Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "People vs. Richard Wheatey"; Law and Order: Organized Crime: "The Christmas Episode" (DickWolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired December 9, 2021)

12-10-21 (Friday), 8:40 a.m.
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched what was billed as a “crossover event” between Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime even though the two episodes had only minimal connections with each other – and for some quirk in their scheduling (probably to make more room for all those treacly holiday-themed TV movies and specials), after the three-week hiatus for both those programs they’re putting them on pause again until January 6. What’s more, the SVU episode, “People vs. Richard Wheatley,” had more to do with the story arcs of the Organized Crime episode, called “The Christmas Episode” presumably because it’s the only show that’s premiering in December 2021 even though the story line had nothing to do with Christmas. “People vs. Richard Wheatley” deait, as the show title suggested, with the trial of organized crime boss Richard Wheatley (Dylan McDermott), whom Dick Wolf’s writers have built into a figure of Moriartian proportions, for ordering the car bomb that blew up Kathy Stabler (Isabel Gillies), wife of Detective Elliott Stabler (my man Christopher Meloni, bald now but still as sexy as ever) and thereby killing her. As his defense attorney Wheatley hires former SVU prosecutor Rafael Barba (Raul Esparza, the only male on the show since Meloni left who’s come close to the same level of sexiness and charisma), and there’s the predictable antagonism between him and his former SVU colleagues, Lt, Olivia Benson (series star Mariska Hargitay) and current SVU prosecutor Dominick Carisi (Peter Scanavino) even though leaving the prosecution side to become a defense attorney is a common career move for real-life lawyers. (And not just real-life ones, either: four years after playing the prosecutor who gets a murder conviction against Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun in 1951, Raymond Burr made his debut as Perry Mason.)

Barba manages to push all the buttons, hinting that Stabler had a sexual relationship with Wheatley’s ex, Angela (Tamara Taylor), and getting him to lose his temper on the witness stand to the point where the judge holds him in contempt (whereupon, like the slimeball he is, Richard Wheatley further taunts him when they “accidentally” run into each other in the men’s room). Barba seems headed for getting Wheatley an out-and-out acquittal when Wheatley insists on taking the witness stand against Barba’s advice and loses it himself. The jury hangs, the judge declares a mistrial, and for the subsequent Organized Crime episode the focus abruptly shifts to Stabler’s youngest child, Eli (Nichy Torchia, who seems awfully twinky to be believable as the son of someone as butch as Christopher Meloni), the one he had from the mercy fuck Kathy gave him during their estrangement in the Law and Order: The Soap Opera continuing storyline they did towards the end of Meloni’s original tenure on SVU. In previous episodes it’s been established that Eli had been stealing prescription pills from his bipolar grandmother (Ellen Burstyn), first to sell at school to his classmates but then to use himself, and his reaction to the trial has been to head out to Fort Lee, New Jersey with some pills. He’s cruised by a young woman named Mia, who takes him to her place and they drink tequila and take some of the stolen pills – and then Eli wakes up at 4:15 a.m. after having passed out on the living-room floor. He calls out for Mia, then goes into her bedroom and finds her dead on the floor. At first both he and we assume she O.D.’d, and Eli is scared both of being implicated in her death and how his super-cop father will react.

He leaves the scene and goes to the George Washington Bridge intending to jump off it and commit suicide. A Fort Lee uniformed cop on only his third day on the job picks him up and takes him to a nearby hospital for a psych evaluation, but in the meantime the detective investigating Mia’s murder finds she was strangled to death and Eli is arrested for murder. Then Elliott Stabler discovers that the apartment where all this happened was maintained by a prostitution ring and wired with cameras to keep track of the clients for potential blackmail purposes. He’s able to enlist the resident computer expert in the Organized Crime Unit to requisition the tapes from the site that was storing them, and they reveal that while Eli was passed out someone else – a hired killer – came in and strangled Mia. Stabler and the rest of the cops involved assume it was the work of Richard Wheatley but, as usual, can’t prove it – and there’s an odd little cliffhanger at the end that was so ambiguous it was just confusing, especially since we’ll have to wait a whole month to find out what it meant. Even the old movie-serial makers only obliged us to wait a week, not a month (let alone a three-month summer hiatus)!

The Dybbuk (Warszawskie Biuro Kinematograficzne Feniks, 1937)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The last two nights my husband Charles and I had screened two highly unusual movies; on Tuesday, December 7 we ran Josef von Sternberg’s 1927 film Underworld and last night we cracked open the Kino Classics boxed set Jewish Soul: Ten Classics of Yiddish Cinema to watch its lead item, a 1937 film of S. Ansky’s play The Dybbuk. The film was made in Poland and directed by a relative newcomer named Michal Waszynski from a script by S. A, Kacyzna and Andrzej Marek. It’s a somber tale set in a 17th century Jewish ghetto in Poland, and the story kicks off with two young men who grew up together and attended the same yeshiva, Nisan (Gerszon Lemberger) and Sender (Mojzesz Lipman), whose wives are both pregnant. The two make a pledge that if one of their children is a boy and the other a girl, the two kids will get married. They make this pledge despite the warning of a mysterious stranger (Ajzyk Samberg), who appears throughout the film as a sort of voice of reason, that it’s wrong to make a pledge binding two people who haven’t even been born yet. Dire things begin to happen as soon as the two kids are ready to be born: Sender’s wife dies in childbirth and leaves him and the girl’s aunt Frayde (Dina Halpern) to raise the child, Leah. Nisan’s wife survives but he doesn’t; he’s drowned when he falls off a boat trying to cross a river in a storm. The two kids re-meet as young adults and are played by Leon Liebgold as Chanan and Lili Liliana as Leah.

They meet and duly fall in love with each other, but Leah’s father Sender has become a money-obsessed miser who sits around all day and literally counts his gold – a staple of anti-Semitic prejudice at the time and a surprising image to see in a Jewish movie produced for a Jewish audience. Sender has arranged for Leah to marry someone else, a rich guy named Menasze (M, Messinger) who’s seen only briefly in the film. Chanan can’t compete because he’s just a poor Talmudic scholar, so he decides he needs supernatural help: he rips off a book on Kabbalah from his school library, starts casting some of the spells in it, and ultimately attempts to summon Satan himself – only he’s struck dead when he tries it. But that doesn’t stop him; he returns to earth (as a double-exposed ghostly image) and becomes a dybbuk, a spirit that haunts the world to take care of the business he left unfinished when he died. In that form, he takes possession of Leah, who under his control disrupts the wedding ceremony. The rabbi who’s been appearing throughout the whole movie basically as the voice of Jewish tradition tries to conduct the Jewish version of an exorcism (confusingly referred to in the subtitles as “excommunication”), but he fails and at the end Leah lays dead, her spirit having been reclaimed by her dead former lover.

In bare outline, The Dybbuk is a sort of Jewish Lucia di Lammermoor – a woman driven crazy by her family, who want her to marry a rich man who will save their fortune instead of the man she really loves – and George Gershwin, of all people, tried to buy the operatic rights but was turned down. But the movie I kept thinking of while watching it was Carl Dreyer’s 1943 film Day of Wrath, a medieval story about a young woman accused of witchcraft who’s browbeaten so relentlessly by her inquisitors she either hallucinates she’s a witch or actually becomes one (Dreyer deliberately kept it ambiguous). Like Dreyer, Waszynski deliberately paces his movie very slowly – one reason I wanted to watch this was the production stills reminded me of 1930’s Universal horror films, but a story a Universal horror director would have told in 70 minutes takes over two hours here – to evoke the feeling of a distant time, place and culture. The movie The Dybbuk reminded Charles of was an even more off-the-beaten-path one: A Page of Madness, an experimental film made by Japanese director Teinosuke Kinugawa, and though The Dybbuk has a much more linear plot line than A Page of Madness it manages at least some of the Japanese film’s uncertainty about the line between sanity and madness and how catastrophic events can stretch it pretty thin.

What impressed both of us about the 1937 The Dybbuk was how beautifully it was produced physically; we’d both been expecting (and dreading) a far cheaper and cheesier production, with cardboard sets and noisy recording; though the opening credits mentioned that the restorers had done a lot of work on the soundtrack, both it and the picture were in excellent quality, quite watchable and close to the best-preserved U,S, films of the time. The extant print was pieced together from a shortened 98-minute version released in France in 1938 (oddly, though Poland was a center for Yiddish cinema before World War II, the Polish government – which was highly anti-Semitic even before the Nazi takeover in 1939 – forbade many of the Yiddish films made in Poland to be released there) and a full-length (123-minute) version found in an Israeli archive. The Israeli print had been subtitled in Hebrew, and in this version (restored and reissued by a company called Lobster – which struck Charles as ironic because under kosher dietary rules lobsters are as about as impure a food as you can get) the Hebrew subtitles were grayed out on the screen and the English ones printed over them. This meant I could see where the editors for the French version had made at least some of their cuts – and frankly the editing eliminated important bits of dialogue that helped clarify the film.

The Dybbuk is also an unusual film in that it’s practically a musical; the Jewish religious services shown shade from preaching into intoning into outright singing much the way the Black revival scene in King Vidor’s 1929 film Hallelujah featured a minister (Daniel Haynes) whose sermon shaded from speaking to rapping to singing (and the song, “Waiting at the End of the Road,” was composed by a Jew: Irving Berlin).There’s also a guest appearance by Warsaw-based cantor Gershon Sirota, who once appeared on a CD of classic cantors of which the Fanfare reviewer said he was good enough to have had a major operatic career if he’d wanted one – and the extraordinary singing he does in this film bears out the point even though director Waszynski shoots the scene with Sirota at the other end of the church set from the camera, so we get to hear him but not really see much of him. And, as one imdb.com reviewer pointed out, the spectre of the Holocaust looms large over the movie, not only because it’s such a downbeat story but because many of the cast members were among the Nazis’ victims: Gershon Sirota was killed in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and Ajzyk Samberg (Meszulach the Messenger), Samuel Landau (Zalman the Matchmaker), Abraham Kurc (Michael), and Zisze Kac (Mendel) were murdered in the death camps. At least the romantic (if you can call them that) leads, Leon Liebgold and Lili Liliana (a real-life couple), had the good sense (and good luck) to flee to the United States, where Liebgold appeared memorably in Maurice Schwartz’ 1939 film Tevya (a stunning adaptation of the same Sholem Aleichem stories that later became the basis for the musical Fiddler on the Roof) as the non-Jew Tevya’s third daughter falls for: he was such a strapping hunk and such a powerful actor I wondered why the Hollywood casting directors, who had plucked Paul Muni out of the Yiddish Art Theatre and turned him into a major movie star, could have missed someone as obviously qualified for stardom as Liebgold. It’s possible he didn’t want a movie career – imdb.com lists only five films for him, all in Yiddish, though he lived until 1993 and could have seemingly had a major mainstream movie career for the asking.

NOVA: "Saving Notre Dame" (Arte France, Sprockets Music, WGBH, PBS, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The TV show I watched last night was a surprisingly fascinating NOVA episode called “Saving Notre Dame,” which began with the disaster everyone remembers – the catastrophic fire that gutted the famous Notre Dame cathedral in Paris on April 15, 2019 – and both the imminent danger to the firefighters charged with putting out the blaze on the spot and the elaborate precautions that had to be taken to preserve what was left of the structure after the fire was out to make sure the walls didn’t collapse. The show also delved into the current attempts to reconstruct the cathedral, which has meant doing a lot of forensic architecture and archaeology to figure out how it was built, and what materials it was made of, in the first place. The famous roof was almost totally consumed in the blaze – the church’s iconic spire was the first item to go and only about 15 percent of the wooden beams holding up the roof survived in any form. The roof beams had been nicknamed “The Forest” because they literally took almost an entire forest to make – the estimate was that 55 oak trees were used – and they were shaped into curves to produce an elaborate birdcage -like structure that had to be duplicated exactly from similar oak trees in other French forests.

The basic building material for Notre Dame was limestone, a sedimentary rock that contains fossils of plankton and other small plants. The original 12th century builders used three different sorts of limestone: hard stone to build the structure-bearing walls and basic framework, soft stone for the sculptures lining the hallways and sides of the main chapel, and medium stone for the vaulted ceiling, since it needed to be strong but also flexible to withstand the elements and the gravitational forces at work on the building. Part of the problem was matching the properties of the original stone to what is available in France today – and the various fossils embedded in the stone were important clues as to what sort of stone went where. One of the issues facing the teams working on the restoration was that Paris has grown so much since the 12th century that both the original forest from which the oaks were harvested and the original quarries that produced the stones are no longer available. Indeed, one of the original quarries was turned into an ossuary in the 18th century, and the most macabre shot in the whole documentary was of a pile of skulls facing the camera as people involved in the restoration inspected it. (Given just when the place was dedicated to disposing of human remains, I can’t help but wonder how many of these skulls were of victims of the French Revolution and the ensuing Reign of Terror.)

My big takeaway from this show was an admiration I’d never had before for the technological know-how of the Middle Ages: the historical legend is that the science and technology developed in ancient Greece and Rome had basically been forgotten throughout the Middle Ages and was only rediscovered by the Renaissance, but ironically the near-destruction of Notre Dame showed off how meticulously it had been built in the first place and how much conscious thought had gone into the design and the selection of building materials to create a structure that would last for 900 years. There were also some interesting side issues, including the delicate process of cleaning the stained glass in the church’s famous display windows (one thing the medieval technologists hadn’t known about was the acute toxicity of lead; the fire released huge clouds of lead dust and the workers doing the post-fire cleanup had to wear haz-mat suits discarded after one use and go through a decontamination procedure before they could leave the site to go home, or even to have lunch). Fortunately the windows had been left so long without being cleaned that the thin film of dust between the windows and the lead made the lead easier to remove. The restorers are also considering a new technique for preserving stained glass that’s being tried in a similar restoration in England of mounting a modern framework with clear glass behind the stained-glass window to minimize its exposure to wind, water and other climate phenomena.

And there was a brief discussion of some plans for creating a futuristic new spire for the cathedral – including one that would have included solar panels – before French president Emmanuel Macron vetoed them and insisted that the post-restoration spire look the same as the original one. (Obviously he wants to avoid the issues that arose in the U.S. when the World Trade Center towers were replaced by something even less practical and more preposterously ugly.) Macron also had pledged that the cathedral would be completely rebuilt and open to the public by 2024 – a pledge the experts interviewed for this program conceded is unlikely to be fulfilled. It’s ironic that it took the near-destruction of Notre Dame to show the world how well it was built in the first place (though luckily there had been efforts to map the cathedral digitally in 2014 and 2016, and these preserved valuable information to guide the restorers in creating what they call the “digital twin” of Notre Dame which will map out the reconstruction of the physical structure), but I came away from this program with a lot more admiration for the technology of the Middle Ages than I’d had before.

The Unsuspected (Michael Curtiz Productions, Warner Bros., 1947)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I wanted to watch last night’s Turner Classic Movies’ “Noir Alley” showing of a 1947 film called The Unsuspected, produced as well as directed by Michael Curtiz and the first movie he made under an in-house independent deal with his long-time employers, Warner Bros., by which he’d put up half the money, Warners would put up the other half, and they’d split the profits (if any) equally but Curtiz would have full artistic control. Curtiz had been a director in his native Hungary when he got a contract offer from Warner Bros. in 1928 on the strength of a Biblical romance he’d made in Hungary called The Moon of Israel. They were about to film Noah’s Ark and wanted a director with Biblical “cred,” and though Noah’s Ark was a flop Curtiz stayed on at Warners and churned out gangster movies, thrillers, Westerns, swashbucklers, tearjerkers and just about everything else studio heads Jack Warner and Hal Wallis threw at him – including at least one acknowledged masterpiece, Casablanca.

For his first semi-independent production Curtiz decided on a dark crime story in the genre later known as film noir and in particular wanted to rip off 20th Century-Fox’s hit Laura (1944). So he bought a novel by Charlotte Armstrong called The Unsuspected that either already contained elements of Vera Caspary’s source novel for Laura or had those added to the story by screenwriters Bess Meredyth (Mrs. Michael Curtiz) and Ranald MacDougall. The script almost seems to be following a checklist of Laura templates: a vain and self-important celebrity who regularly broadcasts on radio and turns out to be the murderer; a woman who’s thought dead and suddenly turns up alive; a portrait of her that hangs over a fireplace and features prominently in the action; and a killer who creates a phony alibi for himself by recording his radio broadcast on a transcvription disc and claiming he couldn’t have committed the murder because he was doing his show at the time. (This gimmick was also used in the “B”movie The Falcon in San Francisco, made between Laura and The Unsuspected in 1945, with Elisha Cook, Jr. as the killer D.J.) It was also interesting how many elements of The Unsuspected got recycled in the two Columbo episodes I’d seen the night before, including the killer (a celebrity) faking a murder of a woman to look like suicide and the use of recording equipment; the central character, Victor Grandison (Claude Rains), has his living room bugged so he can record his guests’ conversations on his disc recorder any time he wants to.

Curtiz planned his film for an all-star cast, including Orson Welles as the killer true-crime radio host; Laura star Dana Andrews as the “nice” male lead; and Joan Fontaine as the female lead – but Andrews and Fontaine were both out of his league salary-wise and Welles didn’t want to do the movie unless he could also direct it. So Curtiz got Claude Rains – obvious casting for a radio host since in his first important film, The Invisible Man, he’d created a spectacular characterization with his voice alone, (Rains made a total of 10 films with Curtiz, most famously as the opportunistic police chief in Casablanca,) For his female lead – Matilda Frazier, Grandison’s niece – he got Joan Caulfield, who until then had mostly played anodyne ingenues in musicals and for his male lead he got Ted North, who’d just made a film at RKO, The Devil Thumbs a Ride. Curtiz changed his first name to Michael so he could bill him with an “Introducing … ” credit, though ironically The Unsuspected turned out to be his last film. Fortunately Curtiz was able to fill out his cast list with excellent supporting actors like Constance Bennett (as Grandison’s long-suffering producer, Jane Moynihan), Hurd Hatfield (as lounge-lizard Oliver Keane, the equivalent of the Vincent Price character in Laura) and Audrey Totter (as Althea Keane, who seduced Oliver away from Matilda and married him).

The film opens with a mysterious character named Roslyn being strangled in Grandison’s living room and then hanged from his chandelier to make it look like she killed herself. The police, headed by Lt. Richard Donovan (character actor Fred Clark in his first film – later he’d usually play villains but in this one he’s a good guy, albeit one so totally tied to Grandison at first I thought he was a private detective on Grandison’s payroll and only later did I realize he was a cop; also I suspect his character name was a screenwriters’ in-joke because the real Richard Donovan had headed the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA, in World War II). Steve Howard (Michael North) turns up and claims to have married Melinda just before she went on a vacation cruise to Lisbon (one remembers the significance of Lisbon in Curtiz’s Casablanca!) and the boat sank on its return trip. She was reported missing and believed dead, but she was rescued by a Brazilian fishing boa and its crew off the shore of Rio de Janeiro and flown back to the U.S. Matilda has no recollection of having married Steve even though he takes her to the justice of the peace who supposedly married them, and when they go on dinner dates the waiters address her as “Mrs. Howard.” Midway through the movie Steven admits to Matilda that they’re not really married – he faked it as a way of getting into Grandison’s inner circle to investigate the death of Roslyn, a relative of his – but by then she’s started to fall in love with him for real.

Grandison, for reasons the writers don’t do too much to explain, decides to eliminate Oliver and Althea, shooting Althea and then planting the gun on Oliver and sending him out in a car whose brake lines he has severed so the car will crash and kill him. When the police find Oliver’s body they do a ballistics test and determine the gun found on Oliver killed Althea, so they assume what Grandison wanted them to assume: Oliver shot Althea and then died in an accident. Later Grandison decides he needs to eliminate Steve and Matilda, too, so she has Matilda write a suicide note (she thinks she’s just taking dictation for one of his broadcasts), then feeds her drugged champagne and clubs Steven over the head. Then, in an unusually macabre murder scene anticipating the early James Bond movies from the 1960’s, Grandison has a crook friend of his load Steve’s unconscious but still living body into a crate and drive it in a pickup to the local dump – only Matilda comes to in time to warn the cops, who trace the truck, follow it to the dump, and arrive just in time to stop the heavy-equipment operator from dropping the trunk containing Steve’s body into the flames. It ends with Grandison being arrested in the middle of rehearsing his radio show – we can tell it’s a rehearsal because the chairs for the studio audience are empty, and I wish they’d anticipated Dick Wolf’s gimmick of arresting the perp in the middle of a public broadcast.

The Unsuspected is actually quite a good movie; though its plot makes virtually no sense it’s a triumph of film noir style over substance. Curtiz borrowed cinematographer Woody Bredell from Universal because he’d liked Bredell’s work on Robert Siodmak’s Phantom Lady (1944), and for his “special effects photographer” he had Robert Burks, who would later become a full-fledged cinematographer in his own right and shoot all but one of Alfred Hitchcock’s films between Strangers on a Train (1951) and Marnie (1964). The result is a visual feast for film noir devotees even though the plot makes little sense and the borrowings from Laura are all too obvious – though there are nice in-jokes in the script, notably when Oliver Keane jokes on Matilda’s return that she hasn’t aged any but her painting has: a reference to Hurd Hatfield’s star-making role in MGM’s The Picture of Dorian Gray two years before!

Happy Holidays from Frank and Bing (Frank Sinatra Productions, ABC-TV, aired December 20, 1957)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Later last night I watched a short (21-minute) oddball item called Happy Holidays with Frank and Bing, an episode of Frank Sinatra’s short-lived (one season) half-hour variety show on ABC in 1957 and one on which imdb.com credits Sinatra with directing as well as appearing. I’d heard the soundtrack from this show on a low-budget CD on the LaserLight label in the early 1990’s but had never actually seen it – and one surprise was that it was in color. At the time virtually all TV was in black-and-white and most people thought it would stay that way indefinitely. (One who didn’t was Walt Disney, who insisted on shooting the Davy Crockett TV mini-series in color – and when Walt’s brother Roy, who ran the business end of the company from New York, asked him, “Why did you spend all that extra money making the Davy Crockett TV shows in color? TV isn’t in color!,” Walt just smiled and said, “It will be.”) The show is a nice, homey get-together between the great teen-idol crooners of the 1930’s and the 1940’s, older, mellower, over their former rivalry (Bing had said when Sinatra first emerged in the 1940’s, “A voice like Frank Sinatra’s comes along once in a lifetime. Why did it have to be my lifetime?”) and at the peak of their vocal powers.

It begins with Bing and Frank duetting on the song “Happy Holidays” from Bing’s 1942 movie Holiday Inn and also on “Jingle Bells,” following which Frank warbles a bit of “The Wassail Song.” This leads into a section in which Frank and Bing blend surprisingly well into a choral ensemble representing street carolers singing “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen,” “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” (for which,due to censorship, they had to change “Offspring of the virgin’s womb” to “Offspring of the favored one”), “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” “The First Noel,” and solos for the stars, Frank on “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” and Bing on “Away in a Manger.” (One disappointment was we didn’t get to hear Bing warble a bit of “O Come, All Ye Faithful” in the original Latin, as “Adeste Fidelis,” as he did on his Decca record. Bing had gone to college at the Jesuit-runn Gonzaga University in Washington state and therefore knew Latin.) The sacred part of the show ends with a duet on “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” and then it’s time for more secular fare. Bing does “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” including a second chorus that shows off his chops as a jazz singer (when Johnny Marks was shopping this then-new song around in 1949, both Bing and Frank turned it down, so it was introduced by cowboy-movie star Gene Autry on a yellow-label Columbia 78, meaning it was intended as a children’s record, and it became a mega-hit with adult buyers), Frank does “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” the two duet on the Mel Torme-Bob Wells “The Christmas Song” that had been a hit for Nat “King” Cole, and the show closes with the inevitable: Bing singing “White Christmas,” which in 1957 still was the biggest-selling record of all time. This show was a lovely time capsule from an era in which entertainment of this quality was presented every week and pretty much taken for granted, and though there are a lot of modern-day singers I like, it’s nice to have this time capsule from a bygone era in which singers sang from the heart and could showcase gentler emotions like delicacy and grace.

Columbo: "Etude in Black" (Levinson-Link Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired September 17, 1972)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I was startled that the Sundance Channel started running the pair of Columbo episodes they usually show on Tuesday and Friday nights at 10 p.m. instead of 11, which gave me the chance to watch both shows they ran. Both episodes, “Etude in Black” (September 17, 1972) and “The Most Crucial Game” (November 5, 1972) were from the show’s second season, but the Columbo formula created by Richard Levinson and William Link was already solidly established: an opening sequence showing someone commit a murder and execute a carefully planned scheme to cover it up. Then Lt. Columbo (Peter Falk) shows up to investigate, somehow magically intuits who the killer is and spends the rest of the episode annoying him or her into confessing. In “Etude for Death,” for which the story was by Levinson and Link themselves but the script by the then-unknown Steven Bochco (whom I’ve cursed in these pages many times for innovating serial form into prime-time dramatic series – today just about every hour-long show worships at the shrine of the Great God SERIAL, and it was Bochco more than anyone else who was the prophet of that religion) and the killer is superstar conductor Alex Benedict (John Cassavetes, in a quite good and effective performance; later Falk would make a ton of money on Columbo and invest quite a bit of it in producing and co-starring in the independent movies Cassavetes produced and directed like A Woman Under the Influence and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, usually with Falk in the male lead and Cassavetes’ wife, Gena Rowlands, in the female lead).

The victim is young,up-and-coming pianist Jenifer Welles (Anjanette Comer) – the spelling of her name with just none :”f” is correct (we see it on her note paper) and we’re told she was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin (an in-joke reference to actor, writer, producer and director Orson Welles, who actually was born in Kenosha, though whenever anyone kidded hm about it he would say, “Yes, but I was conceived in Paris”). She’s been having an affair with Benedict, and she wants him to divorce his wife Janice (Blythe Danner) and marry her – only he’s too dependent on his wife’s family’s money and in particular on the backing of his mother-in-law, Lizzy Fielding (Myrna Loy, who gives the proceedings a touch of old-Hollywood class and performs in a coolly authoritative way that out-classes all the younger actors and their Method affectations). Lizzy is chair of the board of the Southland Symphony Orchestra and has got Alex the job of conducting it in regular televised concerts from the Hollywood Bowl, as well as a huge mansion whose front looks like the White House – and when he’s first introduced we see him rehearsing at the Bowl with both the orchestra members and the TV crew. Then, after a long bit of business involving taking in his Jaguar sports car for allegedly necessary repairs and then sneaking it back out again (apparently he wants to make it look like he never left the Bowl all night because his wife had the family’s other car, a Rolls-Royce – a nice touch on the writers’ part to establish the difference between his wife’s old family money and his own status as an arriviste), he sneaks over to Jenifer’s apartment, chloroforms her with a rag and then puts her in her kitchen and turns the gas on in her stove (all four burners plus the oven) and leaves her there, killing not only her but her pet cockatiel. (A character named after Orson Welles would have a pet cockatiel!) He also takes a note she had started to write and puts it back in her typewriter, adding verbiage to make it read like a suicide note – which itself arouses Columbo’s suspicions because he says suicide notes are almost invariably handwritten.

There are a few red herrings, including Alex’s long-suffering Black assistant Billy Jones (James McEachin) and Paul Rifkin (tall, blond, strikingly handsome James Olson), a trumpet player in the Southland Symphony who moonlights as a Miles Davis-style jazz trumpeter and had some run-ins with the law that lead to him becoming a prime suspect for a couple of acts until the main business of a Columbo episode – Columbo successfully discovering the big hole in the killer’s elaborate cover-up scheme – occurs. This time it’s Alex’s carnation in his lapel, which fell off as he was killing Jenifer and which he did not wear during the televised Hollywood Bowl concert even though he insists he always wears a carnation in his lapel (from his wife’s garden) when he performs publicly. When he was brought back to Jenifer’s apartment after the concert (where she was actually scheduled to appear as a soloist – one would think a halfway sensible murderer would have killed her after the concert instead of arousing suspicion with her no-show) he picked up the flower from where he had dropped it near a leg of her piano, put it on and was photographed with it when a TV news crew showed up and asked him for comment on Jenifer’s death. At least Levinson, Link and Bochco allowed him to be arrested decorously off-camera – Dick Wolf and his Law and Order writers would probably have had the cops apprehend him in the middle of conducting the Southland Symphony in a televised concert at the Bowl!

Columbo: "The Mot Crucial Game" (Levinson=Link Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired Nova.mber 5, 1972)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I had hoped the Sundance Channel would have followed up “Etude for Murder” with the next episode in sequence, “The Greenhouse Jungle,” partly because the plot synopsis on imdb.com sounded interesting (“Columbo arrives at a kidnapping case, which at some point turns to worse. Everything seems to be related to a trust fund managed by a man with a great love for orchids”) and partly because the cast included another old Hollywood “name,” Ray Milland. Instead they chose to show the episode after that, “The Most Crucial Game,” in which the killer is Paul Hanlon (Robert Culp in his second of three Columbo appearances: he was also in the pilot for the short-lived spinoff Mrs. Columbo), the general manager of the Rockets professional football team (who are shown playing the “Pioneers” in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum – ironically, an imdb.com “Trivia” poster claims that the shots of the audience watching this game are from the very first Super Bowl between the Green Bay Packers and the Kansas City Chiefs on January 15, 1967 even though no complete film of that game is known to exist). Hanlon was hired two years previously to turn around the Rockets’ fortunes by their owner, and he has expanded the sports empire to include a basketball team and is about to close a deal to buy a hockey franchise as well – only in the meantime the owner has died and left his estate to his scapegrace son, Eric Wagner (Dean Stockwell).

Eric’s only interest in the business is the money he can make from it so he can lavish it on an expensive home and all the drinks and “party girls” he can afford to indulge in while his wife Shirley (Susan Howard) is out of town. When Hanlon calls Eric to get him ready to go to Montreal, where he’s needed to sign the papers transferring the hockey team, Eric takes the call under an expansive black sheet and there’s a bit of suspense as to whether he’s telling the truth or lying when he assures Hanlon that there’s no one else in the bed. There isn’t, but there was because he’s coming off a big party night in which the hippie girl he invited over brought along her sister for a three-way. Hanlon decides to get rid of Eric once and for all; when he arrives and Eric is in his swimming pool, Hanlon clubs him to death with a block of ice, then throws it in the pool (where the warm pool water will melt it) and fakes it to look like an accidental drowning. Frankly, the most entertaining aspect of this show was Dean Stockwell’s physique: he’d been a child star at MGM in the mid-1940’s and died just a month ago (November 7, 2021) at age 85. When he made this he was in his mid-30’s and was still quite a delectable hunk of man-meat, especially in the black swim trunks that are the only clothes he wears in the whole episode.

Alas, once he departs the episode becomes considerably less interesting, though there are some nice intrigues between Hanlon and Wagner family attorney Walter Cunnell (Dean Jagger), who have literally been bugging each other. Columbo finds that one of the bugs recorded the phone call Hanlon made to Eric, ostensibly from a box at the Coliseum but actually from an ice-cream truck he used to drive to Eric’s place and kill him without anyone knowing he had left with the game playing on the truck’s radio, and confiscates both the bugging equipment and the private investigator’s license of the man who recorded it, Ralph Dobbs (Val Avery), who whines that Columbo’s refusal to return the equipment and the license is keeping him from being able to work. There’s also a scene in which Columbo interviews the woman who planted the bugs for Dobbs, a coolly efficient high-end prostitute named Eve Babcock (Valerie Harper) who mistakes Columbo for her latest “john” – and when her real customer, a bald, homely middle-aged businessman in town for a convention, sees Columbo there and learns he’s a cop, he beats a hasty and quite frightened retreat. In the end Columbo establishes that Hanlon faked the phone call and wasn’t in his stadium box when he made it because it occurred precisely at 2:30 p.m. and didn’t include the chiming of the ornate clock in Hanlon’s box, which rang at every half-hour. This was an efficient Columbo, hardly at the level of inspiration as “Etude in Black” (the writer was John T. Dugan and the director was Jeremy Kagan – the director of “Etude in Black” was Nicholas Colasanto but imdb.com claims Peter Falk and John Cassavetes both had a hand in it) but a nice, reliable piece of entertainment. I liked the Columbo show then and I still do, but after a while both the concept and the schticks get more wearing than entertaining.

Annie Live! (Chloe Productions, Sony Pictures Television, Universal Television, aired December 21, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The musical Annie was written by Martin Charnin, Charles Strouse and Thomas Meehan based on a comic strip created by Harold Gray in the 1920’s. No doubt it became a wish-fulfillment fantasy in the Depression era (the musical is set in 1933, the first year of Franklin D,.Roosevelt’s Presidency, and FDR actually appears as a character in the musical) – though the title and the character come from, an 1890’s poem by James Whitcomb Dr.Rlley called “Little Orphant Annie” (the spelling is ann attempt to reproduce the dialect pronunciation of the central character), an impossibly good little-two-shoes who warns the children of the parents who’ve taken her in, “The Gobble-uns ‘ll git you ef you don’t watch out!” If you get the impression that the musical is a work of cloying sweetness destined to give any reasonably sensitive viewer mental diabetes, you’d be right. The musical was inexplicably a Broadway mega-hit in 1977 and gave its child star, Andrea McArdle, her 15 minutes of fame (though the only other thing I remember her for is a 1979 TV-movie called Rainbow based on the early life of Judy Garland, in which McArdle was hopelessly miscast: McArdle’s was still a little girl’s voice, whereas what originally impressed people about Judy Garland was that even when she was 12 she sang with the power, range and depth of an adult woman). The show got made into a movie in 1982 and, like some other film versions of huge Broadway hits (including A Chorus Line and Cats), it was a major box-office flop. When its producer, industry veteran Ray Stark, announced that he was so proud of it “this is the movie I want on my tombstone,” one snippy critic responded, “Funeral services are being held at a theatre near you.”

I saw the 1982 Annie decades ago on a network TV showing on an old black-and-white TV, and the only thing I can remember about it with any fondness was the full-blooded and marvelous performance by Carol Burnett as the piece’s villain, orphanage manager Miss Hannigan, and an exciting chase scene at the end as Miss Hannigan’s minions try to recover her from her benefactor and foster-father, ultra-rich tycoon Oliver “Daddy” Warbucks, who’s taken her in from the orphanage and given her a life of luxury. The plot deals with Annie’s miserable life at the orphanage, her determination to escape – which she does twice, the second time falling in with a group of homeless Depression victims with whom she sings the best song in the score, “We’d Like to Thank You, Herbert Hoover.” This production decided to go for cross-racial casting and made both Annie (Celina Smith) and Miss Hannigan (Taraji P. Henson) Black; one imdb.com reviewer got into a hissy-fit over Annie being Black but I liked Smith’s performance and she even made Annie’s famous hit song, “Tomorrow,” more tolerable than usual (and, praise be, the writers at least get this piece of sugar-coated shit over with early). As with NBC’s previous live telecasts of musicals, the most impressive aspect of Annie Live! (as they rather clunkily called it) was the chorus dancing: the ensemble they got to play Annie’s fellow orphans is really fine and the ones playing Warbucks’ domestic staff are almost as spectacular.

My problem with Annie is the basic material, which is not only sappily sweet and cloying but badly dated as well: when Warbucks shows up at the orphanage and demands they give him an orphan to spend two weeks in his home over the Christmas holidays, a 2021 audience is going to assume, “Oh, he wants a child he can sexually abuse.” And when he expresses disappointment when Annie arrives and turns out to be a girl – he says, “I thought all orphans were boys” – I thought, “Oh, he’s more Michael Jackson than Jeffrey Epstein.” The first half of Annie at least has a certain appeal – the orphan’s song “It’s a Hard-Knock Life,” though clearly a np-off of “Food, Glorious Food” from Lionel Bart’s 1960’s musical Oliver! (a work Annie owes quite a lot more to than is generally recognized), has an appealing scrappiness about it. But once Annie enters the Warbucks home the show turns flat and dull, and I couldn’t help but make invidious comparisons to a bunch of classic films actually made in the 1930’s – Frank Capra’s Lady for a Day (1933) and It Happened One Night (1934), Gregory La Cava’s My Man Godfrey (1936) and, perhaps closest of all, Henry Koster’s One Hundred Men and a Girl (1937) – that dramatized the clash between the super-rich and the super-poor (heightened by the virtual disappearance of a middle class) far, far better than Annie did. I just got worn down not only by the sentimentality of the material but its utter predictability; when Miss Hannigan, her (Black) brother and (white) sister-in-law plot to pass off the couple as Annie’s real parents (for whom Warbucks, played by Harry Connick, Jr. in a bald pate that makes him look like Lex Luthor in yet another Superman reboot, has offered a $50,000 reward), Warbucks’ investigators all too easily expose them and the plot ends with Warbucks adopting Annie and leaving his long-suffering assistant, Grace Farrell (the racially ambiguous Nicole Scherzinger, whose jazz number, “Annie,” shows her to have the best singing voice in the cast), out in the cold. I was hoping Warbucks would propose to her, not only because she’s clearly been in unrequited love with him all through the show but on the logical ground that Annie needs a mother as well as a father – but no such luck

Too Many Girls (RKO, `1940)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

As Annie Live! lumbered to its closing tableau I switched channels and watched another adaptation of a hit stage musical, RKO’s 1940 film Too Many Girls. It’s a rather silly piece about a super-rich tycoon, Harvey Casey (Harry “Dr, Zarkov” Shannon), whose scapegrace daughter Consuelo, nicknamed “Connie” (Lucille Ball) ,is on her way back to the U.S. after having been deported from Switzerland for crashing her speedboat into a pontoon right when the Swiss president was standing on the pontoon delivering a lecture on water safety. To see that she doesn’t get into any more trouble, Casey orders his daughter to attend college, offering her the pick of any of the all-women schools on the East Coast. Instead she insists on going to Pottawatomie College, a co-ed institution in New Mexico (so this is essentially Girl Crazy with a scapegrace daughter instead of a scapegrace son) whose football team hasn’t scored a touchdown since 1918. Had writers George Marion, Jr. and John Twist, or director George Abbott (who had also helmed Too Many Girls on stage and was notorious for insisting that the screen actors use the same blocking and “business” as their stage counterparts), seen the Marx Brothers’ Horse Feathers, also about a no-account college in disgrace because of its no-account football team? Casey hires the three greatest college football players in the country – Clint Kelly (Richard Carlson), Jojo Jordan (Eddie Bracken), and Al Terwilliger (Hal LeRoy, a spectacular song-and-dance man who was for some reason moistly relegated to shorts to attend Pottawatomie and serve as Co nnie’s bodyguards – along with a fourth man, a Spanish bodyguard named Manuelito (Desi Arnaz).

From that description you can pretty well guess it yourself: the three bodyguards join Pottawatomie’s football team and build the school into a national football powerhouse, only despite the no-romance clause in their contracts and the sorority beanies most of the Pottawatomie girls wear that are supposed to signal their unavailability for any sort of physical affection towards the opposite sex (George Orwell’s Junior Anti-Sex League over four decades early!), Connie and Clint fall in love with each other. At least this pulls her away from her muych older boyfriend, British playwright Beverly Waverly (Douglas Walton, prissy as usual), but it also leaves the student athletes concerned that Clint will be so besotted by love he’ll blow Pottawatomie’s chances in the Big Game against Tennessee. In the end, of course, Clint pulls it together, Pottawatomie wins the big game, Clint and Connie pair off and Manuelito sends us off with a spectacular cohga number that was the highlight of the stage version as well and actually started a fad for conga dancing. The songs are by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, and include one timeless ballad,”I Didn’t Know What Time It Was” (far better performed by Helen Forrest with Artie Shaw’s band in 1939 – and done even better by Carmen McRae on her 1962 live album from the Sugar Hill club in San Francisco – than the perfunctory treatment it gets here); another good love song, “You’re Nearer” (nicely sung by Trudy Erwin, Lucille Ball’s voice double – Lucy never did her own singing in a musical film until her ill-advised decision to do Mame in 1974) and some typically rah-rah college anthems. Whatever reputation Too Many Girls has today stems almost exclusively from it being the project that brought Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz together – he’d been in the stage version while she was an RKO contract player assigned to the film – and though the script pairs her with the dull Richard Carlson it’s no surprise that the electrifying Desi Arnaz was the cast member she fell for in real life – especially since the moment Lucy makes her entrance here, getting out of the car driving her on the last stage of her journey home, Desi sees her and faints at the sheer sight of her superlative beauty ...

Jungle Cruise (Walt Disney Enterprises, Davis Entertainment, Flynn Pictures Company, Seven Bucks Productions, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The one nice thing that happened to my husband Charles and I last night was the unexpectedly good movie we watched together: Jungle Cruise, the latest effort of the Walt Disney entertainment empire to turn one of the Disney theme-park attractions into a feature-film franchise. I went to Disneyland a few times in the 1980’s – back when you could still go there without having to take out a second mortgage to pay for the cost of admission – but I never got to take the Jungle Cruise ride because the people I was with kept telling me, “Oh, you don’t want to do that. It’s boring.” But I found myself interested in watching the Jungle Cruise movie because the TV promos for it made it seem like a reworking of the 1952 classic The African Queen, albeit with two considerably less high-voltage stars: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as Humphrey Bogart and Emily Blunt as Katharine Hepburn. It was directed by Jaume Collet-Serra from a script by a five-member writing committee: John Norville, Josh Goldstein, Glenn Ficarra and John Requa for “story” and Ficarra, Requa and Michael Green for “screenplay.” Fortunately, the Disney machine is well-oiled enough that this ragbag of writers and an unknown director were able to come up with a marvelously entertaining movie, essentially a modern-day screwball comedy that took an enviably light-hearted approach to some pretty threadbare material.

It begins with MacGregor Houghton (Jack Whitehall) giving a lecture before the Royal Academy of Sciences in London in 1916 (in the middle of World War I – also, not coincidentally, the time in which The African Queen was set) explaining that somewhere in the Amazon, about on the border between Brazil and Peru, is a secret lagoon where grows a tree called the Tears of the Moon whose flowers have the potential to heal all human diseases. The head of the Royal Academy recognizes the pitch to back an expedition to find this flower as the same one they’d turned down earlier when it was presented by a woman – MacGregor’s sister Lily, who actually scripted her brother’s presentation and is in the audience watching. She alson steals a priceless arrowhead from the museum's collection that contains a clue to the location of the Tears of the Moon. (Even the character name “Houghton” is a reference to the female star of The African Queen: Katharine Hepburn’s mother’s maiden name was Houghton and the actress’s full name was Katharine Houghton Hepburn.) The Royal Academy members are aghast at the whole idea that a woman could be in charge of anything – which seems like a glitch on the part of the writers to me, since the film is set just 15 years after the death of Queen Victoria and all the fuddy-duddies in that room are clearly old enough to have had living memories of her reign. Being a Walt Disney action-adventure movie from the 21st century – especially one based on one of the Disneyland attractions personally designed by Walt Disney himself and the so-called “Imagineers” under his direction, there should be no surprise that there’s a supernatural element to the MacGuffin: we’re expected to believe that 400 years before the main action a group of conquistadores went searching for the Tears of the Moon tree and actually found it, only when the natives caught them they put a curse on them and in particular their leader, Aguirre (Edgar Ramirez), in particular. The curse was that the conquistadores would be frozen in place, neither fully alive nor dead, and if anyone came by and tried to rescue them, snakes would come out of the zombified conquistdores’ bodies and kill them.

The action then cuts to the Amazon tour boat captained by Frank Wolff (Dwayne Johnson), who leads groups up and down the river giving lectures about the sights which abound in the famously awful puns from the real Disney theme-park jungle cruises. He’s in the middle of a disagreement with an entrepreneur who owns all the other jungle-cruise boats plowing the Amazon and to whom Frank owes 5,000 reales – the guy even repossesses Frank’s engine because, like the bad guy in the 1933 W, C, Fields-Alisoh Skipworth vehicle Tillie and Gus, he wants a monopoly on the business, Just then Lily and MacGregor Houghton show up carrying whole wads of cash and asking to hire Frank and his boat for an expedition to seek the Tears of the Moon, and he accepts because it’s the only way Frank can buy back his engine and put himself back in business. The film is full of touches borrowed from The African Queen, including Frank’s peremptory disposal of most of the Houghtons’ trunks as too much to carry on the trip (he lets MacGregor keep his liquor supply because “that might come in handy,” evoking the real-life tale of the making of The African Queen in which Katharine Hepburn primly refused to drink alcohol and got dysentery from the local water, while Humphrey Bogart and director John Huston brought along cases of whiskey, did everything with it – including brushing their teeth – and stayed healthy throughout the shoot) and Emily’s experience going down a section of rapids, which she describes as “exhilarating.” (Earlier the boat comes to a fork in the river and Lily insists on taking the right fork because that route will be two days quicker, Frank tries to warn her that this route contains rapids, and I joked, “Bogart and Hepburn went through rapids. We have to go through rapids, too!”)

Also in the dramatis personae are a German submarine and his crew, led by Prince Joachim (Jesse Plemons, who seems to have gone to the Christoph Waltz School of How to Play an Evil German), supposedly the youngest son of Kaiser Wilhelm II, who is stalking Our Heroes so Gernany can get the petals of the Tears of the Moon’s flowers and use their magical healing powers for his side in the war (ya remember the war?). We also get a sly but well-written and sympathetic revelation that MacGregor Houghton is Gay – obviously this is not Walt Disney’s Walt Disney – though it tempted me to remix the later scenes of the movie so that instead of torturing MacGregor to reveal the secret of where the Tears of the Moon tree is located, Prince Joachim gives him such great sex that MaGregor falls helplessly in love with him and gives up the secret voluntarily. I was also hoping that instead of pairing Frank and Lily at the end, the writers would have given him a menage a trois in which he’d end up servicing both Houghtons.

The first half of Jungle Cruise is one of the most purely joyous movies I’ve seen in some time – a sign that modern filmmakers can recover the insouciance of their counterparts from Hollywood’s classic era. Then [spoiler alerts!] the plot resolutions rear their ugly heads and Aguirre is able to come back to normal life, while Frank is revealed really to be one of the old conquistadores, able to withstand being stabbed, shot at and thrown off a cliff. I’m not sure if the writers had seen the 1944 German version of Baron Munchhausen but their ending – Lily uses the one remaining petal of the Tears of the Moon to convert Frank into a normal human, no longer immortal but also no longer stuck on the Amazon and able to travel with her to Britain (where the film ends with a quite funny scene of her trying to teach him how to drive a car – obviously the attempt by the writing committee to go for irony given Johnson’s ongoing role as one of the super-drivers in the Fast and Furious series!) – was going for the same sort of pathos. In the 1944 Munchhausen the immortal Baron Munchhausen has fallen ln love with a mortal woman, but he realizes that she’s going to age and die while he maintains his youth, so he gives up his immortality so he can enjoy at least the length of a normal human lifespan with her. The makers of Jungle Cruise don’t quite achieve the pathos of the makers of the 1944 Baron Munchhausen,but they make a nice try that provides a decent, even if awfully Disney-esque, ending to a surprisingly good and quite entertaining film.

Respect (BRON Studios, Creative Media Finance, MGM, United Artists, Universal, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night my husband Charles and I watched a movie I’d been wanting to see since it first came out earlier this year: Respect, a biopic of Aretha Franklin directed by Liesl Tommy (a woman who’s mostly worked on TV – notably on The Walking Dead, AMC’s modern-dress zombie series – and has no other feature-film credits) from a script by Callie Khouri and Tracey Scott Wilson. There’s another Aretha Franklin biopic floating around out there, made for a streaming service and starring Cynthia Erivo as Aretha, but this one more or less had the imprimatur of official status. Supposedly, a month before her death Aretha Franklin met with Jennifer Hudson and told her that if anyone ever made a movie of her life, she’d like Hudson to play her – and it’s a measure of how limited the opportunities for Black women in films still are that it’s taken 15 years since Hudson’s star-making turn in the film Dreamgirls for her to get another role fully worthy of her talents. Respect is the sort of movie that’s good as it stands but could have been a great deal better; in a laudable attempt to avoid the Jazz Singer clichés that were virtually inevitable in a film with this basic story – a clergyman’s offspring forsakes the music of his/her dad’s church and makes it as a star in popular music – writers Khouri and Wilson and director Tommy fell into another set and turned the film essentially into a Black version of the 1955 tear-jerker biopic of white singer Lillian Roth, I’ll Cry Tomorrow.

It also didn’t help that Tommy and her cinematographer, Kramer Morgenthau, shot the whole film in the murky past-is-brown look that’s become Hollywood’s default look for just about everything. As I’ve written before in connection with even better reality-based Black films like Ava DuVernay’s Selma, the past-is-brown look is hard enough to take in a film in which the principles are white and it’s even more annoying when the principals are Black: their brown faces blend all too readily into the murky brown backgrounds and it’s often hard to pick them out. Also the script bears little more than a casual relationship to the facts of Aretha’s life: it’s true that I’ve never read a biography of her and so I don’t know whether her father, Rev. C. L. Franklin (pastor of the largest and most influential church in Detroit and the best-selling artist on Chicago’s Chess Records even though he didn’t sing or play an instrument: his records were merely recordings of his sermons), was living with another woman he wasn’t married to after Aretha’s mother left the family, or whether Aretha had a bout with alcoholism at the height of her career in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s that nearly incapacitated her, and she intended her return-to-gospel album Amazing Grace (1972) as a prayer of thanks to God for getting her off the booze the way John Coltrane recorded A Love Supreme in 1964 as a thank-you letter to God for giving him the strength to get off alcohol and heroin.

But the parts of this story I do know about are told in this movie so far from how they actually happened I have little trust that Khouri and Wilson are giving us the real story of the parts I don’t. In this movie Aretha is sexually molested at age 10 in the middle of a party at her father’s house at which several illustrious soul singers, including Dinah Washington and Sam Cooke, are present; a man at the party sneaks into Aretha’s bedroom, asks if she has a boyfriend, and when she says no he asks her, “Would you like me to be your boyfriend?.” and without her having a chance either to say no or get the hell out of there, he closes the bedroom door behind them and … According to Khouri and Wilson, this is Aretha’s “Rosebud” moment: she never tells anyone (her mom – or at least the mother figure who’s living with her dad and functioning as such – notices something is wrong with her and tries to pry the secret out of her, but without success) but she periodically withdraws into near-catatonic fugue states during which she won’t even speak, much less sing, and these continue to afflict her even as she eventually becomes a superstar and brings soul music to the white masses worldwide.

I find it virtually impossible to believe such an influential and highly regarded Black minister as Rev. C. L. Franklin could have sustained a relationship with a woman he wasn’t married to, and given what I’ve read about the antagonism between the gospel and R&B audiences (though to us white people gospel and soul may sound awfully similar, they appealed to two dramatically different audiences and lovers of gospel music generally rejected R&B and soul and refused to listen to them; I’ve often told the story that a month before he died, Sam Cooke tried to sit in with his old gospel group, the Soul Stirrers, and was literally booed off the stage with catcalls like, “Get that blues singer off the stage! This is a Christian program!”) it’s hard to believe that Rev. Franklin would have even allowed R&B and soul records to be played in his home, much less invited singers in those styles to his home. (At the same time, if Khouri and Wilson had accurately depicted this dividing line between gospel and soul in the script, this film would have seemed like even more of a ripoff of The Jazz Singer than it does.) The film doesn’t mention that Aretha Franklin cut her first album, a gospel record, for Chess in 1956 at age 14 – Rev. C. L. Franklin was Chess’s biggest-selling artist (moving more records than Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf!) and when he told the Chess brothers he wanted his 14-year-old daughter Aretha to record a gospel album, they let him – but they did the album on the cheap. Instead of getting her into a studio and recording her properly, they just clipped her songs from the recordings they’d made of Rev. Franklin’s services to create the best-selling albums of Rev. Franklin’s sermons. Still, this is the first Aretha Franklin album – made four years before she launched her career as a secular soul singer at Columbia Records, where she was signed by the legendary producer John Hammond.

It’s not clear from the movie exactly how Hammond discovered her – it was on a demo he’d received from songwriter Curtis Lewis, who had recruited Aretha to sing a song he’d written called “Today I Sing the Blues” – or what sort of music Hammond wanted from her. The script for Respect makes it seem like Hammond produced all her Columbia records, but he didn’t: at a loss for what to do with her, Columbia recruited Clyde Otis (one of the first Black producers to work for a major white label) from Mercury, where he’d masterminded Dinah Washington’s rise from Black star to crossover superstar with her 1959 record “What a Difference a Day Made.” During her five years at Columbia Aretha worked with various producers, sometimes singing soul versions of 1920’s songs like Dinah had (the one Columbia record with Aretha that even nosed into the pop charts was her unlikely cover of “Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody,” a record that’s been ridiculed by generations of writers who’ve never heard it – it’s actually pretty good), sometimes attempting jazz (Hammond had reportedly heard her as the next Billie Holiday – who had died just one year before Aretha signed with Columbia) and sometimes edging towards the kind of searing soul that would eventually launch her career into superstar orbit when she switched labels from Columbia to Atlantic in 1967.

In his autobiography Hammond was resentful about the way his bosses at Columbia took control of Aretha’s career and recruited other producers to make her records there – and every nasty thing he’d said about how he could have made Aretha a star in 1961 if he’d stayed in control of her records was confirmed when in the early 1980’s Columbia released a compilation of Aretha’s records there called Aretha Sings the Blues, in which they presented 13 songs that showed Aretha groping towards her later style and then one, “Maybe I’m a Fool,” in which she achieves it. The only song on the compilation actually produced by John Hammond, “Maybe I’m a Fool” is as good as anything Aretha cut for Atlantic – a searing gospel-rooted vocal, hammering piano triplets (by Ray Bryant, whom Hammond recruited as her accompanist because he, too, had had roots in the Black church), and even a lyric surprisingly similar to her first Atlantic hit, “I Never Loved a Man (The Way I Love You),” another one of those blues laments in which the singer tells us that her man is a creep but she loves him anyway. (Don’t believe me when I say “Maybe I’m a Fool” was Aretha’s first masterpiece? Hear it yourself at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMjWrFgQ1Vs.)

The film also rather oddly portrays the relationship between Aretha and her great predecessor, Dinah Washington. Dinah is played by Mary J. Blige (who wouldn’t be bad casting for a Dinah Washington biopic) and appears in two scenes, in one of which she gets upset that the 10-year-old Aretha sings a jazz novelty at one of Rev. Franklin’s parties and Dinah announces she was planning to record the song herself; and a later scene at the Village Vanguard nightclub in New York in which Aretha acknowledges that Dinah is in the audience and goes into a version of one of Dinah’s greatest songs, “This Bitter Earth” – and Dinah angrily turns over the table she’s sitting at and chews Aretha out for doing one of her songs in her presence. The film doesn’t mention that Dinah Washington died of a prescription drug overdose in December 1963 – which, ironically, benefited Aretha’s career by eliminating her principal competition. As long as Dinah was alive Aretha would have been only “another Black girl who sings like Dinah Washington.” Once Dinah died, Aretha was her natural successor – even though it took three more years and a change of record labels to bring Aretha the stardom she deserved. In February, 1964 – just two months after Dinah’s death – Columbia recorded Aretha in an album of Dinah’s songs called Unforgettable: A Tribute to Dinah Washington, and though Dinah had been billed as “Queen of the Blues” and Aretha as “Queen of Soul,” there’s definitely an air about this album of “The Queen is dead, long live the Queen.”

The film depicts both Hammond (Tate Donovan) and Aretha’s producer at Atlantic, Jerry Wexler (Marc Maron), as the usual music-industry assholes – though there’s a nice scene in which Rev. Franklin shows up at one of Hammond’s sessions with Aretha and apologizes for her bad behavior. Hammond says he worked with Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday and they gave him a lot more trouble than Aretha did, and Rev. Franklin fires back, “Aretha didn’t grow up in a whorehouse like they did.” There are also other annoying deviations from the known facts in this film; in the movie Aretha recruits her sisters Erma (Saycon Sengbloh) and Carolyn (Halley KIlgore) as her backup singers – Aretha’s real backup singers on her early Atlantic records were a vocal trio called the Sweet Inspirations (one of whom, Cissy Houston, was Whitney Houston’s mother) whom she recorded and toured with until Elvis Presley lured them away because he could pay them more. And of course, being the lead character in a biopic about a woman singer, the men in her life are monsters: Ted White (Marlon Wayans) is shown as an egomaniac wife beater, and the man she finally leaves him for, Ken Cunningham (Albert Jones), isn’t much better.

Not surprisingly, Respect comes most searingly to life when Jennifer Hudson as Aretha is shown actually making music; though her voice doesn’t have quite the edge and power of Aretha’s own, Hudson is one of our very best living woman soul singers (when I wrote a long obituary on Aretha’s death I named her, along with Jill Scott and the gospel singer Mandisa, as the three singers who seem to me to be carrying forward Aretha’s legacy) and she’s certainly appropriate casting. But the I’ll Cry Tomorrow turn the plot takes gets to be a bit much – while the fictional Aretha is shown turning up bombed for a concert date in Europe and collapsing on stage, the real Aretha was performing at the Fillmore West in San Francisco and making an incandescent live album that’s one of the highlights of her career. Respect is full of great moments that deserved a better movie – like the scene in which Aretha shows up at the studio in Muscle Shoals, Alabama to make her first Atlantic single and notices that all the musicians are white. “Don’t they have any Negroes who play music around here?” she says (and for all the criticism I’ve been leveled at Khouri and Wilson for their script, at least they get that right and use the word “Negro,” which was historically accurate, instead of “Black,” which came later), and Jerry Wexler notices the look of distaste she gives them at having been dragged all the way to Alabama to record with a bunch of Southern white boys with Southern white-boy racial attitudes. “Percy Sledge had that same look on his face – until he heard these boys play,” Wexler says. Later Aretha is shown working out her rewrite of Otis Redding’s song “Respect” with her sisters, who take their childhood nickname for her, “Ree,” and use it as the basis of the backing vocals – and the result is such an electrifying transformation of the song few people today identify it with anyone but Aretha. (It was Aretha, not Redding, who wrote the spectacular chorus that became an anthem of feminist empowerment: “R-E-S-P-E-C-T/Find out what it means to me/R-E-S-P-E-C-T/Take care, TCB.”)

The film also does an O.K. job of depicting Aretha’s relationship to the civil rights movement, including her friendship with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (Gilbert Glenn Brown, who does an acceptable turn in the nearly impossible task of playing someone whose actual looks and voice are so much a part of the public record), her increasing militancy (Aretha and her father have the debate between nonviolence and harsher forms of resistance a lot of Black people were having in the late 1960’s, and she publicly supports Angela Davis and records a cover of Nina Simone’s anthem of Black pride, “To Be Young, Gifted and Black”) and the shock she and her family felt when King was killed, as if they’d lost one of their own. But once again Khouri and Wilson can’t resist tweaking an already good story: they have Aretha sing King’s favorite song, “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” at King’s funeral – which she didn’t. The great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson (who’d been onstage behind King at the 1963 March on Washington and had seen he was bombing with a dull historical lecture; she got in his ear and told him, “Give ’em the dream, Martin! Give ’em the dream!,” which he famously did) sang “Precious Lord” at King’s funeral – and Aretha sang it at Mahalia Jackson’s funeral four years later. The writers build the recording of the Amazing Grace album into an appropriately uplifting finish (though even there they slip up – when she tells her father that he taught her all the songs she;’s going to sing, I couldn’t resist saying, “Except Marvin Gaye’s ‘Wholly Holy,’ which I learned from his album What’s Going On; and Carole King’s ‘You’ve Got a Friend,’ which she learned from her album Tapestry”) for a movie that’s magnificent in parts but also frustrating in parts, containing a stirring performance by Jennifer Hudson but marred by a script that ran roughshod over Aretha’s real life.

Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga: One Last Time (CBS-TV, aired November 28, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 8 p.m. I watched a much-hyped CBS-TV concert special featuring Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga performing at Radio City Music Hall for what was billed as “One Last Time.” Bennett is 95 and has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease – though, as with Glen Campbell, it doesn’t seem to have affected his musicianship any. Experts on Alzheimer’s have said that out of all one’s memories, music is the last to go – and Bennett’s singing on this show, though hardly what it was in his glory years, was tuneful and musical. Only one high note in one song escaped his reach; otherwise he was in quite good late form. The concert began with four songs by Lady Gaga solo, which showed that despite the occasional heaviness of her voice she’s got the chops to be a great jazz singer. When I first heard Lady Gaga on her album The Fame Monster (actually an earlier record called The Fame reissued in a package with an EP called Monster) I was impressed more by her songwriting than her singing. There’s not much you can do with so-called “electronic dance music” anyway except spit out the lyrics in time, but what impressed me about Gaga was she wasn’t just sticking a few words on top of a dance groove and calling it a song. Her songs were well constructed and had identifiable beginnings, middles and ends.

Then I heard her and Bennett do “The Lady Is a Tramp” on Bennett’s Duets II album (unlike Frank Sinatra’s two duets albums, Bennett insisted on recording the parts with his partners present in the studio and singing with him in real time instead of overdubbing their parts later) and it impressed me that Lady Gaga had the rhythmic flexibility to sing standards and wasn’t strait-jacketed into the strict tempi of dance music. (It also made me wish the late Donna Summer had cut a standards album: judging by her beautiful phrasing on the slow introductions of songs like “Last Dance” and “On the Radio,” a Summer Sings Standards album would likely have been quite good.) The four Lady Gaga solo songs that opened last night’s show were Frank Loesser’s “Luck, Be a Lady” from Guys and Dolls, Milton Delugg’s and Willie Stein’s “Orange Colored Sky” from 1950, Cole Porter’s “Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall in Love)” from the late 1920’s and John Kander’s and Fred Ebb’s “Theme from New York, New York.” After Lady Gaga subjected “Luck, Be a Lady” to some awkward lyric changes to make it more suitable for a woman (it was originally written for a man), I was wondering what she was going to do to “Let’s Do it” to duck the P.C. Thought Police’s condemnations she would surely have got if she’d sung the opening lines of the refrain, “Chinks do it, Japs do it, Up in Lapland little Lapps do it.” As it turned out, she deleted that part of the song altogether, going straight from the verse (which she phrased beautifully) to the ninth bar of the refrain.

She said “Orange Colored Sky” was one of two jazz songs she’d sung at a benefit which Bennett was also present for; he sent someone backstage to her and asked to meet her, and when they finally got together Bennett told her, “You’re a jazz singer.” “Orange Colored Sky” was written in 1950 and first recorded a year later as Capitol Records’ choice for a vehicle to pair Nat “King” Cole and Stan Kenton – and as Cole tried his best to swing with the big brassy blatts of Kenton’s elephantine ensemble behind him, he closed the record with a joke, “I thought love was quieter than this!” (“Of course you did!” I joked back. “Your wife had sung with Duke Ellington!”) I was also amused that Lady Gaga, in the middle of “Theme from New York, New York,” “A lady can sing this song, too” – either she forgot or she never knew that this song was written for a woman, Liza Minnelli, for the film New York, New York that gave it its title. Then Bennett came out for his solo set, three songs: Michel Legrand’s “Watch What Happens,” Irving Berlin’s “Steppin’ Out” (written for Fred Astaire’s 1948 musical Easter Parade and the title track of Bennett’s tribute album to Astaire) and Bart Howard’s “Fly Me to the Moon” (originally called “in Other Words” when it was recorded by Kaye Ballard and Peggy Lee in the early 1960;s, but retitled by Frank Sinatra when he recorded it with Count Basie for the album It Might as Well Be Swing).

The next set featured duets between Bennett and Gaga on the song “The Lady Is a Tramp” by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, and two songs by Cole Porter, “Love for Sale” and “Anything Goes,” to promote the Bennett-Gaga duet album (their second) which features exclusively Porter songs. Cole Porter wrote “Love for Sale” as the world-weary lament of a prostitute, something that didn’t really come off here even though they included the song’s rarely performed verse. But my favorite version remains Dinah Washington’s from the 1955 album After Hours with Miss D, which doesn’t include the verse and made one change in the lyrics (“Appetizing young love for sale” became “I’m advertising young love for sale”), but her rendition buzzes with anger and venom over being sexually exploited. Bennett and Gaga did the verse relatively slowly but sped up to Dinah’s tempo on the refrain, though without the sense of righteous indignation. For “Anything Goes” Bennett and Gaga were clearly both having fun with Porter’s song about changing mores (the verse reads, “Times have changed/And we’ve often rewound the clock/Since the Puritans got a shock/When they landed on Plymouth Rock/If today, any shocks they would try to stem/Instead of landing on Plymouth Rock/Plymouth Rock would land on them”). After that Lady Gaga sang a verse of “Happy Birthday to You” to Bennett on his 95th birthday and then introduced what she claimed would be the last song Tony Bennett will ever sing in public – and of course it was his greatest and most monumental hit, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”

That song had an emotional significance for me, not only because when it became a hit in 1962 it was a blessed respite from all the garbage rock ’n’ roll that was clogging the charts just then (with most of the great rockers from the 1950’s – Elvis, Carl Perkins, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, Jerry Lee Lewis – sidelined by death, draft or scandal, the pop charts were filled with the so-called “rock” of people like Frankie Avalon, Fabian and Brian Hyland, whose hit “Itsy-Bitsy Teenie-Weenie Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini” would be my choice for the absolute worst song of all time), but because both Tony Bennett and I were born in San Francisco. The song was discovered by Bennett’s long-time accompanist, the late (and beautiful) pianist Ralph Sharon, who thought it might be a nice novelty item for Bennett to add to hsi set list when his upcoming tour played San Francisco. Then Bennett’s label, Columbia, mounted a big promotion for the Broadway musical All American, not only recording the original cast album but having Duke Ellington record an entire album of the All American songs and getting as many of their other artists to record songs from the musical’s score as they could. They assigned Bennett to do the show’s lovely ballad “Once Upon a Time” and needed something to put on the B-side of the record. Bennett and Sharon trotted out their little novelty and recorded it, whereupon some D.J. somewhere flipped the record over, played “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” and it turned out to be an enormous hit, the biggest of Bennett’s career and the legacy song for which he will no doubt be best remembered when he finally croaks. Kudos are also in order for the exciting jazz band that backed Bennett and Gaga on this show – especially the ferocious Black drummer, whose first name is Donald (I didn’t catch his last name), who drove the performances aggressively.

China’s Iron Fist: Xi Jinping and the Stakes for America (CNN, aired November 28, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the Tony Bennett-Lady Gaga special I ended up switching channels and watching a quite different sort of show, a Fareed Zakaria special report called China’s Iron Fist: Xi Jinping and the Stakes for America. Xi Jinping is the current President of China, and Zakaria’s show argued that his leadership is as revolutionary as those of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. Mao, who ruled China as virtually an absolute dictator from the victory of the Communist revolution in 1949 to his death in 1976, not only created the current Communist government of China but periodically threw the country into economic and social chaos with big campaigns like the Great Leap Forward of 1958 (an ill-advised attempt to modernize China by literally encouraging people to install steel furnaces and other bits of industrial infrastructure in their backyards) and the Great Proletaroan Cultural Revolution of 1966. This was the one in which Mao purged virtually the entire leadership of China, sending politicians and intellectuals into the Chjinese countryside to work as farm laborers and upending the entire social structure of China. One of the victims of this was Xi Jiaoping, whose father had been in the leadership class Mao was determined to purge, and instead of racing to it by becoming either an active or a secret opponent of the regime, Xi responded to being essentially orphaned in his teen years by becoming “redder than red,” in the Chinese phrase, and embracing the orthodoxy with the fervor of a true believer. (Come to think of it, this was probably toue outcome Nao wanted for the cadres he so suddenly displaced and relegated to manual-labor jobs.)

Xi applied for membership in the Communist Party and at first was rejected several times because of the continuing disgrace of his family, but ultimately he got in and rose methodically through the hierarchy. He also specialized in agronomy as his career and spent several years in the U.S. learning American farming methods. When Xi became vice-president under Deng – whose policies opened the door both to Chinese capitalism and to foreign investors (and leading to the essential de-industrialization of America as U.S. companies en masse moved their production to China, where wages were low and the repressive dictatorship banned trade unions and blocked any attempts by workers to organize or demand higher pay, benefits and safer working conditions), thereby rendering China a “Communist” country in name only – he was hailed as a reformer, met with U.S. Presidents, and projected a boyish, energetic image. When Xi became President of China on Deng’s death and subsequently had himself proclaimed “President for Life” by the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (he did that while Donald Trump was President of the U.S., and Trump’s reaction was predictable: “‘President for Life’? That sounds like a good idea to me”), he swung China towards a policy of even more bitter repression, a huge military buildup aimed at reconquering Taiwan and dominating the South China Sea and the Asian-Pacific region in general, and an aggressive industrial and high-tech development project that, among other things, is making China the world’s leader in renewable energy technology.

While China skipped the recent Glasgow summit on climate change and is openly defying any international efforts to limit the use of highly polluting fossil fuels like coal, it’s also vastly expanding its renewable energy technology while the U.S. is basically ignoring it – with the likely result that when the U.S. finally decides to switch to renewable energy (most likely because we’ll simply be running out of any other kind), we’ll probably have to buy the technology from China. Among the concerns of the current Chinese government are any attempt at political opening, which they regard as an invitation to allow the whole regime to collapse the way the Soviet Union did in 1989 – which, Zakarla explains, is the main reason not only for the forcible takeover of Hong Kong and the systematic breaking of all the agreements China made when it received Hong Kong back from British colonial rule in 1997, but also for the fierce, almost Nazi-style repression of the Uiguhrs, the Muslim community in northwestern China’s Sinjiang province. The film graphically portrayed China as a country on the move while the U.S. is mired in political conflict and stasis – Zakaria included footage of the January 6, 2021 riots in the U.S. Capitol (which Chinese propagandists have been showing around the world to get non-aligned countries to come to their side instead of ours: the message China is sending with these images is, “This is what democracy looks like – and this is why you shouldn’t want it!”) and contrasted it with the lock-step military parades in Tienanmen Square last June to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party.

It also briefly discussed the fate of China’s leading high-tech entrepreneur, Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, who mysteriously “disappeared” for three months on the eve of a major initial public offering for one of his companies, and when he reappeared on Chinese TV, instead of the highly flamboyant figure he’d been before (including performing as a rock musician at company parties in makeups and costumes the members of KISS might have found excessive) he looked defeated and wan. One gets the impression that in China there’s room for only one personality cult, and it’s Xi’s. Shows like China’s Iron Fist seem to me eerily to invoke the similar debates during the 1930’s over whether democracy or dictatorship was better for the long-term health of a society: a lot of people in the 1930’s seriously argued that Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy or the Soviet Union could handle the Great Depression and the other issues facing major countries better than presumably slower-moving, less efficient republican systems like Great Britain’s and the U.S.’s. World War II was long assumed to have resolved that conflict on the side of republican democracy (though Britain and the U.S. had had to ally themselves with Stalin’s dictatorship to defeat Hitler’s), but now it’s coming back big-time as today’s ruling classes increasingly regard democracy as an expensive luxury they can do without. When people have a right to vote on their leaders – even within the highly circumscribed limits imposed on them by capitalist ruling classes – they have a tendency to elect people who will at least try to slow down the current ruling elite’s long-term project of increasing wealth and income inequality. Between that and the ways in which public dissent from that is taking shape – not as calls for socialism or a more egalitarian capitalism, but as nationalism, racism and calls for long-term democracies like the U.S. to become more dictatorial and seek a return to previous cultural norms and thereby “make _____ (fill in country’s name) great again,” the prospects for democracy worldwide look even bleaker today than they did in the 1930’s.

Alien (20th Century-Fox, 1979)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday I did little but write an extended journal entry and, after 6:30, do one of my movie marathons, watching three films in sequence on Turner Classic Movies and then running a Blu-Ray disc of a fourth. The first film in my sequence was Ridley Scott’s science-fiction horror thriller Alien (1979), a film I’d previously seen only under poor circumstances on an airliner as an in-flight film (one wonders how anyone who ordered an in-flight dinner during a showing of Alien could possibly keep it down!). TCM host Ben Mankiewicz reminisced about how he first saw Alien at home via a TV screener – this was before videotapes of movies were widely available but he had scored one for promotional purposes – and he had a hard time with the film because it wasn’t interrupted by commercials and therefore there was nothing to break Scott’s artfully built-up tension. Alien was filmed in 1979 in Scott’s native England (later, after its huge box-office success, he’d get the green light to film Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? under the title Blade Runner, but he had to shoot it in the U.S. and have to deal with American crews’ insistence on strict scheduled breaks and other inconveniences he hadn’t had to deal with at home).

It was based on a story by Ronald Shusett that was adapted into a screenplay by Dan O’Bannon, and it concerns a cargo spaceship called the Nostromo (the name is from Joseph Conrad’s 1904 novel Nostromo, though the plots of Nostromo and Alien seem to have little to do with each other) which is on its way back to Earth with about 20,000 tons of refined ore space crews on other planets are shipping to Earth for use. We first get some long atmospheric shots of the interior of the Nostromo, beautifully composed and accompanied by Jerry Goldsmith’s stunning music (I know film scores aren’t supposed to call attention to themselves, but this one does and seems quite a bit better than the usual run of Goldsmith film music), before we start meeting the seven-member crew. They are Dallas (Tom Skerritt, top-billed – given that it’s become practically Sigourney Weaver’s life’s work to star in Alien movies, it’s surprising she didn’t get top billing on the first one), the ship’s captain; Ash (Ian Holm), the science officer; Ripley (Sigourney Weaver); Brett (the young Harry Dean Stanton); Kane (John Hurt); Lambert (Veronica Cartwright – I had quite forgotten there was another woman in the cast besides Sigourney Weaver!); and the token Black guy, Parker (Yaphet Kotto).

The opening scenes of the spacecraft reveal a strong influence from 2001: A Space Odyssey (though, oddly, the computer monitors look considerably lower-tech than they did in Stanley Kubrick’s science-fiction masterpiece and the onboard computer, “Mother,” can talk but mostly communicates to the crew via cathode-ray video displays that have already become obsolete) in the way the ship’s exteriors and interiors are constructed, the ways people interact on board (though the synthetic food they have to eat is considerably closer to the real thing than the stuff in 2001, which one critic referred to as “sanitized swill”) and the mixing Scott and his sound designers (imdb.com lists eight people on the sound crew) did, including the astronauts’ breaths heavily amplified to indicate they’re moving around in spacesuits. The action kicks into gear when the Nostromo receives what the crew originally interprets as a distress call from another spaceship right when they’re in the middle of an argument about the size of the bonuses they can expect and how to wheedle more money from the company they work for. Parker, the voice-of-reason Black guy around all the stupid white people, tries to talk the rest of the crew out of answering the call, but he’s overruled because company policy is that if there’s a distress call in space the crew has to answer it or forfeit their bonuses altogether. The ship duly sends out Kane to investigate the wreckage and see if he can find any living people to rescue, but all the humans are on board are not only dead but in a fossilized state. Of course, the creature that made them that way – a malevolent alien being that feeds on any other life form that crosses its path – latches onto Kane and makes its way into the Nostromo.

From then on Alien turns itself into pretty much a remake of the 1951 film The Thing – also a science-fiction tale about a military crew in an isolated environment having to battle a conscience-less space alien who thinks of them only as a food source – and indeed the huge success of Alien was used by director John Carpenter to get approval for a 1982 remake of The Thing that I thought was better than the earlier film (especially since Carpenter restored the monster’s shape-shifting ability it had had originally in the source story, John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There?,” but which the screenwriter of the 1951 film, Charles Lederer, had deleted) – with Weaver essentially playing the role Margaret Sheridan had in the 1951 The Thing and Ian Holm as the Robert Cornthwaite character, the stupid scientist who wants to let the alien live and even protect it against the others because he regards it as a higher life form that needs to be respected. In fact, in a surprise twist towards the end of the movie that reveals a veiled but unmistakable anti-capitalist message, it turns out that Holm’s character is actually a robot that’s been programmed with a secret order, unknown to the rest of the crew, to keep the alien alive at all costs and fly it back to earth. “Crew considered expendable,” the order reads, and it’s clear that the company operating the Nostromo is interested in keeping it alive to develop as a bioweapon for military use.

Of course the most famous scene in the movie is the one in which the alien bursts through Ian Holm’s shoulder not only killing him but literally splashing the rest of the crew with his blood and guts. It’s become as iconic a scene of movie horror as Anthony Perkins knifing Janet Leigh to death in the shower in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), and it’s been copied quite often – including a ludicrous low-budget ripoff from the Sci-Fi Channel (back when it had a real name instead of the preposterous concoction “SyFy”) in which the “alien” was so obviously a hand puppet you could see the fingers of the person working it through the all-too-sheer material. The scene was also spoofed in Mel Brooks’ 1987 spoof Spaceballs, which was mostly a takeoff of Star Wars – but Brooks couldn’t resist the temptation to have the alien burst through the man’s chest (John Hurt again!) wearing a straw hat, carrying a rattan cane and doing a tap dance to the song “My Ragtime Gal.” At the end the alien (created as a puppet by Carlo Rambaldi, who three years later would manufacture an animatronic puppet for a far more benevolent alien creature in Steven Spielberg’s 1982 fairy-tale masterpiece E.T., though enough scenes in this pre-CGI film were done with a human actor in costume that Bolaji Badejo gets screen credit for playing the alien) has knocked off all the crew members except Ripley.

She’s inside the ship’s shuttlecraft and thinks she’s got rid of the alien at long last, but it’s right in there with her and she has to zap it into space in hopes of annihilating it before she reaches Earth. I had misremembered the ending from that long-ago in-flight screening – I had assumed Weaver’s character had sacrificed herself to keep the alien from reaching Earth and turning its entire population into food – and on the basis of that recollection I had questioned the whole idea of making a sequel to Alien. In fact, there have been three: Aliens, Alien3 (that last numeral is supposed to be an exponent but I don’t know how to do those on my current word processor) and Alien: Resurrection, with increasingly preposterous plot gimmicks to explain the continued existence of Weaver’s character (in Alien: Resurrection she was actually supposed to be playing her own clone!). At least the next two Alien movies themselves helped launch the careers of future major directors – James Cameron and David Fincher, respectively – and however silly the sequels may have got (though Alien3 is the only one I’ve actually ever seen, and that was 20 years ago!), the first Alien holds up beautifully as an artful combination of science-fiction and horror, and a nicely honed piece of direction by Ridley Scott in what was only his second full-length film!

It’s In the Stars (MGM, 1938)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Alien Turner Classic Movies showed an odd short film from MGM in 1938 called It’s In the Stars, about a college whose leading fraternity and sorority both hold simultaneous meetings at which they decide that partying and dating members of the opposite sex are only distracting them from their studies. So they decide to impose an outright ban on social contacts with class members of the opposite gender – which in our age of growing acceptance of Queer people (I use the term all-inclusively because I can’t stand the ludicrous and ever-growing set of initials, “LGBTQQIAA+” or whatever it’s up to this week, that in the same sort of perversion of language that gave us the equally bizarre “Latinx” has somehow become the standard designation for us) plays quite differently than it no doubt did in 1938. The most interesting aspect of this movie is its behind-the-camera personnel, who would quickly graduate to major films: director David Miller, writers Robert Lees and Fred Rinaldo (who would end up at Universal in the early 1940’s writing the star-making vehicles for Abbott and Costello), musical director David Snell and cinematographer Alfred Gilks. Gilks would later win a shared Academy Award for color cinematography for the 1951 MGM musical An American in Paris, for which he shot all but the last 20 minutes – but I suspect those last 20 minutes, a ballet staged to George Gershwin’s tone poem of the same title and stunningly directed by Vincente Minnelli and photographed by John Alton, really won the film its cinematography award.

Anyway, It’s In the Stars features dancer Johnny Downs (who was briefly under contract to Paramount, where they paired him with an even more forgotten talent, Eleanore Whitney, in an attempt to create their own competition to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers) and singer-dancer Eleanor Lynn, who are so attracted to each other they end up violating the no-dating rule and are caught when the school’s astronomy professor, Mr. Jones (Roger Converse) – who also seems to be moonlighting in psychology on the side – when he wants to show the class a projection of a lunar eclipse and there are Downs and Lynn making out in front of the telescope and casting their silhouettes on the screen on which Mr. Jones is projecting his image. The other students ostracize them and literally push them into the water at the base of the school’s fountain, but Mr. Jones is determined to break their silly no-dating rule. He tricks them into sponsoring a dance to raise money to renovate the school’s gym, only the dance is a bust at first: the students attend but just stand around the bandstand while the band plays a lackluster easy-listening version of “My Melancholy Baby.” The professor asks some of the students who know the terminology of swing what he should tell the bandleader to play hotter music, and the band members start to go to town on the same song. Downs and Lynn start patting their feet in time and ultimately end up dancing, and as the band starts running through swing standards of the period like “Stompin’ at the Savoy” and “Running Wild” the other students get the idea and soon the gym floor is a hopping dance venue. I kept expecting some prankster to pull the switch that would open the floor and dunk everybody in the swimming pool underneath – the same gag done so beautifully by Frank Capra in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) – but they didn’t. Instead the film ends with all the newly coupled college students join Downs and Lynn for a reprise of the title song, with Downs and Lynn had previously performed as a dancing couple; it’s an O.K. piece of material (by Michael Cleary with lyrics by Max and Nathaniel Leaf) but, like the film itself, nothing special.