The Mallorca Files: "Honour Among Thieves" and "King of the Mountains" (Cosmopolitan Pictures, Clerkenwell Films, BBC, Britbox, PBS, 2019)

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

Last night (Thursday, May 30) I watched the first two episodes of the British TV series The Mallorca Files, set on the Spanish island of Mallorca and dealing with two police detectives who get stuck in Mallorca and have to learn to work together. The detectives are British cop Miranda Blake (Elen Rhys) and her accidental partner – only professionally, not romantically – German detective Max Winter (Julian Looman). Both these shows were from the series’ opening run in late 2019, and the first, “Honour Amongst Thieves,” was a sort of origin story for the series. In the opening, Miranda Blake is shown escorting a London gangster, Niall Taylor (Aidan McArdle), who’s ostensibly turned state’s evidence and is prepared to testify against his old gang and help the British authorities recover the loot his gang stole over years. Miranda has Niall handcuffed to herself and gets anxious when she notices a goon squad of hired killers stalking them through the Mallorca airport. One of them, dressed in the uniform of the Mallorcan police, shoots Niall and apparently kills him. Then the other members of Niall’s gang start getting mysteriously killed themselves, and Blake is told by the bitchy Black woman cop who’s her supervisor in London to stay in Mallorca until the murders are solved. Blake also scores a surveillance video showing a mysterious figure who apparently forces a young woman to go into a car with him, and Blake is convinced she’s been kidnapped and is being held against her will.

Ultimately it turns out that [spoiler alert!] Niall is still alive; he faked his own assassination at the airport using one of his confederates disguised as a cop, and he bribed a genuine (male) London cop to go along with his plot for the money. Only Niall shoots the bad cop just as Blake and Max Winter, a German detective who took a job with the Mallorcan police force for his health, have come to a beachfront home where they’ve traced the alleged kidnap victim – who wasn’t kidnapped at all. She’s actually Niall’s daughter and co-conspirator, and their motive was to grab the loot for themselves and keep it all instead of having to split it with the other crooks. They end up with a fortune of 30 million euros in ill-gotten gains and, in a thoroughly irritating ending, escape with it all. (Raymond Chandler once said that a mystery story had to end with the criminal being published in some way, whether or not through the operation of the law courts. “It’s not a question of morality,” Chandler explained; he said having the crook get away with it at the end “leaves a sense of irritation” with the reader. And it’s indicative of how much of his childhood Raymond Chandler spent in England that he used the phrase “law courts” to describe the justice system.) Superintendent Abbey Palmer (Tanya Moodie), the African-British bitch from London for whom Miranda works, orders her to stay in Mallorca indefinitely on assignment to the local police force, headed by an equally nasty and insistent female official named Inéz Villegas (María Fernández Ache), and she and Max end up as uncertain and mutually wary police partners.

My husband Charles joined me for the second episode of The Mallorca Files, “King of the Mountains,” which was a good deal better and quite frankly the writer, Dan Muirden, could have given his colleagues on the Australian-set show My Life Is Murder lessons on how to maintain suspense and create genuine uncertainty about whodunit in a 45-minute crime show (one hour less commercial interruptions, which these shows were built around even though there were none on the PBS screenings). This one builds around the disappearance of Mallorca’s star bicycle rider, Esteban Domènech (Rafael Cebrián) – though I’m a bit curious about the spelling of the character’s last name because, at least according to Charles, Spanish doesn’t use the accent aigù, though both French and Portuguese do. Esteban used to ride for British coach Terry Davies (Sean Campion), whose martinet tendencies make the real-life drill sergeant in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket seem warm and fuzzy by comparison. Once Esteban left Davies’ team two years earlier, his performance on the bike-racing circuit improved so dramatically Davies was convinced he must have done it with drugs – but Esteban’s drug tests keep coming back clean. Esteban disappears on the eve of the big race and one of Terry’s team vans later turns up, burned out to destroy all internal evidence, making Terry the prime suspect. Later Esteban turns up and claims he escaped from his kidnappers while their van was stopped in traffic.

Supposedly Esteban grew up in Argentina before emigrating to Spain, and his parents and brother were all killed in an auto accident in Argentina – only it turns out [spoiler alert!] that the parents were both killed but Esteban’s brother, Davide (also Rafael Cebrián), survived. What’s more, the Domènech kids are not only brothers but identical twins, and out of shame for having caused the deaths of their parents by driving them while drunk, Davide agrees to Esteban’s plan that Davide will take the cycling industry’s drug tests for him. That will make it look like Esteban is racing “clean” when in fact he’s juiced up to the proverbial gills; when he’s finally caught and the real Esteban is tested, his drug levels are so high the doctors administering the tests say they’ve never seen anything like it before. Obviously this show was conceived in the wake of the scandals surrounding Lance Armstrong and the other top-tier contenders in the world’s most famous open-road bike race, the Tour de France, which led some people to wonder if the whole sport was a fraud and at least one writer to argue that the riders should be allowed to use as many performance-enhancing drugs as they want. There’s a scene in which the owner of the bar at which Max’s girlfriend, Carmen Lorenzo (Tábata Cerezo), is a bartender rips Esteban’s autographed photo off his wall, breaks its glass frame and tears the photo to shreds. The Domènech brothers’ plot fell apart, it seems, when Davide fell in love with Esteban’s supermodel wife, Clara Cicada (Lucía Guerrero), and the two hatched a plot to blow Esteban’s cover and expose him as a druggie so he’d be publicly disgraced and humiliated, which would somehow pave the way for Davide and Clara to become an above-ground couple. After the mystery is solved, the show ends with one of its characteristic tag scenes: a private bicycle race between Miranda and Max which Miranda wins easily because she’s been training for it intensively, riding a stationary bike at a local gym until she can achieve a speed of 30 kilometers per hour, while he hasn’t trained at all.

Photographic Justice: The Corky Lee Story (All Is Well Pictures, Good Docs, 2022)

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

Last night (Tuesday, May 28) I watched a couple of intriguing TV shows on KPBS: Photographic Justice: The Corky Lee Story and a Frontline episode with the awkward title, “Netanyahu, America and the Road to War in Gaza.” Photographic Justice was a fascinating vest-pocket (a one-hour running time) documentary on Asian-American photographer Corky Lee, born September 5, 1947 in Queens, New York (so he was just a year younger than Queens’s most famous home-boy these days, Donald Trump). His parents ran a Chinese laundry and trained Lee to do the same, but he wanted to study law until he got sidetracked into an artistic career. Lee’s inspiration was a photograph of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads meeting at Promontory Summit, Utah on May 10, 1869 by photographer Andrew Russell, but it’s been criticized – both at the time and since – for having cropped out just about all the Chinese workers and leaving just a sea of white faces on the front. (More recent researchers have traced two Chinese people in the crowd in Russell’s photo.) Having learned in school that the transcontinental railroad was largely built by Chinese workers, Lee carefully examined the photo with a magnifying glass and gradually realized that the reason no one in the photo looked like him was because the picture had been deliberately staged to eliminate the Chinese who actually built the damned thing. Working with borrowed cameras until he could afford equipment of his own, Lee started taking pictures of Asian-American community events and political protests just to document how people who looked more or less like him were working to change the world.

He achieved success when he took a photo of a young Asian-American protester, Peter Yew, being beaten by New York police, and after the New York Times and the Daily News both turned him down – they said they’d had their own photographers at the demonstration and they hadn’t seen anything like that – he finally placed the photo with the New York Post (in its pre-Rupert Murdoch days before it became a Right-wing propaganda sheet). The Post printed Lee’s photo on the front page, and on the day it came out 20,000 people marched from Chinatown to City Hall to protest the assault on Yew. In 1982 Lee went to Detroit to cover the unrest in the city’s Asian communities following the lynching of Vincent Chin, a young Chinese-American who was beaten to death by two unemployed auto workers who mistook him for Japanese and assaulted him because they were angry at how they’d lost their jobs, allegedly due to competition from Japanese automakers. Lee was married to another Chinese-American, Margaret Dea, until her death from breast cancer in 2001, though later in life he lived with a younger woman, also Chinese-American and also a photographer, who became a protégée as well as a life partner. Lee himself died on January 27, 2021 of COVID-19, which his friends believe he contracted while covering demonstrations denouncing then-President Donald Trump for having sparked a wave of violence against Asian-Americans with his references to the pandemic as the “Chinese virus” and “Kung Flu.” It’s an indication of how much social impact a man I’d never heard of before could have in a quiet, low-keyed way – people recognized him at virtually all the Asian community events in New York – and even today his photos are widely exhibited and Not on the Menu, the self-published book he produced, collecting his images as well as his written comments on them, has been republished and expanded under the title Corky Lee’s Asian America.

FRONTLINE: "Netanyahu, America and the Road to War in Gaza" (Kirk Documentary Group, Left/Right Docs, WGBH Educational Foundation, PBS, originally 2023, revised 2024)

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

The PBS Frontline series of TV documentaries ran on May 28 the rather awkwardly titled episode “Netanyahu, America and the Road to War in Gaza.” It’s the latest in their ongoing coverage of the continued hostility between Israel and Palestinians, especially in Gaza, and the show – directed by James Jacoby, co-written by him and Anya Bourg, and narrated by Will Lyman in his usual quiet but authoritative tone – attempts to be even-handed to both sides in this highly fraught issue. This particular program was first run on December 19, 2023, 2 ½ months since Hamas, the part political party and part terrorist organization that runs Gaza, launched their horrific attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023 and triggered Israel’s all-out campaign for revenge. I’ve long been convinced that Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, seized on Hamas’s attacks as a pretext for an all-out genocidal campaign to wipe out the Palestinian population once and for all, despite the efforts of U.S. President Joe Biden and others to embrace him publicly but try to restrain him privately. I’ve even posted to my Facebook page calling Netanyahu “the Jewish Hitler” and comparing his tactics in Gaza to the Nazis’ attempt at a “final solution to the Jewish problem.”

Like previous Frontline programs on Israel, Gaza and Hamas, this one began with then-U.S. President Bill Clinton brokering a deal between then-Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and then-Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat in 1993. The agreement was called the “Oslo Accord” after the Norwegian capital where most of the negotiations took place – though the final signing ceremony was held at the White House and, at Clinton’s insistence, Rabin and Arafat publicly shook hands. The ultimate objective was to create a new state of Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza that would peacefully coexist with Israel – only the Israeli hard-Right immediately opposed the deal on the ground that the Palestinians remained committed to the total destruction of Israel and they would use their state, if they got one, as a base to achieve that goal. Netanyahu emerged as the principal political figure of the Israeli Right and made it his goal, even before he first became Prime Minister of Israel in 1996, to make sure that the Palestinians never got a state of their own. Along the way, a Jewish religious fanatic assassinated Yitzhak Rabin, and his successor, Shimon Peres, lost his re-election bid. This program didn’t mention why, but a previous Frontline episode on the ultimate failure of the Oslo Accords did; instead of voting for Peres, Israel’s Arab citizens decided to boycott the election altogether, and this provided Netanyahu with the margin he needed for a slim victory.

It’s a mistake Arab-Americans are about to make themselves; in threatening to withhold their support for Biden and either sit out the 2024 Presidential election or vote for minor-party candidates, which in America’s political system amounts to the same thing, they risk defeating Biden and handing the Presidency back to Donald Trump, who during his first term fulfilled the whole wish list of the Jewish Right. Trump reversed decades of American support for the two-state solution, approved Israel building more settlements in the West Bank on land that was supposed to be part of the Palestinian state, and moved the American Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, thereby endorsing Netanyahu’s insistence that Jerusalem will remain Israeli territory forever and the Palestinians can forget about ever having it as their capital. Ultimately Netanyahu was voted out of office, but he came back in 2006 and has been there ever since except for a brief interregnum when he momentarily lost his party’s majority in the Knesset, Israel’s legislature. Netanyahu, like Trump, also faced serious criminal charges; in fact, three corruption trials against him were already in progress in Israel’s judicial system until October 7, 2023. Netanyahu decided to “reform” Israel’s judiciary to, among other things, end the prosecutions against him, and the result was huge protests in the streets of Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities denouncing him as anti-democratic.

I’ve also long suspected that Netanyahu had advance knowledge of the October 7 attacks and allowed them to happen because, following Shakespeare’s advice to troubled leaders to “busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels,” he realized that an horrific attack on the Israeli population would unite the country behind him and in one stroke end his political problems. Even if he didn’t, Hamas’s attacks perfectly fit into Netanyahu’s strategy; by pledging an all-out campaign to defeat Hamas once and for all – even if that meant the utter destruction of Gaza and its 2 million people, which is what it has meant in practice – he was able to present himself as Israel’s savior. Netanyahu also has had plenty of experience dealing with U.S. Presidents, both Democrats and Republicans, and his negotiations with Bill Clinton, Barack Obama (whom he hated instantly, pointing out that Obama’s middle name was “Hussein” and embracing Trump’s conspiratorial allegation that Obama was really an African-born Muslim) and Joe Biden convinced him that, as much as Democratic Presidents might privately oppose him, they’d be totally in solidarity with him in public and he could “roll” them into continuing to provide Israel with military aid. I remember I once read a Foreign Affairs article on North Korea which said that no superpower ever let a client state push it around as much as China does with North Korea, and I thought, “Are you kidding? What about the U.S. and Israel?”

More recently, Biden’s decision to suspend one shipment of military aid to Israel – so-called “bunker-buster” bombs that have no purpose other than the utter destruction of entire buildings – aroused opposition among 26 House Democrats, led by Rep. Josh Gottenheimer (D-NJ). Gottenheimer’s letter read, “[W]ithholding weapons shipments to Israel … only emboldens our mutual enemies, including Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and other Iranian-backed proxies. … Seven months after October 7, the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the end of the Holocaust, Iranian-backed terrorist proxies continue to fire rockets and mortars into Israel and at Americans from all directions. At the same time, anti-Semitism is spreading globally like wildfire.” It’s not like the Palestinians and their proxies are totally blameless – in fact, in one of my Zenger’s Newsmagazine editorials I coined the phrase “the terrorists’ veto,” an offtake of “the hecklers’ veto,” to describe the way extremists on both sides of a conflict can unilaterally block a peaceful resolution by committing some heinous act that brings potential negotiations to a screeching halt. Netanyahu came to power in 1996 in the first place after Hamas blew up at least two #18 buses in Tel Aviv, killing hundreds of Israelis, while Rabin’s assassination was an example of “the terrorists’ veto” on the other side.

Perhaps the most heart-rending missed opportunity mentioned on the Frontline documentary was told by Dennis Ross, former national security advisor to President Clinton, who recalled the last-ditch attempts Clinton made to revive Oslo in January 2001, just as Clinton was scheduled to leave office. According to Ross, the Israelis and Palestinians reached a tentative deal which Yasir Arafat rejected without seriously considering it. A Palestinian negotiator told Ross, “We in the delegation all wanted to accept it, and Arafat just sort of blew us away. Can you imagine where we would be today if we had said yes?” It’s also occurred to me that Israelis and Palestinians have two competing victim narratives, and that’s one of the reasons why this conflict is so intractable. Israelis justify their occupation of Palestine as their due following 5,000 years of exile from their historic Jewish homeland. In effect they’re saying they had the right to drive the Palestinian Arabs from that land by gunpoint because their ancestors drove the Philistines and Canaanites out of it by spearpoint five millenia earlier. They also claim that because the rest of the world failed to stop the Nazi Holocaust while it was still going on, the world owes the Jewish people a state. Palestinians in turn demand a reversal of the Nakba (literally “catastrophe”) by which the occupying Israelis drove them from their land in 1948.

The attempts on both sides to rewrite history for their own ideological purposes reached a bizarre level when Benjamin Netanyahu made a speech declaring that the real villain of the Holocaust was not Adolf Hitler, but the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Palestine’s principal Muslim cleric in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Netanyahu claimed that Hitler had merely wanted to resettle the European Jews in Madagascar, and the Grand Mufti had talked him into killing them all instead. A lot of Israelis who had personally survived the Holocaust knew better and called Netanyahu out on it, but once again, like Donald Trump, Netanyahu was able to ride out the controversy and remain in power. My personal belief is that the creation of the state of Israel on stolen Arab land in response to the Holocaust was a world-historical mistake – the classic example of the second wrong that doesn’t make a right – and I would want to see a South African-style one-state solution that would create a unified Palestine under Arab leadership with ironclad guarantees of the rights of the Jewish minority. But even before the current conflict, the chances of anything like that actually happening were pretty infinitesimal, and the combination of Hamas’s attacks and Israel’s genocidal response has blown them to smithereens along with killing tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians and reducing Gaza to a wasteland of destruction, starvation and want.

The Ghost Army (Plate of Peas Productions, PBS, 2013)

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

Last night (Monday, May 27) KPBS showed an 11-year-old documentary for Memorial Day called The Ghost Army, made in 2013 after the U.S. military finally declassified the secrets they’d been holding from the public since World War II about a special corps of the U.S. Army formed in 1944 and 1945. Its purpose was to fool the Germans in the European Theatre about Allied plans by creating fake units that would be stationed along the front – first in southern England to make the Germans think the Allied invasion of France would take place at the Pas de Calais (because it was the shortest possible route and the one the Germans would have taken if the positions had been reversed) instead of the actual site, Normandy; then along the French-German border once the Allies liberated France in August 1944. There were three branches of this unit, officially known as the 23rd Headquarters Special Troops: visual, sound and radio. The visual branch was set up to create fake tanks and artillery pieces; their original idea was to create false tank bodies and mount them to Jeeps so they could drive them around, but ultimately the replicas weren’t rugged enough to stand up to battle conditions. So they made their own model tanks out of rubber and inflated them the way life rafts are inflated, with automatic springs and pumps. One of their concerns was that the replica tanks might start losing air and their fake guns would start flapping downwards, giving the game away.

The sound branch was delegated to record the actual sounds of a unit getting ready to do battle, including construction noises to sound like pontoon bridges being assembled as well as the actual sounds made by tanks and other heavy military equipment. The sounds were recorded on 16-inch lacquer transcription discs – the high-fidelity kind used by radio stations to record shows for later broadcast – and also on wire recorders, the progenitors of tape recorders. Instead of recording on plastic ribbons coated with iron oxide, wire recorders used long spools of literally miles of iron wire the thickness of a human hair. (The documentary shows a wire recorder in operation.) Ironically, the Germans had already invented tape recorders, but the Allied countries didn’t have access to this advanced recording technology until the war ended, the German Magnetophon recorders were captured as war booty, and American and British companies started copying and improving on the Germans’ tape recorders. The radio branch was created to fool the enemy by recording and playing back carefully scripted conversations that sounded like real battlefield communications. It might have seemed to the volunteers assigned to the unit – many of whom came from art schools and other creative backgrounds – that it was a combat-free assignment, but it wasn’t. Indeed, if it fooled the Germans well enough they might actually get fired upon or attacked – as happened in March 1945 when two members of the unit were killed and several others wounded by an actual German attack on their dummy force.

A number of well-known artists actually got their start in the 23rd Headquarters division, including fashion designer Bill Blass (who drew pictures of fashionably dressed women in his sketchbook during the war and even designed the logo of his famous fashion house – a reverse-image “B” coupled with a normal one – while he was on duty with the 23rd) as well as painter and sculptor Ellsworth Kelly and photographer Art Kane, who later took the iconic 1958 photo in Esquire of various major and semi-major jazz musicians in Harlem under the title A Great Day in Harlem, which itself became the subject of a major film. There are innumerable anecdotes throughout this film, including one artist who recalled drawing pictures of the female prostitutes that accosted the servicemembers during their leaves in Paris. One hooker offered him a freebie if he’d give her the drawing, but he decided to keep it for himself and turn down the offer of sex in exchange for the drawing. There was also the story of a real reconnaissance plane that tried to land in a fake air base the 23rd had constructed to fool the Germans into thinking the base was somewhere other than where it was, and the time a real tank battalion was sent through a location where the 23rd had created a fake one. Another member of the unit recalled them being awakened almost literally in the dead of night and given marching orders to relocate to the Ardennes Forest on the German-Belgian border when the Nazis launched the Battle of the Bulge, their last-ditch attempt at a major counteroffensive that they hoped would change the course of the war.

The existence of the Ghost Army – which had its own patch, consisting of a drawing of a white Casper-like ghost on a black field, and also sometimes wore the patches of the real units they were impersonating – was kept secret until the 1990’s because almost as soon as World War II ended, the Cold War began and the U.S. military feared America might soon be in a war with the Soviet Union. The U.S. military wanted to maintain the potential for these deception operations in case the U.S. and Russia fought a land war and the U.S. forces needed to pull one or more of those deception strategies again. The release of this documentary in 2013 ironically led to the long-overdue recognition of the Ghost Army and its contributions to winning the real war: in 2022, after 6 ½ years of campaigning led by the film’s writer-director, Rick Beyer, Congress finally passed and President Biden signed a bill to create a special Congressional Gold Medal to honor the Ghost Army. The medal was finally awarded in a public ceremony on March 21, 2024, over two years after the official enactment of the bill authorizing it, which can be viewed on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s417Sush4Aw. Three of the seven surviving members of the unit – 100-year old Bernard Bluestein of Hoffman Estates; 99-year old John Christman of Leesburg, New Jersey; and 100-year old Seymour Nussenbaum of Monroe Township, New Jersey – attended the commemoration and received the long-overdue medal.

35th Annual National Memorial Day Concert (Michael Colbert Productions, WETA, PBS, aired May 26, 2024)

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

Last night (Sunday, May 26) my husband Charles and I watched the 35th annual National Memorial Day Concert on PBS. Actually, “Concert” in connection with this event is something of a misnomer, since it’s long since evolved into a bizarre and sometimes unwieldy mash-up of a traditional concert and a memorial service – though most of the people being paid tribute to aren’t dead, actually. The concert is held annually on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. (though during 2020 and 2021 they did makeshift versions to comply with the COVID-19 lockdown, including peppering it with clips of previous concerts and having the live performances done remotely) and is always accompanied by the National Symphony Orchestra under its “pops” conductor, Jack Everly (who took over after the previous “pops” conductor, Erich Kunzel, died in 2009). This year’s show opened with a spectacular performance of the song “Hero” (as in, “And then a hero comes along … ”) by Patina Miller, and then an even more spectacular performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” by Ruthie Ann Miles. What amazed me about her rendition of this famously difficult song is that she picked a high key to start with that rendered the high notes even higher – but she nailed every last one of them. Then the National Symphony played a tribute to World War II veterans, including a montage of still photos and film clips from the Battle of the Bulge, Adolf Hitler’s last-ditch offensive to try to turn around the course of the war.

As the National Symphony played the “Adagietto” slow movement from Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, actor Bryan Cranston read a memoir from a veteran of that battle, Jack Moran, who recalled feeling a bullet whiz by him and strike down his best friend who was in the line of march behind him. One of the things I liked about this year’s concert was the sheer power and emotional impact of the servicemembers’ testimonials as read by various actors. Another thing I liked was that they didn’t do any of the traditional patriotic songs other than the national anthem and, as a finale, Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” Instead the singers got to do songs from their own repertoire that expressed the values the concert was trying to promote, including “God Bless the Broken Road” by country singer Gary LaVox; a song called either “There Can Be Miracles” or “When You Believe” sung searingly by Cynthia Erivo; the Hawai’ian remembrance song “Aloha Oe” by Ruthie Ann Miles; another country singer, Jamey Johnson, doing an understated song of his own called “Job Well Done” (his plaintive delivery reminded me of Red-Headed Stranger-era Willie Nelson); an unidentified bugler playing “Taps” quite eloquently; and another Gary LaVox song called either “I Will Stand By You” or “I Won’t Let You Go” (a more powerful piece of music than you’d guess from those anodyne putative titles – there were no chyrons to tell us what the various pieces were actually called, so as so often with PBS shows I’m guessing at the titles). For once some of the actors’ readings were more powerful than the music, especially Jenna Malone’s recitation of the memoirs of Kristie Ennis, a U.S. servicewoman who enlisted in the wake of 9/11 because both her parents had served; and B. D. Wong’s speech playing Allen Hoe, a Hawai’ian who served in Viet Nam and then suffered the death of his son fighting another one of America’s wars in Iraq in 2005. (I particularly chuckled when I heard the openly Gay B. D. Wong recall Hoe’s past chasing women before he married one and fathered two sons by her, one of whom became a war casualty.)

Jack Everly and the National Symphony provided appropriate accompaniments to the narrations, playing the Adagietto second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony behind Bryan Cranston’s World War II monologue and Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” under the Viet Nam tribute – almost inevitably after its use by director Oliver Stone in the Viet Nam War movie Platoon (1986). The concert moved quickly to its standard closing: a short speech by General Charles Q. Brown of the Army, current chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (and I believe the second African-American to hold that position, after Colin Powell); a short parade of the Joint Chiefs themselves (including a woman, Navy Admiral Lisa Franchetti: just one more glass ceiling broken!); a medley of all six service-branch anthems (including one for the Space Force, unilaterally created by former and quite likely future President Donald Trump even though America’s other military branches were created by acts of Congress; I’d long assumed they’d press the theme from John Williams’ Star Wars score for the Space Force, but it was a fresh and unfamiliar piece of music); Cynthia Erivo bringing her huge gospel-soul voice to the banal “Reach Out and Touch Somebody’s Hand”; and a joint performance of “God Bless America” to close the event. For me the most depressing thing about this program was the number of people for whom military service has been a tradition that ran in their families; you can read that either as a positive statement that the tradition of service has carried through from one generation to the next (and during all the tributes to the ethic of service I couldn’t help but recall Donald Trump’s comment as he toured the D-Day cemetery to mark the 75th anniversary of the invasion in 2019; he looked at all the crosses and said, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”) or a profoundly negative one that for every generation there will always be a new war and lives needlessly sacrificed for one damned cause or another.

The Breaking Point (Warner Bros., 1950)

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

Later on in the evening my husband Charles and I watched a YouTube video of the 1950 film The Breaking Point, which I’d missed on a recent Eddie Muller “Noir Alley” presentation on Turner Classic Movies but wanted to catch up with on an occasion when I could share it with Charles. The Breaking Point is the second film version of Ernest Hemingway’s novel To Have and Have Not, which was originally published in 1937. In 1939 director Howard Hawks was on a fishing trip with Hemingway and told him he could make a successful movie out of Hemingway’s worst book. “Which one is that?” Hemingway asked. “To Have and Have Not,” Hawks replied. Hawks bought the film rights for Warner Bros. and in 1944 actually made the movie, though he and his writers – William Faulkner, Jules Furthman, Cleve F. Adams and Whitman Chambers (the last two uncredited) – remodeled it almost completely and turned it into essentially a reworking of Warners’ previous hit Casablanca. About the only elements of To Have and Have Not Hawks kept in his movie were the central character – Harry Morgan, a fisherman who leases out his boat for charters – and the opening scene, in which Morgan’s latest client runs out on him without paying. In 1950 screenwriter Ranald MacDougall, riding high at Warner Bros. after the success of his Joan Crawford vehicles Mildred Pierce and Possessed, sold Jack Warner on the idea of remaking To Have and Have Not and this time actually using Hemingway’s novel, or something close to it.

MacDougall also desperately wanted John Garfield to play Harry Morgan, despite Jack Warner briefly considering such other actors as James Cagney and Errol Flynn, and for his female leads he cast Phyllis Thaxter as Lucy, Morgan’s long-suffering wife and mother of his two kids (Sherry Jackson and Donna Jo Boyce); and Patricia Neal as Leona Charles (mistress of the customer who stiffed Harry and left him high and dry financially), a classic film noir femme fatale but drawn this time as a more complex and at least slightly more sympathetic character than usual. After Morgan gets stiffed on the fishing trip, he accepts a seedy deal offered by American attorney Hannegan (Ralph Dumke) to traffic undocumented Chinese immigrants for a coyote named Mr. Sing (Victor Sen Yung, turning in a powerful performance as a villain, quite different from his obnoxious role as Number Two Son in the Sidney Toler Charlie Chan movies at Fox). Alas, Sing not only insists on accompanying his charges as Harry smuggles them, he tries to cheat Harry out of the money and starts a gun battle with him. Sing gets killed and – in a plot twist that rankled Charles – Harry dumps his body overboard without bothering to check for a wallet to recover the money he was promised. Then Harry insists on putting the eight Chinese men he was supposed to be smuggling ashore in Mexico instead of bringing them to the U.S. Nonetheless, he’s reported to the U.S. Coast Guard, whose agent, Rogers (Edmon Ryan), insists on confiscating his boat. Unable to make any money and threatened with foreclosure on it from its mortgage holder, Morgan tries once he gets the boat back (temporarily) to make money off it by charters.

When he can’t, and in order to make some money his wife Lucy starts doing a job at home sewing sails (at this point Charles joked that the film had turned into the 1926 La Bohème, in which Mimì – played by Lillian Gish – took in sewing work and did so much it hastened her death from tuberculosis), Harry accepts a job offer from crooked attorney F. R. Duncan (Wallace Ford) to smuggle five robbers in his boat after they rob a racetrack. Duncan gets killed during the robbery, as is Harry’s Black first mate, Wesley Park (Juano Hernandez). Harry has prepared by hiding various guns on his boat which he intends to use to kill the robbers before they make it to their rendezvous point – only there’s an all-out gun battle in which the robbers are all killed but Harry is seriously wounded and is left unconscious. Harry needs to have his left arm amputated as the only way to save his life, and since he’s unconscious his wife Lisa has to give the doctors the required permission to operate. Apparently in Hemingway’s novel Harry Morgan loses his arm early in the story, not at the end as in the film. Also in the novel Harry has two crew members, both of them obnoxious white racists who throw around the “N-word” a lot (as does Harry himself), and it was MacDougall’s idea not only to combine these two characters into one but to make him Black – and to end the film with a sorrowful close-up of Wesley’s son (played by Juano Hernandez’s real-life son Juan) as yet unaware that he’s going to be facing life without a father.

Since I watched The Breaking Point I’ve seen Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” intro and outro as well as an interview he did with director Alexander Payne about it, and Muller and Payne hailed it as a masterpiece and bemoaned that it isn’t better known, apparently because of a legal skirmish between Warner Bros. and the Hemingway estate that kept it off the screen for decades. I think my husband Charles liked it better than I did; I found it the sort of movie that had quite striking individual moments but didn’t gel for me into a truly moving story. My main problem with The Breaking Point – and I’m not sure whether I should blame Ranald MacDougall or Ernest Hemingway for this – is that the writers larded so many miseries on John Garfield’s character it’s no surprise he reached the titular breaking point. Also during the movie I was convinced that Patricia Neal was playing the wife and Phyllis Thaxter the “other woman,” and it was more than a bit surprising when I looked at the imdb.com credits and it was the other way around – though at least I give Neal quite a bit of props for playing decidedly against her usual typecasting and making a legitimately complex, multidimensional woman out of what could have been just another cardboard villainess. (There’s even a scene between her and Garfield in her beachfront cabaña to which she’s lured him and they get as far as a kiss before he decides not to go the extra-relational route and stay exclusive to his wife instead.)

The Breaking Point was Garfield’s next-to-last movie and his last at Warner Bros., where he’d become a star in the film Four Daughters (1939). He insisted on Michael Curtiz as his director because Curtiz had helmed Four Daughters and a number of Garfield’s other early hits, but he was also about to get caught up in the Hollywood blacklist. When Garfield’s name turned up on a list of suspected Communists in Hollywood, Jack Warner instantly responded by slashing the promotional budget for The Breaking Point, resulting in the film flopping. Garfield wrote an apology for his entire political past called – inevitably, given that in his most successful film, Body and Soul (1947), he’d played a boxer – “I Was a Sucker for a Left Hook.” Then he went to New York for his final film, He Ran All the Way (1951), in which he played a gangster on the run who falls in love with Shelley Winters, an innocent young girl who has no idea who he is, and he died of a heart attack while in bed with a woman other than his wife. I’ve written about Garfield before, noting that he was the first Method actor who became a movie star – anticipating Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando and James Dean (and three of the four died young; Brando was the only one who lived into old age) – and though Warner Bros. tried to mold him into a gangster type, he played those roles quietly and subtly whereas previous Warners gangster stars like Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney had snarled and chewed the scenery through them. Garfield’s daughter Julie apparently told Eddie Muller that The Breaking Point was Garfield’s favorite of his own films, but to me it still seems like a movie better in its parts than as a whole.

The Ice Rink Murders (CMW Motion Pictures, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2024)

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

Last night (Saturday, May 25) I watched two Lifetime movies, one of which I had high hopes for that proved to be a disappointment, while the other was better than I’d expected despite misleading promos that made it seem quite different from what it was. The one that disappointed me aired at 4 p.m. (afternoon instead of evening) and was called The Ice Rink Murders. It’s a story about skullduggery in the world of competitive figure skating, directed by Wendy Ord from a script by Maddison Bullock (a woman, by the way) based on a story she co-wrote with Kelli Kaye and Tom Shell. The imdb.com page for The Ice Rink Murders only lists four actors with their character names, and there are some quite strikingly etched roles in the dramatis personae whom I would dearly love to be able to identify with the people who played them, but I wasn’t able to find any online source that had that information. The central character is Megan Ryder (played by Maddison Bullock herself), a young and upcoming figure skater who took a year or so off because her mother got cancer and is just now in remission after a round of chemo. She’s trying to get back and has a highly prized scholarship offer from the Mission Gym (“Mission” is the name of the town in Washington state where this takes place but it’s also appropriate given the monastic level of discipline imposed by the coach who runs it) to study under their fearsome trainer, Dianne Taylor, who runs the place like a concentration-camp commandant and, among other things, forbids her charges from dating or having any romantic or sexual relationships that might interfere with their training. This poses a particular problem for Megan since she’s being cruised by at least two young men in the program, aspiring hockey player Trevor Johnson (Spencer Borgeson) and aspiring something-or-other Max.

Megan crosses swords with Trevor’s sister Carly (Natasha Calis) almost immediately when Megan does a workout at a ballet-style barre and Carly insists, “That’s my spot.” We’ve already seen a prologue in which a male skater named Brian was assaulted by a hooded figure with a hockey stick and knocked over into the path of a Zamboni (the machine that drives over the ice on a rink to repave it after the skaters have chewed it up). The whirling blades of the Zamboni slice and dice him and splatter his blood over the rink – of course I inevitably joked, “Ah, the Zamboni of Doom!” I remember doing a bit of a double-take when the film opened with a male skater since the promos for it had made it seem like it was about women skaters exclusively, but eventually we learn that Brian was Carly’s ice-dancing partner but was receiving congratulatory notes from a girl named Lyndsey (Brittany Clough). There’s also an eccentric older man named “Blades” who works at the rink and whose job, not surprisingly, is to sharpen the skaters’ skates. Brian’s remains are discovered in Blades’s workspace and he’s arrested for Brian’s murder. Lyndsey is attacked by a saboteur who puts glass in her ballet slipper (a gimmick Lifetime used much more effectively in a previous movie about the rivalry between aspiring ballerinas), which doesn’t kill her but puts her out of action for the all-important training period for the national championships.

While I was watching this film I was rooting around online for information about the names of the production companies and the cast list (one site listed Alana Hawley Purvis, Dalia Blake, Ali Karr, Harrison Coe and Amy Trefrey as being in the movie but did not specify their roles) and came across a Web site called “Villainous Beauties Wiki” which gave away the ending of the movie – not that that was that big a surprise: the villainous beauty is [spoiler alert!] Carly Johnson, who was the masked hockey-stick-wielding assailant who offed Brian in the opening scene and then framed Blades for her and also assaulted her own brother, thereby making it too risky for him to continue playing hockey so he shifted to ice dancing with his sister Carly as his partner, and strangled Coach Taylor to death. Carly’s motives were 1) she had previously been Coach Taylor’s teacher’s pet until Megan showed up and aced her out of that spot, and 2) Brian had been her partner until he decided to bolt from their act and pair up with Lyndsey instead. There’s a predictable suspense finish with Carly stalking Megan through an underground boiler room or something before Megan finally overpowers her and Carly is arrested.

One problem with The Ice Rink Murders is that Lifetime either couldn’t or wouldn’t hire figure-skating doubles for the main cast members, so we don’t see any skaters do the spectacular jumps that are the essence of the sport these days. At least the actors do the sorts of tight spins that are what figure skating used to be all about – the reason the sport is called “figure skating” is that it used to be about tracing figures on the ice surface, and the judges would come out with calipers to measure how precisely the skaters had traced the figures. (This is the sort of figure skating that won Sonja Henie Olympic gold three times in a row – in 1928, 1932 and 1936 – and was probably good training for her when she started making movies and had to do precise choreographies that would put her front and center to the cameras and enable her to hit invisible “marks.”) There’s also a weird scene in which Coach Taylor puts Megan into a harness and pulls her up with a rope; the idea is to prepare her to learn the big jumps, but it comes off more like an S/M sex scene than any sort of athletic training. The biggest disappointment with The Ice Rink Murders is that the murders themselves kept getting in the way of what would otherwise have been a compelling story about a group of fiercely competitive people locked into an hermetically sealed world with their entire futures at stake – though at least I give Maddison Bullock credit for creating a showcase role for herself as both writer and star!

Cruise Ship Murder (Hybrid, Lifetime, 2024)

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

Later on I watched a much better Lifetime film, Cruise Ship Murder, even though I’d expected from the promos that it would be about a series of murders taking place on board a cruise liner instead of just one murder taking place aboard a cruise ship and most of the action is on land. The story begins with yet another enigmatic prologue typical of Lifetime these days – a middle-aged woman is deliberately strangled and drowned in a bathtub – before it cuts to the main action: husband and wife Ian (Matthew Pohlkamp) and Theresa (Carly Reeves) McNeil set sail on an ocean cruise from their home in Beverly Hills down the west coast of Mexico. Once she’s on board, Theresa is accosted by a former boyfriend, Colin Barth (Ryan Carnes), with whom she had an affair while already married to Ian. Colin deliberately booked passage on the same Voyager Cruises liner as Ian and Theresa and made it clear that he wanted to resume their affair. Theresa goes for a walk on deck – or at least that’s what she tells her husband; she’s actually going to Colin’s cabin – only to be panicked when the ship’s whistle sounds a warning alerting everyone to return to their cabins because the ship is hitting heavy seas and the cabins are the safest place to ride out the danger. A young woman named Sara Bates (Jamie Forst) runs into Theresa – literally – coming out of Colin’s cabin after she’s dashing to get back to her own because her parents might look askance at her for having been out necking with a young blond cutie who’s regrettably unidentified in imdb.com’s cast list.

Then Theresa’s black sequined purse is found on deck and Ian immediately assumes that she somehow fell overboard during the storm the characters were being warned to flee from. He demands that the ship stop so they can look for her, and when the storm subsides the U.S. Coast Guard sends out cutters to look for Theresa’s body. Once the cruise is over the story’s focus shifts to Theresa’s niece, free-lance journalist Olivia Toller (Skye Coyne), who decides to investigate Theresa’s death and soon becomes convinced that Ian murdered her, or had her killed, for her money (she had inherited a major fortune from her father, though that didn’t stop her from working at an advertising agency). With the help of her African-American “roommate” Callie (Tyler Price) – who seems to be so close to her emotionally I mentally remixed the film to make them a Lesbian couple – Olivia traces Ian’s mysterious past and finds that he legally had his name changed from Jamison to McNeil, and as Ian Jamison he already lost a previous wife when she ostensibly committed suicide by drowning herself in the bathtub – though a flashback sequence lets us know that she was murdered and that’s the origin of the mysterious scene we saw at the beginning. Olivia traces Donald Warren (Jeff Doba), father of Ian’s first wife, who’s still bitter that Ian knocked off Donald’s daughter and got away with it.

Later Olivia discovers that Colin Barth was the real killer of both Ian’s wives; he and Ian were long-term friends and Colin had once been the house guest of Ian and his first wife until she got tired of him and demanded that Ian throw Colin out. Colin killed the wife so Ian could collect on the huge insurance policy he’d taken out on her, then Colin tried to blackmail Ian. Colin’s financial demands were so great that Ian ran out of money and had to look for a similarly wealthy woman he could marry and then knock off, which is what he was doing with Theresa on that cruise. As with Ian’s first wife, the two planned the crime together but Colin was the one who actually carried it out. Then midway through the movie Colin knocked off Ian because, even though Ian hadn’t inherited Theresa’s millions yet and Colin would have no claim to the money, Ian was threatening to turn them both in and Colin couldn’t let him live to do that. Even the ending is a bit unusual for Lifetime: noting from Colin’s social-media page that he’s always at a certain bar at a certain day of the week and time, Olivia goes there intending to cruise Colin and get him to take her to his place. Once there she searches his bedroom for clues – and discovers a brochure for the same cruise Ian and Theresa took – only Colin knows very well who she is and why she’s there.

Colin hunts down Olivia at her own home, killing the cop who was supposed to be standing guard. Colin pulls a knife on her, they struggle for it, and in the end Olivia grabs the knife and stabs Colin to death in self-defense. Fortunately her “roommate” Callie is there to witness the whole thing and tell the rather discombobulated Asian-American woman police detective who’s been investigating the case (and who appears midway through, apparently having taken the case over from the Black male detective who was investigating it earlier) that it was justifiable homicide, and at the end Olivia and Callie take an ocean cruise of their own. Though I was disappointed that Cruise Ship Murder wasn’t set entirely, or almost entirely, on the cruise ship (I was expecting something more along the lines of Alfred Hitchcock’s films Rich and Strange and The Lady Vanishes, which effectively used the confined spaces of a ship and a train, respectively, to stage a compelling mystery story), it’s nonetheless a powerful, effective melodrama, well directed by Randy Carter from a beautifully constructed script by Hybrid Productions’ regulars: Jeffrey Schenck, Peter Sullivan and Adam Rockoff.

My Life Is Murder: "Lividity in Lycra" (CJZ, Cordell Jigsaw Productions, Film Australia, Team Victoria, American Public Television, PBS, 2019)

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

Last night (Friday, May 24) I watched the third episode of the Australian TV series My Life Is Murder, “Lividity in Lycra,” dealing with retired Australian police detective Alexa Crowe (Lucy Lawless, best known for playing Xena, the Warrior Princess, in a TV series made in New Zealand from 1995 to 1999) and her former police partner, deputy inspector Kieran Hussey (Bernard Curry), who keeps giving her cold cases the police have ruled as either suicide or accidents and asking her to re-investigate as possible murders. This time it’s a case from a month before in which Hugh Miller (Robert Shook), chief financial officer of a hospitality company owned by Roger Simms (Don Hany), falls down dead during a bike ride through the Australian hills along with Simms and six other one-percenters who regularly meet one morning a week to ride their bicycles through the countryside. Simms himself is a “regular” at a coffeehouse that’s part of his chain where Alexa is also a frequent visitor – enough so that the barista takes offense when she just grabs a cup of coffee off his counter and drinks the dregs, then protests that she wouldn’t have done that if he’d been behind the counter instead of in the back of the shop. I loved the episode title – it’s a pun on the Lycra material of which bicycle-riding clothes are made, which among other things so clearly outlines the manhoods of the males who wear it that Alexa gets turned on by guys dressed that way.

This My Life Is Murder show had the same problem as the two previous ones I’ve already watched – too few suspects really to work as whodunits. Almost from the outset Alexa zeroes in on Simms as the killer, and the only suspense is how she’s going to prove it and whether she’ll be in jeopardy herself, since she’s dating and romancing him while simultaneously trying to prove him guilty of a major crime. Alexa is momentarily fooled by a carefully prepared video ostensibly showing all eight riders tightly bunched together, which is supposed to prove that none of the other seven killed Hugh because none of them deviated from the path long enough to do so. Alexa figures it out by watching an old social-media post of Simms announcing the new location he’s purchased for the coffeehouse and pointing to the garden on the patio as the main thing that impressed him enough to make him want to buy the location. Only the garden isn’t there anymore – he had it ripped out – and Alexa later figures out why: it’s because the main plant in the garden was poisonous, and Simms used it as part of an elaborate plan to murder Hugh. Simms spiked Hugh’s water bottle with a chopped-up version of the plant and swapped his own, “clean” bottle for it, thereby ensuring that when Hugh drank the poisoned water he’d have a heart attack en route. Only when the poison from the plant incapacitated Hugh but didn’t quite kill him, Simms came upon him and finished the job by banging his head against a rock. We see this in a flashback, and in a relatively placid and action-free series like this one (the Down Under mystery shows like this one and the New Zealand-set The Brokenwood Mysteries seem to have captured the same reticence about out-and-out blood-and-gore as their British counterparts) the graphic violence of this scene packs a wallop.

His motive was a clause in his father’s will (dad founded the hospitality company and left it to him) saying that both he and Hugh had to approve any major capital expenditures in advance, and Simms was chafing against this restriction while Alexa heard about it and said, “Daddy didn’t trust you very much, did he?” In the end Alexa nails Simms and the cops show up to arrest him, and then Alexa takes another cyclist home with her for at least a one-night stand, the first indication we’ve had that her sexuality is directed at anyone other than Kieran (who was established as a married man in a stray bit of dialogue, so he’s at least theoretically unavailable to her). Like the other two My Life Is Murder episodes I’ve seen, it’s a charming show and particularly strong at presenting Alexa as a free and independent woman, in the bedroom as well as everywhere else, and though I didn’t really care for the jock writers Ainslie Clouston and Chris Hawkshaw paired her with at the end, it’s pretty clear they intend this as just a one-night stand anyway. About all I could wish for from this show is more viable suspects in each crime so we’d be a bit behind Alexa on her journey through each investigation instead of miles ahead of her! I was also grateful that the end credits from this episode included an acknowledgment to the city of Melbourne; until then I’d thought it was Melbourne but the scripts had been maddeningly unclear as to which Australian city in which this show took place.

Stranger Things, season 1, episode 3: "Holly, Jolly" (21 Laps Entertainment, Monkey Massacre, Georgia Film and Television Office, Netflix, 2016)

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

Last night (Thursday, May 23) I’d planned to watch the Midsomer Murders episode “The Witches of Angel’s Rise,” but as soon as it started my husband Charles recognized it as one we’d seen (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/11/midsomer-murders-witches-of-angels-rise.html) and he suggested that instead we get out the DVD boxed set of the first season of the Netflix series Stranger Things and pick up where we’d left off. That was the third of eight series-one episodes, “Holly, Jolly,” which was called that because it’s set around Christmastime and features central character Joyce Byers (Winona Ryder) buying scads of Christmas lights in a vain attempt (or maybe a not-so-vain attempt) to communicate with her missing son Will. The episode opened with one of the most amazingly imaginative scenes I’ve seen recently: a young man, Steve Harrington (Joe Keery), is having sex with an age-peer girlfriend while a mysterious white ghoul-like monster is devouring a woman named Barbara in the swimming pool of the Byers home. Director Shawn Levy (this was the first episode in which series creators Matt and Ross Duffer let other people do the directing and writing – the script is credited to Jessica Mecklenberg, with Jessie Nickson-Lopez credited as “staff writer” – instead of doing it themselves) creatively cuts back and forth between the sex scene and the monster attacking and eating Barbara. The implication is that Steve and his partner don’t do anything to stop the creature because they’re making so much noise having sex they didn’t hear the sounds of the attack.

Alas, it’s pretty much downhill from there, though at least there are some clever gimmicks, including what Joyce does with all those Christmas lights. She paints letters on the wall of her living room and strings the lights under them so each light corresponds to a letter. Thus she makes her living-room wall a D.I.Y. Ouija board and contacts Will, or his spirit, or whatever. Earlier she’s used a variant that could only answer yes-or-no questions and elicited the information from Will that he’s alive but not safe. When she hooks up the D.I.Y. Ouija board, she asks his location and then asks what she should do – and the lights on the board spell “R-U-N,” which is good advice because the episode ends with the white monster coming after her. There’s also more information about the mystery character “Eleven” (Millie Bobby Brown), including the revelation that she was subjected to psychic experimentation by a team led by Dr. Martin Brenner (Matthew Modine) in the secret Department of Energy laboratory outside Hawkins, Indiana, where the story takes place. Eleven starts having flashbacks; when she sees a Coca-Cola commercial on television she recalls a similar experiment in which they put a Coke can in front of her and she crushed it with her mind without touching it. (When I saw the Coke can I joked to Charles, “Now they need to put in a Pepsi can so she can do the taste test.”) There’s also a neat scene in which various kids Eleven’s apparent age are trying to get her to levitate a toy spaceship and fly it around the room. She refuses when they’re there, but later on she does it when she’s alone.

And there’s a powerful scene in which Hawkins police chief Jim Hopper (David Harbour, who seems to have strayed in from a Coen Brothers’ movie) and a team of his officers attempt to crash the secret research facility out of town and get stopped at the gate by a disarmingly cute Black sergeant who tells them they have to get approval from a government bureaucrat whose whereabouts are uncertain. They go in anyway and … well, it’s not clear, at least in this episode, what they find, but it’s presumably shocking. One review of “Holly, Jolly” on imdb.com hailed this as the episode in which the show finally started to get good after a disappointing beginning: “[T]he third one really kicked the things going. The roller-coaster ride of emotions. Episode kicks off with [an] intense scene where we see what happened to the Barb, then the quick fall back into peaceful small-town atmosphere, that even elevates the shock level of the opening scene (can't get over that opening). The tension starts to rise when Eleven decides to help the boys to look for Will, chief Hopper starts to take his act together and finally begins proper investigation. Glimpses into the past of Eleven, final shocking reveals, and then that tearful ending.” But the Duffer brothers’ continuing refusal to map out a coherent story arc and stick to it, and their maddening flitting from one story line and set of characters to another, just leave me pretty cold and uninvolved in the story (whatever it is).

American Experience: "The Riot Report" (42nd Parallel Films, WGBH Educational Foundation, PBS-TV, aired May 21, 2024)

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

Two nights ago (Tuesday, May 21) I watched an oddly compelling documentary on PBS called “The Riot Report,” an American Experience episode on the Kerner Commission, charged by then-President Lyndon Johnson in 1967 to study the race riots that took place throughout major U.S. cities that summer and analyze why they’d happened and what could be done to keep them from happening again. The commission, officially named the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, was chaired by Kerner, who was then the Governor of Illinois, with New York Mayor John Lindsay (a moderate Republican who later switched parties and ran unsuccessfully for President as a Democrat in 1972) as vice-chair. The Commission had 11 members, eight of whom were white men. One was a white woman (Katherine Graham Peden, commissioner of commerce in Kentucky), and two were African-American: U.S. Senator Edward Brooke (the second Black person to serve as a Senator, and like the first – Hiram Revels of Mississippi, elected during Reconstruction – he was a Republican) and NAACP head Roy Jenkins. The commission’s charge, as expressed by President Johnson in the statement he made announcing it, was to answer three questions: “What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again and again?”

The main source for the PBS documentary on the actual inner workings of the Commission was one of its few surviving members, U.S. Senator Fred Harris (D-Oklahoma, and the fact that a Democrat could be elected as a Senator from Oklahoma is in itself a major index of how much American politics and society have changed). Between them, Harris and Lindsay formed a “liberal axis” on the Commission that took on the relatively Right-wing politics of some of the other members, notably Charles “Tex” Thornton, founder of the defense contractor Litton Industries. According to historian Steven Gillon, it was apparent from the first day of the Commission’s meetings that “John Lindsay and Fred Harris wanted to push the committee into dealing with the root causes of racial unrest, which they believed was poverty and a sense of powerlessness. Tex Thornton sees the commission's purpose solely to help law enforcement to crush future uprisings. And in every debate, just about those two on opposite sides.” One big division within the Commission was over the racial makeup of law enforcement in general and the National Guard, the agency generally called in to restore order during or immediately after a riot, in particular. Commission members quickly concluded that, by being almost all white, the local police and National Guard appeared to Black ghetto residents more like an occupying force than a group there “to protect and serve” the local community.

According to Gillon, “African Americans made up less than 2% of National Guard members. Lindsay and Harris both thought that it was important to make that statement. Tex Thornton doesn't want to do it. This is the first big battle. And Tex Thornton argues vehemently against the Commission making any kind of a statement.” Another unusual tactic the Commission adopted was to hold field hearings instead of just talking to Washington, D.C. insiders like long-time Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover was the Commission’s first witness, and he predictably told them that the riots were part of a gigantic conspiracy organized by the Communist Party, U.S.A. to bring down the U.S. government and replace it with a Communist system. Later, when the Commission members started holding hearings in Black areas of major cities and meeting with ordinary people, their points of view changed. For him, as Senator Harris recalled, meeting with actual Black people “really put faces on these problems. And I know that it had the same effect on other members of the commission. Tex Thornton said himself, ‘[A]fter going out to riot cities and talking to people there, I have moved about 90 degrees to the Left.’”

Unfortunately, the Kerner Commission’s deliberations came about at a time when American politics were moving decisively to the Right. Lyndon Johnson’s great legislative successes on racial issues – the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 – had come about thanks to Johnson’s accession to the Presidency following the assassination of his predecessor, John F. Kennedy. Johnson had pledged himself to carry forward Kennedy’s agenda – in Kennedy’s inaugural address he had said, “Let us begin,” and in Johnson’s first speech as President he said, “Let us continue.” As a Southerner himself, he was determined to break the stranglehold on civil-rights legislation held by the long-serving Southern Democrats, the so-called “Dixiecrats,” who had successfully either blocked altogether or watered down previous civil-rights bills, including one Johnson had sponsored himself in 1957. A master at legislative tactics, including intimidation, he was able to push through the Civil Rights Act; Richard Russell (D-Georgia), the Senator who led the opposition, said afterwards, “We could have stopped John Kennedy. We could never stop Lyndon.” Johnson had won an overwhelming victory in the 1964 election against hard-Right Republican Barry Goldwater, and in the wake of that victory he was able to push through the Voting Rights Act, largely due to public revulsion at the way nonviolent civil-rights protesters in Selma, Alabama and other Southern cities had been beaten, sprayed with fire hoses and attacked by police dogs while the TV cameras showed it all to the American people.

But Goldwater’s nomination was a warning signal for the future; he would break the Democratic Party’s Southern monopoly, carrying five Southern states (as well as narrowly winning his home state, Arizona). Goldwater made the Republican Party acceptable to Southern voters by voting against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and on the campaign trail he said things like, “While the President of the United States speaks of the Great Society, our cities and suburbs are turning into the lawless society. … Nothing prepares the way for tyranny more than the failure of public officials to keep the streets from bullies and marauders.” In August 1965, three days of rioting sweep through the streets of Watts, Los Angeles’s Black ghetto, and according to New Yorker journalist Jelani Cobb, President Johnson took the riots as a personal insult. “This is just days after he's cashed in all of his political chips to shepherd the Voting Rights Act through Congress,” Cobb said. “It's kind of indignation, almost a sense of being slapped in the face.” At the same time Johnson was also pushing forward America’s inexplicable commitment to the Viet Nam War, which he regarded as a personal priority. In appointing the members of the Kerner Commission, he’d insisted that no one on it be opposed to, or even publicly skeptical about, the Viet Nam War. Johnson and the Democrats lost big in the 1966 midterm elections – though they maintained Congressional majorities until Republicans took control of the U.S. Senate in 1980 and the House of Representatives in 1994 – and even before those elections, in the wake of Watts Congress unanimously passed the Law Enforcement Assistance Act of 1965. This made huge amounts of federal government funding available to local police departments, including military-grade hardware and technology. This facilitated what libertarian writer Radley Balko would call, in his 2013 book, The Rise of the Warrior Cop.

Historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad described first-hand what the police were doing with this new money: “Setting up virtual checkpoints on the borders of these communities, doing hostile drives through Black neighborhoods, as a show of force for Black people to so-called stay in their place. They're policing the boundaries of Black life.” Another historian, David C. Carter, said the riots marked “a fundamental transition where media simply can't resist the spectacle of urban disorder. The camera simply cannot look away. And as much as it unsettles white viewers, there's also this sort of fixation. In some ways it's confirming their darkest prejudices about Black Americans. Now they're seeing a more menacing face of Black America, and they emphatically do not like what they're seeing.” So when the Kerner Commission came out with a broad program of recommendations, including a guaranteed annual income and major investments in jobs and housing in the African-American ghettoes, much of white America responded with vehement opposition. Senator Fred Harris recalled that his own father gave him hell about the report: “The way he heard the Kerner Report was, ‘Mr. Harris, out of the goodness of your heart, you ought to pay more taxes to help poor Black people who are rioting in Detroit.’ He said this to me, he said, the hell with that. I’m having a hard enough time myself. I’m already paying too much tax, and not getting anything for it. And that, that was true.”

Millions of Americans came to the same conclusion as Harris, Sr. had: enacting all these expensive programs to help Black people would essentially be rewarding them for rioting. President Johnson himself was a savvy enough politician that he responded to the Kerner report basically by ignoring it – and he was typically blunt as to why: the cost of implementing the commission’s recommendations was $2 billion per month. While that was about what America was spending on the Viet Nam War, Johnson complained that the Commission had made all these expensive proposals and hadn’t given him any way to fund them. Johnson’s own popularity was in free fall by then; his Presidential approval rating was down to 36 percent (about where President Biden’s rating is today), and within a month of the Kerner Commission report’s release he announced that he was withdrawing from his re-election campaign. Though a few of the Kerner Commission recommendations were actually implemented, albeit in weakened form – in 1968 Congress passed a bill against racial discrimination in housing (which Donald Trump’s father, former Ku Klux Klan member Fred Trump, would be prosecuted for violating and he agreed to a negotiated settlement), and both police departments and media organizations began hiring more African-Americans and other people of color – for the most part the Kerner Commission and its recommendations got swept into the dustbin of history. At least among white Americans; journalists covering the 1992 riots in Los Angeles after the acquittal of the four police officers accused of beating Rodney King, recalled that Blacks interviewed after the riots frequently invoked the name “Kerner” as a kind of talisman, a souvenir of a long-lost time when at least one mostly white government entity acknowledged the longevity of American racism and the deep-seated harm it had done to Black Americans.

The immediate result of the riots – including the ones in April 1968 after the murder of Black America’s great apostle of nonviolence, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. – was a near-total reversal in American politics. In 1964 Lyndon Johnson had been elected with 61 percent of the vote to 39 percent for his Republican opponent, Barry Goldwater; in 1968 Right-wing candidates Richard Nixon (Republican) and George Wallace (American Independent) got 57 percent of the vote between them to Democrat Hubert Humphrey’s 43 percent. That gave rise to the Right-wing coalition that essentially, with a few partial exceptions, has dominated American politics since. At least four of the six Republicans who have served as President since Lyndon Johnson – Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Donald Trump – have run with the explicit aim of dismantling the changes of the 1960’s in civil rights and social culture, and each one has pursued this agenda more aggressively and explicitly than the last. Though at the moment there is a Democratic President and Senate, the Republicans utterly dominate the current U. S. Supreme Court – whose justices are bent on using their power to impose a radical Right-wing revolution on American society. They also are in control of the House of Representatives, and current polls suggest that this November 5 they will retake both the Presidency and the Senate. And Donald Trump’s increasingly fascistic, authoritarian rhetoric says that what they will do with that united power if and when they get it is, among other things, end all this “nonsense” from the 1960’s about civil rights and racial equality.

Alice (Jack Rollins-Charles H. Joffe Productions, Orion Pictures, 1990)

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

Last night (Wednesday, May 22) my husband Charles and I watched a truly charming film on Turner Classic Movies: Alice, a 1990 release written and directed by Woody Allen and the 10th of his 11 films with his then-partner, actress Mia Farrow. They’d make one more film, Shadows and Fog, before the spectacular implosion of both their personal and professional relationships when Allen started dating Farrow’s adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn, and Farrow responded by accusing him of molesting their daughter Dylan. Allen became one of the principal victims of the #MeToo movement, along with Harvey Weinstein – whose antics were exposed by Allen’s and Farrow’s son Ronan Farrow, who not only renounced Allen’s name for him (Satchel, after the great African-American baseball pitcher Satchel Paige) but claimed that Allen wasn’t really his father. His dad, he claimed, was Frank Sinatra, who’d supposedly fathered him in a for-old-time’s-sake tryst years after Sinatra and Farrow had broken up. By the time this scandal broke Allen’s career was already on its way down, but this hastened the descent. Sadly, Allen had done for Farrow what Alfred Hitchcock had done for Grace Kelly in the 1950’s: he’d brought out her true acting talent and got far more out of her than any of her previous directors.

Alice is a remarkable, if rather strange, movie that might be described as a magical-realist version of the joint Allen-Farrow masterpiece, Hannah and Her Sisters (1986). Alice Tate (Mia Farrow) is a bored upper-middle-class wife – you can’t even call her a housewife since she leaves the housework and taking care of her two children, one of whom is played by the real Dylan Farrow, to professional servants. She’s suffering from what the late Betty Friedan in her book The Feminine Mystique called “the problem that has no name” big-time; though she’d had career ambitions to be a writer, she gave them up when she married husband Doug Tate (William Hurt) 16 years before. Doug is a well-to-do stockbroker and demanded that she not work because he had more than enough money to support them both. She’s also not considered any extra-relational activity until one afternoon when, on one of her rare days picking the kids up from school herself instead of letting her nanny do it, she runs into Joe Ruffalo (Joe Mantegna), another parent with kids in the same school. Joe is a musician who supports himself on studio work but also is in a jazz band that’s currently working on a tribute album to Duke Ellington. Alice is attracted to Joe and can’t get the look of him out of her mind, though she’s also way too hamstrung by Catholic guilt – she came from a hard-core Catholic family and has an older sister, Dorothy (Blythe Danner), who’s a successful attorney.

Alice is suffering from oddball pains, which lead her to the home-office of Dr. Yang (Keye Luke, in his final film – he died at age 86 three weeks after its release, and it’s nice to see he got to make his exit in a film of quality rather than a piece of shit like Joan Crawford’s last film, Trog). Dr. Yang said her problems are mental, not physical, and he prescribes her a series of herbal remedies which introduce the “magic” element in Allen’s magical realism. One of Dr. Yang’s potions literally makes Alice invisible, and she takes it and uses her invisibility to follow Joe around to his ex-wife Vicki (Judy Davis)’s office, where she watches as they have a for-old-times’-sake sexual encounter on her office couch. This discourages her from pursuing her affair with Joe, but ultimately they make it to bed together. Later on they both take the invisibility drug and Joe dares Alice to make love with him against an outdoor mailbox. Alice ultimately uses her invisibility to crash her husband Doug’s office Christmas party, where she discovers that Doug is having an extra-relational experience of his own with a woman who just won a prestige promotion to a job as a script buyer for a TV network. Alice had hoped to use her friendship with this woman to sell her an idea for a TV show, but she realizes that isn’t going to happen when the woman turns out to be her husband’s lover. Instead Alice returns to visibility in her husband’s office while he’s there with his mistress, and the three have a confrontation.

Dr. Yang’s herbs cause Alice all sorts of colorful effects besides invisibility, including one in which she meets the ghost of her first lover, Ed (Alec Baldwin), and the two go for a fly-over through Manhattan that reminded me of the great scene between Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder in the first Reeve Superman. She also crashes Yang’s office one day and finds his living room has become an opium den. She gets offered a pipe and takes it, ultimately ending up sleeping on the floor along with the other opium users on an evening when she’s sneaked out of her apartment to be with Joe (though the rendezvous fell through) on the pretext of needing to meet her sister Dorothy. There’s also a scene in which Alice is trying to write – she’s using a pre-computer state-of-the-art electric typewriter but the paper she’s put into it remains resolutely blank. Alice suddenly finds herself visited by her Muse (Bernadette Peters), who speaks in gravelly New York tones and is naturally cynical about Alice’s ability to write. Ultimately Alice decides to leave her husband and go with Joe, but Joe isn’t interested because he and his ex-wife Vicki have decided to reconcile, so Alice boldly announces to her husband that she’s going to leave him anyway and travel to Calcutta, India to volunteer with Mother Teresa. Doug naturally thinks this is preposterous, saying that the moment Alice is confronted with life without big expense accounts and high-limit credit cards she’ll abandon the altruism schtick and come back to him and his bankroll. Instead Alice actually flies to India and does a volunteer stint, and when she returns home she moves out to a modest apartment with her kids and does whatever public-service work she can.

According to Wikipedia, Alice was a financial flop on its initial release – it cost an estimated $12 million and grossed $7,331,647 – but seen today it’s a quite charming film, not at the level of Hannah and Her Sisters or Allen’s pre-Farrow masterpieces Annie Hall and Manhattan, but quite estimable, charming and funny in a low-keyed way. One of Allen’s nicer touches was successfully using the Catholic-guilt schtick as a substitute for the Jewish-guilt schtick he’d used in previous films, including virtually all the ones in which he both directed and starred. Another is the dazzling array of music he uses: Alice contains many great songs of the past (mostly the 1920’s, 1930’s and 1940’s) used as underscoring, sometimes in modern recordings and sometimes in the original versions, or close thereto. I’m glad that Allen used an instrumental version of the British song “Limehouse Blues” to indicate the “Chineseicity” of Dr. Yang and his neighborhood (Limehouse was London’s Chinatown) and spared us the song’s racist lyrics (particularly the “little Chinkies” reference). He gave us this and three other songs – “I Remember You,” “Moonlight Becomes You” and “Breezin’ Along with the Breeze” – in big-orchestra recordings made in the late 1950’s and credited to TV comedian Jackie Gleason, but they actually featured jazz cornetist Bobby Hackett. There’s also a howlingly funny mistake in the credits: “Breezin’ Along with the Breeze” was actually published in 1926 by songwriters James “Haven” Gillespie, Seymour Simons and Richard Whiting, but Allen listed jazz great John “Dizzy” Gillespie instead – and Dizzy was just eight or nine years old when the song was written.

Alice is a quite charming film, supposedly inspired by a Chinese doctor Allen himself went to for a cyst in his eye as well as Federico Fellini’s film Juliet of the Spirits (1965), another movie about a bored well-to-do married woman (played by Fellini’s wife, Giulietta Masina) who’s tempted to have affairs. It’s an appealing blend of magical realism and Allen’s beloved New York atmosphere (it was shot at Kaufman Astoria Studios, the New York facility built by Paramount in the early days of sound so they could have New York actors make films by day while they were acting on stage at night), and an indication of how much we’ve lost by Woody Allen’s fall from grace even though he’s continued to make films to this day for whatever producers will still have him.

The Kiss (MGM, 1929)

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

Last night (Sunday, May 19) Turner Classic Movies showed on their “Silent Sunday Showcase” series a double bill of two MGM silents featuring Greta Garbo: her last one, The Kiss (1929); and Love (1927). The Kiss was not only Garbo’s last silent film but also the last one MGM made; by 1929 both the studio and Garbo herself were worried about whether American audiences would want to see and hear her in a film, and in particular what kinds of roles would showcase her and how big a problem her Swedish accent would be. The Kiss was based on a story by George M. Saville (though I’m not sure whether it was a previously published work or written especially for the film; the Wikipedia page on the movie indicates that the story was published before the movie but doesn’t give a history of its previous appearance). It was adapted for the screen by former Ernst Lubitsch collaborator Hanns Kräly (whose collaboration ended when Lubitsch caught Kräly having an affair with Mrs. Lubitsch, and rather than react in the what-the-hell way of a Lubitsch character he had a jealous hissy-fit and broke off their professional relationship) and was directed by French expatriate Jacques Feyder. Feyder’s career at MGM seems to have been pretty much limited to making the alternate foreign-language versions of movies featuring MGM’s biggest stars – he worked with Garbo again on the German-language version of Anna Christie (1930), Garbo’s first talkie, and largely because of him Garbo liked that film better than the English-language one directed by Clarence Brown.

In a 1932 article Dwight Macdonald proclaimed Feyder as the only truly talented director Garbo had worked with (later in the sound era she’d get better directors, including Rouben Mamoulian, George Cukor and Lubitsch), but The Kiss is an estimable movie but hardly a great one. It does seem to have been cranked out on the assembly line, and by this time Garbo was getting so bored with roles casting her as a faithless wife she’d actually gone to Louis B. Mayer to complain, “Always the vamp I am, always the woman with no heart.” In this one, set in France in 1929, Garbo plays Irene Guarry, unhappy wife of businessman Charles Guarry (Anders Randolf). She’s carrying on an affair with attorney André Dubail (Conrad Nagel, on the eve of a short-lived stint at superstardom simply because he was the first major actor who established he had a recordable voice; producers casting a male lead kept saying, “Get Nagel – he can talk,” and Nagel himself complained that he and his wife could no longer go to the movies for their own entertainment because they couldn’t find anything playing that he wasn’t in), though it doesn’t appear as if their affair has got anywhere near consummation. Charles is not only having his wife investigated to see if he can dredge up evidence that she’s having an affair, he’s also about to go bankrupt. Lassalle (Holmes Herbert), an attorney friend of his, offers to bail him out, and Charles decides to visit him that night and work out the details. But while driving to Lassalle’s place Charles feels poorly and decides to abandon the trip and go home. By coincidence (or authorial fiat), he catches Irene fending off the annoying advances of Lassalle’s son Pierre (Lew Ayres in his first major role; in his interview for the book The Celluloid Muse Lewis Milestone, who directed Ayres in his star-making role as Paul in All Quiet on the Western Front, made it seem as if Ayres had been an unknown before then, but he’d been big enough to land a role opposite Garbo the year before).

Charles sees Irene and the 18-year-old Pierre kissing (hence the title) and he freaks out. There’s a tense confrontation between the three of them which we don’t get to see until the very end in a flashback. What we know is that Pierre emerges from the room, his face bloodied from the struggle between them, and announces that Charles is dead. Irene is arrested for Charles’s murder, and her lawyer and sort-of boyfriend André agrees to defend her at trial. (Remember that this is taking place under French law, under which you’re assumed guilty and have to prove your innocence.) André manages to get the judge and jury to believe that Charles actually committed suicide over the threat of his impending bankruptcy, but we finally get a flashback showing us what really happened in that room: Charles was threatening to kill Pierre and Irene shot him to defend Pierre from her husband’s assault. Since we can now see it was justifiable homicide, Irene and André get together at the end. The Kiss was actually released with a synchronized soundtrack – not only is there a musical accompaniment adapted by Dr. William Axt mostly from themes by Tchaikovsky (including the Romeo and Juliet overture and the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies) but we hear a thump from the back room as the body falls and shortly after that we hear a telephone ring as Irene remains uncertain for several rings before she finally answers it. So The Kiss counts as a “sound film” in Sergei Eisenstein’s definition rather than either a silent or a talkie – an in-between status that had several chapters of the Better Business Bureau warning moviegoers, “‘Sound’ Doesn’t Always Mean ‘Talk.’” The Kiss is a well-made movie but it’s also the sort of film that has an air of the same-old same-old about it. Garbo was clearly tired of playing unhappily married women involved in extra-relational activities, and ironically, instead of wrecking her career, sound would actually broaden the kinds of roles she could play and make her an even bigger star.

Love (MGM, 1927)

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

Afterwards Turner Classic Movies showed Love, made two years before The Kiss and MGM’s immediate follow-up to the mega-hit Flesh and the Devil, a melodrama in which (though the story is set in Germany) Garbo plays the Spanish dancer Felicitas, who does her level best to wreck the lives of the two men who love her, Leo von Harden (John Gilbert) and Ulrich von Eltz (Lars Hanson, who’d also been her leading man in her biggest Swedish film, The Saga of Gösta Berling, and was I believe the only actor who worked with her on both sides of the Atlantic). Audiences had so thrilled to the love scenes between Garbo and Gilbert (they fell in love – or at least lust – with each other for real, too), and MGM’s production chiefs, Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg, looked hard for a suitable property for the next Garbo-Gilbert vehicle. They found it in, of all places, Leo Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina, which they assigned to screenwriter Lorna Moon to adapt and reshape into a big movie for their big stars. The plot of the movie is basically that of the book – unhappily married Anna Karenina (Greta Garbo) meets dashing, handsome Russian army officer Captain Count Andrei Vronsky (John Gilbert) when her carriage is stranded in a snowstorm on the way to St. Petersburg. He takes her to an inn, where apparently he’s well known already because the innkeeper automatically puts his belongings in her room, figuring they’re there for some hanky-panky. Only he virtuously refuses the invitation and takes his stuff back to his own room.

Anna is unhappily married to Senator Karenin (Brandon Hurst), though they’ve had a son, Serezha (Philippe de Lacey), whom Anna dotes on. Anna and Vronsky do a lot of heavy petting and necking – most of it while they’re both standing up – but Karenin catches them and worries about what the scandal will do to his political career. Vronsky gets threatened with discharge from his regiment – it seems that for generations Vronskys have served in that regiment and if the current Vronsky washes out over his affair with Anna, that will disgrace the family forever. (At this point my husband Charles started calling out, “October!,” reflecting his hope that the Russian Revolution would happen already and free these people from their ridiculous social expectations.) Anna is ready to leave Karenin and flee with Vronsky, but Karenin makes it clear that if she does so she’ll never get to see her son Serezha again. Like The Kiss, Love gets stronger emotionally and dramatically as it progresses, and Garbo’s acting – though more overwrought and openly emotional than what we’re familiar with once sound had made it possible for her to be more reserved and subtle – expertly delineates the impossible dilemma she’s been put in: your lover or your son? Gilbert is also relatively restrained for him – director Edmund Goulding (who two years later would publish an article proclaiming the innate superiority of sound over silent films, and would go on to direct Gloria Swanson in her first talkie, The Trespasser, and give her the biggest hit of her career) is able to calm him down enough to make him a figure of romantic mystery instead of an appallingly over-energetic character. (Gilbert’s best films were made back-to-back in 1925 by strong directors who got him to calm down: King Vidor in The Big Parade and Erich von Stroheim in The Merry Widow.)

In The Shattered Silents, his book on the silent-to-sound transition, Alexander Walker said that the difference between Gilbert and Rudolph Valentino was that Valentino always seemed to be holding something in reserve whereas “Gilbert gave all of himself, utterly” – which is why Valentino seems more watchable and more “modern” today. Gilbert’s quick descent into career oblivion once sound came in has had a lot of nonsense written about it; my own conclusion, based on the Gilbert talkies I’ve seen, is there was nothing wrong with his voice per se but he never learned how to act with it, how to vary his inflections to convey emotions. A contemporary reviewer of Gilbert’s first talkie, His Glorious Night, seemed to have the same idea when he said Gilbert’s line deliveries had all the passion of one assistant director asking another to lunch. Love – at least in the version released in the U.S. – had an unexpectedly happy ending in which, three years after the main action, Senator Karenin dies and Anna and Vronsky are able to get together and presumably live happily ever after. Charles reacted quite strongly to this – it startled him completely – and right after that TCM showed the European ending, in which Anna commits suicide by throwing herself under a train the way she did in Tolstoy’s novel. After the showing, TCM host Jacqueline Stewart explained that MGM shot both endings and allowed their exhibitors to pick which one to use.

Fortunately, Garbo get to remake this story as a talkie in 1935, under Tolstoy’s original title, with David O. Selznick producing, Clarence Brown directing, and Garbo’s friend (and sometimes girlfriend) Salka Viertel and Clemence Dane as writers. This time Selznick laid down the law to the “suits” at MGM and insisted that the film would end with Anna’s suicide. He also cast it considerably better, with Fredric March as Vronsky and Basil Rathbone as Karenin – and Rathbone was good-looking enough that the unworkability of the Karenins’ marriage was depicted by his cold-fish mannerisms rather than physical repulsiveness. Rathbone was also a victim of Garbo’s attitude; he showed up on set one day with a photo of Garbo and asked her to autograph it for him. She refused. For years Rathbone was stung by her decision; it wasn’t, he’d tell friends, like he was just some crazed fan waving a photo and a pen in her face. He was actually her colleague, and her willful rudeness to a fellow actor, especially one who was working with her, probably got replicated a lot in her dealings with the rest of Hollywood and I suspect explained why, though she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress three times (for Anna Christie, Camille and Ninotchka), she never won. What’s more, her first two defeats were at the hands of other MGM stars: Norma Shearer (Mrs. Irving Thalberg) for The Divorcée and the abysmal Luise Rainer for The Good Earth.

Would You Kill for Me? The Mary Bailey Story (MB Films, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2023)

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

Last night (Saturday, May 18) I watched two surprisingly good Lifetime movies, both of which definitely transcended the usual limitations of the genre. The first was a 2023 production with the rather clunky title Would You Kill for Me? The Mary Bailey Story, more or less based on a real-life murder case from West Virginia on February 24, 1987, in which Mary Bailey’s mother persuaded her (13 in the movie, 11 in real life) to shoot her stepfather because stepdad had enmeshed them all in a trap caused by his repeated physical and emotional abuse of the three women in his life: Mary, her mother and her grandmother. Would You Kill for Me? was considerably altered from the real-life events, including changing all the characters’ names except Mary Bailey’s own: her mother, really Priscilla Wyers, became “Veronica Bailey Simms,” while her abusive husband, in fact Wayne Wyers, became “Willard Simms” (the genuinely hot Connor McMahon) and the grandmother, unnamed in the two online articles I looked up on the case (one from the Arts & Entertainment Network’s True Crime Blog at https://www.aetv.com/real-crime/mary-bailey and one from the U.S. edition of the British tabloid The Sun at https://www.the-sun.com/news/9431850/mary-bailey-wayne-wyers-murder/, became “Ella Bailey” (Melissa Joan Hart). Would You Kill for Me? was effectively directed by Simone Stock and written by Gregg McBride, whose handiwork had just been shown the previous Sunday in Mommy Meanest. McBride had scripted that story pretty well but Would You Kill for Me? really challenged him, and he handsomely rose to it.

To use their names in the movie, Veronica Bailey conceived Mary out of wedlock from a married man who seduced her into a one-night stand, and her mom Ella never forgave her for it. While doing volunteer church work for Pastor McCall (Pierre Simpson, who’s playing the one actually sympathetic character in this otherwise sordid story) Veronica meets Willard Simms and it’s lust at first sight. Veronica is pretty quickly warned what she will be up against if she takes up with Willard when Willard dares a male friend of his to kiss Veronica, then punches him in the face just before their lips make contact and tells Veronica, “This is just my way of proving that I’ll always have your back.” McBride dispatches Willard relatively quickly – the film opens with Veronica making a 911 call to the police telling them that she’s just shot her husband, the cops send an ambulance team but Willard dies in the E.R., and when they investigate they find both Veronica’s and Mary’s prints on the murder weapon and ultimately decide that Mary killed her stepfather – and for the rest of the film he uses the Rashomon device of having the three Bailey women (Veronica, Ella and Mary herself) testify in court in Veronica’s murder trial. They all tell basically the same story but with subtle differences that reflect each of their attempts to shade the facts in their favor. Ultimately the jury convicts Veronica of murder – the online articles make clear, as the movie does not, that Mary and her attorney got the state to drop the murder charges against Mary in exchange for her ratting out her mom – though they recommend “leniency,” which under West Virginia law means a 10-year prison sentence without possibility of parole (though in fact the real Priscilla Wyers was paroled in 1998) instead of the death penalty. Would You Kill for Me? is actually a quite good drama in spite of the clunky title (the real Mary Bailey wrote a memoir, My Mother’s Soldier, which would have been a better title for the film as well); the overlapping perspectives on the story intermesh well and make a point about how difficult it is for anybody, especially someone outside the case, to determine “truth” based on the parties’ conflicting narratives.

There’s also very real suspense as to how the case is going to turn out and who will be found guilty of what in the end. Also, as often happens when Lifetime bases its movies on a true story, their writers either embrace the multifaceted nature of actual human beings or at least can’t avoid it; try as they might to turn Veronica into an innocent victim and Willard into a monster, Veronica and Willard both have quite a few extra-relational affairs. Veronica believes that as a young and reasonably attractive woman she’s entitled to sex with anyone she wants who wants her, and Willard has an ongoing relationship with Veronica’s heavy-set, dark-haired best friend Susan (Celina Myers) and in one scene goads Veronica and Susan to kiss each other, presumably preparatory to a three-way. Also the crisis that precipitates Willard’s homicidal rage – he threatens to kill all three generations of Baileys in his life – was Veronica loaning his beloved Jeep SUV to a male “friend” to buy cigarettes, only the “friend” crashed the Jeep and when Willard returned home he was super-angry to see his car wrecked. We definitely get the impression that the “friend” who borrowed Willard’s Jeep was one of Veronica’s tricks. Also Veronica makes it clear that one of the reasons she’s staying with Willard was to keep collecting welfare and food stamps on both Mary and the son she had with Willard, Sammy (Luca Thunberg) – though predictably Willard in one of his rages questions whether he’s really Sammy’s biological father. Naturally Ella is badgering her daughter to find a job rather than depend on the government all her life, while Veronica just mopes and goes through life on a tightrope, dealing with Willard’s abuse as best she can.

And when Veronica is finally convicted while Mary, still a minor, is put up for adoption after having lived with a foster family between the murder and the trial, she pleads with Pastor McCall and his wife (whom we never see) to adopt her. McCall explains that he would like to, but the authorities (whom we also never see in this context) have decided she’d be better off growing up in another town where no one will know her or her sordid history. Alas, the post-credit “Where Are They Now?” sequence fudged the truth even more than the actual script had; the fictional Mary Bailey got married, settled in another town and got work as a geriatric nurse while also becoming an advocate for victims of domestic violence. The real Mary Bailey also got married and started a uniform supply business with her husband, and though the real Priscilla moved in with her daughter prior to Mary’s marriage, they didn’t get along and it wasn’t until 2022 that Mary saw her mom again – just in time to have a Mother’s Day together before Priscilla Wyers died of cancer in August 2022. The film ends with Mary (played as a fully grown adult by Megan Jonker) and Veronica reuniting after Veronica’s release from prison but doesn’t tell us the aftermath – but even the deviations from actual fact can’t take away from the sheer dramatic power and point of Will You Kill for Me?