Too Many Kisses (Paramount, 1925)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase” aired a movie that I’d heard of many years ago but hadn’t had a chance to see: Too Many Kisses, a 1925 Paramount programmer and an unlikely vehicle for Richard Dix, who stars as Richard Gaylord, Jr., son of Richard Gaylord, Sr. (Frank Currier), who has built a fortune with his mining company that Gaylord fils is frittering away through various breach-of-promise settlements with at least seven women (we see the seventh being paid off by Gaylord, Sr. at the start of the movie, complete with an audacious scene in which it looks like, having struck out with the son, she’s going to try to vamp the old man). To stop his son from blowing the family fortune on women, Gaylord père and his assistant Simmons (Joseph Burke) hit on the idea of sending him to the Basque region between France and Spain to negotiate for mining rights to the world’s largest known deposit of a mineral called turidium (turidium, vibranium, unobtanium -- as both a New Yorker critic reviewing Black Panther and an online imdb.com reviewer writing about Too Many Kisses joked, they might as well call it “MacGuffinium”). Simmons thinks that will prevent Gaylord, Jr. from getting into any more scrapes with females because the Basques are a proud and insular people who never marry out of their own race.

Well, the inevitable happens and Gaylord, Jr. falls hard for Yvonne Hurja (Frances Howard, who made only three films before retiring to marry Sam Goldwyn -- ironically, her last film was The Swan, which was remade in the 1950’s as Grace Kelly’s last film before she retired from the screen to get married to an authority figure), daughter of the Basque region’s biggest landowner, Manuel Hurja (Albert Tavernier), even though she’s already sort-of engaged to the local police chief, Don Julio (William Powell). What kept this film at least marginally in the silent canon, both when it was thought lost and once it was rediscovered in 1971 (in a 16-millimeter reduction print from the collection of director Irwin Willat -- even though he didn’t direct it; Paul Sloane did), was that the minor role of “The Village Peter Pan” was played by, of all people, Harpo Marx. Billed with quotation marks around his first name, as “Harpo” Marx (his birth name is Adolph but in 1933 he had it legally changed to Arthur because he understandably didn’t want the same first name as Hitler), he has a minor supporting role, popping up here and there in crowds and having just two significant scenes.

In one of them, he helps William Powell prop up a ladder so Powell can ascend to the woman’s balcony and interrupt Dix’s attempts to make love to her -- and in a bizarre mistaken-identity gag that plays quite differently now than it no doubt did in 1925, Powell kisses Dix’s hand. In his other, he comes upon Dix after the townspeople have tied him up to keep him from going to the town carnival -- where the woman will announce her intended by dancing the Farandole with him (I had visions of Richard Dix asking one of the local townspeople, “How do you dance the Farandole, anyway?”) -- Harpo asks Dix, “Are you sure you can’t move?” When Dix assures him he can’t, Harpo takes a poke at him. A lot of people writing about this movie had pointed out the irony that in his one surviving silent film Harpo “speaks” a line of dialogue via a title, while in all the talkies he made later he never said a word. Though Richard Dix and William Powell are both significant names in Hollywood history and survived well into the sound era, when Too Many Kisses finally had its first theatrical revival since its rediscovery the theatre was filled with Marx Brothers fans who had been waiting for a chance to see Harpo’s silent movie. A lot of critics have wondered whether the great silent clown of the Marx Brothers could have had a solo career in silent comedy, though Harpo’s role in Too Many Kisses is really too small to make that determination. My own inclination is that he probably couldn’t have: he didn’t have the soulfulness of Chaplin or the sheer inventiveness of Keaton, and much of what makes Harpo funny in the Marx Brothers movies is precisely the incongruity of a mute character in what are otherwise pretty relentlessly dialogue-driven films.

Written by Gerald Duffy based on an original story called “A Maker of Gestures” by John Monk Saunders -- who, like his star, was more comfortable in action movies than comedies (Saunders’ next script for Paramount would be for the Academy Award-winning film Wings,the World War I aviation movie that seems to have set the cliches for all military aviation movies since) -- Too Many Kisses is an all too predictable silent rom-com. One imdb.com reviewer said it could have worked better with a different male lead -- it’s really the sort of insouciant tale of romantic intrigue in a foreign country Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. had specialized in a decade earlier (and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. would explore in the minor but charming 1931 film I Like Your Nerve) -- and with that in mind I found myself imagining how Buster Keaton might have played it. (I thought Keaton rather than the other great comedians of the time because he was the one who most often played upper-class twits.) Of course a Keaton Too Many Kisses would have been a very different film from the one we have; for one thing, he would have crammed it full of big acrobatic “trajectory” gags, and he would probably have wanted to show the turidium mine in operation so he could do gags with it and work out an Electric House-type system to extract the stuff more efficiently.

As it is, Too Many Kisses is an O.K. film, which when it was new was probably the sort of film you saw when you decided just to “go to the movies” rather than concern yourself with what movie was actually playing or who was in it. The writers miss obvious plot points that have become clichéd in other movies -- I was expecting when Gaylord, Sr. showed up in the Basque city of Poitigny (yes, I know it’s supposed to be on the border of Spain and France, but that still seems like an awfully French name for a Spanish town) that he (and we) would learn that Manuel owned the land with the world’s largest supply of turidium and therefore for Gaylord’s son to romance Manuel’s daughter was, among other things, a sound business decision that would put these huge mineral holdings at the Gaylord Company’s disposal. It’s an O.K. movie and a fascinating footnote to the Marx Brothers’ career, but it’s hardly a significant addition to the canon of surviving silent films -- especially when potentially great movies like Herbert Brenon’s 1926 film of The Great Gatsby remain lost!

Suspense (King Brothers Productions/Monogram, 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 9:15 my husband Charles and I watched the “Noir Alley” showcase on Turner Classic Movies and saw a really quirky movie that’s long been a special favorite of mine: Suspense, a 1946 production from Monogram that showed the studio getting ready to move into the big time. They’d hit it big in 1945 when producers Maurice and Frank King (their original last name was Kozinski) did a biopic of John Dillinger after the Production Code Administration had finally lifted their flat and absolute ban on movies about the infamous outlaw whose striking resemblance to Humphrey Bogart probably “made” Bogart’s career since he became a star on both stage and film playing the Dillinger-esque Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest. With Bogart tied up at major studios and too old for the part by then, they grabbed Lawrence Tierney for the lead and Anne Jeffreys as his moll, spent $65,000 on the production and had a huge hit. So Monogram president Steve Broidy green-lighted the King brothers to make a $1.1-million extravaganza featuring Monogram’s ice-skating star, Belita (actually a British woman named Maria Belita Jepson-Turner who competed for Britain in the 1936 Winter Olympics at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany -- though she lost the gold medal to Sonja Henie of Norway, winning her third consecutive Olympic figure-skating gold and setting up the situation -- as well as generating a lot of stock footage for -- Henie’s film debut, One in a Million). Monogram signed Belita to compete with Henie at 20th Century-Fox and Vera Hruba Ralston at Republic, ice-skating queens who had parlayed their fame on ice into movie stardom doing elaborate production numbers on skates in films with paper-thin plots. Belita’s first two Monogram movies, Silver Skates and Lady, Let’s Dance, were very much in the mold of Henie’s films, but for her third Monogram film she, the King Brothers and screenwriter Philip Yordan decided to strike out and feature her in a film noir.

When I first saw this film in the early 1980’s I was astonished that, unlike Henie and Ralston, Belita could actually act; in Suspense (originally called Glamour Girl until the Kings and their superiors at Monogram realized that would seem like just another skating musical instead of a major departure) she plays Roberta Elva, a hard-bitten skate performer who’s married her impresario, Frank Leonard (Albert Dekker). She’s become the star of his “Ice Palace” revue but she’s not particularly happy off-rink; she suggests world-weariness by delivering her lines in a low tremolo much like the one Barbara Stanwyck used in Double Indemnity and she drifts into a sort-of affair with fleeing gangster Joe Morgan (Barry Sullivan, second-billed). Joe has come to L.A. because both New York and Chicago have become too “hot” for him (for reasons screenwriter Yordan carefully keeps ambiguous). He looks up Max (George E. Stone), an old friend from New York who’s running a shooting gallery at a carnival midway across from Frank Leonard’s Ice Palace. Indeed, director Frank Tuttle opens Suspense with a shot that still packs a wallop: a young blonde woman wields a pistol and threatens to shoot someone, and then the camera pulls back to show she’s at Max’s shooting gallery and all she’s about to shoot is a metal duck target. The girl is Ronnie (a surprisingly effective adult Bonita Granville), an old flame of Joe’s from his days in Chicago, and Yordan proves himself a disciple of Chekhov in “planting” her this early even before Joe has landed a job selling peanuts at Leonard’s theatre and has started to lust after Roberta.

I’m sure I had a tape of this on VHS and had probably shown it for Charles before, but he hadn’t remembered seeing it and, while he liked the film overall, he had problems with it. It’s billed as a film noir but he argued it was really a pretty standard romantic triangle -- though it becomes more noir-ish as it progresses -- and it’s also a late entry in that odd sub-genre of romantic melodramas from the 1930’s like Other Men’s Women and Dante’s Inferno in which a proletarian rises to riches and social prominence only to lose it all and end up back where the writers, with a surprising degree of class prejudice, tell us he “belongs.” Joe Morgan gets a job selling peanuts at the ice arena, only to win an instant promotion when he watches Frank rehearse Roberta’s latest stunt -- skating through a paper-covered hoop with the paper tearing as she bursts through -- and suggests a variant that will make the stunt more dangerous and thrilling. Instead of just a hoop, he suggests it be ringed with swords that could cut her to pieces if she aimed her leap wrong. Though for Belita’s sake the actual knives were made of rubber, it still looks scary as hell on screen and serves as the climax of a series of skating dances including an Afro-Cuban number (with Miguelito Valdes, Desi Arnaz’s principal rival in the Latin singer/bandleader department in the mid-1940’s: both of them recorded “Babalu,” and though he wasn’t as scary in the opening cries Valdes phrased the rest of the song more sensitively) and a solo skate ballet called “Introspection” Belita insisted on being in the film or she would walk off it.

Yordan’s script is full of brittle wisecracks as well as classic film noir situations, though it suffers (as Charles pointed out) from the characters’ lack of moral ambiguity: under her hard-bitten, ferociously independent exterior Belita is a good girl at heart; Barry Sullivan plays Joe Morgan on one note of thuggishness throughout (ironically the King brothers had discovered two finer noir actors who could have played the part better, Alan Ladd and Robert Mitchum, but by 1946 both of them had decamped to major studios and were out of Monogram’s price range); and only Albert Dekker as Leonard has any moral ambiguity, descending from exploitative but still halfway decent guy to revenge figure after he picks up on Joe’s growing attachment to Belita. The film’s turning point comes when Leonard suggests to his skating star that they return to the cabin in the mountains which he owns and where they had their honeymoon. Only Joe Morgan crashes their party and Frank responds by getting one of the three hunting rifles he has on his wall and stalking Joe with it, but the shot goes wild, causes an avalanche of snow and apparently burying Frank with it. Only as Joe and Roberta continue their partnership and reopen the ice shows, poltergeist-like things start happening around the theatre that suggest Frank is still alive -- including the sudden appearance of Frank’s pipe, which he had custom-made and is therefore unique. Frank ultimately turns up alive and determined for revenge, but Joe kills Frank and stuffs his body into a roll-top desk which he has taken out and burned (apparently sometime or other he’d seen The Front Page), replacing it with a new one and getting Roberta’s suspicions up.

She ultimately cuts off her relationship, such as it ever was, with Joe (we’ve seen him grab her and plant kisses on her, to which she reacted neither by yielding or trying to fight him off -- apparently she’s accepted dealing with men’s amorous attractions as the price she has to pay for having a career), and he gets himself shot to death by Ronnie (ya remember Ronnie?), the girl from Chicago who kills him for rejecting her in favor of Roberta. Though it has its unevennesses and could have been even better than it is, Suspense is a quite exciting noir thriller, with Belita’s big skate dances more smoothly integrated into the film than you’d expect and the typical noir atmosphere of gloom and doom hanging over it. Where Charles thought it went wrong was in the casting of Barry Sullivan, a good actor but one who plays the character as too much of an unrelieved thug to work as a noir protagonist -- having just re-read my post on the 1948 film Sorry, Wrong Number and noted that I’d said John Garfield would have been a better choice for the male lead than Burt Lancaster, I found myself wishing it would have been Garfield instead of Sullivan here: Garfield could play a thug and make you at least understand him, while Sullivan comes off as an out-and-out boor and one wonders why Roberta is willing even to consider having sex with him.

Topaz (Alfred Hitchcock Productions/Universal, 1969)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Just as the week before TCM had followed up their “Noir Alley” screening of an old Monogram picture with one of Alfred Hitchcock’s later films for Universal, last night they followed up Suspense with Topaz, an O.K. but highly problematical movie Hitchcock made in 1969 on uncertain auspices. Barred by Universal’s edict from making the film he really wanted to do -- Sir James M. Barrie’s 1920 romantic fantasy Mary Rose (which, though it contains no suspense or thriller elements, would have been a marvelous story for the director of Vertigo) -- he had just directed a Cold War spy adventure called Torn Curtain, starring Paul Newman and Julie Andrews, which had been a flop. Now he was stuck for his next film, and instead of being able to develop his own story he asked Universal to assign him something -- and the something they assigned him was Topaz, a best-selling novel by Exodus author Leon Uris. They also assigned Uris to do the screenplay based on his own book -- a typically sprawling Uris tale involving a confusing welter of plot lines inhabited by cardboard characters, either all good or all bad. Hitchcock and Uris had plenty of arguments over the film, many of them over Hitchcock’s desire to give the villains some human qualities so the film would have the kinds of moral ambiguities Hitchcock had long sought in his stories, and finally Hitchcock fired Uris on the eve of shooting and asked Arthur Laurents, whom he’d worked with on the 1948 film Rope, to rewrite the script. Laurents turned him down, so Hitchcock then approached Samuel Taylor, who’d written the script for Vertigo, to take over.

Taylor agreed but with shooting scheduled to begin almost immediately on a complicated set of locations including Copenhagen, New York, Paris and whatever piece of real estate they used to represent Cuba (the story takes place in October 1962 and deals with the run-up to the Cuban Missile Crisis; the MacGuffin is the text of the agreement between the Soviet Union and Cuba to put ballistic missiles on the island), he didn’t have time to write the entire movie beforehand. So Taylor would send scenes to the set sometimes minutes before Hitchcock shot them -- a style of filmmaking Hitchcock hated. He always liked to have his storyboards drawn and the script in absolutely final form before he shot a frame, and he would sometimes demoralize his actors by telling them on the first day of shooting that for him the fun part of filmmaking -- the preparation -- had already happened. The opening credits are shown over one of the Soviet Union’s big parades of military hardware down the streets of Moscow -- a sort of arms display soon-to-be-ex-President Donald Trump wanted to bring to the U.S. -- and we see a title that abruptly and unmistakably makes this film’s status as Cold War propaganda all too clear: “Somewhere in this crowd is a high Russian official who disagrees with his government's display of force and what it threatens. Very soon his conscience will force him to attempt an escape while apparently on a vacation with his family.” The Russian defector is Boris Godunov -- oops, I mean Kuzenov (Per-Axel Arosenius) -- and he makes his way out of Copenhagen with his wife (Sonja Kolthoff) and daughter (Tina Hedstrom) in an operation so clumsy that when he finally makes it to Washington, D.C. he criticizes its ineptitude directly to the face of the man who masterminded it, CIA official Michael Nordstrom (John Forsythe, the only member of this cast you’re likely to have heard of before).

As he’s being debriefed he lets the CIA know that there is a highly placed Russian mole in the French delegation to NATO, code-named “Columbine” (a name with much greater and more sinister referents now than it had in 1969!), and he’s the head of a whole group of Russian double agents in the French government called “Topaz.” Among the information the Russians are expecting to get via “Topaz” is how much the United States knows about Russia’s ongoing plans to put ballistic missiles in Cuba, including digging the silos for them and sending soldiers to staff the bases. Because Cubans in general and officials in Fidel Castro’s government in particular won’t deal with Americans, Nordstrom recruits French intelligence agent Andre Devereaux (Frederick Stafford, the closest thing this movie has to a star). The two Cubans Devereaux is particularly interested in are Rico Parra (John Vernon) and his assistant Luis Uribe (Don Randolph), members of Fidel Castro’s security detail when he comes to New York to speak at the United Nations in October 1962 and stays at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem, a mostly Black establishment (which at the time was run, by the way, by former 1930’s and 1940’s bandleader Andy Kirk, whose band, the Clouds of Joy, launched the career of the first major female jazz instrumentalist, arranger and composer, Mary Lou Williams) where Castro stayed because he wanted “a real working-class hotel.” There’s an oddly slapstick scene in which Devereaux sends Phillipe Dubois (Roscoe Lee Browne), a Black florist whose shop is near the hotel, to steal the document so it can be photographed; Dubois and his assistant steal the entire briefcase but aren’t able to return it before Parra notices the loss, has his security detail chase Dubois and try to shoot him -- he makes it back to the flower shop in time but Henri takes the fall and, we’re told later, is tortured and executed once he and Parra return to Cuba.

Parra has a mistress, Juanita de Cordoba (Karin Dor), who unbeknownst to him is not only Devereaux’s affair partner when he’s in Cuba but also the leader of a cell in the anti-Castro Cuban resistance and has installed fellow resisters in Parra’s home as his household staff. In the film’s best scenes, she sends out another anti-Castro Cuban couple to take photographs of the missile bases under construction and the missiles themselves being off-loaded from Russian ships; they get the photos out of the country but her agents are caught and killed, and in the film’s most characteristically “Hitchcockian” scene Parra, who knows she’s in the resistance because one of the agents gave her up under torture before she died, greets her with an embrace, then shoots her, with her long purple dress billowing out under her as she falls dead. (It’s an interesting inversion of the famous scene in Notorious in which Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant find the hidden uranium in Claude Rains’ wine cellar and pose as clandestine lovers to throw Rains off the scent -- when they really were lovers until she met Rains, he proposed to her and Grant,her government handler, told her to go ahead and marry him because that would get her closer to him and the ring of escaped Nazis in Argentina.)

Alas, after Hitchcock and Taylor wrap up the Cuban storyline the film turns flat and dull again, mostly shots of people talking in rooms as they try to figure out who the members of “Topaz” are and how the U.S. and France can plug the leak that’s allowing valuable information from and about NATO to flow to the Soviet Union. Ultimately the second-in-command of “Topaz,” Henri Jarre (French comedian Philippe Noiret) is found out, though he’s killed by the Russians before U.S. or French agents can question him, and in the end “Columbine,” the head of Topaz, is revealed to be Jacques Granville (Michel Piccoli), an old friend of both Devereaux and his wife Nicole (Dany Robin, made up to look like the classic “Hitchcock blonde” but with virtually no depth to her characterization and saddled with one of the worst “French” accents of all time when she’s speaking English -- one wishes she and Frederick Stafford had been allowed to speak French in their scenes en famille and been subtitled instead of having to hear her unequal struggle with English). There’s a final chase scene with Granville trying to escape once he knows the U.S. and French authorities are on to him, and Hitchcock actually shot three different endings. In one, Granville flies out of the country to seek asylum in the Soviet Union, and he and Devereaux pass each other and wave as they fly out of France in different planes. In one, the Russians off-handedly kill Granville now that he’s no longer of use to them. The third ending, the one that exists in most prints (including the one we saw), was pieced together from previously shot material and shows Granville going into his home, followed by the camera pulling back as we hear a shot, indicating that Granville has committed suicide.

Topaz is not one of Hitchcock’s better movies -- it’s one he personally disliked (fortunately he had at least one more masterpiece up his sleeve -- his next movie, Frenzy, a tale of a sexually motivated serial killer in London in 1972, blessedly free of Cold War allusions and returning Hitchcock to the sort of domestic murder mystery that was one of the things he did best) -- and it’s obvious that both the convoluted structure of Uris’s novel and the unsettled writing situation challenged Hitchcock in all the wrong ways. It’s also obvious that, forced to write it on the fly, Samuel Taylor never had a chance to give the villains the kinds of humanizing qualities Hitchcock wanted. It occurred to me that the writer Hitchcock really needed on the project was John le Carre, who had emerged with his book The Spy Who Came In from the Cold and already had shown himself capable of doing these sorts of espionage tales without Cold War editorializing or James Bond-ish derring-do and making the characters on both sides interesting and multidimensional. (It’s a real pity Hitchcock never filmed anything by le Carre; the two would seem to have been perfect for each other.)

As it stands, Topaz is a perfectly decent but mediocre espionage thriller, and if it didn’t carry Hitchcock’s name as director it probably would have a better reputation than it does -- but we expect more from Alfred Hitchcock than a leaden spy tale with no-name actors. And all the actors in it are no-name (John Forsythe, and maybe Roscoe Lee Browne, are the only people in it you’re likely to have heard of) because in his immediately previous film, Torn Curtain, he had used Paul Newman and Julie Andrews in the leads and their large salaries and profit points had significantly reduced Hitchcock’s own compensation for making the film. As much as Hitchcock had worked as far outside the studio system as he could get during its (and his) heyday, it had enabled him to get stars of the caliber of Cary Grant and James Stewart for reasonable fees; in the post-studio era Hitchcock was just one more producer-director who had either to put up the big money free-lance stars could demand or do without them. Bruce Dern recalled being told by Hitchcock on the set of Hitchcock’s last film, Family Plot, that the reason he had got the lead in it was that someone named “Packinow” had wanted $1 million to play the role. It took Dern a while to realize that “Packinow” was Al Pacino, and Hitchcock said to Dern, “Alfred Hitchcock doesn’t pay $1 million to anybody.” (At that, I don’t think Family Plot would have been as good with Pacino in the lead; it needed a less intense, more “ordinary” person to play the marginal Hollywood loser, and Dern was perfect for the role.) Topaz isn’t a bad movie; it’s just that you expect more from Alfred Hitchcock, and I suspect 1969 audiences did too since the film was a commercial flop.

The Magic Carpet (Columbia, 1951)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I ran for Charles two movies I’d just bought on amazon,com as replacements or gifts: the 1951 Columbia “B” The Magic Carpet, which to the extent it’s known at all it’s for Lucille Ball, complete with dyed red hair that lights up the screen like neon in Supercinecolor, playing an Arab princess and Raymond Burr as a corrupt grand vizier who helps an usurping caliph rule and tax his subjects into oblivion. These two murdered the original caliph and his wife, but before they got her she was able to send their baby son out of the palace on a flying carpet (which flies quite convincingly -- though this was a “B” the effects work was really good, especially for the time!) and into the home of an apothecary, who raised him as his own son until he grew up to be played by John Agar. Agar was a good friend of John Wayne as well as the first husband of Shirley Temple -- both of whom he worked with in his screen debut, John Ford’s Fort Apache (it was sort of like Sue Lyon making her first film in the title role of Lolita, with screenplay by the original author, Vladimir Nabokov, and direction by Stanley Kubrick -- after such prestigious debuts both Agar’s and Lyon’s careers had nowhere to go but down). One can tell Agar is copying John Wayne in his role as Ramoth, the “Scarlet Falcon,” who leads a resistance movement against the usurping caliph (I don’t think I’d realized before just how much David Mathews’ script for The Magic Carpet owed to The Desert Song) even before he learns that he’s the rightful heir. He has the same ramrod-straight posture, the same halting cadence in his line deliveries, and the same attempt to project implacable machismo -- something even Wayne himself didn’t always pull off convincingly (I’ve written before about Robert Mitchum being an authentically masculine man and Wayne a poseur) and just makes Agar look ridiculous.

I’d first read of The Magic Carpet as part of a bizarre footnote to Lucille Ball’s career: she was scheduled to play the second female lead in Cecil B. DeMille’s big circus movie The Greatest Show on Earth, but it was a Paramount production and she still owed Columbia one more film on a three-picture contract. Ball asked Columbia studio head Harry Cohn for a loanout and Cohn refused; then Cohn sent Ball the script of The Magic Carpet in hopes she’d turn it down and therefore he could fire her and not have to pay her for the third film on her contract. Instead Ball took the role in The Magic Carpet, thinking that it was just a “B” and therefore she could finish it before DeMille’s film started shooting -- only as it turned out the dressers on The Magic Carpet had to keep letting out Ball’s costumes and she finally realized that after over a decade of trying, she and Desi Arnaz were about to have their first child. There are a couple of shots in The Magic Carpet that show Ball with a bare midriff and make it clear that Lucie Arnaz was one of those stars that, like Liza Minnelli and Mia Farrow, made her screen debut before she was born. I’ve always liked The Magic Carpet despite its dubious auspices, its weak leading man and its hacky director (Lew Landers) because of the deft balancing act David Mathews pulled off in his script, creating a tale the pre-pubescent boys who were the main audience for a film like this could accept as legitimately thrilling adventure while adult viewers (including the parents those pre-pubescent boys had dragged to the theatre) could enjoy it as camp. Part of the film’s plot is a romantic triangle between Ball’s character, Agar’s and a hanger-on in his band of rebels played by Patricia Medina (then Mrs. Joseph Cotten and an actress who had a respectable career in Columbia “B”’s even though hardly at the level of her husband’s!), and I only wish Mathews could have ended his script with Agar marrying both of them: Islam would have allowed it but the Production Code forbade it -- darn.

Previous moviemagg blog post on The Magic Carpet: https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2009/12/magic-carpet-columbia-1951.html

Supernatural (Paramount, 1933)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The other movie I watched with Charles last night was Supernatural, a quite good 1933 film directed by Victor Halperin and produced by his brother Edward for Paramount, which gave them a major-studio contract right after the surprise success of their independent production White Zombie, starring Bela Lugosi. Supernatural deals with convicted murderess Ruth Rogen (Vivienne Osborne), who turned so violently against men in general that she killed three guys she’d been dating in rapid succession -- she’s also a painter and she’s done a life-sized self-portrait in which she poses holding an apple (a marvelous piece of symbolism tying her in with Eve as the original “bad girl”) -- and Roma Courtney (Carole Lombard), an heiress who’s been moping around her big mansion since the unexpected accidental death of her fraternal twin brother John (Lyman Williams -- though he’s dead at the outset of the narrative and there are no formal flashbacks, he’s seen enough in photos, ghostly images and, at one point, his voice on a private record he and Roma made they needed an actor to play him). She has a boyfriend named Grant Wilson (played by Randolph Scott well before he got “typed” as a Western star) as well as a father-like figure named Dr. Carl Houston (H. B. Warner, who played Jesus Christ in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1927 silent The King of Kings -- so when he said, “There is life after death,” I joked, “Look at me! I was crucified and resurrected! I should know!”) and the family attorney, Nick Hammond (William Farnum).

The villain is Paul Bavian (Allan Dinehart), a phony spiritualist who concocts a plan to extract some or all of Roma’s fortune by pretending to put her in touch with her brother’s spirit -- indeed, he goes so far as to break into the mortuary where John Courtney’s body is being readied for burial with some plaster of Parks so he can make a death mask of him for use in his fake seance. Dr. Houston has concocted a theory that the souls of especially notorious criminals live on after they’re executed and inhabit the bodies of others to make them commit similar crimes, and to test his theory he requests the body of Ruth Rogen after her execution to see if he can extract her soul and preserve it so it can’t work its way into someone else’s body -- only he chooses to do this experiment on the proverbial dark and stormy night and the lightning screws things up so instead of getting trapped in Dr. Houston’s equipment, Ruth’s soul finds it way into Roma’s body and goes out to murder Bavian. It seems that Ruth’s homicidal madness started when she was having an affair with Bavian, only he broke it off and gave her a hatred of all men, leading her first to seduce and then kill her hapless victims. (The open portrayal of Ruth’s sexuality and how it drives her homicidal mania very much marks this movie as a product of the so-called “pre-Code” era.)

Though Supernatural has some surprising crudities for a major-studio production -- including some stretches, especially early on, when the soundtrack goes completely quiet, without even any background noise, which made Charles think Supernatural came off more like a film from 1929 than one from 1933 -- it’s a movie I’ve always quite liked. I’m particularly impressed with Carole Lombard’s performance and her ability to change her demeanor, mannerisms and voice depending on whether she’s Roma or Ruth: the same skill Joanne Woodward and Sally Field later brought to their multiple personality movies (The Three Faces of Eve and Sybil, respectively). Charles mentioned Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a precedent for the multiple-personality movie -- and so, when we watched it as a bonus item, did the film’s original trailer -- but the actors who’d played Dr. Jekyll (including Fredric March in a Paramount production from a year earlier, from which I suspect the Halperins recycled some of the sets since the grungy Greenwich Village neighborhood in which Bavian lives, and where he off-handedly kills his obnoxious landlady with a poison-injecting ring he always wears, look a good deal more like 1890’s London than 1930’s New York) wore makeup to make themselves look different, while Lombard didn’t have that sort of help. (In fact Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde specified that Hyde was smaller than Jekyll since he contained only the evil of Jekyll’s personality -- which made me think that the best way to have cast it in the 1930’s or 1940’s would have been to use two actors: Boris Karloff as Jekyll and Peter Lorre as Hyde.)

Supernatural is a little-known but surprisingly effective movie that suggests Lombard had a wider range than the screwball comedy heroines she played in her most famous films, and I suspect both she and Jean Harlow would have been excellent femmes fatales if they’d lived into the film noir era. About the only things I wish the makers of Supernatural had done differently would have been to make Roma’s late brother John one of Ruth Rogen’s victims, which would have more tightly integrated the two big plot strands; and, as much as I love Allan Dinehart’s performance as the villain (both here and in his other best-known film, the Sherlock Holmes drama A Study in Scarlet) I can’t help but wonder how this film might have been even more interesting if the Halperins had got Lugosi to work for them again and play the role.

Previous moviemagg blog post on Supernatural: https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2016/09/supernatural-paramount-1933.html

2020 American Music Awards (Dick Clark Productions, ABC-TV, aired November 22, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last Sunday, November 22 (the 57th anniversary of the assassination of America’s first Roman Catholic President, John F. Kennedy, and the first such anniversary since the election of the second one, Joe Biden) ABC-TV aired the American Music Awards. This was one of those rump “music awards” shows concocted by the late Dick Clark and still put on by his production company (the man is dead, but his corporation lives on!) and which was harder for me to listen to or watch. That was partly due to the atmosphere created by the production in general and the host, Taraji P. Henson, in particular -- she looks like the sort of desperate party hosts who keeps asking her guests to tell her how much fun they’re having because she doesn’t think they’ll have fun unless she repeatedly tells them to -- and partly due to the relentless aural assault of two of my least favorite musical genres, electronic dance music (EDM) and rap (or “hip-hop,” to use the euphemism for rap used by people who actually like it). I give the people currently running Dick Clark Productions credit for stocking their show overwhelmingly with people of color -- the talent roster was largely African-American and most of the performers who weren’t Black were Latino or Latina (I am not under any circumstances going to use that hideous example of politically correct language run amok, “Latinx”!). Dick Clark Productions celebrated the increasing popularity of Latin music by adding more categories for it, though all too much of what passes for “Latin music” today is just over-loud dance or rap with overlays of Latin percussion.

Ironically, the show opened with two white people, Justin Bieber and Shawn Mendes (though with that last name, maybe he counts as Latino even though he doesn’t look it) doing a jumble of songs whose titles I guessed as “I’m So Lonely,” “Oh God (The Way You Hold Me Makes Me Holy),” “The Way You Make Me Feel,” “I Had a Chip on My Shoulder,” and “What If I Fell?” Bieber’s contributions to this weird medley actually sounded good -- like he’s writing self-revelatory songs trying to come to grips with his “bad boy” past and assure us he’ll be better now -- but Mendes’ seemed like the usual “sensitive” singer-songwriter romantic sludge. Next up was a dance number led by Henson and a chorus line that touched on greatness only when it sampled Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy” -- not one of his better songs but a good groove and an accomplishment far above most of the artists represented here. After Henson’s dance number the white Katy Perry and the Black Darius Rucker came together for Perry’s hit “Only Love” -- which I hadn’t realized before was premised on the idea of what you would do if you had only one day left to live -- but it’s a beautiful song and was by far the best item on the program. Afterwards The Weeknd (which is actually an individual, not a group, and he was wearing a bandage on his head that made him look like a cross between the Invisible Man and the Joker -- he wore it on his video segment and later when he made two “live” appearances at the main venue, the Microsoft Theatre in L.A., and I wondered if he’d really had a head injury or it was just part of his costume) joined forces with the unspeakably awful saxophonist Kenny G for a song that appeared to be called “Save Your Tears for Another Day,” an unmemorable tune which The Weeknd illustrated with a video of himself walking down a deserted road while pyrotechnics went off on either side of him.

Then came one of the better parts of the program -- Megan Thee Stallion (whom I admire partly because she’s a “woman of size” -- albeit in great shape and physically able to do spectacular dancing -- and partly because of you’re going to misspell “the,” “thee” seems a much more appealing way to do it than “tha”) doing a rap-dance number called “Body” which celebrated her own and her choristers’ bodies, which were clad in highly revealing black outfits that showed more skin than you’d think possible on a network TV show. I liked it but I’m not sure it would be as effective just as a record without the video portion. After that came a new artist, Lewis Capaldi, singing a song called “(So) Before You Go” which seemed to be hitting all the “sensitive” stops in the manual How to Be a Singer-Songwriter. Then Billie Eilish came out and did a new song called “I Think, Therefore I Am” (well, if Kelly Clarkson could rip off Nietzsche for her song “Stronger,” why couldn’t Eilish do it to Descartes?), which I liked but it didn’t seem as strong as the material on her multi-Grammy Award-winning CD. But at least I give Eilish credit for getting rid of the green shit she’d been wearing in her hair lately that had made it look like birds had crapped big-time on her head. The next number was another typical rap atrocity by Nelly and City Spud whose titles (like a lot of artists on this program, they mashed up several of their songs instead of doing just one) seemed to be “I’m Going Down, Down,” “Who Knows?,” and “Take a Ride with Me.” (No, thank you.) Then Jennifer Lopez (whom I usually can’t stand) and Maluma (whom I’ve liked in other contexts) joined forces for a medley of “Papi” and “Marry Me.” After that Dua Lipa -- yet another performer who’s a single person using a name that sounds like a group -- did an O.K. song called “Levitating.”

Then someone introduced Bell Biv DeVoe as “the first boy band” (really? What about the Four Seasons, the Beach Boys or a bunch of kids from Liverpool, England you may have heard of called The Beatles?) with something called “Do Me, Baby” whose sentiments were as crude as that title (assuming I’ve guessed it right). Afterwards came the show’s concession to country music, Dan + Shea doing a song as interminable as its title: “I Should Probably Go to Bed.” That would probably have been a good idea for me, too, but instead I stuck it out and lasted through some numbers that were at least marginally better than what had come before: 24K Gold’s and Ian Dior’s “Mood,” Shawn Mendes’ “I Wonder What It’s Like to Be Loved by You,” rapper Lil Baby doing “Emotionally Scarred” (a bit more tolerable than most hip-hop because at least the performer exhibited some humility in the face of a traumatic life instead of crudely bragging in the relentless way that is one of the things I most intensely dislike about rap). Bebe Rexha’s and Doja Cat’s “Maybe I’m Jealous” (two talented singers that could move me more with stronger material), someone named Machine Gun Kelly (who turned out to be a white pop-punk artist even though I suspect he was leafing through an old late-1970’s music magazine, saw a photo of the Sex Pistols or the Damned, and thought that was a cool look he should emulate) doing songs called “Bloody Valentine” and “My Ex’s Best Friend” that were the closest things to rock ‘n’ roll on the show (even though the only live parts of the performance were Kelly’s singing and Travis Binder’s drumming -- you could hear a guitar but Kelly, though he was wearing one, wasn’t actually playing it); and the finale, the South Korean boy band BTS doing a couple of songs, one in Korean and one in English in which they mumbled so badly they sounded almost as incomprehensible as they had singing in Korean. At least they’re probably breathing a lot easier over the outcome of the last U.S. Presidential election -- now they have a President who actually gives a damn about South Korea’s national survival instead of one who literally wrote love letters to the crazy North Korean dictator who’s trying to take them over!

Kiss Me Deadly (Parklane Productions, United Artists, 1955)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s “feature” for my husband Charles and I was a Turner Classic Movies showing of the 1955 film Kiss Me Deadly, produced by Victor Saville for Parklane Productions and released through United Artists. For some reason Victor Saville had been the producer to whom hard-boiled detective writer Mickey Spillane sold the rights to all his novels featuring his unscrupulous private-eye character Mike Hammer, who boasts about not only doing the divorce work Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe famously eschewed but using himself and his secretary/girlfriend Velda Wickman to seduce the opposite-sex members of couples claiming divorce on the basis of adultery so each spouse would have cheated and Hammer and Velda could play them off against each other. I remember being introduced to Mike Hammer as a child via reruns of the TV series starring Darren McGavin (still one of the better actors who’s played him) and then running into him again as I was discovering hard-boiled mystery fiction and the films noir made from those stories in the early 1970’s. I remember reading Spillane’s star-making novel, I, the Jury (1953), in 1973 and finding it basically a testosterone-fueled high-school boy’s attempt to write his own The Maltese Falcon; in both books the detective is investigating the murder of either his partner or his friend and soon comes to realize that the woman he’s been dating (and screwing) is the killer -- only the mature Dashiell Hammett had Sam Spade respond by turning her in to the police whereas spoiled-brat Spillane had Mike Hammer simply shoot her -- fulfilling the title that indicated he would be judge, jury and executioner and hold little or any use for such legal niceties as due process.

The other thing about I, the Jury that put off not only me but also Charles (when he read it considerably more recently than I did) was its sheer lubriciousness: Mike Hammer is not only drawn as irresistible to any woman who crosses his path, but his sexual shenanigans are described as clearly and unambiguously as any mainstream writer working for an above-ground publisher could get away with in the 1950’s. In fact, the best comment on this aspect of Spillane I can think of is an episode of the TV series Happy Days in which the 1950’s high-school kids in that show have scored a copy of I, the Jury and are literally using it as porn. I, the Jury was the first Mike Hammer book filmed -- in 1953, with Biff Elliott as Hammer and Harry Essex doing the screenplay and directing. It was enough of a hit that Saville got United Artists to green-light a follow-up, Kiss Me Deadly, which has become a cult classic and entered the pantheon of admission to the Criterion Collection mainly because of its director, Robert Aldrich, who would later make Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and The Dirty Dozen and was credited here as producer with Saville as executive producer. To write the screenplay Aldrich recruited a writer named A. I. Bezzerides, who inevitably got nicknamed “Buzz,” though the only other credit of his I can remember is as the author of Long Haul, a novel about truckers that got incorporated into the 1940 Warner Bros. film They Drive by Night.

In his interview with Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg for the book The Celluloid Muse Aldrich said, “The original book … had nothing. We just kept the title and threw the book away.” But I remember once browsing through a copy of Kiss Me Deadly at a book counter and noting that both the beginning and the end of the film seemed directly taken from the book -- and the hosts of TCM’s “Noir Alley” showing, Eddie Muller and modern-day noir writer Max Allan Collins (who doesn’t look at all like you’d expect a writer of hard-boiled crime fiction to look -- whereas Spillane himself wore the obligatory fedora and trench coat that had become the trademark look of a noir private eye since the 1941 film of The Maltese Falcon, Collins bears a striking resemblance to Elton John, big glasses, blond hair and all), claimed that the film is highly close to the book even though Aldrich and Bezzerides put a more negative “spin” on Hammer’s character and actions than Spillane had. Kiss Me Deadly has one of the most amazing and attention-grabbing opening scenes ever filmed: Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) is flagged as he’s driving his Jaguar XK-120 sports car down a deserted road at night by a woman wearing only a trench coat and nothing else. Her name is Christina Bailey and she’s played by the young Cloris Leachman in her first theatrical feature film (though she’d done TV work before this) as one of three young, attractive starlets who get “Introducing” credits in this film.

She’s escaped from an insane asylum, where she was being held by a well-organized and wide-ranging group of criminals whose origins and sheer reach we only learn later. Hammer picks up, easily gets her through a police blockade by posing as her husband, then stops at a gas station to have a branch removed from his car (it got stuck in his right front wheel when his car went off the road trying to avoid running her down). She gives the gas-station attendant (remember gas-station attendants? People who would actually put gas in your car instead of making you do it yourself?) a letter and asks him to stamp it and mail it for him; the letter is addressed to Hammer and contains only two words, “Remember me.” The words are a reference to a sonnet by the British poet Christina Rossetti (1830-1894), one of the so-called “pre-Raphaelites” who were trying in their own work to evoke a mythical pre-Renaissance Italian past, and though he takes his own sweet time about it Hammer ultimately looks it up and finds it reads like this:

Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land;
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you planned:
Only remember me; you understand
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet if you should forget me for a while
And afterwards remember, do not grieve:
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile
Than that you should remember and be sad.

No sooner has Christina given the gas-station attendant her letter than she and Hammer are kidnapped by carefully unseen people -- all we really learn about them is that one of them,, apparently the ringleader, has a white stripe around the circumference of his otherwise black shoe -- and they have already tortured Christina to death and hung her body in a torture pose to interrogate her until she stops responding and it finally dawns on them that she’s dead. Then they load both her and Hammer into Hammer’s sports car and push it off a cliff so it will look like they died in an “accident,” The mystery of Christina’s disappearance and Hammer’s apparent involvement in it -- and the determination of Hammer’s one friend on the official police force, Lt. Pat Murphy (Wesley Addy), to keep him from investigating the case (he even has Hammer’s private investigator license and his gun permit pulled) -- just make him that much more curious about finding out what’s going on. Eventually, while he’s being trailed both by the bad guys and by investigators for a special Federal committee on organized crime (modeled after the real-life Kefauver hearings in the early 1950’s which investigated the Mafia and revealed the extent of its investments and involvements in supposedly “legitimate” American businesses), Hammer traces the mystery to a locker in a private gym that contains a mysterious box which contains an ultra-radioactive substance: a brief exposure gives Hammer’s arm radiation burns and a longer-term one causes the person and everything in the immediate vicinity burns up and eventually explodes.

Kiss Me Deadly is one of those movies, like the 1956 original Invasion of the Body Snatchers, that came from the most intense period of the domestic version of the Cold War and came off as an ambiguous political metaphor. According to William Everson in The Detective in Film, there was nothing politically ambiguous about Mickey Spillane’s Hammer novels: “Hammer was very much a product of the McCarthy era. The earlier private eyes were sometimes not too bright, their basic assets dogged persistence and a strange kind of integrity, a pride in their work, and a responsibility to their clients. Hammer had no such integrity, and few scruples. He was more ruthless (at least in the books) than the underworld figures he fought and he was particularly inflamed by his crusade against Communists. A latter-day but exaggerated Captain America, he started where Marlowe and Spade left off. Occasionally, they bent the law a little; he took it baldly in both hands and broke it, the end apparently justifying the means.” Aldrich and Bezzerides seem to have been trying to put a more liberal “spin” on the Hammer mythos, but even so as it stands the film Kiss Me Deadly can be read either as a Right-wing metaphor (the dastardly Communists adopting the methods, including wanton murder and torture, of the traditional criminal underworld to get the secret atomic material out of the hands of the U.S. government and use it for genocide against the U.S. and its allies) or a Left-wing one (the unscrupulous government agents determined to retrieve the “Great Whatsit” and not caring how many people they kill or how many lives they ruin in the process).

In their introduction to the TCM showing, Eddie Muller and Max Allan Collins acknowledged the double game Aldrich and Bezzerides had to play: they had to keep their movie close enough to the books to satisfy the Spillane fans in the audience, but they also tried to tip off the more intelligent audience members to critique what was going on and question Hammer’s methods, tactics and values instead of just accepting him as the unambiguous hero Spillane wanted him to be (and to be seen as being). Made towards the end of the original noir cycle, and with cinematographer Ernest Laszlo shooting a lot of it in plain daylight on real locations while also including compositions straight from the height of film noir a decade earlier -- including one shot of a wooden staircase winding up the inside of an apartment building (one wonders if that staircase was a standing set and had a warning card on it reading, “Reserved for directors making film noir”).

Kiss Me Deadly has an unusual place in the noir cycle not only because of its political ambiguity but its rich intellectual allusions: as Alain Silver noted in the entry on Kiss Me Deadly in The Film Noir Encyclopedia, they include “the recurring Christina Rossetti poem, ‘Remember Me’; the Caruso recording with which Carmen Trivago [a mediocre opera singer singing along with a great one, whom Hammer gets to talk by breaking one of his priceless original Caruso Victor 78’s -- as a record collector myself, that scene bothers me viscerally; also the part is played by Fortunio Bonanova, who trained a similarly mediocre opera singer, Susan Alexander, in Citizen Kane] is a Flotow opera, Martha [in which the two male leads disguise themselves as servants to court women and see if they can seduce them without the influence of their money]; Tchaikovsky plays on the radio in Christina’s room (‘She was always listening to that station’) [and among the other classical pieces we hear are Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’ Symphony and Chopin’s ‘Revolutionary’ Etude -- the mysterious atomic box and the machinations around it part of an unfinished revolution?]; a prize fight is being broadcast while Evello and Sugar Smallhouse [the two hit men who killed Christine] are being killed”l; and at least one quite powerful one Silver didn’t mention: the song “Rather Have the Blues,” which is playing on the radio while Hammer drives with Christina (in a version by Nat “King” Cole listed on the film’s credits) and later recurs, long after Christina’s death, when Hammer takes her former roommate Lily Carver (Gaby Rodgers) on a date to a nightclub where Black singer Kitty White (who looks very much like Lena Horne except her hair is much shorter; in the early 1950’s Decca Records signed her after they let Billie Holiday go, and though hardly in Billie’s league she’s a quite good singer in her own right) performs it. (Some sources, including Aldrich himself, identify the singer as Maddie Comfort and say White played another nightclub singer in the film.)

Lily is initially presented as a damsel in distress whom Hammer, of course, is willing to help if he can get into her pants -- only at the end it’s revealed her real name is Gabrielle, she was the girlfriend of Dr. Soberin (Albert Dekker), who masterminded the plot to steal the nuclear box; only she double-crosses him, kills him to gain sole possession of the box, then opens it (the script references both Pandora and Medusa as parallels: the woman who loosed all the evils of humankind on the world by opening her box and the woman with snakes for hair who turned to stone anyone who looked at her) and looses the atomic flame that consumes herself, the beach house she shared with Dr. Soberin and everything and everyone but Hammer and Velda, who escape just in time. (For some reason, after the film was released the producers and distributors decided to cut about a minute and a half from the ending, thereby making it incomprehensible just how Hammer and Velda escaped the explosion of the box. The original ending was only restored in 2004.)

Even more than most noirs, Kiss Me Deadly seems to have an intellectual overlay grafted on top of a simple-minded crime-fiction entertainment, and while a more complex, nuanced actor in the lead than Ralph Meeker (I spent much of the movie imagining how Bogart would have played it, even though by 1955 he was 55 years old and already visibly ill with the cancer that would kill him) might have added additional layers of nuance, Meeker strikes me as note-perfect, the sort of bad actor that can make an excellent effect playing a character just as unsubtle and unscrupulous as he is. One thing Muller and Collins noted in their intro that quite a few of Hammer’s friends are either African-Americans or white ethnics -- including the bizarre comic-relief character of Nick (Nick Dennis), who’s listed as “Nick Va-Va-Voom” on the imdb.com credits list (after something he’s fond of telling Hammer about the power of his cars) and who’s the garage owner who keeps Hammer’s various rides in shape -- the Jaguar, the MG-TD he briefly replaces it with and the early Chevrolet Corvette given to him by Carl Evello, who’s outfitted it with two pipe bombs -- one set to go off when the ignition is turned on and, just in case Hammer misses that one, another that is set to the speedometer so it will blow up the car when Hammer takes it on the freeway and accelerates it to freeway speeds. Later Nick is killed by one of the gang members when they kick out a jack from under a car he’s working on so it falls and crushes him -- yet more examples of the gang’s determination to make all their murders look like accidents involving cars. It’s interesting that I can remember showing Kiss Me Deadly to Charles once before and he didn’t like it because he found it too violent; this time around he seemed to accept that part of Hammer’s world and get into the film, with all its crazy intellectual and political elements stuck onto a thriller whose main source of ambiguity is the disinclination of the filmmakers to tell us until the very end even what the MacGuffin is.

Valley of the Dragons (Zimbalist-Roberts-Bernds Productions, Columbia, 1961)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 9 p.m. I cracked open the Mill Creek Entertainment boxed set of DVD’s of six science-fiction cheapies from the 1950’s released by Columbia -- though two of them were products of Japan’s Toho Studios and Columbia was only the U.S. distributor. I bought this box because I’d caught a couple of the films in it, The 27th Day and The Night the World Exploded, at one of the Golden Hill science-fiction film screenings that ran for years until the SARS-CoV-2 dictatorship intervened and suppressed them, and I’d been so taken with The 27th Day that I not only bought a used copy of the book it was based on from amazon.com, I also bought the DVD so I could share it with Charles since he’d had to work the night it was screened. So last night I ran him two other items from the box, The Night the World Exploded (about a fictional “Element 112” that expands, releases great quantities of toxic gas, and ultimately explodes and causes massive earthquakes once it’s exposed to air -- it’s usually not dangerous because in nature it’s found in water, which neutralizes it, but massive oil drilling and other energy extractions have removed the underground water protecting us from it and allowed it to do its thing, including moving the earth’s rotational axis three degrees: an odd bit of environmentalist social commentary to turn up in a 1950’s sci-fi “B” even though the best science-fiction writers of the period were working social and political themes into their stories) and Valley of the Dragons, the only movie in the box I hadn’t watched before.

Valley of the Dragons was ostensibly based on a Jules Verne novel called Career of a Comet -- it was made in 1961, after a succession of Verne movies in color and with bigger budgets and major stars: Walt Disney’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea from 1954, with James Mason and Kirk Douglas; From the Earth to the Moon, with Joseph Cotten from 1958 (made for RKO but bought by Warner Bros. after RKO went out of business following three years of corporate post-traumatic stress disorder from Howard Hughes’ seven-year ownership from 1948 to 1955); Michael Todd’s all-star Around the World in 80 Days; and Journey to the Center of the Earth, again with James Mason. Alas, Career of a Comet got filmed by an ultra-low budget unit at Columbia in black-and-white as Valley of the Dragons, directed and co-written (with Donald Zimbalist) by Edward Bernds. Bernds had started his career doing sound for the Three Stooges shorts at Columbia and ultimately got to direct them -- Leonard Maltin rates Bernds’ first Stooges short, Micro-Phonies (a radio spoof) from 1945, as their best film. But when he graduated to features he became a science-fiction specialist.

Valley of the Dragons -- a deceptive title because though the film depicts a wide variety of prehistoric fauna, there are only two brief shots of dragons (and after watching the digitally animated dragons of Game of Thrones these look pretty phony by comparison!) -- starts in the 1880’s, with stock “Middle Eastern” shots to tell us we’re in Algeria and two men, Hector Servadac (Cesare Danova, whom we’d otherwise seen only as the villain in Elvis Presley’s Viva Las Vegas) and Michael Denning (Sean McClory, who’s supposed to be playing an Irishman but whose brogue comes and goes), are about to fight a duel over a woman they both loved. Only, just as they’ve finished taking the requisite 10 paces and are about to turn around and fire on each other, a flaming white something-or-other descends from the sky and transports them to a world where evolution never got past the cavemen and prehistoric beasts, including mastodons (which at least did co-exist with humans) and dinosaurs (which didn’t). They also find a race of prehistoric humans which the script identifies as Neanderthals -- they look like the sort of ugly mutants generated in future-set 1950’s movies by atomic radiation and I briefly expected there might be a World Without End-style explanation that they had been projected forward in time to a dystopian future in which humans had regressed to a prehistoric lifestyle -- as well as another tribe that looked more like us and to whom Our Anti-Heroes could teach English so they could communicate.

Of course the two reluctant space travelers -- since it’s eventually established that in one of its previous fly-bys of Earth that comet picked up a large chunk of earth and dumped it on the moon, including enough of earth’s atmosphere that the life forms contained in it could still survive -- each find women they can pair off with. Hector falls for Deena (Joan Staley), a blonde with impeccably perfect hair and a metal container that’s supposed to represent prehistoric ware but is obviously of modern manufacture (the anachronism of her pot bothered me more than the anachronism of her permanent, but for Charles it was the other way around), and the two get a lot of me-Tarzan you-Jane-style dialogue as he teaches her English and she teaches him Cavespeak. Denning’s cave-girl squeeze is Nateeta (Danielle de Metz, who got an “Introducing” credit -- anyone ever hear of her again?), and while the two are canoodling with their cave babes they also mediate a peace settlement between the two warring tribes after nearly getting themselves killed in the cross-fire between them. The film borrowed quite a lot of dinosaur footage from Hal Roach’s 1940 production One Million B.C. (according to an imdb.com “Trivia” poster, it was the last theatrically released feature to do so -- as the Roach studio fell on hard times in the 1950’s, Roach made a lot of money licensing this footage and cheap producers frequently bought it for projects that needed dinosaur footage but didn’t have big enough budgets to create any themselves) but seems to have copied its plot as well.

No special effects person is credited (though imdb.com lists Roy Seawright, the effects person on One Million, B.C., for “uncredited archive footage”) but the effects are actually reasonably convincing for the time: a far cry from what Ray Harryhausen was doing for adventure fantasies at the same studio at the same time (but then none of the footage in Valley of the Dragons seems to have used the stop-motion technique Harryhausen and his mentor, King Kong effects master Willis O’Brien, were known for and a lot of the “dinosaurs” were actually living lizards and other reptiles filmed in slow motion with spines, scales and other protuberances glued on them to make them look more “dinosaurian”). There are a few effects that look risible -- notably the giant spider that attacks the principals in one scene (with a human skeleton stuck to its web to indicate that it eats people), which is semi-convincing (albeit obviously suspended by wires) in the side shots but has a ridiculous cartoon-like head any halfway decent puppet-maker would have been too embarrassed to use. But for the most part the effects are convincing, and one shot in which a mastodon chases after the humans at fast speed stumped both Charles and I. (I suspect they took a living elephant, stuck mastodon horns on its tusks, and filmed in fast motion, but Charles wasn’t convinced and I’m not that sure that’s how they did it, either.) There’s nothing particularly wrong with Valley of the Dragons except that it’s dull -- a handful of reasonably exciting action sequences in the middle of a lot of boring exposition and a sense that we’ve seen this movie before. In one aspect I’m sure we have seen this movie before -- or at least the locations where the outdoor scenes were filmed, which I suspect were the same ones Gene Roddenberry and his scouts picked out for the original 1960’s Star Trek episodes (which often also featured primitive environments that inexplicably contained hot blonde babes with impeccable hair!).

American Experience: Freedom Summer (Firelight Films, PBS, 2014)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I insisted that my husband Charles and I watch the American Experience presentation “Freedom Summer” on KPBS last night. It turned out to be an “oldie” from 2014 -- that was the copyright date and I had already guessed it was an old program from the appearance of interviewees like Julian Bond and Pete Seeger that have passed since. The “Mississippi Freedom Summer” was organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to recruit both Black and white college students to volunteer to come to Mississippi in the summer of 1964 and get Black Mississippians to register to vote. This was excruciatingly difficult because in the post-Reconstruction era Mississippi had so thoroughly and totally disenfranchised its African-American citizens there were virtually no Black voters in the state -- through much of this documentary I was reminded of the chilling scenes at the end of D. W. Griffith’s racist masterpiece The Birth of a Nation in which Black Southerners are stripped of their votes and (even more significantly) their guns, and we are obviously meant by Griffith to approve and see these scenes as a restoration of the natural order of things in which Blacks are subservient to whites and have utterly no political or social power. At times this documentary seems like a sequel to Griffith’s film, with whites using the time-tested traditional means they had used to keep generations of Mississippi Blacks from voting -- including firing them from their jobs, calling in their loans if they owned their own businesses, and in perhaps the cruelest blow of all literally trying to starve them out by cutting off the government’s surplus commodities distribution program on which a lot of them, especially the sharecroppers in the state’s rural areas, depended to sustain them during the harvest.

The situation of Blacks in Mississippi was so oppressive that a Black interviewee remembered that as a boy he was expected to bow and tip his hat every time he passed a white person on the street -- which meant he had to do an awful lot of bowing and hat-tipping to go out anywhere at all. One interviewee noted that until the Mississippi Freedom Summer project started, Mississippi hadn’t had a Ku Klux Klan because it hadn’t needed one: the Citizens’ Councils (sometimes more bluntly called White Citizens’ Councils) were able to do the Klan’s work for it without resorting to the sort of outright violence and terrorism the Klan was known for, and the white establishment that ran the state was united in its commitment to white supremacy. There was no room in Mississippi politics for even the relatively mild racial moderation of figures like Alabama Governor Jim Folsom, much less an out-and-out apostate like South Carolina federal judge Julius Waties Waring (who was on the three-judge panel that heard one of the cases that later became Brown v. Board of Education and wrote a blistering dissent that anticipated the final decision in flat-out saying, “Segregation is per se inequality”). Most of the voices of the racists came from film footage at the time, though one former Citizens’ Council member was interviewed and he looked back without apology even though he seemed to accept that Black Mississippians had won equal voting rights (sort of) and the world hadn’t been destroyed by it.

The Freedom Summer project volunteers first had to go through an orientation in Oxford, Ohio where Black veterans of the civil rights movement tried to let them know what they were getting themselves into -- trying to register Black voters in the Deep South in a state that had been suppressing Black political participation for nearly 100 years (ever since the withdrawal of the final Federal troops from the South in 1877 ended Reconstruction and gave the white Southern elites the green light not only to disenfranchise Blacks but reduce them economically to a situation little better than slavery) -- and that their lives would be at risk. They also tested the white volunteers to see if they’d be willing to work a job that would require them to accept and follow orders from Blacks -- which was hardly a given even among the most self-consciously liberal whites in 1964, when there were virtually no situations in which whites ever worked under Black supervisors.

One group that isn’t mentioned here but was the subject of a separate PBS documentary, also released in 2014, called Spies of Mississippi (for more information see https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2014/03/spies-of-mississippi-trilogy-filmspbs.html), was the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, which was an official government agency authorized by the all-white Mississippi legislature in 1956. Its original purpose was as a P.R. arm of the Mississippi government to put out glossy books and “educational” films about how well the Mississippi system of racial segregation worked, how both whites and Blacks were happy with it, and how it spared Mississippi the high crime rates of Northern cities that had let their Black populations get out of control. The Sovereignty Commission eventually turned into a secret police force, gathering information on the civil rights movements (often by recruiting Blacks to be undercover agents or informers) and keeping dossiers on anyone -- Black or white, from “outside” as well as within Mississippi itself -- they considered a threat to the existing racist order.

The Freedom Summer project began with a pall over it from the murders of James Cheney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner; the Black Cheney and the white Goodman and Schwerner were ambushed in Neshoba County and the station wagon they had been driving was recovered long before their bodies were. (Freedom Summer writer-director Stanley Nelson misses the point that racist Mississippians were as anti-Semitic as they were anti-Black -- indeed, one of their beliefs was that Blacks were too stupid to have organized the civil rights movement themselves and Jews had done it for them as part of their centuries-long plan to destroy the white Christian race -- and therefore the killers, who turned out to include Neshoba County’s sheriff and deputy sheriff, would have hated Goodman and Schwerner as much as they hated Cheney because Goodman and Schwerner were Jews.) Spies of Mississippi director Dawn Porter argued that the Sovereignty Commission had directly “fingered” the three victims, whose bodies weren’t discovered for nearly a month -- and Pete Seeger has a fascinating story in his Freedom Summer interview about how he was giving a free concert for the Freedom Summer volunteers at a Black church when his concert was interrupted by the announcement that the bodies of the three dead volunteers had been found, whereupon he and his audience spontaneously started singing “We Shall Overcome.” (One of the Black volunteers who was at Seeger’s concert recalled that Seeger’s brand of folk music held little appeal for them: “We were all into James Brown.”)

Among the topics writer-director Stanley Nelson covered, largely through interviews with the surviving participants looking back with a kind of bemused tolerance for their younger selves, are the campaign’s effective use of Michael Schwerner’s widow Rita as a spokesperson for the cause -- she even got an audience with President Johnson and addressed him in a no-B.S. way that horrified his aides, one of whom told her, “You don’t talk to the President that way!” (She replied, “I just did.”) Nelson also mentioned that when the local law enforcers arrested the white women volunteers, they seemed obsessed with their sex lives; convinced that the only way young white women would hang out with Black men would be to get fucked by their legendarily huge appendages, the local police and sheriff’s deputies were obsessed with asking them about the size of Black men’s penises. (I wonder if one of these women ever dared come back with the obvious response: “How big are Black men’s dicks? How the hell should I know?”)

Unable to make much headway with their original task -- trying to get Black people in Mississippi registered to vote -- the project refocused on two other programs. One was the so-called “Freedom Schools” in which Black Mississippians were told about their racial heritage, including the great civilizations that had existed in Africa before the white slavers and colonizers came, and also a rewrite of American history to tell the story of the African-American experience honestly and without the overlay of racial prejudice that had infected white American historiography and was still the view being taught when I was in grade school and high school in the 1960’s. I remember that my mother, who was very active as a white supporter of the civil rights movement at the time, gave me the SNCC Freedom School primer on American history and so I got exposed to the point of view that Reconstruction had been a major civil-rights advance and its end had been a bad thing not only for Blacks in the South but the country as a whole before I got exposed to what was then the mainstream view that Reconstruction had been an oppressive disaster and the white Southern “Redeemers” who took power after it ended had been justified in essentially ignoring the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and suppressing Black political participation. (To this day I thank the authors of the SNCC history primer for writing the book that first made me aware of this slice of American history -- and to my mom for giving it to me.)

The other project around which Freedom Summer ended up pivoting was the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, an attempt by Black and white Mississippians to send an alternative delegation to the 1964 Democratic National Convention and unseat the all-white delegation chosen by Mississippi’s white racist Democratic establishment. This was during the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, the Texas Senator who was proud of his record as a racial moderate (when the Left turned against him over the Viet Nam war and made Arkansas Senator J, William Fulbright their new hero because he chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and held hearings challenging the war, Johnson bitterly reminded his more Left-leaning aides that Fulbright had signed the 1956 “Southern Manifesto” -- a pledge by Southern Senators to continue racial segregation by every legal means available -- while Johnson hadn’t) in shepherding a civil rights bill through the Senate in 1957 and the even more expansive Civil Rights Act of 1964. But he also seemed, based on the tape recordings of conversations from the White House used as part of Freedom Summer (every President from Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon had the White House offices wired so they could record conversations, but Nixon was the only one who made the process automatic so his conversations got recorded whether he wanted them to be or not), to have regarded the Freedom Democratic Party challenge as a personal insult that he needed to quash by any means necessary.

The Freedom Democratic Party had hired as their attorney Joseph Rauh, a well-connected liberal lawyer with a reputation as a “fixer” for good causes, including civil rights. But Rauh’s main gig was as attorney for the United Auto Workers, and Johnson leaned on the UAW’s president, Walter Reuther, to threaten to fire Rauh unless Rauh could work out a deal that would eliminate the Freedom Democrats’ challenge. The Freedom Democrats got a hearing before the convention’s Credentials Committee at which their principal organizer, Fannie Lou Hamer -- a Black former sharecropper who had been fired, thrown out of her home and savagely beaten for daring to attempt to register to vote -- spoke before TV cameras until President Johnson abruptly pulled her off the air by announcing an impromptu “press conference” from the White House, knowing the TV networks would cut away from Hamer’s testimony for him. Only it backfired: the TV cameras kept rolling and showed Hamer’s full speech later, and thus built up public sympathy for her and the cause of the Freedom Democrats -- especially among the more liberal convention delegates who regarded Johnson as a hero of the civil rights cause. There was a brief attempt -- unmentioned in this film -- to compromise the issue by seating half the Freedom Democrats’ delegation and half the regular Mississippi Democrats’ delegation, but in the end all the party would offer was two “delegate-at-large” seats to the Freedom Democrats, who rightly rejected this as patronizing and insulting.

Freedom Summer writer-director Stanley Nelson regards the Freedom Democrats’ debacle as the pivotal moment that ended the so-called “Beloved Community” of Blacks and whites working together for civil rights and pursuing change both within the political system and outside it, and its replacement by the more radical, more violent, racially separatist “Black Power” ideology. I think this somewhat overstates the case -- the debacles Martin Luther King and other nonviolent activists faced when they tried to mobilize against racial discrimination in housing in Northern cities probably had a lot to do with the rise of “Black Power” and the sense among a lot of younger Black activists that white liberals were merely pretending to support them and would stick up for white supremacy when the crunch came. But ultimately the Freedom Summer had one positive effect: along with the police riot in Selma, Alabama in early 1965, also over a struggle by African-Americans to be allowed to register and vote, it helped spur passage of the Voting Rights Act, which from 1965 to 2013 required states with a documented history of trying to discriminate along racial lines in whom they would or would not allow to vote to “pre-clear” any changes in their elections laws with the U.S. Department of Justice to make sure they weren’t covers for racial discrimination. It also abolished literacy tests for voter registration and the kinds of bizarre hoops white Southern registrars had put would-be Black voters through -- including having to read back and interpret a passage from the Mississippi state constitution -- tests that, as some of the well-educated Blacks interviewed for this program admitted, they couldn’t pass even though they had masters’ degrees and, in some cases, Ph.D.’s.

Freedom Summer is one of those programs that you can read as a positive statement of how far we’ve come and a bitter criticism of how much is left undone and how strong white-supremacist attitudes still are in the U.S.: the violence that was once used against Blacks who tried to vote still exists, only now it’s aimed at people (including the governor of Michigan) who dare to try to keep her state’s people safe from the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. In 2013 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the “pre-clearance” clause of the Voting Rights Act unconstitutional on the ground that it was obsolete and no longer needed -- and the Southern states that had previously been subject to it, dominated by Republicans ever since the two major parties switched their positions on civil rights in the 1960’s (the Democrats, once the party of slavery, segregation and the Klan, became the party of civil rights, and the Republicans embraced the racists who no longer felt welcome in the Democratic Party), responded by instituting more sophisticated versions of the same tactics of voter suppression that had kept most of their Black popultions from voting before 1965. In 2016 these states provided the base for Donald Trump, perhaps the most openly white-supremacist President in our history, and in 2020 Trump carried all the former Confederate states except Virginia and Georgia: proof that the racist attitudes and actions that drove the response documented in Freedom Summer are still alive and all too well in our country.

Father Brown: "The Wrong Shape" (BBC Television, PBS, 2013)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago I watched an intriguing episode from the first season of the British TV series Father Brown, based on a character created by G. K. Chesterton -- a parish priest in a small North England town who helps the police solve particularly mysterious crimes whether they want him to or not, This episode was called “The Wrong Shape” and was directed by Dominic Keavey from a script by Nicola Wilson, with Rachel Flowerday and Tahsin Guner credited with adapting Chesterton’s character to TV. One thing about Father Brown is the time when it takes place -- the late 1940’s, just after World War Two -- not a particularly common setting for these types of stories (they’re usually contemporary or flash back to the 1920’s or 1930’s), and another thing of interest is the rather dotty performance of Mark Williams as Father Brown and how he captures the character’s duality: on the surface he’s a depressingly normal and seemingly not very bright Anglican priest (I don’t think they actually specified his denomination but he’s drawn as so ordinary he almost has to be with the established church) but with a keen strength and intelligence between the rather bumbling exterior.

This story is about Leonard Quinton (Robert Cavanah), a rather irascible country squire and amateur poet (he's had a book published but we get the impression he paid for it himself) who -- we learn well into the episode -- walked out on a prestigious career as a doctor on Harley Street in London (Harley Street is to medicine what Fleet Street is to journalism or New York’s Wall Street is to the financial markets) and settled to an eccentric existence after he returned from a trip to India (which is described in the script as the Raj -- indicating that this story takes place in the brief interregnum between the end of World War II in 1945 and Britain’s exit from India in 1947). When he went to India he brought home a large collection of Indian plants -- including some poisonous ones (recalling Leo Delibes’ opera Lakme, which as I once told my mother is sort of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, only instead of an American sailor it’s a British soldier; instead of Japan it’s India; and instead of just stabbing herself with a dagger the heroine, spurned by her foreign lover and socially ostracized, commits suicide by deliberately inhaling the fumes of a poisonous plant). He also brought home an Indian to tend them, Umesh Varna (Ramon Tikaram), whom we first see strolling Quinton’s grounds in a white robe and with shoulder-length hair -- and looking, like the real-life eden ahbez (composer of Nat “King” Cole’s 1947 hit “Nature Boy,” he dressed himself in robes, grew his hair long and insisted on taking his composer credit in all lower-case letters because he thought capitals should be reserved for God), like a hippie 20 years early.

Father Brown and a number of his friends are invited to attend a poetry reading at the Quinton home, including a poem by Quinton’s mistress Violet Parnassus (Jennie Jacques) which describes their sex life in lubricious detail., as well as a poem by Quinton himself that appears to celebrate death. Varna tells Quinton that he’s about to die, though he’s also busy with plans to turn Quinton’s barn into a meditation center (when one guest mistakenly calls it a “levitation center” it’s one of the funniest lines of the show). When Quinton is found hung by the roof of the nursery on his property the police instantly suspect suicide, but Father Brown deduces that Quinton was really murdered and the scene faked to look like suicide by a killer who wound the noose the way a right-handed person would do it -- Quinton was left-handed (though we’re just told that and it would have been nice if they’d established that visually by showing him writing, smoking or doing something with his left hand). One of the main suspects is Quinton’s wife Martha (a marvelous performance by Ruth Gemmell), who’s living on her husband’s property even though he’s estranged from her, he’s promised Violet he’ll divorce Martha and marry her, and the overall idea of a man having both his wife and his mistress on the same grounds is a bit hard to swallow.

Another suspect is Quinton’s attorney, Mr. Harris (Simon Thorp), whose main concern seems to be to make sure Quinton leaves enough money for Martha and doesn’t spend all his money on Varna’s schemes to promote Indian religion in Britain. Harris turns out to have been the murderer -- he strangled Quinton and dragged his body into the conservatory and strung it up -- but what he didn’t realize is that when he did this Quinton was already dead. He was still in anguish over the fact that back when they were living in London Martha had got pregnant -- at long last, after they’d waited long and hard for their first child following a series of miscarriages -- only to control the pain of her morning sickness Dr. Quinton obtained a newly invented drug from Germany, which I’m pretty sure was supposed to be thalidomide since the baby was born horribly deformed. We’re not told just what she looked like, but I once saw a woman whom I’m pretty sure was a thalidomide baby -- it was in 1983 at the Albertson’s on 33rd and El Cajon (now Pancho Villa’s) and she looked about 20, the right age since it was in 1962 that the thalidomide scandal broke worldwide and the drug was banned; she looked otherwise normal except her hands were attached straight to her shoulders without any arms between them.

Anyway, the Quintons never mentioned the birth of this daughter to their friends and quietly buried her in their own garden under a blank tombstone, and the shock of his daughter’s deformity and his own sense of responsibility for it led Quinton to give up his medical practice and move to the country -- and finally it turns out that he committed suicide after all, not by hanging himself but with a poisonous white sap from one of his Indian plants. (Before he did himself in with the stuff he tried it out on his old, sick cat -- and it worked.) I’ve generally liked the Father Brown mysteries and this was no exception: it was well done, with a provocative story premise and the kind of quiet, natural British acting U.K. players seem almost to be able to do in their sleep -- a far cry from the straining, heaving and sighing we’ve endured from three generations of American actors under the malign influence of the Actors’ Studio.

Secrets of the Dead: Nero's Sunken City (3BM Television, Channel 4 Television Corporation, Mentorn Barraclough Carey, PBS, 2017)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Charles and I capped off Sunday night with a show we’d caught on KPBS’s second channel after surfing the TV which turned out to be quite compelling: a Secrets of the Dead episode called “Nero’s Sunken City” about the ancient Roman town of Baiae (a name the people on the show couldn’t agree on how to pronounce: the announcer, Jay Sanders, called it “BYE-yuh” but the archaeologists he was interviewing tended to go with “BYE-aye” with a long “i” sound on the second “i”), which was a high-class resort community for the Roman 0.1 percent until it literally sank into the sea in the fourth century C.E. Ironically, what caused it to sink was the same factor that had made it such a popular resort in the first place: it was located near an active volcano that created natural hot springs so the Romans could build baths there and not have to worry about having giant furnaces burning wood or other fuel to heat the water: there was already hot water there naturally. Baiae was a complex of villas owned by the wealthiest Romans, including the Emperor Claudius and his stepson and successor, Nero, who not only liked the baths of Baiae but the sybaritic lifestyle enjoyed there, with plenty of alcohol, fine food (including fish grown in the villas’ own fish ponds) and sex of every conceivable description. As one Roman historian put it, “Baiae is the place where old men go to become young boys, and young boys go to become young girls.”

Nero liked being at Baiae so much he wanted to rule Rome from there by remote control; he murdered his aunt Domitia just to get control of her villa there so he could add it to his own imperial villa, and he also murdered his mother at Baiae because, having plotted and schemed to get him on the throne (including marrying the old Emperor Claudius and then killing him),she’d intended to be co-ruler. The show depicted a Roman coin from the first years of Nero’s reign showing him and his mother Agrippina as equal-sized figures -- only Nero got tired of having to run everything by his mom and decided to off her. First he put her in a boat that had been deliberately rigged to sink -- only she was rescued from the wreckage by a sailor from another ship and Nero had to order his henchmen to do her in in a more obvious and less plausibly deniable way. Most people even remotely familiar with Roman imperial history know at least some of the Nero stories -- including the one about him supposedly fiddling while Rome burned (and though violins actually hadn’t been invented yet Nero was apparently an accomplished virtuoso on the lyre, the plucked string instrument that dominated ancient Roman music) and him actually setting the fire that consumed Rome because he wanted to burn it down so he could construct his own city, Neropolis, in its place. Nero was also the first Roman emperor to organize deliberate persecution of Christians, then a minor Middle Eastern sect which had drifted into Rome during Claudius’s reign (at least that’s the first recorded mention of Christians in ancient Rome) and whom Nero seized on as a convenient scapegoat for the Roman fire.

The Nero stories that weren’t so familiar but got told in this film included the super-canal he wanted to build over 150 miles of Italian shoreline to connect Baiae to Rome so he could rule there and send his imperial decrees to the ostensible capital; the canal was started and Nero requisitioned all the convict slave laborers in all of what is now Italy to work on it. But it was never finished because in the meantime the Roman Senate was able to depose Nero and force him to commit suicide when he was only 30 years old. (This was when some vestiges of Rome’s former republican government still existed, before control of the empire fell to the Praetorian Guards -- who’d originally been formed as the emperor’s security force but became a private army of their own, accountable to no one; in the later years of the empire it was the Praetorian Guards who actually picked the emperor, sort of like the Secret Service electing the U.S. President.) The show interspersed Nero’s story with those of the modern archaeologists who uncovered Baiae and explored both the above-ground and the underwater ruins -- helped by the fact that the same volcanic forces that sank the city in the first place are now working in reverse and raising the earth on which it stood. The archaeologists, many of whom had to use SCUBA gear to explore the city and painstakingly dig it out, included Italians, Britishers and Americans -- including an attractive young Bear-type named Kevin Dicus, who charmed me not only physically (I’ll admit it: I get some weird celebrity and semi-celebrity crushes, including MS-NBC’s elections guru Steve Kornacki,the epitome of nerd sexiness) but vocally when he blessedly and beautifully pronounced the “t” in “often.”

Fear (Monogram, 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched a couple of movies on TCM in quick succession that seemed to make a good pairing even though they were made 30 years apart and under quite different auspices. One was a 1946 Monogram production called Fear which I’d encountered many years ago but hadn’t seen in quite a while. It was an uncredited modern-dress adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment directed and co-written (with Dennis Cooper) by Alfred Zeisler. TCM host Eddie Muller mentioned some of Zeisler’s unusual background: though he was born in Chicago his parents moved to their ancestral homeland, Germany, when he was a boy and he got involved in the German film industry as an actor, writer, director and producer. Probably his most famous German credit was for producing the 1933 film Viktor und Viktoria, about a female German cabaret performer who disguises herself as a man to participate in a drag show -- a bit of gender-bending significantly ill-timed since it came out just as the Nazis were taking power in Germany; and a title and premise that will be familiar to you because of Blake Edwards’ sensationally successful 1982 remake Victor/Victoria. (There was also a quite engaging British version in 1935 called First a Girl, with Jessie Matthews in the lead and her real-life husband, Sonnie Hale, in the role Robert Preston played in the 1982 version.) Forced to flee Germany when the Nazis took over, Zeisler went first to Britain and then the U.S., but for the most part he could only get work as an actor playing stereotypical German villains until Monogram Pictures gave him a chance as a director with this film.

Muller’s introduction made it sound as if it was unusual for a “B” producer to rip off a literary classic from the public domain and turn it into a modern-dress film noir, but in 1945 -- a year before Fear -- PRC had done the same thing to Hamlet with a quite good movie directed by Edgar G. Ulmer alternately released as Out of the Night and Strange Illusion (a film I’ve listed as one of the five best in PRC’s history, with two other Ulmer films -- Bluebeard and Detour -- along with Steve Sekely’s Lady in the Death House and Frank Wisbar’s Strangler of the Swamp -- all, intriguingly, by foreign-born directors). Fear even has one actor in common with Ulmer’s Hamlet rework -- Warren William, the villain (the Claudius equivalent) in the Ulmer film and the police inspector who doggedly pursues this film’s protagonist, Lawrence “Larry” Crain (Peter Cookson), for the murder of Stanley (Francis Pierlot). In this version Larry is a student in medical school who’s one year away from graduation when the school suddenly sends out a letter rescinding all scholarships -- including the one Larry was counting on to be able to finish. Stanley isn’t a pawnbroker per se but a professor at the university who functions as an unlicensed pawnbroker and takes advantage of students in financial trouble. Larry uses him to pawn a watch his father gave him on his 15th birthday but only gets $8 for it. He goes to the local coffee shop and buys a bowl of soup for his own dinner. He also helps out another customer, Eileen (Anne Gwynne, best known as one of Universal’s go-to actresses for young damsels in distress in horror films), who can’t pay her 60-cent check. (Inflation -- isn’t it a bitch?)

The coffee shop also features a pool table which some of Larry’s better-heeled students are using (including a quite striking-looking tall blond) and bitching about their own financial transactions with Professor Stanley, whom they describe as a mean-spirited little miser who keeps his money in a strong box in plain view as he makes his exploitative deals with the students. Beset by financial troubles -- with no way to pay the $400 tuition bill for his next year and the typical obnoxious landlady (Almira Sessions) hounding him for back rent -- Larry returns to Stevens’ home (out of which he conducts his second business) with a glass ashtray he pretends is a silver cigarette case that he offers Stevens to pawn -- only, once Stevens’ back is turned, Larry grabs a poker from Stevens’ fireplace and clubs him to death with it. Alas, there are potential witnesses -- a painter who was working on the apartment just below Stevens’ and two of Larry’s fellow student (including that hot-looking blond I definitely wanted to see more of) -- as well as nagging cops Captain Burke (Warren William) and his sidekick Detective Schaefer (Nestor Paiva, of all people -- when I think of him I think of the boat captain in Creature from the Black Lagoon and its sequel, Revenge of the Creature), who as I noted in my blog post on the most famous come scritto film of Crime and Punishment, the 1935 Columbia version directed by Josef von Sternberg and starring Peter Lorre as the killer and Edward Arnold as the cop come off as sort of prototypes of Columbo, intent on nailing the killer basically by annoying him into confessing.

There are shards of the original social comment in Dostoyevsky’s novel as Larry turns out to have written several articles and submitted them for publication -- including one called “Man Above the Law” which makes the Nietzschean argument that certain individuals are so exceptional and have such potential to make contributions to humanity that they ought to be let alone to do whatever they want and not be subject to such petty inconveniences as the law against murder. Alas, Larry is far more guilt-ridden than the protagonist of his article (which he receives $1,000 for the day after he kills Stevens as well as a renewal of his scholarship -- ah, the irony!), and in the film’s most fascinating scene he takes a walk through deserted city streets at night and sees a montage including the word “DEATH” on a poster, a noose and other reminders of mortality until he’s determined to walk in front of an oncoming train and atone for his crime by committing suicide -- only a railway worker stops him and pulls him back in time. I suspect Zeisler had seen Val Lewton’s The Seventh Victim and copied Jean Brooks’ doom-laden walk through the city streets -- just as I suspect from one setup of Cookson staring straight at a mirror and some of Cookson’s querulous intonations that both director and star had seen Sternberg’s 1935 version of the same story.

Compared to Peter Lorre, Cookson is hardly as good as a stylized figure of menace but he’s more chilling in some ways precisely because he’s so ordinary: one thinks, “If a nice, normal kid like this can be driven to murder someone, any of us can.” Larry is so normal he even dates Eileen, taking her to the park for picnics and seeming interested in her long-term, though at the same time he’s too guilt-ridden to commit and he’s about to be arrested for the crime by Burke, who’s waiting in his apartment -- when all of a sudden Larry comes to and Zeisler and his co-writer pull the all too familiar old gag on us: “It was all a dream!” Given that even mega-talents like director Fritz Lang and writer Nunnally Johnson had used an it-was-all-a-dream ending on a major noir the year before, The Woman in the Window, fellow German expat Zeisler might have felt justified in doing it here. In his waking life Larry gets his scholarship renewed, Stanley turns out to be not only alive but a kind and generous benefactor instead of a nasty S.O.B., and even “Eileen” turns up -- though she insists that her real name is Cathy. Despite the ending, Fear is a work of real power, a master class (alongside the work of Lewton at RKO and Ulmer at PRC) of how you could make a quality movie on a low budget, and surprisingly well acted by Cookson, who got tired of all the boy-next-door roles he was getting and went to Broadway to play the lead in the play The Heiress alongside Beatrice Straight (playing the roles Montgomery Clift and Olivia de Havilland did in the 1949 film), whom he married and stayed with until his death in 1990. Apparently the two were among the founders of the Actors’ Studio -- something you wouldn’t necessarily guess from the good but straightforward performance Cookson gives here, without a trace of the Method affectations all too many American actors learned at the Studio and slavishly copied.