Secret of the Incas (Paramount, 1954)

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

Last night I had intended to show my husband Charles and I a movie that would have been yet another blow against Left-wing McCarthyism and the anti-racist P.C. Thought Police (I’m actually sympathetic to the goals of the Left in general and anti-racism and anti-sexism in particular, but calls for banning films like Gone With the Wind strike me as really over the top) by watching the 1946 Walt Disney musical Song of the South -- one of Disney’s efforts to combine live action and animation in telling Joel Chandler Harris’s Br’er Rabbit stories. It’s a movie the current Disney management hath decreed shall never be shown again because of its racist stereotyping -- in a How Times Have Changed example James Baskett, the Black character actor who played Uncle Remus and narrated the tales to white kid Bobby Driscoll, got a special Academy Award for his performance. Unfortunately, the grey-label DVD I ordered online was labeled as containing Song of the South but actually had on it the 1954 Paramount potboiler Secret of the Incas, one of Charlton Heston’s journeyman roles at Paramount between 1950 (when he made his film debut in a reasonably good film noir called Dark City) and 1956 (when Cecil B. DeMille gave him the star-making part of Moses in The Ten Commandments because DeMille thought Heston looked like Michaelangelo’s statue of Moses).

Though it’s hardly a film on the likely level of Song of the South either as a work of art or a racist hate object, Secret of the Incas is a movie I’d long wanted to see largely because I’m a great fan of the exotic Peruvian singer Yma Sumac (born Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chávarri del Castillo in Ichocan, Peru on September 10, 1923), who not only sings three songs in it but also plays a small part as Kori-Tica, daughter (and designated successor) of the High Priestess of a surviving band of Incas in Cuzco, Peru. Directed by Jerry Hopper from a script by Sidney Boehm and Ranald MacDougall (both writers had other, far more imposing credits than this one!), Secret of the Incas casts Charlton Heston as Harry Steele, freelance adventurer and tour guide (he forces his services on unwilling tourists with a ferocity approaching the grim determination with which he led his captive people out of Egypt two years later) who’s determined to find the Sunburst, a legendary Inca artifact that when I first saw bits of this film years ago (my late roommate and home-care client John had recorded part of it on a late-night showing and I wanted to see Yma Sumac in action) reminded me of a giant and particularly ornate hubcap. Actually there are two Sunbursts in the movie, a small one that’s in the vault of a Peruvian church (though why the Catholic Church is storing an artifact they would have considered a Satanic piece of pagan idolatry is something the writers never bothered to explain) and the Big One, which is buried somewhere in the ruins of Machu Picchu and which Steele is determined to find and steal even if all he could do with it would be to melt it down for the gold and gems (119 diamonds and 250 other precious stones, we’re told) it’s made of.

Secret of the Incas is often cited as a precursor to Raiders of the Lost Ark -- apparently Steven Spielberg copied Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones wardrobe after what Heston wears here (brown leather jacket, dowdy fedora, tan pants, an over-the-shoulder bag, and revolver) and visually quoted a scene or two. But Charles and I found ourselves much more reminded of films made before Secret of the Incas, including three of Humphrey Bogart’s best-known vehicles: The Maltese Falcon (groups of morally dubious people in quest of a priceless relic), Casablanca (not only the exotic locale but the casting of French actress Nicole Maurey, whom Paramount briefly tried giving a star buildup to, as a Romanian refugee trying to escape the clutches of the hard-nosed Romanian official who flies to Peru to arrest her and bring her back), and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (yet another quest movie, set in a rugged Third World locale and largely shot in Mexico, as Secret of the Incas was largely shot in Peru, so the opening titles boast). He also found the general tone of the film and specifically the Heston-Maurey romance (which seems to consist mostly of him winning her affections by literally forcing himself on her, or coming as close to that as you could in a Code-era movie) to a post-Raiders heroic-anthropologist movie, Romancing the Stone (which I’ve never actually seen), and the parallels to both Sierra Madre on one end of movie history and Raiders of the Lost Ark on the other only show how much less talented and charismatic an actor Heston was than either Humphrey Bogart or Harrison Ford.

One of the good things about Secret of the Incas is the sheer number of 1930’s character actors we see in it, including Thomas Mitchell as the principal villain; Glenda Farrell as the wife of one of the tourists Heston leads around Cuzco as a guide (she’s marvelously salty and exits the movie way too soon) and Robert Young as the leader of an archaeological expedition trying to find the Sunburst on the original temple site and acquire it for a museum before adventurers like Heston’s or Mitchell’s characters can steal it. In an early scene in Cuzco, Steele is fired on by a sniper with a silencer-equipped rifle, whom it turns out has been hired by Mitchell’s character to scare him off the quest -- only Steele traces the guy to the hotel room from which he fired, overpowers him, grabs the gun and swings it like a baseball bat against a bed frame, wrecking it. Naturally I couldn’t resist joking to Charles, “Did we just see the future President of the National Rifle Association actually destroy a gun?” Steele and his new squeeze, Elena Antonescu (Nicole Maurey -- remember that the actress is really French and is supposed to be playing a Romanian, but this was still Hollywood in the era in which they considered one foreign accent pretty much like any other, which is how German Marlene Dietrich and Swedish Ingrid Bergman both got cast as Frenchwomen), steal the small Cessna plane on which the Romanian consul flew in to arrest Elena and take her back to Communist Romania. They fly it as close as they can get to Machu Picchu, where Steele uncovers an inflatable life raft he had secreted there earlier to go down the river for the next leg of their journey (an unlikely plot twist that really bothered Charles, who thought the raft would either have rottted away or been stolen long before Steele got to it with Elena).

Once there they find a fully equipped team of archaeologists led by Stanley Moorehead (Robert Young in what was, according to imdb.com, Young’s last role in a feature film: after this he worked exclusively on TV), who’s also interested in Elena and offers to marry her so she can naturalize as a U.S. citizen, but she’s too overwhelmed by the rough steel of Steele’s arms to be seriously interested in anyone else. Of course villain Ed Morgan (Thomas Mitchell) has followed them there, and he manages to get Steele’s gun from him (whatever happened to “pry it from my cold, dead hands”?) and forces him to turn over the rock on which an ancient Inca carving revealed the location of the Sunburst (a piece chipped off from a larger one, the rest of which is on display in that church museum) -- only Ed conveniently falls off the mountain and into a chasm (one of the least convincing dummy shots ever in a major-studio film) to his death. Steele has a change of heart and agrees to return the Sunburst to the remaining Inca for their sacred rituals, and he and Elena fly out to the U.S. as Yma Sumac sings the song “Aytapura” (“High Andes”) and the closing credits come up. Yma Sumac is by far the most entertaining part of the film and the main reason to want to watch it (though Thomas Mitchell and Glenda Farrell also provide nice reminders of their glory days); all three of her songs, including “Taita Inty” (“Virgin of the Sun God”) and “Tumpa” (“Earthquake”), are from her debut U.S. 10-inch LP Voice of the Xtabay (1950). She’s costumed in the same faux Inca finery she wore on that album’s famous cover, and the three songs she sings in the film are all lip-synched to the tracks from the Xtabay LP. One could tell from the dramatic shift in the acoustic, especially the heavy echo producer Les Baxter put on much of the album to make the music sound like it was coming from a faraway mountain and being naturally amplified by an intervening canyon.

I’ve had Xtabay in one form or another for years -- a beat-up copy of the 10-inch, then a 12-inch reissue with another Sumac album and on CD as part of a boxed set called The Exotic Lure of Yma Sumac, and over the years I’ve grown more and more impressed by it. Not only does it showcase Sumac’s remarkable voice -- she encompassed virtually the entire female range, from growling deep-voiced contralto to high, chirping coloratura soprano (she publicly performed at least two operatic roles -- the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s The Magic Flute and the title role in Delibes’ Lakme) -- but also Les Baxter’s beautiful arrangements. I think Baxter’s achievement on Xtabay is comparable to Joseph Canteloube’s Chants d’Auvergne in taking folk material and using it as the basis for at least light-classical compositions of extraordinary and unexpected weight and power. I suspect the only reason Xtabay isn’t part of the standard vocal repertoire along with Chants d’Auvergne is how specifically tailored it was for Sumac’s remarkable range. A few years later Baxter tried it again with an “exotica” album called The Passions, but instead of Sumac the singer he used was the much less talented or interesting Bas Sheva. Yma Sumac lived to be 86 but had the bad luck to die at the same time (late 2008) as Lena Horne and Odetta, both of whom outshone her in the inevitable competition among the obituaries -- though I mourned all three of them equally. It’s nice to see Yma Sumac sing even though the sequences she’s in are ridiculous. She’s standing outside on a crag meant to represent a mountain in the High Andes and dressed in the absurd costumes of her High Priestess role (the stuff she was forced to wear on stage as well since exoticism was what she and her husband and manager, Moises Vivanco, were selling), including a final scene in which she holds aloft the Sacred Hubcap as she sings the ritual song of her people.

The Way We Were (Rastar Productions, Tom Ward Enterprises, Columbia, 1973)

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

Last night at 7 p.m. Turner Classic Movies telecast the 1973 film The Way We Were, legendary as the first (and so far the only, though since they’re both still alive there’s at least an outside chance there’ll be a second) film to co-star Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford. It was directed by Sydney Pollack from a script by Arthur Laurents, who these days is probably best known as the book writer for the Leonard Bernstein/Stephen Sondheim musical West Side Story. The Way We Were produced a title song that became one of Streisand’s most iconic hits (the song is by Marvin Hamlisch, who also wrote the original score for the film -- though much of it is just arrangements of big-band hits from the 1930’s, 1940’s and 1950’s, when the film takes place) and has become hailed as one of the classic romances of the screen, but it’s a film I’ve never warmed to. I’d seen it only once before, in a wretched over-the-air picture on a bad old black-and-white TV on one of its first network airings in 1975, but I didn’t particularly care for it then and I liked it a little better this time around, but not much. I’ll admit that my reaction to it was colored by the article I’d read about it in Ramparts magazine called “The Way We Weren’t” that criticized the film for setting up political conflicts between the characters and then belittling or frankly ignoring them.

The film starts out in 1944, when Katie Morosky (Barbra Streisand) is working as an associate producer and writer for radio broadcasts for the U.S. Office of War Information when she re-meets a young man she knew in college, Hubbell Gardiner (Robert Redford). We then cut to a flashback showing how the two first met: Katie was an English major in college and also a political agitator and member of the Young Communist League, whom we see at an old-fashioned crystal microphone delivering an impassioned lecture about the plight of women and babies being subjected to bombing from German and Italian planes during the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War. It’s well known that the Spanish Civil War was to a large extent a trial run for World War II -- Nazi Germany and fascist Italy were helping the Right-wing rebel leader Francisco Franco overthrow the Spanish Republic, which had been created in 1931 when a popular uprising had forced the King of Spain to abdicate; and the only country in the world that was willing to help the Republic was the Soviet Union (and they put a lot of conditions on that aid, notably wanting to use their influence to make sure that the Communists, not the socialists, anarchists or so-called POUM, unaligned Leftists who were frequently denounced as Trotskyists, got and held power in the Spanish Republic). I mention this only because Arthur Laurents’ script, with only occasional exceptions, doesn’t really delve into the political issues it hints at and the political and social conflicts between Katie and Hubbell become just another typical set of “complications” for an on-screen romance.

In 1936 Katie gets ticked off because their English teacher, saying he’s going to pick the best short story by any of the students, picks Hubbell’s over hers, but she’s haunted by its first line (“Everything had always come too easily for him”), realizes it’s autobiographical and falls in love with him immediately (and the fact that he’s played by Robert Redford in the first flush of his hunkdom doesn’t hurt, either; he’s so callow-looking he actually looks younger than he did in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, made four years earlier). They meet again eight years later when he gets drunk, takes her to her place, throws up in her bathroom and then collapses on her floor -- though eventually they end up in bed together and nature and star chemistry take their course (and it’s nice to see a few topless shots of the young Robert Redford) before they drift into a seemingly serious relationship even though they spend an awful lot of their time arguing over her social and political values versus his lack of any. He takes her to dull parties with worthless friends like J. J. (Bradford Dillman) and Carol Ann (Lois Chiles, who got an “Introducing” credit and may or may not have been Hubbell’s former girlfriend). He’s also working on a second novel even though his first, A Country Made of Ice Cream, barely sold at all (when he sees a copy in Katie’s apartment he says, “You must have been one of the two people who bought it”), though when next we see them he’s signed a lucrative Hollywood contract as a screenwriter and is adapting A Country Made of Ice Cream for film, with his old friend J. J. as producer and George Bissinger (Patrick O’Neal) as director -- and Bissinger is depicted as the usual uncultured lout Hollywood portrays movie directors as being in films about the business.

The Hollywood idyll of Hubbell and Katie is actually the most entertaining part of the movie -- they’re still sniping at each other a lot but they seem more or less genuinely happy, and in a typically elliptical piece of Laurents writing Katie tells Hubbell that she’s pregnant by laying it out as if it were a movie scenario. Then the House Un-American Activities Committee enters the picture and starts investigating Hollywood for alleged Communist subversion in the movie industry. Katie joins the Committee for the First Amendment (which really existed; it ran an anti-HUAC demonstration in Washington, D.C. with Katharine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall and director John Huston in the front of the line -- all of whom later had to eat a lot of crow to be allowed to keep working in the blacklist era) while Hubbell stays in Hollywood and meekly agrees to all the stupid changes J. J. and Bissinger want him to make to A Country Made of Ice Cream before it is filmed. Eventually the coarsening of the political climate leads Hubbell and Katie to break up -- in one of the odder quirks of Laurents’ script they split before Katie’s child (a daughter) is born, and Hubbell seems totally uninterested in maintaining contact or being any part of raising someone who after all is his child, too. There’s a postlude set in the mid-1950’s in which the two principals run into each other again in New York, where Hubbell is working as a writer for live television shows and Katie is still out on the streets, organizing for a Ban the Bomb campaign (so we see her at the end the way we saw her at the beginning, doing scut work on the streets for a Leftist cause). She mentions that she’s remarried -- her name is now “Cohen” -- and we get the impression that he’s remarried too, to the Lois Chiles character who was always presented as much the better match for him. (He’s still not interested at all in that daughter of his; he seems perfectly content to let her be raised by another man -- and we never see either Streisand visibly pregnant or the daughter after she’s born.)

In a way The Way We Were is a Philip Roth novel with the genders reversed -- instead of the nerdy Jewish guy lusting after the tall, blonde, porcelain-skinned shiksa it’s the nerdy Jewish girl lusting after the tall, blond, porcelain-skinned goy. There’s even a weird argument between Streisand’s and Redford’s characters early on during one of their first dates in which she says she isn’t attractive and he tries to reassure her she is attractive,but in a different way -- and with cinematographer Harry Stradling, Jr. (son of the man who’d shot Streisand’s first three films and had died in the middle of making her fourth, The Owl and the Pussycat; she was convinced that the Stradlings, Sr. and Jr., were the only cameramen in Hollywood who knew how to light her nose so it would look prominent without dominating her face) highlighting her nose in her close-ups it’s clear that what Redford’s character means is that Streisand’s is “Jewish-attractive.” It’s probably a movie that irritates me more than it would if it weren’t for the political angle, which is expressed just enough that it becomes a symbol for all the ways Hubbell and Katie are incompatible but isn’t really gotten into all that much.

There are nice touches that writer Laurents could have made more of -- when Hubbell is in Katie’s apartment he notices a photo of President Franklin Roosevelt on her wall and says, “Roosevelt? I thought you thought he was an imperialist warmonger.” (Of course she’s also got a photo of Stalin, but then this is in 1944, when the U.S. and the Soviet Union were allies of convenience in the defeat of Hitler and the Axis -- until the party line changed in both the U.S. and the Soviet Union.) The dizzying speed with which the Communist Party changed course -- from fighting the Axis in the 1930’s to becoming isolationist and pacifist during the era of the Nazi-Soviet Pact to committed enemies of fascism again once Hitler double-crossed Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 -- could have become a legitimate dramatic issue in this film as Hubbell could have complained that he never knew what side of the political fence his wife would turn up on depending on the ideological demands of the Communist Party and the Soviet Comintern that largely controlled it.

I think my main problem with The Way We Were is that Streisand and Redford are playing attitudes instead of fully developed characters -- in that way it’s an ironic reflection and distortion of Bertolt Brecht’s concept of “Epic Theatre,” in which the characters were not supposed to be important in and of themselves but were representatives of the social forces and class relationships he sought to depict. At the same time The Way We Were doesn’t work that well as straight romance because the politics, such as they are, keep getting in the way. People went to see The Way We Were when it was new (and a lot of people did -- it was a box-office hit and became a sort of legendary touchstone of romantic cinema) lured by the posters’ promise of “Streisand and Redford Together!” rather than for any intrinsic qualities in the story that had been used as the excuse to bring them together. Also, a lot of people wanted Streisand and Redford to make a sequel to The Way We Were, which is not that different from all the people who wanted a sequel to Casablanca (which a lot of people wanted a sequel to in order to get the Bogart and Bergman characters together again at long last) -- and apparently at one point Streisand actually signed on to a project in which Hubbell and Katie meet again when he shows up for his daughter’s wedding -- the daughter being a student at UC Berkeley and, like her mom, also a political activist -- but Redford didn’t.

It was also ironic to see Redford playing a character so disinterested in politics when the real Redford is just the opposite; Mia Farrow, his co-star in the 1974 version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, two films later in Redford’s credit list than The Way We Were (The Sting came in between them), recalled that she could never connect with him off-screen because every moment he wasn’t needed before the cameras he was in his dressing-room trailer watching the Senate Watergate hearings on TV.

Detour (PRC, 1946)

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

After The Way We Were TCM showed a “Noir Alley” presentation of a film whose darkness and coldness was much more to my heart -- a fresh breath of foul air, as it were -- Detour, the 1946 film noir directed by Edgar G. Ulmer at the ultra-cheap PRC studio starring Tom Neal as Al Roberts, pianist at a dive bar in New York City whose girlfriend Sue (Claudia Drake) sings at the club. The old Jimmy McHugh song “I Can’t Believe That You’re in Love with Me” is their biggest joint success at the club -- it’s one of the few pieces that can get the bar patrons actually to look up from their tables and drinks and actually listen -- and it becomes associated with Al and his soon-to-be lost love. Sue decides to go to Hollywood to take a run at the movies and she leaves Al alone, determined not to marry him until they’re both successful (Al is the sort of bar pianist who practices classical pieces during his breaks -- the Op. 64, no. 2 waltz by Chopin and the Op. 39 waltz by Brahms, which in the fashion of the time he plays first come scritto and then as a boogie-woogie.) Al gets lonely without her and determines to cross the country, move to L.A. and reunite with her, but even after he’s sold all his meager possessions he has no way he can afford to get there other than hitchhiking.

He eventually works his way as far as Arizona, where he’s picked up by a man named Charles Haskell, Jr. (Edmund McDonald). The first thing Haskell asks Al to do for him is get him a small box of pills from his glove compartment -- I assumed they were nitroglycerine pills and he had a heart condition -- and then Haskell shows off three scars on his hand inflicted by a former girlfriend and a deeper scar on his arm which he got, he says, when he and a friend (they were teenagers at the time) took a pair of dueling sabers off his dad’s wall and played with them until he put his friend’s eye out, whereupon his rich dad disowned him and he’s been drifting ever since. He’s done well enough for himself that he owns a flashy, expensive car -- a 1941 Lincoln V-12 -- which practically becomes a character in the movie itself. Al is relieved that Haskell is going all the way to L.A., but the trip takes an unexpected turn when a rainstorm starts up at night in the middle of the Arizona desert. Al, who’s driving at Haskell’s request since Haskell was tired and wanted to nap, pulls the car over to put up its top and notices Haskell is unconscious. He opens the passenger-side door and Haskell falls out, striking his head on a boulder by the side of the road. Whatever killed him -- the blow to his head or a previous heart attack Haskell couldn’t short-circuit with his pills -- Haskell is dead and Al realizes that the police will suspect he killed Haskell to steal his car and over $700 in cash he had on him.

Al plans to drive Haskell’s car either to San Bernardino or L.A. and abandon it, then get together with Sue, but his plans are short-circuited when he picks up a woman hitchhiker and the film spirals totally into nightmare. The woman turns out to be Vera (Ann Savage), who seems normal at first but startles Al when she asks him what he did with Haskell’s body. She was the woman who got a ride from Haskell and gave him those three scratches on his hand when he made a pass at her and she fought him off. The two uneasy crimebirds form a partnership, intending to sell Haskell’s car to a dealer and get a $1,850 bankroll they can split, but then Vera realizes from a newspaper story that Haskell’s father, who hasn’t seen his son in 16 years, is about to die and Al could conceivably impersonate the son, show up at the Haskell home and claim the estate, especially since the article helpfully pointed out that the family’s attorneys were looking for Haskell, Jr. Vera blackmails Al into going along with the scheme by threatening to report him to the police if he doesn’t -- whereupon he points out that if she does that, he’ll say they were in on it together so they’ll both be executed for Haskell’s murder -- and so it goes until at one point Vera takes the phone in their sleazy little motel room, takes it into the bedroom and says she’s about to call the police. Al grabs the phone cord and pulls it tight, wanting to get the phone away from Vera -- only Vera had got the cord around her neck and by pulling on it Al inadvertently strangles and kills her.

All this is narrated by Al in a framing scene, set in a Nevada diner, where in the great tradition of impoverished movie characters he’s drinking a cup of coffee because he doesn’t have enough money actually to order any food. Things are already pretty mopey for him and they get worse when someone else in the place puts a nickel in the jukebox and plays “I Can’t Believe That You’re in Love with Me” -- and the song has the same effect on Al that that madeleine had on Proust, causing him to recount his life for us even though he isn’t talking to anyone in particular (it’s not like there’s anyone in the place that he’s actually talking to, and given that what he’s saying is he’s wanted for two murders and the police are continually after him it’s unlikely he’d be confiding this to a stranger even in a movie as nervy as this one, with its frayed attitude towards human relationships). Detour has become one of the oddest out-of-left-field films in all movie history to attain classic status, including a full restoration in 2018 by the Cinematheque Francaise in alliance with the Criterion Collection (the best print they could find was one originally released in Belgium with two sets of subtitles, in Flemish and French, and they used another print from the U.S. but in less good condition to erase the subtitles digitally) -- I hadn’t thought of Detour as a film that needed restoration but I’m glad it got it anyway, if only because some of the prints I’d seen seriously shredded the very ending of the film so it was unclear what was supposed to be going on.

Apparently Joseph Breen, Will Hays’ successor as head of the Production Code Administration, objected to Al apparently getting away with murder (he’d had the same objection the same year to Fritz Lang’s noir classic Scarlet Street, in which the character played by Edward G. Robinson murdered the woman he thought was in love with him and her boyfriend got convicted and executed for the crime) and demanded that the film end with a scene in which a police car would pull up to Al and arrest him. But the voice-over narration makes it clear that this isn’t supposed to be something that happens in the actual story; it represents Al’s fear that he will be arrested and ultimately convicted of crimes for which he’s morally innocent but legally guilty. Detour has been hailed for a lot of things, including Ulmer’s artful direction on a pinched budget (the film’s cost has been estimated at $30,000, low even by 1946 standards) and the feral force-of-nature performance by Ann Savage as Vera as well as the superb work of Tom Neal (who in later years was almost as much a low-life off-screen as he was on), but this time around the real unsung hero of Detour seemed to me to be its writer, Martin Goldsmith. He came up with a simple story rich with allusions, and though the film has been criticized for the many loose ends in the plot -- some writers have suspected the film was originally planned as longer and more elaborate than it is, including an on-screen attempt by Al to pass himself off as the heir to the Haskell fortune, but PRC didn’t have the money or time to shoot it -- I think the movie is just fine as it stands.

There are fascinating parallels between the lives of Al’s two victims, both of whom (at least if I’m right about my reading of the plot) are suffering from life-threatening illnesses -- Haskell has a heart condition and Vera has tuberculosis (Al compares her to the heroine of Camille) and says that if she’s caught and executed “the state will be doing me a favor, because I don’t have that much longer anyway” -- and Haskell was a cheap gambler and bookie who’d been on his way to L.A. in the first place to place a bet on a fixed race at Santa Monica. The film gains its power largely from the closed-in world of its two leads (though Vera doesn’t enter the action until about halfway through the running time), and unlike in most femme fatale stories the tension between the leads has nothing to do with sex. The classic femmes fatales, like Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity and Claire Trevor in Murder, My Sweet, used their bodies as sexual lures to pull basically decent but stupid and ultimately greedy men into their plots. Ann Savage -- I can’t think of another movie in which one of the leading actors had such a name perfectly suited to their character! -- comes off as a sheer force of nature without a hint of a redeeming quality, turned hard-bitten by the sheer ordeal of surviving in a noir underworld and with an odd aspect of honesty and forthrightness in her evil: she knows who and what she is and she doesn’t care what either the other characters or the audience think of her. I also liked the irony that Goldsmith gave his false-hearted villainess a name that means “true”!

At times Goldsmith’s dialogue gets silly -- notably the part in which after he recounts his killing of Vera that the music played by the saxophonist practicing in the room next door (who’s both part of the movie’s reality and its background score, since he’s orchestrally accompanied by the orchestra of musical director Leo Erdody) “wasn’t a love song anymore -- it was a DIRGE!” -- but for the most part it’s quite tight and sounds like what people like this would actually say. Some writers have suggested that Al is lying to us in his flashback and he really did kill Haskell and/or Vera intentionally -- which would make Detour the first film to show a visual flashback that was supposed to be a lie (four years before Alfred Hitchcock did it in Stage Fright -- until then the convention had been that a movie character could speak a lie in dialogue, but if the camera showed it, that meant it was a true part of the story reality) -- but I’m more inclined to believe that he, like Fred MacMurray’s character in Double Indemnity, is a basically decent but weak person who gets sucked into the noir world and loses his moral bearings along the way.

Detour is also a marvelous movie technically, reflecting director Ulmer’s work in the 1920’s as a technical assistant to Friedrich Murnau, Fritz Lang and the other giants of Weimar-era German cinema. Though much of it takes place in cars with the characters “driving” in process shots in front of backdrops representing highways, the process work is absolutely convincing despite the film’s ultra-low budget. Indeed, in later interviews Ulmer made the film seem even cheaper than it was -- he claimed it was shot in just one week but the extant PRC files list a 28-day shoot and that’s how long Ann Savage said it was in later years (she actually had the most sane life of the Detour principals and managed to publish an autobiography and live to 87! -- and the Lincoln V-12 convertible that figures so prominently in the action was Ulmer’s own car (nice to know that even in the Poverty Row assignments he was getting he was still able to afford such a nice car) and the sweater Ann Savage is wearing when she’s introduced was a “loaner” from Ulmer’s wife Shirley.

I read Detour as the ultimate expression, outside Frltz Lang’s own films, of Lang’s idea that we are all in the grip of an unalterable fate or destiny that controls our lives and leads them into directions we don’t consciously want to go; it’s known that Ulmer didn’t like Lang personally (they’d worked together in Germany and Ulmer thought Lang unscrupulous and sadistic, and reportedly based Boris Karloff’s architect and Satanist character in the 1934 film The Black Cat on him), but it’s obvious Ulmer had learned his lessons from Lang as a filmmaker and Detour is yet another example showing that film noir came from the fusion of the German cinematic style of the Weimar era, particularly the heavy use of dark shadows, high contrast and chiaroscuro lighting, with the hard-boiled crime fiction published by U.S. pulp magazines in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Indeed, the three films I would regard as the archetypal noirs -- The Maltese Falcon (1941 version), Double Indemnity and Murder, My Sweet -- each stem from works by the three archetypal writers of pulp crime fiction: Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler, respectively.

Christmas in Connecticut (Warner Bros., 1944, released 1945)

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

Last night Charles and I watched a movie he had specifically asked to see, and rather than search for any home-recorded copy I might have had I went ahead and ordered it from Amazon.com, which because I’m an Amazon Prime member shipped it to me in a day or two: Christmas in Connecticut, a film made by Warner Bros. in 1944 (the original copyright date) but not released until August 11, 1945 (not only a bit early in the year for a Christmas movie but also odd in that the film’s plot assumes that World War II is still a going concern -- one big scene occurs at a dance that is being held as part of a War Bond drive -- when in fact it was just about over by the time the film came out). Charles and I had seen it before and remembered it fondly (and I have a previous moviemagg blog post on it at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2009/12/christmas-in-connecticut-warner-bros.html) -- and still enjoyed it. I don’t know whether he’s seen the remake that was done for TV in the 1990’s with Dyan Cannon (fourth of the five Mrs. Cary Grants) in the lead, played here by the incomparable Barbara Stanwyck, and Arnold Schwarzenegger directing for what I think is the first and only time in his career. I certainly haven’t, and I can’t imagine it better than this one.

Christmas in Connecticut was directed by Peter Godfrey -- an O.K. filmmaker whom Jack Warner for some reason decided to give a major “push” to while simultaneously driving away better but also more troublesome directors like John Huston and Howard Hawks -- from a script by Lionel Houser and Adele Commandini based on a story by Aileen Hamilton. The story opens in the North Atlantic, where a German U-Boat sinks a U.S. Navy ship and we see only two survivors, Jefferson Jones (Dennis Morgan) and his pal Sinkiewicz (Frank Jenks). Jones is having a hallucination on board their lifeboat in which he’s eating a seven-course gourmet meal and Sinkiewicz is the tuxedo-clad waiter serving him. They’re finally rescued, but this movie’s obsession with food continues as Sinkiewicz is allowed to eat anything he wants in the hospital but Jones is fed only milk and eggs (one breakfast is a raw egg cracked and poured into a bowl of milk, which looks as ghastly as it sounds). Jones wonders what he has to do to get a decent meal and his buddy tells him to “use the old magoo” -- i.e., to cruise the nurse that serves him, Mary Lee (Joyce Compton, speaking with so thick a Southern accent you think, “What else could be called but ‘Mary Lee’?”). It works, but Mary is so taken with him she expects him to marry her, and in order to get Jones a real Christmas with a real home-cooked meal she writes a letter to magazine publisher Alexander Yardley (Sidney Greenstreet, marvelously imperious but also showing off the comedy chops that had made him a stage star -- his most famous live role was Shakespeare’s Sir John Falstaff -- before his film debut at age 61 as Casper Gutman in The Maltese Falcon gave him a movie career but also “typed” him as a super-villain), whom she knows because she once nursed his great-granddaughter in a hospital and brought her back to health.

The letter asks if Jones can be invited to the home of Elizabeth Lane (Barbara Stanwyck) to share Christmas with her, her husband, their baby and the animals on their farm in Connecticut. Elizabeth Lane is the star writer for Yardley’s Smart Housekeeping magazine and she poses as an authority on home life in general and home cooking in particular -- every one of her articles features mouth-watering descriptions of gourmet dishes and recipes so you can make them at home. Just about everyone who talks or writes about this movie now makes the obvious comparison to Martha Stewart, but this would-be kitchen diva can’t cook at all and she lives alone in a tiny New York apartment with a view of the building next door and the clothesline on its roof. She gets the fabulous recipes she puts in her columns from her friend, Hungarian expatriate restaurateur Felix Bassenak (S. Z. “Cuddles” Sakall in one of his most extensive and delightful performances) and pretty much fakes all the rest. Needless to say, she’s scared to death about having to impersonate a married Connecticut farm resident who’s also a kitchen whiz -- and though this hadn’t occurred to me before Stanwyck’s role in Christmas in Connecticut is a parody of her role in Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe: the committed woman journalist who’s invented a hoax to keep her job with an imperious publisher and has to go to extremes to make sure she isn’t found out and fired.

In this case the lengths she goes to include accepting the frequent marriage proposals of her friend John Sloan (Reginald Gardiner, whose acting here is more “straight” than in some of his films that weren’t meant to be comedies -- like the 1954 Black Widow, a favorite of mine and essentially a murder mystery grafted onto the plot of All About Eve), an architect and a foofy bore who drones on and on about his ideas for heating and plumbing the buildings he designs. She suggests they get married by a local justice of the peace in the Connecticut village near Sloan’s farm, and Sloan’s housekeeper Norah (Una O’Connor, considerably more restrained than she was in James Whale’s The Invisible Man and The Bride of Frankenstein) supplies the baby -- actually two babies she’s baby-sitting for women involved in defense production. Only the two babies not only look visibly different (one has a shock of blond hair and talks) but are of opposite genders. Elizabeth also invites Felix, ostensibly as a friend but actually because she needs him to cook the spectacular dishes Yardley and Jones are both expecting from The Great Household Diva.

What follows is the sort of movie in which much of the enjoyment comes from watching the writers write themselves into one corner after another and then wait for the ingenious ways they think of to write themselves out of it again. Christmas in Connecticut is a series of tests for its female lead to see if she can maintain the pose of a married woman and a household expert -- particularly tough given whom she has to pretend to be married to -- including a set of preposterous scenes in which Elizabeth is challenged to flip pancakes (or, as they’re called in the script, “flapjacks”) in a skillet without using a spatula (that would be cheating) or having the half-cooked pancake land on the ceiling, the floor, the rest of the stove, or her face. Of course the Hollywood-inevitable happens and Elizabeth finds herself falling hard for Jefferson Jones, who’s tall, hunky, a war hero and has a great Irish tenor voice (this was four years before Dennis Morgan starred as Irish-American musical star Chauncey Olcott in the biomusical My Wild Irish Rose, and here gets to croon a new song called “The Wish That I Wish Tonight” as well as the familiar carol “O Little Town of Bethlehem”), though it takes a runaway cow who buries them in snow and (later) a runaway horse that takes them for a sleigh ride as they’re sitting in the sleigh outside that barn dance to bring them together.

Christmas in Connecticut is a marvelously insouciant film -- it’s essentially a screwball comedy made about a decade after the heyday of that genre, but it’s still damned funny and a much more interesting bit of pre-holiday fare than yet another slog through A Christmas Carol. Last time both Charles and I were particularly impressed by Barbara Stanwyck’s performance, but this time around we saw it as much more of an ensemble cast -- not only showcasing Stanwyck’s incredible versatility (she manages the transitions from self-assured domestic diva to scared little hoaxter to almost girlish lovestruck fool seamlessly -- I’ve long hailed Stanwyck as the movies’ greatest actress for her sheer versatility, matched by no one in her own time and only by Meryl Streep since) and Greenstreet’s rarely preserved talent for comedy, but the rest of the cast also scintillates and even Dennis Morgan, in a character that usually would just be the romantic stick-figure lead the Hollywood formulae obliged the heroine to end up with because they had to pair her up with someone at the end, turns in a nice comic performance and gives the character at least some dimension. The last time I watched this I lamented that the director was Peter Godfrey instead of Preston Sturges or Howard Hawks (who’d made Stanwyck’s two best comedies, The Lady Eve and Ball of Fire, respectively), but while he’s not in their league as a farceur Godfrey turns in an admirable job here and puts a well-trained cast through their paces as he moves the plot efficiently through the sheer looniness of the writing committee’s inventions. It’s a sheer delight start-to-finish and arguably the prototype of all the Christmas movies on the Hallmark Channel and Lifetime -- the sort of story where you know how things are going to end up but it’s still a lot of fun watching them get there.

Star in the Night (Warner Bros., 1944, released 1945)

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

After Christmas in Connecticut Charles and I watched an intriguing little bonus item on the same DVD, a 20-minute short called Star in the Night made by Warners’ shorts department and the directorial debut of Don Siegel. Like Christmas in Connecticut its copyright date is 1944 but it wasn’t released until 1945 (October 13, closer to the expected release date of a Christmas-themed film than the August release of Christmas in Connecticut), and it’s a modern-day retelling of the Nativity story. It begins with three cowboys riding across the Southwestern desert with armloads of oddball stuff they just bought at a souvenir shop because they wanted an excuse to cruise the hot young salesgirl. They come across a huge star in the sky that blinks on and off and turns out to be the emblem of the Star Auto Court (an “auto court” was 1930’s and 1940’s speak for “motel”). The star isn’t supposed to blink; the auto court’s owner, Nick Catapoli (J. Carrol Naish -- film historian Tom Weaver noted the irony that Naish played every conceivable ethnicity on screen except his real one, which was Irish), acquired it from a now-defunct movie theatre and is trying to rewire it so it will stay on continuously.

He’s also dealing with a tramp character (Donald Woods) who’s come in and talked Nick into letting him stay in the office and have a cup of coffee while he makes cynical comments about the motel’s guests, including a woman who complains that her neighbors are singing Christmas songs and keeping her awake, and a shirt salesman who says the laundry Nick sent his clothes to tore them up and ruined them. The tramp tells Nick that he doesn’t believe in all that peace-on-earth-good-will-to-men stuff and offers Nick’s customers as proof that it’s all the bunk. Then, just after Nick has rented out the last room he has available, a young Mexican couple, Jose and Maria Santos (Anthony Caruso and Lynn Baggett) show up and, though there’s no room at the inn (where have we heard that before?), he’ll let them stay in the barn on his property, especially since Maria is “with child” and about to give birth. With no one with any medical training on hand to help (though writers Robert Finch and Saul Elkins briefly give us the impression that the tall woman who worried about being kept awake had some experience as a midwife), the hotel guests suddenly grow hearts and start helping out with the birth, carrying big bowls of boiling water, while the shirt salesman tears up his shirts to make bandages as needed.

Just in case we missed the point, Siegel ends the film with a dissolve from a calendar on Nick’s wall with a Nativity painting to the scene of the birth of Maria Santos’s child (I think they say in the dialogue somewhere that it’s a boy instead of just leaving us to assume that given the origins of this tale), with the three cowboys showing up as the Wise Men led there by the star to give their souvenir junk to the newborn babe. Don Siegel and Byron Haskin, who also later became a full-fledged director, had headed Warner Bros.’ montage department for years -- it was Siegel’s idea to have images of giant ticker-tape machines melting over a scene of Wall Street to indicate the 1929 stock market crash in the 1939 gangster film The Roaring Twenties -- and for years he’d pestered Jack Warner for permission to direct a film. As Siegel told Stuart Kaminsky in a book-length interview in 1971, Warner finally gave him the assignment to direct two shorts, and for Star in the Night he deliberately avoided montage sequences because he wanted to show Jack Warner he could do something else.

Siegel’s second short was quite the opposite -- a documentary (his only one) called Hitler Lives which was basically one long montage sequence based mostly on Warners newsreels and U.S. government footage of World War II to argue that though Hitler was dead, the spirit of authoritarianism was still very much alive in the world -- and so were the social forces that had brought Hitler to power in the first place. (When your first two films are about Christ and Hitler, respectively, you’ve covered just about the entire spectrum of human behavior between the opposite poles of good and evil.) Then Jack Warner finally gave Siegel a feature assignment with the 1946 film The Verdict, co-starring Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre (who jointly gave their starts to three famous directors -- Siegel, John Huston in The Maltese Falcon and Jean Negulesco in The Mask of Dimitrios), only to fire him after his very next feature, Night Unto Night, a heavy-breathing soap opera with intellectual pretensions with Swedish actress Vivica Lindfors (whom Siegel fall in love with while making the film, which he admitted screwed up his objectivity about her performance and the film as a whole) and Ronald Reagan miles out of his depth.

Kiss of Death (20th Century-Fox, 1947)

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

Last Saturday Turner Classic Movies had run three films noir (or at least films gris) in a row with at least some vague connection to Christmas, though with one thing or another I’d only had time to comment on the first one, Lady on a Train, a marvelous fusion of screwball comedy, murder mystery and musical starring Deanna Durbin and directed by her future husband, Charles David, in 1945. The second and third in the sequence are more traditionally noir (though in 1944 Durbin had done an even darker Christmas-themed movie, Christmas Holiday, with Gene Kelly as her co-star -- though instead of the bright, sprightly holiday musical you would have expected from that title and those stars it was a dark melodrama in which Kelly plays Durbin’s crazy ex-husband who’s escaped from a mental institution and is determined to kill her), the acknowledged 1947 classic Kiss of Death and the not as well regarded but still intriguing 1946 Raymond Chandler adaptation Lady in the Lake. Kiss of Death officially starred Victor Mature, Coleen Gray (who got an “Introducing” credit) and Brian Donlevy, but it was Richard Widmark (in his first film) as crazy killer Tommy Udo who got the notices and career boost from it. The infamous scene in which he grabs the wheelchair-bound Mrs. Rizzo (Mildred Dunnock), mother of one of the criminals Udo is supposed to track down and kill, and pushes her in her wheelchair down a flight of stairs to her death followed Widmark throughout his career -- 20 years later, working with Don Siegel on the film Madigan (in which Widmark played a police detective with a penchant for accepting favors from local merchants, but still basically honest in the end), he was complaining that people still thought of him as Tommy Udo even though by then he’d played as many good-guy as bad-guy roles. I’ve long suspected 20th Century-Fox studio head Darryl F. Zanuck thought of Widmark as the new James Cagney (whom Zanuck had signed in 1930 when he was head of production at Warner Bros.), a small and high-voiced but tough actor who could play bad guys or good guys whose behavior skirted the good-bad line.

Kiss of Death has only a tangential Christmas theme in an opening narration by Coleen Gray stating that small-time crook Nick Bianco (Victor Mature, showing his usual bovine imperturbability -- in 1941 Josef von Sternberg had got a marvelously nuanced performance out of him as a corrupt doctor in The Shanghai Gesture, but no one else was ever again able to get that much acting out of Mature -- though given that his character is pretty simple-minded and gets led into traps both by fellow crooks and the law because he’s too stupid to perceive them, Mature’s non-acting actually sults the part quite well and a more accomplished actor like Bogart, Dick Powell or Robert Mitchum might not have been as good) has to do his Christmas shopping his own way because his criminal record keeps him from getting a legitimate job. (I remember a few years ago there was a campaign called “Ban the Box” -- the box being the question on an employment application which asks if you’ve ever been convicted, or sometimes even if you’ve merely been arrested even though you haven’t been convicted, which is hard to square with the principle of Anglo-American law that you’re presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.) Nick is arrested for robbing a jewelry store on the 10th floor of a tall business building -- there’s a great suspense scene from director Henry Hathaway in which we wonder whether he’ll get to the ground floor with the loot in time before the police, called by the jeweler, arrive and seal the building so Nick can’t get out -- and tough-as-nails assistant D.A. Louis D’Angelo (Brian Donlevy in one of his best performances, before his chronic alcoholism robbed him of his authority) tries to get Nick to turn state’s evidence and rat out the other members of his gang, who did escape.

Nick turns him down and meets Tommy Udo on his ride to state prison -- Udo, it turns out, is going to be his cellmate, though from the start we’re told that Nick is a good-bad gangster (he drifted into a life of crime because that’s what his father did, too -- the next year Nicholas Ray would make They Live by Night, which even more boldly hinted that criminal tendencies are hereditary) while Udo is a bad-bad gangster, who kills people because someone has hired him to do so but who also takes a great deal of sadistic pleasure in his work, boasting about how he likes to shoot people in the belly so it will take them longer to die. (Two years later Neville Brand spoke similar dialogue for his role as a psycho killer in the 1949 film D.O.A.; that film’s writers, Russell Rouse and Clarence Greene, blatantly plagiarized the lines by Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer in Kiss of Death.) When he went into prison Nick had a wife and two daughters, but when he gets word that his wife has committed suicide and his daughters are in an orphanage, he re-contacts A.D.A. D’Angelo and agrees to “squeal.” Nick is ultimately released and testifies against Udo in a trial based on an earlier murder Nick knew Udp had committed, but Udo is acquitted and Nick knows that Udo will come looking for him and kill him if he has the chance. Eventually Nick agrees to wear a wire and try to record Udo confessing to yet another murder, and he nearly loses everything -- his life, his new wife (Coleen Gray) who used to baby-sit for the kids, his job and his more or less settled existence -- but as a result of Nick’s information there’s a final shoot-out in which Nick is wounded and Udo dies (so Nick doesn’t have to worry about him beating justice in a courtroom again).

Kiss of Death is a well-made film -- Hathaway was usually known as a Western director (he was the next guy on the list if you couldn’t get John Ford or Howard Hawks) but he handles the confines of a film noir quite well -- even though it’s also one of Fox’s “documentary” movies (begun by former March of Time producer Louis de Rochemont in the 1945 film The House on 92nd Street), which had their credits written as if typed on a typewriter and were often shot in real locations rather than studio sets. It’s not all that interesting a story -- though its depiction of how the criminal law is really enforced is a lot closer to reality, then or now, than the dramatic trial scenes (I was astounded when Andrew Weissmann, one of the attorneys in Robert Mueller’s investigation of the ties between Russia and Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, said most criminals serving time in prison got there by jury convictions; he should know better -- most people in U.S. prisons got there by cutting plea bargains, and a lot of the “tough on crime” laws in the U.S. were passed at the urging of prosecutors to give them more leverage to cut plea deals), and I loved the line Hecht and Lederer gave Mature when Nick tells D’Angelo that his side of the law is almost as crooked as Nick’s own, a blurring of the moral line between criminals and cops that would become far more important in 1950’s and 1960’s movies and would get almost totally erased in 1970’s movies like Dirty Harry, The French Connection and Death Wish which would present cops with the apparent morals (or lack thereof) of criminals and expect us in the audience to approve.

Kiss of Death is a peculiarly schizoid movie in which the villains are more interesting than the heroes -- indeed, one of the way it anticipates modern movies is the lack of anyone we can unambiguously root for (the closest character to a representative of positive social values is Donlevy’s, and he seems pretty scummy in his unscrupulousness and his demand that Nick put his own life at risk permanently in these days before witness-protection programs just to nail a few relatively unimportant crooks; at one point he feigns interest in working up the food chain to find the higher-ups, the fences who buy stolen jewels and the crooked dealers who make the real money off them, but for the most part he’s depicted as a harried prosecutor who will take whatever he can get in the way of convictions or plea deals) -- and it’s a good film as it stands but it has the hints of something even better that could have been made of the same material.

Lady in the Lake (MGM, 1946)

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

That’s even more true of the last Christmas-themed film noir TCM showed last Sunday, December 19: Lady in the Lake, MGM’s intriguing but ultimately unsatisfying adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s 1943 novel The Lady in the Lake (which, unlike the movie, did not take place at Christmastime). The omission of the first article from the film’s title was just a hint of the drastic remodelings writer Steve Fisher (hardly at Chandler’s level but a workmanlike veteran of the pulps) and Robert Montgomery, who both directed and starred as Philip Marlowe, put Chandler’s material through. They decided in effect to turn Chandler’s book into a radio play, with Montgomery as Marlowe seated at his office desk (in a much nicer office than the one Chandler had described -- this was MGM, after all) narrating the story and periodically interrupting the action, which otherwise was shown exclusively from Marlowe’s point of view. This technique, which MGM’s publicists called “The Camera Eye,” had been previously used sporadically -- notably by Rouben Mamoulian in his 1932 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in which we don’t see star Fredric March as either Jekyll or Hyde until about 15 minutes into the film; and an obscure 1930 film called The Bishop Murder Case with Basil Rathbone as Philo Vance and the murders filmed through the killer’s eyes -- but no one had ever tried shooting almost an entire film that way.

Apparently Montgomery thought it would be a good cinematic analogue to Chandler’s first-person writing style, telling the story from Marlowe’s point of view, but it really doesn’t work at least in part for the reasons William K. Everson wrote in The Detective in Film. “When the ears pick up a sound,” Everson wrote, “the head does not have to swivel to meet it; sometimes a mere shifting of the eyes is sufficient. Or if the head moves, it does so in one swift movement, picking up no detail on the way. But certainly the head does not move in a smooth panning shot, registering every detail in focus until it reaches the object of its attention. Nor, when one walks (whether stealthily or briskly) does one walk in the measured, ritualized gait necessary for a heavy camera being pushed along by a crew.” Raymond Chandler, who worked briefly on the script before he either quit or was fired (he wrote a letter saying he would never again work on a film of one of his own books because it was “too much digging up old bones”), didn’t like the Camera Eye technique and said it was one of those silly ideas film novices were always thinking up and then realizing it wouldn’t work. “One director even wanted to make the camera the murderer,” Chandler said. “You can’t do that. The camera is too honest.” There are some nice gimmick shots involving the Camera Eye -- like the scene in which Marlowe is punched out and the one in which leading lady Adrienne Fromsett (Audrey Totter, playing a role far inflated from the minor character she was in Chandler’s book) had to kiss him (and Montgomery as director had to tell her to kiss up so it would look natural on screen) -- but for the most part it makes the film draggy and dull.

Another problem with the movie is that Montgomery is so blatantly miscast; I can understand why he wanted to get away from the nice-guy image he’d usually played before (maybe he thought playing Philip Marlowe would revitalize his career the way it had Dick Powell’s in Murder, My Sweet at RKO three years before!), but for some reason he adopts a scratchy high-pitched voice that he seemed to feel would make him “tough.” Montgomery was never one for accents, anyway; I can remember the ghastly Irish brogue he adopted for his role in Yellow Jack (a late-1930’s MGM movie about the successful conquest of yellow fever in Panama at the turn of the last century so the Panama Canal could be built) and how I thought the movie would have been more entertaining if Montgomery had spoken in his normal voice. Lady in the Lake would have been, too -- as my husband Charles put it, “When Humphrey Bogart and Dick Powell played Marlowe, they sounded cynical; Montgomery just sounds whiny” -- and my own comment was that this movie needed Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall and got Robert Montgomery and Audrey Totter.

But the biggest single miscalculation behind Lady in the Lake was the total omission of any scenes taking place at the lake. Marlowe is hired by publisher Derace Kingsby (Leon Ames) -- “Kingsley” in Chandler’s novel -- to find his missing wife, who’s supposed to have run off with Southern-fried stud Chris Lavery (Dick Simmons). Marlowe goes up to Little Fawn Lake, privately owned by Kingsby, and finds that Muriel Chess, wife of Kingsby’s disabled caretaker Bill Chess, is also missing. With the assistance of county sheriff Patton, Marlowe discovers a bloated body in the lake (Chandler describes the recovery process in almost excruciating detail) whom Chess identifies as his wife Muriel. But the body is actually that of Kingsby’s wife Crystal and Muriel Chess -- whose real name was Mildred Haviland and who was involved in a scandal involving a married doctor (an abortionist, Chandler hinted) and his wife, an apparent suicide -- killed her and then fled.

Mildred was also the ex-lover of Al Degarmo (Lloyd Nolan), a once-honest cop in “Bay City” (Marlowe’s name for Santa Monica -- which he described as such a sinkhole of corruption he may have felt he needed to give it a false name to avoid a group libel suit) who fell in love with Mildred and turned crooked to cover up her crimes. One of Degarmo’s tricks is to hijack other people’s cars, crash them and frame them by pouring gin over them and reporting them for drunk driving and, in at least one case, vehicular manslaughter. (One wonders if Raymond Chandler had got this gimmick from the 1939 Warners crime film Each Dawn I Die, in which James Cagney’s character is framed just that way.) Omitting the lake scenes and just having Marlowe tell us about what happened there almost totally destroys the elaborate parallels Chandler worked out not only between the country and the city, but between honest county sheriff Patton (one of the few completely admirable characters Chandler ever wrote) and corrupt city cop Degarmo. Even more than Kiss of Death, Lady in the Lake (the movie) relies almost totally for its entertainment value on the strength of the actors playing villains; though Fisher’s script eliminated most of the backstory explanations for Degarmo’s actions Lloyd Nolan grabbed hold of the few that remained and built a characterization that makes you feel a bit sorry for him even as you hate him -- and Joyce Meadows, in just two brief scenes as Mildred (in one of which she passes herself off as Lavery’s landlord right after she’s killed him), likewise made an indelible impression. All those years Meadows was that nice little Mrs. Steve Allen -- and, as I said of her magnificent bitch-sister performance in the otherwise forgettable film Enchantment, who knew she had such a skill for playing wicked women?

Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood: Garth and Tricia Live (CBS-TV Christmas Special, aired December 20, 2020)

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

Last night the CBS network offered a couple of Christmas-themed music specials, including one featuring Garth Brooks and his wife, Trisha Yearwood, which was a welcome departure from some of Brooks’s previous TV specials. Instead of a gargantuan production in a stadium featuring Garth Brooks flying (he’s not a fat man but he is quite heavy-set and I suspect they have to use cables instead of wires to fly him), it took place in what purported to be Mr. and Mrs. Brooks’ home, including the in-house recording studio where they work, and just featured the two of them gaily bantering back and forth and singing a bunch of low-keyed and often joking renditions of Christmas songs. It actually began with the two of them singing what Brooks introduced as a Thanksgiving song -- he said he was going to start with Thanksgiving and end with New Year’s -- called “There Are Things I’m Thankful For.” The two of them (most of the songs were performed by both singers, though on some of them Trisha was little more than Garth’s backing vocalist -- apparently in his concerts she performs an opening set solo and then becomes one of his backup singers during his set), including “The Little Drummer Boy” and “Silent Night.” Trisha came out with a solo version of Eartha Kitt’s 1950’s novelty “Santa Baby” -- she did it surprisingly well but no one is going to cut Eartha on this song -- and Garth did the most moving song of the evening, “Belleau Wood,” a song about World War I and the fabled “Christmas truce” the soldiers declared against the wishes of their officers.

After that Garth and Trisha sang together on something called “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” which Brooks joked had come about because he wanted to see if he could “tweak” an old (and safely in the public domain!) song into a Christmas theme. The next song was “Ugly Christmas Sweater,” about a man who runs into a woman at an office party and, though he’s never thought of her “that way” before, finds her irresistibly attractive while she’s wearing the titular garment. (I laughed at the song but now it occurs to me that it’s profoundly dated in the era of MeToo! -- though is the MeToo! era over already? Did it get killed because during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic everyone is working from home anyway?) and a quite beautiful solo by Trisha on Adolphe Adam’s classic “O Holy Night.” Garth accompanied her on guitar and later joked about how difficult that song is to play and wondered why the composer wrote it all in minor keys. (Because he was a fully credentialed 19th century classical composer -- besides “O Holy Night” Adam is best known as the composer of the ballet Giselle -- and they did those sorts of things.) After a light-hearted version of “Frosty the Snowman” (unlike other performers on specials like this, Brooks and Yearwood frequently crammed another song -- or at least a bit of one -- in the last minute or so before they had to stop for a commercial break), the two joined each other for Jose Feliciano’s disgustingly unavoidable hot “Feliz Navidad” (one of the nice things about listening to Los Lobos’ Christmas album was to be reminded that there are other Spanish-language Christmas songs besides “Feliz Navidad”), and Brooks spent much of the rest of the show breaking into it and joking about how much he likes it and his wife doesn’t. Trisha came out at this point with a quite good modern song called “Hard Candy Christmas”, which she reprised in response to Garth’s joking reprise of “Feliz Navidad.”

Then came a song that didn’t really have a Christmas connection but which turned out to be one of the highlights of the evening, along with “Belleau Wood” -- “Shallow,” the big duet between Lady Gaga (who can sing) and Bradley Cooper (who can’t) from the latest version of A Star Is Born. It was nice at long last to hear this song done by two people who can sing -- and while the portrayal of the Brooks-Yearwood relationship in this show was a happy, homey, uncomplicated one far removed from the Sturm und Drang of the plot of A Star Is Born. Then there was another unfamiliar (at least to me) recent carol called “Baby Jesus Is Born” which I quite liked, and a song by Dan Fogelberg apparently called “Christmas in the Snow” before they finally rang out the special with “Auld Lang Syne,” nicely harmonized by the couple before Garth ended the show with yet another gag reprise of “Feliz Navidad.” Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood are quite good duet partners -- maybe not at the near-perfect level of Johnny Cash and June Carter but far better than Waylon Jennings and Jessi Colter, who during their marriage tried to be the new Johnny and June and failed miserably because their voices didn’t blend for shit. This show was a nice, comfortable run-through, and if Garth and Trisha were trying to tell us that their relationship is perfectly harmonious (literally and figuratively), they certainly made it look that way!

22nd Annual A Home for the Holidays (Dave Thomas Foundation, CBS-TV, aired December 20, 2020)

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

After the Garth Brooks-Trisha Yearwood holiday special CBS-TV followed it up with what was billed as the 22nd anniversary of A Home for the Holidays. I remember encountering some of the earliest shows in this annual series and being astonished at the whole concept of the program -- an infomercial for adoption. There were plenty of happy couples featured with their new kids, and at least two whose adoptions were officially finalized on camera -- including one of those my-how-far-we’ve-come moments in that one of the adopting couples featured were two legally married Gay men, Carl and Jesse, who’ve adopted two-year-old Nicholas Watkins after his natural parents, both drug users, were busted and sentenced to prison. Niucholas’s great joy in life, besides his two dads, is playing superhero -- which reminded me that, after all, Superman was adopted too. (In fact he was what the producers of the show called a “foster adoption” -- one in which the adopting family first took in the kid as a foster child and then decided they wanted to keep him and make him legally their own.) There was also a segment about a Black couple -- the wife looked quite a bit like Georgia activist and politician Stacey Abrams -- who adopted a pair of twins and then two years later got offered another baby from the same birth mother -- which made me wonder why she keeps cranking them out if she doesn’t want them.

With all the heartwarming stories about newly created families and all the love and joy adoptive kids can bring (no, thank you; I think I’m wretchedly unsuited to parenthood and the powers that be in the universe knew what they were doing when they made me Gay), there was time for ony eight songs: Josh Groban did “Celebrate Me Home” and “Angels” -- nice modern-day pop songs, though I wondered why everyone in Groban’s backup band looked about twice his age. Miranda Lambert did a beautiful rendition of her song “Bluebird” and Andrea Bocelli sang something called “I Believe” -- blessedly not the horrid piece of rancid cheese by that title Frankie Laine ill-advisedly recorded in 1953 (the year I was born!) but almost as banal, and while Bocelli once had a nice voice and could do a fairly credible stab at opera, now it’s surprisingly ragged and barely able to negotiate pop. Leslie Odom, Jr. -- who had appeared on Stephen Colbert’s show doing an uncannily exact replica of Johnny Mathis’s first Christmas album on “O Holy Night” -- did two songs here, “Heaven and Earth” and “Snow,” and sung the latter in one of the most bizarre outfits I’ve ever seen. It was two-toned, half light blue and half brown, but the split was done vertically so his right side was dressed in blue and his left side in brown. (I can imagine the tailor who was hired to make this costume asking whoever commissioned it, “You want what?”) Megan Trainor, whose waist-length hair made her look like the bride of Cousin Itt from The Addams Family, did a nice version of “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” that mixed pop, jazz and country. The finale was the ensemble cast rockin’ out to a version of “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” pretty obviously ripped off from the one on Phil Spector’s Christmas album. The whole concept of A Home for the Holidays is obviously designed for people far more sentimental than I -- though I give points for including a Gay couple in a program produced by a foundation headed and funded by Dave Thomas, founder of Wendy’s, where my husband Charles doesn’t want me to eat because Thomas supposedly was a major contributor to Donald Trump’s campaign.

Lady on a Train (Universal, 1945)

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

Last night Charles and I watched a run of three more or less noir movies with more or less connections to Christmas on Turner Classic Movies. The first was Lady on a Train, a 1945 movie from Universal reflecting their attempts to keep Deanna Durbin popular as she’d grown into adulthood and the determined manipulativeness with which she’d acted as a teenager -- always on a demented quest, usually either to reunite her divorced parents or, if one of her parents had died, to find the other a suitable replacement mate -- didn’t come off so well from a grown woman. One of the curious things about Durbin at Universal versus Judy Garland at MGM (their two careers are tied in an odd way because the two co-starred in the 1936 MGM musical short Every Sunday and they paralleled each other’s rises to popularity as teen stars) was that while MGM was plunking Judy into one big, overstuffed period musical after another Universal was casting Durbin quite creatively. In 1942 they had hired the French expatriate Jean Renoir to direct her in The Amazing Mrs. Halliday, a story about a war widow smuggling orphans out of China to the U.S. (and according to Durbin’s correspondence with film historian William K. Everson, Renoir actually shot two-thirds of the finally released version even though Bruce Manning, usually a writer, got sole credit). In 1944 they put Durbin into a film called Christmas Holiday and borrowed Gene Kelly from MGM to be her co-star -- but your expectation that a film called Christmas Holiday co-starring Deanna Durbin and Gene Kelly would be a bright, happy, sprightly musical would be dashed in a hurry. Instead it was an all-out film noir, directed by Robert Siodmak (in the middle of his run of classic noirs including Phantom Lady, The Killers, The Spiral Staircase and Criss Cross) and cast Kelly as the gangster Durbin married, then broke up with, who came back in her life to kill her for revenge.

Durbin’s next film after Christmas Holiday was Can’t Help Singing, which was more like the stuff MGM was giving Garland -- a musical about Western pioneers (let’s face it, after the smash 1943 stage success of Richard Rodgers’ and Oscar Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! musicals about pioneers were “in”) that was Durbin’s only film in color, for which Universal’s makeup and hair department turned her from dark-haired to blonde. They kept her blonde for Lady on a Train, which turned out to be a combination of mystery thriller, screwball comedy and what I call a “monomusical” (i.e., one in which only one cast member sings). I first heard of Lady on a Train from William K. Everson’s The Detective in Film, in which he gave it a rave review even though he acknowledged the film’s big flaw: “It was a throwback to the gaily lunatic comedy of the 1930’s -- the mixing of madcap murder and cocktails, as in The Thin Man and Remember Last Night? At this point in the 1940’s, murder was being taken very seriously in all the tough and violent crime/private eye melodramas with Bogart, Ladd, Raft et al. Even so, it’s such a lavish and entertaining frolic it’s hard to see why it failed, especially as .. it succeeds both as comedy and thriller.”

Lady on a Train began as a story idea by Leslie Charteris, creator of The Saint series, though Edmund Beloin and Robert O’Brien did the actual screenplay, and the director was a French expatriate named Charles David. He has only two directorial credits listed on imdb.com either in the U.S.or in France -- where he returned in 1950 with Durbin as his bride (she was drawn to older intellectual men and had fallen in love with David while making this film, but he insisted as a condition of marrying her that she give up show business, so she retired permanently after her contract with Universal ran out in 1948, married David in 1950 and lived with him in France until his death in 1999, then stayed there until she died in 2013) -- but his work here is quite good. He ably mixes the comedy and thriller elements of the story, even though the attempt to revive Durbin’s busybody character from her films as a teenager sits oddly and doesn’t quite work the way David and the writers clearly expected it to. The basic plot is a quite engaging one: Durbin plays San Francisco socialite Nikki Collins, who as the film opens is on the final leg of a train journey to New York to spend the Christmas holidays with her uncle. While she’s on the train it comes to a stop long enough for her to look through a window and see an older man being threatened by a younger one, who holds a crowbar over him and is about to clobber him with it when he notices there’s a witness on the train and he draws the window shade. But Nikki can still see the two figures as silhouettes on the shade and she notices the one clubbing the other to death.

Only when her train finally arrives in New York -- where she’s met by fussy busybody Haskell (Edward Everett Horton, as prissy as he was in his supporting roles in Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers films) of “the New York office” until she successfully eludes him -- she can’t get anyone to believe she’s actually witnessed a murder: not Haskell and not the police, either. One reason she can’t get anyone to believe her is she’s a huge fan of murder mysteries -- our first shot of her was her on the train reading a work by popular thriller writer Wayne Morgan (David Bruce) called The Case of the Headless Bride -- and when the cop she tries to report the crime to sarcastically suggests she seek out Wayne Morgan and get him to solve the crime for her, she does exactly that. At first Wayne is irritated at seeing her turn up in his apartment -- especially since his secretary and girlfriend Joyce Williams (Patricia Morison, wasted as usual in her Hollywood career in a role too small for her in both duration and importance) immediately jumps to the wrong conclusion and thinks she and Wayne are having an affair. Nikki follows Wayne and Joyce to a movie theatre where they’re running a newsreel of a fashion show Joyce was in -- and as part of the newsreel Nikki sees a story about the death of a major industrialist, Josiah Waring (Thurston Hall), and recognizes him as the victim she saw being murdered even though the official cause of his death is he fell off a ladder while hanging Christmas decorations.

There’s a scene in which Josiah Waring’s will is being read and we find that he hated his nephews Jonathan (Ralph Bellamy) and Arnold (Dan Duryea) so much he left them $1 each and gave the bulk of his fortune to his mistress, Margo Martin (Maria Palmer), singer at the Circus nightclub. Nikki ends up impersonating Margo at the Circus, going on in her place and singing quite effectively on two pop songs, the O.K. novelty “Give Me a Little Kiss, Will Ya, Huh?” by Roy Turk, Jack Smith and Maceo Pinkard and Cole Porter’s masterpiece “Night and Day.” (Earlier in the movie Durbin also sings “Silent Night” over the phone to her mother in San Francisco.) Durbin proves to be a quite good torch singer (as she had introducing Frank Loesser’s “Spring Will Be a Little Late This Year” in Christmas Holiday), lowering her register from the one she used in singing opera and semi-classics and projecting a powerful world-weariness; and Woody Bredell’s superb cinematography creates a marvelously Sternbergian effect during Durbin’s “Night and Day” and supports the whole film with great noir atmospherics somewhat at odd with the film’s trivial content.

I’m not sure Lady on a Train is as good as William Everson said it was -- certainly Christmas Holiday is an even better movie as well as a far more dramatic transformation in Durbin’s image -- but it’s still an engaging comedy-thriller that’s been all too neglected by film historians and buffs alike. (But then that’s true of virtually all Durbin’s movies; like Shirley Temple, she got out of show business altogether and lived a long and happy life out of the limelight -- which seems to be the only way a child star can hope to have a sane adult life afterwards -- but what was good for Durbin’s health and sanity was lousy for her reputation and she remains virtually forgotten today.) The climax takes place as Nikki is taken to the Waring factory, where she realizes she’s being held in the very room where the murder she watched took place -- and David and the writers at first point the finger of suspicion at Arnold, the twitchy brother, before Jonathan turns out to be the real killer and to go off the rails in a psychotic episode beautifully played by Bellamy -- a far finer actor than his reputation, even though (as Everson conceded) he was so often cast as a murderer (where he wasn’t the second lead losing the girl to the lead or the detective he occasionally played himself) that audiences who only cared whodunit and not why or how could leave the theatre early, confident that Hollywood’s typecasting system would not let them down.

The Man in the High Castle, season one, episodes three and four: "The Illustrated Woman," "Revelations" (Amazon Prime, 2015)

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

Last night Charles and I logged on to Amazon Prime (the only “streaming” channel we’ve ever subscribed to, more for the free and quick shipping on my Amazon.com orders than for the streaming feature) to watch the third and fourth episodes of season one of their TV adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, his 1962 counter-factual novel imagining what life would be like in America if the Nazi Germans and their Japanese allies had won World War II. (There’s also an alternate future to Dick’s alternate future -- a world in which the Allies won the war but not in the same way they actually did.) We managed to watch episodes three, “The Illustrated Woman” (imdb,com summary: “Joe and Juliana must act quickly as a vicious bounty hunter known as The Marshal arrives in Canon City. Tagomi makes plans with Wegener to pass valuable secrets from the Reich, and Frank plots his revenge against the Japanese”) and four, “Revelations” (imdb.com summary: “Joe is increasingly torn between duty and his growing feelings for Juliana. While Ed tries to stop Frank from making an irrevocable decision, Smith's investigation is interrupted when he has trouble with his witness, and Tagomi's plan goes awry as events take a dramatic turn at the Crown Prince's speech”), glitch-free, but the freeze-ups and warning signs that we’d lost our Internet connection kept coming fast and furious through episode five, “The New Normal” (imdb.com: “Juliana returns home, only to discover new clues that lead her closer to unraveling the mystery behind the films. Meanwhile, Joe faces a tough debriefing upon his return home. Kido begins his investigation into the events surrounding the Crown Prince's speech, while Tagomi and Wegener make a last-ditch attempt to complete their mission”), until the damned thing froze up completely in the middle of the episode and we switched it off and went back to normal TV.

The Man in the High Castle is a quite compelling drama about divided loyalties and the sorts of psychopathologies brutally dictatorial regimes like Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan encourage -- the most compelling (if totally loathsome) character in these episodes is “The Marshal” (an excellent performance by Burn Gorman), a shotgun-armed assassin who gets off on terrorizing the people he’s about to kill (or maybe not kill if he gets more of a charge out of scaring them shitless than actually offing them -- he reminds me of a statement one of Charles Manson’s friends made to prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi to the effect that the key to understanding Manson was that ‘fear turns Charlie on”),who comes to Canon City, Nevada (part of the “neutral zone” between the Japanese occupation zone in the West Coast and the Nazi-ruled East and Midwest) in search of another Nazi assassin, one who folds origami cranes (thereby linking the German and Japanese wings of the fascist alliance that, according to this story, are about to have a falling-out and go to war against each other once the terminally ill Hitler dies and an even more fanatical German nationalist -- either Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler or Martin Bormann -- takes over as the second Fuhrer).

The key figures in this story (at least so far) are Joe Blake (Luke Kleintank), tall, handsome and the kind of character who in any other writer’s story would be an uncomplicatedly sympathetic leading man but here is a typically conflicted Philip K. Dick “quest” character who’s a Resistance fighter who’s really a Nazi spy, only with which side (if any) do his true loyalties lay?; Juliana Crain (Alexa Davalos -- an appropriate name for the star of a series produced by Amazon.com!), who was apolitical until she more or less accidentally took her sister Trudy’s place in the Resistance after Trudy got killed smuggling one of the anti-Nazi films depicgting Dick’s alternate-alternate future in which the Allies win the war; Frank Frink (Rupert Evans), struggling with grief over the deaths of her sister and her two children at the hands of the Japanese secret police with German gas technology; Nobosuke Tagomi (Cary-Hiroyuke Tagawa), the Japanese trade minister in San Francisco; and Rudolph Wegener (Carsten Norgaard), a German official posing as a Swedish businessperson as part of a plot with Tagomi to assassinate the Japanese Crown Prince when he visits San Francisco to make a speech.

Frank uses his job as a machinist to build himself a replica of a Colt .45 to assassinate the Crown Prince (he can only get three bullets for his gun and has to pay an astronomical price for them because they’re considered contraband -- the fact that the occupiers have ended all this nonsense about the Second Amendment is actually one of the few good things about them!), though in the end he draws back and someone else in the pay of Tagomi and Wegener (one wonders if Philip K. Dick named this character after Paul Wegener, who played the monster created by a Jewish rabbi to defend the Jewish community against medieval pogroms in the 1920 film The Golem) shoots the Crown Prince instead (though I suspect Dick and his adapters are setting up Frank to be the fall guy for the assassination attempt the way the Nazis blamed the 1933 Reichtag fire on a crazy Communist). After two relatively straightforward opening episodes The Man in the High Castle is starting to look more like a Philip K. Dick story, with convoluted plot lines (in the opening “The Man in the High Castle” was merely the title of the anti-Nazi films showing a version of the war in which the Allies won; here he’s an actual person, the secret leader of the Resistance whom Joe is trying to track down on behalf of the Nazis … assuming that’s where his true loyalties lay), characters of uncertain loyalty and morality, and an overall air of seedy decadence. There are so many grungy-looking cafes and bars in this story one expects Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe to come in any moment -- and the Black cafe owner in Canon City, who initially seemed like just an obnoxious boss, turns out to be a Resistance leader and one of the people on The Marshal’s hit list.

During a previous episode Charles had a problem with the anachronistic use of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit” on a record Joe plays, though as I pointed out that record was made in early 1939 and therefore would have existed before World War II, whatever its outcome -- but these episodes featured a lot of music that probably wouldn’t have existed if the Nazis and their Japanese allies had won the war, including a beautiful Ella Fitzgerald performance of George Gershwin’s “Summertime” with only a piano accompaniment and a record of Memphis Minnie singing “Nobody’s Fault but Mine.” It’s hard to believe these records -- particularly one by a Black singer doing a song from an opera about Black people written by a Jewish composer -- would even have been made, let alone publicly played, in a Nazi-ruled America, just as it’s difficult to imagine one in which Black people would not only have been allowed to remain free but even own and run businesses. Indeed, the theme song for the entire series -- “Edelweiss” from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The Sound of Music, a show created by two Jews about the heroid escape of an anti-fascist Austrian family from the clutches of the Nazis after their 1938 takeover of Austria -- would almost certainly never have existed in this world!

Frontline, December 15, 2020: "Return from ISIS"

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

Last night I watched a quite interesting episode of the long-running PBS documentary series Frontline called “Return from ISIS,” reported, written and directed by Josh Baker (who I’m assuming is British from his accent), about a woman named Samantha Sally who grew up in rural Arkansas (we get to see the crudely constructed home of her parents where she spent her childhood) whose dad describes her as a thrill-seeker and what in the 1920’s would have been called a gold-digger. She had a long series of boyfriends and her dad recalled her dumping them in sequence if someone richer and with more money to spend on her came along. After a failed marriage, she had a rebound affair with a Latino named Juan in Colorado and had a son, Matthew. Then she fell in love with Moussa el-Hassani, who came from a well-to-do family in Morocco (not exactly known as a hotbed of terrorism or Islamic radicalism), whom she married and for all appearances led a normal suburban life with in South Bend, Indiana (while Pete Buttigieg was its mayor, by the way) with her husband, her son and their daughter. There are chillingly ordinary home videos of the kids playing and Moussa wearing a caricatured death’s-head on his T-shirt -- which becomes considerably more sinister when he’s seen later in that same T-shirt as an ISIS fighter posing in one of their recruitment and propaganda videos. So is Matthew, who’s shown assembling a suicide vest and in a curiously affect-less voice describing how he’s going to use it in case an American helicopter and its crew fly in and try to rescue him. Baker saw these videos online and was fascinated by the story, which turned out to be the sort of conversion narrative we’ve heard quite often before in which a man bored by his comfortable but unfulfilling existence at first drifts into bad habits (Sam recalled her husband left home for what turned out to be a three-day cocaine binge) and then discovers a group of people who have a commitment to a cause greater than themselves, which inspires him to clean up their act and join them. (It’s not that different from the conversion narrative of Malcolm X.)

Only the group that gave Moussa a sense of purpose higher than themselves was a gang of murderous terrorists with a desire to conquer the entire world -- or at least the former Islamic caliphate, which at its height stretched all the way from India to Spain -- for their highly strict brand of Islam. Sam joined her husband when he moved to ISIS Central in Raqqa, Syria (the location they were going to use as the capital of their caliphate until they captured the original caliphate’s capital, Baghdad) and they purchased two underage girls (underage by our standards, anyway) so Moussa could keep them as sex slaves. Sam protests in her interviews that she thought they were rescuing them, but these poor women got treated by Moussa exactly the same way they’d been by their previous owners. Sam was in regular, albeit sporadic, communication with her sister Lori back in South Bend via e-mail and whatever phone calls Sam could get a chance to make under ISIS control, and her messages conveyed a quite different picture of their life in Raqqa than what turned out to be true. The documents included a chilling video of Sam’s son Matthew delivering an Islamist diatribe in English to an ISIS videographer proclaiming his devotion to the cause of radical Islam and his warning to his fellow Americans that soon their blood would start flowing in the righteous cause of jihad. Eventually Raqqa fell and Sam -- whose husband by then was already dead, apparently killed in combat -- and the kids (both her own and the slave children they’d “bought”) were arrested and held in a detention camp run by the Iraqi Kurds who were the principal “boots on the ground” in the defeat of ISIS. (They were also the ones soon-to-be ex-President Donald Trump double-crossed by giving Turkisn president Recep Tayyip Erdogan the go-ahead to massacre them and withdrew the U.S,. forces that had protected the Kurds as they did the grunt work of decimating ISIS.)

They were held there for eight months before the U.S. was finally able to reclaim them and bring them back to Indiana -- where Sam was indicted for conspiracy to support a terrorist organization financially. The charges came about because on their way to Syria to join ISIS, Moussa and Sam had cashed out their home, their three cars (including a BMW and a Porsche) and everything else they owned, then gone to Hong Kong and converted the cash from these sales into gold for smuggling into Syria to add to the ISIS treasury. Sam portrayed herself in Baker’s live interview in the Kurdish detention camp (with two Kurdish guards standing in the doorway to supervise) and in later phone calls from prison as an innocent victim who followed her husband and was committed to keeping the marriage together even when her husband became a terrorist. It was ironic to be watching this the night after having seen an episode of the CBS fiction series Bull, in which a woman with a history of working as an FBI analyst gets put on trial because when she and her husband are married she signed tax documents reflecting the husband’s partnership with a drug dealer who, apparently unbeknownst to either of them, was using the restaurant to launder drug profits and thereby making it profitable for the first time. In this scripted show we were supposed to feel sympathy for the wife who was willing to put her capacity for due diligence on hold in order to save her marriage and her husband’s business; in the documentary it seems clear that Josh Baker himself lost much of his original sympathy for Sam Sally El-Hassani as he delved deeper into the case and realized just how much evidence the FBI had against her. One revelation that showed her involvement in ISIS was more intense and committed than he had realized was that when her son Matthew (who was called “Youssef” by his stepfather) shot that horrifying video in which he matter-of-factly explained the construction of his suicide bomb and how he was going to use it against any American helicopter crew that flew in thinking they were going to rescue him, it was Sam who held the camera and actually shot the video.

“Return from ISIS” (note the use of the word “Return” rather than something more sympathetic like “Escape” or “Rescue”) is a chilling (an adjective that keeps coming up) story about just how far loyalty to one’s spouse can take you, sometimes into a terrorist netherworld of utterly amoral people doing evil, genocidal things -- and just what your responsibility is in a situation like that. Baker shows us some of the video phone calls he’s placed to Sam in prison, noting that though she ultimately pleaded guilty to the charges and got a 6 ½-year sentence (though given how white-collar criminals are usually treated by the criminal justice system, I’d really be surprised if she serves more than about 3 ½ years of that) she still hasn’t accepted or come to grips with a full consciousness of her guilt. The show closes with an interview with Matthew, who was a skinny kid when he was with ISIS but really put on weight big-time after he left, who’s now staying with his real father in Colorado (dad is a heavy-set Latino with quite extensive tattoos, which we get to see because one shot of him with Matthew shows him sitting in a fishing boat wearing a body shirt and shorts) and expressing his relief that his life is “normal” again. (Sam’s other kids ended up with her parents back in Arkansas.) This is the sort of documentary you watch in sheer awe at the complexity of human nature and motivations -- it seems to be made to order for dramatization as a movie if you had a director, writer and star sensitive enough to the weird mix of motivations that must have driven Sam to follow her husband, not necessarily blindly but also (one gets the impression) not really aware -- or perhaps turning a blind eye to -- the horror of what her husband was doing and trying to get her and the kids to join him!

Fanchon, the Cricket (Famous Players -- later Paramount, 1915)

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

Last Sunday night’s Turner Classic Movies “Silent Sunday Showcase” was of a 1915 film that had long been thought totally lost: Fanchon, the Cricket, co-written (with Frances Marion) and directed by James Kirkwood, Sr. (whose son, James Kirkwood, Jr., co-wrote the script for A Chorus Line and I got a chance to interview him just four months before he died: I asked him if his dad had been up for Valentino’s role in The Sheik and he said he didn’t know, but he did tell me that his mom, actress Lila Lee, had played the “good girl” in Valentino’s Blood and Sand and, because he was fond of eating traditional Italian foods, heavily spiced with garlic, Lee asked that her love scenes with Valentino be filmed in the morning so she wouldn’t have to deal with his garlic breath after lunch) and starring Mary Pickford as Fanchon, a girl in the French countryside (I’m assuming it’s the south of France because some of the costumes look vaguely Spanish as much as French, and in the communities along the border region between France and Spain some of the cultural and sartorial customs overlap) who lives with her grandmother Fadette (Gertrude Norman) whom the townspeople think is a witch. Fanchon herself is the local troublemaker who runs around the woods and plays tricks on the people who venture near her, including splashing water on them from the local creek and,if that isn’t enough to infuriate them and keep them away, throwing rocks at them.

Fanchon, the Cricket is based on a novel by the 19th century French woman writer George Sand (true name: Aurore Dupin Dudevant), who’s come down in history more for her love life (she was Bisexual but her two most famous partners were male, novelist and poet Alfred de Musset and composer/pianist Frederic Chopin) and her role in the literary scene of the time than for anything she actually wrote. (In the 1970’s British TV did a miniseries about her but this is the first time I’ve ever seen a movie based on anything she wrote.) There’s not much of a plot to this one -- Fanchon spots the male lead, Landry Barbeau (Jack Standing, the sort of beefy schlub that frequently served as silent leading men before the advent of the athletic Douglas Fairbanks, later Pickford’s husband in real life, and the androgynous and still sexy Valentino) at his engagement party to Madelon (Lottie Pickford, Mary’s sister -- her brother Jack is also in this film, in an unspecified role, and Mary reportedly particularly cherished her experience working on this film because it’s the only time she and both her actor siblings got to be in the same movie). Naturally Fanchon instantly falls for Landry and determines to break up his engagement, but she laments that she doesn’t have any clothes nice enough to attend the town’s festivities.

Of course, this being a 1915 silent movie based on a 19th century romantic novel (one suspects if George Sand had lived 100 years later she would have published with Harlequn), Fanchon isn’t really the descendant of that woman who’s been raising her in a hut: “grandma” presents her with a batch of fine clothes and a letter revealing her true parentage. It seem that -- stop me if you’ve heard this before -- Fanchon was the daughter of a well-born woman (though we don’t learn exactly who she was) who for some reason left her in the care of this old hag just before her own death, and now that she’s grown (Mary Pickford is playing a teenager here -- she was 23 when the movie was made but in quite a few of her films she was literally playing a child; indeed a number of Pickford’s silent vehicles were remade with Shirley Temple) her foster-grandma has decided to let her know her true status and gives her a locket from her mom documenting it. Fanchon also turns out to be the one person in the area capable of nursing Landry to health after he’s become deathly ill (another cliche that’s launched a thousand movies since!). The ending is a bit on the ambiguous side -- we’re sure from decades of seeing these movie conventions recycled that Landry is going to abandon his fiancee and end up with Fanchon, but the last scene we see of her is her dancing in the wheat fields, alone.

Overall Fanchon, the Cricket is an enjoyable film that’s made special by the sheer subtle power of Pickford’s acting; she completely avoids the overwrought physical gestures most people associate with silent films (though most people who haven’t ever watched a silent film start to finish think these hammy gestures were more common than they were) and registers her emotions with an extraordinary series of subtle and often fleeting changes in facial expression. The rest of the film is nothing special; Jack Standing is a stolid leading man who’s too far removed from anything a modern audience would consider sexy; Lottie Pickford isn’t bad as the renounced fiancee but the part doesn’t give her much to work with (and director/writer Kirkwood avoids the clash between the two women -- “You can’t take my man away from me!” “Oh, yeah? He’s my man now!” -- we’ve been expecting all movie); and the grandmother is also pretty much a stick figure, made up to look like a prototype of the Wicked Witch of the West even though we learn she’s not a witch at all, thanks to one of Kirkwood’s best shots: we see a crucifix on the wall above her bed and that tells us she’s a good Christian instead of a member of a witch cult.

Fanchon, the Cricket was considered a lost film for decades -- Mary Pickford went to her own grave in 1979 thinking the movie no longer existed -- but in 2007 a print was discovered in the Cinematheque Francaise in Paris. Later a partial print turned up in the British Film Archive (which had the advantage of having the intertitles in English instead of French) and the two archives and the Mary Pickford Foundation teamed up for a full-bore restoration. There’s also a persistent rumor that Fred Astaire and his sister Adele were in this movie; apparently they visited the set in New Jersey and watched some of the filming but there’s no evidence they actually appeared before the camera (though it’s faintly possible Kirkwood pressed them into service as two of the people dancing around the film’s maypole), and Milton Berle later claimed to have appeared in this movie as a child (he didn’t, just as he didn’t play the child in the film Tillie’s Punctured Romance in 1914 with Marie Dressler, Mabel Normand and Charlie Chaplin -- as the villain! -- even though for years he claimed he had). Fanchon, the Cricket is a pretty straightforwardly directed film; Kirkwood doesn’t use the moving camera shots or dramatic point-of-view editing D. W. Griffith was employing at the time (1915 was also the year of Griffith’s racist masterpiece The Birth of a Nation, the first truly great film and an artistic triumph despite its horrible politics), but the film moves effectively and doesn’t seem static or boring the way a lot of pre-Griffith silents do. Though pretty conventional, Kirkwood’s direction and editing (no separate editor is credited, though that doesn’t mean there wasn’t one) at least keep the film moving fast and showcase Pickford’s marvelous performance. Alas, the restored print comes equipped with a modern soft-rock instrumental score that gets really distracting at times, and I wish the presenters had gone with either Joseph Canteloube’s Chants d’Auvergne or a score based on the original folk songs Canteloube adapted.