Christmas Past (Paul Killiam Shows, Kino Lorber, compilation of silent-themed shorts, 1901-1925)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, December 22) when my husband Charles and I got home from a quite beautiful and haunting Christmas service at St. Paul’s – a performance of Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols for a boys’ choir (though the church put it on with adult and teenage women) and harp – plus an hour-long “Lessons and Carols” service (I’ve posted about this on https://musicmagg.blogspot.com/2024/12/st-pauls-cathedral-offers-lessons-and.html), I put on Turner Classic Movies for more entries in their six-day marathon of Christmas-themed films: the movie Remember the Night (the first of four films co-starring Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray – the others were Double Indemnity, which Ben Mankiewicz started introducing instead as a not-very-funny “joke,” The Moonlighter and There’s Always Tomorrow; I have an earlier moviemagg review at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2009/12/remember-night-paramount-1939.html) and a fascinating compilation of nine Christmas-themed silent shorts assembled by Paul Killiam and Kino Lorber called A Christmas Past. The shorts ranged in length from five minutes to nearly half an hour, and the production dates ranged from 1901 to 1925 – though Killiam and the Kino Lorber people did not show them in the order in which they were made, more’s the pity, since showing them in chronological order would have given audiences a fascinating glimpse in the evolution of film from its relatively crude early days to the fully accomplished silent cinema of 1925. The show at least opened with the earliest film on it, A Holiday Pageant at Home (1901), a really crude production with just one set and an immobile camera that just gave us the action from one point of view. It’s a simple story about a husband, a wife and their four children – three boys and a girl – and in the pageant two of the kids play hold-up men while the other two play their victims.

The next film up, A Winter Straw Ride (1906), was a lot more fun. It featured a group of people taking two hay wagons outfitted with sleigh-style runners. They get pelted with snowballs from some of the local kids, one of the wagons overturns (showing the real meaning of those cryptic lines from “Jingle Bells,” “We got into a drifted bank and then we got up sot”), and in the film’s most entertaining sequence some of the snow surface itself starts collapsing like a crumbling glacier. The people on the wagons decide they’ll have a lot more fun sliding down the snow than continuing on the sleigh, and Charles wondered how the women were handling the slides. I pointed out that women wore so many undergarments in those days that their asses were pretty well insulated, but Charles still wondered how they kept all those petticoats and whatnot in place. The third film in sequence was A Trap for Santa Claus (1909), one of Biograph’s one-reelers directed by the very young D. W. Griffith at the start of his career. It wasn’t that advanced technically – he was still learning – but it had a politically progressive slant to it as it told the story of Arthur (future Griffith star Henry B. Walthall) and Helen (Marion Leonard) Rogers. When Arthur loses his job and can’t find another one, he spends his time at the local saloon and tries to drown his troubles in drink (anticipating Griffith’s last film, a dated temperance melodrama called The Struggle, from 1931). The Rogers’ children (Gladys Egan and John Tansey) set up a trap for Santa Claus, who in their home has to come in through the window since they have no chimney, only the person they catch is Arthur, who was trying to break into his former home to burglarize it. Fortunately, Arthur at the end is seemingly repentant and ready to give up all thoughts of crime or suicide (when he left he wrote a note to his wife literally saying she’d be better off without him) and resume his place as the head of the household.

The fourth film in the compilation was an Edison production that, if anything, was even more politically progressive than Griffith’s film: A Christmas Accident (1912), directed by Harold M. Shaw from a script by Annie Eliot Trumbull and Bannister Merwin. It tells the story of two families, a well-off one called Gilton and a not-so-well-off one called Bilton, and the titular Christmas accident occurs when a handsome roast-beef dinner intended for Mr. Gilton (William Wadsworth) gets delivered to Mr. Bilton (Augustus Phillips) by mistake. Needless to say, the Biltons eagerly accept their bounty and devour the meal. When Mrs. Bilton (Ida Williams) tells their children that Santa Claus is too poor to be able to give them a turkey this year, she reads them The Night Before Christmas and when Mr. Gilton shows up at their door, the kids mistake him for Santa Claus. Eventually the Gilton and Bilton families become friends. After that we got another Edison one-reeler, The Adventure of the Wrong Santa Claus, twelfth and last in a series of what were supposed to be mystery thrillers featuring a detective character named Octavius (Barry O’Moore). This film features a burglar dressed as Santa Claus and two other faux Santas, including Octavian in disguise – and the scene in which the burglar “Santa” starts ripping off a family’s Christmas presents eerily anticipates How the Grinch Stole Christmas! The next film was the latest in sequence (1925) and the longest (half an hour); it was simply called Santa Claus and was essentially an offshoot of The Night Before Christmas. It was written and directed by Mr. and Mrs. Frank E. Kleinschmidt, and it boasts in its initial credits that it was filmed in Alaska. Though the interiors could have been shot anywhere, the film contains some spectacular sequences of Alaskan landscapes, and while some of them could have been cribbed from somebody or other’s documentaries, there are scenes in which Santa Claus appears against the spectacular icy backdrops of real Alaskan exteriors in ways that would have been difficult, if not impossible, to “fake” in 1925. The basic plot of this film is that the children have been waiting up all night for Santa, and when he finally shows up they ask him to explain what he does with himself the other 364 days of the year. It turns out he runs a toy workshop, monitors the children of the world with a giant telescope so he can tell who’s being naughty and who’s being nice (in one marvelous sequence he spots an obnoxious kid literally ripping off a blind man, and he crosses him off the list of children getting presents), and in his spare time hangs out with the Easter Bunny and Jack Frost.

Following that we got to see an Edison one-reeler of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1910) – which, surprisingly, was not the first but the third film adaptation of it. It was directed by J. Searle Dawley with two uncredited assistants, Charles Kent and Ashley Miller (who I’m guessing wrote the script because no writers other than Dickens are credited), and it’s an interesting adaptation in that they managed to crowd most of the high points of the story in 15 minutes. It’s also interesting that the actor who played Bob Cratchit, Charles Ogle, was also the Frankenstein monster in Edison’s one-reeler of that story – and to show the monster’s creation they made a dummy of Ogle, set it on fire, then reversed the film so the monster appeared to emerge from a burst of flame. The special effects in the 1910 A Christmas Carol are just as amazing, if not more so: Marley’s Ghost and the Three Spirits, along with the flashback visions they show Scrooge (Marc McDermott), appear as superimpositions. In 1910 there was only one way to do that: to rewind the exposed but undeveloped film in the camera and shoot the new action right over the old. It must have taken a lot of careful positioning of both actors and camera to make it come out as director Dawley intended, probably using surveyors’ instruments the way Buster Keaton famously did in his films 10 to 15 years later. The last movie on the program was an out-and-out adaptation of Clement Clarke Moore’s poem The Night Before Christmas, made in 1905 and taking most of its titles from Moore. Obviously the compilers of A Christmas Past sequenced their film the way they did to get the two Big Stories, A Christmas Carol and The Night Before Christmas, last, but this rather static and glum version of Moore’s famous poem ends the collection on a rather sour note and it’s too bad we don’t get a more exciting movie to end the collection. Still, A Christmas Past is an estimable compilation and well worth seeing at least once.

It Happened on Fifth Avenue (Roy Del Ruth Productions, Allied Artists, 1947)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, December 21) Turner Classic Movies continued its week-long marathon of Christmas films, of which I watched four. Two were movies of which I’ve long been familiar: The Man Who Came to Dinner (1941) (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-man-who-came-to-dinner-warner-bros.html) and We’re No Angels (1955) (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/12/were-no-angels-paramount-1955.html). The other two were a movie I’ve long been curious about and one I’d never heard of before last night. The movie I’d long been curious about was It Happened on Fifth Avenue, which had a rather convoluted production history. It was originally developed by Frank Capra for his short-lived independent production company, Liberty Films, but he placed it in turnaround when Charles Koerner, studio head at RKO (which had agreed to distribute Liberty’s productions), offered him It’s a Wonderful Life instead. It was picked up by “B” studio Monogram, whose head, Steve Broidy, had ambitions to build a major company the way Harry Cohn had done with Columbia. To this end, he founded a new label, “Allied Artists” (an obvious knockoff of United Artists), and bought It Happened on Fifth Avenue as its first film. Broidy hired writers Everett Freeman and Vick Wright to flesh out the original story by Herbert Clyde Lewis and Flash Gordon serial producer Frederick Stephani into a script, and he picked Roy Del Ruth to direct. It Happened on Fifth Avenue centers around a professional squatter, Aloysius T. McKeever (Victor Moore), who sneaks into the homes of wealthy New Yorkers who have gone south for the winter and helps himself to their food, clothing and shelter.

The home he’s targeted this year is that of super-industrialist Michael J. O’Connor (Charlie Ruggles in a part for which Capra would almost certainly have cast Edward Arnold), the second richest man in the world, who’s buying up land parcels right and left to build a combination airport, truck terminal and commercial development in the heart of New York City. One of the places he’s bought for this mega-project is a hotel where World War II veteran Jim Bullock (Don DeFore) is the last remaining tenant, the others having already moved out on cue following the eviction orders given by the executive O’Connor has put in charge of the project, Farrow (Grant Mitchell). When he’s finally thrown out on the street, Jim meets McKeever, who invites him to move into the O’Connor mansion and join him as a squatter. Meanwhile, O’Connor’s daughter Trudy (Gale Storm) runs away from the boarding school in which her divorced parents Michael and Mary (Ann Harding) have put her and lets herself into her dad’s New York home, Though she has a key, McKeever and Jim immediately assume she’s a down-on-her-luck squatter just like they are. Jim and Trudy inevitably fall in love, but there’s a big problem in that Jim hates Michael O’Connor and blames him for being homeless. Trudy hits on a plan: she talks her dad into posing as another homeless person and moving in to his own house, allegedly as a squatter, so he can meet her nice young boyfriend and get to know and like him. There’s another plot strand in that Jim and his fellow housing-challenged war veterans are pooling their allotment money to buy an old disused army barracks and turn it into veterans’ housing, only the land it sits on is yet another parcel O’Connor has earmarked for his big development. There are some quite charming scenes in which O’Connor tries to sneak time on the house’s telephone so he can call Farrow and his other executives to tell them how to run the company in his absence, and McKeever overhears them and thinks “Mike” (the only name O’Connor has given him) is a poor person expressing the delusion that he’s rich.

Del Ruth and the writers also put O’Connor through the traumatic experience of essentially being turned into a servant in his own house, forced to do dishes and sleep in the basement (in a bed that collapses bit by bit as he tries to sleep in it, a set of gags that would no doubt have come naturally to Capra, with his experience as a gag man for Mack Sennett and Hal Roach). Complications arise when O’Connor’s ex-wife Mary decides to pose as a homeless person herself and joins the household as a cook. O’Connor and his ex realize that they’re still in love with each other – she only broke up with him because, like Ebenezer Scrooge’s girlfriend Belle, she’d decided he loved money more than her. We also learn that the O’Connors didn’t start out rich: they initially had no money and worked up from a railroad flat (a sort of apartment common in New York City where the living space is so narrow all the rooms are in line with each other and you can get from one to another only via a long hallway) to a fortune. O’Connor is reminded of his early days as a poor man when he smells the slumgullion stew his wife used to make for him when they had little money. Eventually O’Connor’s company outbids Jim’s veterans for the old Army camp and O’Connor tells Farrow to offer Jim a job at $12,000 per year in Bolivia just to get him out of the country and away from Trudy. There’s a surreal scene in which the vets literally occupy the place and throw rotten fruit at Farrow when he comes in to lead a crew to evict them and tear down the barracks they wanted to rebuild as civilian housing. By this time O’Connor has got in touch with his old values enough that he joins in the riot, eagerly throwing fruit at his own representative, and I’m surprised Del Ruth and the writers didn’t pull the obvious gag of having Farrow recognize O’Connor and wonder just why his boss was throwing fruit at him for following his orders.

Ultimately O’Connor secretly invites Jim and two of his fellow veterans to a meeting at his office, where he startles them by turning out to be the tramp they’ve been living with all this time. O’Connor donates the barracks property to Jim and company, and now that the winter is over McKeever makes plans to journey to O’Connor’s winter home in Virginia and spend his summer there. It Happened on Fifth Avenue isn’t a great movie, and the spectre of what Frank Capra could have done with this plot hangs over it – especially since Capra would almost certainly have cast it better. For one thing, he’d probably have used Thomas Mitchell as McKeever instead of the offensively whiny Victor Moore – one watches Moore’s movies and wonder how on earth he became a star. His best-known film is probably Swing Time with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and he did his level best to ruin it but Astaire, Rogers and Jerome Kern’s great songs proved too much for him. And, as I mentioned above, Capra would probably have cast Edward Arnold as O’Connor instead of Charlie Ruggles, who was a fine character comedian but just doesn’t have the sheer power as an actor to convince us that he’s a super-tycoon whose word can make or break people. Roy Del Ruth pulled one major boner as a director; instead of letting Gale Storm do her own singing (this film has so many songs it practically qualifies as a musical), he insisted on hiring Joyce Terry as her voice double. When Storm offered to audition for him to prove she could sing herself, Del Ruth refused to let her. I’ve long thought Gale Storm’s career was one of the great might-have-beens in Hollywood history: she had a pleasant face, a winsome personality and a good voice, and had she signed with a major studio instead of Monogram she could well have had the sort of career Doris Day did. Overall, though, It Happened on Fifth Avenue is a nice, charming film, predictable in its plot resolution and very much to the Capra mold even though he didn’t direct it, but it’s entertaining and Del Ruth did manage to keep Victor Moore’s whininess under a certain degree of control.

Miracle on Main Street (Grand National, Columbia, Arcadia Pictures, Keith T. Smith Modern Sound Pictures, 1939)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film last night I’d never heard of before turned out to be unexpectedly good: Miracle on Main Street (not to be confused with Miracle on 34th Street eight years later), a 1939 production of Grand National, the plucky little studio that at least tried for major-company status. Grand National was formed in 1936 by producer Edward Hirliman; he already owned a distribution company called First Division, and he intended to expand his activities into production. He scored an early coup – or so it seemed – when James Cagney sued Warner Bros. over a billing issue and was suddenly available on the open market. With the other majors unwilling to risk Jack Warner’s wrath by signing his renegade star, Hirliman signed Cagney to Grand National and made two films with him, Great Guy (in which Cagney played an agent of the Bureau of Weights and Measures out to bust a ring of people who short-changed customers) and Something to Sing About (a musical of which Cagney was so proud he devoted a whole chapter of his autobiography to it). Then Warner Bros. won back Cagney’s contract on appeal and Grand National sold Warners the gangster story Angels with Dirty Faces they had developed for him. With Cagney gone, the closest Grand National had to a major star was Western hero Tex Ritter, pioneer in the “singing cowboy” genre, but Hirliman continued to produce surprisingly adventurous films, including Captain Calamity (a quite good spoof on nautical films shot in the two-strip “Hirlicolor” process), Exile Express (made with star Anna Sten four years after she’d flamed out at Goldwyn) and this one. Unfortunately Grand National went out of business in 1939 and this and their other remaining films were sold to Columbla, which released them in the U.S. (though the print Turner Classic Movies was showing was credited to “Keith T. Smith Modern Sound Pictures,” apparently the British distributor). Miracle on Main Street was a quite charming and unexpectedly good movie, directed by Steve Sekely (a Hungarian immigrant who made such unusually good “B” films as Lady in the Death House for PRC and Hollow Triumph a.k.a. The Scar for its successor company, Eagle-Lion) from a script by Samuel Ornitz, Boris Ingster and Frederick J. Jackson. It reminded me, except for the inevitable (for Hollywood) happy ending, of the so-called “street films” that were big in Germany in the 1920’s, of which by far the best known is The Joyless Street (1925) because it featured Greta Garbo, even though she was only the second female lead (Asta Nielsen and Werner Krauss were the stars).

Maria Porter (Margo, the quite interesting actress/dancer who made her screen debut at age 15 in the 1934 film Crime Without Passion and three years later played the woman who suddenly aged when taken out of Shangri-La in Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon) is a dancer in a shabby little sideshow attraction alternately called “Streets of Cario” (on the overhead sign) and (correctly) “Streets of Cairo” on the smaller sign on the entrance. She’s also a B-girl whose husband, Dick Porter (Lyle Talbot at his oiliest), uses her to lure sailors and other drunks so he can rob them. When one of the “drunks” turns out to be an undercover cop, Dick flees and tells Maria he’ll be in touch with her when he’s sufficiently well established in a new identity which nobody from law enforcement knows about. Stunned by these events and desperate because the lack of Dick’s money means she’ll likely be thrown out of her rooming house by the typically implacable landlady, Mrs. Herman (Jane Darwell), she stumbles into a church on Christmas Eve. There she hears a crying baby, and Sekely’s moving camera first lights on the Jesus doll at the altar before panning to a real baby, left there by his parents (we later learn it’s a boy) because they already had five kids and couldn’t take care of a sixth. Until the baby arrives Sekely and his cinematographer, Charles Van Enger, shoot the film as almost all-out noir; after opening with a powerful montage of various Christmas celebrations the film becomes hard-edged realism as Maria’s dancing gig comes to an ignominious end due to Dick’s illegal side hustle. Meanwhile, wealthy orange grower Jim Foreman (Walter Abel) is having a surprisingly gentlemanly divorce from his wife – they just dispassionately agree that they’re no longer in love with each other and so she goes to Reno to get her marriage dissolved – and he meets Maria at a Mexican restaurant called Pepito’s (the film had some interesting glances at Olvera Street in Los Angeles as it existed in 1939 just after my husband Charles and I had been there recently, and it’s barely changed at all). Maria becomes a driven character, bound and determined to keep her baby and raise him even though he’s not her biological son. Partly to raise the money for her rent and partly so she won’t have to hassle child care, Maria takes a job sewing baby clothes at home and ultimately the shop promotes her to designer.

Maria and Jim date – there are some marvelous scenes in which he drives her to his orange groves and she’s astonished because it’s been decades since she’s seen the country – but there’s the overhanging threat of Dick hanging over them. Maria and Jim are laying out on a beach and Maria is about to confess to Jim what her past had been and her relationship to the man she’s still legally married to when all of a sudden Sadie Blake (Wynne Gibson), her old friend from the Streets of Cairo days, shows up to warn her that Dick is back in town. Dick shows up at Mrs. Herman’s rooming house while Maria is out with Jim and crashes her room (a nice first-floor room Mrs. Herman has reassigned her to now that she’s raising a baby and is making good enough money Mrs. Herman doesn’t have to worry about her making the rent), announcing his intent to wait for her there. When she arrives, he tells her that he’ll leave her permanently and settle in South America if she’ll give him $500, and when she explains that she doesn’t have that kind of money he tells her to get it from the rich man she’s been dating. They work out a scheme by which Maria will tell Jim that her baby is sick and needs an operation (he isn’t and doesn’t) and she needs $500 from him in cash to pay for it. Only when Jim shows up with the money, Maria decides to pretend that she’d only been taking him for a ride all this time and that Dick is the man she really loves and wants to be with (the old La Traviata gimmick). Since as part of this imposture Maria keeps Jim’s money instead of giving it to Dick, he’s still broke and he decides to hold up a late-night delicatessen with a gun he took from Dr. Miles (William Collier, Sr.). Dr. Miles, whom we guess had lost his license to practice medicine but did so under the table for drinks, had previously tried to kill Dick so Maria would be out of her misery and free to marry Jim, but Dick easily took the gun away from him and pocketed it for future use. Fortunately, a cop ex machina happened to see Dick’s attempted robbery go down; he shot Dick from outside the store window (which probably wasn’t so great for the store owner since replacing the window would almost certainly cost him more than the money Dick was trying to steal from him) and conveniently eliminated him so Maria and Jim could get together at long last and co-parent the miracle child.

Miracle on Main Street is an unusually good movie, especially for the time, because of two aspects: Sekely’s advanced direction – he keeps the camera in almost constant motion, avoiding the long, static tableau scenes that afflicted all too many late-1930’s “B”’s because moving-camera shots and shot-reverse shot edits took too long to set up – and also due to the multidimensionality of the characters. Though the writers built their dramatis personae on the chassis of familiar movie clichés, they added enough complexity to create interesting people that aren’t all good or (with the arguable exception of Lyle Talbot’s character) all bad. Maria is drawn as a piece of human flotsam at the start who, faced with the challenge of raising a baby even though it isn’t hers biologically, gradually discovers reserves of strength and agency she didn’t know she had. Jim is basically sympathetic – indeed, one could describe Miracle on Main Street as a prototype of Pretty Woman, with Margo in the Julia Roberts role and Walter Abel as Richard Gere – but he’s also a bit of an arrogant asshole in his belief that money can buy him anything. Mrs. Herman isn’t your typical arrogant landlady but someone who becomes sympathetic once she explains that she, too, has bills to pay and she can’t keep non-paying tenants there forever. Interestingly, just as George Hirliman had shot simultaneous English and Spanish versions of Captain Calamity (the Spanish version was called El Capitán Tormenta), so he shot Miracle on Main Street in an alternate Spanish version, El Milagro de la Calle Mayor, reverting to a pattern in the early days of talkies where they would shoot versions of films in languages other than English, using the same stars if they could speak the languages (or, as in the case of Laurel and Hardy, they were so identified with their roles they couldn’t be substituted for even though they had to learn the lines phonetically) and other cast members if they couldn’t. Miracle on Main Street is an example of the diamond in the rough TCM sometimes allows us to rediscover (or discover in the first place), a quite remarkable film (even if it does fall back on typical Hollywood clichés towards the end) worthy of acknowledgment for Sekely’s inventive direction and a script with genuinely complex human characters.

Sherlock: "The Blind Banker" (Hartswood Films, BBC Wales, Masterpiece Theatre, PBS, 2010)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, December 20) I left on KPBS after the news shows and watched the second episode of the BBC-TV series Sherlock, a modern-day version of the Sherlock Holmes world with Benedict Cumberbatch as Holmes and Martin Freeman as Dr. John H. Watson. The episode was called “The Blind Banker” even though, while there are several bankers in the dramatis personae, none of them are blind – at least not in the literal sense of not being able to see. Written by Steve Thompson and directed by Euros Lyn (one wonders what his name was before the adoption of the Euro currency; actually he was born in Wales in 1971, so he isn’t from a country that uses the euro and I guess “Pounds Lyn” would be too cumbersome a name), “The Blind Banker” is one of those maddening Tony Gilroy-esque stories that has so many reversals that after a while they become the story. It begins as a sort of locked-room mystery when Eddie Van Coon (Daniel Percival) gives Sherlock Holmes a large retainer to investigate the mystery of a stolen Chinese object, or something – only then Van Coon is found dead in his locked apartment. Needless to say, the official police – represented by Detective Inspector Dimmock (Paul Chequer), who resents Sherlock Holmes even more than Inspector Lestrade (played by Rupert Graves in the first episode, “A Study in Pink”) ever did – are convinced he committed suicide. Holmes is equally convinced he was murdered, and meanwhile there are a few scenes taking place in the British Museum of Antiquities involving a young Chinese woman, Soo Lin Yao (Gemma Chan), and Andy Galbraith (Al Weaver), a young British twink who has a boyish crush on her. Soo Lin is introduced doing a Chinese tea ceremony with the tea service in the museum’s collection, explaining that if they’re not used regularly the teapot and cups will disintegrate into their original clay dust. (C’mon, Steve Thompson, hadn’t the ancient Chinese heard of firing clay to waterproof it?) Later a second victim, journalist Brian Lukis (Howard Coggins), is also found dead, and Soo Lin is kidnapped and held hostage inside the museum. It turns out all this is connected with a sinister organization called “The Black Lotus” whose purpose is to steal ancient Chinese artifacts, smuggle them into Britain and then sell them at private auctions for scads of money. It also turns out that a Chinese circus that’s touring Britain is the above-board front for the Black Lotus, and one of their members is Soo Lin’s brother, who blackmailed or otherwise intimidated her into working for them.

The bad guys communicate with each other through leaving clues in public that are actually pairs of numbers written in the old Hangchow Chinese script, and in the one part of the story that actually comes from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (from the novel The Valley of Fear), Holmes deduces that the pairs of numbers are actually references to a commonly available book – in this case a tourists’ guide called London A to Z. Holmes rips off a copy from a flummoxed German tourist and starts looking up the code after he’d requisitioned all the books from Van Coon’s and Lukis’s apartments and tried all of them, without success. There’s also an intriguing scene in which Watson comes on an entire wall covered with graffiti that are actually pairs of numbers in the Hangchow script, only when Holmes shows up to see them the wall is black and Holmes briefly wonders whether Watson had a delusion. Then it turns out Watson has the inscription after all because he photographed it with his cell phone before the baddies painted it over (though since all this happens within a few minutes one would think Holmes and Watson could tell from the freshness of the paint that it had been covered up recently). At least that’s one advantage Steve Thompson had from having his version of Sherlock Holmes take place in the 21st century! Unfortunately, Thompson was one of those writers who literally doesn’t know when to stop: among the complications he threw into the story are a woman who hires Watson as a doctor for her clinic, goes out on a date with him and then Holmes bursts onto the scene to insist that they go to the Chinese circus that’s the above-ground cover for the Black Lotus. Watson and the woman show up and use Holmes’s name to get in, whereupon the dragon-lady villainess running the Black Lotus (or at least this particular wing of it) spends the next 10 minutes or so insisting that Watson is Holmes (particularly since Watson has Holmes’s debit card on him).

There are also various performers in the circus who are really part of the Black Lotus, including one tightrope walker who used his skills to break into the victims’ apartments to make it look like nobody had got in, and a knife-throwing device that’s hooked up to a Wizard of Oz-style hourglass (actually a sandbag) so whoever’s trapped in front of it and held in bondage has only a limited amount of time to free him- or herself before the automaton hurls a knife into them and kills them. This device is first shown in its normal function as part of the circus, then the baddies use it to try to eliminate first Watson’s girlfriend and then Watson himself. (One gets the impression that if Watson ever asks this woman for a second date, she’s going to turn him down.) It also turns out that the MacGuffin is a jade hairpin that for some bizarre reason Steve Thompson never bothers to explain is worth 900,000 British pounds (most of the larger artifacts the Black Lotus has stolen drew auction prices in the 40,00 to 50,000 pound range) and which Eddie Van Coon stole on his own account, not knowing how valuable it was (or how pissed off the Black Lotus would be at losing it), just because he wanted it as a present for Molly Hooper (Louise Brealey), the secretary with whom he was having an intra-office affair. “The Blind Banker” is pretty typical of the Sherlock series, and though this role made Benedict Cumberbatch a star he’s really not that good a Sherlock Holmes – but then again, as I’ve often said in paraphrase of the opening of the Conan Doyle story “A Scandal in Bohemia,” to me Basil Rathbone will always be the Sherlock Holmes. (Indeed, I remember that when Cumberbatch turned up as a villain in the Star Trek movies there were people who questioned casting the actor who’d played Sherlock Holmes as a bad guy – either forgetting or never having known that Basil Rathbone, too, played villains when he wasn’t playing Holmes.)

Strike Up the Band (MGM, 1940)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, December 19) I put on Turner Classic Movies for the next-to-last night of their “Star of the Month” tribute to actor Mickey Rooney. They spent the evening showing all four of his big MGM musicals co-starring Judy Garland: Babes in Arms (1939), Strike Up the Band (1940), Babes on Broadway (1941), and Girl Crazy (1943). The first three were directed by Busby Berkeley and so was the final song, “I Got Rhythm,” for Girl Crazy – only Judy Garland couldn’t stand Berkeley and got him fired from Girl Crazy after they shot the big last production number. Roger Edens, Judy’s musical arranger and director for almost her whole career, didn’t like Berkeley any more than Judy did, and Edens was especially upset that Berkeley brought in two giant cannons and had them fired over “I Got Rhythm,” drowning out much of the inner detail of Edens’s arrangement. The films I watched were Strike Up the Band and Babes on Broadway, both of which were not only directed by Berkeley but co-written by Fred Finklehoffe (with John Monks, Jr. and an uncredited Herbert Fields and Kay Van Riper on Strike Up the Band and Elaine Ryan on Babes on Broadway). Let’s just say that Finklehoffe and his collaborators on each film were well aware of the difficulties in writing and constructing a Mickey Rooney-Judy Garland vehicle and solved them with a lot of resorts to easy deposits in the cliché bank. Strike Up the Band is the one that takes place in the small town of Riverwood (its location is carefully unspecified but is somewhere in the middle West since it’s a relatively easy drive to Chicago. Jimmy Connors (Mickey Rooney) is the predictably bored drummer with the school’s marching band, and he wants to organize the students into a state-of-the-art swing orchestra with Patsy Barton (Judy Garland) as his vocalist. Only his new swing band doesn’t have a place to play until Jimmy and Patsy talk the school’s fearsome but kind-hearted principal, Mr. Judd (Francis Pierlot), into letting him put the band together at his own expense and premiere it at the next regularly scheduled school dance.

Ultimately the kids get word that Paul Whiteman (playing himself – he made his feature-film debut in a 1926 movie called London which was shot there and starred Lillian Gish’s real-life sister Dorothy; he then appeared in a few shorts and his next film was 1930’s King of Jazz, a major Universal musical showcasing Whiteman and his band; after that he wouldn’t appear in a feature again until Thanks a Million in 1935 and an uncredited bit part in Hollywood Hotel from 1937 before this role, replacing Leopold Stokowski in Deanna Durbin’s vehicle One Hundred Men and a Girl, also from 1937, as the deus ex machina who can make the kids’ dreams come true) is doing a nationwide tour. His plan is to stage a contest between high-school bands in which he will personally broadcast the four finalists from Chicago, allow voters to pick one by phone or telegram (once again, kids, the concept behind American Idol was nothing new!) and award the grand prize on air to the contest’s winner. Naturally Jimmy and company seize on this opportunity to make their band a success, but the road to it is paved with the best sorts of not-so-good intentions Finklehoffe, Monks and their uncredited collaborators could provide. First of all, the band’s contract to play at a school dance is a roaring success, but they only get paid $150 and they’re still $50 short of the $200 total (in 1940 dollars!) they need to finance their trip to Chicago. They think they have a shot in a dance party being hosted by the Morgans (George Lessey and Enid Bennett), parents of spoiled rich-bitch Barbara Frances Morgan (June Preisser, repeating her role from Babes in Arms as the girl – in Babes in Arms she was a former child movie star – who tries to vamp Mickey from Judy, though she’s less maddening in this one and turns out to be quite a good acrobat), but the Morgans already have a band set up to play at Barbara’s party – and it turns out to be Paul Whiteman himself, complete with at least two veterans (trumpeter Orville “Goldie” Goldner and banjoist Mike Pingitore) of the late-1920’s Whiteman band with Bix Beiderbecke and Frank Trumbauer. Whiteman sets up his acres of musicians and plays “When Day Is Done,” a song he’d picked up in Vienna during his 1926 European tour from a song-plugger who later escaped to France and then the U.S., future film director Billy Wilder.

After a couple more songs the musicians take a break, Jimmy and his crew can’t resist the temptation to crash the stage and play the Whiteman boys’ quality instruments, and Whiteman is duly impressed by them and loans them the remaining $50 they need to enter his contest. Only the trip gets sidetracked because Willie Brewster (Larry Nunn), the 14-year-old boy who hangs out with the band and has a decidedly unrequited crush on Patsy (though, let’s face it, the real Judy Garland herself had pretty bad taste in men!), injured himself at an Elks Club benefit the band played as part of their fundraising campaign and he desperately needs a shoulder operation that costs, you guessed it, $200. Jimmy and the boys rather grudgingly forfeit their carefully saved travel fund to pay for Jimmy’s operation, but a local rich guy who helped them get the Elks Club gig in the first place chips in and arranges a private train to get them to Chicago on time. Of course, Jimmy and company win the contest and as the grand prize Jimmy gets to conduct Whiteman’s band, his own and the three other high-school bands he beat in a rousing and overwrought performance of the George and Ira Gershwin classic that gives the song its title. This would have been a much better film if MGM had used the original plot of the 1927 Gershwin stage musical for which the title song had been written, which was essentially an eerie premonition of the 1997 comedy movie Wag the Dog: a U.S. cheese manufacturer lobbies the U.S. government to declare war on Switzerland to stop them from exporting cheese to the U.S. As it stands, Strike Up the Band is a reasonably entertaining musical in which the best numbers are the ones featuring Judy Garland on her own or in duet with Mickey Rooney (who looks utterly convincing as a jazz drummer here and in his film The Strip from 1952, in which he gets a job drumming for Louis Armstrong and His All-Stars; I don’t know for a fact that it was Rooney’s own drumming, but it certainly looks like it!) and the charming “Our Love Affair,” which begins as a Rooney-Garland duet and turns into a great animated sequence in which Rooney demonstrates to Garland the huge orchestra he wants to lead someday by arranging fruits on a dining table.

The models were created by animator and puppeteer Henry Rox, and the scene was staged by future director Vincente Minnelli, who had worked previously on a similar concept in the 1937 film Artists and Models at Paramount. He’d been given a six-month contract and was assigned to do the big “Public Melody No. 1” number for Artists and Models with Martha Raye and Louis Armstrong, but I suspect he also worked on a scene called “Mister Esquire” featuring actor Ben Blue with Russell Patterson’s Personettes, miniature puppets who were manipulated to play in scenes with humans. After his six-month contract with Paramount ended, Minnelli went back to stage work and didn’t come back to Hollywood until 1940, when Arthur Freed offered him a contract at MGM and gave him assignments doing scenes in other people’s movies (including Lena Horne’s numbers for the 1942 Panama Hattie) until Freed gave him the chance to direct a feature, Cabin in the Sky, based on a hit Broadway musical with an all-Black cast. Two years later Minnelli’s and Garland’s paths would cross again in the film Meet Me in St. Louis, in which Judy was driven so crazy at the sheer number of takes Minnelli asked for that she asked Mary Astor, who was playing her mother in the film, “Does this guy know what he’s doing?” “He knows,” Astor replied, and not only did Judy’s initial hatred for Minnelli ease, they started dating and ultimately married after the film was finished and was an enormous hit. (Liza Minnelli was one of the results of their relationship.) Also, at one point in Strike Up the Band Rooney declares his disgust with one of his band members who’s ducking out of rehearsals early to be with his girlfriend Annie, and Rooney says, “Women! To me they’re just – people!” (I joked, “So that’s why he married eight of them.”)

Babes on Broadway (MGM, 1941)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Watching Babes on Broadway immediately after Strike Up the Band only reinforced how formulaic these movies were and how much they resembled each other, repeating not only Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland as stars but Busby Berkeley as director and Fred Finkelhoffe as co-writer. As in Babes in Arms (to which Babes on Broadway was not a sequel, though the similarity in their titles made it look like one) and Strike Up the Band, Mickey Rooney plays a typical live-wire character who’s willing to do anything to achieve success in show business. Judy Garland is his precious helpmeet, though at first he sees her only as a professional partner and not a romantic one – until he finally declares his love for her at the end of Strike Up the Band and two-thirds of the way through Babes on Broadway. Babes on Broadway casts Mickey Rooney as stage-struck Tommy Williams, who’s managed to move to New York but is genteelly starving as one of the similarly broke (financially) kids who hang out at a local coffeehouse when they’re not entertaining in the basement of an Italian restaurant. Tommy dances as one of the “Three Balls of Fire” – the slogan on their business card is, “Once we get going, you can’t put us out” (I was waiting for writers Fred Finklehoffe and Elaine Ryan to have one of the other characters make a nasty joke about that, but they didn’t) – along with Ray Lambert (future dancing star Ray McDonald) and Morton “Hammy” Hammond (future director Richard Quine). The owner of the restaurant where they’re playing for tips sadly tells them that he’s going to have to close the place for lack of business, but on their last night there they receive a $5 tip from Miss Jones (Fay Bainter), who despite the “Miss” in front of her name appears to be the wife of Broadway producer Thornton Reed (James Gleason). She arranges for the Three Balls of Fire to have a private audition for Reed, but Tommy brags about it at the coffeehouse and so all the out-of-work performers who hang out there crash the audition and it becomes a typical cattle call.

As for Judy Garland, she plays Penny Morris – a naïve girl who works at a local settlement house for poor kids – and the management has been promising the kids a trip to the country for years now but keeps reneging because they can’t afford it. Tommy hits on the idea of getting his out-of-work actor friends to stage a benefit for the settlement house, which means getting approval not only from Mr. Stone (Donald Meek), the settlement house’s manager, but a mysterious politician named Bush (whom we never see) whose support they need to close down a street for a block party, since the auditorium at the settlement house only seats 100 people and isn’t big enough for the audience they need. The auditorium is, however, big enough to rehearse the main number for the show, “Hoe Down,” staged as a typical Busby Berkeley extravaganza on the classic scale, with bits of fencing used the way he’d use giant bananas as props in The Gang’s All Here three years later. Meanwhile, Jones is getting frantic calls from Thurston Reed, who’s in Philadelphia staging out-of-town tryouts for a musical revue that’s bombing utterly. He’s pleading with her to send over some fresh new talent to perk up his show, and after futilely pleading with an established adult comedy team and getting nowhere, she thinks of Tommy Williams and offers him the gig. At first he’s tempted to take it even though it means walking out on the settlement kids and their dreams of a trip to the country, and Penny is naturally angry with him for putting his own interests first and becoming the latest bad guy to dash the kids’ hopes. (There was a similar scene in Strike Up the Band in which Paul Whiteman offers Rooney’s character a job in a band opening in a New York nightclub and at first he’s willing to take it, only Judy’s character talks sense into him and persuades him he can’t let down the members of his own band just because he has a prestigious job offer.)

Ultimately Jones hands Tommy the keys to an abandoned theatre she and Reed co-own called the Duchess, and there’s a fascinating segment in which Rooney and Garland do impressions of the famous names that performed there in the venue’s heyday. The scenes of them entering the abandoned theatre are shot by Berkeley and cinematographer Lester White as almost all-out noir (remember that just before leaving Warner Bros. for MGM, Busby Berkeley had directed a quite competent crime thriller, They Made Me a Criminal, a John Garfield vehicle that was surprisingly well done). Among the past performers they pay tribute to are Richard Mansfield as Cyrano de Bergerac, Harry Lauder, Fay Templeton, Blanche Ring, Marie Dressler (Judy does her big hit song “Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl,” from her stage show Tillie’s Nightmare that was made into a film, Tillie’s Punctured Romance, by Mack Sennett with Dressler repeating her stage role and Charlie Chaplin as the villain!), and George M. Cohan. (Mickey Rooney does a rendition of “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy” that compares surprisingly well to James Cagney’s version in the 1942 Cohan biopic Yankee Doodle Dandy, for which Cagney won an Academy Award.) The show is closed in mid-performance by an obnoxious fire marshal named Moriarity (Cliff Clark), who announces that the reason the Duchess Theatre hasn’t been used in 15 years is the city government condemned it as a firetrap. (I was expecting Mickey Rooney and the other kids in the show to lock him in a convenient closet and leave him there until the show ended, but the writers chose not to go there.) Before that we’ve seen Rooney in drag doing a quite amusing impersonation of Carmen Miranda, and afterwards the troupe gives the show as planned anyway, with Ross the only audience member, and he agrees to hire them to headline his new show Babes on Broadway.

Alas, the final scene representing this show and the grand finale of the movie is done as a tribute to minstrelsy, with all but one of the performers in blackface and a giant chorus line far bigger than any real minstrel show. This ending was no doubt A-O.K. with 1941 audiences but renders the whole movie pretty outdated and lame today, though Rooney’s banjo playing (really performed on a pre-recording by ace banjo master Eddie Peabody, though Rooney does a quite good job synchronizing to Peabody’s record and making it look like he’s really playing) is good and Judy Garland’s rendition of “F.D.R. Jones” (about a Black boy who’s been given the name of the then-current President – whom Judy Garland, a lifelong liberal politically, campaigned for in 1944 and returned to the hustings for John F. Kennedy in 1960) is O.K. even though it’s not that great a song and she rushes the tempo a bit. Babes on Broadway is a quite entertaining film, like Strike Up the Band at its best when Rooney and Garland are in an intimate scene together – in this case doing the song “How About You?,” written by Burton Lane with music by Ralph Freed very much along the lines of one of Cole Porter’s “list” songs. Rooney and Garland did 10 movies together, though in only the first (Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry, 1937) was she billed ahead of him. They included three in the Hardy Family series – including one called Life Begins for Andy Hardy in which Judy was given four songs but all were left on the cutting-room floor – and their final film together was Words and Music (1948), a biopic of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart with Tom Drake as Rodgers, Rooney as Hart, and Garland doing little more than a guest appearance singing “Johnny One Note” and duetting with Rooney on “I Wish I Were in Love Again.”

The Earthshot Report (TEP Trading Corporation, BBC, PBS, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, December 18) I watched a couple of documentaries on PBS (three, actually, though the third, a French TV production from 2022 or 2023 called Paris: The Mystery of the Lost Palace, I’d already seen on its previous go-round in February 2024: https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2024/02/paris-mystery-of-lost-palace-copa-films.html). One was a show called The Earthshot Report, made in 2024 and aimed at giving information on positive programs to help the environment and avoid the climate crisis. Given that I’d already been sure that Donald Trump’s return to the White House will almost certainly spell the end for the survival of the human species, with his “drill, baby, drill” dedication to continuing and expanding America’s addiction to fossil fuels and his utter contempt for any programs to make earth’s environment more sustainable, I wondered what programs there could be to make me think that humans can counteract what they’ve done to the environment and keep the earth a habitable place for our species. One welcome (albeit not especially important, giving the relative powerlessness of the modern British monarchy) aspect was that the on-screen host was Prince William Windsor, son of King Charles and the late Princess Diana and the heir to the British throne (and, given that King Charles is 75 years old and has already been diagnosed with cancer, William may become king sooner than you’d think). The show was actually MC’d by British actress Hannah Waddingham, and the program was based on a series of awards that’s been given since 2021 called the “Earthshot Awards” for individuals, organizations and corporations pursuing ideas to make the world more sustainable.

The people profiled on last night’s show include Byron Komizek, a Colorado farmer who’s worked out a way to put up solar panels across his farm and thereby generate photovoltaic electricity and grow crops on the same parcel of land. He calls it “agrovoltaics” and says some crops (including lettuce) actually do better with the shade from the solar panels than they would in full sunlight. The show also featured a Native from the Alhuac tribe in Ecuador named Uynkumr Domingo (though the first name is a guess and might be wrong) and London-based researchers Pierre Paslier and Rodrigo Garcia. They’ve founded a company called NOTPLA – as in “not plastic” – that aims to use seaweed as a substitute for plastic, especially in the inner linings of food containers. The show explained that plastic is one of the most environmentally destructive inventions of all time, and the hope of Paslier and Garcia is to create food containers that are totally biodegradable. Their initial invention was a small packet of seaweed-derived faux plastic that contains water – and they said you could actually eat the whole thing since your stomach would digest the container as well as absorbing the water within. The program also profiled a woman named Dr. Carmen Hinosa from the Philippines, who’s latched on to an old Filipino technique of making cloth from the leaves of pineapple plants. She began as a leather-goods maker but became appalled at the environmentally destructive aspects of leather (including all the chemicals involved in tanning it and making it waterproof), looked for a substitute and found it in piña, an old Philippine technique for making fine cloth from the strands of pineapple leaves, which are usually discarded and either left to rot or burned after the pineapples themselves are harvested.

Another person profiled was Dr. Alan Friedlander of Pristine Seas, who’s invented elaborate camera equipment to make documentaries of the ocean and encourage national governments to extend protection to more and more of the ocean. He was shown working in the south-west islands of Palau and shooting footage of almost unearthly beauty. A Kenyan woman named Lumbi Macha won an Earthshot award for founding ROAM, a company in Nairobi that makes electric motorcycles for a country in which most people don’t have either the money or the access to roads needed for full-sized cars. ROAM makes not only the motorcycles themselves but also portable charging stations with which to recharge them (though that still begs the question of electric vehicles generally: where does the electricity to recharge them come from? It doesn’t help the environment that much if the power still ultimately comes from fossil fuels). Perhaps the most interesting awardee was another Kenyan woman, Charlot Magayi, who got pregnant at age 16 and two years later almost lost her daughter when a cookstove fell on top of her and nearly burned her to death. So she decided to invent a new, improved cookstove (remember this is an African Third World country where most people don’t have access to modern stoves and the gas or electricity that run them) that would be more stable and would be made out of recycled metal. She’s also invented a new sort of briquet made out of agricultural waste to fuel the stove, pointing out that these new briquets deliver more even heat and therefore make cooking easier. All the people profiled in The Earthshot Report are “thinking outside the box,” as the saying goes, and implementing programs on a small scale that may not single-handedly solve the sustainability problem but can only help, and they’re doing them basically by ignoring most of the capitalist infrastructure that says, “You can’t do that,” to virtually all large-scale programs to forestall the impending doom of Earth’s human population from human-caused climate change.

NOVA: "Lost Tombs of Nôtre-Dame" (ZED, Arte France, WGBH Educational Foundation, PBS, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After The Earthshot Report KPBS showed a NOVA episode called “Lost Tombs of Nôtre-Dame” (to give the famous cathedral’s name in the original French instead of “Notre Dame,” as it was called in the English titles for this program). The lost tombs were uncovered in the reconstruction work following the horrific fire of April 15, 2019 that destroyed the cathedral’s iconic spire and did severe damage to the rest. While construction workers were testing the remaining foundation to make sure it could still support the weight of a rebuilt cathedral, they discovered two lead sarcophagi that had been buried centuries before and been forgotten. One bore a plaque identifying the corpse buried within as Nôtre-Dame canon Antoine de la Porte (d. 1710), who was significant enough in the church’s hierarchy there’s a painting of him in the Louvre leading a service at Nôtre-Dame. The other was apparently from 100 to 200 years before and there was no plaque or other marking on the coffin to identify him. A team of archaeologists, anthropologists and forensic historians opened the lead caskets to determine who the mystery body had been and what both he and de la Porte died from. They also found bits and pieces of cathedral sculptures that had been part of a wall between the “choir” and the “nave” of the church. During the Middle Ages Roman Catholic priests would literally shut the door behind them and carry out the High Mass service, including the Eucharist, out of sight of the congregation on the ground that this made the “mysteries” of the faith even more mysterious. This ended when the Reformation started, and among the major criticisms Martin Luther and other Reformation leaders had of the Catholic church was that it shrouded its services in so much mystery that ordinary congregants couldn’t figure out what was supposed to be going on. Also the early Protestants accused their Catholic brethren of literally being cannibals, because one of the big points of dispute between Catholics and Protestants was over whether the wafer and wine literally turned into the flesh and blood of Christ. The Catholics said it did; the Protestants said that was merely a metaphor to acknowledge Christ’s sacrifice for the salvation of humanity.

As a result of both the Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation, the choir screens were taken down and the High Mass at last occurred in full view of the audience – though it was still in Latin and remained so until the papacy of John XXIII (1959-1963), who convened the Vatican II conference which gave Catholic churches permission at long last to conduct their services in the languages of the countries in which they took place. The Nôtre-Dame choir screen was taken apart and the fragments of the sculptures that had once adorned them were simply buried in the church’s basement, though there was another nearby French church whose choir screen was intact and that gave the various members of the Nôtre-Dame team the clues they needed to reconstruct the Nôtre-Dame choir screen. For some reason, both corpses had been buried with an ample supply of plants – was this left over from the belief of the ancient Egyptians that you had to bury a dead person with objects they had handled so they’d have them in the afterlife? – some of which might have had medicinal properties. By doing various tests on the remaining bones, the researchers deduced that the unknown body had died at about age 30 and had had tuberculosis. They also came up with a pretty good guess as to who the mystery corpse was. In fact, they came up with two candidates – a knight named Édmound de la Madeleine and a scapegrace François Villon-esque poet named Joaquin Rubollet – but decided the mystery man was more likely de la Madeleine than Rubollet because the corpse had grown up in the east of France (as had Madeleine) and not the west (as had Rubollet). They were able to deduce just what parts of France the corpse had come from based on the digestive patterns they inferred from the surviving bones: a discipline called “forensic pathology.” There was also one talking head, Frédérique Duran, who was credited as an “archaeobotanist,” meaning someone who analyzes remains of plants to determine how old a human was whose body was found with those plants and when they lived. Overall, this NOVA show was quite interesting even though all the names of various experts and their disciplines tended to blur together after a while.

Joy with the Tabernacle Choir (BYU Broadcasting, GBH, Intellectual Reserve, PBS, aired December 17, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, December 17) I watched a couple of quite interesting Christmas-themed shows on KPBS, including the annual Joy with the Tabernacle Choir (in previous years it’s been called Christmas with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir but they seem to be de-emphasizing the religious aspects this year even though the show was produced by the media arm of Brigham Young University) and a rather odd local video of a play called 1222 Oceanfront: A Black Family Christmas. Joy with the Tabernacle Choir was a quite good and pleasant program for its first all-music half but got dull and dreary later on. It began with a choral version of a song identified in the chyron (thank goodness for chyrons!) as “Sing We Now of Christmas” but which I’d heard before on the Kingston Trio’s Christmas album The Last Month of the Year as “Sing We Noël.” The chorus continued with a more obscure song called “Noël Noël” and then tenor Michael Maliakel, whose name I had to look up on line to make sure I was spelling it correctly, came out and did “Joy to the World” and the lovely John Jacob Niles song “I Wonder As I Wander.” Oddly, Niles’s piece has entered the Christmas songbook even though it’s more about Easter; the opening line is, “I wonder as I wander, out under the sky/How Jesus our Savior, he came for to die.” Michael Maliakel was a reasonably nice-looking twink who did a brief interview segment in which he stressed his heterosexual credentials with a wife and an 18-month-old daughter.

Then the choir and orchestra did “Von Himmel hoch,” a hymn tune attributed to Martin Luther (they thoughtfully translated it as “From Heaven on high” in the chyron) and the orchestra played an instrumental arrangement of the song “Patapan” by Bernard de La Monnoye from 1720, though their arrangement interpolated a bit of “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.” Then Maliakel returned for a couple of pop Christmas songs, “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas” and “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” and though his pleasant but bland voice could hardly hope to match Judy Garland’s intensity on the first (and still best) version, he at least did it in a straightforward arrangement after the horrible rock one Kate Hudson had been saddled with on the previous night’s Little Big Town: Christmas at the Opry program. Afterwards the orchestra and chorus took over for a three-song medley: “Still, Still, Still,” “Peace Be Mine,” and an oddly truncated version of the “Ode to Joy” (“An die Freude”) finale from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The arrangement cut abruptly from the opening statement of the theme to the closing coda, removing about 15 minutes of the greatest music ever composed, though at least I give the choir points for singing it in the original German instead of an English translation. (I have two reissues of early English-language recordings of the finale to Beethoven’s Ninth, and in both the German word “Freude” is awkwardly translated as “gladness” instead of “joy” because they needed a two-syllable word to cover Beethoven’s phrase.) Their next selection was a French carol the chyron identified as “To the Cradle Run” but which I know better as “Bring a Torch, Jeannette, Isabella” – a stunning piece of music under either title – and after that they did a forgettable piece called “Merry Christmas! Merry Christmas!”

Then Michael Maliakel came back to sing “God Help the Outcasts” from the 1999 musical The Hunchback of Nôtre-Dame (based on Walt Disney’s 1996 animated film of Victor Hugo’s story, premiered in Berlin in German and first performed in English at the La Jolla Playhouse in 2014) by Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz. Ironically the song was written to be sung by Esmeralda, the story’s female lead, but Maliakel acquitted himself marvelously with it. Alas, it was presented in the program as a lead-in to the show’s weakest, dullest and most interminable segment, “Victor Hugo’s Wonderful Feast,” narrated by Lesley Nicol. She’s best known as the cook on the long-running British TV series Downton Abbey, and she began her appearance by marveling at the magnificence of the Mormon Tabernacle or wherever they were performing and saying, “I finally made it upstairs!” It was a 15-minute piece of narration with music about the big Christmas meals Victor Hugo put on for the poor children of Paris every year from the time he first made enough money as a writer to afford them until his death. At least I was hoping this rather clunky feature would spare us the obligatory dramatization of the Nativity, but after a nice little song called “O Little One Sweet” there was Nicol again reading the opening chapters of the Gospel According to St. Luke, the principal Biblical source for the Christmas story. The show closed with Michael Maliakel blessedly returning to sing a traditional carol listed on the chyron as “Angels of the Highest Glory” but better known as “Angels We Have Heard On High,” a nice enough closer but it didn’t make up for the putrid and boring segments Lesley Nicol had narrated in between. At least the TV director, David Warner, was on his best behavior and mostly aimed the cameras at what we’d like to see – the choir and, when he was singing, Maliakel as vocal soloist – and it was welcome that today’s Mormon Tabernacle Choir actually looks like America, with a large number of Black, Latino/a and Asian faces mixed in with all the white ones.

1222 Oceanfront: A Black Family Christmas (NWB Imaging, New Village Arts Center, KPBS, aired December 17, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Joy with the Tabernacle Choir KPBS showed a locally produced program, a live video of a play called 1222 Oceanfront: A Black Family Christmas. My husband Charles got home from work early (which meant I had to do some quick stepping to make dinner for both of us!) and caught the end of the Tabernacle Choir program and all of 1222 Oceanfront. From the online description on the KPBS Web site I’d expected this to be a concert of Black-themed Christmas music with actors doing scenes in between the songs. Instead it was a tightly scripted romantic drama by the late Dea Hurston, a local African-American author who died in July 2024 at age 73 after a 15-year battle with cancer and an accident which left her immobile for a time. “I could not comprehend information and I could not retain information,” Hurston told KPBS in 2022. “But I realized that I could still write. And so when I tried to get my life back, I took a class at Playwright’s Project and something happened in that class and it clicked with me ... I knew at that point I was a playwright.” Hurston also said she did not want to write “trauma plays” about the evils of racism and what it did to Black people; instead, she said, “I want to write about Black people doing normal things and having normal struggles and normal joys.” In 1222 Oceanfront, premiered in 2021 at the Dea Hurston Family Arts Center in Carlsbad and revived in 2023, she did precisely that. It’s about the family Christmas celebration Dorothy Black has been hosting at her home at 1222 Oceanfront Avenue in Carlsbad for 30 years, ever since she and her late husband James bought the house and then suffered through last-minute changes in the terms of the loan when the sellers realized that the buyers were Black. Among them were a sudden increase in the down payment and a demand that the Blacks buy insurance on each other – which came in handy when Dorothy’s husband James died 10 years later and the insurance settlement allowed Dorothy to pay off the mortgage and own the property free and clear, though we don’t learn that until quite late in the play.

The family Christmas celebration involves Dorothy’s two children, James, Jr. and Javier. James, Jr. is her and James, Sr.’s natural son; Javier is someone they adopted and the actor playing him looks Asian even though the character has a Latino name. (I assumed he was supposed to be Filipino; that’s the logical guess when someone looks Asian but has a Hispanic name.) Javier is also Gay – though no one in his adoptive family seems to have a problem with that, thank goodness – and he’s in a relationship with a man named Brian, who has been making excuses not to go to the Black family dinners for as long as he and Javier have been a couple. At least the Black children and their mates are all middle-class professionals – James, Jr. is an attorney with a big law firm in L.A.; his wife (whose name I can’t remember; it’s something like “Aja”) is a schoolteacher; Javier is a TV weatherman and his partner Brian is a podiatrist. Also in the dramatis personae is Dorothy’s sister, a feisty woman with a drive for love (and sex) belying her years – if The Golden Girls had had a Black cast member, she would have been it – and a man named Victor who owns an avocado ranch in Fallbrook (anachronistic in that most of Fallbrook’s avocado groves have long since been torn out and replaced by high-end housing developments) and works at the local post office, where Dorothy’s sister has met him and decided he’d be a perfect replacement mate for Dorothy even though Dorothy hasn’t had sex, or even dated, since the death of her husband 20 years before. The Blacks and their extended family have a long tradition of serving lasagna on Christmas Eve (it started, supposedly, when the Black family had only Italian food in the house one year) and James, Jr.’s wife brings along a side dish of collard-filled cannolis. James, Jr. stumbles on a letter from a real-estate appraiser, which leads him to conclude that his mom is planning to sell the house he grew up in and cash in on the huge appreciation values so she can live with Victor on his avocado grove in Fallbrook. Javier leaves a series of increasingly desperate phone messages for Brian, who eventually does turn up – though his foot is in a cast, courtesy of an accident (which he doesn’t explain to us) – and though he and Javier were originally planning to move to New York so Brian could do a residency, the accident and resulting surgeries will delay that for at least a year. It also turns out that the only reason Dorothy had the house appraised was she was seeking a loan to build a granny flat (today it would be called an “alternative dwelling unit,” or “ADU” for short) on the property.

It also turns out that James, Jr.’s wife is pregnant, which she found out by filching a pregnancy test kit from Dorothy’s sister’s handbag, so though James, Jr. and his wife were talking about having children in the future, that particular future has arrived significantly sooner than they intended. And the last big secret that emerges from the Christmas Eve dinner is that Dorothy already married Victor – they had a trip together to Las Vegas and went through one of the city’s notorious quickie chapels while there for a convention of lemon growers – and it ends happily, with Dorothy turning over the house to James, Jr. and his wife as he had long hoped. Along the way the characters sing enough songs that 1222 Oceanfront qualifies as a musical, and while some of the songs are familiar Christmas and spiritual standards – “What Child Is This?,” “Go Tell It On the Mountain,” “Silent Night” and a closing medley of “Up on the Housetop,” “Joy to the World,” “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” a Spanish-language version of “Jingle Bells,” “Angels We Have Heard On High” and “I Saw Three Ships” – others are originals. I had to guess at their titles because none of them were listed on Google’s music search app (just as there isn’t an imdb.com page for 1222 Oceanfront, nor any other online source for the show, which means I have no idea who any of the actors were; oddly, the cutest male in the cast was the actor playing Javier’s partner Brian, a tall, rather nellie man who was flashing a big basket under his grey sweat pants), but it sounded like they were called “Wake Up, It’s Christmas Morn,” “Beautiful Christmas Day,” “Back It Up” (a dance number), “Merry Christmas to Me” (sung quite beautifully by the actor playing Javier when it seems like Brian isn’t going to make it) and a country-style number called “All I Wanted for Christmas Was You” (which doesn’t sound at all like the similarly titled “All I Want for Christmas Is You” by Mariah Carey). When Brian finally arrives and explains that he couldn’t get any of Javier’s phone messages because his own phone died and he’d never memorized Javier’s number, I rattled off Charles’s phone number just to prove to my husband that I know it – and he said, “Yes, we grow up when people still had to remember phone numbers.” 1222 Oceanfront has some slow moments, but overall it’s a charming piece that proves Dea Hurston’s point that Black people have pretty much the same family issues as anyone else and certainly don’t live every moment of their lives getting screwed over by white racism, however much it might at certain times be a burden for them!

Little Big Town: Christmas at the Opry (Den of Thieves, NBC-TV, filmed October 4, 2024; aired December 16, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, December 16) I ended up watching both hours of an extended TV special called Little Big Town’s Christmas at the Opry, meaning the new “Opryland” complex in Nashville, Tennessee that replaced the ancient Ryman Auditorium (actually a converted barn, like most theatres that presented country music in its early days) in which the Grand Ole Opry got its start. (The show’s name came from a bizarre joke made by a radio announcer who got impatient when the Metropolitan Opera broadcast that was supposed to be on before his show ran overtime, and when the opera finally ended he drawled an announcement: “You’ve been listening to grand opera from New York, but now here’s some of our Grand Ole Opry!”). The show’s headliners were Little Big Town, a singing quartet founded when two of the members, Karen Fairchild and Kimberly Schlapman, met at a Christian university called Samford in Homewood, Alabama in 1987. They moved to Nashville and by 1998 had formed a four-person vocal group with two men, Jimi Westbrook and Phillip Sweet. They called themselves Little Big Town and cycled through various record companies before they finally found a home with Monument Records, original label for Roy Orbison and Kris Kristofferson. Monument signed them in 2002 and produced their first album before they left for Equity Music, founded by fellow country singer Clint Black. When Equity went out of business, their releases were picked up by Capitol, where they’ve been ever since. The show began with a Little Big Town original called “Glow” and then segued into Kelsea Ballerini doing a quite good version of “White Christmas.” No, she didn’t come close to the heartfelt eloquence of Bing Crosby’s version (which became the best-selling record of all time and, depending on how these sales charts are reckoned in the “streaming” era, may still be), but she was quite good even though she lost points with me for leaving out the song’s marvelous verse. (I first heard the verse used as a mid-song break, rapped by Darlene Love, on the Phil Spector Christmas album, and it was only years later that I realized this hadn’t been concocted by Spector, Love or his regular songwriters, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, but had actually been an original part of the song by Irving Berlin!)

Then Sheryl Crow came on for a cover of Charles Brown’s “Please Come Home for Christmas,” with a deeper and lower voice than I remembered from her at her commercial peak. Like Ballerini with “White Christmas,” Crow sang with less emotional intensity than the original but still turned in a skillful and soulful job. The next group up was a two-man vocal duo called Dan + Shea (the plus sign instead of an ampersand or the word “and” is officially correct) called “Holiday Party,” written by Dan Smyers (the “Dan” of Dan + Shea) with his usual songwriting partners Jordan Reynolds and Andy Albert. Then Josh Groban came out with Little Big Town as his backing singers on a lovely and quite unornamented cover of “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” that was one of the best things on the program. After that came one of the worst things on the program: Kirk Franklin doing an atrocious version of “O Come, All Ye Faithful” that consisted of one-third the song we know, one-third sung bits from other songs and one-third rap. The next singer was Kate Hudson, daughter of singer Bill Hudson and actress and comedienne Goldie Hawn, who took on “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” I still think no one is going to outdo Judy Garland (for whom it was written) on this song, but Hudson didn’t even try; instead of singing the plaintive ballad Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane intended, she sang it to a rock backing that really didn’t work. Then Little Big Town did a song called “Christmas Night with You” (co-written, like “Glow,” by group member Karen Fairchild) and Orville Peck, a singer who for some reason wears a Hallowe’en-style mask over the top part of his face, trotted out “Christmas All Over Again,” originally written by Tom Petty for the 1992 Christmas compilation A Very Special Christmas 2. Sheryl Crow came back out to sing Adolphe Adam’s “O Holy Night,” albeit just the first chorus (twice); I was disappointed that I didn’t get to hear her sing the line “The slave is our brother,” but I guess that would be too politically incorrect in the age of Trump 2.0. Then came one of the best numbers of the night: Little Big Town in a plaintive cover of Merle Haggard’s “If We Make It Through December.” They followed it with Amy Grant’s “Tennessee Christmas,” but anything would have sounded like a letdown after Haggard’s soulful lament.

Then Josh Groban came back with the Mel Tormé-Bob Wells “The Christmas Song,” popularized by Nat “King” Cole in the mid-1940’s – you probably know it by its opening line, “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire” – and while Groban’s version is as far removed from Cole’s hit or Tormé’s own as Kelsea Ballerini’s “White Christmas” or Sheryl Crow’s “Please Come Home for Christmas” are from their originals, it was still nice, heartfelt and tastefully done. Afterwards came another Dan + Shay song, “Take Me Home for Christmas,” written by a committee including both Dan Smyers and Shay Mooney themselves. Then came one of the big gimmick numbers of the night, Eartha Kitt’s 1950’s hit “Santa Baby” (an ode to adult greed that comes off as high irony) sung by four women: Kate Hudson, Kelsea Ballerini and the two female members of Little Big Town, Karen Fairchild and Kimberly Schlapman. After that Kirk Franklin did another one of his demolition jobs on a standard carol, this time “Joy to the World,” and Little Big Town did an infectious version of an African-American spiritual, “Children, Go Where I Send Thee.” Ironically, this song is not on Little Big Town’s official Christmas album – though it should have been; I first heard it on the Kingston Trio’s 1960’s Christmas album The Last Month of the Year, and I fell in love with it then and love it still. The show closed with Orville Peck doing a dull ballad called “Happy Trails” – not the song of that title that was the theme song for Roy Rogers’s and Dale Evans’s TV show – and an ensemble performance of “Santa Claus Is Back in Town,” written by Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller in 1957 for Elvis Presley’s first Christmas album. Once again the version on this show didn’t come close to the incandescent original, but it was good enough to evoke the spirit. Overall, Little Big Town’s Christmas at the Opry was a fun program, even though at two hours it did overstay its welcome a bit. At least director Paul Dugdale, who’d annoyed me so much during the CBS-TV special An Evening with Dua Lipa last Sunday, December 15, was on his best behavior and mostly kept his cameras focused front and center on the performers instead of whipping past them with fast pans.

American Masters: "Brenda Lee: Rockin' Around" (Nashville PBS, TH Entertainment LLC, American Masters Pictures, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, December 16) my husband Charles had an early enough work call that he returned home in time to watch with me a quite fascinating hour-long PBS American Masters documentary on Brenda Lee. She was born Brenda Mae Tarpley on December 11, 1944 in Atlanta (in the charity ward of Grady Hospital, which will give you an idea of how much – or little – money her parents, Ruben Tarpley and Annie Yarbrough Grayce had to raise her). When she was eight her dad, a construction worker, died in an industrial accident. Brenda had begun singing in her local church at age three (so she, like Elvis Presley and Dolly Parton, started out in church; it wasn’t just the great Black singers that did!) By age 10 she was already busking on the street and had become the family’s principal breadwinner. Having a similar sort of voice to Judy Garland’s – she was a girl but she sounded like an adult woman – she got on a local show called TV Ranch that was apparently the first country-music show ever aired on television. When her mom remarried and moved to Cincinnati, she got a job on a local radio show with host Jimmie Skinner. When her mother and stepfather moved back to Georgia – Augusta instead of Atlanta this time – she got a job on yet another local TV show called The Peach Blossom Special. Lee recalled that one night the show was scheduled to air on the night that Lee’s idol, Red Foley, was performing a live show at a local fairgrounds in 1955. She wanted to see him and maybe beg him for any help in getting her own career started. “I still get cold chills thinking about the first time I heard that voice,” Foley said. “One foot started patting rhythm as though she was stomping out a prairie fire but not another muscle in that little body even as much as twitched. And when she did that trick of breaking her voice, it jarred me out of my trance enough to realize I’d forgotten to get off the stage. There I stood, after 26 years of supposedly learning how to conduct myself in front of an audience, with my mouth open two miles wide and a glassy stare in my eyes.”

She sang on March 31, 1955 on the Ozark Jubilee show on local television, and a year later producer Owen Bradley – who also launched the careers of Patsy Cline (whom Lee knew and credited with helping her start her career) and Loretta Lynn – signed her to Decca Records. Her first two singles didn’t go anywhere, but in 1957 she recorded a song called “One Step at a Time” that became a hit in both the country and pop charts. Her next record, “Dynamite,” was also a hit and earned her the nickname “Little Miss Dynamite.” In 1958, at age 13, Lee recorded what remains her best-known record, the holiday novelty “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” written by Johnny Marks, the composer of “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Marks said he wanted another Christmas-themed hit and got it when he fell asleep outdoors and woke up to notice pine trees swaying in a windstorm in front of him. Oddly, though this documentary was called Brenda Lee: Rockin’ Around, that song isn’t mentioned until just 10 minutes before the show ends. The main point producer/director Barbara Hall seemed to be making is that Brenda Lee was actually a wide-ranging artist whose music encompassed country, rock ‘n’ roll, R&B, rockabilly, pop, torch and just about every form of popular music available to a young woman in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. In 1960 she recorded “I’m Sorry,” which became her biggest hit even though Owen Bradley worried about whether a 15-year-old would be credible singing a song about heartbreak and originally relegated it to the “B”-side of her record. It also mentioned that Lee’s popularity was international; in 1962 she appeared at the Star Club in Hamburg where The Beatles were her opening act (though she mis-remembered their name at the time: she referred to them as “The Silver Beatles” but they had dropped “Silver” from their name two years earlier) and she said she especially got along with John Lennon.

Lee had hits in Britain even on songs the U.S. branch of her record company didn’t release as singles, and on one song, about a love affair between an American and a Japanese, she learned enough Japanese phonetically to sing one chorus of the lyrics – and was rewarded with a major hit in Japan. When the styles of American pop music changed in the 1960’s (ironically, largely as a result of The Beatles, her opening act in Hamburg in 1962), Lee switched her focus and targeted the country market. Lee continued to record until 2007, when she made her last album – a gospel record (returning to her roots in the church?) called Gospel Duets with Treasured Friends (the “friends” included Dolly Parton, George Jones, Alison Krauss, Vince Gill, Emmylou Harris, Pam Tillis, Kix Brooks of Brooks and Dunn, Charlie Daniels, Martina McBride, Ronnie Dunn and Huey Lewis). Afterwards she stepped back from performing but continued to be active in music as a staff member for the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville. Brenda Lee is the ultimate disconfirmation of my long-held theory that the only way a child star could have a successful and happy adulthood is if they get away from show business altogether, as Shirley Temple and Deanna Durbin did. She seems to have handled the ups and downs of her career just fine, and I loved that she said the reason she avoided alcohol and drugs was “I was worried that I would like them” (which is also true of me!). Though the only songs of hers I know well are “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” and “I’m Sorry,” I have a lot of admiration for her as an artist and a person – and I love the fact that in 2024 she became the oldest woman to top the music charts when “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” was re-reissued and became even more popular than its big successor as a pop Christmas anthem, Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You.”

An Evening with Dua Lipa (Radical22, Fulwell 73, CBS-TV, aired December 15, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, December 15), my husband Charles and I watched An Evening with Dua Lipa, a music special on CBS featuring Albanian-British baby diva Dua Lipa performing with a symphony orchestra called the “Heritage Orchestra” (probably a pickup band assembled from the quite stellar coterie of classically trained musicians in London) on some of her greatest hits. This marked an interesting contrast to the PBS special we’d just seen with the Violent Femmes performing with the Milwaukee Symphony because Dua Lipa’s music benefited a lot more from the use of orchestral instruments than the Violent Femmes’ did. Before last night’s show, I’d pretty much relegated Dua Lipa to the rather anonymous pool of female pop singers with small, lithe bodies and small, tight voices that are clogging up the music charts these days. I was also confused by her name because it took me literally years to realize that she’s just one person: I was thrown by the usual meaning of the syllable “Dua” or its derivatives and thought she was a duo. (Charles tells me “dua” is “two” in Esperanto.) Dua Lipa is actually her legal name – her parents, Dukagjin Lipa and Anesa Rexha Lipa, fled from war-torn Pristina in the former Yugoslavian republic of Kosovo and settled in London, where Dua was born on August 22, 1995 – and according to her imdb.com page she was teased about it as a child but when she grew up and realized she had the vocal chops to become a singer, she embraced it because it was sufficiently distinctive she wouldn’t have to adopt a stage name. She has two siblings, a sister named Rina and a brother named Gjin, both of whom were introduced on the show. Through an hour-and-a-half time slot, less the predictable avalanche of commercials (Charles joked that this was making PBS look better than ever), Dua Lipa performed 10 songs: “Houdini,” “Levitating,” “Maria,” “Training Season,” “These Walls,” “Love Again,” “Illusion,” “Cold Heart” (a duet with Elton John – more on that later), “Be the One,” and “Dance the Night.” All were in medium-tempo dance grooves but at least weren’t relentlessly ugly, like so many so-called “EDM” (“electronic dance music”) songs these days.

Dua Lipa has a much more flexible and technically accomplished voice than most of the singers in this genre, and at times – notably the slow introduction to “Maria,” in which the singer lamented her partner’s continued attachment to his ex – she showed at least some instinct for phrasing. Among dance divas, the late Donna Summer and the living Lady Gaga had/have the most skill at phrasing – the variations in tempo and rhythm that in the hands of a master singer really make a song come alive – and one of my hopes for Dua Lipa would be that she falls into the hands of a master singer and does a standards album the way Lady Gaga did with Tony Bennett for two marvelous standards albums before he passed. “Maria” in particular sounded like the late Scott Walker’s pop material from the late 1960’s and early 1970’s before he branched off into synth-driven weirdness (though he remained a powerful artist even at his most experimental), and though I wouldn’t say it was the best song she did all night, it was the one that suggested the most possibilities for Dua Lipa’s future growth as an artist. She gave the concert in the Royal Albert Hall, but did it theatre-in-the-round style, putting seats on what’s usually the front stage and seemingly taking out most of the ground-floor seats to make room for a circular stage with curved runways. On one song she marched in a whole crew of backing singers that looked big enough to form a Special Forces commando team, though she mostly used the long runways for her own dance steps. (I’ve often commented in these pages that the huge success of Michael Jackson and Madonna in the mid-1980’s changed audience expectations of pop-music concerts forever. Before that, singers like Frank Sinatra could just stand in front of an orchestra and sing; now people expect singers to dance as well and put on a large production.)

At least Dua Lipa wore only two outfits during the entire show – a red number at the beginning (a full-length gown, albeit with a slit down the side so she could show her legs) and a black one at the end – instead of doing multiple costume changes. She made the change at the point where Elton John came on for their duet on a song called “Cold Heart” which they recorded together, and on which he interpolated a bit of his classic “Rocket Man.” This would have been all well and good if Elton John still had a voice; it was never all that great (he became a huge star on the quality of his songs and a serviceable, if not truly great, voice that could sing them effectively) but decades of physical and vocal abuse have cost him virtually all of the voice he ever had. (I used the Google song search app to get the names of the various songs, and on one of them, “Levitating,” Google said she had a guest star, a Black rapper named DaBaby, but I didn’t notice anyone like that on the actual telecast.) The orchestra included a full-sized saxophone section – one reason I suspect it was a pickup band rather than an established symphony like the one in Milwaukee that backed the Violent Femmes, with the saxophonists plucked from the pop or jazz session musicians around London – and the conductor was rather quickly identified as Ben Paulson (though that could be wrong). I got really annoyed with the director, Paul Dugdale, because I’d have liked to see more of one of her two guitarists, mainly because they looked gender-ambiguous (clean-shaven, flat-chested, with major amounts of jewelry dangling from their ears); I’m guessing from the preponderance of evidence that they’re female but it would have been nice to see enough of them to tell which gender they were. Instead Dugdale kept cutting away from the gender-ambiguous guitarist after glimpses of just a second or two. I came away from this show with a lot more respect for Dua Lipa as an artist than I’d had when I went in, though I also hope she can and will broaden her musical horizons the way Lady Gaga has and move on from dance music to show off more of her real vocal skills.

Little Old New York (Cosmopolitan Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures, 1923)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, December 15) my husband Charles and I watched a genuinely moving film called Little Old New York (1923) as part of Jacqueline Stewart’s “Silent Sunday Showcase” on Turner Classic Movies. This was actually a star vehicle for Marion Davies, and was one of the few times in which Davies’s lover and partner, William Randolph Hearst, actually got screen credit on one of his films (he’s listed as the copyright holder). Charles and I have already seen a number of Davies’s films on TCM and been quite impressed at the level of her talents. Davies’s reputation was destroyed in 1941, four years after she retired from filmmaking, when Orson Welles produced, directed, co-wrote and starred in Citizen Kane, in which he played a character loosely based on Hearst and cast Dorothy Comingore as “Susan Alexander,” a wretchedly untalented opera singer whom “Charles Foster Kane” tried to build into a major star. Since a lot more people have seen Citizen Kane than have ever seen a Davies film start to finish, that reputation has stuck on her and permanently tarred her image. In fact, Davies was a quite talented light comedienne with a flair for spunky, independent roles; it’s a wonder that feminist film critics haven’t latched on to her as one of classic Hollywood’s most powerful examples of a woman with real agency. Part of the problem was that Hearst liked her best in period pieces even though she was at her best in contemporary roles; he spent a lot of money on her films to make the historical backgrounds as authentic as possible, with the ironic result that even though Davies was genuinely popular at the time (as film historian Gary Carey put it, “She got good reviews, and not just from Hearst’s reviewers”), many of her films lost money because Hearst had over-spent on them. Little Old New York was produced as a co-venture between Cosmopolitan Pictures, Hearst’s own studio, and Goldwyn Pictures during its three years in the commercial wilderness between founder Samuel Goldwyn’s ouster in 1921 and its absorption into Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1924. It was one of Davies’s few films that not only made money but was a blockbuster hit, partly because screenwriter (and future director) Luther Reed, artfully adapting an original story by Rida Johnson Young (who wrote books and lyrics for Victor Herbert’s Naughty Marietta and Sigmund Romberg’s Maytime, both of which became hit movies for Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy in the mid-1930’s), gave Davies a role that essentially enabled her to play a “modern” 1920’s-style woman even in a plot set a century or more earlier.

Patricia O’Day (Marion Davies) is a young, high-spirited Irishwoman whom we first see horse-whipping a collection agent for her family’s landlord in Ireland. Her father, barman John O’Day (played by future John Ford favorite J. M. Kerrigan), has been raising her and her brother Patrick (Stephen Carr) as a single parent, presumably since the death of their mother. Meanwhile, O’Day’s brother emigrated to New York and became rich; his stepson Larry Delevan (Harrison Ford – definitely not the same one!) eagerly awaits the $1 million (in 1809 money!) inheritance he expects when the old man croaks, but instead he willed it to his nephew Patrick O’Day with the proviso that if Patrick doesn’t show up in New York within a year, Larry will get the money after all. Patrick and Patricia take a sailing ship to New York to claim the money, but the already sickly Patrick dies in mid-ocean and Patricia decides to impersonate him to claim the fortune for her family. This pisses Larry off not only because he thought he was going to inherit $1 million and all he ends up with is a New York house and a $500 per month stipend, but because he was hoping to use $10,000 of his inheritance to invest in the Claremont, Robert Fulton’s (Courtenay Foote) pioneering steamboat. Quite a few real-life New Yorkers appear in the dramatis personae, including John Jacob Astor (Andrew Dillon), Cornelius Vanderbilt (Sam Hardy), Washington Irving (Mahlon Hamilton) and restaurateur Pietro Delmonico (Charles Judels). Astor is shown as a dealer in pianos and furs, but he also has control of the O’Day family fortune and regards steamboats as a preposterous idea and refuses permission to invest any money in them either from Larry or from Patricia when she shows up in New York and, posing as Patrick, demands the $10,000 Larry had agreed to invest in the Claremont. Ultimately Patricia as “Patrick” tricks Astor into writing her a check, ostensibly to buy a parcel of real estate, and she displays that to Fulton and his skeptical investors as proof that Astor will cover whatever Larry owes them. Naturally there are some scenes in which Larry finds himself mysteriously attracted to “Patrick” even though we know, but he doesn’t, that she’s really a woman.

Three years after this film, Hearst and Davies made Beverly of Graustark, another film in which Davies donned FTM drag to protect her brother’s inheritance by passing as him, and while neither one is as convincing as Katharine Hepburn’s marvelous FTM role in the 1936 film Sylvia Scarlett (made by a Gay director, George Cukor, and co-starring her with real-life Bisexual Cary Grant), Davies is quite convincing as a man in both movies. Indeed, she’s actually sexier in drag – particularly when shot from behind, in tight black pants that reveal a “womanly” ass – than she is in the ridiculous white frilled-up and laced-up dress she wears in the final scenes once she’s “outed” as a woman. She appears in this preposterous outfit (which led Charles to joke, “Who’s that drag queen?”) during a scene in which she has to appear before the New York Town Council to persuade them not to give her a two-year prison sentence for her masquerade as Patrick. Once she’s freed – she’s spared the prison sentence and the council itself agrees to pay her fine – she decides to go to London to get away from the scandal, and predictably Larry offers to come with her and turn the trip into a honeymoon. Little Old New York, though set in the early 19th century, is at least close enough to the contemporary world so Marion Davies could so what she did best – romantic comedy in which she played fiery, spunky and independent – and it’s a quite welcome rediscovery. It also survived intact with all the original titles included – apparently Davies (and Hearst, who after all was paying for them!) had enough clout with the studios to insist on keeping copies of all her films, which her estate eventually donated to the Library of Congress. The only part of the film where the original titles have been altered is at the end, when the original credit for a musical score (so-called “silent” films always had musical accompaniment, and the most prestigious ones had original scores composed for them which were sent out along with the prints in various reductions – full orchestra, organ, string trio, piano – depending on how important the theatre was and what their budget was for musicians) was crudely blacked out and replaced by Ben Model, who recorded a quite convincing new score on a theatre organ (or possibly a synthesizer set up to sound like one) that added effectively to the film.