by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The movie was The American Ruling Class, an engaging 2005 pseudo-documentary written by then-Harper’s editor Lewis H. Lapham — a sort of apostate from the American ruling class since he has the right background, gets invited to all the right parties (including the annual World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland — the primo get-together of the world’s ruling classes — which he’s written scathingly about in his magazine) but trashes them every chance he gets. Directed by John Kirby from Lapham’s script, The American Ruling Class presents its documentary material in the context of a fictional framing story in which two recent Yale graduates are contrasted: Jack Bellamy (Caton Burwell) knows perfectly well that he wants a stint in the American ruling class, and he has managed to land a job as a beginning broker at Goldman Sachs (the investment bank that’s primus inter pares among America’s investment bank and has been the recent go-to place for both Republican and Democratic presidents for secretaries of the treasury); and Mike Vanzetti (Paul Cantagallo), who’s debating whether he wants to go after a similar job or take a year off to write a novel and support himself by being a waiter. (The symbolism that Jack has an Anglo last name and Mike has a white-ethnic one is unstressed but definitely there.)
Along the way Jack and (especially) Mike meet up with a lot of real people playing either themselves or thinly veiled versions of themselves — Barbara Ehrenreich turns up as a waitress with the name tag “Barb” (her best-selling book Nickel and Dimed, in which she lived underground for several months as a member of the modern proletariat, tried to make ends meet on what these jobs were paying her and found she couldn’t, began as an article assignment for Harper’s) and Howard Zinn as a tour guide through the “people’s history” of the U.S., while such heavyweights of the American ruling class as former secretary of state James Baker, former secretary of defense Harold Brown, former State Department spokesperson Hodding Carter III, former commerce secretary William Coleman (one of the first African-Americans to integrate the American ruling class), Carnegie Corporation president Vartan Gregorian, New York Times chair Arthur Sulzberger, and former Harvard University president and World Bank economist Lawrence Summers (whose appointment by President Barack Obama as his economic czar was the biggest signal that “change you can believe in” was going to mean “change the ruling class doesn’t have to worry about” — this despicable, evil man, who was already on record as saying that Africa wasn’t carrying its fair share of the world’s pollution and that women weren’t intellectually qualified to be scientists, is shown in the film as saying that American poverty isn’t so bad because even “poor” people are fat and have TV sets: the sort of slimeball comment one would expect to hear from Rush Limbaugh rather than the principal economic advisor to a Democratic President!) — and it’s pretty obvious that the only way they ended up in this movie was because Lapham is still enough of a good friend of theirs he could talk them into it, mostly as interviewees being asked by Cantagallo in his Mike Vanzetti character, “What is the American ruling class, and how do I get into it?”
It’s basically a bunch of old white Anglo-Saxon men in suits — though increasingly the doors have been opened to women and people of color (and one audience member at the Activist San Diego screening made the observation that as America expands its corporate interests worldwide there’s a reason why the members of the ruling class want to let a greater diversity of races and ethnicities into their club: they want ruling-class members who can be accepted around the world as “looking like us” and being able to interact with members of other countries’ ruling classes) — and their unifying principle, as the film explains, is the idea that they are simply a better order of humanity than the rest of us and therefore they’re entitled not only to a greater share of life’s material goodies but also all the political power they need to keep that share. This is actually how ruling classes have behaved throughout human history, ever since so-called “civilization” was instituted and we came out of our relatively communal hunter-gatherer societies — though the only real historical insight into the persistence of ruling-class/working-class arrangements comes from a quote as an epigram at the movie’s beginning of the motto of the Medici family: “Money into power, power to win money.” (I’m quoting from memory but that’s the gist of it.)
The American Ruling Class is an interesting attempt to break through the American public’s unwillingness to think of themselves as members of economic classes or their society in class terms by creating a film that will not only be informative but also entertaining. The filmmakers’ strategy to do that is quite obviously influenced by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht — to set the more audacious aspects of their social critique to music (the theme song of the film, “The Wurlitzer Plays On,” even sounds like a tune Weill could have written for one of Brecht’s texts!) and enact it with characters who aren’t important in and of themselves but for what they represent in terms of class conflicts. Nonetheless, I’m not sure how effective a film like this would be in reaching beyond its natural audience on the Left — people who are already convinced there is an American ruling class and pretty much agree on who is in it and what they want — to possible audiences outside the clique of initiates. For one thing, this film is particularly weak on just how the ruling class rules — the intricate web of associations both before (in the elite schools which members of the ruling class have attended and the social contacts they have made even before they reach adult age) and during (in the extent to which public institutions, think tanks and corporate boards and executive corps interlock) their ruling-class membership, detailed so well half a century ago by C. Wright Mills in The Power Elite (a book Cantagallo is briefly shown reading in the film) is pretty much assumed instead of documented.
It’s a clever film but it won’t reach a fraction of the audience that really needs to see it — especially now that the Obama administration’s appointments and the limited “changes” of its economic proposals (especially its heartfelt declarations that they will never, no way, no how even consider nationalizing any major banks and thereby wiping out shareholder equity) in the face of America’s greatest economic crisis since 1929 are a first-rate demonstration of how enduring the power of the American ruling class is and how immune it is to serious challenge. (At least one imdb.com commentator on this film noted that it leaves a feeling of despair, even though the ending — with Pete Seeger, playing himself, assuming the role of anti-capitalist guru and offering parables about the eventual efficacy of persistent resistance — is clearly meant to instill hope.)
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Friday, February 27, 2009
Inner Sanctum (Film Classics, 1948)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran the 1948 “B” noir Inner Sanctum, made by arrangement with the producers of the radio show (and with Simon and Schuster, who published the Inner Sanctum tie-in books) by an outfit called Film Classics three years after the Universal series ended. The film was only 52 minutes long (the imdb.com entry on it alternately lists 52 minutes and 62 minutes as the running time, and it’s possible there was a longer version and the one that survives is a cut-down print edited to fit into a one-hour TV time slot, but it’s also possible that the 62-minute listing is a mistake) — but it turned out to be a quite interesting little vest-pocket thriller.
It was produced by Samuel Rheiner and Walter Shenson (Shenson’s presence puts everyone in this cast one degree of separation from the Beatles — his most famous producing credits are, of course, A Hard Day’s Night and Help!) for executive producer Richard B. Morros, and based on a devilishly clever script by Jerome T. Gollard (a writer otherwise unknown to me) that even evoked an unusual sense of style from the generally abysmally hacky director Lew Landers. It opens on a train, with hard-as-nails gold-digger Marie Kembar (Eve Miller) getting a lecture from a mysterious white-haired man named “Doctor Valonius, the Seer” (an almost unrecognizable Fritz Leiber) with an uncanny ability to tell time without a watch and read the minds of his fellow passengers.
When the train stops she insists on getting off, and in order to keep her from doing so he tells her a story that, as a flashback, becomes the main part of the film — Harold Dunlap (Charles Russell, a tall, thin, rangy-looking actor, unglamorous but quite right for this part), tries to sneak off a train but is confronted by his girlfriend. He slams her to the ground and she knocks her head against a water pump (or something — Allen G. Siegler’s shadowy noir cinematography leaves it ambiguous) and dies. He pitches her body onto the back of the train as it sets off again but is seen by Michael Bennett (Dale Belding), a typically obnoxious, bratty movie kid whom he comes close to murdering just to shut him up (and, quite frankly, I was rooting for him to kill the brat!).
A flood, represented by some more ambiguous shots of something or other that turns out to be a driving rainstorm through a forest, hits the town and forces Harold to seek shelter — which he does in a boarding house that turns out to be run by Michael’s mother Ruth (Lee Patrick), which seems to be the only residence in the entire town; at least we don’t meet any characters who don’t live there! What’s more, the place is so crowded that Harold is forced to share a room with Michael and spend his whole time there fearful that Michael will expose him — which he doesn’t more because he’s afraid of mom’s reaction if he confesses to her that he went to the railroad station on his own than because he’s intimidated by having witnessed a murder committed by a guy who’s sleeping in the same room with him.
Harold enters — or at least attempts — a doomed relationship with another piece of noir flotsam, Jean Maxwell (Mary Beth Hughes, an underrated, underused actress who shone in the virtually unknown 1945 noir directed by Anthony Mann, The Great Flamarion), who blew in from San Francisco, got stuck in this little town and sees Harold as her ticket out of it. After an intense action climax in which Michael gets kidnapped, then gets rescued and Harold gets his, the film dissolves to the train we saw in the opening sequence, and Marie Kembar gets off — whereupon Harold confronts her and kills her as we saw in the opening of what we thought was a flashback but is now revealed as a flash-forward, Valonius’ correct prediction of what would happen to her if she got off the train to confront her absconding boyfriend.
That odd supernatural sting-in-the-tail is about the only thing that connects this movie with Inner Sanctum the radio show, the previous movies or the books, but even before that this was quite a good movie, an inventive spin on some old clichés and a welcome bit of noir from a surprising source. Our source print was pretty splicy, but even so it would have been worth it for Universal to include this movie in their Inner Sanctum box even if they didn’t produce it and Lon Chaney, Jr. wasn’t in it (which was probably just as well!).
I ran the 1948 “B” noir Inner Sanctum, made by arrangement with the producers of the radio show (and with Simon and Schuster, who published the Inner Sanctum tie-in books) by an outfit called Film Classics three years after the Universal series ended. The film was only 52 minutes long (the imdb.com entry on it alternately lists 52 minutes and 62 minutes as the running time, and it’s possible there was a longer version and the one that survives is a cut-down print edited to fit into a one-hour TV time slot, but it’s also possible that the 62-minute listing is a mistake) — but it turned out to be a quite interesting little vest-pocket thriller.
It was produced by Samuel Rheiner and Walter Shenson (Shenson’s presence puts everyone in this cast one degree of separation from the Beatles — his most famous producing credits are, of course, A Hard Day’s Night and Help!) for executive producer Richard B. Morros, and based on a devilishly clever script by Jerome T. Gollard (a writer otherwise unknown to me) that even evoked an unusual sense of style from the generally abysmally hacky director Lew Landers. It opens on a train, with hard-as-nails gold-digger Marie Kembar (Eve Miller) getting a lecture from a mysterious white-haired man named “Doctor Valonius, the Seer” (an almost unrecognizable Fritz Leiber) with an uncanny ability to tell time without a watch and read the minds of his fellow passengers.
When the train stops she insists on getting off, and in order to keep her from doing so he tells her a story that, as a flashback, becomes the main part of the film — Harold Dunlap (Charles Russell, a tall, thin, rangy-looking actor, unglamorous but quite right for this part), tries to sneak off a train but is confronted by his girlfriend. He slams her to the ground and she knocks her head against a water pump (or something — Allen G. Siegler’s shadowy noir cinematography leaves it ambiguous) and dies. He pitches her body onto the back of the train as it sets off again but is seen by Michael Bennett (Dale Belding), a typically obnoxious, bratty movie kid whom he comes close to murdering just to shut him up (and, quite frankly, I was rooting for him to kill the brat!).
A flood, represented by some more ambiguous shots of something or other that turns out to be a driving rainstorm through a forest, hits the town and forces Harold to seek shelter — which he does in a boarding house that turns out to be run by Michael’s mother Ruth (Lee Patrick), which seems to be the only residence in the entire town; at least we don’t meet any characters who don’t live there! What’s more, the place is so crowded that Harold is forced to share a room with Michael and spend his whole time there fearful that Michael will expose him — which he doesn’t more because he’s afraid of mom’s reaction if he confesses to her that he went to the railroad station on his own than because he’s intimidated by having witnessed a murder committed by a guy who’s sleeping in the same room with him.
Harold enters — or at least attempts — a doomed relationship with another piece of noir flotsam, Jean Maxwell (Mary Beth Hughes, an underrated, underused actress who shone in the virtually unknown 1945 noir directed by Anthony Mann, The Great Flamarion), who blew in from San Francisco, got stuck in this little town and sees Harold as her ticket out of it. After an intense action climax in which Michael gets kidnapped, then gets rescued and Harold gets his, the film dissolves to the train we saw in the opening sequence, and Marie Kembar gets off — whereupon Harold confronts her and kills her as we saw in the opening of what we thought was a flashback but is now revealed as a flash-forward, Valonius’ correct prediction of what would happen to her if she got off the train to confront her absconding boyfriend.
That odd supernatural sting-in-the-tail is about the only thing that connects this movie with Inner Sanctum the radio show, the previous movies or the books, but even before that this was quite a good movie, an inventive spin on some old clichés and a welcome bit of noir from a surprising source. Our source print was pretty splicy, but even so it would have been worth it for Universal to include this movie in their Inner Sanctum box even if they didn’t produce it and Lon Chaney, Jr. wasn’t in it (which was probably just as well!).
Not My Life (Cinetel Films/Lifetime, 2006)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The movie was Not My Life, which began as an almost risible parody of a Lifetime TV-movie — heroine Alison Morgan (Meredith Monroe) lives an idyllic, picture-perfect existence with her husband, Dr. Steve Morgan (Ari Cohen, darker-haired than usual for a Lifetime leading man but the usual lanky body type), marred only by her inability to remember her past and a chronic heart condition for which she’s taking a medication her husband obtains for her. All she knows — or thinks she knows — about her past was that her parents abused her, as did her previous husband, and she was rescued from a fire by Dr. Steve, who saved her life but has been unable to have children by her. She has a good friend, Janet (Ellie Harvie — a charmingly reversible name; I could well imagine a male Lifetime actor named “Harvie Ellie”!), whom Steve can’t stand, ostensibly because Janet is an alternative health advocate and Steve feels professionally threatened, especially when Janet questions whether Alison really needs the heart medication and whether something more holistic would work better for her.
Then Alison is involved in an auto accident and the shock injures her brain and allows authentic memories of her past to penetrate her current consciousness, albeit in fragmentary and confused form. Steve tells her that she never had another husband but that the two of them had had a daughter and the daughter had accidentally set the fire in which both she and Alison’s parents died. Alison remains suspicious and she sees another doctor, Jennifer Prasad (Iris Paluly), who examines her and tells her a) she never had a heart condition, b) she’s positive for psychotropic drugs, and c) the so-called “heart medication” her husband has been giving her is actually a version of an anti-schizophrenia drug which someone has made in a basement lab and reformulated to heighten its memory-loss effects. Dr. Prasad also X-rays her and finds that she had a lesion in her brain before the accident and the accident had jogged it loose, thereby restoring at least bits of her memory. When Alison confronts her husband and asks why he’s been drugging her with something to make her forget her past, he tells her that as a result of the fire she went crazy and was about to be institutionalized when he figured out a way to eliminate the memories that were driving her crazy, including giving her a D.I.Y. lobotomy (hence the lesion Dr. Prasad’s X-rays uncovered) and making up the drugs in an amateur lab he set up in a storage locker that also contained press clippings of the fire and a copy of the recommendation for her institutionalization.
Alison, still suspicious, hires Kruegher (Michael Woods), the private detective who handled Janet’s divorce (and who’s shown as a scruffy, overweight, Columbo-like figure just to disillusion anyone in the Lifetime audience whose idea of a private detective was a romantic vision of Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe), to tail her husband and also research her own past. Steven offers Kruegher a $10,000 bribe to give him a glowing report, and Kreugher takes the check and uses it to run a fingerprint check — which reveals that Steven is really Dr. Tony Lancaster, who was arrested for selling morphine illegally and then died in an auto accident in the company of a woman named Anna Towne. It turns out that Dr. Lancaster had an obsessive case of the hots for Mrs. Towne, so he kidnapped her away from her husband and daughter, drugged her, deliberately crashed his car so the authorities would assume they had run away together and had died in the crash, then set up shop in another town, lobotomized her, married her and kept her on drugs to keep her from recovering the memory of who she really was and that she already had a family.
There’s a typical over-the-top action sequence at the end in which Dr. Lancaster murders Kreugher with Kreugher’s own gun, only to be killed himself when Anna stabs him with a pitchfork and he falls to his death out of a second-floor window at their ranch home in the country. As far-fetched (to say the least!) as this plot is, writer Paul A. Birkett deserves credit for an interesting and inventive variation on the Gaslight trope, and though C. Kim Miles’ cinematography is pretty typical past-is-brown stuff, director John Terlesky stages it with a real flair for suspense and a welcome avoidance of the “flanging” effects and other computer-generated frou-frou with which a lot of Lifetime directors ruin otherwise perfectly good movies. About the only thing that’s missing is a hot soft-core porn sequence, and this is enough of a nail-biter (as well as one that really allows us to identify with Alison/Anna and her plight) I don’t really mind the loss.
The movie was Not My Life, which began as an almost risible parody of a Lifetime TV-movie — heroine Alison Morgan (Meredith Monroe) lives an idyllic, picture-perfect existence with her husband, Dr. Steve Morgan (Ari Cohen, darker-haired than usual for a Lifetime leading man but the usual lanky body type), marred only by her inability to remember her past and a chronic heart condition for which she’s taking a medication her husband obtains for her. All she knows — or thinks she knows — about her past was that her parents abused her, as did her previous husband, and she was rescued from a fire by Dr. Steve, who saved her life but has been unable to have children by her. She has a good friend, Janet (Ellie Harvie — a charmingly reversible name; I could well imagine a male Lifetime actor named “Harvie Ellie”!), whom Steve can’t stand, ostensibly because Janet is an alternative health advocate and Steve feels professionally threatened, especially when Janet questions whether Alison really needs the heart medication and whether something more holistic would work better for her.
Then Alison is involved in an auto accident and the shock injures her brain and allows authentic memories of her past to penetrate her current consciousness, albeit in fragmentary and confused form. Steve tells her that she never had another husband but that the two of them had had a daughter and the daughter had accidentally set the fire in which both she and Alison’s parents died. Alison remains suspicious and she sees another doctor, Jennifer Prasad (Iris Paluly), who examines her and tells her a) she never had a heart condition, b) she’s positive for psychotropic drugs, and c) the so-called “heart medication” her husband has been giving her is actually a version of an anti-schizophrenia drug which someone has made in a basement lab and reformulated to heighten its memory-loss effects. Dr. Prasad also X-rays her and finds that she had a lesion in her brain before the accident and the accident had jogged it loose, thereby restoring at least bits of her memory. When Alison confronts her husband and asks why he’s been drugging her with something to make her forget her past, he tells her that as a result of the fire she went crazy and was about to be institutionalized when he figured out a way to eliminate the memories that were driving her crazy, including giving her a D.I.Y. lobotomy (hence the lesion Dr. Prasad’s X-rays uncovered) and making up the drugs in an amateur lab he set up in a storage locker that also contained press clippings of the fire and a copy of the recommendation for her institutionalization.
Alison, still suspicious, hires Kruegher (Michael Woods), the private detective who handled Janet’s divorce (and who’s shown as a scruffy, overweight, Columbo-like figure just to disillusion anyone in the Lifetime audience whose idea of a private detective was a romantic vision of Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe), to tail her husband and also research her own past. Steven offers Kruegher a $10,000 bribe to give him a glowing report, and Kreugher takes the check and uses it to run a fingerprint check — which reveals that Steven is really Dr. Tony Lancaster, who was arrested for selling morphine illegally and then died in an auto accident in the company of a woman named Anna Towne. It turns out that Dr. Lancaster had an obsessive case of the hots for Mrs. Towne, so he kidnapped her away from her husband and daughter, drugged her, deliberately crashed his car so the authorities would assume they had run away together and had died in the crash, then set up shop in another town, lobotomized her, married her and kept her on drugs to keep her from recovering the memory of who she really was and that she already had a family.
There’s a typical over-the-top action sequence at the end in which Dr. Lancaster murders Kreugher with Kreugher’s own gun, only to be killed himself when Anna stabs him with a pitchfork and he falls to his death out of a second-floor window at their ranch home in the country. As far-fetched (to say the least!) as this plot is, writer Paul A. Birkett deserves credit for an interesting and inventive variation on the Gaslight trope, and though C. Kim Miles’ cinematography is pretty typical past-is-brown stuff, director John Terlesky stages it with a real flair for suspense and a welcome avoidance of the “flanging” effects and other computer-generated frou-frou with which a lot of Lifetime directors ruin otherwise perfectly good movies. About the only thing that’s missing is a hot soft-core porn sequence, and this is enough of a nail-biter (as well as one that really allows us to identify with Alison/Anna and her plight) I don’t really mind the loss.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
What Happens in Vegas (20th Century-Fox, 2008)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The movie was What Happens in Vegas, an advertising slogan that’s been used as a film title at least twice, once in 2005 and once, this time, in 2008 for a romantic comedy that hews surprisingly close to the 1930’s screwball style even though it’s marked as a modern product by the plethora of sex and bathroom gags (mostly, at least, genuinely funny sex and bathroom gags) and an absence of the sophistication with which a story like this would have been done in the 1930’s precisely because they couldn’t do openly sexual humor under the Production Code.
The story revolves around a quickie Vegas marriage entered into by Jack Fuller (Ashton Kutcher, who’s cute enough I’d find him watchable in anything even though I doubt if he’ll be doing a movie as good as the director’s cut of The Butterfly Effect for some time to come), who’s on the rebound from being fired from his father’s construction company for never finishing a job; and Joy McNally (Cameron Diaz, top-billed), a hot-shot stockbroker in New York who’s on the rebound from being dumped by her even more affluent fiancé, Mason (Jason Sudeikis), who bought her a $30,000 diamond engagement ring and then decided she wasn’t good enough for him. Anyway, our two rebound babies have a hard night of partying and end up married to each other, and just before they return to New York (where they both live and where, contrary to the impression you’d get from the title, most of this film happens) Joy loans Jack a quarter and he uses it to play a super-slot machine that earns him a $3 million jackpot. (It was interesting to be watching this just after having seen the Vegas-set episode of the 1973 TV series Banacek and noting how the Strip had changed in the last 35 years.)
The two sue each other for the money and the case comes before Judge Whopper (a surprisingly queeny Dennis Miller) — his name and that of Joy’s boss, Banger (a welcome Dennis Farina; nice to know there is life after his unceremonious and quite undeserved dumping from Law and Order!), are all too accurate reflections of writer Dana Fox’s sense of humor — who chews them out, saying that it’s straight people like them, not Gays, who are undermining the institution of marriage. He sentences them to live together for six months and make an honest attempt to make their marriage work — quite a trick because they’re shown as despicably hating each other — under the supervision of a marriage counselor/psychiatrist, Dr. Twitchell (Queen Latifah, once again playing an island of sanity in a movie in which it seems like all the white people are crazy).
They play a series of raunchy practical jokes on each other that to me recalled the marvelous 1933 comedy Rafter Romance, which used a different premise for getting the two hatebirds under the same roof (in that film they were Depression babies whose landlady forced them to share a space, he during the day and she during the night, because they owed her so much rent and that would at least cut their tabs in half; in that one the woman was Ginger Rogers, a far more personable and charming actress than Cameron Diaz — and the man was Norman Foster, a far less appealing male lead than Ashton Kutcher!) but otherwise seemed strikingly similar in the way it developed the antagonism between them which we know, of course — far before they do — will eventually blossom into love.
What Happens in Vegas seemed to borrow tropes from a lot of older movies, from relatively obscure ones (I found a hint of the 1930 Warners semi-musical Dancing Sweeties in the idea of a couple suddenly marrying without thinking it through and forced to live together under auspices that will turn decidedly unfriendly if they see any sign of disagreement between the two!) to more well-known ones, but it’s a charming film nonetheless and at least moderately funny even though most of the situations are so shopworn you can tell what’s coming at least a reel or two in advance. Of course, I couldn’t help but wonder what this would have looked like if it had been a 1930’s movie, with Cary Grant and Carole Lombard as the leads, Ben Hecht doing the screenplay and Ernst Lubitsch directing (though Lubitsch would probably have wanted to relocate the story to Europe, setting the main part in Vienna and having them do their quickie marriage and win their jackpot in Monte Carlo!) — but What Happens in Vegas is a nice, amusing movie and the leads are well suited to their roles.
The movie was What Happens in Vegas, an advertising slogan that’s been used as a film title at least twice, once in 2005 and once, this time, in 2008 for a romantic comedy that hews surprisingly close to the 1930’s screwball style even though it’s marked as a modern product by the plethora of sex and bathroom gags (mostly, at least, genuinely funny sex and bathroom gags) and an absence of the sophistication with which a story like this would have been done in the 1930’s precisely because they couldn’t do openly sexual humor under the Production Code.
The story revolves around a quickie Vegas marriage entered into by Jack Fuller (Ashton Kutcher, who’s cute enough I’d find him watchable in anything even though I doubt if he’ll be doing a movie as good as the director’s cut of The Butterfly Effect for some time to come), who’s on the rebound from being fired from his father’s construction company for never finishing a job; and Joy McNally (Cameron Diaz, top-billed), a hot-shot stockbroker in New York who’s on the rebound from being dumped by her even more affluent fiancé, Mason (Jason Sudeikis), who bought her a $30,000 diamond engagement ring and then decided she wasn’t good enough for him. Anyway, our two rebound babies have a hard night of partying and end up married to each other, and just before they return to New York (where they both live and where, contrary to the impression you’d get from the title, most of this film happens) Joy loans Jack a quarter and he uses it to play a super-slot machine that earns him a $3 million jackpot. (It was interesting to be watching this just after having seen the Vegas-set episode of the 1973 TV series Banacek and noting how the Strip had changed in the last 35 years.)
The two sue each other for the money and the case comes before Judge Whopper (a surprisingly queeny Dennis Miller) — his name and that of Joy’s boss, Banger (a welcome Dennis Farina; nice to know there is life after his unceremonious and quite undeserved dumping from Law and Order!), are all too accurate reflections of writer Dana Fox’s sense of humor — who chews them out, saying that it’s straight people like them, not Gays, who are undermining the institution of marriage. He sentences them to live together for six months and make an honest attempt to make their marriage work — quite a trick because they’re shown as despicably hating each other — under the supervision of a marriage counselor/psychiatrist, Dr. Twitchell (Queen Latifah, once again playing an island of sanity in a movie in which it seems like all the white people are crazy).
They play a series of raunchy practical jokes on each other that to me recalled the marvelous 1933 comedy Rafter Romance, which used a different premise for getting the two hatebirds under the same roof (in that film they were Depression babies whose landlady forced them to share a space, he during the day and she during the night, because they owed her so much rent and that would at least cut their tabs in half; in that one the woman was Ginger Rogers, a far more personable and charming actress than Cameron Diaz — and the man was Norman Foster, a far less appealing male lead than Ashton Kutcher!) but otherwise seemed strikingly similar in the way it developed the antagonism between them which we know, of course — far before they do — will eventually blossom into love.
What Happens in Vegas seemed to borrow tropes from a lot of older movies, from relatively obscure ones (I found a hint of the 1930 Warners semi-musical Dancing Sweeties in the idea of a couple suddenly marrying without thinking it through and forced to live together under auspices that will turn decidedly unfriendly if they see any sign of disagreement between the two!) to more well-known ones, but it’s a charming film nonetheless and at least moderately funny even though most of the situations are so shopworn you can tell what’s coming at least a reel or two in advance. Of course, I couldn’t help but wonder what this would have looked like if it had been a 1930’s movie, with Cary Grant and Carole Lombard as the leads, Ben Hecht doing the screenplay and Ernst Lubitsch directing (though Lubitsch would probably have wanted to relocate the story to Europe, setting the main part in Vienna and having them do their quickie marriage and win their jackpot in Monte Carlo!) — but What Happens in Vegas is a nice, amusing movie and the leads are well suited to their roles.
Wicked (Flipped Out Productions, 1998)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I spent most of the earlier part of the morning watching Wicked, a 1998 movie (apparently a movie-movie, though I was watching it on a recording from the Lifetime channel) starring Julia Stiles as Ellie Christianson, older of the two daughters of Ben (William R. Moses, one of the blankly sort-of handsome sandy-haired lanky guys Lifetime usually casts as its male leads) and Karen (Chelsea Field) Christianson. They live in Casa del Norte, a gated community that turns out to be such a hotbed of sexual experimentation and moral busy-bodiness that Peyton Place looks like a convent by comparison. Ben is having an affair with the family’s blonde maid, Lena Anderson (Louise Myrback) — who looks like she could be Ellie’s older sister even though she doesn’t have one — while his wife is sleeping with (or at least getting fucked by) Lawson Smith (Patrick Muldoon, a much hotter guy than William R. Moses), who as the film opens is getting dumped by his wife, who’s leaving him and taking the kids with him because he’s so irresponsible economically. (When they leave they do so in a yellow moving van labeled “Ryker” — obviously the Ryder company didn’t want their product placed in such a kinky movie.)
The synopsis on the Lifetime Web site suggested a good-bad movie in which Ellie takes over her mom’s role after her mom’s death and even gets her dad to have sex with her — and that plot thread is indeed there, but there’s a lot of other stuff as well. About a third of the way through mom doesn’t just die, she’s murdered by a carefully unshown person beating her to death with a ceramic Greek “tragedy” mask, after her window is shattered by a golf ball — which implicates Lawson because all he seems to do all day (besides have affairs) is practice golfing. Ellie not only makes it to bed with her dad, she also starts bossing her younger sister Inger (Vanessa Zima) around just like mom used to, and when dad ultimately rejects her and marries Lena (who’s established as a legal immigrant whose work visa is about to expire, so no matter how it looks to the rest of the community she has to marry him in a hurry so she can legally stay in the U.S.) she has a hissy-fit, getting drunk at the wedding, passing out, spending the night in a sand bar at the local golf course and getting herself picked up by Lawson, who allows her to go in another direction that her mom went before her.
The filmmakers, director Michael Steinberg (who relentlessly overdirects this movie, doing a lot of dizzying panning that’s supposed to represent Ellie’s point of view and being utterly unable to build up any suspense because he’s constantly interrupting sequences with flashy camera angles and inexplicably wrenching edits) and writer Eric Weiss (I was amused that the screenplay for this was written by a guy with the same “real” name, except for the omission of the “h” at the end of “Eric,” as Houdini!), can’t seem themselves to decide which direction they want to take the story in — and the ending is really frustrating; the local police officer, Detective Boland (an aged, bloated Michael Parks), catches Ellie and Lawson together with blood on them and shoots Lawson dead — without any attempt to stop him or take him alive (as if one of the services this gated community offers is summary execution of any criminal caught in the act, without any bothersome ideas about due process getting in the way).
Ellie is also dead when the detective checks out the scene after shooting Lawson, and it’s left ambiguous whether Lawson killed Ellie because she wouldn’t run away with him (as he earlier may have killed Ellie’s mom because she wouldn’t run away with him) or whether Ellie was the real murderer of her mom (implied by the presence of the murder weapon and her mom’s wedding ring in Ellie’s orange suitcase, the one she was periodically packing and threatening to leave with) and was herself killed by her sister Inger, who in the film’s last ambiguous closeup is shown holding the “comedy” mask — the matched one from the set whose “tragedy” mask was used to kill her mom — and gazing hatefully at her new stepmother, as if she’s going to repeat the cycle and herself kill her (step)mother and seduce her father.
There was an intriguing film clip representing a movie Ellie is watching on TV — a blonde woman driving in a car through a ferocious rainstorm — that at first I thought was from Hitchcock’s Psycho (which would have been appropriate, since that film is also about a person who kills his mother and takes her place), but the imdb.com site reports that the blonde woman is actually Candace Hilligoss and the film is Carnival of Souls — though Steinberg would have been well advised to take Hitchcock’s relative restraint as a model for his own directorial style instead of putting us through so many bizarre pans and other camera effects that just took away from the kinky pleasures of the story he was trying to tell — and frankly Eric Weiss would have been better off if, instead of having the mother be murdered, she’d just died (of cancer or some other long-term disease), with Ellie having gradually taken over her mom’s role as mom weakened and then offered herself to her dad as a substitute after mom died.
I spent most of the earlier part of the morning watching Wicked, a 1998 movie (apparently a movie-movie, though I was watching it on a recording from the Lifetime channel) starring Julia Stiles as Ellie Christianson, older of the two daughters of Ben (William R. Moses, one of the blankly sort-of handsome sandy-haired lanky guys Lifetime usually casts as its male leads) and Karen (Chelsea Field) Christianson. They live in Casa del Norte, a gated community that turns out to be such a hotbed of sexual experimentation and moral busy-bodiness that Peyton Place looks like a convent by comparison. Ben is having an affair with the family’s blonde maid, Lena Anderson (Louise Myrback) — who looks like she could be Ellie’s older sister even though she doesn’t have one — while his wife is sleeping with (or at least getting fucked by) Lawson Smith (Patrick Muldoon, a much hotter guy than William R. Moses), who as the film opens is getting dumped by his wife, who’s leaving him and taking the kids with him because he’s so irresponsible economically. (When they leave they do so in a yellow moving van labeled “Ryker” — obviously the Ryder company didn’t want their product placed in such a kinky movie.)
The synopsis on the Lifetime Web site suggested a good-bad movie in which Ellie takes over her mom’s role after her mom’s death and even gets her dad to have sex with her — and that plot thread is indeed there, but there’s a lot of other stuff as well. About a third of the way through mom doesn’t just die, she’s murdered by a carefully unshown person beating her to death with a ceramic Greek “tragedy” mask, after her window is shattered by a golf ball — which implicates Lawson because all he seems to do all day (besides have affairs) is practice golfing. Ellie not only makes it to bed with her dad, she also starts bossing her younger sister Inger (Vanessa Zima) around just like mom used to, and when dad ultimately rejects her and marries Lena (who’s established as a legal immigrant whose work visa is about to expire, so no matter how it looks to the rest of the community she has to marry him in a hurry so she can legally stay in the U.S.) she has a hissy-fit, getting drunk at the wedding, passing out, spending the night in a sand bar at the local golf course and getting herself picked up by Lawson, who allows her to go in another direction that her mom went before her.
The filmmakers, director Michael Steinberg (who relentlessly overdirects this movie, doing a lot of dizzying panning that’s supposed to represent Ellie’s point of view and being utterly unable to build up any suspense because he’s constantly interrupting sequences with flashy camera angles and inexplicably wrenching edits) and writer Eric Weiss (I was amused that the screenplay for this was written by a guy with the same “real” name, except for the omission of the “h” at the end of “Eric,” as Houdini!), can’t seem themselves to decide which direction they want to take the story in — and the ending is really frustrating; the local police officer, Detective Boland (an aged, bloated Michael Parks), catches Ellie and Lawson together with blood on them and shoots Lawson dead — without any attempt to stop him or take him alive (as if one of the services this gated community offers is summary execution of any criminal caught in the act, without any bothersome ideas about due process getting in the way).
Ellie is also dead when the detective checks out the scene after shooting Lawson, and it’s left ambiguous whether Lawson killed Ellie because she wouldn’t run away with him (as he earlier may have killed Ellie’s mom because she wouldn’t run away with him) or whether Ellie was the real murderer of her mom (implied by the presence of the murder weapon and her mom’s wedding ring in Ellie’s orange suitcase, the one she was periodically packing and threatening to leave with) and was herself killed by her sister Inger, who in the film’s last ambiguous closeup is shown holding the “comedy” mask — the matched one from the set whose “tragedy” mask was used to kill her mom — and gazing hatefully at her new stepmother, as if she’s going to repeat the cycle and herself kill her (step)mother and seduce her father.
There was an intriguing film clip representing a movie Ellie is watching on TV — a blonde woman driving in a car through a ferocious rainstorm — that at first I thought was from Hitchcock’s Psycho (which would have been appropriate, since that film is also about a person who kills his mother and takes her place), but the imdb.com site reports that the blonde woman is actually Candace Hilligoss and the film is Carnival of Souls — though Steinberg would have been well advised to take Hitchcock’s relative restraint as a model for his own directorial style instead of putting us through so many bizarre pans and other camera effects that just took away from the kinky pleasures of the story he was trying to tell — and frankly Eric Weiss would have been better off if, instead of having the mother be murdered, she’d just died (of cancer or some other long-term disease), with Ellie having gradually taken over her mom’s role as mom weakened and then offered herself to her dad as a substitute after mom died.
Sybil (LIfetime, 2007)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I settled into our room and I ran him the movie Sybil which I’d recently recorded off the Lifetime channel. I had read the book Sybil in the 1970’s and seen the TV-movie (the 1976 production starring Joanne Woodward as psychiatrist Dr. Cornelia Wilbur and Sally Field as Sibyl), or at least the first half of it, back then, but I hadn’t encountered the story since and when I saw this on Lifetime’s schedule I thought it would be interesting to see it again. Surprise! What Lifetime showed turned out to be not the 1976 Sibyl but a 2007 remake with Jessica Lange as Dr. Wilbur and someone named Tammy Blanchard as Sibyl, which began with a title announcing that Sybil Dorset(t) — the imdb.com entry on this version lists Sybil’s last name with just one “t” but her mother’s last name with two — was actually a pseudonym cooked up by the 1973 book’s author, Flora Rheta Schreiber, to cover up her identity and protect her (though I also couldn’t help but wonder if Schreiber was deliberately picking that name as an analogy to the multi-voiced prophetess Sybil in Greek mythology).
Her real name was Shirley Ardell Mason and she died of breast cancer in Lexington, Kentucky at age 75 on February 26, 1998 after living there for years as a recluse, teaching art students in her home but otherwise having little or no interaction with humanity. It might have been trippy if the makers of this version, Norman Stephens Productions, had cast Sally Field as the psychiatrist — that would have continued the daisy chain that the makers of the first Sybil had started by casting Woodward, who’d played a multiple personality herself in her Academy Award-winning turn in the 1957 film The Three Faces of Eve — but at least Lange had played a mental patient in the Frances Farmer biopic Frances and therefore she could do a similar progression to Woodward’s from playing patient to playing therapist.
Alas, while the 1976 Sybil was a two-part TV-movie scheduled over four hours, this one was only a two-hour single-parter — and the story really seemed rushed in the shorter time frame — and the cause wasn’t helped by Blanchard’s performance, which was perfectly competent where Field’s had been incandescent. (Blanchard is a quite decent actress but I haven’t seen her land any major movies lately or win any Academy Awards and thank the Academy voters for really, really liking her.) At least Lange was quite good as the therapist, especially in the scenes in which she gets to assert herself as a woman and answer the sexist cracks made by a rival male doctor who referred Sibyl to her in the first place and thought Sibyl was a garden-variety hysteric and Dr. Wilbur was implanting in her the delusion that she had all these alternative personalities.
Also standing out in the cast is JoBeth Williams as Sibyl’s mother Hattie, a schizophrenic herself (the one commonality in patients with multiple personality disorder — or, as it’s been renamed, “dissociative identity disorder” — seems to be being raised by parents who are thoroughly bonkers themselves) and one who could have given Joan Crawford lessons in the parenting-from-hell department; the film shows her beating Sybil for breaking a valuable crystal dish (breaking glass becomes so much of a motif in the film that Sybil breaks Dr. Wilbur’s windows often enough that one suspects the doctor’s glazier gives her a quantity discount, and in one attempt at a date with a boy named Ramon [Fab Filippo] he gives her a beautiful crystal unicorn which Sybil gratefully accepts and then one of the other personalities smashes to the ground), giving her ice-water enemas, chaining her to table and piano legs and beating her if she lost bladder or bowel control, and raping her with buttonhooks and other household items.
The book made it clear — which this film does not — that mom’s stated reason for doing the last of those was, “Men are going to be sticking things into you all your life. You need to get used to it.” People who do this sort of thing usually don’t have fulfilling sex lives, but there was nothing wrong or abnormal in the sexual part of Sybil’s parents’ relationship — just one of the many ambiguities in this tale, about whose veracity psychologists are still arguing even though both Sybil and Dr. Wilbur died in the 1990’s. The rest of the 2007 Sybil transmuted this fascinating story into a typical Lifetime disease-of-the-week tale, photographed in murky past-is-brown cliché by Donald M. Morgan, and written and directed with cool efficiency by John Pielmeier and Joseph Sargent, respectively.
Charles and I settled into our room and I ran him the movie Sybil which I’d recently recorded off the Lifetime channel. I had read the book Sybil in the 1970’s and seen the TV-movie (the 1976 production starring Joanne Woodward as psychiatrist Dr. Cornelia Wilbur and Sally Field as Sibyl), or at least the first half of it, back then, but I hadn’t encountered the story since and when I saw this on Lifetime’s schedule I thought it would be interesting to see it again. Surprise! What Lifetime showed turned out to be not the 1976 Sibyl but a 2007 remake with Jessica Lange as Dr. Wilbur and someone named Tammy Blanchard as Sibyl, which began with a title announcing that Sybil Dorset(t) — the imdb.com entry on this version lists Sybil’s last name with just one “t” but her mother’s last name with two — was actually a pseudonym cooked up by the 1973 book’s author, Flora Rheta Schreiber, to cover up her identity and protect her (though I also couldn’t help but wonder if Schreiber was deliberately picking that name as an analogy to the multi-voiced prophetess Sybil in Greek mythology).
Her real name was Shirley Ardell Mason and she died of breast cancer in Lexington, Kentucky at age 75 on February 26, 1998 after living there for years as a recluse, teaching art students in her home but otherwise having little or no interaction with humanity. It might have been trippy if the makers of this version, Norman Stephens Productions, had cast Sally Field as the psychiatrist — that would have continued the daisy chain that the makers of the first Sybil had started by casting Woodward, who’d played a multiple personality herself in her Academy Award-winning turn in the 1957 film The Three Faces of Eve — but at least Lange had played a mental patient in the Frances Farmer biopic Frances and therefore she could do a similar progression to Woodward’s from playing patient to playing therapist.
Alas, while the 1976 Sybil was a two-part TV-movie scheduled over four hours, this one was only a two-hour single-parter — and the story really seemed rushed in the shorter time frame — and the cause wasn’t helped by Blanchard’s performance, which was perfectly competent where Field’s had been incandescent. (Blanchard is a quite decent actress but I haven’t seen her land any major movies lately or win any Academy Awards and thank the Academy voters for really, really liking her.) At least Lange was quite good as the therapist, especially in the scenes in which she gets to assert herself as a woman and answer the sexist cracks made by a rival male doctor who referred Sibyl to her in the first place and thought Sibyl was a garden-variety hysteric and Dr. Wilbur was implanting in her the delusion that she had all these alternative personalities.
Also standing out in the cast is JoBeth Williams as Sibyl’s mother Hattie, a schizophrenic herself (the one commonality in patients with multiple personality disorder — or, as it’s been renamed, “dissociative identity disorder” — seems to be being raised by parents who are thoroughly bonkers themselves) and one who could have given Joan Crawford lessons in the parenting-from-hell department; the film shows her beating Sybil for breaking a valuable crystal dish (breaking glass becomes so much of a motif in the film that Sybil breaks Dr. Wilbur’s windows often enough that one suspects the doctor’s glazier gives her a quantity discount, and in one attempt at a date with a boy named Ramon [Fab Filippo] he gives her a beautiful crystal unicorn which Sybil gratefully accepts and then one of the other personalities smashes to the ground), giving her ice-water enemas, chaining her to table and piano legs and beating her if she lost bladder or bowel control, and raping her with buttonhooks and other household items.
The book made it clear — which this film does not — that mom’s stated reason for doing the last of those was, “Men are going to be sticking things into you all your life. You need to get used to it.” People who do this sort of thing usually don’t have fulfilling sex lives, but there was nothing wrong or abnormal in the sexual part of Sybil’s parents’ relationship — just one of the many ambiguities in this tale, about whose veracity psychologists are still arguing even though both Sybil and Dr. Wilbur died in the 1990’s. The rest of the 2007 Sybil transmuted this fascinating story into a typical Lifetime disease-of-the-week tale, photographed in murky past-is-brown cliché by Donald M. Morgan, and written and directed with cool efficiency by John Pielmeier and Joseph Sargent, respectively.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
The Human Duplicators (Hugo Grimaldi/Woolner Bros., 1965)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Anyway, once we got back Charles and I ran a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 presentation of a 1965 sci-fi messterpiece called The Human Duplicators, a sort of bastard offspring from a mating of Invasion of the Body Snatchers with Robot Monster that even cast Robot Monster’s star — if you can call him that — George Nader (inevitably referred to as “Ralph Nader” by an imdb.com poster), once again playing the fearless human star confronting the wicked alien (Richard Kiel in between Eegah! and James Bond villain-dom) who’s been sent by the dictator of another planet to make Earth the latest colony in its empire (an interesting movie to be seeing just after hearing Robert Jensen’s critique of the American empire!) by kidnapping selected Earthlings, making “duplicates” of them in a machine that looked like a cross between a Star Trek transporter and a walk-in hot-water heater, and then sending out the duplicates and letting them loose on the world as homicidal maniacs.
Just how that was supposed to accomplish the conquest of Earth was one of the many points on which Arthur C. Pierce’s script was maddeningly vague — at least the aliens’ plots in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and its best successor, They Live, made sense — but then I’m still having a hard time trying to figure out how Osama bin Laden thought the 9/11 attacks were supposed to help accomplish the Muslim reconquest of all the formerly Islamic lands from India to Spain, either. There have been MST3K “targets” that were so inept in conception as well as execution (can you say Monster-a-Go-Go or The Wild, Wild World of Batwoman?) they couldn’t have helped but be bad movies, and then there are ones like The Human Duplicators that could at least have been halfway decent with some attention paid to credible characterizations, believable plotting and some measure of action.
As things turn out, almost nothing actually happens in The Human Duplicators — the alien agent, Dr. Kolos (“and Diet Kolos,” the MST3K crew joked), comes to the home of human scientist Prof. Vaughn Dornheimer (George Macready — what a comedown after being in great movies like Gilda and Paths of Glory!) and ensconces himself in Dornheimer’s basement laboratory while simultaneously getting a King Kong-style crush on Dornheimer’s blind daughter Lisa (Dolores Faith). Also in the mix are two other actors who made better — or at least less embarrassing — movies, including Richard Arlen (billed as “National Intelligence” — I’m not making this up, you know! — and recognizable only in one early scene) and Hugh Beaumont (as Nader’s immediate supervisor — naturally the MST3K crew joked incessantly about his most famous role as the father in Leave It to Beaver; well, a job as dad in a family sitcom is probably good training for supervising George Nader, actually), but the whole thing really creeps along, unaided by a numbingly dull script by Pierce and direction to match by Hugo Grimaldi (a black-sheep member of the royal family of Monaco who had to find another way to make a living? It would be nice to think so!), who also produced the film for a studio called the Woolner Brothers.
About the only genuinely creative visual element in this movie is the opening title, which is first shown as a mirror image in yellow letters before it transforms and opposite appears the title correctly oriented and printed in red. It’s all downhill from there, from the model spaceship that (as one MST3K’er joked) looks like it was folded from origami paper to the three diamond-shaped screens by which Richard Kiel communicates with the aliens back home (which show solarized images in different color schemes, sort of like one of Warhol’s silkscreened multiple portraits) and the utter inability of Dolores Faith to convince us her character is blind (let’s see, there’s Virginia Cherrill in City Lights and Jamie Foxx in Ray … and then clear on the other level of credibility there’s Dolores Faith in The Human Duplicators). I suspect that, at least in the later Joel Hodgson years, the MST3K people were specifically looking for movies whose badness expressed themselves largely as boredom; certainly that was the case here!
Anyway, once we got back Charles and I ran a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 presentation of a 1965 sci-fi messterpiece called The Human Duplicators, a sort of bastard offspring from a mating of Invasion of the Body Snatchers with Robot Monster that even cast Robot Monster’s star — if you can call him that — George Nader (inevitably referred to as “Ralph Nader” by an imdb.com poster), once again playing the fearless human star confronting the wicked alien (Richard Kiel in between Eegah! and James Bond villain-dom) who’s been sent by the dictator of another planet to make Earth the latest colony in its empire (an interesting movie to be seeing just after hearing Robert Jensen’s critique of the American empire!) by kidnapping selected Earthlings, making “duplicates” of them in a machine that looked like a cross between a Star Trek transporter and a walk-in hot-water heater, and then sending out the duplicates and letting them loose on the world as homicidal maniacs.
Just how that was supposed to accomplish the conquest of Earth was one of the many points on which Arthur C. Pierce’s script was maddeningly vague — at least the aliens’ plots in Invasion of the Body Snatchers and its best successor, They Live, made sense — but then I’m still having a hard time trying to figure out how Osama bin Laden thought the 9/11 attacks were supposed to help accomplish the Muslim reconquest of all the formerly Islamic lands from India to Spain, either. There have been MST3K “targets” that were so inept in conception as well as execution (can you say Monster-a-Go-Go or The Wild, Wild World of Batwoman?) they couldn’t have helped but be bad movies, and then there are ones like The Human Duplicators that could at least have been halfway decent with some attention paid to credible characterizations, believable plotting and some measure of action.
As things turn out, almost nothing actually happens in The Human Duplicators — the alien agent, Dr. Kolos (“and Diet Kolos,” the MST3K crew joked), comes to the home of human scientist Prof. Vaughn Dornheimer (George Macready — what a comedown after being in great movies like Gilda and Paths of Glory!) and ensconces himself in Dornheimer’s basement laboratory while simultaneously getting a King Kong-style crush on Dornheimer’s blind daughter Lisa (Dolores Faith). Also in the mix are two other actors who made better — or at least less embarrassing — movies, including Richard Arlen (billed as “National Intelligence” — I’m not making this up, you know! — and recognizable only in one early scene) and Hugh Beaumont (as Nader’s immediate supervisor — naturally the MST3K crew joked incessantly about his most famous role as the father in Leave It to Beaver; well, a job as dad in a family sitcom is probably good training for supervising George Nader, actually), but the whole thing really creeps along, unaided by a numbingly dull script by Pierce and direction to match by Hugo Grimaldi (a black-sheep member of the royal family of Monaco who had to find another way to make a living? It would be nice to think so!), who also produced the film for a studio called the Woolner Brothers.
About the only genuinely creative visual element in this movie is the opening title, which is first shown as a mirror image in yellow letters before it transforms and opposite appears the title correctly oriented and printed in red. It’s all downhill from there, from the model spaceship that (as one MST3K’er joked) looks like it was folded from origami paper to the three diamond-shaped screens by which Richard Kiel communicates with the aliens back home (which show solarized images in different color schemes, sort of like one of Warhol’s silkscreened multiple portraits) and the utter inability of Dolores Faith to convince us her character is blind (let’s see, there’s Virginia Cherrill in City Lights and Jamie Foxx in Ray … and then clear on the other level of credibility there’s Dolores Faith in The Human Duplicators). I suspect that, at least in the later Joel Hodgson years, the MST3K people were specifically looking for movies whose badness expressed themselves largely as boredom; certainly that was the case here!
Friday, February 20, 2009
Universal’s “Magnificent Obsessions”: 1935 & 1954
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I grabbed the chance to run us the 1935 version of Magnificent Obsession, starring Irene Dunne and Robert Taylor in the roles far more famously played in the 1954 remake by Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson, and directed by Universal’s 1930’s tear-jerker specialist, John M. Stahl. The script was by Victor Heerman and his wife, Sarah Y. Mason, with a rewrite by George O’Neil, based on a 1929 novel by minister-turned-writer Lloyd C. Douglas, whose enduring fame (such as it is) comes from the movies based on this and another one of his inspirational best-sellers, The Robe.
Magnificent Obsession is a crazy tear-jerker about an almost saintly doctor, Dr. Hudson (never seen in the actual story), who’s endowed the Brightwood Hospital in upstate New York (“played” by Lake Arrowhead in California). At the start of the story, having been widowed some time before, he’s made a second marriage to Helen Hudson (Irene Dunne), who as the film opens is returning from an ocean voyage to Europe and is understandably eager to be reunited with her husband. Alas, when she gets to the hospital — in the company of Joyce Hudson (Betty Furness), Hudson’s adult daughter by his first wife — she’s shocked to find that her husband is dead; he had a swimming accident and fell in the lake, and though he was alive when he was pulled out he died because a lung resuscitator he’d invented was over at the other end of the lake, being used to save the life of the wastrel playboy Robert Merrick (Robert Taylor), who’d fallen in as part of a drunken party he was having with several girlfriends.
To make things even more complicated, Merrick falls for Helen Hudson at first sight — and, naturally, she loathes the sight of him because, while he didn’t outright kill her husband, he’s at least morally responsible for his death. Anxious to atone, Merrick is told by the sculptor Randolph (Ralph Morgan in an unusually sensitive performance — he was probably relieved at the opportunity to make a movie in which he didn’t play a murderer!) about “an infinite source of great power” that involves what would now be called “random acts of kindness,” doing things for other people without expecting either reward or recognition in return — one of the rules is that the help must be kept absolutely secret. Randolph, not surprisingly given that he’s a character in a novel by a Christian minister, identifies Jesus Christ as the founder of this sort of charity. Merrick tries to carry out the program but in a blatantly insincere way — he gives a high-denomination bill (Stahl’s setup and John Mescall’s camera don’t get us close enough to tell how high) to a homeless person and figures the universe has rewarded him when Helen Hudson shows up and opportunely gets car trouble.
Merrick takes her for a drive, ostensibly home, but when he tries to park out in the middle of nowhere she catches on to his game, insists she’ll walk home, gets out of the car — and just then a passing car in the other direction strikes her and knocks her to the ground. She survives but the back of her skull is fractured and her optical nerve is crushed, rendering her blind. Undaunted by the fact that he’s already caused enough trouble for this family and he really should leave them alone, Merrick continues to cruise Helen, taking advantage of the fact that she can no longer see to pose as a mysterious “Dr. Robert” and get close to her, supplying her with Braille-printed books and at one point taking her to Paris to meet with Europe’s greatest surgeons in hopes that one of them will be able to figure out how to operate on her to restore her sight. When none can, he resolves to go to medical school himself — in the later movie he does so in the U.S. but in this version he stays in Europe for his training (it’s established that when he went to college he took pre-med courses but ultimately decided not to pursue his training) — and in the climax he develops an operation and, after a momentary attack of nerves (from which he’s roused by the sight of Randolph looking into the O.R. through a window — I’m not making this up, you know!) he settles into his groove, operates on his girlfriend and saves her sight. The End.
The 1935 Magnificent Obsession was known to exist but was virtually unseeable (especially by comparison with the almost ubiquitous later version!) until its recent release by the Criterion Collection in a two-DVD package with the remake. Therefore, especially in this context, it’s impossible to judge this movie in isolation or avoid the obvious comparisons. Douglas Sirk’s direction in the remake is highly stylized, with heavily symbolic use of color by cinematographer Russell Metty and ample amounts of mood lighting and artistic framing. By contrast, John Stahl’s direction on the original is surprisingly straightforward; despite having a marvelously atmospheric cinematographer in Mescall (whose vivid chiaroscuro work on James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein and Show Boat helped those movies immeasurably), Stahl has almost every scene take place in full light and keeps going for the most obvious, bread-and-butter camera angles.
The Paris idyll between the (sort-of) lovers is by far the best-looking sequence in the film, full of mysterious half-lights and Universal’s marvelous mittel-Europan sets that only underscores the surprising lack of visual distinction in the rest of the movie. Even odder is the almost complete absence of background music — at times this looks more like a 1931 movie than one from 1935 — aside from the Romeo and Juliet overture by Tchaikovsky heard over the opening credits and a few bits of source music — though Universal had Franz Waxman on their staff and, judging from his music for Rebecca five years later, he would have been more than qualified to write a score for this film that would have immeasurably improved its emotional impact.
One curious aspect of the severity of Stahl’s style — the straightforward photography and absence of a background score — is it does force us to contemplate the moral issues behind the story a good deal more than the stylized Sirk version does; Ralph Morgan’s character sounds more like a lay minister whereas Otto Kruger, playing the same role in the Sirk, comes off more as a precursor of the 1960’s counter-culture, dropping out of the “success” treadmill to pursue his artistic ambitions. The acting is about a wash; Irene Dunne was probably intrinsically more talented than Jane Wyman but Stahl lets her get away with way too much overacting in the big moments; and Robert Taylor has to cope with a conception of his character that made him a good deal more insufferable at the beginning and more unbelievably saintly at the end (Hudson actually does a better job at striking just enough of a note of gravitas that the character’s transformation seems at least a bit more believable) — though frankly neither Taylor nor Hudson were the best imaginable actors for this role at their respective times and I can’t help wishing it had been Fredric March in the 1935 version and Montgomery Clift in the remake.
It also doesn’t help that Heerman, Mason and O’Neil both begin and end their script embarrassingly quickly — the Sirk version gets off to a much more powerful start in that we actually get to see the dual accidents that kick off the story, and whereas I faulted the Sirk version for not showing the point-of-view shot at the end of Merrick being the first thing Helen sees when she actually does regain her sight (an inexplicable omission from an otherwise marvelously stylishly directed film!), the Stahl version doesn’t even give us that much — Merrick visits Helen in her hospital room and notices her sight is recovering enough so that she can distinguish light from dark, he promises her that the rest of her sight will soon come back — and the the film fades out and the end title (a 1940’s-style Universal credit — just as the version of the studio logo was the “New Universal” one from 1937-1946 instead of the airplane logo which would have been on the film originally, suggesting that the source of Criterion’s print was a late-1930’s or early-1940’s reissue) comes up.
Charles made the point that it’s hard to compare the films because much of the difference between them is simply that between the standard Hollywood moviemaking style of the 1930’s and that of the 1950’s (and there isn’t a complicating issue like the one between the Stahl and Sirk versions of Imitation of Life, in which Sirk’s version is again more stylish visually and a good deal better acted, but suffers from eliminating the “Aunt Jemima” story thread and using a white actress, Susan Kohner, as the light-skinned African-American “passing” for white where Stahl had used a Black one, Fredi Washington); the 1935 Magnificent Obsession emerges as a real curio, a quite capable attempt to dramatize a story that’s so frankly unbelievable on its face it really takes all the stylization Sirk threw at it in the remake even to be faintly credible on screen.
••••••••••
The 1954 Magnificent Obsession — a star-maker for both Sirk and his male lead, Rock Hudson [in their third of eight films together — the others were Has Anybody Seen My Gal? (1), Taza, Son of Cochise (2), Captain Lightfoot (4), All That Heaven Allows (5), Written on the Wind (6), Battle Hymn (7) and The Tarnished Angels (8)] — is something else again, a grandiose melodrama with religious trappings based on a 1929 novel by Lloyd C. Douglas, a former minister who also wrote a more explicitly Biblical book called The Robe.
The piece had been filmed earlier by director John C. Stahl for the Laemmles’ Universal in 1935, with Robert Taylor and Irene Dunne in the leads played in Sirk’s version by Hudson and Jane Wyman. According to Sirk, Wyman brought the project to Universal producer Ross Hunter by suggesting she’d be willing to make a film there if they would remake this property for her; according to American Movie Classics host Bob Dorian, the piece was originally planned by Hunter as a vehicle for Loretta Young, to be directed by Joseph Pevney — only Young turned it down and Pevney dropped out of the project. (Given that the entire plot turns on anonymous altruism as a direct route to “contact with a source of infinite power” — i.e., God — one could readily imagine why a hard-core Roman Catholic like Loretta Young would turn down a movie that dramatized the Protestant belief that one can reach God directly without going through the priests and the Church hierarchy.)
Anyway, Sirk got involved in the project after Jane Wyman agreed to star; he tried to read the book and couldn’t get through it (“It is the most confused book you can imagine, it is so abstract in many respects that I didn’t see a picture in it,” Sirk told Halliday), then read a script outline based on the Victor Heerman/Sarah Y. Mason adaptation for Stahl’s film (Sirk said he never actually screened the earlier version), “wandered around the house in a deep depression for a couple of days, and then, thinking it over, I realized that maybe Jane Wyman was right and this goddamned awful story could be a success. And it was; it topped the receipts of the old Stahl picture by more than ten times; it was Universal’s most successful enterprise for years.” Indeed, it was such a success that two years later Universal brought back stars (Wyman, Hudson and Agnes Moorehead), director (Sirk) and cinematographer (Russell Metty) for a follow-up, All That Heaven Allows, which is a far more coherent and believable story but does not have the — pardon the inevitable pun — obsessive quality that gives Magnificent Obsession the grip it’s had on its makers, its audiences and (at least in later generations — at the time it was released it was the sort of film critics savaged but ticket buyers flocked to see anyway) intellectual film writers ever since.
Magnificent Obsession is such an over-the-top piece of melodramatic storytelling that even Jon Halliday, with his agenda of building up Sirk’s reputation as a truly great director, calls it “an appalling weepie, remarkable for Sirk’s stunning direction.” The story deals with Robert Merrick (Hudson), heir to an auto-company fortune, who once attended medical school but decided it would take too long to become a doctor and offer too little psychological satisfaction. Instead he became an irresponsible playboy, interested mainly in setting speed records. When we first meet him he and one of his many disposable girlfriends are in his hydroplane on an increasingly choppy lake attempting to break the world’s water speed record; after putting her ashore he makes another record run, only to crash his boat and severely injure himself. He’s brought back to life by a heart respirator borrowed from a nearby hospital, but when its inventor, Dr. Wayne Phillips, coincidentally suffers a heart attack of his own the respirator isn’t available because it’s being used on Merrick, so the saintly (almost literally!) Dr. Phillips dies and, quite naturally, his widow Helen (Wyman) blames Merrick for her husband’s death — as does Joyce (Barbara Rush, in a quite good and authoritative performance), his daughter (by a previous wife; it’s established early on that Helen was a second wife and they’d only been married a few months when Dr. Phillips died).
As if that wasn’t enough to stir the melodramatic pot, Merrick starts hanging around Helen, either to win her absolution or to get into her pants (or both), and at one point he gets into her cab, she gets out to get away from him — and at that moment a passing car hits her and leaves her with a brain tumor that renders her permanently blind. This propels Merrick on a new career track; he returns to medical school and also secretly helps Helen financially as well as romancing her (since she can’t see him she doesn’t know who her new lover really is — though one would think she would have recognized his voice well before she does — and Joyce, who sees him with her stepmother, briefly threatens to “out” him but has a change of heart and decides to help him keep his secret); he also sneaks her the money to go to Switzerland where the world’s leading experts on her condition examine her, and though they conclude it’s hopeless finally, when she’s about to die from the tumor, Merrick, now a credentialed surgeon, flies out to New Mexico, performs the operation, saves her life, restores her eyesight and they presumably live happily ever after.
As excessive and over-the-top as this story is (though it’s a celebration of altruism rather than a denunciation of it — that mysterious dialogue about “mak[ing] contact with an infinite power” turns out to refer to the late Dr. Phillips’ practice of secretly giving away his money, swearing his recipients never to reveal the identity of their benefactor, and brushing away their attempts to repay him by saying “it’s all used up” — indicating his desire to give away money until he has none left, which is how his widow finds out after his death that he left her absolutely nothing but the house they lived in, and the interlocutor who explains all this to Merrick — and to us — is one of the most interesting and loosely tied-in characters in the entire story: Randolph [Otto Kruger], an artist Dr. Phillips helped and in later reels almost literally the personification of God on Earth — it has the same quasi-operatic intensity of an Ayn Rand novel), Magnificent Obsession has one welcome attribute: though it may deal with them in a manipulative and ham-handed way it does deal with big philosophical issues (as ex-minister Lloyd C. Douglas clearly intended it to when he wrote the source novel two decades earlier!): why are we here and what does God expect of us?
The haunting quality of the script (however silly it verges on being, and sometimes goes over) conveys a surprisingly radical view of the Christian ethos for a big-budget Hollywood spectacular shot in 1953 and released in 1954: the Christ that artist Randolph evokes as a precedent for Dr. Phillips’ behavior is certainly not the safe, “Establishment” Christ worshiped in mainline Protestantism in mid-20th Century America, nor the success-oriented, go-getter Christ of Bruce Barton’s (in)famous book The Man Nobody Knows. Robert Merrick is a hateful character in the opening reels not just because he’s a playboy but because he has more money than he knows what to do with and he hasn’t accepted the idea of his fortune as a sacred trust with which he’s supposed to help others rather than himself — a conception one would more readily expect in a 1960’s movie than in a 1950’s one, and proof once again that there were quite a few 1950’s artists (many of them very popular with audiences) who were far more cynical of the values of “success” and conformism than the modern-day idolaters of the 1950’s as America’s Golden Decade!
Magnificent Obsession manages the fascinating feat of presenting its outlandish material honestly and not condescending to it (at least not in Sirk’s direction and in the performances he got out of his cast — screenwriter Robert Blees, working from Wells Root’s adaptation of the earlier Heerman-Mason script, was far less sensitive to the subversive implications of the tale than Sirk was; and Frank Skinner, who composed the musical score with some major help from Chopin, sometimes sailed over the top and back again with his Chopin-based arrangements for full string orchestra, piano soloist and wordless chorus!). As Halliday put it right after his admission that this story was “an appalling weepie,” “Numerous demonstrations of lighting, camerawork, music — in short, style — redeem an otherwise atrocious tale.” Certainly this movie wouldn’t still be shown if Joseph Pevney (whose early-1950’s films at Universal-International show a certain command of noir visual style but nothing of the peculiar intensity of Sirk’s!) had directed it with Loretta Young as star!
Sirk’s direction isn’t perfect — I can’t imagine how, in a plot that turns so much on sight (and the lack of same), he missed the opportunity to film at least part of the climax from Helen’s point of view (the sight of Rock Hudson’s face emerging before her from the darkness in which she’s spent most of the film would have been a perfect capstone to a surprisingly moving story) — but he gets superb performances out of his women (Wyman, Moorehead surprisingly sympathetic as her confidante — a role she’d repeat in All That Heaven Allows at a time when every other director in Hollywood cast her only as a bitch) and (as they would later in All That Heaven Allows) Sirk and cinematographer Metty create absolutely astonishing, painterly scenes, so richly colored and so evocative of the story they tell that modern directors and cinematographers should be forced to watch this film before they unleash another dull, dirty-looking past-is-brown drama on us. One quirk of Sirk’s direction is that his experience in German films (even under Hitler) and American noirs taught him the value of these dark, chiaroscuro scenes — and, unlike a lot of other noir directors, he saw the value of an occasional noir visual even in telling a decidedly different kind of story.
And the visual richness is matched by a richness of theme — the “punch line” of this film, if it can be called that, being that having been responsible for the death of the saintly Dr. Phillips, Merrick atones by literally taking his place — as the doctor in charge of the Brightwood clinic; as the secret philanthropist; and, of course, as Helen’s husband. Sirk himself compared the story to Euripides’ play Alcestis (in which the title character is a Greek queen who offers her own life in exchange for that of her husband, killed in war: “The husband hesitates. If he accepts he is ruined. If he doesn’t he is dead. It is an impossible situation”), and it’s fascinating to note the parallels not only to acknowledged “great” literature but to other films. Charles noted the similarity to Dickens’ A Christmas Carol in the concept of a super-rich man atoning for his sins by giving his money away — and I thought of two films released shortly after Lloyd C. Douglas published his novel, both of which also quite closely associate secret philanthropy and physical disability: John Adolfi’s The Man Who Played God (another film that, at least to me, transcends its origins as a tear-jerker and becomes quite intense and moving) and Charles Chaplin’s City Lights.
In The Man Who Played God it is the secret philanthropist, not one of his recipients, who is disabled (and the disability is deafness, not blindness), but we are clearly meant to see the protagonist’s change from healthy egomania to disabled altruism as a sign of moral progress. In City Lights, of course, the blind girl’s benefactor is Chaplin’s penniless “tramp,” and he has got the money to fund her operation by stealing (and serving a prison term), so the big last-reel revelation once she sees him for the first time is not that he’s super-rich but that he’s super-poor (and his benefactor was an alcoholic who befriended and helped him when he was drunk and gave him the cold shoulder when sober — an interesting variation on the duality of Robert Merrick’s character!) — but certainly all three films have in common a fascinating interchange of perception and philanthropy, of real and false identity (Halliday, in one of his questions to Sirk, drew the “internal balance between the blindness of Jane Wyman and the false identity of Hudson, so the film has a structure, with contrasting characters, which heightens the impact”), of love and responsibility, of sensual pleasure and spirituality — a remarkably sophisticated conception of humans and their place in the universe for works intended “merely” as entertainment! — 5/5/03
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I watched the 1954 version of Magnificent Obsession, which remains one of the great frustration films of all time because it’s better than it has any right to be given the bizarre silliness of the story. The director, Douglas Sirk, was clearly as ambivalent about it as anyone else; asled by Jon Halliday how he could treat a story like that, he said, “You have to do your utmost to hate it — and to love it. … If I had had to stage Magnificent Obsession as a play I wouldn’t have survived. It is a combination of kitsch, and craziness, and trashiness. But craziness is very important, and it saves trashy stuff like Magnificent Obsession. This is the dialectic — there is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains the element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.”
As silly as the story is (a 1929 novel by Lloyd C. Douglas, author of The Robe, that had already been filmed by Universal in 1935, with John M. Stahl as director, Victor Heerman and his wife Sarah Y. Mason as screenwriters and Irene Dunne and Robert Taylor as stars — the American Film Institute Catalog reports this as “print viewed,” which means it still exists, but to the best of my knowledge — or John’s — it’s never been shown on TV or revived) — playboy and auto-company heir Bob Merrick (Rock Hudson) causes the death of philanthropic doctor Warren Phillips (who’s never actually seen in the film, giving him a sort of god-like quality that no doubt only accentuated Douglas’s clear intent at making him a Christ-like figure in his modern-day religious parable) by tying up the one resuscitator available when he has a motorboat accident; then causes Phillips’ widow Helen (Jane Wyman) to go blind when she flees a taxi where he’s making a pass at her and gets herself run over by a car coming down the road on the other side; to make amends for his actions he picks up his abandoned plans to go to medical school, secretly pays for her care with the world’s top-flight experts on her condition; and finally operates on her himself and restores her eyesight, all under the guru-like guidance of Randolph (Otto Kruger, in a sympathetic role for a change), a successful painter whom the late Dr. Phillips had helped and told of a “source of infinite power” that could be tapped as long as one helped out others without asking for repayment or allowing one’s help to be revealed — Magnificent Obsession fully lives up to the title: there is a quite literally obsessive quality to this plot line that Sirk and his writer (Robert Blees, adapting the Heerman-Mason script for the 1935 film rather than working directly from the novel) and especially his cinematographer, Russell Metty, vividly capture and evoke from a group of competent if not especially great actors.
According to Sirk, the idea of doing Magnificent Obsession came originally from Jane Wyman. Universal, desperate for stars, was anxious to get her to work for them and, after she turned down a succession of scripts they offered her, they asked her what she’d be willing to do and she suggested this remake. (Though I’ve never seen the 1935 film, the AFI Catalog’s plot synopsis suggests the two are very close plot-wise.) Sirk said he tried to read the novel, couldn’t, did accept the story based on a synopsis of the earlier film and insisted on Rock Hudson for the male lead because he was trying to build Hudson into a star and he figured the role would be a star-making part for him (which it was, as the 1935 original had been for Robert Taylor).
What strikes one about the 1954 Magnificent Obsession now is its triumph of style over content; in setup after setup, Sirk and Metty achieve the burnished look of Old Masters’ paintings (especially noteworthy are the twilight scenes in Jane Wyman’s hotel room in Switzerland, where she has gone for consultations with the world’s most eminent specialists in brain lesions, which are so perfectly composed and lit they look like Rembrandt could have painted them ); and the richness of themes Sirk and Blees built into this story. Sirk compared the piece to Euripides’ Alcestis — the classic Greek tragedy in which a woman offers her own life in exchange for her recently deceased husband’s — and it’s clear that the parallel informed his direction and shaped the story towards one in which Merrick actually assumes the identity and unfinished business of the late Dr. Phillips in all respects (as a doctor, as a philanthropist and, eventually, as Helen’s love object). There are plenty of other aspects that add richness to the tale, including the marvelous irony that when she still has her eyesight Helen rejects Merrick but, once she’s blind, he can work his way into her affections — as if being literally blinded opens her inner sight (in Greek mythology blind characters like the seer Tiresias were generally thought of as having unusual powers of perception that visual sight would only have interfered with) to his essential goodness even before he is aware of it himself.
There are glitches in this film — we’re told the story opens in 1948 but the cars we see in the opening sequence are clearly those of 1953 (when the film was shot — for some reason it was held back from release for almost a year after production) — and perhaps a certain bit of opportunism in Jane Wyman’s insistence on playing it (I couldn’t help thinking that her eagerness to play a blind woman on screen may have stemmed from her having won an Academy Award for playing a deaf-mute in Johnny Belinda five years earlier) — and I still can’t imagine how a director so otherwise sensitive as Sirk could have missed the seemingly obligatory point-of-view shot of Merrick as Helen regains her sight and he is the first thing she sees, but otherwise Magnificent Obsession is a peculiarly great film, ably summed up by Jon Halliday as “an appalling weepie, remarkable for Sirk’s stunning direction. Numerous demonstrations of lighting, camerawork, music — in short, style — redeem an otherwise atrocious tale.”
At the same time Magnificent Obsession is also noteworthy for its cynical attitude towards success and its worship; a plot line about a rich man who gives all his money away and goes to his death believing he has profited by the deal in terms of the things that really matter was certainly nervier in 1954 than it had been in the middle of the Depression, and even the explicit identification of Dr. Phillips’ ideals with those of Jesus Christ seems amazingly radical for the time — this is not the “success-oriented” Christ of Bruce Barton and Norman Vincent Peale but the Christ of Martin Luther King and the liberation theologians to follow. In a sense, Magnificent Obsession is a New Age film at a time when the New Age wasn’t cool (though as Charles pointed out the ideals later known as “New Age” are at least 160 years old, and certainly works expressing similar philosophies would have been available to Lloyd C. Douglas when he wrote the source novel), and it seems surprising that such a fundamentally anti-materialist film (albeit one whose visual look is drenched in the characters’ comfortable materialistic world — unlike the similarly plotted Depression-era The Man Who Played God, no one here is in visible want) would have been made in such a seemingly materialistic, success-oriented decade as the 1950’s — and it’s even more surprising that the film would have been such an enormous hit! — 6/28/04
I grabbed the chance to run us the 1935 version of Magnificent Obsession, starring Irene Dunne and Robert Taylor in the roles far more famously played in the 1954 remake by Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson, and directed by Universal’s 1930’s tear-jerker specialist, John M. Stahl. The script was by Victor Heerman and his wife, Sarah Y. Mason, with a rewrite by George O’Neil, based on a 1929 novel by minister-turned-writer Lloyd C. Douglas, whose enduring fame (such as it is) comes from the movies based on this and another one of his inspirational best-sellers, The Robe.
Magnificent Obsession is a crazy tear-jerker about an almost saintly doctor, Dr. Hudson (never seen in the actual story), who’s endowed the Brightwood Hospital in upstate New York (“played” by Lake Arrowhead in California). At the start of the story, having been widowed some time before, he’s made a second marriage to Helen Hudson (Irene Dunne), who as the film opens is returning from an ocean voyage to Europe and is understandably eager to be reunited with her husband. Alas, when she gets to the hospital — in the company of Joyce Hudson (Betty Furness), Hudson’s adult daughter by his first wife — she’s shocked to find that her husband is dead; he had a swimming accident and fell in the lake, and though he was alive when he was pulled out he died because a lung resuscitator he’d invented was over at the other end of the lake, being used to save the life of the wastrel playboy Robert Merrick (Robert Taylor), who’d fallen in as part of a drunken party he was having with several girlfriends.
To make things even more complicated, Merrick falls for Helen Hudson at first sight — and, naturally, she loathes the sight of him because, while he didn’t outright kill her husband, he’s at least morally responsible for his death. Anxious to atone, Merrick is told by the sculptor Randolph (Ralph Morgan in an unusually sensitive performance — he was probably relieved at the opportunity to make a movie in which he didn’t play a murderer!) about “an infinite source of great power” that involves what would now be called “random acts of kindness,” doing things for other people without expecting either reward or recognition in return — one of the rules is that the help must be kept absolutely secret. Randolph, not surprisingly given that he’s a character in a novel by a Christian minister, identifies Jesus Christ as the founder of this sort of charity. Merrick tries to carry out the program but in a blatantly insincere way — he gives a high-denomination bill (Stahl’s setup and John Mescall’s camera don’t get us close enough to tell how high) to a homeless person and figures the universe has rewarded him when Helen Hudson shows up and opportunely gets car trouble.
Merrick takes her for a drive, ostensibly home, but when he tries to park out in the middle of nowhere she catches on to his game, insists she’ll walk home, gets out of the car — and just then a passing car in the other direction strikes her and knocks her to the ground. She survives but the back of her skull is fractured and her optical nerve is crushed, rendering her blind. Undaunted by the fact that he’s already caused enough trouble for this family and he really should leave them alone, Merrick continues to cruise Helen, taking advantage of the fact that she can no longer see to pose as a mysterious “Dr. Robert” and get close to her, supplying her with Braille-printed books and at one point taking her to Paris to meet with Europe’s greatest surgeons in hopes that one of them will be able to figure out how to operate on her to restore her sight. When none can, he resolves to go to medical school himself — in the later movie he does so in the U.S. but in this version he stays in Europe for his training (it’s established that when he went to college he took pre-med courses but ultimately decided not to pursue his training) — and in the climax he develops an operation and, after a momentary attack of nerves (from which he’s roused by the sight of Randolph looking into the O.R. through a window — I’m not making this up, you know!) he settles into his groove, operates on his girlfriend and saves her sight. The End.
The 1935 Magnificent Obsession was known to exist but was virtually unseeable (especially by comparison with the almost ubiquitous later version!) until its recent release by the Criterion Collection in a two-DVD package with the remake. Therefore, especially in this context, it’s impossible to judge this movie in isolation or avoid the obvious comparisons. Douglas Sirk’s direction in the remake is highly stylized, with heavily symbolic use of color by cinematographer Russell Metty and ample amounts of mood lighting and artistic framing. By contrast, John Stahl’s direction on the original is surprisingly straightforward; despite having a marvelously atmospheric cinematographer in Mescall (whose vivid chiaroscuro work on James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein and Show Boat helped those movies immeasurably), Stahl has almost every scene take place in full light and keeps going for the most obvious, bread-and-butter camera angles.
The Paris idyll between the (sort-of) lovers is by far the best-looking sequence in the film, full of mysterious half-lights and Universal’s marvelous mittel-Europan sets that only underscores the surprising lack of visual distinction in the rest of the movie. Even odder is the almost complete absence of background music — at times this looks more like a 1931 movie than one from 1935 — aside from the Romeo and Juliet overture by Tchaikovsky heard over the opening credits and a few bits of source music — though Universal had Franz Waxman on their staff and, judging from his music for Rebecca five years later, he would have been more than qualified to write a score for this film that would have immeasurably improved its emotional impact.
One curious aspect of the severity of Stahl’s style — the straightforward photography and absence of a background score — is it does force us to contemplate the moral issues behind the story a good deal more than the stylized Sirk version does; Ralph Morgan’s character sounds more like a lay minister whereas Otto Kruger, playing the same role in the Sirk, comes off more as a precursor of the 1960’s counter-culture, dropping out of the “success” treadmill to pursue his artistic ambitions. The acting is about a wash; Irene Dunne was probably intrinsically more talented than Jane Wyman but Stahl lets her get away with way too much overacting in the big moments; and Robert Taylor has to cope with a conception of his character that made him a good deal more insufferable at the beginning and more unbelievably saintly at the end (Hudson actually does a better job at striking just enough of a note of gravitas that the character’s transformation seems at least a bit more believable) — though frankly neither Taylor nor Hudson were the best imaginable actors for this role at their respective times and I can’t help wishing it had been Fredric March in the 1935 version and Montgomery Clift in the remake.
It also doesn’t help that Heerman, Mason and O’Neil both begin and end their script embarrassingly quickly — the Sirk version gets off to a much more powerful start in that we actually get to see the dual accidents that kick off the story, and whereas I faulted the Sirk version for not showing the point-of-view shot at the end of Merrick being the first thing Helen sees when she actually does regain her sight (an inexplicable omission from an otherwise marvelously stylishly directed film!), the Stahl version doesn’t even give us that much — Merrick visits Helen in her hospital room and notices her sight is recovering enough so that she can distinguish light from dark, he promises her that the rest of her sight will soon come back — and the the film fades out and the end title (a 1940’s-style Universal credit — just as the version of the studio logo was the “New Universal” one from 1937-1946 instead of the airplane logo which would have been on the film originally, suggesting that the source of Criterion’s print was a late-1930’s or early-1940’s reissue) comes up.
Charles made the point that it’s hard to compare the films because much of the difference between them is simply that between the standard Hollywood moviemaking style of the 1930’s and that of the 1950’s (and there isn’t a complicating issue like the one between the Stahl and Sirk versions of Imitation of Life, in which Sirk’s version is again more stylish visually and a good deal better acted, but suffers from eliminating the “Aunt Jemima” story thread and using a white actress, Susan Kohner, as the light-skinned African-American “passing” for white where Stahl had used a Black one, Fredi Washington); the 1935 Magnificent Obsession emerges as a real curio, a quite capable attempt to dramatize a story that’s so frankly unbelievable on its face it really takes all the stylization Sirk threw at it in the remake even to be faintly credible on screen.
••••••••••
The 1954 Magnificent Obsession — a star-maker for both Sirk and his male lead, Rock Hudson [in their third of eight films together — the others were Has Anybody Seen My Gal? (1), Taza, Son of Cochise (2), Captain Lightfoot (4), All That Heaven Allows (5), Written on the Wind (6), Battle Hymn (7) and The Tarnished Angels (8)] — is something else again, a grandiose melodrama with religious trappings based on a 1929 novel by Lloyd C. Douglas, a former minister who also wrote a more explicitly Biblical book called The Robe.
The piece had been filmed earlier by director John C. Stahl for the Laemmles’ Universal in 1935, with Robert Taylor and Irene Dunne in the leads played in Sirk’s version by Hudson and Jane Wyman. According to Sirk, Wyman brought the project to Universal producer Ross Hunter by suggesting she’d be willing to make a film there if they would remake this property for her; according to American Movie Classics host Bob Dorian, the piece was originally planned by Hunter as a vehicle for Loretta Young, to be directed by Joseph Pevney — only Young turned it down and Pevney dropped out of the project. (Given that the entire plot turns on anonymous altruism as a direct route to “contact with a source of infinite power” — i.e., God — one could readily imagine why a hard-core Roman Catholic like Loretta Young would turn down a movie that dramatized the Protestant belief that one can reach God directly without going through the priests and the Church hierarchy.)
Anyway, Sirk got involved in the project after Jane Wyman agreed to star; he tried to read the book and couldn’t get through it (“It is the most confused book you can imagine, it is so abstract in many respects that I didn’t see a picture in it,” Sirk told Halliday), then read a script outline based on the Victor Heerman/Sarah Y. Mason adaptation for Stahl’s film (Sirk said he never actually screened the earlier version), “wandered around the house in a deep depression for a couple of days, and then, thinking it over, I realized that maybe Jane Wyman was right and this goddamned awful story could be a success. And it was; it topped the receipts of the old Stahl picture by more than ten times; it was Universal’s most successful enterprise for years.” Indeed, it was such a success that two years later Universal brought back stars (Wyman, Hudson and Agnes Moorehead), director (Sirk) and cinematographer (Russell Metty) for a follow-up, All That Heaven Allows, which is a far more coherent and believable story but does not have the — pardon the inevitable pun — obsessive quality that gives Magnificent Obsession the grip it’s had on its makers, its audiences and (at least in later generations — at the time it was released it was the sort of film critics savaged but ticket buyers flocked to see anyway) intellectual film writers ever since.
Magnificent Obsession is such an over-the-top piece of melodramatic storytelling that even Jon Halliday, with his agenda of building up Sirk’s reputation as a truly great director, calls it “an appalling weepie, remarkable for Sirk’s stunning direction.” The story deals with Robert Merrick (Hudson), heir to an auto-company fortune, who once attended medical school but decided it would take too long to become a doctor and offer too little psychological satisfaction. Instead he became an irresponsible playboy, interested mainly in setting speed records. When we first meet him he and one of his many disposable girlfriends are in his hydroplane on an increasingly choppy lake attempting to break the world’s water speed record; after putting her ashore he makes another record run, only to crash his boat and severely injure himself. He’s brought back to life by a heart respirator borrowed from a nearby hospital, but when its inventor, Dr. Wayne Phillips, coincidentally suffers a heart attack of his own the respirator isn’t available because it’s being used on Merrick, so the saintly (almost literally!) Dr. Phillips dies and, quite naturally, his widow Helen (Wyman) blames Merrick for her husband’s death — as does Joyce (Barbara Rush, in a quite good and authoritative performance), his daughter (by a previous wife; it’s established early on that Helen was a second wife and they’d only been married a few months when Dr. Phillips died).
As if that wasn’t enough to stir the melodramatic pot, Merrick starts hanging around Helen, either to win her absolution or to get into her pants (or both), and at one point he gets into her cab, she gets out to get away from him — and at that moment a passing car hits her and leaves her with a brain tumor that renders her permanently blind. This propels Merrick on a new career track; he returns to medical school and also secretly helps Helen financially as well as romancing her (since she can’t see him she doesn’t know who her new lover really is — though one would think she would have recognized his voice well before she does — and Joyce, who sees him with her stepmother, briefly threatens to “out” him but has a change of heart and decides to help him keep his secret); he also sneaks her the money to go to Switzerland where the world’s leading experts on her condition examine her, and though they conclude it’s hopeless finally, when she’s about to die from the tumor, Merrick, now a credentialed surgeon, flies out to New Mexico, performs the operation, saves her life, restores her eyesight and they presumably live happily ever after.
As excessive and over-the-top as this story is (though it’s a celebration of altruism rather than a denunciation of it — that mysterious dialogue about “mak[ing] contact with an infinite power” turns out to refer to the late Dr. Phillips’ practice of secretly giving away his money, swearing his recipients never to reveal the identity of their benefactor, and brushing away their attempts to repay him by saying “it’s all used up” — indicating his desire to give away money until he has none left, which is how his widow finds out after his death that he left her absolutely nothing but the house they lived in, and the interlocutor who explains all this to Merrick — and to us — is one of the most interesting and loosely tied-in characters in the entire story: Randolph [Otto Kruger], an artist Dr. Phillips helped and in later reels almost literally the personification of God on Earth — it has the same quasi-operatic intensity of an Ayn Rand novel), Magnificent Obsession has one welcome attribute: though it may deal with them in a manipulative and ham-handed way it does deal with big philosophical issues (as ex-minister Lloyd C. Douglas clearly intended it to when he wrote the source novel two decades earlier!): why are we here and what does God expect of us?
The haunting quality of the script (however silly it verges on being, and sometimes goes over) conveys a surprisingly radical view of the Christian ethos for a big-budget Hollywood spectacular shot in 1953 and released in 1954: the Christ that artist Randolph evokes as a precedent for Dr. Phillips’ behavior is certainly not the safe, “Establishment” Christ worshiped in mainline Protestantism in mid-20th Century America, nor the success-oriented, go-getter Christ of Bruce Barton’s (in)famous book The Man Nobody Knows. Robert Merrick is a hateful character in the opening reels not just because he’s a playboy but because he has more money than he knows what to do with and he hasn’t accepted the idea of his fortune as a sacred trust with which he’s supposed to help others rather than himself — a conception one would more readily expect in a 1960’s movie than in a 1950’s one, and proof once again that there were quite a few 1950’s artists (many of them very popular with audiences) who were far more cynical of the values of “success” and conformism than the modern-day idolaters of the 1950’s as America’s Golden Decade!
Magnificent Obsession manages the fascinating feat of presenting its outlandish material honestly and not condescending to it (at least not in Sirk’s direction and in the performances he got out of his cast — screenwriter Robert Blees, working from Wells Root’s adaptation of the earlier Heerman-Mason script, was far less sensitive to the subversive implications of the tale than Sirk was; and Frank Skinner, who composed the musical score with some major help from Chopin, sometimes sailed over the top and back again with his Chopin-based arrangements for full string orchestra, piano soloist and wordless chorus!). As Halliday put it right after his admission that this story was “an appalling weepie,” “Numerous demonstrations of lighting, camerawork, music — in short, style — redeem an otherwise atrocious tale.” Certainly this movie wouldn’t still be shown if Joseph Pevney (whose early-1950’s films at Universal-International show a certain command of noir visual style but nothing of the peculiar intensity of Sirk’s!) had directed it with Loretta Young as star!
Sirk’s direction isn’t perfect — I can’t imagine how, in a plot that turns so much on sight (and the lack of same), he missed the opportunity to film at least part of the climax from Helen’s point of view (the sight of Rock Hudson’s face emerging before her from the darkness in which she’s spent most of the film would have been a perfect capstone to a surprisingly moving story) — but he gets superb performances out of his women (Wyman, Moorehead surprisingly sympathetic as her confidante — a role she’d repeat in All That Heaven Allows at a time when every other director in Hollywood cast her only as a bitch) and (as they would later in All That Heaven Allows) Sirk and cinematographer Metty create absolutely astonishing, painterly scenes, so richly colored and so evocative of the story they tell that modern directors and cinematographers should be forced to watch this film before they unleash another dull, dirty-looking past-is-brown drama on us. One quirk of Sirk’s direction is that his experience in German films (even under Hitler) and American noirs taught him the value of these dark, chiaroscuro scenes — and, unlike a lot of other noir directors, he saw the value of an occasional noir visual even in telling a decidedly different kind of story.
And the visual richness is matched by a richness of theme — the “punch line” of this film, if it can be called that, being that having been responsible for the death of the saintly Dr. Phillips, Merrick atones by literally taking his place — as the doctor in charge of the Brightwood clinic; as the secret philanthropist; and, of course, as Helen’s husband. Sirk himself compared the story to Euripides’ play Alcestis (in which the title character is a Greek queen who offers her own life in exchange for that of her husband, killed in war: “The husband hesitates. If he accepts he is ruined. If he doesn’t he is dead. It is an impossible situation”), and it’s fascinating to note the parallels not only to acknowledged “great” literature but to other films. Charles noted the similarity to Dickens’ A Christmas Carol in the concept of a super-rich man atoning for his sins by giving his money away — and I thought of two films released shortly after Lloyd C. Douglas published his novel, both of which also quite closely associate secret philanthropy and physical disability: John Adolfi’s The Man Who Played God (another film that, at least to me, transcends its origins as a tear-jerker and becomes quite intense and moving) and Charles Chaplin’s City Lights.
In The Man Who Played God it is the secret philanthropist, not one of his recipients, who is disabled (and the disability is deafness, not blindness), but we are clearly meant to see the protagonist’s change from healthy egomania to disabled altruism as a sign of moral progress. In City Lights, of course, the blind girl’s benefactor is Chaplin’s penniless “tramp,” and he has got the money to fund her operation by stealing (and serving a prison term), so the big last-reel revelation once she sees him for the first time is not that he’s super-rich but that he’s super-poor (and his benefactor was an alcoholic who befriended and helped him when he was drunk and gave him the cold shoulder when sober — an interesting variation on the duality of Robert Merrick’s character!) — but certainly all three films have in common a fascinating interchange of perception and philanthropy, of real and false identity (Halliday, in one of his questions to Sirk, drew the “internal balance between the blindness of Jane Wyman and the false identity of Hudson, so the film has a structure, with contrasting characters, which heightens the impact”), of love and responsibility, of sensual pleasure and spirituality — a remarkably sophisticated conception of humans and their place in the universe for works intended “merely” as entertainment! — 5/5/03
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I watched the 1954 version of Magnificent Obsession, which remains one of the great frustration films of all time because it’s better than it has any right to be given the bizarre silliness of the story. The director, Douglas Sirk, was clearly as ambivalent about it as anyone else; asled by Jon Halliday how he could treat a story like that, he said, “You have to do your utmost to hate it — and to love it. … If I had had to stage Magnificent Obsession as a play I wouldn’t have survived. It is a combination of kitsch, and craziness, and trashiness. But craziness is very important, and it saves trashy stuff like Magnificent Obsession. This is the dialectic — there is a very short distance between high art and trash, and trash that contains the element of craziness is by this very quality nearer to art.”
As silly as the story is (a 1929 novel by Lloyd C. Douglas, author of The Robe, that had already been filmed by Universal in 1935, with John M. Stahl as director, Victor Heerman and his wife Sarah Y. Mason as screenwriters and Irene Dunne and Robert Taylor as stars — the American Film Institute Catalog reports this as “print viewed,” which means it still exists, but to the best of my knowledge — or John’s — it’s never been shown on TV or revived) — playboy and auto-company heir Bob Merrick (Rock Hudson) causes the death of philanthropic doctor Warren Phillips (who’s never actually seen in the film, giving him a sort of god-like quality that no doubt only accentuated Douglas’s clear intent at making him a Christ-like figure in his modern-day religious parable) by tying up the one resuscitator available when he has a motorboat accident; then causes Phillips’ widow Helen (Jane Wyman) to go blind when she flees a taxi where he’s making a pass at her and gets herself run over by a car coming down the road on the other side; to make amends for his actions he picks up his abandoned plans to go to medical school, secretly pays for her care with the world’s top-flight experts on her condition; and finally operates on her himself and restores her eyesight, all under the guru-like guidance of Randolph (Otto Kruger, in a sympathetic role for a change), a successful painter whom the late Dr. Phillips had helped and told of a “source of infinite power” that could be tapped as long as one helped out others without asking for repayment or allowing one’s help to be revealed — Magnificent Obsession fully lives up to the title: there is a quite literally obsessive quality to this plot line that Sirk and his writer (Robert Blees, adapting the Heerman-Mason script for the 1935 film rather than working directly from the novel) and especially his cinematographer, Russell Metty, vividly capture and evoke from a group of competent if not especially great actors.
According to Sirk, the idea of doing Magnificent Obsession came originally from Jane Wyman. Universal, desperate for stars, was anxious to get her to work for them and, after she turned down a succession of scripts they offered her, they asked her what she’d be willing to do and she suggested this remake. (Though I’ve never seen the 1935 film, the AFI Catalog’s plot synopsis suggests the two are very close plot-wise.) Sirk said he tried to read the novel, couldn’t, did accept the story based on a synopsis of the earlier film and insisted on Rock Hudson for the male lead because he was trying to build Hudson into a star and he figured the role would be a star-making part for him (which it was, as the 1935 original had been for Robert Taylor).
What strikes one about the 1954 Magnificent Obsession now is its triumph of style over content; in setup after setup, Sirk and Metty achieve the burnished look of Old Masters’ paintings (especially noteworthy are the twilight scenes in Jane Wyman’s hotel room in Switzerland, where she has gone for consultations with the world’s most eminent specialists in brain lesions, which are so perfectly composed and lit they look like Rembrandt could have painted them ); and the richness of themes Sirk and Blees built into this story. Sirk compared the piece to Euripides’ Alcestis — the classic Greek tragedy in which a woman offers her own life in exchange for her recently deceased husband’s — and it’s clear that the parallel informed his direction and shaped the story towards one in which Merrick actually assumes the identity and unfinished business of the late Dr. Phillips in all respects (as a doctor, as a philanthropist and, eventually, as Helen’s love object). There are plenty of other aspects that add richness to the tale, including the marvelous irony that when she still has her eyesight Helen rejects Merrick but, once she’s blind, he can work his way into her affections — as if being literally blinded opens her inner sight (in Greek mythology blind characters like the seer Tiresias were generally thought of as having unusual powers of perception that visual sight would only have interfered with) to his essential goodness even before he is aware of it himself.
There are glitches in this film — we’re told the story opens in 1948 but the cars we see in the opening sequence are clearly those of 1953 (when the film was shot — for some reason it was held back from release for almost a year after production) — and perhaps a certain bit of opportunism in Jane Wyman’s insistence on playing it (I couldn’t help thinking that her eagerness to play a blind woman on screen may have stemmed from her having won an Academy Award for playing a deaf-mute in Johnny Belinda five years earlier) — and I still can’t imagine how a director so otherwise sensitive as Sirk could have missed the seemingly obligatory point-of-view shot of Merrick as Helen regains her sight and he is the first thing she sees, but otherwise Magnificent Obsession is a peculiarly great film, ably summed up by Jon Halliday as “an appalling weepie, remarkable for Sirk’s stunning direction. Numerous demonstrations of lighting, camerawork, music — in short, style — redeem an otherwise atrocious tale.”
At the same time Magnificent Obsession is also noteworthy for its cynical attitude towards success and its worship; a plot line about a rich man who gives all his money away and goes to his death believing he has profited by the deal in terms of the things that really matter was certainly nervier in 1954 than it had been in the middle of the Depression, and even the explicit identification of Dr. Phillips’ ideals with those of Jesus Christ seems amazingly radical for the time — this is not the “success-oriented” Christ of Bruce Barton and Norman Vincent Peale but the Christ of Martin Luther King and the liberation theologians to follow. In a sense, Magnificent Obsession is a New Age film at a time when the New Age wasn’t cool (though as Charles pointed out the ideals later known as “New Age” are at least 160 years old, and certainly works expressing similar philosophies would have been available to Lloyd C. Douglas when he wrote the source novel), and it seems surprising that such a fundamentally anti-materialist film (albeit one whose visual look is drenched in the characters’ comfortable materialistic world — unlike the similarly plotted Depression-era The Man Who Played God, no one here is in visible want) would have been made in such a seemingly materialistic, success-oriented decade as the 1950’s — and it’s even more surprising that the film would have been such an enormous hit! — 6/28/04
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
The Company She Keeps (RKO, 1950)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The Company She Keeps is a 1950 film noir of sorts from RKO which begins with “bad girl” Mildred Lynch (Jane Greer) going before a parole board two years into her five-year (indeterminate) sentence for receiving stolen property and cashing bad checks — crimes she blames on the boyfriends she was seeing at the time. The four women members of the parole board outvote the one man (who thinks Mildred is using her sexual wiles to get him to let her out) and give her her “ticket of leave” — that rather old-fashioned phrase is actually used in the film’s dialogue (the writer is Ketti Frings), but warn her that technically she’s still in prison and has to stay in the boarding house where they arranged for her to live, work at the job they set up for her (as a nurse’s aide in a hospital), abstain from alcohol and avoid serious entanglements with men.
Taking the name “Diane Stuart,” she tries her best to conceal her identity as a parolee but is “outed” by one of her co-workers, hard-as-nails Tilly Thompson (Fay Baker). Diane’s parole officer is Joan Wilburn (Lizabeth Scott, top-billed), and the two women clash immediately. Their relationship goes from bad to worse when Diane gets a crush on Joan’s boyfriend, newspaper columnist Larry Collins (Dennis O’Keefe, older and puffier than he was in his days as a comedian in the mid-1940’s), and worse still when Larry reciprocates Diane’s attentions, goes on some rather quirky dates with her (their first night out together he takes her to a midget car racing — RKO had just done a short on midget car racing so they had a lot of stock footage of it — and later they go to a planetarium, which prompted Charles to joke, “At least no one gets shot”) and ultimately asks her to marry him — which requires the approval of the parole officer who just happens to be her rival for Larry’s affections.
It’s one of those movies that’s quite entertaining and engaging as it stands but could have been even better — what it needed was a screenplay that delved deeper into the quirky issues raised by the story, a more sensitive and truly noir director than John Cromwell (Anthony Mann would probably have been a good choice then), and above all a stronger actress in the role of the parole officer. Lizabeth Scott’s long-term stardom is one of those inexplicable mysteries Hollywood throws up — how did someone with such limited talent as an actress get to be a star for so long and do major films with legendary performers like Humphrey Bogart and Elvis Presley? — and the film really suffers from the lack of an actress strong enough to be the steel to Jane Greer’s flint (someone like Joan Crawford or, my favorite from the period and a star who seemingly could have improved almost any film, Barbara Stanwyck).
As it is, what rings truest about the film is the inner conflict Greer enacts so well — her tough-as-nails attitude, forged in her years as an itinerant criminal after her family threw her out when she was 11 and then honed to almost diamond hardness by her years in prison, vs. her sufficient intelligence and sensitivity to realize that the hardness that was essential for her survival in prison is actually hurting her chances for success “outside.” The best scenes in the movie are the two in which Diane née Mildred is tempted to go back to a life of crime — when she’s about to go on her first date with Larry and wants a coat, and is tempted to shoplift one; and at the end, when she’s petitioned a judge to restore her civil rights and the judge, despite Joan’s pleadings, seems to be against her; she grabs a chance to flee the building and only when she runs into Larry outside (he gets into the same cab) does she let him talk her into returning and facing the judge’s decision, whatever it is — and the film is “stolen” out from under Lizabeth Scott’s tiny nose by Greer and also by Fay Baker, whose unrepentant crook (she’s using her hospital job to steal drugs and give them to her boyfriend for sale on the street) not only makes a nice contrast to the one who’s trying to reform but also creates the kind of sparks in her conflicts with the heroine that the antagonism between Diane and Joan does not.
It’s not all that clear just what attracts Larry to Diane and why he gives up good old respectable Joan for this ill-fated woman from prison — once again, better writing and direction could have done much to clear this up and made this a deeper, richer film than the one we have, in which the bitterness a person in Joan’s position must have felt about losing a man to one of her charges is soft-pedaled (Lizabeth Scott probably couldn’t have played it anyway) and the three inexplicably seem to end up as friends, with Joan risking her own job to go to bat for Diane. One striking bit of cross-promotion between Howard Hughes’ enterprises occurs in this film: the Hughes-owned RKO produced it and, in a scene at an airport, the plane we see is clearly marked with the logo and insignia of another Hughes property (at the time), TWA.
The Company She Keeps is a 1950 film noir of sorts from RKO which begins with “bad girl” Mildred Lynch (Jane Greer) going before a parole board two years into her five-year (indeterminate) sentence for receiving stolen property and cashing bad checks — crimes she blames on the boyfriends she was seeing at the time. The four women members of the parole board outvote the one man (who thinks Mildred is using her sexual wiles to get him to let her out) and give her her “ticket of leave” — that rather old-fashioned phrase is actually used in the film’s dialogue (the writer is Ketti Frings), but warn her that technically she’s still in prison and has to stay in the boarding house where they arranged for her to live, work at the job they set up for her (as a nurse’s aide in a hospital), abstain from alcohol and avoid serious entanglements with men.
Taking the name “Diane Stuart,” she tries her best to conceal her identity as a parolee but is “outed” by one of her co-workers, hard-as-nails Tilly Thompson (Fay Baker). Diane’s parole officer is Joan Wilburn (Lizabeth Scott, top-billed), and the two women clash immediately. Their relationship goes from bad to worse when Diane gets a crush on Joan’s boyfriend, newspaper columnist Larry Collins (Dennis O’Keefe, older and puffier than he was in his days as a comedian in the mid-1940’s), and worse still when Larry reciprocates Diane’s attentions, goes on some rather quirky dates with her (their first night out together he takes her to a midget car racing — RKO had just done a short on midget car racing so they had a lot of stock footage of it — and later they go to a planetarium, which prompted Charles to joke, “At least no one gets shot”) and ultimately asks her to marry him — which requires the approval of the parole officer who just happens to be her rival for Larry’s affections.
It’s one of those movies that’s quite entertaining and engaging as it stands but could have been even better — what it needed was a screenplay that delved deeper into the quirky issues raised by the story, a more sensitive and truly noir director than John Cromwell (Anthony Mann would probably have been a good choice then), and above all a stronger actress in the role of the parole officer. Lizabeth Scott’s long-term stardom is one of those inexplicable mysteries Hollywood throws up — how did someone with such limited talent as an actress get to be a star for so long and do major films with legendary performers like Humphrey Bogart and Elvis Presley? — and the film really suffers from the lack of an actress strong enough to be the steel to Jane Greer’s flint (someone like Joan Crawford or, my favorite from the period and a star who seemingly could have improved almost any film, Barbara Stanwyck).
As it is, what rings truest about the film is the inner conflict Greer enacts so well — her tough-as-nails attitude, forged in her years as an itinerant criminal after her family threw her out when she was 11 and then honed to almost diamond hardness by her years in prison, vs. her sufficient intelligence and sensitivity to realize that the hardness that was essential for her survival in prison is actually hurting her chances for success “outside.” The best scenes in the movie are the two in which Diane née Mildred is tempted to go back to a life of crime — when she’s about to go on her first date with Larry and wants a coat, and is tempted to shoplift one; and at the end, when she’s petitioned a judge to restore her civil rights and the judge, despite Joan’s pleadings, seems to be against her; she grabs a chance to flee the building and only when she runs into Larry outside (he gets into the same cab) does she let him talk her into returning and facing the judge’s decision, whatever it is — and the film is “stolen” out from under Lizabeth Scott’s tiny nose by Greer and also by Fay Baker, whose unrepentant crook (she’s using her hospital job to steal drugs and give them to her boyfriend for sale on the street) not only makes a nice contrast to the one who’s trying to reform but also creates the kind of sparks in her conflicts with the heroine that the antagonism between Diane and Joan does not.
It’s not all that clear just what attracts Larry to Diane and why he gives up good old respectable Joan for this ill-fated woman from prison — once again, better writing and direction could have done much to clear this up and made this a deeper, richer film than the one we have, in which the bitterness a person in Joan’s position must have felt about losing a man to one of her charges is soft-pedaled (Lizabeth Scott probably couldn’t have played it anyway) and the three inexplicably seem to end up as friends, with Joan risking her own job to go to bat for Diane. One striking bit of cross-promotion between Howard Hughes’ enterprises occurs in this film: the Hughes-owned RKO produced it and, in a scene at an airport, the plane we see is clearly marked with the logo and insignia of another Hughes property (at the time), TWA.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Occupation 101 (Abdallah and Sufyan Omeish, 2006)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Occupation 101 turned out to be quite a movie; directed by Abdallah and Sufyan Omeish (I presume they’re brothers) and written by them and Alison Weir — she did the narration (both writing and delivering it), it’s a relentless portrayal of Israel’s oppression of Palestine dating from the inception of the “Jewish state” in 1948 and even earlier, and makes it clearer than most presentations on this topic that in more ways than one, Israel is yet another bit of collateral damage from the Holocaust; not only did the world community’s position on Zionism shift from anti to pro just after World War II when the victor nations (the U.S. and Britain in particular), realizing how little they’d done to prevent the Holocaust, gave the Zionists international sanction to launch their state, but even before that the pressure of Nazi persecution led a lot of European Jews to flee to the Holy Land and shift the population balance of Palestine from only 3 percent Jews at the turn of the last century to about one-third at the end of World War II. (Ironically, all these Jews ended up going to Palestine at least partly because the U.S. and the Western European countries they would have preferred to relocate to wouldn’t let them in.)
The film taught me one fact about Israel’s occupation of Palestine I hadn’t known before: it highlighted the size of the Palestinian Christian community and noted that they’re lumped in with the Palestinian Muslims and treated just as savagely by the Israeli occupiers — which made it even more ironic that the evangelical Christian movement in the U.S. has embraced Israel’s cause, and in particular the demand of the Israeli far-Right that Israel annex all of the West Bank and Gaza because the fulfillment of the eschatological predictions of the Book of Revelation (at least the way the evangelical community’s consensus reads it) demand, among other things, that the Jews rule all of historic Judea and Samaria so the battle of Armageddon can occur (at which time the Jews will be given an on-the-spot choice — immediate conversion to Christianity or eternal consignment to the flames of Hell — with friends like these, the Jews don’t need enemies!).
Aside from that, Occupation 101 — which begins with footage of the Nazi occupations and then flashes forward to the British in India, the apartheid regime in South Africa and then Israel in Palestine, all set to a relentless rock beat that turns occupation footage into a weird music video (at this point I was thinking maybe the film should have been called Palestoyisqatsi) — presents a story familiar to anyone who’s researched the issue from alternative sources of the Israeli Jews’ relentless pursuit of religio-ethnic cleansing in the Holy Land from their initial occupation of it in the late 1940’s, which kick-started into high gear with Israel’s sweeping triumph in the 1967 Six-Day War and now leaves Israel in effective control of about 90 percent of historic Palestine.
The film features a long list of commentators, many of them Israelis themselves — this isn’t the first movie to note that the Israeli mass media (especially the newspaper Ha’aretz) are more free to offer criticisms of Israel and its occupation policies than the U.S. media, which hew to a strongly pro-Israel line — exposing the Israeli abuses and arguing that what Israel is after is to make the existence of the Palestinians so unpleasant long-term that they simply leave. Indeed, on this point the film may not be radical enough; in Israel’s recent attack on Gaza, even the option of flight was denied to the Gazans under siege because Egypt, the only other country that borders Gaza, accommodated Israel and the U.S. and sealed its border so the Gazans couldn’t leave and badly needed food, medicine and other supplies couldn’t get in.
Quite frankly, the Israelis seem to be interested not in getting the Palestinians to leave but in starving them slowly and achieving the kind of slow-motion “genocide by hunger” the government of Stalin wreaked on the Ukrainians in the early 1930’s — and one could certainly argue the possibility that the Israelis are perfectly aware of a point made in the film, that the more you terrorize people by subjecting them to long-term occupation the likelier they are to lose all faith in life itself and become terrorists, and are counting on that outcome so they can use the Palestinians’ suicide bombings and rocket attacks on Israel as an excuse to wipe them out and thereby apply a “final solution to the Palestinian problem.” After the film I made the point that, while calling the occupation of Palestine a “second Holocaust” (with Jews as perpetrators instead of principal victims this time) is a bit extreme — Israel hasn’t actually set up death camps to kill the Palestinians en masse the way the Nazis did to kill the Jews — Israel has uncannily reconstructed the same array of oppressive measures the Christian governments of Western Europe routinely imposed on their Jewish populations from the Middle Ages until the 18th and 19th centuries: locking them in ghettoes (one shot in the film even shows a spray-painted graffito on the “separation wall” by which Israel has bisected Palestine that reads, “Ghetto,” obviously the work of a Palestinian who has made this historical parallel), depriving them of work and income, forcing them to carry internal passports and have their movements monitored and arbitrarily restricted through checkpoints.
There’s no particular ground for hope in this situation — the makers of this movie are obviously hoping for an international outcry against Israel that will parallel the one against apartheid South Africa and lead to the fall of the Zionist state and its replacement by a secular, democratic, multi-religious Palestine (the “one-state solution”), but as of now Israel has the major cards on its side — notably a state-of-the-art military and the 100 percent backing of the world’s greatest military power ever, the United States — and, ironically, it seems as if the Palestinians’ best hope is if they can hold out as a people long enough for the U.S. to fall victim to its own economic weakness and the American empire to pass from the scene the way the Roman, British, German and Russian empires did.
Occupation 101 turned out to be quite a movie; directed by Abdallah and Sufyan Omeish (I presume they’re brothers) and written by them and Alison Weir — she did the narration (both writing and delivering it), it’s a relentless portrayal of Israel’s oppression of Palestine dating from the inception of the “Jewish state” in 1948 and even earlier, and makes it clearer than most presentations on this topic that in more ways than one, Israel is yet another bit of collateral damage from the Holocaust; not only did the world community’s position on Zionism shift from anti to pro just after World War II when the victor nations (the U.S. and Britain in particular), realizing how little they’d done to prevent the Holocaust, gave the Zionists international sanction to launch their state, but even before that the pressure of Nazi persecution led a lot of European Jews to flee to the Holy Land and shift the population balance of Palestine from only 3 percent Jews at the turn of the last century to about one-third at the end of World War II. (Ironically, all these Jews ended up going to Palestine at least partly because the U.S. and the Western European countries they would have preferred to relocate to wouldn’t let them in.)
The film taught me one fact about Israel’s occupation of Palestine I hadn’t known before: it highlighted the size of the Palestinian Christian community and noted that they’re lumped in with the Palestinian Muslims and treated just as savagely by the Israeli occupiers — which made it even more ironic that the evangelical Christian movement in the U.S. has embraced Israel’s cause, and in particular the demand of the Israeli far-Right that Israel annex all of the West Bank and Gaza because the fulfillment of the eschatological predictions of the Book of Revelation (at least the way the evangelical community’s consensus reads it) demand, among other things, that the Jews rule all of historic Judea and Samaria so the battle of Armageddon can occur (at which time the Jews will be given an on-the-spot choice — immediate conversion to Christianity or eternal consignment to the flames of Hell — with friends like these, the Jews don’t need enemies!).
Aside from that, Occupation 101 — which begins with footage of the Nazi occupations and then flashes forward to the British in India, the apartheid regime in South Africa and then Israel in Palestine, all set to a relentless rock beat that turns occupation footage into a weird music video (at this point I was thinking maybe the film should have been called Palestoyisqatsi) — presents a story familiar to anyone who’s researched the issue from alternative sources of the Israeli Jews’ relentless pursuit of religio-ethnic cleansing in the Holy Land from their initial occupation of it in the late 1940’s, which kick-started into high gear with Israel’s sweeping triumph in the 1967 Six-Day War and now leaves Israel in effective control of about 90 percent of historic Palestine.
The film features a long list of commentators, many of them Israelis themselves — this isn’t the first movie to note that the Israeli mass media (especially the newspaper Ha’aretz) are more free to offer criticisms of Israel and its occupation policies than the U.S. media, which hew to a strongly pro-Israel line — exposing the Israeli abuses and arguing that what Israel is after is to make the existence of the Palestinians so unpleasant long-term that they simply leave. Indeed, on this point the film may not be radical enough; in Israel’s recent attack on Gaza, even the option of flight was denied to the Gazans under siege because Egypt, the only other country that borders Gaza, accommodated Israel and the U.S. and sealed its border so the Gazans couldn’t leave and badly needed food, medicine and other supplies couldn’t get in.
Quite frankly, the Israelis seem to be interested not in getting the Palestinians to leave but in starving them slowly and achieving the kind of slow-motion “genocide by hunger” the government of Stalin wreaked on the Ukrainians in the early 1930’s — and one could certainly argue the possibility that the Israelis are perfectly aware of a point made in the film, that the more you terrorize people by subjecting them to long-term occupation the likelier they are to lose all faith in life itself and become terrorists, and are counting on that outcome so they can use the Palestinians’ suicide bombings and rocket attacks on Israel as an excuse to wipe them out and thereby apply a “final solution to the Palestinian problem.” After the film I made the point that, while calling the occupation of Palestine a “second Holocaust” (with Jews as perpetrators instead of principal victims this time) is a bit extreme — Israel hasn’t actually set up death camps to kill the Palestinians en masse the way the Nazis did to kill the Jews — Israel has uncannily reconstructed the same array of oppressive measures the Christian governments of Western Europe routinely imposed on their Jewish populations from the Middle Ages until the 18th and 19th centuries: locking them in ghettoes (one shot in the film even shows a spray-painted graffito on the “separation wall” by which Israel has bisected Palestine that reads, “Ghetto,” obviously the work of a Palestinian who has made this historical parallel), depriving them of work and income, forcing them to carry internal passports and have their movements monitored and arbitrarily restricted through checkpoints.
There’s no particular ground for hope in this situation — the makers of this movie are obviously hoping for an international outcry against Israel that will parallel the one against apartheid South Africa and lead to the fall of the Zionist state and its replacement by a secular, democratic, multi-religious Palestine (the “one-state solution”), but as of now Israel has the major cards on its side — notably a state-of-the-art military and the 100 percent backing of the world’s greatest military power ever, the United States — and, ironically, it seems as if the Palestinians’ best hope is if they can hold out as a people long enough for the U.S. to fall victim to its own economic weakness and the American empire to pass from the scene the way the Roman, British, German and Russian empires did.
Monday, February 16, 2009
Zoo (Think Film, 2007)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran Charles Zoo, the 2007 documentary (actually quasi-documentary, since many of the sequences in it are re-created, some of them with the actual participants, some with actors) about “zoophiles” — people who like having sex with animals — and in particular the incident in King County, Washington in 2005 in which an aerospace engineer at Boeing died as a result of a perforated colon from having anal-receptive sex with a horse. The film was quite controversial on its initial release — no surprise there — and sparked quite a lot of debate as to the morals and ethics of zoophilia and in particular whether animals can truly “consent” to a sexual experience and, if they can’t, is zoophilia inherently rape. (Lawrence Russell answered that question the way a zoophile might in the 1971 book Perversions, published by Greenleaf Press — the porn house Edward D. Wood, Jr. wrote for the last 15 years of his life: “While a dog cannot be taken to be a consenting adult, dogs usually have rather drastic methods of showing their dislike for something.”)
Zoo reminded me of those dreadfully earnest documentaries made in the late 1960’s about Gay people — the same shroud of secrecy surrounding the people and their actions, the same accounts of the shame they faced internally when they realized in what direction fate had steered their sexual desires, and the same uneasy attempt by the filmmakers to seem “responsible” and avoid direct titillation while at the same time taking advantage of the disquieting (to say the least) nature of their subject. Zoo is a powerful film but also a frustrating one; we get very little sense of what makes the zoophiles “run,” and in their efforts to downplay the obvious opportunities to shock and titillate the audience, director Robinson Devor and his co-writer, Charles Mudede, go in the other direction and make their movie surprisingly dull.
Zoo features marvelous cinematography by Sean Kirby — he takes full advantage of “magic hour” (twilight) to make the naturally awesome Pacific Northwest scenery positively glow — and an eloquent musical score by Paul Matthew Moore that seamlessly taps into the “Neptune — The Mystic” movement from Gustav Holst’s The Planets (at times it’s hard to tell where Holst leaves off and Moore begins, or vice versa). Devor seems genuinely fascinated by the zoophiles and anxious to get to understand them, but about all he can do in that regard is show us the utter normality of every other aspects of their lives — even the zoophile sex party he shows seems like any other weekend gathering of old friends, down to the host saying that sometimes he invites all those people and nothing (or at least nothing zoosexual) happens. To the extent to which we get to see the zoophiles themselves, they seem either loners with a neurotic distaste for the company of humans or people envious of animals for not having the “civilized” world to worry about.
The part of the film that most rang true for me was when one of the zoophiles said it was a relief to be in physical contact with an animal precisely because it allows you to shed the burden of humanness — to turn off the sentient faculties and essentially become an animal yourself for the duration. I remembered hearing that from the man I interviewed for Zenger’s about “horse-play,” which in his view meant people doing role-play as horses rather than having sex with them (and, indeed, many of the people taking on the human roles in these horse-play scenarios recoil with horror at the thought of actual sex with their horse-partners precisely because it carries the psychological taint of bestiality) — that the appeal of it (and of the more common dog-play) was precisely in transcending your human-ness and becoming just another animal, operating solely on sensation and instinct rather than letting the intellect get in the way.
Zoo was a hard movie to watch, in more ways than one; even as relatively un-prudish a person as me is pretty lost by the appeal of zoophilia (I don’t object to it on moral grounds; I just don’t see why anybody would want to do it — though maybe it would be more comprehensible if I’d grown up in a rural area and animals other than family pets had been a routine part of my life), and Devor is so matter-of-fact in his presentation of it that the movie holds your attention only by the sheer outrageousness of the subject matter and in spite of the director’s attempts to play it down.
I ran Charles Zoo, the 2007 documentary (actually quasi-documentary, since many of the sequences in it are re-created, some of them with the actual participants, some with actors) about “zoophiles” — people who like having sex with animals — and in particular the incident in King County, Washington in 2005 in which an aerospace engineer at Boeing died as a result of a perforated colon from having anal-receptive sex with a horse. The film was quite controversial on its initial release — no surprise there — and sparked quite a lot of debate as to the morals and ethics of zoophilia and in particular whether animals can truly “consent” to a sexual experience and, if they can’t, is zoophilia inherently rape. (Lawrence Russell answered that question the way a zoophile might in the 1971 book Perversions, published by Greenleaf Press — the porn house Edward D. Wood, Jr. wrote for the last 15 years of his life: “While a dog cannot be taken to be a consenting adult, dogs usually have rather drastic methods of showing their dislike for something.”)
Zoo reminded me of those dreadfully earnest documentaries made in the late 1960’s about Gay people — the same shroud of secrecy surrounding the people and their actions, the same accounts of the shame they faced internally when they realized in what direction fate had steered their sexual desires, and the same uneasy attempt by the filmmakers to seem “responsible” and avoid direct titillation while at the same time taking advantage of the disquieting (to say the least) nature of their subject. Zoo is a powerful film but also a frustrating one; we get very little sense of what makes the zoophiles “run,” and in their efforts to downplay the obvious opportunities to shock and titillate the audience, director Robinson Devor and his co-writer, Charles Mudede, go in the other direction and make their movie surprisingly dull.
Zoo features marvelous cinematography by Sean Kirby — he takes full advantage of “magic hour” (twilight) to make the naturally awesome Pacific Northwest scenery positively glow — and an eloquent musical score by Paul Matthew Moore that seamlessly taps into the “Neptune — The Mystic” movement from Gustav Holst’s The Planets (at times it’s hard to tell where Holst leaves off and Moore begins, or vice versa). Devor seems genuinely fascinated by the zoophiles and anxious to get to understand them, but about all he can do in that regard is show us the utter normality of every other aspects of their lives — even the zoophile sex party he shows seems like any other weekend gathering of old friends, down to the host saying that sometimes he invites all those people and nothing (or at least nothing zoosexual) happens. To the extent to which we get to see the zoophiles themselves, they seem either loners with a neurotic distaste for the company of humans or people envious of animals for not having the “civilized” world to worry about.
The part of the film that most rang true for me was when one of the zoophiles said it was a relief to be in physical contact with an animal precisely because it allows you to shed the burden of humanness — to turn off the sentient faculties and essentially become an animal yourself for the duration. I remembered hearing that from the man I interviewed for Zenger’s about “horse-play,” which in his view meant people doing role-play as horses rather than having sex with them (and, indeed, many of the people taking on the human roles in these horse-play scenarios recoil with horror at the thought of actual sex with their horse-partners precisely because it carries the psychological taint of bestiality) — that the appeal of it (and of the more common dog-play) was precisely in transcending your human-ness and becoming just another animal, operating solely on sensation and instinct rather than letting the intellect get in the way.
Zoo was a hard movie to watch, in more ways than one; even as relatively un-prudish a person as me is pretty lost by the appeal of zoophilia (I don’t object to it on moral grounds; I just don’t see why anybody would want to do it — though maybe it would be more comprehensible if I’d grown up in a rural area and animals other than family pets had been a routine part of my life), and Devor is so matter-of-fact in his presentation of it that the movie holds your attention only by the sheer outrageousness of the subject matter and in spite of the director’s attempts to play it down.
Tristan + Isolde (20th Century-Fox, 2006)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I didn’t have a chance earlier to write about the movie Charles and I screened Saturday night as a Valentine’s Day special: Tristan + Isolde (that’s how the title is spelled on both the DVD box and the actual credits, apparently in imitation of the Romeo + Juliet nomenclature of the 1996 Baz Luhrmann modern-dress version of Shakespeare’s play, with Leonardo DiCaprio as Romeo and Claire Danes as Juliet), a 2006 production by director Kevin Reynolds — the boyhood friend of Kevin Costner whose relationship was strained when they made Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and then totally destroyed by the traumas of Waterworld — though both Ridley Scott and his brother Tony are among the crowd of credited producers and Ridley actually planned to make this in the 1970’s before abandoning it and doing Alien instead (a wise move for the future of his career!).
Part of the attraction of this movie was the casting of James Franco as Tristan, and for me the temptation to show this the night after we’d watched him in a modern-dress stoner role in Pineapple Express was irresistible. What I wouldn’t have guessed was that the modern-dress drug comedy would be a lot more entertaining than this mediocre period piece! Tristan + Isolde isn’t a bad movie; it’s just not a particularly good one, and given that it’s up against two magnificent tellings of the story in other media — Gottfried von Strassburg’s prose poem and Richard Wagner’s opera — the mediocrity of the version Reynolds and his writer, Dean Georgaris, simply isn’t good enough. Reynolds and Georgaris altered the story almost unrecognizably, using little of either Gottfried or Wagner but some of the proper names and the basic situation — Prince Tristan of Cornwall, adoptive son of King Marke, brings back Irish princess Isolde to be Marke’s bride as part of a peace treaty between England and Ireland but falls in love with her himself.
The big element they left out was the love potion that sparks their affair; Gottfried, stuck with the medieval writer’s obligation to remain faithful to his source (an earlier version of the legend by someone named Thomas) — the new writer was allowed to add detail to the older version but not to add or change plot points — was stuck with the idea that Tristan and Isolde had had no romantic interest in each other until they drank the potion, which left him at a loss to explain why Isolde saved Tristan’s life after he had killed her fiancé, Morold, in battle. Wagner, not stuck with the same rules, hinted that Isolde was romantically (or at least sexually) interested in Tristan pre-potion; Georgaris took that hint and ran with it, not only showing Isolde as having the hots for Tristan but them actually consummating their affair as soon as he was healed enough to be able to have sex.
This has one fringe benefit, at least for straight female and Gay male viewers — it offers more and better views of James Franco “in the flesh” than any other film of his I’ve seen — but not only does it soften the blow when they finally do become adulterers, it wrecks the balance of the plot so carefully crafted by Gottfried and followed by Wagner, especially since in this version Isolde is aware from the beginning who Tristan is (in both Gottfried and Wagner he inverts his first name and calls himself “Tantris” when he’s under Isolde’s care, aware that if she knew who he really was she’d kill him) and therefore there isn’t the visceral thrill or suspense of what’s going to happen to him when she “outs” him. Georgaris not only leaves out the love potion — the armamentarium of herbs Isolde’s mother teaches her to use is strictly medicinal, not supernatural — he omits all the fantasy elements of the story, much to its detriment. Without the potion, and the obsessiveness it adds to the story (especially in Wagner’s death-soaked version, in which Tristan and Isolde are undecided moment-by-moment whether what they most want is sex or death), Tristan + Isolde turns into a very ordinary romantic triangle in which the attempts of Tristan and Isolde to find places they can have sex safely takes on an unintended (at least I hope it was unintended) air of farce.
To make it even worse, Georgaris decides to wrap his story around a political theme, beginning with a sequence of printed titles expressing that the various British tribes are living under the oppressive rule of the Irish empire, with Ireland’s warrior-king Donnchadh (David Patrick O’Hara) keeping control of the next-door island by pitting its tribes against each other and extracting tribute (money and livestock) from them all. I’m not exactly a hard-core Irish nationalist, but given the 1,000 years during which it was Britain that occupied and oppressed Ireland, I got the same sort of clammy feeling from this plot point I’d probably have if I ever watched one of those Nazi propaganda movies detailing the horrible oppression and discrimination Germans supposedly suffered under Polish, Czech or Jewish occupation.
James Franco is part of the problem with this movie; he’s hot-looking and a quite capable actor (I still say I’d have liked the Spider-Man movies better if it had been Franco as Spider-Man and Tobey Maguire as his friend-turned-adversary instead of the other way around!) but, like the late Heath Ledger in A Knight’s Tale (one of the movies, along with Braveheart, evoked in the promotional copy on the DVD box for this), Franco is simply too modern an actor to seem credible in a medieval role (which is true of most of the cast at well; at times watching Tristan + Isolde seems like watching video of a Renaissance Faire) — just as he’s good-looking and charismatic enough to be credible as Tristan the lover but simply isn’t butch enough to be credible as Tristan the warrior. At least he’s better than his Isolde, Sophia Myles, who can barely act at all.
Another aspect of this movie that really rubbed me the wrong way is Anne Dudley’s musical score; it’s true that she has the unfair burden of the inevitable comparisons with Wagner, but the mess of Irish folk-dance music to represent the principals at peace, pounding percussion to represent them at war, and treacly piano-and-strings stuff that would seem right at home in a Lifetime TV-movie to represent the titular lovers probably would sound terrible even if we didn’t have Wagner’s masterpiece to compare it to. (It’s a pity this movie didn’t get a composer who could have done for it what Gottfried Hüppert did for Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen: create a score that sounded appropriately “Wagnerian” without actually lifting any of Wagner’s themes or motifs.)
It also doesn’t help that Artur Reinhart’s cinematography is thoroughly in the past-is-brown mold, and makes the scene look so dirty and squalid Charles and I found ourselves thinking of Monty Python and the Holy Grail and even quoting some of its lines — or that Reynolds' direction is pretty dull in the action scenes, lacking the peculiar intensity of the violence-porn of Mel Gibson's staging of Braveheart. I came away from Tristan + Isolde oddly wishing that Warners would have done a version in the 1930’s, with Errol Flynn as Tristan (he would have had no trouble being credible as both lover and warrior!), Olivia de Havilland as Isolde, Claude Rains as Marke, Michael Curtiz directing and Erich Wolfgang Korngold composing.
I didn’t have a chance earlier to write about the movie Charles and I screened Saturday night as a Valentine’s Day special: Tristan + Isolde (that’s how the title is spelled on both the DVD box and the actual credits, apparently in imitation of the Romeo + Juliet nomenclature of the 1996 Baz Luhrmann modern-dress version of Shakespeare’s play, with Leonardo DiCaprio as Romeo and Claire Danes as Juliet), a 2006 production by director Kevin Reynolds — the boyhood friend of Kevin Costner whose relationship was strained when they made Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and then totally destroyed by the traumas of Waterworld — though both Ridley Scott and his brother Tony are among the crowd of credited producers and Ridley actually planned to make this in the 1970’s before abandoning it and doing Alien instead (a wise move for the future of his career!).
Part of the attraction of this movie was the casting of James Franco as Tristan, and for me the temptation to show this the night after we’d watched him in a modern-dress stoner role in Pineapple Express was irresistible. What I wouldn’t have guessed was that the modern-dress drug comedy would be a lot more entertaining than this mediocre period piece! Tristan + Isolde isn’t a bad movie; it’s just not a particularly good one, and given that it’s up against two magnificent tellings of the story in other media — Gottfried von Strassburg’s prose poem and Richard Wagner’s opera — the mediocrity of the version Reynolds and his writer, Dean Georgaris, simply isn’t good enough. Reynolds and Georgaris altered the story almost unrecognizably, using little of either Gottfried or Wagner but some of the proper names and the basic situation — Prince Tristan of Cornwall, adoptive son of King Marke, brings back Irish princess Isolde to be Marke’s bride as part of a peace treaty between England and Ireland but falls in love with her himself.
The big element they left out was the love potion that sparks their affair; Gottfried, stuck with the medieval writer’s obligation to remain faithful to his source (an earlier version of the legend by someone named Thomas) — the new writer was allowed to add detail to the older version but not to add or change plot points — was stuck with the idea that Tristan and Isolde had had no romantic interest in each other until they drank the potion, which left him at a loss to explain why Isolde saved Tristan’s life after he had killed her fiancé, Morold, in battle. Wagner, not stuck with the same rules, hinted that Isolde was romantically (or at least sexually) interested in Tristan pre-potion; Georgaris took that hint and ran with it, not only showing Isolde as having the hots for Tristan but them actually consummating their affair as soon as he was healed enough to be able to have sex.
This has one fringe benefit, at least for straight female and Gay male viewers — it offers more and better views of James Franco “in the flesh” than any other film of his I’ve seen — but not only does it soften the blow when they finally do become adulterers, it wrecks the balance of the plot so carefully crafted by Gottfried and followed by Wagner, especially since in this version Isolde is aware from the beginning who Tristan is (in both Gottfried and Wagner he inverts his first name and calls himself “Tantris” when he’s under Isolde’s care, aware that if she knew who he really was she’d kill him) and therefore there isn’t the visceral thrill or suspense of what’s going to happen to him when she “outs” him. Georgaris not only leaves out the love potion — the armamentarium of herbs Isolde’s mother teaches her to use is strictly medicinal, not supernatural — he omits all the fantasy elements of the story, much to its detriment. Without the potion, and the obsessiveness it adds to the story (especially in Wagner’s death-soaked version, in which Tristan and Isolde are undecided moment-by-moment whether what they most want is sex or death), Tristan + Isolde turns into a very ordinary romantic triangle in which the attempts of Tristan and Isolde to find places they can have sex safely takes on an unintended (at least I hope it was unintended) air of farce.
To make it even worse, Georgaris decides to wrap his story around a political theme, beginning with a sequence of printed titles expressing that the various British tribes are living under the oppressive rule of the Irish empire, with Ireland’s warrior-king Donnchadh (David Patrick O’Hara) keeping control of the next-door island by pitting its tribes against each other and extracting tribute (money and livestock) from them all. I’m not exactly a hard-core Irish nationalist, but given the 1,000 years during which it was Britain that occupied and oppressed Ireland, I got the same sort of clammy feeling from this plot point I’d probably have if I ever watched one of those Nazi propaganda movies detailing the horrible oppression and discrimination Germans supposedly suffered under Polish, Czech or Jewish occupation.
James Franco is part of the problem with this movie; he’s hot-looking and a quite capable actor (I still say I’d have liked the Spider-Man movies better if it had been Franco as Spider-Man and Tobey Maguire as his friend-turned-adversary instead of the other way around!) but, like the late Heath Ledger in A Knight’s Tale (one of the movies, along with Braveheart, evoked in the promotional copy on the DVD box for this), Franco is simply too modern an actor to seem credible in a medieval role (which is true of most of the cast at well; at times watching Tristan + Isolde seems like watching video of a Renaissance Faire) — just as he’s good-looking and charismatic enough to be credible as Tristan the lover but simply isn’t butch enough to be credible as Tristan the warrior. At least he’s better than his Isolde, Sophia Myles, who can barely act at all.
Another aspect of this movie that really rubbed me the wrong way is Anne Dudley’s musical score; it’s true that she has the unfair burden of the inevitable comparisons with Wagner, but the mess of Irish folk-dance music to represent the principals at peace, pounding percussion to represent them at war, and treacly piano-and-strings stuff that would seem right at home in a Lifetime TV-movie to represent the titular lovers probably would sound terrible even if we didn’t have Wagner’s masterpiece to compare it to. (It’s a pity this movie didn’t get a composer who could have done for it what Gottfried Hüppert did for Fritz Lang’s Die Nibelungen: create a score that sounded appropriately “Wagnerian” without actually lifting any of Wagner’s themes or motifs.)
It also doesn’t help that Artur Reinhart’s cinematography is thoroughly in the past-is-brown mold, and makes the scene look so dirty and squalid Charles and I found ourselves thinking of Monty Python and the Holy Grail and even quoting some of its lines — or that Reynolds' direction is pretty dull in the action scenes, lacking the peculiar intensity of the violence-porn of Mel Gibson's staging of Braveheart. I came away from Tristan + Isolde oddly wishing that Warners would have done a version in the 1930’s, with Errol Flynn as Tristan (he would have had no trouble being credible as both lover and warrior!), Olivia de Havilland as Isolde, Claude Rains as Marke, Michael Curtiz directing and Erich Wolfgang Korngold composing.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Pineapple Express (Columbia, 2008)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The movie I ran Charles last night was Pineapple Express, another accidental acquisition for my DVD collection (it was a Columbia House “director’s selection” that I must not have been on line at the right time to tell them not to send me) but which turned out to be a lot of fun. It’s a comedy from the Judd Apatow stable — a set of films I’d avoided until now because I’d heard they were mostly straight male-bonding films with a doggedly sexist streak and the kinds of offensive potty and puke gags that have put me off most recent “comedies,” but this one, though there was a puke gag in it, was genuinely funny at least often enough to be entertaining.
It’s a spoof of marijuana and drug-soaked crime thrillers that begins with an eccentric sequence set in 1937 (and shot in black-and-white) in which the U.S. government is testing exotic grades of pot on servicemembers, and when one of the test subjects tells the researchers in no uncertain terms how the stuff makes him feel about his superior officers (let’s just say here that it reinforces his already low opinion of them), the Army brass running the tests chant out in unison the word, “ILLEGAL!,” thereby signaling their intention to ban the substance and seal up their test facility so no one can ever get at this high-grade stuff again.
Flash-forward to the present, and we meet our principals: Dale Denton (Apatow regular Seth Rogen, who co-wrote the story with Apatow and executive producer Evan Goldberg and co-wrote the script with Goldberg), who makes a grungy but decent living as a process server and has his pot and his high-school (but already 18, we’re solemnly informed so the filmmakers don’t get the underage-sex Thought Police on their backs) girlfriend Angie (Amber Heard). Just what this nice-looking blonde with a retinue of genuinely hot fellow students surrounding her sees in an overweight stoner schlub like Dale is unfathomable, but hey, it’s only a movie, and a Judd Apatow movie at that, so we take it for granted.
Dale is supposed to meet Angie’s parents for dinner when he stops off at the home of his drug dealer, Saul Silver (James Franco in a genuine change-of-pace role; aside from being by far the most attractive male in the film, he’s a good foil for Rogen, essentially Abbott to his Costello), where he’s introduced to a high-grade sort of weed called Pineapple Express which supposedly no other dealer in L.A. (this is one film both shot in L.A. and set there) has — only the supply of Pineapple Express is supposed to be controlled by kingpin Ted Jones (Gary Cole) and his corrupt-cop girlfriend, Carol (Rosie Perez).
While driving with Saul, Dale sees Ted and Carol do a home invasion and gun someone down — the someone turns out to be part of a Chinese drug cartel who’d been trying to horn in on Ted’s business — and realize they’re in mortal danger, especially since while fleeing the scene (and crashing into two parked cars trying to get out of his own parking space) Dale threw down a roach containing Pineapple Express into the street and Ted picked it up, toked on it, realized what it was and guessed that his secret was out. From then the film is a pretty non-stop action sequence, as Ted sends two hit men — hunky African-American Matheson (Craig Robinson) and henpecked Jew Budlofsky (Kevin Corrigan), whose sole priority is to get the killings they’ve been hired to do over and done with quickly enough so he can make it back to his wife for dinner — to kill Dale and Saul, and they succeed in torturing Red (Danny R. McBride), the go-between in the drug sales chain between Ted and Saul, to find out Dale’s and Saul’s whereabouts.
There’s a great slapstick sequence involving a car chase Mack Sennett would have been proud of — in a modern wrinkle on the old gags, Saul is hit by Dale’s car and ends up spilling Slurpee all over its windshield, making it impossible to see where he’s driving; when Dale suggests Saul kick a hole in the windshield, Saul does so but his foot gets stuck in it, he’s uncomfortable and he still can’t see. The bits of slapstick are the funniest parts of the movie; much of the rest is sufficiently dark it qualifies as black comedy, and the film ends in a nicely staged action climax at the abandoned U.S. pot farm from the 1937 framing sequence, which had been taken over by Ted, who apparently used their surviving stock of seeds to grow his Pineapple Express and various other exotic flavors of grass.
Director David Gordon Green does a deft job of combining the brutal drug-war elements of the Apatow-Rogen-Goldberg script with the gags — the ending sequence could have been appallingly brutal (especially since the script calls for Dale to get part of his ear shot off by one of Ted’s assassins) but instead it’s kept relatively light and our focus remains on Our (Anti-)Heroes and whether and how they will survive the ordeal. I still don’t think movie comedies today even come close to the (relatively) innocent merriment of either the best silent comedies or the screwball and slapstick classics from the 1930’s — though Stranger than Fiction and Kabluey made me laugh and Kabluey came the closest of any film made in the past 20 years or so to recapturing the infectious spirit of silent comedy as well as the otherwise lost art of building gag upon gag upon gag into an irresistibly infectious sequence — and Pineapple Express often seems like a retread of a Cheech and Chong movie (indeed, one could readily imagine them doing virtually the same story in the 1970’s), but on its own terms it’s engaging and often laugh-out-loud funny.
The movie I ran Charles last night was Pineapple Express, another accidental acquisition for my DVD collection (it was a Columbia House “director’s selection” that I must not have been on line at the right time to tell them not to send me) but which turned out to be a lot of fun. It’s a comedy from the Judd Apatow stable — a set of films I’d avoided until now because I’d heard they were mostly straight male-bonding films with a doggedly sexist streak and the kinds of offensive potty and puke gags that have put me off most recent “comedies,” but this one, though there was a puke gag in it, was genuinely funny at least often enough to be entertaining.
It’s a spoof of marijuana and drug-soaked crime thrillers that begins with an eccentric sequence set in 1937 (and shot in black-and-white) in which the U.S. government is testing exotic grades of pot on servicemembers, and when one of the test subjects tells the researchers in no uncertain terms how the stuff makes him feel about his superior officers (let’s just say here that it reinforces his already low opinion of them), the Army brass running the tests chant out in unison the word, “ILLEGAL!,” thereby signaling their intention to ban the substance and seal up their test facility so no one can ever get at this high-grade stuff again.
Flash-forward to the present, and we meet our principals: Dale Denton (Apatow regular Seth Rogen, who co-wrote the story with Apatow and executive producer Evan Goldberg and co-wrote the script with Goldberg), who makes a grungy but decent living as a process server and has his pot and his high-school (but already 18, we’re solemnly informed so the filmmakers don’t get the underage-sex Thought Police on their backs) girlfriend Angie (Amber Heard). Just what this nice-looking blonde with a retinue of genuinely hot fellow students surrounding her sees in an overweight stoner schlub like Dale is unfathomable, but hey, it’s only a movie, and a Judd Apatow movie at that, so we take it for granted.
Dale is supposed to meet Angie’s parents for dinner when he stops off at the home of his drug dealer, Saul Silver (James Franco in a genuine change-of-pace role; aside from being by far the most attractive male in the film, he’s a good foil for Rogen, essentially Abbott to his Costello), where he’s introduced to a high-grade sort of weed called Pineapple Express which supposedly no other dealer in L.A. (this is one film both shot in L.A. and set there) has — only the supply of Pineapple Express is supposed to be controlled by kingpin Ted Jones (Gary Cole) and his corrupt-cop girlfriend, Carol (Rosie Perez).
While driving with Saul, Dale sees Ted and Carol do a home invasion and gun someone down — the someone turns out to be part of a Chinese drug cartel who’d been trying to horn in on Ted’s business — and realize they’re in mortal danger, especially since while fleeing the scene (and crashing into two parked cars trying to get out of his own parking space) Dale threw down a roach containing Pineapple Express into the street and Ted picked it up, toked on it, realized what it was and guessed that his secret was out. From then the film is a pretty non-stop action sequence, as Ted sends two hit men — hunky African-American Matheson (Craig Robinson) and henpecked Jew Budlofsky (Kevin Corrigan), whose sole priority is to get the killings they’ve been hired to do over and done with quickly enough so he can make it back to his wife for dinner — to kill Dale and Saul, and they succeed in torturing Red (Danny R. McBride), the go-between in the drug sales chain between Ted and Saul, to find out Dale’s and Saul’s whereabouts.
There’s a great slapstick sequence involving a car chase Mack Sennett would have been proud of — in a modern wrinkle on the old gags, Saul is hit by Dale’s car and ends up spilling Slurpee all over its windshield, making it impossible to see where he’s driving; when Dale suggests Saul kick a hole in the windshield, Saul does so but his foot gets stuck in it, he’s uncomfortable and he still can’t see. The bits of slapstick are the funniest parts of the movie; much of the rest is sufficiently dark it qualifies as black comedy, and the film ends in a nicely staged action climax at the abandoned U.S. pot farm from the 1937 framing sequence, which had been taken over by Ted, who apparently used their surviving stock of seeds to grow his Pineapple Express and various other exotic flavors of grass.
Director David Gordon Green does a deft job of combining the brutal drug-war elements of the Apatow-Rogen-Goldberg script with the gags — the ending sequence could have been appallingly brutal (especially since the script calls for Dale to get part of his ear shot off by one of Ted’s assassins) but instead it’s kept relatively light and our focus remains on Our (Anti-)Heroes and whether and how they will survive the ordeal. I still don’t think movie comedies today even come close to the (relatively) innocent merriment of either the best silent comedies or the screwball and slapstick classics from the 1930’s — though Stranger than Fiction and Kabluey made me laugh and Kabluey came the closest of any film made in the past 20 years or so to recapturing the infectious spirit of silent comedy as well as the otherwise lost art of building gag upon gag upon gag into an irresistibly infectious sequence — and Pineapple Express often seems like a retread of a Cheech and Chong movie (indeed, one could readily imagine them doing virtually the same story in the 1970’s), but on its own terms it’s engaging and often laugh-out-loud funny.
Friday, February 13, 2009
American East (Distant Horizons, Zahra Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 20th Century-Fox Home Entertainment DVD, 2007)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran us a quite interesting movie I’d got at a shopping run to Vons, American East, which is not at all the sort of movie you expect to find in a supermarket; mostly you get blockbuster titles featuring major stars, occasionally public-domain or closeout items, but hardly something with only one even quasi-major name (Tony Shalhoub), which seems not to have had a theatrical release at all (or, if it did, only a very minor one) and which is about a highly controversial and touchy subject: the oppression of Arab-Americans in the name of the “war on terror.” The film is set in 2005, during a so-called “red” terror alert — which I imagined as something even more stringent than it’s depicted in this film; it’s never happened but my understanding is if it did virtually the whole country would be on lockdown.
The central character is Mustafa Marzoke (Sayed Badrea, who also co-wrote the script with director Hesham Issawi), an Egyptian émigré who runs a Middle Eastern diner called Habibi, and the combination of family members and hangers-on at the restaurant who make up his entire circle: his sister Leila (Tay Blessey), who works as a nurse at a local hospital and is being heavily cruised by one of the doctors but who’s also engaged to a man from Egypt whom she barely remembers from her childhood but whose marriage to her is crucial because of a deal involving Mustafa’s ancestral homestead back home; his grade-school age son Mohammed (Richard Chagoury) who’s disgusted being the only Muslim at his public school and who wants the family to have a Christmas tree and stop practicing this weird religion everyone associates with terrorism; his driver Omar (Kais Nashif), who’s working on an acting career but is getting more and more pissed off that every role he’s asked to play is as an unmotivated terrorist; Murad (Anthony Azizi), a nonpaying customer at the restaurant who watches al-Jazeera constantly and whose virtually sole mode of conversation is obscenity-laced tirades against Jews in general and Israelis in particular over the occupation of Palestine; and Sam, Mustafa’s Jewish friend, whom he’s trying to get as a financial backer in a major expansion of the restaurant into a fancy Middle Eastern-themed establishment.
At times the movie tracks so close to the plot of E. L. Doctorow’s 1970’s novel Ragtime (particularly in the character arc of Omar) I couldn’t help but wonder if the parallels had been intentional, but though some of the plot devices are either wince-inducingly clichéd or flatly unbelievable, others work quite well. Certainly the film accomplishes one thing it set out to do: it shows just how much Arab-Americans have been stereotyped as “terrorists” since 9/11 and have to live their lives in a constant state of being suspected, a theme which kicks off from the moment the movie opens in an airport, where Mustafa has gone to meet his cousin (the one who’s supposed to marry his sister) who’s just flown in from Egypt. He goes running through the airport screaming, “Mohammed!” — he’s just calling his son, who’s got lost, but that gets him picked up by two FBI agents and taken to a secret location for interrogation, and though he’s released the FBI puts him under permanent surveillance from then on and ends up arresting him in the restaurant in connection with Omar’s rampage.
American East is quite well done and generally moving, though it’s also a bit too long and afflicted with a bad case of brown; the cinematographer (not credited on imdb.com) is yet another one of those annoying modern movie D.P.’s who sees the world through dirty brown-colored glasses and seems dementedly determined to photograph the movie with as little of the visible spectrum as possible, the sort of thing that makes me wonder if they’re going to use so little color anyway why they don’t just go ahead and film it in black-and-white.
I ran us a quite interesting movie I’d got at a shopping run to Vons, American East, which is not at all the sort of movie you expect to find in a supermarket; mostly you get blockbuster titles featuring major stars, occasionally public-domain or closeout items, but hardly something with only one even quasi-major name (Tony Shalhoub), which seems not to have had a theatrical release at all (or, if it did, only a very minor one) and which is about a highly controversial and touchy subject: the oppression of Arab-Americans in the name of the “war on terror.” The film is set in 2005, during a so-called “red” terror alert — which I imagined as something even more stringent than it’s depicted in this film; it’s never happened but my understanding is if it did virtually the whole country would be on lockdown.
The central character is Mustafa Marzoke (Sayed Badrea, who also co-wrote the script with director Hesham Issawi), an Egyptian émigré who runs a Middle Eastern diner called Habibi, and the combination of family members and hangers-on at the restaurant who make up his entire circle: his sister Leila (Tay Blessey), who works as a nurse at a local hospital and is being heavily cruised by one of the doctors but who’s also engaged to a man from Egypt whom she barely remembers from her childhood but whose marriage to her is crucial because of a deal involving Mustafa’s ancestral homestead back home; his grade-school age son Mohammed (Richard Chagoury) who’s disgusted being the only Muslim at his public school and who wants the family to have a Christmas tree and stop practicing this weird religion everyone associates with terrorism; his driver Omar (Kais Nashif), who’s working on an acting career but is getting more and more pissed off that every role he’s asked to play is as an unmotivated terrorist; Murad (Anthony Azizi), a nonpaying customer at the restaurant who watches al-Jazeera constantly and whose virtually sole mode of conversation is obscenity-laced tirades against Jews in general and Israelis in particular over the occupation of Palestine; and Sam, Mustafa’s Jewish friend, whom he’s trying to get as a financial backer in a major expansion of the restaurant into a fancy Middle Eastern-themed establishment.
At times the movie tracks so close to the plot of E. L. Doctorow’s 1970’s novel Ragtime (particularly in the character arc of Omar) I couldn’t help but wonder if the parallels had been intentional, but though some of the plot devices are either wince-inducingly clichéd or flatly unbelievable, others work quite well. Certainly the film accomplishes one thing it set out to do: it shows just how much Arab-Americans have been stereotyped as “terrorists” since 9/11 and have to live their lives in a constant state of being suspected, a theme which kicks off from the moment the movie opens in an airport, where Mustafa has gone to meet his cousin (the one who’s supposed to marry his sister) who’s just flown in from Egypt. He goes running through the airport screaming, “Mohammed!” — he’s just calling his son, who’s got lost, but that gets him picked up by two FBI agents and taken to a secret location for interrogation, and though he’s released the FBI puts him under permanent surveillance from then on and ends up arresting him in the restaurant in connection with Omar’s rampage.
American East is quite well done and generally moving, though it’s also a bit too long and afflicted with a bad case of brown; the cinematographer (not credited on imdb.com) is yet another one of those annoying modern movie D.P.’s who sees the world through dirty brown-colored glasses and seems dementedly determined to photograph the movie with as little of the visible spectrum as possible, the sort of thing that makes me wonder if they’re going to use so little color anyway why they don’t just go ahead and film it in black-and-white.
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Cha-Cha-Cha-Boom! (Katzman/Columbia, 1956)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Cha-Cha-Cha-Boom!, a Sam Katzman-produced, Fred F. Sears-directed musical for Columbia that attempts to do for Latin music what the Katzman-Sears rock ’n’ roll extravaganzae did for that genre. Katzman hired Robert E. Kent — the writer (in)famous for being able to tell a co-worker about the baseball game he attended the night before while typing away on his latest script — to come up with a plotlet dealing with rival record executives, Bill Haven (Stephen Dunne, a nice-enough looking man with acceptable acting skills but virtually no charisma) from the Globe company and Debbie Farmer (Alix Talton) from the rival Starbright concern, who between them control virtually the entire record market in New York City (RCA Victor? Columbia? Decca? Capitol? Never heard of ’em!).
Globe is in danger of losing all its major acts to Starbright because of the intrusive policies of Globe’s president, Harry Teasdale (Howard Wright), versus the offer of artistic freedom made to potential artists by Starbright’s head, who’s also Debbie’s father — and, naturally, Bill and Debbie are also in love with each other, turning the record industry as depicted here into a sort of Romeo and Juliet lite, with contracts instead of daggers.
Bill bails on his job with Globe with the intent of starting a label of his own, and goes to Cuba to find talent for it and comes back with Perez Prado, ballyhooed in the credits as “King of the Mambo.” According to imdb.com, his real name was Dámaso Pérez Prado, which certainly sounds more authentically “Latin” even though it roughly translates as “Tommy Peters,” and the Hispanic custom of carrying your mother’s maiden name as a second last name (the official documents and signs in Cuba listed that country’s veteran president as “Fidel Castro Ruz”) threw whoever gave Perez Prado his professional name and also helped get the comic relief actor, José Gonzalez-Gonzalez, his part in this film. José had been a contestant on Groucho Marx’s quiz show, You Bet Your Life, and Groucho had ribbed him unmercifully over his double-Gonzalez last name, giving him his 15 minutes of fame and getting him cast in this film as Bill’s sidekick Pedro Fernandez.
The two head to Cuba and hook up with exotic dancer Nita Munay (Sylvia Lewis) — a stereotyped Lupe Velez-like character who speaks rapid-fire Spanish and vamps just about every male she meets, though her main squeeze is her dancing partner Elvarez (Dante De Paulo). She makes the obligatory pass at Bill and Debbie just happens to walk into the hotel room as they’re kissing — “I’m learning to play saxophone and I’m trying to keep my lip in shape!” is the preposterously lame excuse that’s the best Bill (or Robert E. Kent) can come up with under the circumstances. The story is, as usual, just an excuse for film clips of the musical stars of the film — Prado, the Mary Kaye Trio, Helen Grayco (a quite haunting singer I’d love to hear more of, especially if I can find her record of “Lilly’s Lament,” the film’s opening song and the most compelling performance in it; what Lilly is lamenting is that her boyfriend is in prison), Luis Arcaraz, Lucerito Bárcenas and Manny Lopez — and as Charles pointed out, it’s rather odd that Prado, the biggest star “name” in the film, is also the most boring to watch.
He’s “discovered” leading a voodoo ceremony outdoors in the Cuban countryside (though the “exterior” is almost certainly a soundstage interior with a painted backdrop), which is easily his most exciting contribution to the film; later, after his band is imported to the U.S. to play in nightclubs and as part of the final television extravaganza Bill throws together to build attention for his acts (in Katzman’s musicals there always seemed to be a big TV show at the end!), he’s musically interesting but visually dull except when Nita and Elvarez are dancing in front of his band — reason enough that Bill insisted on signing them even though they wouldn’t be a part of the records! The most appealing performers are Grayco and the Mary Kaye Trio, who do inventive versions of “The Lonesome Road” (it’s not her fault that Stan Kenton’s version with June Christy singing was even more inventive) and “Get Happy” — was Mary Kaye’s entire act remodeling 1920’s and 1930’s songs to fit then-contemporary cabaret styles?
The film doesn’t have the energy of the Katzman-Sears rock movies and would have benefited from a more exciting bandleader than Prado (someone like Machito) and some more inventive filming of the acts. As it is, Sears’ direction is even sloppier here than it usually was in the rock movies; there’s one band for which he focuses on the singer and a saxophone player even though we never actually hear a sax on the track, while we hear but don’t see a prominently featured guitar player. Cha-Cha-Cha-Boom! (a bit of a misnomer because, at least according to one imdb.com commentator, only one of the film’s songs is actually a cha-cha-cha number) is an O.K. movie, but the music is solid and Helen Grayco’s opening number alone makes it worth seeing.
The film was Cha-Cha-Cha-Boom!, a Sam Katzman-produced, Fred F. Sears-directed musical for Columbia that attempts to do for Latin music what the Katzman-Sears rock ’n’ roll extravaganzae did for that genre. Katzman hired Robert E. Kent — the writer (in)famous for being able to tell a co-worker about the baseball game he attended the night before while typing away on his latest script — to come up with a plotlet dealing with rival record executives, Bill Haven (Stephen Dunne, a nice-enough looking man with acceptable acting skills but virtually no charisma) from the Globe company and Debbie Farmer (Alix Talton) from the rival Starbright concern, who between them control virtually the entire record market in New York City (RCA Victor? Columbia? Decca? Capitol? Never heard of ’em!).
Globe is in danger of losing all its major acts to Starbright because of the intrusive policies of Globe’s president, Harry Teasdale (Howard Wright), versus the offer of artistic freedom made to potential artists by Starbright’s head, who’s also Debbie’s father — and, naturally, Bill and Debbie are also in love with each other, turning the record industry as depicted here into a sort of Romeo and Juliet lite, with contracts instead of daggers.
Bill bails on his job with Globe with the intent of starting a label of his own, and goes to Cuba to find talent for it and comes back with Perez Prado, ballyhooed in the credits as “King of the Mambo.” According to imdb.com, his real name was Dámaso Pérez Prado, which certainly sounds more authentically “Latin” even though it roughly translates as “Tommy Peters,” and the Hispanic custom of carrying your mother’s maiden name as a second last name (the official documents and signs in Cuba listed that country’s veteran president as “Fidel Castro Ruz”) threw whoever gave Perez Prado his professional name and also helped get the comic relief actor, José Gonzalez-Gonzalez, his part in this film. José had been a contestant on Groucho Marx’s quiz show, You Bet Your Life, and Groucho had ribbed him unmercifully over his double-Gonzalez last name, giving him his 15 minutes of fame and getting him cast in this film as Bill’s sidekick Pedro Fernandez.
The two head to Cuba and hook up with exotic dancer Nita Munay (Sylvia Lewis) — a stereotyped Lupe Velez-like character who speaks rapid-fire Spanish and vamps just about every male she meets, though her main squeeze is her dancing partner Elvarez (Dante De Paulo). She makes the obligatory pass at Bill and Debbie just happens to walk into the hotel room as they’re kissing — “I’m learning to play saxophone and I’m trying to keep my lip in shape!” is the preposterously lame excuse that’s the best Bill (or Robert E. Kent) can come up with under the circumstances. The story is, as usual, just an excuse for film clips of the musical stars of the film — Prado, the Mary Kaye Trio, Helen Grayco (a quite haunting singer I’d love to hear more of, especially if I can find her record of “Lilly’s Lament,” the film’s opening song and the most compelling performance in it; what Lilly is lamenting is that her boyfriend is in prison), Luis Arcaraz, Lucerito Bárcenas and Manny Lopez — and as Charles pointed out, it’s rather odd that Prado, the biggest star “name” in the film, is also the most boring to watch.
He’s “discovered” leading a voodoo ceremony outdoors in the Cuban countryside (though the “exterior” is almost certainly a soundstage interior with a painted backdrop), which is easily his most exciting contribution to the film; later, after his band is imported to the U.S. to play in nightclubs and as part of the final television extravaganza Bill throws together to build attention for his acts (in Katzman’s musicals there always seemed to be a big TV show at the end!), he’s musically interesting but visually dull except when Nita and Elvarez are dancing in front of his band — reason enough that Bill insisted on signing them even though they wouldn’t be a part of the records! The most appealing performers are Grayco and the Mary Kaye Trio, who do inventive versions of “The Lonesome Road” (it’s not her fault that Stan Kenton’s version with June Christy singing was even more inventive) and “Get Happy” — was Mary Kaye’s entire act remodeling 1920’s and 1930’s songs to fit then-contemporary cabaret styles?
The film doesn’t have the energy of the Katzman-Sears rock movies and would have benefited from a more exciting bandleader than Prado (someone like Machito) and some more inventive filming of the acts. As it is, Sears’ direction is even sloppier here than it usually was in the rock movies; there’s one band for which he focuses on the singer and a saxophone player even though we never actually hear a sax on the track, while we hear but don’t see a prominently featured guitar player. Cha-Cha-Cha-Boom! (a bit of a misnomer because, at least according to one imdb.com commentator, only one of the film’s songs is actually a cha-cha-cha number) is an O.K. movie, but the music is solid and Helen Grayco’s opening number alone makes it worth seeing.
Monday, February 9, 2009
Artists and Models (Paramount, 1937)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran Charles the 1937 Artists and Models, a movie I saw once in the early 1970’s and desperately wanted to see again, so much so that I practically had an orgasm when I saw it on TCM’s schedule for February 1, only to find when I recorded it that the first five minutes offered a ragged soundtrack and no image at all, so we sat in the dark and listened to the Yacht Club Boys’ opening song, “The Super-Special Epic of the Year.” The image cut in five minutes into the movie — just at the very end of the song, in time to give us at least a glimpse of the elaborate stage set Paramount built for it — and the rest was glitch-free.
Artists and Models is known mostly as Vincente Minnelli’s first film; in his early days in Hollywood Minnelli only got to do individual musical numbers in other people’s movies, and here his contribution is “Public Melody No. 1,” the big production number at the end featuring Martha Raye (in blackface) and Louis Armstrong. Minnelli had been a hotshot director on Broadway when Paramount gave him a six-month contract in 1937, but after an unhappy tenure there during which this was the only film he got to work on, he went back to New York as soon as the six months were up and didn’t try the movies again until Arthur Freed signed him for MGM in 1940 and told him he could wander around the lot, watching how movies were made, until he’d figured it out and he told Freed he was ready to work.
Frankly, I suspect that “Public Melody No. 1” wasn’t the only number in Artists and Models Minnelli worked on; there’s also an engaging musical parody called “Mister Esquire” featuring human actor Ben Blue in a spoof of classical music with Russell Patterson’s Personettos, a group of puppets, that seems to have his touch — it’s premonitory of the marvelous animated fruit musicians on the dinner table in Strike Up the Band (another “insertion number” Minnelli directed in a movie of which Busby Berkeley was the director of record), just as “Public Melody No. 1” looks forward to Lena Horne’s numbers in Panama Hattie (Minnelli’s first official MGM credit) and even more to Cabin in the Sky, Minnelli’s first full directorial credit and also a film with African-American performers (including Louis Armstrong, though by the time the film was released Armstrong’s part had been cut to almost nothing).
The rest of the film was directed by Raoul Walsh — an excellent director of action films and melodramas but one somewhat at sea in a comedy/musical — and written by the usual committee (Sig Herzig and Eugene Thackrey, story; Eve Greene and Harlan Ware, “adaptation,” and Walter DeLeon, Lewis E. Gensler and Francis Martin, script), who came up with a romantic-quadrilateral plotlet about Mac Brewster (Jack Benny), owner and CEO of the Brewster Advertising Agency, who’s sucking up to silverware heir Alan Townsend (Richard Arlen, who like his director would have been far more comfortable with an action script) because the ad agency is broke and the $1 million (in 1937 dollars!) contract Townsend is dangling in front of him is his and his agency’s economic salvation.
Brewster’s girlfriend is his agency’s star model, Paula Sewell (Ida Lupino, still with strong traces of her native British accent), and she asks him to ensure that she can be both the Townsend Silver Girl and the queen of the Artists and Models Ball, which Brewster is chairing — only Townsend doesn’t want a professional model for this assignment. Instead, he wants a debutante from the Social Register — and accordingly Paula and her roommate Toots (Judy Canova) fly down to Miami so Paula can pose as debutante “Paula Monterey” and snag the Townsend Silver contract. Meanwhile, Brewster has recruited his own potential Townsend Girl, Cynthia Wentworth (Gail Patrick), a genuine debutante who came to his office to fundraise for a babies’ charity and ends up in love with Brewster (and vice versa). She doesn’t get to be the Townsend Girl — that job was promised by Townsend to Paula before he found out she was really a model, which causes a glitch in their own burgeoning relationship — but she does get her charity named as the ball’s beneficiary and she also lands Brewster, while Paula ends up with Townsend and Toots ends up with Jupiter Pluvius II (Monte Blue), a genuinely amusing comic-relief character (one wouldn’t think a Jack Benny movie needed comic relief, but there it is) called Jupiter Pluvius II, a rainmaker who claims his dad, also a rainmaker, started the Johnstown Flood.
There are some appealing songs in this film, including the Academy Award-nominated “Whispers in the Dark” (sung by Connie Boswell — it was a year after the Boswell Sisters broke up and she was still using the normal spelling of her first name instead of “Connee,” the version she favored later — and played by André Kostelanetz as part of a gargantuan production number on a stage built over the Miami beachfront; she sings beautifully but her face is kept in shadow and the number rather lumbers along, and the attempts of the Kostelanetz orchestra to swing are embarrassing) and “Stop! You’re Breaking My Heart,” which was recorded appealingly by Maxine Sullivan with Claude Thornhill’s studio band in 1937 as a followup to their surprise hit of “Loch Lomond” but here is an almost unlistenable duet between Judy Canova and Ben Blue, who seem determined to gang up on its melody and utterly destroy it. Still, the writing committee came up with some pretty good one-liners — most of them for Jack Benny, who left his violin at home on this one but otherwise played pretty much the character he did on radio (there’s a charming little in-joke in which Brewster and Cynthia walk past a radio tuned to the Benny program and Brewster says, “I’ve always liked him,” while Cynthia replies, “Funny — I’ve never cared for him”).
The Yacht Club Boys are explosive as usual — aside from the blacked-out opening number, they get another energetic routine in Brewster’s office in which they burst in with a whole troupe of singers, dancers and even a horse to demonstrate a “gypsy” production number they want to stage at the ball, just adding to the film’s maddest scene which also features Brewster receving the executives of an underwear company (potential clients of his agency) while he’s in his underwear himself — they mistake him for the male model they requested and say he’s wrong for the assignment — because he’s also simultaneously being examined by a doctor (Donald Meek, which is funny enough in itself). Minnelli’s “Public Melody No. 1” number looks like it came from an entirely different movie; shot in rich chiaroscuro black-and-white instead of the plain style Victor Milner used in the rest of the film, the number is rich in visual inventiveness and features some soulful blues playing by Armstrong as well as wild dancing and an overall noir air that makes it a precursor to the “Girl Hunt Ballet” Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse did in Minnelli’s The Band Wagon.
Overall, Artists and Models is a nice movie, not a world-beater but fun in a dorky way and with the big Minnelli number at the end (which also has the advantage of the most talented musical stars in the film!) that predictably got the movie in trouble with Paramount’s Southern distributors — even though Raye and Armstrong never touch, the Southern execs still watched blackfaced Martha Raye (who actually doesn’t look all that dark — more like a white girl who went to a really good tanning salon) cavort with genuinely African-American Louis Armstrong and, with visions of miscegenation dancing in their heads (not that they had to worry; Armstrong’s preference was always not only for Black women but the darkest-skinned Black women he could find!), they scissored it out of the movie and both it and Judy Canova’s rustic rendition of Billy Gashade’s old “Ballad of Jesse James” were frequently omitted from this film during its 1950’s TV showings — while more recently virtually all the advertised showings of Artists and Models turned out to be the 1955 quasi-remake, a vehicle for Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis that kept nothing from this film but its title. (Paramount was hoping this would become a musical series on the order of their Big Broadcasts, Warners’ Gold Diggers and MGM’s Broadway Melodies, but after only one sequel — Artists and Models Abroad, a 1938 film which carried over Jack Benny but cast him in a different part — they abandoned the idea.)
I ran Charles the 1937 Artists and Models, a movie I saw once in the early 1970’s and desperately wanted to see again, so much so that I practically had an orgasm when I saw it on TCM’s schedule for February 1, only to find when I recorded it that the first five minutes offered a ragged soundtrack and no image at all, so we sat in the dark and listened to the Yacht Club Boys’ opening song, “The Super-Special Epic of the Year.” The image cut in five minutes into the movie — just at the very end of the song, in time to give us at least a glimpse of the elaborate stage set Paramount built for it — and the rest was glitch-free.
Artists and Models is known mostly as Vincente Minnelli’s first film; in his early days in Hollywood Minnelli only got to do individual musical numbers in other people’s movies, and here his contribution is “Public Melody No. 1,” the big production number at the end featuring Martha Raye (in blackface) and Louis Armstrong. Minnelli had been a hotshot director on Broadway when Paramount gave him a six-month contract in 1937, but after an unhappy tenure there during which this was the only film he got to work on, he went back to New York as soon as the six months were up and didn’t try the movies again until Arthur Freed signed him for MGM in 1940 and told him he could wander around the lot, watching how movies were made, until he’d figured it out and he told Freed he was ready to work.
Frankly, I suspect that “Public Melody No. 1” wasn’t the only number in Artists and Models Minnelli worked on; there’s also an engaging musical parody called “Mister Esquire” featuring human actor Ben Blue in a spoof of classical music with Russell Patterson’s Personettos, a group of puppets, that seems to have his touch — it’s premonitory of the marvelous animated fruit musicians on the dinner table in Strike Up the Band (another “insertion number” Minnelli directed in a movie of which Busby Berkeley was the director of record), just as “Public Melody No. 1” looks forward to Lena Horne’s numbers in Panama Hattie (Minnelli’s first official MGM credit) and even more to Cabin in the Sky, Minnelli’s first full directorial credit and also a film with African-American performers (including Louis Armstrong, though by the time the film was released Armstrong’s part had been cut to almost nothing).
The rest of the film was directed by Raoul Walsh — an excellent director of action films and melodramas but one somewhat at sea in a comedy/musical — and written by the usual committee (Sig Herzig and Eugene Thackrey, story; Eve Greene and Harlan Ware, “adaptation,” and Walter DeLeon, Lewis E. Gensler and Francis Martin, script), who came up with a romantic-quadrilateral plotlet about Mac Brewster (Jack Benny), owner and CEO of the Brewster Advertising Agency, who’s sucking up to silverware heir Alan Townsend (Richard Arlen, who like his director would have been far more comfortable with an action script) because the ad agency is broke and the $1 million (in 1937 dollars!) contract Townsend is dangling in front of him is his and his agency’s economic salvation.
Brewster’s girlfriend is his agency’s star model, Paula Sewell (Ida Lupino, still with strong traces of her native British accent), and she asks him to ensure that she can be both the Townsend Silver Girl and the queen of the Artists and Models Ball, which Brewster is chairing — only Townsend doesn’t want a professional model for this assignment. Instead, he wants a debutante from the Social Register — and accordingly Paula and her roommate Toots (Judy Canova) fly down to Miami so Paula can pose as debutante “Paula Monterey” and snag the Townsend Silver contract. Meanwhile, Brewster has recruited his own potential Townsend Girl, Cynthia Wentworth (Gail Patrick), a genuine debutante who came to his office to fundraise for a babies’ charity and ends up in love with Brewster (and vice versa). She doesn’t get to be the Townsend Girl — that job was promised by Townsend to Paula before he found out she was really a model, which causes a glitch in their own burgeoning relationship — but she does get her charity named as the ball’s beneficiary and she also lands Brewster, while Paula ends up with Townsend and Toots ends up with Jupiter Pluvius II (Monte Blue), a genuinely amusing comic-relief character (one wouldn’t think a Jack Benny movie needed comic relief, but there it is) called Jupiter Pluvius II, a rainmaker who claims his dad, also a rainmaker, started the Johnstown Flood.
There are some appealing songs in this film, including the Academy Award-nominated “Whispers in the Dark” (sung by Connie Boswell — it was a year after the Boswell Sisters broke up and she was still using the normal spelling of her first name instead of “Connee,” the version she favored later — and played by André Kostelanetz as part of a gargantuan production number on a stage built over the Miami beachfront; she sings beautifully but her face is kept in shadow and the number rather lumbers along, and the attempts of the Kostelanetz orchestra to swing are embarrassing) and “Stop! You’re Breaking My Heart,” which was recorded appealingly by Maxine Sullivan with Claude Thornhill’s studio band in 1937 as a followup to their surprise hit of “Loch Lomond” but here is an almost unlistenable duet between Judy Canova and Ben Blue, who seem determined to gang up on its melody and utterly destroy it. Still, the writing committee came up with some pretty good one-liners — most of them for Jack Benny, who left his violin at home on this one but otherwise played pretty much the character he did on radio (there’s a charming little in-joke in which Brewster and Cynthia walk past a radio tuned to the Benny program and Brewster says, “I’ve always liked him,” while Cynthia replies, “Funny — I’ve never cared for him”).
The Yacht Club Boys are explosive as usual — aside from the blacked-out opening number, they get another energetic routine in Brewster’s office in which they burst in with a whole troupe of singers, dancers and even a horse to demonstrate a “gypsy” production number they want to stage at the ball, just adding to the film’s maddest scene which also features Brewster receving the executives of an underwear company (potential clients of his agency) while he’s in his underwear himself — they mistake him for the male model they requested and say he’s wrong for the assignment — because he’s also simultaneously being examined by a doctor (Donald Meek, which is funny enough in itself). Minnelli’s “Public Melody No. 1” number looks like it came from an entirely different movie; shot in rich chiaroscuro black-and-white instead of the plain style Victor Milner used in the rest of the film, the number is rich in visual inventiveness and features some soulful blues playing by Armstrong as well as wild dancing and an overall noir air that makes it a precursor to the “Girl Hunt Ballet” Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse did in Minnelli’s The Band Wagon.
Overall, Artists and Models is a nice movie, not a world-beater but fun in a dorky way and with the big Minnelli number at the end (which also has the advantage of the most talented musical stars in the film!) that predictably got the movie in trouble with Paramount’s Southern distributors — even though Raye and Armstrong never touch, the Southern execs still watched blackfaced Martha Raye (who actually doesn’t look all that dark — more like a white girl who went to a really good tanning salon) cavort with genuinely African-American Louis Armstrong and, with visions of miscegenation dancing in their heads (not that they had to worry; Armstrong’s preference was always not only for Black women but the darkest-skinned Black women he could find!), they scissored it out of the movie and both it and Judy Canova’s rustic rendition of Billy Gashade’s old “Ballad of Jesse James” were frequently omitted from this film during its 1950’s TV showings — while more recently virtually all the advertised showings of Artists and Models turned out to be the 1955 quasi-remake, a vehicle for Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis that kept nothing from this film but its title. (Paramount was hoping this would become a musical series on the order of their Big Broadcasts, Warners’ Gold Diggers and MGM’s Broadway Melodies, but after only one sequel — Artists and Models Abroad, a 1938 film which carried over Jack Benny but cast him in a different part — they abandoned the idea.)
Indestructible Man (Independent, 1956)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The last film on the disc was Indestructible Man (most citations refer to it with a definite article but there is no “the” in the actual main title on the film itself), a 1956 vehicle for Lon Chaney, Jr. in the title role as Charles Benton, framed for murder by a crooked attorney and two gangland associates and sentenced to die in the gas chamber at San Quentin — but revived through electricity by a couple of scientists (Robert Shayne and Joe Flynn) searching for a cure for cancer. The treatment leaves his intelligence (if you can call it that) intact but burns out his voice (well, Chaney was used to playing mute characters, including the Frankenstein monster in one film and the Mummy Kharis in three), and Our Antihero promptly heads down to Los Angeles — stealing a car and killing its rightful owner in the process — so he can avenge himself against the three people who set him up.
This film was produced and directed by Jack Pollexfen (who five years earlier had produced the haunting sci-fi film The Man from Planet X for director Edgar G. Ulmer, and would probably have been better advised to get Ulmer to direct this one too) and written by Vy Russell and Sue Bradford. Most of the sources I’ve seen on it suggested it was a remake (of sorts) of Chaney’s 1941 Universal film Man-Made Monster, in which he was a sideshow performer, “The Electric Man,” framed for murder and electrocuted, only instead of killing him the electric chair transformed him into a lethal monster — but the two films have little in common except Chaney’s presence and the plot gimmick of a condemned murderer executed but revived through electricity.
Indestructible Man is much more a crime thriller than a horror film — indeed it freely mixes genres, being part horror film, part science-fiction, part Dragnet-style police procedural (it’s narrated in flashback by actor Casey Adams, who plays an LAPD detective in the clipped deadpan tones of Jack Webb’s Joe Friday) and part film noir (with Marion Carr as a stripper who has important clues on the case, whom the police detective first interviews, then befriends, and finally falls for and marries) — but it lacks the fun of a real genre-bender because it’s clear that instead of deliberately playing around with our genre expectations the writers and director are mixing these film types so indiscriminately simply from hunger, continually writing themselves into corners and reaching for the most readily handy film conventions to get themselves out again. And as Charles joked, it’s also bizarre that Chaney, by far the best actor in the film, should have been ordered to be mute through so much of it! — 10/23/02
•••••
Following Artists and Models, I made the mistake of showing Charles the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 version of Indestructible Man, a movie we’d watched together “straight” before and one so boring and stupid that even the MST3K crew’s interjections couldn’t make it entertaining! I thought about this film pretty much the way I had before; it’s an obvious combined ripoff of The Walking Dead (Boris Karloff as an innocent man unjustly convicted and executed, who’s brought back to life by a scientist and turns into a vicious monster who targets the judge and jury responsible for his conviction) and Man-Made Monster (which featured the same star, Lon Chaney, Jr., as a man exposed to a giant dose of electricity and thereby turned into an electrical monster whose mere touch is fatal) and really a gangster film disguised as sci-fi/horror, since once Chaney is executed and brought back to life (by a couple of scientists whom he immediately murders — talk about ingratitude!) he acts just like a non-revivified gangster in one of those revenge plots that were already hackneyed when Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney did them without benefit of scientific revivification in the early 1930’s. The best joke was one in which one of the MST3K crew said that Chaney murdered one of his victims because the guy had told him, “Your dad was a better actor than you are!” — 2/9/09
The last film on the disc was Indestructible Man (most citations refer to it with a definite article but there is no “the” in the actual main title on the film itself), a 1956 vehicle for Lon Chaney, Jr. in the title role as Charles Benton, framed for murder by a crooked attorney and two gangland associates and sentenced to die in the gas chamber at San Quentin — but revived through electricity by a couple of scientists (Robert Shayne and Joe Flynn) searching for a cure for cancer. The treatment leaves his intelligence (if you can call it that) intact but burns out his voice (well, Chaney was used to playing mute characters, including the Frankenstein monster in one film and the Mummy Kharis in three), and Our Antihero promptly heads down to Los Angeles — stealing a car and killing its rightful owner in the process — so he can avenge himself against the three people who set him up.
This film was produced and directed by Jack Pollexfen (who five years earlier had produced the haunting sci-fi film The Man from Planet X for director Edgar G. Ulmer, and would probably have been better advised to get Ulmer to direct this one too) and written by Vy Russell and Sue Bradford. Most of the sources I’ve seen on it suggested it was a remake (of sorts) of Chaney’s 1941 Universal film Man-Made Monster, in which he was a sideshow performer, “The Electric Man,” framed for murder and electrocuted, only instead of killing him the electric chair transformed him into a lethal monster — but the two films have little in common except Chaney’s presence and the plot gimmick of a condemned murderer executed but revived through electricity.
Indestructible Man is much more a crime thriller than a horror film — indeed it freely mixes genres, being part horror film, part science-fiction, part Dragnet-style police procedural (it’s narrated in flashback by actor Casey Adams, who plays an LAPD detective in the clipped deadpan tones of Jack Webb’s Joe Friday) and part film noir (with Marion Carr as a stripper who has important clues on the case, whom the police detective first interviews, then befriends, and finally falls for and marries) — but it lacks the fun of a real genre-bender because it’s clear that instead of deliberately playing around with our genre expectations the writers and director are mixing these film types so indiscriminately simply from hunger, continually writing themselves into corners and reaching for the most readily handy film conventions to get themselves out again. And as Charles joked, it’s also bizarre that Chaney, by far the best actor in the film, should have been ordered to be mute through so much of it! — 10/23/02
•••••
Following Artists and Models, I made the mistake of showing Charles the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 version of Indestructible Man, a movie we’d watched together “straight” before and one so boring and stupid that even the MST3K crew’s interjections couldn’t make it entertaining! I thought about this film pretty much the way I had before; it’s an obvious combined ripoff of The Walking Dead (Boris Karloff as an innocent man unjustly convicted and executed, who’s brought back to life by a scientist and turns into a vicious monster who targets the judge and jury responsible for his conviction) and Man-Made Monster (which featured the same star, Lon Chaney, Jr., as a man exposed to a giant dose of electricity and thereby turned into an electrical monster whose mere touch is fatal) and really a gangster film disguised as sci-fi/horror, since once Chaney is executed and brought back to life (by a couple of scientists whom he immediately murders — talk about ingratitude!) he acts just like a non-revivified gangster in one of those revenge plots that were already hackneyed when Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney did them without benefit of scientific revivification in the early 1930’s. The best joke was one in which one of the MST3K crew said that Chaney murdered one of his victims because the guy had told him, “Your dad was a better actor than you are!” — 2/9/09
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Sky Commando (Columbia, 1953)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Sky Commando was yet another production from Sam Katzman’s “B” unit at Columbia but a considerably better film than Last Train from Bombay even though it was a military aviation movie and thereby invoked all the tiresome clichés of military aviation movies from Wings and Hell’s Angels through Top Gun. A good deal of it, though, was legitimately tough drama — and its star, Dan Duryea, was not only an edgier personality than Jon Hall but also a considerably better and more “watchable” actor.
Sky Commando begins with combat footage of a jet fighter squadron during the Korean War — which was just winding down when the film was released in 1953 — in which the final two planes in the air, flown by Lt. John Willard (William R. Klein, later William Bryant) and his brother, Capt. Frank Willard (Dick Paxton), are just about to return home when they’re suddenly ordered by their commanding officer, Col. Ed Wyatt (Dan Duryea), to fly out again and bomb a machine-gun nest on top of a hill. They do so successfully, but then their two planes are attacked by four enemy MiG fighters and John’s plane gets back to base successfully but Frank’s is shot down and he’s presumably killed. Naturally, John Willard is pissed at Wyatt for giving them the order that got his brother killed, and he’s about to club Wyatt with a lantern when Major Scott (Michael Fox) intervenes and tells a story about how Wyatt got to be such a tough disciplinarian in the first place.
From then the film becomes mostly a World War II aviation film in which Wyatt is a pilot whose co-pilot has just been killed in the middle of a bombing mission, and whose replacement, Hobson “Hobbie” Lee (Touch Conners, who later worked his way down the Hollywood food chain to cheapies at American International and still later normalized his name to Mike Connors and starred on the private-eye TV show Mannix), is naturally nervous about the experience. Also in the dramatis personae is war correspondent Jo McWethy (Frances Gifford), whom Hobbie immediately falls for and who’s attached (in the modern world we’d say “embedded”) to their squadron.
Hobbie follows Wyatt when half the squadron is reassigned from Britain (from whence they’ve been flying sorties over Germany, mainly to take out the Focke-Wulf aircraft plant near Bremen) to north Africa, partly because Jo has also been reassigned there and partly because he wants to catch Wyatt endangering the lives of his crew so he can bring him up before a board of inquiry and get him punished. At one point, while the principals are still based in England, Wyatt orders the crew of his plane to push out of the cockpit three dead crew members (they’ve been killed by anti-aircraft fire) to lighten the load and make sure both the plane and its precious cargo of reconnaissance film of the raid get back to base (one interesting aspect of this movie is it makes filming the targets of bombing raids, both pre- and post-raid, seem as important as the actual bombing), and when the bodies are recovered in the English Channel one of them turns out to have died not by gunfire but by drowning — indicating he was still alive when pushed out of the plane even though Wyatt insists that there was no way he could have survived his injuries and therefore he was dead weight it was O.K. to dispose of.
This, of course, pisses off Hobbie even more — and he remains upset until the final, climactic mission in which the crew members go up in four-engined B-24 Liberator bombers (they’ve been flying two-engined B-25 Mitchells up until this point in the movie) to take out the oil refinery at Ploesti, Romania (which was supposedly the source of 90 percent of the German army’s fuel supply at the time) and their plane is shot down. Wyatt manages to crash-land it over the border in Yugoslavia and a partisan named Jorgy (Dick Lerner) leads them to a boat waiting to take them and their all-important film to Africa and safety — only Jorgy gets picked off by a German sniper 100 feet away from the beach, not that we mind because he’s one of the most obnoxious, unfunny “comic relief” characters in movie history, complete with an attempt at a “Yugoslav” accent that makes him sound like a cross between Yogi Yorgesson and José Jimenez. Then the film cuts back to the Korean War framing sequence, with Lt. John Willard ready and willing to resume his duties — and in a really unwelcome surprise twist, he gets a note just before he goes up on his next mission that his brother Danny is alive after all: the 300 U.S. Marines who were rescued from being pinned down by that machine-gun nest when the Willard brothers successfully bombed it out of existence in turn repaid the favor by rescuing Danny from the wreckage of his downed plane.
It’s a real pity that these last lapses into cliché mar what was until then a genuinely tough war movie, with dilemmas about love, pride and duty neatly if not exactly freshly presented by screenwriter Samuel Newman (adapting a story by himself and Arthur E. Orloff & William Sackheim) and directed with a real edge and flair for suspense by the normally hacky Fred F. Sears. Sometimes a “B” movie that aims out of its class and just misses can be more frustrating than a “B” that remains solidly in its class and never pretends to be anything else. It also doesn’t help that Sky Commando is way overloaded with stock footage of actual combat aircraft, some of it reasonably well-matched, some of it jarringly mismatched, and with a few clips in particular (notably one of a German anti-aircraft gun going off and then another one of it being reloaded) being recycled so often you want to wave to them and say hello to your new-found friends — but this is still mostly a tough-minded movie and a refreshingly edgy one for a “B” production.
Sky Commando was yet another production from Sam Katzman’s “B” unit at Columbia but a considerably better film than Last Train from Bombay even though it was a military aviation movie and thereby invoked all the tiresome clichés of military aviation movies from Wings and Hell’s Angels through Top Gun. A good deal of it, though, was legitimately tough drama — and its star, Dan Duryea, was not only an edgier personality than Jon Hall but also a considerably better and more “watchable” actor.
Sky Commando begins with combat footage of a jet fighter squadron during the Korean War — which was just winding down when the film was released in 1953 — in which the final two planes in the air, flown by Lt. John Willard (William R. Klein, later William Bryant) and his brother, Capt. Frank Willard (Dick Paxton), are just about to return home when they’re suddenly ordered by their commanding officer, Col. Ed Wyatt (Dan Duryea), to fly out again and bomb a machine-gun nest on top of a hill. They do so successfully, but then their two planes are attacked by four enemy MiG fighters and John’s plane gets back to base successfully but Frank’s is shot down and he’s presumably killed. Naturally, John Willard is pissed at Wyatt for giving them the order that got his brother killed, and he’s about to club Wyatt with a lantern when Major Scott (Michael Fox) intervenes and tells a story about how Wyatt got to be such a tough disciplinarian in the first place.
From then the film becomes mostly a World War II aviation film in which Wyatt is a pilot whose co-pilot has just been killed in the middle of a bombing mission, and whose replacement, Hobson “Hobbie” Lee (Touch Conners, who later worked his way down the Hollywood food chain to cheapies at American International and still later normalized his name to Mike Connors and starred on the private-eye TV show Mannix), is naturally nervous about the experience. Also in the dramatis personae is war correspondent Jo McWethy (Frances Gifford), whom Hobbie immediately falls for and who’s attached (in the modern world we’d say “embedded”) to their squadron.
Hobbie follows Wyatt when half the squadron is reassigned from Britain (from whence they’ve been flying sorties over Germany, mainly to take out the Focke-Wulf aircraft plant near Bremen) to north Africa, partly because Jo has also been reassigned there and partly because he wants to catch Wyatt endangering the lives of his crew so he can bring him up before a board of inquiry and get him punished. At one point, while the principals are still based in England, Wyatt orders the crew of his plane to push out of the cockpit three dead crew members (they’ve been killed by anti-aircraft fire) to lighten the load and make sure both the plane and its precious cargo of reconnaissance film of the raid get back to base (one interesting aspect of this movie is it makes filming the targets of bombing raids, both pre- and post-raid, seem as important as the actual bombing), and when the bodies are recovered in the English Channel one of them turns out to have died not by gunfire but by drowning — indicating he was still alive when pushed out of the plane even though Wyatt insists that there was no way he could have survived his injuries and therefore he was dead weight it was O.K. to dispose of.
This, of course, pisses off Hobbie even more — and he remains upset until the final, climactic mission in which the crew members go up in four-engined B-24 Liberator bombers (they’ve been flying two-engined B-25 Mitchells up until this point in the movie) to take out the oil refinery at Ploesti, Romania (which was supposedly the source of 90 percent of the German army’s fuel supply at the time) and their plane is shot down. Wyatt manages to crash-land it over the border in Yugoslavia and a partisan named Jorgy (Dick Lerner) leads them to a boat waiting to take them and their all-important film to Africa and safety — only Jorgy gets picked off by a German sniper 100 feet away from the beach, not that we mind because he’s one of the most obnoxious, unfunny “comic relief” characters in movie history, complete with an attempt at a “Yugoslav” accent that makes him sound like a cross between Yogi Yorgesson and José Jimenez. Then the film cuts back to the Korean War framing sequence, with Lt. John Willard ready and willing to resume his duties — and in a really unwelcome surprise twist, he gets a note just before he goes up on his next mission that his brother Danny is alive after all: the 300 U.S. Marines who were rescued from being pinned down by that machine-gun nest when the Willard brothers successfully bombed it out of existence in turn repaid the favor by rescuing Danny from the wreckage of his downed plane.
It’s a real pity that these last lapses into cliché mar what was until then a genuinely tough war movie, with dilemmas about love, pride and duty neatly if not exactly freshly presented by screenwriter Samuel Newman (adapting a story by himself and Arthur E. Orloff & William Sackheim) and directed with a real edge and flair for suspense by the normally hacky Fred F. Sears. Sometimes a “B” movie that aims out of its class and just misses can be more frustrating than a “B” that remains solidly in its class and never pretends to be anything else. It also doesn’t help that Sky Commando is way overloaded with stock footage of actual combat aircraft, some of it reasonably well-matched, some of it jarringly mismatched, and with a few clips in particular (notably one of a German anti-aircraft gun going off and then another one of it being reloaded) being recycled so often you want to wave to them and say hello to your new-found friends — but this is still mostly a tough-minded movie and a refreshingly edgy one for a “B” production.
Saturday, February 7, 2009
Last Train from Bombay (Columbia, 1952)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film I picked out was a Columbia “B” from 1952, produced by Sam Katzman for his semi-independent operation there (then called Esskay Pictures and later called Clover), called Last Train from Bombay, directed by Katzman stalwart Fred F. Sears from a script by Robert Libott — who, judging from the evidence, seems to have been reading way too much Eric Ambler, since what this amounts to is one of Ambler’s stories of international intrigue with his formulae merely transferred from Turkey to India.
Newly independent India is threatened with civil war in the province of Jaipur (or something like that), and the hereditary ruler, the Nawob, is being targeted by terrorists who have rigged a bomb in a tunnel his train must pass through on its way from Bombay to Jaipur — though why this is going to be the last train from Bombay is never mentioned (and it’s a bit too early for the reason to be that the Indian government was about to change the city’s name to Mumbai!). There’s a long, wordless opening sequence in which the villain of the piece, whose identity we don’t yet know, murders an Indian in his hotel room and assumes the man’s identity. Then we meet the film’s star, Jon Hall, who’s playing American diplomat Martin Viking (I’m not making this up, you know!), who meets up with his old wartime buddy (they served at Normandy together) Brian O’Hara (Douglas Kennedy), who turns out to be the terrorist who’s been hired to blow up the train.
Once that’s been set up, the film is essentially “action porn,” with the plot being little more than a pretext for Jon Hall to get into various scrapes with various baddies, both white and native, when he’s not romancing the conveniently provided heroine, Mary Ann Palmer (Christine Larsen), daughter of a former British official in the raj who’s going on a sightseeing tour to do nostalgic reveries over the landmarks associated with imperialism — or the conveniently provided femme fatale, Charlane (Lisa Ferriday, who frankly looks so much like Christine Larsen I found myself wondering why she had an accent in some scenes and not others!).
Despite the impression you might get from the title, through most of the film Viking is successfully being kept off the train by the baddies and being forced to commandeer other modes of transportation, including the Palmers’ fancy car as well as a plane, and in between fights he manages to trace the plot — an attempt to nip India’s nascent democracy in the bud and establish a fascist dictatorship in the newly independent country — to a coffeehouse called “The Lame One” and then to a person called The Lame One, who turns out to be living a cover identity as railroad official B. Vornin (Gregory Gaye). By this time Jon Hall was getting a bit long in the tooth for this sort of movie — he was doubled in some of the action scenes by David Sharpe — and after his success as a black-hearted villain in The Invisible Man’s Revenge it would seem as if Hall would have been better advised to “go to the dark side” in picking his future roles instead of playing the dashing hero until the advancing years robbed him of most of his dash.
By far the most interesting character in the film is Captain Tamil (Michael Fox), obviously Robert Libott’s equivalent to Col. Haki (so memorably played by Orson Welles in Journey Into Fear) and a genuinely conflicted person, sometimes admiring Viking’s chutzpah and sometimes convinced he’s guilty of murder (did I mention that he spends most of this whole movie with a murder charge hanging over his head because O’Hara framed him for the murder of the guy he killed for his identity in the opening scene?) and determined to arrest him. Had more of Last Train from Bombay tapped this level of moral ambiguity, it would have been a much better film!
The film I picked out was a Columbia “B” from 1952, produced by Sam Katzman for his semi-independent operation there (then called Esskay Pictures and later called Clover), called Last Train from Bombay, directed by Katzman stalwart Fred F. Sears from a script by Robert Libott — who, judging from the evidence, seems to have been reading way too much Eric Ambler, since what this amounts to is one of Ambler’s stories of international intrigue with his formulae merely transferred from Turkey to India.
Newly independent India is threatened with civil war in the province of Jaipur (or something like that), and the hereditary ruler, the Nawob, is being targeted by terrorists who have rigged a bomb in a tunnel his train must pass through on its way from Bombay to Jaipur — though why this is going to be the last train from Bombay is never mentioned (and it’s a bit too early for the reason to be that the Indian government was about to change the city’s name to Mumbai!). There’s a long, wordless opening sequence in which the villain of the piece, whose identity we don’t yet know, murders an Indian in his hotel room and assumes the man’s identity. Then we meet the film’s star, Jon Hall, who’s playing American diplomat Martin Viking (I’m not making this up, you know!), who meets up with his old wartime buddy (they served at Normandy together) Brian O’Hara (Douglas Kennedy), who turns out to be the terrorist who’s been hired to blow up the train.
Once that’s been set up, the film is essentially “action porn,” with the plot being little more than a pretext for Jon Hall to get into various scrapes with various baddies, both white and native, when he’s not romancing the conveniently provided heroine, Mary Ann Palmer (Christine Larsen), daughter of a former British official in the raj who’s going on a sightseeing tour to do nostalgic reveries over the landmarks associated with imperialism — or the conveniently provided femme fatale, Charlane (Lisa Ferriday, who frankly looks so much like Christine Larsen I found myself wondering why she had an accent in some scenes and not others!).
Despite the impression you might get from the title, through most of the film Viking is successfully being kept off the train by the baddies and being forced to commandeer other modes of transportation, including the Palmers’ fancy car as well as a plane, and in between fights he manages to trace the plot — an attempt to nip India’s nascent democracy in the bud and establish a fascist dictatorship in the newly independent country — to a coffeehouse called “The Lame One” and then to a person called The Lame One, who turns out to be living a cover identity as railroad official B. Vornin (Gregory Gaye). By this time Jon Hall was getting a bit long in the tooth for this sort of movie — he was doubled in some of the action scenes by David Sharpe — and after his success as a black-hearted villain in The Invisible Man’s Revenge it would seem as if Hall would have been better advised to “go to the dark side” in picking his future roles instead of playing the dashing hero until the advancing years robbed him of most of his dash.
By far the most interesting character in the film is Captain Tamil (Michael Fox), obviously Robert Libott’s equivalent to Col. Haki (so memorably played by Orson Welles in Journey Into Fear) and a genuinely conflicted person, sometimes admiring Viking’s chutzpah and sometimes convinced he’s guilty of murder (did I mention that he spends most of this whole movie with a murder charge hanging over his head because O’Hara framed him for the murder of the guy he killed for his identity in the opening scene?) and determined to arrest him. Had more of Last Train from Bombay tapped this level of moral ambiguity, it would have been a much better film!
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Vaccine-Nation (Gary Null Productions, 2008)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
My intent was to show the first half of the Gary Null movie Vaccine-Nation but as things turned out I ended up running the whole thing, partly because the copy I had (the one I had been loaned almost a year ago!) was billed as a “director’s cut” but was totally uncued — it was just one big long DVD file without any chapter stops whatsoever, therefore no convenient place to pick it up for a second showing a month from now; and partly because the story was so compelling, especially the case of Alan Yurko, the “star” of the film.
In 1999 Yurko’s eight-week-old son was given a routine vaccination “cocktail” (it’s amazing here, as in AIDS, a medical procedure is colloquially nicknamed after something decidedly unhealthy!) and, two days after the shot, began to developed the high-pitched cry that’s an acknowledged side effect of the vaccines. Two days after that he stopped breathing, and Alan and his wife Francine rushed the baby to the hospital, where he was given the blood-thinning drug heparin (why?), with the result that blood was ultimately found in the baby’s brain after it died and Alan was arrested and charged with first-degree murder on the “shaken baby syndrome” theory. He was convicted (at least in part, the film suggested, because just before his case went to the jury a local TV news program ran a report on shaken baby syndrome that recommended coming down very hard on the parents) and sentenced to life imprisonment with no possibility of parole — beginning a costly legal battle as well as living hell for Alan, who was lumped in with child molesters by the other prisoners and treated to getting piss and shit dumped on him. This continued until 2004, when his wife and the legal effort she had managed to put together for him won him a new trial and he was acquitted — only to be re-arrested on an old charge in Ohio (he’d been living in Florida when he was arrested and had served his earlier sentence there) from which he was finally freed on parole in February 2005.
Null’s “stars” were Yurko and the late Dr. Michael Hilleman, who courtesy of a soundtrack recording of an interview he gave PBS for a documentary on the polio vaccine recalled his own role in testing it in 1955 and the jocular attitude of his fellow scientists towards his allegations that their vaccines might be contaminated by new viruses which had been undetectable before his research invented new means of detecting them — including HIV (though it seemed odd indeed to hear a reference to the “AIDS virus” in a movie directed by Gary Null, of all people, this is yet another piece of evidence that even if you believe in HIV as the cause of AIDS the syndrome still could be iatrogenic!). Null suggested in the show that vaccination has never been proven to be either safe or effective; his film doesn’t make that case very convincingly (though it does present evidence that the diagnosis and death tolls from catastrophic diseases like smallpox and polio were starting to trend downward even before mass vaccination was introduced, thanks to improved sanitation and other non-medical interventions that helped control the infection vectors) but does suggest very strongly that routine mass vaccination is a bad idea and vaccines should be considered a major health intervention that should be addressed cautiously.
I remember a Tony Brown’s Journal episode on PBS from April 17, 1994 that featured a letter from John Salamuni, whose son came down with polio as an effect of the polio vaccine, who wrote, “I am not recommending that children not be vaccinated, but rather that our government create a policy that provides precautionary measures, so that other children do not become sick from the very program that is designed to promote their health. Most parents are not informed by doctors, prior to vaccination, of potential risks involved, despite an even more comprehensive national program, recently enacted by Congress. There is no policy requiring doctors to inform parents in advance about potential hazards and risk factors, or the option of dead polio versus live polio vaccine. As tragic as David’s case is, it is made more so by the knowledge that a $20 pre-vaccination test could have prevented the polio that crippled him.”
Given that $20 is more than the actual vaccine costs, one can readily understand the health establishment’s reluctance to administer the test en masse — especially since the public health community is so imbued with mass vaccination as a magical principle that requires 100 percent compliance, or nearly so (I’ve read interviews in which vaccination advocates regard children whose parents opt out of vaccination for religious or moral reasons as “freeloaders” who are getting the alleged protective value of vaccination without running the risks), that they dare not allow the release of any information that even remotely questions the safety or effectiveness of mass vaccinations. The film also dramatizes the sheer number of vaccinations routinely ordered for American children — more than in any other country in the world and far more than I had when I was a child(when measles, mumps and rubella were considered rites of childhood passage and not fearsome menaces to be vaccinated against) and raises the interesting point of whether vaccines should be given in combined doses or singly so that the immune system has a chance to develop an antibody response to one vaccine before having to confront another.
About the only flaw I would point to in this film is Null’s repeated suggestion that the vaccine program is being pushed by pharmaceutical companies for profit motives; in fact, the major drug companies are loath to get into vaccines precisely because a vaccine is only given a limited number of times (even ones that require “booster shots” are generally administered only two or three times, and most vaccines are only given once), and the focus of the modern pharmaceutical industry is on drugs that have to be administered repeatedly, hopefully for the rest of the patient’s life (which is why in the mid-1990’s everyone in the AIDS mainstream suddenly stopped talking about a “cure” and started talking about making so-called “HIV disease” a “chronic, manageable condition” — i.e., one for which you would have to take multiple medications for the rest of your life). Indeed, the government liability program Null mentions in his movie — which, like the government liability program for nuclear reactors, caps total damages and makes it illegal for vaccine victims or their parents to sue in court — was put in place because without it the major pharmaceutical companies refused to produce vaccines at all! Null probably spends too much of the current film on the thimerosal issue (thimerosal is the mercury-producing chemical used as a preservative in vaccines that was widely believed to be behind the increased rates of autism in American children over the last 25 years until it was withdrawn in 2002) and not on the overall issue of free cholce versus medical mandates and the power of the medical industry’s argument that in the field of public health we should live under a medical dictatorship in which informed consent is not permitted and those who buck the consensus are punished — and the people who have “side” effects from vaccination should be accepted as collateral damage for a greater public good. That mindset is far more chilling than the direct harm done from the vaccines themselves.
My intent was to show the first half of the Gary Null movie Vaccine-Nation but as things turned out I ended up running the whole thing, partly because the copy I had (the one I had been loaned almost a year ago!) was billed as a “director’s cut” but was totally uncued — it was just one big long DVD file without any chapter stops whatsoever, therefore no convenient place to pick it up for a second showing a month from now; and partly because the story was so compelling, especially the case of Alan Yurko, the “star” of the film.
In 1999 Yurko’s eight-week-old son was given a routine vaccination “cocktail” (it’s amazing here, as in AIDS, a medical procedure is colloquially nicknamed after something decidedly unhealthy!) and, two days after the shot, began to developed the high-pitched cry that’s an acknowledged side effect of the vaccines. Two days after that he stopped breathing, and Alan and his wife Francine rushed the baby to the hospital, where he was given the blood-thinning drug heparin (why?), with the result that blood was ultimately found in the baby’s brain after it died and Alan was arrested and charged with first-degree murder on the “shaken baby syndrome” theory. He was convicted (at least in part, the film suggested, because just before his case went to the jury a local TV news program ran a report on shaken baby syndrome that recommended coming down very hard on the parents) and sentenced to life imprisonment with no possibility of parole — beginning a costly legal battle as well as living hell for Alan, who was lumped in with child molesters by the other prisoners and treated to getting piss and shit dumped on him. This continued until 2004, when his wife and the legal effort she had managed to put together for him won him a new trial and he was acquitted — only to be re-arrested on an old charge in Ohio (he’d been living in Florida when he was arrested and had served his earlier sentence there) from which he was finally freed on parole in February 2005.
Null’s “stars” were Yurko and the late Dr. Michael Hilleman, who courtesy of a soundtrack recording of an interview he gave PBS for a documentary on the polio vaccine recalled his own role in testing it in 1955 and the jocular attitude of his fellow scientists towards his allegations that their vaccines might be contaminated by new viruses which had been undetectable before his research invented new means of detecting them — including HIV (though it seemed odd indeed to hear a reference to the “AIDS virus” in a movie directed by Gary Null, of all people, this is yet another piece of evidence that even if you believe in HIV as the cause of AIDS the syndrome still could be iatrogenic!). Null suggested in the show that vaccination has never been proven to be either safe or effective; his film doesn’t make that case very convincingly (though it does present evidence that the diagnosis and death tolls from catastrophic diseases like smallpox and polio were starting to trend downward even before mass vaccination was introduced, thanks to improved sanitation and other non-medical interventions that helped control the infection vectors) but does suggest very strongly that routine mass vaccination is a bad idea and vaccines should be considered a major health intervention that should be addressed cautiously.
I remember a Tony Brown’s Journal episode on PBS from April 17, 1994 that featured a letter from John Salamuni, whose son came down with polio as an effect of the polio vaccine, who wrote, “I am not recommending that children not be vaccinated, but rather that our government create a policy that provides precautionary measures, so that other children do not become sick from the very program that is designed to promote their health. Most parents are not informed by doctors, prior to vaccination, of potential risks involved, despite an even more comprehensive national program, recently enacted by Congress. There is no policy requiring doctors to inform parents in advance about potential hazards and risk factors, or the option of dead polio versus live polio vaccine. As tragic as David’s case is, it is made more so by the knowledge that a $20 pre-vaccination test could have prevented the polio that crippled him.”
Given that $20 is more than the actual vaccine costs, one can readily understand the health establishment’s reluctance to administer the test en masse — especially since the public health community is so imbued with mass vaccination as a magical principle that requires 100 percent compliance, or nearly so (I’ve read interviews in which vaccination advocates regard children whose parents opt out of vaccination for religious or moral reasons as “freeloaders” who are getting the alleged protective value of vaccination without running the risks), that they dare not allow the release of any information that even remotely questions the safety or effectiveness of mass vaccinations. The film also dramatizes the sheer number of vaccinations routinely ordered for American children — more than in any other country in the world and far more than I had when I was a child(when measles, mumps and rubella were considered rites of childhood passage and not fearsome menaces to be vaccinated against) and raises the interesting point of whether vaccines should be given in combined doses or singly so that the immune system has a chance to develop an antibody response to one vaccine before having to confront another.
About the only flaw I would point to in this film is Null’s repeated suggestion that the vaccine program is being pushed by pharmaceutical companies for profit motives; in fact, the major drug companies are loath to get into vaccines precisely because a vaccine is only given a limited number of times (even ones that require “booster shots” are generally administered only two or three times, and most vaccines are only given once), and the focus of the modern pharmaceutical industry is on drugs that have to be administered repeatedly, hopefully for the rest of the patient’s life (which is why in the mid-1990’s everyone in the AIDS mainstream suddenly stopped talking about a “cure” and started talking about making so-called “HIV disease” a “chronic, manageable condition” — i.e., one for which you would have to take multiple medications for the rest of your life). Indeed, the government liability program Null mentions in his movie — which, like the government liability program for nuclear reactors, caps total damages and makes it illegal for vaccine victims or their parents to sue in court — was put in place because without it the major pharmaceutical companies refused to produce vaccines at all! Null probably spends too much of the current film on the thimerosal issue (thimerosal is the mercury-producing chemical used as a preservative in vaccines that was widely believed to be behind the increased rates of autism in American children over the last 25 years until it was withdrawn in 2002) and not on the overall issue of free cholce versus medical mandates and the power of the medical industry’s argument that in the field of public health we should live under a medical dictatorship in which informed consent is not permitted and those who buck the consensus are punished — and the people who have “side” effects from vaccination should be accepted as collateral damage for a greater public good. That mindset is far more chilling than the direct harm done from the vaccines themselves.
Prayers for Bobby (Lifetime, 2009)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The night before Charles and I ran Prayers for Bobby, a Lifetime TV-movie based on the true story of Mary Griffith (Sigourney Weaver), a heavy-duty Christian (Presbyterian, though the denomination wasn’t specified in the film itself and Charles was especially bothered by the contradictory signals sent about what sort of church these people were part of: at times it seemed Episcopal, at times Baptist and at times Mormon — the last mostly in the person of the two quite young men the minister sent to Mary to explain things later) who went ballistic when she learned her younger son Bobby (Ryan Kelley) was Gay. She found this out in 1979 and immediately enrolled him in a “cure” group and a therapy program with a psychiatrist (who came off looking surprisingly like an aging John Denver in drag), along with such other attempts at changing him as posting hand-written cards with verses from the Bible all over the house.
The 17-year-old Bobby found himself ostracized from their entire family in Walnut Creek, California until a distant cousin invited him to Portland, where he found a circle of friends and even a potential boyfriend, David (Scott Bailey) — though it’s not clear from this story whether he actually ever had sex either with a woman (when he’s first introduced it’s in the cab of a pickup truck with a girl who’s willing to go “all the way” for him, only he draws back and, taking a long jump to the wrong conclusion, she’s convinced he’s got another girlfriend) or a man before, overwhelmed with the guilt feelings induced by his crazy family and in particular by his mom’s insistence that he has a “choice” to be Gay or not and that by choosing to “indulge” his “sin” he’s jeopardizing not only his own salvation but his entire family’s as well, he takes a beautiful back flip off a freeway overpass into the path of an 18-wheeler truck, which kills him instantly.
This happens about halfway through the movie and the rest of it deals with Mary’s slow awakening, first through reading the pro-Gay book Bobby had tried to give her during his lifetime and then meeting with the pastor of the local Metropolitan Community Church, at first arguing with him and then being convinced that the Bible doesn’t issue a hard-and-fast condemnation of homosexuality and the verses that have been cited as such have to be read in an historical and social context. Overcome by her own guilt that by not learning all this sooner and being genuinely supportive of his son and the path he did not “choose,” she helped kill him (it’s interesting in a way that on two consecutive nights Charles and I watched movies, this one and Vaccine-Nation, about parents who inadvertently contributed to their children’s demise, suffered from it and ultimately became activists in the hope of helping keep other children from meeting the same fate), she tears her way into pro-Gay politics and has her big coming-out moment when she attends a meeting of the Walnut Creek City Council and testifies in favor of the city granting a permit for the town’s first Pride event:
“‘Homosexuality is a sin. Homosexuals are doomed to spend eternity in hell. If they wanted to change, they could be healed of their evil ways. If they would turn away from temptation, they could be normal again if only they would try and try harder if it doesn’t work.’ These are all the things I said to my son Bobby when I found out he was Gay. When he told me he was homosexual, my world fell apart. I did everything I could to ‘cure’ him of his ‘sickness.’ Eight months ago, my son jumped off a bridge and killed himself. I deeply regret my lack of knowledge about Gay and Lesbian people. I see that everything I was taught and told was bigotry and dehumanizing slander. If I had investigated beyond what I was told, if I had just listened to my son when he poured his heart out to me, I would not be standing here today with you, filled with regret. I believe that God was pleased with Bobby’s kind and loving spirit. In God’s eyes, kindness and love are what it’s all about. I didn’t know that each time I echoed eternal damnation for Gay people each time I referred to Bobby as sick and perverted and a danger to our children. His self esteem and sense of worth were being destroyed. And finally his spirit broke beyond repair.
"It was not God’s will that Bobby climbed over the side of a freeway overpass and jumped directly into the path of an eighteen-wheel truck which killed him instantly. Bobby’s death was the direct result of his parents’ ignorance and fear of the word ‘Gay.’ He wanted to be a writer. His hopes and dreams should not have been taken from him, but they were. There are children, like Bobby, sitting in your congregations. Unknown to you, they will be listening as you echo “amen” and that will soon silence their prayers. Their prayers to God for understanding and acceptance and for your love but your hatred and fear and ignorance of the word Gay, will silence those prayers. So, before you echo ‘amen’ in your home and place of worship. think. Think, and remember a child is listening.”
Though the Walnut Creek Councilmembers vote down the Pride permit 4-1, Mary Griffith has her own personal epiphany when she goes to San Francisco in 1984 — presented in the movie as a far longer journey than the mere 25 miles it is in real life (one imdb.com contributor noted the absurdity of her packing a suitcase to make the trip, and Charles said it was just a $7 BART ride away, though I think what writer Katie Ford, adapting Leroy Aarons’ non-fiction book, was getting at was the long psychological distance between those two points in Mary Griffith’s life even though geographically the distance may have been quite short) — and marches in the parade with the P-FLAG contingent. There’s a short segment at the end with the real Mary Griffith, white-haired but still looking close enough that Sigourney Weaver’s casting seems to make sense and not just be Lifetime’s effort to get a movie star (albeit one on the downside of her career) to bolster their lineup) and still fighting the good fight for Queer acceptance and love.
Prayers for Bobby is an inherently powerful story that could have been even more powerful if writer Ford and director Russell Mulcahy had trusted in its power — as it is the film is all too frequently overwritten and overdirected (notably in the time-disorienting “flanging” effects that are supposed to represent first Bobby dealing with the trauma of his own realization that he’s Gay and second his mom’s dealing with the trauma of her realization that her homophobia helped kill him) — but I was crying by the end of it even though the next morning, when I looked it up on imdb.com, I found myself getting angry that there was a link to the Web site afterelton.com and an article on that site by Scott Bailey, who played the potentially supportive boyfriend David, proclaiming what a wonderful experience making the movie had been for him despite his own heterosexuality.
That just flashed me back to my anger when an earlier version of the Harvey Milk story was proposed with Robin Williams to play him and I wrote a letter to the Los Angeles Times saying that casting a straight actor as Milk made about as much sense as casting a white actor as Martin Luther King, Jr. I’ve suffered through straight guy William Hurt and straight guy Tom Hanks becoming the only two people to win Academy Awards for playing Gay men — and the fact that when the Milk story did finally get made it was with another straight actor, Sean Penn, in the role, doesn’t make me any happier about that project or more inclined to see it. (Is he considered an “honorary Gay” because he was once married to Madonna?)
Nor did the fact that the supposed “great Gay love story” Brokeback Mountain also starred two straight guys, the late Heath Ledger (who even fell in love with and had a daughter with Michelle Williams, who played his wife in the film, before his prescription drug abuse first drove them apart and then did him in) and Jake Gyllenhaal. (At the same time, Ian McKellen lost the Academy Award he deserved for playing Gay director James Whale in Gods and Monsters, I suspect because the Academy’s homophobes looked at him on their ballots and sniffed, “A Gay man playing a Gay man — that’s not acting!”) Aren’t there enough Gay actors in the world that we have to suffer through straight boys and girls playing us? When can we finally start seeing some movies in which we play ourselves?
The night before Charles and I ran Prayers for Bobby, a Lifetime TV-movie based on the true story of Mary Griffith (Sigourney Weaver), a heavy-duty Christian (Presbyterian, though the denomination wasn’t specified in the film itself and Charles was especially bothered by the contradictory signals sent about what sort of church these people were part of: at times it seemed Episcopal, at times Baptist and at times Mormon — the last mostly in the person of the two quite young men the minister sent to Mary to explain things later) who went ballistic when she learned her younger son Bobby (Ryan Kelley) was Gay. She found this out in 1979 and immediately enrolled him in a “cure” group and a therapy program with a psychiatrist (who came off looking surprisingly like an aging John Denver in drag), along with such other attempts at changing him as posting hand-written cards with verses from the Bible all over the house.
The 17-year-old Bobby found himself ostracized from their entire family in Walnut Creek, California until a distant cousin invited him to Portland, where he found a circle of friends and even a potential boyfriend, David (Scott Bailey) — though it’s not clear from this story whether he actually ever had sex either with a woman (when he’s first introduced it’s in the cab of a pickup truck with a girl who’s willing to go “all the way” for him, only he draws back and, taking a long jump to the wrong conclusion, she’s convinced he’s got another girlfriend) or a man before, overwhelmed with the guilt feelings induced by his crazy family and in particular by his mom’s insistence that he has a “choice” to be Gay or not and that by choosing to “indulge” his “sin” he’s jeopardizing not only his own salvation but his entire family’s as well, he takes a beautiful back flip off a freeway overpass into the path of an 18-wheeler truck, which kills him instantly.
This happens about halfway through the movie and the rest of it deals with Mary’s slow awakening, first through reading the pro-Gay book Bobby had tried to give her during his lifetime and then meeting with the pastor of the local Metropolitan Community Church, at first arguing with him and then being convinced that the Bible doesn’t issue a hard-and-fast condemnation of homosexuality and the verses that have been cited as such have to be read in an historical and social context. Overcome by her own guilt that by not learning all this sooner and being genuinely supportive of his son and the path he did not “choose,” she helped kill him (it’s interesting in a way that on two consecutive nights Charles and I watched movies, this one and Vaccine-Nation, about parents who inadvertently contributed to their children’s demise, suffered from it and ultimately became activists in the hope of helping keep other children from meeting the same fate), she tears her way into pro-Gay politics and has her big coming-out moment when she attends a meeting of the Walnut Creek City Council and testifies in favor of the city granting a permit for the town’s first Pride event:
“‘Homosexuality is a sin. Homosexuals are doomed to spend eternity in hell. If they wanted to change, they could be healed of their evil ways. If they would turn away from temptation, they could be normal again if only they would try and try harder if it doesn’t work.’ These are all the things I said to my son Bobby when I found out he was Gay. When he told me he was homosexual, my world fell apart. I did everything I could to ‘cure’ him of his ‘sickness.’ Eight months ago, my son jumped off a bridge and killed himself. I deeply regret my lack of knowledge about Gay and Lesbian people. I see that everything I was taught and told was bigotry and dehumanizing slander. If I had investigated beyond what I was told, if I had just listened to my son when he poured his heart out to me, I would not be standing here today with you, filled with regret. I believe that God was pleased with Bobby’s kind and loving spirit. In God’s eyes, kindness and love are what it’s all about. I didn’t know that each time I echoed eternal damnation for Gay people each time I referred to Bobby as sick and perverted and a danger to our children. His self esteem and sense of worth were being destroyed. And finally his spirit broke beyond repair.
"It was not God’s will that Bobby climbed over the side of a freeway overpass and jumped directly into the path of an eighteen-wheel truck which killed him instantly. Bobby’s death was the direct result of his parents’ ignorance and fear of the word ‘Gay.’ He wanted to be a writer. His hopes and dreams should not have been taken from him, but they were. There are children, like Bobby, sitting in your congregations. Unknown to you, they will be listening as you echo “amen” and that will soon silence their prayers. Their prayers to God for understanding and acceptance and for your love but your hatred and fear and ignorance of the word Gay, will silence those prayers. So, before you echo ‘amen’ in your home and place of worship. think. Think, and remember a child is listening.”
Though the Walnut Creek Councilmembers vote down the Pride permit 4-1, Mary Griffith has her own personal epiphany when she goes to San Francisco in 1984 — presented in the movie as a far longer journey than the mere 25 miles it is in real life (one imdb.com contributor noted the absurdity of her packing a suitcase to make the trip, and Charles said it was just a $7 BART ride away, though I think what writer Katie Ford, adapting Leroy Aarons’ non-fiction book, was getting at was the long psychological distance between those two points in Mary Griffith’s life even though geographically the distance may have been quite short) — and marches in the parade with the P-FLAG contingent. There’s a short segment at the end with the real Mary Griffith, white-haired but still looking close enough that Sigourney Weaver’s casting seems to make sense and not just be Lifetime’s effort to get a movie star (albeit one on the downside of her career) to bolster their lineup) and still fighting the good fight for Queer acceptance and love.
Prayers for Bobby is an inherently powerful story that could have been even more powerful if writer Ford and director Russell Mulcahy had trusted in its power — as it is the film is all too frequently overwritten and overdirected (notably in the time-disorienting “flanging” effects that are supposed to represent first Bobby dealing with the trauma of his own realization that he’s Gay and second his mom’s dealing with the trauma of her realization that her homophobia helped kill him) — but I was crying by the end of it even though the next morning, when I looked it up on imdb.com, I found myself getting angry that there was a link to the Web site afterelton.com and an article on that site by Scott Bailey, who played the potentially supportive boyfriend David, proclaiming what a wonderful experience making the movie had been for him despite his own heterosexuality.
That just flashed me back to my anger when an earlier version of the Harvey Milk story was proposed with Robin Williams to play him and I wrote a letter to the Los Angeles Times saying that casting a straight actor as Milk made about as much sense as casting a white actor as Martin Luther King, Jr. I’ve suffered through straight guy William Hurt and straight guy Tom Hanks becoming the only two people to win Academy Awards for playing Gay men — and the fact that when the Milk story did finally get made it was with another straight actor, Sean Penn, in the role, doesn’t make me any happier about that project or more inclined to see it. (Is he considered an “honorary Gay” because he was once married to Madonna?)
Nor did the fact that the supposed “great Gay love story” Brokeback Mountain also starred two straight guys, the late Heath Ledger (who even fell in love with and had a daughter with Michelle Williams, who played his wife in the film, before his prescription drug abuse first drove them apart and then did him in) and Jake Gyllenhaal. (At the same time, Ian McKellen lost the Academy Award he deserved for playing Gay director James Whale in Gods and Monsters, I suspect because the Academy’s homophobes looked at him on their ballots and sniffed, “A Gay man playing a Gay man — that’s not acting!”) Aren’t there enough Gay actors in the world that we have to suffer through straight boys and girls playing us? When can we finally start seeing some movies in which we play ourselves?
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Brick Lane (Sony Pictures Classics, 2007)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was a British production called Brick Lane, named after a street in the Shoreditch section of London where there’s a large concentration of immigrants from Bangladesh — and yes, they are clearly identified as Bangladeshi and not Indian or Pakistani, even though the sequences representing the characters’ memories of life in their home country were shot in India and the leading actress is a Bengali Hindu from India. The central character is Nazneen (Tannishtha Chatterjee), a Bangladeshi woman who’s shipped off to London in the early 1980’s to take part in an arranged marriage with homely, large middle-aged Chanu (Satish Kaushik). By the late 1990’s she’s borne him three children, a son who died in his first few years and two daughters, Shahana (Naeema Begum) and Bibi (Lana Rahman), who survived — and Shahana is just entering teenagerhood and discovering the dubious joys of adolescent rebellion. Nazneen has kept up a regular correspondence with Hasina (Zafreen), her sister back home — Hasina is an on-screen character but is seen only in Nazneen’s flashbacks to their childhood together and fantasies of her current life — and longs for the chance to return.
Chanu himself decides the family should move back to Bangladesh, and in order to save up the money to do so he reluctantly allows Nazneen to buy a sewing machine (she borrows the money from a white-haired, puffy-faced female loan shark who has worked out the usual dipsy-doodles required of Muslim capitalists so they can actually charge interest while pretending that they’re not doing so, since the Koran strictly forbids loaning money for interest) so she can do piecework making jeans for a sweatshop factory. While doing this she gets involved with a Muslim defense group called the “Bengal Tigers” who organize to defend the community against gangs of racist whites who periodically invade the neighborhood and beat people up at random. One of her fellow workers, Karim (Christopher Simpson), is also involved in the Bengal Tigers and the two drift into an affair. He tries to get her to stay behind even as her family relocates, and eventually she declines his offer to marry him if she can divorce her husband but nonetheless she stays in London with her kids while their father moves back to Bangladesh.
It’s impossible at the moment to think of any movie about people from the Indian subcontinent — even one, like this, which doesn’t take place there — without making the inevitable comparisons to Slumdog Millionaire (whose protagonists are also Muslims), and the two films overlap in their depiction not only of the grinding poverty of the community but the grim determination of the people to survive it and do their best to get ahead in the face of the hamstringing traditions that are holding them back, but whereas Slumdog charmed with its fairy-tale atmosphere Brick Lane moves on many levels — as a woman-rebels movie, a resilience-in-the-face-of-poverty-and-racism movie, as a journey of self-discovery and as a film with a group of genuinely lovable and charming characters. Even Chanu is presented less as hateful than simply limited; as the film progresses we lose our distaste for this character (at first Brick Lane seems like The Color Purple transposed from rural African-Americans to urban Indo-Brits, and we think Chanu is going to be a stick-figure villain like the husband in that story) and he takes on a surprising degree of pathos — and in the scene in which he crashes the Bengal Tigers meeting and asks why they think they have to mobilize to “defend Islam” when the Islam he believes in is in his heart and no racist bashers can take it away from him is quite surprising and beautiful.
Though it was discouraging that cinematographer Robbie Ryan is yet another devotee of the past-is-brown school and a subscriber to the dictum that the way to illustrate poverty on screen is carefully avoid bright colors at all, for the most part the film is quite sensitively made, directed by Sarah Gavron from a script by Laura Jones and Abi Morgan from a novel by Monica Ali and dramatized in a quite subtle way that draws us into the lives of these characters. One interesting thing about this movie is that the 9/11 attacks are used as an important subplot — when they occur, the central characters are convinced (rightly) that they’re going to be in even more danger from the racist bashers than they were before — and it’s fascinating that the famous footage of them (shown in clips from the TV coverage we all saw back then) no longer carries the kind of emotional wallop it did seven or even four years ago (one reason last year’s Presidential election turned out so differently from the one in 2004).
The film was a British production called Brick Lane, named after a street in the Shoreditch section of London where there’s a large concentration of immigrants from Bangladesh — and yes, they are clearly identified as Bangladeshi and not Indian or Pakistani, even though the sequences representing the characters’ memories of life in their home country were shot in India and the leading actress is a Bengali Hindu from India. The central character is Nazneen (Tannishtha Chatterjee), a Bangladeshi woman who’s shipped off to London in the early 1980’s to take part in an arranged marriage with homely, large middle-aged Chanu (Satish Kaushik). By the late 1990’s she’s borne him three children, a son who died in his first few years and two daughters, Shahana (Naeema Begum) and Bibi (Lana Rahman), who survived — and Shahana is just entering teenagerhood and discovering the dubious joys of adolescent rebellion. Nazneen has kept up a regular correspondence with Hasina (Zafreen), her sister back home — Hasina is an on-screen character but is seen only in Nazneen’s flashbacks to their childhood together and fantasies of her current life — and longs for the chance to return.
Chanu himself decides the family should move back to Bangladesh, and in order to save up the money to do so he reluctantly allows Nazneen to buy a sewing machine (she borrows the money from a white-haired, puffy-faced female loan shark who has worked out the usual dipsy-doodles required of Muslim capitalists so they can actually charge interest while pretending that they’re not doing so, since the Koran strictly forbids loaning money for interest) so she can do piecework making jeans for a sweatshop factory. While doing this she gets involved with a Muslim defense group called the “Bengal Tigers” who organize to defend the community against gangs of racist whites who periodically invade the neighborhood and beat people up at random. One of her fellow workers, Karim (Christopher Simpson), is also involved in the Bengal Tigers and the two drift into an affair. He tries to get her to stay behind even as her family relocates, and eventually she declines his offer to marry him if she can divorce her husband but nonetheless she stays in London with her kids while their father moves back to Bangladesh.
It’s impossible at the moment to think of any movie about people from the Indian subcontinent — even one, like this, which doesn’t take place there — without making the inevitable comparisons to Slumdog Millionaire (whose protagonists are also Muslims), and the two films overlap in their depiction not only of the grinding poverty of the community but the grim determination of the people to survive it and do their best to get ahead in the face of the hamstringing traditions that are holding them back, but whereas Slumdog charmed with its fairy-tale atmosphere Brick Lane moves on many levels — as a woman-rebels movie, a resilience-in-the-face-of-poverty-and-racism movie, as a journey of self-discovery and as a film with a group of genuinely lovable and charming characters. Even Chanu is presented less as hateful than simply limited; as the film progresses we lose our distaste for this character (at first Brick Lane seems like The Color Purple transposed from rural African-Americans to urban Indo-Brits, and we think Chanu is going to be a stick-figure villain like the husband in that story) and he takes on a surprising degree of pathos — and in the scene in which he crashes the Bengal Tigers meeting and asks why they think they have to mobilize to “defend Islam” when the Islam he believes in is in his heart and no racist bashers can take it away from him is quite surprising and beautiful.
Though it was discouraging that cinematographer Robbie Ryan is yet another devotee of the past-is-brown school and a subscriber to the dictum that the way to illustrate poverty on screen is carefully avoid bright colors at all, for the most part the film is quite sensitively made, directed by Sarah Gavron from a script by Laura Jones and Abi Morgan from a novel by Monica Ali and dramatized in a quite subtle way that draws us into the lives of these characters. One interesting thing about this movie is that the 9/11 attacks are used as an important subplot — when they occur, the central characters are convinced (rightly) that they’re going to be in even more danger from the racist bashers than they were before — and it’s fascinating that the famous footage of them (shown in clips from the TV coverage we all saw back then) no longer carries the kind of emotional wallop it did seven or even four years ago (one reason last year’s Presidential election turned out so differently from the one in 2004).
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