American Experience: “The Blinding of Isaac Woodard” (WGBH-TV, PBS, aired March 30, 2021)

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

Last night Charles and I watched a quite compelling American Experience program on PBS called “The Blinding of Isaac Woodard.” Isaac Woodard was an African-American war veteran who returned home in 1946 and intended to pick up his wife, whom he hadn’t seen in four years, in their former home town in South Carolina, after which he planned to take her to New York City, where his parents were already living, and settle there. Shortly before his scheduled trip was supposed to end, he asked the bus driver to let him off at the next stop and then allow him to return so he could use the restroom – itself a controversial issue in the charged and largely absurd racial politics of the time and place because few towns in the South Carolina back country had restrooms Blacks were allowed to use. Instead of acceding to Woodard’s request, the driver got insulted and contacted the police, who met the bus in the town of Batesburg, stopped it, pulled Woodard off it and not only gave him a savage beating, one of them – the town’s police chief, Linwood Shull – stuck the end of the billy club in each of Woodard’s eyes in succession and twisted it, thereby blinding him for life.

The case reached the attention of Walter White, the executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) – and yes, unlike most people referring to it nowadays, the narrator of this show used the group’s full name. Not only was he named “White,” Walter White was light-skinned and didn’t look particularly Black, and he had become controversial within the African-American civil rights community (such as it existed in 1946) for expending most of what little political capital the group had in pursuit of a federal statute to make lynching a federal crime. (Lynching is still not a federal crime: the last attempt to make it so was blocked in the Senate last year by Rand Paul, R-Kentucky.) The heart of the NAACP’s efforts then was the Legal Defense and Education Fund, which was mounting a long-term effort to get the courts to reverse themselves and declare racial segregation unconstitutional; this show mentions two of the three key lawyers at the Fund, Thurgood Marshall and Robert Carter (though they omit the third one, Spottswood W. Robinson), and their strategy was to bring cases that would force Southern states to live up to the promise of “separate but equal” in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case that legitimized segregation.

The NAACP’s strategy was to prove in court that the separate facilities for Blacks were in practice vastly unequal to those for whites, and therefore Southern governments and companies would be forced to render them equal – and hopefully to abandon segregation altogether because it would be easier and cheaper to let Blacks use the white facilities than to lay out the capital needed to make the Black facilities equal. Woodard’s case became a cause célèbre in 1946 largely due to the efforts of Orson Welles, who was then doing a current-events radio show and used all his formidable dramatic talents to bring the Woodard story to life; the first sound we hear on this documentary is Welles’ voice reading Woodard’s signed affidavit describing what had happened to him. The show mentions President Harry Truman and his unlikely emergence as a champion of civil rights, especially considering his background; he was from Missouri, a state so strongly aligned with the South that in 1861 President Lincoln had literally put it under martial law to prevent it from seceding and joining the Confederacy.

Truman grew up with a mother who regarded John Wilkes Booth as a national hero and, when he was President, refused to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom when he had her over at the White House. But when he became President he was so appalled by the treatment of returning Black servicemembers in general and Isaac Woodard in particular he did a 180° on civil rights and became a stronger champion of equal rights for African-Americans than any President (or at least any President since Ulysses S. Grant, who for all the corruption within his administration was not only a strong advocate for Black civil rights but at least attempted to stop the genocide against Native Americans as well) before him. Truman ordered the U.S. Attorney for South Carolina to prosecute Shaw for the assault on Woodard, but the U.S. Attorney was an unapologetic racist who basically threw the case; he put on only two witnesses, Woodard himself and the driver of the bus (the man who’d met Woodard’s request to use the bathroom with a racist slur), and the jury inevitably – for that time and place – acquitted him.

But the case struck the conscience of at least one white man in the courtroom: the judge, Julius Waties Waring. This program makes it seem like the Woodard case was his road-to-Damascus awakening to the injustice of the South’s racism, but in fact Waring had begun his transformation before that. He had started by routinely throwing out cases in which white farm owners would buy consumer debts held by Blacks and force them to work off their debts on the plantations – essentially an attempt to revive slavery while maintaining technical compliance with the 13th Amendment – and he’d already begun to reform his own courtroom, including ceasing to designate the race of potential jurors so Blacks (or at least the handful of Blacks who had actually been able to navigate the obstacle courses white Southern state governments set up to keep them from voting) would have as good a chance of getting on a federal jury in Waring’s courtroom in Charleston as whites.

When the Woodard case landed in his lap Waring’s first instinct was to duck it – he was already starting to get a reputation as being “soft” on racial matters from his rulings in debt peonage cases. But he agreed to hear the case, and he was appalled at the sloppy case the government put on. Waring was also transforming his personal life at the time; he broke up with his first wife (though since South Carolina did not allow divorce at all at the time, the first Mrs. Waring had to go to Florida to obtain her divorce decree) and he remarried to a Michigan-born woman who took him outside the South and exposed him to people, including New York-based record producer John Hammond (who was white and from a rich family but had become well known for his advocacy for civil rights, both as an NAACP board member and his work in the music business; it was he who arranged for Benny Goodman to hire the Black pianist Teddy Wilson and appear publicly with him as part of the Benny Goodman Trio).

The Warings also read up on Southern racism through books like An American Dilemma by Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal and The Mind of the South by W. J. Cash, who was harder than Myrdal for the Southern racists to dismiss because Cash was a white Southerner himself). In 1947 Waring got to hear a challenge by the leaders of the South Carolina Democratic Party to evade the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1944 Smith v. Allwright decision outlawing whites-only primary elections by having the South Carolina legislature repeal every law dealing with primary elections so the Democratic Party could declare itself a “private club” to admit whomever it wanted – and to exclude all Blacks. Waring not only found for the Black plaintiffs, he wrote a scording opinion (Waring’s opinions on racial cases have the fervor of the convert about them) saying, among other things, “It is time for South Carolina to rejoin the union.” A lot of his detractors said snidely, “He’s got a union he should rejoin” – meaning his first marriage – and some were even nastier. He got the usual death threats, mostly in barely legible handwritten scrawls. The Ku Klux Klan burned a cross in his backyard, and on one occasion assailants threw two bricks through his window, which the Warings feared were gunshots. (A paper called the Pee Dee Advocate published a little squib about the attacks that ended, “Unfortunately, the judge was not hurt.”)

Isaac Woodard himself appeared as part of a giant benefit concert held at New York’s Lewisohn Stadium to raise money for him that featured major Black entertainers like Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday and Pearl Bailey. (The appearance of the composer of Black, Brown and Beige and the woman who’d sung “Strange Fruit” is no surprise, but seeing Pearl Bailey’s name abd photo on the concert bill was.) One person who attended the concert told Woodard that within 10 years he’d be forgotten – which turned out to be true (the makers of this show themselves seem to have forgotten about him in the second half, which is about Waring and his involvement in one of the cases challenging school segregation that ultimately became linked as Brown v. Board of Education; it was heard by a three-judge panel and Waring was the lone dissenter, but his dissent is a fiery denunciation of racism that ended, in words Waring underlined, “Segregation is per se inequality” – words that got echoed in Earl Warren’s court opinion in Brown: “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal”), though a tag sequence describes him as having been relatively successful.

He husbanded his money and by the time he died in 1982 he had bought several properties in New York City and was living about as well as could have been expected given the horrible thing that had happened to him – about which he spoke in a late-in-life television interview in a matter-of-fact tone that showed he’d long since let go of his bitterness. This American Experience program was PBS at its best, tellilng an incredibly dramatic story and getting out of the way so the viewers can make the connections themselves and not feel like they’re being propagandized. But there’s also a plus ça change, plus ça même chose aspect to it, especially since in what was almost certainly a coincidence PBS showed it on what turned out to be the second day of Minneapolis former police officer Derek Chauvin for killing unarmed African-American George Floyd. Though Chauvin’s trial has already lasted longer than Shull’s and it’s clearly a case being brought by prosecutors who want to win it, it’s an indictment of America’s continued racism that unarmed Black people are still being assaulted and killed by police, and in a coincidence I’m sure the filmmakers intended they pan down a list prepared in 1945 of people who were lynched that year, and one of the names on it is … “George Floyd.”

The County That Built the Country (““Connected: A Search for Unity” episode) (Grateful Inconvenience, PBS , aired March 39, 2021)

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

After the American Experience program on Isaac Woodard (that also told the story of one of my political and social heroes, South Carolina federal judge Julius Waties Waring, who had an extraordinary road-to-Damascus moment that turned him from a typical upper-class Southerner with typical attitudes about ract to a fiery champion for civil rights that led him to write a scathing dissenting opinion in one of the cases that eventually became Brown v. Board of Education) PBS showed a program called “The County That Built the Country” as part of a series called Connected: A Search for Unity, produced by Monty Moran, founder of the Chipotle’s Mexican fast-food chain who took some of the money he made doing that to buy a private plane and fly around the country with a camera crew. His objective, he said in an opening narration, was to show that despite the intense political and social polarization of the United States today, there are more things that unite us than divide us.

His case in point in this episode was McDowell County, West Virginia, which through much of the 20th century was the richest county in the state, courtesy of its giant coal mines. They were owned not by a coal company but by United States Steel, which wanted a “captive” coal producer to feed its steel mills that in turn provided steel for just about everything the U.S. made: skyscrapers, automobiles, appliances and the million and one other products that are dependent on steel. Other than that the towns in McDowell County, including Welch and Gary (named after United States Steel’s historic headquarters in Gary, Indiana), were run pretty much like other coal towns: the miners lived in company-owned housing and were paid not in actual U.S. currency but so-called “scrip,” private money issued by the company and usable only at the company’s own stores. (The show featured a shot of a scrip coin issued by United States Steel for their co-workers.) The company thereby got to exploit their workers at both ends, as both producers and captive consumers; it’s the source of the line in Merle Travis’s song “Sixteen Tons” (which one of the interviewees actually quotes), “Tell St. Peter I can’t go/I owe my soul to the company store.” (Travis recalled his father, a coal miner, saying that line and put it into the song.)

The show details both the collapse of McDowell County’s economy when United States Steel closed the coal mine in 1986 and the resourcefulness of the people left behind – alas, I haven’t been able to find an online source about this show that gives the names of the people profiled, but some of them were interesting. Among them were the 29-year-old owner of Welch’s three-days-a-week newspaper and an unlikely team of an 80-something white man and a 40-something Black woman who bought the local high school for $100 – he notes rather grimly that they got it so cheaply because selling it to them cost the city less than tearing it down – and used it to set up something called a “School for Life” to teach the local kids to start their own enterprises and work hard as an alternative to collecting welfare and getting on drugs.

“The County That Built a Country” has ideological points to offer both the Left and the Right: the Right can point to it as an example of how government welfare payments destroy people’s will to work and better themselves, and set them up to become drug addicts (though no one in the show seems to be aware of how drugs came to the area – presumably they could have made meth in outlaw labs but cocaine and heroin would have had to be imported, and the 80-something white co-founder of the School for Life tells us he had the trappings of a middle-class lifestyle until he lost it all to his crack habit but he doesn’t give us much of an idea of how he got off the drug)/ The Left in turn can look at it as the sort of “creative destruction” of capitalism run amok and essentially being destructive destruction; one of the crueler aspects of America’s de-industrialization as company after company has shut down American manufacturing and exported it overseas (or kept their plants in the U S. but brought in undocumented immigrants to replace U.S.-born workers) and instead of preserving the industrial infrastructure for someone else that might be able to do useful work with it, they just destroy it on their way out.

I’ve never forgot the photos I’ve seen of the insides of abandoned auto factories that look like a bomb was set off inside just to wreck everything; infrastructures that took decades to build up are destroyed in months and no one stops to think of the social costs. It’s heartbreaking to me that America has pissed away the industrial advantage that allowed it to win World War II (I’ll never forget the story of Akio Morita, the founder of Sony, touring the U.S. in 1946, admiring the huge factories and wondering, “Just how did we think we could win a war against such a big country?”) Charles watched the show with me and called it “pablum,” pointing out that all the resourcefulness of the people who are sticking it out in places like Gary and Welch isn’t going to get them anything more than a small-town existence in which they’re hanging on for dear life and squandering their talents.

This was an interesting show to see in our political climate, though; thanks largely due to the anger West Virginians feel over the wanton destruction of the coal industry and the total disinterest of both the private sector and the government in setting up anything to replace it, West Virginia has shifted from one of the most reliably Democratic states in the country to one of the most reliably Republican, and in the current Senate the balance of power is held by West Virginia’s nominally Democratic Senator, Joe Manchin, who’s holding the threat of switching parties and delivering the Senate majority to the Republicans if Joe Biden and the rest of the Democrats in Washington, D.C. move too far Left to suit him. With the actual Republicans adopting the scorched-earth policy towards Biden they did towards Obama before him (and Clinton before him) and refusing to vote for anything he and the Democrats propose, Manchin has essentially become the one voice on the Right they can (indeed, have to) negotiate with and compromise.

If Monty Moran’s intent in telling this story was to assure the watchers that for all our differences there’s more that unites America than divides it, this show – as moved as I was by the stories – was an abject failure. I’m a city boy, born in San Francisco (the city all too many rural Americans regard as a den of iniquity because of its cosmopolitanism in general and tolerance of Queer people in particular), and people maintaining what I think is an irrational attachment to a deservedly dying industry like coal (both its toll on the miners themselves and the damage coal did to the environment) is as far beyond my ken as the whole “gun culture” – my response to gun massacres like the resent ones in Atlanta and Boulder is to want to tell all rural idiots who whine about us wanting to “take away our guns,” “You’re damned right I want to take your guns! There’s no earthly reason why a private citizen should be able to buy or own an assault weapon. If I had my druthers the Second Amendment would be ripped out of the Consttution and thrown onto the dung heap of history and burned along with all the parts of it that condoned slavery.”

Ghost Catchers (Universal, 1944)

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

Last night’s “feature” was the third and, for some reason, most obscure of the four films the comedy team of Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson made for Universal between 1941 and 1945, Ghost Catchers. I’ve been telling the Olsen and Johnson story a lot in these pages lately, but just to recap: they were veterans of vaudeville who had been playing the circuits for years in the 1920’s and 1930’s and had made a few undistinguished movies for Warner Bros. and Republic until 1938. That year they put an expanded version of their vaudeville show on the Broadway stage as a revue called Hellzapoppin’, and it was an enormous hit. Among other things, its success brought Olsen and Johinson a four-film contract with Universal, including a movie of Hellzapoppin’ which simultaneously tried to bring the show more in line with movie conventions and made fun of itself for doing so. Their second Universal film, Crazy House, cast them as comedians unceremoniously ejected from Universal and forced to produce a movie on their own – it’s long been a personal favorite of mine and the presence of Count Basie as the main musical guest star also helps.

Ghost Catchers was their third Universal film, and the one that came closest to having an actual plot: Southern-fried Col. Breckenridge Marshall (Walter Catlett) brings his two daughters, Susannah (Martha O’Driscoll) and her younger sister Melinda (Gloria Jean), to present them in a song recital at Carnegie Hall, with Melinda as singer and Susannah as her accompanist. Only they need a place to stay while preparing for the concert, and Col. Marshall makes a deal for a six-months’ lease on a house that’s the cheapest place of sufficient size they can afford. The real-estate agent gives them veiled warnings that the place is haunted, and when the Marshalls move in the two women are beset by noises of horses, other mysterious sounds and a cut-out in the walls through which two eyes are watching them. After a reel of this, Susannah is sufficiently scared she runs out of the house and goes to the next-door neighbors for help. Unfortunately for her, the next-door neighbors are Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson, who are running a nightclub (apparently writers Edmund L. Hartmann – who also produced – Eddie Cline, who also directed, and Milt Gross, whose story “High Spirits” provided the basis for it all, had never heard of zoning laws) and subjecting their customers to a steady round of practical jokes and other sorts of abuse.

Their floor show is a song called “The Customer Is Always Right,” though they clearly don’t believe that because some of the performers carry picket signs through the club with cutting slogans that make clear what they really think of their clientele – things like “No Maximum Charge” and a reference to two better movies playing down the street (presumably Hellzapoppin’ and Crazy House), highlighted by a big banner announcing, “Through These Doors Pass the Most Dissatisfied Customers in the World.” (We get the idea.) Poor Susannah Marshall ends up in a prop electric chair and, when she demands to leave, is ejected through a chute and unceremoniously dumped in the street. Then, of course, Olsen and Johnson have a change of heart and agree to help the Marshalls out with their ghost problem, and from there the film turns into a quite close reworking of the 1941 Abbott and Costello vehicle Hold That Ghost – which in one of the film’s funniest scenes is actually referenced: Olsen and Johnson talk about how unbelievable Hold That Ghost was while their film duplicates one of its most famous gags – a candle moving across a table, apparently by itself – and unseen hands undress Olsen and Johnson and put pajamas on them before they go to bed. (Once again the scene with Olsen and Johnson in bed together “plays” quite differently now than it no doubt did in 1944 – especially since they’re bickering at each other like an old married couple.)

The Marshalls and the stars eventually learn the house’s haunted history – it was built by a Gilded Age big shot who for New Year’s in 1899-1900 threw a lavish party, invited 100 chorus girls from a then-popular show, fell out of a window to his (apparent) death in the middle of the festivities and ever since has haunted the place, doing tap dances and pinching Gloria Jean. Olsen, Johnson, bandleader Clay Edwards (Kirby Grant) and his female singer, Ella Mae Morse (playing herself, though not given all that much to do – just parts in big ensemble numbers with titles like “Quoth the Raven,” whose lyrics are a fractured swing version of Poe’s poem – she had become an overnight star on Freddie Slack’s hit record of “Cow Cow Boogie” and she could legitimately be claimed as the first white rock star, but it would be hard to tell that from this movie), decide that the way to exorcise this ghost would be to restage that 1900 party but do more up-to-date music which will drive the ghost crazy and get him to leave. It works, sort of, but then the Marshalls are kidnapped and sealed in the basement by an unseen person who walls up the entrance with bricks à la Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” (there are quite a few Edgar Allan Poe references in this film even though it’s supposed to be a comedy!) and leaves them there to die until Our Heroes figure it out and notify the police, who break down the walls, rescue the Marshalls and set up a more or less happy ending (though one last unseen hand grabs Chic Johnson as the film fades).

Ghost Catchers is a good-natured film and reasonably entertaining, though I found it the least interesting of Olsen and Johnson’s four Universal films I suspect for some of the same reasons Leonard Maltin, in his book Movie Comedy Teams (from which I first heard of Olsen and Johnson) thinks it’s the best. It’s relatively unencumbered by guest stars – Ella Mae Morse actually has an acting role and shows thespian talent in the scene in which Clay Edwards dumps her for Martha O’Driscoll’s character, saying their ballyhooed romance was only for publicity (which reminded me of how real-life bandleader Harry James was having an affair with his band singer, Helen Forrest, while simultaneously courting Betty Grable, whom he’d met making the film Springtime in the Rockies – James eventually married Grable and Forrest found that out the way the rest of the world did, through the media). Kirby Grant was a real-life singer/bandleader who makes a personable if rather stiff romantic leading man, and the only out-of-nowhere guest the filmmakers trotted in this time was Morton Downey, Sr., a radio crooner from the late 1920’s whose act was pretty moth-eaten by this time. He’s featured on one song, “These Foolish Things” – the 1936 classic by British songwriter Eric Maschwitz (though he signed it “Holt Marvell” because he thought his own Jewish-sounding name would hurt its commercial prospects) – whose all-time greatest versions are the two by Billie Holiday and whose all-time worst version is by Rod Stewart on his ill-advised attempt at a standards album. Downey’s version is closer to Stewart’s than Holiday’s – though I give him points for including the lovely and seldom performed final verse (“The scent of smoldering leaves, the wail of steamers/Two lovers on the street who walk like dreamers”) which I’ve otherwise heard only on Billie Holiday’s incomparable second version from 1952. It’s hard to believe that from Downey’s unassuming loins sprang Morton Downey, Jr., 1980’s Right-wing talk-show host and sort of the beta version of Rush Limbaugh.

Despite the mockery of rival Universal comedians Abbott and Costello’s Hold That Ghost (I’ve previously suggested the reason Olsen and Johnson didn’t become major movie stars is that Abbott and Costello arrived at Universal at almost the same time and made Buck Privates, the highest-grossing film of 1941), the two films are close enough Ghost Catchers almost counts as a remake. The deserted and presumably haunted house is in New York City itself instead of upstate, and the MacGuffin is a case full of alcoholic beverages instead of a cache of gangsters’ money (the cellar includes both wine and distilled spirits; Charles questioned whether the spirits – unlike the wine – could have survived 44 years and still been in drinkable condition), but otherwise the two films track considerably closely even though Ghost Catchers doesn’t include the big final number I was expecting.

In the film the Marshall sisters are able to sell just one ticket to their Carnegie Hall concert – with the result that the hall cancels them and schedules a charity show instead – though the one person who bought a ticket insists on hearing the concert anyway, so Gloria Jean sings her concert to him by phone in a scene that plays quite poignantly today. (Today a concert beiig given by telephone would have a ghastly name like “telerecital” and be ballyhooed as a great new advance in entertainment the way “telemedicine" or “telehealth” – both ghastly words – are being promoted as major new advances in health care.) I was surprised the writers didn’t have either the Marshalls perform at the charity show and become instant stars or Clay Edwards and his band bail them out by agreeing to appear as part of their concert and giving them a sellout audience and us a big final production number. I suspect Universal didn’t have enough confidence in Olsen and Johnson as movie “draws” to spend that kind of money on a big, splashy ending for a 68-minute film – and there seems to have been some major surgery on the movie because imdb.com lists a whole lot of songs Morton Downey allegedly sings in this movie even though the extant print gives him just one!

Songbird (STX Films, Invisible Narratives, Platinum Dunes, Universal, 2020)

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

Last night my husband Charles and I watched an interesting movie called Songbird, which a friend of mine had recommended as the first film that has definitively riffed off the current SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 pandemic. The film is dated 2020 and was directed by Adam Mason from a script by him and Steven Boyes, though the name prominently featured on the cover of the Blu-Ray box is Michael Bay, director of such spectacular cinematic apocalypses as The Rock, Armageddon, Pearl Harbor, The Island and the Transformers movies. Mason and Boyes made one big mistake in their script that predictably annoyed me – not only because before I started writing about the pandemic I made sure to get the nomenclature right by looking it up on the Centers for Disease Control Web site but because we’d just watched Lesley Stahl get it right on a 60 Minutes episode alleging that the Chinese government is covering up the true origins of the pandemic and has done so since the first cases emerged in Wuhan, China in late 2019. The correct name for the virus is SARS-CoV-2 – an evolution of the original SARS-CoV virus discovered (also in China) in 2003 – and COVID-19 is the name of the disease it causes. The Mason/Boyes script posits that by 2024 (the date the film takes place, though that’s from the promotional materials and isn’t all that apparent in the film itself) the disease has mutated into a far more virulent and easily transmissible form called “COVID-23” – if the virus did indeed evolve it would more properly be called SARS-CoV-3 (or -4 or -5 if it underwent even more far-reaching changes).

Aside from that, Songbird is a surprisingly short (just 84 minutes of running time) and obviously quickly thrown-together story that’s entertaining enough on its own merits but draws on virtually every science-fiction dystopia made at least since Blade Runner in 1982, with special borrowings from previous pandemic movies like Carriers and Contagion. (I’ve never seen Contagion – though it apparently had a surge in digital rentals and DVD sales when SARS-CoV-2 hit – but I did write about Carriers in 2016 at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2016/10/carriers-paramount-vantage-likely-story.html and not surprisingly found it a deeper and richer film than Songbird.)

The central characters of Songbird are Nick (K. J. Apa, a boyishly handsome if rather sloppy-looking young man who reminded me of Marty Deeks, the character played by Eric Christian Olsen on NCIS: Los Angeles), a bike messenger by day and a motorcycle rider by night; Sara (Sofia Carson), his sort-of girlfriend – they are clearly interested in each other but because of the fearsome lockdown all Los Angeles has been put under they literally can’t see each other and can communicate only on either side of the tightly closed door to her apartment – and Lita (Elpidio Carritio), Sara’s roommate and also her grandmother (though we get the impression these are two separate people being played by the same actress). Nico (also sometimes called Nicholas or Nick) is ferrying packages around Los Angeles for a mysterious client named William Griffin (Bradley Whitford) and his wife Piper (Demi Moore, the only real star “name” in this cast), though he periodically stops at old basketball courts and other locations that make him nostalgic for the old days before the various pandemics, including the original COVID-19 as well as the current COVID-23. These stopovers earn him the ire of Lester (Craig Robinson), the heavy-set Black guy who owns the messenger service and keeps track of Nico through GPS.

At first the two plot lines – Nico’s activities as a bike messenger and William’s surreptitious business that involves the packages Nico delivers to him – don’t seem to have any necessary connection, but soon they get tied together: before the pandemic(s) Sara was an aspiring singer and William was a record-company executive who lured her to L.A. with the promise of rock stardom but really only wanted to fuck her. Then the original pandemic happened and basically shut down the music business, especially the parts of it involving live performance and any hope of launching Sara’s career, so she’s taken to performing online and singing to various people who log on to her channel. Some of her customers complain that she performs only her own songs and not familiar oldies, but let’s be fair: the cost of licensing well-known songs was probably beyond this movie’s budget. Sara is also making extra money as a prostitute and William is her primary client – he’s desperate for direct face-to-face contact and is willing to pay for it, though when she starts putting him off he decides to attack her and tries to break into her car. It turns out that though the virus has evolved so it’s not only more easily transmissible but it kills its victims within just 48 hours of exposure (of course Edgar Allan Poe’s pandemic story, “The Masque of the Red Death,” cut it still further to half an hour!), certain people, including Nick, have developed immunity to all its various strains – though they’re insultingly called “munies” and are actually looked down on by the rest of the population because they can pass the virus to others even though they can’t get sick themselves.

Another gimmick in this movie is that the government organization that enforces the quarantines and ships infected people to the so-called “Q Zones,” essentially concentration camps intended to isolate the victims so they croak without infecting anyone else, is called the “Department of Sanitation,” and in a chilling speech a man named Dozer (Paul Walter Hauser) recalls how he rose from a truck driver for the original Los Angeles Department of Sanitation back when it still did what it does now – dispose of people’s garbage – to head the entire department when his superiors all died, and now he glories in his terrifying job of breaking into the homes of people with the disease and carting them off to the terrifying “Q Zones.” There’s also a man in a wheelchair who identifies himself as a veteran of the war in Afghanistan and also as a “fag” (with his disability providing the excuse that, like most movie Gay men, he’s never shown having or even contemplating actually having sex with a man) who has his own drone and sends it out to protect Sara, who’s become a confidant of his via her musical Webcast, by taking out William Griffin just when he’s about to break into her car and rape her. Dozer breaks into Sara’s apartment to carry out the COVID-23 victims and insists on taking Sara along even though her viral tests have been consistently negative, and Nico races against time to get her a false “munie” bracelet from William’s stash (that was the racket he was involved in) so the two of them can flee the city and be together as a normal pre-pandemic couple.

In the climax, Dozer and an armed tactical squad from the Department of Sanitation is about to cart Sara off to the Q Zone when Nico proclaims that her tests have shown she is actually a “munie,” too. I was expecting the film to end tragically, with both Nico and Sara gunned down by the Department of Sanitation goon squad for resisting being taken to the Q Zone, but instead Nico absurdly easily persuades them that they’re both “munies” and they’re allowed to flee the city on Nico’s motorcycle for what’s obviously supposed to be a crowd-pleasing happy ending.

Songbird is reasonably entertaining but it’s the sort of movie you think you’ve seen before even if you haven’t; director Mason even borrows the famous sound effect from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 of a man in a spacesuit (or, as here, a haz-mat suit) hearing his own breathing unnaturally loudly. I suspect the first film made about a disaster shouldn’t be expected to be any good; I thought of Wake Island (1942), the first U.S. movie made about America’s involvement in World War II, and how it (like Songbird) was an assemblage of pre-existing clichés that had the further handicap of trying to create an inspiring, morale-boosting film at a time when the U.S. was actually getting its ass kicked in the real war. (Apparently the film worked well enough that some theatres had military recruiters stationed in their lobbies to encourage young men to sign up – and quite a few of them did.) It also reminded me of a film I’ve heard of but never seen, The Net – the first film ever made specifically about the Internet (i.e., the one that exists today, not the sort of computer network science-fiction writers might have dreamed about before) – in which Sandra Bullock plays a woman who’s cyber-stalked before cyber-stalking was that much of a real-world “thing.”

At times this film seemed to be trying for the pathos that made Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s novella “Dark Benediction” (1951), still my favorite story in the pandemic-apocalypse genre, so moving – particularly the pathos of the two romantic leads growing more and more attracted to each other but unable to touch each other (in “Dark Benediction” the two are fleeing free-lance fascists aimed at stamping out the pandemic by exterminating the carriers, so they’re out in the open and able to consummate their relationship, but fearful of doing so since the disease is spread by touch and she has it but he doesn’t) – but for the most part Mason and Boyes are content just to make the most obvious points. One odd thing about this disc is it contains a large number of deleted scenes – and quite a few of them would have made the film stronger if they’d been included, including a scene explaining why Sara performs her Webcast a capella (she can’t use her guitar because a string broke and there’s no way to replace it) and more of the announcements from public loudspeakers that would have added to the Big Brother-ish quality of the film. It’s not clear at this stage just how the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic will be depicted in the artworks of the future (one odd thing about the 1918-1919 flu is that virtually none of the artists who lived through it actually wrote about it; it’s mentioned in passing in John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. trilogy – Dos Passos had actually been exposed to it when he shipped out to fight in World War I – but neither F. Scott Fitzgerald nor Ernest Hemingway mentioned it at all), but it’s quite likely they’ll do a better job than Adam Mason and Steve Boyes did. I still hope a filmmaker with the right talent and imagination would just put “Dark Benediction” on the screen already!

My Music: Story Songs (Why Not? Why Not? Why Not? Productions, TJL Productions, PBS-TV, 2019)

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

Last night KPBS showed an unusual program in T. J. Lubinsky’s “My Music” series – and for once he actually spelled “My Music” the normal way instead of mashing the two words together with a capital letter in the middle in the style made (in)famous by computer programs (“MyMusic”). The title was My Music: Story Songs, and the copyright date is 2019. It was something unusual for a Lubinsky show, and that is that it’s all composed of film clips from the past. Usually Lubinsky would stage live concerts with the surviving performers from whatever era he was paying tribute to (though some of his live shows have been rerun since the passing of some of their greatest talents, including Little Richard and James Brown). Sometimes he would intersperse clips of performances by deceased artists with the live playing by the still-living ones – with the ironic results that the dead artists, seen in clips from the peaks of their careers, would often come off better than the living ones whose voices had been worn down by the ravages of time.

One irony in previous Lubinsky shows was that in the footage from the concerts he staged especially for them, the Black singers almost always held up better than the white ones – which I take to be yet another consequence of the fact that virtually all Black pop singers, especially the ones who sang R&B or soul, had started as children in Black churches and had been properly trained by Black church choir directors, while a lot of the white performers had bought into the myth of the “untrained” Black soul voice and had tried to sing this sort of music without the proper technique. (You don’t sing as long as Aretha Franklin did, or as long as Tina Turner or Patti LaBelle have, without a properly trained voice for that sort of music.) This My Music show was different in that all the performers were white and all were represented by film clips, so Lubinsky was able to include anyone he wanted (and he could get the rights to – a fraught condition when you’re dealing with estates as fiercely protective of their legacies as Elvis Presley’s; the promotion for the four-CD set offered as a premium for joining KPBS included “Heartbreak Hotel,” but good luck licensing that, especially for what a PBS producer could afford to pay!) without regard to their current status as alive or dead.

It was also offered under the rubric “Story Songs,” though it’s hard to tell how you differentiate a “story song” from one that isn’t. It seems to mean a song with a discernible plot and a character that grows and changes, albeit not necessarily for good, through the course of the song rather than one that just states that the singer loves someone, or doesn’t love someone, or loves someone who doesn’t love them, or is loved by someone they don’t love in return. Of course, if any of those states changes – as they do in Cole Porter’s “I Loved Him, but He Didn’t Love Me” – I guess then you have a “story song.”) Not only were all the performers on last night’s show white, they all came from either country or folk – perhaps reflecting the descendance of both those genres from the British and Irish ballads of the 19th century – though the contents of the promo CD as listed in what started to look awfully like a K-Tel commercial indicated songs outside those styles, like Gladys Knight and the Pips’ “Midnight Train to Georgia” (which would at least have given us a Black act; as it was this show was as white as a Georgia voter-suppression bill-signing ceremony!).

It began with Tennessee Ernie Ford’s 1955 version of Merle Travis’s “Sixteen Tons,” which has a fascinating history. In 1946 Travis had been commissioned by Capitol Records to do an album of work songs (back when an “album” was a collection of 78 rpm single records packaged in something that looked like a photo album; the name “album” stuck even after LP’s came in and an “album” was a collection of songs on two sides of one LP, sometimes with the exact same contents and cover art as a previously issued 78 album) but he couldn’t find any songs having to do with coal mining. (There was “Which Side Are You On?,” but it was a song about a labor struggle in the mining industry rather than the act of mining itself.) Travis, whose father had been a coal miner, decided to write his own and came up with “Nine-Pound Hammer,” “Dark as a Dungeon” and “Sixteen Tons,” which was released as a single and was a minor hit. Then Tennessee Ernie Ford grabbed it nine years later and had the biggest hit of his career even though the arrangement is a bit dubious (a single trumpet making beeps behind his vocal – it might have been ex-Count Basie trumpeter Harry “Sweets” Edison, who played similarly on some of Frank Sinatra’s records for the same label, Capitol, in the 1950’s).

Then again Merle Travis’s own arrangement was equally odd, especially the jazz-inflected guitar breaks he played on the song just, I suspect, to show that he could. The singer who could really have justice to “Sixteen Tons” was Johnny Cash in his prime, with the rock-solid backing of his original Tennessee Two (electric guitarist Luther Perkins and bassist Marshall Grant), but I discovered from Wikipedia that Cash didn’t record it until 1987 during his short and unhappy tenure with Mercury Records (where he ended up between 1980, when Columbia unceremoniously fired him after 22 years, and 1994, when Rick Rubin picked him up, signed him to his American Recordings label and made that stunning series of albums that gave Cash one of the greatest swan songs an important artist ever had). The next song was the Kingston Trio’s “Tom Dooley” – which a Time magazine cover story on the folk-music craze in the 1960’s gave credit for starting the folk revival (though in 1950, six years before “Tom Dooley,” the Weavers had had a huge hit in their cover of Leadbelly’s “Goodnight, Irene”), in a strange set which supposed to represent a prison cell in which the shortest Kingstoner played the hapless Tom Dooley on the eve of his execution. (The song was actually based on a true story, though the real protagonist was a Black man named Tom Dula, and he was lynched, not legally hanged as in the song.) The next song up was Jimmy Dean’s “Big Bad John,” which turned out to be a Paul Bunyan-esque tale of a huge coal miner (we were back in the mines again!) who single-handedly, Atlas-style, held up the roof of a collapsed mineshaft with his huge hands and saved the lives of 20 fellow miners at the cost of his own (that’s a “story song” if there ever was one!). I know all the Jimmy Deans out there can get confusing – the actor, the singer and the sausage maker.

The next song up was Marty Robbins’ “El Paso,” from his 1959 album Gunfighter Songs and Trail Ballads (the album he had to fight his record label, Columbia, to make; they were positioning him as a country-pop artist with songs like “A White Sport Coat and a Pink Carnation,” and they thought an album called Gunfighter Songs and Trail Ballads was way too “country” for the image they wanted for him; of course, it became the best-selling album he ever had and generated “El Paso,” his biggest hit single!), which I hadn’t realized is a really grim tale in which Felina his Mexican sweetheart is a Carmen-style temptress who gets off on pitting the men in her life against each other. After that we leaped into the 1960’s for Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe” – seen here in a TV performance in which her delivery is a good deal more halting than in her record; at first I wasn’t sure if she was having trouble remembering the words but then I realized she was acting the song in a far more openly emotional way than the almost terminal calm with which she’d sung it on the record). “Ode to Billie Joe” was also the first song we saw in color.

After one of the pledge breaks that are essentially interminable commercials for PBS and are the point of these programs, they showed Jeannie C. Riley doing “Harper Valley P.T.A.” – her one hit, though her delivery is so forceful it seems a wonder she didn’t have enduring success. It was a song that caught the moment of the 1960’s and its skewering of the hypocrisy of the self-proclaimed “guardians of morality” rings all too true today. (Witness how many so-called “Christians”: endorsed the Presidential candidacy of Donald Trump – casino owner, philanderer, usurer, con artist – and the recent bill passed in the Georgia state legislature to make it as tough as possible for Blacks, Latinos and other non-Republicans to vote, which among other things makes it a crime to give water or food to people waiting in line to vote. One can readily imagine what Jesus would have to say about that!)

From one of the best songs on the show Lubinsky cut to one of the worst: Bobby Goldsboro’s “Honey,” a thoroughly disgusting piece of bathos Goldsboro (who’d become known for tear-jerkers with an even worse song called “Molly,” in which he plays a veteran who returns home blinded by a war injury and apologizes to his wife for literally not being able to see her) came up with in which he offers his wife post-mortem apologies for every less than thoughtful things he’d done to her before she croaked. The Smothers Brothers once put Goldsboro on TV to do a straight version of “Honey” and then did a comedy routine that viciously skewered it, set in a “‘Honey’ Gift Shop” that offered replicas of all the props mentioned in the song, including potted plants (one of the song’s gimmicks is that the singer laughed at his wife when she planted a twig in their yard, and now it’s a full-grown tree) and model wrecked cars.

The next two songs were O.K. ballads that were hugely popular in their day – Kenny Rogers’ “The Gambler” and Glen Campbell’s “Wichita Lineman” (written by Jimmy Webb, who also wrote what was probably the ultimate “story song” of all time, “MacArthur Park,” which I have always thought almost terminally silly, though Webb once assured an interviewer was based on an actual affair he’d had with a woman with whom he’d gone for long walks with in MacArthur Park, which occasionally included them having sex there, and on one of their walks they did indeed stumble on a cake someone had left out there in the rain … ). After that came a song of unsurpassable intensity, Loretta Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” which gains it power partly because we all know it’s her own story (she was indeed a coal miner’s daughter who grew up one of many kids in a tumble-down shack in Butcher Holler, Kentucky – though “holler” is simply country-speak for “valley”) but also because she had one of those voices that just throbs with intensity. Like her mentor, the tragically short-lived Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn was the sort of singer that couldn’t sing without emotion if he’d tried; every word she sang vibrated with passion and truth.

Lubinsky wisely spotted this song at the end of his second set because nothing could have topped it, and when the show resumed it was to quite a different sort of “story song,” Jim Croce’s “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.” (I was struck by how much his backup guitarist looked like John Lennon.) The next song was Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” which in a way was a direct throwback to the original “story songs” from Britain and Ireland in the 19th century, which specifically and in great detail described real-life shipwrecks. Though the Edmund Fitzgerald was a modern enough ship that the video included footage of it being launched, sailing normally and later its wreckage (and the shot of its launch, in which it listed to one side and one wondered if it would capsize then and there – that should have been a warning that the ship was too damned big for its own good!), it was very much in the manner of a 19th century song about a maritime disaster.

The next song was Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle,” which I found myself responding to rather differently than I did when it was new – I associated myself not with the father but with the son whose dad would never spend time with him, and who rather bitterly got a pointless and soul-destroying revenge by turning his dad down when dad did try to reach out to him later in life. Then came Don McLean’s “American Pie,” the lengthy and rather bizarre, imagistic fantasy that’s sort of about the history of rock ’n’ roll that works off the idea that February 3, 1959, the day Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J. P. “Big Bopper” Richardson were killed in a small-plane crash, was “the day the music died.” One person who felt particularly insulted by the song was Holly’s original lead guitarist, singer and songwriter Sonny Curtis (who fronted by far the best post-Holly edition of his band, The Crickets, and wrote “I Fought the Law” and “Love Is All Around,” the Mary Tyler Moore Show theme song), who was bothered by the mythology created by McLean’s song and the film The Buddy Holly Story that he wrote an answer song, which he played with the surviving Crickets, called “The Real Buddy Holly Story” that ends, “Because the levee isn’t dry, and the music didn’t die, because Buddy Holly lives every time we play that rock ’n’ roll.”

It’s still a great and haunting song even if the imagery gets a little dense at times, and it’s been proclaimed tie first eight-minute song to become a single hit (it isn’t – it’s the Beatles’ “Hey, Jude”). That ended the main part of the program, but as usual with these programs they squeezed in one more song after yet another interminable and stupid pledge break (I’ve said it before, but when former House Speaker Newt Gingrich tried to defund PBS and one of his arguments was that their pledge breaks were even more infuriating than regular private-TV commercials, he had a point) there was a clip of the show’s on-screen host, B. J. Thomas, doing a song of his called “Rock ’n’ Roll Lullaby” which was supposedly what his mom sang him to sleep with when he was a kid. Of course Thomas is best known for “Raindrops Keep Falling Off My Head,” the theme song from the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and my own personal favorite by him is the haunting ballad “Everybody Loves a Rain Song” (after his hit they kept giving him songs about rain the way they kept giving Judy Garland songs about rainbows after “Over the Rainbow”!), but it was an O.K. song.

Naturally in a show like this part of the fun is second-guessing the compilers and thinking of songs they didn’t include and should have – like Lefty Frizzell’s 1959 comeback hit “Long Black Veil,” Willie Nelson’s “Red-Headed Stranger,” Simon and Garfunkel’s “Homeward Bound” and Bruce Springsteen’s epic “Jungleland” – but overall this was a nicely moving show even if you had to sit through the treacle to get to the gold!

The Milton Berle Show, featuring Olsen and Johnson in “Hellzapoppin’” (Milton Berle Productions, NBC-TV, aired April 24, 1956)

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

Eventually, after Charles got home from work I ran the last item in the videos I had got of the crazy hell-bent-for-leather comedy team of Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson, a 1956 attempt by Milton Berle to reproduce a shortened version of their legendary Broadway revue Hellzapoppin’ on his regular TV time slot on April 24, 1956. NBC was ballyhooing the new “compatible color” system they had just introduced and had got the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to make it the national standard. They announced that it was coming from NBC’s “Color City”: studios in Burbank and even showed a closeup of an RCA (NBC’s parent company and also one of the sponsors of the show, along with Sunbeam – an appliance maker that, unlike a lot of the sponsors of 1950’s television, still exists) color TV camera with the words “Color Television” emblazoned in chrome on its side.

Alas, the only record we have of this show is a black-and-white kinescope (a machine that essentially took a film of a TV show as it was being aired live, though it had to have a “tele-cine” converter to change the 30 frames per second of TV to the 24 of sound film; the kinescopes were rush-printed and flown out to the West Coast so the shows could air in the same time slot as the East Coast, but at the cost of a significant degradation in image quality; this was why Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz insisted on doing I Love Lucy on film, so they could stay in Hollywood instead of having to move to New York and so the show could be run simultaneously everywhere in the U.S. with the same image quality) which has some serious nitrate burns early on. We’ve seen silent films in condition this poor but we’re not used to looking at 1950’s TV in such wretched shape – though since the kinescopes were considered disposable it’s lucky we have any records of 1950’s TV at all!

By this time Milton Berle’s show was airing somewhat irregularly – usually only once every three weeks, alternating with Bob Hope and other star hosts – and this was the first show he’d done since the really weird one he’d done on location in San Diego April 3 aboard the USS Hancock with Elvis Presley, Esther Williams, Harry James and Buddy Rich as his guests. The final credits promised Elvis again (though he didn’t turn up until the season finale on June 5), to the expected excited squeals from the younger members of the studio audience. On the Hancock show with Elvis, Berle had done a weird bit posing as Elvis’s twin brother “Melvin Presley” (one wonders how Elvis, who’d had a stillborn twin named Jesse and was haunted by the tragedy all his life, felt about a New York comedian mocking him for having a twin!), and on this episode – after a bizarre bit in which Olsen and Johnson mock Berle for wanting them to do more subtle forms of humor and demonstrate that such old slapstick standbys as aiming seltzer bottles at people and pushing pies in their faces are still funny – the show opens with a rock ’n’ roll version of the Hellzapoppin’ theme song (though it’s really just a big-band number with an electric guitar and a drummer playing backbeats – it reminded me of the finale of the film Rock, Rock, Rock!, a mock-rock number by a blg band fronted by former Duke Ellington tenor saxophonist Al Sears, and when the teenager played by Connie Francis is astonished that her father actually likes the music, I joked that he should have said, “Why shouldn’t I? It sounds just like the big-band swing your mom and I listened to when we were dating!”) and Berle comes out and imitates Elvis at the end.

The show features a skit from the original 1938 Hellzapoppin’ with Olsen and Johnson sharing a bed in a sleazy ultra-cheap hotel which plays very differently today than it did in 1938 or 1956 – especially in the climax, in which Johnson dreams that he’s being seduced by Rita Hayworth and he wakes up and realizes he’s kissing Olsen! The film also includes some quite good musical numbers, including a song by Chic Johnson’s daughter June and a great pseudo-gospel sequence featuring Black singer Jeanette Williams (who has no other credits on imdb.com and I haven’t been able to find out any information about her online – the only listings that come up for “Jeanette Williams” are for two white women, a politician in Washington state and a bluegrass singer from the 1990’s) and a dance troupe called the Ten Covans (one wonders if they were descendants of the Four Covans, the spectacular Black dance act from the 1929 musical On With the Show). It seemed a bit weird to be watching this pseudo-gospel production number on 1950’s TV just after watching and listening to the real gospel of Mahalia Jackson and Sister Rosetta Tharpe on YouTube, but it was still one of the best numbers on the show and evidence that even Olsen and Johnson realized that audiences needed a respite from the madcap assaults of humor and so there ought to be some music to rest the audience’s funnybones.

The show ends up with Berle movingly joining in Olsen and Johnson’s famous curtain lines – “May you live as long as you want to, and may you laugh as long as you live.” Olsen and Johnson had less than a decade to live when they made this show, but they certainly knew how to make their audiences laugh and have a good time themselves doing it. Much of their humor dates rather badly, but some of it is still hilarious and even when you know what the gag is going to be (like when Berle complains that Olsen and Johnson have dropped so many stuffed birds on his stage and when are they going to drop a stuffed cow … do I really need to tell you what happens next, though i’ll add that the “cow” is obviously just a stuffed teddy bear-style replica), it’s still hilarious when the payoff arrives. Olsen and Johnson influenced Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In in its run from 1968 to 1975 (Dan Rowan admitted as much in an interview; he said he’d seen the original Broadway run of Hellzapoppin’ as a kid and had wanted for years to do something similar) as well as the original Saturday Night Live and much of the sketch comedy we’ve seen since.

Live at the Belly Up: Common Sense, Sara Petite and the Sugar Daddies (KPBS-TV, 2014)

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

Last night at 11 p.m. I put on KPBS again for a Live from the Belly Up episode from 2014 – the Belly Up Tavern being the legendary venue for live music in Solana Beach that’s been open since 1974, though because of my transportation issues I’ve never actually been there. (I wonder how they’ve weathered the storm of COVID-19.) This show consisted of a rather loose reggae/ska/rap band from Santa Barbara called Common Sense – the owner of the Belly Up, Chris Goldstein, was featured on the program saying they’ve probably played there more than any other band, and they recorded their first album live there in 1994. The front man is Nick Hernandez, who was wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt with some slogans printed on the lower right side that were hard to read except at least some of them seemed to have to do with autism, and according to their Wikipedia page their current members are Hernandez, Phil Gough and Billy Sherman on electric guitars (according to Wikipedia, Sherman also plays keyboards, but no keyboards were evident on this Belly Up performance), Mikey Cruz on bass guitar and Tracy Sledge on drums.

They performed eight songs on their 25-minute TV set (as I’ve written about previous Live at the Belly Up shows, you can tell whether a group is a pop band or a jam band and how much improvising they do by the number of songs they perform – the fewer the number of songs, the more jamming they’re doing) and they were all in a sort of jumpy rhythm I associate more with ska than reggae (in a brief interview segment Hernandez said the band’s original name was Ska Pigs) and a lot of their songs had nonsense titles like “Poundy Pound” and “Switchy Switch” which at least gave Hernandez cool-sounding cadences over which he could talk-sing his lyrics. I’m presuming that Phil Gough was the taller, stockier guitarist who played conventional leads (and turned in two scorching solos on “Switchy Switch” and “Let It Roll”) and Billy Sherman the one who mostly played rhythm but did some interesting licks on slide guitar. My one problem with Common Sense is my problem with a lot of the bands on shows like this: their songs sound too similar to each other. Virtually all were in either medium or fast tempi, all featured the same jumpy rhythmic patterns, and while one by one they sounded infectious I started to feel a bit worn down at their sameness.

I was expecting to like local country singer Sara Petite, who calls her band Sara Petite and the Sugar Daddies and who at first seemed to be trying to take over the mantle from the late and sorely missed Candye Kane as San Diego’s mistress of roots music – even though she’s country instead of blues and she both looks and sounds like Bonnie Raitt would have if she had gone into country instead of blues. She was dressed in a blouse that mixed colored patterns and white tassels and showed off a decent level of cleavage – essentially a country-trash outfit but “tweaked” to more urban tastes – and her basic sound is close to Lauren Alaina, Lorrie Morgan and other modern women who do country with a lot of emotion and soul. I was a bit disappointed when her first two songs, “Perfume” and “Movin’ On” (which sounded less like Hank Snow’s original “I’m Movin’ On” than Ray Charles’ heavily remodeled cover; Snow’s was a typically self-pitying country dirge of the day, 1954, while Brother Ray gave it a buzz of anger and a good-riddance attitude; Petite’s was an original song but clearly inspired by the template of what Charles did to Snow), were in the same bouncy tempo as the Common Sense material.

Then things got better: her third song, “Barbwire” (thank you once again to the producers of Live at the Belly Up for including chyrons giving the song titles instead of leaving us to guess at them!), was a great piece about a woman who’s been harmed so much by relationship partners that she’s surrounded her heart with barbed wire and won’t ever let anybody in again. In general Petite sang more powerfully and movingly at slow tempi, and her most powerful songs on the set, “Down the Road I Go,” “You Don’t Care at All,” and “Caged Bird” (her last, and obviously inspired by Maya Angelou’s famous book I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings), were essentially country ballads. My husband Charles didn’t care for what he heard as the country affectations in her voice (they don’t bother me – over the years I’ve come to acknowledge my love for country music; yes, some of it sucks, but that’s also true of my long-time favorite musical genres, classical and jazz) but he was really impressed by her songwriting, especially on “You Don’t Care at All,” a wrenching breakup ballad which – uncommonly for breakup songs – blames the relationship’s collapse on both parties, not just one.

She also did a couple of uptempo numbers towards the end, including “If Mama Ain’t Happy” – in which she tried to get the audience to sing along, with mixed results – and “Love the Parade,” but it’s the slow songs that were the most moving. Incidentally Petite released this same Belly Up performance as an album, though amazon.com seems to have it available only as a download (drat!). But it’s the slow songs she does that really tear at the heart. Sara also had a great band behind her, including lead guitarist Rick Wilkins (who like his counterpart in Common Sense was the sexiest guy in the band and played some spectacular solos), Wade Maurer on bass and John Kuhlken on drums – Kuhlken also gave his name to the “John Kuhlken Memorial Choir” that backed Sara on “Caged Bird” and also on “Scarlet Letter,” an extra song on her album of the show which is, alas, so far available only as a download instead of a physical CD. (If it were available as a physical CD I’d buy it!)

21 Days, a.k.a. 21 Days Together (London Films, United Artists, 1940)

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

My husband Charles got home from work early last night and so we had the time to watch a movie together that proved to be quite interesting: 21 Days, also known as 21 Days Together, made in Britain in early 1940 (after World War II started but before Winston Churchill became Prime Minister and immediately ordered Britain’s movie studios closed to avoid diverting people and resources from the war effort – later he allowed limited production to resume but concentrated on stories that would boost British morale, including Laurence Olivier’s directorial debut, Henry V) and co-starring Laurence Olivier and his then-fiancée Vivien Leigh in an unusual story for them. It’s unusual because most of their movies together were big-budget historical extravaganzae like Fire Over England and That Hamilton Woman (a 1941 production Churchill allowed to be made because Olivier was playing Admiral Horatio Nelson and that he figured would be a morale booster in and of itself even though the story is about Nelson’s adulterous love affair with Lady Emma Hamilton, Leigh’s character).

This one is quite different, a 72-minute vest-pocket thriller in which Olivier plays Larry Darrent (it seems appropriate that in a movie co-starring his real-life partner he got to play a character with the same first name as his own), the ne’er-do-well brother of defense attorney Keith Wallen (Leslie Banks, usually cast as a villain – he was the hunter of humans General Zaroff in the first and best version of The Most Dangerous Game, though with his penchant for casting against “type” Alfred Hitchcock made him the hero of the 1934 version of The Man Who Knew Too Much). 21 Days has some illustrious talent behind the camera – the story is based on a novel called The First and the Last, and Graham Greene co-wrote the screenplay with director Basil Dean – and at least two actors who worked with Hitchcock, Banks and Esmé Percy (the screaming-queen killer of Hitchcock’s flawed but fascinating 1930 whodunit Murder!).

The plot features Larry having just returned from Rhodesia (then a British colony and now the independent but corruption-ridden country of Zimbabwe) having lost a big chunk of the Darrant family’s money. He hooks up with a woman named Wanda Wallen (Vivien Leigh) and they have a night on the town that ends with them returning to her room – only she notices that someone is in her room. With the script having already established that both leads are broke – they pawned some jewelry to get five pounds to finance their date – my first guess was her landlady had thrown her out and the “intruder” was the new tenant. In fact he’s a blustering heavy-set thickly accented guy named Wallen (Esmé Percy) who claims to be Wanda’s husband. She married him in Europe some years back to get some money she desperately needed, and though they were only together for a few weeks he insists that she give him money or he’ll resume his position as her husband. Larry gets furious and, when Wallen attacks him, grabs him and strangles him in self-defense – so, like the female lead of Hitchcock’s 1929 Blackmail, he’s morally innocent but legally guilty of murder.

Larry moves the body and dumps it in a convenient alleyway but he and Wanda are spotted and accosted by Mander (Francis X. Sullivan), a homeless alcoholic who used to work for the Church of England until his drunkenness cost him that job, and who stole money and a ring from the corpse. When the police arrest him he says, “I did a terrible thing” – he means stealing from a dead man but the cops interpret that as a confession to the murder – and he’s put on trial with Keith Darrant as his defense attorney. Keith’s real concern is that he’s up for a judicial appointment and he’s worried that if it comes out that his brother is the real killer, that will disgrace him, he’ll lose the judgeship and he’ll turn into a national joke. So he sends Larry and Wanda off with a sum of money that will allow them to vacation for three weeks, after which he plans to send them out of the country so they can settle elsewhere, get married and stay out of his hair – only, despite all the fun they’re having, Larry is tormented by guilt that an innocent man may hang for the murder he committed.

After the three weeks Larry and Wanda return and Larry learns that the jury in Mander’s case has just returned a verdict – guilty – and Larry determines to turn himself in. Then [spoiler alert!] a deus ex machina appears in the form of Mander’s general ill health when we hear an announcement that he’s “cheated the hangman” – i.e., he’s died au naturel before he could be executed – only Larry has already set out for a police station to turn himself in and there’s a nice suspense sequence at the end to see if Wanda can reach him in the street and stop him before he does so. She does, their life together and his brother’s judicial appointment are saved, and we’re supposed to believe this is a happy ending even though, like the leads of Hitchcock’s Blackmail (1929), they share a guilty secret between them and one can’t help but wonder what this is going to do to their future relationship. The other film 21 Days couldn’t help but remind me of was James Whale’s One More River (1934), also based on a novel by John Galsworthy and also featuring extended scenes in a British courtroom – and despite his rather stuck-up personal character (Hitchcock remembered meeting him for a 1931 film of a Galsworthy play, The Skin Game – yet another story which climaxes in a trial! – and when he was invited to Galsworthy’s home for dinner they asked him who his favorite composer was. Hitchcock said, “Wagner – he’s so melodramatic,” whereupon Mrs. Galsworthy sat straight up in her chair and proclaimed, “We like Bach!”) Galsworthy was known as a liberal on issues of personal morality.

He does rather stack the deck by portraying Wallen as an opportunist who “married” a number of women to get his hands on their money even though he already had a wife – and both we and the characters are stunned when the prosecution calls a “Mrs. Wallen” as a witness and she turns out to be a much older, heavy-set woman who doesn’t look at all like Vivien Leigh and explains to the court just how her slimeball husband made his living. 21 Days is a fine little minor movie, and though Olivier plays his part as if stuck to the camera lens (as if he’s forgotten all the lessons William Wyler had tried to teach him on the set of Wuthering Heights the year before, particularly on how screen acting differs from stage acting and in front of a camera, less very often is more) it works for the rather irresponsible boor he’s supposed to be playing. Basil Dean’s direction, while hardly at the level of Hitchcock’s or Whale’s, is effective and impressive, and the final scene is a suspense sequence of which the Master could have been proud. A very interesting little movie and a surprise coming from early-wartime Britain!

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Paramount-Artcraft, 1920)

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

Last night at 8 p.m. I started a double-bill of two cinematic adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the 1920 Paramount silent directed by John S. Robertson and starring John Barrymore and Nita Naldi in a script by Clara Beranger that freely borrowed not only from the original Stevenson novel but Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey (notably the famous line that the only way to overcome a temptation is to yield to it). I haven’t read Stevenson’s novel in years but I recall it as a somewhat rambling piece in that ill-fitting “novella” length – too long to be a short story but too short to be a full-fledged novel – and it’s in 10 chapters and deals mostly with how Dr. Henry Jekyll attracts the curiosity of his attorney, Mr. Utterson, when he submits a new will leaving everything he owns to his friend Edward Hyde, and that if Dr. Jekyll disappears from ordinary life for more than a few weeks Hyde is to be allowed to occupy his home and help himself to Jekyll’s possessions as if Jekyll were dead. It’s only in the next-to-last chapter that Stevenson reveals – or at least definitively nails it to both characters and readers – that Jekyll and Hyde are the same person and that Hyde was created when Jekyll invented a drug intended to separate the good and evil parts of his personality.

The real meat of the book is in its final chapter, narrated by Jekyll himself and a sort of combination confession and suicide note explaining how he happened to conduct the experiment that turned him into Mr. Hyde and brought forth the monstrous parts of his character, including murdering Sir Danvers Carew by clubbing him to death with Jekyll’s cane. In the book Hyde is described as being shorter and smaller than Jekyll because he contains only the evil parts of Jekyll’s character (which suggested to me that the best casting for a Jekyll-and-Hyde film in the classic Hollywood era would have been to use two actors, and I know whom I would have wanted the two actors to be: Boris Karloff as Jekyll and Peter Lorre as Hyde.) The first film adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was made in 1915 by the Chicago-based Thanhouser studio, which specialized in literary stories by “name” authors, and starred future director James Cruze in the title role(s). In 1920 Paramount decided to make a feature-length version of the story and hired Barrymore to play the lead just four years after his star-making stage triumph in Gerald du Maurier’s play Peter Ibbetson – for which reviewers dubbed him “The Great Profile.” The name stuck, and so did the reputation; it’s obvious that John S. Robertson and his cinematographer, Roy S. Overbaugh, shot a lot of Barrymore’s close-ups in profile just to enable him to live up to that reputation.

Clara Beranger made some fundamental changes to the story that got carried over in the later major-studio versions, particularly the other one we watched last night – the 1932 Paramount remake, written by Samuel Hoffenstein and Percy Heath and directed brilliantly by Rouben Mamoulian, and the 1941 MGM version (for which MGM bought the remake rights to the 1932 version so they could use Hoffenstein’s dialogue, even though the screen credits in 1941 listed John Lee Mahin as the sole screenwriter and suggested he’d written the film as a direct adaptation of Stevenson’s novel with no other writers intervening): instead of an innocent victim of a random killing by Hyde, she made Danvers Carew – or, as she renamed him, George Carewe – the father of Jekyll’s fiancée, Millicent Carewe (Martha Mansfield) and also the one who first tempts him down the primrose path. Carewe says that at least as a young man he indulged in various dissipations and has the memories of them to live with, while Jekyll is spending his own youth in such strait-laced pursuits as running a free clinic for the poor in London’s West End and losing his opportunities to sin. Accordingly Jekyll goes into a laboratory in his home (where, being British, he works in his dressing gown) and devises the potion that will turn him into Hyde. Another change Beranger made in the story that persisted in the later films (though imdb.com lists an intervening stage adaptation by Thomas Russell Sullivan and some of the changes from the novel might be his, not hers) is that even before Jekyll’s transformation, Carewe takes him to a music hall where he sees dancer Miss Gina (Nita Naldi) and is immediately sexually attracted to her. Later, as Hyde, he seeks her out and turns her into his sex slave until, in a fit of anger at her attempts to get away from him, he kills her.

In 1920, the same year the Barrymore version went into production at Paramount, Louis B. Mayer, then an independent producer, shot what amounted to the Asylum Video version (anticipating Asylum’s current policy of rushing out movies based on public-domain stories before the heavily promoted major-studio versions can be released – like their film of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, which came out before the big-budget version directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Tom Cruise – or else story premises that were virtually impossible to copyright, like a drama about street auto races called The Fast and the Fierce and a comedy-drama about ghost hunters called, natch, Ghost Hunters) with Sheldon Lewis as star and a script that Charles liked if only because it depicted Hyde as doing evil things that didn’t have anything to do with sex. (Its most chilling scene, as I recall, was one in which Hyde burns down a building just for the fun of it.) I’ve long regarded Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as essentially the first just-say-no-to-drugs story; in 1880, when Stevenson published it, morphine, heroin and cocaine were all legal and were being so widely abused that their adverse health effects were beginning to become known. In the early 20th century there was an international convention whose participating countries all agree to make those drugs illegal in an attempt to control their use and the socially destructive consequences of them.

The success of Stevenson’s tale led to a whole spate of novels about individuals using either scientific or supernatural means to split their personalities so they could indulge their evil natures without consequences – when Charles and I watched James Whale’s 1933 film of H. G. Wells’ The Invisible Man, published in 1890 (ten years after Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), Wells’ debt to Stevenson’s story was obvious: both are about men who invent powerful drugs that release the evil sides of their natures and turn them into antisocial megalomaniacs. Later Oscar Wilde published The Picture of Dorian Grey, yet another story about a man releasing his evil self, which Clara Beranger ripped off for this film so obviously imdb.com lists Wilde as one of its writers, “uncredited.” The 1920 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is a good film but not a great one; though Barrymore and Naldi are superb in it and the transformations are quite credibly done (ironically, John Barrymore’s Hyde looks a good deal like his brother Lionel Barrymore’s character makeup as Rasputin 12 years later), the other cast members seem pretty much to be walking through their roles, there are too few close-ups and the piece remains relatively stage-bound. (Charles noted one goof in which, in Barrymore’s first transformation from Hyde back to Jekyll, one of his fake long finger extensions falls off before it’s supposed to disappear.) It’s a capable movie but one wishes it could have had a stronger director – like D. W. Griffith, Rex Ingram or Erich von Stroheim (a Stroheim Jekyll and Hyde with him as both director and star … ah, what might have been!), let alone one of the Germans like Robert Wiene, F. W. Murnau, Paul Leni or Fritz Lang, who were inventing the horror film back home (and Murnau directed a Jekyll and Hyde knock-off called Der Januskopf – “The Head of Janus” – in 1920, in which a statue of the two-headed Roman god Janus turns the archaeologist who discovered it into an evil monster) and unwittingly preparing themselves for future careers in America.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Paramount-Publix, 1932)

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

After the dueling versions in 1920 from Paramount with John Barrymore and from Louis B. Mayer’s pre-MGM independent studio with Sheldon Lewis, Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde lay fallow as a movie property until 1932, when other studios were looking at the huge success Universal had had with Dracula and Frankenstein and realizing, as a trade-paper headline almost certainly put it at the time, “there’s gold in them thar chills.” MGM borrowed Frankenstein star Boris Karloff for The Mask of Fu Manchu and green-lighted one of the most bizarre movie projects of all time, Tod Browning’s Freaks. Paramount borrowed Dracula star Bela Lugosi for a key supporting role in a version of H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau (retitled The Island of Lost Souls and still the best of the three films of Wells’ story, though none of the movies really reflected the animal-rights propaganda agenda Wells had when he wrote the book), and they also decided to remake Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a full-dress talking horror picture.

This time they put a great director on the project, Rouben Mamoulian, who’d already made two quite compelling off-the-beaten-path movies, Applause (1929) – a relentlessly dark backstage musical starring Helen Morgan as an entertainer with Broadway ambitions who gets stuck in burlesque and gradually sinks under the weight of age, alcoholism and an absolutely wretched choice of man – and City Streets (1931), a gangster story by Dashiell Hammett which Mamoulian dressed up with symbolism and a subtle approach in which all the murders took place off-screen and Gary Cooper turned in an excellent against-type performance as a naïve young man who flirts with gangland life but ultimately rejects it. For his third film Paramount offered him Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Mamoulian grabbed it, but fought the studio on their choice of Irving Pichel, an actor “typed” as a villain, to play the title role(s). “I wanted someone who could play Jekyll, and Pichel could only play Hyde,” Mamoulian later recalled.

Mamoulian ultimately offered the part to Fredric March, then considered a talented but rather lightweight leading man – his first film was the unexpectedly good The Wild Party (1929), in which he played an anthropology professor seduced by one of his students (Clara Bow in her first talkie and the film for which director Dorothy Arzner invented the microphone boom to make sure the hyperactive Bow’s voice would record audibly no matter where she wandered to on set). Ironically, March remade John Barrymore’s role just two years after he’d starred in the comedy The Royal Family of Broadway, playing an actor character based on John Barrymore (and March would play a Barrymore-based character again in the 1937 version of A Star Is Born). Mamoulian remembered pleading with the Paramount bosses to give March the role: “He’s a natural Jekyll, he’s young, he’s handsome, his speech is fine, and I’m sure he can play Hyde.”

He also wanted Miriam Hopkins to play the music-hall entertainer Clara Beranger had written into the story as a lower-class love interest for both Jekyll and Hyde, whom Hyde sexually enslaves and terrorizes until he finally kills her. Hopkins, known as one of Hollywood’s greatest bitches off-screen as well as on (in later years Bette Davis said the worst co-stars she’d ever worked with were Hopkins and Faye Dunaway; asked, “What about Joan Crawford?,” Davis said, “We never got along, but at least she was professional. She showed up on time, she knew her lines, and she let Bob Aldrich direct the picture instead of trying to take it over from him”). The interview I’ve been quoting Mamoulian from was given to Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg for their 1969 book The Celluloid Muse, and he told them that for the first time in his life he was going to reveal how he had handled March’s transformations from Jekyll to Hyde and back. He tried to make the technique seem like some great secret he had personally invented, but it wasn’t. The trick was that the actor would wear colored makeup and there would be colored gels over the light, so with one color light the character makeup would be invisible and as the color of the lights changed it would appear. The technique was actually invented by Roy Pomeroy, who in the 1920’s had been in charge of Paramount’s special-effects department (though they called special effects “trick shots” then) and had been called on by Cecil B. DeMille to make Moses’ sister Miriam develop leprosy lesions on screen in the 1923 version of The Ten Commandments.

Mamoulian used a lot of unusual techniques in this film, shooting the opening few minutes entirely from Dr. Jekyll’s point of view (in addition to being a highly acclaimed doctor and medical lecturer, he’s also an amateur organist who practices on a tracking instrument in his living room and plays pieces by Schumann and Bach, including Bach’s famous Toccata and Fugue in D minor) and using an almost totally synthetic sound effect during Jekyll’s first transition into Hyde: “We photographed light frequencies of varying intensity from a candle. I hit a gong and cut the impact off and ran the sound backwards, and, to give the sound a panting rhythm, I ran up and down a stairway while they recorded my speeded-up heartbeats. When I saw my heart was in Jekyll and Hyde, I mean that literally!” The sound would be a jolt in a modern movie and sounds especially intense in a film made just five years after the beginning of sound films! Mamoulian also commissioned a great script from Samuel Hoffenstein and Percy Heath – I know little about Heath (except for the coincidence of his having the same name as the bassist for the Modern Jazz Quartet), but Hoffenstein was a major screenwriter and worked frequently with Mamoulian on a number of films, including the follow-up to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: Love Me Tonight, the stunning 1932 musical with Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald and to my mind the greatest musical film ever made.

Hoffenstein and Heath wrote a literate and finely honed adaptation that contained some of the moral contrasts Robert Louis Stevenson put in the story (though one thing they omitted is the confession Jekyll makes at the end to the effect that had he been in a better frame of mind when he took the drug for the first time, it might have turned him totally good instead of totally evil; when I read the book in the early 1970’s that reminded me that the early LSD experimenters had likewise said that the difference between a “good trip” and a “bad trip” lay in the frame of mind you were in when you took the drug, and so they would try to put you in a relaxed setting so it would have beneficial effects – a detail that of course got ignored when the drug went into the street market and became widely abused) and in particular they portrayed the relationship between Hyde and music-hall entertainer Ivy Pearson (Miriam Hopkins) as what we know now is a classic pattern of domestic abuse in which he not only brutalizes her but terrorizes her and threatens to track her down and kill her if she ever tries to leave him or report him to the police.

I love everything about the 1932 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde except for one major flaw: the makeup and characterization of Hyde. In a 1933 survey article on then-recent Hollywood films, Dwight Macdonald critiqued March’s makeup as Hyde and called it “physically far more repulsive than Mr. Barrymore’s, spiritually far less so.” Mamoulian said he wanted Hyde to look like a Neanderthal man, and he got his wish, but it’s hard to believe that Hyde could go about the streets and go to Ivy’s music hall without frightening passers-by and fellow customers. Fredric March actually won an Academy Award for his performance (the first actor to win for a horror role, and the only one until Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster both won for The Silence of the Lambs in 1985) and he’s great as the tortured Dr. Jekyll – but he’s fighting an overly “monstrous” concept of Hyde. It occurred to me that an alternate concept of this story might be to go the Faust route and make Jekyll a middle-aged man who becomes younger-looking and more attractive as Hyde.

It’s interesting how many later films were influenced by this one – even though it was out of circulation for years because MGM bought the remake rights in 1941 for a version with Spencer Tracy as Jekyll/Hyde and Ingrid Bergman as Ivy (bringing far more pathos to the role than Hopkins even though her director, Victor Fleming, and writer, John Lee Mahin, had to cut down on the domestic abuse to meet the stronger Production Code enforcement of 1941), it was obviously a film other directors saw and were influenced by. The scene at the end in which the mortally wounded Hyde reverts to Jekyll’s appearance as he dies was copied almost exactly the next year in James Whale’s The Invisible Man when Jack Griffin (Claude Rains) becomes visible again as he dies, and even though Universal’s effects photographer, John P. Fulton, used double exposures and dissolves instead of colored makeup and lights, the transformations of Lon Chaney, Jr. in the 1941 film The Wolf-Man are strikingly similar to those of March here, particularly when director George Waggner pans down from his star’s face to his arms and shows them acquiring more hair before he pans back to the face, as Mamoulian did with March in this film.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is also noteworthy for carrying over the symbolism Mamoulian had started with City Streets, in which he panned back and forth between two china cats (which Mamoulian brought in from his own large collection of porcelain statuettes) to symbolize a bitchy argument between two people. Here he fills room after room with weird little statues, including one of an idealized naked couple embracing in what was obviously a rather tacky knockoff of ancient Greek art as an ironic counterpoint while Hyde commits one of his murders. Also noteworthy is the performance of Rose Hobart as Jekyll’s upper-class fiancée Muriel Carew; she makes what could have been just another goody-two-shoes leading lady into a genuinely interesting character, torn between her love for Dr., Jekyll and her fear of what his addiction (and it is shown very much like a modern-day drug habit; apparently Mamoulian, Hoffenstein and Heath saw Stevenson’s story much like I do, as – among other things – an early “just say no to drugs” tale) is doing to him and their potential future together. Ironically, in 1944 Rose Hobart would return to Jekyll and Hyde territory when she made The Soul of a Monster, in which she plays an emissary from Satan who saves the life of a dying doctor (George Macready) but at the cost of turning him evil: not only an offtake on Jekyll and Hyde but a surprising attempt at another studio (Columbia) to copy Val Lewton’s shadowy less-is-more approach to horror.

Port of Seven Seas (MGM, 1938)

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

Last night I ran my husband Charles and I the next two films in the sequence of James Whale’s oeuvre last night, Port of Seven Seas and Sinners in Paradise. Port of Seven Seas began as a trilogy of plays by French writer Marcel Pagnol, which he turned into movies at the French branch of Paramount in the early 1930’s: Marius, Fanny and César. The stories take place in the southern French port of Marseilles (and happily this film leaves the “s” on the end of “Marseilles” instead of cutting it off the way Warner Bros. did in 1944 with Passage to Marseille) and deal with two middle-aged widowers, tavern owner César Ollivier and sail-maker Honoré Panisse, and the trouble they get into when César’s son Marius gets his girlfriend Madelon pregnant, then ships out to sea for what’s supposed to be a three-year cruise. Panisse, who’s long had a crush on Madelon even though she’s a young woman and he’s middle-aged, offers to marry her so her child will have a father and appear legitimate.

Carl Laemmle, Jr. bought the American remake rights in 1933 and tried to set up the project with Preston Sturges writing the script, though as James Curtis points out in his biography of James Whale, Sturges had very little original writing to do – mostly Sturges, who had spent part of his childhood in France and knew the language perfectly, just translated Pagnol’s original French dialogue into English. The project got put aside when the Roman Catholic Legion of Decency declared its holy war on Hollywood in 1934, the Production Code Administration got considerably tighter in enforcing the self-censorship the movie industry had set up to ward off government regulation (a real threat because in 1912 the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that movies were merely “a business” and therefore not a form of “speech” protected by the First Amendment, a decision that wasn’t reversed until 1952), and obviously a sympathetic story about a young woman who’d had sex outside of marriage and an older man who agreed to marry her and pose as the father of her child was a big-time problem under the new regime. Then in 1936 Laemmle and his father, who had founded Universal in the first place, were forced out and a hedge fund took over the studio. Junior Laemmle got a producer deal at MGM but only got to make this one film, and having sponsored James Whale’s career at Universal he wanted Whale as director.

Whale was coming off two big commercial flops, The Road Back and The Great Garrick, and though he still owed Universal two films on the contract he’d signed with the Laemmles in 1933, he really wanted to get away and work somewhere else. So he took on the Pagnol project, retitled Port of Seven Seas, and was originally promised a star cast including Margaret Sullavan as Madelon and James Stewart as her boyfriend Marius. Then MGM’s management fired Laemmle (who never even attempted to work again, though he lived until 1979) and his old Universal associate, Henry Henigson, took over the project as producer but wasn’t able to wangle the stars Whale had been promised from what was mockingly referred to as the “College of Cardinals,” the old-line producers at MGM who essentially formed a court around studio head Louis B. Mayer. In the end the only star name who got attached to Port of Seven Seas was Wallace Beery, cast as César and playing it in his usual boorish manner.

Panisse was Frank Morgan, best known today for the title role in The Wizard of Oz, who was a good enough choice except he turned it into yet another of the foofy roles that were his stock in trade – a far cry from the subtle, nuanced and genuinely emotional performance Whale had got out of him in their other film together, The Kiss Before the Mirror (1933). The part of Madelon went to Maureen O’Sullivan, best known as Jane in the MGM Tarzan series, but she turns in a surprisingly intense performance and takes the acting honors for this film. Her spectacular early scene as she rushes to the Marsellies docks in hopes of catching her lover Marius before his ship sails out, then faints in the street as she realizes she’s missed him, is the finest scene in the film and the only time this otherwise stage-bound piece becomes truly cinematic and actually looks like a James Whale movie. Otherwise, as Charles pointed out, for Whale Port of Seven Seas is a return to his stage-bound early films, Journey’s End (1930) and Waterloo Bridge (1931). Most of it takes place either in César’s bar or Panisse’s home (Panisse is depicted as the richest – or at least one of the richest – man in Marseilles, though there are so few on-screen characters Marseilles looks like a small fishing village rather than one of France’s largest cities).

At least Whale got to revert to Sturges’ original script – various writers had tried their hands on it in the meantime and had taken the story farther away from Pagnol and more towards traditional Hollywood melodrama – and though there are some of the usual euphemisms the script is relatively honest about the characters’ sexualities, especially for a film from the post-Legion period of strict Code enforcement. The early scenes of comic by-play between César and Panisse get pretty dreary (one wonders what Sturges could have done if he’d directed the film himself), but when Marius – played by actor John Beal, who’d got a star buildup at RKO which collapsed with the box-office failure of his film The Little Minister, co-starring Katharine Hepburn, who’s no great shakes but at least looks enough like Wallace Beery one can believe in them as father and son (a pet peeve of mine when movies cast people who don’t resemble each other at all and expect us to believe they’re biological kin) – suddenly returns home and demands that Madelon leave Panisse (whom she’s already married and is raising the child with) and run off with him to raise their child together, the dramatic intensity of the story goes up and pushes towards a surprisingly moving ending in which Madelon elects to stay with Panisse and continue the pretense that the baby boy is Panisse’s son. Much of the film revolves around Panisse’s long-frustrated desire for a child, particularly a son through whom he can carry on his business (a theme that must have resonated with Carl Laemmle, Jr.!) – he even has wooden letters that spell “et fils” which he intends to add to the signboard outside his sail shop, and the script is sensitive enough to raise the fraught issue of what he’s going to do if Madelon’s baby turns out to be a fille instead of a fils.

Port of Seven Seas is a worthy film even though it’s one of those movies that could have been better than it is – and certainly the theme of a middle-aged man raising another man’s child as his own and offering his name to the mother to salvage her reputation fits in with the theme of imposture that runs through so many of Whale’s movies (and as a working-class Gay Englishman who tried to appear as a straight aristocrat, Whale was drawn for obvious reasons to stories about people having to pretend to be what they are not). Noting the effeminacy of Frank Morgan’s performance, Charles suggested that it came off like a Gay man's fantasy of getting to raise and parent a child without the bothersome necessity of having sex with a woman first. He made it sound like the 1962 British film A Taste of Honey (1962), in which a Gay man takes in a woman who's been impregnated by a Black sailor, but the script of Port of Seven Seas contains a long monologue by Panisse reminiscing about his late wife Felicity – at first they avoided having a child (how? Did they used whatever primitive birth control methods there were in the 1930's, or did they just not have sex at all?).

Alas,the film was sold wretchedly (“It’s more exciting than Bad Man of Brimstone!” read the original ads, obviously trying to sell it to what remained of Wallace Beery’s fan base by 1938 and promising an action-adventure yarn quite different from what the film actually is), and it got a blah response from the box office that no doubt helped further sink what remained of Whale’s career.