A League of Their Own (Columbia Pictures, Parkway Productions, 1992)

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

Last night (Sunday, July 13) my husband Charles and I watched director Penny Marshall’s 1992 film A League of Their Own, about the All-American Girls’ Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL). The league really existed; it was founded during America’s involvement in World War II at a time when the head honchos running major-league baseball worried that fans would lose interest in baseball with so many male players going off to war and being replaced either by teenagers or over-the-hill older guys. The real one was started by chewing-gum magnate and Chicago Cubs owner Philip K. Wrigley (fictionalized for the movie as chocolate maker “Walter Harvey” and played by Garry Marshall, director Penny Marshall’s older brother) in 1943 and consisted of four teams: the Rockford Peaches, Racine Belles, South Bend Blue Sox, and Kenosha Comets. Originally the teams played a combination of baseball and softball, using the larger softball and requiring all pitchers to throw underhanded, and also playing on a smaller field than a regulation baseball diamond – though Marshall and her writers (Kelly Candaele and Kim Wilson, documentary filmmakers whose PBS film about the league inspired Marshall to make the film and who got credit for the original story; and Babaloo Mandel and Lowell Ganz, two male writers from Marshall’s TV show Laverne and Shirley whom she hired to do the script after she couldn’t get a woman writer to do so) ignored that and shot the film with the actresses playing on normal baseball fields and using regular baseballs. In the film, Walter Harvey sends scout Ernie Capadino (Jon Lovitz) to Oregon to scout Dottie Hinson (Geena Davis), who’s working at a dairy and plays amateur baseball with the dairy’s women’s team. There’s a charming bit in which Ernie refers to Dottie’s job as “plucking cows,” revealing he knows nothing about agriculture. Dottie refuses to sign up for the league unless they also take her younger sister, pitcher Kit Keller (Lori Petty). Ernie, who’s seen Kit bat and strike out, is not impressed, but he’s willing to take Kit if Dottie agrees to join.

As part of the promotion for launching the women’s league, Harvey and his P.R. man, Ira Lowenstein (David Strathairn, 13 years before he got his 15 minutes of fame playing Edward R. Murrow in George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck), decide to hire male managers who were former baseball players and would bring out fans on their own appeal. For the Rockford Peaches, the team both Dottie and Kit end up on, the manager is Jimmy Dugan (Tom Hanks), a star in major league baseball until he became an alcoholic and literally drank himself out of his career. Dugan promises Harvey he’ll quit drinking if he gets the job, but of course he doesn’t, and when he shows up for his first day on the job the first thing he does is take a long piss right in front of the women. The women are so flustered they take out their watches and time his urination. When the team starts playing, Dugan is so disinterested in it that Dottie has to take over and give the umpires the Peaches’ starting lineup. Dugan is also such an asshole that when Dottie shows him one of his old baseball cards and asks him to sign it for her husband Bob (Bill Pullman), who’s off fighting in the war in Italy, Dugan nastily tears it up. When I did my moviemagg review of the film Elvis, in which Tom Hanks played Col. Tom Parker, I wrote it was the most unsympathetic role Hanks had ever played – his stock in trade as an actor has always been lovability – but Jerry Dugan is pretty damned close. Penny Marshall had previously directed Tom Hanks in his film Big, the role that broke him out of the TV ghetto and established him as a feature-film star, so she had no trouble getting him for this role as well. Among the other players are former dance-hall girl Mae Mordabito (Madonna, who also sang a song over the closing credits, “This Used to Be My Playground”); Doris Murphy (Rosie O’Donnell); Helen Haley (Anne Ramsey); the aggressively homely Marla Hooch (Megan Cavanaugh), whom Dottie has to persuade Ernie to sign because she may be unattractive but she can hit; Betty “Spaghetti” Horn (Tracy Reiner, Penny Marshall’s real-life daughter); Shirley Baker (Ann Cusack), who at first doesn’t know she made the teams because she can’t read (Mae, Madonna’s character, teaches her to read with a soft-core porn book); and Evelyn Gardner (Bitty Schramm), who’s having child-care issues with her husband that force her to take their son Stillwell (Justin Scheller) along with the team on its road trips.

Evelyn assures her teammates that Stillwell will be well-behaved, but of course he’s anything but: on their first road trip with him, he gets in the face of the bus driver so the driver literally can’t see where he’s going, and the driver’s response is to stop the bus in the middle of the road and bails out on them. Jerry takes the wheel, which is worrisome enough given that he’s still drinking, and for the rest of the movie we don’t see who’s driving the bus. There are some charming little vignettes along the way, including the preposterous etiquette and posture classes led by the team’s chaperone, Miss Cuthburt (Pauline Brailsford) – of whom Jerry jokes, “Didn’t I see you in The Wizard of Oz?” – which the women players are forced to undergo before the season starts so their off-the-field behavior will be properly “ladylike.” They’re also forced to play in super-short skirts about 20 years before the mini-skirt was invented, for the delectation of males in the audiences. The players are instructed never to drink, smoke, or date men – though men are of course hitting on them all the time – and there’s one sequence in which some of the players sneak out to a roadhouse to relax. Marla is cruised by the roadhouse’s manager, Nelson (Alan Wilder), and decides to bail on the team to marry him. And there’s a great scene early in the movie in which one of the men in the crowd starts mincing in his sexist impression of what a woman ballplayer would be like – and Dottie deliberately throws a baseball at him, then says, “It slipped.” Harvey is about to close down the league because its games aren’t well attended, until Ira arranges with a Life photographer to attend a game. He takes a photo of Dottie doing a sensational dive at home plate to tag a runner out, that photo makes the Life cover, and the publicity starts drawing big crowds to the games. The attendance persuades Harvey to keep the league going even though he’s confident the war will end soon (it actually went on another two years) and therefore male ballplayers will be returning and they won’t need women’s teams to keep interest in the sport going. (In fact the league survived until 1954, and as it evolved the rules became less like softball and more like baseball.)

There’s also a fascinating scene in which the team receives a notice from the War Department that the husband of one of the members has been killed in combat. For bureaucratic reasons the Western Union carrier won’t deliver the message immediately, leaving every married woman on the squad heartstruck and asking, “Is it my husband?” Dottie is convinced it’s her husband Bob, who stopped writing her three weeks before after he’d regularly written every week,but it turns out to be Betty’s after Jerry grabs the telegram from the delivery man’s hand and opens it himself. Ultimately the rivalry between Dottie and Kit gets so extreme that Dottie demands to be traded to another team – but they end up trading Kit instead. There’s a reference to the fact that the Rockford Peaches are doing so well they’re going to make the playoffs – which both Charles and an imdb.com “Goofs” contributor red-flagged as a mistake; since there are only four teams in the league, how can any of them not make the playoffs? (Major League Baseball didn’t start doing division playoffs until 1969, and didn’t start the two-tiered playoff system between the regular season and the World Series until 1994.) Unfortunately, just as the World Series between the Rockford Peaches and the Racine Belles (the team Kit got traded to) is about to start, Dottie’s husband Bob (ya remember Bob?) shows up, wounded and limping but still alive. The two decide to drive out from the Midwest to Oregon immediately (in the middle of the war, with gas rationing still very much in place? I don’t think so!) even though that means Dottie can’t play in the World Series, but she thinks better of it and returns for the seventh and last game. By now anyone who’s seen even one sports movie in their life is sure what’s going to happen – Dottie is going to score the big game-winning home run and the Peaches will win the series – but instead [spoiler alert!] Racine gets a runner on scoring position in the bottom of the ninth and Kit, who’s pitching the game for them and is also Racine’s final batter and base runner, knocks the ball out of Dottie’s hand and thereby keeps her from tagging her out at home, so Racine wins.

The film is framed by sequences taking place in 1987 (with a whole different set of actors playing the principals) on the eve of the All-American Girls’ Professional Baseball League’s induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, in which the survivors meet up with each other. By then Evelyn is dead but her son Stillwell (Mark Holton, looking surprisingly credible as a middle-aged adult version of Justin Scheller) is still alive and attends the reunion. The film ends with the former players still active and playing baseball for fun on the hallowed diamond at Cooperstown. A League of Their Own makes some back-handed comments about sexism and shows a scene in which a woman lecturer is talking about how it’s the bounden duty of all the women who got war jobs to give them up once the war ends and the men return, and another social commentator narrates a newsreel saying that all these professional women are emasculating men. (There was a lot of this nonsense in the immediate post-war years; Ferdinand Lundberg, a progressive on economic issues who coined the phrase “America’s Sixty Families” to describe what later writers and activists called “the power elite” and ultimately “the 1 percent,” co-wrote a fiercely sexist book called Modern Woman: The Lost Sex in 1947.) What’s good about this movie is the mostly flawless re-creation of the atmosphere (though there are a few glitches, like the band in the roadhouse playing the Benny Goodman/Lionel Hampton hit “Flying Home” with far more musicians audible on the soundtrack than we see on screen) and the riveting performances of Geena Davis and Lori Petty as the feuding sisters. Davis is so good and authoritative in the role that it’s a surprise that she was only the third choice. Penny Marshall originally cast Demi Moore, but she got pregnant just before shooting started. Then she offered the part to Debra Winger, who bailed when she learned that Madonna was also going to be in the movie. Also, in order to get parts in the film the women had to try out their baseball skills to prove they could play the game to Marshall’s satisfaction before she’d let them read for the roles. A League of Their Own holds up quite well as a sports movie and a women’s solidarity film, though the reason I was watching it – to write a review for Fanfare of the new release of Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack music – proved to be disappointing. This is what I call a “functional” film score rather than an “expansive” one, making its points economically and adding to the film’s appeal but without being very interesting listening on its own.

The Three Musketeers (Walt Disney Pictures, Caravan Pictures, Wolfgang Odelka Filmproduktion GmbH, Filmfonds Wien, One for All Productions, Buena Vista Pictures Distribution, 1993)

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

Last night (Saturday, July 12) my husband Charles and I watched a Blu-Ray disc of a quite remarkable movie from 1993, The Three Musketeers, yet another adaptation of Alexandre Dumas père’s 1844 novel Les Trois Mousquetaires with Chris O’Donnell as D’Artagnan, Kiefer Sutherland as Athos, Oliver Platt as Porthos, and Charlie Sheen top-billed as Aramis. In fact, when I first heard of this movie I wrote it off with the thought, “Not another one.” Not only had the basic story been done several times by American studios – in 1911 by Edison, in 1916 by Thomas Ince, in 1921 with Douglas Fairbanks (a milestone in his career because it propelled him out of contemporary rom-coms and into big historical epics), in 1935 by RKO with Walter Abel, a spoof in 1939 at 20th Century-Fox with Don Ameche and The Ritz Brothers, a big-budget MGM version in 1948 with Gene Kelly as D’Artagnan, and a 1969 TV-movie with Kenneth Welch and Christopher Walken – but the template for modern adaptations seemed to have been set by Richard Lester, who shot The Three Musketeers and the sequel The Four Musketeers back-to-back in 1973 and 1974. Lester’s films had all-star casts (Michael York, Charlton Heston, Raquel Welch, Oliver Reed, Frank Finlay, Faye Dunaway, Richard Chamberlain, and Peter Sellers’s old Goon Squad partner Spike Milligan) and took a cheekily irreverent approach to the material without descending into out-and-out camp. There were also quite a few adaptations of the story in its native France (where the earliest now-lost Three Musketeers film was made in 1903), and since the 1993 The Three Musketeers there have been many other versions as well, including a Ukrainian musical from 2004 featuring current Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky that gender-changed the Musketeers into women. Surprise: the 1993 The Three Musketeers turned out to be a quite nicely paced entertainment, capably directed by Stephen Herek from a well-constructed script by David Loughery.

I was watching this in preparation for writing a Fanfare magazine review of a two-CD set of Michael Kamen’s music for the film, and this is one movie that comes close to fulfilling Jack Warner’s demand of his music director, Ray Heindorf, that the music start when the opening studio logo came on screen and not stop until “The End” credit. (There even is a “The End” credit in this film, a nice retro touch. I really miss “The End” credits.) The plot deals with a young country lad named D’Artagnan (Chris O’Donnell) who dreams of becoming one of the King’s Musketeers (essentially the equivalent of the Secret Service) in 17th Century France. The king is Louis XIII (Hugh O’Conor), but the real power behind the throne is Cardinal Richelieu (Tim Curry), who as the film opens is touring the dungeons under the palace in Paris and wantonly murders one of the prisoners who’s begging him for forgiveness. Richelieu got the King to disband the Musketeers because he wanted to substitute his own Cardinal’s Guards as the King’s security force, which would mean he could assassinate the King at any time he wanted and no one would have the authority to stop him. (We later learn that Richelieu put Louis XIII on the throne in the first place by having his father, Henry IV, assassinated.) Unbeknownst to anyone, Richelieu has also secretly negotiated a deal with the Duke of Buckingham, who essentially is to the King of England what Richelieu is to the King of France, to sell out France to England and put himself on the throne directly instead of having to rule through a monarch that might at any moment grow the proverbial pair and tell him to take a hike … or worse. He sends Milady Countess Sabine de Winter (Rebecca De Mornay) with the treaty to take it to England on a ship called the Persephone. Richelieu has also persuaded the King to sign an order officially disbanding the Musketeers and drafting them as common infantrymen in the upcoming war against England. Meanwhile, D’Artagnan is being chased by Girard (Paul McGann) and his brothers, who accuse him of taking liberties with their sister, and they follow him all the way to Paris.

D’Artagnan unknowingly challenges each of the three remaining Musketeers to duels, though when they finally encounter each other they decide to let him live and join their band of outlaws. D’Artagnan also meets Constance (Julie Delpy), lady-in-waiting to Queen Anne (Gabrielle Anwar), who recalls that she was put in an arranged marriage to Louis XIII but once she met him, she decided she was in love with him after all. D’Artagnan and Constance also fall in love with each other at first sight, but then she disappears from the action and they don’t finally get together until the very end. At one point the Musketeers hijack Richelieu’s private carriage, throw the gold coins in it to the starving French people, sample its alcoholic beverages and ultimately burn it, while leading Richelieu’s cavalry on a merry horseback chase in which, among other things, the Musketeers set fire to barrels of gunpowder, at least one of which blows up and takes some of Richelieu’s men with it. Ultimately the Three Musketeers and D’Artagnan recruit all the other former Musketeers to re-don their emblematic blue tunics, stage an assault on the palace in Paris, foil Richelieu’s assassination attempt on the King (which he planned because the hated British were demanding a demonstration of Richelieu’s power before they cut a deal with him), and restore the King to full power. King Louis XIII not only reinstates the Musketeers but officially names D’Artagnan to the Musketeers’ ranks, in a ceremony that looks more like a granting of knighthood than merely hiring another security guard. Loughery gives Louis this final speech that sounds all too relevant today in the Age of Trump: “This world is an uncertain realm, filled with danger. Honor undermined by the pursuit of power, freedom sacrificed when the weak are oppressed by the strong. But there are those who oppose these powerful forces, who dedicate their lives to truth, honor, and freedom.”

The 1993 The Three Musketeers is an exciting action picture in the recent modern manner, and Herek and Loughery deserve credit for creating a film with a lot of action even though they’re hamstrung by the low level of 17th century technology. It’s also a quite relentless movie, in which no sooner than one plot line starts to trail off than another one comes in and assumes equal importance. As for the casting, I had my qualms about Chris O’Donnell – like the late Heath Ledger in A Knight’s Tale and James Franco in Tristan + Isolde, he seems just too modern, like he just walked in from a Renaissance Faire where he was cosplaying rather than actually inhabiting a different historical age. But the rest of the cast is quite good, and it was a stroke of at least minor genius on the part of Herek and his casting director, Sharon Bialy, to give the part of Richelieu to Tim Curry. Best known for playing Rocky Horror in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Curry here is almost 20 years older and even seedier. Curry gives Richelieu a marvelous portrayal of controlled evil, quite the best I’ve seen since George Arliss’s 1935 biopic (in which Richelieu was depicted sympathetically). The actors playing the Musketeers are also excellent, particularly when they reveal their secrets: Aramis once studied theology and can still quote the Bible effectively, and Porthos used to be a pirate – a skill that comes in handy when the Musketeers hijack the Persephone and sail it back to France. The Three Musketeers is a nice, engaging movie (though the repetitive action scenes were starting to wear me down by the end), and it’s fun in a way all too many “serious” action movies aren’t anymore.

It also helps that cinematographer Dean Semler for once makes the color look colorful on screen. About the only times we’re stuck with the dark, dingy, faded browns and greens that are the stuff of most “color” films today. The 17th century looked a lot darker than today’s times, and where Semler shoots in dirty browns and greens it’s because he’s filming the scenes in the dungeon and other locales where you expect things to be terribly lit. Elsewhere, especially in the many outdoor scenes, this film is like a breath of fresh air – almost literally – an explosion of color to match the film’s old-style movie action. And one of the things I liked about The Three Musketeers is that it acknowledges that a “musket” was a firearm, albeit a hideously impractical one that had laboriously to be reloaded (which included inserting a charge of gunpowder, tamping it down, loading the bullet and then cocking the trigger to prepare to fire) for each single shot. The Three (and sometimes Four) Musketeers didn’t always fight the enemies with swords the way they’ve been shown in most of the film versions. Indeed, the scene in which Richelieu and his hired gun Rochefort (Michael Wincott) test out the skills of the professional assassin they’ve engaged to kill Louis XIII by having him shoot out a portrait of the king and hit him squarely in the eye is still chilling now!

Shopworn (Columbia, 1932)

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

Late last night (Thursday, July 10) my husband Charles and I watched an unusual 1932 movie on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEgu9ts4oA0): Shopworn, a Columbia production that starred Barbara Stanwyck as Kitty Lane, daughter of a construction worker who gets killed in the film’s spectacular opening: a whole mountain gets dynamited to clear the way for a new road. I suspect the crew at Columbia followed the old Mack Sennett stratagem of scouring the newspapers for announcements of some big spectacular event that was going to happen anyway, then sending a crew to film it and building a story around it. (Sennett’s most famous use of that gimmick was when he heard that a reservoir was to be drained. He got the idea of sending a comedy couple out in a rowboat and having them row across the reservoir, then look appropriately panicked and scared when the water started disappearing around them.) With his dying breath, dad tells Kitty to stay with his sister Dot (ZaSu Pitts, mournful as usual; I can’t watch her play these deadpan comic roles without ruing the tragedy that the self-destruction of Erich von Stroheim’s directorial career wreaked on Pitts as well: Stroheim insisted that Pitts was the screen’s potentially greatest tragic actress, and they proved it in the three films he made with her – Greed, The Wedding March, and Hello, Sister! – but she never got the sort of break Sally Field did 50 years later with Sybil and Norma Rae). Dot co-runs a restaurant in a college town with her husband Fred (Lucien Littlefield). They put Kitty to work as a waitress in the restaurant, and she predictably gets hit on by all the horny young college boys who eat the establishment’s miniature hamburgers, essentially a silver dollar-sized meat patty drowned on a full-sized bun. At one point she rejects an especially persistent suitor by hitting the button on her cash register that reads, “NO SALE.”

One young collegian catches her eye: David Livingston (Regis Toomey), a medical student whom she agrees to date. They have a nice affair that includes a trip to an amusement park where they get a photo taken together against a fake Middle Eastern desert backdrop. The cameraman running the concession is using a big old view camera (there’s a charming shot of Stanwyck and Toomey with their images upside down as the photographer would see them), only they ruin the first take by impulsively kissing each other. Ultimately David decides he wants to marry Kitty, but he runs into a stone wall of opposition from his neurotically overprotective mother (Clara Blandick – that’s right, Auntie Em from The Wizard of Oz as a villain!). Mrs. Livingston and her friend, the influential Judge Forbes (Oscar Apfel), first offer Kitty a $5,000 payment to leave David alone. When she angrily refuses, in the closest Stanwyck comes in this movie to her fabled emotional intensity, they use their social power to frame Kitty for violating the public morality act and get her sentenced to 30 days in a workhouse. They also get David to accompany his mother to Europe and trick him into thinking that Kitty accepted the bribe, and Kitty’s marital uncle Fred backs up their lie because Judge Forbes has bribed Fred with $100 to do so. (At first Judge Forbes tries to palm Fred off with a check to be sent later, but he’s got sense enough to insist on an immediate cash payment.) When Kitty finally serves her sentence, Fred doesn’t want her back and neither does any reputable employer, but she stumbles on a theatre that advertises “40 Beautiful Girls 40” and gets a job in their chorus. Within the space of a few minutes of a montage sequence, Kitty has risen through the ranks and become a major star. She’s also attracted a French male admirer, André Renoir (Albert Conti), who’s offering her a European tour and all the money and boyfriends she could want.

David tries to see her after a show, but she decides to get her revenge against him by pretending to want to see him and then not showing up. When she’s named as the co-respondent in a divorce suit – illustrated by big headlines in a newspaper – she retreats to the small town where she started her journey six years earlier. By now David has finished medical school and become a highly regarded surgeon – part of his repute comes from his ability to claim (rightly) that he finished his medical education in Europe – but his mother still has him tied tightly to her apron strings. When a local paper announces that the notorious Kitty Lane is coming to town, mom first tries to hide the paper from David and then, when he demands to see it, concocts a big social dinner at the local hotel restaurant and insists that he show up. By luck – or authorial fiat – Kitty is dining alone at the same restaurant on the same night, and David gets so bored with the company at his mom’s big table he bails on the party and joins Kitty at her table. Ultimately Kitty invites David to her room, but mom shows up too, crashes the party, and ultimately pulls a gun (the derringer that was established in movies as “the woman’s gun”) on Kitty and threatens to shoot. Kitty walks towards Mrs. Livingston, daring her to shoot her, and ultimately mom wimps out and Kitty takes the gun from her. Eventually it ends as you’d expect it to, with mom reluctantly accepting Kitty as her daughter-in-law and Kitty and David smooching on the couch at the fade-out. It was the sort of ending that to me raised more questions than it answered. Was David going to expect Kitty to give up her star career in show business and just be a stay-at-home wife and mother to their eventual children? Were they going to try to make it work as a two-career couple (obviously far more common now than it was in 1932)? And would David’s medical practice suffer from him being married to That Kind of Woman – which was one of the reasons Mrs. Livingston was so determined to break them up in the first place?

Shopworn had a mediocre director – Nicholas Grinde (usually credited as Nick Grinde, and sometimes as Nick Grindé, with the accent), a journeyman “B” director who cranked them out so fast a lot of Hollywood jokesters thought his last name was all too appropriate. But it had real talent at the writers’ desks: the basic story was by Sarah Y. Mason (who, with her husband Victor Heerman, would write the script for the stunning 1933 adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, directed by George Cukor and starring Katharine Hepburn) and the actual script was by two future Frank Capra collaborators, Jo Swerling and Robert Riskin. The cinematographer, Joseph Walker, and the editor, Gene Havlick, were also Capra people. Shopworn was billed on its YouTube post as a product of the so-called “pre-Code” era, 1930 to 1934, when the Motion Picture Production Code was enforced relatively loosely, but the only version that seems to survive was a 66-minute “post-Code” edit from the late 1930’s. The existing title cards bear a Code certificate number 4749R, the “R” indicating a reissue. Shopworn is a quite good movie of its type, and though the film was presumably edited for its “post-Code” reissue I didn’t notice any of the blatant lacunae we’ve seen in other movies, like Mae West’s 1934 film Belle of the Nineties, that got caught in the transition between loose and strict Code enforcement.

In his autobiography Frank Capra wrote about Stanwyck’s greatest weakness as a film actress – that she gave her best performance on the first take, and anything she did after that was just a pale copy. Capra described how he worked around this by shooting Stanwyck’s close-ups first, with multiple cameras so she would only have to do the scene once. I suspect Archie Mayo did that for one of Stanwyck’s best early films, Ever in My Heart (1933), in which she played a woman whose marriage to a German is broken up and doomed by World War I (it’s essentially Romeo and Juliet, only instead of the lovers being broken up by two feuding families, it’s two feuding countries), but I don’t think Grinde bothered. Also one major disappointment with Shopworn was that we don’t get to see any scenes of Stanwyck actually performing on stage – though she was a quite capable singer, maybe not at the level of the top white women jazz singers of the time (Mildred Bailey and Connee Boswell), but well enough to sing in The Purchase Price (1932), made two films after Shopworn, as well as in Ball of Fire (1941), in which she sang “Drumboogie” with Gene Krupa’s band, and Lady of Burlesque (1943). Shopworn doesn’t offer Stanwyck at her best (I still think she’s the greatest movie actress of all time, mainly for her versatility, matched by no other woman in the classic era and only one, Meryl Streep, since) but it’s still a raw, appealing movie that touches on moral dilemmas that are very much alive today, including the ability of the 1 percent to wreck the lives of anyone else for sometimes maddeningly arbitrary reasons and do it with impunity.

The People Next Door (CBS, Titus Productions, 1968)

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

Last night (Wednesday, July 9) I ran my husband Charles an unexpectedly good movie from the archives of CBS: The People Next Door (1968), the opening episode of the second season of the network’s attempt to revive the classic Playhouse 90 anthology series from the 1950’s. I ran it from YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZMq4Y2QeJM because I’m supposed to be doing a Fanfare music review of a CD composed of three scores Jerry Goldsmith composed for TV-movies between 1968 and 1972: The People Next Door, Pursuit, and Crawlspace (a horror tale of a suburban couple who move into a house they’ve bought, find a young boy living under it in the crawlspace, and adopt him, only to find they’ve got a monster on their hands). Charles and I had watched Pursuit the previous night and found it a rather dull wanna-be “thriller” that had very little action (and very little of Goldsmith’s music). The People Next Door was another matter altogether: a surprisingly good, finely honed story about the conflicts between middle-aged suburban parents Arthur and Gerrie Mason (Lloyd Bridges and Kim Hunter) and their teenage children Artie (Peter Galman) and Maxie (Deborah Winters). There were a lot of these kinds of stories being made in the late 1960’s, but this one is unusual for the moral complexity director David Greene and writer J. P. Miller brought to it. The crisis begins when Arthur and Gerrie invite their “people next door” neighbors David and Tina Hoffman (Fritz Weaver and Phyllis Newman) to dinner, only Artie refuses to leave his room to join the dinner party because, as he bluntly tells his father, he can’t stand the Hoffmans. Gerrie finds a hand-rolled marijuana cigarette in the closet and immediately she and Arthur both assume it’s Artie’s. Artie says drugs are “not my scene anymore” (indicating that he, like me, tried them briefly and decided they didn’t work for him; my two teenage attempts to smoke pot both left me violently nauseous, and I assume that’s a physiological reaction on my part because to this day being around other people smoking marijuana makes me queasy). Instead he’s going to stay in his bedroom practicing his guitar, though eventually he comes down for dinner because he’s hungry.

During the party the Masons hear whimpers from Maxie’s room, and Artie immediately realizes that Maxie is in the middle of a bad LSD trip and starts trying to talk her down from it. Unfortunately, Artie and his dad get into a huge argument that results in Arthur literally throwing his son out of his house and telling him never to come back. Their fight is over Arthur’s assumption that his son turned his daughter on to drugs, which he didn’t. Symbolically, Arthur’s and Artie’s confrontation leads to Arthur breaking the neck of his son’s guitar, which Artie leaves behind, though we later see him rehearsing with his folk-rock ensemble even though he doesn’t have a guitar anymore and therefore can only sing. Gerrie gives Maxie two sleeping pills in hopes that will get her to calm down and get some sleep, but she rather nervously awakes in the early morning hours. In the next few days, Arthur and Gerrie have a series of confrontations with their daughter in which she tells them they’re both hypocrites and idiots. Among other things, Maxie tells her parents that her bad trip wasn’t the first time she’d dropped acid, and also that she’s been sexually active with at least two male partners even though she’s only 16. She points out that Arthur and Gerrie had sex with each other before they were married – something she knows because once she had a sleepover with a female friend whose father was a doctor, and she brought along a stethoscope so they could eavesdrop on Maxie’s parents’ bedroom conversations. She also accuses Arthur of having sexual affairs with other women on nights he’s supposedly working late. This has a galvanic effect on Gerrie, who’d long suspected her husband of extra-relational activity but to have it confirmed so bluntly, and by their own daughter no less, turns her attitude towards her husband around so dramatically she isn’t sure she still wants to sleep with him.

At Gerrie’s insistence, Arthur reluctantly agrees to take Maxie to a therapist, Dr. Margolin (a young Robert Duvall, three years before his role as the consigliere in The Godfather made him a star), for both family and group sessions, but Maxie’s continued hostility both to her parents and the entire idea of group therapy ensures that the sessions aren’t beneficial. At one point, Maxie runs off to the East Village in New York City and, with Artie’s reluctant help, they find her in a squalid apartment in bed with her boyfriend. Later, in a quite startling sequence even today, Maxie secretly takes a dose of the LSD-like chemical STP (an acronym for “Serenity, Tranquility, and Peace” even though the drug offers none of those things) and dashes out of the Mason home totally naked. (I’m not sure whether Deborah Winters was wearing a body stocking or was actually nude, but despite – or maybe because of – David Greene and the uncredited cinematographer’s careful choices of camera angles, the scene still shocks today, I can’t help but wonder what 1968 TV audiences thought of it.) This time she ends up in a mental institution run by Dr. Salazar (Nehemiah Persoff), who offers a grim prognosis for Maxie. Since Arthur and Gerrie don’t have the $25,000 to $40,000 (in 1968 dollars; $232,000 to $371,000 today) to pay for a high-end rehab program for their daughter, they’re stuck with leaving her in the public hospital indefinitely. Dr. Salazar bluntly tells them she might have to be institutionalized for the rest of her life. Meanwhile, David and Tina Hoffman discover that their model son Sandy (Don Scardino), who’s planning to attend law school after he finishes high school and college, is [spoiler alert!] a drug dealer. He conceals his inventory in the trunk of his red Sunbeam sports car, which he keeps in his parents’ garage and reacts angrily when his mom wants to borrow the keys. David is so upset by this revelation he literally calls the police and turns his son in, but Sandy is convinced that the charges won’t stick. They don’t; a judge dismisses the case based on illegally seized evidence, and the police drive Sandy back to his home. Having realized that it was Sandy who provided Maxie with drugs, the moment he gets out of the cop car Arthur attacks him physically, and Frank immediately tells the police to arrest Arthur for assault. The End.

The People Next Door is an absolutely gripping tale that held my interest start-to-finish, and one of the things I liked about it was it didn’t moralize. Most of the teenager-on-drugs tales that made it onto television in 1968 were blatantly propagandistic just-say-no stories. This one wasn’t; we get a good idea of both why the parents are so shocked that their daughter turned to drugs and why she did. Also, though he doesn’t stress it, J. P. Miller’s script quietly makes the point that the parents are just as dependent on various mind-altering substances as their kids. Not only do the elder Masons and Hoffmans drink themselves into alcoholic stupors and smoke incessantly (when Maxie asks her dad for a hit on his cigarette, even though it’s only tobacco, Gerrie is shocked and tells her, “I didn’t know you smoked”), but David admits that the reason his wife Tina has such trouble sleeping is she’s taking amphetamines to lose weight, and they keep her awake so late she needs either alcohol, sleeping pills, or both to get any rest. One of the most interesting aspects of The People Next Door is that Artie, the one truly sympathetic character – the one who tries hardest to be the voice of reason amidst all the insanity going on around him – is also the one that gets treated the worst. At one point after she’s institutionalized, Maxie insists that Artie be allowed to visit her because she needs someone of her own generation whom she knows she can trust. Peter Galman’s performance as Artie is quiet but intense, like the character. As for Maxie, Deborah Winters delivers a portrayal that convinces us her life is literally on the edge, and the two sequences in which she enacts bad trips are heart-rending and decidedly authentic-looking. (I’ve never known anyone who, at least to my knowledge, has taken LSD or STP, but I’ve known enough meth heads to know what a bad trip on that substance looks like – and Miller’s script attributes Maxie’s bad LSD trip to her dose having been laced with “speed.”) The People Next Door also is quite daring for its open ending; unlike the modern-day Lifetime movies that are the descendants of the made-for-TV films of this era, it doesn’t neatly wrap up all the issues in its standard running time. Instead it leaves us grieving for all the characters, their fates, and in particular the messes they’ve made of their own and each others’ lives by keeping secrets and telling each other lies.

The People Next Door was remade as a feature film in 1970, just two years after this version aired, and it carried over David Greene as director (though he was so disgusted by studio interference he tried to have his name taken off the feature version) and J. P. Miller as writer. Fortunately, Deborah Winters as Maxie remained from the original cast, as did Don Scardino as Sandy and Nehemiah Persoff as Dr. Salazar. But all the other actors were different: Eli Wallach and Julie Harris as the Mason parents, Stephen McHattie (who would later star in a TV-movie biopic of James Dean) as Artie, and Hal Holbrook and Cloris Leachman as the elder Hoffmans. Also pop-jazz arranger Don Sebesky replaced Jerry Goldsmith as composer, though the original 1968 TV version had given Goldsmith major opportunities that he didn’t get from the rather dreary Pursuit four years later. In particular, Goldsmith got to write music in different styles for the characters, with Greene using Woody Allen’s trick from a few years later of illustrating the gaps between the characters by their tastes in music. The People Next Door opens with ragtime piano being played on the Masons’ family instrument, then segues to Artie’s quiet acoustic-guitar picking. Even before we’ve heard a word of dialogue, this illustrates the “generation gap” that drives the story. There’s even a sequence in which the Masons and the Hoffmans try to show they’re “with it” by playing a Beatles song in ragtime style – but the song is “She Loves You,” while we’ve seen posters of the Beatles from the Sgt. Pepper’s era in the kids’ bedrooms that show that Artie and Maxie have moved on from what John Lennon contemptuously described in retrospect as the “she loves you, you love her, we all love each other” banality of the Beatles’ early music.

Pursuit (ABC Circle Films, ABC, 1972)

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

Last night (Tuesday, July 8) my husband Charles and I watched yet another movie I’d ordered online from Amazon.com because I was assigned to do a Fanfare review of its soundtrack CD. The film was called Pursuit, and it was a 1972 made-for-TV movie notable mainly as the directorial debut of author Michael Crichton. It was based on a novel called Binary which Crichton had just published under the pseudonym “John Lange.” Crichton had started writing under the “John Lange” name because he was still in medical school and hoped to make some side money for his education, but he didn’t want to use his real name because he was worried that writing what amounted to pulp fiction would affect his credibility as a doctor. But it seems odd that he was still using the “Lange” name in 1972, three years after the blockbuster success of The Andromeda Strain (the first book he published under his real name) had definitively propelled him out of medicine and into writing as a full-fledged career. It also seems odd that Intrada Records would release a soundtrack album of three films featuring Jerry Goldsmith as composer – this one, The People Next Door (about a suburban couple whose daughter becomes a drug addict), and Crawlspace (described on imdb.com as “A childless middle-age couple adopt a troubled youth they find living in their crawlspace and attempt to get him to rejoin society with tragic results”) – when all Goldsmith did for Pursuit was write a few generic “suspense” cues.

Indeed, the first 10 minutes of Pursuit – showing a group of terrorists ambushing a U.S. military truck and stealing two big canisters of gas – are totally unscored, and certainly could have benefited from music. What’s more, Goldsmith took this decidedly low-end assignment just two years after his iconic score for the big-budget biopic Patton established his reputation as a “name” composer for Hollywood’s “A”-list. Pursuit is a decidedly dull tale of a group of government agents, led by Steven Graves (Ben Gazzara), on the trail of a terrorist band led by a crazy Right-wing politician named James Wright (E. G. Marshall). Wright leads a group called the “American Renewal Party,” or something like that, and we first see him giving a televised speech before the logo of his group (which he’s standing so closely in front of we can’t make out all of it) denouncing both the Democratic and Republican parties as corrupt pawns of a heinous political establishment whose members are interested only in feathering its own nests at the expense of the rest of us. I suspect Crichton in 1972 (the script was actually written by Robert Dozier based on Crichton’s novel) loosely based this character on George Wallace, but today he seems like a prototype of Donald Trump. Graves has an uneasy relationship with his immediate supervisor, Robert Phillips (William Windom), who puts limits on his efforts to go after the bad guys because of the pesky due-process requirements of the U.S. Constitution. Graves and his colleagues are stalking the baddies, including Wright and his field commander Timothy Drew (Martin Sheen when he was still young and relatively sexy), through the streets of San Diego in 1972.

All this is happening during a major-party political convention represented by stock shots of a real one – Crichton and Dozier try to avoid specifying which one, but the floor signs for Ronald Reagan give it away – and Wright’s plan seems to involve some sort of attack on the convention. But it takes the good guys a while to figure out just what the weapon is and when and how the attack will take place. One aspect that marks this film as being ahead of its time is how the bad guys acquired the information on which they based their plot: though the Internet was still in its infancy in 1972, the baddies had enough experienced computer hackers to sneak their way into the government’s databases and extract top-secret files. The title of Crichton’s original novel, Binary, refers not to computer code but to the terrorists’ ultimate weapon: “Binary-75” and “Binary-76,” two gases that are each harmless on their own but, when combined, they form a toxic substance that kills within minutes. The good guys watch a captured video from Czechoslovakia showing a prisoner being executed with the substance, and this gives both them and us the necessary information on how dangerous it is. Graves tries to call the White House to get the current President to cancel his plan to travel to San Diego to speak to the convention, but whoever he’s talking to refuses to disrupt the President’s plans. Amazingly, there are no women in this movie except for two bikini-clad babes we briefly get to see as some of the good males train their binoculars on the pool of the resort where Wright and Drew are staying.

In the closest the film gets to generating any real excitement, Graves has himself lowered on a rope to break into the room where the gases are being held. To protect himself against the gases’ combined effects, he’s been outfitted with a pre-inserted needle he’s instructed to inject himself with at the key moment just before he’s exposed. Crichton and Dozier make the rookie mistake of putting their big climax into effect – the successful dismantling of the bomb that was supposed to release the two gases together – with 15 minutes of the film’s 75-minute running time still to go, with the remaining open question of finding the gang’s back-up plan. It involved coating the black canister (they’re color-coded, one yellow and one black) with paint made of plastic explosive and setting it to blow up after they’ve turned off the building’s elevators so the good guys can’t evacuate the yellow canister. The idea is the black canister will blow up, taking the yellow canister with it, and release the toxic gas so one million people will die and Wright will achieve his desired “reset” of American politics and governance. Ultimately Graves realizes what’s going on – with the help of a bomb-sniffing device and the technician who operates it, even though he left it in his car and has to run back for it and arrives with just a minute left to spare – and he tosses it out the hotel-room window after yelling out a barely audible warning to the passers-by below to get out of its way. The black-canister bomb duly explodes in mid-air without blowing up the yellow one, humanity is saved and the good guys can go back to whatever it was they were doing before that.

Pursuit was fun for Charles and I to watch because of the glimpses it gave us of the San Diego skyline – particularly downtown and the waterfront – eight years before I moved here and well before Charles lived here as well. Obviously this was made when the 1972 Republican Convention was still scheduled for San Diego, though because of a political scandal it was later moved to Miami where the 1968 Republican Convention had also taken place. Aside from that, though, it was deadly dull, a cardinal sin in a movie that at least genre-wise was supposed to be a thriller. Crichton’s imdb.com page lists seven other directorial credits for him, six for feature films – including his very next one, Westworld (1973), which eventually spawned an extended cable-TV series and became an iconic success after Crichton’s death in 2008. His other movies as director, mostly based on his novels or screen originals, were Coma (1978), The Great Train Robbery (1978), Looker (1981), Runaway (1984), Physical Evidence (1989) – the only film Crichton directed which he didn’t write as well – and a video-game version of his time-travel novel Timeline (2000).

The Patriot (Columbia Pictures, Centropolis Entertainment, Mutual Film Company, Global Entertainment Productions GmbH & Company Medien KG, H2L Media Group, 2000)

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

Last night (Sunday, July 6) my husband Charles and I watched the 2000 movie The Patriot, a tale of the American Revolution produced by Dean Devlin, directed by Roland Emmerich, written by Robert Rodat, and starring Mel Gibson as South Carolina farmer Benjamin Martin. Benjamin is a farmer and a single father of seven children (Rodat’s original script said they were only six, but when Gibson was cast he insisted Rodat give him an extra child to match the seven kids Gibson had in real life; he’s since had two more). The film begins in 1776, after the Revolution has already started but while the Continental Congress is still debating whether or not to declare formal independence from Great Britain. In 1775 the Congress had sent to London the so-called “Olive Branch” petition, which proposed an arrangement similar to what later became the British Commonwealth of Nations: America would become functionally independent but still recognize the British Crown as sovereign. Alas, King George III or (more likely) his supporters in Parliament rejected the petition without any serious consideration, setting up the Revolutionary War. When the film begins Benjamin has been summoned to a meeting in Charles Town, South Carolina, the colony’s capital (it was not given its current name, Charleston, until 1783), to debate whether or not to support the declaration of independence, as eight of the 13 colonies have already done. Benjamin is as upset as anybody about the heavy taxes the British Crown is levying against them, but he’s against declaring independence. As he puts it – in a line screenwriter Rodat cribbed from a real-life Loyalist, Rev. Mather Byles of Boston – “Why should I trade one tyrant three thousand miles away for three thousand tyrants one mile away?”

Benjamin’s sympathies do an abrupt about-face when one of his children, Thomas (Gregory Smith), is killed by British soldiers rampaging through the area. He watches a battle in which the official forces of the Continental Army are massacred en masse by the British Redcoats after both sides confront each other by standing up and marching towards each other. Benjamin pronounces the Continental commander stupid and decides to join the war, not as part of the regular Continental Army but as leader of a band of guerrilla fighters (today they’d be called “unlawful combatants”), whom he recruits partly from churches and partly from bars. He asks the field officers of the Continental Army to assign him his eldest son, Gabriel (Heath Ledger, in the role that made him a star and launched his meteoric eight-year career before his tragic death from a prescription drug overdose in 2008), as his second-in-command. Benjamin’s irregulars fight a number of battles in which they seem to come out of nowhere and pick off the British soldiers at random, and they’re so effective at this that the British officers nickname Benjamin “The Ghost.” Unfortunately, in one battle in which they’re fighting side by side, Gabriel is mortally wounded just after his wife Anne Howard (Lisa Brenner) is incinerated in a church set on fire by the film’s principal villain, sadistic British Col. William Tavington (Jason Isaacs, cast after the original choice, Kevin Spacey, turned down the role because Mel Gibson was already being paid $25 million and that didn’t leave enough in the budget for him) after he locked and chained all the doors so the colonists couldn’t get away. The film proceeds to the final battle, modeled after the real life Battle of Cowpens in South Carolina on January 17, 1781. Benjamin finally fulfills his promise to kill Col. Tavington by his own hand, and the revolutionaries score a major victory that sets up the final end of the war at Yorktown, Virginia nine months later.

Other characters in the mix include Rev. Oliver (René Auberjonois, for once not playing a screaming queen), the minister who married Gabriel and Anne and pastored the church Tavington burned down; and the rather supercilious French officer Jean Villenueve (Tchéky Karyo, who was born in Turkey but raised in Paris), who bears the brunt of the criticism of Benjamin and his men that the French aren’t doing enough to help their nominal U.S. allies. Their relations are complicated by the fact that Benjamin had previously fought in the French and Indian War of 1754-1763 and had led a campaign in the Wilderness. That had given him a reputation as a war hero, even though what he’d actually done (as he confesses midway through the movie) was commit a series of war crimes including massacring a group of French-Canadian civilians en masse. I had ordered a three-hour “extended version” of The Patriot on Blu-Ray (the standard theatrical version was 2 hours 45 minutes) and I generally liked the film a lot better than Charles did. Charles thought that Mel Gibson, who was born January 3, 1956 in Peekskill, New York and therefore was 44 when he made this movie, was too long in the tooth to play an action hero. Ironically, the role was originally offered to Harrison Ford, who was even older (born July 13, 1942), but he turned it down because he felt Rodat’s script had reduced the American Revolution to a one-man revenge struggle. And that’s a particularly strange complaint given how long John Wayne played action heroes almost until he croaked!

One of the things I liked most about The Patriot is the way it depicts the American Revolution as a turning point in world history, but not necessarily in the ways you’d expect, or the ways American history proclaims it. Col. Tavington – who as a character reminded me quite a lot of President Trump’s nastiest policy advisor, Stephen Miller, architect of Trump’s deliberately cruel jihad against immigrants – is constantly at odds with his immediate superior, Gen. Charles Cornwallis (Tom Wilkinson), because Cornwallis insists that there are gentlemanly rules that should govern even as inherently inhumane an enterprise as war, while Tavington has the more modern attitude that a military should do anything to win, including targeting innocent civilians and destroying their houses and farms. There’s a great scene of Cornwallis hosting an outdoor party that reminded me of James Agee’s description of a similar scene involving the French on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt in Laurence Olivier’s film of Shakespeare’s Henry V (1944): “Olivier transforms the French into sleepy, overconfident, highly intelligent, highly sophisticated noblemen, subtly disunified, casually contemptuous of their Dauphin – an all but definitive embodiment of a civilization a little too ripe to survive.” The final confrontation between Cornwallis and Tavington takes place when Cornwallis orders Tavington to find and kill “The Ghost,” and Tavington replies that this will mean using tactics that will not be “gentlemanly” – which prefaces his burning of the church and everyone inside it once he extracts the information of where Benjamin is hiding.

One of the things I didn’t like so much about The Patriot is that Rodat, like a screenwriter in Hollywood’s classic era, fills his script with so many “plants,” so many coincidences (like the framing of Benjamin’s character arc with the loss of Thomas in the beginning and Gabriel in the end), and a horrendous “comic relief” sub-subplot I could have lived without. Anne is at first reluctant to date Gabriel because of a prank he pulled on her when she was just 11 – he spiked her tea with ink, which she said blackened her teeth for a month (which seems hard to believe given what they used for ink in the period), and after they’re married she gets back at him by spiking his tea with ink, then gets her own teeth blackened from him kissing her. One of the best things about The Patriot is it shows just how home-grown a war the American Revolution was. Not only was it a low-tech war (one of Rodat’s weird bits of symbolism was to have Benjamin take his late son Thomas’s toy soldiers and melt down each one in turn to form pellets to shoot in his musket, recalling an article I read once about how modern-day defenders of the Second Amendment ignore the fact that when the Second Amendment was written, guns were things that basically shot marbles), it was an oddly down-to-earth one. When we first see the rival British and American armies standing straight as they charge each other, our first thought was, “Why aren’t they going to ground?” Then I realized it was because they didn’t think they had to: the guns of the day were so low-tech they had to be laboriously reloaded after each shot (Emmerich fortunately avoided the error I’ve seen in other films about 16th and 17th century wars in which the filmmakers had people fire multiple shots from their guns in quick succession, something the firearms of the period couldn’t do), and so the armies had to hold their fire and shoot at each other in synchronized barrages as ordered by their commanders. It was only in the 19th century, as gun technology improved and it became possible to fire sustained barrages from a single gun, that armies started going to ground and ultimately digging trenches (an innovation of Ulysses S. Grant in the American Civil War that got copied and helped lead to the insane carnage of World War I).

I also liked the way slavery was treated in Rodat’s script. He had Benjamin make clear that the Blacks who work on his farm are free laborers, not slaves, and when Benjamin takes in the slave Occam (Jay Arlen Jones) after his master has abandoned him and fled, he enlists him in his militia. Occam agrees to join, despite the opposition of a racist in the militia who can’t believe that Benjamin is willing to give a Black man a gun, largely on the basis of a promise made by George Washington that any slave who joined the Continental Army and fought for a year would be given his freedom and a bonus payment. (Actually, as an imdb.com “Goofs” poster pointed out, that promise only applied to people who joined the regular Continental Army, not an informal guerrilla group like Benjamin’s.) Occam’s discontent with the final outcome of the war, and particularly his well-founded fear that the promised “freedom” won’t be delivered to people who look like him, subtly and cunningly evokes the still unfinished (and, under the current regime, actively reversed) task of making people of color truly equal Americans. Overall, The Patriot is quite a good movie and a well-done homage to the American Revolution, which has been the subject of all too few movies – especially by contrast to the number that have been made about the Civil War, including two of the all-time blockbuster hits, The Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind.

This Side of the Law (Warner Bros., filmed 1948, released 1950)

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

Last night (Saturday, July 5) my husband Charles and I ended up watching a film on Turner Classic Movies as part of Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” series. It was a real oddity from 1950, a Warner Bros. production called This Side of the Law starring Vivica Lindfors, a Swedish actress they’d imported in hopes that after Greta Garbo and Ingrid Bergman, lightning would strike three times and they’d be able to develop a Swedish actress into a major star. They made her Errol Flynn’s co-star in an elaborate 1948 swashbuckler called The Adventures of Don Juan and put her in a leaden melodrama called Night Unto Night, directed by Don Siegel (who married her; it was his first marriage but her third) and co-starring Ronald Reagan (totally out of his depth) in a drama about amnesia based on a story by Philip Wylie. That one was filmed in 1947 but not released until 1949. This Side of the Law had another long delay, filmed in 1948 but not released until 1950. It occurred to me when I read the imdb.com synopsis – “A drifter is bailed out of jail by a lawyer, who hires him to impersonate a millionaire until the man can be declared legally dead and the estate settled. However, the man soon finds out that things are not exactly how they seem” – that This Side of the Law is the movie Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour would have been if Ulmer and his writer, Martin Goldsmith, had taken up the hint they dropped briefly and then abandoned of having their down-and-out hero pass himself off as the long-missing heir to a major fortune.

Directed by Richard Bare from a story by veteran pulp writer Richard Sale and a script by Russell L. Hughes, it begins with David Cummins (Kent Smith of Cat People, The Curse of the Cat People, and The Fountainhead fame) lamenting that he’s been thrown down an old well at the Sans Souci (he makes sure to reflect on the irony of the place literally being named “Without Care”) and literally can’t climb out again because the inside walls are so slimy. He then delivers a flashback on how he got there: he was on the street, casually eyeing a gun in a store window, when a cop came by and arrested him for vagrancy. He’s taken to night court, where an unscrupulous attorney named Philip Cagle (Robert Douglas) pays his $50 fine and spares him the 30-day jail sentence that would otherwise have been his fate. Cagle has a job for him: to go to Sans Souci and impersonate the long-lost heir, Malcolm Taylor, who’s been missing for six years and 10 months. The time frame is important because if Malcolm doesn’t turn up after having been missing for seven years, his relatives – wife Evelyn (Vivica Lindfors), brother Calder (John Alvin) and sister-in-law Nadine (Janis Paige, mostly known for comedies and musicals but in a considerably darker role than her norm) – can have him declared legally dead and help themselves to his $3 million inheritance. Cummins is able to bid up the price from $500 to $5,000 but agrees to go through with the job. He already strikingly resembles Malcolm Taylor, and Cagle gives him two weeks’ worth of briefings on the history of the man as whom he’s going to pass himself off. Cagle finishes David’s indoctrination with the warning that his brother Calder can’t stand him, and Malcolm’s old dog Angel will only recognize him if he wears clothes Malcolm wore that still have his scent on them. (It’s hard to believe enough of the aroma would linger after seven years, but that’s at best a minor inconsistency in a hastily assembled plot that’s full of them.)

When he arrives at Sans Souci he finds not only that Calder doesn’t like him, his wife Evelyn can’t stand him either, mainly because he’d had a number of extra-relational activities and his latest affair with Calder’s wife Nadine was the final straw. Nadine is the first one to “out” him after noticing that David’s wrists are not scarred – the real Malcolm got permanent scars from a childhood fight with Calder – though she agrees to keep quiet about it for a share of the $3 million. Then David overhears Nadine call Cagle and realizes that the two are involved in a plot together. Cagle, angry at what he considers Nadine’s double-cross, lures her to a secluded spot on the estate overlooking a cliff, kills her, and pushes her body off the cliff. The police rule Nadine’s death an accident, and David is ready to walk out of the whole business and leave Sans Souci, but Cagle offers him a ride to town and then knocks him out and throws his unconscious body into the well. While he’s down there he sees a skeleton with the identification bracelet of Malcolm Taylor, so he realizes the real Malcolm was murdered. Unable to get a grip on the side walls of the well because they’re covered in slime, David works out a way to escape by climbing out horizontally and edging his way up. He gets out in time to save Evelyn from being murdered by Calder, who was going to throw her off the cliff. Cagle grabs a gun and tries to shoot David, but Evelyn sneaks up behind him while David is able to turn the lights out, so Cagle’s shots miss him. Cagle tries to flee, but Angel (the dog ex machina) attacks him and he falls to his presumed death down the well. With Calder arrested and Cagle dead, Evelyn is the legal heir, and she ends up not only with the fortune but also David, whom she’s decided she loves after all and refuses to press charges against.

Even Eddie Muller admitted that This Side of the Law – based on a Richard Sale story called The Doctor Deals in Death, though Hughes rewrote it so extensively that no doctor appears among the dramatis personae – isn’t a particularly good movie. What makes it interesting is that, though there’s nothing supernatural about it, Richard Bare and Russell S. Hughes give it the iconography of a horror film. There’s a portrait on the wall, presumably of a Taylor ancestor, that is strikingly reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe, which had me thinking that for sheer family dysfunctionality, the Taylors rival Poe’s Ushers and J. B. Priestley’s and James Whale’s Femms. They live in an old dark house perched on the side of a cliff overlooking a seashore (as most of Roger Corman’s characters would in his succession of “B” horrors for American International in the 1960’s), and cinematographer Carl E. Guthrie gives it the dark, shadowy, Gothic lighting of a horror film. Even the incomprehensibility of the plot, the sheer level of uncertainty as to who’s doing what to whom and why, makes this film seem more like a horror movie and less like film noir.

It also occurred to me that in 1949, while This Side of the Law was still in the Warner Bros. vaults, Josephine Tey published a novel called Brat Farrar, another tale of an elaborate impersonation of a long-lost heir to secure a fortune, which is everything This Side of the Law should have been but wasn’t. Tey (true name: Elizabeth Mackintosh) created genuine suspense as the impostor fools everyone in the family except his twin brother, who knows very well he can’t be the real heir because he murdered the real heir. She created a brilliant climax on the side of a cliff that succeeds in creating a genuine sense of terror, whereas the equivalent scene in This Side of the Law is just perfunctory and dull. Tey even explained why the impostor and the dead brother looked so much alike – it turns out he was actually a distant cousin from a branch of the family that had moved to the U.S. – whereas Sale, Hughes, and Bare just couldn’t be bothered and we were supposed to chalk up the resemblance as just another coincidence. Indeed, though Brat Farrar has been filmed for TV at least twice (once in the 1980’s and once more recently), I wish Alfred Hitchcock had made it in 1950 with the perfect actor, Cary Grant, for the lead(s). That would have been a film to conjure with!