Broadway (Universal, 1942)

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

Last night I ran Charles and I the 1942 Universal remake of Broadway, the 1929 gangster story that had been a hit play on Broadway (written by Philip Dunning but so heavily doctored by the young George Abbott he got co-writer credit) in 1927 and had been filmed in 1929 as Universal’s biggest production to that time. The 1942 version at least had bigger “name” stars in the two male leads – George Raft and Pat O’Brien – whom Universal seems to have picked up after Warner Bros. decided they were through with them. It’s impossible to watch any of the films Raft actually made in the early 1940’s without thinking, “He turned down High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon to make this?” At least the writers of the 1942 Broadway – Bruce Manning (also the producer and credited with “adaptation”), Felix Jackson and John Bright – came up with a clever gimmick to incorporate Raft into the story. They had him play a character called “George Raft” and introduced him in 1942, when as a major movie star he flies back to New York City and revisits the old haunts, including the Paradise nightclub where his career started in 1929.

Then doomy music creeps onto the soundtrack and we flash back to 1929, when Prohibition was still in force and the Paradise was nominally owned by Nick (S. Z. Sakall, who was also in Casablanca that year – a film Raft had desperately wanted to star in, only to have Jack Warner tell him, “After High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon Bogart’s a bigger star than you are now!”) but really the subject of a turf war between rival bootleggers and gangsters Steve Crandall (Broderick Crawford) and Scar Edwards (Damian O’Flynn). The two had previously set a dividing line at 125th Street, with Crandall getting the liquor market south of that and Edwards getting it north, but Crandall has decided to crash Edwards’ territory and begins the war by hijacking one of Edwards’ shipments (Scotch smuggled in, supposedly from the source in Scotland though more likely from Canada, rather than sloppily manufactured homebrew). The two confront each other in the back room of the Paradise (a set Universal recycled for the L.A. jazz club in The Crimson Canary) and Edwards demands payment for the booze Crandall and his men stole.

Crandall responds by shooting him dead and he and his two leading henchmen take him out of the club and try to make it look like he’s merely drunk, not dead. But they’re witnessed by Billie Moore (Janet Blair), whom Raft is rehearsing as a dance partner to do vaudeville and hopefully break into Broadway musicals. Billie is torn between Raft;’s ambitions for her – as in the original, his character is clearly in love with her but she’s demanding that they remain a professional partnership only – but she’s also being cruised by Steve Crandall, who’s lavishing jeweled bracelets and other trinkets on her. Among the women in the chorus line is Pearl (Anne Gwynne), who previously dated Crandall until he threw her over for Billie and is still carrying the proverbial torch – until she learns that not only did Crandall shoot Scar, he did so when Scar’s back was turned to him. In a final scene copied almost verbatim from the original, she confronts him in that back room (which is beginning to look like New York City’s Murder Central) and shoots him while he’s facing her. The police detective, Dan McCorn (Pat O’Broen, a good deal less overbearing than usual), decides to report Crandall’s death as a suicide and let Pearl get away with it – but when the film reverts to the 1942 framing story Raft explains that she turned herself in anyway, served several years and was then released. (The Production Code Administration struck again!)

The 1942 Broadway is interesting mainly for the way it plays off the speculations that had always surrounded Raft, including the claim that he’d been a gangster in real life before quitting the life and becoming a successful entertainer (the character played by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. in Little Caesar, who quits Rico’s gang to become a Broadway dance star, was supposedly based on Raft), and it’s full of engaging in-jokes. When Raft, in 1942, walks into the decidedly low-budget set of the Paradise he says, “I remember it as being much bigger than this!” (in 1929 it, like so many alleged “nightclubs” in big-budget musicals, looked like an airplane hangar done up in Art Deco; in 1942, for once in a Hollywood movie, a nightclub set actually looked like a real nightclub), and later Raft confronts one of the gangsters and says he wants to star in Broadway musicals “and maybe even pictures.” He says this while he’s flipping a coin repeatedly the way he did in the 1932 Scarface, and the skeptical gangster asks, “Doing that?” (It wasn’t the last time a George Raft film had an in-joke about coin-flipping; in the 1959 Some Like It Hot Raft sees one of his gangster associates, played by Edward G. Robinson, Jr., doing it and asks, “Where’d you learn that cheap trick?”)

There are a few lapses in the 1942 Broadway – elements the 1929 film got right and this one misses: Anne Gwynne totally fails to bring the pathos and intensity to Pearl Evelyn Brent (Josef von Sternberg’s favorite actress until he discovered Marlene Dietrich) did so beautifully in 1929. This film also fails to dramatize Billie’s crisis of conscience – whether to lie to protect her boyfriend Crandall or admit she saw him and his pals take the supposedly “drunk” but really dead Scar Edwards out of the Paradise – and once again, as good as Raft is in the lead (albeit playing himself – or at least the long-rumored version of himself), in 1942 as in 1929 the actor this story really needed was James Cagney. (A pity Universal couldn’t have waited to make this until after Cagney completed his Warner Bros. contract the same year with Yankee Doodle Dandy.) It’s also interesting that rather than use the original songs from the 1927 play (the 1929 film did and they were pretty terrible), they dragged in real songs from the 1920’s – many of them, interestingly, written by Black composers: Shelton Brooks’ “Some of These Days” and “The Darktown Strutters’ Ball,” Maceo Pinkard’s “Sweet Georgia Brown,” Eubie Blake’s “I’m Just Wild About Harry.” Nonetheless, the musical arrangements are closer to 1942 than 1929 and the women playing the Paradise’s chorus girls wear long hair in 1942 style instead of getting themselves bobbed the way women did in 1929. (I’ll never forget my sense of irony when while attending high school in the 1960’s I read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” – in an era in which men were showing their rebellion by growing their hair long, I was reading a story about an era in which women showed their rebellion by cutting their hair short.)

Both Broadway films have their pluses and minuses, and the biggest plus for this one is – surprisingly – the performance of Broderick Crawford as Crandall. Outfitted with a “roo” moustache to let us know he’s the bad guy, he’s about the only cast member who looks like he actually stepped in from the 1920’s and he plays the part with the same power and authority he’d bring to his star-making role in All the King’s Men – a movie he got to do only because the originally cast star, Spencer Tracy, walked out at the last minute – six years later. People with the overall “look” and physique of Broderick Crawford don’t become major box-office movie stars (look at the frustrating career of the recently deceased Brian Dennehy, a superb actor relegated to second-fiddle parts in which he regularly out-acted the stars), but he pulled it off and it’s clear from this film that he had the chops for it even though it would take a few years and a change of studio from Universal to Columbia to pull it off. And though the story of Broadway is simply not that strong, it’s tempting to imagine a modern-day remake that would update the story and make the central figure an aspiring rapper caught in the rivalry between two drug cartels.

93rd Annual Academy Awards (Ac admen of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, ABC-TV, aired April 25, 2021)

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

Last night was the 93rd annual Academy Awards, and if the previous weekend’s Academy of Country Music Awards had been an example of how to do an awards telecast in the middle of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and make it look as normal as possible, the Oscars went to a bare-bones presentation that sometimes made it look like The Academy Awards of Dr. Caligari. Instead of using the Kodak Theatre or whatever it’s called this week (Kodak withdrew its subsidy when the advent of digital cameras and picture-taking smartphones pretty much demolished their main business of selling film), the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences took over Union Station in Los Angeles (the locale was familiar to Charles since he’s taken several train rides to L.A. and he recognized soem of the artistic landmarks). I suspect they did that because they needed a big enough space to accommodate everyone they wanted to invite and still maintain the sacred six-foot “social distancing” (a phrase I totally loathe, hope will die when the pandemic ends but fear will linger, especially if John Brunner’s prediction in his novel The Sheep Look Up is correct and as the environment deteriorates we’ll have one pandemic after another and a new one will spring up as soon as the old one ends).

Instead of an orchestra, there was a D.J. – making the Oscars look like a low-budget wedding whose participants hire a D.J. because they can’t afford a band – named Questlove, who was also credited (under his birth name, or at least his off-booth name, Ahmir Thompson) as the show’s musical director. (This had the interesting side effect of allowing the award winners to go on and on in their acceptance speeches without fear of being “played off.”) The Academy had already pioneered the “hostless” format after an incident a few years ago in which the Black comedian they’d hired as host turned out to have posted a number of anti-Queer slurs on his Twitter page, and the P.C. Enforcement and Thought Control Police came down hard on him and demanded the Academy fire him. They did, but there wasn’t enough time to recruit another host in time for the ceremony, so they did without a host and decided to continue that in future years. The show opened with Regina King, African-American actress and director of the current film One Night in Miami, delivering a diatribe against the shooting of unarmed African-Americans by police officers. She interrupted her speech by acknowledging that there were some people in the audience on TV that might not want to hear her “preach” – and I told Charles, “Hey, I don’t want to hear her preach – and I agree with her!”

King’s speech was an opening declaration of a point made throughout the program: that in this highly divided country, politically and culturally, the artists – or at least the ones that participate in filmmaking at the level of Academy Award consideration – are part of the Left side of the culture, committed (at least nominally) to equality for women, people of color and what are hideously called, in yet another example of P.C. language I can’t stand, “LGBTQ peope.” (If there had been a Pride Parade last year I would have marched wearing a custom-made T-shirt that would have said, “I am a Gay man, not an ‘LGBTQ+ Person’!”) The producers of the show seemed to be going out of their way to put Black faces on TV as much as possible – though the Academy voters foiled what they were probably hoping would be their biggest coup. Instead of building up to the Best Picture award as the last item (of which the winner was La La Land – oops, Nomadland), they gave it second from last and finished the show with Best Actress and Best Actor. The rumor mill on Twitter is claiming they did that because they were expecting the late Black actor Chadwick Boseman to win Best Actor for his last film, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom – just as a decade ago they gave the award posthumously to Heath Ledger for his role as the Joker in The Dark Knight, in which he was terrible (though at least partly that was a consolation Oscar because he’d been passed over for his genuinely award-worthy performance in Brokeback Mountain).

Instead the Academy, like last year’s Democratic Presidential primary voters, went for safety and gave both top acting awards to old white people – Anthony Hopkins for playing a man with Alzheimer’s in The Father and Frances McDormand for playing an RV nomad in Nomadland. (So far McDormand has won three Oscars, none of them for films directed by her husband, Joel Coen – though he gave her her star-making role in Fargo and had to win an argument with his producer to do it.) I had the Los Angeles Times list of the Oscar nominees out throughout the show and marked off the winners, though at one point with my diminishing eyesight and the decision of the Times to print the category names in nearly unreadable colored type (at least nearly unreadable to my eyes), I marked Tenet as having won for Production Design when it really won for Visual Effects and Mank won for Production Design. I was relieved that Mank – yet another salvo in the long-standing campaign of historical revisionism about the film Citizen Kane, which for some reason has become the cause célèbre in the ongoing campaign to exalt writers, not directors, as the real creators of films – got only two awards, Production Design and Cinematography. I would have gone ballistic if Mank had won the Best Picture Oscar a previous Academy wretchedly denied to Citizen Kane itself (much the way I found it loathsome when the Pulitzer Prize for music, outrageously denied to Duke Ellington in 1965 after the awards committee had voted him what amounted to a lifetime achievement award but the overall board of the Pulitzer Foundation nixed him, gave the music award to the thoroughly disgusting, ugly and evil crap dished out by someone or something named Kendrick Lamar).

The big loser last night was Disney’s blockbuster musical Hamilton, a film the studio was planning to be its big summer theatrical blockbuster of 2020, only it ran afoun not only of the pandemic but also of Disney’s decision to release it exclusively on its “Disney+” streaming channel and charge a $30 payment to watch it. Hamilton wasn’t nominated for anything, presumably because it ran afoul of the Academy rule that a movie must be shown theatrically in order to qualify – a rule they tweaked this year to allow films to be nominated that had been planned for theatrical release or had actually played in one of the U.S. states that reopened them, but apparently not enough to admit Hamilton. Had it been eligible, Hamilton could very likely have done an old-fashioned sweep of a kind we haven’t seen since the last film in the Lord of the Rings cycle in 2004, especially since the reports I’ve heard indicate it’s a good movie and not the disaster of previous attempts to film mega-hit Broadway musicals that turned into mega-flop films, like A Chorus Line and Cats. Instead the Academy followed its modern pattern of awarding movies like a Chinese menu, with one from film A and two from film B.

As for the awards show itself, Charles liked the bare-bones format more than I did – I didn’t miss the bad jokes and “in” references to film history but I did miss the live performances of the Best Song nominees. I happened to catch a marvelous performance of one of the nominees, “Hear My Voice” from The Trial of the Chicago 7, and thought that should have won; instead the award went to another 1960’s-themed song sung by a Black performer, “Fight for You” from Judas and the Black Messiah (a good song but, at least to me, hardly at the level of emotion or beauty of “Hear My Voice”). It seemed yet another sign of my age that the Academy was honoring historical films about events – the Chicago 7 trial and the FBI and Chicago Police Department’s assassination of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, both from 1969 – of which I have vivid memories from when they happened. The one attempt at a “production” that occurred – Questlove playing songs from 1980’s and 1990’s movies and seeing if audience members could recall whether they were nominated for Best Song and, if so, if they won – included Prince’s “Purple Rain” (not nominated, though Prince won for the overall score) and Donna Summer’s “Last Dance” (which did win, though to me it was one of those frustrating Donna Summer records that began with a slow introduction in free tempo that revealed what a beautiful voice she had and how she was a master of phrasing – frankly, she would have been a much better choice for the Billie Holiday biopic than Diana Ross, and an assignment like that would have got her out of the straitjacket of disco; as it was, in “Last Dance” and her cover of “MacArthur Park” she luxuriated in the slow introductions and then the tempo sped up;, the drum machines kicked in and Summer had to spit out the lyrics as fast as possible to keep up with those relentless rhythms).

Speaking of Billie Holiday biopics, one was nominated last night – it was called The United States versus Billie Holiday and was about her 1947 drug bust and nine-month prison term thereafter, and starred Audra Day – who, like Viola Davis as another great Black singer, Ma Rainey, was passed over for Best Actress in favor of McDormand. Davis strode through the hall like a colossus; she’s an actress I’ve admired since I saw her in a minor role in the romantic drama Nights in Rodanthe, which was mostly about an affair between Diane Lane and Richard Gere but took off and flew when Davis’s character was on screen. Davis is better looking than Ma Rainey – the one surviving photo of the blues queen, the one that’s on all her album covers, is of a surprisingly homely woman given how big a star she was in the Black community of the 1920’s – but visually she caught the spirit of a blues queen, and though I haven’t seen Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom I suspect she and Boseman both deserved the acting awards for that film. (In fact I realized during the show that Charles and I had seen only one of the nominees, the live-action version of Disney’s Mulan – and that one mainly because it actually came out on DVD instead of being relegated to “streaming.”)

When they were first televised in the early 1950’s the Academy Awards were actually something that brought the country together culturally – most people had seen the nominated films, or at least heard enough about them they could do a fair amount of judging whether the awards were deserved – and, with the movie studios still maintaining a fierce stand against TV (ironically, they would save themselves as businesses by producing shows for TV!) and embargoing their stars from appearing on it, the Academy Awards telecasts were your only chance to see major movie stars on the home screen. Today the home screen has become so dominant there was a sort of desperate pleading in Frances McDormand’s acceptance speech literally begging people to see her movie and the other nominees in theatres even if they’ve already watched them as home streams. I’m not sure movie theatres will recover as a business from the pandemic (especially not if there are a few more worldwide disease outbreaks of comparable scope), though I could be wrong – much of the progress made in moving people away from centralized institutions like offices and schools is already being undone as the pandemic recedes.

My Father’s Other Family (Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2021)

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

Last night Lifetime showed last week’s “premiere” at 6 p.m. and then followed up with a new “premiere” at 8. The one from last Sunday was called My Father’s Other Family, which I assumed would be a Michael Feifer production since he’s had a penchant for stories about characters who lived double lives and maintained two different families (though Ida Lupino’s 1953 film The Bigamist, with Edmond O’Brien in the title role, remains my touchstone for this particular story premise). It turned out to be a Reel One Entertainment presentation, originally shot under the working title Deadly DNA (which might have been stronger and more attention-getting than the rather blah one they went with), directed by Marjorie Ouellet from a script by Taylor Warren Goff. Surprisingly, imdb.com is behind the curve on this film and has only an incomplete page which doesn’t list any of the actors, and I had to go to another page (https://meaww.com/my-fathers-other-family-full-cast-list-kimberly-sue-murray-hannah-anderson-cory-lee-lifetime) to find out who was in this movie and what roles they played.

Set in Knoxville, Tennessee (though no one in the film offers even the trace of a Southern accent) the story opens with a prologue showing a heavy-set older man being shot, though we have no idea who the assailant is. The scene then cuts to a successful restaurant being run by the dead man’s daughter, Shelby Parker (Kimberly Sue-Murray), who’s living with boyfriend Luke (Morgan David Jones, tall, lanky and sandy-haired in the usual type of the “good” Lifetime husband or spouse but at least a bit sexier than most of them) but putting him off when he suggests they get married (which becomes an important plot point later on). Shelby is also the successful proprietress of a family restaurant rather unimaginatively called “Family Restaurant” with business partner Jen (Cory Lee, who from 2005 to 2013 pursued a career as a singer and made four CD’s, the first of which was called What a Difference a Day Makes – a song choice which makes me curious to hear it.) As a surprise present, Luke gives Shelby one of those DNA testing kits that’s supposed to reveal your entire family tree – only it reveals more than either Shelby or Luke expected it to.

Shelby thus finds that in addition to the mother she knew about, who died in an accident while Shelby was still a teenager, dad had another family consisting of Dora, whom we see as a heavy, middle-aged woman who needs virtually round-the-clock care for a rare nervous disorder; and her daughter Rose McGowan (Hannah Anderson), who dropped out of high school in her junior year to take care of mom full-time and is working as a waitress to make ends meet. (Odd that they gave this character the same name as the real-life actress who starred in the first Lifetime Devil in the Flesh movie in 1998 and later took a leading role in exposing, so to speak, Harvey Weinstein’s sexual shenanigans.) Shelby seeks out Rose for a meeting while Luke insists on a DNA test, which confirms that the two women are indeed biological kin. If this were a Hallmark Channel movie that’s where it would have stayed, with the two women working out the emotional uncertainties of their new-found relationship, but this being Lifetime writer Goff had to introduce an element of skullduggery.

She did so in the person of Rose’s boyfriend Travis (regrettably not named on either imdb.com or meaww.com, especially since he’s the sexiest guy in the movie). While Shelby and Luke are out having dinner with Rose, Travis shows up at Shelby’s and Luke’s home with a lockpick. He takes note of Shelby’s jewelry but doesn’t steal any; instead he photographs the will left by Shelby’s late father, Alan Parker (also the name of the director of Midnight Express), then takes it to an attorney named Fred Spolnitz to see if there’s any legal way to break the will, since it left dad’s entire estate to Shelby. Spolnitz solemnly informs him that the will is legally ironclad, but if Shelby herself were to die while she neither has a will nor a husband (hence the significance that she and Luke are not legally married), the estate would automatically pass to Rose on Shelby’s death. That’s all Travis needs to hear: soon thereafter he tries to break into Shelby’s car and club her to death with a blunt object, but she manages to get the car started and escape. Later we hear a scene between Travis and Rose meant to tell us that Rose is fully involved with the plot and it wasn’t just something Travis thought of on her own, and it’s hinted – and later proved when the local cops discover a bloody blanket in Rose’s car and the blood is Travis’s, even though they don’t have his body – that Rose killed Travis because of his incompetent bungling of the job of killing Shelby.

There are also brief hints that they previously pulled off a similar scam on a man named “Bob” – which had me waiting for a scene which would establish that Shelby and Rose really aren’t related and they faked a DNA test result to make it seem like they were – before Rose continues on her next attempt to murder Shelby. It seems that Goff was following Anton Chekhov’s dictum that whenever a writer introduces a pistol in act one it has to go off in act three – only in this case the “pistol” is sesame seeds, to which we learn from Jen that Shelby is deathly allergic to – which, of course, means Rose will buy a package of organic sesame seeds, grind them up and sneak them into a pot of soup Shelby is cooking for her customers, so Shelby will taste the contaminated soup and croak already. Rose has stolen Shelby’s Epipen and sabotaged it, but hasn’t reckoned with her having another one for emergencies, so Shelby ends up in the hospital but still alive. Then Luke gets the key clue when he visits the restaurant and Jen asks him, purely as a favor, to take out the trash – and he finds the empty bag of sesame seeds and realizes someone deliberately spiked the soup to kill Shelby, though he still doesn’t realize who.

The finale occurs when Rose kidnaps Jen and holds her hostage, sending Shelby a text that she’s going to kill Jen unless Shelby shows up … alone. When Shelby shows up Rose holds a gun on her and threatens to kill her. Shelby hits on the idea of calling Rose’s mother Dora to intervene and talk Rose out of it, but in a surprise twist (that really isn’t all that surprising) we learn that Dora was not only involved in Rose’s plot but was the mastermind of it. Dora never forgave Alan for abandoning her half of the family once Shelby was born, and she concocted this scheme to get Alan Parker’s fortune for herself and her daughter. Ultimately the police arrive and the conspirators are either arrested or killed (once you’ve seen as many Lifetime movies as I have their endings tend to blur into each other, though I think this time they killed off the mother and let Rose get arrested) and Shelby accepts Luke’s marriage proposal (which he makes when he’s just returned from the hospital after Rose wounded him with her gun) and celebrates with him and Jen, saying they’re the only three family members she needs. My Father’s Other Family was an O.K. Lifetime movie, acceptably directed and decently acted (the only really sexy and charismatic performer was the actor playing Travis, and he exited way too soon) but suffering from how much Kimberly Sue-Murray and Hannah Anderson look alike. Yes, I’m often faulting casting directors for hiring people who don’t look at all like each other to play biological relatives, but this time they went too far in the other direction. When the heroine and the villainess are engaging in a fight to the death at the finish, it’s nice when they look different enough you at least know whom to root for!

My Husband’s Killer Girlfriend (Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2021)

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

The “premiere” Lifetime showed immediately afterwards, despite an even more risible title – My Husband’s Killer Girlfriend, which pretty much gives the whole plot away – actually turned out to be considerably better than My Father’s Other Family. Directed by Troy Scott (a name I didn’t recognize) from a script by Paul A. Birkett (whom I did), My Husband’s Killer Girlfriend turned out to be a quite good thriller with elements of Kafka and Hitchcock in the predicament it puts its heroine, Leah Watts (Cindy Busby), through. Leah has just gone through a traumatic divorce from attorney Adam Richley (Lane Edwards), and about the only thing the two didn’t contest when they were breaking up was Leah getting custody of their three-year-old daughter Emma. Only Leah, an insurance investigator with a highly prestigious and time-consuming job, has to take a business trip to Washington, D.C. and, in order to be able to leave Emma behind without having to turn her over to Adam, she hires a nanny named Valerie Dobbs (Chelsea Reist). The nanny comes with fabulous references and looks mousy, with brown hair and big glasses, but Leah compliments her on at least not being ancient and hires her.

She then takes off on her business trip but gets concerned when her attempts to video-phone her daughter on her tablet keep going unanswered and her calls to the nanny go straight to voicemail. Much to the disgust of her boss, she cuts her business trip short and flies from Washington to Seattle (where the story takes place, something we learn from an establishing long-shot of the Space Needle to establish “Seattleicity”) – where she’s promptly threatened with arrest for abandoning her daughter and locking her in her bedroom for three days. The case is taken by a racially ambiguous woman cop named Detective Santos (Lucia Walters), but Leah isn’t going to hold still for law enforcement when her liberty and her reputation as a decent mother are at stake. She soon learns that “Valerie Dobbs” is really Cathy Reynolds, and she’s actually blonde and a hot bimbo type her ex-husband is currently dating. Indeed, there’s an ironic touch in Birkett’s script in that we’ve seen Adam with Leah being very domineering – we get the impression that they broke up because she got tired of him trying to run her life – while with Cathy he’s almost literally being led around by his dick. There’s one impressive and blessedly non-underlined sequence in which she grabs his tie and leads him around his own house, clearly establishing that whatever he was going through with Leah, it’s Cathy who “wears the pants” in this relationship!

Leah confronts Adam and Cathy when they’re in a restaurant together and ends up punching out a Black cop who tries to arrest her for assaulting Cathy, so now she’s a fugitive wanted not only for abandoning her kid but assaulting a cop. And as if that isn’t enough trouble for her, she takes Detective Santos hostage and manages to grab the cop’s gun and hold it on her. Leah gets in touch with a Black computer expert, Kevin Duran (Hamza Fouad), whom she was about to report to her employer for insurance fraud involving his grandparents, and says that she’ll leave him alone if he does a computer search for “Cathy” – who, it turns out, is really a woman named Lisa Moore who lived in Alabama and beat her own baby girl to death. She was arrested and tried but was found to be psychopathic and put in a mental institution instead of prison – only she escaped. Leah learns all this from Lisa’s former psychiatrist, Dr. Tucker, whom she conference-calls and who is surprisingly willing to talk to her about his patient despite the usual medical omertà of “confidentiality” (maybe he figures that as an escaped mental patient with a fixation on babies Lisa is enough of a clear and present danger to Leah and Emma she falls within the “duty to warn”), and she manages to document enough of this to convince Adam, at least, that she’s not crazy and her husband’s new girlfriend is a clear and present danger to their daughter.

Meanwhile Lisa sneaks into the hospital where Emma is and kidnaps her, but fortunately she doesn’t get far because Leah, Adam and Detective Santos had all staked out the place – though there’s a final battle in which Lisa is holding a gun and she and Leah both reach for it (Maurine Dallas Watkins, your plagiarism attorney thanks you for his third vacation home in Cabo) and do a death embrace which ends with the two women being pulled apart – director Scott momentarily keeps us in suspense as to which woman got shot when the gun went off but, not surprisingly, it’s the villainess that got taken out while the heroine survives. There’s a tag scene I could have done without that hints that after the debacle of his mid-life crisis affair with the killer bimbo Adam is ready to reconcile with Leah – I wasn’t rooting for a reconciliation if only because he’d been such an asshole in their earlier scenes together – but for the most part My Husband’s Killer Girlfriend is a well-done suspense thriller. Writer Burkitt knew just how far to take Leah’s traumas without larding them on so much they became unbelievable, director Scott’s work is suspenseful and he had the benefit of two excellent actresses in the leads. Cindy Busby is surprisingly sexy and also a quite convincing action heroine, making her single-minded determination to rescue her daughter believable despite all the moral and legal lines she crosses to do so, and all the ways her current predicament stretches her and leads her to do things she never thought she could do before.

Chelsey Reist is just as good as the woman with the glare-ice mind that takes offense at the slightest provocation and responds in ways neither we nor the other characters expect. Her big moment comes when she – who’s already outfitted a room in her own home as a nursery and even posted Emma’s name on the wall, indicating what she’s really after from her relationship with Adam – proposes to him. Instead of immediately accepting her offer he hesitantly says, “Let’s wait a while and slow down.” She goes off into a hissy fit that ends with her not only rejecting his ham-handed advance (earlier it’s become clear to us, if not to him, that the only reason she’s having sex with him is to manipulate him) but ultimately leaving him flat and obviously deciding she’s going to take Emma with or without her dad. Instead of the usual ways psychos get played – the old-fashioned eye-rolling stuff, the nice person-next-door Alfred Hitchcock and Anthony Perkins used in Psycho, or the overwrought perkiness of most teen (or 20-something) girl psychos in previous Lifetime movies – Reist’s performance is chilling in its off-handed intensity, more like a real crazy person than a movie character: the sort of person you could have a rational conversation with until something unbeknownst to you sets them off and they go off the normal track. Despite the dumb title, My Husband’s Killer Girlfriend is quite a good movie, and one would hope the director, the writer and the two women in the leads can all get careers beyond the confines of Lifetime!

Hi’ya Chum (Universal, 1943)

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

Following two Lifetime movies in a row, I felt my husband Charles and I could both use something a lot lighter. So I reached for Hi’ya, Chum!, second of three one-hour “B”-movies the Ritz Brothers made in 1942 and 1943 for Universal. The Ritzes had begun at 20th Century-Fox, where they were frequently featured players in Alice Faye’s big musicals and then got a few films where they were featured. Charles once called them a bizarre attempt to hybridize the Marx Brothers or the Three Stooges, but unlike those other brother-based comedy teams the Ritzes didn’t create characters discernibly different from each other. You can watch a Ritz Brothers movie and, unless they address each other by name, not know for the life of you which Ritz is which. Their career had spiraled down from 20th Century-Fox to Universal, where they’d at least got to make their studio debut in a reasonably budgeted and quite trendy musical called Argentine Nights, co-starring the Andrews Sisters in their first film. Then Universal, who already had Abbott and Costello under contract and therefore didn’t need other comedy teams, palmed off the Ritzes on three ultra-low-budget movies, each lasting over an hour.

The first was Behind the Eight Ball, which appears to have been a combination remake and spoof of one of Universal’s quirkier movies, The Last Warning (1929), a late silent with one brief talking scene (though the currently available print on a Universal Blu-Ray doesn’t include it) about a jinxed theatre where an actor mysteriously died in the middle of a performance. A new producer takes over the theatre a year later, recruiting all the surviving cast members, only the actor playing the part his predecessor was playing when he died himself gets killed during the show. Universal had already remade it as The House of Fear (1939), and they seem to have recycled the plot for something that was at least intended as a comedy and which introduced the great Don Raye-Gene DePaul song “Mr. Five-by-Five.”

Hi’ya Chum was the immediate follow-up and turned out to be one of those movies where the credited screenwriter, Edmund L. Hartman (sometimes he was billed with another “n” at the end of his last name, but not here), seems less to have written the script than merely compiled it from stacks of hoary old movie clichés. The film begins with one of its funniest sequences, in which a ballet class is being taught by one of the Ritz brothers while the other two incompetently cut up in drag as part of a line otherwise composed of womyn-born women. (Charles had joked about Vera West’s gowns credit that she’d be designing gowns for the Ritz Brothers – little did we know that they’d do their drag routine in the opening scene, albeit in tutus instead of gowns!) Alas, this performance is the last night of a revue that has played to a few people sitting well apart from each other on folding chairs, and the producer pays off $15 for each cast member and sends them on their way.

The Ritz Brothers – or, as they’re called in this film, the “Merry Madcaps” – and the show’s two female stars, Sunny Lee (Jane Frazee) and Madge Tracy (June Clyde), set off in an ancient Model “T” Ford (Laurel and Hardy had made the Model “T” de rigueur transportation for movie comedy teams) bound for Hollywood even though the Madcaps have received a telegram saying their moth-eaten act is decidedly not welcome there. Alas, their car (such as it is) makes it only as far as Mercury, California, a former ghost town that has suddenly become a boom town again because the local mines have been revived to produce mercury, important in making explosives for World War II. This gives Hartman(n) a chance to revive all the boom-town gags, particularly the ones about inflation, Universal had done in their version of The Spoilers the year before. It also gives producer Howard Benedict the chance to use Universal’s ample supply of Old West standing sets – even though this film takes place in 1942 (imdb.com dates it as 1943, but 1942 was the copyright date).

It’s somewhat unusual for an early-1940’s comedy to have just one credited writer, but Hartman(n) had a lot of unseen and unknowing collaborators since he grabs just about every clichéd situation from a million previous film scripts to fill in gaps in his plot and jump in to take over when the preceding clichéd scene or situation ran out. We have the mechanic who impounds the Ritzes’ car and demands $1,000 in mechanic’s liens and storage charges to redeem it (in one delightfully preposterous scene they “cut” him for it, double or nothing, using not playing cards but various breads on a sandwich, only the mechanic turns up a slice of pumpernickel raisin bread and wins). The Ritzes also try to finagle a free meal in the café for the Mercury mine workers by complaining about the steaks being too tough – only the cook quits in disgust at being insulted and the Ritzes and their women friends are deputized to replace him. Then it turns out that the workers’ café is the subject of an underhanded takeover bid by villain Terry Barton (Edmund MacDonald, complete with “roo” moustache just to make sure we know he’s a bad guy) and his mumbling sidekick Eddie Gibbs (Lou Lubin). They want the café to open a casino – they need a pre-existing building because wartime priorities won’t allow them to build a new one – and when the women, who have actually become the restaurant’s legal owners, won’t sell, Barton opens anyway in an unoccupied private home on the edge of town and start their business of fleecing the miners of their well-gotten gains.

Of course the casino is being run crookedly, but the Ritzes outwit Barton’s staff by rigging the games to win – until the obligatory scene in every movie about gambling in which the holders of a lucky streak bet it all on one last throw of the dice (or turn of the wheel, or draw of the card) and lose it all. (The snake-eyes that come up on the dice with which they’ve been playing craps are cleverly animated to become a pair of rolling eyes.) Nonetheless, Barton pays the Ritzes off, hoping they’ll take the money and go to Hollywood as originally planned so he can keep ruining the town and impoverishing its workers, but in the meantime Sunny has fallen in love with the restaurant’s organizer (and amateur piano player and singer) Tommy Craig (Robert Paige, reunited with Frazee from the cast of Abbott and Costello’s Buck Privates two years earlier, a far more successful film commercially and also a much funnier one). Craig, who’s also the mining company’s resident chemist, invents a chemical that when sniffed sends the victim into uncontrollable laughter, and he uses this to break up the attempt of Barton and his goons to wreck the restaurant – though there’s a Laurel-and-Hardyesque tag scene in which the gangsters threaten to tie the Ritzes to metal weights and plunge them into the water, and that’s exactly what happens to them at the end – though, despite being totally submerged, they’re still able to breathe … and talk. Hi’ya Chum is a pretty silly movie, one of those comedies in which we get the impression that not all the laughs are intentional, and yet it’s one of those movies that does what it set out to do – though Charles was laughing as much at the auspices under which we were watching, someone’s home-video tape from UHF Channel 68, WQTV, in Boston, whose logo appeared periodically superimposed at the bottom of the picture.

56th Annual Academy of Country Music Awards (Dick Clark Productions, CBS-TV, aired April 18, 2021)

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

Thanks to various pressures, mostly due to an unusually stressful couple of weeks at work, it’s been taken me nearly a week to have a chance to comment on the 56th annual Academy of Country Music awards, aired April 18 on CBS-TV “live” from various stages in Nashville, including both the current Grand Ole Opry (where a group of nurses and other health-care workers were rewarded for their services during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic by being allowed to sit in the balcony, even though the main floor was devoid of audience members as has become customary in this crazy era) and its venerable original home, now known as Ryman Auditorium. It seems like every time this place is shown on TV people get all gooey-eyed and reverential – and, given me, I remember, “This is where Grand Ole Opry manager Jim Denny told Eivls he should go back to driving a truck.” Oddly, the show opened with a quote from Lauren Alaina’s great song “The Road Less Traveled” – but Alaina wasn’t on the program and neither were some of my other favorite current country singers, like Brandi Carlile and the amazing Tenille Townes (have I said enough nice things about Tenille Townes to get you to buy her CD The Lemonade Stand yet? What are you waiting for?).

One of my current faves that did make it is Maren Morris, whom I’ve been a huge fan of since she belted out her anthem “My Church” on a previous country music awards show – that night I decided she’d be the perfect person to play Janis Joplin in a biopic (she’s got the right look, the right voice and even the right origin – from Texas) and I’m still waiting. She actually won Female Artist of the Year and she did a duet with her husband, Ryan Hurd, called “Chasing After You,” in which she was obviously holding back so she wouldn’t drown him out – just like Janis had to do with her first band, Big Brother and the Holding Company. The show opened with Miranda Lambert and Elle King doing a song called “Drunk (And I Don’t Want to Go Home,” and it’s always amusing to see how the producers handle having both Lambert and her ex, Blake Shelton, on the same show. They generally schedule them at opposite ends of the program, and here they probably had them perform in different venues as well – though I pretty quickly lcst track of just which people were at which places.

The second song was Chris Young and Kane Brown duetting on a song called “Famous Friends,” and in a way it was a tribute to Charley Pride, the pioneer African-American country music star (who passed in 2020), that the whole idea of a Black country singer was so controversial in 1970 that they didn’t put Pride’s photo on his first few albums and audiences gasped in shock when the announcer said, “Ladies and gentlemen, Charley Pride,” and a Black man came out. Now Blacks like Brown and Mickey Guyton (who actually co-hosted the show with Keith Urban) are no big deal, and the days in which country music was the cultural preserve of the American Right – represented largely by songs like Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee” – are over. This show featured the same kinds of trendy odes (both in music and in speech) to diversity, inclusion and human equality as the other awards shows, and there were probably a few Right-wingers in the audience at home going, “Et tu, Nashville?” One thing that hasn’t changed about country music is its positing of “country” not only as a style of music but a style of life, an attitude that you carry around with you 24/7: this seems to have been the point of the next songs on the program, a medley of “Country Again” and “What’s Your Country Song?” by Thomas Rhett.

After that Miranda Lambert and Chris Stapleton teamed up for “Maggie’s Song” (a.k.a. “Run, Maggie, Run,” though it wasn’t all that clear what Maggie was supposed to be running from) and then the Morris-Hurd duet (well, at least as a real-life couple they had a bit more of a reason to be singing together than some of the stars the ACM producers threw together just for the hell of it). The next song was “Like a Lady” by Lady A – the group formerly known as Lady Antebellum until someone either in the group itself or in their organization remembered that “antebellum” (literally “before the war”) is a term used by Southern diehards who believe in the “Lost Cause” crap that everything in the South was peachy-keen and hunky-dory until those damned pesky Northerners went to war and forced them to give up their “peculiar institution” of owning Black people as slaves. (I remember joking about Lady Antebellum when they first came out, “What are they going to call their album – Slavery Was Cool?”) They have two lead singers, Hillary Scott (a woman) and Charles Kelley (a man), and I’m glad they chose a song that featured her since I’ve always found her voice a lot more interesting than his.

The next song was “The Good Ones” by Gabby Barrett, who won for Best New Female Artist and would probably have won in that category at the sort-of rival Country Music Association Awards if she hadn’t been up against the amazing Tenille Townes. (Got the message yet? Buy Tenille Townes’ album!), showing real passion and soul. Then Dierks Bentley did one of the most surprising songs of the evening – duetting with Black singer Larkin Poe and a group called The War and Treaty on, of all songs, U2’s ode to Martin Luther King, Jr., “Pride (In the Name of Love).” (Did I tell you this is not your old God, guns and glory country music show? Country has come a long ways since Rose Maddox, the first truly gutsy woman country singer and the one who blazed the trail for Kitty Wells, Wanda Jackson, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, Dolly Parton et al.. covered Woody Guthrie’s “Philadelphia Lawyer” at a time country singers generally didn’t go near Guthrie because of his Left-wing politics.)

Then came one of the most remarkable performances of the night: Carrie Underwood came out and did a medley of four spiritual/gospel/hymn tunes from a new album called My Savior: “Amazing Grace,” “Graeat Is Thy Faithfulness,” “The Old Rugged Cross” and “How Great Thou Art.” It was fascinating to hear her transform “The Old Rugged Cross” and “How Great Thou Art” into all-out gospel, but as good as Underwood was she chose to bring on a Black guest star, CeCe Winans, to sing with her on “Great Is Thy Faithfulness” and “The Old Rugged Cross” and the Black woman just blew the white one off the stage. Still, the spot had so much intensity that the next song up, Eric Church warbling something called “Bunch of Nothing,” sounded like, well, a bunch of nothing by comparison. The next song was the male vocal duo Dan + Shay doing “I’m So Glad You Exist” – a good song, but were all the non-clunky concepts for love songs taken already? The next song was, if anything, even more generic – Luke Combs and Darren Williams on something called “It’s Gonna Be All Right,” followed by Combs going it alone for “Forever After All” – nice sentiments, nicely sung, but hardly revelatory.

After that Miranda Lambert returned with Jack Ingram and Jon Randall for a quite beautiful song called “In His Arms,” and Jimmy Allen (with Brad Paisley, a bigger star, in his background) on a nice don’t-tie-me-down song called “Freedom Like a Highway.” The next song was Kenny Chesney doing his own generic love ballad, “Knowing You,” and after that Ashley McBryde (a veteran performer that somehow has stayed off my radar screen until now) in a haunting ballad called “Our Love’s Divide.” After the next medley – Alan Jackson on “When Daddy Let Me Drive” and “Forever in My Heart” – the producers apparently decided that enough time had elapsed since Miranda Lambert’s last performance to bring on Blake Shelton. He’s not one of my favorites – I think he’s not especially good-looking and his songs are mediocre, and the most amazing thing about him is how he’s been able to get two far more talented, charismatic and sexy women singers (Lambert and his current squeeze, Gwen Stefani) to fall in love with him (“Maybe he has a big dick,” my husband Charles joked), but the two songs he did this time around, a nostalgic ballad called “Austin” and an ode to happiness in spite of poverty called “Minimum Wage” (the latter of which I’d previously heard him do on Stephen Colbert’s late-night show, where it was also impressive) were quite good.

Next up were Carly Pierce and Lee Brice doing a song called “I Hope You’re Happy Now” – yet another good but pretty generic run-through of sentiments that have been presented in a million songs before – and Black woman singer Mickey Guyton doing a song called “Hold On” that was good but hardly as searing as her star-making hit, “Black Like Me.” (I’ve heard “Black Like Me” on several shows and I’ve had the same reaction to it: “It’s a great song, but exactly what makes this ‘country’?” Nothing that I can hear other than a pedal steel guitar buried way in the background of the mix.) The next song was Keith Urban’s “Tumbleweed,” yet another generic country sentiment but done better than a lot of other songs that went down well-traveled roads that night. Then the Brothers Osborne came out for “I’m Not for Everyone”, and after that we got a duet by Kelsea Ballerini and Kenny Chesney called “Half of My Hometown.” After that three members of the group LIttle Big Town (the fourth had to sit out the show since he’d just tested positive for SARS-CoV-2) marched down the streets of Nashville as they performed “Wine, Beer, Whiskey.” (Wine is a bit of a novelty item in today’s country music but beer and whiskey are the emblematic country-music drinks.)

For the finale the Brothers Osborne returned with a song called “Dead Man’s Curve” (the latter was hardly in the same league as Jan & Dean’s 1960’s camp masterpiece – but that’s the risk you run when you rip off someone else’s title). There weren’t any downright awful performances at the 56th annual American Country Music awards but, with the possible exception of Carrie Underwood’s and CeCe Winans’ duets to God, nothing that really stood out either – nothing as amazing as Maren Morris’s “My Church” or Tenille Townes’ “Somebody’s Daughter,” discoveries I’ve made at previous country music awards shows – just a nice if occasionally overblown evening of entertainment, though at least I give the country artists credit for being much less overwhelming in their productions than their pop counterparts at the Grammy Awards. There were no Cirque du Soleil acrobats swinging from the ceilings of the various venues, no fireworks, no light shows that made the performers look like they were being attacked – just nice music, sung with care and taste even if it rarely reached the emotional heights this sort of music can.

Green Hell (Famous Productions, Universal, 1940)

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

Given the uncertainties around my husband Charles’ schedule, I chose last night, April 21, to be the evening on which we finished the James Whale oeuvre and watched the last three films in his canon: Green Hell (1940), They Dare Not Love (1941) and his final film, an experimental short based on a play by William Saroyan called Hello Out There (1949). Green Hell is an insignificant movie artistically but it’s quite important as a landmark in Hollywood history, It was the brainchild of Harry Edington, who in the late 1920’s had won a reputation as Hollywood’s most legendary agent. He was able to attract a stellar list of clients largely on the strength of the contracts he had extracted from MGM for their two biggest stars, John Gilbert and Greta Garbo. In 1940 he decided to become a movie producer, and he thought of a plan that would become one of the most important and most common ways movies would get made after the disintegration of the studio system in the 1950’s. Edington’s model was to put together a film project entirely from his clients, assembling a story, writer, director and cast and offering the whole package to whatever studio wanted to take it on on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. He wouldn’t succeed in this venture – Green Hell was his only film as a producer, and it was both a commercial and critical disaster – but other agents like Charles K. Feldman and Lew Wasserman would adopt Edington’s business model and prosper with it. In fact, Wasserman prospered with it so much that eventually he was able to buy Universal, the venerable studio with which Edington finally cut the deal to make Green Hell.

I remember watching this with Charles early on in our relationship and wondering how on earth a film with a great screenwriter, Frances Marion; a great director, James Whale; and a cast that, if not great, was at least serviceable – Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Joan Bennett, George Sanders, Alan Hale, Vincent Price and John Howard – could come up with a movie this silly. According to James Whale’s biographer, James Curtis, the real problem was Frances Marion. She had become one of Hollywood’s most regarded writers in the silent era because, Curtis argued, silent films emphasized what she was good at – constructing a coherent story and dividing it into scenes that could be filmed – and didn’t require her to write dialogue. When sound came in Marion was under contract to MGM, whose studio chief, Irving Thalberg, used Marion’s talents as a story constructionist and assigned other people – usually Anita Loos – to fill in the dialogue. Alas, when Thalberg died in 1936 the new management at MGM let Marion go and she was on her own. One particularly silly line Curtis quotes from Green Hell is when the white male explorers looking for Inca ruins in the rain forests of Peru (so you thought Peru was all mountains and desert? Obviously Frances Marion didn’t, though I recall reading somewhare that enough of the Amazon rain forest overlaps into Peruvian territory that this isn’t quite as silly as I thought it was when I was watching it)) bring in a woman they’ve found and take her to their camp while she’s unconscious. One of the explorers asks if there’s anything wrong with her, and he’s told, “Just a coma” – a line that apparently brought laughter when Green Hell was previewed before release and various people, including Whale himself, wanted it deleted from the final cut. It’s still there.

Green Hell Is one of those stupid Holliywood jungle movies, with whites in the jungle dealing with such menaces as alligators (the usual stock clips appear) and cannibals, who besiege them at the end of the film with the general idiocy of John Ford’s Indians or Peter Jackson’s orcs. Totally unable to use their numerical advantage in any significant way, they’re sitting ducks for the good natives who come in like Ford’s Seventh Cavalry at the end and rescue all these silly white people from becoming the cannibals’ latest main course. Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. – speaking with the British accent he picked up from his decades of living there (when his dad relocated to Britain following the breakup of his marriage to Mary Pickford, Jr. stayed there and eventually became so “native” a lot of people thought he was English) – is an explorer who when he travels in Peru is surrounded by so many native girls they’re basically groupies. He heads an expedition ostensibly fronted by scientist Dr. Loren (Alan Hale) and including Forrester (George Sanders, who as usual in his otherwise bad movies plays the part with a world-weary hauteur that steals the film from the rest of the cast; Sanders was a fine actor and in the hands of a director who knew what to do with him, like Alfred Hitchcock or Douglas Sirk, he made a great impression, but somehow Whale wasn’t able to get that much out of him, at least with Marion’s cardboard script), Hal Scott (the typically useless John Howard, who spent his career playing drips even in otherwise good movies like Lost Horizon and The Philadelphia Story), “Tex” Morgan (George Bancroft in a schticky comic-relief performance that had Universal had its druthers in the casting would probably have gone to Andy Devine), and Richardson (Vincent Price – one ot the legendary horror stars made a movie for one of the legendary horror directors and it was not a horror film!), who gets killed about a half-hour in.

Joan Bennett plays his wife, who had followed him into the jungle, only she doesn’t arrive until after he’s killed by natives and when she recovers from that non-serious coma the guys have to break the news to her. Of course, now that she’s a not-so-merry widow both Fairbanks and Sanders cruise her, and she seems undecided until the cannibals in the final scene render the choice academic by knocking Sanders off. About all Green Hell has to recommend it is some good special-effects work by Universal’s go-to guy for trick shots, John P. Fulton – the gushes of water that threaten to drown the principals’ camp are especially well done – and the professional acting of Sanders and Price, who stand out if only because they’re able to convey the impression that they take Marion’s tripe seriously. (Later Price would get a lot of scripts that were even worse than this one, and he’d respond by camping them up on purpose, essentially winking to the audience, “I don’t take one word of this garbage seriously – and you shouldn’t, either!”)

They Dare Not Love (Columbia, 1941)

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

Though we were watching it on a grey-label DVD with a couple of glitches in the middle, They Dare Not Love turned out to be a much better movie than either its predecessor or its reputation. It has virtually no reputation because James Whale, working for Columbia Pictures and its notoriously mean-spirited producer Harry Cohn, got fired from the film before it was finished and two directors, Victor Fleming and Charles Vidor, were put on it to replace him. (Fleming had previously taken over even more troubled productions like The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind and brought them to completion, though Fleming was taken off Wizard to take over Gone With the Wind, and but Fleming got sole credit he only did the Oz scenes: King Vidor shot the prologue and epilogue in Kansas, including the most famous clip of Judy Garland’s career: her introduction of “Over the Rainbow.”)

They Dare Not Love was released May 16, 1941 and was therefore the product of a particularly fraught time in Hollywood’s – and America’s – relationship with World War II. The U.S. was not yet a combatant but President Franklin Roosevelt was clearly “tilting” the country in the direction of the Allies, particularly Britain, with decisions like the destroyers-for-bases deal and the passage of the Lend-Lease Act. The Hollywood studios – who were regularly being accused by isolationists of creating pro-Allied propaganda because they were mostly headed by Jews – in fact treaded cautiously: before 1941 only a handful of anti-Nazi films ere made in the U.S. (Confessions of a Nazi Spy, Beasts of Berlin, The Mortal Storm), and most of them were personal projects of directors like Frank Borzage or stars like Edward G. Robinson who persuaded reluctant studio heads to greenlight them. Mostly Hollywood, like pre-war Britain and France, tried to appease the Nazis. Whale himself had suffered from this when his 1937 film The Road Back. set in Germany in the immediate aftermath of World War I. was censored at the behest of the German consul in Los Angeles and released only in heavily butchered form. At a time when American movie companies were still allowed to release their films in Nazi Germany, they went so far to appease the Nazis that Louis B. Mayer sent Joseph Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda and Enlightenment an affidavit that Clark Gable was uncircumcised so the Nazis would be assured he wasn’t Jewish and would therefore continue to allow his films to be shown in Germany.

By the time Harry Cohn greenlighted They Dare Not Love America’s pro-Allied “tilt” had become strong enough studio heads were more concerned about offending the U.S. government and therefore started trickling out more anti-Nazi films. Written by Charles Bennett (the writer who was basically to Alfred Hitchcock what Robert Riskin was to Frank Capra, or Dudley Nichols to John Ford: Bennett wrote six of Hitchcock’s films as well as the source play for a seventh, and many of the devices we think of as “Hitchcockian” were originally created on Bennett’s pages) and Ernest Vajda (whom Whale had worked with in his glory days at the Laemmles’ Universal), They Dare Not Love begins with a series of titles explaining that Hitler and his forces have just occupied Austria and some gripping scenes showing the consequences of this for ordinary Austrians. (There’s been a lot of historical debate as to whether Austria, which Hitler annexed on March 11, 1938, was “Hitler’s first victim” – as the Austrians themselves like to say – or Hitler’s willing partner, since there were plenty of Austrian Nazis, some of them in high government positions, who were all too eager to become part of the Reich,. A bit of this debate actually enters into the script of They Dare Not Love, but the film takes the position that Austrians are not Germans and Hitler’s annexation was a conquest, not a friendly takeover.)

The opening sequences of They Dare Not Love seem to be the scenes in James Whale’s later career that (aside from the dungeon scenes in The Man in the Iron Mask, a good but workmanlike film that could have been directed by just about anybody) turned him on more than anything he’d done since The Road Back. Certainly there was no love lost between James Whale and the Germans – he’d been a prisoner in a German POW camp for two years during World War I and more recently he’d had the indignity of the Nazis effectively censored The Road Back, a film which could have been a masterpiece if the Nazis hadn’t butted in and Universal (fearful of losing foreign revenues not only in Germany but Brazil and China, countries with which Germany had reciprocal trade treaties) hadn’t caved. The opening scenes of They Dare Not Love promise a great movie, and though the promise isn’t quite fulfilled it’s still an estimable film and quite a bit better than its reputation. The film’s biggest problem is its preposterous central character, Prince Kurt von Rotenberg (George Brent), whom we’re supposed to believe is a descendant of Austria’s hereditary royal family (which one?) and a figure of such towering authority and stature he could personally lead a revolution against Austria’s new occupiers and millions of Austrians would flock to his cause and make the Nazis’ rule impossible.

So they’re out to get him at all costs, and he and his household staff are planning to escape to Czechoslovakia – only the Prince, irrepressible ninny that he is, first wants to stop at an old Viennese café because he hears their band playing a Johann Strauss, Jr. waltz. At the café he meets Marta Keller (Martha Scott), an old childhood girlfriend but one he’d abandoned because she’s a commoner and therefore, you guessed it, they dared not love. Instead she’s become engaged to another guy, who runs into her at the café, recognizes the prince and turns out to be a Nazi spy who calls the Gestapo on him. The Germans raid the club and Kurt and Marta barely get away in time, then end up together on an ocean liner bound for America. Only Kurt has an American fiancée, Barbara Murdock (Kay Linaker), and rather than confront the Other Woman Marta sneaks away and Kurt and Barbara have a fling that seems to consist mostly of attending horse races and other opportunities for gambling. Fortunately, Barbara realizes that Kurt is neglecting his responsibilities to go home and lead the anti-Nazi resistance, and she sends him away. Kurt and Marta end up together on an ocean liner they think is a Belgian ship taking them to a conveniently neutral country, only unbeknownst to them just before the ship sails the German government buys it and installs their own crew to sail it to Hamburg, where Kurt will be arrested for his crimes against the Reich.

Fortunately, the captain (Egon Brecher) turns out to be an old-school German who’s afraid to confront the Nazis directly for fear they’ll go after his family in Germany, but he’s willing to marry Kurt and Marta on his own authority (and without the humiliating Nazi ritual of asking both of them to certify they are of “pure Aryan blood,” a necessity under Nazi law) even though that gets him accused of fraternizing with the enemy by the harder-line Nazis on his crew, who make it clear that they’re keeping him alive for the present because they need his skills as a navigator, but once they dock in Hamburg … Eventually a deus ex machina arrives in the form of a British destroyer which, seeing a ship flying the Nazi flag just as World War II has been declared (the captain got a message that the war nad started but no one else on board knew that), starts firing on it and demands that the Germans allow the British crew to board it and take everyone on board prisoner. Needless to say, Kurt and Marta are overjoyed to be rescued by representatives of a country on the right side of the struggle against fascism – much to the surprise of the typical comic-relief British doofus who formally takes custody of them – and the film ends with Kurt and Marta daring to love at last.

They Dare Not Love is a film that marks the end of James Whale’s career – he would make only one other film, a 30-minute short called Hello Out There (more on that later) in 1949 – but also a dry run for all the movies the U.S. would make about romance and intrigue against the backdrop of World War II. In some ways They Dare Not Love is a sort of beta version of Casablanca, with Kurt as a combination Rick Blaine and Victor Laszlo and Marta as his Ilsa Lund, both trying to maneuver their emotional needs with their shared commitment to the fight against fascism. If They Dare Not Love doesn’t blend the elements of romance, intrigue and heroic resistance as well as Casablanca, well, what film did? One sees They Dare Not Love as one of Hollywood’s first gropings towards an approach to the war that would dramatize the Nazi evil without outright scenes of violence and without showing the actual war, and which would counterpoint romance and intrigue in ways that would hold the audience’s interest.

It’s also a movie that is full of characters with ambiguous loyalties; given how much imposture is one of Whale’s running themes as a director, he must have been gratified to work on a story in which so many characters are not what they seem – including Paul Lukas, who like Vajda had worked with Whale in his glory days (as the client in The Kiss Before the Mirror) and who manages to keep both the lead characters and us off balance as to whether he’ll turn out to be a Nazi or an anti-Nazi. Part of the problem with They Dare Not Love is the cast; according to Bette Davis, George Brent was drop-dead gorgeous in persion and virtually every woman who worked with him (including Davis herself) had the hots for him – but on screen he comes off as no more than ordinarily attractive (the opposite of doomed icons like Rudolph Valentino and Marilyn Monroe, both of whom – according to people who knew them – were no more than ordinarily attractive in the flesh but came off as sex gods on film), and he never could act for beans. Martha Scott is professionally competent but little more – imagine this film with Bogart and Bergman in the leads and you’ve got a pretty good idea of what’s wrong with it as it stands! Still, They Dare Not Love is a lot better than its reputation, and it deserves a full restoration and re-evaluation not only as James Whale’s last feature but an early landmark in the U.S. depiction of World War II on film.

Hello Out There (Huntington Hartford Productions, 1949)

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

The final film in our re-evaluation of the James Whale canon was the only filmmaking work he did in the last 15 years of his life: Hello Out There, produced under really quirky auspices and a film shrouded in mystery and misinformation. Before reading the latest edition of James Curtis’s biography of James Whale, A New World of Gods and Monsters, I had been under the impression that it was made for the KTLA Channel 5 L.A.-based TV station, shot in their studios and totally lost and unknown. It was actually produced by Huntington Hartford, an independently wealthy man who basically ran through his entire fortune subsidizing various art projects. He dabbled in commercial filmmaking – probably his most famous film, and certainly the easiest one to obtain since it fell into the public domain relatively quickly, is the 1948 Abbott and Costello film Africa Screams – and he bankrolled this film intending it to be released as part of a feature. In 1948 a British studio had released a compilation film called Quartet, based on four stories by W. Somerset Maugham, and it was such a big hit worldwide that they followed it up with Trio, and other studios started greenlighting features that were essentially compilations of shorts based on short stories, sometimes by the same author and sometimes with some sort of thematic connection.

Hello Out There began as a short play by William Saroyan, who judging from our recent viewing of James Cagney’s (as star and producer) film of Saroyan’s The Times of Their Lives, spent his whole life trying to be Eugene O’Neill and not quite making it. Hello Out There takes place in the rural small town of Matador, Texas, where a man identified in the imdb.com cast list only as “The Young Gambler” (Henry Morgan) has been incarcerated in a prison cell whose bars are installed at such offbeat angles to each other it looks like he’s being held in The Jail of Dr. Caligari. We eventually learn that he’s in jail for assaulting a woman – his defense is that she came up to him in a bar, started walking with him, offered to take him up to her place but then demanded money for doing so, and when he found she was a prostitute he angrily rejected her – and he was arrested when her husband sneaked up behind him with a lead pipe and knocked him out. Now he’s been taken to a jail in another town but the husband has not only followed him there, he’s organized a lynch mob and intends to kill him without any of those bothersome ideas like due process and a fair trial.

He calls out, “Hello out there?,” and he’s answered by Ethel Smith (Marjorie Steele, then Mrs. Huntington Hartford) – the imdb.com page lists her character’s name as “Emily” but “Ethel” is what is clearly heard on the soundtrack, though she’s clearly not the Hit Parade organist of that name. She’s just turned 17 (making her “of age” under Texas law) and she’s instantly attracted to the prisoner. He pleads with her to help him escape before the lynch mob comes to get him, and she tries but is unable to – it’s after hours, all the doors at the jail are locked, and she goes home to grab her father’s gun but can’t find it. The pair are clearly two lost souls – she works for the jail as a cook and gets 50¢ a meal, and got the job because her father runs the place – they talk a lot about running off together and settling in San Francisco (a place she’s romanticized even though she’s never been there) – who instantly fall in love and are obviously meant for each other, but of course their romance is not to be. The husband (Ray Teal) arrives with his wife (Lee Patrick from The Maltese Falcon) and leaves the lynch mob outside the jail so he can dispatch the hapless prisoner who first tried to pick up his wife and then insulted him further by calling her a whore. He shoots the prisoner just as Ethel arrives back at the jail after her unsuccessful attempt to get him her dad’s gun.

Hello Out There is a film that works stunningly despite some big flaws – notably Saroyan’s sometimes convincing but sometimes overwrought dialogue, a one-note performance by Henry Morgan (fans of his Col. Potter on the M*A*S*H TV show are going to be startled not only by how much younger he looks here but how relentlessly he overacts) and Marjorie Steele’s virtual incompetence (she makes Marion Davies look like Katharine Hepburn by comparison) – mainly because of Whale’s staging. In addition to directing, he designed that amazing set and did the lighting himself, and despite the limitations of the cast he had to work with (let’s face it, the actors at the time who would have been “right” for the male lead, Humphrey Bogart and John Garfield, would both have been way beyond Huntington Hartford’s budget) Hello Out There emerges as quite effective theatre and yet another intriguing indication of a Road Not Taken in Whale’s career.

According to Curtis, Whale had husbanded his money well enough he didn’t have to work again – though he would occasionally direct a play either in the U.S. or on one of his periodic trips to Britain – and he also had his mid-life crisis in his 60’s instead of his 40’s, breaking up with his long-time partner David Lewis (whose career had, ironically, been destroyed by a debacle of a flop, Arch of Triumph, based on a novel by Erich Maria Remarque – the same author whose The Road Back had been equally disastrous for Whale’s own career – and whose final break with Whale came about because he was so busy rehabilitating his own career he turned down Whale’s desire for the two to go on vacation together), picking up a boy-toy named Pierre Foegel in France, bringing him back to the U.S. and then when that relationship went sour installing a swimming pool in his backyard, using it as a lure to invite attractive young men but apparently, like Andy Warhol in his “Factory” days, getting off (in both senses) more from watching them cruise each other than going after them himself. He eventually drowned in that swimming pool – it was ruled an accident but it was really suicide, though that wasn’t known until the note he wrote to David Lewis was revealed after Lewis’s own death in 1985 – and, with typical bad Whale timing, he offed himself just six months before Universal released their old horror films to TV on a package called Shock Theatre and film buffs once again began talking about James Whale.

Roll Up Your Sleeves (NBC-TV, Walgreens, aired April 18, 2021)

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

I’ve been waiting for the chance to comment on two star-studded TV shows I watched Sunday night, the 56th annual Academy of Country Music awards on CBS and a hour-long show on NBC that preceded it: Roll Up Your Sleeves, an infomercial to promote the vaccine against the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the disease it causes, COVID-19. The most bizarre thing about Roll Up Your Sleeves is that anyone, including NBC and the principal corporate sponsor, Walgreens, thought it was necessary to promote the vaccine in this way. You would think that anyone faced with a pandemic that has been deranging normal human life for over a year now would grab the chance to do something that would, if not eliminate the COVID-19 threat, at least alleviate it and make it manageable. You’d be wrong. There’s a fascinating article in the April 20 Los Angeles Times by Robb Willer and Jay Van Ravel, “How to Convince Republicans to Get Vaccinated” (https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-04-20/vaccine-hesitancy-covid-republicans-political-polarization), that points out how politically polarized everything about COVID-19 has become, including the vaccine.

According to these authors, 44 percent of Republicans have told pollsters that they don’t intend to get the show, while 92 percent of Democrats either have already got the vaccine or definitely plan to. The authors suggest that the only way to erode Republicans’ unwillingness to get vaccinated is to enlist Repubican spokespeople to advocate it – and the producers of Roll Up Your Sleeves scored exactly one major Republican, former President George W. Bush. Instead the show was far more focused on getting people of color in general and African-Americans in particular. The three co-hosts – Michelle Obama, Ciera and her husband, Russell Wilson – were all Black, and among the major voices promoting the vaccine to African-Americans were former President Barack Obama in a segment with basketball stars Shaquille O’Neal and Charles Barkley. Barack Obama made one good point in referencing the understandable skepticism of African-Americans towards major medical interventions by the federal government – the grim history that has ranged from the Mengele-like experiments done on Black subjects during slavery to the infamous Tuskegee Experiment of 1932, in which African-American men who had contracted syphilis were denied the treatments that then existed so doctors could study the “natural” untreated course of the disease. (Then again, given that the standard treatments for syphilis at the time were compounds of mercury and arsenic, which were only replaced by penicillin after World War II, the government and the researchers might have been unwittingly doing those Black men a favor.)

Obama pointed out that the Tuskegee Experiment involved withholding care and treatment from Black people, while the vaccine campaign involves offering Black people (and Americans in general) a potentially life-saving treatment against a deadly virus. The show also featured at least two African-American church congregations in which the ministers have taken an active role in getting their congregants vaccinated. The show spiraled on through various guest stars – frankly I had thought this would be a musical show with variety acts performing their hits and attracting people to the vaccine message, but even people like Ciara who are known for singing just talked instead. After Michelle Obama’s introduction the show began with a segment between actor Matthew McConaughey and Dr. Anthony Fauci, who for some reason has been hailed not only as a great infectious disease expert despite how thoroughly he screwed up the AIDS response and even called “The Sexiest Man Alive.” They also dragged in NASCAR champion driver Duke Jarrett and actress Eva Longoria, along with current President Joe Biden, ending with the 72-year-old comedian Billy Crystal, who closed the show with a charming anecdote of his grandchildren. I hope the show encourages people to get vaccinated (I’ve already had both shots of the Moderna vaccine in February) but it’s a sad commentary on the craziness that has surrounded this issue from the get-go that anyone thought they needed to make this show!

Wives Under Suspicion (Universal, 1938)

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

Last night I picked up the next two items in the James Whale filmography, which we’ve been working through in chronological order: Wives Under Suspicion and The Man in the Iron Mask. Wives Under Suspicion was James Whale’s final film under the contract he had signed with Universal in 1933 when he was at the height of his critical and commercial success and the father-and-son team of Carl Laemmle Sr. and Jr. still controlled the studio. Whale’s standing at the studio collapsed when his massive production of the musical Show Boat in 1936 was the final straw that broke the back of the Laemmles’ Universal; as Whale overran his budget and schedule, the Laemmles had to go hat-in-hand to hedge-fund owner J. Cheever Cowdin for the money to finish it and keep the studio afloat. The deal allowed Cowdin and his hedge fund to take over Universal in a forced sale if the Laemmles couldn’t pay back the loan on time, which they didn’t – though, ironically, when it was finally released under the new regime Cowdin installed Show Boat was a blockbuster hit.

Whale’s next film, an adaptation of Erich Marka Remarque’s The Road Back – his post-war sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front – again ran over budget and schedule and was further sabotaged by Universal’s new production chief, Charles Rogers, who caved in to pressure from the Nazi German government to take out most of the film’s anti-militaristic content (though what’s left is a flawed but still powerful drama that’s particularly good at dramatizing the returning veterans’ struggle with what now would be called post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD). Whale was also Gay, and as open about it as you could be in 1937, which hadn’t bothered the Laemmles (Whale biographer James Curtis claims that one reason he often used British actors was not only that he felt more at home with them culturally, being British himself, but also that they didn’t care that he was Gay – their attitude was, “A lot of theatre people are Gay. Who cares?” – while U.S. actors were more likely to be homophobic and express disgust at working for a Gay director.

Wives Under Suspicion was a remake of Whale’s 1933 courtroom melodrama The Kiss Before the Mirror (adding Whale to the list of directors, including Cecil B. DeMille, Alfred Hitchcock, Frank Capra and William Wyler, who remade their own movies), in which a defense attorney in early-1930’s Vienna (played by Frank Morgan, who’s best known today for the title role in The Wizard of Oz, whose performance in quite a different role will dumbfound Wizard fans) defends an old friend (Paul Lukas) who shot his wife and killed her when he realized she was having an affair. The original title came because he realized she was cheating on him when he saw her primping before her elaborate set of bedroom mirrors, and when he kissed her she reared back in revulsion and accused him of spoiling her makeup. This let him know that she was making herself up for another man, not him. The attorney then finds out that his own wife is stepping out on him similarly, and he hatches a plot to kill her after he wins his case and therefore establishes legal justification for such an action.

Wives Under Suspicion was scripted by Myles Connolly from the original Austrian play by Ladislas Fodor, and Connolly made one intriguing change in the premise: in his version the attorney (Warren William) is a prosecutor, a district attorney who has an abacus-like rack of 35 miniature skulls in his office that represent the master criminals of his city (Connolly reset the story in the United States but didn’t specify what American city it takes place in) whom he’s prosecuting one by one. The latest scalp in his collection is Joseph Patterson (Matty Fain), who gets convicted and executed in the opening scenes – which have an intriguing and ironic parallel to Frankenstein: a series of elaborate electrical gadgets in which a human body is plugged, this time not to bring it to life but to kill it. This time the murderer Jim Stowell (Warren William) is prosecuting is Shaw MacAllen (Ralph Morgan, brother of Frank Morgan, star of the original The Kiss Before the Mirror), a hapless guy from a well-to-do family who became a political science professor and got disowned by his family for marrying a lower-class woman who turned out to be a “manizer” as well. Shaw finally caught his wife when he kissed her as she primped before the mirror and she reared back with revulsion, though this time around Ralph Morgan merely narrates this in a confession William has recorded – Whale didn’t get to show this action on screen in a flashback as he had in 1933.

William locks the record in a safe in his home and says he won’t reveal it at trial unless the defense pleads insanity, which they do – a goof because if court procedure were the same in 1938 as it is now, the prosecution would be legally obligated to share all the evidence they had with the defense, and if the D.A. tried to pull the stunt William plans in the film, the recorded confession would almost certainly be ruled inadmissible and the D.A. would risk having the judge declare a mistrial. The premise of the film is that Stowell has been ignoring his wife Lucy (Gail Patrick), forgetting her birthday (though his long-suffering secretary “Sharpy,” played by a woman named Cecil Cunningham in what’s clearly the voice-of-reason role in this film, remembers it and sends Lucy a pair of earrings in Jim’s name) and constantly breaking dinner dates with her to work on ine case after another. Given how much strongly the Production Code was being enforced in 1938 than it was in 1933, Connolly had to fudge some important plot points, including making Lucy completely innocent of any intention to have an affair. The man she’s suspected of having the affair with is Phil (William Lundigan), but Lucy is only seeing him because he’s dating her best friend Elizabeth (Constance Moore) and she’s trying to get Elizabeth to marry him despite her uncertainty, mostly about his job prospects because he’s a graduate student in college and Elizabeth is worried about his job prospects after he finishes. (To add to the irony, Connolly made Phil one of Professor MacManus’s students.)

Eventually Jim stalks Lucy and Phil and aims a gun at her when the two are together, though he doesn’t shoot. Instead he destroys MacManus’s recorded confession and agrees to plead the charge down from murder to manslaughter, and he and Lucy eventually end up taking their long-delayed vacation even though a big case is breaking as they leave. From the opening credits to William’s presence in the cast list and a big but dramatically irrelevant scene in which Patterson’s cousin returns from Mexico to gun Jim Stowell down, Wives Under Suspicion looks like a Warner Bros. production in exile – indeed, it’s closer to the usual Warners style than the film Whale actually made there, The Great Garrick – and there’s virtually nothing of Whale’s style in the movie. There are some interesting camera compositions (the cinematographer is George Robinson, who shot some of the best Universal horror movies in the post-Laemmle “New Universal” era as well as some of the studio’s best films noir) that suggest that had Whale been able to keep his career going (as it turned out, it petered out after just two more features, the last of which Whale wasn’t allowed to finish), he might have become a very interesting noir director. Whale’s visual flair, his knowledge of the expressionistic “German style” of cinematography and set design, and his love of moral ambiguity and fascination with characters who are literally not what they seem (as a Gay working-class Englishman who had reinvented himself as a faux aristocrat, Whale was clearly drawn to stories about imposture) should have enabled him to make a comeback in the film noir era.

Thie Man in the Iron Mask (Edward Small Productions, United Artists, 1939)

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

Instead Whale followed up Wives Under Suspicion with The Man in the Iron Mask. a moderate-budget swashbuckler based upon Twenty Years After, the third novel in Alexandre Dumas père’s cycle of novels about the Three Musketeers and their involvements in various political conspiracies set in and around the royal court in 17th Century France. The film was produced by Edward Small, who made a specialty of Dumas adaptations starting with the 1934 version of The Count of Monte Cristo, starring British actor Robert Donat in his only U.S.-made film (after that he high-tailed it back home and even when he signed with the U.S. studio MGM it was with a proviso that all his films for them must be made at MGM’s British studio), and his obsession continued with the 1947 Black Magic (based on Dumas’ Memoirs of a Physician and starring Orson Welles as Caglistro – though Gregory Ratoff was credited as director Welles actually ghost-directed the film and probably had a hand in writing it as well).

Twenty Years After had previously been filmed by Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. as a sequel to his own version of The Three Musketeers, and given that it was finished in 1929 and was a silent Fairbanks decided to add a spoken prologue in which he as D’Artagnan would address the audience directly and tell them what they were about to see. (When the film was reissued in the 1950’s the original soundtrack couldn’t be found, so Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. voice-doubled for his late father.) James Curtis reports in his Whale biography that making The Man in the Iron Mask was an unhappy experience for him – even though the film was a commercial success (the last one Whale had) – because Small extensively micromanaged him throughout the shoot. The plot of The Man in the Iron Mask posits that in the early 17th century King Louis XIII of France sires twin sons, and the courtiers immediately decide that they can’t allow two rival claimants to the throne once the boys grow up. They try to get King Louis to kill his younger (by minutes!) son, only he refuses.

Instead he sends D’Artagnan (Warren Willam, in his second film in a row for Whale and a much less challenging characterization than his role in Wives Under Suspicion) home to his native province of Gascony, deeds him a large estate and exempts it from taxation, and bids D’Artagnan to raise the king’s younger son, Philippe, as his own. Then 20 years pass and the brothers grow up: Louis XIV formally assumes the throne at age five (this really happened, by the way) and by the time he reaches adulthood he’s a nasty little nerd who owes more to Caligula or Nero than even the most abusive kings in France’s actual history. He executes people just for the hell of it and invites his mistress, Mademoiselle de la Vallière (Marian Martin), to the royal palace to “service” him any time he wants. He also jacks up the tax rates on the people to pay for his luxurious lifestyle and gets the French peasants so riled up against him it briefly looks like they’re going to start the Revolution over a century early. Louis orders his guards to seize the D'Artagnan household and get them to pay the taxes his dad permanently exempted them from, and eventually Louis learns that there is a young man in his likeness who’s an exact double of him.

Louis Hayward plays both roles, and intriguingly he’s quite a lot better as the evil Louis than the good Philippe; as the bad guy he orders executions and tortures with an off-handed routineness that remains chilling today and no doubt was even more horrifying to audiences in 1939, when Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin were all still alive and at the peaks of their powers. (Quite a few 1939 movies feature historical villains audiences were clearly meant to compare to the real-life dictators of the time.) The bulk of the film consists of the plots the Musketeers, and Louis’ good advisor, Colbert (Walter Kingsford), to abduct and kill Louis and put Philippe on the throne, and the efforts of Louis and his corrupt advisor, Fouquet (Joseph Schildkraut) to keep that from happening. At one point Louis arrests Philippe and forces him to wear a head-covering mask and hood of iron, which he expects will kill him in a few weeks because, unable to shave under it, Philippe will be choked to death by his own beard. Only Colbert and the Musketeers get Louis’ queen, Maria Theresa of Austria and Spain (Joan Bennett), to steal the key to the mask from around Louis’ neck after he gets drunk one night and passes out in the royal bed (it’s clear by then that Maria Therese loves nice-guy Philippe and hates bad-guy Louis). Colbert and the Musketeers are able to rescue Philippe, get the mask off him and put it on Louis, but the king escapes and gives chase in a carriage; eventually the king’s men kill the Musketeers but Louis dies when his carriage overturns and falls down a chasm (an ironic reworking of the death of Kemp in Whale’s The Invisible Man) and Philippe assumes the throne and presumably will reign the remaining 50 years or so of the real Louis XIV’s tenure under Louis’ identity.

Though one of Whale’s favorite themes – imposture – is at the center of this story, The Man in the Iron Mask has few of Whale’s stylistic elements and seems to come alive only in the scenes set in the dungeons of the Bastille. Here, among the flotsam and jetsam of Louis’ political dictatorship and the people incarcerated (or forced to work there as guards, which seems almost as unpleasant), Whale is in his element, humanizing the dehumanized monsters these people have become though their imprisonment. Aside from those genuinely chilling scenes – and the look of the iron mask itself, which resembles some of the early rejected designs for the Frankenstein monster when they were planning to make him look robotic instead of human – The Man in the Iron Mask is a quite entertaining movie but also a rather routine one, though at least the scenes in which Louis Hayward’s characters share the screen are reasonably convincing and the swordfights (choreographed by champion fencer Fred Cavens, who also coached Errol Flynn in his big historical spectacles) are exciting and fun to watch.

Envy: A “Seven Deadly Sins” Story (T. D. Jakes Enterprises, Lifetime, 2021)

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

I watched last night’s Lifetime “premiere,” Envy, the second film in their Seven Deadly Sins heptalogy based on the “inspirational” writings of Victoria Christopher Murray, who according to her Web site has won an NAACP Image Award and is working on a series of books based on each of the seven deadly sins, though so far she’s only written Lust, Envy, Greed and Wrath. Stripped of its “inspirational” trappings and the heavy-duty religiosity that implies, Envy is a pretty typical Lifetime script about the mysterious stranger who comes to the family fold, all sweetness and light on the surface but secretly hiding deep, dark-secret plans to steal their money, their lovers, their kids or in this case all three. While Lust was about two half-brothers fighting over the same woman, Envy is about two women fighting over the same man. Gabrielle Wilson-Flores (Kandi Burruss) seemingly has it all: a successful public-relations firm in Atlanta, a hot, sexy husband named Mauricio Flores (D.C. Young Fly – from a stage name like that I thought he would be a rapper, but he isn’t: his imdb.com page lists him as an actor and writer) and a charming daughter named Betty (Angeline Friedlander). She;’s also got an inheritance coming from her father, who just retired after starting a successful trucking business – he worked himself up from one truck he drove himself as an independent to a fleet, and now he’s about to retire with his wife and take it easy over how many days he has left.

The opening prologue shows the half-sister Gabrielle doesn’t know she has, Keisha Jones (played in the prologue as a child by Selah Kimbro Jones and as a young adult by Rose Rollins), whose dying mother gives her a copy of the Bible that contains a letter mom wrote to Keisha’s father, Elijah Wilson, who sired her after Gabrielle through an affair he had with Keisha’s mom. He had sent her away with money for an abortion, but mom double-crossed Elijah, gave birth to Keisha and ducked all her questions about just who her dad was. When Keisha came home from school one day, she asked her mom about something her teacher had said in class that everyone has both a mother and a father, and mom replied, “She’s right. Everyone has both a mother and father … except you.” When mom dies in hospital, the staff gives Keisha her Bible, which contains a letter mom drafted to Elijah but never sent him explaining that she’d gone ahead and had his child anyway. Keisha learns from the letter that her dad is Elijah Wilson and he’s a successful truck-company owner in Atlanta (by no coincidence also the setting for Lust – and at least one character from Lust, the minister who raised the earlier film’s protagonist as her grandfather after both her parents were killed in a car crash when she was eight, reappears here and gives a sermon about, you guessed it, envy).

She looks him up on the Web and finds that he’s just retired but his daughter Gabrielle is a successful co-owner of a public-relations firm with a business partner named Regan (Serayah), and their main client is a rapper named Justus whom Gabrielle briefly dated before she married Mauricio instead. Working with an unseen boyfriend back home whom we never see – we only hear him and Keisha talking on the phone – Keisha determines not only to loot as much money as possible from Gabrielle’s company but to take over her entire life: dethroning her from her role in the company, seducing Mauricio away from her and taking their daughter as hers. Lifetime has done innumerable variations on this plot before, including (as here) a paternity test Gabrielle secretly commissions to determine whether Keisha is really her biological sister or not – the test confirms she is – and with that information, as well as Elijah’s enthusiastic support for Keisha’s claim (he says the only way he can atone for his guilt over having sired her out of wedlock in the first place and then driven her mom away and tried to keep her from being born at all is to admit Keisha as part of his family and give her an equal share of his fortune), Keisha joins the P.R. firm. At first Regan is so suspicious of the newcomer she gives Keisha a desk with a phone but no computer (does this company actually still use a receptionist in 2021 instead of subjecting all callers to the mean, evil, harsh regime of voicemail? If so, more power to them!) and sends her out to get coffee while she and Gabrielle pitch their new marketing plan to Justus. Ironically, the plan – that he launch his new line of shoes by signing 12 pair and hiding them around Atlanta, inviting people to join them in a modern-day scavenger hunt – was suggested by Keisha herself, and she’s naturally put out that she’s barred from the meeting at which her idea is being presented.

Meanwhile Keisha, who’s living in Gabrielle’s and Mauricio’s home, has hacked Gabrielle’s laptop and is embezzling from her bank accounts – though that plot point is raised almost in passing and it’s clear Murray and whoever adapted her book for this TV-movie (its imdb.com page credits Damon Lee as director but doesn’t give any writing credits, not even Murray’s) couldn’t be less interested in such a comparatively tawdry crime as grand theft. Instead Keisha gets a more baroque form of revenge by leaking to a celebrity reporter that Justus is really the father of Gabrielle’s daughter Betty (ya remember Betty?). The reporter crashes the reception at which Justus’s shoe scavenger hunt is being announced and asks about it. Mauricio, who already started to get jealous when he found out that Justus provided the seed capital for Gabrielle to start her business (she’d told him it came from her partner Regan’s well-to-do parents), punches Justus out at the event and then announces that he’s leaving Gabrielle for her (nonexistent) infidelity. Keisha then hacks Gabrielle’s laptop again and sends an e-mail in Gabrielle’s name saying that because the scandal surrounding her has made her name toxic in the P.R. business she’s handing all her accounts to Keisha. Keisha also makes a move on Mauricio, which he virtuously refuses, and when Regan catches on to Keisha’s game and does some online research on her ne’er-do-well background she goes to Gabrielle’s house to confront Keisha. The two women confront each other on Gabrielle’s giant curved staircase, and just when we’re thinking, “Regan! Don’t let yourself get caught on top of a staircase with a Lifetime villainess!,” she lets herself get caught on top of a staircase with a Lifetime villainess and said villainess pushes her down the stairs. Director Lee shoots the scene ambiguously enough that we’re not sure whether Keisha pushed her deliberately or Regan just lost her footing in the struggle, and unlike most of the heroines’ African-American best friends who learn the truth about the villain, Regan survives.

Keisha’s last attack on her half-sister is to kidnap Betty, but Gabrielle, her husband and the cops (yes, this takes place in a never-neverland America in which the cops actually help Black people instead of shooting them) track Keisha down and recover Betty. The cops arrest Keisha (presumably for her financial crimes since everything else she’s done, however immoral, seems at least legal) but Gabrielle and her father Elijah insist that whatever she’s done or tried to do to them, she’s still family and they’re going to stand behind her. Frankly, I’d rather see a typical Lifetime movie in which the villainess is an unmitigated killer (though I like Christine Conradt’s knack for giving her evil characters understandable motives) rather than this softer incarnation of one. LIke Lust, this film even ends with a Bible verse (a denunciation of envy from St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians), affirming Murray’s “inspirational” message and her willingness, rare in a Lifetime writer, to forgive the bad girl for her sins. But however nice that is from the standpoint of humanity, it weakens the story as drama – and it also deprives us of the soft-core porn that has made a lot of Lifetime movies entertaining even if their plots were so melodramatic they were just silly!