by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran Charles the movie Changeling, a 2008 film from Universal directed by Clint Eastwood from a script by J. Michael Straczynski based on an actual case — two cases, really — in Los Angeles in the late 1920’s, back when the Los Angeles Police Department was even more corrupt and domineering than usual (which is saying a lot). It was actually the interface of two cases, the disappearance of 10-year-old Walter Collins (Gattlin Griffith) and the attempt of his mother, Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie, top-billed) to find him; and the so-called “Wineville Chicken Coop Murders,” in which chicken ranch owner Gordon Stewart Northcott (Jason Butler Harner) lured pre-pubescent boys into his car (usually by falsely telling them that their parents had had an accident and sent him for them), kidnapped them, drove them to his ranch and there tortured and killed them. A Canadian native, he had an accomplice, 11-year-old Sanford Clark (Eddie Alderson), a distant relative whom he got to help him kill his victims out of fear of his own life after he lured the boy away from his home in Canada with the promise of a vacation in sunny California.
The tie between the two cases is, not surprisingly, that Walter Collins was one of Northcott’s victims — but what made this story really quirky was that in the meantime the police had apprehended another missing boy, Arthur Hutchins (Devon Conti), who had been arrested in DeKalb, Illinois after the man he was with had tried to bum a meal from a diner without paying and had left the kid behind while he supposedly went back to his home to retrieve his money. The LAPD somehow got custody of this kid and decided to create a “success story” by passing him off as Walter Collins and “returning” him to Christine five months after the real Walter’s disappearance — and, when Christine sees through the imposture and realizes the phony “Walter” is not her son (which isn’t hard to figure out; he’s three inches shorter than Walter was when he disappeared, he’s circumcised — the real Walter wasn’t, lucky him! — he doesn’t remember his teacher and he doesn’t have the membranes between his teeth that the real Walter’s dentist had been treating him for), the LAPD has so much of its public image wrapped up in the feel-good story of how they “recovered” this poor mother’s kid that they insist he is Walter, that Christine is just trying to weasel out of her responsibilities as a parent so she can party and date (this is 1928, after all, and the “Roaring Twenties” are in full swing), and when she still insists that the kid the LAPD “reunited” her with is not her real son, they have her incarcerated in a mental institution.
Writer Straczynski was tipped off to the existence of this case when someone he knew at L.A. City Hall stumbled onto the documents about it in a cache of old files that were being cleaned out for destruction, and Straczynski took the files, researched the case for a year and based a good part of the dialogue in his script directly from court transcripts and other contemporary records — though that didn’t stop him from fictionalizing and pulling some of the usual screenwriter’s tricks to heighten the drama of a story that seemingly didn’t need heightening, notably in the rather tacky scene in which Our Heroine is about to be subjected to electroshock treatment and just at that moment her biggest community supporter, Rev. Gustav A. Briegleb (John Malkovich, the film’s male lead — to the extent it has one), shows up to demand her release.
Though the title fits the movie only in the most elliptical way (relating to the ancient myths about people — usually children — who disappeared into a supernatural world and returned distinctly different physically, psychologically and spiritually from how they’d been when they left) and there are a few annoying anachronisms in what’s otherwise a convincing evocation of the 1928-1935 period (electroshock wasn’t used on humans until 1937, the dialogue contains phrases like “serial killer” — a 1970’s coinage; a 1920’s criminologist would have called Northcott a “multiple murderer” — “APB” and “don’t go there,” and towards the end of the film Christine is depicted as listening to the Academy Awards on the radio and having made a bet with a friend that It Happened One Night would win Best Picture; in 1935 the Academy Awards weren’t yet broadcast live and were pretty much of interest only to people in the movie business; they weren’t a mass cultural phenomenon the way they became later), Changeling is a quite remarkable movie.
It’s basically a simple story, told simply (though Charles thought it could have used more of the economy of storytelling of the movies made when it takes place — after seeing James Whale zip through the events of The Kiss Before the Mirror in a mere 67 minutes the deliberate pace of Changeling did tend to pall, and if Eastwood had been able to keep it within two hours instead of stretching it out 21 minutes longer than that, it might have been even better) and directly, and managing to work in some of Eastwood’s obsessions — particularly murders of children and the social response to them — that we know from more personal films of his like Mystic River (which was actually a far weaker film than Changeling, with a vigilante plot line that would have played much better in an Eastwood Western than it did in a contemporary setting).
Oddly, Changeling didn’t start as an Eastwood project at all; it was developed by Ron Howard and his producing partner, Brian Grazer, and Howard was originally set to direct until he ran into scheduling problems with The Da Vinci Code and Eastwood took over the film. It was also Howard’s decision to cast Angelina Jolie as the lead — which is actually one of the better aspects of the film; it’s always nice to see someone who’s been coming off as a spoiled celebrity brat get a down-to-earth role that proves she can really act. Indeed, what’s most special about Changeling is the understated nature of all the performances and the overall quietude of the direction — it’s an exciting movie, but in a subtle way that gets us into the characters and their plights rather than dazzling us with action highlights.
And the issues it raises still resonate: the ways in which people are manipulated by authorities and the media, and the point mystery writer Abigail Padgett made to me when I interviewed her and she reflected on her experience as a Child Protective Services worker and how that impacted her fiction — that if there’s any possible way you can resolve your problems before turning to the system, you should, because systems have their own internal logic and the people within them will be focused far more on the health of the system than the well-being of the individuals who come to it asking for, and expecting, personal justice. Indeed, the entire film takes on a Kafkaesque air, as Christine finds herself in a situation in which every attempt she makes to assert herself and her own humanity is interpreted by the authorities as simply another indicator of her madness — to the point at which she is literally being offered a bribe by the authorities: sign a slip of paper acknowledging that the false Walter Collins is indeed her son, and she can leave immediately.
Changeling is a quite remarkable film that disappeared almost as soon as it was released, and was overshadowed by Eastwood’s other directorial credit from 2008, Gran Torino (probably because Eastwood was in Gran Torino and it was closer to his usual style both in subject and execution), but like Australia it was a box-office disappointment that deserved to be a blockbuster.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
The Torchy Blane Series (Warners, 1937-1939)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched Smart Blonde, the first Torchy Blane movie from Warners in 1937 and the one that established the series. It was also the only one that was based on a story actually written by Torchy’s creator, mystery writer Frederick Nebel (adapted into a screenplay by Warners’ hands Kenneth Gamet and Don Ryan), and it showed in a much more interesting plot than most of these films had, with a large assortment of potential suspects and genuine surprise in the finally-revealed identity of the murderer. It also benefited from being set in genuine Warners’ territory — in the worlds of entertainment and criminality; nightclub and racetrack owner Fitz Mularkey (Addison Richards) is determined to get out of the business and go into real estate to please his fiancée, Marcia Friel (Charlotte Winters). He wants to make sure he sells them to an honest owner instead of one of the New York gangsters itching to get their hands on them, so he sends for Boston entrepreneur Tiny Torgensen (Joseph Crehan) and agrees to sell to him even though Torgensen is offering him considerably less than the New York crooks are.
The deal becomes moot when Torgensen is killed at Union Station right as Torchy Blane (Glenda Farrell) is interviewing him — talk about being on top of a story! — she boarded his train from Boston in mid-run, got to his cabin, started the interview there and was continuing it as he got off the train when he was ambushed and shot. From there much of the action shifts to the Million Club, centerpiece of Fitz’s entertainment mini-empire, where his sort-of former girlfriend Dolly Ireland (the always marvelous Wini Shaw — her credits listing in the American Film Institute Catalog index only covers four years, 1934 to 1937 , and it seems inexplicable that her great performance in the “Lullaby of Broadway” number from Busby Berkeley’s Gold Diggers of 1935 didn’t make her a major star) holds forth as a singer and is shown singing most of a song called, “Why Do I Have to Sing a Torch Song?”
Smart Blonde is probably the darkest of the Blanes — there’s some genuine homicidal madness among the characters (Addison Richards is especially good as the sympathetic nightclub owner driven to rage and the edge of criminal insanity by the deaths of Torgensen and a number of his other friends), including the interesting figure of Chuck Cannon (Max Wagner), Fitz’s “enforcer” and a prime suspect since Fitz’s decision to bail out of the nightclub and racetrack businesses means he’ll be out of job. In the end [spoiler alert!] the killers turn out to be Marcia Friel and her “brother” Louis (David Carlyle, later known as Robert Paige), who turn out not to be brother and sister after all but rather a con-artist couple out for Fitz’s businesses and fortune. (One wonders if Frederick Nebel lifted this gimmick from The Hound of the Baskervilles.) Smart Blonde even looks darker — more proto-noir — than the later films in this series (Warren Lynch was the cinematographer and Frank McDonald, who did most of the Blanes, was the director), and the comedy relief is a lot more restrained than it became in subsequent films in the series. — 7/8/04
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I ran us the first in the eight (out of the total nine) Torchy Blane movies I recently recorded to DVD off TCM, Smart Blonde, a snappy opener to the series and a movie I quite like if only because it’s one of the few screen appearances of Wini Shaw — here cast with her true first name, Winifred — and she even gets to sing a song, “Why Must I Sing a Torch Song?,” in which she’s quite good (nothing that would have kept Billie Holiday awake worrying about the competition, but a nice “torch” voice that did justice to this song just as it did to the magnificent “Lullaby of Broadway” in Gold Diggers of 1935), though alas it’s interrupted by dialogue and we really get to hear only the beginning and the ending of it. The plot deals with a mini-entertainment empire that’s been put together by good-bad gangster Fitz Mularkey (Addison Richards), which includes a racetrack, a boxing arena and the Million Club, basically your average movie nightclub that looks far larger and more elaborate than a real one, in which singer Dolly Ireland (Wini Shaw) holds forth and carried an unrequited crush for her boss.
Fitz has decided to cash out of his businesses so he can settle down as a legitimate real-estate developer and marry his fiancée, Marcia Friel (Charlotte Winters), and rather than sell to one of the four or five New York crooks interested enough in his businesses to pay a premium price for them, he calls in an old friend from Boston (where he grew up), Tim “Tiny” Torgenson (Joseph Crehan), and sells them to him — only Torgenson is killed in a taxicab as soon as he gets off the train, and ace reporter Torchy Blane (Glenda Farrell, top-billed) just happens to be in the cab, witnesses the whole thing and immediately calls the story in. Her boyfriend, police inspector Steve McBride (Barton MacLane), naturally gets the call to investigate the case, and the two cycle through a series of suspects — including Mularkey’s roughneck bodyguard Chuck Cannon (Max Wagner), who’s thought to have killed Torgenson out of fear that Fitz’s withdrawal from the business would leave him unemployed — before they finally realize (in a plot twist original writer Frederick Nebel or screenwriters Kenneth Gamet and Don Ryan might have borrowed from The Hound of the Baskervilles) that the real villains are Marcia Friel and her husband Lewis (David Carlyle, later known as Robert Paige and a mini-star at Universal in the 1940’s, best known as the romantic lead in the Abbott and Costello breakthrough film Buck Privates); Lewis had posed as Marcia’s brother and the two were well-known con artists whose modus operandi was to use the Mrs. as a sexual lure to attract horny middle-aged pigeons for swindling.
Fitz ends up wounded but alive, sadder but wiser, and in the arms of Dolly Ireland at long last when she visits him in the hospital — and Torchy and McBride, after a whole movie of having their meals interrupted by one emergency call or another, finally get to go out to dinner at the fadeout. What appeal there is to Smart Blonde (and most of the Torchys to follow) is mostly in Glenda Farrell’s performance — an outgrowth, William K. Everson argued in The Detective in Film, of her role in Mystery of the Wax Museum as the reporter (again!) who solves the mystery and neatly steals the movie from the nominal female lead, Fay Wray (when Mystery of the Wax Museum was remade in 1953 as House of Wax the reporter character was omitted, and the film suffered big-time) — that and Frank McDonald’s acceptably atmospheric direction and the relentlessly fast pace Warners was known for that manages to get this story on and off screen in 59 minutes. — 4/29/09
••••••••••
The film I picked was Fly Away Baby (oddly the American Film Institute Catalog spells the title as Flyaway Baby, without a space between the first two words, but that’s not how it appears on the opening title), an entry in the Torchy Blane series with Glenda Farrell and Barton MacLane starring and Frank MacDonald turning in a sprightly job of direction. The exploitation gimmick on this one was the credit that the Don Ryan/Kenneth Gamet screenplay was “based on an idea by Dorothy Kilgallen” — who had actually won a race around the world, sponsored by her newspaper, to see who could get around the world fastest taking only commercial flights. (On screen the idea works out rather absurdly — one wonders how anyone can possibly win the race when the three contestants — Torchy, Lucien “Sonny” Croy [Gordon Oliver] and Hughie Sprague [Hugh O’Connell] — keep turning up on the same flights.)
This one is kicked off by the murder of jeweler Milton Devereux in which the three suspects are Croy, Devereux’ business partner Guy Allister (Joseph King) and recently paroled jewel thief Vanoni (the character appears briefly on screen but neither the on-screen credits nor the AFI Catalog list who plays him). The plot resolves into a complicated race around the world during which Blane is dead-set on pinning the murder on Croy — though the real guilty party turns out to be Allister, who kills Croy (his partner in an operation to fence stolen jewels through a crook in Frankfurt, whom Allister also kills) on the Zeppelin on the way to New York from Frankfurt and then, when cornered, tries to make his escape via parachute but pulls the rip cord too soon and ends up plunging to his death. It’s one of those movies where the plot matters less than the characters — Glenda Farrell in full cry is always a treat — though it does seem odd that a film in which key scenes take place in Germany make absolutely no reference to the Nazis and treat Germany as if it were a normal country with a normal government! — 6/17/03
••••••••••
Charles and I ran a movie, Torchy Blane, the Adventurous Blonde, made at Warners in 1937 just after Fly Away Baby. This was a considerably duller movie than Fly Away, Baby, too, despite a quite promising opening: Torchy (Glenda Farrell) is on a train, sitting next to a mysterious woman, Theresa Gray (Natalie Moorhead). A porter comes by and gives them both telegrams, but he gives each one to the wrong woman, so Theresa receives the one from police detective Steve McBride (Barton MacLane) that he’ll marry her as soon as she gets back in town, while Torchy receives one meant for Theresa from her lover, “Harvey,” breaking off their affair. “Harvey” turns out to be actor Harvey Hammond, who becomes involved in a plot hatched by Torchy’s rival reporters who, fearing they’ll be shut out of police stories when Torchy marries McBride, decide to embarrass her by hiring Hammond to fake his own death so she’ll report his murder — and a competing newspaper owned by Theresa’s husband Mortimer Gray (Charles Wilson) will discredit her by reporting him as alive and well. Only somebody takes advantage of this elaborate plot to kill Harvey for real, and Torchy and McBride spend six surprisingly slow-paced reels trying to figure out who.
As the American Film Institute Catalog summarizes it, “The suspects in his death are Grace Brown, an actress in Hammond’s company; her boyfriend Hugo Brand; Mrs. Jenny Hammond, who was jealous of Hammond’s love for Grace; and Theresa Gray, Hammond’s discarded lover” — though the real killer scenarists Robertson White and David Diamond decided on was Mortimer Gray, Theresa’s husband, who was jealous of Hammond for seducing and abandoning Mrs. Gray. It’s a dénouement that strains credibility and hardly seems worth waiting for — and though Frank McDonald repeated as director this is hardly an effort in the same league as Fly Away Baby, which had a faster pace as well as a genuinely mysterious plot and a much more credible ending. (Incidentally the American Film Institute Catalog claims that the plot of Adventurous Blonde is similar to that of Back in Circulation, released by Warners just two months earlier — but aside from the fact that both stories deal with a reporter proving an adulterous wife innocent of murder I detected no particular similarities, and the pathos of Back in Circulation — both in the suspect’s character and in that of the reporter, who puts her job on the line since her editor is convinced the woman is guilty and wants her to write it that way — is totally absent here.) — 6/18/03
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Charles and I didn’t get back until well past 9:30 and we only had time for a short movie: Torchy Blane, the Adventurous Blonde (at least that’s what the title is in the credits and in the American Film Institute Catalog; TCM’s schedule listed it simply as Adventurous Blonde), third in the series (I had a few of them scattered on sporadic videotapes but I took advantage of TCM’s decision last June 30 — the anniversary of Glenda Farrell’s birthday — to tape them all in sequence). It came right after the dazzlingly inventive Fly Away Baby and suffered from the comparison; it deals with the attempt of reporters for rival papers to discredit both Torchy Blane and her cop fiancé, Lt. Steve McBride of the homicide division (Barton MacLane, about whose performances in these films William K. Everson wrote that his “main concession to his playing of the cop was that he shouted a shade less belligerently than when playing the hoodlum”) by bribing actor Harvey Hammond (Leland Hodgson) to pose as a corpse, so Torchy will report his murder and then get shamed out of the business when he turns up alive — only someone takes advantage of this situation to kill him for real (don’t you just hate it when that happens?).
Adventurous Blonde wasn’t much of an entry in the series — it missed the relative audacity of Fly Away Baby and the Warners’ backstage atmosphere of the first one, Smart Blonde (which benefited majorly from the presence of the great Wini Shaw in the cast), and the sight of Glenda Farrell and Barton MacLane making out in the back of a taxi is hardly stimulating or particularly erotic (one wants to walk into the screen and tell her, “You could certainly do a lot better than him!”), but the film is fun even though the mystery isn’t all that mysterious and it doesn’t help the whodunit status of this story that Torchy gets the key clue even before any of the other principals are introduced (on a train coming back to New York City from the ending of Fly Away Baby she runs into a married woman who was having an affair with Hammond, which he had just broken off by telegram, and not at all surprisingly the killer turns out to be the rival publisher whose reporters organized the “fake” Hammond death, who was also the husband of Hammond’s paramour). This one was pretty routinely written (by Robertson White and David Diamond) and directed (by Frank McDonald), but Glenda Farrell in full cry is always fun to watch and she really “makes” this movie. — 7/4/04
••••••••••
The film I’d picked out was Blondes at Work, episode number four in the Torchy Blane series and, like the previous one we’d seen two nights earlier, Torchy Blane … the Adventurous Blonde, it was a pretty dull and unmysterious one, though definitely benefiting from Glenda Farrell’s star presence. The story deals with the sudden disappearance of Marvin Spencer (Kenneth Harlan), owner of the Bon Ton department store, who is later found dead in a hotel room. It turns out he and his rich friend, Maitland Greer (Donald Briggs), were fighting over the affections of former Bon Ton model Louisa Revelle (Rosella Towne), and Greer is accused and even convicted of Spencer’s murder, but in the end the real killer turns out to be Louisa, who stabbed Spencer to keep him from killing Greer and is therefore legally justified on grounds of self-defense.
The American Film Institute Catalog notes the plot similarities to two earlier Warners’ features, Front Page Woman (1935) and Back in Circulation (1937) — in which the enterprising female reporters were played by Bette Davis and Joan Blondell, respectively — though the only real point in common is having the woman reporter spend time in jail for contempt of court for having overheard the jury return a verdict and having “leaked” it to her paper so they published before the verdict was actually read in court.
What value there is in this movie is almost exclusively from the one-liners, the subtext (Thomas Jackson, at his most stubbornly self-righteous, plays a police captain who’s trying to stop Torchy’s cop fiancé, played by Barton MacLane, from giving murder solutions to her paper and thereby scooping her competitors — a prohibition Torchy evades by bribing her boyfriend’s partner to read his diaries) and delightful little bits of characterization like the screaming-queen stereotype in charge of Bon Ton’s fashion department (who would seem to have had his own motive for killing Spencer — “He kept leaving me to date women!”). Albert DeMond’s “original” screenplay suffers from a common fault in journeyman mystery writing — not enough suspects to keep the whodunit angle interesting — but it’s got some good lines, and Frank McDonald directs at the usual Warners breakneck pace and brings it in at 63 minutes so the slender story at least doesn’t outstay its welcome. — 7/6/04
••••••••••
Afterwards I ran Charles another movie, Torchy Blane in Panama. Apparently this wasn’t the next to last in the series — they interrupted the sequence with Glenda Farrell as Torchy and Barton MacLane as Steve McBride to try replacing the principals (Lola Lane played Torchy and Paul Kelly played McBride), then returned Farrell and MacLane to the series before the final film, Torchy Blane … Playing with Dynamite, with Jane Wyman (of all people! Imagine a future Academy Award winner in something like this!) as Torchy and Allen Jenkins as McBride. The experimental cast change didn’t work — frankly, Torchy Blane in Panama would have been a much more entertaining movie with Farrell and MacLane in the leading roles; whereas Farrell could play an assertive woman without losing her femininity Lane is just aggressive and edgy; and Kelly is so utterly lacking in charisma or sex appeal he makes MacLane look like Clark Gable by comparison and we wonder, even more than we do in the Farrell-MacLane Torchy Blanes, what on earth she sees in him.
It’s a pity, because in other respects the script for this one (by George Bricker, from a story by Noah’s Ark collaborator Anthony Coldewey) was one of the more creative entries in the series. It starts at a giant parade for a fictitious lodge organization called the Loyal Order of Leopards (one wonders if Coldewey and Bricker were influenced by the Laurel and Hardy masterpiece Sons of the Desert in using this device); dumb cop Gahagan (Tom Kennedy, the only actor to appear in all nine Blane films) is leading a contingent — which requires all its members to dress up in Tarzan-like leopard skins, showing off all too much of their decidedly un-Tarzan-like physiques — when he witnesses a bank robbery in progress. His contingent rushes in the bank en masse but too late to catch the robber or even get his car license number; frankly, I found myself feeling for the poor customers, who had to deal first with the trauma of watching the bank get robbed and a teller get killed and then had to deal with a contingent of 20 overweight Tarzan wanna-bes led by someone claiming to be a police officer responding to the call!
In any event, Torchy finds a clue at the scene — a Loyal Order of Leopards lodge pin from L.A. inscribed with the name of a lodge leader who’s been dead for three years; and, assuming that the robber has stolen this man’s identity and is planning on skipping out of town with the L.A. contingent, who are stopping off in Panama on the way home, McBride, Gahagan and rival reporter Bill Canby (Larry Williams) get on a boat to Panama and Torchy boards the boat in mid-ocean by parachuting down in a skydive from a small plane she’s rented for the circumstance. It doesn’t take long for Torchy to figure out that the bank robber is Stan Crafton (Anthony Averill), whom she romances to try to find out where the money is; he’s hidden it inside the stuffed leopard that serves as the L.A. contingent’s mascot and plans to sneak it off the ship in Panama and fence the money. As usual Torchy gets captured by the crooks and Steve has to rescue her.
The story is actually quite a clever one, director William Clemens (never one of the more important Warners’ contractees but someone who actually did pretty well with unpretentious “B” scripts like this) maintains a sprightly pace and actually inserts some interesting camera angles, and some of the supporting players are quite good (notably Averill, who plays the robber as a properly smarmy, oily personality but with some degree of actual charm that enables you to believe he could crash the Leopards and be accepted by the other members — the giveaway comes when Gahagan, actually managing to make a genuinely intelligent deduction for a change, figures out he’s not really a Leopard because he shakes hands normally and doesn’t give the secret lodge handshake), and all in all Torchy Blane in Panama manages to be entertaining despite the wrongness of the leads. — 7/13/04
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Charles and I got a ride home and I ran him Torchy Gets Her Man, fifth [actually sixth] in the Torchy Blane series from Warners from 1937 to 1939 and a considerably better film than either the third, Torchy Blane … The Adventurous Blonde, or the fourth, Blondes at Work. This time the mystery was genuinely suspenseful; Albert DeMond’s script told the story of “Hundred Dollar Bill” Bailey (Willard Robertson), master counterfeiter who has been evading detection by the U.S. Secret Service for 15 years. His current plot is to use the $100 window at a racetrack (played by the Inglewood track in which Warners then had a financial interest) to pass his phony money. A Secret Service agent named Gilbert shows up at the New York police department and gets Lt. Steve McBride (series regular Barton MacLane) to cooperate with him and swears him to secrecy.
As part of the alleged cooperation MacBride’s stupid aide Gahagan (Tom Kennedy) is supposed to pass a letter to Brennan (silent-screen veteran Herbert Rawlinson) and wait for a reply — only the letters are lifted from him when he’s stopped on the street in two elaborately staged hoaxes that raise our suspicions well before anyone in the movie actually catches on. It turns out, natch, that “Gilbert” is Bailey — not a genuine Secret Service man turned crook the way Donald Meek’s character was in that RKO movie we saw recently, Behind the Headlines, but a crook mounting a major imposture as a Secret Service agent so he can stake out the racetrack, steal genuine $100 bills and substitute his counterfeits, so nothing will be noticed until the track’s officials actually deposit the money. It’s a good plot, charmingly tricked out with the usual assortment of comic gags (including my favorite — to track down the crooks Torchy and Gahagan rent a German shepherd dog, only they rent him from a German-owned pet shop and find he only responds to commands in German, so Torchy has to get a German-English phrase book to order the dog to do anything) and well constructed from a suspense standpoint as well, with a clever device to reveal Bailey’s masquerade to MacBride (he mentions Torchy’s fondness for steak dinners, something he couldn’t have known about if he hadn’t met her, so MacBride deduces — correctly — that he’s kidnapped her). — 7/7/04
••••••••••
Charles and I had time to hang out here and watch an hour-long “B” movie: Torchy Blane in Chinatown, made in 1939 by Warners as part of a series featuring Glenda Farrell (replaced in one film in mid-series by Lola Lane and in the very last film by Jane Wyman!) as hard-boiled woman reporter Torchy Blane and Barton MacLane as her police detective boyfriend, Lt. Steve McBride, whom she’s constantly beating to the solutions of various homicides. William K. Everson had a special affection for this film — he called it the best of its series — though he had little affection for Barton MacLane, of whom he said that his “main concession to his playing of the cop was that he shouted a shade less belligerently than when playing the hoodlum.” The “comic relief” of Tom Kennedy as an even dumber cop, Gahagan, got rather oppressive — especially Torchy’s constant poking him in the belly to dramatize his obesity — and the plot itself, a good one, had been given a far better workout in the 1933 film A Study in Scarlet and would receive another better one in its quasi-remake, The House of Fear (1945).
Frankly I thought the first Torchy Blane film, Smart Blonde, a much better movie than this one — at least it was set in a familiar Warners milieu (the entertainment industry) and cast the unforgettable Wini Shaw as a singer (and even gave her a number!), so it had other things going for it besides Farrell’s character (and in particular her rapid-fire speech; she was called the “fastest mouth in films” for her ability to spit out dialogue at fantastic rates of speed) and the mystery element. At least Torchy Blane in Chinatown had a quite good supporting cast, including Henry O’Neill as Senator Baldwin, Patric Knowles as Captain Condon and James Stephenson as Mr. Mansfield — Condon and Mansfield were part of an extortion plot against Baldwin, along with a third participant, Fitzhugh (Anderson Lawlor), who posed as vengeful Chinese tong members (and faked their own murders!) allegedly angry at Baldwin for stealing priceless jade burial tablets from China for his personal art collection.
William Beaudine directed, and though he would travel Chinatown’s generic narrow streets again and again and again in his Charlie Chan movies for Monogram, here at least he had a major-studio infrastructure behind him that goosed his usually placid direction to the velocity of a typically fast-paced Warners thriller even though the script by George Bricker, based on an “original” (definitely deserving quotes this time) story by Murray Leinster (actually a highly regarded science-fiction writer and a surprising name to turn up on the credits of a film like this!) and Will Jenkins, was workmanlike but hardly gave Beaudine much to work with. — 11/15/02
••••••••••
We did have time for at least a short movie — I picked the eighth Torchy Blane movie and the last to star Glenda Farrell, Torchy Runs for Mayor, a wildly imaginative movie in which Torchy Blane is out to expose New York’s all-powerful political boss, Dr. Dolan (John Miljan — his first name is never given but it seems clear he really is an M.D., since in the course of the film he “offs” one of his political opponents with an injection of what the script calls “toxic chloride”), who’s been able to install a stooge in the mayor’s office and is in the process of purging the police commission and thereby threatening the jobs of honest cops Captain MacTavish (Frank Shannon) and Torchy’s fiancé, Steve McBride (Barton MacLane).
Torchy strikes back by a number of tactics that probably seemed quite novel to a 1939 audience and are rather astonishing even today, like bugging the mayor’s office and breaking into Dolan’s house to steal the “little red book” that contains a complete ledger of all his payoffs. When her home paper, the Star, stops running her stories because Dolan is organizing an advertiser boycott of them, she places her latest scoop in a tiny paper called the South End Blotter, edited by Hogarth Ward (Irving Bacon), who proudly boasts he’s already been to jail six times for his political convictions and doesn’t mind risking a seventh time to print the story Torchy wrote from Dolan’s purloined book.
A group of citizens seeking to recall the corrupt mayor seizes on Ward as a replacement candidate, only before they can get him on the ballot he’s beaten by a Dolan henchman and then killed by Dolan himself with the “toxic chloride” injection. As a joke, McBride puts Torchy’s name on the recall petitions — and Torchy takes it seriously enough actually to pursue the office and, of course, win — only, in a rankly sexist ending unworthy of an otherwise quite game script by Earle Snell (based on an “idea” by one Irving Rubine), at the press conference held in conjunction with her swearing-in Torchy is given a baby to hold (since the theme of her campaign had been to make the city safe and clean for future generations), and this sends her maternal instinct into overdrive and she instantly announces her intention to resign, marry McBride and be the nice little housewife and mother he’s always wanted. (A pity, since a sequel showing the new Mrs. Torchy McBride trying to juggle wife- and motherdom with running the city would have been a quite entertaining film.)
What’s most interesting about Torchy Runs for Mayor is that the film seems like a mini-Capra movie, what with its corrupt politicians and their secret bosses, the plucky little newspaper that dares to print the truth and the ordinary citizen who finds him/herself in a position of political power — indeed, so many elements seem to prefigure Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington I couldn’t help but wonder if Warners was deliberately trying to get this one out before Capra’s far more prestigious effort (made for a less powerful company, Columbia, but with double the running time, more than double the budget and major stars — James Stewart, Jean Arthur, Edward Arnold and Claude Rains). Glenda Farrell is absolutely convincing until that cop-out ending — as in the earlier Blanes, she’s a dynamo of energy and quite credible as a liberated woman. The direction is by Ray McCarey, who may not have had the brilliance of his brother Leo but nonetheless turned in a stronger job than the hacks like Frank McDonald and William Beaudine who did most of the Blanes, and overall Torchy Runs for Mayor is an above-average series entry that is genuinely about something and keeps the comic relief (notably Tom Kennedy’s ultra-dumb cop Gahagan — ironically Kennedy was the only actor who made all nine of the Blane films!) within welcome limits. — 7/11/04
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I ran Charles the final Torchy Blane movie, Torchy Blane … Playing with Dynamite (the ellipsis is actually part of the title as printed on the opening credit). Though Glenda Farrell wasn’t in it, this was nonetheless one of the better Blanes, powered by a strong crime-drama plot (story by Scott Littleton, script by Earle Snell and Charles Belden) and better-than-average direction (by Noel Smith, who did some of the best Warners “B”’s of the period and probably should have got a shot at “A”-films. Torchy was played by Jane Wyman, and as unlikely as it seems to find a future Academy Award winner in a film like this (just as it seemed unlikely in retrospect that future Academy Award winner Susan Sarandon should have played the ingenue in The Rocky Horror Picture Show!), she’s actually quite good, managing to spit out lines almost as fast as Glenda Farrell did in the role and make her character appealing without the unpleasant edginess that afflicted Lola Lane in her try at the role in Torchy Blane in Panama.
Had they actually cast a young, personable actor as Steve McBride, Torchy’s police detective fiancé, this film might have been a gem — as much as I hate his subsequent career, Wyman’s husband-to-be, the young Ronald Reagan, might have been quite good in the role — but instead Warners went the other way and put Allen Jenkins in the part (“not particularly helpful,” William K. Everson notes, “since he played more for comedy and the gap between him and the still-retained Tom Kennedy [as his doofus sidekick Gahagan] was too narrow”). Still, Torchy Blane … Playing with Dynamite is a good movie, albeit a very derivative one; the plot gimmick has Torchy getting herself sent to jail deliberately so she can contact Jackie McGuire (Sheila Bromley), girlfriend of the notorious bank robber “Denver Eddie” (Eddie Marr), wanted in several states across the country.
Jackie and Torchy stage a prison break (actually arranged in advance by McBride and his contacts in the jail administration) and flee to San Francisco, where Denver Eddie is supposed to meet them; and McBride and Gahagan also go to San Francisco, hoping to win the $50,000 reward by capturing the crook without help from the San Francisco police. From then on the film, despite a mere 59-minute running time, manages to crowd quite a few appealing plot elements into its story, including a bunch of S.F. police officers convinced that McBride and Gahagan are crooks; a wrestling promoter who gets Gahagan to go up against his former Navy wrestling opponent, “The Bone Crusher,” in a match; an associate of Denver Eddie’s who puts Torchy in danger by blowing her cover; and a neat climax in which all parties meet at the wrestling match and Gahagan, thrown out of the ring by his opponent, lands on top of Denver Eddie in the audience and thus gets the credit for his arrest. It was a clever story and a truly appealing film in a generally quite entertaining series. — 7/14/04
I watched Smart Blonde, the first Torchy Blane movie from Warners in 1937 and the one that established the series. It was also the only one that was based on a story actually written by Torchy’s creator, mystery writer Frederick Nebel (adapted into a screenplay by Warners’ hands Kenneth Gamet and Don Ryan), and it showed in a much more interesting plot than most of these films had, with a large assortment of potential suspects and genuine surprise in the finally-revealed identity of the murderer. It also benefited from being set in genuine Warners’ territory — in the worlds of entertainment and criminality; nightclub and racetrack owner Fitz Mularkey (Addison Richards) is determined to get out of the business and go into real estate to please his fiancée, Marcia Friel (Charlotte Winters). He wants to make sure he sells them to an honest owner instead of one of the New York gangsters itching to get their hands on them, so he sends for Boston entrepreneur Tiny Torgensen (Joseph Crehan) and agrees to sell to him even though Torgensen is offering him considerably less than the New York crooks are.
The deal becomes moot when Torgensen is killed at Union Station right as Torchy Blane (Glenda Farrell) is interviewing him — talk about being on top of a story! — she boarded his train from Boston in mid-run, got to his cabin, started the interview there and was continuing it as he got off the train when he was ambushed and shot. From there much of the action shifts to the Million Club, centerpiece of Fitz’s entertainment mini-empire, where his sort-of former girlfriend Dolly Ireland (the always marvelous Wini Shaw — her credits listing in the American Film Institute Catalog index only covers four years, 1934 to 1937 , and it seems inexplicable that her great performance in the “Lullaby of Broadway” number from Busby Berkeley’s Gold Diggers of 1935 didn’t make her a major star) holds forth as a singer and is shown singing most of a song called, “Why Do I Have to Sing a Torch Song?”
Smart Blonde is probably the darkest of the Blanes — there’s some genuine homicidal madness among the characters (Addison Richards is especially good as the sympathetic nightclub owner driven to rage and the edge of criminal insanity by the deaths of Torgensen and a number of his other friends), including the interesting figure of Chuck Cannon (Max Wagner), Fitz’s “enforcer” and a prime suspect since Fitz’s decision to bail out of the nightclub and racetrack businesses means he’ll be out of job. In the end [spoiler alert!] the killers turn out to be Marcia Friel and her “brother” Louis (David Carlyle, later known as Robert Paige), who turn out not to be brother and sister after all but rather a con-artist couple out for Fitz’s businesses and fortune. (One wonders if Frederick Nebel lifted this gimmick from The Hound of the Baskervilles.) Smart Blonde even looks darker — more proto-noir — than the later films in this series (Warren Lynch was the cinematographer and Frank McDonald, who did most of the Blanes, was the director), and the comedy relief is a lot more restrained than it became in subsequent films in the series. — 7/8/04
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I ran us the first in the eight (out of the total nine) Torchy Blane movies I recently recorded to DVD off TCM, Smart Blonde, a snappy opener to the series and a movie I quite like if only because it’s one of the few screen appearances of Wini Shaw — here cast with her true first name, Winifred — and she even gets to sing a song, “Why Must I Sing a Torch Song?,” in which she’s quite good (nothing that would have kept Billie Holiday awake worrying about the competition, but a nice “torch” voice that did justice to this song just as it did to the magnificent “Lullaby of Broadway” in Gold Diggers of 1935), though alas it’s interrupted by dialogue and we really get to hear only the beginning and the ending of it. The plot deals with a mini-entertainment empire that’s been put together by good-bad gangster Fitz Mularkey (Addison Richards), which includes a racetrack, a boxing arena and the Million Club, basically your average movie nightclub that looks far larger and more elaborate than a real one, in which singer Dolly Ireland (Wini Shaw) holds forth and carried an unrequited crush for her boss.
Fitz has decided to cash out of his businesses so he can settle down as a legitimate real-estate developer and marry his fiancée, Marcia Friel (Charlotte Winters), and rather than sell to one of the four or five New York crooks interested enough in his businesses to pay a premium price for them, he calls in an old friend from Boston (where he grew up), Tim “Tiny” Torgenson (Joseph Crehan), and sells them to him — only Torgenson is killed in a taxicab as soon as he gets off the train, and ace reporter Torchy Blane (Glenda Farrell, top-billed) just happens to be in the cab, witnesses the whole thing and immediately calls the story in. Her boyfriend, police inspector Steve McBride (Barton MacLane), naturally gets the call to investigate the case, and the two cycle through a series of suspects — including Mularkey’s roughneck bodyguard Chuck Cannon (Max Wagner), who’s thought to have killed Torgenson out of fear that Fitz’s withdrawal from the business would leave him unemployed — before they finally realize (in a plot twist original writer Frederick Nebel or screenwriters Kenneth Gamet and Don Ryan might have borrowed from The Hound of the Baskervilles) that the real villains are Marcia Friel and her husband Lewis (David Carlyle, later known as Robert Paige and a mini-star at Universal in the 1940’s, best known as the romantic lead in the Abbott and Costello breakthrough film Buck Privates); Lewis had posed as Marcia’s brother and the two were well-known con artists whose modus operandi was to use the Mrs. as a sexual lure to attract horny middle-aged pigeons for swindling.
Fitz ends up wounded but alive, sadder but wiser, and in the arms of Dolly Ireland at long last when she visits him in the hospital — and Torchy and McBride, after a whole movie of having their meals interrupted by one emergency call or another, finally get to go out to dinner at the fadeout. What appeal there is to Smart Blonde (and most of the Torchys to follow) is mostly in Glenda Farrell’s performance — an outgrowth, William K. Everson argued in The Detective in Film, of her role in Mystery of the Wax Museum as the reporter (again!) who solves the mystery and neatly steals the movie from the nominal female lead, Fay Wray (when Mystery of the Wax Museum was remade in 1953 as House of Wax the reporter character was omitted, and the film suffered big-time) — that and Frank McDonald’s acceptably atmospheric direction and the relentlessly fast pace Warners was known for that manages to get this story on and off screen in 59 minutes. — 4/29/09
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The film I picked was Fly Away Baby (oddly the American Film Institute Catalog spells the title as Flyaway Baby, without a space between the first two words, but that’s not how it appears on the opening title), an entry in the Torchy Blane series with Glenda Farrell and Barton MacLane starring and Frank MacDonald turning in a sprightly job of direction. The exploitation gimmick on this one was the credit that the Don Ryan/Kenneth Gamet screenplay was “based on an idea by Dorothy Kilgallen” — who had actually won a race around the world, sponsored by her newspaper, to see who could get around the world fastest taking only commercial flights. (On screen the idea works out rather absurdly — one wonders how anyone can possibly win the race when the three contestants — Torchy, Lucien “Sonny” Croy [Gordon Oliver] and Hughie Sprague [Hugh O’Connell] — keep turning up on the same flights.)
This one is kicked off by the murder of jeweler Milton Devereux in which the three suspects are Croy, Devereux’ business partner Guy Allister (Joseph King) and recently paroled jewel thief Vanoni (the character appears briefly on screen but neither the on-screen credits nor the AFI Catalog list who plays him). The plot resolves into a complicated race around the world during which Blane is dead-set on pinning the murder on Croy — though the real guilty party turns out to be Allister, who kills Croy (his partner in an operation to fence stolen jewels through a crook in Frankfurt, whom Allister also kills) on the Zeppelin on the way to New York from Frankfurt and then, when cornered, tries to make his escape via parachute but pulls the rip cord too soon and ends up plunging to his death. It’s one of those movies where the plot matters less than the characters — Glenda Farrell in full cry is always a treat — though it does seem odd that a film in which key scenes take place in Germany make absolutely no reference to the Nazis and treat Germany as if it were a normal country with a normal government! — 6/17/03
••••••••••
Charles and I ran a movie, Torchy Blane, the Adventurous Blonde, made at Warners in 1937 just after Fly Away Baby. This was a considerably duller movie than Fly Away, Baby, too, despite a quite promising opening: Torchy (Glenda Farrell) is on a train, sitting next to a mysterious woman, Theresa Gray (Natalie Moorhead). A porter comes by and gives them both telegrams, but he gives each one to the wrong woman, so Theresa receives the one from police detective Steve McBride (Barton MacLane) that he’ll marry her as soon as she gets back in town, while Torchy receives one meant for Theresa from her lover, “Harvey,” breaking off their affair. “Harvey” turns out to be actor Harvey Hammond, who becomes involved in a plot hatched by Torchy’s rival reporters who, fearing they’ll be shut out of police stories when Torchy marries McBride, decide to embarrass her by hiring Hammond to fake his own death so she’ll report his murder — and a competing newspaper owned by Theresa’s husband Mortimer Gray (Charles Wilson) will discredit her by reporting him as alive and well. Only somebody takes advantage of this elaborate plot to kill Harvey for real, and Torchy and McBride spend six surprisingly slow-paced reels trying to figure out who.
As the American Film Institute Catalog summarizes it, “The suspects in his death are Grace Brown, an actress in Hammond’s company; her boyfriend Hugo Brand; Mrs. Jenny Hammond, who was jealous of Hammond’s love for Grace; and Theresa Gray, Hammond’s discarded lover” — though the real killer scenarists Robertson White and David Diamond decided on was Mortimer Gray, Theresa’s husband, who was jealous of Hammond for seducing and abandoning Mrs. Gray. It’s a dénouement that strains credibility and hardly seems worth waiting for — and though Frank McDonald repeated as director this is hardly an effort in the same league as Fly Away Baby, which had a faster pace as well as a genuinely mysterious plot and a much more credible ending. (Incidentally the American Film Institute Catalog claims that the plot of Adventurous Blonde is similar to that of Back in Circulation, released by Warners just two months earlier — but aside from the fact that both stories deal with a reporter proving an adulterous wife innocent of murder I detected no particular similarities, and the pathos of Back in Circulation — both in the suspect’s character and in that of the reporter, who puts her job on the line since her editor is convinced the woman is guilty and wants her to write it that way — is totally absent here.) — 6/18/03
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Charles and I didn’t get back until well past 9:30 and we only had time for a short movie: Torchy Blane, the Adventurous Blonde (at least that’s what the title is in the credits and in the American Film Institute Catalog; TCM’s schedule listed it simply as Adventurous Blonde), third in the series (I had a few of them scattered on sporadic videotapes but I took advantage of TCM’s decision last June 30 — the anniversary of Glenda Farrell’s birthday — to tape them all in sequence). It came right after the dazzlingly inventive Fly Away Baby and suffered from the comparison; it deals with the attempt of reporters for rival papers to discredit both Torchy Blane and her cop fiancé, Lt. Steve McBride of the homicide division (Barton MacLane, about whose performances in these films William K. Everson wrote that his “main concession to his playing of the cop was that he shouted a shade less belligerently than when playing the hoodlum”) by bribing actor Harvey Hammond (Leland Hodgson) to pose as a corpse, so Torchy will report his murder and then get shamed out of the business when he turns up alive — only someone takes advantage of this situation to kill him for real (don’t you just hate it when that happens?).
Adventurous Blonde wasn’t much of an entry in the series — it missed the relative audacity of Fly Away Baby and the Warners’ backstage atmosphere of the first one, Smart Blonde (which benefited majorly from the presence of the great Wini Shaw in the cast), and the sight of Glenda Farrell and Barton MacLane making out in the back of a taxi is hardly stimulating or particularly erotic (one wants to walk into the screen and tell her, “You could certainly do a lot better than him!”), but the film is fun even though the mystery isn’t all that mysterious and it doesn’t help the whodunit status of this story that Torchy gets the key clue even before any of the other principals are introduced (on a train coming back to New York City from the ending of Fly Away Baby she runs into a married woman who was having an affair with Hammond, which he had just broken off by telegram, and not at all surprisingly the killer turns out to be the rival publisher whose reporters organized the “fake” Hammond death, who was also the husband of Hammond’s paramour). This one was pretty routinely written (by Robertson White and David Diamond) and directed (by Frank McDonald), but Glenda Farrell in full cry is always fun to watch and she really “makes” this movie. — 7/4/04
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The film I’d picked out was Blondes at Work, episode number four in the Torchy Blane series and, like the previous one we’d seen two nights earlier, Torchy Blane … the Adventurous Blonde, it was a pretty dull and unmysterious one, though definitely benefiting from Glenda Farrell’s star presence. The story deals with the sudden disappearance of Marvin Spencer (Kenneth Harlan), owner of the Bon Ton department store, who is later found dead in a hotel room. It turns out he and his rich friend, Maitland Greer (Donald Briggs), were fighting over the affections of former Bon Ton model Louisa Revelle (Rosella Towne), and Greer is accused and even convicted of Spencer’s murder, but in the end the real killer turns out to be Louisa, who stabbed Spencer to keep him from killing Greer and is therefore legally justified on grounds of self-defense.
The American Film Institute Catalog notes the plot similarities to two earlier Warners’ features, Front Page Woman (1935) and Back in Circulation (1937) — in which the enterprising female reporters were played by Bette Davis and Joan Blondell, respectively — though the only real point in common is having the woman reporter spend time in jail for contempt of court for having overheard the jury return a verdict and having “leaked” it to her paper so they published before the verdict was actually read in court.
What value there is in this movie is almost exclusively from the one-liners, the subtext (Thomas Jackson, at his most stubbornly self-righteous, plays a police captain who’s trying to stop Torchy’s cop fiancé, played by Barton MacLane, from giving murder solutions to her paper and thereby scooping her competitors — a prohibition Torchy evades by bribing her boyfriend’s partner to read his diaries) and delightful little bits of characterization like the screaming-queen stereotype in charge of Bon Ton’s fashion department (who would seem to have had his own motive for killing Spencer — “He kept leaving me to date women!”). Albert DeMond’s “original” screenplay suffers from a common fault in journeyman mystery writing — not enough suspects to keep the whodunit angle interesting — but it’s got some good lines, and Frank McDonald directs at the usual Warners breakneck pace and brings it in at 63 minutes so the slender story at least doesn’t outstay its welcome. — 7/6/04
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Afterwards I ran Charles another movie, Torchy Blane in Panama. Apparently this wasn’t the next to last in the series — they interrupted the sequence with Glenda Farrell as Torchy and Barton MacLane as Steve McBride to try replacing the principals (Lola Lane played Torchy and Paul Kelly played McBride), then returned Farrell and MacLane to the series before the final film, Torchy Blane … Playing with Dynamite, with Jane Wyman (of all people! Imagine a future Academy Award winner in something like this!) as Torchy and Allen Jenkins as McBride. The experimental cast change didn’t work — frankly, Torchy Blane in Panama would have been a much more entertaining movie with Farrell and MacLane in the leading roles; whereas Farrell could play an assertive woman without losing her femininity Lane is just aggressive and edgy; and Kelly is so utterly lacking in charisma or sex appeal he makes MacLane look like Clark Gable by comparison and we wonder, even more than we do in the Farrell-MacLane Torchy Blanes, what on earth she sees in him.
It’s a pity, because in other respects the script for this one (by George Bricker, from a story by Noah’s Ark collaborator Anthony Coldewey) was one of the more creative entries in the series. It starts at a giant parade for a fictitious lodge organization called the Loyal Order of Leopards (one wonders if Coldewey and Bricker were influenced by the Laurel and Hardy masterpiece Sons of the Desert in using this device); dumb cop Gahagan (Tom Kennedy, the only actor to appear in all nine Blane films) is leading a contingent — which requires all its members to dress up in Tarzan-like leopard skins, showing off all too much of their decidedly un-Tarzan-like physiques — when he witnesses a bank robbery in progress. His contingent rushes in the bank en masse but too late to catch the robber or even get his car license number; frankly, I found myself feeling for the poor customers, who had to deal first with the trauma of watching the bank get robbed and a teller get killed and then had to deal with a contingent of 20 overweight Tarzan wanna-bes led by someone claiming to be a police officer responding to the call!
In any event, Torchy finds a clue at the scene — a Loyal Order of Leopards lodge pin from L.A. inscribed with the name of a lodge leader who’s been dead for three years; and, assuming that the robber has stolen this man’s identity and is planning on skipping out of town with the L.A. contingent, who are stopping off in Panama on the way home, McBride, Gahagan and rival reporter Bill Canby (Larry Williams) get on a boat to Panama and Torchy boards the boat in mid-ocean by parachuting down in a skydive from a small plane she’s rented for the circumstance. It doesn’t take long for Torchy to figure out that the bank robber is Stan Crafton (Anthony Averill), whom she romances to try to find out where the money is; he’s hidden it inside the stuffed leopard that serves as the L.A. contingent’s mascot and plans to sneak it off the ship in Panama and fence the money. As usual Torchy gets captured by the crooks and Steve has to rescue her.
The story is actually quite a clever one, director William Clemens (never one of the more important Warners’ contractees but someone who actually did pretty well with unpretentious “B” scripts like this) maintains a sprightly pace and actually inserts some interesting camera angles, and some of the supporting players are quite good (notably Averill, who plays the robber as a properly smarmy, oily personality but with some degree of actual charm that enables you to believe he could crash the Leopards and be accepted by the other members — the giveaway comes when Gahagan, actually managing to make a genuinely intelligent deduction for a change, figures out he’s not really a Leopard because he shakes hands normally and doesn’t give the secret lodge handshake), and all in all Torchy Blane in Panama manages to be entertaining despite the wrongness of the leads. — 7/13/04
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Charles and I got a ride home and I ran him Torchy Gets Her Man, fifth [actually sixth] in the Torchy Blane series from Warners from 1937 to 1939 and a considerably better film than either the third, Torchy Blane … The Adventurous Blonde, or the fourth, Blondes at Work. This time the mystery was genuinely suspenseful; Albert DeMond’s script told the story of “Hundred Dollar Bill” Bailey (Willard Robertson), master counterfeiter who has been evading detection by the U.S. Secret Service for 15 years. His current plot is to use the $100 window at a racetrack (played by the Inglewood track in which Warners then had a financial interest) to pass his phony money. A Secret Service agent named Gilbert shows up at the New York police department and gets Lt. Steve McBride (series regular Barton MacLane) to cooperate with him and swears him to secrecy.
As part of the alleged cooperation MacBride’s stupid aide Gahagan (Tom Kennedy) is supposed to pass a letter to Brennan (silent-screen veteran Herbert Rawlinson) and wait for a reply — only the letters are lifted from him when he’s stopped on the street in two elaborately staged hoaxes that raise our suspicions well before anyone in the movie actually catches on. It turns out, natch, that “Gilbert” is Bailey — not a genuine Secret Service man turned crook the way Donald Meek’s character was in that RKO movie we saw recently, Behind the Headlines, but a crook mounting a major imposture as a Secret Service agent so he can stake out the racetrack, steal genuine $100 bills and substitute his counterfeits, so nothing will be noticed until the track’s officials actually deposit the money. It’s a good plot, charmingly tricked out with the usual assortment of comic gags (including my favorite — to track down the crooks Torchy and Gahagan rent a German shepherd dog, only they rent him from a German-owned pet shop and find he only responds to commands in German, so Torchy has to get a German-English phrase book to order the dog to do anything) and well constructed from a suspense standpoint as well, with a clever device to reveal Bailey’s masquerade to MacBride (he mentions Torchy’s fondness for steak dinners, something he couldn’t have known about if he hadn’t met her, so MacBride deduces — correctly — that he’s kidnapped her). — 7/7/04
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Charles and I had time to hang out here and watch an hour-long “B” movie: Torchy Blane in Chinatown, made in 1939 by Warners as part of a series featuring Glenda Farrell (replaced in one film in mid-series by Lola Lane and in the very last film by Jane Wyman!) as hard-boiled woman reporter Torchy Blane and Barton MacLane as her police detective boyfriend, Lt. Steve McBride, whom she’s constantly beating to the solutions of various homicides. William K. Everson had a special affection for this film — he called it the best of its series — though he had little affection for Barton MacLane, of whom he said that his “main concession to his playing of the cop was that he shouted a shade less belligerently than when playing the hoodlum.” The “comic relief” of Tom Kennedy as an even dumber cop, Gahagan, got rather oppressive — especially Torchy’s constant poking him in the belly to dramatize his obesity — and the plot itself, a good one, had been given a far better workout in the 1933 film A Study in Scarlet and would receive another better one in its quasi-remake, The House of Fear (1945).
Frankly I thought the first Torchy Blane film, Smart Blonde, a much better movie than this one — at least it was set in a familiar Warners milieu (the entertainment industry) and cast the unforgettable Wini Shaw as a singer (and even gave her a number!), so it had other things going for it besides Farrell’s character (and in particular her rapid-fire speech; she was called the “fastest mouth in films” for her ability to spit out dialogue at fantastic rates of speed) and the mystery element. At least Torchy Blane in Chinatown had a quite good supporting cast, including Henry O’Neill as Senator Baldwin, Patric Knowles as Captain Condon and James Stephenson as Mr. Mansfield — Condon and Mansfield were part of an extortion plot against Baldwin, along with a third participant, Fitzhugh (Anderson Lawlor), who posed as vengeful Chinese tong members (and faked their own murders!) allegedly angry at Baldwin for stealing priceless jade burial tablets from China for his personal art collection.
William Beaudine directed, and though he would travel Chinatown’s generic narrow streets again and again and again in his Charlie Chan movies for Monogram, here at least he had a major-studio infrastructure behind him that goosed his usually placid direction to the velocity of a typically fast-paced Warners thriller even though the script by George Bricker, based on an “original” (definitely deserving quotes this time) story by Murray Leinster (actually a highly regarded science-fiction writer and a surprising name to turn up on the credits of a film like this!) and Will Jenkins, was workmanlike but hardly gave Beaudine much to work with. — 11/15/02
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We did have time for at least a short movie — I picked the eighth Torchy Blane movie and the last to star Glenda Farrell, Torchy Runs for Mayor, a wildly imaginative movie in which Torchy Blane is out to expose New York’s all-powerful political boss, Dr. Dolan (John Miljan — his first name is never given but it seems clear he really is an M.D., since in the course of the film he “offs” one of his political opponents with an injection of what the script calls “toxic chloride”), who’s been able to install a stooge in the mayor’s office and is in the process of purging the police commission and thereby threatening the jobs of honest cops Captain MacTavish (Frank Shannon) and Torchy’s fiancé, Steve McBride (Barton MacLane).
Torchy strikes back by a number of tactics that probably seemed quite novel to a 1939 audience and are rather astonishing even today, like bugging the mayor’s office and breaking into Dolan’s house to steal the “little red book” that contains a complete ledger of all his payoffs. When her home paper, the Star, stops running her stories because Dolan is organizing an advertiser boycott of them, she places her latest scoop in a tiny paper called the South End Blotter, edited by Hogarth Ward (Irving Bacon), who proudly boasts he’s already been to jail six times for his political convictions and doesn’t mind risking a seventh time to print the story Torchy wrote from Dolan’s purloined book.
A group of citizens seeking to recall the corrupt mayor seizes on Ward as a replacement candidate, only before they can get him on the ballot he’s beaten by a Dolan henchman and then killed by Dolan himself with the “toxic chloride” injection. As a joke, McBride puts Torchy’s name on the recall petitions — and Torchy takes it seriously enough actually to pursue the office and, of course, win — only, in a rankly sexist ending unworthy of an otherwise quite game script by Earle Snell (based on an “idea” by one Irving Rubine), at the press conference held in conjunction with her swearing-in Torchy is given a baby to hold (since the theme of her campaign had been to make the city safe and clean for future generations), and this sends her maternal instinct into overdrive and she instantly announces her intention to resign, marry McBride and be the nice little housewife and mother he’s always wanted. (A pity, since a sequel showing the new Mrs. Torchy McBride trying to juggle wife- and motherdom with running the city would have been a quite entertaining film.)
What’s most interesting about Torchy Runs for Mayor is that the film seems like a mini-Capra movie, what with its corrupt politicians and their secret bosses, the plucky little newspaper that dares to print the truth and the ordinary citizen who finds him/herself in a position of political power — indeed, so many elements seem to prefigure Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington I couldn’t help but wonder if Warners was deliberately trying to get this one out before Capra’s far more prestigious effort (made for a less powerful company, Columbia, but with double the running time, more than double the budget and major stars — James Stewart, Jean Arthur, Edward Arnold and Claude Rains). Glenda Farrell is absolutely convincing until that cop-out ending — as in the earlier Blanes, she’s a dynamo of energy and quite credible as a liberated woman. The direction is by Ray McCarey, who may not have had the brilliance of his brother Leo but nonetheless turned in a stronger job than the hacks like Frank McDonald and William Beaudine who did most of the Blanes, and overall Torchy Runs for Mayor is an above-average series entry that is genuinely about something and keeps the comic relief (notably Tom Kennedy’s ultra-dumb cop Gahagan — ironically Kennedy was the only actor who made all nine of the Blane films!) within welcome limits. — 7/11/04
••••••••••
I ran Charles the final Torchy Blane movie, Torchy Blane … Playing with Dynamite (the ellipsis is actually part of the title as printed on the opening credit). Though Glenda Farrell wasn’t in it, this was nonetheless one of the better Blanes, powered by a strong crime-drama plot (story by Scott Littleton, script by Earle Snell and Charles Belden) and better-than-average direction (by Noel Smith, who did some of the best Warners “B”’s of the period and probably should have got a shot at “A”-films. Torchy was played by Jane Wyman, and as unlikely as it seems to find a future Academy Award winner in a film like this (just as it seemed unlikely in retrospect that future Academy Award winner Susan Sarandon should have played the ingenue in The Rocky Horror Picture Show!), she’s actually quite good, managing to spit out lines almost as fast as Glenda Farrell did in the role and make her character appealing without the unpleasant edginess that afflicted Lola Lane in her try at the role in Torchy Blane in Panama.
Had they actually cast a young, personable actor as Steve McBride, Torchy’s police detective fiancé, this film might have been a gem — as much as I hate his subsequent career, Wyman’s husband-to-be, the young Ronald Reagan, might have been quite good in the role — but instead Warners went the other way and put Allen Jenkins in the part (“not particularly helpful,” William K. Everson notes, “since he played more for comedy and the gap between him and the still-retained Tom Kennedy [as his doofus sidekick Gahagan] was too narrow”). Still, Torchy Blane … Playing with Dynamite is a good movie, albeit a very derivative one; the plot gimmick has Torchy getting herself sent to jail deliberately so she can contact Jackie McGuire (Sheila Bromley), girlfriend of the notorious bank robber “Denver Eddie” (Eddie Marr), wanted in several states across the country.
Jackie and Torchy stage a prison break (actually arranged in advance by McBride and his contacts in the jail administration) and flee to San Francisco, where Denver Eddie is supposed to meet them; and McBride and Gahagan also go to San Francisco, hoping to win the $50,000 reward by capturing the crook without help from the San Francisco police. From then on the film, despite a mere 59-minute running time, manages to crowd quite a few appealing plot elements into its story, including a bunch of S.F. police officers convinced that McBride and Gahagan are crooks; a wrestling promoter who gets Gahagan to go up against his former Navy wrestling opponent, “The Bone Crusher,” in a match; an associate of Denver Eddie’s who puts Torchy in danger by blowing her cover; and a neat climax in which all parties meet at the wrestling match and Gahagan, thrown out of the ring by his opponent, lands on top of Denver Eddie in the audience and thus gets the credit for his arrest. It was a clever story and a truly appealing film in a generally quite entertaining series. — 7/14/04
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Crips and Bloods: Made in America (PBS, 2009)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The library movie was a preview screening of Crips and Bloods: Made in America, a PBS “Independent Lens” documentary by Stacy Peralta (a white man, by the way) that offered a chilling view of the 40-year civil war on the streets of south-central Los Angeles between the Crips and the Bloods. Peralta’s approach was, rather than create a straightforward documentary, to make a sort of visual equivalent of a D. J.’s mix tape, moving backwards and forwards in time, and also a sort of fashionable liberal bit of sociologizing that locates the origin of the gangs in the de-industrialization of inner-city Los Angeles (the film depicts both the opening of the big defense and auto factories in the early 1940’s and their closure in the late 1950’s and 1960’s) and the successful suppression of the Black nationalist self-help movements of the 1960’s by the federal government (particularly the FBI) and local police departments.
The film depicts L.A.’s legendary police chief William Parker — who may have rooted out the LAPD’s previously endemic corruption but was also such a flaming racist that, as a series of memos recently published in the Los Angeles Times revealed, even J. Edgar Hoover thought he was crazy — and therefore unwittingly (or perhaps not so unwittingly) contributes to the debate as to whether the new LAPD headquarters should retain the “Parker Center” name of the old one. The film — at least in the truncated hour-long form shown last night (apparently there’s a longer version that at least one audience member had previously seen) — leaves out a lot, including barely touching on the importance of the drug trade in general and crack cocaine in particular in financing the gangs. A veteran of the 1950’s predecessors of the Crips and Bloods remarks that their generation of gangsters just fought each other with fists, and it was in the next generation that the gangs began arming themselves until now they have assault-quality weapons and probably are better armed than the police; this is true, but what the film inexplicably didn’t mention is that what’s financed the gangs’ ability to arm themselves is the massive income they get from the drug trade.
The screening was facilitated by Rafik Muhammad, a tall, strikingly attractive African-American who lives part-time in Los Angeles and part-time in San Diego, where he heads the sociology department at USD, and he was confronted by a young Black man in the audience who claimed to be an ex-gangbanger himself and asked if he’d ever used drugs (he refused to answer and both the library staffers in charge of the screening and most of the audience backed him in his refusal — and, let’s face it, that was none of our goddamned business!), and he filled in some of the movie’s hardest-to-understand omissions, including how the gang war on the L.A. streets is not only a civil war within the African-American community but a war between them and Latinos (indeed, the most deadly street gang in L.A. today is probably the MS-13, short for Maru Salvatrucha Trece, a gang that started with refugees from the civil war in El Salvador, though most of their lower echelons these days are filled out by undocumented immigrants from Mexico who’ve joined for protection).
I’m generally quite sympathetic to sociological arguments for crime, but I think it’s a bit too simplistic to think that if the Black Panthers had been able to survive the 1970’s there wouldn’t be Crips and Bloods today — it’s one thing to say that a lot of the potentially positive social-service and entrepreneurial spirit among young African-Americans is being channeled into criminal enterprises because it doesn’t have an outlet in the legitimate economy (Malcolm X made that point in his autobiography 45 years ago!), and quite another thing to absolve the African-Americans themselves for the ridiculous level of intra-group violence that has left 15,000 dead on the streets of L.A. Indeed, through much of this film I was wondering if perhaps the best outcome would be for the Crips and Bloods to get together and form a commission to settle differences between them the way the various Italian-American gangs in the early 20th century formed La Cosa Nostra — while that hasn’t stopped drive-by shootings and other forms of violence between various Mafia families, it has cut down the violence quite a bit and for most of the 20th century left the Mafiosi alone to provide the illegal services that kept them in business and not have to watch their backs for each other all the time.
Perhaps realizing how hopeless and despairing he’d made the rest of his film — Peralta naturally mentioned that due to “tough-on-crime” legislation (though one law he didn’t mention is the ludicrous discrepancy between crack and powder cocaine sentences — in a law actually drafted by African-American Congressmember Charles Rangel in the mistaken belief that he was protecting his community in the early days of the crack epidemic, federal drug laws stipulate minimum sentences for cocaine possession based on the total amount of substance, even though in crack most of the substance is inert, rather than the amount of active drug — which means the Black people’s cocaine is punished far more severely than rich white people’s cocaine) over one-fourth of all African-American males will serve some time in jail or prison — though that’s one of those double-edged statistics since it also means that almost three-fourths of all African-American men won’t serve time, and at least part of the solution lies in facilitating opportunities for them and making sure they and their wives and children don’t become peripheral or collateral victims of gang violence — he dragged in some hopeful characters at the end, a group of middle-aged Black men (many of them former gangbangers) who call themselves “Gang Intervention” specialists and are reaching out to the young to try to keep them from going into gangs and giving them alternatives (though so much of the “alternatives” involve sports and coaching, and one can’t help but think that we’ve been here before).
Peralta is right to be shocked that the death toll on L.A.’s streets is higher than that in the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, and that there are more L.A. Blacks being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder than are residents of Baghdad, and it’s clear that the lock-’em-up-and-throw-away-the-key attitude hasn’t worked (Rafik Muhammad pointed out in his post-film talk that the recidivism rate in California prisons is over 70 percent, which he cited as a reason to institute rehabilitation programs, though once again that’s a double-edged statistic that’s been repeatedly used by “tough-on-crime” politicians and activists as a reason to make sentences even longer), but from the evidence presented in the film it’s not all that clear what will work, if anything — one could use the information in this film to argue that by now the Crips and Bloods are as utterly separate tribes as the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda, and only by isolating them from each other can they be prevented from killing each other in perpetuity.
The library movie was a preview screening of Crips and Bloods: Made in America, a PBS “Independent Lens” documentary by Stacy Peralta (a white man, by the way) that offered a chilling view of the 40-year civil war on the streets of south-central Los Angeles between the Crips and the Bloods. Peralta’s approach was, rather than create a straightforward documentary, to make a sort of visual equivalent of a D. J.’s mix tape, moving backwards and forwards in time, and also a sort of fashionable liberal bit of sociologizing that locates the origin of the gangs in the de-industrialization of inner-city Los Angeles (the film depicts both the opening of the big defense and auto factories in the early 1940’s and their closure in the late 1950’s and 1960’s) and the successful suppression of the Black nationalist self-help movements of the 1960’s by the federal government (particularly the FBI) and local police departments.
The film depicts L.A.’s legendary police chief William Parker — who may have rooted out the LAPD’s previously endemic corruption but was also such a flaming racist that, as a series of memos recently published in the Los Angeles Times revealed, even J. Edgar Hoover thought he was crazy — and therefore unwittingly (or perhaps not so unwittingly) contributes to the debate as to whether the new LAPD headquarters should retain the “Parker Center” name of the old one. The film — at least in the truncated hour-long form shown last night (apparently there’s a longer version that at least one audience member had previously seen) — leaves out a lot, including barely touching on the importance of the drug trade in general and crack cocaine in particular in financing the gangs. A veteran of the 1950’s predecessors of the Crips and Bloods remarks that their generation of gangsters just fought each other with fists, and it was in the next generation that the gangs began arming themselves until now they have assault-quality weapons and probably are better armed than the police; this is true, but what the film inexplicably didn’t mention is that what’s financed the gangs’ ability to arm themselves is the massive income they get from the drug trade.
The screening was facilitated by Rafik Muhammad, a tall, strikingly attractive African-American who lives part-time in Los Angeles and part-time in San Diego, where he heads the sociology department at USD, and he was confronted by a young Black man in the audience who claimed to be an ex-gangbanger himself and asked if he’d ever used drugs (he refused to answer and both the library staffers in charge of the screening and most of the audience backed him in his refusal — and, let’s face it, that was none of our goddamned business!), and he filled in some of the movie’s hardest-to-understand omissions, including how the gang war on the L.A. streets is not only a civil war within the African-American community but a war between them and Latinos (indeed, the most deadly street gang in L.A. today is probably the MS-13, short for Maru Salvatrucha Trece, a gang that started with refugees from the civil war in El Salvador, though most of their lower echelons these days are filled out by undocumented immigrants from Mexico who’ve joined for protection).
I’m generally quite sympathetic to sociological arguments for crime, but I think it’s a bit too simplistic to think that if the Black Panthers had been able to survive the 1970’s there wouldn’t be Crips and Bloods today — it’s one thing to say that a lot of the potentially positive social-service and entrepreneurial spirit among young African-Americans is being channeled into criminal enterprises because it doesn’t have an outlet in the legitimate economy (Malcolm X made that point in his autobiography 45 years ago!), and quite another thing to absolve the African-Americans themselves for the ridiculous level of intra-group violence that has left 15,000 dead on the streets of L.A. Indeed, through much of this film I was wondering if perhaps the best outcome would be for the Crips and Bloods to get together and form a commission to settle differences between them the way the various Italian-American gangs in the early 20th century formed La Cosa Nostra — while that hasn’t stopped drive-by shootings and other forms of violence between various Mafia families, it has cut down the violence quite a bit and for most of the 20th century left the Mafiosi alone to provide the illegal services that kept them in business and not have to watch their backs for each other all the time.
Perhaps realizing how hopeless and despairing he’d made the rest of his film — Peralta naturally mentioned that due to “tough-on-crime” legislation (though one law he didn’t mention is the ludicrous discrepancy between crack and powder cocaine sentences — in a law actually drafted by African-American Congressmember Charles Rangel in the mistaken belief that he was protecting his community in the early days of the crack epidemic, federal drug laws stipulate minimum sentences for cocaine possession based on the total amount of substance, even though in crack most of the substance is inert, rather than the amount of active drug — which means the Black people’s cocaine is punished far more severely than rich white people’s cocaine) over one-fourth of all African-American males will serve some time in jail or prison — though that’s one of those double-edged statistics since it also means that almost three-fourths of all African-American men won’t serve time, and at least part of the solution lies in facilitating opportunities for them and making sure they and their wives and children don’t become peripheral or collateral victims of gang violence — he dragged in some hopeful characters at the end, a group of middle-aged Black men (many of them former gangbangers) who call themselves “Gang Intervention” specialists and are reaching out to the young to try to keep them from going into gangs and giving them alternatives (though so much of the “alternatives” involve sports and coaching, and one can’t help but think that we’ve been here before).
Peralta is right to be shocked that the death toll on L.A.’s streets is higher than that in the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, and that there are more L.A. Blacks being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder than are residents of Baghdad, and it’s clear that the lock-’em-up-and-throw-away-the-key attitude hasn’t worked (Rafik Muhammad pointed out in his post-film talk that the recidivism rate in California prisons is over 70 percent, which he cited as a reason to institute rehabilitation programs, though once again that’s a double-edged statistic that’s been repeatedly used by “tough-on-crime” politicians and activists as a reason to make sentences even longer), but from the evidence presented in the film it’s not all that clear what will work, if anything — one could use the information in this film to argue that by now the Crips and Bloods are as utterly separate tribes as the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda, and only by isolating them from each other can they be prevented from killing each other in perpetuity.
The Kiss Before the Mirror (Universal, 1933)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I finally got to watch a movie I’d been curious about for years and which TCM had shown on their schedule last Sunday: The Kiss Before the Mirror, a 1933 suspense melodrama made by Universal and directed by James Whale from a script by William Anthony McGuire based on a Hungarian play by Ladislaus Fodor. (In an example of the whirlwind pace at which films were made in 1933 — a far cry from the years even popular stories spend in development hell in today’s film industry — the film was released on May 4, 1933, just eight months after the play premiered in Vienna, where it takes place.) The Kiss Before the Mirror is a wild tale which begins with a clandestine meeting between two adulterous lovers, Lucy Bernsdorf (Gloria Stuart) and an unnamed but clearly wealthy man (Walter Pidgeon, who reflecting both his background in operetta before he started making films — he had a singing role in Universal’s first all-talkie, the musical Melody of Love, in 1929 — and a possible influence from Hitchcock’s Blackmail, sings — or at least hums — a song in the sequence). She visits him at his palatial home (this is the sort of movie in which all the homes are palatial; if they weren’t so crowded with breakable bric-a-brac one could readily imagine someone moving a portable basketball net into one of these impossibly large, high-ceilinged rooms and shooting hoops), full of beautiful glass windows and doors, unaware that her husband Walter Bernsdorf (Paul Lukas) has followed her there.
The lover steps out to send his servant home so the two can be alone, and while he’s out Walter fires a revolver through all those beautiful glass panes at his wife, killing her. He then calls the police and turns himself in, and when he’s taken to the police station and put into a holding cell (recycled, out of all the sets on the Universal lot, from the room in which Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein monster was first seen in Whale’s classic Frankenstein film two years earlier) he sends for his close friend, defense attorney Paul Held (Frank Morgan — yes, the Wizard of Oz himself in quite a different role, turning in a strong and utterly un-foofy performance strongly reminiscent of Lionel Barrymore’s Academy Award-winning turn as a super-lawyer in A Free Soul at MGM two years earlier), to represent him. When the two meet Walter tells Held a bizarre story that he hadn’t realized his wife was cheating on him until half an hour before he killed her, when he saw her in front of a large circular mirror, dressing, putting on makeup and primping. He leaned over and gave her a kiss in front of the mirror — and she recoiled and chewed him out for messing up her makeup. So he followed her to her lover’s home and shot her.
Held decides that the only defense he can possibly put on for Walter is what would now be called a diminished-capacity argument that he was rendered temporarily insane by jealousy — and in the meantime Held gets suspicious that his own wife, Maria (Nancy Carroll, top-billed), is having an affair with someone (which she is, with another unnamed Lothario played by Donald Cook). When he finds her in front of her own elaborate collection of mirrors — a three-way mirror above her vanity, two side mirrors on either end and two full-length mirrors on either end of those — dressing and putting on makeup, and he tries to kiss her and she reacts with the same shocked recoil and insistence that he’s ruined her makeup, he goes ballistic. As part of his summation in court — to which he’s insisted she come even though she didn’t want to — he pulls out a revolver (apparently this was well before the days of metal detectors in courtrooms, even though as early as 1937 Fritz Lang’s film You Only Live Once included a sequence in prison showing a metal detector) and brandishes it in the air at the climactic peroration, then threatens that as soon as he wins Walter’s acquittal and thereby establishes the precedent, he will kill his own adulterous wife. Walter tries to talk Held out of killing his wife, saying that even if he escapes legal penalty he’ll feel guilty and miss her all the rest of his life, and when the Helds finally return home he smashes the central panel of her elaborate array of mirrors and kisses her in front of the shards, symbolizing that at least for the present they’ve reconciled.
Like another obscure and long-unseen Whale film, Remember Last Night? — a marvelous screwball comedy which took the basic situation of The Thin Man and ratcheted up both the alcohol consumption and the overall obsessiveness — The Kiss Before the Mirror proved to be a marvelous movie, well worth seeing despite its odd mix of personnel: a director best known for horror films, a writer best known for musicals and a male lead best known for a foofy part in a classic fantasy. Part of its appeal lies in the amazing cynicism of McGuire’s script, full of lines expressing skepticism in the ability of any married couple to remain sexually exclusive for very long, and with a Hitchcock-style wit in some of the supporting characterizations (particularly a large, obnoxious woman who watches the trial and gets in the way of other people in the courtroom audience).
But much of the strength of this film comes from Whale’s direction, full of vertiginous camera movements and recyclings of the sets from his (and others’) Universal horror classics — not only does Paul Lukas’s character get incarcerated in the same holding cell Colin Clive and Edward Van Sloan used (unsuccessfully) to try to contain the Frankenstein monster, but earlier Lukas stalks his faithless ex-wife in what look like some of the soundstage “exteriors” from Whale’s Frankenstein and the entire prison seems to be made up of leavings from the Frankenstein and Dracula sets. The impression one gets is that Whale was so totally in love with the Gothic look of his great horror movies that he tapped that visual iconography even for stories like this one that had nothing to do with horror. When Frank Morgan and Paul Lukas confront each other in that holding cell, Whale shoots their closeups with oblique angles and rich, shadowy lighting (Karl Freund, veteran of both Weimar Germany’s filmmaking and Universal’s early-talkie horrors, was the cinematographer) that makes them look more like the wary confrontation of two almost-human monsters than an attorney grilling his client for information with which to construct a defense.
Another point of this film was one Charles made: that though the sound cinema was only six years old when it was made, it had already developed all the techniques that have been used since; the actors speak naturalistically (though there are times when Whale lets them overact, particularly Lukas in the throes of his confession and Morgan at the end of his courtroom speech), the dialogue is well-paced, there’s an almost continuous background music score (by W. Franke Harling — indeed, the music is actually a bit overdone, especially surprising given how little of it Whale used in The Invisible Man, made six months later) and Whale’s camera is in almost constant motion. Over and over again he uses long tracking shots to discover the action instead of cutting straight into it — a technique usually associated with Orson Welles but which Whale anticipated here, just as he did Hitchcock in his decision to cast a then-major star like Gloria Stuart in a part in which she gets killed in the first reel — and The Kiss Before the Mirror also anticipates Welles in some highly creative uses of sound, particularly the babble of the spectators in the courtroom scenes. (Cecil B. DeMille is generally credited as the first director to insist that his extras carry on their own conversations, unrelated to the main action, in sound films, but Whale uses a similar technique here and, not surprisingly, gets even more out of it than DeMille did.)
In 1938 Whale, now on the downgrade — when Carl Laemmle Sr. and Jr. lost control of Universal in 1936 the new owners were very homophobic and, disapproving of Whale’s more-or-less open homosexuality, ran out their contract with him by giving him three “B” cheapies — was assigned a remake of The Kiss Before the Mirror called Wives Under Suspicion, whose writer, Myles Connolly, made an intriguing change in the plot line — the attorney who finds his own life paralleling the case he’s trying is a prosecutor (played by Warren William) rather than a defense attorney, with an abacus made of 35 model skulls representing the top crooks of New York City (where the setting was moved to),and the experience of living the same situation as the defendant he’s trying to put away for his crime teaches him humility and encourages him to smash the abacus and rehabilitate his marriage by going on vacation with his wife — and though Wives Under Suspicion hardly has the Gothic flair of its predecessor it’s still an appealing movie and one which should also be revived.
Also worthy of note are the two actors in The Kiss Before the Mirror who play Frank Morgan’s courtroom assistants, woman attorney Hilda (Jean Dixon) — who swears she’ll never get married precisely so she doesn’t end up killed by a jealous husband! — and middle-aged alcoholic paralegal Schultz (Charley Grapewin — so this film has two actors who later appeared in The Wizard of Oz!) — and that Morgan’s performance, a few overacted moments aside, is quite credible; like his performance in the RKO thriller Secrets of the French Police the year before, his work in The Kiss Before the Mirror reveals an actor of surprising range who could do quite a lot more than his “Wizard” act.
I finally got to watch a movie I’d been curious about for years and which TCM had shown on their schedule last Sunday: The Kiss Before the Mirror, a 1933 suspense melodrama made by Universal and directed by James Whale from a script by William Anthony McGuire based on a Hungarian play by Ladislaus Fodor. (In an example of the whirlwind pace at which films were made in 1933 — a far cry from the years even popular stories spend in development hell in today’s film industry — the film was released on May 4, 1933, just eight months after the play premiered in Vienna, where it takes place.) The Kiss Before the Mirror is a wild tale which begins with a clandestine meeting between two adulterous lovers, Lucy Bernsdorf (Gloria Stuart) and an unnamed but clearly wealthy man (Walter Pidgeon, who reflecting both his background in operetta before he started making films — he had a singing role in Universal’s first all-talkie, the musical Melody of Love, in 1929 — and a possible influence from Hitchcock’s Blackmail, sings — or at least hums — a song in the sequence). She visits him at his palatial home (this is the sort of movie in which all the homes are palatial; if they weren’t so crowded with breakable bric-a-brac one could readily imagine someone moving a portable basketball net into one of these impossibly large, high-ceilinged rooms and shooting hoops), full of beautiful glass windows and doors, unaware that her husband Walter Bernsdorf (Paul Lukas) has followed her there.
The lover steps out to send his servant home so the two can be alone, and while he’s out Walter fires a revolver through all those beautiful glass panes at his wife, killing her. He then calls the police and turns himself in, and when he’s taken to the police station and put into a holding cell (recycled, out of all the sets on the Universal lot, from the room in which Boris Karloff as the Frankenstein monster was first seen in Whale’s classic Frankenstein film two years earlier) he sends for his close friend, defense attorney Paul Held (Frank Morgan — yes, the Wizard of Oz himself in quite a different role, turning in a strong and utterly un-foofy performance strongly reminiscent of Lionel Barrymore’s Academy Award-winning turn as a super-lawyer in A Free Soul at MGM two years earlier), to represent him. When the two meet Walter tells Held a bizarre story that he hadn’t realized his wife was cheating on him until half an hour before he killed her, when he saw her in front of a large circular mirror, dressing, putting on makeup and primping. He leaned over and gave her a kiss in front of the mirror — and she recoiled and chewed him out for messing up her makeup. So he followed her to her lover’s home and shot her.
Held decides that the only defense he can possibly put on for Walter is what would now be called a diminished-capacity argument that he was rendered temporarily insane by jealousy — and in the meantime Held gets suspicious that his own wife, Maria (Nancy Carroll, top-billed), is having an affair with someone (which she is, with another unnamed Lothario played by Donald Cook). When he finds her in front of her own elaborate collection of mirrors — a three-way mirror above her vanity, two side mirrors on either end and two full-length mirrors on either end of those — dressing and putting on makeup, and he tries to kiss her and she reacts with the same shocked recoil and insistence that he’s ruined her makeup, he goes ballistic. As part of his summation in court — to which he’s insisted she come even though she didn’t want to — he pulls out a revolver (apparently this was well before the days of metal detectors in courtrooms, even though as early as 1937 Fritz Lang’s film You Only Live Once included a sequence in prison showing a metal detector) and brandishes it in the air at the climactic peroration, then threatens that as soon as he wins Walter’s acquittal and thereby establishes the precedent, he will kill his own adulterous wife. Walter tries to talk Held out of killing his wife, saying that even if he escapes legal penalty he’ll feel guilty and miss her all the rest of his life, and when the Helds finally return home he smashes the central panel of her elaborate array of mirrors and kisses her in front of the shards, symbolizing that at least for the present they’ve reconciled.
Like another obscure and long-unseen Whale film, Remember Last Night? — a marvelous screwball comedy which took the basic situation of The Thin Man and ratcheted up both the alcohol consumption and the overall obsessiveness — The Kiss Before the Mirror proved to be a marvelous movie, well worth seeing despite its odd mix of personnel: a director best known for horror films, a writer best known for musicals and a male lead best known for a foofy part in a classic fantasy. Part of its appeal lies in the amazing cynicism of McGuire’s script, full of lines expressing skepticism in the ability of any married couple to remain sexually exclusive for very long, and with a Hitchcock-style wit in some of the supporting characterizations (particularly a large, obnoxious woman who watches the trial and gets in the way of other people in the courtroom audience).
But much of the strength of this film comes from Whale’s direction, full of vertiginous camera movements and recyclings of the sets from his (and others’) Universal horror classics — not only does Paul Lukas’s character get incarcerated in the same holding cell Colin Clive and Edward Van Sloan used (unsuccessfully) to try to contain the Frankenstein monster, but earlier Lukas stalks his faithless ex-wife in what look like some of the soundstage “exteriors” from Whale’s Frankenstein and the entire prison seems to be made up of leavings from the Frankenstein and Dracula sets. The impression one gets is that Whale was so totally in love with the Gothic look of his great horror movies that he tapped that visual iconography even for stories like this one that had nothing to do with horror. When Frank Morgan and Paul Lukas confront each other in that holding cell, Whale shoots their closeups with oblique angles and rich, shadowy lighting (Karl Freund, veteran of both Weimar Germany’s filmmaking and Universal’s early-talkie horrors, was the cinematographer) that makes them look more like the wary confrontation of two almost-human monsters than an attorney grilling his client for information with which to construct a defense.
Another point of this film was one Charles made: that though the sound cinema was only six years old when it was made, it had already developed all the techniques that have been used since; the actors speak naturalistically (though there are times when Whale lets them overact, particularly Lukas in the throes of his confession and Morgan at the end of his courtroom speech), the dialogue is well-paced, there’s an almost continuous background music score (by W. Franke Harling — indeed, the music is actually a bit overdone, especially surprising given how little of it Whale used in The Invisible Man, made six months later) and Whale’s camera is in almost constant motion. Over and over again he uses long tracking shots to discover the action instead of cutting straight into it — a technique usually associated with Orson Welles but which Whale anticipated here, just as he did Hitchcock in his decision to cast a then-major star like Gloria Stuart in a part in which she gets killed in the first reel — and The Kiss Before the Mirror also anticipates Welles in some highly creative uses of sound, particularly the babble of the spectators in the courtroom scenes. (Cecil B. DeMille is generally credited as the first director to insist that his extras carry on their own conversations, unrelated to the main action, in sound films, but Whale uses a similar technique here and, not surprisingly, gets even more out of it than DeMille did.)
In 1938 Whale, now on the downgrade — when Carl Laemmle Sr. and Jr. lost control of Universal in 1936 the new owners were very homophobic and, disapproving of Whale’s more-or-less open homosexuality, ran out their contract with him by giving him three “B” cheapies — was assigned a remake of The Kiss Before the Mirror called Wives Under Suspicion, whose writer, Myles Connolly, made an intriguing change in the plot line — the attorney who finds his own life paralleling the case he’s trying is a prosecutor (played by Warren William) rather than a defense attorney, with an abacus made of 35 model skulls representing the top crooks of New York City (where the setting was moved to),and the experience of living the same situation as the defendant he’s trying to put away for his crime teaches him humility and encourages him to smash the abacus and rehabilitate his marriage by going on vacation with his wife — and though Wives Under Suspicion hardly has the Gothic flair of its predecessor it’s still an appealing movie and one which should also be revived.
Also worthy of note are the two actors in The Kiss Before the Mirror who play Frank Morgan’s courtroom assistants, woman attorney Hilda (Jean Dixon) — who swears she’ll never get married precisely so she doesn’t end up killed by a jealous husband! — and middle-aged alcoholic paralegal Schultz (Charley Grapewin — so this film has two actors who later appeared in The Wizard of Oz!) — and that Morgan’s performance, a few overacted moments aside, is quite credible; like his performance in the RKO thriller Secrets of the French Police the year before, his work in The Kiss Before the Mirror reveals an actor of surprising range who could do quite a lot more than his “Wizard” act.
Friday, April 24, 2009
Black and Blue (CBS, 1999)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched a 1999 made-for-TV movie on one of my Lifetime recordings, though this one was originally shot for CBS and had a semi-respectable provenance from a novel by Anna Quindlen: Black and Blue, a tough if not particularly original melodrama about domestic violence and in particular one woman’s struggle to get away from her abusive husband and take their son with her. The woman is Frances Benedetto (Mary Stuart Masterson), and what gives this an intriguing twist absent from most domestic violence melodramas is that her husband, Bobby Benedetto (Anthony LaPaglia), is a star detective on the New York police force who’s just distinguished himself heroically in a dangerous drug bust and is about to receive a commendation from the police commissioner. He’s also part of an extended New York Italian-American family where it’s simply accepted that the husband is absolute master of his household and that it’s perfectly all right to treat his wife as an overgrown child (he calls her “Franny-Franny-Fran,” thinking that disgusting piece of baby talk is actually an endearment) and knock her around when she steps out of line — for something as simple as leaving dirty dishes in the sink instead of washing them immediately.
What makes it even quirkier is that Frances herself has a career as an emergency-room nurse — of course Bobby makes like he’s doing her an enormous favor by allowing her to work — and after some mild complaints to her sister, Grace Ann Flynn (Sabrina Grdevich — who doesn’t look anywhere near enough like Masterson to be believable as her sister, but that’s a common enough movie failing and it doesn’t really interfere with this film’s effectiveness either as message or as entertainment), and an attempt to tease out from her mother-in-law whether her husband ever beat her, Frances is finally propelled into action when she unsuccessfully tries to revive another woman who’s been beaten by her husband and shows up in the E.R. When that woman dies, a black-haired, black-clad domestic violence advocate shows up to give a press conference expressing zero tolerance for abusing husbands — and Our Heroine gets the message and seeks out this mysterious woman for help.
The mystery woman lays down the law: she has not only to leave her husband, but to do so secretly (he just happens to be getting his commendation the next day and that gives her the opportunity to sneak out), relocate to another state, assume a new identity, live as far off the grid as possible (in particular, to spend only cash and not use credit cards or cell phones) — and she puts Frances in touch with a sort of Underground Railroad for spousal-abuse victims that, in a nice bit of irony Anna Quindlen may have intended, moves in the opposite geographical direction from the original Underground Railroad and dumps Our Heroine and her son Robert (Will Rothhaar) in Florida. She struggles to adjust to her new life, while Robert misses his dad and has only the dimmest idea of why she dragged him down to the other end of the East Coast and has them living there in a roach-infested beach motel and calling themselves Beth and Robert Crenshaw.
Eventually Beth née Frances finds a job as a visiting nurse for terminally ill patients and falls in love with Robert’s fifth-grade counselor (do they have counselors in fifth grade?), Mike Riordan (Sam Robards, who may bear the name of a famous acting family but is also the sort of lanky, sandy-haired, decent-looking but not drop-dead gorgeous leading man Lifetime likes for these sorts of roles). Meanwhile, working with a former police partner who’s now a private detective and breaking the law by wiretapping Frances’s sister (and breaking it even further by sending a knife-wielding thug to sister’s house to try to get Frances’s whereabouts out of her), Bobby Benedetto is looking for his wife and son — and he discovers their whereabouts when sonny boy actually calls him.
The film builds to a final confrontation in which Bobby confronts Frances and slaps her around, then says she’s no longer worthy to be his wife and all he wants is their son, whom he kidnaps from his school soccer practice and takes home. Then there’s a title, “Five years later … ,” and five years later Beth née Frances is living in a nice suburban home, she’s married to Mike and they have a daughter (played by a child actress who looks considerably older than five), but she’s still lonely for her son — and just when we think the filmmakers, director Paul Shapiro and writer April Smith, are going to dare leave a loose end untied in the manner of real life rather than movies, we cut to a scene on the New York streets in which Frances’s sister Grace runs into a young man who’s supposed to be Robert, now grown up to young adulthood (and, like his half-sister in Florida, also cast with someone considerably more than five years older than the kid who played Robert in the preceding scenes), and there’s a burst of treacly piano-and-strings music in the best (or worst) Lifetime manner as the family is brought together at long last (though at this point the abusive husband is heaven-knows-where and we can’t help but feel for Robert’s plight and at the same time wonder if he’s going to grow up to be an abusive husband himself).
Black and Blue is a good movie for what it is but it could have been even better — the film brings up more themes than it can comfortably resolve in 96 minutes — though even when it seems most obviously patched together from clichés at least the limits of a TV time slot force Shapiro and Smith to give it the sort of narrative economy a lot of 1930’s and 1940’s films got from the fact that the audience knew the clichés already and therefore didn’t have to have them explained to them. The film also benefits from strong acting, especially in the leads; Masterson is believable both as the cowed victim in the early scenes and the woman who rises to a precariously held but still valid level of strength later on; and LaPaglia is equally good, resisting the temptation to portray the character as a florid villain and instead making him chillingly believable, not an evil man but a basically good one (he is a police officer, after all, and on the job he’s both capable and honest) with a serious blind spot when it comes to accepting women as equal and treating his family as anything but his chattels. The fact that an otherwise reasonable individual could have been raised by his culture and his own ancestors to believe that his wife and child are his property, and that he could terrorize his wife and not only see nothing wrong with that but see himself as the aggrieved party, makes Bobby Benedetto the character (and LaPaglia’s reading of him) far more chilling than he’d be portrayed as an out-and-out psycho.
I watched a 1999 made-for-TV movie on one of my Lifetime recordings, though this one was originally shot for CBS and had a semi-respectable provenance from a novel by Anna Quindlen: Black and Blue, a tough if not particularly original melodrama about domestic violence and in particular one woman’s struggle to get away from her abusive husband and take their son with her. The woman is Frances Benedetto (Mary Stuart Masterson), and what gives this an intriguing twist absent from most domestic violence melodramas is that her husband, Bobby Benedetto (Anthony LaPaglia), is a star detective on the New York police force who’s just distinguished himself heroically in a dangerous drug bust and is about to receive a commendation from the police commissioner. He’s also part of an extended New York Italian-American family where it’s simply accepted that the husband is absolute master of his household and that it’s perfectly all right to treat his wife as an overgrown child (he calls her “Franny-Franny-Fran,” thinking that disgusting piece of baby talk is actually an endearment) and knock her around when she steps out of line — for something as simple as leaving dirty dishes in the sink instead of washing them immediately.
What makes it even quirkier is that Frances herself has a career as an emergency-room nurse — of course Bobby makes like he’s doing her an enormous favor by allowing her to work — and after some mild complaints to her sister, Grace Ann Flynn (Sabrina Grdevich — who doesn’t look anywhere near enough like Masterson to be believable as her sister, but that’s a common enough movie failing and it doesn’t really interfere with this film’s effectiveness either as message or as entertainment), and an attempt to tease out from her mother-in-law whether her husband ever beat her, Frances is finally propelled into action when she unsuccessfully tries to revive another woman who’s been beaten by her husband and shows up in the E.R. When that woman dies, a black-haired, black-clad domestic violence advocate shows up to give a press conference expressing zero tolerance for abusing husbands — and Our Heroine gets the message and seeks out this mysterious woman for help.
The mystery woman lays down the law: she has not only to leave her husband, but to do so secretly (he just happens to be getting his commendation the next day and that gives her the opportunity to sneak out), relocate to another state, assume a new identity, live as far off the grid as possible (in particular, to spend only cash and not use credit cards or cell phones) — and she puts Frances in touch with a sort of Underground Railroad for spousal-abuse victims that, in a nice bit of irony Anna Quindlen may have intended, moves in the opposite geographical direction from the original Underground Railroad and dumps Our Heroine and her son Robert (Will Rothhaar) in Florida. She struggles to adjust to her new life, while Robert misses his dad and has only the dimmest idea of why she dragged him down to the other end of the East Coast and has them living there in a roach-infested beach motel and calling themselves Beth and Robert Crenshaw.
Eventually Beth née Frances finds a job as a visiting nurse for terminally ill patients and falls in love with Robert’s fifth-grade counselor (do they have counselors in fifth grade?), Mike Riordan (Sam Robards, who may bear the name of a famous acting family but is also the sort of lanky, sandy-haired, decent-looking but not drop-dead gorgeous leading man Lifetime likes for these sorts of roles). Meanwhile, working with a former police partner who’s now a private detective and breaking the law by wiretapping Frances’s sister (and breaking it even further by sending a knife-wielding thug to sister’s house to try to get Frances’s whereabouts out of her), Bobby Benedetto is looking for his wife and son — and he discovers their whereabouts when sonny boy actually calls him.
The film builds to a final confrontation in which Bobby confronts Frances and slaps her around, then says she’s no longer worthy to be his wife and all he wants is their son, whom he kidnaps from his school soccer practice and takes home. Then there’s a title, “Five years later … ,” and five years later Beth née Frances is living in a nice suburban home, she’s married to Mike and they have a daughter (played by a child actress who looks considerably older than five), but she’s still lonely for her son — and just when we think the filmmakers, director Paul Shapiro and writer April Smith, are going to dare leave a loose end untied in the manner of real life rather than movies, we cut to a scene on the New York streets in which Frances’s sister Grace runs into a young man who’s supposed to be Robert, now grown up to young adulthood (and, like his half-sister in Florida, also cast with someone considerably more than five years older than the kid who played Robert in the preceding scenes), and there’s a burst of treacly piano-and-strings music in the best (or worst) Lifetime manner as the family is brought together at long last (though at this point the abusive husband is heaven-knows-where and we can’t help but feel for Robert’s plight and at the same time wonder if he’s going to grow up to be an abusive husband himself).
Black and Blue is a good movie for what it is but it could have been even better — the film brings up more themes than it can comfortably resolve in 96 minutes — though even when it seems most obviously patched together from clichés at least the limits of a TV time slot force Shapiro and Smith to give it the sort of narrative economy a lot of 1930’s and 1940’s films got from the fact that the audience knew the clichés already and therefore didn’t have to have them explained to them. The film also benefits from strong acting, especially in the leads; Masterson is believable both as the cowed victim in the early scenes and the woman who rises to a precariously held but still valid level of strength later on; and LaPaglia is equally good, resisting the temptation to portray the character as a florid villain and instead making him chillingly believable, not an evil man but a basically good one (he is a police officer, after all, and on the job he’s both capable and honest) with a serious blind spot when it comes to accepting women as equal and treating his family as anything but his chattels. The fact that an otherwise reasonable individual could have been raised by his culture and his own ancestors to believe that his wife and child are his property, and that he could terrorize his wife and not only see nothing wrong with that but see himself as the aggrieved party, makes Bobby Benedetto the character (and LaPaglia’s reading of him) far more chilling than he’d be portrayed as an out-and-out psycho.
Catalina Caper (Crown International, 1967)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran Charles another Mystery Science Theatre 3000 episode, this time based on a 1967 film called Catalina Caper which they originally ran between the Jungle Goddess and Rocket Attack U.S.A. episodes. There are a few things that can be said in favor of Catalina Caper: it began with a Warner Bros. logo (though this seems to have been a reissue label; Clive Hirschhorn’s The Warner Bros. Story doesn’t list it and imdb.com credits the original production to our old friends, Crown International), it featured Catalina Island as itself for a change instead of masquerading as the South Pacific or some other bit of beachfront geography, it had a lot of nice-looking young actors of both traditional genders (and the guys in it were showing some quite nice baskets — especially the impossibly blond Brian Cutler as the irresistible girl-magnet Charlie Moss), and it also featured some genuinely imposing musical talents.
The credits announced the presence of Little Richard, Carol Connors and the Cascades as musical guests, and though I’d never heard of Carol Connors before she turned out to be a quite capable singer, belting out a mediocre song (something called “Book of Love” — not the hit of that title by the Monotones but a piece by herself with frequent Brian Wilson collaborator Roger Christian) with worthy abandon and making me wonder where her career might have gone if she’d gotten material worthy of her (as Dusty Springfield finally did around the same time when, after years of singing some pretty sorry songs, she got to record the Burt Bacharach-Hal David classic “Anyone Who Had a Heart”). I knew the Cascades through their only hit, “Rhythm of the Rain,” and the song they sang here wasn’t in league with that classic but was an interesting one on the cusp of psychedelica called “It’s a New World” — written by, of all people, Ray Davies (though I’m sure that if Davies recorded it with the Kinks, that version would be considerably better than this one).
Little Richard, who never recovered the sheer energy and vitality of his classic 1950’s recordings on Specialty (though he came close a couple of times, notably that quite good mid-1960’s album that was reissued as Little Richard and Jimi Hendrix even though Hendrix wasn’t on it, and the 1986 album Lifetime Friend that took advantage of his appearance in the film Down and Out in Beverly Hills), was shown early on singing a nice bit of pseudo-soul called “Scuba Party” he co-wrote with the film’s musical director, Jerry Long — it hardly has the energy of “Tutti Frutti” or “Good Golly, Miss Molly” but it’s still easily the best thing in this film. (The MST3K crew agreed; they mostly shut up during Richard’s number — their biggest comment on it was to say, “Prince, eat your heart out” — and when it finished they said, “There goes Little Richard, the only real talent in this movie,” which was all too true.) There’s also another soul heavyweight represented here: Mary Wells, who sings a rather lame title song called “Never Steal Anything Wet” (also a working title for the film) over a cartoon title sequence by Murakami-Wolf Animation, but she’s almost unrecognizable and it underscores once again what a horrible mistake she made leaving Motown Records right after recording her masterpiece, “My Guy.”
Otherwise, Catalina Caper is mostly a dull teen beach movie with an even duller crime film grafted onto it. It begins with the theft of something that looks like a piece of gilded wallpaper being stripped from a museum frame — the museum’s security arrangements seem to have been done by the same incompetents responsible for protecting the Soviet missile base in Rocket Attack, U.S.A. — and the theft is masterminded by Arthur and Annie Duvall (Del Moore and Sue Casey), who plan to copy the scroll, sell the copy to fabulously wealthy Greek shipping tycoon Lakopolous (Lee Deane), then return the original to the museum wall and hope nobody has noticed it missing in the meantime — even though the local Catalina newspaper has announced its theft with banner headlines. This is one of those movies in which the two plot strands don’t intertwine and certainly don’t help each other along; they just sit on each other, mindlessly alternating until by the end of the film we’re wondering which one we’re less interested in.
The “star” is Tommy Kirk, who plays the nerdy guy who gets the girl away from the babe-magnet — he might have been glad to get away from the Disney plantation but at least Disney gave him legitimately amusing (not laugh-out-loud funny, but at least amusing) roles in mild kiddie comedies, which is more than the makers of this film, producers Bond Blackman and Jack Bartlett, director Lee Sholem (who got his start as Ernst Lubitsch’s assistant on That Uncertain Feeling and evidently learned absolutely nothing from the experience — it’s like finding that a composer of especially treacly 19th century salon pieces had once apprenticed under Beethoven!) and writers Sam Pierce (story) and Clyde Ware (screenplay), could manage to give him. To the extent that any of the young people in this movie show any signs of acting skill, the one that does is Dan Duryea’s son Peter, playing the honest son of the con artists trying to stage the art caper — genes will out, I guess — and the film just kind of lumbers along and turns into a chase scene underwater with two of Lakopoulos’s minions (since this is a diving movie, sort of, the good guys in the white swim trunks get chased by the bad guys in the black wet suits) chasing the teens for the red tube that’s supposed to contain the stolen scroll, which previously had been heaved into Catalina Bay (wouldn’t it have got wet and ruined the scroll? We’re told it was waterproof but it sure doesn’t look it!).
Eventually Peter Duryea’s con-artist parents get arrested, Lakopoulos gives up in disgust and goes away, the teens continue their long-term party, the scroll “mysteriously” reappears on the museum wall and the comic-relief character, Fingers O’Toole (Robert Donner, doing inept versions of the kinds of pratfalls the far older and infinitely more talented Buster Keaton did in his guest appearances in some of American International’s beach non-epics in the mid-1960’s) turns out to be an insurance investigator (yeah, right). The biggest mystery surrounding Catalina Caper is why it exists at all; there doesn’t seem to have been any crying market out there for a beach-movie-with-con-artists — for all the badness of Rocket Attack, U.S.A., at least it was made by people who clearly cared about its message, whereas Catalina Caper could be written off as a rank attempt at commercialism except that it’s impossible to discern who the filmmakers thought were going to buy tickets to it!
I ran Charles another Mystery Science Theatre 3000 episode, this time based on a 1967 film called Catalina Caper which they originally ran between the Jungle Goddess and Rocket Attack U.S.A. episodes. There are a few things that can be said in favor of Catalina Caper: it began with a Warner Bros. logo (though this seems to have been a reissue label; Clive Hirschhorn’s The Warner Bros. Story doesn’t list it and imdb.com credits the original production to our old friends, Crown International), it featured Catalina Island as itself for a change instead of masquerading as the South Pacific or some other bit of beachfront geography, it had a lot of nice-looking young actors of both traditional genders (and the guys in it were showing some quite nice baskets — especially the impossibly blond Brian Cutler as the irresistible girl-magnet Charlie Moss), and it also featured some genuinely imposing musical talents.
The credits announced the presence of Little Richard, Carol Connors and the Cascades as musical guests, and though I’d never heard of Carol Connors before she turned out to be a quite capable singer, belting out a mediocre song (something called “Book of Love” — not the hit of that title by the Monotones but a piece by herself with frequent Brian Wilson collaborator Roger Christian) with worthy abandon and making me wonder where her career might have gone if she’d gotten material worthy of her (as Dusty Springfield finally did around the same time when, after years of singing some pretty sorry songs, she got to record the Burt Bacharach-Hal David classic “Anyone Who Had a Heart”). I knew the Cascades through their only hit, “Rhythm of the Rain,” and the song they sang here wasn’t in league with that classic but was an interesting one on the cusp of psychedelica called “It’s a New World” — written by, of all people, Ray Davies (though I’m sure that if Davies recorded it with the Kinks, that version would be considerably better than this one).
Little Richard, who never recovered the sheer energy and vitality of his classic 1950’s recordings on Specialty (though he came close a couple of times, notably that quite good mid-1960’s album that was reissued as Little Richard and Jimi Hendrix even though Hendrix wasn’t on it, and the 1986 album Lifetime Friend that took advantage of his appearance in the film Down and Out in Beverly Hills), was shown early on singing a nice bit of pseudo-soul called “Scuba Party” he co-wrote with the film’s musical director, Jerry Long — it hardly has the energy of “Tutti Frutti” or “Good Golly, Miss Molly” but it’s still easily the best thing in this film. (The MST3K crew agreed; they mostly shut up during Richard’s number — their biggest comment on it was to say, “Prince, eat your heart out” — and when it finished they said, “There goes Little Richard, the only real talent in this movie,” which was all too true.) There’s also another soul heavyweight represented here: Mary Wells, who sings a rather lame title song called “Never Steal Anything Wet” (also a working title for the film) over a cartoon title sequence by Murakami-Wolf Animation, but she’s almost unrecognizable and it underscores once again what a horrible mistake she made leaving Motown Records right after recording her masterpiece, “My Guy.”
Otherwise, Catalina Caper is mostly a dull teen beach movie with an even duller crime film grafted onto it. It begins with the theft of something that looks like a piece of gilded wallpaper being stripped from a museum frame — the museum’s security arrangements seem to have been done by the same incompetents responsible for protecting the Soviet missile base in Rocket Attack, U.S.A. — and the theft is masterminded by Arthur and Annie Duvall (Del Moore and Sue Casey), who plan to copy the scroll, sell the copy to fabulously wealthy Greek shipping tycoon Lakopolous (Lee Deane), then return the original to the museum wall and hope nobody has noticed it missing in the meantime — even though the local Catalina newspaper has announced its theft with banner headlines. This is one of those movies in which the two plot strands don’t intertwine and certainly don’t help each other along; they just sit on each other, mindlessly alternating until by the end of the film we’re wondering which one we’re less interested in.
The “star” is Tommy Kirk, who plays the nerdy guy who gets the girl away from the babe-magnet — he might have been glad to get away from the Disney plantation but at least Disney gave him legitimately amusing (not laugh-out-loud funny, but at least amusing) roles in mild kiddie comedies, which is more than the makers of this film, producers Bond Blackman and Jack Bartlett, director Lee Sholem (who got his start as Ernst Lubitsch’s assistant on That Uncertain Feeling and evidently learned absolutely nothing from the experience — it’s like finding that a composer of especially treacly 19th century salon pieces had once apprenticed under Beethoven!) and writers Sam Pierce (story) and Clyde Ware (screenplay), could manage to give him. To the extent that any of the young people in this movie show any signs of acting skill, the one that does is Dan Duryea’s son Peter, playing the honest son of the con artists trying to stage the art caper — genes will out, I guess — and the film just kind of lumbers along and turns into a chase scene underwater with two of Lakopoulos’s minions (since this is a diving movie, sort of, the good guys in the white swim trunks get chased by the bad guys in the black wet suits) chasing the teens for the red tube that’s supposed to contain the stolen scroll, which previously had been heaved into Catalina Bay (wouldn’t it have got wet and ruined the scroll? We’re told it was waterproof but it sure doesn’t look it!).
Eventually Peter Duryea’s con-artist parents get arrested, Lakopoulos gives up in disgust and goes away, the teens continue their long-term party, the scroll “mysteriously” reappears on the museum wall and the comic-relief character, Fingers O’Toole (Robert Donner, doing inept versions of the kinds of pratfalls the far older and infinitely more talented Buster Keaton did in his guest appearances in some of American International’s beach non-epics in the mid-1960’s) turns out to be an insurance investigator (yeah, right). The biggest mystery surrounding Catalina Caper is why it exists at all; there doesn’t seem to have been any crying market out there for a beach-movie-with-con-artists — for all the badness of Rocket Attack, U.S.A., at least it was made by people who clearly cared about its message, whereas Catalina Caper could be written off as a rank attempt at commercialism except that it’s impossible to discern who the filmmakers thought were going to buy tickets to it!
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Australia (20th Century-Fox, 2008)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
By far the best thing that happened to me yesterday was the movie Charles and I ended up watching: Australia, the 2008 epic directed and co-written by Baz Luhrmann about his native country in general and in particular how World War II affected the northwest of Australia, both positively (in terms of the dramatic uptick in the market for Aussie beef caused by the British military’s need for provisions) and negatively (the direct military threat caused by Japan, which actually dive-bombed the city of Darwin in northwestern Australia about two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor). Despite being the long-awaited follow-up to Luhrmann’s 2001 film Moulin Rouge! and being a major-budget epic with big stars — including Moulin Rouge! star Nicole Kidman as Lady Sarah Ashley, titled Englishwoman who comes out to Australia upon the murder of her husband, who ran a cattle ranch down there and attracted the enmity of the local cattle baron, King Carney (Bryan Brown); and Hugh Jackman as a character identified only as “The Drover” (i.e., cattle driver), whom Lady Sarah hires to lead her cattle to market and thus attempt to get the money to save the ranch from Carney’s attempts to put her out of business — Australia was a box-office flop, sinking from sight after about a couple of weeks in theatres, winning only one Academy Award nomination and giving rise to the usual doom-saying articles in the Los Angeles Times and elsewhere that the era of the adult-oriented epic movie is over and for the rest of our moviegoing days all the major studios are going to churn out are comic-book films and gross-out comedies.
I don’t know what the long-term effect of the commercial failure of Australia is going to be on the movie business, but if there’s any justice in the film world this movie — like The Wizard of Oz, which features prominently in its plot and was also a major financial failure on its initial release — will gain the reputation it deserves. If I stop short of calling Australia a masterpiece, it’s only because too much of it seems made up of other movies instead of actual life — it’s one of those films in which one feels that the references to other films are being hurled in your face by writers (Luhrmann, Stuart Beattie, Ronald Harwood and Richard Flanagan) anxious to show how clever they are and how many films they’ve seen. Basically it’s a two-part film that grafts a remake of Red River onto a remake of Gone With the Wind, with plenty of other references along the way — including the preposterously inappropriate outfit in which Kidman arrives in Australia and is taken to her late husband’s ranch in the outback, which is straight out of Katharine Hepburn’s wardrobe in The African Queen. For the first half-hour or so the film seems uncertain whether to go for serious drama or camp — the bar fight Jackman’s “Drover” gets involved in is like one of those blarney-filled “comedy” scenes we suffer through in John Ford’s movies to get to the good parts — but once Luhrmann and his co-writers settle down the movie triumphantly achieves the grandeur he was obviously going for.
It’s a trip we feel like we’ve been on before but we’re still being led confidently and serenely by a master director at the peak of his powers (and remember, this praise is coming from someone who thought Moulin Rouge! an overrated movie that choked on its own gimmickry) — he even managed to scout a canyon location of such natural grandiloquence I couldn’t help but joke, “Monument Valley, Australia.” There’s also a crucial subplot that gives what’s otherwise an 1890’s U.S. Western story 1940’s Australian cred: the Australian government’s controversial policy towards the Aborigines and in particular the mixed-race children of Aboriginal mothers and white fathers. (It probably happened the other way, too, but even a movie as expansive and daring as this one wasn’t going to open that particular set of raw wounds.) The government’s policy was to rip such children away from their mothers and send them to church-run schools — as one person puts it in the film — “to breed the blackness out of them” — much the way Native American children in the early 20th century were taken away from their tribes and boarded in prison-like schools, taught to worship Jesus, speak English and forget their tribal traditions. The Australian government didn’t stop this practice until the 1970’s and didn’t formally apologize to the Aboriginal communities until 2000.
In the film, the deceased rancher Maitland Ashley’s overseer, Neil Fletcher (David Wenham) — who in the second act becomes the principal villain of the film after it turns out he’s not only engaged to King Carney’s daughter but is secretly in league with Carney to sabotage the Ashley ranch, Faraway Downs, and send Ashley’s best (but unbranded) cattle into Carney’s herds — has fathered two such children, one of whom, Nullah (Brandon Walters), becomes a sort of spirit guide to the (good) white characters. Along with his Aboriginal grandfather “King George” (David Gulpilil), who’s suspected of the murder of Maitland Ashley but was really framed for it by the true killer, Fletcher (who will later kill Carney as well to take over the cattle empire — and if this film had achieved the success it deserved Wenham, who makes the transition from unscrupulous businessman to raging psychopath far more credibly than most actors manage roles like this, would be well on his way to international stardom by now), Nullah is able to direct the cattle drive by supernatural means — a sort of so-called “magical realism” that in other movies all too often comes off as a lazy cop-out by writers who’ve written themselves into corners they can’t write themselves out of again by strictly materialist plot devices, but here turns into a genuinely moving story thread in its own right as well as a powerful metaphor for the white vs. indigenous culture clash that the film counterpoints with its other, more familiar (to moviegoers, anyway) clash between the upper-class white aristocracy and the down-to-earth proletarianism represented by the Drover (who, significantly, is never referred to by any other name, giving his character the sort of no-name quality Clint Eastwood had in his spaghetti Westerns).
Given how beautifully the cattle drive is staged and how well Luhrmann follows in the footsteps of the directors he’s clearly emulating, John Ford and (especially) Howard Hawks (indeed, given the relationship between the Kidman and Jackman characters I’m almost tempted to call the first half of Australia “Red River — the straight version”), it’s somewhat jarring that the good guys get the cattle on board the British transport ship and win their race against the cattle baron just halfway through this 165-minute movie. Then the war clouds darken and Australia turns into Gone With the Wind in its second half — along with The Wizard of Oz, which is actually referenced directly (it’s shown screening at an outdoor theatre after the song “Over the Rainbow” has already been introduced in Nicole Kidman’s deliberately inept rendition — Nullah takes to the song and in particular to its message about “the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true”) — including one direct visual quote of Kidman and Jackman embracing while silhouetted against a bright orange sunset.
Jackman proves as convincing in his evocation of Clark Gable as he was earlier in his evocation of John Wayne, and though the war as presented is historically inaccurate (the Japanese did indeed dive-bomb Darwin, but two months later than the film shows them doing, and they did not actually land troops on Australian soil), the second half works not as a pendant to the more viscerally exciting first half but as a superior piece of filmmaking in its own right and a genuinely moving piece of drama, particularly when the Mission Island on which the Australian government has relegated all those half-Aboriginal kids is the first place the Japanese planes target and it’s touch-and-go whether Lady Ashley and Nullah will ever get together again. Though the film evokes so many old movies one really isn’t in that much doubt as to how it’s going to turn out — the good guys are going to get what’s coming to them and the bad guys are going to get what they deserve — on its own level Australia is a magnificent piece of filmmaking, achieving the grandeur Luhrmann was clearly aiming for.
Australia had a difficult production history, coming in at 50 percent over the original budget, and Luhrmann had particular problems casting the male lead; though Hugh Jackman is absolutely wonderful in the role he was only the third choice. The first choice was Russell Crowe, but his asking price was too high and 20th Century-Fox asked him to reduce it to bring the film’s whole budget down. Crowe refused, so Luhrmann then sought out Heath Ledger (obviously Luhrmann, given his druthers, would have wanted a genuinely Australian actor for this role!) — but Ledger turned it down to make The Dark Knight instead, and I can’t help but think that that was a major mistake. What Ledger needed back then was a role that would have got him away from the American celebrity race — back to his roots, as it were — the part in Australia would have suited him far better as an actor (I know it’s a minority opinion, but I still think Ledger was abysmally miscast in The Dark Knight and he won his Academy Award less for his actual performance in that film than for his unrealized potential and for having been passed over for Brokeback Mountain), and I can’t help thinking that if he’d chosen differently and spent those months making the film he should have been making instead of working himself into a tizzy over being unable to find any depth to the Joker and drugging himself into oblivion, he’d still be alive.
Also worth mentioning is the fascinating character of Kipling Flynn (Jack Thompson), a rumpot who works as Faraway Downs’ financial manager and goes off on the cattle drive, where before he’s killed he teaches Nullah to play the harmonica — and though his instrument ties this film into Frank Capra’s oeuvre as well (the harmonica appears in Capra’s films as a sign of cultural innocence and purity) the performance is reminiscent of Edward G. Robinson’s marvelous “Cocky” Wainwright in the virtually forgotten film A Boy Ten Feet Tall (also a trek movie, though in Africa instead of Australia) and also some of the later acting jobs of John Huston and Orson Welles. One aspect of the film that rubbed me the wrong way was the racist Asian stereotype character of “Sing-Song” (Yuen Wah, who’s usually a stunt person in martial-arts movies), the Ashley family’s cook; it seemed a bit strange that a film with so strong an anti-racist message about Australia’s treatment of the Aborigines would lapse into such a demeaning portrayal of a person of color.
But that’s only a minor blemish on an otherwise great movie that I liked better than Moulin Rouge!, better than Pearl Harbor (though much of the bombing footage was stock from Tora! Tora! Tora! — one imdb.com contributor even spotted an American battleship anachronistically parked in the background of Darwin harbor — the terror of being under an air raid came through much more strongly in this film than in Pearl Harbor), and —as much as I enjoyed Slumdog Millionaire — I thought Australia was better than that, too. Thank goodness the DVD revolution (and the VHS and cable revolutions before it) have lengthened the commercial lives of movies enough that audiences that missed important movies the first time around have the opportunity to discover them later; Australia is a film that thoroughly deserves the kind of ultimate success The Wizard of Oz and Citizen Kane got after they flopped on their initial runs.
By far the best thing that happened to me yesterday was the movie Charles and I ended up watching: Australia, the 2008 epic directed and co-written by Baz Luhrmann about his native country in general and in particular how World War II affected the northwest of Australia, both positively (in terms of the dramatic uptick in the market for Aussie beef caused by the British military’s need for provisions) and negatively (the direct military threat caused by Japan, which actually dive-bombed the city of Darwin in northwestern Australia about two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor). Despite being the long-awaited follow-up to Luhrmann’s 2001 film Moulin Rouge! and being a major-budget epic with big stars — including Moulin Rouge! star Nicole Kidman as Lady Sarah Ashley, titled Englishwoman who comes out to Australia upon the murder of her husband, who ran a cattle ranch down there and attracted the enmity of the local cattle baron, King Carney (Bryan Brown); and Hugh Jackman as a character identified only as “The Drover” (i.e., cattle driver), whom Lady Sarah hires to lead her cattle to market and thus attempt to get the money to save the ranch from Carney’s attempts to put her out of business — Australia was a box-office flop, sinking from sight after about a couple of weeks in theatres, winning only one Academy Award nomination and giving rise to the usual doom-saying articles in the Los Angeles Times and elsewhere that the era of the adult-oriented epic movie is over and for the rest of our moviegoing days all the major studios are going to churn out are comic-book films and gross-out comedies.
I don’t know what the long-term effect of the commercial failure of Australia is going to be on the movie business, but if there’s any justice in the film world this movie — like The Wizard of Oz, which features prominently in its plot and was also a major financial failure on its initial release — will gain the reputation it deserves. If I stop short of calling Australia a masterpiece, it’s only because too much of it seems made up of other movies instead of actual life — it’s one of those films in which one feels that the references to other films are being hurled in your face by writers (Luhrmann, Stuart Beattie, Ronald Harwood and Richard Flanagan) anxious to show how clever they are and how many films they’ve seen. Basically it’s a two-part film that grafts a remake of Red River onto a remake of Gone With the Wind, with plenty of other references along the way — including the preposterously inappropriate outfit in which Kidman arrives in Australia and is taken to her late husband’s ranch in the outback, which is straight out of Katharine Hepburn’s wardrobe in The African Queen. For the first half-hour or so the film seems uncertain whether to go for serious drama or camp — the bar fight Jackman’s “Drover” gets involved in is like one of those blarney-filled “comedy” scenes we suffer through in John Ford’s movies to get to the good parts — but once Luhrmann and his co-writers settle down the movie triumphantly achieves the grandeur he was obviously going for.
It’s a trip we feel like we’ve been on before but we’re still being led confidently and serenely by a master director at the peak of his powers (and remember, this praise is coming from someone who thought Moulin Rouge! an overrated movie that choked on its own gimmickry) — he even managed to scout a canyon location of such natural grandiloquence I couldn’t help but joke, “Monument Valley, Australia.” There’s also a crucial subplot that gives what’s otherwise an 1890’s U.S. Western story 1940’s Australian cred: the Australian government’s controversial policy towards the Aborigines and in particular the mixed-race children of Aboriginal mothers and white fathers. (It probably happened the other way, too, but even a movie as expansive and daring as this one wasn’t going to open that particular set of raw wounds.) The government’s policy was to rip such children away from their mothers and send them to church-run schools — as one person puts it in the film — “to breed the blackness out of them” — much the way Native American children in the early 20th century were taken away from their tribes and boarded in prison-like schools, taught to worship Jesus, speak English and forget their tribal traditions. The Australian government didn’t stop this practice until the 1970’s and didn’t formally apologize to the Aboriginal communities until 2000.
In the film, the deceased rancher Maitland Ashley’s overseer, Neil Fletcher (David Wenham) — who in the second act becomes the principal villain of the film after it turns out he’s not only engaged to King Carney’s daughter but is secretly in league with Carney to sabotage the Ashley ranch, Faraway Downs, and send Ashley’s best (but unbranded) cattle into Carney’s herds — has fathered two such children, one of whom, Nullah (Brandon Walters), becomes a sort of spirit guide to the (good) white characters. Along with his Aboriginal grandfather “King George” (David Gulpilil), who’s suspected of the murder of Maitland Ashley but was really framed for it by the true killer, Fletcher (who will later kill Carney as well to take over the cattle empire — and if this film had achieved the success it deserved Wenham, who makes the transition from unscrupulous businessman to raging psychopath far more credibly than most actors manage roles like this, would be well on his way to international stardom by now), Nullah is able to direct the cattle drive by supernatural means — a sort of so-called “magical realism” that in other movies all too often comes off as a lazy cop-out by writers who’ve written themselves into corners they can’t write themselves out of again by strictly materialist plot devices, but here turns into a genuinely moving story thread in its own right as well as a powerful metaphor for the white vs. indigenous culture clash that the film counterpoints with its other, more familiar (to moviegoers, anyway) clash between the upper-class white aristocracy and the down-to-earth proletarianism represented by the Drover (who, significantly, is never referred to by any other name, giving his character the sort of no-name quality Clint Eastwood had in his spaghetti Westerns).
Given how beautifully the cattle drive is staged and how well Luhrmann follows in the footsteps of the directors he’s clearly emulating, John Ford and (especially) Howard Hawks (indeed, given the relationship between the Kidman and Jackman characters I’m almost tempted to call the first half of Australia “Red River — the straight version”), it’s somewhat jarring that the good guys get the cattle on board the British transport ship and win their race against the cattle baron just halfway through this 165-minute movie. Then the war clouds darken and Australia turns into Gone With the Wind in its second half — along with The Wizard of Oz, which is actually referenced directly (it’s shown screening at an outdoor theatre after the song “Over the Rainbow” has already been introduced in Nicole Kidman’s deliberately inept rendition — Nullah takes to the song and in particular to its message about “the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true”) — including one direct visual quote of Kidman and Jackman embracing while silhouetted against a bright orange sunset.
Jackman proves as convincing in his evocation of Clark Gable as he was earlier in his evocation of John Wayne, and though the war as presented is historically inaccurate (the Japanese did indeed dive-bomb Darwin, but two months later than the film shows them doing, and they did not actually land troops on Australian soil), the second half works not as a pendant to the more viscerally exciting first half but as a superior piece of filmmaking in its own right and a genuinely moving piece of drama, particularly when the Mission Island on which the Australian government has relegated all those half-Aboriginal kids is the first place the Japanese planes target and it’s touch-and-go whether Lady Ashley and Nullah will ever get together again. Though the film evokes so many old movies one really isn’t in that much doubt as to how it’s going to turn out — the good guys are going to get what’s coming to them and the bad guys are going to get what they deserve — on its own level Australia is a magnificent piece of filmmaking, achieving the grandeur Luhrmann was clearly aiming for.
Australia had a difficult production history, coming in at 50 percent over the original budget, and Luhrmann had particular problems casting the male lead; though Hugh Jackman is absolutely wonderful in the role he was only the third choice. The first choice was Russell Crowe, but his asking price was too high and 20th Century-Fox asked him to reduce it to bring the film’s whole budget down. Crowe refused, so Luhrmann then sought out Heath Ledger (obviously Luhrmann, given his druthers, would have wanted a genuinely Australian actor for this role!) — but Ledger turned it down to make The Dark Knight instead, and I can’t help but think that that was a major mistake. What Ledger needed back then was a role that would have got him away from the American celebrity race — back to his roots, as it were — the part in Australia would have suited him far better as an actor (I know it’s a minority opinion, but I still think Ledger was abysmally miscast in The Dark Knight and he won his Academy Award less for his actual performance in that film than for his unrealized potential and for having been passed over for Brokeback Mountain), and I can’t help thinking that if he’d chosen differently and spent those months making the film he should have been making instead of working himself into a tizzy over being unable to find any depth to the Joker and drugging himself into oblivion, he’d still be alive.
Also worth mentioning is the fascinating character of Kipling Flynn (Jack Thompson), a rumpot who works as Faraway Downs’ financial manager and goes off on the cattle drive, where before he’s killed he teaches Nullah to play the harmonica — and though his instrument ties this film into Frank Capra’s oeuvre as well (the harmonica appears in Capra’s films as a sign of cultural innocence and purity) the performance is reminiscent of Edward G. Robinson’s marvelous “Cocky” Wainwright in the virtually forgotten film A Boy Ten Feet Tall (also a trek movie, though in Africa instead of Australia) and also some of the later acting jobs of John Huston and Orson Welles. One aspect of the film that rubbed me the wrong way was the racist Asian stereotype character of “Sing-Song” (Yuen Wah, who’s usually a stunt person in martial-arts movies), the Ashley family’s cook; it seemed a bit strange that a film with so strong an anti-racist message about Australia’s treatment of the Aborigines would lapse into such a demeaning portrayal of a person of color.
But that’s only a minor blemish on an otherwise great movie that I liked better than Moulin Rouge!, better than Pearl Harbor (though much of the bombing footage was stock from Tora! Tora! Tora! — one imdb.com contributor even spotted an American battleship anachronistically parked in the background of Darwin harbor — the terror of being under an air raid came through much more strongly in this film than in Pearl Harbor), and —as much as I enjoyed Slumdog Millionaire — I thought Australia was better than that, too. Thank goodness the DVD revolution (and the VHS and cable revolutions before it) have lengthened the commercial lives of movies enough that audiences that missed important movies the first time around have the opportunity to discover them later; Australia is a film that thoroughly deserves the kind of ultimate success The Wizard of Oz and Citizen Kane got after they flopped on their initial runs.
Lucia di Lammermoor (Metropolitan Opera, 2009)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran the Metropolitan Opera presentation of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, which originally took place on February 7 and was one of their high-definition live presentations to movie theatres. It was re-run on PBS, originally scheduled for the Wednesday night Great Performances time slot, but because for whatever contemptible reasons KPBS in San Diego chooses to ghettoize cultural programming to either the wee hours or the afternoons, it wasn’t shown here until Sunday at noon, so I recorded it then and we watched it that night. I remember thinking Lucia was a pretty silly opera when I first heard it — Donizetti’s music seemed just too pretty, too nice, too well-behaved for this obsessive tale of love, revenge, murder and madness and I couldn’t help wishing that Verdi had done the story instead.
I’ve grown to appreciate this score more in recent years, largely through Maria Callas’s recordings (particularly her 1953 studio version with Tullio Serafin conducting and the 1955 Berlin Radio broadcast with von Karajan, both with Giuseppe di Stefano as her co-star), but it remains a rather tricky opera and a difficult one to pull off. The Met’s current production was created in their last season for Natalie Dessay, but on this occasion she was relegated to introducing the broadcast as host and Lucia was sung by Anna Netrebko, something of a surprise since she’s known mostly as a lyric soprano and Lucia is the coloratura role to end all coloratura roles. The plot is one of those Romantic concoctions, based on an historical potboiler called The Bride of Lammermoor by Sir Walter Scott (whom the New Yorker critic, reviewing the original run of this production with Dessay as Lucia, called “the Dan Brown of his time”), in which whatever semblance of story logic is involved depends utterly on the characters behaving like complete idiots.
Lucia (“Lucy” in Scott’s text before Donizetti and his librettist, Salvatore Cammarano, “Italicized” it) is the sister of the ambitious Scottish Lord Enrico Ashton, whose fortunes have fallen on hard times. He sees a way out by marrying her off to wealthy Lord Arturo Bucklaw, but in the meantime she’s already met and fallen in love with the Ashton’s family’s most hated rival, Edgardo di Ravenswood. The Ashtons and the Ravenswoods have hated each other for centuries, ever since a Ravenswood man murdered an Ashton woman he was trying to kidnap and seduce, dumped her body in the fountain on the Ashton estate, and she supposedly has remained behind as a ghost haunting the fountain. (We learn all this in Lucia’s first aria, “Regnava nel silenzio,” and though she supposedly doesn’t go mad until later in the opera she sounds pretty crazy already.)
This doesn’t stop Lucia and Edgardo from swearing eternal love and doing a D.I.Y. wedding ceremony on the Scottish heath just before Edgardo is scheduled to leave for France, where he and some other exiles are plotting to take over the Scottish throne. While Edgardo is out of the country, Normanno, the captain of Enrico’s guards, tells him that he’s successfully intercepted all the letters Edgardo and Lucia wrote each other, and in addition he’s forged a letter to make it look as if Edgardo is involved with someone else. Raimondo, the family priest, joins in the pressure on Lucia to marry Arturo and save the Ashton family fortunes, but no sooner has she signed the contract to marry Arturo than Edgardo bursts in, crashes the party, and without stopping either to ask for or receive an explanation, immediately assumes the worst and tears his ring off Lucia’s finger.
Offstage, between Acts II and III, Lucia’s already stretched sanity finally collapses completely and she stabs Arturo as soon as he tries to have sex with her. In the rarely heard “Wolf’s Crag” scene, Edgardo and Enrico meet outside the castle and arrange for a duel, and in the next scene Lucia appears and sings the famous Mad Scene, reliving a rather twisted version of events, imagining herself married to Edgardo and insisting that soon she will be reunited with him in heaven. In the final scene — which for years was omitted because star coloraturas didn’t like the idea that the opera went on for one whole scene without them — Edgardo is waiting for Enrico to show up for their duel when he receives word that Lucia is dead, and he decides not to wait but to commit suicide on the spot.
The Met’s production moved the time of the story up from the 16th to the 19th century, but at least they kept it in Scotland — they didn’t move it to, say, Afghanistan under the warlords or something — and the costumes are relatively coherent (there aren’t the mixups of ancient, medieval and modern wardrobes with which a lot of modern-day European directors assault the audiences for their operas), though by the 19th century Scotland was firmly integrated into the United Kingdom and so the idea of Scottish exiles fleeing to France to plot a revolution against the King of Scotland is dreadfully anachronistic. There are a few other glitches in this production — of which the one that most bothered me (even more so than Edgardo sitting comfortably in an armchair at the start of the Wolf’s Crag scene) was the corporeal appearance of the ghost of the Ashton woman that was murdered centuries before by the Ravenswood man, both in “Regnava nel silenzio” and at the end in Edgardo’s tomb scene. Frankly, she’s a lot more powerful as an off-stage presence — especially when a Lucia with Callas’s power of word-spinning and dramatic inflection makes her seem like a figment of Lucia’s already slightly demented imagination that will later blossom into full-fledged insanity.
Still, this Lucia is on the whole quite effective, with Marco Armillato’s slow-paced conducting not only going easy on Netrebko’s voice (she doesn’t have to do the coloratura at the rapid-fire pace Joan Sutherland was famous for but which Netrebko probably couldn’t have handled) but adding to the darkness and moodiness of the piece. Much of it, especially early on, sounds surprisingly Germanic — maybe not so surprisingly when you remember that Donizetti’s composition teacher was a German, Simon Mayr, who had relocated to Italy — particularly the use of French horns (remember Anna Russell’s joke about how “the French horn, which is German, is called that to differentiate it from the English horn, which is French”) and tympani in the opera’s slow, moody opening.
Netrebko was in excellent vocal form and, though hardly at the level of Callas in moment-by-moment dramatics or Sutherland or Beverly Sills in sheer vocal pyrotechnics, she manages to create a convincing portrait of a woman so totally pulled and torn apart by all the powerful men in her life it’s no surprise that she goes homicidally crazy. Her frequent on-stage partner, Rolando Villazón, was supposed to be her Edgardo in this production, but he got sick and had to cancel — and his replacement was a young Russian tenor named Piotr Beczala, with an enviably strong voice and a rather pinched facial expression that actually worked fairly well for the character. Next to Netrebko, though, the evening belonged to baritone Mariusz Kwiecien as Enrico, who in Mary Zimmerman’s direction isn’t just an ambitious landowner using his sister as a prop to maintain his social position but a full-fledged villain on the level of Baron Scarpia in Tosca (and indeed, judging from his performance here, Scarpia would be a good role for him if he hasn’t already sung it).
Conductor Armillato’s poky tempi worked well in the opening and helped conceal Netrebko’s lack of experience in coloratura, but they also tended to drag the proceedings and make the opera a bit dull — though I give him major points for using the original part for glass armonica which Donizetti wrote for the mad scene but which is almost always omitted because of the sheer cumbersomeness of the instrument and the relative handful of people who can actually play it well; the sound of the armonica adds immeasurably to the atmosphere of the scene and really makes the score sound like someone in an insane babble instead of, as George Bernard Shaw once contemptuously dismissed it, “a test of skill with the first flute.” (The first person to restore the armonica scoring was conductor Thomas Schippers for Beverly Sills’ recording.) The Met Lucia was certainly a quite competent production of an important standard opera — though I suspect I’d have liked it better with a true coloratura like Dessay in the lead — and it was entertaining and blessed with Netrebko’s quite lovely, well-phrased vocalism.
I ran the Metropolitan Opera presentation of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, which originally took place on February 7 and was one of their high-definition live presentations to movie theatres. It was re-run on PBS, originally scheduled for the Wednesday night Great Performances time slot, but because for whatever contemptible reasons KPBS in San Diego chooses to ghettoize cultural programming to either the wee hours or the afternoons, it wasn’t shown here until Sunday at noon, so I recorded it then and we watched it that night. I remember thinking Lucia was a pretty silly opera when I first heard it — Donizetti’s music seemed just too pretty, too nice, too well-behaved for this obsessive tale of love, revenge, murder and madness and I couldn’t help wishing that Verdi had done the story instead.
I’ve grown to appreciate this score more in recent years, largely through Maria Callas’s recordings (particularly her 1953 studio version with Tullio Serafin conducting and the 1955 Berlin Radio broadcast with von Karajan, both with Giuseppe di Stefano as her co-star), but it remains a rather tricky opera and a difficult one to pull off. The Met’s current production was created in their last season for Natalie Dessay, but on this occasion she was relegated to introducing the broadcast as host and Lucia was sung by Anna Netrebko, something of a surprise since she’s known mostly as a lyric soprano and Lucia is the coloratura role to end all coloratura roles. The plot is one of those Romantic concoctions, based on an historical potboiler called The Bride of Lammermoor by Sir Walter Scott (whom the New Yorker critic, reviewing the original run of this production with Dessay as Lucia, called “the Dan Brown of his time”), in which whatever semblance of story logic is involved depends utterly on the characters behaving like complete idiots.
Lucia (“Lucy” in Scott’s text before Donizetti and his librettist, Salvatore Cammarano, “Italicized” it) is the sister of the ambitious Scottish Lord Enrico Ashton, whose fortunes have fallen on hard times. He sees a way out by marrying her off to wealthy Lord Arturo Bucklaw, but in the meantime she’s already met and fallen in love with the Ashton’s family’s most hated rival, Edgardo di Ravenswood. The Ashtons and the Ravenswoods have hated each other for centuries, ever since a Ravenswood man murdered an Ashton woman he was trying to kidnap and seduce, dumped her body in the fountain on the Ashton estate, and she supposedly has remained behind as a ghost haunting the fountain. (We learn all this in Lucia’s first aria, “Regnava nel silenzio,” and though she supposedly doesn’t go mad until later in the opera she sounds pretty crazy already.)
This doesn’t stop Lucia and Edgardo from swearing eternal love and doing a D.I.Y. wedding ceremony on the Scottish heath just before Edgardo is scheduled to leave for France, where he and some other exiles are plotting to take over the Scottish throne. While Edgardo is out of the country, Normanno, the captain of Enrico’s guards, tells him that he’s successfully intercepted all the letters Edgardo and Lucia wrote each other, and in addition he’s forged a letter to make it look as if Edgardo is involved with someone else. Raimondo, the family priest, joins in the pressure on Lucia to marry Arturo and save the Ashton family fortunes, but no sooner has she signed the contract to marry Arturo than Edgardo bursts in, crashes the party, and without stopping either to ask for or receive an explanation, immediately assumes the worst and tears his ring off Lucia’s finger.
Offstage, between Acts II and III, Lucia’s already stretched sanity finally collapses completely and she stabs Arturo as soon as he tries to have sex with her. In the rarely heard “Wolf’s Crag” scene, Edgardo and Enrico meet outside the castle and arrange for a duel, and in the next scene Lucia appears and sings the famous Mad Scene, reliving a rather twisted version of events, imagining herself married to Edgardo and insisting that soon she will be reunited with him in heaven. In the final scene — which for years was omitted because star coloraturas didn’t like the idea that the opera went on for one whole scene without them — Edgardo is waiting for Enrico to show up for their duel when he receives word that Lucia is dead, and he decides not to wait but to commit suicide on the spot.
The Met’s production moved the time of the story up from the 16th to the 19th century, but at least they kept it in Scotland — they didn’t move it to, say, Afghanistan under the warlords or something — and the costumes are relatively coherent (there aren’t the mixups of ancient, medieval and modern wardrobes with which a lot of modern-day European directors assault the audiences for their operas), though by the 19th century Scotland was firmly integrated into the United Kingdom and so the idea of Scottish exiles fleeing to France to plot a revolution against the King of Scotland is dreadfully anachronistic. There are a few other glitches in this production — of which the one that most bothered me (even more so than Edgardo sitting comfortably in an armchair at the start of the Wolf’s Crag scene) was the corporeal appearance of the ghost of the Ashton woman that was murdered centuries before by the Ravenswood man, both in “Regnava nel silenzio” and at the end in Edgardo’s tomb scene. Frankly, she’s a lot more powerful as an off-stage presence — especially when a Lucia with Callas’s power of word-spinning and dramatic inflection makes her seem like a figment of Lucia’s already slightly demented imagination that will later blossom into full-fledged insanity.
Still, this Lucia is on the whole quite effective, with Marco Armillato’s slow-paced conducting not only going easy on Netrebko’s voice (she doesn’t have to do the coloratura at the rapid-fire pace Joan Sutherland was famous for but which Netrebko probably couldn’t have handled) but adding to the darkness and moodiness of the piece. Much of it, especially early on, sounds surprisingly Germanic — maybe not so surprisingly when you remember that Donizetti’s composition teacher was a German, Simon Mayr, who had relocated to Italy — particularly the use of French horns (remember Anna Russell’s joke about how “the French horn, which is German, is called that to differentiate it from the English horn, which is French”) and tympani in the opera’s slow, moody opening.
Netrebko was in excellent vocal form and, though hardly at the level of Callas in moment-by-moment dramatics or Sutherland or Beverly Sills in sheer vocal pyrotechnics, she manages to create a convincing portrait of a woman so totally pulled and torn apart by all the powerful men in her life it’s no surprise that she goes homicidally crazy. Her frequent on-stage partner, Rolando Villazón, was supposed to be her Edgardo in this production, but he got sick and had to cancel — and his replacement was a young Russian tenor named Piotr Beczala, with an enviably strong voice and a rather pinched facial expression that actually worked fairly well for the character. Next to Netrebko, though, the evening belonged to baritone Mariusz Kwiecien as Enrico, who in Mary Zimmerman’s direction isn’t just an ambitious landowner using his sister as a prop to maintain his social position but a full-fledged villain on the level of Baron Scarpia in Tosca (and indeed, judging from his performance here, Scarpia would be a good role for him if he hasn’t already sung it).
Conductor Armillato’s poky tempi worked well in the opening and helped conceal Netrebko’s lack of experience in coloratura, but they also tended to drag the proceedings and make the opera a bit dull — though I give him major points for using the original part for glass armonica which Donizetti wrote for the mad scene but which is almost always omitted because of the sheer cumbersomeness of the instrument and the relative handful of people who can actually play it well; the sound of the armonica adds immeasurably to the atmosphere of the scene and really makes the score sound like someone in an insane babble instead of, as George Bernard Shaw once contemptuously dismissed it, “a test of skill with the first flute.” (The first person to restore the armonica scoring was conductor Thomas Schippers for Beverly Sills’ recording.) The Met Lucia was certainly a quite competent production of an important standard opera — though I suspect I’d have liked it better with a true coloratura like Dessay in the lead — and it was entertaining and blessed with Netrebko’s quite lovely, well-phrased vocalism.
Speak (Showtime, 2004)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
This morning I watched an unexpectedly interesting movie I’d recorded from Lifetime, a 2004 Showtime production called Speak which they probably revived because of the new-found popularity of the film’s young star, Kristen Stewart (thanks to her role in the big teen-vampire franchise Twilight), who here plays Melinda Sordino, a high-school freshman who shows up for her first day in a state of virtual catatonia. At first it seems like it’s just going to be another alienated-teenager movie — the moment she shows up for school she earns the instant displeasure of social-studies teacher Mr. Neck (Robert John Burke) for being late and having an “attitude” — indeed, as the film progresses Mr. Neck turns out to be a low-grade fascist who turns his class lectures into tirades against people of color because his firefighter son was denied a promotion in favor of a person of color (and when one African-American in the class has the temerity to say, “Maybe he was passed over because he wasn’t good enough,” Mr. Neck reacts violently and says, “That’s my son you’re talking about!”).
A number of Melinda’s other teachers turn out to be weirdos of one sort or another — including the English teacher (Leslie Lyles), whom Melinda nicknames “Hairwoman” because she’s usually facing away from the students to write things on the blackboard (and in a nifty running gag she’s always running out of room on the blackboard and has to make the last few letters of whatever she’s writing much narrower than the rest) and even when she is facing the class, her hippie-style long hair is covering much of her weatherbeaten face; Ms. Keen (Kimberly Kish), the biology teacher whom Melinda can’t stand because of her relentlessly chirpy voice; and the one teacher Melinda actually bonds with, art teacher Mr. Freeman (Steve Zahn), one of those liberal teachers who wants to “relate” to his students and shake them into some creativity.
Speak differs from most alienated high-school-student movies in that even before the school year began, Melinda developed a reputation that has caused most of the class — including her former friends from her junior-high years — to denounce her as a “snitcher” and make oinking noises when she appears; the one fellow student who reaches out to her early on, Rachel Bruin (Hallee Hirsh), a transfer student from La Jolla who never lets Melinda (or us) forget it — this movie is somewhat ambiguous as to where it’s supposed to be taking place but it was filmed in Columbus, Ohio — cuts her dead when she realizes Melinda’s friendship is only going to hold her back from being accepted by the school’s “Marthas,” the social-climber clique (“Martha” as in “Stewart,” I presume). What she did to earn this reputation we learn in dribs and drabs from the flashbacks inserted into the story by writers Jessica Sharzer (who also directed) and Annie Young Frisbie (adapting a novel by Laurie Halse Anderson); Melinda was invited to a wild party with a lot of drinking and opportunities for sex, and Melinda was the subject of advances by hunky, athletic B.M.O.C. Andy Evans (Eric Lively), who got her into his Jeep determined to have sex with her and refused to take no for an answer.
Once that’s finally revealed, midway through the film, we realize that Melinda’s unwillingness to speak in public (or much in private, either) is due to lingering trauma not only from the rape but also from the fact that she never reported it — it was why she called the cops on that party but once they actually arrived the scene got so confused that she fled instead of remaining behind to swear out a complaint against Andy — and among the traumas she’s had to endure through the school year is seeing Andy and Rachel dating and wondering if she should bother to tell her former friend just what a creep the guy is. Melinda’s home life isn’t much of a refuge, either; her dad, Jack Sordino (D. B. Sweeney), is unemployed and her mom Joyce (Elizabeth Perkins) is supporting the family through a beauty shop she co-owns, and when she’s at home (which isn’t often) she looks pretty much like a space cadet herself. About the only allies Melinda has are the art teacher and her biology-class lab partner, Dave Petrakis (Michael Angarano), who’s nice-looking, sweet, intelligent, daring (he tells off Mr. Neck during one of his racist tirades) and altogether lovable, but Melinda rebuffs his efforts to date her.
The film’s script is full of felicitous touches — including having the English teacher give a lecture on symbolism in Hawthorne (when one student in the class questions whether her interpretations of Hawthorne’s symbolism have anything to do with what Hawthorne intended, she gets as defensive as Mr. Neck and says, “I wrote my doctoral dissertation on Hawthorne!” — suggesting that school is, among other things, a place where teachers go to work out their own neuroses while their students suffer through it all), the irony being that the movie itself is full of subtle but unmistakable symbolism in details like the various ways Melinda gets to school (sometimes she braves the school bus, sometimes she walks, sometimes she bikes and sometimes daddy drives her) reflecting her various emotional moods.
Eventually the film appears to be moving towards a happy, or at least not too miserable, resolution — the school year ends and Melinda plans to take art courses in the summer; she gets the work she’s been hiding in a storage closet on the school grounds that’s been her hideout when the pressures of the environment got too intense; and her art teacher is there to encourage here — when suddenly [spoiler alert!] Andy confronts her and demands that she go through the entire school telling everybody that she lied and he really didn’t rape her (“I can have any girl I want — willingly!” he thunders at her, along with the inevitable, “You’re not even attractive!”), and she retaliates by throwing some sort of liquid in his face that blinds him, or at least seems to be doing so — and one can’t help but wonder what kind of trouble she’s going to be in now and how he’ll be able to dance away from any responsibility for her violation now that he can claim to be the injured party.
Speak is quite a good movie, well directed — unlike a lot of people at this level of filmmaking, Jessica Sharzer actually has an eye for artful compositions, though they remain totally appropriate to the story and don’t call attention to themselves — and also quite well cast (indeed, seeing Kristen Stewart here makes me more curious about Twilight than I was earlier) — and though much of it is from the grab-bag of alienated-teen movie clichés, they’re at least deployed effectively and for most of this movie one is genuinely uncertain about how it’s all going to turn out. A little gem!
This morning I watched an unexpectedly interesting movie I’d recorded from Lifetime, a 2004 Showtime production called Speak which they probably revived because of the new-found popularity of the film’s young star, Kristen Stewart (thanks to her role in the big teen-vampire franchise Twilight), who here plays Melinda Sordino, a high-school freshman who shows up for her first day in a state of virtual catatonia. At first it seems like it’s just going to be another alienated-teenager movie — the moment she shows up for school she earns the instant displeasure of social-studies teacher Mr. Neck (Robert John Burke) for being late and having an “attitude” — indeed, as the film progresses Mr. Neck turns out to be a low-grade fascist who turns his class lectures into tirades against people of color because his firefighter son was denied a promotion in favor of a person of color (and when one African-American in the class has the temerity to say, “Maybe he was passed over because he wasn’t good enough,” Mr. Neck reacts violently and says, “That’s my son you’re talking about!”).
A number of Melinda’s other teachers turn out to be weirdos of one sort or another — including the English teacher (Leslie Lyles), whom Melinda nicknames “Hairwoman” because she’s usually facing away from the students to write things on the blackboard (and in a nifty running gag she’s always running out of room on the blackboard and has to make the last few letters of whatever she’s writing much narrower than the rest) and even when she is facing the class, her hippie-style long hair is covering much of her weatherbeaten face; Ms. Keen (Kimberly Kish), the biology teacher whom Melinda can’t stand because of her relentlessly chirpy voice; and the one teacher Melinda actually bonds with, art teacher Mr. Freeman (Steve Zahn), one of those liberal teachers who wants to “relate” to his students and shake them into some creativity.
Speak differs from most alienated high-school-student movies in that even before the school year began, Melinda developed a reputation that has caused most of the class — including her former friends from her junior-high years — to denounce her as a “snitcher” and make oinking noises when she appears; the one fellow student who reaches out to her early on, Rachel Bruin (Hallee Hirsh), a transfer student from La Jolla who never lets Melinda (or us) forget it — this movie is somewhat ambiguous as to where it’s supposed to be taking place but it was filmed in Columbus, Ohio — cuts her dead when she realizes Melinda’s friendship is only going to hold her back from being accepted by the school’s “Marthas,” the social-climber clique (“Martha” as in “Stewart,” I presume). What she did to earn this reputation we learn in dribs and drabs from the flashbacks inserted into the story by writers Jessica Sharzer (who also directed) and Annie Young Frisbie (adapting a novel by Laurie Halse Anderson); Melinda was invited to a wild party with a lot of drinking and opportunities for sex, and Melinda was the subject of advances by hunky, athletic B.M.O.C. Andy Evans (Eric Lively), who got her into his Jeep determined to have sex with her and refused to take no for an answer.
Once that’s finally revealed, midway through the film, we realize that Melinda’s unwillingness to speak in public (or much in private, either) is due to lingering trauma not only from the rape but also from the fact that she never reported it — it was why she called the cops on that party but once they actually arrived the scene got so confused that she fled instead of remaining behind to swear out a complaint against Andy — and among the traumas she’s had to endure through the school year is seeing Andy and Rachel dating and wondering if she should bother to tell her former friend just what a creep the guy is. Melinda’s home life isn’t much of a refuge, either; her dad, Jack Sordino (D. B. Sweeney), is unemployed and her mom Joyce (Elizabeth Perkins) is supporting the family through a beauty shop she co-owns, and when she’s at home (which isn’t often) she looks pretty much like a space cadet herself. About the only allies Melinda has are the art teacher and her biology-class lab partner, Dave Petrakis (Michael Angarano), who’s nice-looking, sweet, intelligent, daring (he tells off Mr. Neck during one of his racist tirades) and altogether lovable, but Melinda rebuffs his efforts to date her.
The film’s script is full of felicitous touches — including having the English teacher give a lecture on symbolism in Hawthorne (when one student in the class questions whether her interpretations of Hawthorne’s symbolism have anything to do with what Hawthorne intended, she gets as defensive as Mr. Neck and says, “I wrote my doctoral dissertation on Hawthorne!” — suggesting that school is, among other things, a place where teachers go to work out their own neuroses while their students suffer through it all), the irony being that the movie itself is full of subtle but unmistakable symbolism in details like the various ways Melinda gets to school (sometimes she braves the school bus, sometimes she walks, sometimes she bikes and sometimes daddy drives her) reflecting her various emotional moods.
Eventually the film appears to be moving towards a happy, or at least not too miserable, resolution — the school year ends and Melinda plans to take art courses in the summer; she gets the work she’s been hiding in a storage closet on the school grounds that’s been her hideout when the pressures of the environment got too intense; and her art teacher is there to encourage here — when suddenly [spoiler alert!] Andy confronts her and demands that she go through the entire school telling everybody that she lied and he really didn’t rape her (“I can have any girl I want — willingly!” he thunders at her, along with the inevitable, “You’re not even attractive!”), and she retaliates by throwing some sort of liquid in his face that blinds him, or at least seems to be doing so — and one can’t help but wonder what kind of trouble she’s going to be in now and how he’ll be able to dance away from any responsibility for her violation now that he can claim to be the injured party.
Speak is quite a good movie, well directed — unlike a lot of people at this level of filmmaking, Jessica Sharzer actually has an eye for artful compositions, though they remain totally appropriate to the story and don’t call attention to themselves — and also quite well cast (indeed, seeing Kristen Stewart here makes me more curious about Twilight than I was earlier) — and though much of it is from the grab-bag of alienated-teen movie clichés, they’re at least deployed effectively and for most of this movie one is genuinely uncertain about how it’s all going to turn out. A little gem!
Then She Found Me (ThinkFilm, 2007)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Then She Found Me, presented last Saturday (April 18) by Lifetime as an original TV-movie but apparently made in 2007 with the hope of feature-film distribution, which explains how the movie had a pretty starry cast list, at least by Lifetime standards: Helen Hunt, Matthew Broderick, Colin Firth and Bette Midler. Hunt not only starred in the movie but also directed it and co-wrote the script with Alice Arlen and Victor Levin, based on a novel by Elinor Lipman, though the script was such a rag-bag of soap-opera clichés that it had the air of being especially made for Lifetime even if it wasn’t (it was originally picked up for theatrical distribution by the ThinkFilm company but ThinkFilm just went out of business and that’s probably why it ended up on Lifetime).
Let’s see if I can remember all the details of this convoluted plot: April Epner Green (Helen Hunt) is a 39-year-old schoolteacher who’s in a rather ennui-driven marriage to one of her co-workers, Ben Green (Matthew Broderick), and being 39 she’s desperate for a baby since she can hear the biological clock ticking. She flatly rejects the option of adopting a child because she was adopted herself; her adoptive father died three years before the movie begins and her adoptive mother, Trudy (Lynn Cohen), is on her deathbed when our story begins. Trudy is actually urging April to adopt, but April is reluctant because she’s spent her lifetime being aware of the subtle difference between the way she was treated and the way the elder Epners treated her two siblings, who were their own blood children.
Just after Mrs. Epner croaks, April gets a double whammy: her husband informs her matter-of-factly that he wants out of the marriage and a woman named Bernice Graves (Bette Midler) slams her way into April’s life and claims to be her biological mother. Bernice hosts a Barbara Walters-esque morning talk show and gets semi-star names like Tim Robbins, Janeanne Garofalo and Edie Falco (who appear here as themselves) to appear on it, and to get to know April she takes her to lunch at a ridiculously ritzy restaurant called Barbetta (which apparently really exists), whose hosts make it a point to address their guests in Italian whether they can understand it or not. Bernice tells April that her birth father is Steve McQueen — and April buys it long enough to rent a copy of the McQueen version of The Getaway before a friend points out that during the time she would have had to be conceived McQueen was out of the U.S. making The Sand Pebbles, and later April finds out that her real father was a young Ukranian boy Bernice had an affair with — and still later she finds out that Bernice put her up for adoption when she was already a year old, not just three days as Bernice had told April earlier, because she didn’t want the encumbrance to her budding TV career that single motherhood would have posed.
Meanwhile, April has started dating another co-worker, Frank (Colin Firth) — doesn’t this woman ever meet anybody else? — and things are going along pretty well in this relationship even though Frank is raising two kids of his own from a previous wife who walked out on him as casually and coldly as Ben walked out on April — only Ben comes back for one quickie session of attempted make-up sex in a parked car and that gets April knocked up at long last. Both Frank and Ben show up at the pre-natal screenings — confusing the hell out of the doctors — and at six weeks everything is fine, but at 10 weeks April’s baby’s heart stops beating and April realizes that once again she’s missed out on the thrill of bearing and raising her own blood child. So she uses a nice bit of emotional blackmail that shows that, even though Bernice was Catholic, April has learned something from growing up in a Jewish family (the film features snatches of traditional Hebrew songs just to establish the Epners’ “Jewicity”): she forces Bernice to pick up the tab for fertility treatments and the two of them go through catalogs to select a sperm donor for April.
The film ends somewhat inconclusively — I think we’re supposed to presume that April and Frank get together and raise the child she’s going to have from donor 29X or whatever his number was in the catalog — and Hunt proves a competent but not especially inspired director, getting reasonably good performances from her actors within the limits of the script but bathing the whole movie in a warm autumnal glow rather than daring to show any other parts of the spectrum than dirty greens and browns (a common failing I find in today’s movies — if you’re going to use so little of the visible spectrum, why not just shoot in black-and-white?). Then She Found Me is obviously aiming at some profound statement about life and the human condition, but the result is so mind-numbingly banal one regrets that an actress of Helen Hunt’s obvious intelligence and skill turned to a silly story like this when she wanted to make an especially personal project.
The film was Then She Found Me, presented last Saturday (April 18) by Lifetime as an original TV-movie but apparently made in 2007 with the hope of feature-film distribution, which explains how the movie had a pretty starry cast list, at least by Lifetime standards: Helen Hunt, Matthew Broderick, Colin Firth and Bette Midler. Hunt not only starred in the movie but also directed it and co-wrote the script with Alice Arlen and Victor Levin, based on a novel by Elinor Lipman, though the script was such a rag-bag of soap-opera clichés that it had the air of being especially made for Lifetime even if it wasn’t (it was originally picked up for theatrical distribution by the ThinkFilm company but ThinkFilm just went out of business and that’s probably why it ended up on Lifetime).
Let’s see if I can remember all the details of this convoluted plot: April Epner Green (Helen Hunt) is a 39-year-old schoolteacher who’s in a rather ennui-driven marriage to one of her co-workers, Ben Green (Matthew Broderick), and being 39 she’s desperate for a baby since she can hear the biological clock ticking. She flatly rejects the option of adopting a child because she was adopted herself; her adoptive father died three years before the movie begins and her adoptive mother, Trudy (Lynn Cohen), is on her deathbed when our story begins. Trudy is actually urging April to adopt, but April is reluctant because she’s spent her lifetime being aware of the subtle difference between the way she was treated and the way the elder Epners treated her two siblings, who were their own blood children.
Just after Mrs. Epner croaks, April gets a double whammy: her husband informs her matter-of-factly that he wants out of the marriage and a woman named Bernice Graves (Bette Midler) slams her way into April’s life and claims to be her biological mother. Bernice hosts a Barbara Walters-esque morning talk show and gets semi-star names like Tim Robbins, Janeanne Garofalo and Edie Falco (who appear here as themselves) to appear on it, and to get to know April she takes her to lunch at a ridiculously ritzy restaurant called Barbetta (which apparently really exists), whose hosts make it a point to address their guests in Italian whether they can understand it or not. Bernice tells April that her birth father is Steve McQueen — and April buys it long enough to rent a copy of the McQueen version of The Getaway before a friend points out that during the time she would have had to be conceived McQueen was out of the U.S. making The Sand Pebbles, and later April finds out that her real father was a young Ukranian boy Bernice had an affair with — and still later she finds out that Bernice put her up for adoption when she was already a year old, not just three days as Bernice had told April earlier, because she didn’t want the encumbrance to her budding TV career that single motherhood would have posed.
Meanwhile, April has started dating another co-worker, Frank (Colin Firth) — doesn’t this woman ever meet anybody else? — and things are going along pretty well in this relationship even though Frank is raising two kids of his own from a previous wife who walked out on him as casually and coldly as Ben walked out on April — only Ben comes back for one quickie session of attempted make-up sex in a parked car and that gets April knocked up at long last. Both Frank and Ben show up at the pre-natal screenings — confusing the hell out of the doctors — and at six weeks everything is fine, but at 10 weeks April’s baby’s heart stops beating and April realizes that once again she’s missed out on the thrill of bearing and raising her own blood child. So she uses a nice bit of emotional blackmail that shows that, even though Bernice was Catholic, April has learned something from growing up in a Jewish family (the film features snatches of traditional Hebrew songs just to establish the Epners’ “Jewicity”): she forces Bernice to pick up the tab for fertility treatments and the two of them go through catalogs to select a sperm donor for April.
The film ends somewhat inconclusively — I think we’re supposed to presume that April and Frank get together and raise the child she’s going to have from donor 29X or whatever his number was in the catalog — and Hunt proves a competent but not especially inspired director, getting reasonably good performances from her actors within the limits of the script but bathing the whole movie in a warm autumnal glow rather than daring to show any other parts of the spectrum than dirty greens and browns (a common failing I find in today’s movies — if you’re going to use so little of the visible spectrum, why not just shoot in black-and-white?). Then She Found Me is obviously aiming at some profound statement about life and the human condition, but the result is so mind-numbingly banal one regrets that an actress of Helen Hunt’s obvious intelligence and skill turned to a silly story like this when she wanted to make an especially personal project.
The Side Hackers (Crown International, 1969)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I picked the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 presentation of something called The Side Hackers, a 1969 release from “Crown International Pictures” (living up — or down — to the usual reputation of studios with the word “International” in their names) that turned out to be yet another motorcycle movie starring Ross Hagen, whose true name, Leland Lando Lilly, turned out to be the silliest real-life moniker for a major action star since Marion Michael “Duke” Morrison became John Wayne. We’d seen a previous Hagen vehicle on MST3K, The Hellcats — also a motorcycle film — and pronounced it pretty boring, but this one turned out even worse.
Also known as Five the Hard Way (an even worse title, especially since it would imply a gambling story and no sequence of gambling occurs at any time in the film), The Side Hackers takes its name from an off-shoot form of motorcycle racing called “sidehacking.” The bikes are equipped with sidecars — not the teardrop-shaped ones familiar to anyone who’s seen the motorcycles driven in World War II movies but flat platforms on which the second crew member, the “navigator,” stands (the actual driver is called the “pilot”), and leans either left or right depending on which way he needs to go so the pilot can negotiate a turn successfully. This means that when the person leans left it looks like he’s fucking the pilot in the ass, and when he leans right it looks as if his own ass is going to be sanded off by the ground.
What makes this a particularly bizarre movie is that, though the filmmakers (the director was Gus Trikonis — who supposedly put his then-wife, the then-unknown Goldie Hawn, in the movie as an extra watching a side-hack race — and the writers were Tony Huston and Larry Billman) enlisted the aid of a side-hacking association and got permission to film in Perris State Park, where real sidehackers went to do their thing, after the first half-hour or so no further side-hacking sequences are shown and instead the film becomes a singularly dull revenge drama featuring Vince Rommel (Ross Hagen) going after the villain, “J. C.” (Michael Pataki), for having murdered his girlfriend. (J. C. later kills his own girlfriend as well — one’s got to wonder just what problem this guy has with women.) The film builds (if you can call it that) to a big confrontation in the desert in which Vince virtuously insists that his side will not carry guns — and of course they’re mowed down by J. C.’s gang, which isn’t similarly encumbered. About the only surprise in the denouement is that Vince actually dies at the end — he isn’t given some way to dispatch J. C. without firearms and, just when it looks like J. C. has finally been disarmed, he finds one of his minion’s guns in the desert and uses it to blow away Our Hero.
The Side Hackers isn’t entirely without entertainment value — though the fabric looks more like flannel than denim, at least a lot of the male dramatis personae are wearing tight jeans and showing impressive baskets (particularly Robert Tessier as “Jake”), and the side-hacking scenes themselves are genuinely exciting even though the sport seems particularly pointless (an imdb.com commentator pointed out that cyclists unencumbered by sidecars and their riders do a better job of stabilizing themselves in high-speed turns with their own leans) — but for the most part it’s a pointless bore that makes The Hellcats look like a vertiginous, edge-of-your-seat thriller by comparison, and a movie so lame even the MST3K crew couldn’t do much to make it entertaining.
I picked the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 presentation of something called The Side Hackers, a 1969 release from “Crown International Pictures” (living up — or down — to the usual reputation of studios with the word “International” in their names) that turned out to be yet another motorcycle movie starring Ross Hagen, whose true name, Leland Lando Lilly, turned out to be the silliest real-life moniker for a major action star since Marion Michael “Duke” Morrison became John Wayne. We’d seen a previous Hagen vehicle on MST3K, The Hellcats — also a motorcycle film — and pronounced it pretty boring, but this one turned out even worse.
Also known as Five the Hard Way (an even worse title, especially since it would imply a gambling story and no sequence of gambling occurs at any time in the film), The Side Hackers takes its name from an off-shoot form of motorcycle racing called “sidehacking.” The bikes are equipped with sidecars — not the teardrop-shaped ones familiar to anyone who’s seen the motorcycles driven in World War II movies but flat platforms on which the second crew member, the “navigator,” stands (the actual driver is called the “pilot”), and leans either left or right depending on which way he needs to go so the pilot can negotiate a turn successfully. This means that when the person leans left it looks like he’s fucking the pilot in the ass, and when he leans right it looks as if his own ass is going to be sanded off by the ground.
What makes this a particularly bizarre movie is that, though the filmmakers (the director was Gus Trikonis — who supposedly put his then-wife, the then-unknown Goldie Hawn, in the movie as an extra watching a side-hack race — and the writers were Tony Huston and Larry Billman) enlisted the aid of a side-hacking association and got permission to film in Perris State Park, where real sidehackers went to do their thing, after the first half-hour or so no further side-hacking sequences are shown and instead the film becomes a singularly dull revenge drama featuring Vince Rommel (Ross Hagen) going after the villain, “J. C.” (Michael Pataki), for having murdered his girlfriend. (J. C. later kills his own girlfriend as well — one’s got to wonder just what problem this guy has with women.) The film builds (if you can call it that) to a big confrontation in the desert in which Vince virtuously insists that his side will not carry guns — and of course they’re mowed down by J. C.’s gang, which isn’t similarly encumbered. About the only surprise in the denouement is that Vince actually dies at the end — he isn’t given some way to dispatch J. C. without firearms and, just when it looks like J. C. has finally been disarmed, he finds one of his minion’s guns in the desert and uses it to blow away Our Hero.
The Side Hackers isn’t entirely without entertainment value — though the fabric looks more like flannel than denim, at least a lot of the male dramatis personae are wearing tight jeans and showing impressive baskets (particularly Robert Tessier as “Jake”), and the side-hacking scenes themselves are genuinely exciting even though the sport seems particularly pointless (an imdb.com commentator pointed out that cyclists unencumbered by sidecars and their riders do a better job of stabilizing themselves in high-speed turns with their own leans) — but for the most part it’s a pointless bore that makes The Hellcats look like a vertiginous, edge-of-your-seat thriller by comparison, and a movie so lame even the MST3K crew couldn’t do much to make it entertaining.
Jungle Goddess (Lippert, 1948)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 presentation of another one of the non-epics Lippert Pictures made immediately after World War II: Jungle Goddess. I had some hope for this one partly because the last Lippert production we’d seen from the MST3K archives, King Dinosaur, wasn’t half-bad (except for the risible attempt to pass off footage of living lizards as ancient dinosaurs) and partly because the leading lady was Wanda McKay, who’d been at least a cut above most of the ingénues who inhabited the Bela Lugosi Monograms in the early 1940’s. Alas, this 1948 production was boring even by post-war indie or MST3K standards.
McKay plays the title role, Greta Vanderhorn, a South African heiress who was attempting to fly home from the U.S. in September 1939 to rejoin her father for the duration (apparently she was under the delusion that relocating so far from the actual battlefronts was somehow going to help the Allied war effort), only her plane crash-landed in the middle of the African jungle and, when she helped nurse one of the native chieftains’ wives back to health after a lingering illness, the natives (shown in usual booga-booga style with face paint that would embarrass a trick-or-treater of any race) immediately hailed her as a goddess and gave her total control of their tribe. Once the war is over, her dad in South Africa announces to the world media that he’s offering a reward for the return of his daughter, dead or alive, and two bush pilots, Mike Patton (George Reeves, best remembered for his TV exploits as Superman — who of course could fly without a plane) and Bob Simpson (an almost unrecognizable Ralph Byrd — the “roo” moustache makes him look almost completely different from his appearance as Dick Tracy in four Republic serials and two RKO “B”’s), decide to abandon the two passengers they’re supposed to be flying and chase after Greta and the reward.
Once they arrive, Bob almost immediately shoots one of the natives and is sentenced to death — but Greta assures Mike (whom she’s already falling for) that she’ll make sure they all get out of there before the sentence can actually be carried out. That’s about all the plot this movie has — aside from a lot of stock footage from previous jungle documentaries (both the MST3K crew and the commentators on imdb.com had a lot of fun with the fact that we get a lot of this footage, supposedly viewed from the plane via binoculars, but actually shot on the ground), most of which is actually more interesting to watch than the scenes featuring the human actors — it’s basically a long chase scene and Bob manages to kill yet another native before he gets speared at the end while Mike and Greta escape in Mike’s plane and return to so-called “civilization.” The MST3K crew had a lot of fun with Bob’s trigger-happy character — they did a lot of jokes along the lines of, “Bob! There’s something alive in the corner of the screen! Kill it!” — and after the film they did an I Love Lucy-style lampoon of the movie that was a good deal funnier than anything they managed to do with the film itself.
Before the main feature they showed the opening episode of the 1939 serial The Phantom Creeps, originally made at Universal and featuring Bela Lugosi as mad scientist Dr. Alex Zurka, who’s devised a wide panoply of inventions including a belt that makes its wearer invisible, a remote-control murder device that involves planting a metal disc on the victim and sending a spider (actually one of the least convincing toy models ever shown in a movie!) to the disc, where it combusts and put the living being into suspended animation (so The Devil Bat wasn’t the first time Lugosi experimented with a living monster that needed a co-factor to become active!), and a giant robot that resembles an animate Easter Island statue — the print they were showing came from a reissue outfit called “Commonwealth Films, Inc.” and the MST3K crew actually apologized for the print quality, but Jungle Goddess was even worse — much of it was so badly faded it was no longer black-and-white but off-white-on-white and the difficulty of telling exactly what was supposed to be going on just made a bad movie even worse!
I ran a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 presentation of another one of the non-epics Lippert Pictures made immediately after World War II: Jungle Goddess. I had some hope for this one partly because the last Lippert production we’d seen from the MST3K archives, King Dinosaur, wasn’t half-bad (except for the risible attempt to pass off footage of living lizards as ancient dinosaurs) and partly because the leading lady was Wanda McKay, who’d been at least a cut above most of the ingénues who inhabited the Bela Lugosi Monograms in the early 1940’s. Alas, this 1948 production was boring even by post-war indie or MST3K standards.
McKay plays the title role, Greta Vanderhorn, a South African heiress who was attempting to fly home from the U.S. in September 1939 to rejoin her father for the duration (apparently she was under the delusion that relocating so far from the actual battlefronts was somehow going to help the Allied war effort), only her plane crash-landed in the middle of the African jungle and, when she helped nurse one of the native chieftains’ wives back to health after a lingering illness, the natives (shown in usual booga-booga style with face paint that would embarrass a trick-or-treater of any race) immediately hailed her as a goddess and gave her total control of their tribe. Once the war is over, her dad in South Africa announces to the world media that he’s offering a reward for the return of his daughter, dead or alive, and two bush pilots, Mike Patton (George Reeves, best remembered for his TV exploits as Superman — who of course could fly without a plane) and Bob Simpson (an almost unrecognizable Ralph Byrd — the “roo” moustache makes him look almost completely different from his appearance as Dick Tracy in four Republic serials and two RKO “B”’s), decide to abandon the two passengers they’re supposed to be flying and chase after Greta and the reward.
Once they arrive, Bob almost immediately shoots one of the natives and is sentenced to death — but Greta assures Mike (whom she’s already falling for) that she’ll make sure they all get out of there before the sentence can actually be carried out. That’s about all the plot this movie has — aside from a lot of stock footage from previous jungle documentaries (both the MST3K crew and the commentators on imdb.com had a lot of fun with the fact that we get a lot of this footage, supposedly viewed from the plane via binoculars, but actually shot on the ground), most of which is actually more interesting to watch than the scenes featuring the human actors — it’s basically a long chase scene and Bob manages to kill yet another native before he gets speared at the end while Mike and Greta escape in Mike’s plane and return to so-called “civilization.” The MST3K crew had a lot of fun with Bob’s trigger-happy character — they did a lot of jokes along the lines of, “Bob! There’s something alive in the corner of the screen! Kill it!” — and after the film they did an I Love Lucy-style lampoon of the movie that was a good deal funnier than anything they managed to do with the film itself.
Before the main feature they showed the opening episode of the 1939 serial The Phantom Creeps, originally made at Universal and featuring Bela Lugosi as mad scientist Dr. Alex Zurka, who’s devised a wide panoply of inventions including a belt that makes its wearer invisible, a remote-control murder device that involves planting a metal disc on the victim and sending a spider (actually one of the least convincing toy models ever shown in a movie!) to the disc, where it combusts and put the living being into suspended animation (so The Devil Bat wasn’t the first time Lugosi experimented with a living monster that needed a co-factor to become active!), and a giant robot that resembles an animate Easter Island statue — the print they were showing came from a reissue outfit called “Commonwealth Films, Inc.” and the MST3K crew actually apologized for the print quality, but Jungle Goddess was even worse — much of it was so badly faded it was no longer black-and-white but off-white-on-white and the difficulty of telling exactly what was supposed to be going on just made a bad movie even worse!
Rocket Attack, U.S.A. (Exploit Fllms, 1961)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched something far less exalted than Australia: a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 presentation of a truly weird movie from 1961 called Rocket Attack U.S.A. I had assumed it would be another cheap-jack science-fiction movie with the tacky appeal of some of the others we’ve seen both on MST3K and “straight” — instead it turned out to be succinctly described on the imdb.com Web site as “a cold-war propaganda film, released not too long after the launch of Sputnik, intended to rally public support for an anti-ballistic missile program.”
What followed was an unwittingly surreal cinematic mess of which the first two-thirds were a somewhat straightforward espionage movie: super-agent John Manston (John McKay) is assigned to infiltrate Russia and get the secret of Russia’s new intercontinental ballistic missile — the idea being that once they launched Sputnik I they would acquire all the data they needed to avoid such problems as cosmic radiation and the gravitational pull of other planets and figure out how to build a missile that would wipe out New York City, and the Soviet military would overthrow the Communist party and take control so they could stage a first strike against the U.S. while our own missile program was still unable to stage a successful launch. He’s supposed to meet up with a Russian contact, Tannah (Monica Davis), whom he had met previously in Turkey where she was living with her Turkish husband before she sneaked back into Russia, where somehow she’s managed to become the mistress of the Soviet Minister of Defense — “and when he drinks, he talks,” she explains to John Manston, who insists on moving in with her even though her Defense Minister lover comes over frequently, which means Manston has to spend hours upon hours in the closet until the poor guy passes out from overindulging in vodka and he can finally come out and kiss her right in front of his unconscious body.
Anyway, she manages to worm out of him the secret that the Russian missile is about to be fired from a base in Leningrad — which is a top-secret installation guarded by about three people with all the security savvy of Paul Blart, Mall Cop. Though a “British” (quotes definitely in order since the actor playing him doesn’t even attempt a British accent!) agent gets caught and killed trying to infiltrate the base, Our Hero plants a bomb on the missile that’s supposed to blow it up before it’s launched — only the bomb fizzles and Manston and Tannah are both caught on the beach and killed. The scene abruptly shifts to New York City, where there’s been a series of air-raid drills that have had pretty much the effect of that boy who cried wolf — nobody’s at all impressed when the stentorian voices on the radio start announcing that this civil defense alert is real — and there’s a nostalgia-inducing bit for anyone who grew up listening to radios during the civil-defense era, when the idea was you were instructed to tune to 640 or 1240 AM if there was an attack because only those stations would remain on the air — and radios made then even came with little civil-defense symbols printed on those parts of the dial so you could easily find them if and when.
A whole new series of extraneous characters, including Art Metrano as a truck driver and Jane Ross as his wife (they, along with John McKay and Monica Davis, are the only actors in this movie identified with their roles on the imdb.com Web site, which is an indication of how obscure this movie really is), are introduced, and the MST3K crew (who in one of the interstital segments did an hilarious College Bowl spoof based on the history and mythology of civil defense) had particular fun with a scene showing a blind man walking down a New York street tapping with his cane, trying to find a shelter, and saying to no one in particular, “Help me.” Eventually all of downtown New York is incinerated — the estimate is that three million people have been killed — and though the final scenes offer hope (if you can call it that) that the U.S. will soon be able to retaliate, the last shot is of the door of a taxicab with a crack running through it and a title reading “Don’t Let This Be THE END.”
Rocket Attack, U.S.A. has it all: obnoxious politics, ridiculous plotting, a Cuisinart editing style, virtually nonexistent writing and direction (Barry Mahon took credit for the direction and he’s assumed to have written the script as well, but there’s no writer credit at all — not that I’d have wanted people to know it if I’d written something this silly), lousy acting and an overall air of incompetence that makes Plan Nine from Outer Space look like a deathless masterpiece by comparison (as I’ve said before, the more we’ve seen other people’s ultra-cheap sci-fi and horror films from the 1950’s, the better Ed Wood looks as a director!) — and the MST3K crew had a lot of fun with it, savoring its lameness and being particularly ridiculous about the voice-over narration that translated some of the Russian dialogue but not all of it, as well as paralleling the ending with that of a great atomic-annihilation movie, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, and evoking another Kubrick classic, 2001, in the scenes around the Russian rocket base — you haven’t lived until you’ve heard the MST3K crew do their impression of Gyorgi Ligeti’s vocal chants around the monolith on the moon!
They also showed the second episode of Bela Lugosi’s 1939 serial The Phantom Creeps, which had some potential off-camera (Ford Beebe co-directed with Saul S. Goodkind and the script was based on a story by Son of Frankenstein author Willis Cooper), sadly unrealized in a messy scenario that did an O.K. job of setting up the action and did nothing to stop Lugosi from floridly overacting every scene he’s in; the conceit is that Lugosi’s character has faked his own death and disguised himself by the simple expedient of shaving off his beard, but one would think his long-time associate, good scientist Dr. Fred Mallory (Edwin Stanley), would have easily recognized him the moment he heard That Voice. Not even a reunion between Lugosi and his Dracula cast-mate Edward Van Sloan (playing a character on the same side as Lugosi this time; he’s Jarvis, agent of a carefully unnamed foreign power that wants to buy all of Lugosi’s infernal inventions) can liven up this piece of cheese — though the famous giant-sized robot, which looks like an animate hot-water heater disguised as an Easter Island statue, is cool.
Charles and I watched something far less exalted than Australia: a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 presentation of a truly weird movie from 1961 called Rocket Attack U.S.A. I had assumed it would be another cheap-jack science-fiction movie with the tacky appeal of some of the others we’ve seen both on MST3K and “straight” — instead it turned out to be succinctly described on the imdb.com Web site as “a cold-war propaganda film, released not too long after the launch of Sputnik, intended to rally public support for an anti-ballistic missile program.”
What followed was an unwittingly surreal cinematic mess of which the first two-thirds were a somewhat straightforward espionage movie: super-agent John Manston (John McKay) is assigned to infiltrate Russia and get the secret of Russia’s new intercontinental ballistic missile — the idea being that once they launched Sputnik I they would acquire all the data they needed to avoid such problems as cosmic radiation and the gravitational pull of other planets and figure out how to build a missile that would wipe out New York City, and the Soviet military would overthrow the Communist party and take control so they could stage a first strike against the U.S. while our own missile program was still unable to stage a successful launch. He’s supposed to meet up with a Russian contact, Tannah (Monica Davis), whom he had met previously in Turkey where she was living with her Turkish husband before she sneaked back into Russia, where somehow she’s managed to become the mistress of the Soviet Minister of Defense — “and when he drinks, he talks,” she explains to John Manston, who insists on moving in with her even though her Defense Minister lover comes over frequently, which means Manston has to spend hours upon hours in the closet until the poor guy passes out from overindulging in vodka and he can finally come out and kiss her right in front of his unconscious body.
Anyway, she manages to worm out of him the secret that the Russian missile is about to be fired from a base in Leningrad — which is a top-secret installation guarded by about three people with all the security savvy of Paul Blart, Mall Cop. Though a “British” (quotes definitely in order since the actor playing him doesn’t even attempt a British accent!) agent gets caught and killed trying to infiltrate the base, Our Hero plants a bomb on the missile that’s supposed to blow it up before it’s launched — only the bomb fizzles and Manston and Tannah are both caught on the beach and killed. The scene abruptly shifts to New York City, where there’s been a series of air-raid drills that have had pretty much the effect of that boy who cried wolf — nobody’s at all impressed when the stentorian voices on the radio start announcing that this civil defense alert is real — and there’s a nostalgia-inducing bit for anyone who grew up listening to radios during the civil-defense era, when the idea was you were instructed to tune to 640 or 1240 AM if there was an attack because only those stations would remain on the air — and radios made then even came with little civil-defense symbols printed on those parts of the dial so you could easily find them if and when.
A whole new series of extraneous characters, including Art Metrano as a truck driver and Jane Ross as his wife (they, along with John McKay and Monica Davis, are the only actors in this movie identified with their roles on the imdb.com Web site, which is an indication of how obscure this movie really is), are introduced, and the MST3K crew (who in one of the interstital segments did an hilarious College Bowl spoof based on the history and mythology of civil defense) had particular fun with a scene showing a blind man walking down a New York street tapping with his cane, trying to find a shelter, and saying to no one in particular, “Help me.” Eventually all of downtown New York is incinerated — the estimate is that three million people have been killed — and though the final scenes offer hope (if you can call it that) that the U.S. will soon be able to retaliate, the last shot is of the door of a taxicab with a crack running through it and a title reading “Don’t Let This Be THE END.”
Rocket Attack, U.S.A. has it all: obnoxious politics, ridiculous plotting, a Cuisinart editing style, virtually nonexistent writing and direction (Barry Mahon took credit for the direction and he’s assumed to have written the script as well, but there’s no writer credit at all — not that I’d have wanted people to know it if I’d written something this silly), lousy acting and an overall air of incompetence that makes Plan Nine from Outer Space look like a deathless masterpiece by comparison (as I’ve said before, the more we’ve seen other people’s ultra-cheap sci-fi and horror films from the 1950’s, the better Ed Wood looks as a director!) — and the MST3K crew had a lot of fun with it, savoring its lameness and being particularly ridiculous about the voice-over narration that translated some of the Russian dialogue but not all of it, as well as paralleling the ending with that of a great atomic-annihilation movie, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, and evoking another Kubrick classic, 2001, in the scenes around the Russian rocket base — you haven’t lived until you’ve heard the MST3K crew do their impression of Gyorgi Ligeti’s vocal chants around the monolith on the moon!
They also showed the second episode of Bela Lugosi’s 1939 serial The Phantom Creeps, which had some potential off-camera (Ford Beebe co-directed with Saul S. Goodkind and the script was based on a story by Son of Frankenstein author Willis Cooper), sadly unrealized in a messy scenario that did an O.K. job of setting up the action and did nothing to stop Lugosi from floridly overacting every scene he’s in; the conceit is that Lugosi’s character has faked his own death and disguised himself by the simple expedient of shaving off his beard, but one would think his long-time associate, good scientist Dr. Fred Mallory (Edwin Stanley), would have easily recognized him the moment he heard That Voice. Not even a reunion between Lugosi and his Dracula cast-mate Edward Van Sloan (playing a character on the same side as Lugosi this time; he’s Jarvis, agent of a carefully unnamed foreign power that wants to buy all of Lugosi’s infernal inventions) can liven up this piece of cheese — though the famous giant-sized robot, which looks like an animate hot-water heater disguised as an Easter Island statue, is cool.
Friday, April 17, 2009
Three Days the Earth Stood Still
The 1940 Story “Farewell to the Master” and the 1951 and 2008 Film Versions
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The Day the Earth Stood Still began life as “Farewell to the Master,” a short story by Harry Bates, a pioneering science-fiction writer and editor who ran the magazine Astounding Stories of Super-Science from its inception in 1927 until its publishers, the Clayton Group, closed up shop in 1933 due to the Depression. According to Bob Gay, who wrote an introduction to “Farewell to the Master” for its online publication (http://thenostalgialeague.com/olmag/bates-farewell-to-the-master.html), Bates differed from Hugo Gernsback, editor of Amazing Stories (really the first science-fiction magazine), in being less interested in the details of a story’s scientific basis and more interested in action and plot construction. Bates wrote several stories himself while editing Astounding, but after its closure (it was later revived far more famously as Astounding Science Fiction under different ownership and with John W. Campbell as editor) he wrote surprisingly little and there is virtually no record of how he made his living between 1933 and 1981, when he died in obscurity.
“Farewell to the Master” was originally published in the October 1940 issue of Astounding Science Fiction and reprinted in the book It Came from Hollywood (a fabulous treasure trove of the original stories that inspired a lot of classic science-fiction movies even though they were sometimes hideously mangled in the adaptation), and anyone who comes to it expecting similarities with the 1951 movie will be shocked at how little the two have in common. “Farewell to the Master” takes place well into the future — in it, humans have already traveled safely to Mars on a spaceship of their own and also have developed ray guns and television — and its human protagonist is photojournalist Cliff Sutherland, who’s introduced visiting the new extension to the Smithsonian Institution built three months previously after a spaceship landed in Washington, D.C. bearing two passengers: a humanoid named Klaatu and a giant robot named Gnut. The spaceship landed and two days later it mysteriously opened and Klaatu got out. “It was immediately apparent to all the assembled thousands that the stranger was friendly,” Bates wrote. “ The first thing he did was to raise his right arm high in the universal gesture of peace; but it was not that which impressed those nearest so much as the expression on his face, which radiated kindness, wisdom, the purest nobility. In his delicately tinted robe he looked like a benign god.”
Alas, one human in attendance didn’t get the message; a religious fanatic pulled out a ray gun and killed Klaatu on the spot, thinking he was the devil come to enslave the human race. After Klaatu’s death, “Gnut, a little behind his master and to one side, slowly turned his body a little toward him, moved his head twice, and stood still, in exactly the position you now see him.” The robot has rested in the same position for three months when the story opens, and Sutherland, in the process of photographing him, spots a slight change in his position which makes him realize that — contrary to everyone else’s belief — Gnut has actually moved. Using the permission he has been granted to enter the museum any time he wishes (he’s been issued a key), Sutherland keeps watch on the exhibit — the spaceship, Gnut and the dead body of Klaatu, encased in a Plexiglas mummy case much like Lenin’s — and spots a nightingale, a gorilla and two replicas of Stillwell, the voice actor who recorded the tape played to visitors to the exhibit when the Smithsonian is open to the public.
Eventually it turns out that Gnut is experimenting with a nature film one of the curators of the Smithsonian left behind and doing tests on a technique of bringing a dead animal back to life by reverse-engineering based on a recording of its voice. The eventual object is for Gnut to restore Klaatu to life by this process, but because the recording of Klaatu’s voice (just one line, “I am Klaatu and this is Gnut,” in the few seconds between his emergence from the ship and his murder) was imperfect, the restoration can be only temporary. Sutherland offers to provide Gnut the exact same machine on which Klaatu’s voice was recorded, on the theory that the imperfections in recording and playback will cancel each other out, and thereby Gnut gets the power to create a longer-lasting replica of Klaatu and the two head back from wherever it is they came from, but not before Sutherland has offered Gnut an apology for Klaatu’s death:
“‘Gnut,’ he said earnestly, holding carefully the limp body in his arms, ‘you must do one thing for me. Listen carefully. I want you to tell your master — the master yet to come — that what happened to the first Klaatu was an accident, for which all Earth is immeasurably sorry. Will you do that?’
“‘I have known it,’ the robot answered gently.
“‘But will you promise to tell your master — just those words — as soon as he is arrived?’
“‘You misunderstand,’ said Gnut, still gently, and quietly spoke four more words. As Cliff heard them a mist passed over his eyes and his body went numb.
“As he recovered and his eyes came back to focus he saw the great ship disappear. It just suddenly was not there anymore. He fell back a step or two. In his ears, like great bells, rang Gnut’s last words. Never, never was he to disclose them ’til the day he came to die.
“‘You misunderstand,’ the mighty robot had said. ‘I am the master.’”
Most of the elements that have made the 1951 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still one of the most beloved science-fiction films of all time were added by its screenwriter, Edmund H. North. About all North kept from Bates’s story was the central premise of a spaceship landing in Washington, D.C., with a living being and a robot inside; the name “Klaatu” for the living passenger (though his change of name for the robot from “Gnut” to “Gort” was probably motivated simply by the desire to give the film’s actors something easier to pronounce); and a sequence in which the robot is encased in a slab of clear plastic to keep it immobilized, but is able to escape by increasing its own body temperature to melt the plastic off its metal-alloy skin. The purpose of Klaatu’s visit, left powerfully ambiguous in the story, was established by North as to save the rest of the universe from nuclear annihilation by either persuading Earth to disarm or else destroying it — making The Day the Earth Stood Still a surprisingly clear-cut “message” movie whose message of pacifism was audacious indeed for a film made at the height of the Hollywood blacklist, the McCarthy era and Cold War hysteria generally.
North also invented all the film’s human characters, including Helen Benson (Patricia Neal, who made this liberal message movie just three years after playing a role at the opposite end of the political spectrum in the film of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead), who works as a secretary in the Department of Commerce and makes extra money by renting rooms in her home to boarders. The film opens with Klaatu’s flying saucer (and indeed it is a flying saucer!) being tracked by astronomers and military personnel, who surround it when it lands on the Washington Ellipse; Klaatu (Michael Rennie) is shot almost as soon as he gets out of the craft but it’s by a soldier, not a freelance nutcase; and he’s merely wounded, not killed. He’s taken to a military hospital, where it’s revealed that his body is human — or at least close enough thereof that the surgeons can operate — but on the orders of the President’s chief of staff (Marshall Bradford), he’s locked in his room for further observation. Klaatu uses his superhuman powers to burn the lock off the door and escape, stealing a human suit and assuming the identity of its owner, “Carpenter” (a deliberate allusion to Jesus Christ and his earthly father’s trade, one of many religious metaphors in North’s script).
Deciding he needs to observe humans up close and personal to see if they should be exterminated or preserved, Klaatu stumbles upon Helen Benson’s boarding house, rents a room there and befriends her son Bobby (Billy Gray), whom Helen has been raising as a single mother since his dad was killed in World War II. The authorities mount a dragnet to recapture Klaatu, and with his entreaties to address all the world’s leaders at once predictably rebuffed, he seeks out the aid of scientist Prof. Jacob Barnhardt (Sam Jaffe), who’s depicted as such a goody two-shoes that Jaffe probably found his experience playing the High Lama of Shangri-La in Lost Horizon his most appropriate preparation for this role. Klaatu and the Bensons go to Barnhardt’s home and let themselves in even though the professor is out — Klaatu sees the equation in “cosmomechanics” Barnhardt is working on and writes a correction to it on the professor’s blackboard (according to one imdb.com contributor the character of Barnhardt was based on J. Robert Oppenheimer, who was fond of walking through the other scientists’ offices at the Manhattan Project and correcting their equations if he found something wrong with them), and eventually they work out an idea for a demonstration of the power of Klaatu’s race to enforce pacifist discipline on the earth: for one half-hour Klaatu and Gort will stop all electricity on earth, aside from hospitals and planes in flight. (Throughout the movie the aliens are shown as highly decorous and reverential towards human life; even when they’re getting shot at, Gort uses the heat ray that emanates from his visor merely to destroy the humans’ weaponry, not to kill or harm the soldiers themselves.) In a nice bit of irony, North has the blg blackout start while Klaatu and Helen Benson are in an elevator, trapping them inside for the duration.
The film’s well-known climax has the U.S. military attack the spaceship, which triggers Gort’s programming to destroy earth, only Klaatu has given Helen the stop-code — the now-famous words “Klaatu barada nikto” — and Gort gets back into the spaceship and he and the dying Klaatu return wherever it is they came from for a neat and daringly open-ended ending. Originally Edmund North had planned to have Gort bring Klaatu back to complete life after he was wounded (again) at the end — a conscious parallel to the myth of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection — but movie censor Joseph Breen insisted on adding a line in which Klaatu admits the supremacy of the Christian God (“That power [of resurrection] is reserved for the Almighty Spirit”), which sticks out like a sore thumb in the middle of North’s otherwise far more literate script but also — ironically — moves the story back a bit closer to its Batesian origins in making Klaatu’s revival only temporary.
The 1951 Day the Earth Stood Still holds up quite well. The special effects are pretty tacky by today’s standards (especially the final departure of the spaceship at the end) — though some shots, like the spaceship’s gangway opening up with no visible door (achieved by covering the whole thing with putty so the gate appeared to emerge mysteriously from an utterly smooth surface — likewise the appearance of seamlessness in Gort’s skin was achieved by building two Gort costumes, one laced in front and one laced in back, and having the actor who played him, 7’ 6” former Hollywood doorman Lock Martin, wear whichever one whose seams would not face the camera in each setup), still astonish. North’s script is literate, a bit talky but gripping in its audacity; and Robert Wise’s direction reveals his upbringing not only as a protégé of Val Lewton but, even before that, as an associate of Orson Welles (he and Mark Robson, also a future director, co-edited Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons). Though the connection may be just coincidental, it’s noteworthy that North’s script begins by announcing the imminent arrival of the aliens through footage of TV newscasters (real ones of the day — Elmer Davis, Drew Pearson, Gabriel Heatter — playing themselves) interrupting entertainment programming much the way Welles launched his famous radio broadcast of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds.
The film is basically quiet, thoughtful, intellectual (though not really cerebral the way Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Tarkovsky’s Solaris are) — the action sequences carry more punch because there are so few of them and they erupt so suddenly — and though there are some technical glitches (like a fast-motion shot of the crowd fleeing in panic as the spaceship opens — I’m sorry, but I associate fast-motion so totally with comedy that every time I see it I want to laugh), for the most part it’s a powerful, understated movie that makes its points (artistic and political) effectively without underlining them. It’s also got the remarkable Michael Rennie as the lead actor; like David Bowie in the 1970’s film The Man Who Fell to Earth, Rennie just looks otherworldly: tall, slender, bony and a bit gawky, as if still getting used to a human form on a planet with a different level of gravity from what he’s accustomed to, and speaking in a halting, rather stilted accent that also suggests an alien who has learned English (and all Earth’s other languages) from monitoring Earth’s radio and television broadcasts. Rennie got the part because after the first choice, Claude Rains, turned it down, director Wise decided he wanted an actor who wasn’t especially familiar to movie audiences and therefore would be more credible as an alien (just as Rains got his star-making role in The Invisible Man 18 years earlier, after Boris Karloff turned it down, because James Whale decided to cast someone little-known to movie audiences so they wouldn’t have a preconceived notion of what the invisible man “really” looked like).
It’s a deserved science-fiction classic (one of the handful of movies that have actually achieved something of the intellectual and moral complexity of the best written science fiction), and when I heard it was going to be remade — especially with Keanu Reeves as the star — I dreaded the thought of it becoming another barely motivated Matrix-style shoot-’em-up. Indeed, though most science-fiction fans regard the 1951 Day the Earth Stood Still as a classic, Ray Bradbury, in his introduction to the book It Came from Hollywood, lamented the changes made from Harry Bates’s source story and expressed the hope that if The Day the Earth Stood Still were ever remade, it would return to Bates’s plot. Needless to say, it didn’t — indeed, Bates isn’t even given screen credit (the writing credit for the 2008 Day the Earth Stood Still lists it as new writer David Scarpa’s adaptation of North’s original screenplay) — and the best thing I can say about the 2008 version is it’s a perfectly good science-fiction alien-visitation movie in its own right but it probably would seem better if it had been presented as an original without provoking comparisons to the classic original film (much as I thought Jean Rhys’s novel The Wide Sargasso Sea would have seemed better if she had just presented it as an 18th-century period piece instead of using the character names from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and offering it as a prequel depicting the courtship of Edward Rochester and his mad first wife).
Though nowhere near at the level of its predecessor, the 2008 Day the Earth Stood Still is actually a quite good sci-fi movie in the modern manner even if it suffers from the long shadows not only of the 1951 version but also of the Matrices, thanks to the ill-advised decision to cast Keanu Reeves as Klaatu. Not that Reeves acts the part badly — though he doesn’t look quite as weird as Michael Rennie he’s able in his own right to make us believe that he’s not only from another planet but he’s literally a newborn (in this version, Klaatu’s home planet sends out its emissaries encased in placental tissue and they’re only “born” in the form of the dominant species of the planet they’re visiting once their spaceship lands) — it’s just that it’s impossible not to think of Neo and get the idea that we’ve already seen him in this sort of role.
There are quite a few other changes, reflecting the difference between the Cold War and the War on Terror more than anything else and also the greater emancipation of women in our age, and screenwriter David Scarpa changed the evil Klaatu was sent to Earth to foil from nuclear annihilation to environmental destruction. In this version, Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly) isn’t a secretary; she’s a scientist, part of a group sent by agents of the Department of Homeland Security essentially to kidnap all the experts the government thinks it needs to figure out what Klaatu is, what he’s up to and how to fight it. Her son is changed into Jacob Benson (Jaden Smith), a racially ambiguous kid who isn’t actually any biological relation to her — Helen married Jacob’s dad only after his first wife, Jacob’s mom, died; then dad himself was killed in one of the U.S.’s 21st century wars (the script doesn’t specify whether it was Afghanistan or Iraq). What’s more, the Presidential advisor played by Marshall Bradford in 1951 is here changed into the Secretary of Defense, and is played by Kathy Bates in her most imperious manner — she turns in by far the best piece of acting in the film!
Much of the tension in this version comes from the same source as it did in 1951 — the scientists seeking to understand and communicate with the alien while the military just wants to blast it away — and before it cuts to the present day the new Day the Earth Stood Still has a prologue, set in India in 1928, showing a sphere-like object being opened and emitting (we only find out until reels and reels later) a previous visitor, who settles in and essentially “goes native,” turning up as an old man in 2008 and trying to talk Klaatu out of destroying the human race. Whereas in 1951 Klaatu came to earth to try to talk sense into its leaders and persuade them to disarm and give up war as a way of settling disputes lest their weaponry threaten other planets and the life-forms on them, in 2008 Klaatu comes committed to destroying the earth, but not before taking specimens of all its non-human life-forms so the earth can be repopulated after the holocaust, but exclusively with non-dangerous species.
There are also changes that seem designed more to show off today’s special-effects capabilities than because they make sense or aid in telling this story; Klaatu and Gort (whose name isn’t his own, but an Army acronym the military pins on him) arrive in spherical rather than saucer-like spaceships, they drop such craft all over the world as (essentially) arks, and when they decide to annihilate the human race after all (temporarily, before Helen talks them out of it), they do it by loosing hordes of very nasty flying insects that burrow into people’s skins and kill them. The director is someone named Scott Derrickson, who supposedly has been a long-time admirer of Robert Wise and has wanted to remake The Day the Earth Stood Still since 1993, and if his direction is functional rather than inspired, so was Wise’s. There’s nothing really wrong with the new version of The Day the Earth Stood Still; it’s inevitably disappointing compared to the incandescent original, but on its own it’s a good, solid, entertaining movie with a lot less gore than you might think from the way it’s billed (the DVD contains a blurb from the Watertown Daily Times saying, “This time there’s more action, more special effects and more mayhem!” — as if those were good things), fun and even moving but without quite the same magic as the original.
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The Day the Earth Stood Still began life as “Farewell to the Master,” a short story by Harry Bates, a pioneering science-fiction writer and editor who ran the magazine Astounding Stories of Super-Science from its inception in 1927 until its publishers, the Clayton Group, closed up shop in 1933 due to the Depression. According to Bob Gay, who wrote an introduction to “Farewell to the Master” for its online publication (http://thenostalgialeague.com/olmag/bates-farewell-to-the-master.html), Bates differed from Hugo Gernsback, editor of Amazing Stories (really the first science-fiction magazine), in being less interested in the details of a story’s scientific basis and more interested in action and plot construction. Bates wrote several stories himself while editing Astounding, but after its closure (it was later revived far more famously as Astounding Science Fiction under different ownership and with John W. Campbell as editor) he wrote surprisingly little and there is virtually no record of how he made his living between 1933 and 1981, when he died in obscurity.
“Farewell to the Master” was originally published in the October 1940 issue of Astounding Science Fiction and reprinted in the book It Came from Hollywood (a fabulous treasure trove of the original stories that inspired a lot of classic science-fiction movies even though they were sometimes hideously mangled in the adaptation), and anyone who comes to it expecting similarities with the 1951 movie will be shocked at how little the two have in common. “Farewell to the Master” takes place well into the future — in it, humans have already traveled safely to Mars on a spaceship of their own and also have developed ray guns and television — and its human protagonist is photojournalist Cliff Sutherland, who’s introduced visiting the new extension to the Smithsonian Institution built three months previously after a spaceship landed in Washington, D.C. bearing two passengers: a humanoid named Klaatu and a giant robot named Gnut. The spaceship landed and two days later it mysteriously opened and Klaatu got out. “It was immediately apparent to all the assembled thousands that the stranger was friendly,” Bates wrote. “ The first thing he did was to raise his right arm high in the universal gesture of peace; but it was not that which impressed those nearest so much as the expression on his face, which radiated kindness, wisdom, the purest nobility. In his delicately tinted robe he looked like a benign god.”
Alas, one human in attendance didn’t get the message; a religious fanatic pulled out a ray gun and killed Klaatu on the spot, thinking he was the devil come to enslave the human race. After Klaatu’s death, “Gnut, a little behind his master and to one side, slowly turned his body a little toward him, moved his head twice, and stood still, in exactly the position you now see him.” The robot has rested in the same position for three months when the story opens, and Sutherland, in the process of photographing him, spots a slight change in his position which makes him realize that — contrary to everyone else’s belief — Gnut has actually moved. Using the permission he has been granted to enter the museum any time he wishes (he’s been issued a key), Sutherland keeps watch on the exhibit — the spaceship, Gnut and the dead body of Klaatu, encased in a Plexiglas mummy case much like Lenin’s — and spots a nightingale, a gorilla and two replicas of Stillwell, the voice actor who recorded the tape played to visitors to the exhibit when the Smithsonian is open to the public.
Eventually it turns out that Gnut is experimenting with a nature film one of the curators of the Smithsonian left behind and doing tests on a technique of bringing a dead animal back to life by reverse-engineering based on a recording of its voice. The eventual object is for Gnut to restore Klaatu to life by this process, but because the recording of Klaatu’s voice (just one line, “I am Klaatu and this is Gnut,” in the few seconds between his emergence from the ship and his murder) was imperfect, the restoration can be only temporary. Sutherland offers to provide Gnut the exact same machine on which Klaatu’s voice was recorded, on the theory that the imperfections in recording and playback will cancel each other out, and thereby Gnut gets the power to create a longer-lasting replica of Klaatu and the two head back from wherever it is they came from, but not before Sutherland has offered Gnut an apology for Klaatu’s death:
“‘Gnut,’ he said earnestly, holding carefully the limp body in his arms, ‘you must do one thing for me. Listen carefully. I want you to tell your master — the master yet to come — that what happened to the first Klaatu was an accident, for which all Earth is immeasurably sorry. Will you do that?’
“‘I have known it,’ the robot answered gently.
“‘But will you promise to tell your master — just those words — as soon as he is arrived?’
“‘You misunderstand,’ said Gnut, still gently, and quietly spoke four more words. As Cliff heard them a mist passed over his eyes and his body went numb.
“As he recovered and his eyes came back to focus he saw the great ship disappear. It just suddenly was not there anymore. He fell back a step or two. In his ears, like great bells, rang Gnut’s last words. Never, never was he to disclose them ’til the day he came to die.
“‘You misunderstand,’ the mighty robot had said. ‘I am the master.’”
Most of the elements that have made the 1951 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still one of the most beloved science-fiction films of all time were added by its screenwriter, Edmund H. North. About all North kept from Bates’s story was the central premise of a spaceship landing in Washington, D.C., with a living being and a robot inside; the name “Klaatu” for the living passenger (though his change of name for the robot from “Gnut” to “Gort” was probably motivated simply by the desire to give the film’s actors something easier to pronounce); and a sequence in which the robot is encased in a slab of clear plastic to keep it immobilized, but is able to escape by increasing its own body temperature to melt the plastic off its metal-alloy skin. The purpose of Klaatu’s visit, left powerfully ambiguous in the story, was established by North as to save the rest of the universe from nuclear annihilation by either persuading Earth to disarm or else destroying it — making The Day the Earth Stood Still a surprisingly clear-cut “message” movie whose message of pacifism was audacious indeed for a film made at the height of the Hollywood blacklist, the McCarthy era and Cold War hysteria generally.
North also invented all the film’s human characters, including Helen Benson (Patricia Neal, who made this liberal message movie just three years after playing a role at the opposite end of the political spectrum in the film of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead), who works as a secretary in the Department of Commerce and makes extra money by renting rooms in her home to boarders. The film opens with Klaatu’s flying saucer (and indeed it is a flying saucer!) being tracked by astronomers and military personnel, who surround it when it lands on the Washington Ellipse; Klaatu (Michael Rennie) is shot almost as soon as he gets out of the craft but it’s by a soldier, not a freelance nutcase; and he’s merely wounded, not killed. He’s taken to a military hospital, where it’s revealed that his body is human — or at least close enough thereof that the surgeons can operate — but on the orders of the President’s chief of staff (Marshall Bradford), he’s locked in his room for further observation. Klaatu uses his superhuman powers to burn the lock off the door and escape, stealing a human suit and assuming the identity of its owner, “Carpenter” (a deliberate allusion to Jesus Christ and his earthly father’s trade, one of many religious metaphors in North’s script).
Deciding he needs to observe humans up close and personal to see if they should be exterminated or preserved, Klaatu stumbles upon Helen Benson’s boarding house, rents a room there and befriends her son Bobby (Billy Gray), whom Helen has been raising as a single mother since his dad was killed in World War II. The authorities mount a dragnet to recapture Klaatu, and with his entreaties to address all the world’s leaders at once predictably rebuffed, he seeks out the aid of scientist Prof. Jacob Barnhardt (Sam Jaffe), who’s depicted as such a goody two-shoes that Jaffe probably found his experience playing the High Lama of Shangri-La in Lost Horizon his most appropriate preparation for this role. Klaatu and the Bensons go to Barnhardt’s home and let themselves in even though the professor is out — Klaatu sees the equation in “cosmomechanics” Barnhardt is working on and writes a correction to it on the professor’s blackboard (according to one imdb.com contributor the character of Barnhardt was based on J. Robert Oppenheimer, who was fond of walking through the other scientists’ offices at the Manhattan Project and correcting their equations if he found something wrong with them), and eventually they work out an idea for a demonstration of the power of Klaatu’s race to enforce pacifist discipline on the earth: for one half-hour Klaatu and Gort will stop all electricity on earth, aside from hospitals and planes in flight. (Throughout the movie the aliens are shown as highly decorous and reverential towards human life; even when they’re getting shot at, Gort uses the heat ray that emanates from his visor merely to destroy the humans’ weaponry, not to kill or harm the soldiers themselves.) In a nice bit of irony, North has the blg blackout start while Klaatu and Helen Benson are in an elevator, trapping them inside for the duration.
The film’s well-known climax has the U.S. military attack the spaceship, which triggers Gort’s programming to destroy earth, only Klaatu has given Helen the stop-code — the now-famous words “Klaatu barada nikto” — and Gort gets back into the spaceship and he and the dying Klaatu return wherever it is they came from for a neat and daringly open-ended ending. Originally Edmund North had planned to have Gort bring Klaatu back to complete life after he was wounded (again) at the end — a conscious parallel to the myth of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection — but movie censor Joseph Breen insisted on adding a line in which Klaatu admits the supremacy of the Christian God (“That power [of resurrection] is reserved for the Almighty Spirit”), which sticks out like a sore thumb in the middle of North’s otherwise far more literate script but also — ironically — moves the story back a bit closer to its Batesian origins in making Klaatu’s revival only temporary.
The 1951 Day the Earth Stood Still holds up quite well. The special effects are pretty tacky by today’s standards (especially the final departure of the spaceship at the end) — though some shots, like the spaceship’s gangway opening up with no visible door (achieved by covering the whole thing with putty so the gate appeared to emerge mysteriously from an utterly smooth surface — likewise the appearance of seamlessness in Gort’s skin was achieved by building two Gort costumes, one laced in front and one laced in back, and having the actor who played him, 7’ 6” former Hollywood doorman Lock Martin, wear whichever one whose seams would not face the camera in each setup), still astonish. North’s script is literate, a bit talky but gripping in its audacity; and Robert Wise’s direction reveals his upbringing not only as a protégé of Val Lewton but, even before that, as an associate of Orson Welles (he and Mark Robson, also a future director, co-edited Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons). Though the connection may be just coincidental, it’s noteworthy that North’s script begins by announcing the imminent arrival of the aliens through footage of TV newscasters (real ones of the day — Elmer Davis, Drew Pearson, Gabriel Heatter — playing themselves) interrupting entertainment programming much the way Welles launched his famous radio broadcast of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds.
The film is basically quiet, thoughtful, intellectual (though not really cerebral the way Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and Tarkovsky’s Solaris are) — the action sequences carry more punch because there are so few of them and they erupt so suddenly — and though there are some technical glitches (like a fast-motion shot of the crowd fleeing in panic as the spaceship opens — I’m sorry, but I associate fast-motion so totally with comedy that every time I see it I want to laugh), for the most part it’s a powerful, understated movie that makes its points (artistic and political) effectively without underlining them. It’s also got the remarkable Michael Rennie as the lead actor; like David Bowie in the 1970’s film The Man Who Fell to Earth, Rennie just looks otherworldly: tall, slender, bony and a bit gawky, as if still getting used to a human form on a planet with a different level of gravity from what he’s accustomed to, and speaking in a halting, rather stilted accent that also suggests an alien who has learned English (and all Earth’s other languages) from monitoring Earth’s radio and television broadcasts. Rennie got the part because after the first choice, Claude Rains, turned it down, director Wise decided he wanted an actor who wasn’t especially familiar to movie audiences and therefore would be more credible as an alien (just as Rains got his star-making role in The Invisible Man 18 years earlier, after Boris Karloff turned it down, because James Whale decided to cast someone little-known to movie audiences so they wouldn’t have a preconceived notion of what the invisible man “really” looked like).
It’s a deserved science-fiction classic (one of the handful of movies that have actually achieved something of the intellectual and moral complexity of the best written science fiction), and when I heard it was going to be remade — especially with Keanu Reeves as the star — I dreaded the thought of it becoming another barely motivated Matrix-style shoot-’em-up. Indeed, though most science-fiction fans regard the 1951 Day the Earth Stood Still as a classic, Ray Bradbury, in his introduction to the book It Came from Hollywood, lamented the changes made from Harry Bates’s source story and expressed the hope that if The Day the Earth Stood Still were ever remade, it would return to Bates’s plot. Needless to say, it didn’t — indeed, Bates isn’t even given screen credit (the writing credit for the 2008 Day the Earth Stood Still lists it as new writer David Scarpa’s adaptation of North’s original screenplay) — and the best thing I can say about the 2008 version is it’s a perfectly good science-fiction alien-visitation movie in its own right but it probably would seem better if it had been presented as an original without provoking comparisons to the classic original film (much as I thought Jean Rhys’s novel The Wide Sargasso Sea would have seemed better if she had just presented it as an 18th-century period piece instead of using the character names from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and offering it as a prequel depicting the courtship of Edward Rochester and his mad first wife).
Though nowhere near at the level of its predecessor, the 2008 Day the Earth Stood Still is actually a quite good sci-fi movie in the modern manner even if it suffers from the long shadows not only of the 1951 version but also of the Matrices, thanks to the ill-advised decision to cast Keanu Reeves as Klaatu. Not that Reeves acts the part badly — though he doesn’t look quite as weird as Michael Rennie he’s able in his own right to make us believe that he’s not only from another planet but he’s literally a newborn (in this version, Klaatu’s home planet sends out its emissaries encased in placental tissue and they’re only “born” in the form of the dominant species of the planet they’re visiting once their spaceship lands) — it’s just that it’s impossible not to think of Neo and get the idea that we’ve already seen him in this sort of role.
There are quite a few other changes, reflecting the difference between the Cold War and the War on Terror more than anything else and also the greater emancipation of women in our age, and screenwriter David Scarpa changed the evil Klaatu was sent to Earth to foil from nuclear annihilation to environmental destruction. In this version, Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly) isn’t a secretary; she’s a scientist, part of a group sent by agents of the Department of Homeland Security essentially to kidnap all the experts the government thinks it needs to figure out what Klaatu is, what he’s up to and how to fight it. Her son is changed into Jacob Benson (Jaden Smith), a racially ambiguous kid who isn’t actually any biological relation to her — Helen married Jacob’s dad only after his first wife, Jacob’s mom, died; then dad himself was killed in one of the U.S.’s 21st century wars (the script doesn’t specify whether it was Afghanistan or Iraq). What’s more, the Presidential advisor played by Marshall Bradford in 1951 is here changed into the Secretary of Defense, and is played by Kathy Bates in her most imperious manner — she turns in by far the best piece of acting in the film!
Much of the tension in this version comes from the same source as it did in 1951 — the scientists seeking to understand and communicate with the alien while the military just wants to blast it away — and before it cuts to the present day the new Day the Earth Stood Still has a prologue, set in India in 1928, showing a sphere-like object being opened and emitting (we only find out until reels and reels later) a previous visitor, who settles in and essentially “goes native,” turning up as an old man in 2008 and trying to talk Klaatu out of destroying the human race. Whereas in 1951 Klaatu came to earth to try to talk sense into its leaders and persuade them to disarm and give up war as a way of settling disputes lest their weaponry threaten other planets and the life-forms on them, in 2008 Klaatu comes committed to destroying the earth, but not before taking specimens of all its non-human life-forms so the earth can be repopulated after the holocaust, but exclusively with non-dangerous species.
There are also changes that seem designed more to show off today’s special-effects capabilities than because they make sense or aid in telling this story; Klaatu and Gort (whose name isn’t his own, but an Army acronym the military pins on him) arrive in spherical rather than saucer-like spaceships, they drop such craft all over the world as (essentially) arks, and when they decide to annihilate the human race after all (temporarily, before Helen talks them out of it), they do it by loosing hordes of very nasty flying insects that burrow into people’s skins and kill them. The director is someone named Scott Derrickson, who supposedly has been a long-time admirer of Robert Wise and has wanted to remake The Day the Earth Stood Still since 1993, and if his direction is functional rather than inspired, so was Wise’s. There’s nothing really wrong with the new version of The Day the Earth Stood Still; it’s inevitably disappointing compared to the incandescent original, but on its own it’s a good, solid, entertaining movie with a lot less gore than you might think from the way it’s billed (the DVD contains a blurb from the Watertown Daily Times saying, “This time there’s more action, more special effects and more mayhem!” — as if those were good things), fun and even moving but without quite the same magic as the original.
You Said a Mouthful (Warners/First National, 1932)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
You Said a Mouthful is a Joe E. Brown comedy from Warner Bros. (in “First National” drag — apparently the use of both trade names was a condition of the U.S. government’s antitrust division for approving the 1928 merger of Warners and First National — that they had at least to maintain the fiction of being two separate entities: an especially fascinating factoid in an era in which antitrust seems to have gone the way of the dodo about 30 years ago when Ronald Reagan, former Warners contract player who hated antitrust because he believed it had been what did in the studio system, became president!) recently shown on TCM as part of a day-long tribute to Ginger Rogers that focused on some of her most obscure early credits.
Directed (unusually energetically) by all-purpose Warners hack Lloyd Bacon from a script by Robert Lord and Bolton Mallory from a story by William B. Dover, You Said a Mouthful was a typical Brown vehicle in which, as Joe Holt, a shipping clerk for the Armstrong Rubber Goods and Swimming Wear company, he devises a material from which he can make a bathing suit that will render its wearer unsinkable and thereby cut the rate of people drowning in oceans, lakes and pools. Needless to say, his boss isn’t interested in it and his co-workers keep playing practical jokes on him, so he’s only too glad to escape when he receives word (which at first he thinks is just another rib) that he’s inherited a fortune from a recently deceased aunt in California. Alas, when he gets there he finds (apparently, to paraphrase Dorothy Parker, none of the writers ever outlined this story to a friend and said, “Stop me if you’ve heard this before”) that the “inheritance” is a bunch of worthless shares of stocks in companies that have long since gone bankrupt and $105 in cash, of which the attorneys handling the estate (Bernstein, Bernstein, Bernstein and Jones — one wonders if their offices adjoin those of Hungerdunger, Hungerdunger, Hungerdunger, Hungerdunger and McCormack from the Marx Brothers’ Animal Crackers) take $100 as their fee. Joe also finds that his aunt’s will has obliged him to care for Sam Wellington (Farina from the “Our Gang” series at Hal Roach, later known on TV as “The Little Rascals”), the young Black son of her former servant.
The two apply for jobs on the steamer from Los Angeles to Catalina Island (which played itself in this film; a quarter-century later it would play the Salton Sea in The Monster That Challenged the World!), where Holt is paged by Alice Brandon (Ginger Rogers), daughter of Tom Brandon (Walter Walker), a wealthy man who sponsors an annual swimming race from Catalina to the mainland. Alice has mistaken Holt for another person of the same name, an Australian long-distance swimmer whom the Brandons are sponsoring in the big race. The favorite is Ed Dover (Preston Foster, billed as “Preston S. Foster” here), the typical movie egomaniac hunk — and of course we know where this is going: though Our Hero’s previous experience as a swimmer has been confined to bathtubs, nonetheless he’s going to swim in the race and win both the race and Alice’s hand against Ed, his rival. It’s also clear that the writers have deposited that unsinkable bathing suit Holt has invented into the Screenwriters’ Cliché Bank to be withdrawn as needed — though the twist is that, thinking she’s doing him a favor, Alice sneaks into Joe’s room and substitutes a normal swimsuit for Holt’s invention, so he goes out thinking he’s unsinkable but really isn’t.
The movie ends the way you’d expect it to, but what makes it special is the writers’ firmly tongue-in-cheek attitude towards their material, their obvious awareness that not only is the expected outcome utterly impossible but that their audience knows that, too, so they can play around with the situation and riff on the sheer unlikeliness of it all as part of their plot — and by far the best gag in the movie is the sequence in which Joe gets an unfair advantage (not that we mind!) by hitching a tow from a swordfish (mistakenly identified in the American Film Institute Catalog as a shark) and speeding through about half the course far faster than any unaided human, no matter how well trained, could do. It’s not much of a Ginger Rogers credit — she’s there and she’s recognizable, and that’s about all that can be said for her acting here — but it’s a fun movie anyway.
You Said a Mouthful is a Joe E. Brown comedy from Warner Bros. (in “First National” drag — apparently the use of both trade names was a condition of the U.S. government’s antitrust division for approving the 1928 merger of Warners and First National — that they had at least to maintain the fiction of being two separate entities: an especially fascinating factoid in an era in which antitrust seems to have gone the way of the dodo about 30 years ago when Ronald Reagan, former Warners contract player who hated antitrust because he believed it had been what did in the studio system, became president!) recently shown on TCM as part of a day-long tribute to Ginger Rogers that focused on some of her most obscure early credits.
Directed (unusually energetically) by all-purpose Warners hack Lloyd Bacon from a script by Robert Lord and Bolton Mallory from a story by William B. Dover, You Said a Mouthful was a typical Brown vehicle in which, as Joe Holt, a shipping clerk for the Armstrong Rubber Goods and Swimming Wear company, he devises a material from which he can make a bathing suit that will render its wearer unsinkable and thereby cut the rate of people drowning in oceans, lakes and pools. Needless to say, his boss isn’t interested in it and his co-workers keep playing practical jokes on him, so he’s only too glad to escape when he receives word (which at first he thinks is just another rib) that he’s inherited a fortune from a recently deceased aunt in California. Alas, when he gets there he finds (apparently, to paraphrase Dorothy Parker, none of the writers ever outlined this story to a friend and said, “Stop me if you’ve heard this before”) that the “inheritance” is a bunch of worthless shares of stocks in companies that have long since gone bankrupt and $105 in cash, of which the attorneys handling the estate (Bernstein, Bernstein, Bernstein and Jones — one wonders if their offices adjoin those of Hungerdunger, Hungerdunger, Hungerdunger, Hungerdunger and McCormack from the Marx Brothers’ Animal Crackers) take $100 as their fee. Joe also finds that his aunt’s will has obliged him to care for Sam Wellington (Farina from the “Our Gang” series at Hal Roach, later known on TV as “The Little Rascals”), the young Black son of her former servant.
The two apply for jobs on the steamer from Los Angeles to Catalina Island (which played itself in this film; a quarter-century later it would play the Salton Sea in The Monster That Challenged the World!), where Holt is paged by Alice Brandon (Ginger Rogers), daughter of Tom Brandon (Walter Walker), a wealthy man who sponsors an annual swimming race from Catalina to the mainland. Alice has mistaken Holt for another person of the same name, an Australian long-distance swimmer whom the Brandons are sponsoring in the big race. The favorite is Ed Dover (Preston Foster, billed as “Preston S. Foster” here), the typical movie egomaniac hunk — and of course we know where this is going: though Our Hero’s previous experience as a swimmer has been confined to bathtubs, nonetheless he’s going to swim in the race and win both the race and Alice’s hand against Ed, his rival. It’s also clear that the writers have deposited that unsinkable bathing suit Holt has invented into the Screenwriters’ Cliché Bank to be withdrawn as needed — though the twist is that, thinking she’s doing him a favor, Alice sneaks into Joe’s room and substitutes a normal swimsuit for Holt’s invention, so he goes out thinking he’s unsinkable but really isn’t.
The movie ends the way you’d expect it to, but what makes it special is the writers’ firmly tongue-in-cheek attitude towards their material, their obvious awareness that not only is the expected outcome utterly impossible but that their audience knows that, too, so they can play around with the situation and riff on the sheer unlikeliness of it all as part of their plot — and by far the best gag in the movie is the sequence in which Joe gets an unfair advantage (not that we mind!) by hitching a tow from a swordfish (mistakenly identified in the American Film Institute Catalog as a shark) and speeding through about half the course far faster than any unaided human, no matter how well trained, could do. It’s not much of a Ginger Rogers credit — she’s there and she’s recognizable, and that’s about all that can be said for her acting here — but it’s a fun movie anyway.
The Monster That Challenged the World (United Artists, 1957)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film I picked out was The Monster That Challenged the World, which was a 1957 entry from producers Jules V. Levey (the man behind the 1947 film New Orleans, which was actually pretty good but would have been far better if its African-American leads, Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday, had been permitted to star without interference from a decidedly “C”-list white cast enacting a clichéd plot whose resemblance to the 1936 MGM San Francisco had eluded me until Charles pointed it out) and Arthur Gardner, director Arnold Laven and writers David Duncan (story) and Pat Fiedler (script). This film doesn’t appear on the complete list of extant Mystery Science Theatre 3000 episodes but it might as well have; made with the infrastructure of a major studio behind it, The Monster That Challenged the World was at least somewhat more credible than the cheapies American International and even smaller producers were cranking out for the drive-in audience at the time, but it was still a sci-fi monster movie from the 1950’s with all the vicissitudes of the genre.
This one takes place at a Navy base in the Salton Sea area, with Navy paratroopers doing practice runs jumping into it — only one of them lands in the water and then doesn’t re-emerge even after the boat that’s supposed to pick him up arrives. The two sailors on the boat dive into the sea at that point and they both get killed, one being eaten by the titular monster that’s about to challenge the world and the other dying of fright as the monster, who is apparently amphibious, gets out of the water and appears before them. Then a “fast” girl in the surrounding community runs away from her overprotective mom (who runs a diner that services the servicemen) to go for a dip in the sea with her boyfriend — and they get eaten (as with a lot of movies of this type, the monster is surprisingly decorous and moral, enforcing the standard rules by picking on people having supposedly illicit sex to kill). The key dramatis personae are Navy investigator Lt. Commander John “Twill” Terwilliger (Tim Holt, whose career trajectory remains one of Hollywood’s most bizarre mysteries; he appeared in two of the greatest films ever made, Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons and John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, but most of his movies were “B” Westerns and other cheapies), who takes charge of the investigation and uncovers the giant monster (actually “monsters,” plural, more on that later); Gail MacKenzie (Audrey Dalton), secretary in the base’s research facility (and a single mother who’s raising a less-obnoxious-than-usual movie child whose daddy died in the backstory); and the head of the lab, Dr. Jess Rogers (Hans Conried — TCM was showing this as part of a day-long tribute to him that also included The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. “T” and The Twonky, the latter a guilty pleasure of mine even though its maker, writer-director Arch Oboler, took a marvelously sinister science-fiction story by the great Henry Kuttner and turned it into an appallingly unfunny so-called “comedy” — and here he overacted a good deal less than usual even though, as usual, he obstinately refused to appear on-screen with his hair combed), who figures out what the monster looks like from the residue it leaves on anything it walks on, which looks like a combination of marshmallow cream and semen but turns out to be radioactive.
Director Laven has quite a few things going for him, including a budget several ticks above what Roger Corman and the other American International directors had to work with in making a story like this, actors who can actually deliver a line with a simulacrum of reality instead of the almost porn-star incompetence of some of the people who made movies like this for the cheap companies, and a flair for shock cutting that actually makes the movie’s monster genuinely frightening in a couple of places. Mostly, though, this is a film that falls apart thanks to the risible appearance of the monster, who’s more credible than most of them in films of this era and type but still looks pretty silly — as if the writers couldn’t decide whether he was supposed to be an oversized snail, an oversized slug or an oversized crab, so they gave him aspects of all three and also made him amphibious, so he can move about either under water (and picturesquely strangle a sea diver who’s down there looking for him) or on land (where he stands upright — how? — and munches on people far away from the Salton Sea or any other body of water).
There are some interesting plot twists in the later reels as the monster starts sneaking into the canals that lead out of the Salton Sea and the scientists start worrying that it will start laying eggs (so I guess I should have used the female pronoun above!) and they will hatch and create such a large quantity of its species that they will literally threaten all life on earth. They drop a lot of depth charges into the sea at the points where they determine the monsters have their lairs, but in the meantime one monster egg they’ve had inside the lab hatches and briefly threatens Gail MacKenzie’s daughter Sandy (Mimi Gibson) before “Twill” and the other good guys regain control of the lab and dispatch it to monster heaven (or monster hell, take your pick). The Monster That Challenged the World is better than most of the examples of its genre but not so much better that we wouldn’t have wanted to see it get the full MST3K “treatment” — and when I started to nod off midway through Charles joked, “Of course it’s putting you to sleep — you don’t have the guy and two robots to keep it interesting!”It’s also worth noting that this morning’s Los Angeles Times ran an obituary for Joel McCrea’s son Jody, who is actually in The Monster That Challenged the World — he followed in his dad’s (and his mom’s, Frances Dee) footsteps as a movie actor but didn’t have anywhere near the career they did, with his most famous credits coming as the comic-relief sidekick to Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello in the Beach Party movies.
The film I picked out was The Monster That Challenged the World, which was a 1957 entry from producers Jules V. Levey (the man behind the 1947 film New Orleans, which was actually pretty good but would have been far better if its African-American leads, Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday, had been permitted to star without interference from a decidedly “C”-list white cast enacting a clichéd plot whose resemblance to the 1936 MGM San Francisco had eluded me until Charles pointed it out) and Arthur Gardner, director Arnold Laven and writers David Duncan (story) and Pat Fiedler (script). This film doesn’t appear on the complete list of extant Mystery Science Theatre 3000 episodes but it might as well have; made with the infrastructure of a major studio behind it, The Monster That Challenged the World was at least somewhat more credible than the cheapies American International and even smaller producers were cranking out for the drive-in audience at the time, but it was still a sci-fi monster movie from the 1950’s with all the vicissitudes of the genre.
This one takes place at a Navy base in the Salton Sea area, with Navy paratroopers doing practice runs jumping into it — only one of them lands in the water and then doesn’t re-emerge even after the boat that’s supposed to pick him up arrives. The two sailors on the boat dive into the sea at that point and they both get killed, one being eaten by the titular monster that’s about to challenge the world and the other dying of fright as the monster, who is apparently amphibious, gets out of the water and appears before them. Then a “fast” girl in the surrounding community runs away from her overprotective mom (who runs a diner that services the servicemen) to go for a dip in the sea with her boyfriend — and they get eaten (as with a lot of movies of this type, the monster is surprisingly decorous and moral, enforcing the standard rules by picking on people having supposedly illicit sex to kill). The key dramatis personae are Navy investigator Lt. Commander John “Twill” Terwilliger (Tim Holt, whose career trajectory remains one of Hollywood’s most bizarre mysteries; he appeared in two of the greatest films ever made, Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons and John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, but most of his movies were “B” Westerns and other cheapies), who takes charge of the investigation and uncovers the giant monster (actually “monsters,” plural, more on that later); Gail MacKenzie (Audrey Dalton), secretary in the base’s research facility (and a single mother who’s raising a less-obnoxious-than-usual movie child whose daddy died in the backstory); and the head of the lab, Dr. Jess Rogers (Hans Conried — TCM was showing this as part of a day-long tribute to him that also included The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. “T” and The Twonky, the latter a guilty pleasure of mine even though its maker, writer-director Arch Oboler, took a marvelously sinister science-fiction story by the great Henry Kuttner and turned it into an appallingly unfunny so-called “comedy” — and here he overacted a good deal less than usual even though, as usual, he obstinately refused to appear on-screen with his hair combed), who figures out what the monster looks like from the residue it leaves on anything it walks on, which looks like a combination of marshmallow cream and semen but turns out to be radioactive.
Director Laven has quite a few things going for him, including a budget several ticks above what Roger Corman and the other American International directors had to work with in making a story like this, actors who can actually deliver a line with a simulacrum of reality instead of the almost porn-star incompetence of some of the people who made movies like this for the cheap companies, and a flair for shock cutting that actually makes the movie’s monster genuinely frightening in a couple of places. Mostly, though, this is a film that falls apart thanks to the risible appearance of the monster, who’s more credible than most of them in films of this era and type but still looks pretty silly — as if the writers couldn’t decide whether he was supposed to be an oversized snail, an oversized slug or an oversized crab, so they gave him aspects of all three and also made him amphibious, so he can move about either under water (and picturesquely strangle a sea diver who’s down there looking for him) or on land (where he stands upright — how? — and munches on people far away from the Salton Sea or any other body of water).
There are some interesting plot twists in the later reels as the monster starts sneaking into the canals that lead out of the Salton Sea and the scientists start worrying that it will start laying eggs (so I guess I should have used the female pronoun above!) and they will hatch and create such a large quantity of its species that they will literally threaten all life on earth. They drop a lot of depth charges into the sea at the points where they determine the monsters have their lairs, but in the meantime one monster egg they’ve had inside the lab hatches and briefly threatens Gail MacKenzie’s daughter Sandy (Mimi Gibson) before “Twill” and the other good guys regain control of the lab and dispatch it to monster heaven (or monster hell, take your pick). The Monster That Challenged the World is better than most of the examples of its genre but not so much better that we wouldn’t have wanted to see it get the full MST3K “treatment” — and when I started to nod off midway through Charles joked, “Of course it’s putting you to sleep — you don’t have the guy and two robots to keep it interesting!”It’s also worth noting that this morning’s Los Angeles Times ran an obituary for Joel McCrea’s son Jody, who is actually in The Monster That Challenged the World — he followed in his dad’s (and his mom’s, Frances Dee) footsteps as a movie actor but didn’t have anywhere near the career they did, with his most famous credits coming as the comic-relief sidekick to Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello in the Beach Party movies.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
The Tip-Off (RKO-Pathé, 1931)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The Tip-Off is a 1931 RKO-Pathé production from the same team (Charles Rogers, producer; Harry Joe Brown, associate producer; Albert S. Rogell, director) that brought us Carnival Boat the following year, and also featuring Ginger Rogers in the female lead, though in this case the men were by far the most important characters: the billing had Eddie Quillan’s and Robert Armstrong’s names in big letters above the title, and then below the title in really tiny type it said, “And Ginger Rogers.” It’s a quite charming movie even though a good deal more could have been made of its almost surreal genre shifts, and it could have used both a better star than Quillan (like Buster Keaton) and a better director (like Preston Sturges).
It begins as a proletarian drama with Eddie Quillan as Tommy Jordan, a radio repairman with dreams of stardom — when he’s introduced he’s standing in the window of the store where he works, miming to a rendition of “I Surrender, Dear” and drawing an admiring crowd which quickly disperses when he’s called away on a job while the record continues to play (though the voice he’s lip-synching to appears to be Quillan’s own). The call he’s sent out on is to the home of “Babyface” (Ginger Rogers) — the character has no other name — and he comes upon her while she’s bathing her feet and gets a good look at her legs (oddly fatter than we remember them from her later movies with Fred Astaire — apparently all those dance rehearsals really slimmed them down!). They embark on a tentative flirtation that goes as far as her mixing drinks for them when suddenly her very jealous boyfriend, middleweight boxing contender “Kayo” McClure (couldn’t writers George Kibbe Turner and Earl Baldwin be bothered with thinking up normal names for the protagonists?) — played by Robert Armstrong a year after he’d made the movie Be Yourself with Fanny Brice, in which he also played a boxer — comes home, and Babyface bids Tommy hide under the bed.
When he finally emerges because he thinks Kayo has left, he ends up in the middle of a confrontation between Kayo and a gang led by gangster Nick Vatelli (Ralf Harolde). Kayo has been managed by Vatelli but he’s trying to break the contract, and Vatelli wants him to renew it … or else. Tommy uses the same voice amplifier he used back at the radio store to trick Vatelli into believing that the cops are staking out the place, Vatelli’s gangsters leave and Kayo rewards Tommy by giving him tickets to an upcoming dance — where Babyface wants to dance with him, but scared of Kayo’s possible reaction, Tommy refuses. (“Jerk!” I wanted to yell at him. “You just turned down a chance to dance with Ginger Rogers!” Then Charles pointed out to me that when this movie was made nobody cared whether Ginger Rogers could dance.) Instead Tommy leaps from the frying pan into the fire by picking as his dancing partner Vatelli’s girlfriend, Edna Moreno (Joan Peers), and what’s more he actually falls in love with her — and she with him, though she’s too concerned about his safety to dare bringing down Vatelli’s wrath on him by continuing to date him. It all comes to a head when both Tommy and Kayo learn that Edna is about to marry Vatelli at a restaurant variously called Sarno’s (in the dialogue) and Scarno’s (on screen), and the movie suddenly becomes a grim gangster film with Tommy shot down at the end and doing a death scene that appears to be a parody of Edward G. Robinson’s death in Little Caesar — only [spoiler alert!] he’s really not dead, and the final scene is his wedding to Edna now that Vatelli has been conveniently disposed of.
The Tip-Off isn’t exactly a world-beater, and it’s not altogether clear why it’s called that, but it’s still a fun movie, directed straightforwardly but with a good sense of pace by Rogell and with a script that, like a lot of 1930’s movies, taps into many of the old familiar clichés but deploys them in a sufficiently inventive way that through much of the movie we’re really not sure in what direction the plot is going. Ginger Rogers is good, though it would have been hard to tell from this what she became later — dark-haired and not too attractively costumed, she’s decent-looking but hardly as goddess-like as she appeared in her films with Fred Astaire — and Robert Armstrong overdoes the dumb gags but otherwise is acceptable even though he’s remembered only for his role-of-a-lifetime in King Kong. Eddie Quillan is the star and the movie was obviously a vehicle for him, but he’s pretty obnoxious; he gets laughs, but a subtler comedian with a dryer sense of wit would have got more of them — but while there are times when we just want to strangle him, at least most of his performance can be read as good (if rather overdone) fun and the film itself emerges as clever and entertaining.
The Tip-Off is a 1931 RKO-Pathé production from the same team (Charles Rogers, producer; Harry Joe Brown, associate producer; Albert S. Rogell, director) that brought us Carnival Boat the following year, and also featuring Ginger Rogers in the female lead, though in this case the men were by far the most important characters: the billing had Eddie Quillan’s and Robert Armstrong’s names in big letters above the title, and then below the title in really tiny type it said, “And Ginger Rogers.” It’s a quite charming movie even though a good deal more could have been made of its almost surreal genre shifts, and it could have used both a better star than Quillan (like Buster Keaton) and a better director (like Preston Sturges).
It begins as a proletarian drama with Eddie Quillan as Tommy Jordan, a radio repairman with dreams of stardom — when he’s introduced he’s standing in the window of the store where he works, miming to a rendition of “I Surrender, Dear” and drawing an admiring crowd which quickly disperses when he’s called away on a job while the record continues to play (though the voice he’s lip-synching to appears to be Quillan’s own). The call he’s sent out on is to the home of “Babyface” (Ginger Rogers) — the character has no other name — and he comes upon her while she’s bathing her feet and gets a good look at her legs (oddly fatter than we remember them from her later movies with Fred Astaire — apparently all those dance rehearsals really slimmed them down!). They embark on a tentative flirtation that goes as far as her mixing drinks for them when suddenly her very jealous boyfriend, middleweight boxing contender “Kayo” McClure (couldn’t writers George Kibbe Turner and Earl Baldwin be bothered with thinking up normal names for the protagonists?) — played by Robert Armstrong a year after he’d made the movie Be Yourself with Fanny Brice, in which he also played a boxer — comes home, and Babyface bids Tommy hide under the bed.
When he finally emerges because he thinks Kayo has left, he ends up in the middle of a confrontation between Kayo and a gang led by gangster Nick Vatelli (Ralf Harolde). Kayo has been managed by Vatelli but he’s trying to break the contract, and Vatelli wants him to renew it … or else. Tommy uses the same voice amplifier he used back at the radio store to trick Vatelli into believing that the cops are staking out the place, Vatelli’s gangsters leave and Kayo rewards Tommy by giving him tickets to an upcoming dance — where Babyface wants to dance with him, but scared of Kayo’s possible reaction, Tommy refuses. (“Jerk!” I wanted to yell at him. “You just turned down a chance to dance with Ginger Rogers!” Then Charles pointed out to me that when this movie was made nobody cared whether Ginger Rogers could dance.) Instead Tommy leaps from the frying pan into the fire by picking as his dancing partner Vatelli’s girlfriend, Edna Moreno (Joan Peers), and what’s more he actually falls in love with her — and she with him, though she’s too concerned about his safety to dare bringing down Vatelli’s wrath on him by continuing to date him. It all comes to a head when both Tommy and Kayo learn that Edna is about to marry Vatelli at a restaurant variously called Sarno’s (in the dialogue) and Scarno’s (on screen), and the movie suddenly becomes a grim gangster film with Tommy shot down at the end and doing a death scene that appears to be a parody of Edward G. Robinson’s death in Little Caesar — only [spoiler alert!] he’s really not dead, and the final scene is his wedding to Edna now that Vatelli has been conveniently disposed of.
The Tip-Off isn’t exactly a world-beater, and it’s not altogether clear why it’s called that, but it’s still a fun movie, directed straightforwardly but with a good sense of pace by Rogell and with a script that, like a lot of 1930’s movies, taps into many of the old familiar clichés but deploys them in a sufficiently inventive way that through much of the movie we’re really not sure in what direction the plot is going. Ginger Rogers is good, though it would have been hard to tell from this what she became later — dark-haired and not too attractively costumed, she’s decent-looking but hardly as goddess-like as she appeared in her films with Fred Astaire — and Robert Armstrong overdoes the dumb gags but otherwise is acceptable even though he’s remembered only for his role-of-a-lifetime in King Kong. Eddie Quillan is the star and the movie was obviously a vehicle for him, but he’s pretty obnoxious; he gets laughs, but a subtler comedian with a dryer sense of wit would have got more of them — but while there are times when we just want to strangle him, at least most of his performance can be read as good (if rather overdone) fun and the film itself emerges as clever and entertaining.
First Spaceship on Venus (DEFA/Globe International, 1960-62)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I showed the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 take on a movie I actually remembered from my childhood: First Spaceship on Venus, an Eastern bloc (East German, actually) science-fiction movie from 1960 which was released here in 1962 by a company called “Globe International” but was apparently an actual prestige production in its day. It was made by the Deutsche Film (DEFA) studio and filmed at the old UFA complex in Babelsberg, and in its original version it ran a whopping 130 minutes and was the most expensive movie DEFA had produced to that time.
It also carried Prestige with a capital P; it was intended as a commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (the “German Democratic Republic,” the official name of East Germany — and the fact that the 1990 “reunification” of Germany was really a friendly takeover of the East by the West is exemplified by the fact that the reunited Germany has the same legal name as the old West Germany: the Bundesrepublik Deutschland, or “Federal Republic of Germany”); it was based on a novel called Astronauci by Polish science-fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, whose Solaris was filmed brilliantly by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972 and less brilliantly by Steven Soderbergh in 2003; and DEFA actually sought out an international cast, including Yves Montand and his wife, Simone Signoret — but the East German bureaucrats who held DEFA’s purse strings objected to their collaborating with a big, bad capitalist country like France and so the best the producers could do to bring an international flavor to their movie was to borrow Japan’s Scream Queen, Yoko Tani (probably the most famous person in the world named “Yoko” until John Lennon got involved with Yoko Ono), from Toho Studios and her similar roles in bad Japanese horror/sci-fi movies.
First Spaceship on Venus takes place in the year 1985, when an expedition to the site of the 1908 meteor crash in Siberia (a real event) digs up an object that looks like an inept amateur potter’s attempt to make a vase but which we are solemnly told is a “spool,” a magnetic recording from the spaceship that actually crashed into that bit of Siberian countryside and was mistakenly thought to have been a meteor. When the world’s scientists get hold of it and run it through a computer to decipher and translate it, they learn it’s a message from Venus Central to their operatives in the spaceship on how to attack and conquer Earth. Thinking the plot is still operative, the nations of the world and their representative scientists — Dr. Sumiko Ogimura (Yoko Tani), astrophysicist Prof. Harringway Hawling (Oldrich Lukes), Orloff (Ignacy Machowski), Talua (African actor Julius Ongewe — and yes, it’s nice to see a Black face on screen at a time when U.S. and Western sci-fi films were invariably all-white!), mathematician Prof. Sikarna (Kurt Rackelmann), pilot Raimund Brinkmann (Günther Simon) — in the U.S. version his nationality is changed from (East) German to American and his first name to “Robert” — linguist Dr. Tchen Yu (Tang Hua-Ta, surprisingly the most attractive male in the film), and Durand (Michail N. Postnikow), the first man to land on the moon (and another character who was made an American in the U.S. dubbed version — he was Russian in the original — as well as being the former lover of Dr. Ogimura, and while she couldn’t care less about him he wants to end the “former” part of their relationship and get back together) — decide to redirect their super-rocket, the “Kosmokrator” (a sort of trimaran missile whose three spires make it resemble a Mormon temple), from Mars to Venus to investigate.
First Spaceship on Venus might have been a genuinely interesting movie except for the fact that virtually nothing actually happens. The script was written by no fewer than five credited people — Jan Fethke, Wolfgang Kohlhaase, Günter Reisch, Günther Rücker and Alexander Stenbock-Fermor — plus at least seven other uncredited ones, and according to imdb.com it took three writing teams and 12 screenplays before one was finally found that was acceptable not only to the DEFA producers and director Kurt Maetzig but to the two governments involved (East Germany and Poland were co-producing). The result seems only to provide good evidence for my general field theory of cinema that the quality of a movie is inversely proportional to its number of writers; the script (at least in the 78-minute American dubbed version) is laden down with reams of pseudo-scientific dialogue that doesn’t make any sense to anyone without scientific training and is probably utterly hilarious to people with scientific training in the disciplines supposedly represented by the cast.
I remember seeing this movie when it was first released in the U.S. (by a company called “Globe International” — it seems a good idea to beware of any movie studio that has “International” as the second word in its name), falling asleep relatively quickly and remembering only the stock shots of giant radar antennae sweeping the countryside (the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 crew joked about them coming so close to the humans that they’d take off hats, toupees and pieces of skin) attempting to find clues to what’s going on on Venus and how we puny humans can stop it. Eventually the spaceship not only flies to Venus but actually lands on it, two of the crew members (Brinkmann and Tchen Yu — in one of their few tasteless bits that verges on racism the MST3K crew decided to interpret Tchen Yu’s name as a sneeze and say “Gesundheit!” every time it was spoken) get killed, they discover a group of quasi-mechanical, quasi-biological metal insects that are the only even remotely lifelike objects they find on Venus, and eventually the planet itself rejects the spaceship and launches it involuntarily back to Earth. (Apparently the planet Venus was getting as bored with these people as we were!) I must say that this mind-numbing movie from my childhood has lost none of its remarkable power to make me sleepy!
I showed the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 take on a movie I actually remembered from my childhood: First Spaceship on Venus, an Eastern bloc (East German, actually) science-fiction movie from 1960 which was released here in 1962 by a company called “Globe International” but was apparently an actual prestige production in its day. It was made by the Deutsche Film (DEFA) studio and filmed at the old UFA complex in Babelsberg, and in its original version it ran a whopping 130 minutes and was the most expensive movie DEFA had produced to that time.
It also carried Prestige with a capital P; it was intended as a commemoration of the 10th anniversary of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (the “German Democratic Republic,” the official name of East Germany — and the fact that the 1990 “reunification” of Germany was really a friendly takeover of the East by the West is exemplified by the fact that the reunited Germany has the same legal name as the old West Germany: the Bundesrepublik Deutschland, or “Federal Republic of Germany”); it was based on a novel called Astronauci by Polish science-fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, whose Solaris was filmed brilliantly by Andrei Tarkovsky in 1972 and less brilliantly by Steven Soderbergh in 2003; and DEFA actually sought out an international cast, including Yves Montand and his wife, Simone Signoret — but the East German bureaucrats who held DEFA’s purse strings objected to their collaborating with a big, bad capitalist country like France and so the best the producers could do to bring an international flavor to their movie was to borrow Japan’s Scream Queen, Yoko Tani (probably the most famous person in the world named “Yoko” until John Lennon got involved with Yoko Ono), from Toho Studios and her similar roles in bad Japanese horror/sci-fi movies.
First Spaceship on Venus takes place in the year 1985, when an expedition to the site of the 1908 meteor crash in Siberia (a real event) digs up an object that looks like an inept amateur potter’s attempt to make a vase but which we are solemnly told is a “spool,” a magnetic recording from the spaceship that actually crashed into that bit of Siberian countryside and was mistakenly thought to have been a meteor. When the world’s scientists get hold of it and run it through a computer to decipher and translate it, they learn it’s a message from Venus Central to their operatives in the spaceship on how to attack and conquer Earth. Thinking the plot is still operative, the nations of the world and their representative scientists — Dr. Sumiko Ogimura (Yoko Tani), astrophysicist Prof. Harringway Hawling (Oldrich Lukes), Orloff (Ignacy Machowski), Talua (African actor Julius Ongewe — and yes, it’s nice to see a Black face on screen at a time when U.S. and Western sci-fi films were invariably all-white!), mathematician Prof. Sikarna (Kurt Rackelmann), pilot Raimund Brinkmann (Günther Simon) — in the U.S. version his nationality is changed from (East) German to American and his first name to “Robert” — linguist Dr. Tchen Yu (Tang Hua-Ta, surprisingly the most attractive male in the film), and Durand (Michail N. Postnikow), the first man to land on the moon (and another character who was made an American in the U.S. dubbed version — he was Russian in the original — as well as being the former lover of Dr. Ogimura, and while she couldn’t care less about him he wants to end the “former” part of their relationship and get back together) — decide to redirect their super-rocket, the “Kosmokrator” (a sort of trimaran missile whose three spires make it resemble a Mormon temple), from Mars to Venus to investigate.
First Spaceship on Venus might have been a genuinely interesting movie except for the fact that virtually nothing actually happens. The script was written by no fewer than five credited people — Jan Fethke, Wolfgang Kohlhaase, Günter Reisch, Günther Rücker and Alexander Stenbock-Fermor — plus at least seven other uncredited ones, and according to imdb.com it took three writing teams and 12 screenplays before one was finally found that was acceptable not only to the DEFA producers and director Kurt Maetzig but to the two governments involved (East Germany and Poland were co-producing). The result seems only to provide good evidence for my general field theory of cinema that the quality of a movie is inversely proportional to its number of writers; the script (at least in the 78-minute American dubbed version) is laden down with reams of pseudo-scientific dialogue that doesn’t make any sense to anyone without scientific training and is probably utterly hilarious to people with scientific training in the disciplines supposedly represented by the cast.
I remember seeing this movie when it was first released in the U.S. (by a company called “Globe International” — it seems a good idea to beware of any movie studio that has “International” as the second word in its name), falling asleep relatively quickly and remembering only the stock shots of giant radar antennae sweeping the countryside (the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 crew joked about them coming so close to the humans that they’d take off hats, toupees and pieces of skin) attempting to find clues to what’s going on on Venus and how we puny humans can stop it. Eventually the spaceship not only flies to Venus but actually lands on it, two of the crew members (Brinkmann and Tchen Yu — in one of their few tasteless bits that verges on racism the MST3K crew decided to interpret Tchen Yu’s name as a sneeze and say “Gesundheit!” every time it was spoken) get killed, they discover a group of quasi-mechanical, quasi-biological metal insects that are the only even remotely lifelike objects they find on Venus, and eventually the planet itself rejects the spaceship and launches it involuntarily back to Earth. (Apparently the planet Venus was getting as bored with these people as we were!) I must say that this mind-numbing movie from my childhood has lost none of its remarkable power to make me sleepy!
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Pearl Harbor (Touchstone, 2001)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I picked Pearl Harbor — all 183 minutes of it — the 2001 Jerry Bruckheimer/Michael Bay production for Disney’s Touchstone label, which basically compares to the 1970 Tora! Tora! Tora! (a film that was ripped apart by the critics when it first came out but has since acquired a reputation for historical accuracy and dramatic truth) the way the 1997 James Cameron Titanic does to A Night to Remember: a movie that writes fictional characters into the actual story as opposed to one that finds all the drama it needs in the real deal: the actual people and events. People who liked Pearl Harbor basically praised it for the action scenes — which are indeed quite spectacular; according to imdb.com this film set a record for the sheer amount of explosives used on any single movie — and that despite the fact that a lot of the action shots are quite obviously wholly or partly computer-generated. People who didn’t like it focused on the lame romantic triangle that formed the backbone of the fictional plot.
The movie opens in 1923 in Tennessee, where Rafe McCauley and his best friend Danny Walker have built a fake airplane in a barn — McCauley’s father (or is it Walker’s? I can’t remember!) is actually an aviator who makes his living doing crop dusting (a job that didn’t actually exist until the end of World War II) and he’s also a World War I veteran who says, in a rare moment of candor after the boys have actually started his real plane and flown it for a few seconds before landing it (fortunately unscathed, though except for that detail the scene seemed so much like the opening of that obscure 1935 MGM “B” Pursuit I wondered if Michael Bay and/or his writer, Randall Wallace, had seen it), that they shouldn’t be playing at war because real war is so terrible they won’t want to be joking about it. Then the film cuts forward to January 1941, when McCauley and Walker have grown up to be Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett, respectively, and they’re both training for the U.S. Army Air Corps (it was only after World War II that the Air Force became a separate branch of the U.S. military) and romancing several nurses at the Army hospitals, including one in particular, Evelyn Johnson (Kate Beckinsale).
McCauley gets a volunteer assignment flying in London in the Eagle Squadron (which really existed; it was a chance for American flyers anxious to fight on the side of the Allies to do so, though no one could actually join the Eagle Squadron on loan from the U.S. military as McCauley does in the film; you had to resign your U.S. commission and re-enlist in someone else’s air corps, usually Canada’s), flies as one of Winston Churchill’s famous “Few” and ultimately gets shot down over the English Channel and is presumed dead. Meanwhile, Walker, Evelyn and the movie’s other principals (including Red Winkle, played by Ewen Bremmer in the spirit of Frank McHugh or Allen Jenkins, except that one decidedly unfunny element of his “comic relief” is that he has to fart a lot) get assigned to Hawai’i, where they’re stationed at Pearl Harbor (the title character finally appears 35 minutes into this three-hour movie) and are supposed to be protecting the U.S. fleet from attack — only the base commander is convinced nobody could attack Pearl Harbor so he thinks the only real danger is sabotage, which is why he parks all the planes wingtip-to-wingtip, which famously made them sitting ducks when the Japanese actually did attack. (Like Tora! Tora! Tora!, this film explains both the reason the U.S. military thought Pearl Harbor was immune from air attack and how the Japanese pulled it off; the Americans were convinced that air-launched torpedoes would sink harmlessly in the shallow waters of the harbor, and the Japanese figured out that if they made the torpedoes’ stabilizing fins out of wood instead of metal, they’d remain afloat in the water long enough to hit their targets.)
Anyway, while they’re cavorting around the island and waiting (unknowingly) for the war to begin, Walker and Evelyn, believing McCauley to be dead — can you say Casablanca? — drift into an affair, and when McCauley shows up very much alive and learns that his best friend has been fucking his girlfriend, he wants to and in fact does beat the guy up. (Somehow the makers of Casablanca were able to figure out a way for Rick Blaine and Victor Laszlo to resolve their similar situation without fisticuffs.) There are intercuts between the scenes on the island and the councils in both the American and Japanese governments (the actors playing Japanese bigwigs get to speak Japanese, with English subtitles for our benefit, but the Japanese pilot readying himself for the mission — and, incidentally, putting on the white scarf worn by the kamikazes even though that was a much later development in the war — is forced to say his farewell prayers in horribly accented English; also an imdb.com commentator noted that the depiction of the Japanese officials holding their planning meetings outdoors is wrong, since Japanese would regard even the suggestion of an outdoor meeting as an insult), with Jon Voight playing President Franklin D. Roosevelt — apparently Voight is a long-time devotee of F.D.R. and actively lobbied for the role, though he plays him in a smarmy voice that doesn’t sound at all like the real one and there’s a really tacky scene when, in overruling his Cabinet and authorizing the Doolittle raid on Tokyo (more on that later), he clambers out of his wheelchair, uses his crutches, stands upright (or at least leans against the conference table) and dares anyone to tell him that something is impossible.
Indeed, the biggest problem with Pearl Harbor is not only that it’s over three hours long (one could readily imagine a Warners hack like Lloyd Bacon or Ray Enright getting it on and off the screen in 100 minutes, tops) but that so much of that time is filled with scenes that were clichéd before the filmmakers were born — hell, that were clichéd before the attack on Pearl Harbor even happened! All too much of this film feels like a mid-1930’s Warners aviation drama, with Ben Affleck in the James Cagney role and Josh Hartnett in the Pat O’Brien role. Some of that was deliberate — director Michael Bay said he was trying for a 1940’s feel to the romance (which explains why the movie’s depiction of love and sex is surprisingly decorous for a 20th-century film; McCauley and Evelyn never make it to bed together before McCauley’s “death” — maybe we’re supposed to think that the real reason he’s so pissed at Walker is because Walker popped her cherry — and Walker and Evelyn’s first love scene is a charmingly staged one in which the two of them are standing up and enveloped in the folds of parachutes being packed for flight crews) — but there’s also a ponderousness with which the old clichés are trundled out that makes a good deal of the first hour and a half of this film rather dull but also gives it a quirkily dorky appeal.
At least this film makes sense, which hasn’t always been the case with Michael Bay’s work (you’ll recall that he wrote a letter to the Los Angeles Times responding to people who had said his film Armageddon was incoherent, and the gist of his letter was that young people not only don’t care about but actively dislike plot continuity and they were the audience for which he had made the film), and the action scenes really are spectacular. What’s more, the film does a very good job of depicting the sheer disorientation felt even by people who were supposedly preparing for war when they are in fact attacked — and if Bay and cinematographer John Schwartzman hadn’t shot them through distortion that makes them look like they smeared Vaseline on the lenses, the scenes in the service hospital with the nurses scrambling to save as many of the attack victims as they can and having to improvise a triage system on the fly would have had a similar power.
The production of Pearl Harbor we were watching was a two-DVD edition whose first DVD abruptly ended with the calling-off of the planned third wave of the Japanese attack and the line about how Admiral Yamamoto, who had proposed and commanded the attack, supposedly said when it was over, “I fear we have awakened a sleeping giant” — a line invented by the screenwriters of Tora! Tora! Tora! that has become part of the legend of the actual battle. The remaining 53 minutes of the film (not counting the seemingly endless credit roll — even for a modern film this one listed a lot of effects people, stunt people, editors, sound editors, technicians, computer people and others whose job titles sometimes barely hint to us non-movie professionals exactly what they did on this film) details the story behind the Doolittle raid on Tokyo in April 1942, which was an attempt to strike a psychological blow against Japan to make up for the one they’d struck against us by attacking Pearl Harbor.
When Pearl Harbor came out, the New Yorker reviewer had a lot of fun imagining just how this sequence got in the movie — at a story conference someone said, “Hey, wait a minute. A movie about Pearl Harbor is going to be a downer. It’s a battle we lost” — and at least in the New Yorker critic’s fantasy, they decided to extend the story to the Doolittle raid so the movie could end on a note of triumph. There’s some more exciting action footage in this part and also some more pachydermous exposition (though Alec Baldwin’s acting as Doolittle is, quite frankly, the finest performance in the film), and the romantic triangle is resolved when Walker is killed in the raid and McCauley agrees to marry Evelyn and raise the child she conceived with Walker (did I mention that Walker got her pregnant? Another old-movie cliché Randall Wallace couldn’t resist!), and there’s a final scene that shows them back on the old homestead in Tennessee, with McCauley still flying his dad’s old red biplane on crop-dusting runs.
Pearl Harbor is a movie that is overwhelming in both the good and bad senses of the term — it’s a well-made piece of entertainment and it offers the spectacular action scenes so many modern moviegoers buy tickets to see, but it also leaves one stuffed and sensorily overloaded — and it’s also not especially well acted; Beckinsale’s whole manner is that of a fine actress who’s all too aware that this role doesn’t even come close to tapping her potential but she’s doing it anyway for the money; Affleck too often stares straight at the camera and tries to let his good looks give his performance for him; and Hartnett is probably the best of the principals but he, too, has been challenged more in other roles (notably the Iago character in O, the intriguing retelling of Shakespeare’s Othello set in a previously all-white prep school in the South that has just admitted its first African-American on a basketball scholarship, which according to his imdb.com filmography he actually made after Pearl Harbor — I’d thought it was earlier); though the subject is the 1940’s and the script draws on clichés from even earlier in cinematic history, the overall sensibility is still that of 2001 and this film proved unexpectedly prescient when the 9/11 attacks occurred four months after its release.
I picked Pearl Harbor — all 183 minutes of it — the 2001 Jerry Bruckheimer/Michael Bay production for Disney’s Touchstone label, which basically compares to the 1970 Tora! Tora! Tora! (a film that was ripped apart by the critics when it first came out but has since acquired a reputation for historical accuracy and dramatic truth) the way the 1997 James Cameron Titanic does to A Night to Remember: a movie that writes fictional characters into the actual story as opposed to one that finds all the drama it needs in the real deal: the actual people and events. People who liked Pearl Harbor basically praised it for the action scenes — which are indeed quite spectacular; according to imdb.com this film set a record for the sheer amount of explosives used on any single movie — and that despite the fact that a lot of the action shots are quite obviously wholly or partly computer-generated. People who didn’t like it focused on the lame romantic triangle that formed the backbone of the fictional plot.
The movie opens in 1923 in Tennessee, where Rafe McCauley and his best friend Danny Walker have built a fake airplane in a barn — McCauley’s father (or is it Walker’s? I can’t remember!) is actually an aviator who makes his living doing crop dusting (a job that didn’t actually exist until the end of World War II) and he’s also a World War I veteran who says, in a rare moment of candor after the boys have actually started his real plane and flown it for a few seconds before landing it (fortunately unscathed, though except for that detail the scene seemed so much like the opening of that obscure 1935 MGM “B” Pursuit I wondered if Michael Bay and/or his writer, Randall Wallace, had seen it), that they shouldn’t be playing at war because real war is so terrible they won’t want to be joking about it. Then the film cuts forward to January 1941, when McCauley and Walker have grown up to be Ben Affleck and Josh Hartnett, respectively, and they’re both training for the U.S. Army Air Corps (it was only after World War II that the Air Force became a separate branch of the U.S. military) and romancing several nurses at the Army hospitals, including one in particular, Evelyn Johnson (Kate Beckinsale).
McCauley gets a volunteer assignment flying in London in the Eagle Squadron (which really existed; it was a chance for American flyers anxious to fight on the side of the Allies to do so, though no one could actually join the Eagle Squadron on loan from the U.S. military as McCauley does in the film; you had to resign your U.S. commission and re-enlist in someone else’s air corps, usually Canada’s), flies as one of Winston Churchill’s famous “Few” and ultimately gets shot down over the English Channel and is presumed dead. Meanwhile, Walker, Evelyn and the movie’s other principals (including Red Winkle, played by Ewen Bremmer in the spirit of Frank McHugh or Allen Jenkins, except that one decidedly unfunny element of his “comic relief” is that he has to fart a lot) get assigned to Hawai’i, where they’re stationed at Pearl Harbor (the title character finally appears 35 minutes into this three-hour movie) and are supposed to be protecting the U.S. fleet from attack — only the base commander is convinced nobody could attack Pearl Harbor so he thinks the only real danger is sabotage, which is why he parks all the planes wingtip-to-wingtip, which famously made them sitting ducks when the Japanese actually did attack. (Like Tora! Tora! Tora!, this film explains both the reason the U.S. military thought Pearl Harbor was immune from air attack and how the Japanese pulled it off; the Americans were convinced that air-launched torpedoes would sink harmlessly in the shallow waters of the harbor, and the Japanese figured out that if they made the torpedoes’ stabilizing fins out of wood instead of metal, they’d remain afloat in the water long enough to hit their targets.)
Anyway, while they’re cavorting around the island and waiting (unknowingly) for the war to begin, Walker and Evelyn, believing McCauley to be dead — can you say Casablanca? — drift into an affair, and when McCauley shows up very much alive and learns that his best friend has been fucking his girlfriend, he wants to and in fact does beat the guy up. (Somehow the makers of Casablanca were able to figure out a way for Rick Blaine and Victor Laszlo to resolve their similar situation without fisticuffs.) There are intercuts between the scenes on the island and the councils in both the American and Japanese governments (the actors playing Japanese bigwigs get to speak Japanese, with English subtitles for our benefit, but the Japanese pilot readying himself for the mission — and, incidentally, putting on the white scarf worn by the kamikazes even though that was a much later development in the war — is forced to say his farewell prayers in horribly accented English; also an imdb.com commentator noted that the depiction of the Japanese officials holding their planning meetings outdoors is wrong, since Japanese would regard even the suggestion of an outdoor meeting as an insult), with Jon Voight playing President Franklin D. Roosevelt — apparently Voight is a long-time devotee of F.D.R. and actively lobbied for the role, though he plays him in a smarmy voice that doesn’t sound at all like the real one and there’s a really tacky scene when, in overruling his Cabinet and authorizing the Doolittle raid on Tokyo (more on that later), he clambers out of his wheelchair, uses his crutches, stands upright (or at least leans against the conference table) and dares anyone to tell him that something is impossible.
Indeed, the biggest problem with Pearl Harbor is not only that it’s over three hours long (one could readily imagine a Warners hack like Lloyd Bacon or Ray Enright getting it on and off the screen in 100 minutes, tops) but that so much of that time is filled with scenes that were clichéd before the filmmakers were born — hell, that were clichéd before the attack on Pearl Harbor even happened! All too much of this film feels like a mid-1930’s Warners aviation drama, with Ben Affleck in the James Cagney role and Josh Hartnett in the Pat O’Brien role. Some of that was deliberate — director Michael Bay said he was trying for a 1940’s feel to the romance (which explains why the movie’s depiction of love and sex is surprisingly decorous for a 20th-century film; McCauley and Evelyn never make it to bed together before McCauley’s “death” — maybe we’re supposed to think that the real reason he’s so pissed at Walker is because Walker popped her cherry — and Walker and Evelyn’s first love scene is a charmingly staged one in which the two of them are standing up and enveloped in the folds of parachutes being packed for flight crews) — but there’s also a ponderousness with which the old clichés are trundled out that makes a good deal of the first hour and a half of this film rather dull but also gives it a quirkily dorky appeal.
At least this film makes sense, which hasn’t always been the case with Michael Bay’s work (you’ll recall that he wrote a letter to the Los Angeles Times responding to people who had said his film Armageddon was incoherent, and the gist of his letter was that young people not only don’t care about but actively dislike plot continuity and they were the audience for which he had made the film), and the action scenes really are spectacular. What’s more, the film does a very good job of depicting the sheer disorientation felt even by people who were supposedly preparing for war when they are in fact attacked — and if Bay and cinematographer John Schwartzman hadn’t shot them through distortion that makes them look like they smeared Vaseline on the lenses, the scenes in the service hospital with the nurses scrambling to save as many of the attack victims as they can and having to improvise a triage system on the fly would have had a similar power.
The production of Pearl Harbor we were watching was a two-DVD edition whose first DVD abruptly ended with the calling-off of the planned third wave of the Japanese attack and the line about how Admiral Yamamoto, who had proposed and commanded the attack, supposedly said when it was over, “I fear we have awakened a sleeping giant” — a line invented by the screenwriters of Tora! Tora! Tora! that has become part of the legend of the actual battle. The remaining 53 minutes of the film (not counting the seemingly endless credit roll — even for a modern film this one listed a lot of effects people, stunt people, editors, sound editors, technicians, computer people and others whose job titles sometimes barely hint to us non-movie professionals exactly what they did on this film) details the story behind the Doolittle raid on Tokyo in April 1942, which was an attempt to strike a psychological blow against Japan to make up for the one they’d struck against us by attacking Pearl Harbor.
When Pearl Harbor came out, the New Yorker reviewer had a lot of fun imagining just how this sequence got in the movie — at a story conference someone said, “Hey, wait a minute. A movie about Pearl Harbor is going to be a downer. It’s a battle we lost” — and at least in the New Yorker critic’s fantasy, they decided to extend the story to the Doolittle raid so the movie could end on a note of triumph. There’s some more exciting action footage in this part and also some more pachydermous exposition (though Alec Baldwin’s acting as Doolittle is, quite frankly, the finest performance in the film), and the romantic triangle is resolved when Walker is killed in the raid and McCauley agrees to marry Evelyn and raise the child she conceived with Walker (did I mention that Walker got her pregnant? Another old-movie cliché Randall Wallace couldn’t resist!), and there’s a final scene that shows them back on the old homestead in Tennessee, with McCauley still flying his dad’s old red biplane on crop-dusting runs.
Pearl Harbor is a movie that is overwhelming in both the good and bad senses of the term — it’s a well-made piece of entertainment and it offers the spectacular action scenes so many modern moviegoers buy tickets to see, but it also leaves one stuffed and sensorily overloaded — and it’s also not especially well acted; Beckinsale’s whole manner is that of a fine actress who’s all too aware that this role doesn’t even come close to tapping her potential but she’s doing it anyway for the money; Affleck too often stares straight at the camera and tries to let his good looks give his performance for him; and Hartnett is probably the best of the principals but he, too, has been challenged more in other roles (notably the Iago character in O, the intriguing retelling of Shakespeare’s Othello set in a previously all-white prep school in the South that has just admitted its first African-American on a basketball scholarship, which according to his imdb.com filmography he actually made after Pearl Harbor — I’d thought it was earlier); though the subject is the 1940’s and the script draws on clichés from even earlier in cinematic history, the overall sensibility is still that of 2001 and this film proved unexpectedly prescient when the 9/11 attacks occurred four months after its release.
Friday, April 10, 2009
King Dinosaur (Lippert, 1955)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I picked the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 presentation of a 1955 Lippert release called King Dinosaur, produced by Al Zimbalist, directed by Bert I. Gordon, written by Tom Gries from an “original” (in quotes) story by Zimbalist and Gordon, and featuring Gordon’s career-long obsession with the artificially enlarged. The gimmick here is that four astronauts — two men, Dr. Ralph Martin (William Bryant) and Dr. Richard Gordon (Douglas Henderson), and two women, Dr. Patricia Bennett (Wanda Curtis) and (presumably non-Dr.) Nora Pierce (Patti Gallagher) — are sent up on a newly developed spaceship to explore a recently discovered planet called Nova, which turns out to have a topography similar to that of Earth (or at least that of Bronson Canyon and Griffith Park, where most of it was filmed) and also an Earth-like atmosphere (so we don’t have to see the actors — especially the pretty female ones — walk around in spacesuits), and where some of the fauna (alligators, owls, vultures) are the same size as Earth’s but others (notably bees and lizards) are far larger than what we’re used to.
Oddly, King Dinosaur is actually a not-bad sci-fi cheapie for the period; though liberally filled out with stock footage (a fact the MST3K crew inevitably made fun of), narrated with the usual obviousness by Marvin Miller and suffering from the fact that we’re supposed to accept ordinary, living lizards filmed on miniature sets as “dinosaurs” (in the film’s worst line, one of the characters compares the lizard that’s menacing them at the opening of the cave they’re hiding in to Tyrannosaurus rex, and one’s tempted to yell at the screen, “It doesn’t look like T. rex at all!” — it’s walking on all fours whereas anyone whose science education stopped in grade school knows that T. rex walked upright), its plot at least makes a certain degree of sense; the two-male, two-female casting of the astronauts (and the only humans shown in the film, at least in footage actually shot specifically for it) is innovative and proto-feminist even though it’s only motivated by the desire to form two romantic couples (though I couldn’t help but remix the film in my head and have the two men pair off with each other, and the two women ditto — and there are enough choice shots of William Bryant with his chest exposed, revealing lots of nice body hair and a good pair of nipples that probably showed even better when this was shown in theatres, that it’s not only straight men who will get a sexual charge from this film!); and the special effects are actually pretty good — the process work is surprisingly convincing for the time and the budget and only that rather washed-out looking bee (so washed out that I have to take the MST3K crew’s word for it that it was supposed to be a bee and not some other species of insect) is too bad an effect to allow the viewer to suspend disbelief.
The big problem with this film is the lizards — and particularly the fact that the filmmakers didn’t at least think of shooting them in slow motion to make them look sufficiently ponderous to be believable as giant-sized beasts; when one of them scampers quickly across the screen the way real lizards dash into the bushes when humans approach, all believability is lost instantly. Still, this was a good MST3K presentation because it achieved the right balance for their formula: a movie good enough that it retained some entertainment value but not so good that one would resent hearing it mocked (as was the case with some of MST3K’s later presentations, notably I Was a Teenage Werewolf and The Space Children, both flawed films but of sufficient quality they didn’t deserve the MST3K “treatment”) — and since King Dinosaur, like most Lippert presentations, was only about an hour long (Lippert’s name did end up on a few genuinely good films, but those were all foreign films which Lippert simply distributed in the U.S.), the MST3K crew filled it out with X Marks the Spot, an embarrassingly bad traffic-safety film produced by the state of New Jersey in the 1940’s featuring the heavenly-court gimmick of a very bored-looking God passing judgment on a recently deceased driver and some of the worst acting of all time (notably by a New Jersey state commissioner named Magee, who was so awful he couldn’t even play himself) — and some of MST3K’s all-time best jokes, including two Fibber McGee and Molly references that probably sailed over the heads of most of their viewers!
I picked the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 presentation of a 1955 Lippert release called King Dinosaur, produced by Al Zimbalist, directed by Bert I. Gordon, written by Tom Gries from an “original” (in quotes) story by Zimbalist and Gordon, and featuring Gordon’s career-long obsession with the artificially enlarged. The gimmick here is that four astronauts — two men, Dr. Ralph Martin (William Bryant) and Dr. Richard Gordon (Douglas Henderson), and two women, Dr. Patricia Bennett (Wanda Curtis) and (presumably non-Dr.) Nora Pierce (Patti Gallagher) — are sent up on a newly developed spaceship to explore a recently discovered planet called Nova, which turns out to have a topography similar to that of Earth (or at least that of Bronson Canyon and Griffith Park, where most of it was filmed) and also an Earth-like atmosphere (so we don’t have to see the actors — especially the pretty female ones — walk around in spacesuits), and where some of the fauna (alligators, owls, vultures) are the same size as Earth’s but others (notably bees and lizards) are far larger than what we’re used to.
Oddly, King Dinosaur is actually a not-bad sci-fi cheapie for the period; though liberally filled out with stock footage (a fact the MST3K crew inevitably made fun of), narrated with the usual obviousness by Marvin Miller and suffering from the fact that we’re supposed to accept ordinary, living lizards filmed on miniature sets as “dinosaurs” (in the film’s worst line, one of the characters compares the lizard that’s menacing them at the opening of the cave they’re hiding in to Tyrannosaurus rex, and one’s tempted to yell at the screen, “It doesn’t look like T. rex at all!” — it’s walking on all fours whereas anyone whose science education stopped in grade school knows that T. rex walked upright), its plot at least makes a certain degree of sense; the two-male, two-female casting of the astronauts (and the only humans shown in the film, at least in footage actually shot specifically for it) is innovative and proto-feminist even though it’s only motivated by the desire to form two romantic couples (though I couldn’t help but remix the film in my head and have the two men pair off with each other, and the two women ditto — and there are enough choice shots of William Bryant with his chest exposed, revealing lots of nice body hair and a good pair of nipples that probably showed even better when this was shown in theatres, that it’s not only straight men who will get a sexual charge from this film!); and the special effects are actually pretty good — the process work is surprisingly convincing for the time and the budget and only that rather washed-out looking bee (so washed out that I have to take the MST3K crew’s word for it that it was supposed to be a bee and not some other species of insect) is too bad an effect to allow the viewer to suspend disbelief.
The big problem with this film is the lizards — and particularly the fact that the filmmakers didn’t at least think of shooting them in slow motion to make them look sufficiently ponderous to be believable as giant-sized beasts; when one of them scampers quickly across the screen the way real lizards dash into the bushes when humans approach, all believability is lost instantly. Still, this was a good MST3K presentation because it achieved the right balance for their formula: a movie good enough that it retained some entertainment value but not so good that one would resent hearing it mocked (as was the case with some of MST3K’s later presentations, notably I Was a Teenage Werewolf and The Space Children, both flawed films but of sufficient quality they didn’t deserve the MST3K “treatment”) — and since King Dinosaur, like most Lippert presentations, was only about an hour long (Lippert’s name did end up on a few genuinely good films, but those were all foreign films which Lippert simply distributed in the U.S.), the MST3K crew filled it out with X Marks the Spot, an embarrassingly bad traffic-safety film produced by the state of New Jersey in the 1940’s featuring the heavenly-court gimmick of a very bored-looking God passing judgment on a recently deceased driver and some of the worst acting of all time (notably by a New Jersey state commissioner named Magee, who was so awful he couldn’t even play himself) — and some of MST3K’s all-time best jokes, including two Fibber McGee and Molly references that probably sailed over the heads of most of their viewers!
Thursday, April 9, 2009
Carnival Boat (RKO-Pathé, 1932)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Carnival Boat, a 62-minute RKO-Pathé production from 1932 that TCM had recently shown as part of a tribute to the more obscure films of Ginger Rogers — though both Rogers’ presence and the film’s title are really deceptive as to its true contents. It’s actually a film about lumberjacking, starring William Boyd — the one who later became known almost exclusively as Hopalong Cassidy — and Fred Kohler as rival lumberjacks in the Pacific Northwest. Boyd’s character, Buck Gannon, is actually the son of the lumber camp’s boss, Jim Gannon (former silent-screen star Hobart Bosworth), and the elder Gannon is being threatened with dismissal by DeLacey (Walter Percival), the representative of the corporation that owns the logging operation and wants the rate of production sped up. DeLacey is convinced that the reason the forest isn’t being harvested fast enough for his employers’ satisfaction (this part of the plot seems modern now!) is that the lumberjacks are spending too much time roughhousing and clowning, and too little actually working — and it’s hard to argue with him based on what we actually see, especially a lot of annoying footage with Baldy (Edgar Kennedy) and Stubby (Harry Sweet), who are supposed to be a two-man saw team, only one of them isn’t handling his end of the saw and letting the other do all the work.
The carnival boat doesn’t enter until the film is about half over, and Jim Gannon is strongly opposed to its arrival — it’s really a floating casino and he senses (rightly, as it turns out) that its sole purpose there is to separate his men from their money. Rogers’ character is identified only as “Honey” and she does one number on the boat, “How I Could Go for You,” dancing in front of a chorus line and singing in the Betty Boop voice — depending on which source you believe, she was either the successor to Helen Kane in Paul Ash’s band in 1929 or actually originated the “boop-boop-a-doop” singing style even though Kane was certainly the first one to record it. (Supposedly Ginger was touring in vaudeville with her first husband, Jack Pepper, and singing that way when Kane heard them and decided to steal the style.) She’s also dark-haired, and one really has to look carefully at the face and the voice to recognize either as belonging to the Ginger Rogers we know — the Queen of Carioca with Fred Astaire and the tough but vulnerable screwball comedienne she became when she wasn’t dancing.
Her only plot function is to provide a focal point for the rivalry between Bill Gannon and Hack Logan (Fred Kohler — in a Warners film with this script they’d have been James Cagney and Pat O’Brien!), who in a spectacular final sequence end up rescuing each other from a logjam and the dynamite used to break it up, only to start beating the shit out of each other once they’re both out of the water and safe, and the film ends rather awkwardly when there’s a shot of the carnival boat (ya remember the carnival boat?) steaming away and Ginger Rogers appears on the scene, saying that she’s missed the boat and is ready and willing to marry Bill and settle down in the logging camp — while in the meantime Jim has successfully persuaded DeLacey to let him retire and appoint Bill as his replacement. Just about the only interest Carnival Boat really has comes from the spectacular footage of people actually doing logging — indeed, there’s so much logging footage and so little of it involves the principals that I wondered whether RKO-Pathé bought the rights to a documentary on logging and decided to build a fiction film around the existing footage.
The effects work needed to put the stars in with the logging scenes is sometimes quite good (as befitted the studio that was simultaneously working on King Kong) and sometimes embarrassingly bad — as in one scene in which Boyd and Kohler are on top of the screen while the logs go rushing past them in the river on top of the scene, and it’s one of the most obnoxiously obvious process shots of all time. I note from imdb.com that the film had two working titles, Bad Timber and Timber Beast, either of which would have been better than Carnival Boat — at least the alternate titles would have told you this was a film about logging! — and the film, directed by Albert S. Rogell in his usual coolly efficient fashion and written by James Seymour from an “original” (quotes definitely appropriate!) story by Marion Jackson and Don Ryan, is a pleasant enough time-filler that doesn’t really work as drama but does have a lot of cool logging footage to watch.
The film was Carnival Boat, a 62-minute RKO-Pathé production from 1932 that TCM had recently shown as part of a tribute to the more obscure films of Ginger Rogers — though both Rogers’ presence and the film’s title are really deceptive as to its true contents. It’s actually a film about lumberjacking, starring William Boyd — the one who later became known almost exclusively as Hopalong Cassidy — and Fred Kohler as rival lumberjacks in the Pacific Northwest. Boyd’s character, Buck Gannon, is actually the son of the lumber camp’s boss, Jim Gannon (former silent-screen star Hobart Bosworth), and the elder Gannon is being threatened with dismissal by DeLacey (Walter Percival), the representative of the corporation that owns the logging operation and wants the rate of production sped up. DeLacey is convinced that the reason the forest isn’t being harvested fast enough for his employers’ satisfaction (this part of the plot seems modern now!) is that the lumberjacks are spending too much time roughhousing and clowning, and too little actually working — and it’s hard to argue with him based on what we actually see, especially a lot of annoying footage with Baldy (Edgar Kennedy) and Stubby (Harry Sweet), who are supposed to be a two-man saw team, only one of them isn’t handling his end of the saw and letting the other do all the work.
The carnival boat doesn’t enter until the film is about half over, and Jim Gannon is strongly opposed to its arrival — it’s really a floating casino and he senses (rightly, as it turns out) that its sole purpose there is to separate his men from their money. Rogers’ character is identified only as “Honey” and she does one number on the boat, “How I Could Go for You,” dancing in front of a chorus line and singing in the Betty Boop voice — depending on which source you believe, she was either the successor to Helen Kane in Paul Ash’s band in 1929 or actually originated the “boop-boop-a-doop” singing style even though Kane was certainly the first one to record it. (Supposedly Ginger was touring in vaudeville with her first husband, Jack Pepper, and singing that way when Kane heard them and decided to steal the style.) She’s also dark-haired, and one really has to look carefully at the face and the voice to recognize either as belonging to the Ginger Rogers we know — the Queen of Carioca with Fred Astaire and the tough but vulnerable screwball comedienne she became when she wasn’t dancing.
Her only plot function is to provide a focal point for the rivalry between Bill Gannon and Hack Logan (Fred Kohler — in a Warners film with this script they’d have been James Cagney and Pat O’Brien!), who in a spectacular final sequence end up rescuing each other from a logjam and the dynamite used to break it up, only to start beating the shit out of each other once they’re both out of the water and safe, and the film ends rather awkwardly when there’s a shot of the carnival boat (ya remember the carnival boat?) steaming away and Ginger Rogers appears on the scene, saying that she’s missed the boat and is ready and willing to marry Bill and settle down in the logging camp — while in the meantime Jim has successfully persuaded DeLacey to let him retire and appoint Bill as his replacement. Just about the only interest Carnival Boat really has comes from the spectacular footage of people actually doing logging — indeed, there’s so much logging footage and so little of it involves the principals that I wondered whether RKO-Pathé bought the rights to a documentary on logging and decided to build a fiction film around the existing footage.
The effects work needed to put the stars in with the logging scenes is sometimes quite good (as befitted the studio that was simultaneously working on King Kong) and sometimes embarrassingly bad — as in one scene in which Boyd and Kohler are on top of the screen while the logs go rushing past them in the river on top of the scene, and it’s one of the most obnoxiously obvious process shots of all time. I note from imdb.com that the film had two working titles, Bad Timber and Timber Beast, either of which would have been better than Carnival Boat — at least the alternate titles would have told you this was a film about logging! — and the film, directed by Albert S. Rogell in his usual coolly efficient fashion and written by James Seymour from an “original” (quotes definitely appropriate!) story by Marion Jackson and Don Ryan, is a pleasant enough time-filler that doesn’t really work as drama but does have a lot of cool logging footage to watch.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
The Roaring Twenties (Warners, 1939)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran the 1939 movie The Roaring Twenties, a Warner Bros. production with both James Cagney and Priscilla Lane (who got a lot of plum parts she probably didn’t deserve because she was — or at least was rumored to be — studio chief Hal Wallis’s mistress) billed above the title in a major-budget film detailing the history of Prohibition in New York as seen through the eyes of three buddies who meet during World War I. The film opens with a backwards historical montage, taking us in reverse time sequence from the eve of World War II to April 1918, and then fades in on one of the most transparently phony studio “exteriors” ever shot — the entire war looks like it’s taking part inside a Warners soundstage with a painted backdrop — as our ill-assorted trio land in the same foxhole. They are Eddie Bartlett (James Cagney), former garage mechanic who’s looking forward to getting his old job back after the war; aspiring attorney Lloyd Hart (the almost terminally bland and boring Jeffrey Lynn); and George Hally (Humphrey Bogart) — “Hally” is the name on the final credit roll but during the actual movie he’s never called anything but George — who’s decided he likes killing people and fondles his rifle suggestively to indicate what he wants to do after he gets out of the service. (When Lloyd draws back at shooting a 15-year-old German soldier, George lifts his rifle and cheerily dispatches the poor kid, snarling, “He’ll never be 16.” A split-second later, the Armistice is announced.)
Like some of the real troops in World War I, our trio are held over in Germany as part of the occupation force for two years after the end of major combat operations (plus ça change, plus ça même chose … ), and by the time they finally get home the nation has returned to normalcy and forgotten all about its veterans, and the country is in the grip of a recession and Eddie’s old employer can’t (or won’t) find room for him. Eddie is saved by his former roommate, Danny Green (a relatively restrained Frank McHugh), who agrees to split not only his room but also his cab with him — they can each drive it for 12 hours a day and split the cost of gas, repairs, etc. Eddie is busted as a “mule” for delivering liquor to the high-class speakeasy run by Panama Smith (Gladys George) — a character clearly based on Texas Guinan — and suddenly realizes that Prohibition has opened up much more promising business opportunities for guys like him than normal business could ever offer. He graduates from peddling another gang’s bootleg gin to making his own to hijacking the shipments of other gangsters — particularly Nick Brown (Paul Kelly) — who were actually bothering to smuggle in decent legal drinkables from abroad. On one such run, in which Eddie and his gang have gone out in a boat posing as Coast Guardsmen, he runs into George, who’s now a part of Nick Brown’s gang but is willing to throw Nick overboard (figuratively speaking) and partner with Eddie, George to take charge of the smuggling and Eddie the merchandising.
Meanwhile, in his early scuffling days Eddie had gone out to see his pen pal during the war, Jean Sherman (Priscilla Lane), who’d sent a photo of herself in a high school play and therefore had made herself look considerably older than she actually was. When Eddie becomes a successful bootlegger, and Jean has grown old enough to interest him as a woman, he arranges with Panama to introduce her as a singer in her nightclub, and Jean becomes a star (though, oddly, she never seems to perform anywhere else) in a plot line that intriguingly anticipates Cagney’s role as Ruth Etting’s gangster manager in Love Me or Leave Me 16 years later. Lloyd, meanwhile, has served as Eddie’s attorney until Eddie and George hijack a liquor shipment that the feds had seized from Nick Brown and they in turn steal from the federal warehouse (by far the most visually interesting scene in the film, full of proto-noir atmospherics lacking in the rest), and George murders his old sergeant from the war days.
Things are going swimmingly for the principals — save for the constant arguments between good-bad guy Eddie and bad-bad guy George, and Jean’s loss of interest in Eddie in favor of the affections of good-good guy Lloyd — until the 1929 stock market crash happens, represented by a magnificent montage sequence by future director Don Siegel in which a giant ticker-tape machine hovers over Wall Street, dollar signs burst out of it as it explodes, and the buildings themselves collapse and literally melt into the street below. (This sequence is the biggest thing people remember about The Roaring Twenties and it’s been used in countless movies since, including some serious documentaries about the Depression.) Eddie is caught in the crash and loses his own empire — writers Jerry Wald, Richard Macaulay and Robert Rossen could (and should) have made more of the irony that Eddie made his fortune in an illegal enterprise and lost it all in legitimate (if unethical) investments — while George takes over the gang and recruits Nick Brown’s old henchmen, who’d been cut loose after Eddie murdered Nick in an ambush at the club where Jean sang.
Under the double whammy of losing both his fortune and Jean, Eddie sinks into an alcoholic despair — my husband Charles was especially impressed with Cagney’s acting in these scenes, saying he accurately caught the drunkard’s “tic” instead of just superficially playing intoxication — from which he’s roused only by the news that George’s gang has threatened Lloyd, whereupon he shoots George only to be killed himself — though he gets a death scene that is almost operatic in its extended length, staggering through the streets of New York until he finally expires on the steps of a church. (Apparently someone at Warners had seen John Ford’s The Informer.) The Roaring Twenties is a good Warners gangster movie but somewhat laden down by its sense of Importance with a capital I; it begins with a written those-who-cannot-remember-the-past-are-doomed-to-repeat-it foreword by Mark Hellinger (whose story “The World Moves On” provided the basis for the film) and is narrated throughout by John Deering, whose stentorian voice gives us historical background we could probably have figured out for ourselves.
Raoul Walsh directed — his first job at Warners — and though The Roaring Twenties is an exciting film it’s also oddly slower than most Warners vehicles, and though the film started a fad for the music of the 1920’s (and also contributed the phrase “The Roaring Twenties” to the culture), the songs are authentic for the period but their presentation isn’t. They’re arranged like the music of 1939 — not swing but the string-laden “sweet” dance music played at hotels too upper-class in their clienteles (or at least their aspirations) to want anything that loud — and Priscilla Lane’s vocals (I presume they’re her own; they’re not good enough to sound like a voice double and neither the American Film Institute Catalog nor imdb.com credits a voice double for her) are also in 1939 rather than 1920’s style. I was amused when the first introduction of James Cagney’s character after the war scenes was set to the song “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” — also the tune heard at the end of Cagney’s star-making 1931 film The Public Enemy (also set in the early 1920’s), when his bundled corpse is dumped on his family’s doorstep. It’s not the film it could have been with more sensitive writing, more energetic direction and a better female lead (like Ann Sheridan, maybe?), but it’s still pretty good.
I ran the 1939 movie The Roaring Twenties, a Warner Bros. production with both James Cagney and Priscilla Lane (who got a lot of plum parts she probably didn’t deserve because she was — or at least was rumored to be — studio chief Hal Wallis’s mistress) billed above the title in a major-budget film detailing the history of Prohibition in New York as seen through the eyes of three buddies who meet during World War I. The film opens with a backwards historical montage, taking us in reverse time sequence from the eve of World War II to April 1918, and then fades in on one of the most transparently phony studio “exteriors” ever shot — the entire war looks like it’s taking part inside a Warners soundstage with a painted backdrop — as our ill-assorted trio land in the same foxhole. They are Eddie Bartlett (James Cagney), former garage mechanic who’s looking forward to getting his old job back after the war; aspiring attorney Lloyd Hart (the almost terminally bland and boring Jeffrey Lynn); and George Hally (Humphrey Bogart) — “Hally” is the name on the final credit roll but during the actual movie he’s never called anything but George — who’s decided he likes killing people and fondles his rifle suggestively to indicate what he wants to do after he gets out of the service. (When Lloyd draws back at shooting a 15-year-old German soldier, George lifts his rifle and cheerily dispatches the poor kid, snarling, “He’ll never be 16.” A split-second later, the Armistice is announced.)
Like some of the real troops in World War I, our trio are held over in Germany as part of the occupation force for two years after the end of major combat operations (plus ça change, plus ça même chose … ), and by the time they finally get home the nation has returned to normalcy and forgotten all about its veterans, and the country is in the grip of a recession and Eddie’s old employer can’t (or won’t) find room for him. Eddie is saved by his former roommate, Danny Green (a relatively restrained Frank McHugh), who agrees to split not only his room but also his cab with him — they can each drive it for 12 hours a day and split the cost of gas, repairs, etc. Eddie is busted as a “mule” for delivering liquor to the high-class speakeasy run by Panama Smith (Gladys George) — a character clearly based on Texas Guinan — and suddenly realizes that Prohibition has opened up much more promising business opportunities for guys like him than normal business could ever offer. He graduates from peddling another gang’s bootleg gin to making his own to hijacking the shipments of other gangsters — particularly Nick Brown (Paul Kelly) — who were actually bothering to smuggle in decent legal drinkables from abroad. On one such run, in which Eddie and his gang have gone out in a boat posing as Coast Guardsmen, he runs into George, who’s now a part of Nick Brown’s gang but is willing to throw Nick overboard (figuratively speaking) and partner with Eddie, George to take charge of the smuggling and Eddie the merchandising.
Meanwhile, in his early scuffling days Eddie had gone out to see his pen pal during the war, Jean Sherman (Priscilla Lane), who’d sent a photo of herself in a high school play and therefore had made herself look considerably older than she actually was. When Eddie becomes a successful bootlegger, and Jean has grown old enough to interest him as a woman, he arranges with Panama to introduce her as a singer in her nightclub, and Jean becomes a star (though, oddly, she never seems to perform anywhere else) in a plot line that intriguingly anticipates Cagney’s role as Ruth Etting’s gangster manager in Love Me or Leave Me 16 years later. Lloyd, meanwhile, has served as Eddie’s attorney until Eddie and George hijack a liquor shipment that the feds had seized from Nick Brown and they in turn steal from the federal warehouse (by far the most visually interesting scene in the film, full of proto-noir atmospherics lacking in the rest), and George murders his old sergeant from the war days.
Things are going swimmingly for the principals — save for the constant arguments between good-bad guy Eddie and bad-bad guy George, and Jean’s loss of interest in Eddie in favor of the affections of good-good guy Lloyd — until the 1929 stock market crash happens, represented by a magnificent montage sequence by future director Don Siegel in which a giant ticker-tape machine hovers over Wall Street, dollar signs burst out of it as it explodes, and the buildings themselves collapse and literally melt into the street below. (This sequence is the biggest thing people remember about The Roaring Twenties and it’s been used in countless movies since, including some serious documentaries about the Depression.) Eddie is caught in the crash and loses his own empire — writers Jerry Wald, Richard Macaulay and Robert Rossen could (and should) have made more of the irony that Eddie made his fortune in an illegal enterprise and lost it all in legitimate (if unethical) investments — while George takes over the gang and recruits Nick Brown’s old henchmen, who’d been cut loose after Eddie murdered Nick in an ambush at the club where Jean sang.
Under the double whammy of losing both his fortune and Jean, Eddie sinks into an alcoholic despair — my husband Charles was especially impressed with Cagney’s acting in these scenes, saying he accurately caught the drunkard’s “tic” instead of just superficially playing intoxication — from which he’s roused only by the news that George’s gang has threatened Lloyd, whereupon he shoots George only to be killed himself — though he gets a death scene that is almost operatic in its extended length, staggering through the streets of New York until he finally expires on the steps of a church. (Apparently someone at Warners had seen John Ford’s The Informer.) The Roaring Twenties is a good Warners gangster movie but somewhat laden down by its sense of Importance with a capital I; it begins with a written those-who-cannot-remember-the-past-are-doomed-to-repeat-it foreword by Mark Hellinger (whose story “The World Moves On” provided the basis for the film) and is narrated throughout by John Deering, whose stentorian voice gives us historical background we could probably have figured out for ourselves.
Raoul Walsh directed — his first job at Warners — and though The Roaring Twenties is an exciting film it’s also oddly slower than most Warners vehicles, and though the film started a fad for the music of the 1920’s (and also contributed the phrase “The Roaring Twenties” to the culture), the songs are authentic for the period but their presentation isn’t. They’re arranged like the music of 1939 — not swing but the string-laden “sweet” dance music played at hotels too upper-class in their clienteles (or at least their aspirations) to want anything that loud — and Priscilla Lane’s vocals (I presume they’re her own; they’re not good enough to sound like a voice double and neither the American Film Institute Catalog nor imdb.com credits a voice double for her) are also in 1939 rather than 1920’s style. I was amused when the first introduction of James Cagney’s character after the war scenes was set to the song “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” — also the tune heard at the end of Cagney’s star-making 1931 film The Public Enemy (also set in the early 1920’s), when his bundled corpse is dumped on his family’s doorstep. It’s not the film it could have been with more sensitive writing, more energetic direction and a better female lead (like Ann Sheridan, maybe?), but it’s still pretty good.
Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles (Beijing New Picture Film Co. , 2005)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The library movie was the awkwardly titled Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles, a Chinese-Japanese co-production credited to well-known Chinese director Zhang Yimou (though the order of his names is reversed on the imdb.com entry for the film, which also lists it under its Chinese title, Qian li zou dan qi), though in fact Zhang only shot the parts of the film that take place in China. The parts set in Japan (i.e., the framing story) were directed by Yasuo Furuhata, who was designated as “uncredited” on imdb.com even though he is credited on the closing roll.
The central character is a middle-aged Japanese man, Gou-ichi Takata (Ken Takakura), who lives in an isolated coastal fishing village but travels to Tokyo in the opening sequence (taking the bullet train, which is as cool-looking as I’ve always imagined it) to see his son Ken-ichi, who’s in a hospital dying of cancer and is so bitter about how his dad treated him during childhood and early adulthood that he refuses to see him despite the entreaties of Rie (Shinobu Terajima), Ken-ichi’s wife and one of the voices of reason in this film. Though Ken-ichi is listed in the credits as being played by actor Kiichi Nakai, he’s never shown in the film except during a flashback sequence, a video he shot during his years in the Chinese outback of a performance of a folk opera called Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles starring a legendary singer/actor, Jiamin Li (who appears as himself).
Rie gives her father-in-law a VHS tape of this (which seems a bit anachronistic for a 2005 movie) and he watches it and hears Li complain that Ken-ichi caught him on a bad day and he wants another chance to film his performance when he can do it better. So Gou-ichi decides to travel to China, find the remote village in which his son was living when he shot the tape, and film another performance of the opera featuring Li. When he arrives, not surprisingly he’s confronted by the Chinese bureaucracy — he needs approval from the Foreign Ministry and the Culture Ministry and the Bureau of Prisons, the last because in the meantime Li has been arrested and incarcerated (we’re never told for what). He’s also confronted by a female interpreter , Jasmine (Jiang Wen), since the only person in the Chinese village that knows even a little Japanese is the opera’s producer, Lingo (Lin Qiu), and even he knows only a little. The story obviously attempts to depict the culture shock facing a monolingual Japanese tourist among monolingual Chinese — and I’m sure this element of the story worked fine in both Japan and China, but to the Occidental ear (this Occidental ear, anyway) Chinese and Japanese sound too similar and neither is comprehensible. (It’s not just that I don’t know these languages, it’s that they’re both Asian and therefore farther removed from my sound world than the European languages; had the film been about a French tourist in the darkest reaches of the Black Forest and surrounded by people who speak only German, that I would have got.)
The opening parts of this movie are rather dull, but the film picks up dramatic power and punch when Gou-ichi meets Yang Yang (played by refreshingly unsentimental child actor Zhenbo Yang), Jiamin Li’s illegitimate son, whom he tried to acknowledge publicly just before he was arrested — which for some reason only got him into more trouble with the law. What’s more, Yang Yang is bitter towards his father for having abandoned him — the parallel with Gou-ichi’s situation with his own son is unstressed but readily apparent — and the bitterness extends so far that Yang Yang runs away (in a marvelous section of Chinese countryside that looks remarkably like the Grand Canyon) rather than agree to let Gou-ichi and Jasmine take him to the prison where his father is being held. Yang Yang and Gou-ichi get lost in the Chinese Grand Canyon (along the way Yang Yang has to take a dump, and for the first time in my moviegoing life I actually got to see shit come out of a person’s behind on screen — did Zhang actually cue this or was it a special effect?) and have to spend the night sleeping outside before they’re finally rescued.
After the story line involving Yang Yang, Gou-ichi finally gets permission to visit Li in prison — though in the meantime he’s received a cell phone call from Rie, who said that Ken-ichi told her to tell him that filming the opera really isn’t that important to him; the important thing was that dad was willing to go all the way to China on his behalf — though Gou-ichi is still tortured because he has no way of knowing whether his son actually said this or Rie made it up to make him feel better. By the time he arrives at the prison, he gets another call from Rie, this one telling him that Ken-ichi has died — but the special performance of the opera in prison goes on anyway, with Gou-ichi running a hand-held video camera, and it’s in progress as we fade out.
I was a bit disappointed overall by this movie — it’s good but it’s hardly in the same league as Zhang’s masterpiece, Raise the Red Lantern — though the last two story arcs are fine and moving, and portray the theme that we’d better maintain our connections to our families no matter how much grief they’ve caused us lest our relatives die or disappear on us and deprive us of the chance; and the film is also splendid visually. The scenes in Japan are shot in a cool blue tone, while the scenes in China are a riot of color highlighted by the red banners used in the opera performance; when cinematographer Xiaoding Zhao uses brown tones, it’s because he’s shooting things one would expect to be brown — rocks, soil, wood — not that it’s just his default option. I could have used a better movie yesterday afternoon, but this one was still pretty good.
The library movie was the awkwardly titled Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles, a Chinese-Japanese co-production credited to well-known Chinese director Zhang Yimou (though the order of his names is reversed on the imdb.com entry for the film, which also lists it under its Chinese title, Qian li zou dan qi), though in fact Zhang only shot the parts of the film that take place in China. The parts set in Japan (i.e., the framing story) were directed by Yasuo Furuhata, who was designated as “uncredited” on imdb.com even though he is credited on the closing roll.
The central character is a middle-aged Japanese man, Gou-ichi Takata (Ken Takakura), who lives in an isolated coastal fishing village but travels to Tokyo in the opening sequence (taking the bullet train, which is as cool-looking as I’ve always imagined it) to see his son Ken-ichi, who’s in a hospital dying of cancer and is so bitter about how his dad treated him during childhood and early adulthood that he refuses to see him despite the entreaties of Rie (Shinobu Terajima), Ken-ichi’s wife and one of the voices of reason in this film. Though Ken-ichi is listed in the credits as being played by actor Kiichi Nakai, he’s never shown in the film except during a flashback sequence, a video he shot during his years in the Chinese outback of a performance of a folk opera called Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles starring a legendary singer/actor, Jiamin Li (who appears as himself).
Rie gives her father-in-law a VHS tape of this (which seems a bit anachronistic for a 2005 movie) and he watches it and hears Li complain that Ken-ichi caught him on a bad day and he wants another chance to film his performance when he can do it better. So Gou-ichi decides to travel to China, find the remote village in which his son was living when he shot the tape, and film another performance of the opera featuring Li. When he arrives, not surprisingly he’s confronted by the Chinese bureaucracy — he needs approval from the Foreign Ministry and the Culture Ministry and the Bureau of Prisons, the last because in the meantime Li has been arrested and incarcerated (we’re never told for what). He’s also confronted by a female interpreter , Jasmine (Jiang Wen), since the only person in the Chinese village that knows even a little Japanese is the opera’s producer, Lingo (Lin Qiu), and even he knows only a little. The story obviously attempts to depict the culture shock facing a monolingual Japanese tourist among monolingual Chinese — and I’m sure this element of the story worked fine in both Japan and China, but to the Occidental ear (this Occidental ear, anyway) Chinese and Japanese sound too similar and neither is comprehensible. (It’s not just that I don’t know these languages, it’s that they’re both Asian and therefore farther removed from my sound world than the European languages; had the film been about a French tourist in the darkest reaches of the Black Forest and surrounded by people who speak only German, that I would have got.)
The opening parts of this movie are rather dull, but the film picks up dramatic power and punch when Gou-ichi meets Yang Yang (played by refreshingly unsentimental child actor Zhenbo Yang), Jiamin Li’s illegitimate son, whom he tried to acknowledge publicly just before he was arrested — which for some reason only got him into more trouble with the law. What’s more, Yang Yang is bitter towards his father for having abandoned him — the parallel with Gou-ichi’s situation with his own son is unstressed but readily apparent — and the bitterness extends so far that Yang Yang runs away (in a marvelous section of Chinese countryside that looks remarkably like the Grand Canyon) rather than agree to let Gou-ichi and Jasmine take him to the prison where his father is being held. Yang Yang and Gou-ichi get lost in the Chinese Grand Canyon (along the way Yang Yang has to take a dump, and for the first time in my moviegoing life I actually got to see shit come out of a person’s behind on screen — did Zhang actually cue this or was it a special effect?) and have to spend the night sleeping outside before they’re finally rescued.
After the story line involving Yang Yang, Gou-ichi finally gets permission to visit Li in prison — though in the meantime he’s received a cell phone call from Rie, who said that Ken-ichi told her to tell him that filming the opera really isn’t that important to him; the important thing was that dad was willing to go all the way to China on his behalf — though Gou-ichi is still tortured because he has no way of knowing whether his son actually said this or Rie made it up to make him feel better. By the time he arrives at the prison, he gets another call from Rie, this one telling him that Ken-ichi has died — but the special performance of the opera in prison goes on anyway, with Gou-ichi running a hand-held video camera, and it’s in progress as we fade out.
I was a bit disappointed overall by this movie — it’s good but it’s hardly in the same league as Zhang’s masterpiece, Raise the Red Lantern — though the last two story arcs are fine and moving, and portray the theme that we’d better maintain our connections to our families no matter how much grief they’ve caused us lest our relatives die or disappear on us and deprive us of the chance; and the film is also splendid visually. The scenes in Japan are shot in a cool blue tone, while the scenes in China are a riot of color highlighted by the red banners used in the opera performance; when cinematographer Xiaoding Zhao uses brown tones, it’s because he’s shooting things one would expect to be brown — rocks, soil, wood — not that it’s just his default option. I could have used a better movie yesterday afternoon, but this one was still pretty good.
Romulus, My Father (Arenafilm , 2007)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The library movie was Romulus, My Father, an incredibly dark coming-of-age tale from Australia supposedly based on the memoirs of writer and philosopher Raimond Gaita, who grew up in the Australian outback in such a monumentally dysfunctional family Augusten Burroughs’ upbringing looks like a model of stability by comparison. During the first half-hour or so of the movie he’s living what looks like a financially stressed but otherwise bucolic existence on a farm owned by his father, Romulus Gaita (Eric Bana, almost unrecognizable as the same actor who so beautifully played the Israelis’ avenging angel in Steven Spielberg’s Munich), but things turn dark in a hurry when we learn the real reason why Raimond’s mother isn’t part of the scene: she’s off in Melbourne living with another guy, Mitru (Russell Dykstra), whose brother Hora (Marton Csokas) comes to visit Romulus and Raimond at the farm and ends up looking after Romulus when he crashes his motorcycle and is severely injured. (One thing that’s readily apparent in this movie is that Australia, being a civilized country, offers health care to its citizens and doesn’t make them worry about a major injury or illness bankrupting them as so often happens here in the U.S., where we enjoy our much-touted “liberty” from the “oppression” of universal health care. It’s disorienting, to say the least, for an American viewer to see people in foreign movies going to hospital when they need to without the obsession Americans have with how the hell they’re ever going to be able to pay for their care.)
The film may be based on a true story, but as my husband Charles said about the film Shine (also set in Australia) the reason the filmmakers — director Richard Roxburgh (a theatrical director making his feature-film debut) and writer Nick Drake (the parallel between this story and the life of the writer’s namesake, the tortured British singer-songwriter of the early 1970’s, is almost unbearable) — picked this true story to film is that it so neatly fits into moviedom’s pet clichés. Raimond’s mom, Christina (Franka Potente), turns up on the farm, and the tension between the four adults reaches such intensity that through much of the movie the kid seems the only sane one of the bunch. Much of the film features standard-issue teenage alienation as filtered through the insanely desperate and isolated life the characters lead — about the only link to normal teenager-dom Raimond has is a phonograph owned by a girl his age and the one record she seems to have, the Australian rock song “Real Wild Child” (though heard here only in Jerry Lee Lewis’s cover — one would think an Australian would have bought the original record by Aussie singer Johnny O’Keefe instead) — and the sheer craziness of all the adult principals, particularly Christina, who’s drawn as a suicidal nymphomaniac who takes overdoses of sleeping pills twice in the film — the first time she’s rescued in time but the second suicide attempt is successful.
Romulus, My Father is the sort of movie you want to like — it’s clearly well directed and well acted (though cinematographer Geoffrey Simpson way overdoes the past-is-brown look) and is attempting to tell an “important” story, its intentions are noble and sophisticated — and yet I found it virtually unwatchable because it’s such a total downer. Even the relatively fleeting pleasures Raimond finds — mostly rowing on the local lake with his dad or (later) one of the other men in his family’s life — don’t add up to much in the way of happiness for him, and it’s only when the final American Graffiti-style where-are-they-now credits roll and we learn that Raimond Gaita became a famous writer and philosopher and wrote the autobiography on which the film is based, that we heave a sigh of relief that he avoided the incarceration in a mental institution for which the film’s events, and in particular the repeated traumas he suffered at the hands of every adult he interacted with, seemed to be preparing him. I’ll give special acknowledgment to the marvelous performance of Kodi Smit-McPhee as the young Raimond — his baby face bears an odd resemblance to the very young Bob Dylan and he’s perfect as the island of sanity in the sea of madness in which his character lives — and though his name is a bit of a tongue-twister I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see him get some major credits and follow fellow Aussies Russell Crowe and the late Heath Ledger to big stardom Up Over.
The library movie was Romulus, My Father, an incredibly dark coming-of-age tale from Australia supposedly based on the memoirs of writer and philosopher Raimond Gaita, who grew up in the Australian outback in such a monumentally dysfunctional family Augusten Burroughs’ upbringing looks like a model of stability by comparison. During the first half-hour or so of the movie he’s living what looks like a financially stressed but otherwise bucolic existence on a farm owned by his father, Romulus Gaita (Eric Bana, almost unrecognizable as the same actor who so beautifully played the Israelis’ avenging angel in Steven Spielberg’s Munich), but things turn dark in a hurry when we learn the real reason why Raimond’s mother isn’t part of the scene: she’s off in Melbourne living with another guy, Mitru (Russell Dykstra), whose brother Hora (Marton Csokas) comes to visit Romulus and Raimond at the farm and ends up looking after Romulus when he crashes his motorcycle and is severely injured. (One thing that’s readily apparent in this movie is that Australia, being a civilized country, offers health care to its citizens and doesn’t make them worry about a major injury or illness bankrupting them as so often happens here in the U.S., where we enjoy our much-touted “liberty” from the “oppression” of universal health care. It’s disorienting, to say the least, for an American viewer to see people in foreign movies going to hospital when they need to without the obsession Americans have with how the hell they’re ever going to be able to pay for their care.)
The film may be based on a true story, but as my husband Charles said about the film Shine (also set in Australia) the reason the filmmakers — director Richard Roxburgh (a theatrical director making his feature-film debut) and writer Nick Drake (the parallel between this story and the life of the writer’s namesake, the tortured British singer-songwriter of the early 1970’s, is almost unbearable) — picked this true story to film is that it so neatly fits into moviedom’s pet clichés. Raimond’s mom, Christina (Franka Potente), turns up on the farm, and the tension between the four adults reaches such intensity that through much of the movie the kid seems the only sane one of the bunch. Much of the film features standard-issue teenage alienation as filtered through the insanely desperate and isolated life the characters lead — about the only link to normal teenager-dom Raimond has is a phonograph owned by a girl his age and the one record she seems to have, the Australian rock song “Real Wild Child” (though heard here only in Jerry Lee Lewis’s cover — one would think an Australian would have bought the original record by Aussie singer Johnny O’Keefe instead) — and the sheer craziness of all the adult principals, particularly Christina, who’s drawn as a suicidal nymphomaniac who takes overdoses of sleeping pills twice in the film — the first time she’s rescued in time but the second suicide attempt is successful.
Romulus, My Father is the sort of movie you want to like — it’s clearly well directed and well acted (though cinematographer Geoffrey Simpson way overdoes the past-is-brown look) and is attempting to tell an “important” story, its intentions are noble and sophisticated — and yet I found it virtually unwatchable because it’s such a total downer. Even the relatively fleeting pleasures Raimond finds — mostly rowing on the local lake with his dad or (later) one of the other men in his family’s life — don’t add up to much in the way of happiness for him, and it’s only when the final American Graffiti-style where-are-they-now credits roll and we learn that Raimond Gaita became a famous writer and philosopher and wrote the autobiography on which the film is based, that we heave a sigh of relief that he avoided the incarceration in a mental institution for which the film’s events, and in particular the repeated traumas he suffered at the hands of every adult he interacted with, seemed to be preparing him. I’ll give special acknowledgment to the marvelous performance of Kodi Smit-McPhee as the young Raimond — his baby face bears an odd resemblance to the very young Bob Dylan and he’s perfect as the island of sanity in the sea of madness in which his character lives — and though his name is a bit of a tongue-twister I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see him get some major credits and follow fellow Aussies Russell Crowe and the late Heath Ledger to big stardom Up Over.
Plain Truth (Lifetime, 2004)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
When I got home I decided to run a Lifetime TV-movie from 2004 I’d been curious about: Plain Truth, an intriguing knockoff of Witness with Mariska Hargitay from Law and Order: Special Victims Unit in what’s essentially the Harrison Ford role. It’s set in Pennsylvania (though filmed, typically for Lifetime, in Canada) and features Hargitay as Ellie Harrison, a hot-shot attorney who’s just won an acquittal for a financier who embezzled $300 million from his company and ruined a lot of his investors in the process (a plot twist that reads far more powerfully now than it no doubt did five years ago!). She’s exhausted and takes two months off from the big firm for which she works, intending to vacation in Italy, but instead she gets embroiled in a case when an old friend of hers who left an Amish community and now works as a nurse reports that Katie Fitch (Allison Pill), the daughter of her cousin, Sarah Fitch (Kate Trotter), is being accused of murdering her son immediately after the baby was born.
Though she’s on the other side of the law this time, Hargitay’s role is not all that different from her SVU character Olivia Benson, as she has to break down Katie’s defensiveness and lies — at first Katie denies ever having had a baby or even having had sex, and it’s only as things develop that she not only did have sex, but it wasn’t with her Amish boyfriend Samuel (Andrew Martin-Smith), son of the community’s minister (Colin Fox), but with a young man named Adam Sinclair (Christopher Ralph), a friend of her brother Jacob (Alec McClure), who was disowned by their father Aaron (Jan Niklas) when he insisted on leaving the Amish community to attend college. Sensitively directed by Paul Shapiro from a script by Matthew Tabak based on a novel by Jodi Picoult (who appears in the film as an extra), Plain Truth is a far more moving piece of work than Romulus, My Father even though it’s also about an isolated farm community and a dysfunctional family; the characters are morally ambiguous, the conflicts are intelligently presented and Allison Pill turns in a gnomically subtle performance as a woman whose calm Amish-bred demeanor hides a maelstrom of internal conflict — not only between her family and the world, the punishments of her community and those of the criminal justice system, but between her upbringing and values on one side and her adolescent urges on the other. Hargitay acts with her usual authority but Pill matches the quality of her performance — indeed, the actors in general manage to become their characters in a way one rarely sees today even in far more prestigious films than this one!
Like its prototype, Witness, Plain Truth is at once a clash-of-cultures drama (thanks to a condition in the judge’s grant of bail to her client, Ellen has to live at the Amish farmhouse during the duration of the trial) and a murder mystery; Ellen convincingly argues in court that Katie’s baby wasn’t killed by her or anyone else — it died a few minutes after birth from listeriosis, an infection caused by exposure to dairy products and unpasteurized milk (though if this is such a major health risk one wonders how any Amish babies survive) — but then at the very end of the film [spoiler alert!] Katie’s mom presents her with the bloody pair of scissors with which she cut the umbilical cord, thereby letting Ellie and us know that she murdered her daughter’s baby to preserve her daughter’s place in the Amish world, and leaving Ellie with one final dilemma (unresolved at the fade-out) between her desire to see Katie back in the Amish world where she belongs and her obligation as an attorney (an officer of the court) to report a crime no matter how she hears of it, especially when the person confessing to her is not a client and therefore is not protected by attorney-client privilege. It seems odd that I could watch a prestigious independent film that’s won international awards and a Lifetime movie back-to-back and find the Lifetime production not only better entertainment but deeper and richer as drama, but that’s what happened here.
When I got home I decided to run a Lifetime TV-movie from 2004 I’d been curious about: Plain Truth, an intriguing knockoff of Witness with Mariska Hargitay from Law and Order: Special Victims Unit in what’s essentially the Harrison Ford role. It’s set in Pennsylvania (though filmed, typically for Lifetime, in Canada) and features Hargitay as Ellie Harrison, a hot-shot attorney who’s just won an acquittal for a financier who embezzled $300 million from his company and ruined a lot of his investors in the process (a plot twist that reads far more powerfully now than it no doubt did five years ago!). She’s exhausted and takes two months off from the big firm for which she works, intending to vacation in Italy, but instead she gets embroiled in a case when an old friend of hers who left an Amish community and now works as a nurse reports that Katie Fitch (Allison Pill), the daughter of her cousin, Sarah Fitch (Kate Trotter), is being accused of murdering her son immediately after the baby was born.
Though she’s on the other side of the law this time, Hargitay’s role is not all that different from her SVU character Olivia Benson, as she has to break down Katie’s defensiveness and lies — at first Katie denies ever having had a baby or even having had sex, and it’s only as things develop that she not only did have sex, but it wasn’t with her Amish boyfriend Samuel (Andrew Martin-Smith), son of the community’s minister (Colin Fox), but with a young man named Adam Sinclair (Christopher Ralph), a friend of her brother Jacob (Alec McClure), who was disowned by their father Aaron (Jan Niklas) when he insisted on leaving the Amish community to attend college. Sensitively directed by Paul Shapiro from a script by Matthew Tabak based on a novel by Jodi Picoult (who appears in the film as an extra), Plain Truth is a far more moving piece of work than Romulus, My Father even though it’s also about an isolated farm community and a dysfunctional family; the characters are morally ambiguous, the conflicts are intelligently presented and Allison Pill turns in a gnomically subtle performance as a woman whose calm Amish-bred demeanor hides a maelstrom of internal conflict — not only between her family and the world, the punishments of her community and those of the criminal justice system, but between her upbringing and values on one side and her adolescent urges on the other. Hargitay acts with her usual authority but Pill matches the quality of her performance — indeed, the actors in general manage to become their characters in a way one rarely sees today even in far more prestigious films than this one!
Like its prototype, Witness, Plain Truth is at once a clash-of-cultures drama (thanks to a condition in the judge’s grant of bail to her client, Ellen has to live at the Amish farmhouse during the duration of the trial) and a murder mystery; Ellen convincingly argues in court that Katie’s baby wasn’t killed by her or anyone else — it died a few minutes after birth from listeriosis, an infection caused by exposure to dairy products and unpasteurized milk (though if this is such a major health risk one wonders how any Amish babies survive) — but then at the very end of the film [spoiler alert!] Katie’s mom presents her with the bloody pair of scissors with which she cut the umbilical cord, thereby letting Ellie and us know that she murdered her daughter’s baby to preserve her daughter’s place in the Amish world, and leaving Ellie with one final dilemma (unresolved at the fade-out) between her desire to see Katie back in the Amish world where she belongs and her obligation as an attorney (an officer of the court) to report a crime no matter how she hears of it, especially when the person confessing to her is not a client and therefore is not protected by attorney-client privilege. It seems odd that I could watch a prestigious independent film that’s won international awards and a Lifetime movie back-to-back and find the Lifetime production not only better entertainment but deeper and richer as drama, but that’s what happened here.
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Flubber (Disney, 1997)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Flubber was Walt Disney Production’s 1997 remake of the 1961 The Absent-Minded Professor, itself based on a short story by Samuel W. Taylor called “A Condition of Gravity.” Richard Schickel’s biography The Disney Version said that the 1961 version was one of Walt Disney’s most personal films, and that the central character of Professor Brainard (his first name was “Ned” when Fred MacMurray played him in 1961 and “Philip” when Robin Williams played him in 1997) was based on Disney’s father, the unworldly inventor and tinkerer Elias P. Disney. (Erik Larson’s book The Devil in the White City drew an interesting connection between the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and Disneyland; it seems that among the many workers hired to build the World’s fair was Elias P. Disney, and he never tired of telling his sons Roy and Walt how beautiful it had been … and supposedly Walt carried his dad’s tales in his consciousness for decades and they inspired the design and appearance of Disneyland.)
In both movies, Prof. Brainard more-or-less accidentally invents a super-pliable, metastable solid named “Flubber” (“flying rubber” — I was amused to note that the French title for Flubber was Plaxmol!) and uses it to make his car fly, enable the basketball team at the college that employs him to win a game by putting flubber on their shoes so they jump faster and higher than anyone could naturally, and save the college from going out of business. In Flubber, Robin Williams plays the professor, and while he’s not as deadpan as MacMurray he’s a good deal funnier and seems to have taken this role at least in part to prove that he could still outdo Jim Carrey at physical comedy even though by then Williams was middle-aged. There are other changes; the Flubber itself has far more of a personality this time — in one scene it gets out, divides itself into pieces and stages its own Busby Berkeley-style production number to a tune by the film’s composer, Danny “Boingo” Elfman, called “The Flubber Mambo” (I’m not making this up, you know!), and even when it isn’t going that far to anthropomorphize itself it still has a way of forming itself into a vaguely human shape and even speaking (in the dubbed voice of Scott Martin Gershin).
Flubber is also considerably higher-tech than the previous version — though the Macintosh Plus computer Prof. Brainard works on at home is quite anachronistic for 1997 and only a sign with a Web address betrays the existence of the Internet — mainly because Brainard has two computer pals who help him maintain his home and his schedule. One, Weber, is a speech-less drone whose function is to clean his house; the other, Weebo (voiced by Jodi Benson), is sort of Tinker Bell to Brainard’s Peter Pan (also, you’ll recall, a role played by Robin Williams: in the film Hook!), a general factotum who keeps his schedule, does odd jobs around the house, and even shows him film clips (and not just from Disney films, either — working on the licensing for this film must have been a nightmare!) that mirror his current emotional state. The plot also contains the conceit that the absent-minded professor is so absent-minded that he can’t even remember to attend his wedding; he’s engaged to marry the college’s woman president, Sara Jean Reynolds (Marcia Gay Harden), but at the time the film begins he’s already abandoned her at the altar twice and she’s made up her mind that if he does it again, the engagement is off. Of course, the afternoon of their wedding he’s actually in his garage laboratory inventing Flubber, but her will is implacable and she not only dumps him, she accepts the proposal of the smarmy villain Wilson Croft (Christopher McDonald), who’s sort of like the Kent Smith character in The Fountainhead: he’s become rich, powerful and influential by stealing Brainard’s ideas and taking credit for them himself.
Actually he’s not the principal villain; that’s Chester Hoenicker (Raymond Barry), who lent the college a large sum of money in exchange for which his son Bennett (Wil Wheaton) was supposed to be given a free ride through his academics so he could play basketball and get into Harvard Business School. Only Brainard, having the same sort of integrity Ray Walston’s character had in the otherwise unwatchable Tall Story, has bravely given Bennett a flunking grade in chemistry and thus disqualified him from school athletics — so Chester announces that he’s calling the school’s loan, which will force it to close altogether at the end of the school year. It all ends happily, of course, with Brainard successfully marketing his invention, he and Sara Jean getting back together, the college being saved and Chester Hoenicker’s henchmen, Smith (Clancy Brown) and Wesson (Ted Levine) — their names are a clever touch in a script by John Hughes (yes, that John Hughes — the Pretty in Pink/Breakfast Club/Ferris Bueller’s Day Off John Hughes) and Bill Walsh that is otherwise pretty predictable — and even Weebo, who gets a Peter Pan-esque death scene (I couldn’t help but joke, “Clap three times if you believe in … robots”) and actually expires, but not before uploading a replacement “daughter” of herself, Weebette (voiced by Julie Morrison).
The earlier parts of the film suggest that Weebo is actually jealous of Sara Jean and is deliberately helping make sure Brainard doesn’t remember their wedding dates, but little or nothing is made of this potentially charming plot complication — and in a 1997 movie the idea of the professor trolling around in a Model “T” Ford as Fred MacMurray did in the original version would have seemed impossibly retro, so Williams’ incarnation of Brainard gets to drive (and fly) a late-1950’s Ford Thunderbird convertible. There’s also a character identified simply as “Window Boy” (Benjamin Brock), who has no other plot function except to happen to be looking out the window as Brainard and/or Flubber are doing something particularly outrageous and run screaming to his parents, who of course blow him off and tell him there’s nothing out there for him to be frightened about. Flubber isn’t a great comedy, and it probably would have been better if Williams had made it about 10 to 15 years earlier (when he wouldn’t have had to rely so heavily on digital effects and stunt people to do his pratfalls for him), but it’s still good fun.
Flubber was Walt Disney Production’s 1997 remake of the 1961 The Absent-Minded Professor, itself based on a short story by Samuel W. Taylor called “A Condition of Gravity.” Richard Schickel’s biography The Disney Version said that the 1961 version was one of Walt Disney’s most personal films, and that the central character of Professor Brainard (his first name was “Ned” when Fred MacMurray played him in 1961 and “Philip” when Robin Williams played him in 1997) was based on Disney’s father, the unworldly inventor and tinkerer Elias P. Disney. (Erik Larson’s book The Devil in the White City drew an interesting connection between the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and Disneyland; it seems that among the many workers hired to build the World’s fair was Elias P. Disney, and he never tired of telling his sons Roy and Walt how beautiful it had been … and supposedly Walt carried his dad’s tales in his consciousness for decades and they inspired the design and appearance of Disneyland.)
In both movies, Prof. Brainard more-or-less accidentally invents a super-pliable, metastable solid named “Flubber” (“flying rubber” — I was amused to note that the French title for Flubber was Plaxmol!) and uses it to make his car fly, enable the basketball team at the college that employs him to win a game by putting flubber on their shoes so they jump faster and higher than anyone could naturally, and save the college from going out of business. In Flubber, Robin Williams plays the professor, and while he’s not as deadpan as MacMurray he’s a good deal funnier and seems to have taken this role at least in part to prove that he could still outdo Jim Carrey at physical comedy even though by then Williams was middle-aged. There are other changes; the Flubber itself has far more of a personality this time — in one scene it gets out, divides itself into pieces and stages its own Busby Berkeley-style production number to a tune by the film’s composer, Danny “Boingo” Elfman, called “The Flubber Mambo” (I’m not making this up, you know!), and even when it isn’t going that far to anthropomorphize itself it still has a way of forming itself into a vaguely human shape and even speaking (in the dubbed voice of Scott Martin Gershin).
Flubber is also considerably higher-tech than the previous version — though the Macintosh Plus computer Prof. Brainard works on at home is quite anachronistic for 1997 and only a sign with a Web address betrays the existence of the Internet — mainly because Brainard has two computer pals who help him maintain his home and his schedule. One, Weber, is a speech-less drone whose function is to clean his house; the other, Weebo (voiced by Jodi Benson), is sort of Tinker Bell to Brainard’s Peter Pan (also, you’ll recall, a role played by Robin Williams: in the film Hook!), a general factotum who keeps his schedule, does odd jobs around the house, and even shows him film clips (and not just from Disney films, either — working on the licensing for this film must have been a nightmare!) that mirror his current emotional state. The plot also contains the conceit that the absent-minded professor is so absent-minded that he can’t even remember to attend his wedding; he’s engaged to marry the college’s woman president, Sara Jean Reynolds (Marcia Gay Harden), but at the time the film begins he’s already abandoned her at the altar twice and she’s made up her mind that if he does it again, the engagement is off. Of course, the afternoon of their wedding he’s actually in his garage laboratory inventing Flubber, but her will is implacable and she not only dumps him, she accepts the proposal of the smarmy villain Wilson Croft (Christopher McDonald), who’s sort of like the Kent Smith character in The Fountainhead: he’s become rich, powerful and influential by stealing Brainard’s ideas and taking credit for them himself.
Actually he’s not the principal villain; that’s Chester Hoenicker (Raymond Barry), who lent the college a large sum of money in exchange for which his son Bennett (Wil Wheaton) was supposed to be given a free ride through his academics so he could play basketball and get into Harvard Business School. Only Brainard, having the same sort of integrity Ray Walston’s character had in the otherwise unwatchable Tall Story, has bravely given Bennett a flunking grade in chemistry and thus disqualified him from school athletics — so Chester announces that he’s calling the school’s loan, which will force it to close altogether at the end of the school year. It all ends happily, of course, with Brainard successfully marketing his invention, he and Sara Jean getting back together, the college being saved and Chester Hoenicker’s henchmen, Smith (Clancy Brown) and Wesson (Ted Levine) — their names are a clever touch in a script by John Hughes (yes, that John Hughes — the Pretty in Pink/Breakfast Club/Ferris Bueller’s Day Off John Hughes) and Bill Walsh that is otherwise pretty predictable — and even Weebo, who gets a Peter Pan-esque death scene (I couldn’t help but joke, “Clap three times if you believe in … robots”) and actually expires, but not before uploading a replacement “daughter” of herself, Weebette (voiced by Julie Morrison).
The earlier parts of the film suggest that Weebo is actually jealous of Sara Jean and is deliberately helping make sure Brainard doesn’t remember their wedding dates, but little or nothing is made of this potentially charming plot complication — and in a 1997 movie the idea of the professor trolling around in a Model “T” Ford as Fred MacMurray did in the original version would have seemed impossibly retro, so Williams’ incarnation of Brainard gets to drive (and fly) a late-1950’s Ford Thunderbird convertible. There’s also a character identified simply as “Window Boy” (Benjamin Brock), who has no other plot function except to happen to be looking out the window as Brainard and/or Flubber are doing something particularly outrageous and run screaming to his parents, who of course blow him off and tell him there’s nothing out there for him to be frightened about. Flubber isn’t a great comedy, and it probably would have been better if Williams had made it about 10 to 15 years earlier (when he wouldn’t have had to rely so heavily on digital effects and stunt people to do his pratfalls for him), but it’s still good fun.
Friday, April 3, 2009
The Complete Buddy Holly (Purple Chick, 2007)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The DVD I ran last night was The Complete Buddy Holly, a half-hour bonus download issued by the Purple Chick entity in connection with their 10 CD’s allegedly offering the entire recorded oeuvre of this fascinating figure in early rock ’n’ roll. The CD’s — apparently only available by download (and it’s shameful that Holly’s record company, Universal née MCA née Decca née Coral, has never seen fit to put out their own comprehensive boxed set with versions of everything Holly recorded, without the posthumous overdubs that were added to virtually all the records that were still unreleased when he died, the way they did with two other artists that had major careers and were similarly influential despite their early deaths, Hank Williams and Patsy Cline) — represent an attempt to be as complete as possible; the first six discs contain the records Holly made under his own name and those of his bands, the Two-Tones (renamed “The Three Tunes” by Decca) and the Crickets.
Discs seven and eight contain the records Holly made as a session musician for other people — and with a few exceptions, they’re among the most God-awful music of the 1950’s. There are a few halfway decent rockabilly artists here — notably Gary Dale (his full name was Gary Dale Tollett, but he used just his first and middle names professionally) and Rick Tucker — and some interesting bits of sessions led by Holly’s sidemen and collaborators (Jack Neal, Ben Hall, Sonny Curtis and his drummer, Jerry “J. I..” Allison under the name “Ivan,” his middle name, doing the novelty versions of “Real Wild Child” and “Oh, You Beautiful Doll” included on the 1978 Complete Buddy Holly LP boxed set) — but only two performers Holly recorded with were really worthy of him. One was his protégé, Waylon Jennings, who was a disc jockey at Lubbock country radio station KLLL when Holly met him, got him a Coral record contract and produced his first single, “Jole Blon” b/w “When Sin Stops” (and it was startling to hear that “When Sin Stops” was recorded in the modern fashion — the instrumental backing was laid down first, then Jennings overlaid his vocal and the backup singers were added last), and was the only artist represented on these two discs to go on to a major career of his own.
The other was Carolyn Hester, one of the great enigmas of American music history and, to my knowledge, the only person who recorded with both Buddy Holly and Bob Dylan. Hester had a higher-lying voice than Joan Baez’s but was otherwise pretty much in the same style, and her single with Holly was a Coral release of “Scarlet Ribbons (For Her Hair),” which Harry Belafonte had recorded on his second RCA Victor album (and her arrangement is simply his voice-and-guitar one raised to a higher key for her voice) backed with a cover of the old country standard “Wreck of the Old 97” (a song that doesn’t suit her nearly as well). After her Coral release died in the marketplace, John Hammond heard her in New York and signed her in 1960 — and when it came time to record her first Columbia album she showed up with Dylan and insisted that he play harmonica and sing backup on three songs. The rest, as they say, was history; Hammond loved Dylan at first hearing, signed him, and he became a major star while she was almost totally ignored and forgotten (though she still has enough of a folk following that she was invited to one of the Adams Avenue Roots Festivals a few years ago). Discs nine and 10 contain interviews with Holly and the original versions of records he covered.
The DVD — I was going to get there eventually! — is about half an hour of various clips, including home movie footage of Holly and the Crickets on tour, their appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show (they did “That’ll Be the Day” and “Peggy Sue” the first time out and “Oh, Boy!” the second — and the sound quality, especially on “Oh, Boy!,” is so terrible, with Holly’s vocal almost drowned out by his guitar, that I could only count the Beatles lucky that their Sullivan appearances took place six years later, and apparently in the interim Sullivan’s sound people learned how to mike a rock band properly). The opening clip was in color and was shot silent in 1955 in Oklahoma City while Holly and Elvis Presley were working the two bottom slots on a country package tour headlined by Hank Snow — and apparently represents not only the earliest film footage of Holly but that of Elvis as well (he’s dressed in a neon-bright green shirt and he’s already a physically commanding figure).
The only clips here with synchronized sound are the Sullivan shows, a brief Holly appearance on an American Bandstand-style program, and a weird bit of a New York local show MC’d by Arlene Francis (“I didn’t realize she’d ever done anything other than What’s My Line?,” Charles exclaimed, forgetting that we’ve seen her 1932 appearance as the street prostitute Bela Lugosi picks up for one of his sinister experiments in Murders in the Rue Morgue) in a patronizing fashion, telling her viewers that even if they don’t think they like rock ’n’ roll they should listen to it anyway or else they won’t “understand” young people. Francis is surrounded by a group of young women in what look like prom dresses, who stand around utterly impassively and offer no visible reaction at all while Holly and his bandmates tear into “Peggy Sue” (a better version, oddly, than the one he did on Sullivan), then applaud politely at the end. Other clips on this disc feature attempts to synchronize silent footage with Holly’s recordings (including one surprisingly effective bit of Holly performing Little Richard’s “Ready Teddy”) or to reproduce his lost British TV appearances (including Saturday Night at the London Palladium, where he’s introduced by an MC who looks startlingly like Robert Morley playing Oscar Wilde!) with still photos of him on the sets of these shows while the soundtrack is the home recordings fans made off the air.
The grimmest bit of footage is a series of shots of the plane crash that killed Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens, complete with the dead bodies of the victims lying on the ground in the snow — and what’s most grim about this footage (the soundtrack, by the way, is the undubbed version of one of Holly’s last songs, “Learning the Game”) is that the photographers (almost certainly on assignment from newspapers or wire services) were able to get so close. We’re so used to the sites of plane crashes, especially fatal ones, being cordoned off by FAA investigators determined to recover as much of the wreckage as possible so they can figure out why the plane crashed that it’s shocking that that wasn’t done on this occasion — if there’d been a soul out there sick enough to want to make off with Buddy Holly’s corpse, they probably could have. (Fortunately, the Purple Chick people stuck another five minutes’ worth of footage at the end so we didn’t have to leave with such a downer.)
The DVD I ran last night was The Complete Buddy Holly, a half-hour bonus download issued by the Purple Chick entity in connection with their 10 CD’s allegedly offering the entire recorded oeuvre of this fascinating figure in early rock ’n’ roll. The CD’s — apparently only available by download (and it’s shameful that Holly’s record company, Universal née MCA née Decca née Coral, has never seen fit to put out their own comprehensive boxed set with versions of everything Holly recorded, without the posthumous overdubs that were added to virtually all the records that were still unreleased when he died, the way they did with two other artists that had major careers and were similarly influential despite their early deaths, Hank Williams and Patsy Cline) — represent an attempt to be as complete as possible; the first six discs contain the records Holly made under his own name and those of his bands, the Two-Tones (renamed “The Three Tunes” by Decca) and the Crickets.
Discs seven and eight contain the records Holly made as a session musician for other people — and with a few exceptions, they’re among the most God-awful music of the 1950’s. There are a few halfway decent rockabilly artists here — notably Gary Dale (his full name was Gary Dale Tollett, but he used just his first and middle names professionally) and Rick Tucker — and some interesting bits of sessions led by Holly’s sidemen and collaborators (Jack Neal, Ben Hall, Sonny Curtis and his drummer, Jerry “J. I..” Allison under the name “Ivan,” his middle name, doing the novelty versions of “Real Wild Child” and “Oh, You Beautiful Doll” included on the 1978 Complete Buddy Holly LP boxed set) — but only two performers Holly recorded with were really worthy of him. One was his protégé, Waylon Jennings, who was a disc jockey at Lubbock country radio station KLLL when Holly met him, got him a Coral record contract and produced his first single, “Jole Blon” b/w “When Sin Stops” (and it was startling to hear that “When Sin Stops” was recorded in the modern fashion — the instrumental backing was laid down first, then Jennings overlaid his vocal and the backup singers were added last), and was the only artist represented on these two discs to go on to a major career of his own.
The other was Carolyn Hester, one of the great enigmas of American music history and, to my knowledge, the only person who recorded with both Buddy Holly and Bob Dylan. Hester had a higher-lying voice than Joan Baez’s but was otherwise pretty much in the same style, and her single with Holly was a Coral release of “Scarlet Ribbons (For Her Hair),” which Harry Belafonte had recorded on his second RCA Victor album (and her arrangement is simply his voice-and-guitar one raised to a higher key for her voice) backed with a cover of the old country standard “Wreck of the Old 97” (a song that doesn’t suit her nearly as well). After her Coral release died in the marketplace, John Hammond heard her in New York and signed her in 1960 — and when it came time to record her first Columbia album she showed up with Dylan and insisted that he play harmonica and sing backup on three songs. The rest, as they say, was history; Hammond loved Dylan at first hearing, signed him, and he became a major star while she was almost totally ignored and forgotten (though she still has enough of a folk following that she was invited to one of the Adams Avenue Roots Festivals a few years ago). Discs nine and 10 contain interviews with Holly and the original versions of records he covered.
The DVD — I was going to get there eventually! — is about half an hour of various clips, including home movie footage of Holly and the Crickets on tour, their appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show (they did “That’ll Be the Day” and “Peggy Sue” the first time out and “Oh, Boy!” the second — and the sound quality, especially on “Oh, Boy!,” is so terrible, with Holly’s vocal almost drowned out by his guitar, that I could only count the Beatles lucky that their Sullivan appearances took place six years later, and apparently in the interim Sullivan’s sound people learned how to mike a rock band properly). The opening clip was in color and was shot silent in 1955 in Oklahoma City while Holly and Elvis Presley were working the two bottom slots on a country package tour headlined by Hank Snow — and apparently represents not only the earliest film footage of Holly but that of Elvis as well (he’s dressed in a neon-bright green shirt and he’s already a physically commanding figure).
The only clips here with synchronized sound are the Sullivan shows, a brief Holly appearance on an American Bandstand-style program, and a weird bit of a New York local show MC’d by Arlene Francis (“I didn’t realize she’d ever done anything other than What’s My Line?,” Charles exclaimed, forgetting that we’ve seen her 1932 appearance as the street prostitute Bela Lugosi picks up for one of his sinister experiments in Murders in the Rue Morgue) in a patronizing fashion, telling her viewers that even if they don’t think they like rock ’n’ roll they should listen to it anyway or else they won’t “understand” young people. Francis is surrounded by a group of young women in what look like prom dresses, who stand around utterly impassively and offer no visible reaction at all while Holly and his bandmates tear into “Peggy Sue” (a better version, oddly, than the one he did on Sullivan), then applaud politely at the end. Other clips on this disc feature attempts to synchronize silent footage with Holly’s recordings (including one surprisingly effective bit of Holly performing Little Richard’s “Ready Teddy”) or to reproduce his lost British TV appearances (including Saturday Night at the London Palladium, where he’s introduced by an MC who looks startlingly like Robert Morley playing Oscar Wilde!) with still photos of him on the sets of these shows while the soundtrack is the home recordings fans made off the air.
The grimmest bit of footage is a series of shots of the plane crash that killed Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens, complete with the dead bodies of the victims lying on the ground in the snow — and what’s most grim about this footage (the soundtrack, by the way, is the undubbed version of one of Holly’s last songs, “Learning the Game”) is that the photographers (almost certainly on assignment from newspapers or wire services) were able to get so close. We’re so used to the sites of plane crashes, especially fatal ones, being cordoned off by FAA investigators determined to recover as much of the wreckage as possible so they can figure out why the plane crashed that it’s shocking that that wasn’t done on this occasion — if there’d been a soul out there sick enough to want to make off with Buddy Holly’s corpse, they probably could have. (Fortunately, the Purple Chick people stuck another five minutes’ worth of footage at the end so we didn’t have to leave with such a downer.)
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Religulous (Lionsgate, 2008)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
One thing I didn’t get a chance to do yesterday was write my comments on the film Religulous, Bill Maher’s satirical documentary lampooning organized religion. The title is a Maher coinage obviously making a pun on the words “religious,” “incredulous” and “ridiculous,” which pretty much defines the filmmaker’s attitude towards the subject. To make Religulous, Maher hooked up with director Larry Charles, who used the same technique he had with his hit movie with Sacha Baron Cohen, Borat — essentially getting interviews with people under false pretenses and then filming the results. In this case, Charles requested interviews with various ministers, lay preachers and other religious types by saying they were for a movie called A Spiritual Journey, and only when the film crew actually showed up did the interviewees become aware that Bill Maher was going to be their interviewer and his agenda was quite different from what they’d been led to expect.
What Maher and Charles came up with was a somewhat underhanded film with a few rather nasty cheap shots, but also a quite funny one that’s less about the absurdities of religion than the absurdities of some of its practitioners. I’d have especially liked to see more of the woman televangelist who’s shown in a film clip saying that in order to be in touch with God, her congregants have to have the Holy Spirit “rammed up your ass” — a weird image indeed for a religious tendency so opposed to real live Gay people! Religulous features a wide range of weirdos, ranging from the Blacks and whites who worship together at the “Truckers’ Ministry” (and who — except for one heavy-set white guy who looks and acts like a stereotypical redneck — seem surprisingly sympathetic to Maher’s position and actually come off better than most of his ambush victims) to Jesús Miranda, a Puerto Rican minister who claims, Da Vinci Code-style, to be an actual biological descendant of Jesus Christ.
Some of Maher’s greatest scenes take place in religious installations aimed at selling the faith of their creators in theme-park style, including the infamous Creation Museum in Kentucky (whose main message seems to be that, contrary to reality-based paleontologists, humans and dinosaurs actually inhabited the earth at the same time) and a religious theme park in Florida which attracts a man who not only claims to be Jesus but even dresses like the common image of him. To his credit, this “Jesus” doesn’t seem to be living the delusion that he is Christ, merely assuming the persona as a way of winning people over to Christianity.
Christianity isn’t the only religion that gets scathed in this film; there are also the predictable critiques of Islam and especially its absurd treatment of women — according to Maher’s narration, in one Muslim country women actually had to petition the governing authorities for permission to cut eye slits in their burkas so they could actually see. Maher is also quite delightful about the absurdities of Mormonism — though Mormonism and Scientology are easier targets because their founders lived recently enough that we actually have biographical documentation of them and therefore can subject their claims to prophet-hood to more critical scrutiny than we can those of Abraham, Moses, Jesus or Muhammad. The film succeeds as entertainment and makes a lot of religious people look genuinely ridiculous, but Maher had more in mind for it than that — as he makes clear in the closing peroration he delivers at the end, he wanted it to be a grand statement to the world to reject religion and eliminate it altogether from human culture:
“The irony of religion is that because of its power to divert man to destructive courses, the world could actually come to an end... Plain fact is, religion must die for mankind to live. The hour is getting very late to be able to indulge having in key decisions made by religious people. By irrationalists. By those who would steer the ship of state not by a compass, but by the equivalent of reading the entrails of a chicken. George Bush prayed a lot about Iraq, but he didn’t learn a lot about it... Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking. It’s nothing to brag about. And those who preach faith and enable and elevate it are intellectual slaveholders keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsense that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and destruction.
“Religion is dangerous because it allows human beings who don’t have all the answers to think that they do. Most people would think it’s wonderful when someone says, ‘I’m willing, Lord! I’ll do whatever you want me to do!’ Except that since there are no gods actually talking to us, that void is filled in by people with their own corruptions and limitations and agendas... And anyone who tells you they know, they just know what happens when you die, I promise you you don’t. How can I be so sure? Because I don’t know, and you do not possess mental powers that I do not. The only appropriate attitude for man to have about the big questions is not the arrogant certitude that is the hallmark of religion, but doubt. Doubt is humble, and that’s what man needs to be, considering that human history is just a litany of getting shit dead wrong...
“This is why rational people, anti-religionists, must end their timidity and come out of the closet and assert themselves. And those who consider themselves only moderately religious really need to look in the mirror and realize that the solace and comfort that religion brings you comes at a horrible price... If you belonged to a political party or a social club that was tied to as much bigotry, misogyny, homophobia, violence, and sheer ignorance as religion is, you’d resign in protest. To do otherwise is to be an enabler, a Mafia wife, for the true devils of extremism that draw their legitimacy from the billions of their fellow travelers. If the world does come to an end here, or wherever, or if it limps into the future, decimated by the effects of religion-inspired nuclear terrorism, let’s remember what the real problem was. We learned how to precipitate mass death before we got past the neurological disorder of wishing for it. That’s it. Grow up or die.”
I’m not a religious believer — never have been, never have had much use for it, and agree with Maher’s assumption that the reason religion persists is because we’ve never reconciled ourselves to the reality and inevitability of our own deaths, so wanting to be immortal and realizing at the same time that we must die, we accept the next best thing to real immortality: the fantasy of immortality that every religion offers, the idea that the end of this life is not the end of us (and what would be so terrible about the end of this life being the end of us? Are we all such egomaniacs that we have to believe our consciousness, or as the religious B.S.’ers call it our “soul,” is going to survive the physical death of our body?) — but even I think Maher is going too far here.
I tend to agree with Karen Armstrong in her book The Battle for God that any religious tradition is acceptable as long as it remains rooted in love and compassion; it’s when it gives that up and starts teaching that it’s O.K. to attack (by verbal abuse, institutional discrimination, or physical force) the people who believe in some other religion (or no religion at all) and/or to use the power of government to impose their beliefs on others who don’t share them (as the people who voted for Proposition 8 based on their religious beliefs did to me and Charles when they voted to deny us civil marriage because we are a same-sex couple) that it becomes illegitimate and dangerous. I would agree — and I’ve argued the point with my religious friends — that on balance, repeat on balance, religion has been a negative force in world history; the good religiously motivated people like Gandhi and King have done seems far outweighed by the evil wrought by the Torquemadas, the Cotton Mathers, the Osama bin Ladens.
But I don’t want to destroy religion — just to render it harmless by doing what the framers of the U.S. Constitution thought they were doing when they wrote the first two clauses of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law guaranteeing an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” If we take that literally, Congress — and, by extension, U.S. government in general — can’t put “In God We Trust” on our money or stick God into the Pledge of Allegiance and force atheist schoolchildren like me to swear allegiance (a word virtually no one forced to repeat it in the grade-school classroom actually knows the meaning of, just as they don’t know why the rules Moses brought down from Mt. Sinai got called “The Ten Commandments” instead of simply “The Ten Commands”) to a God we don’t believe in as well as to our country (the insertion of God into the Pledge, with its implication that an atheist or agnostic cannot be a true American, has rankled me ever since I was in grade school, and in my later years I would keep my lips pursed whenever the words “under God” came up — and I felt vindicated when I found out that they weren’t part of the original Pledge, but were added in the 1950’s to reflect the general perception of the Cold War as a battle to the death between “God-fearing” America and “Godless Communism” rather than what it was, a quite normal clash of interests between two major world powers, the U.S. and Russia), while at the same time anyone with any belief, no matter how loony-tunes it is, is entitled to it as long as they don’t start killing other people or doing other sorts of harm in its name.
I liked Religulous overall — as did my believing husband Charles (despite my concerns that it might offend him) — but there’s a certain bit of wise-guyness in its open propagandism for atheism that rubs me the wrong way even though I agree with the main point: that there’s no real evidence that God exists, and all the arguments that God does exist are based on wild assumptions, breathtaking leaps of illogic and ultimately the call to faith — “Don’t worry about whether or not it seems to make sense. Just believe.”
One thing I didn’t get a chance to do yesterday was write my comments on the film Religulous, Bill Maher’s satirical documentary lampooning organized religion. The title is a Maher coinage obviously making a pun on the words “religious,” “incredulous” and “ridiculous,” which pretty much defines the filmmaker’s attitude towards the subject. To make Religulous, Maher hooked up with director Larry Charles, who used the same technique he had with his hit movie with Sacha Baron Cohen, Borat — essentially getting interviews with people under false pretenses and then filming the results. In this case, Charles requested interviews with various ministers, lay preachers and other religious types by saying they were for a movie called A Spiritual Journey, and only when the film crew actually showed up did the interviewees become aware that Bill Maher was going to be their interviewer and his agenda was quite different from what they’d been led to expect.
What Maher and Charles came up with was a somewhat underhanded film with a few rather nasty cheap shots, but also a quite funny one that’s less about the absurdities of religion than the absurdities of some of its practitioners. I’d have especially liked to see more of the woman televangelist who’s shown in a film clip saying that in order to be in touch with God, her congregants have to have the Holy Spirit “rammed up your ass” — a weird image indeed for a religious tendency so opposed to real live Gay people! Religulous features a wide range of weirdos, ranging from the Blacks and whites who worship together at the “Truckers’ Ministry” (and who — except for one heavy-set white guy who looks and acts like a stereotypical redneck — seem surprisingly sympathetic to Maher’s position and actually come off better than most of his ambush victims) to Jesús Miranda, a Puerto Rican minister who claims, Da Vinci Code-style, to be an actual biological descendant of Jesus Christ.
Some of Maher’s greatest scenes take place in religious installations aimed at selling the faith of their creators in theme-park style, including the infamous Creation Museum in Kentucky (whose main message seems to be that, contrary to reality-based paleontologists, humans and dinosaurs actually inhabited the earth at the same time) and a religious theme park in Florida which attracts a man who not only claims to be Jesus but even dresses like the common image of him. To his credit, this “Jesus” doesn’t seem to be living the delusion that he is Christ, merely assuming the persona as a way of winning people over to Christianity.
Christianity isn’t the only religion that gets scathed in this film; there are also the predictable critiques of Islam and especially its absurd treatment of women — according to Maher’s narration, in one Muslim country women actually had to petition the governing authorities for permission to cut eye slits in their burkas so they could actually see. Maher is also quite delightful about the absurdities of Mormonism — though Mormonism and Scientology are easier targets because their founders lived recently enough that we actually have biographical documentation of them and therefore can subject their claims to prophet-hood to more critical scrutiny than we can those of Abraham, Moses, Jesus or Muhammad. The film succeeds as entertainment and makes a lot of religious people look genuinely ridiculous, but Maher had more in mind for it than that — as he makes clear in the closing peroration he delivers at the end, he wanted it to be a grand statement to the world to reject religion and eliminate it altogether from human culture:
“The irony of religion is that because of its power to divert man to destructive courses, the world could actually come to an end... Plain fact is, religion must die for mankind to live. The hour is getting very late to be able to indulge having in key decisions made by religious people. By irrationalists. By those who would steer the ship of state not by a compass, but by the equivalent of reading the entrails of a chicken. George Bush prayed a lot about Iraq, but he didn’t learn a lot about it... Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking. It’s nothing to brag about. And those who preach faith and enable and elevate it are intellectual slaveholders keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsense that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and destruction.
“Religion is dangerous because it allows human beings who don’t have all the answers to think that they do. Most people would think it’s wonderful when someone says, ‘I’m willing, Lord! I’ll do whatever you want me to do!’ Except that since there are no gods actually talking to us, that void is filled in by people with their own corruptions and limitations and agendas... And anyone who tells you they know, they just know what happens when you die, I promise you you don’t. How can I be so sure? Because I don’t know, and you do not possess mental powers that I do not. The only appropriate attitude for man to have about the big questions is not the arrogant certitude that is the hallmark of religion, but doubt. Doubt is humble, and that’s what man needs to be, considering that human history is just a litany of getting shit dead wrong...
“This is why rational people, anti-religionists, must end their timidity and come out of the closet and assert themselves. And those who consider themselves only moderately religious really need to look in the mirror and realize that the solace and comfort that religion brings you comes at a horrible price... If you belonged to a political party or a social club that was tied to as much bigotry, misogyny, homophobia, violence, and sheer ignorance as religion is, you’d resign in protest. To do otherwise is to be an enabler, a Mafia wife, for the true devils of extremism that draw their legitimacy from the billions of their fellow travelers. If the world does come to an end here, or wherever, or if it limps into the future, decimated by the effects of religion-inspired nuclear terrorism, let’s remember what the real problem was. We learned how to precipitate mass death before we got past the neurological disorder of wishing for it. That’s it. Grow up or die.”
I’m not a religious believer — never have been, never have had much use for it, and agree with Maher’s assumption that the reason religion persists is because we’ve never reconciled ourselves to the reality and inevitability of our own deaths, so wanting to be immortal and realizing at the same time that we must die, we accept the next best thing to real immortality: the fantasy of immortality that every religion offers, the idea that the end of this life is not the end of us (and what would be so terrible about the end of this life being the end of us? Are we all such egomaniacs that we have to believe our consciousness, or as the religious B.S.’ers call it our “soul,” is going to survive the physical death of our body?) — but even I think Maher is going too far here.
I tend to agree with Karen Armstrong in her book The Battle for God that any religious tradition is acceptable as long as it remains rooted in love and compassion; it’s when it gives that up and starts teaching that it’s O.K. to attack (by verbal abuse, institutional discrimination, or physical force) the people who believe in some other religion (or no religion at all) and/or to use the power of government to impose their beliefs on others who don’t share them (as the people who voted for Proposition 8 based on their religious beliefs did to me and Charles when they voted to deny us civil marriage because we are a same-sex couple) that it becomes illegitimate and dangerous. I would agree — and I’ve argued the point with my religious friends — that on balance, repeat on balance, religion has been a negative force in world history; the good religiously motivated people like Gandhi and King have done seems far outweighed by the evil wrought by the Torquemadas, the Cotton Mathers, the Osama bin Ladens.
But I don’t want to destroy religion — just to render it harmless by doing what the framers of the U.S. Constitution thought they were doing when they wrote the first two clauses of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law guaranteeing an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” If we take that literally, Congress — and, by extension, U.S. government in general — can’t put “In God We Trust” on our money or stick God into the Pledge of Allegiance and force atheist schoolchildren like me to swear allegiance (a word virtually no one forced to repeat it in the grade-school classroom actually knows the meaning of, just as they don’t know why the rules Moses brought down from Mt. Sinai got called “The Ten Commandments” instead of simply “The Ten Commands”) to a God we don’t believe in as well as to our country (the insertion of God into the Pledge, with its implication that an atheist or agnostic cannot be a true American, has rankled me ever since I was in grade school, and in my later years I would keep my lips pursed whenever the words “under God” came up — and I felt vindicated when I found out that they weren’t part of the original Pledge, but were added in the 1950’s to reflect the general perception of the Cold War as a battle to the death between “God-fearing” America and “Godless Communism” rather than what it was, a quite normal clash of interests between two major world powers, the U.S. and Russia), while at the same time anyone with any belief, no matter how loony-tunes it is, is entitled to it as long as they don’t start killing other people or doing other sorts of harm in its name.
I liked Religulous overall — as did my believing husband Charles (despite my concerns that it might offend him) — but there’s a certain bit of wise-guyness in its open propagandism for atheism that rubs me the wrong way even though I agree with the main point: that there’s no real evidence that God exists, and all the arguments that God does exist are based on wild assumptions, breathtaking leaps of illogic and ultimately the call to faith — “Don’t worry about whether or not it seems to make sense. Just believe.”
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