Midsomer Murders: "The Stitcher Society" (Bentley Productions, all3 Media, ITV Channel 4, American Public Television, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, April 25) I watched a KPBS-TV rerun of a 2021 episode of the series Midsomer Murders, about a fictional “Midsomer County” in central England where a lot of people get murdered – which has prompted my husband Charles to make the same jokes about it he used to make about Cabot Cove, Maine on the TV show Murder, She Wrote: how long is it going to take before everyone in town is either a murder victim or in prison for killing them? This show was called “The Stitcher Society,” and judging from the title I’d expected it to be about murder in a sewing circle. That’s actually a plot point, as Gideon Tooms (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd), who inherits the Stitcher Society when his father Rueben Tooms (Silas Carson) becomes the first murder victim, wants to change the society’s name for precisely that reason. He’s also got a woman financial backer willing to invest in a major expansion of the group, whose real mission is to reach out to people who’ve had heart bypass surgery and get them involved in athletics and social work to give them a reason to live and stimulate their healing so they don’t just sit around feeling sorry for themselves. I had a heart bypass operation in December 2021 and I could identify with it, especially when the police department’s medical examiner, Fleur Perkins (Annette Badland), refers to the surgical scar left behind on the chest as a “zipper,” to the brief confusion of the principal investigators, detective chief inspector John Barnaby (Neil Dudgeon) and his partner, detective sergeant Jamie Winter (Nick Hendrix). (When I told a friend of mine who worked as a nurse about my bypass operation, he joked, “Oh, you’ve joined the zipper brigade.”)

The intrigue gets started when Toby Winter (Peter De Jersey), who five years previously was accused of murder and got off on a technicality. He shows up at a meeting of the Stitcher Society and the rest of the members are shocked that he was willing to show his face in town again even five years later. Julia Steinem (Nimmy March) is Toby’s sister and is convinced he didn’t kill anybody; to exonerate him she brings in private detective Mack McInally (Michael Nardone), but he uncovers evidence that she was at the scene of the murder five years before and tries to use that to blackmail her. Rueben had announced to the town that he had definitive evidence establishing Toby’s innocence, but he also turns out to be having an affair with Julia and planning to run away with her even though his wife Alberta (Lizzy McInnerny) carefully and conscientiously nursed him back to health after his operation. (My husband Charles did the same thing with me.) The real killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Mimi Dagmar (Hannah Waddingham), a local realtor who sold John Barnaby and his wife Sarah (Fiona Dolman) their house – there’s a nice running gag in which she can never remember the cop’s wife’s name, though all her guesses begin with “S” – and was the sister of the original murder victim. Mimi actually was the initial killer – the two sisters got into an argument and Mimi picked up a nearby rock and bludgeoned her with it – and she also killed the other three victims (Rueben, McInally and a woman whom Gideon was about to throw out of the club because she, too, was convinced Toby Winter was innocent) because she was worried that Mack’s re-investigation of the case would point to her even though Mack had nothing. As he arrests Mimi at the end, Barnaby tells her, “You killed three people for nothing.” It was an unusually strong and chilling Midsomer Murders episode and a welcome relief from some of this show’s usual tropes, including the annoying habit of some of its writers to have multiple crimes uncovered in the middle of the investigation so it seems like half the town is being arrested at the conclusion.

The Card, a.k.a. The Promoter (Ealing Studios, Pinewood Studios, British Film-Makers, Ronald Neame Productions, J. Arthur Rank, Universal-International [U.S.], 1952)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Tuesday, April 23) I watched an oddball British film on Turner Classic Movies: The Card, an oddball 1952 movie made by the Ealing Studios in Britain, based on a novel by Arnold Bennett published in 1911 – which is when the film is set (there was a silent version in the 1920’s as well). It was directed by Ronald Neame, who’s also credited as one of the producers (at first I had a prejudice against him because the first film of his I ever saw was The Poseidon Adventure, but later I got to see some of his British films and quite liked him), and the script was by Eric Ambler, who was much better known for his spy thrillers and crime novels than a light comedy like this. It’s about a young man from the (fictitious, though based on a real place) town of Bursley in central England, one of the so-called “Five Towns” that make most of the nation’s plates and bowls for food. The young man is Edward Henry Machin (Alec Guinness, showing why this early in his career he was frequently compared to Stan Laurel even though his character here is resourceful instead of lovably dumb), whose first name is usually abbreviated “Denry.” He’s been raised by his mother (Veronica Turleigh), a widow who provides for them as a washerwoman. As a prank he sneaks into his teacher’s desk, forges better grades for himself than the ones he’s earned, and as he laconically explains in a voice-over he’s rewarded with a scholarship to college, where he’s relentlessly teased by the boys from wealthier families for being a washerwoman’s son. When it comes time for him to look for his first job, he gets it by returning a wallet a local lawyer named Herbert Duncalf (Edward Chapman, who in 1930 had starred in an adaptation of Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock directed by, of all people, Alfred Hitchcock) dropped in the street.

He’s rewarded with a job as Duncalf’s clerk, and as a result he’s given the assignment of making out the invitations for a major ball hosted by the Countess of Chell (Valerie Hobson, older but still the same incandescent beauty she was in James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein). He forges one for himself and another two for the tailor who he talks into making him a dress suit and the woman, Ruth Earp (Glynis Johns), from whom he takes dancing lessons. Denry gets noticed when he, dared by his friends, asks for and gets a dance from the Countess herself. Denry also gets a job collecting rents for local landlord H. Calvert (George Devine), and within a few reels this gig has made him, if not surpassingly wealthy, at least successful enough he can afford to take girlfriend Nellie Cotterell (the young Petula Clark) on an all-day trip to a vacation town. Alas, while out with both Nellie and Ruth, he gets worried about how long his money will hold out in the face of the extravagant purchases both Nellie and Ruth are making with his money. At one point one of them demands he buy them a glass paperweight, and out of sheer frustration he tells the merchant to send it to “Rockefeller” at “Buckingham Palace.” Ruth feels insulted by that remark and walks off, where she eventually marries a rich man. Denry is saved when the captain of a Norwegian fishing boat gets caught in a storm; the boat is salvaged but the captain is inclined to write it off until Denry offers to buy it from him and make it available for tourists interested in going out on the supposedly doomed boat.

Denry ends up with quite a lot of coins and uses them to launch a savings club for local residents at 15 percent interest. He also saves the local football club (that’s “football” as in “soccer,” though it’s a lot more accurately named than American football because it is, after all, about moving a ball with one’s feet) by recruiting a star player, Cregeen (Lyn Evans), who dramatically improves Bursley’s win-loss record. When Cotterell’s parents are ruined by a financial swindler and are emigrating to Canada via the steerage section, Denry rushes to the dock where their ship is about to sail and pays to upgrade their tickets to first class. The film ends with Denry being elected Mayor of Bursley, with Nellie as his first lady since he pulled her off the boat on which she was supposed to go with her parents to Canada and married her instead. During the parade to celebrate his inauguration, Ruth meets another elderly rich man who’s immediately attracted to her, and the two go off together. When it was released in America (by Universal-International even though J. Arthur Rank was the British distributor), the title was changed to The Promoter because The Card wouldn’t have made sense to American audiences in this context. (When I saw this film on the TCM Web page, at first I thought it was a film about gambling à la Pushkin’s novel and Tchaikovsky’s opera The Queen of Spades and thought the titular “card” was a playing card, not a person aggressively seeking financial and social advancement.)

What interested me most about this film was that it featured an upwardly mobile central character in a society that’s supposed to be more highly stratified than ours and where it’s considered virtually impossible to advance on one’s own merits. What’s even more ironic is that in the 1930’s the U.S. made quite a few films like this about determined men exploiting the opportunities the U.S. offered for financial and social advancement, but in the American movies along this line like Other Men’s Women and Dante’s Inferno, the nouveau riche protagonists always over-extended themselves and ended up precisely where they’d started out. These British filmmakers took what was essentially an American-style character, plopped him into the middle of Britain’s highly stratified, rigid class system, and had him not only rise to a position of influence and power but had him stay there at the end of the story. I also liked the subtlety with which Neame and Ambler depicted Denry’s rise, from the donkey-drawn dogcart he drives in the early scenes to a much fancier horse-drawn carriage and, eventually, a car. Though Ealing made funnier movies than this, including Kind Hearts and Coronets, The Lavender Hill Mob and the woefully underrated Passport to Pimlico, The Card is quite good on its own merits and I loved the fact that at least three strong and highly characterized women are in the dramatis personae.

Puccini: La Rondine (Metropolitan Opera Production, 2024) (Metropolitan Opera Guild, Neubauer Foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies, filmed April 20, 2024, repeated April 24, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday (Wednesday, April 24) my husband Charles and I went to see the rerun of last Saturday’s final performance of the Metropolitan Opera’s current production of Puccini’s La Rondine (“The Swallow,” as in the bird) on their “Live in HD” series. La Rondine is something of a stepchild in Puccini’s catalog; he composed it in 1913 or thereabouts (which slots it in between the stunning La Fanciulla del West and Il Trittico, the trilogy of three one-act operas he composed for the Met, which premiered it in 1918) under a commission from the Carltheater in Vienna, Austria. I’d known that for years and had always assumed the piece contained spoken dialogue and was in German, and it wasn’t until the San Francisco Opera did it in the 1970’s (not as part of their main international season but in a lower-cost, both production budget and ticket price, series) that I realized it was a through-sung opera with recitatives instead of dialogue, and (like all of Puccini’s other operas) it was in Italian. It was only in the last few days that I looked up La Rondine on Wikipedia and found that two of Puccini’s non-negotiable demands for this production were that it be through-composed and in Italian. (Verdi was tri-lingual in Italian, French and German, but as far as I know Puccini was mono-lingual in Italian.) Unfortunately, the production ran into a snag called “The Great War” (as World War I was known before there was a World War II), on which Austria and Italy were on opposite sides. Arranging a production involving two countries that were at war with each other proved to be much too complicated, so the opera was finally premiered on March 17, 1917 in Monte Carlo because Monaco was neutral. Italian opera stars Gilda dalla Rizza and Tito Schipa sang the lead roles.

Also, Puccini’s usual publisher, Tito Ricordi, rejected La Rondine as “bad Lehár” (whatever might be wrong with it, it certainly doesn’t sound like Franz Lehár, good or bad!), so Puccini placed it with Ricordi’s great rival, Sonzogno (who already had Mascagni and Leoncavallo under contract but were furious at having missed out on both Verdi himself and Verdi’s successor!), whose offices were bombed in World War II, resulting in the destruction of some of the orchestral score for Puccini’s later revisions of the piece. (In his zeal to revise his old work, Puccini was essentially the George Lucas of his time; in a New Yorker profile Lucas was once asked when he would be done revising the Star Wars movies, and he said, “When I die.”) Basically La Rondine is a mash-up of Verdi’s La Traviata and Puccini’s own La Bohème, though without the tragic underpinnings (i.e., the heroine is not dying of tuberculosis as the female leads of both Traviata and Bohème are) that gave those earlier operas much of their dramatic power. La Rondine is set in Paris in the mid-19th century (though the Met’s production by Nicolas Joël moved it up to the 1920’s) and the leading lady is Magda de Civry (Angel Blue), a high-class “courtesan” (the 19th century French euphemism for prostitute, much the way “escort” is today) who’s kept by a much older rich man named Rambaldo Fernandez (Alfred Walker). Act I takes place at a party at Magda’s home that is attended by the poet Prunier (Bekhzod Davronov, Uzbek tenor making his Met debut), who’s dating Magda’s maid Lisette (Emily Pogorelc). Magda is bored with life as a high-class hooker and is hoping for a man to Take Her Away from All That, and he duly arrives in the person of Ruggero Lastouc (Jonathan Tetelman, whom I’ve heard good things about which he fully lived up to).

Magda’s party breaks up when her guests collectively decide to go to the night spot Bullier’s, and she follows (the Met’s synopsis says she’s “disguised as a shop girl,” but all that changes is she takes off one lavish wrap and puts on another). At Bullier’s (in Puccini’s second act, though as usual for them these days the Met mashed the first two acts into one), Magda meets Ruggero again when he sits at her table. The two fall in love and decide to make a go of it. Act III takes place at a resort on the French Riviera, though they’re starting to run out of money (like Rodolfo in La Bohème, Prunier is a journalist and poet, but it’s not clear how Ruggero makes his living – unless we’re meant to believe he’s living off a well-to-do family and doesn’t have to work) and the hotel officials are suspiciously eyeing them and wondering when they’re going to start paying their bills. Ruggero tells Magda he wants to marry her as soon as his parents give permission, but Magda – who has kept her past secret from Ruggero – already has second thoughts. Those thoughts just become more serious and bitter when Ruggero gets a letter back from his mother, giving him permission to marry Magda but only if she’s a virtuous woman. Magda then tells all, confessing to Ruggero that she isn’t virtuous – at least in the sense Ruggero’s mom means – and at the end Rambaldo shows up and she goes off with him, leaving Ruggero bereft. Musically, La Rondine is gorgeous; though there’s only one aria in it that’s become famous out of context (Magda’s “Che il bel sogno di Doretta,” based on a poem Prunier reads at Magda’s party in Act I; he sings the first stanza but then Magda takes it up), the entire opera is a wash of glorious sound.

The problem with La Rondine is that none of the characters are dramatically interesting: Magda has neither the vulnerability of Violetta in La Traviata nor the pathos of Mimì in La Bohème. Ruggero is pretty much a dramatic cipher, and because his parents aren’t depicted onstage we don’t get anything like the dramatic conflict between Violetta and Giorgio, her beloved Alfredo’s father, nor the worm-turning climax as Giorgio realizes that even though she’s flouted the conventional moral norms, Violetta has been a “good woman” all along in the sense of being true to her own values and living by the Golden Rule. Prunier and Lisette are basically the comic-relief characters, and even as such they’re well below Marcello and Musetta in Bohème – though Charles thought the plot of La Rondine would have worked as a 1930’s screwball comedy and it’s interesting to imagine the story that way (with the inevitable punch-pulling that would have been required under the Production Code). The production was conducted by a woman, Speranza Scappucci (her first name means “Hope” in Italian), the first time I’ve ever seen a Met telecast with a female conductor (in the “it’s about time!” department), and she led the score with passion and authority even though I was perplexed by some of her comments in the pre-recorded intermission interview. She praised the score for its transparency and careful delineation of instrumental voices, where I’d been enjoying it for a glorious overall wash of sound. When I first saw the previews for this production, I’d wondered why Angel Blue, an African-American “woman of size,” was dressed in a gown that made her strongly resemble Bessie Smith. I don’t mind them casting singers of color in roles that don’t necessarily correspond to their real-life races – that’s a battle we won long ago when Leontyne Price regularly appeared as the Japanese heroine of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly – and indeed I loved the irony that a white singer was playing the servant of a Black one (and Rambaldo, Magda’s sugar daddy to whom she returns at the end of the opera, was also cast as a Black singer here).

I noticed that when the Met hosts, Julia Bullock, was introducing Angel Blue she mentioned that she made her initial mark as the Ethiopian princess in Verdi’s Aïda – a role I hope she doesn’t get “typed” in the way Price did because the character is supposed to be Black. Angel Blue has also sung Violetta in La Traviata, and I’d love to hear her do that because, though the two are alike in that they’re both high-end prostitutes who fall genuinely in love with attractive and rich young men but then lose them to family conventions, Violetta is simply a deeper and richer character than Magda, and would give Angel Blue much more to work with as a vocal and dramatic actress. It also doesn’t help that Puccini chose to make both Ruggero and Prunier tenors, and the Met compounded his mistake by casting them both with singers whose voices are quite similar to each other’s. (That was a mistake Mozart made in Idomeneo, too, though that’s a bit more understandable because in the original version of Idomeneo, Idomeneo was a tenor and his son, Idamante, a castrato. Later Mozart had to adapt the opera for a production in a city that, for the obvious reason of public disgust, had already banned the castrati – so in that version he made Idamante a tenor but kept Idomeneo a tenor, too. I’ve long thought Mozart should have rewritten Idomeneo as a baritone so there’d still be a father-and-son distinction between the two voices.) I quite liked La Rondine, despite its flaws, and wish it were better known; for some reason British critic Spike Hughes didn’t include it in his book Puccini’s Great Operas, and it’s the only one of Puccini’s mature operas Renata Tebaldi never recorded (though she would have been great in it!). But still it’s an opera that cries out for glorious singing and expert staging, both of which it got from the Met on April 20.

Love Letters (Hal Wallis Productions, Paramount, 1945)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, April 21) I watched a couple of films I’d never seen before on Turner Classic Movies, the 1945 romantic drama Love Letters and the 1926 silent film La Bohème. Love Letters was one of Hal B. Wallis’s first productions after he left Warner Bros. in 1943 over a battle with Jack Warner on the production credits of the film Casablanca (when Casablanca won the Academy Award for Best Picture, Jack Warner as studio head bolted from his chair and grabbed the award before Wallis, the actual producer, could get it) and set up a semi-independent company to make his films with Paramount as the releasing studio. For his story he bought a novel called Pity My Simplicity by British author Christopher Massie whose plot seems to be pieced together, Frankenstein Monster-style, from Édmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, James Hilton’s Random Harvest (with the genders reversed) and Vera Caspary’s Laura. To adapt Massie’s novel into a film script Wallis hired Ayn Rand, of all people, though blessedly this film is free from her political, economic and sexual obsessions. (I told that to my husband Charles when he emerged from the bedroom about 20 minutes into it, and he said, “So Ayn Rand was just another hack!”) He also picked William (nè Wilhelm) Dieterle as director and went to David O. Selznick’s contract list for his two stars, Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotten.

The plot begins in Italy during the last days of World War II, when Roger Morland (Robert Sully) asks one of his fellow soldiers, Alan Quinton (Joseph Cotten), to write letters in his name to his girlfriend Victoria Remington (Jennifer Jones) in the small village of Longreach in central England. Victoria falls in love with Roger but only through the letters Alan actually wrote, and though we don’t see any of this happening until a flashback at the very end, the boorish Roger turns Victoria off and she can’t reconcile the haunting, romantic tone of “Roger”’s letters with his crude, nasty reality. Then the war ends and Alan returns home to England and his parents (Lumsden Hare and Winifred Harris). He learns that his Aunt Dagmar (whom we never see as an on-screen character, though there’s a still photo of her) has just died and left him her country estate, which is filled with his boyhood possessions as well as 10 gold sovereigns Dagmar told him to give to his wife if and when he marries. Alan has a sort-of fiancée, Helen Wentworth (Anita Louise), but it doesn’t take long for her to realize that Alan is no longer in love with her because he’s haunted by the memory of Victoria. Alan meets Victoria’s friend Dilly Carson (Ann Richards, whom both MGM and Paramount tried to give a star buildup to that didn’t take; she’s a fine actress but not one with star quality) and blurts out the story of himself, Roger, Victoria and the letters when he gets drunk and starts talking to himself for half an hour. Unbeknownst to Alan, Victoria is actually at the party, though she’s caught amnesia and has totally forgotten everything about herself, including her identity and the fact that she and Roger actually did get married and then he died, not in the war but in an “accident.” Later Alan hears that Victoria is also dead and he starts dating a woman named “Singleton” – no other name. We know that “Singleton” is really Victoria, but Alan is clueless (he’d never seen a photo of Victoria, so he had no idea what she looked like – one would have thought she’d have sent a picture of herself to Roger, but no-o-o-o-o).

Alan goes through a wedding ceremony with Singleton, but during the ceremony she slips and calls him “Roger” for reasons of which she has no idea. The two move into the home Alan inherited from the dead Aunt Dagmar, and the film – which up until then has been so dull both Charles and I were having trouble staying awake – suddenly becomes more interesting as Alan patiently works with Singleton to try to jog her memory and help her regain awareness of who and what she is. Alan even buys Singleton an MG sports car (and I admired Paramount’s technical staff for remembering that the British drive on the left side of the road and their cars come with steering wheels on the right side; once I encountered a British tourist on a bus who said he could drive but didn’t want to in the U.S. because it would have been too difficult for him to accommodate to driving on the “wrong” side of the road and then go back to left-hand driving when he got back home), though he drives it because he has no idea whether or not she can drive. One day the two are driving through the British countryside when Singleton sees a road sign pointing to Longreach and demands Alan take her there. When they get there, the house she grew up in turns out to be occupied by two British rustics who work for Singleton’s adoptive mother, Beatrice Remington (Gladys Cooper in one of her delightfully vicious old-lady characterizations).

Alan takes Singleton on a picnic and she spills some sort of red fruit juice on her hand. She wipes it on her white dress, and this immediately flashes her back to how her late husband Roger really died: he was knifed to death and she picked up the knife and got his blood on her hands. Because of this, the police arrested her and she was tried for the murder, though all we get of this are a few fragmentary flashbacks showing her under police custody during a break in the trial. Then Beatrice Remington tells her the whole story of how Roger died: they had a confrontation in which Roger burned all of the letters Alan had written Victoria in Roger’s name, telling her he was tired of living in another man’s shadow. Victoria had a hissy-fit over their destruction and tried to save the letters from the fireplace. Roger came up from behind her with murderous intent, but Beatrice saved her life by coming up from behind Roger and stabbing him. Later, though, Victoria handled the knife and got blood on her hands from it, and that’s why the cops suspected her of Roger’s murder. Alan happens to come on the scene while Beatrice is telling this story, and he finally realizes that he married Victoria after all and the two return to Alan’s home and presumably live happily ever after.

For some reason the Wikipedia page on Love Letters describes it as a film noir, which it definitely is not – though it does have a few nicely Gothic shots of all those old, decaying British manses from ace cinematographer Lee Garmes. It’s just a creepy (in both senses of the word) romantic melodrama set in an unbelievable rendition of the British countryside, and Dieterle directs dutifully but dully. Jennifer Jones seems way too young for her part – Alan decides that she’s 23 but she came off much more like a teenager to me – and during the movie I joked to Charles that if Ayn Rand had had her head she’d have had Alan restore Victoria’s memories by raping her. (All of Ayn Rand’s sex scenes involve a strong, dominating woman being raped into psychological and sexual submission by an even stronger, more dominating man. It’s obvious that was a personal fantasy for her.) Love Letters was both a commercial and a critical success at the time, though I think the latter was because Hal Wallis was obviously going for Quality with a capital “Q,” arranging for major stars and a top-flight director as well as a story that would impress Academy voters (which it did; Love Letters was up for four Oscars, including Jennifer Jones’ third consecutive Best Actress nomination, though it didn’t win any). It doesn’t age very well, though, and I think it’s because the whole conception of the mystery woman as flotsam in the hands of the strong, powerful man seems unbearably sexist and just icky today. The main theme from Victor Young’s score for Love Letters was turned into a pop song to promote the film (with lyrics by the “Body and Soul” guy, Edward Heyman), and in 1957 Nat “King” Cole and Gordon Jenkins made an incomparable recording of it (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sy4jDt6bkG8) for Cole’s album Love Is the Thing that’s a good deal better than the movie itself! There’s also a gospel-soul version by another African-American artist, Ketty Lester, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jz91zXh30sE.

La Bohème (MGM, 1926)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Love Letters, TCM showed a much better movie: La Bohème, a 1926 silent movie based on Henri Murger’s 1851 novel, which in the film’s credits is called Life in the Latin Quarter but its original French title was Scènes de la Vie de Bohème (“Scenes of Bohemian Life”). Murger started writing the book in 1846 and it was published piecemeal in French newspapers, notably Le Corsaire, between 1846 and 1849 before Murger collected his stories as a novel and published them in 1851. The book is best known today as the basis for Giacomo Puccini’s 1896 opera La Bohème, but though TCM hosts Ben Mankiewicz and Jacqueline Stewart both claimed the film was based on Puccini’s opera (for which Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa wrote the libretto; in opera, librettists are to composers what screenwriters are to directors in movies), it really wasn’t. In 1897 Ruggiero Leoncavallo had written his own La Bohème opera, with Leoncavallo writing his own libretto (as he had for his one major hit, Pagliacci), but his was a flop while Puccini’s was a smash success. The credited screenwriter, Fred De Gresac, took his version from Murger rather than Illica and Giacosa, though I was surprised he didn’t include the most famous scene from Murger that isn’t in the Puccini opera: finally evicted by their landlord, Benôit (Karl Dane in the movie) on the eve of a major party, the Bohemians go through with their party anyway but hold it outdoors in their building’s courtyard, where Benôit has dumped all their stuff. (Leoncavallo included that in his Bohème opera; Illica and Giacosa wrote it for their libretto but Puccini decided not to use it.)

The story should be familiar to Puccini buffs, but in case you aren’t one, here goes: four starving, struggling Bohemian artists – journalist and playwright Rodolphe (John Gilbert), painter Marcel (Gino Corrado), musician Schaunard (George Hassell) and hanger-on Colline (Edward Everett Horton – who would have guessed that out of all the cast members he would have the most enduring career when sound came in?) – are sharing a flat in Paris’s Latin Quarter. They have a monumental struggle on the first of every month to come up with the rent, though so far they’ve done it by a series of stratagems, most recently Rodolphe doing a quick draft of an article on dogs and cats for his irascible editor (Agostino Borato) and lengthening the piece on the spot when the editor says it’s too short. Also living in the neighborhood, in a building across the courtyard, is Mimì (Lillian Gish), a seamstress who makes her living working at home. Mimì and Rodolphe meet by chance and are immediately smitten with each other even though Mimì has another, wealthier suitor, Vicomte Paul (Roy D’Arcy). Paul has placed a big order with Mimì for frilly lace garments he can wear at upper-class functions, and he’s made it clear that Mimì’s body is part of the deal. Mimì has no intention of yielding to Paul’s slimy advances but the two of them get physically close enough – even though all Mimì is doing is presenting Paul with the clothes she’s made for him – that Rodolphe, looking through Mimì’s window, sees them and gets entirely the wrong impression. Eventually they get back together and Rodolphe and Mimì go on a picnic (beautifully photographed by Henri Sartov in a way that evokes French pastoral painting of the 19th century just before the advent of Impressionism), but disaster strikes when Rodolphe’s editor, pissed off at him for missing his deadline by four weeks, fires him.

He doesn’t tell Rodolphe; he tells Mimì instead when she’s there to drop off the piece, and Mimì decides not to tell Rodolphe because he’s busy writing a play inspired by her and she doesn’t want to take his attention away from it. So she redoubles her efforts as a seamstress and works herself to the bone, keeping the lights on in her apartment so she can literally work day and night. (The film takes place in 1830 – we know that because in two different scenes we see wall calendars – and back then she would have still been working by candlelight.) Meanwhile Marcel’s girlfriend Musette (Renée Adorée) is dating rich men on the side and getting spectacular outfits from them which she shares with Mimì. Unfortunately, Mimì’s workload has aggravated her tuberculosis; she’s taken a job at a clothing factory but becomes too weak to handle the big bolts of cloth involved, and ultimately she’s let go from her job. She retreats to her little apartment, staggering home and barely making it, and in the end she dies quietly and alone while the rest of the Bohemians are celebrating the success of Rodolphe’s play – which got put on thanks to the promotion of Vicomte Paul and his “friends in high places.” La Bohème was Lillian Gish’s first MGM film after years of working for pioneering director D. W. Griffith and playing the delicate, winsome “good girls” in The Birth of a Nation (1915), Intolerance (1916), Way Down East (1920) and Orphans of the Storm (1921). Then she retreated to Europe and worked there for two years before returning to the U.S. Gish sought a contract at a major studio and finally signed with MGM after production chief Irving Thalberg gave her a deal that included everything she wanted. She could choose her own stories and had approval of her director and co-stars.

Having worked in Europe for two years and therefore not being familiar with the current Hollywood talent, she asked Thalberg for advice; Thalberg showed her two reels of MGM’s latest production, The Big Parade – a love story set against the backdrop of World War I (or “The Great War,” as it was usually called before there was a World War II) – and Gish immediately demanded that she make La Bohème with The Big Parade’s director, King Vidor, and stars John Gilbert and Renée Adorée. Gish also laid down the law that she didn’t want her and Gilbert actually to be shown kissing on screen. She thought their love would be more powerfully shown if it were understated and didn’t involve visible physical affection. Unfortunately, preview audiences were audibly disappointed when the film didn’t contain any of the heavy-breathing kissing scenes for which John Gilbert was famous, and so the film was put back into production so scenes of Gilbert almost slobbering over Gish could be added. Frankly, I think Lillian Gish was right and MGM and the preview audiences were wrong – and I suspect the additional scenes were directed by someone other than King Vidor (as a fill-in director, George Hill, had shot scenes for The Big Parade depicting the actual war). In his scenes for both The Big Parade and La Bohème Vidor had got a remarkable degree of subtlety from Gilbert, whereas he’s almost totally unrestrained in the La Bohème retakes and one wants to put a leash on him.

Nonetheless, despite those rather tacky love scenes, La Bohème is a quite remarkable movie. Gish literally starved herself for three days before shooting her death scene, wanting to look as emaciated as possible on camera. The film is quite haunting and benefits from Vidor’s quiet direction and excellent Paris atmosphere – kudos to art directors Cedric Gibbons and A. Arnold Gillespie for remembering that a film set in France should have road signs and other public postings in French (though an imdb.com “Goofs” contributor noticed one mistake: the sign outside Mimì’s front door says “Melle.” instead of “Mlle.,” the correct French abbreviation for “Mademoiselle”) – as well as the finely honed acting of Gish and the supporting characters. (John Gilbert is a special case, for both good and ill.) Unfortunately, TCM chose to show it with an odd musical accompaniment, mostly featuring solo piano with an occasional violin part – and the bits with the violin were the most appropriate because they’re the only ones that drew on Puccini’s music for this story. The lowest point in the problematic accompaniment was a ragtime theme that was played under one of the sequences of Lillian Gish slinking home to die of TB – but La Bohème is a strong enough work of art it survived even the tacky playing of the unnamed pianist and the wrong-headed nature of much of the score.

The 100th: Billy Joel at Madison Square Garden – The Greatest Arena Run of All Time (Enliven Entertainment, Maritime Productions, Sony Music Entertainment, originally aired April 14, 2024; rebroadcast April 19, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, April 19) CBS-TV re-ran The 100th: Billy Joel at Madison Square Garden – The Greatest Arena Run of All Time, the Billy Joel concert special filmed on March 28, 2024 representing his 100th performance at Madison Square Garden in New York City. Joel had performed at least one concert per month there since 2010 and he’d become such a “regular” that the arena’s technical crew quickly set up the venue for a music concert just as easily as they could for a sports event. The show was originally aired on Sunday, April 14 but, on my husband Charles’s advice, I bypassed it and instead watched the Lifetime movies Killer Fortune Teller and Trapped by My Sugar Daddy. It was rebroadcast on Friday for a rather strange reason: viewers in the Eastern and Central time zones had to watch the concert half an hour later than it was scheduled because the Masters golf tournament lasted a half-hour longer than it was supposed to, and at the end of the show CBS affiliates on the East and Midwest cut it off in the middle of the last song – Joel’s star-making hit, “Piano Man” – to broadcast their local news. If I’d watched it here in California it would not have been affected by this sort of petty vandalism, but once again, even on those rare occasions when the time-zone differences work in our favor, the East Coast-centric media mavens can’t stand it and make it sound like the world is coming to an end. There’s one post on Entertainment Weekly (https://ew.com/billy-joel-100th-residency-special-cut-short-cbs-8631580) that quoted three tweets (or do we need to call them “X”’s now?), including one by Kevin Connolly that read, “You couldn’t produce a worse product than CBS just did on the Billy Joel special. Way too many commercials, didn’t play some of his best songs, went extremely out of order in his set list, and then cuts away to the local news in the middle of ‘Piano Man’?!? A total flop by CBS.”

I certainly didn’t think it was a total flop; I’ve been a Billy Joel fan at least since the late 1970’s (when he released two back-to-back mega-hit albums on Columbia, The Stranger and 52nd Street, which raised him from medium-level music star to pop icon and superstar) and I enjoyed the show thoroughly. I agree with Connolly that there were “way too many commercials,” though that’s part of the price you have to pay for all privately-owned television, and also with Connolly’s comment that he “didn’t play some of his best songs.” His set list didn’t include the ballad “Just the Way You Are,” which was the iconic Billy Joel song from the late 1970’s. Like Stevie Wonder’s “You Are the Sunshine of My Life,” it was heard everywhere – there was even a piano-roll version which the late John Gabrish and I heard at a visit to San Diego’s Old Town in the late 1980’s – and I remember liking it at first, then getting thoroughly sick of it (both from incessant airings of Joel’s version and the equally incessant covers), and after it faded off the airwaves hearing it again in a few years and saying to myself, “You know, that’s a really nice song.” (I had the same reaction to “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” as well.) There were some other Billy Joel songs I’d have liked to have heard on the show – including “Big Shot,” “Zanzibar” (a curious knock-off of Barry Manilow’s “Copacabaña”: the Copacabaña and Zanzibar were both major nightclubs in New York City in the 1940’s), “Allentown,” “Pressure,” “Uptown Girl” and his infamous history lesson, “We Didn’t Start the Fire” – but the songs he did include were quite fine. Joel began his set with “Lights Out on Broadway” and then played an intro based on the “Ode to Joy” finale from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to his song “Anthony’s Song (Movin’ Out).”

Then, after a lesser-known song from The Stranger called “Vienna” (I wondered if Joel placed that there because Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, from which he’d just quoted, was composed and premiered in Vienna in 1824) and a brief speech by Jerry Seinfeld, Joel did “New York State of Mind” and then brought on a guest star, Sting, to sing with him on “Big Man on Mulberry Street.” Sting came out in a powder-blue suit and did what amounted to a Sinatra impression, less vocally than physically – and he was so immaculately turned out Joel’s basic-black outfit seemed blah by comparison. Then Joel confessed to some uncertainty as to whether he could still hit the high notes on the next song he was about to sing – “An Innocent Man,” the title of a quite good Joel album of the early 1980’s in which he paid tribute to doo-wop in general and the Four Seasons in particular. Despite his disclaimer, Joel actually did quite well with “An Innocent Man.” He not only still has those high notes, they rang out clearly and strongly even though without the sheer ethereal power they had in the 1980’s. I couldn’t help but compare Joel to Elton John, whose current voice simply doesn’t have the killer falsetto it had in his prime – something that became painfully apparent when he appeared on a late-night TV show with Miley Cyrus a few years back. He let Miley Cyrus pick whatever song from his catalog she wanted to do, and she chose “Tiny Dancer” – which mercilessly exposed the deterioration in the upper register of John’s voice. After that there was a commercial break and then a gag segment in which people in the audience were allegedly asked what they wanted to hear Joel sing next – and all but one of them said they would like to hear his new song, “Turn the Lights Back On” (was it Joel’s belated answer record to his own “Lights Out on Broadway”?). Joel dutifully performed “Turn the Lights Back On” and then went into the title track from Joel’s final (1993) pop-rock album, River of Dreams.

During this song Joel gave one of his backup singers and musicians, Crystal Taliaferro – a Black woman who wore a considerably flasher and more flamboyant costume than Joel’s (most stars don’t let their backup singers upstage them in the costume department) and variously played saxophone, timbales (the stand-up drums used in Latin bands) and triangle – a chance to sing solo. Taliaferro responded to the challenge by belting out the first two choruses of “River Deep – Mountain High” with more ferocity and power than anyone since the first recording by Tina Turner with Phil Spector’s backup band. Then Joel came back and reprised “River of Dreams” with an intriguing interpolation of The Cadillacs’ 1954 hit “Gloria” towards the end. (There are quite a few songs called “Gloria,” including Van Morrison’s star-making 1964 hit with the band Them and the 1982 dance-pop hit for the late Laura Branigan.) After “River of Dreams” Joel came back with “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” – an enigmatic song with a fast middle section about the unhappy relationship of former prom queen and king Brenda and Eddie – and “It’s Still Rock ‘n’ Roll to Me” from the 1980 album Glass Houses (which may feature the sexiest photo of Billy Joel ever published), for which once again Joel got out from behind the piano, stood in front of the band and sang. Then Joel played what is probably my favorite song of his, “Only the Good Die Young,” which despite its title is actually a blistering attack on the Roman Catholic Church and especially what its teachings do to teenage women unlucky enough to be brought up in it. After that Joel played the first track on Glass Houses, “You May Be Right (I May Be Crazy),” during which director Paul Dugdale cut to a man and woman in the audience, both of them wearing black T-shirts, with hers reading “You May Be Right” and his reading “I May Be Crazy.” This song, too, contained an interpolation; Billy Joel’s lead guitarist took the vocal mike and belted out some of Led Zeppelin’s song “Rock ‘n’ Roll.”

The final piece on the program was “Piano Man,” the title song from Joel’s second album (and first for Columbia Records; before that he’d made a little-known album called Cold Spring Harbor for Ampex, the short-lived label started by a well-known company that made tape recorders) and his first major-label hit. It was Joel’s breakthrough song and it’s become part of American culture; I knew one cocktail-lounge pianist who would always make a point of playing it every Saturday at 9 p.m. because the song’s opening line is, “It’s nine o’clock on a Saturday.” That was the song that for some reason got cut off in the East and Midwest time zones when this show originally aired on April 14 so CBS decided to rebroadcast it five days later. It was also a song on which Joel took the omnipresent demand of modern pop-rock performers for audiences to sing along to the extreme of not actually singing the final chorus at all, convinced that his audience will sit shame-facedly through the song’s melody and join it so well the crowd sang it perfectly and without apparent guidance from Joel himself. The song featured Joel simultaneously singing, playing piano and playing harmonica from a Bob Dylan-style rack (which looked constructed to hold a much larger harmonica than the one Joel was playing) and was a worthy close to a quite remarkable evening.

One thing I admired about the telecast was the sheer power of Joel’s band – even though he inexplicably fired Liberty DeVitto, the great drummer on most of his records, just before his 2006 tour (DeVitto sued Joel in 2009 claiming, among other things, that he’d co-written many of Joel’s songs, but the suit was settled out of court in 2010 and DeVitto ended up starting what amounts to a Billy Joel tribute band called The Lords of 52nd Street) – and another thing was the extent to which Joel’s music has been influenced by jazz. Not only does he carry a three-piece horn section (trumpet, trombone, saxophone) but Joel’s own piano playing sounds considerably jazzier “live” than it did on his records. Also, like James Taylor, Joel has long since lost the exciting mane of hair he showcased on his early album covers and he’s now totally bald (either that or he’s responded to male pattern baldness by shaving his head completely). The show was rather awkwardly labeled The 100th: Billy Joel at Madison Square Garden – The Greatest Arena Run of All Time, but it was well worth watching and a showcase for one of the most interesting pop-song catalogues of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s.

Law and Order: "Inconvenient Truth" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired April 18, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, April 18) I watched the usual trifecta of Law and Order shows on NBC – though they’re doing yet another hiatus next Thursday and won’t be back until May 2. The flagship Law and Order episode, “Inconvenient Truth” (though it had nothing to do with climate change or Al Gore!) was O.K. It featured Jordan Bryant (Apollo Levine), an African-American who 12 years earlier was convicted of raping a white woman, and while he was in prison he defended himself as best he could. He also worked in the prison kitchen and determined to have an above-board legal career as a chef when he got out, which he did thanks to the efforts of attorney Keith Palmer (Paul Schultze). Keith Palmer also filed a lawsuit against the city on Jordan’s behalf and won a settlement of $10 million, but Palmer not only took 55 percent of the settlement as his fee (the standard is one-third) but billed Jordan for all his expenses in researching the case, including his paralegals, deposition expenses and the like. Jordan determined to open his own restaurant with the $1 million he had left (less $100,000 he gave to his estranged daughter, with which she was able to pay off her student loans) but got into arguments with his (white) business partner over money.

Then Jordan is knifed to death outside the restaurant after briefly having an argument with someone inside, and the police and prosecutors come to the conclusion that Keith Palmer deliberately murdered Jordan because Palmer was in line for a judicial appointment and the suit Jordan was threatening to file against Palmer could have derailed it. Prosecutors Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) actually take Jordan to trial, but in the middle of the trial he whips out a document that gives him an unshakable alibi: he was in his car receiving an automated traffic ticket at the time of the murder, and he was photographed in the act. Ultimately it turns out that Jordan was actually killed by Palmer’s wife Amanda (Jodi Stevens), who resented him for potentially destroying her husband’s career and his opportunity for a judgeship. There’s a potentially fascinating sequel to this one in which Keith Palmer represents his wife in court and manages to get her acquitted by savaging the prosecution and arguing, “A few weeks ago you were equally certain I committed this crime!” But as things stand, despite the attempt of writers Gia Gordon and Pamela Wechsler to make some social comments about the unreliability of eyewitness testimony (their whole case against Keith rested on a rather twitchy waiter who more or less placed him at the scene of the crime), ultimately it was one of the less satisfying recent Law and Orders and the wife ex machina gimmick really bothered me.