by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran our “feature” for the evening, The Carey Treatment, an interesting and entertaining if not especially great medical thriller from MGM in 1972. The director was Blake Edwards (this was from TCM’s recent tribute to Edwards during their “great directors” month, shown right after Experiment in Terror, which for all its flaws was a better movie than The Carey Treatment), and curiously both the author of the book on which it was based and the screenwriter were credited with pseudonyms: the book, A Case of Need (a considerably more interesting title!), was actually written by Michael Crichton but the author was designated here as “Jeffery Hudson” (did he publish the book under the “Hudson” name or was that the studio’s idea?), and the film script was done by Harriet Frank, Jr. as “James P. Bonner.”
The plot deals with rambunctious rebel doctor Peter Carey (James Coburn), who’s just come from his native Northern California to take a job as a pathologist in a hospital in Boston, and he runs into a political hornet’s nest including the hospital’s chief administrator, J. T. Randall (Dan O’Herlihy), who’s fiercely protective of his turf; his son Joshua (Alex Dreier), a doctor on staff; Sanderson (Regis Toomey), the retiring pathologist Carey has been hired to replace; Angela Holder (Skye Aubrey), a voluptuous young nurse; Andrew Murphy (John Fink), the awfully boyish-looking chief surgeon; and David Tao (James Hong), a young Asian doctor who Carey befriends. The police invade the hospital searching for someone on the inside stealing medical-grade morphine and making it available to street dealers; an orderly flees the cops and gets busted and fired because he had illegal drugs on him — not morphine but marijuana, and acquired on the street for his personal use — and then everyone gets into hotter water when Randall’s 15-year-old daughter Evelyn (Elizabeth Allen) is found dead, her front cut up as if from a botched attempt at abortion. Dr. Tao is the immediate suspect, and he’s arrested and spends almost the whole movie in jail awaiting trial — it turns out he had done illegal abortions, but only for cost, but he hadn’t done Evelyn’s and, indeed, Evelyn hadn’t actually been pregnant at all — she’d suffered from a rare pituitary disorder that made her look and feel pregnant without actually being so, though that’s explained only in passing and not until the final reel.
What could have been a quite compelling medical thriller is weakened by the superhero delineation of Carey’s character — the filmmakers were obviously inspired by the fact that James Coburn was best known at the time for the Flint movies, which were on the cusp between serious James Bond knockoffs and spoofs, and here he’s drawn as a Bond-like action figure with an M.D. instead of a license to kill, able to melt just about any woman’s heart just by looking at her (though he has a steady girlfriend — hospital dietitian Georgia Hightower, played by Jennifer O’Neill during her brief post-Summer of ’42 heyday — whom he moved in with on his first or second day there!) including Hudson, Evelyn (before she gets knocked off instead of knocked up — bad pun), Evelyn’s roommate and friend Lydia (Jennifer Edwards) — who, in the film’s weirdest scene, is the victim of Carey’s intimidation; in order to get information out of her he gets her to accept a ride from him and then deliberately drives fast and almost out of control to scare her into talking about Evelyn and their shared past — and Holder, who turns out [spoiler alert!] to have murdered Evelyn with that illegal “abortion” at the behest, and with the assistant, of Evelyn’s boyfriend Roger Hudson (Michael Blodgett, pudgy and not all that appealing but blond and hot in a certain dorky way — one can easily see what about him would turn on teenage girls), who was also a hospital orderly and the one who was stealing the morphine (ya remember the stolen morphine?), to which he had got Holder addicted, which was why she was willing to do his dirty work. The Carey Treatment is a satisfying movie, with some appealing scenes — notably a weirdly homoerotic one in which Carey poses as a massage patient to get a chance to talk to Hudson and there’s the sense of both love (or at least lust) and danger as Hudson works him over and threatens to dispatch him then and there by pinching him at some especially sensitive point — though when the scene ends it reverts to silliness: after we’ve been told how young and superbly conditioned Hudson is, he gets beaten up by a guy twice his age.
The film benefits from surprisingly progressive politics — Michael Crichton was still reality-based in 1972 and the lines about defending a woman’s “personal autonomy” to have an abortion if she feels she needs one are hardly what we’d expect from an author who eventually became a Right-wing crank — though it also suffers from the compulsion of its makers to make it as “relevant” as possible, crowding more social issues into the story than it can support and also using a bouncy jazz score by Roy Budd similar to the way Oliver Nelson and others were scoring the Universal TV-movies at the time (the film reminded both Charles and I of the Banacek episodes we’d been watching recently, though as far as I’m concerned the 1970’s George Peppard is way ahead of the 1970’s James Coburn in the sexiness department!). In a rather odd way, The Carey Treatment seems more dated than many films from the 1930’s — including the medical drama Life Begins from Warners in 1932, which however contrived it might have been had an intense emotional impact The Carey Treatment lacked — and it was a jolt in the opening scene to see James Coburn standing in the middle of a hospital lobby lighting and smoking a cigarette, with neither he nor anybody else on the staff finding that the least bit odd.
Monday, June 29, 2009
A Teacher’s Crime (Capital Productions/Lifetime, 2008)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran one of the Lifetime TV-movies I’d recorded over the weekend: A Teacher’s Crime, directed by Robert Malenfant (whose name almost seems to invite a bad pun!) from a script by Christine Conradt and Corbin Mezner. The title, the promotion and especially the tag line (“Her first mistake ... was getting close to him”) were calculated to make it seem like this was going to be yet another one of those Mary Kay LeTourneau-inspired stories about a 30-something sexually frustrated schoolteacher who gets it on with a horny barely-pubescent boy in one of her classes and ends up imprisoned and disgraced — which would have been a much nicer slice of good clean dirty fun than the film we actually got.
The lead character is a 30-something (or maybe 20-something, since the actress who plays her, Ashley Jones, is 33 in real life and quite sexy — perhaps a bit too sexy for the role she’s playing here) teacher named Carrie McMillian Ryans, who’s reaching out to an intelligent but troubled teen in her class named Jeremy Rander (Erik Knudsen, whose hair is a bit wavy but who otherwise looks like he’s going to grow up to be the kind of tall, lanky, sandy-haired, anonymously handsome but not particularly sexy “type” Lifetime likes in its leading men). Rander is a whiz at history and is particularly interested in the military, since his dad was a career soldier who was killed fighting in Bosnia (you remember, Clinton’s stupid “liberal” war as opposed to Bush’s stupid “conservative” war in Iraq and Obama’s stupid “progressive” war in Afghanistan) and his mom committed suicide the day after she got the news.
The deaths of his parents left him stuck with his uncle Bill (Chris Mulkey), who essentially pulled an all-male version of the plot of Jim Thompson’s The Grifters on him: he enlisted Jeremy’s help in a series of cons that kept them going financially. Now they’re settled in Philadelphia, where Bill is running a used-car lot that deals in stolen cars, provided him by Evan (Tom Rack) on behalf of a mysterious organized-crime boss named Collins (whom we never see, and though we hear his voice on the phone the imdb.com entry on this film doesn’t list who the voice actor was). Bill wants to make a major score so he can have the seed capital to cut Collins out of the loop and buy cars directly from Miguel (also unlisted in the imdb.com cast list), the crook who actually steals them. He’s fastened on Carrie because her father, David McMillian (Art Hindle), just made millions selling his auto-parts company (this film was made in 2008 and already that plot point seems horrendously dated!) and he hatches a plot to get his hands on the McMillian millions by telling Jeremy to go after Carrie and make it appear as if they’re having an affair — and make it look good enough that Bill can secretly take photos and blackmail Carrie with them.
Just to ensure the success of his plot, Bill follows David to his summer house where he’s gone to fish and pushes him down a long flight of stairs, killing him in a way that looks like an accident, so instead of David trying to talk Carrie out of paying the blackmail demand she’ll be on her own and thereby will pay off rather than risk losing not only her career but also custody of her daughter Lacey (Veronique-Natale Szalankiewicz) — whose father Dean (James Gallanders), from whom Carrie is separated but not divorced, is in cahoots with Bill to get sole custody, since Bill had even arranged for the breakup of Dean’s and Carrie’s marriage by instructing his girlfriend, bartender Shannon (Sonya Salomaa), to seduce Dean away from Carrie and get him to move in with her, an arrangement that pisses off Lacey because she can’t stand the drinking, smoking and arguing Shannon and her sleazy friends do whenever she’s required to spend the weekend with her dad.
As you can tell from the above synopsis, the main problem with A Teacher’s Crime is the sheer amount of melodrama and credibility-bending happenstance Conradt and Mezner have loaded into their script — what were they doing, auditioning for Law and Order? — which the hapless actors do the best they can with. Ashley Jones seems to be miscast as a teacher — she’s so sexy one wonders why all the (straight) boys in her class don’t have crushes on her — and the actor playing her husband looks more like Jeremy’s big brother than anything (ironically making it believable that she and Jeremy could have been having an affair), but Chris Mulkey delivers a nice portrait of low-level evil and, despite the over-the-topness of much of their script, at least Conradt and Mezner resisted the temptation to put their central character in a life-or-death crisis at the end.
Instead, the police get Jeremy to weasel a confession out of his uncle on a wiretapped phone, then go to arrest him … and it turns out Evan, his organized-crime connection, has already been there and killed him at Collins’ order because he was trying to double-cross the Mob and go into the stolen-car business himself … A Teacher’s Crime’s deceptive title still rankles somewhat, but it’s a pretty good thriller even though nowhere near the level of Cries in the Dark, whose title was deceptive only in that the film itself turned out to be better than you’d have thought from what it was called!
I ran one of the Lifetime TV-movies I’d recorded over the weekend: A Teacher’s Crime, directed by Robert Malenfant (whose name almost seems to invite a bad pun!) from a script by Christine Conradt and Corbin Mezner. The title, the promotion and especially the tag line (“Her first mistake ... was getting close to him”) were calculated to make it seem like this was going to be yet another one of those Mary Kay LeTourneau-inspired stories about a 30-something sexually frustrated schoolteacher who gets it on with a horny barely-pubescent boy in one of her classes and ends up imprisoned and disgraced — which would have been a much nicer slice of good clean dirty fun than the film we actually got.
The lead character is a 30-something (or maybe 20-something, since the actress who plays her, Ashley Jones, is 33 in real life and quite sexy — perhaps a bit too sexy for the role she’s playing here) teacher named Carrie McMillian Ryans, who’s reaching out to an intelligent but troubled teen in her class named Jeremy Rander (Erik Knudsen, whose hair is a bit wavy but who otherwise looks like he’s going to grow up to be the kind of tall, lanky, sandy-haired, anonymously handsome but not particularly sexy “type” Lifetime likes in its leading men). Rander is a whiz at history and is particularly interested in the military, since his dad was a career soldier who was killed fighting in Bosnia (you remember, Clinton’s stupid “liberal” war as opposed to Bush’s stupid “conservative” war in Iraq and Obama’s stupid “progressive” war in Afghanistan) and his mom committed suicide the day after she got the news.
The deaths of his parents left him stuck with his uncle Bill (Chris Mulkey), who essentially pulled an all-male version of the plot of Jim Thompson’s The Grifters on him: he enlisted Jeremy’s help in a series of cons that kept them going financially. Now they’re settled in Philadelphia, where Bill is running a used-car lot that deals in stolen cars, provided him by Evan (Tom Rack) on behalf of a mysterious organized-crime boss named Collins (whom we never see, and though we hear his voice on the phone the imdb.com entry on this film doesn’t list who the voice actor was). Bill wants to make a major score so he can have the seed capital to cut Collins out of the loop and buy cars directly from Miguel (also unlisted in the imdb.com cast list), the crook who actually steals them. He’s fastened on Carrie because her father, David McMillian (Art Hindle), just made millions selling his auto-parts company (this film was made in 2008 and already that plot point seems horrendously dated!) and he hatches a plot to get his hands on the McMillian millions by telling Jeremy to go after Carrie and make it appear as if they’re having an affair — and make it look good enough that Bill can secretly take photos and blackmail Carrie with them.
Just to ensure the success of his plot, Bill follows David to his summer house where he’s gone to fish and pushes him down a long flight of stairs, killing him in a way that looks like an accident, so instead of David trying to talk Carrie out of paying the blackmail demand she’ll be on her own and thereby will pay off rather than risk losing not only her career but also custody of her daughter Lacey (Veronique-Natale Szalankiewicz) — whose father Dean (James Gallanders), from whom Carrie is separated but not divorced, is in cahoots with Bill to get sole custody, since Bill had even arranged for the breakup of Dean’s and Carrie’s marriage by instructing his girlfriend, bartender Shannon (Sonya Salomaa), to seduce Dean away from Carrie and get him to move in with her, an arrangement that pisses off Lacey because she can’t stand the drinking, smoking and arguing Shannon and her sleazy friends do whenever she’s required to spend the weekend with her dad.
As you can tell from the above synopsis, the main problem with A Teacher’s Crime is the sheer amount of melodrama and credibility-bending happenstance Conradt and Mezner have loaded into their script — what were they doing, auditioning for Law and Order? — which the hapless actors do the best they can with. Ashley Jones seems to be miscast as a teacher — she’s so sexy one wonders why all the (straight) boys in her class don’t have crushes on her — and the actor playing her husband looks more like Jeremy’s big brother than anything (ironically making it believable that she and Jeremy could have been having an affair), but Chris Mulkey delivers a nice portrait of low-level evil and, despite the over-the-topness of much of their script, at least Conradt and Mezner resisted the temptation to put their central character in a life-or-death crisis at the end.
Instead, the police get Jeremy to weasel a confession out of his uncle on a wiretapped phone, then go to arrest him … and it turns out Evan, his organized-crime connection, has already been there and killed him at Collins’ order because he was trying to double-cross the Mob and go into the stolen-car business himself … A Teacher’s Crime’s deceptive title still rankles somewhat, but it’s a pretty good thriller even though nowhere near the level of Cries in the Dark, whose title was deceptive only in that the film itself turned out to be better than you’d have thought from what it was called!
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Angel Face (RKO, 1952)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran the movie Angel Face, a 1952 attempt at film noir from RKO (Howard Hughes is listed as the producer), directed by Otto Preminger from a story by Chester Erskine and a script by Frank S. Nugent, Oscar Millard (who four years later would write the Hughes disaster The Conqueror, directed by Dick Powell and starring John Wayne as Genghis Khan) and an uncredited Ben Hecht. Reportedly this is one of those movies RKO boss Hughes shoved in the face of its female star, Jean Simmons, as punishment because she wouldn’t have sex with him (she met and married MGM hunk Stewart Granger instead, and Hughes actually paid for their wedding but still never forgave Simmons); she plays Diane Tremayne, psychopathic daughter of rich retiree Charles Tremayne (Herbert Marshall, getting long-in-the-tooth even for father roles but still bringing a sense of dignity to his performance sorely lacking in the rest of the movie).
The film opens with Charles’ wife Catherine (Barbara O’Neil) nearly dying when the gas jet in the gas fireplace in her room is turned on without the fireplace being lit. The key that turns it on and off is found kicked under the logs, and she’d have suffocated if Charles hadn’t noticed the gas smell, come in, found the gas jet on without its key and turned it off with the identical key from the fireplace in his own room. The Los Angeles Fire Department sends an ambulance and part of the ambulance crew is driver Frank Jessup (Robert Mitchum, even more somnolent than usual — as if he realized the movie was a worthless piece of shit and decided almost literally to sleep through it), and Jessup finds himself attracted to Charles’ (but not Catherine’s) daughter Diane and also to her snazzy modified Jaguar XK 140 sports car. Jessup was an up-and-coming race driver until his career was aborted by World War II, and she offers him a chance to drive the car in a race after he modifies it any way he likes. He’s planning to open a garage specializing in racing cars and that would be good promotion for it; he’s also dating another woman, Mary Wilton (Mona Freeman), whom Diane sees and offers her $1,000 to give to Frank for his shop — but all Mary notices is that this woman spent the night with her husband-to-be and Frank lied about it; he says that after his ambulance call at the Tremaynes’ he was so tired “I just hit the sack,” and she — knowing he was out with Diane because Diane told her — fires back, “I’ll bet you hit the sack!,” a surprisingly direct allusion to sex for a 1952 movie and a line quite likely the personal work of Howard Hughes.
It doesn’t take us long to realize that Diane Tremayne is actually a psychopathic bitch — though she conceals that fact with a “classy” demeanor instead of snarling through the femme fatale role like Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity or Ann Savage in Detour — and that she attempted to murder her stepmother. Midway through the film, using knowledge about cars Frank has innocently given her, Diane sabotages the car her father and stepmother drive, killing both of them. Both Diane and Frank are put on trial for murder, and unlike a lot of crime thrillers the courtroom scenes not only don’t flag the film’s energy level but actually enliven it — thanks largely to the kinky casting of the attorneys: the prosecutor is Jim Backus and the defense lawyer is Leon Ames. Once they’re acquitted, Diane offers to dictate a statement to her attorney that she killed her dad and stepmom but Frank had nothing to do with it — she can’t be touched legally, as he explains to her, but she says she doesn’t want the stigma of a murder hanging over his head as he goes back to Mary and gets on with his life. In the final scene, Frank waits for a cab that will take him to the train station where he plans to leave for Mexico — and Diane offers him a ride to the station in that snazzy Jaguar and then [spoiler alert!] shoves both the car and her motivations into reverse, backing it down a cliff where the final fate of its inhabitants remains technically unknown but it does so many turnovers in mid-air on the way down that it’s pretty clear from the ending that they both die.
Angel Face is a frustrating film, one of those bad movies that could have been good; with a more sensitive director than Otto Preminger (let’s face it, there are rocks with more sensitivity than Otto Preminger!) and one more adept at the visual atmospherics of film noir, this film could have been a great noir and Jean Simmons’ classy version of the femme fatale might have come across as vivid and insightful ambiguity instead of merely an indifferent performance by an actress who clearly didn’t care about this trashy film. (By far Simmons’ best moment is when the script obliges her to recite a bit of Shakespeare — and we’re reminded all too well that four years before she made this piece of cheese she had played Ophelia in Olivier’s Hamlet.) As it is, Angel Face just rambles aimlessly through scene after misplayed scene, shot in standard full-lit Hollywood style (that’s Preminger for you; he had absolutely no sense of visual atmospherics, ever, and his best films are Anatomy of a Murder and Advise and Consent, stories that didn’t suffer from that lack — I’m not counting Laura because most of that film’s visual richness came from Rouben Mamoulian, whom Preminger replaced as director in mid-shoot), until an ending that if anything makes the preceding hour-and-a-half seem even trashier than it did before.
I ran the movie Angel Face, a 1952 attempt at film noir from RKO (Howard Hughes is listed as the producer), directed by Otto Preminger from a story by Chester Erskine and a script by Frank S. Nugent, Oscar Millard (who four years later would write the Hughes disaster The Conqueror, directed by Dick Powell and starring John Wayne as Genghis Khan) and an uncredited Ben Hecht. Reportedly this is one of those movies RKO boss Hughes shoved in the face of its female star, Jean Simmons, as punishment because she wouldn’t have sex with him (she met and married MGM hunk Stewart Granger instead, and Hughes actually paid for their wedding but still never forgave Simmons); she plays Diane Tremayne, psychopathic daughter of rich retiree Charles Tremayne (Herbert Marshall, getting long-in-the-tooth even for father roles but still bringing a sense of dignity to his performance sorely lacking in the rest of the movie).
The film opens with Charles’ wife Catherine (Barbara O’Neil) nearly dying when the gas jet in the gas fireplace in her room is turned on without the fireplace being lit. The key that turns it on and off is found kicked under the logs, and she’d have suffocated if Charles hadn’t noticed the gas smell, come in, found the gas jet on without its key and turned it off with the identical key from the fireplace in his own room. The Los Angeles Fire Department sends an ambulance and part of the ambulance crew is driver Frank Jessup (Robert Mitchum, even more somnolent than usual — as if he realized the movie was a worthless piece of shit and decided almost literally to sleep through it), and Jessup finds himself attracted to Charles’ (but not Catherine’s) daughter Diane and also to her snazzy modified Jaguar XK 140 sports car. Jessup was an up-and-coming race driver until his career was aborted by World War II, and she offers him a chance to drive the car in a race after he modifies it any way he likes. He’s planning to open a garage specializing in racing cars and that would be good promotion for it; he’s also dating another woman, Mary Wilton (Mona Freeman), whom Diane sees and offers her $1,000 to give to Frank for his shop — but all Mary notices is that this woman spent the night with her husband-to-be and Frank lied about it; he says that after his ambulance call at the Tremaynes’ he was so tired “I just hit the sack,” and she — knowing he was out with Diane because Diane told her — fires back, “I’ll bet you hit the sack!,” a surprisingly direct allusion to sex for a 1952 movie and a line quite likely the personal work of Howard Hughes.
It doesn’t take us long to realize that Diane Tremayne is actually a psychopathic bitch — though she conceals that fact with a “classy” demeanor instead of snarling through the femme fatale role like Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity or Ann Savage in Detour — and that she attempted to murder her stepmother. Midway through the film, using knowledge about cars Frank has innocently given her, Diane sabotages the car her father and stepmother drive, killing both of them. Both Diane and Frank are put on trial for murder, and unlike a lot of crime thrillers the courtroom scenes not only don’t flag the film’s energy level but actually enliven it — thanks largely to the kinky casting of the attorneys: the prosecutor is Jim Backus and the defense lawyer is Leon Ames. Once they’re acquitted, Diane offers to dictate a statement to her attorney that she killed her dad and stepmom but Frank had nothing to do with it — she can’t be touched legally, as he explains to her, but she says she doesn’t want the stigma of a murder hanging over his head as he goes back to Mary and gets on with his life. In the final scene, Frank waits for a cab that will take him to the train station where he plans to leave for Mexico — and Diane offers him a ride to the station in that snazzy Jaguar and then [spoiler alert!] shoves both the car and her motivations into reverse, backing it down a cliff where the final fate of its inhabitants remains technically unknown but it does so many turnovers in mid-air on the way down that it’s pretty clear from the ending that they both die.
Angel Face is a frustrating film, one of those bad movies that could have been good; with a more sensitive director than Otto Preminger (let’s face it, there are rocks with more sensitivity than Otto Preminger!) and one more adept at the visual atmospherics of film noir, this film could have been a great noir and Jean Simmons’ classy version of the femme fatale might have come across as vivid and insightful ambiguity instead of merely an indifferent performance by an actress who clearly didn’t care about this trashy film. (By far Simmons’ best moment is when the script obliges her to recite a bit of Shakespeare — and we’re reminded all too well that four years before she made this piece of cheese she had played Ophelia in Olivier’s Hamlet.) As it is, Angel Face just rambles aimlessly through scene after misplayed scene, shot in standard full-lit Hollywood style (that’s Preminger for you; he had absolutely no sense of visual atmospherics, ever, and his best films are Anatomy of a Murder and Advise and Consent, stories that didn’t suffer from that lack — I’m not counting Laura because most of that film’s visual richness came from Rouben Mamoulian, whom Preminger replaced as director in mid-shoot), until an ending that if anything makes the preceding hour-and-a-half seem even trashier than it did before.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
Escape in the Fog (Columbia, 1945)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film I picked was Escape in the Fog, which sounded like it was going to be a good melodrama; an early “B” assignment for director Budd Boetticher (still using his full name, Oscar Boetticher, Jr.) at Columbia and starring Otto Kruger and Nina Foch in a script by Aubrey Wisberg. Indeed, it began magnificently with an opening shot of the San Francisco Bay Bridge in the fog; we then see Eileen Carr (Nina Foch) walking along the bridge’s walkway and a police officer accosting her to see if she’s there to commit suicide. (The Bay Bridge never had a walkway and never became known as a site for suicide; scenarist Wisberg probably had it confused with the Golden Gate Bridge.) Then she sees a car pull up with two men attempting to murder a third, and she screams — and then she suddenly wakes up in a hospital bed: the entire previous sequence has been her dream.
She was in the hospital (the place is actually called an “inn” but it seems like some sort of nursing home) because she was a servicewoman (the film was made in early 1945 when the U.S. was still fighting World War II) and the ship she was on was sunk — and she’s been suffering from what the script refers to as “shock” and which would now be called post-traumatic stress disorder. She’s visited by Barry Malcolm (William Wright), a tall actor with a thin moustache who was part of her dream even though she’d never met him before. Alas, from this quite interesting beginning the film degenerates into a standard-issue espionage melodrama, with Paul Devon (Otto Kruger) — who also featured prominently in Eileen’s dream even though she’d never met him before — as the leader of a spy ring which is trying to get its hands on an envelope containing some top-secret documents (we’re never told what they are or why they’re so important, though as Alfred Hitchcock repeatedly explained we never really care what the spies are after anyway).
There’s a charming plot device — anticipating the 1960 film of H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine — in which one of the conspirators works in a shop that does clock and watch repairs and has an endless succession of ticking clocks all going at once, all making noise (when I saw The Time Machine on its first TV showing in the early 1960’s I was traumatized by that sound, and ever since then I have been unable to sleep anywhere within earshot of a ticking clock; all the timepieces in my various bedrooms have had to be silent ones) — but for the most part Escape in the Fog is just another movie, surprisingly flatly photographed and dully directed by the usually interesting Boetticher (it’s quite a comedown from his previous Columbia “B,” the Boston Blackie series entry One Mysterious Night, which had a much better writer, Paul Yawitz), though Aubrey Wisberg is far more to blame for the film’s failure than Boetticher.
This script makes about as much sense as the plot of Mighty Jack, and like that Japanese disaster of a spy movie this one suffers from Wisberg’s conceit that just about all the dramatis personae other than the stalwart hero seem to be participating in the villains’ plot in one way or another. Nina Foch is interesting but came off considerably stronger in some of her other Columbia “B”’s, including My Name Is Julia Ross (creatively directed by Joseph H. Lewis even though the plot is basically a ripoff of the Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches”), I Love a Mystery and Boston Blackie’s Rendezvous. The rest of the cast — aside from Kruger’s good but well-worn villainy — leaves a lot to be desired, especially William Wright, who’s a decent-looking but singularly boring actor (he dragged down Reveille with Beverly a bit, too, but with Ann Miller as the star and all the guest appearances by major swing and pop musicians and singers of the period, including Frank Sinatra, Duke Ellington and Count Basie, Wright did far less harm to that film than he did here) — and ultimately the dull direction and almost incomprehensible plotting make Escape in the Fog just another “B” that almost totally fails to get any dramatic interest in the theme of premonition stated in that marvelous opening.
The film I picked was Escape in the Fog, which sounded like it was going to be a good melodrama; an early “B” assignment for director Budd Boetticher (still using his full name, Oscar Boetticher, Jr.) at Columbia and starring Otto Kruger and Nina Foch in a script by Aubrey Wisberg. Indeed, it began magnificently with an opening shot of the San Francisco Bay Bridge in the fog; we then see Eileen Carr (Nina Foch) walking along the bridge’s walkway and a police officer accosting her to see if she’s there to commit suicide. (The Bay Bridge never had a walkway and never became known as a site for suicide; scenarist Wisberg probably had it confused with the Golden Gate Bridge.) Then she sees a car pull up with two men attempting to murder a third, and she screams — and then she suddenly wakes up in a hospital bed: the entire previous sequence has been her dream.
She was in the hospital (the place is actually called an “inn” but it seems like some sort of nursing home) because she was a servicewoman (the film was made in early 1945 when the U.S. was still fighting World War II) and the ship she was on was sunk — and she’s been suffering from what the script refers to as “shock” and which would now be called post-traumatic stress disorder. She’s visited by Barry Malcolm (William Wright), a tall actor with a thin moustache who was part of her dream even though she’d never met him before. Alas, from this quite interesting beginning the film degenerates into a standard-issue espionage melodrama, with Paul Devon (Otto Kruger) — who also featured prominently in Eileen’s dream even though she’d never met him before — as the leader of a spy ring which is trying to get its hands on an envelope containing some top-secret documents (we’re never told what they are or why they’re so important, though as Alfred Hitchcock repeatedly explained we never really care what the spies are after anyway).
There’s a charming plot device — anticipating the 1960 film of H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine — in which one of the conspirators works in a shop that does clock and watch repairs and has an endless succession of ticking clocks all going at once, all making noise (when I saw The Time Machine on its first TV showing in the early 1960’s I was traumatized by that sound, and ever since then I have been unable to sleep anywhere within earshot of a ticking clock; all the timepieces in my various bedrooms have had to be silent ones) — but for the most part Escape in the Fog is just another movie, surprisingly flatly photographed and dully directed by the usually interesting Boetticher (it’s quite a comedown from his previous Columbia “B,” the Boston Blackie series entry One Mysterious Night, which had a much better writer, Paul Yawitz), though Aubrey Wisberg is far more to blame for the film’s failure than Boetticher.
This script makes about as much sense as the plot of Mighty Jack, and like that Japanese disaster of a spy movie this one suffers from Wisberg’s conceit that just about all the dramatis personae other than the stalwart hero seem to be participating in the villains’ plot in one way or another. Nina Foch is interesting but came off considerably stronger in some of her other Columbia “B”’s, including My Name Is Julia Ross (creatively directed by Joseph H. Lewis even though the plot is basically a ripoff of the Sherlock Holmes story “The Adventure of the Copper Beeches”), I Love a Mystery and Boston Blackie’s Rendezvous. The rest of the cast — aside from Kruger’s good but well-worn villainy — leaves a lot to be desired, especially William Wright, who’s a decent-looking but singularly boring actor (he dragged down Reveille with Beverly a bit, too, but with Ann Miller as the star and all the guest appearances by major swing and pop musicians and singers of the period, including Frank Sinatra, Duke Ellington and Count Basie, Wright did far less harm to that film than he did here) — and ultimately the dull direction and almost incomprehensible plotting make Escape in the Fog just another “B” that almost totally fails to get any dramatic interest in the theme of premonition stated in that marvelous opening.
Cries in the Dark (Fast/Dark Protocol/Lifetime, 2006)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran a Lifetime TV-movie I recorded a couple of weeks ago that turned out to be quite good, despite its appallingly generic title, Cries in the Dark. It opens with one of those gooder-than-good Lifetime suburban openings that leaves us utterly convinced something dire is going to happen to all these people, even though we can’t be sure precisely what: Elle (pronounced “el”) Cornwell (Camille Sullivan) is in her final month of pregnancy and expecting her daughter (she’s had the sonogram or whatever they call it done so she won’t be in suspense as to her newborn’s gender) any day now. She runs a real-estate office in partnership with her husband Scott (Adam Harrington, the sort of tall, lanky, sandy-haired, blue-eyed, not bad-looking but not drop-dead gorgeous guy Lifetime seems to like in its leading men) who’s put her off because of his workaholism and also his occasional dalliances with other women — nothing serious, just one-night stands with people he’s picked up in bars, but still … They’re also close to Elle’s sister, policewoman Carrie Macklin (Eva La Rue Callahan, top-billed), who one morning jokingly “stops” Elle’s car and tells her, “You have the right to remain pregnant.”
One night the three of them are scheduled to have dinner together at Scott’s and Elle’s home — Carrie is asked by the local police chief (Anthony Harrison) to stop at a motel where recently released sex offender Glenn Davis (Diego Diablo Del Mar) is staying because, even though he hasn’t done anything they know of, they want to let him know that the cops are keeping an eye on him, but she passes that off to her partner, Darrell Wynn (Adrian Holmes, a really hot African-American who’s by far the most attractive male in this film — memo to Dick Wolf: if Christopher Meloni doesn’t re-up for the next season of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, please hire Adrian Holmes as his replacement!) and instead goes to her sister’s dinner party, only Scott gets a call to run an errand for work and Carrie also leaves early for reasons screenwriter Kraig Wenman doesn’t do a good job explaining (if he supplied any, I missed them), leaving Elle home alone … and when Scott returns from his errand Elle is gone, the sliding glass door to their patio is cracked open, and the kettle on their stove is boiling.
Carrie takes a leading role in the investigation of Elle’s disappearance despite the chief’s concern that her obvious conflict of interest is going to compromise the case if anybody is arrested and needs to be prosecuted, so he takes Carrie’s gun away and makes Darrell the lead investigator of whatever it was happened — which turns out to be murder after Elle’s body is found. At first, the police naturally suspect Glenn Davis — who had stopped by Elle’s office and, under the guise of being interested in a house, made a pass at her — but he turns out to have an alibi: the night of Elle’s disappearance and murder he was stalking another woman at a town 32 miles away. Then Carrie deduces from the condition of Elle’s body — it was sliced open at the womb — that the baby may still be alive and Elle’s killer may have been motivated by the desire for a child of her own and, being unable to have one naturally, she targeted a woman in the last days of pregnancy and kidnapped her, surgically removed her baby (it’s established that she worked as a dental hygenist so she knew something about medicine) and passed the child off as her own. It turns out that the murderess is someone Elle knew from her hospital visits: a pregnant woman (at least she looked pregnant — Wenman’s script leaves it as a loose end just how she pulled off that disguise) who befriended Elle and said she was expecting a baby of her own but wouldn’t say who the father was because he was a married man. This woman, Rosa Allen (Gina Chiarelli), abandons the trailer she’s been living in and moves in with her own father — and it turns out that she was one of Scott Cornwell’s one-night tricks, and she formed an obsession on him that she was going to take his wife’s place as well as claiming their baby as her own. The cops trace her, ironically, when she sends a love letter to Scott — and she ends up showing up at Scott’s home with baby in tow, demanding that he flee with her and pulling a gun on him when he refuses and calls the police instead.
Cries in the Dark is a remarkably good Lifetime movie; director Paul Schneider has a real flair for suspense and thrills, and Wenman’s script, though saddled with a few loose ends he never bothers to tie up, makes sense and is particularly remarkable for not taking the easy ways out: there are plenty of bits in this film where he could have plugged in a handy cliché and he decided to be more creative than that. The acting is also finely honed, though of all the characters only the three women really live and breathe as complex, individualized people — even more than usual for Lifetime, the men are dramatic ciphers — and I liked the unmistakable anti-cheating message for the film even though its producers are clearly playing the same game the major Hollywood studios played during the Production Code era: showing really kinky or extra-marital sexual relationships and offering them as examples of how not to behave even while giving the audience an erotic charge from depicting the perverse (though this time there aren’t any soft-core porn scenes — a pity; I found myself wishing Wenman had done more than hint of Darrell’s sexual interest in Carrie and actually showed them going at it!).
I ran a Lifetime TV-movie I recorded a couple of weeks ago that turned out to be quite good, despite its appallingly generic title, Cries in the Dark. It opens with one of those gooder-than-good Lifetime suburban openings that leaves us utterly convinced something dire is going to happen to all these people, even though we can’t be sure precisely what: Elle (pronounced “el”) Cornwell (Camille Sullivan) is in her final month of pregnancy and expecting her daughter (she’s had the sonogram or whatever they call it done so she won’t be in suspense as to her newborn’s gender) any day now. She runs a real-estate office in partnership with her husband Scott (Adam Harrington, the sort of tall, lanky, sandy-haired, blue-eyed, not bad-looking but not drop-dead gorgeous guy Lifetime seems to like in its leading men) who’s put her off because of his workaholism and also his occasional dalliances with other women — nothing serious, just one-night stands with people he’s picked up in bars, but still … They’re also close to Elle’s sister, policewoman Carrie Macklin (Eva La Rue Callahan, top-billed), who one morning jokingly “stops” Elle’s car and tells her, “You have the right to remain pregnant.”
One night the three of them are scheduled to have dinner together at Scott’s and Elle’s home — Carrie is asked by the local police chief (Anthony Harrison) to stop at a motel where recently released sex offender Glenn Davis (Diego Diablo Del Mar) is staying because, even though he hasn’t done anything they know of, they want to let him know that the cops are keeping an eye on him, but she passes that off to her partner, Darrell Wynn (Adrian Holmes, a really hot African-American who’s by far the most attractive male in this film — memo to Dick Wolf: if Christopher Meloni doesn’t re-up for the next season of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, please hire Adrian Holmes as his replacement!) and instead goes to her sister’s dinner party, only Scott gets a call to run an errand for work and Carrie also leaves early for reasons screenwriter Kraig Wenman doesn’t do a good job explaining (if he supplied any, I missed them), leaving Elle home alone … and when Scott returns from his errand Elle is gone, the sliding glass door to their patio is cracked open, and the kettle on their stove is boiling.
Carrie takes a leading role in the investigation of Elle’s disappearance despite the chief’s concern that her obvious conflict of interest is going to compromise the case if anybody is arrested and needs to be prosecuted, so he takes Carrie’s gun away and makes Darrell the lead investigator of whatever it was happened — which turns out to be murder after Elle’s body is found. At first, the police naturally suspect Glenn Davis — who had stopped by Elle’s office and, under the guise of being interested in a house, made a pass at her — but he turns out to have an alibi: the night of Elle’s disappearance and murder he was stalking another woman at a town 32 miles away. Then Carrie deduces from the condition of Elle’s body — it was sliced open at the womb — that the baby may still be alive and Elle’s killer may have been motivated by the desire for a child of her own and, being unable to have one naturally, she targeted a woman in the last days of pregnancy and kidnapped her, surgically removed her baby (it’s established that she worked as a dental hygenist so she knew something about medicine) and passed the child off as her own. It turns out that the murderess is someone Elle knew from her hospital visits: a pregnant woman (at least she looked pregnant — Wenman’s script leaves it as a loose end just how she pulled off that disguise) who befriended Elle and said she was expecting a baby of her own but wouldn’t say who the father was because he was a married man. This woman, Rosa Allen (Gina Chiarelli), abandons the trailer she’s been living in and moves in with her own father — and it turns out that she was one of Scott Cornwell’s one-night tricks, and she formed an obsession on him that she was going to take his wife’s place as well as claiming their baby as her own. The cops trace her, ironically, when she sends a love letter to Scott — and she ends up showing up at Scott’s home with baby in tow, demanding that he flee with her and pulling a gun on him when he refuses and calls the police instead.
Cries in the Dark is a remarkably good Lifetime movie; director Paul Schneider has a real flair for suspense and thrills, and Wenman’s script, though saddled with a few loose ends he never bothers to tie up, makes sense and is particularly remarkable for not taking the easy ways out: there are plenty of bits in this film where he could have plugged in a handy cliché and he decided to be more creative than that. The acting is also finely honed, though of all the characters only the three women really live and breathe as complex, individualized people — even more than usual for Lifetime, the men are dramatic ciphers — and I liked the unmistakable anti-cheating message for the film even though its producers are clearly playing the same game the major Hollywood studios played during the Production Code era: showing really kinky or extra-marital sexual relationships and offering them as examples of how not to behave even while giving the audience an erotic charge from depicting the perverse (though this time there aren’t any soft-core porn scenes — a pity; I found myself wishing Wenman had done more than hint of Darrell’s sexual interest in Carrie and actually showed them going at it!).
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Mighty Jack (Tsurubaya Productions/Sandy Frank Productions, 1968/1987)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I played Charles his newly downloaded disc of the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 incarnation of the 1968 Japanese movie Mighty Jack. It turned out to be a spy movie, a thoroughly inept James Bond knock-off (the villain even has a furry white lap-cat he’s always stroking!) in which the President (of what country we’re not quite sure) organizes a strike force called “Mighty Jack” to defeat the designs of a sinister organization called “Q,” which of course is interested in world domination. Charles noted that this film was made by the same crew that did the Ultra-Man TV shows and also featured a lot of the same actors — though, alas, the male members of the cast were dressed in business suits instead of the hot orange jumpsuits they wore as the “Science Patrol” in Ultra-Man (and which were tight enough to show off their baskets — who said Asian men weren’t well hung?).
In some ways the production values of Mighty Jack were a bit better than those of Ultra-Man — the craft the Mighty Jack crew members (scenarists Shinichi Sekizawa and Eizaburo Shiba seem never quite to have decided whether “Mighty Jack” referred to the team or the contraption they traveled in) use to move around the world to combat Q’s agents, which can both fly and operate underwater as a submarine, is a more convincing prop than the dime-store gadgets they flew in Ultra-Man, and the colors are spectacular and quite pretty (a refreshing change from all the dirty-brown movies we get these days) — and there aren’t any tacky-looking monsters, though quite frankly this movie is so relentlessly confusing that tacky-looking monsters would actually have helped!
About all we know for sure is that “Q” has kidnapped a scientist named Atari (were they after the software for Pong?) in a nicely inventive way — they threw a fishing net around his car and lifted it up with a helicopter, then flew back to their base with the car dangling in the net 2,000 feet off the ground — and the members of Mighty Jack are trying to get him back and at the same time trying to figure out who in their operation is leaking their secrets to “Q” — and suspicion fastens first on the German-accented (at least in this dubbed version — there’s no love lost between the former World War II allies in this story!) son of one of the administrators, then the administrator himself — and by the time this thing grinds to a halt we neither know nor care who’s the “Q” agent in their midst, nor do we have anything more than the vaguest idea of what’s been happening on screen for the last hour and a half. Supposedly Mighty Jack was actually a TV series in Japan and this film was assembled from three or four of its half-hour episodes, spliced together into a semblance (not much of a semblance, at that) of story continuity — which explains why entire plot threads just disappear in mid-air and also why the action scenes are even more repetitious than usual, as well as singularly ineptly staged by director Kazuho Mitsuta, who frankly wasn’t going to have kept Akira Kurosawa awake nights worrying about the competition.
Mighty Jack was prepared for American release by the infamous Sandy Frank, which meant terrible dubbing of English-language lines so dementedly silly it was sometimes hard to tell which bits of dialogue were from the actual soundtrack and which were the MST3K crew’s mockeries of it — which, predictably, focused largely on the movie’s utter incomprehensibility. There were a few cute gags — in one sequence of a man strumming a 12-string guitar in a nightclub (don’t ask) one of the MST3K crew joked, “Ah, Django Reinhardt! No, too many fingers.” (They were wrong; it was Django’s left hand, not his right, that was injured; and he kept all his fingers, though two were paralyzed and useless for fretting, though he could still form bar chords with them.)
I played Charles his newly downloaded disc of the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 incarnation of the 1968 Japanese movie Mighty Jack. It turned out to be a spy movie, a thoroughly inept James Bond knock-off (the villain even has a furry white lap-cat he’s always stroking!) in which the President (of what country we’re not quite sure) organizes a strike force called “Mighty Jack” to defeat the designs of a sinister organization called “Q,” which of course is interested in world domination. Charles noted that this film was made by the same crew that did the Ultra-Man TV shows and also featured a lot of the same actors — though, alas, the male members of the cast were dressed in business suits instead of the hot orange jumpsuits they wore as the “Science Patrol” in Ultra-Man (and which were tight enough to show off their baskets — who said Asian men weren’t well hung?).
In some ways the production values of Mighty Jack were a bit better than those of Ultra-Man — the craft the Mighty Jack crew members (scenarists Shinichi Sekizawa and Eizaburo Shiba seem never quite to have decided whether “Mighty Jack” referred to the team or the contraption they traveled in) use to move around the world to combat Q’s agents, which can both fly and operate underwater as a submarine, is a more convincing prop than the dime-store gadgets they flew in Ultra-Man, and the colors are spectacular and quite pretty (a refreshing change from all the dirty-brown movies we get these days) — and there aren’t any tacky-looking monsters, though quite frankly this movie is so relentlessly confusing that tacky-looking monsters would actually have helped!
About all we know for sure is that “Q” has kidnapped a scientist named Atari (were they after the software for Pong?) in a nicely inventive way — they threw a fishing net around his car and lifted it up with a helicopter, then flew back to their base with the car dangling in the net 2,000 feet off the ground — and the members of Mighty Jack are trying to get him back and at the same time trying to figure out who in their operation is leaking their secrets to “Q” — and suspicion fastens first on the German-accented (at least in this dubbed version — there’s no love lost between the former World War II allies in this story!) son of one of the administrators, then the administrator himself — and by the time this thing grinds to a halt we neither know nor care who’s the “Q” agent in their midst, nor do we have anything more than the vaguest idea of what’s been happening on screen for the last hour and a half. Supposedly Mighty Jack was actually a TV series in Japan and this film was assembled from three or four of its half-hour episodes, spliced together into a semblance (not much of a semblance, at that) of story continuity — which explains why entire plot threads just disappear in mid-air and also why the action scenes are even more repetitious than usual, as well as singularly ineptly staged by director Kazuho Mitsuta, who frankly wasn’t going to have kept Akira Kurosawa awake nights worrying about the competition.
Mighty Jack was prepared for American release by the infamous Sandy Frank, which meant terrible dubbing of English-language lines so dementedly silly it was sometimes hard to tell which bits of dialogue were from the actual soundtrack and which were the MST3K crew’s mockeries of it — which, predictably, focused largely on the movie’s utter incomprehensibility. There were a few cute gags — in one sequence of a man strumming a 12-string guitar in a nightclub (don’t ask) one of the MST3K crew joked, “Ah, Django Reinhardt! No, too many fingers.” (They were wrong; it was Django’s left hand, not his right, that was injured; and he kept all his fingers, though two were paralyzed and useless for fretting, though he could still form bar chords with them.)
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
California Mail (Warners, 1936)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran California Mail, a 1936 “B” Western from Warner Bros., who had obviously noted the burgeoning popularity of the “Singing Westerns” with Gene Autry at Republic and decided to do a singing Western of their own. They picked Dick Foran as their star — he had a nice tenor voice, probably “better” than Autry’s but less distinctive — though they only gave him two songs, one (“Ridin’ the Mail”) used early on while he’s doing just that as a member of the Pony Express, and another (“Love Begins at Evening”) which he sings at a dance where he’s courting his girlfriend. Foran plays Bill Harkins, a Pony Express rider who realizes that the days of the Pony Express are numbered (the service only lasted two years in real life!) and in future mail will be brought to the West in stagecoaches.
Accordingly he buys a stagecoach and puts in a bid for the mail contract, and since there are two other bids and the three are close in terms of the numbers, the post office (not a private stagecoach company, as mis-stated in the American Film Institute Catalog’s synopsis) decides to sponsor a stagecoach race along the most treacherous part of the mail run. One of the competing bidders, Ferguson (Fred Barnes), is harmless; the others, brothers Roy (Ed Cobb) and Burt (Milton Kibbee) Banton, are quite dangerous. Not only are they willing to do anything to win the contract — including sawing through the wheels of Harkins’ stagecoach to sabotage it so it crashes on the run — but once they win the contract they work with a gang of bandits led by Fred Wyatt (Bob Woodward) to rob their own stagecoaches, thereby getting both legal and illegal sources of income. (One member of the gang, “Bud,” is played by future Frankenstein monster Glenn Strange — his first name has only one “n” here and he’s a gangly Ray Bolger type, hardly the sort of actor one would expect to step into Boris Karloff’s asphalter’s boots except for his great height, obviously why he got that part.) After trying and failing to murder Harkins at least twice, they set him up to take the fall for a murder actually committed by Wyatt — and to make it even more complicated, the murder victim is Dan Tolliver (James Farley), father of Mary Tolliver (Linda Perry), the woman Bill and Roy have been fighting over all movie (including starting a big saloon brawl over her).
There’s absolutely nothing distinctive about California Mail — it’s one of those movies where the credited writers, Roy Chanslor and Harold Buckley, seem more to have compiled their script from lists of clichés rather than thinking up anything original — except maybe the role of “Smoke” the Wonder Horse, listed in the credits as playing himself (and billed third!), who’s actually more heroic than the human lead: he kills Wyatt and captures Roy, in both cases by knocking them down and kicking them. Watching “Smoke” in action it’s clear that this is the studio that made Rin Tin Tin a star; they seemed to be trying to duplicate that success with another species of animal. California Mail is a bit of a “cheat” in that Foran is billed as a “Singing Cowboy” but after the movie is 15 minutes old (of a total one-hour running time) he sings no more — but he’s personable and either he’s good at taking falls or his stunt double looked more like him than usual, though it’s a bit difficult to take him seriously in this movie if you’ve seen the Abbott and Costello vehicle Ride ’Em, Cowboy from six years later, in which Foran plays an actor posing as a singing cowboy (in which he got to introduce the Don Raye/Gene de Paul standard “I’ll Remember April,” a far better song than any he got to sing here!) when he’s really a totally hapless tenderfoot.
I ran California Mail, a 1936 “B” Western from Warner Bros., who had obviously noted the burgeoning popularity of the “Singing Westerns” with Gene Autry at Republic and decided to do a singing Western of their own. They picked Dick Foran as their star — he had a nice tenor voice, probably “better” than Autry’s but less distinctive — though they only gave him two songs, one (“Ridin’ the Mail”) used early on while he’s doing just that as a member of the Pony Express, and another (“Love Begins at Evening”) which he sings at a dance where he’s courting his girlfriend. Foran plays Bill Harkins, a Pony Express rider who realizes that the days of the Pony Express are numbered (the service only lasted two years in real life!) and in future mail will be brought to the West in stagecoaches.
Accordingly he buys a stagecoach and puts in a bid for the mail contract, and since there are two other bids and the three are close in terms of the numbers, the post office (not a private stagecoach company, as mis-stated in the American Film Institute Catalog’s synopsis) decides to sponsor a stagecoach race along the most treacherous part of the mail run. One of the competing bidders, Ferguson (Fred Barnes), is harmless; the others, brothers Roy (Ed Cobb) and Burt (Milton Kibbee) Banton, are quite dangerous. Not only are they willing to do anything to win the contract — including sawing through the wheels of Harkins’ stagecoach to sabotage it so it crashes on the run — but once they win the contract they work with a gang of bandits led by Fred Wyatt (Bob Woodward) to rob their own stagecoaches, thereby getting both legal and illegal sources of income. (One member of the gang, “Bud,” is played by future Frankenstein monster Glenn Strange — his first name has only one “n” here and he’s a gangly Ray Bolger type, hardly the sort of actor one would expect to step into Boris Karloff’s asphalter’s boots except for his great height, obviously why he got that part.) After trying and failing to murder Harkins at least twice, they set him up to take the fall for a murder actually committed by Wyatt — and to make it even more complicated, the murder victim is Dan Tolliver (James Farley), father of Mary Tolliver (Linda Perry), the woman Bill and Roy have been fighting over all movie (including starting a big saloon brawl over her).
There’s absolutely nothing distinctive about California Mail — it’s one of those movies where the credited writers, Roy Chanslor and Harold Buckley, seem more to have compiled their script from lists of clichés rather than thinking up anything original — except maybe the role of “Smoke” the Wonder Horse, listed in the credits as playing himself (and billed third!), who’s actually more heroic than the human lead: he kills Wyatt and captures Roy, in both cases by knocking them down and kicking them. Watching “Smoke” in action it’s clear that this is the studio that made Rin Tin Tin a star; they seemed to be trying to duplicate that success with another species of animal. California Mail is a bit of a “cheat” in that Foran is billed as a “Singing Cowboy” but after the movie is 15 minutes old (of a total one-hour running time) he sings no more — but he’s personable and either he’s good at taking falls or his stunt double looked more like him than usual, though it’s a bit difficult to take him seriously in this movie if you’ve seen the Abbott and Costello vehicle Ride ’Em, Cowboy from six years later, in which Foran plays an actor posing as a singing cowboy (in which he got to introduce the Don Raye/Gene de Paul standard “I’ll Remember April,” a far better song than any he got to sing here!) when he’s really a totally hapless tenderfoot.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Food, Inc. (Magnolia Pictures, 2008/2009)
If You Eat, You Need to See Food, Inc.
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
PHOTOS, top to bottom: Robert Kenner (director), Barbara Kowalcyk, Joel Salatin, Eric Schlosser. Courtesy Magnolia Pictures.
One of the most abused terms in movie reviewing is “must-see.” It usually means nothing more than that the film the critic is writing about is especially funny, exciting or spectacular. But director Robert Kenner’s new documentary Food, Inc. is truly a “must-see” movie for every American who eats. It’s basically a horror tale — not in the gross-out sense (David Brancaccio, host of the PBS-TV series NOW, joked when he interviewed Kenner on the show that “there are people who are gonna think, ‘Oh, we’re gonna be sitting in a slaughterhouse for the next 90 minutes’” — which you won’t be) but in the sense that Kenner joked he had thought of calling the film Invasion of the Food Snatchers.
The “food snatchers,” according to Kenner, are giant multinational corporations who over the past 50 years have not only taken near-complete control of the U.S. food industry (and are pushing towards controlling it worldwide) but have reorganized it according to industrial methods of production. While they still merchandise their food with old-fashioned imagery of family farmers growing it with love and care under sunny skies, the reality is that today’s “farm” looks more like a factory than the pastoral scenes on the food packages. Scenes shot with hidden cameras — the giant corporations that own your food system don’t want you to know how they operate — show dead chickens and cows being strung up on giant conveyor belts and sliced by assembly-line workers, many of them undocumented immigrants (they come cheap and can’t complain about low wages and dangerous conditions for fear of being deported) whose bosses consider them as disposable as the meat animals themselves.
What’s more, the food these gargantuan factories produce is increasingly standardized, artificial, tasteless and even dangerous. According to Kenner, that has its roots in the fast-food revolution sparked by the McDonald brothers and continued by Ray Kroc after he bought them out of the company that still bears their name. McDonald’s built an empire of cheap restaurants, first by applying industrial methods to food service — including a squirting machine (you see it in action in the film) that put just the “right” amount of ketchup on the burger — and making restaurant cooking so low-skilled anyone could do it, which means they could pay people minimum wage and accept a high turnover of workers. Then, as the company expanded nationwide, McDonald’s management insisted that a McDonald’s hamburger must taste the same no matter where it was sold — Downey, California (where the first McDonald’s was built), New York, Miami or Shanghai — and that meant that the meat processors who sold it to them had to ensure that McDonald’s would get a uniform product or McDonald’s would simply not buy from them anymore.
Some of Kenner’s most grotesque footage shows how the meat from thousands of cows gets ground up and turned into a giant vat of raw ground beef. Defenders of industrialized food often claim that it’s safer than the products of genuine family farms because its production can be controlled more carefully — but, as Food, Inc. points out, it’s actually more dangerous because one sick cow’s meat can contaminate hundreds of tons of ground beef and spread across the country through the power of a fast-food chain. Bacteria like the deadly E. coli are not only killing hamburger eaters but, through the runoff from the farms where those cows are grown and the factories where they’re killed and their meat is processed, they’ve contaminated spinach and other vegetable products even though in nature E. coli doesn’t infect plants.
One of the heroes of Food, Inc., Barbara Kowalcyk, learned about E. coli the hard way. She and her family were coming home from a vacation when they stopped into a fast-food place and ordered three hamburgers. Her 2 1/2-year old son Kevin got sick and was dead within two weeks, and it was only after he died that doctors learned from an autopsy that E. coli had killed him. Kowalcyk responded by becoming a two-person lobbying campaign with her mother, Patricia Buck, going to Congress to get them to pass “Kevin’s Law.” This was a bill that would give back to inspectors from the U.S. Department of Agriculture the power to close down a meat-packing plant that repeatedly produced E. coli-tainted meat. In a country where the politicians actually gave a damn about the people they supposedly represent, this would have been a no-brainer — but Kowalcyk and Buck, who started their effort in 2002 (one year after Kevin’s death), still haven’t been able to get “Kevin’s Law” through Congress.
The overwhelming power of the food industry is a running theme of this film. Not only does the industry have the power to poison people and the political clout to ensure that they never have to worry about being punished for it, they’re extending their control over the food supply in other ways as well. One key section of the film tells the story of Monsanto, a giant corporation that used to make things like DDT and Agent Orange (the defoliant the U.S. used in the Viet Nam war which killed or sickened a lot of its own troops) and got into food when it invented a weed killer called RoundUp. The problem with RoundUp was that it killed not only the weeds but a lot of the crops as well. To “solve” this, Monsanto hooked up with some scientists that had developed a way of genetically modifying soybeans so they could withstand RoundUp.
But Monsanto’s “RoundUp Ready” soybeans came with an elaborate command-and-control agenda attached. To use them, you had to sign a contract not only that the only herbicide you would use would be RoundUp (a C.Y.A. Monsanto put into the deal to make sure there’d be a captive market for their product even after its patent on RoundUp expired) but that you would buy a whole new batch of seeds each year for that year’s planting. Saving seeds from one year’s crop for the next year’s planting — something farmers have been doing since agriculture was invented — was now illegal. What’s more, because Monsanto’s modifications to the soybean gene were themselves patentable, Monsanto has claimed — and won in every case — that even if you didn’t buy their seeds and didn’t want their genetic modifications in your crop, if your soybeans contained their genetic modifications because pollen from a field that was planted with Monsanto seeds crossed over into your field, you were therefore in violation of their patent and they could sue you and claim ownership of your crop.
One of the most fascinating characters in Food, Inc. is Moe Parr, who ran a seed-cleaning operation to wash the debris off harvested seeds so they can be saved and planted the next year. Monsanto declared him a public enemy and sought to put him out of business by litigation — and after finding out it would cost over a million dollars to defend himself, he settled with Monsanto and got out of the seed business altogether. Monsanto’s aggressive defense of its seed patents is reminiscent of the Mafia in a 1930’s gangster movie; they stake out farmers whom they suspect of saving seeds, hire detectives and pay handsome bounties to farmers to turn each other in. As a result, Parr and others who tried to resist Monsanto’s total takeover of U.S. soybean farming found that people who’d been their friends for 50 years would no longer talk to them. What’s more, Monsanto has asked the U.S. courts to declare the very existence of seed-cleaning illegal as an infringement on their patents.
Food, Inc. details a lot of other ways the giant corporations have taken over the food business and suppressed any opposition or even discussion. One of the most sinister is so-called “food-libel laws,” state laws that make it illegal — and, in some cases, a felony — to disparage corporate food products in public. Most Americans first heard of these laws when a cattle raisers’ association in Texas sued Oprah Winfrey because in 1996 she’d done a show with some people talking about the unhealthy ways beef cattle were raised, and she’d blurted out on air that after hearing them she’d never want to eat a hamburger again. She was forced into a years-long legal battle, which she turned into a public-education campaign; when she had to travel to Texas for the trial, she did her show there and kept commenting on the issue. Oprah, who’s probably the world’s richest woman of African descent, could afford the multi-million dollar cost of this legal battle; almost nobody else could.
Another tactic of the multinational corporations that control your food supply is relentless opposition to labeling laws. One would think even the most diehard lassiez-faire Libertarian would at least endorse a requirement that the people trying to sell you something at least tell you what’s in it. After all, Adam Smith, who was to capitalism what Karl Marx was to socialism, said in the 18th century that one of the essentials for a free market was that buyers and sellers must be honest with each other about the real nature of the merchandise. But the food corporations, aware that a lot of people would choose not to buy their products if they knew what was in them and the horrible conditions under which they are produced, have fought tooth and nail for the right not to tell them. Thus, when genetically modified ingredients were introduced into processed foods, European consumers got warning labels and Americans didn’t — and U.S. food companies invoked the World Trade Organization’s secret tribunals to have the European labeling laws thrown out as a restraint on “free trade.”
The main clout the food companies have to write the laws the way they want them, drive out competition and keep consumers in the dark as to exactly what they’re eating comes not only from their campaign contributions to politicians but also the so-called “revolving door” by which most of the officials who supposedly “regulate” the food supply come directly from the companies they’re allegedly regulating. Either that or they come from law firms used by the food companies — like U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. In the 1970’s Thomas worked at a law firm and handled cases involving Monsanto; in 1991 he wrote the majority opinion in the case that gave Monsanto the clout to have even accidental contamination of a crop by their modified soybean genes declared a patent infringement — the precedent Monsanto has used to put Moe Parr out of business and take over virtually all soybean cultivation in the U.S.
Though there are a few omissions — like the potentially catastrophic effects of growing only one variety of crop, which could lead to the disappearance of an entire food source and the starvation of billions if a pest evolves with a particular taste for it — Food, Inc. is surprisingly comprehensive for a 94-minute documentary. The film vividly shows how the food industry has essentially turned every farmer in America into a sharecropper, forced to grow a certain way, pay exorbitant prices for their equipment and supplies, live their lives in permanent debt and go along with the secrecy imposed on them by the industry or lose their livelihood altogether. It also depicts how food itself has become increasingly processed, divorced from its roots in nature, in ways that are making us fatter and less healthy — thanks largely to government policies that subsidize artificial foods and jack up the price of natural vegetables and produce — and it shows how the lower your income, the fewer choices you’ll have and the less healthy your food will be.
Like a lot of other documentaries in its genre, Food, Inc. is quite a bit better at telling us how awful everything is than it is at giving us ways we can fight back. Much of it is based on the research of two people who are extensively interviewed in the film, Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser (who’s also listed as a co-producer) and The Omnivore’s Dilemma author Michael Pollan, and the filmmakers’ “what you can do” advice is pretty much what you’d expect: cut down on meat consumption, stop drinking sodas and other sweetened beverages, shop at farmers’ markets if there’s one close to you, and buy organic. But Robert Kenner is too good a director to ignore what’s happening to the label “organic” as more and more “organic” food producers are being acquired by the same multinationals that control the rest of our food supply.
Though Kenner doesn’t stress the point, his film contains a fascinating debate (of sorts, since they never appear together) between two organic food producers. Gary Hirshberg of Stonyfield Farms comments with evident embarrassment on old videotapes showing him as a young idealist criticizing capitalism, and boasts that he was able to build the third largest yogurt producer in the country and ultimately sell out to an Italian food conglomerate that allowed him to keep running it. He boasts that not only did he get his yogurt into Wal-Mart — which, in an otherwise relentlessly anti-corporate movie, is depicted surprisingly positively — but that, thanks to consumer pressure, Wal-Mart has withdrawn all milk containing recombinant bovine growth hormone and therefore, for once, the clout of a major multinational has actually made the food supply healthier. By contrast, Joel Salatin of Polyfield Farms in Virginia says in so many words that marketing his free-range, grass-fed livestock to Wal-Mart would be like selling his soul.
Food, Inc. is a film that’s going to provoke reactions, and not always the ones the filmmakers intended. Kenner shows footage of how chickens are killed on Salatin’s farm — they’re put head-first into a funnel, their necks are wrung and their throats are slit — and clearly means us to read that as the healthier alternative to the way it’s done at an industrial chicken processing plant. But the audience at the June 18 preview screening at Landmark Hillcrest in San Diego got equally grossed out by both scenes. Still, very little of Food, Inc. is even potentially disgusting, and much of it is surprisingly moving, especially the depiction of the people who’ve been victimized by the “food snatchers” and how they’re fighting back. If you give a damn about what you put in your mouth, you have to see this movie.
•••••
Facts from Food, Inc.
Source: The Food, Inc. press kit.
In the 1970’s, the top five beef packers controlled about 25% of the market. Today, the top four control more than 80% of the market.
In the 1970’s, there were thousands of slaughterhouses producing the majority of beef sold. Today, we have only 13.
In 1998, the USDA implemented microbial testing for salmonella and E. coli 0157h7 so that if a plant repeatedly failed these tests, the USDA could shut down the plant. After being taken to court by the meat and poultry associations, the USDA no longer has that power — and a grass-roots lobbying campaign started in 2002 to get Congress to restore it has so far failed.
In 1972, the FDA conducted 50,000 food safety inspections. In 2006, the FDA conducted only 9,164.
During the Bush administration, the head of the FDA was the former executive vice-president of the National Food Processors Association.
During the Bush administration, the chief of staff at the USDA was the former chief lobbyist for the beef industry in Washington.
Prior to renaming itself an agribusiness company, Monsanto was a chemical company that produced, among other things, DDT and Agent Orange.
In 1996 when it introduced RoundUp Ready Soybeans, Monsanto controlled only 2% of the U.S. soybean market. Now, over 90% of soybeans in the U.S. contain Monsanto’s patented gene.
Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas was an attorney at Monsanto from 1976 to 1979. After his appointment to the Supreme Court, Justice Thomas wrote the majority opinion in a 1991 case that helped Monsanto enforce its seed patents.
The average chicken farmer invests over $500,000 and makes only $18,000 a year.
32,000 hogs a day are killed in Smithfield Hog Processing Plant in Tar Heel, N.C, which is the largest slaughterhouse in the world.
The average American eats over 200 lbs. of meat a year.
30% of the farmland in the U.S. is used for planting corn.
The modern supermarket now has, on average, 47,000 products, the majority of which is being produced by only a handful of food companies.
70% of processed foods have some genetically modified ingredient.
SB63 Consumer Right to Know measure requiring all food derived from cloned animals to be labeled as such passed the California state legislature before being vetoed in 2007 by Governor Schwarzenegger, who said that he couldn’t sign a bill that pre-empted federal law.
Corn products include: ketchup, cheese, Twinkies, batteries, peanut butter, Cheez-Its, salad dressings, Coke, jelly, Sweet & Low, syrup, juice, Kool-Aid, charcoal, diapers, Motrin, meat and fast food.
Corn, which is the main ingredient in animal feed, is also used as a food additive. Those products commonly include: Cellulose, Xylitol, Maltodextrin, Ethylene, Gluten, Fibersol-2, Citrus Cloud Emulsion, Inosital, Fructose, Calcium Stearate, Saccharin, Sucrose, Sorbital, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Citric Acid, Di-glycerides, Semolina, Sorbic Acid, Alpha Tocopherol, Ethyl Lactate, Polydextrose, Xanthan Gum, White Vinegar, Ethel Acetate, Fumaric Acid, Ascorbic Acid, Baking Powder, Zein, Vanilla Extract, Margarine, and Starch.
1 in 3 Americans born after 2000 will contract early onset diabetes; among minorities, the rate will be 1 in 2.
E. coli and Salmonella outbreaks have become more frequent in America, whether it be from spinach or jalapeños. In 2007, there were 73,000 people sickened from the E. coli bacterium.
Organics is the fastest growing food segment, increasing 20% annually.
Behind Green Lights (20th Century-Fox, 1946)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Our “feature” last night was Behind Green Lights — I’m not sure why it’s called that, though since it takes place mostly in and around a police station maybe in 1946, when it was made, the lights outside a police station were green. It’s a 64-minute thriller from 20th Century-Fox that’s an example of what I like to call film gris — a basically ordinary crime film that’s trying to gussie itself up with a few chiaroscuro lighting techniques and oblique camera angles to pass itself off as film noir — though the story is a compelling one and in better hands it might have been an interesting film. Even as it stands, it’s entertaining and mostly makes sense.
Directed by Otto Brower from a script by W. Scott Darling (clearly moving up in the cinematic world from his days writing the Mr. Wong series at Monogram!) and Charles G. Booth, Behind Green Lights begins with a scene in which sleazy private detective Walter Bard (Bernard Nedell) is attempting to blackmail Janet Bradley (Carole Landis, top-billed), daughter of the reform candidate for mayor who’s attempting to sweep out of office the current administration, with which the police department is aligned. (As in Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key and James M. Cain’s Love’s Lovely Counterfeit, we get the impression that the “reformers” are as corrupt as the people they’re trying to displace.) Bard is shot and his body is loaded into his car and dumped in front of the police station, and the head of that particular precinct, Lt. Sam Carson (William Gargan), and newly assigned police reporter Johnny Williams (Richard Crane), who’s from a paper supportive of the current city government and skeptical of the “reformers,” team up to solve the crime.
There are a lot of incidents in this movie, including all too much rather forced “comic relief” — including a scene in which a crook needing a quick hiding place dumps Bard’s body in a closet inside the police station’s press room (there’s a lot of Front Page-ish byplay between the reporters, and even a Bensinger-like character named Daniel Boone Wintergreen, played by character actor Charles Arnt) and hides himself on the gurney that was supposed to take it to the morgue; he therefore gets out of the police station, and when the morgue attendants get ready to unload Bard’s corpse, of course they find it isn’t there. As if that wasn’t enough misplaced humor for you, Johnny Williams finds Bard’s body in the closet and thinks he’s got the scoop of his career — only when he tries to call it in both Wintergreen and a flower seller (Mabel Paige) interrupt him.
The problem with this film that keeps it from achieving noir is the lack of really interesting characterizations, and the problem that keeps it from being more than a standard-issue thriller is that there are way too many plot incidents and too little is made out of any of them. The extent to which the crime is interconnected with the city’s upcoming election and the political struggle between its factions would have made a quite compelling plot theme if Darling and Booth had followed up on it; as it is, though, they mention it a few times in passing but otherwise pretty much forget about it. What saves this film is the cool major-studio professionalism with which it’s executed — and also the performance of William Gargan; heavy-set and no longer suitable for leading-man types, he’s actually quite good as the dedicated, coolly efficient lead cop who ultimately [spoiler alert!] fastens onto a peripheral character, Dr. Hastings (William Forrest, Jr.) as the killer — though Darling and Booth aren’t especially forthcoming about his motive. Behind Green Lights is one of those frustrating good-movies-that-could-have-been-better; certainly the premise could have inspired a far greater film than this, yet like Gargan’s character it’s coolly efficient and a nice 64-minute time-killer.
Our “feature” last night was Behind Green Lights — I’m not sure why it’s called that, though since it takes place mostly in and around a police station maybe in 1946, when it was made, the lights outside a police station were green. It’s a 64-minute thriller from 20th Century-Fox that’s an example of what I like to call film gris — a basically ordinary crime film that’s trying to gussie itself up with a few chiaroscuro lighting techniques and oblique camera angles to pass itself off as film noir — though the story is a compelling one and in better hands it might have been an interesting film. Even as it stands, it’s entertaining and mostly makes sense.
Directed by Otto Brower from a script by W. Scott Darling (clearly moving up in the cinematic world from his days writing the Mr. Wong series at Monogram!) and Charles G. Booth, Behind Green Lights begins with a scene in which sleazy private detective Walter Bard (Bernard Nedell) is attempting to blackmail Janet Bradley (Carole Landis, top-billed), daughter of the reform candidate for mayor who’s attempting to sweep out of office the current administration, with which the police department is aligned. (As in Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key and James M. Cain’s Love’s Lovely Counterfeit, we get the impression that the “reformers” are as corrupt as the people they’re trying to displace.) Bard is shot and his body is loaded into his car and dumped in front of the police station, and the head of that particular precinct, Lt. Sam Carson (William Gargan), and newly assigned police reporter Johnny Williams (Richard Crane), who’s from a paper supportive of the current city government and skeptical of the “reformers,” team up to solve the crime.
There are a lot of incidents in this movie, including all too much rather forced “comic relief” — including a scene in which a crook needing a quick hiding place dumps Bard’s body in a closet inside the police station’s press room (there’s a lot of Front Page-ish byplay between the reporters, and even a Bensinger-like character named Daniel Boone Wintergreen, played by character actor Charles Arnt) and hides himself on the gurney that was supposed to take it to the morgue; he therefore gets out of the police station, and when the morgue attendants get ready to unload Bard’s corpse, of course they find it isn’t there. As if that wasn’t enough misplaced humor for you, Johnny Williams finds Bard’s body in the closet and thinks he’s got the scoop of his career — only when he tries to call it in both Wintergreen and a flower seller (Mabel Paige) interrupt him.
The problem with this film that keeps it from achieving noir is the lack of really interesting characterizations, and the problem that keeps it from being more than a standard-issue thriller is that there are way too many plot incidents and too little is made out of any of them. The extent to which the crime is interconnected with the city’s upcoming election and the political struggle between its factions would have made a quite compelling plot theme if Darling and Booth had followed up on it; as it is, though, they mention it a few times in passing but otherwise pretty much forget about it. What saves this film is the cool major-studio professionalism with which it’s executed — and also the performance of William Gargan; heavy-set and no longer suitable for leading-man types, he’s actually quite good as the dedicated, coolly efficient lead cop who ultimately [spoiler alert!] fastens onto a peripheral character, Dr. Hastings (William Forrest, Jr.) as the killer — though Darling and Booth aren’t especially forthcoming about his motive. Behind Green Lights is one of those frustrating good-movies-that-could-have-been-better; certainly the premise could have inspired a far greater film than this, yet like Gargan’s character it’s coolly efficient and a nice 64-minute time-killer.
He Laughed Last (Columbia, 1956)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran Charles our “feature,” a 1956 film called He Laughed Last that represented the last of Frankie Laine’s “B” starring vehicles for Columbia — and one of the weakest; I haven’t seen them all but the two we watched before this, On the Sunny Side of the Street and Bring Your Smile Along, were both stronger. The film opens with a bang — literally; a gangland assassination shot in as close to classic film noir style as director Blake Edwards (his second film in that capacity after a brief career as an actor and a longer but still pretty undistinguished one as a writer) and cinematographer Henry Freulich could get in late Technicolor — before the titles come up and the transition from the dark murder sequence to a light, uptempo piece of music that comes up as we see the name of the film spelled out in bullet holes is just the first of many jars we’re going to have to put up if we watch this film.
The basic problem with He Laughed Last is its creators, Edwards and Richard Quine (his directorial mentor and co-author of the screenplay), never quite decide whether they wanted it to be a gangster movie, a musical or a soap opera. It starts in 1935 with Laine playing “Gino Lupo” (the last name means “wolf” and it’s a surprise to see Frankie Laine, true name Frank Lo Vecchio, playing a character with the sort of openly Italian name he himself changed for his showbiz career), owner, manager and principal entertainer at a dying nightclub called the “Happy Club.” An old friend, a reporter, comes by the club to interview Gino and get the real story on the death of 1920’s gangster “Big Dan” Hennessy (Alan Reed), and the story flashes back to the 1920’s, when the “Happy Club” was a happening place and “Big Dan” was its owner until rival gangsters had him eliminated. “Big Dan” was trying to seduce the club’s star, Rosemary “Rosie” LeBeau (Lucy Marlow), with expensive gifts, but though she took his presents she saved her affections for a police officer who’s trying to bust the gangs.
The movie just sort of meanders through a lot of scenes that don’t seem to mean much, and it doesn’t help that though the film was shot in Technicolor towards the end of its glory days, the extant print has faded to a deep brown tone that makes it look more like a color film of today than one from the 1950’s. There are some good musical numbers but not enough of them — Laine sings the song “Save Your Sorrows ’Til Tomorrow” in the club (he sings it well but Peggy Lee did it better; her wry, ironic style suited this song more than Laine’s dogged earnestness); Lucy Marlow does “Strike Me Pink” with five ostrich feathers behind her that turn out to be being held by chorus girls (it’s a dorky number but also an entertainingly clever one); and the high point of the film is Laine’s performances of “Danny Boy.” He sings two, one a cappella at “Big Dan”’s funeral (backed by four of his gangster associates doing barber-shop harmony behind him) and one towards the end as he reminisces about those exciting days of the 1920’s and Rosie, her husband the cop and their four kids ask to hear it.
Laine, not a particularly good-looking or charismatic personality when he wasn’t singing (though he was way too big a movie star by 1956 to be caught dead in a flimsy production like this, the film really calls for Frank Sinatra, not Frankie Laine!), sings “Danny Boy” (especially in the unaccompanied version) with real power, conviction and soul that makes the song the best thing in the movie. It’s easy to understand why Laine became such a big star and why his career at the top was so (relatively) short; like Al Jolson before him and Elvis Presley after him, Laine channeled African-American singing styles to a white audience (when he’d just hit it big with the 1947 record “That’s My Desire” — a song he’d learned from the record Black boogie-woogie singer-pianist Hadda Brooks had made the year before — he named Bessie Smith as the biggest influence on his style, and certainly one can hear a lot more of Bessie in him than one can in Billie Holiday!), but though he was clearly an influence on the early white rockers (Elvis copied the sorts of dramatic register shifts Laine did in songs like “Jezebel” and Buddy Holly actually covered “That’s My Desire”), their success pretty much rendered Laine irrelevant — and though he lived quite a long time and worked almost until the end, he didn’t get the chance to re-invent himself as a jazz singer the way Rosemary Clooney did on her later records for Concord Jazz.
The irony is that there were plenty of Warner Bros. movies in the 1930’s — including one I thought of as a parallel while we were watching He Laughed Last, the first Torchy Blane film Smart Blonde — that did a better job combining the gangster, musical and soap-opera genres and got the mix right whereas here it went terribly awry (and Edwards would one day make a great musical with gangster and soap elements, Victor/Victoria, which for all its gender-bending elements and frank acceptance of homosexuality wasn’t all that different in mood from this — though the veteran Edwards of 1982 was able to blend the elements far more effectively than the journeyman Edwards of 1956).
I ran Charles our “feature,” a 1956 film called He Laughed Last that represented the last of Frankie Laine’s “B” starring vehicles for Columbia — and one of the weakest; I haven’t seen them all but the two we watched before this, On the Sunny Side of the Street and Bring Your Smile Along, were both stronger. The film opens with a bang — literally; a gangland assassination shot in as close to classic film noir style as director Blake Edwards (his second film in that capacity after a brief career as an actor and a longer but still pretty undistinguished one as a writer) and cinematographer Henry Freulich could get in late Technicolor — before the titles come up and the transition from the dark murder sequence to a light, uptempo piece of music that comes up as we see the name of the film spelled out in bullet holes is just the first of many jars we’re going to have to put up if we watch this film.
The basic problem with He Laughed Last is its creators, Edwards and Richard Quine (his directorial mentor and co-author of the screenplay), never quite decide whether they wanted it to be a gangster movie, a musical or a soap opera. It starts in 1935 with Laine playing “Gino Lupo” (the last name means “wolf” and it’s a surprise to see Frankie Laine, true name Frank Lo Vecchio, playing a character with the sort of openly Italian name he himself changed for his showbiz career), owner, manager and principal entertainer at a dying nightclub called the “Happy Club.” An old friend, a reporter, comes by the club to interview Gino and get the real story on the death of 1920’s gangster “Big Dan” Hennessy (Alan Reed), and the story flashes back to the 1920’s, when the “Happy Club” was a happening place and “Big Dan” was its owner until rival gangsters had him eliminated. “Big Dan” was trying to seduce the club’s star, Rosemary “Rosie” LeBeau (Lucy Marlow), with expensive gifts, but though she took his presents she saved her affections for a police officer who’s trying to bust the gangs.
The movie just sort of meanders through a lot of scenes that don’t seem to mean much, and it doesn’t help that though the film was shot in Technicolor towards the end of its glory days, the extant print has faded to a deep brown tone that makes it look more like a color film of today than one from the 1950’s. There are some good musical numbers but not enough of them — Laine sings the song “Save Your Sorrows ’Til Tomorrow” in the club (he sings it well but Peggy Lee did it better; her wry, ironic style suited this song more than Laine’s dogged earnestness); Lucy Marlow does “Strike Me Pink” with five ostrich feathers behind her that turn out to be being held by chorus girls (it’s a dorky number but also an entertainingly clever one); and the high point of the film is Laine’s performances of “Danny Boy.” He sings two, one a cappella at “Big Dan”’s funeral (backed by four of his gangster associates doing barber-shop harmony behind him) and one towards the end as he reminisces about those exciting days of the 1920’s and Rosie, her husband the cop and their four kids ask to hear it.
Laine, not a particularly good-looking or charismatic personality when he wasn’t singing (though he was way too big a movie star by 1956 to be caught dead in a flimsy production like this, the film really calls for Frank Sinatra, not Frankie Laine!), sings “Danny Boy” (especially in the unaccompanied version) with real power, conviction and soul that makes the song the best thing in the movie. It’s easy to understand why Laine became such a big star and why his career at the top was so (relatively) short; like Al Jolson before him and Elvis Presley after him, Laine channeled African-American singing styles to a white audience (when he’d just hit it big with the 1947 record “That’s My Desire” — a song he’d learned from the record Black boogie-woogie singer-pianist Hadda Brooks had made the year before — he named Bessie Smith as the biggest influence on his style, and certainly one can hear a lot more of Bessie in him than one can in Billie Holiday!), but though he was clearly an influence on the early white rockers (Elvis copied the sorts of dramatic register shifts Laine did in songs like “Jezebel” and Buddy Holly actually covered “That’s My Desire”), their success pretty much rendered Laine irrelevant — and though he lived quite a long time and worked almost until the end, he didn’t get the chance to re-invent himself as a jazz singer the way Rosemary Clooney did on her later records for Concord Jazz.
The irony is that there were plenty of Warner Bros. movies in the 1930’s — including one I thought of as a parallel while we were watching He Laughed Last, the first Torchy Blane film Smart Blonde — that did a better job combining the gangster, musical and soap-opera genres and got the mix right whereas here it went terribly awry (and Edwards would one day make a great musical with gangster and soap elements, Victor/Victoria, which for all its gender-bending elements and frank acceptance of homosexuality wasn’t all that different in mood from this — though the veteran Edwards of 1982 was able to blend the elements far more effectively than the journeyman Edwards of 1956).
Friday, June 19, 2009
Teenage Caveman (Malibu Productions/American International, 1958)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I ended up watching a movie, though a considerably less exalted one than Food, Inc.: I had intended to run the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 presentation of a film called Mighty Jack — wondering whether that would be a science-fiction space opera or a juvenile delinquency film (it turns out from its imdb.com listing that it’s really a spy movie spliced together from several episodes of a Japanese TV series) but it was missing from the disc Charles downloaded and instead what came up was a film called Teenage Caveman (its imdb.com page lists the title as Teenage Cave Man — three words — but the main title on the print we were watching shows it as two), a 1958 American International production directed by Roger Corman from a script by R. Wright Campbell.
Some years ago I actually watched and made a VHS recording of this movie, which for all its risible aspects — including the perfectly coiffed and pomaded hair on the central character and his absolutely smooth-shaven face — actually moved me and, I think, ends up on that short list of films (like Rocketship X-M, This Island Earth, Revenge of the Creature, I Was a Teenage Werewolf and The Space Children) that MST3K ought to have left alone. For much of its running time it appears to have been an uncredited adaptation of Ayn Rand’s 1937 novella Anthem, with its individualistic hero, “The Symbol Maker’s Teenage Son” — nobody in this movie actually has a name — rebelling against the strictly enforced rules of his “clan” that prevent them from hunting and gathering beyond a strictly prescribed area on their side of the river.
This character — played by Robert Vaughn, best known as Napoleon Solo in the hit mid-1960’s TV series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (and looking here like Napoleon Solo was searching for THRUSH agents among a group of particularly dedicated caveman-life re-enactors) — and his father, “The Symbol Maker” (Leslie Bradley), are responsible for ensuring the success of the “clan”’s hunts by drawing pictures of the animals they’re hunting on the cave walls. The plot turns around Our Hero’s continued insistence that there is life beyond the river and abundant hunting grounds to sustain them — and in his own explorations there he meets dinosaurs (mostly shots recycled from Hal Roach’s 1940 production One Million B.C. — when the Roach studio fell on hard times this proved a major source of stock dinosaur footage for independent producers that wanted it but didn’t have the money to stage it themselves) and a couple of beings that look like char-broiled versions of American International’s usual ambulatory monsters (though he’s not credited, it’s Paul Blaisdell’s all-purpose AIP monster suit redressed) — until the final twist, in which one of the monsters dies and the other, also in his death throes, gives Robert Vaughn a copy of a book.
Yes, a book — a picture book called The Atomic Age — and as he’s dying the monster, who’s actually a human who lived through the nuclear apocalypse because he was wearing an anti-radiation suit that only gave him the appearance of a monster, explains that humankind developed an elaborate civilization and then blew itself up with nuclear weapons, leaving only a few scattered remnants of humanity who quickly regressed to a caveman lifestyle. The radiation from all those atomic blasts also caused mutations that brought the dinosaurs back to life after they had long since died out. Thus a film that started out as a Randian rant about the power of the individual and the need to stand up against the collective (though Charles argued that the film also proclaimed the superiority of first-hand experience over tradition and ideology, which didn’t seem to him to be an especially Randian notion) ended up as a progressive warning about the dangers of nuclear war, quite possibly inspired by Albert Einstein’s famous comment that he didn’t know what weapons World War III would be fought with, “but I can tell you what weapons World War IV will be fought with — stone axes and spears!”
The duality in this movie’s politics reflected Robert Corman’s own ideological schizophrenia, his ability to make a Right-wing propagandist piece like It Conquered the World and then a progressive civil-rights drama like The Intruder, and certainly the fact that this film has a political message — however muddled it might be — sets it far above the norm for MST3K’s targets. (The surprise ending also seems to me to anticipate the one added to Planet of the Apes — it wasn’t in the original novel — 10 years later.) It’s also worth noting that Corman shot the film under the title Prehistoric Earth and hated AIP’s title change so much that later in life, when he was asked about it, said, “I never directed a movie called Teenage Caveman.” MST3K did a pretty good job parodying and ridiculing a film that really didn’t deserve their parody and ridicule, throwing in the inevitable Man from U.N.C.L.E. references (including at least two calls to “open Channel D,” the radio frequency by which U.N.C.L.E. agents communicated with their home base) as well as quite a few references to popular songs.
Along with Teenage Caveman the MST3K crew included a couple of shorts which fit their format a good deal better , a 1950’s short from Castle Films called Aquatic Wizardry about people training to be water skiers (most of them reasonably attractive young women who looked like they were auditioning for an Esther Williams chorus line), and a piece that looked like it was from the 1930’s, with an outrageously inappropriate piece of intro music that sounded better suited to a Hal Roach comedy, about a man (actually two men, but one of them was an Indian wearing a skirt and was so demeaned in both the footage and the narration that compared to this the treatment of Tonto in The Lone Ranger was a model of racial sensitivity) named Ross trapping live animals in the Florida Everglades — a piece so outrageously boorish that not only did the MST3K crew joke, “Where is PETA when you need them?,” but afterwards they did an outrageously funny spoof of it with Joel Hodgson cast as a hunter who seeks to trap the human “hero” of that movie with the same blatantly inhumane techniques he was using on the animals.
Charles and I ended up watching a movie, though a considerably less exalted one than Food, Inc.: I had intended to run the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 presentation of a film called Mighty Jack — wondering whether that would be a science-fiction space opera or a juvenile delinquency film (it turns out from its imdb.com listing that it’s really a spy movie spliced together from several episodes of a Japanese TV series) but it was missing from the disc Charles downloaded and instead what came up was a film called Teenage Caveman (its imdb.com page lists the title as Teenage Cave Man — three words — but the main title on the print we were watching shows it as two), a 1958 American International production directed by Roger Corman from a script by R. Wright Campbell.
Some years ago I actually watched and made a VHS recording of this movie, which for all its risible aspects — including the perfectly coiffed and pomaded hair on the central character and his absolutely smooth-shaven face — actually moved me and, I think, ends up on that short list of films (like Rocketship X-M, This Island Earth, Revenge of the Creature, I Was a Teenage Werewolf and The Space Children) that MST3K ought to have left alone. For much of its running time it appears to have been an uncredited adaptation of Ayn Rand’s 1937 novella Anthem, with its individualistic hero, “The Symbol Maker’s Teenage Son” — nobody in this movie actually has a name — rebelling against the strictly enforced rules of his “clan” that prevent them from hunting and gathering beyond a strictly prescribed area on their side of the river.
This character — played by Robert Vaughn, best known as Napoleon Solo in the hit mid-1960’s TV series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (and looking here like Napoleon Solo was searching for THRUSH agents among a group of particularly dedicated caveman-life re-enactors) — and his father, “The Symbol Maker” (Leslie Bradley), are responsible for ensuring the success of the “clan”’s hunts by drawing pictures of the animals they’re hunting on the cave walls. The plot turns around Our Hero’s continued insistence that there is life beyond the river and abundant hunting grounds to sustain them — and in his own explorations there he meets dinosaurs (mostly shots recycled from Hal Roach’s 1940 production One Million B.C. — when the Roach studio fell on hard times this proved a major source of stock dinosaur footage for independent producers that wanted it but didn’t have the money to stage it themselves) and a couple of beings that look like char-broiled versions of American International’s usual ambulatory monsters (though he’s not credited, it’s Paul Blaisdell’s all-purpose AIP monster suit redressed) — until the final twist, in which one of the monsters dies and the other, also in his death throes, gives Robert Vaughn a copy of a book.
Yes, a book — a picture book called The Atomic Age — and as he’s dying the monster, who’s actually a human who lived through the nuclear apocalypse because he was wearing an anti-radiation suit that only gave him the appearance of a monster, explains that humankind developed an elaborate civilization and then blew itself up with nuclear weapons, leaving only a few scattered remnants of humanity who quickly regressed to a caveman lifestyle. The radiation from all those atomic blasts also caused mutations that brought the dinosaurs back to life after they had long since died out. Thus a film that started out as a Randian rant about the power of the individual and the need to stand up against the collective (though Charles argued that the film also proclaimed the superiority of first-hand experience over tradition and ideology, which didn’t seem to him to be an especially Randian notion) ended up as a progressive warning about the dangers of nuclear war, quite possibly inspired by Albert Einstein’s famous comment that he didn’t know what weapons World War III would be fought with, “but I can tell you what weapons World War IV will be fought with — stone axes and spears!”
The duality in this movie’s politics reflected Robert Corman’s own ideological schizophrenia, his ability to make a Right-wing propagandist piece like It Conquered the World and then a progressive civil-rights drama like The Intruder, and certainly the fact that this film has a political message — however muddled it might be — sets it far above the norm for MST3K’s targets. (The surprise ending also seems to me to anticipate the one added to Planet of the Apes — it wasn’t in the original novel — 10 years later.) It’s also worth noting that Corman shot the film under the title Prehistoric Earth and hated AIP’s title change so much that later in life, when he was asked about it, said, “I never directed a movie called Teenage Caveman.” MST3K did a pretty good job parodying and ridiculing a film that really didn’t deserve their parody and ridicule, throwing in the inevitable Man from U.N.C.L.E. references (including at least two calls to “open Channel D,” the radio frequency by which U.N.C.L.E. agents communicated with their home base) as well as quite a few references to popular songs.
Along with Teenage Caveman the MST3K crew included a couple of shorts which fit their format a good deal better , a 1950’s short from Castle Films called Aquatic Wizardry about people training to be water skiers (most of them reasonably attractive young women who looked like they were auditioning for an Esther Williams chorus line), and a piece that looked like it was from the 1930’s, with an outrageously inappropriate piece of intro music that sounded better suited to a Hal Roach comedy, about a man (actually two men, but one of them was an Indian wearing a skirt and was so demeaned in both the footage and the narration that compared to this the treatment of Tonto in The Lone Ranger was a model of racial sensitivity) named Ross trapping live animals in the Florida Everglades — a piece so outrageously boorish that not only did the MST3K crew joke, “Where is PETA when you need them?,” but afterwards they did an outrageously funny spoof of it with Joel Hodgson cast as a hunter who seeks to trap the human “hero” of that movie with the same blatantly inhumane techniques he was using on the animals.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
“Whatever Works”: Woody Allen’s Homecoming
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
When Pedro Almodóvar released his film Bad Education in 2004, I headlined my review, “Almodóvar Comes Home” because instead of spending his talents on stories involving women (as George Cukor and other Gay male filmmakers had done in the past), he had returned to his roots and made a sexually and socially edgy tale in which the protagonists were Gay, Bisexual or “Gay for pay” men. Woody Allen’s new movie, Whatever Works, has a similar — and similarly welcome — sense of “homecoming” about it. Allen has “come home” literally; after a series of movies both shot and set in Europe, mainly because European financiers are more likely than American ones to back films that aren’t based on comic books, don’t star superheroes and don’t feature spectacular action scenes, Whatever Works is both set on Allen’s home turf, New York City, and was shot there.
Allen has also “come home” thematically. Like his masterpieces from the 1970’s and 1980’s (Annie Hall, Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters), Whatever Works is a film about the impermanence of human relationships, the ease with which people fall both in and out of love and the ways they simultaneously strive for happiness and sabotage that quest. His protagonist, Boris Yellnikoff (played by Seinfeld creator Larry David), is a bitter old curmudgeon, a retired nuclear physicist whose first marriage ended when his wife announced she was leaving him and he responded by hurling himself out the window of their beautiful moderne apartment. Now he’s reduced to living in a hovel and spending his time grousing with his old Jewish friends — did I tell you he’s Jewish? He’s a Woody Allen lead, isn’t he? — freely expressing his contempt for the rest of humanity. He’s got such a low opinion of the intelligence of just about everyone else that “inchworms” and “cretins” are the kindest things he calls his fellow humans, and when a woman complains that instead of teaching her son to play chess (seemingly his only source of income) he hit him on the head with the chessboard, he patiently explains that he didn’t; he just upended the board and poured the pieces over the little moron’s head.
Love comes into Boris’s loveless life anyway when he takes in a runaway, Melodie St. Ann Celestine (played with just the right degree of guilelessness by Evan Rachel Wood, who outdoes Reese Witherspoon at Reese’s own act). Even for a movie couple, they’re a mismatch made in hell; she’s blonde, she’s not Jewish, she’s an airhead, she’s one-third his age and she’s a runaway from a dysfunctional Southern family. Her parents, Marietta (Patricia Clarkson) and John (a well-weathered Ed Begley, Jr.), broke up when John ran off with Marietta’s best friend — though that doesn’t stop them from coming, separately, to New York with the intent of bringing her back home. That doesn’t stop Boris from squiring Melodie around the city, showing her all the tourist attractions he’s so carefully avoided seeing in all his years there, and ultimately their companionship blooms into love and (then) marriage.
From then the plot is a bizarre series of reversals and character transformations that stretch, but fortunately don’t break, the bounds of credibility. One of the characters comes out as Queer, and as he did in Radio Days Allen tells this strand of his plot quietly, calmly, with dignity and an awareness rare in filmmakers generally that same-sex love really isn’t any different from opposite-sex love and it isn’t worth getting ourselves in a snit about. Like Hannah and Her Sisters, the film ends with an uneasy but hopeful coming-together of the various characters that provides a satisfying resolution to the story even as it leaves us making a sequel in our own heads and wondering how these people will continue to separate and recombine in the future.
Allen’s direction is utterly sure-footed. There’s nothing of the hesitation that has sometimes creeped into his filmmaking when he’s wondered why he was working abroad or in another genre or with stars he was told were popular whether they were right for his film or not. He gets marvelous performances from all his cast members, top to bottom, in a film that’s simultaneously an ensemble piece and a tour de force for Larry David. Reportedly Whatever Works was an old script Allen had written decades ago for Zero Mostel, who died in 1977, but only dug out of his files recently. It’s probably just as well he didn’t make it then; not only does this film strike me as a piece that, like Brian Wilson’s album Smile, it took a young man to conceive and an older, more experienced man to make, but Mostel would have been way too overbearing in the lead and you’d have wanted to strangle him after about 15 minutes. (The one film Mostel is remembered for, The Producers, worked because he was playing a character as offensively overbearing as he was.)
Watching Whatever Works, I wondered how the film might have been different if Woody Allen had played the lead himself. He’s certainly old enough for it by now, he’s got the same Jewishkeit as Larry David, and as an on-screen nerd before the word “nerd” even existed Allen would have been more believable as a retired nuclear physicist. But while Allen would have done the curmudgeonliness of the character as well as David, I think he would have had trouble with the lovability that’s supposed to lie underneath it. Boris Yellnikoff (no doubt Allen deliberately intended the pun on the word “yell” in his last name) is really a warm-hearted soul under all the misanthropic bluster, and David digs into the surface of the character and gives us both sides. In a film filled with typically Allenesque ironies, one of the biggest ironies of Whatever Works is entirely off-screen: the way a man best known for creating a hit TV series that was billed as “a show about nothing” is so adept at playing the lead in a film about something.
Perhaps no director since the great Ernst Lubitsch has built his films so much around “touches” — little bits of off-the-wall business that at once advance the action, offer us dramatic insights and simultaneously remind us that it’s only a movie — as Woody Allen. Whatever Works is full of them, from the name of the rock band Melodie goes to see with Perry (John Gallagher, Jr.) on her first New York date with someone her own age — “Anal Sphincter” — to the Hannah and Her Sisters-esque contrast between her and Boris’s musical tastes as a metaphor for their differences as people. Boris’s theme song is “If I Could Be with You One Hour Tonight,” presented in a 1950’s mood-music version credited to Jackie Gleason — the star TV comedian had a recording contract with Capitol, but his records weren’t comedy albums but easy-listening compilations, many (like this one) featuring the warm trumpet sound of jazz musician Bobby Hackett. Though the song’s yearning lyrics (“If I could be with you I’d love you long/If I could be with you I’d love you oh so strong”) aren’t heard in the film, Hackett “sings” them so eloquently with his horn that the record takes on the symbolic meaning Allen wants it to: as a metaphor for the ideal of romantic love his characters hold in their hearts even though they’re often sabotaging their quests for it.
Another one of the “touches” in Whatever Works is the way Larry David — like two of the comedians Allen idolized when he was growing up, Groucho Marx and Bob Hope — periodically turns to the camera and addresses the audience directly. Here the man who made The Purple Rose of Cairo (an inversion of Buster Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr.: in Keaton’s film a movie projectionist dreamed his way into the film he was showing; in Purple Rose a movie character stepped off the screen into the “real” world) at once titillates and frustrates our expectations of what a movie should be and casts us as voyeurs, eavesdropping on the lives and actions of his characters. It’s a device Allen uses cleverly and with restraint — he could easily have overdone it and left us with the impression we were being harangued by Larry David’s character, but he didn’t — that adds piquancy to the film much like the ironic titles that commented on the action in Hannah and Her Sisters.
Is there anything not to like about Whatever Works? A few things: the cinematography by Harris Savides is way too dark and grungy — it’s one of those movies in which so much of everything is brown, one wonders if they’re going to use so little of the spectrum why don’t they just film it in black-and-white (as Allen actually did in Manhattan and Stardust Memories). And, at least for my taste, John Gallagher, Jr. disappears way too quickly and the actor whose character takes over his story function, Henry Cavill, is hardly as interesting either as a body or a personality. But for the most part, Whatever Works is a marvelous movie, quiet, low-keyed, moving, thematically and emotionally rich, genuinely entertaining instead of intellectually arid, and — most important of all — very, very funny. Even if you haven’t seen a Woody Allen movie in years, you owe it to yourself to see this one. Welcome home, Woody Allen.
Whatever Works opens Friday, June 26 at the Landmark Cinemas Hillcrest, 3965 Fifth Avenue in Hillcrest. Please call (619) 819-0236 for showtimes and other information.
Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
When Pedro Almodóvar released his film Bad Education in 2004, I headlined my review, “Almodóvar Comes Home” because instead of spending his talents on stories involving women (as George Cukor and other Gay male filmmakers had done in the past), he had returned to his roots and made a sexually and socially edgy tale in which the protagonists were Gay, Bisexual or “Gay for pay” men. Woody Allen’s new movie, Whatever Works, has a similar — and similarly welcome — sense of “homecoming” about it. Allen has “come home” literally; after a series of movies both shot and set in Europe, mainly because European financiers are more likely than American ones to back films that aren’t based on comic books, don’t star superheroes and don’t feature spectacular action scenes, Whatever Works is both set on Allen’s home turf, New York City, and was shot there.
Allen has also “come home” thematically. Like his masterpieces from the 1970’s and 1980’s (Annie Hall, Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters), Whatever Works is a film about the impermanence of human relationships, the ease with which people fall both in and out of love and the ways they simultaneously strive for happiness and sabotage that quest. His protagonist, Boris Yellnikoff (played by Seinfeld creator Larry David), is a bitter old curmudgeon, a retired nuclear physicist whose first marriage ended when his wife announced she was leaving him and he responded by hurling himself out the window of their beautiful moderne apartment. Now he’s reduced to living in a hovel and spending his time grousing with his old Jewish friends — did I tell you he’s Jewish? He’s a Woody Allen lead, isn’t he? — freely expressing his contempt for the rest of humanity. He’s got such a low opinion of the intelligence of just about everyone else that “inchworms” and “cretins” are the kindest things he calls his fellow humans, and when a woman complains that instead of teaching her son to play chess (seemingly his only source of income) he hit him on the head with the chessboard, he patiently explains that he didn’t; he just upended the board and poured the pieces over the little moron’s head.
Love comes into Boris’s loveless life anyway when he takes in a runaway, Melodie St. Ann Celestine (played with just the right degree of guilelessness by Evan Rachel Wood, who outdoes Reese Witherspoon at Reese’s own act). Even for a movie couple, they’re a mismatch made in hell; she’s blonde, she’s not Jewish, she’s an airhead, she’s one-third his age and she’s a runaway from a dysfunctional Southern family. Her parents, Marietta (Patricia Clarkson) and John (a well-weathered Ed Begley, Jr.), broke up when John ran off with Marietta’s best friend — though that doesn’t stop them from coming, separately, to New York with the intent of bringing her back home. That doesn’t stop Boris from squiring Melodie around the city, showing her all the tourist attractions he’s so carefully avoided seeing in all his years there, and ultimately their companionship blooms into love and (then) marriage.
From then the plot is a bizarre series of reversals and character transformations that stretch, but fortunately don’t break, the bounds of credibility. One of the characters comes out as Queer, and as he did in Radio Days Allen tells this strand of his plot quietly, calmly, with dignity and an awareness rare in filmmakers generally that same-sex love really isn’t any different from opposite-sex love and it isn’t worth getting ourselves in a snit about. Like Hannah and Her Sisters, the film ends with an uneasy but hopeful coming-together of the various characters that provides a satisfying resolution to the story even as it leaves us making a sequel in our own heads and wondering how these people will continue to separate and recombine in the future.
Allen’s direction is utterly sure-footed. There’s nothing of the hesitation that has sometimes creeped into his filmmaking when he’s wondered why he was working abroad or in another genre or with stars he was told were popular whether they were right for his film or not. He gets marvelous performances from all his cast members, top to bottom, in a film that’s simultaneously an ensemble piece and a tour de force for Larry David. Reportedly Whatever Works was an old script Allen had written decades ago for Zero Mostel, who died in 1977, but only dug out of his files recently. It’s probably just as well he didn’t make it then; not only does this film strike me as a piece that, like Brian Wilson’s album Smile, it took a young man to conceive and an older, more experienced man to make, but Mostel would have been way too overbearing in the lead and you’d have wanted to strangle him after about 15 minutes. (The one film Mostel is remembered for, The Producers, worked because he was playing a character as offensively overbearing as he was.)
Watching Whatever Works, I wondered how the film might have been different if Woody Allen had played the lead himself. He’s certainly old enough for it by now, he’s got the same Jewishkeit as Larry David, and as an on-screen nerd before the word “nerd” even existed Allen would have been more believable as a retired nuclear physicist. But while Allen would have done the curmudgeonliness of the character as well as David, I think he would have had trouble with the lovability that’s supposed to lie underneath it. Boris Yellnikoff (no doubt Allen deliberately intended the pun on the word “yell” in his last name) is really a warm-hearted soul under all the misanthropic bluster, and David digs into the surface of the character and gives us both sides. In a film filled with typically Allenesque ironies, one of the biggest ironies of Whatever Works is entirely off-screen: the way a man best known for creating a hit TV series that was billed as “a show about nothing” is so adept at playing the lead in a film about something.
Perhaps no director since the great Ernst Lubitsch has built his films so much around “touches” — little bits of off-the-wall business that at once advance the action, offer us dramatic insights and simultaneously remind us that it’s only a movie — as Woody Allen. Whatever Works is full of them, from the name of the rock band Melodie goes to see with Perry (John Gallagher, Jr.) on her first New York date with someone her own age — “Anal Sphincter” — to the Hannah and Her Sisters-esque contrast between her and Boris’s musical tastes as a metaphor for their differences as people. Boris’s theme song is “If I Could Be with You One Hour Tonight,” presented in a 1950’s mood-music version credited to Jackie Gleason — the star TV comedian had a recording contract with Capitol, but his records weren’t comedy albums but easy-listening compilations, many (like this one) featuring the warm trumpet sound of jazz musician Bobby Hackett. Though the song’s yearning lyrics (“If I could be with you I’d love you long/If I could be with you I’d love you oh so strong”) aren’t heard in the film, Hackett “sings” them so eloquently with his horn that the record takes on the symbolic meaning Allen wants it to: as a metaphor for the ideal of romantic love his characters hold in their hearts even though they’re often sabotaging their quests for it.
Another one of the “touches” in Whatever Works is the way Larry David — like two of the comedians Allen idolized when he was growing up, Groucho Marx and Bob Hope — periodically turns to the camera and addresses the audience directly. Here the man who made The Purple Rose of Cairo (an inversion of Buster Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr.: in Keaton’s film a movie projectionist dreamed his way into the film he was showing; in Purple Rose a movie character stepped off the screen into the “real” world) at once titillates and frustrates our expectations of what a movie should be and casts us as voyeurs, eavesdropping on the lives and actions of his characters. It’s a device Allen uses cleverly and with restraint — he could easily have overdone it and left us with the impression we were being harangued by Larry David’s character, but he didn’t — that adds piquancy to the film much like the ironic titles that commented on the action in Hannah and Her Sisters.
Is there anything not to like about Whatever Works? A few things: the cinematography by Harris Savides is way too dark and grungy — it’s one of those movies in which so much of everything is brown, one wonders if they’re going to use so little of the spectrum why don’t they just film it in black-and-white (as Allen actually did in Manhattan and Stardust Memories). And, at least for my taste, John Gallagher, Jr. disappears way too quickly and the actor whose character takes over his story function, Henry Cavill, is hardly as interesting either as a body or a personality. But for the most part, Whatever Works is a marvelous movie, quiet, low-keyed, moving, thematically and emotionally rich, genuinely entertaining instead of intellectually arid, and — most important of all — very, very funny. Even if you haven’t seen a Woody Allen movie in years, you owe it to yourself to see this one. Welcome home, Woody Allen.
Whatever Works opens Friday, June 26 at the Landmark Cinemas Hillcrest, 3965 Fifth Avenue in Hillcrest. Please call (619) 819-0236 for showtimes and other information.
The Bourne Identity (Alan Shayne Productions, 1988)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I looked for a recent (more or less) DVD and found it in The Bourne Identity — not the 2003 theatrical film starring Matt Damon but an earlier TV miniseries from 1988 with Richard Chamberlain as Bourne, exciting thriller direction by Roger Young and a script by Carol Sobieski that reportedly (I couldn’t tell because I’ve neither read the book nor seen the Damon version) sticks closer to the original novel by Robert Ludlum than the more recent theatrical film. The Bourne Identity stars Richard Chamberlain (“back then it was legally required that Richard Chamberlain be in every mini-series!” Charles joked) as a mysterious man who, when we’re introduced to him, is being fired upon by gunmen whom he can’t get away from because they’re all on a boat sailing off the coast of southern France. He falls off the boat and ultimately floats to the surface, barely alive, where he’s discovered by Geoffrey Washburn (Denholm Elliott), an alcoholic doctor who lost his license when his drunken malpractice killed a patient.
Washburn takes all the bullets out of his body and also extracts, from an implant under the stranger’s skin, a piece of microfilm that contains the name of a Swiss bank and the number for one of its secret accounts. Once he recovers, the stranger travels to Zürich (for an American film, it’s surprising to see the umlaut where it belongs!) to access the account and see if he can discover who and what he is — and for the first half of this surprisingly compelling movie the plot seems like Ian Fleming meets Franz Kafka. He shows up at the Carillon du Lac hotel (for a while I misheard the soundtrack and thought they were saying “Carrion du Lac,” which would have been considerably kinkier), where he pretends to have a sprained hand and therefore unable to fill out the registration, so the hotel clerk, who recognizes him, obligingly writes down the name “J. Bourne” and he finally has at least the shard of an identity. He also finds out that just about everyone he meets in the movie is out to kill him, and that he’s able to keep himself alive because the one skill he has — which he preserves by instinct even though he still only has the haziest idea of who and what he is — is to shoot people.
Eventually he gets embroiled with a Canadian economics professor, Marie St. Jacques (Jaclyn Smith), and he takes her hostage when his enemies ambush him in the hall where she’s supposed to give a lecture about international trade. From there the action of the movie moves to Paris and then New York (where a passing shot of the two World Trade Center towers evokes a twinge of emotion), as he discovers that his first name is Jason and fears that he’s really Carlos the terrorist. Carlos — also known as “Carlos the Jackal,” after the assassin in Frederick Forsyth’s book The Day of the Jackal — was a real-life mercenary who was born in Venezuela in 1949 (his original name was Ilich Ramirez Sánchez) and, like Ludlum’s fictional version of him, was considered a terrorist of almost superhuman powers until he was finally apprehended in Sudan in 1994 and extradited to France, where he’s now serving a life sentence for murder. In the movie, Carlos has just assassinated the U.S. ambassador to France and Bourne wonders whether he is Carlos, but in the end he turns out to be David Webb, the son of a close friend of CIA bigwig David Abbott (Donald Moffat), who tapped him for a secret assignment: assuming the identity of a psychopathic ex-agent the CIA had dispatched, he was supposed to travel around the world and take out America’s enemies, posing as a hit man doing this work free-lance, and copy Carlos’s M.O. so closely that the real Carlos would get pissed, come out of hiding, go after Webb/Bourne and thereby enable the CIA either to capture or kill him.
The Bourne Identity isn’t a great movie, and it suffers from the miscasting of both Chamberlain (he’s too nice an actor to be credible as a man of mystery — which is not to suggest that Matt Damon was likely any better!) and, even worse, Smith (one would expect that her previous stint as one of Charlie’s original angels would have suited her better for a thriller role than the panicked pouting she falls back on through most of this film), but it’s a well-constructed story (even though it starts to drag in part two, after most of Bourne’s secrets are revealed, and instead of a collaboration between Ian Fleming and Franz Kafka it starts seeming like one between Fleming and Marcel Proust!) and director Young shows a flair for suspense and action far beyond some more prestigious feature-film directors working with more important stars! Interestingly, this film ends with a major shoot-out in which Bourne kills Carlos — definitely a departure from Ludlum’s books, which kept Carlos alive through two sequels and rematched him and Bourne in book three, The Bourne Supremacy — and the feature-film series based on all three of Ludlum’s Bourne novels omits Carlos as a character altogether.
I looked for a recent (more or less) DVD and found it in The Bourne Identity — not the 2003 theatrical film starring Matt Damon but an earlier TV miniseries from 1988 with Richard Chamberlain as Bourne, exciting thriller direction by Roger Young and a script by Carol Sobieski that reportedly (I couldn’t tell because I’ve neither read the book nor seen the Damon version) sticks closer to the original novel by Robert Ludlum than the more recent theatrical film. The Bourne Identity stars Richard Chamberlain (“back then it was legally required that Richard Chamberlain be in every mini-series!” Charles joked) as a mysterious man who, when we’re introduced to him, is being fired upon by gunmen whom he can’t get away from because they’re all on a boat sailing off the coast of southern France. He falls off the boat and ultimately floats to the surface, barely alive, where he’s discovered by Geoffrey Washburn (Denholm Elliott), an alcoholic doctor who lost his license when his drunken malpractice killed a patient.
Washburn takes all the bullets out of his body and also extracts, from an implant under the stranger’s skin, a piece of microfilm that contains the name of a Swiss bank and the number for one of its secret accounts. Once he recovers, the stranger travels to Zürich (for an American film, it’s surprising to see the umlaut where it belongs!) to access the account and see if he can discover who and what he is — and for the first half of this surprisingly compelling movie the plot seems like Ian Fleming meets Franz Kafka. He shows up at the Carillon du Lac hotel (for a while I misheard the soundtrack and thought they were saying “Carrion du Lac,” which would have been considerably kinkier), where he pretends to have a sprained hand and therefore unable to fill out the registration, so the hotel clerk, who recognizes him, obligingly writes down the name “J. Bourne” and he finally has at least the shard of an identity. He also finds out that just about everyone he meets in the movie is out to kill him, and that he’s able to keep himself alive because the one skill he has — which he preserves by instinct even though he still only has the haziest idea of who and what he is — is to shoot people.
Eventually he gets embroiled with a Canadian economics professor, Marie St. Jacques (Jaclyn Smith), and he takes her hostage when his enemies ambush him in the hall where she’s supposed to give a lecture about international trade. From there the action of the movie moves to Paris and then New York (where a passing shot of the two World Trade Center towers evokes a twinge of emotion), as he discovers that his first name is Jason and fears that he’s really Carlos the terrorist. Carlos — also known as “Carlos the Jackal,” after the assassin in Frederick Forsyth’s book The Day of the Jackal — was a real-life mercenary who was born in Venezuela in 1949 (his original name was Ilich Ramirez Sánchez) and, like Ludlum’s fictional version of him, was considered a terrorist of almost superhuman powers until he was finally apprehended in Sudan in 1994 and extradited to France, where he’s now serving a life sentence for murder. In the movie, Carlos has just assassinated the U.S. ambassador to France and Bourne wonders whether he is Carlos, but in the end he turns out to be David Webb, the son of a close friend of CIA bigwig David Abbott (Donald Moffat), who tapped him for a secret assignment: assuming the identity of a psychopathic ex-agent the CIA had dispatched, he was supposed to travel around the world and take out America’s enemies, posing as a hit man doing this work free-lance, and copy Carlos’s M.O. so closely that the real Carlos would get pissed, come out of hiding, go after Webb/Bourne and thereby enable the CIA either to capture or kill him.
The Bourne Identity isn’t a great movie, and it suffers from the miscasting of both Chamberlain (he’s too nice an actor to be credible as a man of mystery — which is not to suggest that Matt Damon was likely any better!) and, even worse, Smith (one would expect that her previous stint as one of Charlie’s original angels would have suited her better for a thriller role than the panicked pouting she falls back on through most of this film), but it’s a well-constructed story (even though it starts to drag in part two, after most of Bourne’s secrets are revealed, and instead of a collaboration between Ian Fleming and Franz Kafka it starts seeming like one between Fleming and Marcel Proust!) and director Young shows a flair for suspense and action far beyond some more prestigious feature-film directors working with more important stars! Interestingly, this film ends with a major shoot-out in which Bourne kills Carlos — definitely a departure from Ludlum’s books, which kept Carlos alive through two sequels and rematched him and Bourne in book three, The Bourne Supremacy — and the feature-film series based on all three of Ludlum’s Bourne novels omits Carlos as a character altogether.
American Experience: The Living Weapon (PBS, 2009)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched two films on a DVD I’d recorded in the wee hours from KPBS, including an American Experience episode called “The Living Weapon” about the U.S. biological weapons research program, which existed secretly and tested biological agents (sometimes with “simulants” — harmless, or at least hopefully harmless, bacteria that would spread similarly to lethal or pathogenic ones — and sometimes with the real thing; the guinea pigs for the latter were usually Seventh Day Adventists whose religion forbade them to bear weapons but not to serve in a non-combat role; they were also forbidden to smoke or drink and therefore were generally healthier than most servicemembers, which made them good subjects for bioweapon research for isolate-the-variable reasons; if they got sick the scientists could be reasonably confident that it was the agents they were exposing them to that were making them sick).
The program started in 1942 at the request of the British government, who were concerned that the Germans might drop biological agents (particularly anthrax) on British cities as an offensive weapon, and they wanted anthrax stockpiles of their own and turned to the U.S. because we could produce them in far more massive quantities than they could. That’s when the biological weapons research center at Fort Detrick, Maryland was founded — and interestingly, the first head of it was Ira Sullivan, head of the biology department at the University of Wisconsin, who was recruited and took the job despite his Quaker background and the overall distaste for war with which that had left him. Later the program’s chairs decided they needed a place to expose servicemembers to biological agents “in the field,” and so they set up the infamous “proving ground” at Dugway, Utah (in one instance flying their Seventh Day Adventist volunteers out to Utah, exposing them and then flying them back for observation just a day later!) — and the program hummed along until it got involved in the agitation around the Viet Nam war, in which the U.S. government used chlorine gas as a chemical weapon (for the first time since World War I) and also spread the defoliant Agent Orange — which turned out to be at least as dangerous to our servicemembers as anyone else.
After a major accident at Dugway in which an agent they were testing blew away in the wind and killed 6,000 sheep on nearby ranches, in 1969 President Nixon bowed to public pressure and halted the bioweapons program by executive order (imagine that — a Republican President actually doing something humane!). I’m surprised the show didn’t point out the obvious practical objection to biological weapons (as differentiated from the moral ones), namely that a bacterium or virus doesn’t know friend from foe and under field conditions, with winds blowing this way and that, it’s hard to ensure that a biological battlefield weapon kills the other guys and leaves your forces alone. (That was a problem with chemical weapons, too, which is why the first Geneva Convention, signed in 1925, banned them — though the U.S., scofflaw nation as it’s consistently been on such matters, didn’t actually ratify this treaty until 1975!)
Other than that, this was a nicely done show; it was amazing just how much film footage of the bioweapons tests still exists, and it also made the point that, like the scientists who invented the atomic bomb during World War II, the ones in the bioweapons program justified their work on the basis that we were dealing with a particularly evil, unscrupulous enemy that was probably developing bioweapons themselves and wouldn’t have qualms about using them — though, ironically, at least as far as the Germans were concerned we needn’t have worried; for all the evil things he did, Adolf Hitler had been so traumatized by being on the receiving end of a gas attack in World War I (it left him incapacitated for several weeks, during which time the war ended) that he forbade German forces from using chemical or biological weapons.
This was not the case in Japan, however, where a scientist named Ishii not only pushed a bioweapons program but tested it on Chinese in Japanese-occupied territory — and got a free pass from any war crimes trial because the U.S. bioweapons researchers wanted his data. It’s fascinating how Nazism remains “the gift that keeps on giving,” that because the Nazis were (generally) so unscrupulous we felt we had to sink to their level, and ever since then we’ve been justifying it by reference to a steady succession of “existential” enemies: the Soviet Union and now “terrorists.” At the same time, as I’ve pointed out here earlier, the whole idea that it was 20th century war that blurred the distinction between combatants and civilians is nonsense; armies have been targeting civilians as long as nation-states have existed and fought each other — in ancient times with sieges and catapults; in the 19th century with long-range cannon; and in the 20th century with bombing planes and, later, rockets. The idea that war can be somehow “professionalized” and the civilian population insulated from it is, and has always been, utter nonsense, preached by those who want to make war seem more antiseptic and “clean” than it is or can ever be.
I watched two films on a DVD I’d recorded in the wee hours from KPBS, including an American Experience episode called “The Living Weapon” about the U.S. biological weapons research program, which existed secretly and tested biological agents (sometimes with “simulants” — harmless, or at least hopefully harmless, bacteria that would spread similarly to lethal or pathogenic ones — and sometimes with the real thing; the guinea pigs for the latter were usually Seventh Day Adventists whose religion forbade them to bear weapons but not to serve in a non-combat role; they were also forbidden to smoke or drink and therefore were generally healthier than most servicemembers, which made them good subjects for bioweapon research for isolate-the-variable reasons; if they got sick the scientists could be reasonably confident that it was the agents they were exposing them to that were making them sick).
The program started in 1942 at the request of the British government, who were concerned that the Germans might drop biological agents (particularly anthrax) on British cities as an offensive weapon, and they wanted anthrax stockpiles of their own and turned to the U.S. because we could produce them in far more massive quantities than they could. That’s when the biological weapons research center at Fort Detrick, Maryland was founded — and interestingly, the first head of it was Ira Sullivan, head of the biology department at the University of Wisconsin, who was recruited and took the job despite his Quaker background and the overall distaste for war with which that had left him. Later the program’s chairs decided they needed a place to expose servicemembers to biological agents “in the field,” and so they set up the infamous “proving ground” at Dugway, Utah (in one instance flying their Seventh Day Adventist volunteers out to Utah, exposing them and then flying them back for observation just a day later!) — and the program hummed along until it got involved in the agitation around the Viet Nam war, in which the U.S. government used chlorine gas as a chemical weapon (for the first time since World War I) and also spread the defoliant Agent Orange — which turned out to be at least as dangerous to our servicemembers as anyone else.
After a major accident at Dugway in which an agent they were testing blew away in the wind and killed 6,000 sheep on nearby ranches, in 1969 President Nixon bowed to public pressure and halted the bioweapons program by executive order (imagine that — a Republican President actually doing something humane!). I’m surprised the show didn’t point out the obvious practical objection to biological weapons (as differentiated from the moral ones), namely that a bacterium or virus doesn’t know friend from foe and under field conditions, with winds blowing this way and that, it’s hard to ensure that a biological battlefield weapon kills the other guys and leaves your forces alone. (That was a problem with chemical weapons, too, which is why the first Geneva Convention, signed in 1925, banned them — though the U.S., scofflaw nation as it’s consistently been on such matters, didn’t actually ratify this treaty until 1975!)
Other than that, this was a nicely done show; it was amazing just how much film footage of the bioweapons tests still exists, and it also made the point that, like the scientists who invented the atomic bomb during World War II, the ones in the bioweapons program justified their work on the basis that we were dealing with a particularly evil, unscrupulous enemy that was probably developing bioweapons themselves and wouldn’t have qualms about using them — though, ironically, at least as far as the Germans were concerned we needn’t have worried; for all the evil things he did, Adolf Hitler had been so traumatized by being on the receiving end of a gas attack in World War I (it left him incapacitated for several weeks, during which time the war ended) that he forbade German forces from using chemical or biological weapons.
This was not the case in Japan, however, where a scientist named Ishii not only pushed a bioweapons program but tested it on Chinese in Japanese-occupied territory — and got a free pass from any war crimes trial because the U.S. bioweapons researchers wanted his data. It’s fascinating how Nazism remains “the gift that keeps on giving,” that because the Nazis were (generally) so unscrupulous we felt we had to sink to their level, and ever since then we’ve been justifying it by reference to a steady succession of “existential” enemies: the Soviet Union and now “terrorists.” At the same time, as I’ve pointed out here earlier, the whole idea that it was 20th century war that blurred the distinction between combatants and civilians is nonsense; armies have been targeting civilians as long as nation-states have existed and fought each other — in ancient times with sieges and catapults; in the 19th century with long-range cannon; and in the 20th century with bombing planes and, later, rockets. The idea that war can be somehow “professionalized” and the civilian population insulated from it is, and has always been, utter nonsense, preached by those who want to make war seem more antiseptic and “clean” than it is or can ever be.
America at a Crossroads/The Mosque in Morgantown
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The other film I watched this morning was an episode of an occasional series called America at a Crossroads, and it was called “The Mosque in Morgantown” and dealt with the conflict at the Islamic Center of Morgantown, Virginia, which achieve national notoriety even though the small college town only has about 500 Muslims in it, and most of them are students or teachers at the local university. The central character is Asra Nomani, who gets upset at her local mosque because women are not allowed to worship in the same hall as men — a separate balcony is set up for them — and she regards this as unfair discrimination and against the best principles of her religion. Nomani’s background is highly unconventional — she studied journalism at the local university and left Morgantown to work for the Wall Street Journal, where she was assigned to cover the war in Afghanistan and its spillover into Pakistan at the same time as another Journal reporter, Daniel Pearl — whose murder by Pakistani Islamists naturally horrified her and made her less inclined to accept the most conservative interpretations of Islam.
In Pakistan she had an affair and got pregnant, and decided to return to Morgantown because she thought it would be a good place to raise her son as a single mother — only by having a baby out of wedlock she had violated Islamic teachings, and she scandalized the local congregation still further when she went to the front door of the mosque and demanded to be let in (women are only supposed to enter via the back door) and to be allowed to pray on the same floor as the men. This show could easily have turned into a heroine-and-villains tale — noble woman heroically resisting the men in charge of her religion and their sexist strictures about women’s proper behavior (at least one of the mosque officials justifies the policy of segregation by saying that in the prostrate position in which Muslims pray, women’s asses would be sticking up and this would inflame the lusts of men if they were allowed to pray in the same space at the same time!) — but director Brittany Huckabee had a broader agenda in mind, encompassing the women in the Morgantown mosque who have no trouble with and even support the segregation, and she’s fair to both sides in the argument.
The controversy inflames itself as both sides dig in and attitudes harden — at one point the men running the mosque are actually preaching sermons and publishing prayers for Allah to strike Nomani with some unspecified but undoubtedly dire punishment — while Nomani goes on a book tour to promote her memoir, Standing Alone in Mecca (the title is a reflection on the fact that when she went on the hajj she was able to worship in the same room, and at the same time, as men; and why should a mosque in America be pissier about the subject that Islam HQ back where the religion was founded?) and gets herself covered by CNN and ABC. At the same time the film is a subtle but unmistakable indictment of the religious mentality in general, particularly the conservatives’ argument that the Quran was delivered complete and entire by God through the Angel Gabriel to Muhammad and therefore it is unalterable — versus the modernizers’ argument that the Quran, like any other book of moral teachings, needs to be read in historical context and its lessons applied to the modern world. Obviously this kind of conflict is hardly unique to Islam — it’s essentially the battle in our own majority culture between evangelical and mainline Christianity — and Nomani is clearly aware of this tradition since her ultimate protest is to write a 99-point critique of the mosque’s teachings and fasten it to their door in deliberate evocation of Martin Luther’s similar protest against the Roman Catholic hierarchy of his day.
The Mosque in Morgantown is a fascinating movie, made so especially by Huckabee’s refusal to paint the struggle in black-and-white terms — and it’s a bit of point-making that should be required viewing for people in this country who are continually calling on the Muslim world to “moderate” itself (sometimes while they themselves subscribe to the more Fundamentalist varieties of Christianity!) and vastly underestimating the difficulties involved — and the protest of some of the conservatives in the movie against their being equated with the 9/11 terrorists and Daniel Pearl’s murderers rings true (truer, quite frankly, than the whining of anti-abortion activists in the official “pro-life” movement about the murder of Dr. George Tiller when the viciousness of their rhetoric not only can have the effect of encouraging the more demented members of their movement to murder abortion providers but, I think, is designed to do that!).
The other film I watched this morning was an episode of an occasional series called America at a Crossroads, and it was called “The Mosque in Morgantown” and dealt with the conflict at the Islamic Center of Morgantown, Virginia, which achieve national notoriety even though the small college town only has about 500 Muslims in it, and most of them are students or teachers at the local university. The central character is Asra Nomani, who gets upset at her local mosque because women are not allowed to worship in the same hall as men — a separate balcony is set up for them — and she regards this as unfair discrimination and against the best principles of her religion. Nomani’s background is highly unconventional — she studied journalism at the local university and left Morgantown to work for the Wall Street Journal, where she was assigned to cover the war in Afghanistan and its spillover into Pakistan at the same time as another Journal reporter, Daniel Pearl — whose murder by Pakistani Islamists naturally horrified her and made her less inclined to accept the most conservative interpretations of Islam.
In Pakistan she had an affair and got pregnant, and decided to return to Morgantown because she thought it would be a good place to raise her son as a single mother — only by having a baby out of wedlock she had violated Islamic teachings, and she scandalized the local congregation still further when she went to the front door of the mosque and demanded to be let in (women are only supposed to enter via the back door) and to be allowed to pray on the same floor as the men. This show could easily have turned into a heroine-and-villains tale — noble woman heroically resisting the men in charge of her religion and their sexist strictures about women’s proper behavior (at least one of the mosque officials justifies the policy of segregation by saying that in the prostrate position in which Muslims pray, women’s asses would be sticking up and this would inflame the lusts of men if they were allowed to pray in the same space at the same time!) — but director Brittany Huckabee had a broader agenda in mind, encompassing the women in the Morgantown mosque who have no trouble with and even support the segregation, and she’s fair to both sides in the argument.
The controversy inflames itself as both sides dig in and attitudes harden — at one point the men running the mosque are actually preaching sermons and publishing prayers for Allah to strike Nomani with some unspecified but undoubtedly dire punishment — while Nomani goes on a book tour to promote her memoir, Standing Alone in Mecca (the title is a reflection on the fact that when she went on the hajj she was able to worship in the same room, and at the same time, as men; and why should a mosque in America be pissier about the subject that Islam HQ back where the religion was founded?) and gets herself covered by CNN and ABC. At the same time the film is a subtle but unmistakable indictment of the religious mentality in general, particularly the conservatives’ argument that the Quran was delivered complete and entire by God through the Angel Gabriel to Muhammad and therefore it is unalterable — versus the modernizers’ argument that the Quran, like any other book of moral teachings, needs to be read in historical context and its lessons applied to the modern world. Obviously this kind of conflict is hardly unique to Islam — it’s essentially the battle in our own majority culture between evangelical and mainline Christianity — and Nomani is clearly aware of this tradition since her ultimate protest is to write a 99-point critique of the mosque’s teachings and fasten it to their door in deliberate evocation of Martin Luther’s similar protest against the Roman Catholic hierarchy of his day.
The Mosque in Morgantown is a fascinating movie, made so especially by Huckabee’s refusal to paint the struggle in black-and-white terms — and it’s a bit of point-making that should be required viewing for people in this country who are continually calling on the Muslim world to “moderate” itself (sometimes while they themselves subscribe to the more Fundamentalist varieties of Christianity!) and vastly underestimating the difficulties involved — and the protest of some of the conservatives in the movie against their being equated with the 9/11 terrorists and Daniel Pearl’s murderers rings true (truer, quite frankly, than the whining of anti-abortion activists in the official “pro-life” movement about the murder of Dr. George Tiller when the viciousness of their rhetoric not only can have the effect of encouraging the more demented members of their movement to murder abortion providers but, I think, is designed to do that!).
Monday, June 15, 2009
Gun Crazy (King Bros./United Artists, 1949/50)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After the poor print quality of the UCSD channel’s showing of Joseph H. Lewis’ The Big Combo, Lewis’ Gun Crazy was a refreshing change, not only because it was shown in an excellent print — the images of cinematographer Russell Harlan clear and bright, the sound (excitingly and creatively designed by Tom Lambert, who could have given Michael Cimino lessons in how to use sound effects lavishly and intelligently without rendering key dialogue inaudible!) crisp and the dialogue easily audible — but also because it was a far better movie. Lewis’ direction this time is taut and energetic, with unflagging intensity; the script by MacKinlay Kantor (an odd name indeed to find on the credits of a film noir, but he wrote the source story published in the Saturday Evening Post) and Millard Kaufman (The Film Noir Encyclopedia credits the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo with a contribution as well) is far richer and better structured than Philip Yordan’s for The Big Combo; and the acting in this one is superb.
Basically it’s a story about a husband-and-wife team who meet in a circus sideshow, work together as markspeople and then turn their skills with guns into armed robbery — Annie Oakley and Frank Butler meet (or, rather, become) Bonnie and Clyde. What makes this one work so superbly is a marvelous combination of elements: Lewis’ direction (years later he boasted that all the shots of the hero and heroine — if you can call them that — fleeing the scenes of their robberies in getaway cars were shot on real streets, with no process work, and with actual bystanders and drivers on the streets as well as Lewis’ actors), a well-characterized script (even though the Freudian symbolism of gun = penis and violence = sex gets a bit heavy-handed at times) and marvelous performances by the leads, Peggy Cummins and John Dall. Dall is, if anything, even more effective as the passive member of a straight criminal couple than he was as the active member of a Gay one in Hitchcock’s Rope; and Cummins is even better in her evocation of the sheer visceral (and erotic) thrill she gets out of violence and crime.
The film also evokes White Heat (made the same year) in its intriguing contrast between the rugged individualism of the criminals and the heavily organized, corporate structure of the police apparatus seeking to catch them (one reason for the fascination of this film — to the extent that 11 years after it was made it was quoted in Jean-Luc Godard’s film Breathless, whose protagonist, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, actually watches it and takes the criminal characters as role models! — is that the crooks seem so much more whole, so much more truly alive, than the cops), and Kantor gives it an air of genuine tragedy by having the couple finally caught because they do something sympathetic and painfully human: they go back to the town where Dall’s character grew up to see his family, and are ultimately discovered and killed by his childhood friends (one of whom just happens to have become the town sheriff). Gun Crazy is a work of surprising dignity as well as richness, in which the sex-violence interchange powers the entire plot instead of seeming an afterthought (as it did in The Big Combo) and the lovers on the run retain a surprising degree of sympathy even though the acts they do are unquestionably horrible (a balancing act the later Bonnie and Clyde also tried, though Gun Crazy pulls it off even better). — 2/28/99
•••••
Directed by Joseph H. Lewis from a Saturday Evening Post short story by MacKinlay Kantor, author of Glory for Me (the basis for The Best Years of Our Lives) and Andersonville and a far more prestigious literary “name” than usually turns up on a film noir, Gun Crazy was scripted by Kantor and “Millard Kaufman” (though according to imdb.com “Kaufman” was a front for Dalton Trumbo!) and tells the story of Bart Tare, a small-town boy who grows up with a pathological obsession with guns. It’s not that he actually wants to shoot any human or animal — as an early flashback shows, he once shot a BB gun into a chicken and her chicks, killed one of the chicks and never got over it — he just likes the feel of a gun, and while the Production Code allowed the writers to do no more than hint as to why, it’s incredibly obvious to anyone with a mental age above about five that his gun obsession is sexual, an elaborate Freudian displacement of his anxieties about his own sexuality.
Tare is played by Rusty Tamblyn (later Russ Tamblyn, the second male lead in the film of West Side Story who totally out-acted the bland Richard Beymer in the lead) at age 14, and in the first scene this incarnation of the character throws a rock through a hardware store window, steals a gun, then slips and falls in the street (all this is happening in a driving rainstorm) and picks up the gun, then looks up and sees that it fell at the feet of a sheriff’s deputy and he is so caught. He’s then shown in his juvenile court hearing, where we learn that his parents are dead and he’s been raised by his older sister Ruby (Anabel Shaw), and she and his friends Dave Allister and Clyde Boston (Paul Frison) testify on his behalf — Dave and Clyde recall a camping trip the three took as seven-year-olds (they’re played, of course, by a different set of actors in the flashback, including Mickey Little as Bart and David Bair as Dave) in which, asked by the other boys to kill a mountain lion, Bart froze because he couldn’t bear the thought of killing anything. Despite all the hearts-and-flowers testimony on Bart’s behalf, the judge sentences him to reform school -— and the film suddenly leaps ahead eight years.
Bart has spent half of those years in reform school and half in the army — where they kept him stateside and had him teach other people how to shoot — and when he gets out he’s played by one of Hollywood’s most famous screaming queens, John Dall. The actor lived with his mother — they were jokingly called “The Dalls” around Hollywood — and he was reportedly so nellie that Bette Davis tried to get him fired from her 1945 film The Corn Is Green; not that she minded him being Gay, but he was so queeny she didn’t think he was suitable for his role as the son of a Welsh miner whose chance to leave the mining village and get a college education is temporarily derailed by the fact that he’s got a local girl pregnant. Anyway, when Bart gets out of the army and returns to his home town he has little money and no job prospects, and he meets his old friends Dave (Nedrick Young) and Clyde (Harry Lewis) — Dave now edits the town paper and Clyde is the town sheriff — and they go to a traveling carnival run by Packett (Berry Kroeger). The carnival’s star attraction is markswoman Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins, top-billed), who in an obvious imitation of the real Annie Oakley is billed as “direct from London,” and the moment Bart sees Annie and the way she handles her guns, he’s smitten big-time. The only problem is that Annie is more or less the girlfriend of Packett, who’s blackmailed her into the relationship because they once held up a man in St. Louis and Annie shot and killed him.
Packett hires Bart to travel with the carnival and makes him room with Bluey-Bluey (Stanley Prager), a philosophical clown (aren’t all movie clowns philosophical?) who warns him that he’s “dumb with women” and tries to alert him that Packett considers Laurie (the part of her name she goes by off-stage) his property and will resent it if anyone horns in on him. Bart tries to visit Laurie in her living quarters, sees Packett there making a drunken advance on her, and shoots the mirror of the room — getting both Bart and Laurie fired. They flee and decide to make their living as criminals — at least Laurie, who definitely wears the pants in their relationship, makes that decision and tells Bart to go along with it or she’s leaving him — with Bart pulling various holdups and eventually the two of them graduating up to bank robbery. They get the money but the robbery turns messy and the two have to lay low for a while, re-emerging with an elaborate plan to rob the payroll of the Armour meat-packing plant (one surprise in this 1949 movie is the use of a real company name rather than a made-up one!) by first working their way in as employees and then springing the trap and doing the job at just the right moment.
The robbery goes per plan except for one old woman who trips the burglar alarm, forcing Laurie to shoot her and a security guard, and the two bandits to flee in a panic; later, when they start spending the proceeds from the job, they find that the bills’ serial numbers have been recorded and they are found out. Eventually — after a grimly amusing scene in which Dave as the local editor boasts that the most famous fugitives in the country are among their town’s native sons and he’s going to write an article about them (what’s he going to headline it, one wonders — “Local Boy Makes Bad”?)— Bart and Laurie turn up at the home of Bart’s sister, now married to a decent guy, Ira, and obviously torn between her family ties to Bart and her loathing of what he has become. Bart takes Laurie into the mountains, but his old camping buddy Clyde knows the mountains as well as he does and finds him. In a desperate panic, Bart shoots Laurie before expiring himself from a policeman’s shot.
Gun Crazy — originally titled Deadly Is the Female, which hints at far less of the plot than Gun Crazy — is the masterpiece of its sporadically interesting director, Joseph H. Lewis, who had started out making lousy East Side Kids and Bela Lugosi movies at Monogram and slowly worked his way up; though the plot is pretty obviously inspired by the story of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, the movie is driven by obsessions far beyond those documentable in the lives of any real crooks. The film is pretty obviously powered by Freudian symbolism — particularly the oft-quoted metaphor between the penis and the gun that points out their similar shapes (they’re both long, cylindrical and shoot out things) and opposite functions (a penis shoots out things which create life, a gun shoots out things which destroy it) — and also by the reverse dynamics of the sexual relationship between Bart and Laurie.
John Dall’s queeniness and his rather odd appearance made him problematic to cast, but they’re precisely right for Bart (much the way Macaulay Culkin was so perfect as Michael Alig in Party Monster) — and instead of playing the femme fatale in the approved growling fashion of Barbara Stanwyck or Ann Savage, Peggy Cummins affects an almost kewpie-doll appearance and a high, rather squeaky voice to match, creating a fascinating clash of images with her butch persona and her obvious use of firearms as a strategy to overcome her own penis envy (part of her stage act consists of her bending over with her legs spread and firing a gun between them just below crotch level — and Lewis and cinematographer Russell Harlan naturally shoot this from an angle that emphasizes the phallic symbolism).
Though it’s not a film big on chiaroscuro visuals, Gun Crazy qualifies as film noir because of the complexity of the characterizations, the moral reversal we as audience members are kept in through much of the film (as in the most famous later version of this story, 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde, we’re generally rooting for the crooks over the cops) and the combination of symbolism and relentless action; it’s not surprising that this was the movie that inspired Godard to make Breathless (indeed he even used a clip from Gun Crazy in Breathless as a film that the male lead sees and takes as a role model), and the story’s circular structure, with the criminal couple returning to the male member’s home town and seeking refuge in the familiar locations already established as important to him in his boyhood, makes the ending — he’s eventually shot by his boyhood friend turned sheriff — far more intense and moving than a simple Production Code-mandated bad-guy-must-die shootout.
Gun Crazy is a richly complex work that taps into a far wider range of dramatic issues than most films in the genre and manages to understate the sexual symbolism as well as other dramatic points like the contrast between the high life Bart and Laurie expect to live off their ill-gotten gains and the grungy existence they actually do end up with. Gun Crazy is almost a textbook example of the effect the Production Code had on films for good and ill; it may have made it almost impossible to be honest about sex or violence on screen, but it also provoked talented filmmakers like Lewis, the King Brothers (who produced) and their writers to an imaginative treatment far subtler than the way all the gory details — all the bloodletting and the screwing — of a tale like this would be hurled in our faces by a modern filmmaker. (There was a recent — 1992 — remake, with the title mashed together into one word, Guncrazy, with James LeGros and Drew Barrymore in the leads and someone named Tamra Davis directing.) Gun Crazy is one of the thematically richest noirs and a triumph for Joseph H. Lewis, who for once got to direct a movie with both a script and a cast worthy of him. — 6/15/09
After the poor print quality of the UCSD channel’s showing of Joseph H. Lewis’ The Big Combo, Lewis’ Gun Crazy was a refreshing change, not only because it was shown in an excellent print — the images of cinematographer Russell Harlan clear and bright, the sound (excitingly and creatively designed by Tom Lambert, who could have given Michael Cimino lessons in how to use sound effects lavishly and intelligently without rendering key dialogue inaudible!) crisp and the dialogue easily audible — but also because it was a far better movie. Lewis’ direction this time is taut and energetic, with unflagging intensity; the script by MacKinlay Kantor (an odd name indeed to find on the credits of a film noir, but he wrote the source story published in the Saturday Evening Post) and Millard Kaufman (The Film Noir Encyclopedia credits the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo with a contribution as well) is far richer and better structured than Philip Yordan’s for The Big Combo; and the acting in this one is superb.
Basically it’s a story about a husband-and-wife team who meet in a circus sideshow, work together as markspeople and then turn their skills with guns into armed robbery — Annie Oakley and Frank Butler meet (or, rather, become) Bonnie and Clyde. What makes this one work so superbly is a marvelous combination of elements: Lewis’ direction (years later he boasted that all the shots of the hero and heroine — if you can call them that — fleeing the scenes of their robberies in getaway cars were shot on real streets, with no process work, and with actual bystanders and drivers on the streets as well as Lewis’ actors), a well-characterized script (even though the Freudian symbolism of gun = penis and violence = sex gets a bit heavy-handed at times) and marvelous performances by the leads, Peggy Cummins and John Dall. Dall is, if anything, even more effective as the passive member of a straight criminal couple than he was as the active member of a Gay one in Hitchcock’s Rope; and Cummins is even better in her evocation of the sheer visceral (and erotic) thrill she gets out of violence and crime.
The film also evokes White Heat (made the same year) in its intriguing contrast between the rugged individualism of the criminals and the heavily organized, corporate structure of the police apparatus seeking to catch them (one reason for the fascination of this film — to the extent that 11 years after it was made it was quoted in Jean-Luc Godard’s film Breathless, whose protagonist, played by Jean-Paul Belmondo, actually watches it and takes the criminal characters as role models! — is that the crooks seem so much more whole, so much more truly alive, than the cops), and Kantor gives it an air of genuine tragedy by having the couple finally caught because they do something sympathetic and painfully human: they go back to the town where Dall’s character grew up to see his family, and are ultimately discovered and killed by his childhood friends (one of whom just happens to have become the town sheriff). Gun Crazy is a work of surprising dignity as well as richness, in which the sex-violence interchange powers the entire plot instead of seeming an afterthought (as it did in The Big Combo) and the lovers on the run retain a surprising degree of sympathy even though the acts they do are unquestionably horrible (a balancing act the later Bonnie and Clyde also tried, though Gun Crazy pulls it off even better). — 2/28/99
•••••
Directed by Joseph H. Lewis from a Saturday Evening Post short story by MacKinlay Kantor, author of Glory for Me (the basis for The Best Years of Our Lives) and Andersonville and a far more prestigious literary “name” than usually turns up on a film noir, Gun Crazy was scripted by Kantor and “Millard Kaufman” (though according to imdb.com “Kaufman” was a front for Dalton Trumbo!) and tells the story of Bart Tare, a small-town boy who grows up with a pathological obsession with guns. It’s not that he actually wants to shoot any human or animal — as an early flashback shows, he once shot a BB gun into a chicken and her chicks, killed one of the chicks and never got over it — he just likes the feel of a gun, and while the Production Code allowed the writers to do no more than hint as to why, it’s incredibly obvious to anyone with a mental age above about five that his gun obsession is sexual, an elaborate Freudian displacement of his anxieties about his own sexuality.
Tare is played by Rusty Tamblyn (later Russ Tamblyn, the second male lead in the film of West Side Story who totally out-acted the bland Richard Beymer in the lead) at age 14, and in the first scene this incarnation of the character throws a rock through a hardware store window, steals a gun, then slips and falls in the street (all this is happening in a driving rainstorm) and picks up the gun, then looks up and sees that it fell at the feet of a sheriff’s deputy and he is so caught. He’s then shown in his juvenile court hearing, where we learn that his parents are dead and he’s been raised by his older sister Ruby (Anabel Shaw), and she and his friends Dave Allister and Clyde Boston (Paul Frison) testify on his behalf — Dave and Clyde recall a camping trip the three took as seven-year-olds (they’re played, of course, by a different set of actors in the flashback, including Mickey Little as Bart and David Bair as Dave) in which, asked by the other boys to kill a mountain lion, Bart froze because he couldn’t bear the thought of killing anything. Despite all the hearts-and-flowers testimony on Bart’s behalf, the judge sentences him to reform school -— and the film suddenly leaps ahead eight years.
Bart has spent half of those years in reform school and half in the army — where they kept him stateside and had him teach other people how to shoot — and when he gets out he’s played by one of Hollywood’s most famous screaming queens, John Dall. The actor lived with his mother — they were jokingly called “The Dalls” around Hollywood — and he was reportedly so nellie that Bette Davis tried to get him fired from her 1945 film The Corn Is Green; not that she minded him being Gay, but he was so queeny she didn’t think he was suitable for his role as the son of a Welsh miner whose chance to leave the mining village and get a college education is temporarily derailed by the fact that he’s got a local girl pregnant. Anyway, when Bart gets out of the army and returns to his home town he has little money and no job prospects, and he meets his old friends Dave (Nedrick Young) and Clyde (Harry Lewis) — Dave now edits the town paper and Clyde is the town sheriff — and they go to a traveling carnival run by Packett (Berry Kroeger). The carnival’s star attraction is markswoman Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins, top-billed), who in an obvious imitation of the real Annie Oakley is billed as “direct from London,” and the moment Bart sees Annie and the way she handles her guns, he’s smitten big-time. The only problem is that Annie is more or less the girlfriend of Packett, who’s blackmailed her into the relationship because they once held up a man in St. Louis and Annie shot and killed him.
Packett hires Bart to travel with the carnival and makes him room with Bluey-Bluey (Stanley Prager), a philosophical clown (aren’t all movie clowns philosophical?) who warns him that he’s “dumb with women” and tries to alert him that Packett considers Laurie (the part of her name she goes by off-stage) his property and will resent it if anyone horns in on him. Bart tries to visit Laurie in her living quarters, sees Packett there making a drunken advance on her, and shoots the mirror of the room — getting both Bart and Laurie fired. They flee and decide to make their living as criminals — at least Laurie, who definitely wears the pants in their relationship, makes that decision and tells Bart to go along with it or she’s leaving him — with Bart pulling various holdups and eventually the two of them graduating up to bank robbery. They get the money but the robbery turns messy and the two have to lay low for a while, re-emerging with an elaborate plan to rob the payroll of the Armour meat-packing plant (one surprise in this 1949 movie is the use of a real company name rather than a made-up one!) by first working their way in as employees and then springing the trap and doing the job at just the right moment.
The robbery goes per plan except for one old woman who trips the burglar alarm, forcing Laurie to shoot her and a security guard, and the two bandits to flee in a panic; later, when they start spending the proceeds from the job, they find that the bills’ serial numbers have been recorded and they are found out. Eventually — after a grimly amusing scene in which Dave as the local editor boasts that the most famous fugitives in the country are among their town’s native sons and he’s going to write an article about them (what’s he going to headline it, one wonders — “Local Boy Makes Bad”?)— Bart and Laurie turn up at the home of Bart’s sister, now married to a decent guy, Ira, and obviously torn between her family ties to Bart and her loathing of what he has become. Bart takes Laurie into the mountains, but his old camping buddy Clyde knows the mountains as well as he does and finds him. In a desperate panic, Bart shoots Laurie before expiring himself from a policeman’s shot.
Gun Crazy — originally titled Deadly Is the Female, which hints at far less of the plot than Gun Crazy — is the masterpiece of its sporadically interesting director, Joseph H. Lewis, who had started out making lousy East Side Kids and Bela Lugosi movies at Monogram and slowly worked his way up; though the plot is pretty obviously inspired by the story of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, the movie is driven by obsessions far beyond those documentable in the lives of any real crooks. The film is pretty obviously powered by Freudian symbolism — particularly the oft-quoted metaphor between the penis and the gun that points out their similar shapes (they’re both long, cylindrical and shoot out things) and opposite functions (a penis shoots out things which create life, a gun shoots out things which destroy it) — and also by the reverse dynamics of the sexual relationship between Bart and Laurie.
John Dall’s queeniness and his rather odd appearance made him problematic to cast, but they’re precisely right for Bart (much the way Macaulay Culkin was so perfect as Michael Alig in Party Monster) — and instead of playing the femme fatale in the approved growling fashion of Barbara Stanwyck or Ann Savage, Peggy Cummins affects an almost kewpie-doll appearance and a high, rather squeaky voice to match, creating a fascinating clash of images with her butch persona and her obvious use of firearms as a strategy to overcome her own penis envy (part of her stage act consists of her bending over with her legs spread and firing a gun between them just below crotch level — and Lewis and cinematographer Russell Harlan naturally shoot this from an angle that emphasizes the phallic symbolism).
Though it’s not a film big on chiaroscuro visuals, Gun Crazy qualifies as film noir because of the complexity of the characterizations, the moral reversal we as audience members are kept in through much of the film (as in the most famous later version of this story, 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde, we’re generally rooting for the crooks over the cops) and the combination of symbolism and relentless action; it’s not surprising that this was the movie that inspired Godard to make Breathless (indeed he even used a clip from Gun Crazy in Breathless as a film that the male lead sees and takes as a role model), and the story’s circular structure, with the criminal couple returning to the male member’s home town and seeking refuge in the familiar locations already established as important to him in his boyhood, makes the ending — he’s eventually shot by his boyhood friend turned sheriff — far more intense and moving than a simple Production Code-mandated bad-guy-must-die shootout.
Gun Crazy is a richly complex work that taps into a far wider range of dramatic issues than most films in the genre and manages to understate the sexual symbolism as well as other dramatic points like the contrast between the high life Bart and Laurie expect to live off their ill-gotten gains and the grungy existence they actually do end up with. Gun Crazy is almost a textbook example of the effect the Production Code had on films for good and ill; it may have made it almost impossible to be honest about sex or violence on screen, but it also provoked talented filmmakers like Lewis, the King Brothers (who produced) and their writers to an imaginative treatment far subtler than the way all the gory details — all the bloodletting and the screwing — of a tale like this would be hurled in our faces by a modern filmmaker. (There was a recent — 1992 — remake, with the title mashed together into one word, Guncrazy, with James LeGros and Drew Barrymore in the leads and someone named Tamra Davis directing.) Gun Crazy is one of the thematically richest noirs and a triumph for Joseph H. Lewis, who for once got to direct a movie with both a script and a cast worthy of him. — 6/15/09
Night of the Demon (Sabre/Columbia, 1961)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Our “feature” was Night of the Demon, a 1961 British production that reunited director Jacques Tourneur and star Dana Andrews from The Fearmakers but turned out to be a much better movie — even though it was badly compromised by the producers’ insistence on showing the titular demon whereas Tourneur, having learned his less-is-more lessons from Val Lewton on the three films they made together (Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie and The Leopard Man), had wanted to suggest its presence with sound alone.
Based on a short story by British writer Montague R. James called “Casting the Runes,” and written by Charles Bennett (who wrote six Alfred Hitchcock films — seven if you count Blackmail, which Bennett didn’t work on but which was based on his play — and was essentially to Hitchcock what Dudley Nichols was to John Ford or Robert Riskin to Frank Capra) and Hal E. Chester (who also produced), Night of the Demon is a quite good horror mystery whose villain is Dr. Julian Karswell (Niall MacGinnis), a superbly oily character who has somehow extracted the world’s only extant copy of a medieval book on demons and demonology from the British Museum, figured out how to read it (more difficult than it sounds because the entire thing was written in code), used one of its formulae to conjure up a demon whenever he’s got an enemy he wants to get rid of, and also organized a Satanic cult in the English countryside. In the opening scene he receives a visit from professor Henry Harrington (Maurice Denham), who is about to expose him at an upcoming scientific convention in London; Karswell takes care of Harrington by summoning up the demon to kill him, which the demon does by toppling a pole covering a power line on top of Harrington’s car, thus electrocuting him.
Karswell has another threat to his authority and public image in the person of American professor Dr. John Holden (Dana Andrews), an internationally famous debunker of psychic and spiritualist claims. On the plane coming over (seemingly represented by the same stock shot of an airliner that transported Andrews’ character in The Fearmakers!) he runs into Joanna Harrington (Peggy Cummins, the butch psychopath from Joseph Lewis’s masterpiece Gun Crazy), the dead scientist’s niece, and the two of them join forces to investigate Karswell. There are several neat scenes, in which Karswell confronts Holden in the reading room of the British Museum (looking almost exactly as it had when Hitchcock showed it in his film of Bennett’s Blackmail 42 years earlier!) and hands him a card that contains a threat to his life that materializes only momentarily before the thing reverts to being a similarly normal business card again; and one lead into the inner workings of a Satanic cult in the person of farmer Rand Hobart (Brian Wilde), a member who went homicidally crazy one day and, though apprehended before he got around actually to killing anybody, has been in a mental institution ever since.
Despite the two visible demon attacks, one at the beginning (which really defies the conventions of Horror Filmmaking 101, one of which is not to show the monster until you’ve already finished the exposition!) and one at the end — and the general tackiness of the demon’s appearance — most of Night of the Demon is done subtly, the horror suggested rather than shown and the two leads on a sort of intellectual quest for clues to the menace not unlike the structure of the recent hit The Da Vinci Code. The film has its flaws — it’s too long and slow-moving (the U.S. distributor, Columbia, recut the film, shrinking it from 95 to 83 minutes and retitling it Curse of the Demon — though the print we were watching was the British version as shown on TCM) and would probably have profited from being kept to the usual 70-to-80 minute length of one of the Lewton productions — but on the whole it’s a marvelous piece of work, with plenty of shadowy, atmospheric shots from Tourneur and cinematographer Edward Scaife and an overall plot construction that goes for literate horror instead of blood and guts. Dana Andrews is a perfectly acceptable lead — he’s not great but he’s certainly better than he was in The Fearmakers — and Peggy Cummins is a disappointment because her role is too normal, too “nice,” to play to her strengths as an actress; but Niall McGinnis is absolutely superb as the villain, unctuously nice on the surface and presenting himself in a matter-of-fact way that only makes his real activities and agenda that much scarier.
Our “feature” was Night of the Demon, a 1961 British production that reunited director Jacques Tourneur and star Dana Andrews from The Fearmakers but turned out to be a much better movie — even though it was badly compromised by the producers’ insistence on showing the titular demon whereas Tourneur, having learned his less-is-more lessons from Val Lewton on the three films they made together (Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie and The Leopard Man), had wanted to suggest its presence with sound alone.
Based on a short story by British writer Montague R. James called “Casting the Runes,” and written by Charles Bennett (who wrote six Alfred Hitchcock films — seven if you count Blackmail, which Bennett didn’t work on but which was based on his play — and was essentially to Hitchcock what Dudley Nichols was to John Ford or Robert Riskin to Frank Capra) and Hal E. Chester (who also produced), Night of the Demon is a quite good horror mystery whose villain is Dr. Julian Karswell (Niall MacGinnis), a superbly oily character who has somehow extracted the world’s only extant copy of a medieval book on demons and demonology from the British Museum, figured out how to read it (more difficult than it sounds because the entire thing was written in code), used one of its formulae to conjure up a demon whenever he’s got an enemy he wants to get rid of, and also organized a Satanic cult in the English countryside. In the opening scene he receives a visit from professor Henry Harrington (Maurice Denham), who is about to expose him at an upcoming scientific convention in London; Karswell takes care of Harrington by summoning up the demon to kill him, which the demon does by toppling a pole covering a power line on top of Harrington’s car, thus electrocuting him.
Karswell has another threat to his authority and public image in the person of American professor Dr. John Holden (Dana Andrews), an internationally famous debunker of psychic and spiritualist claims. On the plane coming over (seemingly represented by the same stock shot of an airliner that transported Andrews’ character in The Fearmakers!) he runs into Joanna Harrington (Peggy Cummins, the butch psychopath from Joseph Lewis’s masterpiece Gun Crazy), the dead scientist’s niece, and the two of them join forces to investigate Karswell. There are several neat scenes, in which Karswell confronts Holden in the reading room of the British Museum (looking almost exactly as it had when Hitchcock showed it in his film of Bennett’s Blackmail 42 years earlier!) and hands him a card that contains a threat to his life that materializes only momentarily before the thing reverts to being a similarly normal business card again; and one lead into the inner workings of a Satanic cult in the person of farmer Rand Hobart (Brian Wilde), a member who went homicidally crazy one day and, though apprehended before he got around actually to killing anybody, has been in a mental institution ever since.
Despite the two visible demon attacks, one at the beginning (which really defies the conventions of Horror Filmmaking 101, one of which is not to show the monster until you’ve already finished the exposition!) and one at the end — and the general tackiness of the demon’s appearance — most of Night of the Demon is done subtly, the horror suggested rather than shown and the two leads on a sort of intellectual quest for clues to the menace not unlike the structure of the recent hit The Da Vinci Code. The film has its flaws — it’s too long and slow-moving (the U.S. distributor, Columbia, recut the film, shrinking it from 95 to 83 minutes and retitling it Curse of the Demon — though the print we were watching was the British version as shown on TCM) and would probably have profited from being kept to the usual 70-to-80 minute length of one of the Lewton productions — but on the whole it’s a marvelous piece of work, with plenty of shadowy, atmospheric shots from Tourneur and cinematographer Edward Scaife and an overall plot construction that goes for literate horror instead of blood and guts. Dana Andrews is a perfectly acceptable lead — he’s not great but he’s certainly better than he was in The Fearmakers — and Peggy Cummins is a disappointment because her role is too normal, too “nice,” to play to her strengths as an actress; but Niall McGinnis is absolutely superb as the villain, unctuously nice on the surface and presenting himself in a matter-of-fact way that only makes his real activities and agenda that much scarier.
Saturday, June 13, 2009
The Fearmakers (Pacemaker/United Artists, 1958)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran the 1958 film The Fearmakers, a curious anti-Communist propaganda piece disguised as a film noir shown by TCM as part of a tribute to Jacques Tourneur (this month they’re saluting one or two famous directors every day), who made it for a company called “Pacemaker” releasing through United Artists. Written by Chris Appley and Elliot West from a novel by one Darwin L. Teilhet, The Fearmakers stars Dana Andrews as Alan Eaton, co-founder of the Eaton and Clark public-relations firm in Washington, D.C. until as an Army reservist he was re-activated to serve in Korea, captured, held in a Chinese POW camp for two years, repeatedly beaten and tortured and falsely reported as dead.
When he’s finally released he flies back to D.C. and expects to resume his old job as head of the agency — only he shows up to find that another man, Jim McGinnis (an almost unrecognizable — and surprisingly authoritative — Dick Foran), now owns the place, having bought out Clark the day before he was killed in an auto accident, run down by a hit-and-run driver. While on the plane to D.C. Eaton had run into Dr. Gregory Jessup (Oliver Blake), a nuclear physicist who tried to recruit him to a campaign to abolish nuclear weapons and also referred him to a boarding house in D.C. in case he needed a place to stay. The boarding house turns out to be owned by a couple, Harold “Hal” and Vivian “Viv” Loder (Kelly Thordsen and the marvelous Veda Ann Borg) — he’s a heavy-set blowhard who claims a World War II background and, of course, has none; she’s a middle-aged blonde who’s still trying to play the slut and getting her husband jealous over it — and all of these people, plus the agency’s chief statistician, Barney Bond (Mel Tormé — and would someone please tell me why so many Hollywood casting directors in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s thought Mel Tormé could act? He was one of the best, and most superbly musical, male jazz singers of all time, and he was also a talented composer and arranger of music, but he was a mediocre actor who seemingly couldn’t get a line out of his mouth without making it sound like a song cue), are part of a Communist plot (though interestingly the C-word is never used in the film) to use public relations to subvert the American people and get them to accept a “peace” plan that will bring about their unilateral disarmament and conquest by a sinister foreign power.
The Fearmakers was a somewhat interesting attempt to harness noir situations and imagery in the service of Right-wing propaganda, and Tourneur actually got a few atmospheric shots into it, but for the most part it’s just another movie, in which Our Hero, his secretary Lorraine Dennis (Marilee Earle) and Walder (Roy Gordon), a Senator who used to be a client of the agency but dropped it after Eaton left, get together and stop the sinister plot from going forward — though not before some interesting reversals and a plot device by which Eaton suffers incapacitating flashbacks to his days as a POW being beaten and tortured whenever he’s under stress — including one grim scene in which an ill-timed attack allows the villains to wrest away the gun he’d been holding on them. The Fearmakers is a damned sight better than The Red Menace, Big Jim McLain and most of the other better-known Red-baiting movies — not that that’s saying much for it — and at least there’s a talented director and star at the helm, though working well below both their potentials — and, though Foran and Borg are capable, the rest of the supporting cast is nothing to write home about either. What’s most interesting about it is that through much of the dialogue we hear much of the progressive critique of P.R. — that it’s being used to manipulate people without their knowing it and turn them into unthinking drones — albeit from people who are denouncing the Left for exploiting the P.R. industry in that way.
I ran the 1958 film The Fearmakers, a curious anti-Communist propaganda piece disguised as a film noir shown by TCM as part of a tribute to Jacques Tourneur (this month they’re saluting one or two famous directors every day), who made it for a company called “Pacemaker” releasing through United Artists. Written by Chris Appley and Elliot West from a novel by one Darwin L. Teilhet, The Fearmakers stars Dana Andrews as Alan Eaton, co-founder of the Eaton and Clark public-relations firm in Washington, D.C. until as an Army reservist he was re-activated to serve in Korea, captured, held in a Chinese POW camp for two years, repeatedly beaten and tortured and falsely reported as dead.
When he’s finally released he flies back to D.C. and expects to resume his old job as head of the agency — only he shows up to find that another man, Jim McGinnis (an almost unrecognizable — and surprisingly authoritative — Dick Foran), now owns the place, having bought out Clark the day before he was killed in an auto accident, run down by a hit-and-run driver. While on the plane to D.C. Eaton had run into Dr. Gregory Jessup (Oliver Blake), a nuclear physicist who tried to recruit him to a campaign to abolish nuclear weapons and also referred him to a boarding house in D.C. in case he needed a place to stay. The boarding house turns out to be owned by a couple, Harold “Hal” and Vivian “Viv” Loder (Kelly Thordsen and the marvelous Veda Ann Borg) — he’s a heavy-set blowhard who claims a World War II background and, of course, has none; she’s a middle-aged blonde who’s still trying to play the slut and getting her husband jealous over it — and all of these people, plus the agency’s chief statistician, Barney Bond (Mel Tormé — and would someone please tell me why so many Hollywood casting directors in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s thought Mel Tormé could act? He was one of the best, and most superbly musical, male jazz singers of all time, and he was also a talented composer and arranger of music, but he was a mediocre actor who seemingly couldn’t get a line out of his mouth without making it sound like a song cue), are part of a Communist plot (though interestingly the C-word is never used in the film) to use public relations to subvert the American people and get them to accept a “peace” plan that will bring about their unilateral disarmament and conquest by a sinister foreign power.
The Fearmakers was a somewhat interesting attempt to harness noir situations and imagery in the service of Right-wing propaganda, and Tourneur actually got a few atmospheric shots into it, but for the most part it’s just another movie, in which Our Hero, his secretary Lorraine Dennis (Marilee Earle) and Walder (Roy Gordon), a Senator who used to be a client of the agency but dropped it after Eaton left, get together and stop the sinister plot from going forward — though not before some interesting reversals and a plot device by which Eaton suffers incapacitating flashbacks to his days as a POW being beaten and tortured whenever he’s under stress — including one grim scene in which an ill-timed attack allows the villains to wrest away the gun he’d been holding on them. The Fearmakers is a damned sight better than The Red Menace, Big Jim McLain and most of the other better-known Red-baiting movies — not that that’s saying much for it — and at least there’s a talented director and star at the helm, though working well below both their potentials — and, though Foran and Borg are capable, the rest of the supporting cast is nothing to write home about either. What’s most interesting about it is that through much of the dialogue we hear much of the progressive critique of P.R. — that it’s being used to manipulate people without their knowing it and turn them into unthinking drones — albeit from people who are denouncing the Left for exploiting the P.R. industry in that way.
Cheaters’ Club (Chesler/Perlmutter Productions/Lifetime, 2006)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran the movie Cheaters’ Club, a 2006 production that seemed to promise a lot of soft-core porn and other sleazy fun. The central premise: a woman psychiatrist, Roberta “Bobbie” Adler (Wendy Anderson), runs both a private practice and a group-therapy session open exclusively to married women with problems with their relationships. She also hosts a local talk-radio show that’s growing in popularity, and the message of both her talk show and her therapy is that a woman has the absolute right to a fulfilling sex life, and if she can’t get that from her husband she not only has the right but the duty to herself to find alternate partners who can satisfy her.
There are three patients in her group: high-powered attorney Meredith Glass (Krista Bridges), who’s basically turned her spouse Eric (Jeff Pangman) into an emasculated house-husband since he lost his job and she became the family’s sole breadwinner; real estate broker Cindy Hartford (Katya Gardner), blonde (the only one of the four female principals who isn’t dark-haired) and seemingly the most level-headed of the bunch; and Linda Stern (the improbably named Charisma Carpenter), who as the film opens announces to the group that she’s just yielded to their social pressure and had her first affair, with a man named Kyle (Andrew Kraulis) who’s easily the hottest guy in the movie — slightly built, wiry, butch, with a page-boy haircut and a short beard. Certainly he’s better looking than the paramours of the others: Paolo Abruzzi (Chris Violette) is a blankly handsome young graduate student who’s the fuck buddy first of Meredith and then of Bobbie; Tony Armstrong (Rogue Johnston) is the vaguely racially mixed escort Meredith hires after Bobbie seduces Paolo away from her; and the man we see Cindy with, her high-school sweetheart Alex (or at least we think it’s him), who jilted her after he got her pregnant, forcing her to marry her husband David just so her kid would have a father, is as typical a Lifetime “type” — sandy-haired, lanky, decent-looking but nothing special — as you could imagine, much like the actors playing the other husbands, Eric, Benny Stern (Luke Murdoch) and Robert Adler (James Gilpin).
The film opens with its title scratched out in letters, as if written with a key on the side of a car door, against a backdrop of surveillance photos; and for the first 20 minutes it’s the sort of raunchy fun its synopsis advertised. Then it takes a turn into thriller-dom as both Bobbie and Paolo are murdered — she stabbed 20 times, he once, indicating that the killer was more pissed off at her than him — and the case is assigned to Detective Rollins (Kate Trotter), a bull-dyke who doesn’t seem to have a first name and comes off as so strongly Lesbian one expects her to make passes at the members of the Cheaters’ Club and convince them that all the trouble they’re in is the result of their dating (or marrying) men. Meredith is dead set against the members of the club having anything to do with Rollins or anyone else from the police — she’s fearful of being exposed and having her emasculated house-husband (whom we see in only one scene but who comes off more like a character in a Faith Baldwin story from the 1930’s than someone we’d expect to see in a modern movie!) leave her and take their kids with them — but Linda ultimately levels with Rollins after Meredith has a hissy-fit at one of the three women’s lunch dates and threatens to kill either of the others if they cooperate with the law.
Meredith gets fired after a videotape of her and Tony having at it gets e-mailed to everyone in her law firm and every potential client and every judge in the court system, and as if that wasn’t a bad enough day for her, she also gets arrested for the murders (by then Tony has also been found dead — he had been approached online by the killer to plant a camera in his bedroom and film one of Meredith’s trysts, only when the killer came back for the tape, Tony got stabbed as well). Meanwhile, Linda — who had Dr. Adler’s PDA on her when the doctor was killed (the doc had mistakenly slipped it into Linda’s purse instead of her own) — has been reading Dr. Adler’s therapy notes and realizes that Cindy is the real killer: she made up the story about Alex.
Eventually we learn not only Cindy’s guilt but her motive: “Kyle,” the man Linda was having her affair with, was really David Hartford, Cindy’s husband, and Cindy — an unbalanced woman with a previous history of mental hospitalizations — decided to take revenge by killing not only Linda but everyone connected with the group, starting with the doctor who had encouraged Linda to have the affair with Cindy’s husband in the first place. Though no great shakes as drama and marred by the usual improbabilities, Cheaters’ Club is actually a quite good thriller, suspensefully directed by Steve DiMarco (who’s several cuts above the usual Lifetime directors in his flair for exciting action) from a difficult-to-believe but otherwise good script by Kevin Commins and Camilla Carr and maintaining its excitement until a climax that’s action-packed but at least (within the context of this story) believable — and there’s quite a lot of Lifetime’s usually hot soft-core porn as well!
I ran the movie Cheaters’ Club, a 2006 production that seemed to promise a lot of soft-core porn and other sleazy fun. The central premise: a woman psychiatrist, Roberta “Bobbie” Adler (Wendy Anderson), runs both a private practice and a group-therapy session open exclusively to married women with problems with their relationships. She also hosts a local talk-radio show that’s growing in popularity, and the message of both her talk show and her therapy is that a woman has the absolute right to a fulfilling sex life, and if she can’t get that from her husband she not only has the right but the duty to herself to find alternate partners who can satisfy her.
There are three patients in her group: high-powered attorney Meredith Glass (Krista Bridges), who’s basically turned her spouse Eric (Jeff Pangman) into an emasculated house-husband since he lost his job and she became the family’s sole breadwinner; real estate broker Cindy Hartford (Katya Gardner), blonde (the only one of the four female principals who isn’t dark-haired) and seemingly the most level-headed of the bunch; and Linda Stern (the improbably named Charisma Carpenter), who as the film opens announces to the group that she’s just yielded to their social pressure and had her first affair, with a man named Kyle (Andrew Kraulis) who’s easily the hottest guy in the movie — slightly built, wiry, butch, with a page-boy haircut and a short beard. Certainly he’s better looking than the paramours of the others: Paolo Abruzzi (Chris Violette) is a blankly handsome young graduate student who’s the fuck buddy first of Meredith and then of Bobbie; Tony Armstrong (Rogue Johnston) is the vaguely racially mixed escort Meredith hires after Bobbie seduces Paolo away from her; and the man we see Cindy with, her high-school sweetheart Alex (or at least we think it’s him), who jilted her after he got her pregnant, forcing her to marry her husband David just so her kid would have a father, is as typical a Lifetime “type” — sandy-haired, lanky, decent-looking but nothing special — as you could imagine, much like the actors playing the other husbands, Eric, Benny Stern (Luke Murdoch) and Robert Adler (James Gilpin).
The film opens with its title scratched out in letters, as if written with a key on the side of a car door, against a backdrop of surveillance photos; and for the first 20 minutes it’s the sort of raunchy fun its synopsis advertised. Then it takes a turn into thriller-dom as both Bobbie and Paolo are murdered — she stabbed 20 times, he once, indicating that the killer was more pissed off at her than him — and the case is assigned to Detective Rollins (Kate Trotter), a bull-dyke who doesn’t seem to have a first name and comes off as so strongly Lesbian one expects her to make passes at the members of the Cheaters’ Club and convince them that all the trouble they’re in is the result of their dating (or marrying) men. Meredith is dead set against the members of the club having anything to do with Rollins or anyone else from the police — she’s fearful of being exposed and having her emasculated house-husband (whom we see in only one scene but who comes off more like a character in a Faith Baldwin story from the 1930’s than someone we’d expect to see in a modern movie!) leave her and take their kids with them — but Linda ultimately levels with Rollins after Meredith has a hissy-fit at one of the three women’s lunch dates and threatens to kill either of the others if they cooperate with the law.
Meredith gets fired after a videotape of her and Tony having at it gets e-mailed to everyone in her law firm and every potential client and every judge in the court system, and as if that wasn’t a bad enough day for her, she also gets arrested for the murders (by then Tony has also been found dead — he had been approached online by the killer to plant a camera in his bedroom and film one of Meredith’s trysts, only when the killer came back for the tape, Tony got stabbed as well). Meanwhile, Linda — who had Dr. Adler’s PDA on her when the doctor was killed (the doc had mistakenly slipped it into Linda’s purse instead of her own) — has been reading Dr. Adler’s therapy notes and realizes that Cindy is the real killer: she made up the story about Alex.
Eventually we learn not only Cindy’s guilt but her motive: “Kyle,” the man Linda was having her affair with, was really David Hartford, Cindy’s husband, and Cindy — an unbalanced woman with a previous history of mental hospitalizations — decided to take revenge by killing not only Linda but everyone connected with the group, starting with the doctor who had encouraged Linda to have the affair with Cindy’s husband in the first place. Though no great shakes as drama and marred by the usual improbabilities, Cheaters’ Club is actually a quite good thriller, suspensefully directed by Steve DiMarco (who’s several cuts above the usual Lifetime directors in his flair for exciting action) from a difficult-to-believe but otherwise good script by Kevin Commins and Camilla Carr and maintaining its excitement until a climax that’s action-packed but at least (within the context of this story) believable — and there’s quite a lot of Lifetime’s usually hot soft-core porn as well!
Friday, June 12, 2009
Emilio (Landmark Films, 2008)
Familiar but Moving Immigrant Tale
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Emilio Luna (Walter Perez) is a 19-year-old man living on the outskirts of Guadalajara in central Mexico whose 14-year-old sister Maria (Lauren Torres), a girl with the habit of hanging out in bars and coming off as sexually precocious for her age, has been kidnapped by a middle-aged man named Manuel Ortega (Alexandre DeMesquita) and taken to Los Angeles. So, armed with a thousand pesos, a few belongings in a backpack and a much-folded black-and-white photo of Ortega, he flies to Tijuana, crosses the border, makes it to L.A. and starts looking for his sister and the man who took her away. This central premise of writer-director Kim Jorgensen’s new movie, called simply Emilio and produced by the Landmark Theatres chain (which Jorgensen founded and which is showing it locally even though he no longer owns it), isn’t exactly the freshest idea for a movie, but it’s told with a great deal of warmth that gets and keeps us emotionally involved with its hero and makes it well worth seeing.
A lot of things happen to the central character in Emilio. He gets ripped off early on by a couple of Latino gangstas. He meets a philosophical African-American street person, identified in the cast list only as “Bearded Bum” (Wendell Wright), with a taste for decadent French writers like the Marquis de Sade and Céline. He falls in with a couple of other Latinos, José (Danny Martinez) and Fausto (Alejandro Patino), and ends up sharing their apartment in a grungy old residence hotel and working with them on a job for a bottled-water company called Strasbourg — the grim joke being that the “company” is actually the back room of a garage in which they stick the bottles under a regular tap, fill them and seal new caps on them to pass them off as healthy bottled water.
Emilio, who until the very end of the movie seems to have no romantic or sexual interests of his own — though it’s made clear early on that he’s straight — gets cruised by Zack (Ryan McTavish), aspiring (but not too aspiring) actor and scapegrace son of a rich family that bought him a Porsche. They meet on the Venice Beach pier and Zack takes the unsuspecting Emilio to a hot dance club called Rage (“There don’t seem to be too many women here,” says our cluelessly naïve hero) and then to his place — where there’s a party going on with Gay men of all ages, levels of butchness and drug habits. An exhausted Emilio falls asleep in Zack’s bed and they spend the night together — though, again, we’re clearly told that no physical contact occurred between them other than Zack’s arm across Emilio’s chest — and Emilio makes the mistake of accepting a ride home from Zack. As soon as one of his roommates sees him getting out of a fancy car being driven by a Gay gringo, they toss Emilio’s clothes in a bag and throw him out. The joke in this sequence is on both Emilio and the Gays who think he's available “fresh meat,” and though the sequence doesn’t come off as homophobic the Richard Glatzer/Wash Westmoreland film Quinceañera (2006) did a better job of dramatizing the clash between Latino traditions and the Gay culture.
While nothing in Emilio is exactly fresh storytelling, the film is sensitively written and doesn’t have the damnable detachment that wrecks a lot of attempts at serious drama in modern movies. Kim Jorgensen clearly likes and feels for his character, and wants us to as well. Walter Perez is perfectly cast as Emilio, attractive in an understated way and delivering a matter-of-fact performance that makes the character credible and moving. The kid’s guilelessness does get to be a bit unbelievable after a while, but instead of maintaining the literally demented optimism of the woman at the center of Happy-Go-Lucky, Emilio remains a well-grounded character, capable of understanding evil and learning from the bad things that happen to him. Certainly the film sometimes conveys the impression of a deliberate attempt to do a domestic version of Slumdog Millionaire — though it doesn’t have the fable-like plotting, the fairy-tale coincidences or the triumphal ending of Slumdog; instead Jorgensen dares a bittersweet resolution of his plot and leaves Emilio with one dream dashed but with a good shot at the fulfillment of another.
Jorgensen’s background is unusual, to say the least, for a first-time director. He’s been involved in the movie business, in one capacity or another, for over three decades. He’s credited as “executive producer” — a catch-all title that can mean almost anything (including once having had the rights to a story even if he had nothing to do with the version that got made) — on an acknowledged classic, Out of Africa (1985), and also had credits on three typically dumb comedies of the period: Kentucky Fried Movie (1977), Growing Pains (1984) and Mortuary Academy (1988). None of those credits hint at the nervy, deliberately low-tech look he cultivates as the director of Emilio, including some dizzying hand-held pans in the early L.A. scenes that suggest a six-year-old who just got a video camera for his birthday. Fortunately, Jorgensen’s direction later settles into a more conventional groove, giving us plenty to watch and allowing us to watch it.
Emilio is being presented as one of Landmark’s experiments in digital projection. There’ve been several others, including The Architect (2006), a digitally shot film that came across on screen with vivid clarity — too vivid clarity, it seemed in some sequences that could have benefited from the delicate shadings of a filmed image instead of the maddening crispness of high-definition video. Emilio, at least as presented at the June 11 preview screening — presumably the folks at Landmark Hillcrest will have the bugs out of the system before they present it to paying customers — was technically a mess. The projectionist was unable to get the film in the right aspect ratio, thereby cutting off the English subtitles and leaving non-Spanish speakers in the audience at sea during the sequences in which only Latinos appear on screen. Also, much of the sound was distorted — Tree Adams’ simple but evocative musical score suffered in particular — and sometimes the sound effects drowned out the dialogue.
Nonetheless, the quality of Emilio emerged even through a less than optimal presentation — and once the folks at Landmark get the technical glitches taken care of and show this film the way the founder of their company meant it to be seen, it’ll be well worth watching.
Emilio is now playing at the Landmark Cinemas Hillcrest, 3965 Fifth Avenue in Hillcrest. Please call (619) 819-0236 for showtimes and other information.
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Emilio Luna (Walter Perez) is a 19-year-old man living on the outskirts of Guadalajara in central Mexico whose 14-year-old sister Maria (Lauren Torres), a girl with the habit of hanging out in bars and coming off as sexually precocious for her age, has been kidnapped by a middle-aged man named Manuel Ortega (Alexandre DeMesquita) and taken to Los Angeles. So, armed with a thousand pesos, a few belongings in a backpack and a much-folded black-and-white photo of Ortega, he flies to Tijuana, crosses the border, makes it to L.A. and starts looking for his sister and the man who took her away. This central premise of writer-director Kim Jorgensen’s new movie, called simply Emilio and produced by the Landmark Theatres chain (which Jorgensen founded and which is showing it locally even though he no longer owns it), isn’t exactly the freshest idea for a movie, but it’s told with a great deal of warmth that gets and keeps us emotionally involved with its hero and makes it well worth seeing.
A lot of things happen to the central character in Emilio. He gets ripped off early on by a couple of Latino gangstas. He meets a philosophical African-American street person, identified in the cast list only as “Bearded Bum” (Wendell Wright), with a taste for decadent French writers like the Marquis de Sade and Céline. He falls in with a couple of other Latinos, José (Danny Martinez) and Fausto (Alejandro Patino), and ends up sharing their apartment in a grungy old residence hotel and working with them on a job for a bottled-water company called Strasbourg — the grim joke being that the “company” is actually the back room of a garage in which they stick the bottles under a regular tap, fill them and seal new caps on them to pass them off as healthy bottled water.
Emilio, who until the very end of the movie seems to have no romantic or sexual interests of his own — though it’s made clear early on that he’s straight — gets cruised by Zack (Ryan McTavish), aspiring (but not too aspiring) actor and scapegrace son of a rich family that bought him a Porsche. They meet on the Venice Beach pier and Zack takes the unsuspecting Emilio to a hot dance club called Rage (“There don’t seem to be too many women here,” says our cluelessly naïve hero) and then to his place — where there’s a party going on with Gay men of all ages, levels of butchness and drug habits. An exhausted Emilio falls asleep in Zack’s bed and they spend the night together — though, again, we’re clearly told that no physical contact occurred between them other than Zack’s arm across Emilio’s chest — and Emilio makes the mistake of accepting a ride home from Zack. As soon as one of his roommates sees him getting out of a fancy car being driven by a Gay gringo, they toss Emilio’s clothes in a bag and throw him out. The joke in this sequence is on both Emilio and the Gays who think he's available “fresh meat,” and though the sequence doesn’t come off as homophobic the Richard Glatzer/Wash Westmoreland film Quinceañera (2006) did a better job of dramatizing the clash between Latino traditions and the Gay culture.
While nothing in Emilio is exactly fresh storytelling, the film is sensitively written and doesn’t have the damnable detachment that wrecks a lot of attempts at serious drama in modern movies. Kim Jorgensen clearly likes and feels for his character, and wants us to as well. Walter Perez is perfectly cast as Emilio, attractive in an understated way and delivering a matter-of-fact performance that makes the character credible and moving. The kid’s guilelessness does get to be a bit unbelievable after a while, but instead of maintaining the literally demented optimism of the woman at the center of Happy-Go-Lucky, Emilio remains a well-grounded character, capable of understanding evil and learning from the bad things that happen to him. Certainly the film sometimes conveys the impression of a deliberate attempt to do a domestic version of Slumdog Millionaire — though it doesn’t have the fable-like plotting, the fairy-tale coincidences or the triumphal ending of Slumdog; instead Jorgensen dares a bittersweet resolution of his plot and leaves Emilio with one dream dashed but with a good shot at the fulfillment of another.
Jorgensen’s background is unusual, to say the least, for a first-time director. He’s been involved in the movie business, in one capacity or another, for over three decades. He’s credited as “executive producer” — a catch-all title that can mean almost anything (including once having had the rights to a story even if he had nothing to do with the version that got made) — on an acknowledged classic, Out of Africa (1985), and also had credits on three typically dumb comedies of the period: Kentucky Fried Movie (1977), Growing Pains (1984) and Mortuary Academy (1988). None of those credits hint at the nervy, deliberately low-tech look he cultivates as the director of Emilio, including some dizzying hand-held pans in the early L.A. scenes that suggest a six-year-old who just got a video camera for his birthday. Fortunately, Jorgensen’s direction later settles into a more conventional groove, giving us plenty to watch and allowing us to watch it.
Emilio is being presented as one of Landmark’s experiments in digital projection. There’ve been several others, including The Architect (2006), a digitally shot film that came across on screen with vivid clarity — too vivid clarity, it seemed in some sequences that could have benefited from the delicate shadings of a filmed image instead of the maddening crispness of high-definition video. Emilio, at least as presented at the June 11 preview screening — presumably the folks at Landmark Hillcrest will have the bugs out of the system before they present it to paying customers — was technically a mess. The projectionist was unable to get the film in the right aspect ratio, thereby cutting off the English subtitles and leaving non-Spanish speakers in the audience at sea during the sequences in which only Latinos appear on screen. Also, much of the sound was distorted — Tree Adams’ simple but evocative musical score suffered in particular — and sometimes the sound effects drowned out the dialogue.
Nonetheless, the quality of Emilio emerged even through a less than optimal presentation — and once the folks at Landmark get the technical glitches taken care of and show this film the way the founder of their company meant it to be seen, it’ll be well worth watching.
Emilio is now playing at the Landmark Cinemas Hillcrest, 3965 Fifth Avenue in Hillcrest. Please call (619) 819-0236 for showtimes and other information.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Freedom Songs: The Music of the Civil Rights Movement (PBS)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
When Charles duly arrived I showed him a pledge program I’d just recorded from KPBS which I thought he’d be interested in: Freedom Songs: The Music of the Civil Rights Movement, which I’d assumed would be a documentary about the actual “Freedom” groups of the period (like Bernice Johnson Reagon’s Freedom Singers) but instead turned out to be a broader account of the interchange between African-American popular music of the late 1950’s and 1960’s and the civil rights movement. The program made the point that the civil rights movement was started in churches whose members had sung the classic spirituals, but not in the formal style of the Fisk Jubilee Singers and H. T. Burleigh’s arrangements (the ones just about every major opera singer of African-American descent, from Marian Anderson to Denyce Graves, has had to suffer through); rather in the (far more moving, to me) gospel style exemplified by Mahalia Jackson.
It paralleled both obscure and well-known Black hits of the period — including the Impressions’ “People Get Ready” (which, with its explicit references to the Lord, really qualifies as a gospel song), James Brown’s “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud),” Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” (which they presented not in Cooke’s original version but in the freer, more ornamented cover by Otis Redding), Otis Redding’s “Respect” (which they presented in the far better-known version by Aretha Franklin — one commentator even attributed the part in which the singer spells out “R-E-S-P-E-C-T” to Redding without realizing that had been added by Aretha in her arrangement), Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddamn” (which was presented as a complete performance clip from 1960’s TV while Aretha’s “Respect” was presented only as an excerpt, from what appeared to be a contemporary music video in which Aretha danced in the street to her own record), Stevie Wonder’s “Heaven Help Us All,” and Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On” (presented in a quite beautiful live performance in which Gaye sat at a piano and played as well as sang — and he remodeled his own melody quite extensively and, if anything, made the song even more yearning and questioning than it had been on his record) — with the events of the period, the nonviolent early days of the civil rights movement, the rise of Black Power (it’s still impossible for me to watch a clip of Stokely Carmichael in full rhetorical cry and not hate him, though for all its talk about taking up the gun the Black Power movement wasn’t particularly violent in practice — the violence involving it came almost entirely from the police, FBI and other authorities against it!) and the killings of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy (and RFK was presented in a series of carefully edited film clips that made him seem a good deal more liberal than he was!).
It was a moving show and an important, evocative slice of both American political and cultural history, though if it had a flaw it was that it was too self-consciously drenched in nostalgia and offered nary a clue as to how the lessons of the civil rights movement could be drawn upon by both activists and artists interested in social change today.
When Charles duly arrived I showed him a pledge program I’d just recorded from KPBS which I thought he’d be interested in: Freedom Songs: The Music of the Civil Rights Movement, which I’d assumed would be a documentary about the actual “Freedom” groups of the period (like Bernice Johnson Reagon’s Freedom Singers) but instead turned out to be a broader account of the interchange between African-American popular music of the late 1950’s and 1960’s and the civil rights movement. The program made the point that the civil rights movement was started in churches whose members had sung the classic spirituals, but not in the formal style of the Fisk Jubilee Singers and H. T. Burleigh’s arrangements (the ones just about every major opera singer of African-American descent, from Marian Anderson to Denyce Graves, has had to suffer through); rather in the (far more moving, to me) gospel style exemplified by Mahalia Jackson.
It paralleled both obscure and well-known Black hits of the period — including the Impressions’ “People Get Ready” (which, with its explicit references to the Lord, really qualifies as a gospel song), James Brown’s “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud),” Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” (which they presented not in Cooke’s original version but in the freer, more ornamented cover by Otis Redding), Otis Redding’s “Respect” (which they presented in the far better-known version by Aretha Franklin — one commentator even attributed the part in which the singer spells out “R-E-S-P-E-C-T” to Redding without realizing that had been added by Aretha in her arrangement), Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddamn” (which was presented as a complete performance clip from 1960’s TV while Aretha’s “Respect” was presented only as an excerpt, from what appeared to be a contemporary music video in which Aretha danced in the street to her own record), Stevie Wonder’s “Heaven Help Us All,” and Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On” (presented in a quite beautiful live performance in which Gaye sat at a piano and played as well as sang — and he remodeled his own melody quite extensively and, if anything, made the song even more yearning and questioning than it had been on his record) — with the events of the period, the nonviolent early days of the civil rights movement, the rise of Black Power (it’s still impossible for me to watch a clip of Stokely Carmichael in full rhetorical cry and not hate him, though for all its talk about taking up the gun the Black Power movement wasn’t particularly violent in practice — the violence involving it came almost entirely from the police, FBI and other authorities against it!) and the killings of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy (and RFK was presented in a series of carefully edited film clips that made him seem a good deal more liberal than he was!).
It was a moving show and an important, evocative slice of both American political and cultural history, though if it had a flaw it was that it was too self-consciously drenched in nostalgia and offered nary a clue as to how the lessons of the civil rights movement could be drawn upon by both activists and artists interested in social change today.
Lady Be Good (MGM, 1941)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Eventually we watched the movie Lady Be Good, a 1941 MGM musical produced by Arthur Freed at a time when Freed’s productions were still pretty much standardized items from the musical cliché mill. Lady Be Good began on Broadway in the 1920’s as a musical by George and Ira Gershwin, but Freed and his writers — Jack McGowan, “original” story; McGowan, Kay Van Riper and John McClain, script; and Ralph Spence, Arnold Auerbach, Herman Wouk (! — so now we know what he wrote before World War II!), Robert McGunigle and Vincente Minnelli, uncredited script doctors — threw out all but two of the Gershwin songs, “Oh, Lady Be Good” and “Fascinating Rhythm.” They also threw out the original story and substituted an excessively lame, boring one about husband-and-wife songwriters Eddie Crane (Robert Young) and Dixie Donegan (Ann Sothern) who divorce, get back together and then split up again, only the judge who heard their first divorce case (Lionel Barrymore, playing his whole role seated behind the bench to conceal that he could no longer walk and needed a wheelchair) refuses to divorce them again and so they more or less reconcile at the finish.
The show was laden down with mediocre new songs by Roger Edens, “You’ll Never Know” (definitely not the Harry Warren song for the film of that title at 20th Century-Fox that won the Academy Award two years later) and “Your Words and My Music” (the latter with lyrics by, you guessed it, Arthur Freed himself), and a quite beautiful song by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, “The Last Time I Saw Paris,” performed by Ann Sothern in a nightclub in which she and Young are being fêted as songwriters of the year for “Oh, Lady Be Good.” Hammerstein wrote the lyrics to express his traumatic reaction when Paris fell to the Nazis, and though at the time he was working on a show with Sigmund Romberg he knew that Kern and only Kern would be the right composer for his special song (one of the few times Hammerstein and Kern ever wrote a song that was conceived on its own instead of as part of a show); the song won the Academy Award for 1941 —though Kern, a good sport as usual, said he thought Harold Arlen’s “Blues in the Night” (introduced far less effectively in its film) should have won — largely due to its moving presentation here, in which the second chorus is accompanied on screen by stock footage of pre-war Paris: a rare moment of raw emotion in a movie otherwise content to stay on well-blazed trails of clichés.
One of the most frustrating things about Lady Be Good is that we’re constantly being cut away from the more interesting characters in the movie — Eleanor Powell (bizarrely billed first even though she’s really playing a second lead) as Marilyn Marsh, ace tap dancer (though it’s not until 74 minutes into this 111-minute movie that we finally get to see her dance), star of the show the feuding songwriters eventually stay together long enough to write, and roommate of Dixie’s when she and her now-and-again husband are apart; and Red Skelton (billed seventh and deserving better both in cast order and in being given something to do), playing the Cranes’ song-plugger and taking some marvelous pratfalls that make us a) laugh and b) wish he had a much bigger part in the film — to focus on the boring parts played by Young and Sothern. Given how many great comedies Hollywood was making just then about divorced couples who couldn’t let each other go and ultimately reconciled at the fade-out — obscure ones like The Ex-Mrs. Bradford, directed by Stephen Roberts and starring William Powell and Jean Arthur, as well as famous ones like The Awful Truth, His Girl Friday and The Philadelphia Story — it seems really disappointing that Arthur Freed, director Norman Z. McLeod (whose best credits are films with zany comedians as his stars — Monkey Business and Horse Feathers with the Marx Brothers and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty with Danny Kaye) and the writing committee didn’t bring some more imagination and flair to this story.
There are some nice one-liners in the film — notably the one in which Eleanor Powell says to Red Skelton, whose antics are getting on her nerves, “Why don’t you go back into the clock and close the little door behind you?” — and a couple of hot dance numbers by the Berry Brothers, a Black group of tap dancers who are rather like the Nicholas Brothers except that there are three of them and they’re equally spectacular in their combination of tap and acrobatics. There’s also a nice performance by Tom Conway as Dixie’s divorce lawyer and a forgettable minor role for Dan Dailey — and, on the “down” side, there’s the execrable John Carroll as Eddie’s rival for Dixie’s hand. Carroll is ostensibly the radio singer who introduces the Cranes’ songs and makes hits of them, but his voice is so drearily stentorian one gets the impression the songs are becoming popular in spite of him.
Among the other good stuff in this movie are the montage sequence that shows the song “Oh, Lady Be Good” becoming a hit, with piles of sheet music and records (the record we see is on the Victor label — a rare use of a real record label in a film of the period — but the label is white with black lettering, not the black with gold lettering Victor actually used for their pop records at the time) mounting to vertiginous heights as the song inches its way up the charts — and the spectacular dance number to “Fascinating Rhythm” that climaxes the film, with the Berry Brothers joining Eleanor Powell when they’re not seated at three pianos that are themselves dancing — and at the end Powell is shown dancing out of a giant chiffon curtain that is billowing out behind and above her. According to Hugh Fordin, Arthur Freed’s biographer — who made it clear throughout his book that he couldn’t stand Busby Berkeley — this was an arduous number to film, largely because of the sheer amount of time Berkeley took on it. “Freed gave Berkeley an ultimatum: ‘You’ve got three days to rehearse and one day to shoot,’” Fordin wrote. “He started shooting at nine o’clock in the morning; at ten in the evening George Folsey, the cameraman, had to be replaced; and at two-thirty in the morning the crew walked off the set. Berkeley’s total lack of discipline killed off any professionalism Eleanor Powell ever had.” (The scenes in Berkeley’s Footlight Parade of James Cagney as the maniacal dance director locking his cast and crew inside a rehearsal hall for three days straight, moving in cots so they could cat-nap between rehearsals and having sandwiches delivered so they could eat, are a pretty good illustration of Berkeley’s actual working methods.)
The resulting number isn’t quite as demented as the extravaganzae Berkeley had previously created at Goldwyn and Warners, but it’s still easily the best thing (along with “The Last Time I Saw Paris”) in the movie. (Powell’s only other dance sequence takes place in her apartment — which, Charles noted, is the exact same set that was used for the Cranes’ apartment, only re-dressed, a bit of cheapness one expected more from Monogram than MGM — in which she does quite a clever routine with a dancing dog named Buttons; I have no idea how he was trained or by whom — they didn’t give credits for “dog wranglers” then — but he’s quite good.) Lady Be Good is an example of one of those frustratingly mediocre films that could have been good: with more of the Gershwin score kept intact (besides “Oh, Lady Be Good” and “Fascinating Rhythm” we hear a snatch of “So Am I” played by Robert Young to impress the society friends he loves and Ann Sothern can’t stand, and an even smaller bit of “Hang On to Me” in the background score), a more stylish director, snappier writing and, above all, a starrier cast — like Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, who’d played together brilliantly in The Awful Truth and would have been a damned sight better in this movie than Robert Young and Ann Sothern (not only were they far more charismatic personalities and funnier comedians but Dunne had a much better singing voice than Sothern’s) — this could have been a real gem instead of a mediocre film made while the Freed Unit was still groping towards the genuinely stylish masterpieces of its maturity: Meet Me in St. Louis, An American in Paris, Singin’ in the Rain, et al.
Eventually we watched the movie Lady Be Good, a 1941 MGM musical produced by Arthur Freed at a time when Freed’s productions were still pretty much standardized items from the musical cliché mill. Lady Be Good began on Broadway in the 1920’s as a musical by George and Ira Gershwin, but Freed and his writers — Jack McGowan, “original” story; McGowan, Kay Van Riper and John McClain, script; and Ralph Spence, Arnold Auerbach, Herman Wouk (! — so now we know what he wrote before World War II!), Robert McGunigle and Vincente Minnelli, uncredited script doctors — threw out all but two of the Gershwin songs, “Oh, Lady Be Good” and “Fascinating Rhythm.” They also threw out the original story and substituted an excessively lame, boring one about husband-and-wife songwriters Eddie Crane (Robert Young) and Dixie Donegan (Ann Sothern) who divorce, get back together and then split up again, only the judge who heard their first divorce case (Lionel Barrymore, playing his whole role seated behind the bench to conceal that he could no longer walk and needed a wheelchair) refuses to divorce them again and so they more or less reconcile at the finish.
The show was laden down with mediocre new songs by Roger Edens, “You’ll Never Know” (definitely not the Harry Warren song for the film of that title at 20th Century-Fox that won the Academy Award two years later) and “Your Words and My Music” (the latter with lyrics by, you guessed it, Arthur Freed himself), and a quite beautiful song by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, “The Last Time I Saw Paris,” performed by Ann Sothern in a nightclub in which she and Young are being fêted as songwriters of the year for “Oh, Lady Be Good.” Hammerstein wrote the lyrics to express his traumatic reaction when Paris fell to the Nazis, and though at the time he was working on a show with Sigmund Romberg he knew that Kern and only Kern would be the right composer for his special song (one of the few times Hammerstein and Kern ever wrote a song that was conceived on its own instead of as part of a show); the song won the Academy Award for 1941 —though Kern, a good sport as usual, said he thought Harold Arlen’s “Blues in the Night” (introduced far less effectively in its film) should have won — largely due to its moving presentation here, in which the second chorus is accompanied on screen by stock footage of pre-war Paris: a rare moment of raw emotion in a movie otherwise content to stay on well-blazed trails of clichés.
One of the most frustrating things about Lady Be Good is that we’re constantly being cut away from the more interesting characters in the movie — Eleanor Powell (bizarrely billed first even though she’s really playing a second lead) as Marilyn Marsh, ace tap dancer (though it’s not until 74 minutes into this 111-minute movie that we finally get to see her dance), star of the show the feuding songwriters eventually stay together long enough to write, and roommate of Dixie’s when she and her now-and-again husband are apart; and Red Skelton (billed seventh and deserving better both in cast order and in being given something to do), playing the Cranes’ song-plugger and taking some marvelous pratfalls that make us a) laugh and b) wish he had a much bigger part in the film — to focus on the boring parts played by Young and Sothern. Given how many great comedies Hollywood was making just then about divorced couples who couldn’t let each other go and ultimately reconciled at the fade-out — obscure ones like The Ex-Mrs. Bradford, directed by Stephen Roberts and starring William Powell and Jean Arthur, as well as famous ones like The Awful Truth, His Girl Friday and The Philadelphia Story — it seems really disappointing that Arthur Freed, director Norman Z. McLeod (whose best credits are films with zany comedians as his stars — Monkey Business and Horse Feathers with the Marx Brothers and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty with Danny Kaye) and the writing committee didn’t bring some more imagination and flair to this story.
There are some nice one-liners in the film — notably the one in which Eleanor Powell says to Red Skelton, whose antics are getting on her nerves, “Why don’t you go back into the clock and close the little door behind you?” — and a couple of hot dance numbers by the Berry Brothers, a Black group of tap dancers who are rather like the Nicholas Brothers except that there are three of them and they’re equally spectacular in their combination of tap and acrobatics. There’s also a nice performance by Tom Conway as Dixie’s divorce lawyer and a forgettable minor role for Dan Dailey — and, on the “down” side, there’s the execrable John Carroll as Eddie’s rival for Dixie’s hand. Carroll is ostensibly the radio singer who introduces the Cranes’ songs and makes hits of them, but his voice is so drearily stentorian one gets the impression the songs are becoming popular in spite of him.
Among the other good stuff in this movie are the montage sequence that shows the song “Oh, Lady Be Good” becoming a hit, with piles of sheet music and records (the record we see is on the Victor label — a rare use of a real record label in a film of the period — but the label is white with black lettering, not the black with gold lettering Victor actually used for their pop records at the time) mounting to vertiginous heights as the song inches its way up the charts — and the spectacular dance number to “Fascinating Rhythm” that climaxes the film, with the Berry Brothers joining Eleanor Powell when they’re not seated at three pianos that are themselves dancing — and at the end Powell is shown dancing out of a giant chiffon curtain that is billowing out behind and above her. According to Hugh Fordin, Arthur Freed’s biographer — who made it clear throughout his book that he couldn’t stand Busby Berkeley — this was an arduous number to film, largely because of the sheer amount of time Berkeley took on it. “Freed gave Berkeley an ultimatum: ‘You’ve got three days to rehearse and one day to shoot,’” Fordin wrote. “He started shooting at nine o’clock in the morning; at ten in the evening George Folsey, the cameraman, had to be replaced; and at two-thirty in the morning the crew walked off the set. Berkeley’s total lack of discipline killed off any professionalism Eleanor Powell ever had.” (The scenes in Berkeley’s Footlight Parade of James Cagney as the maniacal dance director locking his cast and crew inside a rehearsal hall for three days straight, moving in cots so they could cat-nap between rehearsals and having sandwiches delivered so they could eat, are a pretty good illustration of Berkeley’s actual working methods.)
The resulting number isn’t quite as demented as the extravaganzae Berkeley had previously created at Goldwyn and Warners, but it’s still easily the best thing (along with “The Last Time I Saw Paris”) in the movie. (Powell’s only other dance sequence takes place in her apartment — which, Charles noted, is the exact same set that was used for the Cranes’ apartment, only re-dressed, a bit of cheapness one expected more from Monogram than MGM — in which she does quite a clever routine with a dancing dog named Buttons; I have no idea how he was trained or by whom — they didn’t give credits for “dog wranglers” then — but he’s quite good.) Lady Be Good is an example of one of those frustratingly mediocre films that could have been good: with more of the Gershwin score kept intact (besides “Oh, Lady Be Good” and “Fascinating Rhythm” we hear a snatch of “So Am I” played by Robert Young to impress the society friends he loves and Ann Sothern can’t stand, and an even smaller bit of “Hang On to Me” in the background score), a more stylish director, snappier writing and, above all, a starrier cast — like Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, who’d played together brilliantly in The Awful Truth and would have been a damned sight better in this movie than Robert Young and Ann Sothern (not only were they far more charismatic personalities and funnier comedians but Dunne had a much better singing voice than Sothern’s) — this could have been a real gem instead of a mediocre film made while the Freed Unit was still groping towards the genuinely stylish masterpieces of its maturity: Meet Me in St. Louis, An American in Paris, Singin’ in the Rain, et al.
Monday, June 8, 2009
Frontline: “The Tank Man” (PBS, 2006)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I took a bus to the meeting of the San Diego Humanist Fellowship at the San Diego Public Library; they’d planned a commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the massacre at Tiananmen Square in Beijing on June 4, 1989 (20 years and three days previously), and I thought it might be an interesting meeting to cover except they scheduled it to go on way too long: they planned to have a speaker, professor Jeff Zinnemann, and to show the 90-minute PBS documentary The Tank Man, aired on the PBS series Frontline on April 11, 2006 and scheduled for an encore presentation tomorrow (though not in San Diego, of course — KPBS is doing a pledge drive and showing old music specials instead).
The Tank Man was written, produced and directed by Antony Thomas and was centered around the spectacular image that was photographed and shown worldwide of the square on the morning of June 5, after the Chinese army had cleared it, in which a lone man, seen only from the back and apparently dressed in a white T-shirt and jeans, carrying a couple of shopping bags, had stood in front of one of the tanks and got it to stop. (Remembering the fate of Rachel Corrie, who was run over by a military bulldozer in occupied Palestine and killed while trying to use her body to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian family’s home, I thought immediately, “If this had been the Israeli army, they would have just run him over.”) The image of the “tank man” only gains power from the fact that (though one candidate was rather dubiously identified in print) we still don’t know who he was or what happened to him after his fabled act of defiance.
The famous photo was taken by Charles Cole, who was interviewed for the film and recalled, “During this time, I’m thinking, ‘This guy is going to be killed any moment now. And if he is, I just can’t miss this. This is something that he’s giving his life for. It’s my responsibility to record it as accurately as possible.’” Cole also recalled how the Chinese “Public Security Bureau” — the euphemism for their secret police — nearly got the photo away from him before it could even be developed: “I realized that the public security bureau had been watching us from the other rooftop by binoculars. So I went in and took the film out of the camera and reloaded it into the plastic film can, and went into the toilet, took off the top of the toilet and put it in the holding tank, put the toilet top back on. And shortly after that, probably 10, 15 minutes afterwards, the public security bureau broke through the door. They got one other roll of film from the shots that I’d taken from the night before, and they were pretty satisfied they’d cleaned up the situation.” According to professor Zinnemann, another picture of the event recently surfaced in the archives of the New York Times, though it didn’t tell us much more than Cole’s now-iconic photo did — the Tank Man is still only shown with his back to the camera.
Director Thomas uses the Tiananmen incident in general and the mysterious fate of the Tank Man in particular as a starting point to riff on the entire history of China over the last two decades, noting that Deng Xaioping (who as secretary of the Communist Party was the real ruler of China during this period, not whoever was the nominal president — at the height of the 1989 protests he replaced the conciliatory president with Zhang Zemin, who had previously put the hammer down on pro-democracy protests as governor of Shanghai) repressed the Tiananmen demonstrators largely to safeguard his market-based economic programs and he effectively offered the Chinese people — or at least the relatively affluent ones who could afford big-city college educations at all — a Faustian bargain: forgo any of those silly Western notions about democracy and a government ruling by consent of the governed, and in exchange he’d give them massive economic growth and opportunities to become rich.
The economic part of that program worked; China is today the world’s fastest growing economy — due largely, ironically enough given that it still has a nominally “Communist” government, to its willingness to reinvent itself as sweatshop to the world, attracting Western corporations to manufacture based on the ultra-low wages paid to its workers and the dictatorial political system that bars independent labor unions and crushes any attempt to organize them with the same ruthlessness (and without the Western media watching) that it crushed the Tiananmen protests — and it’s currently the United States’ principal banker, funding most of America’s growing and potentially crushing debt. Though the last part of the equation doesn’t really enter into Thomas’s program, it’s occurred to me often enough that the end game of the current U.S. economic crisis may come when China simply forecloses on the U.S. and imposes a structural adjustment program to ensure that this country can pay its debts to China.
The ironies continue with the fact that on one level the Chinese-mandated U.S. economic policy is likely to be a radical-Right member’s dream come true; like the current budget crunch in California, which is being “solved” by the evisceration of education, health and human services programs (there’s a fascinating article in today’s Los Angeles Times about how the state’s major public-employee unions are disappointed in the Democrats in the legislature for not pushing harder for more taxes — indicating once again how totally out of touch the idiots running these unions are with the political realities of California today; as I predicted, Governor Schwarzenegger and the legislative Republicans are interpreting the results of the May 19 special election as a voter mandate against any new taxes and a call for balancing the budget on whopping spending cuts alone, and for the unions to come out against the ballot measures was one of the most supremely stupid political moves of all time and will lead directly to thousands of their members losing their jobs — but then again, “stupid” and “labor leader” are practically synonymous in today’s America!), the Chinese version of a structural adjustment program is likely to involve whacking cuts in America’s health, education and human services network in order to ensure that the government runs budget surpluses that will be used to repay its foreign debts.
China is a lot better at doing empire than the U.S. — they’ve had a lot more experience at it (thousands of years’ worth), and if history is any guide the basis of the future Chinese empire that will replace the American one will be suzerainty and tribute: the Chinese will let us govern our country more or less as we want to, but we will have to acknowledge their superior authority (including aligning our foreign policy with theirs) and pay them money to be let alone. Thomas’s film is also quite good at showing how Deng’s economic “reforms” have changed China from one of the most economically egalitarian countries on earth to one of the most economically unequal countries on earth; for all the hype surrounding China’s affluent cities (including the hosting of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing — the film includes a shot of the “bird’s-nest” stadium under construction), over four-fifths of the Chinese population is still agricultural peasants, and they have been the hardest-hit sector by the “reforms.”
The abolition of free education and health care has basically meant that the peasants are locked out of any chance of advancement whatsoever; indeed, though they’re technically still in the same country, many of the factory workers being exploited for Western corporations in the sweatshop-like factories of the cities are working there in order to send remittances home to their families so their brothers and sisters can afford to pay the fees to go to school. (The relationship of the Chinese cities and countryside begins to look an awful lot like that between the U.S. and Mexico!)
Thomas’s editing is sometimes jarring — whenever he cuts to the Tank Man image after a discussion of some other part of his story, including the extent to which the Chinese have censored the Tank Man image and any mention of the 1989 protests at Tiananmen Square from the version of the Internet available in China (indeed, for the 20th anniversary they turned off access to most of the West’s search engines altogether lest some mention of the event leak through their firewalls), and they had the full support of Yahoo!, Google, Cisco and Microsoft to help them do it (reminiscent of the way American companies continued to do business until Nazi Germany until December 1941), one wants to do an Anna Russell impression and go, “Remember the Tank Man?” — but for the most part the film is a fascinating documentary on the nation that is in all probability going to replace the United States as the world’s greatest power within two or three decades, and a chilling premonition of what they’re likely to do with that power once they have it.
I took a bus to the meeting of the San Diego Humanist Fellowship at the San Diego Public Library; they’d planned a commemoration of the 20th anniversary of the massacre at Tiananmen Square in Beijing on June 4, 1989 (20 years and three days previously), and I thought it might be an interesting meeting to cover except they scheduled it to go on way too long: they planned to have a speaker, professor Jeff Zinnemann, and to show the 90-minute PBS documentary The Tank Man, aired on the PBS series Frontline on April 11, 2006 and scheduled for an encore presentation tomorrow (though not in San Diego, of course — KPBS is doing a pledge drive and showing old music specials instead).
The Tank Man was written, produced and directed by Antony Thomas and was centered around the spectacular image that was photographed and shown worldwide of the square on the morning of June 5, after the Chinese army had cleared it, in which a lone man, seen only from the back and apparently dressed in a white T-shirt and jeans, carrying a couple of shopping bags, had stood in front of one of the tanks and got it to stop. (Remembering the fate of Rachel Corrie, who was run over by a military bulldozer in occupied Palestine and killed while trying to use her body to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian family’s home, I thought immediately, “If this had been the Israeli army, they would have just run him over.”) The image of the “tank man” only gains power from the fact that (though one candidate was rather dubiously identified in print) we still don’t know who he was or what happened to him after his fabled act of defiance.
The famous photo was taken by Charles Cole, who was interviewed for the film and recalled, “During this time, I’m thinking, ‘This guy is going to be killed any moment now. And if he is, I just can’t miss this. This is something that he’s giving his life for. It’s my responsibility to record it as accurately as possible.’” Cole also recalled how the Chinese “Public Security Bureau” — the euphemism for their secret police — nearly got the photo away from him before it could even be developed: “I realized that the public security bureau had been watching us from the other rooftop by binoculars. So I went in and took the film out of the camera and reloaded it into the plastic film can, and went into the toilet, took off the top of the toilet and put it in the holding tank, put the toilet top back on. And shortly after that, probably 10, 15 minutes afterwards, the public security bureau broke through the door. They got one other roll of film from the shots that I’d taken from the night before, and they were pretty satisfied they’d cleaned up the situation.” According to professor Zinnemann, another picture of the event recently surfaced in the archives of the New York Times, though it didn’t tell us much more than Cole’s now-iconic photo did — the Tank Man is still only shown with his back to the camera.
Director Thomas uses the Tiananmen incident in general and the mysterious fate of the Tank Man in particular as a starting point to riff on the entire history of China over the last two decades, noting that Deng Xaioping (who as secretary of the Communist Party was the real ruler of China during this period, not whoever was the nominal president — at the height of the 1989 protests he replaced the conciliatory president with Zhang Zemin, who had previously put the hammer down on pro-democracy protests as governor of Shanghai) repressed the Tiananmen demonstrators largely to safeguard his market-based economic programs and he effectively offered the Chinese people — or at least the relatively affluent ones who could afford big-city college educations at all — a Faustian bargain: forgo any of those silly Western notions about democracy and a government ruling by consent of the governed, and in exchange he’d give them massive economic growth and opportunities to become rich.
The economic part of that program worked; China is today the world’s fastest growing economy — due largely, ironically enough given that it still has a nominally “Communist” government, to its willingness to reinvent itself as sweatshop to the world, attracting Western corporations to manufacture based on the ultra-low wages paid to its workers and the dictatorial political system that bars independent labor unions and crushes any attempt to organize them with the same ruthlessness (and without the Western media watching) that it crushed the Tiananmen protests — and it’s currently the United States’ principal banker, funding most of America’s growing and potentially crushing debt. Though the last part of the equation doesn’t really enter into Thomas’s program, it’s occurred to me often enough that the end game of the current U.S. economic crisis may come when China simply forecloses on the U.S. and imposes a structural adjustment program to ensure that this country can pay its debts to China.
The ironies continue with the fact that on one level the Chinese-mandated U.S. economic policy is likely to be a radical-Right member’s dream come true; like the current budget crunch in California, which is being “solved” by the evisceration of education, health and human services programs (there’s a fascinating article in today’s Los Angeles Times about how the state’s major public-employee unions are disappointed in the Democrats in the legislature for not pushing harder for more taxes — indicating once again how totally out of touch the idiots running these unions are with the political realities of California today; as I predicted, Governor Schwarzenegger and the legislative Republicans are interpreting the results of the May 19 special election as a voter mandate against any new taxes and a call for balancing the budget on whopping spending cuts alone, and for the unions to come out against the ballot measures was one of the most supremely stupid political moves of all time and will lead directly to thousands of their members losing their jobs — but then again, “stupid” and “labor leader” are practically synonymous in today’s America!), the Chinese version of a structural adjustment program is likely to involve whacking cuts in America’s health, education and human services network in order to ensure that the government runs budget surpluses that will be used to repay its foreign debts.
China is a lot better at doing empire than the U.S. — they’ve had a lot more experience at it (thousands of years’ worth), and if history is any guide the basis of the future Chinese empire that will replace the American one will be suzerainty and tribute: the Chinese will let us govern our country more or less as we want to, but we will have to acknowledge their superior authority (including aligning our foreign policy with theirs) and pay them money to be let alone. Thomas’s film is also quite good at showing how Deng’s economic “reforms” have changed China from one of the most economically egalitarian countries on earth to one of the most economically unequal countries on earth; for all the hype surrounding China’s affluent cities (including the hosting of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing — the film includes a shot of the “bird’s-nest” stadium under construction), over four-fifths of the Chinese population is still agricultural peasants, and they have been the hardest-hit sector by the “reforms.”
The abolition of free education and health care has basically meant that the peasants are locked out of any chance of advancement whatsoever; indeed, though they’re technically still in the same country, many of the factory workers being exploited for Western corporations in the sweatshop-like factories of the cities are working there in order to send remittances home to their families so their brothers and sisters can afford to pay the fees to go to school. (The relationship of the Chinese cities and countryside begins to look an awful lot like that between the U.S. and Mexico!)
Thomas’s editing is sometimes jarring — whenever he cuts to the Tank Man image after a discussion of some other part of his story, including the extent to which the Chinese have censored the Tank Man image and any mention of the 1989 protests at Tiananmen Square from the version of the Internet available in China (indeed, for the 20th anniversary they turned off access to most of the West’s search engines altogether lest some mention of the event leak through their firewalls), and they had the full support of Yahoo!, Google, Cisco and Microsoft to help them do it (reminiscent of the way American companies continued to do business until Nazi Germany until December 1941), one wants to do an Anna Russell impression and go, “Remember the Tank Man?” — but for the most part the film is a fascinating documentary on the nation that is in all probability going to replace the United States as the world’s greatest power within two or three decades, and a chilling premonition of what they’re likely to do with that power once they have it.
Sunday, June 7, 2009
American Experience: Buffalo Bill (PBS, 2009)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran an interesting American Experience show from PBS on the life of “Buffalo Bill” Cody, a genuine scout in the American Indian wars of the 1860’s and 1870’s who was more or less recruited by a New York writer named Ned Buntline and promoted into the archetypal figure of the American West. The show is a good deal more sympathetic to Cody himself than some of the other depictions of him, which have regarded him as a ne’er-do-well hack whose entire story was Buntline’s invention — indeed, it depicts Cody as getting rid of Buntline early and achieving success on his own, more or less, with a shrewd business manager who helped him put together the famous “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West” extravaganzae, live shows that were put on in stadia remodeled to resemble the Western topography of Cody’s Kansas-spent youth. The shows featured hundreds of performers (many of them Native Americans playing the “Indian” villains of the pieces) staging situations that purported to represent the real lifestyle of the pioneer West, and one critic pointed out that virtually all the clichés of the later Western movies originated in the scripts for Buffalo Bill’s shows.
The film did a good job of showing the extent to which William F. Cody reinvented himself as one of the earliest of modern-style celebrities, using the high-tech of his day — the railroads (which enabled him to tour his show throughout the U.S.) and steamships (which allowed him to take it to Europe for five years in the 1880’s), the cheap “dime novels” (actually newspapers with lurid color covers and fictional stories inside) in which Buffalo Bill’s (ghost-written, first by Buntline and then, when they had a parting of the ways, by Colonel Prentiss Ingraham) adventures appeared and the cheap printing systems with which he was able to run off full-color posters advertising his shows — and also tapping into the urban proletariat as his core audience, people who were living miserable lives as factory workers and the like but grabbed the chance to dream their way into the mythical “Wild West” Buffalo Bill’s shows represented.
William Cody’s story also seems quite modern in the way his star fell as fast as it had risen; a bitter divorce suit with his often-abandoned wife (perhaps this is where Edna Ferber got the idea for Yancy Cravat’s frequent disappearances from home and hearth in Cimarron!) which Cody lost (which meant he had to stay married to her, hard as that may be to believe in the modern era), and in which his predilections for other women and the high life in general were exposed; and also the rise of a new technology, motion pictures, which meant that audiences who’d once flocked to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West could now have the same sort of entertainment for a fraction of the price. Cody tried to beat the newcomers at their own game, sinking his life savings into a movie of his own — a story about the end of the Plains Indians wars with the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee — without realizing that he knew nothing about how to make a stirring, exciting film and didn’t bother to hire anyone who did.
The commentary to this film says that “filmmakers” had devised ways to use close-ups to draw people into a story instead of just portraying it from a distance — what the narration doesn’t explain is that as of 1913 that essentially meant one filmmaker, director D. W. Griffith; had Cody made Griffith (who at the time was chafing at the two-reel limit his employers at Biograph had imposed on him and was crying out for the chance to make feature-length films) an offer to direct an epic with a Western theme, the venture might have turned out quite satisfactorily for both men. Instead Cody directed the film himself and came up with something that, in one critic’s words, looked like “his Wild West show seen from the back of the stadium.” Buffalo Bill’s movie bombed and took his fortunes with it, and a man who had always wanted to retire (but could never afford to because he fell victim to a whole succession of con artists with get-rich-quick schemes) and said he didn’t want to die a showman had to hire himself out to a circus owner and keep performing, keep up the “Buffalo Bill” image, until his death in 1917.
One twist in the Buffalo Bill story I hadn’t known was that Ned Buntline, his first associate and the man who did more than anyone else to “create” the “Buffalo Bill” character, was not only a scapegrace who’d run out on several women and jumped bail more than once, he’d also been a member of the Know-Nothing Party before the Civil War and he apparently wanted to present Bill Cody as an example of the true 100 percent Anglo-Saxon American to whom the Know-Nothings wanted to restrict the country by closing down immigration (and their arguments about the “flood of immigrants” destroying “American values” and “American culture” sound all too familiar today!), and Cody himself, while hardly a progressive, didn’t share Buntline’s anti-immigrant mania and that was what led Cody to fire him. (Indeed, while Cody’s early shows had included vivid representations of Indian attacks on unarmed settlers and a gruesome re-enactment of how he took his first scalp, he treated the Native American performers in his troupe quite well and hung out with them when he wanted to get away from the pressures of celebrity.)
The Buffalo Bill story as presented here encompasses quite a few of America’s myths — the 19th century myth of the West cheek-by-jowl with the 20th century myth of celebrity — and the consciousness with which both William F. Cody himself and his business partners marketed his image for maximum commercial appeal is the beginning of a process that still goes on and will probably continue as long as there is a United States of America and a U.S. culture industry.
I ran an interesting American Experience show from PBS on the life of “Buffalo Bill” Cody, a genuine scout in the American Indian wars of the 1860’s and 1870’s who was more or less recruited by a New York writer named Ned Buntline and promoted into the archetypal figure of the American West. The show is a good deal more sympathetic to Cody himself than some of the other depictions of him, which have regarded him as a ne’er-do-well hack whose entire story was Buntline’s invention — indeed, it depicts Cody as getting rid of Buntline early and achieving success on his own, more or less, with a shrewd business manager who helped him put together the famous “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West” extravaganzae, live shows that were put on in stadia remodeled to resemble the Western topography of Cody’s Kansas-spent youth. The shows featured hundreds of performers (many of them Native Americans playing the “Indian” villains of the pieces) staging situations that purported to represent the real lifestyle of the pioneer West, and one critic pointed out that virtually all the clichés of the later Western movies originated in the scripts for Buffalo Bill’s shows.
The film did a good job of showing the extent to which William F. Cody reinvented himself as one of the earliest of modern-style celebrities, using the high-tech of his day — the railroads (which enabled him to tour his show throughout the U.S.) and steamships (which allowed him to take it to Europe for five years in the 1880’s), the cheap “dime novels” (actually newspapers with lurid color covers and fictional stories inside) in which Buffalo Bill’s (ghost-written, first by Buntline and then, when they had a parting of the ways, by Colonel Prentiss Ingraham) adventures appeared and the cheap printing systems with which he was able to run off full-color posters advertising his shows — and also tapping into the urban proletariat as his core audience, people who were living miserable lives as factory workers and the like but grabbed the chance to dream their way into the mythical “Wild West” Buffalo Bill’s shows represented.
William Cody’s story also seems quite modern in the way his star fell as fast as it had risen; a bitter divorce suit with his often-abandoned wife (perhaps this is where Edna Ferber got the idea for Yancy Cravat’s frequent disappearances from home and hearth in Cimarron!) which Cody lost (which meant he had to stay married to her, hard as that may be to believe in the modern era), and in which his predilections for other women and the high life in general were exposed; and also the rise of a new technology, motion pictures, which meant that audiences who’d once flocked to Buffalo Bill’s Wild West could now have the same sort of entertainment for a fraction of the price. Cody tried to beat the newcomers at their own game, sinking his life savings into a movie of his own — a story about the end of the Plains Indians wars with the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee — without realizing that he knew nothing about how to make a stirring, exciting film and didn’t bother to hire anyone who did.
The commentary to this film says that “filmmakers” had devised ways to use close-ups to draw people into a story instead of just portraying it from a distance — what the narration doesn’t explain is that as of 1913 that essentially meant one filmmaker, director D. W. Griffith; had Cody made Griffith (who at the time was chafing at the two-reel limit his employers at Biograph had imposed on him and was crying out for the chance to make feature-length films) an offer to direct an epic with a Western theme, the venture might have turned out quite satisfactorily for both men. Instead Cody directed the film himself and came up with something that, in one critic’s words, looked like “his Wild West show seen from the back of the stadium.” Buffalo Bill’s movie bombed and took his fortunes with it, and a man who had always wanted to retire (but could never afford to because he fell victim to a whole succession of con artists with get-rich-quick schemes) and said he didn’t want to die a showman had to hire himself out to a circus owner and keep performing, keep up the “Buffalo Bill” image, until his death in 1917.
One twist in the Buffalo Bill story I hadn’t known was that Ned Buntline, his first associate and the man who did more than anyone else to “create” the “Buffalo Bill” character, was not only a scapegrace who’d run out on several women and jumped bail more than once, he’d also been a member of the Know-Nothing Party before the Civil War and he apparently wanted to present Bill Cody as an example of the true 100 percent Anglo-Saxon American to whom the Know-Nothings wanted to restrict the country by closing down immigration (and their arguments about the “flood of immigrants” destroying “American values” and “American culture” sound all too familiar today!), and Cody himself, while hardly a progressive, didn’t share Buntline’s anti-immigrant mania and that was what led Cody to fire him. (Indeed, while Cody’s early shows had included vivid representations of Indian attacks on unarmed settlers and a gruesome re-enactment of how he took his first scalp, he treated the Native American performers in his troupe quite well and hung out with them when he wanted to get away from the pressures of celebrity.)
The Buffalo Bill story as presented here encompasses quite a few of America’s myths — the 19th century myth of the West cheek-by-jowl with the 20th century myth of celebrity — and the consciousness with which both William F. Cody himself and his business partners marketed his image for maximum commercial appeal is the beginning of a process that still goes on and will probably continue as long as there is a United States of America and a U.S. culture industry.
Call of the Jungle (Monogram, 1944)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 1944 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Call of the Jungle was an oddity from Monogram in 1944, the last of five “B” features star stripper Ann Corio made for PRC and Monogram in the early 1940’s. Don Miller’s book “B” Movies had nothing but vicious attacks on Corio’s first feature, Swamp Woman, made for PRC in 1941 — he said he acting was abysmally amateurish and the whole film was badly acted, stupidly scripted, ineptly directed and staged on cheap sets that never even came close to convincing. Reading that about her — and not knowing she’d been an enormous star in the world of burlesque, probably next to Gypsy Rose Lee the most successful stripper of all time (when she played Minsky’s she got $1,000 per week and 25 percent of the gross) — I’d been pleasantly surprised when we watched her third film, the 1943 Monogram musical Sarong Girl, which despite a silly and deceptive title (this one wasn’t set in the South Seas, but was a modern-dress movie about a stripper who’s caught in a raid and has to produce a mother to stay out of jail, so she hires someone from an old ladies’ home to pose as her mom — it was an uncredited remake of a 1934 Columbia movie called Lady by Choice, starring Carole Lombard, but still entertaining) offered a perfectly competent professional performance by Corio that made me think watching one of her other films wouldn’t be the excruciating experience Miller had described in critiquing Swamp Woman.
Call of the Jungle was Corio’s last starring vehicle — her only subsequent acting appearances were a guest shot on a 1965 episode of the TV series The Trials of O’Brien and a 1979 TV-movie called Here It Is, Burlesque! — and it turned out to be a deadly dull movie whose pluses, fine atmospheric photography of Monogram’s “South Seas” (probably Catalina Island) locations by Arthur Martinelli and a surprisingly effective music score credited to David Chudnow (usually the music man at rival PRC; while Chudnow probably compiled most of this score from existing tracks rather than composing it himself, he managed to deploy whatever resources he had to create a well-wrought “South Seas” mood reinforcing the excellence of Martinelli’s cinematography) can’t redeem a thoroughly boring plot line by George Callahan and unimaginative direction by Phil Rosen.
The personnel on this film — director Rosen, writer Callahan and producers Philip N. Krasne and James S. Burkett — were also behind Monogram’s 1944 revival of the Charlie Chan series after 20th Century-Fox had declared it exhausted two years earlier, and though the trans-racial impersonation in this one is a white girl pretending to be Polynesian (though it’s revealed at the end, à la Golden Dawn, that she’s actually an abandoned white baby who was only raised by a Polynesian family) rather than a white man pretending to be Asian, the show, despite its surprisingly good (for Monogram) physical production, fails due to a script that offers virtually no action or dramatic interest.
Corio plays Princess Tana (named after the leaves that kept the mummy alive at Universal? One wonders) of the South Pacific island of Ta’pu, whose (foster) father Kahuna (is this where that familiar surfer’s slang word came from?) is concerned because sinister white people have just stolen the priceless black pearls that the Ta’puians use as the eyes of the idol statue they worship. (This being a Monogram film, we never actually see the statue, either with or without black-pearl eyes; apparently the Monogram “suits” decided actually building the objet d’art was a needless expense.) The sinister white people include Harley (John Davidson), a gaunt, white-haired (actually he’s mostly bald but what little hair he does still have is white) trader whom Tana is sympathetic towards and convinced is innocent; and the thieves who are trying to frame him for it: Boggs (Edward Chandler), Louie (Muni Seroff) and Carlton (I. Stanford Jolley). There’s also a bad white girl, Gracie (a nicely honed performance by Claudia Dell, who’d played opposite Tom Mix in the first version of Destry Rides Again at Universal in 1932), and a nice white guy, Jim (James Bush, a typically colorless Monogram leading man), for Tana to fall in love with and leave her island for at the end.
Call of the Jungle is one of those numbing movies with which there’s nothing wrong except that it’s dull, dull, dull; the plot never goes anywhere (eventually it gets resolved, but only because the film was reaching the end of its allotted 60-minute running time; had they not had to worry about a time limit the writer could have kept this movie spinning around in circles forever!) and all that prettily photographed (albeit in black-and-white) “Polynesian” scenery and nice music can’t keep our attention forever (or even very long) against a mind-numbingly boring and incident-free plot. It’s hard to judge Corio as an actress by this, since it’s not much of a part, she doesn’t get to wear anything particularly revealing (let alone take any of it off!) and she isn’t an interesting enough personality to be watchable despite how little help she’s getting from the writer and director.
Call of the Jungle was an oddity from Monogram in 1944, the last of five “B” features star stripper Ann Corio made for PRC and Monogram in the early 1940’s. Don Miller’s book “B” Movies had nothing but vicious attacks on Corio’s first feature, Swamp Woman, made for PRC in 1941 — he said he acting was abysmally amateurish and the whole film was badly acted, stupidly scripted, ineptly directed and staged on cheap sets that never even came close to convincing. Reading that about her — and not knowing she’d been an enormous star in the world of burlesque, probably next to Gypsy Rose Lee the most successful stripper of all time (when she played Minsky’s she got $1,000 per week and 25 percent of the gross) — I’d been pleasantly surprised when we watched her third film, the 1943 Monogram musical Sarong Girl, which despite a silly and deceptive title (this one wasn’t set in the South Seas, but was a modern-dress movie about a stripper who’s caught in a raid and has to produce a mother to stay out of jail, so she hires someone from an old ladies’ home to pose as her mom — it was an uncredited remake of a 1934 Columbia movie called Lady by Choice, starring Carole Lombard, but still entertaining) offered a perfectly competent professional performance by Corio that made me think watching one of her other films wouldn’t be the excruciating experience Miller had described in critiquing Swamp Woman.
Call of the Jungle was Corio’s last starring vehicle — her only subsequent acting appearances were a guest shot on a 1965 episode of the TV series The Trials of O’Brien and a 1979 TV-movie called Here It Is, Burlesque! — and it turned out to be a deadly dull movie whose pluses, fine atmospheric photography of Monogram’s “South Seas” (probably Catalina Island) locations by Arthur Martinelli and a surprisingly effective music score credited to David Chudnow (usually the music man at rival PRC; while Chudnow probably compiled most of this score from existing tracks rather than composing it himself, he managed to deploy whatever resources he had to create a well-wrought “South Seas” mood reinforcing the excellence of Martinelli’s cinematography) can’t redeem a thoroughly boring plot line by George Callahan and unimaginative direction by Phil Rosen.
The personnel on this film — director Rosen, writer Callahan and producers Philip N. Krasne and James S. Burkett — were also behind Monogram’s 1944 revival of the Charlie Chan series after 20th Century-Fox had declared it exhausted two years earlier, and though the trans-racial impersonation in this one is a white girl pretending to be Polynesian (though it’s revealed at the end, à la Golden Dawn, that she’s actually an abandoned white baby who was only raised by a Polynesian family) rather than a white man pretending to be Asian, the show, despite its surprisingly good (for Monogram) physical production, fails due to a script that offers virtually no action or dramatic interest.
Corio plays Princess Tana (named after the leaves that kept the mummy alive at Universal? One wonders) of the South Pacific island of Ta’pu, whose (foster) father Kahuna (is this where that familiar surfer’s slang word came from?) is concerned because sinister white people have just stolen the priceless black pearls that the Ta’puians use as the eyes of the idol statue they worship. (This being a Monogram film, we never actually see the statue, either with or without black-pearl eyes; apparently the Monogram “suits” decided actually building the objet d’art was a needless expense.) The sinister white people include Harley (John Davidson), a gaunt, white-haired (actually he’s mostly bald but what little hair he does still have is white) trader whom Tana is sympathetic towards and convinced is innocent; and the thieves who are trying to frame him for it: Boggs (Edward Chandler), Louie (Muni Seroff) and Carlton (I. Stanford Jolley). There’s also a bad white girl, Gracie (a nicely honed performance by Claudia Dell, who’d played opposite Tom Mix in the first version of Destry Rides Again at Universal in 1932), and a nice white guy, Jim (James Bush, a typically colorless Monogram leading man), for Tana to fall in love with and leave her island for at the end.
Call of the Jungle is one of those numbing movies with which there’s nothing wrong except that it’s dull, dull, dull; the plot never goes anywhere (eventually it gets resolved, but only because the film was reaching the end of its allotted 60-minute running time; had they not had to worry about a time limit the writer could have kept this movie spinning around in circles forever!) and all that prettily photographed (albeit in black-and-white) “Polynesian” scenery and nice music can’t keep our attention forever (or even very long) against a mind-numbingly boring and incident-free plot. It’s hard to judge Corio as an actress by this, since it’s not much of a part, she doesn’t get to wear anything particularly revealing (let alone take any of it off!) and she isn’t an interesting enough personality to be watchable despite how little help she’s getting from the writer and director.
Friday, June 5, 2009
Torture Ship (Producers’ Pictures, later PRC, 1939)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Torture Ship was a 1939 production by Sigmund Neufeld for the fledgling Producers’ Pictures, later Producers’ Distributing Corporation and ultimately Producers’ Releasing Corporation, or PRC, the initials by which it’s become known and either loved or loathed by generations of film fanatics since. (The inevitable Hollywood wags of the 1940’s said the initials PRC really stood for “Pretty Rotten Crap,” which is unfair to some of their best movies — Lady in the Death House, Bluebeard, Detour — but an all too accurate description of many others.) This was only PRC’s second film — their first had been the 1939 production Beasts of Berlin, Hollywood’s first exposé of the evils of Nazi rule in Germany (and a film with a surprisingly similar plot line to MGM’s The Mortal Storm, made a year later) — and its credits insisted it was “suggested” by a Jack London story called “A Thousand Deaths.”
The London connection is believable because the plot as staged here bears a family resemblance to The Sea Wolf, only in this case the principal villain is not a ship’s captain but a mad scientist, Dr. Herbert Stander (Irving Pichel, anemic in a part Boris Karloff could have played to perfection). A reviewer who posted a comment on this film to its page on the archive.org site wrote, “Watching this movie from the beginning actually feels as if one walked into the show in the middle” — and indeed anyone who watches this version has walked into this show in the middle: the archive.org download runs only 49 minutes whereas the American Film Institute Catalog gives the running time as between 57 and 62 minutes. What I suspect happened is that this version was prepared for sale to television in the early 1950’s (before the major studios had lifted their anti-TV embargo on their own catalogs and therefore the only movies available to TV stations were British imports and “B” cheapies from companies like PRC, Monogram and Republic), and in order to allow the film to fit into an hour-long time slot and still leave room for commercials, the TV packagers simply cut out the first reel.
“Convinced that glandular disorders are at the seat of all criminality,” the AFI Catalog plot synopsis begins, “Dr. Herbert Stander begins experimenting with endocrine injections. To conduct his experiments without interference, the doctor charters a yacht, which he convinces his nephew, Lieutenant Bob Bennett [Lyle Talbot, top-billed, which will give you an idea of how cheap this movie really is!], to captain, then helps eight killers escape from jail and brings them aboard as guinea pigs.” The film as we have it opens in a room in which the eight killers are locked in — aside from a few process shots showing a deck of the boat overlooking water, there is no attempt to make the action look as if it is credibly taking place on board a floating vessel — bemoaning their fate and expressing their fears about the doctor’s injections, also vowing revenge and plotting mutiny, unaware that the doctor has the entire ship bugged and can hear every word they’re saying.
Also on board — with little account of what they’re doing or how they got there — are female convict Mary Slavish (Sheila Bromley), who ran an insurance scam that involved poisoning people and then collecting on their policies; and nice-girl Joan Martel (Jacqueline Wells, later known as Julie Bishop, who had appeared in the 1934 film The Black Cat — thereby two of this film’s cast members, her and Talbot, also appeared with Bela Lugosi), who was Mary’s secretary and was convicted along with her even though she was innocent of any knowledge of her murderous activities and thought she was only running a legitimate insurance business. Bob and Mary fall in love, of course, and in the meantime Dr. Stander decides he needs a normal, non-criminal subject for his experiments — so he makes Bob his guinea pig and turns him into a criminal beast. Bob recovers when the drug wears off and, rather than submit to a new injection, puts distilled water into the doctor’s hypodermic — and the film ends with the convicts mutinying and Bob turning the tables by faking the voice of the now-dead doctor, claiming they're all about to die from the effects of the drug, and getting them to give themselves up. There’s another scene, towards the end, referenced in the AFI Catalog synopsis — “As they sail home, the doctor’s experiments are vindicated when Mary awakens from her treatment and repents her crimes” — and the film ends with a conventional romantic clinch between Bob and Joan on deck.
Torture Ship is an oddly unmoving film, lacking in either terror or thrills, surprising given that the director is Victor Halperin and he had made two great movies in the early 1930’s, White Zombie and Supernatural — but then his directorial gifts seemed to have shriveled and died on the vine; the film has none of the visual atmospherics Halperin indulged in in his good movies, and it’s directed surprisingly flatly in a way that makes us all too aware of the cheapness of the production instead of concealing it the way the best “B” directors did. George Sayre’s barely motivated script doesn’t help much, either, and the lame casting also weakens a movie whose plot had the potential to be a quite exciting horror/suspense thriller but which fell far short of what it could have been.
Torture Ship was a 1939 production by Sigmund Neufeld for the fledgling Producers’ Pictures, later Producers’ Distributing Corporation and ultimately Producers’ Releasing Corporation, or PRC, the initials by which it’s become known and either loved or loathed by generations of film fanatics since. (The inevitable Hollywood wags of the 1940’s said the initials PRC really stood for “Pretty Rotten Crap,” which is unfair to some of their best movies — Lady in the Death House, Bluebeard, Detour — but an all too accurate description of many others.) This was only PRC’s second film — their first had been the 1939 production Beasts of Berlin, Hollywood’s first exposé of the evils of Nazi rule in Germany (and a film with a surprisingly similar plot line to MGM’s The Mortal Storm, made a year later) — and its credits insisted it was “suggested” by a Jack London story called “A Thousand Deaths.”
The London connection is believable because the plot as staged here bears a family resemblance to The Sea Wolf, only in this case the principal villain is not a ship’s captain but a mad scientist, Dr. Herbert Stander (Irving Pichel, anemic in a part Boris Karloff could have played to perfection). A reviewer who posted a comment on this film to its page on the archive.org site wrote, “Watching this movie from the beginning actually feels as if one walked into the show in the middle” — and indeed anyone who watches this version has walked into this show in the middle: the archive.org download runs only 49 minutes whereas the American Film Institute Catalog gives the running time as between 57 and 62 minutes. What I suspect happened is that this version was prepared for sale to television in the early 1950’s (before the major studios had lifted their anti-TV embargo on their own catalogs and therefore the only movies available to TV stations were British imports and “B” cheapies from companies like PRC, Monogram and Republic), and in order to allow the film to fit into an hour-long time slot and still leave room for commercials, the TV packagers simply cut out the first reel.
“Convinced that glandular disorders are at the seat of all criminality,” the AFI Catalog plot synopsis begins, “Dr. Herbert Stander begins experimenting with endocrine injections. To conduct his experiments without interference, the doctor charters a yacht, which he convinces his nephew, Lieutenant Bob Bennett [Lyle Talbot, top-billed, which will give you an idea of how cheap this movie really is!], to captain, then helps eight killers escape from jail and brings them aboard as guinea pigs.” The film as we have it opens in a room in which the eight killers are locked in — aside from a few process shots showing a deck of the boat overlooking water, there is no attempt to make the action look as if it is credibly taking place on board a floating vessel — bemoaning their fate and expressing their fears about the doctor’s injections, also vowing revenge and plotting mutiny, unaware that the doctor has the entire ship bugged and can hear every word they’re saying.
Also on board — with little account of what they’re doing or how they got there — are female convict Mary Slavish (Sheila Bromley), who ran an insurance scam that involved poisoning people and then collecting on their policies; and nice-girl Joan Martel (Jacqueline Wells, later known as Julie Bishop, who had appeared in the 1934 film The Black Cat — thereby two of this film’s cast members, her and Talbot, also appeared with Bela Lugosi), who was Mary’s secretary and was convicted along with her even though she was innocent of any knowledge of her murderous activities and thought she was only running a legitimate insurance business. Bob and Mary fall in love, of course, and in the meantime Dr. Stander decides he needs a normal, non-criminal subject for his experiments — so he makes Bob his guinea pig and turns him into a criminal beast. Bob recovers when the drug wears off and, rather than submit to a new injection, puts distilled water into the doctor’s hypodermic — and the film ends with the convicts mutinying and Bob turning the tables by faking the voice of the now-dead doctor, claiming they're all about to die from the effects of the drug, and getting them to give themselves up. There’s another scene, towards the end, referenced in the AFI Catalog synopsis — “As they sail home, the doctor’s experiments are vindicated when Mary awakens from her treatment and repents her crimes” — and the film ends with a conventional romantic clinch between Bob and Joan on deck.
Torture Ship is an oddly unmoving film, lacking in either terror or thrills, surprising given that the director is Victor Halperin and he had made two great movies in the early 1930’s, White Zombie and Supernatural — but then his directorial gifts seemed to have shriveled and died on the vine; the film has none of the visual atmospherics Halperin indulged in in his good movies, and it’s directed surprisingly flatly in a way that makes us all too aware of the cheapness of the production instead of concealing it the way the best “B” directors did. George Sayre’s barely motivated script doesn’t help much, either, and the lame casting also weakens a movie whose plot had the potential to be a quite exciting horror/suspense thriller but which fell far short of what it could have been.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Union Station (Paramount, 1950)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The movie we finally ended up watching last night was Union Station, a 1950 semi-thriller that had a lot of potential that didn’t get realized. It was made at Paramount, produced by Jules Schermer (who later produced Pickup on South Street for director Sam Fuller at 20th Century-Fox) and directed by Rudolph Maté from a script by Sidney Boehm based on a story by Thomas Walsh. It was William Holden’s very next movie after Sunset Boulevard and reunited him with the second female lead from that film, Nancy Olson, this time playing Joyce Willecombe, a woman who works as the private secretary to industrialist Henry Murchison (Herbert Heyes) and is traveling on a train from his home in Westport to New York City when she spots a man with a gun and reports it to the train’s conductor (Harry Hayden), who couldn’t care less but eventually agrees to call the security department at Union Station, where the train is scheduled to arrive.
The head of Union Station security, Lieutenant William Calhoun (William Holden), takes the case personally and works with New York Police Department Inspector Donnelly (Barry Fitzgerald, basically recycling his role from The Naked City). It turns out that the man with the gun is Joe Beacon (Lyle Bettger) and he’s kidnapped Murchison’s blind daughter Lorna (Allene Roberts) and is holding her somewhere in the station, demanding that $100,000 in ransom money be placed in his own suitcase (which he knows the police have already searched after using a pass key to open the locker where he stashed it) and delivered to him by a Western Union messenger. The movie gets quite a few things right and quite a few others wrong; the script doesn’t offer much room for the kinds of visual atmospherics Maté was good at (and indulged in to the max in his best film as a director, the 1949 D.O.A.), the sparing use of music (by Irvin Talbot) is welcome given how many otherwise great movies from classic Hollywood (from the 1941 Maltese Falcon to Edgar Ulmer’s Bluebeard) were weakened by overwrought and overused scores, but at times it’s a little too sparing and scenes that cry out for musical heightening don’t get it; and though it’s nominally a film noir there isn’t much of the sense of moral ambiguity that (along with the chiaroscuro visual style) distinguishes noir from other sorts of movies about urban crime.
The good guys are all good — Holden’s police officer, with his willingness to beat up suspects and heedlessness towards due process and constitutional rights, seems straight out of one of the Dirty Harry movies (indeed, if Union Station had been remade in the 1970’s, Clint Eastwood would have been the logical choice as the star); and Lyle Bettger’s performance as the villain is suitably twitchy but carefully avoids giving us anything to sympathize with, any reason to regard the person himself with anything other than our hatred for what he’s doing. The lead actors go through the motions and deliver solidly professional but not particularly moving performances — this may have reunited Holden and Olson from Sunset Boulevard but it didn’t give them anything like the complex emotions they were required to play in the earlier film — and it’s up to the supporting cast to take the acting honors. Allene Roberts is utterly convincing as the blind girl (indeed, she looks remarkably like a blind person I know: Jen Restle from the Bisexual Forum), and Jan Sterling gets only two brief scenes as Bettger’s girlfriend (who’s obliged to hold his kidnap victim in their apartment before he takes her away and returns her to Union Station) but nonetheless makes the most of them; torn between loyalty to her lover and revulsion that he’s taken up such a cowardly crime as kidnapping, she gets to play the kind of powerful moral ambiguity lacking in writer Boehm’s conception of the leads. (She was clearly warming up for her remarkable performance the next year in Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, a film which should have made her a major star but didn’t.)
By far the best part of Union Station is the ending, in which Bettger has hidden his kidnap victim in a tunnel under the station accessible only through its power room (apparently, at least according to this movie, Union Station was off the grid and generated its own electricity) and Holden as the super-cop tracks them there and there’s a final shoot-out between them in which Maté at last gets to use the shadowy, chiaroscuro visual style of which he was a master — and there’s a fascinating moment in which Holden orders all the lights in the tunnel turned off, though more could have been made of the fact that by doing so he was putting Bettger’s blind victim on an equal, or even superior, footing, since the two men now had to function in the same lightless environment she was used to, and eventually Bettger’s suitcase bursts open as he tries to flee and the money scatters on the floor of the tunnel (anticipating the ending of Kubrick’s The Killing by seven years) before Holden finally shoots him down as he’s attempting to kill the girl. (Since she couldn’t see the mortal danger she was in, one wonders what the internal-affairs investigation of the shooting is going to be like and whether he’ll be able to establish that he shot the villain down legitimately — though given the cavalier acceptance earlier in the film of what would now be considered police brutality, that was probably not an issue either the filmmakers or the 1950 audience were concerned about.) Union Station was a good movie that could have been considerably better — with faster, more intense editing, a bit more music and a more complex script — but it’s at least reliable entertainment from the ending days of the studio system.
The movie we finally ended up watching last night was Union Station, a 1950 semi-thriller that had a lot of potential that didn’t get realized. It was made at Paramount, produced by Jules Schermer (who later produced Pickup on South Street for director Sam Fuller at 20th Century-Fox) and directed by Rudolph Maté from a script by Sidney Boehm based on a story by Thomas Walsh. It was William Holden’s very next movie after Sunset Boulevard and reunited him with the second female lead from that film, Nancy Olson, this time playing Joyce Willecombe, a woman who works as the private secretary to industrialist Henry Murchison (Herbert Heyes) and is traveling on a train from his home in Westport to New York City when she spots a man with a gun and reports it to the train’s conductor (Harry Hayden), who couldn’t care less but eventually agrees to call the security department at Union Station, where the train is scheduled to arrive.
The head of Union Station security, Lieutenant William Calhoun (William Holden), takes the case personally and works with New York Police Department Inspector Donnelly (Barry Fitzgerald, basically recycling his role from The Naked City). It turns out that the man with the gun is Joe Beacon (Lyle Bettger) and he’s kidnapped Murchison’s blind daughter Lorna (Allene Roberts) and is holding her somewhere in the station, demanding that $100,000 in ransom money be placed in his own suitcase (which he knows the police have already searched after using a pass key to open the locker where he stashed it) and delivered to him by a Western Union messenger. The movie gets quite a few things right and quite a few others wrong; the script doesn’t offer much room for the kinds of visual atmospherics Maté was good at (and indulged in to the max in his best film as a director, the 1949 D.O.A.), the sparing use of music (by Irvin Talbot) is welcome given how many otherwise great movies from classic Hollywood (from the 1941 Maltese Falcon to Edgar Ulmer’s Bluebeard) were weakened by overwrought and overused scores, but at times it’s a little too sparing and scenes that cry out for musical heightening don’t get it; and though it’s nominally a film noir there isn’t much of the sense of moral ambiguity that (along with the chiaroscuro visual style) distinguishes noir from other sorts of movies about urban crime.
The good guys are all good — Holden’s police officer, with his willingness to beat up suspects and heedlessness towards due process and constitutional rights, seems straight out of one of the Dirty Harry movies (indeed, if Union Station had been remade in the 1970’s, Clint Eastwood would have been the logical choice as the star); and Lyle Bettger’s performance as the villain is suitably twitchy but carefully avoids giving us anything to sympathize with, any reason to regard the person himself with anything other than our hatred for what he’s doing. The lead actors go through the motions and deliver solidly professional but not particularly moving performances — this may have reunited Holden and Olson from Sunset Boulevard but it didn’t give them anything like the complex emotions they were required to play in the earlier film — and it’s up to the supporting cast to take the acting honors. Allene Roberts is utterly convincing as the blind girl (indeed, she looks remarkably like a blind person I know: Jen Restle from the Bisexual Forum), and Jan Sterling gets only two brief scenes as Bettger’s girlfriend (who’s obliged to hold his kidnap victim in their apartment before he takes her away and returns her to Union Station) but nonetheless makes the most of them; torn between loyalty to her lover and revulsion that he’s taken up such a cowardly crime as kidnapping, she gets to play the kind of powerful moral ambiguity lacking in writer Boehm’s conception of the leads. (She was clearly warming up for her remarkable performance the next year in Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole, a film which should have made her a major star but didn’t.)
By far the best part of Union Station is the ending, in which Bettger has hidden his kidnap victim in a tunnel under the station accessible only through its power room (apparently, at least according to this movie, Union Station was off the grid and generated its own electricity) and Holden as the super-cop tracks them there and there’s a final shoot-out between them in which Maté at last gets to use the shadowy, chiaroscuro visual style of which he was a master — and there’s a fascinating moment in which Holden orders all the lights in the tunnel turned off, though more could have been made of the fact that by doing so he was putting Bettger’s blind victim on an equal, or even superior, footing, since the two men now had to function in the same lightless environment she was used to, and eventually Bettger’s suitcase bursts open as he tries to flee and the money scatters on the floor of the tunnel (anticipating the ending of Kubrick’s The Killing by seven years) before Holden finally shoots him down as he’s attempting to kill the girl. (Since she couldn’t see the mortal danger she was in, one wonders what the internal-affairs investigation of the shooting is going to be like and whether he’ll be able to establish that he shot the villain down legitimately — though given the cavalier acceptance earlier in the film of what would now be considered police brutality, that was probably not an issue either the filmmakers or the 1950 audience were concerned about.) Union Station was a good movie that could have been considerably better — with faster, more intense editing, a bit more music and a more complex script — but it’s at least reliable entertainment from the ending days of the studio system.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Bowery at Midnight (Banner Productions/Monogram, 1942)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Bowery at Midnight was made in 1942 by Sam Katzman’s Banner Productions for Monogram release and was the fifth of Bela Lugosi’s nine vehicles for Katzman and Monogram — and I think it’s the best of the bunch, though all nine of these movies are such a sorry lot that the quality is only relative. It’s essentially a gangster movie rather than a horror film, though it intriguingly combines elements from two far better movies — the 1919 German classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and the 1926 Lon Chaney, Sr. vehicle The Blackbird — even though it does precious little with these recycled plot devices.
The film opens with an “exciting” jailbreak sequence — at least by the standards of Monogram c. 1942 and this film’s mediocre (which is actually being kind to him) director, Wallace Fox, though it’s filled out with so many dowdy-looking stock clips Charles joked it was being filmed in “Murk-o-Vision.” The escaping prisoner is safecracker “Fingers” Dolan (John Berkes), and for the first few minutes the film’s focus stays on him, as he clubs a man who’s got out of his car to repair it, steals the car (I guess he waited until the man was finished fixing it before he struck), drives to New York City and runs into an old friend from his previous days on the outside, Stratton (Wheeler Oakman). Stratton takes “Fingers” Dolan to the Friendly Mission, run by Karl Wagner (Bela Lugosi), who’s really a Moriarty-style criminal mastermind using the mission as a front for his activities. Only he’s really respected psychology professor Dr. Frederick Brenner, who by day teaches classes at a university and lives a reasonably normal home life with his wife (Anna Hope), while by night in his Karl Wagner identity he runs the mission and uses it as a front for his criminal activities, which he’s carrying on so he can do a research paper on the criminal mind (I suppose “original” story and screenplay writer Gerald Schnitzler had seen The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse).
The connections to both Caligari (the psychologist who begins by investigating criminal insanity and ends up an insane criminal himself) and The Blackbird (in which Lon Chaney played a dual role, the crippled “Bishop” who runs the mission and his criminal brother, “The Blackbird,” proceeds from whose crimes keep the mission in business — and of course, this being a Lon Chaney film, midway through the movie it’s revealed that “The Bishop” and “The Blackbird” aren’t brothers, but in fact are the same person) are obvious to anyone who’s seen all three movies, and had Bowery at Midnight got the attentions of a visually imaginative director (like Robert Florey, Edgar G. Ulmer or even Frank Wisbar) who could have evoked the look of Caligari as well as copying its plot device, Bowery at Midnight might have been a real gem.
Instead, it starts to go wrong from typical Monogram slovenliness when Lugosi looks exactly the same as Brenner and Wagner — neither he nor Monogram’s makeup department bother even to attempt any visual distinction between the characters, leaving one to wonder just how a man who (as we’re told in the dialogue) so zealously guards his secret identity that he’ll kill someone from his nighttime world who tries to learn what he does during the day could leave himself so open to having his cover blown the moment someone from one side of his life sees him in the other. The two nice young lovers who are the most likely to “out” him are Judy Malvern (Wanda McKay), an heiress who works at the Friendly Mission as a pet project to help the underprivileged (and, of course, has no idea of what Wagner is up to in the multiple back rooms in the mission’s basement, where he meets his accomplices and stashes the loot from his crimes), and her boyfriend Richard Dennison (John Archer), a student in one of Professor Brenner’s classes — when the two visit Brenner’s home and Judy sees his photo and recognizes it as Wagner, the jig is up and it’s only a matter of time before Brenner/Wagner/whatever his name is is brought to justice.
Schnitzler throws in quite a few other plot complications, including Wagner’s compulsion to leave a dead accomplice at the scene of every crime — one would think word of this would get out around the criminal underground and he’d have a hard time recruiting competent help — and the subsidiary character of Doc Brooks (Lew Kelly), a former doctor who sank to the depths of humanity and ended up at the mission, where Wagner pressed him into service as a janitor. Schnitzler’s script is surprisingly frank about the reason for the doc’s degradation — in one scene he’s shown anxiously awaiting a mysterious “prescription” another denizen of the mission has obtained for him, and one wonders how Monogram got away with such an obvious depiction of drug addiction when the Production Code made it verboten at the major studios — but the writer sails both himself and the audience over the top when he establishes that the doc has requested to be provided with all the corpses of Wagner’s murder victims, so he can stash them in a tomb he’s rigged up in one of the mission’s multiple cellars (an odd serious use of the device famous from Arsenic and Old Lace — I half-expected Lugosi to tell him, “Here’s another yellow fever victim you have to bury in Panama!”), only his skills as a medico are not only intact but are so far advanced of anybody else’s in the world that he’s been able to bring all these people to life and keep them in reserve as a deus ex machina to dispatch Lugosi’s character when the cops start closing in on him: he locks Lugosi in the room where all his zombified revivification subjects live and they take him out for a finish, after which there’s a tag scene in which Richard Dennison — one of the people Lugosi killed and the doctor revived! -— is in the hospital recovering from his attack of sudden deadness and Judy visits him and promises to be a good little wife, bear him six children and do her future social work “anywhere but the Bowery.”
Bowery at Midnight is the best of the Lugosi Monograms not because it’s such a great picture itself — it suffers from the usual flaws of Monogram’s product in its second iteration, including murky photography, a general air of seediness (which works quite well for the mission scenes but undermines every sequence that’s supposed to take place in the homes of the affluent characters) and wildly inappropriate library music by Edward Kay — but because at least it stole from good sources (as Plan Nine from Outer Space — hardly the worst movie ever made, or even the worst movie Ed Wood ever made — did when it ripped off The Day the Earth Stood Still) and got itself on and off the screen with a cool efficiency, if not the sort of inspiration that made “B” movies like Ulmer’s Bluebeard (despite its overused and problematic musical score) great.
Bowery at Midnight was made in 1942 by Sam Katzman’s Banner Productions for Monogram release and was the fifth of Bela Lugosi’s nine vehicles for Katzman and Monogram — and I think it’s the best of the bunch, though all nine of these movies are such a sorry lot that the quality is only relative. It’s essentially a gangster movie rather than a horror film, though it intriguingly combines elements from two far better movies — the 1919 German classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and the 1926 Lon Chaney, Sr. vehicle The Blackbird — even though it does precious little with these recycled plot devices.
The film opens with an “exciting” jailbreak sequence — at least by the standards of Monogram c. 1942 and this film’s mediocre (which is actually being kind to him) director, Wallace Fox, though it’s filled out with so many dowdy-looking stock clips Charles joked it was being filmed in “Murk-o-Vision.” The escaping prisoner is safecracker “Fingers” Dolan (John Berkes), and for the first few minutes the film’s focus stays on him, as he clubs a man who’s got out of his car to repair it, steals the car (I guess he waited until the man was finished fixing it before he struck), drives to New York City and runs into an old friend from his previous days on the outside, Stratton (Wheeler Oakman). Stratton takes “Fingers” Dolan to the Friendly Mission, run by Karl Wagner (Bela Lugosi), who’s really a Moriarty-style criminal mastermind using the mission as a front for his activities. Only he’s really respected psychology professor Dr. Frederick Brenner, who by day teaches classes at a university and lives a reasonably normal home life with his wife (Anna Hope), while by night in his Karl Wagner identity he runs the mission and uses it as a front for his criminal activities, which he’s carrying on so he can do a research paper on the criminal mind (I suppose “original” story and screenplay writer Gerald Schnitzler had seen The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse).
The connections to both Caligari (the psychologist who begins by investigating criminal insanity and ends up an insane criminal himself) and The Blackbird (in which Lon Chaney played a dual role, the crippled “Bishop” who runs the mission and his criminal brother, “The Blackbird,” proceeds from whose crimes keep the mission in business — and of course, this being a Lon Chaney film, midway through the movie it’s revealed that “The Bishop” and “The Blackbird” aren’t brothers, but in fact are the same person) are obvious to anyone who’s seen all three movies, and had Bowery at Midnight got the attentions of a visually imaginative director (like Robert Florey, Edgar G. Ulmer or even Frank Wisbar) who could have evoked the look of Caligari as well as copying its plot device, Bowery at Midnight might have been a real gem.
Instead, it starts to go wrong from typical Monogram slovenliness when Lugosi looks exactly the same as Brenner and Wagner — neither he nor Monogram’s makeup department bother even to attempt any visual distinction between the characters, leaving one to wonder just how a man who (as we’re told in the dialogue) so zealously guards his secret identity that he’ll kill someone from his nighttime world who tries to learn what he does during the day could leave himself so open to having his cover blown the moment someone from one side of his life sees him in the other. The two nice young lovers who are the most likely to “out” him are Judy Malvern (Wanda McKay), an heiress who works at the Friendly Mission as a pet project to help the underprivileged (and, of course, has no idea of what Wagner is up to in the multiple back rooms in the mission’s basement, where he meets his accomplices and stashes the loot from his crimes), and her boyfriend Richard Dennison (John Archer), a student in one of Professor Brenner’s classes — when the two visit Brenner’s home and Judy sees his photo and recognizes it as Wagner, the jig is up and it’s only a matter of time before Brenner/Wagner/whatever his name is is brought to justice.
Schnitzler throws in quite a few other plot complications, including Wagner’s compulsion to leave a dead accomplice at the scene of every crime — one would think word of this would get out around the criminal underground and he’d have a hard time recruiting competent help — and the subsidiary character of Doc Brooks (Lew Kelly), a former doctor who sank to the depths of humanity and ended up at the mission, where Wagner pressed him into service as a janitor. Schnitzler’s script is surprisingly frank about the reason for the doc’s degradation — in one scene he’s shown anxiously awaiting a mysterious “prescription” another denizen of the mission has obtained for him, and one wonders how Monogram got away with such an obvious depiction of drug addiction when the Production Code made it verboten at the major studios — but the writer sails both himself and the audience over the top when he establishes that the doc has requested to be provided with all the corpses of Wagner’s murder victims, so he can stash them in a tomb he’s rigged up in one of the mission’s multiple cellars (an odd serious use of the device famous from Arsenic and Old Lace — I half-expected Lugosi to tell him, “Here’s another yellow fever victim you have to bury in Panama!”), only his skills as a medico are not only intact but are so far advanced of anybody else’s in the world that he’s been able to bring all these people to life and keep them in reserve as a deus ex machina to dispatch Lugosi’s character when the cops start closing in on him: he locks Lugosi in the room where all his zombified revivification subjects live and they take him out for a finish, after which there’s a tag scene in which Richard Dennison — one of the people Lugosi killed and the doctor revived! -— is in the hospital recovering from his attack of sudden deadness and Judy visits him and promises to be a good little wife, bear him six children and do her future social work “anywhere but the Bowery.”
Bowery at Midnight is the best of the Lugosi Monograms not because it’s such a great picture itself — it suffers from the usual flaws of Monogram’s product in its second iteration, including murky photography, a general air of seediness (which works quite well for the mission scenes but undermines every sequence that’s supposed to take place in the homes of the affluent characters) and wildly inappropriate library music by Edward Kay — but because at least it stole from good sources (as Plan Nine from Outer Space — hardly the worst movie ever made, or even the worst movie Ed Wood ever made — did when it ripped off The Day the Earth Stood Still) and got itself on and off the screen with a cool efficiency, if not the sort of inspiration that made “B” movies like Ulmer’s Bluebeard (despite its overused and problematic musical score) great.
Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Daddy-O (Imperial, 1958)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Daddy-O is a 1958 juvenile delinquency/rock ’n’ roll movie of such stupefying boredom even the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 crew could do little to make it entertaining. Virtually nobody involved in this movie went on to a major career, and watching it it’s easy to see why: the director is someone named Lou Place and the writer someone equally (if not more) undistinguished named David Moessinger. The only people connected with this film I’d heard of before were the star, Dick Contino — who made some quite appealing instrumental accordion records for Mercury in the 1950’s and is still alive and performing — and the composer of the background score, John Williams. Yes, that John Williams, writing a rather nice jazz accompaniment for much of the movie and showing himself ready for biggers and betters — I had thought Elmer Bernstein’s debut in Cat Women on the Moon was the most embarrassing first credit for a composer that went on to major-budget productions and won Academy Awards, but this one certainly rivals it!
Contino looks far too old to be playing a teenager (he was born January 17, 1930, which would have made him 28 when this film was made) — though that’s also true of the entire rest of the cast as well — and he doesn’t get to do the one thing he really could do well, play the accordion. Instead he’s presented in three characterizations, in none of which does he really distinguish himself, including the titular “Daddy-O,” a teenage truckdriver (well, it worked for Elvis, didn’t it?) who’s nearly run off the road by Thunderbird-driving blonde babe Jana Ryan (Sandra Giles, who was to Mamie Van Doren what Van Doren was to Marilyn Monroe), which is about the only plot this film has until very much later, about a reel before the end, in which Pete Plum (another one of Contino’s alter egos in this movie, though I kept expecting to hear he did it in the library with the lead pipe) is given a package to deliver to someone by throwing it out of his car at a predetermined point (we can guess the package contains illegal drugs, but he seems utterly oblivious to that possibility), only the police are lying in wait at the drop point and arrest him.
Along the way there’s an auto race and Giles gets to try to channel Natalie Wood from Rebel Without a Cause as she signals the two teen boy drivers to start, but aside from that nothing happens in this movie: the characters simply drive around and hang out at a coffee shop where there’s a house rock ’n’ roll band (the actors playing musicians just bop up and down to the pre-recorded soundtrack and don’t even try to make it look like they’re really playing their instruments) to which they sometimes sing — which provoked the nasty comment from one of the MST3K crew, “Why couldn’t he have been on that plane instead of Buddy Holly?” Actually, Dick Contino was a quite good musician in a limited genre — I remember particularly his reading of the song “Nightingale” on the Mercury sampler album Music to Live By, quite eloquently phrased and much more impressive than Les Baxter’s recording of the same piece — and he’s not only still alive, he lives in Las Vegas, still performs and records, and he’s married to a woman named Tonia who sells medicinal herbs (Dick’s Web site, www.dickcontino.com, links to hers). One would think he deserved a better movie as a showcase!
Daddy-O is a 1958 juvenile delinquency/rock ’n’ roll movie of such stupefying boredom even the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 crew could do little to make it entertaining. Virtually nobody involved in this movie went on to a major career, and watching it it’s easy to see why: the director is someone named Lou Place and the writer someone equally (if not more) undistinguished named David Moessinger. The only people connected with this film I’d heard of before were the star, Dick Contino — who made some quite appealing instrumental accordion records for Mercury in the 1950’s and is still alive and performing — and the composer of the background score, John Williams. Yes, that John Williams, writing a rather nice jazz accompaniment for much of the movie and showing himself ready for biggers and betters — I had thought Elmer Bernstein’s debut in Cat Women on the Moon was the most embarrassing first credit for a composer that went on to major-budget productions and won Academy Awards, but this one certainly rivals it!
Contino looks far too old to be playing a teenager (he was born January 17, 1930, which would have made him 28 when this film was made) — though that’s also true of the entire rest of the cast as well — and he doesn’t get to do the one thing he really could do well, play the accordion. Instead he’s presented in three characterizations, in none of which does he really distinguish himself, including the titular “Daddy-O,” a teenage truckdriver (well, it worked for Elvis, didn’t it?) who’s nearly run off the road by Thunderbird-driving blonde babe Jana Ryan (Sandra Giles, who was to Mamie Van Doren what Van Doren was to Marilyn Monroe), which is about the only plot this film has until very much later, about a reel before the end, in which Pete Plum (another one of Contino’s alter egos in this movie, though I kept expecting to hear he did it in the library with the lead pipe) is given a package to deliver to someone by throwing it out of his car at a predetermined point (we can guess the package contains illegal drugs, but he seems utterly oblivious to that possibility), only the police are lying in wait at the drop point and arrest him.
Along the way there’s an auto race and Giles gets to try to channel Natalie Wood from Rebel Without a Cause as she signals the two teen boy drivers to start, but aside from that nothing happens in this movie: the characters simply drive around and hang out at a coffee shop where there’s a house rock ’n’ roll band (the actors playing musicians just bop up and down to the pre-recorded soundtrack and don’t even try to make it look like they’re really playing their instruments) to which they sometimes sing — which provoked the nasty comment from one of the MST3K crew, “Why couldn’t he have been on that plane instead of Buddy Holly?” Actually, Dick Contino was a quite good musician in a limited genre — I remember particularly his reading of the song “Nightingale” on the Mercury sampler album Music to Live By, quite eloquently phrased and much more impressive than Les Baxter’s recording of the same piece — and he’s not only still alive, he lives in Las Vegas, still performs and records, and he’s married to a woman named Tonia who sells medicinal herbs (Dick’s Web site, www.dickcontino.com, links to hers). One would think he deserved a better movie as a showcase!
Monday, June 1, 2009
Rocketship X-M (Lippert, 1950)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran him a movie we’d recently downloaded: Rocketship X-M, a 1950 production from Lippert Pictures but one with more competent help both in front of and behind the cameras than Lippert usually mustered. The stars are Lloyd Bridges as Col. Floyd Graham, pilot on the “Rocketship Expedition Moon” that gives the film its title; John Emery (Mr. Tallulah Bankhead) as Dr. Karl Eckstrom, who along with his partner Dr. Ralph Fleming (Morris Ankrum) conceived of the lunar mission; Noah Beery, Jr. and Hugh O’Brian as two other crew members (with a woman, Osa Massen as Dr. Lisa Van Horn, chemist and inventor of the rocket’s fuel, to add sex appeal to the cast even though through most of the movie Massen is playing in the sort of thickly accented, stiff-upper-lip style of Garbo in Ninotchka), while behind the camera Kurt Neumann is credited as producer, writer and director, the cinematographer is Karl Struss (which explains why Rocketship X-M looks so much better than most 1950’s sci-fi cheapies) and the musical score is by former Paul Whiteman arranger, Rhapsody in Blue orchestrator and Grand Canyon Suite composer Ferde Grofé. (He rather overuses the theremin but otherwise turns in a quite capable score.)
Rocketship X-M had a convoluted production history: it began as a script by Neumann about a rocket flight to Mars, on which the crew encounters living dinosaurs (one can imagine what the “suits” at Lippert must have thought when Neumann came in with a concept for a movie that would have been far too expensive for them to make — when they did King Dinosaur a year later, the “dinosaurs” were living lizards, photographed on model sets, and they scampered too quickly and energetically to be believable as huge, ponderous prehistoric beasts). Then special effects artist Jack Rabin approached Lippert with an idea for a film about a rocket to the moon called Destination Moon — just when George Pal was developing a project with that title and central premise. To get his company’s film into theatres before Destination Moon and take advantage of the publicity Pal and his studio, Eagle-Lion (the former PRC), was doing around the whole concept of space travel on film, Robert Lippert decided to rush his own space opera into production and combined the Neumann and Rabin stories — though after Pal threatened to sue anyone who did a movie about a rocket mission to the moon, Neumann reverted to his original concept and rewrote the script so the rocket is aimed at the moon but actually reaches Mars instead.
Once there (the Martian scenes are tinted in sepia to suggest that they’re on the “Red Planet”), they don’t find living dinosaurs, but they do learn that Mars once boasted a civilization of humanoids whose technological advancement was well ahead of our own, only they discovered nuclear energy and wiped most of themselves out in a nuclear war, and the surviving Martians have reverted to cavemen. Lippert actually got his film into theatres several weeks before the more prestigious Destination Moon, though audiences confused between the two films resented it enough that after a while theatres showing Rocketship X-M had to put up posters reading, “This is not Destination Moon” (much the way the revival theatre in San Francisco where I first saw the 1931 film of The Maltese Falcon had to put up a sign warning people that they were not showing the far more famous 1941 remake with Bogart).
Rocketship X-M was revised in 1982 when entrepreneur Wade Williams bought the rights and reshot some of the scenes of the rocket taking off and actually flying — though in the 1990’s most (but not all) of the original footage was restored — and the film as it stands is unusually good for a Lippert production, well staged, acted (within the limits of the genre), directed (despite the self-imposed limitation on Kurt Neumann to keep it interesting within the confines of the small spaceship on which most of it takes place) and reasonably convincing as a depiction of space travel even though weightlessness isn’t depicted consistently and is played mostly for laughs. Carlos Clarens didn’t think much of Rocketship X-M, calling it “a gimcrack story about a spaceship detoured by a female member of the crew [sic — the detour is actually caused by the arrogance of Eckstrom, who refuses to listen to the female crew member’s warning that his calculations are off and thereby makes the mistake that shoves the ship off course] from going to the moon and reaching Mars instead,” and saying of the plot gimmick that the Martians had annihilated themselves in a nuclear war except for a few who regressed to a prehistoric lifestyle, “This would-be pawky moral warning had all the earmarks of cheap, last-minute opportunism.”
I think he’s being unfair to this film, which though clearly inferior technically to Destination Moon (which had the benefits of color, a Walter Lantz cartoon sequence and spacecraft designed by the famous industrial designer Raymond Loewy) is actually a better movie. Much of Rocketship X-M seems less an attempt to rip off Destination Moon and more a politically progressive response to it: the spaceship is launched by a government agency (in Destination Moon it was sent up by a group of Ayn Randian private-sector capitalists after the government refused to bankroll anything so seemingly useless as a trip to the moon) and the whole tenor of the script, with its independent-feminist crew member and its anti-nuclear war message, seems so far on the other side of the political fence from the quasi-fascism of Robert Heinlein (who wrote the story on which Destination Moon was based and had a one-third credit on the script) it’s easy to believe the report on imdb.com that blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo had a hand in the Rocketship X-M script.
Most of the press on Rocketship X-M has veered between qualified raves and qualified pans, and the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 crew even gave this their “treatment” (though when Charles downloaded it that way I insisted that, having never seen Rocketship X-M before, I wanted my first encounter with it to be “straight”), and as Charles pointed out it’s hardly in the same league as The Day the Earth Stood Still or Forbidden Planet (or, for that matter, Fritz Lang’s 1928 Woman on the Moon, which in my opinion remained the best film about space travel until 2001: A Space Odyssey 40 years later), but on its own merits it’s a quite well done science-fiction film, and the Martian scenes (which no doubt gave Kurt Neumann a sense of liberation after all the scenes he’d had to shoot inside that tin can of a spaceship!) in particular are marvelously conceived, vividly exploiting the Death Valley locations on which they were filmed (a quite appropriate locale for a film scored by Ferde Grofé, whose most famous work as a composer was the Grand Canyon Suite!) and suspensefully staged and edited.
The final scene, in which the surviving crew members suddenly realize that they don’t have enough fuel for a safe landing back on Earth and therefore they’re going to be killed in a crash — but they radio back to their home base to communicate the all-important “message” that Earth needs to avoid the fate of the Martians (though even in a film this gutsy exactly what we have to do to avoid their fate is not spelled out in the script) — is oddly moving and much more intense than the similar crisis at the end of Destination Moon (in which the astronauts have to jettison practically the whole interior of their ship to make it light enough to fly back to earth on their existing fuel supply — and that film ends oddly with the rocket still in mid-space on the way back from the moon to Earth!); and even the rather schlocky gimmick that Col. Graham and Dr. Van Horn finally discover and declare their love for each other just when their rocket is about to crash to Earth and they’re about to die is done in a way that avoids the obvious sentimentality and achieves a Romantic-opera sensibility of two lovers about to be united forever by their simultaneous deaths. Rocketship X-M isn’t a great movie, but it’s an engagingly quirky one and has a lot more to offer than your standard space opera of the period.
I ran him a movie we’d recently downloaded: Rocketship X-M, a 1950 production from Lippert Pictures but one with more competent help both in front of and behind the cameras than Lippert usually mustered. The stars are Lloyd Bridges as Col. Floyd Graham, pilot on the “Rocketship Expedition Moon” that gives the film its title; John Emery (Mr. Tallulah Bankhead) as Dr. Karl Eckstrom, who along with his partner Dr. Ralph Fleming (Morris Ankrum) conceived of the lunar mission; Noah Beery, Jr. and Hugh O’Brian as two other crew members (with a woman, Osa Massen as Dr. Lisa Van Horn, chemist and inventor of the rocket’s fuel, to add sex appeal to the cast even though through most of the movie Massen is playing in the sort of thickly accented, stiff-upper-lip style of Garbo in Ninotchka), while behind the camera Kurt Neumann is credited as producer, writer and director, the cinematographer is Karl Struss (which explains why Rocketship X-M looks so much better than most 1950’s sci-fi cheapies) and the musical score is by former Paul Whiteman arranger, Rhapsody in Blue orchestrator and Grand Canyon Suite composer Ferde Grofé. (He rather overuses the theremin but otherwise turns in a quite capable score.)
Rocketship X-M had a convoluted production history: it began as a script by Neumann about a rocket flight to Mars, on which the crew encounters living dinosaurs (one can imagine what the “suits” at Lippert must have thought when Neumann came in with a concept for a movie that would have been far too expensive for them to make — when they did King Dinosaur a year later, the “dinosaurs” were living lizards, photographed on model sets, and they scampered too quickly and energetically to be believable as huge, ponderous prehistoric beasts). Then special effects artist Jack Rabin approached Lippert with an idea for a film about a rocket to the moon called Destination Moon — just when George Pal was developing a project with that title and central premise. To get his company’s film into theatres before Destination Moon and take advantage of the publicity Pal and his studio, Eagle-Lion (the former PRC), was doing around the whole concept of space travel on film, Robert Lippert decided to rush his own space opera into production and combined the Neumann and Rabin stories — though after Pal threatened to sue anyone who did a movie about a rocket mission to the moon, Neumann reverted to his original concept and rewrote the script so the rocket is aimed at the moon but actually reaches Mars instead.
Once there (the Martian scenes are tinted in sepia to suggest that they’re on the “Red Planet”), they don’t find living dinosaurs, but they do learn that Mars once boasted a civilization of humanoids whose technological advancement was well ahead of our own, only they discovered nuclear energy and wiped most of themselves out in a nuclear war, and the surviving Martians have reverted to cavemen. Lippert actually got his film into theatres several weeks before the more prestigious Destination Moon, though audiences confused between the two films resented it enough that after a while theatres showing Rocketship X-M had to put up posters reading, “This is not Destination Moon” (much the way the revival theatre in San Francisco where I first saw the 1931 film of The Maltese Falcon had to put up a sign warning people that they were not showing the far more famous 1941 remake with Bogart).
Rocketship X-M was revised in 1982 when entrepreneur Wade Williams bought the rights and reshot some of the scenes of the rocket taking off and actually flying — though in the 1990’s most (but not all) of the original footage was restored — and the film as it stands is unusually good for a Lippert production, well staged, acted (within the limits of the genre), directed (despite the self-imposed limitation on Kurt Neumann to keep it interesting within the confines of the small spaceship on which most of it takes place) and reasonably convincing as a depiction of space travel even though weightlessness isn’t depicted consistently and is played mostly for laughs. Carlos Clarens didn’t think much of Rocketship X-M, calling it “a gimcrack story about a spaceship detoured by a female member of the crew [sic — the detour is actually caused by the arrogance of Eckstrom, who refuses to listen to the female crew member’s warning that his calculations are off and thereby makes the mistake that shoves the ship off course] from going to the moon and reaching Mars instead,” and saying of the plot gimmick that the Martians had annihilated themselves in a nuclear war except for a few who regressed to a prehistoric lifestyle, “This would-be pawky moral warning had all the earmarks of cheap, last-minute opportunism.”
I think he’s being unfair to this film, which though clearly inferior technically to Destination Moon (which had the benefits of color, a Walter Lantz cartoon sequence and spacecraft designed by the famous industrial designer Raymond Loewy) is actually a better movie. Much of Rocketship X-M seems less an attempt to rip off Destination Moon and more a politically progressive response to it: the spaceship is launched by a government agency (in Destination Moon it was sent up by a group of Ayn Randian private-sector capitalists after the government refused to bankroll anything so seemingly useless as a trip to the moon) and the whole tenor of the script, with its independent-feminist crew member and its anti-nuclear war message, seems so far on the other side of the political fence from the quasi-fascism of Robert Heinlein (who wrote the story on which Destination Moon was based and had a one-third credit on the script) it’s easy to believe the report on imdb.com that blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo had a hand in the Rocketship X-M script.
Most of the press on Rocketship X-M has veered between qualified raves and qualified pans, and the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 crew even gave this their “treatment” (though when Charles downloaded it that way I insisted that, having never seen Rocketship X-M before, I wanted my first encounter with it to be “straight”), and as Charles pointed out it’s hardly in the same league as The Day the Earth Stood Still or Forbidden Planet (or, for that matter, Fritz Lang’s 1928 Woman on the Moon, which in my opinion remained the best film about space travel until 2001: A Space Odyssey 40 years later), but on its own merits it’s a quite well done science-fiction film, and the Martian scenes (which no doubt gave Kurt Neumann a sense of liberation after all the scenes he’d had to shoot inside that tin can of a spaceship!) in particular are marvelously conceived, vividly exploiting the Death Valley locations on which they were filmed (a quite appropriate locale for a film scored by Ferde Grofé, whose most famous work as a composer was the Grand Canyon Suite!) and suspensefully staged and edited.
The final scene, in which the surviving crew members suddenly realize that they don’t have enough fuel for a safe landing back on Earth and therefore they’re going to be killed in a crash — but they radio back to their home base to communicate the all-important “message” that Earth needs to avoid the fate of the Martians (though even in a film this gutsy exactly what we have to do to avoid their fate is not spelled out in the script) — is oddly moving and much more intense than the similar crisis at the end of Destination Moon (in which the astronauts have to jettison practically the whole interior of their ship to make it light enough to fly back to earth on their existing fuel supply — and that film ends oddly with the rocket still in mid-space on the way back from the moon to Earth!); and even the rather schlocky gimmick that Col. Graham and Dr. Van Horn finally discover and declare their love for each other just when their rocket is about to crash to Earth and they’re about to die is done in a way that avoids the obvious sentimentality and achieves a Romantic-opera sensibility of two lovers about to be united forever by their simultaneous deaths. Rocketship X-M isn’t a great movie, but it’s an engagingly quirky one and has a lot more to offer than your standard space opera of the period.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)