Tequila Sunrise (Warner Bros., Mount Productions, 1988)

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

I hadn’t realized until last night that Turner Classic Movies had been spending the entire month of July showing so-called “neo-noirs” from the 1980’s on Friday nights, with co-hosts Ben Mankiewicz and Eddie Muller (who does the classic “Noir Alley” showings on Saturday nights) picking 15 films, of which I caught the last, Tequila Sunrise. This was a 1988 production by Warner Bros. (with the current melting-soundstages logo set to a record of Herman Hupfeld’s “As Time Goes By,” a song famous for the film Casablanca starring iconic noir actor Humphrey Bogart) in association with producer Thom Mount, written and directed by Robert Towne (the second of just four directorial credits for him, though he’s remained in demand as a writer) and probably fitting more in with two other recent thrillers Charles and I had watched together lately, Carlito’s Way (1993) and Contraband (2012), than with classic film noir. The big thing all three movies have in common is that their male leads are people who’ve been involved in the drug trade but more or less want to get out of it; in Tequila Sunrise he’s Dale McKussic (Mel Gibson), who when we first meet him is in a seedy motel room with a tall, striking-looking blond man who we’re told is his lawyer but we almost never see again. They’re supposedly concluding a drug deal – at least we see large packets of white powder and a briefcase that’s supposed to contain a great deal of money – only Dale puts the drugs in the tank of the toilet (with a plastic shield to keep them from being flushed away) and escapes with neither drugs nor money.

He’s good friends with a local police agent, Nick Frescia (Kurt Russell), who’s supposed to be after him and other big-time drug smugglers, but who keeps letting Dale get away because they’ve been friends since they went to high school together. This arouses the ire of a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent who’s in town ostensibly to work with the LAPD to bust McKussic and also to discover the secret identity of “Carlos,” the head of the cocaine cartel supplying McKussic’s product. Meanwhile, both Dale and Frescia are dating Jo Ann Vallenari (Michelle Pfeiffer), who owns a high-end Italian restaurant where much of the film’s action, such as it is, takes place. About midway through the movie the reluctant cop allies are joined by officer Jaime Escalante (Raul Julia) of the Mexican federales, though almost from the moment he enters we know that he’s going to turn out to be Carlos. After all, not since Charlton Heston’s role in Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958) has a Hollywood movie depicted a Mexican drug enforcement agent who wasn’t corrupt and secretly part of the cartels he was ostensibly trying to bust. This nearly two-hour movie meanders through various plot points, including the melodramatics of McKussic’s relationship with his ex-wife Shaleen (Ann Magnuson), who’s complaining that he’s being a dead-beat on his alimony and child support (he protests that he’s not making as much money as he used to when he was still involved in the drug business – though, ironically, the “legitimate” business of selling hydroponic farming equipment is one that at least in this country is most associated with marijuana growers) while McKussic is not only romancing Jo Ann but even using her as a baby-sitter for his son Cody (Gabriel Damon) when Cody (in one of his occasional custodial visits to his dad) crashes his surfboard into a pier piling and is confined to bed rest for a reel or two.

Tequila Sunrise is one of those movies that isn’t really bad but isn’t very good either; in terms of stories about drug dealers riven by conscience into trying (or at least claiming to try) to quit the trade, Carlito’s Way and Contraband have it all over this one (though it helps that they have better actors playing the part: Carlito’s Way star Al Pacino is of course a legend, but after mentally comparing this film to Contraband Mark Wahlberg looked better to me than he ever has before: he may not be at Pacino’s level but he’s a damned sight better at this sort of character than Mel Gibson!). Before the movie Ben Mankiewicz and Eddie Muller had warned me that the film would feature one of my pet peeves in moviemaking – an inability on the part of the director and writer (here, the same person!) to decide whether they were making a serious film or spoofing the genre. I’m not that big a fan of the 1951 film His Kind of Woman, directed by John Farrow (Mia’s dad) and starring Robert Mitchum, Jane Russell and Vincent Price, because after about an hour as a serious film noir it goes off the deep end and becomes pure camp at the end – but at least it works better than Tequila Sunrise, which bounces back and forth between the two rather uncertainly.

In fact, as my husband Charles noticed when he came back from work with half an hour left to go on the film, this is one of those movies that seems spliced together from other films: he recognized Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Key Largo, while from the moment Michelle Pfeiffer came on screen it seemed obvious to me that director Towne had told her, “I want you to look, dress and talk like the young Lauren Bacall.” (She did surprisingly well; for all the flaws in the way Towne drew her character, she’s still by a comfortable margin the best actor in the film.) Ben Mankiewicz says he particularly likes the film because of Raul Julia, but he did little for me – apparently he and Towne couldn’t decide whether to overplay or underplay his character (though as I noted above the fact that the supposed Mexican cop turns out to be the head of the drug cartel is absolutely no surprise whatsoever!), The moment we start taking Julia’s character serioiusly as either cop or crook, Towne literally starts having him sing light-classical pop like “Cielito Lindo” or “Santa Lucia” in a quite credible tenor voice (not operatic quality but good enough to remind us that Julia played in stage musicals, notably Nine, the Broadway musical adaptation of Fellini's film 8 1/2.)

Towne also does a classic bit of old-Hollywood “planting” when McKussic complains that his boat (a red speedboat in which Escalante hides half a million dollars’ worth of cocaine and sends McKussic off with it for no apparent reason – the only explanation I can think of is that he wanted McKussic to get busted for it and go to prison, whereupon he would use his drug-cop incognito to steal the coke from police impoundment and make off with it) has a gas leak, which sets up a spectacular climax off the Pacific coast in which both McKussic’s speedboat and Escalante’s yacht blow up, they start a conflagration that takes out all the subsidiary characters (Kurt Russell’s character presumably excepted, though earlier he’s shot the DEA agent who was trying to bust McKussic), while McKussic and Jo Ann are shown at the end hugging each other in front of a seascape that has turned bright orange from the fires. There are some good aspects to Tequila Sunrise, notably Conrad Hall’s stunning cinematography (though this is one of those annoying neo-noirs that attempted to do the noir atmosphere with dank greens and browns rather than seeking a color equivalent to the dark shadows and vivid chiaroscuro contrasts of classic black-and-white noir the way John Alton did beautifully in Allan Dwan’s 1956 film Slightly Scarlet) and a quite effective use of music (notably a remake of the Beach Boys’ “Don’t Worry, Baby” with the Beach Boys joining the Everly Brothers quite beautifully), but it suffers from a set of filmmakers all too conscious of what they’re doing.

Just as, in Dwight MacDonald’s words, “the builders of Chartres Cathedral didn’t know they were making Gothic architecture (though the builders of our modern collegiate ‘Gothic’ did),” Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, John Huston, Howard Hawks, Edward Dymytryk and the other directors of the classic noirs didn’t know they were making film noir but modern neo-noir directors do – and it shows; elements that seemed fresh and spontaneous in the 1940’s (or in modern viewings of 1940’s noirs) just seem derivative and clichéd today. We’re all too aware of how a film noir is supposed to go: an innocent but naïve hero, a sinister criminal plot and a femme fatale out to ruin him – though I give Towne points for avoiding the femme fatale, at least; he could easily have turned Michelle Pfeiffer’s character into one but I’m really glad he didn’t. Instead he used an even hoarier cliché. setting up a romantic triangle between McKussic, Frescia and Jo Ann, and loading down this two-hour movie with a lot of boring footage of the soap-opera complications between the three – though Pfeiffer gets a nice line to the effect that Gibson’s character is really interested in her while Russell’s is only fucking her to get information about his quarry. And one would (at least I would) excpect that a film called Tequila Sunrise would feature the titular cocktail in the plot – at least it would be the favorite drink of one of the characters (a 1940’s screenwriter would likely have established that the mysterious drug lord “Carlos” is fond of them and given Escalante’s identity as Carlos away wheh he ordered one at Jo Ann’s bar) – but the film runs almost two hours with no explanation of the title.

Ambroise Thomas: Hamlet (Opéra-Comique, Fraprod, Mezzo, Medici TV, CNC, Naxos Records, 2019)

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

Last night I had a Blu-Ray disc I wanted to run of Ambroise Thomas’s 1868 opera Hamlet in a new production from 2019 featuring the chorus of the Opéra-Comique (do I really need to explain once again that the name of the venue has nothing necessarily to do with the “comic” or non-“comic” nature of the works performed there? Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette and Bizet’s Carmen, both with famously unhappy endings, were premiered at the Opéra-Comique) and the group Les Éléments along with the Orchestre des Champs-Élysees conducted by Louis Langrée.The stars were baritone Stéphane Degout as Hamlet (Thomas was originally going to compose the role for tenor, but the famous baritone Jean-Baptiste Fauré – best known today as the composer of the song “Les Rameaux” – was “between parts” just then so it became a vehicle for him), coloratura soprano Sabine Deviellhe as Ophelia, bass Laurent Alvaro as Claudius, mezzo-soprano Sylvie Brunet-Grupposo as Hamlet’s mother Gertrude, and tenor Julien Behr as Laertes. Hamlet has got a lot of bad press over the years for being a, shall we say, rather “free” adaptation of Shakespeare’s play – librettists Jules Barbier and Michel Carré (who also wrote the texts for Thomas’s Mignon and Gounod’s Faust and Roméo et Juliette) didn’t work from the actual Shakespeare play but from an intervening French adaptation by, of all people, Alexandre Dumas père. Just what a French adventure writer whose most famous book these days is The Three Musketeers was doing writing a semi-translation, semi-adaptation of Shakespeare seems like a mystery, but supposedly he was at once taken with Shakespeare’s Hamlet and convinced that the play come scritto, even translated into French, wouldn’t work for French audiences.

The main problems were the sheer number of characters in the original, the use of the Ghost of Hamlet’s murdered father – who appears in Shakespeare’s Act I to tell Hamlet that his brother Claudius murdered him and then married Hamlet’s mother Gertrude and took the Danish throne, and demand Hamlet kill Claudius to avenge him, but never shows up again – and the ending. Accordingly Dumas cut out the subsidiary characters altogether or reduced them to mere walk-ons and had the Ghost reappear twice more, including at the end of the last act as a deus ex machina. Also, instead of the bloodbath that ends Shakespeare’s play – in which Laertes fatally wounds Hamlet as part of a plot by Claudius to eliminate him, the dying Hamlet slays both Claudius and Gertrude and mortally wounds Laertes as well, and then Shakespeare’s own deus ex machina, the Norwegian Prince Fortinbras, comes on at the end to take over Denmark now that the Danish royal family has essentially annihilated itself en masse – Hamlet merely kills Claudius, the Ghost reappears to tell the Danish court that Hamlet has now “expiated” the sin of Claudius’s murder of Hamlet’s father, and the court proclaims Hamlet the new King of Denmark. This was the version Barbier and Carré supplied Thomas in their libretto, and Thomas responded with a rather mopey-sounding opera that takes about an act and a half to build up any emotional or dramatic power but becomes surprisingly good for the rest of the evening.

Anyone with even a passing familiarity with the play is going to miss a lot of people and events that occur in it but don’t in the opera – Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are out completely (though some people producing the play also delete them), Polonius is reduced to a walk-on in one scene (and Hamlet doesn’t kill him by mistake thinking he’s Claudius) and Laertes’ part is shrunk considerably (though he gets a nice early aria and a later duet with Hamlet, the sort of tenor-baritone “buddy duet” that appeared in French operas as early as Jacques Hálevy’s 1840’s The Queen of Cyprus and by 1868 had recently graced French stages in Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers and Verdi’s Don Carlos) while Ophelia’s is greatly expanded. She gets a long coloratura aria in act one, another extended solo in act two, and act four is devoted exclusively to her big mad scene, which along with Hamlet’s drinking song in act two (he sings it before he brings on the players to re-stage Claudius’s murder of Hamlet’s father as a pantomime play and thereby “catch the conscience of the King”, and then reprises it after Claudius immediately shuts down the play once he realizes what it’s about and why Hamlet wanted to put it on). Ophelia’s mad scene has become a favorite of coloratura sopranos – Nellie Melba made a complete record of it in 1910 (even though it stretched over two 78 rpm sides, and in the days before her record label, Victor, released two-sided classical records that meant you had to pay $4 in 1910 dollars to hear the whole thing) and Maria Callas followed suit in 1958 (on an LP called Callas Sings Mad Scenes that also included the finales of Donizetti’s Anna Bolena and Bellini’s Il Pirata) and Joan Sutherland in 1960 (on her album The Art of the Prima Donna, a series of tributes to the great divas of the 19th century) – though much to my surprise there’s a fascinating five-minute postlude that includes a chorus that was omitted from all these separate recordings that is even lovelier than the main part of the scene.

This Hamlet was staged by Cyril Teste, who had me scared for a moment when I read the blurb on the Blu-Ray box which credited him with “reinstating the powerful original ending.” That made me wonder whether he had actually staged the ending with Hamlet surviving and becoming King of Denmark, or whether he had used the alternate ending Thomas wrote for a proposed production at Covent Garden in London in 1869 in which Hamlet commits suicide, thereby bringing the opera closer to the “powerful original ending” of Shakespeare’s play. According to the Wikipedia page on the opera, the Covent Garden ending wasn’t actually used in the Covent Garden production, or anywhere else until the 1980’s – when Richard Bonynge, Joan Sutherland’s husband, conductor and musical guru, dredged it up and recorded a version with her as Ophelia, Sherrill Milnes as Hamlet, and an ending Bonynge mashed up from both of Thomas’s versions in which Hamlet dies more or less as he does in Shakespeare. Thomas and his librettists seem to have been motivated to create the alternate ending by the fear that a Hamlet with a happy ending could be accepted in France but would be laughed off the stage in Shakespeare’s own country, but in the end the British productions of the 19th century had the same happy ending as the French ones and endured this brickbat from a critic for the Pall Mall Gazette in 1890: “No one but a barbarian or a Frenchman would have dared to make such a lamentable burlesque of so tragic a theme as Hamlet.”

The authors of the Wikipedia page on the opera seem to be arguing that the French had fallen in love with the doomed Ophelia as a character – and especially with the Scottish actress Harriet Smithson, who had come to Paris with a troupe of Scottish actors to perform several Shakespeare plays in the late 1820’s. They were performing in English, which makes me wonder just how much the French audiences got out of it, but critics raved about Smithson’s pantomime of Ophelia’s growing madness. The Frenchman who was most infatuated with her was composer Hector Berlioz, an ardent admirer of Shakespeare in general, who pursued Smithson romantically and eventually got her to marry him even though he knew no English and she knew no French. She reportedly inspired him to compose the Symphonie Fantastique (actually a grim story-telling symphony about a young artist who, under the influence of opium, dreams that he kills his girlfriend, is executed and ends up in hell; director Joseph Ruben used the final movement, “Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath,” as the theme for Julia Roberts’ abusive husband, played by Patrick Bergin, in the 1991 film Sleeping with the Enemy) and they stayed married for two decades, despite her own life-imitates-art descent into mental illness. (Some of the saddest parts of Berlioz’ autobiography detail the amounts of time and money he had to spend making sure she was taken care of, drawing him away from his own work.)

I have mixed feelings about Thomas’s Hamlet; it’s not the play – not even the play as it would have necessarily had to be shortened for an operatic adaptation – but then I can’t think of many 19th century composers besides Berlioz or Verdi (or Wagner, except he probably wouldn’t have been interested even though he'd written a Shakespeare-based opera early in his career) who could have done it better. (Verdi would have loved the challenge of setting the bloodbath that ends the play; Thomas was probably O.K. with the libretto not containing it.) It’s an oddly talky opera, which led my husband Charles to argue early on that it was in a way a throwback to the all-recitative early operas of Monteverdi and the other creators of the form, which they called dramma per musica and aimed at re-creating the performances of ancient Greek plays (which quite frankly were probably closer to modern-day rap – dialogue declaimed in regular rhythms to percussion accompaniment – than either modern-day drama or modern-day opera). It doesn’t have a lot of big arias (except for Ophelia), though it also doesn’t have the big, churning orchestra Wagner used to carry the emotional weight of his scores. (In 1868, seven years after the legendary failure of Tannhäuser at the Paris Opéra, Wagner’s name was anathema through most of the French musical world; by the 1890’s, well after Wagner’s death, so many French composers were being influenced by him that the Paris Opéra got nicknamed “le petit Bayreuth.”)

Much of it is surprisingly understated, though there are some marvelously theatrical moments, notably the play-within-a-play scene in which Hamlet narrates the action just to drive the dramatic point home both to Claudius and to us. Cyril Teste’s production involved multi-media effects, notably use of a giant TV screen suspended over the stage that could be raised or lowered to give us different perspectives on the action (one of the ways modern directors try to give live stage shows some of the attributes of film), and he also had the actors perform in modern dress – though that’s become common enough in actual Shakespeare productions it didn’t particularly bother me. It’s an intriguing opera and I’m glad both that I finally caught up with it and I got to see a version with the original ending – even though the ending seems rather limp (Hamlet kills Claudius – either that or the Ghost comes back and takes him away à la the Commendatore in Mozart’s Don Giovanni, another opera in which a murder victim returns supernaturally to take revenge against his killer – he orders Gertrude to a convent and the people, who in Act I eagerly proclaimed their joy at having Claudius marry his former sister-in-law and become King, equally eagerly proclaim their joy at having that rather indecisive nerd made King of Denmark). Teste’s staging innovations didn’t (at least for me) cross the line into offensive Regietheater, and he cast the opera well. Degout was a good Hamlet (though he’s suffering male pattern baldness that made him look older than Laurent Alvaro’s Claudius –but he might have looked even sillier if Teste had given him the page-boy blond wig Laurence Olivier wore in his 1948 film of the play), and Devillhe might not be quite as spectacular as Callas or Sutherland but she did Ophelia’s mad scene beautifully, even though at the end, in one of Teste’s sillier staging decisions, he had her sing the postlude through a screen that was supposed to make her look like she was underwater, sort of like the cast of Aquaman.

Thomas composed an aria for “To be, or not to be,” and though I can imagine a stronger setting of this great piece of poetry it worked in the context and Degout did it justice, and he was particularly effective in the play scene and the chilling confrontation between him and his mom. Sylvie Brunet-Grupposo did full justice to the scene and to her role in general, and if anything Barbier and Carré made Gertrude more culpable in her husband’s murder than Shakespeare did (which suggested that Degout and Brunet-Grupposo might be appropriate casting for Mr. and Mrs. Macbeth in Verdi’s opera of that play). Certainly the overall production and Langrée’s conducting (I’ve found him a bit gimmicky in some of his televised Mostly Mozart concerts on PBS, but he was fine here) did justice to the work, even though it’s enough of a fringe opera that when I looked up the 14-CD Bravissimo Records collection Shakespeare at the Opera, it wasn’t included. The works that were were Verdi’s Macbeth, Otello and Falstaff, Bellini’s I Capuleti è I Montecchi – which only has a “cousin” relationship to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet since it was based not on the play but on the original Italian story, the “Daysong,” which was also Shakespeare’s source – Wagner’s Das Liebesverbot (based on Measure for Measure), Nicolai’s The Merry Wives of Windsor and Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette.

Defunctland: The History of the 1964 New York World’s Fair (Kevin Perjurer Productions, 2020)

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

Last night my husband Charles and I watched a surprisingly interesting video on the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair and the clash of the ego titans between Robert Moses and Walt Disney – this came from a Web site called “Defunctland,” https://defunctland.com, which seems to specialize in stories about Disney, Universal and their theme parks from a “black” perspective. I had already read bits of the story in the “black” biographies of Robert Moses, The Power Broker by Robert Caro, and Walt Disney, The Disney Version by Richard Schickel. Caro’s book is over 1,000 pages and incredibly detailed (and has set the consensus view of Moses ever since – that he was a racist creep who as he got older and harder of hearing became more and more out of touch with the public he was ostensibly serving – while Schickel’s, written just after Disney’s death, had little to do with the World’s Fair and the attractions he created for it (many of which are mainstays of Disney’s theme parks today – the Enchanted Tiki Room, It’s a Small World and the electromechanical Abraham Lincoln, which my old junior-college friend Richmond Young praised for its writers’ skillful cherry-picking of Lincoln’s actual speeches to create a mishmash that would appeal to just about everyone’s political sensibilities, from hard-Right to far-Left, and leave them thinking, “Lincoln thought about things the same way ! do!”). Schickel was particularly intimidated by the whole concept of “audio-animatronics,” which allowed robotic figures to come to visible life and speak dialogue (though there’s a funny part of the Defunctland video about how Walt Disney directed the actor recording Lincoln’s lines and essentially browbeat him into giving the “worried Lincoln” performance he wanted).

Disney’s Lincoln debuted about a decade after the science-fiction writer Walter M. Miller, Jr. wrote “The Darfsteller,” in which both live plays and movies have been replaced by “autodramas,” shows enacted in live space and real time by tape-controlled robots, and the hero of his story is one of the few remaining living actors who sneaks his way into a show otherwise being acted by robots. Miller is best known for his magnum opus, the three-part novel A Canticle for Liebowitz (1959), which would make one of the great dystopian sci-fi film cycles if anyone ever films it, but I treasure his other work, particularly “Dark Benediction,” which anticipates Canticle in suggesting that the Roman Catholic Church would become the channel by which civilization would be preserved after a catastrophe destroyed it (nuclear war in Canticle, a space-brought plague in “Dark Benediction”) but also seemed to me to be one of the best, if not the absolute best, worldwide plague story and one of the first books I ordered from Amazon.com as the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic started (along with Alfred Crosby’s 1976 book America’s Forgotten Pandemic, about the 1918-1919 flu pandemic; when I read the book about suffragists and their last push to get women the vote in the U.S. I was struck by the irony of Woodrow Wilson’s role: “Ah, a racist, sexist President who ignored a pandemic. Where have we seen that one since?”)

Anyway, the Defunctland video on the 1964 World’s Fair portrayed Moses as a crotchety old man with wildly outdated notions about what constituted popular entertainment (as Caro noted in his book, Moses was used to building bridges and toll roads people would have to pay to use, not putting on a show to which people would have to be persuaded to buy tickets), antagonizing the Bureau of International Expositions [BIE] (which had a rule that no country could host two World’s Fairs in the same decade, and the organizers of the Seattle World’s Fair in 1962 had played by the rules and got the BIE’s approval while Moses publicly insulted them as “three people living in a dumpy apartment in Paris”) and really interested not in the Fair itself but in turning enough of a profit that he could turn the site (Flushing Meadows in Queens) into a huge urban park that would be named “Robert Moses Park.” It was a fascinating program about the clash of the ego titans and the nexus of government and corporate power – and in a way Moses anticipated the modern era in which governments have pulled back from funding major enterprises and egomaniacs in the private sector have taken over (as witness the current space race between Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk to see who can get up their rockets first and farthest and fastest – as I’ve told Charles, in the late 19th century men with more money than they knew what to do with, the first Gilded Age tycoons who took advantage of economic policies that were making the rich insanely richer and starving everyone else, spent their money on what Thorstein Veblen called “conspicuous consumption” and in particular built ocean-worthy yachts, the modern-day multibillionaires of the second Gilded Age build rockets and launch themselves into space, turning the stars into a playground for the rich and preparing to escape the planet while the rest of us are left behind to live the plot of John Brunner’s mega-dystopian novel The Sheep Look Up in real life).

Just as Moses responded to the Bureau of International Expositions’ boycott call (their refusal to approve of his fair meant that countries which were signatories to the BIE treaty couldn’t have officially sponsored government pavilions) by appealing to the private sector, allowing American corporations to turn it into a gigantic trade fair and also encouraging corporations from other countries to sponsor pavilions that would bear the names of their countries but without government involvement so the countries would be in at least technical compliance with the BIE treaty. Moses also locked anyone building a pavilion at the fair into using the contractors he selected (essentially the ones he’d always used as part of his power network) and allowing themselves to be gouged by these people – at one point the people running the Spanish pavilion, outraged by how much they were being charged for trash service, threatened to dump their garbage in the reflecting pool around the Unisphere, the metallic globe that was supposed to be the Fair’s icon. The story is a fascinating one and it was quite interesting to hear it again – and to see actual clips from the time of the World’s Fair and the people involved in it, including Walt Disney at work on creating a vision of electromechanical entertainment and the futurism of the so-called “EPCOT” (“Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow”) that would eventually be incorporated into Walt Disney World in Florida (for which Disney,.once again anticipating the tycoons of today, incorporated his own city so he wouldn’t have to deal with the pesky demands of a city government the way he had to with Anaheim at Disneyland) – but only, as the Defunctland documentary wryly notes at the end, after Walt Disney the person had died (of lung cancer he almost certainly got from his lifetime habit of major amounts of smoking).

American Masters: Buddy Guy (WNET, PBS, RCA Records, 2021)

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

Last night’s first music show on PBS was a long-overdue American Masters tribute to blues singer and guitarist Buddy Guy, who’s long existed in a sort of netherworld: he’s sold enough records to lift himself out of poverty, he’s been acclaimed as a model by other blues guitarists (including white ones like Eric Clapton and John Mayer) and he’s won about nine Grammy Awards and mentions in various Halls of Fame. But he’s never quite managed to become the sort of icon of blues Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and B. B. King did, and judging from this show I’d say the main reason is his quiet, humble personality. George “Buddy” Guy was born July 30, 1936 in Lettsworth, Louisiana to a family of sharecroppers. As a boy he picked cotton for $2.50 per 100 pounds and learned to play guitar on a homemade two-stringed instrument called a “diddley bow” (the origin of fellow R&B legend Bo Diddley’s name) before he got his first actual guitar, a Harmony acoustic that decades later he donated to the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame. One of the big influences on Guy’s career was a little-known player named Guitar Slim who had one hit record, “The Things I Used to Do,” in 1953 on the Specialty label (the piano player was a star in his own right, the young Ray Charles). Guitar Slim (true name: Eddie Jones) was known for a flamboyant stage act and for being so small the musicians in his band would literally carry him onto the stage; and the Vanguard Visionaries compilation on Buddy Guy features a scorching live cover of “The Things I Used to Do” as well as a song called “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” which Guy wrote based on the old Mother Goose rhyme that Stevie Ray Vaughan later covered.

When Guy got his first professional gig with a bandleader in Baton Rouge named Big Poppa Tilley (Guy had had to move to Baton Rouge to go to high school because there were no Black high schools in the Lettsworth area – yet another example of how Jim Crow segregation was separate and incredibly unequal), he insisted on facing away from the audience when he played – and Tilley fired him the first night. Eventually Guy moved to Chicago on September 25, 1957, and according to his own account (one of the best things the makers of this program did was have virtually all of it narrated by Guy himself, sometimes from archival interviews but mostly in footage made especially for the show) he really wasn’t interested in pursuing a career as a musician himself. He was hoping to get a day job that would keep him alive while he haunted the blues clubs at night to hear the blues legends that had already come up from the South to Chicago: Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf in particular. Guy got jobs as a backing musician and made his first record for the tiny Cobra label, which also launched the career of Otis Rush (another fabulously talented blues musician who never quite cracked the pantheon even though his early record “I Can’t Quit You, Baby” was covered by Led Zeppelin). The show didn’t mention, though Guy’s Wikipedia page does, that his second session for Cobra was produced by, and featured the piano playing of, Ike Turner – yet more evidence that, as much of an asshole as he became, he was one hell of a talent scout: among the people Ike Turner helped launch were B. B. King, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Howlin’ Wolf, Elmore James and, of course, Tina Turner.

He signed with Chess Records in 1964 but, like Rush, he found that Leonard and Phil Chess, the company’s (white, Jewish) owners were no longer interested in breaking new, unique talent the way they’d been when they signed Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry. Guy got pressed into service as a session musician for Muddy and Wolf and, when he got a chance to make his own sides, they tried to cast him as their answer to B. B. King (one of the few major blues musicians of the 1950’s who escaped the Chess orbit: he signed with the L.A.-based Modern Records company in 1951, stayed there a decade, then moved to ABC-Paramount and stayed there as it merged into MCA, then Universal Music, until the end), recording him as a soul singer with horn sections and occasional guitar breaks. (One of his Chess single releases was “That’s My Speed,” a pretty obvious knock-off of Barrett Strong’s Motown hit “Money [That’s What I Want].”) Live, Buddy Guy developed a thrilling act that included using an unusually long cord to connect his electric guitar to his amplifier, so he could walk through the entire bar and sometimes even walk out the door of the bar and play on the street – with the predictable result that when he went back in, new customers would follow to hear more of those amazing sounds. But Leonard Chess didn’t think Guy’s guitar style was saleable on records – he notoriously dismissed it as “just a bunch of noise” – and so Guy didn’t get a chance to shine on records until he quit Chess when his contract ran out in 1968.

He was signed by, of all companies, Vanguard Records, which had started as a classical label, then branched out into folk music – they got the contract to record the Newport Folk Festivals and there discovered their biggest artist, Joan Baez – and in the late 1960’s they moved even further into blues and rock. Their big rock act was the San Francisco Bay Area band Country Joe and the Fish, and they established themselves as a blues label with a three-LP series called Chicago! The Blues! Today! Buddy Guy appeared on those albums and also got to record whole LP’s for Vanguard, but even before that he’d teamed up with harmonica player Junior Wells for live gigs and sessions for Delmark Records, which he made under a pseudonym because he was still under contract to Chess. Guy’s biggest success on records came when he was already in his 60’s, when he signed to the Silvertone Records company – which started out as a roots-rock subsidiary of Jive Records and ended up as an imprint of the giant Sony-BMG combine, which has put out Guy’s most recent records on what remains of the RCA label – and started winning Grammy Awards in both the traditional and contemporary blues categories. Guy has some odd stories to tell here, including the phone call he got in 1987 from Muddy Waters, who said he’d been ill but was getting better and he wanted to make sure Guy kept working to keep the blues alive. Two days later Guy got a call from a reporter who asked him to comment on the death of Muddy Waters, and Guy said, “What do you mean, Muddy passed? I just talked to him on the phone two days ago!”

There were also brief clips of other guitarists, including Eric Clapton, Carlos Santana and John Mayer, explaining just what made Guy’s style so unique; he pushed the finger-bending that enables the player to change the pitch of a note while the string is still vibrating further than anyone else (Mayer explained that the technique began with Aaron “T-Bone” Walker – who’d probably learned it from his teacher, the short-lived jazz great Charlie Christian – only B. B. King had pushed it farther and Buddy Guy pushed it farther still. Ironically, on his own American Masters program King had explained that he started string-bending only because he could never master the slide guitar, so he came as close as he could to the sound of a slide without using one.) Buddy Guy is a classic example of a musician who never became an enormous star (not even, in his own field, to the extent B. B. King did) but had a substantial and influential career through sheer hard work and perseverance, and he made it to the White House to perform for the Obamas (Barack Obama even sang a chorus with Guy’s band and he had a reasonably credible voice, though not good enough for him to consider giving up his day job) as well as getting mentioned by a lot of other guitarists (mostly white and, in Carlos Santana’s case, Latino) as an influence even though they’ve made a lot more money than he has.

Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World (PBS-TV “Independent Lens,” 2019)

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

After the American Masters program on Buddy Guy, PBS ran a 2019 episode of their Independent Lens series called Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World, a provocative program about the huge and unacknowledged influence Native American musicians have had on American music and culture. The show was named after “Rumble,” a scorching instrumental hit by guitarist Link Wray in 1959. Wray was born in 1929 in Dunn, North Carolina, a town so dominated by the Ku Klux Klan that a photo shown in the program includes a huge billboard advertising for Klan membership and another one showed doors to three separate restrooms labeled “Colored,” “Indian” and “White.” Though, according to Wray’s Wikipedia page, census records for 1940 and 1950 identify both Wray’s parents as “white,” Wray said his mother was a Shawnee Indian and they were targeted by the local Klan as much or more than the town’s Black residents: “The cops, the sheriff, the drugstore owner — they were all Ku Klux Klan. They put the masks on and, if you did something wrong, they'd tie you to a tree and whip you or kill you.” “Rumble” and a later Wray record, “Rawhide,” became famous not only for the sheer volume with which Wray played and the overall intensity of his sound, but specifically for the distorted guitar sound (which Wray said years later that he had got by using an ice pick to punch tiny holes in his amplifier speaker). Pete Townshend, lead guitarist and principal songwriter for The Who, said he had got the idea from Wray’s “Rumble” to overload his guitar amp to achieve similar distortion – and both he and Wray himself got notes from their record companies saying all that distortion rendered the records unreleasable. “Rumble” also got banned from radio stations for allegedly being obscene – a strange fate for a song that had no lyrics; Wray said he improvised it one night at a dance when he was asked to play a stroll. He didn’t know any songs in that tempo, so he just made one up on the spot using the stroll rhythm. But, possibly because of the title he put on it, “Rumble” became associated with juvenile delinquency and teen gang violence.

The show begins with “Rumble” and then flashes back to the earliest days of slavery, when white settlers in what is now the United States tried to enslave the Native populations as well as bringing slaves in from Africa. The show pointed out that it was hard for whites to keep Natives as slaves because Native men were used to living as hunters and gatherers and knew the terrain far better than the whites, so they could easily escape. But it also pointed out that 90 percent of the slaves brought in from Africa were male, and since the American slaveowners (unlike some of their brethren in the West Indies and elsewhere in the hemisphere) wanted a self-reproducing slave population, they encouraged Black men to mate with Native women – with the result that, according to the program’s script, 90 percent of modern-day African-Americans have at least some Native blood in their ancestry. The show included a clip of modern Native Americans singing one of their old ritual songs – and damned if they don’t sound like a Black gospel quartette, not only in the way the voices blend but in the call-and-response patterns between the lead singer and the others. Among the major American musical artists identified in the show as Native or part-Native, there were some I knew about – not just the ones like Buffy Sainte-Marie, Robbie Robertson and the sadly short-lived Peter LaFarge that publicly identified as Native and made it a major part of their image, but ones like Jimi Hendrix, who was part African-American and part Native American and cited his Native heritage in songs like “I Don’t Live Today” (which Hendrix wrote about life on a reservation) and “Castles Made of Sand.”

There were also a few I didn’t know about, like 1920’s Delta blues master Charley Patton. The commentary argued that Patton would be the consensus choice of blues fans and scholars as the form’s most important pioneer (probably a lot of people would say Robert Johnson, but Patton recorded a decade earlier and set the template for the various sounds that would come out of the Delta) and they played quite a few of Patton’s records, They noted his use of the guitar as a percussion instrument (he often hit the guitar at the end of a line or beat out rhythm patterns on it, which the show explained was derived from the days when whites would not allow either Native or Black people to own drums because they had “talking drum” codes they could use to communicate with each other over long distances and possibly plot an escape from bondage) and also the whoops and hollers that punctuated his singing. Those are usually explained in standard blues histories as the cries of African-American field hands working in plantations and calling out to their mules and other pack animals to move the cotton (or whatever) along, but this show argued persuasively that these are also characteristics of Native singing. At the same time arguments like this can be taken too far, especially since some musicians who have presented as white have incorporated elements of their own people’s folk traditions. I remember hearing klezmer music when it had its brief revival in the early 1980’s and thinking, “So that’s where Benny Goodman got his style! The parts of it he didn’t rip off of Black New Orleans jazz clarinetists came from the folk music of his own people – duh!” Likewise Bing Crosby’s use of melisma – a vocal technique in which one syllable is stretched out over several notes without pause – has sometimes been attributed to his love of Black jazz music, but it turns out it’s also a feature of the folk singing of Crosby’s ancestral homeland, Ireland.

At the same time Bing Crosby had a direct line to Native singing via his first vocal partner, Al Rinker, who was part-Native and whose sister, Mildred Bailey, became a major jazz singer in the 1930’s and a huge influence on future jazz vocalists. This show actually has a segment on Mildred Bailey – which was nice, especially given how many of these music documentaries almost completely ignore anything before the 1950’s – and attributed much of the way she ornamented song melodies to her Native roots (but once again, other singers without discernible Native ancestry, including part-Black, part-Irish Billie Holiday, sang similarly). Oddly, it doesn’t mention quite a few major jazz names who were part Native, including ones who presented as white (like Frank Trumbauer and Jack Teagarden – and this show had me wondering whether the foghorn vocals Trumbauer sang on some of his records might trace back to Native chants) as well as ones who presented as Black (like Charlie Parker – as important a figure in the history of jazz as Hendrix was in the history of rock – as well as Oscar Pettiford and Sonny Rollins). Ironically, a lot of these part-Black, part-Native people owed their existence to a quirk in many of America’s anti-miscegenation laws, which barred interracial marriages only when one of the parties was white (a fact the U.S. Supreme Court cited in 1967 in ruling such laws unconstitutional); the law didn’t object if one person of color wanted to marry a different sort of person of color. Also, the show argued that a lot of dark-skinned Native people fled to places like New Orleans and “passed” as Black, since as bad as Blacks had it under America’s version of apartheid Native people had it worse (maybe because the people running this country wanted Black people around to exploit them for their labor, while they just wanted to get rid of the Natives altogether; as Adolf Hitler told Edward R. Murrow in their interview in 1940, “I’m just doing to the Jews what you did to the Indians”), and suggested that a lot of the roots of New Orleans’ fabled Mardi Gras celebrations, including the feathers and other elaborate costumes, are from Native traditions.

As the show moved into the 1960’s and since it picked up the careers of musicians who were not only open about their Native heritage but wrote protest songs about anti-Native oppression and genocide, including Peter LaFarge – though they claim that LaFarge was signed to Columbia Records before Bob Dylan and he was their first folk artist. Not so: LaFarge made most of his records for the small Folkways label and he didn’t sign with Columbia until 1964 – after the label had already signed Pete Seeger, Carolyn Hester and Bob Dylan. The show mentioned Johnny Cash’s Bitter Tears album, a concept album about the oppression of Native Americans Cash recorded in 1964 and included five songs by LaFarge, two by Cash and one, “The Vanishing Race,” co-written by Cash and Johnny Horton. On the liner notes Cash claimed to be part-Native himself – though later DNA tests showed he wasn’t: all Cash’s discernible ancestry was Scots, Irish or German. The show also did a print-the-legend version of the history of Bitter Tears, claiming that Columbia hadn’t wanted to release it at all and that radio stations had banded together to blacklist the album – though Bitter Tears went to #2 on the country music charts and the single from it, “Ballad of Ira Hayes,” went to #3. The show did not mention Peter LaFarge’s sad end: after getting on Columbia largely due to Cash’s insistence and making one album for them, he also got hooked on prescription drugs (this was at the height of Cash’s own drug habit and, as usual, addiction loves company) and he died of an overdose in 1965.

It does mention a later Native American musician who was done in by working with white people and picking up their drug habits: guitarist Jesse Ed Davis, who was mostly a sideman and session musician, and whose most famous record is probably the guitar solo on Jackson Browne’s original record of “Doctor My Eyes.” He got hired for Rod Stewart’s touring band at a time when many of its members were doing heroin, took up the drug, got hooked, went into rehab (largely at the insistence of his wife, who threatened to leave him if he didn’t clean up), did a compelling spoken-word album called AKA Graffiti Man in which he played guitar behind Native poet and American Indian Movement activist John Trudell (who was interviewed for this program but must have died shortly afterwards, since the show was dedicated to his memory), then relapsed and died the typical ignominious addict’s death, O.D.’ing and being found on the floor of the laundry room in his apartment building.

There were also segments on Native American musicians who’ve had long careers, including Robbie Robertson and Buffy Sainte-Marie (both of whom are Canadian); after a fair amount of success in the 1960’s Sainte-Marie’s radio airplay and requests for interviews dried up almost overnight, and it was only 20 years later that she found out why: a D.J. doing an interview with her started by apologizing for going along with a letter sent by the White House (she didn’t say from which President, but it was almost certainly Richard Nixon) demanding that stations not play her records or let her do interviews. (Her disappearance coincided with her leaving her first record label, Vanguard, and her signing with MCA, which slapped a self-consciously “sexy” photo onto its cover with the name “Buffy” printed over her ass. I’d always assumed it was this silly and ill-advised image change that sank her career, not literal pressure from the White House aimed, she said, specifically at her opposition to the U.S. government selling oil and gas leases on Native land.) Robbie Robertson became a rock star as a result of his joining a backup band of Canadian musicians that played first behind Ronnie Hawkins and later for Bob Dylan – including on his legendary British tour (well, four-fifths of them anyway: the British Musicians’ Union wouldn’t let them use their U.S.-born drummer, Levon Helm; they were O.K. with the other members because they were from Canada, a British Commonwealth country, but they demanded Dylan use a British drummer, Mickey Jones), where supposedly they were booed at all stops, with Dylan called things like “Traitor!” and “Judas!” by folk-music purists angry that he’d taken up electric guitar and hired a rock band.

Like many music legends, the truth is a bit more complicated; in the 1990’s Columbia issued a two-CD set that supposedly represented the tour’s concluding concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London, but was really from an earlier stop in Manchester. Later Columbia released what was billed as “The Real Royal Albert Hall Concert” – where there was no audible audience booing and where, ironically, the whole performance seemed weaker: Dylan actually seemed energized by the audience hostility at Manchester into giving a more intense and exciting show. It’s well known that after touring with Dylan, Robertson and his musicians organized themselves as a separate group and called themselves, simply, “The Band.” The commentary here gives them credit for launching the “roots” movement in American music and turning rock away from the excesses of the psychedelic era, with its elaborate studio effects and long live jams – which ignores that the San Francisco Bay Area band Creedence Clearwater Revival had beat them to it by two years. (It also, not surprisingly, ignores the complaints from other Band members that Robertson was an egomaniac who took sole credit for songs that were really composed collectively.) The final musician profiled was drummer Randy Castillo, who worked in Ozzy Osbourne’s touring band and had an especially spectacular style that included tubular metal drums, allegedly influenced by traditional Native drums, as well as the normal set. He died in 2002 at age 52 but at least it was from cancer rather than drugs. Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World was the sort of show that shakes up your perceptions of musical and cultural history and indicates that Native Americans have had a much greater role in creating our musical history than we’ve been led to believe – and despite some overstatements and bits of what I call “first-itis” (the tendency among biographers to say the person they’re depicting was the first one to do something even though there are previous examples), it’s a welcome corrective to the standard cultural history of American music, which acknowledges white and Black influences, pays a passing mention to Latinos and pretty much ignores everyone else.

Night World (Universal, 1932)

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

Last night at 9 p.m. I ran a movie I’d wanted to see again for quite some time: Night World, a quirky hour-long 1932 “B” movie from Universal about Happy’s Club, a New York nightspot run by “Happy” McDonald (Boris Karloff, in an odd choice for his first Universal film after Frankenstein, speaking in an oddly chipper voice that seemed to be his attempt to do an American accent), and the doings and misdoings of the patrons and staff around the place. One of the quirky reasons I like this movie is it’s the only film on which Boris Karloff and Busby Berkeley both worked; Berkeley was brought in to choreograph the nightclub’s floor show, and while he was restricted to just 12 chorus girls (wearing hand-me-down costumes from the “Happy Feet” number in King of Jazz), a small set and an old song (“Who’s Your Little Whosis?” by Ben Bernie, Al Goering – presumably no relation – and Walter Hirsch), he was still able to get in both his trademark shots: the overhead kaleidoscope formation and the “tunnel of legs” tracking shot in which the camera pans through the chorines with their legs spread apart and their crotches visibly the focal point. (One male customer is shot hunching over so he can look lasciviously at the display of scantily clad female sex organs.) Night World is blessed with a marvelously cynical script by P. J. Wolfson, Allen Rivkin and Richard Schayer, and was directed by Hobart Henley – who was usually a hack but outdid himself here, starting with the Walther Ruttmann-esque montage of New York City night life and picking up a lot of oddball camera angles that emphasize the anything-goes nature of the goings-on at Happy’s.

It’s also very much a product of the so-called “pre-Code” period of loose Production Code enforcement; just about everyone at Happy’s Club seems to be either a rich sugar daddy with their gold-digging mistress or an older woman with her gigolo. We eventually discover the stars of the film, Lew Ayres and Mae Clarke; Mae is one of the 12 choristers in Berkeley’s formation and Lew is Michael Rand, whose father tracked down his mom (Hedda Hopper) at the home of the man she was having an affair with, with fatal results. (Ayres and Hopper have one scene together, and her delivery is so ponderous and dull one doesn’t question the wisdom of her career change to writing a gossip column.) In addition to their loose sexual morals, the people in Night World seem to pass around guns like party favors: they always seem to be packing iron (this film is a National Rifle Association member’s wet dream!), and “Happy” meets his demise when a group of gangsters comes to the club intending to kill him. He thinks he’s armed, but what he doesn’t know is that his wife Jill (Dorothy Revier) is having an affair with one of the gangsters, so to save her lover’s life at the expense of her husband’s she’s unloaded Happy’s gun and pocketed the bullets. (Henley and his writers make sure we know that ahead of time, but of course Happy doesn’t, and Karloff’s best acting in the film comes when he fires the empty gun and realizes he’s defenseless.)

Only the gangster shoots her, too, because he says he can’t afford to leave behind any witnesses – one wonders how he’ll explain away all the dead bodies (earlier he’s shot the nightclub doorman, played by the fine Black actor Clarence Muse, though since he’s just been told his wife has died in a hospital we’re not all that sorry to see him join her in death like the hero of a 19th century romance) – and he’s just about to shoot Lew Ayres and Mae Clarke, who have paired off after he’s been spending night after night in the club drinking to deal with the post-traumatic stress disorder from his dad’s death, when the cop on the beat patrolling the club, played by Robert Emmet O’Connor (a large actor who made a specialty of playing Irish cops), comes in and shoots the gangster instead. The final shot is of an obnoxious comic-relief drunk who’s been pestering the other customers looking for someone from Schenectady coming out from behind the bar and witnessing the remnants of the closing bloodbath, followed by a sign advertising Happy’s Club, whose fate now that its principal owner is dead is uncertain but unlikely to remain a going concern. Along the way there are barbed references to Prohibition, which was still in effect but on its way out – at one point Clarke even tells Ayres that if he wants to be an alcoholic he should at least wait until Repeal so he can do it with good-quality booze (to which I joked that he would respond, “I can still see, and that means it’s good stuff” – a lot of movies around this time, including Puttin’ On the Ritz with Harry Richman and Young Man of Manhattan with Chaudette Colbert, Norman Foster and Ginger Rogers, featured storylines of characters being blinded by bootleg liquor, often because the U.S. government and the bootleggers’ chemists were fighting an arms race, with the government chemists seeking ways to spike legal industrial alcohol with toxic ingredients and the bootleggers’ chemists figuring out ways to remove these adulterants).

Universal intended this film at least in part as a follow-up to Broadway, their 1929 mega-production which had a similar story line (a nightclub owner is caught in a gang war between rival bootleggers, each demanding he buy his booze from them … or else), but this is an enviable example of the economy of classic-era Hollywood storytelling that the writers and director were able to cram so many plot lines and themes into a running time of less than an hour. It’s also a film in which Boris Karloff got to work with a number of people he’d done other movies with in the last two years: Dorothy Revier in Graft (the 1930 Universal film he made before Frankenstein and which, at least according to the legend, got him on the lot where James Whale was preparing the monster movie and saw Karloff eating in the studio commissary; he got a look at Karloff’s lanky body and rather boxy head and decided to test him for the Monster – though Whale biographer James Curtis says it didn’t happen that way: Whale was visiting his family in Britain when Graft was filmed and it was actually Whale’s partner, David Lewis, who spotted Karloff and suggested him for the role), Mae Clarke in Frankenstein and George Raft (who has a small but unmistakable role as one of the gangsters; he even flips a coin, though it’s a two-headed coin and he uses it to try to trick Mae Clarke’s character into dating him) in the original Scarface (filmed in 1931 before Frankenstein but released afterwards due to producer Howard Hughes’ battles with the censors). There’s also an odd “Trivia” item on the imdb.com page for Night World that claims “Mae Clarke was sick during most of the production of The Impatient Maiden (1932) (directed by James Whale, and also co-starring her with Lew Ayres) and this film, which were made back-to-back. At the end of this film, she was so sick that her face swelled up and she was having hallucinations. She was able to go for detox treatments in Palm Springs and Pasadena.” That conceals more than it reveals: just what was she detoxing from? Obviously something more serious than simple exhaustion!

Icon: Music Through the Lens, part 2: “On the Road” (Cinefromage, Mercury Productions, PBS-TV, 2020)

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

After Night World Charles and I watched the second episode of the awkwardly titled PBS-TV series (actually produced in Britain in 2020 and released in the U.S. now) Icon: Music Through the Lens, a six-part series of documentaries about rock photography. This episode was called “On the Road” and dealt more or less with the art of photographing rock ’n’ roll musicians in live performance. I say “more or less” because one of the most fascinating segments was about the legendary New York CBGB venue that (ironically, since the initials in the name stood for “Country, Bluegrass and Blues”) became the home base for American punk rock in the late 1970’s and hosted early performances by the Ramones, Television, Patti Smith (she and her original guitarist, former music critic Lenny Kaye, met there), Talking Heads and Blondie. But these weren’t in-performance shots because the photographer wasn’t using flash; instead he was shooting the bands outside the venue between sets because he was using short lenses and needed exposure times of ¼ second (compared to the normal 1/125 second of an average amateur camera and the even faster exposure times used by professional photographers shooting concerts, sporting events or other subjects with a lot of fast motion). That meant that both he and the subjects had to hold still for relatively long periods of time – and somehow he was able to get these presumably eternally rebellious, perpetually alienated punk rockers to hold still for him, literally and figuratively, and create utterly haunting images.

I was gratified that a couple of photographers who were quite famous, Baron Wolman (who got billing for his photos in Rolling Stone in type as big or bigger than the writers who wrote the articles with which his pictures appeared) and Henry Diltz, who hadn’t been mentioned in episode one were depicted (and, in Wolman’s case, interviewed) in this one. The people included in the show – among whom were some actual musicians, notably Lars Ulrich of Metallica and Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age – talked incessantly and rather annoying about the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle, and about how – especially in the early days, from the mid-1960’s to the mid-1970’s – the photographers got to hang out with the musicians backstage, party with them after their gigs, and share in their alcohol and drugs. When I hear the words “alcohol” and “drugs” mentioned in connection with musicians, quite frankly the first things I think about are all the people whose lives were cut short because they indulged in them and all the great music that doesn’t exist because its practitioners offed themselves too early on various substances. I stopped drinking in 1978 and never did drugs (apart from two brief experiments with marijuana in 1969, which did nothing for me except make me very nauseous: I figured the universe was tapping me on my shoulder and saying, “Mark, drugs are not your path”), and by now not drinking or taking drugs have just become such basic aspects of how I define myself I’m not at all tempted to indulge in either (and my late sixties would be a weird time to pick up the bad habits of youth anyway). At least one photographer interviewed for the program admitted that he was a frustrated musician and shooting photos of rock bands was the closest he could come – especially since it got him on the tour buses hanging out with the musicians when they weren’t performing as well as giving him access when they were.

There was a lot of talk about how certain photos become “iconic” – including one of Jimi Hendrix grimacing at the microphone, his mouth so wide open it looks like he’s about to go down on it, that I consider one of the ugliest photos of him but for some reason was hailed in the narration and the recollection of the photographer himself as “iconic.” (Actually probably the most famous Hendrix photo was the solarized head shot used on the cover of the U.S. version of Electric Ladyland; it was taken by a young scenester named Linda Eastman, who later married one of the Beatles and became famous – or infamous – as Linda McCartney.) Though the interviewees were careful to maintain a distinction between themselves as artists and anyone who just shoots pictures of things and call themselves photographers, they also stressed that getting that concert shot that’s going to become iconic is sheer luck. One of the photographers said, “If you see it in the viewfinder, you’ve missed it,” and I could see what he meant: by the time you’ve noticed it the moment has gone by and you can only hope you clicked your shutter at the right moment to capture the fleeting image before the singer or musicians changed positions and that magic moment was lost.

A number of the photographers talked about how the rules for access tightened in the mid-1970’s and concert promoters issued a hard-and-fast rule that photographers could use flash for only the first three songs of a set. No one knows just how that rule came about or who first decreed it – though at least one legend is that it started with David Bowie, hyper-concerned about his appearance even by rock-star standards, and his desire not to be distracted by flashbulbs bursting in his eyes throughout a set. Other sources claim it was promoters who decided it because audience members were complaining about photographers getting in the way of their views of the band. One photographer said that when you photograph a concert it takes so long for you to accustom yourself to the movements of the musicians it takes almost a whole set to learn what you should be doing with that act, and therefore it would be a better rule to tell the photographers they could only shoot the last three songs of a concert. Ironically, now professional photographers as well as audience members have to deal with the rise of digital cameras and smartphones, to the point where just about everyone who attends a concert feels they have a right to photograph it and some audience members spend the whole night looking not at the actual performer in the flesh but the performer through the screen of their phones.

One modern photographer whose work seemed especially striking was Pooneh Ghana, who’s managed to navigate the intricacies of today’s music world and its hyper-concern with “intellectual property” and protecting copyrightable images to do work with today’s artists as good as anything Wolman, Diltz and their contemporaries were doing in the late 1960’s and 1970’s. There were also some interesting stories, including one from a photographer who was taking pictures of The Who in the 1970’s at San Francisco’s Winterland and noticed that Roger Daltrey was swinging his microphone ever closer at him. He was in the middle of photographing Daltrey as the killer mike came closer, assuming Daltrey didn’t know how close he was coming, when one of the band’s security people ushered him out of his vantage point and told him that Daltrey was being so intimidated by his presence he deliberately intended to hit him with the mike and just make it look like it was part of the show. So ne retreated to the upper balcony that ringed the Winterland auditorium (where I remember sitting the second time out of three I saw the Rolling Stones – Stevie Wonder was their opening act just before the succession of great albums he made in the mid-1970’s that relieved him of ever having to open for anybody again) and shot down at both the Who and the crowd for some surprisingly stunning shots.

There was also a famous photograph of Freddie Mercury performing with Queen at Wembley Stadium in 1986 – a gig for the whole band and not the Live Aid concert a year earlier (for some reason Queen’s set at Live Aid has become a touchstone of live rock, whereas I didn’t find it all that good – though Freddie Mercury did a quite beautiful song solo at Live Aid called “Is This the World We Created?” that fit the benefit purpose quite well; still, the band that really knocked me out at Live Aid was not Queen but U2!) – and a photographer saying across the shot, “If you couldn’t get a great picture of Freddie Mercury, you were in the wrong business.” I stumbled on this show and I’m finding it sometimes fascinating, sometimes annoying and sometimes frustrating. It’s still a bit hard for me to relate to the conceit that the photographers who take pictures of rock musicians are as great artists as the musicians themselves (I don’t think Richard Avedon probably thought of himself as being at the level of Maria Callas when he shot her album cover for the 1960 re-recording of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor), but there are enough great photos and interesting trivia about the musicians and the often chancy relationship they have with the people around them that I’ve found this show worth watching so far.

Murder on Maple Drive (Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2021)

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

Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” was a film called Murder on Maple Drive, a title for which imdb.com revealed no hits at all – either under that name or the film’s working title, Killer Deal. The only people associated with the film whose names I could find online were the two actors playing the lead couple, Mark and Tess Allison (Sebastien Roberts and Bea Santos). Sebastien Roberts is a hot Black hunk to drool for – and once again, as in the previous night’s “premiere” Next-Door Nightmare, Lifetime gives us an interracial couple (this one even more obviously interracial than that of Next-Door Nightmare because Sebastien Roberts is darker and much more visibly Black than the more racially ambiguous Mark Taylor) without making any big to-do about it. When Murder on Maple Drive opens the Allisons have just closed on the titular murder house on Maple Drive, whose previous occupants, Andrew and Sophie Clark, had been found in the house’s basement a year before, both shot to death with a shotgun. The local police ruled it a murder-suicide – they claimed Andrew shot Sophie and then himself – but we know a third person was involved. For one thing, we’ve seen a prologue of a third person dragging a body out of the garage to plant it in the basement. For another, a shotgun seems like an awkward weapon to stage a murder-suicide; though people have been known to kill themselves with shotguns (does the name “Ernest Hemingway” mean anything to you?), it’s a strange choice to kill either yourself or someone else at close quarters and someone contemplating killing their spouse and then themselves would be more likely to get a pistol.

Which brings up the third reason to be suspicious: as Tess Allison starts her own investigation of the mysterious deaths in her house – and as more people with information about the crime start being attacked themselves – she hears from various townspeople that Andrew Clark never actually owned a gun; he’s suspected of stealing the weapon but he also had a reputation of being scared by guns. (I can relate: I’ve never owned a gun, I’ve never even touched or handled a real gun, and the only places I’ve seen actual – as opposed to toy – firearms are in police officers’ holsters and on display for sale at Big “5” Sporting Goods stores. So it’s hard for me to understand the gun culture and the people I’ve known, most of whom grew up in the Midwest, who can remember their fathers taking them out behind the barn with a gun to teach them how to shoot, including how to handle a gun safely.) Anyway, like the male lead of Next-Door Nightmare, Mark Allison is frantically traveling across the country visiting various cities to nail down a lucrative business deal that will enable them actually to afford the house they have optimistically bought – and that only at a discount because the realtor who sold it to them (who’s also a personal friend of Tess’s) did her legal duty and warned them that two people had been killed there. (Hence the film’s original title, Killer Deal.) Of course what the realtor didn’t tell Tess was that people are still being killed, or at least assaulted, to keep them quiet about the house’s secrets.

One of them is Harmony Heyer, a reporter for the town’s local newspaper, who wrote a series of articles about the Clark killings and became convinced that it was not a murder-suicide; it was a double murder, and though she hasn’t been able to prove it she is pretty confident she knows who did it. During her researches Tess gets to meet two presumably supportive neighbors, both named David, only one of them, David Gleason, is so nice and too-good-to-be-true that we hardened Lifetime watchers are convinced he will turn out to be the villain – and indeed he does, though his motives are a bit unusual for a Lifetime bad guy. It seems he was perfectly normal until his wife died of natural causes two years earlier, whereupon he began hitting on other women who vaguely resembled her. He was fired from his job – though he was allowed to announce it as a “resignation” and given a generous severance package – after three women in the workplace accused him of sexual harassment. He also reportedly had an affair with Sophie Clark until she realized he only wanted her because he saw her as a living incarnation of his dead wife – and of course the film ends with him assaulting Tess until he’s shot down. There were some potential class conflicts in the script – particularly when reporter Heather informs Tess that she was fired from the newspaper for continuing to write about the Clark case because David Gleason was wealthy and politically connected in the town and had enough influence to get her publisher to fire her and quash further stories about the case – but not much is made of that.

The director is Michelle Ouellet, who had also done the Lifetime movie Evil Stepmom my husband Charles and I had watched the night before, but at least in Evil Stepmom she had a script which, within the conventions of Lifetime storytelling, made some sense. Here she was forced to work with a story that made virtually no sense, though she responded with an unusual number of overhead shots and some quite convincing Gothic suspense scenes – notably one in which the heroine has locked herself in the basement to hide from the villain. She intended to call the police but she left her phone behind in the kitchen, and she’s locked the door behind her but it’s a flimsily constructed wooden door and he’s got a crowbar, with which he attacks it and opens hole after hole until he’s been able to make a big enough opening so he can reach in and unlock it. Ouellet has a real flair for this sort of suspense and it’s a pity that here it wasn’t harnessed in service to a better script; once we meet David Gleason, all superficial niceness and charm, we know he’s going to turn out to be the villain and we only wonder why it’s taking the characters so long to see through him – and there isn’t a character like Gabrielle in Evil Stepmom who sees through him immediately and tries in vain to warn everybody else. It also doesn’t help that, though Sebastien Roberts’ character is supposed to be the male lead, he’s on screen so little and when he finally does reappear the villain knocks him out almost immediately, so he’s no help to the imperiled heroine. (Instead it’s the nice neighbor David who saves her from the nasty neighbor David.) I’d like to see this movie again under better circumstances (I had a dinner guest over and he was distracting me, especially since we were still cooking through most of the film) … no, I really wouldn’t. It would be nice to be a bit clearer about what’s going on but I’m not eager to invest another two hours of my life in this sorry film. Please, Lifetime, give Michelle Ouellet some better scripts; she’s too good a director to be wasted on this sort of garbage!

Next Door Nightmare (Reel One Entertainment, NB Thrilling Films, Lifetime, 2021)

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

I watched last night’s Lifetime movies with my husband Charles, a “premiere” called Next Door Nightmare and another 2021 production called Evil Stepmom. Next Door Nightmare was actually quite good: it was pretty much along the lines of similarly plotted Lifetime movies about middle-aged women who become convinced the younger, healthier and recently married lead is actually their daughter, but this was better done than usual. I suspect one reason is that the writer, Stephen Romano, established the plot quickly and economically and didn’t keep us dancing around half the running time before making clear who was doing what to whom, who the villain was and what dangers the good guys were in. The film opens with a prologue in which Helen Henderson (Deborah Grover, in a full-throated psycho performance that’s blessedly and deliciously unsubtle – don’t get me wrong: it’s nice to see subtle depictions of evil, but it’s also nice to see an actor playing a psycho bare their teeth and unashamedly chew the scenery) hounding her latest victim, a young woman named Kelly Jones who’s about to give birth to a baby girl. Helen is convinced that Kelly is her daughter and the girl she’s carrying in her womb is Helen’s granddaughter. This is right after Kelly’s husband has died in mysterious circumstances – the police aren’t definitively able to establish that foul play was involved but when they come to interrogate Helen she stabs one of the officers with a knife and gets incarcerated in a mental hospital for nine months.

Meanwhile, Kelly has been killed in a car crash because she was driving to get away from Helen’s home – only in the middle of her drive she got a call back from a doctor affiliated with the Philadelphia Department of Mental Health (we’re in the City of Brotherly Love and it must be winter, or maybe early spring, since there’s an awful lot of snow on the ground). She tried to take the call while driving, lost control of her car and ended up in a fatal collision with a tree. Nine months later Helen is back in the same house, only she’s got a new set of neighbors, another young couple in which the wife is expecting a baby – though she doesn’t learn that until about half an hour into the running time. The couple are Sarah Collins (Julia Borsellino, top-billed) and her racially ambiguous husband Kyle (Mark Taylor) – when we first meet him he seems vaguely Black (light-skinned but nappy-haired and with a broad, sort-of African nose) but his real racial identity isn’t nailed down until his mother Judith (Marium Carvell) comes on the scene and is very visibly Black. (Presumably Kyle’s dad was white.) The Collinses are caught between two incredibly pushy women, Helen and Judith, both of whom insist on helping them unpack – only Judith is just an overly aggressive but sympathetic mother-in-law while Helen has fixated on Sarah as her next candidate to take the place of her own daughter, who years earlier committed suicide because she couldn’t take her mom’s craziness and domineering nature any longer.

Since then Helen has insisted she had two daughters – she didn’t – and has tried to latch on to several young women in troubled marriages who were about to have kids and recast them as her (nonexistent) “other” daughter. It’s also established that Helen is independently wealthy due to the fortune left her by her late husband (though given from what we see of her, we start wondering whether she knocked him off, too), and early on in the movie she receives word from the mortgage holder of a country estate she bought on the outskirts of Philadelphia (conveniently located just outside the range of cell phone service – since the advent of cell phones a lot of Lifetime writers have located the climaxes of their stories in out-of-the-way locations that don’t have cell phone service so the victims can’t call for help) to which she eventually intends to move Sarah and her daughter-to-be so she’ll have a three-generation all-female family and won’t have any of those pesky males around. (It actually reminded me of Margaret Dumont raising her daughter, Helen Miller, on a mountaintop in the 1941 W. C. Fields film Never Give a Sucker an Even Break.) In addition to Helen, there’s at least one other crazy person in the film: Kyle’s ex, Angela Robinson (Cait Alexander), whom he broke up with because she was running through his money due to her compulsive gambling. Kyle is setting up some big firm and, while we’re not sure exactly what it does, he’s in line for a lucrative contract but he has to go first to New York and then to London to nail it down – which means Sarah has a lot of time to herself.

On one dinner date with the people Kyle is going to be working for as a contractor, Kyle is entrapped in the restroom by Angela, who sexually assaults him while a friend of hers photographs it and makes it look like Kyle was a willing respondent to her attentions. Then she has the pictures delivered to Sarah, who looks at them, immediately jumps to the worst possible conclusion and leaves him a voicemail message announcing her intention to dump him and raise their kid as a single parent. It turns out that the reason Angela did this was she was bribed by Helen, who offered her cash to set Kyle up for the compromising pictures – which Sarah found all too believable because Kyle had also had a brief affair (presumably with yet a third woman) and they had barely kept their marriage together after that blow. Angela makes an attempt to get twice as much money out of Helen as she was promised, but Helen holds a knife on her and forces her to accept what they previously agreed to and no more. We’re already fearful for Angela because we’ve seen Helen knife two people in the movie already: first a social worker named Grace Henry (Deanna Jarvis) who came to see her on behalf of the Philadelphia Department of Mental Health, which is supposed to keep track of her post-release. Grace stumbled on Helen’s typical shrine room, decorated on its wall with a drawing of a big house in which she’s plugged in, on the cut-outs supposed to represent windows, all the previous victims, young women she’s fastened on and tried to “adopt” to replace her supposedly missing (but really never existent) second daughter. Helen realizes that Grace is about to report her to her supervisor as a patient who, though she did a good enough job feigning recovery to get released, is still obsessed about other people’s families and thereby still a danger to herself or others. So Helen sneaks up from behind, grabs her and stabs her to death. Then Helen buries Grace’s body in her garden under a thin blanket of snow and parks her car (a reddish-brown Jeep SUV) in a garage specifically marked, “No Surveillance.”

Helen also eliminates Kyle’s mother Judith when Judith spots a business card from the Philadelphia Department of Mental Health with Helen’s name written by hand on the back – it was left there by Grace’s co-worker, David Mellard (Ash Catherwood), who’s been looking for her since she stopped showing up for work – and does an online search for Helen. (Nobody else in the movie seems to think of doing that!) Of course Helen catches her and stabs her to death, making her The Heroine’s Black Friend Who Uncovered the Villain’s Plot but Got Killed Before She Could Tell Anybody. Having successfully turned Sarah against her husband, Helen’s only remaining worry is Sarah’s best friend Jennifer Wiles (Michelle Chiu); the two of them grew up together in a group home and were never adopted (hence Sarah’s vulnerability to Helen’s twisted affections, since Sarah never had a mother in any but the most basic biological sense and now she does, sort of) but have remained BFF’s well into adulthood. Jennifer endorses Sarah’s decision to break up with Kyle after she sees the photos, but she’s also the one person in Sarah’s life who seems to see through Helen’s smarmy act. Kyle cuts his business trip to London short to save his marriage from the frame-up Helen engineered with Angela (whom, somewhat surprisingly, Helen actually allowed to live!), only it’s too late: by the time he arrives Helen has already spirited Sarah to her new home in the country.

Helen slips Sarah a drugged drink of water and when she comes to she’s Helen’s prisoner in the big house, with all its doors and windows locked and barred, while Helen is insisting that the three of them (including Sarah’s as-yet unborn daughter) are going to live there forever as one big happy family and, whether she likes it or not just then, sooner or later Sarah will get used to it and enjoy it. Jennifer tries to find out just where Helen’s country home is, but she can’t trace it until she goes to Helen’s city house and goes through her trash can – where she finds that crumpled-up notice from the bank telling Helen that her mortgage has been paid in full, and helpfully including the property’s address. She relays that information to Kyle, who’s driving around the lakeshore area looking for the place, and apparently he’s able to get the local police on the line because, before Helen can shoot either him or Sarah with the gun she conveniently has on premises (something of a surprise because she’s committed all her previous murders with knives, but I guess she wanted a tool with which she could kill at longer range), they arrive and eventually take her back into custody. This time they don’t have to worry about not being able to pin a murder on her because Jennifer has conveniently found where Helen buried Grace Henry’s body (ya remember Grace Henry?), so this time Helen will get more than a nine-month sentence and a slap on the wrist. Also, praise be, writer Romano spared us a tag scene showing Helen behind bars muttering to herself and planning her revenge … I quite liked Next Door Nightmare; though it didn’t really extend the Lifetime formulae any, it was well written by Stephen Romano (I especially liked how quickly he set up the main points of his plot, including just what was wrong with Helen, instead of dawdling for almost an hour of running time the way less talented Lifetime scribes have done), had effective suspense direction by Gordon Yang, and was well acted – especially by Deborah Grover as the lead psycho.

Evil Stepmom (Tuna Waffle Productions, MarVista Entertainment, Lifetime, 2021)

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

In fact, Next Door Nightmare was so good the movie Lifetime showed immediately afterwards, Evil Stepmom, seemed weaker than it really was by comparison. Part of the problem is that Lifetime stuck a title on it that gave the whole plot away – instead of starting with a bang the way Stephen Romano did in Next Door Nightmare, Evil Stepmom writer Huelah Lander (I presume that’s a woman, though there’s neither a bio nor a photo on their imdb.com page) dances around her plot premise for almost an hour of running time and wants us to be asking, “Is she or isn’t she?,” about her villain characters, Caroline Hargrave (Tara Spencer-Naim) and her daughter Bethany (Emily Clarke). Even if Lander intended their villainy to be a surprise to the audience, whoever stuck this movie with the title Evil Stepmom rather gave it away. The story is set in Oregon and deals with Tim Lasky (Randy Thomas, who bears a really odd resemblance to the 1950’s psychic Criswell, friend of Mae West and Ed Wood; he’s not bad-looking but he’s not exactly passion’s plaything either!), a widower who’s raising two daughters Annabelle (Hannah Vandenbygaart) and Gabrielle (Julia Lalonde). There were a few bits of dialogue trying to establish that the two girls were actually twins, but they look barely enough alike to be believable as sisters and totally unbelievable as twins – Annabelle has straight blonde hair and Gabrielle has curly dark hair, and Gabrielle is nearly a head shorter.

Annabelle has decided that after the death of their mother a few years earlier from an aneurysm while on a mountain hike, it’s time for their dad to start dating again, so without his knowledge she signs him up for an online dating service. Caroline and Bethany are a couple of con artists experienced at throwing themselves at rich men (we’re never told what Tim does for a living, but judging from the richly appointed house they live in it’s obvious that it’s lucrative; he may not be super-rich but he’s certainly well-to-do), draining them dry and then moving on, but Caroline’s online dating profile identifies her as a doctor and that’s sort-of accurate: she was a doctor in Colorado until she was caught selling opiate prescriptions and was busted; it doesn’t appear that she served any time but she did lose her medical license. That doesn’t stop her from pretending to be a doctor and to have a job at the local hospital in the small Oregon community where this takes place. Caroline arranges to meet Tim at the soccer practice of the all-girls team he coaches, the Toffees (I wondered if the team changed its name from something now considered politically incorrect, like the Squaws – I was thinking of the recent change in the name of the Cleveland major league baseball team from the Indians to the Guardians – though Major League Baseball’s Web site, https://www.mlb.com/indians/scores, still has the old name – does this mean that we’re going to get a whole bunch of superhero names and the Washington, D.C. football team, which dumped the “Redskins” moniker without picking a new one, will end up the Washington Avengers?),where she brings along her daughter Bethany, who tries out for the Toffees and instantly makes it onto the team when she shoots a goal directly into the net. (The Toffees and the teams they play against have probably the worst goalies in the world; if it were as easy to score goals in real-life soccer as it is in this movie, soccer would probably have become much more popular in the U.S.)

We get a quick scene between Caroline and Bethany in their car which establishes that whatever Caroline’s plot is, Bethany is totally in on it and not an innocent victim who doesn’t know what her mom is doing – though in that story it’s a mother and son rather than a mother and daughter, it reminded me of Jim Thompson’s The Grifters and the movie made from it – while we get a clue about Caroline’s agenda from a rather seedy-looking man who approaches her on foot and blames her for impoverishing him and ruining his life. It reminded me of the early scene in the 1915 film A Fool There Was in which the vamp villainess, played by Theda Bara in her first film (and one of only two that survive), is approached by a barely alive homeless person who points out “what you have made of me – and still you prosper, you hellcat.” Though he doesn’t exactly fall head over heels for Caroline, Tim is taken enough with her that when Caroline tells him there’s been a fire in her home and she and Bethany will need a place to stay while the place is rebuilt, he invites her and Bethany to stay with him for the duration. Gabrielle is the one person in the movie who’s immediately on to Caroline – like the Thelma Ritter character in All About Eve – and she tries her best to expose her, including sneaking out of school to pay a visit to the home where Caroline supposedly lives. She encounters a heavy-set Black woman who says it’s her home and, when Gabrielle shows her a photo of Caroline on her cell phone, the Black woman says she’s never seen her before and the complex is so small that if Caroline lived there, she would know her.

Gabrielle also notices Caroline trying to steal her late mother’s silverware and a pearl necklace, but Caroline spies her and is savvy enough to put the necklace back – though one pearl falls from it, Gabrielle picks it up but Bethany is able to recover it so Gabrielle has no evidence that her dad is dating a thief. About three-quarters of the way through the movie Gabrielle finally decides to look up Caroline Hargrave on the Oregon state medical board’s Web site to find out if she really is a doctor. She doesn’t get any hits, so she concludes she’s totally faking it – but later she realizes from the supposedly “fake” ID Bethany showed at a liquor store as Beth Ann Thompson from Colorado, she should be searching the Colorado medical board’s site, and she discovers that there used to be a doctor in that state named Caroline Thompson until she lost her license for dealing drugs. But Gabrielle is getting herself into so much trouble ditching school, playing below her best in the Toffees’ games, and acting hostile towards her soon-to-be stepmother, her dad retaliates against her and lays down the law that she’s to treat Caroline and Bethany with respect and welcome them into the family … or else. (Along the way Caroline has also claimed to be pregnant, presumably with Tim’s child, but we don’t believe her, not only because she’s such a total liar but because, though they’ve been sleeping in the same bed, they’ve been fully clothed and haven’t touched at all.) He’s not specific about the “or else” but Caroline is; out of earshot of Tim she threatens to have Gabrielle committed to a mental institution on the ground that being beaned by a ball during a soccer game has given her concussions that have altered her mental state and made her paranoid. (The quiet but sinister way Tara Spencer-Clarke delivers this threat is the best part of a performance that is overall quite good.)

The climax occurs at the Toffees’ big game, where Gabrielle is supposed to be scouted by a college recruiter who has a soccer scholarship to offer which will help Gabrielle go to school out of town; when I saw a heavy-set Black woman step out of a car and be introduced as the recruiter I briefly thought writer Lander was going to have the recruiter be the same person as the Black woman Gabrielle had run into trying to trace Caroline’s home. Instead Caroline goes totally haywire and kidnaps both Gabrielle and Annabelle from the big game, driving them out to heaven knows where (probably a pre-planned hideout which, like most LIfetime villains in the age of cell phones, she’s picked as a location because there’s no cell service there). Fortunately dad calls them and one of the sisters turns on the phone so Tim gets to hear the crazy stuff Caroline and Bethany – who, it turns out, isn’t Caroline’s daughter at all, but her younger sister; the supposedly “fake” ID with which she bought liquor for the college boys’ party she took the Lasky sisters to was real and she is 23 – is telling his kids. He’s able to hunt them down and rescue them; Caroline has a gun but she keeps getting knocked down from behind by one or the other of the Lasky sisters, and eventually the police arrive and take Caroline and Bethany into custody. The film ends with dad and his two girls back together, and Gabrielle getting a letter that she got the college scholarship after all – they gave it to her after watching films of her previous games. Evil Stepmom isn’t as exciting as Next Door Nightmare – at least partly because its script forced Tara Spencer-Naim and Emily Clarke to play quiet, controlled villainy instead of the high-powered acting Deborah Grover got to do as the neighbor from hell – and after the good clean dirty fun of the previous movie it seemed a bit too understated overall and not as well structured as a script, but it still delivered the Lifetime goods even though, let’s face it, I could have used a hotter actor as the dad!

Columbo: “Agenda for Murder” (Levinson-Link Productions, Universal, 1990)

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

Last night at 11 p.m. Charles and I watched a Sundance Channel rerun of a Columbo episode from 1990, relatively late in the show’s history and when they’d extended the running time from 90 minutes to two hours, which meant that the scripts often seem padded. The extra time was usually taken up by more scenes of Lt. Columbo (Peter Falk) annoying the principal suspect until he finally breaks down and confesses – ironically a strategy detectives in 1940’s Universal movies had been using pretty much ever since Thomas Gomez’s character in the 1944 Phantom Lady. This episode was called “Agenda for Murder” and dealt with Oscar Finch (Patrick McGoohan from the 1960’s shows Secret Agent and The Prisoner – he was actually the third name on the short list to play James Bond in the original films, after Sean Connery and Roger Moore, but unlike them he never actually got to play 007, though his Secret Agent character was a pretty obvious Bond ripoff), campaign manager for California Congressmember Paul Mackey (Denis Arndt, a quite impressive screen presence in his own right) who’s up for consideration as the running mate for a Presidential candidate named Montgomery – whom we never actually see but becomes a sort of godlike presence off-screen.

The problem is that Finch once did a favor back in 1969 for Frank Staplin (Lou is Zorich) – the last name, by the way, is pronounced with a long “A” like “stapler,” not a short one like “Chaplin” – that involved getting Mackey, then a very junior assistant in the district attorney’s office, to shred a key document that would have revealed Staplin as a crook and led to his conviction. (Well, it’s as good a MacGuffin as any.) Now Staplin is once again in legal trouble – he’s facing a federal indictment and is likely to be arrested in a week – and Staplin wants to fire his attorneys and hire super-lawyer Finch to replace them. Only Finch has no desire to quit a political campaign that’s going very well for him and his candidate to represent an obviously guilty defendant in a hopeless case. But when he tells this to Staplin, Staplin threatens to reveal the favor Finch and Mackey did for him 21 years before, which will ruin both their careers. So Finch hatches an elaborate murder plot to kill Staplin and make it look like suicide, which involves two squares of tin foil, a cigar which he shreds in Staplin’s ashtray, and a gun from which he extracts some of the powder and carries it with him to the crime scene so he can plant gunpowder on Staplin’s body to bolster the illusion that he killed himself. Only midway through the show the cops realize that Staplin didn’t commit suicide – the night he was killed he had just faxed his wife, who was vacationing without him in Hawai’i, a dirty joke about Jews (a Jewish woman gets flashed by the archetypal man in a raincoat with nothing on under it, and when she gets a look at him she says, “You call that a lining?”) and another dirty joke about Irish people which he never got around to faxing because Finch shot him first.

The cops figure that Staplin wasn’t in a frame of mind to take his own life if the last thing he did before he died was fax his wife a dirty joke. (One of the nice parts of watching shows of this vintage is that you get to see technologies that at the time were cutting-edge and now have pretty much gone the way of the Model “T” – the cops make a big deal out of fax machines and also the elaborate phone Finch uses, which can actually store numbers for speed-dial so you don’t have to punch all the buttons to call someone you phone frequently and the call-waiting feature on Finch’s phone so he can take two calls without having to hang up on call one so the phone rings again for call two. All these things are depicted here as incredible technological marvels.) Lt. Columbo goes on the merry way he’d established long before on this series – it’s not for nothing that when Mad magazine parodied this series, they named it Cobumble – making himself a nuisance as the California primary campaign goes into its home stretch and Montgomery seems headed for a big victory, which will enhance the chances for the Californian Mackey to be his running mate. (The conceit that California’s June primary could actually decide a Presidential nomination contest is yet another aspect of Jeffrey Bloom’s script that seems ridiculously dated.)

Eventually the climax occurs on the night of the primary, in which Montgomery wins easily and Finch is arrested in the middle of the headquarters celebration and party (which features an unseen Dixieland jazz band playing songs like “When the Saints Go Marching In” and “Bye, Bye, Blackbird”), though at least Columbo escorts him into a private room at the hotel where the celebration is taking place so – unlike the cops in the 1929 movie Say It With Songs (in which Al Jolson is arrested for manslaughter just after he’s finished the song “I’m in Seventh Heaven” about how wonderfully his life is going) or the ones in Law and Order, a show which made a virtual fetish of having its cops arrest the perps at the most embarrassing possible moment (a CEO in the middle of a board meeting or a celebrity while on camera doing a live TV show). This Columbo was quite engaging, and one of the nicest things about the series was that they followed Alfred Hitchcock’s practice of letting the audience in from the get-go on what was really going on and who the murderer was, and building the suspense out of how the characters would find out and what would happen to them when they did. (HItchcock did a whodunit in his early years – the 1930 film Murder! – but decided never again, and Columbo creators Richard Levinson and William Link once did a whodunit episode and got it special promotion in TV Guide because that wasn’t how this show usually worked.)

By far the best part of this show was Patrick McGoohan’s performance as the villain – even though, with his white hair and bushy moustache, it looked like he was auditioning for a biopic of Boris Karloff – at a time when celebrities were fighting each other for the honor of being cast as a killer on Columbo, McGoohan’s performance strikes me as a perfect rendition of the utterly amoral attorney and politician, and his total self-absorption and utter disinterest in anyone else except as he can use them to further his ends (he boasts several times that if he can get Congressmember Mackey elected vice-president it’ll be only a matter of time before he becomes President – what’s he planning to do, knock off Montgomery so he can put his man in the White House and win himself a Cabinet appointment out of the deal?) marks him as a creature of our time even if other aspects of this show seem pretty dated. One can easily imagine him in the Trump administration as one of at least seven close associates of the President who’ve been arrested for felony charges (the latest being longtime Trump friend and chair of his inaugural committee, Tom Barrack, who’s so fabulously rich he was held on a $250 million bail and made it!), even though I was a bit disappointed that writer Bloom didn’t make the villain an actual Presidential candidate – the idea of someone trying to enact an elaborate murder plot while in the world’s biggest fishbowl would have been fascinating!