Mystery Science Theatre 3000: "Fire Maidens of Outer Space" (Criterion Films, 1956; MSTeK version, 1992)

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

My husband Charles came home from work at about 9:15 p.m. and within half an h our we watched a YouTube movie, a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 presentation of Cy Roth’s 1956 messterpiece Fire Maidens of Outer Space. (Apparently the working title was Fire Maidens from Outer Space, which at least is a more normal cadence, but “of” instead oif “from” is the official conjunction in the title.) Roth both wrote and directed (as well as co-produced) this ridiculous and totally boring film (as I’ve noted in these pages before, a lot of the MST3K targets were selected because of their boredom) which is so dull it makes Cat Women of the Moon seem like 2001: A Space Odyssey by comparison. The plot is your usual machismo fantasy nonsense in which astronomers have discovered a previously unknown 13th moon of Jupiter. (At least that’s what is called in the film itself; in the trailer it’s the 13th moon of Saturn.) This hitherto unknown planetoid not only has an atmosphere almost identical to Earth’s, it also is warm enough to sustain human life. In fact, it’s beel doing that for thousands of years: as the lost continent of Atlantis began to sink beneath the waves, its scientists somehow managed to evacuate some of the Atlanteans to the 13th moon of Jupiter, where they set up a colony called “New Atlantis” – only, unfortunately, the one lone male New Atlantean left is Prasus (Owen Berry), who’s obviously too old to be of much use keeping the New Atlantean population going.

So he decides to guide the five boring astronauts crewing the spaceship sent to explore the new moon and press them into service to have sex with his “daughters” (he refers to them as such throughout the film and only towards the end is it revealed that he’s not literally the father of them all, they just call him that because they revere him so) and thereby repopulate New Atlantis. One of the astronauts, Luther Blair (Anthony Dexter, five years after he played Rudolph Valentino in a Columbia biopic that got lousy reviews and sank at the box office, which explains why within five years he was reduced to making crap like this), genuinely falls in love with New Atlantean princess Hestia (Susan Shaw, who shows signs of genuine acting talent Cy Roth’s script does not allow her to exercise) and schemes to break her out of the New Atlantean compound, take her back to Earth, and presumably marry her. The other astronaut whom the New Atlanteans try to press into stud service whines that he’s married and therefore he’s not interested in the hot New Atlantean babes, who are called the “Fire Maidens” even though they have nothing to do with fire except for one scene, in which they sacrifice one of their number n a large open pit of flames. (This isn’t going to do much to solve their underpopulation problem.) The other three astronauts of the five-member crew remain on board the spaceship, and there’s also a monster roaming the planet’s surface who looks like a cross between the Incredible Hulk and James Arness’s makeup in the 1951 version of The Thing.

I first read about this wretched movie in one of the Michael and Harry Medved books about bad movies, which mentioned that they got the soundtrack music from old Russian albums they had bought as imports (presumably from the Four Continents Bookstore, which imported books and records from what was then the Soviet Union, and you could get yourself blacklisted if you were caught ordering from them), notably the Polovetsian Dances from Alexander Borodin’s opera Prince Igor (including the one that had already become the basis for the song “Stranger in Paradise,” and for Artie Shaw’s “My Fantasy” a decade before that) and the “Oriental Suite” by Ukrainian-born composer Monia Liter. (That’s right: a man named Monia.) The classical selections – which Roth’s production company could rip off with impunity because shortly after he came to power in 1917 Vladimir Lenin abolished all Russia’s intellectual property laws – serve as the basis for three excruciatingly boring dance numbers performed by the Fire Maidens, of which one of the MST3K robots joked, “Can’t they even try to move in time to the music?” It seems like Cy Roth took the dance footage and then just dubbed in whatever records he had on hand he thought would fit. The Medveds said that at one point you could clearly hear the needle drop on the record before the music began, though I’ve only seen this film in the MST3K incarnation and they probably talked over that part.

This version was actually one of the earlier MST3K episodes, from their fifth season (1992), before series creator Joel Hodgson (who played a character named “Joel Robinson,” perhaps because their announcer found the name “Hodgson” too much of a mouthful to pronounce) relinquished command of the Satellite of Love to Mike Nelson (who was first the show’s head writer and then its on-ait host). In general the episodes with Hodgson are more fun – they were still making this for Comedy Central and they didn’t have to do the damnable “story arcs” the Sci-Fl Channel imposed on them later when they moved. Also Hodgson was a more genial host, and a bit sexier to boot!

The Garden Murder Case (MGM, 1936)

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

Late last night my husband Charles and I watched a 1936 MGM “B” film (yes, I’ve mentioned several times in these pages that MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer threatened to fire anyone who referred to an MGM film as a “B” movie, but this one ran only an hour and three minutes and Lucien Hubbard, a low-budget specialist, was the producer) called The Garden Murder Case. It was based on one of the Philo Vance novels written by Willard Huntington Wright, though he signed them “S. S. Van Dine” in honor of the two things he was hoping to do more of if the books were successful (which they were; though all but forgotten today, when Van Dine was writing them Vance was considered the American Sherlock Holmes), eat (“Dine”) and travel (“S. S,”). It was directed by Edwin L. Marin, who’d previously tried his hand at a Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, for the short-lived Sono-Art World Wide Pictures in 1933; and his best-known credit was probably MGM’s 1938 version of A Christmas Carol, in which his Sherlock Holmes, Reginald Owen, was tapped to play Scrooge at the last minute after the originally set actor, Lionel Barrymore, developed such severe arthritis he lost the ability to walk and had to use a wheelchair in all his subsequent films. (Lionel Barrymore had become so identified with Scrooge on radio that he appeared in the film’s trailer.)

In some ways the screenwriter, Bertram Millhauser, was more interesting than the director; like Marin, he would work on films featuring Sherlock Holmes – he would write the last few episodes in the Universal Holmes series in the 1940’s, with Basil Rathbone (who had also played Philo Vance in a 1930 MGM film called The Bishop Murder Case) the ideal Sherlock Holmes. Indeed, Millhauser self-plagiarized the ending of this film for one of his Rathbone Holmes scripts, Sherlock Holmes and the Spider Woman, seven years later. The Garden Murder Case begins with a scene at a horse-race track (“played,” as usual in Hollywood films, by Santa Anita – Charles asked me later if I could think of any movie Hollywood ever made about horse racing that staged original footage for the racing scenes instead of using stock clips, and I suspect the most recent Seabiscuit film might have but that’s the only one I can think of) in which oen of the so-called “gentleman jockeys” who’s supposed to ride in the big steeplechase, Floyd Garden (Douglas Walton, who along with Gavin Gordon was one of the great Hollywood weaklings and usually played screaming queens) starts mumbling about how he’s going to ride in the big race and break his neck in a fall.

This duly happens, and among the suspects are self-made tycoon Edgar Lowe Hannle (Gene Lockhart); his niece, Zelia Graem (pronounced “Graham”) (Virginia Bruce, wasted as usual; she got the role of a lifetime in the 1934 Monogram version of Jane Eyre, in which she totally out-acted Joan Fontaine in the same role nine years later, but it’s a movie almost no one has seen and she almost never got a role that good from a major studio); a nurse with a dark past, Gladys Beeton (Benita Hume, Mrs. Ronald Colman); and hanger-on Woode (pronounced “Woody”) Swift (Kent Smith, for once not playing an architect as he did in Cat People and The Fountainhead). Philo Vance (Edmund Lowe) enters the action when he was a guest at the racing party, and he falls for Zelia Graem but they’re a singularly uninteresting couple. Vance deduces – wrongly, as it turns out – that a woman knocked off Edgar Lowe Hannle, who was shot with one of his own dueling pistols, on the ground that the pistol was pulled down from the gun collection on Hannle’s wall and a male killer would have gone for the revolver, while a woman would have just grabbed the first gun they saw. Midway through the movie Gladys Beeton announces that she knows who the murderer is, but of course she herself is killed before she can tell anybody: she falls off the top deck of a double-decker bus after having said in the same hypnotized voice as Floyd Garden earlier, “I’m going out to get killed.”

Ultimately Vance realizes that the actual killer is Major Fenwicke-Ralston (H. B. Warner, whose revelation as the villain must have freaked out 1936 audiences because his most famous role was as Jesus Christ in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1927 biopic The King of Kings), or at least someone posing as Major Fenwicke-Ralston. In the scene Millhauser self-plagiarized for Sherlock Holmes and the Spider Woman the pretend “major” attempts to hypnotize Philo Vance and get him to walk off the roof of a tall building, falling to his death. Only Vance has successfully resisted Fenwicke-Ralston’s hypnotic spell – the only explanation we get is when Vance says, “Some people just aren’t so easily hypnotized.” Vance tells the usual dumb cop, Sergeant Heath (Nat Pendleton), that he had to pretend to be hypnotized to worm a confession out of Fenwicke-Ralston since he did such a good job of covering his tracks that without a confession the police and prosecutors could never have convicted him.

The Garden Murder Case is a typical Vance story (though I must confess I’ve never read one of the “Van Dine” Vance novels, and I have no idea whether that ending was Van Dine’s idea or Millhauser’s), dramatically preposterous but still fun. In his book The Detective in Film William K. Everson was unimpressed, to say tle least, by Edmund Lowe; he wrote that apart from his star-making turn opposite Victor McLaglen in the 1926 Fox film What Price Glory?, “Lowe never seemed to attempt an in-depth characterization, Whether he was playing Chandu the Magician or Philo Vance, he was always exactly the same” the veneer was polished but there was no subtlety or differentiation of roles beneath it.” (The main thing I remember about the 1932 Fox film Chandu the Magician, in which Lowe played Chandu and Bela Lugosi the villain Roxor, is how totally Lugosi out-acted him when he got to play Chandu himself in the 1934 serial The Return of Chandu; it was one of the rare occasions in which Lugosi got to play a role with real emotion and depth, and he soared to the challenge!) It also doesn’t help that so many of the young men in it, including Lowe as Vance, are wearing those annoying “roo” moustaches, and as a result it got hard to tell who was who.

The Garden Murder Case is a pleasant time-filler but it is not a great movie, and one can understand why William Powell (whom Everson thought was as pre-eminent among Vances as I think Basil Rathbone is among Sherlock Holmeses) refused to play Vance again after his marvelous turn in MGM’s 1934 adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's The Thon Man. His attitude seems to have been, “After I’ve played a great detective character like Nick Charles, why would I want to go back to that Vance crap?”

Torchy Gets Her Man (Warner Bros., 1938)

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

After my husband Charles and I got home from the Spreckels Organ Pavilion last night for the opening concert of the Monday night summer series, which I’ve already posted about to my music blog at https://musicmagg.blogspot.com/2022/06/spreckels-organ-society-monday-night.html, I ran him a movie on YouTube: a rather crudely colorized version of the 1938 Warner Bros. “B” film Torchy Gets Her Man. In all, Warners made nine films in this series, three each year between 1937 and 1939, and in seven of the nine Torchy Blane, adventurous woman reporter who’s engaged to police lieutenant Steve McBride, was played by Glenda Farrell. Farrell had broken through to stardom in the 1930 gangster drama Little Caesar, which starred Edward G. Robinson (in his star-making role), and three years later played a wisecracking reporter in the 1933 Warners horror film Mystery of the Wax Museum, the very last feature shot in Technicolor’s original two-strip process. I’ve long been a fan of two-strip Technicolor; for all its limitations (notably an inability to photograph blue, though they could approximate blue closely enough by making things turquoise or teal), it had a warm, painterly elegance the often shrieking hues of the three-strip process which replaced it (and which the iconic color movies of the late 1930’s, like The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind, were shot in) lacked.

Alas, the colorization job on Torchy Gets Her Man made the whole thing look like a badly faded two-strip print with elements in each scene (notably items the colorizers wanted to be grey) remaining obstinately black-and-white. It was directed more or less acceptably by William Beaudine (a man with a checkered career; his first credit was something called Diana of the Farm, a 1915 short, and his last was a 1968 TV special celebrating the 40th anniversary of Mickey Mouse. He’s probably best remembered, ironically enough, for one of the worst movies ever made – a Monogram knockoff called The Ape Man (1943) starring Bela Lugosi in what’s probably his most dementedly awful movie until he and Ed Wood hooked up – and screenwriter Albert DeMond was no great shakes either. The two of then came up with a serviceable vehicle for Glenda Farrell, who was Torchy Blane in all but two of the films (this was the sixth and marked her return to the role after the comparatively droopy Lola Lane replaced her in number five, Torchy Blane in Panama; the only other Blane in which Farrell didn’t star was the last one, Torchy Blane … Playing with Dynamite, in which the young Jane Wyman tried the part) with Barton MacLane in the thankless role of Lt. Steve McBride, her police-officer boyfriend. In his book The Detective in Film William K. Everson questioned MacLane’s casting and noted, “MacLane’s one concession to playing a cop was he shouted a shade less belligerently than he did when playing a hoodlum.”

Torchy Gets Her Man deals with a mysterious counterfeiter nicknamed “One Hundred Dollar-Bill” Bailey whom the U.S. Secret Service has been trailing and trying to catch for 15 years, without success. (Few people realize that the Secret Service was originally formed as a branch of the U.S. Treasury Department and its initial job was to bust counterfeiters. The business of protecting the President came later, after Willlam McKinley’s assassination in 1901.) A Secret Service agent named Charles Gilbert (Willard Robertson) shows up and asks McBride for help tracking down and arresting Bailey, but swears hilton secrecy. It doesn’t take long for a reasonably acute viewer (even if you haven’t seen the imdb.com page for this film, which gives it away) to figure out that the supposed “Agent Gilbert” really is Bailey, and he’s fooled McBride witn an elaborate series of forged letters made up by the gang member who also made the plates for Bailey’s fake $100 bills. “Gilbert” tells McBride to stake out the local horse-race track where he says “Bailey” will be passing the bills at the track’s $100 window. The oppressively dumb cop Gahagan (Tom Kennedy, the only actor in all nine of the Blane films) is also at the track, trying to make money off a system he’s invented, but he lets slip to Torchy at least enough of what the plot is about so she can deduce the rest.

Only even she isn’t smart enough to realize that “Gilbert” is actually Bailey, and to trace the mysterious “Bailey” she pours creosote on the tires of his car, only to trace him she needs a dog who can follow the scent. Unfortunately, the dog Gahagan gets her s from a German pet-store owner and therefore understands only German, so Torchy has to get a German-English phrase book to communicate with the dog. In the end Torchy gets captured by the gang but works her way out of it by getting the crooks to let her take the dog for a walk, and the dog eventually runs away, goes to the police station and leads the cops to where Torchy and Gahagan are being held. In 1969 Glenda Farrell gave an interview with Time magazine in which she talked about how hard she worked to play Torchy Blane: "[B]efore I undertook to do the first Torchy, I determined to create a real human being — and not an exaggerated comedy type. I met those [newswomen] who visited Hollywood and watched them work on visits to New York City. They were generally young, intelligent, refined and attractive. By making Torchy true to life, I tried to create a character practically unique in movies." This no doubt explains why the seven Torchy Blane films with Farrell are so good, and why her performance dominates no matter how silly the stories or slovenly the direction; as she did in Mystery of the Wax Museum, essentially a warm-up for the Blane films, she dominates the screen and enables them to hold up as quality entertainment no matter their cheapness and other failings.

He's Not Worth Dying For (Doomed Productions, Ltd., Lifetime, 2022)

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

Yesterday afternoon at 4 I watched a Lifetime movie that had had its “premiere” the night before: He’s Not Worth Dying For, a production that told the story of two young women – white would-be “influencer” Isla Masters (Rachel Boyd) and heavy-set but still attractive Black girl Grace Heinemann (Hilda Martin). The two young women start an online catfight over the dubious charms of Jake Carter (Lachlan Quarrnby, a young but quite attractive twink type whom we get to see in luscious soft-core porn scenes with both his girlfriends). Jake is from a military family and he’s returned to the town of Hayesville, Oregon (this is one Lifetime movie specifically set in a genuine location instead of just Anywhere, U.S.A., generally “played” by Anywhere, Canada) to live with his grandmother (actually he’s sleeping on her living-room couch) following his father’s death by suicide. At first we see Jake with Isla, then we see Jake with Grace, and then we see Grace with her parents (her mom is played by Robin Givens, the one actor in the film I’d heard of before). Because she’s so in love with Jake, Grace has decided – much to her strait-laced parents’ horror – that she wants to transfer from the exclusive private Marist high school tu Sheldon, the public school Jake attends. Grace has been on a solid track to go to college and study to become a veterinarian (though we oddly never see her in the same frame with an animal) and her parents are afraid her infatuation with Jake will disrupt her from her life plan.

For the first half-hour of the film Isla and Grace remain blissfully ignorant of each other’s role in Jake’s life, and Grace is sure he is the one while Isla is less committed but still ticked off big-time when she learns Jake is seeking the company of other women. One thing about the movie is writer Jacqueline Zambrano’s incorporation of social media in general, and Instagram in particular, into the plot. Not only is Isla’s career ambition to become an “influencer” – a bizarre new job category in which you’re paid to talk up other people’s products online – and she’s awaiting the goal of 10,000 online followers so she can sell herself to a sponsor, but the two women each learn about each other by posting each other’s hot videos of Jake having sex with them. At one point Isla gets her revenge against Jake by picking up another guy, filming them having sex, and posting it to her Instagram page with a “lots of fish in the sea” legend attached. We’ve also seen a prologue with Isla throwing out a previous boyfriend for having extra-relational activities with other women, so we know that despite her protestations she’s as jealous as Grace is. At one point Isla picks up a military knife Jake had left at her home – it was a leftover heirloom he inherited it from his late dad – and at a big party an hour and a half into the movie, Isla confronts Grace with the knife. She later insists she only intended to scare Grace into leaving Jake alone, but Isla gets so worked up she stabs Grace and Grace actually dies.

This was a real shocker for me because until then I had thought He’s Not Worth Dying For was going to be a black comedy. The ending I was expecting was the one from John O’Hara’s Pal Joey: the two women in the life of a scapegrace male protagonist decide they’d both be better off without him, abandon him and ultimately become friends. Instead, the last half-hour turns into wrenching drama, as Mr. and Mrs. Heinemann have to grieve the loss of their intelligent, attractive, promising and previously sensible daughter to a stupid fight over a man, and Robin Givens gets a rare chance to show her acting chops in a scene at Grace’s funeral. It’s an unusually rich film, ably written by Zambrano and capably directed by Kevin Fair, and it has a lot of fascinating touches. One of the school’s English teachers tries to make the literary works she has to teach relevant to her students by having them do fake Instagram pages for Romeo, Juliet, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Indeed, one of the aspects of the movie that especially fascinated me is its dramatization of just how important social media sites have become to modern=day young people, to the point where their lives blu9r the distisiinction between online and offline “reality,” and also the old Rebel Without a Cause-style theme of the gap between how young people perceive the world and their traumas and how older people try to tell them they’re overreacting to them and the things that seem so important to them now will fade away in time.

There’s also a real sense of tragedy even before Grace gets killed, in that we see both women risking everything they’ve worked for amd tried to become jeopardized over a man who isn’t worthy of either of them – and a sense of sadness in the end in that one of the women who fought over him is dead and the other is in prison for murder. Meanwhile, Jake gets away scot-free and unscathed both legally and socially for his role in the plot: he’s a star prosecution witness in Isla’s trial/ At one point relatively early on Zambrano has Jake say to Grace that Isla sees him as he is and Grace sees him for what he could be – and in some ways Jake is the most interesting character in the movie, desperately lonely and seeking for affection, and really too wounded to realize what effect his actions are having towards the people around him in general, and the two women he’s dating in particular. He’s Not Worth Dying For is the sort of movie I’m finding myself liking better as I reflect on it than I did when I was actually watching it (and though I’ll admit I understand what an asshole Lachlan Quarmby is playing I was also having the hots for him all movie!), unlike a lot of other Lifetime movies which when they end make me think, “Why the hell was I wasting my time on something this stupid?”

Ice Road Killer (Fireside Pictures, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2022)

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

My husband Charles came home from work in time to join me in watching the second Lifetime movie I screened last night, Ice Road Killer. This didn’t have the extraordinary social resonances of He’s Not Worth Dying For; instead it’s just a simple, straightforward action/suspense thriller based on the exploits of a mother, Helen Taylor (Sarah Allen), who is driving through the frozen North – where the snow and other weather conditions are so wretched we’re at least briefly unsure whether the film takes place in the U.S. or Canada – to pick up her daughter Lauren (Erica Anderson) from college for a vacation weekend at a deserted mountain cabin the Taylors own. “Not another deserted mountain cabin!” a hardened Lifetime movie viewer will be thinking about now – as cell phones have become more important, a lot of Lifetime writers have started setting the endings of their scripts at deserted mountain cabins so the people are out of the range of cell-phone service and therefore the heroines can’t call the police for rescue from the villain – and there are scenes in this film that use that trope. Helen picks up a hitchhiker, a woman named Carly (Zoë Belkin) who gibes Helen enough of a sob story she falls for it.

In reality Carly is a thief, engaged in a scam with her boyfriend Boyd (Connor McMahon, who’s so genuinely hunky it’s a pity we lose him in the second reel – more later) in which she gets rides from strangers and then texts him the information so he can ambush them and they can make off with their valuables. Carly has misgivings about targeting the Taylors – when she learns Helen makes her living as a music teacher she figures they probably don’t have enough worth stealing, and later she sees a gun in Helen’s glove compartment and freaks out. But Boyd insists on going through with the scheme, telling Carly that after this one last job they’ll have enough money to high-tail it to Mexico. Only they get ambushed themselves by a sinister dude in a big rig who’s identified in the cast list only as “Trucker” (Michael Swatton), who knocks off Boyd in reel two and then chases after Carly, sending her threatening texts from Boyd’s phone with threats about how he’s slowly going to dismember her before he finally kills her. Writer Shawn Riopelle (whom I’ve heard of previously as the author of similar Lifetime movies like The Evil Twin, Deadly House Call and Stalked by a Prince) and director Max McGuire (whom I hadn’t) carefully keep “Trucker” in the background as an abstract figure of menace, and even when we start seeing full-figure shots of him about midway through the movie we’re clearly supposed to hate the guy and not look for redeeming qualities in him the way a Lifetime write like Christine Conradt would want us to.

The only moment of pathos comes when he finally explains to Helen and Lauren exactly why he’s so anxious to avenge himself against Boyd and Carly. It seems that he was one of their previous victims, and Carly first offered herself to him sexually, then blindfolded him as part of their scene, only instead of sex he got robbed as he was helpless and this totally ruined his life. He also blames Helen and Lauren for having spoiled his revenge plot because he originally just wanted to kill Boyd and Carly – “That would have been justice!” he exclaims – only because Helen fell for Carly’s sob story he’s going to have to kill two innocent strangers as well. There are some interesting twists and turns in Riopelle’s script – like Lauren being pregnant and Carly catching on far quicker than her not-so-streetwise mother does – and an odd scene in which the three women are staying at “Earl’s Diner” in a guest room Earl makes available for them (Earl himself is one of the most interesting and appealing characters in the story) and nearly murder a man who they think is “Trucker” but in the end is just an innocent older man. But in the end “Trucker” kills Carly with a knife after he’s overpowered her and she’s lost the gun she stole from Helen (ya remember the gun?). Then he ties Helen and Lauren up and proposes to burn down the cabin he is holding them in (it’s not clear whether this is the cabin Helen and Lauren were on their way to or another one, though I had the impression it was “Trucker”’s own). It’s not clear whether he intends this to be a murder-suicide or “Trucker” intends to escape as the flames consume the cabin and kill Helen and Lauren, but eventually “Trucker” nuggets overpowered by the two women and it is Helen who finally beats him to death with a tire iron. Then the two survivors are, ironically, forced to hitchhike themselves and the driver is a skeptical Black woman with butch hair who at first is reluctant to pick them up, but ultimately does so.

I ran into an interesting blog post on the Cinemaholic Web site, https://thecinemaholic.com/is-lifetimes-ice-road-killer/, which argued that though Ice Road Killer is a work of fiction there’s a fascinating real-life prototype to the story. It happened in the U.S. in 1938 and involved Hazel Frome and her daughter Nancy. “The two embarked on a cross-country road trip from Berkeley, California, to South Carolina on March 23, 1938, to meet with Nancy’s younger sister Mada and her husband Lt. Benjamin McMakin,” wrote Kumari Shriva for Cinemaholic. ”Hazel and Nancy had to stop in El Paso, Texas, due to issues with the engine. The car stayed in the mechanic’s shop for almost five days before the mother and daughter left on March 30, 1938, with a repaired car and embarked on the desert road to Pecos, Texas. Just a day later, the Packard was discovered in a ditch with unlocked doors and keys still in the ignition. The only things missing were the luggage, Hazel and Nancy. The disappearance of the Frome women made national news, with people searching everywhere for them. Their bodies were found on April 3, 1938, though the motive behind the murder remained a mystery. Though the women’s bodies bore signs of brutal torture, later confirmed by medical professionals, they were not raped. Robbery was also ruled out as a possible reason since they were still wearing their valuable jewelry.” Suspicion at the time fell on Wesley Frome, Helen’s husband and Nancy’s father, who was an executive at a company that made explosives; there were even allegations that Nazi spies were involved. The true story probably would have made a much more interesting movie than the fictionalized version we got, though probably Lifetime’s budget would not have allowed them to do a convincing period piece. As it is, Ice Road Killer is the sort of movie that’s good for what it is, but as my husband Charles pointed out what it is is something we’ve seen many times before as film and TV show makers have been doing this lost-on-deserted-roads-and-in-mortal-peril stories for decades now.

Father Brown:: "The New Order" (BBC-TV, 2022)

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

Last night at 8 my husband Charles and I put on KPBS for a recent episode of the long-running BBC-TV series Father Brown, based on a series of stories by G. K. Chesterton about a Roman Catholic priest named Father Brown (Mark Williams) who solves crimes despite the opposition of the local police chief, Inspector Mallory (Jack Dean), who is so closed-minded he makes Inspector Lestrade in the Sherlock Holmes stores seem like a model of enlightenment by comparison. This episode was called “The New Order,” and from the title and the overall time period in which the show takes place (in the late 1940’s, immediately after the end of World War II) I was expecting a story about neo-Nazi diehards setting up shop in Father Brown’s out-of-the-way parish and attempting to overthrow the Britisn government. Instead it’s about penny-pinching Fleet Street publisher Lord Arthur Hawthorne (Matthew March), who is retiring from the paper he’s edited for decades and plans to install his son Gabe (Luke Nunn) in his place – only during the outdoor garden party where he plans to make this announcement, instead he’s shot and wounded with a long rifle.

Inspector Mallory immediately jumps to the conclusion and arrests Stanley Buchanan (Evan Milton), who just returned after a two-year prison sentence for being Gay, which in the immediate aftermath of World War II was still a serious crime in Britain. (It may soon become one in the U.S., or at least in several of the usual-suspect states, if the crazies on the current Supreme Court have their way.) The cops are convinced Stanley was behind the assault on Lord Hawthorne because even before Stanley was arrested, Lord Hawthorne’s paper exposed him as Gay and the police found his love letters to his boyfriend and entrapped him in a restroom. Meanwhile, Father Brown is having his own problems with crazy authority figures: a new man, Canon Damien Fox (Roger May), has been installed as the head of the local church and therefore Father Brown’s superior. When Canon Fox calls Father Brown into his office and tells him to follow orders, Father Brown rather predictably says he follows no one but God, and Canon Fox said, “As far as you are concerned, I am God.” Canon Fox proceeds to frame Father Brown for violating the seal of the confessional – the absolute confidentiality of whatever is said to a priest in the confession booth, or even outside it if it is acknowledged as a formal rite – and suspends him from his ministry. His goal is to excommunicate Father Brown, and to that end he has already prepared proceedings and referred the matter to Rome.

The new priest he intends to install in Father Brown’s place is African-British minister Father Featherstone (Zephryn Taitte), who at one point apologizes to Father Brown for allowing himself to be used in Canon Fox’s scheme and offers to resign the priesthood, but in the end he agrees to leave the parish and volunteer to be a missionary in Swaziland. The main intrigue resolves itself when Stanley Buchanan essentially kidnaps Lord Hawthorne and forces him to drive to a deserted spot (one of the craggy locations the BBC also used to use as alien planets in the Doctor Who shows), where he intends to murder him. Father Brown commandeers a motorcycle and drives out to the cliffside where Stanley is holding Hawthorne, and it turns out that the reason Stanley hates Hawthorne so much is that Hawthorne’s son Gabe was his Gay partner, only Hawthorne protected Gabe and made sure he was never arrested or even suspected. In the end Father Brown not only stops Stanley from murdering Hawthorne, he takes the position of the current Pope (rather than the one who would have been in power in 1947) and says, essentially, “Who am I to judge?”

Though Stanley has started chemical castration treatments to “cure” himself of being Gay (a weird sort of torture the British government frequently forced on suspected or convicted Gays, including the pioneering computer scientist Alan Turing, who committed suicide just two years after being forced to start the treatments), he’s apparnelty not so far along on them that he can’t recover his sexual capacity if he stops them, and in the end Father Brown essentially blesses their union and sends them off to tour the Continent together. Lord Hawthorne agrees to continue as editor of his paper and, after he’s confronted with photos of his extra-relational activities with women other than his wife Margo (Sara Stewart) – who humiliates him by packing all his belongings and forcing him to move out of their home prior to divorcing him, agrees never to print anything more about his son or the man in his life.

I quite liked this show, written by Neil Irvine and directed by Jo Hallows (man or woman? I can’t tell, and their imdb.com page lists nothing about their gender), even though I had mixed feelings about the outrageously anachronistic nature of the plot and its resolution. Even a gentle, loving, humble man like Father Brown would in real life have likely bought into the church’s general condemnation of homosexuality and certainly would not have sent a Gay couple off on a Grand Tour the way he does in this show – and it might have been more powerful if the example of Gabe Hawthorne and Stanley Buchanah had forced him to rethink the whole Gay question instead of just accepting the orthodox view of the time that homosexuality was both a sin against God and an offense against human nature and common decency.

Dolly Parton: Celebrating 50 Years as a Member of the Grand Ole Opry (NBC-TV, “live,” November 26, 2019)

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

Afterwards I watched a special called Dolly Parton: Celebrating 50 Years as a Member of the Grand Ole Opry which I hadn’t realized that not only was it an old show from NBC on November 26, 2019, I had watched it then and posted to moviemagg about it (it’s available on https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2019/11/dolly-parton-celebrating-50-years-as.html) and had many of the same comments now I did then, including the marvels of her performance in the film Nine to Five (she not only had one of the biggest hits of her career with the theme song, she held her own in the cast with far more experienced actresses like Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin), my irritation at her print-the-legend presentation of the history of women in country music – especially women singing assertively and maintaining their independence from men – with the release of Kitty Wells’ “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels” in 1952 (“What about Rose Maddox?” I thundered with the zeal of a recent convert, since I had just discovered this amazing singer and true country-music pioneer on Ken Burns’ eight-part mini-series on country music), and my comments on the rather bizarre history of one of Dolly’s best-known songs – though not in her version, but in Whitney Houston’s – “I Will Always Love You.”

Dolly wrote it originally as a farewell to Porter Wagoner, even though their relationship was just a mentoring one, not a romantic or sexual one. It was nice to see this show again, and though PBS is notorious for deleting several songs when they grab a music special for a TV pledge periodand offering the rest only as a premium for a hefty contribution to the member stations, this time they left out only one song: a version of “Islands in the Stream,” originally recorded by Dolly as a duet with Kenny Rogers (of all people – and naturally her voice totally overpowered his!) in 1983 and performed on the original show by lead singers Hillary Scott and Charles Kelley of the band then known as Lady Antebellum but now called just “Lady A.” It seems that they realized the racist connotations of their original name – the word “antebellum” literally means “before the war” and became part of the “Lost Cause” mythology of the American South as a wonderful land of plantation owners and happy, contented “servants” (i.e., slaves). Indeed, when I first heard of Lady Antebellum I rather grimly joked, “What are they going to call their album – Slavery Was Cool?”

Live at the Belly Up: John Hiatt with the Jerry Douglas Band (Belly Up Tavern, San Diego State University, KPBS, 2022)

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

Last night I watched a couple of quite interesting TV shows on KPBS: a Live at the Belly Up episode featuring John Hiatt and the Jerry Douglas Band (two names I have been on the periphery of my awareness for a while without my actually knowing much about them) and just before that a show called American Anthems in which singer-songwriter Jennifer Nettles reaches out to various real-life heroes and writes songs about their life-threatening struggles and their courage in the face of them. In this case the hero was Seth Grumet, who in 2010 was diagnosed with a cancerous tumor just as he was training for his second Iron Man triathlon. The song Nettles wrote about him was called “Life Is Sweet” and it was a surprisingly intense, emotional song, far from the dirge usually associated with songs about people surviving cancer. Ironically, Seth was lucky that at least this happened to him a decade before COVID-19, in that the people near and dear to him – including his wife, their three children, and his sister, whose bone-marrow donation saved his life even though it was an incredibly painful process for her as well as him – were able to visit him en masse without the infuriating restrictions I had to put up with during my own recent health crisis (which was nowhere nearly as serious as Seth’s, just to make it clear).

Nettles is “typed” as a country singer but her voice is considerably stronger than that – the way she belted out the high notes on the song she and her songwriting partner Bill Sherman wrote for Seth had me thinking, “White Aretha Franklin” – and the show was not only heartwarming in itself (Seth started a non-profit foundation called “STOMP the Monster,” named after his middle daughter said to him when he told her about his diagnosis, and it raises money to help people with cancer get to therapy appointments, cover day care for their kids, and the like) but a nice antidote to the dreary news from the U.S. Supreme Court. The Live at the Belly Up program was also interesting and engaging; John Hiatt joked about his lack of musical expertise (he said his mom rented him a guitar and paid for lessons, but he got upset with the teacher because the teacher wanted to teach him more than just the five chords Hiatt wanted to learn so he could write folk-style songs; it reminded me of Lou Reed’s marvelous story about how his parents bought him his first guitar and also included in the deal was a certain number of lessons. After a few times with the teacher Reed grew exasperated and brought in some Carl Perkins records to show the teacher what he wanted to learn to play. The teacher said, “You don’t want to learn that! It’s just three chords!” And Reed replied, “O.K., then show me the three chords”) and played a program of 12 songs, all but one of which backed by the Jerry Douglas Band.

The Jerry Douglas band as presented here is actually only part of the group listed on his Web site – the full band includes Vance Thompson on trumpet, Jared Mitchell on saxophone and Doug Belote on drums – but the edition presented here included only Douglas on dobro (a kind of resonator-equipped guitar invented by a pair of instrument makers called the Douglas Brothers – “dobro” was just a mashup of “Douglas Brothers” and I couldn’t help but wonder if Jerry Douglas was a relative of theirs), Mike Seal on electric guitar, Daniel Kimbro on bass (who played a surprisingly jazzy introduction on the song “Keen Rambler”) and the band’s cutest member, Christian Sedelmyer on violin (though given that this is at least nominally a country band I probably should say “fiddle”). Hiatt is an eccentric songwriter with a great sense of humor, as evidenced by the first two songs on the 12-song program, “Long Black Electric Cadillac” (a bit of a misnomer since General Motors isn’t making long black Cadillacs, either gas or electric, bur maybe they should be) and “Perfectly Good Guitar,” which laments the way certain star performers smash up perfectly good guitars on stage.

The rest of the songs – “Feels Like Rain,” “All the Lilacs in Ohio” (is Ohio particularly associated with lilacs? Just wondering), “The Music Is Hot” (actually a laid-back country-bluegrass number that isn’t particularly “hot” at all), “Your Dad Did” (very much in the rockabilly vein), “Mississippi Phone Booth,” “Keen Rambler” (the song doesn’t sound anything like Ella Mae Morse’s “Ond Shank’s Mare” but the two are lyrically similar: both are about people who travel long distances on foot), “Thing Called Love” (which Bonnie Raitt covered and had one of the biggest hits of her career; Hiatt joked that the royalties from Raitt’s version put two of his daughters through college), “Memphis in the Meantime,” “Have a Little Faith in Me” (which Hiatt performed solo, and on which he came as close to sounding like Bob Dylan as he had all night), and the closer, “Riding with the King,” which I presume was supposed to be a song about Elvis Presley – also showcased his deep wit and love of roots music. It was a quite good Live at the Belly Up – much better than the annoying one the week before, a five-year-old rerun with the Soul Rebels and rapper Talib Kwali – and it was filmed in 2022 now that the COVID-19 pandemic has been more or less officially declared over (even though the virus is continually evolving new so-called “variants” and “subvariants”) to promote a new album the stars have jointly recorded and released. Douglas also mentioned that in his high-school days in the late 1960’s he was photographed holding a copy of the Creedence Clearwater Revival album Green River, having no idea that 30 years later he would not only tour and record with Creedence leader John Fogerty but would teach Fogerty how to play the dobro!

Shadow of Doubt (MGM, 1935)

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

Last night my husband Charles got home from work in time for us to watch a surprisingly interesting movie on YouTube: Shadow of Doubt, a 1935 “B” in all but name from MGM (MGM head Louis B. Mayer threatened to fire anybody who referred to an MGM production as a “B” picture) not to be confused with Shadow of a Doubt, Alfred Hitchcock’s dark-toned masterpiece from 1943 (eight years later) – which didn’t stop Randall Schaefer, host of the “Hastings Mystery Theatre” that presented this film and others on YouTube, from referring to this film as Shadow of a Doubt. The 1935 Shadow of Doubt was directed by silent-era veteran George B. Seitz from a script by Wells Root based on a story by Arthur Somers Roche, who’s best known for the 1933 MGM film Penthouse and its 1939 remake, Society Lawyer. It starred Ricardo Cortez and Virginia Bruce in roles which in a bigger-budgeted MGM production would have gone to William Powell and Myrna Loy: Simeon “Sim” Sturdevant (Cortez) is an advertising executive from a well-to-do family and Trenna Plaice (Bruce) is a fading movie star coming off a huge flop called Lost Paradise.

Sim wants to marry her and also revitalize her career by getting her a contract for a radio show, which will enable them to live together in New York rather than having to have a long-distance relationship with him in New York and her in Hollywood. She protests that she already has a movie contract, and he tells her that after the failure of Lost Paradise her studio will likely drop her option and therefore she’ll be free to accept the radio gig. She tells him that independent producer Len Haworth (Bradley Page) has just offered her a three-picture deal for a million dollars, and though the deal is contingent on her accepting his marriage proposal, she’s going to go through with both contract offers. Sim warns her that Haworth has at least two other girlfriends – heiress Lisa Bellwood (Betty Furness) and cabaret singer Inez Johnson (Isabel Jewell) – and also that he has a history of beating up his women. It doesn’t matter, though, because within a reel after all that is established Len Haworth is found dead in his own apartment and both Sim, who had previously had an argument in public with Haworth at a nightclub where Inez performed, and Trenna are suspected.

The lead police officer on the case is Lt. Fred Wilcox (Ed Brophy), who’s hoping that solving the murder will mean his promotion to captain. But the film’s most interesting character by far is Sim’s aunt, Melissa Pilson (Constance Collier), who when she isn’t upbraiding Sim about his allegedly horrible taste in women is playing a big pipe organ. At first she’s ready to detest Trenna because she assumes she’s a gold-digger only after the family fortune, but when she actually crashes Trenna’s apartment she decides she likes her after all and wants her nephew Simi to marry her, which she had already decided to do even before Len got killed. She also hides Trenna’s gun, a 9 mm Luger which Trenna won in a shooting contest on the location of a desert picture she made back in 1926, which was stolen from her by a former butler and used to kill Len Haworth. Len’s butler Ehrhardt (Bernard Siegel) calls Trenna and tells her he knows who killed Len, but he will only tell her if she comes to meet him in person at a restaurant downtown – and of course he’s murdered himself before she can rendezvous with him and get the name. Later the killer shoots a third person as well, and is revealed to be [spoiler alert!] Ryan Ross (Regis Toomey), a Broadway tipster and wanna-be reporter who makes his living supplying columnists with leads on personal scandals involving celebrities and society people.

Though Shadow of Doubt is hardly in the same league as Hitchcock’s masterpiece with almost the same title, it’s a quite competent little film and one of the best movies Ricardo Cortez ever made, though if pressed I’d say his very best films were Frank Capra’s The Younger Generation (1928) – in which Cortez, né Jacob Krantz, plays what he was for real, a Jew who changes his name to succeed in business; and as Sam Spade in the original version of The Maltese Falcon in 1931, a quite good movie regrettably overshadowed by the masterpiece John Huston and Humphrey Bogart made of the same story a decade later.

Mystery Science Thetre 3000: "Invasion of the Neptune Men" (New Toei, Toei Company, ProPix, 1061; MST3K version, 1997)

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

Last night at about 9:45 I ran my husband Charles and I a YouTube file of a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 episode based on the 1961 Japanese children’s film Invasion of the Neptune Men. The plot of Invasion of the Neptune Men, to the extent it has one, deals with the titular Neptune Men invading and trying to take over Earth and the efforts of five Japanese boys (all still far away from puberty, though that doesn’t stop director Kôji Ohta from giving us a lot of mid-snots of their butts – quite frankly, among the few people I would actually recommend this film to are members of NAMBLA) to stop them. Of course they try to alert the authorities and the authorities brush them off and say they couldn’t care less, and all they have in the way of allies that could save the Earth from destruction and colonization by the Neptune Men is a nondescript semi-superhero called “Space Chief” (Shin’ichi Chiba) who flies in on a spacecraft that, as one of the MST3K robots joked, looks like Thomas the Tank Engine developed the capability of interstellar flight. Mystery Science Theatre 3000 was an important part of Charles’ and my history: we video-recorded a lot of the later episodes on the Sci-Fi Channel (where it migrated after its early run on Comedy Central and its even earlier run on a local TV station in Minneapolis, where the people in charge realizes they had a library of utterly awful old science-fiction movies and one way to turn them into viable entertainment might be to have comedians talk over them and make jokes about the movies as they were aired) and watched them together at Charles’s place.

Later he discovered a cache of them available for download from an archival Web site, and we watched quite a few of them – including the earlier episodes with series creator Joel Hodgson as host, before he was replaced by Mike Nelson (who had started on the show as head writer and graduated to star). I also recalled that in the early 1980’s my then-girlfriend Cat and I had watched a quite similar program called Schlock Theatre, which differed from MST3K only in having even cheaper production values, with just two cast members instead of three, four or five (or more, as the show developed later and the interstitial skits became more elaborate and required more people) hosting from a parked car inside the TV studio and with their snarky comments about the movie printed on screen as subtitles rather than spoken over the dialogue. (One Schlock Theatre show I remember especially fondly was a screening of the 1949 film Daughter of the Jungle, in which one of the cast members said, “He’s acting very strangely!” The subtitle read, “This is the only time anyone has ever mentioned ‘acting’ in connection with this film.”) The problem with MST3K is that it only worked with a certain range of film quality: the movie had to be bad enough you wouldn’t mind seeing it mocked, but not so bad that even with the mockery the experience of watching the movie would be too excruciating.

Invasion of the Neptune Men – a sequel of sorts to another Japanese sci-fi cheaple called Prince of Space, which due to different U.S. distributors doing the English dialogue was the same character seen here as “Space Chief” – was dangerously close to the latter. It was excruciatingly boring (a lot of the MST3K “targets” were movies whose badness expressed itself in boredom), so much so that many of the jokes were about how dull the movie was and how little seemed to be actually happening in it. The Neptune Men themselves were a singularly boring group of villains, all dressed in costumes similar to the ones Paul Blaisdell was creating at American International around the same time, with conical heads and antennae sticking out of them, though I’m assuming the Japanese costume designer simply copied Biaisdell’s “look” instead of actually securing his surplus costumes. At one point the MST3K crew started referencing The Magnificent Ambersons for some reason – unless it was as some sort of weird homage imbecility was paying to greatness (much like the horrible overuse of the opening of Richard Strrauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra in various cheap movies and on TV, including commercials, after Stanley Kubrick’s stunning use of it in 2001: A Space Odyssey) – and through most of the film most of their jokes were about how putrid the movie was and how they wished it would end already. (Keep in mind that, as the MST3K theme song told us, Mike Nelson and his robot crew “can’t control where the movies begin or end.”). I was consciously trying to find us a film we hadn’t seen on MST3K before, though I knew I had failed when I recognized one of the jokes from under the opening credits: referencing “ProPix,” the U.S. company that created the English-language version, one of the robots joked, “I used to be violently anti-pix, but now I’m ProPix.”

They Might Be Giants (Newman-Foreman Company, Universal, 1971)

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

At 9 p.m. yesterday my husband Charles and I watched a quite charming 1971 movie called They Might Be Giants, written by James Goldman based on a previous play of his, and directed by Anthony Harvey the oddball British director who got his ticket into the big time from Katharine Hepburn. She’d seen a crudely produced black-and-white fion of Amirir Baraka’s play Dutchman from 1966 and decided he would be the right director for The Lion in Winter, her big-budget spectacle based on the British King Henry II (Peter O’Toole) and his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine (Katharine Hepburn). They Might Be Giants was his third film, and it was an odd tale about a famous attorney and judge named Justin Playfair (George C. Scott), who once he lost his wife a year before the main action developed a classic paranoid delusion and thought he was Sherlock Holmes. The villains of the piece are his brother Blevins (Lester Rawlins) who wants to get Justin committed to a mental institution so he can get his hands on Justin’s fortune; and a hit man named “Mr. Brown” (James Tolkan), to whom Blevins owes a substantial sum of money. Assured that Blevins will inherit Justin’s money if he dies, Brown determines to kill him without waiting for Blevins to institutionalize him first. Justin ends up at a clinic run by Dr. Strauss (Ron Weyand), who has grown a full beard probably because Sigmund Freud had one (this film was made during the tail end of the Freudian era in American psychiatry and a lot of therapists grew Freud-style beards in the hope it would give them gravitas).

Fortunately for Justin, he falls into the hands of a psychiatrist named Dr. Mildred Watson (Joanne Woodward, whose husband Paul Newman co-produced the film with John Foreman and Jennings Lang, the agent Joan Bennett’s husband Walter Wanger once shot at in the mistaken belief that Bennett and Lang were having an affair). Naturally Justin is over the moon at finding a real-life Dr. Watson to join him as Holmes’ assistant and chronicler, and the two of them go on a rambunctious trip through New York City and meet all sorts of offbeat characters. Among them is a library clerk named Peabody (Jack Gilford, third-billed); an eccentric couple named Mr. and Mrs. Bagg (Worthington Miner and Frances Fuller), who once ran a college for tree-trimmers but closed it and have just concentrated on doing their own designs; Peggy (Therese Merritt), an African-American telephone operator who quits her job because she’s frustrated by the insane bureaucracy of the phone company (that part of this movie rings true today!); and such other character-actor greats as Al Lewis (Grandpa on The Munsters), Rue McClanahan and F. Murray Abraham, who made his screen debut in this film. They Might Be Giants is very much “of its time” in deliberately blurring the line between sanity and insanity and presenting the supposedly “insane” ss morally purer and more decent than the “sane.” I suspect it was influenced by the theories of psychologist R. D. Laing, who argued that “sanity” and “insanity” were just social constructs and that one wasn’t necessarily better than the other.

It’s a really charming movie, though the last time I saw it nearly 50 years ago when it first aired on network TV I found myself wishing they’d just cast George C. Scott as Sherlock Holmes (he played the part, even though it’s not the “real” Holmes and he reveals this when he picks up his violin and plays terribly, the opposite of the “real” Holmes as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle described him, with power and authority and he would have been welcome during the long interregnum between the departure of Basil Rathbone and the arrival of Jeremy Brett). It also has a surprisingly disappointing and inconclusive ending; Justin as “Holmes” and Dr. Watson march off in search of “Professor Moriarty,” whom Justin has trailed through a series of clues that in modern-day parlance seem more like the demented ravings of QAnon and its followers, and they’re just about to confront him when the film abruptly ends. I was hoping for an ending in which Holmes would find Blevins and the mysterious “Mr. Brown,” assume Brown was Moriarty, bring him to justice and turn him over to the New York police, but no-o-o-o-o, James Goldman wasn’t interested in a good-defeats-evil ending. Still, They Might Be Giants is a truly charming film (though Joanne Woodward said she so hated the experience of making it that she seriously considered retiring from acting – she never specified what about the experience she hadn’t liked but said it had nothing to do with George C. Scott, whom Woodward described as “a gentleman” – which was hardly the experience of some of Scott’s co-stars in other films), and its title, inspired by a situation from Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, itself led a 1980’s alternative rock band to use “They Might Be Giants” as their name.

Who Kidnapped My Mom? (Neshama Entertainment, MarVista Entertainment, Lifetime, 2022)

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

Last night at 8 my husband Charles and I watched an intriguing if somewhat frustrating Lifetime movie called Who Kidnapped My Mom? One of the frustrating things about this movie is that imdb.com doesn’t have a page for it, nor was I able to find a YouTube channel streaming it to get the credits that way. All I was able to find online was a couple of articles listing the major cast members, though while the director’s name meant nothing to me on screen (it looked vaguely Asian and was probably a man), I did recognize the name of the writer: Jessica Landry, whom I’d encountered recently as the author of another Lifetime movie, Deadly Mom Retreat. The plot deals with Eva Jones (Lucie Guest), 36-year-old widowed mother of two daughters, teenager Samantha “Sami” (Jordan Zavisha) and her pre-pubescent younger sister Grace (Ceilidh MacDonald). Eva’s husband Ryan dropped dead at age 34 a year previous to the main action, apparently of a heart attack, though his mother Nancy (regrettably unidentified on any of the online sources I’ve consulted even though she turns in a full-bodied villainous performance that’s one of the highlights of the movie) insists he was the victim of foul play. “Thirty-four year-old men don’t just drop dead of a heart attack!” Mancy thunders at her former daughter-in-law. Eva has already been the victim of one kidnapping attempt – though she’s recovered almost immediately – a year after her husband’s death and a year before the main action, in which she is kidnapped again, this time for real and apparently permanently.

The rest of the movie alternates between Eva’s plight and the increasingly desperate attempts of Sami to locate ahd free her. Eva is being held in a room where she’s been outfitted with a metal ankle bracelet with a chain attached linked to the floor of the wall. At first lt looks like a motel room – I even joked to Charles, “Hey, she’s being held inside a Motel 6!” – but the room has no windows and ghastly wallpaper on the walls (what did they do, borrow the set from old PRC leftovers?), and her kidnapper has installed a security video camera and a box through which he occasionally speaks with one of those voice-distorting devices. The first we hear from him is when she addresses the camera and demands to be let go, and the voice says, “Not time yet.” Meanwhile, Sami is running into unexpected opposition from everyone, including her grandmother-from-hell Nancy as well as Detective Campbell of the local police department – she’s a woman but we don’t get her first name – who’s convinced Eva faked both her kidnappings and has run away. Sami’s only real ally is her boyfriend Gabe (played by one uf the cute twinks Lifetime usually casts in roles like this). At one point Nancy not only takes custody of Sami and Grace despite their total uninterest in living with her, she even locks Sami in her room and forces her to open an upstairs window to escape, join gabe and continue the starch for her mom – an ironic reflection of her mom’s own plight, though Jessica Landry couldn’t have cared less about that.

There are various red herrings in the dramatis personae, including Clint Barker – a man Eva met through a dating app and who got obsessed with her ahd started driving past her car, apparently stalking her, but when Detective Campbell investigates him she finds he has an unshakable alibi (he was drinking at a bar the night Eva was kidnapped and filmed by their security camera) – and Charlie Black, a private investigator hired by Nancy to investigate her son Ryan’s death. Sami sees Nancy meet Black in a park and hand him a packet of money, and she immediately wonders if Nancy hired him to kidnap her mom, but later Nancy explains that she hired Black to get enough evidence to get Ryan’s body exhumed, and it turns out she was right: he was slowly poisoned with various chemicals, not enough of any of them to kill him instantly but enough to give him heart disease and lead to his premature death. There’s another suspect in the mix: Eva’s too-good-to-be-true next-door neighbor, Dane Clark (Kelsey Flower) – by coincidence also the name of a Warner Bros. tough-guy actor whose best-known credits are Pride of the Marines, 1945; and Moonrise, 1948 – whom I should have realized would turn out to be Eva’s kidnapper well before I did (which was two acts before he was formally revealed).

Jessica Landry dropped a number of hints I should have picked up on well before I did, including Dane begging off Eva’s attempts to set him un on a date with her friend Ashley (whom we never see) and the clear familiarity the kidnapper shows with Eva’s taste in food and drunk – he brings her Chinese food and coffee from favorite places of hers. Dane, it turns out, not only had an unrequited crush on Eva but was responsible for poisoning her late husband Ryan (ya remember Ryan?) in hopes of eliminating the competition so they’d end up together. Only Sami and Gabe figure it out with the help of photos Dane dropped off at Nancy’s place of Eva in what looks like a motel room but is really an underground cellar on Dane’s property where he’s been holding her. Eventually Sami and Gabe set Eva free and Eva herself knocks Dane unconscious with the proverbial blunt instrument, and the rest of the family is reconciled. Even Nancy turns out to be a good sport at the end as the three generations of Joneses sit down to a family dinner. It’s frustrating not to know who the other cast members are – especially the actress playing Nancy (and also the actor playing Gabe; he’s no great shakes as a performer but he sure is cute!) – but Who Kidnapped My Mom? Is just so typical a Lifetime movie title, and it delivers the goods engagingly without pushing the envelope of the formula or making Dane a figure of real pathos the way Christine Conradt might have done. About the only trope we didn’t get was a soft-core porn scene – but then the only characters who could have conceivably had one were Sami and Gabe, and the producers (our old friends at Neshama Entertainment and MarVista Entertainment) probably figured they were too young.

Michael Tilson Thomas Concert: Boston Symphony Orchestra: Ives, Sibelius,. Wagner (ICA Classics, 1970_

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

After Who Kidnapped My Mom? Charles and I watched a DVD that surprised me when I recently ran into it in the backlog: a 1970 concert video by the Boston Symphony under their assistant conductor at the time, Michael Tilson Thomas. The DVD consists of performances of three rather forbidding pieces in late 19th and early 20th century repertoire: Charles Ives’ Three Places in New England (composed between 1908 and 1914 and revised in 1929), Jean Sibelius’ Symphony No. 4 (composed in 1910 and 1911), and the Dawn and Siegfried’s Rhine Journey instrumental sequence from Richard Wagner’s opera Götterdämmerung (composed between 1871 and 1874 and first performed in Bayreuth in 1876 as part of the complete cycle The Ring of the Nibelung). There were also two bonus tracks consisting of interviews with Michael Tilson Thomas, one from 1970 and quite obviously filmed as part of the original telecast, in which he discusses the Sibelius Symphony No. 4 and praises the work’s economy, noting that the entire symphonic structure is built on the first four notes (“Just like Beethoven’s Fifth!” I couldn’t help but think), and one from 2013 in London in which he recalls just how he got the job as assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony while he was still in his 20’s.

Even before that Tilson Thomas had been quite extraordinarily lucky in getting himself into situations where older musicians mentored him – including Igor Stravinsky, Friedelind Wagner (Richard Wagner’s granddaughter), legendary pianist Artur Rubinstein, violin star Jascha Heifetz and cello soloist Gregor Piatigorsky. He also mentions having come from a theatrical background; his grandfather was Boris Thomashevsky, founder of the Yiddish Art Theatre in New York in the 1880’s. Tilson Thomas recalled being hired in the late 1960’s to work at Bayreuth under Friedelind Wagner to serve as rehearsal pianist for quite a lot of complicated contemporary German music, and at one point he went to a rehearsal of Hans Werner Henze’s opera The Bassarids but left after five minutes on the ground that he was already playing difficult German music on his job and he shouldn’t have to listen to it on his day off as well. By chance another person also walked out of the Henze rehearsal and turned out to be a composer who’d just placed a work with the Boston Symphony, who were looking for an assistant to their newly hired conductor, William Steinberg. Tilson Thomas not only worked under Steinberg for a year or so but got quite a few concerts of his own, especially in the field of contemporary music since he’d already established “cred” with modern composers like Pierre Boulez, Lukas Foss and John Cage. He also got to record with the Boston Symphony for Deutsche Grammophon, including a spectacular recording of Ives’ Three Places in New England backed with a work I was even more interested in, Sun-Treader by Ives’ friend, the notoriously cranky and self-critical Carl Ruggles. (In 1979, as music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic, Tilson Thomas recorded a two-LP set of all the then-extant music of Ruggles, including a remake of Sun-Treader; the set was later reissued on CD in 2012, and New World Records unearthed some previously unknown Ruggies pieces in 2005 for a CD called The Uncovered Ruggles.)

Tilson Thomas’s interview also featured his reminiscences of certain Boston Symphony players as individuals – including a quirky clarinetist who had previously worked with Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony, who had a penchant for adding or subtracting notes from his part and leaving the rest of the reed section to scramble to keep up with him. The interviews were, if anything, more interesting than the music; I was familiar with Tilson Thomas’s magisterial reading of the Ives because I’d grown up with it since the 1970’s, but both it and the Sibelius got a bit too craggy after a while and I longed for the breaking dawn and bright sunshine of the Wagner. It’s a pity Tilson Thomas didn’t conduct more opera (he’s still alive but because of ill health has stepped back from most conducting gigs), because his Wagner is fully alive to the power of the music. I noticed he took the grandiose, upbeat concert ending Engelbert Humperdinck (Wagner’s assistant at Bayreuth and the composer of Hansel und Gretel, not the British singer who appropriated his name in the 1960’s) added to the Rhine Journey. Purists object to this, but the ending Wagner wrote isn’t really an ending at all; it’s a transition to the darker music and drama of the scene with the Gibichungs that marks the first act of Götterdäuuerung, and it works superbly in context but it really doesn’t work when the piece is performed as a stand-alone concert work. In 1970 Michael Tilson Thomas was still a quite cute young man with a resemblance to the young Dustin Hoiffman, and it was fun to watch him already making great music at the outset of a career that, at least within the realm of classical music, would make him a superstar.

Suitcase Killer: The Melanie Mcguire Story (Big Dreams Entertainment, Swirl Films, Lifetime, 2022)

≤br>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday at 8 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched a Lifetime movie called Suitcase Killer: The Melanie McGuire Story, based on a true-crime story that took place in 2004 in Middletown Township, New Jersey. When the Lifetime version starts, Melanie State (Candice King) and Bill McGuire (hot stud-muffin Michael Roark) are working together at a fast-food counter where the work uniform is a singularly hideous blue plaid shirt, though both of them are working their way up. She’s attending nursing school and he’s studying to become a full-time professor – though we’re never told where or what subject he’s teaching. Melanie and Bill start a hot affair that includes him taking her to the big casinos in Atlantic City and telling her he’s going to release her “inner gambler.” Soon Melanie moves out of her parents’ home to live with Bill and he proposes marriage to her, though just before the wedding she gets a nocturnal visit from one of Bill’s ex-es, Marci Polsky (Hayley O’Connor), who tries to warn her off Bill. Marci tells Melanie that Bill is a compulsive gambler and womanizer, and also a domestic abuser, but of course Melanie doesn’t believe a word of it and the marriage goes ahead. Five years later, in 2004, Bill and Melanie have had two sons but their marriage is not a happy one: he’s constantly screaming at her, often for no apparent reason, and also dashing for days at a time to hang out at the casinos and share hot tubs with multiple women.

Bill also talks about moving to Virginia to be with his family, but Melanie thinks that’s a terrible idea because their jobs are in New Jersey – by now Bill is an adjunct professor on a tenure track and Melanie is a nurse at a fertility clinic. In fact, she even closes a deal to buy a house in New Jersey to tie up Bill’s money and make sure he can’t blow it all on gambling and women. Melanie finds a phone number for one of Bill’s alternate sex partners on a slip of paper in Bill’s pocket (back when people used to exchange phone numbers on paper instead of just entering them on their own phones), and then goes ballistic when the same woman shows up at Melanie’s fertility clinic asking to dnoate her eggs. No doubt believing that what’s sauce for the gander ought to be sauce for the goose as well, Melanie begins an affair with Dr. Brad Harris (Jackson Hurst), the staff doctor at the clinic, and he assures her that though he’s technically married he and his wife rre separated and in the process of getting divorced. The two get even hotter soft-core porn scenes than Melanie and Bill had – Bill and Brad (or the actors playing them) both have pecs to die for, which added to this film’s entertainment value for me – and things come to a head on the night Melanie wants to celebrate closing on their new home while Bill laments that that’s $500,000 he can’t gamble and whore away.

The accusations against Melanie are that she forged a doctor’s signature to obtain chloral hydrate, a knockout drug with which she spiked Bill’s wine; then she used a gun she had bought at a gun store in Pennsylvania and shot her husband twice in the head. Then she dragged his body and spent the next two days dismembering his corpse in their bathtub, packing the pieces in a set of designer luggage they owned, meticulously cleaning up to make sure there would be no traces of blood in their home, and as a final insult she loaded the suitcases containing her husband’s remains into her SUV and drove the 700 miles to Virginia Beach, Virginia, as if this was her final insult: “You wanted to move to Virginia Beach so bad? Well, here it is!” Alas for Melanie, she forgot to clean the residue off her shoes and so bits of human debris got tracked into her SUV, where police forensic examiners traced them through DNA and proved they’d been part of Bill’s body. In real life, the first suitcase found on the Virginia Beach shore was discovered by a family – a husband, wife and their two kids – but in the movie it’s discovered by a lone woman dressed way too scantily to be believable as a beachcomber, and wielding a metal detector.

What’s odd about this movie is that, though no writers are credited (either on the film itself or on imdb.com), whoever wrote the script seems to have had a hard time believing in Melanie’s guilt. Her defense was that Bill had been killed by Mob types to whom he owed money, and though the police got Dr. Brad Harris to turn against her and threatened to charge him as an accomplice, the phone calls he placed to her to try to get a confession out of her generated nothing of the sort, just continued protestations of her innocence. The writer(s) and casting director(s) pulled a curious trick with the casting of Patti Prezioso, the assistant district attorney for the state of New Jersey; the real Patti Prezioso, whom we got to see in a 15-minute “Behind the Headlines” mini-documentary Lifetime showed after the feature, was relatively short and had long, curly black hair. In the film she’s played by Wendie Malick as a tall, blonde no-nonsense hardass who refuses to entertain any other suspects besides Melanie and chews out an African-American detective on her staff for referring to the bits of Bill found on the floorboards of Melanie’s car as as “skin fragments.” Prezioso wants to call them “human sawdust,” and for good measure she insists that the investigators in her office refer to Melanie not as “the suspect” but as “the defendant” even before Melanie is formally indicted. The way Prezioso is portrayed in the script makes her seem like a zealous, unscrupulous prosecutor railroading an innocent defendant just to score the brownie points for a conviction.

Indeed, the script goes out of its way to depict Bill McGuire as a despicable excuse for a human being whom the world is better off without – indeed, had Melanie claimed to have killed him in self-defense after a long history of beng abused, she might have had a better shot at an acquittal even though she’d have been in the all-too-familiar Catch-22 of abused wives: since she never reported the abuse to the police or told her friends about it, we had only her word for it that it happened. Melanie ends up with a high-powered attorney representing her, Joe Tapacino, who says he took her case because “Patti Prezioso is a bully, and I take down bullies,” but he was unable to do anything to keep her from being convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Director Nicole L. Thompson strengthens the case for Melanie’s innocence by staging the scenes supposedly representing the prosecution’s case against her insoft focus, while the scenes showing her side of the story are hard-edged and crystal-clear. It’s an oddly schizoid movie in that it’s easy to see why the jury convicted her – both on the extensive forensic evidence against her and the sheer unlikelihood of her story – but at the same time Thompson and her writers are using every trick in the cinematic book to bolster the case for Melanie’s innocence.

At least part of that is due to the animate kewpie-doll performance Thompson gets out of Candice King as Melanie; she goes through the entire second half of the movie with an air of “Who, me?” every time she’s confronted with the horrific accusations against her. In one of the scenes showing the prosecution’s view of what happened to Bill, we hear the sound of an electric bone saw cutting up Bill’s corpse; we never actually see the saw in action (this movie was already pushing the envelope of basic cable: its rating was TV-14, with special alerts for language, sex and violence, so seeing Melanie chop up Bill’s body would have been way past the limits) but we certainly hear it, and this explains why the police originally investigated Dr. Harris as an accomplice: it’s hard to imagine how Melanie could have procured this grisly piece of equipment without borrowing it, with or without authorization, from her workplace.

Daughter of Shanghai (Paramount, 1937)

≤br>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Suitcase Killer Charles and I went back online for an archive.org stream of a quite good thriller from 1937, Daughter of Shanghai, directed by Robert Florey from a script by Gladys Unger and Garnett Weston, with William Hurlbut (co-author of the script for The Bride of Frankenstein) credited with additional dialogue on imdb.com. What makes this one particularly interesting is that the leads are both Asian-Americans; Anna May Wong is top-billed as Lan Ying Lin, daughter of legitimate Chinese art dealer Quan Lin (Ching-Wah Lee), and though he’s only billed ninth Philip Ahn (whom I hadn’t realized until I saw the PBS-TV special Asian-Americans was not Chinese, but Korean) plays Kim Lee, a Chinese-American FBI agent who’s sent to San Francisco to bust a rung of “alien smugglers” – what today would be called “human traffickers.”

In the opening scene two men from the alien smuggling gang (one of whom is played by a young Anthony Quinn) are flying a plane containing six would-be undocumented immigrants from China. Alas, a Coast Guard plane is closing in on them (even though the smugglers’ plane is a 1937 monoplane while the Coast Guard plane that is chasing them is a World War I-era biplane, obviously represented by stock footage from a World War I aviation movie), so to avoid getting caught the smugglers pull a lever on their dashboard and a door opens on the floor of the plane, plunging all six people to their deaths in the ocean below. The public uproar over these wanton murders leads the FBI to send out Kim Lee to work from San Francisco and bust the gang. Meanwhile, agents from the smuggling ring show up at Quan Lin’s business while he’s entertaining wealthy white woman Mrs. Mary Hunt (Cecil Cunningham) and tell him sotto voce that he will accept workers from the people they’re smuggling – or else. “Else” happens almost immediately when the gang members waylay a taxi Quan Lin is using to go to a dinner at Mrs. Hunt’s place – they drive it into a moving van and then take the van to a pier and shove the car containing Quan Lin and his daughter Lan Yang Lin into San Francisco Bay, where they’ll drown.

Only Our Heroine manages to escape and swim to shore safely (though her fancy evening dress looks immaculate even after she’s supposed to have escaped from a sinking car in it), where she shows up at Mrs. Hunt’s party and explains that her dad was wayiaid and killed on the way. [Not true: she actually escaped before the baddies sent the cab into the water, so there was no reason for her to be wet when she got away. – M.G.C., 8/27/23.] This isn’t news to Mrs Hunt because, as a previous scene has shown, she is the mastermind of the smuggling ring; she ordered her men to finish off the Lins because Quan Lin was about to turn over a dossier he’d compiled on the smugglers to Kim Lee, and Mrs. Hunt wanted to make sure not only that he would be killed before he got to Kim but all copies of the dossier would be destroyed. Naturally she chews out the gangsters on her payroll for letting Lan escape. Meanwhile, Lan decides to go undercover and infiltrate the gang through their headquarters at “Port O’Juan” on Clipperton Island off the east coast of Mexico.

Clipperton Island actually exists, and was the subject of an international dispute between Mexico and France (oddly, they got the king of Italy to arbitrate; they filed the petition in 1909 but it wasn’t adjudicated until 1931, when the son of the original Italian king they’d submitted it to ruled in favor of France). But no one actually lived there except a garrison of Mexican soldiers who, since the island was barren and no plants could grow on it, lived off a herd of pigs who themselves survived by eating a sort of crab humans can’t eat but pigs can. But the non-availability of plant life probably accounted for the fact that by the time the Mexican government sent a ship to evacuate their garrison, only one man was left: the others had died of scurvy. When the French took over, the first thing they did was slaughter all the pigs. But the city of “Port O’Juan,” depicted here as a lawless Safe in Hell-style place where the smuggling ring’s agent, Otto Hartman (Charles Bickford, second-billed), runs a raunchy club that’s a front for the smugglers, is entirely fictional.

To work her way into the gang, Lan gets a job as a dancer – obviously Hartman hires her so he can get in her pants – and this arouses the jealousy of his former mistress among the dancers, Olga Derey (Evelyn Brent, who’d been on the cusp of stardom in the late 1920’s thanks to Josef von Sternberg’s frequent use of her, though when Sternberg went to Germany in 1930 to make The Blue Angel that film’s star, Marlene Dietrich, became his new favorite and he never worked with Brent again). There are a lot of atmospherically photographed action scenes in various grungy clubs (including one in which she does her dance routine and is introduced as “the daughter of Shanghai,” the one reference to the film’s title), and one sequence that rips off the 1922 Paramount film Moran of the “Lady Letty” in which Lan disguises herself as a man to sneak aboard a freighter containing the latest batch of trafficked immigrants, only her long hair slips out from under her cap and gives her away., The ship’s captain, Gutner (Fred Kohler), is ready to rape her when fortunately she’s saved by Kim Lee and the opportune arrival of the Coast Guard.

In the end Mrs. Hunt and her fellow gangsters are apprehended, thanks to a change of heart by her manservant, dumb but good-natured Andrew Sheets (Buster Crabbe, though billed here under his real first name, Larry), who’s disgusted that his boss wants him to kill that nice young Asian couple. Kim Lee and Lan get together in a car, where he asks her if she’d like to move to Washington, D.C. and she says, “Are you asking me to marry you?” Daughter of Shanghai is a quite good movie for lts relatively low ambition and a running time of just over an hour, and Robert Florey proves himself a quite capable director good at extracting maximum entertainment quality out of a minimal budget. In fact, he was so good at doing this that, like Edgar G. Ulmer, he spent virtually all of his career stuck making “B” movies and never got the quality productions and budgets he deserved.

Watergate at 50 (CBS-TV, aired June 17, 2022)

≤br>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 9 I watched the CBS-TV news special on the 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in – these shows have been something of a tradition ever since they did the 20th anniversary one in 1992, from which this show took a lot of film clips to represent people who are no longer alive, including former U.S. Senator and Republican Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona) and former Nixon staffer Chuck Colson. “Watergate” became a catch-all term for a series of crimes and “dirty tricks” in which the Nixon campaign indulged to ensure not only that he would win re-election in 1972 but he would win by such an overwhelming and convincing margin there would be no more lingering doubts about his legitimacy. Nixon was well aware that he had won in the first place in 1968 by a narrow margini (similar to that with which he had lost in 1960), and he was obsessed first with establishing Republican control of the United States Senate in 1970 and then, when that didn’t happen, ensuring that he would so totally destroy the reputation of the Democrats who had led the campaign against him in 1970 – particularly U.S. Senator Ed Muskie (D-Maine), who had been Hubert Humphrey’s running mate in 1968 and whose pivotal role in the 1970 Senate campaign had made him the Democratic front-runner in 1972.

Nixon was particularly afraid of Muskie for the same reasons Donald Trump was afraid of Joe Biden, to the point where he sought out the aid of Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky to get (or manufacture) “dirt” on Biden and his scapegrace son Hunter: he thought Muskie was a nonthreatening centrist and the most likely candidate to beat him in 1972. So the infamous Donald Segretti not only forged the infamous “Canuck letter” that led to Muskie publicly crying over its insult to his wife (which destroyed Muskie’s political career virtually overnight), he also stole official Muskie campaign stationery and used it to forge official-looking press releases attacking other Democratic candidates, including Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-Washington). The objective was to sow so much mistrust among all the Democratic candidates for President that whoever got the nomination against Nixon would be unable to hold the party together. One key to the strategy was to ensure that the Democrats would nominate Senator George McGovern (D-South Dakota – and it’s an indication of how far our politics have shifted Rightward since 1972 that today it’s inconceivable that South Dakota would ever elect a Democrat to the Senate), the farthest Left of the major Democratic Presidential candidates and for that reason the easiest for Nixon to beat. (As an 18-year-old newly eligible to vote for the first time, I was a McGovern diehard and was too politically naïve to realize that by pushing McGovern we were basically handing Nixon the overwhelming win he wanted and ultimately got.)

During the middle of a campaign that looked like an unstoppable Nixon juggernaut came the weird piece of news that five people had been arrested for attempting to break in to the offices of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate hotel complex in Washington, D.C. on Saturday, June 17, 1972. I remember when I first heard the news: I overheard it on a radio as I was making my way home from a free concert by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band in San Francisco’s Stern Grove, and as I was waiting on the streetcorner for the bus to take me home to Marin County I heard a broadcast with the news and thought, “I wonder if the Republicans had anything to do with this.” It turned out the Republicans had a great deal to do with it, and that this wasn’t even the first attempt to break into the DNC offices and plant listening devices on the DNC chair’s and treasurer’s phones. The first had taken place three weeks previously, and the bing on the DNC chair’s phone had malfunctioned while the one on the treasurer’s phone had worked but mostly recorded him calling various potential girlfriends for dates. So on the morning if June 17 James McCord, security director for Nixon’s official campaign, the Committee to Re-Elect the President (which as the scandal broke almost inevitably got nicknamed CREEP), and four Cuban exiles who had participated in the CIA’s unsuccessful attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro’s regime in Cuba in 1961 broke into the Watergate again – and were caught by an unusually alert African-American security guard, Frank Wills, who noticed the tape they had put across the office door so it wouldn’t close behind them and lock them in. Nixon and his top aides – including chief of staff H. Robert Haldeman, domestic policy advisor John Ehrlichman and John Mitchell, former Attorney General who had quit that post to run CREEP – instituted a cover-up.

They had a lot more to worry about than just Watergate, including a whole elaborate plan by former FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy to sabotage the Democratic convention and hire prostitutes to lure promiennt Democrats into compromising positions so they could be photographed and blackmailed, as well as slipping LSD into the water brought by protesters and kidnapping people and holding them on barges off the Florida coast during both the Republican and Democratic conventions. (One would-be protester asked John Mitchell during a break in the 1974 Watergate cover-up trial what would have happened to them on the barges if they had been kidnapped and taken there. “How should I know?” Mitchell testily responded. “It was Liddy’s plan, not mine.”) The Watergate cover-up probably began three days after the break-in and certainly had started six days later, when on June 23, 1972 Nixon had a meeting in the Oval Office with Bob Haldeman and others and Nixon said he was going to ask the CIA to ask the FBI to curtail their investigation into Watergate because they might uncover national security secrets, when Nixon and his men knew full well they wouldn’t. Alas, it would be over two years before the tape of this meeting surfaced and doomed Nixon’s Presidency.

In the meantime the nation lived through the constant drip-drip-drip of national scandal, including the unraveling of the first phase of the cover-up when John Sirica, the judge who drew the first assignment to try the Watergate burglars (the five who were actually arrested on site plus G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt) and became convinced there was more to the story than just what he was hearing in court; the dogged work of reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post and Lesley Stahl of CBS – all of whom are still alive and were interviewed for this show – and ultimately the hearings of the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, as it was formally called even though it was known as the “Senate Watergate Committee.” One thing about this committee that seems inconceivable today is that, while its members included four Democrats and three Republicans, only one of the Republicans – Edward Gurney of Florida – aggressively took up the cudgels of defending Nixon. Howard Baker of Tennessee, the committee’s ranking Republican member and vice-chair, asked his famous question, “What did the President know, and when did he know it?” Though a number of Left-wing commentators said Baker had cunningly phrased his question to let the White House off the hook – it’s like asking a bank robber, “What did the head of your gang know, and when did he know it?” And Lowell Weickier of Connecticut was so strong an anti-Nixon voice and so much a member of the now-extinct breed of “liberal Republicans” that in 1988 he lost the Republican primary for re-election to the Senate, though he ultimately ran for and won the governorship of Connecticut as a non-partisan candidate in 1990. (Ironically, the unusually liberal Republican Weicker was defeated in his Senate bid and the seat ultimately went to Joe Lieberman, an unusually Right-wing Democrat.)

The CBS-TV special followed the historical trajectory of Watergate familiar to those of us who were alive and politically aware during the period – though the ins and outs might be confusing to people who just know this as history. Nixon was able to ride the scandal long enough to win the landslide re-election he craved, but then the drip-drip-drip of the scandal emerged and ultimately the Senate Watergate committee’s hearings became must-see TV for millions of Americans (up to 80 million people watched the hearing where former White House counsel John Dean laid out the case against Nixon, compared to just 20 million who watched the recent first hearing of the House Select Committee on the January 6, 2021 U.S. Capitol riot). The CBS special showcased Dean’s testimony and also the revelation from Alexander P. Butterfield that on Nixon’s orders he had installed a tape recording system in the White House so that every conversation that took place in the Oval Office or the President’s office in the Executive Office Building was automatically recorded. The idea that there might be recordings that would either confirm or deny John Dean’s explosive revelations about the cover-up and Nixon’s direct role in it. One of ther people interviewed for the show was former assistant special prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste, whose memoir Stonewall (written with another former Watergate deputy special prosecutor, George Frampton) is probably the best book ever written about prosecuting Watergate.

In his book Ben-Veniste and Frampton recalled the thrill that went through the office when, after a legal battle during which the first special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, had been fired by Nixon and his two top officials at the Justice Department, Attorney General Elliott Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, both resigned rather than carry out the order, the special prosecutor’s office finally received the tapes and they heard the crucial March 21, 1973 meeting in which Dean had told Nixon Watergate was “a cancer on the Presidency.” Listening to it in light of the statement Nixon had just made publicly in which he had famously declared, “I am not a crook,” Ben-Veniste and Frampton recalled thinking that “he was a crook, and we had the evidence to prove it.” The so-called “Saturday Night Massacre,” in which Nixon had to work his way down the hierarchy of the Justice Department to find the third in line, Solicitor General Robert Bork, willing to fire Cox, led to the start of an official impeachment inquiry, the hearings before the House Judiciary Committee that in those pre-C-SPAN days were the first glimpses most Americans had had about how Congressional committees actually function. Meanwhile,replacement special prosecutor Leon Jaworski and Cox’s old team continued their battle to get their hands on the White House tapes.

Nixon famously released his own selective and heavily edited transcripts of some of the recordings, hoping this would put an end to the legal battle over the tapes. His gesture backfired big-time: not only did the special prosecutor’s office continue their battle for the actual tapes (at least in part under the so-called “best evidence” doctrine, in which in order to be admissible as evidence something has to be as close to the original as possible – so transcripts of tapes did not count as long as the tapes themselves still existed), which led to an 8-0 U.S. Supreme Court decision forcing him to release them, but the transcripts were so damning that a lot of Americans thought, “If this is the stuff Nixon thought it was O.K. to release, imagine what there is in the tapes that got left out of these transcripts.” The revelation of the tapes – particularly the three from June 23, 1972 that preserved Nixon’s voice in so many words ordering the CIA to join the cover-up by telling the FBI to back off their investigation – led to the evaporation of Nixon’s support in Congress.

When Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott and Senator Barry Goldwater went to meet Nixon, Nixon was convinced that he still had the support of 40 Republican Senators, enough to escape conviction and removal from office in an impeachment trial. Goldwater famously told him, “No, you don’t have 40. You have four, and you don’t have mine.” That was when Nixon got the message that he would have to resign the Presidency to avoid being thrown out of it in an impeachment trial, which he did on August 8, 1974. The last 20 minutes or so of the CBS-TV special went off the rails as far as I’m concerned – they tried to portray Nixon’s resignation as a tragedy and his bizarre farewell speech to the White House staff the morning of the day his resignation went into effect as a moment of self-revelation, especially when he said, “People will hate you, but it only hurts you of you hate them back.” This runs counter to a statement Nixon had made in one of his recorded conversations, in which he had sounded positively Trumpian when he said, “Remember, the press is the enemy. The Establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy.”

The show also presented Nixonj’s successor Gerald Ford’s awful blanket pardon of Nixon for all crimes he may have committed during his Presidency as a noble gesture of national healing in which Ford sacrificed his own chances to win a Presidential election for the sake of binding the nation’s wounds. Bullshit: the pardon angers me now for the same reasons it did then – it established the tradition in the U.S. that former Presidents will not be held legally accountable for any crimes they commit in office, no matter how heinous or how destructive of the ideal of American self-governance. The show also touched on the similarities and the differences between Richard Nixon and Donald Trump, including the one I’ve noted before that Nixon was essentially a Presidential version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The Jekyll Nixon signed the major environmental bills into law – the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act and the bill establishing the Environmental Protection Agency (all things Trump tried his damnedest to gut during his four years in office), opened the door to détente with the Soviet Union and America’s long-delayed recognition of the Communist regime in China, finally brought an end to the war in Viet Nam (albeit after ordering a last round of bombings of North Viet Nam for no apparent reason), and made serious proposals for universal national health care (a considerably more liberal plan than the one that eventually got passed under President Obama) and seriously supposed a guaranteed annual income (an idea both of America’s major parties consider politically radioactive today).

Meanwhile, the Hyde Nixon either ordered or condoned not only the Watergate break-in itself but a wide range of extra-legal activities to ensure his own re-election, including the burglary of Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in hopes of getting damaging information and offering the directorship of the FBI to the judge in Ellsberg’s trial. Whereas Nixon was Jekyll and Hyde, Trump is just Hyde, a pure sociopath with no redeeming personal or political qualities, who clearly sought the Presidency (and is seeking to regain it, with a very good chance of succeeding) just to feed the two obsessions that rule his life, his ego and his bankroll. One of the most sensational revelations of the January 6 committee hearings is that Trump’s claim that “voter fraud” stole his re-election from him led him to release a series of fundraising e-mails to his supporters, sometimes as many as 25 ini a day, pleading for donations to something called the “Official Election Defense Fund” which turned out not to exist at all. Nonetheless, Trump raised $250 million – that’s a quarter of a billion dollars – including $100 million just in the first week, for this nonexistent “fund” – a pot of money with which Trump can do whatever he likes, including handing it off to his loyal supporters.

One article posted on the CBS Web site (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/watergate-at-50-the-political-scandal-that-changed-washington/), includes æn interview with Garrett Graff, who has just published a new history of Watergate and was asked the difference between then and now, between Nixon and Trump. "Two things: Fox News, and members of Congress who acted as Republicans first and members of Congress second. That's it," Graff replied. "I think if you had Fox News in the 1970’s, Richard Nixon would have stepped down from office in January 1977 totally unscathed." The transition Graff is allouding to was actually a gradual one initiated when President Ronald Reagan’s appointees to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) undid the so-called “Fairness Doctrine,” which from 1949 to 1987 had decreed that broadcast stations that aired political coverage at all had to maintain a rough balance between various views. With the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, and the end of music on AM radio as music stations switched to the better-sounding FM band, AM radio essentially became a continuous transmission belt for Right-wing propaganda. The advent of Fox News in 1996 brought this sort of programming to TV, and the subsequent rise of the Internet and social media have made it possible for millions of Americans to live in communications bubbles, listening only to programming that already reflects their point of view and never hearing the thoughts or ideas of anyone else.

And contrary to the assertions on this program that Nixon’s actions in Watergate were a threat to the American republic on a scale not seen again until Trump, that’s simply not true. Under Reagan you had the Iran-contra scandal and a President so determined to put in place a policy Congress had specifically disapproved that Congress was treated as a minor inconvenience. Under George W. Bush, a compliant Congress in the wake of the 9/11 attacks passed the USA PATRIOT Act, another step forward in the American Right’s long-term goal to displace democracy and substitute an authoritarian government. Bush even said once, “I don’t see anything wrong with a dictatorship, as long as I’m the dictator,” and his principal aide, Karl Rove, said it was his goal to give the Republican Party “full-spectrum dominance” over American politics. At present, the Republicans are only two elections away from achieving just that. They are expected to win a landslide sweep of the 2022 midterms, as voters pissed off about inflation in general and high gas and grocery prices in particular get ready to punish the Democrats big-time even though there’s surprisingly little the President or Congress can do to stop inflation. This will move Republicans one step closer to total political dominance, and either the re-election of Donald Trump to the Presidency in 2024 or the election of a Trump acolyte like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis or Texas Governor Greg Abbott will complete the process and give the Republican Party, already armed with extensive tools of voter suppression and sabotage the U.S. Supreme Court gave them by gutting the Voting Rights Act in 2013 and the current nominal Democratic majority in the Senate refused to reverse, complete, total and likely permanent control of American politics.