Murder in the Music Hall (Republic, 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 10 I ran Charles a 90-minute video off YouTube of a 1946 film called Murder in the Music Hall, hosted by Randall Schaefer. I had assumed from the title and the relatively long length that it was a British production; instead it was a vehicle from U.S.-based Republic Pictures for their ice-skating star Vera Hruba Ralston. She was born in Prague on July 12, 1923 and competed as a figure skater in the 1936 Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany. Though she didn’t win the gold medal – Sonja Henie of Norway did, winning her third consecutive Olympic gold and earning herself a contract with a major studio, 20th Century-Fox – Ralston fit the Nordic ideal of the Nazis well enough that Adolf Hitler asked her, “Would you be willing to skate for the swastika?” Ralston answered, “I’d be willing to skate on the swastika,” and shortly after insulting Der Führer she got the hell out of Germany and Europe altogether. She arrived in the U.S. in 1941 and, as Vera Hruba (her original Czech name) made two films with the Ice Capades revue for Republic Studios. At the time Republic was owned and run by Herbert J. Yates, who had previously been in charge of the American Record Company before selling it to CBS in 1938.

Yates was ferociously anti-labor and he also fell in love with Vera, who after her two Ice Capades movies was given the last name “Ralston” and put in a relatively big-budget horror movie called The Lady and the Monster, an adaptation of Curt Siodmak’s Donovan’s Brain with Erich von Stroheim (as a mad scientist) and an aging Richard Arlen (as her leading man). She appeared with Stroheim again in her next film, Storm Over Lisbon, which comes off as a bizarre, misfired attempt to do an unofficial sequel to Casablanca, though the gap between Ingrid Bergman and Vera Hruba Ralston as actors or screen personalities is all too obvious. In broad outline, the story of Herbert Yates and Vera Ralslon may seem to resemble William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies, but at least Davies was a genuinely talented light comedienne who made some entertaining movies like The Patsy, Show People and Five and Ten. Ralston quite literally couldn’t act at all; as Harry and Michael Medved put it when they nominated her for Worst Actress of All Time in their book The Golden Turkey Awards (I’m quoting from memory here), “For someone so agile on skates, Miss Ralston appeared hopelessly clumsy on dry land.”

With her bovine stare, her facial immobility and her hopelessly incomprehensible accent (Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich were able to make their foreign accents sound sexy and alluring; Ralston just sounded annoying), Ralston walked through one vehicle after another, racking up 27 screen credits and driving Republic’s one bona fide star, John Wayne, out of the studio. He actually got a release from his Republic contract because he feared for his own future after Yates kept co-starring him with Ralston, and it also eventually got to be too much for Republic’s shareholders, who confronted Yates at a stockholders’ meeting and asked him point-blank why he was blowing so much of the studio’s money on his girlfriend (and, after 1952, his wife). Yet Ralston continued to star in film after film until 1958, when Yates sold the studio just as it was about to go bankrupt (the physical plant became CBS Television City) and the two lived in a relatively comfortable retirement until Yates’s death in 1966 (just as the success of the Batman TV series created a market for feature-film adaptations of the old Republic serials – but that’s another story).

Murder in the Music Hall (a misnomer because the titular murder doesn’t take place in the music hall, but in a penthouse apartment on top of the building that houses it) was Ralston’s seventh film, and it was an attempt to showcase what Ralston could do best – what would now be called ice dancing – mixed in with a film noir. The story was by Arnold Phillips and Maria Matray (I’ve never heard of him, but she was a figure in pre-Nazi German cinema and directors Douglas Sirk and Joseph Losey recalled having to deal with her when they wanted to remake German silent and early-sound classics from the Weimar era) and the script by Frances Hyland and Lászlo Görog (who would have a sole credit on one of the worst films of all time, 1956’s The Mole People), while the director is reliable Republic hack John English. The fllm opens with an elaborate skating routine that’s part of the show Lila Leighton (Vera Hruba Ralston) and her three friends perform at the titular music hall (which doesn’t seem to have any other name). Though Jack Marta is listed in the opening credits as director of photography, the ice-dancing sequences were photographed by the great John Alton, who five years later would get a similarly split credit on the 1951 Academy Award winner An American in Paris.

On An American in Paris, Alfred Gilks shot the rest of the movie but, after director Vincente Minnelli worked with Alton on the low-budget sequel to Father of the Bride, Father’s Little Dividend, he decided he wanted Alton to shoot the big ballet at the end based on George Gershwin’s tone poem of that title – and of course the big ballet is the only part of that film anybody remembers, and it earned both Alton and Gilks an Academy Award. In fact, when my husband Charles and I were watching Murder in the Music Hall, I found myself wondering if Alton had been involved in some of the rest as well – notably the heart-stoppingly beautiful film noir compositions – though Marta had a pretty major résumé of his own, starting with Raoul Walsh’s What Price Glory? in 1926 and extending to 1971, when he worked with Steven Spielberg on his first film, the TV-movie Duel (a horror piece in which Dennis Weaver played a motorist who finds himself being chased by a truck that seemingly has no driver) and with Tom Laughlin on The Trial of Billy Jack, The Master Gunfighter and the unreleased Billy Jack Goes to Washington.

Alas, Lila gets a note from an old flame of hers, Carl Lang (Edward Norris), who used to be the promoter of her ice show until he went to prison for criminal negligence five years before in the death of her skating partner Douglas. Five years earlier Douglas and Lila had been a couple off the ice as well, until he jilted her for her friend Diane (Julie Bishop) and then met his death from ammonia fumes from a gas factory near the theatre. Now Lang is ready to promote a new show and he demands that Lila star in it, and if she doesn’t he’ll tell the police that she actually murdered Douglas over her jealousy that he dumped her for Diane. Lila meets with Lang for half an hour and then leaves to return to the show, only when she realizes she left her purse in the apartment she and the show’s bandleader, Don Jordan (William Marshall, a relatively attractive man whom Randall Schaefer denounced as having no acting talent, which seemed to me to be unfair to him: he’s not bad, just mediocre, and he’d been a sideman in Fred Waring’s band before briefly leading a band of his own, though as things happen it’s easy enough to see how Fred MacMurray was able to parlay a career as a band musician into major stardom while Marshall was not), take off in the middle of the performance to retrieve it. (The participants in this show have a remarkable ability to bail on it for long periods of time; it’s hard to believe anybody in a real show could leave it for that long without being fired.).

When they enter the apartment they find that Carl Lang is dead, murdered by someone who grabbed an ornamental dagger from the wall, and for the rest of the film they race back and forth across New York City (where all this takes place) trying to find the murderer before the police, headed by Inspector Wilson (William Gargan, who seven years earlier had played much the same character in a better film, Joe May’s The House of Fear from 1939), can find them and arrest them. The chase across the city is interspersed by some pretty spectacular skating sequences – a woman named Fanchon (imdb.com gives no other name for her) was the choreographer and the dancers included Don Condon and Mary Bohland, Red McCarthy, Patti Phillippe, John Jolliffe and Henry Lie as the skaters. The cutting back and forth between the police investigation and the skating numbers gets to be tiresome after a while, though during the course of the investigation Lila and Don meet some interesting characters; including Rita Morgan (Nancy Kelly), wife of prominent newspaper columnist George Morgan (the marvelously dry character actor Jerome Cowan, who was never used to his full potential: in his most famous movie, as Miles Archer in the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon, he’s killed off in the first reel), and the blind streed peddler who could confirm or totally blow out of the water Rita’s alibi. The script for Murder in the Music Hall seems just a bit “off,” with claracters doing things that don’t match up to any normal human behaviors (I particularly found myself infuriated by the scene in which first Don and then the police touch virtually every exposed surface of the murder apartment without regard for fingerprints),

Ironically, the same year Republic made Murder in the Music Hall, an even tackier studio, Monogram, made a strikingly similar movie called Suspense that attempted to bring together an ice-shating musical and a film noir, only it was a much better movie than this one, with characterizations that actually made sense, a vividly realized noir atmosphere and an actress playing the skating star, Belita, who could actually act. It helped that Belita was originally a British woman (her full name was Maria Belita Jepson-Turner) and therefore English was her native language. Suspense was directed by Frank Tuttle, whose best-known credit was probably the 1942 version of The Glass Key which cemented Alan Ladd’s rise to stardom, and it was written by Philip Yordan – bearing in mind my general-field theory of cinema that the quality of a movie is inversely proportional to its number of writers. Suspense has its flaws – notably the acting of Barry Sullilvan in the male lead (he presents the character as just a thug and, while the story works that way, it would have been a lot better and more insightful with an actor like Bogart, Garfield, Mitchum or Ladd who could have make him more sympathetic and given him more dimension), Suspense is a much better movie than Murder in the Music Hall (for my comments on Suspense view my moviemagg blog at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2020/11/suspense-king-brothers.html).

The Thing about Pam, episode 4: "She's a Loving Daughter"(Big Picture Company, Blumhouse Television, NBC-TV, aired March 29, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 10:10 p.m. last night I turned on NBC and watched the latest episode of The Thing About Pam, dealing with a cornpone psychopath hamed Pam Hupp (Renée Zellwegger) who befriended a terminal cancer patient, Betsy Faria (Katy Mixon), got her to switch the beneficiary on her life insurance policy from her husband Russ Faria (Glenn Fleshler) to Pam, then allegedly killed Betsy and testified against Russ in his murder trial, which resulted in his conviction and incarceration for three years. All this happened in Troy, Missouri, where Pam was a well-known figure as a real-estate ”flipper,” buying homes and then reselling them again at a major profit. This started to arouse the antagonism of Pam’s husband, Mark Hupp (Sean Bridgers), who wondered how they were going to be able to afford all the mortgage payments his wife was racking up. She’s already gone through the $150,000 payout on the life insurance policy Betsy made over to her – it was supposed to be held in trust for Betsy’s daughters by a previous marriage but Betsy transferred it to her own account and ran through it in nothing flat (in one of the episode’s most bizarre and sickening scenes she holds up a $1 bill in front of Mark and announces to him that that’s all there is left of the policy income).

What we also didn’t know about Pam is that she was also looking after a sick and incontinent mother, and given that I worked as an in-home caregiver for 37 years the arguments between them and the bitchery on both sides,with Pam’s mom complaining about how she was never there for her and forced her to lie around all day in her own shit, while Pam kept telling her mom that she’d be helpless without her, were familiar to me even though I never treated a client as badly as Pam treated her mom. (At least I hope I didn’t.) One of the things Pam’s mother, Shirley Neumann (Celia Weston) was mad at her for was her first marriage to a man named Gunderson – apparently the Gundersons and the Neumanns had long hated each other, sort of like the Ashtons and the Ravenswoods in Lucia di Lammermoor – and though she eventually broke up with him and married Mark Hupp, she brought a new little Gunderson, Randy (Kyler Porche), into the world. (She also had a son with Mark Hupp, Travis, played by Drew Scheid.) At the end of the episode Pam and her mom have an argument which ends with her mom falling off her apartment balcony and dying from the fall. Officially the death was ruled an accident, but we’re obviously supposed to think that Pam found her mother too burdensome and pushed her off the balcony.

While all this is going on prosecutor Leah Askey (Judy Greer), who prosecuted Russ Faria in the first place and is still convinced he killed his wife, is running for re-election and is facing Russ’s defense attorney, Joel Schwartz (Josh Duhamel,the only cast member besides Zellwegger I’d actually heard of before), who is seeking a so-called “Mooney motion” to win Russ a new trial. (When Pam hears about this she’s resentful that her testimony is being questioned and she calls this a “money motion,” protesting because she hasn’t any.) Joel gets a break when Tina (Rachael Thompson), Askey’s guilt-ridden assistant, leaks Joel some of the evidence Askey had illegally refused to turn over to him in the first trial. Among them are the photos of the crime scene taken with Luminol, a chemical we regular Law and Order watchers are familiar with because it’s supposed to light up wherever blood has been spilled no matter how much of an attempt there’s been to clean it up. The photos are dead-black, which in the original trial Askey told Joel was because the camera had malfunctioned, but in the retrial Joel has the evidence he needs to convince the new judge – he’s requested a bench instead of a jury trial – that the reason there was no blood on Russ’s floor was he hadn’t killed his wife and therefore there had been no blood for him to have to clean up.

Also while all this is going on a crew from Dateline NBC (whose long-standing narrator, Keith Morrison, was used on this scripted series about the case as well) is investigating the case and checking out Russ’s claims that he is innocent and Pam is the most likely real killer – and Pam, whose testimony was so decisive to the outcome of the first trial, in the retrial isn’t called at all. Askey washes her hands of Pam after she invents a truly bizarre story that she and Betsy Faria were Lesbian lovers and Russ killed his wife out of jealousy, and Joel briefly considers calling her as a witness for the defense but decides not to because “we’ve heard enough of her lies.” The next (and last, at least we hope) two episodes deal with Pam’s next victim, Louis Gumpenberger (Jeff Ryan Baker), whom she shot and later pleaded guilty to, which led in turn to the reopening of the Faria case and Pam’s indictment in 2019, though in the latest development her trial has been delayed indefinitely because Pam’s public defender suddenly died of a heart attack. The Thing About Pam is an acting tour de force for Renée Zellwegger,at once a grimly determined psycho and an almost childlike figure – and if anybody else takes acting honors for this show it’s Judy Greer, who vividly demonstrates Askey’s absolute conviction that Russ murdered his wife and anyone who suggests anything different is just arbitrarily undermining the justice her office achieved in the case.

American Song Contest, episode 2 (Brain Academy, Propagate Content, Universal Television Alternative Studios, NBc-TV, aired March 28, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 8 p.m. I watched the second episode of American Song Contest, a bizarre spectacle hosted by Snoop Dogg and Kelly Clarkson (supposedly Snoop Dogg is representing California and Kelly Clarkson is representing Texas, though frankly I’d much rather be represented by Clarkson than that tall, ugly, anemic rapper with the “doggy” stage name, whose true moniker is Calvin Broadus) and featuring 11 performers, 10 from U.S. states and one from the Virgin Islands. All too many of the performers were baby-divas doing electronic dance music in its various forms – though the opening act, a couple of guys from Portland, Oregon named Micah and Eli who jointly call themselves courtship (no capital), was a pure pop song called “Million Dollar Smoothie” that featured them dressing up in odd costumes that were supposed to make them resemble green smoothies. It seemed to me that Oregon in general and Portland in particular would have been better represented by a punk band – but NBC isn’t about to put on a pure punk band in prime time. There are FCC regulations against that sort of thing, along with NBC’s own “Standards and Practices” department, the network euphemism for “censors.”

Next up was Jonah Prill, decked out in skin-tight blue jeans and showing off a basket that was considerably more interesting than the song, an old piece off the country log called “Fire It Up.” At least I got a charge out of watching him shake his hot bod! After that New York, home of the most febrile music scene in the country – it’s where all the people move to get discovered except the people who go to Hollywood instead – was inexplicably represented by one of those standard-issue baby diva wanna-bes named ENISA (all caps!) doing an O.K. song for the genre called “Green Light.” Following that was a heavy-set, short-haired woman named Jocelyn doing a quite beautiful and moving song called “Never Alone.” She had my Dyke Detector going through the roof, partly because of her butch appearance, partly because of the content of her song (it’s a ballad reaching out to comfort people by saying that just because they’re lonely, they’re never alone), and partly because of the long-haired woman whose photo was shown during the introductory segment and described as Jocelyn’s “friend” – of course I immediately thought, “‘Friend’ – yeah, right.”

The next performer was someone from the Virgin Islands who calls himself Cruz Rock, lives on the island of St. Croix, and comes off as more Latino than Polynesian – explained by the fact that while his mother was a Virgin Islands native, his dad is Puerto Rican. He was dressed all in green and did a song called “Celebrando” that was partly in English and partly in Spanish and, as the title suggests, it was a party song. Then came an act who’s already won one of the NBC contest shows, season nine of The Voice; his name is Jordan Smith, he was representing Kentucky, and his song was called “Sparrow” (as in “His eye is on the … “) and it was an O.K. ballad of faith even though it’s hardly on the level of the Black hymn that supplied the title of autobiographies by both Ethel Waters and Diana Ross. Jordan Smith is one of those odd guys, like Harry Langdon, who’s managed to make it to adulthood while still retaining the characteristics of a baby: his body has grown larger but otherwise he still looks pretty much as he probably did in the cradle. And his high-lying voice seems to match his appearance.

The next song was “Can’t Make You Love Me” bh Chloe Fredericks, a Native American (though her parents were from different tribes) and easily the most powerful performer of the night. Her song throbbed with emotion and real soul, and her unusual background (like some of the other performers from rural states, she stressed how hard she had to work on her parents’ ranch; her story reminded me of how Warner Bros. put James Dean on a high-fat, high-calorie diet before he made East of Eden, and when he asked why they said, “We want you to look like you grew up on a farm.” “But I did grow up on a farm!” Dean replied. “Don’t you know how hard farm kids have to work?”) and the fire and fury of her singing just added to her appeal. The next performer was a nondescript rapper from Kansas named Broderick Jones, who began his act by saying Charlie Parker had come from his state (he did technically – he was born in Kansas City, Kansas but his parents moved him across the river to Kansas City, Missouri and that’s where he grew up and was formed as a musician). After that came another anonymous dance diva-ette named Almira Zaky, representing Virginia; she’s the daughter of a Muslim couple from Indonesia but, alas, her song, “Over You,” was forgettable dance-pop and showed nothing of her rather interesting musical roots.

Next was King Kyote (that’s how he spells it) from Maine, and he was clearly hoping that with the guy from Rhode Island having dominated the last week’s program, lightning would strike twice and his song “Get Out Alive” would score over everyone else. It didn’t. The final song of the night was sung by one of the ringers, long-time veteran singer Macy Gray, who represented Ohio and did a song called “Every Night” whose catch phrase was “Higher” – thereby evoking comparisons to far better and more talented writers like Paul McCartney and Sly Stone, respectively. Gray had stage presence to spare, but her song was saddled with a guest rapper named Maino and there were bits of gospel-derived soul in the mix, but also a lot of horrid pop bits. Gray performed with authority, but it seemed a bit (or nore than a bit) unfair to make the other contestants compete with a thoroughgoing professional like Chloe Fredericks. The show was saddled with “competition” trappings, including the cheesy “halftime” segment that interrupted the proceedings midway through and the phony suspense build-up before the winner of the jury prize was announced – and it was Jordan Smith, even though Chloe Fredericks was clearly the one who deserved it.

The Endgame, episode 6: "Judge, Jury and Executioner" (My So-Called Company, Perfect Storm Entertainment, Nicholas Wootton Productions, NBC-TV, aired March 28, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the American Song Contest my husband Charles came home and joined me for an episode of The Endgame, that curious crime show which is a vehicle for Morena Baccarin and Ryan Michelle Bathé. Baccarin plays Elena Fedorova, Russian-born international criminal mastermind and commander of “Snow White,” a mercenary army which has captured seven banks in New York City and is holding the people in them hostage even though Fedorova herself is in a basement prison run by the FBI. Bathé plays Val Turner, an African-American FBI agent whose husband was set up for taking money from a drug gang – in a previous episode Val was told by Fedorova that she framed Val’s husband, but that plot point has been pretty well dropped by now. The show’s main gimmick has been to expose a character who has previously seemed beyond reproach as corrupt; it’s as if series creators Nicholas Wootton and Jake Coburn have taken to heart Robert Penn Warren’s famous quote from All the King’s Men. When powerful Governor Willie Stark (read: Huey Long) announces to his guilt-ridden aide Carter Burden to find up dirt on one of his political enemies, and Carter protests that the man is squeaky-clean, Stark insists, “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption, and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.”

In this case the seemingly above-board figure who’s revealed as having the stink of corruption about her is Judge Caroline Walsh (Gameeta Wright), who is kidnapped by an escaped convict she found guilty of murder at a bench trial even though he was innocent, and it turns out she sent up 24 other innocent people at the behest of the same Ukrainian crime family that featured prominently in a previous episode. (Apparently Wootton and Coburn didn’t get the memo that the line has changed and now Russian villains are O.K. but we’re supposed to like Ukraine.) Turner discovers the 25 witnesses who falsely testified in these cases are all listed as being on the payroll of a phony “business” operated by the bad Ukrainians. At the end of this episode – which for some reason I was thinking would be the last one even though this show has paid obeisance to the Great God SERIAL – the electrical power in the basement compound where Elena is being held suddenly goes out. Naturally the FBI personnel on hand assume that she figured out a way to cut power to the building – but she denies it and we’re clearly supposed to think that for once she’s telling the truth. Then comes a title card reading, “To Be Continued” – an advisement we haven’t seen on this show before even though it’s been presented as a continuous story arc – and then the frustrating news that we’re going to have to wait two weeks instead of the usual one to find out how it comes out.

94th Annual Academy Awards (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sceinces, ABC-TV, aired March 27, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 5 I settled on to watch the 94th annual Academy Awards. This turned out to be an unusual spectacle whose big moment was Will Smith apparently punching out Chris Rock on stage after Rock made a joke about Smith’s wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, losing her hair. (Apparently she has a medical condition called alopecia, one of whose symptoms is total or partial hair loss.) Rock said that Mrs. Smith was preparing to star in a sequel to G. I. Jane and “I can’t wait to see it.” On the actual TV show, with most of the scene censored to meet the bizarrely prudish standards of American television, I had first assumed it was a bizarre schtick between the two actors in which Will Smith pretended to punch Chris Rock, but it was apparently a real blow – as Smith delivered the punch he told Rock, “Keep my wife’s name out of your fucking mouth” – and the sound was bleeped out for quite a long time before Rock said, “That was the greatest night in the history of television.” Later Sean “Diddy” Combs tried to tell both Smith and Rock to settle this “like family” later – you know you’re in the land of surrealism when Sean Combs is your voice of reason – and when Will Smith subsequently won the Best Actor award for playing Richard Williams, father of tennis legends Serena and Venus Williams, in a film called King Richard, he delivered a long, self-pitying speech in which he seemed to be trying to break Greer Garson’s record for the longest Oscar acceptance speech of all time. Smith praised Williams as “a fierce defender of his family” and added, "I know to do what we do, you gotta be able to take abuse and have people talk people about you. In this business, you gotta have people disrespecting you. And you gotta smile and pretend that's O.K."

It was a weird incident that was the low/high point of an evening that was generally pretty dull. All the nominees for Best Animated Feature were done in that stiff, blocky computer-generated style – as I saw the clips representing them I thought to myself, “Doesn’t anybody draw anymore?” – though one movie from Denmark that was nominated for Best International Feature (what used to be called the Foreign-Language category), Flee, was drawn animation. (Flee was also nominated for Best Documentary Feature, though just how is an animated film a documentary?) I really don’t like the look of computer animation, though I’ve been able to overcome my overall distaste of the look to enjoy several computer-animated films, notably Ratatouille and Soul. In keeping with the recent pattern of Academy Awards shows, there was no clear winner among the top nominees: Best Picture went to Coda, a romantic melodrama about the hearing child of a pair of deaf-mute parents who take it as an insult when she decides she wants to become a professional singer, which also won Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor to Troy Kotsur for playing the father. The filmmakers, to their credit, went with genuinely deaf actors for the roles of the parents, Kotsur and Marlee Matlin (who of course had long since won an Academy Award for Children of a Lesser God), and they’re the only deaf acting winners in Oscar history.

The Best Actress award went to Jessica Chastain for playing Tammy Faye Bakker in The Eyes of Tammy Faye, which also won for Best Makeup and Hairstyling (well, anyone who could reproduce the real Tammy Faye Bakker’s appearance and get within hailing distance of it deserved an award!), and Best Supporting Actress went to Ariana DeBose for West Side Story, becoming at least the third performer in history to win the same award as the actor or actress who played the part in an earlier film (the others were Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro for playing Vito Corleone and Heath Ledger and Joaquin Phoenix for playing The Joker) – and she was clearly a lot more comfortable giving her speech than Rita Moreno when she won for the earlier version. DeBose told us she was “openly Queer,” so there were probably a lot of straight guys whose fantasies about her from seeing her breasts flopping around under her gown had them dashed (and no doubt some Lesbian viewers got their hopes up!). The biggest disappointment was the virtual snubbing of the film Belfast, which I expected would sweep the awards but got only Best Original Screenplay for Kenneth Branagh. (I remember when his marriage to Emma Thompson broke up after she won an Academy Award decades before he did.)

The biggest winner last night was the science-fiction epic Dune – or at least Dune, Part One since they only filmed the first half of the book – which won awards not only for Best Sound (they no longer give separate awards for sound editing and mixing) but Best Original Score, Best Cinematography, Best Visual Effects, Best Production Design and Best Editing: That’s six awards, but none in the marquee categories – but then the Academy has long considered science-fiction and fantasy films pretty much beneath their regard (the only science-fiction or fantasy film that has ever won Best Picture was the third in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and one of the biggest black marks in Academy history was the failure even to nominate Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey for Best Picture; the winner that year was Oliver!, a manipulative piece of musical treacle whose only redeeming qualities were the few shards of genuine emotion and drama left over from Charles Dickens’ original novel). The Best Director Oscar went to Jane Campion for The Power of the Dog; it was nice to see a second woman win Best Director and even nicer to see her win for a movie that has important female roles in it (the first, Katnryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker, was a tale about men and the few women in it were just peripheral characters).

TThough the actual awards show was held in the Dolby nèe Kodsk Theatre, the opening song was a typically gargantuan production number featuring Beyoncé and her co-writer, Dixon, performing “Be Alive” from King Richard with a chorus dressed in pink. They took pains to inform us that the number was being staged in Compton – so it’s nice to know that that Southern California city has inspired better music than the rap garbage of N.W.A.’s album Straight Outta Compton – but it was still one of Beyoncé’s overdone productions. She didn’t win Best Song, either; that went to Billie Eilish (O’Connell) and her brother Finneas for the title song of the new James Bond movie No Time to Die: a good song, but to my mind the song that should have won was “Somehow You Do” from a film called Four Good Days, unexpectedly soulfully performed by Reba McIntire. I was amused not only that the winner for Best Costume Design was Jenny Beavan from the film Cruella, but she was wearing a costume she had deliberately designed herself to look like Cruella de Vil – albeit an older and suitably humbled version. And despite the relegation of the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award and the Board of Governors’ Lifetime Achievement Awards to ceremonies held before the telecast, there were so many interminable tributes to older movies – the 60th anniversary of the James Bond franchise, the 50th anniversary of The Godfather, the 30th anniversary of White Men Can’t Jump and the 28th anniversary of Pulp Fiction (from which Samuel L. Jackson and Uma Thurman both look like older versions of themselves but John Travolta is so bald and bloated he looks like he’s auditioning for the Syd Barrett story) – the show still ran 40 minutes over its scheduled three-hour time slot.

The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (Latent Image Productions, Australian Film Finance Corporation, PolyGram Filmed Entertainment, MGM, 1994)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the Oscars I finally caught up with a movie I first heard of on its initial release but hadn’t actually seen until now: The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, a 1994 tale about three Australians, two Gay men and one a Transwoman, traveling across the outback in a bus they call “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” to get to a gig in the middle of nowhere. Our three hero(ine)s are Mitzi, true name Tick (Hugo Weaving, who five years after making this movie was the endlessly replicating Agent Smith, villain in the Matrix films, and later the anarchist hero of V for Vendetta); Felicia, true name Adam (Guy Pearce); and Bernadette, pre-transition name Ralph (Terence Stamp, who made it to overnight stardom in the 1962 film of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd and had an off-and-on career from which he bugged out to spend three years in India, after which he re-emerged as a character actor). They live in Sydney and dread making the cross-country trip through the Australian outback, not only because of the natural scenery and the isolation it keeps them in if anything goes wrong with their bus (as happens several times in the film, including at least one early scene in which it stops running in the middle of nowhere and in the next scene it’s moving again and writer-director Stephan Elliott doesn’t bother to explain how, as he does with some of its later breakdowns) but also the rough-and-tumble homophobes they’re likely to meet.

At one point the bus breaks down and Bernadette goes walking through the desert until he actually finds two people in a Jeep willing to drive him back and help out – only when they realize the other two people in the bus are Gay men, they drive off in a cloud of disgust. The only people who are willing to help out are a group of Aborigines and a man named Bob Spart (Bill Hunter) who runs a small garage they stop in on the way. Bob explains that the bus really needs a new gas tank, which he can order but it will take a week to arrive, which is too long for the Terrific Three since they need to get to their gig in six days. Bob tells them he can jury-rig something that will get them to the place where they’re supposed to perform, and he ends up pairing up with Bernadette (we’re told she’s already had her full surgery so there’s no chance of Bob being put out by any Crying Game-like surprises) after his obnoxious wife Cynthia Campos (Julia Cortez) bails on him after trying to crash the party Bob throws for his new friends at the local bar. The twist is that the person who’s hired the drag troupe to perform at her club is Tick’s ex-wife Marion (Sarah Chadwick). Naturally Tick’s friends are shocked, shocked! to find that he not only had a full sex life with his wife before he broke up with her to be Gay (I can relate to that because I had a nearly five-year relationship with a woman before I finally and definitively came out) but the two of them have a son, Benjamin (Mark Holmes), who suddenly finds he has a father even though he’s not exactly the sort of dad he had in mind.

Along the way they perform to a nice assortment of disco (including some of the few songs I liked way back when, like Alicia Bridges’ “I Love the Night Life” and Gloria Gaynor’s overpowering ode to resiliency, “I Will Survive”), pop (Adam is a huge fan of ABBA and even travels with a piece of shit in a glass tube, which he claims he fished out of a bathroom just after it had been used by Agnetha Fältskog) and some interesting and quirky older music, including a record of Mack David’s song “I Don’t Care if the Sun Don’t Shine” by Patti Page. (I’d known this song from the version Elvis Presley recorded for Sun, but the first record was by Tony Martin, the second by Patti Page, and the third by Dean Martin.) The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert is a visually stunning movie – the cinematography by Brian J. Breheny is rich with color and does justice to the outback scenery (including one shot that looked so much like the elevated mesa in John Ford’s Westerns I joked, “Monument Valley, Australia”) – and it’s also heavily dramatic when it’s not being richly, warmly funny.

The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert was a surprise hit in the U.S. – I remember it being promoted at the 1994 Pride Festival with so many pennant-shaped flags I didn’t realize at first it was a movie promotion: I thought it was someone running for Imperial Court Empress in Palm Springs – and the following year Universal and Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment essentially reworked it as To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar, also a fun movie but hardly in the same league as Priscilla. Like most U.S. attempts at Gay humor, To Wong Foo relied almost exclusively on camp; while the cnaracters in Priscilla have their camp aspects, they are also strong, tough, resilient people. For me the whole if-you-have-lemons-make-lemonade aspect of this film is one in which some homophobic vandals spray-paint the bus with slogans calling on all AIDS faggots to die – and Adam responds by repainting the bus and covering the graffiti with lavender.

Caught in His Web (Assemble Media, Cyber Productions, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On the Lifetime TV-movie schedule online I had spotted a Lifetime movie I had previously missed, Caught in His Web, which was co-executive produced by Whoopi Goldberg, who was sufficiently impressed with it that she promoted it on one of the late-night talk shows. It turned out to be surprisingly good, a gripping tale of three high-school freshmen – or, rather, freshwomen – in a small town and the male cyber-bully who torments them. The girls are Emma Lawrence (Alison Thornton), who fell into the web of the mysterious cyber-bully “Blake” when he posed as a woman and joined a Web site for Queer students to troll for Lesbian victims with whom he could carry on a mock flirtation; Olivia (Malia Baker), a Black girl whose father is a minister and is so hung up on what her parents will think of her she won’t tell them anything about the ways she’s being traumatized; and Gabby (Emma Tremblay), an aspiring photographer whose teacher notices that her grades are slipping – she hasn’t even developed the rolls of film she shot for her last two class assignments – because she’s so wrapped up in the trauma of being cyber-stalked. “Blake” blackmails his victims into sending him nude photos of themselves by threatening that if they don’t, he will do mass e-mails to their classmates revealing their most closely-held and embarrassing secrets.

The film’s true heroine is Detective Holland (Garcelle Beauvais), an African-American woman police officer in a town so small she’s the police force’s only detective. While everyone else in town, including both her fellow officers and the high-school principal (Tosca Baggoo) who ignored the complaints of the three victims, couldn’t care less, Detective Holland takes the case to heart, ignoring her other cases to focus on it. Detective Holland lives with her father, a white-haired Black man who flirts with various hobbies, including home gardening (there’s a grimly amusing scene in which they sit down to have dinner together and the entire meal is one tomato, which they have to split: the rest of her dad’s crop got eaten by raccoons). He briefly developed an interest in computers before switching to gardening, and during that time he took an extension class at the local community college. Detective Holland seeks out the teacher of that class, and instead of the older Black man I was hoping for because I was hoping writer Danielle Iman would create a romantic interest, the teacher turns out to be a young white woman with whom Holland partners to catch the mysterious “Blake.” Though I think writer Iman revealed “Blake’s” true identity midway through the film, which was way too early in my view, Holland and the computer science teacher are able to deduce that the cyber-stalker lives in town (he’s way too familiar with the victims’ whereabouts to be someone from another town or city) and are able to trace his true identity: Nathan (Berkley Duffield), an assistant at the local hardware store who seemed to me to be, if not drop-dead gorgeous, at least cute enough he shouldn’t have to resort to cyber-stalking to get dates.

With half the film’s running time left to go, and Nathan getting himself fired from the hardware store over his extracurricular activities (his boss doesn’t know what Nathan is really doing but it’s clearly affecting his work and scaring their customers), the trick for Detective Holland is getting the evidence to prove it. Since Nathan is good at erasing his phones and laptops to obliterate all the evidence against him – and the small town’s police department can’t afford either the time or the money to recover the erased data from his devices – the case looks hopeless until Nathan decides to get his revenge by “outing” Emma. This causes Emma to attempt suicide – though, blessed be, writer Iman allows her to recover – and it gives Detective Holland and her unlikely partner the evidence they need finally to go after him. When Nathan is caught and pleads guilty rather than face trial, Emma is allowed to give a “victim impact statement” in which she talks about how glad she is to have regained power over her life. Caught in His Web, despite its silly and punning title, is actually a quite good movie, well directed by Hannah Cheesman, a quite accomplished Canadian filmmaker with two theatrical features under her belt, The Definites and The Boathouse (the latter won top prize at the 2021 Rhode Island Film Festival – who knew there was a Rhode Island Film Festival in 2021?), and on the strength of this effort she looks like a director to watch, who not only kept the suspense and terror but also managed to get excellent performances from all her cast members. Lifetime is ballyhooing the opportunities they’re giving to women filmmakers during Women’s History Month, but Cheesman takes her place alongside Christine Conradt and Vanessa Parise as women directors of real talent and promise whose later careers we will be worth waiting for.

The Lost Girls, a.k.a. Angie: Lost Girls (Freestyle Digital Media, Artists for Change Productions.Lifetime, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Caught in His Web Lifetime showed its “Premiere” movie of the weekend, actually a two-year-old movie called The Lost Girls. This was difficult to find since imdb.com doesn’t have a listing for it – they have a listing for a 2022 film called The Lost Girls, but it’s a fantasy offshoot of Peter Pan described as follows: “Like her grandmother and her mother Jane before her, Wendy must escape Pan's hold on her and the promise he wants her to keep.” The stars of that The Lost Girls are Vanessa Redgrave, Joely Richardson and Iain Glen, and it was written and directed by Livia de Paolis based on a novel by Laurie Fox. This The Lost Girls is directed by Julia Verdin from a script co-written by herself and Janet Odogwu, and it’s listed on imdb.com under the title Angie: Lost Girls, though another Web site, https://bestmoviecast.com/the-lost-girls-2022-cast-release-date-plot-trailer/, gave the full cast and crew list.

Angie Morgan (Jane Widdop) is a teenager, alienated first by her parents Dan (Randall Batinkoff) and Hayley (Olivia d’Abo, the closest this film has to a “name” star) moving her from the “West Adams” neighborhood where she had friends and a social life to Los Angeles, where she feels lonely and desperate. She drifts into an affair with a young man named Mario (Dylan Sprayberry) who woos her with boyish charm. Of course she has no idea he’s really a recruiter for a gang of human traffickers led by Deacon (Marty Dew) and Ida (Denise Nicholson), a truly formidable and nasty woman who, though writers Verdin and Odogwu don’t spell this out for us, probably was a human trafficking victim herself who rose through the ranks and ultimately became the gang’s madam and enforcer. (That’s what real recovering trafficking victims and the brave volunteers who help them have told me in public presentations and interviews.)

The breaking point comes when Angie’s parents fail to show up at her recital where, as part of a program involving her fellow students, she plays ukulele and sings several songs. (The first song we hear Angie sing is “House of the Rising Sun,” a traditional folk blues about a woman forced into a life of prostitution. I’m sure Verdin and Odogwu deliberately picked that song because later that will be Angie’s fate as well.) Mario comes up and offers to drive her home, but first he wants to take her to meet his uncle, who he says is a music producer and promoter who can help launch her career as a professional singer. Of course we know he’s lying, not just because we’ve already seen the promos and therefore we know what the movie is about, but because Jane Widdop’s voice is scratchy, harsh and not exactly the stuff of which professional singing careers are made. Angie, renamed “Angel” by the gang, soon learns the truth and suffers several beatings before she yields to the inevitable and starts turning tricks for the gang, and many of the men she has to have sex with get off on beating her up.

She makes friends with two women in the same predicament, Zoë (Lindsey De Sylveira) and Latisha (Rita Rucker), both Black. Zoë gives Angie a beaded bracelet that was made for her by a woman who tried to get her out of The Life, and later on when Angie makes her own escape the volunteer anti-trafficking activist who helped both women recognizes the bracelet and tells Angie of its origins. Until the mid-point the film cuts back and forth between Angie’s ordeal at the hands of the traffickers and the ordeal of her parents and her younger sister Maddie (Juliette Hanover), who miss her. Among the people who show up to the home of Angie’s parents are a Black detective who looks a lot like one of the people in the trafficking ring – lending credence to Ida’s statement, “Don’t bother going to the police, because they’re on our payroll.” (This too is quite common among trafficking gangs: often they pay off the local police either in cash or in “freebies.”) Angie is put in a safe house and given a new phone whose number only the police, her parents and Rachel (Cherie Jiminez), the volunteer who’s helping her, are supposed to have the number.

But the traffickers find her anyway, after storming into a group therapy session and taking out Latisha, whom they kill almost immediately to intimidate Angie into returning; and then calling Angie directly after they get her number from a fellow trafficking victim who showed up for what was supposed to be a janitorial job. She brought her one-year-old baby because she couldn’t afford a sitter or anyone else to leave her with, and the traffickers threatened either to sell the child into human slavery or just kill her if her mom didn’t cooperate. Angie returns to the clutches of the traffickers, thinking she has to do so or they will kill her sister Maddie, and the cops and Rachel have to trace her again, which they do surprisingly quickly. Though the film has its flaws and overall isn’t as coherent a piece of work as Caught in His Web, The Lost Girls gets better as it progresses and is especially strong in depicting the Mother of All Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders Angie is going through once she’s been rescued. Indeed, I wondered why in the entire movie no one suggested she undergo therapy for PTSD, but instead tne Verdin-Odogwu script explains that the sort of help she really needs can only come from other human trafficking victims who can relate to her on a victim-to-victim level.

The Lost Girls was followed by a 15-minute mini-documentary which featured interviews with two people: José Lewis Alfaro, who was thrown out of his home by his parents for refusing to go through “conversion therapy” because he was Gay and went on a chat board that was really run by traffickers; and Toni D. Rivera, a middle-aged Black woman who was also a trafficking victim (though she offers herself as an example of how you can make it through the experience; she proclaims herself married and with five children, so having been trafficked did not screw up her ability to have a normal, loving relationship) and – though she didn’t mention this in the Lifetime interview – also a trafficker herself until, as reporter Terry Shropshire reported in an online article on July 4, 2020 (https://rollingout.com/2020/07/04/former-sex-slave-toni-d-rivera-now-saves-kids-from-sex-traffricking-trade/), “her daughter had [been] very nearly victimized the way she was. While riding the 6-train in New York one day, a known trafficker tried to snatch her daughter off of a packed subway and no one tried to step in to help her.” As I’ve noted before about previous Lifetime movies about human trafficking and other forms of child abuse, including the 2006 film For the Love of a Child about the founding of Childhelp International, movies like this make you think that virtually the entire human race is pond scum for allowing these things to happen – but also that there are some redeeming people who actually try their damnedest to help fight these evils.

Tangier (Universal, 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

When my husband Charles came home from work last night two hours early I ran us both a 1946 movie called Tangier, a terrible movie ripping off some great ones (notably Casablanca) with Maria Montez in a fusion of the Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henried roles: she’s Rita, a fugitive from Madrid, Spain (so at least this time she, a real-life native of the Dominican Republic, was playing a Hispanic instead of an Arab, a Polynesian or a Gypsy) whose father and two brothers were tortured and murdered during the Spanish Civil War. She dances at a nightclub called the Ritz (I couldn’t help but joke, “Everybody comes to Ritz”), only she tries to hunt down the man who tortured her father and brothers so she can kill him. So she frequently asks her maidservant Dolores (the marvelous Louise Allbritton, whose magnificent performance in the 1943 film Son of Dracula – in which director Robert Siodmak and his brother Carl, who wrote the script, anticipated Anne Rice’s vampire tales by casting Allbritton as a normal human who wants to become a vampire so she can be immortal despite the considerable down side of having to attack and kill people for their blood – should have made her a star: instead she got relegated to comedy parts and her career ended in 1964) to go on in her place.

The Humphrey Bogart character is Paul Kenyon (Robert Paige), a discredited former war correspondent who’s trying to rehabilitate his reputation, who falls in love with Rita even though he’s warned she only dates guys with big bankrolls they can lavish on her. Among the other men in her life are her dance partner, Ramón (Kent Taylor) and Col, José Artiego (Preston Foster, heavier-set than we remember him from his career peak – to the extent he had one – in the early 1930’s). It doesn’t help that it seems all the men in Rita’s life have little thin moustaches and, aside from Preston Foster looking about a decade older than Rpbert Paige or Kent Taylor, they pretty much resemble each other. They’re also among the most boring people ever created by movie writers – in this case Alice Duer Miller, who wrote the “original” story (and for some reason Miller’s imdb.com page omits the most important film ever made based on a story she wrote: the 1935 musical Roberta with Irene Dunne, Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, based on a 1933 musical script by Otto Harbach based in turn on a Miller novel called Gowns by Roberta) and M. M. Musselman and Monty F. Collins, who wrote the screenplay – and one of the most irritating aspects of this movie is the desperation with which the writers went to get World War II intrigues into the story even though the war itself had ended the year before.

The good guys and the bad guys are both chasing after a large diamond (we see the “diamond” and it’s one of the most obvious fakes ever produced for a film) in Rita’s possession – though, realizing that holding it puts her life in danger, Rita later palms it off on Dolores – and Alec Rocco (J. Edward Bromberg), who skulks around the action to the side for most of the film and is thought by Rita to be the torturer from Franco’s Spain she’s sworn to kill, turns out to be an agent of the wartime Allies there to recover looted property the bad guys still have in their possession after the war. Needless to say, Col. Artiego is the real torturer and Nazi villain – as if we couldn’t tell from the medals on his chest, which make him look like Conrad Veidt’s character in the original Casablanca – and the writers can’t figure out a better exit for him than having him and Allbritton’s character get trapped in the hotel’s defective elevator, which crashes and kills both of them. (At least Louise Allbritton got to take out the principal villain, albeit at the cost of her own life.) There’s even an equivalent to the Dooley Wilson character in Sabu, who plays “Pepe,” a street minstrel who walks between the tables at the Ritz nightclub singing bad versions of American folk songs like “She’ll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain” and “Polly Wolly Doodle,” which in one of the film’s few genuinely funny lines he introduces as “Number One on the American Hit Procession.”

The wretched misuse of Sabu in this and virtually all his other Universal films speaks volumes about the mistreatment of actors of color; even Universal, who cast Turhan Bey so creatively (in The Mad Ghoul he’s actually the hero and bland white actor David Bruce is the titular monster),didn’t know what to do with Sabu. He suffered the same fate that Sue Lyon did a quarter-century later: just as Lyon’s career began at the top (playing the title character of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita with Nabokov himself doing the screenplay and Stanley Kubrick directing) and therefore had nowhere to go bot down, so Sabu also started at the top (under Robert Flaherty’s direction in the film Elephant Boy) and therefore also had nowhere to go but down. He made a few genuinely good films after that, including Drums and The Thief of Baghdad (a considerably better movie than the deadly-dull 1923 Douglas Fairbanks silent), but then he got stuck at Universal in one dead-end character role after another, usually opposite Maria Montez. But then again there were a lot of bizarre attempts to knock off Casablanca both during and after the war, including Warners’ own To the Victor (1948), and none of them matched the perfect balance of wartime intrigue, suspense and romance of the original – though Tangier failed so dismally the gap between it and Casablanca looms larger than the actual distance between the two Moroccan cities that give the films their titles.

Rio (Universal, 1939)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At about 9:20 last night I ran my husband Charles an intriguing movie I’d never seen before or even heard of until I ran across it in a post on YouTube: Rio, a Universal film from 1939 directed by John Brahm (a sporadically interesting German expatriate with a flair for Gothic imagery even though at times he seems like the sort of director who got offered the scripts Fritz Lang turned down) from a committee-wrltten script. Future director Jean Negulesco is credited with the original story, but four other writers – Aben Kandel, Edwin Justus Mayer, Frank Partos and Stephen Morehouse Avery – got credit for the actual screenplay. Rio is an oddball movie that stars Basil Rathbone as Parisian financier Paul Reynard, who as the film opens is about to celebrate his one-year anniversary. His bride is former nightclub chanteuse Irene Reynard (Sigrid Gurie, who had been given a huge star buildup by Sam Goldwyn, who cast her in The Adventures of Marco Polo opposite Gary Cooper, only her chance for a major career dried up almost immediately when it turned out that, contrary to Goldwyn’s publicists who claimed she was an immigrant from Norway, her parents were Norwegian immigrants but she herself had been born in Flatbush, Brooklyn), who seems happy enough in the marriage but is scared of the enraged looks she sometimes gets from her husband whenever he’s suffered a business reversal.

When the film opens he’s desperate for a loan: he tries to get one from a bankers’ syndicate in Paris. When they turn him down he flies out to London but is turned down there, too, so he makes another run at the Paris bankers and this time he tells them – honestly – that most of the securities he’s deposited with them are worthless forgeries. He thinks this is going to lead them to bail him out on the ground that if it became publicly known that the banks he’s trying to borrow from were stocked with fraudulent securities, they would collapse, so he figures he has them over the proverbial shoals and they will have to bail him out in order to keep from going under themselves. Instead they swear out a complaint against him and the police arrest him as a swindler in the most embarrassing venue conceivable: at the one-year anniversary party he’s throwing for his wife at the club where she used to work, and where she’s recognized and asked to sing one of her old songs. Until this point I’d assumed that the writers wanted us to think of Rathbone’s character as a lovable rogue we’d be rooting for, but when he is found guilty and sentenced to 10 years in an island penal colony off the coast of South America, it’s clear we’re supposed to read him as a full-fledged villain.

His wife gives away the valuable jewelry he’d given her on their anniversary night, saying she doesn’t want his “tainted money,” and she and his faithful servant and best friend Dirk (Victor McLaglen, second-billed, behind Rathbone but ahead of Gurie) move to Rio de Janeiro (well, it had to figure in the plot somewhere!), where she gets a job at the “Club Samba” croaking out old songs (actually written by Frank Skinner, music, and Ralph Freed, words, though the first song Gurie sang back in Paris, “Love Opened My Eyes,” was by Jimmy McHugh, lyrics as well as music). Skinner and Freed also penned a song for the Rio Carnival, “Sí, Sí, Sí,” which is sung by Samba Club manager Roberto (Leo Carrillo) and his assistant Manuelo (Billy Gilbert, suggesting that one tag line that could have been used to advertise this film was “Billy Gilbert Sings!”). For the next few reels the film alternates between Paul Reynard;s ordeal serving his sentence on Devil’s Island (it’s never explicitly referred to as that in the film – maybe Universal was tired of having the sort of kerfuffle Warner Bros. had had with the French government when they made Devil’s Island in 1939, a “B” knockoff of John Ford’s great film The Prisoner of Shark Island in which Boris Karloff plays a doctor unjustly convicted of a crime and sentenced to Devil’s Island until his medical skills become indispensable as the island is beset by an epidemic; ironically once France fell to the Nazis in 1940 Warners reissued this film and adveertised it as, “Now the Truth Can Be Told!”) and his wife’s career singing at the Samba Club, fending off the advances of the club’s owner and redeeming a barfly who gets on her bad side by literally blowing a pile of matches in her face.

The man is Bill Gregory (an almost unrecognizable Robert Cummings), and it turns out he’s a disgraced engineer who designed a bridge that collapsed shortly after it was opened. Gregory insists that the bridge’s design was sound and the collapse was due to an unscrupulous contractor who short-changed the project by using cheaper building materials than the ones he had specified (so one of the two men in Irene Reynard’s life is a swindler and the other is a victim of swindlers). He gets dragged into an alcoholic stupor and then gets dragged out of it again when the local authorities have to ration the city’s water supply quite severely. Gregory finds out that the cause of the shortage is a malfunctioning irrigation system, and he says that though he can do a short-term fix of the city’s pump, long-term the only real solution is to build a dam. (It’s a measure of how short Universal’s budget was on this film that while we hear a lot of talk about the dam, we never actually get to see it – not even a model.) When the dam is completed (preposterously quickly) there’s a bizarre scene at the local church where the dam is officially blessed by the local priest, with both Gregory and Irene in attendance. Naturally their proximity has ripened into love, and the two appear altar-bound after Paul Reynard’s escape attempt seemingly ends with him turning up dead in the swamp that surrounds the prison and is the last line of defense after jungle growth and a flock of killer ants.

Unfortunately, Reynard isn’t dead: he planted his ID bracelet on his fellow convict who was supposed to break out with him but had succumbed to the killer ants (and Paul helped him along by stabbing him), and he and faithful servant Dirk takes him to safety in a boat and then go to the Samba Club to get Irene to see the error of her ways and demand her back. Unfortunately for Paul, however, the Rio police have got wind that he’s headed there and they are ready to shoot down both him and Dirk (though, once again, this presumed dramatic action highlight is never shown on screen, though that might have been an artistic decision similar to the ending shoot-out of The Big Sleep seven years later) – while Irene and the reformed Gregory are able to pair off together at last. Rio is a truly unusual movie, a weird sort of genre-bender which cuts back and forth from the Samba Club to Paul’s ordeal on the Penal Colony Which Dares Not Speak Its Name. The Devil’s Island scenes led Charles jokingly to call it “Papillon – The Musical,” and Larry Ceballos (third in line for the choreography jobs at Warner Bros. after Busby Berkeley and Bobby Connolly were unavailable) is credited for choreographing the Rio Carnival sequence (built up with a lot of stock footage of the real Rio Carnival). It’s saved by the power and authority of Rathbone’s acting (everyone else in the movie is either all-good, all-bad or comic relief, and I found myself wondering whether Sigrid Gurie’s part may have originally been written for Marlene Dietrich, who would have been a lot better at portraying the character’s world-weariness; she also could have done her own singing, while Gurie’s singing voice was so much lower in pitch than her speaking voice I suspected she had a voice double even though I wasn’t sure) and by the stunning atmospherics of director John Brahm.

I long wrote off Brahm as a poor man’s (or a poor producer’s) Fritz Lang, and I suspect much of my distaste for Brahm came from having watched his 1939 movie Let Us Live, a shameless ripoff of Lang’s 1937 masterpiece You Only Live Once with the same male star, Henry Fonda, playing the same part – a young convict who’s trying to go straight – and defaced with a happy ending instead of Lang’s tragic one. I’ve seen more of Brahm’s films since then, including the three in one of the Fox Horror boxes I liked (The Undying Monster, The Lodger – the 1944 20th Century-Fox remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s star-making 1926 silent – and Hangover Square); the movies were packaged together in what wasn’t billed as a tribute to Brahm but could have been since he made all three. Aided by magnificent chiaroscuro cinematography by Hal Mohr, Brahm makes Rio a real treat for the eyes that qualifies as film noir at least visually, if not thematically (had the writing committee made Basil Rathbone’s character more emotionally complex and morally ambiguous Rio would have qualified as noir thematically as well as visually). It’s a film that runs all over the map both in terms of critical reception in 1939 and in the seven imdb.com reviews today, which run the gamut from “Don’t waste your time” to “A little gem.” I quite liked Rio even though it was all too obviously another entry in that odd cycle of movies with titles from the Third World cities in which they took place (a trail blazed by producer Walter Wanger when he bought the remake rights to 1937’s French film Pépé le Moko and retitled it Algiers, though eight years earlier Josef von Sternberg had arguably made the template for these exotica movies, Morocco) and of which the most famous one to date is obviously Casablanca.

The Fatal Hour (Monogram, 1940)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 9:40 last night I screened my husband Charles and I a YouTube post of The Fatal Hour, fourth and next-to-last of the five "Mr. Wong" films Boris Karloff made for Monogram from 1938 to 1940. James Lee Wong was a Chinese detective created by Hugh Wiley in a series of short stories that appeared in Collier’s magazine; he was obviously a knock-off of Charlie Chan but lacked either Chan’s aphoristic tendencies or his family. James Lee Wong was decidedly single, and so his films lacked ether the amusing byplay among all (or almost all) Chan’s children over dinner as featured in the Earl Derr Biggers novels and the 1931 film The Black Camel (the only one of the first five Chan movies with Warner Oland that survives) or the use of Chan’s Number One, Two or Three sons as comic-relief foils for him. The last time Charles and I watched The Fatal Hour together I was quite impressed by the sheer depth of raw emotion in the opening reel. I was especially surprised by the performance of Grant Withers (Loretta Young’s first husband until her hyper-Catholic family had it annulled) in his recurring series character.

For the most part he was just a boorish cop, the sort of foil for Wong the way Inspector Lestrade was for Sherlock Holmes, but in this one – aided by W. Scott Darling’s script, which begins with the murder of Street’s best friend on the police force – “The most convincing aspect of the early reels is — surprise! — Grant Withers’ genuine pathos in expressing his character’s grief for the man he started with in the police department. For once Withers actually expresses deep emotion instead of just playing the irascible screamer he was through most of the series — indeed, [writer Scott] Darling’s script and Withers’ performance puts the grief so much front and center that when Boris Karloff enters as Mr. Wong he seems like an extra in his own vehicle. Had the film focused on Bill Street and his determination to avenge the murder of his friend and fellow cop, The Fatal Hour could have been a fine movie and an important proto-noir; instead, after a quite impressive start the usual Monogram formulae take over and the film assumes the stately talkiness of the first two Wongs (relieved a bit in Mr. Wong in Chinatown simply because on that go-round Darling actually got some real action in his script).”

The Fatal Hour was made at a curious juncture in Karloff’s career in which the new management at Universal that had taken over when Carl Laemmle Sr. and Jr. were driven out of the company in 1936 had decided that audiences were no longer interested in horror films. They still owed Karloff one film under the contract the Laemmles had signed him to after the huge success of Frankenstein in 1931, and they used that commitment to make Night Key, in which Karloff played a dotty old inventor who got cheated of the royalties for a new burglar alarm by a crooked capitalist (Samuel S. Hinds) and gets his revenge by teaming up with a petty crook to hack his own system and leave notes behind saying, “What I can create, I can destroy.” When I showed Charles Night Key he called it the first hacker movie, and I noticed the similarities between it and the 2004 German film The Edukators, also about the inventors of a super-secure alarm system getting their revenge against corrupt capitalists.

But Night Key was a box-office flop and Karloff agreed to Monogram’s offer of a six-film contract to play James Lee Wong – though in a foredoomed attempt to make him look kinda-sorta Asian he got plastered in almost as much makeup as he wore to play the Frankenstein Monster or the Mummy. He also looks like he’s wearing black shoe polish in his hair (the real Karloff was nearing 50 and had already gone grey by then) and he moves stiffly through the part, turning in a solid, professional performance but not offering anything special. Then in 1938 a Los Angeles theatre owner decided to double-bill the original Frankenstein and Dracula together, they did more business than either had when they were first released, and Universal got the message big-time. Not only did they offer the Frankenstein/Dracula double bill to any theatre that wanted it, they decided to make another film in the Frankenstein series, Son of Frankenstein, and put Karloff back under contract.

In fact, at the height of the studio system, when it was customary for each actor to be tied to just one studio, Karloff had contracts with four: Universal for big-budget horror blockbusters like Son of Frankenstein and Tower of London, Columbia for a series of “B”-pictures in which he played kindly old scientists who test their inventions in socially irresponsible ways; Warner Bros., for thrillers and transplanted Westerns (like The Bad Man, which got reworked as West of Shanghai with Karlolff playing a Chinese warlord instead of a Western outlaw), and Monogram for the "Mr. Wong" series. In fact, the producers at Monogram decided to play the Wong films for Karloffps usual audience: while the first three films had featured Wong in their titles – Mr. Wong, Detective, The Mystery of Mr. Wong and Mr. Wong in Chinatown – the last two they made with Karloff got more “horrific” titles like The Fatal Hour and Doomed to Die – though in Britain The Fatal Hour was called Mr. Wong at Headquarters and Doomed to Die was called The Mystery of the “Wentworth Castle,” the Wentworth Castle being a ship that’s sunk at the start of the film.

For the last film Karloff owed them, they decided to pull him out of the "Mr. Wong" series altogether and instead put him in The Ape, a 1940 movie based on an old play by Adam Hull Shirk about a kindly doctor who dons an ape suit and commits murder to obtain other people’s spinal fluid so he can cure his paralyzed daughter. (If this sounds a lot like the mad-scientist movies Karloff was making at Columbia, that’s no coincidence.) Meanwhile, since Monogram had promised their distributors a sixth and final "Mr. Wong" movie, they came up with a surprisingly good one called Phantom of Chinatown with Keye Luke as Wong, Lotus Long as his racially appropriate girlfriend and Grant Withers the only actor repeating his role from the earlier films. Karloff biographer Donald F. Glut explained that the script for Phantom of Chinatown explained the dramatic age difference between Karloff and Luke by saying he was the original James Lee Wong’s son – maybe that was a mistake because Luke had earlier played the Number One Son of Charlie Chan in the films with Warner Oland – but there’s no mention of that in the actual script by George Waggner (who would turn up at Universal a year later as director of The Wolf Man) and Ralph Gilbert Bettison, though the film was a good one overall and it was nice to have an Asian detective actually played by an Asian actor!

Ellery Queen and the Perfect Crime (Columbia,. 1941)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 9 p.m. yesterday I ran my husband Charles and I a movie off YouTube, a 1941 film called Ellery Queen and the Perfect Crime, which starred Ralph Bellamy as Ellery Queen and Margaret Lindsay as his long-suffering secretary and sort-of fiancée, Nikki Porter. It begins with what would today be called an insider-trading scandal: John Matthews (Douglass Dumbrille) receives word that the South Valley Power Company is about to be put out of business by a raging flood (represented in this “B”-movie by stock footage of the 1927 Mississippi River floods). Rather than level with his investors that the power company is about to go under, he instructs his broker to sell off his own holdings and short the stock so he’ll be able to keep his own fortune while all his investors will lose completely. John Williams’ son Walter (John Beal, who looks enough like Dumbrille they’re believable as father and son; one of my pet peeves in filmmaking is when actors who look nothing like each other are cast as biological relatives) wants no part of the fortune John has made and kept through such unfair and illegal means, and he tells his dad he should give the money to the people who lost everything in the collapse of the company. John accuses Walter of being a sentimental idealist who doesn’t realize how the world really works, and he plans to disinherit his son and has his lawyer draft a new will that leaves his fortune instead to his sister-in-law Carlotta Emerson (Spring Byington at her ditziest).

Then John Williams gets murdered, apparently stabbed witn a dagger in his study, and the principal suspects are Walter Williams and Ray Jardin (H. B. Warner), an investor in South Valley Power who handles the loss of his whole fortune with the same noble stoicism he used to face the trauma of being crucified in his most famous previous role as Jesus Christ in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1927 silent blockbuster The King of Kings. There’s a noble scene in which he tells his butler Henry (Walter Kingsford) that he can no longer afford to keep him on – he and everyone else on the household staff will need to find other positions, Jardin (whose name is pronounced much like “Jordan,” rather appropriate considering the actor’s past) explains – and Henry laments that at his age it’ll be hard for him to find something else. It also turns out that Jardin’s daughter Marian (Linda Hayes) is in love with Walter Williams, though the two get estranged when Marian becomes convinced that Walter is going to hang her father out to dry because her dad and her boyfriend are the prime suspects. Carlotta Emerson has an obnoxious pet monkey and also a nasty boyfriend, attorney Anthony Rhodes (Sidney Blackmer), who offers to defend Walter in court but (like a similarly corrupt attorney in another Columbia film, Orson Welles’ noir masterpiece The Lady from Shanghai, seven years later) he really means to throw the case, ensure that Walter is found guilty and sentenced to death, so Carlotta will get John Williams’ money.

There’s a long scene in which Ellery Queen (Ralph Bellamy), who shows up at the estate sale of Ray Jardin’s belongings armed with a checkbook and a determination to bid on every item for sale, is planning to do just that while both Nikki Porter (Margaret Lindsay, who switched to Columbia after she got tired of playing the “good girl” to Bette Davis’s “bad girl” in innumerable Warner Bros. melodramas), Ellery Queen’s secretary and sort-of fiancée, and the people running the auction think he’s crazy. Two guys in white coats show up, ostensibly from an asylum where Ellery is a patient but actually from a moving company to haul away Ellery’s purchases. Nikki grabs a check for one-quarter of the purchase prices Ellery has just written the incredibly queeny auctioneer, Rufus Smith (Charles Halton, whose hair is topped by one of the worst comb-overs in movie history; obviously he was allowing his availability for the “pansy” roles Franklin Pangborn was too busy to take). She’s sure he has no way of covering the check, especially since Ellery Queen’s publisher hasn’t yet paid him for his latest novel (the conceit of the Ellery Queen series is that the two writers who actually created him, Frederick Dannay and Manfred Lee, not only signed the books “Ellery Queen” but made him the central character), but Ellery assures her that he has the money because Walter Williams has given it to her as a way of repaying him for his losses on South Valley Power without offering him an outright handout which he’d be too proud to accept.

For a while I was guessing that Carlotta would turn out to be the murderer, since it would have been a good dramatic twist for writers Dannay, Lee and Eric Taylor (who did the screenplay) to have the apparent ditz actually turn out to be guilty. But though they hinted at that outcome with a scene in which her pet monkey throws a dagger similar to the one that supposedly killed John Williams, in the meantime Ellery Queen has deduced that Williams was not killed in the study where the body was found. Instead he was killed outside and his body dragged into the house, and an autopsy revealed that the dagger wound was too shallow to have been fatal and instead John Williams was killed by poison. In the end this turns out to be one mystery in which the butler really did it: Henry shot Williams with a poison-tipped arrow (though his motive remains a mystery since, unlike some of the other characters, he didn’t have anything to gain financially by Willilams’ death), dragged his body into the study and clubbed Walter Williams so he could come to next to the body of his dead dad.

Ellery Queen and the Perfect Crime was the sort of light-hearted comedy-mystery film that would disappear almost overnight from American screens after the success of the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon made murder serions business again. The by-play between Ellery Queen, amateur sleuth, and his father, New York Police Department Inspector Queen (Charley Grapewin – well, other Columbia mystery series cast William Frawley as a police detective, and if you can believe Fred Mertz as a cop you should be able to believe in Dorothy’s Uncle Henry as a cop as well), anticipates the by-play between several generations of cops in the current TV series Blue Bloods even though Grapewin’s character is your typical Inspector Lestrade type who’s there only to get outwitted by his amateur-sleuth detective who in this reading also happens to be his son. Charles asked me if I had any idea who the most popular character in mystery fiction who’s an actual sworn police officer instead of a private detective (official or otherwise), and after I thought about that for a while my answer would be Steve Carella of the Ed McBain 87th Precinct novels.

The Thing About Pam, episode 3: "She's a Star Witness" (Big Picture Company, Blumhouse Television, NBC News Studios, NBC-TV, aired March 22, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I wanted to go through a relatively short film because at 10 p.m. I wanted to watch the latest episode of the NBC-TV series The Thing About Pam, based on a true-crime story from Troy, Missouri in 2011: the murder of Betsy Faria (Katy Mixon), a woman who was already suffering from terminal breast cancer that had spread to her ilver. On December 27, 2011 Betsy visited her friend Pam Hupp (Renée Zellwegger) six days after Betsy had changed the beneficiary on her insurance policy from her husband Russ (Glenn Fleshler) to Pam. Ostensibly this was to make sure the payout was put into a trust fund for Betsy’s daughters (not from Russ but by a previous relationship), but Pam collected the insurance money and put it in her own account instead. Russ Faria was convicted of his wife’s murder in 2013 after an outrageously unfair trial in which the woman judge (Heather Magee) was not only a Best Friend Forever of the woman prosecutor, Leah Askey (Judy Greer), the prosecutor was also having a sexual affair with the male sheriff’s deputy in charge of the case.

Among the judge’s most bizarre rulings was that Russ’s attorney, Joel Schwartz (Josh Duhamel), was not allowed to offer alternate theories of the crime and in particular was not allowed to suggest in any way that Pam Hupp was the actual killer, even though incontrovertible evidence had established that she was the last person to see Betsy Faria alive. The third episode – the one I watched on TV last night – covered the trial, the disappointment that Russ Faria went through when his two stepdaughters become star witnesses for the prosecution, Pam’s own twisted tales of the events when she takes the witness stand, and the interest shown in the case by the producers of the true-crime NBC-TV series Dateline NBC, who did no fewer than five episodes on the story from 2014 to 2019.

The Wikipedia page on Pam Hupp, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pam_Hupp, offers quite a lot of additional information, including the identity of the next person Pam killed, Louis Gumpenberger (Jeff Ryan Baker in his first TV role), described on NBC’s Web page for the series, https://collider.com/thing-about-pam-cast-character-guide/, as follows: “Pam’s first victim, or so they thought. Louis was an unsuspecting participant in a twisted fantasy that ended in murder. Gumpenberger had sustained impaired mental and physical capabilities after a devastating car accident in 2005, which made him an easy target for Pam’s scheme.” Pam shot Gumpenberger three times on August 16, 2016 and ultimately entered a guilty plea to the crime, so she was already in prison when authorities started looking at her as a possible suspect in Betsy Faria’s murder, too. Pam was also accused of killing her own mother, Shirley Neumann, who fell off an apartment balcony in what was originally ruled an accident. The Thing About Pam is a star turn for Renée Zellwegger, who dominates the show and creates an unforgettable characterization. Otherwise, this series is pretty much a mess, and NBC made the unusual (to say the least) decision to have Keith Morrison, the familiar narrator’s voice on Dateline NBC, narrate this as well just to make it seem like a true-crime story instead of a scripted series just based on a true-crime story.

American Song Contest, episode 1 (Brain Academy, Propagate Content, Universal Television Alternative Studios, NBC-TV, aired March 21, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 8 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched the premiere episode of American Song Contest on NBC. I hadn’t expected that Charles would be watching it with me, but he did and he was less impressed than I was, especially with the quality of the songs. He argued that the songs were pretty derivative and fit neatly into established genres. There were a few exceptions – notably “New Boot Goofin’” by Ryan Charles of Wyoming, which was not country but rap (and not a country-rap fusion like last year’s “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus, either: “New Boot Goofin’” was straight-up rap on a country subject, though at least you could understand the words: a lot of my frustration with rap comes from its virtual incomprehensibility, and I figure if you’re going to reduce music to just lyrics and rhythm, at least you ought to make it possible for us to decipher what you’re saying) – but for the most part last night’s songs fit neatly into established genres. The opener, “Ready to Go” by the Minnesota band YAM Haus, was a nice bit of 1970’s pop-rock with a baby-faced lead singer that if he’d been around 50 years ago would have been a teen idol gracing the cover of Tiger Beat.

The next song was “Wonderland” by AleXa (that’s how she officially spells her name), and the promos for the show picked up on the unlikelihood of a K-Pop artist from Oklahoma. Actually her story wasn’t quite so weird: her mother is Korean, her dad is from New York City, and they met, paired up and decided to raise their family in Tulsa. “Wonderland” turned out to be a fun song, a nice piece of ear candy with some spectacular dancing going on behind it, and I liked the fact that it was all in English instead of doing the annoying linguistic shifts of the mega-K-Pop band BTS, whose songs shift maddeningly from English to Korean to gibberish. Tne next song was “Never Like This” from Arkansas-based country singer Kelsey Lamb, a beautiful love ballad whom Lamb made a bit too “particular” for my taste by saying she had written it about the husband she married less than a year ago. Given that one of the greatest country singers of all time, Johnny Cash, came from Arkansas, Lamb had some pretty big boots to fill – and she filled them beautifully. After that came a Black rapper from Indiana named UG Skywalkin’ – the “UG” in his name, he said, is short for Uganda, where his parents were born – whose song was called “Love in My City,” but he had the usual lousy intonation of many rappers and the second rapper he featured, Maxie, actually rapped with more power and authority (and you could at least understand what he was saying!).

Then the show shifted to Puerto Rico – the gimmick was it’s supposed to represent not only all 50 states but the five U.S. territories as well as Washington, D.C. – for an exciting performance by Christian Dijon of a song called “Loko.” I’m not sure why he spelled it that way because what he was singing was the Spanish word “loco,” meaning “crazy,” but I liked the song a lot better than Charles. I really got into the song and didn’t really notice – as he did – that it was just cobbled together from bits of Ricky Martín and Menudo. (Ya remember Menudo? The boy band, not the food.) I also thought he had the hottest bod of any of the guys on the program, and I liked his two-tone hair, half in basic black and half dyed dead-white. I had a little pang of disappointment when he mentioned that he has a girlfriend with whom he rode out Hurricane Maria (ya remember Hurricane Maria? The event for which President Donald Trump responded by going to San Juan and throwing paper towels at the crowd, then defending it as a joke?)

The next act was a real blast from the past: Michael Bolton, representing his home state of Connecticut (where he built a fully professional home recording studio so he never has to leave his wife and family to work). A real surprise of this program was that in addition to featuring artists on their way up (and artists who have already recorded and played to crowds of tens of thousands at home-state venues we haven’t heard of), they’re also featuring artists on their way down like Michael Bolton and Jewel. Bolton did a song called “Beautiful World” that seemed a bit ill-timed after the current horrors in Ukraine, but it was a nice pop ballad and for once Bolton didn’t overact (as he did in one Los Angeles concert reviewed hilariously by the now-retired Robert Hilburn in the Los Angeles Times, who wrote, “If I were to write my review of Michael Bolton’s concert the way he sang it, EVERY other WORD would BE in ALL-CAPS and EVERY sentence WOULD end WITH an EXCLAMATION POINT!”). After that a woman from Iowa named Alisabeth von Presley (did her parents stick her with that mouthful of a moniker or was that her own idea?), wearing a pink outfit and dyeing her long hair pink to match, did a song called “Wonder” that was considerably less spectacular than her stage presentation. She’s one of these people who plays a portable keyboard instrument that you hold in your hands front and center so you don’t have to hide behind a console: you can stand in front of your band on stage as if you were playing guitar. (I believe this contraption was invented for Herbie Hancock, though you could make the case that an accordion is a similar instrument: a keyboard-operated contraption but one which leaves you free to stand front and center instead of hidden behind the instrument’s bulk.)

The next song was “Feel Your Love” by Jake’O from Wisconsin, who describes his style as “Nuvo Retro” – which means he stands in front of his band wearing a white suit jacket and carrying a 1950’s-style electric guitar, while his backup singers are three women dressed in cheerleader outfits. Alas, the song he played, “Feel Your Love,” was contemporary pop instead of rockabilly (either traditional or “nuvo”), though he had a good stage presence. The next performer was from Mississippi, and was introduced by a title card mentioning previous singers who were born there, including Leontyne Price (I had forgotten about her!), Muddy Waters and Elvis Presley – though in Elvis’s case they are perhaps stretching a point because, though he was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, he grew up and came of age musically in Memphis, Tennessee, and his Tennessee heritage was far more important to the music he actually made. (Ironically, I’ve been listening a lot to another Mississippi native who was not on her list but could have been: the jazz/blues singer-songwriter Mose Allison.) The performer from Mississippi was a Black singer named Keyone Starr and she described herself as what would have happened if Aretha Franklin and Lenny Kravitz had had a daughter. I was disappointed with her song, “Fire,” because though she had paid tribute to the Delta blues tradition in her interviews, her song was a pretty plain piece of contemporary pop and didn’t match the searing intensity of Aretha (who was born, after all, in Detroit, Michigan and came straight from the Black church tradition; did I need to mention that Aretha’s father, the Rev. C. L. Franklin, was pastor of the largest and most influential Black church in Detroit, or that his albums were the biggest sellers Chess Records ever had – bigger than Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf – even though they were simply recordings of his sermons?).

After the country-rap guy from Wyoming came the last and, to my mind at least, most interesting artist of the night: Hueston from Rhode Island, who went on and on and on in his interviews about his blue-collar roots, which made me think, “Ah, he wants to be the next Bruce Springsteen.” His song, “Hold On Too Long,” didn’t sound particularly Springsteen-esque but I quite liked it anyway – and so did the show’s secret panel of 56 music-industry insiders and critics, whol voted to advance Hueston to the semi-finals of the American song contest. Alas, Charles didn’t get past Hueston’s facial tattoos to judge his music fairly. The first episode of American Song Contest lumbered on and on, complete with a so-called “Halftime Show,” and the hosts were Snoop Dogg (whom I find totally repulsive as a personality and an artist) from California and Kelly Clarkson (whom I like, though she was wearing one of those deliberately ill-fitting tops that looks like it’s about to fall off at any moment and reveal her breasts – doubtless the straight guys in the audience get more of a thrill out of this sort of thing than I do) from Texas – and whenever Snoop Dogg proclaimed he was representing California, I kept wanting to puke and thinking, “No, you’re not. Not my California, You may be representing the land of gangstas and thugs, but you don’t represent me. I’d much rather be represented by Kelly Clarkson!”

The Endgame, episode 5: "Gold Rush" (My So-Called Company, Perfect Storm Entertainment, Nicholas Wootton Productions, NBC-TV, aired March 21, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the first episode of American Song Contest I watched the next-to-last episode (at least I think it’s the next-to-last episode) of The Endgame, all about a Russian woman named Elena Fedorova (Morena Baccarin, whose fashion designer could have given Kelly Clarkson’s lessons on how much breast you can reveal while still remaining within the puritanical standards of American TV) and her gang of thugs named “Snow White.” In the opening episode they took over seven New York banks and held the people in them hostage, and there seems to be a group photo of people connected to the administration of former President Cutler (his first name, if we were ever told it, remained a mystery but I was wondering if he’s supposed to be based on Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton or both) which Elena has targeted because she blames them for the bomb that was planted at the wedding of herself and her partner Sergei. They actually both survived the assault but both their families were assassinated en masse, and the order for the bombing was actually given by an official in the Cutler administration – but who?

The good guy, FBI agent Val Turner (Ryan Michelle Bathé), figures out that Elena is getting real-time information about what’s going on and how the government is responding to her activities (even though Elena herself is in federal custody in a secret location, in defiance of those procedural niceties like the U.S. Constitution) from her ex-husband Owen (Kamal Angelo Bolden), who’s serving a sentence in Peekskill Prison in New Jersey for allegedly having taken money from a drug cartel. He was actually framed for this crime by Elena, though that’s been a plot point that’s been pretty much ignored in the later episodes. Instead writer Moira Kirland gives us so many jaw-dropping reversals towards the end of this episode one wonders if “Kirland” is a pseudonym for Tony Gilroy – either that or the producers bring in Gilroy for a last-minute uncredited rewrite. First Agent Turner, who has been told that the only person who knows how to sneak into the Federal Reserve vault was the man who designed it in the first place, Khaled Abdel (Amir Malaklou). So Agent Turner goes to Abdel’s place and finds three other people, all wearing the black-and-white masks emblematic of Elena’s “Snow White” killers, carrying machine guns (Agent Turner has only a semi-automatic pistol) and bent on assassinating Abdel. Only Agent Turner is somehow able to take them out instead, killing the first two and taking the third one prisoner – but in the first big reversal the guy she’s taken alive tells her they’re not part of Elena’s operation. They bought the masks from a street vendor – and Val realizes that they’re hired killers from the Ukrainian crime family that had already bribed one of the members of the Cutler administration in Elena’s photo.

Val suddenly deduces that Abdel himself is on Elena’s payroll, and she’s just walked her into the super-secret vault Elena was going to crash so she can vaporize the $20 million in gold ingots held therein and destabilize the U.S. economy enough to create a worldwide depression. (This plot point reminded both Charles and I of the ending of the James Bond story Goldfinger, in which Goldfinger’s plan is to sneak into Fort Knox, not to steal the gold but to turn it radioactive so it will be at least presumably useless as a reserve for backing currency.) Agent Turner and a colleague disarm Elena’s bomb just in time to avert the catastrophe – only it turns out the Black guy who was leading Elena’s commando team has another bomb, made to look like an ingot, and he sets that one to go off as the episode reaches its cliff-hanger ending. Charles pointed out that a bomb powerful enough to actually vaporize gold – not just melt it, in which case it could easily be reconstituted into solid blocks as soon as it cooled – the bomb would have to be so powerful it would take out all of Manhattan and create a catastrophe dwarfing the one at Hiroshima in August 1945.; But then again you don’t watch a show like The Endgame for scientific accuracy or plot credibility: you watch it for the cat-and-mouse game the writers have constructed between heroine and villainess, and on that show the producers have delivered well even though the neck-breaking reversals at the end of this episode got to me after a while.

An Audience with Adele (fulfill TV, NBC-TV, produced 2021, aired March 20, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I wanted to watch the NBC-TV special An Audience with Adele, thinking a) it would be on at 8 p.m. and b) it would be a simple Adele concert special with her singing 20 songs over the telecast time slot. In fact it was on at 9 p.m. (I filled in the hour between by watching a Meloni-era Law and Order: Special Victims Unit rerun on the USA Channel) and it was “an audience with Adele” in both senses of the term. The crowd was filled with other celebrities, including Samuel L. Jackson, Idris Elba and Emma Thompsun, and Adele called on them to ask her questions which she answered in crushingly banal terms. What’s more, NBC decided to use this show as a mega-promo for tonight’s premiere of the American Song Contest, a new show of their own patterned on the Eurovision Song Contest with up-and-comers from each state competing with people on the way down, including Michael Bolton from Connecticut and Jewel representing, of all states, Alaska. (Jewel is her actual first name; she was born Jewel Kilcher in Payson, Utah but her family relocated to Anchorage, Alaska shortly after she was born on May 23, 1974. The family were originally Mormons but stopped attending the church after her parents divorced.)

Between the long interactions Adele had with fellow celebrities in the audience, the promos for American Song Contest that made me feel like I was being bludgeoned to death with the insistence that I watch that show (it premieres tonight) and the other commercials, Adele only got to sing nine songs over a two-hour time slot. This was one song fewer than she got in her Adele: One Night Only concert special last November, which promised us an interview with Adele by Oprah Winfrey as well as a concert special, and which I’d assumed would be a short interview segment followed by a full concert. Instead it was a bunch of cut-up interview segments interspersed between Adele’s songs. I had thought An Audience with Adele would be simply a concert special without all the frou-frou that got dragged in between the songs. My first clue was when they broke for commercials after Adele had sung just one song – the usual norm for a show like this on commercial TV was at least two songs between each commercial interruption.

I still love Adele; I fell in love with her on one of the awards shows and I realized she is a “woman of size,” as the current euphemism goes, and she’s not averse to showing that off. At a time when other female singers feel compelled to starve themselves to the dimensions of a concentration-camp survivor, it’s nice to see Adele unafraid to show off her weight in public. What’s more, she performs with little or no “production”: no Cirque du Soleil performers, no armies of choristers, no quasi-fascistic dance formations behind her (when I’ve seen Beyoncé’s videos I’ve joked that they look like they were directed by the love child of Busby Berkeley and Leni Riefenstahl, and I still haven’t forgotten the video Janet Jackson did years ago for the song “Rhythm Nation” that looked like Metropolis: The Musical): just a formally but plainly dressed woman standing on stage with no one but her backup musicians and singers belting her heart out. If there’s a flaw with Adele it’s monotony: so many of her songs are about the miseries of relationships gone wrong that at one point I said that I wished the Gay & Lesbian Times were still around doing their “Unlikely New Year’s Predictions” so I could do one about Adele: “This year Adele will write and record a song about a relationship that is actually working.”

I like Adele precisely because she’s a new singer whose stage act (or lack thereof) hearkens back to the divas of old: Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington, Judy Garland. She mentioned Barbra Streisand as one of her role models, and the similarities are there, particularly in the purity of their voices and their ability to hit high notes without screeching and within a musical context. But all the things I like about Adele got sidetracked – as they had last November as well – by the things I didn’t. She likes to do the same sort of “tea break” with which Frank Sinatra used to interrupt his Las Vegas shows and tell unfunny “jokes.” She’s also not an especially compelling personality when she isn’t singing; her attempts to make herself “relatable” to the audience fell pretty much flat. The concert’s promoters seemed undecided whether to make Adele seem like an incomparable diva or like jes’ plain folks, and they came up with an uneasy mix of both.