he should have quit while he was ahead.

The show was closed by a blankly handsome young man named Conan Gray, dressed in a purple robe that made him look like yet another white guy who wants to be Prince, singing a song called “Vodka Cranberry.” There’s a Reddit page on the song, https://www.reddit.com/answers/cdba0f37-55a4-449a-bcc3-e15aea6e6860/?q=Meaning%20of%20Vodka%20Cranberry%20by%20Conan%20Gray&source=PDP, that hints that “Vodka Cranberry” is Gay-themed. Gray’s Wikipedia page is silent about his sexual orientation, but the actual video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yzbvv8WdP9k&list=RDYzbvv8WdP9k&start_radio=1) is clearly about two young male lovers sadly but bitterly breaking up. The video is a lot more poignant than the performance Gray gave on the Video Music Awards, which seemed (like too much of the show) to drown in its own pretensions. His VMA performance is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OWIuCp1fyg&list=RD5OWIuCp1fyg&start_radio=1 and began with a shot that reminded me of the current Purple Mattress commercial, a parody of Sleeping Beauty in which the prince wakes the sleeping princess with a kiss, but she begs off, sends him away and insists on being allowed to continue to sleep on her Purple Mattress. The figure in the Video Music Awards performance was too androgynous to be clearly identifiable as male; it looked to me like a small-breasted woman. It was an odd ending to a typically lumbering awards show in which even the potentially moving moments were drowned in too much production.