by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched a surprisingly good movie I recorded from Lifetime: Murder on Her Mind, which despite the generic title, the rather bland casting (the only genuinely cute male in the film gets himself killed in the opening scene, though he’s seen in flashbacks thereafter) and the two sappy soft-rock songs heard towards the end, turned out to be a powerful thriller with a message. It’s basically the coming-together of two women’s lives and their discovery that they had a great deal in common despite the vast difference in how they ended up. The film starts in 2008, the year it was made, with Sally Linden (Annabeth Gish — nice to know she still got to keep working after her Mystic Pizza co-star Julia Roberts became a superstar and she didn’t), wife of a successful novelist (Callum Keith Rennie) and with an unsuccessful book of her own published, is packing her daughter Aimée (Kristen Hager) off to college when she finds a yellow notebook.
The film then flashes back to 1993 in Hawai’i, when Sally was married to her first husband Danny (Gabriel Hogan), a small-time crook promoting real-estate scams and draining the family bank account (such as it was) for seed money, and Aimée was just a little girl (and played as such by Isabella Magalhaes). Sally took the notes in the book while on the jury in the murder trial of Theresa Nichol (Chandra West), who like Sally herself grew up in a respectable and affluent family and threw it all away to marry a scapegrace crook. Her husband Vincent (Hugh Dillon) had worked out a scheme by which Sally would go up to men in bars, cruise them, offer to help them get drugs and then Vincent, posing as her brother, would come on the scene, they’d get in the victim’s car and then Vincent would hold a gun on the victim and force him to drive to a secluded spot on the beach, where Vincent and Theresa would tie up the victim and steal his money. Only in the case of this victim, Bobby Gordon (David West Read — the cute one), for some reason the script never quite makes clear (possibly disappointment that he only had $40 on him) Vincent shot and killed him. (We see this happen in a “teaser” shot at the very beginning and again several times over in the course of the film, which is probably what earned it a TV PG-V rating.)
Vincent and Theresa then fled to California, where they pulled the same scam and again Vincent killed the victim; they were arrested and extradited to Hawai’i, whereupon Vincent decided to cut a deal and turn state’s evidence, saying it was Theresa who killed the victim. Theresa ends up serving her sentence in the women’s wing at Chino (the script by Semi Chellas — which if this movie weren’t as good as it is would probably lead me to a Medved brothers’-style joke that if his older brother Fully Chellas had written it, it would have been better — never quite bothers to explain how the jurisdictional snarls of two people committing similar crimes in different states got resolved; as it is, she’s shown having been arrested in California, convicted in Hawai’i and imprisoned in California again), where Sally visits her and expresses her belief in Theresa’s innocence even though the jury found her guilty. You see, on the last day of the trial Sally had a fight with David and took her daughter Aimée with her after David refused to remain home and baby-sit Aimée for her — Sally arrived at the courthouse five minutes late and the judge immediately threw her off the jury and installed an alternate, much to the disappointment of Theresa’s lawyer, who was counting on Sally either to persuade the rest of the jurors to acquit, Twelve Angry Men-style, or at least to hang the jury.
The incident encouraged Sally to wire her mother for the money to come home, break up with David and eventually meet Leonard (who agreed to raise Aimée as his own — it’s not until the flashbacks start that we realize she isn’t Leonard’s natural daughter), while Theresa paid the price for having let her own no-goodnick husband draw her into a life of crime. Sally gets on the case and investigates it herself, partly because she sees the opportunity to write a book about it and partly because she comes to identify with Theresa on a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I basis — and ultimately she gets an attorney on her case, gets Theresa’s Hawai’i conviction expunged and finally sees her paroled for her California crime. The film also touches on how laws differ from state to state — the law in Hawai’i that spouses could not testify against each other was repealed just a few months before the original murder, and under Hawai’ian law the only party to an incident like this who was considered guilty of murder was the one who actually shot the victim, whereas in California if two people are involved in a crime together and one of them commits murder during the course of it, both are legally considered murderers.
But the main meat of the film, ably communicated in Chellas’s script and David Wellington’s restrained, understated direction, is the connection between the two women and the similarities in their life situations even though one of them got out of her destructive relationship in time and the other did not. Wellington also deserves credit for making the characters who appear in both 1993 and 2008 sequences appear 15 years older without slathering makeup on them or otherwise artificially aging the actors; he’s able to get the actors to play older by moving more slowly and changing their postures. A movie like Murder on Her Mind is the sort of experience every regular Lifetime watcher hopes for: a diamond in the rough that makes up for all the dull, slovenly, ill-told stories that clutter up the network.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Friday, November 6, 2009
(Untitled) (Samuel Goldwyn Films, 2009)
“(Untitled)” Skewers the Modern Art World
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Photo: Adam Goldberg and Marley Shelton in (Untitled). Copyright © 2009 by Untitled the Movie and Samuel Goldwyn Films.
The New York art world might not seem like the likeliest target for a satirical movie — you may go in wondering what director Jonathan Parker and writer Catherine DiNapoli, who worked with him on the script, could possibly have to say about it that would make it look more ridiculous than it already is — but if you let that discourage you from seeing (Untitled), you’ll be missing a remarkable and quite charming film. At first, seeing avant-garde composer Adrian Jacobs (Adam Goldberg, the closest this movie has to a “name” star) stroll the mean streets of New York’s arts district, see a small but promising group of people waiting outside the hall where his New Music Ensemble is about to perform, then see a bus pull into the frame and pick all of them up, you might expect the young Woody Allen to show up any minute.
But (Untitled) isn’t a 1970’s Woody Allen re-tooled for the present. It’s an expert skewering of a group of people who seem locked in an unwitting contest to top each other for sheer pretentiousness. The great virtue about (Untitled) — the parentheses are part of the title, which refers to the name a gallery usually slaps on a work when the artist hasn’t given it an actual title — is it makes fun of everybody: the fiercely independent I-don’t-give-a-damn-about-an-audience artist; the commercial painter whose works get bought by the yard for offices and hospitals; the genuine talents and the wanna-bes, the conceptualists whose work treads on the thin edge of not being art at all; and the rich people whose own mixed motives for buying art — from wanting to be accepted as connoisseurs shaping the destiny of the cultural world to seeing it as just another investment they hope will make them a profit — finance much of the show.
(Untitled) is an unusually well constructed (for a modern movie) story centered around two brothers, high-strung “artistic” composer Adrian and commercial painter Josh (Eion Bailey), whose institutional sales are keeping the Madeleine Grey gallery in business and allowing Grey (Marley Shelton) to pose as a resolutely noncommercial gallery operator, mounting self-consciously avant-garde shows in the front room while sneaking Josh’s paintings out the back as if they were contraband. Josh, who deals in safe abstractions — washes of color with a few strategically placed circles on each canvas — desperately wants a gallery show in Madeleine’s front space. He also desperately wants Madeleine’s body, but it’s Adrian who gets her in a relationship that seems to be about little more than sheer lust.
What about Adrian’s music? It’s self-consciously avant-garde, all right, played from scores that look more like schematic drawings of new computer designs than anything one usually thinks of as sheet music. Adrian himself falls against his piano, elbows it, plays dissonant tonal clusters that sound like Cecil Taylor on crystal and resolutely avoids anything resembling a melody. He also occasionally kicks a bucket — literally — and employs chains and other seemingly random noisemakers. His group consists of a woman playing bass clarinet (she’s identified in the dramatis personae only as “The Clarinet” and is portrayed by Lucy Punch), and a percussionist with an array of drums, gongs and “found” instruments that add to the general cacophony. The people who attend his concerts — at least the ones who don’t walk out in the middle — find his performances so disorienting that only the sight of the musicians bowing gives away when the piece has actually ended and they may applaud.
Nonetheless, Madeleine’s case of the hots for Adrian leads her to invite him to her loft — filled with works of art just as bizarre, if not more so, than the ones she shows in her gallery (my favorite was a painting with big block letters reading “NO YOU SHUT UP”) — and for her to invite him and his group to perform at the opening of the big show by British artist Ray Barko (Vinnie Jones). Barko, a character the writers obviously based on real-life British avant-gardist Damien Hirst, shows pieces consisting of stuffed animals in grotesque poses mounted in installations with inanimate objects. He also makes the expected pass at Madeleine and, when she brushes him off, turns his attentions towards “The Clarinet” — who appears to have an unrequited crush on Adrian but who also gets herself involved with Porter Canby (Zak Orth). Canby, who made a fortune from “something with computers,” wants to be accepted as a culture maven. He also wants to buy Barko’s work because he thinks it’s “underpriced,” but in the topsy-turvy world of art he first has to prove himself aesthetically “worthy” to purchase it — which Madeleine suggests he do by spending $25,000 to commission a new work for Adrian’s ensemble.
What makes (Untitled) work is the writers’ cool efficiency in setting up their targets. It’s a movie in which everyone is fair game, mainly because they’re all drowning in pretension. One of the film’s best running gags is how the people viewing the shows at Madeleine’s gallery are tempted at first to say in plain English whether or not they like them — until they realize that that would be breaking the rules; their comments have to be crouched in the convoluted, high-falutin’ language of Artspeak. Eventually Madeleine discovers and insists on showing the weirdest and most pretentious artist of all — an emotional basket case called Monroe (Ptolemy Slocum) who comes off as a high-functioning autistic and whose pieces bear names like “Post-It Note on a Wall,” “Door Partially Propped Open by a Doorstop” and “Thumbtack Stuck in a Wall.” (Madeleine titles his show, “MONROE: Something from Nothing.”) On the day of his opening — which causes a breakup between Madeleine and Adrian because Monroe is too “out there” even for Adrian’s taste — Monroe signs a whole stack of “Certificates of Authenticity.” It turns out that when you “buy” a Monroe work you get the ingredients, a set of instructions and a certificate to document that you bought that thumbtack for a multi-figure sum from a real Artist instead of just picking up a pack of them at a 99¢ store.
Along with the satire, (Untitled) touches in a light-hearted way on issues that are major subjects for debate in the art world. What exactly constitutes a work of art? What is the artist’s role? Does one have to create a material object to be an artist, or is a “concept” enough? (Did the fact that Andy Warhol used his considerable skills as a draftsman to paint photo-realistic depictions of Campbell’s soup cans and Brillo boxes make him a more legitimate artist than someone who just signs his name to a real Campbell’s soup can or Brillo box and exhibits it as “art”?) Does the artist have to create personally every aspect of the work to claim it as “his,” or can he entrust part of the work’s manufacture to others? (This comes off in the film when Madeleine takes Porter to Barko’s workshop and they see his assistants working on the piece she’s trying to sell to Porter — and it comes out that Barko has never actually stuffed any of the animals in his work. But it was also raised in connection with as acknowledged an Old Master as Rembrandt, who at the height of his popularity as a portrait painter employed a whole studio full of assistants who did a lot of the actual application of paint to canvas on “Rembrandt’s” works.)
(Untitled) won’t make you scream with laughter the way a more rambunctious, less intellectual comedy would — but it will keep you in a state of sustained merriment. One gets the impression that Parker and DiNapoli genuinely love the world they’re making fun of, and that makes the humor warmer and richer. What’s more, they’re adept at creating characters we genuinely care about — we may laugh at them but we also root for them and hope they get what they want out of this crazy game with its mixed-up rules. Parker’s casting is near-perfect — Marley Shelton in particular nails both the artistic and the sexual (she doesn’t seem genuinely capable of actual love) pretensions of his character. Adam Goldberg and Eion Bailey not only look enough alike we can believe them as brothers, they’re good enough to convince us they’ve had a long-standing rivalry going and each of them envies the other’s position in the art world. Perhaps the best performance is Ptolemy Slocum’s as Monroe; he’s so convincing he makes us ache for the way this poor semi-functional man is being exploited by the art world, with his very uncommunicativeness and utter lack of people skills hailed as yet more signs of his “genius.” There’s also a wonderful turn by Ben Hammer as Morton Cabot, a nonagenarian composer whose works — just as percussive as Adrian’s but a good deal more lyrical — convince Our Hero that it’s O.K. to try for beauty in his pieces.
As director, Parker picks a few oblique camera angles but mostly tells his story straightforwardly and with a deserved confidence in the ability of his and DiNapoli’s script to make its points. With production designer David L. Snyder, he’s nailed the different environments in which the characters work, live and function — particularly the grungy hovel in which Adrian creates as opposed to the antiseptic gallery and concert spaces in which he performs and the dark brown cocktail lounge where he plays background piano to support himself. Parker also wisely hired composer David Lang to score the film with music at least superficially similar to — though less aggressively ugly than — what Adrian performs in the film. (Untitled) is a charming farce, created with love and a willingness rare in this generation of filmmakers to make us identify with the characters emotionally rather than view them as if they were lab rats and we were researchers running experiments on them. Whether you’re an habitué of modern-art galleries and concert halls or you don’t know which end of a modern painting is up, you’ll still enjoy (Untitled).
(Untitled) is now playing at the Landmark Hillcrest Cinemas, 3965 Fifth Avenue in Hillcrest. Please call (619) 819-0236 for showtimes and more information.
Johnny Mercer: The Dream’s on Me (TCM, 2009)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I had recorded the Turner Classic Movies special Johnny Mercer: The Dream’s on Me when it was on Wednesday night and I ran it for Charles last night. It was directed by Bruce Ricker, who had previously done a special on Tony Bennett and therefore had a feel for the kind of music Mercer wrote lyrics for (and occasionally composed songs as well). It was produced by Clint Eastwood, whose connection benefited the film in that he’s long since shown his feel for jazz (he is, after all, the director of the best jazz biopic of all time, Bird) but who hurt it by dragging out his kids, son Kyle and daughter Morgan, to perform. Kyle is a not-bad bass player but Morgan, who seems to be about 14, is a totally incompetent singer who managed to get her rendition of “This Time the Dream’s on Me” on national TV only because her dad is a superstar and a Hollywood legend. The first I heard her little voice squeaking its way through a song Ella Fitzgerald recorded superbly (other people have done it, too, including Earl Coleman, but Ella’s is my favorite) I thought, “This is what it would sound like if Yoko Ono did a standards album” — though that’s being unfair to Yoko, who’s a good enough musician she’d at least try to phrase adequately.
Later on another, almost as incompetent young girl named Maude Maggart came out and croaked and pouted her way through a Mercer song — and her presence on this show didn’t even have the excuse of a nepotistic family connection! Aside from Audra MacDonald, who sang superbly, none of the modern-day singers showed much appreciation for this music or talent to bring it off — but fortunately, as the show progressed they stopped showing that many modern singers and started showing clips of the vocal greats of the past, back when Mercer was still alive and his musical style was the lingua franca of American pop. I love Johnny Mercer, though I did find it odd to lionize him the way this show did given that he was mostly a lyric writer (he tried his hand at composing but did not make the permanent change from lyricist to composer-lyricist the way Stephen Sondheim did) and one could argue that the true greats of his songs were the people who wrote their melodies: Hoagy Carmichael (who actually suggested the last line of the “Lazy Bones” lyric), Harold Arlen and (on one project, the 1942 film You Were Never Lovelier) Mercer’s long-time idol, Jerome Kern, as well as less legendary but still incredibly talented people like Richard Whiting and Harry Warren.
One thing that set Mercer aside from most of the songwriters of his generation was that he was a great vocalist himself; like his frequent collaborator Hoagy Carmichael, he had a voice that wasn’t especially pretty but his complete understanding of musicianship and phrasing allowed him to project a song vividly. (Mercer’s own recording of “One for My Baby” ranks with the classic versions by Fred Astaire and Frank Sinatra; where Astaire made it angry and Sinatra made it sad, Mercer’s made it rather lighthearted — Astaire’s protagonist literally trashed the bar, Sinatra’s was probably going to fall asleep in his cups, while Mercer’s was going to go home, sleep it off and wake bright and refreshed the following day.) I remember hearing Johnny Mercer on black-label Capitols (he, songwriter turned movie producer Buddy de Sylva and record-store owner Glenn Wallichs founded Capitol in 1942) well before I realized he was a songwriter — and he was able to have hit records even on songs he hadn’t written.
Mercer actually came to Hollywood hoping to make it as an actor, and appeared in two “B” musicals at RKO — Old Man Rhythm and To Beat the Band — and in Old Man Rhythm he was an appealing on-screen personality (though basically just playing himself) and he also wrote the songs for both those films, though with less illustrious collaborators than he had later (though two of the songs from To Beat the Band — “Eeny Meeny Miney Mo” and “If You Were Mine” — survive, largely because Billie Holiday recorded them). But his real fame had come from radio broadcasts with Paul Whiteman before his first Hollywood stint and Benny Goodman afterwards.
The show told me a few things about Mercer I’d known before (like his illustrious ancestry from the Southern aristocracy — he was from Savannah, Georgia, famous as the locale for the movies Gone With the Wind and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil — the protagonist of Midnight lived in a house built by Mercer’s grandfather and where Johnny himself had grown up, and though Mercer died in Los Angeles his body was shipped to Savannah and buried in the famous cemetery within eyeshot of the legendary statue that became the logo for both book and film of Midnight, complete with an accompanying bench on which was chiseled the line from “One for My Baby,” “You’d never know it/But buddy, I’m kind of a poet,” while the headstone itself contains the phrase “And the Angels Sing” from his hit co-written with Goodman trumpeter Ziggy Elman and recorded by the Goodman band with Martha Tilton singing) and a few I hadn’t (like his early-1940’s affair with Judy Garland — her biographers, at least the ones I’ve read had never mentioned him in that connection, though her romantic entanglements with Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Tyrone Power have been almost too well documented).
Mercer’s skill was in writing lyrics that sounded complicated and frequently dredged up incredibly obscure words (one line in “Too Marvelous for Words” stumped a librarian, who ultimately discovered that the last published use of that word before Mercer got hold of it had been in 1792!) but still fell easily off the tongues and throats of the singers, and which engaged in dazzling wordplay but didn’t call attention to their brilliance the way Cole Porter’s and Lorenz Hart’s did. Mercer was an incredible talent — one of those who wasn’t Black or Jewish but who instinctively realized that at the root of the Great American Song Tradition were the Black and Jewish cultures (when the show presented the scene from the film Blues in the Night where that famous song was originated — by a stentorian African-American Paul Robeson wanna-be named William Gillespie — I pointed out that the appropriation of a Black style by a Jewish songwriter, Harold Arlen née Hymie Arlick, who’d actually been the son of a cantor was really what the Broadway and Hollywood musical styles were all about!) and who had learned from (and daringly socialized with, given that he grew up at the height of Jim Crow) Savannah’s Blacks as a child and had picked up the Jewish end of the American musical tradition from working with Jewish collaborators. The show had a bittersweet quality as it wound on, mainly because the rise of rock ’n’ roll in the 1950’s did to Mercer what it did to just about all of the surviving greats from the previous era of American pop music — it rendered him largely irrelevant — though unlike a lot of other pre-rock composers, lyricists and performers, Mercer got a comeback with the song “Moon River” and the movie theme songs that followed it.
Mercer was a literate man who kept the common touch — as a singer, the most effective part of his personality was his swagger; his record of “Personality” from the film The Road to Utopia has a completely different affect from Dorothy Lamour’s performance in the movie, not just because he’s a man and she’s a woman but because he gives it a ballsy quality whereas she just seems to be toying with the song. Mercer’s greatest monuments are not only his songs but his recordings of them — his version of “Blues in the Night” with Jo Stafford for Capitol’s Americana subsidiary is one of my two favorites (the other is Artie Shaw’s with the great singer-trumpeter Oran “Hot Lips” Page) — and also, as the show pointed out, the great array of talent he signed to Capitol (many of them rejects from Mercer’s former record company, Decca — including Freddie Slack, Nat “King” Cole and Stan Kenton — as well as Jo Stafford and Peggy Lee, who came to him by accident: Lee had retired from singing when she married guitarist Dave Barbour, who was doing session work at Capitol on a jazz history album, and when the producer said he needed a female singer on two of the songs, Barbour said, “My wife used to sing with Goodman … ” — and Mercer’s former boss, Paul Whiteman); at a time when major musical talents usually didn’t get involved in the business area of recording, Mercer in effect paved the way for future generations of rock ’n’ rollers who’d form their own labels, and he did it in an era in which starting a record company was considerably more difficult than it became in the 1960’s or is today. Despite its deficiencies — including the usual fault of music documentaries, giving the performances in bits and pieces and only offering a few seconds of most of the songs — Johnny Mercer: The Dream’s on Me is an engaging tribute to a major triple-threat (songwriter, singer, businessman) musical talent.
I had recorded the Turner Classic Movies special Johnny Mercer: The Dream’s on Me when it was on Wednesday night and I ran it for Charles last night. It was directed by Bruce Ricker, who had previously done a special on Tony Bennett and therefore had a feel for the kind of music Mercer wrote lyrics for (and occasionally composed songs as well). It was produced by Clint Eastwood, whose connection benefited the film in that he’s long since shown his feel for jazz (he is, after all, the director of the best jazz biopic of all time, Bird) but who hurt it by dragging out his kids, son Kyle and daughter Morgan, to perform. Kyle is a not-bad bass player but Morgan, who seems to be about 14, is a totally incompetent singer who managed to get her rendition of “This Time the Dream’s on Me” on national TV only because her dad is a superstar and a Hollywood legend. The first I heard her little voice squeaking its way through a song Ella Fitzgerald recorded superbly (other people have done it, too, including Earl Coleman, but Ella’s is my favorite) I thought, “This is what it would sound like if Yoko Ono did a standards album” — though that’s being unfair to Yoko, who’s a good enough musician she’d at least try to phrase adequately.
Later on another, almost as incompetent young girl named Maude Maggart came out and croaked and pouted her way through a Mercer song — and her presence on this show didn’t even have the excuse of a nepotistic family connection! Aside from Audra MacDonald, who sang superbly, none of the modern-day singers showed much appreciation for this music or talent to bring it off — but fortunately, as the show progressed they stopped showing that many modern singers and started showing clips of the vocal greats of the past, back when Mercer was still alive and his musical style was the lingua franca of American pop. I love Johnny Mercer, though I did find it odd to lionize him the way this show did given that he was mostly a lyric writer (he tried his hand at composing but did not make the permanent change from lyricist to composer-lyricist the way Stephen Sondheim did) and one could argue that the true greats of his songs were the people who wrote their melodies: Hoagy Carmichael (who actually suggested the last line of the “Lazy Bones” lyric), Harold Arlen and (on one project, the 1942 film You Were Never Lovelier) Mercer’s long-time idol, Jerome Kern, as well as less legendary but still incredibly talented people like Richard Whiting and Harry Warren.
One thing that set Mercer aside from most of the songwriters of his generation was that he was a great vocalist himself; like his frequent collaborator Hoagy Carmichael, he had a voice that wasn’t especially pretty but his complete understanding of musicianship and phrasing allowed him to project a song vividly. (Mercer’s own recording of “One for My Baby” ranks with the classic versions by Fred Astaire and Frank Sinatra; where Astaire made it angry and Sinatra made it sad, Mercer’s made it rather lighthearted — Astaire’s protagonist literally trashed the bar, Sinatra’s was probably going to fall asleep in his cups, while Mercer’s was going to go home, sleep it off and wake bright and refreshed the following day.) I remember hearing Johnny Mercer on black-label Capitols (he, songwriter turned movie producer Buddy de Sylva and record-store owner Glenn Wallichs founded Capitol in 1942) well before I realized he was a songwriter — and he was able to have hit records even on songs he hadn’t written.
Mercer actually came to Hollywood hoping to make it as an actor, and appeared in two “B” musicals at RKO — Old Man Rhythm and To Beat the Band — and in Old Man Rhythm he was an appealing on-screen personality (though basically just playing himself) and he also wrote the songs for both those films, though with less illustrious collaborators than he had later (though two of the songs from To Beat the Band — “Eeny Meeny Miney Mo” and “If You Were Mine” — survive, largely because Billie Holiday recorded them). But his real fame had come from radio broadcasts with Paul Whiteman before his first Hollywood stint and Benny Goodman afterwards.
The show told me a few things about Mercer I’d known before (like his illustrious ancestry from the Southern aristocracy — he was from Savannah, Georgia, famous as the locale for the movies Gone With the Wind and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil — the protagonist of Midnight lived in a house built by Mercer’s grandfather and where Johnny himself had grown up, and though Mercer died in Los Angeles his body was shipped to Savannah and buried in the famous cemetery within eyeshot of the legendary statue that became the logo for both book and film of Midnight, complete with an accompanying bench on which was chiseled the line from “One for My Baby,” “You’d never know it/But buddy, I’m kind of a poet,” while the headstone itself contains the phrase “And the Angels Sing” from his hit co-written with Goodman trumpeter Ziggy Elman and recorded by the Goodman band with Martha Tilton singing) and a few I hadn’t (like his early-1940’s affair with Judy Garland — her biographers, at least the ones I’ve read had never mentioned him in that connection, though her romantic entanglements with Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Tyrone Power have been almost too well documented).
Mercer’s skill was in writing lyrics that sounded complicated and frequently dredged up incredibly obscure words (one line in “Too Marvelous for Words” stumped a librarian, who ultimately discovered that the last published use of that word before Mercer got hold of it had been in 1792!) but still fell easily off the tongues and throats of the singers, and which engaged in dazzling wordplay but didn’t call attention to their brilliance the way Cole Porter’s and Lorenz Hart’s did. Mercer was an incredible talent — one of those who wasn’t Black or Jewish but who instinctively realized that at the root of the Great American Song Tradition were the Black and Jewish cultures (when the show presented the scene from the film Blues in the Night where that famous song was originated — by a stentorian African-American Paul Robeson wanna-be named William Gillespie — I pointed out that the appropriation of a Black style by a Jewish songwriter, Harold Arlen née Hymie Arlick, who’d actually been the son of a cantor was really what the Broadway and Hollywood musical styles were all about!) and who had learned from (and daringly socialized with, given that he grew up at the height of Jim Crow) Savannah’s Blacks as a child and had picked up the Jewish end of the American musical tradition from working with Jewish collaborators. The show had a bittersweet quality as it wound on, mainly because the rise of rock ’n’ roll in the 1950’s did to Mercer what it did to just about all of the surviving greats from the previous era of American pop music — it rendered him largely irrelevant — though unlike a lot of other pre-rock composers, lyricists and performers, Mercer got a comeback with the song “Moon River” and the movie theme songs that followed it.
Mercer was a literate man who kept the common touch — as a singer, the most effective part of his personality was his swagger; his record of “Personality” from the film The Road to Utopia has a completely different affect from Dorothy Lamour’s performance in the movie, not just because he’s a man and she’s a woman but because he gives it a ballsy quality whereas she just seems to be toying with the song. Mercer’s greatest monuments are not only his songs but his recordings of them — his version of “Blues in the Night” with Jo Stafford for Capitol’s Americana subsidiary is one of my two favorites (the other is Artie Shaw’s with the great singer-trumpeter Oran “Hot Lips” Page) — and also, as the show pointed out, the great array of talent he signed to Capitol (many of them rejects from Mercer’s former record company, Decca — including Freddie Slack, Nat “King” Cole and Stan Kenton — as well as Jo Stafford and Peggy Lee, who came to him by accident: Lee had retired from singing when she married guitarist Dave Barbour, who was doing session work at Capitol on a jazz history album, and when the producer said he needed a female singer on two of the songs, Barbour said, “My wife used to sing with Goodman … ” — and Mercer’s former boss, Paul Whiteman); at a time when major musical talents usually didn’t get involved in the business area of recording, Mercer in effect paved the way for future generations of rock ’n’ rollers who’d form their own labels, and he did it in an era in which starting a record company was considerably more difficult than it became in the 1960’s or is today. Despite its deficiencies — including the usual fault of music documentaries, giving the performances in bits and pieces and only offering a few seconds of most of the songs — Johnny Mercer: The Dream’s on Me is an engaging tribute to a major triple-threat (songwriter, singer, businessman) musical talent.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
The Walking Dead (Warners, 1936)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Walking Dead, another in TCM’s Boris Karloff marathon last October 30, and a movie that took some typical Karloff situations (including casting him as a man who dies and is then brought back to life by scientific means) but gave them fresh spins and managed to create a quite somber mood very different from the sensational (for its time) horror of a lot of his better-known vehicles. It was made at Warner Bros., which had just signed Karloff to a five-film contract (at one point in 1939, the height of the studio system, when most Hollywood actors were working for just one company, Karloff had non-exclusive multi-picture contracts with four studios at once: Universal, Columbia, Warners and Monogram.) Indeed, for its first few minutes it seems like a typical Warners crime drama and one wonders just how they’re gong to fit Karloff into it: Stephen Martin (Kenneth Harlan) is on trial (without a jury) before Judge Shaw (Joseph King) on the charge of defrauding the government on contracts. Martin is actually part of a gang of high-class criminals headed by his attorney, Nolan (Ricardo Cortez). They mount a campaign of intimidation and threats against Judge Shaw to get him to acquit Martin, but he convicts him anyway. Nolan meets with his associates in the gang — Loder (Barton MacLane), Werner (Henry O’Neill) and Blackstone (Paul Harvey) — and announces he’s hired a hit man named Trigger (Joseph Sawyer) to kill Judge Shaw.
When the other gang members protest that this will draw more heat on them, not less, Nolan tells them not to worry: he’s got the perfect fall guy lined up (obviously playing Sam Spade in the first version of The Maltese Falcon five years earlier had taught Ricardo Cortez a thing or two about finding a fall guy). His patsy is John Ellman (Boris Karloff), who 10 years earlier was sentenced to a long prison term by Judge Shaw for killing a man who accosted his wife. Ellman has just been released two weeks before Trigger’s scheduled hit on Shaw, and they arrange to run Ellman’s car off the road and plant Shaw’s body in it after they kill him. The frame works and Ellman is tried, convicted and sentenced to death — Nolan, pretending he’s doing him a favor, deliberately mishandles the trial so badly as to ensure Ellman’s conviction (12 years before Orson Welles used the same plot gimmick in The Lady from Shanghai) — but there’s one complication. Jimmy (Warren Hull) and Nancy (Marguerite Churchill), two young medical students working as lab assistants to medical researcher Dr. Beaumont (Edmund Gwenn), actually witnessed the real killer run Ellman’s car off the road and transfer Shaw’s body to it.
Jimmy wants the two to come forward as witnesses, but Nancy successfully talks him out of it until the night Ellman is scheduled to be executed, when she finally breaks down and allows him to go to Nolan with the information that can spare his client’s life. Nolan deliberately delays reaching anyone in law enforcement with this information so he can make a show of concern while really sabotaging things so that the governor’s reprieve reaches the prison just after Ellman is executed. He hasn’t reckoned with Dr. Beaumont, who demands that instead of being autopsied Ellman’s body be turned over to him at once, whereupon he takes it to his lab and, with Jimmy and Nancy assisting, plugs it into a bunch of Frankenstein-like gizmos (including the so-called “Lindbergh heart,” which the celebrated aviator and fascist apologist actually co-invented with Dr. Alexis Carrel, whose real-life experiments with research partner Dr. Robert Cornish in attempting to revive electrocution victims apparently inspired this film) that bring Ellman back to life. At first Ellman is incapable of speech — he emits only non-verbal whines, groans and snarls similar to those he used in Frankenstein — but eventually he comes to and achieves at least a bit of his former intelligence. He also seems to acquire some sort of extra-sensory power, because without any actual evidence he intuits the identities of the people who set him up and starts knocking them off one by one. Eventually the police close in on him and he’s shot down, and before he dies the second time Beaumont frantically tries — and fails — to get Ellman to describe what the experience of death (his first one) was actually like.
The Walking Dead is an intriguing movie that tends to argue against my general field theory of cinema that the quality of a movie is inversely proportional to its number of writers; though five people worked on this script (Ewart Adamson and Joseph Fields get credit for the story and Adamson, Peter Milne, Robert Andrews and Lillie Hayward for the script), it has a lot of felicitious touches. Asked if he has a last request, Ellman is at first indignant — “You take my life and you want to grant me a favor?” — but then comes up with one: he asks that a live musician play his favorite piece as he’s walking to the electric chair (and as he gets in the chair he gestures up to the ceiling and says, “He will forgive me,” meaning God). Indeed, the first half of this film is considerably more moving and better as drama than the second half — though the whole piece is presented with a remarkable subtlety for what was pretty obviously intended as an exploitation piece aimed at Karloff’s core horror audience.
Michael Curtiz is the director, and he’s probably the best one Karloff worked with in the 1930’s other than James Whale (and maybe Edgar G. Ulmer). As Ellman, a sympathetic victim of both criminals and law enforcement, Karloff underplays throughout the film — a far cry from the snarling overacting he sometimes fell into with less carefully drafted scripts and less assertive directors — creating a vivid impression of a sensitive man, not especially bright but sympathetic and all too aware of what’s happening to him and why. The parallels to Frankenstein are there but they’re kept subtle — Ellman, even after he’s revivified, remains a normal human being (albeit one with quirky post-resurrection mental powers) and a likable if rather distant character whose killings are sufficiently well motivated that they don’t cost him the audience’s sympathy. The cinematographer is Hal Mohr (an Academy Award winner for the 1935 A Midsummer Night’s Dream and a far more prestigious name than one would expect on a 62-minute “B” picture), and even when he has Ellman doing Karloffian things like skulking around in graveyards, he creates a vivid and somber atmosphere just as effective as the outdoor scenes in Karloff’s 1930’s films for Universal.
The Walking Dead is a quite good movie, ably showcasing Karloff’s remarkable sensitivity and subtlety as an actor and using familiar horror/sci-fi elements in intriguingly different ways. It helps that Edmund Gwenn’s character is also subtly played — instead of the usual “mad scientist” he’s a totally benign figure, even avuncular (in fact Gwenn plays this so much like his role as Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street 11 years later — and with his neatly trimmed white beard he even looks like he did as Santa Claus — that one half-expects him to announce to his lab assistants Jimmy and Nancy that as soon as he finishes the experiment he’s going to have to load his sleigh with toys to deliver them to all the children of the world on Christmas eve), motivated not by some mad scheme to rule the world or even (as Karloff was in most of his own mad-scientist roles) by an idea to help humanity that he pursues in an unethical way, but simply by a sense of atonement for the guilt of his associates in failing to stop Ellman’s execution.
Though it sags a bit in the second half as the plot turns towards more conventional 1930’s horror situations, The Walking Dead is still an estimable movie that contains one of Karloff’s very best performances. Too bad his later work for Warners was in routine melodramas, most of them remakes (Invisible Menace, West of Shanghai, Devil’s Island, British Intelligence) that hardly “stretched” him the way this one did!
The film was The Walking Dead, another in TCM’s Boris Karloff marathon last October 30, and a movie that took some typical Karloff situations (including casting him as a man who dies and is then brought back to life by scientific means) but gave them fresh spins and managed to create a quite somber mood very different from the sensational (for its time) horror of a lot of his better-known vehicles. It was made at Warner Bros., which had just signed Karloff to a five-film contract (at one point in 1939, the height of the studio system, when most Hollywood actors were working for just one company, Karloff had non-exclusive multi-picture contracts with four studios at once: Universal, Columbia, Warners and Monogram.) Indeed, for its first few minutes it seems like a typical Warners crime drama and one wonders just how they’re gong to fit Karloff into it: Stephen Martin (Kenneth Harlan) is on trial (without a jury) before Judge Shaw (Joseph King) on the charge of defrauding the government on contracts. Martin is actually part of a gang of high-class criminals headed by his attorney, Nolan (Ricardo Cortez). They mount a campaign of intimidation and threats against Judge Shaw to get him to acquit Martin, but he convicts him anyway. Nolan meets with his associates in the gang — Loder (Barton MacLane), Werner (Henry O’Neill) and Blackstone (Paul Harvey) — and announces he’s hired a hit man named Trigger (Joseph Sawyer) to kill Judge Shaw.
When the other gang members protest that this will draw more heat on them, not less, Nolan tells them not to worry: he’s got the perfect fall guy lined up (obviously playing Sam Spade in the first version of The Maltese Falcon five years earlier had taught Ricardo Cortez a thing or two about finding a fall guy). His patsy is John Ellman (Boris Karloff), who 10 years earlier was sentenced to a long prison term by Judge Shaw for killing a man who accosted his wife. Ellman has just been released two weeks before Trigger’s scheduled hit on Shaw, and they arrange to run Ellman’s car off the road and plant Shaw’s body in it after they kill him. The frame works and Ellman is tried, convicted and sentenced to death — Nolan, pretending he’s doing him a favor, deliberately mishandles the trial so badly as to ensure Ellman’s conviction (12 years before Orson Welles used the same plot gimmick in The Lady from Shanghai) — but there’s one complication. Jimmy (Warren Hull) and Nancy (Marguerite Churchill), two young medical students working as lab assistants to medical researcher Dr. Beaumont (Edmund Gwenn), actually witnessed the real killer run Ellman’s car off the road and transfer Shaw’s body to it.
Jimmy wants the two to come forward as witnesses, but Nancy successfully talks him out of it until the night Ellman is scheduled to be executed, when she finally breaks down and allows him to go to Nolan with the information that can spare his client’s life. Nolan deliberately delays reaching anyone in law enforcement with this information so he can make a show of concern while really sabotaging things so that the governor’s reprieve reaches the prison just after Ellman is executed. He hasn’t reckoned with Dr. Beaumont, who demands that instead of being autopsied Ellman’s body be turned over to him at once, whereupon he takes it to his lab and, with Jimmy and Nancy assisting, plugs it into a bunch of Frankenstein-like gizmos (including the so-called “Lindbergh heart,” which the celebrated aviator and fascist apologist actually co-invented with Dr. Alexis Carrel, whose real-life experiments with research partner Dr. Robert Cornish in attempting to revive electrocution victims apparently inspired this film) that bring Ellman back to life. At first Ellman is incapable of speech — he emits only non-verbal whines, groans and snarls similar to those he used in Frankenstein — but eventually he comes to and achieves at least a bit of his former intelligence. He also seems to acquire some sort of extra-sensory power, because without any actual evidence he intuits the identities of the people who set him up and starts knocking them off one by one. Eventually the police close in on him and he’s shot down, and before he dies the second time Beaumont frantically tries — and fails — to get Ellman to describe what the experience of death (his first one) was actually like.
The Walking Dead is an intriguing movie that tends to argue against my general field theory of cinema that the quality of a movie is inversely proportional to its number of writers; though five people worked on this script (Ewart Adamson and Joseph Fields get credit for the story and Adamson, Peter Milne, Robert Andrews and Lillie Hayward for the script), it has a lot of felicitious touches. Asked if he has a last request, Ellman is at first indignant — “You take my life and you want to grant me a favor?” — but then comes up with one: he asks that a live musician play his favorite piece as he’s walking to the electric chair (and as he gets in the chair he gestures up to the ceiling and says, “He will forgive me,” meaning God). Indeed, the first half of this film is considerably more moving and better as drama than the second half — though the whole piece is presented with a remarkable subtlety for what was pretty obviously intended as an exploitation piece aimed at Karloff’s core horror audience.
Michael Curtiz is the director, and he’s probably the best one Karloff worked with in the 1930’s other than James Whale (and maybe Edgar G. Ulmer). As Ellman, a sympathetic victim of both criminals and law enforcement, Karloff underplays throughout the film — a far cry from the snarling overacting he sometimes fell into with less carefully drafted scripts and less assertive directors — creating a vivid impression of a sensitive man, not especially bright but sympathetic and all too aware of what’s happening to him and why. The parallels to Frankenstein are there but they’re kept subtle — Ellman, even after he’s revivified, remains a normal human being (albeit one with quirky post-resurrection mental powers) and a likable if rather distant character whose killings are sufficiently well motivated that they don’t cost him the audience’s sympathy. The cinematographer is Hal Mohr (an Academy Award winner for the 1935 A Midsummer Night’s Dream and a far more prestigious name than one would expect on a 62-minute “B” picture), and even when he has Ellman doing Karloffian things like skulking around in graveyards, he creates a vivid and somber atmosphere just as effective as the outdoor scenes in Karloff’s 1930’s films for Universal.
The Walking Dead is a quite good movie, ably showcasing Karloff’s remarkable sensitivity and subtlety as an actor and using familiar horror/sci-fi elements in intriguingly different ways. It helps that Edmund Gwenn’s character is also subtly played — instead of the usual “mad scientist” he’s a totally benign figure, even avuncular (in fact Gwenn plays this so much like his role as Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street 11 years later — and with his neatly trimmed white beard he even looks like he did as Santa Claus — that one half-expects him to announce to his lab assistants Jimmy and Nancy that as soon as he finishes the experiment he’s going to have to load his sleigh with toys to deliver them to all the children of the world on Christmas eve), motivated not by some mad scheme to rule the world or even (as Karloff was in most of his own mad-scientist roles) by an idea to help humanity that he pursues in an unethical way, but simply by a sense of atonement for the guilt of his associates in failing to stop Ellman’s execution.
Though it sags a bit in the second half as the plot turns towards more conventional 1930’s horror situations, The Walking Dead is still an estimable movie that contains one of Karloff’s very best performances. Too bad his later work for Warners was in routine melodramas, most of them remakes (Invisible Menace, West of Shanghai, Devil’s Island, British Intelligence) that hardly “stretched” him the way this one did!
The Soviet Story (Labvakar/Perry Street Advisors, 2008)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
This morning I also watched a chilling if overwrought documentary recently shown on PBS: The Soviet Story, a production from a Latvian company called Labvakar, directed and written by Edvins Snore, whose movie would be a good deal more moving if he had just stuck to the facts he could document and not placed them in a hard-Right ideological, philosophical and propagandist context designed to discredit all forms of socialism, liberalism and any other political-economic philosophy but lassiez-faire capitalism and worship of “The Market.” The basic thesis (if I can borrow a word from dialectic terminology whose use in connection with his film Mr. — or is it Ms.? — Snore would probably detest) of The Soviet Story is that Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Hitler were virtually identical; all sought to create a socialist society of one form or another, and all called for mass murders of anyone whose existence they considered an obstacle to their foredoomed attempts to remake human nature.
Snore’s ideological purpose is to trash any and all of the myths and legends by which modern-day socialists (or, for that matter, modern-day liberals and progressives) attempt to dissociate themselves and their goals from the horrors of Communism and Nazism, though his case against Marx and Engels rests mainly on the appearance of one word, “Völkerabfälle,” in the Communist Manifesto. Snore translates this as “racial trash” and explains in his narration (he wrote the film, though in the English version the narration is delivered by Jon Strickland in a quiet, calm, matter-of-fact way that only makes the film more chilling) that this meant that people whose societies hadn’t yet experienced the capitalist transformation (he apparently cited the Basques and the Scottish Highlanders as examples) would have to be exterminated before the transition from capitalism to socialism could be completed. (Ironically, the first socialist revolution occurred in a society that was still largely feudal — indeed, the ideological battle between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks was based largely on this very point: could you make a socialist revolution in a society that hadn’t even finished the transition to capitalism yet? — but this is just one of the many real-life complexities that aren’t in Snore’s film because they don’t fit his ideological schema.)
Snore makes some pretty wild leaps and instances of guilt by association (a favorite tactic of the Right) to establish ideological and inspirational connections between Nazism and Communism, going so far as to claim that the Nazis were really Leftists because they had the word “socialist” in their name and they shared a belief in exterminating enemies of the state — only the Nazis’ targets were based on race while the Soviets’ targets were based on class. Snore includes a montage sequence comparing Nazi German posters on the left side of the screen with Soviet Russian posters on the right (shouldn’t it have been the other way around?) in an effort to depict the similarities of the regimes — though all his montage really proves is that these two despotisms sold themselves to their people in similar ways (it’s really more a commonality of marketing than of ideology). He also dredges up footage of George Bernard Shaw (I presume from his famous Movietone newsreel of 1928) claiming that certain “undesirable” people should be made to justify their existence and (he leaves this unspoken but this is a legitimate inference from what he said) got rid of if they can’t prove they add more value to the world than they take from it in their support. The idea is to tie West European socialism to both the Soviets and the Nazis (and indeed Shaw did say in the 1930’s that democracy was proving inadequate to the economic crisis and maybe the future lay with dictatorships, which is more an embarrassment to Shaw and proof of how far a great mind can go off the rails than the blanket condemnation of all socialism and progressivism Snore wants to paint it as) and to argue that humankind’s only choices are capitalism or barbarism.
I’ll concede one important point to Snore: liberals, progressives and Leftists in general have been considerably softer in their criticisms of Communist atrocities than of fascist ones, and I agree with him that the reason for that is that the fascists, especially the Nazis, committed their crimes against humanity in the name of an ideal of “racial purity” that appalls us as much as the crimes themselves do, while the Soviets committed theirs in the name of human equality, economic freedom (in the Rooseveltian sense of “freedom from want and freedom from fear”) and a classless society, so there’s a definite tendency on the Left towards apologizing for the Communists because we like their stated ideals even if we abhor their policies and tactics. (I’ll even admit that in nit-picking Snore’s film I’m probably at least partially guilty of this myself.)
The real unfortunate aspect of Snore’s film is that his ideological purpose gets in the way of the real meat of his movie: his dramatization of the Soviet evil (he estimates that “at least 20 million” people were killed by the Soviet regime throughout its existence — about 3 1/2 times the total toll of the Nazi Holocaust) and his retellings of classic stories about the brutality and mass murders committed under the Soviet regime: the so-called “genocide by hunger” in Ukraine in 1932-33 (which I already read about in Miron Dolot’s book Execution by Hunger: The Hidden Holocaust — a vivid and well documented account that worked for me more than this film did precisely because Dolot did not have the kinds of historical axes to grind that Snore did; by refusing to underscore the story as a condemnation of all attempts to rein in the private sector Dolot made me rethink my attitude towards the Soviet Union in ways this film did not), the massacre of Poles in Katyn Forest in 1940 and the Soviets’ return of German Jews (and, even more inexplicably, German Communists) who had fled the Nazi persecution in 1940-41 so the Germans could send them to concentration camps and kill them as part of the Holocaust. The film also makes clear that the Nazi-Soviet alliance from August 1939 to June 1941 was not a mere “non-aggression pact” but an actual, active military partnership (though, true to form, in depicting the partition of Poland between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia as “evidence” of the identity between the two he ignores the long history of German and Russian governments dividing up Poland between them, which predated both the Nazis and the Soviets by more than a century).
Had Snore just stuck to the historical facts and not attempted to condemn all Left-of-center politics by association — and in particular had he avoided his bizarre attempts to cite the Soviets as Hitler’s inspiration (he says it was the Soviet success at mass murder that inspired Hitler to order the Holocaust, and uses Joseph Goebbels’ publicly expressed admiration of Lenin to tie the Soviets and the Nazis ideologically — ignoring the fact that when Goebbels said those things he was part of a Left-wing movement within the Nazi party that Hitler subsequently purged, though he kept Goebbels on when he renounced the Left-wing variant of Nazism and convinced Hitler of his personal loyalty) and his bizarre attempt to recast Nazism as a movement of the Left and not the Right. Snore’s present-day ideological purpose is revealed at the end, in which he issues a sweeping condemnation of all the governments of the present-day European Union for still commemorating the Soviet Union (Strickland speaks this part of the narration over an image of a couple of statues meant to represent Lenin and Stalin — though they’re not actually very good likenesses — without any clue as to where they are, which would seem relevant if the idea is to critique the governments of Western Europe for not adopting his view of the Soviet Union, its history and its crimes) — and his film seems aimed particularly at modern-day Russia, where there’s a good deal of nostalgia for the Communist years (associated in many modern Russians’ minds not with atrocities but with relative plenty and social equality as opposed to the corrupt buccaneer capitalism which replaced it) and Vladimir Putin, first as president and then as prime minister, has become the latest in a long line of autocrats in Russian history that, contrary to Snore, well pre-dated Communist ideology or the Soviet Union — including Stalin’s role models Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great as well as Lenin and Stalin himself.
In fairness to The Soviet Story, I must point out that I saw it under adverse circumstances, in a 56-minute TV version cut down from Snore’s 86-minute original and in a badly framed edition (probably a glitch from the conversion from analog TV, with its 1.33-1 screen ratio, to digital’s 1.78-1) that cut off much of the subtitles so it was difficult to discern much of what Snore’s non-English-speaking interviewees were actually saying.
This morning I also watched a chilling if overwrought documentary recently shown on PBS: The Soviet Story, a production from a Latvian company called Labvakar, directed and written by Edvins Snore, whose movie would be a good deal more moving if he had just stuck to the facts he could document and not placed them in a hard-Right ideological, philosophical and propagandist context designed to discredit all forms of socialism, liberalism and any other political-economic philosophy but lassiez-faire capitalism and worship of “The Market.” The basic thesis (if I can borrow a word from dialectic terminology whose use in connection with his film Mr. — or is it Ms.? — Snore would probably detest) of The Soviet Story is that Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Hitler were virtually identical; all sought to create a socialist society of one form or another, and all called for mass murders of anyone whose existence they considered an obstacle to their foredoomed attempts to remake human nature.
Snore’s ideological purpose is to trash any and all of the myths and legends by which modern-day socialists (or, for that matter, modern-day liberals and progressives) attempt to dissociate themselves and their goals from the horrors of Communism and Nazism, though his case against Marx and Engels rests mainly on the appearance of one word, “Völkerabfälle,” in the Communist Manifesto. Snore translates this as “racial trash” and explains in his narration (he wrote the film, though in the English version the narration is delivered by Jon Strickland in a quiet, calm, matter-of-fact way that only makes the film more chilling) that this meant that people whose societies hadn’t yet experienced the capitalist transformation (he apparently cited the Basques and the Scottish Highlanders as examples) would have to be exterminated before the transition from capitalism to socialism could be completed. (Ironically, the first socialist revolution occurred in a society that was still largely feudal — indeed, the ideological battle between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks was based largely on this very point: could you make a socialist revolution in a society that hadn’t even finished the transition to capitalism yet? — but this is just one of the many real-life complexities that aren’t in Snore’s film because they don’t fit his ideological schema.)
Snore makes some pretty wild leaps and instances of guilt by association (a favorite tactic of the Right) to establish ideological and inspirational connections between Nazism and Communism, going so far as to claim that the Nazis were really Leftists because they had the word “socialist” in their name and they shared a belief in exterminating enemies of the state — only the Nazis’ targets were based on race while the Soviets’ targets were based on class. Snore includes a montage sequence comparing Nazi German posters on the left side of the screen with Soviet Russian posters on the right (shouldn’t it have been the other way around?) in an effort to depict the similarities of the regimes — though all his montage really proves is that these two despotisms sold themselves to their people in similar ways (it’s really more a commonality of marketing than of ideology). He also dredges up footage of George Bernard Shaw (I presume from his famous Movietone newsreel of 1928) claiming that certain “undesirable” people should be made to justify their existence and (he leaves this unspoken but this is a legitimate inference from what he said) got rid of if they can’t prove they add more value to the world than they take from it in their support. The idea is to tie West European socialism to both the Soviets and the Nazis (and indeed Shaw did say in the 1930’s that democracy was proving inadequate to the economic crisis and maybe the future lay with dictatorships, which is more an embarrassment to Shaw and proof of how far a great mind can go off the rails than the blanket condemnation of all socialism and progressivism Snore wants to paint it as) and to argue that humankind’s only choices are capitalism or barbarism.
I’ll concede one important point to Snore: liberals, progressives and Leftists in general have been considerably softer in their criticisms of Communist atrocities than of fascist ones, and I agree with him that the reason for that is that the fascists, especially the Nazis, committed their crimes against humanity in the name of an ideal of “racial purity” that appalls us as much as the crimes themselves do, while the Soviets committed theirs in the name of human equality, economic freedom (in the Rooseveltian sense of “freedom from want and freedom from fear”) and a classless society, so there’s a definite tendency on the Left towards apologizing for the Communists because we like their stated ideals even if we abhor their policies and tactics. (I’ll even admit that in nit-picking Snore’s film I’m probably at least partially guilty of this myself.)
The real unfortunate aspect of Snore’s film is that his ideological purpose gets in the way of the real meat of his movie: his dramatization of the Soviet evil (he estimates that “at least 20 million” people were killed by the Soviet regime throughout its existence — about 3 1/2 times the total toll of the Nazi Holocaust) and his retellings of classic stories about the brutality and mass murders committed under the Soviet regime: the so-called “genocide by hunger” in Ukraine in 1932-33 (which I already read about in Miron Dolot’s book Execution by Hunger: The Hidden Holocaust — a vivid and well documented account that worked for me more than this film did precisely because Dolot did not have the kinds of historical axes to grind that Snore did; by refusing to underscore the story as a condemnation of all attempts to rein in the private sector Dolot made me rethink my attitude towards the Soviet Union in ways this film did not), the massacre of Poles in Katyn Forest in 1940 and the Soviets’ return of German Jews (and, even more inexplicably, German Communists) who had fled the Nazi persecution in 1940-41 so the Germans could send them to concentration camps and kill them as part of the Holocaust. The film also makes clear that the Nazi-Soviet alliance from August 1939 to June 1941 was not a mere “non-aggression pact” but an actual, active military partnership (though, true to form, in depicting the partition of Poland between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia as “evidence” of the identity between the two he ignores the long history of German and Russian governments dividing up Poland between them, which predated both the Nazis and the Soviets by more than a century).
Had Snore just stuck to the historical facts and not attempted to condemn all Left-of-center politics by association — and in particular had he avoided his bizarre attempts to cite the Soviets as Hitler’s inspiration (he says it was the Soviet success at mass murder that inspired Hitler to order the Holocaust, and uses Joseph Goebbels’ publicly expressed admiration of Lenin to tie the Soviets and the Nazis ideologically — ignoring the fact that when Goebbels said those things he was part of a Left-wing movement within the Nazi party that Hitler subsequently purged, though he kept Goebbels on when he renounced the Left-wing variant of Nazism and convinced Hitler of his personal loyalty) and his bizarre attempt to recast Nazism as a movement of the Left and not the Right. Snore’s present-day ideological purpose is revealed at the end, in which he issues a sweeping condemnation of all the governments of the present-day European Union for still commemorating the Soviet Union (Strickland speaks this part of the narration over an image of a couple of statues meant to represent Lenin and Stalin — though they’re not actually very good likenesses — without any clue as to where they are, which would seem relevant if the idea is to critique the governments of Western Europe for not adopting his view of the Soviet Union, its history and its crimes) — and his film seems aimed particularly at modern-day Russia, where there’s a good deal of nostalgia for the Communist years (associated in many modern Russians’ minds not with atrocities but with relative plenty and social equality as opposed to the corrupt buccaneer capitalism which replaced it) and Vladimir Putin, first as president and then as prime minister, has become the latest in a long line of autocrats in Russian history that, contrary to Snore, well pre-dated Communist ideology or the Soviet Union — including Stalin’s role models Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great as well as Lenin and Stalin himself.
In fairness to The Soviet Story, I must point out that I saw it under adverse circumstances, in a 56-minute TV version cut down from Snore’s 86-minute original and in a badly framed edition (probably a glitch from the conversion from analog TV, with its 1.33-1 screen ratio, to digital’s 1.78-1) that cut off much of the subtitles so it was difficult to discern much of what Snore’s non-English-speaking interviewees were actually saying.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
The Man with Nine Lives (Columbia, 1940)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran a movie I’d recorded October 30, when TCM did a marathon of Boris Karloff’s movies and I set the DVD recorder to get all the films on their schedule I didn’t already have on DVD — including the two from his cycle of five films for Columbia from 1939 to 1942 inexplicably left out of the recent Columbia Karloff DVD package, The Man with Nine Lives and The Devil Commands. While I think The Devil Commands is the best of these films by a wide margin — partly because it had the strongest story source (William Sloane’s moody, atmospheric novel The Edge of Running Water) and partly because it had Edward Dmytryk as director instead of Nick Grindé or Lew Landers, the movie I ran last night was The Man with Nine Lives, mainly because I hadn’t seen it since the 1960’s.
This was the second in the cycle and a pretty close recycling of the first, The Man They Could Not Hang — down to the names of Karloff’s characters. In The Man They Could Not Hang he was Dr. Henryk Savaard; here he’s Dr. Leon Kravaal, and he’s likewise revived from the dead during the course of the narrative — though this time he’s actually dead at the start of the film and he doesn’t appear until over 20 minutes into this 73-minute movie. The film opens with a long written prologue, claiming that “frozen therapy” — chilling the body to sub-normal temperatures to facilitate the effectiveness of operations and medicine — is already an accepted part of medical practice, and surely more applications for it will be discovered. (Some of the Karloff Columbias actually attempted to ground themselves in the science of the time, but this one seems wildly outrageous; one would have to ask writers Karl Brown and Harold Shumate whether they really thought packing people in ice as if they were beers in a cooler at a frat party was one day going to be an integral part of the cure for cancer.)
We then cut to a hospital, one of those rooms where a doctor can operate while a whole bunch of other doctors look on and watch, where Dr. Tim Mason (Roger Pryor) has encased a cancer patient in ice and is pumping liquefied gas into coolers attached to her bed and is blowing fans on her, all in the interests of suppressing her cancer and killing off the malignant cells. When this cockamamie therapy actually works, the hospital is flooded with applications from desperate cancer patients anxious to get the new treatment — and the hospital’s head, Dr. Harvey (Charles Trowbridge), orders Dr. Mason to stop talking to the media and to take a leave of absence. Dr. Mason then explains to his nurse/girlfriend Judith Blair (Jo Ann Sayers) that his own researches in frozen therapy were inspired and stimulated by the previous discoveries of Dr. Leon Kravaal, who published a book called Frozen Therapy and then mysteriously disappeared in 1930. Mason decides to spend his enforced leave to go up to Silver Lake in upstate New York, where Dr. Kravaal lived until his disappearance, and he drags Judith along with him and has to deal with the usual reluctant locals — he gets the typical horror-film warnings not to go to the Kravaal place — and also finds that four locals, Sheriff Stanton (Hal Taliaferro, previously known in the silent era as minor Western star Wally West), district attorney John Hawthorne (John Dilson), coroner Dr. Bassett (Byron Foulger) and spoiled rich kid Bob Adams (Stanley Brown), disappeared at the same time Dr. Kravaal did.
Arriving in the Kravaal home, Mason searches for any remaining records Kravaal might have taken down after he published his book, and when Judith falls through a weak floor to the cellar below she and Mason discover a long underground passageway with several doors that leads to a room where they find the skeleton of a man. Then they find another door that leads to an underground glacier, which Dr. Kravaal had been using as a sort of natural freezer — and they find Dr. Kravaal himself, dead for 10 years but still in a state of suspended animation, and thaw him out with the same technique (including force-feeding him coffee) they used on that cancer patient back at the hospital. When he comes to, he narrates a flashback (during which, oddly, Boris Karloff’s hair looks grayer than it does in the present-day scenes) explaining what happened: he was treating Jasper Adams (Lee Willard), Bob’s uncle, for cancer, only Bob decided that Kravaal was bleeding Jasper’s bank account and trying to collect money from someone who was already dead, so he rounded up the authorities and went out there. Dr. Bassett saw Jasper’s body in a state of frozen therapy and pronounced him dead; Kravaal insisted he was alive; the sheriff and D.A. insisted on arresting Kravaal and he fought back by mixing three toxic chemicals, noting down the proportions, then throwing the beaker to the floor and rendering all five people unconscious, locked in his natural icebox. (The skeleton Mason and Judith found on the floor earlier was Jasper Adams’; he actually came to on Kravaal’s operating table but, with no one attending him, suffered a fall and died of his injuries.)
Kravaal, Mason and Judith realize that if Kravaal himself survived, the others probably did too and could also be thawed out and revived — and after they’re all together, Bob Adams gets the bad news that since more than seven years have passed, he and all the other people in the room have been declared legally dead and therefore there’s no way Bob can inherit his uncle’s fortune — whereupon Bob responds by seizing the piece of paper containing Kravaal’s notes from 10 years earlier and throws it in the fire. Able to remember what chemicals he used but not their correct proportions, Kravaal goes ballistic and insists he’s going to use everyone else in the room as human guinea pigs to discover what concentration of the toxic drugs enables people to survive sub-freezing temperatures. He shoots Bob Adams and kills the other three in the tests — then realizes that because they’d already had the drug, it no longer protected them but instead killed them, and he insists on making Judith his next subject because she and Mason are the only people there who’ve never been exposed before. Judith actually survives the drug, but just then a search party led by Silver Lake’s current sheriff (Ivan Miller) and alerted to the situation by Pete Daggett (Ernie Adams), the man who rented the boat to Mason and Judith that allowed them to get to Kravaal’s home, crashes in and shoots Kravaal, who this time dies for keeps.
The similarities to The Man They Could Not Hang are obvious — particularly the Karloff character keeping the people he feels wronged him in a confined space and using them as hostages, knocking them off one by one — but this film, though pretty ridiculous scientifically, is better constructed dramatically and has the advantage over The Man They Could Not Hang and the third film in the series, Before I Hang, of not attributing the Karloff character’s moral degeneration to his death and resurrection. The Brown-Shumate script for The Man with Nine Lives actually gives Karloff the chance to play a character with a truly tumbled psyche — one moment all smiles and beneficence as he announces his intention not to patent his discovery but to give it to the world for free; the next all snarling and revenge-driven as his scientific obsession and determination to crush anybody who stands in his way takes control of his personality and leads him to murder.
Nick Grindé’s direction is also a bit better than usual; many of the shots are surprisingly atmospheric and the film, once it gets to Kravaal’s place, takes on an old-dark-house aura that helps build the cross between science fiction and horror the director, writers and studio were obviously aiming for. The Man with Nine Lives is hardly a great movie — and the gimmick of Karloff as the obsessed scientist driven mad when he can’t get the authorities or the public to accept his work was done better in some of his other films (notably the 1936 British film The Man Who Changed His Mind, which really set the template for the Columbias and most of Karloff’s other mad-scientist roles and had two considerably more prestigious writers, John L. Balderston and Sidney Gilliatt, than most of Karloff’s later forays into mad-doctor parts) — but it’s a lot of fun and, within its rather twisted plot devices, it actually maintains a level of integrity and provides a showcase for Karloff that shows off his depth as an actor.
I ran a movie I’d recorded October 30, when TCM did a marathon of Boris Karloff’s movies and I set the DVD recorder to get all the films on their schedule I didn’t already have on DVD — including the two from his cycle of five films for Columbia from 1939 to 1942 inexplicably left out of the recent Columbia Karloff DVD package, The Man with Nine Lives and The Devil Commands. While I think The Devil Commands is the best of these films by a wide margin — partly because it had the strongest story source (William Sloane’s moody, atmospheric novel The Edge of Running Water) and partly because it had Edward Dmytryk as director instead of Nick Grindé or Lew Landers, the movie I ran last night was The Man with Nine Lives, mainly because I hadn’t seen it since the 1960’s.
This was the second in the cycle and a pretty close recycling of the first, The Man They Could Not Hang — down to the names of Karloff’s characters. In The Man They Could Not Hang he was Dr. Henryk Savaard; here he’s Dr. Leon Kravaal, and he’s likewise revived from the dead during the course of the narrative — though this time he’s actually dead at the start of the film and he doesn’t appear until over 20 minutes into this 73-minute movie. The film opens with a long written prologue, claiming that “frozen therapy” — chilling the body to sub-normal temperatures to facilitate the effectiveness of operations and medicine — is already an accepted part of medical practice, and surely more applications for it will be discovered. (Some of the Karloff Columbias actually attempted to ground themselves in the science of the time, but this one seems wildly outrageous; one would have to ask writers Karl Brown and Harold Shumate whether they really thought packing people in ice as if they were beers in a cooler at a frat party was one day going to be an integral part of the cure for cancer.)
We then cut to a hospital, one of those rooms where a doctor can operate while a whole bunch of other doctors look on and watch, where Dr. Tim Mason (Roger Pryor) has encased a cancer patient in ice and is pumping liquefied gas into coolers attached to her bed and is blowing fans on her, all in the interests of suppressing her cancer and killing off the malignant cells. When this cockamamie therapy actually works, the hospital is flooded with applications from desperate cancer patients anxious to get the new treatment — and the hospital’s head, Dr. Harvey (Charles Trowbridge), orders Dr. Mason to stop talking to the media and to take a leave of absence. Dr. Mason then explains to his nurse/girlfriend Judith Blair (Jo Ann Sayers) that his own researches in frozen therapy were inspired and stimulated by the previous discoveries of Dr. Leon Kravaal, who published a book called Frozen Therapy and then mysteriously disappeared in 1930. Mason decides to spend his enforced leave to go up to Silver Lake in upstate New York, where Dr. Kravaal lived until his disappearance, and he drags Judith along with him and has to deal with the usual reluctant locals — he gets the typical horror-film warnings not to go to the Kravaal place — and also finds that four locals, Sheriff Stanton (Hal Taliaferro, previously known in the silent era as minor Western star Wally West), district attorney John Hawthorne (John Dilson), coroner Dr. Bassett (Byron Foulger) and spoiled rich kid Bob Adams (Stanley Brown), disappeared at the same time Dr. Kravaal did.
Arriving in the Kravaal home, Mason searches for any remaining records Kravaal might have taken down after he published his book, and when Judith falls through a weak floor to the cellar below she and Mason discover a long underground passageway with several doors that leads to a room where they find the skeleton of a man. Then they find another door that leads to an underground glacier, which Dr. Kravaal had been using as a sort of natural freezer — and they find Dr. Kravaal himself, dead for 10 years but still in a state of suspended animation, and thaw him out with the same technique (including force-feeding him coffee) they used on that cancer patient back at the hospital. When he comes to, he narrates a flashback (during which, oddly, Boris Karloff’s hair looks grayer than it does in the present-day scenes) explaining what happened: he was treating Jasper Adams (Lee Willard), Bob’s uncle, for cancer, only Bob decided that Kravaal was bleeding Jasper’s bank account and trying to collect money from someone who was already dead, so he rounded up the authorities and went out there. Dr. Bassett saw Jasper’s body in a state of frozen therapy and pronounced him dead; Kravaal insisted he was alive; the sheriff and D.A. insisted on arresting Kravaal and he fought back by mixing three toxic chemicals, noting down the proportions, then throwing the beaker to the floor and rendering all five people unconscious, locked in his natural icebox. (The skeleton Mason and Judith found on the floor earlier was Jasper Adams’; he actually came to on Kravaal’s operating table but, with no one attending him, suffered a fall and died of his injuries.)
Kravaal, Mason and Judith realize that if Kravaal himself survived, the others probably did too and could also be thawed out and revived — and after they’re all together, Bob Adams gets the bad news that since more than seven years have passed, he and all the other people in the room have been declared legally dead and therefore there’s no way Bob can inherit his uncle’s fortune — whereupon Bob responds by seizing the piece of paper containing Kravaal’s notes from 10 years earlier and throws it in the fire. Able to remember what chemicals he used but not their correct proportions, Kravaal goes ballistic and insists he’s going to use everyone else in the room as human guinea pigs to discover what concentration of the toxic drugs enables people to survive sub-freezing temperatures. He shoots Bob Adams and kills the other three in the tests — then realizes that because they’d already had the drug, it no longer protected them but instead killed them, and he insists on making Judith his next subject because she and Mason are the only people there who’ve never been exposed before. Judith actually survives the drug, but just then a search party led by Silver Lake’s current sheriff (Ivan Miller) and alerted to the situation by Pete Daggett (Ernie Adams), the man who rented the boat to Mason and Judith that allowed them to get to Kravaal’s home, crashes in and shoots Kravaal, who this time dies for keeps.
The similarities to The Man They Could Not Hang are obvious — particularly the Karloff character keeping the people he feels wronged him in a confined space and using them as hostages, knocking them off one by one — but this film, though pretty ridiculous scientifically, is better constructed dramatically and has the advantage over The Man They Could Not Hang and the third film in the series, Before I Hang, of not attributing the Karloff character’s moral degeneration to his death and resurrection. The Brown-Shumate script for The Man with Nine Lives actually gives Karloff the chance to play a character with a truly tumbled psyche — one moment all smiles and beneficence as he announces his intention not to patent his discovery but to give it to the world for free; the next all snarling and revenge-driven as his scientific obsession and determination to crush anybody who stands in his way takes control of his personality and leads him to murder.
Nick Grindé’s direction is also a bit better than usual; many of the shots are surprisingly atmospheric and the film, once it gets to Kravaal’s place, takes on an old-dark-house aura that helps build the cross between science fiction and horror the director, writers and studio were obviously aiming for. The Man with Nine Lives is hardly a great movie — and the gimmick of Karloff as the obsessed scientist driven mad when he can’t get the authorities or the public to accept his work was done better in some of his other films (notably the 1936 British film The Man Who Changed His Mind, which really set the template for the Columbias and most of Karloff’s other mad-scientist roles and had two considerably more prestigious writers, John L. Balderston and Sidney Gilliatt, than most of Karloff’s later forays into mad-doctor parts) — but it’s a lot of fun and, within its rather twisted plot devices, it actually maintains a level of integrity and provides a showcase for Karloff that shows off his depth as an actor.
Between the Folds (Green Fuse Films/PBS, 2008)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Between the Folds, a 2008 documentary by Vanessa Gould (she’s credited as director, writer and narrator — and, aside to Charles, in the last of those capacities she pronounces the “t” in “often”) about origami. I remembered origami — a traditional Japanese art involving folding square pieces of paper to make often elaborate shapes — from my childhood, when San Francisco public television station KQED (back when the network it was part of was still called National Educational Television!) ran a show about it and for a while I was taking pieces of binder paper, folding them diagonally and tearing off the 2 1/2 inches at the top so they would take on the square shape needed for origami.
What I hadn’t realized is that in the 45 years between those “educational” shows on origami and this one, the art form has become a lot more elaborate and attracted attention from the scientific community, both as a way to teach mathematical concepts and as a sophisticated amusement in which computers are used to design origami patterns, which are then executed by hand and often result in elaborate sculptures of elephants and other animals. I found the show sometimes excruciatingly boring, sometimes fascinating — I especially liked MIT professor Erik Dumaine, a real-life Doogie Howser who went to college at 12, got his Ph.D. at 20 and is a full professor at his alma mater at 24. He’s got long hair, a winning smile, and is cute in a kind of dorky way I find appealing — and he has that disarming manner of someone who’s so much smarter than you are he doesn’t need to push that in your face.
There were all sorts of people profiled, including artists who work exclusively in origami and have had exhibits and sold works (and one of the artists profiled actually manufactures his own handmade paper on which to execute his origami creations), and the whole show was appealing but also a bit “precious,” taking an approach that unquestioningly endorses the importance of the subject matter and expects us to do so too. The library put this on in full “discussion” mode, complete with a post-film Q&A (which I skipped out on) and a group of origamists doing their thing at a table in the library’s first-floor lobby. It’s supposed to be on the Independent Lens series on PBS (though it’s anybody’s guess whether our KPBS affiliate will bother to show it at all, or if they do if they’ll put it on exclusively at 2 a.m. the way they ghettoize a lot of PBS’s more esoteric programming) and it’s a program I’d recommend with reservations; like the origamists themselves, Gould’s movie is a bit too clever, too “twee,” for its own good — but it’s still a lot of fun and it’s a good deal nicer to spend an hour on TV with people who get off on paper folding than put up with the screaming meemies on Fox news!
The film was Between the Folds, a 2008 documentary by Vanessa Gould (she’s credited as director, writer and narrator — and, aside to Charles, in the last of those capacities she pronounces the “t” in “often”) about origami. I remembered origami — a traditional Japanese art involving folding square pieces of paper to make often elaborate shapes — from my childhood, when San Francisco public television station KQED (back when the network it was part of was still called National Educational Television!) ran a show about it and for a while I was taking pieces of binder paper, folding them diagonally and tearing off the 2 1/2 inches at the top so they would take on the square shape needed for origami.
What I hadn’t realized is that in the 45 years between those “educational” shows on origami and this one, the art form has become a lot more elaborate and attracted attention from the scientific community, both as a way to teach mathematical concepts and as a sophisticated amusement in which computers are used to design origami patterns, which are then executed by hand and often result in elaborate sculptures of elephants and other animals. I found the show sometimes excruciatingly boring, sometimes fascinating — I especially liked MIT professor Erik Dumaine, a real-life Doogie Howser who went to college at 12, got his Ph.D. at 20 and is a full professor at his alma mater at 24. He’s got long hair, a winning smile, and is cute in a kind of dorky way I find appealing — and he has that disarming manner of someone who’s so much smarter than you are he doesn’t need to push that in your face.
There were all sorts of people profiled, including artists who work exclusively in origami and have had exhibits and sold works (and one of the artists profiled actually manufactures his own handmade paper on which to execute his origami creations), and the whole show was appealing but also a bit “precious,” taking an approach that unquestioningly endorses the importance of the subject matter and expects us to do so too. The library put this on in full “discussion” mode, complete with a post-film Q&A (which I skipped out on) and a group of origamists doing their thing at a table in the library’s first-floor lobby. It’s supposed to be on the Independent Lens series on PBS (though it’s anybody’s guess whether our KPBS affiliate will bother to show it at all, or if they do if they’ll put it on exclusively at 2 a.m. the way they ghettoize a lot of PBS’s more esoteric programming) and it’s a program I’d recommend with reservations; like the origamists themselves, Gould’s movie is a bit too clever, too “twee,” for its own good — but it’s still a lot of fun and it’s a good deal nicer to spend an hour on TV with people who get off on paper folding than put up with the screaming meemies on Fox news!
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