Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pryde (Joe Rock Productions, Universal, 1925); Habeas Corpus (Hal Roach Productions, 1928); The Haunted House (Buster Keaton Productions, Joseph M. Schenck Productions, Metro, 1922)

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

My husband Charles and I just returned from the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in San Diego’s Balboa Park, where for the last two days a quite spectacular theatre organist named Mark Herman has been performing. On Saturday, October 30 he closed out this year’s Monday night organ festival concert – though this one was moved to Saturday, October 30 so it would take place before Hallowe’en instead of afterwards – which was the venue’s traditional “Movie Night,” an annual event in which they show either a silent feature or (as this year) a program of silent shorts, with the organist supplying live musical accompaniment. This, mind you, is how silent films were shown “in the day”: the very largest theatres had full orchestras, the next rung down had organs, the theatres below them had string trios (piano, violin and cello) and the cheapest theatres just had a piano. Major films – the blockbusters of the silent era, like D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation and Allan Dwan’s Robin Hood (1922, starring Douglas Fairbanks) – not only had elaborately prepared scores, they were sent out with the movie in various arrangements so that whatever the number and caliber of the musicians that theatre could afford, they would have the correct music. DWan recalled that when Robin Hood played in its first-run showings, he would go to the theatre and arrive a day ahead of time so he could rehearse with the orchestra and make sure they got all the sound effects called for in the score right. Indeed, when sound came in to movies in the late 1920’s, a number of critics said audiences would be disappointed because they were used to hearing live music with their movies and they would soon get tired of the music being recorded and played on a soundtrack instead.

As things turned out this year, the organist was considerably more interesting than the movies: Mark Herman is based in Los Angeles and often performs both as a live accompanist to silent films and as a concert artist. He’s still a relatively young man, and in 2012 he became the youngest winner of the American Guild of Theatre Organists’ Organist of the Year Award. The tradition at the Organ Pavilion’s silent-movie nights has been that the organist plays a short set (about half an hour) of concert selections, mostly light music or pop songs from the silent-movie era, but Herman broke the mold. He played three pieces at the start of the show, then ran the first movie, then played a medley mostly of TV themes, played the second movie, and opened the second set after the intermission with two more songs, ran the third and last film, and then played what amounted to an encore, the “Television March” by the British light-music composer Eric Coates (1886-1957). Intriguingly, he repeated the “Television March” at today’s Hallowe’en concert, opening a set that included some of the same music he’d played the night before but also some different and, in some cases, unusual repertoire for someone billed as a theatre organist. The biggest thing I like about Mark Herman is that he has a real feel for jazz: he began his October 30 program with Duke Ellington’s “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing),” and instead of playing with the big, heavy, corny voicings most theatre organists use when they play pop songs, he really swung. What’s more, he was able to use the organ’s cymbal gadget – a cymbal struck with a mechanically operated stick that’s supposed to duplicate the sound of a real jazz drummer playing a ride cymbal – and came close to the model. (Some musicians who’ve attempted jazz on the Spreckels organ have attacked this device with all the subtlety of a blacksmith hammering out a horseshoe on an anvil.) After doing justice to Duke’s piece Herman played a novelty from the 1920’s called “Poodle in the Park” by Dutch composer Jack Trombey (1927-2017), which he may have been inspired to play by the sheer number of dogs in general, and poodles in particular, in the park that night. (I was sitting next to a party of three quite charming women and two poodles, Sequoia and Poppy.) His third piece was “Pure Imagination” from the score of the 1971 movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory by composer Anthony Newley and lyricist Leslie Bricusse – though for some reason, both last night and when he repeated it in this afternoon’s concert, he credited only Bricusse, not Newley.

After the first film – a silly but still very funny spoof of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde called Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pryde made by Stan Laurel (before he teamed up with Oliver Hardy) in 1925 for independent producer Joe Rock, releasing through Universal and therefore getting to use their elaborate sets (notably for the 1923 film The Hunchback of Notre Dame) – Herman played a seven-song medley that included themes from the TV shows The Addams Family, Tales from the Crypt and The Munsters as well as several songs from Walt Disney movies (“real” Walt Disney movies, produced while Disney was still alive and creating them himself before he died in 1966 and his name became a brand): Leigh Harline’s and Ned Washington’s “Hi-Diddle-De-Dee” and “When You Wish Upon a Star” from Pinocchio (1940) and “Heigh-Ho, Heigh-Ho” from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Then he ran the second movie, Habeas Corpus, a Laurel and Hardy silent short from 1928. Dr. Pyckie and Mr. Pryde was actually better – though Oliver Hardy wasn’t in it (and it would have been even funnier if Hardy had appeared and played a parody of Mr. Utterson, Jekyll’s attorney, who unravels the story of Jekyll’s chemical transformation into Hyde), Laurel plays Jekyll as the same prim, impossibly stuck-up upper-class British twit he would play as Lord Paddington in the late Laurel and Hardy film A Chump at Oxford (1940). What’s most amusing about this movie is the sheer banality of Hyde’s “evil,” including stealing an ice-cream cone from a kid and getting into a fight with the cops using pea-shooters. Herman upset me a bit when he made a nasty comment about the film Laurel was parodying – the big-budget 1920 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from Paramount starring John Barrymore. After today’s concert he explained it a bit to me – he said he’s had to play live for the Barrymore Jekyll and Hyde many times and it’s a hard film to accompany because it has so many dull stretches when nothing particularly interesting (or inspiring to him at the organ bench) is happening. I looked up my moviemagg comments on it, https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2021/03/dr-jekyll-and-mr-hyde-paramount.html, and I found I called it “a good movie but not a great one” and wished it had had a more inspiring director than John S. Robertson (like D. W. Griffith, Rex Ingram or Erich von Stroheim – indeed that started one of my Hollywood never-was fantasies: a Jekyll and Hyde with Stroheim as both director and star … ). It’s certainly not in a league with the true classics of silent horror, like the German films The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or The Golem, or the Lon Chaney, Sr. vehicles The Hunchback of Notre Dame or The Phantom of the Opera. Herman said he’s played Phantom many times and it and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis are his all-time favorite silent films – but he’s never performed Metropolis because he hasn’t had the chance to learn the original score Lang commissioned from composer Gottfried Hüppertz and he wouldn’t want to perform it with any other music.

Alas, Habeas Corpus, the second film on the program of vaguely Hallowe’en-themed short comedies was the weakest, even though it had Laurel and Hardy as stars and some pretty major talents behind the camera as well – the writer was H. M. “Beanie” Walker, the director was James Parrott (brother of Charley Parrott, who was a major comedy star at the Hal Roach studio in his own right – he directed his own films and starred as Charley Chase but took his directing credits under his real name, much like such later music stars as McKinley Morganfield, Chester Alan Arthur Burnett and Declan Patrick Aloysius MacManus – you know them better as Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Elvis Costello) and under his credit it says, “Supervised by Leo McCarey.” McCarey was the Hal Roach producer/director who first thought of teaming Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy and worked out they uniquely slow approach to slapstick in general and fight scenes in particular, and he would later direct the Marx Brothers’ greatest film, Duck Soup, along with the 1937 screwball comedy classic The Awful Truth and Bing Crosby’s priest movies Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary’s. Alas, these talents came together for a reasonably funny but rather lame movie with a simple plot – a mad scientist (Richard Carle) hires Laurel and Hardy to steal a body for him from a graveyard (anticipating the 1931 Frankenstein by three years) and offers him $500, while a cop (Charles Rogers, later a Roach director) tries to arrest them. There are some brilliantly funny bits in the movie but none of them have much to do with horror, even comic horror; the best gag in the movie is the one in which Laurel and Hardy try to climb a street sign to see where they are, and it’s only after they’ve got to the top and made messes of themselves that both they and we see the “Wet Paint” sign on the signpole. For some reason Rogers the cop wears a white cloak to the cemetery, and naturally Laurel and Hardy mistake him for a ghost and tie him inside a knapsack, hoping to deliver him to the professor and get their $500. But he’s able to escape, and the three of them end up in a giant well-sized sinkhole that must have been a fixture on the Roach lot, because it was also used in several other Laurel and Hardy movies (including their first one, Putting Pants on Philip).

After the Laurel and Hardy film there was an intermission, and then Herman played two more songs – “Put On a Happy Face” from the musical Bye, Bye, Birdie (and I was startled to learn that the songwriters from that show, Charles Strouse and Lee Adams, are both still alive – Strouse was born in 1928 and Adams in 1924) and “Smile,” composed by Charlie Chaplin as an instrumental for his 1936 film Modern Times (he insisted on making it silent, not speaking until he does a vocal number in the last scene, but writing an elaborate and quite beautiful score that was orchestrated by future Music Man composer Meredith Willson) with an added lyric by Geoffrey Parsons in the 1950’s. Though Chaplin had nothing to do with the lyrics, they’re very much in line with his philosophy of smiling your way through adversity and not letting the catastrophes of life wear you down. Then, after a bow to one of the great auteurs of silent comedy, Herman accompanied the other, Buster Keaton, in a 1922 film called The Haunted House. It was clearly the best of the three films on the program, though it’s still not one of Keaton’s best; it begins with him arriving for work at a bank in a limo – Keaton often cast himself as an upper-class twit, I suspect deliberately to differentiate himself from Chaplin by playing at the opposite end of the class spectrum from Chaplin’s lower-class “Tramp” – only he’s really just a lowly clerk with a typically hopeless crush on the bank president’s daughter (Virginia Fox, later Mrs. Darryl F. Zanuck). Two of Keaton’s fellow bank employees have hatched a scheme to manufacture counterfeit money and substitute it for the real deal in the bank’s vaults (one wonders if Keaton had seen Fritz Lang’s Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler, also made in 1922, which features a gang of counterfeiters substituting their product for real money in bank vaults as part of a sinister plan to destabilize the European economy). They’re working this scam and producing their money (though, alas, we never see the printing press in operation – which, given Keaton’s love of mechanical devices both on and off screen, would have made a great gag opportunity for him) in a deserted house.

To keep both cops and potential prying eyes away, they’ve spread the rumor that the house is haunted, and in order to ward off and frustrate anyone who tries to pursue them inside the house, they’ve hooked up a device to its central staircase so it can be turned into a slide with the pull of a lever. The big gags are Keaton’s screw-up at the bank – he grabs something he thinks is resin to lubricate his hands to make it easier to handle the bank’s money, but it turns out to be glue instead and both he and a gang of would-be robbers get money all stuck to themselves – and the big chase scene at the end in which Keaton vainly tries to outwit that unseen mechanical device that keeps turning the stairs into a slide. By far the film’s funniest and most creative gag appears at the end, in which Keaton, his girlfriend and their child die and ascend the long staircase to Heaven – only St. Peter decides Keaton is unworthy and pulls a lever that turns the stairway to Heaven (gee, somebody should write a song with that title!) into a long slide that deposits him in Hell with a grinning devil (whom we’d previously seen fleeing a ruined performance of Faust by the Daredevil Opera Company that was disrupted by the cops chasing the crooks through the theatre) licking his lips and looking like Sylvester about to gobble up Tweety. Herman’s October 30 performance ended with what amounted to an encore, Eric Coates’ “Television March,” which he repeated as the start of his Hallowe’en afternoon concert. He then followed it with “When the Saints Go Marching In,” beginning it slowly and sombrely before speeding it up to the usual jazz tempo. Then he repeated “Pure Imagination” and did an oddball riff of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor that largely turned it into a tango. Then, instead of repeating the medley from the night before, he split it into two parts, a batch of TV themes that included Bewitched as well as The Addams Family, Tales from the Crypt, and The Munsters and a later medley of Disney songs. Herman’s next item was the Rodgers and Hart song “Blue Moon” from 1935, and then a piece called “Orient Express” whose composer he didn’t identify, which was designed to allow the organ to imitate the sounds a steam train made when it was getting up pressure and setting off.

Then Herman did an expanded version of the Disney portion of his medley from the night before, beginning with “Whistle While You Work” from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, then segueing into “Cruella de Vil” from the 1960 animated version of 101 Dalmatians, “Give a Little Whistle” and “When You Wish Upon a Star” from Pinocchio, and he closed with a far more swinging version – inspired, he said, by the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s version of the song (Brubeck recorded quite a lot of Disney material, including a whole album of it called Dave Digs Disney) and, as a tag, a bit of “A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes” from the 1950 Cinderella. After that Herman played a piece by Billy Joel, a ragtime instrumental called “Root Beer Rag” from his 1974 album Streetlife Serenade. (Joel was a reasonably successful artist by then but his career didn’t really take off to superstar status until he released The Stranger three years later.) Then he apologized because, never having played an afternoon concert at the Organ Pavilion, he didn’t realize he was obliged to close with patriotic material, so he did “America, the Beautiful” and “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Blessedly he did not invite the audience to sing along on the last. Mark Herman is a quite talented and capable all-around musician with a special flair for jazz – we’ve already heard one organist at the Pavilion, Michael Hey, play a transcription of one of Thomas “Fats” Waller’s original organ compositions from the late 1920’s, and I’d love to hear Herman play those pieces. What makes him special is that he has a light touch – he didn’t drown 1920’s and 1930’s songs in big, heavy, thick “theatre organ” voicings but comes closer to the style of the actual performers of the period (including the husband-and-wife team who dominated pop organ recording in the 1920’s, Jesse and Helen Crawford) – and he also plays credible jazz. And, though this weekend was his first time ever playing the Spreckels organ, he seems to have grasped the essence of the instrument, and particularly the fact that it’s broadcasting its sound into an outdoor space and therefore you can’t play it the way you play a church organ, where you can count on a vaulted ceiling giving you natural reverberation. Mark Herman is an excellent musician and I hope we’ll have a chance to hear a lot more of him!

Columbo: “Columbo Cries Wolf” (Levinson-Link Productions, Universal, NBC-TV,. 1990)

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

Last Friday night at 11 p.m. I watched another Columbo rerun from the Sundance Channel, this one from the series’ reboot starting in 1989 after the original went off the air in 1978 – still, of course, with Peter Falk as Lt. Columbo of the L.A. Police Department’s homicide squad (in real life it’s called “Robbery-Homicide,” presumably because of how often these two crimes are committed together) driving his outrageously ugly little Peugeot convertible amongst the cars of the rich and famous whose crimes against each other he investigates. This was the first Columbo from 1990 and the first clue both my husband Charles and I had that it wasn’t from the series’ original run was the song “She Drives Me Crazy,” released in 1988 by the band Fine Young Cannibals, heard as part of a party scene at the mansion owned by playboy Sean Brantley (Ian Buchanan, who comes off as a sort of more sinister version of Montgomery Clift) and paid for with the income from Bachelor magazine (read:Playboy). Only his business partner, Diane Hunter (Deidre Hall), wants to sell the publication to British media mogul Sir Henry Matthews (Alan Scarfe), who will cut costs on the publication and in particular close down the Beverly Hills chateau where Brantley lives and indulges hismelf with a continuous flow of alcohol, probably other substances, and women who seem willing to throw themselves into his much-explored arms at the drop of a thong.

Brantley stages an elaborate operation that involves kidnapping Diane on her way to the airport, ambushing and killing her while her chauffeur Cosner (Mark Margolis) has parked her limo in the back alley entrance of a particular restaurant that has the ultra-thin sliced salmon she likes. A heavily made-up and bundled-up woman gets on the plane to London with Diane’s ticket, but the real Diane’s whereabouts are unknown. Columbo spends most of the episode piecing together a theory that Brantley killed Diane with a female accomplice who posed as her in the limo and boarded the plane, then disappeared. They even dig up the grounds of Brantley’s chateau to find the body of Diane, presumably buried there as part of the plot, only the city’s officials, including the mayor (David Huddleston), get angry at the speculative nature of the investigation and in particular their inability to locate Diane’s remains. The mayor has a press conference and puts the LAPD on the spot for mounting an “investigation” when they can’t even prove a crime was cimmitted – and then Diane turns up, very much alive, and the cops realize that the whole “disappearance” was cooked up between Sean and Diane as a way to boost circulation of their magazine. Only Sean and Diane are still at cross purposes – he still wants to keep the magazine independent even if it means having to mortgage it so Sean can buy out Diane’s 51 percent interest, while she still wants to sell it to Matthews and cash out.

So Diane disappears again and, with a very public black eye from his earlier fiasco, this time around Columbo investigates far more gingerly – only, in yet another surprise twist (from writer William Read Woodfield) on a show that usually worshiped at the shrine of St. Alfred Hitchcock and avoided whodunits or surprise tricks (Hitchcock always thought the audience should know what was really going on from the get-go, and the suspense should come from how the characters would find out and what would happen to them when they did), it turns out that Diane engineered Sean so the whole plot would expose him as a potential murderer and allow her to get out from under him and sell out to Matthews. We find this out at the end when one of the two matching gold bracelets Sean and Diane wear that are really beepers (remember beepers?) from Diane to Sean flashes the message, “Gotcha.” After the decade-long hiatus this Columbo, aired under the episode title “Columbo Cries Wolf,” was surprisingly good; it helped that Peter Falk (like Robert Mitchum) had never been especially good-looking, so age wasn’t going to be the sort of career threat to him it was to a handsomer, sexier actor. It also helped that Woodfield concocted a script that mostly stayed close to the old Columbo formula but also included variations and surprise twists – and though there wasn’t a “name” star in this one (at one point in the 1970’s celebrities had been actively seeking roles as murderers on Columbo – someday I’d love to see the one they’ve been promo-ing with Johnny Cash, who in his few screen appearances as an actor showed himself quite authoritative and considerably better than his former Sun label-mate, Elvis Presley), Ian Hamilton was a quite effective villain, good-looking but with all too much awareness of the power of his good looks and how he could use them to manipulate those around him and get what he wanted both economically and sexually.

NOVA: “The Universe: The Age of Stars” (WGBH, PBS, 2021)

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

Last night I watched a couple of quite interesting nature programs on KPBS, a NOVA episode called “The Age of Stars” and a Secrets of the Dead called “Lady Sapiens.” The NOVA episode – preceded, as usual, with an acknowledgment of funding by the “David H. Koch Fund for the Advancement of Science” (as opposed to the David H. Koch PAC’s for the Trashing of Science, which gave oodles of money to candidates who don’t believe in human-caused climate change) – was actually quite interesting and surprising even though most of the graphics were computer-generated. It was centered around the launch of something called the Parker Solar Probe, a spacecraft which has actually been launched towards the sun – though really it’s an artificial planet designed to make at least 12 orbits around the sun, getting closer each time and measuring the composition and heat levels of the solar atmosphere (which for some reason is actually hotter than its surface). The intent of the probe is to find out more not just about the specific composition and mechanics of the sun (remember that, like all stars, the sun is essentially a giant nuclear fusion reactor) but to extrapolate that to all stars. The main business of the show, however, was to present a vision of the history and likely future of the universe that, if anything, made humans seem even smaller and less important than we did before.

The title “The Age of Stars” refers to the history of the universe as modern astrophysicists have reasoned, in which after the Big Bang the universe was pretty much without form and void for about half a billion years until it started forming something called “The Cosmic Web,” in which the only chemical elements were hydrogen and helium and these gases (or plasmas, or whatever) formed giant tendrils that eventually came together to form stars. The first stars, according to this explanation, were so-called “blue giants” that dwarfed any of the stars we know and ran out of hydrogen fuel relatively quickly, breaking apart as they died but forming other chemical elements from the crashing-together of hydrogen and helium atoms and eventually becoming the bases of the stars we know, some of which in turn threw off planets. What made this even more depressing than most depictions of the likely history of the universe – and this was something I hadn’t known anything about before – is that the Age of Stars is drawing to a close and over the next trillion years or so all the stars we know, including our own, will burn out. When the last star dies the universe will be nothing more than a bunch of giant rocks floating around in space that used to be stars when they still had hydrogen to fuel their fusion reactions. That makes us feel even more irrelevant to the cosmos than we did before – and the idea that stars aren’t permanent and someday the universe will be totally without them seems bizarre and intimidating to me. I had always assumed that stars were like people – they would go through a life cycle and die out eventually, but new stars would form and replace them – but apparently we’ve already reached the point of no return and the reproductive rate of stars has already passed its peak and is slowing down.

Secrets pf the Dead: “Lady Sapiens” (3BM Television, Channel 4 Television, Mentorn Barraclough Carey, WMET, PBS, 2021; re=edit of a British TV documentary from 1999)

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

The show that came on afterwards was a Secrets of the Dead episode called “Lady Sapiens,” a challenge to the usual depictions of prehistoric societies that held that in so-called hunter-gatherer cultures the men did the hunting and therefore were the most important, higher-status members of the tribe. The women in this scenario stayed behind, did the gathering and raised the kids. This consensus apparently started to unravel with the discovery of a set of fossils in the Canigliare cave in northern Italy: a 24,000-year-old set of bones from a person who had been buried in full regalia and with objects important to them included in the tomb so they could have them in the afterlife. The remains were discovered in 1872 and, under the prevailing sexist assumptions of the time, were assumed to be those of a man – but in 1995 a female anthropologist re-examined the bones and realized that the pelvic bone in this set of remains was definitely female. The idea that not only did people have a conception of an afterlife, and therefore some sort of spiritual belief system, that early but a woman could be sufficiently high-status to be given such an elaborate burial challenged a lot of assumptions about human culture and the division between the sexes. There’s a certain golly-gee-whillikers quality to the narration in this program that is common in documentaries of this type (and gets even worse when the History Channel does shows alleging influence on human culture, or even human existence, from space aliens, with lots of words like “maybe” and “could have” in the narrations), but it was also eye-opening to think that primitive societies were considerably more gender-equal than we’ve been led to believe all these millennia.

One thing that fascinated me about this show was how few of the talking heads were speaking English – most of them were speaking French, Italian or German (and most of the discoveries were in southern France, so naturally that language predominated), which made me wonder if European paleontologists are more open to re-examining women’s roles in early human history than American ones. Some of the most interesting points made in the program were from studies of modern humans who are still living the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, including a tribe in Tanzania where a large part of the work in maintaining the society is done by grandmothers, who not only look after the kids while the men (and some women) are out hunting and the women are out gathering but essentially provide the glue that holds those societies together and are respected and venerated. (Years ago I read an intriguing feminist article on what the author called “the crone,” the elderly woman who kept her civilization together and preserved the knowledge that had to be passed down from one generation to another for the tribe to survive.) There was a fascinating segment about tribes in southern France who survived by hunting large flocks of reindeer (I had no idea reindeer had ever lived in France – when you think of reindeer you think of considerably colder and farther-north climates than France!) and had a division of labor in which the women stripped the reindeer carcasses and preserved the meat the only way they could back then, essentially by drying it and turning it into jerky.

Like the NOVA episode, this one did what a science show should do: present the natural world in a new way that forces you to re-examine your previous assumptions about the world, how it works and how it should work – and an obvious sub-theme of “Lady Sapiens” is how much our understanding of primitive cultures was shaped by the sexist assumptions of the 19th century and what effect they had on the conclusions the anthropologists and paleontologists of that time, who read the heavily sexist conceptions of the role of women into the evidence and came up with distorted conclusions. There was even a segment on how women themselves might have been hunters, including a few shots of a living javelin athlete in France that pointed out female remains from the paleolithic era show the same kinds of bone wear that afflict modern javelin throwers. Since the javelin is a direct descendant of the hunting spear (javelin is one of the Olympic events that date back to the beginnings of the games in ancient Greece, and they obviously adapted it from the spears they used in hunting and also in warfare), this indicates that at least some prehistoric women didn’t just stay home, gather nuts and berries, and have kids: they went out hunting right along with the men.

Schindler’s List (Universal Pictures, Amblin Entertainment, 1993)

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

Last night my husband Charles and I ran a movie that was made recently enough we were able to see it during its original theatrical release, but before we were together as a couple: Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, his 1993 magnum opus about the Holocaust, and in particular the story of Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), an aspiring German entrepreneur who when Nazis kicked off World War II by invading Poland and knocking off the Polish military, such as it was, in two weeks saw the chance of a lifetime to make a fortune. He decided to set up a factory in Krakow which would make enameled housewares (it was called “Deutsche Emailfarbenwerke,” which led Charles to make one of his weirder jokes: “He’s manufacturing e-mails? Spam is older than I thought!”) and he would exploit the Jews of Poland for both his labor force and his capital. The capital he would get from well-to-do Jews who, under the Nazi race laws, suddenly no longer could be involved in businesses themselves, but they could give him the money and he would essentially pay them dividends in the form of the factory’s products, which they could sell on the black market. For a labor force he requisitioned workers from the slave-labor camp the Nazis set up nearby Krakow, including one Jew in particular, Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley), who had been an accountant at one of Poland’s Jewish-owned firms before the Nazis seized it and put it under German control. Schindler knows he’s no businessman – from what we see of him before the factory opens he’s a bon vivant who hobnobs with the top Nazis, goes to nightclubs with them, drinks their champagne, eats their caviar (Charles wondered how the Nazis were getting caviar until I pointed out that not only had they occupied all of Scandinavia except Sweden, but until Hitler’s surprise attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia were allies) and seduces their women. (Some critics faulted the movie for romanticizing Schindler and ignoring his less savory qualities, including his greed and his womanizing, but those are there in Steven Zaillian’s script, albeit played down.)

Schindler and his work force live through various crackdowns ordered by the Nazis against the Polish Jews, including first herding them into ghettoes and then taking them out again to be exterminated at Auschwitz, the most notorious of the death camps – which, contrary to common belief, was located not in Germany but in Poland. In fact, nowhere else in Europe – not even in Germany itself – did the Nazis come as close to exterminating an entire country’s Jewish population as they did in Poland. And the reason for that is there was a long and ugly tradition of anti-Semitism in Poland, and the Nazis had quite a lot of help from non-Jewish Poles in getting rid of Poland’s Jews. In 1939 there were an estimated 4.5 million Jews in Poland; in 1945 there were just 45,000 – and the population had dwindled still further so that there were fewer than 4,000 Jews in Poland at the time Spielberg made this movie. And anti-Semitism was still enough of a factor in Polish politics and culture in the early 1990’s that Spielberg, much to his horror, was met with demonstrations opposing his movie and attempts to sabotage it while he was shooting there. It’s important to remember that there were plenty of other attempts to kill Europe’s Jews en masse before Hitler; the only reason the Nazi Holocaust is remembered while the previous tries are mostly forgotten is that the Nazis brought the resources of a modern technological state to their genocide and therefore came closer to success. Indeed, the issues raised by the Holocaust in general and Schindler’s List as a dramatization of it in particular are still very much with us: among the T-shirts worn by some of the rioters at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, as they attempted an armed insurrection to keep President Donald Trump in power even after he lost both the popular vote and the Electoral College, had slogans like “Camp Auschwitz,” “Work Makes You Free” (a translation of the infamous motto emblazoned over the gates of the original Auschwitz, Arbeit macht Frei), and perhaps the most chilling one, “6MWE” – which stands for “Six Million Weren’t Enough.”

Charles and I watched Schindler’s List on the day jury selection opened in a civil trial brought against the perpetrators of the August 2017 riots in Charlottesville, Virginia by nine people who were physically or psychologically injured by them. The horrifying fact that not only are there Americans who sympathise with the Nazis’ racial views but regard the Holocaust as an unfinished job they intend to complete (“6MWE”) – and that a former (and potentially future) U.S. President, Donald Trump, embraced enough of their message that they regard him as an inspirational and almost divine figure makes Schindler’s List a lot more relevant to today’s politics than it seemed in 1993, when most of us good little liberals thought of white supremacism in general and Nazism in particular as something safely tucked away behind historical rear-view mirrors. It’s true that Steven Spielberg seems to have approached Schindler’s List as a prestige project as well as a personal one, the movie that would forever raise him above his reputation as a director who could make highly commercial box-office blockbusters about people being attacked by sharks, dinosaurs or other science-fictional creations (or, alternatively, befriended by nice outer-space aliens whose only “down” side was sticking the family that hosted them with a humongous phone bill). Spielberg wanted to prove that he could make a Serious Movie that would win him the Academy Award for Best Director (which it did). He’d already tried once before with his film of Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple, which was accused by quite a few critics (including Walker herself) as being a rankly sentimentalized version of her book. A critic for the music magazine Fanfare (reviewing the soundtrack album to The Color Purple but referencing the movie as a whole) noted that it set a dubious record for the most Academy Award nominations without any wins, and said that if Spielberg wanted to win the Oscar and be taken seriously as a filmmaker of substance he would have to realize “that goo is not synonymous with emotion.”

There’s a consciousness throughout Schindler’s List that this was Spielberg’s second try at making the breakthrough movie that would get the rest of Hollywood to take him seriously, and like David Selznick with Gone With the Wind he was deliberately trying to make The Greatest Movie of All Time. Schindler’s List shares with Gone With the Wind a very long running time (205 minutes) and a weighty treatment of its subject, this time an exposé of racism instead of a romanticization of it. Spielberg also made the decision to film Schindler’s List in black-and-white, perhaps as a throwback to the days before color production became standard in the late 1960’s when, counterintuitively, the most “serious” and “realistic” subjects and stories were shot in black-and-white, while color was reserved for big-budget spectacles, fantasies and musicals. I have vivid memories of seeing it in 1993 at the now sadly defunct United Artists cinemas in Horton Plaza in downtown San Diego; Charles saw it when he was living with his mother in Grass Valley, California on the Nevada border but he doesn’t remember whether the one quasi-official movie venue in Grass Valley showed it or he had to go to a more mainstream theatre in a larger community nearby. We both re-watched it when it was first shown on TV in a special screening sponsored by the Ford Motor Company, and while most people probably missed the ironic significance of that sponsorship, both Charles and I were aware of it. The founder of the Ford Motor Company, Henry Ford, was a virulent anti-Semite who in 1916 bought The Dearborn Independent, the local paper of the Detroit suburb of Dearborn, Michigan where Ford’s main factory was located, just to have an outlet for his articles attacking Jews. What’s more, he collected these articles into a book he published in 1922 called The International Jew, which became so popular among anti-Semites worldwide that Hitler himself praised it as a source. This was even ironically referenced in the 1930 film Just Imagine, in which a Swedish-American doofus (El Brendel) gets transported 50 years into the future, when people have alphanumeric names, they eat their food as pills, and they move around in small planes instead of cars. Noting that the airplane manufacturers all have Jewish names – Rosenblatt, Pinkus, Goldfarb – Brendel’s character jokes, “It looks like someone got even with Henry Ford!”

So this was our third go-round with Schindler’s List, and it strikes me now as a monumental movie even though it sometimes seems to be trying too hard to be monumental. It’s certainly yet one more demonstration of the fact that no living director can match Spielberg in his command of the basic grammar of film. He seems always to know when to move the camera and when to make it stand still, when to hold a scene on the screen and when to cut, when to overwhelm the action with dialogue and music and when to make the sound screen shut up. The use of black-and-white gives the film an odd effect, at once coolly distancing and bringing its reality home by making it look like a film from the time it takes place (though the black-and-white format apparently bedeviled projectionists in 1993, who were used to running color and had a hard time keeping the thinner black-and-white film in focus). The film also made stars of two previously little-known British actors, Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes (who played Amon Goeth, the openly sadistic Nazi commandant with whom Schindler had to deal to get his workers, who’s drawn as a psycho who will kill anyone who crosses him without batting an eye and not kill someone who’s crossed him equally offhandedly, as if he’s so sure the Nazi project will succeed and all Europe’s – and, eventually, the world’s – Jews will die anyway it doesn’t matter in the great scheme of things whether he lets a particular one live a few days longer or not), though this time around I thought Ben Kingsley’s understated performance stole the film out from under the two higher-profile and more bravura leads. (When Gandhi came out I loved Kingsley’s performance but at the same time wondered, “What the hell else can he ever play?” In fact he’s had a quite long and successful career both artistically and commercially.)

Dramatizing the Holocaust is one of those projects that is well-nigh impossible because in order to portray the horror of it you have to show just how extensive a project it was and the sheer enormity of the death toll, but at the same time in order to make a movie that will be genuinely moving and hold an audience’s attention you have to have a few strong characters to engage the audience and give them people with whom they can identify. In the story of Oskar Schindler Spielberg found that balance (as playwright couple Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett had done before with The Diary of Anne Frank), and though he pulled some pretty outrageously sentimental moments – notably the sight of the young girl, her red cloak “toned” to stand out as a splash of color in an otherwise black-and-white image, whom Schindler sees first attempting to flee the mass roundup of Krakow’s Jews and then as a corpse as the local Nazis get orders from above to exhume and burn the bodies of the victims they’ve already massacred – overall he makes Schindler’s character arc, from exploiting the Jews as slave laborers to make money to putting himself on the line and spending his entire fortune to bribe Nazi higher-ups into saving them as “essential workers” (a phrase that in the current COVID-19 era has a whole different set of implications than the ones Spielberg and Zaillian had here), convincing. And it occurred to me that Spielberg here was doing something of the same thing he and his later writer, Tony Kushner, were roasted by critics (especially Leftist critics) for 20 years ago in his film Lincoln, about the adoption of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution banning slavery, which lovingly details all the bribes and corrupt deals Lincoln and his fellow Republicans in Congress had to do to get the great anti-slavery amendment through.

Here Spielberg and Zaillian equally lovingly detail the sheer amount of bribery and corruption to get “his” Jews spared the Holocaust and relocated to his new armaments factory in Czechoslovakia, where (in a neat detail in Zaillian’s script) he deliberately sabotages his own production because by that time he’d come to believe it would be a greater good if Germany lost the war. Schindler’s List eloquently portrays the bizarre duality at the heart of the Nazi project – its calculated cruelty and its efficiency: in one of the film’s most terrifying scenes, the belongings of the Jews who’ve been exterminated at Auschwitz are casually and matter-of-factly sorted into the useless (their personal photos) and the potentially useful, including teeth with golden fillings extracted from the corpses so the gold could be mented down and salvaged. There’s also a remarkable scene in which the train carrying the men on Schindler’s list gets to its destination at his Czech factory but the train with the women and children gets sent to Auschwitz instead (meaning that Schindler has to come up with more wealth this time in the form of uncut diamonds – to ransom them again), and the Jews that were supposed to be spared get put through the killing machinery – their hair is cut off and they’re locked into Auschwitz’ infamous “showers” which dispensed poison gas – only at the very last minute the showers start pouring out water instead, indicating that these particular victims will be spared after all. Schindler’s List manages to portray the horror of the Holocaust without letting us see Hitler or any of the other top Nazi leaders, or having us endure hearing them spew out their racist garbage: they simply are, and because of who and what they are some people get money from their victims, some people get to indulge their most violent fantasies (one of the most depressing aspects of the Nazi story in general is how many people deeply enjoy and love the idea of killing other people, and given social permission – as they were quite explicitly in the Nazi era and as they have been, albeit more subliminally and less overtly, in this country by the creeps from the National Rifle Association and other gun-lobby groups who implicitly say that mass shootings are the price we have to pay for the “freedom” to bear arms) and a lot of people end up iimprisoned or dead.

Given how we are watching the potential transformation of the United States into a fascist dictatorship – not only with Donald Trump as a would-be Hitler but millions of Americans supporting him blindly, including a large fraction who believe the QAnon nonsense that the world is run by a cabal of cannibalistic pedophiles and Trump has literally been sent by God to redeem us from them (the similarities between the way the Nazis depicted the allegedly all-powerful Jews as masterminds of a conspiracy to rule the world and the modern-day American Right’s fantasies of a “deep state” are all too frightening) – and with President Biden and the Democratic Party in general offering little but the most feeble kinds of resistance (they can’t even get together to pass a bill in Congress to protect themselves against Right-wing plots to steal future American elections and rig them so the Right will always win!), it seems like sometimes we’re in a terrifying historical rerun that makes a movie like Schindler’s List not only history but potential prophecy.

Danger Next Door, a.k.a. The Danger Next Door, a.k.a. Terror in the Country (CMW Winter Productions, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2021)

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

Last night my husband Charles and I ended up watching a pretty standard-issue Lifetime movie, listed on imdb.com as The Danger Next Door (with a working title given as Terror in the Country) but shown under just Danger Next Door (without the article). Actually that’s not a literally accurate title because the danger the central couple, Robin (Hannah Emily Anderson) and her husband Ben (Jake Epstein) are in comes not from next door but from across the street. When the story starts they’re an upwardly mobile couple in Chicago; she’s an attorney with a big law firm where she’s about to make junior partner, and he’s an aspiring novelist who’s just got a contract for his first book. Then it all gets spoiled one night when a mugger assaults them on the street, gives Ben a life-threatening blow and forces Robin to give him her wedding ring as well as all her other valuables. This freaks both of them out; Robin keeps freaking out whenever she sees anyone on the street who vaguely resembles her mugger (which director Bill Corcoran oddly shoots in a way reminiscent of the marvelous montage in The Gay Divorcée when Fred Astaire, having met Ginger Rogers but then lost track of her, reacts to every woman he sees in the street who even vaguely resembles her – of course, the main difference is in an Astaire-Rogers musical you want him to find her again, and expect him to), and this derails her fast track to promotion at her law firm because every time she tries to return to work, she sees a seedy-looking guy in the street and is intimidated enough to return home and work there.

Ben catches Robin leafing through an issue of Country Life magazine and the two of them decide that the way to save their marriage, their sanity and her ability to give birth to their child in safety and security is to relocate an hour and a half away from the city. They duly find a home in a country community, and in the manner of innumerable previous Lifetime movies on this theme they’re immediately greeted by neighbors Sharon (Kyra Harper) and Guy (David Ferry). The entire story was prefaced by a prologue whose significance only becomes apparent much later: a teenage couple are shown making out in a car and progressing to out-and-out sex – they’re jnot worried about her getting pregnant because she already is – only they notice people from another car are watching them. They frantically try to defrost the windows so they can get away, but no such luck: another car barrels into them and kills them both. At first I thought where the writer (who was listed on the opening credits but isn’t on imdb.com) was going with this was that Guy and Sharon were sort of avenging angels who caught people expressing their sexuality in ways and places they considered inappropriate, and had deliberately rammed their car into that of the young couple, but the connection only becomes apparent several acts later. To continue her legal career while her husband writes his book, Robin has taken a job with a local attorney named Amanda Foster (oddly, imdb.com lists the actress who plays this character’s teenage incarnation in a flashback – Naya Liviah – but not who plays her as an adult; also, Amanda is the only character the writer blessed with a last name).

The moment Amanda was introduced and I saw she was Black, I immediately assumed the writer was setting her up to be The Heroine’s African-American Best Friend Who Discovers the Villain’s Plan but Is Killed Before She Can Warn the Heroine. What I wasn’t expecting is that Amanda is the character who reveals the clue that lets Robin and us know the real motive behind Sharon’s and Guy’s campaign against them – which escalates to them literally letting themselves into Robin’s and Ben’s home any time they feel like it. (Obviously they have keys to the place, which made me wonder why it never occurred to Ben and Robin to have their locks changed.) It turns out that back in their high-school days Amanda was best friends with Sharon’s and Guy’s daughter Riley (Alexandra Floras-Matic, who obviously got the part when the producers decided to upgrade from Alexandra Floras-Manual – joke) until Riley went off the rails and started indulging in alcohol, pills and men. Lots of men, one of whom knocked her up. Those two were the couple we saw in the opening scene necking, and almost fucking, and though the other car that rammed into theirs and killed them was just a random driver, Sharon had driven out in her own car, followed them and intended to confront her daughter Riley and stop her from wrecking her life by running off with her latest boyfriend de jour. So Sharon and Guy had become obsessed with the idea of kidnapping and indefinitely holding another young, pregnant woman the age Riley would be if she’d lived, thereby reproducing their family. Also in the dramatis personae is Robin’s own mother, Carla (Paula Boudreau), who comes to visit them and gets clonged on the head by Sharon with a casserole dish – the film inserted a commercial break just before the blue and when it resumed, the scene was Robin tied up and gagged in Sharon’s and Guy’s basement (a truly hellish environment featuring a doll’s house and racks of rather gruesome-looking home-canned foods).

Naturally she can’t get out – all the windows have been locked or nailed shut and so has the door – and this sets up a series of Lifetime-esque confrontations in which Ben has returned from an out-of-town trip (which provided Sharon and Guy the opening they needed to kidnap Robin), finds his house empty but discovers Carla, knocked unconscious and with her hands bound with duct tape. Ben tells Carla to call 911 and get the police involved (until then we have had no idea how this little town does its law enforcement, and I wondered if it was too small to have its own sheriff’s deputy and they’d have to send to the next town over for police help), though in a goof Charles noted he neglects to undo the bondage, so just how she makes the call is a mystery. Ben goes over but gets stabbed by Guy, who gets Ben’s blood all over his hands and then, like Macbeth, has a crisis of conscience and feels guilty about having nearly killed someone. In the confusion Robin is able to escape the basement and cut through her own duct-tape bondage through a rail on Guy’s and Sharon’s bed, then is able to knock out both of them. The police arrive and in the end Ben and Robin are rescued, though we never find out what happened to Amanda – whether she got to live or suffered at Sharon’s and Guy’s hands the usual fate of the Heroine’s Black Best Friend in a Lifetime movie. Also one of the minor issues of the story is the gender of Robin’s and Ben’s baby – through their connections with the small town’s obstetrician, Sharon and Guy find out it’s going to be a girl before Ben and Robin themselves know (they were going old-school and wanted it to be a surprise). And there are the usual sinister implications that Sharon and Guy had done this before to a couple named Stephens who formerly occupied That House.

The ending was a bit of a surprise – I had thought Ben and Robin would move back to Chicago, deciding that muggers were less of a threat than psycho country neighbors, but instead they’re comfortably ensconced on the front porch of their country home and it’s the former home of Sharon and Guy that has the “For Sale” sign out front. Danger Next Door is pieced together, Frankenstein monster-style, from bits and pieces of other (and mostly better) Lifetime movies, and while director Corcoran sporadically attempts to make it into a Gothic horror piece he’s really not very good at that sort of thing – and after the strong and incisive performances in The Good Father: The Martin MacNeill Story it was disappointing to see acting in a Lifetime movie revert to its usual level of slovenliness.

The Good Father: The Martin MacNeill Story (Julijette, Lifetime, 2021)

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

Last night Lifetime reran one of their recent telecasts, a more or less fact-based movie called The Good Father: The Martin MacNeill Story based on a mysterious death in the suburbs of Provo, Utah (who knew Provo was big enough to have suburbs?) in 2007. The victim was Michele Marie Somers MacNeill (Charisma Carpenter) and her killer was her husband, Dr. Martin MacNeill (Tom Everett Scott in a chilling performance of controlled villainy). When the film opens the MacNeills seem to be living the perfect suburban existence in Provo – he’s a highly respected doctor with good connections in the town, she’s a dedicated homemaker, and in the film’s opening scene she’s winning a town award as “Sunday School Teacher of the Year.” (It’s not stated in the film, but – not surprisingly, given where the story takes place – the real MacNeills were Mormons.) Only Michele is getting suspicious of her husband, who seems more withdrawn and distant than usual and who skips out a lot, ostensibly for medical emergencies. She suspects he’s having an affair, and of course she’s right; she enlists her daughter Alexis (Anwen O’Driscoll), a medical student in Nevada, to investigate him. Alexis comes up with a set of Martin’s phone records that proves he’s been making frequent calls at all hours of the day and night to a woman named Jillian “Gypsy” Willis (Nicola Correia-Damude). Either at Martin’s urging or to make herself look younger in order to be more competitive with her husband’s “other woman,” Michele agrees to undergo a facelift and she ends up with her head swathed in bandages (thinking of the 1947 film Dark Passage, I thought, “Oh, great. She;’s going to end up looking like Humphrey Bogart”).

At her husband’s urging, her plastic surgeon prescribes her a whole raft of very nasty painkillers, including oxycodone, and we get the impression Martin is trying to engineer his wife’s death by giving her so many dangerous drugs she’ll die of a polypharmaceutical overdose. Her death occurs eight days after she’s released from the hospital; Martin sends his five-year-old adopted daughter to the bathroom, where she discovers Michele’s body slumped over the bathtub. Martin passes it off as an accidental drowning as she was trying to unstop the tub following her bath, and the authorities initially buy that. But Alexis is suspicious – she doesn’t think her dad killed her mom, at least at first, but she takes an instant dislike to Gypsy when dad moves her into the home, ostensibly to be his kids’ “nanny.” (In the script the MacNeills have one biological child, Alexis, and four prepubescent girls they adopted from Ukraine. In real life the MacNeills had four children of their own as well as the four adoptees, and one of them, their son Damian, himself committed suicide in 2010 while attending law school in New York.) The nascent conflicts between Martin and Alexis flare up into open warfare once Martin moves Gypsy into the house and demands that Alexis accept her as essentially her stepmother – and director Annie Bradley, working from a script by John Fasano and Abdi Nazermian, stages a nice opening shot to introduce her: we see her emerge from the back of the car that’s driven her to the MacNeill home, and she’s dressed in the sort of skimpy black-lace dress one would expect a high-end call girl to dress in for work.

The film then turns into a battle of wills between Martin and Alexis (both superbly acted by Scott and O’Driscoll), as she grows more determined to find out the truth about him and uncover all his lies. She already knew that shortly after his marriage Martin served a six-month sentence for check fraud – something Martin had explained to Michele as no big deal, some sort of accounting mistake – and now, digging deeper into her dad’s past, she finds out he was stealing the identities of dead people and using them to defraud. She also finds out that he faked his transcripts to get into medical school, stealing the records of a dead fellow student to do so. Alexis goes to various authorities, including the police (represented by a disinterested, heavy-set Black detective who just wants to get this crazy white woman out of his office already) and Child Protective Services, while dad clandestinely ships one of his adoptees back to Ukraine and asks Alexis for her passport so he can fake an identity for Gypsy – who, it turns out, was on the run from the law for her own criminal activities. (As Alexis notes later on in her dialogue, the two scumbags seem made for each other.) Eventually, Alexis, with the help of a retired cop who’s a friend of the family, nails Martin for identity fraud in faking Gypsy’s passport, and that allows them to get the police to hold him long enough to charge him with the murder of Michele. He’s tried and convicted in 2017 – yes, that’s right, it took his daughter ten years to bring him to book – and sentenced to 17 years to life, but shortly thereafter he kills himself in his cell.

The Good Father: The Martin MacNeill Story is a chilling tale that sometimes lapses into Lifetime’s usual clichéd silliness, but it’s also an effective thriller and quite a lot more credible than many movies in which someone we’ve seemingly been set up to like emerges as a villain. It does suffer from one flaw of a lot of movies – and not just Lifetime movies, either – where do the characters get their money? Martin is a doctor, all right, but in small-town Utah, and Alexis seems to have almost limitless financial resources of her own, able to afford repeated travel (including at least two trips to Ukraine as Martin tries to send one of his adopted kids back – the implication is he wants to get rid of all of them so he and Gypsy can live their romantic idyll unencumbered by anything as pesky as “family”), as well as being able to take days or even weeks off her medical studies in Nevada at a moment’s notice. (Just about everyone I know who actually went to medical school has told me it’s literally an all-encompassing experience that leaves you utterly no time or energy, physical or mental, for anything else.) And I can’t help but irreverently suggest that perhaps Michele MacNeill’s early demise is collateral damage from the Mormons having been forced by the federal government to give up polygamy in 1890; maybe if Martin had been able legally to take Gypsy as wife number two, he wouldn’t have felt compelled to knock off wife number one …

Switched Before Birth (Lifetime, 2021)

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

The next of last night’s Lifetime movies was the much-ballyhooed “premiere,” Switched Before Birth, a “take” on the risks and overall chanciness of in vitro fertilization in which – as the promos for the film made clear – two women’s embryos got mixed up and one got implanted in the other’s womb. (The promos actually made it look like both mothers gave birth to each other’s babies, but that’s not the story writer Kelly Ferguson wrote.) Once again, we have a story that carefully ignores or explains away the sheer amount of money the principals are spending trying to have their own biological children despite nature’s constraints. Though one claimant couple, Anna Ramirez (Justina Machado, who delivers a full-bodied – physically and emotionally – performance that’s by far the best in the film) and her husband Gabe (Yancey Arias), are entrepreneurial enough they own three successful restaurants, that’s not that lucrative a business; while the other couple, Olivia Crawford (Skyler Samuels) and her husband Brian (Bo Yokely), have proletarian jobs, he in construction and she as a clerk in a liquor store whose owner seems boundlessly patient with her when she keeps asking for time off to visit her fertility doctor and drives her to the hospital when her water breaks while she’s working. The action centers around something called the Nori Family Center – at first I thought “NORI” was an acronym for something but it turns out to be the name of the doctor who runs the place, a heavy-set (East) Indian with a manner perched uneasily between the beneficent and the creepy. Olivia has already lost two IVF babies to miscarriages when the film begins, but somehow she and her husband have been able to scrape the cash together for another try. Meanwhile, Anna has learned from that creepy Dr. Nori that the reason she hasn’t been able to get pregnant au naturel is not her fault, it’s her husband’s: somehow his sperm is defective and unable to fertilize his wife’s (or anybody else’s) eggs.

So Dr. Nori sends her home with a photo book containing profiles of potential sperm donors, including accounts of their family histories, careers and hobbies, and they pick one after Gabe has rejected Anna’s first choice as too white-looking to father a Latino couple’s child. Writer Ferguson spends the first hour of the movie carefully building up a loving and mutually supportive friendship between Olivia and Anna as they meet by chance at the fertility clinic, obviously to increase the irony of what’s going to happen to them later – which we know in advance if we’ve seen the promos – which is that they’ll be at each other’s throats. Dr. Nori ministers to them on the same morning but gets the samples mixed up; Anna gets one of her own embryos but Olivia gets both one of hers and one of Anna’s, and as things turn out Anna loses hers in a miscarriage (another miscarriage? Miscarriages ex machina are becoming one of Lifetime’s most annoying clichés) while Olivia gives birth to a boy and a girl whom she and Brian assume are fraternal twins. Only the first indication they get that they’re not only not fraternal twins, they’re not fraternal at all, is when boy Sam’s blood test comes back type AB (both the Crawfords are type O, as is their daughter Mia). Then they get a call from the clinic that there was a “mixup” and she was accidentally impregnated with Anna’s embryo as well as her own – and the friendship between the two women immediately turns into scorched-earth antagonism as both Olivia and Anna sue for custody of Sam. The officials at family court try to arrange a meeting between the two women to see if they can settle it themselves, but when Olivia says she’s keeping Sam but will allow Anna “visitation,” she goes berserk and grabs Olivia’s arm, forcing the court personnel to break them up and end the session.

Switched Before Birth isn’t that good a movie – director Elisabeth Röhm (best known, at least to me, for her four seasons as a prosecutor on the original Law and Order) gets a great performance out of Justina Machado, the rest of the acting is pretty blah and she doesn’t have the command of suspense or dramatic intensity Annie Bradley brought to The Good Father, and Fullerton’s script seems like two movies stuck together, a Hallmark Channel-ish first half and a more Lifetime-esque second – but it clarified for me why I get a creepy, skin-crawling feeling about all these bizarre biomedical tricks being used to get people to have children when nature pretty clearly doesn’t intend them to. Though he’s only in that one scene, the actor playing Olivia’s father expressed my view completely when during a family dinner he asks her and Brian why they are spending so much money, time and effort to conceive artificially “when there are so many babies out there who need good homes.” He asked the question I’d been asking all movie: why don’t they adopt? Yes, I know that a lot of couples out there are obsessed with having “their” children instead of raising someone who, however much you might love them and regard them as your own, are not your biological kin. The growing consciousness about genetic diseases, particularly ones that develop later in life, has also helped discourage adoption and made families who do adopt more willing to keep the adoptions “open” so they can remain in touch with the birth mother and do workups about the risks of genetic diseases.

Still, there’s a fetishistic aspect to the whole artificial-fertility biz – “This child is mine!” – no matter how detached the process of bringing that child into the world is from normal human reproduction. It gets even detached in a story like this when you realize that the child Anna and Gabe are fighting so hard to keep is biologically hers but not his – and it gets even farther out when couples hire a surrogate to carry their pregnancy for them, and even worse when the surrogate is also the biological mother. There’s a sense of “It’s not nice to fool with Mother Nature” about this whole subject, as well as a bit of Brave New World and the obvious parallel between the dilemma facing the judge in the family court case – a rather nerdy-looking young Asian guy named Mariposa (Kurt Yue) – and the one King Solomon had to deal with in the Bible between two rival mothers claiming the same baby. Röhm and Fullerton do create genuine suspense about how the final court case will go – through much of the ending I thought the judge would award custody of Sam to the Crawfords simply because they’re white and the Ramirezes are Latino; and if he gave Sam to the Ramirezes it would be because as successful independent businesspeople they’d be able to give him a more affluent upbringing as the Crawfords. (Financial questions like that have a lot more to do with how familiy court decisions are made than we like to think.)

In the end [spoiler alert!] the judge awards Sam to the Ramirezes on the ground that, while there are hardly any precedents for the courts in dealing with IVF babies or any mismatches between them, generally in disputes like this the courts favor the biological parents, and that’s what he decides to do here (even though, as mentioned above, Anna is the only one of the four parties who actually has a genetic connection to Sam). Then Kelly Fullerton reverts to Hallmark territory for an ending that’s supposed to put a happy gloss on the story – the Ramirezes have decided to make up with the Crawfords and allow them visitation (something Anna had previously refused and the judge had explicitly ruled that she didn’t have to), and the last scene jumps ahead several months to a joint birthday party for Sam and Mia, with the Crawfords and the Ramirezes all present and wolfing down the gluten-free cupcakes Gabe has baked for the occasion. Switched Before Birth isn’t that great a movie, but it sure raises a lot of uncomfortable issues about just what it means to be a “parent” and what the key ingredient is: Genetics? Experience? Bonding? (Olivia is understandably upset at losing a baby she not only carried inside her womb for nine months but raised for five months after that.) The film ended with a title noting that there still are no government regulations on in vitro fertilization, an oblique warning to Lifetime viewers (especially women who want children but haven’t been able to have them by the “normal,” fun way) that IVF is a jungle and they’d better beware of evil, incompetent or simply sloppy operatives posing as “fertility specialists.” There was also one amusing shot of the so-called “success stories” posted on Dr. Nori’s wall, one of whom is of a Gay couple (we know that because we see them kissing in the photo), and one wonders what the mechanics of that were, including which one was the sperm donor, how they recruited a woman to be their surrogate and whether Lifetime will someday give us a movie about them, and in particular about the very nasty custody battle likely to ensue in case they break up and the biological dad pulls rank on his former partner in family court.

Stormy Weather (20th Century-Fox, 1943)

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

The movie Turner Classic Movies was showcasing last night was the 1943 all-Black musical Stormy Weather from 20th Century-Fox, one of two major-studio films that year with all-Black casts (MGM’s Cabin in the Sky was the other) that showcased the breadth of African-American entertainment talent in general and one African-American entertainer in particular, Lena Horne, who starred in both films. Both may have come about as a result of a 1942 meeting between major-studio managers and representatives of the African-American community, which Thomas Cripps argued in his 1977 book Slow Fade to Black marked a turning point in the history of Blacks in American cinema and a move away from the racist stereotypes that had dominated Black representations in U S. cinema before that. I read Cripps’ book shortly after it came out but I never thought there was such a strict dividing line, or that the way American films depicted Blacks improved much after that supposed turning point. One thing that might have motivated the green-light for these films was World War II, in which Blacks were being asked to join the war effort – though the U.S. military was still segregated and therefore, when Blacks fought in combat, they did so in their own units (though still under white commanders) – and one purpose behind these movies seems to have been to tell the African-American community, “You’re a part of this country, so you have a stake in us winning this war, too.” (The NAACP accordingly launched a campaign they called “The Double-V” – victory in the war and victory against racism at home. Of course, the victory against racism is still proving elusive; real progress didn’t come until the 1950’s and 1960’s and there have been white backlashes since.)

While Cabin in the Sky was based on a successful all-Black Broadway musical and carried over the story’s stage star, Ethel Waters (it’s a Faust-like tale of good wife Waters and evil temptress Horne, sent by a Black Satan played by actor Rex Ingram – who incidentally had played “De Lawd” in the 1936 film The Green Pastures and therefore became the first actor to play both God and the Devil on screen), Stormy Weather was an original loosely based on the career of its male star, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. In the opening he’s hanging out on the porch of his nice suburban home with a group of Black kids to whom he’s teaching his famous staircase dance to a song called “Rang Tang Tang.” (I haven’t seen the other film in years but I suspect this is the same set on which he did that dance with Shirley Temple in The Littlest Rebel eight years earlier. Incidentally, Robinson said that Temple was the quickest study he ever worked with – all he had to do was demonstrate the routine he wanted once and she would pick it up easily. That’s pretty incredible praise, especially since Robinson also taught Sammy Davis, Jr.) He’s called “Bill Williamson” in the script (by Jerry Horwin and Seymour Robinson, story; H. S. Kraft, adaptation; and Frederick J. Jackson and Ted Koehler, script; incidentally Koehler had also written the lyrics to the title song, “Stormy Weather,” over a decade earlier) and he’s settled down to life in Hollywood and the fruits of a long struggle. One of the kids picks up Bill’s mail for him, and it contains a lavish edition of a show-biz magazine saluting “Bill Williamson’s” career, complete with ads from various people who figured prominently in his rise to fame.

Naturally he combs through the pages of the magazine and explains to the kids who the various people mentioned in it are, and the film flashes back to Bill and his scapegrace friend Gabe Tucker (Dooley Wilson, a Black singer best known for his role as Sam the piano player in Casablanca, even though he really couldn’t play piano and had to make excuses when he was inevitably asked to play “As Time Goes By” at Hollywood parties) returning from World War I and marching in the band led by James Reese Europe (Ernest “Bubbles” Whitman, the announcer of the Armed Forces Radio Service’s Jubilee program aimed at Black listeners; I didn’t recognize him visually but his voice was unmistakable). The real James Reese Europe had been the musical director for the white dance couple Vernon and Irene Castle before the war (their story was filmed in 1939 with, inevitably, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers playing them, but the Castles’ Black bandleaders weren’t depicted and their manservant, a Black man in real life, was played by Walter Brennan) and essentially created the big swing band. Europe made relatively few records, but the ones he did make reveal a band that had the familiar brass, reed and rhythm sections familiar from the later swing era but also an entire section of banjo players. Europe led a band that played under fire for the American troops in World War I but was murdered in 1919 by a musician in his band who thought Europe was having an affair with his wife, though before he died he founded the Clef Club, an organization aimed at raising the profile of Black American music and encouraging Black bandleaders and composers to create their own style that would be neither the low-down jive of the minstrel show or a copy of white classical and band music. The Clef Club was short-lived but had a major legacy – among its members were Ford Dabney, Cecil Mack, William H. Thiers and Will Marion Cook. You may not know who these people were but you’ve heard the songs they wrote, and Cook may have been the most important of them because he not only led a band, the Southern Syncopated Orchestra, that toured Europe in 1919 (and earned a rave review from classical conductor Ernest Ansermet, who particularly praised Cook’s reed soloist, Sidney Bechet), he was also Duke Ellington’s composition teacher.

The film next shows Bill and Gabe arriving at a club in a limousine Gabe has actually poached from his white employers, but Gabe has made it look like he has money and attracted the attentions of a stereotypical movie gold-digger. He’s saved from a bill he has no way of paying by Chick Bailey (Emmett “Babe” Wallace), who’s at the club with his fiancée, singer Selina Rogers (Lena Horne, top-billed). Needless to say Bill falls for Selina at first sight, and the rest of the movie consists of him rising through the ranks of the entertainment business and pursuing Selina, whom at one point he proposes to but only if she’ll give up her career and stay at home to raise their kids. She turns him down flat (good girl!) and he mopes for several reels before they’re finally brought together at a World War II benefit by an unlikely deus ex machina, Cab Calloway, who hires Bill to perform and then asks him to sit in front while an unannounced guest appears. Of course, it’s Selina, and they settle their differences and appear headed for a two-career marriage at the end. The film cheerily ignores that fact that Bill Robinson was old enough to have been Lena Horne’s grandfather (he was born May 25, 1878 and she on June 30, 1917), which may be why the writers and director Andrew Stone (who used Calloway again on a musical he made the next year, Sensations of 1945), don’t give them any scenes showing them getting too intimate. I also suspect they heavily dyed Robinson’s hair and used makeup to make him look younger.

Of course what really matters in this movie is the great Black musical acts Bill meets along the way; first there’s a group billed as “The Tramp Band” whom he meets on a riverboat on his way to Nashville, where he hopes to find work. They do a song called “Linda Brown” and I suspect they were really the Spirits of Rhythm, a great but only sporadically successful band headed by novelty singer Leo Watson and guitarist Teddy Bunn (their 1933 record of “I Got Rhythm” is surprisingly advanced for the time and features licks Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and the other bebop pioneers thought they were discovering over a decade later); though the guitarist is playing an acoustic instrument on screen, what we hear is an electric guitar and it’s played in Bunn’s usual scorching style. Then, when he finally gets to work at a Nashville cabaret, the proprietress and principal entertainer is 1920’s blues shouter Ada Brown and her piano player and bandleader is Thomas “Fats” Waller (in his last film; after making it he took a train from Los Angeles to New York City, his home, but died on board the train in Kansas City at only 39). Brown does a hot version of the blues “That Ain’t Right” (though there’s also a subtler, more ironic version by Nat “King” Cole on one of his early dates for Decca) and then Waller and the band – led by Benny Carter, who for the film played trumpet instead of his usual alto sax – do a nicely laid-back version of “Ain’t Misbehavin’.” Alas, Bill’s nemesis Chick Bailey shows up and offers both Brown and Waller in the all-Black revue he’s putting together, thereby putting Bill out of work. Selina pleads with him to hire Bill, but he gives him only a humiliating job banging a drum in an “African” production number. Bill fights back one night by doing a spectacular dance in which he leaps around and jumps on various sizes of drum – it’s his best number in the movie and really showcases the talent that made Bill Robinson a superstar in the African-American community (so much so that when he died in 1949 hundreds of thousands of people lined the streets of Harlem as his funeral procession passed, giving him the sort of send-off you’d expect if the President died) even though most white people had never heard of him.

Meanwhile, Lena Horne – oops, I mean “Selina Rogers” – is becoming a singing star with songs like “There’s No Two Ways About Love” (by James P. Johnson and Ted Koehler, with publisher Irving Mills taking a “cut-in” credit – Mills got a special producer credit on the movie, no doubt for allowing songs he had published to be used, and he was undoubtedly well paid too), “Diga Diga Doo” (written by white songwriters Jimmy McHugh and Dorothy Fields for one of Mills’ most lucrative properties, the all-Black musical Blackbirds of 1928, though the Production Code Administration forced the filmmakers to delete the song’s best line, “So let those funny people smile/Say, how can this be a virgin isle?”), “I Can’t Give You Anything but Love” (another Fields-McHugh song – they had a reputation of being white songwriters who could “write Black”) and the title song, “Stormy Weather.” “Stormy Weather” was composed by Harold Arlen with lyrics by Ted Koehler after Arlen had taken over from McHugh as house songwriter for the Cotton Club. It was introduced there by Ethel Waters in 1932, and a year later it was filmed spectacularly by the great singer Ivie Anderson with Duke Ellington and His Orchestra for the 1933 short A Bundle of Blues, but starting with this movie it became identified with Lena Horne. (Ethel Waters was notoriously jealous of other Black women singers; a decade earlier she had blackballed Billie Holiday from opening from her at the Apollo Theatre, and during the filming of Cabin in the Sky she had been totally rude and stand-offish towards Horne. So it couldn’t have helped her moods when this film publicly identified Lena Horne with a song originally written for Waters!) It’s used here for a sequence in which Horne sings it at a window looking out at a driving rainstorm, and the scene dissolves into a production number featuring the dance troupe of Katharine Dunham, who essentially becomes Lena Horne’s dance double. (Dunham had played the temptress role in the stage version of Cabin in the Sky, and because she was a dancer instead of a singer Ethel Waters had got along with her just fine. But when MGM replaced her with Horne, a fellow Black woman singer, for the film, Waters was angry and went out of her way to snub Horne. So in a way Stormy Weather is one of my “doubles” movies.)

Then Cab Calloway enters the action and does one of his established specialties, “The Jumpin’ Jive,” and an unusual song, “Geechy Joe.” Calloway had introduced this song in 1941, when the young Dizzy Gillespie was still in his band, and in his compilation of his big-band reviews from “the day” George T. Simon printed a review of a radio broadcast in which Dizzy took the song’s spectacular opening trumpet solo (and Simon singled out his work for praise). But I suspect Dizzy had already left the band by the time they recorded it, since the solo in the studio version (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CymvScEuYE) begins on a long held note and doesn’t sound like Dizzy at all. The trumpeter on this version from 1943 is certainly not Dizzy, but he sounds more like him than the one on Cab’s record from two years earlier, and the song overall shows that Calloway wasn’t content to rest on his laurels but was heating up his band’s music to keep pace with the galvanic changes already beginning to sweep the jazz world. The big finale, which reunites Bill and Selina, is set to a song called “Ain’t That Something” on which Bill and Cab do a vocal duet and the Nicholas Brothers do a spectacular dance routine. It seems odd in a film whose male star is the great Bill Robinson that Fox put in an act at the end that almost totally overshadows him. (The older Nicholas Brother, Fayard, was born October 20, 1914 and the younger, Howard, March 17, 1921. That’s a bit of a surprise since I’d always assumed they were closer in age than that.) There’s a sense of the passing of the torch in this ending, especially since in the years after the film Black musical tastes would move away from jazz and towards the new, rawer style that was originally known as rhythm and blues and then – once white people took it up – rock ’n’ roll. The Nicholas Brothers were already getting a big “push” from 20th Century-Fox when this movie was made – they’d been in big white movies like Down Argentine Way, Tin Pan Alley, The Great American Broadcast and Glenn Miller’s two films, Sun Valley Serenade and Orchestra Wives – and so it’s not surprising that they get the final scene, leaping over staircases and nightclub tables while Bill Robinson and Lena Horne are billing and cooing off to the side. It’s as if the filmmakers were clearing away the refined, subtle artistry of Robinson to make way for the wild kids!

Jammin’ the Blues (Warner Bros., 1944) and Spreadin’ the Jam (MGM, 1945)

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

After Stormy Weather Turner Classic Movies showed two shorts that more or less related to it. One was an acknowledged classic: Jammin’ the Blues, produced by Warner Bros.’ shorts department in 1944 and featuring one of the jazz giants, Lester Young. The other was a rather silly but still fun attempt by the shorts department at MGM to do a film of a rent party, Spreadin’ the Jam, in which a young aspiring singer (Jan Clayton) is about to be thrown out of her room by the stereotypical battle-axe landlady (Helen Boise) when her fellow tenants organize a rent party for her. They include various musicians – all of them white, and all played by actors who don’t evidence any clue that they knew what to do with these instruments beyond holding them – who accompany Clayton on the title song and ultimately get the landlady to join the party, show off her own dancing skills and let everyone stay there rent-free for the next year. The most interesting person associated with Spreadin’ the Jam is its writer, Sid Kuller, who had worked on the Broadway show Meet the People and had been one of Duke Ellington’s collaborators on his 1941 musical Jump for Joy, Ellington’s attempt to do a show that would explode and destroy the racist stereotypes of Blacks in entertainment and culture in one fell swoop. (One of the song’s titles would indicate what Ellington, Kuller and lyricist Paul Francis Webster were after: “Uncle Tom’s Cabin Is a Drive-In Now.”) Kuller made it to Hollywood as a writer of special novelty songs for the Ritz Brothers and he’s probably best known as a co-writer on the Marx Brothers’ last movie for MGM, The Big Store (1941). The director of Spreadin’ the Jam was Charles Walters, a close friend of Judy Garland who took over as her director when her therapist told her one of her problems was that her husband, director Vincente Minnelli (Liza’s father), was also her boss. He was apparently one of the Gay men who got pressed into service to escort the trophy wives of Hollywood bigwigs who didn’t want their much younger spouses going out with straight guys who might potentially sedice them.

Jammin’ the Blues is something else again, a dazzlingly inventive movie that begins with a scene that shows two concentric circles filling the screen under the credits. Then the camera pulls back and the “circles” turn out to belong to Lester Young’s trademark pork-pie hat as he plays a haunting slow blues and a narrator (who, after the opening bit of scene-setting, blessedly shuts up) explains that we’re watching a jam session in which hot musicians get together after hours for what “might be called a midnight symphony.” The film consists of three songs, the opening “Midnight Symphony,” “On the Sunny Side of the Street” with singer Marie Bryant, and a closing free-for-all called “Jammin’ the Blues” in which the band changes drummers in mid-song (Sid Catlett replaces Young’s old band-mate from his days with Count Basie, Jo Jones) and Young plays the opening tenor sax solo but the close featured the far more frenzied, less lyrical tenor sax of the great “honker” Illinois Jacquet. Like the final sequence of Stormy Weather, this is a harbinger of the changes to come in music in general and Black music in particular, as Black audiences were getting less interested in jazz and more interested in rhythm and blues. Jammin’ the Blues is also notable for its director, Gjon Mili, who had made a major career as a still photographer for Life magazine but had never made a movie before. Aided by the great cinematographer Robert Burks (who would work with Alfred Hitchcock from 1951 until his death in a household accident in 1964), Jammin’ the Blues largely set the template for how jazz would be depicted on film: the fumata effects from the musicians’ cigarettes, the stark chiaroscuro lighting, the shadowy visuals (more shadowy in the case of guitarist Barney Kessel, the only white musician in the cast; his long-shot is done as a virtual silhouette and for the close-ups of him fretting and plucking his guitar, his hands were stained with prune juice so he’d look more like the other musicians) and even a few prototype music-video effects, including showing Marie Bryant first horizontally (with her striped dress making an almost abstract pattern on screen) before the camera rights itself and we see her standing up.

Though some of the multiple images had been used in jazz videos before – notably Dudley Murphy’s Black and Tan (1929) and Fred Waller’s Symphony in Black (1935), both starring Duke Ellington – Jammin’ the Blues remains a classic, not only for the illustrious talent (besides the ones mentioned above, trumpeter Harry “Sweets” Edison, bassists Red Callender and John Simmons, and Marlowe Morris, who was a pianist when he made this movie but later played electric organ exclusively) but the overall “look” that defined for several generations of filmmakers what a jazz performance should look like on screen. Though Gordon Hollingshead, the overall head of Warners’ shorts department, was listed as the overall producer, the film was actually made by Norman Granz, who in 1942 had promoted a jazz concert to benefit the defense of the “Sleepy Lagoon” arrestees and had built a brand called “Jazz at the Philharmonic” after a concert he held in Philharmonic Hall in Los Angeles in 1944. He pioneered the recording and release of actual live jazz concerts and became a very rich man from the success of his labels, Verve and Pablo. Also there’s been some uncertainty as to when Jammin’ the Blues was made and in particular before or after Lester Young’s psychologically devastating stint in the U.S. military in 1944 – they must have been getting really desperate for manpower if they drafted someone as outrageously unsuited for military service as Lester Young. The standard view of Young’s career is that his military stint (most of which he spent in the detention barracks after he was caught making a homebrew concoction of medicinal alcohol and cocaine he’d stolen from the base infirmary; his first post-war record, “D.B. Blues,” paid tribute to his stint there) wrecked his mental state and led him to a quieter, more laid-back style of playing, but in the opening of this film, almost certainly recorded before he was drafted, he’s playing with the sensitivity and laid-back lyricism of his post-war style.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: “The Five-Hundredth Episode” (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired October 21, 2021)

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

Last Thursday night at 9 p.m. I watched a Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode, actually called “The 500th Episode,:” and then a Law and Order: Organized Crime episode called “Unforgivable.” (Why are Dick Wolf’s writers and show runners giving the Organized Crime shows titles that are puns on Clint Eastwood movies? The last three were called “The Outlaw Eddie Wagner,” “For a Few Leke More” – I presume the “leke” is the Albanian currency – and “The Good, the Bad and the Lovely.”) The SVU was a quite good one even though the promise of bringing back people who’d figured on the show before was fulfilled in only two instances: Danny Pino, the repulsive presence from Season 13 (I couldn’t believe the casting acumen of Wolf’s staff had fallen so far that he was Christopher Meloni’s immediate replacement!) who partially redeemed himself as a genuinely personable U.S. Senator on the short-lived CBS series BrainDead (a weird mashup of The West Wing with Invasion of the Body Snatchers as Washington, D.C. figures are taken over by a parasite from outer space); and Dann Florek, shown looking older than death on inserts representing Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) calling him on her cell phone to ask for advice on an old case. The plot dealt with an old flame of Benson’s, mystery writer turned true-crime podcaster Benton Lowe (Aidan Quinn) whom she had an affair with when he was 21 and she was 17, who returns to her life ostensibly to crusade for the freeing of Ian Ridley (a nicely twitchy performance by Kyle Cameron), who has been serving 25 years in prison for raping and murdering his high-school girlfriend on prom night in high school all those years ago. But Lowe has come to the conclusion that he’s innocent and has hired Nick Amaro (Danny Pino), who since his stint as an SVU detective has become a forensic scientist and is working for a company that has refined DNA testing to a level that makes samples that couldn’t be tested before able to be profiled now.

This company’s technology enables Amaro, Lowe and Benson to determine that Ridley didn’t rape and kill his girlfriend; the real culprit was her soccer coach, Roger Murray (Brian Kerwin), whose attentiveness and mentorship towards her turned out to be cover for an unrequited crush on her. Only, in the sort of hard-right turn SVU’s writers started pulling late in the Meloni years but have largely given up since, the second half of the episode turns out to go in a different direction: as Benson, Lowe and Amaro are high-fiving each other in the courthouse lobby when a woman comes up to Lowe and accuses him of raping her when she was an intern with his book editor. It turns out, in what’s become a depressingly familiar pattern in the #MeToo era, that Lowe regularly seduced much younger women by plying them with flowers, expensive dinner dates and booze, then having his way with them while they were too drunk to resist. Benson even learns what his seduction song was – “The Girl from Ipanema” (the short single version with Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto) – which he gave her a cassette of way back when and has since provided his newer girlfriends on flash drives. At the end Benson, who actually yielded to Lowe’s advances and had a for-old-time’s-sake fuck with him, takes the old tape and throws it off a bridge into one of New York’s rivers, sort of like Gloria Stuart as the older version of Kate Winslet in Titanic throwing that jewel back into the water just before she dies and ascends to heaven, which in her case is Leonardo Di Caprio’s dancing arms. This was actually a good SVU and a nice show for a 500th episode, even though I wish they could have brought back more of the regulars (they did have a brief shot of Tamara Tunie doing medical tests on the victim’s underwear).

Law and Order; Organized Crime: “Unforgivable” (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired October 21, 2021)

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

The Organized Crime episode which followed had a quite gruesome scene in which Jon Kosta (Michael Raymond-James) literally (and surprisingly graphically for a network show!) slices off the tongue of one of his men in his determination to find out who leaked to the police the information about the big human-trafficking party he and multigazillionaire Edmund Ross (Gregg Henry) threw at the end of the previous week’s episode. (Ross is pretty obviously based on Jeffrey Epstein and at the end the writers seem to be setting him up for a fate similar to the real Epstein’s: people who have way too much to lose will arrange to knock him off in prison and set it up to look like a “suicide.”) The show deals with Teddy Garcia, progressive candidate for governor of New York, calling out the Albanian mob in general and Kosta in particular in a speech vowing to get rid of it, and Kosta responding by ordering a hit on Garcia that ends up sparing him but killing his wife instead. The most interesting part of this show is that a young man turns up in the middle of all this and claims to be the son of Eddie Wagner – Elliot Stabler’s (Christopher Meloni) cover identity under which he’s infiltrated the Albanian mob. The people who set him up for the job found him an identity of a previously deceased criminal but missed any indication that the real Eddie Wagner had fathered a child (we’re told that’s because the records of that were only in printed files and they’d just searched digital databases), and the kid has now traced his “dad.” As much as Stabler in his “Wagner” identity tries to get rid of the boy, he clings to him and at the end tells him he’s somehow intuited that he’s not really Eddie Wagner, lowlife criminal, and he wants to form a fatherly bond with him even though he knows Stabler as “Wagner” isn’t his real dad.

Meanwhile the plot line of Stabler’s actual son Eli, who in the last episode was stealing his grandmother’s (Ellen Burstyn) prescription Xanax, originally just to sell to schoolmates but later to use himself, just got bypassed in this episode. Being that this is a show being made under the regime of the Great God SERIAL, we also get bits and pieces of other plot lines, including the girlfriend of Stabler’s superior officer, Black Lesbian cop Sgt. Ayanna Bell (Danielle Moné Truitt), seeking help from Congressmember Kilbride – who in a previous episode we were led to believe was honest because he went to the Ross party but didn’t partake of any of the underage girl meat, but who this time around gives his assistant an envelope filled with cash she is supposed to deliver to an unnamed source with the message that ‘there’s plenty more of that where this came from” – for a settlement for his brother, whose promising career as a Django Reinhardt-style jazz guitarist was put to a sudden end when he was assaulted by a police officer who stepped on his left hand and crushed his finger bones beyond repair. (Thinking of Clara Rockmore, the violinist who became a virtuoso theremin player after she developed arthritis, I had previously joked, “Maybe they should buy him a theremin.”) I’ve been willing to put up with this show because of Meloni even though the serialization, the outright gore and the long-standing inability of Wolf’s writers to bring organized criminals to anything resembling real life (they’ve mostly rehashed the familiar Mob clichés from The Godfather movies, GoodFellas, etc.), as well as the serialization and the sheer number of plot lines you have to keep in mind week to week to make sense of this show are beginning to try my patience.

The Last Airbender (Paramount, Nickelodeon, Blinding Edge, 2010)

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

Last night my husband Charles and I watched two movies on disc, a Blu-Ray of the 2010 film The Last Airbender, a movie we’d been curious about which was based on a series of “graphic novels” (the term of art for book-length comic books, usually if not always of somewhat more serious content than the magazine-style comics we grew up with) and a Nickelodeon TV series called Avatar: The Last Airbender created by Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko. It tells the tale of a quasi-primitive world ruled by the classic four elements – air, water, earth and fire – where for centuries peace, love and harmony reigned under the wise guidance of an “Avatar,” the only person who could “bend” (i.e., physically manipulate by waving his hands in the air) all the elements. Only 100 years before the action of the film, the 12-year-old boy Aang (Noah Ringer), who was supposed to be the next Avatar, disappeared and ended up frozen in ice, something like Captain America between the 1940’s and 1960’s, while the Fire Benders took advantage of his absence to develop technology and use it to try to conquer the realms still controlled by the other “benders.” They massacred Aang’s entire tribe and laid waste to the earth-benders’ community, but the water-benders were able to hold out against them because, at least if given half a chance, water puts out fire. Aung is liberated from suspended animation by a brother-and-sister team, Katara (Nicola Peltz) and Sokka (Jackson Rathbone), who discover that he’s the world’s last remaining air-bender (hence the title) and decide they need to protect him from capture by the fire people, who travel around the earth’s ocean in a quite spectacular-looking steamship and eventually turn out to have a whole fleet of them while everybody else still seems to be living in primitive villages of huts. (I asked Charles if that meant The Last Airbender qualified as steampunk, and he said, “No, this is magic.”)

Meanwhile various representatives of the Fire People are trying to capture Aung because they’re worried that the emergence of a living, functioning Avatar will undo their plans for world domination and genocide against the other people. The most interesting character in the story is Prince Zuko (Dev Patel, the only cast member I’d heard of before), son of the ruler of the Fire People, who’s been disowned by his father and won’t be admitted back to the family until he captures the Avatar. What the Fire People plan to do with the Avatar – either enslave him and turn his powers to evil or just kill him – isn’t clear, but what is clear is that the Avatar Aung has powers of his own, which like all the other demonstrations of power in this movie are represented by martial-arts gestures and moves. The Last Airbender was originally filmed with the “A”-word in the title, but Paramount dropped it at the last minute after the smash success of James Cameron’s Avatar (2009) essentially used up the word as the basis for a fiction film. Also, Paramount was obviously hoping to build a Last Airbender franchise – and they had plenty of story material with which to do it: the last time I was in a Barnes & Noble virtually an entire shelf of their graphic-novel section was taken up by Avatar: The Last Airbender comic books, in large format and elaborately hard-bound. Unfortunately, the film didn’t do well enough at the box office – according to imdb.com, the production cost was $150 million and it grossed $40 million on its opening weekend (the Fourth of July weekend in 2010), not a mega-flop but not the kind of numbers that would have encouraged the “suits” at Paramount to green-light the sequelae.

Part of the problem with this film is its director, M. Night Shaymalan, who also wrote the script based on the comic books/graphic novels/TV scripts, and while they deserve credit for putting a potential popcorn franchise in the hands of a visionary director with a reputation for sophisticated films (though quite frankly I know little about Shaymalan; the only other film of his I’ve seen is The Sixth Sense, so I’ve seen his dead people). The Last Airbender is one of those frustrating fantasy stories in which, because in a fantasy literally anything can happen, the writers make anything happen regardless of whether it makes sense or is consistent with the assumptions behind the story as they’ve been explained to us earlier. In the middle of the film, once the three main characters have made it from the Southern Water Kingdom to the Northern Water Kingdom, we’re introduced to two new characters, or at least entities, Moon Spirit and Ocean Spirit. They’re represented by medium-sized fish with translucent bellies, and in the film’s most shocking scene one of the Fire People’s leaders captures the Moon Spirit fish and pulls it out of the water in a bag, which he then stabs with a sword. The significance of this is that the only way the Water People can defeat the Fire People and their steam technology is if they fight them at night when the moon comes out, and if the Moon Spirit is dead they can’t harness the moon’s power for their side. So the Northern Water Girl that Sokka has fallen in love with (and who looks so much like the ice princess in Disney’s Frozen I had to remind myself that The Last Airbender was actually made two years before Frozen) has to drown herself to restore the Moon Spirit to life – which she does, much to Sokka’s understandable upset, in the one scene in the movie that actually touches some level of human emotion. Another wrinkle is that, while Aung is supposed to be the Avatar and the Avatar is supposed to be able to control all elements, at the start he can only “bend” air. From the people in the Northern Water Kingdom he learns how to bend water, but at the end of this movie he still doesn’t know how to “bend” earth or fire, and the last scene before the credits indicates that that would have been one of the subjects of the sequels that never materialized.

The Last Airbender has the usual virtue and the usual fault of a movie actually based on comic books – as opposed to a film that simply uses characters that originated in comics. The usual virtue of such movies is sheer visual splendor; since the original comic-book artists have already created the visual design, all the director, cinematographer and set designers have to do is copy the original and they are virtually guaranteed to come up with a visually splendid film. The down side is that movies based on comic books tend to be wretchedly episodic, a series of visually stunning but dramatically ambiguous episodes that don’t add up to a coherent plot. Charles also complained that scenes that seemed moving kept getting undercut by other, rather childish bits, reflecting the property’s origins as an animated TV series for kids and the involvement of Nickelodeon, Viacom’s kids’ channel, in its production. The Last Airbender was utterly gorgeous to look at but didn’t work for me as a movie; the pathos of Dev Patel’s character (the only person in this movie who’s morally ambiguous instead of all-good or all-bad), who at one point his dad suspects of being the beneficent Blue Spirit in bad-guy disguise, might have worked dramatically if Shaymalan and the original writers he was adapting had been more interested in developing him, but as it stands he’s just a mess of a character and Patel, the film’s finest actor, is at sea trying to figure out how to play him. I can see why this film flopped while the Cameron Avatar, with more fully fleshed out characters and a plot that made sense (and was science fiction rather than fantasy), was a smash hit and revived the market for 3-D movies – The Last Airbender was also shot in 3-D and, while we weren’t watching it that way (and since 2009 my eyesight, especially in my right eye, has deteriorated enough it would be hard for me to watch a 3-D movie) it would have been nice to see it that way at the time even though the task of making it look like Noah Ringer could do martial-arts moves in mid-air was probably one of the components that pushed the budget to $150 million, but it’s not a franchise I’m particularly interested in exploring again.