by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film last night was The Black Cat, a Universal horror-comedy made in 1941 and not to be confused with the marvelously surreal (it was a spacey script to begin with and got even more confusing when first the American and then the British film censors got through with it!) 1934 horror film The Black Cat, also from Universal, starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. Karloff isn’t in this one, but Lugosi is — playing a manservant, as he would in the later Night Monster, though this time in thick makeup that seems to have been intended to make him look like a Gypsy and therefore justify his ineradicable Hungarian accent. The plot of the 1941 The Black Cat has nothing to do with that of the 1934 version, and neither has anything to do with the plot of the Edgar Allan Poe short story “The Black Cat” which both films claim as their inspiration.
The 1941 The Black Cat is that old familiar chestnut about the greedy relatives waiting impatiently for the family patriarch to die — only in this case it’s a family matriarch, Henrietta Winslow (Cecelia Loftus), who may be in a wheelchair and on death’s door but she’s still determined to give her family members a hard time as they sit around her living room waiting and hoping for her to croak soon. Henrietta is a mad eccentric who built a huge mansion and lived in it alone except for a pride of cats; she took them in, gave them food and houseroom, and built a special crematorium in her backyard (accessible directly from the house through a secret passage that, like most such devices in movies, is only discovered by accident midway through) whereby she could cremate her cats when they died. What’s more, she made the oven big enough to cremate a human, so she could be disposed of in the same way as her cats when the time came. The only wrinkle was that she absolutely forbade any black cats on the premises because she considered them harbingers of death — though she built a statue of a black cat in her crematorium and a black cat has sneaked onto the premises anyway and made itself at home with the other cats.
She ultimately gets stabbed with a knitting needle in the crematorium, after she’s read her will but before she’s revealed that she’s put in a codicil that the money she’s willed her family members will only be paid out once her maidservant Abigail (Gale Sondergaard, who plays in such a superb battle-axe fashion she makes Judith Anderson in Rebecca — a part Sondergaard was actually considered for — seem warm and fuzzy by comparison) — and the cats all die. The family members are a bit hard to get straight — they include her grandson Montague Hartley (Basil Rathbone), his brother Richard (Alan Ladd, billed 11th in the original credits but second in the Realart reissue trailer also included in this DVD — obviously they moved him up after the explosive success of This Gun for Hire made him a superstar at Paramount), Montague’s wife Myrna (Gladys Cooper), a grandson from a different son-in-law named Stanley Borden (John Eldredge as the milquetoast, as usual) whose father was a brilliant architect who passed on none of his talent to his son, and a few other miscellaneous descendants: Elaine Winslow (Anne Gwynne), whom Henrietta wills the bulk of her estate because “you’re the least bad of all of them,” and Margaret Gordon (Claire Dodd).
But the real stars of the film are the ostensible comic-relief players, distant relative “Gil” Smith (Broderick Crawford), who’s hoping to sell Henrietta’s house and all its belongings; and Mr. Penny (Hugh Herbert), the person he’s hoping to sell it to, who comes along with a little hand drill to put holes in the furniture and call them wormholes so they’ll be worth more in the antiques market. Herbert is a good deal funnier than he was in some of his Warners vehicles but he still outwears his welcome pretty quickly, and in turns of screen time the oppressive presence of Broderick Crawford makes him the real star of the film, no matter what it says in the billing. At least two of the writers, Robert Lees and Frederick Rinaldo, were also better known for comedy (they were industriously cranking out the Abbott and Costello vehicles for Universal at the same time this was made, and producer Burt Kelly was also supervising A&C) — the other writers were Eric Taylor and Robert Neville, and the director was Albert S. Rogell, not exactly atop the “A” list of the time but still a better-known filmmaker than most of the hacks who churned out these things for Universal.
The filmmakers were obviously trying for the same marvelously nervy mixture of comedy and horror James Whale and his writers, Benn W. Levy and R. C. Sherriff, hit in the 1932 film The Old Dark House, and though they don’t come anywhere near hailing distance of Whale’s masterpiece the 1941 The Black Cat is a charming little film that tweaks a few of the genre conventions — even though Lugosi is wasted, as he usually was on his rare excursions back to the major studios by 1941, and Rathbone could have made more of an impression with more screen time but still acts the scenes he does have with his usual power and authority. At one point Broderick Crawford’s character says of Rathbone’s, “He thinks he’s Sherlock Holmes” — an in-joke reference to Rathbone’s two films as Holmes for 20th Century-Fox in 1939 (The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes) and possibly also an advance promotion for his upcoming series of 12 Holmes films for Universal.
The 1941 Black Cat is hardly in the same league as the marvelous 1934 film of the same title, but on its own it’s suitably light-hearted (despite the murders and the mild scare scenes) and entertaining — and Orson Welles saw it when it first came out and decided, on the basis of the marvelous chiaroscuro lighting and atmospheric camera angles, to hire its cinematographer, Stanley Cortez, to shoot The Magnificent Ambersons (also a film about a dysfunctional family inhabiting a crumbling old Victorian mansion). Still, there have been better “takes” on the situation of a bunch of greedy relatives with their hands out awaiting the death of a rich person in their family — and it did occur to me that as long as Universal wanted to do a dark comedy around this situation, they might have been better advised to buy the film rights to Puccini’s opera Gianni Schicchi and put their legendary comedy star, W. C. Fields, in the lead!
Monday, November 30, 2009
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Angels & Demons (Sony/Columbia, 2009)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I had a chance to show Angels & Demons, the much-ballyhooed follow-up to The Da Vinci Code — likewise based on a novel by Dan Brown featuring the character of Harvard “symbologist” Robert Langdon messing around in a mystery involving the Roman Catholic Church. (Just about everything written about these movies or the books they’re based on has taken pains to point out that “symbology” is a nonexistent academic discipline Dan Brown made up for his fiction — presumably lest credulous students flock to colleges asking to major in it.) I read Angels and Demons before I read The Da Vinci Code — though after the sensational success of The Da Vinci Code had made Dan Brown a worldwide household name — and by chance I happened to be reading it, a novel set around a conclave of the College of Cardinals to elect a new Pope, just as John Paul II finally died and a real conclave occurred, though it passed with far less melodrama than the one depicted here: it elected Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, former head of the modern-day descendant of the Holy Inquisition, in one ballot.
Anyway, Angels and Demons not only seemed to me a better book than The Da Vinci Code, it seemed a better movie as well — even though there’s an annoying bit of dialogue early on that turned it from a Da Vinci Code prequel into a sequel. Though many of the creative principals remained the same — director Ron Howard, producer Brian Grazer, writer Akiva Goldsman (bolstered this time around by David Koepp) and star Tom Hanks — Angels and Demons came off as a more successful thriller, better paced and lacking the biggest weakness of Da Vinci Code the movie — the deadly seriousness with which the material was presented and the resulting slow, stately pace as if Howard and company were filming a literary masterpiece instead of an engaging potboiler.
Well, this time around Howard discovered (or rediscovered) suspense pacing and created an exciting, relentless thriller out of Brown’s plot: the Pope has mysteriously died and a secret sect that claims to be reviving the Illuminati (actually an 18th century organization founded by Adam Weishaupt and a favorite of conspiracy-mongers ever since) has kidnapped the “Preferiti,” the four Cardinals who had been the favorites in the Papal election. One of the inspirations for this book was John Langdon, an artist who managed to create several Gothic-lettered “ambigrams” — meaning a piece of writing that looks the same upside down as it does right-side up — with the word “Illuminati” as well as the four classical elements: “Earth,” “Fire,” “Water” and “Air.” (Brown got the last name of his central character from his artist friend.) The gimmick is that the Illuminati plan to murder all four kidnapped cardinals, one each hour from 8 to 11 p.m., and then at midnight they plan to detonate a nuclear device consisting of pure antimatter and therefore vaporize the entire Vatican and thus destroy the church worldwide.
They acquired the antimatter from the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, and the chief scientist in charge of the project is murdered and his assistant Vittoria Vetra (Ayelet Zurer) joins forces with Langdon in a chase across Rome despite the opposition of the Swiss Guards, the official force guarding the Pope (basically to him what the Secret Service is to the President) and the apparent assistant of the Camerlengo (Ewan McGregor), who was Italian in the book but is Irish here. The Camerlengo is the chief assistant to the Pope and takes over the administration of Vatican City for the nine days after a pope’s death that the College of Cardinals meets in secret session to pick his replacement. He’s easily the most engaging character in the film (as he was in the book as well) — his only real competition is Cardinal Strauss (Armin Mueller-Stahl), the avuncular chair of the conclave and one who agrees to take that post to beg off on any papal ambitions himself — and therefore anyone familiar with Dan Brown’s fiction and its recurring patterns will just know that he’s going to turn out to be the bad guy at the end (though Charles guessed it would be Cardinal Strauss who turned out to be the bad guy and mastermind of the whole plot).
It seems that after having been taken in by the previous Pope when he was still a child, the Camerlengo grew up in the Vatican with the Pope as essentially a father figure — and served him until he was ready to make an accommodation with the scientists doing research at the Large Hadron Collider and accept the so-called “God particle, “ the Higgs-Boson particle that supposedly is what causes things to have mass, not as a threat to Catholic belief but as the final proof from the scientific world that God indeed exists. To the Camerlengo, that’s heresy, so he kills his Papal benefactor and hatches a plot to take over the church himself by creating the illusion that the Illuminati have reorganized and the church is at war with them; he will eliminate the four principal competitors to the papacy, stage a spectacular last-minute rescue (when the antimatter bomb is found, he takes it up in a helicopter and then bails out, so the bomb will explode safely in mid-sky) and get himself elected Pope by acclamation, whereupon he’ll lead a new Counter-Reformation aimed at extirpating any connection or hint of a peace between religion and science.
As a plot line, it’s a perfectly serviceable premise for a thriller even though it’s hardly any more than that — like The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons is a simple adventure tale masquerading as a meditation on God and man’s place in the universe — but it’s well done, it’s engaging, it’s (faintly) credible within the conventions of the genre and, though there are a few risible moments, overall it’s a much better movie than The Da Vinci Code: more engaging, more exciting and simply more fun.
I had a chance to show Angels & Demons, the much-ballyhooed follow-up to The Da Vinci Code — likewise based on a novel by Dan Brown featuring the character of Harvard “symbologist” Robert Langdon messing around in a mystery involving the Roman Catholic Church. (Just about everything written about these movies or the books they’re based on has taken pains to point out that “symbology” is a nonexistent academic discipline Dan Brown made up for his fiction — presumably lest credulous students flock to colleges asking to major in it.) I read Angels and Demons before I read The Da Vinci Code — though after the sensational success of The Da Vinci Code had made Dan Brown a worldwide household name — and by chance I happened to be reading it, a novel set around a conclave of the College of Cardinals to elect a new Pope, just as John Paul II finally died and a real conclave occurred, though it passed with far less melodrama than the one depicted here: it elected Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, former head of the modern-day descendant of the Holy Inquisition, in one ballot.
Anyway, Angels and Demons not only seemed to me a better book than The Da Vinci Code, it seemed a better movie as well — even though there’s an annoying bit of dialogue early on that turned it from a Da Vinci Code prequel into a sequel. Though many of the creative principals remained the same — director Ron Howard, producer Brian Grazer, writer Akiva Goldsman (bolstered this time around by David Koepp) and star Tom Hanks — Angels and Demons came off as a more successful thriller, better paced and lacking the biggest weakness of Da Vinci Code the movie — the deadly seriousness with which the material was presented and the resulting slow, stately pace as if Howard and company were filming a literary masterpiece instead of an engaging potboiler.
Well, this time around Howard discovered (or rediscovered) suspense pacing and created an exciting, relentless thriller out of Brown’s plot: the Pope has mysteriously died and a secret sect that claims to be reviving the Illuminati (actually an 18th century organization founded by Adam Weishaupt and a favorite of conspiracy-mongers ever since) has kidnapped the “Preferiti,” the four Cardinals who had been the favorites in the Papal election. One of the inspirations for this book was John Langdon, an artist who managed to create several Gothic-lettered “ambigrams” — meaning a piece of writing that looks the same upside down as it does right-side up — with the word “Illuminati” as well as the four classical elements: “Earth,” “Fire,” “Water” and “Air.” (Brown got the last name of his central character from his artist friend.) The gimmick is that the Illuminati plan to murder all four kidnapped cardinals, one each hour from 8 to 11 p.m., and then at midnight they plan to detonate a nuclear device consisting of pure antimatter and therefore vaporize the entire Vatican and thus destroy the church worldwide.
They acquired the antimatter from the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland, and the chief scientist in charge of the project is murdered and his assistant Vittoria Vetra (Ayelet Zurer) joins forces with Langdon in a chase across Rome despite the opposition of the Swiss Guards, the official force guarding the Pope (basically to him what the Secret Service is to the President) and the apparent assistant of the Camerlengo (Ewan McGregor), who was Italian in the book but is Irish here. The Camerlengo is the chief assistant to the Pope and takes over the administration of Vatican City for the nine days after a pope’s death that the College of Cardinals meets in secret session to pick his replacement. He’s easily the most engaging character in the film (as he was in the book as well) — his only real competition is Cardinal Strauss (Armin Mueller-Stahl), the avuncular chair of the conclave and one who agrees to take that post to beg off on any papal ambitions himself — and therefore anyone familiar with Dan Brown’s fiction and its recurring patterns will just know that he’s going to turn out to be the bad guy at the end (though Charles guessed it would be Cardinal Strauss who turned out to be the bad guy and mastermind of the whole plot).
It seems that after having been taken in by the previous Pope when he was still a child, the Camerlengo grew up in the Vatican with the Pope as essentially a father figure — and served him until he was ready to make an accommodation with the scientists doing research at the Large Hadron Collider and accept the so-called “God particle, “ the Higgs-Boson particle that supposedly is what causes things to have mass, not as a threat to Catholic belief but as the final proof from the scientific world that God indeed exists. To the Camerlengo, that’s heresy, so he kills his Papal benefactor and hatches a plot to take over the church himself by creating the illusion that the Illuminati have reorganized and the church is at war with them; he will eliminate the four principal competitors to the papacy, stage a spectacular last-minute rescue (when the antimatter bomb is found, he takes it up in a helicopter and then bails out, so the bomb will explode safely in mid-sky) and get himself elected Pope by acclamation, whereupon he’ll lead a new Counter-Reformation aimed at extirpating any connection or hint of a peace between religion and science.
As a plot line, it’s a perfectly serviceable premise for a thriller even though it’s hardly any more than that — like The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons is a simple adventure tale masquerading as a meditation on God and man’s place in the universe — but it’s well done, it’s engaging, it’s (faintly) credible within the conventions of the genre and, though there are a few risible moments, overall it’s a much better movie than The Da Vinci Code: more engaging, more exciting and simply more fun.
Road House (20th Century-Fox, 1948)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last Wednesday night Charles and I watched two movies, one from a recent DVD purchase and one I’d recorded off TCM the same night. The new recording was Road House, a pretty good 1948 film noir about the rivalry between long-time friends Jefty (the odd first name is short for “Jefferson T.”) Robbins (Richard Widmark) and Pete Morgan (Cornel Wilde), co-owners of Jefty’s Road House, an odd establishment in a small town called Elton, 15 miles from the Canadian border (screenwriter/producer Edward Chodorov, adapting an “original” story by Margaret Gruen and Oscar Saul, carefully tells us Elton is 15 miles from the Canadian border but omits what U.S. state it’s in), and the falling-out between these old friends — not only have they known each other literally since boyhood, but Jefty actually took Pete in after they served together in World War II and allowed him to live in the road house as well as co-own and co-manage it. All that changes when Jefty hires singer/pianist Lily Stevens (Ida Lupino, top-billed and so hard-boiled one suspects you could strike a match on her face) for $250 a week for six weeks — twice her usual going rate — with the obvious intention of getting into her pants.
The first half-hour of Road House, directed by Jean Negulesco at 20th Century-Fox just after he had been fired by Jack Warner (ironically after having had the biggest success of his career to that time, Johnny Belinda — just as Warner fired John Huston after The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Key Largo; those films may have made money, but Warners’ number one grosser in 1948 was Doris Day’s film debut, Romance on the High Seas, and Warner decided that melodrama and noir were out and staked the future of his studio on more musical vehicles for Day) and with two other Warners refugees involved, studio head Darryl F. Zanuck and star Ida Lupino.
In his interview with Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg for the 1969 book The Celluloid Muse, Negulesco recalled that when he handed him the script for Road House, Zanuck told him, “This is a bad script. Three directors have refused it. They don’t know what they’re doing, because it’s quite good. Remember those pictures we used to make at Warner Bros., with Pat O’Brien and Jimmy Cagney, in which every time the action flagged we staged a fight and every time a man passed a girl she’d adjust her stocking or something, trying to be sexy? That’s the kind of picture we have to have with Road House. Now take it and do it like that.” Negulesco didn’t quite catch the insouciance of the Cagney-O’Brien buddy pictures (though Zanuck’s remark is indicative that he saw Widmark as another Cagney type, able to imbue psychopathology with a fascinating overlay of charm and a bad-guy actor who could also be used as a good-guy action hero, as he’d be in Panic in the Streets two years later), mainly because it was 1948 instead of the mid-1930’s and the moment for such high-spirited male-bonding pictures had passed and the Zeitgeist had got darker, at least in the movie world.
For the first half-hour Road House shines, mainly on the strength of Chodorov’s hard-boiled dialogue (especially for Lupino), and while it sags a bit in the middle it picks up again in the final third, when Jefty finds out just when he’s about to propose to Lily that she’s really in love with Pete, and he wreaks an unusual revenge on Pete: he frames him for stealing $2,600 from the road house’s weekly receipts (he admits to taking the $600 he was owed as a partner, but no more) and gets Pete paroled into his custody, thereby turning Pete into a virtual slave — and as the final reels progress Jefty gallops towards total psychopathology and threatens the lives of both Pete and Lily until Lily steals his pistol and shoots him in self-defense just as Jefty is about to crush her with a boulder.
Among the interesting attractions of Road House are Ida Lupino’s non-vocals — she can’t sing in the usual sense but she can croak out songs like “One for My Baby” and “Again” (written by the film’s musical director, Lionel Newman, with lyrics by one Dorcas Cochran, and like “The Four Winds and the Seven Seas” it was a hit for Vic Damone but was sung far better by Mel Tormé) with just the right sort of world-weariness and borderline competence one would expect from a singer at the level of talent and status in the business the script tells us she is — even though Celeste Holm had the second female lead (Susan, who works at the road house and has an unrequited crush on Pete even though she’s enough of a good sport to help Pete and Lily get together at the end) and I could readily imagine her thinking, “I was in Oklahoma!, one of the most successful musicals of all time, and I have to listen to Ida Lupino get all the songs?” I was also amused by one particularly imaginative use of music; in one scene Lily and Pete are hanging out in a boat on the lake near the road house, and as they listen to the radio Lily recalls that her mom wanted her to be an opera singer and that ambition got dashed when she suddenly lost her voice — and the piece on the soundtrack is “Elsa’s Dream” (“Einsam in trüben Tagen”) from Wagner’s Lohengrin, appropriate because like Elsa, Lily is hoping for a knight-like figure who will love her and get her out of her virtual enslavement to the bad guy.
About the only real weakness in Road House is the casting of Cornel Wilde — he’s a boring actor who never took to film noir and the incandescence of Richard Widmark (oddly billed fourth, even after his great success in Kiss of Death) and Ida Lupino makes him seem even worse by comparison. I can’t help wishing they could have got someone more to the noir manner born — someone like Robert Mitchum, Alan Ladd or even Dick Powell — instead of Wilde, who seemed to have used up all his great moments when he played Chopin.
Last Wednesday night Charles and I watched two movies, one from a recent DVD purchase and one I’d recorded off TCM the same night. The new recording was Road House, a pretty good 1948 film noir about the rivalry between long-time friends Jefty (the odd first name is short for “Jefferson T.”) Robbins (Richard Widmark) and Pete Morgan (Cornel Wilde), co-owners of Jefty’s Road House, an odd establishment in a small town called Elton, 15 miles from the Canadian border (screenwriter/producer Edward Chodorov, adapting an “original” story by Margaret Gruen and Oscar Saul, carefully tells us Elton is 15 miles from the Canadian border but omits what U.S. state it’s in), and the falling-out between these old friends — not only have they known each other literally since boyhood, but Jefty actually took Pete in after they served together in World War II and allowed him to live in the road house as well as co-own and co-manage it. All that changes when Jefty hires singer/pianist Lily Stevens (Ida Lupino, top-billed and so hard-boiled one suspects you could strike a match on her face) for $250 a week for six weeks — twice her usual going rate — with the obvious intention of getting into her pants.
The first half-hour of Road House, directed by Jean Negulesco at 20th Century-Fox just after he had been fired by Jack Warner (ironically after having had the biggest success of his career to that time, Johnny Belinda — just as Warner fired John Huston after The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Key Largo; those films may have made money, but Warners’ number one grosser in 1948 was Doris Day’s film debut, Romance on the High Seas, and Warner decided that melodrama and noir were out and staked the future of his studio on more musical vehicles for Day) and with two other Warners refugees involved, studio head Darryl F. Zanuck and star Ida Lupino.
In his interview with Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg for the 1969 book The Celluloid Muse, Negulesco recalled that when he handed him the script for Road House, Zanuck told him, “This is a bad script. Three directors have refused it. They don’t know what they’re doing, because it’s quite good. Remember those pictures we used to make at Warner Bros., with Pat O’Brien and Jimmy Cagney, in which every time the action flagged we staged a fight and every time a man passed a girl she’d adjust her stocking or something, trying to be sexy? That’s the kind of picture we have to have with Road House. Now take it and do it like that.” Negulesco didn’t quite catch the insouciance of the Cagney-O’Brien buddy pictures (though Zanuck’s remark is indicative that he saw Widmark as another Cagney type, able to imbue psychopathology with a fascinating overlay of charm and a bad-guy actor who could also be used as a good-guy action hero, as he’d be in Panic in the Streets two years later), mainly because it was 1948 instead of the mid-1930’s and the moment for such high-spirited male-bonding pictures had passed and the Zeitgeist had got darker, at least in the movie world.
For the first half-hour Road House shines, mainly on the strength of Chodorov’s hard-boiled dialogue (especially for Lupino), and while it sags a bit in the middle it picks up again in the final third, when Jefty finds out just when he’s about to propose to Lily that she’s really in love with Pete, and he wreaks an unusual revenge on Pete: he frames him for stealing $2,600 from the road house’s weekly receipts (he admits to taking the $600 he was owed as a partner, but no more) and gets Pete paroled into his custody, thereby turning Pete into a virtual slave — and as the final reels progress Jefty gallops towards total psychopathology and threatens the lives of both Pete and Lily until Lily steals his pistol and shoots him in self-defense just as Jefty is about to crush her with a boulder.
Among the interesting attractions of Road House are Ida Lupino’s non-vocals — she can’t sing in the usual sense but she can croak out songs like “One for My Baby” and “Again” (written by the film’s musical director, Lionel Newman, with lyrics by one Dorcas Cochran, and like “The Four Winds and the Seven Seas” it was a hit for Vic Damone but was sung far better by Mel Tormé) with just the right sort of world-weariness and borderline competence one would expect from a singer at the level of talent and status in the business the script tells us she is — even though Celeste Holm had the second female lead (Susan, who works at the road house and has an unrequited crush on Pete even though she’s enough of a good sport to help Pete and Lily get together at the end) and I could readily imagine her thinking, “I was in Oklahoma!, one of the most successful musicals of all time, and I have to listen to Ida Lupino get all the songs?” I was also amused by one particularly imaginative use of music; in one scene Lily and Pete are hanging out in a boat on the lake near the road house, and as they listen to the radio Lily recalls that her mom wanted her to be an opera singer and that ambition got dashed when she suddenly lost her voice — and the piece on the soundtrack is “Elsa’s Dream” (“Einsam in trüben Tagen”) from Wagner’s Lohengrin, appropriate because like Elsa, Lily is hoping for a knight-like figure who will love her and get her out of her virtual enslavement to the bad guy.
About the only real weakness in Road House is the casting of Cornel Wilde — he’s a boring actor who never took to film noir and the incandescence of Richard Widmark (oddly billed fourth, even after his great success in Kiss of Death) and Ida Lupino makes him seem even worse by comparison. I can’t help wishing they could have got someone more to the noir manner born — someone like Robert Mitchum, Alan Ladd or even Dick Powell — instead of Wilde, who seemed to have used up all his great moments when he played Chopin.
Night Monster (Universal, 1942)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The movie we finally did watch last night was the companion piece to Wednesday night’s last movie, Captive Wild Woman, on the Universal Horror: Classic Movie Archive collection: Night Monster, a quite engaging 1942 piece of atmospherics produced and directed by Ford Beebe (who’s got short shrift in the histories of Universal horror because he was best known as the director of the Flash Gordon serials, but I’ve loved The Invisible Man’s Revenge so much over the years I took Beebe’s dual credit as a hopeful sign — and I was right) and a rather quirky rewrite of the already quirky film The Old Dark House overlaid with physical disability (or the appearance of same), an (East) Indian swami, a possibly insane woman and a revenge plot directed against the medical profession.
The plot: a New England small town near a fog-shrouded seacoast lives in fear of the so-called “Night Monster,” which emerges from the fog to wreak havoc. Its first victim — at least the first one we actually get to know — is Milly Carson (Janet Shaw), a housemaid who threatens to report the sinister doings at the Ingston Towers, the sinister old pile where she works, to the police. Laurie (Leif Erickson, whose presence here puts the rest of the cast one degree of separation from James Dean — Erickson and Dean appeared together in that rather odd 1951 Roman Catholic TV production called Hill Number One, based on the last days of Christ with Erickson as Pontius Pilate and Dean as the Apostle John, which when we watched it together Charles described as “an infomercial for rosary beads”), the Ingston family’s chauffeur, offers her a ride to town after housekeeper Sarah Judd (Doris Lloyd) fires her for threatening to talk, but midway to town Laurie parks the station wagon and tries to rape her (shown with surprising explicitness for a “post-Code” movie!).
She gets out of the car at the first opportunity and, of course, is a sitting duck for the Night Monster — only as the monster gets her, Dr. Lynne Harper (Irene Hervey) a passing motorist who’s had trouble with her own car, hears her screams. Shortly thereafter Dr. Harper, who’s been summoned to Ingston Towers to treat the mentally unbalanced Margaret Ingston (Fay Helm), gets a ride to Ingston Towers from Dick Baldwin (Don Porter), a mystery/horror writer who’s on his way to Ingston Towers for reasons screenwriter Clarence Upson Young doesn’t pause in his exposition long enough to explain. Ingston Towers is owned by Margaret’s brother, Kurt Ingston (Ralph Morgan), who has summoned three doctors of his own — Dr. King (Lionel Atwill), Dr. Timmons (Frank Reicher) and Dr. Phipps (Francis Pierlot) — because they attempted to treat him for something or other and committed such spectacular medical malpractice that they left him in a wheelchair and with blackened hands and arms so withered that he can’t pick up anything for himself. (There’s a fascinating scene of the chauffeur Laurie literally picking Kurt up and cradling him like a baby as he carries him from his bed to his wheelchair — and I couldn’t help but think how that goes against everything I’ve been taught about how to transfer a chair-bound person.)
There’s also Rolf (Bela Lugosi, inexplicably top-billed and probably grateful for the chance to be working at a major studio again even though it’s a nothing part and just about anyone could have played it), a sinister butler who pushes down the hang-up button on the house phone just when Milly is trying to call out with her warning to the police; and Agor Singh (Nils Asther), a swami who’s teaching Kurt an East Indian trick of mind-over-matter, as well as Sarah Judd — who runs the household with such fierce authority she makes Judith Anderson in Rebecca seem like Mother Teresa by comparison, ordering about not only the other servants (including a broken-looking man named Torque, played by Cyril Delavanti, who staffs the front gate of the grounds of Ingston Towers and seems to have been the prototype for the equally sinister doorman in Manos: The Hands of Fate).
Night Monster has a plot — several plots, actually — that makes almost no sense at all, but rarely has that mattered less: cinematographer Charles Van Enger’s chiaroscuro lighting and vertiginous moving-camera shots maintain the atmosphere, and the performances are generally excellent — particularly Fay Helm’s; she bathes every line in acid and creates a far more credible villain than the real “night monster” — who turns out, as just about every hardened moviegoer either in 1942 or now would have no trouble guessing, to be Kurt Ingston, who’s been able to overcome his disability by means of the mind-over-matter discipline Agor Singh taught him; in the finale, he’s shot in the back by one of the local cops just as he was about to take out Dick Baldwin and Dr. Harper, while meantime back at Ingston Towers, Margaret Ingston declares that the house and the entire family are evil and she’s going to burn the place down (evoking both The Old Dark House and Rebecca!), which she does, taking out nasty ol’ Sarah Judd at the same time and confounding at least one set of audience expectations: one expected Dr. Harper to be able to cure Margaret instead of Margaret totally losing it at the end. Night Monster is yet another one of those triumphs of style over (lack of) substance and proof that as late as 1942, with the batteries of their original Laemmle-era inspirations running pretty low, Universal could still create a neatly unsettling, entertaining old-dark-house thriller with a fair quotient of chills.
The movie we finally did watch last night was the companion piece to Wednesday night’s last movie, Captive Wild Woman, on the Universal Horror: Classic Movie Archive collection: Night Monster, a quite engaging 1942 piece of atmospherics produced and directed by Ford Beebe (who’s got short shrift in the histories of Universal horror because he was best known as the director of the Flash Gordon serials, but I’ve loved The Invisible Man’s Revenge so much over the years I took Beebe’s dual credit as a hopeful sign — and I was right) and a rather quirky rewrite of the already quirky film The Old Dark House overlaid with physical disability (or the appearance of same), an (East) Indian swami, a possibly insane woman and a revenge plot directed against the medical profession.
The plot: a New England small town near a fog-shrouded seacoast lives in fear of the so-called “Night Monster,” which emerges from the fog to wreak havoc. Its first victim — at least the first one we actually get to know — is Milly Carson (Janet Shaw), a housemaid who threatens to report the sinister doings at the Ingston Towers, the sinister old pile where she works, to the police. Laurie (Leif Erickson, whose presence here puts the rest of the cast one degree of separation from James Dean — Erickson and Dean appeared together in that rather odd 1951 Roman Catholic TV production called Hill Number One, based on the last days of Christ with Erickson as Pontius Pilate and Dean as the Apostle John, which when we watched it together Charles described as “an infomercial for rosary beads”), the Ingston family’s chauffeur, offers her a ride to town after housekeeper Sarah Judd (Doris Lloyd) fires her for threatening to talk, but midway to town Laurie parks the station wagon and tries to rape her (shown with surprising explicitness for a “post-Code” movie!).
She gets out of the car at the first opportunity and, of course, is a sitting duck for the Night Monster — only as the monster gets her, Dr. Lynne Harper (Irene Hervey) a passing motorist who’s had trouble with her own car, hears her screams. Shortly thereafter Dr. Harper, who’s been summoned to Ingston Towers to treat the mentally unbalanced Margaret Ingston (Fay Helm), gets a ride to Ingston Towers from Dick Baldwin (Don Porter), a mystery/horror writer who’s on his way to Ingston Towers for reasons screenwriter Clarence Upson Young doesn’t pause in his exposition long enough to explain. Ingston Towers is owned by Margaret’s brother, Kurt Ingston (Ralph Morgan), who has summoned three doctors of his own — Dr. King (Lionel Atwill), Dr. Timmons (Frank Reicher) and Dr. Phipps (Francis Pierlot) — because they attempted to treat him for something or other and committed such spectacular medical malpractice that they left him in a wheelchair and with blackened hands and arms so withered that he can’t pick up anything for himself. (There’s a fascinating scene of the chauffeur Laurie literally picking Kurt up and cradling him like a baby as he carries him from his bed to his wheelchair — and I couldn’t help but think how that goes against everything I’ve been taught about how to transfer a chair-bound person.)
There’s also Rolf (Bela Lugosi, inexplicably top-billed and probably grateful for the chance to be working at a major studio again even though it’s a nothing part and just about anyone could have played it), a sinister butler who pushes down the hang-up button on the house phone just when Milly is trying to call out with her warning to the police; and Agor Singh (Nils Asther), a swami who’s teaching Kurt an East Indian trick of mind-over-matter, as well as Sarah Judd — who runs the household with such fierce authority she makes Judith Anderson in Rebecca seem like Mother Teresa by comparison, ordering about not only the other servants (including a broken-looking man named Torque, played by Cyril Delavanti, who staffs the front gate of the grounds of Ingston Towers and seems to have been the prototype for the equally sinister doorman in Manos: The Hands of Fate).
Night Monster has a plot — several plots, actually — that makes almost no sense at all, but rarely has that mattered less: cinematographer Charles Van Enger’s chiaroscuro lighting and vertiginous moving-camera shots maintain the atmosphere, and the performances are generally excellent — particularly Fay Helm’s; she bathes every line in acid and creates a far more credible villain than the real “night monster” — who turns out, as just about every hardened moviegoer either in 1942 or now would have no trouble guessing, to be Kurt Ingston, who’s been able to overcome his disability by means of the mind-over-matter discipline Agor Singh taught him; in the finale, he’s shot in the back by one of the local cops just as he was about to take out Dick Baldwin and Dr. Harper, while meantime back at Ingston Towers, Margaret Ingston declares that the house and the entire family are evil and she’s going to burn the place down (evoking both The Old Dark House and Rebecca!), which she does, taking out nasty ol’ Sarah Judd at the same time and confounding at least one set of audience expectations: one expected Dr. Harper to be able to cure Margaret instead of Margaret totally losing it at the end. Night Monster is yet another one of those triumphs of style over (lack of) substance and proof that as late as 1942, with the batteries of their original Laemmle-era inspirations running pretty low, Universal could still create a neatly unsettling, entertaining old-dark-house thriller with a fair quotient of chills.
Captive Wild Woman (Universal, 1943)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Certainly Night Monster is a much better movie than Captive Wild Woman, its DVD disc-mate which Charles and I watched Wednesday night right after the 1948 Road House (itself not to be confused with the 1989 Patrick Swayze vehicle of that name, which was not a remake but a totally different story). Captive Wild Woman seems to have had two purposes in mind: to create a distaff version of the Wolf-Man character and to recycle quite a lot of footage of African jungle animals — particularly lions and tigers — Universal had left over from a 1933 semi-documentary called The Big Cage, which had starred real-life animal trapper and trainer Clyde Beatty (referred to here as “BEE-tee,” by the way — I’d always assumed the name was pronounced “BAY-tee,” but it wasn’t), including a lot of footage showing Beatty from the back cracking a whip at the lions and tigers to keep them in line. (I’ve read that, unlike lions, tigers are totally untamable — and it’s noteworthy that the filmmakers of The Big Cage created the illusion of tame tigers by running footage of them in slow motion and sometimes reversing it so the tigers appear to be backing up on Beatty’s cue.)
Captive Wild Woman had a committee-written script — Ted Fithian and Neil P. Varnick, story; Griffin Jay (three years before his career nadir, The Devil Bat’s Daughter) and Henry Sucher, screenplay — and it was directed by, of all people, Edward Dmytryk, who had already had his big commercial breakthrough the year earlier with Hitler’s Children at his home studio, RKO. Why Universal thought this piece of committee-written cheese needed the services of a loan-out director when any number of in-house hacks could have done a similar job with it is a mystery — and, assuming he actually had a choice in the matter, why Dmytryk took the job is an even bigger mystery. (Fortunately, the next year he would make the film noir masterpiece Murder, My Sweet and firmly establish himself on the “A”-list, a status broken only by his blacklisting as one of the Hollywood 10.)
Captive Wild Woman centers around a circus owned by John Whipple (Lloyd Corrigan) which has just commissioned Clyde Beatty to do an animal act involving mixed breeds — 20 lions and 20 tigers in the same ring at once — despite the rivalry between the two species. When Beatty (who is never seen in the film) backs out, Whipple reluctantly accepts the offer of his assistant trainer, Fred Mason (Milburn Stone, who didn’t usually play romantic leads but whose short, stocky build enabled him to match the footage of the real Clyde Beatty from The Big Cage), to run the act. Meanwhile, Mason’s girlfriend Beth Colman (Evelyn Ankers, playing yet another screaming damsel in distress), another member of the circus troupe, is worried about her sister Dorothy (Martha MacVicar, later known as Martha Vickers and superb as Lauren Bacall’s sister in The Big Sleep and in her own right in The Big Bluff), who’s ill with unspecified ailments that Beth is convinced can best be treated by the internationally renowned glandular specialist Dr. Sigmund Walters (John Carradine, top-billed and in a way warming up for his role as a mad scientist who literally invents a new gland in 1957’s The Unearthly), who’s convinced that by manipulating glands one can literally transform one species of animal into another.
To do this he takes Cheela (Ray Corrigan), a female gorilla (so Ray’s casting here is both trans-specific and transgender!) who was delivered to the Whipple circus, and manipulates her glands so she becomes a human female, Paula Dupree (Acquanetta). Paula signs on to help Mason do his animal-taming act at the circus, since she seems to have a mysterious power over the animals; the problem is she also falls in love with Mason, and when she realizes he only has eyes for her human-born rival Beth, the shock sends her into a devolutionary spiral and she ends up regaining her ape form. This pisses off Dr. Walters no end, especially since in order to govern her behavior he had to sacrifice his long-suffering nurse, Strand (Fay Helm), by splicing her cerebrum into Cheela’s/Paula’s head to bolster her higher brain functions. Captive Wild Woman has some things going for it, including an exciting final sequence that cross-cuts between the circus (a bolt of lightning has flipped out the animals in the middle of Mason’s act and caused them to escape, predictably panicking the crowd) and the gorilla-turned-human-turned-gorilla-again on the loose, ultimately saving Mason from being clawed to death by the untamable lion Nero, only to be picked off herself by a local police officer who either ignores or simply doesn’t hear in time Mason’s entreaties not to shoot the ape.
Also, the were-ape makeup by Jack P. Pierce is one of his better late creations — for my money even more convincing than the Wolf-Man getup — and John P. Fulton’s double-exposures are hauntingly beautiful and surprisingly believable in documenting the woman-to-ape change. But it doesn’t help that Acquanetta, though certainly easy on the eyes, literally can’t act at all — maybe audiences “read” her non-performance in this film as the dramatizaton of a character literally new to human existence, including human language; but she talked in that same dull first-day-of-acting-school way in later films (like the Lon Chaney, Jr. Inner Sanctum vehicle Dead Man’s Eyes) in which she played human-born humans. For some inexplicable reason, Captive Wild Woman was successful enough that Universal made two, count ’em, two sequels to it — Jungle Woman (1944), in which Acquanetta repeated her role and haunted a college campus; and Jungle Captive (1945), in which actress Vicky Lane took over as the apewoman. Seen today, though, Captive Wild Woman has little to offer other than the animal footage and a cool efficiency to the direction — it probably wasn’t a credit Edward Dmytryk was proud of, though at least it didn’t do his career any long-term harm!
Certainly Night Monster is a much better movie than Captive Wild Woman, its DVD disc-mate which Charles and I watched Wednesday night right after the 1948 Road House (itself not to be confused with the 1989 Patrick Swayze vehicle of that name, which was not a remake but a totally different story). Captive Wild Woman seems to have had two purposes in mind: to create a distaff version of the Wolf-Man character and to recycle quite a lot of footage of African jungle animals — particularly lions and tigers — Universal had left over from a 1933 semi-documentary called The Big Cage, which had starred real-life animal trapper and trainer Clyde Beatty (referred to here as “BEE-tee,” by the way — I’d always assumed the name was pronounced “BAY-tee,” but it wasn’t), including a lot of footage showing Beatty from the back cracking a whip at the lions and tigers to keep them in line. (I’ve read that, unlike lions, tigers are totally untamable — and it’s noteworthy that the filmmakers of The Big Cage created the illusion of tame tigers by running footage of them in slow motion and sometimes reversing it so the tigers appear to be backing up on Beatty’s cue.)
Captive Wild Woman had a committee-written script — Ted Fithian and Neil P. Varnick, story; Griffin Jay (three years before his career nadir, The Devil Bat’s Daughter) and Henry Sucher, screenplay — and it was directed by, of all people, Edward Dmytryk, who had already had his big commercial breakthrough the year earlier with Hitler’s Children at his home studio, RKO. Why Universal thought this piece of committee-written cheese needed the services of a loan-out director when any number of in-house hacks could have done a similar job with it is a mystery — and, assuming he actually had a choice in the matter, why Dmytryk took the job is an even bigger mystery. (Fortunately, the next year he would make the film noir masterpiece Murder, My Sweet and firmly establish himself on the “A”-list, a status broken only by his blacklisting as one of the Hollywood 10.)
Captive Wild Woman centers around a circus owned by John Whipple (Lloyd Corrigan) which has just commissioned Clyde Beatty to do an animal act involving mixed breeds — 20 lions and 20 tigers in the same ring at once — despite the rivalry between the two species. When Beatty (who is never seen in the film) backs out, Whipple reluctantly accepts the offer of his assistant trainer, Fred Mason (Milburn Stone, who didn’t usually play romantic leads but whose short, stocky build enabled him to match the footage of the real Clyde Beatty from The Big Cage), to run the act. Meanwhile, Mason’s girlfriend Beth Colman (Evelyn Ankers, playing yet another screaming damsel in distress), another member of the circus troupe, is worried about her sister Dorothy (Martha MacVicar, later known as Martha Vickers and superb as Lauren Bacall’s sister in The Big Sleep and in her own right in The Big Bluff), who’s ill with unspecified ailments that Beth is convinced can best be treated by the internationally renowned glandular specialist Dr. Sigmund Walters (John Carradine, top-billed and in a way warming up for his role as a mad scientist who literally invents a new gland in 1957’s The Unearthly), who’s convinced that by manipulating glands one can literally transform one species of animal into another.
To do this he takes Cheela (Ray Corrigan), a female gorilla (so Ray’s casting here is both trans-specific and transgender!) who was delivered to the Whipple circus, and manipulates her glands so she becomes a human female, Paula Dupree (Acquanetta). Paula signs on to help Mason do his animal-taming act at the circus, since she seems to have a mysterious power over the animals; the problem is she also falls in love with Mason, and when she realizes he only has eyes for her human-born rival Beth, the shock sends her into a devolutionary spiral and she ends up regaining her ape form. This pisses off Dr. Walters no end, especially since in order to govern her behavior he had to sacrifice his long-suffering nurse, Strand (Fay Helm), by splicing her cerebrum into Cheela’s/Paula’s head to bolster her higher brain functions. Captive Wild Woman has some things going for it, including an exciting final sequence that cross-cuts between the circus (a bolt of lightning has flipped out the animals in the middle of Mason’s act and caused them to escape, predictably panicking the crowd) and the gorilla-turned-human-turned-gorilla-again on the loose, ultimately saving Mason from being clawed to death by the untamable lion Nero, only to be picked off herself by a local police officer who either ignores or simply doesn’t hear in time Mason’s entreaties not to shoot the ape.
Also, the were-ape makeup by Jack P. Pierce is one of his better late creations — for my money even more convincing than the Wolf-Man getup — and John P. Fulton’s double-exposures are hauntingly beautiful and surprisingly believable in documenting the woman-to-ape change. But it doesn’t help that Acquanetta, though certainly easy on the eyes, literally can’t act at all — maybe audiences “read” her non-performance in this film as the dramatizaton of a character literally new to human existence, including human language; but she talked in that same dull first-day-of-acting-school way in later films (like the Lon Chaney, Jr. Inner Sanctum vehicle Dead Man’s Eyes) in which she played human-born humans. For some inexplicable reason, Captive Wild Woman was successful enough that Universal made two, count ’em, two sequels to it — Jungle Woman (1944), in which Acquanetta repeated her role and haunted a college campus; and Jungle Captive (1945), in which actress Vicky Lane took over as the apewoman. Seen today, though, Captive Wild Woman has little to offer other than the animal footage and a cool efficiency to the direction — it probably wasn’t a credit Edward Dmytryk was proud of, though at least it didn’t do his career any long-term harm!
Our Mother’s Murder (Morgan Hill/Universal/USA, 1997)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The Lifetime movie I watched this morning was actually one that had been on the USA Network back in 1997, originally titled Daughters but now called Our Mother’s Murder — which rather gives away the ending. The story is based on the true-life tale of newspaper heiress Anne Scripps Morrell (Roxanne Hart), who divorced her first husband Tony Morrell (Ryan Michael) for reasons writer Richard DeLong Adams doesn’t bother to explain. By the time the film opens Anne’s daughters Alex (Holly Marie Combs, top-billed) and Annie (Sarah Chalke) are about ready to get out of high school (“prep school,” actually, they being rich kids in upstate New York) and go on to college when mother Anne suddenly starts dating Scott Douglas (James Wilder), a remodeling contractor she met in a sports bar while they were watching the Super Bowl. Things move quickly as Scott marries Anne, impregnates her and thereby creates a new daughter, “Tory” (short for Victoria), then reveals himself to be an alcoholic and wife-batterer — and with Mom intimidated into silence by fear, particularly the fear that Scott will disappear with Tory and so she’ll never see her new daughter again, it’s up to Alex and Annie to try to save their mom from this creep who’s, predictably, stealing her blind as well as making her life hell.
She gets up enough gumption to divorce him, but then her lawyer tells her that since she can’t prove she’s been abused — it’s just your word against his, she’s told — she can’t keep Scott from having a parental role in their daughter’s life, and the courts will look more kindly on her petition for sole custody if she at least tries to reconcile with him. She accordingly does so, letting him move back in with her and putting up with his presence and the fear he instills in her as much as possible. Things keep going like this, with the Morrell daughters putting their own romantic lives on hold until they can be sure their mom will be safe, until the holiday season — where Anne’s attempt to get an order evicting Scott from their house is frustrated by the fact that the courts are closed for the holidays, and on New Year’s Eve Alex goes out with her boyfriend Jimmy (Jonathan Scarfe) — he’s got a cottage for the weekend so they can be by themselves, Annie gets invited to a party and goes, and Scott takes advantage of having Anne home alone by sneaking into her place and bashing her head in with a hammer. She hangs on in the hospital for six days until she croaks, he abandons his car and leaves the murder weapon behind, and eventually he’s found three months later drowned in the Hudson River after it melts during spring thaw.
It’s not much different from your average Lifetime movie (though it seems to have at least a brief theatrical release since its imdb.com page lists an MPAA rating) but it’s unusually well done, directed quietly but suspensefully by Bill L. Norton, Adams’ script could have tapped some of the darker aspects of his tale — we really don’t get much of an idea of What Makes Scott Run, whether he’s a conscious gold-digger who loses control of himself and the situation or a troubled young man in over his head from the start, who responds to his uneasy situation (including the likely sense of being “unmanned” by living off his wife’s fortune) by getting drunk and lashing out at his wife. It’s also not clear just why he kills her or how he hopes to get away with it — assuming he does hope to get away with it and is thinking that rationally as a criminal, which is debatable — but on the whole Our Mother’s Murder makes sense as drama.
It’s generally well cast (though Sarah Chalke doesn’t look credible either as Roxanne Hart’s daughter or Holly Marie Combs’ sister) and, not surprisingly, the actor who comes off the best is James Wilder, not only because the villains in these sorts of tales are usually more interesting than the heroes but also because he’s drop-dead gorgeous — far better looking than the general run of blankly semi-attractive lanky, sandy-haired men Lifetime usually casts as its male leads — and he doesn’t make Scott more of a schemer than he should be. Wilder also ably depicts the character’s surface charm and knows just when to drop the mask and let us see the monster beneath. I was a bit disappointed that there wasn’t more than just one brief soft-core porn scene between Wilder and Hart — not only would more of their sex life have added directly to the entertainment value, it would also have made it more believable that Anne would stay with him despite being abused (I’ve heard from people who’ve actually been victims of domestic violence that one reason they stayed in their relationships as long as they did was “the make-up sex was fabulous!”). Despite the dorky title (though Daughters was so ambiguous it would hardly have been better!), Our Mother’s Murder is actually one of the better things I’ve seen on Lifetime, a nice mixture of emotion and thrills that one only wishes could have had a happier ending.
The Lifetime movie I watched this morning was actually one that had been on the USA Network back in 1997, originally titled Daughters but now called Our Mother’s Murder — which rather gives away the ending. The story is based on the true-life tale of newspaper heiress Anne Scripps Morrell (Roxanne Hart), who divorced her first husband Tony Morrell (Ryan Michael) for reasons writer Richard DeLong Adams doesn’t bother to explain. By the time the film opens Anne’s daughters Alex (Holly Marie Combs, top-billed) and Annie (Sarah Chalke) are about ready to get out of high school (“prep school,” actually, they being rich kids in upstate New York) and go on to college when mother Anne suddenly starts dating Scott Douglas (James Wilder), a remodeling contractor she met in a sports bar while they were watching the Super Bowl. Things move quickly as Scott marries Anne, impregnates her and thereby creates a new daughter, “Tory” (short for Victoria), then reveals himself to be an alcoholic and wife-batterer — and with Mom intimidated into silence by fear, particularly the fear that Scott will disappear with Tory and so she’ll never see her new daughter again, it’s up to Alex and Annie to try to save their mom from this creep who’s, predictably, stealing her blind as well as making her life hell.
She gets up enough gumption to divorce him, but then her lawyer tells her that since she can’t prove she’s been abused — it’s just your word against his, she’s told — she can’t keep Scott from having a parental role in their daughter’s life, and the courts will look more kindly on her petition for sole custody if she at least tries to reconcile with him. She accordingly does so, letting him move back in with her and putting up with his presence and the fear he instills in her as much as possible. Things keep going like this, with the Morrell daughters putting their own romantic lives on hold until they can be sure their mom will be safe, until the holiday season — where Anne’s attempt to get an order evicting Scott from their house is frustrated by the fact that the courts are closed for the holidays, and on New Year’s Eve Alex goes out with her boyfriend Jimmy (Jonathan Scarfe) — he’s got a cottage for the weekend so they can be by themselves, Annie gets invited to a party and goes, and Scott takes advantage of having Anne home alone by sneaking into her place and bashing her head in with a hammer. She hangs on in the hospital for six days until she croaks, he abandons his car and leaves the murder weapon behind, and eventually he’s found three months later drowned in the Hudson River after it melts during spring thaw.
It’s not much different from your average Lifetime movie (though it seems to have at least a brief theatrical release since its imdb.com page lists an MPAA rating) but it’s unusually well done, directed quietly but suspensefully by Bill L. Norton, Adams’ script could have tapped some of the darker aspects of his tale — we really don’t get much of an idea of What Makes Scott Run, whether he’s a conscious gold-digger who loses control of himself and the situation or a troubled young man in over his head from the start, who responds to his uneasy situation (including the likely sense of being “unmanned” by living off his wife’s fortune) by getting drunk and lashing out at his wife. It’s also not clear just why he kills her or how he hopes to get away with it — assuming he does hope to get away with it and is thinking that rationally as a criminal, which is debatable — but on the whole Our Mother’s Murder makes sense as drama.
It’s generally well cast (though Sarah Chalke doesn’t look credible either as Roxanne Hart’s daughter or Holly Marie Combs’ sister) and, not surprisingly, the actor who comes off the best is James Wilder, not only because the villains in these sorts of tales are usually more interesting than the heroes but also because he’s drop-dead gorgeous — far better looking than the general run of blankly semi-attractive lanky, sandy-haired men Lifetime usually casts as its male leads — and he doesn’t make Scott more of a schemer than he should be. Wilder also ably depicts the character’s surface charm and knows just when to drop the mask and let us see the monster beneath. I was a bit disappointed that there wasn’t more than just one brief soft-core porn scene between Wilder and Hart — not only would more of their sex life have added directly to the entertainment value, it would also have made it more believable that Anne would stay with him despite being abused (I’ve heard from people who’ve actually been victims of domestic violence that one reason they stayed in their relationships as long as they did was “the make-up sex was fabulous!”). Despite the dorky title (though Daughters was so ambiguous it would hardly have been better!), Our Mother’s Murder is actually one of the better things I’ve seen on Lifetime, a nice mixture of emotion and thrills that one only wishes could have had a happier ending.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
House of Horrors (Universal, 1946)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran another item from the Universal Cult Horror Collection box: House of Horrors, a generically titled 1946 effort that I’ve always quite liked even though it’s notorious as the next-to-last film made by Rondo Hatton, a genuinely tragic figure whose real life was much more compelling than any of his movies. Hatton was born on April 22, 1894 in Hagerstown, Maryland and in 1912 moved with his family to Tampa, Florida, where as a young man was quite attractive, a star high-school athlete and very popular. All that changed when he went to fight in World War I, was caught in a German poison-gas attack, and survived but contracted acromegaly, a rare disease in which the body overproduces human growth hormone and the extremities swell up to grotesque proportions. Hatton got a job after the war as a reporter with the Tampa Tribune, and in 1930 he was covering the location trip of a movie company shooting a film called Hell Harbor. His grotesque appearance caught the eye of the film’s director, Henry King who gave him a small role in the movie.
According to imdb.com, he also played a juror in the 1931 William Wellman masterpiece, Safe in Hell, but then didn’t work in films again until 1936, when he and his second wife had the idea of moving to Hollywood and allowing the movie companies to exploit his real “monstrous” face and gait. He was mostly cast in minor roles — albeit sometimes minor roles in quite important movies like In Old Chicago, Alexander’s Ragtime Band, The Ox-Bow Incident, The Moon and Sixpence and the 1939 Dieterle/Laughton version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame — until 1944, when Universal signed him and decided to give him a major buildup as a horror star. They launched his new career by casting him as a mute, monstrous murderer in the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce film The Pearl of Death, an adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Six Napoleons” in which Hatton played an invented character, “The Hoxton Creeper,” the hired-gun killer used by master jewel thief Giles Conover (Miles Mander) to knock off anyone in the way of his pursuit of the Borgia Pearl.
Universal used him again in movies like Jungle Captive and The Spider Woman Strikes Back and then decided to launch his career as a monster star with House of Horrors — shot under the working titles Joan Medford Is Missing (which doesn’t happen until the final reel!) and Murder Mansion (there isn’t a mansion — murderous or otherwise — in the film at all). Universal used writer Dwight V. Babcock to concoct an “original” story for Hatton’s monster-star debut, George Bricker to turn it into a screenplay and (a boy named) Jean Yarbrough to direct — and the surprise is that House of Horrors, though made at the tail end of Universal’s Gothic horror cycle, turned out to be quite good.
Part of the film’s quality comes from Yarbrough’s flair for Gothic atmosphere — unlike William Nigh with The Strange Case of Dr. Rx, Yarbrough emerged from the salt mines of the sub-“B” studios (in his case PRC instead of Monogram) and actually took full advantage of the resources of a major studio with state-of-the-art production facilities; he and cinematographer Maury Gertsman included some extensive moving-camera shots, dark, chiaroscuro lighting, appropriately doomy music from the Universal stock library and an overall aura of chill far above most of the routine Universal horror product of the time. Another plus is the performance of Martin Kosleck, an actor best known for playing Joseph Goebbels twice (in 1944’s The Master Race and 1962’s Hitler) and perfectly cast here as Marcel Delange, an artist who creates clay sculptures of oddly distorted figures that look fine to me but arouse the ire of vicious art critics F. Holmes Harmon (Alan Napier) and Hal Ormiston (Howard Freeman).
The film opens in Delange’s studio, where he is lamenting that all he has to live on is bread and cheese, and at night he has to work by candlelight because he couldn’t afford to pay his electric bill, but he’s hopeful that a rich collector, Mr. Samuels (Byron Foulger), will buy one of his works and allow him to eat a decent meal, feed his cat all the milk the animal could want, and get his lights turned on again. Alas, Samuels arrives at Delange’s studio with critic Harmon in tow — and Harmon viciously assaults Delange’s work and gets the artist so mad he throws both of them out of his studio, then smashes the sculpture Harmon just talked Samuels out of buying. Delange then walks to a convenient river and is about to End It All by throwing himself in, whereupon he sees someone else in the water and rescues him instead.
The man he’s saved is “The Creeper” (no other name, though in the imdb.com listing for Hatton he’s identified as “Hal Moffet” because that was his name in the next “Creeper” movie, The Brute Man). Once the two are together, the plot draws on such unlikely ancestors in the Universal canon as The Bride of Frankenstein (the monster taken in and befriended by a stranger) and the 1935 The Raven (the monster exploited by a madman for personal revenge). Delange wins the Creeper’s affections by buying him food (albeit with the Creeper’s own money: $3 he found on the Creeper when he pulled him out of the river) and being nice to him, and in return the Creeper faithfully goes out and murders the art critics he hears Delange rail against. In the course of his tirades Delange takes care to give the Creeper the addresses of the people he wants to kill, thereby turning his attentions from knocking off women (it’s established early on that he’s become a wanted killer because of his habit of approaching women on the street for sex; when they inevitably scream at the sight of him, he attacks them with such force that he breaks their spines) to becoming Delange’s avenging devil.
Mixed up in all of this is commercial artist Steve Morrow (Robert Lowery, two years before he became the movies’ second Batman), who does girlie pictures for magazine covers and has also attracted Harmon’s ire because, as Harmon puts it, “No girl really looks like that.” (Actually Joan Fulton, the actress playing Morrow’s model, really does look that good.) The plot incidents are pretty predictable — it ends with Morrow’s girlfriend, art critic Joan Medford (Virginia Grey), trapped in Delange’s studio; she convinces the Creeper that Delange means to turn him in to the police, and so the Creeper kills Delange and is about to kill Joan as well when the representative of the official police, lieutenant Larry Brooks (Bill Goodwin), who had previously suspected Steve of the murders because he and Harmon had a public argument, shoots the Creeper through the window of Delange’s studio and thereby saves Joan’s life.
It’s not a particularly ambitious movie, and Hatton’s appearance inspires more sympathy than fright — which I actually think is a good thing. Harry and Michael Medved, in their book The Golden Turkey Awards, nominated Hatton for their “P. T. Barnum award for the Worst Cinematic Exploitation of a Physical Deformity” (the other nominees were conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton in Chained for Life, Billy Curtis in the 1973 gangster spoof Little Cigars and the winners, the entire cast of The Terror of Tiny Town), but despite his difficult-to-look-at appearance Hatton actually strikes notes of pity and pathos — maybe not the kind of pathos Boris Karloff could have achieved if he’d been playing this part in one of Jack P. Pierce’s makeups (ironically Pierce gets screen credit for this film where he didn’t for the first two Frankenstein movies, despite the crucial importance of his famous makeup to those films’ success), but still an oddly moving performance that suggests (as does his actual biography) that Hatton was a decent and loving human being under those grotesque gas-distorted features.
Aside from that, House of Horrors plays out with a cool professionalism, ably recycling admittedly well-worn materials and a much better film than the two other “new” items in the Cult Horror Classics box, The Strange Case of Doctor Rx and The Mad Ghoul. (The fourth and fifth films in the box, Murders in the Zoo and The Mad Doctor of Market Street, are both ones Charles and I had seen relatively recently and quite liked, Murders in the Zoo for its unusually graphic violence for a 1933 film and both for Lionel Atwill’s underplayed urbanity as the villains of the pieces.)
Hatton lived to make only one other film, The Brute Man, produced at Universal with the same director and writers (with M. Coates Webster added to the writing team this time), but the combination of Hatton’s death on February 2, 1946 (from two heart attacks in rapid succession — apparently heart attacks are a side effect of acromegaly) and Universal’s decision to merge with International Pictures and get out of the “B”-movie business led Universal to sell the rights to The Brute Man to director Yarbrough’s old stomping ground, PRC. Ironically, two years earlier PRC had made a film called The Monster Maker that used acromegaly as a plot device — as did Universal’s 1955 film Tarantula.
I ran another item from the Universal Cult Horror Collection box: House of Horrors, a generically titled 1946 effort that I’ve always quite liked even though it’s notorious as the next-to-last film made by Rondo Hatton, a genuinely tragic figure whose real life was much more compelling than any of his movies. Hatton was born on April 22, 1894 in Hagerstown, Maryland and in 1912 moved with his family to Tampa, Florida, where as a young man was quite attractive, a star high-school athlete and very popular. All that changed when he went to fight in World War I, was caught in a German poison-gas attack, and survived but contracted acromegaly, a rare disease in which the body overproduces human growth hormone and the extremities swell up to grotesque proportions. Hatton got a job after the war as a reporter with the Tampa Tribune, and in 1930 he was covering the location trip of a movie company shooting a film called Hell Harbor. His grotesque appearance caught the eye of the film’s director, Henry King who gave him a small role in the movie.
According to imdb.com, he also played a juror in the 1931 William Wellman masterpiece, Safe in Hell, but then didn’t work in films again until 1936, when he and his second wife had the idea of moving to Hollywood and allowing the movie companies to exploit his real “monstrous” face and gait. He was mostly cast in minor roles — albeit sometimes minor roles in quite important movies like In Old Chicago, Alexander’s Ragtime Band, The Ox-Bow Incident, The Moon and Sixpence and the 1939 Dieterle/Laughton version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame — until 1944, when Universal signed him and decided to give him a major buildup as a horror star. They launched his new career by casting him as a mute, monstrous murderer in the Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce film The Pearl of Death, an adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Six Napoleons” in which Hatton played an invented character, “The Hoxton Creeper,” the hired-gun killer used by master jewel thief Giles Conover (Miles Mander) to knock off anyone in the way of his pursuit of the Borgia Pearl.
Universal used him again in movies like Jungle Captive and The Spider Woman Strikes Back and then decided to launch his career as a monster star with House of Horrors — shot under the working titles Joan Medford Is Missing (which doesn’t happen until the final reel!) and Murder Mansion (there isn’t a mansion — murderous or otherwise — in the film at all). Universal used writer Dwight V. Babcock to concoct an “original” story for Hatton’s monster-star debut, George Bricker to turn it into a screenplay and (a boy named) Jean Yarbrough to direct — and the surprise is that House of Horrors, though made at the tail end of Universal’s Gothic horror cycle, turned out to be quite good.
Part of the film’s quality comes from Yarbrough’s flair for Gothic atmosphere — unlike William Nigh with The Strange Case of Dr. Rx, Yarbrough emerged from the salt mines of the sub-“B” studios (in his case PRC instead of Monogram) and actually took full advantage of the resources of a major studio with state-of-the-art production facilities; he and cinematographer Maury Gertsman included some extensive moving-camera shots, dark, chiaroscuro lighting, appropriately doomy music from the Universal stock library and an overall aura of chill far above most of the routine Universal horror product of the time. Another plus is the performance of Martin Kosleck, an actor best known for playing Joseph Goebbels twice (in 1944’s The Master Race and 1962’s Hitler) and perfectly cast here as Marcel Delange, an artist who creates clay sculptures of oddly distorted figures that look fine to me but arouse the ire of vicious art critics F. Holmes Harmon (Alan Napier) and Hal Ormiston (Howard Freeman).
The film opens in Delange’s studio, where he is lamenting that all he has to live on is bread and cheese, and at night he has to work by candlelight because he couldn’t afford to pay his electric bill, but he’s hopeful that a rich collector, Mr. Samuels (Byron Foulger), will buy one of his works and allow him to eat a decent meal, feed his cat all the milk the animal could want, and get his lights turned on again. Alas, Samuels arrives at Delange’s studio with critic Harmon in tow — and Harmon viciously assaults Delange’s work and gets the artist so mad he throws both of them out of his studio, then smashes the sculpture Harmon just talked Samuels out of buying. Delange then walks to a convenient river and is about to End It All by throwing himself in, whereupon he sees someone else in the water and rescues him instead.
The man he’s saved is “The Creeper” (no other name, though in the imdb.com listing for Hatton he’s identified as “Hal Moffet” because that was his name in the next “Creeper” movie, The Brute Man). Once the two are together, the plot draws on such unlikely ancestors in the Universal canon as The Bride of Frankenstein (the monster taken in and befriended by a stranger) and the 1935 The Raven (the monster exploited by a madman for personal revenge). Delange wins the Creeper’s affections by buying him food (albeit with the Creeper’s own money: $3 he found on the Creeper when he pulled him out of the river) and being nice to him, and in return the Creeper faithfully goes out and murders the art critics he hears Delange rail against. In the course of his tirades Delange takes care to give the Creeper the addresses of the people he wants to kill, thereby turning his attentions from knocking off women (it’s established early on that he’s become a wanted killer because of his habit of approaching women on the street for sex; when they inevitably scream at the sight of him, he attacks them with such force that he breaks their spines) to becoming Delange’s avenging devil.
Mixed up in all of this is commercial artist Steve Morrow (Robert Lowery, two years before he became the movies’ second Batman), who does girlie pictures for magazine covers and has also attracted Harmon’s ire because, as Harmon puts it, “No girl really looks like that.” (Actually Joan Fulton, the actress playing Morrow’s model, really does look that good.) The plot incidents are pretty predictable — it ends with Morrow’s girlfriend, art critic Joan Medford (Virginia Grey), trapped in Delange’s studio; she convinces the Creeper that Delange means to turn him in to the police, and so the Creeper kills Delange and is about to kill Joan as well when the representative of the official police, lieutenant Larry Brooks (Bill Goodwin), who had previously suspected Steve of the murders because he and Harmon had a public argument, shoots the Creeper through the window of Delange’s studio and thereby saves Joan’s life.
It’s not a particularly ambitious movie, and Hatton’s appearance inspires more sympathy than fright — which I actually think is a good thing. Harry and Michael Medved, in their book The Golden Turkey Awards, nominated Hatton for their “P. T. Barnum award for the Worst Cinematic Exploitation of a Physical Deformity” (the other nominees were conjoined twins Daisy and Violet Hilton in Chained for Life, Billy Curtis in the 1973 gangster spoof Little Cigars and the winners, the entire cast of The Terror of Tiny Town), but despite his difficult-to-look-at appearance Hatton actually strikes notes of pity and pathos — maybe not the kind of pathos Boris Karloff could have achieved if he’d been playing this part in one of Jack P. Pierce’s makeups (ironically Pierce gets screen credit for this film where he didn’t for the first two Frankenstein movies, despite the crucial importance of his famous makeup to those films’ success), but still an oddly moving performance that suggests (as does his actual biography) that Hatton was a decent and loving human being under those grotesque gas-distorted features.
Aside from that, House of Horrors plays out with a cool professionalism, ably recycling admittedly well-worn materials and a much better film than the two other “new” items in the Cult Horror Classics box, The Strange Case of Doctor Rx and The Mad Ghoul. (The fourth and fifth films in the box, Murders in the Zoo and The Mad Doctor of Market Street, are both ones Charles and I had seen relatively recently and quite liked, Murders in the Zoo for its unusually graphic violence for a 1933 film and both for Lionel Atwill’s underplayed urbanity as the villains of the pieces.)
Hatton lived to make only one other film, The Brute Man, produced at Universal with the same director and writers (with M. Coates Webster added to the writing team this time), but the combination of Hatton’s death on February 2, 1946 (from two heart attacks in rapid succession — apparently heart attacks are a side effect of acromegaly) and Universal’s decision to merge with International Pictures and get out of the “B”-movie business led Universal to sell the rights to The Brute Man to director Yarbrough’s old stomping ground, PRC. Ironically, two years earlier PRC had made a film called The Monster Maker that used acromegaly as a plot device — as did Universal’s 1955 film Tarantula.
The Gay Falcon (RKO, 1941)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Afterwards Charles and I watched The Gay Falcon, a 1941 detective thriller from RKO that was at least nominally based on Michael Arlen’s good-bad detective-thief character, The Falcon. RKO’s inspiration for making a series of movies based on The Falcon was that Leslie Charteris, creator of Simon Templar a.k.a. The Saint, had pulled the rights to his character and left RKO scrambling to find a replacement character that could be played by the same actor, the urbane and sardonic George Sanders. RKO even advertised the film as “Fiction’s slickest super sleuth, created by Michael Arlen and portrayed by the star who thrilled you as ‘The Saint,’” and, as William Everson noted in his book The Detective in Film, “All that was really retained of the original stories was The Falcon’s fondness for the ladies and the smoothness with which he moved in high society. … With George Sanders starring, the movie series did little more than change his name from the Saint to the Falcon.” Indeed, the movie series did so little more than change the character’s name from the Saint to the Falcon that Leslie Charteris actually filed a plagiarism suit against RKO, though there doesn’t seem to be a record of how it turned out.
The Gay Falcon is also the only one of RKO’s many Falcon movies (the first three starring Sanders, the next one — The Falcon’s Brother — co-starring Sanders and his real-life brother Tom Conway as brothers, enabling the writers and producer to kill Sanders’ character off at the end of the film and continue the series with Conway in the lead as the original Falcon’s brother) to be based on an actual Michael Arlen story — and if all the Arlen Falcon tales were as dull as this one, it’s no wonder RKO sought out other writers for the later episodes (including buying Raymond Chandler’s novel Farewell, My Lovely for the third Falcon film, The Falcon Takes Over, in 1942 before remaking it two years later as Murder, My Sweet with Dick Powell as Philip Marlowe and Edward Dmytryk directing).
The Gay Falcon is an incredibly dull movie that seems a good deal longer than its actual 67 minutes, with a surprisingly uninteresting plot line about the priceless “Monsoon Diamond,” prize possession of Mrs. Vera Gardner (Lucile Gleason, surprisingly effective as a society woman given that she usually played the proletarian wife of her real-life husband, James Gleason), who brings it to a party hosted by Maxine Wood (Gladys Cooper), despite the fact that Wood’s parties are becoming notorious because at each one of them, a woman is robbed of her jewels. There’s a lot of back and forth between the two women in the Falcon’s life, fiancée Helen Reed (Wendy Barrie) and Elinor Benford (Anne Hunter), who recruits him to get involved in Ms. Wood’s case, and when Mrs. Gardner is murdered at a Wood-hosted party by a member of the jewel-thief ring, the story becomes a whodunit in which to no one’s particular surprise (at least no one who’s seen enough movies to recognize one of the hoariest old clichés when he or she encounters one) Ms. Wood herself turns out to be the mastermind of the ring, stealing the jewels as part of an insurance scam that involves claiming them as a “loss” and collecting on her policies as well as having the jewels herself to dispose of on the black market.
The most interesting aspects of this movie are a quite good villain performance by Turhan Bey as Manuel Retana, one of the actual thieves working for Ms. Wood, and some surprisingly noir-ish compositions from director Irving Reis and cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca (who would later shoot some of RKO’s greatest noirs, including Out of the Past). At the risk of sounding like a heretic, I’m tempted to say based on my memories of the later Falcon films that the series actually got better with Tom Conway in the lead — not surprisingly given their real-life sibling status, they were two quite similar “types,” but Sanders comes off as a bit too dour for the role and Conway did the lightness and insouciance of the character better. (Sanders was their actual family name; Conway changed his because he wanted to make it on his own merits and not because people associated him with his already established brother.)
Afterwards Charles and I watched The Gay Falcon, a 1941 detective thriller from RKO that was at least nominally based on Michael Arlen’s good-bad detective-thief character, The Falcon. RKO’s inspiration for making a series of movies based on The Falcon was that Leslie Charteris, creator of Simon Templar a.k.a. The Saint, had pulled the rights to his character and left RKO scrambling to find a replacement character that could be played by the same actor, the urbane and sardonic George Sanders. RKO even advertised the film as “Fiction’s slickest super sleuth, created by Michael Arlen and portrayed by the star who thrilled you as ‘The Saint,’” and, as William Everson noted in his book The Detective in Film, “All that was really retained of the original stories was The Falcon’s fondness for the ladies and the smoothness with which he moved in high society. … With George Sanders starring, the movie series did little more than change his name from the Saint to the Falcon.” Indeed, the movie series did so little more than change the character’s name from the Saint to the Falcon that Leslie Charteris actually filed a plagiarism suit against RKO, though there doesn’t seem to be a record of how it turned out.
The Gay Falcon is also the only one of RKO’s many Falcon movies (the first three starring Sanders, the next one — The Falcon’s Brother — co-starring Sanders and his real-life brother Tom Conway as brothers, enabling the writers and producer to kill Sanders’ character off at the end of the film and continue the series with Conway in the lead as the original Falcon’s brother) to be based on an actual Michael Arlen story — and if all the Arlen Falcon tales were as dull as this one, it’s no wonder RKO sought out other writers for the later episodes (including buying Raymond Chandler’s novel Farewell, My Lovely for the third Falcon film, The Falcon Takes Over, in 1942 before remaking it two years later as Murder, My Sweet with Dick Powell as Philip Marlowe and Edward Dmytryk directing).
The Gay Falcon is an incredibly dull movie that seems a good deal longer than its actual 67 minutes, with a surprisingly uninteresting plot line about the priceless “Monsoon Diamond,” prize possession of Mrs. Vera Gardner (Lucile Gleason, surprisingly effective as a society woman given that she usually played the proletarian wife of her real-life husband, James Gleason), who brings it to a party hosted by Maxine Wood (Gladys Cooper), despite the fact that Wood’s parties are becoming notorious because at each one of them, a woman is robbed of her jewels. There’s a lot of back and forth between the two women in the Falcon’s life, fiancée Helen Reed (Wendy Barrie) and Elinor Benford (Anne Hunter), who recruits him to get involved in Ms. Wood’s case, and when Mrs. Gardner is murdered at a Wood-hosted party by a member of the jewel-thief ring, the story becomes a whodunit in which to no one’s particular surprise (at least no one who’s seen enough movies to recognize one of the hoariest old clichés when he or she encounters one) Ms. Wood herself turns out to be the mastermind of the ring, stealing the jewels as part of an insurance scam that involves claiming them as a “loss” and collecting on her policies as well as having the jewels herself to dispose of on the black market.
The most interesting aspects of this movie are a quite good villain performance by Turhan Bey as Manuel Retana, one of the actual thieves working for Ms. Wood, and some surprisingly noir-ish compositions from director Irving Reis and cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca (who would later shoot some of RKO’s greatest noirs, including Out of the Past). At the risk of sounding like a heretic, I’m tempted to say based on my memories of the later Falcon films that the series actually got better with Tom Conway in the lead — not surprisingly given their real-life sibling status, they were two quite similar “types,” but Sanders comes off as a bit too dour for the role and Conway did the lightness and insouciance of the character better. (Sanders was their actual family name; Conway changed his because he wanted to make it on his own merits and not because people associated him with his already established brother.)
Monday, November 23, 2009
“Pirate Radio”: Two Views
Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
PHOTO: L to R, actors Philip Seymour Hoffman and Rhys Ifans and writer/director Richard Curtis on the set of Pirate Radio. (Alex Bailey/MCT; copyright © 2009.)
••••••••••
Frat-Boy Romp Through the British Invasion
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
“One boat, eight D.J.’s, no morals.” That’s how Pirate Radio, the new film by writer-director Richard Curtis, is being advertised. But though Pirate Radio is a work of fiction, it’s inspired by true events in Britain in the mid-1960’s. At the time, British rock bands — the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Kinks, Yardbirds and others — were the most popular in the world; indeed, they sold so many records and drew so many concertgoers in the U.S. as well as the U.K. that they were known as the “British Invasion.” But the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) only broadcast rock ’n’ roll on the AM band two hours a day — and to serve a rock-hungry public a group of independent entrepreneurs hit on the idea of breaking the BBC’s monopoly and broadcasting all-rock programs from stations aboard ships, moored in international waters off the British coast and therefore at least theoretically out of the reach of British law.
At least that’s the legend the film tells. The BBC wasn’t as uniformly hostile to rock as it’s depicted in this movie. The Beatles themselves had a half-hour weekly program on the BBC, Pop Go the Beatles, in which they played not only their hits but material (mostly covers of 1950’s hits by their American heroes, including Carl Perkins, Buddy Holly and the Coasters) they never otherwise recorded — and in 1994 some of these songs were issued on CD’s and turned out to be among the most exciting and dynamic performances the Beatles ever gave. What the BBC did refuse to do was play rock ’n’ roll records for more than two hours a day. In the U.S. in the 1930’s and 1940’s U.S. radio stations had generally avoided playing commercial records, partly because the record companies didn’t want them to (the reasoning was that you wouldn’t buy a record if you could hear it on the air for free) and partly because they didn’t think records sounded good enough for the radio. Improvements in sound quality and the development of radio as a promotional medium for records changed all that in the U.S. in the 1950’s — but the BBC still clung to the idea that if they were going to broadcast rock at all, they were going to do it the old-fashioned way, with the musicians in their own studios performing in real time.
The inspiration of the pioneers of what came to be called “pirate radio” — not only because they were operating in defiance of British law but because they were literally doing so at sea — was not only to play rock records on the air but to copy the format of American Top 40 radio. That meant a high-energy presentation in which the disc jockeys wouldn’t just politely tell you what the song was called and who was playing it, the way the BBC’s announcers did; they’d practically scream out the titles and band names, carry on a running line of patter to project their own personalities and sometimes even talk over the music. It also meant that they would accept advertising and support themselves financially through commercials, the way American stations did. In her 1966 book on British rock, The Pop Makers, author Caroline Silver described how the most popular of the pirate stations, Radio Caroline — named after U.S. President Kennedy’s daughter and the real-life model for the fictitious “Radio Rock” in Pirate Radio — operated:
“Unlike licensed British radio stations, which do not broadcast commercials, Radio Caroline is a commercial station, accepting advertisements which are paid for at the rate of 100 pounds sterling ($280) a minute. With this money, Caroline operates two radio ships, Caroline North and Caroline South, from which it transmits continuous pop music interspersed with commercials. Since unlicensed broadcasting is not permitted on British territory, both the ships are moored in international waters, which means they must always be at least three miles out to sea. Caroline South lies off the southeast coast of England; Caroline North is moored in the Irish Sea near Liverpool. Their programs are enormously popular with British teenagers. The name ‘pirate’ was given to the radio ships by the press. In response, disc jockeys working on board the ships wear T-shirts with skulls and crossbones on them.”
The real Radio Caroline was powerful and well-heeled enough to run the Caroline Club, a fan club which gave it both extra promotion and an additional source of income in membership dues; and to promote live shows on the British mainland — including a November 1965 concert called Zowie One at the New Brighton Tower ballroom near Liverpool (one of the places the Beatles had played in the early days) in which 11 bands, including the well-known Yardbirds, played for free in exchange for promotion on Radio Caroline. The movie “Radio Rock” is a considerably raunchier operation, in which — unlike the real pirate D.J.’s — the fictional ones hardly ever leave the ship. It comes off as less a radio station — even a counter-cultural one — than a giant, ongoing frat party at sea. The plot of Pirate Radio intersperses three story lines: the coming-of-age story of young naïf Carl (Tom Sturridge), who’s sent to the station’s ship by his hyper-sexual mother Charlotte (Emma Thompson); the rivalries among the D.J.’s themselves — particularly the charismatic Gavin Cavanaugh (Rhys Ifans) and “The Count” (Philip Seymour Hoffman), an American expat hired by Radio Rock to give their programs the authentic U.S. “feel” they were aiming for; and the efforts of the British government to shut down the pirate stations.
The real 1960’s pirate D.J.’s were regularly ferried back and forth between the radio ships and dry (British) land, where they got to socialize, hang out in pubs and generally have normal lives. The movie D.J.’s are a bunch of horny straight guys trapped on the ship almost 24/7 with only one female — a Lesbian cook named Felicity (Katherine Parkinson) — and supplied with food, drink and sex only at two-week intervals when a launch comes to the ship bearing women. Among the ship’s permanent residents are the self-consciously aristocratic owner Quentin (Bill Nighy), whom Carl at one point thinks is his father. (Asked by one of the D.J.’s who his dad was, Carl laconically says, “Some guy who fucked my mum one night and left without leaving a thank-you or an address.”) The assorted D.J.’s include Dave (Nick Frost), who takes on the task of getting Carl his first chance at sex — an effort which ends a good deal better for Dave than Carl when he comes between him and nice-girl Marianne (Talulah Riley), Quentin’s niece and the woman Carl really wants but is too scared to ask.
The forces of authority are led by Cabinet minister Sir Alistair Dormandy (an almost unrecognizable Kenneth Branagh) and his assistants, Twatt (Jack Davenport) and Miss C (Sinèad Matthews) — in the original draft of the script she was called “Miss Clit” but Curtis blessedly decided that two characters whose names were sexual innuendi were at least one too many. Coming off as refugees from Monty Python (whose initial run on BBC-TV started in 1969, three years after the prime of pirate radio), these three are caricatures of the evil authority figures common in rock ’n’ roll movies. Dormandy is a social reactionary who wants to impose his own preference for classical music on the entire country, and he’s also sufficiently screwed-up sexually that he continually talks about wanting to “grab the testicles” of the radio pirates and squeeze them.
The conceit that there’s an ongoing battle for the soul of radio between elitists who want to stick the public with boring classical music and down-to-earth folks who want to give audiences the pop they want is as old as the 1943 movie Reveille with Beverly — also based on a real-life radio personality (a woman named Jean Hay who broadcast a swing-music show to American servicemembers in World War II) and also refusing to acknowledge the possibility that there might be some people out there who like both classical and pop. It’s an especially ironic plot gimmick for a movie set in 1960’s Britain, where many of the rockers drew on the classics for inspiration (Paul McCartney wrote a piccolo trumpet into “Penny Lane” after he heard one in Bach’s Brandenburg Concerti, and Procol Harum turned a Bach organ chorale into “A Whiter Shade of Pale”) and were quite proud of themselves for doing so.
There’s another older movie that has a similar authorities-vs.-youth conflict over music, and it was also both made and set in Britain: It’s Trad, Dad! (released in the U.S. as Ring-a-Ding Rhythm), a 1962 production directed by Richard Lester and drawing on the same cheeky sensibilities as his later films with the Beatles, A Hard Day’s Night and Help! In some ways it’s even cheekier than Pirate Radio — complete with a narrator who takes an active part in the action — made during a time when film censorship was considerably stricter in both the U.K. and the U.S. and the kind of sexual content splashed across the screen in Pirate Radio would have been inconceivable. Nonetheless, Pirate Radio (released in Britain — and listed on the imdb.com Web site — as The Boat That Rocked, a more ambiguous title) is quite likable, a rambunctious romp, nicely acted and so ferociously energetic that though it’s relatively long (135 minutes) it doesn’t seem padded, as so many two-hour-plus movies these days do.
Pirate Radio is being sold as a star vehicle for Philip Seymour Hoffman, probably because he won the Academy Award for playing the title role of Capote, but it’s really an ensemble film. Certainly Hoffman’s role as the grizzled “Count” is as far from the nattily dressed, queeny Truman Capote as could be imagined — a nice tribute to the actor’s versatility — but Rhys Ifans’ Gavin is a more striking and more charismatic character. (Ifans previously starred in a charming Australian import from 2004 called Danny Deckchair, in which he’s a proletarian loser whose life changes when he equips his deck chair with helium balloons and flies: a live-action precursor to the recent computer-animated hit Up.) As Carl, Tom Sturridge is perfectly cast, attractive but sufficiently guileless that we can believe he’s still a virgin when the action starts — and Emma Thompson delivers a force-of-nature performance as his mom, making an indelible impression in just five minutes of screen time. Bill Nighy is O.K. as Quentin — though I couldn’t help but wish Curtis had cast Branagh in this role and got Monty Python veteran John Cleese to play Dormandy — and of the three “baddies” it’s Jack Davenport’s Twatt who makes the strongest impression, projecting the character’s bullying nature as well as his fear of losing his job if he can’t figure out a legal way to get Radio Rock and its pirate brethren off the air.
Though Curtis draws on many real-life incidents involving the pirate radio ships for plot elements — including an on-air marriage of one of the D.J.’s and a shipwreck scene he directs in what appears to be a deliberate parody of the James Cameron Titanic — the most moving plot element is the dramatization of just how powerfully the pirate stations reached their audience and built a sense of community. Early on in the film Curtis shows a young boy sneaking a portable radio out of his dresser drawer and keeping it under his pillow so he can listen to Radio Rock clandestinely while his parents think he’s sleeping — a scene Curtis remembered from his own childhood. Throughout the film Curtis cuts between the broadcasting activities aboard Radio Rock’s ship and people of various ages and stations in life listening to them and cherishing the D.J.’s as virtual friends. (Even the station’s newscaster, played by Will Adamsdale as the expected WKRP in Cincinnati nerd stereotype, seems to spend more time talking about the doings of the D.J.’s than anything that’s happening outside the ship.) This powerful sense of rock ’n’ roll radio as a community builder — immortalized in the 1960’s by songs like Bob Seger’s “Heavy Music” and Lou Reed’s “Rock ’n’ Roll” — is, more than anything else, what makes Pirate Radio more than just a raunchy comedy with an intriguing premise.
The ending of Pirate Radio portrays the battle between the pirates and the authorities as one in which the pirates lost the battle but won the war. Curtis doesn’t tell us that the British government’s response to pirate radio was both to beat them and join them; while Parliament was passing the Marine Offences Act to make the pirate broadcasters illegal, the BBC was creating a 24-hour rock channel, Radio One, and even hiring some of the pirate stations’ star D.J.’s — including Radio Caroline’s Johnny Walker (real-life model for “The Count”) and Radio London’s John Peel. Nor does he mention that the real crusader against pirate radio in the British government wasn’t a cookie-cutter Right-winger like the fictional Dormandy; he was Tony Benn, a radical socialist in the Labor Party (he’d been born into an aristocratic family as Anthony Wedgwood-Benn but had cut down his name to match his Leftist politics). Curtis’ final credits boast that there are now half a million radio stations in the world playing rock and pop full-time, but in his zeal for an affirmative ending he ignores just how homogenized and dull commercial rock radio has become; a little over a decade after Seger and Reed penned their songs about the power and community of broadcast rock, the best songs about rock on the air were cynical anti-commercialist diatribes like Elvis Costello’s “Radio, Radio” and the Clash’s “Capital Radio.”
Nonetheless, Pirate Radio is a dazzling film, a fun romp that manages to put a fresh spin on the hoary old clichés of the rock ’n’ roll movie and make some pretty well-worn situations seem new and amusing. Occasionally Curtis seems to have written his script around the music — one gets the impression the film uses “Marianne” and “Elenor” as character names just because there were songs from the period with those titles — but with strong, vital music like this that’s not a problem. Ironically, the songs by American acts — the Beach Boys, Turtles, Supremes, Smokey Robinson, Otis Redding, Aaron Neville and the Box Tops — seem to hold up at least marginally better than the ones by the Brits, the Kinks and the Who excepted. But there are enough music cues in this film that if they included all of them on the soundtrack CD, it would be a boxed set. Though one could imagine an even more interesting film with the 1960’s radio pirates as its basis, this one is quite entertaining and well worth your while.
••••••••••
Something for Everyone
by D J CEE
Pirate Radio has something for everyone. Saying some thing like this is usually lazy and evasive, but this film really does have just about everything.
(Full disclosure: I was a D.J. on Free Radio San Diego for about five years and was asked to do this review because I might have a unique take. This movie is about a very different time, and my pirate experiences only vaguely resemble the fictionalized history Pirate Radio offers.)
Let’s check everything off and be sure that Pirate Radio does have something for everyone.
Sex: Yes, plenty; about as much as you can have in an R-rated film and still have time for anything else. (While the gigantic popularity of Radio Caroline, the main inspiration for the film, might have given the D.J.’s an edge with women, a man today would have better luck being in the worst band in town than being a pirate D.J.)
Heartbreak: Yes. One D.J.’s marriage collapses as soon as it begins. (See also sex.)
Coming of age/Journey of Discovery: Yes. Much of the film focuses on a young man just expelled from school, who for no rational reason ends up living on the pirate radio ship. He also loses his virginity. (See also sex.)
Violence/Catastrophe: Not much in the way of violence, personal violence. There’s a rivalry between D.J.’s that approaches insanity. The real action comes toward the end. There’s a police raid (something too familiar to radio pirates today) that puts you on the edge of the seat. The real action comes at the end in a shipwreck that draws on The Poseidon Adventure and Titanic.
Comedy: Yes. Lots. Sometimes just right. Sometimes a bit jarring: the Pythonesque scenes of Kenneth Branagh as the government minister working to close down pirate radio just try too hard.
Now while it’s fun to dissect a movie, you will have much more fun seeing this one. It will make you talk to your friends. You’ll wonder why some things are unavoidable on radio while others are entirely absent. You’ll remember times that you got together with others for a purpose.
Perhaps more than the sex, catastrophe, comedy or great ensemble acting, this movie is about the power of music. Even if you don’t like rock ’n’ roll, or any sort of popular music, you have almost certainly been under the spell of a musician. Screaming, hollering, running around in front of the bandstand (or the pulpit) demonstrates the power of music. Falling into a trance at a piano recital demonstrates music’s power. Risking prison, confiscations, and astronomical fines just to broadcast makes music’s hold on us plain. Celebrating the power of music and uncensored speech is what pirate radio is all about. Happily, it’s what this movie is about.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
The Strange Case of Doctor Rx (Universal, 1942)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The movie Charles and I watched last night was another entry from the Cult Horror Classics boxed set produced jointly by Universal and TCM: The Strange Case of Doctor Rx, copyrighted 1941 but not released until 1942, which I had vague memories of having seen on TV in the 1970’s but couldn’t remember any more of than Patric Knowles’ interesting vocal inflections when he pronounced the name “Doctor Rx.” Knowles got top billing as private detective Jerry Church, who has just returned to New York City following a mysterious trip out of town, where he’s discussed giving up crime as a career and moving back to his native Boston to work for his family’s bond-selling firm. (Let’s see if we have this right: he wants to move out of New York City to be involved in the financial markets?) His friend (and friendly rival), police detective captain Bill Hurd (Edmund MacDonald), wants him to stay in town and work on finding the mysterious “Doctor Rx,” who has been knocking off notorious criminals after the great criminal defense attorney Dudley Crispin (Samuel S. Hinds) succeeds in persuading juries to acquit them.
The film opens with Church and Hurd examining the corpse of Dr. Rx’s fifth victim (he leaves slips of paper at the scene of each crime with his signature and a numeral keeping score of how many people he’s killed) — well, actually it opens with a long radio prologue in which a news announcer describes the Dr. Rx slayings and gives us the backstory we need to ‘get” the rest of the movie. The film isn’t really a horror movie at all; it’s a murder mystery, and a not particularly challenging one at that; Lionel Atwill appears as one of the most transparently obvious red herrings in film history — obviously his appearance and the title were supposed to evoke memories of his 1932 chiller Doctor “X” but the quality gap between that film and this one is pretty enormous, and Atwill makes such fleeting (and quirky) appearances here he’s barely in the film until the final reel. The gimmick is that Dr. Rx is not only a free-lance avenger of people who deserve to be convicted of murder but are in fact acquitted, he’s also a mad scientist obsessed with the idea of transplanting a human brain in an ape’s body and vice versa — but the one scene that depicts this seems so out-of-place with the rest of the movie it seems to have been spliced in from another film altogether.
The Strange Case of Doctor Rx was written by Clarence Upson Young from an original story by an uncredited Alex Gottlieb (later a producer at Universal and then at Warners) and directed by William Nigh — almost always a bad sign; like William Beaudine, Nigh got to work with A-list stars in the silent era, made a lot of money, lost it all in the 1929 stock-market crash and thereafter had to support himself with whatever job assignments he could get. The ape-man interlude at least allowed Nigh to relive one of the (relative) high points in his career: The Monster, an MGM silent he directed in 1926 in which Lon Chaney, Sr. played a mad scientist (for the only time in his career) with a similar interest in ape-to-man brain transplants — but it sits uneasily in the middle of a film whose denouement is all too predictable: the super-lawyer Dudley Crispin is himself Doctor Rx, first acquitting his clients and then knocking them off because he knows they’re really guilty. The film moves along — or doesn’t — at Nigh’s usual plodding pace, and though he seems relieved to be working at a major studio (at least he didn’t have to worry about the sets falling down on the actors at any moment!) he doesn’t really bring much distinction to this one as opposed to his work at Monogram, and he doesn’t even include any of the Venetian blind shots that were usually his sole efforts at visual atmosphere.
The cast doesn’t help; Patric Knowles is a personable young actor who did a good job as Errol Flynn’s brother in the 1936 The Charge of the Light Brigade but was just too lightweight a personality to be able to carry a film on his own. Anne Gwynne, his romantic interest (they pose as merely a dating couple for the first half of the movie and then suddenly, and for reasons only Clarence Upson Young could have explained, reveal that they were actually married on that mysterious trip Knowles had just returned from when the film opened), is likewise a nice, personable actress without any particular charisma or depth. Atwill, though billed second, is utterly wasted (the Cult Horror Classics box also includes two much better vehicles for him, Murders at the Zoo and The Mad Doctor of Market Street), as is Shemp Howard, whose presence seems to promise funnier-than-usual “comic relief” but who instead is cast in an almost completely serious supporting part. (Shemp made movies with “name” comedians like W. C. Fields, Abbott and Costello and Olsen and Johnson before replacing his brother Curly in the Three Stooges — where his dry wit fit rather oddly with the precise physical slapstick the Stooges were known for — and he got enough laughs in his great movies one can forgive him his odd lapse in this film.)
The real star of this movie is the other comic-relief guy, Mantan Moreland, perfectly cast as Knowles’ manservant and given the grandiloquent character name “Horatio B. Fitz Washington.” As usual, Moreland manages at once to live up to the stupid Black servant stereotype and totally transcend it — whether he’s chewing out another character for not knowing who George Washington was and loudly proclaiming his pride in having as his namesake the man who crossed the Mississippi to win the American revolution (of course, it was really the Delaware!) or acting to a surprising extent as the voice of reason, not comic stupidity, in the film, Moreland is easily the most watchable actor in it — and one suspects screenwriter Young was aware it was going to turn out that way, since he gave Moreland both the film’s first line of dialogue and its last. Next to Moreland, the film’s most entertaining aspect is the gorgeous Art Deco apartment art director Martin Obzina created for Knowles to live in — a good thing, too, since so much of this movie takes place in that apartment it gets an oddly claustrophobic feeling and gives us all too much time to admire Obzina’s set design. Even when Young creates an intense dramatic scene — a newly acquitted client of Crispin’s takes a medicinal powder and croaks right in the courtroom — Nigh muffs it in the staging, and the scene becomes even more inexplicable later when Knowles assures us the man was neither poisoned nor strangled (as Doctor Rx’s previous victims had been), leaving us wondering just how the guy did die.
The Strange Case of Doctor Rx is one of Universal’s most forgettable movies from the early 1940’s, and why Universal and TCM put this in their “Cult Horror Classics” boxed set when it’s neither a horror film nor a classic is a bigger mystery than the secret identity of Doctor Rx in the film — especially since the 1934 masterpiece The Man Who Reclaimed His Head (also with Lionel Atwill) and the intriguing 1942 Edgar Allan Poe adaptation The Mystery of Marie Roget (also with Patric Knowles) remain frustratingly unavailable.
The movie Charles and I watched last night was another entry from the Cult Horror Classics boxed set produced jointly by Universal and TCM: The Strange Case of Doctor Rx, copyrighted 1941 but not released until 1942, which I had vague memories of having seen on TV in the 1970’s but couldn’t remember any more of than Patric Knowles’ interesting vocal inflections when he pronounced the name “Doctor Rx.” Knowles got top billing as private detective Jerry Church, who has just returned to New York City following a mysterious trip out of town, where he’s discussed giving up crime as a career and moving back to his native Boston to work for his family’s bond-selling firm. (Let’s see if we have this right: he wants to move out of New York City to be involved in the financial markets?) His friend (and friendly rival), police detective captain Bill Hurd (Edmund MacDonald), wants him to stay in town and work on finding the mysterious “Doctor Rx,” who has been knocking off notorious criminals after the great criminal defense attorney Dudley Crispin (Samuel S. Hinds) succeeds in persuading juries to acquit them.
The film opens with Church and Hurd examining the corpse of Dr. Rx’s fifth victim (he leaves slips of paper at the scene of each crime with his signature and a numeral keeping score of how many people he’s killed) — well, actually it opens with a long radio prologue in which a news announcer describes the Dr. Rx slayings and gives us the backstory we need to ‘get” the rest of the movie. The film isn’t really a horror movie at all; it’s a murder mystery, and a not particularly challenging one at that; Lionel Atwill appears as one of the most transparently obvious red herrings in film history — obviously his appearance and the title were supposed to evoke memories of his 1932 chiller Doctor “X” but the quality gap between that film and this one is pretty enormous, and Atwill makes such fleeting (and quirky) appearances here he’s barely in the film until the final reel. The gimmick is that Dr. Rx is not only a free-lance avenger of people who deserve to be convicted of murder but are in fact acquitted, he’s also a mad scientist obsessed with the idea of transplanting a human brain in an ape’s body and vice versa — but the one scene that depicts this seems so out-of-place with the rest of the movie it seems to have been spliced in from another film altogether.
The Strange Case of Doctor Rx was written by Clarence Upson Young from an original story by an uncredited Alex Gottlieb (later a producer at Universal and then at Warners) and directed by William Nigh — almost always a bad sign; like William Beaudine, Nigh got to work with A-list stars in the silent era, made a lot of money, lost it all in the 1929 stock-market crash and thereafter had to support himself with whatever job assignments he could get. The ape-man interlude at least allowed Nigh to relive one of the (relative) high points in his career: The Monster, an MGM silent he directed in 1926 in which Lon Chaney, Sr. played a mad scientist (for the only time in his career) with a similar interest in ape-to-man brain transplants — but it sits uneasily in the middle of a film whose denouement is all too predictable: the super-lawyer Dudley Crispin is himself Doctor Rx, first acquitting his clients and then knocking them off because he knows they’re really guilty. The film moves along — or doesn’t — at Nigh’s usual plodding pace, and though he seems relieved to be working at a major studio (at least he didn’t have to worry about the sets falling down on the actors at any moment!) he doesn’t really bring much distinction to this one as opposed to his work at Monogram, and he doesn’t even include any of the Venetian blind shots that were usually his sole efforts at visual atmosphere.
The cast doesn’t help; Patric Knowles is a personable young actor who did a good job as Errol Flynn’s brother in the 1936 The Charge of the Light Brigade but was just too lightweight a personality to be able to carry a film on his own. Anne Gwynne, his romantic interest (they pose as merely a dating couple for the first half of the movie and then suddenly, and for reasons only Clarence Upson Young could have explained, reveal that they were actually married on that mysterious trip Knowles had just returned from when the film opened), is likewise a nice, personable actress without any particular charisma or depth. Atwill, though billed second, is utterly wasted (the Cult Horror Classics box also includes two much better vehicles for him, Murders at the Zoo and The Mad Doctor of Market Street), as is Shemp Howard, whose presence seems to promise funnier-than-usual “comic relief” but who instead is cast in an almost completely serious supporting part. (Shemp made movies with “name” comedians like W. C. Fields, Abbott and Costello and Olsen and Johnson before replacing his brother Curly in the Three Stooges — where his dry wit fit rather oddly with the precise physical slapstick the Stooges were known for — and he got enough laughs in his great movies one can forgive him his odd lapse in this film.)
The real star of this movie is the other comic-relief guy, Mantan Moreland, perfectly cast as Knowles’ manservant and given the grandiloquent character name “Horatio B. Fitz Washington.” As usual, Moreland manages at once to live up to the stupid Black servant stereotype and totally transcend it — whether he’s chewing out another character for not knowing who George Washington was and loudly proclaiming his pride in having as his namesake the man who crossed the Mississippi to win the American revolution (of course, it was really the Delaware!) or acting to a surprising extent as the voice of reason, not comic stupidity, in the film, Moreland is easily the most watchable actor in it — and one suspects screenwriter Young was aware it was going to turn out that way, since he gave Moreland both the film’s first line of dialogue and its last. Next to Moreland, the film’s most entertaining aspect is the gorgeous Art Deco apartment art director Martin Obzina created for Knowles to live in — a good thing, too, since so much of this movie takes place in that apartment it gets an oddly claustrophobic feeling and gives us all too much time to admire Obzina’s set design. Even when Young creates an intense dramatic scene — a newly acquitted client of Crispin’s takes a medicinal powder and croaks right in the courtroom — Nigh muffs it in the staging, and the scene becomes even more inexplicable later when Knowles assures us the man was neither poisoned nor strangled (as Doctor Rx’s previous victims had been), leaving us wondering just how the guy did die.
The Strange Case of Doctor Rx is one of Universal’s most forgettable movies from the early 1940’s, and why Universal and TCM put this in their “Cult Horror Classics” boxed set when it’s neither a horror film nor a classic is a bigger mystery than the secret identity of Doctor Rx in the film — especially since the 1934 masterpiece The Man Who Reclaimed His Head (also with Lionel Atwill) and the intriguing 1942 Edgar Allan Poe adaptation The Mystery of Marie Roget (also with Patric Knowles) remain frustratingly unavailable.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
The Mad Ghoul (Universal, 1943)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Mad Ghoul, a 1943 Universal horror production which I hadn’t seen since the old Robert Wilkins Creature Feature days in the Bay Area in the 1970’s but which I had fond memories of if only because it was yet another example of how Egyptian-American actor Turhan Bey escaped the usual fate of people of color in classic-era Hollywood. Just about any other actor of color would have been relegated to the title role, while the white Anglo-Saxon co-lead with a bland name like David Bruce would have been the hero; instead, producer Ben Pivar and director James P. Hogan had Bruce play the titular monster and Bey got to end up with the female lead, Evelyn Ankers, at the end.
Aside from that, The Mad Ghoul is a pretty small chip off the old horror log, with George Zucco billed third (after Bruce and Ankers, in that order) but really the star as chemistry professor Dr. Alfred Morris. It begins with him giving a college class in which he shows slides of ancient Mayan paintings, in one of which puffs of white smoke appear in the design. Morris explains that this is evidence that the Mayans actually had a form of poison gas, which he is attempting to replicate in his lab (the fact that it would have been far more likely to be tobacco smoke doesn’t occur to him — or to the film’s writers, Paul Gangelin and Brenda Weisberg, adapting a story by former Lubitsch and Valentino collaborator Hans Kräly). Like the heroine of the Lifetime movie Student Seduction, professor Zucco notes that student Ted Allison (Bruce) is neglecting his chemistry studies and offers to tutor him privately — and over the summer (the class we’ve seen depicted at the beginning is supposed to be the last one of the term) Ted starts coming over to Morris’s house, where he learns that Morris has already discovered the Mayan gas formula and that it doesn’t kill its victims, but puts them into a weakened “death in life” state in which they’re susceptible to being commanded by a superior will.
Romance then rears its attractive head in the person of Isabel Lewis (Evelyn Ankers), who’s about to graduate from the music department and pursue a lucrative career as a concert singer with Eric Iverson (Turhan Bey, billed fifth) as her accompanist. (Charles questioned why an Egyptian actor with a noticeable accent would be playing a character named “Iverson,” but I reasoned he could have been the product of a British father and a Egyptian mother, much like the Zita Johann character in Universal’s 1932 classic, The Mummy.) According to a trivia note on the Universal-TCM DVD, Ankers wanted to do her own singing for the role — she could have — but because the shooting schedule was so short, producer Pivar had her mime to three recordings already in Universal’s music library by singer Lillian Cornell, including “I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls” from Balfe’s operetta The Bohemian Girl and a piece called “Our Love Will Live” cobbled together from the famous opening theme of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1. (The dubbing was more obvious than usual, mainly because Cornell’s records were so old the sound on them was grainy and distorted, and clearly inferior to the rest of the soundtrack.)
Isabel was previously dating Ted but has decided he’s too young and shallow for her — and she confesses to Dr. Morris that she wants someone older and more worldly. Morris has a crush on her himself and thinks she means him, but she doesn’t — she means her accompanist Eric. Thinking this will pave the way for him to get Isabel, Dr. Morris mixes his crystals containing his Mayan gas formula with water (in a crucible that was a familiar prop to Zucco, who’d also used it to brew the tana-leaf tea with which he revived the Mummy in Universal’s later films in the cycle), locks Ted in the basement lab as the gas is being released, and thereby turns him into the Mad Ghoul. He actually becomes one of Universal’s most disappointing and least scary monsters, looking like a cross between a punk rocker and Moe Howard’s younger brother. Jack P. Pierce’s usual makeup genius was out to lunch for the duration of this project, and there was also no attempt through colored filters or double exposures to do Ted’s man-to-monster or monster-to-man transformations on screen. Instead David Bruce merely puts his hands over his head and sinks his head in his lap (he always seems to be sitting down when the “changes” happen), and when he raises his head again and lets us see his face it’s the monster’s.
It turns out that the only thing that can change Ted back to a normal human being is blood drawn from the heart of a recently deceased human being — which means that he and Dr. Morris end up following Isabel around on her concert tour, with Ted in his monster state neatly removing the hearts from the newly dead (using a fresh corpse if one is available, creating one themselves by committing murder if it isn’t) and Isabel getting upset that the concerts she’s giving and the acclaim she’s getting are being eclipsed in the media by the exploits of the killer ghoul. Reporter “Scoop” McClure (Robert Armstrong, fourth-billed and as authoritative as ever even though Hollywood ill-used this ballsy actor by sending him back to the character-player salt mines after his star turns in King Kong and Son of Kong) notices the juxtaposition that a ghoul victim turns up dead in every city in which Isabel performs — no one else in the movie seems to pick up on that — and he and the cops (including a young Charles McGraw) finally track the ghoul to Isabel’s final performance (on the famous set built for the 1925 Phantom of the Opera) and the cops shoot Ted down just as he’s about to kill Eric — which was Dr. Morris’s plan: turn Ted into a monster and use his zombie-like control over him to get him to kill Eric, so both his rivals for Isabel’s love would be eliminated and she’d have nowhere else to go.
The Mad Ghoul isn’t much of a movie — its derivations from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari are too obvious, and it’s made with a cool professionalism throughout but it still isn’t very exciting. Zucco was making even tackier films in the mid-1940’s — including The Mad Monster, Dead Men Walk and The Flying Serpent for PRC — but somehow those crude movies have an energy The Mad Ghoul lacks, probably because Hogan didn’t let Zucco chew the scenery the way PRC director Sam Newfield (who made all of those movies, either under his own name or as “Sherman Scott”) did, and somehow an under-wraps Zucco is a less effective Zucco. Universal deserves points for having Turhan Bey get the girl (as they did again in the 1945 historical epic Sudan with Maria Montez and Jon Hall) in spite of his ethnicity, but otherwise The Mad Ghoul is a pretty standard by-the-numbers horror exercise and yet one more piece of evidence that by 1943 artistic leadership in U.S. horror films had decisively shifted from Universal to Val Lewton’s unit at RKO.
The film was The Mad Ghoul, a 1943 Universal horror production which I hadn’t seen since the old Robert Wilkins Creature Feature days in the Bay Area in the 1970’s but which I had fond memories of if only because it was yet another example of how Egyptian-American actor Turhan Bey escaped the usual fate of people of color in classic-era Hollywood. Just about any other actor of color would have been relegated to the title role, while the white Anglo-Saxon co-lead with a bland name like David Bruce would have been the hero; instead, producer Ben Pivar and director James P. Hogan had Bruce play the titular monster and Bey got to end up with the female lead, Evelyn Ankers, at the end.
Aside from that, The Mad Ghoul is a pretty small chip off the old horror log, with George Zucco billed third (after Bruce and Ankers, in that order) but really the star as chemistry professor Dr. Alfred Morris. It begins with him giving a college class in which he shows slides of ancient Mayan paintings, in one of which puffs of white smoke appear in the design. Morris explains that this is evidence that the Mayans actually had a form of poison gas, which he is attempting to replicate in his lab (the fact that it would have been far more likely to be tobacco smoke doesn’t occur to him — or to the film’s writers, Paul Gangelin and Brenda Weisberg, adapting a story by former Lubitsch and Valentino collaborator Hans Kräly). Like the heroine of the Lifetime movie Student Seduction, professor Zucco notes that student Ted Allison (Bruce) is neglecting his chemistry studies and offers to tutor him privately — and over the summer (the class we’ve seen depicted at the beginning is supposed to be the last one of the term) Ted starts coming over to Morris’s house, where he learns that Morris has already discovered the Mayan gas formula and that it doesn’t kill its victims, but puts them into a weakened “death in life” state in which they’re susceptible to being commanded by a superior will.
Romance then rears its attractive head in the person of Isabel Lewis (Evelyn Ankers), who’s about to graduate from the music department and pursue a lucrative career as a concert singer with Eric Iverson (Turhan Bey, billed fifth) as her accompanist. (Charles questioned why an Egyptian actor with a noticeable accent would be playing a character named “Iverson,” but I reasoned he could have been the product of a British father and a Egyptian mother, much like the Zita Johann character in Universal’s 1932 classic, The Mummy.) According to a trivia note on the Universal-TCM DVD, Ankers wanted to do her own singing for the role — she could have — but because the shooting schedule was so short, producer Pivar had her mime to three recordings already in Universal’s music library by singer Lillian Cornell, including “I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls” from Balfe’s operetta The Bohemian Girl and a piece called “Our Love Will Live” cobbled together from the famous opening theme of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1. (The dubbing was more obvious than usual, mainly because Cornell’s records were so old the sound on them was grainy and distorted, and clearly inferior to the rest of the soundtrack.)
Isabel was previously dating Ted but has decided he’s too young and shallow for her — and she confesses to Dr. Morris that she wants someone older and more worldly. Morris has a crush on her himself and thinks she means him, but she doesn’t — she means her accompanist Eric. Thinking this will pave the way for him to get Isabel, Dr. Morris mixes his crystals containing his Mayan gas formula with water (in a crucible that was a familiar prop to Zucco, who’d also used it to brew the tana-leaf tea with which he revived the Mummy in Universal’s later films in the cycle), locks Ted in the basement lab as the gas is being released, and thereby turns him into the Mad Ghoul. He actually becomes one of Universal’s most disappointing and least scary monsters, looking like a cross between a punk rocker and Moe Howard’s younger brother. Jack P. Pierce’s usual makeup genius was out to lunch for the duration of this project, and there was also no attempt through colored filters or double exposures to do Ted’s man-to-monster or monster-to-man transformations on screen. Instead David Bruce merely puts his hands over his head and sinks his head in his lap (he always seems to be sitting down when the “changes” happen), and when he raises his head again and lets us see his face it’s the monster’s.
It turns out that the only thing that can change Ted back to a normal human being is blood drawn from the heart of a recently deceased human being — which means that he and Dr. Morris end up following Isabel around on her concert tour, with Ted in his monster state neatly removing the hearts from the newly dead (using a fresh corpse if one is available, creating one themselves by committing murder if it isn’t) and Isabel getting upset that the concerts she’s giving and the acclaim she’s getting are being eclipsed in the media by the exploits of the killer ghoul. Reporter “Scoop” McClure (Robert Armstrong, fourth-billed and as authoritative as ever even though Hollywood ill-used this ballsy actor by sending him back to the character-player salt mines after his star turns in King Kong and Son of Kong) notices the juxtaposition that a ghoul victim turns up dead in every city in which Isabel performs — no one else in the movie seems to pick up on that — and he and the cops (including a young Charles McGraw) finally track the ghoul to Isabel’s final performance (on the famous set built for the 1925 Phantom of the Opera) and the cops shoot Ted down just as he’s about to kill Eric — which was Dr. Morris’s plan: turn Ted into a monster and use his zombie-like control over him to get him to kill Eric, so both his rivals for Isabel’s love would be eliminated and she’d have nowhere else to go.
The Mad Ghoul isn’t much of a movie — its derivations from Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari are too obvious, and it’s made with a cool professionalism throughout but it still isn’t very exciting. Zucco was making even tackier films in the mid-1940’s — including The Mad Monster, Dead Men Walk and The Flying Serpent for PRC — but somehow those crude movies have an energy The Mad Ghoul lacks, probably because Hogan didn’t let Zucco chew the scenery the way PRC director Sam Newfield (who made all of those movies, either under his own name or as “Sherman Scott”) did, and somehow an under-wraps Zucco is a less effective Zucco. Universal deserves points for having Turhan Bey get the girl (as they did again in the 1945 historical epic Sudan with Maria Montez and Jon Hall) in spite of his ethnicity, but otherwise The Mad Ghoul is a pretty standard by-the-numbers horror exercise and yet one more piece of evidence that by 1943 artistic leadership in U.S. horror films had decisively shifted from Universal to Val Lewton’s unit at RKO.
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
An Age of Kings (BBC-TV, 1960)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I broke open the DVD boxed set of An Age of Kings, the remarkable 1960 British TV cycle in which the BBC, under producer Peter Dews and director Michael Hayes, took eight of Shakespeare’s history plays — Richard II; Henry IV, Part 1; Henry IV, Part 2; Henry V; Henry VI, Part 1; Henry VI, Part 2; Henry VI, Part 3 and Richard III — and edited them into a 15-part mini-series telling the story of Britain’s royal family and the civil wars between various relatives for the crown between 1399, when Richard II was deposed by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke; and 1485, when the last of the Plantagenets, Richard III, was defeated at Bosworth Field by Henry Tudor, later King Henry VII.
The show ran the plays in historical chronological order rather than in the order Shakespeare wrote them — he actually wrote the last four before the first four (and it shows in the greater maturity of the language and dramatic complexity in the first four than the last ones), and it’s not altogether clear just how much of the three Henry VI plays — the earliest ones in the accepted Shakespeare canon — is actually Shakespeare’s writing. Earlier versions of these plays exist, and it seems likely that Shakespeare’s company just picked up the scripts (remember that in the 1500’s there were no copyright laws; everything was in the public domain, and one reason so few plays were published during this era and why so few play scripts exist was that theatre companies wanted to keep their scripts as secure as possible so rivals couldn’t rip off a hit play and perform it themselves) and he patched them together and pumped them up with his own writing. When I read Henry VI, Part 1 in a separate edition it was clear to me that the only scene that was definitely Shakespeare’s was a scene in a garden in which the rivals pick red and white roses, symbolizing the rival Houses of Lancaster and York that would fight the Wars of the Roses in the second half of the cycle — and since earlier versions of this play don’t contain the scene, it seemed obvious that Shakespeare had written it in to tie the first Henry VI play with the two sequels, which were closer to his mature style.
An Age of Kings was personally important to me because National Educational Television (NET), the precursor to PBS, picked up the American rights and I watched the shows on KQED in Marin County when I was growing up — at first tuning in only to the introductions by Dr. Frank C. Baxter, who set the context for each episode and untangled the often snarled genealogy of the British royals at the time so you could tell who was who, how they were related and how much of a claim each would-be king really had to the throne. KQED ran the series every year from 1961 to about 1964 or 1965, at first showing the episodes once weekly, and then, for the last year they had the rights they “stripped” them and showed them daily for 15 days in a row — and they were my introduction to Shakespeare. Indeed, they were so powerful an introduction not only to Shakespeare but to stage-based drama altogether that for a long time I thought all plays were written in blank verse and dealt with the kinds of mythological, historical or otherwise “elevated” subjects as Shakespeare’s did.
The other thing An Age of Kings is famous for is the cast, particularly two actors who went on to bigger and better things: Sean Connery, who played Hotspur in the first four episodes two years before he filmed Dr. No and launched the James Bond series; and Judi Dench, who as a young actress played Catherine, the French princess Henry V marries to solidify his claim to the French throne, and who would become world-famous in her old age for playing hereditary female monarchs: Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love and Victoria in Mrs. Brown. (She too would eventually make it into the James Bond series, as the first female “M” in the most recent Bond films.) So when I heard that An Age of Kings was coming out on DVD I rushed to order it (in fact, I got two copies, one for myself and one for my mother because I realized she’d have many of the same memories of it I had and therefore be as eager to see it again as I was), and last night I screened the first three episodes: “This Hollow Crown” and “The Deposing of a King,” based on Richard II; and “Rebellion from the North,” based on the first half of Henry IV, Part 1.
Seen today, what most impresses about An Age of Kings is the sheer speed with which it moves — Michael Hayes keeps the pace moving forward and creates the impression of a history that is moving at such blazing speed even the participants seem overwhelmed by it — and the uniformly excellent quality of the acting, especially its naturalism. An article I read years ago — written by someone whose name I have, alas, long since forgotten — argued that the only way Shakespeare can work for a modern audience is if the actors manage to convince us that they talk this way all the time. In An Age of Kings they meet that challenge handsomely and convince us that they are real people, speaking the language of a bygone age but facing personal, psychological and political issues very familiar to us today.
All too many Shakespeare productions approach the language far too reverently — treating it like a dose of intellectual medicine (“listen to this, it’s good for you”) and chanting the lines in an annoying sing-song pattern, as if they’re too frightened of the iambic pentameter even to try to utter it like normal speech. Not here. From the first three episodes one gets the impression that Shakespeare was aware of mental illnesses we’ve known and categorized today, and depicted them accurately in his characters, even though medical science in his time was almost clueless about the diseases of the body and totally clueless about the diseases of the brain. I first had that thought watching the surviving 1953 kinescope of Orson Welles in a Peter Brook-directed TV production of King Lear, and it occurred to me that what Welles was portraying was an almost clinically exact picture of Alzheimer’s disease — and that Shakespeare may have observed similarly out-of-it old people and written their condition into the role of Lear. I had a similar feeling watching the two Age of Kings episodes based on Richard II and seeing Richard’s mercurial moods — alternating in rapid succession in the opening scene between letting the duel between Bolingbroke and Mowbray go forward, then stopping the duel and sending them into exile — Mowbray for life and Bolingbroke for 10 years, then cutting Bolingbroke’s exile from 10 years to six — and later between resisting Bolingbroke’s challenge to his authority and yielding to it — and suddenly reading Richard’s abrupt changes in mood as what would now be called bipolar disorder.
I also found myself “getting” parts of the play I hadn’t before and finding new meanings as a middle-aged adult that had eluded me when I saw these shows as a child — like the almost screaming-queen quality with which David William played Richard II (one does get the impression that the commoners Bushy, Bagot and Green, whom he’s elevated with knighthoods and made part of his entourage, are also his Gay boyfriends — and given that he was the great-grandson of Britain’s Gay monarch Edward II, vividly and openly characterized as Queer in Christopher Marlowe’s play about him, that would make a certain degree of sense) or the serious drinking Prince Hal (Robert Hardy) does in Henry IV, Part 1. Indeed, one could draw a parallel between Hal, later King Henry V, and George W. Bush: both members of hereditary ruling families who grew up as wastrels and alcoholics, pulled themselves together, eventually succeeded their fathers as heads of state and launched foreign wars that began with quick victories but eventually turned into extended occupations and quagmires.
One thing that comes off strongly from the first three episodes of An Age of Kings was how conservative Shakespeare really was. He was far, far ahead of his time in understanding human psychology and creating multidimensional characters that evoke the unchanging parts of human nature, but he was very much of his time in his reverence for class distinctions and the whole concept of “the divine right of kings.” The entire history cycle begins with an attack on the natural kingly order and ends with that order being restored with the defeat of Richard III and the ascension of the House of Tudor — and while modern historians might regard the Tudors, who were farther removed from the royal line than any of the rival claimants Shakespeare depicts in these plays, as parvenu pretenders, they were the reigning house when he wrote them, he had to suck up to them or risk his career or his life, and they had brought back a sense of stability (ironically reflected by Josephine Tey in the novel The Daughter of Time — which she wrote as part of her mission to rehabilitate Richard III’s reputation from the damage that had been done to it by the Tudor-era propaganda of Shakespeare and the historian Raphael Holinshed, who was his principal source — when early on she joked that when British schoolchildren got to the Battle of Bosworth Field, they rejoiced because “the Wars of the Roses were over and now they could go on to the Tudors, who were dull but easy to follow”).
One running theme in these plays is the idea that kings forfeit their authority to rule when they appeal to the common people for help — Richard weakens his just status as monarch when he brings Bushy, Bagot and Green into his inner circle; and Bolingbroke only underscores the illegitimacy of his claim when he directly appeals to the commoners for support. Remember that Shakespeare was the son of a gentleman who for mysterious reasons had been dispossessed, and the thing he was proudest of at the end of his life was not that he had written a series of literary masterpieces that would be performed centuries after his death, or even that he’d kept a theatrical company together and working for at least two decades, but that he had replenished his family fortunes — reason enough that his death certificate described him as “William Shakespeare, Gent.”
Richard II is no more tragic as a character than when he realizes that the promise under which he took the throne (22 years earlier, at age 11, when even though he was a boy and couldn’t yet rule in his own right he was expected to be in some sort of magic contact with the people so that his mere presence would settle the Peasant’s Revolt) that he had a mandate from God to rule for the rest of his life, has been taken away from him by Bolingbroke with the sheer power of earthly force — despite the extent to which the concept “divine right of kings” sits oddly on us now that for centuries a mandate from the people has replaced a mandate from heaven as the social mechanism for conferring legitimacy on a ruler. (Even 20th century dictatorships regularly trotted their people out to the polls to vote in rigged “elections” to establish at least the fig leaf of popular support.)
The acting in An Age of Kings is generally extraordinary, though I did find Frank Pettingell’s Sir John Falstaff a bit of a trial (and, referencing the film My Own Private Idaho, Charles joked that Robert Hardy looked nothing like Keanu Reeves!); he’s right enough for the part, but I’ve never stopped wishing that the 20th century comedian Shakespeare seemed almost mystically to be anticipating when he created this old, fat, drunken but still lovable braggart — W. C. Fields — had had the chance to play the role on film. (The closest we came to seeing Fields in a classic is his marvelous reading of Mr. Micawber in the 1935 film David Copperfield.) Remember that Falstaff has that “Sir” on the front end of his name, indicating that he fell from at least some level of social distinction and wasn’t a tavern drunk all his life!
And though I’m not sure anyone would have guessed watching An Age of Kings that out of all the actors in it, Sean Connery would have been the one to achieve superstardom (both my mom and I thought at the time it was going to be Robert Hardy!), it’s certainly a testament to his versatility that he could be so effective as the appropriately named Hotspur — tough, hot-blooded, quick to anger and obsessively concerned with maintaining his “honor” (and with his Scottish accent far more in evidence than usual) — and just two years later make it big in an almost completely different role as James Bond, the icon of cool. — 10/8/09
••••••••••
I ran episode four of Shakespeare’s An Age of Kings, “The Road to Shrewsbury” — Shrewsbury being the town in the north of England, close to the Scottish border, where the decisive battle happened that ended the main rebellion against King Henry IV (there would be others, and the next two episodes deal with them) and solidified his place on the throne. The episode is based on the second half of the play Henry IV, Part 1 — Shakespeare’s most popular play during his lifetime (which surprised Charles, who thought of the histories as sort of also-rans in the Shakespeare canon — not all that odd since aside from Henry V and Richard III, they’re not as often performed today as the comedies and especially the tragedies) and the second most popular play of the entire Elizabethan era (number one was Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy), mainly due to the success of the comic character, Sir John Falstaff (reportedly based on a real-life hanger-on in Elizabeth’s court named Sir Jonas Oldacre). Falstaff was so popular, in fact, that Shakespeare wrote two more plays depicting him, Henry IV, Part 2 and The Merry Wives of Windsor.
What amazed Charles most about this production was, as he put it, “they were doing Shakespeare on a Dr. Who budget” — the BBC had only so much money and so they went to their familiar locations when they absolutely needed an outdoor sequence, and the battle of Shrewsbury itself is merely a few isolated people squabbling in the woods. The final duel between the two Harrys (Harry Percy, Earl of Hotspur; and Harry of Monmouth, later King Henry V) in which our Prince Hal kills Hotspur and thereby establishes his war-cred for the British throne takes place on the balcony and consists mainly of Robert Hardy and Sean Connery just hacking away at each other until Hardy gets the chance to stab the future James Bond. (As I mentioned in my comments on the third episode, “Rebellion From the North,” it’s hard to imagine from seeing the two together in this film that Connery would become an international superstar and Hardy, a charismatic personality and a fine actor who holds his own as Henry against the inevitable comparisons with Laurence Olivier, wouldn’t!)
At that — as I’ve pointed out before in my notes on films set in the medieval period — this sort of rather crude sword-play was probably far closer to how medieval swordfights actually went than the elaborately choreographed duels Errol Flynn and Tyrone Power fought on-screen against Basil Rathbone (who resented dueling with Flynn because he’d actually studied fencing — Flynn hadn’t — and yet the scripts always called for him to lose), Henry Daniell, George Sanders and others from Hollywood’s villains’ hall of fame. As anemic as the battle of Shrewsbury looks in this re-creation — it looks more like something staged by an impoverished group of Wars of the Roses re-enactors than a serious attempt to depict an historical incident — it’s at least closer to the probable reality than the way director Rowland V. Lee staged Bosworth Field in the 1939 film Tower of London (which was the Richard III story transposed into a Universal horror film) as armies moving in strict formations, more like a Busby Berkeley production than the “fog of war” then or now.
Orson Welles’ film Chimes at Midnight — also based on Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays — probably got it right; his budget (supplied by a Spanish production company) was adequate for a fair number of extras, but the battle as Welles staged it is a confused series of fights in which Henry IV’s forces won more by wearing down the rebels (whom they outnumbered — Shakespeare’s text says Henry IV had an army of 30,000, while two of the main rebel forces never made it to the battle at all and thus the rebels were hopelessly disadvantaged) than scoring any decisive victory in the field. It’s also worthy of note that An Age of Kings doesn’t skirt the gorier parts of the story but manages to stage them tastefully — I’m still impressed at the way David William’s eyes bulged out when Richard II is stabbed in the back by a gang of free-lance assassins who think (wrongly) it will curry them favor with the new king to eliminate the old one, and at the end of “The Road to Shrewsbury” a few bodies draped in grotesque positions powerfully suggest the brutality of the battle without going overboard on the blood and guts (and it’s that shot over which the final credits come up).
What holds up best in “The Road to Shrewsbury” is the marvelous meditation on “honor” and the ultimate silliness of war that Shakespeare built into the script — as conservative (in the literal sense) as Shakespeare may have been about the divine right of kings, and as dismissive as he was of the very idea that the common people ought to have a say in the way they were governed, he was also not at all a glorifier of war; what comes through most strongly in the play’s treatment of the battle is the sheer pointlessness of it, the way Hotspur’s obsession with “honor” literally leads to his death (when the rest of the rebel forces don’t show Hotspur’s reaction is that the victory will be even sweeter, and his “honor” even greater, if it’s achieved against the odds of numbers; and when Henry IV sends out a peace feeler before the battle, offering both an amnesty and to apologize for whatever slights the rebels think he did them if they’ll lay down their arms and give up their challenge to his power, the other rebels carefully conceal this from Hotspur because they’re afraid that the deal will assuage his concern over his “honor,” and therefore he’ll want to take it), while Shakespeare’s sympathies are clearly with Falstaff, who gives a famous speech ridiculing the whole concept of “honor” — especially that you generally have to die in battle to achieve it — and he ends up dishonorable but still alive. (This speech was incorporated by Arrigo Boïto into his libretto for Verdi’s opera Falstaff, even though the opera’s basic plot and most of its text came from The Merry Wives of Windsor.)
Overall, An Age of Kings lives up to my memories and its formidable reputation even though it’s a mystery why, after having been so ubiquitous on the nascent U.S. public broadcasting network in the early 1960’s it so totally faded from sight until its release on DVD last year. (My guess is that some of the actors in it, or their heirs, weren’t willing to authorize it to be shown again without royalty payments far larger than what the BBC could or would pay.) It’s certainly a worthwhile translation of Shakespeare’s plays into the language of television; it should be required viewing for any actor interested in playing Shakespeare; and it also serves as a good introduction both to Shakespeare in general and to some of his less performed scripts. — 10/9/09
••••••••••
I ran parts five and six of An Age of Kings, “The New Conspiracy” and “Uneasy Lies the Head,” which correspond to Shakespeare’s play Henry IV, Part 2. Like a lot of modern-day producers, Shakespeare not only did a sequel to his first Henry IV play because the first one had been so popular, he emphasized the element that had been crucial to its box-office success: the character of Sir John Falstaff. At the same time, it’s a very odd play indeed because its theme is decrepitude and decay; the characters and the conflicts that seemed so fresh in the first play are old and tired here; many of the characters themselves are suffering visibly from the effects of age (when Falstaff goes to the country and meets his old friend Justice Shallow to recruit young boys for Henry IV’s army, they reminisce on their mutual friends who have died and Falstaff says, “We have seen the chimes at midnight” — a phrase Orson Welles used as the title of his movie based on the two Henry IV plays, in which he played Falstaff as well as directing), and even the ones who aren’t seem tired.
The play opens with the rebels who failed to get rid of Henry IV the first time dredging up their old, tired plot and trying again — indeed, there’s a fascinating scene at the beginning in which the first person who comes to Northumberland’s castle with news of the battle has it wrong, telling the earl that their side won a great victory; and it’s only later that he gets the truth that not only did the rebels get their asses kicked but his son Hotspur is dead. Even the first words out of the mouth of Prince Hal, who doesn’t enter until 23 minutes into the 59-minute first episode, are, “Before God, I am exceeding weary” — weary, it turns out, of the burden of having to pretend to be a wastrel so people will be surprised when he finally mounts the throne and becomes a responsible king.
The most dramatically “aged” character in the piece is, of course, King Henry IV himself — and actor Tom Fleming deserves enormous credit for portraying both the young Bolingbroke, eager rebel who goes for broke taking on Richard II and winning; the mature monarch who leads his forces to victory at Shrewsbury; and the decrepit old man, barely hanging on (he’s not seen at all in the “New Conspiracy” episode and the first glimpse we get of him is at the start of “Uneasy Lies the Head” — he’s going through a heavy-duty bout of insomnia that anticipates Macbeth’s and has led some writers to suggest that Shakespeare may have been insomniac himself), until he finally dies, regretting that the constant series of rebellions against him (a process he started by his own rebellion against Richard!) has made it impossible for him to lead a new Crusade — and Shakespeare has his dying wish be to be taken to a room in the palace called the “Jerusalem Room” so he can satisfy the prophecy that he would die in Jerusalem, “which vainly I supposed to be the Holy Land.”
Henry IV, Part 2 is full of the kinds of psychological one-on-one conflicts between strong-willed individuals that are consistently the sorts of scenes Shakespeare was best at (he was weakest, ironically, where his contemporary Marlowe was strongest: in dramatizing class conflicts and political struggles that couldn’t be translated into one-on-one terms — and it was interesting that when the Soviet film industry, under Stalin’s lash, moved in the 1930’s away from dramas of class conflict and mass revolution towards more conventional great-man movies of history, the official advice from the government to its filmmakers was to “learn from Shakespeare” how to make the conflicts between individuals stand in for the conflicts between classes).
The best parts of this sometimes creaky play are the final scenes, first between Henry IV and Prince Hal — when he tries the crown on for size, thinking his father already dead, and dad comes back to consciousness and understandably has a hissy-fit that his crazy son couldn’t wait for him to croak before starting to rule — and in which Henry IV advises his son to “busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels,” settling all the tiresome arguments over the succession and the ensuing civil wars by starting a foreign war and thereby uniting the country around a common enemy (and everybody in the court knows just who the common enemy will be: France, which British monarchs had been laying claim to ever since William the Conqueror took over England from his base in Normandy; indeed, as Dr. Frank C. Baxter explained in his introductions to the American showings of An Age of Kings, regrettably omitted from the DVD’s, the vests worn by the royals in the film depict both the British lion and the French fleur de lys, indicating the British monarchs’ claim to be rightful rulers of both countries) — and the final sequence, in which Sir John Falstaff shows up at Henry V’s coronation, thinking he’s going to get to be the power behind the throne, and is instead told coldly, cuttingly, calculatedly, “I know thee not, old man/Fall to thy prayers.”
Oddly, in a performance that is otherwise so insightful, Robert Hardy as Henry V almost throws away the key line and the great speech (“How ill white hairs become a fool and jester” — yet another reference to age in a play that is full of them) that follows — but that’s a minor glitch in a series that’s been uniformly well acted, reflecting the steady performing tradition that has continued in Shakespeare’s country from his day to ours with only one interruption (the 12-year Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, who as a Puritan closed down all public amusements, including all theatres, as frivolous and likely to take people’s attention away from their duty to serve God). There’s even a clever afterword where, through the final credits, we see one of the actors taking off his makeup and he delivers the postlude of Shakespeare’s play, where he promises another installment “with Sir John in it” (a promise he did not fulfill; he narrates Falstaff’s death in Henry V but does not show him as an on-stage character — although Laurence Olivier did in the 1944 film of Henry V, hiring an old music-hall star named George Robey to play Falstaff in a silent scene depicting the death that is merely talked about and speculated on in the script) and to “make you merry with fair Catherine of France,” the French princess whom Henry marries after winning his war in order to solidify his and his heirs’ claim on the French throne. (In An Age of Kings this part was played by the actor who, next to Connery, had the most illustrious subsequent career of anyone in the series: Judi Dench.) — 10/10/09
••••••••••
The film I picked was the third disc in An Age of Kings, the cycle of Shakespeare’s history plays produced by the BBC in 1960 with a cast of those wonderful British actors that seem to recur in each generation. This contained two episodes dealing with the play Henry V, “Signs of War” and “The Band of Brothers,” and the single episode editor Eric Crozier got out of the play Henry VI, Part 1, “The Red Rose and the White.” One problem with presenting the Shakespeare history plays as a cycle is that Shakespeare wrote the second set of four — the three Henry VI plays and Richard III — before he wrote the first set, and scholars still disagree about how much of the Henry VI plays are Shakespeare’s work. I read Henry VI, Part 1 once and came to the conclusion that only one scene in the piece could be Shakespeare’s — the scene in the garden in which people representing the two contending factions in what’s about to become a civil war pick white and red roses, respectively, to designate which side they’re on, which will become the name of the war.
It’s known that that scene was added after the rest of the play was completed because published versions that don’t credit an author and don’t contain the scene exist — and when I read the whole play the garden scene stood out with the quiet dignity and strength of its writing compared to the overheated, fustian rhetoric of the rest (the opening scene in which someone curses the “bad revolting stars” that took Henry V’s life well before his time sounds like Christopher Marlowe on a very bad day and the rest of the play was probably a collaboration among several Elizabethan hacks, though it’s worth reading as an example of the mediocre run-of-the-mill sort of Elizabethan drama that gives you more of an appreciation of Shakespeare and Marlowe just because it shows you the rut they rose above).
Henry V was Shakespeare’s last history play (aside from Henry VIII, one of his last works and not part of the cycle depicted in An Age of Kings), written in 1599 and apparently at least in part a celebration of the Earl of Essex, who was about to launch a war to subdue Ireland that Queen Elizabeth saw as an analogue to Henry V’s war for France — though as things turned out Essex, unlike Henry V, got his ass kicked by an Irish army led by the Earl of Tyrone, and the defeat cost him Elizabeth’s favor and ultimately led to the plot that finally got him arrested and executed for treason. On the surface, it’s a glorification of war and imperialism — but that’s only on the surface; as strong and decisive as Henry V appears, the play also contains a lot of dialogue questioning not only some of the actions but the justice and righteousness of his cause itself. Though this scene was deleted from An Age of Kings, the play begins with a nervous debate between two high church officials worried that the new king is going to seize the church’s assets, and accordingly when a cleric is asked for his opinion about the justice of Henry V’s claim to the French throne (in the scene that opens this presentation of the play) naturally he knows he has to give the “right” answer.
Watching An Age of Kings in this go-round I’ve been struck by the parallel between Henry V and George W. Bush — indicative that the source of Shakespeare’s endurance has been the fact that not only did he capture human nature and depict both political and personal issues with an insight rare for the time, but that human nature has changed so little that our species continues to generate situations similar to those Shakespeare wrote about. Both Henry V and George W. Bush were the sons of hereditary rulers, both had youthful periods of licentiousness and wastrel behavior that disappointed their fathers (indeed, both had more strait-laced brothers who had much more of their dad’s favor), and both ultimately rose out of their drinking and carousing to seize the responsibilities of power. The parallel isn’t entirely exact — Henry V instructs his occupying army to treat the French gently, take no French food or other goods without paying for it, and (at least until the scene in the aftermath of Agincourt in which he ordered his army to massacre the French prisoners — a major war crime we’re really not prepared for by the way Shakespeare has drawn Henry V up to that point) to take good care of their prisoners — but the arrogance of the war council with which the play opens and the sheer outrageousness of the idea that, armed with a flimsy claim to the throne of France, Henry V can install himself as king of both countries by sheer will and force of arms ring all too closely parallel to more recent bits of history.
So, when it comes to that, does the aftermath depicted in Henry VI, Part 1 — like the U.S. in Iraq, the British in France win a quick military victory (one could readily imagine Henry V posing over the battlefield at Agincourt with a banner reading, “Mission Accomplished”) followed by a long, draining occupation and the rise of an indigenous opposition led by a freedom fighter — in this case, Jeanne la Pucelle, better known these days as Joan of Arc (more on her later). Producer Peter Dews and director Michael Hayes had more competition on Henry V than on most of the plays in the series — in 1944 Laurence Olivier had done a big-screen feature film (shooting the battle scenes in Ireland, where there was enough unspoiled countryside to stage a medieval battle without any modern anachronisms creeping in), and in 1989 Kenneth Branagh (both starring and directing, as Olivier had) did a remake — and their version suffers in the depiction of the actual battle of Agincourt (which is basically a handful of people hacking away at each other with swords — on a 1960 BBC-TV budget they couldn’t possibly duplicate the massed longbow attacks that actually won the battle for the British), but is certainly competitive with the casting.
I haven’t seen either the Olivier or Branagh films in years, but Robert Hardy is as good a Henry V as I remember his formidable feature-film competitors as being, capturing the character’s sense of justice and morals as well as his arrogance and self-righteousness, his understanding of the common people from having hung out with them before he became king (yet another strong difference between him and George W. Bush), his ability to make quick decisions even if (like the massacre of the French prisoners) they’re not necessarily the best decisions he could have made, and above all his ability to rally a significantly outnumbered army to victory. (In the 1920’s and 1930’s football coaches studied Henry’s St. Crispian’s Day address to figure out how to do pep talks to their teams.) He’s matched by a formidable cast of supporting actors — what’s most amazing about the acting in An Age of Kings is how well the cast members mesh and how they manage to inhabit characters speaking in an unfamiliar sort of English and actually convince us they’re people living 450 years earlier — including the young (but instantly recognizable) Judi Dench as Princess Catherine of France, whom Henry marries to solidify his claim to the French throne but whom he also wants genuinely to love and be loved by.
One quirk of Shakespeare’s career is that though he is thought to have started writing plays as early as 1592 (and been involved in the theatre at least a decade before that), he really hit his stride just about at the turn of the century. Henry V and Romeo and Juliet are generally dated 1599 (and because of the Essex connection we have a better idea when Henry V premiered than we do for most of Shakespeare’s plays!) and the play generally assumed to be Shakespeare’s greatest, Hamlet, is from 1600. If one watched An Age of Kings second-half first, and thereby ordered the plays in the sequence in which they were written rather than the one in which they take place, one could get a pretty good picture of Shakespeare’s maturation as a writer from the relative crudities of the Henry VI plays to the melodramatics of Richard III and then, in the four plays starting with Richard II, the coming-together of Shakespeare’s true voice and his dramatic and emotional sophistication at its best.
One of the most interesting aspects of Henry V is the extent to which religion — only peripherally mentioned in the earlier plays, and then usually in a context of frustration (Richard II aghast that God, who supposedly installed him as king, is allowing him to be deposed by a mere mortal; Henry IV’s intention to atone for his sin in deposing Richard by mounting a Crusade, systematically frustrated by the unrest at home and the attempts to organize a revolution against him, one of which — at the start of Henry IV, Part 2 — is led by a clergyman) — takes center stage; with the church already having been suborned, blackmailed or whatever into giving divine blessing to Henry’s actions, the characters cross themselves incessantly and are constantly appealing to God’s favor on their enterprise. (Henry’s eve-of-battle pep talk even keys on the saint whose name-day is the day the battle is taking place.)
Another interesting parallel that you wouldn’t notice if you weren’t watching the plays in sequence, in a context like this in which they’re being presented as a single story instead of separate works, is the similarity between Hotspur’s eve-of-battle attitude in Henry IV, Part 1 and Henry’s attitude here — particularly when both rally the troops by saying that, contrary to showing fear at the way they’re outnumbered, they should glory in being outnumbered because then the victory will be all the sweeter. Though this really doesn’t come through in Shakespeare, other tellings of the story — like A. M. Maughan’s novel Harry of Monmouth — stress that Henry and Hotspur were boyhood friends (their fathers, after all, were friends and allies until they broke spectacularly right after Richard II’s fall), grew up together and were similar in a lot of ways, and in Henry IV, Part 1 Henry IV audibly wishes Hotspur were his son (just as in Henry IV, Part 2 he wishes his younger son, John of Lancaster, were the heir to his throne — as I noted above, yet another parallel to George H. W. Bush and his relative estimation of his children’s fitness to rule; it’s well known that Daddy Bush thought it would be Jeb, not W., who’d be the second President Bush).
All the rich allusions and complexities in the first four plays in the Age of Kings cycle have the unintended consequence of making Henry VI, Part 1 seem even weaker than it is — despite a marvelous directorial trick by Michael Hayes: opening the Henry VI, Part 1 episode with the same scene (albeit from a different angle) with which Henry V ended: Henry V’s ceremonial coffin with his crown and battle helmet on it. In some ways Henry VI, Part 1 continues the parallel to more recent events — the collapse of an occupation following an imperial war leads to, and opens the door for, vicious unrest at home (though it wasn’t what Mao was talking about when he coined the phrase “turning imperialist wars into civil wars,” that’s just what happens in the cycle) and the replacement of a strong-willed, decisive leader with a weak one who tries to make nice with all the factions and succeeds only in greasing the skids of his own downfall.
Admittedly the parallel between Henry VI and Obama is a lot more distant than that between Henry V and George W. Bush — after all, one of the downsides of an hereditary monarchy is the fact that it can hand over at least technical power to a child, which is what happened to Henry VI (and one of the bad guys in the play, a corrupt cleric, literally tells us of his intent to kidnap the boy king and hold him hostage so he, not the official regent, can become the actual ruler); and whatever you think of Obama and his performance in office thus far, though he may not have been the progressive crusader his farther-out followers were hoping for, he’s not the constitutional idiot Henry VI grew up to be (at least in Shakespeare’s plays; as with his other historical characters, there’s been a revisionist literature that’s gone back to the primary sources to re-evaluate him and change our Bard-conditioned point of view towards him) either!
After the incandescent brilliance of Henry V (the character and the play), the cut-down version of Henry VI, Part 1 called “The Red Rose and the White” is disappointing, clearly the product of a less sophisticated and talented author (whether or not they were the same person!), and though the acting remains as finely honed as throughout the series and the production values also remain about the same (with Michael Hayes actually being quite creative in his use of a meager BBC-TV budget), the magic just doesn’t quite gel in such a relatively minor play. The only truly complex character in Henry VI, Part 1 is Joan of Arc, who’s going to be a problem in any modern production because in Shakespeare’s time she was considered the witch (literally!) who had cost the English control of France; under the influence of the Roman Catholic Church (who canonized her in 1920) and more recent playwrights like Schiller, Shaw, Anouilh and Anderson she’s been rehabilitated and is now regarded as not only a saint but as an icon of liberation and feminism.
Shakespeare meant her as a villain, but at least in the Age of Kings presentation she comes across as a lot more complex than that: savvy enough to see through the imposture of the Dauphin substituting one of his dukes for himself at their first meeting, genuinely inspiring and at least somewhat sympathetic (though at least part of that is how the play comes off to a modern-day viewer with a healthy skepticism towards imperialist adventures of all kinds and a conviction that any occupation — Britain’s of France in the 1400’s, the Nazi occupations during World War II, Israel’s occupation of Palestine and the U.S.’s occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq — will engender a home-grown resistance) until she goes crazy during her trial and stages an almost operatic mad scene at her exit. At least part of the complexity comes from the way Michael Hayes chose to portray her; within the limits of Shakespeare’s script (at least in this highly edited version) he makes her a strong-willed character and even dresses the actress playing her, Eileen Atkins, the way Otto Preminger dressed and made up Jean Seberg in his film of Shaw’s Saint Joan: with close-cropped blonde hair (the real Joan, if the contemporary depictions of her are to be believed, had long brown hair) and a penchant for white unisex garments. Shakespeare (or whoever wrote these scenes), seizing on the English propaganda that described Joan of Arc the way American writers today would depict Osama bin Laden, tried to make her a monomaniacal villainess — but at least as presented here some of Joan’s humanity comes through, and it’s difficult not to feel sympathy for someone who is, after all, fighting for the liberation of her country against a foreign oppressor. — 10/17/09
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Our night’s “feature” was “The Fall of a Protector” and “The Rabble from Kent,” the tenth and eleventh episodes of the BBC’s 1960 Shakespeare-based miniseries An Age of Kings, corresponding to Shakespeare’s play Henry VI, Part 2. The production of An Age of Kings was one of the best things that ever happened to Shakespeare on film or video, but the attempt to use his plays to dramatize the complete history of the Wars of the Roses from the fall of Richard II in 1399 to the death of Richard III and ascension of Henry Tudor to the throne of England in 1485 had one major problem: Shakespeare wrote the first four plays in the cycle — Richard II, the two Henry IV plays and Henry V — after he wrote the second four, the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III.
Indeed, it’s not altogether clear how much of the three Henry VI plays are Shakespeare’s work; I recall reading Henry VI, Part 1 start-to-finish and being amazed at what a dreadful play it really is, with only one scene (the one in the garden, where the people who will ultimately lead the civil war between the houses of Lancaster and York pluck roses from two bushes, one of red roses and one of white ones, to symbolize which side they’re on, thereby earning the conflict the name “Wars of the Roses”) clearly Shakespeare’s work. In a play otherwise filled with fustian rhetoric and dull hackwork, that scene stood out with the quiet dignity and strength that are Shakespeare’s hallmarks as a writer. It’s not clear exactly who wrote the rest of the play — printed versions exist that pre-date Shakespeare’s production and do not include the garden scene, indicating that Shakespeare added that to a script otherwise by other hands to tie it in with the two other plays in the sequence — though Christopher Marlowe’s name has been offered, and the opening scene of Henry VI, Part 1 might be Marlowe on a really bad day.
Henry VI, Part 2 seems more “Shakespearean,” but there are still long stretches of dull or hacky dialogue it’s hard to match with our perception of Shakespeare honed on his truly great plays. Offhand I suspect that the scenes involving Henry VI himself and his queen, Margaret of Anjou (whom he married as part of a corrupt dynastic deal negotiated by her lover, William de la Pole, the Duke of Suffolk) are Shakespeare’s work, but it’s hard to tell about the rest. Part of the problem with Henry VI, Part 2 is that it’s really not a self-contained work — the three parts of Henry VI really do seem as if they were written to be mini-series episodes rather than stand-alone dramas; the ending of Part 2, with Richard, Duke of York delivering a soliloquy about how he intends to exploit the conflicts within Henry’s court to grab the throne for himself, is as obviously a set-up for the next episode, rather than an actual resolution of the plot, as the ending of The Matrix Reloaded was.
Henry VI, Part 2 suffers from a confusing plot line in which so many dastardly conspiracies are being hatched against Henry’s reign it’s hard to keep track of them all or remember from scene to scene which side everybody’s on (frankly, I miss the commentaries Frank C. Baxter taped for the U.S. release of these programs that helped explain it all and allowed people who didn’t grow up in Britain and therefore don’t have a thorough familiarity with this slice of its history to follow the plot and remember who was who); between the time he wrote these plays and the time he did his masterpieces Shakespeare improved not only as a poet and dialogue writer but as a dramatic constructionist as well. It also didn’t help that the production values of An Age of Kings — particularly the casting, which had been so impeccable in the first half of the series (Robert Hardy as Henry V — holding his own in the inevitable comparisons with Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh — plus Sean Connery as Hotspur and Judi Dench as Henry’s Queen Katherine!) — started to fall down in this part of the series.
Yes, I know Henry VI was supposed to have been an unworldly young man and a religious devotee who prayed while his kingdom crumbled around him (watching the story in sequence it’s hard not to see the parallel between the similarly unworldly Richard II, who was overthrown by the far more capable Henry Bolingbroke, and Henry VI, whose throne was threatened by Richard, Duke of York), but I really doubt whether either the real Henry VI or the one Shakespeare envisioned when he wrote the play were as neurasthenic as Terry Scully plays him here. The other actors are quite capable but there’s a reason why the people from this series who did have subsequent major careers appeared in the earlier episodes — the standouts are Mary Morris as Margaret of Anjou (who was the subject of the first individual line from a Shakespeare play that became famous out of context — “O tiger’s heart, wrapped in a woman’s hide!”); she senses that the character is essentially Shakespeare’s warmup for Lady Macbeth and plays her that way — and whoever played her lover, the Duke of Suffolk, who turns in a marvelously slimy reading of a character who first sets up the wife of Henry’s uncle and regent, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (John Ringham), for execution as a witch; then has Humphrey murdered on the eve of his trial for treason for fear Henry would acquit him; and ultimately falls himself at the hands of a subtler schemer, Richard, Duke of York (played by Jack May in a surprisingly overwrought style; mostly director Michael Hayes stopped his actors from scenery-chewing but May got away from him and did his beaver impression on the sets), who sets up an agitator named Jack Cade from Kent to stir up the people in London to revolt against the king and royal authority in general (it was Cade who said, “Let’s kill all the lawyers,” and later when he denounces someone as a traitor just because he speaks French, it was hard not to see Cade as the great-great ancestor of talk radio) and then marches his own army from Ireland, ostensibly to restore order but actually to set up a military presence in the capital so he can depose the king.
Henry VI, Part 2 is also considerably gorier than Shakespeare got later; though Titus Andronicus (also an early work) has the reputation as Shakespeare’s goriest play, this one comes pretty close — and director Hayes doesn’t decorously cut away from the murders; he displays most of them right on camera before our eyes. It’s worth having An Age of Kings on DVD and it’s fascinating to make my acquaintance with it again — the original miniseries was actually my introduction to Shakespeare — but it does tend to sag in the middle. — 10/28/09
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Last night Charles and I ran episodes 12 and 13 of An Age of Kings, the 15-part BBC-TV cycle of Shakespeare’s history plays (all but the first one, King John, and the last one, Henry VIII) telling the full story of British history from 1399, when Henry Bolingbroke deposed Richard II and became Henry IV, to 1485, when Henry Tudor defeated the army of Richard III at Bosworth Field, took the Plantagenets off the British throne and inaugurated the House of Tudor, which was still ruling when Shakespeare began his career and wrote these plays. Episodes 12, “The Morning’s War,” and 13, “The Sun in Splendour,” are drawn from the play Henry VI, Part 3, and after the lameness of much of the writing in the first two Henry VI plays (only one scene in the extant Henry VI, Part 1 is clearly Shakespeare’s work and the extent of his authorship of Part 2 is also dubious) it’s a relief to reach Part 3 and experience Shakespeare finally becoming Shakespeare. Though it still has a lot of the gore characteristic of Elizabethan drama in general — not only are the dramatis personae knocked off right and left, they’re killed in full view of the audience (director Michael Hayes averts his cameras from any actual skin-piercing and bloodletting with the swords and daggers, but he gets us close enough that we get the point — it would only be in later plays like Macbeth that Shakespeare would keep the horrors off-stage and realize that leaving them to the audience’s imagination just made them that much more horrible) — we also can sense Shakespeare growing and maturing, not only in the sheer poetic beauty of the writing but also in its quiet dignity and strength (Shakespeare tended at his best to underwrite at a time when most of his contemporaries — even his best one, Marlowe — were melodramatically overwriting). The soliloquy by Henry VI that the producers of An Age of Kings used as the source for the title of Episode 12 reveals Shakespeare becoming Shakespeare:
This battle fares like to the morning’s war,
When dying clouds contend with glowing light,
What time the shepherd, blowing of his nails,
Can neither call it perfect day or night.
Now sways it this way, like a mighty sea
Forced by the tide to combat with the wind.
Now sways it that way, like that selfsame sea
Forced to retire by the fury of the wind.
Sometimes the flood prevails, and then the wind;
Now one the better, then another best;
Both tugging to be victors, breast to breast,
Yet neither conqueror nor conquered:
So is the equal poise of this fell war.
This speech is not only considerably more eloquent than anything we’ve heard in the first two Henry VI plays, it’s also a good summing-up of the Wars of the Roses as Shakespeare depicted them, complete with dastardly murders and dazzling reversals: Edward IV (Julian Glover), who like a more recent U.S. President had a hard time keeping his dick in his pants, assaults the unassailable virtue of the widow Elizabeth Gray and then finds that the only way she’ll let him screw her is if he marries her. He does so, and promptly pisses off the Earl of Warwick (Frank Windsor), who receives the news while in France negotiating a deal with the French king for Edward to marry a French princess, Bona (Tamara Hinchco). With Warwick and Queen Margaret of Anjou (Mary Morris) both in the French court at the same time bidding for the support of the French king (and it’s indicative of how fast the British power had faded that once Henry V had conquered France, and now the competing sides in a British civil war are bidding for France’s support), Warwick responds by changing sides and, now that he’s deposed Henry VI (Terry Scully) in favor of Edward IV of York, now he signs on with Margaret and plots to restore Henry VI to the throne — which he does, even recruiting Edward’s brother George, Duke of Clarence (Patrick Garland), to fight against him — only at the last minute George switches sides again and returns to his brother’s fold, thereby providing the decisive forces that allow the York side to win once and for all.
This back-and-forth plotting and abrupt switches in loyalty make Henry VI, Part 3 sound more like a Mafia story than a slice of British history (and though the Mafia were centuries in the future when Shakespeare wrote, Italy was already notorious for gangs of banditti and Shakespeare, who set many of his plays in Italy, probably knew about them). Henry VI, Part 3 is a better play than its two immediate predecessors, but it’s still far below the first four plays in the cycle (which Shakespeare wrote later, even though they take place first), and in general the weaker plays seemed to inspire the Age of Kings producers less and draw weaker casting.
Terry Scully as Henry VI seems to me to be the low point of the series, acting-wise; yes, the guy was supposed to have been a religion-obsessed wimp, but even so it’s hard to imagine he was as weak and pathetic as Scully plays him. His appearance in the role seems to me to be the biggest mistake in an otherwise marvelously cast show — certainly the Yorkist pretenders have it all over him in terms of butchness. Jack May is properly charismatic as Richard, father of the clan; Glover is appropriately tall, blond, a bon vivant and a good soldier even if not exactly the brightest bulb in the kingdom as Edward IV; and Paul Daneman plays Richard, Duke of Gloucester — later Richard III — more as a conventional scheming villain than a devil from hell, though the BBC makeup department saddled him with an anachronistic haircut that makes him look more like a 1950’s U.S. army officer than a medieval prince, and Shakespeare himself sticks him with a motivation to become king even while his brother Edward still lives, when even the historians who agree that Richard was a murderer still acknowledge the depth of the love between the brothers. What does come through in the body language between Julian Glover and Paul Daneman is how much Richard the hunchback (though the “hunch” is de-emphasized in his makeup and costuming here) envies his older brother’s attractiveness, charisma and devil-may-care way with women. — 11/10/09
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The film we watched last night was the two-part adaptation of Shakespeare’s Richard III that made up the final episodes, “The Dangerous Brother” and “The Boar Hunt,” of the 1960 BBC-TV miniseries An Age of Kings. The shows were originally telecast in the U.K. at two-week intervals from April 28 to November 17, 1960 — and though they were clearly taped in a studio without an audience present, I suspect that the first airings of these shows were “live” because occasionally the actors make slips in the dialogue that one expects in a real-time performance but would ordinarily be edited out and retaken in a studio production. Shakespeare wrote the last four plays in this eight-play chronological sequence — the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III — before he wrote the first four (Richard II, the two Henry IV plays and Henry V), and Richard III is the earliest one of the eight that is still part of the standard dramatic repertoire.
Not surprisingly, given the fact that Shakespeare was living and writing in the age of the last Tudor monarch, Elizabeth I, Richard III comes off as a black-hearted villain and essentially a serial killer — though less in the psychopathic sense and more like a would-be Mafia don murdering his way to the head of the “family.” At the same time, by 1594 (the date usually thought of as that of Richard III’s premiere) Shakespeare had developed into a subtle enough writer that Richard III isn’t just a villain — and an actor playing him has to register the various moods, now cajoling, now flattering, now promising, now stern and ruthless, Richard assumes to do his dirty work and put himself on the throne of England. In An Age of Kings Richard was played by Paul Daneman, who blessedly avoids the kinds of scenery-chewing some Richards have fallen into and manages to make him totally believable; one gets his cruelty but also his charm, his ability to use his disabilities (his hunchback and his “withered arm,” which he claims he got from sorcery committed by his brother-in-law) to evoke sympathy for his plight.
Richard III is pretty much a one-man show, more so than any other play in the cycle (not even Henry V — the yin to Richard III’s yang in that in Shakespeare’s version of history Henry V is supposed to represent the ideal of a great king and Richard III an equally perfect example of an evil one — presents its protagonist so much front and center and reduces the rest of the cast to supporting roles), especially since Shakespeare uses the soliloquy device more than he had in the rest of the history cycle, periodically interrupting the action so that Richard can tell the audience just what he’s after and how he intends to go about getting it in the next scene. The scene in which Richard seduces Anne and gets her to agree to marry him even though he killed her previous husband Edward and his father, Henry VI, is one of Shakespeare’s most audacious inventions — and a singularly difficult one to pull off, especially when staged (as Shakespeare intended, and as it’s done here) with the corpse of Henry VI in its coffin right there, on stage, as Richard performs his macabre wooing, and it’s a testament to Daneman’s acting skills and Michael Hayes’ direction of him that he pulls it off. (Terry Scully, who played the living Henry VI, gets an acting credit for the role at the end of “The Dangerous Brother” even though he’s only seen as a face through the window in Henry’s coffin.)
The final episode, “The Boar Hunt,” was 75 minutes long (the series episodes were billed as an hour in length but several of them — including both halves of Henry IV, Part 1 and the last half of Henry IV, Part 2 — went considerably over that) and is the one in which Richard finally becomes king but doesn’t have that good a time on the throne — one gets the impression he wonders why he bothered — especially with Henry Tudor, the Earl of Richmond (one point of confusion, especially to non-Brits, with these plays is the sheer multiplicity of names the characters have — it’s unclear whether “Plantagenet” or “York” is Richard’s birth last name and when he was appointed Duke of Gloucester that word, too, was added to his name — while at the same time they seemed to have only a limited store of first names; as I remarked in my notes on the film Tower of London, Universal’s 1939 adaptation of the Richard III story but with Shakespeare’s dialogue replaced by that of Robert N. Lee, the director Rowland V. Lee’s brother, so many of the dramatis personae were named either Richard or Edward it got awfully confusing and hard to follow after a while), first in exile in France, then sneaking back to England and finally meeting Richard at the battle of Bosworth Field and ultimately defeating him and taking the throne as Henry VII, founder of the House of Tudor.
Shakespeare presents him as an idealized hero — his Tudor propagandist purposes outweighed his usual condemnation of royal usurpers and forced him to present that one in a positive light — and it was ironic to hear him promise over Richard’s dead body to “proclaim a pardon as to the soldiers fled/That in submission will return to us” when the real Henry VII did exactly the opposite: he actually back-dated the start of his reign to the day before the battle so he could, and did, charge those who had fought on Richard’s side with treason and have them executed. (I treasure Josephine Tey’s marvelous novel The Daughter of Time, which in the course of an investigation by a hospitalized Scotland Yard detective fascinated by a reproduction of a contemporary painting of Richard III develops a case exonerating him of the murder of Edward IV’s sons — but you don’t have to whitewash Richard and find him innocent to see Henry VII as a creep who willfully had most of the surviving claimants to the throne put to death to avoid any attempts to repeat the Wars of the Roses, or to wonder about the historians who portray Richard as a black-hearted villain for murdering his nephews while giving Henry VII a pass on similar crimes: as Lacey Baldwin Smith wrote in The Realm of England, “By the very nature of kingship, the elimination of rival contenders to the throne through exile, battle, or execution became the foundation of government policy” under Henry VII — the same argument Richard’s apologists could have made had he won the battle of Bosworth Field.)
Certainly Jerome Willis as Richmond exudes charisma — he comes off as something like a young Elvis and quite a bit more exciting than the real Henry VII (who hasn’t attracted much interest in historians — or dramatists, for that matter; Shakespeare never wrote a play solely about him but, when he took up British history again towards the end of his career, went straight to Henry VIII), ably fulfilling the pro-Tudor propaganda intent of the play (indeed, as a boy Richmond had appeared towards the end of Henry VI, Part 3 in one of those bald-faced “plantings” of a minor character and hints of his forthcoming major importance that is just the sort of cheap dramatic gimmick it’s especially embarrassing to find in a work by the man who’s supposedly the greatest playwright of all time).
One thing I hadn’t realized about An Age of Kings before is that many of the actors played more than one character through the duration of the series — “The Boar Hunt” features Frank Pettingell, who’d played Sir John Falstaff, as the Bishop of Ely; Jack May, who’d played Richard, Duke of York (Edward IV’s and Richard III’s father), as Lord Stanley, whose abrupt change of allegiance and shift of his army from Richard to Richmond gave Richmond the decisive advantage at Bosworth Field (in Shakespeare’s play Stanley is depicted as fighting for Richard — or agreeing to — only because Richard is holding his son hostage; once he receives word that his son has escaped and is safe, he goes with the side he really wanted to be on in the first place); and even Julian Glover, who was Edward IV in the previous episodes, turns up here as the Earl of Oxford.
What makes Richard III a fitting end to the Age of Kings series is mostly Daneman’s smooth performance — he evokes such great names of the acting past as Charles Laughton (he even gets a Laughtonesque scene in which he, as the king, greedily gnaws on chicken bones, though director Hayes at least stopped short of having him throw the bones over his shoulder), John Barrymore (whose one surviving film clip as a Shakespearean actor is as Richard III in a scene from Henry VI, Part 3 in the 1929 Warners revue The Show of Shows) and Basil Rathbone — indeed, Daneman’s Richard often struck me as very much the way Rathbone would have played him in Tower of London if he’d been allowed to use Shakespeare’s dialogue. And what makes Richard III as Shakespeare wrote it a fitting end to the eight-play cycle is, once again, Shakespeare’s greatest strength as a dramatist: not his genius as a poet nor his talent for dramatic structure, but his understanding of human nature and his ability to depict common human “types” that have hardly changed from his day to ours; though both the real Richard III’s life and Shakespeare’s depiction of it came long before Robespierre, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler or Saddam Hussein lived, there were parts of this play that reminded me of all of them! — 11/18/09
I broke open the DVD boxed set of An Age of Kings, the remarkable 1960 British TV cycle in which the BBC, under producer Peter Dews and director Michael Hayes, took eight of Shakespeare’s history plays — Richard II; Henry IV, Part 1; Henry IV, Part 2; Henry V; Henry VI, Part 1; Henry VI, Part 2; Henry VI, Part 3 and Richard III — and edited them into a 15-part mini-series telling the story of Britain’s royal family and the civil wars between various relatives for the crown between 1399, when Richard II was deposed by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke; and 1485, when the last of the Plantagenets, Richard III, was defeated at Bosworth Field by Henry Tudor, later King Henry VII.
The show ran the plays in historical chronological order rather than in the order Shakespeare wrote them — he actually wrote the last four before the first four (and it shows in the greater maturity of the language and dramatic complexity in the first four than the last ones), and it’s not altogether clear just how much of the three Henry VI plays — the earliest ones in the accepted Shakespeare canon — is actually Shakespeare’s writing. Earlier versions of these plays exist, and it seems likely that Shakespeare’s company just picked up the scripts (remember that in the 1500’s there were no copyright laws; everything was in the public domain, and one reason so few plays were published during this era and why so few play scripts exist was that theatre companies wanted to keep their scripts as secure as possible so rivals couldn’t rip off a hit play and perform it themselves) and he patched them together and pumped them up with his own writing. When I read Henry VI, Part 1 in a separate edition it was clear to me that the only scene that was definitely Shakespeare’s was a scene in a garden in which the rivals pick red and white roses, symbolizing the rival Houses of Lancaster and York that would fight the Wars of the Roses in the second half of the cycle — and since earlier versions of this play don’t contain the scene, it seemed obvious that Shakespeare had written it in to tie the first Henry VI play with the two sequels, which were closer to his mature style.
An Age of Kings was personally important to me because National Educational Television (NET), the precursor to PBS, picked up the American rights and I watched the shows on KQED in Marin County when I was growing up — at first tuning in only to the introductions by Dr. Frank C. Baxter, who set the context for each episode and untangled the often snarled genealogy of the British royals at the time so you could tell who was who, how they were related and how much of a claim each would-be king really had to the throne. KQED ran the series every year from 1961 to about 1964 or 1965, at first showing the episodes once weekly, and then, for the last year they had the rights they “stripped” them and showed them daily for 15 days in a row — and they were my introduction to Shakespeare. Indeed, they were so powerful an introduction not only to Shakespeare but to stage-based drama altogether that for a long time I thought all plays were written in blank verse and dealt with the kinds of mythological, historical or otherwise “elevated” subjects as Shakespeare’s did.
The other thing An Age of Kings is famous for is the cast, particularly two actors who went on to bigger and better things: Sean Connery, who played Hotspur in the first four episodes two years before he filmed Dr. No and launched the James Bond series; and Judi Dench, who as a young actress played Catherine, the French princess Henry V marries to solidify his claim to the French throne, and who would become world-famous in her old age for playing hereditary female monarchs: Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love and Victoria in Mrs. Brown. (She too would eventually make it into the James Bond series, as the first female “M” in the most recent Bond films.) So when I heard that An Age of Kings was coming out on DVD I rushed to order it (in fact, I got two copies, one for myself and one for my mother because I realized she’d have many of the same memories of it I had and therefore be as eager to see it again as I was), and last night I screened the first three episodes: “This Hollow Crown” and “The Deposing of a King,” based on Richard II; and “Rebellion from the North,” based on the first half of Henry IV, Part 1.
Seen today, what most impresses about An Age of Kings is the sheer speed with which it moves — Michael Hayes keeps the pace moving forward and creates the impression of a history that is moving at such blazing speed even the participants seem overwhelmed by it — and the uniformly excellent quality of the acting, especially its naturalism. An article I read years ago — written by someone whose name I have, alas, long since forgotten — argued that the only way Shakespeare can work for a modern audience is if the actors manage to convince us that they talk this way all the time. In An Age of Kings they meet that challenge handsomely and convince us that they are real people, speaking the language of a bygone age but facing personal, psychological and political issues very familiar to us today.
All too many Shakespeare productions approach the language far too reverently — treating it like a dose of intellectual medicine (“listen to this, it’s good for you”) and chanting the lines in an annoying sing-song pattern, as if they’re too frightened of the iambic pentameter even to try to utter it like normal speech. Not here. From the first three episodes one gets the impression that Shakespeare was aware of mental illnesses we’ve known and categorized today, and depicted them accurately in his characters, even though medical science in his time was almost clueless about the diseases of the body and totally clueless about the diseases of the brain. I first had that thought watching the surviving 1953 kinescope of Orson Welles in a Peter Brook-directed TV production of King Lear, and it occurred to me that what Welles was portraying was an almost clinically exact picture of Alzheimer’s disease — and that Shakespeare may have observed similarly out-of-it old people and written their condition into the role of Lear. I had a similar feeling watching the two Age of Kings episodes based on Richard II and seeing Richard’s mercurial moods — alternating in rapid succession in the opening scene between letting the duel between Bolingbroke and Mowbray go forward, then stopping the duel and sending them into exile — Mowbray for life and Bolingbroke for 10 years, then cutting Bolingbroke’s exile from 10 years to six — and later between resisting Bolingbroke’s challenge to his authority and yielding to it — and suddenly reading Richard’s abrupt changes in mood as what would now be called bipolar disorder.
I also found myself “getting” parts of the play I hadn’t before and finding new meanings as a middle-aged adult that had eluded me when I saw these shows as a child — like the almost screaming-queen quality with which David William played Richard II (one does get the impression that the commoners Bushy, Bagot and Green, whom he’s elevated with knighthoods and made part of his entourage, are also his Gay boyfriends — and given that he was the great-grandson of Britain’s Gay monarch Edward II, vividly and openly characterized as Queer in Christopher Marlowe’s play about him, that would make a certain degree of sense) or the serious drinking Prince Hal (Robert Hardy) does in Henry IV, Part 1. Indeed, one could draw a parallel between Hal, later King Henry V, and George W. Bush: both members of hereditary ruling families who grew up as wastrels and alcoholics, pulled themselves together, eventually succeeded their fathers as heads of state and launched foreign wars that began with quick victories but eventually turned into extended occupations and quagmires.
One thing that comes off strongly from the first three episodes of An Age of Kings was how conservative Shakespeare really was. He was far, far ahead of his time in understanding human psychology and creating multidimensional characters that evoke the unchanging parts of human nature, but he was very much of his time in his reverence for class distinctions and the whole concept of “the divine right of kings.” The entire history cycle begins with an attack on the natural kingly order and ends with that order being restored with the defeat of Richard III and the ascension of the House of Tudor — and while modern historians might regard the Tudors, who were farther removed from the royal line than any of the rival claimants Shakespeare depicts in these plays, as parvenu pretenders, they were the reigning house when he wrote them, he had to suck up to them or risk his career or his life, and they had brought back a sense of stability (ironically reflected by Josephine Tey in the novel The Daughter of Time — which she wrote as part of her mission to rehabilitate Richard III’s reputation from the damage that had been done to it by the Tudor-era propaganda of Shakespeare and the historian Raphael Holinshed, who was his principal source — when early on she joked that when British schoolchildren got to the Battle of Bosworth Field, they rejoiced because “the Wars of the Roses were over and now they could go on to the Tudors, who were dull but easy to follow”).
One running theme in these plays is the idea that kings forfeit their authority to rule when they appeal to the common people for help — Richard weakens his just status as monarch when he brings Bushy, Bagot and Green into his inner circle; and Bolingbroke only underscores the illegitimacy of his claim when he directly appeals to the commoners for support. Remember that Shakespeare was the son of a gentleman who for mysterious reasons had been dispossessed, and the thing he was proudest of at the end of his life was not that he had written a series of literary masterpieces that would be performed centuries after his death, or even that he’d kept a theatrical company together and working for at least two decades, but that he had replenished his family fortunes — reason enough that his death certificate described him as “William Shakespeare, Gent.”
Richard II is no more tragic as a character than when he realizes that the promise under which he took the throne (22 years earlier, at age 11, when even though he was a boy and couldn’t yet rule in his own right he was expected to be in some sort of magic contact with the people so that his mere presence would settle the Peasant’s Revolt) that he had a mandate from God to rule for the rest of his life, has been taken away from him by Bolingbroke with the sheer power of earthly force — despite the extent to which the concept “divine right of kings” sits oddly on us now that for centuries a mandate from the people has replaced a mandate from heaven as the social mechanism for conferring legitimacy on a ruler. (Even 20th century dictatorships regularly trotted their people out to the polls to vote in rigged “elections” to establish at least the fig leaf of popular support.)
The acting in An Age of Kings is generally extraordinary, though I did find Frank Pettingell’s Sir John Falstaff a bit of a trial (and, referencing the film My Own Private Idaho, Charles joked that Robert Hardy looked nothing like Keanu Reeves!); he’s right enough for the part, but I’ve never stopped wishing that the 20th century comedian Shakespeare seemed almost mystically to be anticipating when he created this old, fat, drunken but still lovable braggart — W. C. Fields — had had the chance to play the role on film. (The closest we came to seeing Fields in a classic is his marvelous reading of Mr. Micawber in the 1935 film David Copperfield.) Remember that Falstaff has that “Sir” on the front end of his name, indicating that he fell from at least some level of social distinction and wasn’t a tavern drunk all his life!
And though I’m not sure anyone would have guessed watching An Age of Kings that out of all the actors in it, Sean Connery would have been the one to achieve superstardom (both my mom and I thought at the time it was going to be Robert Hardy!), it’s certainly a testament to his versatility that he could be so effective as the appropriately named Hotspur — tough, hot-blooded, quick to anger and obsessively concerned with maintaining his “honor” (and with his Scottish accent far more in evidence than usual) — and just two years later make it big in an almost completely different role as James Bond, the icon of cool. — 10/8/09
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I ran episode four of Shakespeare’s An Age of Kings, “The Road to Shrewsbury” — Shrewsbury being the town in the north of England, close to the Scottish border, where the decisive battle happened that ended the main rebellion against King Henry IV (there would be others, and the next two episodes deal with them) and solidified his place on the throne. The episode is based on the second half of the play Henry IV, Part 1 — Shakespeare’s most popular play during his lifetime (which surprised Charles, who thought of the histories as sort of also-rans in the Shakespeare canon — not all that odd since aside from Henry V and Richard III, they’re not as often performed today as the comedies and especially the tragedies) and the second most popular play of the entire Elizabethan era (number one was Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy), mainly due to the success of the comic character, Sir John Falstaff (reportedly based on a real-life hanger-on in Elizabeth’s court named Sir Jonas Oldacre). Falstaff was so popular, in fact, that Shakespeare wrote two more plays depicting him, Henry IV, Part 2 and The Merry Wives of Windsor.
What amazed Charles most about this production was, as he put it, “they were doing Shakespeare on a Dr. Who budget” — the BBC had only so much money and so they went to their familiar locations when they absolutely needed an outdoor sequence, and the battle of Shrewsbury itself is merely a few isolated people squabbling in the woods. The final duel between the two Harrys (Harry Percy, Earl of Hotspur; and Harry of Monmouth, later King Henry V) in which our Prince Hal kills Hotspur and thereby establishes his war-cred for the British throne takes place on the balcony and consists mainly of Robert Hardy and Sean Connery just hacking away at each other until Hardy gets the chance to stab the future James Bond. (As I mentioned in my comments on the third episode, “Rebellion From the North,” it’s hard to imagine from seeing the two together in this film that Connery would become an international superstar and Hardy, a charismatic personality and a fine actor who holds his own as Henry against the inevitable comparisons with Laurence Olivier, wouldn’t!)
At that — as I’ve pointed out before in my notes on films set in the medieval period — this sort of rather crude sword-play was probably far closer to how medieval swordfights actually went than the elaborately choreographed duels Errol Flynn and Tyrone Power fought on-screen against Basil Rathbone (who resented dueling with Flynn because he’d actually studied fencing — Flynn hadn’t — and yet the scripts always called for him to lose), Henry Daniell, George Sanders and others from Hollywood’s villains’ hall of fame. As anemic as the battle of Shrewsbury looks in this re-creation — it looks more like something staged by an impoverished group of Wars of the Roses re-enactors than a serious attempt to depict an historical incident — it’s at least closer to the probable reality than the way director Rowland V. Lee staged Bosworth Field in the 1939 film Tower of London (which was the Richard III story transposed into a Universal horror film) as armies moving in strict formations, more like a Busby Berkeley production than the “fog of war” then or now.
Orson Welles’ film Chimes at Midnight — also based on Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays — probably got it right; his budget (supplied by a Spanish production company) was adequate for a fair number of extras, but the battle as Welles staged it is a confused series of fights in which Henry IV’s forces won more by wearing down the rebels (whom they outnumbered — Shakespeare’s text says Henry IV had an army of 30,000, while two of the main rebel forces never made it to the battle at all and thus the rebels were hopelessly disadvantaged) than scoring any decisive victory in the field. It’s also worthy of note that An Age of Kings doesn’t skirt the gorier parts of the story but manages to stage them tastefully — I’m still impressed at the way David William’s eyes bulged out when Richard II is stabbed in the back by a gang of free-lance assassins who think (wrongly) it will curry them favor with the new king to eliminate the old one, and at the end of “The Road to Shrewsbury” a few bodies draped in grotesque positions powerfully suggest the brutality of the battle without going overboard on the blood and guts (and it’s that shot over which the final credits come up).
What holds up best in “The Road to Shrewsbury” is the marvelous meditation on “honor” and the ultimate silliness of war that Shakespeare built into the script — as conservative (in the literal sense) as Shakespeare may have been about the divine right of kings, and as dismissive as he was of the very idea that the common people ought to have a say in the way they were governed, he was also not at all a glorifier of war; what comes through most strongly in the play’s treatment of the battle is the sheer pointlessness of it, the way Hotspur’s obsession with “honor” literally leads to his death (when the rest of the rebel forces don’t show Hotspur’s reaction is that the victory will be even sweeter, and his “honor” even greater, if it’s achieved against the odds of numbers; and when Henry IV sends out a peace feeler before the battle, offering both an amnesty and to apologize for whatever slights the rebels think he did them if they’ll lay down their arms and give up their challenge to his power, the other rebels carefully conceal this from Hotspur because they’re afraid that the deal will assuage his concern over his “honor,” and therefore he’ll want to take it), while Shakespeare’s sympathies are clearly with Falstaff, who gives a famous speech ridiculing the whole concept of “honor” — especially that you generally have to die in battle to achieve it — and he ends up dishonorable but still alive. (This speech was incorporated by Arrigo Boïto into his libretto for Verdi’s opera Falstaff, even though the opera’s basic plot and most of its text came from The Merry Wives of Windsor.)
Overall, An Age of Kings lives up to my memories and its formidable reputation even though it’s a mystery why, after having been so ubiquitous on the nascent U.S. public broadcasting network in the early 1960’s it so totally faded from sight until its release on DVD last year. (My guess is that some of the actors in it, or their heirs, weren’t willing to authorize it to be shown again without royalty payments far larger than what the BBC could or would pay.) It’s certainly a worthwhile translation of Shakespeare’s plays into the language of television; it should be required viewing for any actor interested in playing Shakespeare; and it also serves as a good introduction both to Shakespeare in general and to some of his less performed scripts. — 10/9/09
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I ran parts five and six of An Age of Kings, “The New Conspiracy” and “Uneasy Lies the Head,” which correspond to Shakespeare’s play Henry IV, Part 2. Like a lot of modern-day producers, Shakespeare not only did a sequel to his first Henry IV play because the first one had been so popular, he emphasized the element that had been crucial to its box-office success: the character of Sir John Falstaff. At the same time, it’s a very odd play indeed because its theme is decrepitude and decay; the characters and the conflicts that seemed so fresh in the first play are old and tired here; many of the characters themselves are suffering visibly from the effects of age (when Falstaff goes to the country and meets his old friend Justice Shallow to recruit young boys for Henry IV’s army, they reminisce on their mutual friends who have died and Falstaff says, “We have seen the chimes at midnight” — a phrase Orson Welles used as the title of his movie based on the two Henry IV plays, in which he played Falstaff as well as directing), and even the ones who aren’t seem tired.
The play opens with the rebels who failed to get rid of Henry IV the first time dredging up their old, tired plot and trying again — indeed, there’s a fascinating scene at the beginning in which the first person who comes to Northumberland’s castle with news of the battle has it wrong, telling the earl that their side won a great victory; and it’s only later that he gets the truth that not only did the rebels get their asses kicked but his son Hotspur is dead. Even the first words out of the mouth of Prince Hal, who doesn’t enter until 23 minutes into the 59-minute first episode, are, “Before God, I am exceeding weary” — weary, it turns out, of the burden of having to pretend to be a wastrel so people will be surprised when he finally mounts the throne and becomes a responsible king.
The most dramatically “aged” character in the piece is, of course, King Henry IV himself — and actor Tom Fleming deserves enormous credit for portraying both the young Bolingbroke, eager rebel who goes for broke taking on Richard II and winning; the mature monarch who leads his forces to victory at Shrewsbury; and the decrepit old man, barely hanging on (he’s not seen at all in the “New Conspiracy” episode and the first glimpse we get of him is at the start of “Uneasy Lies the Head” — he’s going through a heavy-duty bout of insomnia that anticipates Macbeth’s and has led some writers to suggest that Shakespeare may have been insomniac himself), until he finally dies, regretting that the constant series of rebellions against him (a process he started by his own rebellion against Richard!) has made it impossible for him to lead a new Crusade — and Shakespeare has his dying wish be to be taken to a room in the palace called the “Jerusalem Room” so he can satisfy the prophecy that he would die in Jerusalem, “which vainly I supposed to be the Holy Land.”
Henry IV, Part 2 is full of the kinds of psychological one-on-one conflicts between strong-willed individuals that are consistently the sorts of scenes Shakespeare was best at (he was weakest, ironically, where his contemporary Marlowe was strongest: in dramatizing class conflicts and political struggles that couldn’t be translated into one-on-one terms — and it was interesting that when the Soviet film industry, under Stalin’s lash, moved in the 1930’s away from dramas of class conflict and mass revolution towards more conventional great-man movies of history, the official advice from the government to its filmmakers was to “learn from Shakespeare” how to make the conflicts between individuals stand in for the conflicts between classes).
The best parts of this sometimes creaky play are the final scenes, first between Henry IV and Prince Hal — when he tries the crown on for size, thinking his father already dead, and dad comes back to consciousness and understandably has a hissy-fit that his crazy son couldn’t wait for him to croak before starting to rule — and in which Henry IV advises his son to “busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels,” settling all the tiresome arguments over the succession and the ensuing civil wars by starting a foreign war and thereby uniting the country around a common enemy (and everybody in the court knows just who the common enemy will be: France, which British monarchs had been laying claim to ever since William the Conqueror took over England from his base in Normandy; indeed, as Dr. Frank C. Baxter explained in his introductions to the American showings of An Age of Kings, regrettably omitted from the DVD’s, the vests worn by the royals in the film depict both the British lion and the French fleur de lys, indicating the British monarchs’ claim to be rightful rulers of both countries) — and the final sequence, in which Sir John Falstaff shows up at Henry V’s coronation, thinking he’s going to get to be the power behind the throne, and is instead told coldly, cuttingly, calculatedly, “I know thee not, old man/Fall to thy prayers.”
Oddly, in a performance that is otherwise so insightful, Robert Hardy as Henry V almost throws away the key line and the great speech (“How ill white hairs become a fool and jester” — yet another reference to age in a play that is full of them) that follows — but that’s a minor glitch in a series that’s been uniformly well acted, reflecting the steady performing tradition that has continued in Shakespeare’s country from his day to ours with only one interruption (the 12-year Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, who as a Puritan closed down all public amusements, including all theatres, as frivolous and likely to take people’s attention away from their duty to serve God). There’s even a clever afterword where, through the final credits, we see one of the actors taking off his makeup and he delivers the postlude of Shakespeare’s play, where he promises another installment “with Sir John in it” (a promise he did not fulfill; he narrates Falstaff’s death in Henry V but does not show him as an on-stage character — although Laurence Olivier did in the 1944 film of Henry V, hiring an old music-hall star named George Robey to play Falstaff in a silent scene depicting the death that is merely talked about and speculated on in the script) and to “make you merry with fair Catherine of France,” the French princess whom Henry marries after winning his war in order to solidify his and his heirs’ claim on the French throne. (In An Age of Kings this part was played by the actor who, next to Connery, had the most illustrious subsequent career of anyone in the series: Judi Dench.) — 10/10/09
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The film I picked was the third disc in An Age of Kings, the cycle of Shakespeare’s history plays produced by the BBC in 1960 with a cast of those wonderful British actors that seem to recur in each generation. This contained two episodes dealing with the play Henry V, “Signs of War” and “The Band of Brothers,” and the single episode editor Eric Crozier got out of the play Henry VI, Part 1, “The Red Rose and the White.” One problem with presenting the Shakespeare history plays as a cycle is that Shakespeare wrote the second set of four — the three Henry VI plays and Richard III — before he wrote the first set, and scholars still disagree about how much of the Henry VI plays are Shakespeare’s work. I read Henry VI, Part 1 once and came to the conclusion that only one scene in the piece could be Shakespeare’s — the scene in the garden in which people representing the two contending factions in what’s about to become a civil war pick white and red roses, respectively, to designate which side they’re on, which will become the name of the war.
It’s known that that scene was added after the rest of the play was completed because published versions that don’t credit an author and don’t contain the scene exist — and when I read the whole play the garden scene stood out with the quiet dignity and strength of its writing compared to the overheated, fustian rhetoric of the rest (the opening scene in which someone curses the “bad revolting stars” that took Henry V’s life well before his time sounds like Christopher Marlowe on a very bad day and the rest of the play was probably a collaboration among several Elizabethan hacks, though it’s worth reading as an example of the mediocre run-of-the-mill sort of Elizabethan drama that gives you more of an appreciation of Shakespeare and Marlowe just because it shows you the rut they rose above).
Henry V was Shakespeare’s last history play (aside from Henry VIII, one of his last works and not part of the cycle depicted in An Age of Kings), written in 1599 and apparently at least in part a celebration of the Earl of Essex, who was about to launch a war to subdue Ireland that Queen Elizabeth saw as an analogue to Henry V’s war for France — though as things turned out Essex, unlike Henry V, got his ass kicked by an Irish army led by the Earl of Tyrone, and the defeat cost him Elizabeth’s favor and ultimately led to the plot that finally got him arrested and executed for treason. On the surface, it’s a glorification of war and imperialism — but that’s only on the surface; as strong and decisive as Henry V appears, the play also contains a lot of dialogue questioning not only some of the actions but the justice and righteousness of his cause itself. Though this scene was deleted from An Age of Kings, the play begins with a nervous debate between two high church officials worried that the new king is going to seize the church’s assets, and accordingly when a cleric is asked for his opinion about the justice of Henry V’s claim to the French throne (in the scene that opens this presentation of the play) naturally he knows he has to give the “right” answer.
Watching An Age of Kings in this go-round I’ve been struck by the parallel between Henry V and George W. Bush — indicative that the source of Shakespeare’s endurance has been the fact that not only did he capture human nature and depict both political and personal issues with an insight rare for the time, but that human nature has changed so little that our species continues to generate situations similar to those Shakespeare wrote about. Both Henry V and George W. Bush were the sons of hereditary rulers, both had youthful periods of licentiousness and wastrel behavior that disappointed their fathers (indeed, both had more strait-laced brothers who had much more of their dad’s favor), and both ultimately rose out of their drinking and carousing to seize the responsibilities of power. The parallel isn’t entirely exact — Henry V instructs his occupying army to treat the French gently, take no French food or other goods without paying for it, and (at least until the scene in the aftermath of Agincourt in which he ordered his army to massacre the French prisoners — a major war crime we’re really not prepared for by the way Shakespeare has drawn Henry V up to that point) to take good care of their prisoners — but the arrogance of the war council with which the play opens and the sheer outrageousness of the idea that, armed with a flimsy claim to the throne of France, Henry V can install himself as king of both countries by sheer will and force of arms ring all too closely parallel to more recent bits of history.
So, when it comes to that, does the aftermath depicted in Henry VI, Part 1 — like the U.S. in Iraq, the British in France win a quick military victory (one could readily imagine Henry V posing over the battlefield at Agincourt with a banner reading, “Mission Accomplished”) followed by a long, draining occupation and the rise of an indigenous opposition led by a freedom fighter — in this case, Jeanne la Pucelle, better known these days as Joan of Arc (more on her later). Producer Peter Dews and director Michael Hayes had more competition on Henry V than on most of the plays in the series — in 1944 Laurence Olivier had done a big-screen feature film (shooting the battle scenes in Ireland, where there was enough unspoiled countryside to stage a medieval battle without any modern anachronisms creeping in), and in 1989 Kenneth Branagh (both starring and directing, as Olivier had) did a remake — and their version suffers in the depiction of the actual battle of Agincourt (which is basically a handful of people hacking away at each other with swords — on a 1960 BBC-TV budget they couldn’t possibly duplicate the massed longbow attacks that actually won the battle for the British), but is certainly competitive with the casting.
I haven’t seen either the Olivier or Branagh films in years, but Robert Hardy is as good a Henry V as I remember his formidable feature-film competitors as being, capturing the character’s sense of justice and morals as well as his arrogance and self-righteousness, his understanding of the common people from having hung out with them before he became king (yet another strong difference between him and George W. Bush), his ability to make quick decisions even if (like the massacre of the French prisoners) they’re not necessarily the best decisions he could have made, and above all his ability to rally a significantly outnumbered army to victory. (In the 1920’s and 1930’s football coaches studied Henry’s St. Crispian’s Day address to figure out how to do pep talks to their teams.) He’s matched by a formidable cast of supporting actors — what’s most amazing about the acting in An Age of Kings is how well the cast members mesh and how they manage to inhabit characters speaking in an unfamiliar sort of English and actually convince us they’re people living 450 years earlier — including the young (but instantly recognizable) Judi Dench as Princess Catherine of France, whom Henry marries to solidify his claim to the French throne but whom he also wants genuinely to love and be loved by.
One quirk of Shakespeare’s career is that though he is thought to have started writing plays as early as 1592 (and been involved in the theatre at least a decade before that), he really hit his stride just about at the turn of the century. Henry V and Romeo and Juliet are generally dated 1599 (and because of the Essex connection we have a better idea when Henry V premiered than we do for most of Shakespeare’s plays!) and the play generally assumed to be Shakespeare’s greatest, Hamlet, is from 1600. If one watched An Age of Kings second-half first, and thereby ordered the plays in the sequence in which they were written rather than the one in which they take place, one could get a pretty good picture of Shakespeare’s maturation as a writer from the relative crudities of the Henry VI plays to the melodramatics of Richard III and then, in the four plays starting with Richard II, the coming-together of Shakespeare’s true voice and his dramatic and emotional sophistication at its best.
One of the most interesting aspects of Henry V is the extent to which religion — only peripherally mentioned in the earlier plays, and then usually in a context of frustration (Richard II aghast that God, who supposedly installed him as king, is allowing him to be deposed by a mere mortal; Henry IV’s intention to atone for his sin in deposing Richard by mounting a Crusade, systematically frustrated by the unrest at home and the attempts to organize a revolution against him, one of which — at the start of Henry IV, Part 2 — is led by a clergyman) — takes center stage; with the church already having been suborned, blackmailed or whatever into giving divine blessing to Henry’s actions, the characters cross themselves incessantly and are constantly appealing to God’s favor on their enterprise. (Henry’s eve-of-battle pep talk even keys on the saint whose name-day is the day the battle is taking place.)
Another interesting parallel that you wouldn’t notice if you weren’t watching the plays in sequence, in a context like this in which they’re being presented as a single story instead of separate works, is the similarity between Hotspur’s eve-of-battle attitude in Henry IV, Part 1 and Henry’s attitude here — particularly when both rally the troops by saying that, contrary to showing fear at the way they’re outnumbered, they should glory in being outnumbered because then the victory will be all the sweeter. Though this really doesn’t come through in Shakespeare, other tellings of the story — like A. M. Maughan’s novel Harry of Monmouth — stress that Henry and Hotspur were boyhood friends (their fathers, after all, were friends and allies until they broke spectacularly right after Richard II’s fall), grew up together and were similar in a lot of ways, and in Henry IV, Part 1 Henry IV audibly wishes Hotspur were his son (just as in Henry IV, Part 2 he wishes his younger son, John of Lancaster, were the heir to his throne — as I noted above, yet another parallel to George H. W. Bush and his relative estimation of his children’s fitness to rule; it’s well known that Daddy Bush thought it would be Jeb, not W., who’d be the second President Bush).
All the rich allusions and complexities in the first four plays in the Age of Kings cycle have the unintended consequence of making Henry VI, Part 1 seem even weaker than it is — despite a marvelous directorial trick by Michael Hayes: opening the Henry VI, Part 1 episode with the same scene (albeit from a different angle) with which Henry V ended: Henry V’s ceremonial coffin with his crown and battle helmet on it. In some ways Henry VI, Part 1 continues the parallel to more recent events — the collapse of an occupation following an imperial war leads to, and opens the door for, vicious unrest at home (though it wasn’t what Mao was talking about when he coined the phrase “turning imperialist wars into civil wars,” that’s just what happens in the cycle) and the replacement of a strong-willed, decisive leader with a weak one who tries to make nice with all the factions and succeeds only in greasing the skids of his own downfall.
Admittedly the parallel between Henry VI and Obama is a lot more distant than that between Henry V and George W. Bush — after all, one of the downsides of an hereditary monarchy is the fact that it can hand over at least technical power to a child, which is what happened to Henry VI (and one of the bad guys in the play, a corrupt cleric, literally tells us of his intent to kidnap the boy king and hold him hostage so he, not the official regent, can become the actual ruler); and whatever you think of Obama and his performance in office thus far, though he may not have been the progressive crusader his farther-out followers were hoping for, he’s not the constitutional idiot Henry VI grew up to be (at least in Shakespeare’s plays; as with his other historical characters, there’s been a revisionist literature that’s gone back to the primary sources to re-evaluate him and change our Bard-conditioned point of view towards him) either!
After the incandescent brilliance of Henry V (the character and the play), the cut-down version of Henry VI, Part 1 called “The Red Rose and the White” is disappointing, clearly the product of a less sophisticated and talented author (whether or not they were the same person!), and though the acting remains as finely honed as throughout the series and the production values also remain about the same (with Michael Hayes actually being quite creative in his use of a meager BBC-TV budget), the magic just doesn’t quite gel in such a relatively minor play. The only truly complex character in Henry VI, Part 1 is Joan of Arc, who’s going to be a problem in any modern production because in Shakespeare’s time she was considered the witch (literally!) who had cost the English control of France; under the influence of the Roman Catholic Church (who canonized her in 1920) and more recent playwrights like Schiller, Shaw, Anouilh and Anderson she’s been rehabilitated and is now regarded as not only a saint but as an icon of liberation and feminism.
Shakespeare meant her as a villain, but at least in the Age of Kings presentation she comes across as a lot more complex than that: savvy enough to see through the imposture of the Dauphin substituting one of his dukes for himself at their first meeting, genuinely inspiring and at least somewhat sympathetic (though at least part of that is how the play comes off to a modern-day viewer with a healthy skepticism towards imperialist adventures of all kinds and a conviction that any occupation — Britain’s of France in the 1400’s, the Nazi occupations during World War II, Israel’s occupation of Palestine and the U.S.’s occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq — will engender a home-grown resistance) until she goes crazy during her trial and stages an almost operatic mad scene at her exit. At least part of the complexity comes from the way Michael Hayes chose to portray her; within the limits of Shakespeare’s script (at least in this highly edited version) he makes her a strong-willed character and even dresses the actress playing her, Eileen Atkins, the way Otto Preminger dressed and made up Jean Seberg in his film of Shaw’s Saint Joan: with close-cropped blonde hair (the real Joan, if the contemporary depictions of her are to be believed, had long brown hair) and a penchant for white unisex garments. Shakespeare (or whoever wrote these scenes), seizing on the English propaganda that described Joan of Arc the way American writers today would depict Osama bin Laden, tried to make her a monomaniacal villainess — but at least as presented here some of Joan’s humanity comes through, and it’s difficult not to feel sympathy for someone who is, after all, fighting for the liberation of her country against a foreign oppressor. — 10/17/09
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Our night’s “feature” was “The Fall of a Protector” and “The Rabble from Kent,” the tenth and eleventh episodes of the BBC’s 1960 Shakespeare-based miniseries An Age of Kings, corresponding to Shakespeare’s play Henry VI, Part 2. The production of An Age of Kings was one of the best things that ever happened to Shakespeare on film or video, but the attempt to use his plays to dramatize the complete history of the Wars of the Roses from the fall of Richard II in 1399 to the death of Richard III and ascension of Henry Tudor to the throne of England in 1485 had one major problem: Shakespeare wrote the first four plays in the cycle — Richard II, the two Henry IV plays and Henry V — after he wrote the second four, the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III.
Indeed, it’s not altogether clear how much of the three Henry VI plays are Shakespeare’s work; I recall reading Henry VI, Part 1 start-to-finish and being amazed at what a dreadful play it really is, with only one scene (the one in the garden, where the people who will ultimately lead the civil war between the houses of Lancaster and York pluck roses from two bushes, one of red roses and one of white ones, to symbolize which side they’re on, thereby earning the conflict the name “Wars of the Roses”) clearly Shakespeare’s work. In a play otherwise filled with fustian rhetoric and dull hackwork, that scene stood out with the quiet dignity and strength that are Shakespeare’s hallmarks as a writer. It’s not clear exactly who wrote the rest of the play — printed versions exist that pre-date Shakespeare’s production and do not include the garden scene, indicating that Shakespeare added that to a script otherwise by other hands to tie it in with the two other plays in the sequence — though Christopher Marlowe’s name has been offered, and the opening scene of Henry VI, Part 1 might be Marlowe on a really bad day.
Henry VI, Part 2 seems more “Shakespearean,” but there are still long stretches of dull or hacky dialogue it’s hard to match with our perception of Shakespeare honed on his truly great plays. Offhand I suspect that the scenes involving Henry VI himself and his queen, Margaret of Anjou (whom he married as part of a corrupt dynastic deal negotiated by her lover, William de la Pole, the Duke of Suffolk) are Shakespeare’s work, but it’s hard to tell about the rest. Part of the problem with Henry VI, Part 2 is that it’s really not a self-contained work — the three parts of Henry VI really do seem as if they were written to be mini-series episodes rather than stand-alone dramas; the ending of Part 2, with Richard, Duke of York delivering a soliloquy about how he intends to exploit the conflicts within Henry’s court to grab the throne for himself, is as obviously a set-up for the next episode, rather than an actual resolution of the plot, as the ending of The Matrix Reloaded was.
Henry VI, Part 2 suffers from a confusing plot line in which so many dastardly conspiracies are being hatched against Henry’s reign it’s hard to keep track of them all or remember from scene to scene which side everybody’s on (frankly, I miss the commentaries Frank C. Baxter taped for the U.S. release of these programs that helped explain it all and allowed people who didn’t grow up in Britain and therefore don’t have a thorough familiarity with this slice of its history to follow the plot and remember who was who); between the time he wrote these plays and the time he did his masterpieces Shakespeare improved not only as a poet and dialogue writer but as a dramatic constructionist as well. It also didn’t help that the production values of An Age of Kings — particularly the casting, which had been so impeccable in the first half of the series (Robert Hardy as Henry V — holding his own in the inevitable comparisons with Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh — plus Sean Connery as Hotspur and Judi Dench as Henry’s Queen Katherine!) — started to fall down in this part of the series.
Yes, I know Henry VI was supposed to have been an unworldly young man and a religious devotee who prayed while his kingdom crumbled around him (watching the story in sequence it’s hard not to see the parallel between the similarly unworldly Richard II, who was overthrown by the far more capable Henry Bolingbroke, and Henry VI, whose throne was threatened by Richard, Duke of York), but I really doubt whether either the real Henry VI or the one Shakespeare envisioned when he wrote the play were as neurasthenic as Terry Scully plays him here. The other actors are quite capable but there’s a reason why the people from this series who did have subsequent major careers appeared in the earlier episodes — the standouts are Mary Morris as Margaret of Anjou (who was the subject of the first individual line from a Shakespeare play that became famous out of context — “O tiger’s heart, wrapped in a woman’s hide!”); she senses that the character is essentially Shakespeare’s warmup for Lady Macbeth and plays her that way — and whoever played her lover, the Duke of Suffolk, who turns in a marvelously slimy reading of a character who first sets up the wife of Henry’s uncle and regent, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester (John Ringham), for execution as a witch; then has Humphrey murdered on the eve of his trial for treason for fear Henry would acquit him; and ultimately falls himself at the hands of a subtler schemer, Richard, Duke of York (played by Jack May in a surprisingly overwrought style; mostly director Michael Hayes stopped his actors from scenery-chewing but May got away from him and did his beaver impression on the sets), who sets up an agitator named Jack Cade from Kent to stir up the people in London to revolt against the king and royal authority in general (it was Cade who said, “Let’s kill all the lawyers,” and later when he denounces someone as a traitor just because he speaks French, it was hard not to see Cade as the great-great ancestor of talk radio) and then marches his own army from Ireland, ostensibly to restore order but actually to set up a military presence in the capital so he can depose the king.
Henry VI, Part 2 is also considerably gorier than Shakespeare got later; though Titus Andronicus (also an early work) has the reputation as Shakespeare’s goriest play, this one comes pretty close — and director Hayes doesn’t decorously cut away from the murders; he displays most of them right on camera before our eyes. It’s worth having An Age of Kings on DVD and it’s fascinating to make my acquaintance with it again — the original miniseries was actually my introduction to Shakespeare — but it does tend to sag in the middle. — 10/28/09
••••••••••
Last night Charles and I ran episodes 12 and 13 of An Age of Kings, the 15-part BBC-TV cycle of Shakespeare’s history plays (all but the first one, King John, and the last one, Henry VIII) telling the full story of British history from 1399, when Henry Bolingbroke deposed Richard II and became Henry IV, to 1485, when Henry Tudor defeated the army of Richard III at Bosworth Field, took the Plantagenets off the British throne and inaugurated the House of Tudor, which was still ruling when Shakespeare began his career and wrote these plays. Episodes 12, “The Morning’s War,” and 13, “The Sun in Splendour,” are drawn from the play Henry VI, Part 3, and after the lameness of much of the writing in the first two Henry VI plays (only one scene in the extant Henry VI, Part 1 is clearly Shakespeare’s work and the extent of his authorship of Part 2 is also dubious) it’s a relief to reach Part 3 and experience Shakespeare finally becoming Shakespeare. Though it still has a lot of the gore characteristic of Elizabethan drama in general — not only are the dramatis personae knocked off right and left, they’re killed in full view of the audience (director Michael Hayes averts his cameras from any actual skin-piercing and bloodletting with the swords and daggers, but he gets us close enough that we get the point — it would only be in later plays like Macbeth that Shakespeare would keep the horrors off-stage and realize that leaving them to the audience’s imagination just made them that much more horrible) — we also can sense Shakespeare growing and maturing, not only in the sheer poetic beauty of the writing but also in its quiet dignity and strength (Shakespeare tended at his best to underwrite at a time when most of his contemporaries — even his best one, Marlowe — were melodramatically overwriting). The soliloquy by Henry VI that the producers of An Age of Kings used as the source for the title of Episode 12 reveals Shakespeare becoming Shakespeare:
This battle fares like to the morning’s war,
When dying clouds contend with glowing light,
What time the shepherd, blowing of his nails,
Can neither call it perfect day or night.
Now sways it this way, like a mighty sea
Forced by the tide to combat with the wind.
Now sways it that way, like that selfsame sea
Forced to retire by the fury of the wind.
Sometimes the flood prevails, and then the wind;
Now one the better, then another best;
Both tugging to be victors, breast to breast,
Yet neither conqueror nor conquered:
So is the equal poise of this fell war.
This speech is not only considerably more eloquent than anything we’ve heard in the first two Henry VI plays, it’s also a good summing-up of the Wars of the Roses as Shakespeare depicted them, complete with dastardly murders and dazzling reversals: Edward IV (Julian Glover), who like a more recent U.S. President had a hard time keeping his dick in his pants, assaults the unassailable virtue of the widow Elizabeth Gray and then finds that the only way she’ll let him screw her is if he marries her. He does so, and promptly pisses off the Earl of Warwick (Frank Windsor), who receives the news while in France negotiating a deal with the French king for Edward to marry a French princess, Bona (Tamara Hinchco). With Warwick and Queen Margaret of Anjou (Mary Morris) both in the French court at the same time bidding for the support of the French king (and it’s indicative of how fast the British power had faded that once Henry V had conquered France, and now the competing sides in a British civil war are bidding for France’s support), Warwick responds by changing sides and, now that he’s deposed Henry VI (Terry Scully) in favor of Edward IV of York, now he signs on with Margaret and plots to restore Henry VI to the throne — which he does, even recruiting Edward’s brother George, Duke of Clarence (Patrick Garland), to fight against him — only at the last minute George switches sides again and returns to his brother’s fold, thereby providing the decisive forces that allow the York side to win once and for all.
This back-and-forth plotting and abrupt switches in loyalty make Henry VI, Part 3 sound more like a Mafia story than a slice of British history (and though the Mafia were centuries in the future when Shakespeare wrote, Italy was already notorious for gangs of banditti and Shakespeare, who set many of his plays in Italy, probably knew about them). Henry VI, Part 3 is a better play than its two immediate predecessors, but it’s still far below the first four plays in the cycle (which Shakespeare wrote later, even though they take place first), and in general the weaker plays seemed to inspire the Age of Kings producers less and draw weaker casting.
Terry Scully as Henry VI seems to me to be the low point of the series, acting-wise; yes, the guy was supposed to have been a religion-obsessed wimp, but even so it’s hard to imagine he was as weak and pathetic as Scully plays him. His appearance in the role seems to me to be the biggest mistake in an otherwise marvelously cast show — certainly the Yorkist pretenders have it all over him in terms of butchness. Jack May is properly charismatic as Richard, father of the clan; Glover is appropriately tall, blond, a bon vivant and a good soldier even if not exactly the brightest bulb in the kingdom as Edward IV; and Paul Daneman plays Richard, Duke of Gloucester — later Richard III — more as a conventional scheming villain than a devil from hell, though the BBC makeup department saddled him with an anachronistic haircut that makes him look more like a 1950’s U.S. army officer than a medieval prince, and Shakespeare himself sticks him with a motivation to become king even while his brother Edward still lives, when even the historians who agree that Richard was a murderer still acknowledge the depth of the love between the brothers. What does come through in the body language between Julian Glover and Paul Daneman is how much Richard the hunchback (though the “hunch” is de-emphasized in his makeup and costuming here) envies his older brother’s attractiveness, charisma and devil-may-care way with women. — 11/10/09
••••••••••
The film we watched last night was the two-part adaptation of Shakespeare’s Richard III that made up the final episodes, “The Dangerous Brother” and “The Boar Hunt,” of the 1960 BBC-TV miniseries An Age of Kings. The shows were originally telecast in the U.K. at two-week intervals from April 28 to November 17, 1960 — and though they were clearly taped in a studio without an audience present, I suspect that the first airings of these shows were “live” because occasionally the actors make slips in the dialogue that one expects in a real-time performance but would ordinarily be edited out and retaken in a studio production. Shakespeare wrote the last four plays in this eight-play chronological sequence — the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III — before he wrote the first four (Richard II, the two Henry IV plays and Henry V), and Richard III is the earliest one of the eight that is still part of the standard dramatic repertoire.
Not surprisingly, given the fact that Shakespeare was living and writing in the age of the last Tudor monarch, Elizabeth I, Richard III comes off as a black-hearted villain and essentially a serial killer — though less in the psychopathic sense and more like a would-be Mafia don murdering his way to the head of the “family.” At the same time, by 1594 (the date usually thought of as that of Richard III’s premiere) Shakespeare had developed into a subtle enough writer that Richard III isn’t just a villain — and an actor playing him has to register the various moods, now cajoling, now flattering, now promising, now stern and ruthless, Richard assumes to do his dirty work and put himself on the throne of England. In An Age of Kings Richard was played by Paul Daneman, who blessedly avoids the kinds of scenery-chewing some Richards have fallen into and manages to make him totally believable; one gets his cruelty but also his charm, his ability to use his disabilities (his hunchback and his “withered arm,” which he claims he got from sorcery committed by his brother-in-law) to evoke sympathy for his plight.
Richard III is pretty much a one-man show, more so than any other play in the cycle (not even Henry V — the yin to Richard III’s yang in that in Shakespeare’s version of history Henry V is supposed to represent the ideal of a great king and Richard III an equally perfect example of an evil one — presents its protagonist so much front and center and reduces the rest of the cast to supporting roles), especially since Shakespeare uses the soliloquy device more than he had in the rest of the history cycle, periodically interrupting the action so that Richard can tell the audience just what he’s after and how he intends to go about getting it in the next scene. The scene in which Richard seduces Anne and gets her to agree to marry him even though he killed her previous husband Edward and his father, Henry VI, is one of Shakespeare’s most audacious inventions — and a singularly difficult one to pull off, especially when staged (as Shakespeare intended, and as it’s done here) with the corpse of Henry VI in its coffin right there, on stage, as Richard performs his macabre wooing, and it’s a testament to Daneman’s acting skills and Michael Hayes’ direction of him that he pulls it off. (Terry Scully, who played the living Henry VI, gets an acting credit for the role at the end of “The Dangerous Brother” even though he’s only seen as a face through the window in Henry’s coffin.)
The final episode, “The Boar Hunt,” was 75 minutes long (the series episodes were billed as an hour in length but several of them — including both halves of Henry IV, Part 1 and the last half of Henry IV, Part 2 — went considerably over that) and is the one in which Richard finally becomes king but doesn’t have that good a time on the throne — one gets the impression he wonders why he bothered — especially with Henry Tudor, the Earl of Richmond (one point of confusion, especially to non-Brits, with these plays is the sheer multiplicity of names the characters have — it’s unclear whether “Plantagenet” or “York” is Richard’s birth last name and when he was appointed Duke of Gloucester that word, too, was added to his name — while at the same time they seemed to have only a limited store of first names; as I remarked in my notes on the film Tower of London, Universal’s 1939 adaptation of the Richard III story but with Shakespeare’s dialogue replaced by that of Robert N. Lee, the director Rowland V. Lee’s brother, so many of the dramatis personae were named either Richard or Edward it got awfully confusing and hard to follow after a while), first in exile in France, then sneaking back to England and finally meeting Richard at the battle of Bosworth Field and ultimately defeating him and taking the throne as Henry VII, founder of the House of Tudor.
Shakespeare presents him as an idealized hero — his Tudor propagandist purposes outweighed his usual condemnation of royal usurpers and forced him to present that one in a positive light — and it was ironic to hear him promise over Richard’s dead body to “proclaim a pardon as to the soldiers fled/That in submission will return to us” when the real Henry VII did exactly the opposite: he actually back-dated the start of his reign to the day before the battle so he could, and did, charge those who had fought on Richard’s side with treason and have them executed. (I treasure Josephine Tey’s marvelous novel The Daughter of Time, which in the course of an investigation by a hospitalized Scotland Yard detective fascinated by a reproduction of a contemporary painting of Richard III develops a case exonerating him of the murder of Edward IV’s sons — but you don’t have to whitewash Richard and find him innocent to see Henry VII as a creep who willfully had most of the surviving claimants to the throne put to death to avoid any attempts to repeat the Wars of the Roses, or to wonder about the historians who portray Richard as a black-hearted villain for murdering his nephews while giving Henry VII a pass on similar crimes: as Lacey Baldwin Smith wrote in The Realm of England, “By the very nature of kingship, the elimination of rival contenders to the throne through exile, battle, or execution became the foundation of government policy” under Henry VII — the same argument Richard’s apologists could have made had he won the battle of Bosworth Field.)
Certainly Jerome Willis as Richmond exudes charisma — he comes off as something like a young Elvis and quite a bit more exciting than the real Henry VII (who hasn’t attracted much interest in historians — or dramatists, for that matter; Shakespeare never wrote a play solely about him but, when he took up British history again towards the end of his career, went straight to Henry VIII), ably fulfilling the pro-Tudor propaganda intent of the play (indeed, as a boy Richmond had appeared towards the end of Henry VI, Part 3 in one of those bald-faced “plantings” of a minor character and hints of his forthcoming major importance that is just the sort of cheap dramatic gimmick it’s especially embarrassing to find in a work by the man who’s supposedly the greatest playwright of all time).
One thing I hadn’t realized about An Age of Kings before is that many of the actors played more than one character through the duration of the series — “The Boar Hunt” features Frank Pettingell, who’d played Sir John Falstaff, as the Bishop of Ely; Jack May, who’d played Richard, Duke of York (Edward IV’s and Richard III’s father), as Lord Stanley, whose abrupt change of allegiance and shift of his army from Richard to Richmond gave Richmond the decisive advantage at Bosworth Field (in Shakespeare’s play Stanley is depicted as fighting for Richard — or agreeing to — only because Richard is holding his son hostage; once he receives word that his son has escaped and is safe, he goes with the side he really wanted to be on in the first place); and even Julian Glover, who was Edward IV in the previous episodes, turns up here as the Earl of Oxford.
What makes Richard III a fitting end to the Age of Kings series is mostly Daneman’s smooth performance — he evokes such great names of the acting past as Charles Laughton (he even gets a Laughtonesque scene in which he, as the king, greedily gnaws on chicken bones, though director Hayes at least stopped short of having him throw the bones over his shoulder), John Barrymore (whose one surviving film clip as a Shakespearean actor is as Richard III in a scene from Henry VI, Part 3 in the 1929 Warners revue The Show of Shows) and Basil Rathbone — indeed, Daneman’s Richard often struck me as very much the way Rathbone would have played him in Tower of London if he’d been allowed to use Shakespeare’s dialogue. And what makes Richard III as Shakespeare wrote it a fitting end to the eight-play cycle is, once again, Shakespeare’s greatest strength as a dramatist: not his genius as a poet nor his talent for dramatic structure, but his understanding of human nature and his ability to depict common human “types” that have hardly changed from his day to ours; though both the real Richard III’s life and Shakespeare’s depiction of it came long before Robespierre, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler or Saddam Hussein lived, there were parts of this play that reminded me of all of them! — 11/18/09
Monday, November 16, 2009
Student Seduction (CinéGroupe/Lions’ Gate, 2003)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Student Seduction, a 2003 production by a Canadian company called CinéGroupe in association with Lions’ Gate Films (their official name doesn’t have an apostrophe but, damnit, one belongs there), which like another recent Lifetime movie, A Teacher’s Crime, has a title suggesting that it’s going to be about a woman teacher who seduces an underage male student but it’s really about a teacher falsely accused of doing so. Christie Dawson (Elizabeth Berkley) is a 27-year-old who’s just returned to her teaching career after holding a series of more menial jobs in order to put her husband Drew (Rick Roberts, tall, sandy-haired and lanky but considerably hotter than most of the men Lifetime puts in their movies, especially as the heroines’ husbands) through medical school.
She’s teaching a chemistry class and is called to account by a wealthy, influential couple because she’s giving failing grades to their son, Josh Gaines (Corey Sevier), and thereby jeopardizing his place on the honor roll and his chances at admission to a fancy college. The Gaineses demand a meeting with Christie and the school’s principal, Helen Davis (Bronwen Mantel), asking Christie to cut him some slack on his chemistry grades; instead Christie offers to tutor him after school, and he’s so overjoyed that he takes her to dinner at a local hamburger joint frequented by the students — though, being the wife of a doctor, she says she doesn’t do “31 grams of fat” and only orders a salad. Josh is also dating a fellow student, Monica Corelli (Sarah Smyth) — when Lorraine Boyle (Karen Robinson), the avuncular African-American confidant for the heroine who’s part of the Lifetime schtick for stories like these, sees her and Josh deep-kissing in the hallway she says, “The next two members of the Unwed Parenthood Club” — and he also has an ex-girlfriend, Jenna, who’s sour towards Josh for reasons we don’t find out (though we start to suspect them) until about three-quarters of the way through the movie.
But Josh dumps both his age-peer girlfriends in a concentrated attempt to seduce his teacher — that’s right, the film is called Student Seduction but it’s the student who’s the would-be seducer, not the seducee — and little signs like her stroking his shoulder after he’s got a particularly difficult chemistry problem soived, or her playfully slapping him with a red glove when he offers to work on her stalled car after school and gets it going in two minutes, are piled up in the script by Edithe Swensen and Peter Svatek’s unusually subtle (at least for Lifetime) direction, and we just know that at some point all these things are going to get taken the wrong way. The climax comes when after one tutoring session Josh pushes Christie up against the hallway wall, says he knows she wants him, and gives her a full-lip kiss — and she responds by telling him to stop and slapping his silly face. The next day he walks into her home while she’s trying to fix a leaky kitchen sink (she has open a copy of a book called Plumbing for Dummies) and chases her through the house, finally catching her on the stairwell and pushing her down but not actually raping her.
She reports him for sexual assault, but the police end up totally uninterested in her story and the reason soon becomes clear: largely from the influence of Josh’s father, they’ve become convinced that Christie seduced him and she’s ultimately arrested for child molestation and all sorts of other nasty things. Though totally circumstantial, the case against her appears so strong — and Josh’s father has done such a good job manipulating the media to make her look like a slimy sexual predator (a passing shot when she goes to his office reveals that he’s the owner of a media production company, giving us a good idea of just why he’s so good at manipulating public perception) — that at the end she’s ready to take a plea bargain, confess to a felony in exchange for probation, get kicked out of the teaching profession forever and force her husband to relocate to another city where they’re unknown (and as if to twist the knife in, during this process she’s become pregnant and a good disincentive to taking the case to trial is the prospect of having to have a baby in prison) when Jenna, who previously had acknowledged to Christie that Josh raped her but had refused to testify in court, comes forward because she’s appalled by the injustice and also realizes that if Josh gets away with this he’ll rape someone else and get off scot-free again.
Student Seduction is a pretty much by-the-numbers Lifetime script (including some welcome soft-core porn interludes between Christie and her husband that serve the story function of making it difficult for us to believe she’d even be interested in anyone else) but it’s done more sensitively than usual by director Svatek and writer Swensen, and it’s especially well cast — Berkley catches the youthful vigor and enthusiasm of her character in the opening scenes quite well and is equally convincing in the Kafka-esque nightmare Svensen puts her through in the second half; and though Sevier does little for me personally (he looks like Erik Estrada’s younger brother) he’s good-looking enough that one can see why he’d end up with such a cynical view of women, the idea that he can have anyone he wants and it isn’t rape because she “really” wants him — and the actor manages the changes in his character as the mask of the nice young kid drops away and reveals the sexual psychopath within.
What’s more, Swensen and Svatek manage to bring their movie to a satisfying resolution without a heart-stopping, brutal action scene that puts Our Heroine in physical as well as psychological danger; the ending seems a bit abrupt (Jenna meets Christie and agrees to come forward, and then there’s a jump cut to Christie back in front of the chemistry class again, obviously fully exonerated) but at least it brings the piece to a close without the cheap-thrill climaxes some Lifetime writers and directors have stuck on the ends of their scripts.
The film was Student Seduction, a 2003 production by a Canadian company called CinéGroupe in association with Lions’ Gate Films (their official name doesn’t have an apostrophe but, damnit, one belongs there), which like another recent Lifetime movie, A Teacher’s Crime, has a title suggesting that it’s going to be about a woman teacher who seduces an underage male student but it’s really about a teacher falsely accused of doing so. Christie Dawson (Elizabeth Berkley) is a 27-year-old who’s just returned to her teaching career after holding a series of more menial jobs in order to put her husband Drew (Rick Roberts, tall, sandy-haired and lanky but considerably hotter than most of the men Lifetime puts in their movies, especially as the heroines’ husbands) through medical school.
She’s teaching a chemistry class and is called to account by a wealthy, influential couple because she’s giving failing grades to their son, Josh Gaines (Corey Sevier), and thereby jeopardizing his place on the honor roll and his chances at admission to a fancy college. The Gaineses demand a meeting with Christie and the school’s principal, Helen Davis (Bronwen Mantel), asking Christie to cut him some slack on his chemistry grades; instead Christie offers to tutor him after school, and he’s so overjoyed that he takes her to dinner at a local hamburger joint frequented by the students — though, being the wife of a doctor, she says she doesn’t do “31 grams of fat” and only orders a salad. Josh is also dating a fellow student, Monica Corelli (Sarah Smyth) — when Lorraine Boyle (Karen Robinson), the avuncular African-American confidant for the heroine who’s part of the Lifetime schtick for stories like these, sees her and Josh deep-kissing in the hallway she says, “The next two members of the Unwed Parenthood Club” — and he also has an ex-girlfriend, Jenna, who’s sour towards Josh for reasons we don’t find out (though we start to suspect them) until about three-quarters of the way through the movie.
But Josh dumps both his age-peer girlfriends in a concentrated attempt to seduce his teacher — that’s right, the film is called Student Seduction but it’s the student who’s the would-be seducer, not the seducee — and little signs like her stroking his shoulder after he’s got a particularly difficult chemistry problem soived, or her playfully slapping him with a red glove when he offers to work on her stalled car after school and gets it going in two minutes, are piled up in the script by Edithe Swensen and Peter Svatek’s unusually subtle (at least for Lifetime) direction, and we just know that at some point all these things are going to get taken the wrong way. The climax comes when after one tutoring session Josh pushes Christie up against the hallway wall, says he knows she wants him, and gives her a full-lip kiss — and she responds by telling him to stop and slapping his silly face. The next day he walks into her home while she’s trying to fix a leaky kitchen sink (she has open a copy of a book called Plumbing for Dummies) and chases her through the house, finally catching her on the stairwell and pushing her down but not actually raping her.
She reports him for sexual assault, but the police end up totally uninterested in her story and the reason soon becomes clear: largely from the influence of Josh’s father, they’ve become convinced that Christie seduced him and she’s ultimately arrested for child molestation and all sorts of other nasty things. Though totally circumstantial, the case against her appears so strong — and Josh’s father has done such a good job manipulating the media to make her look like a slimy sexual predator (a passing shot when she goes to his office reveals that he’s the owner of a media production company, giving us a good idea of just why he’s so good at manipulating public perception) — that at the end she’s ready to take a plea bargain, confess to a felony in exchange for probation, get kicked out of the teaching profession forever and force her husband to relocate to another city where they’re unknown (and as if to twist the knife in, during this process she’s become pregnant and a good disincentive to taking the case to trial is the prospect of having to have a baby in prison) when Jenna, who previously had acknowledged to Christie that Josh raped her but had refused to testify in court, comes forward because she’s appalled by the injustice and also realizes that if Josh gets away with this he’ll rape someone else and get off scot-free again.
Student Seduction is a pretty much by-the-numbers Lifetime script (including some welcome soft-core porn interludes between Christie and her husband that serve the story function of making it difficult for us to believe she’d even be interested in anyone else) but it’s done more sensitively than usual by director Svatek and writer Swensen, and it’s especially well cast — Berkley catches the youthful vigor and enthusiasm of her character in the opening scenes quite well and is equally convincing in the Kafka-esque nightmare Svensen puts her through in the second half; and though Sevier does little for me personally (he looks like Erik Estrada’s younger brother) he’s good-looking enough that one can see why he’d end up with such a cynical view of women, the idea that he can have anyone he wants and it isn’t rape because she “really” wants him — and the actor manages the changes in his character as the mask of the nice young kid drops away and reveals the sexual psychopath within.
What’s more, Swensen and Svatek manage to bring their movie to a satisfying resolution without a heart-stopping, brutal action scene that puts Our Heroine in physical as well as psychological danger; the ending seems a bit abrupt (Jenna meets Christie and agrees to come forward, and then there’s a jump cut to Christie back in front of the chemistry class again, obviously fully exonerated) but at least it brings the piece to a close without the cheap-thrill climaxes some Lifetime writers and directors have stuck on the ends of their scripts.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Murder at the Vanities (Paramount, 1934)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Murder at the Vanities was a 1934 Paramount production directed by Mitchell Leisen from a script by Carey Wilson, Joseph Gollomb and Sam Hellman based on a play by Earl Carroll and Rufus King. The story of this film really began in 1923, when the success of the Florenz Ziegfeld Follies was inspiring other Broadway producers to start their own series of musical revues with one-word titles whose contents would change every year, with the new edition differentiated from its predecessor just by a change in the year number. Already George White had launched the Scandals, and in 1923 Earl Carroll presented the first of his Vanities and borrowed Ziegfeld’s formula of elaborate sets and stage machinery used to present surprisingly static tableaux of carefully selected chorus girls. The shows were sold on the basis of the girls’ attractiveness — the billing on the film heralds “100 of the Most Beautiful Girls in the World” before it goes on to name the actors who play identifiable characters.
At some point Carroll and his collaborator hit on the idea of writing a murder mystery with the Vanities as a backdrop, and Paramount filmed this in 1934 just on the cusp of the Roman Catholic Legion of Decency’s campaign against Hollywood and the resulting ultra-strict enforcement of the movie studios’ Production Code. The 1930-34 period of relative freedom (especially sexual freedom) in Hollywood has gone down in movie histories under the name “pre-Code,” a whopping misnomer if there ever was one; the Production Code (a copy of which is included as a bonus in the Universal DVD box that contains Murder at the Vanities) was actually written and promulgated in 1930, and it was enforced. Indeed, the American Film Institute Catalog entry on this film largely describes the back-and-forth between Paramount executives and Joseph Breen, head of the Production Code Administration (described colloquially as the “Hays Office” long after its first head, former Harding cabinet member Will Hays, had ceased to have anything to do with it personally), including a comment from Breen to Paramount executive A. M. Botsford, “As a general caution, we call your attention to the fact that, throughout the stage directions in the script, considerable stress is laid upon the almost-nudity of the girls. We assume that in production, you will take care that nothing offensive creeps in from this standpoint.”
Breen also objected to three racy lines in the script — “Crawling out of the minister’s night shirt,” “Those dames have got some clues I’d like to work on,” and “Go and rivet some panties on those cuties of yours,” though all those are actually in the film as it stands (the difference between “pre-Code” and “post-Code” is that after July 1934 Breen could have ordered Paramount to delete those lines) — and to the song “Marahuana” (that’s how it was spelled then), which was allowed in the film when Breen reviewed the final cut in April 1934 but, after the Legion of Decency’s campaign, was deleted from the extant prints (including the foreign-release versions) in 1935. (The song is included in the Universal DVD and was there in the print the American Film Institute’s reviewers screened.)
Murder at the Vanities is, as the title suggests, a murder mystery grafted onto a musical, taking place at the opening night of the latest edition of the Vanities; a never-seen Earl Carroll is laid up sick in Atlantic City and his assistant, Jack Ellery (Jack Oakie), sees this as his big chance to show Carroll what he can do by getting and keeping the show going. Like the 1929 Warners musical On With the Show, Murder at the Vanities takes place in real time — the mystery story and the opening performance of the Vanities are happening simultaneously, and the killers are finally revealed just after the show concludes — and its plot deals with star singer Eric Lander (Danish entertainer Carl Brisson, whose son Frederick later married Rosalind Russell), freshly imported from Europe to star in the Vanities. He’s fallen in love with and proposed marriage to his singing co-star, Ann Ware (Kitty Carlisle), in the process jilting Rita Ross (Gertrude Michael), who’s also in the show as a torch singer (Ware, fittingly since she’s played by a fully trained operatic soprano, sings the show’s big operetta numbers while Rita handles the low-down torch songs).
There’s also a maid, Norma Watson (Dorothy Stickney), who has a Liù-like crush on Eric — she knows it’s hopeless and if she can’t have him, she’ll at least make sure he can be happy with the woman he does want — and a backstage dresser, Helene Smith (Elsie Watson), whom Eric fawns over so affectionately that, since a romance between them is impossible given the age barrier, it’s clear they have some sort of family connection. It turns out several reels later that Helene Smith is really the former Viennese opera star Elsie Watson, who murdered a man in Vienna 30 years ago and fled to the United States; she’s also Eric’s mother, and as a matter of filial duty he’s bound and determined to make sure she’s safe from extradition to Austria. Alas for Eric, Rita has discovered the secret by intercepting a letter from the Viennese police to Eric about her. Eric has hired female detective Sadie Evans (Gail Patrick) to get the letter back, which she does by breaking into Rita’s apartment and stealing it; later Sadie is found dead in the catwalks above the theatre. Ellery convinces his friend, homicide detective Bill Murdock (Victor McLaglen), to let the show continue while he investigates the killing backstage. Later Rita herself is found dead — also above the stage while the show is being performed (chorus girl Toby Wing notices blood on her bare shoulder and that alerts Murdock to the presence of a second corpse), and in the end it turns out that Rita killed Sadie and the maid Norma killed Rita to prevent her from exposing Helene’s secret or using the threat of doing so to blackmail Eric into jilting Ann and coming back to her.
Interspersed with this murder plot is a great deal of singing and dancing, showing off scantily clad chorines cavorting on massive sets. The songs, all by Sam Coslow (lyrics) and Arthur Johnston (music), include “Cocktails for Two,” which became a standard (though it would have been hard to predict that fate for it from the stentorian performance it gets here; its melody is beautiful but its lyrics are awfully awkward and it’s not surprising that, though a number of jazz musicians have recorded great instrumental versions of it, the best-known vocal version aside from this movie is probably the Spike Jones parody); “Live and Love Tonight” (a song with a beautiful, soaring melody which was probably kept from standard status by a really clunky lyric — there’s a reason that both Duke Ellington and Count Basie recorded it as an instrumental); an elaborate production called “The Rape of the Rhapsody” (more on that one later); a stentorian introductory number called “Where Do They Come From?” speculating on the origins and possible fates of the Vanities showgirls; one called “Lovely One” set to an engaging production number — Carl Brisson is stranded on a desert island (or at least a transparently obvious set representing one) surrounded by girls laying on the floor simulating the ocean surface, moving giant ostrich feathers to symbolize waves (and the illusion is pretty good until bits start flying off the feathers and floating in mid-air); and the “Marahuana” song, which Paramount actually tried to convince Joseph Breen didn’t really have anything to do with drugs. Its lyrics go, “Sweet Marahuana/Soothe me with your caress/Marahuana/Help me in my distress/Sweet Marahuana, please do/You alone can bring my lover back to me/Even though I know it’s just a fantasy/And then, put me to sleep/Sweet Marahuana.” Knowing something about the real effects of marijuana, I was expecting Gertrude Michael to start grabbing any even remotely edible part of the set and chowing it down — and the background for the number, with chorines (so scantily clad that at least two imdb.com commentators thought they were looking at topless women) dancing around and popping out of flowering cacti, would make any uninitiate probably think marijuana was a form of cactus.
Murder at the Vanities is one of those frustrating movies that’s good as it stands but could have been a good deal better. Part of the problem is the dull filming of the musical numbers, which are staged exactly as they would have been in a theatre and filmed from a good seat in the orchestra; given that this movie was made after 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933, Footlight Parade and many of the other Busby Berkeley extravaganzae, it was surprising to see how dully these spectacularly choreographed (by Larry Ceballos and LeRoy Prinz) numbers were filmed. As we were watching the movie I wondered if Earl Carroll had been involved with the production and had wanted the numbers filmed this way so the movie would depict what it was like to be in the audience at the Vanities and thereby promote his show — but one imdb.com commentator revealed that it was director Mitchell Leisen who rejected any Berkeley-style camerawork because he didn’t like it. With the sort of idiot judgment for which Billy Wilder ridiculed him (according to biographer Maurice Zolotow, Wilder suffered through Leisen mangling so many of his scripts he determined to become a director himself), Leisen reasoned that Berkeley’s numbers were ridiculous because they were supposedly taking place on a stage but in fact couldn’t possibly be staged live. It was a common criticism of his work then (and now), but it’s really beside the point; Berkeley’s cinematic direction of musical numbers makes them hold up as exciting spectacles even now, while Leisen’s dull, stagy filming of similar productions begins to be more numbing than entertaining after a while.
Another problem with this film is Carl Brisson: he’s a decent-looking leading man but he’s stiff, clearly uncomfortable in English (this was his first English-language talkie, though he’d been in Alfred Hitchcock’s British-made late silent The Manxman) and has a stentorian voice somewhat reminiscent of that of Denmark’s other internationally famous singer of the time, Lauritz Melchior — hardly the right voice to put over selections like “Cocktails for Two” and “Live and Love Tonight.” I get the impression that, with Maurice Chevalier’s contract having just expired, Paramount had the idea of importing someone else from Europe and giving him a similar buildup — but Brisson is about at the opposite pole from Chevalier in terms of charisma, star quality and comfort level with his songs and his role. (Imagine Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald in this movie, and Ernst Lubitsch or Rouben Mamoulian directing instead of Mitchell Leisen, and one has a quite different view of what this story could have become.)
Still another problem is Gertrude Michael; she moans her way through the “Marahuana” number quite effectively but falls short when she has to sing “Ebony Rhapsody” as part of the “Rape of the Rhapsody” number. The gimmick here is that the Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 is first performed relatively “straight,” as an orchestra-and-piano number with Vanities performer Homer Boothby (Charles Middleton) impersonating Liszt as Carl Brisson croaks his way through a set of Sam Coslow lyrics to Liszt’s tunes and a Vanities ballet company dances. Then a few Black musicians sneak into the orchestra and start emitting hot licks that sound a lot like Duke Ellington’s “jungle” style — and Middleton slips away from the piano long enough for Ellington himself to take his place and lead the band in a stirring performance of “Ebony Rhapsody”, the Johnston/Coslow pop song based on Liszt’s themes, in which some dark-skinned chorus girls unexpectedly mix it up with the lighter-hued ones. (At least two imdb.com commentators gave the filmmakers credit for allowing whites and Blacks to dance on screen together — though I’m convinced that never happened; the “Black” chorines looked all too much to me like white ones with dark makeup.)
As Ellington is wrapping up his number, Middleton as Liszt comes back on the scene with a machine gun and mows down the entire band and all the boogieing chorus girls — and Norma takes advantage of the noise from the machine gun (which supposedly is a real one, loaded with blanks — even blank cartridges would have been too dangerous to use in a live production; more likely a producer putting on a scene like this would have used a prop gun that made noise on cue but didn’t have any shells in it, blank or otherwise) to shoot Rita onstage in the middle of the performance. I wish she had murdered Rita before “The Rape of the Rhapsody,” if only because that means they would have had to do the “Ebony Rhapsody” number with Ellington’s own vocalist, Ivie Anderson — who recorded the song with the Ellington band in 1934 as promotion for the movie and whose hauntingly deep voice and superb phrasing totally aces Gertrude Michael, even though she couldn’t manage Liszt’s name — it came out “Litz.” (She would similarly record “My Old Flame” and “Troubled Waters” from the next movie Ellington’s band was in, Mae West’s Belle of the Nineties — and she’d again out-point the white singer, though with West the margin was at least closer.)
What’s good about Murder at the Vanities are the songs, the envelope-pushing of the production numbers (in the opening scene women are decked out with price tags and enveloped in vagina-like clamshells which slowly open to reveal them) and the winsome sincerity of Kitty Carlisle. One imdb.com commentator said Carlisle looked like a “train wreck” compared to the Vanities chorus girls, but I couldn’t disagree more; while the Vanities girls were dressed (or undressed) to the nines, Carlisle’s stark, natural beauty outshone all of them — and her opera-trained voice was by far the best in the film, easily encompassing the soaring lines of Johnston’s melodies and projecting the innocence and sincerity of the character.
Murder at the Vanities was a 1934 Paramount production directed by Mitchell Leisen from a script by Carey Wilson, Joseph Gollomb and Sam Hellman based on a play by Earl Carroll and Rufus King. The story of this film really began in 1923, when the success of the Florenz Ziegfeld Follies was inspiring other Broadway producers to start their own series of musical revues with one-word titles whose contents would change every year, with the new edition differentiated from its predecessor just by a change in the year number. Already George White had launched the Scandals, and in 1923 Earl Carroll presented the first of his Vanities and borrowed Ziegfeld’s formula of elaborate sets and stage machinery used to present surprisingly static tableaux of carefully selected chorus girls. The shows were sold on the basis of the girls’ attractiveness — the billing on the film heralds “100 of the Most Beautiful Girls in the World” before it goes on to name the actors who play identifiable characters.
At some point Carroll and his collaborator hit on the idea of writing a murder mystery with the Vanities as a backdrop, and Paramount filmed this in 1934 just on the cusp of the Roman Catholic Legion of Decency’s campaign against Hollywood and the resulting ultra-strict enforcement of the movie studios’ Production Code. The 1930-34 period of relative freedom (especially sexual freedom) in Hollywood has gone down in movie histories under the name “pre-Code,” a whopping misnomer if there ever was one; the Production Code (a copy of which is included as a bonus in the Universal DVD box that contains Murder at the Vanities) was actually written and promulgated in 1930, and it was enforced. Indeed, the American Film Institute Catalog entry on this film largely describes the back-and-forth between Paramount executives and Joseph Breen, head of the Production Code Administration (described colloquially as the “Hays Office” long after its first head, former Harding cabinet member Will Hays, had ceased to have anything to do with it personally), including a comment from Breen to Paramount executive A. M. Botsford, “As a general caution, we call your attention to the fact that, throughout the stage directions in the script, considerable stress is laid upon the almost-nudity of the girls. We assume that in production, you will take care that nothing offensive creeps in from this standpoint.”
Breen also objected to three racy lines in the script — “Crawling out of the minister’s night shirt,” “Those dames have got some clues I’d like to work on,” and “Go and rivet some panties on those cuties of yours,” though all those are actually in the film as it stands (the difference between “pre-Code” and “post-Code” is that after July 1934 Breen could have ordered Paramount to delete those lines) — and to the song “Marahuana” (that’s how it was spelled then), which was allowed in the film when Breen reviewed the final cut in April 1934 but, after the Legion of Decency’s campaign, was deleted from the extant prints (including the foreign-release versions) in 1935. (The song is included in the Universal DVD and was there in the print the American Film Institute’s reviewers screened.)
Murder at the Vanities is, as the title suggests, a murder mystery grafted onto a musical, taking place at the opening night of the latest edition of the Vanities; a never-seen Earl Carroll is laid up sick in Atlantic City and his assistant, Jack Ellery (Jack Oakie), sees this as his big chance to show Carroll what he can do by getting and keeping the show going. Like the 1929 Warners musical On With the Show, Murder at the Vanities takes place in real time — the mystery story and the opening performance of the Vanities are happening simultaneously, and the killers are finally revealed just after the show concludes — and its plot deals with star singer Eric Lander (Danish entertainer Carl Brisson, whose son Frederick later married Rosalind Russell), freshly imported from Europe to star in the Vanities. He’s fallen in love with and proposed marriage to his singing co-star, Ann Ware (Kitty Carlisle), in the process jilting Rita Ross (Gertrude Michael), who’s also in the show as a torch singer (Ware, fittingly since she’s played by a fully trained operatic soprano, sings the show’s big operetta numbers while Rita handles the low-down torch songs).
There’s also a maid, Norma Watson (Dorothy Stickney), who has a Liù-like crush on Eric — she knows it’s hopeless and if she can’t have him, she’ll at least make sure he can be happy with the woman he does want — and a backstage dresser, Helene Smith (Elsie Watson), whom Eric fawns over so affectionately that, since a romance between them is impossible given the age barrier, it’s clear they have some sort of family connection. It turns out several reels later that Helene Smith is really the former Viennese opera star Elsie Watson, who murdered a man in Vienna 30 years ago and fled to the United States; she’s also Eric’s mother, and as a matter of filial duty he’s bound and determined to make sure she’s safe from extradition to Austria. Alas for Eric, Rita has discovered the secret by intercepting a letter from the Viennese police to Eric about her. Eric has hired female detective Sadie Evans (Gail Patrick) to get the letter back, which she does by breaking into Rita’s apartment and stealing it; later Sadie is found dead in the catwalks above the theatre. Ellery convinces his friend, homicide detective Bill Murdock (Victor McLaglen), to let the show continue while he investigates the killing backstage. Later Rita herself is found dead — also above the stage while the show is being performed (chorus girl Toby Wing notices blood on her bare shoulder and that alerts Murdock to the presence of a second corpse), and in the end it turns out that Rita killed Sadie and the maid Norma killed Rita to prevent her from exposing Helene’s secret or using the threat of doing so to blackmail Eric into jilting Ann and coming back to her.
Interspersed with this murder plot is a great deal of singing and dancing, showing off scantily clad chorines cavorting on massive sets. The songs, all by Sam Coslow (lyrics) and Arthur Johnston (music), include “Cocktails for Two,” which became a standard (though it would have been hard to predict that fate for it from the stentorian performance it gets here; its melody is beautiful but its lyrics are awfully awkward and it’s not surprising that, though a number of jazz musicians have recorded great instrumental versions of it, the best-known vocal version aside from this movie is probably the Spike Jones parody); “Live and Love Tonight” (a song with a beautiful, soaring melody which was probably kept from standard status by a really clunky lyric — there’s a reason that both Duke Ellington and Count Basie recorded it as an instrumental); an elaborate production called “The Rape of the Rhapsody” (more on that one later); a stentorian introductory number called “Where Do They Come From?” speculating on the origins and possible fates of the Vanities showgirls; one called “Lovely One” set to an engaging production number — Carl Brisson is stranded on a desert island (or at least a transparently obvious set representing one) surrounded by girls laying on the floor simulating the ocean surface, moving giant ostrich feathers to symbolize waves (and the illusion is pretty good until bits start flying off the feathers and floating in mid-air); and the “Marahuana” song, which Paramount actually tried to convince Joseph Breen didn’t really have anything to do with drugs. Its lyrics go, “Sweet Marahuana/Soothe me with your caress/Marahuana/Help me in my distress/Sweet Marahuana, please do/You alone can bring my lover back to me/Even though I know it’s just a fantasy/And then, put me to sleep/Sweet Marahuana.” Knowing something about the real effects of marijuana, I was expecting Gertrude Michael to start grabbing any even remotely edible part of the set and chowing it down — and the background for the number, with chorines (so scantily clad that at least two imdb.com commentators thought they were looking at topless women) dancing around and popping out of flowering cacti, would make any uninitiate probably think marijuana was a form of cactus.
Murder at the Vanities is one of those frustrating movies that’s good as it stands but could have been a good deal better. Part of the problem is the dull filming of the musical numbers, which are staged exactly as they would have been in a theatre and filmed from a good seat in the orchestra; given that this movie was made after 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933, Footlight Parade and many of the other Busby Berkeley extravaganzae, it was surprising to see how dully these spectacularly choreographed (by Larry Ceballos and LeRoy Prinz) numbers were filmed. As we were watching the movie I wondered if Earl Carroll had been involved with the production and had wanted the numbers filmed this way so the movie would depict what it was like to be in the audience at the Vanities and thereby promote his show — but one imdb.com commentator revealed that it was director Mitchell Leisen who rejected any Berkeley-style camerawork because he didn’t like it. With the sort of idiot judgment for which Billy Wilder ridiculed him (according to biographer Maurice Zolotow, Wilder suffered through Leisen mangling so many of his scripts he determined to become a director himself), Leisen reasoned that Berkeley’s numbers were ridiculous because they were supposedly taking place on a stage but in fact couldn’t possibly be staged live. It was a common criticism of his work then (and now), but it’s really beside the point; Berkeley’s cinematic direction of musical numbers makes them hold up as exciting spectacles even now, while Leisen’s dull, stagy filming of similar productions begins to be more numbing than entertaining after a while.
Another problem with this film is Carl Brisson: he’s a decent-looking leading man but he’s stiff, clearly uncomfortable in English (this was his first English-language talkie, though he’d been in Alfred Hitchcock’s British-made late silent The Manxman) and has a stentorian voice somewhat reminiscent of that of Denmark’s other internationally famous singer of the time, Lauritz Melchior — hardly the right voice to put over selections like “Cocktails for Two” and “Live and Love Tonight.” I get the impression that, with Maurice Chevalier’s contract having just expired, Paramount had the idea of importing someone else from Europe and giving him a similar buildup — but Brisson is about at the opposite pole from Chevalier in terms of charisma, star quality and comfort level with his songs and his role. (Imagine Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald in this movie, and Ernst Lubitsch or Rouben Mamoulian directing instead of Mitchell Leisen, and one has a quite different view of what this story could have become.)
Still another problem is Gertrude Michael; she moans her way through the “Marahuana” number quite effectively but falls short when she has to sing “Ebony Rhapsody” as part of the “Rape of the Rhapsody” number. The gimmick here is that the Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 is first performed relatively “straight,” as an orchestra-and-piano number with Vanities performer Homer Boothby (Charles Middleton) impersonating Liszt as Carl Brisson croaks his way through a set of Sam Coslow lyrics to Liszt’s tunes and a Vanities ballet company dances. Then a few Black musicians sneak into the orchestra and start emitting hot licks that sound a lot like Duke Ellington’s “jungle” style — and Middleton slips away from the piano long enough for Ellington himself to take his place and lead the band in a stirring performance of “Ebony Rhapsody”, the Johnston/Coslow pop song based on Liszt’s themes, in which some dark-skinned chorus girls unexpectedly mix it up with the lighter-hued ones. (At least two imdb.com commentators gave the filmmakers credit for allowing whites and Blacks to dance on screen together — though I’m convinced that never happened; the “Black” chorines looked all too much to me like white ones with dark makeup.)
As Ellington is wrapping up his number, Middleton as Liszt comes back on the scene with a machine gun and mows down the entire band and all the boogieing chorus girls — and Norma takes advantage of the noise from the machine gun (which supposedly is a real one, loaded with blanks — even blank cartridges would have been too dangerous to use in a live production; more likely a producer putting on a scene like this would have used a prop gun that made noise on cue but didn’t have any shells in it, blank or otherwise) to shoot Rita onstage in the middle of the performance. I wish she had murdered Rita before “The Rape of the Rhapsody,” if only because that means they would have had to do the “Ebony Rhapsody” number with Ellington’s own vocalist, Ivie Anderson — who recorded the song with the Ellington band in 1934 as promotion for the movie and whose hauntingly deep voice and superb phrasing totally aces Gertrude Michael, even though she couldn’t manage Liszt’s name — it came out “Litz.” (She would similarly record “My Old Flame” and “Troubled Waters” from the next movie Ellington’s band was in, Mae West’s Belle of the Nineties — and she’d again out-point the white singer, though with West the margin was at least closer.)
What’s good about Murder at the Vanities are the songs, the envelope-pushing of the production numbers (in the opening scene women are decked out with price tags and enveloped in vagina-like clamshells which slowly open to reveal them) and the winsome sincerity of Kitty Carlisle. One imdb.com commentator said Carlisle looked like a “train wreck” compared to the Vanities chorus girls, but I couldn’t disagree more; while the Vanities girls were dressed (or undressed) to the nines, Carlisle’s stark, natural beauty outshone all of them — and her opera-trained voice was by far the best in the film, easily encompassing the soaring lines of Johnston’s melodies and projecting the innocence and sincerity of the character.
Georgia Rule (Universal, 2007)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
This morning I watched a quirky movie I’d recorded yesterday on Lifetime called Georgia Rule, about three generations of a monumentally dysfunctional family: Lilly (Felicity Huffman), wife of a successful and well-respected defense attorney in San Francisco, has despaired of keeping control of her daughter Rachel (Lindsay Lohan) and therefore has decided that, now that she’s graduated from high school and is supposed to start at Vassar in the fall, she’s going to send Rachel to Hull, Idaho to spend the summer with Georgia (Jane Fonda), Lilly’s mother, a highly judgmental and strict person who literally washes out with soap the mouths of people who take the Lord’s name in vain and has invented a whole peculiar series of injunctions, do’s and don’ts by which she makes her daughter, her granddaughter and everyone else in her orbit — including two of the neighbor kids who come over and hang out with her for reasons which boggle the imagination — live by, and whenever anyone questions any of her pronouncements she smiles sweetly — or as sweetly as she can under the circumstances — and says, “Georgia Rule,” hence the film’s title. (As the film progressed she reminded me more and more of my mother.)
On the way to Hull Rachel bolts from the car in which Lilly is driving her there (“Why can’t we just fly like normal people?” she asked earlier), walks a few miles until she collapses, is rescued by an attractive long-haired young man named Harlan (Garrett Hedlund) and commandeers a ride from a tall, lanky, sandy-haired man named Simon (Dermot Mulroney). From there one would expect from writer Mark Andrus and director Garry Marshall a simple city-bad, country-good fable in which Georgia’s stern old-world country-bred values seize control of Rachel and Make a Good Woman Out of Her, but instead the filmmakers throw us some intriguing curveballs. When Rachel first met Simon, she judged from the absence of a wedding ring on his finger and the fact that he didn’t make a pass at her that he was Gay (indeed, I was rather hoping it would turn out he was Gay and Harlan was his boyfriend!), but later on Simon tells Rachel that his wife and their son were killed in a car accident three years earlier — and Rachel plays a game of can-you-top-this with him by saying that she was regularly abused sexually by her stepfather Arnold (Cary Elwes), the big-shot attorney. Later Rachel says that she just made that up, but for much of the rest of the film Marshall and Andrus keep us in a state of suspense as to whether she was molested or not.
It also turns out that Lilly is an alcoholic, and while she’s sober at the start of the film she does a spectacular back-flip off the wagon when Rachel’s revelation reaches her — and if that weren’t enough in the way of surprise, it also turns out that Lilly dated Simon before either of them met the partners with whom they had their kids, and the banked flames between them flare up briefly in Simon’s office (he’s officially a veterinarian but he occasionally treats his patients’ companion humans as well) and it looks like they’re about to fuck then and there except Lilly draws back, probably because Rachel has a job working as Simon’s receptionist and bill collector and Lilly doesn’t want her daughter catching her doing the down and dirty with the boss. Rachel is drawn even beyond the usual fish-out-of-water stereotype as a virtual apparition, a creature so alien to the conservative mores of Hull, Idaho she couldn’t be more out of place if she’d beamed in from another planet — and, like a lot of real-life child sexual abuse victims, she’s also depicted as a woman used to getting what she wants through sex and willing to seduce just about anybody as a way of manipulating them. She gets Harlan to let her go down on him during a boat ride on the local lake; later she crashes Simon’s motel room and tries to seduce him; and Simon gives her a fatherly lecture (let’s face it, we know that one of the places this movie is going is to get Simon and Lilly back together and thereby put Simon in loco parentis to Rachel) to the effect that all her life she’s been using sex and drugs (did I mention that Rachel drank and took drugs? She’s an alienated teenager in a movie, isn’t she?) to overcome the lack of legitimate physical affection from her parents.
It’s also acknowledged in the writing that Rachel isn’t the first rebel in her family; Lilly herself started drinking and took up with an out-of-towner (Rachel’s dad, whose background and fate are otherwise completely concealed from us) to get away from her mother and the stifling “Georgia rules.” The film ends with Lilly in her own car (a Mercedes) driving back to San Francisco with Arnold — she’s ready to reconcile with her husband after deciding her daughter lied about him — when Arnold’s sudden willingness to leave his Ferrari behind in Hull and give it to Rachel as a present (or a bribe) convinces Lilly that Arnold did molest Rachel after all. “She seduced me!” he protests (giving the lame excuse a lot of molesters give), and she orders him to pull the car over and let her out — and sure enough Georgia, Simon and Harlan, who’ve been following them, pull up, pick her up and take her back to Idaho, where it’s established that Simon and Lilly will pair off — as will Harlan and Rachel once he completes his two-year mission in the Mormon Church.
Though Georgia Rule is well and truly to the Lifetime manner born, the star power on both sides of the camera and the presence of an MPAA rating (R, “for sexual content and some language” — though in the Lifetime version, edited down from a 112-minute theatrical release, there’s only a hint of soft-core porn and any swear words darker than “God” are left on the cutting-room floor), as well as the use of actual Los Angeles locations instead of Canadian ones (though frankly Canada might have been more credible as Idaho!) indicate that Universal intended this one to be shown theatrically, and it shows in the somewhat more complex interrelationships between the characters than usual for Lifetime. It helps that Jane Fonda, Felicity Huffman and Lindsay Lohan are believable (barely) as three generations of the same family; that Fonda brings her customary authority to her role even though sometimes it seems like she’s rehashing On Golden Pond 25 years later with her character on the other end of the generational divide; and that Lohan — albeit in a part tailored to fit her off-screen image as the tabloids have been feeding it to us for years — is surprisingly good, acting with power, conviction and authority that suggest if she can conquer her personal demons she can still turn in credible performances that will remake her reputation and convince people she’s a talented actress and not just a tabloid-created freak.
This morning I watched a quirky movie I’d recorded yesterday on Lifetime called Georgia Rule, about three generations of a monumentally dysfunctional family: Lilly (Felicity Huffman), wife of a successful and well-respected defense attorney in San Francisco, has despaired of keeping control of her daughter Rachel (Lindsay Lohan) and therefore has decided that, now that she’s graduated from high school and is supposed to start at Vassar in the fall, she’s going to send Rachel to Hull, Idaho to spend the summer with Georgia (Jane Fonda), Lilly’s mother, a highly judgmental and strict person who literally washes out with soap the mouths of people who take the Lord’s name in vain and has invented a whole peculiar series of injunctions, do’s and don’ts by which she makes her daughter, her granddaughter and everyone else in her orbit — including two of the neighbor kids who come over and hang out with her for reasons which boggle the imagination — live by, and whenever anyone questions any of her pronouncements she smiles sweetly — or as sweetly as she can under the circumstances — and says, “Georgia Rule,” hence the film’s title. (As the film progressed she reminded me more and more of my mother.)
On the way to Hull Rachel bolts from the car in which Lilly is driving her there (“Why can’t we just fly like normal people?” she asked earlier), walks a few miles until she collapses, is rescued by an attractive long-haired young man named Harlan (Garrett Hedlund) and commandeers a ride from a tall, lanky, sandy-haired man named Simon (Dermot Mulroney). From there one would expect from writer Mark Andrus and director Garry Marshall a simple city-bad, country-good fable in which Georgia’s stern old-world country-bred values seize control of Rachel and Make a Good Woman Out of Her, but instead the filmmakers throw us some intriguing curveballs. When Rachel first met Simon, she judged from the absence of a wedding ring on his finger and the fact that he didn’t make a pass at her that he was Gay (indeed, I was rather hoping it would turn out he was Gay and Harlan was his boyfriend!), but later on Simon tells Rachel that his wife and their son were killed in a car accident three years earlier — and Rachel plays a game of can-you-top-this with him by saying that she was regularly abused sexually by her stepfather Arnold (Cary Elwes), the big-shot attorney. Later Rachel says that she just made that up, but for much of the rest of the film Marshall and Andrus keep us in a state of suspense as to whether she was molested or not.
It also turns out that Lilly is an alcoholic, and while she’s sober at the start of the film she does a spectacular back-flip off the wagon when Rachel’s revelation reaches her — and if that weren’t enough in the way of surprise, it also turns out that Lilly dated Simon before either of them met the partners with whom they had their kids, and the banked flames between them flare up briefly in Simon’s office (he’s officially a veterinarian but he occasionally treats his patients’ companion humans as well) and it looks like they’re about to fuck then and there except Lilly draws back, probably because Rachel has a job working as Simon’s receptionist and bill collector and Lilly doesn’t want her daughter catching her doing the down and dirty with the boss. Rachel is drawn even beyond the usual fish-out-of-water stereotype as a virtual apparition, a creature so alien to the conservative mores of Hull, Idaho she couldn’t be more out of place if she’d beamed in from another planet — and, like a lot of real-life child sexual abuse victims, she’s also depicted as a woman used to getting what she wants through sex and willing to seduce just about anybody as a way of manipulating them. She gets Harlan to let her go down on him during a boat ride on the local lake; later she crashes Simon’s motel room and tries to seduce him; and Simon gives her a fatherly lecture (let’s face it, we know that one of the places this movie is going is to get Simon and Lilly back together and thereby put Simon in loco parentis to Rachel) to the effect that all her life she’s been using sex and drugs (did I mention that Rachel drank and took drugs? She’s an alienated teenager in a movie, isn’t she?) to overcome the lack of legitimate physical affection from her parents.
It’s also acknowledged in the writing that Rachel isn’t the first rebel in her family; Lilly herself started drinking and took up with an out-of-towner (Rachel’s dad, whose background and fate are otherwise completely concealed from us) to get away from her mother and the stifling “Georgia rules.” The film ends with Lilly in her own car (a Mercedes) driving back to San Francisco with Arnold — she’s ready to reconcile with her husband after deciding her daughter lied about him — when Arnold’s sudden willingness to leave his Ferrari behind in Hull and give it to Rachel as a present (or a bribe) convinces Lilly that Arnold did molest Rachel after all. “She seduced me!” he protests (giving the lame excuse a lot of molesters give), and she orders him to pull the car over and let her out — and sure enough Georgia, Simon and Harlan, who’ve been following them, pull up, pick her up and take her back to Idaho, where it’s established that Simon and Lilly will pair off — as will Harlan and Rachel once he completes his two-year mission in the Mormon Church.
Though Georgia Rule is well and truly to the Lifetime manner born, the star power on both sides of the camera and the presence of an MPAA rating (R, “for sexual content and some language” — though in the Lifetime version, edited down from a 112-minute theatrical release, there’s only a hint of soft-core porn and any swear words darker than “God” are left on the cutting-room floor), as well as the use of actual Los Angeles locations instead of Canadian ones (though frankly Canada might have been more credible as Idaho!) indicate that Universal intended this one to be shown theatrically, and it shows in the somewhat more complex interrelationships between the characters than usual for Lifetime. It helps that Jane Fonda, Felicity Huffman and Lindsay Lohan are believable (barely) as three generations of the same family; that Fonda brings her customary authority to her role even though sometimes it seems like she’s rehashing On Golden Pond 25 years later with her character on the other end of the generational divide; and that Lohan — albeit in a part tailored to fit her off-screen image as the tabloids have been feeding it to us for years — is surprisingly good, acting with power, conviction and authority that suggest if she can conquer her personal demons she can still turn in credible performances that will remake her reputation and convince people she’s a talented actress and not just a tabloid-created freak.
Friday, November 13, 2009
The People v. Leo Frank (PBS, 2009)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright @ 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
This morning I watched another program from PBS, The People v. Leo Frank, a recent broadcast about the murder of Leo Frank (Will Janowitz) in 1915. Frank was a Jew from New York City who came to Atlanta early in the 20th century to manage a pencil factory owned by one of his uncles, and he got into trouble when he was accused of killing 13-year-old Mary Phagan, an employee in his factory, after she came by on the morning of a Confederate Decoration Day parade to pick up her check for $1.20 (real money in 1913!) and she later turned up dead in the basement, assaulted (apparently raped) and killed. The body was discovered by a Black worker at the factory, Newt Lee (Gordon Danniels), and later another Black worker, Jim Conley (Seth Gilliam), and Frank turned out to be the principal suspects.
The well-off Frank, who had married into Atlanta’s own Jewish community, had “the finest defense money can buy,” namely legendary attorney Luther Rosser (Brent White), famous for refusing to wear a tie in court and helping the cream of Atlanta’s high society avoid legal penalties for their antisocial behaviors — but Conley also had an attorney, William Smith (Jayson Warner Smith), a sort of real-life Atticus Finch who became famous for taking on Black clients and sometimes winning their freedom. Smith was able to assist the state’s official prosecutor, Hugh Dorsey (Steve Coulter), and to handle the direct examination of Conley — and according to the police Frank not only killed Mary Phagan when she refused to have sex with him, he got Conley to implicate himself by dictating notes, allegedly left by Phagan herself before she died, identifying her killer as a “big, tall, black Negro.”
Conley withstood a withering cross-examination, while Frank used a legal loophole — he was allowed to read an unsworn statement into the record — to avoid either refusing to testify at all or being subject to cross-examination himself. Then prosecutor Dorsey put a long line of young women who’d worked at Frank’s factory on the stand to claim that he was what in modern parlance would be called a serial sexual harasser — the language of sexual harassment didn’t exist in 1913 but the reality of it did, and was frequently cited by people with sexist prejudices against women working at all. Feelings against Frank ran so high in Atlanta that the judge decided for his own safety that he should not be in court when the verdict was read, He was found guilty and sentenced to death; his appeal was heard 13 times and denied each time (the last time by the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld his conviction 7-2 even though Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes pointed out in his dissent that if the judge thought that the defendant’s safety required his absence from the courtroom when the verdict was read, that was pretty obvious evidence that the depth of the community’s feeling against him had prevented him from receiving a fair trial).
Then William Smith took another look at the trial transcript and compared Jim Conley’s testimony to the notes supposedly taken down from Frank’s dictation and found that, contrary to Dorsey’s closing argument — which claimed that the notes had come from the mind of a more educated man than Conley because they used the verb “did” correctly while Conley used “done” instead — Conley had actually said “did” properly 50 times in his testimony, and he was also partial to using three adjectives in front of a noun the way the note had in its reference to a “big, tall, black Negro.” At this point the Frank story turns into what To Kill a Mockingbird would have been if Atticus Finch had discovered, after a white person had been convicted of the crime, that his Black client was guilty after all. With this new evidence, Smith went before Georgia governor John Slaton (Terrence Gibney) and joined Frank’s lawyers in a request to commute Frank’s sentence to life imprisonment — apparently on the theory that sentiment still ran so high against Frank that he’d be in mortal danger if he were freed from custody altogether. (Curiously, this show does not mention that Slaton had been the law partner of Frank’s attorney and was therefore accused, with some basis, of having a conflict of interest.)
In the meantime Frank’s case had continued to be a cause célèbre on both sides; the New York Times took his side in what’s been described as its first and only journalistic crusade (an odd turn of phrase given that both Frank and Times publisher Adolph Ochs were Jewish), and as well meant as this was it’s clear that much of the support Frank was getting from the Times and other prominent Northern Jews was backfiring big-time. Ranged against Frank was Georgia populist leader Thomas E. Watson (middle initial just in case you want to Google him and don’t want to come up with Thomas A. Watson, Alexander Graham Bell’s assistant and the recipient of the first telephone call; or Thomas J. Watson, the president of IBM at the time of the company’s most spectacular growth; or former Marine general Thomas E. Watson, USMC), who had degenerated from his initial calls for racial unity and the franchise for Blacks into a vicious race-baiter.
Watson’s paper, The Jeffersonian, attacked not only Frank and his Northern Jewish supporters but Jews in general, and offered lubricious details of Frank’s supposed sexual perversions (sounding a lot like the most ferocious attackers of Roman Polanski today) and suggested that the Jews supporting him either did those sorts of things themselves or at the very least actively protected other Jews who did. On August 17, 1915, just after he’d been transferred from the holding cell in Atlanta to a state prison, Frank was taken out by a lynch mob made up of some of the most respected officials in Georgia — many of them judges, solicitors general (what Georgia called its prosecutors then) and other community leaders — and hanged after being driven 100 miles (the lynchers used a caravan of cars at a time when automobiles were still a novelty item for the rich) so they could kill him in a grove outside Marietta, Mary Phagan’s home town.
The People v. Leo Frank is one of those bastard creations that increasingly afflict PBS’s schedule — it’s not really a documentary and it’s not really a dramatic film; it has a full cast of actors playing the historical characters in reconstructed scenes, but also has talking-head views of historians and photos of the real people and events, including crime-scene shots of Mary Phagan’s body. (At least Will Janowitz looks strikingly like the real Leo Frank and captures Frank’s habitual nervousness — one of the aspects that made the cops suspect him — quite well.) I’d have preferred more documentary and less drama, especially since the Frank case has been dramatized in at least two previous movies (a 1988 TV-movie called The Murder of Mary Phagan, with Jack Lemmon playing Governor Slaton; and, in disguised form, in the 1937 film They Won’t Forget, with Claude Rains playing the William Smith character — renamed “Griffin,” also Rains’ name in The Invisible Man — as well as in the recent musical Parade, whose author, Alfred Uhry, was briefly interviewed in this show), but the story is still fascinating for its network of prejudices, the bizarre justifications the lynchers used, and some of the ways the South (at least the white Southern leadership) opposed civil rights struggles into the 1960’s, blaming them on “outside agitators” and coming up with preposterous justifications for lynchings and other murders, often (as in the Mississippi killings of 1964) committed by the very people supposedly charged with investigating them and bringing the criminals to justice.
It also touched on the abysmal sloppiness of police work a century ago; one point Russell Miller made in his biography of Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is that Conan Doyle was more aware of the importance of securing a crime scene and extracting all possible evidence from it than most real-life policemen of his day (in story after story Conan Doyle had Holmes lament that potentially vital clues had been destroyed by the stupidity of police officers who didn’t secure the scene), and the Frank case is one of many in which crucial evidence was lost or destroyed. And it’s impossible to look at Thomas E. Watson’s role in stoking the fires that led to the lynching without regarding him as an ancestor of modern-day talk radio, especially hosts like Steve Yuhas who have openly said on air that Barack Obama has to be removed from the presidency before the next election. It’s a sad and sorry commentary on the persistence of this meanness in American politics (perhaps in human nature!), this overwhelming desire to separate humanity into the Good and True on one side and everyone else on the other, and to consign everyone who isn’t white, Christian and straight into the “other” category that we really don’t have to bother with and we can oppress and deal with exactly as we please.
This morning I watched another program from PBS, The People v. Leo Frank, a recent broadcast about the murder of Leo Frank (Will Janowitz) in 1915. Frank was a Jew from New York City who came to Atlanta early in the 20th century to manage a pencil factory owned by one of his uncles, and he got into trouble when he was accused of killing 13-year-old Mary Phagan, an employee in his factory, after she came by on the morning of a Confederate Decoration Day parade to pick up her check for $1.20 (real money in 1913!) and she later turned up dead in the basement, assaulted (apparently raped) and killed. The body was discovered by a Black worker at the factory, Newt Lee (Gordon Danniels), and later another Black worker, Jim Conley (Seth Gilliam), and Frank turned out to be the principal suspects.
The well-off Frank, who had married into Atlanta’s own Jewish community, had “the finest defense money can buy,” namely legendary attorney Luther Rosser (Brent White), famous for refusing to wear a tie in court and helping the cream of Atlanta’s high society avoid legal penalties for their antisocial behaviors — but Conley also had an attorney, William Smith (Jayson Warner Smith), a sort of real-life Atticus Finch who became famous for taking on Black clients and sometimes winning their freedom. Smith was able to assist the state’s official prosecutor, Hugh Dorsey (Steve Coulter), and to handle the direct examination of Conley — and according to the police Frank not only killed Mary Phagan when she refused to have sex with him, he got Conley to implicate himself by dictating notes, allegedly left by Phagan herself before she died, identifying her killer as a “big, tall, black Negro.”
Conley withstood a withering cross-examination, while Frank used a legal loophole — he was allowed to read an unsworn statement into the record — to avoid either refusing to testify at all or being subject to cross-examination himself. Then prosecutor Dorsey put a long line of young women who’d worked at Frank’s factory on the stand to claim that he was what in modern parlance would be called a serial sexual harasser — the language of sexual harassment didn’t exist in 1913 but the reality of it did, and was frequently cited by people with sexist prejudices against women working at all. Feelings against Frank ran so high in Atlanta that the judge decided for his own safety that he should not be in court when the verdict was read, He was found guilty and sentenced to death; his appeal was heard 13 times and denied each time (the last time by the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld his conviction 7-2 even though Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes pointed out in his dissent that if the judge thought that the defendant’s safety required his absence from the courtroom when the verdict was read, that was pretty obvious evidence that the depth of the community’s feeling against him had prevented him from receiving a fair trial).
Then William Smith took another look at the trial transcript and compared Jim Conley’s testimony to the notes supposedly taken down from Frank’s dictation and found that, contrary to Dorsey’s closing argument — which claimed that the notes had come from the mind of a more educated man than Conley because they used the verb “did” correctly while Conley used “done” instead — Conley had actually said “did” properly 50 times in his testimony, and he was also partial to using three adjectives in front of a noun the way the note had in its reference to a “big, tall, black Negro.” At this point the Frank story turns into what To Kill a Mockingbird would have been if Atticus Finch had discovered, after a white person had been convicted of the crime, that his Black client was guilty after all. With this new evidence, Smith went before Georgia governor John Slaton (Terrence Gibney) and joined Frank’s lawyers in a request to commute Frank’s sentence to life imprisonment — apparently on the theory that sentiment still ran so high against Frank that he’d be in mortal danger if he were freed from custody altogether. (Curiously, this show does not mention that Slaton had been the law partner of Frank’s attorney and was therefore accused, with some basis, of having a conflict of interest.)
In the meantime Frank’s case had continued to be a cause célèbre on both sides; the New York Times took his side in what’s been described as its first and only journalistic crusade (an odd turn of phrase given that both Frank and Times publisher Adolph Ochs were Jewish), and as well meant as this was it’s clear that much of the support Frank was getting from the Times and other prominent Northern Jews was backfiring big-time. Ranged against Frank was Georgia populist leader Thomas E. Watson (middle initial just in case you want to Google him and don’t want to come up with Thomas A. Watson, Alexander Graham Bell’s assistant and the recipient of the first telephone call; or Thomas J. Watson, the president of IBM at the time of the company’s most spectacular growth; or former Marine general Thomas E. Watson, USMC), who had degenerated from his initial calls for racial unity and the franchise for Blacks into a vicious race-baiter.
Watson’s paper, The Jeffersonian, attacked not only Frank and his Northern Jewish supporters but Jews in general, and offered lubricious details of Frank’s supposed sexual perversions (sounding a lot like the most ferocious attackers of Roman Polanski today) and suggested that the Jews supporting him either did those sorts of things themselves or at the very least actively protected other Jews who did. On August 17, 1915, just after he’d been transferred from the holding cell in Atlanta to a state prison, Frank was taken out by a lynch mob made up of some of the most respected officials in Georgia — many of them judges, solicitors general (what Georgia called its prosecutors then) and other community leaders — and hanged after being driven 100 miles (the lynchers used a caravan of cars at a time when automobiles were still a novelty item for the rich) so they could kill him in a grove outside Marietta, Mary Phagan’s home town.
The People v. Leo Frank is one of those bastard creations that increasingly afflict PBS’s schedule — it’s not really a documentary and it’s not really a dramatic film; it has a full cast of actors playing the historical characters in reconstructed scenes, but also has talking-head views of historians and photos of the real people and events, including crime-scene shots of Mary Phagan’s body. (At least Will Janowitz looks strikingly like the real Leo Frank and captures Frank’s habitual nervousness — one of the aspects that made the cops suspect him — quite well.) I’d have preferred more documentary and less drama, especially since the Frank case has been dramatized in at least two previous movies (a 1988 TV-movie called The Murder of Mary Phagan, with Jack Lemmon playing Governor Slaton; and, in disguised form, in the 1937 film They Won’t Forget, with Claude Rains playing the William Smith character — renamed “Griffin,” also Rains’ name in The Invisible Man — as well as in the recent musical Parade, whose author, Alfred Uhry, was briefly interviewed in this show), but the story is still fascinating for its network of prejudices, the bizarre justifications the lynchers used, and some of the ways the South (at least the white Southern leadership) opposed civil rights struggles into the 1960’s, blaming them on “outside agitators” and coming up with preposterous justifications for lynchings and other murders, often (as in the Mississippi killings of 1964) committed by the very people supposedly charged with investigating them and bringing the criminals to justice.
It also touched on the abysmal sloppiness of police work a century ago; one point Russell Miller made in his biography of Sherlock Holmes creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is that Conan Doyle was more aware of the importance of securing a crime scene and extracting all possible evidence from it than most real-life policemen of his day (in story after story Conan Doyle had Holmes lament that potentially vital clues had been destroyed by the stupidity of police officers who didn’t secure the scene), and the Frank case is one of many in which crucial evidence was lost or destroyed. And it’s impossible to look at Thomas E. Watson’s role in stoking the fires that led to the lynching without regarding him as an ancestor of modern-day talk radio, especially hosts like Steve Yuhas who have openly said on air that Barack Obama has to be removed from the presidency before the next election. It’s a sad and sorry commentary on the persistence of this meanness in American politics (perhaps in human nature!), this overwhelming desire to separate humanity into the Good and True on one side and everyone else on the other, and to consign everyone who isn’t white, Christian and straight into the “other” category that we really don’t have to bother with and we can oppress and deal with exactly as we please.
Heartbeat: Deadlier Than the Male (British TV, 2009)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles asked if I had anything relatively short for us to watch, and it turned out I did: an episode of a British TV show called Heartbeat, which apparently has been on the air since 1992 although the current season, from which this show derived, hasn’t yet been shown in Britain but has been shown in Sweden, from which my download derived (which meant it had “hard” Swedish subtitles permanently embedded in the image). I had stumbled on this when I was looking for the 1966 film Deadlier Than the Male, an attempt to enliven the Bulldog Drummond franchise by essentially remodeling Drummond from a James Bond precursor into a James Bond clone, because the episode title was “Deadlier Than the Male.”
The overall series centers around the police department in a small British town called Aidensfield, and is set in the 1960’s — which is indicated mostly by the presence of a lot of British Invasion music on the soundtrack (and it’s interesting to listen to snatches of the work of bands that did not make it to the States and become enormous stars the way the Beatles and the Rolling Stones did); the theme song is by Buddy Holly (though it’s not heard in Holly’s own performance — which made it all the more startling that when one of the characters got arrested the soundtrack burst forth with Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” — and unless there was an amazingly convincing Elvis impersonator in Britain covering the song, the record is Elvis’s own) — and this particular episode centered around a married couple, Vic and Eileen Needham (Hugo Speer and Michelle Holmes), who seem out to give the characters Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner played in The War of the Roses lessons in how to have a dysfunctional relationship.
She starts the tit-for-tat by pouring his liquor supply down the kitchen sink; he responds by tearing up her favorite dress; she takes his Jaguar sedan and deliberately crashes it (she doesn’t destroy it but she does leave it severely dented and scratched); and he responds by smashing her collection of knickknacks, many inherited from her mother and therefore literally irreplaceable. That gets her upset enough that she files charges against him, and she also calls in a woman solicitor from Leeds, Sylvia Swinton (Samantha Bond), whose cool authority makes her the most interesting character in the piece, to represent her in a divorce action. Not only that, she throws him out of their house (one which, as he tells everyone he meets, he actually helped build with his own hands) and has the locks changed — to which he responds by breaking a window, only the police arrest him before he can actually enter illegally. While this intrigue is going on, there’s a subplot involving local knife sharpener Stan Bickle (Sam Kelly), whose daughter Josie (played by a dark-haired, heavy-set and quite striking-looking actress named Jenna Boyd) is trying to date a local man named David and running into interference from the aunt who’s living with him and being ludicrously overprotective even though David is not only a fully grown adult but a rather seedy-looking middle-aged one at that.
Neither the guest performers nor the series regulars are all that good-looking (even the younger member of the two-man police team at the center of the action. Steven Blakeley, is homely and rather nerdish rather than the hot babe magnet an American producer would have cast in a role like this; ironically, though we’re supposed to dislike him Hugo Speer is the best-looking male on the show!), and though Heartbeat is nominally a crime show its intrigues are more the garden-variety problems in human behavior dealt with routinely by real cops but almost never by TV ones. It’s not a great show but it has a certain degree of charm and it’s refreshing, in a way, to watch a show where the people aren’t expertly coiffed actors but actually look like ordinary human beings without unlimited wardrobe and makeup budgets — and writer Peter Gibbs has a knack for clever situations, like having Sylvia Swinton stay at the same inn as her client’s husband — the one she’s accusing of all those terrible things to get his wife a divorce — with neither of them happy about the situation (nor is the innkeeper, who tries to figure out a way to get rid of one of them).
It’s an interesting show, and it’s amazing to think that a show filled with not only people but cars (the police’s principal vehicle is a baby-blue Ford Anglia, one of the most aggressively ugly vehicles ever manufactured — though the very relentlessness of its ugliness gives it a certain charm) that wouldn’t have lasted two days on American TV has been running almost twice as long as Law and Order.
Charles asked if I had anything relatively short for us to watch, and it turned out I did: an episode of a British TV show called Heartbeat, which apparently has been on the air since 1992 although the current season, from which this show derived, hasn’t yet been shown in Britain but has been shown in Sweden, from which my download derived (which meant it had “hard” Swedish subtitles permanently embedded in the image). I had stumbled on this when I was looking for the 1966 film Deadlier Than the Male, an attempt to enliven the Bulldog Drummond franchise by essentially remodeling Drummond from a James Bond precursor into a James Bond clone, because the episode title was “Deadlier Than the Male.”
The overall series centers around the police department in a small British town called Aidensfield, and is set in the 1960’s — which is indicated mostly by the presence of a lot of British Invasion music on the soundtrack (and it’s interesting to listen to snatches of the work of bands that did not make it to the States and become enormous stars the way the Beatles and the Rolling Stones did); the theme song is by Buddy Holly (though it’s not heard in Holly’s own performance — which made it all the more startling that when one of the characters got arrested the soundtrack burst forth with Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” — and unless there was an amazingly convincing Elvis impersonator in Britain covering the song, the record is Elvis’s own) — and this particular episode centered around a married couple, Vic and Eileen Needham (Hugo Speer and Michelle Holmes), who seem out to give the characters Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner played in The War of the Roses lessons in how to have a dysfunctional relationship.
She starts the tit-for-tat by pouring his liquor supply down the kitchen sink; he responds by tearing up her favorite dress; she takes his Jaguar sedan and deliberately crashes it (she doesn’t destroy it but she does leave it severely dented and scratched); and he responds by smashing her collection of knickknacks, many inherited from her mother and therefore literally irreplaceable. That gets her upset enough that she files charges against him, and she also calls in a woman solicitor from Leeds, Sylvia Swinton (Samantha Bond), whose cool authority makes her the most interesting character in the piece, to represent her in a divorce action. Not only that, she throws him out of their house (one which, as he tells everyone he meets, he actually helped build with his own hands) and has the locks changed — to which he responds by breaking a window, only the police arrest him before he can actually enter illegally. While this intrigue is going on, there’s a subplot involving local knife sharpener Stan Bickle (Sam Kelly), whose daughter Josie (played by a dark-haired, heavy-set and quite striking-looking actress named Jenna Boyd) is trying to date a local man named David and running into interference from the aunt who’s living with him and being ludicrously overprotective even though David is not only a fully grown adult but a rather seedy-looking middle-aged one at that.
Neither the guest performers nor the series regulars are all that good-looking (even the younger member of the two-man police team at the center of the action. Steven Blakeley, is homely and rather nerdish rather than the hot babe magnet an American producer would have cast in a role like this; ironically, though we’re supposed to dislike him Hugo Speer is the best-looking male on the show!), and though Heartbeat is nominally a crime show its intrigues are more the garden-variety problems in human behavior dealt with routinely by real cops but almost never by TV ones. It’s not a great show but it has a certain degree of charm and it’s refreshing, in a way, to watch a show where the people aren’t expertly coiffed actors but actually look like ordinary human beings without unlimited wardrobe and makeup budgets — and writer Peter Gibbs has a knack for clever situations, like having Sylvia Swinton stay at the same inn as her client’s husband — the one she’s accusing of all those terrible things to get his wife a divorce — with neither of them happy about the situation (nor is the innkeeper, who tries to figure out a way to get rid of one of them).
It’s an interesting show, and it’s amazing to think that a show filled with not only people but cars (the police’s principal vehicle is a baby-blue Ford Anglia, one of the most aggressively ugly vehicles ever manufactured — though the very relentlessness of its ugliness gives it a certain charm) that wouldn’t have lasted two days on American TV has been running almost twice as long as Law and Order.
American Experience: Hoover Dam (PBS, 2009)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I also spent most of the morning watching three programs out of the four I had recorded on a DVD over the past two days: the latest episodes of The Good Wife and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and a PBS American Experience special on the construction of Hoover Dam, which was fascinating in its account of how a massive public works project was pushed through in ways that would have been politically impossible today — both the Right, with its obsession with fiscal responsibility, and the Left, with its environmentalist caucus that would be aghast at such a powerful disturbance of the natural order, would have gone all-out to stop it if the politics of today had existed then.
The show was also a fascinating story about the big-money interests that came together to build the dam (since both the task itself and the $5 million performance bond the federal government demanded from the contractor was beyond any one company, the winning bid was submitted by a coalition of established big-name contractors in San Francisco who called their association “The Six Companies” and whose proprietors included such later “stars” as Henry J. Kaiser and William Bechtel) and how rough they were with the workers, paying them tiny wages (which, this being the depths of the depression — 1931 to 1935 — they accepted because they considered themselves lucky to be working at all), brutally suppressing a six-day strike attempt led by the Industrial Workers of the World (the fact that the IWW was still that much of a going concern in 1931 was itself a surprise to me!), the institutionalized racism at the construction site (Blacks were not hired to work on the dam at all from 1931 to 1933, and even after that — when Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, Sr., ordered an end to employment discrimination — they were still not allowed to live at Boulder City, the company town created to house the white workers) and even a certain degree of Orwellianism in the name of the dam (it was Hoover Dam when first authorized by Congress in 1931, Boulder Dam from Roosevelt’s election until the Republicans regained control of Congress in 1947, and Hoover Dam thereafter), and it’s made me a bit less skeptical about greenlighting major public works projects given that we’re in the middle of a depression.
Indeed, the sheer size and scope of Boulder/Hoover Dam was itself a spit-in-the-eye response to the depression, an assertion that Americans had done great things and could do them again that probably had a positive effect on the economy even beyond the several thousand people it actually employed and the resulting “multiplier” effects on the economy.
I also spent most of the morning watching three programs out of the four I had recorded on a DVD over the past two days: the latest episodes of The Good Wife and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and a PBS American Experience special on the construction of Hoover Dam, which was fascinating in its account of how a massive public works project was pushed through in ways that would have been politically impossible today — both the Right, with its obsession with fiscal responsibility, and the Left, with its environmentalist caucus that would be aghast at such a powerful disturbance of the natural order, would have gone all-out to stop it if the politics of today had existed then.
The show was also a fascinating story about the big-money interests that came together to build the dam (since both the task itself and the $5 million performance bond the federal government demanded from the contractor was beyond any one company, the winning bid was submitted by a coalition of established big-name contractors in San Francisco who called their association “The Six Companies” and whose proprietors included such later “stars” as Henry J. Kaiser and William Bechtel) and how rough they were with the workers, paying them tiny wages (which, this being the depths of the depression — 1931 to 1935 — they accepted because they considered themselves lucky to be working at all), brutally suppressing a six-day strike attempt led by the Industrial Workers of the World (the fact that the IWW was still that much of a going concern in 1931 was itself a surprise to me!), the institutionalized racism at the construction site (Blacks were not hired to work on the dam at all from 1931 to 1933, and even after that — when Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, Sr., ordered an end to employment discrimination — they were still not allowed to live at Boulder City, the company town created to house the white workers) and even a certain degree of Orwellianism in the name of the dam (it was Hoover Dam when first authorized by Congress in 1931, Boulder Dam from Roosevelt’s election until the Republicans regained control of Congress in 1947, and Hoover Dam thereafter), and it’s made me a bit less skeptical about greenlighting major public works projects given that we’re in the middle of a depression.
Indeed, the sheer size and scope of Boulder/Hoover Dam was itself a spit-in-the-eye response to the depression, an assertion that Americans had done great things and could do them again that probably had a positive effect on the economy even beyond the several thousand people it actually employed and the resulting “multiplier” effects on the economy.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
The Devil Commands (Columbia, 1941)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film I ran last night was The Devil Commands, fourth in the cycle of five “Mad Doctor” films Boris Karloff made at Columbia from 1939 to 1942 (though after the success of his stage comeback in Arsenic and Old Lace they rewrote the last one, The Boogie Man Will Get You, into a spoof of the genre) and the best by quite a wide margin. This time they went to a literary source for their story instead of concocting one in-house; they bought the rights to William Sloane’s novel The Edge of Running Water (which I’ve actually read; I found a copy in the 1970’s and recall it as a haunting tale told in poetic prose that deserved a better — or at least bigger-budgeted — movie), about a scientist, Dr. Julian Blair (the Karloff role, of course!), who’s driven mad by the sudden death of his wife in a car accident and becomes obsessed with the idea that she can communicate with him from the great beyond.
Before he becomes a widower, Blair has been conducting experiments at Midvale College, of which he’s the head of the science department, which involve strapping metal bands around a person’s head and then encasing it in a weird metal helmet that makes them look like medieval torture victims, in order to prove his theory that the human brain gives off electrical impulses that can be recorded and monitored. (Part of the fun of movies like this is to see if they got the science right and if the device the writers had their heroes invent really exists today, and in this case they made a good call: Blair has essentially invented the EEG.) He tests his contraption out first on his daughter’s boyfriend, Dr. Richard Sayles (Richard Fiske), and then on his wife Helen (Shirley Warde), before he and Helen go out to the train station to meet their daughter Anne (Amanda Duff) on her 20th birthday. On the way they stop to pick up a cake for her, and while Helen is double-parked in the car outside the bakery another car strikes hers and she is killed. Unwilling to go home and face all the reminders of his wife’s existence, Blair goes back to the lab instead, turns on his gizmos — and the pen writing on a large chart on the wall traces the same brain-wave pattern Helen left when the machine was tested on her while she was still alive.
This sends Blair on a years-long obsession with inventing a radio-like apparatus that will enable him to make contact with Helen’s brain wave. Blair was given to megalomaniac ambitions even before his wife’s death — in presenting his machine to his colleagues he said it would permit anyone using it to read the thoughts of anyone else anywhere in the world, which in the days of Hitler and Stalin (both of whom were alive, well, and at or near the peaks of their power when this film was made) seemed like quite a sinister prospect in itself — and his ambitions reach even beyond that once his wife is dead and he’s convinced he has the secret of breaking down the mental barrier between the living and what he refers to as “the so-called ‘dead’.” Blair’s manservant Karl (Ralph Penney) introduces him to a spirit medium, Mrs. Walters (Anne Revere), who’s been helping Karl contact the spirit of his dead mother — and Blair quickly realizes Mrs. Walters is a fake (the “ghost” is a mechanical contraption and her voice is Mrs. Walters’ own, electronically distorted), but at the same time a mysterious electrical charge he feels at the séance table convinces Blair that Mrs. Walters is unconsciously in touch with the beyond and has genuine mediumistic powers. (The gimmick of a fake spiritualist with real powers they’re unaware of is a pretty common one in this sort of fiction.)
Together the two of them relocate from Midvale to an old deserted mansion on the New England coast, and Anne (from whose point of view the film is narrated) doesn’t see them for two years; when she finally traces Blair, he’s considerably more gaunt and haggard-looking — his hair, formerly black and seemingly glued to his head, is now grey and tousled, and though he isn’t wearing a goatee he otherwise bears a striking resemblance to Leon Trotsky — and he’s amplified his spirit-radio contraption by stealing dead bodies from the local cemetery, encasing them in metal spacesuits and plugging them into Mrs. Walters, forming what looks like a séance of robots. The town sheriff (Kenneth MacDonald) gets suspicious of what’s going on there, and he gets even more suspicious when Blair’s maidservant, Mrs. Marcy (Dorothy Adams), accidentally slips into Blair's lab (Blair forgot to lock the door), plugs herself into the gadget and electrocutes herself. Mrs. Walters fakes her death to look like an accident — like she just fell off a cliff on her way home — but Marcy’s husband Seth (Walter Baldwin) is convinced Blair and/or Mrs. Walters murdered her, and organizes a lynch mob (an interesting modern-day off-take of the angry villagers in the Frankenstein movies) to crash the Blair home.
Just then Anne and Dr. Sayles arrive, and having electrocuted Mrs. Walters in his previous experiment, Blair becomes convinced that the only way he’s gong to make contact with his late wife at last is to plug their daughter into the machine. Naturally she’s upset by this, but he goes through with it anyway and actually does manage to hear his wife’s voice before the drain on his circuits shuts down the power, Blair dies either of a heart attack or an accidental electrocution, Dr. Sayles gets Anne out of the gizmo and revives her, and she’s left with a nice guy and brutal and haunting memories of her father and his obsession. Though saddled with a “B” budget and the attendant shortcomings, The Devil Commands has qualities that lift it above the series rut even though overall the film is a weird mixture of the sensitive and the preposterous. The writing by Robert Hardy Andrews and Milton Gunzberg allows Karloff to play the same sort of frustrated romantic he did so superbly in The Mummy — so few of Karloff’s films actually gave him the chance to depict affection for a fellow human being, no matter how twisted, it’s treasurable when that finally happens — and instead of Nick Grindé (whose name, except for its last letter, is all too accurate a description of his approach), Columbia tapped the up-and-coming Edward Dmytryk to direct this one.
Dmytryk wouldn’t become a star director until he made Hitler’s Children (actually a much less interesting film than The Devil Commands) at RKO the next year, but The Devil Commands has interesting anticipations of his masterpiece, Murder, My Sweet — notably the voice-over narration (though Amanda Duff delivers it in a surprisingly affect-less tone that makes it far less moving than it could have been with a more sensitive actress) and the gimmick of the phony spiritualist. Boris Karloff seizes the chances this script gives him to play warmth and love — emotions he rarely got to register on screen — and in the post-widowhood scenes Anne Revere matches him and creates a truly fearsome villainess whose chilling understatement only makes her that much more frightening. (It also makes one wish that someone had thought to cast Karloff and Revere as Mr. and Mrs. Macbeth.)
Despite some obvious borrowings from more prestigious films of the period — the opening is a long tracking shot of the ruins of Blair’s former home (actually a model, but a quite good one) while we hear Amanda Duff’s narration, and Charles caught the Rebecca reference as quickly as I did — The Devil Commands is a quite impressive piece of work and makes one wish a modern-day filmmaker would remake the film and use William Sloane’s far more evocative title, The Edge of Running Water.
The film I ran last night was The Devil Commands, fourth in the cycle of five “Mad Doctor” films Boris Karloff made at Columbia from 1939 to 1942 (though after the success of his stage comeback in Arsenic and Old Lace they rewrote the last one, The Boogie Man Will Get You, into a spoof of the genre) and the best by quite a wide margin. This time they went to a literary source for their story instead of concocting one in-house; they bought the rights to William Sloane’s novel The Edge of Running Water (which I’ve actually read; I found a copy in the 1970’s and recall it as a haunting tale told in poetic prose that deserved a better — or at least bigger-budgeted — movie), about a scientist, Dr. Julian Blair (the Karloff role, of course!), who’s driven mad by the sudden death of his wife in a car accident and becomes obsessed with the idea that she can communicate with him from the great beyond.
Before he becomes a widower, Blair has been conducting experiments at Midvale College, of which he’s the head of the science department, which involve strapping metal bands around a person’s head and then encasing it in a weird metal helmet that makes them look like medieval torture victims, in order to prove his theory that the human brain gives off electrical impulses that can be recorded and monitored. (Part of the fun of movies like this is to see if they got the science right and if the device the writers had their heroes invent really exists today, and in this case they made a good call: Blair has essentially invented the EEG.) He tests his contraption out first on his daughter’s boyfriend, Dr. Richard Sayles (Richard Fiske), and then on his wife Helen (Shirley Warde), before he and Helen go out to the train station to meet their daughter Anne (Amanda Duff) on her 20th birthday. On the way they stop to pick up a cake for her, and while Helen is double-parked in the car outside the bakery another car strikes hers and she is killed. Unwilling to go home and face all the reminders of his wife’s existence, Blair goes back to the lab instead, turns on his gizmos — and the pen writing on a large chart on the wall traces the same brain-wave pattern Helen left when the machine was tested on her while she was still alive.
This sends Blair on a years-long obsession with inventing a radio-like apparatus that will enable him to make contact with Helen’s brain wave. Blair was given to megalomaniac ambitions even before his wife’s death — in presenting his machine to his colleagues he said it would permit anyone using it to read the thoughts of anyone else anywhere in the world, which in the days of Hitler and Stalin (both of whom were alive, well, and at or near the peaks of their power when this film was made) seemed like quite a sinister prospect in itself — and his ambitions reach even beyond that once his wife is dead and he’s convinced he has the secret of breaking down the mental barrier between the living and what he refers to as “the so-called ‘dead’.” Blair’s manservant Karl (Ralph Penney) introduces him to a spirit medium, Mrs. Walters (Anne Revere), who’s been helping Karl contact the spirit of his dead mother — and Blair quickly realizes Mrs. Walters is a fake (the “ghost” is a mechanical contraption and her voice is Mrs. Walters’ own, electronically distorted), but at the same time a mysterious electrical charge he feels at the séance table convinces Blair that Mrs. Walters is unconsciously in touch with the beyond and has genuine mediumistic powers. (The gimmick of a fake spiritualist with real powers they’re unaware of is a pretty common one in this sort of fiction.)
Together the two of them relocate from Midvale to an old deserted mansion on the New England coast, and Anne (from whose point of view the film is narrated) doesn’t see them for two years; when she finally traces Blair, he’s considerably more gaunt and haggard-looking — his hair, formerly black and seemingly glued to his head, is now grey and tousled, and though he isn’t wearing a goatee he otherwise bears a striking resemblance to Leon Trotsky — and he’s amplified his spirit-radio contraption by stealing dead bodies from the local cemetery, encasing them in metal spacesuits and plugging them into Mrs. Walters, forming what looks like a séance of robots. The town sheriff (Kenneth MacDonald) gets suspicious of what’s going on there, and he gets even more suspicious when Blair’s maidservant, Mrs. Marcy (Dorothy Adams), accidentally slips into Blair's lab (Blair forgot to lock the door), plugs herself into the gadget and electrocutes herself. Mrs. Walters fakes her death to look like an accident — like she just fell off a cliff on her way home — but Marcy’s husband Seth (Walter Baldwin) is convinced Blair and/or Mrs. Walters murdered her, and organizes a lynch mob (an interesting modern-day off-take of the angry villagers in the Frankenstein movies) to crash the Blair home.
Just then Anne and Dr. Sayles arrive, and having electrocuted Mrs. Walters in his previous experiment, Blair becomes convinced that the only way he’s gong to make contact with his late wife at last is to plug their daughter into the machine. Naturally she’s upset by this, but he goes through with it anyway and actually does manage to hear his wife’s voice before the drain on his circuits shuts down the power, Blair dies either of a heart attack or an accidental electrocution, Dr. Sayles gets Anne out of the gizmo and revives her, and she’s left with a nice guy and brutal and haunting memories of her father and his obsession. Though saddled with a “B” budget and the attendant shortcomings, The Devil Commands has qualities that lift it above the series rut even though overall the film is a weird mixture of the sensitive and the preposterous. The writing by Robert Hardy Andrews and Milton Gunzberg allows Karloff to play the same sort of frustrated romantic he did so superbly in The Mummy — so few of Karloff’s films actually gave him the chance to depict affection for a fellow human being, no matter how twisted, it’s treasurable when that finally happens — and instead of Nick Grindé (whose name, except for its last letter, is all too accurate a description of his approach), Columbia tapped the up-and-coming Edward Dmytryk to direct this one.
Dmytryk wouldn’t become a star director until he made Hitler’s Children (actually a much less interesting film than The Devil Commands) at RKO the next year, but The Devil Commands has interesting anticipations of his masterpiece, Murder, My Sweet — notably the voice-over narration (though Amanda Duff delivers it in a surprisingly affect-less tone that makes it far less moving than it could have been with a more sensitive actress) and the gimmick of the phony spiritualist. Boris Karloff seizes the chances this script gives him to play warmth and love — emotions he rarely got to register on screen — and in the post-widowhood scenes Anne Revere matches him and creates a truly fearsome villainess whose chilling understatement only makes her that much more frightening. (It also makes one wish that someone had thought to cast Karloff and Revere as Mr. and Mrs. Macbeth.)
Despite some obvious borrowings from more prestigious films of the period — the opening is a long tracking shot of the ruins of Blair’s former home (actually a model, but a quite good one) while we hear Amanda Duff’s narration, and Charles caught the Rebecca reference as quickly as I did — The Devil Commands is a quite impressive piece of work and makes one wish a modern-day filmmaker would remake the film and use William Sloane’s far more evocative title, The Edge of Running Water.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
The Good Soldier (Out of the Blue Productions, 2009)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched a potted (50-minute instead of the 80-minute theatrical release which is scheduled for tomorrow) version of a powerful new documentary on war and its aftermath, The Good Soldier, shown on last Friday’s Bill Moyers’ Journal TV show. The film profiles five American veterans who served in wars ranging from World War II through Viet Nam to the current conflict in Iraq (current despite Obama’s election one year ago and his pledge to end it!), and shows how their lives were impacted by the trauma of experiencing combat and how it took years — often decades — for them to get over it. The most moving stories in the film are those of Edward Wood, who served in the Army in Europe in World War II (this is not the transvestite director of cheapie movies Ed Wood, who was also a WW2 vet but served in the Marines in the Pacific) and was wounded in France in September 1944 — he literally took a bullet in his butt that sliced it open, and when a combat medic attended to him the medic took a shrapnel hit that took off a piece of his nose and the medic’s blood splashed all over Wood’s face — as well as two more recent veterans.
Will Williams was an African-American Viet Nam war veteran who came back from his first tour (1966-67) and was so incensed by seeing anti-war protesters that he worried he would kill one of them, and therefore signed up for a second tour in Viet Nam because there he could kill people and not suffer legal repercussions for doing so because that was what he was supposed to be doing. (He’s also the person who changed most visibly in terms of his appearance; it’s hard to believe the short, rather dumpy-looking man he is now could be the same person as the hunk shown in his wartime photos.) During his second tour (1968-69) his views about the nature and justice of the war he was fighting changed so radically that he ended up on the protesters’ side — as did the other people who were interviewed, since directors/writers/producers Lexy Lovell and Michael Uys seemed particularly to pick interview subjects who had become anti-war activists and were involved in various veterans-for-peace groups.
Perhaps the most chilling story — and not just because it’s the most recent, although that certainly helps — came from Jimmy Massey, who served in Iraq in 2003 and who remembered watching the first Gulf War on TV and thinking that looked really cool (it’s a measure of how continually warmongering the U.S. is as a nation that a man who watched footage of the first Gulf War while still a child would ultimately get to fight another war in the same country when he’d grown up 12 years later), and whose attitude towards war in general and that war in particular did a 180° change once he gunned down the occupants of a red Kia that happened to park a few hundred feet away from theit location in downtown Baghdad — but within their “perimeter,” whatever that meant in their context. His unit ripped the car with fire, enough to disable and injure the occupants but not to kill them; and when they went over they found that they were still alive and they had been unarmed. Massey called for medics to come and take care of the civilians his unit had nearly killed, and the corpsmen instead dragged them out of the car and left them by the side of the road to die — right in front of the brother of one of the men, who apparently lost it completely, because what Massey recalled him doing was just circling around the wreckage, crying.
Later one of his officers asked Massey what he thought of the action and the U.S. role in Iraq generally, and Massey made the mistake of being honest and saying, “I think we’re committing genocide” — and soon enough he found himself tagged with the “conscientious objector” label and being on his way to a discharge. He got angry at being called a C.O., pointing out that he’d already killed 30 people in Iraq, and he said from then on until he got out of Iraq he slept with a 9 mm. pistol — he didn’t specify why, but it was obviously in case one of his fellow servicemembers decided to take out the “coward” out of some misguided idea that this would uphold the “honor” of the unit. Eventually he got an honorable discharge and a long-standing set of nightmares — he said he hasn’t had a good night’s sleep from that day to this — just one more of the many ways war can destroy a person even if it leaves him biologically alive.
Bill Moyers gave the show a sensitive introduction that didn’t hammer home the anti-war message (the film itself does quite a good enough job of that!) but did mention the recent killings at Fort Hood, Texas, in which an Army psychiatrist apparently went bonkers and started shooting, killing 13 people and wounding quite a few others before M.P.’s brought him down — and since the alleged killer was a Muslim, had an Arabic name and apparently frequented a Web site sponsored by a Muslim cleric, a U.S. citizen who relocated to Yemen in 2002, the yahoo chorus on radical-Right talk radio is basically saying that the U.S. military should be purged of all Muslims because Muslims are our enemies in the current war. (So much for all the B.S. that the “war on terror” isn’t a war against Islam! We had German-Americans and Japanese-Americans in the ranks in World War II — indeed, enlisting in the military was one of the few outlets Japanese-Americans had for getting out of the internment camps — but apparently we can’t tolerate believers in the so-called “enemy” religion in what is in fact, as much as we try to deny it, a religious war — as witness the commanders who have said in public that “our God is bigger than your God” and they see it as a war for Christianity against Islam.)
Let’s be clear on what the purpose of a military is: it is to kill, and subsidiarily it is to train its members to overcome their natural human instincts not to kill their fellow humans so they actually kill on demand. War brings nothing but destruction and death — there is nothing noble, idealistic or character-building about it — and the sooner we get over these illusions the sooner we can move beyond it and have a chance of continued survival on this planet instead of annihilating ourselves and much of the rest of Earth’s biosphere. I couldn’t agree more with Albert Einstein’s famous quote, “Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.”
I watched a potted (50-minute instead of the 80-minute theatrical release which is scheduled for tomorrow) version of a powerful new documentary on war and its aftermath, The Good Soldier, shown on last Friday’s Bill Moyers’ Journal TV show. The film profiles five American veterans who served in wars ranging from World War II through Viet Nam to the current conflict in Iraq (current despite Obama’s election one year ago and his pledge to end it!), and shows how their lives were impacted by the trauma of experiencing combat and how it took years — often decades — for them to get over it. The most moving stories in the film are those of Edward Wood, who served in the Army in Europe in World War II (this is not the transvestite director of cheapie movies Ed Wood, who was also a WW2 vet but served in the Marines in the Pacific) and was wounded in France in September 1944 — he literally took a bullet in his butt that sliced it open, and when a combat medic attended to him the medic took a shrapnel hit that took off a piece of his nose and the medic’s blood splashed all over Wood’s face — as well as two more recent veterans.
Will Williams was an African-American Viet Nam war veteran who came back from his first tour (1966-67) and was so incensed by seeing anti-war protesters that he worried he would kill one of them, and therefore signed up for a second tour in Viet Nam because there he could kill people and not suffer legal repercussions for doing so because that was what he was supposed to be doing. (He’s also the person who changed most visibly in terms of his appearance; it’s hard to believe the short, rather dumpy-looking man he is now could be the same person as the hunk shown in his wartime photos.) During his second tour (1968-69) his views about the nature and justice of the war he was fighting changed so radically that he ended up on the protesters’ side — as did the other people who were interviewed, since directors/writers/producers Lexy Lovell and Michael Uys seemed particularly to pick interview subjects who had become anti-war activists and were involved in various veterans-for-peace groups.
Perhaps the most chilling story — and not just because it’s the most recent, although that certainly helps — came from Jimmy Massey, who served in Iraq in 2003 and who remembered watching the first Gulf War on TV and thinking that looked really cool (it’s a measure of how continually warmongering the U.S. is as a nation that a man who watched footage of the first Gulf War while still a child would ultimately get to fight another war in the same country when he’d grown up 12 years later), and whose attitude towards war in general and that war in particular did a 180° change once he gunned down the occupants of a red Kia that happened to park a few hundred feet away from theit location in downtown Baghdad — but within their “perimeter,” whatever that meant in their context. His unit ripped the car with fire, enough to disable and injure the occupants but not to kill them; and when they went over they found that they were still alive and they had been unarmed. Massey called for medics to come and take care of the civilians his unit had nearly killed, and the corpsmen instead dragged them out of the car and left them by the side of the road to die — right in front of the brother of one of the men, who apparently lost it completely, because what Massey recalled him doing was just circling around the wreckage, crying.
Later one of his officers asked Massey what he thought of the action and the U.S. role in Iraq generally, and Massey made the mistake of being honest and saying, “I think we’re committing genocide” — and soon enough he found himself tagged with the “conscientious objector” label and being on his way to a discharge. He got angry at being called a C.O., pointing out that he’d already killed 30 people in Iraq, and he said from then on until he got out of Iraq he slept with a 9 mm. pistol — he didn’t specify why, but it was obviously in case one of his fellow servicemembers decided to take out the “coward” out of some misguided idea that this would uphold the “honor” of the unit. Eventually he got an honorable discharge and a long-standing set of nightmares — he said he hasn’t had a good night’s sleep from that day to this — just one more of the many ways war can destroy a person even if it leaves him biologically alive.
Bill Moyers gave the show a sensitive introduction that didn’t hammer home the anti-war message (the film itself does quite a good enough job of that!) but did mention the recent killings at Fort Hood, Texas, in which an Army psychiatrist apparently went bonkers and started shooting, killing 13 people and wounding quite a few others before M.P.’s brought him down — and since the alleged killer was a Muslim, had an Arabic name and apparently frequented a Web site sponsored by a Muslim cleric, a U.S. citizen who relocated to Yemen in 2002, the yahoo chorus on radical-Right talk radio is basically saying that the U.S. military should be purged of all Muslims because Muslims are our enemies in the current war. (So much for all the B.S. that the “war on terror” isn’t a war against Islam! We had German-Americans and Japanese-Americans in the ranks in World War II — indeed, enlisting in the military was one of the few outlets Japanese-Americans had for getting out of the internment camps — but apparently we can’t tolerate believers in the so-called “enemy” religion in what is in fact, as much as we try to deny it, a religious war — as witness the commanders who have said in public that “our God is bigger than your God” and they see it as a war for Christianity against Islam.)
Let’s be clear on what the purpose of a military is: it is to kill, and subsidiarily it is to train its members to overcome their natural human instincts not to kill their fellow humans so they actually kill on demand. War brings nothing but destruction and death — there is nothing noble, idealistic or character-building about it — and the sooner we get over these illusions the sooner we can move beyond it and have a chance of continued survival on this planet instead of annihilating ourselves and much of the rest of Earth’s biosphere. I couldn’t agree more with Albert Einstein’s famous quote, “Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.”
Monday, November 9, 2009
The Fleet’s In (Paramount, 1942)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The movie we watched was The Fleet’s In, a 1942 musical and another item in the tribute TCM paid to Johnny Mercer last Wednesday night (it’s continuing every Wednesday this month), along with the original documentary Johnny Mercer: The Dream’s on Me and several other movies containing songs he worked on, including Blues in the Night (a mediocre movie that gave the world a fabulous title song) and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. The Fleet’s In was the last film ever made by director Victor Schertzinger, and though it was released on January 24, 1942 (a month and a half after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor catapulted the U.S. into World War II), not only does the film not mention the war but it even describes the male lead, sailor Casey Kirby (William Holden), as due to get out of the Navy when his hitch expires in a few months — they wouldn’t have let him out on schedule once the war was on!
TCM host Robert Osborne gave it a curious introduction, saying that it was a film that he’d wanted to screen throughout the 15 years of TCM’s existence but had only been able to get to now — not surprisingly since TCM was built on the catalogs of MGM, Warners and RKO (which Ted Turner owned until he merged his company with Time Warner) and The Fleet’s In was a Paramount picture, meaning that TCM would have to rent it from its current owners, Universal. (Universal got control of most of the Paramount output from 1929 to 1949 when MCA’s Revue TV subsidiary bought the Paramount catalog in 1959; then MCA merged with Universal in 1962.) Osborne admitted that the plot of this movie was no great shakes (you can say that again!), but The Fleet’s In was a big musical and the plot was even more incidental than usual — though it seems a shame that Victor Schertzinger, who had made genuinely innovative, frame-breaking musicals like Something to Sing About (made by James Cagney during his brief stint at Grand National in 1937) and the first two Bob Hope-Bing Crosby Road movies, would end his career (he died right after it was finished) with a mound of half-digested clichés like this.
Schertzinger also wrote the songs for the film, with Mercer supplying lyrics, and at least two of them, “Tangerine” and “I’ll Remember You,” became standards. The writing credits are bizarrely complicated; Walter DeLeon, Sid Silvers and Ralph Spence get credit (or blame) for the script, based on a “short story” by Monte Brice and J. Walter Ruben and a 1933 play called Sailor Beware by Kenyon Nicholson and Charles Robinson. While one sits through the film numbed by the idea that it took no fewer than seven writers to create this ragbag of hackneyed situations and plot contrivances, the story behind the scenes is that Paramount combined an original screen story by Brice and Ruben for a 1928 film with Clara Bow, also called The Fleet’s In and now, regrettably, lost, with the Nicholson-Robinson play, which they’d already filmed in 1936 under the title Lady Be Careful with poor Lew Ayres saddled with the part played by Holden on this go-round. (And as if three times around the block with this plot wasn’t bad enough, Paramount trotted it out again in 1952 for the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis vehicle Sailor Beware.)
The film starred Dorothy Lamour, William Holden and Eddie Bracken (in that order!), with Betty Hutton topping the miscellaneous acting credits on the next card — she was making her feature-film debut in this one, though she’d made band shorts with Vincent Lopez for Warners and Paramount before, and TCM actually prefaced this film with her Warners one (a quite clever conceit — Lopez’s band members stage a mock revolt against their having to play the song “Nola,” and he finally assuages them by producing a swing version — though Hutton, billed as the Queen of the Jitterbugs, looks surprisingly uncoordinated in her dance numbers and raucous and frequently flat in her singing) — and, as if one leather-lunged but shaky-voiced female singer wasn’t enough for this film, Cass Daley is also in it, billed way down but given a couple of featured numbers.
The plot (if you can call it that) of The Fleet’s In starts in San Diego, with movie star Diana Golden (Betty Jane Rhodes) singing the title song (a charmingly cynical number about sailors and girls Mercer must have had fun writing the lyrics to — especially when the singer says he’s willing to be taxed more and then adds, “Just kidding”) at a personal appearance and then being upbraided by her manager for being rude to her fans. He decides on the spot that the way she can overcome her diva image is to kiss a sailor and be photographed doing so — and the sailor who happens to come along (with an autograph book he wants her to sign for his niece) is Casey Kirby (a callow-looking young William Holden who looks like he just got out of high school — which is right for the part of a naïve sailor but a little strange in that he bears only a slight resemblance to the Holden we know from his 1950’s films). By being kissed by a movie star and having the photo of himself doing so plastered all over the front page of every newspaper in the country (or so it seems), Casey suddenly acquires an undeserved reputation as a lady-killer, which only grows when the admiral’s daughter kisses him as well and requisitions him for “special duty.” (Actually all she wants for him is to arrange Diana Golden’s appearance at a benefit, but it certainly looks Code-bending as all get-out.)
The other sailors on his ship make a bet that Casey can seduce “The Countess” (Dorothy Lamour), a performer at the Swingland ballroom in San Francisco who is famously resistant to the attentions of sailors, during the four days they’re going to be in port there before the ship ships out. Casey’s shipmate, Barney Waters (Eddie Bracken), mistakenly bets an heirloom watch he’s holding for another sailor and, when the other sailor finds out, he threatens to beat up Barney if he doesn’t recover the watch — which gives Barney a vested interest in making sure Casey seduces “The Countess” and wins them the bet. Adding to the mix is that Barney’s former girlfriend Bessie Day (Betty Hutton) is the Countess’s roommate — they live in an apartment atop a long flight of outdoor stairs the Countess calls “The Discourager” because it keeps men who’ve taken her home from asking to come in. With these bare facts, you know what’s going to happen — the Countess and Casey will fall genuinely in love, then she’ll find out about the wager (from Bessie, who blurts out the truth one day) and turn against him, then she’ll end up with him again — and while the writing committee rings a few mildly clever spins on the clichés, they remain pretty much the old Hollywood musical standbys.
What saves this musical from total oblivion is the quality of the songs and the presence of Jimmy Dorsey’s orchestra to play them — and his singers, Bob Eberly and Helen O’Connell, who have considerably better voices than any of the movie “names” around them (though they still weren’t the best big-band singers of the time — when this film was made Jimmy Dorsey’s brother Tommy had Frank Sinatra and Jo Stafford in his band!). When we finally get to San Francisco and see Swingland (an Art Deco ballroom with a dance floor so vast that Charles joked, “During the day they build destroyers there”), the Jimmy Dorsey band plays a snatch of their hit “Amapola” — for which Dorsey and his arrangers introduced the gimmick of having Eberly sing the song as a straight ballad, and then O’Connell sing it as an uptempo swing number, often with a different and considerably more jocular set of lyrics — and then they proceed to do the new song “Tangerine” the exact same way, giving the band another hit (it was this gimmick, as well as the relative novelty of doing these numbers in Latin-flavored style, that finally gave J.D. his first big commercial success and got him out from under the long shadow of his brother).
There are two songs in this film that became standards, “Tangerine” and “I’ll Remember You” (though the latter didn’t really become established until Australian ballad-rock singer Frank Ifield covered it in 1962) and a third that should have, a haunting, world-weary ballad of romantic disillusionment called “Not Mine” — “There’s somebody else’s moon above/Not mine/There’s somebody else’s night for love/Not mine” — though Benny Goodman’s record, with a scintillating arrangement by Eddie Sauter and an eloquently phrased vocal by the young Peggy Lee, made a better case for it than Eberly, O’Connell, Lamour and J.D. did in this film. The writers do deserve credit for spoofing the convention of having the band magically appear to accompany whoever is singing (though given the way Schertzinger broke the frame in his previous musicals I suspect this is his doing, not that of the writing committee); the band just happens to be rehearsing on an outdoor patio below Lamour’s and Hutton’s home when Lamour takes it into her head to sing “Not Mine,” and at the end of the film (after Lamour and Holden have been married inside a taxicab to make sure they get hitched legally before his ship sails) Dorsey’s band bus is parked outside the dock and the band is inside it. blasting away.
Dorothy Lamour is a serviceable singer and the songs serve her well enough; Betty Hutton is almost unlistenable — before she came to Hollywood at the behest of Paramount studio chief Buddy DeSylva, she’d been in the supporting cast of the Ethel Merman musical Panama Hattie, and she’d obviously adopted Merman’s devil-may-care attitude towards intonation — though she got tolerable later, and in her nonmusical The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (also with Eddie Bracken), the great writer-director Preston Sturges managed to make Hutton’s raucousness serve his script; but the songs themselves are worth listening to (Hutton’s dubious coordination actually makes her big novelty number, “Arthur Murray Taught Me Dancing in a Hurry,” work, even though she’s so gawky one wants to add, “And I’ll bet he was glad to get rid of you!”) and the women’s dresses have such high shoulders one expects them to sprout wings and helicopter-rotor beanies so they can fly.
The Fleet’s In is O.K. entertainment, though given Schertzinger’s greatest claim to fame (aside from being one of the few auteurs who not only directed but wrote music for his films — like Charlie Chaplin before him and Clint Eastwood since), one can’t help wish he had cast Bing Crosby and Bob Hope in the roles played by Holden and Bracken, respectively (even though Crosby would have been too old in 1942 to play a callow sailor); if he’d done that he’d probably have had to call it The Road to San Francisco, but then it would have been a comic masterpiece!
The movie we watched was The Fleet’s In, a 1942 musical and another item in the tribute TCM paid to Johnny Mercer last Wednesday night (it’s continuing every Wednesday this month), along with the original documentary Johnny Mercer: The Dream’s on Me and several other movies containing songs he worked on, including Blues in the Night (a mediocre movie that gave the world a fabulous title song) and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. The Fleet’s In was the last film ever made by director Victor Schertzinger, and though it was released on January 24, 1942 (a month and a half after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor catapulted the U.S. into World War II), not only does the film not mention the war but it even describes the male lead, sailor Casey Kirby (William Holden), as due to get out of the Navy when his hitch expires in a few months — they wouldn’t have let him out on schedule once the war was on!
TCM host Robert Osborne gave it a curious introduction, saying that it was a film that he’d wanted to screen throughout the 15 years of TCM’s existence but had only been able to get to now — not surprisingly since TCM was built on the catalogs of MGM, Warners and RKO (which Ted Turner owned until he merged his company with Time Warner) and The Fleet’s In was a Paramount picture, meaning that TCM would have to rent it from its current owners, Universal. (Universal got control of most of the Paramount output from 1929 to 1949 when MCA’s Revue TV subsidiary bought the Paramount catalog in 1959; then MCA merged with Universal in 1962.) Osborne admitted that the plot of this movie was no great shakes (you can say that again!), but The Fleet’s In was a big musical and the plot was even more incidental than usual — though it seems a shame that Victor Schertzinger, who had made genuinely innovative, frame-breaking musicals like Something to Sing About (made by James Cagney during his brief stint at Grand National in 1937) and the first two Bob Hope-Bing Crosby Road movies, would end his career (he died right after it was finished) with a mound of half-digested clichés like this.
Schertzinger also wrote the songs for the film, with Mercer supplying lyrics, and at least two of them, “Tangerine” and “I’ll Remember You,” became standards. The writing credits are bizarrely complicated; Walter DeLeon, Sid Silvers and Ralph Spence get credit (or blame) for the script, based on a “short story” by Monte Brice and J. Walter Ruben and a 1933 play called Sailor Beware by Kenyon Nicholson and Charles Robinson. While one sits through the film numbed by the idea that it took no fewer than seven writers to create this ragbag of hackneyed situations and plot contrivances, the story behind the scenes is that Paramount combined an original screen story by Brice and Ruben for a 1928 film with Clara Bow, also called The Fleet’s In and now, regrettably, lost, with the Nicholson-Robinson play, which they’d already filmed in 1936 under the title Lady Be Careful with poor Lew Ayres saddled with the part played by Holden on this go-round. (And as if three times around the block with this plot wasn’t bad enough, Paramount trotted it out again in 1952 for the Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis vehicle Sailor Beware.)
The film starred Dorothy Lamour, William Holden and Eddie Bracken (in that order!), with Betty Hutton topping the miscellaneous acting credits on the next card — she was making her feature-film debut in this one, though she’d made band shorts with Vincent Lopez for Warners and Paramount before, and TCM actually prefaced this film with her Warners one (a quite clever conceit — Lopez’s band members stage a mock revolt against their having to play the song “Nola,” and he finally assuages them by producing a swing version — though Hutton, billed as the Queen of the Jitterbugs, looks surprisingly uncoordinated in her dance numbers and raucous and frequently flat in her singing) — and, as if one leather-lunged but shaky-voiced female singer wasn’t enough for this film, Cass Daley is also in it, billed way down but given a couple of featured numbers.
The plot (if you can call it that) of The Fleet’s In starts in San Diego, with movie star Diana Golden (Betty Jane Rhodes) singing the title song (a charmingly cynical number about sailors and girls Mercer must have had fun writing the lyrics to — especially when the singer says he’s willing to be taxed more and then adds, “Just kidding”) at a personal appearance and then being upbraided by her manager for being rude to her fans. He decides on the spot that the way she can overcome her diva image is to kiss a sailor and be photographed doing so — and the sailor who happens to come along (with an autograph book he wants her to sign for his niece) is Casey Kirby (a callow-looking young William Holden who looks like he just got out of high school — which is right for the part of a naïve sailor but a little strange in that he bears only a slight resemblance to the Holden we know from his 1950’s films). By being kissed by a movie star and having the photo of himself doing so plastered all over the front page of every newspaper in the country (or so it seems), Casey suddenly acquires an undeserved reputation as a lady-killer, which only grows when the admiral’s daughter kisses him as well and requisitions him for “special duty.” (Actually all she wants for him is to arrange Diana Golden’s appearance at a benefit, but it certainly looks Code-bending as all get-out.)
The other sailors on his ship make a bet that Casey can seduce “The Countess” (Dorothy Lamour), a performer at the Swingland ballroom in San Francisco who is famously resistant to the attentions of sailors, during the four days they’re going to be in port there before the ship ships out. Casey’s shipmate, Barney Waters (Eddie Bracken), mistakenly bets an heirloom watch he’s holding for another sailor and, when the other sailor finds out, he threatens to beat up Barney if he doesn’t recover the watch — which gives Barney a vested interest in making sure Casey seduces “The Countess” and wins them the bet. Adding to the mix is that Barney’s former girlfriend Bessie Day (Betty Hutton) is the Countess’s roommate — they live in an apartment atop a long flight of outdoor stairs the Countess calls “The Discourager” because it keeps men who’ve taken her home from asking to come in. With these bare facts, you know what’s going to happen — the Countess and Casey will fall genuinely in love, then she’ll find out about the wager (from Bessie, who blurts out the truth one day) and turn against him, then she’ll end up with him again — and while the writing committee rings a few mildly clever spins on the clichés, they remain pretty much the old Hollywood musical standbys.
What saves this musical from total oblivion is the quality of the songs and the presence of Jimmy Dorsey’s orchestra to play them — and his singers, Bob Eberly and Helen O’Connell, who have considerably better voices than any of the movie “names” around them (though they still weren’t the best big-band singers of the time — when this film was made Jimmy Dorsey’s brother Tommy had Frank Sinatra and Jo Stafford in his band!). When we finally get to San Francisco and see Swingland (an Art Deco ballroom with a dance floor so vast that Charles joked, “During the day they build destroyers there”), the Jimmy Dorsey band plays a snatch of their hit “Amapola” — for which Dorsey and his arrangers introduced the gimmick of having Eberly sing the song as a straight ballad, and then O’Connell sing it as an uptempo swing number, often with a different and considerably more jocular set of lyrics — and then they proceed to do the new song “Tangerine” the exact same way, giving the band another hit (it was this gimmick, as well as the relative novelty of doing these numbers in Latin-flavored style, that finally gave J.D. his first big commercial success and got him out from under the long shadow of his brother).
There are two songs in this film that became standards, “Tangerine” and “I’ll Remember You” (though the latter didn’t really become established until Australian ballad-rock singer Frank Ifield covered it in 1962) and a third that should have, a haunting, world-weary ballad of romantic disillusionment called “Not Mine” — “There’s somebody else’s moon above/Not mine/There’s somebody else’s night for love/Not mine” — though Benny Goodman’s record, with a scintillating arrangement by Eddie Sauter and an eloquently phrased vocal by the young Peggy Lee, made a better case for it than Eberly, O’Connell, Lamour and J.D. did in this film. The writers do deserve credit for spoofing the convention of having the band magically appear to accompany whoever is singing (though given the way Schertzinger broke the frame in his previous musicals I suspect this is his doing, not that of the writing committee); the band just happens to be rehearsing on an outdoor patio below Lamour’s and Hutton’s home when Lamour takes it into her head to sing “Not Mine,” and at the end of the film (after Lamour and Holden have been married inside a taxicab to make sure they get hitched legally before his ship sails) Dorsey’s band bus is parked outside the dock and the band is inside it. blasting away.
Dorothy Lamour is a serviceable singer and the songs serve her well enough; Betty Hutton is almost unlistenable — before she came to Hollywood at the behest of Paramount studio chief Buddy DeSylva, she’d been in the supporting cast of the Ethel Merman musical Panama Hattie, and she’d obviously adopted Merman’s devil-may-care attitude towards intonation — though she got tolerable later, and in her nonmusical The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (also with Eddie Bracken), the great writer-director Preston Sturges managed to make Hutton’s raucousness serve his script; but the songs themselves are worth listening to (Hutton’s dubious coordination actually makes her big novelty number, “Arthur Murray Taught Me Dancing in a Hurry,” work, even though she’s so gawky one wants to add, “And I’ll bet he was glad to get rid of you!”) and the women’s dresses have such high shoulders one expects them to sprout wings and helicopter-rotor beanies so they can fly.
The Fleet’s In is O.K. entertainment, though given Schertzinger’s greatest claim to fame (aside from being one of the few auteurs who not only directed but wrote music for his films — like Charlie Chaplin before him and Clint Eastwood since), one can’t help wish he had cast Bing Crosby and Bob Hope in the roles played by Holden and Bracken, respectively (even though Crosby would have been too old in 1942 to play a callow sailor); if he’d done that he’d probably have had to call it The Road to San Francisco, but then it would have been a comic masterpiece!
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Repo Man (Universal, 1984)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I hadn’t seen Repo Man since it was at least relatively new (on premium cable in 1985), and Charles remembered a heavily censored version from the USA Network back when it had some pretty wild stuff (including videos by Bob Marley and U2, the legendary 1965 rock concert video The T.A.M.I. Show, movies like Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains and schlock classics like the Bela Lugosi Monograms) that included some scenes that weren’t in the theatrical release and turned up on this DVD as “deleted scenes.” I liked it then and it holds up quite well today.
Written and directed by Alan Cox, Repo Man has earned a reputation as the first youth movie that rendered itself deliberately, jaggedly obscure to reflect the alienation of its 20-something slacker characters — which it wasn’t; Jeff Lieberman’s Blue Sunshine, made in 1976, anticipated much of the style of this film (though the MacGuffin in that was a bad drug instead of a mysterious car containing a trunk full of energy either from a nuclear weapon or the bodies of dead aliens — Cox set Repo Man in New Mexico, probably because it was close to Roswell, though he shot in and around L.A. and many of the cityscapes are readily recognizable) and was ubiquitously available in the early 1980’s (KTLA ran it fairly often on their late-night movie show) and ready to influence future filmmakers.
But Repo Man is an excellent movie on its own merits, with Cox constructing a script that for all its weirdness and fantasy elements actually makes sense (which many more recent exercises in this youth sub-genre haven’t) and assembling a marvelous cast, even though his stars, Harry Dean Stanton and Emilio Estevez, are seemingly the only actors in the film who have been heard of since. The gimmick is that punk wanna-be Otto (Estevez) and his even dorkier-looking friend Kevin (Zander Schloss) start out the movie by being fired from their supermarket jobs (watching this part of the film must have been a busman’s holiday for Charles!) and Otto stumbling onto Bud (Stanton), who offers him $10 to drive what he says is his wife’s car — he’s got a cock-and-bull story that his wife is about to “drop” twins and they need to get both cars to the hospital right away. When the car’s owners come after Otto as he starts to drive it away, he begins to realize he’s been had — and Bud ends up leading him to the repo lot where he works. Otto is so upset at being turned into a repo man that when they offer him a beer (which, like all the food and drink products in this film, comes in a white generic container with blue lower-case lettering like the ones they used to sell at Ralph’s when this film was made and for the rest of the 1980’s), he pours it on the floor and someone else in the office thinks someone has pissed on the floor. (It’s that kind of movie.) Otto insists, “I’ll never be a repo man,” and Bud hands him the $25 they agreed on and says, “Too late, kid. You already are.”
There are a lot of subplots in the movie — including Otto’s ex-girlfriend (they broke up when, in the middle of what he was hoping would be a one-on-one sex session, she sent him away to get her a beer — and when he returned another man, a friend of his, was in bed with her) and her two new lovers suddenly deciding to become Bonnie and two Clydes and stick up local grocery and liquor stores (and by authorial fiat they seem to hit all their targets exactly when Bud and Otto are showing up there for more legitimate purposes); a rivalry between Bud’s repo operation and another one run by the Rodriguez brothers (when they meet up with each other in the L.A. culvert that’s been a site for action scenes in movies as diverse as Roadblock and Terminator, they do a chase scene, and later in the film they try to run each other off the road); and several bits and pieces of punk rock by major L.A.-based groups in the genre at the time (including the Latino punks the Plugz as well as the Circle Jerks — who actually perform a bit of a song on screen — Suicidal Tendencies, Big Race, Black Flag, the Juicy Bananas and Fear).
But the main intrigue involves a 1964 Chevy Malibu that contains a piece of white-hot energy material in the trunk that is either a nuclear weapon or the bodies of four dead aliens from the Roswell site (presumably) that have been stashed there and have become a W.M.D. in their deterioration. In the movie’s opening scene, a motorcycle cop pulls this car over and demands to look in the trunk. “You don’t want to look in the trunk,” the driver warns him, but the cop — probably assuming there are drugs in there — insists on opening it, and he’s hit by the full force of the energy (whatever it is) and is vaporized almost instantly, with nothing left of him but his big leather boots. Director/writer Cox said his inspiration for this was the neutron bomb — a piece of atomic weaponry developed under the Reagan administration whose stated purpose was to cause a minimum of property damage while effectively killing people (what it actually meant was simply setting the trade-off in any nuclear-weapon design between blast effects and fallout way over in the direction of fallout, to minimize the bomb’s danger to property and maximize its lethality towards people and other life forms) — but I couldn’t help but think of both Mickey Spillane’s novel Kiss Me Deadly and Robert Aldrich’s film version, which also featured a box containing an energy source which instantly fried anyone who opened its container and got hit by it full-force. The ending is pure fantasy but it works beautifully and caps a film that through much of its running time seems un-endable. It makes me want to explore some of the other Alex Cox movies that eluded me at the time, especially Sid and Nancy.
Incidentally, the imdb.com site says Cox has just made a “quasi-sequel” called Repo Chick, and the “deleted scenes” segment of this DVD is framed as an interview Cox is doing with Simon Cohen, who supposedly invented the neutron bomb; as well as Fox Harris, who plays the bomb’s inventor in the movie — and whose longer version of his scene in the car with Otto is one of the few sequences in the “deleted scenes” whose inclusion would actually have strengthened the film; it would have made its social critique more pointed and more specifically political. Some of the deleted scenes would have clarified the film but detracted from its marvelous ambiguity; some of them would have confused it even further and pushed it more towards unwatchability. All in all, Repo Man is a major film that’s influencing young moviemakers even today (the DVD contained a trailer for Brick, a quite good recent youth drug movie that’s one of the best of Repo Man’s many progenies) and remains watchable and entertaining, mainly because Cox (unlike some of his more recent imitators) instinctively seemed to know just how far to take the weirdness without falling into the totally arbitrary plotting that’s ruined many an attempt at spaced-out youth fantasy since.
I hadn’t seen Repo Man since it was at least relatively new (on premium cable in 1985), and Charles remembered a heavily censored version from the USA Network back when it had some pretty wild stuff (including videos by Bob Marley and U2, the legendary 1965 rock concert video The T.A.M.I. Show, movies like Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains and schlock classics like the Bela Lugosi Monograms) that included some scenes that weren’t in the theatrical release and turned up on this DVD as “deleted scenes.” I liked it then and it holds up quite well today.
Written and directed by Alan Cox, Repo Man has earned a reputation as the first youth movie that rendered itself deliberately, jaggedly obscure to reflect the alienation of its 20-something slacker characters — which it wasn’t; Jeff Lieberman’s Blue Sunshine, made in 1976, anticipated much of the style of this film (though the MacGuffin in that was a bad drug instead of a mysterious car containing a trunk full of energy either from a nuclear weapon or the bodies of dead aliens — Cox set Repo Man in New Mexico, probably because it was close to Roswell, though he shot in and around L.A. and many of the cityscapes are readily recognizable) and was ubiquitously available in the early 1980’s (KTLA ran it fairly often on their late-night movie show) and ready to influence future filmmakers.
But Repo Man is an excellent movie on its own merits, with Cox constructing a script that for all its weirdness and fantasy elements actually makes sense (which many more recent exercises in this youth sub-genre haven’t) and assembling a marvelous cast, even though his stars, Harry Dean Stanton and Emilio Estevez, are seemingly the only actors in the film who have been heard of since. The gimmick is that punk wanna-be Otto (Estevez) and his even dorkier-looking friend Kevin (Zander Schloss) start out the movie by being fired from their supermarket jobs (watching this part of the film must have been a busman’s holiday for Charles!) and Otto stumbling onto Bud (Stanton), who offers him $10 to drive what he says is his wife’s car — he’s got a cock-and-bull story that his wife is about to “drop” twins and they need to get both cars to the hospital right away. When the car’s owners come after Otto as he starts to drive it away, he begins to realize he’s been had — and Bud ends up leading him to the repo lot where he works. Otto is so upset at being turned into a repo man that when they offer him a beer (which, like all the food and drink products in this film, comes in a white generic container with blue lower-case lettering like the ones they used to sell at Ralph’s when this film was made and for the rest of the 1980’s), he pours it on the floor and someone else in the office thinks someone has pissed on the floor. (It’s that kind of movie.) Otto insists, “I’ll never be a repo man,” and Bud hands him the $25 they agreed on and says, “Too late, kid. You already are.”
There are a lot of subplots in the movie — including Otto’s ex-girlfriend (they broke up when, in the middle of what he was hoping would be a one-on-one sex session, she sent him away to get her a beer — and when he returned another man, a friend of his, was in bed with her) and her two new lovers suddenly deciding to become Bonnie and two Clydes and stick up local grocery and liquor stores (and by authorial fiat they seem to hit all their targets exactly when Bud and Otto are showing up there for more legitimate purposes); a rivalry between Bud’s repo operation and another one run by the Rodriguez brothers (when they meet up with each other in the L.A. culvert that’s been a site for action scenes in movies as diverse as Roadblock and Terminator, they do a chase scene, and later in the film they try to run each other off the road); and several bits and pieces of punk rock by major L.A.-based groups in the genre at the time (including the Latino punks the Plugz as well as the Circle Jerks — who actually perform a bit of a song on screen — Suicidal Tendencies, Big Race, Black Flag, the Juicy Bananas and Fear).
But the main intrigue involves a 1964 Chevy Malibu that contains a piece of white-hot energy material in the trunk that is either a nuclear weapon or the bodies of four dead aliens from the Roswell site (presumably) that have been stashed there and have become a W.M.D. in their deterioration. In the movie’s opening scene, a motorcycle cop pulls this car over and demands to look in the trunk. “You don’t want to look in the trunk,” the driver warns him, but the cop — probably assuming there are drugs in there — insists on opening it, and he’s hit by the full force of the energy (whatever it is) and is vaporized almost instantly, with nothing left of him but his big leather boots. Director/writer Cox said his inspiration for this was the neutron bomb — a piece of atomic weaponry developed under the Reagan administration whose stated purpose was to cause a minimum of property damage while effectively killing people (what it actually meant was simply setting the trade-off in any nuclear-weapon design between blast effects and fallout way over in the direction of fallout, to minimize the bomb’s danger to property and maximize its lethality towards people and other life forms) — but I couldn’t help but think of both Mickey Spillane’s novel Kiss Me Deadly and Robert Aldrich’s film version, which also featured a box containing an energy source which instantly fried anyone who opened its container and got hit by it full-force. The ending is pure fantasy but it works beautifully and caps a film that through much of its running time seems un-endable. It makes me want to explore some of the other Alex Cox movies that eluded me at the time, especially Sid and Nancy.
Incidentally, the imdb.com site says Cox has just made a “quasi-sequel” called Repo Chick, and the “deleted scenes” segment of this DVD is framed as an interview Cox is doing with Simon Cohen, who supposedly invented the neutron bomb; as well as Fox Harris, who plays the bomb’s inventor in the movie — and whose longer version of his scene in the car with Otto is one of the few sequences in the “deleted scenes” whose inclusion would actually have strengthened the film; it would have made its social critique more pointed and more specifically political. Some of the deleted scenes would have clarified the film but detracted from its marvelous ambiguity; some of them would have confused it even further and pushed it more towards unwatchability. All in all, Repo Man is a major film that’s influencing young moviemakers even today (the DVD contained a trailer for Brick, a quite good recent youth drug movie that’s one of the best of Repo Man’s many progenies) and remains watchable and entertaining, mainly because Cox (unlike some of his more recent imitators) instinctively seemed to know just how far to take the weirdness without falling into the totally arbitrary plotting that’s ruined many an attempt at spaced-out youth fantasy since.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Murder on Her Mind (Lifetime, 2008)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched a surprisingly good movie I recorded from Lifetime: Murder on Her Mind, which despite the generic title, the rather bland casting (the only genuinely cute male in the film gets himself killed in the opening scene, though he’s seen in flashbacks thereafter) and the two sappy soft-rock songs heard towards the end, turned out to be a powerful thriller with a message. It’s basically the coming-together of two women’s lives and their discovery that they had a great deal in common despite the vast difference in how they ended up. The film starts in 2008, the year it was made, with Sally Linden (Annabeth Gish — nice to know she still got to keep working after her Mystic Pizza co-star Julia Roberts became a superstar and she didn’t), wife of a successful novelist (Callum Keith Rennie) and with an unsuccessful book of her own published, is packing her daughter Aimée (Kristen Hager) off to college when she finds a yellow notebook.
The film then flashes back to 1993 in Hawai’i, when Sally was married to her first husband Danny (Gabriel Hogan), a small-time crook promoting real-estate scams and draining the family bank account (such as it was) for seed money, and Aimée was just a little girl (and played as such by Isabella Magalhaes). Sally took the notes in the book while on the jury in the murder trial of Theresa Nichol (Chandra West), who like Sally herself grew up in a respectable and affluent family and threw it all away to marry a scapegrace crook. Her husband Vincent (Hugh Dillon) had worked out a scheme by which Sally would go up to men in bars, cruise them, offer to help them get drugs and then Vincent, posing as her brother, would come on the scene, they’d get in the victim’s car and then Vincent would hold a gun on the victim and force him to drive to a secluded spot on the beach, where Vincent and Theresa would tie up the victim and steal his money. Only in the case of this victim, Bobby Gordon (David West Read — the cute one), for some reason the script never quite makes clear (possibly disappointment that he only had $40 on him) Vincent shot and killed him. (We see this happen in a “teaser” shot at the very beginning and again several times over in the course of the film, which is probably what earned it a TV PG-V rating.)
Vincent and Theresa then fled to California, where they pulled the same scam and again Vincent killed the victim; they were arrested and extradited to Hawai’i, whereupon Vincent decided to cut a deal and turn state’s evidence, saying it was Theresa who killed the victim. Theresa ends up serving her sentence in the women’s wing at Chino (the script by Semi Chellas — which if this movie weren’t as good as it is would probably lead me to a Medved brothers’-style joke that if his older brother Fully Chellas had written it, it would have been better — never quite bothers to explain how the jurisdictional snarls of two people committing similar crimes in different states got resolved; as it is, she’s shown having been arrested in California, convicted in Hawai’i and imprisoned in California again), where Sally visits her and expresses her belief in Theresa’s innocence even though the jury found her guilty. You see, on the last day of the trial Sally had a fight with David and took her daughter Aimée with her after David refused to remain home and baby-sit Aimée for her — Sally arrived at the courthouse five minutes late and the judge immediately threw her off the jury and installed an alternate, much to the disappointment of Theresa’s lawyer, who was counting on Sally either to persuade the rest of the jurors to acquit, Twelve Angry Men-style, or at least to hang the jury.
The incident encouraged Sally to wire her mother for the money to come home, break up with David and eventually meet Leonard (who agreed to raise Aimée as his own — it’s not until the flashbacks start that we realize she isn’t Leonard’s natural daughter), while Theresa paid the price for having let her own no-goodnick husband draw her into a life of crime. Sally gets on the case and investigates it herself, partly because she sees the opportunity to write a book about it and partly because she comes to identify with Theresa on a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I basis — and ultimately she gets an attorney on her case, gets Theresa’s Hawai’i conviction expunged and finally sees her paroled for her California crime. The film also touches on how laws differ from state to state — the law in Hawai’i that spouses could not testify against each other was repealed just a few months before the original murder, and under Hawai’ian law the only party to an incident like this who was considered guilty of murder was the one who actually shot the victim, whereas in California if two people are involved in a crime together and one of them commits murder during the course of it, both are legally considered murderers.
But the main meat of the film, ably communicated in Chellas’s script and David Wellington’s restrained, understated direction, is the connection between the two women and the similarities in their life situations even though one of them got out of her destructive relationship in time and the other did not. Wellington also deserves credit for making the characters who appear in both 1993 and 2008 sequences appear 15 years older without slathering makeup on them or otherwise artificially aging the actors; he’s able to get the actors to play older by moving more slowly and changing their postures. A movie like Murder on Her Mind is the sort of experience every regular Lifetime watcher hopes for: a diamond in the rough that makes up for all the dull, slovenly, ill-told stories that clutter up the network.
I watched a surprisingly good movie I recorded from Lifetime: Murder on Her Mind, which despite the generic title, the rather bland casting (the only genuinely cute male in the film gets himself killed in the opening scene, though he’s seen in flashbacks thereafter) and the two sappy soft-rock songs heard towards the end, turned out to be a powerful thriller with a message. It’s basically the coming-together of two women’s lives and their discovery that they had a great deal in common despite the vast difference in how they ended up. The film starts in 2008, the year it was made, with Sally Linden (Annabeth Gish — nice to know she still got to keep working after her Mystic Pizza co-star Julia Roberts became a superstar and she didn’t), wife of a successful novelist (Callum Keith Rennie) and with an unsuccessful book of her own published, is packing her daughter Aimée (Kristen Hager) off to college when she finds a yellow notebook.
The film then flashes back to 1993 in Hawai’i, when Sally was married to her first husband Danny (Gabriel Hogan), a small-time crook promoting real-estate scams and draining the family bank account (such as it was) for seed money, and Aimée was just a little girl (and played as such by Isabella Magalhaes). Sally took the notes in the book while on the jury in the murder trial of Theresa Nichol (Chandra West), who like Sally herself grew up in a respectable and affluent family and threw it all away to marry a scapegrace crook. Her husband Vincent (Hugh Dillon) had worked out a scheme by which Sally would go up to men in bars, cruise them, offer to help them get drugs and then Vincent, posing as her brother, would come on the scene, they’d get in the victim’s car and then Vincent would hold a gun on the victim and force him to drive to a secluded spot on the beach, where Vincent and Theresa would tie up the victim and steal his money. Only in the case of this victim, Bobby Gordon (David West Read — the cute one), for some reason the script never quite makes clear (possibly disappointment that he only had $40 on him) Vincent shot and killed him. (We see this happen in a “teaser” shot at the very beginning and again several times over in the course of the film, which is probably what earned it a TV PG-V rating.)
Vincent and Theresa then fled to California, where they pulled the same scam and again Vincent killed the victim; they were arrested and extradited to Hawai’i, whereupon Vincent decided to cut a deal and turn state’s evidence, saying it was Theresa who killed the victim. Theresa ends up serving her sentence in the women’s wing at Chino (the script by Semi Chellas — which if this movie weren’t as good as it is would probably lead me to a Medved brothers’-style joke that if his older brother Fully Chellas had written it, it would have been better — never quite bothers to explain how the jurisdictional snarls of two people committing similar crimes in different states got resolved; as it is, she’s shown having been arrested in California, convicted in Hawai’i and imprisoned in California again), where Sally visits her and expresses her belief in Theresa’s innocence even though the jury found her guilty. You see, on the last day of the trial Sally had a fight with David and took her daughter Aimée with her after David refused to remain home and baby-sit Aimée for her — Sally arrived at the courthouse five minutes late and the judge immediately threw her off the jury and installed an alternate, much to the disappointment of Theresa’s lawyer, who was counting on Sally either to persuade the rest of the jurors to acquit, Twelve Angry Men-style, or at least to hang the jury.
The incident encouraged Sally to wire her mother for the money to come home, break up with David and eventually meet Leonard (who agreed to raise Aimée as his own — it’s not until the flashbacks start that we realize she isn’t Leonard’s natural daughter), while Theresa paid the price for having let her own no-goodnick husband draw her into a life of crime. Sally gets on the case and investigates it herself, partly because she sees the opportunity to write a book about it and partly because she comes to identify with Theresa on a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God-go-I basis — and ultimately she gets an attorney on her case, gets Theresa’s Hawai’i conviction expunged and finally sees her paroled for her California crime. The film also touches on how laws differ from state to state — the law in Hawai’i that spouses could not testify against each other was repealed just a few months before the original murder, and under Hawai’ian law the only party to an incident like this who was considered guilty of murder was the one who actually shot the victim, whereas in California if two people are involved in a crime together and one of them commits murder during the course of it, both are legally considered murderers.
But the main meat of the film, ably communicated in Chellas’s script and David Wellington’s restrained, understated direction, is the connection between the two women and the similarities in their life situations even though one of them got out of her destructive relationship in time and the other did not. Wellington also deserves credit for making the characters who appear in both 1993 and 2008 sequences appear 15 years older without slathering makeup on them or otherwise artificially aging the actors; he’s able to get the actors to play older by moving more slowly and changing their postures. A movie like Murder on Her Mind is the sort of experience every regular Lifetime watcher hopes for: a diamond in the rough that makes up for all the dull, slovenly, ill-told stories that clutter up the network.
Friday, November 6, 2009
(Untitled) (Samuel Goldwyn Films, 2009)
“(Untitled)” Skewers the Modern Art World
by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Photo: Adam Goldberg and Marley Shelton in (Untitled). Copyright © 2009 by Untitled the Movie and Samuel Goldwyn Films.
The New York art world might not seem like the likeliest target for a satirical movie — you may go in wondering what director Jonathan Parker and writer Catherine DiNapoli, who worked with him on the script, could possibly have to say about it that would make it look more ridiculous than it already is — but if you let that discourage you from seeing (Untitled), you’ll be missing a remarkable and quite charming film. At first, seeing avant-garde composer Adrian Jacobs (Adam Goldberg, the closest this movie has to a “name” star) stroll the mean streets of New York’s arts district, see a small but promising group of people waiting outside the hall where his New Music Ensemble is about to perform, then see a bus pull into the frame and pick all of them up, you might expect the young Woody Allen to show up any minute.
But (Untitled) isn’t a 1970’s Woody Allen re-tooled for the present. It’s an expert skewering of a group of people who seem locked in an unwitting contest to top each other for sheer pretentiousness. The great virtue about (Untitled) — the parentheses are part of the title, which refers to the name a gallery usually slaps on a work when the artist hasn’t given it an actual title — is it makes fun of everybody: the fiercely independent I-don’t-give-a-damn-about-an-audience artist; the commercial painter whose works get bought by the yard for offices and hospitals; the genuine talents and the wanna-bes, the conceptualists whose work treads on the thin edge of not being art at all; and the rich people whose own mixed motives for buying art — from wanting to be accepted as connoisseurs shaping the destiny of the cultural world to seeing it as just another investment they hope will make them a profit — finance much of the show.
(Untitled) is an unusually well constructed (for a modern movie) story centered around two brothers, high-strung “artistic” composer Adrian and commercial painter Josh (Eion Bailey), whose institutional sales are keeping the Madeleine Grey gallery in business and allowing Grey (Marley Shelton) to pose as a resolutely noncommercial gallery operator, mounting self-consciously avant-garde shows in the front room while sneaking Josh’s paintings out the back as if they were contraband. Josh, who deals in safe abstractions — washes of color with a few strategically placed circles on each canvas — desperately wants a gallery show in Madeleine’s front space. He also desperately wants Madeleine’s body, but it’s Adrian who gets her in a relationship that seems to be about little more than sheer lust.
What about Adrian’s music? It’s self-consciously avant-garde, all right, played from scores that look more like schematic drawings of new computer designs than anything one usually thinks of as sheet music. Adrian himself falls against his piano, elbows it, plays dissonant tonal clusters that sound like Cecil Taylor on crystal and resolutely avoids anything resembling a melody. He also occasionally kicks a bucket — literally — and employs chains and other seemingly random noisemakers. His group consists of a woman playing bass clarinet (she’s identified in the dramatis personae only as “The Clarinet” and is portrayed by Lucy Punch), and a percussionist with an array of drums, gongs and “found” instruments that add to the general cacophony. The people who attend his concerts — at least the ones who don’t walk out in the middle — find his performances so disorienting that only the sight of the musicians bowing gives away when the piece has actually ended and they may applaud.
Nonetheless, Madeleine’s case of the hots for Adrian leads her to invite him to her loft — filled with works of art just as bizarre, if not more so, than the ones she shows in her gallery (my favorite was a painting with big block letters reading “NO YOU SHUT UP”) — and for her to invite him and his group to perform at the opening of the big show by British artist Ray Barko (Vinnie Jones). Barko, a character the writers obviously based on real-life British avant-gardist Damien Hirst, shows pieces consisting of stuffed animals in grotesque poses mounted in installations with inanimate objects. He also makes the expected pass at Madeleine and, when she brushes him off, turns his attentions towards “The Clarinet” — who appears to have an unrequited crush on Adrian but who also gets herself involved with Porter Canby (Zak Orth). Canby, who made a fortune from “something with computers,” wants to be accepted as a culture maven. He also wants to buy Barko’s work because he thinks it’s “underpriced,” but in the topsy-turvy world of art he first has to prove himself aesthetically “worthy” to purchase it — which Madeleine suggests he do by spending $25,000 to commission a new work for Adrian’s ensemble.
What makes (Untitled) work is the writers’ cool efficiency in setting up their targets. It’s a movie in which everyone is fair game, mainly because they’re all drowning in pretension. One of the film’s best running gags is how the people viewing the shows at Madeleine’s gallery are tempted at first to say in plain English whether or not they like them — until they realize that that would be breaking the rules; their comments have to be crouched in the convoluted, high-falutin’ language of Artspeak. Eventually Madeleine discovers and insists on showing the weirdest and most pretentious artist of all — an emotional basket case called Monroe (Ptolemy Slocum) who comes off as a high-functioning autistic and whose pieces bear names like “Post-It Note on a Wall,” “Door Partially Propped Open by a Doorstop” and “Thumbtack Stuck in a Wall.” (Madeleine titles his show, “MONROE: Something from Nothing.”) On the day of his opening — which causes a breakup between Madeleine and Adrian because Monroe is too “out there” even for Adrian’s taste — Monroe signs a whole stack of “Certificates of Authenticity.” It turns out that when you “buy” a Monroe work you get the ingredients, a set of instructions and a certificate to document that you bought that thumbtack for a multi-figure sum from a real Artist instead of just picking up a pack of them at a 99¢ store.
Along with the satire, (Untitled) touches in a light-hearted way on issues that are major subjects for debate in the art world. What exactly constitutes a work of art? What is the artist’s role? Does one have to create a material object to be an artist, or is a “concept” enough? (Did the fact that Andy Warhol used his considerable skills as a draftsman to paint photo-realistic depictions of Campbell’s soup cans and Brillo boxes make him a more legitimate artist than someone who just signs his name to a real Campbell’s soup can or Brillo box and exhibits it as “art”?) Does the artist have to create personally every aspect of the work to claim it as “his,” or can he entrust part of the work’s manufacture to others? (This comes off in the film when Madeleine takes Porter to Barko’s workshop and they see his assistants working on the piece she’s trying to sell to Porter — and it comes out that Barko has never actually stuffed any of the animals in his work. But it was also raised in connection with as acknowledged an Old Master as Rembrandt, who at the height of his popularity as a portrait painter employed a whole studio full of assistants who did a lot of the actual application of paint to canvas on “Rembrandt’s” works.)
(Untitled) won’t make you scream with laughter the way a more rambunctious, less intellectual comedy would — but it will keep you in a state of sustained merriment. One gets the impression that Parker and DiNapoli genuinely love the world they’re making fun of, and that makes the humor warmer and richer. What’s more, they’re adept at creating characters we genuinely care about — we may laugh at them but we also root for them and hope they get what they want out of this crazy game with its mixed-up rules. Parker’s casting is near-perfect — Marley Shelton in particular nails both the artistic and the sexual (she doesn’t seem genuinely capable of actual love) pretensions of his character. Adam Goldberg and Eion Bailey not only look enough alike we can believe them as brothers, they’re good enough to convince us they’ve had a long-standing rivalry going and each of them envies the other’s position in the art world. Perhaps the best performance is Ptolemy Slocum’s as Monroe; he’s so convincing he makes us ache for the way this poor semi-functional man is being exploited by the art world, with his very uncommunicativeness and utter lack of people skills hailed as yet more signs of his “genius.” There’s also a wonderful turn by Ben Hammer as Morton Cabot, a nonagenarian composer whose works — just as percussive as Adrian’s but a good deal more lyrical — convince Our Hero that it’s O.K. to try for beauty in his pieces.
As director, Parker picks a few oblique camera angles but mostly tells his story straightforwardly and with a deserved confidence in the ability of his and DiNapoli’s script to make its points. With production designer David L. Snyder, he’s nailed the different environments in which the characters work, live and function — particularly the grungy hovel in which Adrian creates as opposed to the antiseptic gallery and concert spaces in which he performs and the dark brown cocktail lounge where he plays background piano to support himself. Parker also wisely hired composer David Lang to score the film with music at least superficially similar to — though less aggressively ugly than — what Adrian performs in the film. (Untitled) is a charming farce, created with love and a willingness rare in this generation of filmmakers to make us identify with the characters emotionally rather than view them as if they were lab rats and we were researchers running experiments on them. Whether you’re an habitué of modern-art galleries and concert halls or you don’t know which end of a modern painting is up, you’ll still enjoy (Untitled).
(Untitled) is now playing at the Landmark Hillcrest Cinemas, 3965 Fifth Avenue in Hillcrest. Please call (619) 819-0236 for showtimes and more information.
Johnny Mercer: The Dream’s on Me (TCM, 2009)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I had recorded the Turner Classic Movies special Johnny Mercer: The Dream’s on Me when it was on Wednesday night and I ran it for Charles last night. It was directed by Bruce Ricker, who had previously done a special on Tony Bennett and therefore had a feel for the kind of music Mercer wrote lyrics for (and occasionally composed songs as well). It was produced by Clint Eastwood, whose connection benefited the film in that he’s long since shown his feel for jazz (he is, after all, the director of the best jazz biopic of all time, Bird) but who hurt it by dragging out his kids, son Kyle and daughter Morgan, to perform. Kyle is a not-bad bass player but Morgan, who seems to be about 14, is a totally incompetent singer who managed to get her rendition of “This Time the Dream’s on Me” on national TV only because her dad is a superstar and a Hollywood legend. The first I heard her little voice squeaking its way through a song Ella Fitzgerald recorded superbly (other people have done it, too, including Earl Coleman, but Ella’s is my favorite) I thought, “This is what it would sound like if Yoko Ono did a standards album” — though that’s being unfair to Yoko, who’s a good enough musician she’d at least try to phrase adequately.
Later on another, almost as incompetent young girl named Maude Maggart came out and croaked and pouted her way through a Mercer song — and her presence on this show didn’t even have the excuse of a nepotistic family connection! Aside from Audra MacDonald, who sang superbly, none of the modern-day singers showed much appreciation for this music or talent to bring it off — but fortunately, as the show progressed they stopped showing that many modern singers and started showing clips of the vocal greats of the past, back when Mercer was still alive and his musical style was the lingua franca of American pop. I love Johnny Mercer, though I did find it odd to lionize him the way this show did given that he was mostly a lyric writer (he tried his hand at composing but did not make the permanent change from lyricist to composer-lyricist the way Stephen Sondheim did) and one could argue that the true greats of his songs were the people who wrote their melodies: Hoagy Carmichael (who actually suggested the last line of the “Lazy Bones” lyric), Harold Arlen and (on one project, the 1942 film You Were Never Lovelier) Mercer’s long-time idol, Jerome Kern, as well as less legendary but still incredibly talented people like Richard Whiting and Harry Warren.
One thing that set Mercer aside from most of the songwriters of his generation was that he was a great vocalist himself; like his frequent collaborator Hoagy Carmichael, he had a voice that wasn’t especially pretty but his complete understanding of musicianship and phrasing allowed him to project a song vividly. (Mercer’s own recording of “One for My Baby” ranks with the classic versions by Fred Astaire and Frank Sinatra; where Astaire made it angry and Sinatra made it sad, Mercer’s made it rather lighthearted — Astaire’s protagonist literally trashed the bar, Sinatra’s was probably going to fall asleep in his cups, while Mercer’s was going to go home, sleep it off and wake bright and refreshed the following day.) I remember hearing Johnny Mercer on black-label Capitols (he, songwriter turned movie producer Buddy de Sylva and record-store owner Glenn Wallichs founded Capitol in 1942) well before I realized he was a songwriter — and he was able to have hit records even on songs he hadn’t written.
Mercer actually came to Hollywood hoping to make it as an actor, and appeared in two “B” musicals at RKO — Old Man Rhythm and To Beat the Band — and in Old Man Rhythm he was an appealing on-screen personality (though basically just playing himself) and he also wrote the songs for both those films, though with less illustrious collaborators than he had later (though two of the songs from To Beat the Band — “Eeny Meeny Miney Mo” and “If You Were Mine” — survive, largely because Billie Holiday recorded them). But his real fame had come from radio broadcasts with Paul Whiteman before his first Hollywood stint and Benny Goodman afterwards.
The show told me a few things about Mercer I’d known before (like his illustrious ancestry from the Southern aristocracy — he was from Savannah, Georgia, famous as the locale for the movies Gone With the Wind and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil — the protagonist of Midnight lived in a house built by Mercer’s grandfather and where Johnny himself had grown up, and though Mercer died in Los Angeles his body was shipped to Savannah and buried in the famous cemetery within eyeshot of the legendary statue that became the logo for both book and film of Midnight, complete with an accompanying bench on which was chiseled the line from “One for My Baby,” “You’d never know it/But buddy, I’m kind of a poet,” while the headstone itself contains the phrase “And the Angels Sing” from his hit co-written with Goodman trumpeter Ziggy Elman and recorded by the Goodman band with Martha Tilton singing) and a few I hadn’t (like his early-1940’s affair with Judy Garland — her biographers, at least the ones I’ve read had never mentioned him in that connection, though her romantic entanglements with Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Tyrone Power have been almost too well documented).
Mercer’s skill was in writing lyrics that sounded complicated and frequently dredged up incredibly obscure words (one line in “Too Marvelous for Words” stumped a librarian, who ultimately discovered that the last published use of that word before Mercer got hold of it had been in 1792!) but still fell easily off the tongues and throats of the singers, and which engaged in dazzling wordplay but didn’t call attention to their brilliance the way Cole Porter’s and Lorenz Hart’s did. Mercer was an incredible talent — one of those who wasn’t Black or Jewish but who instinctively realized that at the root of the Great American Song Tradition were the Black and Jewish cultures (when the show presented the scene from the film Blues in the Night where that famous song was originated — by a stentorian African-American Paul Robeson wanna-be named William Gillespie — I pointed out that the appropriation of a Black style by a Jewish songwriter, Harold Arlen née Hymie Arlick, who’d actually been the son of a cantor was really what the Broadway and Hollywood musical styles were all about!) and who had learned from (and daringly socialized with, given that he grew up at the height of Jim Crow) Savannah’s Blacks as a child and had picked up the Jewish end of the American musical tradition from working with Jewish collaborators. The show had a bittersweet quality as it wound on, mainly because the rise of rock ’n’ roll in the 1950’s did to Mercer what it did to just about all of the surviving greats from the previous era of American pop music — it rendered him largely irrelevant — though unlike a lot of other pre-rock composers, lyricists and performers, Mercer got a comeback with the song “Moon River” and the movie theme songs that followed it.
Mercer was a literate man who kept the common touch — as a singer, the most effective part of his personality was his swagger; his record of “Personality” from the film The Road to Utopia has a completely different affect from Dorothy Lamour’s performance in the movie, not just because he’s a man and she’s a woman but because he gives it a ballsy quality whereas she just seems to be toying with the song. Mercer’s greatest monuments are not only his songs but his recordings of them — his version of “Blues in the Night” with Jo Stafford for Capitol’s Americana subsidiary is one of my two favorites (the other is Artie Shaw’s with the great singer-trumpeter Oran “Hot Lips” Page) — and also, as the show pointed out, the great array of talent he signed to Capitol (many of them rejects from Mercer’s former record company, Decca — including Freddie Slack, Nat “King” Cole and Stan Kenton — as well as Jo Stafford and Peggy Lee, who came to him by accident: Lee had retired from singing when she married guitarist Dave Barbour, who was doing session work at Capitol on a jazz history album, and when the producer said he needed a female singer on two of the songs, Barbour said, “My wife used to sing with Goodman … ” — and Mercer’s former boss, Paul Whiteman); at a time when major musical talents usually didn’t get involved in the business area of recording, Mercer in effect paved the way for future generations of rock ’n’ rollers who’d form their own labels, and he did it in an era in which starting a record company was considerably more difficult than it became in the 1960’s or is today. Despite its deficiencies — including the usual fault of music documentaries, giving the performances in bits and pieces and only offering a few seconds of most of the songs — Johnny Mercer: The Dream’s on Me is an engaging tribute to a major triple-threat (songwriter, singer, businessman) musical talent.
I had recorded the Turner Classic Movies special Johnny Mercer: The Dream’s on Me when it was on Wednesday night and I ran it for Charles last night. It was directed by Bruce Ricker, who had previously done a special on Tony Bennett and therefore had a feel for the kind of music Mercer wrote lyrics for (and occasionally composed songs as well). It was produced by Clint Eastwood, whose connection benefited the film in that he’s long since shown his feel for jazz (he is, after all, the director of the best jazz biopic of all time, Bird) but who hurt it by dragging out his kids, son Kyle and daughter Morgan, to perform. Kyle is a not-bad bass player but Morgan, who seems to be about 14, is a totally incompetent singer who managed to get her rendition of “This Time the Dream’s on Me” on national TV only because her dad is a superstar and a Hollywood legend. The first I heard her little voice squeaking its way through a song Ella Fitzgerald recorded superbly (other people have done it, too, including Earl Coleman, but Ella’s is my favorite) I thought, “This is what it would sound like if Yoko Ono did a standards album” — though that’s being unfair to Yoko, who’s a good enough musician she’d at least try to phrase adequately.
Later on another, almost as incompetent young girl named Maude Maggart came out and croaked and pouted her way through a Mercer song — and her presence on this show didn’t even have the excuse of a nepotistic family connection! Aside from Audra MacDonald, who sang superbly, none of the modern-day singers showed much appreciation for this music or talent to bring it off — but fortunately, as the show progressed they stopped showing that many modern singers and started showing clips of the vocal greats of the past, back when Mercer was still alive and his musical style was the lingua franca of American pop. I love Johnny Mercer, though I did find it odd to lionize him the way this show did given that he was mostly a lyric writer (he tried his hand at composing but did not make the permanent change from lyricist to composer-lyricist the way Stephen Sondheim did) and one could argue that the true greats of his songs were the people who wrote their melodies: Hoagy Carmichael (who actually suggested the last line of the “Lazy Bones” lyric), Harold Arlen and (on one project, the 1942 film You Were Never Lovelier) Mercer’s long-time idol, Jerome Kern, as well as less legendary but still incredibly talented people like Richard Whiting and Harry Warren.
One thing that set Mercer aside from most of the songwriters of his generation was that he was a great vocalist himself; like his frequent collaborator Hoagy Carmichael, he had a voice that wasn’t especially pretty but his complete understanding of musicianship and phrasing allowed him to project a song vividly. (Mercer’s own recording of “One for My Baby” ranks with the classic versions by Fred Astaire and Frank Sinatra; where Astaire made it angry and Sinatra made it sad, Mercer’s made it rather lighthearted — Astaire’s protagonist literally trashed the bar, Sinatra’s was probably going to fall asleep in his cups, while Mercer’s was going to go home, sleep it off and wake bright and refreshed the following day.) I remember hearing Johnny Mercer on black-label Capitols (he, songwriter turned movie producer Buddy de Sylva and record-store owner Glenn Wallichs founded Capitol in 1942) well before I realized he was a songwriter — and he was able to have hit records even on songs he hadn’t written.
Mercer actually came to Hollywood hoping to make it as an actor, and appeared in two “B” musicals at RKO — Old Man Rhythm and To Beat the Band — and in Old Man Rhythm he was an appealing on-screen personality (though basically just playing himself) and he also wrote the songs for both those films, though with less illustrious collaborators than he had later (though two of the songs from To Beat the Band — “Eeny Meeny Miney Mo” and “If You Were Mine” — survive, largely because Billie Holiday recorded them). But his real fame had come from radio broadcasts with Paul Whiteman before his first Hollywood stint and Benny Goodman afterwards.
The show told me a few things about Mercer I’d known before (like his illustrious ancestry from the Southern aristocracy — he was from Savannah, Georgia, famous as the locale for the movies Gone With the Wind and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil — the protagonist of Midnight lived in a house built by Mercer’s grandfather and where Johnny himself had grown up, and though Mercer died in Los Angeles his body was shipped to Savannah and buried in the famous cemetery within eyeshot of the legendary statue that became the logo for both book and film of Midnight, complete with an accompanying bench on which was chiseled the line from “One for My Baby,” “You’d never know it/But buddy, I’m kind of a poet,” while the headstone itself contains the phrase “And the Angels Sing” from his hit co-written with Goodman trumpeter Ziggy Elman and recorded by the Goodman band with Martha Tilton singing) and a few I hadn’t (like his early-1940’s affair with Judy Garland — her biographers, at least the ones I’ve read had never mentioned him in that connection, though her romantic entanglements with Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Tyrone Power have been almost too well documented).
Mercer’s skill was in writing lyrics that sounded complicated and frequently dredged up incredibly obscure words (one line in “Too Marvelous for Words” stumped a librarian, who ultimately discovered that the last published use of that word before Mercer got hold of it had been in 1792!) but still fell easily off the tongues and throats of the singers, and which engaged in dazzling wordplay but didn’t call attention to their brilliance the way Cole Porter’s and Lorenz Hart’s did. Mercer was an incredible talent — one of those who wasn’t Black or Jewish but who instinctively realized that at the root of the Great American Song Tradition were the Black and Jewish cultures (when the show presented the scene from the film Blues in the Night where that famous song was originated — by a stentorian African-American Paul Robeson wanna-be named William Gillespie — I pointed out that the appropriation of a Black style by a Jewish songwriter, Harold Arlen née Hymie Arlick, who’d actually been the son of a cantor was really what the Broadway and Hollywood musical styles were all about!) and who had learned from (and daringly socialized with, given that he grew up at the height of Jim Crow) Savannah’s Blacks as a child and had picked up the Jewish end of the American musical tradition from working with Jewish collaborators. The show had a bittersweet quality as it wound on, mainly because the rise of rock ’n’ roll in the 1950’s did to Mercer what it did to just about all of the surviving greats from the previous era of American pop music — it rendered him largely irrelevant — though unlike a lot of other pre-rock composers, lyricists and performers, Mercer got a comeback with the song “Moon River” and the movie theme songs that followed it.
Mercer was a literate man who kept the common touch — as a singer, the most effective part of his personality was his swagger; his record of “Personality” from the film The Road to Utopia has a completely different affect from Dorothy Lamour’s performance in the movie, not just because he’s a man and she’s a woman but because he gives it a ballsy quality whereas she just seems to be toying with the song. Mercer’s greatest monuments are not only his songs but his recordings of them — his version of “Blues in the Night” with Jo Stafford for Capitol’s Americana subsidiary is one of my two favorites (the other is Artie Shaw’s with the great singer-trumpeter Oran “Hot Lips” Page) — and also, as the show pointed out, the great array of talent he signed to Capitol (many of them rejects from Mercer’s former record company, Decca — including Freddie Slack, Nat “King” Cole and Stan Kenton — as well as Jo Stafford and Peggy Lee, who came to him by accident: Lee had retired from singing when she married guitarist Dave Barbour, who was doing session work at Capitol on a jazz history album, and when the producer said he needed a female singer on two of the songs, Barbour said, “My wife used to sing with Goodman … ” — and Mercer’s former boss, Paul Whiteman); at a time when major musical talents usually didn’t get involved in the business area of recording, Mercer in effect paved the way for future generations of rock ’n’ rollers who’d form their own labels, and he did it in an era in which starting a record company was considerably more difficult than it became in the 1960’s or is today. Despite its deficiencies — including the usual fault of music documentaries, giving the performances in bits and pieces and only offering a few seconds of most of the songs — Johnny Mercer: The Dream’s on Me is an engaging tribute to a major triple-threat (songwriter, singer, businessman) musical talent.
Wednesday, November 4, 2009
The Walking Dead (Warners, 1936)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Walking Dead, another in TCM’s Boris Karloff marathon last October 30, and a movie that took some typical Karloff situations (including casting him as a man who dies and is then brought back to life by scientific means) but gave them fresh spins and managed to create a quite somber mood very different from the sensational (for its time) horror of a lot of his better-known vehicles. It was made at Warner Bros., which had just signed Karloff to a five-film contract (at one point in 1939, the height of the studio system, when most Hollywood actors were working for just one company, Karloff had non-exclusive multi-picture contracts with four studios at once: Universal, Columbia, Warners and Monogram.) Indeed, for its first few minutes it seems like a typical Warners crime drama and one wonders just how they’re gong to fit Karloff into it: Stephen Martin (Kenneth Harlan) is on trial (without a jury) before Judge Shaw (Joseph King) on the charge of defrauding the government on contracts. Martin is actually part of a gang of high-class criminals headed by his attorney, Nolan (Ricardo Cortez). They mount a campaign of intimidation and threats against Judge Shaw to get him to acquit Martin, but he convicts him anyway. Nolan meets with his associates in the gang — Loder (Barton MacLane), Werner (Henry O’Neill) and Blackstone (Paul Harvey) — and announces he’s hired a hit man named Trigger (Joseph Sawyer) to kill Judge Shaw.
When the other gang members protest that this will draw more heat on them, not less, Nolan tells them not to worry: he’s got the perfect fall guy lined up (obviously playing Sam Spade in the first version of The Maltese Falcon five years earlier had taught Ricardo Cortez a thing or two about finding a fall guy). His patsy is John Ellman (Boris Karloff), who 10 years earlier was sentenced to a long prison term by Judge Shaw for killing a man who accosted his wife. Ellman has just been released two weeks before Trigger’s scheduled hit on Shaw, and they arrange to run Ellman’s car off the road and plant Shaw’s body in it after they kill him. The frame works and Ellman is tried, convicted and sentenced to death — Nolan, pretending he’s doing him a favor, deliberately mishandles the trial so badly as to ensure Ellman’s conviction (12 years before Orson Welles used the same plot gimmick in The Lady from Shanghai) — but there’s one complication. Jimmy (Warren Hull) and Nancy (Marguerite Churchill), two young medical students working as lab assistants to medical researcher Dr. Beaumont (Edmund Gwenn), actually witnessed the real killer run Ellman’s car off the road and transfer Shaw’s body to it.
Jimmy wants the two to come forward as witnesses, but Nancy successfully talks him out of it until the night Ellman is scheduled to be executed, when she finally breaks down and allows him to go to Nolan with the information that can spare his client’s life. Nolan deliberately delays reaching anyone in law enforcement with this information so he can make a show of concern while really sabotaging things so that the governor’s reprieve reaches the prison just after Ellman is executed. He hasn’t reckoned with Dr. Beaumont, who demands that instead of being autopsied Ellman’s body be turned over to him at once, whereupon he takes it to his lab and, with Jimmy and Nancy assisting, plugs it into a bunch of Frankenstein-like gizmos (including the so-called “Lindbergh heart,” which the celebrated aviator and fascist apologist actually co-invented with Dr. Alexis Carrel, whose real-life experiments with research partner Dr. Robert Cornish in attempting to revive electrocution victims apparently inspired this film) that bring Ellman back to life. At first Ellman is incapable of speech — he emits only non-verbal whines, groans and snarls similar to those he used in Frankenstein — but eventually he comes to and achieves at least a bit of his former intelligence. He also seems to acquire some sort of extra-sensory power, because without any actual evidence he intuits the identities of the people who set him up and starts knocking them off one by one. Eventually the police close in on him and he’s shot down, and before he dies the second time Beaumont frantically tries — and fails — to get Ellman to describe what the experience of death (his first one) was actually like.
The Walking Dead is an intriguing movie that tends to argue against my general field theory of cinema that the quality of a movie is inversely proportional to its number of writers; though five people worked on this script (Ewart Adamson and Joseph Fields get credit for the story and Adamson, Peter Milne, Robert Andrews and Lillie Hayward for the script), it has a lot of felicitious touches. Asked if he has a last request, Ellman is at first indignant — “You take my life and you want to grant me a favor?” — but then comes up with one: he asks that a live musician play his favorite piece as he’s walking to the electric chair (and as he gets in the chair he gestures up to the ceiling and says, “He will forgive me,” meaning God). Indeed, the first half of this film is considerably more moving and better as drama than the second half — though the whole piece is presented with a remarkable subtlety for what was pretty obviously intended as an exploitation piece aimed at Karloff’s core horror audience.
Michael Curtiz is the director, and he’s probably the best one Karloff worked with in the 1930’s other than James Whale (and maybe Edgar G. Ulmer). As Ellman, a sympathetic victim of both criminals and law enforcement, Karloff underplays throughout the film — a far cry from the snarling overacting he sometimes fell into with less carefully drafted scripts and less assertive directors — creating a vivid impression of a sensitive man, not especially bright but sympathetic and all too aware of what’s happening to him and why. The parallels to Frankenstein are there but they’re kept subtle — Ellman, even after he’s revivified, remains a normal human being (albeit one with quirky post-resurrection mental powers) and a likable if rather distant character whose killings are sufficiently well motivated that they don’t cost him the audience’s sympathy. The cinematographer is Hal Mohr (an Academy Award winner for the 1935 A Midsummer Night’s Dream and a far more prestigious name than one would expect on a 62-minute “B” picture), and even when he has Ellman doing Karloffian things like skulking around in graveyards, he creates a vivid and somber atmosphere just as effective as the outdoor scenes in Karloff’s 1930’s films for Universal.
The Walking Dead is a quite good movie, ably showcasing Karloff’s remarkable sensitivity and subtlety as an actor and using familiar horror/sci-fi elements in intriguingly different ways. It helps that Edmund Gwenn’s character is also subtly played — instead of the usual “mad scientist” he’s a totally benign figure, even avuncular (in fact Gwenn plays this so much like his role as Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street 11 years later — and with his neatly trimmed white beard he even looks like he did as Santa Claus — that one half-expects him to announce to his lab assistants Jimmy and Nancy that as soon as he finishes the experiment he’s going to have to load his sleigh with toys to deliver them to all the children of the world on Christmas eve), motivated not by some mad scheme to rule the world or even (as Karloff was in most of his own mad-scientist roles) by an idea to help humanity that he pursues in an unethical way, but simply by a sense of atonement for the guilt of his associates in failing to stop Ellman’s execution.
Though it sags a bit in the second half as the plot turns towards more conventional 1930’s horror situations, The Walking Dead is still an estimable movie that contains one of Karloff’s very best performances. Too bad his later work for Warners was in routine melodramas, most of them remakes (Invisible Menace, West of Shanghai, Devil’s Island, British Intelligence) that hardly “stretched” him the way this one did!
The film was The Walking Dead, another in TCM’s Boris Karloff marathon last October 30, and a movie that took some typical Karloff situations (including casting him as a man who dies and is then brought back to life by scientific means) but gave them fresh spins and managed to create a quite somber mood very different from the sensational (for its time) horror of a lot of his better-known vehicles. It was made at Warner Bros., which had just signed Karloff to a five-film contract (at one point in 1939, the height of the studio system, when most Hollywood actors were working for just one company, Karloff had non-exclusive multi-picture contracts with four studios at once: Universal, Columbia, Warners and Monogram.) Indeed, for its first few minutes it seems like a typical Warners crime drama and one wonders just how they’re gong to fit Karloff into it: Stephen Martin (Kenneth Harlan) is on trial (without a jury) before Judge Shaw (Joseph King) on the charge of defrauding the government on contracts. Martin is actually part of a gang of high-class criminals headed by his attorney, Nolan (Ricardo Cortez). They mount a campaign of intimidation and threats against Judge Shaw to get him to acquit Martin, but he convicts him anyway. Nolan meets with his associates in the gang — Loder (Barton MacLane), Werner (Henry O’Neill) and Blackstone (Paul Harvey) — and announces he’s hired a hit man named Trigger (Joseph Sawyer) to kill Judge Shaw.
When the other gang members protest that this will draw more heat on them, not less, Nolan tells them not to worry: he’s got the perfect fall guy lined up (obviously playing Sam Spade in the first version of The Maltese Falcon five years earlier had taught Ricardo Cortez a thing or two about finding a fall guy). His patsy is John Ellman (Boris Karloff), who 10 years earlier was sentenced to a long prison term by Judge Shaw for killing a man who accosted his wife. Ellman has just been released two weeks before Trigger’s scheduled hit on Shaw, and they arrange to run Ellman’s car off the road and plant Shaw’s body in it after they kill him. The frame works and Ellman is tried, convicted and sentenced to death — Nolan, pretending he’s doing him a favor, deliberately mishandles the trial so badly as to ensure Ellman’s conviction (12 years before Orson Welles used the same plot gimmick in The Lady from Shanghai) — but there’s one complication. Jimmy (Warren Hull) and Nancy (Marguerite Churchill), two young medical students working as lab assistants to medical researcher Dr. Beaumont (Edmund Gwenn), actually witnessed the real killer run Ellman’s car off the road and transfer Shaw’s body to it.
Jimmy wants the two to come forward as witnesses, but Nancy successfully talks him out of it until the night Ellman is scheduled to be executed, when she finally breaks down and allows him to go to Nolan with the information that can spare his client’s life. Nolan deliberately delays reaching anyone in law enforcement with this information so he can make a show of concern while really sabotaging things so that the governor’s reprieve reaches the prison just after Ellman is executed. He hasn’t reckoned with Dr. Beaumont, who demands that instead of being autopsied Ellman’s body be turned over to him at once, whereupon he takes it to his lab and, with Jimmy and Nancy assisting, plugs it into a bunch of Frankenstein-like gizmos (including the so-called “Lindbergh heart,” which the celebrated aviator and fascist apologist actually co-invented with Dr. Alexis Carrel, whose real-life experiments with research partner Dr. Robert Cornish in attempting to revive electrocution victims apparently inspired this film) that bring Ellman back to life. At first Ellman is incapable of speech — he emits only non-verbal whines, groans and snarls similar to those he used in Frankenstein — but eventually he comes to and achieves at least a bit of his former intelligence. He also seems to acquire some sort of extra-sensory power, because without any actual evidence he intuits the identities of the people who set him up and starts knocking them off one by one. Eventually the police close in on him and he’s shot down, and before he dies the second time Beaumont frantically tries — and fails — to get Ellman to describe what the experience of death (his first one) was actually like.
The Walking Dead is an intriguing movie that tends to argue against my general field theory of cinema that the quality of a movie is inversely proportional to its number of writers; though five people worked on this script (Ewart Adamson and Joseph Fields get credit for the story and Adamson, Peter Milne, Robert Andrews and Lillie Hayward for the script), it has a lot of felicitious touches. Asked if he has a last request, Ellman is at first indignant — “You take my life and you want to grant me a favor?” — but then comes up with one: he asks that a live musician play his favorite piece as he’s walking to the electric chair (and as he gets in the chair he gestures up to the ceiling and says, “He will forgive me,” meaning God). Indeed, the first half of this film is considerably more moving and better as drama than the second half — though the whole piece is presented with a remarkable subtlety for what was pretty obviously intended as an exploitation piece aimed at Karloff’s core horror audience.
Michael Curtiz is the director, and he’s probably the best one Karloff worked with in the 1930’s other than James Whale (and maybe Edgar G. Ulmer). As Ellman, a sympathetic victim of both criminals and law enforcement, Karloff underplays throughout the film — a far cry from the snarling overacting he sometimes fell into with less carefully drafted scripts and less assertive directors — creating a vivid impression of a sensitive man, not especially bright but sympathetic and all too aware of what’s happening to him and why. The parallels to Frankenstein are there but they’re kept subtle — Ellman, even after he’s revivified, remains a normal human being (albeit one with quirky post-resurrection mental powers) and a likable if rather distant character whose killings are sufficiently well motivated that they don’t cost him the audience’s sympathy. The cinematographer is Hal Mohr (an Academy Award winner for the 1935 A Midsummer Night’s Dream and a far more prestigious name than one would expect on a 62-minute “B” picture), and even when he has Ellman doing Karloffian things like skulking around in graveyards, he creates a vivid and somber atmosphere just as effective as the outdoor scenes in Karloff’s 1930’s films for Universal.
The Walking Dead is a quite good movie, ably showcasing Karloff’s remarkable sensitivity and subtlety as an actor and using familiar horror/sci-fi elements in intriguingly different ways. It helps that Edmund Gwenn’s character is also subtly played — instead of the usual “mad scientist” he’s a totally benign figure, even avuncular (in fact Gwenn plays this so much like his role as Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street 11 years later — and with his neatly trimmed white beard he even looks like he did as Santa Claus — that one half-expects him to announce to his lab assistants Jimmy and Nancy that as soon as he finishes the experiment he’s going to have to load his sleigh with toys to deliver them to all the children of the world on Christmas eve), motivated not by some mad scheme to rule the world or even (as Karloff was in most of his own mad-scientist roles) by an idea to help humanity that he pursues in an unethical way, but simply by a sense of atonement for the guilt of his associates in failing to stop Ellman’s execution.
Though it sags a bit in the second half as the plot turns towards more conventional 1930’s horror situations, The Walking Dead is still an estimable movie that contains one of Karloff’s very best performances. Too bad his later work for Warners was in routine melodramas, most of them remakes (Invisible Menace, West of Shanghai, Devil’s Island, British Intelligence) that hardly “stretched” him the way this one did!
The Soviet Story (Labvakar/Perry Street Advisors, 2008)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
This morning I also watched a chilling if overwrought documentary recently shown on PBS: The Soviet Story, a production from a Latvian company called Labvakar, directed and written by Edvins Snore, whose movie would be a good deal more moving if he had just stuck to the facts he could document and not placed them in a hard-Right ideological, philosophical and propagandist context designed to discredit all forms of socialism, liberalism and any other political-economic philosophy but lassiez-faire capitalism and worship of “The Market.” The basic thesis (if I can borrow a word from dialectic terminology whose use in connection with his film Mr. — or is it Ms.? — Snore would probably detest) of The Soviet Story is that Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Hitler were virtually identical; all sought to create a socialist society of one form or another, and all called for mass murders of anyone whose existence they considered an obstacle to their foredoomed attempts to remake human nature.
Snore’s ideological purpose is to trash any and all of the myths and legends by which modern-day socialists (or, for that matter, modern-day liberals and progressives) attempt to dissociate themselves and their goals from the horrors of Communism and Nazism, though his case against Marx and Engels rests mainly on the appearance of one word, “Völkerabfälle,” in the Communist Manifesto. Snore translates this as “racial trash” and explains in his narration (he wrote the film, though in the English version the narration is delivered by Jon Strickland in a quiet, calm, matter-of-fact way that only makes the film more chilling) that this meant that people whose societies hadn’t yet experienced the capitalist transformation (he apparently cited the Basques and the Scottish Highlanders as examples) would have to be exterminated before the transition from capitalism to socialism could be completed. (Ironically, the first socialist revolution occurred in a society that was still largely feudal — indeed, the ideological battle between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks was based largely on this very point: could you make a socialist revolution in a society that hadn’t even finished the transition to capitalism yet? — but this is just one of the many real-life complexities that aren’t in Snore’s film because they don’t fit his ideological schema.)
Snore makes some pretty wild leaps and instances of guilt by association (a favorite tactic of the Right) to establish ideological and inspirational connections between Nazism and Communism, going so far as to claim that the Nazis were really Leftists because they had the word “socialist” in their name and they shared a belief in exterminating enemies of the state — only the Nazis’ targets were based on race while the Soviets’ targets were based on class. Snore includes a montage sequence comparing Nazi German posters on the left side of the screen with Soviet Russian posters on the right (shouldn’t it have been the other way around?) in an effort to depict the similarities of the regimes — though all his montage really proves is that these two despotisms sold themselves to their people in similar ways (it’s really more a commonality of marketing than of ideology). He also dredges up footage of George Bernard Shaw (I presume from his famous Movietone newsreel of 1928) claiming that certain “undesirable” people should be made to justify their existence and (he leaves this unspoken but this is a legitimate inference from what he said) got rid of if they can’t prove they add more value to the world than they take from it in their support. The idea is to tie West European socialism to both the Soviets and the Nazis (and indeed Shaw did say in the 1930’s that democracy was proving inadequate to the economic crisis and maybe the future lay with dictatorships, which is more an embarrassment to Shaw and proof of how far a great mind can go off the rails than the blanket condemnation of all socialism and progressivism Snore wants to paint it as) and to argue that humankind’s only choices are capitalism or barbarism.
I’ll concede one important point to Snore: liberals, progressives and Leftists in general have been considerably softer in their criticisms of Communist atrocities than of fascist ones, and I agree with him that the reason for that is that the fascists, especially the Nazis, committed their crimes against humanity in the name of an ideal of “racial purity” that appalls us as much as the crimes themselves do, while the Soviets committed theirs in the name of human equality, economic freedom (in the Rooseveltian sense of “freedom from want and freedom from fear”) and a classless society, so there’s a definite tendency on the Left towards apologizing for the Communists because we like their stated ideals even if we abhor their policies and tactics. (I’ll even admit that in nit-picking Snore’s film I’m probably at least partially guilty of this myself.)
The real unfortunate aspect of Snore’s film is that his ideological purpose gets in the way of the real meat of his movie: his dramatization of the Soviet evil (he estimates that “at least 20 million” people were killed by the Soviet regime throughout its existence — about 3 1/2 times the total toll of the Nazi Holocaust) and his retellings of classic stories about the brutality and mass murders committed under the Soviet regime: the so-called “genocide by hunger” in Ukraine in 1932-33 (which I already read about in Miron Dolot’s book Execution by Hunger: The Hidden Holocaust — a vivid and well documented account that worked for me more than this film did precisely because Dolot did not have the kinds of historical axes to grind that Snore did; by refusing to underscore the story as a condemnation of all attempts to rein in the private sector Dolot made me rethink my attitude towards the Soviet Union in ways this film did not), the massacre of Poles in Katyn Forest in 1940 and the Soviets’ return of German Jews (and, even more inexplicably, German Communists) who had fled the Nazi persecution in 1940-41 so the Germans could send them to concentration camps and kill them as part of the Holocaust. The film also makes clear that the Nazi-Soviet alliance from August 1939 to June 1941 was not a mere “non-aggression pact” but an actual, active military partnership (though, true to form, in depicting the partition of Poland between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia as “evidence” of the identity between the two he ignores the long history of German and Russian governments dividing up Poland between them, which predated both the Nazis and the Soviets by more than a century).
Had Snore just stuck to the historical facts and not attempted to condemn all Left-of-center politics by association — and in particular had he avoided his bizarre attempts to cite the Soviets as Hitler’s inspiration (he says it was the Soviet success at mass murder that inspired Hitler to order the Holocaust, and uses Joseph Goebbels’ publicly expressed admiration of Lenin to tie the Soviets and the Nazis ideologically — ignoring the fact that when Goebbels said those things he was part of a Left-wing movement within the Nazi party that Hitler subsequently purged, though he kept Goebbels on when he renounced the Left-wing variant of Nazism and convinced Hitler of his personal loyalty) and his bizarre attempt to recast Nazism as a movement of the Left and not the Right. Snore’s present-day ideological purpose is revealed at the end, in which he issues a sweeping condemnation of all the governments of the present-day European Union for still commemorating the Soviet Union (Strickland speaks this part of the narration over an image of a couple of statues meant to represent Lenin and Stalin — though they’re not actually very good likenesses — without any clue as to where they are, which would seem relevant if the idea is to critique the governments of Western Europe for not adopting his view of the Soviet Union, its history and its crimes) — and his film seems aimed particularly at modern-day Russia, where there’s a good deal of nostalgia for the Communist years (associated in many modern Russians’ minds not with atrocities but with relative plenty and social equality as opposed to the corrupt buccaneer capitalism which replaced it) and Vladimir Putin, first as president and then as prime minister, has become the latest in a long line of autocrats in Russian history that, contrary to Snore, well pre-dated Communist ideology or the Soviet Union — including Stalin’s role models Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great as well as Lenin and Stalin himself.
In fairness to The Soviet Story, I must point out that I saw it under adverse circumstances, in a 56-minute TV version cut down from Snore’s 86-minute original and in a badly framed edition (probably a glitch from the conversion from analog TV, with its 1.33-1 screen ratio, to digital’s 1.78-1) that cut off much of the subtitles so it was difficult to discern much of what Snore’s non-English-speaking interviewees were actually saying.
This morning I also watched a chilling if overwrought documentary recently shown on PBS: The Soviet Story, a production from a Latvian company called Labvakar, directed and written by Edvins Snore, whose movie would be a good deal more moving if he had just stuck to the facts he could document and not placed them in a hard-Right ideological, philosophical and propagandist context designed to discredit all forms of socialism, liberalism and any other political-economic philosophy but lassiez-faire capitalism and worship of “The Market.” The basic thesis (if I can borrow a word from dialectic terminology whose use in connection with his film Mr. — or is it Ms.? — Snore would probably detest) of The Soviet Story is that Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Hitler were virtually identical; all sought to create a socialist society of one form or another, and all called for mass murders of anyone whose existence they considered an obstacle to their foredoomed attempts to remake human nature.
Snore’s ideological purpose is to trash any and all of the myths and legends by which modern-day socialists (or, for that matter, modern-day liberals and progressives) attempt to dissociate themselves and their goals from the horrors of Communism and Nazism, though his case against Marx and Engels rests mainly on the appearance of one word, “Völkerabfälle,” in the Communist Manifesto. Snore translates this as “racial trash” and explains in his narration (he wrote the film, though in the English version the narration is delivered by Jon Strickland in a quiet, calm, matter-of-fact way that only makes the film more chilling) that this meant that people whose societies hadn’t yet experienced the capitalist transformation (he apparently cited the Basques and the Scottish Highlanders as examples) would have to be exterminated before the transition from capitalism to socialism could be completed. (Ironically, the first socialist revolution occurred in a society that was still largely feudal — indeed, the ideological battle between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks was based largely on this very point: could you make a socialist revolution in a society that hadn’t even finished the transition to capitalism yet? — but this is just one of the many real-life complexities that aren’t in Snore’s film because they don’t fit his ideological schema.)
Snore makes some pretty wild leaps and instances of guilt by association (a favorite tactic of the Right) to establish ideological and inspirational connections between Nazism and Communism, going so far as to claim that the Nazis were really Leftists because they had the word “socialist” in their name and they shared a belief in exterminating enemies of the state — only the Nazis’ targets were based on race while the Soviets’ targets were based on class. Snore includes a montage sequence comparing Nazi German posters on the left side of the screen with Soviet Russian posters on the right (shouldn’t it have been the other way around?) in an effort to depict the similarities of the regimes — though all his montage really proves is that these two despotisms sold themselves to their people in similar ways (it’s really more a commonality of marketing than of ideology). He also dredges up footage of George Bernard Shaw (I presume from his famous Movietone newsreel of 1928) claiming that certain “undesirable” people should be made to justify their existence and (he leaves this unspoken but this is a legitimate inference from what he said) got rid of if they can’t prove they add more value to the world than they take from it in their support. The idea is to tie West European socialism to both the Soviets and the Nazis (and indeed Shaw did say in the 1930’s that democracy was proving inadequate to the economic crisis and maybe the future lay with dictatorships, which is more an embarrassment to Shaw and proof of how far a great mind can go off the rails than the blanket condemnation of all socialism and progressivism Snore wants to paint it as) and to argue that humankind’s only choices are capitalism or barbarism.
I’ll concede one important point to Snore: liberals, progressives and Leftists in general have been considerably softer in their criticisms of Communist atrocities than of fascist ones, and I agree with him that the reason for that is that the fascists, especially the Nazis, committed their crimes against humanity in the name of an ideal of “racial purity” that appalls us as much as the crimes themselves do, while the Soviets committed theirs in the name of human equality, economic freedom (in the Rooseveltian sense of “freedom from want and freedom from fear”) and a classless society, so there’s a definite tendency on the Left towards apologizing for the Communists because we like their stated ideals even if we abhor their policies and tactics. (I’ll even admit that in nit-picking Snore’s film I’m probably at least partially guilty of this myself.)
The real unfortunate aspect of Snore’s film is that his ideological purpose gets in the way of the real meat of his movie: his dramatization of the Soviet evil (he estimates that “at least 20 million” people were killed by the Soviet regime throughout its existence — about 3 1/2 times the total toll of the Nazi Holocaust) and his retellings of classic stories about the brutality and mass murders committed under the Soviet regime: the so-called “genocide by hunger” in Ukraine in 1932-33 (which I already read about in Miron Dolot’s book Execution by Hunger: The Hidden Holocaust — a vivid and well documented account that worked for me more than this film did precisely because Dolot did not have the kinds of historical axes to grind that Snore did; by refusing to underscore the story as a condemnation of all attempts to rein in the private sector Dolot made me rethink my attitude towards the Soviet Union in ways this film did not), the massacre of Poles in Katyn Forest in 1940 and the Soviets’ return of German Jews (and, even more inexplicably, German Communists) who had fled the Nazi persecution in 1940-41 so the Germans could send them to concentration camps and kill them as part of the Holocaust. The film also makes clear that the Nazi-Soviet alliance from August 1939 to June 1941 was not a mere “non-aggression pact” but an actual, active military partnership (though, true to form, in depicting the partition of Poland between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia as “evidence” of the identity between the two he ignores the long history of German and Russian governments dividing up Poland between them, which predated both the Nazis and the Soviets by more than a century).
Had Snore just stuck to the historical facts and not attempted to condemn all Left-of-center politics by association — and in particular had he avoided his bizarre attempts to cite the Soviets as Hitler’s inspiration (he says it was the Soviet success at mass murder that inspired Hitler to order the Holocaust, and uses Joseph Goebbels’ publicly expressed admiration of Lenin to tie the Soviets and the Nazis ideologically — ignoring the fact that when Goebbels said those things he was part of a Left-wing movement within the Nazi party that Hitler subsequently purged, though he kept Goebbels on when he renounced the Left-wing variant of Nazism and convinced Hitler of his personal loyalty) and his bizarre attempt to recast Nazism as a movement of the Left and not the Right. Snore’s present-day ideological purpose is revealed at the end, in which he issues a sweeping condemnation of all the governments of the present-day European Union for still commemorating the Soviet Union (Strickland speaks this part of the narration over an image of a couple of statues meant to represent Lenin and Stalin — though they’re not actually very good likenesses — without any clue as to where they are, which would seem relevant if the idea is to critique the governments of Western Europe for not adopting his view of the Soviet Union, its history and its crimes) — and his film seems aimed particularly at modern-day Russia, where there’s a good deal of nostalgia for the Communist years (associated in many modern Russians’ minds not with atrocities but with relative plenty and social equality as opposed to the corrupt buccaneer capitalism which replaced it) and Vladimir Putin, first as president and then as prime minister, has become the latest in a long line of autocrats in Russian history that, contrary to Snore, well pre-dated Communist ideology or the Soviet Union — including Stalin’s role models Ivan the Terrible and Peter the Great as well as Lenin and Stalin himself.
In fairness to The Soviet Story, I must point out that I saw it under adverse circumstances, in a 56-minute TV version cut down from Snore’s 86-minute original and in a badly framed edition (probably a glitch from the conversion from analog TV, with its 1.33-1 screen ratio, to digital’s 1.78-1) that cut off much of the subtitles so it was difficult to discern much of what Snore’s non-English-speaking interviewees were actually saying.
Tuesday, November 3, 2009
The Man with Nine Lives (Columbia, 1940)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran a movie I’d recorded October 30, when TCM did a marathon of Boris Karloff’s movies and I set the DVD recorder to get all the films on their schedule I didn’t already have on DVD — including the two from his cycle of five films for Columbia from 1939 to 1942 inexplicably left out of the recent Columbia Karloff DVD package, The Man with Nine Lives and The Devil Commands. While I think The Devil Commands is the best of these films by a wide margin — partly because it had the strongest story source (William Sloane’s moody, atmospheric novel The Edge of Running Water) and partly because it had Edward Dmytryk as director instead of Nick Grindé or Lew Landers, the movie I ran last night was The Man with Nine Lives, mainly because I hadn’t seen it since the 1960’s.
This was the second in the cycle and a pretty close recycling of the first, The Man They Could Not Hang — down to the names of Karloff’s characters. In The Man They Could Not Hang he was Dr. Henryk Savaard; here he’s Dr. Leon Kravaal, and he’s likewise revived from the dead during the course of the narrative — though this time he’s actually dead at the start of the film and he doesn’t appear until over 20 minutes into this 73-minute movie. The film opens with a long written prologue, claiming that “frozen therapy” — chilling the body to sub-normal temperatures to facilitate the effectiveness of operations and medicine — is already an accepted part of medical practice, and surely more applications for it will be discovered. (Some of the Karloff Columbias actually attempted to ground themselves in the science of the time, but this one seems wildly outrageous; one would have to ask writers Karl Brown and Harold Shumate whether they really thought packing people in ice as if they were beers in a cooler at a frat party was one day going to be an integral part of the cure for cancer.)
We then cut to a hospital, one of those rooms where a doctor can operate while a whole bunch of other doctors look on and watch, where Dr. Tim Mason (Roger Pryor) has encased a cancer patient in ice and is pumping liquefied gas into coolers attached to her bed and is blowing fans on her, all in the interests of suppressing her cancer and killing off the malignant cells. When this cockamamie therapy actually works, the hospital is flooded with applications from desperate cancer patients anxious to get the new treatment — and the hospital’s head, Dr. Harvey (Charles Trowbridge), orders Dr. Mason to stop talking to the media and to take a leave of absence. Dr. Mason then explains to his nurse/girlfriend Judith Blair (Jo Ann Sayers) that his own researches in frozen therapy were inspired and stimulated by the previous discoveries of Dr. Leon Kravaal, who published a book called Frozen Therapy and then mysteriously disappeared in 1930. Mason decides to spend his enforced leave to go up to Silver Lake in upstate New York, where Dr. Kravaal lived until his disappearance, and he drags Judith along with him and has to deal with the usual reluctant locals — he gets the typical horror-film warnings not to go to the Kravaal place — and also finds that four locals, Sheriff Stanton (Hal Taliaferro, previously known in the silent era as minor Western star Wally West), district attorney John Hawthorne (John Dilson), coroner Dr. Bassett (Byron Foulger) and spoiled rich kid Bob Adams (Stanley Brown), disappeared at the same time Dr. Kravaal did.
Arriving in the Kravaal home, Mason searches for any remaining records Kravaal might have taken down after he published his book, and when Judith falls through a weak floor to the cellar below she and Mason discover a long underground passageway with several doors that leads to a room where they find the skeleton of a man. Then they find another door that leads to an underground glacier, which Dr. Kravaal had been using as a sort of natural freezer — and they find Dr. Kravaal himself, dead for 10 years but still in a state of suspended animation, and thaw him out with the same technique (including force-feeding him coffee) they used on that cancer patient back at the hospital. When he comes to, he narrates a flashback (during which, oddly, Boris Karloff’s hair looks grayer than it does in the present-day scenes) explaining what happened: he was treating Jasper Adams (Lee Willard), Bob’s uncle, for cancer, only Bob decided that Kravaal was bleeding Jasper’s bank account and trying to collect money from someone who was already dead, so he rounded up the authorities and went out there. Dr. Bassett saw Jasper’s body in a state of frozen therapy and pronounced him dead; Kravaal insisted he was alive; the sheriff and D.A. insisted on arresting Kravaal and he fought back by mixing three toxic chemicals, noting down the proportions, then throwing the beaker to the floor and rendering all five people unconscious, locked in his natural icebox. (The skeleton Mason and Judith found on the floor earlier was Jasper Adams’; he actually came to on Kravaal’s operating table but, with no one attending him, suffered a fall and died of his injuries.)
Kravaal, Mason and Judith realize that if Kravaal himself survived, the others probably did too and could also be thawed out and revived — and after they’re all together, Bob Adams gets the bad news that since more than seven years have passed, he and all the other people in the room have been declared legally dead and therefore there’s no way Bob can inherit his uncle’s fortune — whereupon Bob responds by seizing the piece of paper containing Kravaal’s notes from 10 years earlier and throws it in the fire. Able to remember what chemicals he used but not their correct proportions, Kravaal goes ballistic and insists he’s going to use everyone else in the room as human guinea pigs to discover what concentration of the toxic drugs enables people to survive sub-freezing temperatures. He shoots Bob Adams and kills the other three in the tests — then realizes that because they’d already had the drug, it no longer protected them but instead killed them, and he insists on making Judith his next subject because she and Mason are the only people there who’ve never been exposed before. Judith actually survives the drug, but just then a search party led by Silver Lake’s current sheriff (Ivan Miller) and alerted to the situation by Pete Daggett (Ernie Adams), the man who rented the boat to Mason and Judith that allowed them to get to Kravaal’s home, crashes in and shoots Kravaal, who this time dies for keeps.
The similarities to The Man They Could Not Hang are obvious — particularly the Karloff character keeping the people he feels wronged him in a confined space and using them as hostages, knocking them off one by one — but this film, though pretty ridiculous scientifically, is better constructed dramatically and has the advantage over The Man They Could Not Hang and the third film in the series, Before I Hang, of not attributing the Karloff character’s moral degeneration to his death and resurrection. The Brown-Shumate script for The Man with Nine Lives actually gives Karloff the chance to play a character with a truly tumbled psyche — one moment all smiles and beneficence as he announces his intention not to patent his discovery but to give it to the world for free; the next all snarling and revenge-driven as his scientific obsession and determination to crush anybody who stands in his way takes control of his personality and leads him to murder.
Nick Grindé’s direction is also a bit better than usual; many of the shots are surprisingly atmospheric and the film, once it gets to Kravaal’s place, takes on an old-dark-house aura that helps build the cross between science fiction and horror the director, writers and studio were obviously aiming for. The Man with Nine Lives is hardly a great movie — and the gimmick of Karloff as the obsessed scientist driven mad when he can’t get the authorities or the public to accept his work was done better in some of his other films (notably the 1936 British film The Man Who Changed His Mind, which really set the template for the Columbias and most of Karloff’s other mad-scientist roles and had two considerably more prestigious writers, John L. Balderston and Sidney Gilliatt, than most of Karloff’s later forays into mad-doctor parts) — but it’s a lot of fun and, within its rather twisted plot devices, it actually maintains a level of integrity and provides a showcase for Karloff that shows off his depth as an actor.
I ran a movie I’d recorded October 30, when TCM did a marathon of Boris Karloff’s movies and I set the DVD recorder to get all the films on their schedule I didn’t already have on DVD — including the two from his cycle of five films for Columbia from 1939 to 1942 inexplicably left out of the recent Columbia Karloff DVD package, The Man with Nine Lives and The Devil Commands. While I think The Devil Commands is the best of these films by a wide margin — partly because it had the strongest story source (William Sloane’s moody, atmospheric novel The Edge of Running Water) and partly because it had Edward Dmytryk as director instead of Nick Grindé or Lew Landers, the movie I ran last night was The Man with Nine Lives, mainly because I hadn’t seen it since the 1960’s.
This was the second in the cycle and a pretty close recycling of the first, The Man They Could Not Hang — down to the names of Karloff’s characters. In The Man They Could Not Hang he was Dr. Henryk Savaard; here he’s Dr. Leon Kravaal, and he’s likewise revived from the dead during the course of the narrative — though this time he’s actually dead at the start of the film and he doesn’t appear until over 20 minutes into this 73-minute movie. The film opens with a long written prologue, claiming that “frozen therapy” — chilling the body to sub-normal temperatures to facilitate the effectiveness of operations and medicine — is already an accepted part of medical practice, and surely more applications for it will be discovered. (Some of the Karloff Columbias actually attempted to ground themselves in the science of the time, but this one seems wildly outrageous; one would have to ask writers Karl Brown and Harold Shumate whether they really thought packing people in ice as if they were beers in a cooler at a frat party was one day going to be an integral part of the cure for cancer.)
We then cut to a hospital, one of those rooms where a doctor can operate while a whole bunch of other doctors look on and watch, where Dr. Tim Mason (Roger Pryor) has encased a cancer patient in ice and is pumping liquefied gas into coolers attached to her bed and is blowing fans on her, all in the interests of suppressing her cancer and killing off the malignant cells. When this cockamamie therapy actually works, the hospital is flooded with applications from desperate cancer patients anxious to get the new treatment — and the hospital’s head, Dr. Harvey (Charles Trowbridge), orders Dr. Mason to stop talking to the media and to take a leave of absence. Dr. Mason then explains to his nurse/girlfriend Judith Blair (Jo Ann Sayers) that his own researches in frozen therapy were inspired and stimulated by the previous discoveries of Dr. Leon Kravaal, who published a book called Frozen Therapy and then mysteriously disappeared in 1930. Mason decides to spend his enforced leave to go up to Silver Lake in upstate New York, where Dr. Kravaal lived until his disappearance, and he drags Judith along with him and has to deal with the usual reluctant locals — he gets the typical horror-film warnings not to go to the Kravaal place — and also finds that four locals, Sheriff Stanton (Hal Taliaferro, previously known in the silent era as minor Western star Wally West), district attorney John Hawthorne (John Dilson), coroner Dr. Bassett (Byron Foulger) and spoiled rich kid Bob Adams (Stanley Brown), disappeared at the same time Dr. Kravaal did.
Arriving in the Kravaal home, Mason searches for any remaining records Kravaal might have taken down after he published his book, and when Judith falls through a weak floor to the cellar below she and Mason discover a long underground passageway with several doors that leads to a room where they find the skeleton of a man. Then they find another door that leads to an underground glacier, which Dr. Kravaal had been using as a sort of natural freezer — and they find Dr. Kravaal himself, dead for 10 years but still in a state of suspended animation, and thaw him out with the same technique (including force-feeding him coffee) they used on that cancer patient back at the hospital. When he comes to, he narrates a flashback (during which, oddly, Boris Karloff’s hair looks grayer than it does in the present-day scenes) explaining what happened: he was treating Jasper Adams (Lee Willard), Bob’s uncle, for cancer, only Bob decided that Kravaal was bleeding Jasper’s bank account and trying to collect money from someone who was already dead, so he rounded up the authorities and went out there. Dr. Bassett saw Jasper’s body in a state of frozen therapy and pronounced him dead; Kravaal insisted he was alive; the sheriff and D.A. insisted on arresting Kravaal and he fought back by mixing three toxic chemicals, noting down the proportions, then throwing the beaker to the floor and rendering all five people unconscious, locked in his natural icebox. (The skeleton Mason and Judith found on the floor earlier was Jasper Adams’; he actually came to on Kravaal’s operating table but, with no one attending him, suffered a fall and died of his injuries.)
Kravaal, Mason and Judith realize that if Kravaal himself survived, the others probably did too and could also be thawed out and revived — and after they’re all together, Bob Adams gets the bad news that since more than seven years have passed, he and all the other people in the room have been declared legally dead and therefore there’s no way Bob can inherit his uncle’s fortune — whereupon Bob responds by seizing the piece of paper containing Kravaal’s notes from 10 years earlier and throws it in the fire. Able to remember what chemicals he used but not their correct proportions, Kravaal goes ballistic and insists he’s going to use everyone else in the room as human guinea pigs to discover what concentration of the toxic drugs enables people to survive sub-freezing temperatures. He shoots Bob Adams and kills the other three in the tests — then realizes that because they’d already had the drug, it no longer protected them but instead killed them, and he insists on making Judith his next subject because she and Mason are the only people there who’ve never been exposed before. Judith actually survives the drug, but just then a search party led by Silver Lake’s current sheriff (Ivan Miller) and alerted to the situation by Pete Daggett (Ernie Adams), the man who rented the boat to Mason and Judith that allowed them to get to Kravaal’s home, crashes in and shoots Kravaal, who this time dies for keeps.
The similarities to The Man They Could Not Hang are obvious — particularly the Karloff character keeping the people he feels wronged him in a confined space and using them as hostages, knocking them off one by one — but this film, though pretty ridiculous scientifically, is better constructed dramatically and has the advantage over The Man They Could Not Hang and the third film in the series, Before I Hang, of not attributing the Karloff character’s moral degeneration to his death and resurrection. The Brown-Shumate script for The Man with Nine Lives actually gives Karloff the chance to play a character with a truly tumbled psyche — one moment all smiles and beneficence as he announces his intention not to patent his discovery but to give it to the world for free; the next all snarling and revenge-driven as his scientific obsession and determination to crush anybody who stands in his way takes control of his personality and leads him to murder.
Nick Grindé’s direction is also a bit better than usual; many of the shots are surprisingly atmospheric and the film, once it gets to Kravaal’s place, takes on an old-dark-house aura that helps build the cross between science fiction and horror the director, writers and studio were obviously aiming for. The Man with Nine Lives is hardly a great movie — and the gimmick of Karloff as the obsessed scientist driven mad when he can’t get the authorities or the public to accept his work was done better in some of his other films (notably the 1936 British film The Man Who Changed His Mind, which really set the template for the Columbias and most of Karloff’s other mad-scientist roles and had two considerably more prestigious writers, John L. Balderston and Sidney Gilliatt, than most of Karloff’s later forays into mad-doctor parts) — but it’s a lot of fun and, within its rather twisted plot devices, it actually maintains a level of integrity and provides a showcase for Karloff that shows off his depth as an actor.
Between the Folds (Green Fuse Films/PBS, 2008)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Between the Folds, a 2008 documentary by Vanessa Gould (she’s credited as director, writer and narrator — and, aside to Charles, in the last of those capacities she pronounces the “t” in “often”) about origami. I remembered origami — a traditional Japanese art involving folding square pieces of paper to make often elaborate shapes — from my childhood, when San Francisco public television station KQED (back when the network it was part of was still called National Educational Television!) ran a show about it and for a while I was taking pieces of binder paper, folding them diagonally and tearing off the 2 1/2 inches at the top so they would take on the square shape needed for origami.
What I hadn’t realized is that in the 45 years between those “educational” shows on origami and this one, the art form has become a lot more elaborate and attracted attention from the scientific community, both as a way to teach mathematical concepts and as a sophisticated amusement in which computers are used to design origami patterns, which are then executed by hand and often result in elaborate sculptures of elephants and other animals. I found the show sometimes excruciatingly boring, sometimes fascinating — I especially liked MIT professor Erik Dumaine, a real-life Doogie Howser who went to college at 12, got his Ph.D. at 20 and is a full professor at his alma mater at 24. He’s got long hair, a winning smile, and is cute in a kind of dorky way I find appealing — and he has that disarming manner of someone who’s so much smarter than you are he doesn’t need to push that in your face.
There were all sorts of people profiled, including artists who work exclusively in origami and have had exhibits and sold works (and one of the artists profiled actually manufactures his own handmade paper on which to execute his origami creations), and the whole show was appealing but also a bit “precious,” taking an approach that unquestioningly endorses the importance of the subject matter and expects us to do so too. The library put this on in full “discussion” mode, complete with a post-film Q&A (which I skipped out on) and a group of origamists doing their thing at a table in the library’s first-floor lobby. It’s supposed to be on the Independent Lens series on PBS (though it’s anybody’s guess whether our KPBS affiliate will bother to show it at all, or if they do if they’ll put it on exclusively at 2 a.m. the way they ghettoize a lot of PBS’s more esoteric programming) and it’s a program I’d recommend with reservations; like the origamists themselves, Gould’s movie is a bit too clever, too “twee,” for its own good — but it’s still a lot of fun and it’s a good deal nicer to spend an hour on TV with people who get off on paper folding than put up with the screaming meemies on Fox news!
The film was Between the Folds, a 2008 documentary by Vanessa Gould (she’s credited as director, writer and narrator — and, aside to Charles, in the last of those capacities she pronounces the “t” in “often”) about origami. I remembered origami — a traditional Japanese art involving folding square pieces of paper to make often elaborate shapes — from my childhood, when San Francisco public television station KQED (back when the network it was part of was still called National Educational Television!) ran a show about it and for a while I was taking pieces of binder paper, folding them diagonally and tearing off the 2 1/2 inches at the top so they would take on the square shape needed for origami.
What I hadn’t realized is that in the 45 years between those “educational” shows on origami and this one, the art form has become a lot more elaborate and attracted attention from the scientific community, both as a way to teach mathematical concepts and as a sophisticated amusement in which computers are used to design origami patterns, which are then executed by hand and often result in elaborate sculptures of elephants and other animals. I found the show sometimes excruciatingly boring, sometimes fascinating — I especially liked MIT professor Erik Dumaine, a real-life Doogie Howser who went to college at 12, got his Ph.D. at 20 and is a full professor at his alma mater at 24. He’s got long hair, a winning smile, and is cute in a kind of dorky way I find appealing — and he has that disarming manner of someone who’s so much smarter than you are he doesn’t need to push that in your face.
There were all sorts of people profiled, including artists who work exclusively in origami and have had exhibits and sold works (and one of the artists profiled actually manufactures his own handmade paper on which to execute his origami creations), and the whole show was appealing but also a bit “precious,” taking an approach that unquestioningly endorses the importance of the subject matter and expects us to do so too. The library put this on in full “discussion” mode, complete with a post-film Q&A (which I skipped out on) and a group of origamists doing their thing at a table in the library’s first-floor lobby. It’s supposed to be on the Independent Lens series on PBS (though it’s anybody’s guess whether our KPBS affiliate will bother to show it at all, or if they do if they’ll put it on exclusively at 2 a.m. the way they ghettoize a lot of PBS’s more esoteric programming) and it’s a program I’d recommend with reservations; like the origamists themselves, Gould’s movie is a bit too clever, too “twee,” for its own good — but it’s still a lot of fun and it’s a good deal nicer to spend an hour on TV with people who get off on paper folding than put up with the screaming meemies on Fox news!
Monday, November 2, 2009
The Blackbird (MGM, 1926)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film I picked out was The Blackbird, a Lon Chaney vehicle from MGM in 1926 that was directed by Tod Browning (one of their 10 films together) from a script by Waldemar Young based on a story by Browning himself. While this was one of the most highly regarded films either Chaney or Browning made when it first came out, it’s become oddly obscure and is more rarely revived than some of their others, though I remember seeing it in the 1970’s and being mightily impressed. It didn’t seem as strong this time around, mainly because it isn’t as kinky as some of their other collaborations (particularly The Unholy Three and The Unknown) and it’s an oddly static movie — much of it consists of long sequences in confined spaces — but it’s still quite good.
It’s set in the Limehouse district of London, where The Bishop (Lon Chaney), a crippled cleric, leads a mission and attempts to help the poor people in the area — and his brother Don Lee, a.k.a. The Blackbird (also Lon Chaney), is a street criminal and robs people to help support the Bishop’s mission. The relatively decent people living in Limehouse say that it’s a pity the Blackbird undoes all the good work the Bishop tries to do. The Blackbird hangs out at a combination music hall and pub where his ex-wife, Limehouse Polly (Doris Lloyd), performs — and when a new act, a puppet show in which the woman puppet is voiced by Fifi Lorraine (Renée Adorée), debuts there, he gets a mad infatuation with Fifi. The problem is Fifi has eyes for someone else: West End Bertie (Owen Moore — Mary Pickford’s first husband), who comes in dressed as an upper-class “toff” with two women on either side but still makes eyes at Fifi. Two thugs (Sidney Bracey and Ernie Adams) come in and rob Bertie’s girlfriends, and the Blackbird catches on at once: Bertie is himself a thief who robs people by encouraging them to go “slumming” in Limehouse, whereby his hired thugs stick them up and the three of them split the proceeds afterwards.
Bertie and Fifi fall in love and Bertie proposes to her; the two of them approach the Bishop, asking him to perform their wedding, and he says he’ll do it only if Bertie gives up crime. The Bishop hides Bertie and Fifi out in a secret room of the mission, and at one point when he’s summoned we see the Blackbird enter the building, then go into a quick transformation, curling up his leg to make himself look crippled, and thus two-thirds of the way through the movie we’re finally made aware that the Bishop and the Blackbird are not brothers, but are in fact the same person. (On the TCM showing I recorded Robert Osborne shamefully gave away this part of the plot in his introduction, where he said that Chaney was playing a character in disguise — undoing Browning’s carefully planted fiction that he was two separate people, though an early scene showing the Blackbird supposedly carrying on a conversation with the unseen Bishop at least dropped a hint.) It ends with the Blackbird taking a bad fall — at first it looked like he was having a heart attack, but later he explains that he had posed as a cripple so long that he had actually become one — and Chaney getting a death scene almost operatic both in its intensity and its duration before he sends the lovers on their way and expires.
Though the motives for Chaney’s disguise remain unclear, The Blackbird remains a powerful melodrama and a testament to Chaney’s skill and versatility as an actor (a versatility his son Creighton, a.k.a. Lon Chaney, Jr., regrettably did not inherit from him) as well as a clear source of inspiration for Bowery at Midnight, the best of Bela Lugosi’s films for Monogram (though Bowery at Midnight’s quality is only relative and the people who made it hardly had the imagination of Browning or the makers of the other film that inspired their plot, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), particularly in the plot gimmick of a criminal disguising himself as a mission owner doing social work in a particularly raunchy and infamous location.
The film I picked out was The Blackbird, a Lon Chaney vehicle from MGM in 1926 that was directed by Tod Browning (one of their 10 films together) from a script by Waldemar Young based on a story by Browning himself. While this was one of the most highly regarded films either Chaney or Browning made when it first came out, it’s become oddly obscure and is more rarely revived than some of their others, though I remember seeing it in the 1970’s and being mightily impressed. It didn’t seem as strong this time around, mainly because it isn’t as kinky as some of their other collaborations (particularly The Unholy Three and The Unknown) and it’s an oddly static movie — much of it consists of long sequences in confined spaces — but it’s still quite good.
It’s set in the Limehouse district of London, where The Bishop (Lon Chaney), a crippled cleric, leads a mission and attempts to help the poor people in the area — and his brother Don Lee, a.k.a. The Blackbird (also Lon Chaney), is a street criminal and robs people to help support the Bishop’s mission. The relatively decent people living in Limehouse say that it’s a pity the Blackbird undoes all the good work the Bishop tries to do. The Blackbird hangs out at a combination music hall and pub where his ex-wife, Limehouse Polly (Doris Lloyd), performs — and when a new act, a puppet show in which the woman puppet is voiced by Fifi Lorraine (Renée Adorée), debuts there, he gets a mad infatuation with Fifi. The problem is Fifi has eyes for someone else: West End Bertie (Owen Moore — Mary Pickford’s first husband), who comes in dressed as an upper-class “toff” with two women on either side but still makes eyes at Fifi. Two thugs (Sidney Bracey and Ernie Adams) come in and rob Bertie’s girlfriends, and the Blackbird catches on at once: Bertie is himself a thief who robs people by encouraging them to go “slumming” in Limehouse, whereby his hired thugs stick them up and the three of them split the proceeds afterwards.
Bertie and Fifi fall in love and Bertie proposes to her; the two of them approach the Bishop, asking him to perform their wedding, and he says he’ll do it only if Bertie gives up crime. The Bishop hides Bertie and Fifi out in a secret room of the mission, and at one point when he’s summoned we see the Blackbird enter the building, then go into a quick transformation, curling up his leg to make himself look crippled, and thus two-thirds of the way through the movie we’re finally made aware that the Bishop and the Blackbird are not brothers, but are in fact the same person. (On the TCM showing I recorded Robert Osborne shamefully gave away this part of the plot in his introduction, where he said that Chaney was playing a character in disguise — undoing Browning’s carefully planted fiction that he was two separate people, though an early scene showing the Blackbird supposedly carrying on a conversation with the unseen Bishop at least dropped a hint.) It ends with the Blackbird taking a bad fall — at first it looked like he was having a heart attack, but later he explains that he had posed as a cripple so long that he had actually become one — and Chaney getting a death scene almost operatic both in its intensity and its duration before he sends the lovers on their way and expires.
Though the motives for Chaney’s disguise remain unclear, The Blackbird remains a powerful melodrama and a testament to Chaney’s skill and versatility as an actor (a versatility his son Creighton, a.k.a. Lon Chaney, Jr., regrettably did not inherit from him) as well as a clear source of inspiration for Bowery at Midnight, the best of Bela Lugosi’s films for Monogram (though Bowery at Midnight’s quality is only relative and the people who made it hardly had the imagination of Browning or the makers of the other film that inspired their plot, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), particularly in the plot gimmick of a criminal disguising himself as a mission owner doing social work in a particularly raunchy and infamous location.
A Daughter’s Conviction (Johnson/Lifetime, 2006)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was one I recorded yesterday from Lifetime: A Daughter’s Conviction, also known as The Perfect Suspect (the title under which imdb.com listed it), a 2006 TV-movie made in British Columbia, Canada (and set in Seattle so British Columbia can conveniently stand in for it) and dealing with Jo Hansen (Brooke Nevin), who grew up there but left for New York to attend college. She’s about to graduate when she goes back home for spring break to reconnect with her mother, Maureen (Kate Jackson), only when she arrives she finds her stepfather, Jack McBride (Steve Francis), dead on their living-room floor and mom passed out by the side of the pool. The police at first assume Jo killed her stepfather, and when her alibi checks out — much to their disgust — they fasten on Maureen as “the perfect suspect” and promptly arrest her.
It turns out that the McBrides had such a relentlessly dysfunctional marriage George and Martha from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? look like a model couple by comparison — like Albee’s characters they were fond of drinking way too much for their own good (especially since Maureen is bipolar and a lot of her medications are not supposed to be mixed with alcohol) and getting into really vicious arguments, sometimes alone and sometimes in the presence of others who could recall Maureen getting out a gun and waving it at her husband. (She insists that the gun was never actually loaded, but since it was the murder weapon somebody inserted real bullets.) The main part of the film depicts Jo’s attempt to investigate the murder herself, since she becomes convinced early on that the cops aren’t interested in considering anyone but her mom as a suspect, and the assistance of her girlhood friend Erin (Keegan Connor Tracy), who had previously worked for McBride as a research assistant and volunteers to help Jo with her investigation.
The moment Erin appeared on the scene, all unctuous charm and phony good nature, I had her fingered as the real murderess — and that’s what the writing committee (Marc and Becca Doten, Luanne Ensle and Mac Hampton) eventually gave us, though not before throwing such a dizzying array of plots, counterplots and potential other suspects at us that their film frequently threatened to sink under the weight of its own complexity. The gimmick is that McBride had been a columnist for a Seattle newspaper (back when Seattle had newspapers!) for 25 years and had written a memoir that was going to blow the lid on a lot of local scandals — indeed, he’d lined up a literary agent before the book was finished and had written the last words of it the night he was killed. Among the scandals McBride uncovered that Jo stumbles across in her research is one in which the former head of the vice unit of the Seattle Police Department was convicted of leading a rogue squad that killed people, and the brother of that cop, Detective Gibson (John Furey), is leading the investigation into McBride’s murder.
She also runs afoul of Haggerty (Andrew McIlroy), who runs an illegal gambling parlor in which McBride played a lot of poker (and to whom McBride owed $165,000 at the time of his murder) and his muscle thug, Ken Curry (John Tench), a 1960’s hippie type who looks like a cross between George Harrison and Charles Manson. With all McBride’s womanizing as well as his gambling — which threatens to run through the fortune Maureen inherited from Jo’s father (her second of four husbands) — he seems like a quite nasty piece of work, though once Maureen is finally cleared the finger of suspicion falls on Sam Lee (Sean Rogerson), Erin’s estranged husband and a former rock musician who attempted to make it big on the heels of Pearl Jam and Nirvana, failed dismally (he released three CD’s locally but never got a major-label deal) and now is described as “a roadie for a band that never tours.”
He’s also a wife-beater whom Erin is determined to keep from gaining custody of their daughter Marybeth (Erica Bernard), and given McBride’s reputation he was suspicious that Erin started an affair with McBride while they were working together and that McBride was Marybeth’s real father. Erin tells Jo that Sam was so paranoid about his daughter’s true parentage that he ordered a paternity test — only it turns out that Erin ordered it herself, not to find out who her daughter’s father was but who her own father was, since she had become convinced it was McBride (her mom was a nurse whom McBride interviewed for a story about medical fraud), and though Maureen insisted that McBride couldn’t have been anybody’s father since he couldn’t have children at all, Erin was so deluded that she ultimately killed him when he refused to recognize her as his daughter, then planted the gun in Maureen’s passed-out hand so when she came to it would look like she did it. (So I had Erin pegged as the murderer but I had her motive wrong; I had assumed she killed McBride because he wouldn’t stop hitting on her.)
As silly as the plot seems in summary, A Daughter’s Conviction is actually a pretty good thriller despite some bits of overdirection by David Winkler — notably all the sequences in which Jo fantasizes how her suspect de jour might have committed the crime — as well as the overly bouncy musical score by Hal Beckett and the regrettable but forgivable absence of any of the hot soft-core porn scenes for which Lifetime is famous. Winkler manages to keep the tension up despite the ridiculously obvious script, and the ending (Erin holds Jo and Maureen hostage in Maureen’s house and is about to shoot Jo when Gibson comes in and shoots the gun out of Erin’s hand) is legitimately gripping while avoiding the bloodbath that ends too many of Lifetime’s thrillers. I’ve seen better movies on Lifetime but this one is easily above average.
The film was one I recorded yesterday from Lifetime: A Daughter’s Conviction, also known as The Perfect Suspect (the title under which imdb.com listed it), a 2006 TV-movie made in British Columbia, Canada (and set in Seattle so British Columbia can conveniently stand in for it) and dealing with Jo Hansen (Brooke Nevin), who grew up there but left for New York to attend college. She’s about to graduate when she goes back home for spring break to reconnect with her mother, Maureen (Kate Jackson), only when she arrives she finds her stepfather, Jack McBride (Steve Francis), dead on their living-room floor and mom passed out by the side of the pool. The police at first assume Jo killed her stepfather, and when her alibi checks out — much to their disgust — they fasten on Maureen as “the perfect suspect” and promptly arrest her.
It turns out that the McBrides had such a relentlessly dysfunctional marriage George and Martha from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? look like a model couple by comparison — like Albee’s characters they were fond of drinking way too much for their own good (especially since Maureen is bipolar and a lot of her medications are not supposed to be mixed with alcohol) and getting into really vicious arguments, sometimes alone and sometimes in the presence of others who could recall Maureen getting out a gun and waving it at her husband. (She insists that the gun was never actually loaded, but since it was the murder weapon somebody inserted real bullets.) The main part of the film depicts Jo’s attempt to investigate the murder herself, since she becomes convinced early on that the cops aren’t interested in considering anyone but her mom as a suspect, and the assistance of her girlhood friend Erin (Keegan Connor Tracy), who had previously worked for McBride as a research assistant and volunteers to help Jo with her investigation.
The moment Erin appeared on the scene, all unctuous charm and phony good nature, I had her fingered as the real murderess — and that’s what the writing committee (Marc and Becca Doten, Luanne Ensle and Mac Hampton) eventually gave us, though not before throwing such a dizzying array of plots, counterplots and potential other suspects at us that their film frequently threatened to sink under the weight of its own complexity. The gimmick is that McBride had been a columnist for a Seattle newspaper (back when Seattle had newspapers!) for 25 years and had written a memoir that was going to blow the lid on a lot of local scandals — indeed, he’d lined up a literary agent before the book was finished and had written the last words of it the night he was killed. Among the scandals McBride uncovered that Jo stumbles across in her research is one in which the former head of the vice unit of the Seattle Police Department was convicted of leading a rogue squad that killed people, and the brother of that cop, Detective Gibson (John Furey), is leading the investigation into McBride’s murder.
She also runs afoul of Haggerty (Andrew McIlroy), who runs an illegal gambling parlor in which McBride played a lot of poker (and to whom McBride owed $165,000 at the time of his murder) and his muscle thug, Ken Curry (John Tench), a 1960’s hippie type who looks like a cross between George Harrison and Charles Manson. With all McBride’s womanizing as well as his gambling — which threatens to run through the fortune Maureen inherited from Jo’s father (her second of four husbands) — he seems like a quite nasty piece of work, though once Maureen is finally cleared the finger of suspicion falls on Sam Lee (Sean Rogerson), Erin’s estranged husband and a former rock musician who attempted to make it big on the heels of Pearl Jam and Nirvana, failed dismally (he released three CD’s locally but never got a major-label deal) and now is described as “a roadie for a band that never tours.”
He’s also a wife-beater whom Erin is determined to keep from gaining custody of their daughter Marybeth (Erica Bernard), and given McBride’s reputation he was suspicious that Erin started an affair with McBride while they were working together and that McBride was Marybeth’s real father. Erin tells Jo that Sam was so paranoid about his daughter’s true parentage that he ordered a paternity test — only it turns out that Erin ordered it herself, not to find out who her daughter’s father was but who her own father was, since she had become convinced it was McBride (her mom was a nurse whom McBride interviewed for a story about medical fraud), and though Maureen insisted that McBride couldn’t have been anybody’s father since he couldn’t have children at all, Erin was so deluded that she ultimately killed him when he refused to recognize her as his daughter, then planted the gun in Maureen’s passed-out hand so when she came to it would look like she did it. (So I had Erin pegged as the murderer but I had her motive wrong; I had assumed she killed McBride because he wouldn’t stop hitting on her.)
As silly as the plot seems in summary, A Daughter’s Conviction is actually a pretty good thriller despite some bits of overdirection by David Winkler — notably all the sequences in which Jo fantasizes how her suspect de jour might have committed the crime — as well as the overly bouncy musical score by Hal Beckett and the regrettable but forgivable absence of any of the hot soft-core porn scenes for which Lifetime is famous. Winkler manages to keep the tension up despite the ridiculously obvious script, and the ending (Erin holds Jo and Maureen hostage in Maureen’s house and is about to shoot Jo when Gibson comes in and shoots the gun out of Erin’s hand) is legitimately gripping while avoiding the bloodbath that ends too many of Lifetime’s thrillers. I’ve seen better movies on Lifetime but this one is easily above average.
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Behind the Mask (Columbia, 1932)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran us a movie from the rather curious collection of movies with Boris Karloff that TCM had run on Saturday: Behind the Mask, not a horror film per se but a fairly conventional undercover cop movie tricked out with a very unconventional Gothic atmosphere, at least for the cops ’n’ robbers genre. As William K. Everson explained in his book The Detective in Film, Behind the Mask was an action vehicle for Jack Holt (something of the Bruce Willis of the early 1930’s) as an FBI agent working with the Secret Service “to break up a drug ring run by Boris Karloff and Edward Van Sloan for an unknown ‘higher-up.’ The writers [Jo Swerling, story and dialogue; Dorothy Howell, continuity] were apparently unable to forget that Karloff and Van Sloan were more familiarly associated with the horror film and incorporated some bizarre electrical machinery and graveyard scenes into their narrative.”
The film begins with some clips from Columbia’s The Criminal Code — made in 1931, a year before Behind the Mask, and also featuring Karloff and leading lady Constance Cummings — showing a small army of prisoners being marched through an exercise yard, then dollies into the prison set (presumably also left over from The Criminal Code) and discovers convicts Henderson (Boris Karloff) and Quinn (Jack Holt). Henderson is telling Quinn that when they get out they should hook up with Arnold (Claude King), a high official who will put them to work in the mysterious “Mr. X”’s drug cartel and enable them to make plenty of money. In fact, Henderson boasts, Arnold has the clout to get him sprung early — but Quinn says he’s too impatient and plans to escape that very night, which he does. The scene shifts to Arnold’s Gothic mansion on the proverbial dark and stormy night, and to a scene between him and his daughter Julie (Constance Cummings) in which she tells him she knows he’s involved in something shady, even though she doesn’t know exactly what, and if he knows what’s good for him he’ll get out of it before it destroys him. Arnold is in mortal fear of being killed by Mr. X, particularly since his housemaid Edwards (Bertha Mann) is a spy for Mr. X, who has installed in his headquarters a 1932 version of an answering machine. She puts in a call to Mr. X’s special phone line and it’s answered by a mechanical contraption which puts the phone receiver next to a transmitter, which in turn is connected to a Dictaphone machine which records the incoming message on a cylinder.
Another high-up figure in the drug ring is Dr. August Steiner (Edward Van Sloan in an outrageously false beard — according to the American Film Institute Catalog, “Contemporary reviewers commented on Edward Van Sloan’s excellent makeup,” which is almost impossible to believe to anyone who sees this film now), who hires Henderson as his hit person and orders him to dispose of Arnold. Thanks to his network of spies, Dr. Steiner discovers that Quinn, who’s shown up at Arnold’s offering to join the gang, is really an FBI guy, and on his orders Henderson kills Burt, the Secret Service agent who was Quinn’s contact. Quinn, whose real name is Jack Hart (obviously the writers were coming as close as possible to the actor’s real name!), gets assigned to fly a plane to pick up drugs from a ship anchored 200 miles offshore — not knowing that the gang has already “made” him and it’s a trap: they’re going to have him bail out and then let him drown in the water off Long Island after he’s delivered their drugs. Julie, to whom Jack has confessed his true name and job, gets wind of this and there’s a great scene in which she’s driving madly in a big car on a windy night, desperate to reach Jack before his plane takes off; she doesn’t make it, but he intuits the plot on his own, rigs up a dummy, attaches it to his parachute and throws it out of his plane, thereby fooling the bad guys while getting away clean.
Then Jack and his supervisor, E. J. Hawkes (Willard Robertson), go to arrest Arnold but find that he’s been taken to Dr. Steiner’s hospital — and when they arrive they learn that Steiner has murdered him by performing unnecessary surgery on him. But they can’t prove it without exhuming his body, and rather than wait for a court order they traipse right over to the graveyard and dig it out, planning to have an autopsy performed by Dr. Alec Munsell (also Edward Van Sloan), who’s head of a citizens’ committee that has offered $25,000 for the capture of the head of the drug ring. Only when they get the coffin, they find that it doesn’t contain a dead body — instead it contains the drugs the gang has been smuggling (morphine in neat, professionally made medical ampules).
Jack has also discovered the secret recording machine in Dr. Steiner’s office and has stashed Julie in a hotel room, telling her not to leave until he returns so the gang doesn’t kidnap her — which they do anyway, and Jack spills the whole story to the hotel maid and asks her to call the cops, not realizing that she too is part of the gang (though we guessed that almost immediately!) Jack makes it to the hospital where Julie is being held, but is taken prisoner himself, rendered unconscious and placed on Dr. Steiner’s operating table, where Dr. Steiner says he’s a very sick man and needs immediate surgery but is too weak to stand being anaesthetized. Dr. Steiner calls for Edwards, who in addition to being his spy at Arnold’s place is also his nurse, but the masked and gowned woman who enters is really Julie, who escaped, got a gun from somewhere and shoots down Dr. Steiner — who turns out to be the same person as Dr. Munsell and the real head of the dope ring.
Charles found a lot of plot holes in Behind the Mask — like why does a doctor have to go through all these shenanigans of having the drugs smuggled in when he could just order them and claim he needed them for his hospital (my guess was he was dealing in larger quantities than he could justify even as an M.D. with a hospital of his own) and the fact that the drug ring seems to have no way to distribute the stuff (though maybe they were just acquiring the drugs and then selling them to another gang, which actually merchandised them), or why the cops seemed so determined to go after the drug gang but weren’t concerning themselves with who was selling the stuff to users — which is what real narcotics agents would have been most interested in.
Yes, there are a lot of credibility gaps in this movie — including the singular obviousness of Edward Van Sloan’s makeup (director John Francis Dillon tried to avoid “outing” Munsell as the same person as Steiner by shooting him at odd angles and having Van Sloan try to disguse his accent, but the opening credits — which identify Edward Van Sloan’s character name as Munsell, not Steiner — gave the game away), but for my money the film was so rich, so drenched in atmosphere, and so creative in its intermixing of gangster and horror clichés that it was worth watching anyway even though Karloff probably wondered why he was still getting offered roles like this — a pretty stereotypical lieutenant in a criminal organization — after his breakthrough role in Frankenstein. The shots in Steiner’s lab are vividly atmospheric (including some of Kenneth Strickfaden’s cool electrical equipment that no doubt both Karloff and Van Sloan recognized from the lab set of Frankenstein!), and so are the dark-and-stormy-night scenes at Arnold’s home.
The film went through several titles, including In the Secret Service and The Man Who Dared, and it occurred to me that a better title might have been Behind the Masks — plural — because of how many characters on both sides of the law, including the principal hero as well as the principal villain, are in disguise. The acting is on the whole pretty good — Van Sloan clearly enjoyed the chance to play a florid villain instead of the avuncular voice of reason he was in both Dracula and Frankenstein — and though Karloff does the best he can with a pretty one-dimensional role (a far cry from the challenges he got in The Criminal Code, Five Star Final and Frankenstein), the real surprise is Constance Cummings.
In The Criminal Code (as the warden’s daughter who falls in love with unjustly convicted inmate Phillips Holmes) she’d seemed little more than decorative, but here, under Dillon’s powerful direction and with a challenging character to play, she’s excellent at expressing the conflicting loyalties that are tearing her character apart and acts with real power and authority. Behind the Mask is the sort of quirky film that doesn’t let its quirks sink it, but actually gains from them; the overall “horrific” atmosphere and the use of horror actors as well as situations (and the “pre-Code” ability to make narcotics the MacGuffin — though the relative freedom stopped with being able to depict Dr. Steiner’s sadistic surgeries; the notice with the U.S. Copyright office mentions “horrific scenes showing Dr. Steiner’s operations,” but they’re not in the extant prints) elevates this well above the typical crime programmer and makes the movie a sort of good clean scary fun.
I ran us a movie from the rather curious collection of movies with Boris Karloff that TCM had run on Saturday: Behind the Mask, not a horror film per se but a fairly conventional undercover cop movie tricked out with a very unconventional Gothic atmosphere, at least for the cops ’n’ robbers genre. As William K. Everson explained in his book The Detective in Film, Behind the Mask was an action vehicle for Jack Holt (something of the Bruce Willis of the early 1930’s) as an FBI agent working with the Secret Service “to break up a drug ring run by Boris Karloff and Edward Van Sloan for an unknown ‘higher-up.’ The writers [Jo Swerling, story and dialogue; Dorothy Howell, continuity] were apparently unable to forget that Karloff and Van Sloan were more familiarly associated with the horror film and incorporated some bizarre electrical machinery and graveyard scenes into their narrative.”
The film begins with some clips from Columbia’s The Criminal Code — made in 1931, a year before Behind the Mask, and also featuring Karloff and leading lady Constance Cummings — showing a small army of prisoners being marched through an exercise yard, then dollies into the prison set (presumably also left over from The Criminal Code) and discovers convicts Henderson (Boris Karloff) and Quinn (Jack Holt). Henderson is telling Quinn that when they get out they should hook up with Arnold (Claude King), a high official who will put them to work in the mysterious “Mr. X”’s drug cartel and enable them to make plenty of money. In fact, Henderson boasts, Arnold has the clout to get him sprung early — but Quinn says he’s too impatient and plans to escape that very night, which he does. The scene shifts to Arnold’s Gothic mansion on the proverbial dark and stormy night, and to a scene between him and his daughter Julie (Constance Cummings) in which she tells him she knows he’s involved in something shady, even though she doesn’t know exactly what, and if he knows what’s good for him he’ll get out of it before it destroys him. Arnold is in mortal fear of being killed by Mr. X, particularly since his housemaid Edwards (Bertha Mann) is a spy for Mr. X, who has installed in his headquarters a 1932 version of an answering machine. She puts in a call to Mr. X’s special phone line and it’s answered by a mechanical contraption which puts the phone receiver next to a transmitter, which in turn is connected to a Dictaphone machine which records the incoming message on a cylinder.
Another high-up figure in the drug ring is Dr. August Steiner (Edward Van Sloan in an outrageously false beard — according to the American Film Institute Catalog, “Contemporary reviewers commented on Edward Van Sloan’s excellent makeup,” which is almost impossible to believe to anyone who sees this film now), who hires Henderson as his hit person and orders him to dispose of Arnold. Thanks to his network of spies, Dr. Steiner discovers that Quinn, who’s shown up at Arnold’s offering to join the gang, is really an FBI guy, and on his orders Henderson kills Burt, the Secret Service agent who was Quinn’s contact. Quinn, whose real name is Jack Hart (obviously the writers were coming as close as possible to the actor’s real name!), gets assigned to fly a plane to pick up drugs from a ship anchored 200 miles offshore — not knowing that the gang has already “made” him and it’s a trap: they’re going to have him bail out and then let him drown in the water off Long Island after he’s delivered their drugs. Julie, to whom Jack has confessed his true name and job, gets wind of this and there’s a great scene in which she’s driving madly in a big car on a windy night, desperate to reach Jack before his plane takes off; she doesn’t make it, but he intuits the plot on his own, rigs up a dummy, attaches it to his parachute and throws it out of his plane, thereby fooling the bad guys while getting away clean.
Then Jack and his supervisor, E. J. Hawkes (Willard Robertson), go to arrest Arnold but find that he’s been taken to Dr. Steiner’s hospital — and when they arrive they learn that Steiner has murdered him by performing unnecessary surgery on him. But they can’t prove it without exhuming his body, and rather than wait for a court order they traipse right over to the graveyard and dig it out, planning to have an autopsy performed by Dr. Alec Munsell (also Edward Van Sloan), who’s head of a citizens’ committee that has offered $25,000 for the capture of the head of the drug ring. Only when they get the coffin, they find that it doesn’t contain a dead body — instead it contains the drugs the gang has been smuggling (morphine in neat, professionally made medical ampules).
Jack has also discovered the secret recording machine in Dr. Steiner’s office and has stashed Julie in a hotel room, telling her not to leave until he returns so the gang doesn’t kidnap her — which they do anyway, and Jack spills the whole story to the hotel maid and asks her to call the cops, not realizing that she too is part of the gang (though we guessed that almost immediately!) Jack makes it to the hospital where Julie is being held, but is taken prisoner himself, rendered unconscious and placed on Dr. Steiner’s operating table, where Dr. Steiner says he’s a very sick man and needs immediate surgery but is too weak to stand being anaesthetized. Dr. Steiner calls for Edwards, who in addition to being his spy at Arnold’s place is also his nurse, but the masked and gowned woman who enters is really Julie, who escaped, got a gun from somewhere and shoots down Dr. Steiner — who turns out to be the same person as Dr. Munsell and the real head of the dope ring.
Charles found a lot of plot holes in Behind the Mask — like why does a doctor have to go through all these shenanigans of having the drugs smuggled in when he could just order them and claim he needed them for his hospital (my guess was he was dealing in larger quantities than he could justify even as an M.D. with a hospital of his own) and the fact that the drug ring seems to have no way to distribute the stuff (though maybe they were just acquiring the drugs and then selling them to another gang, which actually merchandised them), or why the cops seemed so determined to go after the drug gang but weren’t concerning themselves with who was selling the stuff to users — which is what real narcotics agents would have been most interested in.
Yes, there are a lot of credibility gaps in this movie — including the singular obviousness of Edward Van Sloan’s makeup (director John Francis Dillon tried to avoid “outing” Munsell as the same person as Steiner by shooting him at odd angles and having Van Sloan try to disguse his accent, but the opening credits — which identify Edward Van Sloan’s character name as Munsell, not Steiner — gave the game away), but for my money the film was so rich, so drenched in atmosphere, and so creative in its intermixing of gangster and horror clichés that it was worth watching anyway even though Karloff probably wondered why he was still getting offered roles like this — a pretty stereotypical lieutenant in a criminal organization — after his breakthrough role in Frankenstein. The shots in Steiner’s lab are vividly atmospheric (including some of Kenneth Strickfaden’s cool electrical equipment that no doubt both Karloff and Van Sloan recognized from the lab set of Frankenstein!), and so are the dark-and-stormy-night scenes at Arnold’s home.
The film went through several titles, including In the Secret Service and The Man Who Dared, and it occurred to me that a better title might have been Behind the Masks — plural — because of how many characters on both sides of the law, including the principal hero as well as the principal villain, are in disguise. The acting is on the whole pretty good — Van Sloan clearly enjoyed the chance to play a florid villain instead of the avuncular voice of reason he was in both Dracula and Frankenstein — and though Karloff does the best he can with a pretty one-dimensional role (a far cry from the challenges he got in The Criminal Code, Five Star Final and Frankenstein), the real surprise is Constance Cummings.
In The Criminal Code (as the warden’s daughter who falls in love with unjustly convicted inmate Phillips Holmes) she’d seemed little more than decorative, but here, under Dillon’s powerful direction and with a challenging character to play, she’s excellent at expressing the conflicting loyalties that are tearing her character apart and acts with real power and authority. Behind the Mask is the sort of quirky film that doesn’t let its quirks sink it, but actually gains from them; the overall “horrific” atmosphere and the use of horror actors as well as situations (and the “pre-Code” ability to make narcotics the MacGuffin — though the relative freedom stopped with being able to depict Dr. Steiner’s sadistic surgeries; the notice with the U.S. Copyright office mentions “horrific scenes showing Dr. Steiner’s operations,” but they’re not in the extant prints) elevates this well above the typical crime programmer and makes the movie a sort of good clean scary fun.
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