The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart? (Diamond Docs, PolyGram Records, Polygram Entertainment, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, May 29) I turned to CNN hoping that they would have some actual news coverage, but instead they were 45 minutes into a surprisingly interesting two-hour documentary on the history of the Bee Gees. My friend Garry and I picked this up in 1974, as the Bee Gees were about to be dropped by Atlantic Records because they hadn’t had a hit since “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart?” in 1971. Desperate for a way to revitalize their career, brothers Barry, Maurice and Robin Gibb (the name “Bee Gees” simply is short for “Brothers Gibb,” though there were a lot of fanciful explanations for the name, including that it was slang for marijuana cigarettes in their native Australia) hit on Black rhythm-and-blues as a way to make their music more modern and more salable. They seized on the dance-funk style that was the hot new “thing” in the African-American community in the early 1970’s and made a quite credible record in the style called “Jive Talkin’,” which gave them their first hit in three years and saved their careers. From there they made a series of records in similar dance grooves, including “You Should Be Dancing” and “More Than a Woman,” which got them the plum assignment of writing original songs for the soundtrack to the 1977 film Saturday Night Fever, produced by Robert Stigwood (their long-time manager and founder of RSO Records, which took over their contract from Atlantic even though that meant they could no longer work with Atlantic’s in-house producer Arif Mardin; fortunately the Bee Gees found Karl Richardson and Ahlby Galuten, who took over as their producers and worked in a similar style) and starring John Travolta in what became a legendary blockbuster.

Stigwood actually released the Bee Gees’ songs for the film in advance of the movie itself and used their success to promote the film; he also got his distributor, Paramount, to do a wide release of the movie so it would open in 300 theatres all at once (though this wasn’t that pioneering a marketing strategy; producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown and director Steven Spielberg had done just that with Jaws two years earlier). I remember the Saturday Night Fever two-LP soundtrack album from early 1978, when it was inescapable in the dorms of San Francisco State University; I liked the Bee Gees’ own songs and the Trampps’ “Disco Inferno” (which despite being in the disco style had a real sense of drama and excitement and wasn’t just a few words barked out over a dance groove), but hated the rest of the album. The rest of the album was pretty much a compilation of Disco’s Greatest Hits (save for the records of Donna Summer, which were being reserved for her own movie Thank God It’s Friday, and once again I liked her own songs but hated the rest of the soundtrack). The documentary discussed the anti-disco backlash and made it seem quite nastier than I remembered it; they showed the infamous Nuremberg-style rally anti-disco D.J. Steve Dahl organized at Comiskey Park in Chicago (home of the White Sox), in which you could be admitted for 98¢ if you brought a disco record for Dahl to add to his bonfire and blow up on the baseball field in between games of a double-header. About 9,000 people showed up and Dahl literally exploded a pile of disco records and left such a mess on the field that the White Sox couldn’t play the second game of their scheduled double-header and had to forfeit it to the Detroit Tigers.

My own memories of Steve Dahl are a lot kinder than the way he’s presented here as a sort of Joseph Goebbels wanna-be; I remember him mainly for his brilliant parody record “Do Ya Think I’m Disco?,” a spoof of Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?” which features lines like, “My shirt is open/I never use the buttons/Though I look hip/I work for E. F. Hutton,” and “Do ya think I’m disco/’Cause I spend so much time/Blow-drying out my hair?/Do ya think I’m disco/’Cause I know the dance steps/Learned them all at Fred Astaire’s.” Stewart’s manager at the time thought the parody was offensive and asked him to sue to have it taken off the market, but Stewart himself said, “I think it’s hilarious! Leave it alone.” (The song is available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLFMELubizU, and one commentator wished Dahl would have done a similar bonfire when rap emerged about a decade or so later.) The talking heads (some white, some Black) said the anti-disco backlash was an expression of racism and homophobia; as an anti-racist Gay man I think it’s entirely possible to dislike disco on purely aesthetic grounds, just as I have an even deeper loathing for virtually all rap. But the anti-disco backlash reached such extremes that the Bee Gees literally got death threats while they were touring in support of their album Spirits Having Flown – their first release since Saturday Night Fever, and given that it was the follow-up to the biggest record seller of all time (until Michael Jackson’s Thriller) the Bee Gees would have had problems maintaining their career momentum even without the ludicrous backlash they now faced. The rest of the show peters out along with the Bee Gees’ career, and it includes the tragic story of the Bee Gees’ younger brother Andy, who had a brief, stellar solo career but succumbed to drug addiction and died at 30, just after he’d achieved his long-time ambition to be admitted to the family as a full-fledged Bee Gee.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Metro Pictures, 1920, released 1921)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, May 28) at 9 p.m. I put on Turner Classic Movies for their “Silent Sunday Showcase,” which because it was Memorial Day eve they showed one of the greatest of all silent films, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1920, released 1921). The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse was based on a novel by Spanish writer Vicente Blasco Ibáñez published in 1916, while World War I was still going on, and translated into English by Charlotte Brewster Jordan in 1918. Jordan’s English edition became the best-selling novel in the U.S. in 1918-1919, making a movie adaptation almost inevitable. The film version was produced by Metro Pictures in 1920 (that’s the copyright date) and released in 1921. It’s best remembered as the film that launched the brief but stratospheric career of Rudolph Valentino, an Italian-born actor (true name: Rodolfo Guglielmi) who’d emigrated to the U.S. in the early teens, got jobs as a professional dancer (including replacing the almost as young Clifton Webb as partner to Bonnie Glass, who then was considerably better known than either man) and then moved to Hollywood in search of a film career. Alas, the only jobs available to a swarthy “exotic” type were small villain roles in “B” movies, including two with Mae Murray (in one of which, The Delicious Little Devil, he got “noticed” for the first time) directed by her then-husband Robert Z. Leonard, and a supporting role opposite the legendary cross-dressing star Julian Eltinge, whose films frequently played on his gender ambiguity (either he was cast as a woman impersonating a man, a man impersonating a woman, or in a dual role as both).

The Four Horsemen was actually an ambitious anti-war epic about a Spanish émígre named Julio Madariaga (Pomeroy Cannon) who moves to Argentina (as Blasco Ibáñez himself did) and works his way up from poverty to super-wealth, eventually owning acres of land and fine cattle, sheep and other herd animals to graze on them. He has so many children by so many different women the titles allude to the mystery that so many of the workers on his ranch physically resemble him – anticipating the joke in the film The Mouse That Roared that the first Duke of Grand Fenwick was “in the most literal sense, the father of his country” – but the two who actually have any claim to legitimacy are his two daughters, who both marry immigrants. The older daughter marries a Frenchman named Marcelo Desnoyers (Josef Swickard) while the younger one, Elena (Mabel Van Buren), marries a German, Karl von Hartrott (Alan Hale). The Hartrotts have three sons, including Otto (Stuart Holmes), and Karl puts his three boys through military drills much like the way Baron von Trapp raised his kids in The Sound of Music until Maria came along and loosened him up. Madariaga aches for a son from his other son-in-law and the kid finally arrives in the person of Julio (Rudolph Valentino), though when Julio grows up he’s uninterested in the rough-and-tumble life of a rancher. Instead he hangs out in a disreputable district of Buenos Aires and frequents a tango bar – and the sight of Valentino dancing the tango with an unnamed partner became one of the most iconic star introductions in movie history.

Early on both Marcelo Desnoyers and Karl von Hartrott decide to relocate their families to their ancestral homelands, whereupon the Hartrotts all become good little German soldiers while Julio, who still couldn’t care less about his family or (once it starts) the war, hangs out at the Tango Palace and starts a career as an artist. Whether he’s any good at it or not is unclear (in Blasco Ibáñez’s book, which I’ve read, it’s made clear he’s just mediocre), but he runs up big tabs at various hostelries, eateries and wherever else he can burn through his family’s money. He lives in a rooming house with two freeloader “friends,” a dispossessed Spanish aristocrat named Argensola (Bowditch M. Turner) and Tchernoff (Nigel de Brulier), a Russian refugee who lives upstairs from them and has a large book containing Albrecht Dürer’s famous etchings of the Book of Revelation, which is where the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse come in. When World War I – or the “Great War,” as it was usually called before there was a World War II – breaks out, Tchernoff predicts that it is the start of the Biblical apocalypse and the Four Horsemen – Conquest (pioneering African-American actor Noble Johnson), Famine, Pestilence (C. C. Cooper) and Death – will run roughshod throughout Europe and claim the lives of millions of people.

Eventually Julio falls into a semi-serious relationship with Marguerite Laurier (Alice Terry, who became Mrs. Rex Ingram and starred in a lot of his movies whether she was any good in the roles or not, which sad to say she usually wasn’t), wife of Étienne Laurier (John St. Polis), a rich man whom her family forced her to marry. On a tip, Étienne visits Julio’s room and finds him and Marguerite smooching. Étienne challenges Julio to a duel, but fortunately the outbreak of the war calls it off. Eventually Otto von Hartrott ends up in the German army and participates in a siege of the great castle Marcelo Desnoyers bought on the banks of the Marne River, and as the Germans retreat in the face of a French counter-offensive they blow up the castle (a sequence that is one of the most viscerally exciting parts of the novel and still packs a punch in the film), Marguerite Laurier becomes a nurse and helps take care of the wounded, and her husband Étienne is blinded by a war injury; she ends up as his caregiver but doesn’t want him to know that, which is more believable in a silent film than it would have been in a talkie when the audience would have been wondering why he didn’t recognize her voice. Julio’s younger sister Chichí (Virginia Warwick) marries René Lacour (Derrick Ghent), sole heir of Senator Lacour (Mark Fenton), who after wangling an assignment far from the front lines eventually volunteers for an artillery corps and ends up losing his left arm in combat. Julio finally has an attack of conscience, national pride or sheer embarrassment and enlists, and predictably life as a soldier turns him around and lets loose his inner hero – until both his and Otto von Hartrott’s lives end when they confront each other in a foxhole and a stray shell from one side or the other takes out both of them simultaneously.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is a great movie, a finely wrought adaptation of a novel that’s surprisingly impressive for its time and its didactic purpose, ably scripted by June Mathis and both produced and directed (the actual credit is “directed and supervised”) by Rex Ingram, one of the greatest and most woefully underrated directors who ever lived and worked. I remember being astounded when I read in Gary Carey’s book on MGM, All the Stars in Heaven, that Ingram was born in Dublin and his birth name was Reginald Ingram Montgomery Hitchcock – so two of the greatest directors of all time were born with the name “Hitchcock,” and though they achieved fame in different eras of film history Rex Ingram was only eight years older than Alfred Hitchcock. (Ingram was born in 1892, Hitchcock in 1900.) The Four Horsemen is that rarity in cinematic history, a true ensemble movie – Valentino dominates every scene he’s in but it is not a star vehicle for him (or anyone else) – though the other thing that’s amazing about it besides the overall quality of the direction and script is how powerfully understated Valentino’s acting is. One of Valentino’s biographers, Irving Shulman, told a story of how he and Richard Barthelmess both auditioned for D. W. Griffith, and Barthelmess got the part because he played subtly and powerfully while Valentino overacted. Evidently Valentino got the message, because here and in his subsequent starring vehicles Valentino underplays so well he seems almost not to be acting at all. Valentino’s less-is-more acting style probably would have fitted him for sound films if he’d lived long enough to make them, even though I remember downloading his two surviving records (both made for Brunswick in 1923 but not released until 1938, 12 years after his death) from archive.org and being startled that Valentino’s voice was a baritone and not the tenor I’d always imagined from his silent films. It gave me an interesting insight into why so many late-1920’s moviegoers were flummoxed by many early talkies featuring stars who turned out to have quite different voices from the ones they’d always imagined!

Who Killed Our Father? (NB Thrilling Films 6, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, May 27) my husband Charles and I watched back-to-back movies on Lifetime, Who Killed Our Father? (announced as a 2023 “premiere”) and How to Live Your Best Death, a rerun from 2022. Who Killed Our Father? was directed by Roxanne Boisvert from a script by Melissa Cassera, and turned out to be a well-constructed thriller with a genuinely surprising twist ending (more on that later). It begins with an alternation between Atlanta and Philadelphia, with the Atlanta part of the story headlined by Leila Moore (Kirsten Comerford). Leila responds to a call for help from her old foster sister Iris (Sofia Salituro), but by the time she arrives it’s too late: Iris has already been stabbed to death by a no-good live-in boyfriend, and the guy attacks Leila as well but she’s able to stab him to death with his own knife. Leila calls her own no-good live-in boyfriend, Brad (Mikael Conde), a gambling addict who’s run up a $50,000 debt to his bookie, and Brad tells her not to call the police but to leave the bodies of Iris and her no-good beau behind. The Philadelphia story involves a sullen teenage girl named Violet Hyatt (Devin Cecchetto) whose father, Scott Hyatt (Jeff Teravainen), was just clubbed to death in a local park where he was training for an upcoming marathon race. Scott pissed off Violet by almost immediately remarrying Nora (Joanne Boland) just months after the death of Violet’s biological mother, and the loss of her dad on top of her mom only amps up Violet’s bitterness.

What links the two women is that Scott Hyatt was the father of both of them; well before he’d met Violet’s mom he’d had an affair with a woman who, once they broke up, descended into drug addiction and ultimately died of an overdose. But before all that happened she gave birth to Scott’s daughter Leila, who was taken away from her mom when she was 10 and run through the foster-care system. The two women find out about each other through taking home DNA tests from a company that reports they both have familial matches they didn’t know about. Leila runs away to Philadelphia partly to get away from the bookies that are threatening to kill Brad – it’s dawned on her that the longer she stays with him, the more danger she’s in from his enemies – and partly to meet the sister she never knew she had. Leila and Violet form an uneasy partnership to find out who killed Scott, since the local police are stumped and don’t have any leads. Nora, who expects to inherit Scott’s thriving real-estate business, offers Leila a place to stay in the guest room. Later, while going through Scott’s old suits in the family closet trying to pick out which one he should be buried in, Violet finds a receipt for a necklace worth $8,000 from a high-end jeweler in town and is determined to figure out what the item is and who he bought it for. The first time Violet goes to the jeweler it’s “closed for inventory,” and the second time she goes she runs into a very haughty counterperson who tells her all their sales are “confidential.” Violet takes advantage of a conveniently timed phone call to sneak a peek at the store’s ledger, but the counterperson catches her and threatens to call the police. But before she’s caught Violet gets the information she wanted about what the item was, and later she recognizes it when she sees it on the corpse of Nora’s personal assistant, Hazel Carter (Konstantina Mantelos).

Hazel has been found dead in her apartment, victim of an apparent suicide – the cops assume that because what reads like a suicide note has been found on her phone – only Violet discovers one of the pills Hazel supposedly took, does an online search from the number on the pill, and later finds a bottle of the same medication inside a drawer in the guest room where Leila is staying. Until Hazel is found dead, writer Cassera has carefully built her up as a potential suspect, and my husband Charles was a bit ashamed for having fallen for the red herring and identified Hazel as the murderer until she herself died. There are plenty of other suspects around, including the one we never actually see but we’re told about: the man Hazel had been seeing until she dumped him to have the affair with Scott. There’s also Brad, who’s followed Leila from Atlanta to Philadelphia, and the mysterious bookies who are still after him for their $50,000 and threaten to kill not only Leila but Violet as well if they’re not paid. At one point someone flattens a tire on Leila’s car and then Brad comes along to help her change it (which reminded me of the 1920 Charlie Chaplin film The Kid, in which the titular kid, played by Jackie Coogan, throws rocks through store windows and then Chaplin, as an itinerant glazier, “happens” to come along and offer to fix them), and later on Leila is in a parking garage and has to duck after someone takes a shot at her. There’s also a subplot in which Nora offers Leila Hazel’s old job as her personal assistant, gives her a $5,000 cash advance – which Leila immediately gives to scapegrace Brad, who questions it because it’s only one-tenth of what he needs – and, since Leila has refused to steal her dad’s $50,000 watch for Brad to give to his bookies, Nora pays off the debt herself, or at least says she has.

It all resolves itself eventually when Scott’s business partner Peter (Frank Fiola) returns from Dubai to read Scott’s will – which turns out to have been changed a week before his death to disinherit Nora and leave his entire fortune to Violet. In a real surprise [spoiler alert!], Nora turns out to have been the killer; she set herself a seemingly unshakable alibi by saying she was at home the night of Scott’s murder watching a movie with her sister Faith Brewer (Angela Besharah), only just before the movie started Nora gave Faith a glass of wine spiked with a powerful drug that rendered her unconscious so Nora could borrow Faith’s car and drive out to the spot where Scott would be running so she could bash his head in with the proverbial blunt instrument. Leila and Violet discovered this from the security camera footage given them by neighbor Maya (JaNae Arnogan), yet another potential suspect since she was interested in Scott herself and hoped she’d be able to land him after his wife died until Nora beat her to the punch. Ultimately Nora is arrested (not killed) and Leila and Violet decide to move in together in Scott’s old house and take over his business. What I liked about Who Killed Our Father? is its relative understatement; there are no obvious scenery-chewing melodramatics and even the principal villain, Nora, is played as a matter-of-fact schemer rather than a demon from hell like so many previous Lifetime villainesses. I also liked the fact that Kirsten Comerford and Devin Cecchetto looked enough alike to be completely believable as sisters; in fact, they were close enough I could have believed them as full sisters instead of just half-sisters. It’s long been one of my pet peeves in movies to have actors who have virtually no physical resemblance to each other at all playing characters we’re told are biologically related!

How to Live Your Best Death (Synthetic Cinema International, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Curiously, the movie Lifetime showed right after Who Killed Our Father?, How to Live Your Best Death, was in some ways the virtual opposite – a tale with virtually no grey areas, in which the good people are all good, the bad people are all bad, and there’s no attempt either to keep us in suspense as to who the villain is or motivate them to create any real pathos – and yet the fun this time was precisely in the black-and-white nature of the story. It was basically a thrill ride through the mentoring-turned-deadly relationship between heroine Kristin Adams (Danielle Baez) and the sinister, domineering “life coach” she hires, Ashley Thomas (Alissa Filoramo). Kristin is an aspiring public-relations consultant at a firm called BeSpoke until she’s aced out of a promotion she deserved by a slimy male co-worker named Gus (Adam Fontana) who builds his contacts by playing lawn golf with the clients on the roof of BeSpoke’s headquarters. Kristin’s sister Sara (Saman Hasan, who looks enough like Danielle Baez they’re believable as blood relatives), suggests she hire a life coach, and after searching through the Internet and rejecting candidates who offer either help with her ascension to an astral plane or a successful struggle against her inner demons, Kristin lights on Ashley Thomas’s Web page and hires her without doing any other online checking (which becomes an important plot point later). We already know Ashley is a demented villainess because we’ve seen a prologue showing Ashley with a previous client (played by the film’s assistant costume designer, Molly Morgan) whom she killed when she didn’t live up to Ashley’s empyrean expectations, jamming her full of prescription medications to make the death look like suicide. (So both of Lifetime’s movies last night featured murderesses offing people by making it look like suicide via drugs.)

Once Ashley signs on as Kristin’s “life coach,” she takes over Kristin’s life with the thoroughgoing efficiency of a drill sergeant, setting rules about how she can drink, what she can eat, whom she can go out with and what sort of job she can have. On Ashley’s urging, Kristin quits BeSpoke and seeks out an interview with their principal local competitor, InterVision. Her interviewer, Bill Kelly (Al Pagano), is unimpressed and throws Kristin’s résumé in the trash, only Ashley spots it there and determines to blackmail Bill into hiring Kristin after all – which she does by cruising Bill in a bar, taking him to a hotel room, offering him a bondage session and then leaving him there after taking photos of them together and threatening to send them to his wife. (It’s never made clear by whoever the writers were – imdb.com lists Rachel Annette Helson as the director but doesn’t offer any script credits – just how Bill gets out or how he deals with the embarrassment of the predicament in which he’s let himself be lured.) Later Ashley follows Kristin and her sister Sara to a bar, where they cruise a hot, muscular young man – only Ashley overpowers him in the men’s room and threatens to beat him up, or even kill him, if he doesn’t leave immediately and stand Kristin up, which he does. Sara goes after Ashley and does an online search which reveals that she was previously a professional therapist until she lost her license after patients complained of her maniacally overbearing ways with them, following which she re-invented herself as a “life coach” and kept on doing pretty much the same thing. Later she bribes a lobby clerk in Ashley’s building (at first she comes on to the guy but he says laconically that 30 or even 20 years before that might have worked, but now he’ll let her in and risk losing his job only for a cash payment) to let her into Ashley’s apartment, where she finds a beloved old cup of Kristin’s, one of the items Ashley had decreed were “trash” and broken into Kristin’s apartment to dispose of. Alas, though Sara is Kristin’s sister and both women are white, Sara fulfills the role of The Heroine’s Best Friend Who Discovers the Villain’s Plot But Gets Killed Before She Can Warn Her that’s usually a Black character; Ashley catches her in the apartment and strangles her with a red belt.

Ashley then turns up at a celebration of Kristin’s presentation having won InterVision a major new account, demanding credit for the victory, after she previously dispatched Kristin’s old rival Gus by overpowering him during one of his rooftop golf sessions, forcing him to sign a “suicide” note, and then pushing him off the roof. Bill Kelly is there and recognizes her immediately but is too embarrassed to say anything, and Kristin ushers Ashley out and determines to fire her. Ashley retaliates by taking surveillance photos of Kristin and her boyfriend from work, the racially ambiguous Kevin Stitt (Giovanni DeVal), smooching in a parking lot after a dinner date. She has prints made and sent anonymously to InterVision’s boss, Diane Vance (Gretchen Allison), and Diane calls Kristin into her office and gives her a dressing-down, saying it’s inappropriate for two co-workers in the same office to be having an affair. Ashley also ambushes Kevin and injects him with a powerful drug (we’ve already seen her prepare several hypodermics of the stuff and put them into a case so she’ll have them ready at the call) that renders him unconscious and comatose for about a week or so. It builds to a typical Lifetime climax in which Ashley gruesomely reveals to Kristin that she’s killed Sara through a photo board she’s made up of pics of Sara’s corpse. The two have a fight to the death in which Ashley tries both to stab Sara and inject her with the same drug she used on Kevin, but eventually Kristin jabs Ashley with the drug instead – though the finale is one of Lifetime’s annoying open-ended endings in which Ashley, in jail awaiting trial for Sara’s murder, rehearses her tired old I-can-build-you-up-into-anything spiel to use on the lawyer assigned to defend her. (One hopes the attorney will be a jaded old public defender who will tell her, “Lady, don’t bother.”)

Though it’s cut so closely to previous Lifetime formulae they might as well have called it The Perfect Life Coach, The Wrong Life Coach or The Life Coach She Met Online, How to Live Your Best Death is a lot more fun than most of these movies, partly due to the splendid visual power of Rachel Annette Helson’s almost Gothic direction and partly because of the full-blooded bad-girl performance of Alissa Filoramo as Ashley. What S. J. Perelman famously wrote of Erich von Stroheim applies just as well here: “Whatever von Stroheim’s shortcomings as an artist, he was consistent. When he set out to limn a louse, he put his back into it. He never palliated his villainy, never helped old ladies across the street to show that he was a sweet kid au fond or prated about his Oedipus complex like the Percy boys who portray heavies today (1952). I remember Grover Jones, a scenarist of long experience, once coaching me in Hollywood in the proper method of characterizing the menace in a horse opera. ‘The minute he pulls in on the Overland Stage,’ expounded Jones, ‘he should kick the nearest dog.’ Von Stroheim not only kicked the dog; he kicked the owner and the S.P.C.A. for good measure.” Obviously Alissa Filoramo had the same sheer joy in playing evil that Stroheim did; she’s a total amoral creep with utterly no redeeming values whatsoever, and though How to Live Your Best Death might have been a stronger work of art with a writer like Christine Conradt’s knack for giving her villains multidimensionality, it wouldn’t have been such a great showcase for Filoramo, who really becomes, to sex-change another famous line attached to Stroheim, the woman you love to hate.

Anything Goes (Barbican Theatre London, PBS, 2021, originally aired May 11, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, May 26) I watched what turned out to be a repeat telecast from May 2022 of a performance of Cole Porter’s classic 1934 musical Anything Goes from the Barbican Theatre in London. I’ve seen the show “live” before at the late, lamented Starlight Bowl venue in Balboa Park in 1988, and I also think I saw a previous PBS telecast of the version presented at New York’s Lincoln Center in 1987 – though the Starlight Bowl production followed a revised version of the show created by Porter in 1962 and incorporating songs from some of his other shows into the score. That 1962 version, an off-Broadway production starring Eileen Rogers as Reno Sweeney, a disgraced ex-evangelist turned cabaret singer because she needed another way to make a living – a role Porter and librettists Guy Bolton, P. G. Wodehouse, Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse originally wrote for the formidable Ethel Merman – and Hal “Barney Miller” Linden as the juvenile male lead, Billy Crocker – was the last Cole Porter musical produced on stage in New York during Porter’s lifetime. The show had something of a star-crossed history because it was originally supposed to be about a catastrophic shipwreck and a group of ill-assorted travelers stuck together on a desert island – but just as the show was about to start rehearsals a real-life ship disaster, a fire at sea aboard the S.S. Morro Castle, claimed the lives of 138 people. Producer Vinton Freedley decided that audiences would no longer find the subject of a ship disaster an appropriate subject for musical comedy, but he’d already ordered the expensive ship set built. With the original librettists, Bolton and Wodehouse, having returned to their native Britain and therefore no longer available for rewrites, Freedley had his chosen director, Lindsay, write a whole new script with nothing in common with the original except that both took place aboard an ocean liner making a transatlantic crossing.

Lindsay brought in Crouse – starting a writing partnership that lasted decades – and the two came up with a tale of Billy Crocker (Samuel Edwards), a junior stockbroker at the firm of Elisha “Eli” Whitney (Gary Wilmot), hopelessly in love with Hope Harcourt (Nicole-Lily Baisden), daughter of society lady Mrs. Evangeline Harcourt (Felicity Kendal). One problem is that Mrs. Harcourt has already arranged for Hope to marry Lord Evelyn Oakleigh (Haydn Oakley), a typically stuck-up upper-class British twit who carries with him a notebook in which he writes down American slang expressions – only he keeps getting them wrong. The company operating the ship, the S.S. American, is upset that there are no real celebrities aboard – Charlie Chaplin was scheduled to make the crossing on the American but at the last minute he took another company’s liner instead – and the closest they have to someone anyone’s heard of is Reno Sweeney (Sutton Foster, who first played the part in 2011 and won a Tony Award, her second, for it; she’s far more musical than Merman, but then there are rabid dogs out there more musical than Merman, and Foster actually phrases the songs quite well even though a few high notes are rather iffy – accidental or intentional on Foster’s part to make her seem more “Mermanesque”?) and Moonface Martin (Robert Lindsay), a hapless gangster who in the original script had to content himself with the title “Public Enemy No. 13.” There’s the predictable set of complications along the way, as at one point Billy is disguised as Snake-Eyes Johnson, Public Enemy No. 1, and it’s an indication of the loony-tunes comedy of this show that while people think he’s a hard-edged gangster he’s féted aboard the ship and becomes the toast of the voyage, while when he’s exposed as an innocent naïf he’s thrown into the ship’s brig along with Martin. Eventually all works out and Billy and Hope get married, as do Evelyn and Reno, and Eli and Mrs. Harcourt; in the original script the three weddings take place on Evelyn’s estate in Britain, but in this version they take place on the S.S. American just before it docks, with the ship’s captain officiating.

What has kept this show on the world’s various stages is Cole Porter’s score – though some of the best-known songs in it are actually from some of his other shows, and one great song, “Easy to Love,” was originally written for Anything Goes but was cut from the show in early rehearsals because it contained notes too high for the original Billy Crocker, William Gaxton. (It made its debut in Porter’s film score for his first original movie, 1936’s Born to Dance, with a singer with even weaker high notes than Gaxton’s: James Stewart, who actually boasted in the first That’s Entertainment compilation film from 1974 that it was a tribute to the greatness of the song and Porter’s enormous talent as a songwriter that “Easy to Love” became a standard despite him introducing it.) Among the Porter classics here are the title song, “You’re the Top,” “I Get a Kick Out of You,” “It’s De-Lovely,” “All Through the Night” and a great mock spiritual called “Blow, Gabriel, Blow” that keys off Reno’s past as an evangelist before some unspecified scandal tumbled her off the top of the Bible biz. (I suspect the original book writers were thinking of Aimée Semple McPherson, whose promising career as the first radio evangelist crashed and burned when she faked her own kidnapping to spend a hot weekend with her radio engineer.)

There were actually quite a few pop spirituals written around this time, including “Sing, You Sinners,” “Is That Religion?,” “Stay on the Right Side of the Road,” “The Lonesome Road” (written by white singer Gene Austin and brilliantly covered by Louis Armstrong in 1931 in what was arguably the first rap record; he plays “Reverend Satchelmouth” and in the record’s funniest line he tells his congregation, “I’d like to thank you for your offering. Of course, it could have been better; $2 more and I could have got my shoes out of pawn”) and the two Bessie Smith recorded stunningly in 1930, “On Revival Day” and “Moan, You Mourners.” (Bessie sang these songs with so much more authority and power than she brought to the increasingly tawdry and sexually explicit blues material Columbia was given her then that I’ve often wondered how her career – and her life – might have gone if she, like Ethel Waters and Robert Wilkins, had become a born-again Christian and re-invented herself as a gospel singer.) I hadn’t seen any version of Anything Goes in decades and I remember the script’s humor as being less low-brow than the version presented here – but the cast was first-rate all around (despite the modern-day annoyance of so-called “non-traditional casting” in which we’re expected to believe that Mrs. Harcourt is white and her daughter is Black) and the ensemble dancing, especially in the two big tap numbers, truly spectacular. The Brits certainly did a good job with one of the crown jewels of American musical theatre!

North to Alaska (20th Century-Fox, 1960)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, May 25) my husband Charles and I watched a used DVD from the North Park Library of an engaging if hardly great movie: North to Alaska, a 1960 vehicle for John Wayne with a strong, if rather oddly assorted, supporting cast and Henry Hathaway – the director you got then if you had John Wayne for your movie and his best directors, John Ford and Howard Hawks, weren’t available. The film is one of those movies that never quite settles on a tone; one minute it’s slapstick comedy, the next romantic comedy, the next melodrama, and only rarely (in just one scene, an armed confrontation between Wayne and his mining partner Stewart Granger on one side and various claim jumpers on the other) the sort of action movie one expects from a Wayne vehicle. The plot deals with the Yukon gold rush in Alaska in 1901 and casts Wayne and Granger as Sam McCord and George Pratt, respectively, who’ve struck it rich with a highly productive gold mine. Pratt wants McCord to go to Seattle to bring back his fiancée Jenny Lamont (Lilyan Chauvin), whom he left behind there promising to send for her when he struck it rich. It’s now three years later and Pratt has struck it rich, but in the meantime Jenny got tired of waiting for him and married a scrawny little nobody with male-pattern baldness because he was rich. (Jenny’s true motives become apparent when Sam hunts her down and tells him that he and Pratt are now worth $1 million each. “A million dollars?” Jenny says, obviously wondering if maybe she should have held out and got a better deal on George than on the milquetoast she did marry for money.)

Bereft of George’s actual girlfriend, Sam hits on the idea of getting him a replacement, and in search of one he high-tails it to “The Hen House,” the local “dance hall” (the standard Production Code-era euphemism for a whorehouse) and meets Michelle “Angel” Bonnet (Capucine, t/n Germaine Lefebvre). Since she’s French, like Jenny, Sam offers to take her to Nome and pass her off as the original Jenny, thinking George won’t know the difference after three years apart. Once Sam takes Michelle back to Nome, she attracts the decidedly unwelcome amorous attentions of the film’s principal villain, unscrupulous club owner Frankie Cannon (Ernie Kovacs), whose thin “roo” moustache and overall imperious manner made me think, “Ah, this is what Harvey Korman was parodying as ‘Hedley Lamarr’ in Blazing Saddles.” It turns out Frankie and Michelle had a previous romantic relationship in New Orleans, where she was plying the oldest profession (or at least as much as that could be hinted at in a late Production Code-era film) and he was one of her johns. It’s clear he’d like to resume their sexual relationship and she couldn’t be less interested in it. In one respect North to Alaska is a film ahead of its time; Michelle is depicted as a feisty, independent character with her own mind – especially ironic given that the actress playing her was on record as saying, “Men spoil women in America. A woman needs to know that the man is her master.”

In other respects it’s a film very much of its time, a carefully assembled vehicle for John Wayne – after watching Sylvester Stallone the night before in Creed and marveling that his acting hadn’t improved one whit between the original Rocky in 1975 and Creed 40 years later, it was ironic in a way that we were watching a man who became an iconic superstar despite his virtual inability to act (though in at least one film, Howard Hawks’ Red River, either Hawks or the writers broke through and actually got a genuinely powerful and emotional performance out of him) – in which Hathaway and a stellar team of writers (John Lee Mahin, Martin Rackin, Claude Binyon and an uncredited Ben Hecht and Wendell Mayes) deliberately crafted a story that would allow Wayne to do all the things he could do well and avoid the things he couldn’t. Among the things Wayne could do well were both straight action and comedy action – the opening fight scene in Kovacs’ bar is wonderfully funny even though one suspects (as one does through the entire movie) that Wayne is being stunt-doubled through much of it. (Part of the fun watching the film is seeing if you can tell when John Wayne stepped out of the scene and his stunt double came in.) It’s also odd for a movie set in Alaska that there’s no snow – though imdb.com lists the Canadian Yukon as one of the locations it’s pretty clear that most of the mountain scenery came from southern California – and almost no twilight.

North to Alaska is the sort of movie in which the filmmakers deliberately tried to include multiple elements that would draw disparate audience members in to buy tickets, including trying to appeal to the teen audience by casting then-teen idol Fabian as George’s younger brother Billy. Billy naturally got a schoolkid’s crush on Michelle as soon as she enters – Sam has offered to take her to the mine to protect her from Frankie’s slimy advances – and the two of them get plastered on the supply of champagne George had been saving to celebrate Jenny’s arrival. (Ya remember Jenny?) Fabian gets to sing one song on screen, a limp romantic ballad called “If You Knew,” which led me to joke, “Is this the boy that was supposed to save rock ‘n’ roll after Elvis got drafted and Buddy Holly died?” Much better remembered is the film’s great title song, sung by country star Johnny Horton over the opening credits and a huge hit for him even though he didn’t live long enough to enjoy it; he died in a car crash just days after the record was released. In fact, Horton wasn’t the only person associated with this movie to meet an early and macabre demise; two years later Ernie Kovacs also would die in a car accident (and he’d become a posthumous poster child for seat belts; his name was frequently invoked during the subsequent campaign to have seat belts required in all cars and their use made mandatory), and after a lifetime of dealing with depression and bipolar disorder Capucine committed suicide by leaping out of an eight-story building in 1990. (It was apparently not the first time she’d tried it.)

North to Alaska builds to a great finale, a no-holds-barred battle in a muddy street in which Kovacs’ character emerges plastered with goo that makes him look like a science-fiction monster in a really cheap “B” movie, while Sam McCord a.k.a. John Wayne is neatly paired off with Michelle a.k.a. Capucine (I’d always assumed she got her name from the capuchin monkey, but it turns out according to imdb.com that it really came from the French word for the nasturtium flower) despite his demented assertions all movie that marriage is slavery and he won’t allow himself to be tied down to any one woman. At least North to Alaska is a souvenir of the days when color movies were actually colorful; the cinematographer was Leon Shamroy, and he loved neon-bright colors and the sparkling glow of sunny daylight throughout his films. If you wanted a genuinely dramatic use of color, Shamroy was not your man (John Alton was); but if you just wanted your film to sparkle brightly whether that made any sense in terms of your story, he was the right cameraman for you.

Creed (MGM, Warner Bros., New Line Cinema, Chartoff-Winkler Productions.2015_

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, May 24) my husband Charles and I watched a really schizoid movie, Creed, a 2015 film directed and co-written by Ryan Coogler. On one hand it’s a Coogleresque saga of a young Black kid who learns of his family’s history and becomes a figure of destiny who has to prove himself in combat with his family’s enemies, which in essence was also the plot of Coogler’s best-known film, Black Panther. On the other hand, it’s also an episode in the ongoing Rocky universe, featuring not only Rocky Balboa himself (played, as always, by Sylvester Stallone, who couldn’t act when he made the original Rocky in 1975 and hadn’t got any better at it in the intervening 40 years) but also Rocky’s principal opponent in the first film, Apollo Creed. Michael B. Jordan, who also starred in Coogler’s first directorial effort, Fruitvale Station (named after the BART station that serves Black Oakland), plays Adonis Johnson, who unbeknownst to him (but pretty much beknownst to us from the get-go) is really the son of the late heavyweight champion Apollo Creed. We first see him as a boy (played by Alex Henderson) in a detention facility in Oakland in 1998 (Coogler is from Oakland and he likes to begin his heroes’ quests there) in which he’s been put in solitary confinement because of a fight he got into with one of the other inmates. An immaculately dressed Black woman named Mary Anne (Phylicia Rashad) shows up at the facility and demands to see him. At first Adonis is skeptical, thinking she’s a social worker come to take him to a group home, but she turns out to be … well, not his mother, exactly, but as close to one as he’s going to get.

It turns out Adonis was the product of Apollo Creed and a woman with whom he was having extra-relational activity, but with both his biological parents dead Mary Anne, Creed’s widow, is offering to take him in and raise him as her own. She lives in a palatial mansion – obviously Apollo Creed saved his money and left his wife a sizable fortune that’s still enough to support both her and his son by another woman – and young Adonis is stunned by his new surroundings in a scene that echoes everything from Oliver Twist to Annie. The scene flashes forward to 2015 L.A., where Adonis Johnson (he’s using his biological mother’s last name) is an executive at some firm or another (it’s not clear just what his job is or what the company he works for does). He’s just received a big promotion, but he decides to quit and pursue his long-standing dream of becoming a boxer, in search of which he’s already been sneaking off to Tijuana for 15 professional fights in Mexico. He’s entirely self-trained, and he’s decided that in order to fulfill his dream of becoming a champion prizefighter he needs to go to Philadelphia and get Rocky Balboa to train him. Rocky is semi-retired and running a restaurant called Adrian’s; he’s disinterested in getting involved in the fight game again, even as a trainer, but eventually Johnson talks him into it. Rocky recognizes him as Creed’s son but Johnson swears him to secrecy about it because he wants to make it on his own and not with his dad’s name and legend boosting him. Johnson also has a meet-cute with a hot young Black woman neighbor named Bianca (Tessa Thompson), an aspiring singer who’s going deaf (she points out the hearing aids in her ears to Johnson) but is determined to pursue her musical career for as long as she can. Johnson lands his first professional bout in the U.S. when a trainer who’s an old friend of Rocky’s needs an opponent for the fighter he’s promoting as the next light-heavyweight contender, Pete Sporino (Ritchie Coster), whose lithe white body is covered virtually head to toe with tattoos.

Creed easily beats Sporino, and this sets him up for a championship fight with the reigning fighter in his division, “Pretty” Ricky Conlan (Tony Bellew) from Liverpool. (There’s a brief bit of narration about how Liverpool is a rough town and people who grow up there look to their town heroes for inspiration – which had both Charles and I doing double-takes because, let’s face it, the most famous Liverpudlians of all time were The Beatles. Also, both Charles and I had a lot of fun with the fact that this character has the same last name as I do.) Conlan is just emerging from a seven-year prison sentence and he’s already blown his first chance at a comeback fight by cracking the jaw of his opponent at the face-off ceremony, since Conlan couldn’t hold back his temper long enough to wait for the occasion when he was supposed to hit the guy. The film inevitably builds to a climactic fight at the arena in Liverpool, where Conlan and Creed (by now Johnson has been “outed” as Creed’s son after footage of his fight with Sporino went viral over the Internet and mainstream sports media) are scheduled for 12 rounds (midway between a standard 10-round fight and a 15-round championship bout). Conlan is the heavy favorite both among the audience and the professional handicappers, especially since he’s taller than Creed and has longer arms – so, as Rocky explains to both Creed and us, Creed will have to get in under him to land any blows. In the end, just as Balboa did in the original 1975 Rocky, Creed “goes the distance” with Conlan but loses in a split decision – though apparently Coogler (or someone else) shot an alternate ending in which Creed wins, which might have actually made for a better conclusion. (Then again, it might not have, and I wish the makers of this DVD had included both endings on the disc.)

The reason I called Creed a schizoid movie is it’s caught between its place in the Rocky cycle and the deeper, richer work Ryan Coogler might have created if he’d been given his head and hadn’t had to deal with Sylvester Stallone as co-writer, co-producer and co-star. I used to joke about Stallone that he was undoubtedly jealous of his rivals as 1970’s male action stars: Clint Eastwood became an Academy Award-winning director who could make hit movies whether he starred in them or not, and Arnold Schwarzenegger became a two-term governor of California, while Stallone just got mired in action roles whose box-office appeal got smaller as his face got craggier and more, as Douglas Sirk put it about John Wayne, “petrified.” One can sense Ryan Coogler groping towards themes he powerfully realized in Black Panther: the responsibilities one has to one’s ancestors whether one grew up in a “normal” family or not; the burden of heritage and the quest for self-definition; the role of the lone Black hero in a culture determined and largely defined by whites. At the same time Creed misses as much as it hits, though the final fight is brilliantly staged and showcases, as few fight films ever have (1949’s The Set-Up is the exception that proves the rule), the sheer brutality of boxing and the bloodiness (literally as well as figuratively) of the sport.

The Man With My Husband's Face (RNR Media, Almost Never Films, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (May 21) my husband Charles and I watched two recent movies on Lifetime: the previous night’s “premiere,” The Man With My Husband’s Face, and last night’s “premiere,” Lies Beneath the Sea (made under the working titles Deadly Suspicion and Killer in the Cabin). The Man With My Husband’s Face was actually pretty good even though it started out as the old chestnut about the workaholic husband, Heath Grierson (Thomas Gipson, nice-looking if a bit on the nerdy side), and the irritated wife, Katrina (Koko Marshall, top-billed), who wants some social time with him but is frustrated at how many work meetings he has to take. Katrina has a job of her own writing pithy sayings for an Internet app, though she’s also at work on a novel about the 1940’s women’s baseball leagues. Heath is a free-lance realtor who’s involved with a major land development. One Saturday morning Katrina insists on taking them kayaking, only Heath at first begs off saying he has yet another meeting, then agrees to go but insists that they have to finish and be done by 2:30 p.m. so he can do his meeting. At the kayak rental place, Heath and Katrina has an argument and Heath tears off in a kayak without her. She follows but gets concerned when her ride ends and there’s no sign of him. She reports him as missing to the police, who send a rather hostile Black detective named Frank Brand (Benjamin David Dennis) who thinks Katrina is hallucinating. For the first half of the movie Katrina tries to convince this nasty cop that she’s actually seen her presumably dead husband out and about, and Brand is equally convinced that she’s just seeing things.

There’s also a side character named Crampton Ligotti, who’s either Katrina’s book agent, divorce attorney (she’d been contemplating leaving Heath at the start of the movie), or both. Ligotti, a grey-haired senior citizen, warns Katrina that there’s a loophole in her will she needs to come in and correct immediately: there’s no provision to protect her if she’s declared mentally incompetent. “Aha!” we think. “Another deposit in the Screenwriters’ Cliché Bank for later withdrawal.” Katrina also notices that she’s being stalked by a mystery woman, who presents herself as psychiatrist Dr. Prisca Giddings (Katie Page). She tells Katrina that [spoiler alert!] the man who’s moved back in with her who claims to be Heath is really Heath’s long-lost twin brother, Jacob Vance. Dr. Giddings explains that Heath and Jacob were both farmed out for adoption by different couples, and though they’re otherwise identical Jacob has a leaf tattoo on his right ankle. Because the family that adopted Heath was a good deal better off financially than the family that adopted Jacob, Jacob is determined to knock off Heath and take his place as a well-to-do realtor with a hot wife. Dr. Giddings tells Katrina to sneak a peek at “Heath’s” right ankle and see if she spots the tattoo. Only writer Taylor Warren Goff has another surprise up their sleeve (I wrote “their” because I’m not sure whether Goff is a man, a woman or something in between): it turns out [double spoiler alert!] that there is no long-lost twin. Instead Heath and his girlfriend, masseuse Ivy Kascmarek, concocted this plot by which the two would drive Katrina crazy and have her committed. This included Ivy posing as the nonexistent “Dr. Prisca Giddings” and the two of them staging a fake “therapy session,” of which they show a video recording to Katrina, in which “Jacob” reacts violently to the news that he has a twin and tips over the coffee table in her live/work space, storming out with a vow to kill the “twin” and take his place.

Their reason is that the company that developed the app Katrina writes for (ya remember the app?) is about to go public, which means that Katrina’s stock options, worthless at present, will be worth millions – and with Katrina declared incompetent and nothing to protect her in her will (since one of the two conspirators has conveniently dispatched Crampton Ligotti by breaking into his office and slicing his throat with a knife), Heath will have total control over all that money. Eventually the plot is foiled and Detective Brand finally catches on that Katrina is not crazy and she’s been the victim of a quite elaborate plot to make her seem so. The bad guys are arrested (in Ivy’s case) or killed (in Heath’s – or was it the other way around?) and Katrina goes on to collect the millions from her stock options and to publish her book, of which she presents an autographed copy to Detective Brand along with an announcement that her next novel will be a crime thriller, presumably based on her own life. Ironically given imdb.com’s usual obsession with avoiding “spoilers,” their cast list partially gives the plot away by listing Katie Page as playing both “Prisca” and “Ivy,” which makes one (at least it made me) suspicious that the presumably helpful “therapist” was really not as she seemed. The Man With My Husband’s Face – well directed by Danny J. Boyle (he’s not the similarly named Academy Award-winning director of Slumdog Millionaire and Trainspotting, but he’s quite capable and definitely a cut above most Lifetime directors, and he moves this film fast enough we don’t have the chance to linger over the plot improbabilities) from Goff’s intriguing, if hard to believe, script – is actually a better-than-average Lifetime movie, delivering the network’s usual “pussies in peril” formula with more than the usual aplomb.

Lies Beneath the Sea (RNR Media, Almost Never Films, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (May 21) my husband Charles and I watched successive films on Lifetime, The Man With My Husband’s Face and Lies Beneath the Sea, and as so often happens with Lifetime the relative quality of the first film (it didn’t push the envelope of Lifetime’s formulae but did them better than usual, and I give director Danny J. Boyle a lot of credit for that) only made the second seem even worse. Also shot under the working titles Deadly Suspicion and Killer in the Cabin, Lies Beneath the Surface is not about a hunt for undersea treasure that may or may not actually exist, as the title they finally went with would seem to indicate. Instead it’s a tale about Hanna Nielsen (Lelia Symington), who runs a concession called Kayak Kountry in Clearwater, Florida. (At least this movie, unlike a lot of other Lifetime productions, is specific as to just where it takes place.) Hanna is still recovering from the long, slow, lingering death of her daughter from cancer – we get a few flashback glimpses of the poor daughter in a hospital bed with her head shaved and IV’s sticking out of her – and the resulting end of her marriage to her late daughter’s father, Tom Nielsen (Dean Deck). They’ve agreed to the terms of a divorce but Hanna hasn’t signed the papers yet, not out of any lingering hope of saving the marriage but just because she hasn’t got around to it, and Tom is pressuring her to sign them already because he has a new girlfriend (whom we never see) and wants to be free of Hanna so he can marry her. The moment Charles saw that this film centered around kayak rentals, just like the last one had, Charles inevitably joked about it – and I said, “Maybe the production companies got a package deal on kayaks.” (The two films were produced by the same companies: RNR Media, Almost Never Films, and distributor Reel One Entertainment.)

Actually, kayak rentals are far more central to this film than the last one (in which the kayak was just a convenient excuse to explain the male lead’s sudden and mysterious disappearance); Kayak Kountry is Hanna’s livelihood as well as her pride and joy. The plot begins in earnest when a woman, Kate Marks (Sara Malfara), and her daughter Sara (Alexa Carroll) show up and rent cabin 407, just across the pathway from Hanna’s cabin 406. At first they tell Hanna they’ve run away from an abusive husband back home in Texas (it’s not clear just where in Texas, though when the husband finally shows up in Clearwater we’re told he’s a law enforcement officer with something called the “SWPD,” which I had a lot of fun trying to figure out which Texas city that was). At first they seem like perfectly nice, rather skittish people on the run from a domestic abuser, but soon afterwards the husband, Jason Marks (Brad Worch II, who’s sexy enough we’re almost immediately aware he’s going to turn out to be a villain), invades their cabin. His presence, and that of his mother Alice (Rhonda Davis), immediately terrorizes Kate and Sara and nips in the bud a promising attraction between Sara and Hanna’s teenage assistant, Riley (Brett Cormier, easily the hottest guy in the film, just oozing twink-ish charm). Lies Beneath the Sea turns into an almost Gothic horror film, as we get glimpses of Jason terrorizing his wife and daughter and Alice – who comes off as the most monstrous mother-in-law since Endora, the one literally from hell Agnes Moorehead played so unforgettably in the 1960’s TV series Bewitched – intimidating Hanna and telling her not to be fooled by Kate’s innocent exterior.

The intimidation Alice and Jason aim at Hanna turns mean, as they first seek to sabotage Kayak Kountry with fake negative reviews online, then complain to the town authorities that Hanna is stalking them, and finally vandalize her entire stock of rental kayaks with black spray paint. The head of the local Chamber of Commerce calls Hanna in for a dressing-down and tells her not only that she can’t go around bad-mouthing the tourists that are the town’s livelihood, he pulls her business license so she can’t rent any more kayaks until he decides either to lift the ban or not. The only person who’s on Hanna’s side is a local cop named Officer Cooper (Michael Perl), who, in defiance of the usual Lifetime convention that hot, hunky guys are almost invariably villains, is Hanna’s former lover – a status they resume during the course of the film – and he talks a fellow cop out of arresting Hanna after Jason’s van window was smashed with an old kayaking trophy of Hanna’s. The trophy was stolen from Hanna’s cabin during a mysterious break-in at night for which we know either Alice or Jason Marks were responsible, but the cops still blame Hanna for the vandalism until Officer Cooper notices from the police photos that the broken glass from the window was outside the vehicle, not inside as it would have been if Hanna had committed the attack from outside. It ends, of course, with a final shoot-out in which Jason emerges from the shadows and hunts down Hanna and his own wife and daughter with a gun after he’s chained Kate and Sara to their beds with handcuffs. Alice accidentally shoots Jason with her own gun and the cops, now fully on Hanna’s side, arrest Jason and free Kate and Sara from his terrorism. Only they fail to find Alice’s body, and in a final shot that’s supposed to be chilling but is only yet another annoying Lifetime affectation, we see Alice inside a car, observing Kate and Sara with obviously sinister intent. Maybe this means a sequel is coming, maybe it doesn’t. After the relative quality of The Man With My Husband’s Face, Lies Beneath the Sea is a return to the slovenly form of so many Lifetime movies, and though José Montesinos is credited with both directing and editing it, he does only an O.K. job on both counts thanks to the ridiculous improbabilities of Matt Fitzsimons’ script.

Father Brown: "The Show Must Go On" (Britbox, BBC-TV, PBS, filmed 2022, aired 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, May 20) my husband Charles and I watched the latest episode of the British TV series Father Brown, based on a character created by G. K. Chesterton: a British Roman Catholic priest in a small town in central England in the early 1950’s who helps the police solve local crimes and frequently annoys them in the process of doing so. This Father Brown episode was called “The Show Must Go On” and listed a 2022 copyright date though it wasn’t shown, even in Britain, until February 17, 2023. It dealt with skullduggery amongst the Kembleford Players, an amateur theatrical group, rehearsing a production of William Shakespeare’s comedy Much Ado About Nothing. It was directed by Miranda Howard-Williams (given the similarity of the last names, I wondered if she’s the wife or a relative of the series’ star, Mark Williams, who plays Father Brown, but there’s no such indication on imdb.com) from a script by Sarah-Louise Hawkins. During a break in one of the play’s rehearsals, leading man Jeremy Sanford (Mark Fleischmann) is found dead of an agricultural pesticide which was fed to him by spiking his omnipresent flask with the poison. It turns out Jeremy Sanford was a con man who had swindled the mother of one of the cast members out of her life’s savings by getting her to “invest” in a fictitious New York financial firm. The daughter sent anonymous letters exposing Sanford both to the local police and to the local newspaper. The director of the play is Patrick Maidland (Sam Phillips) and the original female star is his wife Charlotte, nicknamed “Charlie” (Sonita Henry), only she complains that she can’t stand working with Sanford because his constant drinking from that flask means his breath continually stinks of liquor.

Later Charlotte has a backstage accident and turns up with her leg in a cast, which requires her to be replaced as the leading lady of the play. It turns out that Patrick Maidland and Jeremy Sanford – or “Jonathan Spicer,” as he was previously known – went to college together and even participated in joint business schemes, though Patrick bailed on the partnership when he realized Sanford was actually doing illegal things. The two had matching flasks through which they kept themselves, uh, fortified during their business excursions. It also turns out that his murderer is [spoiler alert!] Charlotte Maidland, who actually took her husband’s flask, had it engraved with the initials “J.S.” (previously both flasks had been blank) and sneaked it into Sanford’s room so he would drink out of it and ingest the poison. I didn’t remember her motive, but Charles did: years before Jeremy was supposed to baby-sit the Maidlands’ infant daughter, but Jeremy left her unattended overnight while going out to do one of his scam presentations, and the baby died of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). Like most Father Brown episodes, this one was rather droll and light-hearted; it helps that only one character gets murdered, and it helps even more when we learn that the victim was a scumbag and we’re really not at all sorry to see him go. Charlotte had the play’s prop person make her a fake cast of papier-maché so she could commit a crime requiring full mobility and no one would suspect her because she supposedly had a broken leg and was in a full-length cast for it. Father Brown, who’s in and around the rehearsals because Patrick cast him in the small role of a village friar (talk about acting what you know!), spots this when he sees the inside of the cast and notes when the newspaper inside was dated. Like a lot of British mystery stories, this Father Brown isn’t particularly exciting but it’s highly droll and cute, and there’s an overall warmth about it that’s entertaining and stimulating on its own terms.

Dial 1119 (MGM, 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night, after the Father Brown episode on PBS, I switched to Turner Classic Movies for Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” presentation of a film I didn’t have much hope for, but which turned out to be surprisingly good: Dial 1119, a 1950 75-minute film from MGM that was a “B” movie in all but name, since it was relatively short and didn’t have any major stars. The only even semi-name in the cast was Leon Ames, cast as a sleazy slimeball dirty old man who keeps making passes at attractive young women and offering to take them on vacations even though he’s already got a wife. It may be the least sympathetic part I’ve ever seen Ames in, as well as the nastiest character in the movie even though the lead role is that of a psychopathic killer. The plot is simple: mad killer Gunther Wyckoff (Marshall Thompson) has escaped from a mental institution for the criminally insane after serving three years. He returns to his old home town, Terminal City, to hunt down and kill the psychiatrist whose testimony sent him there, Dr. John Faron (Sam Levene), though he either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that without Dr. Faron’s testimony that he was insane, he would have been sentenced to death and executed already. On his way into Terminal City, he steals the bus driver’s gun and, when the driver demands that Wyckoff return it, he shoots the driver dead. Then he seeks refuge in the Oasis bar, run by bartender “Chuckles” (William Conrad), and he holds hostage the five people already in the bar: Earl (Leon Ames), woman professional executive Freddy (Virginia Field) whom he’s trying to convince to go home with him, “hard girl” Helen (Andrea King), drunken reporter Harrison D. Barnes (James Bell, best known for his two films for Val Lewton, as the drunken relative in I Walked with a Zombie and the psycho killer himself in The Leopard Man) and Skip (Keefe Brasselle), a young man who’s anxious because his wife is in the hospital about to give birth to their baby.

Alerted to Wyckoff’s presence in town because they found the bus driver’s body and lifted a fingerprint off the rear-view mirror they identified as his, the police surround the Oasis and worry about how they can get in and rescue the hostages. Wyckoff tells the hostages a story about how his insanity started when he was left alone on Normandy beach during D-Day and had to keep killing German defenders one by one, only just as we’ve assumed this is going to be a PTSD story and Wyckoff is going to be at least a semi-sympathetic character turned into a murderer by the stresses of combat, [spoiler alert!] Dr. Faron enters the bar at his own request, overruling the better judgment of police captain Henry Keiver (Richard Rober), and tells the hostages that Wyckoff’s story is so much B.S. Instead Wyckoff tried to enlist but was rejected because the Army decided he was too crazy for them, and Wyckoff “rewards” the doc’s honesty by shooting him dead. Wyckoff also shoots and presumably kills – he’s alive when he’s pulled out of the air ducts but we’re told his prognosis isn’t good – a slightly built police sharpshooter who’s sent in via the club’s air conditioning system to take a shot at Wyckoff without harming the hostages. Captain Keiver and Dr. Faron get into an argument before Dr. Faron joins the list of Wyckoff’s victims about the relative merits of incarceration vs. execution, with Captain Keiver making the point that if Dr. Faron hadn’t butted in and found Wyckoff insane, the bus driver, the sharpshooter cop and Dr. Faron himself would still be alive. (It was a powerful enough scene it made me at least momentarily doubt my long-term opposition to the death penalty.) Eventually, after Helen grabs the bartender’s gun and tries to kill Wyckoff, only to have him tell her, “You shouldn’t have tried to shoot me,” the cops use C4 explosive to blow open the back door of the bar (we’re told it had been a speakeasy during Prohibition, so its doors were unusually heavy and almost impenetrable) and pick off Wyckoff while rescuing the five hostages, who go on about their merry or not-so-merry ways. Freddy regains her self-respect and turns down Earl’s blandishments, Earl makes a pass at Helen and she laughs in his face, Skip finally gets through to the hospital and learns he’s the father of a daughter, and Harrison gets the mother of all scoops: an insider account of what it felt like being held hostage by a crazed killer.

Dial 1119 is a film that has a lot of premonitions of later developments in society and technology – the TV in the Oasis bar is a 40-inch flat screen at a time when such sets wouldn’t exist for almost another half-century; the film’s title is an emergency number for calling the police that likewise didn’t exist yet (in 1957 a nationwide association of fire departments asked the Federal Communications Commission to create a three-digit universal emergency number, but they didn’t do it until 1968, and though there’s no evidence the FCC was inspired to make that number “911” on the basis of the one in this film, it is one hell of a coincidence) – and it’s also a film rich in allusions and symbolism, surprisingly so for a cheap film with mostly one set that could almost as easily have been done on stage. The town where it takes place is “Terminal City” – a destination that will indeed be “terminal” for Wyckoff’s victims and, in the end, for Wyckoff himself. The bar is called the “Oasis” (which is anything but true for its unfortunate occupants), and there’s a motto on its wall reading, “Time and tide wait for no man.” The drugstore across the street from the Oasis bar where the cops set up their headquarters is called the Rialto, and the TV station that covers the standoff live has the call letters WKYL (either “we kill” or “why kill?”). Dial 1119 was the feature-film directorial debut of Gerald Mayer, Louis B. Mayer’s nephew, and despite his uncle’s horribly negative attitude towards film noir as a genre Mayer manages to create a terrific atmosphere and keep the story moving while maintaining suspense. (Later Mayer would focus on television and, among other credits, he would reunite with William Conrad on the early-1980’s Nero Wolfe TV series, with Mayer as director/producer and Conrad as Wolfe.)

Mayer also gets a marvelously dry and understated performance from Marshall Thompson, who portrays the psychopath very much in the style of today rather than the eye-rolling hulking manner of Lawrence Tierney, then the screen’s dominant go-to guy for roles like this. Thompson makes it clear that Wyckoff is crazy and has been all along, while at the same time we feel a bit sorry for him even though we also recognize him as an amoral monster. The script is by Don McGuire (who as an actor had played in a film very much like this one, The Threat, at RKO in 1949, though the main difference was that in The Threat the environment where the psycho killer was holding the normal people hostage was a rural shack rather than an urban bar) and Hugh King, who came up with the “original” story John Monks, Jr. later turned into a screenplay. The cinematography is by Paul C. Vogel, MGM’s go-to guy for the noir look then, and the music score is by the young André Previn. Dial 1119 is a real “sleeper,” a film from which one expects routine that turns out to be phenomenally well done, though Eddie Muller’s intro made an attempt to relate it to modern-day mass shootings that really doesn’t work. Today a Gunther Wyckoff would walk into that bar with a legally obtained AR-15 and turn everybody inside into hamburger in a matter of seconds!

Shakespeare: Richard III (Public Theatre of Central Park, PBS-TV, recorded July 2022, aired May 19, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, May 19) at 10 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched an intriguing presentation on PBS of a Free Shakespeare in the Park production of Richard III with a Black woman, Danai Gurira, in the title role. This production, directed by Robert O’Hara – whose artistic priorities are exemplified by his most famous previous credit, as director of Jeremy Harris’s 2018 work Slave Play (not a play about American slavery but a modern-dress one about sexual dysfunction in mixed-race couples and the “Antebellum Sexual Performance Therapy” they undergo to address it) – took non-traditional casting almost to the max. Richard III is played by a Black woman but his older brother, Edward IV (Gregg Mozgala) is white, as is their brother George, Duke of Clarence (the strikingly handsome Paul Niebanck). Edward’s queen, Elizabeth Woodville York (Heather Alicia Simms), is Black, but their two sons, Edward, Prince of Wales (Wyatt Cirbus) and Richard, Duke of York (Sam Duncan), are white. Charles was trying to discern some rhyme or reason behind the cross-racial casting, noting that Elizabethan England did have some African-descended people in it (though they would probably have been called “Moors”), but there really wasn’t any.

Danai Gurira played Richard III without the famous hunchback, though there were some differently abled people in the cast: the actor who played Sir James Tyrrell (the murderer Richard III sends to the Tower to knock off his two nephews) was a little person, Queen Anne (Ali Stroker), the widow of Prince Edward, Henry VI’s son, whom Richard successfully seduced after killing her first husband in one of Shakespeare’s most amazing scenes, is in a wheelchair (and she’s white), and at least two characters, the Second Murderer in the scene in which Richard hires two professional killers to knock off his brother George, and Richard III’s mother (Monique Holt), are played as deaf people communicating in American Sign Language. (The Second Murderer is also gender-changed into a woman.) There’s a long sequence in which Richard and his mother converse in sign language, which was helpfully subtitled for us, but mostly when Richard’s mom speaks one of the other characters interprets for her. This production of Richard III was powerful and compelling, but it had one major flaw: it was way overacted. Danai Gurira in particular started at 11 and worked her way up to about 25, and just about everyone else in the cast doesn’t speak when they can scream.

One reason I wanted to see this is that Charles and I had just seen Gurira in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, in which she’d played Okoye, commander of the Dora Milaje (essentially Wakanda’s all-female Special Forces) until Wakandan Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) demoted her in mid-movie, but in that role she seemed far more self-controlled and self-contained than she did here. Charles defended the intensity of Gurira's performance, and the production as a whole, as in keeping with the spirit of the play, but I can’t recall seeing another version of Richard III that was this relentlessly overwrought. When Gurira bellows out her soliloquies about how Richard can modulate his voice and affect to be slyly seductive or seemingly loyal to people he intends to do in, we don’t believe it for a moment. The show made me want to get out some of the previous films or TV adaptations of Richard III just to confirm my impression that earlier versions hadn’t played the story at this level of continuous hysteria. In previous comments about Richard III I’ve noted that though none of these people had existed yet when Shakespeare wrote the play, Richard comes off as a prototype of Robespierre, Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Mao, Saddam Hussein and others: the pathological revolutionary leader who has no compunction whatsoever about ordering the deaths of anyone who’s crossed him or just seems to be in his way. But it’s hard for me to believe that anyone this openly pathological could have survived as long as the historical Richard III did.

Also I come to Shakespeare’s Richard III from my familiarity with Josephine Tey’s remarkable 1951 novel The Daughter of Time, which within the framework of a modern-day mystery argued the defense case for Richard III and said Shakespeare was working from highly propagandist sources produced during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the last Tudor monarch and granddaughter of Henry VII (played here by Gregg Mozgala, who also portrayed Edward IV, in a nice and rather appropriate bit of double-casting from director O’Hara; both his characters are usurpers who take the throne by force), who wanted to paint Richard III as a particularly dastardly villain to justify the Tudor takeover. Tey first wrote the case for Richard III in her 1934 play Dickon (her real name was Elizabeth Mackintosh but she wrote plays as “Gordon Daviot” and mystery novels as “Josephine Tey”) and then in The Daughter of Time (in which her regular detective hero, Scotland Yard Inspector Alan Grant, is recuperating in a hospital from an injury sustained in the line of duty when he comes across a reproduction of a contemporary portrait of Richard III, decides he simply doesn’t look like a murderer, and re-investigates the case from his hospital bed). But even within Shakespeare’s characterization of Richard III as a black-hearted psychopathic murderer, there is still room for a less hard-edged, more subtle approach than all the bellowing and screaming which Daniel O’Hara let Danai Gurira get away with here!

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (Marvel Studios, Walt Disney Pictures, 2022)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago (Wednesday, May 17) my husband Charles and I watched a pretty good modern-day superhero movie that had the unfortunate distinction of having to compete with a stone-cold masterpiece: Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. The original Black Panther from 2018 is, I think, far and away the best comic-book superhero movie ever made, one which transcends the limitations of the genre the way Citizen Kane transcended all the other films made by classic Hollywood about newspapers and the people who ran them. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever was handicapped from the get-go not only by the sheer burden of having to compete with the first film but having to compete without the charisma of the first film’s star, Chadwick Boseman. Boseman’s role of T’Challa, both the king of Wakanda (a very fictitious African country with access to the world’s only known supply of a magical element called vibranium, originally brought to earth by a meteor) and the titular superhero, was unavailable to the filmmakers because Boseman himself died of colon cancer in 2020 at age 43. When I heard that Marvel Studios and its parent company, Disney, were making a Black Panther sequel my two immediate questions were, would Ryan Coogler return as director and co-writer; and second, who would replace Chadwick Boseman? As things turned out, the answer to the first question was, “Yes,” and the answer to the second was, “No one.” Instead Coogler and his co-writer, Joe Robert Cole, decided to have the character of T’Challa die along with the actor who had originally played him. They created a story about how the surviving Wakandans would keep themselves and their society going without him.

The principal characters of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever are Ramonda (Angela Bassett), who takes over ruling Wakanda after her son T’Challa’s death (unlike Boseman’s real-life death, we don’t know what T’Challa died from); Ramonda’s daughter (and T’Challa’s sister) Shuri (Letitia Wright, top-billed); and Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o), T’Challa’s ex and – though we don’t find this out until the very end, in the sort of post-credits sequence that’s become a trademark of Marvel films (and much imitated by other studios, particularly those like Warner Bros. which also own a comics company) – mother of Toussaint (Divine Love Konadu-Sun), T’Challa’s son and heir to the Wakandan throne. When the film opens, Shuri is in one of the high-tech labs Wakanda has been able to build and operate through the power of vibranium to genetically re-engineer the now-lost herb that gave the original Black Panther his super-powers. The previous supply of the herb was destroyed by the first film’s Black villain, Erik “Killmonger” Stevens (Michael B. Jordan), who wanted Wakanda to use the power of vibranium to subjugate the rest of the world as a sort of anti-colonial revenge for what whites did to Blacks over previous generations. The Wakandans realize that their power is determined by their country being the only one in the world that has vibranium – until a second meteor containing it is discovered on the ocean floor off the coast of Yucatan, Mexico by a team from the CIA and the U.S. Navy’s SEAL unit. They’re using a vibranium detector built by 19-year-old MIT college student Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne), who’s Black – though it’s not clear whether she’s Wakandan, from another part of Africa, or African-American.

Alas, the CIA/SEAL team looking for vibranium underwater is slaughtered by a group of humanoid warriors who live under the sea and can extract oxygen from the sea with their skins, thereby not needing either lungs or gills. Their leader is Prince Namor (Tenoch Huerta Mejía), who as a Marvel comics character was known as “Sub-Mariner” and was from the lost continent of Atlantis but here is an indigenous Mayan and the leader of Talokan, a lost remnant of Mayans who continued Mayan culture under the seas. I was hoping they would someday introduce Namor into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but I didn’t think they’d make him an out-and-out villain instead of one of their typically angst-ridden heroes as he was in the comics! Namor wants to create an alliance between his undersea kingdom of surviving Mayans and Wakanda, but if they won’t join he intends to destroy Wakanda and then use the power of both the world’s vibranium supplies to conquer the surface world and at last avenge himself on the injuries done to his people by the conquistadores. (The real Mayans were conquered and subjugated by the Aztecs about 100 years before the Spaniards arrived, and many Mayans helped the Spaniards, wrongly thinking they would liberate them from the tyranny of the Aztecs.) Also in the cast list are CIA agent Everett Ross (Martin Freeman, one of the few whites who had a leading role in both Black Panther movies) and his ex, CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia-Louis Dreyfus), who for the most part grimly tolerates his attempts to reconcile with her until at the end she surprises both him and us by arresting him for sharing confidential CIA information with Queen Ramonda of Wakanda. There’s also Okoye (Danai Gurira), female leader of Wakanda’s all-woman Special Forces until Ramonda demotes her for allowing Namor to capture Shuri and Rari Williams; and M’Baku (Winston Williams), leader of the Jabari, one of the five tribes that make up the Wakandan Federation, who claims the right under trial by combat to seek the throne of all Wakanda from Shuri, who has taken the reins following Ramonda’s death (from drowning during an attempt to save Rari).

The film climaxes with an all-out battle between Shuri’s forces and Namor’s, during which Shuri dons a female version of the original Black Panther costume after she’s acquired the super-powers to go with it via her genetically re-engineered herb. During the ceremony in which she ingested the herbal decoction, she saw Killmonger, who urged Shuri to use the herb’s power to avenge her family by killing Namor – but after she gets the upper hand over Namor she allows him to live provided he agrees to work with the Wakandans to preserve the secret of vibranium from the rest of the world. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is a stunningly produced movie, and as with the first film Coogler and Cole are able to create amazing scenes blending together African traditions and high-tech science-fiction in staging rituals. What the film misses is Chadwick Boseman; early on the filmmakers decided to kill off the original Black Panther character rather than look for another young, hot Black actor to fill the suit, and once they’d made that decision they were stuck with a rather diffuse movie that doesn’t have the powerful character arc of the original. While it’s nice to know the Wakandans have transcended the reflexive sexism one might have attributed to them and can countenance the idea of a woman leader, it doesn’t help the film’s overall structure that Shuri doesn’t become the second Black Panther until the last 45 minutes of this 165-minute movie. The first Black Panther was a cinematic milestone – the first time Charles and I watched it I realized about 20 minutes in, “This is not a great comic-book superhero movie. This is not a great movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. This is a great movie, period” – and the sequel, deprived by circumstance of Boseman’s charismatic performance in the lead and by the filmmakers’ decision not to seek a replacement for him, is a good, solid, entertaining movie in the modern high-tech superhero sci-fi mode but nowhere near the work of art its predecessor was.

American Masters: "Nam June Paik: Moon Is the First TV" (JBS Arts, Curatorial, Dogwoof, PBS-TV, aired May 16, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Until last night (Tuesday, May 16), when PBS ran an “American Masters” documentary on Korean-born artist, videographer, pianist, composer and all-around provocateur Nam June Paik (called Nam June Paik: The Moon Is the First TV and directed by Amanda Kim), the name “Nam June Paik” had been at best on the periphery of my personal consciousness. I’d heard of him partly through a tribute album he and Joseph Beuys recorded on two pianos in Düsseldorf, Germany on July 7, 1978 at a memorial concert for George Macunias, founder of a radical multi-media arts collective called Fluxus which was active in New York, mostly in the 1960’s. The recording of this concert got a negative review by John Ditsky in the September-October 1984 issue of Fanfare, which noted that the two pianists were set to perform for 74 minutes – the inverse of Macunias’s age when he died, 47 – though the concert only lasted a bit over 71 minutes: “During that time, two pianists with little improvisational rapport noodle around in an ambience of considerable audience and performer (microphone) noise, perhaps out of shared and understandable restlessness. To enliven things (it doesn't work), a cassette recorder is flicked on and off now and again, giving us snippets of what I take to be the dead man's voice speaking or singing. For further variation, there is a lot of breathing into microphones and such interpolated materials as a funeral march [Chopin’s, from the Piano Sonata No. 2], ‘Summertime,’ and ‘St. Louis Blues.’ Yet in the end these two mutually unresponsive pianists manage to make this ‘memorable’ Düsseldorf evening as dead as their dedicatee.” (I listened to a YouTube post of this piece while writing this and found it much more beautiful than Ditsky made it sound: its basic harmonic language is from Debussy and Bartók out of Chopin, and the interspersed bits of cassette recordings of Macunias speaking or humming aren’t as intrusive as Ditsky’s review made them sound. Try it yourself at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eaiKdp0tAdc.)

Nam June Paik was born in Seoul on July 20, 1932, the fifth and last child of parents who were actually well-to-do members of the chaebol, the 20 or so families that basically controlled Korea’s economy. (You’ve probably heard the name of at least one of the other chaebol families, Samsung.) Paik grew up while Korea was under Japanese occupation, and his dad was later accused of being a collaborationist. In 1950 Paik’s family fled Korea during the Korean War and settled first in Hong Kong and then in Japan, where Paik studied classical music and wrote a thesis on avant-garde composer Arnold Schönberg, whom he considered a kindred spirit. The PBS documentary includes a video clip of Paik performing the first of Schönberg’s cycle of five pieces for piano, and he makes the music sound strikingly lyrical. In 1957 he moved to Germany to study classical music at its source, but a year later he attended a concert given by American composer John Cage, and the experience revolutionized his outlook on music, art and life in general. While much of the audience walked out of Cage’s concert, Paik fell in love with Cage’s music and especially with his idea that music is simply a collection of sounds, and it doesn’t have to be organized along the traditional lines of melody, harmony and rhythm. Paik went backstage to congratulate Cage after the concert, and Cage thanked him. The experience left Paik determined to emigrate to the U.S. in general and New York in particular, and he wrote an increasingly desperate series of letters to the handful of people he knew who lived in New York searching for someone to sponsor him. Eventually he found someone who had no money of his own, but luckily for Paik the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service never bothered to check him out to see if he had the financial wherewithal to sponsor an immigrant, especially someone who wasn’t a relative.

Paik finally made his way to New York in 1960 and became a part of Fluxus, joining its events and partnering (only professionally, not personally) with cellist Charlotte Moorman. In 1967 Moorman was arrested for obscenity after she and Paik gave a concert in which they played a work of his for cello and piano during which he cut off her clothes, piece by piece, until she was performing topless at the end. (Someone should have warned Paik and Moorman that New York was never as cosmopolitan as it advertised itself; 40 years earlier Mae West had similarly been busted for obscenity for writing and starring in a play called Sex, and decades later she was still amused at the irony that she served a 10-day jail sentence for playing a prostitute on stage and most of her fellow prisoners were in jail for being prostitutes.) While in Germany Paik had also discovered television and realized the possibilities of using it as an artistic medium. When he moved from Germany to the U.S. he brought in a shipment of eight German TV’s (one wonders how he got them to work given that Germany has a different TV format and a different sort of electrical current than the U.S.), and he continued the experiments he’d begun in Germany of putting magnets on top of televisions to distort the images on purpose. During a brief return to Japan Paik discovered Sony’s first home-video equipment, a separate camera and videotape recorder – you slung the package containing the recorder over your shoulder like a handbag while you manipulated the camera – and he immediately bought one and decided to reinvent himself as a filmmaker. Later he got the more advanced version – the camcorder, which combined camera and tape recorder into a single unit – and began using it. Paik was frustrated by the fact that this early video equipment only recorded in black-and-white; he desperately wanted to incorporate color into his videos, and got the chance to do so when after years of trying he finally got a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.

Paik arranged to work with WGBH, the public television station in Boston, though he was hamstrung by the large amount of money they’d charged for studio time and became determined to invent his own color television synthesizer, which could create abstract patterns with the touch of a few buttons on a console. Paik did that with the help of technicians at Sony, and he compared it to the then-new music synthesizers. Paik joined Fluxus in 1962 and took part in some of their multi-media “happenings.” There was at least one other Asian-born member of Fluxus besides Paik and his partner (later his wife, and after that his widow), fellow Korean avant-garde artist Shigeka Kubota: Yoko Ono (yes, that Yoko Ono), a leading light in the international avant-garde art world long before she met and got together with John Lennon and the rest of the world heard of her. (Some online sources on Fluxus list Lennon as a member because once he and Ono became a couple, he participated in some of her art events under the Fluxus banner.) The manifesto for Fluxus Macunias wrote in 1963 will give you an idea of what the group was about, and though it drew on Marcel Duchamp and the Dadaists for some of its inspiration its overall sensibility was very 1960’s: “Purge the world of bourgeois sickness, ‘intellectual,’ professional and commercialized culture; PURGE the world of dead art, imitation, artificial art, abstract art, illusionistic art, mathematical art – PURGE THE WORLD OF ‘EUROPANISM’!” Unlike a lot of other avant-garde artists of the 1960’s, Paik not only survived the decade but eventually wore down the art establishment and got the sort of funding he’d always wanted (there are clips of him in the show complaining about his persistent poverty and in particular his lack of access to health care when he needed it), which allowed him to do multi-media projects like the 1983-84 New Year’s telecast Good Morning, Mr. Orwell, a reference to George Orwell’s classic dystopian novel 1984 and what Orwell had been both right and wrong about in his predictions of what life would be like in that year.

Paik also began to make a living selling multi-media art installations, including his most popular piece, TV Buddha. This featured a statue of Buddha on one end, while at the other end was a video camera and a portable TV receiver in a white egg-shaped case. The camera was placed so it telecast an image of the Buddha statue onto the TV screen, so it appeared that the Buddha was watching himself on TV. When Paik first bought a Buddha statue for this piece, his partner Kubota complained that he’d spent the last money they had on this awful, ugly statue of Buddha. Luckily for both of them, a Dutch collector bought the first TV Buddha for a large sum of money and Paik continued to make other editions of the piece and turn them into a reliable income stream. On June 22, 1984, Paik returned to South Korea for the first time in 34 years, despite his nervousness about going home because South Korea was still a Right-wing military dictatorship and he was worried his Marxist past might catch up with him there and get him arrested. Instead, the opposite happened; Paik’s international contacts enlivened the Korean art scene and started breaking down the cultural barriers between his native country and the rest of the world. As the Wikipedia page on Paik explains, “From the mid-1980’s to the mid-1990's, Paik played an integral role in Korea's art scene. As the curator Lee Sooyon has argued, Paik became more than just an illustrious visitor to Korea, he became the leader who helped open Korea's art scene to the broader international art world. In addition to opening solo exhibitions in Korea and mounting two world-wide broadcast projects for the 1986 Asia Games and the 1988 Olympics (both hosted in Seoul), Paik also organized a number of exhibitions in Korea. Some exhibitions coordinated by Paik introduced John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Joseph Beuys to Korea's art scene; others brought recent developments in video art and interactivity from Europe and the U.S. to Korea, in ways that bridged similar activities in Korea's art scene.”

Paik suffered a series of strokes from 1996 to his death in 2006, though even while using a wheelchair he still continued to create. The PBS documentary shows a late appearance of his in which he repeatedly pushed over an upright piano; two assistants would use ropes and cords to raise it, and Paik would push it over again. (This was a throwback to one of his most infamous pieces on Germany: he would methodically destroy a piano after performing on it, and German audiences, used to the tradition of treating a piano in the home with reverence, would be shocked – as Paik intended them to be.) Nam June Paik was famous not only for his art pieces but his appraisal of technology in general and the Internet in particular; he’s often credited with coining the phrase “information superhighway,” though he seems to have meant it quite differently from how the phrase is used today. Indeed, in later years he compared the Internet not to traveling on a superhighway but to being cast adrift on a small boat far from any shore, with only your navigational skills to point you in one direction or another. Paik’s work has become a mainstay of musea and collectors alike, though as his Wikipedia page acknowledges, TV and video technologies have changed so drastically in the years since Paik’s death that some of his elaborate installations no longer work in the ways in which Paik intended. Paik was a symbol of international culture and yet he also never lost sight of his Korean identity; according to the interviewees who knew him, Paik claimed to speak 30 languages but spoke them all oddly, often confusing listeners to whom he was trying to communicate. (At the same time, the documentary contains an anecdote about Paik being interviewed by a Korean reporter on his 1984 return to Seoul, and Paik telling the interviewer, “I speak better Korean than you do.”) Even the different pronunciations of his family name – sometimes “Pake,” as in “bake” or “cake”; sometimes “Pike,” as in the medieval weapon – add to the confusion and uncertainty surrounding him; at different points in the film Paik himself is heard using both pronunciations.