Racism, Sexism, Individualism and Public Health: Two PBS Documentaries Explore Their Deadly Clashes

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

On Tuesday, March 26, PBS showed two quite compelling documentaries on public health campaigns that provided an interesting then-and-now comparison and also showed how racism, sexism and America’s cult of the individual interfered with our nation’s ability to survive and respond effectively to major health crises. The first was an episode of PBS’s long-running series American Experience called “The Cancer Detectives,” about Dr. George N. Papanicolaou’s invention of the PAP Smear for detecting cervical cancer in the 1920’s and his 35-year struggle to get his test approved and routinely used.

The second, shown immediately afterwards, was the first episode of a four-part mini-series called The Invisible Shield, about public health in the U.S. and how it’s been hamstrung by an early decision to leave the responsibility for protecting the public health to individual states rather than at the federal level. Though there is such an organization as the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS), it arose largely from the system of U.S. military hospitals created by Congress in 1798 – the same year it passed the law giving states, not the federal government, overall responsibility for protecting the public health – and its Wikipedia page describes it thusly:

“PHS had its origins in the system of marine hospitals that originated in 1798. In 1871 these were consolidated into the Marine Hospital Service, and shortly afterwards the position of Surgeon General and the PHS Commissioned Corps [PHSCC] were established. As the system's scope grew to include quarantine authority and research, it was renamed the Public Health Service in 1912. A series of reorganizations in 1966–1973 began a shift where PHS’s divisions were promoted into departmental operating agencies. PHS was established as a thin layer of hierarchy above them rather than an operating agency in its own right.”

Both “The Cancer Detectives” and “The Old Playbook,” first episode in the four-part mini-series The Invisible Shield, show how Americans’ ability to protect their collective health has been affected by various outside factors, including racist and sexist prejudices as well as America’s deep suspicion of collective actions of all kinds. “The Cancer Detectives” is an unlikely tale of a dedicated, determined Greek-born medical researcher; his wife, also of Greek extraction, who emigrated with him and became his first research subject; a Japanese immigrant artist; and a Black woman doctor in Philadelphia whose father had escaped from slavery and who had overcome racism and sexism to make it through medical school and set up a practice among largely poor inner-city patients.

The Greek-born medical researcher was George Papanicolaou, who settled in the U.S. in 1913 with his wife, Mary Mavroyeni. He arrived bilingual in Greek and German but knowing almost no English, though he was able to get hired by Cornell University in 1914. The person who hired him was Dr. Charles Stockard, an anatomist and zoologist who was also a prominent activist in the eugenics movement. Eugenics was a racist pseudo-science that not only believed in the innate superiority of whites over people of color, but argued that people should select their mates according to who should pair with whom to produce the most talented, intelligent and otherwise desirable offspring.

Eugenics lost most of its credibility when the Nazis adopted it and cited it as one of their justifications for the Holocaust, but before then it was quite popular and influential. Eugenic principles were used not only to encourage the supposedly “superior” people to have more children but to forcibly sterilize the supposedly “inferior” to keep them from reproducing at all. In 1927 the U.S. Supreme Court, by a vote of 8 to 1, authorized the forced sterilization of women like the plaintiff in the case, Carrie Buck. In an opinion written by the usually progressive Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Court held, “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. … Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

George Papanicolaou began examining the vaginal fluid first of research animals, including guinea pigs, and then his wife, using a tool called the speculum. It had been invented in the 1840’s by a researcher with his own contacts with racism: James Marion Sims. He had done his research on enslaved African-American women, who of course had no legal right not to consent to being his test subjects. For Dr. Papanicolaou, the speculum gave him the ability to examine the cells of women without having to do a biopsy – a highly invasive surgical procedure – to obtain them. Ultimately he observed that certain cells showed signs of becoming cancerous, and he realized that his test offered the chance of detecting cervical cancer well before it advanced to the stage of being untreatable.

Dr. Papanicolaou first began his researches on human women in 1925 at the Women’s Hospital of the City of New York. By 1928 he felt he’d obtained enough data to present his findings, Unfortunately, he chose to do this at a eugenics conference, the so-called “Race Betterment Conference,” in Battle Creek, Michigan in 1928. Though his presentation didn’t have anything to do with scientific racism, he presented anyway but got nowhere. Partly that had to do with the poor quality of the slides he presented, but also, according to historian Leah Hazard, the doctors there regarded biopsies as the gold standard of cervical cancer diagnosis and didn’t “understand why it would be appealing to switch from the biopsy, a painful, invasive diagnostic, to one that was arguably uncomfortable, but not painful. There probably wasn’t really a recognition that the woman's comfort and the patient’s preference would be in any way a deciding factor.”

Undaunted, Dr. Papanicolaou continued with his research, and ultimately he hooked up with a Japanese-American artist named Hashime Muriyama. Born in Japan and trained at the art school in Kyoto, Muriyama had emigrated to the U.S. and got a job at Cornell doing artists’ renderings for medical researchers. Muriyama’s skills enabled Dr. Papanicolaou to collect images that could educate doctors in just what abnormalities to look for in women’s uterine cells to indicate whether or not they’d get cancer. Unfortunately, just as the two were nearly finished with the book the doctor was writing and Muriyama was illustrating, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Muriyama escaped internment for a bit over a year, but in March 1943 he was arrested and taken to one of the camps, ironically enough on Ellis Island, which had been the entry point for European immigrants in the late 19th century.

Fortunately, Hashime Muriyama had powerful friends most of the Japanese-American internees didn’t. Dr. Papanicolaou wrote extensive letters to everyone he could think of in the U.S. government to request Muriyama’s release. So did a lot of other prominent people. Eventually in August 1943 U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle, just about the only person in the federal government willing to express misgivings about the internment policy in general (the U.S. military had insisted on it as a necessity and President Franklin Roosevelt didn’t think he should second-guess the military on how to fight the war; later documents were released that revealed racism, not military considerations, had been the motive behind the policy), ordered Muriyama to be freed, and he went back to work with Dr. Papanicolaou on the text that was finally published in 1946 explaining how the PAP Smear worked and what diagnosticians should be looking for to diagnose cervical cancer.

A Black Light in the White Darkness

One of the physicians who read the Papanicolaou/Muriyama book was an African-American woman doctor named Helen Dickens. She had graduated from medical school at the University of Illinois in 1934 and had settled in Philadelphia. She’d endured the racist taunts of her fellow medical students and adopted an unusual strategy to deal with them: she’d always sit in the front row of the classroom, where she couldn’t see the white men taunting her and if they wanted a clear view of the blackboard, they’d have to sit next to her. Resistance to racial oppression ran in her family; her father had escaped slavery in Kentucky, taught himself to read and write, and had abandoned his slave name and called himself Charles Dickens, after his favorite author.

“The Cancer Detectives” included an archived audio interview with Dr. Helen Dickens herself as well as reminiscences from her daughter, Dr. Jayne Henderson Brown. Dr. Dickens had got a job at the Aspiranto birthing home for Black mothers, where she was mentored by another Black woman doctor, Virginia Alexander, “The patients came to us,” Dr. Dickens recalled. “She had two rooms in her house for patients and one little room where you delivered patients. Oh, it was different. The O.B. patients stayed in nine days. Most of them were poor. People weren't able to pay, they weren't expected to pay a lot.” Dr. Dickens also did direct outreach to women in the Black community of North Philadelphia. “Going in the middle of the night, and you were going into all kinds of communities,” she said. “You were going into the homes, you were seeing all these people. You were taking responsibility for taking care of people.”

When information about the PAP Smear became available, Dr. Dickens was determined to reach out to Black women and get them to take the tests. She ran into a lot of opposition, suspicion and outright hatred from her would-be patients for the medical community in general. Part of that was a legacy of the eugenics movement; under the laws allowing forcible sterilization which the U.S. Supreme Court had O.K.’d in 1927, Black women had frequently been sterilized without their consent or foreknowledge. The procedures acquired the dark nickname, “Mississippi appendectomies.” Dickens opened a clinic to do PAP Smears at Mercy Hospital in Philadelphia, where she’d been appointed to run the cancer center in 1953 despite the stereotype that Black people didn’t need to worry about cancer because they would die from something else before they had a chance to get cancer.

Meanwhile, the first mass test of the PAP Smear as a diagnostic tool for cervical cancer was going on in Memphis, Tennessee from 1952 to 1957. It was called the Memphis Cancer Survey Project and it operated not only from established clinics but from old buses converted into mobile testing labs. “You took a van and went out to the churches in various places, and invited women in to have a PAP Smear done,” Dr. Dickens recalled of the early years when she expanded the testing program to Philadelphia. With the aid of the American Cancer Society, originally the American Society for the Control of Cancer until philanthropist Mary Lasker took it over in the 1950’s and rebranded it, raised more money for it and expanded its outreach, PAP Smears became a standard practice in women’s health. In 1958 Dr. Papanicolaou and his wife Mary were invited to the White House for a dinner with President Dwight Eisenhower. “The PAP Smear changed the landscape for cancer, for its detection, its diagnosis, management, and treatment,” Leah Hazard said at the end of “The Cancer Detectives.” “Suddenly we could envision a time when we could screen healthy people, and we could all be thriving in a new and quite exciting way.”

Public Health: Where the Victories Are Invisible

“The Old Playbook,” first out of four episodes of a mini-series on American public health called The Invisible Shield which PBS showed right after “The Cancer Detectives,” was largely centered around the fact that the triumphs of public health campaigns are invisible. They’re measured in intangibles: how many people don’t get sick, what giant outbreaks of disease don’t happen. Though “The Old Playbook” touches on the entire history of U.S. government responses to disease and real or threatened epidemics, it focused largely on the response to COVID-19 from 2020 to date and the bizarre political and social divisions that arose in response to the threat and the various ways individuals in government, medicine and science responded to it.

It brought to mind my own reactions to COVID-19, especially after the mass government-ordered lockdowns began in March 2020. In a post to the Zenger’s Newsmagazine blog on March 23, 2020, “SARS-CoV-2 and the Rush to Judgment” (https://zengersmag.blogspot.com/2020/03/sars-cov-2-and-rush-to-judgment.html), I wrote, “The advent of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the COVID-19 pandemic it is causing has hit the human race like a whirlwind. Less than two months after the World Health Organization (WHO) identified it as a global health threat (though they hung back from calling it a ‘pandemic’ — a worldwide epidemic — for another month after that), nations, states and cities are taking drastic actions to stop it that countries usually don’t take unless they’ve been directly attacked in a war. I started writing this article about a week ago — March 16, 2020 — and already the state of California has taken actions I would have considered unthinkable then. On Thursday, March 19 California Governor Gavin Newsom essentially declared public life illegal in this state.”

Two months later, in a post called “Life During Wartime” (https://zengersmag.blogspot.com/2020/05/life-during-wartime.html), I had calmed down just a little. I began the post with a quote from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s poem “Song of the Flea,” a satire about how a lowly flea gets elevated by the Russian Czar and the other nobles are afraid to scratch themselves for fear of killing the Czar’s new favorite, to indicate how “[t]his submicroscopic package of RNA, proteins and a lipid coat has done what the armed forces of Germany and Japan were unable to do to the U.S. in two world wars: end professional sports and live concerts, shut down the Broadway theatres and make millions of Americans essentially prisoners in their own homes. It has caused almost all the world’s advanced industrial countries to bring their economies to a skidding halt and zoomed the U.S.’s unemployment rate from 3.4 to 14.7 percent in just one month (from February to March 2020). It threatens to start a long-lasting worldwide depression rivaling the one from the 1930’s.”

Ironically, my husband Charles and I were not among the millions who were made “essentially prisoners in their own homes.” He was (and still is) a grocery clerk and I, until a health crisis entirely unrelated to COVID-19 forced me to retire in December 2021, two years earlier than I’d hoped to, was an in-home caregiver. Both were considered “essential occupations” under the terms of the lockdown orders, so we went on working throughout the worst of the pandemic, albeit under some level of anxiety and a few dirty looks as we used the buses to go to work (I’ve never learned to drive and Charles has a driver’s license but not a car) and wore face masks as instructed. In fact, both of us still wear masks on the buses even though they’re no longer required. And fortunately the U.S. and the rest of the world have largely, if not totally, recovered from the economic effects of the COVID-19 lockdowns and the fears of “a long-lasting worldwide depression rivaling the one from the 1930’s” haven’t materialized.

In my “Life During Wartime” post, I unwittingly pointed out the same problem public-health authorities have in general, a dilemma made in The Invisible Shield: no one remembers the epidemics that don’t happen. “For the last 50 years epidemiologists and virologists have been screaming their little heads off about one virus or another that was supposed to cause a pandemic and kill millions of people worldwide,” I wrote. “Remember Legionnaire’s Disease? Swine flu? Swine fever? SARS? MERS? Ebola? Zika? None of these materialized as pandemics. Even AIDS, as devastating as it was to the Gay male community and the other so-called ‘risk groups,’ never became a general threat in the developed world, either because the virus was so weakly transmissible (according to the HIV/AIDS mainstream, your likelihood of getting infected from a single unprotected sexual contact is one in 500) or, as I’ve believed all along, because it was never a viral disease at all.”

There’s no way we can run a controlled experiment on whether the interventions we made to stop the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, actually worked. Nor would we want to. What’s certain is that the interventions themselves – particularly the lockdowns – created a massive backlash that led in some cases to physical threats against individuals in elective office and appointed positions. One of the worst effects of Donald Trump’s Presidency and his continuing campaign to regain the office is the extent to which they’ve legitimized political violence in general, and violence against people perceived by Right-wing extremists as being in the way of their so-called “freedom” in particular.

According to director Jason Kliot and the other people behind The Invisible Shield, the collapse of America’s confidence in its public health system began with Ronald Reagan and his election as President in 1980. Reagan explicitly challenged the notion that individuals had any responsibility to come together for collective action to solve the nation’s dilemmas. The show included the famous clip from early in Reagan’s Presidency when he said, “Government is not the solution to our problems. Government is the problem.” It was an ethos that trashed the whole idea of collective responses to anything, including public health. It was what was behind Reagan’s fabled unwillingness even to mention AIDS from the White House (or anywhere else) until 1987, just one year before his second term expired.

One of the arguments made in The Invisible Shield is that America has done a decent job of responding to public health emergencies once they occur but a thoroughly lousy effort to maintain the capacities to deal with them before they happen. It seems that the U.S. mobilizes to deal with each new epidemic and then forgets the lessons we learned and lets those capabilities go. Ironically, it’s what we used to do with our military as well: we’d build it up to fight each new war and then let it go to pieces, shrinking the war budget and letting go both the people and the industrial capacities we’d built up to fight and win the last war. We stopped doing that with the military after World War II, when the rise of the Soviet Union, the Communist takeover of China and other factors kicked off the Cold War and led to the creation of a permanent military-industrial complex that has made the U.S. the country that spends more on its military than the next 25 nations in the world combined.

But we’ve never similarly prioritized public health. When Ronald Reagan took office, his officials looked for things they could cut in the domestic budget to fund his desired expansion of the military and tax cuts for the rich, and one of the things he zeroed in on was the “War on Cancer” Richard Nixon and Congress had declared in 1969. As a result, the nation’s cancer virologists zeroed in on AIDS and attributed it to a virus they’d previously been studying as a potential cause of cancer so they could keep their labs funded. In the later years of Barack Obama’s Presidency, he’d set up a task force in the White House to develop ways to fight a new, emerging virus that might cause an epidemic, or even a pandemic. When Donald Trump succeeded him, he immediately disbanded that task force, so America was left essentially defenseless when SARS-CoV-2 hit and the COVID-19 pandemic began.

The reason the first episode of The Invisible Shield was called “The Old Playbook” was because, suddenly confronted with the threat of COVID-19, public health officials and state and local governments reached for measures that had been in place to fight previous viral epidemics. One of the most fascinating reports during the height of the COVID crisis was one on 60 Minutes showing what medieval governments had done to fight plague – including requiring people to wear face masks outdoors (the masks back then were quite a bit fancier than the ones now, including giant nose covers that looked like beaks) and stay at least six feet apart from each other. People were encouraged to carry long sticks so they could push away anyone else who came too close to them. It struck me that even in an era where no one had any idea that germs even existed, much less that they could cause disease, humans still intuited that diseases were transmitted between people based on proximity, and one way to minimize your risk is to keep others at a distance.

At the height of the COVID pandemic, Turner Classic Movies showed a 1950 film called The Killer That Stalked New York (reviewed by me at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2021/02/the-killer-that-stalked-new-york.html). At least loosely based on a true story, it dealt with the threat of a smallpox epidemic unwittingly sparked in New York City by a lounge singer whose husband was a crook. I posted about this movie to my moviemagg blog on February 7, 2021, and one of the things that most impressed me was it showed the mayor of New York publicly getting inoculated with the smallpox vaccine as an example to the rest of the city’s residents to do so as well.

“One of the most powerful scenes in the movie is the one in which the mayor summons the CEO’s of the leading pharmaceutical companies and essentially demands that they drop everything else during the present emergency and just produce smallpox vaccine – and his shame campaign works.” I wrote. “There’s also a brief acknowledgment of an anti-vaccine campaign similar to the ones we’ve seen around COVID – though unlike today’s anti-vaxxers, the ones in the movie stop at legal demonstrations and don’t actually try to disrupt the vaccinations. Though the New York vaccine campaign – both as depicted in this film and the real one that occurred in 1947 – had several advantages over the one today (they were only trying to vaccinate a city, not an entire country; and the smallpox vaccine was an established product that companies knew how to produce, and it required only one vaccine dose instead of the two needed for COVID), the biggest difference between then and now was an aggressive government response that grabbed the emergency by the proverbial tail and did not allow the disease to become a political football.

“If today’s health crisis is virtually an object lesson in how not to respond to a public-health emergency – especially in the contemptible response of ex-President Trump and his consistent belittling of the threat and anyone who wanted to take it seriously – the depiction of one in The Killer That Stalked New York is an example of how to deal with one,” I added. Unfortunately, the political polarization we saw emerge over COVID-19 has only increased even as the immediate threat has receded. Donald Trump found that out to his cost when one of his usually ultra-faithful rally audiences actually booed him when he urged them to take the COVID-19 vaccine. Ironically, rushing the vaccine through development under what he called “Operation Warp Speed” was one of the few things about COVID Trump actually got right (though it took Joe Biden’s administration to distribute it effectively), but so many B.S. conspiracy theories got floated around the vaccine and so many of Trump’s supporters believed them that vaccination against COVID became yet another victim of America’s intense political polarization.

50 First Dates (Happy Madison Productions, Anonymous Content, Flower Films, Columbia, 2004)

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

Last night (Thursday, March 28) my husband Charles and I ran a 20-year-old movie from the DVD backlog: 50 First Dates, directed by Peter Segal (who before this was mostly a director of comedy series entries like Nutty Professor 2: The Klumpps and Naked Gun 33 ⅓: The Final Insult) from a script by George Wing. 50 First Dates stars Adam Sandler as Henry Roth, a hapless veterinarian at a Hawai’ian theme park called Sea Life in Oahu who burns through women like Kleenex until he meets one that really turns his crank. She is Lucy Whitmore (Drew Barrymore, granddaughter of John Barrymore – and the resemblance is quite apparent in her close-ups), who about a year and a half before the main story begins was involved in a car accident with her father, Marlin Whitmore (Blair Clark). He was relatively unscathed but she suffered a permanent brain injury that practically eliminated her short-term memory. According to her doctor, Dr. Keats (Saturday Night Live and Ghostbusters veteran Dan Aykroyd in a coolly effective performance), every night as she sleeps her brain essentially reboots itself and wipes out all memories of what happened all day. Her long-term memory is unaffected but she’s essentially frozen in time: since the accident happened on her father’s birthday, dad and her brother Doug (Sean Astin, biological son of actress Patty Duke and stepson of actor John Astin) have to re-enact the events of that day every day, including baking him a birthday cake (which they almost immediately throw away) and giving him a present, a videotape of the film The Sixth Sense, which they watch and have to pretend to be surprised at its famous trick ending. They’ve also stockpiled copies of the Honolulu Star-Advertiser for the day of her accident to reinforce her illusion that it’s still the same day the accident occurred, and every day they have to whitewash the walls of one of the rooms in their house because just before the accident Lucy had been painting the white walls with murals of flowers, particularly lilies (her favorite).

Marlin and Doug do all they can to make sure Henry and Lucy don’t fall in love lest the stresses of an actual relationship blow the delicate balance in her life. Henry tries to avoid them by staging fake accidents of his own and leaving himself stranded in various out-of-the-way situations so the good-hearted Lucy can “rescue” him from them, including one in which his sidekick from the theme park, Ula (Rob Schneider), stages a mock attack on him and she literally won’t leave him alone. She catches up to him, knocks him down and repeatedly kicks him, reopening a fearsome wound Ula got when a shark attacked him despite Henry’s repeated assurances that sharks never attack humans unless the humans did something to bother them first. Through much of its running time the film seems like a bizarre mash-up of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Groundhog Day and one of my all-time favorite films, Good Bye, Lenin! (a German film from 2003 in which the gimmick was the central character’s mother was devoted to the socialist ideals proclaimed by the former East Germany, and her son and his best friend surround her with props so when she returns home after an eight-month coma she won’t realize that East Germany no longer exists and the West basically staged a friendly takeover of the East). It also seems like the sort of screwball comedy that was sensationally popular in the late 1930’s, and indeed one could readily imagine a 1930’s version of this premise with Cary Grant and Carole Lombard. 50 First Dates is essentially a one-joke movie, though Segal and Wing are able to get a lot of neat variations on that one joke, including one in which Henry and Lucy actually spend the night together in the same bed after (presumably) having sex, only in the morning she not only has no memory of him but reacts violently to the presence of a strange man in her bed and assaults him with a lacrosse stick.

The careful schemes of Marlin and Doug Whitmore to keep Lucy in the dark about what year it is and what’s going on in the rest of the world unravel in a quite ingenious way. A traffic cop writes her a ticket, saying that the registration on her car – a yellow Volkswagen “Thing” (a vehicle originated during World War II by Dr. Ferdinand Porsche; it was the German equivalent of the Jeep and its big advantage is that if it tipped over, it was so light the crew running it could simply tip it over and get it right side up) – is expired. She says it’s still current and won’t need to be renewed for another few months. He writes her a ticket which she, of course, tears up. Henry makes a videotape (though the DVD format had existed for nearly a decade when this movie was made – my husband Charles and I first saw The Sixth Sense on a DVD we bought the day the film came out – it’s totally ignored in this movie) showing Lucy what her life has been like. The two inevitably fall in love and start a relationship, though she breaks up with him because she fears she’s keeping him away from a planned trip to Alaska to study the underwater behavior of walruses. To accomplish this trip, Henry and Ula have rebuilt an old yacht they call the Sea Serpent – the obvious patches on the sails of this craft tell us all we need to know about its overall seaworthiness, or lack of same – only Lucy ends up on board. By the time the film ends they’ve not only got married but have a five-year-old daughter, Nicole, and of course Henry has to keep reminding Lucy who Nicole is and that she is their child.

50 First Dates has some quite funny gags that aren’t part of the main story, including one in which Henry is treating a Sea Life walrus for stomachaches, and it pukes all over his androgynous assistant Alexa (Lusia Strus), a rare example of a sympathetically portrayed Transgender character in a film this (relatively) early. (Lusia Strus’s pronoun on their imdb.com page is “she,” by the way, though writer Wing keeps us so much in doubt about the character’s gender identity we can go either way on the question, “Is he or isn’t she?”) Though I think Charles liked 50 First Dates a bit more than I did – at least I’m guessing that from the number of times he laughed – he told me something after the movie that flabbergasted me: he’d literally been in tears as the movie ended. When I asked him why, he told me that during my health crisis in December 2021 – first my heart attack, then my open-heart surgery and the two strokes I had the day after the operation – Charles had been worried that I might lose my memory and come to literally not knowing who he was. So this film hit quite close to home for him on a decidedly personal level!

Gounod's "Roméo et Juliette" at the Metropolitan Opera: "Live in HD" Telecast (Metropolitan Opera, aired March 23, 2024)

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

Right now I’m listening to a 1976 radio broadcast of Charles Gounod’s opera Roméo et Juliette, featuring a capable cast – Alain Vanzo as Roméo and Andrée Esposito as Juliette – with Antonio de Almeida conducting the orchestra and chorus of the Opéra de Nice. This was the opera my husband Charles and I went to see yesterday afternoon in the Met’s “Live in HD” satellite telecast at the AMC 20 theatre complex in Mission Valley. The theatre management let us in free because there had been some dropouts when they tested the image, courtesy of interference from some storms that had been racking New York City recently, but in the end there was only a brief bit of digital dithering in the image towards the end. In these pages before I’ve noted my frustration that the truly great composers who contemplated writing operas based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet never did so while the lesser talents actually did. The first important opera based on the Romeo and Juliet story was composed by Nicola Vaccai (I wonder if he got teased as a kid because his last name derives from the Italian word for “cow”) in 1825 and was based not on Shakespeare’s play but on the original 1580 Italian story, the “Daysong” (so called because the good things that happen to the lovers all occur at night and the bad things happen during the day), by Luigi Da Porto that was also Shakespeare’s source. Vaccai’s librettist, Felice Romani, also worked from an intervening Italian play by Luigi Scevola called Giulietta è Romeo (note the reverse order of the names from the one we’re used to!) from the eighteen-teens. Later Romani recycled his libretto for Vaccai’s opera and gave it to Vincenzo Bellini for an opera called I Capuleti è I Montecchi, which was also based directly on the Italian sources rather than on Shakespeare. Both Vaccai and Bellini cast Romeo as a travesti or “trouser” role; that is, a male character played by a woman in drag. (I once mentioned this to my late roommate/home-care client John and he said, “Why did they do that?” Then I reminded him that in Shakespeare’s productions both Romeo and Juliet were played by males.)

In 1839 Hector Berlioz took up the Romeo and Juliet story but not, alas, for an opera. Instead, his Roméo et Juliette was a so-called “dramatic symphony,” which featured vocal soloists, chorus and orchestra in an opening movement that paid tribute to Shakespeare and the play, then four more or less conventional symphonic movements (though with choral interjections in the love and death scenes), and a final movement that dramatized the play’s epilogue, in which Friar Laurence presides over the joint funerals of Romeo and Juliet and at last gets the Montagues and the Capulets to settle their difference and stop the insane generations-long feud that has killed both their kids. The pattern of great composers falling through on their plans for a Romeo and Juliet opera while lesser talents did theirs continued; Tchaikovsky got as far as a “Fantasy-Overture” on the play (which I’ve never cared for, actually, being particularly annoyed by the cheaply gushing Big Tune for the lovers) and a duet on the balcony scene. Debussy contemplated a Roméo et Juliette opera for Mary Garden, the soprano who had created the role of Mélisande in Debussy’s one completed opera, Pelléas et Mélisande, but according to Garden this was one of many projects Debussy abandoned in the wake of the breakup of his first marriage and his remarriage to socialite Emma Bardac. Instead the composers who finished and premiered Romeo and Juliet operas in the 19th and 20th centuries were Charles Gounod and Riccardo Zandonaï.

Gounod is best known today for his opera Faust, based on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s dramatic poem, and his Roméo et Juliette was premiered in Paris in 1867 at the Théâtre-Lyrique Impérial du Châtelet, the lesser theatre for composers who couldn’t make it into the Paris Opéra. At least Gounod and his librettist, Jules Barbier and Michel Carré, cast Romeo and Juliet as the characters’ actual biological genders – the only “trouser role” in this opera is Romeo’s page Stéphano – and gave them both a series of powerful and moving duets that form the heart of the opera. However, just about the only parts of this opera well known to modern audiences are Juliet’s aria “Je veux vivre” (“I want to live”), sung before she and Romeo even meet; and Romeo’s aria “Ah! Lêve-toi soleil” (“Arise, fair sun”), sung after he sees Juliet for the first time at the Capulets’ party which he’s crashed but before they’ve had any interaction with each other. As Charles and I were leaving the theatre I ran into an older straight couple and the man told me, “Prokofieff’s Romeo and Juliet is a masterpiece; this is just music.” I know what he means, though I’d substitute Berlioz’s for Prokofieff’s; Prokofieff was originally commissioned to compose a ballet based on Romeo and Juliet in 1936 but was told by the choreographer to give it a happy ending because “people can’t dance lying down.” Fortunately that original production fell through, and in 1940 a new choreographer, Leonid Lavrovsky, took a look at the score and approached Prokofieff about staging it. Lavrovsky asked Prokofieff, “Why does it have a happy ending?” Prokofieff replied, “Because the first choreographer told me people can’t dance lying down.” Lavrovsky told Prokofieff, “Write me the most intense and moving death scene you can imagine, and let me worry about what the dancers will do.”

Anyway, getting back to Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette, it opens with a weird overture that reminded me of the one to Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman – especially the big string tremeloes that open it – and seemed more appropriate for a ship sailing through a storm than a tale of two star-crossed lovers. Then we get a chorus adapted from Shakespeare’s prologue about the generations-long feud between the Montagues and the Capulets, which segues into the Capulets’ party in which Romeo (Benjamin Bernheim, who despite his German-Jewish last name is actually French, and he gave an intermission interview in which he talked about how good it felt to sing in his native language instead of Italian, German or Russian) and his Montague friends crash the gate and worry about being found out. Romeo has been dating a woman named Rosaline (whom we never see) and Juliet (American soprano Nadine Sierra, who’s quite good) is being forced by her father (Nathan Berg) and mother to marry an obnoxious guy named Páris (Daniel Rich). (I noticed that the singers pronounced the “s” in Páris’s last name, presumably to distinguish him from the French capital, in which the “s” is silent.) But once the two lay eyes on each other at the party, they lose all interest in anyone else. The plot cycles through the familiar highlights from Shakespeare’s play: the balcony scene, the sequence in which Friar Laurence (Alfred Walker) secretly marries them, their one night of lovemaking, the catastrophic duel – incited, at least in this version, by Stéphano (Samantha Hankey) and the insulting song he sings about the Capulets – in which Capulet family member Tybalt kills Romeo’s friend Mercutio and Romeo kills Tybalt in revenge, the plot hatched by Friar Laurence to get Juliet out of having to marry Páris by giving her a drug that will make her look dead but in reality she will just sleep for a day, Romeo entering the Capulet family tomb and finding Juliet dead, Romeo drinking poison and then Juliet waking up from the drug, finding Romeo dead and then killing herself with Romeo’s dagger.

Like Berlioz and his librettist, Émile Deschamps, Gounod, Barbier and Carré worked not from Shakespeare’s original but from a rewrite by 18th century British actor/author David Garrick, who changed the ending so Juliet awakens after Romeo has already drunk the poison but before it’s killed him, so the two can sing a beautiful and heartrending final duet as they face the inevitability of their mutual demises and look forward to their reunion in death. (This whole business of being “reunited in death” is one of the sillier conceits of the entire Romantic era, though it’s one of the aspects of Romeo and Juliet that powered its rediscovery after having been largely forgotten in the intervening two centuries after Shakespeare’s death. At least Barbier and Carré didn’t have Romeo and Juliet survive at the end the way they did with Hamlet in their libretto for Ambroise Thomas’s opera on that play, based once again not on the original but a rewrite, this time by Alexandre Dumas père, best known today for The Three Musketeers.) Their last words are a prayer to God, “Forgive us!,” reflecting that in Roman Catholic theology suicide is a mortal sin and earns you eternal damnation. In one of the earlier duets for the lovers, they argue over whether a particular bird song they’ve heard is a nightingale heralding the evening or a lark heralding daybreak – a carry-over from the original “Daysong” origin of the story in which the good things that happen to Romeo and Juliet all occur at night and the bad things happen during daytime.

Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette is a competent, workmanlike opera with some quite stunning moments – a surprising bit of world-weariness for Juliet in which, even before she’s met Romeo, she complains that her life seems meaningless and she longs for death; a late duet for the lovers called “Va, je t'ai pardonne” (recorded by Plácido Domingo and Renata Scotto on a quite impressive duets album for Columbia in 1978); and Romeo’s final scene in the tomb (recorded by legendary Polish tenor Jean de Reszke in 1905 but never approved for release by him, and no copy of the master disc exists). It also ends rather abruptly, with the deaths of the lovers and without Shakespeare’s epilogue in which Friar Laurence officiates at the joint funeral of Romeo and Juliet and at least tries to use the families’ grief at the loss of their kids to end their feud at last. (Since this is the one part of the play Berlioz set in operatic style, it might be interesting to graft the last movement of Berlioz’s Roméo et Juliette onto a production of Gounod’s opera. At least they’re both from the mid-19th century and are both in French.) The Met’s production of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette was basically well done and did justice to the story. Director Bartlett Sher and his production designers (Michael Yeargan for sets and Catherine Zuber for costumes) moved up the setting from the 16th to the 18th centuries, but it was still “antique” enough to fit the mood and not offer any of the outrageous anachronisms that infect modern-dress productions of Shakespeare. The Met’s current music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conducted with loving attention to the score and didn’t glibly rush through it the way he’s done in some previous productions.

The cast was stunning, especially the singers in the leads; for some reason the Mercutio, Tybalt and Friar Laurence were all Black, but that was a battle fought and won long ago (though I was still taken aback when a preview for the Met’s next “Live in HD” production, Puccini’s La Rondine, featuring soprano Angel Blue, a heavy-set African-American, less because she’s Black than she was dressed in a costume that made her look like Bessie Smith). While not an opera at the level of the very best conceivable adaptations (and I still mourn that we don’t have Romeo and Juliet operas by Berlioz or Debussy!), Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette is still a quite capable piece of work and the Met’s current production (which debuted in 2017) does it justice. Oddly, though, it’s in just two acts; Gounod, Barbier and Carré wrote it in five short acts but the Met jammed it all together into two long ones, spotting the single intermission in between the two scenes of act three: a far cry from the Met’s 1930’s practice of either splitting long one-act operas like Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman and Das Rheingold to create intermissions or having Richard Strauss’s Salomé and Elektra preceded by curtain-raisers so there would be an intermission: a provision in the contract with their food-service provider required they have at least one intermission each time they performed!

Winchester '73 (Universal-International, 1950)

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

Last night (Wednesday, March 27) my husband Charles and I watched a DVD of the 1950 film Winchester ‘73 (that’s the original spelling, with an apostrophe before the number instead of a decimal point), a quite good movie which I’ve previously described as “a film noir in Western drag.” Winchester ‘73 was a quite important film in American movie history for reasons unrelated to its quality as a movie. Universal had absorbed International Pictures in 1946 and was anxious to upgrade its productions to compete with the major studios that owned their own theatres: MGM, Warner Bros., Paramount, Fox and RKO. One way Universal’s owners wanted to do that was to hire major stars, but their depleted coffers couldn’t match the asking price for big-name talent. James Stewart demanded $200,000 per picture, and that was too much up-front money for Universal. So instead Stewart offered to make the film for a percentage of its profits, and the film was such a huge hit it was estimated that he would clear $1 million just on his profit share. The actual amount, according to an imdb.com “Trivia” post, was more like $600,000, but that was still a hefty sum for a single film in 1950. Winchester ‘73 began life as a short story by Stuart N. Lake (whose name was originally left off the credits and he sued the studio to get it listed) and was adapted into a screenplay by Robert L. Richards and Borden Chase. One of Chase’s own stories had just been filmed by director Howard Hawks as Red River (shot 1946, released 1948), so he knew something about not only Westerns but relatively deep, well motivated “psychological Westerns” in particular.

Winchester ‘73 was directed by Anthony Mann, who’d worked with Stewart in the 1930’s on stage but whose directorial career had mostly been making films noir for cheap studios like Republic and Eagle-Lion (the former PRC). The cinematographer was William Daniels, who’d been employed for years by MGM as a glamour cameraman (he was Greta Garbo’s favorite, he shot 17 of Garbo’s 24 films and in later years he said his one career regret was that Garbo never made a color film so he couldn’t show her beautiful blue eyes in color). Then he abruptly quit MGM and went over to Universal, where he explored the dark side both figuratively and literally, shooting noir classics like 1948’s The Naked City. For Winchester ‘73 he used red filters throughout almost the whole movie, giving a deep, contrasty Western “look” and achieving some of the claustrophobia of film noir even in a wide-open environment like the Old West. The plot of Winchester ‘73 is basically “boy meets gun, boy loses gun, boy gets gun back.” Lin McAdam (James Stewart, playing a dark, driven character quite different from the unambiguous heroes he’d been portraying most of his film career) arrives in Dodge City on July 4, 1876 to compete in a contest honoring the American Centennial. The prize is a new, rare Winchester ‘73 rifle, a gun so great it’s marketed as “One in a Thousand.” Unfortunately he has an especially determined opponent, Dutch Henry Brown (Stephen McNally, Universal’s go-to guy for black-hearted villains then). The two end up neck and neck for the prize until Lin offers to shoot a hole through a postage stamp affixed to a charm from a Native American bracelet. He pulls it off and wins the rifle (according to imdb.com, the shot was actually executed by Herb Parsons, who was sent out by the Winchester company to train James Stewart in the proper handling of their gun), only Brown and two of his associates mug him for it and steal it.

Since they’re otherwise unarmed – Dodge City sheriff Wyatt Earp (Will Geer) and his deputy insisted that all the out-of-town gunslingers competing for the prize rifle check their own guns at the door and use only locally sourced rifles for the shooting contest – Brown and his gang have to give the precious Winchester to Joe Lamont (John McIntire) in exchange for $300 in gold pieces plus guns from Lamont’s stock of six-shooters. Then Lamont is ambushed by the Natives he was going to sell guns to, and their chief, Young Bull (Rock Hudson in a very early role that had my husband Charles laughing at his costuming and war paint to make him look Native; after that another later Big Name, Tony Curtis, turns up as a U.S. cavalry officer), turns down the old, worn-out guns Lamont wanted to palm off on him. Instead he demands the Winchester, and when Lamont refuses the Natives scalp him and take the gun anyway. Meanwhile, Wyatt Earp has chased local prostitute Lola Manners (Shelley Winters) out of town on a stagecoach in a sequence strikingly similar to Mae West’s treatment at the start of My Little Chickadee (1940), also a Universal film. Lola insisted she was there to meet her fiancé, Steve Miller (Charles Drake), who turns out to be an ineffectual coward who leaves her stranded when Natives attack their wagon. Ultimately Steve finds a cavalry detachment from the U.S. Army who are after the same Natives, and he and Lola end up in their camp despite facing near-certain annihilation from the Apaches. Lin McAdam and his sidekick “High-Spade” Frankie Wilson (Millard Mitchell) also show up at the camp, and Lin teaches the cavalry commander, Sgt. Wilkes (Jay C. Flippen), the most effective ways of fighting Natives, including waiting for their second charge because that’s when they’ll use their most impressive weapons, the large repeating rifles that won them the Battle of the Little Big Horn. (Word of George Armstrong Custer’s annihilation is just starting to figure down to the Kansas Territory where Winchester ‘73 takes place.)

Ultimately the whites win the battle (darnit!) and Young Bull drops the precious Winchester as he falls. But Lin McAdam doesn’t recover the rifle because he misses it completely – we can tell which one it is because it’s got a silver plate screwed to its stock which was supposed to be engraved with Lin’s name, only it was stolen from him before that could happen – and Steve picks it up from the battlefield. He and Lola ride to the Jameson place, owned by his family which they’re going to pass down to him and Lola, only he’s really a crook in league with Henry Brown and outlaw Waco Johnny Dean (Dan Duryea in one of his best psycho performances; he takes charge of the screen in every scene he’s in). Dean is determined to kill Steve and kidnap Lola for himself, and to that end he stages a home-invasion robbery of the Jameson place and, when that doesn’t flush her out, he loads a wagon with incendiaries and sets the house on fire. Steve gets killed and Waco grabs Lola, but his partner-in-crime Dutch Henry Brown (ya remember him?) insists the Winchester is his and demands it. The misbegotten gang attempts a robbery at a town called Tascosa in Texas, but it goes about as well as all the other crimes in the film: Lin ambushes Waco and kills him (reportedly 1950 audiences gasped at the sight of James Stewart calmly and methodically gunning down Dan Duryea because none of his previous movies had prepared them for the sight of James Stewart, Action Hero), then stages a gun battle with Dutch Henry Brown. Lin’s sidekick Wilson tells Lola and us that Dutch Henry Brown is really Matthew McAdam, Lin’s brother, giving an air of Cain and Abel to their final confrontation, which takes place on some rocky ledges.

At first Dutch t/n Matthew has the advantage because he’s higher up, but Lin manages to sneak behind enough rocks to get above him and take him down (represented by one of the least convincing dummy shots ever in a major film), and ultimately Lin recovers the gun from his brother’s corpse. He did not end up with Lola as per traditional Hollywood conventions, and Shelley Winters was withering in her scorn for this film in later interviews. “Here you've got all these men … running around to get their hands on this goddamned rifle, instead of going after a beautiful blonde like me,” she said. “What does that tell you about the values of that picture? If I hadn't been in it, would anybody have noticed?” But she did praise James Stewart for yielding on the issue of how their faces should be photographed during their scenes together. Both thought their left sides were their best sides, but Stewart agreed to be filmed from the right side in scenes with Winters so she could show her best side to the camera. Winchester ‘73 today holds up surprisingly well even though it wasn’t even the first film noir Western (that honor goes to Blood on the Moon, made two years earlier at RKO by director Jacques Tourneur and echt noir star Robert Mitchum, though well before the noir era John Ford’s tragically underrated 1926 silent film Three Bad Men had had surprisingly noir-ish elements that anticipated the so-called “psychological Westerns” that were all the rage in the early 1950’s, largely on the strength of Winchester ‘73’s huge commercial success as well as that of High Noon, two years later). It’s a film that holds up surprisingly well even though Broken Arrow comes off as more politically progressive in its treatment of Native Americans, but Broken Arrow isn’t as good a movie overall and it’s handicapped by being in color, which plays against the darkness of its material while the black-and-white Winchester ‘73 ironically seems more true to life and faithful to the mythos of the West.

The Boob (MGM, 1926)

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

Last night (Sunday, March 24) I saw a couple of films on Turner Classic Movies that unwittingly had something in common: they were both surprisingly mediocre (or, in one case, even worse than that) efforts by directors with major reputations. The first was a “Silent Sunday Showcase” movie called The Boob, a not-particularly-funny comedy made at MGM in 1925 but not released until a year later. It was directed by William A. Wellman and was such a total flop that MGM production chief Louis B. Mayer fired him after its release – whereupon he decamped to Paramount and made the first Academy Award winner for Best Production, Wings, in 1927. Then Wellman moved on to Warner Bros. and directed James Cagney in his star-making role in The Public Enemy (1931) and made a minor masterpiece, Safe in Hell, a precursor to film noir and a great movie in which, given a script with two African-American characters speaking in Hollywood’s stupid excuse for “Negro dialect,” he overruled the writers and told the actors, Nina Mae McKinney and Clarence Muse, to speak their lines in normal English. I was thinking of this because “Silent Sunday Showcase” host Jacqueline Stewart, who’s African-American herself, criticized The Boob for its stereotypical Black character, “Hamm,” a boy played by an actor unidentified on imdb.com – though actually the Black boy is smarter than just about any of the white people in the movie and his dog, “Benzene,” is smarter than any of the humans!

The writing credits on The Boob are typically convoluted for a late silent: George Scarborough and Annette Westbay get credit for the “original” story (quotes definitely merited!); Kenneth B. Clarke for “scenario” and Katharine Hilliker and H. H. Caldwell for writing the intertitles. The Boob lists four principal cast members: Gertrude Olmstead, George K. Arthur, Joan Crawford and Charles Murray, in that order – but the two men get a lot more screen time than the two women. Plot-wise it’s the old chestnut about the country hayseed, Peter Good (George K. Arthur), whose girlfriend Amy (Gertrude Olmstead) has dumped him for a city slicker, Harry Benson (Antonio D’Algy – and given the overall creepiness of his character, it’s entirely appropriate that he be played by an actor named after a slimy underwater plant), who turns out to be a bootlegger. Benson is there to supply a new roadhouse called “The Booklovers’ Club” which, in one of the few genuinely witty touches in the script, dispenses alcoholic potables out of fake books with titles tweaked to reflect their real contents. Benson takes Amy to “The Booklovers’ Club” and promises to marry her the next day, much to the discomfiture of his gang, who understandably don’t want a woman – especially an innocent country girl who at best will be a fifth wheel on their operation and at worst might blow the whistle on them – tagging along. In case you’re wondering where the young Joan Crawford fits in (The Boob was her 11th movie and it’s pretty obvious that MGM didn’t yet know what to do with her; she’d had bit roles in great movies like Stroheim’s The Merry Widow and the 1926 Ben-Hur and she’d just come back from a loanout to First National for Harry Langdon’s first starring feature, Tramp, Tramp, Tramp), she plays a Prohibition enforcement agent named Jane who’s part of a crew of feds staking out The Booklovers’ Club and trying to bust Benson and his gang.

Though Charles Murray, as “Cactus Jim,” is billed fourth, he actually gets more screen time than any of the principals; he’s shown repeatedly breaking the glass flask containing his bootleg booze (one wonders why it never occurred to him to buy one of the metal flasks my husband Charles and I have seen in many other movies set during Prohibition and often made while it was still in effect), and as I once said about rustic comedian Bob Burns’s role in the 1937 Jack Benny vehicle Artists and Models, it’s unclear just why the people at the studio thought a film that was already a comedy (at least, as Dwight MacDonald put it, in thought and intent) needed a comic-relief character, and such a stupid, oppressive and unfunny one at that. The low point in Murray’s performance comes when the bootleggers dump a cache of illegal liquor to avoid getting caught with it, and Murray thinks he’s in hog heaven and picks up as much of the booze as he can grab. He ends up looking like a porcupine with bottlenecks sticking out of him at every conceivable hiding place, and ultimately he drinks his whole stash in one night, with predictable results. (The Black kid and the dog come upon him and try as best they can to sober him up.) The gimmick is that Peter Good thinks he can win Amy back by becoming a free-lance detective and busting Harry Benson’s bootlegging ring, and to ready him for this task Cactus Jim outfits him in a preposterous outfit of pseudo-Western dude-ranch decorations that, when Amy sees him, she actually compares to Tom Mix’s costumes.

The Boob actually has two quite good special-effects sequences, a movie-within-the-movie illustrating Cactus Jim’s boasts of his prowess as an Indian fighter and a remarkable dream in which Peter is driving Benson’s white car and it takes off and flies, with various other characters falling out of it as it travels through the skies. It ends about the way you’d expect it to, with Peter busting the bootleggers and earning a $2,000 reward and the promise of a federal enforcement job whenever he wants it, and while I was hoping he’d take the job and end up with Joan Crawford at the end, he returns to Amy and his dull hayseed existence after the other members of Benson’s gang inform him, to absolutely no one’s surprise, that Benson can’t marry Amy because he’s already married. It was ironic that Crawford made this movie right after working with Harry Langdon because, with my habit of mentally recasting classic-era movies with other actors who were around at the time, I’d been thinking of Langdon as the right actor to play Peter. With Langdon’s peculiar talent of bringing his baby-ish character and his adult reality into comedically effective contrasts, he could have made Peter sympathetic and even lovable in ways that totally eluded George K. Arthur.

All These Women (För att inte tala om alla dessa kvinnor) (Svensk Filmindustri, 1964)

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

Alas, the next film on the Turner Classic Movies schedule March 24 was even lamer: All These Women (1964), a rare attempt at comedy from Swedish director Ingmar Bergman. Alicia Malone, who hosts TCM’s weekly showcase for foreign films, said this was his attempt to do a box-office hit after his dour faith-based trilogy, Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Winter Light (1962) and The Silence (1963), which had been released to critical acclaim but not much of an audience. Its original Swedish title was a real mouthful, För att inte tala om alla dessa kvinnor, and Bergman not only directed but co-wrote the script with Swedish comedian Erland Josephson. For the first time in Bergman’s career he worked with color – Eastmancolor – and he used his regular cinematographer, Sven Nykvist. (American cinematographer Conrad Hall once said he was professionally jealous of Nykvist because of Sweden’s relative position to the sun, which gives it naturally indirect light.) All These Women is set in the 1920’s – as we learn from the elaborate cars of the period and the use of overly strident records of 1920’s songs like “Yes! We Have No Bananas” – and deals with an internationally famous cellist, Felix (we get a couple of glimpses of him but no one is identified on imdb.com as playing him); his biographer, Cornelius (Jari Kulle), who’s also a composer trying to get Felix to play a piece of his and hinting that the book he’s writing about Felix will make him look good, or not, depending on whether Felix plays Cornelius’s composition; and the harem of women Felix has assembled around him.

He calls them his “mistresses” and he’s given them names different from the ones they were born with: Bumblebee (Bibi Andersson, top-billed), Isolde (Harriet Andersson), Adelaide (Eva Dahlbeck), Traviata (Gertrud Fridh), Cecelia (Mona Malm) and Beatrica (Barbro Hiort af Ornäs). You’ll note that at least some of these characters are based after famous pieces of music – “Adelaide” is from a song by Beethoven which gets croaked by Jari Kulle as Cornelius in a raspy non-voice – though the main girl in Felix’s harem (Ghislaine Maxwell to Felix’s Jeffrey Epstein, as it were) is a heavy-set middle-aged woman named Madame Tussaud (Karin Kavli), named after the proprietress of the famous London wax museum (which actually gets name-checked in the script). Felix also has a long-suffering manservant and butler named Tristan (Georg Funkquist), who used to be a major cellist himself until Felix beat him at an international music competition, whereupon he withdrew from his career like Erich von Stroheim with Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard and devoted the rest of his life to serving the Great Man. There’s also Felix’s manager, Jilliker (Allan Edwall), who has to deal with Felix’s refusal to announce the programs for his concerts in advance (Felix insists that the audiences come to see him perform and don’t care what he’s playing) and who ultimately quits after he’s appalled at Felix’s open flouting of conventional sexual morality. The film actually begins at Felix’s funeral, in which all the women in his life parade past his coffin and say, “He looks just the same – only different.” Then it flashes back to the last four days of Felix’s life, in which we see one of the mistresses shooting at statues of Felix in his garden; it’s not clear just how Felix is supposed to have died, though the hint is that he was shot.

There are some clever gags in the movie, including a scene in which we get a title saying that because of censorship the director won’t be able to show Cornelius and Bumblebee actually having sex and then the scene cuts to a black-and-white shot of them doing a Valentino-esque tango dance. But for the most part it’s just a dismal assemblage of would-be gags. One irony is that Bergman had proven in his 1955 film Smiles of a Summer Night that he could do comedy, but Smiles of a Summer Night was a romantic farce while All These Women is slapstick, and badly staged slapstick at that. I had much the same feeling about All These Women as I’ve had for years about Wagner’s Die Meistersinger – both are the works of basically serious artists who tried to make us laugh and couldn’t (though at least Die Meistersinger has moments of genuine pathos and a few drop-dead gorgeous set-piece arias of the kind Wagner deliberately avoided in his other mature works) – and I’d be tempted to offer All These Women on a double bill with Woody Allen’s Interiors as a pairing of works by highly regarded artists each trying to play on the other’s turf. (Other examples I’d have in mind include a double bill of Bela Lugosi playing the Frankenstein monster in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and Boris Karloff’s one vampire role, in Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath; and a pairing of Alfred Hitchcock’s one musical, Waltzes from Vienna, with They Made Me a Criminal, a quite good 1939 thriller directed by Busby Berkeley.)

Coogan's Bluff (Malpaso Productions, Universal, 1968)

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

On my way back from the Musica Vitale “Celebrating Women in the Arts” concert at St. Paul’s Episcopal Cathedral on Saturday, March 23 (https://musicmagg.blogspot.com/2024/03/musica-vitale-brings-life-to-widely.html), I had excellent bus luck and had no trouble getting home in time to watch two noir-ish films on Turner Classic Movies I really wanted to see. The first was Coogan’s Bluff, made in 1978 by Universal in association with Malpaso Productions, a company started by the film’s star, Clint Eastwood. Eastwood’s career had had a rather quirky beginning; he was signed as a contract player by Universal in 1955 and put in an unbilled bit role in the 1955 sci-fi/horror film Revenge of the Creature as an inexperienced lab assistant who loses one of the four rats in his care. In 1959 he landed the second lead, “Rowdy Yates,” on a Western TV series called Rawhide that ran six seasons and had a long afterlife on reruns. In 1964 an Italian studio was about to shoot a U.S.-set Western called A Fistful of Dollars and they wanted the male lead of Rawhide, Eric Fleming, to play the lead. When Fleming turned it down, the Italian casting director no doubt thought, “Wait – why don’t we ask the other guy in that show to do it?” So they offered the part to Eastwood, he said yes, and when A Fistful of Dollars was released it became a worldwide hit and made Eastwood and director Sergio Leone international stars. It also sparked a whole cycle of Italian films about the U.S. West inevitably nicknamed “spaghetti Westerns,” including two more with Eastwood: For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Eastwood was suddenly in demand in his homeland, and after making a U.S. Western called Hang ‘Em High he ended up doing a modern-dress police thriller titled Coogan’s Bluff that was in essence the beta version of his 1971 mega-hit Dirty Harry. Both films were directed by Don Siegel and co-written by Dean Riesner, who’d had an interesting career backstory of his own; his father, Charles Riesner, had been an assistant to Charlie Chaplin in the early 1920’s and later a director himself. Under the name “Dinky Dean,” the five-year-old Dean Riesner played a bratty boy in Chaplin’s The Pilgrim (1922), and decades later he was establishing himself in Hollywood as a screenwriter and ended up working on both these Eastwood projects. Coogan’s Bluff is a nicely done thriller in which Coogan (Clint Eastwood) – no first name, at least none that we ever learn – is a sheriff’s deputy in Arizona whom we see taking insane risks trying to arrest a Native American in the Arizona desert. Though his quarry shoots at him with a high-powered rifle while all Coogan has is a standard-issue handgun, Coogan ultimately gets his man, but then antagonizes his boss, Sheriff McCrea (long-time Siegel “regular” Tom Tully), by leaving the prisoner hog-tied on a front porch without formally arresting him or reading him his rights. Then McCrea sends Coogan to New York City to pick up another prisoner, James Ringerman (Don Stroud), who’s wanted in Arizona but managed to escape to New York. Coogan ends up in the Big Apple and writers Riesner, Howard Rodman and Herman Miller cook up a lot of fish-out-of-water gags for him.

When Coogan hails a cab to take him to the police precinct where Ringerman was being held, he’s told by the cab driver the ride will be an extra 50 cents because he was carrying “luggage” – a small mini-suitcase – and later when he checks in at the spectacularly misnamed “Golden Hotel” (a sleazy dive whose main business is obviously renting rooms to prostitutes and their clients), he’s told he’ll need to pay $7 instead of the posted rate of $5 because he doesn’t have luggage. Coogan makes it to the police station, only Lt. McElroy (Lee J. Cobb), the precinct captain, tells him that Ringerman is in Bellevue Hospital after he OD’d on LSD (our Hayseed Hero asks how he got LSD while in custody, and I was wondering why he would want such a chancy drug instead of something more predictable like amphetamines or heroin). McElroy tells Coogan the procedure he has to go through, including petitioning the New York Supreme Court for an official writ of extradition and then getting the authorities at Bellevue formally to turn over custody of Ringerman to Coogan, only Coogan can’t be bothered. When I first heard of this movie I’d assumed “Coogan’s Bluff” was a geographical feature, but it really refers to the elaborate bluff Coogan pulls on the hospital authorities to get Ringerman by pretending he’s already dotted the bureaucratic “i”’s and crossed the “t”’s. Coogan gets Ringerman but almost immediately loses him again, thanks to an ambush staged by Ringerman’s girlfriend Linny Raven (Tisha Sterling, whom director Siegel remembered as just as much of a handful during the shoot as her character is on screen) and two male thugs, one of them played by the young Seymour Cassel.

The Terrible Trio manage to steal Coogan’s gun (a piece of symbolic castration the writers apparently borrowed from Akira Kurosawa’s 1949 film Stray Dog, another modern-dress police thriller), and Coogan’s subsequent attempts to recapture Ringerman lead to him harassing Ringerman’s mother Ellen (Betty Field) and compromising an elaborately staged NYPD “sting” operation involving Sgt. Jackson (James Edwards, who in 1949 starred as a Black serviceman victimized by racism in Stanley Kramer’s and Mark Robson’s Home of the Brave and briefly looked like he’d be the first African-American actor to be a star in leading roles, but his career didn’t take off while Sidney Poitier’s did). McElroy threatens to arrest Coogan, pointing out that while he may be a cop in Texas (there’s a nice running gag in which people assume Coogan is from Texas because he wears a cowboy hat, and he continually corrects them and says, “Arizona”), in New York he’s just another private citizen subject to arrest for obstruction of justice. Meanwhile Coogan cruises Linny Raven’s probation officer, Julie Roth (Susan Clark), and gets her to have sex with him by sheer persistence and star prerogative. Later he encounters Linny herself at a 1960’s-style discothéque called The Pigeon-Toed Orange Peel (a name Siegel said he got from his then pre-pubescent son Kris), goes home with her and they have sex – only when he asks her where Ringerman is, she leads him into another trap. Siegel was particularly proud of this plot twist; he said he was tired of movies in which the hero gives the villain’s girlfriend such a good fuck she changes sides and betrays him, and in his film he’d have Coogan’s male ego set him up for her trap. The film climaxes in a motorcycle chase in which Ringerman is driving his own bike and Coogan follows in a cycle he’s commandeered from a middle-aged straight couple who were thrown from it after Ringerman crashed into them. “What are you doing with my bike?” the man futilely complains.

The two confront each other at The Cloisters, an old religious building we’ve seen before when Julie tried to take him there and he couldn’t have been less interested; Ringerman falls off his motorcycle and he and Coogan have a fist fight which Coogan wins. Then Coogan announces to the New York police that he’s making a citizen’s arrest of Ringerman, and in the film’s final scene the two are handcuffed together in a helicopter taking them to the airport and Coogan offers Ringerman a cigarette and lights it for him. (These days it’s a shock to see anyone smoking on board an aircraft.) As I noted above, Coogan’s Bluff is essentially a warmup for Dirty Harry: in both films Eastwood is playing an incorruptible but single-minded cop who’s so intent on pursuing his prey (a word that’s actually used in this script) he doesn’t care about such minor little details as the U.S. Constitution and its guarantees of equal protection and due process. It’s also very much a film of its time in its open ridicule of the hippie movement and in particular its pretensions about being for “peace” and “love” (among the fixtures in Linny Raven’s apartment are a plate for a light switch that says, inevitably, “You Turn Me On”) when hippies really – at least in this movie – protect and hang with lowlifes and crooks. It’s not really much of a film noir – the characters are too black-and-white (while the film itself is in color) and Lalo Schifrin’s musical score too bouncy and not dire enough – but Coogan’s Bluff works as a police procedural, a fish-out-of-water story and a way of fitting Clint Eastwood’s Western character into a modern-dress tale.

Where Danger Lives (Westwood Productions, RKO, 1950)

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

After Coogan’s Bluff TCM ran an Eddie Muller “Noir Alley” presentation of a really quirky film by director John Farrow (Mia Farrow’s father) from the Howard Hughes-owned RKO in 1950, Where Danger Lives. This one had high-powered talent at the typewriters: the original story was by Leo Rosten and the script by Charles Bennett, the British-born thriller writer who had worked for Alfred Hitchcock on six films from 1934 to 1940, including the first The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), and earlier one of his plays, Blackmail, had been the basis of Hitchcock’s first talkie in 1929. I’ve long thought Bennett was to Hitchcock what Dudley Nichols was to John Ford or Robert Riskin to Frank Capra: the writer who helped an auteur in the making crystallize his style and set his overall basic themes. The film is credited as “A John Farrow Production” – which seems to have been one way RKO lured Farrow from his previous studio, Paramount, where he made two back-to-back film noir masterpieces, The Big Clock and The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, in 1948 – though the credits list two other producers, Irving Cummings, Jr. and Irwin Allen. (Allen would later become a major Hollywood figure specializing in disaster movies like The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno in the early 1970’s.)

Where Danger Lives is an odd movie in many ways; though the original poster art promoted Robert Mitchum and promised, “MITCHUM IN ACTION!,” the film itself makes Mitchum’s character, Dr. Jeff Cameron, pretty much a patsy in the hands of a scheming woman, Margo Lannington (Faith Domergue in her first major release, though Howard Hughes had bought her contract from Warner Bros. in 1941 when she was only 15; Warners had changed her name to “Faith Dorn” but Hughes changed it back and spent the next nine years starring her in a film called Vendetta that cycled through four directors – Max Ophuls, Preston Sturges, Stuart Heisler and Mel Ferrer, as well as Paul Weatherwax and Hughes himself in a few scenes – over five years of pre-production and four years of actual shooting before Hughes finally released it a month after Where Danger Lives). Unlike most of Hollywood, Robert Mitchum actually got along with Howard Hughes; in 1948, as Hughes was buying RKO, Mitchum got himself arrested for possession of marijuana. Hughes worked out an ingenious plan to get Mitchum released from state prison; he dredged up a pretty stupid script called The Big Steal and had one of his aides present it to the judge in Mitchum’s case. Hughes’s agent persuaded the judge that he had 120 people on his payroll ready to shoot this movie in Mexico, and if the judge didn’t release Mitchum he’d have to lay off all those workers. It worked; The Big Steal got made (it’s a pretty mindless action movie but also a lot of fun), and Mitchum was once again available for future projects while his bad-boy image was actually bolstered by his pot bust. Unfortunately, Hughes preferred to use Mitchum as a basic weakling and a sucker for a pretty female face and a hot bod attached to it.

Dr. Cameron meets Margo in an emergency room in San Francisco where she’s been taken after an attempted suicide. Once she’s well enough to be discharged, the two start dating, to the understandable discomfiture of Dr. Cameron’s nurse, Julie Dorn (Maureen O’Sullivan, then Mrs. John Farrow and Mia’s mother), who’d been in love with him herself and was hoping they’d get married when he left the hospital staff and started his own medical practice. Jeff is anxious to meet the mystery man whom he’s been told is Margo’s father, Frederick Lannington (Claude Rains in a part that ends way too soon; he plays with the cool authority he showed in Casablanca and Notorious), and when the two finally meet Jeff tells him he wants to marry Lannington’s daughter. “I’m afraid she’s not my daughter,” Frederick tells the shocked Dr. Cameron. “She’s my wife!” Jeff and Frederick end up in a brawl in Frederick’s fancy living room and Frederick repeatedly beats Jeff with a fireplace poker. Then Jeff pushes Frederick to the floor near the fireplace, though John Farrow is careful to show us where Frederick’s head landed: not anywhere near an andiron, which in previous people’s movies had meant certain death. Given how high Claude Rains had been billed (third, on an above-title card below Mitchum and Domergue) and how well his character had been established, I was fully expecting him to return later on in the film, not dead at all but just embittered and out for revenge. Alas, he’s dead, all right, and Jeff and Margo flee the country, or try to, sure that they’ll be arrested as soon as Frederick’s body is found.

Their first plan is to use the plane tickets to Nassau Frederick had bought before his death to take himself and Margo on a Caribbean vacation, but they get scared by a page asking “Nicholas Lannington” to come to the desk at the airport. It’s just a letter bidding him bon voyage signed by his office staff, but the two guilt-ridden love/hatebirds run out on their flight thinking it’s a sign that the police are after them. Messrs. Farrow, Rosten and Bennett pull the same gag later when Jeff and Margo pull up at a police roadblock – though it’s really just an agricultural quarantine inspecting people’s fruits and vegetables for pests. The two unlikely fugitives finally make it to Arizona and prepare to cross the U.S.-Mexico border at Nogales, but in the meantime they’re taken into custody by the sheriff in Postville, Arizona. It seems that Postville is in the middle of its annual “Wild West Whiskers Week,” and every male in Postville is required to wear a beard – real or fake – during the event. Down to their last $13, they are forced into a quickie wedding and given the bridal suite, which they won’t be allowed to leave. They finally work up an escape plan involving a traveling carnival (one of whose entertainers is a buxom woman who sings a raucous version of the song “Living In a Great Big Way” from the 1935 RKO musical Hooray for Love) and $1,000 in money a local pawnbroker paid them for a valuable bracelet Margo was carrying, but in the end Jeff learns that Margo is certifiably crazy – she was under the care of two New York psychiatrists – and, what’s more, she killed Nicholas by smothering him with a pillow and Jeff had nothing to do with it and is in the clear legally. Ultimately the police kill Margo in a shoot-out at the border and Jeff goes back to San Francisco and the waiting arms of Julie Dorn (ya remember Julie Dorn?), presumably to marry her and set up his own medical practice.

Robert Mitchum is hardly the late-1940’s Hollywood actor you’d think of in terms of playing a doctor, but he’s good enough to create a tough and multidimensional character out of what Farrow and the writers have given him. Aside from that, however, Where Danger Lives is pretty much a mess – a stylish mess, it’s true (Nicholas Musuraca is the cinematographer; he was a master of RKO’s frequent attempts at shadowy menace, and looks it), but still a mess. I was especially disappointed in the whole Postville sequence; as in the next film Mitchum made for RKO with Farrow as director, His Kind of Woman (1951), the film’s climax is terminally silly but also a sheer delight for overwrought camp, but it’s the sort of madcap humor that really doesn’t belong in a film noir. And I was wondering just how the issues surrounding Jeff’s future were going to sort out: remember that he and Margo were legally married before the cops croaked her, and that would presumably mean that with both Lanningtons dead Dr. Jeff Cameron would hold the entire Lannington fortune and he’d have no trouble with the seed money to start his practice.

Law and Order: "Façade" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired March 21, 2024)

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

Last night (Thursday, March 21) I watched a three-episode run of Law and Order shows on NBC, and my husband Charles joined me midway through for the last half of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and all of Law and Order: Organized Crime. The flagship Law and Order series episode was called “Façade” and was directed by Michael Smith from a script by Art Alamo and Ajani Jackson. It opens with a chilling prologue in which a woman on her way home late at night on the New York subways first has a homeless man burst out at her from his encampment in a subway station. Then she’s approached by three young thug-type men and she changes to another car, where she runs into a Black man named Ellis Joyner (Tyler Thomas Moore). In the next scene we see the police detectives Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks) and Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) arrive on the scene, only when they pull back the cover on the dead body it’s Ellis Joyner’s corpse we see, not the woman’s. It turns out that Ellis was a) a Black stand-up comedian, b) an asthmatic and c) a closeted Gay man. The police initially investigate an older Black comic, Malcolm Paige (SaMi Chester), whom Ellis had “dissed” in his act (were the writers thinking Hamilton Burress and Bill Cosby here?), but Paige has a solid alibi. Then they zero in on a white man, Brandon Arnou (Daniel Marconi), who trains at a gym run by Domhnall Kovac (Kevin Makely). Arnou is taking a class Kovac teaches on “urban combat,” which not surprisingly turns out to be a front for white supremacism and urban terrorism. Prosecutors Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi, an Israeli actress playing an Arab-American) indict Arnou for Joyner’s murder, but just when they appear to have the case won the defense attorney springs a surprise witness on them. (“Surprise witnesses” are a staple of crime fiction but almost never occur in real life because the rules of courts require that each side notify the other in advance of all the witnesses they intend to call; if you want to add an extra witness in mid-trial you have to petition the judge for permission and have a good explanation of just why you couldn’t have mentioned this person in previous proceedings in the case.)

The surprise witness is Rebecca Lasky (Ashlyn Fitch), the woman in the prologue, who insists that she was being attacked by Ellis Joyner and Brandon Arnou was a hero who came to her rescue and saved her from the proverbial Fate Worse Than Death. Price does the best he can to rehabilitate his case in cross-examination, including getting Rebecca to concede that what she interpreted as him grunting like an animal in anticipation of raping her might have actually been him having an asthma attack, but he also sends the cops out to Kovac’s gym to see if he can uncover evidence that Brandon was a racist and he attacked Joyner out of prejudice. They find it, all right, but the person who offers it to them is an undercover agent for the federal government (probably the FBI, though we’re not told for sure) who’s been infiltrating Kovac’s operation for nine months and has just got wind of a major terrorist attack they’re planning in New York City. Unfortunately, having him testify against Brandon Arnou on the Joyner murder case would blow his cover, and Price and his boss, District Attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn), agree not to call him for the “greater good” of stopping the terror plot. So Brandon Arnou is acquitted, and the last shots are of him, Kovac and their cronies high-fiving each other outside the courtroom as they get to go home. Usually Dick Wolf and his writers and show runners would end an episode like this with a hint that the bad guys were arrested anyway and put away for long stretches for their terrorist activities, but this show didn’t go there and instead left the story chillingly open-ended with a shot of Ellis Joyner’s partner, Michael Zane (Kameron Kierce), obviously devastated that Ellis’s murderer got off scot-free on grounds of “justifiable homicide.”

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Third Man Syndrome" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired March 21, 2024)

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

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed, “Third Man Syndrome,” also dealt with prejudice and Queer-bashing, though this time the victims aren’t really Gay – just perceived as such – and they are immigrants from Colombia, while they’re attacked by a gang of two whites and a fellow Latino. The principal victim is Javi Lopez (Martin Martinez), who’s just come to join his cousin Teo Garcia (Sebastian Barba) in New York. Teo previously immigrated to New York three years before; he came on a legitimate visa but overstayed it and so is technically “illegal.” He gets Javi an under-the-table job as a construction worker for his own employer, and as a celebration he invites Javi for a night on the town in Greenwich Village and buys him a white shirt which spells out “New York” in spangles. The two walk the streets of Greenwich Village vainly searching for a nighttime establishment that isn’t a Gay bar, though they settle on one which is because there’s a sing-along going on featuring Broadway show tunes and Teo figures that’s a way to introduce Javi to American culture. Unfortunately, as they’re coming out of the bar with their arms over each other’s shoulders (a quite common thing for Latino men to do with each other whether they’re Gay or not), they’re set upon by three thugs in a black SUV which they’ve stolen to go for a night of Queer-bashing. Teo gets away relatively unscathed but Javi is nowhere near so lucky; one of the assailants is carrying a baseball bat and gives him a nice hard smack on the groin with it. Ultimately he’s taken to an emergency room, where the doctor announces to the cops in charge of the case – it’s gone to the Special Victims Unit because Javi’s pants were pulled down and he was bleeding big-time from his crotch – that they’ve had to remove one of his testicles and he may never be able to have children.

The white assailants are Zach Swann (Daniel Sovich) and Mo Franks (Collin Linnville), both of whom have nicely styled longish hair that reminded me of one of our neighbors, while their Latino companion is Jordan Ramirez (Rene Moran), who hung back in the car and served as a lookout while the other two did the actual attack. It’s an indication of the extent of Jordan’s brushes with the law that when the police come to his house to arrest him, his mother Dora (Marcia Hopson) asks, “What’s he done now?” Ultimately the police can’t get a positive ID out of the victims themselves – both of whom didn’t see their assailants well enough in the dark to recognize them later – or out of the homeless man who happened on the incident but made discretion the better part of valor and ran away just after the attack started. Fortunately the whole assault was witnessed by a young woman named Anne Holmes (Caitlin Houlahan) who watched it from the window of her apartment just above the crime scene. Unfortunately, she’s an agoraphobic who won’t leave her home because she’s terrified of the world outside – though given what she’s just seen it’s hard not to be sympathetic to her reasons for not wanting to venture out – and it’s up to Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) to coax her out of the protective cocoon of her apartment and over to the police station to ID the alleged assailants. (I was wondering why they couldn’t have her do the lineups over Zoom; a lot of courtroom proceedings were held via Zoom in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, and I was a bit perplexed that no one thought of asking a judge for permission to do that in this case since it would have seemed to me to be a reasonable accommodation for a person with a disability.) She ID’s all three participants and prosecutor Dominick Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino) is able to get guilty pleas from them all so she wouldn’t have to come to a courtroom and testify. While not quite at the level of the Law and Order episode that preceded it, this SVU was a good and quite chilling tale, though the person I felt sorriest for in the dramatis personae was Javi Lopez because cold, hard, unforgiving New York City gave him such a wretched first impression and at the end of the show he can’t wait to get back to the much warmer climate of Colombia!

Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Sins of Our Fathers" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired March 21, 2024)

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

Afterwards the Dick Wolf night continued with a Law and Order: Organized Crime episode that, as usual, wasn’t as good as the Law and Order and SVU shows that preceded it but had its points. It was basically a continuation of the earlier run of episodes that were kicked off by the discovery of women’s bodies on the beaches outside the fictional (I presume) Long Island town of “Westbrook,” and the overall role played by the town’s political and social boss, retired judge Clay Bonner (Keith Carradine), in covering up a series of serial murders of real or suspected prostitutes by Bonner’s son Eric (Will Janowitz). In the last episode, “Original Sin,” Eric was caught in the act of torturing and preparing to murder New York police detective Elliot Stabler (Christopher Meloni) when his sister, Westbrook police chief Meredith Bonner (Jennifer Ehle), burst in and shot him dead to protect Stabler and save his life. This episode was called “Sins of Our Fathers” and centers around Meredith Bonner’s growing realization that her mother, Karen Bonner (Patricia Hurley), whose remains were found on the same beach as all of Eric’s victims, was killed not by her brother but by her dad. Officially Karen just left the family and disappeared for parts unknown – at least that’s what Clay told both his kids, though later we learn that Eric actually saw his dad dispose of his mom’s body on That Beach and that’s what gave him the psychological compulsion to kill supposedly “loose” women and bury them in similar fashion.

The longer this episode ran the more I noticed the similarities between this storyline and Edgar G. Ulmer’s 1944 film Bluebeard, which starred John Carradine – Keith Carradine’s father – in a similar tale of an outwardly good and even charming young man who is a serial killer laboring under a similar psychological compulsion. In Bluebeard John Carradine’s character was an artist and puppeteer, Gaston Morel; in this Organized Crime story ark Eric was a woodworker who made his living restoring old churches, Both characters singled out their victims out of an obsession with fear, guilt and religious mania; Morel killed his models after learning that the woman who’d posed for his portrait of Joan of Arc was a prostitute, and Eric tortured his victims, all prostitutes hired to service the party guests of the Westbrook prosecuting attorney (his dad’s good friend), to death inside the churches he was hired to restore before bringing them home and burying them on the beach. And the 1944 Bluebeard featured both of Keith Carradine’s parents; not only was his dad the star but his mom, John Carradine’s then-wife Sonia Sorel, was in the film in a small role. (Keith’s late older brother David was John Carradine’s son by a previous wife, Ardelle McCool.) In “Sins of Our Fathers” we learn that Clay Bonner was the mastermind of a private-prison investment scheme that enriched himself and his friends; by controlling both the Westbrook prosecutor’s office and its judicial system, Clay Bonner ensured that there would be a steady stream of inmates for the network of private for-profit prisons he and his business partners were building in the neighborhood. Meredith Bonner and Elliot Stabler learn all this through a prisoner named Logan (Jon Collin Barclay) who 20 years before had been convicted of murdering a Westbrook police officer. He’s been insisting all along he was framed, and it turned out Clay Bonner killed two birds with one stone, so to speak: he had the cop who was on the point of uncovering his own corruption killed and framed Logan for the crime.

Meanwhile there’s a considerably less interesting subplot involving Stabler’s investigation by the New York Police Department’s Internal Affairs Bureau, led by a Black cop named Moses Warren (Malcolm Goodwin) who blames Stabler for the recent suicide of his mentor on the force, who had formerly been Stabler’s father’s police partner until both of them were busted from the force for being “dirty.” This part of the show features the welcome return of Dann Florek as Daniel Craigin, who was the captain of the Manhattan Special Victims Unit during Meloni’s SVU tenure and for a season or two thereafter, who luckily talks Stabler into cooperating with the Internal Affairs investigation against him instead of trying to blow it off, and who ultimately talks Warren out of his vendetta against Stabler by persuading it’s O.K. to let bygones be bygones and not keep nursing old wounds. Though in general I don’t like Organized Crime as much as its companion shows, at least in part because in Organized Crime Dick Wolf and his writers and show runners are paying obeisance to the Great God SERIAL instead of making each episode a complete and discrete story in itself (I know that’s what modern-day viewers expect, but I’m sufficiently old-school I don’t like it), this story arc was unusually powerful and it ends with Clay Bonner massacring everyone else in his crime ring because he got word that the others were about to freeze him out and make him the fall guy for their corrupt enterprise. The episode climaxes with daughter Meredith coming on her dad as he’s just turned his gun on himself and is about to commit suicide, only she talks him out of it and arrests him instead.

Mr. District Attorney (Columbia, 1947)

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

Last night (Wednesday, March 20) my husband Charles and I watched a 1947 movie on YouTube, Mr. District Attorney, a Columbia “B” from 1947 lasting an hour and 24 minutes. The YouTube post (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dy603XWJZVo) identified it as “Crime-Film Noir,” but there’s little noir about it aside from the opening scene and one other near the end. Mr. District Attorney began as a radio show created by Phillips H. Lord, who’d begun his career writing fiction under the persona of “Seth Parker,” supposedly telling tales of his rustic country background. Lord created “Seth Parker” as a radio series and featured himself and others singing gospel songs and hymn tunes. In 1933 he set out on an ocean voyage aboard a sailing ship he renamed the Seth Parker and broadcasted his radio show from the vessel, but his sojourn at sea ended two years later. The ship ran into a tropical storm off American Samoa in February 1935 and Lord had to summon an Australian ship for rescue. He was accused of staging the whole thing for publicity, but the Australian government announced that they’d investigated and the emergency was genuine. Once he returned home he started a new program, Gang Busters, which ran from July 20, 1935 to November 20, 1957 and featured stories of real-life criminals who hadn’t been caught yet. In a gimmick later copied by the producers of America’s Most Wanted, the program’s announcer appealed to listeners for help in catching them. In 1939 Lord launched another crime show, Mr. District Attorney, based on the exploits of New York’s real-life D.A. Thomas Dewey, later Republican nominee for President in 1944 and 1948. Mr. District Attorney was first filmed by Republic Pictures in 1941 with Dennis O’Keefe as a newly hired deputy D.A. and Stanley Ridges as the title character.

For this movie, made by Columbia in 1947, O’Keefe returned as the same sort of person but with a different character name, Steve Bennett, while Mr. District Attorney is played by Adolphe Menjou and his character name is “Craig Warren” – which made me think that the writers had had in mind not only Tom Dewey but Earl Warren, who by then had risen from Alameda County District Attorney to Attorney General of California and now was in his second term as Governor. The film was directed by Robert B. Sinclair and the writing credits were split between Sidney Marshall (“story”), Ben Markson (“adaptation”) and Ian McLellan Hunter. So the 1947 Mr. District Attorney included at least two names with quite different relationships to the Hollywood blacklist that started the year it was made: Menjou was an enthusiastic “friendly witness” to the House Committee on Un-American Activities in its investigation of suspected Communists in Hollywood, gleefully naming names and calling his targets “rats” and “vermin” (like a certain Republican Presidential candidate these days), while Hunter’s best-known credit came for a film he didn’t write at all. It was the 1953 romantic comedy Roman Holiday, directed by William Wyler and starring Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn, and Hunter’s credit was merely a “front” for the actual author, Dalton Trumbo. Trumbo had been one of the original “Hollywood Ten” jailed for contempt of Congress following their refusal to name names to the Committee, and when Hunter himself was threatened with blacklisting and told that his name might be taken off the Roman Holiday credits, Trumbo said, “They can’t do this to you!” Hunter reminded him, “But, Dalton, you wrote that script.”

Mr. District Attorney begins with a quite creatively staged scene in which a shadowy figure of a man opens an apartment window from outside, steals his way in, takes out a gun and shoots a sleeping woman to death while we hear police sirens from outside. We’re later told that the man is also dead, killed in a shoot-out with police, and the first time we meet Craig Warren a woman named Marcia Manning (Marguerite Chapman) has come to his office to complain that a photo of her ran in a newspaper and was misidentified as the woman who was killed in the opening scene. Warren explains that there’s nothing he can do about that – she’ll have to contact the newspaper, ask them to run a retraction and, if they won’t, sue them. She then explains how the police got her photo in the first place: the police department in Kansas City sent it by mistake because she’d been involved in an accidental death in a car crash in which a man was killed. Marcia explains that she was acquitted at trial but was still widely believed to have caused the man’s death, especially since she was a major beneficiary of his life insurance. Meanwhile Warren sends for Steve Bennett (Dennis O’Keefe, who’d played a similar role in the 1941 Republic Mr. District Attorney but under a different character name, “P. Cadwallader Jones”), who’s just walked out of a promising job with a major private law firm over a workplace safety suit against manufacturer Ed Jamison (Ralph Morgan). He quit the case and the law firm because he did his own investigation and found Jamison was guilty of deliberately running an unsafe workplace and putting his employees at risk. Warren offers him a job as an assistant district attorney and assigns him to prosecute Jamison on the same charges he was being sued over. But Bennett also starts dating Marcia Manning even though she’s the secretary of James Randolph (George Coulouris), who stood to lose a large amount of money if Jamison were either criminally convicted or civilly held liable.

Marcia is what Nunnally Johnson, in a later movie (the 1954 Black Widow), called a “purpose girl,” amoral rather than immoral. She’s determined to assure herself a comfortable future by marrying a rich man, and she’s set her sights on Randolph because he’s not only wealthy but single. (Her problem with the man she was accused of killing in Kansas City had been that he had a wife and wouldn’t divorce her to marry Marcia.) Bennett unwittingly blows his case against Jamison because he calls Warren from Marcia’s apartment (where he’s just having dinner, this being a Production Code-era movie) to tell him he’s located a key witness, only Marcia overhears the call and immediately relays the information to Randolph, who arranges the man’s “disappearance.” (We never definitively hear what happened to the man – whether the thugs in Jamison’s and/or Randolph’s employ killed him or bribed him to go away, or he simply left town to avoid the pressure. I was expecting the witness’s body to turn up and Warren to launch an investigation into how he was killed and use that to bust Randolph’s gang, but no-o-o-o-o.) Because his key witness isn’t available, the best Bennett can do against Jamison is a 90-day misdemeanor sentence, and Warren is predictably pissed at him but it never occurs to either of them that Marcia was the source of the leak. Bennett obliviously continues to date Marcia and even proposes marriage to her, while Warren decides to break them up by any means necessary not because he’s realized Marcia is corrupt, but simply out of jealousy that Bennett’s burgeoning relationship is taking Bennett’s attention from the seven-day work schedule Warren imposes on his associates. Warren sends Bennett out of the country to bring back a witness from Rome, and by the time Bennett returns from his three-month assignment Marcia has already married Randolph. After Bennett angrily quits the D.A.’s office, Marcia turns on her sexual charms long enough to recruit Bennett to work for Randolph as an attorney and allow Randolph to set him up in his own office with rent and law books covered as part of Randolph’s retainer.

Warren and his investigator, Henderson (played in all-out Irish schtick by Michael O’Shea, whose best-known credit is for his role as Jack London in a 1943 biopic), are shown drinking together, and eventually it dawns on Bennett that Marcia is not what she seems despite her protestations of love for him even though she’s married to the other guy. The climax involves a nightclub owner named Berotti (Steven Geray) whose enterprise is part of Randolph’s empire, and who’s arrested for allegedly pushing someone else off a balcony. Warren and Bennett appear on opposite sides of the case, and in a final confrontation Bennett overhears Marcia talking on the phone with Randolph and finally realizes she’s set him up. The two confront each other on the same balcony and Marcia tries to kill Bennett by pushing him off, but in the end it’s Bennett who survives and Marcia who takes the fatal fall. Warren offers Bennett his old A.D.A. job again and once again warns him that he’s going to work him seven days a week and he won’t have any time for himself. While almost none of Mr. District Attorney qualifies as film noir (had the character of Marcia been more developed and more complex, she could have been a quite interesting femme fatale, but the writers and director Sinclair didn’t go there), it’s a competent, workmanlike crime drama and an entertaining time-filler even though it’s hardly a great movie. Certainly it’s hard for people with the political orientations of Charles and I to take Adolphe Menjou seriously as a fine, upstanding hero, though we’re A-O.K. with watching him play scumbags like he did in Stanley Kubrick’s anti-war masterpiece, Paths of Glory!