Monday, March 18, 2024

Friday Night Sext Scandal (MarVista Entertainment, Neshama Entertainment, Wishing Floor Films, Lifetime, 2024)


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

Last night (Sunday, March 17) my husband Charles and I watched a couple of recent Lifetime movies, both set in high school and at least nominally about students there (though one on-line reviewer complained that the actors on the first Lifetime film of last night’s program, Friday Night Sext Scandal, were too old for their parts). First was the awkwardly titled Friday Night Sext Scandal, in which the main characters were the slightly built Shawn Martins (Anthony Timpano, not exactly a hunk to die for but certainly easy on the eyes) and Lauren (Keana Lyn Bastidas). Shawn’s and Lauren’s mothers are both raising them as single parents (as usual with Lifetime it’s not at all clear what happened to their dads, though at least in Shawn’s case it’s hinted that his father is dead) and have been best buds for years. Lauren often gives Shawn rides to school, and the two of them seem to have one of those oddball relationships (like Victor Frankenstein and Elizabeth Lavenza in Mary Shelley’s original novel Frankenstein) that isn’t biologically incestuous but seems so emotionally. We also get the impression that Shawn has a major crush on Lauren but Lauren sees Shawn only as a friend. Things appear to turn around for Shawn when he finally makes the starting lineup of Westmoorland High School’s football team, “The Vikings,” and he befriends the various other guys on the team. Among his new-found friends are the team captain, Woodley Jones (Jamie Champagne), who’s discovered a Web site called “HNTD” (as in “hunted,” but without the vowels) in which young men can log on to seek out teenage girls, cruise them and score points depending on how far they get with them.

Then Shawn is injured during a practice session and he’s out for the season, forced to hobble around on crutches. At first Woodley and the other players still let him hang out with the team, but eventually they hold a party but declare it reserved for “starters only,” freezing out Shawn. Desperate for some silly adolescent reason to stay in these monsters’ good graces, Shawn figures out a way to score big in the game by donning a black hoodie (the first time I saw him put it on my immediate thought was, “Who is he going to kill?,” since Lifetime has made black hoodies the de rigueur garment for their murderers), sneaking around outside Lauren’s house and taking photos of her naked with his smartphone. There’s a nice little suspense scene in which he’s about to upload his pics to the Internet when his mom Lucinda (Tara Nicodemo) knocks on his door just as he’s about to hit the “send” button, and the intervention of his mother briefly makes him hesitate, but in the end he clicks on the control and sends the deadly photos to the Internet. Of course Lauren’s pics “go viral” around Westmoorland and she becomes the talk of the school in more ways than one. Shawn also makes a crude pass at Brooklynn (Devyn Nekoda), the school’s “fast girl,” and even though it’s later established that they’d already had sex together and he lost his virginity to her, she’s predictably put out at the unwanted attention. Lauren is so embarrassed at being the centerpiece of a school scandal that she attempts suicide with an overdose of drugs (probably her mom’s prescription meds), and Shawn’s mom, a professional firefighter, just happens to be on the crew that discovers her and rescues her in time.

An avuncular African-American police detective named Zeke (Eddie G) explains to Shawn’s mom Lucinda that since Lauren was underage, Shawn is looking at a multi-year prison sentence and permanent appearance on the sex offenders’ registry for “possession of child pornography.” Lucinda responds by taking the hard drive on which Shawn had stored Lauren’s images and ultimately destroying it so, as much as he’s deservedly suffering for his sins (among other things, Lauren won’t talk to him and the guys on the football team are pissed at him because their coach [Tim Progosh] benched all the starting players from the season’s last game, the one where all the college and NFL scouts were at, as collective punishment), at least he won’t get branded for life as a pedophile. What’s interesting about Friday Night Sext Scandal is we get the impression that there was a much more interesting and powerful movie available than the one they actually made: certainly I responded to the pathos of Shawn vainly attempting to maneuver on crutches with anything like his former grace and alacrity (I did enough caregiver work for people with disabilities to identify with him!), and it’s also noteworthy as a perhaps unwitting tale of just how unforgiving we’ve become as a society. Both Friday Night Sext Scandal and the next Lifetime movie, Killing for Extra Credit, made me glad that however rough my adolescence was, at least it didn’t take place in the era of the Internet and social media, where the kinds of stupid things young people frequently do take on an eternal life and live online even when you’re decades older and have long since grown out of them.

Killing for Extra Credit (CMW Horizon Productions, Reel One Entertainment, Champlain Media, Lifetime, 2024)


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

Surprisingly, the next movie on Lifetime’s March 17, 2024 agenda, Killing for Extra Credit, had strong similarities to Friday Night Sext Scandal even though it was presented as a whodunit. From the promos and the title I’d assumed that it was about a psychopathic student so willing literally to kill for extra-credit points to facilitate their college applications. Instead, “extracredit” (one word) turns out to be an Internet provocateur with a seemingly boundless knowledge base about his fellow students at Lakehills High School, billed as “Home of the Knights!” It starts out as the story of three odd people out from the campus student hierarchy: Marybeth Morris (Matreya Scarrwener – when I saw that name on the credits I joked, “That can be cured, you know”), Sophie Arredondo (Kennedy Rowe) and Ron (unidentified on imdb.com). They’re all starting their senior year and competing to get into good colleges, but Marybeth was forced to withdraw from her campaign for student body president when nude photos of her taken by her then-boyfriend, football team captain Josh Whittaker (Quinten James), were leaked onto the Internet. She was counting on that honor to get the scholarship she needed to go to a college in Washington state where her father attended. Like the leads in Friday Night Sext Scandal, Marybeth is being raised by a single mother, though in her case we definitively know her dad is dead, and she’s very much in his shadow, especially since her mom Lydia (Jessie Fraser) is holding her to her dad’s life path and actively discouraging her from doing anything else. “Extracredit” exposes one girl in school by claiming that her mother isn’t a high-powered attorney, as everyone thought, but a highly paid escort.

“Extracredit” also learns that Sophie was adopted by a rich father, Richard Arredondo (Harrison Coe), and rather than go through a legal adoption agency he essentially purchased her from an illegal broker, sort of the way Christina Crawford said her superstar mom Joan Crawford adopted her in Mommie Dearest. There are three main suspects for the secret identity of “extracredit”: Josh, Ron and the school’s most sympathetic teacher, Miss Mitchell (Amy Trefry). I was starting to suspect the teacher if only because I was flashing back to Blood of Dracula, the 1958 American-International film in which a female high-school student, Nancy Perkins (Sandra Harrison), is hypnotized into becoming a vampire by the one seemingly sympathetic teacher in the school, Miss Branding (Louise Lewis). Miss Mitchell doesn’t turn out to be “extracredit” but she does end up being exposed as a villain; it was she who leaked the nude photos of Marybeth to the Internet and forced her to withdraw from the campaign, so Toby Dandrich (Tyler Cody) – a thoroughly repulsive piece of work who seems destined to grow up to be Donald Trump, though it turns out that instead of being born to money he’s had to work hard and scheme for his big breaks – got elected instead. For a while Marybeth thinks Toby might be “extracredit,” but Toby boasts that if he wanted to ruin someone he’d do it openly instead of hiding behind a screen name. In the meantime Sophie had been found dead outside a so-called “safe space” she and Marybeth had frequently repaired to, and the students mostly assumed she’d committed suicide and had even held a memorial vigil for her – at which Miss Mitchell had attended in disguise and held up signs telling Marybeth to stop looking for the truth about Sophie, which was (among other things) that Miss Mitchell had actually killed her in a scuffle on the rooftop.

It turns out that Miss Mitchell was Sophie’s biological mother – we learn this when we see a photo of the two of them together during Sophie’s prepubescence which Marybeth discovered in the presence of her dad, who promptly grabbed the photo and threw it away (and Marybeth, Josh and Ron stage a late-night raid and have to do some fancy and unintentionally funny evasive maneuvers to steal the bits of the photo while the elder Arredondo is there and stalking the unseen burglars with a gun) – and that was the leverage Toby had on her. He was able to blackmail Miss Mitchell into leaking the embarrassing photo of Marybeth by threatening to reveal that the adoption of Sophie wasn’t legal and potentially putting all of them in jeopardy. Marybeth has an after-school job working at a local bowling alley, staffing the shoe-rental concession, and the final climax takes place there. Marybeth has accepted Josh’s offer of a date after her shift ends, but when she accidentally spills soda on his crotch and he leaves to clean up, she gets an “extracredit” text message a week after the arrests of Miss Mitchell and Toby Dandrich seemingly stopped the “extracredit” threat. Thinking that Josh is “extracredit,” Marybeth calls Ron for help – only it turns out, courtesy of writer Leo McGuigan, that Ron is “extracredit” and his motive was the classic stalker’s fixation on Marybeth. Ron was convinced that the two of them were meant to be together, regardless of whatever else Marybeth would want to do with her life or whom she might want to do it with. Marybeth even gets a nice speech to the effect that she’s tired of other people telling her what she should do and who she should be, and from now on she’s going to make those decisions on her own: a nice self-empowering sentiment that deserved to be in a better movie. In fact, I had the same problem with Killing for Extra Credit that I did with Friday Night Sext Scandal: both movies seemed to be mediocre formula pieces with hints of much better things lurking around inside them. The whole business of a rich middle-aged man literally buying a baby as a fashion accessory and raising her as his own is pretty horrifying as it stands; instead McGuigan decided to create a spark of romantic interest between Señor Arredondo and Lydia Morris, where it seemed to me his only interest in her is, “Well, I can marry her and get myself a replacement daughter.”

Sunday, March 17, 2024

Ms. Fisher's Modern Murder Mysteries: "Reel Murder" (Every Cloud Productions, Seven Productions, Screen Australia, Film Victoria, All3 Media, GPB, WGBH, PBS, 2021)


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

Last night (Saturday, March 16) I watched a couple of TV items, an episode of Ms. Fisher’s Modern Murder Mysteries called “Reel Murder” and a 1967 French neo-noir movie called Le Samouraï. The Ms. Fisher’s Modern Murder Mysteries episode (the show’s awkward title is explained by the fact that it’s set in the 1960’s and is a follow-up to a previous show, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries, set in the 1920’s and featuring a plucky female detective who’s either the mother or the aunt of the lead in this one) has the highest rating of any show in the series (though there were only 12 shows total over a run from 2019 to 2021). But I found it pretty dull going; it’s about a fishing party led by Peregrine Fisher (Geraldine Hakewill) and featuring some of her friends, including Samuel Birnside (Toby Truslove), who hooks a corpse accidentally while casting his line. The corpse turns out to be Morris Dunnet (Wayne Cartwright), a spousal abuser and all-around nasty piece of work. His wife disappeared five years before and he was indicted for murdering her, but he was acquitted largely because he’d done such a good job disposing of her body it was never found.

Among the suspects are middle-aged woman Enid Holdstock (Jennifer Vuletic), who used to clean house for the Dunnets and therefore got to watch first-hand as Morris regularly assaulted her; Abraham Sifo (Christopher Kirby), a minister whose church included the Dunnets as parishoners and thereby also got a ringside seat at the horrible way he treated her; Frank Quinn (Matthew MacFarlane), Morris’s former brother-in-law, who’s also never forgiven Morris for the way he treated Morris’s wife/Frank’s sister; and another oyster in the stew, Suzie Lew (Alessandra Merlo), a family friend. Eventually writer Felicity Packard decided [spoiler alert!] to rip off the notorious gimmick first used (I think) by Agatha Christie in Murder in the Calais Coach, later filmed twice as Murder on the Orient Express: all four prime suspects worked together to off the bastard, though the official cop on the case, Peregrine’s sort-of boyfriend Detective James Steed (Joel Jackson), is told by his superiors to accept Enid’s confession of sole guilt. She reasons she’s the oldest of the four and her heart condition makes it unlikely that she’ll live much longer anyway, so she agrees to assume legal guilt to protect the well-meaning other three. This plot gimmick is hard enough to accept as it is – “Only a half-wit could guess it,” said Raymond Chandler about Christie’s novel – and it only works if the murder victim is himself a despicable person: a child molester in Christie’s novel (though for some reason that plot point was eliminated in the first film, and I haven’t seen the second) or a domestic violence perpetrator here.

Le Samouraï (Studios Jenner, Compagnie Industrielle et Commerciale Cinématographique, Fida Cinematografica, Filmel, T. C. Productions, S. N. Prodis, 1967)


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

Later I watched Le Samouraï as the first episode in the long-awaited return of Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” telecast after a month and a half off to commemorate Turner Classic Movies’ Black History Month series and also the network’s annual “31 Days of Oscar” celebration. It’s a film I’ve heard a great deal about over the years, though it was shot relatively late (1967) for a film noir and Melville and his associates – co-writer Georges Pellegrin and cinematographer Henri Decaë – made a bad mistake. They shot the damned thing in color, thereby missing the cool, dark chiaroscuro look of classic noir and not coming up with anything worthwhile to replace it. (For an example of how to do classic film noir in color, check out Allan Dwan’s Slightly Scarlet, a 1956 adaptation of James M. Cain’s novel Love’s Lovely Counterfeit in which Dwan and his cinematographer, John Alton, successfully re-created the noir look despite the handicap of color.) The plot deals with Jef Costello (Alain Delon), a professional hit man in the Parisian underworld, who’s assigned to kill Martey, the owner of a swanky jazz nightclub whose star entertainer is a Black woman pianist (Caty Rosier). In his intro Eddie Muller suggested Rosier’s character was based on Josephine Baker, but because she’s a piano player and not a singer I was thinking more Dorothy Donegan or Nellie Lutcher here. In the opening scene we see Jef, whom we’re later told is such an Americaphile he’s taken as his alias a first name that sounds American, alone in his ratty apartment with a caged bird as just about his only companion. Melville, Decaë and a fellow cinematographer (the credits list Decaë for shooting the exteriors and someone else, whose name I didn’t write down, for doing the studio work, but imdb.com lists Decaë alone) shoot the opening scene as close to black-and-white as they could get, and only the blue smoke Jef is blowing out of his mouth as he smokes a cigarette in bed gives away that this film is going to be in color (alas).

Le Samouraï was supposedly based on a novel by Jean McLeod called The Ronin – “ronin” means “a vagrant samurai without a master,” and they were considered lower in status than the samurai who had masters – but there’s no trace of the existence of this book online and the general consensus appears to be that Melville invented the plot himself and decided to attribute it to a nonexistent writer. The film opens with a supposed quote from Bushido, the traditional Japanese book on the ways of the samurai, but this one is definitely made up by Melville (and perhaps co-writer Pellegrin as well). Melville also reportedly said he based this film and Delon’s character in it on the hit man Alan Ladd played in Frank Tuttle’s This Gun for Hire (Paramount, 1932), which made Ladd a star after years of slaving away in “B” movies for independent producers. But there’s little of classic noir in this film, which is surprisingly boring despite a few intense action scenes. Most of it is simply Jef Costello making his way around Paris, mostly trying to avoid capture by a determined police squad headed by an unnamed “Commissioner” (François Périer, usually known as a comedian but pressed into service here for a deadly serious role) after he kills Martey but his carefully constructed alibi (involving an all-night poker game in a hotel as well as his girlfriend Jane Lagrange, played by Delon’s real-life wife at the time, Nathalie Delon, though they were already in the process of separating when this film was made and broke up officially in 1969) quickly falls apart when at least one of the club patrons identifies him. There are some quite clever touches in Le Samouraï, including the long key ring Jef carries with him; he drives only stolen Citroën cars (the Citroëns had a deliberately futuristic look that makes them among the coolest cars ever), and the key ring has a sample of every key combination used to start a Citroën. While one wonders whether this in itself could attract the attention of the police – especially if Jef had to work his way through most of the keys in his collection before he found the one that started the particular car he was stealing – the two times we actually see him do this he gets the right key on the fourth or fifth try.

Midway through the film Jef finds himself on the receiving end of an attempted hit from a blond man named Wiener (Michel Boisrond), who gave him the contract to kill Martey but worries that since the police held Jef in custody for hours, even though he told them nothing and the cops eventually let him go, Jef has become a liability he and his boss, Olivier Rey (Jean-Pierre Posier), need to get rid of. Jef and Wiener confront each other twice, the second time in Jef’s apartment just after Jef has noticed and disconnected a “bug” the police had planted in his home. This time Wiener offers Jeff another contract and Jef reluctantly agrees, only it turns out the new victim is the Black piano player at Martey’s. In the final scene, after Jef checks his gun to make sure it’s loaded (it’s a six-shot revolver and all the chambers are full), Jef confronts the pianist between sets at the club. She asks, “Why do you want to kill me?,” and he says, “Because someone hired me to.” Then the police, who have staked out the club, open fire on the scene and kill Jef, and it turns out his gun was empty but there’s no particular clue as to who emptied it, when or how. Prior to that there’s a long tracking sequence in which the police are keeping Jef under electronic surveillance as he makes his way through the Métro (the Paris subway), and his location is indicated by solid lights on a map of the city that are turned on remotely whenever a police operative sees him pass by a particular spot. This reminded me of the 1949 film White Heat, directed by Raoul Walsh and starring James Cagney, which Charles Reich in his 1970 book The Greening of America cited as a dramatization of the clash of values between “Consciousness I” – the rugged individual of American historical myth – and “Consciousness II,” the bureaucratization of society and the systematization of everything into order, structure and routine. Like Cagney’s character in White Heat, Delon’s character here is ultimately brought down not by a similarly individualistic cop but by a whole bureaucracy, with each of its cogs meshing in predetermined ways to find the killer and either arrest or kill him.

Le Samouraï had a troubled production history; Studios Jenner, the production facility Melville had built himself with the proceeds from his previous films, burned down midway through the shoot. Melville suspected arson, but the real-life police investigation didn’t prove it one way or the other and the mystery was never solved. This forced Melville to go hat-in-hand to other film companies in Paris to rent studio space from them to finish the movie. Also, Le Samouraï wasn’t released in the U.S. until 1972, five years after it came out in France, and the U.S. distributor had it dubbed into English and retitled The Godson to make it seem like an immediate sequel to the sensationally successful 1972 film The Godfather. It was only years later that another distributor issued Le Samouraï in the U.S. in a properly subtitled version that accurately reflected what the original French audiences had seen in 1967. The film since then has been hailed as a classic, but I still think it’s an uneven film with a lot of longueurs and an absence of the wall-to-wall background music it would have had if it had been an American film – though that might not be such a bad thing; certainly the final chase benefits, in a way, from not having a Mickey Mouse-style score telling us minute by minute just how we’re supposed to react to the events that happen!

Saturday, March 16, 2024

American Masters: "Mae West: Dirty Blonde" (Thirteen/WNET, 1515 Productions Limited, American Masters Pictures, 2024)


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

Right now I’m listening to a quite entertaining LP from Columbia, reissued in the late 1960’s from material recorded for the Brunswick label in the mid-1930’s, featuring songs by Ethel Merman (back when her voice still had some resemblance to normal pitches; she was always a big-voiced woman with killer high notes, but this early at least she hit those notes relatively cleanly instead of just screaming in the general direction of pitch as she did later), Lyda Roberti (the Polish-born diva-ette who sang with a very thick accent and died at age 31 of a heart attack after years of heart trouble) and Mae West. I dug this album out of the backlog because last night (Friday, March 15) my husband Charles and I watched a quite good American Masters documentary about Mae West, almost inevitably called Dirty Blonde. It was basically a print-the-legend version of Mae West’s story, though it had some interesting explorations of the various controversies involved in West’s career, both when it was still going on (when she was a lightning rod for censorship) and since (arguments within the feminist community over whether to consider West a pioneer feminist icon or excoriate her, as Marjorie Rosen did in her 1970’s book Popcorn Venus). Mae West is one of my big culture heroines, mainly because she was in total control of her own career; she not only starred in movies but insisted on writing her own scripts. Her contract with Paramount from 1932 to 1937 gave her not only the authority to write her films but a provision that her credit as writer be in letters 75 percent the size of her credit as star. What’s more, she became a movie star when she was either pushing forty or already passed it (her Wikipedia page gives her birthdate as August 17, 1893; as I once wrote in a moviemagg post about one of West’s films, “She would be a Leo!”).

Mae West made her stage debut at age five and never wanted to do anything else with her life. She was born in Brooklyn (and kept the accent all her life instead of working with voice coaches to “normalize” her diction), and there’s a story in this film in which she once got upset when doing a childhood performance because the spotlight was on the other side of the stage from her, so she managed to coax it over to her. Mae West became a star in vaudeville and its raunchier cousin, burlesque. The show emphasized her proletarian origins – her father was a prizefighter named John Patrick West, nicknamed “Battlin’ Jack,” and her mother was corset and fashion model Mathilde Delker – though according to Charlotte Chandler’s book on her she had an attorney uncle, Thomas West, who read all her contracts and advised her on them. In 1926 West was out on the town when she saw a female prostitute wearing a hat with two bird-of-paradise feathers at a time when there was such a demand for such hats the bird they came from had literally been hunted to extinction. Since the woman was in visible want, West found herself wondering why she had spent whatever money she had on food instead of those ultra-expensive feathers, and West started imagining a play based on her experiences. West hired Elwood Elsner, a prestigious director who’d worked with John Barrymore, and she started rehearsing the play before she’d settled on a title. At one point, Elsner complained, “This play reeks of sex, sex, sex!” Mae West heard that and immediately decided to call the play Sex, even though the New York Times then did not allow that word in its pages; the Times ads heralded “Mae West in that certain play.” During the run of Sex the New York Police Department raided the play on protests from women’s religious groups who claimed it was obscene, and West was actually convicted and sentenced to 10 days in jail (though she only served eight). In a 1969 Life magazine interview, West said she was struck by the irony that he was in women’s jail for playing a prostitute, and just about all the other inmates were there for being prostitutes. She also befriended the warden and his wife, and got to have dinners with them. According to her Wikipedia page, West was offered the chance to pay a fine and avoid jail time, but she was a shrewd enough self-publicist to see the possibilities of publicizing the film for which she’d be willing to go to jail. West boasted on her release that there would be enough pent-up demand to see her play that it would run for years, and she was right.

While Sex was winding down she wrote another play (signing it “Jane Mast,” an obvious pseudonym) called The Drag about Gay men, though the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice managed to keep her from opening it in New York after successful tryouts in Connecticut and New Jersey. In an effort to broaden her appeal and in particular to get more women to come to their shows – at one performance of Sex she’d looked into the audience and noticed it was 80 percent male – she decided to set her next play, Diamond Lil, in the 1890’s. I’ve long suspected one reason Mae West kept gravitating to the 1890’s as a setting for her stories was because that was when women who looked like her – buxom, big-chested and with waists cinched tight by corsets – had been considered the acme of female sexiness before the tall, slender, boyish “flapper” look came into vogue in the 1920’s. Anyway, Diamond Lil was a huge hit and it attracted the attentions of the Hollywood studios, though it wasn’t until 1932 – in the depths of the Depression (which really didn’t start hitting the movie business hard until 1931, but when it did it threatened all but one of the major studios with bankruptcy) – that West finally accepted a contract offer from Paramount. According to this documentary, West asked the studio executive who was negotiating with her, “How much money do you make?” He told her, and she said, “Give me a dollar more than that and I’ll sign.” West’s first film was a rather quirky mashup of gangster film and soap opera called Night After Night (1932), in which she was billed fourth (after George Raft, Constance Cummings and the quite good but largely forgotten Wynne Gibson, and just ahead of the great character comedienne Alison Skipworth), but she demanded the right to write her own dialogue for the scenes in which she would appear. The moment she breezes in to the titular speakeasy “55,” appears at the hat-check desk where the girl at the desk exclaims, “Goodness, what beautiful diamonds” – and West answered back, “Goodness had nothin’ to do with it, honey” – Mae West became a movie star.

Her next film was an adaptation of Diamond Lil, though Paramount had her change the title to She Done Him Wrong and “Lil” became “Lady Lou.” It was shot on a 17-day schedule for a competent but unimaginative hack named Lowell Sherman (who’d begun as an actor and actually delivers a great performance as a drunken has-been director in the 1932 film What Price Hollywood?, the precursor to the multiple versions of A Star Is Born), and for her leading man West picked Cary Grant. The print-the-legend version of how Grant got the part is the one told here; reportedly West looked down a long line of Paramount leading men, spotted Grant and said, “If he can talk, I'll take him!” Grant had actually signed with Paramount a year before and his first film had been This Is the Night (1932), a quite good romantic comedy much along the lines of the movies that would make him a star later on. By the time he co-starred in She Done Him Wrong he’d already worked with major stars – Tallulah Bankhead, Gary Cooper and Charles Laughton in Devil and the Deep; Marlene Dietrich and Herbert Marshall in Josef von Sternberg’s Blonde Venus; and a non-musical version of Madame Butterfly with Sylvia Sidney as Butterfly and Grant as Pinkerton – though Grant’s patented mix of romance and comic exasperation played perfectly with West’s steamroller sex drive and their two films together, She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel (for which Paramount realized what they had in Grant enough they gave him billing along with West on the title card: “Mae West in I’m No Angel with Cary Grant”), are her best.

They’re her best for another reason: both were made during the so-called “pre-Code” era of Hollywood history. Throughout the 1920’s women’s clubs and other busybodies had been denouncing Hollywood as immoral, both for the relative brevity of many of the stars’ marriages and the casual content of the films themselves. In 1930 the movie industry issued a Production Code which the major studios claimed they would enforce against each other to ensure that all movies would be “clean” enough to entertain the entire family. The studios hired Will H. Hays, who’d been Postmaster General under President Warren G. Harding, to be the public face of the cleanup campaign, though the person actually in charge of enforcing the code was a former Jesuit named Joseph Breen. (One critic has pointed out the irony that the studio owners, most of whom were Jewish, hired a bunch of Roman Catholics to advise them on what a mostly Protestant nation would consider “clean” entertainment.) For the first four years, however, the Code was only loosely enforced, and movies took on sexual topics with a refreshing honesty that wouldn’t return to American movies until the 1960’s. Then Mae West came on the screen, and though there were other movies featuring other stars who bore a large amount of the would-be censors’ wrath, she became Public Enemy Number One. The U.S. branch of the Roman Catholic Church organized a pressure group called the Legion of Decency with the clear and openly stated goal of driving “immoral” entertainment in general, and Mae West in particular, off the screen. When the Legion of Decency struck, West had just finished her fourth film, originally entitled It Ain’t No Sin, and it was ready for release – only Joseph Breen’s censors demanded major cuts and the New York state censorship board cut it even further. Among the censor-mandated changes were a scene at the end in which West’s and Roger Pryor’s character would get married – original reviewers rightly guessed this scene had been added only to mollify the censors – as well as a quite obvious cut of one chorus of West’s song “When a St. Louis Woman Comes Down to New Orleans” and a change in the title to the anodyne Belle of the Nineties.

The censors’ no-holds-barred attack on Mae West put the people running Paramount in a quandary: they still had a hot star on their hands, but they also had a lot of bothersome busybodies chiming in with their own two cents’ worth on what they could and should do with her. The result was a series of films – Goin’ to Town (1935), Klondike Annie (1936), Go West Young Man (1936) and Every Day’s a Holiday (1937) – that lost money at the box office because they didn’t give West’s audience what they wanted to see from her. West drifted into radio work but also ran afoul of the censors, thanks in large part to an Adam and Eve spoof she did on Edgar Bergen’s radio show, which led to a flood of letters to NBC and an outright ban on West’s further radio appearances. West would get to make two more movies, My Little Chickadee with W. C. Fields for Universal in 1940 (Universal had had a success with fellow Paramount refugee Marlene Dietrich with a Western spoof called Destry Rides Again in 1939 and thought lightning would strike again; it did, sort of, but though Fields and West were supposed to write the script together, according to her 1969 Life interview West wrote the whole thing except for one scene in which Fields fills in for an absent bartender) and The Heat’s On for Columbia in 1943 (oddly not mentioned here; plot-wise it’s a knock-off of the Warner Bros. Busby Berkeley musical Dames and a quite entertaining spoof of censorship even though it suffers from the unwillingness of Columbia’s producers to let West write her own dialogue). Then, locked out of movies and radio, she returned to the live stage, first in a revival of Diamond Lil and then in a Las Vegas stage show in which she filled the stage with musclemen. Among her recruits were Mickey Hargitay (who later married another blonde bombshell, Jayne Mansfield, fathered Mariska Hargitay from Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and sponsored Arnold Schwarzenegger’s immigration to the U.S.) and Chester Rybinski, who under the name “Paul Novak” became West’s life partner for the last 30 years of her life. "I believe I was put on this Earth to take care of Mae West,” Novak once said.

Mae West’s private life was as unconventional as those of her characters; she’d briefly married a fellow vaudevillian named Frank Szatkus, who performed under the name “Frank Wallace,” in Milwaukee in 1911 (and since she’d never divorced him, this sparked controversy when a town clerk in 1935 discovered the marriage record and leaked it publicly, undermining West’s frequent claims that she’d never been married), and later she had an affair with an accordion player named Guido Deiro. She got pregnant by him (they tried a crude form of birth control but it didn’t work), and on the advice of her mother West had an illegal abortion – which was botched and left her unable to bear children again. Mae West got rediscovered in the 1960’s largely as an icon of the sexual revolution in general and the Queer community in particular; she’d always been sympathetic to Queer rights and her over-the-top costumes were often copied by drag queens. This had her full awareness and approval; when she met Walter Plunkett, costume designer for The Heat’s On, she told him, “Make me dresses the female impersonators will want to wear.” West made an ill-advised comeback attempt in the 1970’s with two movies, a supporting role in the film of Gore Vidal’s Trans bestseller Myra Breckenridge and a lead in a film called Sextette, based on a story she’d written in 1959 but filmed 20 years later, in which she and her current husband get together with all of her exes. There’s a clip from Sextette in this documentary in which she’s introduced to a man who’s six feet, seven inches tall, and she says, “Never mind the six feet. Just give me the seven inches” – which, especially coming from a woman in her 70’s whose face looks like her makeup has been applied with a trowel to cover the effects of age, is a) not funny and b) just shows how little Mae West had to say in an era in which all the envelopes she had pushed in the 1930’s had since been totally shredded.

Fortunately, Mae West at least had a comfortable existence; she’d saved her money from her glory years and used it to invest in real estate, mostly in Van Nuys. She’d also never drank or smoked, and she’d avoided the chemical temptations that frequently come with major stardom. Though there’s a certain degree of sadness over how Mae West’s life ended (she finally died November 22, 1980, three months after suffering a stroke), she lived her life on her own terms and had a quite long run, living to be 87. In 1971 the UCLA student body voted West “Woman of the Century” because of her outspoken advocacy of sexual honesty and her denunciation of the censorship that both boosted her career and did so much to destroy it.

Friday, March 15, 2024

Law and Order: "Balance of Power" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired March 14, 2024)


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

Last night (Thursday, March 14) I watched an unusually good run of shows in Dick Wolf’s Law and Order franchise, including an episode of the flagship Law and Order called “Balance of Power.” This episode dealt with a multi-millionaire (his fortune was over $250 million) named Jonah Barlowe (Andy Christopher) who’s found clubbed to death in his own apartment. Jason made a huge fortune overnight by promoting the stock of a video-rental company at a time when video rentals looked like history and the big Wall Street money was selling the stock short (obviously writers Art Alamo and Ted Malawer were thinking the real-life Gamestop stock bubble). It also turned out that Jason was a big-time submissive in BDSM scenes, which had earlier led his wife Elizabeth (Natalie Smith) to leave him (though she was still emotionally attached to him). At first he went for garden-variety scenes in which he called on women to dress in underwear, tase him and torture him while calling him a worthless piece of garbage who didn’t deserve his good fortune, but later he branched out into “fin-dom” scenes. “Fin-dom” apparently means “financial dominance” and it involves literally ceding control of your money to another person for a short time and allowing them to spend it however they like – only Jonah’s killer, Melissa James (Piper Patterson), took advantage of him and ripped off $23 million from his account, sending it to a secret bank in Panama which refuses to cooperate with the New York Police Department’s subpoena for the records. Melissa visited Jonah in his apartment and refused to return the money, whereupon Jonah threatened to call the police on her and she responded by picking up a gold statuette of Atlas and walloping him with it until he died. (I wondered if the writers were doing a deliberate reference to Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged here.) Unfortunately, the police accidentally blew a big part of the case against Melissa when they grabbed her cell phone without a warrant, and while they only had custody of it for three seconds, nonetheless the judge in the case, Thomas Hatcher (William Charlton), rules any evidence from the phone inadmissible as the fruits of an illegal search.

The show also featured the new New York District Attorney, Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn), who comes in figuratively with both guns blazing, determined to assert control over the office, ranging from redecorating it in modern colors instead of the dark wood panels his predecessor Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston) favored to repairing good relations with the city’s mayor which McCoy had blown in a previous episode. (Inevitably he reminded me of Donald Trump’s similarly ultra-aggressive takeover of the Republican Central Committee.) Barred by the judge’s ruling from using any of the evidence on Melissa’s cell phone, including the texts back and forth between her and Jonah that established her motive, the police go looking for a previous victim of Melissa’s, whom they find in Derek Parker (David L. Townsend). Derek is the ultimate reluctant witness; though Melissa scammed him of much less money than she stole from Jonah, she threatened to reveal all his personal peccadilloes to his family and his employers if he went to the police, so he kept quiet until the trial. Melissa’s attorney offers a plea deal in which Melissa will reveal evidence that a major movie star is actually a serial rapist – supposedly he revealed this to her in BDSM sessions she recorded and filmed, including one we get to see a clip of in which he boasted that he was able to stab his victims in parts of the body which the camera wouldn’t show. DA Baxter wants lead prosecutor Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) to take the deal, but when Melissa’s attorney balks at the 10-year manslaughter sentence Baxter insisted on as the minimum his office would accept, the deal falls through, the trial continues and Melissa is found guilty of second-degree murder. Part of Price’s reluctance to accept the deal is that he can’t verify any of it: the star himself is out of the country filming a movie and Melissa can’t or won’t name any of the alleged victims – which leads a thoughtful viewer to wonder if the “rape” scenarios were just role-playing between the actor and Melissa and the crimes hadn’t really existed. Certainly my knowledge of the BDSM community, such as it is, leads me to doubt that the same person would be a rapist of women and a submissive to a dominant woman!

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Probability of Doom" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired March 14, 2024)


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

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed, “Probability of Doom,” directed by Martha Mitchell from a script by David Graziano and Nicholas Evangelista, features one of the quirkiest villains the show has ever had. Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) starts the episode in full dress uniform to attend the police academy graduation ceremony, in which one of the graduating officers is a young woman whom Benson rescued years earlier as a kidnapping victim of a serial pedophile. Only Benson is called away from the graduation before she can speak to her rescuee because others on her squad, including Detective Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T) and Captain Renée Curry (Aimé Donna Kelly), who transferred from the Internal Affairs Bureau to Special Victims Unit, have found the body of a serial pedophile chopped up in pieces and left to rot in his apartment. Later a second known pedophile is found in similar condition, and though the writers made surprisingly little of the theme which I thought they would be going to – the mixed feelings between the SVU squad members’ devotion to enforcing the law and the undoubted sympathies for the mysterious killer’s motives – they eventually trace the murders to Tori Brock (Sarah Lynn Marion), a 20-something hard-assed woman of size who started her killing spree by knocking off her own father, who had been regularly molesting her throughout her childhood. She was troubled enough she dropped out of high school (though she later got a G.E.D. certificate) and went to work in construction, in which capacity she owned the sort of saw with which she cut up the bodies of at least three serial pedophiles. She recruited her victims through a “dark Web” phone app called K-Dome, which started as a site for illegal drug sales (“K” as in “special K,” the street name for the animal tranquilizer ketamine) but branched out into facilitating meetings between pedophiles and potential victims. Tori used photos of her still pre-pubescent sister Nina (Fiona Morgan Quinn) to lure her targets, and one of the men Tori later killed had posed for photos with Nina in the cab of his pickup truck – actually perfectly legitimate ones, but with a definite undercurrent of sexualization. The person I really felt sorry for in this episode is Sarah Lynn Marion, mainly because though she’s quite an accomplished actor, she’s going to be very difficult to cast. About the only other sort of part I can imagine her playing is a super-butch Lesbian. She was certainly fun to watch here: powerful, dominating, taking on a protective-mother role towards her sister and making us feel sorry for her even though we also understand how her horrible experience with her own dad (the “probability of doom” is a late-in-the-episode mention of Tori’s fear of her father, and in particular whether once he came home from work he’d be appropriately loving towards her or want to rape her) led her to her terrible program of revenge against not only her father (who not surprisingly was her first victim) but all similarly situated men.