One Dangerous Night (Columbia, 1942, releaned 1943)

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

Last night at 9:50 I ran another old-time “B” mystery movie on YouTube: One Dangerous Night, not to be confused with One Mysterious Night which we’d seen a few nights before. This was in the Lone Wolf “B” detective series instead of the Boston Blackie “B” detective series, though the Lone Wolf (Warren William) and Boston Blackie (Chester Morris) were both reformed jewel thieves who faced representatives of the official police who weren’t convinced they had truly reformed. Most of the movies in both series featured spectacular jewel heists, usually also involving a murder, in which the police at first suspect Our Heroes until Our Heroes come through and solve the crimes themselves. One Dangerous Night begins with a dramatic scene in which Eve Andrews (Marguerite Chapman) is driving frantically at night when her convertible car has a tire blowout. She’s anxious to get to a particular address and hitches a ride from Michael Lanyard, the Lone Wolf, and his valet Jamison (Eric Blore, who gets so much screen time my husband Charles joked that it seemed like a vehicle for him). The Lone Wolf’s biggest problem with Jamison is that the valet keeps wanting to steal valuable jewels and the Lone Wolf is all too aware that if any valuable jewels go missing from anyone whose path has crossed his, he’ll be suspected and end up in prison. Jamison steals a diamond-encrusted silver handbag from Eve and the Lone Wolf insists on returning to the house where they dropped her off so they can return the stolen bag.

What they don’t know – but we, the audience, do – is that Eve was one of three women who came to the house to meet Harry Cooper (Gerald Mohr), with whom they had run up gambling debts in the old days when Cooper ran a casino which the three women – Eve, Sonia Buddeny (Tala Birell in a nice hard-as-nails performance that’s the best piece of acting in the film) and Jane Merrick (Mona Barrie) – used to gamble. All three of them have important relationships that would be jeopardized if it came out that they had gambled at an illegal casino: Jane is the star of a play called Murder Will Out and the revelation that she once visited a casino would destroy her promising acting career. Sonia is the wolfe of a stuck-up doctor, Eric Buddeny (Gregory Gay), and Eve has an important social position that would also be jeopardized by the revelation that she’d hung out at a casino. When Lanuard and Jamison return to the home where they’d dropped off Eve, they find the place deserted except for Cooper – or, rather, his corpse, since just as he was presenting his demands to the three women (he wanted them to give him valuable jewels in exchange for his silence), the lights went out in the house and they heard a shot, which killed Cooper. Naturally the official police, Inspector Crane (Thurston Hall) and his typically stupid sidekick, Detective Dickens (Fred Kelsey, who made a career of playing dumb cops), immediately suspect Lanyard and he has to investigate and solve the crime himself to prove his innocence.

Lanyard learns that the night he died Cooper was scheduled to fly out of town on a plane with a woman, who turns out to be Patricia Blake (Margaret Hayes). Lanyard and Jamison are kidnapped by two crooks working for Arthur (Louis Jean Heydt – once again, why didn’t this charismatic, attractive and talented actor become a star? Why did he spend his whole career trapped in the salt mines of character parts?),who wants to keep the late Cooper’s blackmail racket going. But they escape with the help of Sidney Shannon (Walter Ashe), a gossip columnist who works the Broadway beat. Patricia shows up at the airport not knowing that Cooper is dead until she’s told that just as she’s about to get on the plane to meet him, and in the end it turns out that [spoiler alert!] the killer is Sidney Shannon, and his motive was jealousy. It seems he was married to Patricia Blake and he was understandably upset that she was going to leave him, especially for a criminal. It’s hard to avoid comparing One Dangerous Night with One Mysterioius Night since we’d seen both under similar auspices and both were Coilumbia “B”-series detective films featuring ex-crook characters in the lead, but One Dangerous Night is a considerably better movie even though its director, Michael Gordon, hardly has the auteur reputation of Budd Boetticher.

Gordon was an all-arounder whose most famous credits are the 1950 Cyrano de Bergerac with José Ferrer and the first Doris Day-Rock Hudson movie, Pillow Talk (1958). Gordon again worked with Doris Day in the 1964 film Move Over, Darling, with her, Jmaes Garner and Polly Bergen in the roles originally intended for Marilyn Monroe, Dean Martin and Cyd Charisse in the never-finished 1962 film Something’s Got to Give, itself a remake of the 1940 film My Favorite Wife with Cary Grant, Irene Dunne and Randolph Scott. This hardly seems like the best background to direct a mystery film with shadowy noir atmospherics but in One Dangerous Night – his first featire – Gordon turns in a marvelously professional job. It also helps that the script for One Dangerous Night by Donald Davis, Arthur Lipp and Max Nosseck (a German refugee who three years later turned up at Monogram to direct the film Dillinger after the Production Code Administration finally lifted its decade-long ban on films about the notorious real-life gangster) is a whodunit, and while the man generally considered the greatest suspense director of all time, Alfred Hitchcock, almost totally avoided whodunits, One Dangerous Night works a good deal better than One Mysterious Night, in which it’s all too obvious from the get-go who the bad guys are. It’s ironic that Warren William and Eric Blore ended up acting together in a series of crime films after they were in some of the best musicals in the 1930’s – William in Gold Diggers of 1933 with Dick Powell, Ruby Keeler and numbers directed by Busby Berkeley, and Blore in several Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers movies – but they’re fully professional here and they fully rise to the challenge. It’s also the first film in which Ann Savage appeared, though only in the minor role of Patricia’s sidekick Vivian, and she would have to wait for Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1946 film Detour to be in a film which showcased her (and, even more than Heydt’s, it’s baffling that Ann Savage didn’t become a star after her acid-edged performance in Detour).

Law and Order: "Legacy" (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired April 28, 2022)

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

Last night I watched the run of three Dick Wolf-produced shows on NBC-TV: the original Law and Order in its current rebooted form, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order: Organized Crime. The Law and Order show, “Legacy,” was about a new headmaster at the elite Davenport private school who is found shot dead in his classroom the night the school performed the recent musical Dear Evan Hansen. The police at first suspect a number of the parents who were upset with the murdered principal for introducing “woke” curricula, including have the students take tests in the classroom about how they’ve either benefited from or been harmed by racism. But the police eventually trace the murder to Cooper Young (Christopher Bailey), a scholarship student who has been bullied by Bennett Richardson (Stephen Moran), a legacy admission (hence the episode title) who never let Cooper forget that he was there out of the sufferance of the people who gave him the scholarship and he didn’t “really” belong there. (George Orwell recalled enduring such snobbish bullying in his days as a scholarship kid in a British “public” school in his essay “Such, Such Were the Joys,” and Bennett is putting Cooper through the same snobbish nonsense Orwell described in his autobiographical story.)

It turns out Bennett Richardson actually shot and killed the teacher after previously got into a fight with Cooper on the soccer field. It also turns out that Bennett had previously filled out notebooks with drawings of violent fantasies, including one which he left in Cooper’s locker of himself holding a gun, and in one class Bennett went after his art teacher when the teacher questioned him about the violence in Bennett’s images. Of course dad gave the teacher a $10,000 settlement to keep quiet about it. Dad, John Rchardson (Darrell Goldstein), also gave his emotionally disturbed 17-year-old son the gun he used to kill the principal, which he bought when the family was at their vacation home in Wyoming, and when Cooper attacked Bennett at the soccer practice dad told him he had an obligation to fight back – which Bennett did by bringing the gun to school, threatening Cooper and killing the principal by accident when All Three Reached for the Gun. (Maurine Dallas Watkins, your plagiarism attorney thanks you for funding his fifth vacation home.)

The prosecutors, Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Haroun (Odelya Halevi), decide to charge John Richardson as an accomplice to murder and reach a deal with Bennett’s attorney offering him complete immunity in exchange for his testimony against his dad – only at the last minute Bennett can’t go through with ratting his father out and, since John Richardson’s attorney didn’t have a chance to cross-examine him before Bennett bolted the witness stand and the courtroom altogether, the prosecutors then focus on getting John’s wife (Bonnie Somerville) to testify against him. They have to clear the hurdle of spousal privilege to do so, but they get a ruling from the judge in the case and persuade her to testify by telling her that if her husband goes to prison, she’ll still have Bennett to raise. She makes the Faustian bargain and the jury finds John Richardson guilty – which rather surprised me since where I thought the writer, Pamela Wechsler, was taking this was they would find John Richardson not guilty because he had nothing to do with the actual killing, however much his actions may have facilitated it. If nothing else, Wechsler’s script did a good job of depicting the extent to which in certain families a father teaching his son to shoot is an acknowledged rite of passage, an initiation into manhood. This has seemed ultra-weird to me not only because I never really had a father in any but the strictest biological sense, but because I have never even held, much less fired, a real gun. But enough people I know had just that experience with their dads I know it’s a real thing.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Tangled Strands of Justice" (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired April 28, 2022)

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

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed, “Tangled Strands of Justice,” had two interlocking plot lines (as the title suggests), an annoying practice Dick Wolf has mostly avoided in Law and Order and SVU but which worked powerfully here. It helped that the writers, old Law and Order hands Warren Leight and Julie Martin, kept it to just two stories instead of the three that’s become standard on legal shows as well as the otherwise estimable cop show Blue Bloods (which I like a good deal better than my husband Charles because he sees it as rah-rah propaganda for the police whereas I see it as a good deal more complicated and nuanced than that). One plot line deals with a young woman, Libby Brandon (Gabrielle Carrubba), who we first see in bed with a middle-aged man. She gets up while he’s still asleep and steals eight high-end watches from his dresser drawer, and later she’s arrested and the watches are recovered. It turns out that the reason the Major Crimes Squad detective who caught the case, Nadia Szabo (Orfeh – when I saw that oddball name in the credits I assumed she was Black, which she isn’t), was able to apprehend her so quickly is that her DNA was in the system because a year before she had been violently raped, and her rape-kit sample was leaked to Detective Szabo by Abel Truman (Frank Wood), an official in the medical examiner’s office with whom Szabo was having an affair.

Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) of the Manhattan Special Victims Unit goes ballistic when she hears about this because it’s hard enough to get rape victims to cooperate with the police and go through the trauma of having a rape kit done (which is such an invasive procedure it’s literally like being raped all over again) without the knowledge that their DNA could be used against them if they’re ever suspected of a crime themselves. Detective Szabo and the district attorney assigned to prosecute the case, Cassandra Drakos (Orlagh Cassidy), couldn’t be less interested in such details: to their minds, Libby is a perpetrator now regardless of how she may have been a victim before. The other plot strand deals with a prologue set on September 11, 2001, in which a 15-year-old Black girl named Aretha Green is the subject of a police grid search because she’s been reported missing by her mother, Cora Green (Nicki Micheaux), only the search is abruptly called off because of the World Trade Center attacks and the cops conducting it are all ordered to go to Ground Zero. As a result, Aretha’s disappearance ends up forgotten for over 20 years until her body suddenly turns up, and what’s more, she turns out to have been five months pregnant when she died. The autopsy doctors discover fetal bones among the remains and do DNA tests on Aretha’s remains as well as the child’s and some old baby teeth of Aretha’s which her mom had saved.

Though the DNA tests rule out any family member as the father of Aretha’s unborn child, her grandfather, Coleman Green (Ron Canada), turns out to be the culprit anyway because [spoiler alert!] he’s not really her grandfather, just someone who married Cora’s mom after she got pregnant with a guy who abandoned her. When he’s finally arrested for molesting and murdering his supposed granddaughter, he inisists that God is O.K. with his conduct because at least Aretha wasn’t his biological kin. The part of the story that really moved me was the trauma Cora will be going through when she realizes that the grandfather she was relying on all those years for support was a) her daughter’s killer and b) not her grandfather at all – though at least she gets a weird sort of consolation prize. She’s reunited with her younger daughter Nina (Renée Harrison), who had run away from home after Aretha’s disappearance and got into prostitujtion and drugs, and though she’s been in a rehab program and doing reasonably well, the news of her sister’s discovery throws her off the wagon byg-time and she’s found on the street desperately trying to turn a trick to raive the money for drugs when the cops find her, spare her that downward spiral and get her back to her mom. Meanwhile, associate district attorney Cassandra Drakos gives a press conference announcing that she was the one who discovered the abuses in the medical examiner’s office that led to rape victims’ DNA being leaked – and Captain Benson has to watch it with a predictable level of disgust at Drakos’s grandstanding.

Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Dead Presidents" (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV,. aired April 28, 2022_

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

As usual, after the relative power of Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, the Law and Order: Organized Crime episode that followed, “Dead Presidents” (also the name of a 1995 movie about a returning Viet Nam War veteran who finds out that virtually every opportunity he has to make a better living for his family involves crime), was relatively disappointing. At least this one was relatively coherent and involved an attempt by Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni, more grizzled than he was in his SVU days when I fell in lust with him but also dressed far more sexily, in leather pantsuits instead of the Armani he wore on SVU), posing as number two man of an organization of corrupt cops called “The Brotherhood,” attempting to set up both Brotherhood founder Frank Donnelly (Denis Leary) and corrupt Black businessman Preston Webb (Mykelti Williamson) by offering to steal back several million dollars in hard currency the Brotherhood stole from Webb in the first place. He traces the cash to a money launderer named Rutger Ulrich (Carsten Norgaard – incidentally “Al Norgaard” was the one honest member of the hopelessly corrupt police force in “Bay City,” actually Santa Monica, in Raymond Chandler’s novels).

Using $1 million of Webb’s money as seed capital to get into Ulrich’s operation, Stabler, Donnelly and Malachi (Wasam Keach), a computer hacker who got recruited to join the Organized Crime Task Force to avoid prosecution as a hacker (a deal a number of real-life hackers have also made with law enforcement when they’ve been caught), deduce that Unrich keeps his money in a safe concealed in a secret part of his room, only when they break in they find just $700. Meanwhile Stabler’s superior officer, young Black Lesbian cop Sgt. Ayanna Bell (Danielle Moné Truitt), is unhappy that her wife is about to take a job for the law firm of Congressmember Leon Kilbride (Ron Cephas Jones) even though Bell’s task force is investigating him for corruption. Stabler is also digging up his own past, particularly the Golden Cross his dad Jack Stabler got for heroism in what Donnelly has told him was a faked operation: at the time Stabler’s and Donnelly’s father were on the police force and Donnelly had told Stabler that his dad actually shot himself in the leg with the suspect’s own gun to make it look like a “good shooting” instead of the outright murder of an unarmed man. If nothing else, the Organized Crime plot conceit at least gives Meloni a chance to show off his acting chops in ways he only rarely got to show on SVU, but the overall plot complexity of this show is getting tiresome and so are the forced cliffhanger endings to show how Dick Wolf and his writers and show runners are all worshiping at the shrine of the Great God SERIAL.

One Mysterious Night (Columbia, 1944)

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

Last night I ran my husband Charles and I a YouTube post of the 1944 Columbia “B” thriller One Mysterioius Night. This was part of the “Boston Blackie” series Columbia made in the 1940’s along with the Lone Wolf and Crime Doctor films and adaptations of then-popular radio shows like The Whistler and I Love a Mystery. Boston Blackie was actually created by Jack Boyle, who was born in Chicago in 1881 and became a reporter in San Francisco in the early 20th century until he became addicted to opium, drifted into crime and started writing the Boston Blackie stories while serving a prison term at San Quentin. He even signed the first Boston Blackie stories “No. 6066” rather than use his name. The Boston Blackie stories first saw print in The American Magazine in 1914 and continued to appear until 1920, eight years before Boyle’s death. There were a number of silent films based on the Boston Blackie stories – or at least on the character – but after 1927 the character wasn’t used in a film until Columbia launched their “B” series in 1941.

Boyle’s stories had depicted Blackie as an active criminal who targeted other, deeper-pocketed criminals who had unjustly ripped off and exploited decent people, but with the Production Code in effect Columbia had to make him a reformed ex-con who’s perpetually being suspected of major crimes, usually by Inspector Ferriday of the official police (sort of Lestrade to Blackie’s Sherlock Holmes). Columbia’s executives made a superb choice for the actor to play Boston Blackie: Chester Morris, who in the 1930’s had just missed the brass ring of stardom. He certainly had the acting chops for it, and in 1929 he made the film Alibi for director Roland West. In his book The Detective in Film William K. Everson described Morris’s performance in Alibi as “Cagneyesque … well before Cagney,” and though it wasn’t that much before Cagney (Alibi was made in 1929 and the real Cagney’s first film, Sinners’ Holiday, was made in 1930), it had something of the same mix of toughness and offbeat charm. Like Cagney, Morris could play a gangster and make you feel at least some sympathy for him, or he could play a good guy and still give the character an “edge.” By 1941 Morris – unlike Cagney – had been relegated th the “B” ranks, but his rendition of Boston Blackie over 14 films from 1941 to 1949 tapped into his skill set and indicated a tough-guy image even while playing a misunderstood hero.

One Mysterious Night was made ini 1944, midway through the Boston Blackie series (it was the seventh of the 14 Boston Blackie movies in Columbia’s series) and it’s attracted more attention than it deserves mainly because of its director. His name was Oscar Boetticher, Jr. but on his later films he was credited as Budd Boetticher, and he achieved a reputation as at least a mini-auteur mostly on the basis of the Westerns he directed for Columbia and Warner Bros. featuring Randolph Scott in the 1950’s. It would be nice to report that Boetticher brought something special to this film that raised it above the run of the mill for the Boston Blackie series the way he would with nis next film, the non-series Columbia “B” The Missing Juror – but no such luck. This film is pretty much cut to the pattern of the previous ones: a priceless jewel is stolen (here itis called the “Star of the Blue Nile” and it’s the featured attraction on an exhibit of jewelry being run as a war benefit) and Boston Blackie is named as the one and only suspect at a press conference being given by Inspector Ferriday (Richard Lane).

The moment we see George Daley (Robert E. Scott, later known as Mark Rpberts), an employee at the hotel where the exhibit is taking place, hobnobbing with a couple of crooks with “roo” moustacnes we know he’s up to no good, and he shocks his sister by claiming to have the priceless diamond in his possession – only he’s lost it and it turns up the handbag of reporter Dorothy Appleton (Janis Carter) because she mistakenly grabbed Daley’s sister’s bag and Daley had stashed the jewel in it. (Carter de;ivers the best performance in the film, but it's still the clichéd hard-boiled woman reporter.) There’s no whodunit aspect to the story – a bit of a surprise in a “B” mystery of this vintage – and though Inspector Ferriday knows perfectly well that Boston Blackie didn’t steal the Star of the Blue Nile he announces that anyway in hopes of getting Blackie to come to headquarters and help solve the crime himself. One Mysterious Night isn’t an especially mysterious film; it rings the expected changes on the Boston Blackie formula but doesn’t do much of anything original with it – a real surprise coming from Boetticher, who as a director was well known for being able to take clichéd situations and do something new and different with them.

Lucy and Desi (Imagine Documentaries, White Horse Pictures, Amazon Studios, 2021)

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

At 9 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched Lucy and Desi, a documentary directed by Amy Poehler and written by Mark Monroe. Poehler’s involvement can be explained by the extent to which Lucille Ball has become a sort of patron saint for later female comedians, and Monroe’s script includes a typical bit of first-itis: he said Lucille Ball was the first woman to do physical comedy on screen. (Does the name “Mabel Normand” mean anything to you? Or “Carole Lonbard,” for that matter?) Poehler and Monroe largely based their documentary on a cache of audio tapes Ball and her first husband, co-star and business partner, Desi Arnaz, recorded which were made available by their kids, Lucie and Desi, Jr. But the story as told here doesn’t add much to the historical record on Ball, Arnaz (Sr. – actually he was Desiderio Arnaz III and his son was Desiderio Arnaz IV) and the sensational success of their show together, I Love Lucy. If anything about this show surprises, it’s in how total a break Desi had with his native country, Cuba, to the point where he never went back there even while he still could have before Fidel Castro’s revolution in 1959. Desi had literally been a boat person; his father had actually breen mayor of Santiago, Cuba’s second-largest city, before the regime of brutal, corrupt dictator Gerardo Machado came to a violent end in 1933.

Arnaz’s family were supporters and political allies of Machado, and when he was toppled Arnaz’s father told him that he had to get himself and his mother out of the country immediately. “What can I take with us?” Arnaz asked. “Nothing,” his dad told him – and so at the age of 14 Desi Arnaz became what would later be referred to as a “boat person,” frantically fleeing across the fabled 90 miles to make it to the Florida coast. Both he and Lucy would take care of their mothers for the rest of their lives. The show also discussed the crisis in Lucy’s childhood; when her father died her grandfather, Fred Hunt, took on the task of raising her. (Ironically, Fred’s daughter – Lucy’s mother – was named “Desiree,” yet another case of something a fiction editor would have rejected: how can you ask people to believe that the man she married had the masculine form of her mother’s name? And yet he did!) When Lucy was 16 years old, her brother, Fred Ball, accidentally shot a neighbor’s child with a .22 caliber rifle his grandfather had given him, and the boy survived but was paralyzed for the rest of his life. The boy’s family sued the Hunt-Ball family for everything they had and left them destitute.

Later Fred Ball would get Lucy in potentially career-ending trouble when, in 1936, he persuaded her to register to vote with the Communist Party. Lucy’s own explanation was that her grandfather had always been for the working man and had a strong sense of social justice. She also said that she had never actually voted Communist, let alone been a member of the party, and when the scandal came to light in 1953 at the height of the Joe McCarthy era and the Congressional investigation of alleged Communist subversion in Hollywood, she basically got out of it by playing lovable Lucy Ricardo. When asked at a press conference whether she hadn’t thought being registered as a Communist would hurt her career, she said, “What career? I was a stock girl at RKO. I made $35 a week, and if they’d told me to clean the studio floor, I’d have had to.” This film includes Desi Arnaz’s famous remark about Lucy in a warmup for an I Love Lucy filming during which he got J. Edgar Hoover on the phone to certify publicly that the FBI had nothing derogatory on Lucille Ball, and Desi famously said (though for some reason Aaron Sorkin did not include this line in his dramatization of this incident in his script for Being the Ricardos), “The only thing red about Lucy is her hair, and even that’s not legitimate.”

The show briefly touches on Lucy’s comedy mentor, Buster Keaton, though it does so only in passing and doesn’t mention how they got together: it was in the late 1940’s, they were both under contract at MGM (Keaton was there to write gags for Red Skelton, many of them recycled from Keaton’s own 1920’s classics). Keaton, Ball and a third person – Keaton’s former director, Edward Sedgwick – had a lot of time together which they spent making real-life versions of Rube Goldberg’s famous cartoon gadgets (including a “Venetian-blind opener,” which when it opened the blinds it started a record player playing “Hail to the Chief” and revealed a picture of MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer; when Mayer heard about this he ordered a studio construction crew to destroy it and personally watched them do it). Keaton noticed Ball’s gift for physical comedy and started sending notes up to the “suits” at MGM telling them that if they wanted to revive her moribund career, they should stop giving her musicals and romantic comedies and instead give her slapstick roles. Naturally their attitude was, “That drunken has-been? What does he know?” Ball eventually got out of her MGM contract and made two films for Columbia, The Fuller Brush Girl and Miss Grant Takes Richmond, both with William Holden as her co-star and both of which gave her the chance to play physical comedy.

She also got the chance to co-star in a radio sitcom called My Favorite Husband, playing the ditzy wife of sportswriter Richard Denning, and in 1949 the CBS network,which aired My Favorite Husband, told Ball they wanted to put it on TV. Ball famously said she’d only do it if her real-life husband, Desi Arnaz, got to play her husband on the show – they wanted a project which would allow them to live and work together in Los Angeles. I’ve already mentioned the tortures of the damned Lucy and Desi went through to get the right to do I Love Lucy and do it their way – the best account of it is by Desi himself in his autobiography, A Book – but they ended up literally owning the hottest TV show and uising the profits from it to expand their production company, Desilu, including taking over the RKO studio (where they had both been lowly contract players in the early 1940’s) and producing not only the Andy Griffith Show and the Dick Van Dyke Show but a crime drama, The Untouchables. Much of the sorrow on this series came from the rather sad ending: Lucy and Desi broke up as a couple in 1960 (they literally broke up two days after the filming of their final Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour wrapped), though they remained business partners until she bought him out in 1964.

Desilu produced the next Lucille Ball comedy series, The Lucy Show, which co-starred her I Love Lucy cast-mate Vivian Vance as two single women raising their kids (it was based on a play about divorcées but for purposes of the TV standards of the time they had to be widows instead), and after Lucy’s and Desi’s business partnership ended she went on to produce Mission: Impossible and Star Trek. (I remember getting into an argument with a co-worker after Lucy died in 1989; he said, “I never liked Lucille Ball; I preferred more serious TV, like Star Trek,” and I told him, “If it hadn’t been for Lucille Ball there would never have been a Star Trek!”). As for Desi, he upped his drinking and screwing around, though he did try one more series, The Mothers-in-Law, which got good reviews but was not a commercial success. Lucie Arnaz (using her married name, Luckinbill) was interviewed for the show and she said that she was with her dad in the last hours of his life in 1986 and she called her mom to say goodbye. They ended by saying they loved each other even though both Lucy and Desi had remarried after they broke up (and their second marriages – hers to comedian Gary Morton and his to Edith Mack – lasted longer than Lucy’s and Desi’s had), and the show leads to a bittersweet ending on one of those professional and personal partnerships that forever changed the face of popular entertainment.

American Song Contest, episode 6 (Brain Academy, Propagate Content, Universal Television Alternative Studios, NBC-TV, aired April 25, 2022)

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

At 8 p.m. yesterday I switched channels from MS-NBC to the flagship NBC network and watched episode six of American Song Contest, featuring the first of two semi-final competition rounds. The singers who had made it this far got to do the same songs they had in the previous round – it is, after all, called American Song Contest rather than American Singers’ Contest – and I found myself liking the stronger songs a bit more this time while the weaker songs came off less well. It didn’t help tuat the prodjucers of the song contest decided to front-load the show with five “inspirational” power ballads – “inspirational” in this case meaning not thinly (or not so thinky) veiled religious messages but overall songs about overcoming obstacles and triumphing over adversity. The show opened with Jordan Smith’s “Sparrow” (an O.K. song but I couldn’t help but compare it to the identically titled but far better song from Paul Simon on the first Simon and Garfunkel album, Wednesday Norming, 3 a.m.), which led show co-host Kelly Clarkson to comment that “we’d been to church” because of a vaguely cross-shaped set of lights on the backdrop and the sond’s clear derivation from the old 1905 gospel hymn “His Eye Is On the Sparrow: and the quote from Jesus in the Gospel According to St. Matthew that inspired composer Civilia D. Martin: “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows.” (Obviously that’s the King James version since a more modern translator would be highly unlikely to use the now-defunct British currency unit “farthing.”)

The next performers – Riker Lynch from Colorado (Feel the Love”), MARi from New Hampshire (at least I think that’s the correct typography of her last name, all caps except for the last letter) (“Fly”), Allen Stone from Washington state (“A Bit of Both”) and Ni/Co from Alabama (“The Difference”) – all did variations on the same “inspirational” theme, though “Fly” took on greater power because MARi is a “woman of size” who has her hair frizzed out like a Raggedy Ann doll, and she said that when she was a child she’d been belittled and fat-shamed by her parents, who regularly told her she would never amount to anything; and the two people who make up Ni/Co, Black man Colton Jones and white woman Dani Brilhart, dramatized their interracial relationship (the first time they were on American Song Contest they mentioned that they dated each other for two years before they started performing together) and did a song called “The Difference.” (The first time around I noted the irony that Alabama was the last state to get rid of the law banning interracial marriages; they didn’t repeal it until 2000, 33 years after the United States Suprene Court had rendered it unenforceable in Loving v. Virginia.) I was really repelled by Allen Stone’s performance, less because there was anything wrong with it and more because he looks like he beamed in from the 1970’s, when it was “in” for white guys with curly hair to sing supposedly “sensitive” but really dull ballads like this. The next performer – doing one of the so-called “Redemption Song” slots that brought back people who hadn’t made the semi-finals yet (and itself evoked a masterpiece by Bob Marley that was a far better song than anything that was being performed last night) wqas Ryan Charles from Wyoming doing a song called “New Boot Goofin’” that disappointed me on the first go-round because instead of a country-rap fusion like the recent hit “Old Town Road” by Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus, it was a pure rap number, though drawing on country “tropes” for its inspiration.

The next song was “Held On Too Long” by Hueston, a singer from Rhode Island whose song I’d liked on its first go-round but I liked even better last night, mainly because instead of a feel-good “inspirational” number it dealt with one of the darker aspects of human life: in this case, remaining in a toxic relationship for far too long. I also liked the sheer soul with which he sang the song, reminiscent of Bruce Springsteen and John Mellencamp but still strikingly original. Tne next song was “Fire It Up” by Jonah Prill from Montana, a modern-day example of the kind of Southern-rock song that masquerades as “country music” today. Prill’s song isn’t bad, and he was sure fun to look at, wearing blue jeans and one of those T-shirts with the sleeves cut off and open down almost the whole torso. Between them, he and Ryan Charles (wearing skin-tight white jeans) were the highest-scoring contestatnts on my personal Lust-O-Meter but let’s just say I liked the singer’s looks much better than the song. Next on deck was the youngest contestant, 17-year-old Ada LeAnn from Michigan, doing a song called “Natalie” in which she laments that her boyfriend had been seeing another girl on the side – Natalie is his paramour’s name, though she began the song with an apology to any women out there actually named Natalie – which when we watched its debut on a previous episode, Charles had express the wish it could have been performed by a gutsier singer, like Janis Joplin, Grace Slick or Melanie (and the last two, at least, are still alive, though Slick seems to be retired) while it reminded me of Lesley Gore’s “It’s My Party,” also a song by a realil-fe teenager about learning her boyfriend has been engaging in extra-relational activities, but Gore’s voice buzzed with anger and hurt while LeAnn’s seems more resigned and philosophical. This was one song I think I liked at least a bit better on this go-round than I had the first tome around, though it didn’t “grab” me emotionally the way Hueston’s song (also about a breakup but a far more socially and emotionally mature piece) had done.

The next song was an O.K. ballad called “Shameless” by Jared Lee of Massachusetts, and after that was the weird cultural mashup, “Wonderland,” by Alexa, who though she’s representing her home state of Oklahoma is drawing on the K-Pop style because her mother is Korean. She mentioned that she put a lot more work into rehearsing the dance moves than the song itself, and I had no trouble believing that; the song itself is an inoffensive bit of modern-day dance-pop but the physical production, buth of Alexa’s own dancing and the special effects (including images of clocks and other elements from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, which inspired the song even though Alexa cited one of the film versions, not the book itself, for her inspiration), was stunning. Thus went the first of two semi-final rounds of American Song Contest, which will move on to another semi-final round and then th the grand finale two weeks from now – and though I’m as fed up with the repulsive antics of co-hosts Kelly Clarkson and Snoop Dogg as many of the people posting reviews of the show on imdb.com, the overall quality of the performances has been blessedly high even though most of the songs are mediocre examples of popular genres; over half of them were dance-pop of one sort or another, and all the artists except Hueston seemed to have avoided much emotional depth in their lyrics.

The Endgame, episode 7: "Beauty and the Beast" (My So-Called Company, Perfect Storm Entertainment, Nicholas Wootton Productions, NBC-TV, aired April 25, 2022_

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

After that my husband Charles and I watched episode seven (of eight) of The Endgame, “Beauty and the Beast,” which continued this show’s tradition of picturesque improbability. In episode six, “All That Glotters,” we were supposed to believe that President Andrew Wright (Sasha Polz) has secretly stolen half a billion dollars in gold ingots from the U.S. Federal Reserve bank and done heaven knows what to them. In this episode it’s revealed that President Wright owes his election to Unrakian crime boss Natalya Belock (Melissa Farman) and there’s a secret flash drive somewhere recording Wright talking with Natalya and arranging for a “hit” on the husband of the woman who was his principal rival for his party’s nomination, which forces her to quit the presidential race and thereby ensures Wright’s nomination. Natalya’s motive in all this – at least as far as we can tell – is to steal the $500 million in U.S., gold for herself and the Belock crime family (like the Barkers, the Belocks are believers in the principle that “the family that slays together stays together”), though it’s unclear what she plans to do with it. Not only are gold ingots virtually impossible to use to buy anything in real-world economies. It would be difficult to turn them into negotiable currency – and with that much gold in (or out of) circulation, it’s hard to imagine what anyone or any family could do with it all. I’ve compared the premise of this series to the 1922 German classic film Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler, directed by Fritz Lang and written by his then-wife Thea von Harbou from a French novel by Norbert Jacques, only in that story the super-villain at least had a motive that made sense: he was having his minions break into bank vaults all over Europe, steal real currency and substitute their own counterfeits, with the idea that once the counterfeits were discovered this would destabilize the entire European economy. (Lang made this film when the German currency was about to collapse for real, and given the times of impending hyper-inflation this was obviously quite a topical theme for the German film audience of 1922.)

The principal villains in this episode are President Wright and Max Gallo (Tarek Bishara), head of the President’s personal Secret Service detail, whose loyalty to the President at all costs lead him to murder. He and his squad kill tne “Serial Skeptic” blogger (Keith Nobbs) whose posts about the series’ villain-hero, Elena Fedorova (Morena Baccarin, top-billed and also an executive producer on the show), have led to her becoming a popular figure, with at least thousands of Americans demonstrating in the streets for her release. Gallo also kidnaps Fedorova from the FBI installation where she’s been held for the entire ron of the series and takes her to the same location but for a different sort of treatment. First President Wright shows her the instruments of torture – she can’t really see them because they’ve put a hood over her head like an Abu Ghraib prisoner, but he explains that he’s going to inject her with sodium pentothal (so-called “truth serum”) to get her to reveal the hidden location of the Matryoshka, the Russian nesting doll in which she’s hidden the incriminating flash drive that shows President Wright and Natalya Belock plotting the murder of the husband of Wright’s principal rival for his party’s nomination. The actual hit man was the family’s chauffeur, Eduardo Reyes, who at the moment is working above ground running an auto repair shop. Our heroes, African-American FBI agents Val Turner (Ryan Michelle Bathé) and Anthony Flowers (Jordan Johnson-Hinds), who’s her police partner and early on in the series it was established he had an unrequited crush on her as well, find Reyes surprisingly easily given that Reyes a) is in mortal danger and b) knows that. Reyes tells them he loved the people he worked for but he’s forced to kill one of them in a staged “auto accident” because the Belocks threatened to kill Reyes’ own family if he did not.

Turner and Flowers recover the flash drive after Elena sends the Secret Service agents who are torturing her to the wrong bank – it’s not clear how she’s been able to resist the “truth serum” effects of the pentothal and the other two drugs President Wright has injected her with – but the show ends with Gallo and his other Secret Service colleagues sealing Elena in a coffin and burying her alive, the cliffhanger at the end of this episode. There’s also a subplot (there is always a subplot in this show) set in New Jersey’s Peekskill Prison, in which Elena’s husband Sergei Vodianov (Costa Ronin) and Val Turner’s ex-husband Owen (Kamal Angelo Bolden) are about to stage their long-awaited and long-planned joint escape attempt, only the vehicle they’ve chosen to escape in is unloading a shipment of gold buttons that were actually made from the stolen gold ingots (I’m not making this up, you know!). Just how all this was accomplished – how the gold was melted down and made into buttons, as well as the sheer bulk of the things – is cheerily ignored by our writers, series creators Nicholas Wootton and Jake Coburn, and Cristina Bonda, the actual screenwriter. I wanted to like The Endgame better than I have, but to paraphrase Lewis Carroll in Alice Through the Looking Glass, the writers believed in writing at least six impossible things before breakfast, and it shows in the sheer weight of the improbabilities with which this show is being buried under its own weight as it drags itself to a long-awaited climax. It’s all supposed to end next week, and quite frankly I’ll be glad when it does!

The Family That Preys (Louisiana Producers Film Source, Tyler Perry Enterprises, Lionsgate, 2008)

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

The first film my husband Charles and I watched on Lifetime last night was The Family That Preys (note the pun), a 2008 film and written and directed by Tyler Perry, who also plays the part of Ben, a minor character who’s the junior partner in a construction business one of the male leads, Chris Bennett (Rockmond Dunbar). They are actually direct employees of a big white family-owned developer led by Charlotte Cartwright (Kathy Bates, older but still with the authority and power we remember from her mid-1980’s performances) and her son William (Cole Hauser), but Chris in particular wants to start his own company and bid for jobs with uther developers. William is secretly having an affair with Chris’s wife Andrea (Sanaa Lathan), a Black woman who’s worked her way up in the company hierarchy, and she’s secretly banked more than $280,000 in money she’s received from William – though for some reason she’s put it in a joint account with both hers and Chris’s name on it. Chris discovers the existence of the account by accident when he shows up at their bank to make a cash withdrawal from the account he knows about and he’s told by the bank clerk that this otner account exists and has a six-figure balance.

While all this is going on, Andrea’s mother, Alice Pratt (Alfre Woodard, another name from the past who remained a quite talented and powerful actor), decides to accept the dare of her friend Robin (Kaira Whitehead) to go on a cross-country trip in a lime-green Cadillac convertible she’s just bought, she explains, because it matches her dress. They joke about traveling cross-country like Thelma and Louise (which is probably not such a great analogy considering how that film ended – though Charles joked that they were probably making the sequel, referencing my old joke that anybody who had seen a Republic serial could have figured out how to do a sequel to Thelma and Louise: just before their car went off the cliff, they jumped out of it), and they have a wonderful time together. They cruise (in both senses) at country bars and get hit on by heavy-set white guys, they go to a male strip club and they’re enjoying themselves until Robin tells Alice that she’s been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and it’s untreatable. In a grim late scene Robin has the mirrored door to her medicine cabinet covered with post-it stickers reminding her of things she needs to know and would otherwise forget, and after Robin dies Alice leads her funeral and decides to sell her diner (which, given the “faith-based” audience that is Tyler Perry’s fan base, is predictably titled “Wing and a Prayer” – though how Tyler Perry won a “faith-based” audience in the first place when his main star-making character was a Black drag queen named “Madea” is a mystery to me) and live on the road full-time.

William’s and Andrea’s affair is discovered by Abby (Robin Givens), a new financial officer Charlotte hired, who notices that he’s billing the company for the hotel room in which their trysts take place. Eventually the two are caught together making out at a company gala by William’s (white) wife Jillian (KaDee Strickland – with a name like “KaDee” in the credit list for a Tyler Perry movie you’d be forgiven if you assumed she were Black, but she’s white). Charlotte is philosophical at the news, stating that William’s late father had extra-relational partners in the same hotel room where William has been meeting Andrea. Chris gives Andrea a back-handed slap with such force he knocks her over – in Tyler Perry’s weird vision of the world we’re obviously supposed to approve – and he also drains Andrea’s secret account of its entire balance so he can use it as seed capital to start his own construction firm. William is also secretly plotting to force Chariotte to sell part of her shareholding in the company, which would reduce her from a majority to a minority owner and allow him to get the other board members to vote her out, but a deux ex machina emerges in the form of Nick (Sebastian Siegel), who’s currently homeless but was a stockbroker until he lost his job and his wife left him.

But fortunately Alice Pratt the diner owner (ya remember Alice Pratt the diner owner?) has befriended Nick and given him free food and a chance to clean up, and eventually Nick regains enough of his stockbroker chops that he locates the owners of a block of stock in Charlotte’s company and gets them to join the board, so it’s Charlotte who aces Willliam out of the firm and not the other way around. Andrea pleads with William to divorce his wife and marry her, but he signals his refusal by getting in his Porsche and driving away, and in the end Chris and Ben start their construction company, with Andrea presumably handling the business end. I had expected The Family That Preys to be more Lifetime-ish and less Hallmarky, and I resented the way we were first set up to like Andrea and then got told she was a villain, but overall it wasn’t a bad movie. It was certainly a capable piece of filmmaking (I’d never seen a Tyler Perry movie before), though it was also one of those movies in which the old pros, Kathy Bates and Alfre Woodard, easily took the acting honors away from the younger cast members. It’s also one of these films, like Lifetime’s own productions Wrath and The Wrong High School Sweetheart, that contains a not so thinly veiled message against interracial relationships; in all three cases the Black woman protagonist gets in trouble when she gets romantically or sexually involved with a white man and is redeemed when she returns to a partner of her own race. The moment we see William Cartwright arm in arm with his plastic white wife, we know how forlorn Andrea’s hope was that he would leave her and marry Andrea: he was not going to show up to fancy dinner parties with a Black woman on his arm!

Single Black Female (Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2022)

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

At 10 p.m. yesterday Charles and I watched another Lifetime movie, Single Black Female, which was a good deal closer to their usual fare than The Family That Preys. Though I’d never seen it before, I’d run across it a few times before on Lifetime’s schedule, and it was basically Stalker Plot #101. Single Black Female was directed by Shari L. Carpenter and written by Sa’Rah Jones (that’s how her frist name is spelled on imdb.com) and Tessa Evelyn Scott, and features the story of Monica Harris (Raven Goodwin), a Black woman of size who is hoping to score the gig hosting the morning “Tea Time” program on a local TV station in Houston as soon as the incumbent retires. Alas, she has a white woman rival, Elodie Price (Erin Ownbey), who’s polite to Monica’s face but underneath is working so that she, not Marion, will get the job. Though the woman currently hosting Tea Time is Black, Elodie is obviously counting on her white skin color to get her the job over Monica, who’s not only Black but is clearly a “woman of size.” I don’t mind large women – one of the reasons I became a huge fan of Adele the first time I saw her perform on TV is I respected her for staying the size nature made her instead of starving herself to the proportions of a concentration-camp victim – but for some reason I got tired of watching two jumbo-sided women, Monica and her assistant Simone Hicks (Amber Riley), rival each other.

At times I thought I was watching two linebackers from the Women’s National Football Conference (which really exists, by the way; it was founded in 2018 and played its inaugural season a year later, and it was the successor to the Women’s National Football League, which played from 1974 to 1988), and it occurred to me that if Single Black Female were remade as a musical Megan Thee Stallion and Lizzo would be good casting for the leads. Simone was hired by the TV station’s management and assigned to work with Monica as her assistant, but Monica completely trusts her and takes her into her confidence. Of course, this is a huge mistake on Monica’s part; Simone turns out to be a psychopath who spent a term in a mental institution after her mother burned to death in a house fire (authorities couldn’t prove that she set it, which is why she ended up in a psychiatric hospital instead of prison). Monica is at her wit’s end because she just buried her beloved father, who was the mayor of Houston, and also she’s just gone through a rather bitter breakup from her ex-boyfriend André (Kevin Savage) after she found out he’d had sex with another woman in a hotel restroom. Midway through the movie she ends up tricking with Eric (Devale Ellis), a Black guy who works at the TV station that hosts Tea Time, only unbeknownst to her Simone, who had the hots for Eric herself, was hiding in her bedroom closet the whole time and is well aware of everything that happened between them. (The soft-core porn scene of Monica and Eric getting it on is, as usual, one of the most entertaining aspects of this film.)

Needless to say, Simone is a total bitch and bastard (literally as well as figuratively), first severely beating Elodie (whose first name seems like the writers couldn’t decide whether to call her “Melody” or “Eloise,” so they came up with something roughly between the two) and then leaving her so bruised that she can’t appear on camera and is forgotten about (or at least never seen again) for the duration of the movie. Next Simone gets tired of the drunken snooping of the landlady, Mrs. Fletcher (Gail-Everett Smith) and literally severs her head and walks around with the head in a tote bag. Eventually it turns out [spoiler alert!] that Simone set the whole thing up, killing Monica’s beloved father with a poisoned drink after she ran into him in a bar, and also seducing Monica’s boyfriend André and getting him to have sex with her by drugging him (essentially the Bill Cosby bit with the genders reversed). She’s also taken out André along the way by sneaking up behind him and clubbing him, and her motive for all this is [double spoiler alert!] Simone and Monica are half-sisters.

It seems that their dad the apparently super-respectable politician fucked Simone’s mom just after his legal wife gave birth to Monica, which explains their physical resemblance (this film’s casting directors obviously had to find two women wh would look enough like each other to be believable as blood relatives) and also shows why Simone grew up without a father figure in her life at all. Her intentiion is to get rid of Monida and take over her life – we even see an early scene that makes this clear when she’s holding a pretend microphone and introducing herself as “Simone Hicks – no, Simone Harris” – and she ties up Monica and tries to burn her house down (the two of them live in adjoining rooms on Mrs. Fletcher’s estate because no sooner did Monica find a room there after she left André, Simone followed her and got the next room), only the police and fire authorities come in time, Monica escapes and Simone is presumably killed in the fire, though there’s enough ambiguity to set up a potential sequel. After the dreary Hallmarkisms of The Famlly That Preys, Single Black Female is at least a return to the good clean dirty ful of the usual Lifetime movie, even though the writing is pretty far-fetched (to say the least) and, as I’ve written about Lifetime directors before, I don’t really think I can judge Shari L. Carpenter’s talents fairly until I can see what she does with a better script than this.

Greed: A "Seven Deadly Sins" Story (RobinHood Productions, TDJ Enterprises, New Directions Entertainment, Johnson Pruduction Group, Lifetime, 2022)

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

I watched the two “premiere” movies on Lifetime from 8 p.m. to midnight: Greed: A “Seven Deadly Sins” Story and The Wrong Blind Date. Greed – not to be confused with the sadly truncated but still great 1924 movie directed by Erich von Stroheim based on Frank Norris’s novel McTeague – actually turned out to be quite good, the best by a considerable margin of the four LIfetime movies so far made from Victorla Christopher Murray’s novels based on the seven deadly sins. (I understand Murray plans to write books about all seven of the deadly sins, but so far the only ones she’s actually published are Lust, Envy, Wrath and Greed. Also her Web site claims that she was “dubbed a Christian Fiction writer because no one else was writing about religious topics,” which seems to me to be very hard to believe.) The main reason Greed stood out from the others is the authenticity of the character conflicts: heroine Zuri Maxwell (Monique Coleman), a budding interior designer, thinks she’s got the break of a lifetime when she gets a job designing a nook for the formidable Vivian “Aunt Viv” Anderson (LisaRaye McCoy), with the prospect of more work to come from both Aunt Viv and others she’s connected with. The young man who’s the cousin of Aunt Viv is Godfrey Anderson (Eric Benet), who’s not only drop-dead gorgeous and filthy rich (thanks to the chain of nursing homes Aunt Viv founded and runs), he buys his way into chairing the board of a foundation Zuri volunteers for, the Baltimore Literacy Project. that teaches adults to read after they missed out in acquiring that skill earlier on.

Zuri has a disabled father and lives with a boyfriend, Stephen (pronounced “Stefan”) Gardner (Nathan Witte, who’s as totally different a body type from Eric Benet as you could imagine given that they’re both relatively young Black men – like author Murray, almost all the characters in the “Seven Deadly Sins” books are Black), but his devil-may-care attitude and lack of ambition has become a flash point in the relationship and Zuri is really tired of Stephen blowing off the opportunities she keeps trying to create for him. So she’s all too vulnerable to Godfrey and his dubious charms even though it’s established early on that the Anderson nursing homes are a fraud; they survive on sending Medicaid bills for services not rendered and they’re engaging in whatever dodges Aunt Viv’s fertile mind can think up. Godfrey puts Zuri on the board of the Baltimore Literacy Project, but it’s only a pretext so she can unwittingly help him loot the proceeds of the project for his own use and use it to launder the dirty money that’s keeping Aunt Viv’s nursing homes afloat. She finds out she’s been duped when one of her prize students, a middle-aged Black man who drifted into the gangster life and did a prison sentence works hard, gets his G.E.D. and applies for college, ends up not being able to continue because the Baltimore Literacy Project was supposed to pay his tuition, only it couldn’t because Godfrey had done such a good job looting the foundation that it’s broke.

The screenwriters of Greed, Wuese Houston-Jibo and Monique N. Matthews, do a great job dramatizing the moral conflicts between Zuri’s honesty and the increasing level of financial crime the Andersons are drawing herselt into, including padding her invoices as an interior designer. Greed has its failings – not only does Zuri’s father have a bad fall down stairs the night she and Godfrey fly to Barbados for the weekend and they have sex for the first time (thereby adding this to the bizarre list of movies Charles and I went to see at press screenings 20 years ago in which a person near and dear to the heroine had to die or suffer a health crisis so she could get laid), but at the end Aunt Viv turns from a tightly controlled woman whose only crimes are financial to a full-blooded psychopath determined to kill Zuri, Godfrey and Stephen and burn her own house down to do it. The idea is to make it look like Stephen caught Godfrey and Zuri in bed together, and in a jealous rage Stephen shot them both and then burned down the house and committed suicide. Also adding dimension to this unexpectedly good movie are the quotes interspersed through it, which sound Biblical even though my husband, Reverend Charles, thought only the final quote was actually authentic. Somehow the quotes, whether they’re bona fide Biblical or made up by Murray, Houston-Jibo or Matthews, help better integrate Murray’s “inspirational” message into the script and make the film’s moral center seem an integral part of the story instead of just seeming patched on the way they did in Lust, Envy or Wrath. At the end Stephen rescues Zuri from the crazy Andersons and they’re both arrested (not killed this time), with Aunt Viv sentenced to life imprisonment and Godfrey to 30 years, while Zuri and Stephen reconcile – much to the joy of Zuri’s dad, who never lined Godfrey and thought Stephen was a better match for his daughter even before we knew Godfrey was a crook.

The Wrong Blind Date (Hybrid, Lifetime, 2022)

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

Alas, the second movie, The Wrong Bliind Date, was considerably weaker and followed all the Lifetime clichés without putting a creative spin on them the way Greed did. It was yet another “Wrong … “ story produced by and starring Vivica A. Fox (this time playing a psychiatrist instead of a school principal, though still having to deal with a shocking level of emotional immaturity among her charges), directed by David DeCoteau and with a story by Jeffrey Schenck and Peter Sullivan, though the actual script was by one Lark Bunker, an otherwise unknown writer to me. (So far The Wrong Blind Date is his or her first and only credit on imdb.com. This time the story is set in Hollywood and the central character is Laura Reynolds (Meredith Thomas), a nice, pert, attractive blonde woman but one who’s clearly just started to lose her looks; she’s still reasonably hot but one can tell the beginnings of “worry lines” on her face. She’s in the middle of a separation from her second husband, Michael Reynolds (Clark Moore), a police detective (he’s insistent on being called that and not just an “officer”) and a controlling bastard at home with Laura. Michael so dotes on Laura’s daughter Hannah (Sofia Masson) that for a while I thought the writers were heading for Lolita territory here, but no such luck. Instead Hannah is only Michael’s stepdaughter – her biological dad, Laura’s first husband, died when Hannah was eight – though that hasn’t stopped Michael from raising her as a “daddy’s girl.” On the incredibly terrible advice of psychiatrist Beth (Vivica A. Fox), Laura logs on to an Internet dating site (one of the things I am grateful for my marriage is that neither Charles nor I have had to deal with the hazards of Internet dating, and hopefully we never will) and gets a response even though she deletes her account after it’s been up just six hours.

The response is from a man who calls himself Kevin Holmes (Matthew Pohlkamp), claims to be a venture capitalist with a home in Beverly Hills, and has the same tastes in books and movies as Laura. An online promo on LIfetime’s Web site dropped a big hint that Kevin was actually wooing Laura as part of a plot hatched by her ex-husband Michael (when the story starts they are legally separated but not yet divorced, and Michael has a penchant for dropping in as if he owned the place, then answers her complaints with the reminder that he’s paying the mortgage on it and therefore in a manner of speaking he does own it) to win her back by scaring her away from dating other men. It turns out that Michael has not only hired “Kevin” to go after his wife but briefed him on her tastes so he can come off as a perfect match for her. Laura is partners in a design firm with Angela (Lesli Kay), who’s sort of the Voice of Reason in all this, and “Kevin” offers to set up a golf match with one of his investment clients to get her more accounts – only the person she’s supposed to play with is out of the country for two months and never plays golf anyway. Though Angela is white, it seems as if she’s being set up for the usually African-American role of The Heroine’s Best Friend Who Figures Out the Villain’s Plot but Gets Killed Before She Can Reveal It.

Laura’s daughter Hannah and Hannah’s boyfriend Noah (Rainer Dawn, a great-looking young man with a penchant for going topless and showing off his hot set of pecs; he looks like he stepped out of a porn video) start revealing “Kevin’s” multiple mysteries and ultimately learn that he’s really an ex-con called Stephen Johnson, who was arrested way back when by Michael Reynolds, who paid Stephen to go after his wife – only Stephen fell genuinely in love with Laura and tried to renege on the deal. First Stephen murders Jason (Peter Daniel Adams, a close second to Rainer Dawn for the hottest guy in the film), a bartender who recognizes him from “the joint” and threatens to blackmail him. Then Stephen overpowers Michael and leaves him near death – though he’s rescued. Stephen then entraps Noah by cloning Hannah’s phone (he does this just by pointing his phone at hers and hitting a button, which Charles said is impossible; you can only clone someone’s phone if there’s an electrical contact between each phone) and sending a text for him to meet “her,” then stabbing Noah with a knife – though, like Michael, Noah is left alive at the end. A “teaser” shot at the beginning shows how this story is going to end: Stephen has left both Laura and Hannah gagged (and presumably bound) on their couch, but Our Intrepid Therapist has let herself into the Reynolds’ home and grabs a wrench or something, hits Stephen over the head with it, knocks him out and then says Vivica A. Fox’s classic bad line, “You went on the wrong blind date.” (She seems to end every Lifetime “Wrong … “ movie with some variation on this line.)

Not only is The Wrong Blind Date a virtual compendium of LIfetime clichés, its casting directors, Jan Glaser and Nancy McManus, screwed up by making all the men in it look very much alike. There’s surprisingly little physical difference between Clark Moore, Matthew Pohlkamp and Peter Daniel Adams, and even Rainer Dawn looks like he’s going to grow up into that “type” in 20 years or so. All this makes for a highly confusing movie in which in many scenes, until director DeCoteau and his cinematographer (surprisingly unidentified on imbd.com, although the “first assistant camera,” Ben Stevenson, is!) move in for a close-up it’s not easy to tell which man is whom. The worst thing about The Wrong Blind Date is the feeling we get that we’ve seen it all before; as the familiar plot clichés troop out on screen and we stay two or three acts ahead of the director at all times (when he re-watched the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon in the early 1960’s Dwight Macdonald praised it by saying, “How nice it is to be behind the director instead of two or three reels ahead of him!”), we start to wonder, “Why are we watching this? We’ve seen it already,” even as we know we haven’t.

Being the Ricardos (Amazon Studios, Escape Artists, Big Indie Pictures, 2021)

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

At 9 p.m. I put on the movie Being the Ricardos with my husband Charles for Amazon Prime (and, fortunately, the cost was included in our Prime membership so we didn’t have to pay anything else to watch it.) Written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, who’s become something of a specialist in movies like The Social Network and TV series like The West Wing, tight-knit dramas taking place in enclosed spaces, Sorkin this time took on a particularly hellish week in the production history of the 1950’s TV series I Love Lucy. One was the revelation – first heard on radio on Walter Winchell’s show and then splashed across banner headlines in newspapers, at least one of whom printed a banner headline in red, that Lucille Ball had registered o vote with the Communist Party in 1936. This was in 1953, at the height of the House Un-American Activities Committee’s investigations of Communists and alleged “subversives” in Hollywood, and it’s a measure of Sorkin’s scriptwriting savvy that he has Lucille Ball (Nicole Kidman) more concerned about whether her husband, producer and co-star, Desi Arnaz (Javier Bardem), is having extra-relational activities with other women than the potential that being exposed as a “Red” could have had to destroy her career.

The other big crisis facing the producers of I Love Lucy was Lucille Ball’s pregnancy with Desi Arnaz, Jr. and the couple’s – particularly Desi Arnaz, Sr.’s – decision to incorporate Lucy’s pregnancy into the plot lines so Lucy and Ricky Ricardo would have a baby the same time as Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz had theirs. The film periodically flashes back to earlier times in Lucy’s life, like the making of the 1940 film Too Many Girls on which Lucy and Desi first met (it was a Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart musical, Desi Arnaz had been in the stage production and had had an instant success – especially when his spectacular final number sparked a nationwide craze for conga lines – and Lucille Ball was an RKO contract player assigned to play the female lead in the film, not the second lead as Sorkin’s script would have it) and the closest she ever came to dramatic stardom with the 1942 film The Big Street (based on a Damon Runyon story, “Little Pinks,” with Lucy as a bitchy, diva-esque entertainer whose gangster boyfriend pushes her down a flight of stairs and leaves her in a wheelchair, and Henry Fonda as the busboy at the club where she worked who becomes her caregiver out of an unrequited crush on her), only RKO fired her for reasons that aren’t clear in the film.

Actually I’d been under the impression that it was Lucy who bailed on RKO, not the other way around, because she had a contract offer from MGM – where her first film there was DuBarry Was a Lady, another diva-esque role with Red Skelton in Fonda’s place as the hapless proletarian who works at the theatre where she performs and has a crush on her. It was for this film, her first in color, that MGM hairstylist Sydney Guilaroff dyed her hair flaming red because “her soul is on fire.” Sorkin’s script has some inaccuracies – like when he says Lucy got the role in The Big Street only because Rita Hayworth and Judy Holliday had turned it down (at the time The Big Street was made, 1942, Holliday was a member of the Revuers comedy group in Greenwich Village and had never made a film), or early on when he refers to a “taping” of an I Love Lucy episode (at the time I Love Lucy was made videotape had not yet been invented and I Love Lucy was famously shot on film) or has people use slang expressions like “story arc,” “gaslit” and “copy that” that weren’t part of the language in 1953. But, with one major exception, Being The Ricardos is well cast and beautifully staged.

Actually I’d been under the impression that it was Lucy who bailed on RKO, not the other way around, because she had a contract offer from MGM – where her first film there was DuBarry Was a Lady, another diva-esque role with Red Skelton in Fonda’s place as the hapless proletarian who works at the theatre where she performs and has a crush on her. It was for this film, her first in color, that MGM hairstylist Sydney Guilaroff dyed her hair flaming red because “her soul is on fire.” Sorkin’s script has some inaccuracies – like when he says Lucy got the role in The Big Street only because Rita Hayworth and Judy Holliday had turned it down (at the time The Big Street was made, 1942, Holliday was a member of the Revuers comedy group in Greenwich Village and had never made a film), or early on when he refers to a “taping” of an I Love Lucy episode (at the time I Love Lucy was made videotape had not yet been invented and I Love Lucy was famously shot on film) or has people use slang expressions like “story arc,” “gaslit” and “copy that” that weren’t part of the language in 1953. But, with one major exception, Being The Ricardos is well cast and beautifully staged. The one exception is Javier Bardem as Desi Arnaz; Bardem is a talented actor but he’s all wrong for the part – he’s too old, not sexy enough and a mediocre (or worse) singer. (In the film The Mambo Kings Desi Arnaz, Jr. was quite effective playing his father on screen – the story is about a mambo band working to get a potentially star-making opportunity by appearing as guest stars on I Love Lucy – but by now he is too old for the part, too.)

Nicole Kidman has been criticized as well – notably by people who questioned the idea of a serious actress playing an irrepressible comedienne – but I thought she was excellent. If nothing else, this film reproduces just how hard it can be to make audiences laugh on cue, and like her filmmaking mentor at MGM, Buster Keaton, Lucille Ball approached the business of making comedy as a serious one. No doubt she’d heard the old adage, “If you’re laughing, the audience won’t be.” In one sequence she calls in the cast, including J. K. Simmons playing William Frawley playing Fred Mertz and Nina Arianda as Vivian Vance as Ethel Mertz, for a run-through at 2 a.m. to rehearse a new blocking she’s devised for a gag sequence: she’s cutting flowers for a fancy dinner at which, unbeknownst to the Mertzes – they are having a long-term argument and it looks like they’re headed for divorce court – she’s invited both Fred and Ethel in hopes of reconciling them. She cuts the flowers too short, then adds water to the vase, and the flowers start growing out of the vase (courtesy of one of the show’s writers, who’s under the table pushing them up). Ironically the whole flower sequence doesn’t end up in the episode as filmed and submitted to CBS for airing.

The story of how I Love Lucy got on the air in the first place is fascinating – and was best told by Desi Arnaz himself in his autobiography, simply titled A Book. It seems that Lucille Ball and Richard Denning were co-starring on radio in a sitcom called My Favorite Husband, in which he played a sportswriter and she played the typically ditzy wife whose schemes got min in trouble. CBS wanted to put My Favorite Husband on TV and Lucy was amenable, but on one condition: she wanted the part of her TV husband to be played by Desi Arnaz, her husband in real life. According to one account (alas not reproduced by Sorkin in the film), the “suits” at CBS told Lucy, “No one would ever believe you were married to a Cuban bandleader.” “Why not?” Lucy replied. “I am married to a Cuban bandleader.” Then CBS executives told Lucy and Desi that in order to do the show, they would have to move to New York. This enraged Lucy because the whole idea of doing a show with her husband was to keep him home in Hollywood at night and away from touring with his band, where she knew he would be tempted to drink and to have extra-relational affairs. (When she finally divorced Desi in 1960 she cited his drinking and womanizing as the reasons.) At the time virtually all TV shows were done live, and people on the East Coast got to see them as they were being performed while people on the West Coast got crappy-looking kinescopes – literally films made by sticking a movie camera in front of a TV set and filming the result – which were flown out to the West Coast so they could be shown in the same time slot, only three hours later to adjust for the difference between Eastern and Pacific time. (This was the start of the horrible tradition that makes the West Coast suck hind tit to the East Coast.)

Desi Arnaz wanted to shoot I Love Lucy on film so it would have the same visual quality wherever it was shown, and when the CBS “suits” insisted the show be done live because “we think Lucy is at her best in front of a live audience,” Desi said, “Fine. We’ll film it in front of a live audience.” Desi decided to use the three-camera technique that had been pioneered by Ralph Edwards on his TV quiz show Truth or Consequences, but had never been used on a scripted show before. He inadvertently also invented the rerun: before that if a radio or TV show were repeated, the only way to do it had been to recruit the same actors (or different ones if the originals weren’t available) and redo the whole show live. Given that I Love Lucy was produced as a tangible physical object, the shows could be run as many times as desired – and are still entertaining audiences even though Lucy, Desi and virtually all the creative people both in front of and behind the camera are dead. Charles liked the fact that Sorkin’s script made it clear that Lucille Ball had been a movie star – not at the top level of Joan Crawford or Bette Davis, but certainly a capable, highly creative and talented actress who could bring people out to theatres – and in addition to The Big Street I’d also recommend Dance, Girl, Dance (a much better film than Sorkin makes it out to be), DuBarry Was a Lady, Lured (when I wrote about that film in an article about underrated films by great directors – in this case, Douglas Sirk – I wrote that it contained “great dramatic performances by George Sanders and Lucille Ball – yes, you read that right”) and the 1949 Easy Living (which stars Victor Mature as a professional football player in one of the few films noir about a team sport).

Charles also didn’t like the way Sorkin’s script hammered home that William Frawley was an alcoholic – CBS originally didn’t want him on the show and Desi personally had to indemnify the network in case they lost money due to Frawley’s drinking issues. Overall, though, Being the Ricardos is an excellent film despite its flaws, and a touching portrayal of the creation of a cultural artifact that is still engaging audiences and moving people to laughter at one of the world’s greatest clowns.

Thje Devil to Pay! (Howard Productions, United Artists, 1930)

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

Last night at 10 my husband Charles and I watched a “freebie” from Amazon Prime – a movie included with our subscription instead of one where we have to pay a separate rental fee over and above the cost of Prime membership – called The Devil to Pay! (with the exclamation point), a 1930 film from Samuel Goldwyn’s company (though billed as “Howard Productions, Inc.” after Frances Howard, the maiden name of Mrs. Samuel Goldwyn) starring Ronald Colman. It’s the sort of light-hearted romantic comedy Goldwyn had had the sense to put Colman in after he realized the heavy-breathing love stories Colman, Rudolph Vaientino and John Gilbert had become stars in wouldn’t work in sound films. Colman played William Hale, son of Lord Leland (Frederick Kerr, best known as the father of Colin Clive in the original Frankenstein), who as the film opens is upset tol the point of threatening to disown him after he learns that Hale is selling all the possessions Lord Leland staked him to so he could start a plantation in Kenya. We first see William Hale when he takes over as the property’s auctioneer, deliberately selling pieces to lower bidders than the ones who’ve technically “won” because he likes them and making clear he’s only interested in getting enough money to pay for a passage back home to England and enough left over to stake him to a visit to the nearest horse-race track. Hale explains his perpetual dire straits to us by saying he’s a compulsive gambler and lost all his money to “horses with noses not long enough, and cards that were good but not good enough.” He arrives in England with 20 pounds to his name and spends 15 of them on a dog named George, a wire fox terrier who looks a lot like the dog in the Thin Man films but wasn’t.

Alas, George quickly gets forgotten about and doesn’t appear until late in the movie, and instead it becomes a rom-com in which Hale is smitten with Dorothy Hope (Loretta Young), whose father (David Torrence) has made a fortune in linoleum and wants to keep her from falling in love with a fortune-hunter. So he had arranged for her to marry Russian Grand Duke Paul (Paul Cavanagh), a stuck-up pill whom Dorothy can’t stand. Given that basic information, you could probably write the rest of it yourself and achieve about the same result as the actual writer, Frederick Lonsdale, who had a reputation for writing similar stories for the London stage, though this is a screen original (albeit with Benjamin Glazer credited as “adapter”) rather than one of Lonsdale’s plays. It’s inevitable, given the rules of the genre, that Dorothy will fall for charming, irrepressible William Hale, and there’s a neat twist towards the ending in which Dorothy, having a jealous hissy-fit because William went to Liverpool to visit former girlfriend Mary Cheyne (Myrna Loy, billed sixth and actually out-acting the other principals), writes him a check for five thousand pounds. William cashes the check – Dorothy was expecting him to virtuously refuse it – but then gives the money o Grand Duke Paul, who turns out not to have any money at all and be precisely the sort of male gold-digger from whom Mr. Hope was trying to protect his daughter. The Devil to Pay! was directed by George Fitzmaurice, who has not fared well in Hollywood histories (in her biography of Samuel Goldwyn, Carol Easton said of Fitzmaurice, “He made bad pictures beautifully”) but had made enough of a reputation that he not only got a separate “A George Fitzmaurize Production” credit besides h is credit for director, his directorial credit featured his name in cursive script: a rare honor in those days. Rudolph Valentino had wanted to work with Fitzmaurice his entire career and finally got the chance to on his last film, The Son of the Sheik (1926), so obviously someone out there at the time thought Fitzmaurice was a great director.

In The Devil to Pay! he turns in a fully competent job, getting an effectively insouciant performance from Colman and quite dignified work from Loretta Young and Myrna Loy – and at least Loy was playing a woman legitimately in love with her man instead of the nymphomaniac vamp she usually was cast in during her early career. (The legend was that Louis B. Mayer had to deal with Loy’s insistence that she was tired of playing “loose women” – and after loaning her out to RKO for a beautiful film with John Barrymore, Topaze, Mayer saw the movie and told Loy, “You were right. From now on you will always be a lady.”) Half an hour into this 72-minute movie, Ronald Colman and Loretta Young visit an arcade in which, among other things, they play a game called “coconut shy” which fascinated Charles enough he looked it up online. The Wikipedia page on “coconut shy” describes it as “a traditional game frequently found as a sidestall at funfairs and fêtes. The game consists of throwing wooden balls at a row of coconuts balanced on posts. Typically a player buys three balls and wins when each coconut is successfully dislodged. In some cases other prizes may be won instead of the coconuts. The word ‘shy’ in this context means to toss or throw.” It’s a nice offshoot to an extended sequence in which Colman’s and Young’s characters also ride on swings shaped to look like boats and have a picnic outdoors while a horse race Colman’s character has bet on is taking place at a nearby track, and naturally Grand Duke Paul (whom we don’t yet know is a bounder) is upset that Dorothy is with some other guy eating lunch on the grass instead of in the stands with him.

The adjective I keep thinking of to describe The Devil to Pay! is “charming”; like a lot of other movies, it’s a triumph of style over (lack of) substance, though it led to Colman demanding heavier roles that would show off his acting chops. Three years after The Devil to Pay! Goldwyn cast Colman in a story called The Masquerader in which he played a dual role – a Member of Parliament who’s secretly a drug addict and a lookalike double who’s recruited to stand in for him – and the film was a total failure at the box office. Colman demanded a release from his Goldwyn contract – which he got – and developed an aversion to dual roles. When he was offered the lead in MGM’s A Tale of Two Cities the original plan was for Colman to play both Sidney Carton and Charles Darnay, who agrees to be guillotined in Carton’s place, but Colman would only agree to play the part if he just played Carton and not Darnay. Two years later the same producer, David O. Selznick, offered Colman The Prisoner of Zenda, in which he had to play a dual role for the story to work at all – and after much trepidation he eventually did, and had one of the biggest hits of his career.

Madam Satan (MGM, 1930)

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

Last night I put on the DVD of Cecil B. DeMille’s 1930 film Madam Satan, his second of three films for MGM. At the time DeMille was going through a bad patch of his career; having been present (and, indeed, instrumental) at the creation of one major studio, Paramount, in 1914 (actually the Jesse L. Lasky Company, which merged with Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players to form Paramount), he thought he could do it again. So in 1925 DeMille organized a company called Producers’ Distributing Corporation (PDC, certainly not to be confused with the 1940’s “B”: studio PRC, for Producers’ Releasing Corporation) and made his first PDC film, The Volga Boatmen, Unfortunately, it was a commercial disappointment and, without his knowledge or approval, his financial backers sold the company to Pathé, which was already in the throes of decline. DeMille’s next film, The King of Kings (1927), a gloriously over-the-top biopic of Jesus Christ (and DeMille’s estate was so lavish he was able to use his backyard garden to “play” Gethsemane), was a huge hit. He followed it up with The Godless Girl (1928), a parable about religious belief and disbelief which took the interesting tack that the titular character rebels against her upbringing in a church based on fear and retribution, then turns around and becomes a believer when she’s presented with a vision of God as love. Alas, DeMille made this movie at the cusp of the silent-to-sound transition, and the bosses at Pathé took it away from him and hired Fritz Feld – usually a comic character actor best known as the crazy psychiatrist in Howard Hawks’ comedy masterpiece Bringing Up Baby (1938) and as the real Anatole of Paris, whom Danny Kaye impersonates, in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947) – to direct additional sound sequences. (Ironically, that version of the film is lost today but DeMille kept a personal print of the silent version, which survives.)

DeMille understandably was disgusted at the way the “suits” at Pathé had treated him, so in 1929 he signed with MGM for a three-picture contract. His first film, Dynamite (1929), was one of those reverse-Cinderella tales oddly common in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s in which a spoiled heiress falls for a proletarian type and ultimately has to descend the social ladder and learn to live on his income. It did O.K. at the box office, and so DeMille was allowed to make a bizarre big-budgeted musical (the only one of his career) called Madam Satan. The first hour or so is a pretty typical drawing-room tale of unfaithful husbands and long-suffering wives: Bob Brooks (Reginald Denny, oddly cast as a romantic lead in a part that cries out for Cary Grant or Errol Flynn, neither of whom were making feature films yet) and his best friend, Jimmy Wade (Roland Young) have been out all night and come back to the Brooks home quite a bit the worse for wear. Wade is single but Brooks is married to Angela (Kay Johnson, top-billed; critic Leonard Maltin lamented that the best thing Hollywood could think of doing with this remarkably beautiful, poised and talented actress was to have her play silly upper-class heroines for DeMille’’s morality plays; she gave up her career to concentrate on being the wife of director John Cromwell, though they divorced in 1946, and actor James Cromwell, best known for playing the lead human role of Farmer Hoggett in the film Babe, is their son).

The two try to sneak quietly into the Brooks’s home – where in a welrdly homoerotic scene they end up sleeping together, albeit in the obligatory twin beds – but not only are they too drunk to avoid making noise, they’ve already been “outed” by a front-page story in the morning newspaper announcing that socialites Bob Brooks and Jimmy Wade appeared in night court at 2 a.m. along with “Mrs. Brooks.” Naturally Angela wants to know who this other “Mrs. Brooks” was, especially since she knows it couldn’t have been her – she went to bed at 10 p.m. – and it turns out to be Trixie (Lillian Roth, who apparently caused so much trouble on the set of this movie that as punishment MGM loaned her to Paramount and sent her to make Animal Crackers with the Marx Brothers). There’s a bizarre and oddly slow-moving scene in Trixie’s apartment in which Bob and Jimmy have gone – Bob has tried to pass off Trixie as Jimmy’s wife – and Angela crashes Trixie’s apartment intending to tell her to leave Bob alone if she knows what’s good for her. Unfortunately Trixie has left and Angela ends up in Trixie’s bed with blankets entirely covering her and Jimmy lying on bed on top of her, so Bob thinks Jimmy has a secret girlfriend and is unaware that it’s his own wife. This reads like the stuff of French bedroom farce, except it’s carefully not played for laughs and at the same time it’s not really drama either, Angela does get a chance to confront Trixie and tell her that if her husband wants a “bad” woman, she’ll play bad and make him so sick of vice he’ll return to her and virtue.

Angela sees her opportunity when Jimmy decides to host a wild costume party aboard a dirigible – I’m not making this up, you know! – and disguises herself as a French vamp called “Madam Satan,” and in one of the worst phony “French” accents of all time she calls out to all the guests at Jimmy’s party, “Would you like to go to hell with Madam Satan?” (Fortunately this was made during the period of loose enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code; after the Code was tightened in 1934 its enforcement arm, the Hays Office, decreed that this story premise was permissible only if the erring husband knew all along that the mystery woman vamping him was really his wife.) The party scenes are easily the best parts of the film, featuring a character billed as “Electricity” (Theodore Kosloff), who leads an elaborate dance sequence in the then-current style of Ballet Mécanique, which was originally filmed in two-strip Technicolor but, alas, no color print is known to exist. There are also characters at the party called “Miss Conning Tower” (Julianne Johnston) and “Call of the Wild” (Vera Marsh), as well as an ensemble introduced as “Mr. and Mrs. Henry VIII” – a man and six women. (Even the real Henry VIII didn’t try to be married to more than one woman at a time.) Trixie comes to the party as “Miss Golden Pheasant” and wants Bob to bid for her at the auction that will climax the party and make her the belle of the ball if she fetches the highest price (the winner of the auction gets a dance with the woman he bids for), but she’s royally upset when the upstart “Madam Satan” enters the party and Bob starts bidding for her instead.

Just then a storm starts outside in what passes for divine retribution in a Cecil B. DeMille movie set in the present day, and the dirigible’s captain (Boyd Irwin) tells Jimmy he should evacuate his guests while there’s still time. Jimmy, of course, ignores him, and what follows is a turbulent (literally and figuratively) scene in which the party-goers scramble for parachutes and the harnesses they need to be able to use them. There are some interesting gags about where the parachuting party-goers end up – including one where a woman crashes through the roof of a men’s bathhouse just as the guys are talking about how wonderful it is to get away from women. (My husband Charles joked that this may be the earliest screen depiction of a Gay bathhouse.) The only guest who doesn’t get to parachute to safety is Bob Brooks, and he’s able to survive – albeit with a broken hand – by diving out of the wreckage of the dirigible into Central Park Lake. Of course Bob and Angela are united at the end. Madam Satan is one of those oddly schizoid movies in which the first and second halves have little or nothing to do with each other, and the second (the party) and third (the retribution) are both a lot more fun than the rather pachydermous exposition in act one that sets up the situation. Both Charles and I noted the visual similarities between Madam Satan and Just Imagine, the futuristic musical Fox made in 1930 with Buddy DeSylva, Lew Brown and Ray Henderson as producers, and though Just Imagine was supposed to take place 50 years in the future (i.e., 1980) while Madam Satan was set in the present, the set designs in particular are very similar – so much so that Charles joked he felt like El Brendel, the Swedish dialect comedian who was the star of Just Imagine, was going to walk into Madam Satan at any moment.

The original ads for Madam Satan promised, “You’ve never seen anything like it before!,” and as with some other big-budgeted musicals of 1930 (including the stunning masterpiece King of Jazz) the Depression-driven box office had passed it by. Audiences of 1930 were far more interested in gangster stories – the biggest film of the year in terms of box-office receipts was Little Caesar – than elaborate musicals, especially elaborate musicals about people with too much money for their own good. DeMille’s next and last MGM film was The Squaw Man, a story he’d already filmed twice before (in 1914 and 1918 – the 1914 version was the first feature-length film ever made in Hollywood) to good results at the box office. The 1931 Squaw Man, with Warner Baxter as a cowboy and Lupe Velez as the Native American girl he falls for, also was a flop, and MGM let DeMille go, He went hat in hand back to Paramount, where he had to beg for a limited budget to make an elaborate spectacle called The Sign of the Cross about the Emperor Nero (Charles Laughton) and the Christians he persecutes. The Sign of the Cross was an enormous hit and DeMille kept working for Paramount until his death in 1959, making increasingly leaden and dull super-spectacles that made tons of money for both DeMille and Paramount – though as he grew older DeMille got lazier and his talents as a director actually declined, as you can see if you watch the original 1923 version of The Ten Commandments and the far better known 1956 remake back to back (easy to do since the currently available DVD of the 1956 The Ten Commandments includes the 1923 version as a bonus item).

Summer of Soul: Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised (Mass Distraction Media, RadicalMedia, Vulcan Productions, Hulu, Searchlight Films, 2021)

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

I ended up running for my husband Charles and I the 2021 documentary Summer of Soul: Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised, about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival. This was a project of a Black lounge singer turned musical entrepreneur, Tony Lawrence, who had been working with the city of New York as early as 1964. Lawrence actually put on the first Harlem Cultural Festival in 1967 with a varied lineup of acts reflecting the diversity of African-American music – and not just African-American, either; according to the Wikipedia page on the festivals, the first one in 1967 featured “a Harlem Hollywood Night, boxing demonstrations, a fashion show, go-kart grand prix, the first Miss Harlem contest, and concerts featuring soul, gospel, calypso, and Puerto Rican music.” For the second festival in 1968 Lawrence brought in documentary filmmaker Hal Tulchin and presented concerts with Count Basie, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Mahalia Jackson and Tito Puente. Some of Tulchin’s footage was broadcast locally by New York TV station WNEW (so much for the inaccurate moniker that this was a time when “the revolution could not be televised”!). The current film was made in 2021 based on footage from the 1969 festival, and directed by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, who won both an Oscar and a Grammy for it.

The list of artists included is quite impressive: Stevie Wonder, the Chambers Brothers, B. B., King (introduced by Tony Lawrence as “the world’s greatest blues singer” – yes, he was great, but that seemed like a strange thing to say in 1969, when Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and T-Bone Walker were still alive and active), Herbie Mann (the one token Caucasian headliner), the Fifth Dimension (who jumped at the chance to perform for the first time in Harlem because a lot of people had thought they were white and they wanted people to know they were Black), the Edwin Hawkins Singers (doing their huge hit “Oh, Happy Day,” but with a rougher, more gritty lead singer, Shirley Miller, than Dorothy Morrison, who had sung lead on their hit record and then departed for a brief and unsuccessful run at a secular soul career), the Staple Singers, Mahalia Jackson (whose duet with Mavis Staples on the song “Precious Lord” is the high point of the program – this was a year after Mahalia performed the song at Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s funeral and three years before Aretha Franklin would sing it at Mahalia’s funeral), David Ruffin (former lead singer of The Temptations, who screwed himself out of a potentially major solo career by marrying and then divorcing one of Motown Records founder Berry Gordy’s sister; Marvin Gaye sabotaged his Motown career by doing the same thing). Gladys Knight and the Pips (doing “I Heard It Through the Grapevine”), Sly and the Family Stone (more on them later), Mongo Santamaria, Ray Barretto (both Latino artists put on the program in recognition of the Latino, particularly Puerto Rican, heritage of Harlem), jazz drummer Max Roach and his then-wife, singer Abbey Lincoln, trumpeter Hugh Masakela (a refugee from South Africa and its wretched apartheid system of near-total racial segregation), and the amazing Nina Simone. (Oddly, Stevie Wonder, Hygh Masakela and the Roach-Lincoln group were left off the soundtrack CD if the film.)

The show featured interviews with people who were at the Festival (one woman recalled that in order to get away from theri strict mothers, she and her girlfriend had to lie and sneak out of the house to attend), including a man who remembered the cultural shock when he saw Sly and the Family Stone. He had been used to the idea that all Black groups performed in suits and ties, or the female equivalent thereof, and out came Sly in his hippie finery, leading a band that was not only interracial (his drummer, Gregg Errico, was white) but multi-gendered. Next to Sly, the most powerful musician in the band was Sly’s sister, Rose Stone, who not only sang but played trumpet – and I’ve long wondered why Rose Stone never went out on her own when Sly’s career started unraveling under the influence of drugs, which among other things distorted his sense of time so much he would literally not show up for gigs. (One of the interviewers recalled that even when Sly Stone was introduced from the stage, you could never be sure he would actually be there.) Director Thompson did a good job covering the political and social ferment of the time through contemporary news clips; ordinarily I’m peeved at music documentaries that interrupt the songs with interview segments and voice-overs, but this time I didn’t mind so much because Thompson was using them to depict the overall context of the show and how the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival fit into the overall social and political ferment of the time.

About the only thing I would fault the film for is it way overdid the argument that racism was why this footage sat in a basement for over 50 years until Thompson acquired the rights and started restoring it. (There are literally hours of footage and I hope we could see the rest of it someday.) Despite Thompson’s slapping the contentious subtitle “When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised” on his film, the fact is that two TV specials were made from Tolchin’s footage and shown on major networks in 1969: one on CBS on July 23 (while the shows, six weekends in a row in July and August, were still going on) and one on ABC on September 16. Thompson’s narration hints that the reason the footage sat unseen for so long is racism, but the real reasons were a lack of funding and legal battles between Tony Lawrence and Hal Tolchin over who owned the rights to the footage. At one point Tolchin attached the title Black Woodstock to the project in hopes that evoking the legacy of Woodstock (a far less well produced event whose promoters lost their proverbial shirts on it, though they were bailed out by royalties from the Woodstock movie) would get him the backing he needed for his Harlem Cultural Festival film. (Ironically, two acts seen at the Harlem Cultural Festival – the Chambers Brothers and Sly and the Family Stone – also performed at Woodstock. Jimi Hendrix was legendarily pissed off that the only Black acts at Woodstock besides himself were Sly, the Chamberses and Black folksinger Richie Havens.) And in the early 1970's, while Tulchin's footage sat in a basement, at least two major concert films with multiple Black artists, Wattstax and Soul II Soul, were released and were box-office hits.

The film also claims that the Black Panther Party provided security for the Festival, which was true only for the concert featuring Sly and the Family Stone; despite the fractious history of relations between New York’s Black community and the New York Police Department (then and since), the NYPD were there for all the other concerts. “Are you ready to kill if necessary? … Are you ready to smash white things,to burn buildings?” Nina Simone asks in the song “Are You Ready?” (a poem by David Nelson which Simone reads over a backing of Latin precision, like the Last Poets, the pioneering rap group that had made their first record in 1968), putting herself in the most radical current of Black thought of that time. One of the most interesting stories in the film is narrated by New York Times reporter Chariayne Hunter-Gault, who recalled how in 1969 she wrote a story about a group of 200 Black women – and her editors changed “Black” to “Negro,” Hunter-Gault wrote an 11-page memo to her editors explaining why she had used the word “Black,” and her editors ultimately went along with her and set “Black” as the way Black people would be referred to in the New York Times from then on.