The Most Hated Family in America (BBC, 2007)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the Bill Moyers’ Journal I ran the film Charles had downloaded immediately after it, the 2007 BBC documentary The Most Hated Family in America, directed by Geoffrey O’Connor with Louis Theroux doing an on-camera commentary in a sort of bemused British version of Michael Moore, about the Westboro Baptist Church of the Reverend Fred Phelps, Jr. and his bizarre activities picketing funerals, Jewish synagogues (“Jew churches,” his minions call them with a sneer before saying that the reason they’re targeting the Jews is “they killed Christ” — to which one slumps in one’s chair and thinks, “Oh, no, not that again”), Swedish establishments (apparently someone in Sweden denounced Rev. Phelps and as a result he put the entire country under his interdict — O’Connor and Theroux politely don’t mention that Phelps announced that the 2004 tsunami that wiped out much of Thailand’s tourist industry was God’s revenge against … Sweden, supposedly because many Swedes go to Thailand as sex tourists), the U.S. military and just about anyone who runs afoul of his curiously skewed interpretation of the Bible.

Rev. Phelps is right about one thing — the Bible clearly and unmistakably calls for the death penalty for [male] homosexuals — despite the attempts of Gay and pro-Gay Christians and Jews to explain that away by giving it some sort of “context” that denies the plain and bloodthirsty language of Leviticus 20:13: “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.” (That’s why it remains a deep-seated mystery to me why any self-respecting Queer can still believe in Christianity, Judaism or Islam.) Where Phelps goes wrong, even by the standards of the radical religious Right (which is why even the late Jerry Falwell denounced him as a dangerous nut), is his broad-brush application of the term “fag” to just about everybody: not just men who lie with men and women who lie with women but men who lie with women they’re not legally married to and/or for purposes other than procreation (when Louis Theroux for some reason admitted to the Phelpses that he was living with a female partner and had had a child with her without benefit of clergy, that was it: they totally discounted everything he had to say about anything after that, and in an “interview” for which Phelps had allocated all of five minutes Phelps called him one of the stupidest men he’d ever met and a few other even less kind things.

What I hadn’t realized about the Phelpses before I saw this — I was aware that virtually all the members of Phelps’ congregation are Phelpses, either by blood or by marriage — mostly by blood; his daughters married and had kids but his granddaughters don’t seem all that interested in doing so, largely because (like the earliest Christians) they believe the End Times are going to come in their lifetimes and therefore perpetuating the human species is a non-issue for them — but what I hadn’t known is how anti-American, in the literal sense, they are. Along with “God Hates Fags” (which, as I mentioned above, is a word they define even more broadly, if such a thing is possible, than the John Birch Society defined “Communist”) and the celebrity dishonor roll (that includes people like Elizabeth Taylor and Princess Diana — and since Theroux is British the inclusion of Di as someone whose death “split Hell wide open,” to use a metaphor of which the Phelpses are unduly fond, seemed to strike him personally), they also carry signs reading, “Thank God for 9/11” and “Thank God for IED’s,” and the reason they target the funerals of U.S. servicemembers who were killed in Iraq is that they believe President Bush was trapped into starting that war by Satan and he’s only serving the devil’s purposes — as are the people actually doing the fighting.

What’s fascinating about the Phelpsians is their utter contempt for the rest of the world, their absolute (self-)righteousness and conviction that they and they alone are going to heaven while the rest of us are bound for hell, and — which seems to set them apart from most of the Christian Right — their absolute, unconcealed delight in that prospect. Louis Theroux noticed one of the Phelps granddaughters giggling when she said that the servicemember whose funeral they were picketing would wind up in hell, and their joy at pronouncing damnation on everyone else isn’t tempered by the least bit of sorrow for their unconverted souls. At the end one of the Phelpses (they tend to blend together after a while, partly because most of them are female — out of the members we see, only Fred Phelps himself and Steve Drain, who came to the Phelps church as a Queer-friendly Libertarian to do a documentary film on them and ended up converted, becoming one of the few people in Phelps’s operation who is not a blood Phelps, are male — not even the people who married into the clan seem to be in evidence in this movie — and one suspects the only reason the Phelpses put up with Theroux’ openly mocking attitude for as long as they did was they were hoping lightning would strike twice and they would convert him) is calling what they’re doing a “courtesy” — that they’re informing people that the wrath of God’s judgments are going to send them all to hell, there’s nothing they can do to stop this (unlike most religions — even most cults — they don’t offer the poor benighted souls in the outside world much of a chance for redemption).

The other thing that amazed me about the Phelpses is that they’re a perfect example of both ends meeting in the middle on the opposite sides of the circle; after all, it’s become accepted dogma on the Left that Bush was hoodwinked into starting the Iraq war by Dick Cheney and the devotees of the Project for a New American Century, who got him to abandon the kinder, gentler, reluctantly interventionist (if not downright noninterventionist!) foreign policy he’d promised during the 2000 Presidential campaign and instead to seize on 9/11 as a pretext for pre-emptive war, torture, indefinite detention of citizens and aliens alike, and an overall “our way or the highway” attitude towards the rest of the world, coupled with the U.S. maintaining a military budget larger than that of every other country in the world combined to make sure that no country or combination of countries could ever threaten the U.S. on the battlefield again. For all the looniness of their readings of Scripture (when I told Charles that I thought the one thing Phelps got right was the clear, unmistakable condemnation and death sentence for homosexuality in the Bible, he said, “The Bible also says, ‘God is love’” — to which I can only reply, “Yeah, but the Bible sure puts a lot of asterisks on that one”), the Phelpses sound an awful lot like my friends on the Left when they’re condemning America’s foreign policy and predicting its downfall as a nation, even if we tend to believe the downfall will come from secular rather than supernatural causes — particularly the unsustainability of our current course both economically (the current issue of the Atlantic has an article I’ll probably want to read because it’s about China, America’s biggest creditor, and the conditions they’re going to start setting on us in return for funding all the bailouts by continuing to buy U.S. Treasury bills) and environmentally (both in terms of the exhaustion of resources in general and fossil fuels in particular, and also the potential secular/scientific apocalypse of global warming).

Not only did I find myself feeling oddly sorry for the Phelpsians (and fearing that the laws being passed to keep them away from military funerals will be used to hamstring anti-war protests as well!), I also found them uncomfortably close to me in terms of our very different but equally strongly held beliefs that humanity is at a crossroads and our current ways of living and managing the earth are not sustainable.

Intimate Stranger (Lifetime, 2006)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

This morning I ran a surprisingly good Lifetime TV-movie I’d recorded over the weekend: Intimate Stranger, a 2006 production whose synopsis in TV Guide (“A single mom falls in love with a younger man”), I was expecting one of those stories in which a middle-aged woman falls in love with a hot young hunk and the dramatic issues are either her own concerns about how long she can hold him or her friends’ disapproval of the age gap in the relationship. Instead it was a tale about the boyfriend from heaven who turns out to be the boyfriend from hell: Karen Reese (Kari Matchett) is a successful investment banker at a firm in Kansas City, Kansas who divorced her husband John (Corey Livingstone) because she found him too controlling — and who has that problem with a number of men she’s dated since, including Randy (unseen in the film), whom she dumped after three dates, but whom she suspects of stalking her.

Into her life comes fellow investment banker Denis Teague (Peter Outerbridge) — perhaps because much of this movie was shot in Canada, the imdb.com entry on it spells his first name in the British style — who sweeps her off her feet and ends up in bed with her (giving us an excuse for a quite good Lifetime-trademark soft-core porn scene) — and, perhaps more importantly, winning over her family and especially her young son Justin (Matthew Knight). What makes this above-average for Lifetime is the substantial script construction by Michael Vickerman and the accomplished direction by Bert Kish, who shows himself equally adept at romance and suspense. Early on Vickerman’s script drops a hint at Denis’s real agenda when he lets slip to Karen, “I’ve studied you and everything you like,” but she doesn’t pick up on the hint and it goes by.

It turns out Denis figured out a way to get into the attic of Karen’s house and used it to spy on her well before they ever formally met, so that when he appeared in her life he knew everything about her and everything he’d need to appear to be for her to see him as her perfect man. When she tells him he’s going too fast and needs to back off, he turns on her and starts sending her unwelcome gifts and doing hang-up phone calls on her, to panic her into thinking that her last boyfriend is stalking her and thereby make her more dependent on him — and in a florid but exciting finish he kidnaps and threatens to kill her, they drive out to a deserted country road, she deliberately crashes the car (had she seen Dangerous?) and wrests back from him the (unlicensed) gun he stole from her earlier and is about to shoot him when the police, alerted by a 911 call from her son, come to the scene and threaten to shoot her unless she puts the gun down and allows them to take him alive — which she does.

There are well-done complexities and bits of symbolism in the script — Denis is a lifelong butterfly collector (the sort of person who kills them, mounts them between panes of glass and displays them that way), and though he presents that as an innocent childhood hobby that’s become lifelong, it grosses out Justin when he takes him on a butterfly-hunting trip and eventually it becomes a metaphor for his character much the way it did in Madama Butterfly (in which Cio-Cio-San briefly suspects Pinkerton of being after her for his collection the way Americans catch real butterflies, stick them with pins, kill and display them). Denis’s butterfly-collecting hobby also establishes that he knows how to use chloroform, with which he sneaks into Karen’s bedroom in order to drug her so she’ll get sick and screw up her ability to function at work; he also tries a few other crazy-making techniques on her, including Second Woman-like plot complications in which Karen’s ex-husband John complains that he never got an invitation to Justin’s birthday party (Karen gave the invitations to Denis to mail) and an important report for work she was working on at home disappears just as she’s finished it and is about to turn it in. (Didn’t she have it backed up on her computer? She doesn’t even seem to have a computer, a major anachronism in a film about an urban professional made in 2006.)

There are a few wince-inducing lines and bits of plot construction, but overall Intimate Stranger (a marvelous title) is an exciting, emotionally stimulating and moving film about an obsessive love (Vickerman keeps the reasons for Denis’s obsession powerfully ambiguous instead of throwing in some movie-cliché “explanation” of them) turned into destructive mania — and Peter Outerbridge as Denis isn’t drop-dead gorgeous but is rather tall, gangly, sandy-haired and balding: not unattractive (we certainly don’t ask ourselves, “What does Karen see in him?”) but not exactly Mr. Babe Magnet either. It’s also nice at the end to see Karen paired up with Alex (Jonas Chernick), her five-years-younger boss who’s been more-or-less seriously cruising her all through the movie and to whom she suddenly but understandably turns to for support after the disaster with Denis.

The Woman in Red (Warners, 1935)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s “feature” was one I hurriedly dug out of the backlog: The Woman in Red, a Warners (in “First National” drag) melodrama from 1935 directed by Robert Florey (a more interesting “name” than one usually got with these things, though only an occasional oblique angle gave away that this was something more than the typical competent Warners’ hack) starring Barbara Stanwyck as a woman named Shelby Barrett, who tours the country riding in horse shows for pay. She meets up with Gene Raymond as Johnny Wyatt, a poor relation to a wealthy and influential upstate New York family who also tours the country riding in horse shows, though he does it without being paid just for the exposure and free housing and food.

The two fall in love and thereby run afoul of Nicko Nicholas (Genevieve Tobin in one of her usual bitch roles) — yes, that’s right; not only is there a woman named “Shelby” in this film, there’s also a woman named “Nicko” — in any case, Nicko has relationships with both the lovebirds, given that she was Wyatt’s lover before Shelby came into his life and she’s also Shelby’s employer. So she fires both of them and, with Wyatt’s family unwilling to help, they’re reduced to opening a small corner of the Wyatt estate as a boarding and training stable for the Wyatt family neighbors who need some place to leave their horses when they take the months-long vacations typical of movie rich people.

To get working capital to fix up the stable and open it, Shelby — without consulting her husband — contacts another suitor, Eugene Fairchild (John Eldredge) — an ex-working class parvenu who’s trying, now that he has money, to buy his way into the circle of snobby rich people represented by the Wyatts and their class. Eugene gives her a loan of $9,000 to open the stable and he talks her into taking a cruise on his yacht, where catastrophe strikes: the only other guests are a straight couple whose female member, Olga (Dorothy Tree), falls overboard in a drunken accident and drowns. Since Olga was also a former flame of Fairchild’s — it’s hard to tell the lovers in this film without a scorecard — he’s assumed to have murdered her, and he goes on trial.

The prosecutor is a lawyer named Foxall, played by none other than Dracula’s nemesis Edward Van Sloan (billed as “Ed” for some reason). Shelby is the mysterious “woman in red” whose testimony could conceivably exonerate Fairchild, but she refuses to come forward because that will ruin her reputation and her chances for business success and personal happiness with her husband. Eventually, though Shelby breaks down (as only Barbara Stanwyck could break down!) and testifies, and though Foxall attempts to impeach her testimony by saying she’s doing it for love of Fairchild, the Wyatts pull together and decide to drop the charges and save the family’s face after Johnny (falsely) says he knew all along Fairchild was loaning money to his and his wife’s business. She walks out of the courtroom sure that she’s lost her husband, but he turns out to be in the car that pulls up for her and at the end they’re proclaiming their love a “closed corporation” (a line Charles particularly liked, as I imagined he would when I was cueing this disc).

The Woman in Red gives Stanwyck two big emotional scenes, both towards the end; otherwise her flame is at a low simmer, but she’s still the only reason to bother with this film; based on a 1932 novel called North Shore by Wallace Irwin, it’s a pretty typical Depression-era you-may-think-the-rich-have-it-better-than-you-but-they-really-don’t effort and only the sincerity of Stanwyck and Raymond in the leads makes it work.

Escort Girl (Continental Pictures, 1941)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Escort Girl turned out to be a pretty quirky movie in its own right, a film that though clearly a product of 1941 in its relative photographic clarity has the “feel” of an exploitation movie from about a decade earlier. When I first saw this listed on the Turner Classic Movies schedule I was startled that the star was Betty Compson, who had been born in 1897 and had starred in some of the earliest Warners talkies after a 12-year career in silent films, whom I therefore would be quite long in the tooth to be playing an escort girl. As it turned out, she wasn’t; she plays Ruth Ashley, the madam running the escort service in partnership with the man in her life, Gregory Stone (Wheeler Oakman), who appears to be her husband or at least her lover even though the dialogue describes them as having separate apartments.

She must have been married, or at least involved with someone else, before because she has a daughter, June (Margaret Marquis), whom she’s used the profits from the escort service to educate and keep her as far from Los Angeles as possible — only June has fallen in love with Drake Hamilton (Robert Kellard), he’s moving to L.A. to take a special job he’s been offered and June suggests that she go with him so they can live in the same city and be married. At this point I thought that the fate writers Ann and David Halperin had in store for June was that she would get to the Big Bad City, drift downhill (perhaps as the result of a transitory falling-out with Drake) and become an escort girl herself — and give her mom the shock of her life when she turned up as a staff member in mom’s agency — but instead, as luck (or the scriptorial fiat of the Halperins) would have it, the special job Drake is in town to do is to go undercover and bust the escort services — which extend to far more than just escort services: Stone also owns his own hotel and a nightclub/restaurant in it to which the “escorts” (he offers escorts of both genders, though the services they provide are strictly heterosexual) are instructed to bring their clients. When Drake and June choose Stone’s club as the scene of their first date in L.A., they’re waited on by a man with such a terrible phony French accent (and the supercilious manner to go with it) that Charles joked, “Hi, I’m your waiter and I’m going to cleep you now.”

There’s quite a lot of padding in this movie, including shots of the dance team that entertains at this establishment (according to imdb.com, the female dancer was the very young Cyd Charisse!) and a clip of a strip tease which is played on a Soundies machine and, though grainy and visibly from another cinematic world than the main part of the film, includes a performer in pasties and underwear who projects far more charisma than any of the actors in the plot portions. Eventually it groans to a conclusion when Drake calls Stone’s front man, Breeze Nolan (Guy Kingsford), to request an escort girl as his entrée into the racket he’s trying to bust, Stone sends June to Drake’s room for what she assumes are innocuous purposes, only to have him accuse her of being an escort girl and the two of them get into an argument that leads to a jealous hissy-fit that lasts for a couple of reels until June finally figures out what happened and realizes that Stone is the brains behind the escort gang.

Like a typically stupid movie protagonist, instead of going straight to the police — or to Drake — with this information, she confronts Stone directly — and Stone fires back that June’s own beloved mother is his partner in the escort gang and that’s where she got the money to pay for June’s expensive education and vacations. A better writing team than the Halperins might have done more with June’s crisis of conscience — let my mom continue her illegal racket or turn her in? — or come up with a more inventive resolution than Drake and Stone both reaching for a gun (Maurine Watkins, call your plagiarism attorney!) and accidentally shooting June’s mom in the process, allowing her to weasel out of legal responsibility by conveniently dying — while Drake ultimately pitches Stone out the window, also by accident, and he dies in the fall.

Escort Girl is a pretty silly movie, competently directed by one Edward E. Kaye (one wonders what Edgar G. Ulmer could have done with this script, given his success even with something as silly as Girls in Chains) and acted with authority by Compson and spectacular incompetence by everyone else — and it doesn’t help that the extant print is so riddled with splices much of it is almost unwatchable and Charles was joking that the producers could have got rid of anything potentially censorable simply by deleting it and pretending the frames were lost in a splice.

Two 1950’s Educational Films: “As Boys Grow … ” and “Gang Boy”

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I put in the DVD I’d recorded the night TCM showed The Road to Ruin and ran the next three items on it, a feature (well, 58 minutes anyway) from 1941 called Escort Girl and two really quirky shorts, As Boys Grow … and Gang Boy. As Boys Grow … was a bizarre educational film from a company called “Medical Arts Productions” that began with a high-school track coach (or at least an actor playing one, Joseph Miksak) working out his boys on the field and then calling them together for a series of lectures on sex, reproductive organs and the other strange glandular changes that are happening to his charges as they reach puberty -— a term he’s asked to define at several times during the film, a question he consistently ducks.

This film was clearly noble in purpose, and was surprisingly explicit for 1957 — particularly when one of the boys confesses to another that he’s had a wet dream — though the stylized diagrams that are brought on that supposedly illustrate sex organs are spectacularly inept: the one of a woman’s uterus and vagina looks like an automobile hood ornament from the period and the drawing of a penis just had me thinking how many anonymous artists working on bathroom walls have done a better job depicting one. The fact that the kids were played by the Boys’ Clubs of San Francisco probably made the whole thing seem “Gayer” than it really was!

Gang Boy was a 1954 film from Sid Davis Productions in badly faded color (so badly faded it looked like a modern-day past-is-brown depiction of the world of 1954!), allegedly inspired by a real-life truce between Los Angeles street gangs but actually filmed in Pomona, where a Latino gang and a white gang have a few tiffs that are threatening to explode into all-out gang war when a sympathetic police officer brings them together and negotiates a truce. The film was produced and photographed by Sid Davis and written, directed and edited by Arthur Swerdloff — who apparently had to move heaven and earth to keep the bits of dialogue in synch since Davis had shot it with a silent camera, though technically this is better than several Mystery Science Theatre 3000-quality features we’ve seen in this regard!

The only credited cast member is Curly Riviera as Danny, the head of the Latino gang, who also narrates the movie and describes himself as a troubled kid wronged in unspecified ways by society — Swerdloff’s script is modishly (for the period) sociological in terms of explaining why boys join gangs, but the film resolutely avoids any but the vaguest explanations of what happened to Danny (or anyone else in the film) that would lead him down the gang path. (There’s a hint that Danny joined a gang because of the way his psyche had been twisted by anti-Latino racism — but in that case, why did the white kids in the film join gangs?)

What’s most interesting about this movie is the physical atmosphere of 1954 — particularly the agricultural life (the gang members make money by picking oranges or green peppers) and the cars of the period — and the low-tech weaponry available to the gangs: when they’re not beating each other up with fists they have axes and baseball bats but nothing nastier … a far cry from today’s drug-fueled (and drug-funded) gangs that have ready access to firearms, including fully automatic weapons!

Gay Purr-ee (UPA/Warners, 1962)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was Gay Purr-ee, an odd childhood favorite of mine since I saw it on the old NBC “Saturday Night at the Movies” — with no credit sequence, so I wasn’t aware of what this movie was called. All I knew about it was that it featured the voices of Judy Garland and Robert Goulet as a star-crossed cat couple in turn-of-the-[last]-century France and that it was done in the highly stylized animation style typical of its production company, UPA (United Productions of America). It’s a testament to the interest of this film — I wouldn’t quite call it “great” but it is a work of real quality and charm — that I fell in love with it even watching it on a black-and-white TV and therefore deprived of what’s probably its most interesting element, its color design, a flat-out copy of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters active in France when it was set (the opening is a blatant copy of Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” painting fading into a scene of real sunflowers in the farm village in Provence where the film opens).

The film was ballyhooed by Warner Bros., its distributor, as a brand new idea in screen entertainment, which it wasn’t — the idea of anthropomorphizing animals and having them have animated adventures similar to those engaged in by live actors in live-action movies had been done again and again, and the screenplay by Dorothy and Chuck Jones, Joan Gardner and Ralph Wright drew on a wide variety of sources, some familiar (John Huston’s 1952 Moulin Rouge and the Arthur Freed-Vincente Minnelli 1958 Gigi in particular) and some not so familiar (the basic love triangle comes straight from Chaplin’s A Woman of Paris and one important deus ex machina device comes from another Chaplin film, The Gold Rush) to tell the tale of Mewsette (Judy Garland), a cute little white cartoon cat who’s loved by Jaune-Tom (Robert Goulet), an off-orange mouser, but who’s attracted to Paris and the promise of champagne, champignons, and the Champs-Elysées (“I wonder what they taste like,” Mewsette mewses).

No sooner does she arrive in the big, bad city than she falls into the clutches of evil Meowrice Percy Beaucoup (Paul Frees) and his gang, the Money-Cats. Meowrice hires Madame Rubens-Chatte (Hermione Gingold, the only actual cast overlap between this film and Gigi) to train Mewsette to be a lady-cat instead of the farm-bred she actually is, and when Mewsette is ready Meowrice intends to ship her off to Henry Phtt in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a repulsively ugly (we wisely never see him, but we see Mewsette’s revulsion at a photo of him) but rich cat who’s paid Meowrice handsomely for Mewsette as a mail-order bride, or courtesan, or something. To get rid of Jaune-Tom — who’s walked his way to Paris with his side-cat Robespierre (Red Buttons) — Meowrice has the Money-Cats kidnap him and sell him to a ship’s captain who’s going to the Yukon to join in the Alaska gold rush, and Jaune-Tom accidentally leads him to a fabulous strike that allows him to return to Paris in triumph, trace Mewsette, vanquish Meowrice and the Money-Cats and send Meowrice to the U.S. in the box intended for Mewsette.

The film is quite clever and has a lot of witty dialogue — which probably sailed over the heads of much of the pre-pubescent audience when this film was released in 1962; the movie was a box-office flop on its first release and most of Hollywood thought that was because it was just too sophisticated for a cartoon. At the same time the colors are so dazzling (much more so than the rather jerky “limited animation” style UPA was famous for; had they had the budget and the time to do Disney-style full animation Gay Purr-ee would be an even better movie than it is) and are used so psychedelically that had this been released five years later it would probably have made money from the hippie audience; they would probably have watched the film under the influence of various mind-altering substances the way they did when Disney re-released Fantasia in 1966.

Gay Purr-ee has its problems, and frankly they’re inherent in the concept; Mewsette is supposed to be a feline naïf, a young ingénue, and yet she sings in the well-worn voice of the 40-something Judy Garland and the songs she sings are by Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg — she insisted on using them as a condition for her doing the film (a wise move, too; though nothing in this film is at the level of “Over the Rainbow” the songs they wrote for Judy are great and deserved a life outside of it — particularly “Little Drops of Rain,” which Judy was hoping would replace “Over the Rainbow” as her theme song — with great, soaring melodies that show off Garland’s voice, still strong and mostly on pitch in 1962, and clever if somewhat arch lyrics like “The chestnut, the willow/The colors of Utrillo”), and she probably also insisted on Mort Lindsey as the musical arranger and director (and his arrangements are superb, ably setting off the songs and Judy’s great performances of them).

Judy’s strongly emotional, heartbreaking interpretations of these sophisticated songs knocks the rather simple-minded concept of the story into a hat — both she and her songs are far better than the novelties most of the other cast members get (though the Money-Cats’ song is fun and so is “The Horse Won’t Talk,” Paul Frees’ featured number as the villain) — but she’s marvelous, and the elements that hold up most strongly in the film today are Judy's vocals, the “Women-yuck!” adolescent angst expressed by Red Buttons’ character, and all the bizarre puns on the names of the famous landmarks of Paris to make them appropriately “catlike” for this story (the Mewlon Rouge, the Felines Bergere, Meowmartre and the name of Garland’s character, Mewsette).

The film is consistently imaginative visually (especially in the famous sequence in which Meowrice shows off a series of portraits of Mewsette painted by the famous names in the Paris art world of the time — which must have been a lot of fun for the artists at UPA to design!) and clever and charming, even though it never really found an audience because, as a Newsweek reviewer said when it was new, “There seems to be an effort to reach a hitherto undiscovered audience — the fey four-year-old of recherché taste.” Today, when it’s not so odd that an animated film might deliberately appeal to adults, Gay Purr-ee doesn’t seem as strange as it no doubt did in 1962!

Dr. Who: “The Next Doctor” (BBC-TV, 2008)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The latest Doctor Who episode, aired on Christmas Day in Britain (the credit was from the Welsh wing of the BBC), was called “The New Doctor,” since it apparently signals the passage of the latest “Doctor” torch from middle-aged David Tennant to the genuinely young and hunky David Morrissey (any relation to the sexually ambiguous pop singer?). This is the first time we’ve watched any of the current Doctor Who series (though we have the third-season boxed set in the backlog) and the first impression I had was how good the production values are. Well, in the age in which computer-generated imagery has become standard in feature films they could hardly hope to get away with the delightfully campy special effects (or attempts thereof) of the classic Doctor Who series in the 1960’s and 1970’s.

This time around the action is set in 1851 London, and at first I wondered if their Christmas show would be an update of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, with Dr. Who and his sidekicks taking the roles of the three spirits and teaching a reprobate capitalist the true meaning of Christmas. Instead, 1851 London was used as the backdrop for a surprising attack by the Cyber-Men, whom I’d seen in a video transfer of a cycle of episodes from the 1960’s in which they were played by actors in the standard “robot” costumes of the time — the ones that looked like cardboard boxes sprayed with metal paint and with holes cut in them so the actors could get inside and stick their arms and legs out. This time I wasn’t sure whether they were actors or entirely computer-generated, and they looked like taller, more menacing silver-colored versions of C3PO from Star Wars.

One neat kicker was that they actually enlisted a human of that time and place, a woman named Miss Hartigan (superbly played by Dervla Kirwan in a performance that channeled Bette Davis — especially when she shocked onlookers by wearing a red dress to a funeral! — and her ability to spit out the most hackneyed super-villain lines and still maintain dignity and credibility as a performer would make her an interesting choice for the villainess in the next Batman movie), who sought to attain world domination with the Cyber-Men’s help and instead found them locking her in a giant robot to be the Cyber-King (the idea was to do their own twisted version of the Nativity in which what was coming was not the Son of God but a gigantic robot that would rule over all Earth in a far more direct sense) and threatening to suck out her brain in order to turn her into a Cyber-Person herself.

The acting was quite good for the format (Morrissey was an O.K. performer but a sheer delight to look at, and his African-British sidekick Rosita, played by Velile Tshabalala, threw herself into the role with the sort of spunkiness one expects in a super-heroine) and the effects were excellent, though one prissy imdb.com commentator complained that the scene taking place at a funeral was filmed in a real cemetery, with actors bumping into the tombstones and otherwise failing to show proper respect for the dead. (I don’t think much of this, but then I’ve never been one to stand on ceremony when it comes to what’s going to happen to me after I die — frankly, I want to be mulched, which is what is supposed to happen to dead organic matter: it’s supposed to return to the soil and continue the cycle of life — and Charles recently told me that his sister has got a funeral director’s license and is specializing in so-called “green funerals,” which means no embalming, no taking out the body parts and replacing them with cotton batting, none of the other horrors visited on the dead that Jessica Mitford so vividly described to give them a simulacrum of physical permanence in defiance of the same laws of nature that require us to die in the first place).

The Two Mr. Kissels (Lifetime, 2008)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film I watched was The Two Mr. Kissels, a Lifetime “Crime of the Week” movie that premiered on the channel November 18 and out-rated NBC (with reruns) and ABC (with football). It was based on a true story about two brothers, Andrew and Robert Kissel, both born to a rich family (their dad was a real-estate investor in New Jersey), both making their careers in the stock market and both making a ton of money in their own right in the boom markets of the 1990’s and the 2000’s (and apparently weathering the Internet crash of 2000-2001 O.K.). Seen at a time when the economy has almost totally imploded, the ecstatic pronouncements of the woman stock analyst from CNN Andrew marries about how all you have to do to make money in the market (of the late 1990’s before the tech boom busted) is “wake up” seem even more out of touch with reality than they would have then — when similar sentiments fooled a lot of people who should have known better.

But the main subject of The Two Mr. Kissels is the marriage and family lives of the title characters — particularly Robert’s wife Nancy (Robin Tunney), a restaurant manager with a flair for partying and drugs that she manages to put into abeyance for a while (mostly because of the “high” she seems to get from spending her husband’s money) but which soon comes out when hubby takes a job assignment in Hong Kong, she initially moves there with them but is sent to the U.S. when the SARS epidemic hits, and back in their old home in Vermont she ends up falling for the cable guy (in real life it was a stereo repairman, but apparently “cable guy” was too juicy a cliché for writer Maria Nation to pass up). Returning to Hong Kong, she does Web searches on date-rape drugs with the intent of giving one to her husband so she can knock him off — which she does by bludgeoning him to death, then thinking that she can leave the body lying around their apartment building (in one chilling scene she has some workmen move it from their bedroom to their storage locker, and her four-year-old son holds the door open for them) and no one will notice. (She deserves as much condemnation for being dumb as for being evil.) She’s convicted — in a court that features British-accented English-speaking personnel and British procedure (though this was 2003, six years after Hong Kong reverted to China, apparently the Brits were still in charge of at least some of the criminal justice system) — and sentenced to life in a 7’ x 7’ cell in a women’s prison on the Chinese mainland with no one there, either guards or fellow prisoners, who speaks English.

Meanwhile, Andrew also gets into the investment business, only he does it crookedly and ends up losing millions for his investors — he’s appropriated most of the profits (most of the principal, in fact) and blown it all on fancy cars, prostitutes and drugs (he’s especially fond of sniffing cocaine off the hoods of his designer “wheels”) — and he’s arrested and released on bail but confined to his home under house arrest, whereupon his wife leaves him (this was beginning to look like Memron, but in this more serious context he didn’t try to chase her and set off his monitoring ankle bracelet) and the day before he’s supposed to stand trial he’s found stabbed to death in his Greenwich, Connecticut home. His chauffeur is the prime suspect and is held for the murder (according to the end credits the case is still pending and he hasn’t been tried yet), but a white-haired character who’s a composite for the various people Andrew ripped off in his investment business theorizes that Andrew really hired someone to kill him so his family could collect on his life insurance, which they wouldn’t be able to if he flat-out killed himself. (The end credits indicate that the insurance company froze payment on the claim anyway.) In fact, Nation’s script includes quite a lot of flashback narration, including some from the Kissel boys themselves, telling us about their lives and deaths from beyond the grave à la Scared to Death and Sunset Boulevard.

The Two Mr. Kissels seems to be trying to make some money-can’t-buy-happiness statements but Nation’s script is too diffuse and too much in search of a through-line to make this a moral tale, and indeed one problem with this movie is it’s one of those stories in which everyone is so repulsive there’s really no one to root for. Director Edward Bianchi gives the story to us straightforwardly and doesn’t let any directorial tricks get in the way of the soft-core porn (especially in the scenes in which Rob and Nancy are having sex and it’s all too clear that that’s her hold over him), but since one of the murders is all too obvious while the other is all too obscure, it’s impossible to get much suspense out of the story and Bianchi and Nation don’t really try. There seem to be an awful lot of potential resonances in the Kissels’ real-life story that get ignored or at best addressed half-heartedly in this movie, and to the extent that this has entertainment value it’s supplied by the acting. Former TV idol John Stamos plays Andrew (he also is listed as executive producer) and plays him as a compulsively dishonest moral basket case, while Anson Mount as Rob looks enough like him to be credible as his brother and delivers the goods in a much less juicy role. Still, this was an awfully depressing movie to be watching on Christmas Eve!

Universal's Three Modern Mummies

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Charles and I watched The Mummy, the 1999 version, written and directed by Stephen Sommers and owing a lot more to contemporary action films — particularly Raiders of the Lost Ark, Romancing the Stone and their sequelae — than to Universal’s earlier Mummy films (the 1932 Karl Freund/John Balderston/Boris Karloff classic and the 1940 film The Mummy’s Hand). It’s a quite modern combination of extraordinary special effects work, including the mummy’s morphing into and out of human form (nothing so simple as donning a long coat and a fez the way Karloff did in 1932!) and summoning other mummies to form an army (a scene clearly influenced by Ray Harryhausen’s famous army of skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts), being able literally to animate the sand, and summoning forth small armies of scarab beetles to devour alive anyone who got in his way; with pretty numb-skulled acting and plotting.

Arnold Vosloo as the Mummy — still called Imhotep but bearing little relation either to the historical Imhotep (the designer of the pyramids and the only person other than a Pharoah whom the ancient Egyptians deified) or the character Karloff played — was quite striking (and in his human form, if anything, he was sexier than the lead!); but foul-mouthed (in both senses of the word) Brendan Fraser and dorky Rachel Weisz could hardly match David Manners and the majorly underrated Zita Johann as the romantic leads. Not that the tones of the films are all that similar; whereas John Balderston’s script was a romantic fantasy with a few horrific elements, this one was an action-adventure film with horror (relatively mild horror, at least by today’s standards; there’s really not much blood-and-gore here, which was fine by both of us) and quite a lot of comedy — in that regard this film is closer to The Mummy’s Hand than the 1932 Mummy, even though the broad outline of the plot is closer to Balderston’s story and even a couple of his expository lines about the curse on Imhotep’s casket are heard in almost identical form.

The comedy isn’t all that funny, and Fraser’s performance is at its least convincing when he tries for a Clint Eastwood-esque toughness that doesn’t come naturally to him — and Adrian Boole’s cinematography is the past-is-brown look run riot (anyone seeing this film is going to assume that ancient Egyptians were gold-plated) — but nonetheless it’s a reasonably entertaining audience-pleaser even though the elements of the 1932 film that continue to make it great — its subtlety, its doomed romanticism, the pathos of Karloff’s performance and the genuinely conflicted acting of Johann, who really does look like she’s being torn apart psychologically between the English and Egyptian parts of her heritage, and between her previous incarnation as the princess (a plot element missing from the 1999 version, and sorely missed) and her current one — completely eluded Stephen Sommers and the others involved in the new one. — 10/7/02

••••••••••

Charles and I hung out in the bedroom and I ran him the tape I’d made the night before of the film The Mummy Returns, written and directed by Stephen Sommers as a sequel to his wildly successful 1999 remake of The Mummy. This was a regular commercial TV broadcast with a disclaimer that the film had been reformatted to fit the TV screen (apparently the great unwashed broadcast audience is still not considered worthy of letterboxing) and edited for content and to fill the time slot allotted — which made me wonder just how much more of it there could possibly have been in the theatrical version. (Then again I’m not entirely averse to content editing — I remember seeing Wes Craven’s original Nightmare on Elm Street on network TV and liking it, while also reflecting that had I seen the complete — and no doubt gorier — theatrical version I probably wouldn’t have liked it as much!)

The Mummy Returns is, if anything, even campier than the 1999 film to which it was a sequel — in which, even though Sommers very deliberately and campily played against the mood of doomed romanticism that made the 1932 Karl Freund/John Balderston version so appealing, there were still enough shards of Balderston’s plot left that the film had some emotional impact. This time Sommers’ script was structured as arbitrarily as a porn film, only with action set-pieces instead of sex scenes — and though the action scenes were quite vividly staged they did get tiresome after a while. The Mummy Returns is mindless fun, a real testament to the power of digital graphics — the film couldn’t have been made without digitalization and its capacity to realize all those shots Sommers so loves of rivers of animate beings (usually insects, humans or, in this film, a whole army of dog-faced people supposedly led by the dog-faced Egyptian god Anubis, who actually was just part of their pantheon but in this film takes on the role of Satan), sand melting into the shape of people or places and then melting away back into sand, the spectacular visions seen by the son of Brendan Fraser’s character when he puts on the scorpion bracelet created by the legendary Scorpion King, who 5,000 years before the main action of the film takes place attempted to conquer Egypt with the aid of Anubis’s dog-faced army.

The plot line of this film features so many villains, both supernatural and terrestrial, that it’s hard to keep track of who they are, who’s on who’s side or what they want, but it’s the sort of film where none of that matters anyway; and while Brendan Fraser gets one acting moment in which he shows a genuine talent for pathos (when he has to react to the death of his wife — the temporary death of his wife, this being a fantasy and thereby not subject to the normal rules of human existence), and for the most part he’s a bit more personable and restrained this time than he was in the previous Mummy film (in which his appalling antics — which director Sommers obviously thought were cute and funny — made me cast fond thoughts back to David Manners despite his almost terminal blandness as an actor), this certainly wasn’t going to win him any Academy Award nominations or even offers of better parts. I guess watching The Mummy Returns is like pigging out at McDonald’s; you know you’re not supposed to enjoy it, but in spire of yourself you do even though you want something more substantial the next time you go out! — 2/11/04

••••••••••

The movies Charles and I watched last night — we squeezed in two even when I wasn’t doing OperaShare downloads of obscure Puccini — were the new Universal Mummy series film, saddled with the awkward title The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, and one of the Jack Benny TV show episodes offered by Critics’ Choice Video. (They put out at least five volumes of Benny episodes but their current catalog offers only the first three; the fourth contains an episode with Marilyn Monroe and, knowing how fiercely protective her heirs are of her legacy, I imagine they threatened legal action if Critics’ Choice maintained it in their catalog.)

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor is not written and directed by Stephen Sommers, as the first two episodes in the series were; instead it’s directed by Rob Cohen from a script by Alfred Gough & Miles Millar (and the fact that a big-budget action-effects extravaganza like this was actually written by just two people is pretty amazing in and of itself!), and instead of Arnold Vosloo’s reincarnated Egyptian mummy Imhotep it features an entirely new villain — and a new setting, China. The new villain is Emperor Han, who reigned two years ago and (like the real Chinese Emperor Qin) attempted to unify the various provinces of China at sword-point if necessary. In a rather clunky prologue narrated by Freda Foh Shen in a voice that sounds like the narrator of one of those “audio-visual” movies shown in grade and high schools when I was a boy, it’s explained that Han lusted after a witch who promised him the secret of eternal life, only she had eyes for his military commander, General Ming (Russell Wong) instead. Learning this, Han tricked her into revealing the secret of eternal life, then killed both her and Ming — not realizing that she had tricked him and put a spell on him that made his face turn into stone and periodically burst into fire, then put itself out and become stone again.

When the emperor finally died, he was buried in a tomb with plenty of booby-traps to make sure no one could reach his sarcophagus, exhume his body and restart him on his quest for immortality — on the ground that if he got up and was able to revivify his army of terra-cotta soldiers, he would be unstoppable and would literally conquer the world. The main part of the movie is set in China in 1946, where an expedition including Alex O’Connell (Luke Ford), son of the adventure couple from the first film — Rick O’Connell (Brendan Fraser) and his wife Evelyn (Maria Bello, replacing Rachel Weisz and for my money actually a better, more appealing heroine, though the consensus view is quite different) — has discovered the emperor’s tomb and is busy negotiating the booby-traps (I had a hard time suspending disbelief to accept that all the traps were still in working order after 2,000 years, but an imdb.com “Trivia” contributor says the tomb is real and so are the traps — and that’s one reason why the Chinese are taking a lot longer to excavate it than they anticipated).

This being 1946, with the Chinese civil war still going (it would be three years more before the Communists definitively won), there’s a modern-day warlord called General Yang (Chau Sang Anthony Wong) who has decided that if he can dig up the emperor and bring back him and his terra-cotta army to life, he can conquer all China and then the world. Yang has the elders kidnapped and brought to the tomb site — aided by a treacherous British diplomat in league with him — and the emperor is indeed revived, while to go up against him all they have are a few of the O’Connells’ hangers-on and Alex’s girlfriend Zi Juan (Michelle Yeoh), who it turns out is the daughter of the original witch (she’s immortal — and when a nonplussed Alex hears how old the girl he’s dating really is, he says, “I don’t mind older women”) and has a magic dagger on her person that’s the one weapon that can kill Han once he bathes in a pool inside Shangri-La that will make him (otherwise) immortal.

None of this really matters because, as with the last two modern-day Mummy movies (especially the second, The Mummy Returns), the “plot” is as pretextual as one in a porn movie: it exists merely to set up the action scenes — which are staged with a cool efficiency that makes them entertaining but not as exuberant or spectacular as they were in the earlier films. There’s nothing here as deliciously horrific as the waves of sand of the earlier films that metamorphosed into armies of insects sent into battle at Imhotep’s direction to menace the heroes — the closest is the big set-piece towards the end, in which Han’s revivified terra-cotta army does battle against another fighting force brought back from the dead, this time from Han’s former slaves who were buried in the foundations of the Great Wall of China after Han literally worked them to death in its construction (another detail that unctuous audio-visual narrator gave us in the prologue). This isn’t a great movie but it’s fun, it does what it set out to do — dazzle us with impeccably created digital imagery (there’s even a credit for “hair technical director,” Zack Weiler) — and it doesn’t last long enough to overstay its welcome: its official running time is 112 minutes but the last 10 minutes or so of that is the closing credit roll. — 12/23/08

Jach Benny Hour (TV, 1965)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright @ 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Critics’ Choice DVD on which we watched the 1965 Jack Benny Hour — before the show proper began, he stood in front of a curtain and said, “I don’t know why they call it a ‘special.’ It’s just a show, and the only difference is it’s an hour long. So think of it as two half-hours stuck together” — showed it in black-and-white, a disappointment because it was in color originally and Benny even has a few jokes relating to it being in color (notably a running gag about a stagehand assigned to strangle him periodically to give his cheeks the rosy-red glow desired by the color camerapeople). It had a nice assortment of guest stars, including Bob Hope (who does some quite amusing vaudeville-type humor with Benny), Elke Sommer and the Beach Boys, who sing “California Girls” and “Barbara Ann” and who appeared to be miming to a pre-recording: Brian Wilson was visibly present on bass (he usually wasn’t by 1965) and the version of “Barbara Ann” included the high vocal line from the original Beach Boys’ record (they weren’t the original group to do it; it was written by Fred Fassert and first recorded by a group called the Regents; later it was covered by Jan and Dean for an oldies album, and afterwards the Beach Boys did it on their Beach Boys’ Party! album with Dean Torrence coming in and doing the high part because none of the Beach Boys could sing that high, and though he’s not visible on the program it certainly sounds like him on the soundtrack).

It was a fun show and well worth watching, featuring such guest stars as Walt Disney (playing himself and essentially the butt of a gag in which Benny asks for 110 free tickets to Disneyland and Disney insists in return that they incorporate a Disney motif into the show somewhere — which they do by inserting a parody of Mary Poppins into a skit originally intended as a spoof of Italian movies, with Benny as the cuckolded husband and Hope as his wife’s chauffeur and paramour) and Elke Sommer, who as usual with women who looked that good is milked only for her looks. She also gets to sing a song, which Benny announced came off her new MGM label record — I had no idea Elke Sommer had ever recorded, and as things turn out she’s unable to project any degree of sensuality as a singer (unlike, say, Marilyn Monroe, whose recordings throb with erotic power even in a non-visual medium).

The show’s high points are the Beach Boys’ performances and a nice skit (excerpted in the documentary about them, The Beach Boys: American Heroes) in which Benny and Hope don mop-like long-hair wigs, carry a surfboard, drive in a ridiculously decorated hot-rod pickup and try to master the surfing lingo. Also of note was the fact that (as usual with Critics’ Choice) they left in the original commercials — for Eastern Airlines, a carrier I can only vaguely remember and certainly no longer exists (it was stripped for its assets by corporate raider Frank Lorenzo and went out of business in 1991) — including one promoting a travel agent (I remember travel agents!).

The Road to Ruin (Willis Kent Productions, 1934)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Road to Ruin turned out to be a surprisingly good movie by the meager standards of the exploitation genre — well above such 1930’s camp classics as Reefer Madness, Marihuana: Weed with Roots in Hell, Sex Madness, Cocaine Fiends and the like. The direction was co-credited to Mrs. Wallace Reid (Dorothy Davenport) and Melville Shyer, and though there was no screenwriting credit the two co-directors were probably responsible for the script as well, especially since Mrs. Reid — who got her exploitation-film cred by being the widow of the first of so many movie figures to die a drug-related death— had written a version of the same story, under the same title, for a 1928 silent film produced and co-written by Willis Kent (who produced this one as well) and directed by Norton S. Parker. Variety complained that the 1934 version was considerably milder than the “hotly sexed” silent, though another trade paper, The Exhibitor, called this one “a vast improvement over its silent brother” and said it “lends itself to commercial exploitation.”

Willis Kent produced non-exploitation films as well (including the 1932 mystery Sinister Hands, which isn’t an especially great film but does have Mischa Auer in a rare — and quite well played — non-comic role) and he wasn’t trucking around with a projector and a print the way really sleazy exploitation entrepreneurs like Dwain Esper (who liberally filled out his film Narcotic with clips from the silent version of The Road to Ruin) and Kroger Babb did, and where his film scores far above the exploitation brethren is in its quality of production. The directors and their cinematographer, James Diamond, clearly had an eye for composition and lighting — especially in the exteriors (notably a scene in which the protagonists take a boat ride and the dappled sunlight seen through the trees and reflected on the water recall those in the Sternberg An American Tragedy) — and they had a cast that, with one rather obvious exception (Paul Page as Ralph Bennett, the man who completes the heroine’s ruination, who delivers his lines in a first-day-of-drama-school monotone and has utterly no expression at all, though that may have been the directors’ idea to make him seem more sinister), is quite competent.

Helen Foster, who’d starred in the silent Road to Ruin as well, gets above-the-title billing as Ann Dixon, whose clueless parents (Richard Tucker and Virginia True Boardman) watch helplessly as she sinks from good little schoolgirl — we know she’s good because her classmates seek her out for help on their homework — to wanton passenger on the titular road to ruin, and she’s effective within the limits of the didactic script — while Nell O’Day as her friend Eve, who gives her the first shove onto That Road, is even better: she’s a striking screen personality and her platinum-blonde hair makes me wonder why a major studio didn’t snap her up and try to make her a competitor to Jean Harlow. (At the same time, a story about a girl named Ann — as close to “Adam” as they could get in a woman’s name — being led into temptation by a woman named Eve is an indication of how obvious this film’s symbolism really is.)

Ann gets tempted down the Road to Ruin when Eve pulls up in a car driven by her boyfriend Tommy (Glen Boles), who has the hots for Ann; and Tommy’s friend Ed, who’s interested in Eve and is hoping to pair Tommy with Ann so he can have Eve for himself. Gradually Ann and Tommy do develop a relationship, and Tommy takes Eve on that boat ride and then takes her to a wooded glade, where it’s not clear whether he actually has sex with her or not — first they’re making out, then there’s a cut and when the scene resumes they’re both standing up and she’s readjusting her clothes while he’s apologizing to her, but it’s kept ambiguous whether he actually got into her pants or she successfully fought off his attempts to do so.

They then turn up at a lodge that’s a sort of nightclub (though the film was released in 1934, the dates shown in written documents as part of the movie indicate the time frame as mid-1933 and evidently Prohibition is still in effect, since the customers at the nightclub are shown bringing in their liquor in flasks and our four wanton high-school kids are able to get in without being carded) with a wretched but somewhat appealing jazz band whose lead instruments are xylophone, violin and subtone clarinet. (They’re probably the best band Willis Kent’s budget could afford, but their mediocrity adds to the dramatic verisimilitude; one doesn’t get the impression, as one does in major-studio productions of the period, that we’re hearing a much better band than this sort of establishment could afford — though when the characters switch on radios and we hear the same musicians, it does jar because by 1934 radio stations were getting top-flight talent to play on-air.) Tommy and Ed get incapacitatedly drunk and two older seducers, Ralph (Paul Page) and Brad, see their opportunity and move in on Ann and Eve, respectively.

Things come to a climax at a party which is raided by the police after the participants go swimming in a pool in their underwear — in one example of the relative subtlety of this film compared to other exploitation numbers, the people who call are a middle-aged couple who live next door; the wife is determined to call the police and shut the party down, but the husband is unwilling to make the call because he’s having too much fun watching the scantily-clad young girls — and Ann and Eve find themselves confronted by a social worker (a butch woman wearing a severely tailored suit and a necktie, which was probably “read” by 1934 audiences — at least those sexually savvy enough to be watching a movie like this!) who insists that they’ll be released as soon as they’re “examined” (“Examined!” they respond in horror) but their parents will have to be told what they’ve been up to.

The medical examinations reveal that Eve has syphilis — she’s sent off for treatment (the standard treatment of the day would have been Dr. Ehrlich’s arsenic compound, salvarsan) and within a month or so she’s declared cured — but Ann, though she’s been spared any STD’s, has met an even worse fate: Ralph has knocked her up. She expects him to marry her — the fool! — but he explains that he’s already married, and he arranges for her to have an illegal abortion; when we hear the abortionist subtly slurring a few of his words, we’re all too aware what fate is in store for her, but it duly happens. Ralph at this point decides to turn Ann out as a “party girl” — in the virtual-prostitute sense that phrase usually meant in the early 1930’s — but that never quite happens (the American Film Institute Catalog plot synopsis says it does but the sequence was probably cut from this print) and instead she’s overcome by the infection that incompetent quack stuck her with, she sees a legitimate doctor but too late to do anything, and there’s a surprisingly moving death scene in which her parents are with her and try to take the blame for her fate, but she nobly refuses to blame her impending demise on anyone but herself and then expires.

The Road to Ruin is a surprisingly good film for the genre, but it’s still an awfully limited genre. As well shot and staged as it is, the titular road to ruin looks like an unbelievably decorous one. With one exception — a mysterious “brew” Ralph offers Ann just before he has sex with her for the first time — the characters don’t do any substances stronger than tobacco and alcohol (and Charles and I had a lot of fun trying to guess what the “brew” was, with him thinking it was a “Spanish fly”-style aphrodisiac and me thinking at first it was laudanum — opium dissolved in alcohol — or maybe absinthe; it certainly wasn’t a modern-style date-rape drug since Ralph was shown taking it himself, and there wasn’t the obligatory scene of him slipping something into her drink but not his own common to movie date-rape scenes then and now) — and the film really doesn’t have much of a sense of pace: Ann lumbers along on the road to ruination so slowly she’d be in no danger of being arrested for speeding.

It impresses more because the competition was so awful than because it’s all that great itself; the filmmakers try to show their story with humanity and understanding but their didactic purpose (or, rather, the didactic purpose they had to pay lip service to in order to get their film made and shown at all) defeats them — and while the participants on this film’s road to ruin at least seem to be having more fun than their confreres in such films as Reefer Madness, it’s still one of those movies whose main efficacy in deterring “sin” (or at least what its makers defined as such) is to make the demi-monde seem so boring it hardly seems worth the trouble!

Hancock (Sony/Columbia, 2008)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The movie Charles and I ran last night was Hancock, which I’d been mildly interested in but which the Columbia House DVD Club sent me unbid (I must have forgotten to respond to their mailers — I probably thought I’d gone online to cancel this one but hadn’t). It turned out to be a pleasant surprise and at least two-thirds of a good movie. John Hancock (Will Smith) is a super-powered human who thinks the usual skin-tight superhero costumes are “faggy” and who does his super-things in ordinary street clothes, looking awfully dowdy since when he’s not being a superhero he’s a down-and-out alcoholic who lives in two old, abandoned trailers he’s jammed together and whose only source of solid food is Jiffy-Pop popcorn. (I couldn’t help but wonder if the makers of Jiffy-Pop paid for this product placement!)

In the opening scene, three Asian-American baddies are careening down the street in a white SUV and causing havoc, but not so much havoc as the whiskey-soaked Hancock causes when he goes after them and ends up causing $9 million of damage to innocent people’s cars and properties before impaling the bad guys’ SUV on the spire atop the Capitol Tower. The L.A. County district attorney’s office (this is set in Los Angeles, which if nothing else made it easier for them to find locations) announces that they intend to prosecute Hancock for the rampage — and for the next one he starts, in which he comes across a car trapped in a traffic jam and stalled across a railroad track with a train bearing down on it. (For a moment I thought the filmmakers were going to pull Buster Keaton’s old gag of having the train miss the car, and then another train on a track going the other direction would hit it.)

Hancock saves the car’s occupant, public-relations consultant Ray Embrey (Jason Bateman), though typically he also destroys most of the other cars caught in the traffic jam and, instead of merely lifting Ray’s car out of the way of the train, stops the train with his own body (in a move that, as Charles pointed out, would have killed everybody on the train from the sudden deceleration — though it turns out to be a freight train and therefore the only people on board, aside from any hoboes or runaways, would have been the people driving the locomotive). Ray agrees to give Hancock a P.R. makeover and tells him to work on his landings — he can fly but he can’t seem to come down to earth again without tearing up great chunks of pavement in the process — and also that he should turn himself in and do a stretch in county jail, which he does via a press conference that’s probably the most pointed moment of the script by Vy Vincent Ngo and Vince Gilligan, an hilarious send-up of celebrity rehab!

Ray lives in an ordinary suburban house in the San Fernando Valley with his wife Mary (Charlize Theron) and his — but not her — son Aaron (Jae Head); we’re told later that Aaron’s mom died giving birth to him and then Mary came along as an “angel” to redeem Ray’s life and get him over his grief. (This will become an important plot point later on.) For the first hour or so this is a truly delightful comedy — and it is a comedy — that makes gentle but unmistakable fun of the superhero genre and manages to answer questions I’ve always had, like wouldn’t the residents of a city where a superhero operated finally decide he was more trouble than he was worth because of all the super-villains he’d attract; just how would anybody repair the damage the hero caused in his crime-fighting activities; and whether a being with super-powers could possibly have sex with a being without them without burning out her insides. (In one early scene, Hancock attracts a young Black woman groupie, takes her back to his place and warns her to pull back before he climaxes — and when she ignores his warning, the power of his orgasm literally pushes her away from him, across his room and through his wall until she collapses outside.)

Then the script takes more conventional paths and introduces a plot twist that turns this film from an engaging comedy to something considerably less fun. Hancock finds himself romantically and sexually attracted to Mary Embrey, and one day while he’s at their house and Ray and Aaron are out Hancock makes his move, they get almost to the point of a kiss (supposedly the DVD contains a 102-minute extended version of the film, 10 minutes longer than the standard theatrical release, in which they do kiss, but the one we watched was the 92-minute theatrical version), and suddenly she flies him across the room. Yes, folks, it turns out that she is a super-being just like himself, though she’s given up the superhero life and is content to be the normal suburban housewife, sort of like Elizabeth Montgomery’s character on Bewitched. (You didn’t think that after her star-making, Oscar-winning part in Monster they’d cast Charlize Theron as a real suburban housewife, did you?)

What’s more, it turns out that they’re both over 3,000 years old and that they were destined to be a pair, only part of the deal that gave them their super-powers in the first place also was that if they actually got together and lived as a couple, they would both lose their super-powers forever and would also lose their immortality, living the rest of a human life span and then dying at the regular age. The two recall the previous times they did actually live together, including one in the 1860’s and one “80 years ago” — a somewhat confused time sequence because their idyll ended after they went to a movie theatre in Miami together to see the James Whale Frankenstein on its initial release — the dialogue said they saw it 80 years earlier, which would have been 1928, three years before Frankenstein (and someone with sharper eyes than mine these days, and no doubt the advantage of having seen this in a theatre, noted that on the ticket stub for the showing, which she’s carefully preserved, one contributor to imdb.com noted that the date on the stub was June 21, 1931 — the right year but still almost five months before the actual release of Frankenstein on November 4) — only they were set upon by a lynch mob upset at the sight of an interracial couple in Miami in the Jim Crow era (Charles was upset at this plot twist, finding that even within the suspension of disbelief required by a superhero movie it was way too hard to believe that they could have lived in Miami together without becoming aware of the danger of racist vigilantism well before this!) and, with his superpowers ebbing, Hancock was beaten so badly he lost his memory … which led to his being called Hancock; when a nurse asked him to “put your John Hancock” on the admission form, he thought she was calling him by name.

Then both Hancock and Mary are near-mortally wounded and there’s a major crisis that resolves itself into the movie’s final action scene, edited in typical modern-day Cuisinart style in which Hancock and Mary seem to be in synch so that every time one of them has a life-threatening crisis the other does, too — until both more or less recover and accept the need for geographical separation, so Hancock goes to New York to do his superhero thing there while Mary stays in L.A. with Ray — and as a final thank-you Hancock goes to the moon and burns onto its surface the read “All Heart” logo Ray was trying to sell various major corporations on — the idea being that it would become a symbol that his pharmaceutical-company clients were giving away their drugs free to Third World people who really needed them (the board members he was pitching this to, including director Peter Berg in a cameo, respond with a predictable lack of enthusiasm, just as they do to Bono and other would-be savants in the real world offering similar advice).

The finale of Hancock is a bit of a let-down, taking what’s been a well-pointed spoof of the superhero genre into serious action-film territory, but it’s a nice movie anyway, largely due to the excellent acting of Will Smith, who as he’s got older has got more character in his face; he really does look like a down-and-out man laboring under severe psychological burdens and a set of super-powers that all too often seem like far more trouble than they’re worth. It’s a star vehicle for him — even Charlize Theron’s role could have been played by just about any actress of the right age and figure — and it works (and while seemingly no one was looking Will Smith quietly took over from Tom Cruise as the world’s most popular movie star, as measured by the consistently stratospheric box-office grosses of his films: yet another triumph for racial equality in the year of Obama!).

MIracle on 34th Street (20th Century-Fox, 1947)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Charles and I got home early enough last night to run a movie, and we decided on the 1947 feature-film version of Miracle on 34th Street even though the only copy I had of it was a colorized VHS release from Fox Home Video in the early 1990’s (evidently before Rupert Murdoch bought the company, because the logo does not have “A News Corporation Company” across the bottom) and the colorization, though not as offensively bad as some of them from this period, bathes the movie in dreary browns — at times it looks like it was shot in sepia and then highlighted in the manner of the “tinting and toning” processes used extensively in the silent era but pretty much abandoned when sound came in.

Charles and I were both curious about this movie because we’d just watched a quite effective 1955 TV abridgment of it shot for a 20th Century-Fox TV anthology series (they launched a TV show to promote their movies in 1955, the same year MGM and Warners did) and this piqued our curiosity about seeing the whole thing again. Miracle on 34th Street was produced and directed by George Seaton, who’s not one of Hollywood’s most highly regarded auteurs but who made some engagingly quirky and envelope-bending films — including the 1946 comedy The Shocking Miss Pilgrim, a major feminist movie at a time when most of Hollywood (and most of the mainstream media generally) were telling women, “Hey, girls, the war’s over, time to get back into the kitchen and let your husbands take back the jobs.” Miracle was a personal project for Seaton — according to the “trivia” section on imdb.com, he had to promise Darryl F. Zanuck to make three studio assignments sight-unseen to do it (and Zanuck insisted on releasing the film in May because he thought a Christmas movie would be dead on arrival at the box office, so even though the plot of the film centers around the existence of Santa Claus the ads carefully avoided any hint that it was a Christmas-themed movie at all).

Miracle on 34th Street involved quite a lot of location shooting — the scenes taking place in the Macy’s department store in New York City were actually filmed there (though the movie company had to bring their own generator because Macy’s power supply couldn’t handle the amount of current needed to run film equipment) — and in order to depict the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, the filmmakers not only shot the actual 1946 parade (with multiple cameras to make sure they got everything they needed since retakes were impossible) but arranged for Edmund Gwenn, hired to play Santa Claus in the film, to appear as such in the parade and fill all the normal duties of the actor playing Santa in the parade — including officially opening the Macy’s toy department for Christmas shoppers.

Miracle on 34th Street is a marvelous movie, clearly derived from Frank Capra — the overall sweetness, the charm, the use of faith as a story driver and even the finale, a trial in which the nice young man who’s courting the heroine has to go to court to prove that his friend and confederate is not insane, are all clearly derived from Capra’s great films of the late 1930’s. So is the vaguely anti-capitalist message — including the idea that by recommending that his customers shop at other stores if they want an item Macy’s doesn’t have in stock, Macy’s will make itself more money in the long run as well as earning valuable public goodwill. (This is a quite venerable plot device that even turns up in modern movies; we’d just seen it in the “All Heart” campaign Jason Bateman’s character futilely tries to sell to at least two corporate boards in Hancock.)

Maureen O’Hara plays the lead role, Doris Walker, a woman who went through a divorce (kudos to Seaton and Valentine Davies, who wrote the original story, for not taking the easy way out for 1947 and having had her husband killed in the war!) and was stuck raising their daughter Susan (Natalie Wood, seven years old, in a star-making performance that’s one of the best pieces of acting ever done by a child and miles ahead of the cloying sweetness Shirley Temple established as the norm for pre-pubescent performers in films) while working in the toy department at Macy’s and running the annual Thanksgiving Day parade. When the Santa Claus she’s hired for the parade (Percy Helton) turns up drunk — “Well, it’s cold outside. A man’s gotta do something to keep warm,” the man explains — she latches onto a passing stranger, Kris Kringle (Edmund Gwenn), and impresses him into service as the parade Santa — at which he’s so convincing that she also drafts him to play Santa Claus in the Macy’s toy department.

There’s only one hitch: Kris Kringle insists that he really is Santa Claus — and when Doris traces him to the old-folks’ home he was living at before, its director, Dr. Pearce (James Seay), confesses that he knew of the man’s delusion but thought it was harmless because it didn’t make him a danger to himself or others — it just gave him a compulsion to walk around doing good for people. Doris, clearly embittered by her divorce (though Seaton is a subtle enough writer not to hammer that into our faces the way a modern scribe probably would), has trained Susan to be a hard-core rationalist, carefully keeping her away from fairy tales (when she’s told the story of Jack and the beanstalk she’s surprised because she’s never heard it before!) and training her to acknowledge that Santa Claus does not exist. (When you work in a department store and have the power to hire and fire Santa Clauses, that’s easier than it is for most parents.)

The overall plot of the film is the breaking down of both Walkers’ resistance to faith, belief and Santa Claus by the pincer movement of Kringle and the male romantic lead, attorney Fred Gailey (John Payne — and did George Seaton have to give him such a “queer” last name?), who lives in the same apartment building as the Walkers and is wooing Mrs. Walker by befriending her daughter Susan. There’s also a veiled Gay subtext in the character of Alfred (Alvin Greenman), the nellie 17-year-old overweight janitor at Macy’s whom Kringle befriends against the pressure from Granville Sawyer (Porter Hall), who runs the personnel department’s aptitude testing program and fancies himself a psychologist — who gives the poor boy a lot of nonsense about guilt complexes and hating his father (“I didn’t know I hated my father until Dr. Sawyer told me so”), and says that he has to give up playing Santa at the old-folks’ home even though, being overweight and constantly teased about it, playing Santa every Christmas is the one joy in his life. (This isn’t spelled out as a Gay metaphor — in 1947 under the Production Code it couldn’t have been — but it’s not hard to figure out!)

The whole thing gets resolved when Kringle strikes Sawyer on the head with his cane while defending Alfred in an argument, and Sawyer has Kringle committed to Bellevue and draws up the papers to institutionalize him. Gailey agrees to represent Kringle in the legal system and demands a competency hearing, presided over by Judge Henry X. Harper (Gene Lockhart), who in yet another Capraesque touch in a film full of them is really controlled by political boss Charlie Halloran (William Frawley) — who, stopped from coming into court with a lit cigar, refuses to throw it away and instead merely pinches the burning end with his fingers (ouch!), thereby putting it out. The marvelous character actor Jerome Cowan is the prosecuting attorney, Thomas Mara, who thinks he has the case won when he puts Kringle on the stand and gets him to say out loud, in so many words, that he is really Santa Claus.

Gailey demands the right to present the case that there is in fact a Santa Claus, and that Kringle is he — and to prove the first he puts Mara’s son (Robert Hyatt) on the stand. Thomas Mara, Jr. testifies that he knows there’s a Santa Claus because “my daddy told me so, and my daddy wouldn’t lie to me.” Judge Harper says he’ll consult “a higher authority” before ruling on whether Santa Claus exists or not, and of course the “higher authority” is Halloran, who points out that if he rules that there is no Santa Claus there’ll be such hostility from voters that it will sink their whole ticket in the next election. Accordingly, Harper rules that there is a Santa Claus but that Gailey must still prove that Kris Kringle is he — and he gets a break when two overworked clerks at the New York post office (one of them played by a very young and almost unrecognizable Jack Albertson!) decide not only to deliver the letter Susan Walker wrote to Kris Kringle at the New York courthouse but all the Santa Claus letters to him — and Gailey brings all 21 bags of these letters to court and says, “Your Honor, every one of these letters is addressed to Santa Claus. The Post Office has delivered them. Therefore the Post Office Department, a branch of the Federal Government, recognizes this man Kris Kringle to be the one and only Santa Claus.” There’s a happy ending in which Susan Walker finally gets the house in the suburbs she’d asked Santa Claus for — and she also gets a new daddy in the person of Fred Gailey, who in a film that has otherwise totally avoided the subject of sex finally gets to kiss Doris Walker at the fade-out.

Miracle on 34th Street holds up as a very charming movie, a bittersweet but ultimately uplifting film, and since Charles and I had just watched the surprisingly impressive TV adaptation from eight years later comparisons were inevitable, especially involving the cast. Maureen O’Hara (despite the colorizers’ inability to decide on the color of her hair — in some scenes it’s russet-brown, in others flaming-red) brings a kind of hurt dignity to her role —but Teresa Wright plays it similarly and equally well on the TV adaptation, and though Edmund Gwenn’s Kringle won him the Academy Award and became legendary (and indeed it’s amazing that Gwenn could be equally effective as Katharine Hepburn’s scapegrace father in Sylvia Scarlett and as Santa Claus here!), Thomas Mitchell turns in just as good a job in the TV show (and, apropos of the long-running “in” joke between Charles and I, both of them sound the “t” when they say the word “often”).

Where the TV show cast suffered in comparison with the film is in the male lead — McDonald Carey is good in certain types of roles but he’s so unpersonable one really doesn’t want the heroine to get stuck with him. John Payne isn’t that much better — the role really cried out for James Stewart, but the budget for this film couldn’t have afforded him — but he’s at least young and likable — and the child. Sandy Descher is a perfectly competent child actor but she can’t hold a candle to the incandescent young Natalie Wood — even though I had to laugh out loud when I saw Wood early on turn her face into a pout and realized she had used that expression in different contexts throughout her career! Also, as I’d expected, Philip Tonge, the virtually unknown character actor playing Mr. Shellhammer (Doris’s immediate supervisor in the Macy’s toy department), can’t hold a candle to Hans Conried’s marvelously twitchy performance in the TV version — and the TV script, though heavily cut and eliminating the marvelous subplot involving Alfred, has a more effective way for Kringle to get in trouble with Sawyer (he challenges him when Sawyer is lecturing on the dangers of superstition at a “Progressive Association” forum) — which was the version Charles remembered from a book based on the film story that he read as a child.

The Smartest Girl in Town (RKO, 1936)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night we opened our movie evening with a 64-minute RKO “B” I’d had on the same tape as Finishing School (and The Tenderfoot, the quirky Joe E. Brown comedy, also with Ginger Rogers, noteworthy for including a clip from the ballet mècanique from the 1930 film Lilies of the Field, otherwise lost): The Smartest Girl in Town, one of the Gene Raymond-Ann Sothern series of “B” comedies and musicals that were sort of the second-string for Astaire and Rogers, though this one kept busy three of the droll comedians most familiar today for their character parts in the Astaire-Rogers films: Helen Broderick, Eric Blore and Erik Rhodes.

Raymond is top-billed but this time Sothern dominates in terms of screen time and plot importance; she plays advertising model Frances “Cookie” Cooke, who works for an agency that also employs her sister Gwen (Broderick) as a typist and receptionist. One day, having sneaked aboard a yacht to do a photo shoot, she mistakes the yacht’s owner, Richard Stuyvesant Smith (Raymond), as the male model she’s supposed to work with. Immediately smitten, Richard has his valet, Philbean (Blore), set up a mock agency and hire Cookie to work there at the outrageous sum of $25 per day, and the rest of the plot deals with his attempts to woo her and hers to resist because, even though she’s attracted to him, she’s determined to marry a man with money even though the only candidate she has is Baron Enrico Torene (Rhodes, playing the same foofy “Italian” character he used in the Astaire-Rogers Gay Divorcée and Top Hat).

The outcome is a foregone conclusion but the script (by Viola Brothers Shore from a story by Muriel Scheck and H. S. Krafft) is genuinely witty and charming, and in 64 minutes’ worth of running time the movie’s one joke at least doesn’t have time to overstay its welcome. (Today the gimmick is probably most familiar from the 1953 film of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes — and since Anita Loos’s novel was actually written and filmed in the 1920’s it’s entirely possible Scheck, Krafft and Shore were deliberately ripping it off.) There’s even a pretty good song, “Will You?,” with which Richard serenades Cookie while accompanying himself on the ukulele (and, of course, the RKO orchestra uncredited off-screen), much in the vein of the early Arthur Freed-Nacio Herb Brown songs like “Should I?” and “Would You?” but noteworthy in that it was written by Gene Raymond himself — he’d graduated from playing a songwriter in Flying Down to Rio to being one in this film! — 1/27/05

•••••

Since I got so rushed yesterday I didn’t have time to comment on the movie Charles and I watched on Thursday night as a sort of cinematic palate-cleanser after Hancock: The Smartest Girl in Town, a little 1936 romp from RKO starring Gene Raymond and Ann Sothern, whom the studio was then trying to build up into a sort of second-string Astaire and Rogers. They first put them together in the 1935 musical Hooray for Love (a film I’ve always had an affection for even though the final musical sequence, the Harlem number “Living in a Great Big Way,” brings in Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Thomas “Fats” Waller and the attractive, personable Black actress Jeni LeGon, all of whom totally steal the movie out from under the white people) and made a few “B”’s with them thereafter, most of them musicals, though this one contains only one song — “Will You?,” which Raymond not only performs in the film but actually wrote himself — and is basically an offtake of the Cinderella myth. Frances “Cookie” Cooke (Ann Sothern) is a penniless woman who works as a model, wears incredibly expensive clothes for her photo shoots, and dreams of marrying a rich man so she can own such fabulous garments.

She works for a cheap ad agency and is managed by her sister, Gwen Mayen (Helen Broderick), who made the mistake of marrying the agency’s wastrel photographer, Terry (Harry Jans), and divorced him but still couldn’t get rid of him. Cookie arrives one afternoon for a photo shoot on a yacht — the agency has given Lucius Philbean (Eric Blore), the servant whose master owns the yacht, a $50 bribe to let them shoot there as long as they finish before the master returns — and when the master, Richard Stuyvesant Smith (Gene Raymond), does return unexpectedly, Cookie and Terry mistake him for the male model who’s supposed to appear in the photos and do the shoot with him. Warned by Philbean not to get involved with another woman who’s going to extract a major breach-of-promise settlement out of him — Philbean has even framed the cancelled checks and hung them on Smith’s wall — Smith decides to woo Cookie while posing as a man who’s as poor as she is.

He buys Terry’s camera and uses it to set up an “agency” of his own, with Philbean playing its CEO (and, in some of scenarist Viola Brothers Shore’s most delightful scenes, having trouble maintaining the imposture because he instinctively slips back into servant mode when he’s around Smith), and after 57 minutes’ worth of the best complications Shore and the writers whose “original” story she was adapting, Muriel Scheck and H. S. Kraft, he finally wins her by faking his suicide and borrowing a minister from another wedding to marry them before he (presumably) croaks. This is pretty much a one-joke movie, but at least the one joke is funny and the writers and director, Joseph Santley (who co-directed the Marx Brothers’ first film, The Cocoanuts), make the most of it — and it’s helped that no fewer than four veterans of the Astaire-Rogers series appear: Raymond, Broderick, Blore and Erik Rhodes, who repeats his Gay Divorce/Top Hat characterization as a malapropistic Italian baron with designs on Our Heroine and an avocation — collecting rare fossilized eggs — which turns her completely off. It’s also helped by the fact that it comes in under an hour and therefore doesn’t stretch this rather flimsy situation any more than it can handle. — 12/20/08

“The Dark Knight” and All the Batmen

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

All right, I'll admit it: I love Batman. I fell in love with him via the campy 1960's TV series, with the general air of insouciant hilarity and in particular the over-the-top acting by the "special guest villains." I've collected all the commercially released videos and DVD's of the Batman movies, from the 1943 Columbia serial with Lewis Wilson (in some ways still the best Batman, particularly in looking authentically weary when it was called for) to the latest, "The Dark Knight." My favorite Batman movie remains the 1989 Tim Burton release that featured Michael Keaton in the role and Jack Nicholson as the Joker — mainly because it seemed to balance the thrilling atmospherics of the comic books at their best and the airy campiness of the 1960's show and because Burton and his writing team seemed aware that there are limits to how "serious" and "dramatic" you can get in a movie in which your central character is a guy who goes around at night in a skin-tight black suit and a cape.

The great appeal of Batman is that he wasn't from another planet, he didn't have a magic shield, and he wasn't exposed to a radioactive spider or gamma rays from a nuclear test site. He was an ordinary human being who WILLED himself to be a superhero — both physically and mentally — and he was independently wealthy, so he didn't have to worry about making a living and had the money not only to spend his days fighting crime but to invent all the cool Batgear he used. That's the aspect of the character I think Lewis Wilson captured better than anyone who's played him since; besides looking more credible in the Bruce Wayne identity than any subsequent Batman, Wilson came off at the end of all those serial-style escapes looking genuinely weary, as if the experiences had tired him out. Anyway, here are my notes on viewing the Batman movies over the years (mostly at home, though I have seen the 1943 serial and the 1989 feature in theatres):

••••••••••

The film I picked was the third and last DVD I just bought at Suncoast Video: Batman, the 1943 Columbia serial that was the Caped Crusader’s first screen appearance. My plan was to run the first seven episodes (i.e., the first disc in the two-DVD set) last night and finish the remaining eight episodes tonight — Charles looked a bit askance at that and said he’d prefer to do this one an episode or two a night along with other films, the way we watched The Clutching Hand — but in the end we watched all seven episodes and, while it was a bit of an endurance test, for the most part it was quite entertaining. Batman the serial is actually quite good for the genre, handsomely produced (Columbia in 1943 had already won Academy Awards for Frank Capra’s 1930’s films and attracted other major directors and free-lance stars like Irene Dunne and Cary Grant, and they were on the cusp of full-fledged major-studio status, which Rita Hayworth’s sensational popularity would give them) and directed not by a serial hack but by Lambert Hillyer, a silent-era veteran with two quite good Universal horror films under his belt (The Invisible Ray with Karloff and Lugosi, and Dracula’s Daughter, both from 1936) and a real sense of atmosphere.

A good deal of Batman is shot in relatively flat light, but there are also some beautifully dark chiaroscuro scenes in the expressionistic style of the silent films that had inspired Bob Kane’s visual look for the comic-book character in the first place. (As is well known, Kane’s inspiration for Batman was the title character of The Bat — first made as a silent in 1926 and remade in sound in 1930 — and he copied the look of the Joker from Conrad Veidt’s makeup in the 1928 silent The Man Who Laughs.) There are a few defects — the use of fast-motion photography in the fight scenes (an odd serial convention that’s hard to take seriously today, now that fast motion is associated almost exclusively with comedy), the risible high ears on the cowl of an otherwise quite credible Batsuit, the absence of a Batmobile (Batman and Robin drive around in the same big touring convertible they use as Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson) and the rather portly figure of Lewis Wilson in the title role (though in the character’s Bruce Wayne identity Wilson is more credible than anyone who’s played him since) — but overall this is a quite strong serial, decently written by Victor McLeod, Leslie Swabacker & Harry L. Fraser, effectively directed by Hillyer and especially fortunate in its choice of a villain.

Since this was made during World War II Columbia decided to go topical and have Batman fight a Japanese spy-and-sabotage ring operating here in the U.S. The principal bad guy is Tito Daka (J. Carroll Naish) — variously referred to as “Doctor” and “Prince” in that easygoing attitude towards continuity that affected many serials — who has his hideout in an otherwise abandoned area of town called “Little Tokyo” which the narrator, Knox Manning, describes thusly: “This was part of a foreign land, transplanted bodily to America and known as Little Tokyo. Since a wise government rounded up the shifty-eyed Japs, it has become virtually a ghost street, where only one business survives, eking out a precarious existence on the dimes of curiosity-seekers.” While the reference to the Japanese internment en masse as the policy of a “wise government” is predictably wince-inducing today, the one surviving business on the street is a wax museum of Japanese war atrocities that — in a nice touch of irony from the writers — is the cover for Dr. Daka’s secret installation. (Since the producer was a man named Rudolph C. Flothow, it’s easy to see why the Japanese and not the Germans were the Axis enemies of choice for this project.)

I’d seen the Batman serial once before — in a 4 1/2-hour marathon at the UC Theatre in Berkeley (an enormous old single-screen house that was the forerunner of the Landmark chain) with my brother in the mid-1970’s; I think there were only about four or five other people in the theatre with the requisite craziness to sit through the whole thing on the big screen in one go — and he was at the height of his Madama Butterfly-induced love affair with all things Japanese and was impressed that even though the film’s intent was to be pro-war racist agitprop, the interior décor of Naish’s redoubt nonetheless reflected the beauty of Japanese culture. (It did, too.) Naish’s Daka is quite credibly made up (as Tom Weaver noted, this actor played every ethnicity except his genuine Irish one) and his manner is courtly but still implacably evil — a far cry from the eye-rolling villainy of some of the bad guys in other serials. Batman is a classy project from the get-go, making effective use of Columbia’s roster of standing sets (the nightclub in which a key confrontation happens looked like the same one in which Irene Dunne and Cary Grant played one of their big scenes in The Awful Truth) and coming up with some genuinely imaginative cliffhangers (this is one serial in which the good guys don’t escape seemingly mortal danger just by jumping — as I joked not long ago, anyone who’d ever seen a Republic serial could have figured out how to do a sequel to Thelma and Louise: just before their car went over the cliff, they jumped out of it). The acting is overall pretty good — Shirley Patterson as a more intelligent than usual ingénue is quite appealing and Douglas Croft’s Robin is a bit too chipper, though that’s the character more than the actor — and the action sequences are well staged without the too obviously pulled punches of later serials. I’m certainly looking forward to seeing the rest! — 2/26/06

•••••

I ran Charles episodes eight through 15 of the 1943 Batman serial. There are some curious unintended ironies about this film, including the fact that its plot is based on the premise that the Japanese have successfully designed an atomic weapon and plan to use it against the U.S. — the truth, of course, was the other way around — and the appearance of so relentlessly racist an anti-Japanese film under the present-day banner of a Japanese company, Sony (one of the many dubious miracles of globalization). It’s also ironic that its director, Lambert Hillyer, is best known today for his two 1936 Universal horror films, The Invisible Ray (which, like the Batman serial, involves radium — in that one Boris Karloff becomes a sort of human bomb after he descends into a mineshaft looking for a new radioactive element called “Radium-X” — alas, there was a hole in the glove of his protective suit and as a result the Radium-X contaminated him and made him fatal to the touch: I wonder if Steve Altman ever saw this film, since it seems to anticipate at least part of the premise of his Deprivers series) and Dracula’s Daughter (also a movie involving a mysterious quasi-human who lives in a cave full of bats) — and one other irony of the 1943 Batman is that both hero and villain have their clandestine headquarters in underground grottoes.

One nice touch of the serial that was reproduced in the 1966-68 TV series was that Batman and Robin move from Wayne Manor to the Batcave via a secret entrance concealed in the grandfather clock in Bruce Wayne’s study, and one rather sad element is that the film’s most likable character, radium mine owner Ken Colton (played by Charles Middleton, best known as the sadistic commandant in the two Laurel and Hardy spoofs of the French Foreign Legion, Beau Hunks and The Flying Deuces, and as the villainous Emperor Ming in the Flash Gordon serials), sacrifices his own life in chapter 9 to blow up the mine so the Japanese baddies can’t get at it.

Overall, the second half of this serial confirmed my high impression of the quality of the first — though the state of preservation varied from episode to episode and the first episode was particularly washed out — and I particularly liked the vulnerability of the hero. The essence of Batman’s appeal was always that he was an ordinary human being who had willed himself to be a superhero — he didn’t come from another planet, get exposed to atomic radiation, or receive a magic incantation that gave him super-powers; instead he worked out and trained for the job, but retained the ability to get tired if the fight against evil overtaxed him and even to be killed by normal bullets and the thousand other shocks that flesh is heir to. And this film, more than the 1960’s TV show or the 1989-2005 film series, highlights the vulnerability of Batman (perhaps simply because Lewis Wilson wasn’t exactly Mr. Universe material): he clearly tires from the fight scenes, it takes him a while to get up when he’s escaped the villains’ latest trap for him, and he’s projected as a full-fledged human, genuinely concerned emotionally for the fates of the people he’s responsible for (especially Robin and Bruce Wayne’s girlfriend, Linda Page — played by Shirley Patterson in an enviably spunky performance that should have marked her for biggers and betters) — though the film ignores the darker parts of the Batman backstory and (perhaps blessedly, given how totally the more recent films have milked this plot point) doesn’t bother to tell us that both he and Robin got into the crimefighting business because they were orphaned when criminals killed their parents.

The cliffhangers in the second leg of the Batman serial weren’t as creative as those in the first — there was one in which Batman was trapped in a burning car that was about to go over a cliff and, you guessed it, he jumped out just in time (well, there had to be at least one jump — at least the writers didn’t use that device over and over again the way their colleagues at Republic did!) and another in which Batman is — stop me if you’ve heard this before — trapped in a room where the walls are not only coming together and closing in on him but they have knife blades attached so he’ll be skewered and stabbed well before he’s crushed. Since the villain, Dr. Daka, is running this contraption at the same time as he’s using his zombification machine (which resembles a giant hair dryer) to turn Linda Page, whom he’s kidnapped, into a zombie, I had the feeling the drain on Dr. Daka’s circuits would blow a fuse and cancel the power to allow Batman to escape — but no-o-o-o, Robin (previously knocked out) came to in time to wedge a crowbar between the closing walls and give Batman time to crawl out, and then turned the damned thing off. (I still would have liked it better my way!) — 2/27/06

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I ran Batman: The Movie, the 1967 film with the TV-show cast (and a thoroughly stupid plot involving a scheme to take over the world by turning the members of the U.N. Security Council into a glittery powder with the sinister “dehydration machine,” then rehydrating them). The campy conceits of this plot line were better done on the TV show, where you only had to watch them for half an hour at a time (at that length, they were funny!). Over feature-film length,the gags got a bit wearing after a while, and Adam West and Burt Ward looked merely tired through much of the film (West in particular seemed exhausted by the sheer effort involved in the attempt to pronounce this drivel as if it were meaningful dialogue), but on the whole, it was at least an entertaining movie. — 2/3/96

••••••••••

The 1989 Batman movie holds up quite well, actually, though I still find the ending sequence weak; Jack Nicholson’s performance as the Joker has always seemed to me to be superb — an excellent example of an actor taking all the most offensive, insufferable characteristics of his style (the grin, the vulpine laugh and the general aura of in-your-face decadence that surrounds him and totally undoes his attempts to play heroes) and using them for a character for which they are totally appropriate (much the way James Mason did in playing a very different type of villain in North by Northwest). — 2/10/96

••••••••••

I ran Batman Returns — it struck me how much of a family relationship there is between Jack Nicholson’s Joker in the first new-series Batman film, Danny DeVito’s Penguin in this one and Tommy Lee Jones’ Two-Face in Batman Forever — almost as if they have just one template of villain and they keep stamping them out with only minor variations (whereas the same characters were depicted very differently from each other in the comic books), and how indifferent and perfunctory Tim Burton is as an action director, for all his stunning gifts for atmosphere and a general sense of weirdness. — 2/24/96

••••••••••

Batman Forever is a pretty strange movie — directed by Joel Schumacher, vaguely “produced” by Tim Burton, it starts right in with a big action scene with no exposition at all! Well, after two previous movies in the series, maybe Burton, Schumacher and screenwriters Lee Batchler & Janet Scott Batchler and Akiva Goldsman assumed we didn’t need any exposition — but it’s still nicer to ease into a movie rather than to have it in your face right from the end of the opening credits. The film casts Tommy Lee Jones as Two-Face, a.k.a. former District Attorney Harvey Dent — whose origin is preserved from the comic books: a gangster he was prosecuting threw acid in his face during a trial and scarred the left side of his face, thereby leading to his mental derangement and his emergence as the villainous Two-Face. (Since Billy Dee Williams played Harvey Dent in the first Batman movie, the acid seems not only to have scarred part of his face, but to have changed the skin color of his entire body.) Jones is a superb actor, but he’s been playing demented villains of one sort or another for so long that it has scarred his acting talents as thoroughly as Two-Face’s face — and it doesn’t help that he decided to play this one as a flagrant imitation of Jack Nicholson’s beautiful performance as the Joker from the first Batman, all colorful vocal intonations and vulpine laughs.

Jim Carrey does considerably better as the Riddler — whose origin from the comic books was also retained, at least somewhat (in the comic books he was a sideshow trick artist; in the movie he’s an employee of Bruce Wayne’s research lab who gets fired for inventing a mind-manipulation device that offends Our Hero’s rather prissy sense of morality — but his real name, Edward Nigma — “E. Nigma” — is retained, though the last name is respelled “Nygma” for the film). He’s essentially playing the same dual character he did in The Mask, a mild-mannered clerk type who becomes a highly flamboyant, colorful person in his alternate identity — only he’s surrounded by so much padding that he doesn’t have the opportunity to build gag upon gag the way he did in The Mask, so whereas he had me falling-down laughing in the earlier film, he only evoked mild chuckles this time around.

Had The Riddler been the only villain in Batman Forever, the way Nicholson’s Joker was in the first Batman, and had the plot not been so drawn out with pseudo-psychological padding, Batman Forever would be a much better movie than it was. Indeed, the first half promised an intriguing change in direction for the series, a lighter tone that blended the campy approach from the 1960’s Batman TV show with the darker, more 1920’s-German look from the two Tim Burton-directed Batman films. When the new, redesigned Batmobile turned and started driving up a building — and, in a later scene, Batman swung down on his Batrope in a descent so long and steep it began to look as if he’d acquired his old friend Superman’s power to fly, and subsequently he survived gas fires and all manner of hazards that would have killed an ordinary human being, it appeared as if Schumacher and the new writing team were taking a cartoon approach to the movie that boded well for it as sheer entertainment, however much it may have been sacrificing Burton’s dark, Gothic vision in the two previous films.

Instead, about midway through, with the introduction of Dr. Chase Meridian (Nicole Kidman) as a police psychiatrist fascinated by Batman, the film made an odd turn into psychological depth and introspection that took a lot of the energy out of it. The writers set up the same old man/woman/superhero romantic triangle we remember from the Superman comics — remember how Clark Kent loved Lois Lane, but she only loved Superman, and even a five-year-old comic book reader could appreciate the irony of this given that Clark Kent and Superman were the same person (uh, being, or whatever)? Well, they did it again; Bruce Wayne loves Dr. Meridian, who only loves Batman — though by the end of the film, having been kissed by both men (I expected her to do a Mae West imitation and say, “A man’s kiss is his signature,” the way West did in My Little Chickadee, but she didn’t — though it would have been appropriate for a movie with so many “in” references, from H. P. Lovecraft and Hitchcock’s Saboteur to Ghostbusters and Superman), she’s figured out Batman’s dual identity.

Indeed, by the end of Batman Forever the fact that Bruce Wayne is Batman has become the worst-kept secret in Gotham City — not only does Dr. Meridian know it, but so does Dick Grayson (of the Flying Graysons, gunned down by Two-Face during a circus robbery — yes, Robin finally appears in the modern Batman series this time around, creating a surprisingly Bisexual ending in which Bruce Wayne/Batman ends up with both a girlfriend and a boyfriend!) and even the two villains — though Two-Face ends up dead and the Riddler totally insane (in a dramatic final scene at “Arkham Asylum,” where he’s visited by Dr. Meridian in the company of the asylum’s attending psychiatrist, “Dr. Burton”). All the psychological heavy breathing — in which, as in the first film, Batman relives, again and again, the murder of his parents that made him determined to be a crime-fighting superhero in the first place — really takes away from the action and makes Batman Forever — still an entertaining movie — a lot less fun than it could have been. — 11/2/95

••••••••••

The fourth film in the current Batman cycle — and the seventh in all (counting the two 1940’s serials for Columbia and the 1967 film with the TV cast — interestingly, though there have been seven Batman films only one actor, Michael Keaton, has ever played the Caped Crusader on the big screen twice) — Batman and Robin opens marvelously, with a highly baroque fight sequence between the Dynamic Duo and Mr. Freeze (played by a top-billed Arnold Schwarzenegger) that doesn’t even try for narrative relevance. All we see is the voice and face of Commissioner Gordon on a TV monitor in the Batmobile ordering Batman and Robin to the museum to fight a new villain called Mr. Freeze — and we’re in for 10 minutes of pure, joyous action that’s the best part of the whole movie, full of leaps, tumbles and dazzling effects that proceed in cheery disregard of the established laws of physics. (The final credits list no fewer than 77 stunt people for this film — I believe it — and also credits John Dykstra, the man who made the spaceships fly in 2001 and Star Wars, as head of the special effects. One can tell.)

From then on, alas, Batman and Robin sags — not as seriously as the last Batman film, Batman Forever, a dreary farrago partially redeemed only by Jim Carrey’s dazzling performance as the Riddler, mainly because it doesn’t take itself so mind-numbingly seriously. But the marvelous mixture of dark background and camp foreground that Tim Burton so beautifully hit in the 1989 Batman that started the current series has consistently eluded the filmmakers since. Akiva Goldsman, the rewriter of Batman Forever, gets sole screenplay credit this time, and perhaps it was his (her?) idea to minimize the “serious” subplots (we get only a few seconds of the young boy Bruce Wayne grieving the death of his parents this time, not the whole leaden flashback that brought Batman Forever to a dead stop for about five minutes). But I couldn’t help wishing that Goldsman and director Joel Schumacher had gone whole hog and done an all-out camp job a la the old TV series with Adam West and Bruce Ward.

As it is, Batman and Robin is good clean comic-book fun whenever the actors are actually in action, dreary and dull when they are in repose — and George Clooney’s Batman is no help. One would think that Clooney, with his more buff physique than either Michael Keaton or Val Kilmer, would have been a good Batman — and if he’d had a campier script he could have been a good Adam West-style Batman — but his military haircut and his wooden voice are all wrong for this conception of the Caped Crusader; and Chris O’Donnell, who was much more interesting in Batman Forever despite the longueurs of its script, this time tries to ape Clooney’s woodenness. The most charming performance in the film is Alicia Silverstone’s as Batgirl (even though we’re supposed to believe she’s Alfred the butler’s grand-niece from England, yet Silverstone doesn’t even make the slightest attempt at a British accent!); and Uma Thurman’s Poison Ivy is a close second, though even with her character Goldsman and Schumacher miss some opportunities. She crashes a benefit Bruce Wayne is giving as a trap for Mr. Freeze and does a great dance number to an instrumental version of the old Coasters song, “Poison Ivy” — what else? — yet this scene would have been so much more charming had she sung the song as well!

Add to this Stephen Goldblatt’s overwrought photography — there are scenes in this film (mostly involving Poison Ivy and her artificially enhanced strongman sidekick, Bane) where there is so much color, and it’s so densely packed into the frame without regard to possible clashes, that it almost literally hurts one’s eyes to watch the movie at these points — and Elliot Goldenthal’s serviceable but unmemorable score (Danny “Boingo” Elfman, come back; we miss you!), and we have an all-too-typical example of modern mass entertainment with a few good moments — the kind of movie that, as one recent critic put it, doesn’t so much entertain the audience as bludgeon it into submission. I still love the whole mythos of Batman, but if the lucrative Warners franchise on this character is to continue, they have to make the next film more exuberant, lighter, cheerier, campier and more fun — in other words, lighten up! — 10/25/97

••••••••••

The movie I picked was Batman Begins, the latest (2005) entry in the Warners/DC franchise and the film that was generally acclaimed as the return to form for the series after the much-maligned Batman and Robin (which I actually rather liked, at least early on ), though which both Charles and I found to be a quite decent comic-book movie buried under a lot of pseudo-philosophical padding. It begins in Tibet (“played” by Iceland, by the way), where Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) has escaped the rigors of growing up an orphan after her parents were gunned down by a street criminal (a central element in the Batman mythos, but less central in the comic books than in these films: this is the third time in the five Warners Batman films that we’ve seen this event dramatized) only to find himself in an Asian prison, from which he’s bailed out by an agent from the mysterious “League of Shadows” headed by the mysterious Ra’s Al Guhl (Ken Watanabe).

He’s given a blue flower and told to ascend a mountaintop à la Ronald Colman at the end of Lost Horizon (about the last movie I expected to see ripped off in a Batman film!), where he finds a decrepit version of Shangri-La (well, it has been under Chinese occupation for 46 years) and is trained to become a League of Shadows warrior, only to draw back from that rather dubious honor when he’s told that his mission will include the total destruction of Gotham (Batman’s home town is shorn of the “City” that used to be part of its name); it turns out the League has historically taken down every city that was threatening to destroy the rest of civilization with its excesses, including ancient Rome, Constantinople, London (they sent plague-bearing rats thither in the Middle Ages), etc.

Since the director of this film is Christopher Nolan (Memento, Insomnia) and Nolan also co-wrote the script with Blade creator David S. Goyer, one can expect a lot of confusing flashbacks and playing with the time sequence, and indeed that occurs. At various points during the first hour of this film we learn that once upon a time the young Bruce Wayne and his childhood girlfriend Rachel Dawes (who grows up to be Katie Holmes, Tom Cruise’s current main squeeze) were playing in the Waynes’ gargantuan yard when Bruce fell down a well and was assaulted by a flock of bats (in a scene that’s an almost exact visual quote of Hitchcock’s The Birds, by the way) — giving him a lifelong phobia of bats that proves fatal to his parents when, in the first act of an opera (I thought it was either Turandot or Otello but according to the credits on imdb.com it’s a piece based on the Faust legend with a bass as Faust, a soprano as Marguerite and a tenor as Mephistopheles), Bruce sees bat-like shapes descend from the theatre’s ceiling as part of the staging, and makes his parents take him out — thereby unwittingly setting them up for their murder by street robber Joe Chill (Richard Brake).

Chill later becomes an informant for the federal government against Gotham’s crime boss, Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson), only to be shot down in the courthouse corridor by one of Falcone’s hit men just as Bruce Wayne was about to dispatch him himself. (This is depicted as taking place in the days before metal detectors and searches became de rigueur in public buildings in general and courthouses in particular; indeed, one of the most annoying aspects of Batman Begins is the general uncertainty as to when it takes place — the attribution of Chill’s crime to Depression-induced desperation suggests the 1930’s, the decade when the Batman character debuted, but the settings, fashions and cars are modern.)

This sets Bruce Wayne off on his wanderjahr and his rendezvous with destiny in the Icelandic version of Tibet, which ends with his presumed annihilation of the League of Shadows — though he preserves the life of his own teacher, Henri Ducard (played by Liam Neeson with full British accent, ignoring the presumably French derivation of his character) — his return to Gotham, his discovery that the CEO of Wayne Enterprises is about to sell the family stock holding and take the company public, and his hooking up with the Wayne family butler Alfred (Michael Caine, in the film’s most delightful performance), and Wayne Enterprises’ resident scientific genius, Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman, once again an éminence negre lending more weight and gravitas to a fundamentally silly film than it deserves), who manages to channel all the high-tech gadgetry in Wayne Enterprises’ vaults to Bruce Wayne without once suspecting he’s turning it all into Batgear.

As this film unrolls across two hours and 20 minutes of running time (though the last 10 minutes of that doesn’t really count because it’s the closing credit roll) the plot complications pile on: they include the revelation that even Falcone answers to a higher boss than himself; the theft of a microwave water vaporizer from Wayne Enterprises; a corrupt psychiatrist, Dr. Jonathan Crane (played by Cillian Murphy in a performance that has some of the same demented charm as his work in Breakfast on Pluto); a new hallucinogen that makes people look as if snakes are coming out of their heads and provokes them to fight each other out of fear; and the final revelation that Henri Ducard,the real head of the League of Shadows (ya remember Henri Ducard? Ya remember the League of Shadows? This film is full of Anna Russell moments) is the higher boss of Gotham’s crime syndicate and his plot is to destroy the city by using the microwave gizmo to vaporize Gotham’s water supply, already “spiked” with the hallucinogen, and thereby blow it all into the faces of the city’s entire population.

Batman Begins has flashes of the old camp spirit — notably in the scenes between Bruce Wayne and Alfred — but for the most part, even more than Batman and Robin, it takes itself way too seriously: instead of the annoying strategy of The Mask of Zorro, which camped up the action and took the exposition all too seriously (the Fairbanks/Niblo and Power/Mamoulian Zorro movies had camped up the exposition and taken the action seriously, a much more entertaining way to make a movie), in Batman Begins the exposition and the action basically sit on each other, with hero and villain barking pseudo-philosophical mal mots at each other during the big fisticuff sequences. (I began to miss the splattering of words like “Pow!” and “Zap!” across the screen, and at one point told Charles it made me want to run some of the 1960’s Batman TV shows just to remind myself that once upon a time, Batman was fun.)

Add to that a serviceable but pretty generic score by Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard that made me miss Danny “Oingo Boingo” Elfman’s contributions to the Tim Burton Batman films that much more, and that Mixmaster editing style in which shots are flashed so fast and cut so seemingly at random it’s hard to tell what’s supposed to be going on or who’s doing what to whom (this accursed style, born of music videos, that’s supposed to be the only way you can make a movie that holds the attention of teenagers), and Batman Begins turns into a sporadically entertaining but surprisingly dull movie whose annoying pretentiousness (like that of Spider-Man 2) may have wowed the critics but leaves me pretty cold. I find myself wanting to say to the suits at Warners what I said about Batman and Robin eight years ago: “make the next film more exuberant, lighter, cheerier, campier and more fun — in other words, lighten up!” — 12/29/05

••••••••••

The Dark Knight is a compelling movie but one that really doesn’t achieve the greatness it was clearly aiming for — and it’s a film that’s sincerely out of whack in its attempt to graft intense moral, social and political meaning onto a story based on an old comic book about a rich guy who fights psychopathic criminals dressed in a bat costume. It’s essentially a nightmare vision of Gotham (Batman’s abode is here shorn of the “City” that was traditionally the second word of its name) beset by dueling crime lords from various foreign countries (Italy, Hong Kong and Chechnya — the last of these villains is identified in the dramatis personae just as “The Chechen”) as well as home-grown psycho The Joker (Heath Ledger),who’s targeting the Mafia by sending his gangs to rob all the banks where the Mafia stashes and launders its money. The Joker also murders all his sidekicks so he won’t have to split the money with them — just like Bela Lugosi’s crime lord in the film Bowery at Midnight — and as with that movie one begins to wonder how he’ll be able to get anyone to work with him once his cavalier (to say the least!) treatment of his associates becomes known throughout the underworld.

On the side of good are Batman (Christian Bale, only the second person to play the Caped Crusader in a film more than once — Michael Keaton, who played Batman in both of Tim Burton’s Batmovies, was the first), his long-suffering butler Alfred (Michael Caine), his R&D chief Lucius Fox (Morgan Freeman, éminence noire as usual), along with Gotham’s crusading D.A. Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhardt, who was the one good thing about the 2006 film The Black Dahlia and equally dominates here); his assistant/girlfriend, Rachel Dawes (Maggie Gyllenhaal, replacing Katie Holmes from the first film), who’s also Bruce Wayne’s es-squeeze (so Heath Ledger ended up making movies with both Gyllenhaals!); and Jim Gordon (Gary Oldman), who in this version starts out as a police lieutenant commanding a squad of formerly “dirty” cops Dent investigated before as an internal affairs officer for the Gotham Police Department, and doesn’t get to be police commissioner until midway through the movie when the Joker assassinates his predecessor, Gillian Loeb (Colin McFarlane) — a boy named Gillian? — and Gordon gets the nod to replace him.

The part of this movie that rings truest is the sense of Gotham as an environment where law and order have almost totally broken down; criminals knock off city officials with impunity and have so thoroughly penetrated the official police that people who are trying to work within the system, like Gordon and Dent, are virtually powerless because they have no idea who they can trust. I’d have thought this portrayal was exaggerated were it not literally coming true in Mexico — where the police and the government are so honeycombed with agents for the drug cartels that through much of Mexico law enforcement has virtually ceased to exist (it’s one thing when that happens in a place as sufficiently remote as Colombia; it’s quite another when you read about it in Tijuana and realize how quickly and easily the poison could spread to our side of the border).

The film also aspires to be a metaphor for the “War on Terror,” especially when the Joker boasts that he’s been able to demoralize Gotham and virtually bring down its entire city government just with a few sticks of dynamite and some drums of diesel oil — it’s hard to miss the obvious parallel with the 9/11 hijackers and their ability to transform the politics of the United States and send us on a self-destructive course of invading Iraq and trashing our own constitution and laws just with a few box cutters on airplanes. The parallel breaks down, though, with the refusal of writers Christopher Nolan (who also directed), Jonathan Nolan and David S. Goyer to give the Joker any comprehensible reason, either ideological or financial, for his actions; Michael Caine’s Alfred describes him as “someone who just likes to watch things burn,” which is as close as we’re going to get to this character — at least Osama bin Laden, as maniacal as he is, has an idealistic goal behind his actions, however much his goals (“purifying” the world and re-establishing the Muslim empire from Spain to India on a hard-core fundamentalist path ruled the way the Taliban ruled Afghanistan) are as repulsive as his tactics. The clash between Bruce Wayne and Lucius Fox towards the end — Wayne has used one of his high-tech gizmos to turn every cell phone in Gotham into a microphone so he can monitor all conversations throughout the city and eavesdrop on the Joker, and Fox says that if Wayne goes through with such a hard-core mass invasion of people’s privacy he will resign — also has its obvious parallels with the real-life debates of privacy vs. security during the Bush administration (security won, and given Barack Obama’s vote for the NSA spying bill security will probably continue to trump privacy for the foreseeable future in this country).

The Dark Knight is an impressive movie — the visuals are stunning and the use of real cityscapes (Chicago’s, even though “Gotham” was originally a metaphor for New York), though not quite as effective (at least to my sensibilities) as the Ghostbusters-out-of-Caligari painted (or digitally rendered) backdrops of Tim Burton’s two Batman films, works well and blends effectively with the studio work from Britain (with a side trip to Hong Kong for Batman to kidnap a Chinese gangster hiding out there — how they got the Chinese government to greenlight this sequence given how bad it makes them look is a mystery to me!). Where it’s less fun than it could have been — and I’m sorry I’m being a broken record about this in my comments about all the latter-day Batman movies — is in the sheer ponderousness of it all, the fact that the entire movie (even the action!) is taken at a deliberate pace to try to give the impression of Seriousness to the material when it’s really about a cop and a crook in funny costumes chasing each other across a cityscape.

Aaron Eckhart, a favorite of mine, really takes the acting honors; if he seems a bit too stuffily self-righteous as Harvey Dent it’s because the self-righteousness is part of the character, and when (way too late in the picture) he gets caught in the Joker’s trap, half of his face is eaten away and he becomes the villainous Two-Face (though in this reading of the character Two-Face only kills criminals and crooked cops), he acts the part with real authority and makes the character’s bitterness over the death of Rachel Dawes (yes, that’s right, Nolan and company kill off a major returning character from the immediately previous film, Batman Begins!) believable as motivation for his moral turn. Heath Ledger, by contrast, is just completely wrong; whereas Cesar Romero overdid the camp aspects of the character and Jack Nicholson married menace and camp superbly in what probably remains the greatest performance of his career, Ledger is so relentlessly evil, so utterly un-charming and creepy, that he can’t make an effect.

This was quite deliberate on the part of the filmmakers, but it pissed Ledger off; in the New York Times interview he did a month before he died (the same one in which he confessed he couldn’t sleep for more than about an hour or two at a time) he complained that the Joker was the first role he’d ever played in which the character had no redeeming qualities, nothing he could hold on to as an actor and build some depth. I don’t know that much of Ledger’s previous work — the only films of his I’m familiar with are Monster’s Ball and Brokeback Mountain — but I get the impression that he was a very closed-in performer and he was best at playing introverts, which is the exact opposite of what you need for a spectacular extrovert like the Joker. If Ledger gets any awards for this performance, it’ll be as a memorial and a gesture towards what he could have done if he’d lived rather than for any intrinsic quality he showed in this film!

But then the problem with the whole movie is its air of strained seriousness, the ponderousness with which it’s paced (it times out at 2 hours and 33 minutes, at least a half hour too long for its own good) and the sheer nihilism of the ending: the Joker is captured alive (Batman rescues him from a fall off a tall building), Harvey Dent a.k.a. Two-Face is killed, Batman agrees to take the rap for the five murders Dent committed in his Two-Face identity to preserve Dent’s heroic image and make him a martyr for law and order — which means Batman will be an outlaw and all the police in Gotham will try to capture him — Lucius Fox, on his way out the door at Wayne Enterprises, erases the entire computerized network and destroys the company’s whole R&D department; Rachel (the girl both Bruce Wayne and Harvey Dent loved) is already dead; and the mood is one of hopelessness and despair, not at all how one wants a superhero movie to end nor what one would expect from the most popular movie of the year Obama won the presidency! It also makes me wonder just how on earth even the best screenwriting brains Warner Bros. can hire can come up with the inevitable sequel! — 12/14/08

Hercules Unchained (Galatea/Embassy, 1959)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Charles and I had a chance to run a movie and I picked out the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 take on Hercules Unchained, the second in the series of Italian Hercules movies from the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. For some reason they did this one before they did Hercules, the 1958 film that initiated the cycle and first cast American actor (using the term loosely) Steve Reeves in the title role — maybe because this is even worse than its predecessor. Made mostly by the same people — director and co-screenwriter Pietro Francisci, who along with his writing partner Ennio De Concini pieced his story together from various mythological sources, including the Queen Omphale story as well as the sequels to the Oedipus myths, Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus and Aeschylus’ The Seven Against Thebes. The writers got one story right: they staged the fight between Hercules and Antaeus the giant (played, in his last film appearance, by former heavyweight boxing champion Primo Carnera — whom Charles and I could recall having seen previously only in his bizarre appearance as himself in Mighty Joe Young) at least something like the way it was in the original myths: as the son of the earth goddess, Antaeus was rejuvenated and refreshed by his mom’s energy, so Hercules couldn’t defeat him until he realized this and held him up in mid-air, lifting him with one hand and punching him out with the other … though in the film Hercules gives him a wrestling-style spin and hurls him off the shore into the nearby ocean (different god, no jurisdiction).

What seemed most obviously different was the level of sexual content; Hercules Unchained (a really silly title because you never actually see him chained at any time during the film!) spends most of its time in the kingdom (or queendom) of Lydia, ruled by Queen Omphale (Sylvia Lopez), which is the location of the “Fountain of Forgetfulness,” which causes Hercules to forget all about his wife Iole (Sylva Koscina) back home in Thebes, along with King Oedipus (whom he’s encountered blind and living in a cave) and his sons Eteocles (Sergio Fantoni) and Polynices (Mimmo Palmara), who were supposed to take turns ruling Thebes and switch off at one-year intervals, only Eteocles double-crossed his brother and intends to keep the throne, while Polynices organized a resistance movement and threatened a civil war. In this version, Oedipus asks Hercules to become a shuttle diplomat and negotiate a truce between his two sons — only by the time he regains his memory the war has already happened and both Eteocles and Polynices have been killed. (Since this was intended as a “family film,” the script carefully omits the backstory — we see Oedipus blind but don’t get to find out that he put out his own eyes in shame when he learned that he had killed his father and married his mother, so Eteocles and Polynices have no idea that their mom was also their grandmom — nor do we get the aftermath of the war and the nasty business with Oedipus’ daughter Antigone that Sophocles wrote so movingly about.)

What director Francisci seemed to be more interested in this time than last was appealing to the straight male audience; the Gay hints he dropped in the first film are removed and instead he uses the “Fountain of Forgetfulness” gimmick (not all that different from the big plot twist in Wagner’s Götterdämmerung — which only highlights the vast gulf between Wagner and Francisci as artists!) mostly as an excuse to allow Steve Reeves to cavort with a hotter-looking actress than the one playing his wife (and if Sylvia Lopez hadn’t got leukemia and died after completing only one other film, she might have been able to give Brigitte Bardot a run for her money in the Euro-bimbo department) and to show a lot of other scantily clad actresses playing Omphale’s serving girls serving the men of Hercules’ crew in other ways. For all its silliness — and the surprising (well, not so surprising to anyone who’d seen the first Hercules in the cycle) dullness of the action scenes — this movie does take advantage of the greater sexual frankness of European films at the time, and while we don’t get any out-and-out soft-core porn there’s a refreshing honesty about what all these men want out of all these hot-looking women.

Alas, that’s about all that can be said for Hercules Unchained; otherwise the film is ludicrous, from the opening scene in which Hercules and Iole are shown riding around in a covered wagon (did the ancient Greeks really have such things or were these producers warming up for the spaghetti Westerns?) to the absurd casting of light-skinned, blond-haired Sergio Fantoni and swarthy, dark-haired Mimmi Palmara as brothers, from the bad English dubbing to the even worse reformatting to fit a CinemaScope image into a TV-screen shape (they didn’t even pan-and-scan this one: they just put up whatever was in the middle of the screen originally, which means we get a lot of shots of half-people), this is a pretty useless movie and the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 crew do what they can with it, including dressing Mike Nelson up to look like Steve Reeves (this was before he was the host, but he was the head writer and filled in when they needed a bit of on-air talent in addition to the “regulars”) and passing him off thereof in the interstital segments.

Memron (Crewless Productions, 2004)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film Charles and I eventually watched last night was Memron, a 2004 spoof whose title and capital-“M” logo clearly marks it as a spoof of Enron, though interestingly, director and co-writer (with Robert Stark Hickey) Nancy Hower doesn’t make it a spoof of Enron itself, but the aftermath of the Enron collapse, with CEO Ken Clay (Michael McShane, a bulbously obese and repulsive screen presence who’s exactly right for the role even though it’s hard to imagine anything else he can play besides a fallen fat-cat CEO) serving six months of a 10-year sentence and basically playing a combination of baseball and golf in the prison exercise yard — he hits golf balls with a club, but his guards are forced to field them like baseballs — before he’s released and placed under house arrest. Most of the dramatis personae are the flotsam and jetsam of Memron who found themselves suddenly unemployed and bereft of their life savings when the company imploded — though Clay maintains a skeletal operation and sends his principal assistant, Justin Zimmerman (David Wiater), into the unemployed workers’ meetings as a spy.

The workers themselves are in a seminar called “Where’s Your Parachute?” (a quite wicked play on the book title What Color Is Your Parachute?, the book that purports to help you treat unemployment as an empowering experience) that’s held in a grade-school classroom and is a humiliating experience for all parties concerned. When the workshop leader challenges them to explain in plain English just what they did in their former jobs at Memron, they’re unable to do so without lapsing into human-resources jobspeak! Among the fired are Bruce Corning (Jeff Hayenga), a disgusting go-getter type with a penchant for turning his hand into a model of Puff, the Magic Dragon that sickens everyone he does it for, adults and children alike; Shelley Johansson (Mary Pat Gleason), heavy-set middle-aged woman who’s Corning’s principal victim; Tamara (Susan Saunders), basket case with a penchant for getting into weird scrapes with the law; Janet Kelso (Shirley Prestia), rail-thin, of indeterminate age and closed-in crabbiness; and the closest thing this movie has to a truly pathetic figure, Jim Westerfield (Chris Wells), who’s sleeping in his car because he can’t afford to maintain a home for both himself and his mother (Pat Crawford Brown), and who in what little he has of a private life gets bossed around not only by mom but also by his layabout brother Donald (Joey Slotnick). Jim also lusts after the Memron office slut, Brenda Wright (a marvelous performance by Evie Peck) but can’t bring himself to ask her for a date even though just about every other male in the movie (including, in the film’s most bittersweet sequence, Jim’s hated brother Donald) is able to get into her pants just by looking at her.

Memron is a film largely hamstrung by its budget limitations — director Hower called her production company “Crewless Productions,” and though imdb.com actually does list some crew members for the film it does have the look of a sole filmmaker with a video camera following her actors around and getting the scenes down as best she can. Still, she gets some great gags — notably out of ex-CEO Clay’s predicament when (after making telephonic assignations with her lover in Italian, her native language but one he doesn’t understand a word of) his trophy wife Vangelia (Claire Forlani) walks out on him and he tries to chase her but can’t because every time he steps off the sidewalk outside his house, the beeper of his house-arrest ankle bracelet goes off and alerts the cops. Hower and Hickey also come up with a great spoof of capitalism run rampant when the ex-Memronites come up with a new business idea — bottling and selling air — and there are some great scenes of them trying to collect the stuff at various beaches, then attempting to figure out a way to bottle it as well as working out an ad campaign to get people to pay for air instead of getting it free (the slogan they come up with is “Air … It’s the Next Big Thing”), trying to run the business out of Jim’s mother’s garage (no one else was willing to rent to them and even Jim’s mom won’t let them into her house, not even to use the bathroom!) and ultimately seeing their idea get stolen by Ken Clay and Justin Zimmerman, who use it to revivify Memron and get back on top again while their ex-employees are once again left in the dust.

Memron is less a spoof of Enron than of capitalism in generally and specifically the “unemployment industry” vividly exposed by Barbara Ehrenreich in her book Bait and Switch (at times the film seems almost a deliberate spoof of her book, even though it came first!), and with the economy totally melting down these days some aspects of Memron seem both more funny and more grim than they probably did in 2004, when the shady and downright illegal business practices of Enron seemed like just the sins of a handful of companies instead of the capitalist system as a whole — and the fact that Hower and Hickey chose to advertise their film with the tag line “The Trickle-Down Has Trickled Out” seems to indicate that their satirical agenda encompassed more than just one bad company!

Parole, Inc. (Eagle-Lion, Equity, Orbit, 1948)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Parole, Inc. turned out to be a modest but interesting little movie, coming from the dregs of PRC right after it had been taken over by J. Arthur Rank, renamed “Eagle-Lion” (to reflect the transatlantic U.S.-British nature of the company) and aimed for more prestigious films. The production credits are almost as multifarious as those on a modern movie (where it seems that anyone who put money into a movie gets a production-company credit and a marvelously ambiguous computer-generated logo to flash on the screen): the opening credit identifies it as an Equity production (“This movie is going to be foreclosed on,” I joked), the copyright notice is to Pathé Industries and the closing credit is to Orbit Productions. The cast is a pretty good one for a second-tier studio: Michael O’Shea (one of the many James Cagney wanna-bes that got shafted by the refusal of the original Cagney to give up these bad-ass roles as he aged) as the hero, Evelyn Ankers and Turhan Bey reunited from Universal as the principal villains, and Lyle Talbot (considerably bulkier than he was either at Warners in the 1930’s or in his Ed Wood appearances in the 1950’s) as a police commissioner.

There’s one of those long, interminable crawling forewords that makes this look more like a 1935 movie than one from 1948 (though the huge, bulbous, tank-like cars the people were driving give away its real vintage) to the effect that some states have such lax parole systems that conviction of a crime is little more than “a minor inconvenience,” while in states where the laws are “more inflexible” crooks attempt to get their colleagues paroled via bribery. The film then fades in on a carefully unnamed state whose parole board has been paid off big-time to let off certain major crooks specified by a syndicate, and police agent Richard Hendricks (Michael O’Shea) is assigned to go undercover and pose as a recent parolee from another state (assuming the identity of a crook who fled the country) whose confederate in a bank robbery is about to be paroled in that state if Carson — to use the alias Hendricks assumes (though the person he’s impersonating is actually named Murdock) to infiltrate the gang that is selling dirty paroles.

He traces a recent parolee, Harry Palmer (Charles Bradstreet), to the Pastime, “a combination gin mill and cheap café” (as Hendricks explains in his voice-over narration into a Dictaphone — apparently screenwriters Sherman L. Lowe and Royal K. Cole had seen Double Indemnity — which he delivers from a hospital room where he’s trussed up in bandages à la The Invisible Man) owned by Jo-Jo Dumont (Evelyn Ankers), who’s agreed to hire him as a “driver” because his wife Glenda (Virginia Lee) already works for her as a waitress. We suspect she really wants him around for criminal purposes, and of course we’re right. Carson attempts to get himself into the good graces of the gang so he can trace the gang to Dumont’s superior, who turns out to be corrupt attorney Barney Rodescu (Turhan Bey — an Egyptian-American actor playing a Romanian … right), and it all ends up in a confrontation at a farm to which Carson’s “friend” Monty Cooper (Charles Jordan) was supposed to be paroled.

Since Monty would immediately “out” Carson as a government agent if they ever met — they were supposed to have committed a crime together but in fact they’ve never seen each other (one would have thought the police might have offered Carson a reduced sentence for posing as a corrupt parolee and going along with the plot, but no-o-o-o-o) — the cops arrange for police from other states who want Carson for crimes he committed elsewhere to re-arrest him as soon as he’s released, but the extradition paperwork isn’t completed in time and so Cooper arrives at the farm, outs Carson, and the gang tortures him before the police finally arrive to say the day. Both archive.org and imdb.com list this as a film noir, which it isn’t — director Alfred Zeisler and cinematographer Gilbert Warrenton shoot it straightforwardly without a hint of chiaroscuro or noir atmosphere, and the story is full of good good guys and bad bad guys without a hint of ambiguity (Turhan Bey’s character is courtly enough one could imagine him as a pleasant dinner guest, but that’s about all you can say for him).

It’s also one of those silly movies in which the crooks are careful and cautious about some things and reckless and stupid in others — as when one gang member shoots Harry Palmer to keep him from spilling the beans, and later attacks and tries to kill Glenda as well (only to be busted by a well-time visit from the cops); one wonders how he’s going to explain all these bodies lying around, especially since he makes no attempt to dispose of Harry’s corpse, nor does he (as I should have thought he would, under the circumstances) try to fake a setup that will make Harry’s death look like an accident. Nonetheless, Parole, Inc. has enough fresh “spins” on the old clichés that it’s reasonably entertaining, and it’s quite well acted for a “B” — Virginia Lee rather overdoes the scene in which one of the thugs is menacing her, but otherwise hers is a quite compelling characterization even though the film would have had more nuance if she’d been shown falling for the cop à la The Big Heat.

Private Buckaroo (Universal, 1942)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

This morning I ran the 1942 film Private Buckaroo to dub the songs off its soundtrack (there were no fewer than 14 of them!) and had fun seeing it again even though it’s a pretty pointless movie — well, the point was to crowd in a lot of great swing music by Harry James and the Andrews Sisters, along with a nice title song sung by Dick Foran in much the same vein as his introduction of “I’ll Remember April” (also a Raye/De Paul song) in the Abbott and Costello comedy Ride ’Em, Cowboy. The plot — there is a plot — deals with radio crooner Lon Prentice (Dick Foran), who’s desperate to get into the Army despite his one flat foot, and eventually does so — while Harry James (who in real life was 4-F) is drafted and there’s a lot of “comic” byplay about James’ inability to blow bugle calls. (There’s also a lot of wince-inducing references to James as “the world’s greatest trumpet player,” which he wasn’t; in 1942 the world’s greatest living trumpet player was Louis Armstrong.)

The plot gimmick is that Prentice complains about the Army’s rules and regulations, and as a result lieutenant Howard Mason (Richard Davies) decides to exempt him from having to do anything he doesn’t want to do — figuring (rightly) that this will piss off the other men so much that eventually Prentice will want to pull his fair share of duty and become a good soldier just to gain the respect of his peers. Meanwhile, Prentice is also romancing Mason’s sister Joyce (Jennifer Holt). The plot goes through more twists and turns than one would think possible in a 69-minute musical with at least eight songs, some of them generated by the eight-year-old sister of the leading lady, who’s got to be one of the most consummate child bitches ever put on the screen by anybody. Also involved in this bizarre movie is Donald O’Connor (as one of a pair of dead-end teenagers who lie about their age to enlist).

The best part of Private Buckaroo is the music; the second-best part is the comic relief, which is actually a good deal more entertaining than the plot it’s supposed to be relieving: sergeant “Muggsy” Shavel (Shemp Howard, during that period of his career when he still got to make great movies with first-class comics like W. C. Fields, Olsen and Johnson and Abbott and Costello, before the illness of his younger brother Curly forced him into the Three Stooges as Curly’s replacement) and entertainer Lancelot Pringle McBiff (Joe E. Lewis — the real one, who frankly comes off much more like Bert Lahr than Frank Sinatra!) are romantic rivals for the affections of well-proportioned but big-nosed comedienne Bonnie-Belle Schlopkiss (Mary Wickes).

At the end there’s a fascinating sequence showing the Andrews Sisters singing suitably patriotic songs with titles like “Johnny, Get Your Gun Again” and “We’ve Got a Job to Do” amidst a lot of stock footage showing combat and also war production — when I showed this film to Charles right after I bought the videotape he watched this sequence and said, “Wow! Universal was doing socialist realism!” It’s a decent movie, effectively directed by Edward Cline (even though it doesn’t contain any of the demented slapstick that was what ex-Keystone Kop Cline did best as a director) from an O.K. script by Edward James and Edmond Kelso based on a story by Paul Gerard Smith — and the music is a lot of fun for any swing buff (and there’s a lot more of it than in some of James’s more lavish “A” vehicles for major studios!).

Santa Claus Conquers the Martians (Jalor Productions, 1964)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I made the mistake of trying to sit with Charles through another movie, a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 incarnation of the film Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. I had no idea this movie would actually turn out to be worse than its reputation: directed by Nicholas Webster from a script by Paul L. Jacobson and Glenville Mareth, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians turns out to be a “children’s movie” that any self-respecting child within hailing distance of normal intelligence would have walked out on. The sets look like they were built in a high-school shop class, the costumes as if the filmmakers made their “Martian” attire out of converted pajamas, and the story so perfectly achieves a consistent level of uninspired banality that it contains no entertainment value whatsoever. It also doesn’t help that John Call, playing Santa (the only cast member anyone ever heard of again was Pia Zadora, here in her pre-pubescent years playing one of the Martian kids), sounds like he was drunk out of his gourd through the entire shoot, or that the actress playing his wife looks like a Mrs. Butterworth syrup bottle come to life and is about as animated.

The plot? It seems there’s a civil war on Mars between the people who like the fact that Martian children are dead-serious miniature versions of Martian adults and the faction that wants to teach them to play and have fun, and for which purpose they abduct Santa Claus from earth -— only, as the title suggests, he turns the tables on them. It’s the sort of movie whose credits list a “custume designer” where they obviously meant “costume designer,” and one can only hope that aside from Ms. Zadora all the unfortunate actors trapped in this movie eventually found honest work doing something else. The most (unwittingly) entertaining sequence in the film was a stock shot of U.S. Air Force bombers undergoing air-to-air refueling — the very same stock footage that was used in the opening of Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece Dr. Strangelove. Imagine: one of the best movies of all time and one of the worst movies of all time using the same stock shots!

And Now for Something Completely Different (Playboy/Columbia, 1971)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film I picked out, largely because I felt Charles wanted a comedy (and, having been up since 5 a.m. and being a bit weary, so did I!) was And Now for Something Completely Different, the 1971 British film that marked the big-screen debut of Monty Python and was originally intended to “break” the great comedy team in the U.S. I remember seeing the trailer for this film quite often at the Cento Cedar Cinema, the marvelous revival house in San Francisco where I saw quite a few interesting films for the first time, and being totally confused by it — the routines being excerpted in the trailer were obviously supposed to be funny but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how or why. Later, in 1975, KQED, the PBS station in San Francisco, started regular showings of the Monty Python TV episodes — and from the moment I saw the first one, particularly the sketch “It’s A. Tree” (billed as a talk show hosted by the eminent arts authority, Arthur Tree, and turning out to be literally hosted by a tree, with such guests as a piece of wood, a patch of creosote and a lump of laminated plastic), I was falling over with laughter and I was hooked.

This movie was actually produced by Playboy Enterprises’ short-lived film division for release by Columbia (the second Monty Python film, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, was also a Columbia release; Life of Brian came out from Warners’ and The Meaning of Life from Universal) and was a flop in the U.S. but did well in Britain, where audiences remembered the sketches (or most of them) from the TV show. (The show was filmed between the first and second seasons of the TV series and some of the sketches in it, notably the Hungarian-English phrase book sequence, had already been written but not yet videotaped for TV.) The film is basically a greatest-hits DVD for Pythonmaniacs (many of whom have noticed that the versions of some of the sketches seen here were not identical to the ones on TV — there were a few abridgments and some rewrites): such hilarious routines as “How Not to Be Seen,” “Military Fairies” (there was a glitch on the DVD when we watched this one but I suspect the disc just had dirt on it at that point), “The Killer Cars,” “Hell’s Grannies,” “Hungarian Phrasebook,” “Ex-Parrot,” “Lumberjack,” “Mountaineering” (in which Eric Idle interviews for a mountaineering expedition with a team leader who literally sees double — he’s convinced there are two Eric Idles and two peaks to Mount Kilimanjaro, which there aren’t, and says that the purpose of this year’s expedition is to find whatever traces remains of last year’s expedition, which disappeared without a trace while trying to build a bridge between the two peaks), “The Restaurant” (in which the management of a fancy restaurant are progressively reduced to sniveling tears and utter craziness by the discovery of a dirt stain on a fork) and “Upper-Class Twit of the Year,” appropriately used as a finale — all artfully bridged by Terry Gilliam’s famous animated sequences — are all here.

Back in the 1970’s I didn’t realize (even though I’d grown up on the Beyond the Fringe album, the pre-Python troupe that loosed Dudley Moore on the world) that Monty Python was at the end of a long line of British zaniness that had begun in the 1950’s with the Goon Squad (Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe) and continued through Flanders and Swann (whose album At the Drop of Another Hat is one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard — it holds up better than Songs for Swingin’ Sellers even though Flanders and Swann hardly achieved the worldwide fame of Peter Sellers) and the other comedy groups George Martin produced for records before he discovered the Beatles. Still, this material is incredibly funny and reaches the heights of anything-for-a-laugh zaniness that was my original attraction to Monty Python in the first place: the idea that they would dare anything at all, as long as they thought it would be funny (and they were usually right, at least until they made The Meaning of Life, all too much of which crossed the bounds from hilarious to tasteless). Holy Grail and Life of Brian are the Pythons’ movie masterpieces, but And Now for Something Completely Different is nice to have and it’s particularly valuable to have so many of the great Monty Python routines in one place.

Christmas Classics on Early TV: “The Christmas Carol," “Miracle on 34th Street”

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I ran him a couple of quirky Christmas shows he’d downloaded from archive.org: a 1949 kinescoped live version of A Christmas Carol (for some reason retitled The Christmas Carol even though Charles Dickens himself, as well as all his other adapters that I know of, used the indefinite article) and a 1955 (though misidentified on the archive.org site as also from 1949) hour-long TV version of Miracle on 34th Street. The Christmas Carol was produced by Mike Stokey and Bernard Ebert (which makes it sound like a film-review show from Chicago) and written and directed by Arthur Pierson. It begins with a narrator, Vincent Price, reading from a large picture-storybook edition of the classic Dickens tale, and periodically (where the original commercial breaks were spotted) the scene returns to Price in his armchair with his book giving us the next tidbit of exposition needed to follow the story.

It’s a good adaptation even though it’s hamstrung by the limited time available — it was squeezed into a half-hour time slot and, less commercials, they only had about 25 minutes to tell their story. Pierson did a good job of condensing the Dickens story into the limited time available — though other people (including whoever wrote the script for Ronald Colman’s performance on Decca records) have done it better — and there’s one pretty astonishing special effect for live TV: Marley’s ghost enters the scene by walking through a closed door (actually a piece of paper with the image of the door superimposed over it) and into the set representing Scrooge’s room. Charles was annoyed by the identification of the central character as “Ebeneezer” (he lamented the fact that it had five “e”’s and I pointed out that that was only one more than Dickens had used) but otherwise it was quite good for the limited budget, facilities and running time, getting the basics of the story in even though it wasn’t a great adaptation: Taylor Holmes’ Scrooge didn’t have the authority of the truly great portrayals (including Alastair Sim and Jim Backus, who voiced the character superbly on Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol) and the ghosts were appealing (and George James as Christmas Present was clean-shaven and considerably hunkier than what we usually get!), while the Cratchits included the child Jill St. John (under her real name, Jill Oppenheim) as Missie and a refreshingly un-milked Bobby Hyatt as Tiny Tim.

Miracle on 34th Street (1955) was considerably better, partly because it was shot on film — when we saw the principals observing the real Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade it was clearly a process shot rather than some stopgap cooked up in a live TV studio — and partly because it was the work of a major studio: 20th Century-Fox, which had produced the original 1947 film (written and directed by George Seaton based on a story by Valentine Davies), hired writer John Monks, Jr. to boil down the story to a 46-minute time slot, not counting commercials (less than half the 96-minute running time of the movie) and threw some great people into the project on both ends of the camera: MacDonald Carey in the John Payne role, Teresa Wright in the Maureen O’Hara role, Thomas Mitchell stepping into Edmund Gwenn’s red suit as Santa Claus and the marvelous Hans Conried playing Shellhammer, Doris Walker’s (Wright) direct supervisor at Macy’s (who in the 1947 film was played by a nondescript character actor named Philip Tonge) and some of the usual Fox people in the technical jobs: Lyle Wheeler as co-art director, Ben Nye and Stanley Orr doing makeup and Charles Le Maire as one of the costumers.

The director was Robert Stevenson, no doubt warming up for his later assignments at Disney (including Mary Poppins) but still an excellent director and easily in Seaton’s league in terms of getting this story told and evoking the tears without going all-out in jerking them. MacDonald Carey doesn’t have the romantic panache John Payne brought to the role of Gaily (which sounds really weird on the soundtrack!), the attorney who successfully defends Kris Kringle (Mitchell) from a charge of insanity because he believes himself to be Santa Claus, and Sandy Descher as the daughter is good and shows welcome restraint but doesn’t quite grab the part the way Natalie Wood did in the film. Still, this is a quite appealing movie and, despite the condensation, tells basically the same story as the original and makes all the same points — and both Wright and Mitchell are every bit as good as their 1947 counterparts, O’Hara and Gwenn. This was a quite nice production, and I wonder how many other interesting TV remakes of their film hits are moldering in the 20th Century-Fox vaults!

Campus Rhythm (Monogram, 1943)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I ran Charles another in TCM’s recent tribute to Gale Storm: Campus Rhythm, a 1943 musical directed by Arthur Dreifuss from a script by the usual committee: screenplay by Charles R. Marion, Albert Beich and Frank Tarloff from an “original” (quotes definitely intended) story by Ewart Adamson and Jack White, that seemed to be riffing off some of those interesting early-1930’s musicals Ginger Rogers was making pre-Fred Astaire in which she played a radio crooner tired of the mold the sponsors, network officials and others around her were forcing her into and ready to rebel in whatever ways she could. In this version, Gale Storm plays Joan Abbott, teenage singing sensation whose program, sponsored by the Crunchy-Wunchy cereal company, has earned her the nickname “the Crunchy-Wunchy Thrush” — only Our Joan wants a break from radio stardom so she can go to college like a normal high-school graduate (she lists all the different high schools she attended while touring as a vaudevillian before she got her show). But her uncle Willie (Douglas Leavitt) is in debt for $5,000 to the show’s advertising agent, J. P. Hartman (Herbert Heyes), and Hartman will forgive the debt only if Willie — who’s still Joan’s guardian since she’s underage — signs Joan for another series of shows.

Joan has no idea this has happened until she hears it announced at the end of (what she thinks is) her last show that her contract has been renewed — the revelation is one of the most charming scenes in the movie, as she tries to hold on to a game face in public while seething with resentment inside — and naturally she’s upset, enough that she steals the identity of Hartman’s secretary Susie Smith (Marie Blake) and enrolls at Rawley College under Smith’s name. Desperate, the ad agency leaks the news that the whole thing was a publicity stunt and invites the radio audience to seek Joan out. Meanwhile, Joan falls in with the boys at a fraternity, including Buzz O’Hara (Robert Lowery), who leads the student band and is generally the B.M.O.C.; and comparatively nerdy “Scoop” Davis (Johnny Downs, top-billed and once again forced to play in a musical and watch other people do the numbers even though he was a superb tap dancer), who wears glasses, edits the school paper, thinks students should be concerning themselves with world affairs instead of dances and other trivia, and is horrified at the “news” of Joan Abbott’s publicity stunt even while he’s falling in love with her “Susie Smith” identity.

The writing committee does manage to put a few new spins on this ragbag of college-movie and radio-movie clichés — including a couple of marvelous scenes in which Uncle Willie comes to the town where Rawley is located, tries to trace Joan, and ends up being busted as a peeping Tom by the local policeman (Tom Kennedy, at least marginally less dumb than he usually played) — but the plot is little more than a pretext for eight, count ’em, eight songs: six listed on the official credits and two more, “Me, Myself and I” and “Baby, Won’t You Please Come Home,” “sung” by Candy Candido in his trick voices. (On their own terms, these numbers are acceptable novelties — but I’m too used to hearing these songs done by great singers like Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, respectively.) Even the ending is a bit of a cheat — we see Gale Storm giving her first radio broadcast of the new season after she’s been “outed,” with Buzz O’Hara’s band (winner of a nationwide contest for college bands sponsored by another company in the Hartman stable) backing her, and while we presume she and “Scoop” end up together (he’s in the audience at the broadcast with a sore ass from the paddling his fraternity brothers gave him to get him to stop being such a nerd and have some fun in his life), the fadeout is on Gale Storm singing, not clinching.

I could think of several other more satisfying resolutions the writing committee could have given this story — like having Joan Abbott continue in school and do her broadcasts as remotes from the campus, with Buzz’s band backing her — but as it is Campus Rhythm is a nice piece of fluff, benefiting from some well-honed performances by the women (who totally out-act the men in this one): GeGe Pearson as comic singer “Babs” Marlow (the joke is she’s been a freshman for eight years and Candy Candido, her boyfriend, has been one for 10, and he’s waiting for her to catch up), Marie Blake as (the real) Susie Smith and Claudia Drake as campus bitch Cynthia Walker, who’s out to destroy Susie because she’s afraid Susie is after her boyfriend, Buzz. There’s even a short scene that actually takes place in a classroom — most college movies of this period never bothered to show any actual education going on, but this one at least features a trigonometry class (and trig is as boring as I remember it from my own school days!), and director Dreifuss and cinematographer Mack Stengler (an old Monogram hand) get a few surprisingly atmospheric shots as the college boys and girls romance each other after dark. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Gale Storm (best known for her early-1950’s TV series My Little Margie) is an appealing personality who deserved to be as big a star as Doris Day — who had a similar winsomemess and vocal skills — and probably would have been if she’d been at a major studio instead of Monogram. Intriguingly, this film opened with a Pathé logo — a real surprise — which I take to mean that Pathé distributed this film outside the U.S. and THAT was the source of the print that survived.

Blazing the Western Trail (Columbia, 1945)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I ran a movie I’d recorded off TCM immediately after Rockin’ at the Rockies: Blazing the Western Trail, a 1950 Columbia Western that was part of a series called “The Durango Kid” featuring 1930’s actor Charles Starrett (another star who, like Randolph Scott, focused exclusively on Westerns and thereby stretched out his career for a couple of decades after he stopped getting offered “civilian” roles) as a Lone Ranger-esque good-bad character who wore an all-black outfit and masked his face (the better for stunt double Ted Mapes to substitute for Starrett in the action scenes, especially one spectacular fall from the roof of a building), the difference being that unlike the Lone Ranger he had a civilian identity too, as Jeff Waring, who comes to the Quanto Valley in the middle of a war between two stagecoach companies (the year is 1870) for the rights to the U.S. mail contract.

The good stagecoach company is Halliday’s, run by Bill Halliday (Nolan Leary) and his daughter Mary (Carole Matthews, an appealingly spunky performer who probably deserved better than female leads in “B” Westerns) and her comic-relief sidekick “Cannonball” (Dub Taylor, who probably had to post-record all his dialogue — joke). The bad stagecoach company is Brent, owned by Forrest Brent (Al Bridge) and run by Jeff Waring’s uncle Dan (Steve Clark). Though Dan is a decent guy and has been kept in ignorance of this, Brent has hired a goon squad of outlaws to burn Halliday’s garage and rob his coaches — in a spectacular action highlight early on, the Brent janjaweed dynamites a bridge just as a Halliday stagecoach is traveling on it, and it falls into the canyon below (it’s a pretty obvious model shot but it’s a quite good model shot and certainly credible for a “B”) — and when Dan Waring stumbles onto the truth and threatens to expose Brent (like the typically dumb movie character he is, he tells Brent and the leader of Brent’s gang to their faces that he’s going to expose them instead of just shutting up and doing so), a Brent gang member shoots him through Halliday’s window and sets Halliday up for the fall.

Though all their drivers have quit and gone to work for Brent, Mary Halliday and “Cannonball” continue to drive Halliday’s one remaining stage — and when they’re held up by Brent’s no-goodniks, Jeff Waring and his sidekick Tex Harding (the actor’s name is the same as the character’s) come to their rescue and drive off the outlaws. Jeff takes his late uncle’s job as Brent’s manager, mainly because he suspects Brent in the death of his uncle and figures that by working inside Brent’s operation he can get the evidence he needs to nail the guy — and when Brent’s outlaws continue their campaign to harass Halliday, Jeff assumes his Durango Kid identity and not only protects the Halliday stage but pulls the same outlaw tricks on Brent’s stages, though he carefully deposits everything he steals from Brent with the town sheriff (Edmund Cobb). Eventually Mary Halliday and Brent agree to stage a stagecoach race, with the winner to get the postal contract, and though the sight of two such lumbering vehicles racing each other doesn’t sound like it would be that exciting, the race is actually staged quite well by director Vernon Keays (how do you pronounce his last name?), and the Durango Kid drives the Halliday stage part of the way and helps it win, meanwhile extracting a confession from Jim McMasters (Mauritz Hugo), Brent’s head hired gun, that he killed Dan Waring on Brent’s orders.

Jeff rides off into the sunset in the best Lone Ranger style but Tex actually stays behind and pairs with Mary Halliday for a happily-ever-after ending. What makes Blazing the Western Trail (a bit of a misnomer because no trails get blazed in the film, either literally or figuratively — J. Benton Cheney’s screenplay credit really should have had quotation marks around the word “original”!) distinctive is that it features the OTHER Kings of Western Swing, Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys (he and Spade Cooley dueled for the title), as guest artists — and they’re cut so boldly into the action, with no attempt to provide any reasonable segue into their numbers or any rational pretext for why these people should be singing at this time, that I can’t help thinking that screenwriter Cheney asked producer Colbert Clark, “Don’t you want me to write cues for Bob Wills’ songs?,” and Clark replied, “Oh, don’t worry about that — just write us a Western script and we’ll stick in the songs wherever we feel like it.”

That’s precisely what they did, though the Wills songs add a great deal to the entertainment value of the film even though by then he’d largely retreated from the “swing” part of Western swing and his sole concession to jazz was a trumpet (cornet, actually, assuming the musician played the same instrument during the pre-recordings that he’s shown with on screen) player who seemed to think that if he ended each solo with an out-of-tempo legato passage in a weirdly unrelated key he’d sound like Bix Beiderbecke. (I’ve heard Wills records that sounded a lot jazzier than his playing in this film, including one called “Lyla Lou” that’s a state-of-the-art swing chart from the late 1930’s — but wasn’t actually released until the 1980’s — and others that added clarinet to the mix and sounded more like a country/Dixieland mix.) It’s still a lot of fun to hear Bob Wills in this film and see one of his most famous bands — though one wonders where their electric guitarists plugged in in 1870 — and he adds a lot to what’s otherwise a fairly standard “B” Western, though at least a well-done one with a few genuinely creative compositions from Keays and cinematographer George Meehan.

Rockin’ in the Rockies (Columbia, 1945)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I ran Charles a rather nifty 1945 Columbia “B” I’d recorded recently from TCM: Rockin’ in the Rockies, one of the few feature-length (more or less: this one times out at just 62 minutes!) films the Three Stooges made during their initial (1934-1957) tenure at Columbia, when they were employed mainly making the famous series of shorts that later proved comeback vehicles for them when Columbia’s TV subsidiary Screen Gems released them to television in 1958. Rockin’ in the Rockies is a modern-dress musical Western set in and around Reno, featuring the Stooges (though they’re top-billed) basically as support for a pair of ingénue leads, young ranch owner Rusty Williams (Jay Kirby) and New York entertainer June McGuire (Mary Beth Hughes, the marvelous femme fatale of The Great Flamarion appealing in this part and doing a couple of nice vocals as well, though I’m not absolutely sure it’s actually her voice).

June and her partner Betty Vale (Gladys Blake) — who gets some nice vocal features of her own — are playing in a Reno casino and have $75 each with which they plan to return to New York when their engagement abruptly ends. Stooges Larry Fine and Curly Howard play two vagrants who are being hunted down by the sheriff; when they accidentally win $1,500 at the casino attached to the nightclub where all this is happening, Shorty Williams (Moe Howard) sees it as an opportunity to make a dishonest dollar and sells them shares in his (nonexistent) mining venture, then tells the sheriff he can’t arrest them as vagrants because they’re his business partners. A comedy with the Three Stooges as comic miners à la Chaplin’s The Gold Rush might have been even more fun than the film we actually get, but the film we actually get is charming (though rarely laugh-out-loud funny — probably the best gag is one in which Larry and Curly fall into an overstuffed trunk Betty has packed and emerge from it in full drag).

The Stooges discover that a Broadway producer, Tom Trove (Tim Ryan), is in town and literally kidnap him to force him to listen to their lineup of country talent, including June, Betty, the Hoosier Hotshots (a comedy-jazz band sort of like a cornpone version of Spike Jones) and the Cappy Barra Boys, a harmonica ensemble who perform — of all things — Count Basie’s star-making hit “One O’Clock Jump” (inexplicably credited to white pianist/bandleader Bob Zurke on the imdb.com Web page for this film!) — as well as Spade Cooley, the King of Western Swing (both Cooley and Bob Wills were billing themselves that way then), who don’t have a role in the film (unlike most of the other musical performers; the Hoosier Hotshots double as the ranch hands à la The Wizard of Oz) but come on at the end for one song. Meanwhile, Rusty Williams (ya remember Rusty Williams?) has invited mining engineer and entrepreneur Sam Clemens (Forrest Taylor) to come to check out his land to see if there are any potentially valuable minerals on it — and for his pains Clemens gets arrested and then later on in the film both he and Rusty are hog-tied and thrown into a shed by the Stooges so they won’t bother the audition. (There are some amusing gags around Clemens’ name and the fact that it was also the real name of Mark Twain — a rather surprising intellectual conceit for a Three Stooges movie.)

Eventually Rusty gets both Jane and a successful mine (after one of the other characters brings in some smoldering black rocks from his land and they turn out to be a fictitious but highly valuable substance), the Stooges open a nightclub in the ranch house and everyone presumably lives happily and prosperously ever after. Rockin’ in the Rockies is one of those quirky Westerns in which automobiles and horses are equally important means of transportation, and there are so many songs in it that it qualifies as a musical, but at least it’s fun and there’s an attempt to characterize Moe Howard separately from the other Stooges the way Groucho Marx was usually cast as a person with at least one foot in respectable society while his brothers played total rapscallions. (Things slip up in one slapstick scene in which the other two Stooges address Moe as “Moe,” not “Shorty.”)

I’ve blown hot and cold on the Three Stooges: when my age was still in single digits and their shorts were enjoying their renewed popularity on TV, I thought they were hilarious. Later, after I’d seen a lot of truly great silent comedy, they seemed tiresome and decidedly unfunny — and the violence of their “humor” wasn’t the biggest problem; Laurel and Hardy also tripped each other and poked each other in the eyes, but somehow with them you felt for them even as you laughed — Stan and Ollie created characters you liked and cared about, whereas Moe, Larry and Curly came on, did their things and any resemblance between them and real human beings was purely coincidental. Now I can appreciate them a bit more again; though there are funnier movies in the world than the Stooges’ films, one can admire the almost balletic precision of their timing and their ability to stage such violent slapstick and move in the proper, well-rehearsed synch needed for these routines to work — and here, at least, you get them in small enough doses (and with a lot of nice music in between the comedy routines to leaven them) that they’re entertaining instead of oppressive.

The one figure in this film who IS oppressive is male lead Jay Kirby, who in a role that cries out for the winning personality of Gene Autry or Roy Rogers (the obvious models for Columbia’s scripting department) is tall, gangly, nerdy and cursed with a voice that sounds like he was sucking on helium before every line. Still, Rockin’ in the Rockies — scripted by the usual committee (J. Benton Cheney and John Grey from a story by Gail Davenport and Louise Rousseau) and directed by someone named Vernon Keays (and no, I don’t have any idea how to pronounce his last name!) — is a harmlessly fun movie and worth an hour of your time.

28 Days (Columbia, 2000)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film I picked was one of a couple of DVD’s I’d had Charles buy us at Vons from their two-for-$10 table: 28 Days, a rehab movie from 2000 that I’d been curious about for a while — Charles had brought over a VHS tape of it from one of his friends who was getting rid of them all now that it’s the DVD era (and no sooner will I have everything on DVD than the format will probably change again and everything will be exclusively on Blu-Ray … or perhaps the next format, in which the player will beam movies directly into people’s heads without the intervention of any other hardware) and I had seen the DVD on sale last night … the cover promised a widescreen version but the disc itself didn’t deliver anything other than the pan-and-scan version, though this wasn’t the sort of movie that really suffered much from being panned-and-scanned.

28 Days has been criticized for being too light, too fluffy and more of a pop-rehab movie than one that really drags the audience through the depths of addiction and the difficulty of recovery — and that all may be true, but I found it charming, at times hilarious, at times deeply moving and entertaining throughout, and from what I’ve read about addiction treatments — especially high-end residential programs in rural settings like the one (“Serenity Glen”) depicted here — the routines as shown here, including the boot camp-like aspects and the use of ritual shaming as a therapeutic technique (in one scene the heroine is forced to wear a sign around her neck at all times that reads, “Confront me if I don’t ask for help”) and even the bizarre routine involving horses (the idea is that just being around equines is comforting for humans and helps them get centered and grow beyond their addictions) ring true.

28 Days is the story of Gwen Cummings (Sandra Bullock, displaying the kind of compact dark-haired feminine appeal and no-nonsense attitude that probably would have made her a good choice for a movie about Christine Maggiore), New York party girl and some sort of writer (the imdb.com synopsis describes her as a newspaper columnist but that’s not apparent from the film itself) whose flame-out is shown by writer Susannah Grant and director Betty Thomas in a few quick economical scenes: she’s at a party at a New York disco where they’re playing the Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” (the idea that anywhere in the world there’s a disco in 2000 that’s playing the Clash itself requires a suspension of disbelief!) and Gwen is publicly losing it, slamming her body into everybody else’s table and undressing a man and commencing sex with him right on the dance floor. We don’t even have any idea that these two people know each other until we see them continuing the proceedings in a rather ratty-looking apartment, and we don’t know that they’re actually a couple until they wake up in bed together the next morning after their amorous but drug- and alcohol-fueled activities accidentally set fire to the place; fortunately, the male, Jasper (Dominic West), was able to put the fire out without much lasting damage to anything except Gwen’s bra, which how has two large holes in it in front of where the nipples would ordinarily go.

Though it’s Saturday, Gwen suddenly realizes that they’re late for a major appointment, and it turns out it’s the wedding of her sister Lily (Elizabeth Perkins) to strait-laced young man Andrew (Andrew Dolan). Several sheets to the wind not only on the alcohol and prescription drugs (Vicodin is her drug of choice) she consumed the night before but the ones she’s hurriedly gulped down that morning, Gwen grabs food from the hors d’oeuvre trays with her mouth without any intervention from her hands first; later she takes the entire tray and places it on a chair, where a matronly lady sits on it and ruins her dress; still later she grabs a drink, tosses it down, loses her balance and falls ass-first in the wedding cake, then steals the black limousine the bride and groom had rented to take them from their wedding to their wedding night with the drug-induced intention of finding a cake store and buying a replacement on the spot. Only she loses control of the limousine and crashes it into one of those silly hitching-post statues of one of her sister’s neighbors, and the next we see of her she’s confronting the admissions clerk at Serenity Glen (it’s supposed to be in upstate New York but the scenes there were actually filmed in Asheville, North Carolina),who’s ordering her to surrender her cell phone and other possessions (“This ain’t the Sheraton,” the clerk growls) while she serves the 28 days in rehab she’s been sentenced to as an alternative to jail for the theft of the car and the damage she did with it.

From then on the movie becomes a sort of updated adult version of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, with Gwen entering rehab as the freshest girl, with a big-time chip on her shoulder and a total disinclination to take the process at all seriously. She approaches a man on the shore of the lake that borders the place, asks him for a cigarette — which he provides (nicotine being the one addictive substance the inmates of this place are permitted) — and to score for her, which he refuses, telling her that her counselor will have her thrown out (which will automatically lead to her serving time in jail) if she’s caught using on the premises. Then it turns out this rather nerdy-looking man is her counselor, Cornell Shaw (Steve Buscemi).

Gwen is put off by her roommate, teenage heroin addict and self-mutilator Andrea (Azura Skye), and isn’t much more thrilled by many of the other people there, including Gerhardt (Alan Tudyk), a German-accented Gay man whose already thick voice approaches incomprehensibility and goes over at his most emotionally intense moments; Eddie (Viggo Mortensen, looking genuinely sexy for one of the few times in his career), a professional baseball player who’s in for addictions to cocaine and casual sex with women (he even makes a pass at Our Heroine even though on-campus sex between patients is yet another one of the bozo-no-no’s around the place); Daniel (Reni Santoni), a former doctor whose idea of handling his alcohol consumption was sticking a tube down his throat into his stomach so he could suck it all out again, until one day he missed, hit his neck, required a life-saving tracheotomy (presumably from a more sober surgeon than himself!) and lost his license as a result; and several others, including one referred to in the credits simply as “Guitar Guy” who sings deliberately awful songs about substance abuse and recovery (and is played, surprise, by a genuinely talented major music star, Loudon Wainwright III).

Andrea’s biggest disappointment in rehab is she’s missing the new episodes of her favorite soap opera, Santa Cruz — the inmates are allowed to watch TV only during the evenings — but Eddie is also a Santa Cruz fan (as a pitcher, he doesn’t have to play every day so he follows the soap on the days he has off) and he has episodes sneaked in on videotape. The “soap opera” is actually a demented satire — I’m presuming Susannah Grant wrote the scenes we see depicting it as well as the overall script for the film, and she (or whoever) put tongue firmly in cheek and came up with a marvelously accurate lampoon of soap-opera plots (the young lovers are not only brother and sister but it turns out each one is also involved with an older partner, and the girl’s lover is the doctor who’s supposed to be treating her brother/boyfriend for a fictitious disease with a long Latinate medical name that supposedly amounts to a lot of little clots in his brain instead of one big one).

Eddie teaches Gwen to throw a baseball and hit the strike zone (he’s presumably going back to his team and so he’s set up a practice target on the grounds); and, appalled by the usual send-off the facility gives its clients/patients/inmates/whatever the hell they are after the titular 28 days (a group hug and sing of Bill Withers’ “Lean on Me” — which is heard as the outro music on the closing credits, though alas in Tom Jones’s then-recent cover rather than Withers’s far more subtle, plaintive original), when Andrea is discharged Gwen stages a mock scene from Santa Cruz with the other clients taking parts. Alas, it does no good as Gwen sneaks in a dose of heroin and O.D.’s fatally — but the tragedy seems to put the final seal on Gwen’s own recovery, and there’s the inevitable tag scene in which Gwen and Jasper try to get together afterwards but find that without booze and pills to unite them, they really have nothing in common. (The scene in which she approaches a horse from one of New York’s remaining hansom cabs and does the exercise she learned in the facility — and Jasper is left perplexed that she’s jilted him for a horse! — is one of the funniest and most poignant in the film.)

Gerhardt, who while in rehab asked the counselor about whether or not he could have sex and was told to buy a plant, and if it’s still alive in one year buy a pet, and if that is still alive in one year maybe he can consider dating again, turns up with a dead plant pleading with the florist who sold it to him, “It can’t be my fault that this plant died or I’ll never get laid again!” — an example of how the logic of rehab (that you can’t involve yourself with other people until you’ve first finished your work on yourself) can be stretched to the fascistically absurd. No, 28 Days is not the great rehab movie (or the great anti-drug or anti-drinking movie), but it’s charming, funny, poignant and quite well done — and ably held together by Bullock’s performance, equally credible in the character’s stoned and sober moments.

Leaf (Parking Lot Films, 2008)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I wanted to go to the library for what looked like an interesting movie: Leaf, a 2008 film about the former San Diego Chargers (and Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and Dallas Cowboys, and Seattle Seahawks) quarterback Ryan Leaf. What I hadn’t realized was that the San Diego Union-Tribune had run a big story about it on the front page of its sports section the day before, so about 200 people turned out to see it. They were expecting a personal appearance by the film’s director, Tim Carr — who also wrote it and starred as Ryan Leaf -— but before the film began library staffer Lynn Whitehouse (whom Charles and I know well by now!) announced that the real Ryan Leaf had just lost his latest job and therefore Carr was unable to make it because he was reworking the ending of his film, so what future audiences would see would not be what we saw at the end.

Leaf (the movie) turned out to be — well, not really a documentary since virtually everybody in it was played by an actor (only a few of the figures in Leaf’s life, notably Union-Tribune sportswriter Jay Posner — whom Leaf swore at in the clubhouse after an early defeat and thus alerted San Diego’s media and fans that this was a problem child — appear as themselves), and not really a “mockumentary” either since its intent wasn’t to make fun of Leaf or America’s football cult in general (though both, especially the latter, deserve satire) but to present him seriously and even semi-sympathetically. Leaf is a frustrating movie because its impoverished production budget shows — we don’t get to see any footage of Ryan Leaf in action (the costs of either licensing the actual clips from NFL Films or staging pro football games were way beyond the kind of money Carr and his company, “Parking Lot Films,” had available), many of the “actors” are barely competent, and the production is pretty cheap (much of it looks like it was shot on video with available light, which was probably the case) — and because it’s clear writer Carr is as clueless as to What Made Ryan Run (in both senses of the last word!) as the rest of us, though as Leaf Carr is just right: a perpetually perplexed jock who still can’t understand why he fell so far so fast and keeps repeating that it was all for the best because it was a “learning experience.”

Despite its deficiencies (and the inherent difficulty in making a biopic about someone who’s still alive and whose life lacks an obvious “climax” — the way this sort of sports movie is supposed to end is with the formerly reprobate player pulling himself together and becoming a star, but that’s not how the real story turned out), Leaf is a quite engaging movie even if you don’t know or care that much about football. Certainly the reach of the game is such that even I knew who Ryan Leaf was and what craziness he was putting the San Diego Chargers and their fans through by his on- and off-field antics in 1998 through 2000 — and one thing that at once perplexes and fascinates about Leaf’s story is that he was relentlessly self-destructive without any of the usual excuses — he didn’t drink, do drugs or have a diagnosable mental illness; instead he was one of those too-young men thrust in a position of authority and whose relentless bravado masked some pretty obvious insecurity and fear (“Am I really that good?”).

There were at least three reporters doing interviews in the lobby outside the library auditorium, including two from TV stations (KUSI and KNSD) — and one of the people being interviewed said he thought what had ruined Leaf was the $11.5 million signing bonus the Chargers had paid him up front on top of a $30 million contract, which meant that he’d already made his pile and therefore he didn’t really have to do anything to earn it. (He’s quoted during the film as saying that he won’t have to touch that money until his kids are ready for college — though given that he’s already been married and divorced, and his relationships with women are as crazy as his relationships with everyone else, one shouldn’t hold one’s breath waiting for any more little Leaves to come into existence.) The more I think about that, the more that makes sense — though other players have got big signing bonuses and have delivered as expected.

One of the film’s most interesting characters is a kind of Greek-chorus character called “Colts Fan,” played by Geoffrey Wigdor as a slightly built white man with dark, curly hair and a hyperactive manner, whose purpose is to contrast Leaf with the young quarterback the Indianapolis Colts drafted at the same time, Peyton Manning, who led his team to a Super Bowl victory in 2007 while Leaf was coaching at a minor high school — and whose name is bracketed with Leaf throughout the film as the phenom who made it versus the one who didn’t.

Christmas at Rockefeller Center (NBC-TV, 2008)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The 2008 edition of Christmas at Rockefeller Center was a pretty perplexing program with various stars of yesterday and today, including Tony Bennett with the “Count Basie” orchestra (a ghost-band performance that’s particularly bizarre when you recall that Bennett made an album with the real Count Basie in 1960) and a capable pianist, Monty Alexander (he doesn’t sound like Basie — who does? — but he’s still an excellent accompanist and spark plug) doing “Winter Wonderland” and showing all the other singers in the program how it’s done. Jamie Foxx did a decent version of “The Christmas Song” on vocal and piano; Harry Connick, Jr. also did double duty at the mike and on the keys, though oddly his vocal on “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” was more ragged technically than Bennett’s even though he’s considerably younger.

The country vocal group Rascal Flatts did a decent version of “White Christmas” (Bing Crosby will own this song into eternity — though the versions by Charlie Parker, Clyde McPhatter and whoever did it on the Phil Spector Christmas album are worth having). Faith Hill did a pretty pretentious “Joy to the World” with the Morgan State University Choir (are you aware of a 51st U.S. state named “Morgan”? Didn’t think so). Rosie O’Donnell came on with a bunch of teenage dancers called her “Broadway Kids” for a genuinely amusing if incredibly dated novelty called “We Want to See Santa Do the Mambo.” Miley Cyrus did “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” capably enough — I think Brenda Lee was even younger when she recorded the original version than Ms. Cyrus is now — but Cyrus’s (female) backup singers were hotter-looking than she was (and I suspect they probably have better voices too!).

The Jonas Brothers turned up to do an original called “All I Want for Christmas Is the Girl of My Dreams” — and they were surprisingly good; though they’re hardly a ground-breaking band, they rock hard and don’t come up with the wimpy harmony-driven songs usually associated with the term “boy band” (and at least two of the Jonases appear to play guitar — at least they were holding guitars and miming playing them, though I don’t think they were plugged in and a professional three-piece backup band played behind them), and for their market niche they’re surprisingly rugged-looking, enough that if they auditioned for a Gay porn video they’d probably be turned down as “too butch.”

American Idol winner David Cook dared John Lennon’s “Happy Christmas (War Is Over)” and made it clear that he shared its anti-war sentiments. Beyoncé ex-Knowles did a pretty pretentious song called “Ave Maria” that took its first few notes from Schubert but was otherwise original, a rambling meditation on faith that Beyoncé (who’s a much better singer and actress than her reputation — remembering how good she was as the Diana Ross analogue in Dreamgirls I’m not at all upset that she’s playing Etta James in the new movie Cadillac Records) plodded through and tried her best to turn into something coherent. It closed with the official lighting of the Radio City Christmas tree and a number from the Rockettes called “Let Christmas Shine” that was likable.

Rosie Live! (NBC-TV, 2008)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

This morning I watched the Rosie Live! show from last Wednesday as well as the Law and Order episode that followed it — with a “special Thanksgiving edition” of the rancid quiz show Deal or No Deal (which seems to combine the worst elements of Let’s Make a Deal and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?) sandwiched in between them (which I used the skip function to avoid). Rosie O’Donnell’s show was her usual mixture of egomania and self-ridicule of her egomania, with a madly assorted guest list including Liza Minnelli — they did a pathetic duet called “City Lights” which was about what you’d expect from a pairing of a once-great singer who’s totally lost her voice with a non-singer who never had one — walk-ons by Alec Baldwin and Harry Connick, Jr. (he sang a nice chorus of “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas”) and a featured song by Alanis Morrissette (the high point of the program) as well as one by Neo, a fedora-topped Black guy with a low-cut black shirt and matching pants. When he came on I dreaded that we’d hear a rap song, but in fact Neo (thoroughly belying his name) turned out to be a quite nice retro-soul singer.

O’Donnell did an opening monologue joking about her desire to hug every Black person she saw after Obama won (the fact that African-Americans voted 70 to 30 percent to annul her marriage as well as mine and 18,000 others didn’t seem to enter into this) and most of her jokes weren’t all that funny. This show isn’t going to revive the moribund variety genre — not when “narrowcasting” and audience differentiation killed it in the first place (the days when even budding rock ’n’ roll stars like the Beatles turned to MOR showcasers like Ed Sullivan for commercial and cultural validation are long, long gone) — and as it stands it’s a monument to Rosie O’Donnell’s overweening ego more than anything else.

Suspense (CBS-TV; two episodes, 1949 & 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Charles had logged on to archive.org and had downloaded some interesting items, including five Charlie Chan radio shows and two 1949 episodes of the Suspense TV series — actually a radio anthology show that was transferred to TV, live production, cheesy organ soundtrack and all — one called “Murder at the Mardi Gras” featuring George Reeves in between his Warners and Superman days, and the other an adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s (his middle name was misspelled “Allen” on the opening credit) “The Cask of Amontillado” featuring Bela Lugosi — not, as I’d expected, as the narrator, but as Fortunato, the man on whom the narrator (played with a marvelously sinister sense of outward courtesy and nobility by Romney Brent, the British actor and author whose book Nymph Errant became the basis for Cole Porter’s 1933 British musical for Gertrude Lawrence, which contained some of his very best songs; Brent did his own adaptation and he and Porter spent a lot of time hanging out and socializing together while working on the show) wreaks his terrible revenge.

Halstead Welles adapted the story with surprising creativity; instead of keeping it in period, Welles set it in Italy after the war and made Brent’s character a former aristocrat dispossessed by the fascists in general and Fortunato in particular. Fortunato in this incarnation was an early adherent of Mussolini’s movement who was rewarded by being given a generalship in the Italian army (if Mussolini really handed out commands this way no wonder the Italian army was so useless during World War II!) and allowed to requisition the nobleman’s estate. He also more or less forced the nobleman to let him marry the man’s youngest sister, and she died in a plane crash — which the narrator suspected he arranged deliberately to eliminate her because Fortunato had in the meantime started an affair with the narrator’s own wife.

While all this backstory lacks the enigmatic power of Poe’s famous opening — “The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge,” which aside from being the source of the phrase “adding insult to injury” keeps us powerfully in the dark as to just what Fortunato had done to the protagonist and why he wanted revenge — it not only serves to make the narrator/murderer a more sympathetic figure as he narrates the story to two American military officers as a frame by which the original tale is told in flashback. Lugosi’s performance is marvelous — with a far better role than the horrible ones he was getting stuck with in his movies by then, and in the unusual position of being on the receiving end for a change, he responds to the challenge and turns in a wonderful job of acting both the character’s surface bravado and his ultimate cowardice. And he’s ably partnered by Brent, who’s equally fine in his delineation of the narrator’s outward courtliness and inward bitterness.

The show was done live, which rather surprisingly put Lugosi at a decided advantage over his fellow cast members; forced, as usual, by his limited command of English to learn his lines phonetically, ironically he’s the one cast member who’s so grounded in what he’s supposed to be saying that he makes no audible slip-ups in his lines — and whoever directed (I don’t recall a directorial credit) did a really good job of staging the story within the limitations of a live telecast from a tiny studio even though it’s all too obvious that Lugosi and Brent are going round and round the same set of studio stairs even as they’re supposed to be descending into a catacomb. The show is sponsored by Auto-Lite, an intriguing name to be seeing on a show these days — especially given their boast that they made 400 different sorts of auto parts at a time when it’s beginning to look like the American auto industry is going to go the way of its consumer electronics industry and disappear completely — and the commercials are typically early-TV tacky (endearingly tacky, but still tacky), but the show itself is quite appealing and I look forward to watching the other episode.

••••••••••

Charles duly arrived at 9 and we stayed up long enough to have tamales for dinner and then we ran the Suspense episode “Murder at the Mardi Gras,” a 1950 show that was billed on archive.org as featuring George Reeves — former Warners contractee and future Superman on TV — even though in fact Reeves is billed third and it’s Tom Drake, Judy Garland’s “boy next door” from Meet Me in St. Louis, who was featured above the episode title. Written by Charles Robinson from a story by Robert A. Arthur and David Kogan, “Murder at the Mardi Gras” was a neat little mystery with an almost incomprehensible resolution: Drake plays up-and-coming movie actor Dan Bedell, who’s in New Orleans for the Mardi Gras and who falls in love with Connie Williams (Mary Sinclair) and plans to propose to her — only a gambler, Morgan Nelson (Robert Emhardt), at whose casino Dan has lost a hefty chunk of change, tells Dan that Connie is actually a blackmailer in cahoots with corrupt reporter Bill Reed (George Reeves) to get him into a compromising situation so they can extract money from him in order to protect his career.

During this confrontation, a shot from Dan’s balcony kills Nelson’s bodyguard Louie (a young and almost unrecognizable Jack Klugman) and Nelson sticks Dan and Connie with the body. They decide to dress the corpse in Bill’s Mardi Gras costume and take him out of the hotel as if he was merely another passed-out reveler — only the police spot them, as does Nelson, and Nelson is holding everyone else at gunpoint (it turns out he and Reed were co-conspirators in the blackmail racket — at least that’s how I think it turns out: the plot got awfully shaky as it lurched towards resolution) when the cops come in, save Dan and Connie from Nelson’s determination to kill them, arrest the baddies and send the two young lovebirds to Hollywood and shared fame. This isn’t exactly fresh writing but it’s a lot of fun, and director Robert Stevens (who also produced) stages it effectively within the limits of live TV and pads it out with some relatively well-done inserts of stock footage of the real Mardi Gras. (The CBS logo at the end featured a disclaimer that some of the show had been done on film — at that time using film on TV was considered “cheating,” a holdover from the days of radio, where virtually all shows were done live and broadcasting a pre-recorded transcription or a commercial record was considered a sign of desperation!)

Attack of the Giant Leeches (AIP, 1959)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Charles and I had come home from the library movie and run a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 presentation of something called Attack of the Giant Leeches, a 1959 drive-in co-feature from the bowels of American International — indeed, the same unit at the studio that had given us Night of the Blood Beast the year before: Roger Corman as executive producer, his brother Gene Corman as line producer and Bernard Kowalski (and this time the MST3K crew did make the obvious Tennessee Williams jokes around his name) as director. Night of the Blood Beast — despite a rather disgusting title that made the movie sound considerably gorier than it turned out to be — actually had an intriguing concept that faltered in the execution, while Attack of the Giant Leeches was just plain bad and didn’t even have the potentially saving grace of an even remotely credible monster.

To create the giant leeches (of which there were only two, played by Guy Buccola and Ross Sturlin), the Cormans and Kowalski just took the usual American International monster suits, dyed them black and put on giant funnel-like mouths that supposedly sucked the blood out of the bodies of their victims. As usual, these things were much more funny than scary, and if Attack of the Giant Leeches has any appeal at all it’s in the rather oddly Tennessee Williams-esque backstory (so having a director named “Kowalski” helm it was actually somewhat appropriate!). It’s set in the Florida swamp country and features Yvette Vickers in a surprisingly good performance as Liz Walker, blonde bimbo out of Carroll Baker’s Williams-scripted Baby Doll role (though at least she forebears from sucking her thumb) who’s chillingly child-like and, though married to tub-o’-lard Dave (Bruno VeSota), starts an affair with the far hunkier (and slimmer) Lem Sawyer (George Cisar) — only Dave catches them in flagrante delicto (or as close to it as the Production Code would still allow in 1959), grabs his shotgun and drives them at gunpoint into the swamp, whereupon the giant leeches duly make their appearance and eat them both.

Once Vickers’ role is over (about midway through this film’s seemingly interminable 62-minute running time), so is most of the interest in this film; the good guys (Ken Clark as federal ranger Steve Benton and Jan Shepard as his girlfriend, Nan Greyson) are dull as usual, there’s the usual stupid pseudo-scientific explanation of where the monsters come from (ordinary swamp leeches artificially enlarged by radioactive debris from the rocket launches at Cape Canaveral — yeah, right) and a final sequence in which the monsters are presumably vanquished, though the movie ends so abruptly it’s hard to tell and it’s a mystery whether the filmmakers were trying to keep it daringly open-ended (are there more giant leeches in that swamp?), setting up a potential sequel or — my guess — just being sloppy. The MST3K crew filled out the meager running time of this one with the opening episode from the 1936 Republic serial Undersea Kingdom, and it was pretty obvious they were having a lot more fun mocking that than they were with the feature film — especially when their “tag” clip came from the serial (the scene in which the typically obnoxious pre-pubescent movie kid played by Lee Van Atta has climbed to the top of a building and opened its skylight just so he can watch the star, Ray “Crash” Corrigan, wrestle some of his college buddies) and not the feature!

Priceless (France 2 Cinéma and others, 2006)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2008 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Charles and I planned to go the library for the movie and it proved to be a good one even though it was hardly the film promised by the blurb: Priceless, a 2006 French production starring Audrey Tautou (who seems to have taken over from Gerard Depardieu as the French actor whom their government stipulates must be in every movie made there) as Irène, the sort of woman who in 1930’s Warners movies would have been called a gold-digger: she latches on to wealthy men and offers them her body and her companionship in exchange for every material item — dresses, jewelry, fancy meals and whatnot — she can get out of them. The film takes place at a variety of upscale French hostelries and begins with her latching on to Jean (Gad Elmaleh), a rather nondescript though not unattractive young man who’s really a bellboy but whom she takes for someone with money — and takes, and takes, and takes until his meager savings are utterly exhausted and he’s stuck with a room and food bill he couldn’t pay in 100 years.

Just then Madeleine (Marie-Christine Adam) a middle-aged blonde with a striking resemblance to Lauren Bacall, picks up Jean when he hears the desk clerk calling to a bellboy to pick up her bags and, on instinct, he snaps to and starts to get them. She’s a wealthy female looking for a young boy-toy, and when the two of them stroll off together the desk clerk calls the manager and tells him to put the bill for his room onto hers. Meanwhile, Irène has latched onto her own alternate pigeon, Gilles (Jacques Spiesser), though she keeps running into Jean at the hotel (and at various other hotels, because at some point I didn’t really pick up on — mainly because all these overstuffed hostelries looked pretty much the same to me — the action moved from the Provence region of France to Biarritz to Monaco) and giving him tips on the sex-for-money business, which seems so universal in this movie that at times it looks like everyone in that particular hotel is either a sex worker or a client.

Dumped by Gilles when he catches her making out with Jean on a balcony, Irène hatches a plot to entrap a prince as her next customer, and to do this Jean has to fake an assignation with Irène’s friend (and the prince’s former pay-for-play flame) Agnès (Annelise Hesme), which in turns blows it between Jean and Madeleine — but at the end the two penniless young lovers drive off in a scooter that’s the last remaining bit of the proceeds of Jean’s coupling with Madeleine and they desperately fish their pockets, purses and other receptacles to find the one-euro coin they need to pay the toll on a bridge … The End. Priceless is one of those delicate little French comedies in which the end is one you can see a mile away (just as most of the similar screwball farces in 1930’s Hollywood ended with the penniless young would-be gold-diggers turned lovers together and not worried about their financial futures because they had Love) but what’s good about it is the subtlety of the gags and the sophistication of the wit (there’s one scene in which Irène has to sneak out her room with Gilles and she’s waiting for him to fall asleep, and the only way she’s able to get him to sleep is to have sex with him first — I told you this was a French comedy!).

I’ve noted before how the French admiration for Jerry Lewis seems even more incomprehensible in light of the subtlety and wit of their own comedies, and Priceless is an example (though there’s one scene, in which Madeleine returns unexpectedly to the room she’s renting for herself and Jean while Irène is there and the film briefly turns into a French farce as they play dodge-’em around the room) — plus it’s an absolutely lovely film visually, filled with all the colors of the rainbow (not just green and brown as are all too many films these days) and a quite interesting visual effect in which cinematographer Gilles Henry keeps the principals in crisp focus in the foreground while the background blurs out into an approximation of an impressionistic painting, which gives the film a soupçon of visual elegance that adds to its overall appeal and offers an artistic use of color far beyond what we usually get in American films these days!