by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Let’s Fall in Love, a charming semi-musical (Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler wrote four songs for it — “Let’s Fall in Love,” which became a standard even though the film itself was quickly forgotten — and “Love is Love Anywhere,” which were used; and “Breakfast Ball” and “This Is Only the Beginning,” which weren’t in the final cut) from Columbia in 1933 (the film was produced between October 23 and November 18 and released December 26, though that was so late in the year that Clive Hirschhorn in The Hollywood Musical listed it as 1934) directed by David Burton from a script by Herbert Fields. Hirschhorn described it as “a satisfying blend of music, romance and comedy,” and that about sums it up.
It’s a behind-the-scenes film about Hollywood, and in particular the Premier Pictures studio, headed by boorish, thickly accented Max Hopper (Gregory Ratoff). He’s currently making a movie called Let’s Fall in Love that’s a personal project of the studio’s star director, Kenneth Lane (Edmund Lowe, top-billed), and the star is Swedish import Hedwig Forsell (Tala Birell), whom Lane discovered working at a drugstore counter just two years earlier and built up into the world’s most famous actress. When the movie opens Lane is teaching the title song to the chorus that’s supposed to accompany Forsell in the film’s big number — only she’s having a diva hissy-fit, yelling successively at her maid, her director, her producer and two women sitting on the set who are wives of major exhibitors who can make or break the film’s chances for success when — if — it ever gets finished and released. When Lane shoots a love scene, Forsell snaps instantly from diva mode to committed actress, only to break off in mid-lovemaking and angrily insist that the script is stupid and she can’t play it. (Judging from the dialogue we’ve already heard for the film-within-the-film, she has a point.) The character is obviously a parody of Greta Garbo — or at least the common image of her — and Fields even cribs such famous lines from the real Garbo as “I vant to be alone” and “I t’ank I go home now.” Birell rises to the challenge and plays her to the nines.
Lane fires her from the project and Max tries to get him to hire an established American actress to replace her, but Lane insists that since the film is set in Sweden he needs a genuinely Swedish woman to play the lead — only after hundreds of Swedish women of all ages and appearances have passed through the doors of Premier’s casting department and none of them have been what Lane was looking for, he’s ready to give up in desperation when suddenly, on a date to a traveling carnival with his assistant (and girlfriend) Gerry Marsh (Miriam Jordan), he sees a girl with an outrageously phony “French” accent running a concession on the midway and instantly decides she’s right for the part. There are only two complications — when the girl, Jean Kendall (Ann Sothern), hears Lane approach her and say he’s in the film business and can put her in the movies, she naturally assumes it’s a cheap pick-up line and turns him down; and, when she relents and agrees to test for his film, she’s not Swedish.
He doesn’t consider that a problem because he’s hatched a plan: he’ll have her move in with a middle-aged Swedish couple, Svente and Lisa Bjorkman (John Qualen and Greta Meyer) — who, though we’re supposed to believe they’re real Swedes, talk with the phony “Swedish” accents of El Brendel-style dialect comedians — and live there for several weeks, during which they’ll give her a crash course in Swedish language and culture so when Lane finally introduces her at the studio, he can pass her off as genuine Swedish actress “Sigrid Lund.” Jean agrees to go through the whole charade because, needless to say, she’s got a crush on Ken — though she’s disappointed when she learns, on the eve of her big film debut, he’s already got a girlfriend — and when Ken hosts a party and invites celebrities and the media to meet his new star, in a fit of jealousy Gerry outs her as an American and not a Swede at all.
Max, thinking of how long Ken put the film on hold to look for a real Swede and how much money that costs him, has an argument with Ken which results in Ken resigning from the studio — but in the meantime the media coverage makes Jean a heroine (“The Girl Who Fooled Hollywood!” the headlines cry, making the rather obvious point that she must be a great actress if she could convince so many people for so long that she was a nationality other than her own) and people flood movie theatres all over the country demanding to see the as-yet unfinished film. There’s just one catch: Jean has disappeared from Hollywood, and Ken has to find her — which he does by tracing her carnival to Kansas City, ultimately winning her back both professionally and personally.
Though this isn’t exactly the freshest story in the world — it wasn’t then, either — Let’s Fall in Love is told with a marvelous wit and insouciant charm that makes up for its triteness and the failure to showcase its title song adequately. We hear it three times — first sung by an adenoidal Irish tenor in the opening sequence (one wonders what possessed the great director Kenneth Lane to put an Irish tenor into a movie about Sweden) and then twice sung by Ann Sothern, who was a personable and likable actress but hardly one of the golden throats of cinematic history. (I couldn’t help but imagine what a breathtaking film this could have been with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in the leads!)
One wonders how a film got greenlighted at Columbia that portrayed a studio boss as obnoxious, pushy and unscrupulous — the usual view of Columbia’s real-life head, Harry Cohn — and also how life imitated art four years later when Sam Goldwyn suffered a major embarrassment after Sigrid Gurie, the actress he had supposedly (and with great fanfare and ballyhoo) imported from Norway, turned out to have been born in Flatbush, Brooklyn (though she was at least Norwegian by ancestry; her parents had emigrated from there), thereby ruining the box-office chances of the film he’d starred her in, The Adventures of Marco Polo with Gary Cooper. Interestingly, Let’s Fall in Love was remade at Columbia 14 years later under the title Slightly French — reflecting a change in the country the heroine (Dorothy Lamour) had to pretend to be from from Sweden to France — directed by Douglas Sirk, who rather airily dismissed the movie when he told Jon Halliday, “I have no feeling for this picture at all.”
Friday, July 31, 2009
Love Thy Neighbor (Marvista/Lifetime, 2006)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
This morning I saw a quite interesting movie I’d recorded off Lifetime: Love Thy Neighbor, a 2006 production from something called Marvista Entertainment (whose logo was actually a view of a seascape with a rock-like island off to the right side — for once one of these paper production companies picked a logo with some real-world tie to its name!), directed by Paul Schneider from a script by Kraig Wenman and dealing with a woman named Laura Benson (Alexandra Paul, top-billed) who’s raising her teenage daughter Erin (Ksenia Solo) more or less on her own. She and her husband Jim (Gary Hudson) are still together, but his job — he works for a major aviation company flying around the world to sell their civilian planes to airlines — keeps him away from home so much Laura is practically a single mother. A couple of burglars, one identified in the cast list only as “Shooter” (James Binkley) and his accomplice, Jack Kim (Sean Baek), decide to take advantage of her male-free lifestyle and break into her house while she and Erin are alone there; they kill the family dog, Fred, but this alerts the police and they arrive at the house, not in time to catch the burglars but at least in time to scare them into fleeing — and later they do catch the shooter while he’s burglarizing another home and Laura learns from the lead police detective on the case, Zeller (John Bourgeois), that the burglar team previously robbed, raped and killed an 80-year-old woman.
Nonetheless, both Laura and Erin suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and, with at least one of the burglars still at large and threatening to return to keep them from testifying, during one of his occasional returns home Jim (ya remember Jim?) decides that the way to keep his wife and daughter safe is to buy a home in a gated community with built-in burglar alarms, a guard at the front gate and heavy-duty security. Erin decides she likes the new house “except for the Alcatraz stuff,” but not surprisingly, this being a Lifetime movie, the security isn’t enough to deter either Kim (who’s eventually arrested, only to be released on bail) or a new threat to the Bensons: their next-door-neighbor, Janis Rivers (Shannon Lawson), who arrives all chirpy and chipper, baking them a key lime pie to welcome them into the neighborhood and offering to be their best friend. Janis has a daughter, Jenny (Michelle Killoran), who’s Erin’s age and virtually catatonic — it’s all too believable that someone with a relentlessly talkative mother who demands to take charge of any and all social situations would respond by shutting up and essentially shutting down.
It’s not surprising that neither Ksenia Solo nor Michelle Killoran look even remotely like the actors purportedly playing their parents — indeed, Killoran would be more believable as Alexandra Paul’s daughter (since at least they’re both blonde) than as Shannon Lawson’s — but that’s a common movie casting faux pas and it doesn’t affect the film much. Anyway, Janis keeps her game face on, constantly offering quotes from 19th century authors and buddying up to the Bensons — including Jim on his rare returns home — until both Laura and we suddenly see a different side of her when her ex-husband Alan (John Jarvis) shows up to return Jenny after a weekend visitation and Janis goes ballistic over his return late and even more so when he tries to give her an affectionate pat on her shoulder. “Don’t touch me! Don’t you ever touch me!” she snarls, giving us a quite different view of this person than the virtual Stepford Mom we’ve seen before. Things really go into overdrive when both Erin and Jenny try out for the high-school girl’s soccer team; Erin makes it but Jenny doesn’t, and Janis takes Laura out to lunch and in a tearful plea asks Laura to pull Erin off the team to make room for Jenny.
Laura, not surprisingly, refuses — and from then on it’s all-out war as Janis calls in an anonymous (false) report that Erin has been seen taking steroids, forcing her off the team until she can be drug-tested — and when the drug test is about to come back clean, Janis strikes again and tells the school principal that the coach has been having an affair with the mother of one of the students in exchange for giving his paramour’s daughter special treatment. She also fakes a threatening note, made up of words clipped from magazine headlines in the best tradition of 1930’s gangster movies, that purports to come from Kim and threatens that he knows where Laura lives and will come back and kill her the way he did her dog — “Ruff Ruff.” Things really heat up when Janis butchers Laura’s cat (a stray cat wandered in when they were moving in and Erin joked to her mom, “It looks like we’ve been adopted,” words she later used about Janis as well) and confronts her in her home (Laura makes the mistake of turning off all that high-tech security and letting her in, thinking it’s Detective Zeller), beating her up and trying to stab her with a knife and club Erin to death with a fireplace poker — and there’s a hot confrontation scene which ends with Janis falling through a stair rail on the top floor of the house and crashing to the floor below, though the blow only stuns her and she’s taken into custody alive at the end.
Love Thy Neighbor (one wishes they could have found room to play Bing Crosby’s 1934 song of the same title from his film We’re Not Dressing, creating the ironic effect the makers of Watchmen went for when they had the opening murder take place to the strains of Nat “King” Cole’s “Unforgettable”) is a pretty generic example of what Maureen Dowd derisively referred to as Lifetime’s “pussies in peril” movies, but at least it’s well constructed and suspenseful (though Paul Schneider — as if consciously seeking to copy the style of his far more famous near-namesake, Paul Schrader — pretty relentlessly overdirects), and it has one first-rate performance: Shannon Lawson’s as the villainess. The sort of person politely referred to as “a woman of size” — big but not completely unattractive and sufficiently hot that she can bat her eyes (and other things) at security guard Crowley (Rod Crawford) and thereby get him to see her conflicts with Laura her way — Lawson probably didn’t get many offers for roles this big and meaty, and given one she seized every opportunity.
The character basically comes off as a grown-up version of Rhoda Penmark from Maxwell Anderson’s play The Bad Seed (the Production Code Administration mandated that she die in the movie, but in the play she lives while her mom dies), able to conceal her psychopathology under a mask of sweetness and lovability and to turn her nature and her whole affect around on a dime as the spirit moves her, suddenly letting loose the monster underneath the relentlessly chipper perfect-suburbanite exterior. An unhinged woman with a record of assault and domestic violence (“She has a mean right hook,” Zeller warns Laura a few scenes before Laura finds herself on the receiving end of it), whose final descent into madness appears to have been sparked when her ex-husband (the typical lanky, sandy-haired milquetoast Lifetime’s casting department generally likes in roles like this) sued for custody of Jenny and looked like he was about to win, Janis is a vividly written character brought to intense and unforgettable life by Lawson’s finely honed acting.
This morning I saw a quite interesting movie I’d recorded off Lifetime: Love Thy Neighbor, a 2006 production from something called Marvista Entertainment (whose logo was actually a view of a seascape with a rock-like island off to the right side — for once one of these paper production companies picked a logo with some real-world tie to its name!), directed by Paul Schneider from a script by Kraig Wenman and dealing with a woman named Laura Benson (Alexandra Paul, top-billed) who’s raising her teenage daughter Erin (Ksenia Solo) more or less on her own. She and her husband Jim (Gary Hudson) are still together, but his job — he works for a major aviation company flying around the world to sell their civilian planes to airlines — keeps him away from home so much Laura is practically a single mother. A couple of burglars, one identified in the cast list only as “Shooter” (James Binkley) and his accomplice, Jack Kim (Sean Baek), decide to take advantage of her male-free lifestyle and break into her house while she and Erin are alone there; they kill the family dog, Fred, but this alerts the police and they arrive at the house, not in time to catch the burglars but at least in time to scare them into fleeing — and later they do catch the shooter while he’s burglarizing another home and Laura learns from the lead police detective on the case, Zeller (John Bourgeois), that the burglar team previously robbed, raped and killed an 80-year-old woman.
Nonetheless, both Laura and Erin suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and, with at least one of the burglars still at large and threatening to return to keep them from testifying, during one of his occasional returns home Jim (ya remember Jim?) decides that the way to keep his wife and daughter safe is to buy a home in a gated community with built-in burglar alarms, a guard at the front gate and heavy-duty security. Erin decides she likes the new house “except for the Alcatraz stuff,” but not surprisingly, this being a Lifetime movie, the security isn’t enough to deter either Kim (who’s eventually arrested, only to be released on bail) or a new threat to the Bensons: their next-door-neighbor, Janis Rivers (Shannon Lawson), who arrives all chirpy and chipper, baking them a key lime pie to welcome them into the neighborhood and offering to be their best friend. Janis has a daughter, Jenny (Michelle Killoran), who’s Erin’s age and virtually catatonic — it’s all too believable that someone with a relentlessly talkative mother who demands to take charge of any and all social situations would respond by shutting up and essentially shutting down.
It’s not surprising that neither Ksenia Solo nor Michelle Killoran look even remotely like the actors purportedly playing their parents — indeed, Killoran would be more believable as Alexandra Paul’s daughter (since at least they’re both blonde) than as Shannon Lawson’s — but that’s a common movie casting faux pas and it doesn’t affect the film much. Anyway, Janis keeps her game face on, constantly offering quotes from 19th century authors and buddying up to the Bensons — including Jim on his rare returns home — until both Laura and we suddenly see a different side of her when her ex-husband Alan (John Jarvis) shows up to return Jenny after a weekend visitation and Janis goes ballistic over his return late and even more so when he tries to give her an affectionate pat on her shoulder. “Don’t touch me! Don’t you ever touch me!” she snarls, giving us a quite different view of this person than the virtual Stepford Mom we’ve seen before. Things really go into overdrive when both Erin and Jenny try out for the high-school girl’s soccer team; Erin makes it but Jenny doesn’t, and Janis takes Laura out to lunch and in a tearful plea asks Laura to pull Erin off the team to make room for Jenny.
Laura, not surprisingly, refuses — and from then on it’s all-out war as Janis calls in an anonymous (false) report that Erin has been seen taking steroids, forcing her off the team until she can be drug-tested — and when the drug test is about to come back clean, Janis strikes again and tells the school principal that the coach has been having an affair with the mother of one of the students in exchange for giving his paramour’s daughter special treatment. She also fakes a threatening note, made up of words clipped from magazine headlines in the best tradition of 1930’s gangster movies, that purports to come from Kim and threatens that he knows where Laura lives and will come back and kill her the way he did her dog — “Ruff Ruff.” Things really heat up when Janis butchers Laura’s cat (a stray cat wandered in when they were moving in and Erin joked to her mom, “It looks like we’ve been adopted,” words she later used about Janis as well) and confronts her in her home (Laura makes the mistake of turning off all that high-tech security and letting her in, thinking it’s Detective Zeller), beating her up and trying to stab her with a knife and club Erin to death with a fireplace poker — and there’s a hot confrontation scene which ends with Janis falling through a stair rail on the top floor of the house and crashing to the floor below, though the blow only stuns her and she’s taken into custody alive at the end.
Love Thy Neighbor (one wishes they could have found room to play Bing Crosby’s 1934 song of the same title from his film We’re Not Dressing, creating the ironic effect the makers of Watchmen went for when they had the opening murder take place to the strains of Nat “King” Cole’s “Unforgettable”) is a pretty generic example of what Maureen Dowd derisively referred to as Lifetime’s “pussies in peril” movies, but at least it’s well constructed and suspenseful (though Paul Schneider — as if consciously seeking to copy the style of his far more famous near-namesake, Paul Schrader — pretty relentlessly overdirects), and it has one first-rate performance: Shannon Lawson’s as the villainess. The sort of person politely referred to as “a woman of size” — big but not completely unattractive and sufficiently hot that she can bat her eyes (and other things) at security guard Crowley (Rod Crawford) and thereby get him to see her conflicts with Laura her way — Lawson probably didn’t get many offers for roles this big and meaty, and given one she seized every opportunity.
The character basically comes off as a grown-up version of Rhoda Penmark from Maxwell Anderson’s play The Bad Seed (the Production Code Administration mandated that she die in the movie, but in the play she lives while her mom dies), able to conceal her psychopathology under a mask of sweetness and lovability and to turn her nature and her whole affect around on a dime as the spirit moves her, suddenly letting loose the monster underneath the relentlessly chipper perfect-suburbanite exterior. An unhinged woman with a record of assault and domestic violence (“She has a mean right hook,” Zeller warns Laura a few scenes before Laura finds herself on the receiving end of it), whose final descent into madness appears to have been sparked when her ex-husband (the typical lanky, sandy-haired milquetoast Lifetime’s casting department generally likes in roles like this) sued for custody of Jenny and looked like he was about to win, Janis is a vividly written character brought to intense and unforgettable life by Lawson’s finely honed acting.
Thursday, July 30, 2009
Watchmen (Warners/Paramount, 2009)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film Watchmen began its life as a comic-book serial published by DC in 1986-87, drawn and lettered by Dave Gibbons from a script by Alan Moore — who’s become noted in the comics world for his innovative long-form scripts and his Salinger-esque hatred of the movie business; as essentially a writer-for-hire he hasn’t been able to prevent the filmization of his works completely (as Salinger has ever since he sold one story, “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut,” to Sam Goldwyn in the early 1950’s and was appalled at the saccharine soap opera it turned into as the 1952 film My Foolish Heart), but he has denounced every one of the films made from his works, and on Watchmen he went so far as to decline screen credit, so the film’s opening titles (itself a refreshing return to tradition in a movie industry that increasingly relegates all its credits — even the name of the film itself! — to the end) attribute the script to David Hayter and Alex Tse based on a “graphic novel co-created by Dave Gibbons,” with nary a mention of who his co-creator was.
Watchmen was first published as a series of normal-length comic books and then reprinted in complete form as a book-length “graphic novel” (the term of art for a comic book with pretensions), and since it was created in the mid-1980’s it takes place then — albeit in an alternate-reality version of the 1980’s in which Richard Nixon (Robert Wisden) successfully got the 22nd Amendment repealed (as he actually planned to do following his landslide re-election victory in 1972 — only the metastasizing Watergate scandal undid his political capital and channeled his energies into sheer survival rather than extending his term in office) and is now (1985) just beginning his fifth term in office. He was able to stay in office that long partly because of Doctor Manhattan née Jon Osterman (Billy Crudup), who like the Incredible Hulk gained super-powers as the result of a nuclear-energy experiment gone awry — only Jon turned blue instead of green, he went about naked from then on (his cock is clearly visible in the film, apparently even more than it was in the comic — where the appearance of a male with a visible penis was itself a major departure from the norms of the form) and he gained not only physical brawn but an ability to manipulate time and space and an increase of his already formidable intellectual and physical powers.
The main characters of Watchmen are the assemblage of super-heroes so named, who’ve had to go into retirement since the passage of the Keene Act in 1981 forbade people from going about wearing masks; they are themselves an offshoot of another group of superheroes called the Minutemen, formed in 1940 to help America emerge triumphant in its upcoming involvement in World War II, and at least two of the members of the Watchmen, Nite Owl a.k.a. Dan Dreiberg (Patrick Wilson) and the Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman — a woman named Malin, top-billed), are descendants of the originals from the Minutemen (Stephen McHattie and Carla Gugino, respectively) — and not only is the new Silk Spectre the daughter of the original, her father, it turns out midway through the movie, is the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), yet another Watchman who attempted to rape the original Spectre but then came back and somehow managed to seduce her into having sex with him willingly.
The main Watchman is Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), whose gimmick is that his mask is white with black splotches on it but the splotches constantly change form and shape — not all that different from the gimmicky (and physically impossible) villains Chester Gould had Dick Tracy confront in the later years of the comic strip (my favorite was “Spots,” a crook who had spots … not on his face but trailing along beside it, in mid-air), but an effect in which for once the movie medium scores over the graphic novel: all Dave Gibbons could do is vary the pattern of Rorschach’s spots every time he drew him, while the filmmakers can animate his spots and have them change before our eyes. In the opening scene the Comedian is murdered, and Rorschach — who spends most of his time wandering the mean streets of the Watchmen’s home city (we’re supposed to think it’s New York, I suppose) and spouting off pseudo-poetic lines that make it sound as if Allen Ginsberg or Charles Bukowski has suddenly acquired a super-power: “Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face. The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout, ‘Save us!’... and I’ll whisper, ‘No’” — determines that there’s a mysterious masked avenger who is attempting to eliminate all the Watchmen as part of some sinister scheme for which he needs a world without superheroes.
Rorschach is also depicted as a disgusted Right-winger, continually sounding off against the liberals who have ruined America — suggesting that had the story of Watchmen actually followed American history instead of inventing its own alternative version, instead of taking long nocturnal walks through seedy neighborhoods and living in a dump. Rorschach could have made a lot of money as a talk-radio host.
Anyway, after a long series of sometimes powerful and more often just confusing incidents involving love, sex (Silk Spectre begins the movie as Doctor Manhattan’s lover and ends it as Nite Owl’s), jealousy, the media (in one of the film’s most fascinating scenes, Doctor Manhattan, who though rarely seen is acknowledged in the public eye as the power behind Nixon’s throne, grants a TV interview and then disrupts the studio and vaporizes all its inhabitants when he doesn’t like the line of questioning he’s being subjected to), Mars (where Doctor Manhattan flees because after his girlfriend jilts him he no longer feels any connection to Earth) and the threat of nuclear annihilation over the war in Afghanistan, in which Nixon (still with Henry Kissinger as his right-hand man) and the Soviet premier are threatening all-out war between the superpowers as both the Russians and the Americans mass troops and high-tech weaponry on the Afghan border, Watchmen drags along for over three hours (the theatrical release was 162 minutes but I called Columbia House to change my order to the 186-minute director’s cut once I heard that the longer one existed) — and the U.S. military leadership meets with Nixon in a set obviously patterned on the War Room in Dr. Strangelove (one of many older and, quite frankly, better movies Watchmen quotes from) — the plot, such as it is, resolves in Antarctica, where yet another former Watchman, Ozymandias a.k.a. Adrian Veidt — as in Conrad (Matthew Goode, the one genuinely handsome male in the cast), has built what’s supposedly a clean-energy plant that can eliminate shortages and scarcity worldwide.
Only it’s really a device that will set off nuclear mega-weapons in all the world’s most important cities, including New York, London, Paris and Moscow, because Veidt has apparently absorbed the theories of the deep ecologists and decided that the only way the world’s people will allow themselves to bury national, tribal and racial divisions and hatreds is if some horrendous disaster befalls them, millions of humans are killed and the remaining members of the human race find it necessary to pull together in the post-catastrophe world. Adrian’s plan actually goes off as scheduled, and the other Watchmen decide that he’s right and the truth needs to be concealed from the human race to maximize the potential for world peace as a result — except for Rorschach, who’s killed by Nite Owl when he threatens to reveal the details of Veidt’s plot — and though he dies his diary ends up in the hands of a Right-wing newspaper called the New Frontiersman, which eagerly prints it to debunk the whole peace movement and undo Veidt’s plot.
Watchmen is a movie that virtually epitomizes everything that’s wrong with modern-day filmmaking — and I say that with a great deal of sorrow because it’s a film you want very much to like; though it’s aiming for the blockbuster comic-movie crowd it’s also aiming a lot higher than that, it’s attempting to deal with Big Issues both emotional and political, and its script is rich with allusions (the smiley-face button that was the Comedian’s symbol with drops of his blood on it, the watch — Veidt says his father was a watchmaker who gave up his craft when he realized Einstein was right when he said space and time were relative — the “nuclear doomsday clock” which when the action begins is set at five to midnight — and a whole plethora of enigmatic clues which form unifying threads throughout the film) and is well put together for the genre. But Watchmen suffers from too many of the sins of modern-day filmmaking for it to be enjoyable.
It’s got one of those crazy-quilt stories in which literally anything can happen — which means that you can’t create a legitimate sense of surprise because you haven’t created a baseline of audience expectations you can then startle them by violating. Instead you watch this movie drone on and on and, when the plot takes a particularly fantastic turn, you say, “Oh, yeah, they’re on Mars. Right.” It’s also one of those modern-day movies that seems to have been edited with a vegetable chopper, in which the filmmakers (including Zack Snyder, who got the assignment to direct Watchmen after the success of his film 300, based on another Alan Moore graphic-novel script about the battle of Thermopylae, meaning they were interested in his command of on-screen action more than any ability to work with actors or create a film that makes sense) seem utterly convinced that if they hold a shot for more than about three seconds the entire audience will get ADHD and walk out or get bored — and it’s another one of those damnable films in which the director and writers maintain an almost anthropological distance from their characters, attempting to be “cool” and only achieving an emotional coldness which carefully avoids giving us any characters we can like or relate to, and any more than the most basic, simplistic emotional conflicts between them.
Much of the publicity surrounding Watchmen — which was in development at one studio or another for over 20 years and ran through quite a few putative directors and actors before the one we have finally got made — centered around the desire of the filmmakers to remain faithful to the graphic novel so the hard-core fans would be sure to like the movie, Maybe they should have spent some more time worrying about who else would like the movie; as it stands, Watchmen is an overwhelming film, but not necessarily in the positive sense of that term — it drones on and on and on, and some of the imagery is breathtakingly beautiful (director Snyder deliberately worked from Gibbons’ original drawings instead of storyboarding the action on his own) but little or none of this movie makes much sense — and I couldn’t help wishing that Larry and Adam Wachowski had been given the nod to do this, because in V for Vendetta they took an Alan Moore-scripted graphic novel and made a film that (despite a few of the same flaws as Watchmen, notably scenes that seemed to exist more to show off their visual virtuosity than to add to the plot or characterizations) has a clearly defined beginning, middle and end, a hero we can root for (despite, or perhaps because of, his flaws), and a story that taps real human emotions and ends in legitimate and even moving tragedy.
Watchmen was one of the most intensely hyped films of this year, and three studios fought in court over its box-office receipts — but it was a commercial disappointment and after it was made Warners’ studio head announced that they would never again make a comic-book movie with an “R” rating (as if that were the problem — commercial or artistic — with this film!).
The film Watchmen began its life as a comic-book serial published by DC in 1986-87, drawn and lettered by Dave Gibbons from a script by Alan Moore — who’s become noted in the comics world for his innovative long-form scripts and his Salinger-esque hatred of the movie business; as essentially a writer-for-hire he hasn’t been able to prevent the filmization of his works completely (as Salinger has ever since he sold one story, “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut,” to Sam Goldwyn in the early 1950’s and was appalled at the saccharine soap opera it turned into as the 1952 film My Foolish Heart), but he has denounced every one of the films made from his works, and on Watchmen he went so far as to decline screen credit, so the film’s opening titles (itself a refreshing return to tradition in a movie industry that increasingly relegates all its credits — even the name of the film itself! — to the end) attribute the script to David Hayter and Alex Tse based on a “graphic novel co-created by Dave Gibbons,” with nary a mention of who his co-creator was.
Watchmen was first published as a series of normal-length comic books and then reprinted in complete form as a book-length “graphic novel” (the term of art for a comic book with pretensions), and since it was created in the mid-1980’s it takes place then — albeit in an alternate-reality version of the 1980’s in which Richard Nixon (Robert Wisden) successfully got the 22nd Amendment repealed (as he actually planned to do following his landslide re-election victory in 1972 — only the metastasizing Watergate scandal undid his political capital and channeled his energies into sheer survival rather than extending his term in office) and is now (1985) just beginning his fifth term in office. He was able to stay in office that long partly because of Doctor Manhattan née Jon Osterman (Billy Crudup), who like the Incredible Hulk gained super-powers as the result of a nuclear-energy experiment gone awry — only Jon turned blue instead of green, he went about naked from then on (his cock is clearly visible in the film, apparently even more than it was in the comic — where the appearance of a male with a visible penis was itself a major departure from the norms of the form) and he gained not only physical brawn but an ability to manipulate time and space and an increase of his already formidable intellectual and physical powers.
The main characters of Watchmen are the assemblage of super-heroes so named, who’ve had to go into retirement since the passage of the Keene Act in 1981 forbade people from going about wearing masks; they are themselves an offshoot of another group of superheroes called the Minutemen, formed in 1940 to help America emerge triumphant in its upcoming involvement in World War II, and at least two of the members of the Watchmen, Nite Owl a.k.a. Dan Dreiberg (Patrick Wilson) and the Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman — a woman named Malin, top-billed), are descendants of the originals from the Minutemen (Stephen McHattie and Carla Gugino, respectively) — and not only is the new Silk Spectre the daughter of the original, her father, it turns out midway through the movie, is the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), yet another Watchman who attempted to rape the original Spectre but then came back and somehow managed to seduce her into having sex with him willingly.
The main Watchman is Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), whose gimmick is that his mask is white with black splotches on it but the splotches constantly change form and shape — not all that different from the gimmicky (and physically impossible) villains Chester Gould had Dick Tracy confront in the later years of the comic strip (my favorite was “Spots,” a crook who had spots … not on his face but trailing along beside it, in mid-air), but an effect in which for once the movie medium scores over the graphic novel: all Dave Gibbons could do is vary the pattern of Rorschach’s spots every time he drew him, while the filmmakers can animate his spots and have them change before our eyes. In the opening scene the Comedian is murdered, and Rorschach — who spends most of his time wandering the mean streets of the Watchmen’s home city (we’re supposed to think it’s New York, I suppose) and spouting off pseudo-poetic lines that make it sound as if Allen Ginsberg or Charles Bukowski has suddenly acquired a super-power: “Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach. This city is afraid of me. I have seen its true face. The streets are extended gutters and the gutters are full of blood and when the drains finally scab over, all the vermin will drown. The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout, ‘Save us!’... and I’ll whisper, ‘No’” — determines that there’s a mysterious masked avenger who is attempting to eliminate all the Watchmen as part of some sinister scheme for which he needs a world without superheroes.
Rorschach is also depicted as a disgusted Right-winger, continually sounding off against the liberals who have ruined America — suggesting that had the story of Watchmen actually followed American history instead of inventing its own alternative version, instead of taking long nocturnal walks through seedy neighborhoods and living in a dump. Rorschach could have made a lot of money as a talk-radio host.
Anyway, after a long series of sometimes powerful and more often just confusing incidents involving love, sex (Silk Spectre begins the movie as Doctor Manhattan’s lover and ends it as Nite Owl’s), jealousy, the media (in one of the film’s most fascinating scenes, Doctor Manhattan, who though rarely seen is acknowledged in the public eye as the power behind Nixon’s throne, grants a TV interview and then disrupts the studio and vaporizes all its inhabitants when he doesn’t like the line of questioning he’s being subjected to), Mars (where Doctor Manhattan flees because after his girlfriend jilts him he no longer feels any connection to Earth) and the threat of nuclear annihilation over the war in Afghanistan, in which Nixon (still with Henry Kissinger as his right-hand man) and the Soviet premier are threatening all-out war between the superpowers as both the Russians and the Americans mass troops and high-tech weaponry on the Afghan border, Watchmen drags along for over three hours (the theatrical release was 162 minutes but I called Columbia House to change my order to the 186-minute director’s cut once I heard that the longer one existed) — and the U.S. military leadership meets with Nixon in a set obviously patterned on the War Room in Dr. Strangelove (one of many older and, quite frankly, better movies Watchmen quotes from) — the plot, such as it is, resolves in Antarctica, where yet another former Watchman, Ozymandias a.k.a. Adrian Veidt — as in Conrad (Matthew Goode, the one genuinely handsome male in the cast), has built what’s supposedly a clean-energy plant that can eliminate shortages and scarcity worldwide.
Only it’s really a device that will set off nuclear mega-weapons in all the world’s most important cities, including New York, London, Paris and Moscow, because Veidt has apparently absorbed the theories of the deep ecologists and decided that the only way the world’s people will allow themselves to bury national, tribal and racial divisions and hatreds is if some horrendous disaster befalls them, millions of humans are killed and the remaining members of the human race find it necessary to pull together in the post-catastrophe world. Adrian’s plan actually goes off as scheduled, and the other Watchmen decide that he’s right and the truth needs to be concealed from the human race to maximize the potential for world peace as a result — except for Rorschach, who’s killed by Nite Owl when he threatens to reveal the details of Veidt’s plot — and though he dies his diary ends up in the hands of a Right-wing newspaper called the New Frontiersman, which eagerly prints it to debunk the whole peace movement and undo Veidt’s plot.
Watchmen is a movie that virtually epitomizes everything that’s wrong with modern-day filmmaking — and I say that with a great deal of sorrow because it’s a film you want very much to like; though it’s aiming for the blockbuster comic-movie crowd it’s also aiming a lot higher than that, it’s attempting to deal with Big Issues both emotional and political, and its script is rich with allusions (the smiley-face button that was the Comedian’s symbol with drops of his blood on it, the watch — Veidt says his father was a watchmaker who gave up his craft when he realized Einstein was right when he said space and time were relative — the “nuclear doomsday clock” which when the action begins is set at five to midnight — and a whole plethora of enigmatic clues which form unifying threads throughout the film) and is well put together for the genre. But Watchmen suffers from too many of the sins of modern-day filmmaking for it to be enjoyable.
It’s got one of those crazy-quilt stories in which literally anything can happen — which means that you can’t create a legitimate sense of surprise because you haven’t created a baseline of audience expectations you can then startle them by violating. Instead you watch this movie drone on and on and, when the plot takes a particularly fantastic turn, you say, “Oh, yeah, they’re on Mars. Right.” It’s also one of those modern-day movies that seems to have been edited with a vegetable chopper, in which the filmmakers (including Zack Snyder, who got the assignment to direct Watchmen after the success of his film 300, based on another Alan Moore graphic-novel script about the battle of Thermopylae, meaning they were interested in his command of on-screen action more than any ability to work with actors or create a film that makes sense) seem utterly convinced that if they hold a shot for more than about three seconds the entire audience will get ADHD and walk out or get bored — and it’s another one of those damnable films in which the director and writers maintain an almost anthropological distance from their characters, attempting to be “cool” and only achieving an emotional coldness which carefully avoids giving us any characters we can like or relate to, and any more than the most basic, simplistic emotional conflicts between them.
Much of the publicity surrounding Watchmen — which was in development at one studio or another for over 20 years and ran through quite a few putative directors and actors before the one we have finally got made — centered around the desire of the filmmakers to remain faithful to the graphic novel so the hard-core fans would be sure to like the movie, Maybe they should have spent some more time worrying about who else would like the movie; as it stands, Watchmen is an overwhelming film, but not necessarily in the positive sense of that term — it drones on and on and on, and some of the imagery is breathtakingly beautiful (director Snyder deliberately worked from Gibbons’ original drawings instead of storyboarding the action on his own) but little or none of this movie makes much sense — and I couldn’t help wishing that Larry and Adam Wachowski had been given the nod to do this, because in V for Vendetta they took an Alan Moore-scripted graphic novel and made a film that (despite a few of the same flaws as Watchmen, notably scenes that seemed to exist more to show off their visual virtuosity than to add to the plot or characterizations) has a clearly defined beginning, middle and end, a hero we can root for (despite, or perhaps because of, his flaws), and a story that taps real human emotions and ends in legitimate and even moving tragedy.
Watchmen was one of the most intensely hyped films of this year, and three studios fought in court over its box-office receipts — but it was a commercial disappointment and after it was made Warners’ studio head announced that they would never again make a comic-book movie with an “R” rating (as if that were the problem — commercial or artistic — with this film!).
Sicko (Dog Eat Dog/Weinstein Co./Lionsgate, 2007)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Michael Moore’s Sicko, two years after its release, turns out to be unexpectedly timely in the middle of the debate in Washington, D.C. over health care “reform” — though I use the term in quotes because the entire deliberation at the federal level has been committed to the idea that, whatever happens, the current structure of the U.S.’s private, for-profit health insurance industry as the bulwark of health coverage must be kept intact. I would argue — and I’m sure, on the basis of his film, that Moore would agree with me — that universal coverage and a private insurance industry are mutually incompatible: you can have one or the other, but not both. The reason is very simple: it’s the enormous profits the health insurance companies are making (mostly for their shareholders but also for their CEO’s and other top executives) that are sucking resources out of the system that otherwise could be used to extend coverage to the currently uninsured. The resources to cover everybody exist nowhere else — which is why the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently estimated that the so-called “reform” being pushed by the Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress would cost a whopping $1 trillion more than the current system.
Sicko the movie is typical Michael Moore — a good amount of grandstanding and a liberal dose of wit (sometimes clever, sometimes heavy-handed) to make a serious point: that everywhere else in the advanced industrialized world, government guarantees its citizens access to health care as a right and it is simply accepted as a matter of practicality and realism that the health care system will be funded primarily by taxes — and will make its services available to anyone, regardless of coverage, employment status, pre-existing conditions or ability to pay. It’s a movie that went absolutely nowhere, though, in terms of affecting the debate over health care — on the July 10, 2009 episode of Bill Moyers’ Journal, Wendell Potter, former public relations director for Cigna, boasted of his and the industry’s efforts that “blunted” the potential political impact of Sicko:
“WENDELL POTTER: I thought that he hit the nail on the head with his movie. But the industry, from the moment that the industry learned that Michael Moore was taking on the health care industry, it was really concerned.
“BILL MOYERS: What were they afraid of?
“WENDELL POTTER: They were afraid that people would believe Michael Moore.
“BILL MOYERS: We obtained a copy of the game plan that was adopted by the industry’s trade association, AHIP. And it spells out the industry strategies in gold letters. It says, ‘Highlight horror stories of government-run systems.’ What was that about?
“WENDELL POTTER: The industry has always tried to make Americans think that government-run systems are the worst thing that could possibly happen to them, that if you even consider that, you’re heading down on the slippery slope towards socialism. So they have used scare tactics for years and years and years, to keep that from happening. If there were a broader program like our Medicare program, it could potentially reduce the profits of these big companies. So that is their biggest concern.
“BILL MOYERS: And there was a political strategy. ‘Position Sicko as a threat to Democrats’ larger agenda.’ What does that mean?
“WENDELL POTTER: That means that part of the effort to discredit this film was to use lobbyists and their own staff to go onto Capitol Hill and say, ‘Look, you don’t want to believe this movie. You don’t want to talk about it. You don’t want to endorse it. And if you do, we can make things tough for you.’
“BILL MOYERS: How?
“WENDELL POTTER: By running ads, commercials in your home district when you’re running for re-election, not contributing to your campaigns again, or contributing to your competitor.
“BILL MOYERS: This is fascinating. You know, ‘Build awareness among centrist Democratic policy organizations … including the Democratic Leadership Council.’ … Then it says, ‘Message to Democratic insiders. Embracing Moore is one-way ticket back to minority party status.’
“WENDELL POTTER: Yeah.
“BILL MOYERS: Now, that’s exactly what they did, didn’t they? They … radicalized Moore, so that his message was discredited because the messenger was seen to be radical.
“WENDELL POTTER: Absolutely.”
Sicko is full of grim horror stories (though the film as it exists didn’t confirm my fear that it would be too gross to watch), including the uninsured patient who sliced off the tips of two of his fingers with a table saw and was told by the hospital that he could have a choice: they could reattach his middle finger for $60,000 or his ring finger for just $12,000. There’s also the incredibly moving testimony of Dr. Linda Peeno, speaking before a congressional committee in 1996 virtually in tears as she told about her routine denials of health insurance claims, including one that actually resulted in someone’s death — and for which service she was handsomely rewarded by her insurance company, as part of a system that routinely gives bonuses to doctors in charge of review panels based on how many claims they deny: the more denials you issue, the more money you get:
“My name is Linda Peeno. I am here primarily today to make a public confession: In the Spring of 1987, as a physician, I denied a man a necessary operation that would of saved his life, and thus caused his death. No person, and no group has held me accountable for this, because in fact, what I did was I saved a company a half a million dollars for this. And for the more, this particular act secured my reputation as a good medical director, and it insured my continued advancement in the health care field. I went from making a few hundred dollars a week as a medical reviewer, to an escalating six-figure income as a physician executive. In all my work, I had one primary duty, and that was to use my medical expertise for the financial benefit for the organization which I worked. And I was told repeatedly that I was not denying care, I was simply denying payment. I know how managed care pains and kills patients. So I am here to tell you about the dirty work of managed care. And I’m haunted by the thousands of pieces of paper in which I have written that deadly word, ‘denied.’”
Sicko is basically a morality play, alternating dire stories from the U.S. health care system — individuals denied medical coverage (including a middle-aged couple forced to move into their daughter’s basement and share house-room with her computer because he had three heart attacks and lost his coverage, and she got cancer), individuals turned down flat by insurers who didn’t want their business at all because the companies feared they would cost far more than they’d bring in in premiums (there’s a receding crawl, accompanied by the Star Wars main theme, showing all the “pre-existing conditions” insurers routinely turn down potential customers based on), coverage conveniently pulled because the insurer’s detectives (one of the detectives, who’s since left the business because he, like Linda Peeno, actually had an attack of conscience, is one of Moore’s most fascinating interviews) uncovered a “pre-existing condition” (like the woman who was denied a claim for a $72,000 operation because years before she had had a yeast infection and sought medical care for it, and she hadn’t disclosed that on her application — indeed, the detective Moore interviewed said that in some states you can be denied coverage even for a health problem you didn’t seek treatment for based on a “prudent-person” doctrine that a normal person in that situation would have sought care) and in some cases the deaths of several patients (including an 18-month-old girl and the African-American husband of a white woman who actually worked at the hospital where she was trying to get her husband treated for bone-marrow cancer, who in the middle of a hostile hearing suddenly said, “Is it because he’s Black and I’m white?,” and stormed out of the room) — with happy tales of how wonderfully single-payer health care works in the rest of the civilized world.
Moore visits Canada (where he encounters an American woman who claims to be the common-law wife of a Canadian just so she can access the single-payer health care system — I’d known about people in the northern U.S. crossing the border into Canada to buy prescription drugs more cheaply but I’d never before heard of Americans going to Canada and using subterfuges to get actual health care), Britain, France and Cuba — the last the most controversial part of his movie; at the time the Chicago Tribune reported that Moore was actually under investigation by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for having filmed in Cuba and they were threatening to seize his film, so he had to sneak it out of the country to show it at the Cannes Film Festival — in which he gathered together a group of Americans that had been denied care, including some people who’d volunteered their services as rescue workers at Ground Zero after the 9/11 attacks, and sought to get them onto the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay after Republican Senators boasted during Congressional hearings that the detainees there didn’t have it so bad because the base had state-of-the-art hospital facilities in which the detainees got state-of-the-art care.
Not surprisingly, Moore wasn’t able to get his people to Guantánamo, but he was able to land them on Cuban soil (there’s a grimly funny credit to the effect that Department of Homeland Security regulations prohibit him from showing just how) and to get them treated in the Cuban health care system. He also shot an interview with Alecia Guevara, a Cuban pediatrician and daughter of Che Guevara (who’ll, you recall, originally trained as a doctor and whose first role in the Cuban revolution was as a medic treating revolutionary fighters in the field, before he rose to become a participant and a commander in actual combat), who says, “Cuba is a little island in the Caribbean with little to no resources. We can do a lot to improve the people’s health. This does not happen in the United States. Why are we able and you are not?” Wendell Potter made a similar point in his interview on Bill Moyers’ Journal (a fascinating tale that’s basically Cinderella in reverse: he got off his company-issued private plane, where he was served dinner on gold-rimmed plates with gold-plated utensils to eat it with, and attended a health fair in Tennessee and saw the uninsured literally flocking to get tests and treatments in crudely set-up stations in open-air booths, and that was his “aha!” moment during which he realized how the industry that paid him so well had screwed up America’s health-care system), when he said that the movie contained “a great truth,” which was:
“That we shouldn’t fear government involvement in our health care system. That there is an appropriate role for government, and it’s been proven in the countries that were in that movie.
“You know, we have more people who are uninsured in this country than the entire population of Canada. And that if you include the people who are underinsured, more people than in the United Kingdom. We have huge numbers of people who are also just a lay-off away from joining the ranks of the uninsured, or being purged by their insurance company, and winding up there.
“And another thing is that the advocates of reform or the opponents of reform are those who are saying that we need to be careful about what we do here, because we don’t want the government to take away your choice of a health plan. It’s more likely that your employer and your insurer is going to switch you from a plan that you’re in now to one that you don’t want. You might be in the plan you like now.
“But chances are, pretty soon, you’re going to be enrolled in one of these high deductible plans in which you’re going to find that much more of the cost is being shifted to you than you ever imagined.”
The real message of Sicko — and it’s a quite depressing one — is just how far apart we are from the rest of the industrialized world in terms of basic values, and in particular how we see ourselves and our relationship with the state. The countries that have been able to pull off successful single-payer systems — in the movie, Britain and France along with Canada (a former colony of both of them) and Cuba (a country whose revolutionary government overthrew capitalism 50 years ago) — all have something of a feudal heritage, and while the official justification of feudalism as a mutually beneficial relationship in which the serfs received protection and security from the landowner in return for a share of their produce was honored in practice far more in the breach than in the observance, nonetheless it built into those countries’ social DNA a sense of a mutual obligation between government and the citizenry.
The United States, by contrast, was never a feudal society — it was capitalist from the get-go (the only serious competitor to capitalism as an economic system in the U.S. was the slave-based landed aristocracy of the South, and that conflict was settled by the Civil War) — and has had a very different conception of the role of government, basically one in which government is seen as inherently suppressive of individual rights and therefore must be kept in check as much as possible. One of the grimmest parts of Sicko is the montage showing how the private health industry (not only the insurance companies but also the American Medical Association and the various trade associations including the hospital industry and especially the pharmaceutical companies) has killed attempts to establish government-based health care programs again and again with exactly the same rhetoric each time: it’ll take away your freedom to choose your own doctor, you’ll be forced into a government-run system where government bureaucrats will get in between you and your doctor and decide what care you can or can’t receive — and aside from a couple of slip-ups at the height of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” in the 1960’s, where he was able to slip through Medicare and Medicaid (Mad magazine bitterly summed up the AMA’s opposition to Medicare when they joked, “Medicare robs older people of their freedom to choose the doctor they cannot afford to go to”), the health business has managed to kill every initiative to set up anything even remotely resembling the kind of health-care guarantees every other developed country gives its citizens.
The fact that they’ve been the same arguments every time — and they’re being trotted out again (with some interesting new wrinkles: before I saw the movie I’d heard a bit of Mark Levin’s talk show in which he quoted an article purporting to debunk all the claims that are made that other countries have better health outcomes and do more preventive care; he said that infant mortality rates are deceptive because they fail to take into account genetic differences between countries — to which one can only wonder exactly where he thinks most of the current U.S. population came from? All those despicable European countries that actually have universal single-payer health care! — and that if you factored out auto accidents and gunshot deaths, the U.S. life expectancy would exceed those in Europe … which seemed to me a place a Right-winger like Levin would ordinarily not want to go, since it suggests that we have too many cars and too many guns!) — is less depressing than the fact that they work every time.
Americans simply buy the idea that having a government bureaucrat between you and your doctor is the epitome of social evil, while having a private bureaucrat between you and your doctor is just part of the price you pay for “freedom.” It really has to do with a difference in philosophy between this country and the rest of the world, the extent to which the ideal of “rugged individualism” is encoded into our social DNA and that except under particularly stressful conditions Americans instinctively reject collectivist solutions to our social problems and embrace individualistic ones instead. Moore has a fascinating interview with Tony Benn (formerly Sir Anthony Wedgwood-Benn, retired British politician who gave up his hereditary title and abbreviated his name to accord with his strongly Leftist “Old Labour” politics) in which, right after a montage of how much debt Americans live under, Benn says, “Keeping people hopeless and pessimistic — see I think there are two ways in which people are controlled — first of all frighten people and secondly demoralize them. An educated, healthy and confident nation is harder to govern.”
The implication is that Americans are fearful and hopeless and that they’re deliberately kept that way by their government and corporations so they won’t revolt the way people routinely do in countries like France, where governments who try to cut back on the society’s public benefits or employers who try to cut wages and perks are routinely met by tens of thousands of demonstrators in the streets. (One of the most fascinating aspects of Sicko was that Moore depicted the European welfare state in a positive fashion; when the U.S. media deign to mention it at all, it’s usually in a context of condemning European governments and employers for “spoiling” their people with 35-hour workweeks, six-month maternity leaves, five-week vacations and the rest of it — and thereby their economies are falling behind ours since we’re energizing ourselves by working multiple jobs, never taking time off and having the discipline of the market unimpeded by any dangerously socialist ideas about the government taking care of us. The fact that the U.S. economy isn’t appreciably stronger than the European ones by objective measures doesn’t enter into it any more than the fact that other countries’ health care systems keep their people alive longer and healthier.) One of Moore’s interviews with a Canadian explains just what a gulf there is between our perceptions of government’s proper role in society and theirs:
“Michael Moore: I’m wondering why you expect your fellow Canadians, who don’t have your problem, why should they, through their tax dollars, have to pay for a problem you have.
“Canadian: Because we would do the same for them. It’s just the way it’s always been, and so we hope it’ll always be.
“Michael Moore: Right. But if you just had to pay for your problem, and don’t pay for everybody else’s problem, just take care of yourself.
“Canadian: Well, there are lots of people who aren’t in a position to be able to do that. And somebody has to look out for them.”
Moore himself movingly articulates the communitarian perspective in his peroration at the end — just after he mentions that in what he wanted us to read as noble but which came off to me as an offensively patronizing act of noblesse oblige that he anonymously donated $12,000 to the proprietor of the nation’s leading anti-Michael Moore Web site after that person had said he might have to take it down because he could no longer afford both the maintenance of his site and the health insurance his wife needed — in which he says:
“It was hard for me to acknowledge that in the end, we truly are all in the same boat. And that now matter what are differences, we sink or swim together. That’s how it seems to be everywhere else. They take care of each other, no matter what their disagreements. You know, when we see a good idea from another country, we grab it. If they build a better car, we drive it. If they make a better wine, we drink it. So if they’ve come up with a better way to treat the sick, to teach their kids, to take care of their babies, to simply be good to each other, then what’s our problem? Why can’t we do that? They live in a world of ‘we’, not ‘me’. We’ll never fix anything until we get that one basic thing right. And powerful forces hope that we never do. And that we remain the only country in the western world without free, universal health care. You know, if we ever did remove the chokehold of medical bills, college loans, daycare, and everything else that makes us afraid to step out of line, well, watch out. ‘Cause it will be a new day in America.”
Don’t hold your breath, though: as Cathleen Decker noted in a fascinating article on the California budget crisis in the July 26 Los Angeles Times, despite their reputation as living in one of the most “liberal” states in the country, Californians have decisively rejected the idea that government has much of anything positive to offer in terms of solving social problems. Her article contrasted the major expansion of California government under Pat Brown’s governorship (1959-1967) to the anti-government attitude of Californians today: “In Brown’s California, there was a broad consensus that government was a competent force for good. Now, among Californians of all political ideologies, there is the opposite: a repudiation of government and, even more, of any confidence in the governor and the Legislature to act competently. On that matter, at least, California as a whole has shifted to the Right.”
Michael Moore’s Sicko, two years after its release, turns out to be unexpectedly timely in the middle of the debate in Washington, D.C. over health care “reform” — though I use the term in quotes because the entire deliberation at the federal level has been committed to the idea that, whatever happens, the current structure of the U.S.’s private, for-profit health insurance industry as the bulwark of health coverage must be kept intact. I would argue — and I’m sure, on the basis of his film, that Moore would agree with me — that universal coverage and a private insurance industry are mutually incompatible: you can have one or the other, but not both. The reason is very simple: it’s the enormous profits the health insurance companies are making (mostly for their shareholders but also for their CEO’s and other top executives) that are sucking resources out of the system that otherwise could be used to extend coverage to the currently uninsured. The resources to cover everybody exist nowhere else — which is why the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) recently estimated that the so-called “reform” being pushed by the Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress would cost a whopping $1 trillion more than the current system.
Sicko the movie is typical Michael Moore — a good amount of grandstanding and a liberal dose of wit (sometimes clever, sometimes heavy-handed) to make a serious point: that everywhere else in the advanced industrialized world, government guarantees its citizens access to health care as a right and it is simply accepted as a matter of practicality and realism that the health care system will be funded primarily by taxes — and will make its services available to anyone, regardless of coverage, employment status, pre-existing conditions or ability to pay. It’s a movie that went absolutely nowhere, though, in terms of affecting the debate over health care — on the July 10, 2009 episode of Bill Moyers’ Journal, Wendell Potter, former public relations director for Cigna, boasted of his and the industry’s efforts that “blunted” the potential political impact of Sicko:
“WENDELL POTTER: I thought that he hit the nail on the head with his movie. But the industry, from the moment that the industry learned that Michael Moore was taking on the health care industry, it was really concerned.
“BILL MOYERS: What were they afraid of?
“WENDELL POTTER: They were afraid that people would believe Michael Moore.
“BILL MOYERS: We obtained a copy of the game plan that was adopted by the industry’s trade association, AHIP. And it spells out the industry strategies in gold letters. It says, ‘Highlight horror stories of government-run systems.’ What was that about?
“WENDELL POTTER: The industry has always tried to make Americans think that government-run systems are the worst thing that could possibly happen to them, that if you even consider that, you’re heading down on the slippery slope towards socialism. So they have used scare tactics for years and years and years, to keep that from happening. If there were a broader program like our Medicare program, it could potentially reduce the profits of these big companies. So that is their biggest concern.
“BILL MOYERS: And there was a political strategy. ‘Position Sicko as a threat to Democrats’ larger agenda.’ What does that mean?
“WENDELL POTTER: That means that part of the effort to discredit this film was to use lobbyists and their own staff to go onto Capitol Hill and say, ‘Look, you don’t want to believe this movie. You don’t want to talk about it. You don’t want to endorse it. And if you do, we can make things tough for you.’
“BILL MOYERS: How?
“WENDELL POTTER: By running ads, commercials in your home district when you’re running for re-election, not contributing to your campaigns again, or contributing to your competitor.
“BILL MOYERS: This is fascinating. You know, ‘Build awareness among centrist Democratic policy organizations … including the Democratic Leadership Council.’ … Then it says, ‘Message to Democratic insiders. Embracing Moore is one-way ticket back to minority party status.’
“WENDELL POTTER: Yeah.
“BILL MOYERS: Now, that’s exactly what they did, didn’t they? They … radicalized Moore, so that his message was discredited because the messenger was seen to be radical.
“WENDELL POTTER: Absolutely.”
Sicko is full of grim horror stories (though the film as it exists didn’t confirm my fear that it would be too gross to watch), including the uninsured patient who sliced off the tips of two of his fingers with a table saw and was told by the hospital that he could have a choice: they could reattach his middle finger for $60,000 or his ring finger for just $12,000. There’s also the incredibly moving testimony of Dr. Linda Peeno, speaking before a congressional committee in 1996 virtually in tears as she told about her routine denials of health insurance claims, including one that actually resulted in someone’s death — and for which service she was handsomely rewarded by her insurance company, as part of a system that routinely gives bonuses to doctors in charge of review panels based on how many claims they deny: the more denials you issue, the more money you get:
“My name is Linda Peeno. I am here primarily today to make a public confession: In the Spring of 1987, as a physician, I denied a man a necessary operation that would of saved his life, and thus caused his death. No person, and no group has held me accountable for this, because in fact, what I did was I saved a company a half a million dollars for this. And for the more, this particular act secured my reputation as a good medical director, and it insured my continued advancement in the health care field. I went from making a few hundred dollars a week as a medical reviewer, to an escalating six-figure income as a physician executive. In all my work, I had one primary duty, and that was to use my medical expertise for the financial benefit for the organization which I worked. And I was told repeatedly that I was not denying care, I was simply denying payment. I know how managed care pains and kills patients. So I am here to tell you about the dirty work of managed care. And I’m haunted by the thousands of pieces of paper in which I have written that deadly word, ‘denied.’”
Sicko is basically a morality play, alternating dire stories from the U.S. health care system — individuals denied medical coverage (including a middle-aged couple forced to move into their daughter’s basement and share house-room with her computer because he had three heart attacks and lost his coverage, and she got cancer), individuals turned down flat by insurers who didn’t want their business at all because the companies feared they would cost far more than they’d bring in in premiums (there’s a receding crawl, accompanied by the Star Wars main theme, showing all the “pre-existing conditions” insurers routinely turn down potential customers based on), coverage conveniently pulled because the insurer’s detectives (one of the detectives, who’s since left the business because he, like Linda Peeno, actually had an attack of conscience, is one of Moore’s most fascinating interviews) uncovered a “pre-existing condition” (like the woman who was denied a claim for a $72,000 operation because years before she had had a yeast infection and sought medical care for it, and she hadn’t disclosed that on her application — indeed, the detective Moore interviewed said that in some states you can be denied coverage even for a health problem you didn’t seek treatment for based on a “prudent-person” doctrine that a normal person in that situation would have sought care) and in some cases the deaths of several patients (including an 18-month-old girl and the African-American husband of a white woman who actually worked at the hospital where she was trying to get her husband treated for bone-marrow cancer, who in the middle of a hostile hearing suddenly said, “Is it because he’s Black and I’m white?,” and stormed out of the room) — with happy tales of how wonderfully single-payer health care works in the rest of the civilized world.
Moore visits Canada (where he encounters an American woman who claims to be the common-law wife of a Canadian just so she can access the single-payer health care system — I’d known about people in the northern U.S. crossing the border into Canada to buy prescription drugs more cheaply but I’d never before heard of Americans going to Canada and using subterfuges to get actual health care), Britain, France and Cuba — the last the most controversial part of his movie; at the time the Chicago Tribune reported that Moore was actually under investigation by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for having filmed in Cuba and they were threatening to seize his film, so he had to sneak it out of the country to show it at the Cannes Film Festival — in which he gathered together a group of Americans that had been denied care, including some people who’d volunteered their services as rescue workers at Ground Zero after the 9/11 attacks, and sought to get them onto the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay after Republican Senators boasted during Congressional hearings that the detainees there didn’t have it so bad because the base had state-of-the-art hospital facilities in which the detainees got state-of-the-art care.
Not surprisingly, Moore wasn’t able to get his people to Guantánamo, but he was able to land them on Cuban soil (there’s a grimly funny credit to the effect that Department of Homeland Security regulations prohibit him from showing just how) and to get them treated in the Cuban health care system. He also shot an interview with Alecia Guevara, a Cuban pediatrician and daughter of Che Guevara (who’ll, you recall, originally trained as a doctor and whose first role in the Cuban revolution was as a medic treating revolutionary fighters in the field, before he rose to become a participant and a commander in actual combat), who says, “Cuba is a little island in the Caribbean with little to no resources. We can do a lot to improve the people’s health. This does not happen in the United States. Why are we able and you are not?” Wendell Potter made a similar point in his interview on Bill Moyers’ Journal (a fascinating tale that’s basically Cinderella in reverse: he got off his company-issued private plane, where he was served dinner on gold-rimmed plates with gold-plated utensils to eat it with, and attended a health fair in Tennessee and saw the uninsured literally flocking to get tests and treatments in crudely set-up stations in open-air booths, and that was his “aha!” moment during which he realized how the industry that paid him so well had screwed up America’s health-care system), when he said that the movie contained “a great truth,” which was:
“That we shouldn’t fear government involvement in our health care system. That there is an appropriate role for government, and it’s been proven in the countries that were in that movie.
“You know, we have more people who are uninsured in this country than the entire population of Canada. And that if you include the people who are underinsured, more people than in the United Kingdom. We have huge numbers of people who are also just a lay-off away from joining the ranks of the uninsured, or being purged by their insurance company, and winding up there.
“And another thing is that the advocates of reform or the opponents of reform are those who are saying that we need to be careful about what we do here, because we don’t want the government to take away your choice of a health plan. It’s more likely that your employer and your insurer is going to switch you from a plan that you’re in now to one that you don’t want. You might be in the plan you like now.
“But chances are, pretty soon, you’re going to be enrolled in one of these high deductible plans in which you’re going to find that much more of the cost is being shifted to you than you ever imagined.”
The real message of Sicko — and it’s a quite depressing one — is just how far apart we are from the rest of the industrialized world in terms of basic values, and in particular how we see ourselves and our relationship with the state. The countries that have been able to pull off successful single-payer systems — in the movie, Britain and France along with Canada (a former colony of both of them) and Cuba (a country whose revolutionary government overthrew capitalism 50 years ago) — all have something of a feudal heritage, and while the official justification of feudalism as a mutually beneficial relationship in which the serfs received protection and security from the landowner in return for a share of their produce was honored in practice far more in the breach than in the observance, nonetheless it built into those countries’ social DNA a sense of a mutual obligation between government and the citizenry.
The United States, by contrast, was never a feudal society — it was capitalist from the get-go (the only serious competitor to capitalism as an economic system in the U.S. was the slave-based landed aristocracy of the South, and that conflict was settled by the Civil War) — and has had a very different conception of the role of government, basically one in which government is seen as inherently suppressive of individual rights and therefore must be kept in check as much as possible. One of the grimmest parts of Sicko is the montage showing how the private health industry (not only the insurance companies but also the American Medical Association and the various trade associations including the hospital industry and especially the pharmaceutical companies) has killed attempts to establish government-based health care programs again and again with exactly the same rhetoric each time: it’ll take away your freedom to choose your own doctor, you’ll be forced into a government-run system where government bureaucrats will get in between you and your doctor and decide what care you can or can’t receive — and aside from a couple of slip-ups at the height of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” in the 1960’s, where he was able to slip through Medicare and Medicaid (Mad magazine bitterly summed up the AMA’s opposition to Medicare when they joked, “Medicare robs older people of their freedom to choose the doctor they cannot afford to go to”), the health business has managed to kill every initiative to set up anything even remotely resembling the kind of health-care guarantees every other developed country gives its citizens.
The fact that they’ve been the same arguments every time — and they’re being trotted out again (with some interesting new wrinkles: before I saw the movie I’d heard a bit of Mark Levin’s talk show in which he quoted an article purporting to debunk all the claims that are made that other countries have better health outcomes and do more preventive care; he said that infant mortality rates are deceptive because they fail to take into account genetic differences between countries — to which one can only wonder exactly where he thinks most of the current U.S. population came from? All those despicable European countries that actually have universal single-payer health care! — and that if you factored out auto accidents and gunshot deaths, the U.S. life expectancy would exceed those in Europe … which seemed to me a place a Right-winger like Levin would ordinarily not want to go, since it suggests that we have too many cars and too many guns!) — is less depressing than the fact that they work every time.
Americans simply buy the idea that having a government bureaucrat between you and your doctor is the epitome of social evil, while having a private bureaucrat between you and your doctor is just part of the price you pay for “freedom.” It really has to do with a difference in philosophy between this country and the rest of the world, the extent to which the ideal of “rugged individualism” is encoded into our social DNA and that except under particularly stressful conditions Americans instinctively reject collectivist solutions to our social problems and embrace individualistic ones instead. Moore has a fascinating interview with Tony Benn (formerly Sir Anthony Wedgwood-Benn, retired British politician who gave up his hereditary title and abbreviated his name to accord with his strongly Leftist “Old Labour” politics) in which, right after a montage of how much debt Americans live under, Benn says, “Keeping people hopeless and pessimistic — see I think there are two ways in which people are controlled — first of all frighten people and secondly demoralize them. An educated, healthy and confident nation is harder to govern.”
The implication is that Americans are fearful and hopeless and that they’re deliberately kept that way by their government and corporations so they won’t revolt the way people routinely do in countries like France, where governments who try to cut back on the society’s public benefits or employers who try to cut wages and perks are routinely met by tens of thousands of demonstrators in the streets. (One of the most fascinating aspects of Sicko was that Moore depicted the European welfare state in a positive fashion; when the U.S. media deign to mention it at all, it’s usually in a context of condemning European governments and employers for “spoiling” their people with 35-hour workweeks, six-month maternity leaves, five-week vacations and the rest of it — and thereby their economies are falling behind ours since we’re energizing ourselves by working multiple jobs, never taking time off and having the discipline of the market unimpeded by any dangerously socialist ideas about the government taking care of us. The fact that the U.S. economy isn’t appreciably stronger than the European ones by objective measures doesn’t enter into it any more than the fact that other countries’ health care systems keep their people alive longer and healthier.) One of Moore’s interviews with a Canadian explains just what a gulf there is between our perceptions of government’s proper role in society and theirs:
“Michael Moore: I’m wondering why you expect your fellow Canadians, who don’t have your problem, why should they, through their tax dollars, have to pay for a problem you have.
“Canadian: Because we would do the same for them. It’s just the way it’s always been, and so we hope it’ll always be.
“Michael Moore: Right. But if you just had to pay for your problem, and don’t pay for everybody else’s problem, just take care of yourself.
“Canadian: Well, there are lots of people who aren’t in a position to be able to do that. And somebody has to look out for them.”
Moore himself movingly articulates the communitarian perspective in his peroration at the end — just after he mentions that in what he wanted us to read as noble but which came off to me as an offensively patronizing act of noblesse oblige that he anonymously donated $12,000 to the proprietor of the nation’s leading anti-Michael Moore Web site after that person had said he might have to take it down because he could no longer afford both the maintenance of his site and the health insurance his wife needed — in which he says:
“It was hard for me to acknowledge that in the end, we truly are all in the same boat. And that now matter what are differences, we sink or swim together. That’s how it seems to be everywhere else. They take care of each other, no matter what their disagreements. You know, when we see a good idea from another country, we grab it. If they build a better car, we drive it. If they make a better wine, we drink it. So if they’ve come up with a better way to treat the sick, to teach their kids, to take care of their babies, to simply be good to each other, then what’s our problem? Why can’t we do that? They live in a world of ‘we’, not ‘me’. We’ll never fix anything until we get that one basic thing right. And powerful forces hope that we never do. And that we remain the only country in the western world without free, universal health care. You know, if we ever did remove the chokehold of medical bills, college loans, daycare, and everything else that makes us afraid to step out of line, well, watch out. ‘Cause it will be a new day in America.”
Don’t hold your breath, though: as Cathleen Decker noted in a fascinating article on the California budget crisis in the July 26 Los Angeles Times, despite their reputation as living in one of the most “liberal” states in the country, Californians have decisively rejected the idea that government has much of anything positive to offer in terms of solving social problems. Her article contrasted the major expansion of California government under Pat Brown’s governorship (1959-1967) to the anti-government attitude of Californians today: “In Brown’s California, there was a broad consensus that government was a competent force for good. Now, among Californians of all political ideologies, there is the opposite: a repudiation of government and, even more, of any confidence in the governor and the Legislature to act competently. On that matter, at least, California as a whole has shifted to the Right.”
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
The Terror of Tiny Town (Buell/Astor/Columbia, 1938)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Terror of Tiny Town, producer Jed Buell’s 1938 novelty Western with a cast of little people — as in “midgets.” All midgets. (There is supposedly a version in which you see a normal-sized human at the beginning just for purposes of comparison, but I’ve never seen it.) Buell put ads in entertainment newspapers all across the country advertising “Big Salaries for Little People” and reportedly spent $100,000 on this film — a modest budget even in 1938 but considerably more than most “B” Westerns cost. He also hired normal-sized hacks to direct and write it — Sam Newfield and Fred Myton, respectively, who later reunited for a lot of PRC’s early gangster and horror output — and used Edward Kilenyi to score the film, though I have no idea whether that’s Kilenyi, Sr. (who was one of George Gershwin’s music teachers) or Kilenyi, Jr. (a concert pianist who recorded the complete Chopin waltzes for Remington in the early 1950’s). It was shot in some of the familiar “B” Western locations, including the Lazy A Ranch in Santa Susana, California (later infamous as the hangout from which Charles Manson’s “Family” set out to commit the ritual murders he thought were going to start a race war) as well as Newhall and Placentia Canyons.
Buell actually recruited a fairly competent cast; Harry Earles, the genuinely talented midget actor who had appeared in both versions of The Unholy Three, had mostly retired from movies after Freaks in 1932 (his other career, with his sisters Daisy, Grace and Tiny, was as an act with the Ringling Bros., Barnum and Bailey circus, with which they performed until they retired in the mid-1950’s; Harry died in 1985), so he wasn’t available, but for the lead hero they got Billy Curtis, a competent actor who was still appearing in featured roles into the 1970’s; while the heroine, Yvonne Moray, is surprisingly charming and winsome and would probably have had a bigger career if there’d been more of a call for midget ingénues back then. The plot — Myton was truly stretching credibility when he took a credit for “original” story! — is your standard “B” Western intrigue dealing with villain Pat Haines (played by an actor identified only as “Little Billy”), who’s rustling cattle from the two rival ranches just outside Tiny Town, Lawson’s and Preston’s, and making it look as if each ranch is being rustled by the other.
Though the novelty casting of The Terror of Tiny Town makes it impossible to take it seriously — especially since some of the sets and props have been scaled down to fit the size of the actors (the “horses” they ride are ponies) while others haven’t been (they get into saloons by walking under the normal-sized swinging doors and likewise evade fences by walking under them, and the midget actor playing a blacksmith has to put a shoe on the movie’s one full-sized horse) — it’s very carefully not played for laughs, and surprisingly it’s at its most entertaining when it’s simply following the conventions of a “B” Western and we can ignore the odd casting.
There’s actually one great scene in the movie — Haines’ men attempt to ambush the stagecoach bringing the heroine to Tiny Town -— in which Newfield does some quite good suspense editing and cinematographer Mack Stengler (later a house man at Monogram) finds some unusual (at least for a “B”) camera angles — and there are also five songs (this was made at the height of the “singing cowboy” craze, after all), one of which is a genuinely charming novelty called “Mister Jack and Missus Jill,” which contemplates the wedding of the famous duo from the Mother Goose nursery rhyme. (That’s funny; for some reason I’d always thought of them as brother and sister, even though nothing in the original specifies their relationship.) Interestingly, the women in the cast — Moray and Nita Krebs (as “The Vampire,” Haines’ girlfriend, who does a number in the Tiny Town saloon that’s an obvious parody of Marlene Dietrich in Morocco) — do their own singing, while the men are dubbed by singers who don’t sound at all like them and were probably non-midgets.
The problem is that The Terror of Tiny Town is a one-joke movie, and the joke isn’t particularly funny — it’s not really offensive (there’s nothing in this movie that is making the midgets the butt of “sizist” ridicule); it’s just not amusing either. One quirky aspect is that in the opening credits the characters aren’t named, but just given “types” — thus we’re told that Billy Curtis plays “The Hero,” Yvonne Moray “The Heroine,” Pat Haines “The Villain,” Bill Platt “The Rich Uncle,” and so on — a device that got revived in the 1960’s by independent filmmakers who thought they were being oh so innovative by not giving their characters names. Though The Terror of Tiny Town was picked up for distribution by a (relatively) major studio, Columbia, it must have been a box-office disappointment because Buell didn’t get to follow through on his ideas for other films with all-midget casts — including one that sounds absolutely fascinating: Problem Child.
Apparently Buell had hooked up with the virtually forgotten (by 1938) Mack Sennett to make a comedy featuring some of the midgets from Tiny Town, and he had caught Stan Laurel while he was temporarily on the outs with both Oliver Hardy and Hal Roach and offered him the role of the son of a midget couple who unexpectedly grows up full-sized and has a hard time coping with the miniaturized world in which his parents live. Had Laurel been permitted to develop his own gags for this film, it might have been screamingly funny and oddly touching at the same time; instead it was never made, and he returned to Hardy for the independent production The Flying Deuces and then the two settled with Roach for the films A Chump at Oxford and Saps at Sea — while many of the little people who’d been recruited to Hollywood for The Terror of Tiny Town went on themselves to fill out the ranks of the Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz: straight from one of the worst movies of all time to one of the best!
The film was The Terror of Tiny Town, producer Jed Buell’s 1938 novelty Western with a cast of little people — as in “midgets.” All midgets. (There is supposedly a version in which you see a normal-sized human at the beginning just for purposes of comparison, but I’ve never seen it.) Buell put ads in entertainment newspapers all across the country advertising “Big Salaries for Little People” and reportedly spent $100,000 on this film — a modest budget even in 1938 but considerably more than most “B” Westerns cost. He also hired normal-sized hacks to direct and write it — Sam Newfield and Fred Myton, respectively, who later reunited for a lot of PRC’s early gangster and horror output — and used Edward Kilenyi to score the film, though I have no idea whether that’s Kilenyi, Sr. (who was one of George Gershwin’s music teachers) or Kilenyi, Jr. (a concert pianist who recorded the complete Chopin waltzes for Remington in the early 1950’s). It was shot in some of the familiar “B” Western locations, including the Lazy A Ranch in Santa Susana, California (later infamous as the hangout from which Charles Manson’s “Family” set out to commit the ritual murders he thought were going to start a race war) as well as Newhall and Placentia Canyons.
Buell actually recruited a fairly competent cast; Harry Earles, the genuinely talented midget actor who had appeared in both versions of The Unholy Three, had mostly retired from movies after Freaks in 1932 (his other career, with his sisters Daisy, Grace and Tiny, was as an act with the Ringling Bros., Barnum and Bailey circus, with which they performed until they retired in the mid-1950’s; Harry died in 1985), so he wasn’t available, but for the lead hero they got Billy Curtis, a competent actor who was still appearing in featured roles into the 1970’s; while the heroine, Yvonne Moray, is surprisingly charming and winsome and would probably have had a bigger career if there’d been more of a call for midget ingénues back then. The plot — Myton was truly stretching credibility when he took a credit for “original” story! — is your standard “B” Western intrigue dealing with villain Pat Haines (played by an actor identified only as “Little Billy”), who’s rustling cattle from the two rival ranches just outside Tiny Town, Lawson’s and Preston’s, and making it look as if each ranch is being rustled by the other.
Though the novelty casting of The Terror of Tiny Town makes it impossible to take it seriously — especially since some of the sets and props have been scaled down to fit the size of the actors (the “horses” they ride are ponies) while others haven’t been (they get into saloons by walking under the normal-sized swinging doors and likewise evade fences by walking under them, and the midget actor playing a blacksmith has to put a shoe on the movie’s one full-sized horse) — it’s very carefully not played for laughs, and surprisingly it’s at its most entertaining when it’s simply following the conventions of a “B” Western and we can ignore the odd casting.
There’s actually one great scene in the movie — Haines’ men attempt to ambush the stagecoach bringing the heroine to Tiny Town -— in which Newfield does some quite good suspense editing and cinematographer Mack Stengler (later a house man at Monogram) finds some unusual (at least for a “B”) camera angles — and there are also five songs (this was made at the height of the “singing cowboy” craze, after all), one of which is a genuinely charming novelty called “Mister Jack and Missus Jill,” which contemplates the wedding of the famous duo from the Mother Goose nursery rhyme. (That’s funny; for some reason I’d always thought of them as brother and sister, even though nothing in the original specifies their relationship.) Interestingly, the women in the cast — Moray and Nita Krebs (as “The Vampire,” Haines’ girlfriend, who does a number in the Tiny Town saloon that’s an obvious parody of Marlene Dietrich in Morocco) — do their own singing, while the men are dubbed by singers who don’t sound at all like them and were probably non-midgets.
The problem is that The Terror of Tiny Town is a one-joke movie, and the joke isn’t particularly funny — it’s not really offensive (there’s nothing in this movie that is making the midgets the butt of “sizist” ridicule); it’s just not amusing either. One quirky aspect is that in the opening credits the characters aren’t named, but just given “types” — thus we’re told that Billy Curtis plays “The Hero,” Yvonne Moray “The Heroine,” Pat Haines “The Villain,” Bill Platt “The Rich Uncle,” and so on — a device that got revived in the 1960’s by independent filmmakers who thought they were being oh so innovative by not giving their characters names. Though The Terror of Tiny Town was picked up for distribution by a (relatively) major studio, Columbia, it must have been a box-office disappointment because Buell didn’t get to follow through on his ideas for other films with all-midget casts — including one that sounds absolutely fascinating: Problem Child.
Apparently Buell had hooked up with the virtually forgotten (by 1938) Mack Sennett to make a comedy featuring some of the midgets from Tiny Town, and he had caught Stan Laurel while he was temporarily on the outs with both Oliver Hardy and Hal Roach and offered him the role of the son of a midget couple who unexpectedly grows up full-sized and has a hard time coping with the miniaturized world in which his parents live. Had Laurel been permitted to develop his own gags for this film, it might have been screamingly funny and oddly touching at the same time; instead it was never made, and he returned to Hardy for the independent production The Flying Deuces and then the two settled with Roach for the films A Chump at Oxford and Saps at Sea — while many of the little people who’d been recruited to Hollywood for The Terror of Tiny Town went on themselves to fill out the ranks of the Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz: straight from one of the worst movies of all time to one of the best!
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Daredevil (20th Century Fox/Regency/Marvel, 2003)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran a disc Charles had downloaded recently: the 2006 “Rifftrax” version of the 2003 superhero film Daredevil, from 20th Century-Fox and Marvel Entertainment. “Rifftrax” is the latest venture from the final cast of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 — Mike Nelson as himself, Kevin Murphy as Tom Servo and Bill Corbett as Crow — in which they record snarky soundtracks to be played over feature films and sell their works as mp3’s, along with a program you can use to synch their riff tracks to a commercial DVD of the film they’re lampooning.
The 2003 Daredevil was a potentially interesting movie based on one of Marvel’s quirkier characters — Daredevil, son of a prizefighter who grew up in Hell’s Kitchen, New York and was blinded as a boy when an accident involving a toxic-waste truck led to some foul liquid being splashed into his eyes, rendering them non-functional and turning them a steely grey color, eyeballs and all. His non-hero name is Matt Murdock, and despite his handicap he grows up to be an attorney and does justice in the courtrooms by day and on the streets at night, billing himself as “Daredevil — The Man Without Fear!” In this film Daredevil himself is played by Ben Affleck — who for some really quirky reason doesn’t come off as well as a superhero as he did as an actor playing a superhero (George Reeves playing Superman) in Hollywoodland three years later — and the film opens with a closeup of a rat prowling the streets of New York City (we expect to hear Michael Jackson crooning “Ben” at any moment!) — and then Daredevil himself comes crashing to earth in the middle of a Roman Catholic church, shattering its stained-glass window as he does so, and he’s revived by his parish priest, Father Everett (Derrick O’Connor) — this may be the first superhero movie I’ve ever seen that took pains to let us know the superhero’s religion.
Anyway, we find out about two-thirds of the movie later that Daredevil suffered these injuries in the middle of a battle with Bullseye (Colin Farrell, who for my money is a lot sexier than Ben Affleck even in his villain’s drag, which is basically a lot of studded leather clothing and a bull’s-eye scar carved into his forehead), hired hit man of the Kingpin, the organized crime boss of New York City, whom at first we’re led to believe is Nick Manolis (Lennie Loftin) but we eventually learn is Black gangster Wilson Fisk (Michael Clarke Duncan). So six years before an African-American became president of the United States for real, one became a gangland boss in a movie — even though he’s played in a rather retro fashion and comes across more like Bumpy Johnson, the real-life numbers king depicted at the end of his life in the film American Gangster (where ex-Mod Squad member Clarence Williams III played him) than like anybody we’d expect to see running a whole city’s crime syndicate today.
The version of Daredevil the Rifftrax folks were ridiculing was the 100-minute theatrical version (there’s also a 133-minute director’s cut on DVD, and at least one commentator on imdb.com swears by it — sometimes, as with The Butterfly Effect, seeing the director’s cut is a far better experience than watching the original theatrical release, but something tells me that in this case all it would add to the experience is length), and it’s virtually a compendium of all the aspects of the superhero genre at its modern-day worst: murky, brown-dominated cinematography; sotto voce line deliveries from the hero; preposterous super-powers (for somebody who’s supposed to be a normal guy who trained to be a superhero, like Batman, Daredevil has such overdeveloped acrobatic skills he’s practically able to fly and he seems — though this may just be sloppy scripting on the part of director/writer Mark Steven Johnson — to be able to make it rain any time he wants merely by willing it to); a ridiculous female lead (Jennifer Garner as “Elektra Natchios” — “Electric nachos?” the Rifftrax crew inevitably joked — who comes on with acrobatic skills of her own and a pair of elaborate daggers, one in each hand, which Bullseye easily takes from her and uses against her; she also spends several reels hating Daredevil because Bullseye killed Elektra’s father and framed Daredevil for it); maddeningly arbitrary plotting; a slow, deliberate pace that takes the edge off the action scenes that are the one reason anybody bothers to go see a movie like this; and, above all, an infuriating sense of its own self-importance, an attempt to get us to see this as not just a fun excursion in a trashy but entertaining genre but some important statement about the human condition.
Daredevil was billed in the comics as “The Man Without Fear,” and Johnson takes that conceit and runs with it far faster and further than he ought to have — virtually all the villains in the movie take it upon themselves to teach him fear (thinking of Wagner’s Siegfried, I couldn’t help but joke, “He has to go through the magic fire and rescue the woman who’s lying on the rock on the other side of it … ”), leading to a series of pretty pointless confrontations that obviously kept Ben Affleck’s stunt doubles, Tim Connolly and Christopher Caso, busy but are too dully staged and paced to be much fun for us. Johnson also clearly wanted to project Daredevil as tapping into the iconography of Satan, and while his red costume with the little Batman-like horns on the cowl does lend itself to that interpretation, it doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that in the world the rest of us live in a daredevil is someone like Evel Kneivel, the sort of entertainer who astonishes his audience by risking his life in live performances of pointless stunts, and doesn’t advance himself as an agent of the Dark Side unless he’s specifically chosen that as his marketing strategy.
Daredevil is one of those movies that just sort of drones on (one reason I definitely think I wouldn’t like it any better if it were half an hour longer!), blowing the potential in the material and with so relentlessly dark and unappealing a set of characters that Jon Favreau as Matt Murdock’s law partner (who’s concerned about all the pro bono work Matt is doing and wants to get their firm some clients who will actually pay) is easily the most likable person in the film. It’s also cursed with a voice-over narration, delivered by Affleck in the sepulchral tones of Liberace in The Loved One and so stupidly written by Johnson it wasn’t always easy to tell the movie’s actual voiceover from the ones the Rifftrax crew were supplying — which were funny enough (especially the lampoons of other Affleck bombs, like Gigli), though without the endearing characterizations they played on MST3K they just sound like three wise guys you’ve invited over who insist on talking over the film you’re showing them.
I ran a disc Charles had downloaded recently: the 2006 “Rifftrax” version of the 2003 superhero film Daredevil, from 20th Century-Fox and Marvel Entertainment. “Rifftrax” is the latest venture from the final cast of Mystery Science Theatre 3000 — Mike Nelson as himself, Kevin Murphy as Tom Servo and Bill Corbett as Crow — in which they record snarky soundtracks to be played over feature films and sell their works as mp3’s, along with a program you can use to synch their riff tracks to a commercial DVD of the film they’re lampooning.
The 2003 Daredevil was a potentially interesting movie based on one of Marvel’s quirkier characters — Daredevil, son of a prizefighter who grew up in Hell’s Kitchen, New York and was blinded as a boy when an accident involving a toxic-waste truck led to some foul liquid being splashed into his eyes, rendering them non-functional and turning them a steely grey color, eyeballs and all. His non-hero name is Matt Murdock, and despite his handicap he grows up to be an attorney and does justice in the courtrooms by day and on the streets at night, billing himself as “Daredevil — The Man Without Fear!” In this film Daredevil himself is played by Ben Affleck — who for some really quirky reason doesn’t come off as well as a superhero as he did as an actor playing a superhero (George Reeves playing Superman) in Hollywoodland three years later — and the film opens with a closeup of a rat prowling the streets of New York City (we expect to hear Michael Jackson crooning “Ben” at any moment!) — and then Daredevil himself comes crashing to earth in the middle of a Roman Catholic church, shattering its stained-glass window as he does so, and he’s revived by his parish priest, Father Everett (Derrick O’Connor) — this may be the first superhero movie I’ve ever seen that took pains to let us know the superhero’s religion.
Anyway, we find out about two-thirds of the movie later that Daredevil suffered these injuries in the middle of a battle with Bullseye (Colin Farrell, who for my money is a lot sexier than Ben Affleck even in his villain’s drag, which is basically a lot of studded leather clothing and a bull’s-eye scar carved into his forehead), hired hit man of the Kingpin, the organized crime boss of New York City, whom at first we’re led to believe is Nick Manolis (Lennie Loftin) but we eventually learn is Black gangster Wilson Fisk (Michael Clarke Duncan). So six years before an African-American became president of the United States for real, one became a gangland boss in a movie — even though he’s played in a rather retro fashion and comes across more like Bumpy Johnson, the real-life numbers king depicted at the end of his life in the film American Gangster (where ex-Mod Squad member Clarence Williams III played him) than like anybody we’d expect to see running a whole city’s crime syndicate today.
The version of Daredevil the Rifftrax folks were ridiculing was the 100-minute theatrical version (there’s also a 133-minute director’s cut on DVD, and at least one commentator on imdb.com swears by it — sometimes, as with The Butterfly Effect, seeing the director’s cut is a far better experience than watching the original theatrical release, but something tells me that in this case all it would add to the experience is length), and it’s virtually a compendium of all the aspects of the superhero genre at its modern-day worst: murky, brown-dominated cinematography; sotto voce line deliveries from the hero; preposterous super-powers (for somebody who’s supposed to be a normal guy who trained to be a superhero, like Batman, Daredevil has such overdeveloped acrobatic skills he’s practically able to fly and he seems — though this may just be sloppy scripting on the part of director/writer Mark Steven Johnson — to be able to make it rain any time he wants merely by willing it to); a ridiculous female lead (Jennifer Garner as “Elektra Natchios” — “Electric nachos?” the Rifftrax crew inevitably joked — who comes on with acrobatic skills of her own and a pair of elaborate daggers, one in each hand, which Bullseye easily takes from her and uses against her; she also spends several reels hating Daredevil because Bullseye killed Elektra’s father and framed Daredevil for it); maddeningly arbitrary plotting; a slow, deliberate pace that takes the edge off the action scenes that are the one reason anybody bothers to go see a movie like this; and, above all, an infuriating sense of its own self-importance, an attempt to get us to see this as not just a fun excursion in a trashy but entertaining genre but some important statement about the human condition.
Daredevil was billed in the comics as “The Man Without Fear,” and Johnson takes that conceit and runs with it far faster and further than he ought to have — virtually all the villains in the movie take it upon themselves to teach him fear (thinking of Wagner’s Siegfried, I couldn’t help but joke, “He has to go through the magic fire and rescue the woman who’s lying on the rock on the other side of it … ”), leading to a series of pretty pointless confrontations that obviously kept Ben Affleck’s stunt doubles, Tim Connolly and Christopher Caso, busy but are too dully staged and paced to be much fun for us. Johnson also clearly wanted to project Daredevil as tapping into the iconography of Satan, and while his red costume with the little Batman-like horns on the cowl does lend itself to that interpretation, it doesn’t seem to have occurred to him that in the world the rest of us live in a daredevil is someone like Evel Kneivel, the sort of entertainer who astonishes his audience by risking his life in live performances of pointless stunts, and doesn’t advance himself as an agent of the Dark Side unless he’s specifically chosen that as his marketing strategy.
Daredevil is one of those movies that just sort of drones on (one reason I definitely think I wouldn’t like it any better if it were half an hour longer!), blowing the potential in the material and with so relentlessly dark and unappealing a set of characters that Jon Favreau as Matt Murdock’s law partner (who’s concerned about all the pro bono work Matt is doing and wants to get their firm some clients who will actually pay) is easily the most likable person in the film. It’s also cursed with a voice-over narration, delivered by Affleck in the sepulchral tones of Liberace in The Loved One and so stupidly written by Johnson it wasn’t always easy to tell the movie’s actual voiceover from the ones the Rifftrax crew were supplying — which were funny enough (especially the lampoons of other Affleck bombs, like Gigli), though without the endearing characterizations they played on MST3K they just sound like three wise guys you’ve invited over who insist on talking over the film you’re showing them.
Dick Tracy at RKO, 1945-1947
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I had showed the first RKO Dick Tracy, made in 1945 and the inaugural effort in a series of four before RKO got out of the “B” business altogether in 1947. I’ve always liked the RKO Tracys — even the first two, made with Morgan Conway in the title role (prior to RKO’s “B”-feature ventures, Dick Tracy had only appeared on the screen in four Republic serials, played by Ralph Byrd — after the relative box-office disappointment of the second RKO Tracy, Dick Tracy vs. Cueball, RKO took Conway off the series and hired Byrd, who made their last two Tracy films and starred as the detective again in a 1951-52 TV series that lasted a year — it was popular and would have been renewed except that Ralph Byrd died over the summer, and the producers decided to cancel it rather than risk a replacement who wouldn’t be accepted by audiences as Tracy the way Byrd had been — and that was the end of Tracy on screen until the Warren Beatty extravaganza of 1990). Conway is a perfectly fine Tracy, reasonably handsome and authoritative, though he lacked the famously jutting chin of Chester Gould’s cartoon.
The 1945 Dick Tracy was a film in a bit of a netherworld of its own, half straightforward cops-and-robbers yarn and half film noir, in which the mystery is who is the sinister “Splitface” who seems to be knifing people to death at random, and what is the connection between his victims. Eventually the connection turns out to be that the 14 people on his hit list are the 12 jurors and two alternates responsible for his conviction, who otherwise run all over the map in terms of income, status and career. Dick Tracy was written by Eric Taylor based on Gould’s comic strip, and for the most part (except for the mortician named “Deathridge”) he avoided the campy names with which Gould usually adorned his people. It opens with an out-and-out quote from RKO’s Cat People, which had featured Simone Simon stalking Jane Randolph through a green patch of urban soil — in this case a woman schoolteacher is being stalked by a psycho killer, she turns back and he isn’t there, then she starts walking forwards again and he is there, and he catches and kills her — and even shot on the very same set (a tree-lined walkway) Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur had used for the similar scene in Cat People.
From that point the movie becomes an intriguing game of spot-the-set, and watchable mainly because of Conway, Anne Jeffreys as Tess Trueheart (she was as good as the girlfriend of a super-cop as she’d been as the girlfriend of a super-crook in Dillinger) and Mike Mazurki’s awesome performance as Splitface. Though the script gives him little or nothing in the way of motivation, Mazurki brings unexpected pathos to his role by playing Splitface much the way he did Moose Malloy in Murder, My Sweet (RKO’s noir masterpiece from 1944 based on Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely), giving the character far more depth and range than Taylor supplied in his script and making us almost feel sorry for the guy. There’s a hint that Splitface is actually a rarely seen and never photographed nightclub owner, Steve Owens (Morgan Wallace) — his daughter Judith, played by a young and almost unrecognizable Jane Greer, is an important character — but different actors play the two men.
The director is William Berke, who mostly ground out hack entries in the Falcon series with Tom Conway (including The Falcon in Mexico, for which he had Orson Welles as his uncredited co-director — a few clips of the Latin American scenes for Welles’ unfinished documentary It’s All True made their way into The Falcon in Mexico) but who here also seems to have been watching some noir movies, since much of the 1945 Dick Tracy is vividly atmospheric and visually quite distinguished, albeit sometimes more atmospheric than it needs to be to tell a relatively simple story. — 7/20/09
••••••••••
I turned on the TV and VCR to do some cueing and in the meantime managed to watch almost all of Dick Tracy vs. Cueball. The history of the Tracy character in film is four (relatively) big-budget Republic serials between 1937 and 1941 starring Ralph Byrd (the third of which co-starred a young actress named Phyllis Isley, who later achieved fame as Jennifer Jones); then four RKO “B”’s in 1945-47, the first two of which starred Morgan Conway as Tracy and the last two returned Ralph Byrd to the role; then a TV series in the early 1950’s, also with Byrd, which got good ratings but only lasted one season because Byrd died during the summer hiatus; then nothing until the big-budget version from 1990 with Warren Beatty and Madonna, a beautiful-looking film (Beatty and his production designer wisely eschewed the past-is-brown look in favor of a broad, intense palette copied from the color panels of Chester Gould’s comic strip) but something of a dud dramatically.
This one was the second of RKO’s four and the last to star Morgan Conway, whom William K. Everson called “somewhat dour” — he did a lot of crimefighter roles at the time and is good as the prosecutor in the contemporaneous The Truth about Murder but not quite right for a superhero cop — along with Anne Jeffreys as Tess Trueheart (Jeffreys left the series when Conway did) and Ian Keith as the Barrymore-esque ham actor Vitamin Flintheart (alas, Keith’s own career had suffered from the same disease — alcoholism — that had screwed up John Barrymore’s, though within the campy writing of this character he’s actually quite good). The titular Cueball is played by Dick Wessel, and his appearance is one of the most remarkable aspects of the film: dressed in a worn leather jacket and wearing a cowboy hat that supplies the leather band he uses to strangle people, his favorite mode of murder, he looks at once convincingly proletarian and almost sexy in his relentless butchness, which is a relief given that aside from him and Tracy just about every other male in this film is a screaming queen: Jules Sparkle (Harry Cheshire), owner of a jewelry store whose employees, unbeknownst to him (or maybe beknownst to him after all, since the writers on this film — Luci Ward, story; and Dane Lussier and Robert E. Kent, script — weren’t exactly big on plot clarity), have hatched a plot to import $300,000 worth of uncut diamonds and sent Cueball, a.k.a. Harry Lake, to steal them; Percival Priceless (Douglas Walton), antique dealer; his clerk Higby (Milton Parsons) and Simon Little (Byron Foulger), Sparkle’s diamond cutter.
The story isn’t much but this film hardly deserves a listing in the book The Fifty Worst Films of All Time — it’s actually a pretty good crime “B” and benefits from the fact that it was made at the height of the noir cycle and director Gordon Douglas (who went on to biggers and betters) and cinematographer George Diskant threw a lot of noir compositions that helped enliven what could otherwise have been a quite ordinary film — though there’s nothing as interesting here as the quite surprising plot of the first RKO Dick Tracy, which cast Mike Mazurki as the villain in what was essentially a repeat of his role in Murder, My Sweet and actually gave him a surprising degree of pathos (surprising for the villain in a Dick Tracy story, anyway). There’s also a nice hard-woman performance from Rita Corday as Mona Clyde, Sparkle’s secretary and the mastermind of the jewel-robbery plot — though how a nice bad-girl like her got mixed up with a nasty bad-guy like Cueball remains a mystery, and the clue by which Tracy traces Cueball and discovers his real identity — Butch (Jimmy Clemons), friend of Tracy’s adopted son Junior (Jimmy Crane), is wearing a hat with the band just like the one Cueball is using as his murder weapon, and Tracy traces the hats to a workshop at the New Mexico prison from which Cueball had been released a month before — is clever though a bit arch.
Though uneasily perched between Gould’s comic-strip aesthetic (including the ridiculous, campy character names that were a stock in trade for him) and film noir, Dick Tracy vs. Cueball is quite an entertaining film in a series that aimed relatively high for a “B” crime show, though the first and last RKO Tracys remain the best mainly because they had the best bad guys (Mazurki in the first and Boris Karloff as, inevitably, “Gruesome” in the last). Also worthy of note is the animated neon sign that advertises the dive bar in which the crooks meet, the Dripping Dagger (I think RKO used that same bar set in every Tracy movie but changed its name each time), and Esther Howard’s performance as Filthy Flora, the Dripping Dagger’s owner; she played the very similar character of Jessie Florian in Murder, My Sweet and brought some of the same sadness here (and anticipated the pathos of Thelma Ritter’s role in Pickup on South Street). — 3/15/07
•••••
Dick Tracy did well enough at the box office that RKO went ahead and made three sequels, of which the first, Dick Tracy vs. Cueball, was released towards the end of 1946 and retained Morgan Conway as Tracy but had a new director (Gordon Douglas, later marked for biggers and betters) and new writers (Luci Ward, story; and crime veteran Dane Lussier and the ubiquitous Robert E. Kent, script). This time the writers did incorporate the deliberately campy names Tracy cooked up for both his associates and his adversaries: among the former are Tess Trueheart (Anne Jeffreys again, though having little to do until the end, when she masquerades as a society woman to catch the baddies red-handed and actually does a quite credible job) and ham actor Vitamin Flintheart (an obvious caricature on the then recently deceased John Barrymore, enacted by Ian Keith in his best flaming-queen style), while among the baddies are jeweler “Jules Sparkle” (Harry Cheshire); his diamond cutter “Simon Little” (Byron Foulger, who wears ultra-thick glasses throughout and comes off so much like Anthony Edwards in the movie Northfork its writer-directors, brothers Michael and Mark Polish, might have patterned their character after him), antiques dealer “Percival Priceless” (Douglas Walton) and “Dripping Dagger” bar owner “Filthy Flora” (Esther Howard, who like Mike Mazurki in the first RKO Dick Tracy was recycling a characterization she’d played in Murder, My Sweet — as Jessie Florian, alcoholic widow of a bar owner).
Dick Tracy vs. Cueball was listed as one of “The Fifty Worst Films of All Time” by Harry Medved and Randy Dreyfuss in their book of that title, a dishonor it really doesn’t deserve; it’s actually a quite capable, exciting film in its genre, directed by Douglas with a real flair for suspense and action, and a rapid-fire pace that makes it look more like a Warners film than something from RKO (and indeed Douglas went to work for Warners later). What’s most fascinating about this movie is the extent to which RKO’s casting department filled the cast list with such screaming queens: Lester Abbott (Trevor Bardette), the thief who’s stolen a set of valuable diamonds for a ring, as well as its other male participants: Douglas Walton as “Priceless,” Byron Foulger as Little, Milton Parsons as Priceless’s clerk (and, we almost get the impression, his boyfriend) and Skelton Knaggs as Little’s associate. Even some of the good guys — notably Ian Keith as Flintheart and Lyle Latell as Tracy’s partner, Pat Patton — seem pretty queeny. The idea seems to have been to make Tracy and Cueball (Dick Wessel) the only butch guys in the whole film — the crime ring all those queer boys are participating in is run, natch, by a tough-as-nails woman, Rita Corday (under her cover as Mona, Sparkle’s secretary) — and Cueball easily overpowers all the Gay guys in the gang.
Wearing a blue-collar worker’s outfit — a leather jacket and work pants — and topped with that big head with no hair, Cueball ends up looking like a giant, self-ambulating penis, “screwing” his fellow crooks figuratively (by refusing to give them the jewels he took from Abbott and constantly raising his price for them) and almost literally — especially since his preferred murder method, which involves removing the leather band from his hat and strangling his victims with it, requires close physical contact which Douglas shoots in a way that heightens the sublimated lust = death sexuality. (The band also fulfills an important plot purpose; Cueball had made them while serving a stretch in prison, and Tracy is thereby able to trace him and learn his real name, Harry Lake.) The “family” interludes — with Tracy’s ward Junior (itself a pretty kinky relationship, though clearly we weren’t meant to think so), his friend Butch (who’s wearing one of the hatbands, which gives Tracy the clue he needs to link them to Cueball), Tess Trueheart (in other crime series the hero had to put off marrying his girlfriend because he was always being called away to solve a crime; in these films, she can’t even land a dinner date with Tracy before he’s called away!) — aren’t as interesting as all the quirky sexual hints surrounding the villains, but the film is strongly plotted, the action is logical and even the ending, which Medved and Dreyfuss ridiculed — Tracy has traced Cueball to a railroad yard, Cueball has got his foot caught in between two rails, and “just when you’re thinking, ‘Oh, no, they’re not going to have him get hit by a train,’ he gets hit by a train” — adds to the aura of invincible masculinity surrounding Cueball by suggesting that neither the criminal justice system nor even a cop with a gun was sufficient to take him out: it had to be an accident, an “act of God.” — 7/20/09
••••••••••
The film I picked out was Dick Tracy’s Dilemma, next in sequence in the RKO series and the return of Ralph Byrd to the role of Dick Tracy — Byrd was hardly as good an actor as Morgan Conway but he was better for the role physically, with his tall physique and prominent chin at least approximating the famously angular jutting chin Chester Gould had given the character in the comics. Dick Tracy’s Dilemma is probably the weakest of the RKO Tracys, mainly because there isn’t much of a plot — the super-villain this time is “The Claw” (Jack Lambert), who’s just a swarthy proletarian thug distinguished only by having a sharp hook where his right hand should be (and using it as a supremely lethal murder weapon — it’s interesting how the writers of the first three RKO Tracys avoided gunplay as much as possible and favored crooks who murdered their victims in ways that required physical contact: Splitface slit their throats with a knife, Cueball strangled them with a hatband and the Claw impaled them on his hook-like artificial hand).
In the opening, “The Claw” steals a shipment of furs from the Collins company — “clawing” the night watchman at the Collins plant to do it — and most of the rest of it is a series of very dark action scenes (sometimes too dark to make out what’s supposed to be going on) interspersed with a lot of dull palaver involving Tracy, his partner Pat Patton (Lyle Latell), his girlfriend Tess Trueheart (regrettably replaced by Kay Christopher — maybe Anne Jeffreys, who played Tess in the previous two films with Conway, felt wasted in the role, which she was), Collins company owner Humphries (Charles Marsh) and two people from the Honesty Insurance Company: vice-president Peter Premium (William B. Davidson) and investigator Mr. Cudd (Al Bridge). There are a few scenes for atmosphere — the grungy bar that appeared as the “Dripping Dagger” in Dick Tracy vs. Cueball is here called the “Blinking Skull” — it’s the same set; only the animated neon sign in the window has changed — and one of the most interesting (and, here, wasted) characters in the series, “Sightless” (Jimmy Conlin), a Tracy informant who poses as a blind homeless beggar to keep an eye on the criminal underworld, hangs out in front of the bar, which is owned this time around by a man, Jigger (Wade Crosby).
There’s also a nice scene in which Tracy encounters Longshot Lillie the female fence (Bernadene Hayes) and recognizes her from previous criminal encounters — but eventually believes her when she said she had nothing to do with the fur heist because, as we’ve figured out about two or three reels before the characters do, the “robbery” was really an inside job: Humphries arranged for his own merchandise to be stolen and fenced so he could scam the insurance company, claim the loss and also make money from a criminal sale of the furs. Written by Robert Stephen Brode — peculiarly, RKO never seemed to use the same writers more than once on this series — and directed by John Rawlins, fresh from Universal where he’d done a couple of the Jon Hall-Maria Montez films as well as the first modern-dress Rathbone/Bruce Sherlock Holmes film, Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror — Dick Tracy’s Dilemma (a “cheating” title since at no time is Dick Tracy faced with any kind of dilemma in the plot — one would have expected a story involving Tess or one of Tracy’s friends being kidnapped and his dilemma being to go after the crooks or let them go to save his friends) is strong in the atmosphere department but surprisingly weak as a thriller, and also bereft of the marvelous Gay undertones that made Dick Tracy vs. Cueball so much fun; out of all the queens from the cast of Cueball, Ian Keith as Tracy’s actor friend Vitamin Flintheart (obviously a caricature of John Barrymore) is the only one that returns, and even he seems under wraps this time around.
Fortunately, for the next (and, alas, last) episode in their series RKO would get a truly inspired villain — Gruesome (Boris Karloff — who else? One wonders if they owed him a film on his contract after having cancelled Val Lewton’s planned production of Blackbeard, which they eventually revived but cast Robert Newton in the pirate role originally intended for Karloff) — and ramp up the camp aspects to produce a film that pretty much junked the noir affectations of the earlier RKO Tracys but probably came closer to the spirit of the Gould comics than any of the previous ones. It’s also worthy of note that in Britain, where the Tracy comics weren’t published, Dick Tracy’s Dilemma was retitled Mark of the Claw — which probably left audiences expecting a horror film instead of the lukewarm cops ’n’ robbers melodrama they actually got! — 7/22/09
••••••••••
Our “feature” for last night was the fourth and last in the RKO Dick Tracy series — a short-lived effort RKO launched in 1945 just as they were edging their way out of the “B” business. They’d ended the Falcon detective series in 1946 but they kept the Tracy series going a year longer, attempting to liven it up by replacing contract player Morgan Conway as Tracy with Ralph Byrd — who’d made the part his own in four Republic serials from 1937 to 1941 (those oddly changed Tracy from a Chicago police detective to an FBI agent!) — in the third film (frankly, Byrd looks more like the Chester Gould comics but Conway is the better actor!) and, for the fourth, not only brought along a particularly illustrious actor as the guest villain but gave him top billing.
He is, of course, Boris Karloff, who as I speculated in my notes on Dick Tracy’s Dilemma may have been owed one more film by RKO under his contract to appear in the Val Lewton productions The Body Snatcher, Isle of the Dead and Bedlam. (Lewton planned to follow those up by starring Karloff in a pirate melodrama, Blackbeard, for which RKO was willing to give him a higher budget. Then Lewton did his usual meticulous research and found that the pirates of Blackbeard’s day hadn’t sailed in large ships; rather, they’d put together fleets of fast, maneuverable cutters with which they surrounded the large cargo ships they intended to rob — much the way today’s much talked-about pirates use speedboats — and he became determined to show that kind of piracy in his film. The RKO bosses angrily replied that they weren’t spending all that money for a movie showing Boris Karloff captaining a fleet of fishing boats, so they cancelled the project, fired Lewton, and later revived it and had Robert Newton as Blackbeard sailing a large, ungainly and historically inaccurate vessel.)
Anyway, they concocted a villain called “Gruesome” for Karloff to play, giving a performance that oddly recalled his pre-Frankenstein work in the movie The Criminal Code 16 years before — though the makeup isn’t particularly gruesome at all; he really looks more like a modern-dress version of the cabman John Gray, his role in Lewton’s The Body Snatcher, than an out-and-out monster — and gave him a sidekick, “Melody” (Tony Barrett), who plays piano at the “Hangman’s Knot,” the same dive bar we saw in the two immediately preceding Tracy films but under different identities (the “Dripping Dagger” in Dick Tracy vs. Cueball and the “Blinking Skull” in Dick Tracy’s Dilemma). The two of them team up with a discredited scientist, Dr. Lee Thal (Edward Ashley), who works as a hired-gun researcher at the Wood Plastics Company but in his spare time has invented a gas which leaves anyone who’s exposed to it paralyzed and frozen in place for about 10 to 15 minutes. To make this stuff, he needed to steal a chemical from the State University — which he achieved by getting it from his girlfriend, Dr. Irma M. Learned — “I. M. Learned” — (June Clayworth), assistant to State University physicist Dr. A. Tomic (Milton Parsons), who claims to have been receiving death threats and who turns up missing midway through the film (he’s never seen again and the writing committee — William H. Graffis and Robert E. Kent, story; Robertson White and Eric Taylor, screenplay — never bothers to tell us what happened to him).
There’s a fascinating meeting between Gruesome, Melody, Dr. Thal and his assistant, X-Ray (Skelton Knaggs — the RKO casting department really deserves kudos for bringing back at least two of that marvelous assortment of “queen” types, Parsons and Knaggs, from Dick Tracy vs. Cueball) in which it’s clear that the bookish types are no match for the criminal men of action they’ve recruited, and a great bank robbery scene in which the paralyzing gas is played up for its most comic possibilities — a watchman is frozen in place while chasing a cat (the cat, of course, is frozen too!), a bank customer is caught in mid-sneeze, and so on. Indeed, the whole movie is played up for comic possibilities; the writers follow the Gouldian penchant for naming the characters after what they do (at one point Tracy’s partner, Pat Patton, traces the crooks to a taxidermy shop whose proprietor — whom we don’t see — is called, what else, “Y. Stuffum”); Gruesome is declared dead early on after a beta version of the gas knocks him out — and when he gets up off the morgue slab and escapes once he’s come to, Patton says, “If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear we were dealing with Boris Karloff!” (That line was obviously copied from the original Broadway production of Arsenic and Old Lace, in which Karloff played Jonathan Brewster and entered with his back to the audience until his sidekick, Dr. Einstein, asked why he killed the harmless old man they’d run into — and Karloff turned to the audience, showing his face for the first time in the play, and roared, “Because he said I looked like Boris Karloff!”)
The film is essentially a collection of campy chase scenes, but Karloff distinguishes himself and so does the series’ third Tess Trueheart, Anne Gwynne (who’d worked with Karloff before — she’d played his daughter in Black Friday), who witnesses the bank robbery and calls the police because when the gas bomb went off she was inside a phone booth and therefore protected from it. Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome essentially dispensed with the film noir pretensions of the three previous series entries and went for camp — and managed to be the most entertaining of the four precisely for that reason, and not just because of the presence of Karloff as its formidable guest star! — 7/23/09
I had showed the first RKO Dick Tracy, made in 1945 and the inaugural effort in a series of four before RKO got out of the “B” business altogether in 1947. I’ve always liked the RKO Tracys — even the first two, made with Morgan Conway in the title role (prior to RKO’s “B”-feature ventures, Dick Tracy had only appeared on the screen in four Republic serials, played by Ralph Byrd — after the relative box-office disappointment of the second RKO Tracy, Dick Tracy vs. Cueball, RKO took Conway off the series and hired Byrd, who made their last two Tracy films and starred as the detective again in a 1951-52 TV series that lasted a year — it was popular and would have been renewed except that Ralph Byrd died over the summer, and the producers decided to cancel it rather than risk a replacement who wouldn’t be accepted by audiences as Tracy the way Byrd had been — and that was the end of Tracy on screen until the Warren Beatty extravaganza of 1990). Conway is a perfectly fine Tracy, reasonably handsome and authoritative, though he lacked the famously jutting chin of Chester Gould’s cartoon.
The 1945 Dick Tracy was a film in a bit of a netherworld of its own, half straightforward cops-and-robbers yarn and half film noir, in which the mystery is who is the sinister “Splitface” who seems to be knifing people to death at random, and what is the connection between his victims. Eventually the connection turns out to be that the 14 people on his hit list are the 12 jurors and two alternates responsible for his conviction, who otherwise run all over the map in terms of income, status and career. Dick Tracy was written by Eric Taylor based on Gould’s comic strip, and for the most part (except for the mortician named “Deathridge”) he avoided the campy names with which Gould usually adorned his people. It opens with an out-and-out quote from RKO’s Cat People, which had featured Simone Simon stalking Jane Randolph through a green patch of urban soil — in this case a woman schoolteacher is being stalked by a psycho killer, she turns back and he isn’t there, then she starts walking forwards again and he is there, and he catches and kills her — and even shot on the very same set (a tree-lined walkway) Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur had used for the similar scene in Cat People.
From that point the movie becomes an intriguing game of spot-the-set, and watchable mainly because of Conway, Anne Jeffreys as Tess Trueheart (she was as good as the girlfriend of a super-cop as she’d been as the girlfriend of a super-crook in Dillinger) and Mike Mazurki’s awesome performance as Splitface. Though the script gives him little or nothing in the way of motivation, Mazurki brings unexpected pathos to his role by playing Splitface much the way he did Moose Malloy in Murder, My Sweet (RKO’s noir masterpiece from 1944 based on Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely), giving the character far more depth and range than Taylor supplied in his script and making us almost feel sorry for the guy. There’s a hint that Splitface is actually a rarely seen and never photographed nightclub owner, Steve Owens (Morgan Wallace) — his daughter Judith, played by a young and almost unrecognizable Jane Greer, is an important character — but different actors play the two men.
The director is William Berke, who mostly ground out hack entries in the Falcon series with Tom Conway (including The Falcon in Mexico, for which he had Orson Welles as his uncredited co-director — a few clips of the Latin American scenes for Welles’ unfinished documentary It’s All True made their way into The Falcon in Mexico) but who here also seems to have been watching some noir movies, since much of the 1945 Dick Tracy is vividly atmospheric and visually quite distinguished, albeit sometimes more atmospheric than it needs to be to tell a relatively simple story. — 7/20/09
••••••••••
I turned on the TV and VCR to do some cueing and in the meantime managed to watch almost all of Dick Tracy vs. Cueball. The history of the Tracy character in film is four (relatively) big-budget Republic serials between 1937 and 1941 starring Ralph Byrd (the third of which co-starred a young actress named Phyllis Isley, who later achieved fame as Jennifer Jones); then four RKO “B”’s in 1945-47, the first two of which starred Morgan Conway as Tracy and the last two returned Ralph Byrd to the role; then a TV series in the early 1950’s, also with Byrd, which got good ratings but only lasted one season because Byrd died during the summer hiatus; then nothing until the big-budget version from 1990 with Warren Beatty and Madonna, a beautiful-looking film (Beatty and his production designer wisely eschewed the past-is-brown look in favor of a broad, intense palette copied from the color panels of Chester Gould’s comic strip) but something of a dud dramatically.
This one was the second of RKO’s four and the last to star Morgan Conway, whom William K. Everson called “somewhat dour” — he did a lot of crimefighter roles at the time and is good as the prosecutor in the contemporaneous The Truth about Murder but not quite right for a superhero cop — along with Anne Jeffreys as Tess Trueheart (Jeffreys left the series when Conway did) and Ian Keith as the Barrymore-esque ham actor Vitamin Flintheart (alas, Keith’s own career had suffered from the same disease — alcoholism — that had screwed up John Barrymore’s, though within the campy writing of this character he’s actually quite good). The titular Cueball is played by Dick Wessel, and his appearance is one of the most remarkable aspects of the film: dressed in a worn leather jacket and wearing a cowboy hat that supplies the leather band he uses to strangle people, his favorite mode of murder, he looks at once convincingly proletarian and almost sexy in his relentless butchness, which is a relief given that aside from him and Tracy just about every other male in this film is a screaming queen: Jules Sparkle (Harry Cheshire), owner of a jewelry store whose employees, unbeknownst to him (or maybe beknownst to him after all, since the writers on this film — Luci Ward, story; and Dane Lussier and Robert E. Kent, script — weren’t exactly big on plot clarity), have hatched a plot to import $300,000 worth of uncut diamonds and sent Cueball, a.k.a. Harry Lake, to steal them; Percival Priceless (Douglas Walton), antique dealer; his clerk Higby (Milton Parsons) and Simon Little (Byron Foulger), Sparkle’s diamond cutter.
The story isn’t much but this film hardly deserves a listing in the book The Fifty Worst Films of All Time — it’s actually a pretty good crime “B” and benefits from the fact that it was made at the height of the noir cycle and director Gordon Douglas (who went on to biggers and betters) and cinematographer George Diskant threw a lot of noir compositions that helped enliven what could otherwise have been a quite ordinary film — though there’s nothing as interesting here as the quite surprising plot of the first RKO Dick Tracy, which cast Mike Mazurki as the villain in what was essentially a repeat of his role in Murder, My Sweet and actually gave him a surprising degree of pathos (surprising for the villain in a Dick Tracy story, anyway). There’s also a nice hard-woman performance from Rita Corday as Mona Clyde, Sparkle’s secretary and the mastermind of the jewel-robbery plot — though how a nice bad-girl like her got mixed up with a nasty bad-guy like Cueball remains a mystery, and the clue by which Tracy traces Cueball and discovers his real identity — Butch (Jimmy Clemons), friend of Tracy’s adopted son Junior (Jimmy Crane), is wearing a hat with the band just like the one Cueball is using as his murder weapon, and Tracy traces the hats to a workshop at the New Mexico prison from which Cueball had been released a month before — is clever though a bit arch.
Though uneasily perched between Gould’s comic-strip aesthetic (including the ridiculous, campy character names that were a stock in trade for him) and film noir, Dick Tracy vs. Cueball is quite an entertaining film in a series that aimed relatively high for a “B” crime show, though the first and last RKO Tracys remain the best mainly because they had the best bad guys (Mazurki in the first and Boris Karloff as, inevitably, “Gruesome” in the last). Also worthy of note is the animated neon sign that advertises the dive bar in which the crooks meet, the Dripping Dagger (I think RKO used that same bar set in every Tracy movie but changed its name each time), and Esther Howard’s performance as Filthy Flora, the Dripping Dagger’s owner; she played the very similar character of Jessie Florian in Murder, My Sweet and brought some of the same sadness here (and anticipated the pathos of Thelma Ritter’s role in Pickup on South Street). — 3/15/07
•••••
Dick Tracy did well enough at the box office that RKO went ahead and made three sequels, of which the first, Dick Tracy vs. Cueball, was released towards the end of 1946 and retained Morgan Conway as Tracy but had a new director (Gordon Douglas, later marked for biggers and betters) and new writers (Luci Ward, story; and crime veteran Dane Lussier and the ubiquitous Robert E. Kent, script). This time the writers did incorporate the deliberately campy names Tracy cooked up for both his associates and his adversaries: among the former are Tess Trueheart (Anne Jeffreys again, though having little to do until the end, when she masquerades as a society woman to catch the baddies red-handed and actually does a quite credible job) and ham actor Vitamin Flintheart (an obvious caricature on the then recently deceased John Barrymore, enacted by Ian Keith in his best flaming-queen style), while among the baddies are jeweler “Jules Sparkle” (Harry Cheshire); his diamond cutter “Simon Little” (Byron Foulger, who wears ultra-thick glasses throughout and comes off so much like Anthony Edwards in the movie Northfork its writer-directors, brothers Michael and Mark Polish, might have patterned their character after him), antiques dealer “Percival Priceless” (Douglas Walton) and “Dripping Dagger” bar owner “Filthy Flora” (Esther Howard, who like Mike Mazurki in the first RKO Dick Tracy was recycling a characterization she’d played in Murder, My Sweet — as Jessie Florian, alcoholic widow of a bar owner).
Dick Tracy vs. Cueball was listed as one of “The Fifty Worst Films of All Time” by Harry Medved and Randy Dreyfuss in their book of that title, a dishonor it really doesn’t deserve; it’s actually a quite capable, exciting film in its genre, directed by Douglas with a real flair for suspense and action, and a rapid-fire pace that makes it look more like a Warners film than something from RKO (and indeed Douglas went to work for Warners later). What’s most fascinating about this movie is the extent to which RKO’s casting department filled the cast list with such screaming queens: Lester Abbott (Trevor Bardette), the thief who’s stolen a set of valuable diamonds for a ring, as well as its other male participants: Douglas Walton as “Priceless,” Byron Foulger as Little, Milton Parsons as Priceless’s clerk (and, we almost get the impression, his boyfriend) and Skelton Knaggs as Little’s associate. Even some of the good guys — notably Ian Keith as Flintheart and Lyle Latell as Tracy’s partner, Pat Patton — seem pretty queeny. The idea seems to have been to make Tracy and Cueball (Dick Wessel) the only butch guys in the whole film — the crime ring all those queer boys are participating in is run, natch, by a tough-as-nails woman, Rita Corday (under her cover as Mona, Sparkle’s secretary) — and Cueball easily overpowers all the Gay guys in the gang.
Wearing a blue-collar worker’s outfit — a leather jacket and work pants — and topped with that big head with no hair, Cueball ends up looking like a giant, self-ambulating penis, “screwing” his fellow crooks figuratively (by refusing to give them the jewels he took from Abbott and constantly raising his price for them) and almost literally — especially since his preferred murder method, which involves removing the leather band from his hat and strangling his victims with it, requires close physical contact which Douglas shoots in a way that heightens the sublimated lust = death sexuality. (The band also fulfills an important plot purpose; Cueball had made them while serving a stretch in prison, and Tracy is thereby able to trace him and learn his real name, Harry Lake.) The “family” interludes — with Tracy’s ward Junior (itself a pretty kinky relationship, though clearly we weren’t meant to think so), his friend Butch (who’s wearing one of the hatbands, which gives Tracy the clue he needs to link them to Cueball), Tess Trueheart (in other crime series the hero had to put off marrying his girlfriend because he was always being called away to solve a crime; in these films, she can’t even land a dinner date with Tracy before he’s called away!) — aren’t as interesting as all the quirky sexual hints surrounding the villains, but the film is strongly plotted, the action is logical and even the ending, which Medved and Dreyfuss ridiculed — Tracy has traced Cueball to a railroad yard, Cueball has got his foot caught in between two rails, and “just when you’re thinking, ‘Oh, no, they’re not going to have him get hit by a train,’ he gets hit by a train” — adds to the aura of invincible masculinity surrounding Cueball by suggesting that neither the criminal justice system nor even a cop with a gun was sufficient to take him out: it had to be an accident, an “act of God.” — 7/20/09
••••••••••
The film I picked out was Dick Tracy’s Dilemma, next in sequence in the RKO series and the return of Ralph Byrd to the role of Dick Tracy — Byrd was hardly as good an actor as Morgan Conway but he was better for the role physically, with his tall physique and prominent chin at least approximating the famously angular jutting chin Chester Gould had given the character in the comics. Dick Tracy’s Dilemma is probably the weakest of the RKO Tracys, mainly because there isn’t much of a plot — the super-villain this time is “The Claw” (Jack Lambert), who’s just a swarthy proletarian thug distinguished only by having a sharp hook where his right hand should be (and using it as a supremely lethal murder weapon — it’s interesting how the writers of the first three RKO Tracys avoided gunplay as much as possible and favored crooks who murdered their victims in ways that required physical contact: Splitface slit their throats with a knife, Cueball strangled them with a hatband and the Claw impaled them on his hook-like artificial hand).
In the opening, “The Claw” steals a shipment of furs from the Collins company — “clawing” the night watchman at the Collins plant to do it — and most of the rest of it is a series of very dark action scenes (sometimes too dark to make out what’s supposed to be going on) interspersed with a lot of dull palaver involving Tracy, his partner Pat Patton (Lyle Latell), his girlfriend Tess Trueheart (regrettably replaced by Kay Christopher — maybe Anne Jeffreys, who played Tess in the previous two films with Conway, felt wasted in the role, which she was), Collins company owner Humphries (Charles Marsh) and two people from the Honesty Insurance Company: vice-president Peter Premium (William B. Davidson) and investigator Mr. Cudd (Al Bridge). There are a few scenes for atmosphere — the grungy bar that appeared as the “Dripping Dagger” in Dick Tracy vs. Cueball is here called the “Blinking Skull” — it’s the same set; only the animated neon sign in the window has changed — and one of the most interesting (and, here, wasted) characters in the series, “Sightless” (Jimmy Conlin), a Tracy informant who poses as a blind homeless beggar to keep an eye on the criminal underworld, hangs out in front of the bar, which is owned this time around by a man, Jigger (Wade Crosby).
There’s also a nice scene in which Tracy encounters Longshot Lillie the female fence (Bernadene Hayes) and recognizes her from previous criminal encounters — but eventually believes her when she said she had nothing to do with the fur heist because, as we’ve figured out about two or three reels before the characters do, the “robbery” was really an inside job: Humphries arranged for his own merchandise to be stolen and fenced so he could scam the insurance company, claim the loss and also make money from a criminal sale of the furs. Written by Robert Stephen Brode — peculiarly, RKO never seemed to use the same writers more than once on this series — and directed by John Rawlins, fresh from Universal where he’d done a couple of the Jon Hall-Maria Montez films as well as the first modern-dress Rathbone/Bruce Sherlock Holmes film, Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror — Dick Tracy’s Dilemma (a “cheating” title since at no time is Dick Tracy faced with any kind of dilemma in the plot — one would have expected a story involving Tess or one of Tracy’s friends being kidnapped and his dilemma being to go after the crooks or let them go to save his friends) is strong in the atmosphere department but surprisingly weak as a thriller, and also bereft of the marvelous Gay undertones that made Dick Tracy vs. Cueball so much fun; out of all the queens from the cast of Cueball, Ian Keith as Tracy’s actor friend Vitamin Flintheart (obviously a caricature of John Barrymore) is the only one that returns, and even he seems under wraps this time around.
Fortunately, for the next (and, alas, last) episode in their series RKO would get a truly inspired villain — Gruesome (Boris Karloff — who else? One wonders if they owed him a film on his contract after having cancelled Val Lewton’s planned production of Blackbeard, which they eventually revived but cast Robert Newton in the pirate role originally intended for Karloff) — and ramp up the camp aspects to produce a film that pretty much junked the noir affectations of the earlier RKO Tracys but probably came closer to the spirit of the Gould comics than any of the previous ones. It’s also worthy of note that in Britain, where the Tracy comics weren’t published, Dick Tracy’s Dilemma was retitled Mark of the Claw — which probably left audiences expecting a horror film instead of the lukewarm cops ’n’ robbers melodrama they actually got! — 7/22/09
••••••••••
Our “feature” for last night was the fourth and last in the RKO Dick Tracy series — a short-lived effort RKO launched in 1945 just as they were edging their way out of the “B” business. They’d ended the Falcon detective series in 1946 but they kept the Tracy series going a year longer, attempting to liven it up by replacing contract player Morgan Conway as Tracy with Ralph Byrd — who’d made the part his own in four Republic serials from 1937 to 1941 (those oddly changed Tracy from a Chicago police detective to an FBI agent!) — in the third film (frankly, Byrd looks more like the Chester Gould comics but Conway is the better actor!) and, for the fourth, not only brought along a particularly illustrious actor as the guest villain but gave him top billing.
He is, of course, Boris Karloff, who as I speculated in my notes on Dick Tracy’s Dilemma may have been owed one more film by RKO under his contract to appear in the Val Lewton productions The Body Snatcher, Isle of the Dead and Bedlam. (Lewton planned to follow those up by starring Karloff in a pirate melodrama, Blackbeard, for which RKO was willing to give him a higher budget. Then Lewton did his usual meticulous research and found that the pirates of Blackbeard’s day hadn’t sailed in large ships; rather, they’d put together fleets of fast, maneuverable cutters with which they surrounded the large cargo ships they intended to rob — much the way today’s much talked-about pirates use speedboats — and he became determined to show that kind of piracy in his film. The RKO bosses angrily replied that they weren’t spending all that money for a movie showing Boris Karloff captaining a fleet of fishing boats, so they cancelled the project, fired Lewton, and later revived it and had Robert Newton as Blackbeard sailing a large, ungainly and historically inaccurate vessel.)
Anyway, they concocted a villain called “Gruesome” for Karloff to play, giving a performance that oddly recalled his pre-Frankenstein work in the movie The Criminal Code 16 years before — though the makeup isn’t particularly gruesome at all; he really looks more like a modern-dress version of the cabman John Gray, his role in Lewton’s The Body Snatcher, than an out-and-out monster — and gave him a sidekick, “Melody” (Tony Barrett), who plays piano at the “Hangman’s Knot,” the same dive bar we saw in the two immediately preceding Tracy films but under different identities (the “Dripping Dagger” in Dick Tracy vs. Cueball and the “Blinking Skull” in Dick Tracy’s Dilemma). The two of them team up with a discredited scientist, Dr. Lee Thal (Edward Ashley), who works as a hired-gun researcher at the Wood Plastics Company but in his spare time has invented a gas which leaves anyone who’s exposed to it paralyzed and frozen in place for about 10 to 15 minutes. To make this stuff, he needed to steal a chemical from the State University — which he achieved by getting it from his girlfriend, Dr. Irma M. Learned — “I. M. Learned” — (June Clayworth), assistant to State University physicist Dr. A. Tomic (Milton Parsons), who claims to have been receiving death threats and who turns up missing midway through the film (he’s never seen again and the writing committee — William H. Graffis and Robert E. Kent, story; Robertson White and Eric Taylor, screenplay — never bothers to tell us what happened to him).
There’s a fascinating meeting between Gruesome, Melody, Dr. Thal and his assistant, X-Ray (Skelton Knaggs — the RKO casting department really deserves kudos for bringing back at least two of that marvelous assortment of “queen” types, Parsons and Knaggs, from Dick Tracy vs. Cueball) in which it’s clear that the bookish types are no match for the criminal men of action they’ve recruited, and a great bank robbery scene in which the paralyzing gas is played up for its most comic possibilities — a watchman is frozen in place while chasing a cat (the cat, of course, is frozen too!), a bank customer is caught in mid-sneeze, and so on. Indeed, the whole movie is played up for comic possibilities; the writers follow the Gouldian penchant for naming the characters after what they do (at one point Tracy’s partner, Pat Patton, traces the crooks to a taxidermy shop whose proprietor — whom we don’t see — is called, what else, “Y. Stuffum”); Gruesome is declared dead early on after a beta version of the gas knocks him out — and when he gets up off the morgue slab and escapes once he’s come to, Patton says, “If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear we were dealing with Boris Karloff!” (That line was obviously copied from the original Broadway production of Arsenic and Old Lace, in which Karloff played Jonathan Brewster and entered with his back to the audience until his sidekick, Dr. Einstein, asked why he killed the harmless old man they’d run into — and Karloff turned to the audience, showing his face for the first time in the play, and roared, “Because he said I looked like Boris Karloff!”)
The film is essentially a collection of campy chase scenes, but Karloff distinguishes himself and so does the series’ third Tess Trueheart, Anne Gwynne (who’d worked with Karloff before — she’d played his daughter in Black Friday), who witnesses the bank robbery and calls the police because when the gas bomb went off she was inside a phone booth and therefore protected from it. Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome essentially dispensed with the film noir pretensions of the three previous series entries and went for camp — and managed to be the most entertaining of the four precisely for that reason, and not just because of the presence of Karloff as its formidable guest star! — 7/23/09
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
My Daughter’s Secret (Capital/Lifetime, 2008)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Afterwards I watched a Lifetime movie I’d recorded Sunday: My Daughter’s Secret.which sounded like it might have had an interesting premise — suburban single mom Denise (Jennifer Grant) finds that her just-about-to-go-to-college daughter Justine (Nina Dobrev) has been taking a few too many walks on the wild side and is in trouble with the law, and she’s torn between her desire to help her daughter and her duty as a citizen. Alas, My Daughter’s Secret turned out to be considerably milder than the publicity made it sound, and it was one of those horrible stories (the writer was Christine Conradt) where the entire plot is dependent on the central character — Justine — being such an idiot that it’s hard to work up so much sympathy for anyone who would behave so stupidly and keep blowing her chances to get out of her own situation.
In the backstory, Justine has been dating a tall, blond, baby-faced (I kept wondering throughout the movie just how he shaves so closely — or maybe the actor was too young to need to shave at all!) high-school dropout named Brent (Steve Byers). As the film opens Justine is sneaking out of her house — she lives with her mom and mom, in one of the wisest moves anyone in this film has made, has forbidden her to see Brent, a dictate Our Teenage Heroine is, not surprisingly, ignoring — only to find that he’s picked her up in a green SUV he borrowed from the auto body repair shop where he and his brother Reggie (James Gilbert — he’s shorter than Byers, has dark hair and a craggier face; they’re not at all believable as brothers, but that’s the least of this movie’s problems) work; Reggie is with them; and before they socialize there’s a minor little errand Reggie and Brent have to run. The minor little errand turns out to be sticking up the jewelry store where Justine’s mom Denise works — they hired Denise just after Justine’s dad left her and the owners, Albert (Norman Mikeal Berketa) and Frank (whom we never see) and Brent pumped Justine for information about the store’s security systems and also about when they’d have a particularly valuable bit of merchandise it would be especially profitable to steal.
In the course of the robbery Reggie shoots Albert — who at first seems like the sort of fat, pig-like man who usually owns jewelry stores in movies, though later on as we see him lingering in the hospital for about half the rest of the film until he finally expires, it becomes clear that as lousy a first impression as he made, we’re really supposed to like him. The robbery is reported to the police by Denise, who just happened to be in the store’s offices, covering for a night-shift employee (jewelry stores have night shifts?) who was out that day, and Brent keeps Justine from going either to the police or her mom by frightening her and telling her (accurately) that just by having been there and stayed in the car when Reggie told her they needed her to be the “lookout,” she’s as guilty as they are and in jeopardy of being prosecuted as an accessory to murder.
Justine’s biggest mistake was made at the very beginning, when Reggie and Brent left her in the car alone and went in to rob the store. Did she take out her cell phone and call the police? Did she run out of the car? Did she think of driving the car away, stranding the would-be robbers and seeking help from the law? No, she did none of those; she just sat there, either because she was frozen with fear or because she was so loyal to Brent that she wasn’t going to go against him even when he was robbing a jewelry store, and her mom’s employer at that. Throughout the rest of the movie Justine blows off virtually every chance she gets to extricate herself from the situation — Conradt seems to want us to believe she’s got such a bad case of the hots for Brent that she’s willing to do anything, including risking prison, for him, but she’s nowhere near a good enough writer to make us accept that — and My Daughter’s Secret becomes an excessively dull way to spend an hour and a half watching an asinine ninny just dig herself deeper into trouble.
My Daughter’s Secret has a good director, Douglas Jackson, who gets the possessory credit (“A Douglas Jackson Film”) and deserves it; he’s got a flair for dark urban atmosphere (the dramatic lighting of the nighttime scenes is quite beautiful and a far better solution for how to do film noir in color than the dirty green-and-brown look that for some reason has become standard), and he’s also an effective suspense director — but he’s up against the dull, underwritten Conradt script that ignores all the subtleties and nuances this story could have had and at plot point after plot point goes for the easiest, most clichéd resolutions. The hapless actors in this thing do the best they can — Jennifer Grant (Cary’s daughter, by the way) deserves a purple heart for having to play such a lame role as the all-knowing mom who recognizes she can’t run her daughter’s life but still gives it a try — and the two guys are at least cute (and though they’re supposed to be playing brothers they give off body language that makes them look more like a Gay couple — perhaps Conradt should have made Reggie Gay and Brent Bi, making his affair with Justine more opportunistic than romantic — as it stands she never bothered to decide whether Brent was just using Justine or was genuinely in love with her; instead, she tried to write it both ways), but Dobrev goes through the whole movie with a hangdog expression on her face and neither the threat of prison nor the withdrawal of that threat at the end seems to disturb her sang-froid in the slightest.
Afterwards I watched a Lifetime movie I’d recorded Sunday: My Daughter’s Secret.which sounded like it might have had an interesting premise — suburban single mom Denise (Jennifer Grant) finds that her just-about-to-go-to-college daughter Justine (Nina Dobrev) has been taking a few too many walks on the wild side and is in trouble with the law, and she’s torn between her desire to help her daughter and her duty as a citizen. Alas, My Daughter’s Secret turned out to be considerably milder than the publicity made it sound, and it was one of those horrible stories (the writer was Christine Conradt) where the entire plot is dependent on the central character — Justine — being such an idiot that it’s hard to work up so much sympathy for anyone who would behave so stupidly and keep blowing her chances to get out of her own situation.
In the backstory, Justine has been dating a tall, blond, baby-faced (I kept wondering throughout the movie just how he shaves so closely — or maybe the actor was too young to need to shave at all!) high-school dropout named Brent (Steve Byers). As the film opens Justine is sneaking out of her house — she lives with her mom and mom, in one of the wisest moves anyone in this film has made, has forbidden her to see Brent, a dictate Our Teenage Heroine is, not surprisingly, ignoring — only to find that he’s picked her up in a green SUV he borrowed from the auto body repair shop where he and his brother Reggie (James Gilbert — he’s shorter than Byers, has dark hair and a craggier face; they’re not at all believable as brothers, but that’s the least of this movie’s problems) work; Reggie is with them; and before they socialize there’s a minor little errand Reggie and Brent have to run. The minor little errand turns out to be sticking up the jewelry store where Justine’s mom Denise works — they hired Denise just after Justine’s dad left her and the owners, Albert (Norman Mikeal Berketa) and Frank (whom we never see) and Brent pumped Justine for information about the store’s security systems and also about when they’d have a particularly valuable bit of merchandise it would be especially profitable to steal.
In the course of the robbery Reggie shoots Albert — who at first seems like the sort of fat, pig-like man who usually owns jewelry stores in movies, though later on as we see him lingering in the hospital for about half the rest of the film until he finally expires, it becomes clear that as lousy a first impression as he made, we’re really supposed to like him. The robbery is reported to the police by Denise, who just happened to be in the store’s offices, covering for a night-shift employee (jewelry stores have night shifts?) who was out that day, and Brent keeps Justine from going either to the police or her mom by frightening her and telling her (accurately) that just by having been there and stayed in the car when Reggie told her they needed her to be the “lookout,” she’s as guilty as they are and in jeopardy of being prosecuted as an accessory to murder.
Justine’s biggest mistake was made at the very beginning, when Reggie and Brent left her in the car alone and went in to rob the store. Did she take out her cell phone and call the police? Did she run out of the car? Did she think of driving the car away, stranding the would-be robbers and seeking help from the law? No, she did none of those; she just sat there, either because she was frozen with fear or because she was so loyal to Brent that she wasn’t going to go against him even when he was robbing a jewelry store, and her mom’s employer at that. Throughout the rest of the movie Justine blows off virtually every chance she gets to extricate herself from the situation — Conradt seems to want us to believe she’s got such a bad case of the hots for Brent that she’s willing to do anything, including risking prison, for him, but she’s nowhere near a good enough writer to make us accept that — and My Daughter’s Secret becomes an excessively dull way to spend an hour and a half watching an asinine ninny just dig herself deeper into trouble.
My Daughter’s Secret has a good director, Douglas Jackson, who gets the possessory credit (“A Douglas Jackson Film”) and deserves it; he’s got a flair for dark urban atmosphere (the dramatic lighting of the nighttime scenes is quite beautiful and a far better solution for how to do film noir in color than the dirty green-and-brown look that for some reason has become standard), and he’s also an effective suspense director — but he’s up against the dull, underwritten Conradt script that ignores all the subtleties and nuances this story could have had and at plot point after plot point goes for the easiest, most clichéd resolutions. The hapless actors in this thing do the best they can — Jennifer Grant (Cary’s daughter, by the way) deserves a purple heart for having to play such a lame role as the all-knowing mom who recognizes she can’t run her daughter’s life but still gives it a try — and the two guys are at least cute (and though they’re supposed to be playing brothers they give off body language that makes them look more like a Gay couple — perhaps Conradt should have made Reggie Gay and Brent Bi, making his affair with Justine more opportunistic than romantic — as it stands she never bothered to decide whether Brent was just using Justine or was genuinely in love with her; instead, she tried to write it both ways), but Dobrev goes through the whole movie with a hangdog expression on her face and neither the threat of prison nor the withdrawal of that threat at the end seems to disturb her sang-froid in the slightest.
Monday, July 20, 2009
Confessions of a Go-Go Girl (Nomadic/Lifetime, 2008)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
This morning I ran a Lifetime TV-movie I’d recorded the night before: Confessions of a Go-Go Girl, the old chestnut about the nice young woman who gets lured into the sex biz and loses almost everything else she found important — her family, her boyfriend, her potential as both a lawyer (the career she was training for when she finished college) and an actress (the one she shifted to when she took a couple of drama classes and got the acting “bug”) — before she finally quits go-go dancing and wins it all back again. There were some potentially interesting themes in Lenore Kletter’s script, based on a play by Jane Morley (since the lead character delivers a monologue about her experiences at the end, were we supposed to take this as autobiographical?) — Our Heroine, Jane McCoy (Chelsea Hobbs), becomes a go-go girl not only to earn the money to work her way through acting school but because it’s a way of taking herself off the ultra-tight leash her parents put her on (they even sent her to Catholic school when they could barely afford it so she would grow up sheltered from the wild side of life); and once she gets into it she finds the sheer power she can wield over men with her body and the instant gratification in the form of tips she gets when she’s having the desired effect on them — but this one gets bobbled in the execution, mainly because Morley and Kletter can’t resist throwing in the most clichéd and ancient scenes in their script.
After she’s carefully concealed her go-go career from them, Chelsea is “outed” when her father (James D. Hopkin), her brother (Graeme Black) and her boyfriend Eric (Travis Milne, a good-looking but rather faceless guy who’s just right for the role, especially in the mix of pleasure and perplexity that crosses his face when the “new” Jane insists on giving him a blow job in the middle of a sidewalk at night) go for the brother’s bachelor party at the new high-class strip club “Tantra” the night Jane is making her debut as a dancer there; or the comeuppance Jane’s friend Angela (Sarah Carter) gets when she goes in for a breast augmentation and ends up dying on the operating table because she was abusing cocaine and it cross-reacted with the anaesthetic. There are some quirky characterizations, including strip-club owner Nick (Corbin Bernsen — and no, the years have not been kind), depicted with a loving avuncularity that goes against everything I’ve ever heard about the sleazepits who actually own strip clubs in the real world; and the dancers’ unofficial den mother, Donna (Rachel Hunter), who works at the club as well as making the other dancers’ costumes and has been able to make enough money to support her 13-year-old daughter Elizabeth (Shae Keebler) all these years — and yes, there’s a hint that Elizabeth is as disgusted with her mom as Jane was about her family, and is going to rebel in the other direction by being very strait-laced and “moral.”
But all the subtleties this story could have developed are lost in a welter of silly clichés by a batch of writers and a director (Grant Harvey) who go for the easy way out of just about every crossroads in their plot and waste some good performances by Hunter, Carter and Tygh Runyan as Kurt, a coke-addicted photographer and Angela’s boyfriend, who claims to be the son of Marlon Brando (and looks enough like him it’s at least faintly believable) and steals $42,000 of Angela’s money and takes off in mid-movie to get back in touch with his inner druggie.
This morning I ran a Lifetime TV-movie I’d recorded the night before: Confessions of a Go-Go Girl, the old chestnut about the nice young woman who gets lured into the sex biz and loses almost everything else she found important — her family, her boyfriend, her potential as both a lawyer (the career she was training for when she finished college) and an actress (the one she shifted to when she took a couple of drama classes and got the acting “bug”) — before she finally quits go-go dancing and wins it all back again. There were some potentially interesting themes in Lenore Kletter’s script, based on a play by Jane Morley (since the lead character delivers a monologue about her experiences at the end, were we supposed to take this as autobiographical?) — Our Heroine, Jane McCoy (Chelsea Hobbs), becomes a go-go girl not only to earn the money to work her way through acting school but because it’s a way of taking herself off the ultra-tight leash her parents put her on (they even sent her to Catholic school when they could barely afford it so she would grow up sheltered from the wild side of life); and once she gets into it she finds the sheer power she can wield over men with her body and the instant gratification in the form of tips she gets when she’s having the desired effect on them — but this one gets bobbled in the execution, mainly because Morley and Kletter can’t resist throwing in the most clichéd and ancient scenes in their script.
After she’s carefully concealed her go-go career from them, Chelsea is “outed” when her father (James D. Hopkin), her brother (Graeme Black) and her boyfriend Eric (Travis Milne, a good-looking but rather faceless guy who’s just right for the role, especially in the mix of pleasure and perplexity that crosses his face when the “new” Jane insists on giving him a blow job in the middle of a sidewalk at night) go for the brother’s bachelor party at the new high-class strip club “Tantra” the night Jane is making her debut as a dancer there; or the comeuppance Jane’s friend Angela (Sarah Carter) gets when she goes in for a breast augmentation and ends up dying on the operating table because she was abusing cocaine and it cross-reacted with the anaesthetic. There are some quirky characterizations, including strip-club owner Nick (Corbin Bernsen — and no, the years have not been kind), depicted with a loving avuncularity that goes against everything I’ve ever heard about the sleazepits who actually own strip clubs in the real world; and the dancers’ unofficial den mother, Donna (Rachel Hunter), who works at the club as well as making the other dancers’ costumes and has been able to make enough money to support her 13-year-old daughter Elizabeth (Shae Keebler) all these years — and yes, there’s a hint that Elizabeth is as disgusted with her mom as Jane was about her family, and is going to rebel in the other direction by being very strait-laced and “moral.”
But all the subtleties this story could have developed are lost in a welter of silly clichés by a batch of writers and a director (Grant Harvey) who go for the easy way out of just about every crossroads in their plot and waste some good performances by Hunter, Carter and Tygh Runyan as Kurt, a coke-addicted photographer and Angela’s boyfriend, who claims to be the son of Marlon Brando (and looks enough like him it’s at least faintly believable) and steals $42,000 of Angela’s money and takes off in mid-movie to get back in touch with his inner druggie.
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Black Dragons (Banner/Monogram, 1942)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ended up running a couple of 1940’s “B” movies. One was a film I had on the computer: Black Dragons, a 1942 Bela Lugosi vehicle for Monogram that’s one of those peculiar movies (like The Da Vinci Code — I defy anyone who hasn’t read Dan Brown’s source novel to make sense of The Da Vinci Code on film) that’s a lot more fun — because it’s a lot more comprehensible — if you go into it actually knowing the plot premise in advance. Like the MGM “A” Keeper of the Flame, released the following year, Black Dragons is supposed to be a suspense thriller with a surprise “twist” at the end, but most of the action is completely mystifying without advance awareness of what all of this is really about.
Made right after the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor by producers (Sam Katzman, Jack Dietz and Barney A. Sarecky) who were so determined to keep their story topical that they kept screenwriter Harvey Gates busy at his typewriter for rewrite after rewrite during the shoot (which must have driven Lugosi, who never learned much English and had to memorize his lines phonetically, utterly nuts) and came up with a confusing mess of a plot, Black Dragons opens in Washington, D.C. at an upper-class party where, as Tom Weaver put it in his book Poverty Row Horrors!, “business leaders, bankers and lawyers schmooze about the War; classified information is being bandied about like back-fence gossip.” The party is being hosted by Dr. Bill Saunders (George Pembroke), and after the guests leave Saunders and five other people, New York banker Amos Hanlin (Robert Fraser), Pittsburgh steel magnate Ryder (Edward Pell, Sr.), businessmen Phillip Wallace (Robert Fiske) and John Van Dyke (Irving Mitchell) and labor leader Kerney (Max Hoffman, Jr.) start discussing their real aims and boasting of how they’ve been able to sabotage the war effort by holding up financing and parts production, fomenting strikes and the like. In between these sequences there’s a series of stock clips edited into a montage of the saboteurs at work sinking ships, blowing up bridges and burning oil wells, so we know the plot is working.
Then a sinister Frenchman who calls himself “Monsieur Colomb” (Bela Lugosi) shows up at the Saunders house and hypnotizes him in the best Lugosi manner, keeping Saunders locked in his bedroom and establishing himself as Saunders’ house guest — and the other members of Saunders’ dinner party start turning up dead, some of them in hotel rooms but most of them at the now-closed Japanese embassy in Washington, D.C., where Colomb (well, it’s a Bela Lugosi movie, so there’s not a lot of suspense about who the killer is!) dumps them after he kills them at the Saunders home or wherever else he’s able to lure them. In a flashback sequence, stylishly directed by (or at least credited, like the rest of the film, to) William Nigh with far more interesting lighting and camera angles than the rest of the movie, it’s revealed that “Colomb” was really German plastic surgeon Dr. Melcher, who in an interesting case of Axis cooperation was sent to Japan to take six members of the sinister Black Dragon Society (which really existed; they operated from the 1890’s to the end of World War II and were a bunch of Right-wingers who systematically sabotaged any attempts by the Japanese government to pursue a peace policy, including staging the infamous military coup attempt of 1936 as well as murdering at least two prime ministers before that) and remodel their faces to look like six prominent American business and labor leaders whom the Japanese had kidnapped and killed.
After the operations are complete, the head of the Black Dragon Society (I. Stanford Jolley) double-crosses Melcher and imprisons him, but Melcher still has his surgical instruments with him and does a little D.I.Y. surgery on himself so that he resembles his about-to-be-released cellmate (also played by Lugosi, in his second and last dual role; his first was in the 1935 indie Murder by Television), and thereby escapes — and in the final scene it turns out that Lugosi has given Saunders a serum that has turned him into a monster, and as Lugosi’s character dies Saunders whines, “And now I must go on living!” (The gimmick was probably inspired by Lugosi’s similar manipulation of Boris Karloff in the 1935 The Raven by “uglifying” his face and then offering to make it good-looking if Karloff’s character would just follow orders.) After watching The Invisible Ghost it’s hard not to imagine what Joseph H. Lewis could have done with the script of Black Dragons (and, indeed, it’s entirely possible Lewis did direct the flashback sequence, which shows a richness and depth of visual imagination usually far beyond William Nigh), instead of the flat, dull, boring presentation we actually get even of some pretty far-out material: like many of the other Lugosi Monograms he’s shown doing a lot of Dracula-esque things even in the context of a story that, as far-fetched as it might be, doesn’t contain any supernatural elements.
Charles actually rather liked Black Dragons, mainly for its combination of whodunit, Old Dark House-style thriller and international intrigue — and it’s also of interest in that one of the good guys is FBI agent Dick Martin, played by future Lone Ranger Clayton Moore (who seems oddly shorter and gawkier without mask, silver bullets or horse), and the other is Joan Barclay, reunited with Lugosi after the 1936 serial Shadow of Chinatown and playing Saunders’ long-lost niece — only it turns out that she’s another government agent merely posing as Saunders’ long-lost niece (with the approval of the original, whom we never see).
I ended up running a couple of 1940’s “B” movies. One was a film I had on the computer: Black Dragons, a 1942 Bela Lugosi vehicle for Monogram that’s one of those peculiar movies (like The Da Vinci Code — I defy anyone who hasn’t read Dan Brown’s source novel to make sense of The Da Vinci Code on film) that’s a lot more fun — because it’s a lot more comprehensible — if you go into it actually knowing the plot premise in advance. Like the MGM “A” Keeper of the Flame, released the following year, Black Dragons is supposed to be a suspense thriller with a surprise “twist” at the end, but most of the action is completely mystifying without advance awareness of what all of this is really about.
Made right after the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor by producers (Sam Katzman, Jack Dietz and Barney A. Sarecky) who were so determined to keep their story topical that they kept screenwriter Harvey Gates busy at his typewriter for rewrite after rewrite during the shoot (which must have driven Lugosi, who never learned much English and had to memorize his lines phonetically, utterly nuts) and came up with a confusing mess of a plot, Black Dragons opens in Washington, D.C. at an upper-class party where, as Tom Weaver put it in his book Poverty Row Horrors!, “business leaders, bankers and lawyers schmooze about the War; classified information is being bandied about like back-fence gossip.” The party is being hosted by Dr. Bill Saunders (George Pembroke), and after the guests leave Saunders and five other people, New York banker Amos Hanlin (Robert Fraser), Pittsburgh steel magnate Ryder (Edward Pell, Sr.), businessmen Phillip Wallace (Robert Fiske) and John Van Dyke (Irving Mitchell) and labor leader Kerney (Max Hoffman, Jr.) start discussing their real aims and boasting of how they’ve been able to sabotage the war effort by holding up financing and parts production, fomenting strikes and the like. In between these sequences there’s a series of stock clips edited into a montage of the saboteurs at work sinking ships, blowing up bridges and burning oil wells, so we know the plot is working.
Then a sinister Frenchman who calls himself “Monsieur Colomb” (Bela Lugosi) shows up at the Saunders house and hypnotizes him in the best Lugosi manner, keeping Saunders locked in his bedroom and establishing himself as Saunders’ house guest — and the other members of Saunders’ dinner party start turning up dead, some of them in hotel rooms but most of them at the now-closed Japanese embassy in Washington, D.C., where Colomb (well, it’s a Bela Lugosi movie, so there’s not a lot of suspense about who the killer is!) dumps them after he kills them at the Saunders home or wherever else he’s able to lure them. In a flashback sequence, stylishly directed by (or at least credited, like the rest of the film, to) William Nigh with far more interesting lighting and camera angles than the rest of the movie, it’s revealed that “Colomb” was really German plastic surgeon Dr. Melcher, who in an interesting case of Axis cooperation was sent to Japan to take six members of the sinister Black Dragon Society (which really existed; they operated from the 1890’s to the end of World War II and were a bunch of Right-wingers who systematically sabotaged any attempts by the Japanese government to pursue a peace policy, including staging the infamous military coup attempt of 1936 as well as murdering at least two prime ministers before that) and remodel their faces to look like six prominent American business and labor leaders whom the Japanese had kidnapped and killed.
After the operations are complete, the head of the Black Dragon Society (I. Stanford Jolley) double-crosses Melcher and imprisons him, but Melcher still has his surgical instruments with him and does a little D.I.Y. surgery on himself so that he resembles his about-to-be-released cellmate (also played by Lugosi, in his second and last dual role; his first was in the 1935 indie Murder by Television), and thereby escapes — and in the final scene it turns out that Lugosi has given Saunders a serum that has turned him into a monster, and as Lugosi’s character dies Saunders whines, “And now I must go on living!” (The gimmick was probably inspired by Lugosi’s similar manipulation of Boris Karloff in the 1935 The Raven by “uglifying” his face and then offering to make it good-looking if Karloff’s character would just follow orders.) After watching The Invisible Ghost it’s hard not to imagine what Joseph H. Lewis could have done with the script of Black Dragons (and, indeed, it’s entirely possible Lewis did direct the flashback sequence, which shows a richness and depth of visual imagination usually far beyond William Nigh), instead of the flat, dull, boring presentation we actually get even of some pretty far-out material: like many of the other Lugosi Monograms he’s shown doing a lot of Dracula-esque things even in the context of a story that, as far-fetched as it might be, doesn’t contain any supernatural elements.
Charles actually rather liked Black Dragons, mainly for its combination of whodunit, Old Dark House-style thriller and international intrigue — and it’s also of interest in that one of the good guys is FBI agent Dick Martin, played by future Lone Ranger Clayton Moore (who seems oddly shorter and gawkier without mask, silver bullets or horse), and the other is Joan Barclay, reunited with Lugosi after the 1936 serial Shadow of Chinatown and playing Saunders’ long-lost niece — only it turns out that she’s another government agent merely posing as Saunders’ long-lost niece (with the approval of the original, whom we never see).
Friday, July 17, 2009
$9.99 (Australian Film Finance Corporation/Regent Releasing, 2008/9)
Charming Stop-Motion Movie Offers the Meaning of Life
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
“Have you ever wondered, ‘What’s the meaning of life? Why do we exist?’,” runs the advertising copy for a book called The Meaning of Life, offered for sale for the titular price in a charming new movie called $9.99. “The answer to this vexing question is now within your reach! You’ll find it in a small yet amazing booklet, which will explain, in easy-to-follow, simple terms your reason for being! The booklet, printed on the finest paper, contains illuminating, exquisite color pictures, and could be yours for a mere $9.99.”
$9.99 — the movie, not the price tag — is a stop-motion animation feature, a co-production from Australia, the U.S. and Israel, based on a series of short stories by an Israeli writer named Etgar Keret and co-written by him and the film’s director, Tatia Rosenthal. It’s set in a modernistic apartment building — the exterior looks sharp and new but the insides seem to be crumbling — and it brings together a set of characters who seem to have little in common but having ended up under the same roof.
The central characters, more or less, are the Peck family: single dad Jim (Anthony LaPaglia) and his two young-adult sons, Lenny (Ben Mendelsohn) and Dave (Samuel Johnson). Lenny has a sleazy job as a repossessor — a sort of employment that in today’s era of economic breakdown may seem incredibly timely, but which in this film means they can come into a debtor’s home and take not only whatever the person borrowed money on and isn’t repaying, but just about everything in the house that isn’t nailed down and possibly a few things that are, as well. Lenny also has a seemingly hopeless crush on the supermodel Tanita (Leeanna Walsman), who’s just occupied the penthouse of their building and is actually willing to have sex with him. But her price for her favors is a chilling set of physical transformations that would have scared even the late Michael Jackson.
As for Dave — the younger brother who orders The Meaning of Life — he doesn’t have a job at all. He gets a tryout with Lenny’s employer, only he bungles the first repossession he goes out on because he feels sorry for the guy, a long out-of-work magician named “Marcus Pocus.” Also in the building live several other tenants, each with equally odd problems and hopes. Ron (Joel Edgerton) gets dumped by his schoolteacher fiancée Michelle (Claudia Karvan) and hangs out in his apartment with three two-inch gnomes, identified as “students” in the official synopsis but recognizable as such only to the extent that they drink beer (which Ron feeds them with an eyedropper) and party a lot. They learn to activate Ron’s turntable (he listens to music on vinyl) and generally use his place as a frat house.
Zack (Jamie Katsamatsas) is a schoolboy in Michelle’s class, who’s got his heart set on an electronic toy called “Soccer Jack.” As one of those parental exercises in teaching fiscal responsibility, his single father (oddly, while there are women in this film, none of them are mothers) gives him a piggy bank and tells Zack he’ll give him 50 cents for every glass of milk he drinks — then, when he’s drunk enough milk to fill the piggy bank, they’ll break it open and he’ll be able to buy “Soccer Jack.” Only Zack falls in love with the piggy bank, bringing it in to show-and-tell day at school and boasting that it smiles at him whether he puts money in it or not.
The final strand in this eccentric plot concerns Albert (Barry Otto), a retiree who takes in a homeless man (Geoffrey Rush) who turns out to be a guardian angel — though, as he explains, that’s actually a demotion. The angel hasn’t quite mastered the art of using his wings, but he has become adept at wheedling money out of passers-by by threatening to commit suicide on the spot if they don’t give him a handout … and actually doing so. (He gets away with this because he’s an angel, so he can’t die permanently.)
As arbitrary as this plot sounds, not only in its free mixture of natural and supernatural elements (the sort of thing usually described by the vague and overworked phrase “magical realism”) but also in the rather tenuous connections between the plot lines — one gets the impression each strand was a separate Keret story and it was only while writing the film that he and Rosenthal figured out ways to link them — $9.99 mostly works. The relative crudity of stop-motion animation works better than any other conceivable way of telling the story — a live-action version would have come across as way too arch and a computer-animated one would have seemed too machine-made and lacked the tactile surfaces of the characters as we have them — and the voices, especially LaPaglia’s, supply depths of character the clay puppets lack.
$9.99 is a quite impressive film that uses animation to express intellectual content as well as to have fun. In that regard it’s reminiscent of Richard Linklater’s Waking Life — a film which used Rotoscoping (tracing over live-action footage to turn human actors into what appear to be hand-drawn cartoons) and told a similar story of individuals on an intellectual quest for the meaning of life. But whereas Linklater’s film seemed awfully preachy at times, Rosenthal’s expertly balances joy and thought, innocence and experience, and stays interesting despite the seeming arbitrariness of the plotting: this is one film in which “anything can happen” — and does.
It also helps that $9.99 carefully cultivates its universality. The plot description on imdb.com gives the location as Sydney, Australia — though the film’s title is American and the check Dave receives as a refund when his second book order doesn’t go through is in dollars — but it really could be happening anywhere in the world where there’s a white-majority population and English is the native language. (For that matter, it could be happening in a country where English isn’t the native language; with the relative crudity of the stop-motion puppets’ lip movements, it would be easy enough to dub it into other tongues.) It’s also nice to see an animated film that frankly admits that people not only possess sex organs (Lenny is enviably well-hung) but use them to have sex.
$9.99 is a movie that’s well worth seeing if you can get into its quirky charm. It’s only 78 minutes long — it doesn’t overstay its welcome, though the ending seems abrupt and one could easily imagine it going on for another half-hour or so — and it’s certainly not the sort of cookie-cutter entertainment with which the major studios regularly bludgeon us these days. If you’re looking for something different at the movies, give it a chance.
$9.99 is now playing at the Ken Cinema, 4061 Adams Avenue in San Diego. Please call (619) 819-0236 for showtimes and other information.
The International (Relativity Media/Sony/Columbia, 2009)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film Charles and I watched last night was a quite good recent one: The International, a recent (February 2009) release and a piece of international intrigue spiced with anti-capitalist comment — this is probably the most cynical movie made about international capitalism since Network — in which Interpol agent Louis Salinger (Clive Owen) and New York assistant district attorney Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts) team up to go after the International Bank of Commerce and Credit (a thinly veiled reference to the real Bank of Credit and Commerce International, or BCCI, which fell apart as a result of a series of scandals in the 1990’s and which is described thusly on its Wikipedia page:
“The Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) was a major international bank founded in Karachi, Pakistan in 1972 by Agha Hasan Abedi, a Pakistani financier. The company was registered in Luxembourg. Within a decade BCCI touched its peak, it operated in 78 countries, had over 400 branches, and had assets in excess of US$ 20 billion making it the 7th largest private bank in the world by assets.[1][2]
“BCCI came under the radar of regulatory bodies and intelligence agencies in the 1980’s due to its perceived avoidance of falling under one regulatory banking authority, a fact that was later, after extensive investigations, proven to be true. BCCI became the focus of a massive regulatory battle in 1991 and was described as a ‘$20-billion-plus heist’.
“Investigators in the U.S. and the UK revealed that BCCI had been ‘set up deliberately to avoid centralized regulatory review, and operated extensively in bank secrecy jurisdictions. Its affairs were extraordinarily complex. Its officers were sophisticated international bankers whose apparent objective was to keep their affairs secret, to commit fraud on a massive scale, and to avoid detection.’ BCCI organized its own intelligence network, diplomatic corps and shipping & trading companies.
“The liquidators, Deloitte & Touche, filed a lawsuit against Price Waterhouse and Ernst & Young — the bank’s auditors — which was settled for $175 million in 1998. A further lawsuit against the Emir of Abu Dhabi, a major shareholder, was launched in 1999 for approximately $400 million. BCCI creditors also instituted a $1 billion suit against the Bank of England as a regulatory body. After a nine-year struggle, due to the Bank’s statutory immunity, the case went to trial in January 2004. However, in November 2005, Deloitte dropped its action against the Bank of England as contrary to creditors’ interests.[citation needed][vague][which?] To date liquidators have recovered about 75% of the creditors’ lost money.[3]”
In the movie, the bank goes far beyond regulatory evasion and gets into all sorts of unsavory activities, including arms dealing and bankrolling an African revolutionary, Charles Motomba of Liberia (Lucian Msamati) — a character pretty obviously based on the late Laurent Kabila of the Congo — just so the bank will hold the country’s loans after he takes over the government and thereby will be able to boost its Third World assets. The bank’s plot, worked out by CEO Jonas Skarssen (Ulrich Thomsen) and his principal advisors, is to provide arms to all sorts of civil conflicts throughout the world, on both sides. To pull this off he needs a sophisticated missile guidance system that’s made by only two companies in the world: one owned by Italian businessman and aspiring politician (writer Eric Singer seems to have been thinking of Silvio Berlusconi here) Umberto Calvini (Luca Giorgio Barbareschi) and Turkish arms maker Ahmet Sunay (Haluk Bilginer). The bank also hires its own hit man (Brian F. O’Byrne), listing him on the books as a “consultant” (which is what the character is called in the credits), to remove anyone and everyone who threatens to expose the scope of its operations — including one of its own executives, André Clement (Georges Bigot), who’s murdered early on in what’s faked to look like an auto accident — this after he met with one of Salinger’s agents, who was also killed by being administered a poison that made it look like he’d had a heart attack.
The International is directed by Tom Tykwer, whose most famous credit is Run, Lola, Run, and while this isn’t as nervy a film it is a quite capable thriller, a marvelously structured film in which the good guys, Salinger and Whitman, are caught up in a Kafka-esque web of frustration, eventually explained when a disgusted former bank insider, Wilhelm Wexler (Armin Mueller-Stahl), explains it all to them in a speech strikingly reminiscent of the “there is no America, there is no democracy” speech in Network, saying that the bank is involved with so many governments in the world, including the U.S.’s, and so many people on all sides of the world’s conflicts — including Israel and Hezbollah — are dependent on the bank’s services that the governments of the world will simply not allow people like Salinger and Whitman to hold it accountable for anything.
The spirit of Alfred Hitchcock hangs heavy over this movie — especially in a shoot-out inside the Guggenheim Museum in New York (the real museum couldn’t be used since Singer’s script called for it to be riddled with bullet holes at the end, so the filmmakers acquired the original plans for it and used those to build an exact duplicate of its interior inside a sound stage), the sort of exotic and picturesque location in which Hitchcock liked to stage his climaxes — and The International isn’t as fast or exciting as it would have been if Hitchcock had been around to make it, but on its own it’s a first-rate thriller and far, far better than Clive Owen’s subsequent foray into international intrigue in the hopelessly confusing (on purpose!) Duplicity.
The International got a big promotional “push,” including a TV ad campaign, by its distributor, Sony, and sank virtually without a trace at the box office, which is a pity — this is a quite good modern movie, plotted in a linear fashion and without the deliberately obfuscating welter of flashbacks that weighed down Duplicity, with the characters having clear motives for what they do and a blessed lack of sexual tension between Owen and Watts — her character is established early on as having a husband and kids in New York and she’s therefore not interested in anyone else (and there’s only a brief, passing hint of him having any interest in her).
Several people on an imdb.com message board criticized Watts for an impersonal performance and said she’d got as far as she has in Hollywood only by being Nicole Kidman’s friend, but I found her performance here just fine. The impassivity some of the imdb.com commentators criticized seemed to me credible as a portrayal of a rather impersonal character, who’s able to function at work only by tuning everything else out and just doing her job (and not dwelling on how her activities against the International might jeopardize the safety of hubby and kids back home), though it’s actually Mueller-Stahl who takes the acting honors, portraying a sad little man who worked for the East Germans, defied their government and its abuses, then ended up selling out to the bank and is only now getting cold feet about that.
The International deserved a better fate than it got — indeed, I could readily see a Leftist group like Activist San Diego showing it at a meeting and using it to spark a discussion of the power of international banks and just how far they will go to maximize their profits — and it’s a real pity that films like this (which got bad preview scores when it was originally completed for release in August 2008 — the release was moved to February 2009 to allow the filmmakers to include more action) are such a hard sell these days; for all its melodrama and some barely credible plot devices, more than most movies The International levels with the audience about who we are as a race and how we are governed, by whom and why.
The film Charles and I watched last night was a quite good recent one: The International, a recent (February 2009) release and a piece of international intrigue spiced with anti-capitalist comment — this is probably the most cynical movie made about international capitalism since Network — in which Interpol agent Louis Salinger (Clive Owen) and New York assistant district attorney Eleanor Whitman (Naomi Watts) team up to go after the International Bank of Commerce and Credit (a thinly veiled reference to the real Bank of Credit and Commerce International, or BCCI, which fell apart as a result of a series of scandals in the 1990’s and which is described thusly on its Wikipedia page:
“The Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) was a major international bank founded in Karachi, Pakistan in 1972 by Agha Hasan Abedi, a Pakistani financier. The company was registered in Luxembourg. Within a decade BCCI touched its peak, it operated in 78 countries, had over 400 branches, and had assets in excess of US$ 20 billion making it the 7th largest private bank in the world by assets.[1][2]
“BCCI came under the radar of regulatory bodies and intelligence agencies in the 1980’s due to its perceived avoidance of falling under one regulatory banking authority, a fact that was later, after extensive investigations, proven to be true. BCCI became the focus of a massive regulatory battle in 1991 and was described as a ‘$20-billion-plus heist’.
“Investigators in the U.S. and the UK revealed that BCCI had been ‘set up deliberately to avoid centralized regulatory review, and operated extensively in bank secrecy jurisdictions. Its affairs were extraordinarily complex. Its officers were sophisticated international bankers whose apparent objective was to keep their affairs secret, to commit fraud on a massive scale, and to avoid detection.’ BCCI organized its own intelligence network, diplomatic corps and shipping & trading companies.
“The liquidators, Deloitte & Touche, filed a lawsuit against Price Waterhouse and Ernst & Young — the bank’s auditors — which was settled for $175 million in 1998. A further lawsuit against the Emir of Abu Dhabi, a major shareholder, was launched in 1999 for approximately $400 million. BCCI creditors also instituted a $1 billion suit against the Bank of England as a regulatory body. After a nine-year struggle, due to the Bank’s statutory immunity, the case went to trial in January 2004. However, in November 2005, Deloitte dropped its action against the Bank of England as contrary to creditors’ interests.[citation needed][vague][which?] To date liquidators have recovered about 75% of the creditors’ lost money.[3]”
In the movie, the bank goes far beyond regulatory evasion and gets into all sorts of unsavory activities, including arms dealing and bankrolling an African revolutionary, Charles Motomba of Liberia (Lucian Msamati) — a character pretty obviously based on the late Laurent Kabila of the Congo — just so the bank will hold the country’s loans after he takes over the government and thereby will be able to boost its Third World assets. The bank’s plot, worked out by CEO Jonas Skarssen (Ulrich Thomsen) and his principal advisors, is to provide arms to all sorts of civil conflicts throughout the world, on both sides. To pull this off he needs a sophisticated missile guidance system that’s made by only two companies in the world: one owned by Italian businessman and aspiring politician (writer Eric Singer seems to have been thinking of Silvio Berlusconi here) Umberto Calvini (Luca Giorgio Barbareschi) and Turkish arms maker Ahmet Sunay (Haluk Bilginer). The bank also hires its own hit man (Brian F. O’Byrne), listing him on the books as a “consultant” (which is what the character is called in the credits), to remove anyone and everyone who threatens to expose the scope of its operations — including one of its own executives, André Clement (Georges Bigot), who’s murdered early on in what’s faked to look like an auto accident — this after he met with one of Salinger’s agents, who was also killed by being administered a poison that made it look like he’d had a heart attack.
The International is directed by Tom Tykwer, whose most famous credit is Run, Lola, Run, and while this isn’t as nervy a film it is a quite capable thriller, a marvelously structured film in which the good guys, Salinger and Whitman, are caught up in a Kafka-esque web of frustration, eventually explained when a disgusted former bank insider, Wilhelm Wexler (Armin Mueller-Stahl), explains it all to them in a speech strikingly reminiscent of the “there is no America, there is no democracy” speech in Network, saying that the bank is involved with so many governments in the world, including the U.S.’s, and so many people on all sides of the world’s conflicts — including Israel and Hezbollah — are dependent on the bank’s services that the governments of the world will simply not allow people like Salinger and Whitman to hold it accountable for anything.
The spirit of Alfred Hitchcock hangs heavy over this movie — especially in a shoot-out inside the Guggenheim Museum in New York (the real museum couldn’t be used since Singer’s script called for it to be riddled with bullet holes at the end, so the filmmakers acquired the original plans for it and used those to build an exact duplicate of its interior inside a sound stage), the sort of exotic and picturesque location in which Hitchcock liked to stage his climaxes — and The International isn’t as fast or exciting as it would have been if Hitchcock had been around to make it, but on its own it’s a first-rate thriller and far, far better than Clive Owen’s subsequent foray into international intrigue in the hopelessly confusing (on purpose!) Duplicity.
The International got a big promotional “push,” including a TV ad campaign, by its distributor, Sony, and sank virtually without a trace at the box office, which is a pity — this is a quite good modern movie, plotted in a linear fashion and without the deliberately obfuscating welter of flashbacks that weighed down Duplicity, with the characters having clear motives for what they do and a blessed lack of sexual tension between Owen and Watts — her character is established early on as having a husband and kids in New York and she’s therefore not interested in anyone else (and there’s only a brief, passing hint of him having any interest in her).
Several people on an imdb.com message board criticized Watts for an impersonal performance and said she’d got as far as she has in Hollywood only by being Nicole Kidman’s friend, but I found her performance here just fine. The impassivity some of the imdb.com commentators criticized seemed to me credible as a portrayal of a rather impersonal character, who’s able to function at work only by tuning everything else out and just doing her job (and not dwelling on how her activities against the International might jeopardize the safety of hubby and kids back home), though it’s actually Mueller-Stahl who takes the acting honors, portraying a sad little man who worked for the East Germans, defied their government and its abuses, then ended up selling out to the bank and is only now getting cold feet about that.
The International deserved a better fate than it got — indeed, I could readily see a Leftist group like Activist San Diego showing it at a meeting and using it to spark a discussion of the power of international banks and just how far they will go to maximize their profits — and it’s a real pity that films like this (which got bad preview scores when it was originally completed for release in August 2008 — the release was moved to February 2009 to allow the filmmakers to include more action) are such a hard sell these days; for all its melodrama and some barely credible plot devices, more than most movies The International levels with the audience about who we are as a race and how we are governed, by whom and why.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Dillinger (King Brothers/Monogram, 1945)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched a movie I’d actually videotaped earlier: Dillinger, the 1945 Monogram version with Lawrence Tierney in the title role and Anne Jeffreys as his girlfriend (they meet when he holds up the movie theatre at which she’s working in the box office, and she gets him off the hook when she gets such a bad case of the hots for him that she backs off the positive identification she had made of him earlier — happens all the time, at least in Hollywood’s version of the criminal life). Surprisingly, the film had some major names attached to it: Dimitri Tiomkin did the music (not that it sounded all that much better than the dreary library-stock music Monogram usually used) and the director was Max Nosseck, a refugee who’d had a major reputation in France as a director of slow, moody thrillers.
Unfortunately, any attempts at atmosphere or style Nosseck may have been tempted to try for were lost in the unrelenting cheapness and tackiness of Monogram’s production, with its liberal use of clips from other movies — not only did they copy one entire robbery out of Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once eight years before, they printed the stock footage so that the frame jumped as it ran — and its flat, clear photography (only one scene — showing Dillinger hiding out, just before his death — has that kind of shadowy, maudit quality Nosseck and the other 1930’s French thriller directors so loved) undermines any attempt to make this more than a gangster potboiler with an imposing name in the title.
A pity this microbudget production wastes not only a good story but a good cast (Elisha Cook, Jr. and Eduardo Ciannelli are especially effective in supporting roles) — a pity, too, that the Production Code people flatly prohibited the studios from making a Dillinger movie for a full decade after he was killed by FBI agents in 1934; one can only dream of what kind of a movie Warners might have been able to make of the Dillinger story in the late 1930’s when the actor who so strongly resembled Dillinger that his entire early career in films was built on the resemblance — Humphrey Bogart — was still available for this sort of thing (not that Lawrence Tierney was bad — actually his portrayal was good, though his career proved limited because all he could be was a tough guy, whereas Bogart could have sounded more depths in the role). — 1/16/98
•••••
The film I picked out was Dillinger, the 1945 Monogram version (there’ve been at least two “open” Dillinger biopics since: a 1973 version directed by John Milius with Warren Oates as star, and the currently in-release Public Enemies, directed by Michael Mann and starring Johnny Depp). I just got this from the Columbia House DVD Club along with two recent movies that have been on my want-to-see list, The International and Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, and almost certainly Warners, the current holders of the Monogram catalog (at least those parts of it that haven’t lapsed into the public domain), reissued it on DVD now to take advantage of any interest in John Dillinger among moviegoers from the promotion of Public Enemies.
Incidentally, everyone in this movie pronounces “Dillinger” with a soft “g,” which according to biographer John Toland (whose book The Dillinger Days would have made an excellent basis for a Dillinger movie, though the film it did inspire wasn’t about him at all; Toland periodically cut in the stories of other notorious gangsters of the period, and his descriptions of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow inspired the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde) was wrong: the Dillingers were descendants of German immigrants and pronounced the name German-style, with a hard “g.”
I’d seen the 1945 Dillinger before and not been especially impressed, even though it was clearly reaching beyond the usual Monogram tackiness: the director was French émigré Max Nosseck, the writer was Philip Yordan (who actually achieved an Academy Award nomination!), there was an original music score by Dimitri Tiomkin (though it wasn’t recorded especially well and ended up sounding much like the usual Monogram sludge anyway) and the supporting characters included Edmund Lowe, Eduardo Ciannelli (whose role here as one of Dillinger’s henchmen must have had him looking nostalgically back on the days when, as a Lucky Luciano-based character in Warners’ Marked Woman, he had run the entire underworld in New York City!) and Elisha Cook, Jr.
Dillinger was played by Lawrence Tierney, who gets an “introducing” credit here and was apparently as tough off screen as on — he got into a lot of real-life fights and other embarrassing situations, behaving as much as possible like the tough guy he played in his films without actually becoming an outlaw — and he’s certainly good casting for the part, though one still regrets the 10-year ban on Dillinger as a movie subject imposed by the Production Code Administration after the real one was killed in 1934 because it cost us the putative Dillinger movie Warners could have made with the actor who was almost literally born to play the part, Humphrey Bogart. (I once read a biography of Dillinger by Ovid Demaris which featured a cover photo that looked astonishingly like Bogart — though the resemblance between the two wasn’t as great by the time Dillinger died because he’d had a bad plastic surgery job and the leftover scars were clearly visible in the photos of his corpse — and in any case it was Bogart’s resemblance to Dillinger that launched his career: it won Bogart the Dillingeresque role of Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest on both stage and film, and the part made him a star.)
Needless to say, Yordan’s script has only a bare resemblance to the facts of Dillinger’s life; though like the real one, the movie Dillinger meets some ace bank robbers while in prison for a minor stick-up, joins their gang and ultimately takes it over, evades state and local cops throughout the Midwest only to be nabbed in Tucson, Arizona, gets sent back to jail in his native Indiana, escapes by using a wooden gun he made in his cell, is finally tracked down by the FBI and shot to death outside a movie theatre showing the 1934 MGM production Manhattan Melodrama (a gangster film — what else?). Dillinger has some of the usual Monogram tackiness — notably the Farmers’ Bank robbery sequence, which was lifted almost completely from Fritz Lang’s 1937 classic You Only Live Once (just a couple of crude cut-ins of Tierney and Cook serve to integrate it into the main action) and printed in a jumpy, off-sprocket fashion at that (a technical glitch I was hoping would have been addressed in this DVD transfer — it wasn’t, and the original trailer, included on the DVD, also included shots from this jumpily reproduced clip from another, greater film) — but it also has some surprisingly substantial sets, notably the prison interiors (though they may have just rented space at a major studio that had standing prison sets already), a quite good cast and a relatively literate script.
Where it falls short of the film it could have been is in the pace — the movie has some individually exciting moments but just sort of rambles on between them, and one misses the sheer energy with which Warners would have staged this script — but I still found myself liking it a good deal better than I had before. The excellent DVD transfer helps a lot — for the first time I got to see this in a print that did full justice to Jackson Rose’s chiaroscuro cinematography — and among the good points are Anne Jeffreys, an unjustly neglected actress who plays a (fictitious) girlfriend of Dillinger’s who ultimately becomes the fabled “Lady in Red” who set him up to be killed by the FBI; she manages to capture the emotional tumult inside this basically decent person who finds herself irresistibly attracted to a kill-crazy thug. The supporting cast in general live up to their reputations, though Dillinger’s relationship with Kirk Otto (Elisha Cook, Jr.) is pretty straightforward and doesn’t have the deliciously homoerotic aspects of their subsequent teaming in the otherwise disappointing Born to Kill. Edmund Lowe is particularly good as Specs Green, the expert who’s Dillinger’s cellmate and teaches him all he needs to know about bank robbery (though Dillinger never thinks to ask him, “Hey, if you’re so good at it, what are you doing here in prison with me?”) and tells him, “Never kill somebody except for a reason” — advice Dillinger, of course, ignores.
Needless to say, a lot of the potentially fascinating angles that could be taken on Dillinger aren’t followed up in this movie — there’s only a hint of the media frenzy around him (though there’s an early establishing shot of Dillinger and a date at a movie theatre where the featured attraction is Dillinger’s actual father, hosting a newsreel about him); there’s nothing about the clash between local law enforcement and the FBI (when I read Toland’s The Dillinger Days I remember thinking that the movie I’d like to have seen made from it would have been called Dillinger and Leach — Leach being Matt Leach, head of the Indiana State Police, who became personally obsessed with Dillinger and, after the FBI took over the manhunt for him, got so paranoid about Hoover’s G-men that he actually urged Indianians not to cooperate with FBI agents),and I also fear that the release of the Public Enemies movie may have discouraged Erik Larson, author of The Devil in the White City — the marvelous book that combined the story of a real-life Chicago serial killer, H. H. Holmes, with the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair — from doing the obvious follow-up: a conflation of Dillinger’s story with that of the 1933-34 Century of Progress Exposition, also in Chicago, which Dillinger actually attended frequently.
The 1945 Dillinger was made at the height of the film noir era and is sometimes referred to as a noir (though The Film Noir Encyclopedia doesn’t list it), but it doesn’t really have the moral ambiguity needed for noir and, despite the credit to a French director, only one sequence — Dillinger alone in a cheap hotel room shortly before his death, lonely, miserable and frustrated despite the amount of money he’s stolen and the public assumption that he’s living the high life — even looks like a scene from a French thriller, Nonetheless, the 1945 Dillinger is a quite competent movie and Tierney plays the part as well as anyone except Bogart could have at the time — and it helped producers Frank and Maurice King and screenwriter Yordan achieve major-studio careers. — 7/16/09
I watched a movie I’d actually videotaped earlier: Dillinger, the 1945 Monogram version with Lawrence Tierney in the title role and Anne Jeffreys as his girlfriend (they meet when he holds up the movie theatre at which she’s working in the box office, and she gets him off the hook when she gets such a bad case of the hots for him that she backs off the positive identification she had made of him earlier — happens all the time, at least in Hollywood’s version of the criminal life). Surprisingly, the film had some major names attached to it: Dimitri Tiomkin did the music (not that it sounded all that much better than the dreary library-stock music Monogram usually used) and the director was Max Nosseck, a refugee who’d had a major reputation in France as a director of slow, moody thrillers.
Unfortunately, any attempts at atmosphere or style Nosseck may have been tempted to try for were lost in the unrelenting cheapness and tackiness of Monogram’s production, with its liberal use of clips from other movies — not only did they copy one entire robbery out of Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once eight years before, they printed the stock footage so that the frame jumped as it ran — and its flat, clear photography (only one scene — showing Dillinger hiding out, just before his death — has that kind of shadowy, maudit quality Nosseck and the other 1930’s French thriller directors so loved) undermines any attempt to make this more than a gangster potboiler with an imposing name in the title.
A pity this microbudget production wastes not only a good story but a good cast (Elisha Cook, Jr. and Eduardo Ciannelli are especially effective in supporting roles) — a pity, too, that the Production Code people flatly prohibited the studios from making a Dillinger movie for a full decade after he was killed by FBI agents in 1934; one can only dream of what kind of a movie Warners might have been able to make of the Dillinger story in the late 1930’s when the actor who so strongly resembled Dillinger that his entire early career in films was built on the resemblance — Humphrey Bogart — was still available for this sort of thing (not that Lawrence Tierney was bad — actually his portrayal was good, though his career proved limited because all he could be was a tough guy, whereas Bogart could have sounded more depths in the role). — 1/16/98
•••••
The film I picked out was Dillinger, the 1945 Monogram version (there’ve been at least two “open” Dillinger biopics since: a 1973 version directed by John Milius with Warren Oates as star, and the currently in-release Public Enemies, directed by Michael Mann and starring Johnny Depp). I just got this from the Columbia House DVD Club along with two recent movies that have been on my want-to-see list, The International and Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, and almost certainly Warners, the current holders of the Monogram catalog (at least those parts of it that haven’t lapsed into the public domain), reissued it on DVD now to take advantage of any interest in John Dillinger among moviegoers from the promotion of Public Enemies.
Incidentally, everyone in this movie pronounces “Dillinger” with a soft “g,” which according to biographer John Toland (whose book The Dillinger Days would have made an excellent basis for a Dillinger movie, though the film it did inspire wasn’t about him at all; Toland periodically cut in the stories of other notorious gangsters of the period, and his descriptions of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow inspired the 1967 film Bonnie and Clyde) was wrong: the Dillingers were descendants of German immigrants and pronounced the name German-style, with a hard “g.”
I’d seen the 1945 Dillinger before and not been especially impressed, even though it was clearly reaching beyond the usual Monogram tackiness: the director was French émigré Max Nosseck, the writer was Philip Yordan (who actually achieved an Academy Award nomination!), there was an original music score by Dimitri Tiomkin (though it wasn’t recorded especially well and ended up sounding much like the usual Monogram sludge anyway) and the supporting characters included Edmund Lowe, Eduardo Ciannelli (whose role here as one of Dillinger’s henchmen must have had him looking nostalgically back on the days when, as a Lucky Luciano-based character in Warners’ Marked Woman, he had run the entire underworld in New York City!) and Elisha Cook, Jr.
Dillinger was played by Lawrence Tierney, who gets an “introducing” credit here and was apparently as tough off screen as on — he got into a lot of real-life fights and other embarrassing situations, behaving as much as possible like the tough guy he played in his films without actually becoming an outlaw — and he’s certainly good casting for the part, though one still regrets the 10-year ban on Dillinger as a movie subject imposed by the Production Code Administration after the real one was killed in 1934 because it cost us the putative Dillinger movie Warners could have made with the actor who was almost literally born to play the part, Humphrey Bogart. (I once read a biography of Dillinger by Ovid Demaris which featured a cover photo that looked astonishingly like Bogart — though the resemblance between the two wasn’t as great by the time Dillinger died because he’d had a bad plastic surgery job and the leftover scars were clearly visible in the photos of his corpse — and in any case it was Bogart’s resemblance to Dillinger that launched his career: it won Bogart the Dillingeresque role of Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest on both stage and film, and the part made him a star.)
Needless to say, Yordan’s script has only a bare resemblance to the facts of Dillinger’s life; though like the real one, the movie Dillinger meets some ace bank robbers while in prison for a minor stick-up, joins their gang and ultimately takes it over, evades state and local cops throughout the Midwest only to be nabbed in Tucson, Arizona, gets sent back to jail in his native Indiana, escapes by using a wooden gun he made in his cell, is finally tracked down by the FBI and shot to death outside a movie theatre showing the 1934 MGM production Manhattan Melodrama (a gangster film — what else?). Dillinger has some of the usual Monogram tackiness — notably the Farmers’ Bank robbery sequence, which was lifted almost completely from Fritz Lang’s 1937 classic You Only Live Once (just a couple of crude cut-ins of Tierney and Cook serve to integrate it into the main action) and printed in a jumpy, off-sprocket fashion at that (a technical glitch I was hoping would have been addressed in this DVD transfer — it wasn’t, and the original trailer, included on the DVD, also included shots from this jumpily reproduced clip from another, greater film) — but it also has some surprisingly substantial sets, notably the prison interiors (though they may have just rented space at a major studio that had standing prison sets already), a quite good cast and a relatively literate script.
Where it falls short of the film it could have been is in the pace — the movie has some individually exciting moments but just sort of rambles on between them, and one misses the sheer energy with which Warners would have staged this script — but I still found myself liking it a good deal better than I had before. The excellent DVD transfer helps a lot — for the first time I got to see this in a print that did full justice to Jackson Rose’s chiaroscuro cinematography — and among the good points are Anne Jeffreys, an unjustly neglected actress who plays a (fictitious) girlfriend of Dillinger’s who ultimately becomes the fabled “Lady in Red” who set him up to be killed by the FBI; she manages to capture the emotional tumult inside this basically decent person who finds herself irresistibly attracted to a kill-crazy thug. The supporting cast in general live up to their reputations, though Dillinger’s relationship with Kirk Otto (Elisha Cook, Jr.) is pretty straightforward and doesn’t have the deliciously homoerotic aspects of their subsequent teaming in the otherwise disappointing Born to Kill. Edmund Lowe is particularly good as Specs Green, the expert who’s Dillinger’s cellmate and teaches him all he needs to know about bank robbery (though Dillinger never thinks to ask him, “Hey, if you’re so good at it, what are you doing here in prison with me?”) and tells him, “Never kill somebody except for a reason” — advice Dillinger, of course, ignores.
Needless to say, a lot of the potentially fascinating angles that could be taken on Dillinger aren’t followed up in this movie — there’s only a hint of the media frenzy around him (though there’s an early establishing shot of Dillinger and a date at a movie theatre where the featured attraction is Dillinger’s actual father, hosting a newsreel about him); there’s nothing about the clash between local law enforcement and the FBI (when I read Toland’s The Dillinger Days I remember thinking that the movie I’d like to have seen made from it would have been called Dillinger and Leach — Leach being Matt Leach, head of the Indiana State Police, who became personally obsessed with Dillinger and, after the FBI took over the manhunt for him, got so paranoid about Hoover’s G-men that he actually urged Indianians not to cooperate with FBI agents),and I also fear that the release of the Public Enemies movie may have discouraged Erik Larson, author of The Devil in the White City — the marvelous book that combined the story of a real-life Chicago serial killer, H. H. Holmes, with the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair — from doing the obvious follow-up: a conflation of Dillinger’s story with that of the 1933-34 Century of Progress Exposition, also in Chicago, which Dillinger actually attended frequently.
The 1945 Dillinger was made at the height of the film noir era and is sometimes referred to as a noir (though The Film Noir Encyclopedia doesn’t list it), but it doesn’t really have the moral ambiguity needed for noir and, despite the credit to a French director, only one sequence — Dillinger alone in a cheap hotel room shortly before his death, lonely, miserable and frustrated despite the amount of money he’s stolen and the public assumption that he’s living the high life — even looks like a scene from a French thriller, Nonetheless, the 1945 Dillinger is a quite competent movie and Tierney plays the part as well as anyone except Bogart could have at the time — and it helped producers Frank and Maurice King and screenwriter Yordan achieve major-studio careers. — 7/16/09
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
The Invisible Ghost (Banner/Monogram, 1941)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I picked the film The Invisible Ghost — a 1941 Monogram vehicle for Bela Lugosi — mainly because Joseph H. Lewis was the director and after having watched My Name Is Julia Ross, Lewis’s “breakthrough” film from Columbia four years later, I thought it would be fun to see Lewis’s eye for artistic compositions and instinct for using them to liven up a rather silly movie up against the demented stupidity of one of Sam Katzman’s Banner Productions, released through Monogram. The Invisible Ghost was the first film Lugosi made for Katzman (earlier Lugosi had made The Mysterious Mr. Wong for the first iteration of Monogram in 1935, but that was not one of the studio’s most distinguished pictures, a Mask of Fu Manchu knockoff in which Lugosi played a Chinese madman obsessed with collecting the 12 coins of Confucius and thereby establishing himself as the ruler of the Chinese province of Keelat) and its script was by Helen and Al Martin.
I presume the Martins were a married couple (though they could have been brother and sister — imdb.com lists Al Martin but doesn’t mention either a wife or a sister in the business, and doesn’t list this particular Helen Martin at all) — later Al would write, solo, a better horror vehicle which Lewis directed at Universal, The Mad Doctor of Market Street — and on this occasion they came forth with a potentially interesting plot premise: Charles Kessler (Lugosi) mourns the death of his wife (former silent-screen star Betty Compson), to the point that not only is his living room dominated by a Laura-style portrait of her but every year, on the evening of their wedding anniversary, he has his manservant Evans (Clarence Muse, who though he’s playing a Black servant gets to portray a genuinely dignified, actually intelligent character with none of the eye-rolling stupidity of Stepin Fetchit or Willie Best) serve a dinner for both of them, presenting “her” portion to an empty chair which he addresses as if she were still alive.
Only she is still alive; she supposedly died in a car crash while running off with her lover (“the usual best friend,” Lugosi explains to his daughter’s boyfriend, in a low-keyed line reading that’s not at all the kind of acting we expect from him), but in fact she survived, badly scarred (at least that’s what the script tells us; it looks like all she needs is a comb-over and some fresh makeup) and unwilling to present herself to her husband in her current state for fear he’d reject her. She hides out in the basement of the estate (later reused by Monogram as the basement of Lugosi’s mission in Bowery at Midnight), where she’s fed and looked after by Kessler’s gardener, Jules (Ernie Adams) — only periodically she slips out and appears at Kessler’s window, hypnotizing him into murdering the first available victim, which means he spends most of the movie knocking off his own household staff.
This being a Monogram movie, the police never even bother to suspect Kessler despite all of the victims having been on his payroll; instead, when Cecile (Terry Walker), a former girlfriend of Kessler’s daughter’s boyfriend Ralph Dickson (John McGuire), hires on as Kessler’s new maid and is promptly found dead — strangled, like all the other victims, with a long black robe (yet another attempt in a Lugosi movie to tap the Dracula imagery even though this film has nothing to do with vampirism) so there are no fingerprints on her — the cops nail Ralph for it and he’s arrested, sentenced to death and actually executed. Only it turns out Ralph had a brother, Paul (also played by John McGuire), who shows up to investigate the crimes himself and see if he can exonerate the dead Ralph (a little late, don’t you think?) — a gimmick that had been used in a previous Lugosi film, Murder by Television, in which it was Lugosi’s character who was killed midway through and replaced by a lookalike “brother” whom he also played.
Kessler gets hypnotized three more times, knocking off Jules and nearly killing his daughter Virginia (Polly Ann Young) — she’s saved by a bolt of lightning that de-hypnotizes him and snaps him to his usual moral state — and on the fourth go-round he tries to kill Evans before his wife actually appears on the scene, then collapses and dies, and in the end Kessler is taken into custody by the police. There are a few elements of this script that don’t follow the usual trend of a Lugosi vehicle — he’s the hypnotism victim instead of the hypnotizer, and at the end he’s actually arrested instead of killed (the number of films in which Bela Lugosi’s character didn’t die is about the same as the number of films John Wayne made in which he did die) — but for the most part The Invisible Ghost is the usual malarkey Lugosi got saddled with after Universal let him go.
As for Lewis, he tries — he really tries — to enliven this stupid story with creative visuals; the man who brought along a collection of wagon wheels to the set of his “B” Westerns and shot through them to give scenes visual distinction not surprisingly looks for similar devices in a modern-dress setting, and he finds them. Much of the exposition is shot with the camera pointing out through the Kessler fireplace, with the action framed by licking flames and air currents that, like the wagon wheels in Lewis’s Westerns, distract us from how silly the dialogue is; and Compson’s last two appearances as Lugosi’s (unwitting) hypnotist both take place in driving rain, anticipating the rainstorm that began My Name Is Julia Ross. “Unlike the typical Monogram hack who viewed the studio only as a last stop,” Tom Weaver writes in his book Poverty Row Horrors!, “Lewis looked on it as only a First Step, and he loads the film with mildly interesting camera moves, lighting effects, editing tricks and the like. … The camera, often immobile in low-budget pictures, dollies and swoops around regularly, and there are many high- and low-angle shots; it even passes through walls as characters troop from one room to another.”
Weaver also notes the sequences that are shot in mirrors (many creative directors, including Orson Welles and Douglas Sirk, were fascinated with mirrors) and the creativity with which Lewis and his cinematographers, Marcel Le Picard and Harvey Gould, shoot the first meeting between Mr. and Mrs. Kessler — though the scene’s power gets vitiated when it’s repeated again and again, almost identically, whenever the script calls for her to hypnotize him (a typical trick at ultra-cheap studios like Monogram, where it probably was the identical footage each time!). The Invisible Ghost is a silly movie — why this script got a talented and visually imaginative director like Lewis while the far superior Bowery at Midnight, with which Lewis could have had a field day, got stuck with hack director Wallace Fox is a mystery. Weaver notes that The Invisible Ghost is a particular favorite of Lugosi fans because he got to play a character who was (mostly) kindly and paternal — though the gimmick of the serial killer who’s an ultra-nice guy when he isn’t actually killing was pulled far, far better by Edgar G. Ulmer and Pierre Gendron in PRC’s 1944 Bluebeard — but it’s of interest, if at all, only for Lewis’s visually stunning direction and his ability to make a classy-looking film even with a penny-pinching budget, a quickie schedule, a cheesy script and only two genuinely good actors, Lugosi and Compson.
I picked the film The Invisible Ghost — a 1941 Monogram vehicle for Bela Lugosi — mainly because Joseph H. Lewis was the director and after having watched My Name Is Julia Ross, Lewis’s “breakthrough” film from Columbia four years later, I thought it would be fun to see Lewis’s eye for artistic compositions and instinct for using them to liven up a rather silly movie up against the demented stupidity of one of Sam Katzman’s Banner Productions, released through Monogram. The Invisible Ghost was the first film Lugosi made for Katzman (earlier Lugosi had made The Mysterious Mr. Wong for the first iteration of Monogram in 1935, but that was not one of the studio’s most distinguished pictures, a Mask of Fu Manchu knockoff in which Lugosi played a Chinese madman obsessed with collecting the 12 coins of Confucius and thereby establishing himself as the ruler of the Chinese province of Keelat) and its script was by Helen and Al Martin.
I presume the Martins were a married couple (though they could have been brother and sister — imdb.com lists Al Martin but doesn’t mention either a wife or a sister in the business, and doesn’t list this particular Helen Martin at all) — later Al would write, solo, a better horror vehicle which Lewis directed at Universal, The Mad Doctor of Market Street — and on this occasion they came forth with a potentially interesting plot premise: Charles Kessler (Lugosi) mourns the death of his wife (former silent-screen star Betty Compson), to the point that not only is his living room dominated by a Laura-style portrait of her but every year, on the evening of their wedding anniversary, he has his manservant Evans (Clarence Muse, who though he’s playing a Black servant gets to portray a genuinely dignified, actually intelligent character with none of the eye-rolling stupidity of Stepin Fetchit or Willie Best) serve a dinner for both of them, presenting “her” portion to an empty chair which he addresses as if she were still alive.
Only she is still alive; she supposedly died in a car crash while running off with her lover (“the usual best friend,” Lugosi explains to his daughter’s boyfriend, in a low-keyed line reading that’s not at all the kind of acting we expect from him), but in fact she survived, badly scarred (at least that’s what the script tells us; it looks like all she needs is a comb-over and some fresh makeup) and unwilling to present herself to her husband in her current state for fear he’d reject her. She hides out in the basement of the estate (later reused by Monogram as the basement of Lugosi’s mission in Bowery at Midnight), where she’s fed and looked after by Kessler’s gardener, Jules (Ernie Adams) — only periodically she slips out and appears at Kessler’s window, hypnotizing him into murdering the first available victim, which means he spends most of the movie knocking off his own household staff.
This being a Monogram movie, the police never even bother to suspect Kessler despite all of the victims having been on his payroll; instead, when Cecile (Terry Walker), a former girlfriend of Kessler’s daughter’s boyfriend Ralph Dickson (John McGuire), hires on as Kessler’s new maid and is promptly found dead — strangled, like all the other victims, with a long black robe (yet another attempt in a Lugosi movie to tap the Dracula imagery even though this film has nothing to do with vampirism) so there are no fingerprints on her — the cops nail Ralph for it and he’s arrested, sentenced to death and actually executed. Only it turns out Ralph had a brother, Paul (also played by John McGuire), who shows up to investigate the crimes himself and see if he can exonerate the dead Ralph (a little late, don’t you think?) — a gimmick that had been used in a previous Lugosi film, Murder by Television, in which it was Lugosi’s character who was killed midway through and replaced by a lookalike “brother” whom he also played.
Kessler gets hypnotized three more times, knocking off Jules and nearly killing his daughter Virginia (Polly Ann Young) — she’s saved by a bolt of lightning that de-hypnotizes him and snaps him to his usual moral state — and on the fourth go-round he tries to kill Evans before his wife actually appears on the scene, then collapses and dies, and in the end Kessler is taken into custody by the police. There are a few elements of this script that don’t follow the usual trend of a Lugosi vehicle — he’s the hypnotism victim instead of the hypnotizer, and at the end he’s actually arrested instead of killed (the number of films in which Bela Lugosi’s character didn’t die is about the same as the number of films John Wayne made in which he did die) — but for the most part The Invisible Ghost is the usual malarkey Lugosi got saddled with after Universal let him go.
As for Lewis, he tries — he really tries — to enliven this stupid story with creative visuals; the man who brought along a collection of wagon wheels to the set of his “B” Westerns and shot through them to give scenes visual distinction not surprisingly looks for similar devices in a modern-dress setting, and he finds them. Much of the exposition is shot with the camera pointing out through the Kessler fireplace, with the action framed by licking flames and air currents that, like the wagon wheels in Lewis’s Westerns, distract us from how silly the dialogue is; and Compson’s last two appearances as Lugosi’s (unwitting) hypnotist both take place in driving rain, anticipating the rainstorm that began My Name Is Julia Ross. “Unlike the typical Monogram hack who viewed the studio only as a last stop,” Tom Weaver writes in his book Poverty Row Horrors!, “Lewis looked on it as only a First Step, and he loads the film with mildly interesting camera moves, lighting effects, editing tricks and the like. … The camera, often immobile in low-budget pictures, dollies and swoops around regularly, and there are many high- and low-angle shots; it even passes through walls as characters troop from one room to another.”
Weaver also notes the sequences that are shot in mirrors (many creative directors, including Orson Welles and Douglas Sirk, were fascinated with mirrors) and the creativity with which Lewis and his cinematographers, Marcel Le Picard and Harvey Gould, shoot the first meeting between Mr. and Mrs. Kessler — though the scene’s power gets vitiated when it’s repeated again and again, almost identically, whenever the script calls for her to hypnotize him (a typical trick at ultra-cheap studios like Monogram, where it probably was the identical footage each time!). The Invisible Ghost is a silly movie — why this script got a talented and visually imaginative director like Lewis while the far superior Bowery at Midnight, with which Lewis could have had a field day, got stuck with hack director Wallace Fox is a mystery. Weaver notes that The Invisible Ghost is a particular favorite of Lugosi fans because he got to play a character who was (mostly) kindly and paternal — though the gimmick of the serial killer who’s an ultra-nice guy when he isn’t actually killing was pulled far, far better by Edgar G. Ulmer and Pierre Gendron in PRC’s 1944 Bluebeard — but it’s of interest, if at all, only for Lewis’s visually stunning direction and his ability to make a classy-looking film even with a penny-pinching budget, a quickie schedule, a cheesy script and only two genuinely good actors, Lugosi and Compson.
Natalee Holloway (Sony/Lifetime, 2009)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The show I watched this morning was Natalee Holloway, a Lifetime made-for-TV movie based upon the real case — the disappearance of a high-school girl from Mississippi with a pretentiously misspelled name on a vacation to Aruba, which previously I’d heard of only in the title of an Andrew Holleran novel, Nights in Aruba, which I’d never read. I hadn’t realized until the Natalee Holloway story broke (I hate to admit it, but the pretentious spelling of her first name always rankled me — if “Natalie” was good enough for Ms. Wood, why wasn’t it good enough for Mrs. Holloway, who by the time of her daughter’s disappearance had long since divorced Natalee’s dad and married a guy named Twitty?) that Aruba was actually a Dutch colony. One doesn’t expect to find colonies anywhere in the world in the 21st century, and indeed it turns out that at least according to this movie (scripted by one Teena Booth from Beth Holloway-Twitty’s own memoir) part of the problem was that the local Aruban authorities ran the police department but it was under the authority of the overall government, which was Dutch.
In case someone has been resting in tabloid-free heaven for the last five years and missed it all, the story was that Natalee and a bunch of her friends decided to celebrate their graduation from high school with a vacation in Aruba, and like all stupid teenage girls (and quite a few stupid older women as well!) in Lifetime movies, they got drunk, partied, either lost their virginity with some of the locals or came close to doing so (the fact that a lot of real high-school girls have sex before they graduate seems to have been lost on Ms. Booth — or maybe on Mrs. Twitty née Holloway, for that matter) and went home somewhat the worse for wear, except for Natalee who never got home at all. She simply disappeared — the last her friend Hayley (Natasha Loring) saw Natalee (Amy Gumenick, who’s seen throughout the movie in various flashbacks dramatizing the differing accounts of what happened to her — and who can’t be credited with either a good or a bad performance since all that was required of her was to play an airhead and then a victim), she had got in a car with three strange men and driven off with them under the mistaken idea that they were going to drive her back to her hotel.
Instead they took her to the beach and either let her pass out there or gave her a drug, whereupon they either had sex with her (consensually or otherwise) or they didn’t, and either killed her or left her to die or left her alive. It can’t have been easy for either writer Booth or director Mikael Salomon (which gives him at least one thing in common with his title character: a pretentiously spelled first name!) to make a movie about a story this open-ended, in which nobody really knows for sure quite what happened (“Somebody knows the truth,” ran the advertising copy for this film, but it sure wasn’t the filmmakers themselves!), but it didn’t help that they made most of the characters such ninnies we didn’t really care what happened to them — and that included Natalee herself, who we were told was incredibly intelligent and wanted to be a doctor but comes off as such an idiot one ends up entertaining the dreadful idea that maybe it was a good thing she disappeared off the world before carrying on her sorry-ass airhead genes to another generation.
The film attempts to grapple with some of the interesting themes raised by the real story — the effects of the media (for both good and ill) on the search, the clash between American and Aruban values, the influence the prime suspect supposedly had to evade responsibility since his father was an Aruban judge (they relocated to the home country, the Netherlands, after he was more or less cleared by the Aruban authorities and freed to go) and the contrast between the sheer physical beauty of the setting and the horror of the events that took place there — but it doesn’t really do more than touch on them. (Needless to say, the filmmakers weren’t allowed anywhere near Aruba — and, rather than do their location work at another Caribbean island, they trekked all the way to Cape Town, South Africa, maybe so they could find Afrikaans-speaking whites to stand in for the Dutch-descended people on the real Aruba.) The accents are also a bit strange — especially the silly one used by Sean Higgs as the corpulent chief detective, Frank Sneider, which makes one wonder how a white person running a police force in a Dutch colony ends up with a Frito Bandito version of a Latino accent — but what makes this film almost worth watching in spite of the silliness, the incredibly unsympathetic characterizations and the fallback on Lifetime (and other people’s) clichés, is the powerful performance by Tracy Pollan as Beth.
An imdb.com comment by Michael Elliott dissed her acting, but I found her legitimately powerful, nailing each of her big emotional moments and showing the trauma of not only losing your daughter but not knowing for sure what happened to her and facing a wall of official indifference on one side and media exploitation on the other. (When Beth gets a false tip that Natalee is being held inside a crack house — we’re told that gangs in Aruba hold rich white tourists hostage, feed them drugs and keep them there until they’ve extracted their ATM cards and code numbers and drained their bank accounts — the media come along for the ride, and Beth’s fury at them for denying her a private moment with her daughter only gets worse when she finds she’s been fed a bum steer.) Whatever its defects in other respects, Booth’s script gives Beth a series of intense scenes — when she finds a private place to pray just so she can feel God’s presence; when she confronts one of the principal suspects at the copy store where he works and says she’ll be bringing in a photo of Natalee every day until he comes clean about her disappearance and his role in it; later, back home, when the stresses of Natalee’s disappearance break up her marriage and leave Natalee’s younger brother Matt (Kai Coetzee) traumatized; and the final sequence in which a Dutch crime reporter entraps the lead suspect, Joran Van Der Sloot (Jacques Strydom) into a videotaped confession by sending a staff member to pose as a potential partner in a drug-dealing enterprise and film him inside an SUV with hidden cameras (at least two hidden cameras, since director Salomon and film editor Sidney Wolinsky do conventional shot-reverse shot editing in the confession scene) and then shows it to Beth on live TV in Amsterdam — later Joran repudiates the confession but Beth accepts it as true and finally gains (that horrible word!) “closure” — and Pollan plays them all to the hilt, making us forget she’s an actress and getting us to accept her as a grief-stricken mother desperately searching for the truth about her daughter.
Incidentally, there’s a rather ham-handed epilogue in which both Pollan and the real Beth Holloway-Twitty tell young Americans taking exotic vacations in foreign lands to plan out their evenings ahead of time and stick to their plans (the most jarringly dumb ending to a film since Thea von Harbou implored the parents in her audience to “watch your children” at the end of her then-husband Fritz Lang’s film M) — and (memo to Charles) the real Beth pronounces the “t” in “often.”
The show I watched this morning was Natalee Holloway, a Lifetime made-for-TV movie based upon the real case — the disappearance of a high-school girl from Mississippi with a pretentiously misspelled name on a vacation to Aruba, which previously I’d heard of only in the title of an Andrew Holleran novel, Nights in Aruba, which I’d never read. I hadn’t realized until the Natalee Holloway story broke (I hate to admit it, but the pretentious spelling of her first name always rankled me — if “Natalie” was good enough for Ms. Wood, why wasn’t it good enough for Mrs. Holloway, who by the time of her daughter’s disappearance had long since divorced Natalee’s dad and married a guy named Twitty?) that Aruba was actually a Dutch colony. One doesn’t expect to find colonies anywhere in the world in the 21st century, and indeed it turns out that at least according to this movie (scripted by one Teena Booth from Beth Holloway-Twitty’s own memoir) part of the problem was that the local Aruban authorities ran the police department but it was under the authority of the overall government, which was Dutch.
In case someone has been resting in tabloid-free heaven for the last five years and missed it all, the story was that Natalee and a bunch of her friends decided to celebrate their graduation from high school with a vacation in Aruba, and like all stupid teenage girls (and quite a few stupid older women as well!) in Lifetime movies, they got drunk, partied, either lost their virginity with some of the locals or came close to doing so (the fact that a lot of real high-school girls have sex before they graduate seems to have been lost on Ms. Booth — or maybe on Mrs. Twitty née Holloway, for that matter) and went home somewhat the worse for wear, except for Natalee who never got home at all. She simply disappeared — the last her friend Hayley (Natasha Loring) saw Natalee (Amy Gumenick, who’s seen throughout the movie in various flashbacks dramatizing the differing accounts of what happened to her — and who can’t be credited with either a good or a bad performance since all that was required of her was to play an airhead and then a victim), she had got in a car with three strange men and driven off with them under the mistaken idea that they were going to drive her back to her hotel.
Instead they took her to the beach and either let her pass out there or gave her a drug, whereupon they either had sex with her (consensually or otherwise) or they didn’t, and either killed her or left her to die or left her alive. It can’t have been easy for either writer Booth or director Mikael Salomon (which gives him at least one thing in common with his title character: a pretentiously spelled first name!) to make a movie about a story this open-ended, in which nobody really knows for sure quite what happened (“Somebody knows the truth,” ran the advertising copy for this film, but it sure wasn’t the filmmakers themselves!), but it didn’t help that they made most of the characters such ninnies we didn’t really care what happened to them — and that included Natalee herself, who we were told was incredibly intelligent and wanted to be a doctor but comes off as such an idiot one ends up entertaining the dreadful idea that maybe it was a good thing she disappeared off the world before carrying on her sorry-ass airhead genes to another generation.
The film attempts to grapple with some of the interesting themes raised by the real story — the effects of the media (for both good and ill) on the search, the clash between American and Aruban values, the influence the prime suspect supposedly had to evade responsibility since his father was an Aruban judge (they relocated to the home country, the Netherlands, after he was more or less cleared by the Aruban authorities and freed to go) and the contrast between the sheer physical beauty of the setting and the horror of the events that took place there — but it doesn’t really do more than touch on them. (Needless to say, the filmmakers weren’t allowed anywhere near Aruba — and, rather than do their location work at another Caribbean island, they trekked all the way to Cape Town, South Africa, maybe so they could find Afrikaans-speaking whites to stand in for the Dutch-descended people on the real Aruba.) The accents are also a bit strange — especially the silly one used by Sean Higgs as the corpulent chief detective, Frank Sneider, which makes one wonder how a white person running a police force in a Dutch colony ends up with a Frito Bandito version of a Latino accent — but what makes this film almost worth watching in spite of the silliness, the incredibly unsympathetic characterizations and the fallback on Lifetime (and other people’s) clichés, is the powerful performance by Tracy Pollan as Beth.
An imdb.com comment by Michael Elliott dissed her acting, but I found her legitimately powerful, nailing each of her big emotional moments and showing the trauma of not only losing your daughter but not knowing for sure what happened to her and facing a wall of official indifference on one side and media exploitation on the other. (When Beth gets a false tip that Natalee is being held inside a crack house — we’re told that gangs in Aruba hold rich white tourists hostage, feed them drugs and keep them there until they’ve extracted their ATM cards and code numbers and drained their bank accounts — the media come along for the ride, and Beth’s fury at them for denying her a private moment with her daughter only gets worse when she finds she’s been fed a bum steer.) Whatever its defects in other respects, Booth’s script gives Beth a series of intense scenes — when she finds a private place to pray just so she can feel God’s presence; when she confronts one of the principal suspects at the copy store where he works and says she’ll be bringing in a photo of Natalee every day until he comes clean about her disappearance and his role in it; later, back home, when the stresses of Natalee’s disappearance break up her marriage and leave Natalee’s younger brother Matt (Kai Coetzee) traumatized; and the final sequence in which a Dutch crime reporter entraps the lead suspect, Joran Van Der Sloot (Jacques Strydom) into a videotaped confession by sending a staff member to pose as a potential partner in a drug-dealing enterprise and film him inside an SUV with hidden cameras (at least two hidden cameras, since director Salomon and film editor Sidney Wolinsky do conventional shot-reverse shot editing in the confession scene) and then shows it to Beth on live TV in Amsterdam — later Joran repudiates the confession but Beth accepts it as true and finally gains (that horrible word!) “closure” — and Pollan plays them all to the hilt, making us forget she’s an actress and getting us to accept her as a grief-stricken mother desperately searching for the truth about her daughter.
Incidentally, there’s a rather ham-handed epilogue in which both Pollan and the real Beth Holloway-Twitty tell young Americans taking exotic vacations in foreign lands to plan out their evenings ahead of time and stick to their plans (the most jarringly dumb ending to a film since Thea von Harbou implored the parents in her audience to “watch your children” at the end of her then-husband Fritz Lang’s film M) — and (memo to Charles) the real Beth pronounces the “t” in “often.”
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
My Name Is Julia Ross (Columbia, 1945)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran My Name Is Julia Ross, a quite engaging Columbia “B” from director Joseph H. Lewis in 1945 that was one of those occasional “B”’s that stepped so far out of its class that it got “A” playing time on its own (despite a 64-minute running time and a cast of solidly talented actors who weren’t exactly stars of the day — Nina Foch, George Macready, Dame May Whitty) and helped launch Lewis’s career. Lewis had already worked his way up the Hollywood food chain from Monogram (several East Side Kids adventures and the Bela Lugosi vehicle The Invisible Ghost) to Universal (The Mad Doctor of Market Street) and now Columbia, but Bob Porfirio in The Film Noir Encyclopedia said My Name Is Julia Ross “is the film that Lewis likes to consider as the ‘real’ beginning of his career.” (The present tense is appropriate because The Film Noir Encyclopedia was first published in 1979, my edition (the third) is from 1992, and Lewis lived until August 30, 2000, when he died at the age of 97.)
When I first saw it in the 1970’s I noticed immediately its similarities to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story “The Copper Beeches,” since both deal with a young woman being hired for a live-in job by a sinister family living in the boondocks because of her resemblance to a now-deceased family member. The story began as the novel The Woman in Red by Anthony Gilbert (and the film was apparently shot with that as a working title even though no one is described as wearing red at any time in the film) and was adapted by Muriel Ray Bolton — and as great as Lewis’s work (with Burnett Guffey as cinematographer, he fills the movie with atmospheric shots and chiaroscuro lighting, as well as far more close-ups than were typical in a low-budget film) is, Bolton’s script also has a good deal to do with the quality of this film even though it didn’t break open her career the way it did his (she’d been a writer on the Aldrich family movies in the 1930’s — they were Paramount’s attempt to mount a series to compete with the Hardy series at MGM — and after a few more “B” credits she decamped to TV in the 1950’s, returning to My Name Is Julia Ross for a 1955 TV remake on Lux Video Theatre).
The story: Julia Ross (Nina Foch — incidentally I’d always pronounced her name as “Fohsh,” with a long “o,” but in Robert Osborne’s introduction he called her “Fawsh,” and since he probably knew her I’d take that as authoritative) is a young single woman living in London. Her only living relative is an aunt in America, and she’s just broken up with her fiancé Dennis Bruce (Roland Varno) because he’s left her to marry someone else. She’s also three weeks behind in her room rent to boarding-house owner Mrs. Mackie (Doris Lloyd), and, desperate for a job, she eagerly applies to an ad from the Allyson Employment Agency for a live-in position as secretary to dowager Mrs. Hughes (Dame May Whitty). Mrs. Hughes, her son Ralph (George Macready) and the hatchet-faced woman who’s in charge of the agency interview Julia and get her to swear that she has neither relatives nor “a young man” who would be interested in her and concerned about her fate, and on that condition Julia accepts her job and reports to work at a London address. The night before she takes the job, though, Dennis returns to her life — he didn’t marry the other woman after all and he wants to resume his relationship with Julia — but she says she’s already taken the job and so that would be impossible.
She goes to her employer’s presumed home in London, spends the day there (after using their advance to pay off her boarding-house bill — which the maid at the boarding-house attempts to steal!) and goes to sleep at the usual hour — and wakes up not in the same house, but in a seaside estate in Cornwall (“played” by Malibu, as usual in an American film about Britain). Gradually she realizes that she’s being forced to assume the identity of another woman — Ralph’s now-dead wife Marian — and her protestations that her name is Julia Ross are passed off as mental illness, the delusions of a woman who had just returned from an asylum. Eventually she (and we) learn that the real Marian is dead — killed by Ralph in a psychopathic rage and dumped in the ocean off one of the Cornwall cliffs — and Ralph and his mother have plotted to hire a girl who looked like Marian and drive her to suicide so they can pass off her body as Marian’s and escape legal responsibility for her death.
The film and its plotting clearly owe a lot to Conan Doyle (not only “The Copper Beeches” but also the gimmick of the phony business, designed solely to lure someone into a plot, which was used in “The Red-Headed League” and “The Stock-Broker’s Clerk”) and also to Alfred Hitchcock: the murder on the beach from Young and Innocent, the fish-out-of-water aspects of Rebecca (Lewis even cribs one of Hitchcock’s famous shots of the heroine confronted with the late wife’s initials on her hand mirror) and the gimmick in Suspicion (Hitchcock’s original draft of Suspicion, anyway) of having the heroine trick the husband who intends to do her in into mailing a letter that will expose his plot.
At the same time My Name Is Julia Ross anticipates gimmicks in Hitchcock films yet to come: our roommate noted the similarities to Vertigo (a rich man recruits a young woman to participate in a plot to cover up his murder of his wife) and I picked up on the Strangers on a Train-ish aspect of the psycho’s mother covering for him. My Name is Julia Ross is vividly directed — Lewis’s and Guffey’s noir atmospherics brilliantly depict the almost Kafka-esque plight the story puts its heroine through — and marvelously cast. Foch and Macready had been teamed before, including the first of Columbia’s three films based on the radio show I Love a Mystery, but here they get roles worthy of their talents: Foch starts the film looking a bit like the young Dietrich, but as the plot gets more intense she loses any sense of reserve and leaves us in suspense (as Ingrid Bergman did in George Cukor’s Gaslight) whether she’ll genuinely lose her sanity before the plot to drive her crazy can be exposed; and Macready plays the psycho husband in a low-keyed way that anticipates the performances Alfred Hitchcock got out of Robert Walker in Strangers on a Train and Anthony Perkins in Psycho and is a far cry from the scenery-chewing Macready got away with in films with more prestigious directors like Charles Vidor and Stanley Kubrick.
But I suspect the reason My Name Is Julia Ross launched Lewis’s career is that it was the first time he got to work with a genuinely strong story, a plot that for all its far-fetched aspects at least made sense and gave him and his cast members real emotions to grab onto instead of the charades of stylishly directed nonsense most of Lewis’s previous films had been. (Lewis was aware of how dreadful his earlier scripts had been; at Universal he was nicknamed “Wagon-Wheel Joe” because when he was shooting “B” Westerns and he came upon a passage of particularly lousy dialogue, he would go to his wagon-wheel collection — he had several, of different sizes — and put one on the set and aim the camera through it, thereby creating an “artistic” effect and distracting the audience from the awfulness of what the actors were saying.) On a tiny budget and with a cast of talented unknowns who were boosted to stardom from this movie (well, the two leads were, at least), My Name Is Julia Ross offers some of the same intensity as Rebecca and Gaslight and deserves its enduring reputation as a “B” that stepped up from its class and rated “A” playing time.
I ran My Name Is Julia Ross, a quite engaging Columbia “B” from director Joseph H. Lewis in 1945 that was one of those occasional “B”’s that stepped so far out of its class that it got “A” playing time on its own (despite a 64-minute running time and a cast of solidly talented actors who weren’t exactly stars of the day — Nina Foch, George Macready, Dame May Whitty) and helped launch Lewis’s career. Lewis had already worked his way up the Hollywood food chain from Monogram (several East Side Kids adventures and the Bela Lugosi vehicle The Invisible Ghost) to Universal (The Mad Doctor of Market Street) and now Columbia, but Bob Porfirio in The Film Noir Encyclopedia said My Name Is Julia Ross “is the film that Lewis likes to consider as the ‘real’ beginning of his career.” (The present tense is appropriate because The Film Noir Encyclopedia was first published in 1979, my edition (the third) is from 1992, and Lewis lived until August 30, 2000, when he died at the age of 97.)
When I first saw it in the 1970’s I noticed immediately its similarities to Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes story “The Copper Beeches,” since both deal with a young woman being hired for a live-in job by a sinister family living in the boondocks because of her resemblance to a now-deceased family member. The story began as the novel The Woman in Red by Anthony Gilbert (and the film was apparently shot with that as a working title even though no one is described as wearing red at any time in the film) and was adapted by Muriel Ray Bolton — and as great as Lewis’s work (with Burnett Guffey as cinematographer, he fills the movie with atmospheric shots and chiaroscuro lighting, as well as far more close-ups than were typical in a low-budget film) is, Bolton’s script also has a good deal to do with the quality of this film even though it didn’t break open her career the way it did his (she’d been a writer on the Aldrich family movies in the 1930’s — they were Paramount’s attempt to mount a series to compete with the Hardy series at MGM — and after a few more “B” credits she decamped to TV in the 1950’s, returning to My Name Is Julia Ross for a 1955 TV remake on Lux Video Theatre).
The story: Julia Ross (Nina Foch — incidentally I’d always pronounced her name as “Fohsh,” with a long “o,” but in Robert Osborne’s introduction he called her “Fawsh,” and since he probably knew her I’d take that as authoritative) is a young single woman living in London. Her only living relative is an aunt in America, and she’s just broken up with her fiancé Dennis Bruce (Roland Varno) because he’s left her to marry someone else. She’s also three weeks behind in her room rent to boarding-house owner Mrs. Mackie (Doris Lloyd), and, desperate for a job, she eagerly applies to an ad from the Allyson Employment Agency for a live-in position as secretary to dowager Mrs. Hughes (Dame May Whitty). Mrs. Hughes, her son Ralph (George Macready) and the hatchet-faced woman who’s in charge of the agency interview Julia and get her to swear that she has neither relatives nor “a young man” who would be interested in her and concerned about her fate, and on that condition Julia accepts her job and reports to work at a London address. The night before she takes the job, though, Dennis returns to her life — he didn’t marry the other woman after all and he wants to resume his relationship with Julia — but she says she’s already taken the job and so that would be impossible.
She goes to her employer’s presumed home in London, spends the day there (after using their advance to pay off her boarding-house bill — which the maid at the boarding-house attempts to steal!) and goes to sleep at the usual hour — and wakes up not in the same house, but in a seaside estate in Cornwall (“played” by Malibu, as usual in an American film about Britain). Gradually she realizes that she’s being forced to assume the identity of another woman — Ralph’s now-dead wife Marian — and her protestations that her name is Julia Ross are passed off as mental illness, the delusions of a woman who had just returned from an asylum. Eventually she (and we) learn that the real Marian is dead — killed by Ralph in a psychopathic rage and dumped in the ocean off one of the Cornwall cliffs — and Ralph and his mother have plotted to hire a girl who looked like Marian and drive her to suicide so they can pass off her body as Marian’s and escape legal responsibility for her death.
The film and its plotting clearly owe a lot to Conan Doyle (not only “The Copper Beeches” but also the gimmick of the phony business, designed solely to lure someone into a plot, which was used in “The Red-Headed League” and “The Stock-Broker’s Clerk”) and also to Alfred Hitchcock: the murder on the beach from Young and Innocent, the fish-out-of-water aspects of Rebecca (Lewis even cribs one of Hitchcock’s famous shots of the heroine confronted with the late wife’s initials on her hand mirror) and the gimmick in Suspicion (Hitchcock’s original draft of Suspicion, anyway) of having the heroine trick the husband who intends to do her in into mailing a letter that will expose his plot.
At the same time My Name Is Julia Ross anticipates gimmicks in Hitchcock films yet to come: our roommate noted the similarities to Vertigo (a rich man recruits a young woman to participate in a plot to cover up his murder of his wife) and I picked up on the Strangers on a Train-ish aspect of the psycho’s mother covering for him. My Name is Julia Ross is vividly directed — Lewis’s and Guffey’s noir atmospherics brilliantly depict the almost Kafka-esque plight the story puts its heroine through — and marvelously cast. Foch and Macready had been teamed before, including the first of Columbia’s three films based on the radio show I Love a Mystery, but here they get roles worthy of their talents: Foch starts the film looking a bit like the young Dietrich, but as the plot gets more intense she loses any sense of reserve and leaves us in suspense (as Ingrid Bergman did in George Cukor’s Gaslight) whether she’ll genuinely lose her sanity before the plot to drive her crazy can be exposed; and Macready plays the psycho husband in a low-keyed way that anticipates the performances Alfred Hitchcock got out of Robert Walker in Strangers on a Train and Anthony Perkins in Psycho and is a far cry from the scenery-chewing Macready got away with in films with more prestigious directors like Charles Vidor and Stanley Kubrick.
But I suspect the reason My Name Is Julia Ross launched Lewis’s career is that it was the first time he got to work with a genuinely strong story, a plot that for all its far-fetched aspects at least made sense and gave him and his cast members real emotions to grab onto instead of the charades of stylishly directed nonsense most of Lewis’s previous films had been. (Lewis was aware of how dreadful his earlier scripts had been; at Universal he was nicknamed “Wagon-Wheel Joe” because when he was shooting “B” Westerns and he came upon a passage of particularly lousy dialogue, he would go to his wagon-wheel collection — he had several, of different sizes — and put one on the set and aim the camera through it, thereby creating an “artistic” effect and distracting the audience from the awfulness of what the actors were saying.) On a tiny budget and with a cast of talented unknowns who were boosted to stardom from this movie (well, the two leads were, at least), My Name Is Julia Ross offers some of the same intensity as Rebecca and Gaslight and deserves its enduring reputation as a “B” that stepped up from its class and rated “A” playing time.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Valkyrie (United Artists, 2008)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Valkyrie, the second release on the “new” United Artists label that was basically a vanity production company for Tom Cruise and a vehicle for the Sony conglomerate (which now owns what’s left of MGM, UA and Columbia) to lure him and his long-time producing partner Paula Wagner (who parted company with him after this movie was finished — she’s one of the laundry list of 17 producers on the credits) after Paramount fired them. It’s based on one of the most fascinating true stories of World War II: the 15th and last attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler, most of them staged by a cadre within the German officer corps who thought Hitler was dragging down Germany.
Some of them were principled anti-fascists; some of them were descendants of the Junkers (the old Prussian aristocracy) who were appalled at the idea of being ruled and led into battle by an Austrian nobody (as I’ve joked elsewhere, from Marie Antoinette to the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico to Adolf Hitler to Arnold Schwarzenegger, the record of Austrians who have got involved in other countries’ politics has not been good); and some of them had supported the start of World War II but were angered by Hitler’s fabled refusal to allow them to do tactical retreats (“Where the German soldier stands, there he stays!” Hitler would frequently thunder at his generals, thereby converting military defeats into total annihilations and hastening Germany’s overall loss of the war). William Shirer didn’t think much of the German officers who plotted against Hitler; in his book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich they essentially become the comic relief (one practically expects to hear the Laurel and Hardy theme song “Dance of the Cuckoos” every time they come on), and Shirer explains their repeated failure to off the Führer by sheer ineptitude conditioned by the fact that they were trained to lead armies in conventional battles, not to plot political assassinations and stage coups.
Valkyrie — the opening credits show the title in its German form, Walküre (making me wonder if anybody seeing this film had a momentary fear that they were going to be obliged to sit through a Wagner opera by mistake), and then the word is seen dissolving into English — begins in North Africa in 1942, where Col. Claus von Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise) is severely wounded by a British fighter squadron that strafes his unit’s position. Stauffenberg loses his right hand completely and all but two fingers on his left. The film then depicts one of the earlier failures to kill Hitler by planting a bomb on his plane flying him from Ukraine back to Germany in 1943 — the fuse of the bomb froze at the high altitude the plane flew at and so it never went off — and shows some of the masterminds (if I can be polite) of the subsequent attempt: major-general Henning von Tresckow (Kenneth Branagh), former German military commander Ludwig Beck (a grizzled, wizened and appropriately corpulent Terence Stamp), general Friedrich Ollbricht (Bill Nighy), general Ernest Fellgiebel (Eddie Izzard) and Dr. Carl Goerdeler (Kevin R. McNally).
Goerdeler, whom the plotters apparently had in mind to replace Hitler as chancellor in the new government they planned to form after the assassination, was a fascinating character described by Douglas Sirk — who knew him because Goerdeler had been mayor of Leipzig when the Nazis took over and he allowed Sirk’s planned premiere of the Kurt Weill-Georg Kaiser musical Der Silbersee to go on despite Nazi opposition. In his book-length interview with Jon Halliday, Sirk recalled Goerdeler as “an old-fashioned conservative Democrat … an honest, highly educated German of the old school, a kind of Adenauer. He came from Königsberg, the city of Kant, and he was a Kantian himself, with the same unshakable ethical beliefs, the moral stubbornness, though his mind had not been sharpened by any experience of Marxism, whether accepted or rejected.”
However, the focus in Valkyrie is not on the civilians brought into the plot but on the military people who were the only ones with direct access to Hitler and therefore the people who actually had to kill him for the plot to succeed. The plotters were hoping that if they got rid of Hitler and the Nazi regime, they would be able to sue for peace and the Allies would give Germany a better deal than they would if the Nazis stayed in power and fought to the end — which, as Shirer and others who’ve written about the period have noted, was a forlorn hope: the Allied leaders, Churchill in particular, regarded the German military leadership and political class as hopelessly corrupted by the ideal of world conquest (remember that in World War I the Germans had also fought a war of aggression and justified it on the basis of nationalism and the alleged superiority of the German race; the only real difference between the Kaiser’s regime and Hitler’s in that regard was that the Kaiser’s government was not anti-Semitic, and indeed many Jews played key roles in Germany’s World War I effort) and were not going either to help a coup against Hitler succeed or offer a post-Hitler government better peace terms.
The title Valkyrie comes not only from the Nordic myths and Wagner’s Ring (in one scene in the film, Hitler plays a recording of the “Ride of the Valkyries” — with, praise be, an authentic German Grammophon label for the period; the label lists Hans Knappertsbusch as the conductor but the record is actually a modern one by the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra, recorded for Naxos but with the conductor unspecified; arkivmusic.com lists him as Uwe Mund — and says a line he apparently used in real life, “One cannot understand National Socialism if one does not understand Wagner”) but also from a plan Hitler had ordered to restore order in the Reich in general and Berlin in particular in case there was an attempt to overthrow or murder him. The officers in charge of the bomb plot get the idea to rework Valkyrie to serve the opposite of its initial purpose; fearful that the SS and the Gestapo will attempt to keep the Nazi regime in power, they work out a way to convince the Army Reserve that the SS and Gestapo are Hitler’s killers and are plotting a coup of their own that the reservists must mobilize to resist.
Valkyrie the movie is slow going at first — after the combat scene in which Stauffenberg is injured much of the first half-hour or so is just people sitting in rooms, talking to each other — but as the film goes on director Bryan Singer and writers Christopher McQuarrie and Nathan Alexander ratchet up the tension and emerge with a movie comparable to the 1973 The Day of the Jackal in its ability to build suspense even though the story is an historical event whose outcome is known by the audience in advance. Valkyrie got mixed-to-negative reviews and sank at the box office without a trace, but it’s quite a good movie even though some of the flaws the critics noticed are in evidence; Tom Cruise really is miscast as Stauffenberg (though it was what remained of his clout as a major box-office star that got the film made in the first place), and his American accent sticks out like a sore thumb in the nest of British actors who are his co-stars. (Once again, as in the 1940’s and since, Hollywood is using the British accent as an all-purpose indicator of “foreign-ness” — suggesting to American viewers that these people are from another country even though they’re speaking English, not German.)
The film took great pains to be historically accurate, even to shooting in the surviving buildings of the Third Reich (which meant some dodgy negotiations with the current German government — which is attempting to suppress the Church of Scientology and therefore was unwilling to facilitate the filming of one of their most treasured historical stories with one of the world’s most famous Scientologists in the lead), but both Charles and I got the impression that the McQuarrie-Alexander script was vastly exaggerating the ability of the coup plotters to gain a foothold on the ground in Berlin during those crucial hours of July 20, 1944 when it wasn’t at all clear whether Hitler was still alive. There are a few details the filmmakers inexplicably left out even though they greatly facilitate an understanding of the event — like why the 1943 bomb attempt failed (the fuse to the bomb froze at the high altitude at which Hitler’s plane was flying) or why the 1944 attack also failed (someone moved Stauffenberg’s briefcase, containing the bomb, under the heavy oaken conference table in Hitler’s room, and the oak absorbed most of the energy of the blast so Hitler was shaken but suffered only minor injuries) or how the coup plotters were dealt with after their attempt failed.
Hitler was anxious enough about maintaining the loyalty of the rest of the military that the officers were permitted either an execution by firing squad or the right to commit suicide (as Beck is shown doing in the film and as Erwin Rommel, whom Hitler was convinced had participated in the plot even though his later biographers disagree over whether and to what extent he was involved — and who isn’t depicted in Valkyrie at all! — was also allowed to do), but, on Hitler’s direct order, the civilians who took part in the plot were hanged with piano wire so they would die very slowly and painfully. Sirk’s account of Goerdeler’s death is a rare moment of emotional revulsion in what’s otherwise a typical long-format interview of a movie director: “They hung this Kantian man on a meat-hook, like an animal, letting him die this way. Later on, after hearing about this, it has followed me as a constant nightmare and has hardened me towards any kind of totalitarianism.” What’s more — something not depicted in the film, though it certainly could (and should!) have been, Hitler ordered the hangings filmed and ran the footage in private quite frequently in the remaining months of his life — and the trials of the plotters before the so-called “People’s Court” headed by judge Roland Friesler were also filmed by the crew of the German Weekly Newsreel for a feature-length film, Traitors Before the People’s Court.
Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels shelved the release of this movie when he realized that the coup plotters, who faced their inevitable convictions and executions with dignity and self-assurance, were coming off considerably better than the raving, screaming Friesler, who as Robert Edwin Herzstein writes in his book The War That Hitler Won (a reference to the fact that the Nazi regime held the support of the German people until the end and was not overthrown at the last minute the way the Kaiser had been days before the end of World War I), “dominates the movie by screaming obscenities and denunciations at the helpless prisoners, who somehow maintain their ‘Prussian’ dignity in the face of this madman. The existence of the film caused uneasiness in Army circles, especially among cadets, and the movie was never released for general viewing. The Reich Film Chamber supplied a print to Martin Bormann, who … ordered that Traitors not be sent out to individual Gauleiters [regional Nazi leaders] even as a party film, since … this could lead to ‘undesirable’ discussions about the manner in which the trial was carried out.” In any case, the trials ended abruptly when a British air raid on Berlin dropped a bomb on the courthouse and killed Friesler and just about everyone else in the room in the middle of a trial session.
A bit more on the aftermath in order to make the ending coherent to people not up on Nazi historical trivia would have helped make Valkyrie an even better film than it is, but as it stands it’s quite a bit better than the critical consensus would have it and a solid historical thriller even if Cruise’s presence does make it seem at times as if his Mission: Impossible character is going up against a really sinister and evil group of Nazi Germany re-enactors. The actor playing Adolf Hitler, David Bamber, manages to capture the haggard look the Führer had this late in the war, though the rather clipped comments he gives at the staff briefings cut against just about everything we know about life chez Hitler — mostly from the memoirs of Albert Speer, who said that being in Hitler’s presence was really boring since he insisted on talking for hours on end (and on having stenographers take down his words — these were later published as historical documents, called Tischgespräche — “table talks” — which are the real Hitler diaries and were used as the source material for the fake “Hitler diaries” from the early 1990’s) on a confusing mélange of subjects; he also insisted on playing records for his guests, and by the time Speer was part of Hitler’s inner circle he’d occasionally start out with a Wagner side or two for old time’s sake but would later switch to operetta in general and Franz Lehár in particular.
At least Bamber looks more like his real-life counterpart than Harvey Friedman, who plays Goebbels and looks and acts only superficially like the real one (but then Martin Kosleck played Goebbels twice and remains the definitive one; both in looks and in mannerisms he came closer to the extant footage of the real one than anyone else ever has). Valkyrie isn’t quite the movie its subject deserved, but on its own merits it’s quite good, though quite frankly Tom Cruise did a better job playing a military man who resists his government’s prosecution of an unjust war nearly two decades earlier in his turn as Viet Nam veteran turned war resister Ron Kovic in Born on the Fourth of July.
The film was Valkyrie, the second release on the “new” United Artists label that was basically a vanity production company for Tom Cruise and a vehicle for the Sony conglomerate (which now owns what’s left of MGM, UA and Columbia) to lure him and his long-time producing partner Paula Wagner (who parted company with him after this movie was finished — she’s one of the laundry list of 17 producers on the credits) after Paramount fired them. It’s based on one of the most fascinating true stories of World War II: the 15th and last attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler, most of them staged by a cadre within the German officer corps who thought Hitler was dragging down Germany.
Some of them were principled anti-fascists; some of them were descendants of the Junkers (the old Prussian aristocracy) who were appalled at the idea of being ruled and led into battle by an Austrian nobody (as I’ve joked elsewhere, from Marie Antoinette to the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico to Adolf Hitler to Arnold Schwarzenegger, the record of Austrians who have got involved in other countries’ politics has not been good); and some of them had supported the start of World War II but were angered by Hitler’s fabled refusal to allow them to do tactical retreats (“Where the German soldier stands, there he stays!” Hitler would frequently thunder at his generals, thereby converting military defeats into total annihilations and hastening Germany’s overall loss of the war). William Shirer didn’t think much of the German officers who plotted against Hitler; in his book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich they essentially become the comic relief (one practically expects to hear the Laurel and Hardy theme song “Dance of the Cuckoos” every time they come on), and Shirer explains their repeated failure to off the Führer by sheer ineptitude conditioned by the fact that they were trained to lead armies in conventional battles, not to plot political assassinations and stage coups.
Valkyrie — the opening credits show the title in its German form, Walküre (making me wonder if anybody seeing this film had a momentary fear that they were going to be obliged to sit through a Wagner opera by mistake), and then the word is seen dissolving into English — begins in North Africa in 1942, where Col. Claus von Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise) is severely wounded by a British fighter squadron that strafes his unit’s position. Stauffenberg loses his right hand completely and all but two fingers on his left. The film then depicts one of the earlier failures to kill Hitler by planting a bomb on his plane flying him from Ukraine back to Germany in 1943 — the fuse of the bomb froze at the high altitude the plane flew at and so it never went off — and shows some of the masterminds (if I can be polite) of the subsequent attempt: major-general Henning von Tresckow (Kenneth Branagh), former German military commander Ludwig Beck (a grizzled, wizened and appropriately corpulent Terence Stamp), general Friedrich Ollbricht (Bill Nighy), general Ernest Fellgiebel (Eddie Izzard) and Dr. Carl Goerdeler (Kevin R. McNally).
Goerdeler, whom the plotters apparently had in mind to replace Hitler as chancellor in the new government they planned to form after the assassination, was a fascinating character described by Douglas Sirk — who knew him because Goerdeler had been mayor of Leipzig when the Nazis took over and he allowed Sirk’s planned premiere of the Kurt Weill-Georg Kaiser musical Der Silbersee to go on despite Nazi opposition. In his book-length interview with Jon Halliday, Sirk recalled Goerdeler as “an old-fashioned conservative Democrat … an honest, highly educated German of the old school, a kind of Adenauer. He came from Königsberg, the city of Kant, and he was a Kantian himself, with the same unshakable ethical beliefs, the moral stubbornness, though his mind had not been sharpened by any experience of Marxism, whether accepted or rejected.”
However, the focus in Valkyrie is not on the civilians brought into the plot but on the military people who were the only ones with direct access to Hitler and therefore the people who actually had to kill him for the plot to succeed. The plotters were hoping that if they got rid of Hitler and the Nazi regime, they would be able to sue for peace and the Allies would give Germany a better deal than they would if the Nazis stayed in power and fought to the end — which, as Shirer and others who’ve written about the period have noted, was a forlorn hope: the Allied leaders, Churchill in particular, regarded the German military leadership and political class as hopelessly corrupted by the ideal of world conquest (remember that in World War I the Germans had also fought a war of aggression and justified it on the basis of nationalism and the alleged superiority of the German race; the only real difference between the Kaiser’s regime and Hitler’s in that regard was that the Kaiser’s government was not anti-Semitic, and indeed many Jews played key roles in Germany’s World War I effort) and were not going either to help a coup against Hitler succeed or offer a post-Hitler government better peace terms.
The title Valkyrie comes not only from the Nordic myths and Wagner’s Ring (in one scene in the film, Hitler plays a recording of the “Ride of the Valkyries” — with, praise be, an authentic German Grammophon label for the period; the label lists Hans Knappertsbusch as the conductor but the record is actually a modern one by the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra, recorded for Naxos but with the conductor unspecified; arkivmusic.com lists him as Uwe Mund — and says a line he apparently used in real life, “One cannot understand National Socialism if one does not understand Wagner”) but also from a plan Hitler had ordered to restore order in the Reich in general and Berlin in particular in case there was an attempt to overthrow or murder him. The officers in charge of the bomb plot get the idea to rework Valkyrie to serve the opposite of its initial purpose; fearful that the SS and the Gestapo will attempt to keep the Nazi regime in power, they work out a way to convince the Army Reserve that the SS and Gestapo are Hitler’s killers and are plotting a coup of their own that the reservists must mobilize to resist.
Valkyrie the movie is slow going at first — after the combat scene in which Stauffenberg is injured much of the first half-hour or so is just people sitting in rooms, talking to each other — but as the film goes on director Bryan Singer and writers Christopher McQuarrie and Nathan Alexander ratchet up the tension and emerge with a movie comparable to the 1973 The Day of the Jackal in its ability to build suspense even though the story is an historical event whose outcome is known by the audience in advance. Valkyrie got mixed-to-negative reviews and sank at the box office without a trace, but it’s quite a good movie even though some of the flaws the critics noticed are in evidence; Tom Cruise really is miscast as Stauffenberg (though it was what remained of his clout as a major box-office star that got the film made in the first place), and his American accent sticks out like a sore thumb in the nest of British actors who are his co-stars. (Once again, as in the 1940’s and since, Hollywood is using the British accent as an all-purpose indicator of “foreign-ness” — suggesting to American viewers that these people are from another country even though they’re speaking English, not German.)
The film took great pains to be historically accurate, even to shooting in the surviving buildings of the Third Reich (which meant some dodgy negotiations with the current German government — which is attempting to suppress the Church of Scientology and therefore was unwilling to facilitate the filming of one of their most treasured historical stories with one of the world’s most famous Scientologists in the lead), but both Charles and I got the impression that the McQuarrie-Alexander script was vastly exaggerating the ability of the coup plotters to gain a foothold on the ground in Berlin during those crucial hours of July 20, 1944 when it wasn’t at all clear whether Hitler was still alive. There are a few details the filmmakers inexplicably left out even though they greatly facilitate an understanding of the event — like why the 1943 bomb attempt failed (the fuse to the bomb froze at the high altitude at which Hitler’s plane was flying) or why the 1944 attack also failed (someone moved Stauffenberg’s briefcase, containing the bomb, under the heavy oaken conference table in Hitler’s room, and the oak absorbed most of the energy of the blast so Hitler was shaken but suffered only minor injuries) or how the coup plotters were dealt with after their attempt failed.
Hitler was anxious enough about maintaining the loyalty of the rest of the military that the officers were permitted either an execution by firing squad or the right to commit suicide (as Beck is shown doing in the film and as Erwin Rommel, whom Hitler was convinced had participated in the plot even though his later biographers disagree over whether and to what extent he was involved — and who isn’t depicted in Valkyrie at all! — was also allowed to do), but, on Hitler’s direct order, the civilians who took part in the plot were hanged with piano wire so they would die very slowly and painfully. Sirk’s account of Goerdeler’s death is a rare moment of emotional revulsion in what’s otherwise a typical long-format interview of a movie director: “They hung this Kantian man on a meat-hook, like an animal, letting him die this way. Later on, after hearing about this, it has followed me as a constant nightmare and has hardened me towards any kind of totalitarianism.” What’s more — something not depicted in the film, though it certainly could (and should!) have been, Hitler ordered the hangings filmed and ran the footage in private quite frequently in the remaining months of his life — and the trials of the plotters before the so-called “People’s Court” headed by judge Roland Friesler were also filmed by the crew of the German Weekly Newsreel for a feature-length film, Traitors Before the People’s Court.
Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels shelved the release of this movie when he realized that the coup plotters, who faced their inevitable convictions and executions with dignity and self-assurance, were coming off considerably better than the raving, screaming Friesler, who as Robert Edwin Herzstein writes in his book The War That Hitler Won (a reference to the fact that the Nazi regime held the support of the German people until the end and was not overthrown at the last minute the way the Kaiser had been days before the end of World War I), “dominates the movie by screaming obscenities and denunciations at the helpless prisoners, who somehow maintain their ‘Prussian’ dignity in the face of this madman. The existence of the film caused uneasiness in Army circles, especially among cadets, and the movie was never released for general viewing. The Reich Film Chamber supplied a print to Martin Bormann, who … ordered that Traitors not be sent out to individual Gauleiters [regional Nazi leaders] even as a party film, since … this could lead to ‘undesirable’ discussions about the manner in which the trial was carried out.” In any case, the trials ended abruptly when a British air raid on Berlin dropped a bomb on the courthouse and killed Friesler and just about everyone else in the room in the middle of a trial session.
A bit more on the aftermath in order to make the ending coherent to people not up on Nazi historical trivia would have helped make Valkyrie an even better film than it is, but as it stands it’s quite a bit better than the critical consensus would have it and a solid historical thriller even if Cruise’s presence does make it seem at times as if his Mission: Impossible character is going up against a really sinister and evil group of Nazi Germany re-enactors. The actor playing Adolf Hitler, David Bamber, manages to capture the haggard look the Führer had this late in the war, though the rather clipped comments he gives at the staff briefings cut against just about everything we know about life chez Hitler — mostly from the memoirs of Albert Speer, who said that being in Hitler’s presence was really boring since he insisted on talking for hours on end (and on having stenographers take down his words — these were later published as historical documents, called Tischgespräche — “table talks” — which are the real Hitler diaries and were used as the source material for the fake “Hitler diaries” from the early 1990’s) on a confusing mélange of subjects; he also insisted on playing records for his guests, and by the time Speer was part of Hitler’s inner circle he’d occasionally start out with a Wagner side or two for old time’s sake but would later switch to operetta in general and Franz Lehár in particular.
At least Bamber looks more like his real-life counterpart than Harvey Friedman, who plays Goebbels and looks and acts only superficially like the real one (but then Martin Kosleck played Goebbels twice and remains the definitive one; both in looks and in mannerisms he came closer to the extant footage of the real one than anyone else ever has). Valkyrie isn’t quite the movie its subject deserved, but on its own merits it’s quite good, though quite frankly Tom Cruise did a better job playing a military man who resists his government’s prosecution of an unjust war nearly two decades earlier in his turn as Viet Nam veteran turned war resister Ron Kovic in Born on the Fourth of July.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
In God's Country (CTV/Shaftesbury/Lifetime, 2007)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran one of the Lifetime TV-movies I recorded the night before: In God’s Country, one I’d been particularly interested in seeing because of its provocative (albeit safely provocative) subject matter: polygamy among breakaway Mormon sects. In this movie the sect is called “Harmony” and its motto is “Keep sweet” — “sweet” being defined as a proper relationship to God and His representatives on Earth, a creepy-looking bald guy known only as “The Prophet” (played by the appropriately named Marc Strange, who looks like a cross between Yul Brynner and Boris Karloff) and his second-in-command, Bishop Josiah Leavitt (a marvelously sinister Richard Burgi).
“The Prophet” has told Josiah that he’s fatally ill and is looking for a successor, and the hint is that Josiah can have the job as long as he shows he can control his own family — but Josiah is having a little problem with the increasingly restive wife number eight, Judith Leavitt (Kelly Rowan, top-billed), and her five kids. Her oldest, daughter Charlotte (Martha MacIsaac), is actually the child of Judith’s first husband, a sect member who was thrown out for apostasy and whose wives were taken away from him and reassigned to Bishop Josiah — and who responded by killing himself. Judith is feeling put upon by the demands of the authoritarian sect — though Kelly Rowan is so limited and inexpressive an actress that she spends the entire movie showing no emotion beyond a hang-dog look on her face that suggests she needs a hit of Pepto-Bismol immediately before she pukes — but what finally makes her decide to leave is when “The Prophet” decides that in order to restore discipline to their sect, he needs to take a few more wives himself and one of those he chooses is Judith’s 12-year-old daughter Alice (Hannah Lochner).
Judith sets fire to their house on the sect’s land and flees with her children, then makes contact with the authorities — whom she’s already heard from when Charlotte was raped by a young male sect member who told her he needed to “check her out” to determine her suitability for bride-hood. The girl broke her arm while trying to fight back, and the cult circled the wagons by inventing the preposterous cover story that she leaped off a barn roof into a hay bale and broke it accidentally — and the cult’s security goons, who ride motorcycles through the compound all day looking for all manner of unauthorized goings-on, caught Judith trying to tell the authorities the true story. Anyway, once she finally breaks free of the cult she contacts Child Services, who find her a place to stay and give her a voucher for food; and, spending the voucher at “Adam’s Market” (a nice piece of symbolism from writers Esta Spalding and Peter Behrens), she runs into Louise (Lynda Boyd), a grocery clerk who befriends her and ultimately gets her a job at the market … where she’s flummoxed by the grocery scanner since she’s never handled a piece of equipment like that before (it’s been established that the Harmony sect is self-supporting; its compound is also a fully functioning farm and all their food is home-grown). Judith also meets Officer Wayne (he had a last name but imdb.com doesn’t list it), played by Peter Outerbridge, and there’s a hint of burgeoning romantic interest between the two.
The climax occurs when Charlotte, who misses life at Harmony and especially misses her boyfriend Jamie (Kristopher Turner — an actor who looks like every cute but dorky-looking Mormon missionary who ever tried to hand you a copy of The Book of Mormon on a streetcorner or a bus), betrays them and returns to the cult, lured back by Bishop Josiah’s promise to let her marry Jamie despite the policy decision of “The Prophet” that the young women need the “spiritual guidance” of much older men as their husbands (yeah, right … ), only in the final scene we find out it’s a trap: Bishop Josiah really intends to marry Charlotte (his stepdaughter, remember) himself but doesn’t plan to tell her until she actually shows up for the ceremony — and in the meantime he’s assigned the church’s goon squad (including the man who actually raped Charlotte earlier on) to beat up Jamie and throw him off the property. Judith drives to the compound, hoping to enlist the aid of local law enforcement to get her daughter out of there before her ex forces her to marry him, and Officer Wayne picks up on where she’s going just in time to do the Seventh Cavalry act — and there’s a marvelously sardonic ending in which “The Prophet” decides it’s all Josiah’s fault for failing to control his women, so he declares that Judith and her family are free to leave and Josiah’s punishment is knowing he’s blown his chance to be “The Prophet”’s successor.
In God’s Country is one of those frustrating movies which has some original elements and could have been deeper and richer than it was. The Harmony cult seems draconian and oppressive — at times its level of control over its inhabitants evokes comparison with The Magdalene Sisters and 1984 — but it’s also depicted by director John L’Ecuyer and cinematographer Thomas M. Haring as a pastoral near-paradise, a bucolic bit of country whose people live simply, comfortably and in a way that would seem quite fulfilling to anyone who’d never experienced any other sort of life. (In that regard it’s quite different from the patch of Arizona desert inhabited by the real-life Mormon polygamist cult of the late Rulon Jeffs and his son and successor, Warren, that was the writers’ obvious inspiration for their story.)
At times the writers and director appear aware of just how traumatic it would be for anyone who’d been born and raised there to leave, and how hard it would be for them to struggle to survive in the outside world (when Alice and Mark enroll in non-cult schools for the first times in their lives, the school principal is impressed by Alice’s intelligence and skill but finds Mark two years behind his normal development — because after sixth grade he was pulled out of school to work on the cult’s farm). There’s a marvelous scene of culture shock when, on their first trip to Adam’s Market, the kids see Playboy-type magazines for the first time and can’t conceive of how or why anyone would publish and sell photos of naked women. Ultimately, though, In God’s Country blows as many opportunities as it hits — and it’s predictable enough that all Charles had to see was an early establishing scene of Bishop Josiah presiding over a congregation consisting mostly of women in 19th century dresses to guess what the movie was about: “Lifetime vs. polygamy.”
I ran one of the Lifetime TV-movies I recorded the night before: In God’s Country, one I’d been particularly interested in seeing because of its provocative (albeit safely provocative) subject matter: polygamy among breakaway Mormon sects. In this movie the sect is called “Harmony” and its motto is “Keep sweet” — “sweet” being defined as a proper relationship to God and His representatives on Earth, a creepy-looking bald guy known only as “The Prophet” (played by the appropriately named Marc Strange, who looks like a cross between Yul Brynner and Boris Karloff) and his second-in-command, Bishop Josiah Leavitt (a marvelously sinister Richard Burgi).
“The Prophet” has told Josiah that he’s fatally ill and is looking for a successor, and the hint is that Josiah can have the job as long as he shows he can control his own family — but Josiah is having a little problem with the increasingly restive wife number eight, Judith Leavitt (Kelly Rowan, top-billed), and her five kids. Her oldest, daughter Charlotte (Martha MacIsaac), is actually the child of Judith’s first husband, a sect member who was thrown out for apostasy and whose wives were taken away from him and reassigned to Bishop Josiah — and who responded by killing himself. Judith is feeling put upon by the demands of the authoritarian sect — though Kelly Rowan is so limited and inexpressive an actress that she spends the entire movie showing no emotion beyond a hang-dog look on her face that suggests she needs a hit of Pepto-Bismol immediately before she pukes — but what finally makes her decide to leave is when “The Prophet” decides that in order to restore discipline to their sect, he needs to take a few more wives himself and one of those he chooses is Judith’s 12-year-old daughter Alice (Hannah Lochner).
Judith sets fire to their house on the sect’s land and flees with her children, then makes contact with the authorities — whom she’s already heard from when Charlotte was raped by a young male sect member who told her he needed to “check her out” to determine her suitability for bride-hood. The girl broke her arm while trying to fight back, and the cult circled the wagons by inventing the preposterous cover story that she leaped off a barn roof into a hay bale and broke it accidentally — and the cult’s security goons, who ride motorcycles through the compound all day looking for all manner of unauthorized goings-on, caught Judith trying to tell the authorities the true story. Anyway, once she finally breaks free of the cult she contacts Child Services, who find her a place to stay and give her a voucher for food; and, spending the voucher at “Adam’s Market” (a nice piece of symbolism from writers Esta Spalding and Peter Behrens), she runs into Louise (Lynda Boyd), a grocery clerk who befriends her and ultimately gets her a job at the market … where she’s flummoxed by the grocery scanner since she’s never handled a piece of equipment like that before (it’s been established that the Harmony sect is self-supporting; its compound is also a fully functioning farm and all their food is home-grown). Judith also meets Officer Wayne (he had a last name but imdb.com doesn’t list it), played by Peter Outerbridge, and there’s a hint of burgeoning romantic interest between the two.
The climax occurs when Charlotte, who misses life at Harmony and especially misses her boyfriend Jamie (Kristopher Turner — an actor who looks like every cute but dorky-looking Mormon missionary who ever tried to hand you a copy of The Book of Mormon on a streetcorner or a bus), betrays them and returns to the cult, lured back by Bishop Josiah’s promise to let her marry Jamie despite the policy decision of “The Prophet” that the young women need the “spiritual guidance” of much older men as their husbands (yeah, right … ), only in the final scene we find out it’s a trap: Bishop Josiah really intends to marry Charlotte (his stepdaughter, remember) himself but doesn’t plan to tell her until she actually shows up for the ceremony — and in the meantime he’s assigned the church’s goon squad (including the man who actually raped Charlotte earlier on) to beat up Jamie and throw him off the property. Judith drives to the compound, hoping to enlist the aid of local law enforcement to get her daughter out of there before her ex forces her to marry him, and Officer Wayne picks up on where she’s going just in time to do the Seventh Cavalry act — and there’s a marvelously sardonic ending in which “The Prophet” decides it’s all Josiah’s fault for failing to control his women, so he declares that Judith and her family are free to leave and Josiah’s punishment is knowing he’s blown his chance to be “The Prophet”’s successor.
In God’s Country is one of those frustrating movies which has some original elements and could have been deeper and richer than it was. The Harmony cult seems draconian and oppressive — at times its level of control over its inhabitants evokes comparison with The Magdalene Sisters and 1984 — but it’s also depicted by director John L’Ecuyer and cinematographer Thomas M. Haring as a pastoral near-paradise, a bucolic bit of country whose people live simply, comfortably and in a way that would seem quite fulfilling to anyone who’d never experienced any other sort of life. (In that regard it’s quite different from the patch of Arizona desert inhabited by the real-life Mormon polygamist cult of the late Rulon Jeffs and his son and successor, Warren, that was the writers’ obvious inspiration for their story.)
At times the writers and director appear aware of just how traumatic it would be for anyone who’d been born and raised there to leave, and how hard it would be for them to struggle to survive in the outside world (when Alice and Mark enroll in non-cult schools for the first times in their lives, the school principal is impressed by Alice’s intelligence and skill but finds Mark two years behind his normal development — because after sixth grade he was pulled out of school to work on the cult’s farm). There’s a marvelous scene of culture shock when, on their first trip to Adam’s Market, the kids see Playboy-type magazines for the first time and can’t conceive of how or why anyone would publish and sell photos of naked women. Ultimately, though, In God’s Country blows as many opportunities as it hits — and it’s predictable enough that all Charles had to see was an early establishing scene of Bishop Josiah presiding over a congregation consisting mostly of women in 19th century dresses to guess what the movie was about: “Lifetime vs. polygamy.”
Lucky Blue (Swedish TV, 2007)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles had screened an interesting half-hour movie for me: Lucky Blue, a coming-out short shot for Swedish television in 2007 which takes place on a farm. Directed and written by Håkon Liu (the last name had both of us wondering if he was the son of Chinese immigrants to Sweden), Lucky Blue — the title refers to a pet parrot that escapes during the course of the film but eventually comes back — is set on a Swedish farm whose owners, Kjelle (Johan Friberg) and Amanda (Michaela Berner), are setting up an outdoor stage for a karaoke party. The relationships of the people in this film took a little time to sort out but eventually it emerged that tall, dark-haired, handsome and relatively butch Olle (Tobias Bengtsson) is their son and Kevin (Tobias Bengtsson) is a house guest who’s traveling for the summer (Kevin is 16, Olle is 17 and they’re on summer break from school) with someone named Barbro (Britta Andersson).
The movie is a sort of extended flirtation between Olle and Kevin — Olle is, or at least thinks of himself as, straight while Kevin is already so aware of his Gayness that in the opening scene he is shown kissing his own image in a mirror in an almost exact visual quote from Funeral Parade of Roses, a quite dire Japanese film about Gays from 1969 (though the Japanese version is even kinkier because the Gay teenager is also a budding drag queen, so he’s kissing himself in the mirror while wearing lipstick he’s appropriated from his mother) — and it was a bit disorienting in that the central actors and the settings look so much like the stuff of Gay porn you end up thinking, “Cut the preliminaries and start having sex already!” Nonetheless, it’s an interesting little movie which Charles probably responded to even more than I did, mainly because he was a Gay teenager and I wasn’t (I didn’t really become aware of my Gay side until I was 24) and he had all the little adolescent crushes that seem so big at that time — only he had them on guys, and added to all the anxious worries endemic to sexual awakening anyway (“Will that person really like me?”) were the ones unique to the same-sex loving: “Are they Gay? Are they straight?” (Straight adolescents generally only have to worry about rejection; Queer adolescents have to worry not only about rejection but about the rejection taking the form of physical violence.)
The film reminded me of the quite nice French Gay feature, Come Undone, which Charles and I watched some years ago and which impressed me at the time as a refreshing antidote to Brokeback Mountain (which for all its being hailed as a ground-breaking Gay movie was still the old, dreary tale of two men falling into socially disapproved love and one of them ending up dead while the other ended up totally devastated and emotionally wasted inside); what Come Undone and Lucky Blue had in common was an acceptance of homosexuality as a normal reality of life, not some horrible fate either to be rejected at all costs or anguished over for years of misery and finally, only grudgingly accepted — and both films depicted their Gay characters as not so different from adolescent straight boys going through similar emotional angst over girls.
Charles had screened an interesting half-hour movie for me: Lucky Blue, a coming-out short shot for Swedish television in 2007 which takes place on a farm. Directed and written by Håkon Liu (the last name had both of us wondering if he was the son of Chinese immigrants to Sweden), Lucky Blue — the title refers to a pet parrot that escapes during the course of the film but eventually comes back — is set on a Swedish farm whose owners, Kjelle (Johan Friberg) and Amanda (Michaela Berner), are setting up an outdoor stage for a karaoke party. The relationships of the people in this film took a little time to sort out but eventually it emerged that tall, dark-haired, handsome and relatively butch Olle (Tobias Bengtsson) is their son and Kevin (Tobias Bengtsson) is a house guest who’s traveling for the summer (Kevin is 16, Olle is 17 and they’re on summer break from school) with someone named Barbro (Britta Andersson).
The movie is a sort of extended flirtation between Olle and Kevin — Olle is, or at least thinks of himself as, straight while Kevin is already so aware of his Gayness that in the opening scene he is shown kissing his own image in a mirror in an almost exact visual quote from Funeral Parade of Roses, a quite dire Japanese film about Gays from 1969 (though the Japanese version is even kinkier because the Gay teenager is also a budding drag queen, so he’s kissing himself in the mirror while wearing lipstick he’s appropriated from his mother) — and it was a bit disorienting in that the central actors and the settings look so much like the stuff of Gay porn you end up thinking, “Cut the preliminaries and start having sex already!” Nonetheless, it’s an interesting little movie which Charles probably responded to even more than I did, mainly because he was a Gay teenager and I wasn’t (I didn’t really become aware of my Gay side until I was 24) and he had all the little adolescent crushes that seem so big at that time — only he had them on guys, and added to all the anxious worries endemic to sexual awakening anyway (“Will that person really like me?”) were the ones unique to the same-sex loving: “Are they Gay? Are they straight?” (Straight adolescents generally only have to worry about rejection; Queer adolescents have to worry not only about rejection but about the rejection taking the form of physical violence.)
The film reminded me of the quite nice French Gay feature, Come Undone, which Charles and I watched some years ago and which impressed me at the time as a refreshing antidote to Brokeback Mountain (which for all its being hailed as a ground-breaking Gay movie was still the old, dreary tale of two men falling into socially disapproved love and one of them ending up dead while the other ended up totally devastated and emotionally wasted inside); what Come Undone and Lucky Blue had in common was an acceptance of homosexuality as a normal reality of life, not some horrible fate either to be rejected at all costs or anguished over for years of misery and finally, only grudgingly accepted — and both films depicted their Gay characters as not so different from adolescent straight boys going through similar emotional angst over girls.
Friday, July 10, 2009
Frost/Nixon (Universal, 2008)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Frost/Nixon is the 2008 re-creation of the 1977 interviews David Frost did with Richard Nixon that eventually turned out to be the only extensive interviews Nixon gave on camera to anyone between his resignation from the presidency in 1974 and his death almost 20 years later. The basic outlines of the story were familiar to me because years ago I’d read Frost’s memoir of the event, “I Gave Them a Sword,” the quotes in the title being used because they came from Nixon’s startlingly self-serving pseudo-confession in which he admitted some level of wrongdoing in the Watergate cover-up but managed to turn that around to blame his downfall on the people he’d always hated and who’d always hated him (though less so in reality than in his dark fantasies of them): the Eastern Establishment and the media.
Watching Frost/Nixon after reading the first chapter of Norman Mailer’s Cannibals and Christians, which is about the 1964 Republican convention, the nomination of Barry Goldwater and the birth of the radical Right (in yesterday’s journal entry I quoted Debussy’s description of Wagner as “a beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn” and said the Goldwater campaign was just the reverse: an ugly sunrise that was mistaken for a dusk), was especially fascinating because it reveals just how amazingly consistent the Right’s appeal has been and how they’ve been able to sustain this appalling level of ressentiment (memo to political scientists: you can always trick out an ordinary and even banal piece of analysis by putting it in French!) for 45 years — longer if you count the Right of the 1930’s (you know, the handful of people who were saying Franklin Roosevelt was a Bolshevik and an instrument of the international Jewish conspiracy who was dragging America down to hell) or the 1950’s (especially Joe McCarthy and the fanatical following he attracted — and it’s impossible to listen to the surviving records of McCarthy without hearing in embryo the cadences of Rush Limbaugh and most of Right-wing talk radio and Fox News).
Frost/Nixon, directed by Ron Howard and written by Peter Morgan based on his stage play, essentially follows the story arc Frost presented in his memoir: a professional entertainer and talk-show host on the celebrity downgrade sees a chance for a comeback by opening his checkbook for an interview with the disgraced ex-President, begins the project with no political ax to grind either pro- or anti-Nixon, hires research assistants who see the interviews as a chance to give Nixon “the trial he never got” because he resigned rather than face impeachment and his hand-picked successor, Gerald Ford, pardoned him before he could be indicted, gets badly blooded by Nixon on the first sessions of the interview taping but rallies, comes back and slams Nixon to the wall by finally getting him to admit wrongdoing in connection with Watergate. (This heroic self-image Frost projected and Peter Morgan faithfully reproduced in his script is somewhat belied by the fact that the interviews as a whole were so pro-Nixon that when Frost released them on VHS in the early 1990’s, he marketed them to conservatives and bought time on Rush Limbaugh’s show to advertise them.)
Frost/Nixon is a good movie but not a great one. It’s nice to see a movie made in 2008 that not only draws its inspiration from real life and real history but doesn’t trick it out with explosions or action or romance (though there’s a subplot of Frost indulging his notorious playboy tendencies with a woman named Caroline Cushing, played by Rebecca Hall, whom he meets on an airplane and seduces by offering her a meeting with Nixon — I’m not making this up, you know!) and assumes that the movie audience is adult and can be entertained and even moved by a tale of intellectual combat. Morgan said the story reminded him of a boxing match — and indeed he staged it as such, with Nixon and Frost as the fighters and their aides — producer John Birt [Matthew Macfadyen] and journalists James Reston, Jr. [Sam Rockwell] and Bob Zelnick [Oliver Platt] on Frost’s side and unsmiling aide and ex-Marine Jack Brennan [Kevin Bacon] on Nixon’s — as their “seconds.” In the stage play Nixon, Frost and their aides were the only characters; in the film Morgan “opened up” his original script by adding historical footage (including shots of journalists like Walter Cronkite and Eric Sevareid playing themselves) and going into more detail on Nixon’s fall — though much of that material was ultimately excised from the final cut. (The “deleted scenes” section of the DVD contains material that would have deepened the audience’s understanding of the underlying history but would also have slowed the film down — as it is, it comes just under two hours, a nice length that doesn’t feel overstuffed like so many modern movies do — and it’s revealing that there are no “deleted scenes” included from the re-creations of the actual Nixon-Frost interviews.)
Morgan’s presence as screenwriter can’t help but evoke memories of The Queen, another movie that drew for its inspiration on recent political history and sought to take us “behind the scenes” for a look at power in its element — though as with The Queen, much of the “re-creation” of the events in Frost/Nixon comes from Peter Morgan’s head and he has no more idea how Nixon related to his aides, his family or anyone else in his private life than we do. Frost/Nixon doesn’t seem to be as good a movie as The Queen, not so much because the situation in The Queen was inherently more dramatic (though it was, and certainly it was more cinematic) but because Ron Howard simply isn’t as good a director as Stephen Frears. It’s not that Howard does anything wrong — he gets (mostly) good performances from his actors (his stars, Frank Langella as Nixon and Michael Sheen as Frost, had already played their parts on stage in London and New York and Howard insisted on using them in the film), he paces the film well and keeps us interested in the story — but somehow the righteous passion Frears brought to The Queen is beyond Howard and is sorely missed.
The other problem with Frost/Nixon is Frank Langella’s performance as Nixon. It’s true he’s up against what is probably the most challenging situation imaginable for a modern actor — playing a person who was filmed and recorded so often that his re-creation is inevitably going to be compared to the real thing as seen by millions of members of his audience — and Langella (like Anthony Hopkins in Oliver Stone’s Nixon biopic) wisely avoids any attempt at a Rich Little- or David Frye-style “impression.” (It’s also grimly amusing for an old Nixon-hater like me that he be played by an actor who formerly played Dracula.) Langella’s Nixon is a plausible characterization in its own right, and at two points in the movie — while delivering that maudlin final speech to the White House staff the day his resignation took effect, and during his final breakdown and sort-of admission in the Watergate interview — Langella actually manages to make Nixon a tragic figure and even a sympathetic one. (At the same time when he says he gave his enemies a sword and they got pleasure sticking it in and twisting it around inside him, he adds, “And if I’d have been them I’d have done the same thing” — an unwittingly revealing comment on just how unscrupulous Nixon really was and the horrible example his no-holds-barred style of attack politics has set for just about everyone else since.)
Elsewhere, though, Langella overacts — and perhaps the worst part of his performance was unwittingly highlighted on one of the DVD’s special features in which they showed clips of the real Nixon/Frost interviews and counterpointed them with the re-creations of them in the movie. Michael Sheen, though quite a bit smaller than the real David Frost, managed to capture the character quite well — the superficiality and the attempt to rise above it — while Langella delivers the famous line, “When the President does it, that means it is not illegal” (a line that got quoted to death during the Bush administration after that philosophy, bolstered by the legal memos of John Yoo and other apologists, became the official policy of the administration!), in so overwrought a manner you practically expect him to open his mouth and show off the Dracula fangs. In the actual interview, Nixon tossed off the line with a far more sinister lack of affect, as if the idea that the president of the United States could do anything he wanted in the name of “national security” and make it legal simply by doing it was so self-evident he came off like an eighth-grade civics teacher explaining the point to a particularly thick student.
Frost/Nixon is quite a good movie, and is far more worth watching than most of the crap the major studios are turning out today, but it also doesn’t rise to the potential of its story as much as it should have — and there’s a lot of potential there, not only in the clash between Frost and Nixon themselves but also in the fish-out-of-water subplot of the dedicated journalists suddenly thrust into Frost’s celebrity milieu (they’re taken to a party at a posh nightclub and are awestruck at the number of famous people there — “Is that Neil Diamond?” — and the fact that the waitresses are real-life Playboy Bunnies; the cast list even includes an actor playing Hugh Hefner). Still, it’s nice that this movie exists and for the most part it does justice to its subject.
Frost/Nixon is the 2008 re-creation of the 1977 interviews David Frost did with Richard Nixon that eventually turned out to be the only extensive interviews Nixon gave on camera to anyone between his resignation from the presidency in 1974 and his death almost 20 years later. The basic outlines of the story were familiar to me because years ago I’d read Frost’s memoir of the event, “I Gave Them a Sword,” the quotes in the title being used because they came from Nixon’s startlingly self-serving pseudo-confession in which he admitted some level of wrongdoing in the Watergate cover-up but managed to turn that around to blame his downfall on the people he’d always hated and who’d always hated him (though less so in reality than in his dark fantasies of them): the Eastern Establishment and the media.
Watching Frost/Nixon after reading the first chapter of Norman Mailer’s Cannibals and Christians, which is about the 1964 Republican convention, the nomination of Barry Goldwater and the birth of the radical Right (in yesterday’s journal entry I quoted Debussy’s description of Wagner as “a beautiful sunset that was mistaken for a dawn” and said the Goldwater campaign was just the reverse: an ugly sunrise that was mistaken for a dusk), was especially fascinating because it reveals just how amazingly consistent the Right’s appeal has been and how they’ve been able to sustain this appalling level of ressentiment (memo to political scientists: you can always trick out an ordinary and even banal piece of analysis by putting it in French!) for 45 years — longer if you count the Right of the 1930’s (you know, the handful of people who were saying Franklin Roosevelt was a Bolshevik and an instrument of the international Jewish conspiracy who was dragging America down to hell) or the 1950’s (especially Joe McCarthy and the fanatical following he attracted — and it’s impossible to listen to the surviving records of McCarthy without hearing in embryo the cadences of Rush Limbaugh and most of Right-wing talk radio and Fox News).
Frost/Nixon, directed by Ron Howard and written by Peter Morgan based on his stage play, essentially follows the story arc Frost presented in his memoir: a professional entertainer and talk-show host on the celebrity downgrade sees a chance for a comeback by opening his checkbook for an interview with the disgraced ex-President, begins the project with no political ax to grind either pro- or anti-Nixon, hires research assistants who see the interviews as a chance to give Nixon “the trial he never got” because he resigned rather than face impeachment and his hand-picked successor, Gerald Ford, pardoned him before he could be indicted, gets badly blooded by Nixon on the first sessions of the interview taping but rallies, comes back and slams Nixon to the wall by finally getting him to admit wrongdoing in connection with Watergate. (This heroic self-image Frost projected and Peter Morgan faithfully reproduced in his script is somewhat belied by the fact that the interviews as a whole were so pro-Nixon that when Frost released them on VHS in the early 1990’s, he marketed them to conservatives and bought time on Rush Limbaugh’s show to advertise them.)
Frost/Nixon is a good movie but not a great one. It’s nice to see a movie made in 2008 that not only draws its inspiration from real life and real history but doesn’t trick it out with explosions or action or romance (though there’s a subplot of Frost indulging his notorious playboy tendencies with a woman named Caroline Cushing, played by Rebecca Hall, whom he meets on an airplane and seduces by offering her a meeting with Nixon — I’m not making this up, you know!) and assumes that the movie audience is adult and can be entertained and even moved by a tale of intellectual combat. Morgan said the story reminded him of a boxing match — and indeed he staged it as such, with Nixon and Frost as the fighters and their aides — producer John Birt [Matthew Macfadyen] and journalists James Reston, Jr. [Sam Rockwell] and Bob Zelnick [Oliver Platt] on Frost’s side and unsmiling aide and ex-Marine Jack Brennan [Kevin Bacon] on Nixon’s — as their “seconds.” In the stage play Nixon, Frost and their aides were the only characters; in the film Morgan “opened up” his original script by adding historical footage (including shots of journalists like Walter Cronkite and Eric Sevareid playing themselves) and going into more detail on Nixon’s fall — though much of that material was ultimately excised from the final cut. (The “deleted scenes” section of the DVD contains material that would have deepened the audience’s understanding of the underlying history but would also have slowed the film down — as it is, it comes just under two hours, a nice length that doesn’t feel overstuffed like so many modern movies do — and it’s revealing that there are no “deleted scenes” included from the re-creations of the actual Nixon-Frost interviews.)
Morgan’s presence as screenwriter can’t help but evoke memories of The Queen, another movie that drew for its inspiration on recent political history and sought to take us “behind the scenes” for a look at power in its element — though as with The Queen, much of the “re-creation” of the events in Frost/Nixon comes from Peter Morgan’s head and he has no more idea how Nixon related to his aides, his family or anyone else in his private life than we do. Frost/Nixon doesn’t seem to be as good a movie as The Queen, not so much because the situation in The Queen was inherently more dramatic (though it was, and certainly it was more cinematic) but because Ron Howard simply isn’t as good a director as Stephen Frears. It’s not that Howard does anything wrong — he gets (mostly) good performances from his actors (his stars, Frank Langella as Nixon and Michael Sheen as Frost, had already played their parts on stage in London and New York and Howard insisted on using them in the film), he paces the film well and keeps us interested in the story — but somehow the righteous passion Frears brought to The Queen is beyond Howard and is sorely missed.
The other problem with Frost/Nixon is Frank Langella’s performance as Nixon. It’s true he’s up against what is probably the most challenging situation imaginable for a modern actor — playing a person who was filmed and recorded so often that his re-creation is inevitably going to be compared to the real thing as seen by millions of members of his audience — and Langella (like Anthony Hopkins in Oliver Stone’s Nixon biopic) wisely avoids any attempt at a Rich Little- or David Frye-style “impression.” (It’s also grimly amusing for an old Nixon-hater like me that he be played by an actor who formerly played Dracula.) Langella’s Nixon is a plausible characterization in its own right, and at two points in the movie — while delivering that maudlin final speech to the White House staff the day his resignation took effect, and during his final breakdown and sort-of admission in the Watergate interview — Langella actually manages to make Nixon a tragic figure and even a sympathetic one. (At the same time when he says he gave his enemies a sword and they got pleasure sticking it in and twisting it around inside him, he adds, “And if I’d have been them I’d have done the same thing” — an unwittingly revealing comment on just how unscrupulous Nixon really was and the horrible example his no-holds-barred style of attack politics has set for just about everyone else since.)
Elsewhere, though, Langella overacts — and perhaps the worst part of his performance was unwittingly highlighted on one of the DVD’s special features in which they showed clips of the real Nixon/Frost interviews and counterpointed them with the re-creations of them in the movie. Michael Sheen, though quite a bit smaller than the real David Frost, managed to capture the character quite well — the superficiality and the attempt to rise above it — while Langella delivers the famous line, “When the President does it, that means it is not illegal” (a line that got quoted to death during the Bush administration after that philosophy, bolstered by the legal memos of John Yoo and other apologists, became the official policy of the administration!), in so overwrought a manner you practically expect him to open his mouth and show off the Dracula fangs. In the actual interview, Nixon tossed off the line with a far more sinister lack of affect, as if the idea that the president of the United States could do anything he wanted in the name of “national security” and make it legal simply by doing it was so self-evident he came off like an eighth-grade civics teacher explaining the point to a particularly thick student.
Frost/Nixon is quite a good movie, and is far more worth watching than most of the crap the major studios are turning out today, but it also doesn’t rise to the potential of its story as much as it should have — and there’s a lot of potential there, not only in the clash between Frost and Nixon themselves but also in the fish-out-of-water subplot of the dedicated journalists suddenly thrust into Frost’s celebrity milieu (they’re taken to a party at a posh nightclub and are awestruck at the number of famous people there — “Is that Neil Diamond?” — and the fact that the waitresses are real-life Playboy Bunnies; the cast list even includes an actor playing Hugh Hefner). Still, it’s nice that this movie exists and for the most part it does justice to its subject.
Thursday, July 9, 2009
They Made Me a Spy (RKO, 1939)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film we ended up watching was They Made Me a Spy, an engaging if somewhat unthrilling 1939 RKO “B” starring Sally Eilers as Irene Eaton, who offers her services to U.S. intelligence as a counterspy after her brother is blown up while the U.S. Army is testing a new bazooka shell he’s invented — an “accident” later attributed to a sabotage ring led by a mystery man in the pay of a carefully unnamed foreign power. (The U.S. wouldn’t be involved in World War II for another two years and the studios were still treading carefully around the sensibilities of isolationists in the movie audience.) On assignment from Col. Shaw (Frank M. Thomas), she hangs out at the Dome restaurant (obviously a set left over from an earlier, bigger-budgeted RKO film) which is also the secret headquarters of enemy agent Dr. Krull (Fritz Leiber — whose German accent leaves no doubt which country we were supposed to think was behind the sabotage).
Using the name “Margaret Brennan,” Irene joins the enemy spy ring and feeds them secret information, and is then assigned to help with the landing of another agent, George Wolf (Alan Lane), who’s being infiltrated on a beach after he’s swum to shore from a ship. The moment handsome, personable Alan Lane lands on the beach and he and Irene start to vibrate with mutual romantic (or at least sexual) attraction, we know that he’s going to turn out to be a good guy in the last reel — just as we’re sure that the secret head of the spy ring is going to turn out to be one of the four people in Col. Shaw’s office at the opening of the film and we’ve got a pretty good idea of which one, too: Brock (Addison Richards), listed on the imdb.com site as a U.S. Senator and in the American Film Institute Catalog synopsis as a Congressional investigator (the latter seems more believable), who had crashed the staff meeting in Col. Shaw’s office and demanded more immediate action against the saboteurs (oh, the irony!).
The film pretty much works out the way we think it’s going to, though there’s an unexpected action climax inside the Washington Monument, where Brock, once he’s been found out, tries to flee; he meets up with an intensely patriotic elevator operator (Alec Craig) who talks about how proud he is to have that gig — this is the one scene in the movie that shows the wit of screenwriter Michael Kanin, one of the four members of this film’s writing committee (he and Jo Pagano wrote a script from an “original” story by George Bricker and Lionel Houser) and about the only one who went on to a major career — and, when he’s trapped there by the good guys, either falls to his death accidentally or commits suicide (we’re not sure which), thereby shutting down the espionage/sabotage ring without any embarrassing publicity. There’s also a welcome, if short, appearance by the strikingly tall blond actor Louis Jean Heydt as Gillian, a.k.a. “Waiter No. 4” at the Dome, who’s Irene’s contact there and who gets found out and killed for his pains — Heydt was a handsome and charismatic performer and why he didn’t become a bigger star is a mystery — and though predictably the “enemy” agent Gregory Wolf turns out to be on the side of good after all (thereby enabling him and Irene to pair up at the end), there is a bit of novelty in that instead of being a fellow American intelligence agent, he’s revealed to be a reporter on the trail of the spy ring for a news syndicate.
Otherwise They Made Her a Spy (a misnomer since she made herself a spy and had to persuade the American intelligence bosses to accept her as one!) is a comfortable little movie, not especially exciting — director Jack Hively was efficient but uninspired and even the big action scenes don’t really thrill (a recurring problem with RKO’s crime films in the 1930’s) — and suffering from a virtual absence of background music even though RKO stalwart Roy Webb gets an “original music” credit. As much as the wall-to-wall scoring Jack Warner insisted on in his studio’s products gets oppressive at times, the absence of music through most of this film makes it look like a product of 1929 instead of 1939 (though at least the dialogue is delivered naturalistically and the camera moves!) and makes it a good deal less exciting than it could have been — and the acting, except for Leiber’s marvelously sinister performance as the villain (in these sorts of stories the bad guys are almost always more interesting than the good guys!), is also workmanlike rather than inspired.
The film we ended up watching was They Made Me a Spy, an engaging if somewhat unthrilling 1939 RKO “B” starring Sally Eilers as Irene Eaton, who offers her services to U.S. intelligence as a counterspy after her brother is blown up while the U.S. Army is testing a new bazooka shell he’s invented — an “accident” later attributed to a sabotage ring led by a mystery man in the pay of a carefully unnamed foreign power. (The U.S. wouldn’t be involved in World War II for another two years and the studios were still treading carefully around the sensibilities of isolationists in the movie audience.) On assignment from Col. Shaw (Frank M. Thomas), she hangs out at the Dome restaurant (obviously a set left over from an earlier, bigger-budgeted RKO film) which is also the secret headquarters of enemy agent Dr. Krull (Fritz Leiber — whose German accent leaves no doubt which country we were supposed to think was behind the sabotage).
Using the name “Margaret Brennan,” Irene joins the enemy spy ring and feeds them secret information, and is then assigned to help with the landing of another agent, George Wolf (Alan Lane), who’s being infiltrated on a beach after he’s swum to shore from a ship. The moment handsome, personable Alan Lane lands on the beach and he and Irene start to vibrate with mutual romantic (or at least sexual) attraction, we know that he’s going to turn out to be a good guy in the last reel — just as we’re sure that the secret head of the spy ring is going to turn out to be one of the four people in Col. Shaw’s office at the opening of the film and we’ve got a pretty good idea of which one, too: Brock (Addison Richards), listed on the imdb.com site as a U.S. Senator and in the American Film Institute Catalog synopsis as a Congressional investigator (the latter seems more believable), who had crashed the staff meeting in Col. Shaw’s office and demanded more immediate action against the saboteurs (oh, the irony!).
The film pretty much works out the way we think it’s going to, though there’s an unexpected action climax inside the Washington Monument, where Brock, once he’s been found out, tries to flee; he meets up with an intensely patriotic elevator operator (Alec Craig) who talks about how proud he is to have that gig — this is the one scene in the movie that shows the wit of screenwriter Michael Kanin, one of the four members of this film’s writing committee (he and Jo Pagano wrote a script from an “original” story by George Bricker and Lionel Houser) and about the only one who went on to a major career — and, when he’s trapped there by the good guys, either falls to his death accidentally or commits suicide (we’re not sure which), thereby shutting down the espionage/sabotage ring without any embarrassing publicity. There’s also a welcome, if short, appearance by the strikingly tall blond actor Louis Jean Heydt as Gillian, a.k.a. “Waiter No. 4” at the Dome, who’s Irene’s contact there and who gets found out and killed for his pains — Heydt was a handsome and charismatic performer and why he didn’t become a bigger star is a mystery — and though predictably the “enemy” agent Gregory Wolf turns out to be on the side of good after all (thereby enabling him and Irene to pair up at the end), there is a bit of novelty in that instead of being a fellow American intelligence agent, he’s revealed to be a reporter on the trail of the spy ring for a news syndicate.
Otherwise They Made Her a Spy (a misnomer since she made herself a spy and had to persuade the American intelligence bosses to accept her as one!) is a comfortable little movie, not especially exciting — director Jack Hively was efficient but uninspired and even the big action scenes don’t really thrill (a recurring problem with RKO’s crime films in the 1930’s) — and suffering from a virtual absence of background music even though RKO stalwart Roy Webb gets an “original music” credit. As much as the wall-to-wall scoring Jack Warner insisted on in his studio’s products gets oppressive at times, the absence of music through most of this film makes it look like a product of 1929 instead of 1939 (though at least the dialogue is delivered naturalistically and the camera moves!) and makes it a good deal less exciting than it could have been — and the acting, except for Leiber’s marvelously sinister performance as the villain (in these sorts of stories the bad guys are almost always more interesting than the good guys!), is also workmanlike rather than inspired.
The Stolen Sun (Soyuzmultfilm, 1944)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles began the evening with a short he’d downloaded from archive,org, a quite charming 1944 Russian animated film called The Stolen Sun, apparently based on a children’s fable and dealing with an almost impossibly perfect pastoral setting with anthromorphized animals (looking very much like the early work of Walt Disney; the piece could have been a Silly Symphony from the 1929-32 period before Disney started using color, which was still unavailable to Soviet filmmakers). The gimmick here is that a nasty crocodile invades the sylvan glen (there’s a river running through it which allows the croc to get in) and literally swallows the sun, and the denizens of the forest have to enlist the aid of the forest’s resident bear to fight the croc, get him to spit out the sun and allow daylight to occur again. Given that this film was made during World War II, the symbolism is pretty obvious — the crocodile is the Axis in general and/or Germany in particular, the forest creatures are the rest of the Allies and the bear, of course, is Russia (never mind that Russia actually began World War II on Germany’s side and it was only when Hitler stabbed them in the back and invaded 21 months into the war that Russia switched and joined forces with the U.S. and Britain against the Nazis) — but the film is nonetheless a quite watchable and technically accomplished cartoon, as good as anything American animators were doing at the time except that there was no color. The director, Ivan Ivanov-Vano, used very little dialogue — Charles wanted to make sure the English subtitles were included in the version we were watching, but there was almost no dialogue and we probably could have figured out the film even without them — and there was almost a wall-to-wall music track of vaguely familiar classical-sounding stuff, including one piece it was especially easy to recognize: the fourth, “Storm” movement of Beethoven’s Sixth (“Pastorale”) Symphony was used to underscore the actual fight between the crocodile and the bear.
Charles began the evening with a short he’d downloaded from archive,org, a quite charming 1944 Russian animated film called The Stolen Sun, apparently based on a children’s fable and dealing with an almost impossibly perfect pastoral setting with anthromorphized animals (looking very much like the early work of Walt Disney; the piece could have been a Silly Symphony from the 1929-32 period before Disney started using color, which was still unavailable to Soviet filmmakers). The gimmick here is that a nasty crocodile invades the sylvan glen (there’s a river running through it which allows the croc to get in) and literally swallows the sun, and the denizens of the forest have to enlist the aid of the forest’s resident bear to fight the croc, get him to spit out the sun and allow daylight to occur again. Given that this film was made during World War II, the symbolism is pretty obvious — the crocodile is the Axis in general and/or Germany in particular, the forest creatures are the rest of the Allies and the bear, of course, is Russia (never mind that Russia actually began World War II on Germany’s side and it was only when Hitler stabbed them in the back and invaded 21 months into the war that Russia switched and joined forces with the U.S. and Britain against the Nazis) — but the film is nonetheless a quite watchable and technically accomplished cartoon, as good as anything American animators were doing at the time except that there was no color. The director, Ivan Ivanov-Vano, used very little dialogue — Charles wanted to make sure the English subtitles were included in the version we were watching, but there was almost no dialogue and we probably could have figured out the film even without them — and there was almost a wall-to-wall music track of vaguely familiar classical-sounding stuff, including one piece it was especially easy to recognize: the fourth, “Storm” movement of Beethoven’s Sixth (“Pastorale”) Symphony was used to underscore the actual fight between the crocodile and the bear.
Blonde from Brooklyn (Columbia, 1945)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The “feature” we ran after that was Blonde from Brooklyn (incidentally, imdb.com insists that there was a definite article at the beginning of the title, but the opening credit omitted the “The”), which turned out to be a minor but quite engaging Columbia “B” musical from 1945. It begins with former vaudevillian Dixon Harper (Robert Stanton) being mustered out of the service after World War II by a lieutenant played by Hugh Beaumont (later best known as the father on Leave It to Beaver). He’s putting on a “Southern” act even though he’s actually from Dubuque, Iowa — apparently the South and its stereotypes were his stock-in-trade as a vaudeville performer — and after he gets out of the service, rather than go to college on the GI Bill, he plans to head to New York City to find work as an entertainer. He calls up the “Maestro” jukebox service — which we’ve seen in action in at least one other Columbia movie — a fascinating operation in which depositing your coin doesn’t play a record located there; instead it connects you with an operator in a central room with a bank of phonographs and a library of records, from which the operator selects the song you requested and asks if you want an instrumental or a vocal version.
Dixon is trying to impress an old flame who, unbeknownst to him, got married to a Marine (“The Marines always get there first,” he says ruefully) when he requests a vocal version of a swing number. The “Maestro” only has an instrumental record, but no problem: the operator, Susan Parker (Lynn Merrick) sings the number to the record and so impresses Dixon that he wants to meet her. Alas, her use of the service to make a date gets her fired by the hatchet-faced woman who runs it, Miss Quackenfish (Myrtle Ferguson). Once they meet, though, Dixon decides that Susan would be the perfect partner for his act — despite the fact that, though individually Robert Stanton and Lynn Merrick both have pleasant voices (not great, but pleasant), when singing together they don’t blend well for shit. (When Waylon Jennings was married to Jessi Colter he tried recording duets with her, hoping they’d be the next Johnny Cash and June Carter, but where Johnny’s and June’s voices blended beautifully, Waylon’s and Jessi’s didn’t.)
Nonetheless, they pass the audition and get hired on the radio show sponsored by W. Wilson Wilbur (Walter Soderling) — a marvelous deadpan comic who manages to avoid ever looking excited, or even moved in the slightest, by anything — only in order to appear authentically “Southern,” Dixon hires Col. Hubert Farnsworth (Thurston Hall) to create a Dixie-fried identity for her and coach her in proper behavior for the scioness of a rich Southern family taking a flyer in show business. The colonel — whom we can tell is a con man but that isn’t definitively revealed until much later in the film — gives her the moniker “Suzanne Bellwithers” because his research has indicated that the real-life Bellwithers family died out — only no sooner do Dixon and “Suzanne” get on the air than an attorney surfaces and tells “Suzanne” that as the last surviving Bellwithers she’s entitled to an $800,000 inheritance. Now Dixon and Susan are up against it; if they claim the inheritance they risk being convicted of fraud, while if they admit the truth and acknowledge that she’s really a blonde from Brooklyn, they risk being fired.
Complications ensue when Col. Farnsworth engages a friend and former associate, Curtis Rossmore (Matt Willis, best known as Bela Lugosi’s werewolf sidekick in Return of the Vampire), to pose as another Bellwithers heir and let Susan off the hook by claiming the inheritance — only the will stipulates that only a woman Bellwithers can inherit. Eventually a genuine Bellwithers heir surfaces and gets the money, while Dixon and Susan get radio stardom and each other — though I was surprised writer Erna Lazarus (no relation, I presume, to the woman who wrote the poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty) didn’t do the charming wrap-up I was expecting, in which Susan would be asked if her name really was Bellwithers and she’d respond by flashing her wedding ring and saying, “No, my name is Harper.”
Still, Blonde from Brooklyn is a genuinely charming film, an easygoing little piece of entertainment that gets by on the stars’ appeal. Lazarus’s clever deployment of the clichés (it’s one of those scripts that derives almost exclusively from clichéd situations but nonetheless achieves originality by deploying them in unexpected ways), and sprightly direction by Del Lord, who was a slapstick specialist — he’d begun as a Keystone Kop and Columbia had hired him to do the Three Stooges’ shorts — but proves here he could handle romantic comedy equally well. Oddly, I haven’t been able to get any information on the songs in this film — imdb.com doesn’t list any of them and Clive Hirschhorn’s book The Hollywood Musical only lists the final number, “My Baby Said Yes” by Sid Robin and Ted Walters — which Robert Stanton and Lynn Merrick sing decently and charmingly in the final sequence … only on July 26, 1944 (a year before the release of this film), Bing Crosby and Louis Jordan had recorded a great version for Decca that blows theirs away completely.
The “feature” we ran after that was Blonde from Brooklyn (incidentally, imdb.com insists that there was a definite article at the beginning of the title, but the opening credit omitted the “The”), which turned out to be a minor but quite engaging Columbia “B” musical from 1945. It begins with former vaudevillian Dixon Harper (Robert Stanton) being mustered out of the service after World War II by a lieutenant played by Hugh Beaumont (later best known as the father on Leave It to Beaver). He’s putting on a “Southern” act even though he’s actually from Dubuque, Iowa — apparently the South and its stereotypes were his stock-in-trade as a vaudeville performer — and after he gets out of the service, rather than go to college on the GI Bill, he plans to head to New York City to find work as an entertainer. He calls up the “Maestro” jukebox service — which we’ve seen in action in at least one other Columbia movie — a fascinating operation in which depositing your coin doesn’t play a record located there; instead it connects you with an operator in a central room with a bank of phonographs and a library of records, from which the operator selects the song you requested and asks if you want an instrumental or a vocal version.
Dixon is trying to impress an old flame who, unbeknownst to him, got married to a Marine (“The Marines always get there first,” he says ruefully) when he requests a vocal version of a swing number. The “Maestro” only has an instrumental record, but no problem: the operator, Susan Parker (Lynn Merrick) sings the number to the record and so impresses Dixon that he wants to meet her. Alas, her use of the service to make a date gets her fired by the hatchet-faced woman who runs it, Miss Quackenfish (Myrtle Ferguson). Once they meet, though, Dixon decides that Susan would be the perfect partner for his act — despite the fact that, though individually Robert Stanton and Lynn Merrick both have pleasant voices (not great, but pleasant), when singing together they don’t blend well for shit. (When Waylon Jennings was married to Jessi Colter he tried recording duets with her, hoping they’d be the next Johnny Cash and June Carter, but where Johnny’s and June’s voices blended beautifully, Waylon’s and Jessi’s didn’t.)
Nonetheless, they pass the audition and get hired on the radio show sponsored by W. Wilson Wilbur (Walter Soderling) — a marvelous deadpan comic who manages to avoid ever looking excited, or even moved in the slightest, by anything — only in order to appear authentically “Southern,” Dixon hires Col. Hubert Farnsworth (Thurston Hall) to create a Dixie-fried identity for her and coach her in proper behavior for the scioness of a rich Southern family taking a flyer in show business. The colonel — whom we can tell is a con man but that isn’t definitively revealed until much later in the film — gives her the moniker “Suzanne Bellwithers” because his research has indicated that the real-life Bellwithers family died out — only no sooner do Dixon and “Suzanne” get on the air than an attorney surfaces and tells “Suzanne” that as the last surviving Bellwithers she’s entitled to an $800,000 inheritance. Now Dixon and Susan are up against it; if they claim the inheritance they risk being convicted of fraud, while if they admit the truth and acknowledge that she’s really a blonde from Brooklyn, they risk being fired.
Complications ensue when Col. Farnsworth engages a friend and former associate, Curtis Rossmore (Matt Willis, best known as Bela Lugosi’s werewolf sidekick in Return of the Vampire), to pose as another Bellwithers heir and let Susan off the hook by claiming the inheritance — only the will stipulates that only a woman Bellwithers can inherit. Eventually a genuine Bellwithers heir surfaces and gets the money, while Dixon and Susan get radio stardom and each other — though I was surprised writer Erna Lazarus (no relation, I presume, to the woman who wrote the poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty) didn’t do the charming wrap-up I was expecting, in which Susan would be asked if her name really was Bellwithers and she’d respond by flashing her wedding ring and saying, “No, my name is Harper.”
Still, Blonde from Brooklyn is a genuinely charming film, an easygoing little piece of entertainment that gets by on the stars’ appeal. Lazarus’s clever deployment of the clichés (it’s one of those scripts that derives almost exclusively from clichéd situations but nonetheless achieves originality by deploying them in unexpected ways), and sprightly direction by Del Lord, who was a slapstick specialist — he’d begun as a Keystone Kop and Columbia had hired him to do the Three Stooges’ shorts — but proves here he could handle romantic comedy equally well. Oddly, I haven’t been able to get any information on the songs in this film — imdb.com doesn’t list any of them and Clive Hirschhorn’s book The Hollywood Musical only lists the final number, “My Baby Said Yes” by Sid Robin and Ted Walters — which Robert Stanton and Lynn Merrick sing decently and charmingly in the final sequence … only on July 26, 1944 (a year before the release of this film), Bing Crosby and Louis Jordan had recorded a great version for Decca that blows theirs away completely.
Monday, July 6, 2009
The Amazing Colossal Man (Malibu/American International, 1958)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I picked the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 version of The Amazing Colossal Man, a Bert I. Gordon production for his Malibu company, released through American International. Made in 1958, a year after Universal-International’s hit The Incredible Shrinking Man, it was obviously an attempt to do a knock-off of that film, copying the cadence of the title, reversing the central premise (atomic radiation induces someone to become ever-larger instead of ever-smaller) and attempting — and dismally failing at — the philosophical profundity the far more talented (than Gordon, Mark Hanna and an uncredited George Worthing Yates) writer of The Incredible Shrinking Man, Richard Matheson, managed to achieve at least some of the time.
Glen Langan (whose first name usually had a double “n”) stars as Lt. Col. Glenn Manning, who’s part of an army unit in Nevada witnessing the first test of a plutonium-powered nuclear weapon (actually the first plutonium-powered nuclear weapon was developed in 1945 — it was used in the Trinity test and the “Fat Man” bomb dropped on Nagasaki, though the Hiroshima “Little Boy” bomb was uranium-235-powered). The bomb doesn’t go off on schedule — we’re solemnly told the chain reaction was still picking up steam — and a private pilot flies over the site and crashes just as the bomb is about to go off. Manning charges out of the protective trench to try to rescue the pilot — and then BOOM! The bomb goes off and Our Hero gets a full blast of radiation, which at first burns up to 90 percent of his body and then, within a day, magically heals him — but with the unfortunate side effect that he starts growing uncontrollably. (He also loses all his hair and starts looking like Mr. Clean without the earring.)
Most of the film takes place at the Army hospital where he’s being cared for, with a lot of boring chatter between the doctors and a lot of scenes involving his fiancée, Carol Forrest (Cathy Downs, a potentially personable actress thoroughly wasted here). The doctors are trying to figure out whether they can harness the healing power of plutonium to treat ordinary burn patients without turning them into jumbo-sized monsters, and also whether there’s a way to develop a serum that will at least arrest Manning’s growth, and maybe even return him to normal size. When Manning gets too big for the hospital to accommodate him, they build him a tent off to the side of the building, where he tries to read normal-sized books and newspapers (unsuccessfully), eats entire animals for his food, picks up dollhouse-sized furnishings (Bert I. Gordon probably did get his props from a toy store selling doll furniture!) and goes into self-pitying laments, notably when he tells his girlfriend, “Why don’t you ask me what it feels like to be a freak?”
Eventually the doctors come up with a serum and, to administer it, they construct a hypodermic that looks like a harpoon — only when they corner our big guy and jab him with it, he reacts like he’s being attacked and, in his first truly anti-social act in the entire movie, he hurls the hypo harpoon back at one of the people who injected it into him, killing the guy, then scoops up Carol in his giant arm (looking very much like at some time in his pre-enlarged life he saw King Kong and thought it was cool) and carries her … well, not to the top of the Empire State Building but to the top of Boulder Dam, from which pilots in helicopters come and knock him off in both senses of the term … though not permanently, since Gordon quickly made a sequel, War of the Colossal Beast, also released in 1958. The special effects in The Amazing Colossal Man are actually pretty good for a low-budget movie in the late 1950’s, but the script offers almost no thrills and seems to think a giant-sized guy walking around in infinitely expandable shorts (the Army doctors rigged them up for him when they saw what they were up against) would in and of itself instill terror in movie audiences without the giant actually having to do anything.
I picked the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 version of The Amazing Colossal Man, a Bert I. Gordon production for his Malibu company, released through American International. Made in 1958, a year after Universal-International’s hit The Incredible Shrinking Man, it was obviously an attempt to do a knock-off of that film, copying the cadence of the title, reversing the central premise (atomic radiation induces someone to become ever-larger instead of ever-smaller) and attempting — and dismally failing at — the philosophical profundity the far more talented (than Gordon, Mark Hanna and an uncredited George Worthing Yates) writer of The Incredible Shrinking Man, Richard Matheson, managed to achieve at least some of the time.
Glen Langan (whose first name usually had a double “n”) stars as Lt. Col. Glenn Manning, who’s part of an army unit in Nevada witnessing the first test of a plutonium-powered nuclear weapon (actually the first plutonium-powered nuclear weapon was developed in 1945 — it was used in the Trinity test and the “Fat Man” bomb dropped on Nagasaki, though the Hiroshima “Little Boy” bomb was uranium-235-powered). The bomb doesn’t go off on schedule — we’re solemnly told the chain reaction was still picking up steam — and a private pilot flies over the site and crashes just as the bomb is about to go off. Manning charges out of the protective trench to try to rescue the pilot — and then BOOM! The bomb goes off and Our Hero gets a full blast of radiation, which at first burns up to 90 percent of his body and then, within a day, magically heals him — but with the unfortunate side effect that he starts growing uncontrollably. (He also loses all his hair and starts looking like Mr. Clean without the earring.)
Most of the film takes place at the Army hospital where he’s being cared for, with a lot of boring chatter between the doctors and a lot of scenes involving his fiancée, Carol Forrest (Cathy Downs, a potentially personable actress thoroughly wasted here). The doctors are trying to figure out whether they can harness the healing power of plutonium to treat ordinary burn patients without turning them into jumbo-sized monsters, and also whether there’s a way to develop a serum that will at least arrest Manning’s growth, and maybe even return him to normal size. When Manning gets too big for the hospital to accommodate him, they build him a tent off to the side of the building, where he tries to read normal-sized books and newspapers (unsuccessfully), eats entire animals for his food, picks up dollhouse-sized furnishings (Bert I. Gordon probably did get his props from a toy store selling doll furniture!) and goes into self-pitying laments, notably when he tells his girlfriend, “Why don’t you ask me what it feels like to be a freak?”
Eventually the doctors come up with a serum and, to administer it, they construct a hypodermic that looks like a harpoon — only when they corner our big guy and jab him with it, he reacts like he’s being attacked and, in his first truly anti-social act in the entire movie, he hurls the hypo harpoon back at one of the people who injected it into him, killing the guy, then scoops up Carol in his giant arm (looking very much like at some time in his pre-enlarged life he saw King Kong and thought it was cool) and carries her … well, not to the top of the Empire State Building but to the top of Boulder Dam, from which pilots in helicopters come and knock him off in both senses of the term … though not permanently, since Gordon quickly made a sequel, War of the Colossal Beast, also released in 1958. The special effects in The Amazing Colossal Man are actually pretty good for a low-budget movie in the late 1950’s, but the script offers almost no thrills and seems to think a giant-sized guy walking around in infinitely expandable shorts (the Army doctors rigged them up for him when they saw what they were up against) would in and of itself instill terror in movie audiences without the giant actually having to do anything.
Sex, Lies and Obsession (Cairo/Simpson/Hearst/Lifetime, 2001)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
This morning I also watched a Lifetime movie called Sex, Lies and Obsession, a 2001 production starring Harry Hamlin as sexually compulsive orthopedic surgeon Cameron Thomas and Lisa Rinna as his long-suffering wife Joanna, a high-school drama teacher who at the start of the movie is supposedly utterly clueless about her husband’s extra-relational activities even though he’s going about it so blatantly obviously he’s left a trail about two miles wide. He cruises all over the place, picking up an off-duty flight attendant named Tiffany Sheldon (Carolyn Dunn) when his flight from Boston to Pittsburgh is delayed and rendezvousing with her in a Pittsburgh hotel (Joanna’s suspicions are aroused when she finds his credit-card receipt for a hotel other than the one he told her he was staying at) — when he shows up and asks for her room number and for a room adjoining hers, the desk clerk is played in a marvelous vignette performance by Emanuel Arruda (proving that they didn’t break the mold after they made Franklin Pangborn) in which he seems to be thinking, “Straight people are so obvious when they cruise!”
In any event, it seems as if Cameron is dropping his pants (and his seed) all over the place, from “massage” parlors to street hookers to grungy tricks in rotten neighborhoods (in Pittsburgh he asked that desk clerk if there were any “bad” neighborhoods he should avoid, and when the clerk told him, in the very next scene he hailed a taxi and told the cab driver to take him there!). In one sequence he picks up a woman off the street — she’s actually a crack dealer and thinks he’s a rich white guy there for drugs rather than sex, though she’s willing to do him for $20 and takes him to her crash pad, whereupon just after they’ve done the down and dirty they’re greeted by her boyfriend, who says, “You’re only supposed to be selling rock, not your ass!” (that’s not quite accurate since from what we’ve seen earlier it’s clear she just sucked him off and they didn’t fuck), beats him up and says that if he had the time he’d kill them both.
Then he’s really caught when he accosts a dark-haired woman in full street-hooker drag, and as he’s about to offer her money for sex he sees the picture of his wife and two sons Josh (Kevin Zegers) and Ryan (Robert Clark) and draws back — too late, as she turns out to be an undercover cop and he’s busted for solicitation for prostitution. When Joanna shows up to bail him out she’s ushered into a room where all the other wives and girlfriends of the men caught similarly are waiting, and eventually Cameron’s attorney wangles him a deal to avoid a public trial and jail time in return for joining a 12-step group and getting therapy for sex addiction. From this point the movie ceases to be a potentially interesting A Spy in the House of Love-ish story of a person leading a double life and spending a lot of time on the sexual dark side, and becomes instead a quite dull and overly predictable “therapy movie” in which both the relapses (actually, just one relapse) and the ultimate reconciliation come way too patly in Patricia Resnick’s script.
Sex, Lies and Obsession — the title, of course, is a ripoff from Steven Soderbergh’s star-making 1989 indie sex, lies and videotape (the original title of that film was printed in all lower-case letters), though the two movies otherwise have virtually nothing in common aside from a sexual theme — is indifferently directed by Douglas Barr, and isn’t helped by the surprisingly small amount of soft-core porn (just a quick opening sequence of Hamlin in bed with an anonymous blonde) or by the fact that Lisa Rinna, with her round face, fat lips and eyeliner ringing the entire circumference of her eyes, looks more like Mick Jagger in drag than the suburban housewife and dedicated teacher we’re told she is in Resnick’s script. (I’ll give the casting department credit for one coup, though: Kevin Zegers actually looks credible as the offspring of Harry Hamlin and Lisa Rinna — though that isn’t much help because Robert Clark, cast as his younger brother, doesn’t look much like anyone else in his movie “family.”)
Sex, Lies and Obsession disappoints because it simply isn’t the sort of good clean dirty fun its title and premise promised, and though we’re supposed to think Harry Hamlin is the rotter of all time I couldn’t help but flash back to his part as the Gay man who seduced Michael Ontkean away from his wife in the 1982 melodrama Making Love — I wanted to take Lisa Rinna aside and tell her, “It could be worse — at least he’s only sleeping with women!”
This morning I also watched a Lifetime movie called Sex, Lies and Obsession, a 2001 production starring Harry Hamlin as sexually compulsive orthopedic surgeon Cameron Thomas and Lisa Rinna as his long-suffering wife Joanna, a high-school drama teacher who at the start of the movie is supposedly utterly clueless about her husband’s extra-relational activities even though he’s going about it so blatantly obviously he’s left a trail about two miles wide. He cruises all over the place, picking up an off-duty flight attendant named Tiffany Sheldon (Carolyn Dunn) when his flight from Boston to Pittsburgh is delayed and rendezvousing with her in a Pittsburgh hotel (Joanna’s suspicions are aroused when she finds his credit-card receipt for a hotel other than the one he told her he was staying at) — when he shows up and asks for her room number and for a room adjoining hers, the desk clerk is played in a marvelous vignette performance by Emanuel Arruda (proving that they didn’t break the mold after they made Franklin Pangborn) in which he seems to be thinking, “Straight people are so obvious when they cruise!”
In any event, it seems as if Cameron is dropping his pants (and his seed) all over the place, from “massage” parlors to street hookers to grungy tricks in rotten neighborhoods (in Pittsburgh he asked that desk clerk if there were any “bad” neighborhoods he should avoid, and when the clerk told him, in the very next scene he hailed a taxi and told the cab driver to take him there!). In one sequence he picks up a woman off the street — she’s actually a crack dealer and thinks he’s a rich white guy there for drugs rather than sex, though she’s willing to do him for $20 and takes him to her crash pad, whereupon just after they’ve done the down and dirty they’re greeted by her boyfriend, who says, “You’re only supposed to be selling rock, not your ass!” (that’s not quite accurate since from what we’ve seen earlier it’s clear she just sucked him off and they didn’t fuck), beats him up and says that if he had the time he’d kill them both.
Then he’s really caught when he accosts a dark-haired woman in full street-hooker drag, and as he’s about to offer her money for sex he sees the picture of his wife and two sons Josh (Kevin Zegers) and Ryan (Robert Clark) and draws back — too late, as she turns out to be an undercover cop and he’s busted for solicitation for prostitution. When Joanna shows up to bail him out she’s ushered into a room where all the other wives and girlfriends of the men caught similarly are waiting, and eventually Cameron’s attorney wangles him a deal to avoid a public trial and jail time in return for joining a 12-step group and getting therapy for sex addiction. From this point the movie ceases to be a potentially interesting A Spy in the House of Love-ish story of a person leading a double life and spending a lot of time on the sexual dark side, and becomes instead a quite dull and overly predictable “therapy movie” in which both the relapses (actually, just one relapse) and the ultimate reconciliation come way too patly in Patricia Resnick’s script.
Sex, Lies and Obsession — the title, of course, is a ripoff from Steven Soderbergh’s star-making 1989 indie sex, lies and videotape (the original title of that film was printed in all lower-case letters), though the two movies otherwise have virtually nothing in common aside from a sexual theme — is indifferently directed by Douglas Barr, and isn’t helped by the surprisingly small amount of soft-core porn (just a quick opening sequence of Hamlin in bed with an anonymous blonde) or by the fact that Lisa Rinna, with her round face, fat lips and eyeliner ringing the entire circumference of her eyes, looks more like Mick Jagger in drag than the suburban housewife and dedicated teacher we’re told she is in Resnick’s script. (I’ll give the casting department credit for one coup, though: Kevin Zegers actually looks credible as the offspring of Harry Hamlin and Lisa Rinna — though that isn’t much help because Robert Clark, cast as his younger brother, doesn’t look much like anyone else in his movie “family.”)
Sex, Lies and Obsession disappoints because it simply isn’t the sort of good clean dirty fun its title and premise promised, and though we’re supposed to think Harry Hamlin is the rotter of all time I couldn’t help but flash back to his part as the Gay man who seduced Michael Ontkean away from his wife in the 1982 melodrama Making Love — I wanted to take Lisa Rinna aside and tell her, “It could be worse — at least he’s only sleeping with women!”
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Abducted (Incendo/Power/Anne Carlucci/Lifetime, 2007)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
My other TV item this morning was considerably better than the Capitol Fourth concert (see below): I ran the Lifetime movie Abducted which they showed yesterday morning as part of a weekend-long celebration called “Hot ’n’ Steamy Fourth,” featuring Lifetime doing what they do best: intense, suspenseful thrillers liberally spiced with soft-core porn. This one was made in 2007 and is listed on imdb.com as Abducted: Fugitive for Love (which rather gives away the plot), though the subtitle doesn’t appear on the official credits. It stars Sarah Wynter as Melanie Stone, who eight years previously married ambitious aspiring politician Tom Stone (Eric Breker). Things have deteriorated between them to the point that Tom, who’s working as a prison warden in Washington state and simultaneously launching a mayoral campaign he hopes will ultimately make him the state’s governor, sees his wife as little more than a political prop to be brought out for photo-ops so he can convey the image of being a devoted family man while he really couldn’t care less about her and is having an affair with his campaign manager, Paula Simms (Carrie Colak).
From there this movie turns into State of the Union meets Mrs. Soffel, as Melanie — who’s had to give up her job as a swimming coach to her friend Amy (Eleanor Noble), who’s engaged to prison guard George Motts (Donny Falsetti), and who is being so totally controlled by Tom that he’s ordered her not to attend their upcoming wedding because Paula says her being at the wedding of a prison guard would be bad for Tom’s “image” — teaches a GED class at the prison and meets super-convict Jack Carlson (Andrew Walker). We’ve already seen Carlson, a convicted murderer facing a 16-year sentence, square off against three other cons in the prison’s exercise yard and fight with the martial-arts skills of a James Bond (indeed, with his rugged good looks Walker wouldn’t be bad casting as Bond), so we know he’s already some sort of superhero even though he’s on the wrong side of the law, and the sexual tension between Mr. Carlson and the repressed Mrs. Stone flares up as they both flash their baby-blue eyes at each other and the camera.
Nonetheless, it’s a shock when, after Tom calls Carlson to the warden’s office and threatens to add years to his sentence for the prison fight and thereby keep him in for life — and we see that Tom had left on his hand-held tape recorder while he practiced a public speech, had an on-the-top-of-the-desk quickie with Paula (and though Eric Breker is hardly in Andrew Walker’s league as a sex god he’s hot enough, especially with his shirt off flashing an appealingly light dusting of chest hair, that he and Carrie Colak are no slouches in the soft-core porn department even though we’re breathlessly awaiting the Main Event of seeing Walker and Sarah Wynter get it on!), then had his confrontation with Carlson — the next thing Carlson does, after he’s put on the work-farm detail (the work-farm is Tom’s personal property and he treats the convicts as his slaves, sort of like the similar farm for female prisoners in the 1957 film Untamed Youth), is grab a gun from a desk drawer and use it to hold Melanie as hostage while he escapes.
He leads her on a chase through the hills of northern Washington (one suspected that this movie was set there so it could be shot just across the Canadian border in Vancouver, but according to imbd.com it was actually filmed in Montréal) and plants fake clues to fool the police and federal marshals into thinking he’s either heading north to Canada or south to Oregon, but he’s really heading east to Idaho because — at this point director Richard Roy and writer Laurie Horowitz pull their big reversal — it turns out that he was really framed by his ex-wife Stephanie (Ellen Dubin) and her lover (now her second husband) Ron (Howard Rosenstein), and that the person he was supposed to have murdered is in fact still alive, paid off by the adulterous lovebirds to hide out under a new identity. While all this is going on, a team of federal marshals led by Wyatt (Rick Bramucci), who along with his female partner were on to Tom immediately (at least as far as his affair with Paula was concerned), are tracing them across the country.
The hate between Carlson and Melanie eventually blossoms into love — or at least lust — especially after Carlson plays the accidentally recorded tape in which we learn that Tom actually solicited him to kidnap, rape and murder Melanie, and used the threat of a life sentence as a way to get him to do so. Carlson and Melanie, now a loving couple instead of a criminal and his hostage, trace the supposed “murder victim” to Idaho — and find that he’s a different person altogether, and has been in a coma in an assisted-living facility for five years: Ron and Stephanie stole his identity as part of their plot, and the real person lives in Portland. Eventually the marshals trace them, but in the meantime Melanie briefly returns to her husband to get to the computer that links to the federal database so she can trace the real person’s whereabouts — and the press conference Tom calls to celebrate his wife’s safe return is crashed by her friend George, who plays the tape of Tom soliciting Carlson to murder her (Melanie got the tape from Carlson and slipped it to George), so Tom, Stephanie and Ron are all arrested, Carlson’s sentence is commuted to time served, Melanie is threatened with prison time herself for helping a fugitive but Wyatt agrees to go to bat for her with the judge to get her let off, and the end occurs at the swimming pool where Carlson meets Melanie during a coaching session and they go off together, symbolizing their new life.
Though the plot seems at times to be a cut-and-paste assemblage of Lifetime’s greatest hits, Abducted is well constructed by Horowitz and directed by Roy with a genuine flair for suspense — and in contrast to a lot of the Lifetime movies these days, it’s full to the brim with hot-looking men, not only Walker but Breker and even Bramucci, who’s heavy-set but flashes a good-sized basket during the frequent medium shots of him at work in law enforcement.
My other TV item this morning was considerably better than the Capitol Fourth concert (see below): I ran the Lifetime movie Abducted which they showed yesterday morning as part of a weekend-long celebration called “Hot ’n’ Steamy Fourth,” featuring Lifetime doing what they do best: intense, suspenseful thrillers liberally spiced with soft-core porn. This one was made in 2007 and is listed on imdb.com as Abducted: Fugitive for Love (which rather gives away the plot), though the subtitle doesn’t appear on the official credits. It stars Sarah Wynter as Melanie Stone, who eight years previously married ambitious aspiring politician Tom Stone (Eric Breker). Things have deteriorated between them to the point that Tom, who’s working as a prison warden in Washington state and simultaneously launching a mayoral campaign he hopes will ultimately make him the state’s governor, sees his wife as little more than a political prop to be brought out for photo-ops so he can convey the image of being a devoted family man while he really couldn’t care less about her and is having an affair with his campaign manager, Paula Simms (Carrie Colak).
From there this movie turns into State of the Union meets Mrs. Soffel, as Melanie — who’s had to give up her job as a swimming coach to her friend Amy (Eleanor Noble), who’s engaged to prison guard George Motts (Donny Falsetti), and who is being so totally controlled by Tom that he’s ordered her not to attend their upcoming wedding because Paula says her being at the wedding of a prison guard would be bad for Tom’s “image” — teaches a GED class at the prison and meets super-convict Jack Carlson (Andrew Walker). We’ve already seen Carlson, a convicted murderer facing a 16-year sentence, square off against three other cons in the prison’s exercise yard and fight with the martial-arts skills of a James Bond (indeed, with his rugged good looks Walker wouldn’t be bad casting as Bond), so we know he’s already some sort of superhero even though he’s on the wrong side of the law, and the sexual tension between Mr. Carlson and the repressed Mrs. Stone flares up as they both flash their baby-blue eyes at each other and the camera.
Nonetheless, it’s a shock when, after Tom calls Carlson to the warden’s office and threatens to add years to his sentence for the prison fight and thereby keep him in for life — and we see that Tom had left on his hand-held tape recorder while he practiced a public speech, had an on-the-top-of-the-desk quickie with Paula (and though Eric Breker is hardly in Andrew Walker’s league as a sex god he’s hot enough, especially with his shirt off flashing an appealingly light dusting of chest hair, that he and Carrie Colak are no slouches in the soft-core porn department even though we’re breathlessly awaiting the Main Event of seeing Walker and Sarah Wynter get it on!), then had his confrontation with Carlson — the next thing Carlson does, after he’s put on the work-farm detail (the work-farm is Tom’s personal property and he treats the convicts as his slaves, sort of like the similar farm for female prisoners in the 1957 film Untamed Youth), is grab a gun from a desk drawer and use it to hold Melanie as hostage while he escapes.
He leads her on a chase through the hills of northern Washington (one suspected that this movie was set there so it could be shot just across the Canadian border in Vancouver, but according to imbd.com it was actually filmed in Montréal) and plants fake clues to fool the police and federal marshals into thinking he’s either heading north to Canada or south to Oregon, but he’s really heading east to Idaho because — at this point director Richard Roy and writer Laurie Horowitz pull their big reversal — it turns out that he was really framed by his ex-wife Stephanie (Ellen Dubin) and her lover (now her second husband) Ron (Howard Rosenstein), and that the person he was supposed to have murdered is in fact still alive, paid off by the adulterous lovebirds to hide out under a new identity. While all this is going on, a team of federal marshals led by Wyatt (Rick Bramucci), who along with his female partner were on to Tom immediately (at least as far as his affair with Paula was concerned), are tracing them across the country.
The hate between Carlson and Melanie eventually blossoms into love — or at least lust — especially after Carlson plays the accidentally recorded tape in which we learn that Tom actually solicited him to kidnap, rape and murder Melanie, and used the threat of a life sentence as a way to get him to do so. Carlson and Melanie, now a loving couple instead of a criminal and his hostage, trace the supposed “murder victim” to Idaho — and find that he’s a different person altogether, and has been in a coma in an assisted-living facility for five years: Ron and Stephanie stole his identity as part of their plot, and the real person lives in Portland. Eventually the marshals trace them, but in the meantime Melanie briefly returns to her husband to get to the computer that links to the federal database so she can trace the real person’s whereabouts — and the press conference Tom calls to celebrate his wife’s safe return is crashed by her friend George, who plays the tape of Tom soliciting Carlson to murder her (Melanie got the tape from Carlson and slipped it to George), so Tom, Stephanie and Ron are all arrested, Carlson’s sentence is commuted to time served, Melanie is threatened with prison time herself for helping a fugitive but Wyatt agrees to go to bat for her with the judge to get her let off, and the end occurs at the swimming pool where Carlson meets Melanie during a coaching session and they go off together, symbolizing their new life.
Though the plot seems at times to be a cut-and-paste assemblage of Lifetime’s greatest hits, Abducted is well constructed by Horowitz and directed by Roy with a genuine flair for suspense — and in contrast to a lot of the Lifetime movies these days, it’s full to the brim with hot-looking men, not only Walker but Breker and even Bramucci, who’s heavy-set but flashes a good-sized basket during the frequent medium shots of him at work in law enforcement.
Capitol Fourth of July Concert (PBS, 2009)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
One was my DVD recording of last night’s Capitol Fourth concert on PBS, which surprised me by being decidedly inferior to the National Memorial Day concert from last May 24 I’d just got around to watching yesterday morning on the ground that an orgy of patriotism would be an appropriate way to begin the Fourth of July. The big problem was that the greatness-to-schlock ratio was way out of whack; conducted (as was the Memorial Day concert) by Erich Kunzel with the National Symphony Orchestra, the Capitol Fourth concert began with a marvelous performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” by Aretha Franklin. Aretha essentially turned the national anthem into a gospel song, varying the melody, “worrying” the notes and changing the word “o’er” the two times it appears to “over” just so she could have an extra note to play with. It was a marvelous performance, in some ways closer to Jimi Hendrix’ famous instrumental recording from Woodstock than any other vocal version, and my only regrets were 1) she only sang the familiar first chorus (I wanted to hear more!) and 2) the rest of the concert was going to have a hard time following her.
They didn’t even try; instead the program bee-lined straight from the sublime to the beneath-ridiculous and brought out Barry Manilow for three songs: “It’s a Miracle,” a medley of “Daybreak” with “This One’s for You” and “Somewhere in the Night,” and “Copacabaña” (I hadn’t heard “Copacabaña” since it was originally popular in the late 1970’s and frankly I’d forgotten what a terrible song it is; it’s got an infectious hook, all right, but the rest of it sucks rotten eggs). It got even worse than that as they brought out the Sesame Street Muppets for a ghastly medley of the Sesame Street theme with some of the songs representing the individual Muppet characters — “Elmo’s World,” “I Love Trash,” “Somebody Come and Play” and “’C’ Is for Cookie” — which made me think that it was a pity Dick Cheney was no longer in office, because if he’d been there he probably would have had this music replace Yoko Ono and the Red Hot Chili Peppers as the material with which to torture — excuse me, aid in “enhanced interrogation” of — the Guantánamo detainees.
Then they brought on Natasha Bedingfield, a singer I ordinarily like (despite the irony of celebrating American independence by bringing on a performer from the country we won our independence from), singing the Carpenters’ “Sing” — a song that under ordinary circumstances would have suited her voice well even though it doesn’t have the awesome purity of Karen Carpenter’s — only they had her do it with the Muppets, who as if we hadn’t been tortured (excuse me, “enhanced”) enough at this point came back again for a medley of George M. Cohan’s “Yankee Doodle Boy” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag.” After that things got at least marginally better: the current company of the Four Seasons biomusical Jersey Boys (Jared Spector, Josh Franklin, Devin May and Michael Ingersoll) came on for a Four Seasons medley (“Sherry,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” “Walk Like a Man” — devastatingly parodied by the show Forbidden Broadway: Special Victims Unit as “Walk like a man/Sing like a girl” — “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You” and their comeback record, “Oh, What a Night”) that was a good deal better than most of the material that had preceded it and reminded us of what marvelous ear candy the Four Seasons’ recordings were even though as artists they were blown away, first by the Beach Boys and then, even more definitively, by the Beatles.
After that Natasha Bedingfield came back to do her hit “Pocketful of Sunshine” and things got better with a performance of bits and pieces of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue featuring pianists Michael Feinstein and Andrew von Oyer (it seemed hardly necessary to engage two pianists for music Gershwin wrote for one, but at least Feinstein has a direct Gershwin connection — all those years he worked as an assistant to Ira — and his presence was welcome, as was the TV director’s decision twice to copy the great overhead shot, with the camera revolving as it looks down at the piano[s], with which Irving Rapper ended the 1945 Gershwin biopic Rhapsody in Blue) and Aretha Franklin dredging up two of her old soul hits, “Think” and “Respect.” Though her voice isn’t as loud, imposing or flexible as it was when she recorded the originals, she’s enough of a canny old professional that she managed to rework them and still blow away everyone and everything else on the program.
After that it was another sorry return by Barry Manilow doing “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” (appropriating the national anthem of the country we won independence from!) and a supposedly “inspirational” original called “Let Freedom Ring” (it was actually a relief when they began the fireworks during this number!) and then the usual ending fare: the last few minutes of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture complete with fireworks (visible and audible), cannons and a chorus, a march medley by — let me make sure I have all of these — the U.S. Army’s Marching Trumpets, Drum and Fife Corps (who plays a fife in the 21st century, for heaven’s sake?) and Ceremonial Marching Band (they all make a joyful noise but the Marine Corps Band is better), followed by a ride-out featuring the full National Symphony Orchestra in Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever.”
The patriotism wasn’t the problem with this concert; the problem was the sheer amount of tripe with which it was weighed down so that only Aretha Franklin emerged triumphant from the morass of terrible music (the Muppets’ selection), mediocre music (Manilow’s originals), and good music ill-treated (Bedingfield’s features and the Gershwin and Tchaikovsky bits). And incidentally I’m still amused by the fact that the intensely moving recitation about Iraq War victim José Pequeño in the 2009 Memorial Day concert (overall a much better show than the Fourth of July concert!) was followed by Katherine McPhee singing, of all songs, “Somewhere” from West Side Story — composed by anti-war Leftist Bisexual Leonard Bernstein …
One was my DVD recording of last night’s Capitol Fourth concert on PBS, which surprised me by being decidedly inferior to the National Memorial Day concert from last May 24 I’d just got around to watching yesterday morning on the ground that an orgy of patriotism would be an appropriate way to begin the Fourth of July. The big problem was that the greatness-to-schlock ratio was way out of whack; conducted (as was the Memorial Day concert) by Erich Kunzel with the National Symphony Orchestra, the Capitol Fourth concert began with a marvelous performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” by Aretha Franklin. Aretha essentially turned the national anthem into a gospel song, varying the melody, “worrying” the notes and changing the word “o’er” the two times it appears to “over” just so she could have an extra note to play with. It was a marvelous performance, in some ways closer to Jimi Hendrix’ famous instrumental recording from Woodstock than any other vocal version, and my only regrets were 1) she only sang the familiar first chorus (I wanted to hear more!) and 2) the rest of the concert was going to have a hard time following her.
They didn’t even try; instead the program bee-lined straight from the sublime to the beneath-ridiculous and brought out Barry Manilow for three songs: “It’s a Miracle,” a medley of “Daybreak” with “This One’s for You” and “Somewhere in the Night,” and “Copacabaña” (I hadn’t heard “Copacabaña” since it was originally popular in the late 1970’s and frankly I’d forgotten what a terrible song it is; it’s got an infectious hook, all right, but the rest of it sucks rotten eggs). It got even worse than that as they brought out the Sesame Street Muppets for a ghastly medley of the Sesame Street theme with some of the songs representing the individual Muppet characters — “Elmo’s World,” “I Love Trash,” “Somebody Come and Play” and “’C’ Is for Cookie” — which made me think that it was a pity Dick Cheney was no longer in office, because if he’d been there he probably would have had this music replace Yoko Ono and the Red Hot Chili Peppers as the material with which to torture — excuse me, aid in “enhanced interrogation” of — the Guantánamo detainees.
Then they brought on Natasha Bedingfield, a singer I ordinarily like (despite the irony of celebrating American independence by bringing on a performer from the country we won our independence from), singing the Carpenters’ “Sing” — a song that under ordinary circumstances would have suited her voice well even though it doesn’t have the awesome purity of Karen Carpenter’s — only they had her do it with the Muppets, who as if we hadn’t been tortured (excuse me, “enhanced”) enough at this point came back again for a medley of George M. Cohan’s “Yankee Doodle Boy” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag.” After that things got at least marginally better: the current company of the Four Seasons biomusical Jersey Boys (Jared Spector, Josh Franklin, Devin May and Michael Ingersoll) came on for a Four Seasons medley (“Sherry,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” “Walk Like a Man” — devastatingly parodied by the show Forbidden Broadway: Special Victims Unit as “Walk like a man/Sing like a girl” — “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You” and their comeback record, “Oh, What a Night”) that was a good deal better than most of the material that had preceded it and reminded us of what marvelous ear candy the Four Seasons’ recordings were even though as artists they were blown away, first by the Beach Boys and then, even more definitively, by the Beatles.
After that Natasha Bedingfield came back to do her hit “Pocketful of Sunshine” and things got better with a performance of bits and pieces of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue featuring pianists Michael Feinstein and Andrew von Oyer (it seemed hardly necessary to engage two pianists for music Gershwin wrote for one, but at least Feinstein has a direct Gershwin connection — all those years he worked as an assistant to Ira — and his presence was welcome, as was the TV director’s decision twice to copy the great overhead shot, with the camera revolving as it looks down at the piano[s], with which Irving Rapper ended the 1945 Gershwin biopic Rhapsody in Blue) and Aretha Franklin dredging up two of her old soul hits, “Think” and “Respect.” Though her voice isn’t as loud, imposing or flexible as it was when she recorded the originals, she’s enough of a canny old professional that she managed to rework them and still blow away everyone and everything else on the program.
After that it was another sorry return by Barry Manilow doing “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” (appropriating the national anthem of the country we won independence from!) and a supposedly “inspirational” original called “Let Freedom Ring” (it was actually a relief when they began the fireworks during this number!) and then the usual ending fare: the last few minutes of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture complete with fireworks (visible and audible), cannons and a chorus, a march medley by — let me make sure I have all of these — the U.S. Army’s Marching Trumpets, Drum and Fife Corps (who plays a fife in the 21st century, for heaven’s sake?) and Ceremonial Marching Band (they all make a joyful noise but the Marine Corps Band is better), followed by a ride-out featuring the full National Symphony Orchestra in Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever.”
The patriotism wasn’t the problem with this concert; the problem was the sheer amount of tripe with which it was weighed down so that only Aretha Franklin emerged triumphant from the morass of terrible music (the Muppets’ selection), mediocre music (Manilow’s originals), and good music ill-treated (Bedingfield’s features and the Gershwin and Tchaikovsky bits). And incidentally I’m still amused by the fact that the intensely moving recitation about Iraq War victim José Pequeño in the 2009 Memorial Day concert (overall a much better show than the Fourth of July concert!) was followed by Katherine McPhee singing, of all songs, “Somewhere” from West Side Story — composed by anti-war Leftist Bisexual Leonard Bernstein …
Saturday, July 4, 2009
National Memorial Day Concert (PBS, 2009)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The 20th annual National Memorial Day Concert, telecast on PBS May 24, 2009, was the usual mixed bag — I’ve set the DVD recorder to record tonight’s Capitol Fourth concert with the same sources, but something about me this morning wanted an early fix of patriotism, so here goes — it opened with a sappy version of the “safe” verses of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” so overarranged that one expected the Radio City Rockettes to come out any moment and start kicking (that distant rumble was Woody Guthrie turning over in his grave), and sung by Brian Stokes Mitchell, whom I used to like but whose voice has settled into an uncomfortable space between Paul Robeson’s and Boris Karloff’s, and who did an equally ghastly (if somewhat less relentlessly overarranged) version of “God Bless America” that had me longing for the resurrection of Kate Smith (or at least wishing that they’d just plugged in the famous film clip of her singing it from the 1943 movie This Is the Army).
Then they brought in operatic mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” (just the first and most famous verse), and though the arrangement wasn’t all that impressive it was fascinating to hear her add an interpolated high note at the end: this song is hard enough to sing come scritto that I admired her chutzpah in making it even harder, and meeting her self-set challenge with gusto! After that violinist Robert McDuffie was brought on to play the Ashokan Farewell (a pre-existing piece that Ken Burns used as the theme for his documentary The Civil War) and Laurence Fishburne was brought on during it to read a letter President Lincoln wrote to the mother of a soldier killed in the Civil War.
Indeed, the theme of tonight’s concert was the losses from war, not only those killed but also those wounded and left permanently disabled (a Zeitgeist shift from the celebration of war in the post-9/11 Bush years to a consciousness of its horrible costs? I hope that was intentional! BTW, Michelle Obama was at the concert but the President wasn’t — there was an empty seat beside hers), the orchestra (the National Symphony under Erich Kunzel, who’s conducted all 20 of these concerts) played the theme from the movie Gettysburg, and then Denyce Graves came back for one of the high points of the evening, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which she made absolutely wrenching despite yet another bombastic overarrangement.
Then they brought on Chinese-born pianist Lang Lang (one of the musicians the American Record Guide loves to hate — they’ve jokingly called him “Bang Bang,” though that doesn’t overly bother me because I rather like percussive piano players — which is probably why my favorite jazz pianists include the boogie-woogie guys as well as Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Herbie Nichols and Cecil Taylor — and Duke Ellington, especially when he played those loud, banging chromatic chords with which he used to kick-start his band musicians) for an excessively shortened version of the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1 (basically what you would have heard if you had played the first and last side of a 78 rpm recording and just left out all six sides in the middle), following which he joined singer Katherine McPhee for a version of “America, the Beautiful” — her contribution was unexceptionable (though a major comedown after Graves’ spectacular “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and I couldn’t help wishing Graves had got to sing this, too) but his, in the middle of a singularly treacly orchestral arrangement, suggested he was getting in touch with his inner Liberace.
The next part of the concert was its most bizarre and affected portion, but also incredibly moving: a dialogue between actresses Dianne Wiest and Katie Holmes (the third Mrs. Tom Cruise) portraying the mother and sister, respectively, of José Pequeño, a New Hampshire man who left his job as police chief of one of the state’s small towns (the youngest police chief in the state) to join the Army and was critically injured when an insurgent threw a bomb into his Humvee while he was checking out a reported suicide bomber. The driver was killed instantly, and frankly after we learned what happened to Pequeño the driver seemed like the lucky one; he was rushed to a military field hospital and the doctors there removed two lobes of his brain, giving his head a sunken-in quality on his left side. He got a Veterans’ Administration disability pension but that went to his wife; mom and daughter assumed the full-time burden of caring for him, moving to Washington so they could be near the VA hospital in which he was being treated and giving up their home, their jobs, their incomes and their lives — they exhausted their savings and lived on ramen noodles for three months before sister finally found a temp job in the VA hospital so she could make some money while still being present in case her brother’s condition took a turn for the worse.
We were obviously supposed to admire these people and the incredible sacrifice they were making for their brother’s welfare — such as it is; his doctors regarded it as a miracle when he responded to his mother’s touch by actually saying, “Mom” (i.e., that he had to go through the maturation process all over again and had finally learned to pronounce the first syllable with which almost everyone starts to talk) — yet I found myself getting angrier and angrier as this segment progressed: angrier at the war itself — the sheer pointlessness of the sacrifice this poor young man with so much potential had made just to satisfy George W. Bush’s ego and the way his country had treated him (and at that he was getting better and more conscientious care from the VA than a lot of servicemembers who almost literally have been dumped out in the streets!) — and, let’s face it, at all war (and as I noted above, I credit the producers of this year’s Memorial Day concert for avoiding the implicit celebration of war that’s afflicted some of their previous concerts — though they did the obligatory medley of military service themes and had on the current head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, and retired general Colin Powell for speeches, the general tenor of this show was much more sorrow at the losses from war than exultation of the military spirit).
The rest of the program was a bit anticlimactic after the haunting power of the Pequeño story: a sappy song called “When I Go the Distance” sung by the oddly sepulchral voice of Brian Stokes Mitchell; a montage of footage from previous National Memorial Day concerts to celebrate the 20th anniversary; an eerie song called “Bring Him Home” sung by Colm Wilkinson in an odd countertenor with such weird diction that it took me about half the first chorus to realize he was singing in English, not Gaelic — and then yet another jolting and welcome song, “Say a Prayer for Peace” by country star Trace Adkins (I’m taking their word for that since I’d never heard of him before, though judging from this powerful song I’d like to hear more!), which aside from being an intense piece of music in its own right (especially as projected by Adkins’ imposing Johnny Cash-ish baritone) was also a welcome denunciation of war and of that part of human nature that chooses to wage it and thereby forces other nations to engage in it to defend themselves. All in all a mixed bag, and yet a much more powerful and moving — and ideologically congenial, at least to me — concert than many of these previous affairs have been!
The 20th annual National Memorial Day Concert, telecast on PBS May 24, 2009, was the usual mixed bag — I’ve set the DVD recorder to record tonight’s Capitol Fourth concert with the same sources, but something about me this morning wanted an early fix of patriotism, so here goes — it opened with a sappy version of the “safe” verses of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land,” so overarranged that one expected the Radio City Rockettes to come out any moment and start kicking (that distant rumble was Woody Guthrie turning over in his grave), and sung by Brian Stokes Mitchell, whom I used to like but whose voice has settled into an uncomfortable space between Paul Robeson’s and Boris Karloff’s, and who did an equally ghastly (if somewhat less relentlessly overarranged) version of “God Bless America” that had me longing for the resurrection of Kate Smith (or at least wishing that they’d just plugged in the famous film clip of her singing it from the 1943 movie This Is the Army).
Then they brought in operatic mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” (just the first and most famous verse), and though the arrangement wasn’t all that impressive it was fascinating to hear her add an interpolated high note at the end: this song is hard enough to sing come scritto that I admired her chutzpah in making it even harder, and meeting her self-set challenge with gusto! After that violinist Robert McDuffie was brought on to play the Ashokan Farewell (a pre-existing piece that Ken Burns used as the theme for his documentary The Civil War) and Laurence Fishburne was brought on during it to read a letter President Lincoln wrote to the mother of a soldier killed in the Civil War.
Indeed, the theme of tonight’s concert was the losses from war, not only those killed but also those wounded and left permanently disabled (a Zeitgeist shift from the celebration of war in the post-9/11 Bush years to a consciousness of its horrible costs? I hope that was intentional! BTW, Michelle Obama was at the concert but the President wasn’t — there was an empty seat beside hers), the orchestra (the National Symphony under Erich Kunzel, who’s conducted all 20 of these concerts) played the theme from the movie Gettysburg, and then Denyce Graves came back for one of the high points of the evening, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which she made absolutely wrenching despite yet another bombastic overarrangement.
Then they brought on Chinese-born pianist Lang Lang (one of the musicians the American Record Guide loves to hate — they’ve jokingly called him “Bang Bang,” though that doesn’t overly bother me because I rather like percussive piano players — which is probably why my favorite jazz pianists include the boogie-woogie guys as well as Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Herbie Nichols and Cecil Taylor — and Duke Ellington, especially when he played those loud, banging chromatic chords with which he used to kick-start his band musicians) for an excessively shortened version of the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1 (basically what you would have heard if you had played the first and last side of a 78 rpm recording and just left out all six sides in the middle), following which he joined singer Katherine McPhee for a version of “America, the Beautiful” — her contribution was unexceptionable (though a major comedown after Graves’ spectacular “Battle Hymn of the Republic” and I couldn’t help wishing Graves had got to sing this, too) but his, in the middle of a singularly treacly orchestral arrangement, suggested he was getting in touch with his inner Liberace.
The next part of the concert was its most bizarre and affected portion, but also incredibly moving: a dialogue between actresses Dianne Wiest and Katie Holmes (the third Mrs. Tom Cruise) portraying the mother and sister, respectively, of José Pequeño, a New Hampshire man who left his job as police chief of one of the state’s small towns (the youngest police chief in the state) to join the Army and was critically injured when an insurgent threw a bomb into his Humvee while he was checking out a reported suicide bomber. The driver was killed instantly, and frankly after we learned what happened to Pequeño the driver seemed like the lucky one; he was rushed to a military field hospital and the doctors there removed two lobes of his brain, giving his head a sunken-in quality on his left side. He got a Veterans’ Administration disability pension but that went to his wife; mom and daughter assumed the full-time burden of caring for him, moving to Washington so they could be near the VA hospital in which he was being treated and giving up their home, their jobs, their incomes and their lives — they exhausted their savings and lived on ramen noodles for three months before sister finally found a temp job in the VA hospital so she could make some money while still being present in case her brother’s condition took a turn for the worse.
We were obviously supposed to admire these people and the incredible sacrifice they were making for their brother’s welfare — such as it is; his doctors regarded it as a miracle when he responded to his mother’s touch by actually saying, “Mom” (i.e., that he had to go through the maturation process all over again and had finally learned to pronounce the first syllable with which almost everyone starts to talk) — yet I found myself getting angrier and angrier as this segment progressed: angrier at the war itself — the sheer pointlessness of the sacrifice this poor young man with so much potential had made just to satisfy George W. Bush’s ego and the way his country had treated him (and at that he was getting better and more conscientious care from the VA than a lot of servicemembers who almost literally have been dumped out in the streets!) — and, let’s face it, at all war (and as I noted above, I credit the producers of this year’s Memorial Day concert for avoiding the implicit celebration of war that’s afflicted some of their previous concerts — though they did the obligatory medley of military service themes and had on the current head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, and retired general Colin Powell for speeches, the general tenor of this show was much more sorrow at the losses from war than exultation of the military spirit).
The rest of the program was a bit anticlimactic after the haunting power of the Pequeño story: a sappy song called “When I Go the Distance” sung by the oddly sepulchral voice of Brian Stokes Mitchell; a montage of footage from previous National Memorial Day concerts to celebrate the 20th anniversary; an eerie song called “Bring Him Home” sung by Colm Wilkinson in an odd countertenor with such weird diction that it took me about half the first chorus to realize he was singing in English, not Gaelic — and then yet another jolting and welcome song, “Say a Prayer for Peace” by country star Trace Adkins (I’m taking their word for that since I’d never heard of him before, though judging from this powerful song I’d like to hear more!), which aside from being an intense piece of music in its own right (especially as projected by Adkins’ imposing Johnny Cash-ish baritone) was also a welcome denunciation of war and of that part of human nature that chooses to wage it and thereby forces other nations to engage in it to defend themselves. All in all a mixed bag, and yet a much more powerful and moving — and ideologically congenial, at least to me — concert than many of these previous affairs have been!
Friday, July 3, 2009
Week-End at the Waldorf (MGM, 1945)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran a “feature,” the 1945 MGM all-star film Week-End at the Waldorf (that antique spelling of “Week-End,” as two words with a hyphen between, is the one on the main title), a cleverly reworked remake of the 1932 film Grand Hotel with the locale changed from a fictitious hotel in Berlin to the real Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City (a second unit shot footage of the exterior of the real Waldorf and it was matched to studio sets in Hollywood) and the original script by Hans Kräly (based on the 1929 novel Menschen im Hotel by German writer Vicki Baum, her own German-language stage adaptation of it in 1930 and the English-language version adapted by William A. Drake and staged on Broadway later in 1930) is quite cleverly redone by Guy Bolton and Sam and Bella Spewack for an American setting in the immediate aftermath of World War II (the film was released in October 1945 but filmed while the war was still going on).
The Spewacks would shortly go on to do an even more creative reworking of an even more prestigious play — the musical Kiss Me, Kate, based on William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and paralleling the Shakespeare play with the real lives of the divorced couple who are starring in a production of it — and some of the same sensibility is apparent here. The on-the-way-down ballerina Grusinskaya (Greta Garbo) becomes movie star Julie Malvern (Ginger Rogers), who’s just about to open her latest and most prestigious film at its New York premiere; and the Baron von Geigern (John Barrymore), a jewel thief who romances her to get access to her room but then finds himself falling genuinely in love with her, becomes war correspondent Chip Collyer (Walter Pidgeon), who when he stumbles into Julie’s room (whose entrance is disguised as the door to a supply room!) while chasing down a story involving the occupants of the room next door to hers — more on that later — and is mistaken for the jewel thief Julie’s maid Anna (Rosemary DeCamp) had previously warned her about, who we never see (we’re told during the movie that the real thief has been arrested elsewhere), and in what is only the second time I can recall in the history of filmmaking that a remake has directly referenced its original film, Chip starts trying to seduce Julie with some of John Barrymore’s dialogue and she recognizes it and says, “That’s Grand Hotel!” (The other film I’m aware of that pulled a similar trick was We’re Not Dressing, the 1934 Bing Crosby-Carole Lombard vehicle that was a remake of James M. Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton — in which sailor Crosby, addressing the socialites whose yacht has run aground on a desert island and stranded them there, announces that he’s seen the previous film of this story, Cecil B. DeMille’s Male and Female, and he’s going to take over and assume the role of Crichton to ensure their survival.)
Kringelein, the terminally ill bookkeeper who comes to the Grand Hotel with his life’s savings determined to enjoy his final days to the hilt — so memorably played by Lionel Barrymore in the original Grand Hotel — here becomes Captain James Hollis (Van Johnson), a military pilot who’s on his way to Washington, D.C. for a delicate operation to remove some shrapnel inside him — an operation he’s told by the hotel doctor, Robert Campbell (Warner Anderson), that only has a 50 percent chance of success — and somehow a man who’s facing the prospect of an operation that he may or may not survive doesn’t seem as poignant as a man who’s already under a medical death sentence. The character of Flämmchen, the secretary played by Joan Crawford in 1932, here is saddled with the silly name “Bunny Smith” and goes to Lana Turner — who’s impassive and bovine as usual, though she comes close enough to acting to register her dilemma over whether to become the mistress of financial speculator Martin X. Edley (Edward Arnold, taking over the part of Wallace Beery in Grand Hotel and also acting a role quite similar to the one he played opposite Joan Crawford in the 1934 film Chained), who in a dangerously Production Code-bending conception appears to want her not only as his own mistress but as a sexual favor he can bestow to any potential deal partners who require such perks to agree to put money into his schemes.
Edley is in the Waldorf to meet with the Bey of Aribajan (George Zucco), who throughout the film is in heavy makeup and a full Valentino-style burnoose (those were the days in which Arab leaders actually wore classy native outfits instead of that silly thing Yasir Arafat always wore that looked like he made it from a dish towel) and is pretending to be unable to speak a word of English. The gimmick is that in order to impress the Bey and his handlers — one of whom is played by the great British character actor Miles Mander, who starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s first film as a director (The Pleasure Garden, 1925) and played the rich old man in Murder, My Sweet — and get them to give his oil company the rights to their country’s petroleum reserves (a plot line that makes this otherwise dated movie seem awfully contemporary!) Edley has falsely said that honest oil broker Jessup (Samuel S. Hinds, playing a character the cadaverous Tully Marshall portrayed in Grand Hotel) is a partner in the deal — which he isn’t. (This is the story Collyer was chasing after when he stumbled into Julie’s room by mistake.)
Like her predecessor in Grand Hotel, Bunny is torn between Edley’s offer to keep her in luxury in exchange for making her his all-purpose whore and Captain Hollis’s honest, sincere love for her and offer to settle down with her in his home town of Jasmine in the California desert if he makes it through his operation — and eventually she chooses love and poverty over wealth and sexual objectification, a good thing since when Jessup returns from his business trip on Monday morning he exposes Edley as a fraud and Edley is arrested. The Spewacks replaced the philosophical hotel doctor’s role as narrator with Robert Benchley, called “Randy Morton” but basically playing himself, a successful columnist who lives in the Waldorf permanently — and they did an interesting switcheroo on the original’s gimmick, in which doorman Jean Hersholt is impatiently awaiting news from the hospital where his wife is about to give birth to their child, and has Benchley fretting through the whole movie about his dog being in a veterinary hospital about to have her first litter of puppies. (A rather mangy-looking street dog passes in the opposite direction from Benchley’s leash-led purebred in an early scene and we’re clearly supposed to assume he’s the father.)
Weekend at the Waldorf is one of those portmanteau movies in which the filmmakers crammed just about every device they could think of into the script to ensure that there would be something in it to entertain every audience member — a far cry from the strategy of today, which is to tailor your film so narrowly to a specific niche that members of your target audience will flock to see it on opening weekend even if nobody else particularly cares for it at all — even to including Xavier Cugat and his orchestra, performing two songs. One is a ballad called “And There You Are,” ostensibly written by an old service buddy of Captain Hollis who was killed in action during the war (actually composed by Sammy Fain and Ted Koehler, both of whom were associated with much better songs than this), and the other is a full-dress production number on Pepe Guizár’s song “Guadalajara,” which also seems to be the song’s entire lyric. The ballad is done by Bob Graham, who doesn’t otherwise appear in the movie and was probably Cugat’s regular male singer; “Guadalajara” features a lead vocal by actress Lina Romay as “Juanita,” a stereotypically temperamental singer whom Cugat fires and then almost immediately rehires.
Overall, Weekend at the Waldorf is hardly in the same league as its original (let’s face it, though they’re all talented people Ginger Rogers, Walter Pidgeon and Van Johnson are major steps down from Garbo and the Barrymores!) but it’s still a fun film, what might be called a “comfort movie” in the sense of “comfort food.” It’s Grand Hotel with most of the sentiment (and sentimentality) preserved but all the tragedy meticulously taken out — the chilling scene in the original in which Wallace Beery murders John Barrymore by hitting him over the head with a telephone is left out here (though director Robert Z. Leonard gives us two extreme close-ups of telephones and puts doomy music under them, which probably only confused people who hadn’t seen the original Grand Hotel and led people who had to assume there would be another phone-related murder here) — and it’s also 15 minutes longer and not as well-paced — Leonard was a quite competent director (he’s never been one of my favorites, though I noticed that when Turner Classic Movies featured him as one of their 52 “Great Directors” showcased in June I recorded every movie of his they showed except for two I already had) but nowhere near Edmund Goulding either in atmospherics or in getting the most from his actors.
One thought that occurred to me after that big production number to “Guadalajara” was that as long as they were going to insert songs into it, maybe they should have gone whole hog and turned it into a full-dress musical, and cast Fred Astaire as Chip Collyer — it would have been a better reunion film for him and Rogers than their actual one, The Barkleys of Broadway. It also occurred to me that this was one black-and-white film from the classic era that should have been in color; the lavish settings would have glowed in three-strip Technicolor and color would have given this remake an appeal the original film didn’t have — but even this late MGM was surprisingly reticent about the extra expense involved in shooting in color and pretty much reserved it for musicals and historical spectacles.
I ran a “feature,” the 1945 MGM all-star film Week-End at the Waldorf (that antique spelling of “Week-End,” as two words with a hyphen between, is the one on the main title), a cleverly reworked remake of the 1932 film Grand Hotel with the locale changed from a fictitious hotel in Berlin to the real Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City (a second unit shot footage of the exterior of the real Waldorf and it was matched to studio sets in Hollywood) and the original script by Hans Kräly (based on the 1929 novel Menschen im Hotel by German writer Vicki Baum, her own German-language stage adaptation of it in 1930 and the English-language version adapted by William A. Drake and staged on Broadway later in 1930) is quite cleverly redone by Guy Bolton and Sam and Bella Spewack for an American setting in the immediate aftermath of World War II (the film was released in October 1945 but filmed while the war was still going on).
The Spewacks would shortly go on to do an even more creative reworking of an even more prestigious play — the musical Kiss Me, Kate, based on William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and paralleling the Shakespeare play with the real lives of the divorced couple who are starring in a production of it — and some of the same sensibility is apparent here. The on-the-way-down ballerina Grusinskaya (Greta Garbo) becomes movie star Julie Malvern (Ginger Rogers), who’s just about to open her latest and most prestigious film at its New York premiere; and the Baron von Geigern (John Barrymore), a jewel thief who romances her to get access to her room but then finds himself falling genuinely in love with her, becomes war correspondent Chip Collyer (Walter Pidgeon), who when he stumbles into Julie’s room (whose entrance is disguised as the door to a supply room!) while chasing down a story involving the occupants of the room next door to hers — more on that later — and is mistaken for the jewel thief Julie’s maid Anna (Rosemary DeCamp) had previously warned her about, who we never see (we’re told during the movie that the real thief has been arrested elsewhere), and in what is only the second time I can recall in the history of filmmaking that a remake has directly referenced its original film, Chip starts trying to seduce Julie with some of John Barrymore’s dialogue and she recognizes it and says, “That’s Grand Hotel!” (The other film I’m aware of that pulled a similar trick was We’re Not Dressing, the 1934 Bing Crosby-Carole Lombard vehicle that was a remake of James M. Barrie’s The Admirable Crichton — in which sailor Crosby, addressing the socialites whose yacht has run aground on a desert island and stranded them there, announces that he’s seen the previous film of this story, Cecil B. DeMille’s Male and Female, and he’s going to take over and assume the role of Crichton to ensure their survival.)
Kringelein, the terminally ill bookkeeper who comes to the Grand Hotel with his life’s savings determined to enjoy his final days to the hilt — so memorably played by Lionel Barrymore in the original Grand Hotel — here becomes Captain James Hollis (Van Johnson), a military pilot who’s on his way to Washington, D.C. for a delicate operation to remove some shrapnel inside him — an operation he’s told by the hotel doctor, Robert Campbell (Warner Anderson), that only has a 50 percent chance of success — and somehow a man who’s facing the prospect of an operation that he may or may not survive doesn’t seem as poignant as a man who’s already under a medical death sentence. The character of Flämmchen, the secretary played by Joan Crawford in 1932, here is saddled with the silly name “Bunny Smith” and goes to Lana Turner — who’s impassive and bovine as usual, though she comes close enough to acting to register her dilemma over whether to become the mistress of financial speculator Martin X. Edley (Edward Arnold, taking over the part of Wallace Beery in Grand Hotel and also acting a role quite similar to the one he played opposite Joan Crawford in the 1934 film Chained), who in a dangerously Production Code-bending conception appears to want her not only as his own mistress but as a sexual favor he can bestow to any potential deal partners who require such perks to agree to put money into his schemes.
Edley is in the Waldorf to meet with the Bey of Aribajan (George Zucco), who throughout the film is in heavy makeup and a full Valentino-style burnoose (those were the days in which Arab leaders actually wore classy native outfits instead of that silly thing Yasir Arafat always wore that looked like he made it from a dish towel) and is pretending to be unable to speak a word of English. The gimmick is that in order to impress the Bey and his handlers — one of whom is played by the great British character actor Miles Mander, who starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s first film as a director (The Pleasure Garden, 1925) and played the rich old man in Murder, My Sweet — and get them to give his oil company the rights to their country’s petroleum reserves (a plot line that makes this otherwise dated movie seem awfully contemporary!) Edley has falsely said that honest oil broker Jessup (Samuel S. Hinds, playing a character the cadaverous Tully Marshall portrayed in Grand Hotel) is a partner in the deal — which he isn’t. (This is the story Collyer was chasing after when he stumbled into Julie’s room by mistake.)
Like her predecessor in Grand Hotel, Bunny is torn between Edley’s offer to keep her in luxury in exchange for making her his all-purpose whore and Captain Hollis’s honest, sincere love for her and offer to settle down with her in his home town of Jasmine in the California desert if he makes it through his operation — and eventually she chooses love and poverty over wealth and sexual objectification, a good thing since when Jessup returns from his business trip on Monday morning he exposes Edley as a fraud and Edley is arrested. The Spewacks replaced the philosophical hotel doctor’s role as narrator with Robert Benchley, called “Randy Morton” but basically playing himself, a successful columnist who lives in the Waldorf permanently — and they did an interesting switcheroo on the original’s gimmick, in which doorman Jean Hersholt is impatiently awaiting news from the hospital where his wife is about to give birth to their child, and has Benchley fretting through the whole movie about his dog being in a veterinary hospital about to have her first litter of puppies. (A rather mangy-looking street dog passes in the opposite direction from Benchley’s leash-led purebred in an early scene and we’re clearly supposed to assume he’s the father.)
Weekend at the Waldorf is one of those portmanteau movies in which the filmmakers crammed just about every device they could think of into the script to ensure that there would be something in it to entertain every audience member — a far cry from the strategy of today, which is to tailor your film so narrowly to a specific niche that members of your target audience will flock to see it on opening weekend even if nobody else particularly cares for it at all — even to including Xavier Cugat and his orchestra, performing two songs. One is a ballad called “And There You Are,” ostensibly written by an old service buddy of Captain Hollis who was killed in action during the war (actually composed by Sammy Fain and Ted Koehler, both of whom were associated with much better songs than this), and the other is a full-dress production number on Pepe Guizár’s song “Guadalajara,” which also seems to be the song’s entire lyric. The ballad is done by Bob Graham, who doesn’t otherwise appear in the movie and was probably Cugat’s regular male singer; “Guadalajara” features a lead vocal by actress Lina Romay as “Juanita,” a stereotypically temperamental singer whom Cugat fires and then almost immediately rehires.
Overall, Weekend at the Waldorf is hardly in the same league as its original (let’s face it, though they’re all talented people Ginger Rogers, Walter Pidgeon and Van Johnson are major steps down from Garbo and the Barrymores!) but it’s still a fun film, what might be called a “comfort movie” in the sense of “comfort food.” It’s Grand Hotel with most of the sentiment (and sentimentality) preserved but all the tragedy meticulously taken out — the chilling scene in the original in which Wallace Beery murders John Barrymore by hitting him over the head with a telephone is left out here (though director Robert Z. Leonard gives us two extreme close-ups of telephones and puts doomy music under them, which probably only confused people who hadn’t seen the original Grand Hotel and led people who had to assume there would be another phone-related murder here) — and it’s also 15 minutes longer and not as well-paced — Leonard was a quite competent director (he’s never been one of my favorites, though I noticed that when Turner Classic Movies featured him as one of their 52 “Great Directors” showcased in June I recorded every movie of his they showed except for two I already had) but nowhere near Edmund Goulding either in atmospherics or in getting the most from his actors.
One thought that occurred to me after that big production number to “Guadalajara” was that as long as they were going to insert songs into it, maybe they should have gone whole hog and turned it into a full-dress musical, and cast Fred Astaire as Chip Collyer — it would have been a better reunion film for him and Rogers than their actual one, The Barkleys of Broadway. It also occurred to me that this was one black-and-white film from the classic era that should have been in color; the lavish settings would have glowed in three-strip Technicolor and color would have given this remake an appeal the original film didn’t have — but even this late MGM was surprisingly reticent about the extra expense involved in shooting in color and pretty much reserved it for musicals and historical spectacles.
Thursday, July 2, 2009
The Divorcée (MGM, 1930)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
One was The Divorcée, a 1930 MGM potboiler that inexplicably won Norma Shearer the Academy Award for Best Actress, in which she and Chester Morris played a couple who attempted what would now be called an “open relationship,” divorced when he couldn’t handle the thought of his wife seeing other men even though he was seeing other women, then got back together at the fade-out. It was typical Hollywood tripe, based on a novel by Ursula Parrott called Ex-Wife, adapted for the screen by Zelda Sears, Nick Grindé and John Meehan and directed to his usual level of mediocrity by Robert Z. Leonard.
The following year Shearer and Robert Montgomery (who had a supporting role in The Divorcée) would play this kind of story deliciously in Private Lives, but Noël Coward was a far better writer than Ursula Parrott; Hans Kraly, Claudine West and Richard Schayer were also superior to Sears, Grindé and Meehan; and Sidney Franklin a much better director than Leonard. Also, Coward’s story had played the situation for sophisticated comedy while Parrott’s was oh-so-serious about it — and Shearer’s performance, though not as ludicrously stylized as some of her work, was bland and hardly what one would consider Oscar-caliber today (of the movies of hers I’ve seen, I think The Women offers her best work — her performance in it tends to get overshadowed by the bravura playing of Joan Crawford as the bitch, but Shearer is quite affecting in the role of the wife betrayed as much by her gossipy friends as her straying husband). — 3/28/98
•••••
I picked out a relatively short movie: The Divorcée, the 1930 romantic melodrama which starred Norma Shearer and three, count ’em, three leading men: Chester Morris, Conrad Nagel and Robert Montgomery. It’s one of those movies about the affluent — though at least most of the people in this movie actually have jobs, which automatically sets them apart from most people in movies, especially MGM movies about rich people, in 1930 — and their cavalier, to say the least, attitudes about marriage, fidelity, commitment and divorce.
Based on a novel called Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott (yet another pop writer whose works got filmed in Hollywood’s classic era whose name otherwise means nothing to me) and scripted by the usual conglomeration of talents for an early talkie — Nick Grindé and Zelda Sears, “treatment,” and John Meehan, “dialogue and continuity” — and directed by Robert Z. Leonard (though in typical MGM fashion for the time he’s not credited as such; instead, a small line of type on the same card as the main title identifies the film as “A Robert Z. Leonard Production,” which confused the major-domos at imdb.com into listing them on their site as producer, not director), The Divorcée is a titillating but ultimately moralistic saga about Jerry (Norma Shearer), who as the film begins has never been married herself but hangs out and goes to parties and nightclubs with a batch of picturesquely decadent people including Paul (Conrad Nagel), Don (Robert Montgomery), Paul’s girlfriend Dot (Helen Johnson), the much-divorced Helen (Florence Eldridge — making a surprise appearance in a film that doesn’t feature her real-life long-term husband, actor Fredric March) and her current hot squeeze, Bill Baldwin (Robert Elliott).
Into the mix comes aspiring journalist Ted Martin (Chester Morris, acting with his usual power and authority and blowing away every other male in the cast); he and Jerry fall hard for each other and eventually get married, but not before the principals have been involved in a disastrous auto accident because Paul insisted on driving while drunk; his car veered off the road and the other people were relatively unscathed, but Dot was permanently disfigured and for the rest of the movie is seen either in bandages or with an elaborate hood over her head that makes her look like a cross between a Ku Klux Klansman and a burka-clad Muslim woman. There’s a fascinating sequence that counterpoints the wedding of Jerry and Ted (in a church, with the full nine yards of ceremony) and that of Paul and Dot (in Dot’s hospital room).
Alas, first Ted drifts into an affair, or at least a one-night stand, with Helen — whom he apparently dated at some previous point and who still wants him — and figuring that what’s sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose, Jerry has her own one-night trick with Don (a pretty unconvincing pairing because Montgomery is so young and gawky here he looks like he just got out of high school — it’s hard to believe from this film that just the next year Montgomery and Shearer were able to play a far more sophisticated version of this basic situation in the film of Noël Coward’s Private Lives) and then goes into a guilt-ridden tizzy when Ted returns from his business trip.
This leads to the breakup of their marriage and Jerry’s inexplicable rebound affair with Paul — a more romantically credible actor might have made this part believable, but Conrad Nagel looks like both his makeup and his hair have been plastered on his head with a trowel and he’s the same stuffed-shirt egomaniac he usually played — even though that means Paul will have to divorce Dot, which he thinks she’ll accept if he gives her a financial settlement. (His callousness towards her is only the most blatant indication of what an unscrupulous rotter he really is.) At this point the action of the film, which heretofore has taken place entirely in the United States, gets peripatetic as Paul offers to take Jerry on his company’s assignment of him to Japan as soon as he dumps Dot and is able to marry her, while she gets a competing offer from her own employer to set up a branch in London (we get the impression she’s a fashion designer, though about our only clue in that direction is scene in which she’s shown sketching a female figure on a giant pad), and the final scene takes place in Paris where Ted, who’s lost his own job and is making his living free-lancing (an American journalist free-lancing in a country with a different language?), is hanging out in the hope of getting in touch with her, and eventually they re-meet on New Year’s Eve (which is used symbolically much the way Woody Allen would use it in Whatever Works nearly eight decades later!), reconcile and decide that in Ted and Jerry 2.0 they’re going to take a far less cavalier attitude towards monogamy and fidelity than they did in 1.0.
Technically, The Divorcée is quite a good film for the period; Robert Z. Leonard had a hack reputation (though he made at least one masterpiece, the 1937 Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy film Maytime) but here he’s in the forefront of early-talkie directors in terms of moving the camera, shooting from angles that involve the viewer in the action instead of merely broadcasting it from a safe distance, and allowing the actors to say their lines relatively naturalistically instead of the s-l-o-w, p-o-n-d-e-r-o-u-s readings forced on many more complaisant early-talkie directors by the sound engineers. (The fact that the film’s sound engineer happened to be the leading lady’s brother, Douglas Shearer, may have had something to do with the fact that she was able to act her lines instead of intone them.)
Where the film falls short is in the arbitrary nature of its plotting; The Divorcée is one of those movies whose didactic agenda is all too clear — titillate the audience by hinting at alternatives to monogamy and sexual exclusivity in relationships, then slam the door on them with a forceful and even ferocious re-assertion of traditional morality at the end. Norma Shearer’s performance hangs up on just this dichotomy; she’s marvelous in the silent scene in which she has to face the return of her husband the morning after she’s cheated on him, stiff and unconvincing in the later dialogue when she has to become the don’t-do-what-I-have-done spokesperson for Production Code morality (though her tirades probably wowed the Academy voters back in 1930). The subtlety with which Friedrich Murnau and Carl Mayer brought their similarly straying marital partners back together in Sunrise totally eludes the makers of this film — and yet on its own terms The Divorcée is quite good, (mostly) understated and with characters who aren’t really heroes or villains but ordinary human beings with ordinary human weaknesses.
It was surprising, though, to read on imdb.com that Norma Shearer asked for this part because she wanted to get away from the goody-two-shoes roles she’d been stuck with in her silents — which seemed strange since she’d got to play far more interesting and morally ambiguous characters than this in her 1925 silent Lady of the Night (in that one she played a dual role, gooder-than-good Florence Banning and good-bad girl Mary Helmer, and while her Florence was a typically dull Shearer characterization her Mary was superb) and her 1928 film A Lady of Chance (also directed by Robert Z. Leonard, in which she’s part of a gang of con artists redeemed when she falls genuinely in love with her latest “mark,” played with his usual woodenness by Johnny Mack Brown). As it stands, The Divorcée is a fascinating movie, alternately oppressive and genuinely moving, with some of its emotional dilemmas seeming very, very dated while others would ring true in a film made today. — 7/2/09
One was The Divorcée, a 1930 MGM potboiler that inexplicably won Norma Shearer the Academy Award for Best Actress, in which she and Chester Morris played a couple who attempted what would now be called an “open relationship,” divorced when he couldn’t handle the thought of his wife seeing other men even though he was seeing other women, then got back together at the fade-out. It was typical Hollywood tripe, based on a novel by Ursula Parrott called Ex-Wife, adapted for the screen by Zelda Sears, Nick Grindé and John Meehan and directed to his usual level of mediocrity by Robert Z. Leonard.
The following year Shearer and Robert Montgomery (who had a supporting role in The Divorcée) would play this kind of story deliciously in Private Lives, but Noël Coward was a far better writer than Ursula Parrott; Hans Kraly, Claudine West and Richard Schayer were also superior to Sears, Grindé and Meehan; and Sidney Franklin a much better director than Leonard. Also, Coward’s story had played the situation for sophisticated comedy while Parrott’s was oh-so-serious about it — and Shearer’s performance, though not as ludicrously stylized as some of her work, was bland and hardly what one would consider Oscar-caliber today (of the movies of hers I’ve seen, I think The Women offers her best work — her performance in it tends to get overshadowed by the bravura playing of Joan Crawford as the bitch, but Shearer is quite affecting in the role of the wife betrayed as much by her gossipy friends as her straying husband). — 3/28/98
•••••
I picked out a relatively short movie: The Divorcée, the 1930 romantic melodrama which starred Norma Shearer and three, count ’em, three leading men: Chester Morris, Conrad Nagel and Robert Montgomery. It’s one of those movies about the affluent — though at least most of the people in this movie actually have jobs, which automatically sets them apart from most people in movies, especially MGM movies about rich people, in 1930 — and their cavalier, to say the least, attitudes about marriage, fidelity, commitment and divorce.
Based on a novel called Ex-Wife by Ursula Parrott (yet another pop writer whose works got filmed in Hollywood’s classic era whose name otherwise means nothing to me) and scripted by the usual conglomeration of talents for an early talkie — Nick Grindé and Zelda Sears, “treatment,” and John Meehan, “dialogue and continuity” — and directed by Robert Z. Leonard (though in typical MGM fashion for the time he’s not credited as such; instead, a small line of type on the same card as the main title identifies the film as “A Robert Z. Leonard Production,” which confused the major-domos at imdb.com into listing them on their site as producer, not director), The Divorcée is a titillating but ultimately moralistic saga about Jerry (Norma Shearer), who as the film begins has never been married herself but hangs out and goes to parties and nightclubs with a batch of picturesquely decadent people including Paul (Conrad Nagel), Don (Robert Montgomery), Paul’s girlfriend Dot (Helen Johnson), the much-divorced Helen (Florence Eldridge — making a surprise appearance in a film that doesn’t feature her real-life long-term husband, actor Fredric March) and her current hot squeeze, Bill Baldwin (Robert Elliott).
Into the mix comes aspiring journalist Ted Martin (Chester Morris, acting with his usual power and authority and blowing away every other male in the cast); he and Jerry fall hard for each other and eventually get married, but not before the principals have been involved in a disastrous auto accident because Paul insisted on driving while drunk; his car veered off the road and the other people were relatively unscathed, but Dot was permanently disfigured and for the rest of the movie is seen either in bandages or with an elaborate hood over her head that makes her look like a cross between a Ku Klux Klansman and a burka-clad Muslim woman. There’s a fascinating sequence that counterpoints the wedding of Jerry and Ted (in a church, with the full nine yards of ceremony) and that of Paul and Dot (in Dot’s hospital room).
Alas, first Ted drifts into an affair, or at least a one-night stand, with Helen — whom he apparently dated at some previous point and who still wants him — and figuring that what’s sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose, Jerry has her own one-night trick with Don (a pretty unconvincing pairing because Montgomery is so young and gawky here he looks like he just got out of high school — it’s hard to believe from this film that just the next year Montgomery and Shearer were able to play a far more sophisticated version of this basic situation in the film of Noël Coward’s Private Lives) and then goes into a guilt-ridden tizzy when Ted returns from his business trip.
This leads to the breakup of their marriage and Jerry’s inexplicable rebound affair with Paul — a more romantically credible actor might have made this part believable, but Conrad Nagel looks like both his makeup and his hair have been plastered on his head with a trowel and he’s the same stuffed-shirt egomaniac he usually played — even though that means Paul will have to divorce Dot, which he thinks she’ll accept if he gives her a financial settlement. (His callousness towards her is only the most blatant indication of what an unscrupulous rotter he really is.) At this point the action of the film, which heretofore has taken place entirely in the United States, gets peripatetic as Paul offers to take Jerry on his company’s assignment of him to Japan as soon as he dumps Dot and is able to marry her, while she gets a competing offer from her own employer to set up a branch in London (we get the impression she’s a fashion designer, though about our only clue in that direction is scene in which she’s shown sketching a female figure on a giant pad), and the final scene takes place in Paris where Ted, who’s lost his own job and is making his living free-lancing (an American journalist free-lancing in a country with a different language?), is hanging out in the hope of getting in touch with her, and eventually they re-meet on New Year’s Eve (which is used symbolically much the way Woody Allen would use it in Whatever Works nearly eight decades later!), reconcile and decide that in Ted and Jerry 2.0 they’re going to take a far less cavalier attitude towards monogamy and fidelity than they did in 1.0.
Technically, The Divorcée is quite a good film for the period; Robert Z. Leonard had a hack reputation (though he made at least one masterpiece, the 1937 Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy film Maytime) but here he’s in the forefront of early-talkie directors in terms of moving the camera, shooting from angles that involve the viewer in the action instead of merely broadcasting it from a safe distance, and allowing the actors to say their lines relatively naturalistically instead of the s-l-o-w, p-o-n-d-e-r-o-u-s readings forced on many more complaisant early-talkie directors by the sound engineers. (The fact that the film’s sound engineer happened to be the leading lady’s brother, Douglas Shearer, may have had something to do with the fact that she was able to act her lines instead of intone them.)
Where the film falls short is in the arbitrary nature of its plotting; The Divorcée is one of those movies whose didactic agenda is all too clear — titillate the audience by hinting at alternatives to monogamy and sexual exclusivity in relationships, then slam the door on them with a forceful and even ferocious re-assertion of traditional morality at the end. Norma Shearer’s performance hangs up on just this dichotomy; she’s marvelous in the silent scene in which she has to face the return of her husband the morning after she’s cheated on him, stiff and unconvincing in the later dialogue when she has to become the don’t-do-what-I-have-done spokesperson for Production Code morality (though her tirades probably wowed the Academy voters back in 1930). The subtlety with which Friedrich Murnau and Carl Mayer brought their similarly straying marital partners back together in Sunrise totally eludes the makers of this film — and yet on its own terms The Divorcée is quite good, (mostly) understated and with characters who aren’t really heroes or villains but ordinary human beings with ordinary human weaknesses.
It was surprising, though, to read on imdb.com that Norma Shearer asked for this part because she wanted to get away from the goody-two-shoes roles she’d been stuck with in her silents — which seemed strange since she’d got to play far more interesting and morally ambiguous characters than this in her 1925 silent Lady of the Night (in that one she played a dual role, gooder-than-good Florence Banning and good-bad girl Mary Helmer, and while her Florence was a typically dull Shearer characterization her Mary was superb) and her 1928 film A Lady of Chance (also directed by Robert Z. Leonard, in which she’s part of a gang of con artists redeemed when she falls genuinely in love with her latest “mark,” played with his usual woodenness by Johnny Mack Brown). As it stands, The Divorcée is a fascinating movie, alternately oppressive and genuinely moving, with some of its emotional dilemmas seeming very, very dated while others would ring true in a film made today. — 7/2/09
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
For the Bible Tells Me So (Atticus Group, 2007)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was For the Bible Tells Me So, a chilling and moving 2007 documentary about the clash between religion and so-called “family values” versus real family values in the case of parents of Queer children. It’s not an especially fresh subject for drama, either documentary or narrative film — at least two PBS documentaries have already traveled the same path, as well as the surprisingly good Lifetime TV-movie Prayers for Bobby, in which (as does Mary Lou Wallner in this film) a mother drives away her Queer child (a Gay man in Prayers for Bobby, a Lesbian in For the Bible Tells Me So) with a religiously-driven negative reaction to his/her sexuality, then feels guilt-ridden when their Queer child commits suicide and does what she should have done while her kid was still alive: read up on the subject, change her mind and ultimately become a Queer-rights activist.
Though it was in the works before that, For the Bible Tells Me So was inspired by a 2006 protest in Colorado Springs at the headquarters of James Dobson’s Focus on the Family (a loathsome organization that when it’s not bashing Queers and telling their parents they need “reparative therapy” is advocating a really vicious “dare to discipline” attitude towards child-rearing including frequent use of corporal punishment — it’s a wonder any kids raised by parents who follow Dobson’s advice, even the straight ones, end up at all well-adjusted and happy!) and all but one of the families profiled came from people who were involved in that protest. That one was African-American minister couple David and Brenda Poteat (that’s a real name!) and their Lesbian daughter Tonia, included because the film’s director,Daniel Karslake, insisted on having at least one family of color in the mix.
Some of the people in the movie are celebrities — including the controversial Episcopal bishop W. Gene Robinson, the first openly Gay (and sexually active) bishop consecrated by any diocese in the Anglican communion (an act that is still splitting the church apart, as conservative churches and even entire dioceses in the U.S. seek to split off from a U.S. church that countenanced something so “anti-Biblical” and re-affiliate themselves under the supervision of culturally conservative churches in Africa) as well as Chrissy Gephardt and her father, former U.S. Congressmember and Presidential candidate Dick Gephardt. Watching this film was an intense experience for me even though it left me (as usual with writings or movies on this subject) with a profoundly mixed bag of emotions — torn between loving the people who were gradually able to get over their Bible-fueled prejudices and love their children as God, nature, nurture or whatever made them and hating not only the particular religious prejudices that had led them to reject their kids in the first place but the very idea of religion, period.
I grew up in a free-thought home and never set foot in a church until I was well into adulthood — and, I must say, always looked down (and to an extent still do!) on people who believe in all the old superstitions of the Bible and its rival religions simply because they can’t accept the reality of their own deaths and therefore need to believe in a fantasy of immortality as the next best to the real thing. (I can’t see any other reason for the persistence of religious belief, including its appearance in otherwise intelligent and even brilliant people — though I must say that watching a movie like this gives me empathy for the importance other people attach to religion, spirituality and God even while simultaneously angering me about the depths of misery to which that can lead a person who finds out he or she is the “wrong” sort of human being to be accepted as fully righteous and legitimately human in that particular religious tradition.)
The storyline of Mary Lou Wallner and her late daughter Anna — particularly the letters that passed back and forth between them, Anna’s written in longhand in purple ink on lined paper and her mother’s typed precisely because only by depersonalizing it through the machine could she write it at all; Anna’s talking about love and emotional struggle and her mom’s using the condemnatory language she’d heard in church and read in black and white on the pages of the Bible — is not surprisingly the most moving and wrenchingly tragic in the film; the story of Jake Reitan and his parents, Phil and Randy, serves as a sort of counterpoint as they not only get off the anti-Queer judgmental soapbox in time to accept their son before he gets near suicide but ultimately the three Reitans become the first to break the line at Colorado Springs and get arrested in an act of civil disobedience against Dobson’s pustulent organization (the folks who brought us Proposition 8, by the way; the initiative’s principal author and spokesperson, Ron Prentice — whom I tried and failed to get an interview with, by the way — is the California organizer for Focus on the Family and it was in that capacity that he pushed Proposition 8 to the ballot and fended off the activities of a rival Christian-Right group who wanted a more far-reaching measure that would invalidate domestic partnerships and civil unions as well).
I could have asked for more nuance in the movie, less of a dichotomy between “Gay” and “straight” in its assessment of the dramatis personae — after all, W. Gene Robinson was married for some time and had children; and Chrissy Gephardt was also married to a man when she met Anna (a different Anna), the woman who brought her out and who identified herself as dating both women and men — yes, that’s right, in this film as well as in so much other discourse in the Queer community it is bisexuality that is the love that dare not speak its name — and I had mixed feelings about the bizarre cartoon sequence in the middle. It’s done in a deliberate parody of 1950’s “educational” movies and it’s a rather heavy-handed scene in which a homophobe named “Christian” who’s drawn like a grown-up version of Charlie Brown (complete with a zig-zag pattern across the front of his T-shirt) meets a Gay man named “George” and a Lesbian named “Martha” (I’d have liked to know if the use of the names of the famously squabbling straight couple in Gay playwright Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was deliberate) and also hears from a voice-of-God narrator (played by the late Don LaFontaine, one of the leading narrators of movie trailers) reciting statistics, studies and scientific authorities that refute the common assumptions about homosexuality.
Director Karslake was uncomfortable enough with this scene that he almost cut it out of the film and only restored it after a trial screening for three straight Christian couples, from Georgia, Kentucky and Tennessee, at Manhattan’s General Theological Seminary. “The first thing they all mentioned was how much they loved the cartoon, how it gave the film some much needed comic relief, and how much they learned from it,” Karslake said. (At the same time I can’t help but be concerned about the whole idea that scientific “fact” should be determined by popular vote; the American Psychological Association only decided that homosexuality is not a mental illness in 1974, and if for some reason they should reverse themselves and decide that it is again, would that make it true?) One of the film’s executive producers is Michael Huffington, the famous Republican challenger to Senator Dianne Feinstein (who came close to defeating her) who later broke up with his wife Arianna and announced that while he didn’t want to label himself “Gay,” the fact was he’d rather date men; another executive producer, Robert Greenbaum, showed up last night and fielded a few questions (too few, since there was another event in the room right afterwards — a comedy night — and the audience for that was lined up outside clamoring to get in), making the recommendation that people look on the Web for lists of famous Gay and Lesbian people throughout history … and, being the sort of person I am (an inveterate troublemaker even in sympathetic settings!) I spoke up and said most of the so-called “famous Gay and Lesbian people throughout history” that appear on those lists were in fact Bisexual.
As I’ve said before, as a community we’re going through the motions of inclusion with that horrible acronym “LGBT people” but aren’t facing up to the fundamental changes in Queer ideology that would be necessary to incorporate the reality of Bisexual and Transgender people and how their existence challenges the shibboleth that sexual orientations and gender identities are either genetically determined or fixed early on in childhood. For the Bible Tells Me So rightly condemns the so-called “reparative therapy” programs pushed on Queer people and their families by the religious Right and the churches affiliated with it (to the point where conservative churches and their ministers outright tell parents not to accept their Queer kids on the “tough-love” assumption that disapproval from their parents will push them into reparative-therapy programs to seek to be “cured”) but it also buys into the “born that way” notion and, like a lot of other pro-Queer material, profiles people like W. Gene Robinson and Chrissy Gephardt who changed from leading straight lives to Gay or Lesbian ones without acknowledging the possibility that that might also work in the other direction: that a person might live in a same-sex sexual lifestyle and behavior pattern and then spontaneously shift to an opposite-sex one based on their own changes and the people around them (including simply meeting and falling in love with a person of the other gender). We’re right to condemn the use of religious dogma to force people into attempts to change their sexual orientation, but we’re wrong to assume that the Queer-to-straight progression in those who make it on their own, for their own reasons, is somehow less legitimate, less honest, less real than the straight-to-Queer one.
The film was For the Bible Tells Me So, a chilling and moving 2007 documentary about the clash between religion and so-called “family values” versus real family values in the case of parents of Queer children. It’s not an especially fresh subject for drama, either documentary or narrative film — at least two PBS documentaries have already traveled the same path, as well as the surprisingly good Lifetime TV-movie Prayers for Bobby, in which (as does Mary Lou Wallner in this film) a mother drives away her Queer child (a Gay man in Prayers for Bobby, a Lesbian in For the Bible Tells Me So) with a religiously-driven negative reaction to his/her sexuality, then feels guilt-ridden when their Queer child commits suicide and does what she should have done while her kid was still alive: read up on the subject, change her mind and ultimately become a Queer-rights activist.
Though it was in the works before that, For the Bible Tells Me So was inspired by a 2006 protest in Colorado Springs at the headquarters of James Dobson’s Focus on the Family (a loathsome organization that when it’s not bashing Queers and telling their parents they need “reparative therapy” is advocating a really vicious “dare to discipline” attitude towards child-rearing including frequent use of corporal punishment — it’s a wonder any kids raised by parents who follow Dobson’s advice, even the straight ones, end up at all well-adjusted and happy!) and all but one of the families profiled came from people who were involved in that protest. That one was African-American minister couple David and Brenda Poteat (that’s a real name!) and their Lesbian daughter Tonia, included because the film’s director,Daniel Karslake, insisted on having at least one family of color in the mix.
Some of the people in the movie are celebrities — including the controversial Episcopal bishop W. Gene Robinson, the first openly Gay (and sexually active) bishop consecrated by any diocese in the Anglican communion (an act that is still splitting the church apart, as conservative churches and even entire dioceses in the U.S. seek to split off from a U.S. church that countenanced something so “anti-Biblical” and re-affiliate themselves under the supervision of culturally conservative churches in Africa) as well as Chrissy Gephardt and her father, former U.S. Congressmember and Presidential candidate Dick Gephardt. Watching this film was an intense experience for me even though it left me (as usual with writings or movies on this subject) with a profoundly mixed bag of emotions — torn between loving the people who were gradually able to get over their Bible-fueled prejudices and love their children as God, nature, nurture or whatever made them and hating not only the particular religious prejudices that had led them to reject their kids in the first place but the very idea of religion, period.
I grew up in a free-thought home and never set foot in a church until I was well into adulthood — and, I must say, always looked down (and to an extent still do!) on people who believe in all the old superstitions of the Bible and its rival religions simply because they can’t accept the reality of their own deaths and therefore need to believe in a fantasy of immortality as the next best to the real thing. (I can’t see any other reason for the persistence of religious belief, including its appearance in otherwise intelligent and even brilliant people — though I must say that watching a movie like this gives me empathy for the importance other people attach to religion, spirituality and God even while simultaneously angering me about the depths of misery to which that can lead a person who finds out he or she is the “wrong” sort of human being to be accepted as fully righteous and legitimately human in that particular religious tradition.)
The storyline of Mary Lou Wallner and her late daughter Anna — particularly the letters that passed back and forth between them, Anna’s written in longhand in purple ink on lined paper and her mother’s typed precisely because only by depersonalizing it through the machine could she write it at all; Anna’s talking about love and emotional struggle and her mom’s using the condemnatory language she’d heard in church and read in black and white on the pages of the Bible — is not surprisingly the most moving and wrenchingly tragic in the film; the story of Jake Reitan and his parents, Phil and Randy, serves as a sort of counterpoint as they not only get off the anti-Queer judgmental soapbox in time to accept their son before he gets near suicide but ultimately the three Reitans become the first to break the line at Colorado Springs and get arrested in an act of civil disobedience against Dobson’s pustulent organization (the folks who brought us Proposition 8, by the way; the initiative’s principal author and spokesperson, Ron Prentice — whom I tried and failed to get an interview with, by the way — is the California organizer for Focus on the Family and it was in that capacity that he pushed Proposition 8 to the ballot and fended off the activities of a rival Christian-Right group who wanted a more far-reaching measure that would invalidate domestic partnerships and civil unions as well).
I could have asked for more nuance in the movie, less of a dichotomy between “Gay” and “straight” in its assessment of the dramatis personae — after all, W. Gene Robinson was married for some time and had children; and Chrissy Gephardt was also married to a man when she met Anna (a different Anna), the woman who brought her out and who identified herself as dating both women and men — yes, that’s right, in this film as well as in so much other discourse in the Queer community it is bisexuality that is the love that dare not speak its name — and I had mixed feelings about the bizarre cartoon sequence in the middle. It’s done in a deliberate parody of 1950’s “educational” movies and it’s a rather heavy-handed scene in which a homophobe named “Christian” who’s drawn like a grown-up version of Charlie Brown (complete with a zig-zag pattern across the front of his T-shirt) meets a Gay man named “George” and a Lesbian named “Martha” (I’d have liked to know if the use of the names of the famously squabbling straight couple in Gay playwright Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was deliberate) and also hears from a voice-of-God narrator (played by the late Don LaFontaine, one of the leading narrators of movie trailers) reciting statistics, studies and scientific authorities that refute the common assumptions about homosexuality.
Director Karslake was uncomfortable enough with this scene that he almost cut it out of the film and only restored it after a trial screening for three straight Christian couples, from Georgia, Kentucky and Tennessee, at Manhattan’s General Theological Seminary. “The first thing they all mentioned was how much they loved the cartoon, how it gave the film some much needed comic relief, and how much they learned from it,” Karslake said. (At the same time I can’t help but be concerned about the whole idea that scientific “fact” should be determined by popular vote; the American Psychological Association only decided that homosexuality is not a mental illness in 1974, and if for some reason they should reverse themselves and decide that it is again, would that make it true?) One of the film’s executive producers is Michael Huffington, the famous Republican challenger to Senator Dianne Feinstein (who came close to defeating her) who later broke up with his wife Arianna and announced that while he didn’t want to label himself “Gay,” the fact was he’d rather date men; another executive producer, Robert Greenbaum, showed up last night and fielded a few questions (too few, since there was another event in the room right afterwards — a comedy night — and the audience for that was lined up outside clamoring to get in), making the recommendation that people look on the Web for lists of famous Gay and Lesbian people throughout history … and, being the sort of person I am (an inveterate troublemaker even in sympathetic settings!) I spoke up and said most of the so-called “famous Gay and Lesbian people throughout history” that appear on those lists were in fact Bisexual.
As I’ve said before, as a community we’re going through the motions of inclusion with that horrible acronym “LGBT people” but aren’t facing up to the fundamental changes in Queer ideology that would be necessary to incorporate the reality of Bisexual and Transgender people and how their existence challenges the shibboleth that sexual orientations and gender identities are either genetically determined or fixed early on in childhood. For the Bible Tells Me So rightly condemns the so-called “reparative therapy” programs pushed on Queer people and their families by the religious Right and the churches affiliated with it (to the point where conservative churches and their ministers outright tell parents not to accept their Queer kids on the “tough-love” assumption that disapproval from their parents will push them into reparative-therapy programs to seek to be “cured”) but it also buys into the “born that way” notion and, like a lot of other pro-Queer material, profiles people like W. Gene Robinson and Chrissy Gephardt who changed from leading straight lives to Gay or Lesbian ones without acknowledging the possibility that that might also work in the other direction: that a person might live in a same-sex sexual lifestyle and behavior pattern and then spontaneously shift to an opposite-sex one based on their own changes and the people around them (including simply meeting and falling in love with a person of the other gender). We’re right to condemn the use of religious dogma to force people into attempts to change their sexual orientation, but we’re wrong to assume that the Queer-to-straight progression in those who make it on their own, for their own reasons, is somehow less legitimate, less honest, less real than the straight-to-Queer one.
The Astral Factor (Invisible Strangler) (Jordan/Lyon Productions, 1976)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I decided to pick another entry from the two discs Charles downloaded (five movies each) from the 50 Sci-Fi Classics collection online since we’d had good luck with the one we’d watched the night before, Bride of the Gorilla. Mistake! The movie we ended up watching was The Astral Factor, also known (and listed on imdb.com) as Invisible Strangler, a 95-minute made-for-TV loser from 1976 in which a cute blond prisoner, Roger Sands (Frank Ashmore), suddenly develops the ability to make himself invisible and practice telekinesis (i.e., moving objects about without touching them) by sheer mental energy.
He uses this skill first to intimidate, and nearly murder, a Black fellow con and then, more reasonably, to escape (he’s able to get the prison doors to open themselves and the keys to move through mid-air and lock the guards in the cells, while he himself becomes invisible and uses that power to sneak out of the prison), and afterwards to resume the career as a serial killer of women that got him into prison in the first place. (The official synopsis for the film says that he acquired these abilities through acquiring books on paranormal phenomena from the prison library and using them to train himself in the techniques; though we see a cache of books spill on the floor of his cell, this is otherwise not made clear or even hinted at in the film itself.)
The cast list is a bit more impressive than the norm for these sorts of productions; the top-billed actor is Robert Foxworth, playing Lt. Charles Barrett, the lead investigator for the police in their efforts to catch the guy (he’s not bad looking, though the honor of best-looking male in the film is a split decision between Ashmore as the invisible psycho and Mark Slade as Det. Holt, who’s supposed to be Barrett’s goofus assistant but seems pretty competent to me); his wife is played by future Hart to Hart star Stefanie Powers; Elke Sommer and Cesare Danova are listed as “guest stars”; and one of the victims is Sue Lyon, who must have regarded this role as a major comedown after having worked for Stanley Kubrick on Lolita 14 years earlier!
But it’s one of those movies that not only is boring in and of itself (the screenplay was by Arthur C. Pierce based on an “original” story by Earle Lyon, and the director of record was John Florea, though according to imdb.com he had uncredited help at the helm from writer Pierce and Gene Fowler, Jr.) but also sucks off too many other truly great movies, notably the 1933 classic The Invisible Man. I wondered how John Florea and company were able to direct the women who play the victims of the invisible strangler — and in particular how they got them to pantomime being strangled by an invisible assailant — but then I wondered the same thing about James Whale working with Walter Brennan, Una O’Connor and the other great character actors who ran afoul of his invisible psycho.
The filmmakers even had the chutzpah to steal the marvelous scene in the Whale film in which the carefully laid plans to ambush the Invisible Man in the home of a person he’s threatened to kill are undone by a stray cat climbing the wall around the victim’s home and triggering the trap — only in this movie, instead of a cat, it’s two stray birds. Lyon and Pierce also steal from another genuine classic, Psycho, in having the villain be a young man who first murdered his mother and then fell under her spell, committing further murders in the illusion that his new victims are also his mother and he’s punishing her once again for having abandoned him (shown in black-and-white flashbacks the filmmakers prove utterly incapable of integrating into the main action with anything remotely resembling credibility or continuity). I don’t remember seeing this film on the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 list, but it certainly would have deserved their “treatment”!
I decided to pick another entry from the two discs Charles downloaded (five movies each) from the 50 Sci-Fi Classics collection online since we’d had good luck with the one we’d watched the night before, Bride of the Gorilla. Mistake! The movie we ended up watching was The Astral Factor, also known (and listed on imdb.com) as Invisible Strangler, a 95-minute made-for-TV loser from 1976 in which a cute blond prisoner, Roger Sands (Frank Ashmore), suddenly develops the ability to make himself invisible and practice telekinesis (i.e., moving objects about without touching them) by sheer mental energy.
He uses this skill first to intimidate, and nearly murder, a Black fellow con and then, more reasonably, to escape (he’s able to get the prison doors to open themselves and the keys to move through mid-air and lock the guards in the cells, while he himself becomes invisible and uses that power to sneak out of the prison), and afterwards to resume the career as a serial killer of women that got him into prison in the first place. (The official synopsis for the film says that he acquired these abilities through acquiring books on paranormal phenomena from the prison library and using them to train himself in the techniques; though we see a cache of books spill on the floor of his cell, this is otherwise not made clear or even hinted at in the film itself.)
The cast list is a bit more impressive than the norm for these sorts of productions; the top-billed actor is Robert Foxworth, playing Lt. Charles Barrett, the lead investigator for the police in their efforts to catch the guy (he’s not bad looking, though the honor of best-looking male in the film is a split decision between Ashmore as the invisible psycho and Mark Slade as Det. Holt, who’s supposed to be Barrett’s goofus assistant but seems pretty competent to me); his wife is played by future Hart to Hart star Stefanie Powers; Elke Sommer and Cesare Danova are listed as “guest stars”; and one of the victims is Sue Lyon, who must have regarded this role as a major comedown after having worked for Stanley Kubrick on Lolita 14 years earlier!
But it’s one of those movies that not only is boring in and of itself (the screenplay was by Arthur C. Pierce based on an “original” story by Earle Lyon, and the director of record was John Florea, though according to imdb.com he had uncredited help at the helm from writer Pierce and Gene Fowler, Jr.) but also sucks off too many other truly great movies, notably the 1933 classic The Invisible Man. I wondered how John Florea and company were able to direct the women who play the victims of the invisible strangler — and in particular how they got them to pantomime being strangled by an invisible assailant — but then I wondered the same thing about James Whale working with Walter Brennan, Una O’Connor and the other great character actors who ran afoul of his invisible psycho.
The filmmakers even had the chutzpah to steal the marvelous scene in the Whale film in which the carefully laid plans to ambush the Invisible Man in the home of a person he’s threatened to kill are undone by a stray cat climbing the wall around the victim’s home and triggering the trap — only in this movie, instead of a cat, it’s two stray birds. Lyon and Pierce also steal from another genuine classic, Psycho, in having the villain be a young man who first murdered his mother and then fell under her spell, committing further murders in the illusion that his new victims are also his mother and he’s punishing her once again for having abandoned him (shown in black-and-white flashbacks the filmmakers prove utterly incapable of integrating into the main action with anything remotely resembling credibility or continuity). I don’t remember seeing this film on the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 list, but it certainly would have deserved their “treatment”!
Bride of the Gorilla (Jack Broder Productions, 1951)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Bride of the Gorilla, which Charles and I watched the night before The Astral Factor, actually proved to be a pretty good movie — not a deathless horror classic, and certainly in thrall to earlier, better films that had involved the same personnel, but quite entertaining, well worth watching and a movie the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 folks also seem to have left alone, perhaps because even they realized it didn’t deserve their ridicule.
The stars are Barbara Payton as Dina Van Gelder, frustrated wife of Klaas Van Gelder (Paul Cavanagh), who’s stuck her on his rubber plantation in the Amazonas [sic] and left her miserable and in search of alternate male companionship; Lon Chaney, Jr. as Police Commissioner Taro of the Itmas Valley region that borders the Amazonas, who delivers the opening narration over a traveling shot of the Van Gelder plantation house in ruins; and the two men who are offering Dina the alternate companionship she isn’t getting from her sniveling weakling of a husband: plantation overseer Barney Chavez (Raymond Burr) and in-house psychiatrist (what on earth is he doing there?) Dr. Viet (Tom Conway). It’s hard to believe that, given her druthers, Barbara Payton would pick Raymond Burr over Tom Conway, but she does, starting a clandestine affair with him that she hopes will lead to her departure from the plantation, especially since her husband has decided to fire him.
Instead Barney decides to grab both the plantation and Dina by offing her husband — he takes him for a walk in the jungle, then trips him while he’s in the path of a poisonous snake, and the snake ex machina finishes him off — marrying her and then, much to her disappointment, announcing that he’s going to stay on at the plantation as the owner and she’ll have to remain there with him. This pisses off the native servant girl, Larina (Carol Varga), who goes to her grandmother Al-long (Gisela Werbisek) to complain — and grandma, either because Barney jilted her granddaughter for the white girl or she’s upset that he killed Klaas, puts a curse on Barney that will change him into a gorilla.
Bride of the Gorilla, despite the risible title producers Edward Leven and Jack Broder saddled it with (the working title was The Face in the Water, which is more evocative and suspenseful but would probably have been a less effective selling tool to the audience for a film like this), is actually a pretty good movie, thanks largely to the efforts of a good cast and writer-director Curt Siodmak. It’s a pretty obvious recycling job from movies both Siodmak and his cast members had done better in the past — most notably The Wolf Man (though it’s jarring to see Raymond Burr playing the were-gorilla, especially with Lon Chaney, Jr. appearing elsewhere in the cast, and frankly this film might have been even better had they switched roles), from whom Siodmak borrows not only the central character but also the Maria Ouspenskaya role (it’s quite obvious that Werbisek is channeling Ouspenskaya as the elderly female oracle!) and even a few scenes, notably one in which Raymond Burr’s arms suddenly start going dark, his first stage of transition into gorilla-hood, just as he’s about to sign the contract to sell the plantation (which he quickly decides not to do anyway) — he had to cope with this shit without even the warning of a full moon to give him a heads-up that he was about to change!
Val Lewton’s I Walked with a Zombie is also evoked, not only by Tom Conway’s presence in the cast but by some striking visual quotes, notably one of Barbara Payton standing straight and tall in the shadows of the half-lit jungle at night. Though derivative as all get-out and clearly inferior to the films it’s derivative of, Bride of the Gorilla is nonetheless a legitimately entertaining and chilling 64 minutes’ worth of viewing time; Siodmak’s direction is genuinely creative, seeking unusual camera angles and getting the most out of cinematographer Charles Van Enger’s evocative, chiaroscuro work — and his cast is coolly competent and, in Payton’s case, better than that; playing close to her real-life character — the slut who got off on playing the men in her life against each other — Payton creates a convincing update of the silent-era vamp and gives quite a bit of life to this film.
Bride of the Gorilla, which Charles and I watched the night before The Astral Factor, actually proved to be a pretty good movie — not a deathless horror classic, and certainly in thrall to earlier, better films that had involved the same personnel, but quite entertaining, well worth watching and a movie the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 folks also seem to have left alone, perhaps because even they realized it didn’t deserve their ridicule.
The stars are Barbara Payton as Dina Van Gelder, frustrated wife of Klaas Van Gelder (Paul Cavanagh), who’s stuck her on his rubber plantation in the Amazonas [sic] and left her miserable and in search of alternate male companionship; Lon Chaney, Jr. as Police Commissioner Taro of the Itmas Valley region that borders the Amazonas, who delivers the opening narration over a traveling shot of the Van Gelder plantation house in ruins; and the two men who are offering Dina the alternate companionship she isn’t getting from her sniveling weakling of a husband: plantation overseer Barney Chavez (Raymond Burr) and in-house psychiatrist (what on earth is he doing there?) Dr. Viet (Tom Conway). It’s hard to believe that, given her druthers, Barbara Payton would pick Raymond Burr over Tom Conway, but she does, starting a clandestine affair with him that she hopes will lead to her departure from the plantation, especially since her husband has decided to fire him.
Instead Barney decides to grab both the plantation and Dina by offing her husband — he takes him for a walk in the jungle, then trips him while he’s in the path of a poisonous snake, and the snake ex machina finishes him off — marrying her and then, much to her disappointment, announcing that he’s going to stay on at the plantation as the owner and she’ll have to remain there with him. This pisses off the native servant girl, Larina (Carol Varga), who goes to her grandmother Al-long (Gisela Werbisek) to complain — and grandma, either because Barney jilted her granddaughter for the white girl or she’s upset that he killed Klaas, puts a curse on Barney that will change him into a gorilla.
Bride of the Gorilla, despite the risible title producers Edward Leven and Jack Broder saddled it with (the working title was The Face in the Water, which is more evocative and suspenseful but would probably have been a less effective selling tool to the audience for a film like this), is actually a pretty good movie, thanks largely to the efforts of a good cast and writer-director Curt Siodmak. It’s a pretty obvious recycling job from movies both Siodmak and his cast members had done better in the past — most notably The Wolf Man (though it’s jarring to see Raymond Burr playing the were-gorilla, especially with Lon Chaney, Jr. appearing elsewhere in the cast, and frankly this film might have been even better had they switched roles), from whom Siodmak borrows not only the central character but also the Maria Ouspenskaya role (it’s quite obvious that Werbisek is channeling Ouspenskaya as the elderly female oracle!) and even a few scenes, notably one in which Raymond Burr’s arms suddenly start going dark, his first stage of transition into gorilla-hood, just as he’s about to sign the contract to sell the plantation (which he quickly decides not to do anyway) — he had to cope with this shit without even the warning of a full moon to give him a heads-up that he was about to change!
Val Lewton’s I Walked with a Zombie is also evoked, not only by Tom Conway’s presence in the cast but by some striking visual quotes, notably one of Barbara Payton standing straight and tall in the shadows of the half-lit jungle at night. Though derivative as all get-out and clearly inferior to the films it’s derivative of, Bride of the Gorilla is nonetheless a legitimately entertaining and chilling 64 minutes’ worth of viewing time; Siodmak’s direction is genuinely creative, seeking unusual camera angles and getting the most out of cinematographer Charles Van Enger’s evocative, chiaroscuro work — and his cast is coolly competent and, in Payton’s case, better than that; playing close to her real-life character — the slut who got off on playing the men in her life against each other — Payton creates a convincing update of the silent-era vamp and gives quite a bit of life to this film.
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