32nd Annual National Memorial Day Concert (PBS-TV, aired May 30, 2021)

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

Last night, after my husband Charles and I watched Rossini’s comic opera Le Comte Ory as part of a free trial offer from the Metropolitan Opera’s on-demand streaming service, he and I watched the repeat broadcast of the 32nd annual National Memorial Day Concert on PBS. A couple of caveats have to be stated in advance when discussing this “concert.” First, it has long since ceased to have any resemblance to what we usually think of as a “concert” – a program of one or more singers, accompanists or instrumentalists performing musical selections. Instead it’s become a quite elaborate program of war reminiscences saluting the various soldiers, sailors and others – including war nurses, who were the dominant honorees of the segment on Viet Nam – who have served in America’s wars, or at least the ones from World War II to the present since those are the ones where there are still surviving participants. Of the program’s 26 segments (at least according to the cue sheet I was keeping during it), only 11 featured either the National Symphony Orchestra (conducted by Jack Everly, who’s been at the helm of these events ever since their founding conductor, Erich Kunzel, died) or solo singers, even though the singers were pretty illustrious: Gladys Knight, Mickey Guyton, Denyce Graves, Sara Bareilles, The Four Tops (or at least a rump version thereof – Motown, now a division of Universal Music, owns all the old group names and can send out anyone they want even though Levi Stubbs, lead singer of the original Four Tops and more than anyone else responsible for their distinctive sound, died in 2008), Alan Jackson, Brian D’Arcy James, and Vince Gill.

Second, as the show has been given more and more to stories of American heroism and valor in combat, the overall impact of the show has become decidedly more grim. There used to be a sense of rah-rah patriotism about this event, but the way they do it now seems much more about the horrors of war than about anything glorious or noble about it. After Mickey Guyton (a currently popular Black singer who for some reason is characterized as country even though her music doesn’t sound especially “country” to me) to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and Denyce Graves (introduced as a “superstar of opera,” which seemed a little excessive) did an O.K. song called “America, I Give My Best to You,” the narrators, Joe Mantegna and Gary Sinise (who have been hosting this show over and over for years), mentioned that 265,000 women had served in the armed forces during the Viet Nam conflict (though I suspect most of those were working in office jobs stateside since only 11,000 were actually “in country” and 7,500 of those were nurses), actress Kathy Baker did an extraordinary tribute to one of those nurses, Diane Carlson. As the National Symphony played Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” (actually written in 1938, on the eve of World War II, but inextricably associated now with Viet Nam because of Oliver Stone’s use of it as the main soundtrack theme for his 1982 film Platoon). Baker read Carlson’s memoir of working as a nurse in Viet Nam under combat conditions, including having to make on-the-spot decisions as to who had a chance to survive and who did not and could therefore only be comforted and made to feel as much at ease as possible before they died of their wounds. She talked about having nightmares of her service that lasted well past the time she returned home – what was variously called “shell shock” or “the soldier’s heart” was a dirty secret of war undiscussed for centuries before it finally acquired a name and a medical diagnosis, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Baker’s performance – which ended, as many of the Memorial Day concert segments do, with the real person being paid tribute to being introduced and posing alongside the actor who had played him or her – was so powerful it made the musical selection that followed, Sara Bareilles singing Carole King’s “You’ve Got a Friend,” seem hopelessly banal by comparison. (I’m not knocking the song – like just about the rest of America, I fell in love with it when King put it out in 1972 as part of her Tapestry album – but it doesn’t have the emotional weight the producers of this concert needed at that moment. Then General Colin Powell, who’s also become a fixture of these events, introduced a tribute to Private Lawrence Brooks from World War II with a brief speech underscored by the orchestra playing Richard Rodgers’ “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from the film Carousel (another piece of music that gets trotted out for occasions like this even though it, like “You’ve Got a Friend,” hardly has the emotional weight to carry the burden it’s assigned) and Gary Sinise paid tribute to Private Lawrence Brooks, who served at Pearl Harbor the day of the attack. The next segment was a tribute to the all-Black Second Rangers Unit that fought during the Korean War – while President Harry Truman had courageously ordered the U.S. military integrated in 1948, apparently a few all-Black units still persisted, and the record of the Second Rangers was a major step forward in that it proved that African-Americans were capable of serving not only as ordinary privates but in highly trained and skilled special units as well. Colin Powell said they were a particular inspiration to him as he was growing up, and their example helped him decide to make the military his career. The musical selection that followed this story was yet another overfamiliar anthem of bathos, “Wind Beneath My Wings,” though it was sung by Gladys Knight, whose vocal chops are still in great shape and who performed it with utter sincerity (this may be the best version I’ve ever heard of this song).

After that was a tribute to the veterans of the 1990 Gulf War which ended, bizarrely, with the rump Four Tops singing “Baby, I Need Your Lovin’” – the song seemed too blatantly sexual for the context and I thought “Reach Out (I’ll Be There)” would have worked better. After that there was a tribute to the survivors of Pearl Harbor – two in particular, Maury Ganitch and Lee Canler (my apologies if my note-taking mangled their names) and then a tribute to the first responders to the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. The featured tributee was Steve Buscemi, who had been a New York firefighter before he became an actor and had just started filming a new movie when the 9/11 attacks happened and he volunteered to rejoin his old fire company and help with the rescue efforts. This time the song spotted after the 9/11 tribute was not an anticlimax: it was “Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning?,” written by country star Alan Jackson and first recorded and performed by him shortly after the attacks. It still packs an emotional wallop 20 years later – and its message of love, hurt and hope contrasts dramatically to the other country song that came out just after 9/11, Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American),” an open call to violence and revenge. (During Barack Obama’s terms as President he had stars like Aretha Franklin, Paul McCartney and Bruce Springsteen at the White House or his events; the best Donald Trump could manage was Toby Keith.)

The next segment paid tribute to the Americans who have fought, and some who’ve died, in the so-called “generation of war” that has followed 9/11, including the war immediately launched against Afghanistan in the wake of the attacks because Osama bin Laden had supposedly launched them from there. I remember being on an anti-war protest march through downtown San Diego against George W. Bush’s attack on Iraq – a brutal dictatorship but also a secular Muslim country that had had nothing to do with 9/11 and did not possess either weapons of mass destructions or any functioning programs to build them – and someone came up to me and asked, “If we’re attacked, don’t we have a right to fight back?” “Who attacked us? Not Iraq!” I replied. “Where did the 9/11 hijackers come from? Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Where did we go to war? Afghanistan and Iraq.” The irrelevance of Afghanistan in the broader war against bin Laden and his al-Qaeda (“The Base”) organization became even clearer when, after nearly a decade of failure, the U.S. finally located him, hunted him down and killed him … not in Afghanistan but in neighboring Pakistan, where the Pakistani military had been helping him hide out even while accepting U.S. aid as a supposed “partner” in the struggle against terrorism in general and al-Qaeda in particuilar. Actresses Mary McCormick (whom I remember quite liking from the four seasons of her show In Plain Sight, in which she played an agent of the federal witness protection program trying to keep its clients alive) and Bailey Madison played the wife and daughter, respectively, of National Guard staff sergeant Joe Phaneuf, who had planned to leave the Guard and spend more time with his family – until 9/11 inspired him not only to re-enlist but to volunteer for combat, where he was killed by an improvised explosive device (IED) and both his wife and his daughter had the grim experience of receiving the armed forces official who was there to tell them that Joe had died.

The song the concert organizers picked to follow that essentially unfollowable story was “You Will Be in My Heart” by Brian D’Arcy James, which made the predictable points but was more moving than “You’ve Got a Friend,” “Wind Beneath My Wings,” or “You’ll Never Walk Alone” had been earlier if only because it’s not so mind-numbingly familiar. Then Colin Powell asked the audience (not that there was one, this still being the COVID-19 era) to stand for the bugle call “Taps,” and after that came the show’s most intensely emotional moment, Vince Gill performing a song called “Go Rest High on That Mountain.” He’s done it before as a memorial – including a duet he and Patty Loveless performed on the Grand Ole Opry in 2003 as a tribute to the late George Jones – but Gill’s heartfelt sincerity and the simplicity of his arrangement (just his own guitar and a pianist accompanying him, appropriately, with gospel chords) made this, along with Jackson’s “Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning?,” the emotional high points of the program’s musical portions. (Vince Gill’s performance is available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sht7VjoBC-8.) After that the hosts of the show gave out a national hotline for veterans suffering from PTSD, and then it was time for the traditional big finish – the medley of the theme songs of all the branches of the U.S. military. (Incidentally the so-called “Space Force” Donald Trump tried to establish – even though only Congress can actually create a U.S. military branch – doesn’t have a theme song yet, though at one point I tried to come up with one by writing suitably martial lyrics to John Williams’ theme from Star Wars. I got as far as, “Rise up! We are the Space Force! We are the Space Force, we conquer the stars. Rise up! We are the Space Force. We’re colonizing Venus and Mars.”)

Given how far away this show has gone from any actual celebration of the military spirit – the picture of war shown here was one of unrelieved horror, trauma and death, not a glorious enterprise but a dirty business that devalues all its participants and a sometimes necessary evil, but still an evil – the medley of the military themes seems weirdly out of place, a relic from a bygone era when people could still pretend that there was something noble and beautiful about human beings fighting each other and laying waste to each other’s countries on battlefields. General Mark A. Milley, current head of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave a brief tribute to the people who were killed at the Pentagon during the 9/11 attacks and then turned it over to Gladys Knight, who sang “Let There Be Peace on Earth (And Let It Begin with Me).” Various choristers from the military services joined in as her backup singers – which led Charles to joke, “All their lives, their one ambition was to be a Pip” – and then sang “God Bless America” with the National Symphony Orchestra to close the show. It’s been fascinating to watch the National Memorial Day Concert every year and note how it’s evolved over time; whatever its original intent was, today it’s become more of a memorial, not only to the individuals who die in wars but to our whole sense of shared purpose as communities, a country and, indeed, a human race. War is a wasteful enterprise but one that seems to reproduce itself in every generation – as Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. noted in the preface to Slaughterhouse-Five in which he recalled being asked what he was working on. “An anti-war book,” he said – to which the person said, “Why bother to write an anti-war book? You might as well write an anti-glacier book?” It’s even more ironic given that human-caused climate change is melting the glaciers so severely that it’s likely glaciers will disappear well before war does!

Rossini: Le Comte Ory (Metropolitan Opera, Virgin Classics, 2011)

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

I’d had some TV watching planned for my husband Charles and I last night, including the Father Brown and Frances Drake mystery shows on PBS and the first go-round of the 32nd annual National Memorial Day Concert (though under the iron rule of our Viral Dictator the concert, for the second year in a row, was held virtually in various locations instead of with an audience on the Capitol Mall), but Charles had another idea. He’d run across an announcement on Twitter that the Metropolitan Opera was doing a free preview of its streaming-on-demand service with a 10-year-old video of Rossini’s comic opera Le Comte Ory (“Count Ory”). Rossini’s opera actually began ini 1825 as Il Viaggio à Reims, an occasional piece he was commissioned by the French government to write to celebrate the coronation of Charles X as the new king of France during the Restoration following all that nasty business of revolution and Napoleon. The piece duly got premiered as part of the coronation festivities and then was laid away and forgotten (at least until the 1980’s, when the performance materials were rediscovered and the score was reconstructed and recorded) – but not by Rossini, an inveterate recycler of his own stuff, who saw a pile of perfectly good music sitting around and figured he could use it to compose a new opera based on another plot. Big-time French librettist Eugène Scribe and someone with the indigestible name Charles-Gaspard Delestre-Poirison gave Rossini a text based on a spoken play they’d premiered in 1817.

Le Comte Orytakes place around the year 1200 in and around the castle of Formoutiers. Most of the men in the area have marched off to join the latest of the Crusades, but the Count Ory (Juan Diego Florez) and 24 of his knights have stayed behind and are interested in seducing the wives the Crusaders have left behind. Count Ory is particularly hot for the mistress of the castle, Countess Adèle (Diana Damrau), who – it’s carefully established in the libretto – is waiting not for a husband but a brother, so she’s still at least technically single. In the first act Ory disguises himself as a hermit, a holy man – and he fools just about everyone else in the cast in this imposture, offering himself as a spiritual advisor who can help the women solve their romantic problems through God’s word. He manages to bluff his way into the castle, where Adèle is trying to keep Ory’s knights from having access to the women she’s set out to protect, but he’s been followed by his page boy Isolier (Joyce DiDonato in a “trouser role” – opera-speak for a woman performer playing a male character), who suggests that Ory and his knights can enter the castle if they disguise themselves as nuns. In Act II they’ve done exactly that – though in Bartlett Sher’s Met production, at least, a lot of Ory’s knights have kept their facial hair (and even Ory himself has a five o’clock shadow), doing what people in the Gay community used to call “slag drag” (i.e., cross-dressing but maintaining male appearance otherwise in order to toy with the whole notion of gender and its signifiers). The women – even Adèle, who successfully “outed” Ory in his hermit guise in Act I – take in the “nuns” and offer them a meal consisting exclusively of fruit and milk. But Ory’s second-in-command, Raimbaud (Stéphane Dégout), knows of a secret passage in the castle that leads to its wine cellar and so he and Ory’s other knights help themselves to the wine collection of Adèle’s brother.

Then the characters receive word that the latest batch of Crusaders has returned victorious from the Holy Land, which means that if Ory and his knights are going to get laid they’re going to have to do it quickly because within two days all the women’s husbands will return. The finale occurs in Adèle’s bedroom, in which Ory enters, takes off at least some of his clothes and gets into bed with her – not realizing that his page Isolier is already in there – and what ends up happening is a bizarre three-way in which Adèle uses her voice to convince Ory that the person he’s making love to is her, when he’s really holding and kissing Isolier’s hand. The opera ends with Adèle and the hot, horny young page boy kicking Ory out of bed and him accepting defeat with some degree of grace. (Referencing Mozart’s Don Giovanni and its similar situation of a super-seducer getting his comeuppance, I joked, “At least a statue didn’t come to life and drag him to hell.”) The Wikipedia page on Le Comte Ory notes that though it’s a “comic opera” in the sense that the story is intended to be funny, it isn’t one in the genre sense the French of the time meant by the term. Instead of having its musical numbers connected by spoken dialogue, it’s through-composed with sung recitatives accompanied by orchestra – and it premiered at the Paris Opéra instead of the Opéra-Comique. (The distinctions became even blurrier later in the 19th century when the Opéra-Comique started presenting serious works with tragic endings, like Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette and Bizet’s Carmen.)

Plot-wise, Ory harkens back to such comic-opera precedents as Rossini’s own The Barber of Seville (based on a play by french author Pierre Caron de Beaumarchais) and Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro (also based on a Beaumarchais play – indeed, on the author’s sequel to The Barber of Seville) and Don Giovanni. The title character is a man who’s proud of his ability to seduce just about any woman he wants – though, as in Don Giovanni, none of his attempts we actually see are successful – and, as in The Marriage of Figaro, the horny aristocrat is undone by a plot including his own servant (Isolier comes off as a kind of mashup of Figaro and Cherubino from Mozart’s opera). It hadn’t occurred to me before but Ory is essentially The Barber of Seville in reverse – instead of the nice young Count whom we want to see get together with the nice young woman despite the “useless precautions” (the subtitle of both play and opera) of the men around her who are trying to keep them apart, while in Ory our sympathies are with the woman who wants nothing to do with the scapegrace Count and the people who are helping her keep him away. There are also intimations of operas yet to come, including Alexander Borodin’s Prince Igor – the knights who wriggle their way out of the war so they can stay behind and drink and whore – and Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier (the aristocratic woman fooling around with the hot young page boy – again played by a woman in drag! – though in Rosenkavalier she graciously gives him up to an age-peer girlfriend).

The Met production pulled one trick I could have done without – we got glimpses of the stage machinery, including the thunder sheet and the lanterns, that would have been used in an early 19th century production (a bit of business pioneered in opera by Ingmar Bergman in his 1970’s film of The Magic Flute, and before that in Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film of Shakespeare’s Henry V, but Bartlett Sher didn’t have the movie infrastructure or the budget to pull it off), but aside from that it was a joyous and colorful production. The highlight of the Met’s Ory was the stunning singing of the three leads – the moment Juan Diego Florez opened his mouth it became clear why he’s the go-to Rossini tenor these days. His sound was loud and heroic, which was probably not what Rossini wanted (he wrote the part for the soft-voiced tenor Adolphe Nourrit, and when Rossini heard Rubini, the first tenor in history ever to sing a full-throated high “C” from the chest, he hated the sound and said it was like a capon being strangled) but worked for a modern audience. We’re used to hearing loud, forceful tenors in later operas and it’s great that we have a singer like Florez who, like the late Luciano Pavarotti, can boom out those big high notes while still retaining the flexibility needed to sing Rossini’s coloratura and having a sufficiently high-lying voice to handle the role as written and not have to take it down a key or two (as often happened in other Rossini productions).

Diana Damrau was a bit too heavy-set to come across as passion’s plaything, but she sang excellently – as did Joyce DiDonato, even though she wore her hair long and was unconvincing (to say the least!) in FTM drag. There’s one other character, Ragonde (Suzanne Resmark), who’s essentially the house mistress of Adèle’s women’s shelter but whose function as the morals enforcer was somewhat belied by her costuming, which showed off so much of her breasts (including her upper tan line) she looked like a wardrobe malfunction waiting to happen. It’s the weirdest mismatch of character and costume since Trisha Yearwood wore one of those preposterous dresses with a hole in the top between the breasts and the waist to play the Virgin Mary in that God-awful adaptation of the Passion Play set in New Orleans and telecast by Fox a few years ago. Le Comte Ory is not one of Rossini’s better-known works, probably because for all the tuneful music there aren’t any spectacular arias on the level of “Ecco ridente,” “Largo al factotum” or “Una voce poco fa” from Barber or “Nacqui all’affano” from La Cenerentola (Rossini’s “take” on the Cinderella story) – though at least its relative neglect has had one positive outcome: no one bothered to translate it from the original French to Italian, and so we got a performance of a French opera (though written by an Italian composer) in French. (Oh, how I wish more companies would perform Verdi’s French operas, The Sicilian Vespers and Don Carlos, in the original French instead of the awkward Italian translations that have become standard! Verdi was trilingual in Italian, French and German and he was perfectly capable of composing to French texts.) Le Comte Ory was a lot of fun and would be a nice antidote to anyone who thinks of opera as a long, dreary spectacle which always has to end with a bloodbath on stage.

Daddy’s Perfect Little Girl (NB Thrilling Films, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2021)

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

Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” was of something called Daddy’s Perfect Little Girl, a pretty blatant knock-off of The Bad Seed (which Lifetime recently remade in 2018 with Rob Lowe both directing and starring as the “bad seed”’s father – I just re-read my moviemagg post on that film at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2018/09/the-bad-seed-front-street-pictures.html and found I’d liked it better back then than I remember it as being now) which Lifetime had also ripped off previously as Mommy’s Little Girl and Mommy’s Little Princess, both of them produced – as was this one – by a company called NB Thrilling Films. Though it was written by Melissa Cassera instead of Christine Conradt, who wrote the “Mommy’s … ” movies referenced above, it was directed by Conradt’s long-time collaborator Curtis James Crawford, who can count one directorial triumph: he gets a marvelous little-girl-psycho performance out of Hattie Kragten rivaling the one Patty McCormick gave in the 1956 film of The Bad Seed.

This time the demented little-girl killer is called Ella Chambers (Hattie Kragten) and she’s the adopted daughter of advertising-agency owner Nolan Chambers (Matt Wells, at least a bit better-looking than the usual tall, lanky, sandy-haired guys Lifetime usually casts as the innocent good-guy husbands and fathers). Ella became available for adoption in the first place because her biological mother was killed by an abusive boyfriend – writer Cassera doesn’t come right out and say that the no-good boyfriend was Ella’s biological father, but it makes sense to read the plot that way and it gives Ella the same sort of “bad seed” the original Rhoda Penmark in The Bad Seed got from being the granddaughter of a serial killer. Ella has really been up against it all her life: not only was her mom killed with her watching (did Cassera get this from the real-life story of country singer Shelby Lynne, whose dad killed her mom with her watching?), but within a year after Nolan adopted her, his wife got diagnosed with terminal cancer and died just as she and Ella were starting to bond as mother and daughter. Since then Nolan has been raising Ella as a single father, with help from his housekeeper Larissa Anderson (Sochi Fried), and Ella seems to have only one friend, a well-to-do Black girl named Kinsley Winters (Ajanae Stephenson).

Dad lands a deal for the woman who turns out to be Ella’s favorite actress, TV star Juliette Lee (Andrea Pavlovic), who appears regularly on a series called Twisted Pretty in which she plays a woman who is out on a revenge quest and in each episode kills people she thinks are in her way. Apparently the scripts for Twisted Pretty are full of what the old Motion Picture Production Code used to ban as “imitable details of crime,” and Ella carefully studies the show and the ways Juliette’s character kills people to figure out how she can do so in real life. Nolan visits Juliette on the set of the commercial she agreed to film for his agency, and brings Ella along. Ella gets upset because Juliette won’t pose for a selfie with her, which Kinsley had demanded to see so Ella could prove to her that she really met the star. Instead Juliette posed for one with Zander Grant (Joshua Obra), son of Cecily, an attractive Black woman on Juliette’s staff. (There’s a bit of confusion about Cecily’s and Zander’s last name: it’s “Grant” in the film’s dialogue, “Gant” on the sign on a bicycle reserved for Zander on a camping trip the characters take, and “Gray” on imdb.com.) Nolan and Cecily meet on the set of the commercial and are instantly smitten – provoking Ella to fits of jealous rage as the two start dating. Ella gets so upset whenever anything doesn’t go the way she wants that she starts by destroying things – including an elaborate glass lighting fixture on the set of the commercial – and soon moves up to killing people.

Her first target is Albert Foster (Paul Amato), a middle-aged schlub and a neighbor of Nolan’s who’s got tired of Emma cutting across his property on her way to see her friend Kinsley – whom she breaks off with when Kinsley gives her a hard time over not getting the selfie with Juliette Lee Kinsley had demanded as proof Ella really met the star. Albert is up on a ladder cleaning the grout from his gutters when Ella kicks the ladder out from under him, he falls and dies – though his body isn’t discovered until the next day, even though it’s lying in plain sight. Needless to say, the cops and everybody else accept this as an “accident.” Ella’s next target is the mother of Nolan’s business partner, Fay Broward (Heather Mitchell), whom she resents because Fay unexpectedly had to fly to New York to settle mom in a new house the weekend Ella was counting on going on an “adventure camp” weekend with Nolan – meaning Nolan will have to stay behind and cover the agency’s meetings since Fay won’t be in town. So Ella decides to off Fay’s mom by spiking her yogurt with detergent pods – she even looks it up online to determine what dose will be lethal, and she shoplifts enough pods for the fatal dose, only Albert caught her and that’s what led her to the final decision to get rid of him first. Fay’s mom eats the spiked yogurt but fortunately Fay finds her and rescues her, calling 911 in time to have her stomach pumped and her life saved, but she calls the New York trip off – only Ella still can’t go to the adventure camp with her dad because in the meantime he’s already canceled their reservations and the camp is solidly booked both that weekend and the next.

Cecily says she can get them there anyway – she knows someone who works there and scores them four tickets as long as they stay off-site instead of at the camp itself. Nolan thanks Cecily and invites her to come along and bring Zander to use the other two tickets; Cecily at first sensibly backs off, knowing that Ella really wanted this trip as a “just the two of us” bonding experience with her adoptive dad, but Nolan insists and the four of them set off together. Then Ella decides to knock off Zander by cutting the brake cable of his bike just as he’s about to go on “Level Five,” the longest and most challenging of the camp’s five mountain bike trails – and Zander duly crashes his bike when he realizes it has no brakes and ends up alive but in the hospital and looking forward to spending the next six weeks on crutches, which jeopardizes the basketball scholarship he was counting on to go to college. Why Zander didn’t check out the brakes before he went on the mountain trail is a mystery – all he would have needed to do is squeeze the brake levers and look to make sure they correctly gripped the wheels. Also a mystery is why nobody inspects the wreckage of Zander’s bike, which would have revealed that the brakes didn’t just fail: the cord between the lever and the brake itself was deliberately cut. Another thing that should have given Ella away is the succession of text messages she sends to Juliette Lee, which if they’d come from an adult would have had her staff reporting them to the police and searching high and low for the crazy stalker sending them.

But then it seems throughout this movie as if Ella has everybody so snowed with her cute-little-girl act and her tales of previous woe they don’t bother to suspect her no matter how obvious the evidence seems to us – until the very end, when Cecily catches on to her and she’s ultimately apprehended. Since she’s only 12, instead of being sent to an adult prison she ends up in some sort of group home that looks like a quite nice and pleasant summer school, in which she proudly finishes an art therapy project and does a voice-over about how much she’s looking forward to showing it to dad. Aside from Hattie Kragten’s remarkable performance as Ella, Daddy’s Perfect Little Girl is pretty much by-the-numbers Lifetime, with reasonably effective direction by Curtis Crawford (who’s done storyboards for some animated TV series from the 1980’s and 1990’s but whose live-action directorial credits seem all to be for Lifetime or other outlets seeking similar stories) and a script by Melissa Cassera that had promise but also had way too many loose ends to be credible.

Moana: A Romance of the Golden Age (Paramount, 1926; reissued with sound, 1980)

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

Last Wednesday night my husband Charles and I screened a new Blu-Ray release of a film I had literally been waiting for decades to see: Moana: A Romance of the Golden Age, made by Robert J. Flaherty and his wife, Frances Hubbard Flaherty (her contributions were so important he gave her co-director credit) in 1923-24 and released by Paramount in 1926. Flaherty had been an explorer in northern Canada for over two decades (his directorial credit has the letters “F.R.G.S” after his name; it stood for “Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society” and was an award he’d been given under the British Commonwealth for his explorations in Canada) when he stunned the film world with a 1922 movie about a real-life Inuit hunter named Nanook and his and his family’s struggles to survive in the unforgiving climate of the Ungava Peninsula in northwest Canada. I’d been interested in Flaherty’s career even before I’d seen any of his films thanks to a copy of The Innocent Eye, a biography of him by Arthur Calder-Marshall my mother gave me in the late 1960’s. Produced by the Revillon Fréres’ trading company and released by another French firm, Pathé, Flaherty’s movie, Nanook of the North, was a sensation – and, as usual when an independent producer makes a movie that captures the attention of a large audience, the major studios came a-calling and offered to back Flaherty’s next project. Flaherty hadn’t had a next project in mind, but he was willing to take one on if he’d be able to document a pre-modern lifestyle and culture in its natural environment and make some money from it. To the end of his life Flaherty recalled the telegram he got from Jesse Lasky, production head of Paramount at the time: “I want you to go off somewhere and make me another Nanook. Go where you will, do what you like. I’ll foot the bills. The world’s your oyster.”

Frances Flaherty asked that her husband select a part of the world-oyster that would be comfortable and temperate enough that she could go with him, and a family friend named Frederick O’Brien – author of White Shadows in the South Seas, a book about how white settlers and traders had wrecked the traditional Polynesian culture – suggested they go to Safune, a village on Savai’i, an island in the Samoan archipelago, where “you may still be in time to catch some of that beautiful old culture before it passes entirely away.” Samoa is actually divided into two political jurisdictions, American Samoa, which is the only U.S.-ruled territory in the Southern Hemisphere, and Samoa, which at the time the Flahertys made their film was still a protectorate of New Zealand but was granted independence in 1962. (Samoa recently re-entered the news when the ruling party that had controlled its government since independence was voted out of office – and the prime minister who’d been in the job for 22 years responded by locking the doors of the Samoan parliament building and refusing to let the new government enter the building, let alone occupy it and start governing. Rachel Maddow covered this on her news show and compared it to Alexander Lukashenko, perpetual dictator of Belarus, forcing down an airliner over his country to arrest a prominent opposition journalist and his partner, as well as the antics of Donald Trump and the mob he recruited to go to Washington January 6 and stop the certification of the ballots that had removed him from office and replaced him with Joe Biden.)

O’Brien had written Flaherty a letter of introduction to Felix David, an émigré from Germany and a trader who had come out to the South Seas after his ambition to be an opera singer was frustrated by his family’s opposition. Felix David was also Gay, and at least part of his attraction to Samoa was the young, nubile Samoan boys he could seduce. He called himself “King of Savai’i” and would regale his Samoan audiences with renditions of classics of German opera, including Siegfried’s death scene from Götterdämmerung – his favorite. The Samoans had never seen movies – and neither had David, since he’d left Germany before they were widely shown publicly – but Flaherty had brought along a projector and a few prints of Paramount releases so he could explain to the natives what a movie was and demonstrate what he was doing with them. One film in particular caught the eye of the Samoans: the 1920 horror classic The Golem, made in Germany by UFA Studios and distributed in the U.S. by Paramount. “The massive stone figure of the Monster (a giant clay statue brought to life through Kabalistic magic by a rabbi to defend his Jewish community against anti-Semitic authorities), played by Paul Wegener, so struck the Safune people that for years later children would be named after the Golem,” Calder-Marshall explained in his book. Flaherty brought along his wife and his brother David, but for the rest of his crew – including the lab people who would actually physically develop the film – he trained locals.

What Flaherty hadn’t realized until he got to Samoa was that the challenges there, such as they were, weren’t at all like what he’d been used to in northern Canada that he had vividly depicted in Nanook of the North. The Samoans “had none of the heroic Eskimo virtues,” Calder-Marshall wrote. “Life was exceptionally easy. The sea wasn’t an implacable enemy. It was a heated bathing pool crammed with seafood. The land was so rich that ‘farming’ wasn’t work, but fun. Climactically Samoa was a denial of all the epic virtues which Flaherty had come to accept as the axiomatic contrast to the industrial situation which he loathed.” After realizing that his initial idea of having the Samoans beset by giant octopi, tiger sharks or other sea monsters they would have to fight was not going to work (though there’s a curious scene in the final film in which Savai’i is beset by an ocean squall of higher-than-normal waves that seems to be Flaherty retreating to the closest he could come to filming the sea storms he had shot in Nanook and would do again in his 1934 Irish-set film Man of Aran), he decided that the subject of his movie would be “fa’a Samoa,” the complex native culture and rituals that governed life on the islands and had essentially allowed the Samoans to rule themselves.

Flaherty took so long to develop his story that he stumbled on a technological advance that revolutionized filmmaking worldwide. He had taken along the two Akeley cameras he had used to film Nanook (it was an unusual brand of camera he had picked because it was lubricated with graphite instead of oil, which would have frozen in the Arctic climate) and also an elaborate gadget called a Prizma, which shot images through colored filters and used two strips of film at once. The idea was that if printed on stock of the same color used to shoot them and projected simultaneously on the same screen, the images would combine and create an illusion of color. The Prizma needed panchromatic film, which had a greater color sensitivity and produced a far richer palette of greyscales. Flaherty started shooting Moana on the then more common orthochromatic stock, which had worked for him in Nanook because almost all the backgrounds were solid expanses of white, but he found that the film couldn’t cope with the multicolored Polynesian environment; it reduced everything to murk. When the Prizma broke down, Flaherty put a roll of panchromatic film in one of his Akeleys – and was blown away by the results. “The figures jumped right out of the screen,” Frances Flaherty recalled. “They had a roundness and modeling and looked alive, and because of the color correction, retained their full beauty of texture. The settings immediately acquired a new significance.” No one had ever filmed an entire movie on panchromatic stock before – it had been used only for cloud scenes and other outdoor effects – and it was harder to work with: orthochromatic film could be processed under red light while panchromatic had to be developed and fixed in total darkness.

Moana became one of the most beautiful films made to that time (and even now), not only because of the use of panchromatic film but because Flaherty shot it either in the early morning or late afternoon, what cinematographers call “magic hour.” But there were also complications; two of the native film processors Flaherty had got involved in a murder, and Flaherty himself fell deathly ill from – he learned months later – drinking water from a pool in which, unbeknownst to him, the chemicals from the film processing had accumulated. The Flahertys left Samoa in December 1924 and spent the next year assembling a rough cut and trying to keep away the Paramount executives – who, when they finally saw it, they found it dull and unsaleable. “There were no octopi, no tiger-sharks, not even a hurricane,” Calder-Marshall summed up their reaction. “There was a slender love-interest, but Moana and the girl didn’t do anything.” Paramount agreed to release it nationwide if Flaherty could sell the film in limited release in six particularly tough movie towns and draw audiences – which he did by hosting meetings and buying subscription lists from magazines to draw more sophisticated, intellectual people who usually didn’t go to movies.

Flaherty had drawn his story as basically a series of incidents in the life of traditional Samoans, and had searched through the islands for people who had the old craft skills he wanted to shoot. He also gave his leading man, a young Samoan named Ta’avale, the character name “Moana” and concocted a plot in which he would be in love with a young woman named Fa’angase (Flaherty’s third leading lady after the first one had run off with a lover and the second one had broken up with hers and, according to Samoan custom, had to cut off her hair in response), but whom he wouldn’t be allowed to marry until he had had the entire lower half of his body, from the hips to the feet, tattooed. It’s interesting to note that the titles for this film describe the tattooing custom as obsolete and cruel – as if the Flahertys and Julian Johnson, the high-priced, highly regarded writer Paramount brought in to add credibility to the movie, felt they had to justify showing something so disgusting and pointless to an American movie audience, when today tattooing is an “in” ritual in America and a lot of people (especially, but not exclusively, men) go about with almost as much tattooing as Ta’avale/Moana in the film. Ta’avale would never have endured the pain of being tattooed if not for the movie; he was talked into it, according to Frances Flaherty, because it “was not only his own pride that was at stake but the honor of all Samoa” and as the central figure in the film’s longest and climactic sequence “he was certainly the hero of the film now.” Calder-Marshall quoted that and wrote, “It would certainly not be cynical to add that Ta’avale was well paid by Flaherty to undergo the traditions of his race.”

The trials of Moana didn’t end with its release; following its initial showings (where it got great reviews – including one from British critic, and later producer-director in his own right, John Grierson, who wrote that Moana “has documentary value,” the first use of the “D”-word in connection with a non-fiction film), it disappeared into the Paramount vaults and might have been lost forever if it weren’t for one of the great unsung heroines of film preservation, Iris Barry, curator at the New York Museum of Modern Art, who in the 1930’s convinced her bosses that films were as much an art form as any other and therefore they were something a museum should be interested and active in preserving and collecting. In 1975 Flaherty’s daughter Monica went back to Savai’i with veteran documentary filmmaker Richard Leacock and recorded a soundtrack for Moana consisting of Samoans of that time speaking in their native language, along with singing traditional Samoan songs, and they “married” their 1975 soundtrack surprisingly well to the 1923-24 picture to create a new version, briefly released in 1980 with the awkward title Moana with Sound. (This isn’t all that different from what Flaherty himself did with his 1934 production Man of Aran, in which after he shot the film on location he recruited his cast members to come to London and add voice-overs in a Gaumont-British recording studio because by 1934 a film couldn’t be released without some sort of soundtrack.) Both Charles and I wondered what it would have been like to see Moana in 1926 with a live musical accompaniment (which I would presume would have been based on Hawai’ian music because, while Samoan music was totally terra incognita to American composers and musical directors, Hawai’ian music was a long-established commercial property and plenty of American musicians – both Hawai’ians who’d emigrated to the mainland and mainlanders who had learned the style from them – knew how to play it), but the combination of silent images and post-recorded sound was surprisingly effective. In 2005 there was a further restoration that involved Flaherty’s great-grandson and various film archives aimed at creating the most physically impeccable version of the film and using the Monica Flaherty-Richard Leacock soundtrack to accompany it.

The result is a film of astonishing beauty and power; the images seem to leap off the screen – the opening establishing shots of the Samoan countryside reminded me of the black-and-white postcards of the period, which had a wealth and richness of detail almost no movies achieved in the 1920’s – and the beauty of Samoa comes through so strongly in the panchromatic black-and-white images it’s one of those movies that makes you wonder, “Just why the hell did anyone ever think the movies needed color?” At the same time it’s easy to see what put off the Paramount executives: there really isn’t much of a storyline, We see Tu’ungaita (playing Moana’s mother) making a lavalava, the traditional Samoan woman’s dress, peeling the basic material from the bark of a mulberry tree, stretching it and adding patches as needed, then dyeing it with flowers and nuts. We see a scene of the Samoans hunting some sort of animal which the titles present as the only truly dangerous beast on the island – and it turns out to be a wild boar (Flaherty was big on filming hunting sequences that don’t reveal until the very end just what animal is being hunted). We see it and a turtle the villagers capture later being brought in alive and not killed until they’re ready to cook them (which, as Charles pointed out, was the sort of thing you had to do with meat or fish animals before refrigeration existed), and at the end we see Moana undergo the tattooing ritual, with the titles elaborately explaining just how painful it is and how they can do only a few inches at a time because the person getting tattooed couldn’t stand it. There’s also a famous sequence in which Flaherty pans up the trunk of a coconut tree to show Pe’a, Moana’s younger brother in the story, climbing up so he can cut down coconuts and let them fall to earth so they can be harvested; nearly every Hollywood film set in Polynesia for the next two decades copied that effect.

“The film has a wonderful organic unity,” Calder-Marshall wrote of Moana. “Every incident is an integral part of the family’s everyday life. It is a lyric of calm and peace. Even the dances and the tattooing have no violent or aggressive qualities.” He quotes one odd comment that John Grierson made in his review: “Lacking in the film was the pictorial representation of the sex-life of these people.” Even in the genuinely “pre-Code” period of the mid-1920’s Flaherty was pushing the envelope with the shots of Fa’angase topless – her breasts are shown in just about every scene she’s in and, when Flaherty ended up at MGM in an attempt to do a film of Frederick O’Brien’s White Shadows in the South Seas, he was put off by the project (and eventually quit it well before it was finished) when the producer, Hunt Stromberg, responded to a screening of Moana by saying, “Let’s fill the screen with tits.” (The 1930 Production Code even had an exception to its flat ban on showing women’s breasts on screen: it was acceptable if it was footage of native women who habitually went about that way if it was filmed in their native country.) At the same time, it’s known that the native Polynesians came as close to a totally sexually free lifestyle, with no jealousy, no possessiveness and no expectation of monogamy, as any human population ever has, though they had one huge advantage that will never be repeated: they had no sexually transmitted diseases. (Those microbes didn’t exist in their environment until white people brought them in – and I remember reading that and thinking, “That’s white people for you! We ruin everything.”)

Moana is a masterpiece of its kind, and the only reason I can think of for anyone not to like it is we’re simply not used to slowing ourselves down to the softer, gentler pace of the traditional Samoan lifestyle. (In Flaherty’s attempt to show Samoan life as it had been in what his subtitle called “the golden age” instead of what it was in the mid-1920’s, he slipped up only once: when Moana is shown sharpening a wood stake to turn it into a harpoon for catching fish, the knife he’s using is clearly a modern product of Western manufacture.) Critic Matthew Josephson, reviewing Moana when it was new, wrote, “With [Flaherty’s] broad vision he has suddenly made us think seriously, in between the Florida boom and our hunting for bread and butter on Wall Street, about the art of life. Here, he says to us, are people who are successful in the art of life. Are we that, with our motor-cars, factories, skyscrapers, radio receivers?” And so we spend the 98-minute running time of Moana with people who are successful in the art of life and live in a state of harmony with nature we modern urban dwellers can only dream about – and are thankful for the industrial infrastructure of electricity, television, video disc players and the like that allow us to see it at our leisure and then screw ourselves up and head back to work to earn the money to pay for these modern conveniences – including being able to sit at home and watch a movie about people who didn’t (at least until we came to their islands and taught them to) have to worry about any of that.

The Falcon in Danger (RKO, 1943)

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

Last night’s “feature” was the next in sequence in the Falcon series with Tom Conway at RKO: The Falcon in Danger. The omens for this one weren’t good – the director was William Clemens, who’d previously ground out similar “B” mysteries for Warner Bros., and the writers were Fred Niblo, Jr. (son of the director of the Valentino Blood and Sand and the silent Ben-Hur) and Craig Rice. Surprise! The Falcon in Danger turned out to be quite good, with a genuinely interesting and surprising plot (though I guessed it about two-thirds of the way through), stylish direction by Clemens and cinematography by Frank Redman (oddly there are more shots in this movie that look like film noir than in the previous series entry, The Falcon Strikes Back, even though that one was directed by Edward Dmytryk just a year before he made one of the film noir masterpieces, Murder, My Sweet) and a solid supporting cast – with one exception, Amelita Ward’s annoying performance as Texas-born Bonnie Caldwell, who has somehow become the fiancée of Tom Lawrence, a.k.a. The Falcon (Tom Conway), even though her cornpone lines and butter-thick fake Southern accent make this look like a match made in casting director’s hell.

The film begins with a dramatic sequence in which a number of people are waiting for a plane to come into a New York airport – only the plane cracks up on landing and, when it finally stops, it turns out to have no one on board. The plane was carrying a complement of passengers including Stanley Harris Palmer (Clarence Koib), owner of a large factory producing crucial war materiel (the mystery doesn’t have to do with the war but the war is very much a part of this 1943 film, from the morale-boosting posters to the key scene set in a recycling center for scrap metal and a scene in which Tom Lawrence escapes a trap laid in an antique store after hours by turning on its neon sign and thereby alerting the police and the local air raid warden, who was supposed to be enforcing a dim-out in the neighborhood), and his assistant Wally Fairchild (Robert Emmett Keane). Palmer’s daughter Nancy (Elaine Shepard) and Fairchild’s niece Iris (a marvelously hard-edged performance by Jean Brooks, future writer-director Richard Brooks’ first wife and the woman who literally walks with death at the end of Val Lewton’s vest-pocket masterpiece The Seventh Victim, made the same year) both receive ransom notes demanding $25,000 for the safe return of the two men, who were presumably kidnapped off the plane at its last stop, at which all the passengers were removed and the plane was flown the rest of the way by automatic remote control. (In other words, it became a drone.)

Among the principal suspects are Nancy’s poor boyfriend Kenneth Gibson (Richard Davies), whom Palmer didn’t want her to marry because he has no money, and a family of crooked antique dealers headed by Morley (Felix Basch), who run a basement shop in New York (its address is 327 but it’s in the same building as an above-ground apartment building labeled 32 – familiar to classic movie buffs as the building in Citizen Kane in which Charles Foster Kane was keeping Susan Alexander as a mistress) out of which they pursue various criminal endeavors. Palmer, who lives in another set recycled from an Orson Welles movie – it's the Amberson mansion from The Magnificent Ambersons, and I suspect RKO amortized their losses on that film from how often they reused the set (from The Seventh Victim to a 1952 two-reel comedyt called Ghostbuster – note the singular title), actually turns up unharmed and says that he was the victim of kidnappers who forced him to parachute from the plane and then picked him up on the ground and held him, but – as I began to suspect about two-thirds of the way through – Palmer was the actual culprit. Fairchild had discovered documents proving that he was the rightful co-owner of Palmer’s company and Palmer had used a shell corporation to defraud him of his half-interest, then offered him a job at a humilatingly low salary. The two struggle about this during the flight, one of them pulls out a firearm, They Both Reach for the Gun (Maurine Dallas Watkins, your plagiarism attorney once again thanks you for all the work) and Palmer accidentally kills Fairchild, then concocts the whole story about the kidnapping to cover up his crime (though how the Morleys found out about it and sent the fake ransom notes remains a mystery).

It’s noteworthy that Palmer’s lie about what happened to him on the plane is presented visually as a flashback – a rare instance (seven years before Alfred Hitchcock supposedly pioneered the device in Stage Fright) of a visual flashback turning out to be a character’s lie. The Falcon in Danger is a movie that tries to be quite a few things – screwball comedy, French farce, mystery, proto-noir and even horror (the Morleys’ antique shop is straight out of The Old Dark House) – and it manages to shift gears quite nicely even though it could have done with a lot less of the so-called “comic relief” filmmakers still thought was obligatory even in a movie made this late, two years after the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon had dispensed with the comic relief and essentially set the ground rules for film noir. It’s also quite a good entry in the Falcon series – maybe not as good as the best Conway Falcons, The Falcon in Mexico and The Falcon in Hollywood, but still a tough little movie, well directed and acted by Conway with his usual insouciance (Val Lewton and his directors and writers got considerably more out of him, but in this movie – and in the series generally – he was all too aware that he was essentially understudying his brother, George Sanders, who had starred in RKO’s films based on Leslie Charteris’s Saint character and, when Charteris pulled the rights, simply switched over to playing Michael Arlen’s Falcon as a virtual clone of the Saint).

A Mother’s Lie (Neshama Entertainment, MarVista Entertainment, Lifetime, 2021)

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

Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” was a sometimes chilling, sometimes silly but generally entertaining effort called A Mother’s Lie. The story deals with a thirty-something married couple, Chuck and Katherine Robertson (Gabriel Vennen and Alex Paxton-Beesley); their daughter Haley (Zoe Tarantakis), who is dying from leukemia and needs an immediate bone-marrow transplant; and Katherine’s mother, Nora Hollingsworth (Louise Kerr), who seems to combine the worst features of Cruella de Vil and Endora from Bewitched. Nora, who makes it clear throughout the story that she can’t stand her son-in-law and thinks Katherine could have done way better in a choice of mate, is the owner of Hollingsworth Cosmetics. Her money has given her a position of power and influence which she uses relentlessly to further her goals, including the Big Lie at the center of the story. It seems that well before they got married and had Haley, Katherine and Chuck had sex and she got pregnant. Nora, hyper-concerned that her daughter’s unwed-mother status would affect her business and ruin her social standing, spirited Katherine away to a house in the hills, built a fully equipped maternity room and kept her there for the nine months until she was ready to give birth, then told Katherine that her baby was stillborn. In fact the baby survived and Nora put her up for adoption, and now she’s a college student named Libby (Madelyn Keys) who works as a barista at a local coffeehouse and has a male friend named Will (Nick Narre) who’d like to be more than a friend, but Libby keeps putting him off.

The only person besides Nora who knows that Katherine’s older daughter is still alive is the doctor who delivered her, Dr. Baker (Geraldine Ronan), but Nora has silenced her by giving her a major grant for clinical research but making it clear that if she ever breathes a word to Katherine (or anybody else) about the daughter’s true status, her funding would immediately be canceled. The implication is that Nora has also secretly been funding Libby’s scholarship and has suddenly pulled the funding, telling her that the funders have tightened the grant criteria, and leading Libby to decide to get tested for what she thinks is a public appeal to find a suitable bone-marrow donor match for the operation that could save Haley’s life. Libby takes the test, hoping that the money being paid for the bone-marrow donation will enable her to complete her current year at college, but Nora takes control of her life after that and insists that she and Will stay at the lake house, where she virtually imprisons them and tells them that they’re not to go into one room of the house that’s always kept locked up and contains “hidden family secrets” (which was actually the working title under which this film was shot). When Dr. Baker shows up at the hospital intent on telling Katherine that the bone-marrow donor who is saving her daughter’s life is in fact her previous daughter, Nora responds by sneaking up behind her and clubbing her with a blunt object – and the moment Nora kills the good doctor is the moment at which this film goes from being just another Lifetime melodrama to being a camp-fest. Nora also kills Amber (Grace Callahan), a nurse at the hospital who has figured out that Libby and Haley are sisters just by noticing how much they look alike, by shoving her down a flight of stairs in the hospital building.

When Will gets fatally curious about that mystery room in the house where they’re staying, picks the lock and discovers Nora’s dark secret, she clubs him, too, though fortunately he survives, and luckily at the end Katherine realizes not only that Libby is her daughter but where Nora is holding her, and summons the police to liberate Libby and save not only her life but Will’s as well, since (true to form for a Lifetime writer) he was merely wounded, not killed, by Nora’s homicidal attack. The finale takes place two months later and shows Katherine, Chuck, Haley and Libby as one big happy family (we never get to meet Libby’s adoptive parents; it would have been nice but probably the production companies, Neshama Entertainment and our old friends MarVista Entertainment, figured not showing them would mean two fewer actors to pay) with Haley fully recovered and playing like a normal girl her age. Effectively if rather straightforwardly directed by Stefan Brogren, A Mother’s Lie is lifted above the usual Lifetime level of mediocrity by Louise Kerr’s full-blooded performance as the villainous Nora; she etches the screen with acid and effectively delineates the character of a woman who is used to using her riches to manipulate and dominate people. Like Donald Trump, she’s convinced that she can make anything “true” she wants to be just by her sheer power and resources to manipulate others, and she’s not above killing to keep her various secrets and maintain the illusions she wants to create and everyone else to believe in. Kerr captures both the character’s amiability (though she also nails her inability to disguise what a weakling she thinks Chuck is and what a rotten choice he was for her daughter to marry). Nora is one of those characters that, in the words of a silent-era Universal publicist about Erich von Stroheim, you love to hate. She’s at once able to delineate the madwoman and make the character just campy enough you know you’re not supposed to take her that seriously. It’s a neatly balanced performance and makes A Mother’s Lie a good deal more entertaining than it would have been with a more straightforward, less flamboyant actress in the part.

A Predator Returns (Johnson Production Group, Synthetic Cinema International, Lifetime, 2021)

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

Last night Lifetime showed a “premiere” that actually turned out to be the third in a series: A Predator Returns, part of a cycle that started in 2017 with a film called Stalker’s Prey and continued in 2020 with a movie called A Predator’s Obsession. All three films in the cycle were directed by Colin Theys and written by John Doolan, though the identity of the actor playing the titular psycho predator changed from Mason Dye in Stalker’s Prey to Houston Stevenson in the later two films. (I first got attracted – in both senses – to Mason Dye when he played the lead in the first film in Lifetime’s Flowers in the Attic, though in that cycle too he was replaced by another actor, that time Wyatt Nash, in the subsequent installments based on V. C. Andrews’ five-novel Dollanganger family cycle.) This morning I looked up my moviemagg posts on the two previous films in the cycle – Stalker’s Prey at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2017/03/stalkers-prey-stargazer-films-synthetic.html and A Predator’s Obsession at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2020/03/a-predators-obsession-aka-stalkers-prey.html – and realized just how blatantly Theys and Doolan had copied from their own previous work. It’s also clear they had studied the work of the Master of Suspense, St. Alfred Hitchcock, since Theys’s direction is full of Hitchcockian ripoffs – from the shots of characters confronting each other on staircases to the final scene, a stone copy of the ending of Hitchcock’s Saboteur in which the villain is dangling from the top of a tall structure. In Saboteur it was the Statue of Liberty, and here it’s a lighthouse. (One wonders if Lifetime’s movie library has copies of all Hitchcock’s major films so their writers and directors can turn to them for, uh, inspiration.)

A Predator Returns starts out off the coast of an unnamed Eastern U.S. community (though whether it’s New England – the locale of Jaws, another movie that was a big influence on this cycle – or the South remains unclear, and it was called “Hunter’s Cove” in the first film), where there’s a pile of rocks sticking out of the middle of the sea called Faron Island. The island and the area around it have been declared off limits to the locals by the authorities, partly because the island is pretty much just a pile of rocks (easy to slip off of and fall) and also because there’s a colony of sharks who have made the waters off Foron their principal feeding grounds. Only the titular predator, whose real name was Bruce Cain but called himself “Daniel” in A Predator’s Obsession and “David Burke” here, has established a camp there and regularly sets out on his boat to observe the sharks. He claims to be there as part of a university team doing research on the sharks, but a busybody attempting to enforce the ban on visitors to Faron shows up and demands to see the papers that will identify “David” as a legitimate scholastic researcher. I was half-expecting David to act like the bandit disguising himself as a cop in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and say, “Papers? I don’t got to show you no steenking papers!” Instead he puts the guy off with a series of lame excuses that just get his suspicions up until finally David uses his favorite murder method on him: he overpowers him, knocks him out, makes sure he’s bleeding and throws him overboard into the water so his pet sharks will eat him.

Meanwhile we also meet the high-school senior who’s going to become David a.k.a. Daniel a.k.a. Bruce’s latest love (or lust) obsession: Courtney Shayne (Leigha Sinnott), who goes out there as part of a four-person crew of equally stupid teenagers led by Ryan (Chris Jehnert), who obviously wants to be Courtney’s boyfriend (and who’s cute in a tousled-haired way but no match for Our Predator in the butchness or hotness departments!) and a Black couple of equal stupidity and naïveté, Courtney’s best friend Kat (Amber James) and her boyfriend Peter (Jonathan Cruz). They insist not only on sailing to the coast of the forbidden Faron Island but diving in the water and pushing each other overboard as a “joke” despite the island’s reputation (which got it forbidden in the first place) as overlooking a feeding ground for sharks. One sees these nice but incredibly dumb young people and hope they don’t live long enough to reproduce and pass their sorry-ass genes to another generation. Anyway, Courtney falls into the water and is about to be attacked by the sharks when David swoops in on his own boat and saves her life – and of course is immediately smitten with her because she’s not only hot to trot, she also reminds him of his lost love Alison, whom he obsessed over in the backstory to the whole cycle before deliberately running his car off the road and crashing it, sparing himself but leaving her dead. Since then he’s tried that with at least one other person in installment two, though this time he mostly hangs out at the Faron Island lighthouse (which, we’re repeatedly told, is automated, so its lights go on and off and its sirens ring but not necessarily via any human controller). He starts dating Courtney and even makes it to bed with her – though he’s also living in a house he previously shared with his now-deceased mother, whom he has long conversations with and even offers her meals. (We eventually get a glimpse of towards the end as a desiccated corpse in a canopy bed – didn’t I tell you this movie contained a lot of Hitchcock ripoffs? Well, at least he doesn’t don drag and kill people in his mother’s persona the way Norman Bates did in Psycho!)

Courtney is also the daughter of divorced parents Branden (Matthew Crawley) and Erica (Hannah Jane MacMurray) Shayne, though Branden seems to hang around the home of Courtney and Erica so much I was startled when writer Doolan dropped a line of dialogue that indicated they were no longer a couple. As typical in Lifetime movies with teen protagonists, the lead’s mother is depicted as parenting her with all the warmth and compassion of a commandant at Auschwitz, tearing into her for coming home late as if she’s about to send her to a gas chamber and insisting that she not have any fun but devote herself entirely to schoolwork and landing a scholarship so she can go to college, since she’s doing well enough academically to get into a high-class institution but doesn’t have the money for one. Given the non-support she’s getting from her mom and the hapless attempts of her dad to get her mom to lighten up on her – and also given the allure of his mysterious past, the appeal of a man who deals with sharks for a living (at least that’s what she thinks he does!) and the sheer hot hunkiness of Houston Stevenson’s bod, it’s no wonder that Courtney falls hard enough for him not only to have sex with him but, we soon learn, to get impregnated by him. She shares this information with her friend Kat but swears her to secrecy – though somehow David finds out because he posts it online and pretty soon everyone in Courtney’s high school knows she got knocked up and is giving her the cold shoulder over it.

One of David’s peculiar quirks is he insists on never being photographed, but it turns out Kat snapped a Polaroid photo (an oddly retro bit of technology for a film made and set in 2021!) of him and she offers it to Courtney – but, in the usual way of a Lifetime heroine’s African-American best friend, she’s killed by David before she can share the photo. The murder scene is actually quite inventively directed by Theys: it takes place after the rehearsal of a school play and involves him catching Kat backstage in the school theatre and tormenting her Phantom of the Opera-style before he finally offs her. Meanwhile, in his most creative plot twist of the entire movie, Doolan throws us an interesting variant on the basic plot of Lolita: Courtney’s mom Erica decides to log on to an online dating service to find a new man in her life. (She doesn’t know that David has already killed her ex – he lured him to the lighthouse, knocked him out, tied a weight to his body and threw him into the shark pit – and when Branden figured out how to unhook the weight and swim to the surface, David shot him not with an ordinary firearm but with, of all things, a harpoon gun, which creates the necessary blood-letting for the sharks to find him irresistible and consume him. At least this spares David the annoying and risky task most movie murderers have of disposing of the victim’s body.)

Erica’s new man duly shows up – and it’s David a.k.a. Daniel a.k.a. Bruce, having grown a moustache and beard to make himself look older in his online photo. Mom is as smitten with the psycho predator as her daughter was – like Humbert Humbert, he’s got access to the daughter by romancing her mother, and the reason Courtney wanted the photo of David was to prove to her mom that her new boyfriend and Courtney’s previous one were the same person – though given that the original Stalker’s Prey established that the psycho’s dad was a Hunter’s Cove City Councilmember one would think the family was prominent enough that at least some of the townspeople would have seen Bruce Cain, remembered what he looked like and recognized him in his later incarnations. It all comes to a head when both Courtney and Erica confront David in his digs, see his mom in her current state and have a fight to the finish that ends up with Theys’s Saboteur quote – the bad guy dangling off the edge of the lighthouse and Courtney attempting to pull him up (presumably she wants him arrested, not dead or disappeared) but losing control of him as his body plunges from the top of the lighthouse into the water, where one thinks his destiny will be to end up as shark food.

Then again, given that he’s already survived two seemingly certain brushes with death at the ends of the previous movies, one can’t help but wonder if Colin Theys and John Doolan have in mind a Stalker’s Prey 4, presumably with Bruce Cain in yet another identity hunting down Courtney to find the whereabouts of their baby and kidnap it. A Predator Returns is O.K. Lifetime, notable for the genuinely suspenseful scenes director Theys was able to cook up out of Doolan’s mishmash of a plot (though Doolan too rises to a surprising level of quality in some of the lines, notably a monologue in which David talks about the mercilessness of sharks as predators, in which they’re always competing for food and killing off the weaker sharks – he even claims that before they’re born alpha sharks will kill their weaker fellows in the womb. I have no idea whether that’s scientifically true, but it makes the villain a more convincing and chilling character) and Houston Stevenson has a sort of boy-next-door charm that makes it believable that so many people are taken in by him. He’s also hot enough that it’s fun to watch him in his soft-core porn scene with Leigha Sinnott, especially since Doolan wrote it so she is the sexual aggressor!

Dangerous Medicine (Johnson Production Group, Shadowboxer Films, Lifetime, 2021)

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

The next film on Lifetime’s schedule was at least a bit better, though it also suffered from the unwitting silliness a lot of Lifetime movies take on when they start tapping the network’s favorite cliché banks. It was called Dangerous Medicine, which led me to expect a Stalked by My Doctor-style melodrama in which a psycho doctor goes after an innocent, nubile young female patient. Instead the film could well have been called Psycho Caregiver, since the central character is Daphne Jones (Leann Van Mol), a visiting nurse who takes care of a hot young man named Tony Fox (Chris Cimperman). Tony was riding in a car being driven by his girlfriend Jasmine (Chloe Stafford), a young Black girl (it’s noteworthy that, as in a number of other Lifetime movies, the film presents an interracial relationship and doesn’t make a big deal of it). The two are discussing their relative chances of getting into college – Tony, a student athlete, is virtually assured of a track scholarship but Jasmine is worried that she won’t be able to afford to get into Stanford, where she’s determined to take a pre-med program and ultimately become a doctor. Alas, while she’s driving she gets a text from a college recruiter and, rather than take Tony’s sensible suggestion that if she wants to read it immediately she should pull over, she opens her phone, loses control of her car and crashes. She emerges unscathed but he’s paralyzed in the legs – he can still move them but they will no longer support his weight – and his mom Ellen (Meredith Thomas) hires Daphne as his caregiver.

Alas, it soon becomes apparent that Daphne has far more than a professional interest in Tony: she gives him thigh massages, getting awfully close to his cock (which we’re obviously supposed to think still works even though his legs don’t), and then she bathes him and practically jacks him off in the water. Daphne tries her best to break Tony and Jasmine up, pointing out that Daphne will be attending college at the other end of the country and will no doubt find a whole bunch of cute (and intact) boys to date there and will forget about the cripple back home. She also blurts out at the Fox dinner table that, after all, Jasmine is responsible for Tony’s disability since she caused the accident that crippled him, something Ellen didn’t want brought up but Jasmine readily admits her responsibility and said she’s had to think of it “every other day.” (I guess “every day” would have been too clichéd even for Lifetime.) At one of the conversations chez Fox, Daphne slips up and calls Tony “Kyle,” explaining that that was the name of a previous client. Meanwhile, Tony and his mom Ellen learn that a nearby surgeon named Dr. Peters (Matthew Pohlkamp) has invented a procedure that just might enable Tony to walk and even run again, though it’s complicated and if it goes wrong it might just leave him more disabled. Tony is gung-ho to go through this surgery but, when a slot on Dr. Peters’ schedule opens up and his office contacts the Foxes, the call is intercepted by Daphne, who never lets either Tony or Ellen know that the opportunity for the super-surgery became available. A week later Ellen Fox receives a call from Dr. Peters’ office, asking why she didn’t respond to their earlier call and saying that when she didn’t call back, they had to give that slot on Dr. Peters’ schedule to the next patient in line. Now it seems like Tony will have to wait another year for a chance for the super-operation to open up again.

Ellen is so angry at Daphne not having given her the message that she fires her, but in the meantime Tony has fallen in love with her and Daphne figures out a way to get back into Tony’s good graces. She sneaks into the Foxes’ home (they seem to have no sense of security – even when they lock their front doors they leave their back ones open – and Daphne has this bizarre knack of sneaking into other people’s bedrooms, stealing their phones and sabotaging them while the victim sleeps through the whole thing, though when she tries that at Jasmine’s place to send a phony text that Tony can’t “perform” any more and therefore she’s available for other men, a heavy-set Black guy who’s obviously Jasmine’s dad tries to chase her down in his house but fails) and pulls the gas connections so Tony will be asphyxiated – only she’s really doing this so she can return a few hours later, break into the house and rescue him à la Munchhausen’s. Naturally, the belief that Daphne saved his life makes Tony even more enamored of her, and when Ellen not only fires Daphne but makes it clear she’s no longer welcome in their house, Daphne says that’s all right: she’ll just have Tony (who’s already 18 and therefore above the age of consent) move in with her. Only in the meantime Jasmine is tracing the mysterious “Kyle,” whose name is tattooed on Daphne’s arm in Japanese characters (though Daphne says the characters are Chinese and mean “peace and love”).

She finds that Daphne’s legal last name is “Edwards” and calls down a long list of people named Kyle Edwards until she finds her former client, who’s still alive (in the opening prologue it had been hinted that he was dead; indeed, writers Doug Campbell, David Nathan Schwartz and Michael J. MacDonough cleverly sent us off the scent in a prologue in which a woman we later remember was Daphne is being chased through the forest by a heavy-set man with a moustache and a beard: at first we assume Daphne is an innocent victim and the man and his daughter, whom we also see, were tormenting her, but later we learn that the man was Kyle’s brother Nathan, played by Butch Klein, and he was getting back at Daphne for nearly murdering Kyle, then telling his daughter, “At least she won’t be coming around again”), who tells her that when he wanted out of their marriage Daphne threatened to cut off his arms so he could never get away again, a macabre plot twist that reminded me of those kinky late-1920’s melodramas Tod Browning and his writers thought up for Lon Chaney, Sr. (most notably The Unknown, in which Chaney played a circus performer who posed as the “Armless Wonder” and attracted Joan Crawford, who played a young woman who insisted that she never wanted to be held in someone’s arms; in the end a desperate Chaney tries to win her by having his arms amputated for real, only to find that Crawford’s character has fallen for a guy with all his limbs intact and has no problem with him holding her!).

In the end Daphne kidnaps Tony and takes him to, you guessed it, a deserted mountain cabin, and Tony’s mom Ellen and Jasmine set off in search of them. They finally get the clue they need from Kyle, who recalls that Daphne’s grandfather left her a property in the mountains that had once been a hippie commune (I suspect the current addiction of Lifetime writers for setting their climaxes in deserted mountain cabins was so they can get their characters out of range of cell phones) and is able to tell them where it is. Tony comes to as Daphne has drugged him, tied him to a bed and is about to cut off his arms the way she wanted to do with Kyle (and almost did until Nathan and Nathan’s daughter caught her, leading to that scene in the prologue of Nathan chasing her through the woods and ultimately, alas, losing her). She’s even done a Web search for a page called “How to Amputate an Arm” (I just did that and got some intriguing responses, including a medical training video on YouTube and a page on how to amputate your own arm in case you’re ever in an accidental situation where you would need to), though what she’s threatening to do the operation with looks like a common hand saw you’d find in a tool kit instead of something medical (then again when she tried it on Kyle she was going to use an ax!), and she’s about to do the dirty deed when Ellen and Jasmine show up. Daphne easily overpowers them both and ties Jasmine up, but Ellen comes to and Jasmine begs her to untie her. She tries, but can’t loosen Daphne’s expert bondage. Jasmine sends Ellen into the kitchen for a knife, and no sooner can you say “Anton Chekhov” than Daphne reappears and is about to de-arm Tony when Jasmine gets free, the two women struggle and mom reaches for the knife and stabs Daphne with it (though for some reason she does not draw blood).

Tony is liberated and can now go through the super-surgery that can restore him to walking and even competing in track – and though Daphne sabotaged both his previous attempts, going so far as to knock off Dr. Peters by disguising herself as a hospital nurse, sneaking up behind him in his office and giving him an injection of potassium chloride (also the main ingredient in the three-drug “cocktails” used in lethal injection executions), thereby making it look like he had a heart attack and croaked just as he was about to do Tony’s surgery, fortunately it turns out he trained a protegé and this person agrees to perform the surgery. It works, and the final sequence is Ellen watching as Jasmine times Tony in a practice 100-yard dash. Dangerous Medicine is an O.K. Lifetime movie, decently directed by old Lifetime hand Jeff Hare from a committee-written script, but it has one big thing going for it: the superb villain performance of Leann Van Mol as Daphne. Tall, skinny, leggy and given to dressing in skin-tight black pants and matching tops, many of which show off her midriff, Daphne is at once an implacable villainess and every teenage straight boy’s dream lust object. She plays the part with a remarkable control of her body and an up-front physicality, and an equally implacable mental state that sends her after whatever she wants regardless of the cost in other human lives that just happen to get in her way.

The Virginian (Paramount, 1929)

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

Last night Charles and I screened a movie that was intriguing if not all that great as filmmaking: the 1929 Paramount version of Owen Wister’s 1902 Western novel The Virginian (full title: The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains), which had been a best-selling novel and then a successful play written by Wister and Kirke La Shelle (both of whom get credit for the story source in this film) in 1904. It had already been filmed by Paramount twice in the silent era – the first directed by Cecil B. DeMille and starring Dustin Farnum in 1914, the second, from 1923 with Kenneth Harlan and Florence Vidor – when the studio green-lighted this first sound version. The writing credits list “adapted by” Grover Jones and Keene Thompson, with Howard Estabrook credited with “screen play” and Edward E. Paramore, Jr. with “dialogue.” (In Aaron Latham’s Crazy Sundays, his book about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s years in Hollywood, he wrote that when Fitzgerald and Paramore worked together on the script for MGM’s film of Erich Maria Remarque’s Three Comrades, Fitzgerald accused Paramore of writing “Owen Wister dialogue.” Now that I know Paramore actually wrote dialogue for a film based on a Wister novel, that criticism makes more sense.)

The Virginian was the first sound film directed by Victor Fleming and the first all-talkie made by Gary Cooper – though he’d done at least two previous films that had talking sequences, The Shopworn Angel (better known for a 1940 remake with James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan) and The Wolf Song. (Sound films took over so rapidly that a lot of big-budgeted silent films made in 1928 were quickly withdrawn so new scenes could be added and they could be advertised as talkies.) The Virginian emerges today as a good but not great movie, which avoids at least one of the pitfalls of early sound films – the actors deliver their lines naturalistically without any of the horrible pausing that makes a lot of early talkies almost unwatchable – and director Fleming and his recording engineer, M. M. Paggi, manage the difficult (in those days) feat of recording dialogue outdoors and making it comprehensible. But for a famous Western based on a legendary story it has hardly little action, and Charles was more bothered than I was by the lack of a background musical score (two years later another Western saga, Cimarron, directed by Wesley Ruggles and also scripted by Howard Estabrook, became the first sound film to use a non-source musical score throughout; the composer was Max Steiner, and he and other film composers soon perfected the technique of underscoring a film until it practically became an art form of its own).

The Virginian deals with a mysterious stranger, never referred to by name but only as “The Virginian” (Gary Cooper, visibly recognizable but sounding not quite like himself vocally because he’s trying to do a light Southern accent), who comes to the town of Sunk Creek, Wyoming as the foreman of a cattle ranch owned by Judge Henry (E. H. Calvert). Much of the movie takes place in the town’s saloon, where the three male central characters – The Virginian, his old friend Steve (Richard Arlen) and the bad guy, Trampas (Walter Huston), who leads a local gang of rustlers that are targeting Judge Henry’s cattle. Early on in the action a young woman named Molly Stark Wood (Mary Brian) comes to town to open a school for the children of Sunk Creek, and though Steve cruises her almost as soon as she arrives, naturally she falls for the Virginian even though they’re at cross purposes. She wants to stay, educate the town’s children (and, it’s hinted, any adults who want to learn as well) and in general make it a better, more respectable place, while the Virginian is feeling the wanderlust typical of male leads in Westerns and wants to skedaddle to Utah or Nevada or some place further West as soon as he catches the thieves that are rustling Judge Henry’s cattle. He discovers that his old friend Steve is one of the thieves, and leads a lynching party that hangs Steve and two other members of the gang. Later on the Virginian is ambushed and wounded by Trampas, who shoots him from behind, and the Virginian is urged (and has several opportunities) to kill Trampas similarly – but he’s too honorable a man to do that: he’s out to kill Trampas, all right, but he wants to do it facing him so he can’t be accused of the cowardice of shooting a man in the back.

One gets the impression that Wister’s story, with its conflicting loyalties and culture clashes, had a better potential movie in it than the one that actually got made. One of the best scenes is when Mary Brian’s character is confronted by pioneer woman Mrs. Taylor (Helen Ware), who tells her of how when they were coming out to Wyoming their wagon train was raided by Indians, who shot her husband and left him to die at her feet; and Our Schoolmarm says that she’s no stranger to Indian attacks – back in the old days her New England forebears were attacked by an Indian raiding party and nearly annihilated. Aside from the outrageous political incorrectness of the scene by modern-day standards – Native Americans depicted as mindless savages and the two white women comparing notes on how they successfully resisted their depredations – it’s actually one of the most powerful scenes in the film – but little is made of the issues that would seem to have been naturals for film. Gary Cooper, at least then, was too limited an actor really to dramatize the moral conflict between his old friendship and his responsibility to protect his boss’s herd – this film’s virtual endorsement of lynching is one of the many aspects that make it politically problematic today (if Turner Classic Movies decided they needed to bring in experts to do a disclaimer before showing this film, the disclaimer would be almost as long as the 91-minute running time of the movie itself) – and the final confrontation in the streets, properly facing each other, between the Virginian and Trampas is shot so slowly and perfunctorily that if you blinked, you’d miss it.

The Virginian lurches to such a weirdly perfunctory and inconclusive ending that if you blinked, you’d miss it – it’s not clear whether the Virginian flees Sunk Creek after killing Trampas or stays on (in the novel, at least according to its Wikipedia page, he stayed and ultimately became an influential figure in the town and a key campaigner in the eventual drive to make Wyoming a U.S. state). The Virginian has retained its popularity over the years; there was another version in 1946 with Joel McCrea, TV-movies in 2000 and 2014 (the latter with country singer Trace Adkins as The Virginian) and a TV series in the 1960’s that lasted eight years and starred James Drury (or, as Mad magazine called him in their parody, “James Droopy”). It was the origin of the line, “The next time you call me that, smile!” – said by the Virginian to Trampas in an early confrontation at that saloon – which became as much a bit of lingua franca slang as “Make him an offer he can’t refuse” did decades later. The Virginian is surprisingly well acted for an early talkie, not only by the three legendary male leads but by Mary Brian as well; she was an underrated actress who really brings multidimensionality to the character. Confronted with life as a single woman in a town full of horny straight guys (though the script is actually pretty decorous – besides the Virginian, Steve seems to be the only man who makes an outright advance on her), she manages to show the character’s strength between the respectable dignity and poise.

One thing I hadn’t expected was that Gary Cooper essentially remade the movie 23 years later when he made High Noon – where he also played an authority figure in a small Western town torn between wanting to flee and wanting to confront the outlaws threatening it, and also engaged to a schoolmarm who wants no part of the violence Cooper’s character doesn’t like but realizes will be necessary. There’s even a Mexican woman who hangs on at the cantina and briefly tempts Our Hero in both films (and, oddly, the imdb.com page for The Virginian doesn’t list either this character or the actress playing her), but the more incisive direction of Fred Zinnemann and the more sophisticated script by Carl Foreman make High Noon a classic while the 1929 The Virginian is reasonably entertaining but of interest mostly as an historical curio.

Out of the Inkwell: The Fleischer Story (New Wave Entertainment, 2008)

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

After watching the 1929 version of The Virginian I looked for something Charles and I could watch that wouldn’t last too long and found it in Out of the Inkwell: The Fleischer Story, a 47-minute documentary available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xemq4sNfMf8, made in 2008 and telling the story of the Fleischer Brothers animation studio, which was founded in the early 1920’s and lasted until 1942. At their peak they were the principal rivals to Walt Disney’s company both artistically and commercially, and this documentary – narrated by Carl Reiner, no slouch in the comic genius department himself – presents their story as a combination of great success, ignominious ending and lasting frustration. There were actually four Fleischer brothers, children of German-Jewish immigrants to New York (“Fleischer” is the German word for “butcher,” by the way, though by the time these particular Fleischers got to America they were tailors, not butchers), not just the two I’d known about – Max Fleischer, who was listed as producer on their films, and Dave Fleischer, listed as director. There were also Leo Fleischer, a musician who composed for the Fleischer films and also recruited major musical stars to appear in them – including jazz greats Louis Armstrong and Cab Calloway – and Charles Fleischer, oldest of the brothers and mostly the company’s business manager (much the way Walt Disney’s brother Roy managed the business end of their company).

The story begins in 1923, when the Fleischers started making animated cartoon films in New York and trying to come up with more innovative techniques than the simple line drawings of the preceding cartoons. Their first successful character was Koko the Clown, who literally poured himself “out of the inkwell” at the opening of his films – an effect one of the Fleischers first thought of when he accidentally knocked over an ink bottle and ink spilled out. The Fleischers anticipated Disney in quite a few advanced techniques Disney is usually given credit for inventing, including the Rotoscope (a way of filming live actors in front of a blank background and then tracing each frame so the actor becomes the basis of an animated character – essentially motion-capture before computers), the multidimensional animation camera and even the sound cartoon: well before Disney’s Steamboat Willie (1928), generally considered the first cartoon talkie, the Fleischers were working with Lee DeForest, the pioneer of sound-on-film technology, on experimental cartoon shorts with synchronized sound (though if any of these still exist, this documentary did not contain any). The makers of this film – particularly Mark Nassief, who wrote the script and co-produced with Constantine Nasr, Chris Chaplin (any relation?) and Gabrielle M. Tasulo – make the case that the Fleischers were the first producers to bring an urban sensibility to animated films. Walt Disney had grown up in the Midwest and his films depicted a bucolic, rural America (the design of Disneyland channels every visitor through an idealized “Main Street” which reproduces a typical small American country town of the early 20th century, when Walt Disney grew up), while the Fleischer cartoons were set in New York or other major American cities and featured tough, scrappy characters living in a working-class urban environment.

Koko the Clown was actually “played” by Dave Fleischer himself – it was he in front of the camera that shot the action that would then be Rotoscoped into the cartoons – and when the Fleischers combined live-action and animated footage in the 1920’s they did so a lot more effectively and convincingly than Disney did. They soon attracted a major distributor, Paramount, and for about a decade the synergy between the scrappy cartoon producers and the big corporate studio worked well. The Fleischers got the freedom to innovate and produce quite inventive cartoons, and also to develop unusual characters – including Betty Boop, who at first was intended to be Minnie Mouse to the animal character Koko the dog, but as she developed after being introduced in a Koko short she became not only fully human but genuinely sexy. The character was based on the “boop-boop-a-doop” line from the song “I Wanna Be Loved by You,” a huge hit in the late 1920’s for singer Helen Kane, and reportedly Kane herself was the first voice of Betty Boop – though this documentary claims that Mae Questal (who lived into the 1990’s and played a small role in a Woody Allen movie, New York Stories, as well as National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation) was the voice of Betty Boop throughout the series. (Not so, says the one person who’s reviewed this film for imdb.com so far: that reviewer, Martin Hafer, says Margie Hines was the first audible Boopster in a Fleischer cartoon.)

Up until the mid-1930’s the Fleischers mostly developed their own characters, but that changed in 1936 when they bought the rights to a comic strip by E. C. Segar called Popeye the Sailor and adapted it into the most successful series they’d had to date. Mark Nassief credits the Popeye cartoons with starting the trend for cartoon violence that major studios like Warner Bros. and MGM picked up on in their later shorts. The Fleischers were also the first filmmakers to adapt Superman: they did a series of 13 seven-minute short movies based on the Man of Steel comics (which, since they were adapting a colored comic book rather than a black-and-white newspaper strip, they shot in color), and in 1939, two years after Walt Disney’s pioneering animated feature Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, they made a feature of their own based on Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels – or at least the first book of it. By this time the Fleischers had faced a strike among their animators and artistic personnel in general in New York City in 1937, and they decided to respond by relocating the company to Florida. There Paramount built them a state-of-the-art animation studio and the Fleischers used Paramount’s money to lure as many of the staff who wanted to relocate to do so. Alas, the combination of the expenses involved in moving the operation and getting the personnel settled and the money required to make feature-length animated films got the Fleischers more and more in hock to Paramount.

In 1941 the Fleischers made their second – and, as it turned out, their last – animated feature, Mr. Bug Goes to Town (later reissued as Hoppity Goes to Town), about a gang of insects in New York City who do what they need to to protect their habitat from being destroyed by the city’s human beings. Alas, they had the monumentally bad timing to release this film on December 7, 1941 – just as the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the nation was plunged into World War II, and all of a sudden the movie market was no place for a whimsical fairy tale in which insects were the heroes and humans – American humans, at that – were the villains. In 1942 Paramount swooped in and took over the Fleischer Brothers’ studio, driving them out of it and forcing them to collect what work they could. Max and Dave ultimately found their way to Hollywood and worked at Columbia and Universal – where Dave became a drone in their special-effects department – while Leo was not so fortunate: one friend who’d known him in the glory days was embarrassed and heartbroken for him when he found Leo in a line of people applying for unemployment insurance. Paramount also “unpersonned” the Fleischers, removing their names from the credits of their films – Max and Dave ultimately filed suit to have their credits restored, but they waited too long and their case was thrown out for being over the statute of limitations – and while the Popeye series continued under “Associated Artists Productions” (a company formed by Paramount and King Features Syndicate, which owned the rights to Segar’s original comic strip), they were relatively dull and utterly lacked the visual inventiveness that had made the Fleischer Popeyes so entertaining. (One scene I particularly remember from a Popeye film called “The Two-Alarm Fire” features two flames from a fire meeting on the roof of a house and shaking hands, the sort of physically impossible gag Disney forbade at his studio.) About the one ray of light in this rather sad story came when Walt Disney hired Max Fleischer’s son Richard to direct the 1954 film 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and Richard arranged a meeting between his dad and his once-hated rival Disney that led to an unlikely friendship for the last 12 years of Walt Disney’s life.