The Peanut Butter Falcon (Roadside Attractions, Armory Films, Endeavor Content, 2019)

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

Last week, from July 23 through 29, my husband Charles and I went on vacation in Martinez, California to visit Charles’s mother Edi. I like to say I’m one of the few males on the planet who genuinely likes his mother-in-law. Edi has a Netflix connection, which Charles and I don’t, and between that and an unexpected movie event at the Campbell Playhouse in Martinez Charles and I got to see four movies that would have otherwise eluded us. On July 23 we got to watch The Peanut Butter Falcon, a quite remarkable movie that was one of Edi’s favorites. It came about, according to a “Trivia” entry on its imdb.com page, when “the directors [Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz] met Zack Gottsagen at a camp for disabled and non-disabled people and he expressed his desire to be a movie star. So the directors wrote the script around him and Zack’s hopes and dreams that bled into the script and people they knew who would allow them to film for free and without permits.” Gottesagen, a real-life person with Down’s Syndrome, plays Zak, a 20-year-old man with Down’s Syndrome who’s in an “assisted living” facility but is determined to get out and become a professional wrestler. He’s been encouraged in this ambition by an ancient VHS tape he watches incessantly featuring a former professional wrestler called “Salt Water Redneck” (Thomas Haden Church) promoting his wrestling school in Ayden, North Carolina. Zak is determined to make it from Manteo, North Carolina to Ayden, and he’s taken under the wing of Tyler (Shia LaBeouf, top-billed), who’s on the run from two other lobster fishermen who accuse him (accurately) of stealing their traps.

Along the way they meet Eleanor (Dakota Johnson), who’s a volunteer at the home where Zak was living when the film started. She’s sent out after Zak to bring him back to the home, but once she tracks him down she decides to stay with Zak and Tyler (is it at all surprising that she also falls in love with Tyler?) and join them in their quest. Zak’s roommate at the home was Carl – played by Bruce Dern, who’d previously made his film debut in Alfred Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964) alongside Johnson’s grandmother, ‘Tippi’ Hedren; had appeared in Smile (1975) and Mulholland Falls (1996) with Johnson’s mother, Melanie Griffith; and had also acted in Django Unchained (2012) with her dad, Don Johnson. (Just in case you didn’t believe Hollywood was an incestuous place … ) When they finally get to Ayden, “Salt Water Redneck” turns out to be a burned-out and bitter old guy named Clint, and he says he closed his wrestling school a decade before. (This explains why the tape promoting it had been on such a retro format as VHS.) Clint also explains that the so-called “atomic throw” that had particularly impressed Zak – in which he grabbed his opponent with one hand and threw him out of the ring – was faked for the video. Zak gets a wrestling bout with an opponent who’s supposed to have agreed to throw the match, but the other wrestler double-crosses him and Zak appears done for when he finally masters the “atomic throw” and wins. The Peanut Butter Falcon (the title comes from the nom de wrestle Zak adopts) isn’t exactly the freshest premise for a movie – watching it after the 1927 film West Point made that all too clear – but it’s told with such sensitivity and charm it became the highest-grossing independent film of 2019 and won an award from the Ruderman Family Foundation for its accurate portrayal of a character with a disability. It also benefits from a quite well selected set of songs, including three gospel numbers from the Staples Singers (“Freedom Highway,” “This Train” and “Uncloudy Day”) as well as other well-picked slices of Americana. If there’d been a soundtrack CD from this film it would have been as great a listening experience as the one from O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Boy Erased (Focus Features, Perfect World Pictures, Anonymous Content, Blue-Tongue Films, 2018)

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

The next night, Wednesday, July 24, Edi, Charles and I watched a quite good film about the so-called “ex-Gay ministries,” Boy Erased. The film was based on a true story; the protagonist’s real name was Garrard Conley (though he’s called “Jared Eamons” in the film and is played by Lucas Hedges) and he was a young man from Arkansas whose father was owner of a Ford auto dealership and a part-time minister on Sundays. When “Jared” went off to college, after he’d broken up with his high-school girlfriend Chloe (Madelyn Cline) because she wanted to have sex with him and he didn’t, he was befriended by a man named “Henry” (Joe Alwyn) – his name, like that of all the other real-life characters in the film, was changed for the movie – who ultimately raped him. Henry acknowledged that he’d done this to at least one other boy, and Jared was horrified and returned home. Henry then called Jared’s father, posing as a school counselor and “outing” Jared as Gay. As a result Jared’s parents, Marshall (Russell Crowe, who’d begun his film career playing a young Gay man in an Australian movie called The Sum of Us whose father is so sympathetic to his son’s sexual orientation he spends the whole movie trying to help him find a boyfriend) and Nancy (Nicole Kidman), enrolled him in the Love in Action “conversion therapy” program, headed by a man named “Victor Sykes” (Joel Edgerton, who also directed and wrote the film) whose real name was John Smid. At first the Eamonses think the program will only last 12 days or so, but Jared soon discovers that they will keep him there for weeks, months or even years until “Victor” is convinced he’s no longer Queer. (There’s one woman in the program, Lee, played by Emily Hinkler, but other than that everyone, either staff or patient, is male.)

There are even dark allusions to “the houses,” where particularly recalcitrant inmates are kept and subjected to even nastier tortures than most of the supposed “patients,” and security people who prowl the grounds and ensure that the “patients” cannot leave. (According to the Wikipedia page on Garrard Conley, this part was invented by the filmmakers and doesn’t appear in Conley’s memoir, on which the film was supposedly based.) One aspect of the Love in Action “treatment” the film stresses is that the patients are not supposed to tell anybody, especially their parents, what’s going on inside the “camp.” That becomes a major issue when one young man is severely injured when baseballs are spat at him by a pitching machine. Having either no idea or no inclination that he’s supposed to respond by swinging at them with the bat they’ve given him, he’s struck by the balls and knocked down. He somehow gets word to his dad, who shows up and pulls him out, threatening the organizers with legal action if they don’t let him leave with his son. One of the “queenier” inmates, Gary, is played by openly Gay South African-born singer Troye Sivan, who also contributed two songs to the film, “Revelation” (nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Song) and “The Good Side.” But the person the people running the operation really comes down the hardest on is Cameron Van Heusen (Britton Sear) precisely because aside from being Gay, he’s the epitome of all the masculine “butch” values, including being a football star, they’re trying to inculcate in the other campers/patients/inmates. They stage a mock funeral for Cameron, complete with a real coffin, and instruct his fellow inmates to beat him with their Bibles. (This too is something writer Edgerton added to Garrard Conley’s memoir.) Eventually Jared bails on the camp, aided by his mother, who’s come around to his point of view that nothing – especially nothing Love in Action is trying to do to him – will make him no longer Gay. Once out of the camp, Jared learns that Cameron committed suicide, and this leads him to write an exposé for the place and place it with the New York Times, since he’s decided to leave Arkansas and settle in New York.

The film ends ambiguously in terms of Jared’s relationship with his parents: mom at least accepts him as he is, but dad is still trying to reconcile his “Christian” beliefs with his son’s sexuality. There’s a nice bit of symbolism in that throughout the film we’ve seen the Ford logo, emphasizing not only what Marshall does for a living but his plans for his son (he had planned that Jared would take over the Ford dealership, marry a woman and keep the Eamons family line going). We’ve even seen the young pre-“conversion” Jared wear a T-shirt with the Ford logo – but when he’s finally settled in New York as an “out” Gay man we see him driving a car with an Asian logo on the hub of the steering wheel, an unobtrusive but definite symbol of his rejection of the life his dad had in mind for him. Ultimately the film’s credits tell us that “Jared Eamons” – like his real-life prototype, Garrard Conley – is living in New York with his husband, and “Victor Sykes,” like his real-life prototype John Smid, is living in Texas with his husband. Conley’s Wikipedia page mentions Smid’s later repudiation of “conversion therapy” and quotes him as saying he “never met a man who experienced a change from homosexual to heterosexual.” Though it could have been even stronger – I’ve been told by people who’ve gone through “ex-Gay” programs that they are, among other things, great places to cruise, and Edgerton seems to be hinting at secret sexual goings-on between the men in the program but never comes out and shows any – overall Boy Erased is a quite powerful and moving film, and Lucas Hedges brings his character vividly to life.

Lifeboat (20th Century-Fox, 1944)

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

On Thursday, July 25 my husband Charles and I went to the Campbell Playhouse in Martinez for what we thought would be a live theatre program of seven one-act plays. I’d misread the poster advertising it, but the event they were actually presenting was almost as interesting. It was a screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1944 film Lifeboat, put on by a local organization called Backdoor Films. Their slogan is, “Keeping your guilty pleasures on the big screen!,” and they define themselves as “a movie club for FANS of cult, Queer, Black and alternative cinema.” The film was hosted by the group’s organizer, Omar, who showed up in a sailor’s costume with a blue cardboard model of a ship around his waist to emphasize the movie’s nautical theme. Lifeboat seems to have made it onto the Backdoor Films schedule not so much because of its director as its star, Tallulah Bankhead, the sexually omnivorous (with both men and women) theatrical legend who made only a handful of films, notably Devil and the Deep (1932) – a World War I submarine melodrama in which she seduced her co-star, Gary Cooper, and later said he’d given her gonorrhea – Faithless (1932) and this one. Hitchcock’s idea was to do a film set entirely on a lifeboat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, and the reason he cast Bankhead in the lead was he thought she’d be the person you’d be least likely to meet in that circumstance. I’d seen Lifeboat only once before, and that was in the early 1970’s on a commercial TV screening. I took a strong dislike to it then and had avoided seeing it again until last Thursday, when I figured that as long as we were there anyway (and Omar and his fellow attendees seemed like fun people to hang out with), I’d try to make my peace with it. I liked it better than I did last time but it’s still not one of Hitchcock’s best.

Lifeboat was supposedly based on a story by John Steinbeck, though apparently the idea was actually Hitchcock’s and the actual screenplay was by Jo Swerling (a man, by the way), who was best known as a comedy writer and seemed a little out of place in a World War II melodrama that was supposed to reproduce some of the conflicts of the war in microcosm. One of the film’s gimmicks is that the reason the characters are stranded on a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean (they’re trying to chart a course to Bermuda) is because the ship they were on before that was sunk by a German U-boat, which was in turn almost immediately sunk by an Allied plane. The U-boat captain, Willi (Walter Slezak), tries to pass himself off as just another German sailor, but heroine Constance “Connie” Porter (Tallulah Bankhead) “outs” him when she addresses him as “Capitaine” (she’s established as fluent in at least three languages, English, German and French) and he responds. The other people on the lifeboat are former marathon dance champion Gus Smith (William Bendix, billed second), who much to Willi’s displeasure changed his last name years before from “Schmidt”; anti-social sailor John Kovac (John Hodiak), whom Connie naturally and almost immediately takes a sexual interest in; British nurse Alice McKenzie (Mary Anderson), who laments having fallen for a married man; fellow outcast Stanley Garrett (Hume Cronyn), who takes an interest in her; and railroad tycoon Charles J. Rittenhouse (Henry Hull). Anti-fascist journalist Dorothy Thompson and New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther both hated the film, and in a 1969 interview with Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg for their book The Celluloid Muse Hitchcock explained why. “The main complaint was that I’d shown the Nazi in ascendancy over the rest of the people,” Hitchcock said. “But that was ridiculous because, after all, he was a submarine commander; he’d be the man who was most proficient at handling a boat than anyone else. It also showed that they were all at sixes and sevens with each other, and to get rid of this man, they had to combine. Irrespective of whether Henry Hull was a Fascist or John Hodiak a Communist, they had to get together.”

Not surprisingly, Willi turns out to be a double-crosser – he’s said throughout the voyage that he doesn’t have a compass, but he’s hiding one, and he’s steering the lifeboat not to Bermuda, but to a German supply ship on which they’ll be taken into custody and sent to concentration camps or worse. This time around I was genuinely moved when Mary Anderson tells her story, and even more moved when Gus goes through a D.I.Y. amputation (with brandy from a flask as the anesthetic) because his leg has become infected and his main concern is that if he survives his dance-partner girlfriend won’t want anything to do with him anymore. Eventually Willi pitches Gus overboard on the Nazi principle that he’s become useless to the world anyway and the others would be better off without him. I also liked the meticulous way Connie is stripped of her possessions, one by one: first her movie camera with which she’d filmed the attack on the ship; then her fur coat; then her typewriter and finally the jeweled bracelet – a gift from her first husband (her emphasis, not mine!), she tells us – after she had the idea of using it as bait to catch a fish. (Charles pointed out that the fish on screen was actually a fresh-water koi – imdb.com says it’s a carp – which wouldn’t be found in a salt-water sea.) And one of the best remembered aspects of the film is the way Hitchcock worked in his cameo appearance; he’d just been on one of his periodic attempts to diet, so he decided to take before-and-after photos of himself and use them as part of an ad for a fictitious diet product called “Reduco” which is seen in a newspaper John Hodiak picks up and reads from the lifeboat’s floor. Needless to say, 20th Century-Fox got plenty of letters from people asking what “Reduco” was and where they could get it. Nonetheless, Lifeboat was a terrific box-office flop, so much so that though 20th Century-Fox had bought Hitchcock’s services from David O. Selznick for two films, they canceled the second film. Fortunately for Hitchcock, his next film, Spellbound – a brilliant thriller set in an insane asylum, personally produced by Selznick and starring Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck – was a huge hit and revitalized his career.

Hillbilly Elegy (Imagine Entertainment, Netflix, 2020)

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

Last Sunday, July 28, my husband Charles, his mother Edi and I watched the 2020 film Hillbilly Elegy, based on the 2016 memoir by J. D. Vance that got seized on by much of the liberal intelligentsia as the best explanation they were going to get as to why Donald Trump had won the Presidential election and what all those people in what seemingly sophisticated East and West Coast intellectual enclaves dismissed as “flyover country” really thought, felt and voted. Vance had already had a quite remarkable rise from poor son of a drug-addicted mother – he was born in Kentucky but raised in Ohio when his family moved there to take a job at a steel mill – to law student at Yale. Since then he’s had an even more meteoric career; he briefly worked in Silicon Valley as a venture capitalist, got elected to the U.S. Senate from Ohio largely with the money of PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, and in June 2024 was appointed by former (and quite likely future) President Donald Trump as his running mate. It’s impossible to watch Hillbilly Elegy without thinking of the as-yet unwritten sequel, especially since the whole premise of the movie is whether J. D. Vance (played as a boy by Owen Asztalos and as a young man by Gabriel Basso) will make it to his all-important internship interview on time despite his mother Bev (Amy Adams in a quite remarkable and completely de-glamorized performance) having just overdosed on heroin and needing his help back in Middletown, Ohio. The script of Hillbilly Elegy is by Vanessa Taylor, and Ron Howard provides his typically quiet, understated direction to tell a story that is oddly moving despite Vance’s creepy politics.

It’s basically the story of how Vance as a boy was torn between his drug-addicted mother – she trained as a nurse and actually put herself through nursing school while raising him as a single parent after his father died, then started helping herself to the abundantly available meds and ultimately got hooked big-time – and his maternal grandmother, who goes by the bizarrely infantilizing nickname “Mamaw,” pronounced “ma’am-awe” (Glenn Close). Mamaw takes over the raising of young J. D. after his mother, high on something or other, takes him out for a drive and deliberately speeds the car. In panic, he tells her to stop, and when she finally does, she slaps him a good one, then pleads with him not to report her to the police. Before that Bev, J. D.’s mother, was so free with her affections that he literally has no idea who his biological father was. She cycles through men at near-warp speed, and one day she announces to J. D. that she has just got married – not to the man J. D. had known she was dating but to Ken (Keong Sim), who heads the dialysis unit at the hospital where Bev works. As we see J. D. abruptly moved out of the home he’d felt more or less comfortable in and forced to move in with Ken and share a bedroom with Ken’s pothead son, I said, “Now we know why J. D. Vance hates step-parents so much!” J. D. Vance was caught on video a few years ago saying that the Democratic Party was run by “childless cat ladies.” When this surfaced recently, he tried to walk it back by saying he hadn’t intended to insult … cats. Elsewhere he’s said that people who don’t have children should have fewer votes in elections than people who do because only by having children do you establish a stake in the future – odd talk coming from a man who joined the rest of the Senate Republican caucus in killing Joe Biden’s child tax credit and who’s running on a ticket with a Presidential candidate who’s pledged to “drill, baby, drill” on day one and end all Biden’s attempts to promote the sale of electric cars. One of Kamala Harris’s step-children – she and her husband, Doug Emhoff, haven’t had kids of their own but he brought two children he’d had with a previous wife – responded on X nèe Twitter defending their family and saying that “we love our three parents.”

Hillbilly Elegy is a sometimes confusing movie; at times the only way we can tell when a particular scene takes place is by whether Owen Asztalos or Gabriel Basso is playing J. D. Vance in it. Howard tries his best but he can’t always smooth out the often abrupt transitions in Vanessa Taylor’s script. Nonetheless, the suspense buildup at the end – will Vance make it to his all-important interview with the super-rich white dude who can make or break his career? – is effectively done, and Vance’s (East) Indian girlfriend (now his wife) Usha (Freida Pinto) is depicted not as just a convenience but a dramatically compelling character in her own right. At one point Vance and his sister Lindsay (Haley Bennett) find Bev a motel room for the night after she’s forcibly discharged from the hospital following her overdose, only she sneaks out and scores some heroin and the “works” needed to inject it. J. D. catches her just in time, just after he’s maxed out his credit cards to raise the $3,000 needed to get her into a rehab program, only, like Amy Winehouse, she’s refused. (So much of this movie is about the ultra-high cost of health care under America’s for-profit medical system you might expect J. D. Vance as a politician to be in favor of expanding opportunities for lower-income people to get health coverage. Instead he’s a good little Republican boy in favor of eliminating the Affordable Care Act and cutting back Social Security and Medicare to fund unnecessary tax breaks for the super-rich.)

Hillbilly Elegy is actually a genuinely moving and even gripping film, thanks largely to Howard’s typically understated direction and the finely honed performances of Amy Adams and Glenn Close. We’re told in the end credits that Bev has got clean and stayed off drugs and alcohol for six years – and the real-life Bev made an almost spectral appearance at the 2024 Republican National Convention, looking like death warmed over as she watched her son become the Republican candidate for vice-president. One wonders how she managed to clean up long-term when we’ve seen her go through so many cycles of recovery and relapse; I suspect that would make an even more interesting movie than the one we have, but telling that story would also mean having to tell J. D. Vance’s political degeneration from Trump critic (he once said Trump “could become America’s Hitler”) to Trump toady and his passing the “loyalty” test – not to the U.S. government or its Constitution but to the person of Donald Trump – Trump demands of his appointees to anything.

Off the Shelf and On the Stage: One-Act Festival (Onstage Repertory Theatre, B8 Theatre Company; "Live" in Martinez, CA, July 26, 2024)

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

My husband Charles and I just returned from a six-day vacation in Martinez, California to visit his mother Edi and experience a surprisingly rich creative arts presence for such a small town. On successive nights we went to a community film screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1944 film Lifeboat, a local theatre presentation called Off the Shelf and On the Stage: One-Act Festival, and a quite good local blues-rock trio called Howell Devine. This is a review of the live theatre presentation I wrote the day after Charles and I saw it.

Last night (Friday, July 26) my husband Charles and I went to the Campbell Community Theatre in Martinez where we’d been the night before to see the program of seven one-act plays we’d hoped to see, only they were doing a film screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat instead. The show’s whole title was Off the Shelf and On the Stage: One-Act Festival, and it was a co-production of two local theatre groups called Onstage Repertory Theatre and B8 Theatre Company. (Multiple groups use the space, not only for plays and film screenings but concerts as well.) There were seven plays on the program, though the whole evening clocked it at just two hours (with a 15-minute intermission) and so some of the works were more just skits than one-act plays. The opener was called “Randall and Ward Attend the Theatre,” written by Rom Watson (that’s how it’s spelled in the program), directed by JanLee Marshall and featuring Alan Cameron as Randall and Michael Garrahan as Ward. It’s set in 1981 (the date becomes highly significant at the end) and the characters are Randall, who’s what used to be called euphemistically a “confirmed bachelor,” and Ward, who’s married to a woman but is really Gay even though he hasn’t actually had sex with Randall. There’s enough of an emotional connection between them that they’re celebrating their fourth anniversary outside the small theatre where they met, and are preparing to go again even though they really don’t particularly like the company or the plays it produces, because it’s sparsely attended and therefore they can sit in a box at the back and hold hands during the performance. The significance of the date becomes apparent at the end when AIDS rears its ugly head (back when it was still being called “the Gay plague”) and they comment about how lucky they are that they haven’t done the down ‘n’ dirty, at least not with each other! Next was a fantasy called “Lighted Fools,” written by Bridget Grace Shealf and directed by Annie Potter, about a queen (Toneia Hawkins, the one Black person in the cast – and I liked the irony of whoever cast it making the Black person the authority figure and the whites her servants and courtiers) and five courtiers, servants or whatever gathered around her. The gimmick is that the queen decrees that, “As of today there shall be no yesterday,” and then because there is no longer any yesterday she can’t remember how to undo her decree.

Next up was a play that hit particularly close to home for me: “Good Morning, Miriam,” written by Jacquie Priskom and directed by JanLee Marshall. The reason this hit home was because it’s about Ari (Mitchell Vanlandingham, who’d also been in “Lighted Fools” and whom I found quite sexy even though he’s short, stocky and not that conventionally attractive), who’s an in-home caregiver for Miriam (played by Pam Drummer-Williams as an older woman and Tori Thompson as her younger self). Audrey (Asha Sundararaman), Miriam’s daughter, wants Miriam to sell her house and move into a nursing home/”assisted living facility” or whatever the au courant euphemism is, but Miriam is understandably reluctant to go even though she keeps forgetting, among other things, that her husband Carl has been dead for 10 years. That was, quite frankly, the high point of the evening for me. The next play, and the last before the intermission, was “Annabel Lee,” an intriguing musical adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem written by Jim Maher and co-directed by Randy Anger and Todd Drummond. It featured Stefanie Suzuki as Annabel Lee, Calem Hough as her lover (identified as “Poe” in the program) and Michael Garrahan as “Seraph” and “Usher.” I liked the elaborate 19th century costumes Suzuki and Hough wore but didn’t care for the musical setting; somehow Poe deserves something scarier than soft rock! Act II began with “The Female Gaze,” written by Christine Benvenudo and directed by Alan Cameron, in which five women – Louelle (Annie Larson), Frieda (Pam Drummer-Williams), Zoe (Tori Thompson), Janice (Sara Delphine) and Candance (Peg Keffer) – are in an art museum looking at Grant Wood’s 1930 painting “American Gothic.” I’m familiar with “American Gothic” from various reproductions and I’ve long thought it was one of the ugliest and meanest paintings ever to acquire a major reputation, and the characters looking at it here pretty much agree with me. They speculate on whether the long-suffering and visibly put-upon woman in the painting is the man’s wife or his daughter (or maybe both, since one of them guesses he made her his incestuous sex slave following the death of her mother in a plot twist that headed for V. C. Andrews’ territory), whether the model for the man was Wood himself or his dentist, and how this painting compares to Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” The punch line for the sketch comes when another woman enters, looks at “American Gothic,” and literally screams, assuming the pose of the character in Munch’s painting.

After that, at least for me, the quality of the plays took a major nose-dive. The next piece was called “Fishing,” written by C. C. Cardin and with no director credited, a monologue by Mark Hinds (also the general manager of the Campbell Theatre) about an already elderly man recalling taking fishing trips with “Pops,” who turns out to be not his father but his maternal grandfather. He recalls how “Pops” died and how scared he was when the body in the coffin at the funeral didn’t look much like “Pops” as he remembered him. Before that he remembers his troubled relationship with his father, who was always pressuring him to “make something of himself,” and at one point gave him a new state-of-the-art fishing pole and creel – which he used once, caught three fish in a short space of time, then threw it into the water and went back to the crude wooden home-made one he and “Pops” had used. The punch line – and it was a good one – came when we heard a woman’s voice from offstage saying, “Gramps? Are we gonna go fishing?” The last piece on the program was called “In Between Songs,” written by Lewis Black, directed by Eddie Peabody and centered around the first two songs on side two of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. It’s about three old codgers, Chaz (Jerry Motta), Ed (Wayne McRice) and Grace (Annie Larson), listening to the Dylan record – which for some reason magically stops between “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” and “Bob Dylan’s Dream” – and reminiscing of the good old days of the 1960’s. I suppose that hits close to home for me because I’m 70 years old and I grew up in the 1960’s, and it’s a sign of my advanced age that I can relate to three old people sitting around a record player listening to an old Bob Dylan album and, among other things, wondering what he’s doing now. (He’s making albums of 1930’s standards which he was never qualified to sing even during his 1960’s vocal prime!) But it was a pretty dreary play (Charles thought so, too) and the weakest on the program – though it was also the only one that had been professionally staged before, in New York in 2008. (Some of the other pieces had had staged readings before, but these were their first full productions. I know that because I had a chance to talk to the woman in overall charge of the production afterwards, and I asked her the background of the plays.)

West Point (MGM, 1927)

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

Last night (Sunday, July 21) my husband Charles and I watched the “Silent Sunday Showcase” feature on Turner Classic Movies, West Point (1927), directed by Edward Sedgwick (most known for his comedies, though he was brought in to “ghost-direct” the final chase scene for Lon Chaney, Sr.’s The Phantom of the Opera after original director Rupert Julian’s version fell flat with preview audiences) from a script by Raymond Schrock with titles by Joseph Farnham (cursed by several generations of film buffs as the man who chopped and channeled Erich von Stroheim’s Greed at producer Louis B. Mayer’s insistence). West Point was pretty obviously a follow-up to Tell It to the Marines (1926), which Charles and I had seen on last week’s “Silent Sunday Showcase.” The stars were William Haines as obnoxious would-be cadet Brice Wayne (a character name a bit too close to Bruce Wayne for comfort, though this film was made a decade before the first Batman comic story) and Joan Crawford as Betty Channing, the young girl whose attentions Brice tries to gain by annoying the hell out of her. She’s got an alternate boyfriend who’s farther up the West Point hierarchy than Brice, Bob Sperry (Neil Neely), but Bob has been put “on furlough.” I’m not sure what that means but it does impose some strict restrictions on his ability to move around off campus. Brice shows up on the ferry to West Point with a miniature banjo which he uses to accompany himself in a set of loud, obnoxious and ribald songs. We get their lyrics as intertitles and when he was serenading Joan Crawford with some of these ditties, I was hoping she’d grab the banjo from him and bash him over the head with it. No such luck.

Indeed, Raymond Schrock’s biggest mistake in this film is he keeps Brice totally obnoxious for way too long, and we spend much of this movie wondering, “When the hell is the writer going to give him his comeuppance already?” That doesn’t happen until after Brice has become a football star for the Army team – he scores a lot of touchdowns but also acquires a reputation for arrogance – and he gives an interview to a reporter and denounces alleged “favoritism” on the part of his coach, Towers (Raymond G. Moses, a real-life Army major who was also on the film as a technical advisor). As a result, Brice is benched on the eve of the all-important Army-Navy game (represented by a lot of stock footage of the real one), and he loses his temper completely and says, “To hell with the Corps!” He’s overheard and brought up on charges by the cadets’ Honor Committee that could lead to his expulsion. Brice gets into an argument with his faithful roommate, “Tex” McNeil (William Bakewell) – given that we know the real William Haines was Gay, it’s hard to read their on-screen relationship as anything other than a lovers’ spat between a Gay couple. “Tex” tells him to apologize, Brice refuses, and Brice ends up shoving “Tex” against a wall, which eventually gives “Tex” a concussion. (It’s ironic indeed that the one young man in this movie who isn’t a football player is the one who gets the football-related injury.) “Tex” defends Brice before the Honor Committee and reveals that Brice secretly paid the $250 “entrance fee” for one of the cadets now leading the charge against him. He says that just before the effects of his concussion kick in and he ends up in the hospital for the rest of the movie. Brice writes a resignation letter and sends it to West Point’s superintendent (E. H. Calvert), but ultimately he talks the superintendent into refusing to accept it. Ultimately it ends the way you’d expect it to, with Brice sent in during the fourth quarter of the Army-Navy game and scoring the game-winning touchdown for Army (an obvious ripoff of Harold Lloyd’s The Freshman, made two years earlier and a much better film!). The game’s outcome redeems him with his fellow cadets and the film flashes forward three years to Brice’s graduation ceremony and his final pairing with Betty at the end.

Though William Haines is basically playing the same character he did in Tell It to the Marines and most of his other movies – the obnoxious college kid who matures – Tell It to the Marines was a much better movie, mainly because of Lon Chaney’s presence as the authority figure. For its first half West Point is more a comedy than anything else – no wonder they assigned comedy specialist Edward Sedgwick to direct! – but for the second half it’s a soap opera, and a dull, uninteresting soap opera at that. Schrock isn’t as good a writer as Richard Schayer was on Tell It to the Marines in creating enough sympathy for William Haines’s character that we root for him in spite of his surface obnoxiousness. Haines’s career trailed off in the mid-1930’s; he made it through the transition to sound O.K. but he worried that he was aging out of college-boy roles and wasn’t getting the kinds of parts he wanted to prove he could do other things. In 1934, with the Roman Catholic Legion of Decency breathing down the necks of the major studios and demanding that Hollywood “clean up” its act, MGM head Louis B. Mayer told his biggest Gay male stars, Haines and Ramon Novarro, that they would have to marry women or he would fire them. Both refused; Novarro went back to his native Mexico and made movies there, while Haines did three films for the Mascot studio (which later became Republic) and then shifted careers and became a well-regarded interior designer. He was launched in that career change by Joan Crawford – who once called Haines and his partner, Jimmie Shields, the happiest married couple she knew. Crawford hired Haines to redecorate her house, invited the picture magazines to photograph it, and sang Haines’s praises in the accompanying interviews.

Dollar (Svensk Filmindustri, 1938)

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

Later my husband Charles and I stayed on Turner Classic Movies for the first of two foreign-language films featuring Ingrid Bergman: Dollar, made in 1938 in her native Sweden, directed by Gustaf Molander (who made the two best of Bergman’s Swedish films, the 1936 Intermezzo, later remade in the U.S. with Bergman repeating her role for her first English-language movie; and the 1938 A Woman’s Face, also remade in Hollywood but with Joan Crawford playing Bergman’s role and giving the performance of her career) from a script by Stina Bergman based on a play by Hjalmar Bergman (Stina’s husband) – so there were three people named Bergman involved with this film! From the synopsis on imdb.com – “Ludvig and Sussi Battwyhl (Håkan Westergren and Birgit Tengroth), Louis and Katja Brenner (Kotti Chave and Tutti Rolf), and Julia and Kurt Balzar (Ingrid Bergman and Georg Rydeberg) are upper-class millionaires. They don't seem to do any real work but still need a vacation in the mountains. Everybody seems to be romantically involved with everybody. A rich American woman joins them” – I expected Dollar to be a screwball comedy. For the first half I wasn’t disappointed, but then, like West Point (a film it in no other way resembles!), it turned into a rather dreary soap opera. The basic intrigues are that Julia Balzar is having an affair with Ludwig – or is it Louis? – and her husband Kurt is interested in Sussi. Julia’s paramour is wanted for embezzlement and/or gambling debts, and Julia wants to bail him out but secretly and without her husband finding out. The moment we had our first exterior scene – even though it was just a city street with most of the characters in cars – it was visibly snowing and I joked, “Now this looks like a Swedish movie.”

It starts to look even more like a Swedish movie when the three interchanging couples go for a vacation in the mountains and do a lot of cross-country skiing while waiting for their American friend, Mary Jonston (Elsa Burnett, who speaks a mixture of English and Swedish in a thick, risible accent entirely unbelievable as an American – but then that’s what a lot of audiences in other countries probably think as American actors vainly try to make their way through the language of the country their character is supposed to be from). Mary is properly horrified at the, shall we say, free-wheeling attitude towards marital fidelity taken by the Swedish characters, and she chews them out both from her morality – she explains that she was raised by Mormons and so if they want extra-relational partners, they should practice polygamy – and her knowledge of Freudian psychology. (She’s described as a polymath who went to several universities and got degrees in various subjects.) Mary happens on the scene when Sussi has fallen down a mountain during a skiing trip, and takes charge of the rescue (which featured stock shots of a herd of elk being driven by trained dogs – I couldn’t help but think of the W. C. Fields short The Fatal Glass of Beer; its catch line, “And it ain’t a fit night out for man nor beast,” and the snow that gets flung in his face every time he says it). When Sussi is brought back to the hotel (whose desk clerk is fat, middle-aged and had Charles wishing for Franklin Pangborn) she’s paralyzed from the waist down. Given that we actually saw her (or her stunt double, though given the low budgets available to Swedish filmmakers Tutta Rolf probably did the stunt herself) take the fall, it’s readily believable that she really was paralyzed and will have to use a wheelchair for the rest of her life. But Mary insists that the paralysis was purely psychosomatic and essentially wills Sussi to walk again. Eventually Dollar lurches towards a close and Julia and Kurt, at least, get back together.

One thing I was hoping for from Dollar was it would be an example of the greater sexual frankness available to European filmmakers that didn’t have to worry about the Hollywood Production Code. This was one of Bergman’s Swedish films that wasn’t going to get a U.S. remake, though quite frankly I wish it had, with Bergman repeating her role, Cary Grant playing her husband and Preston Sturges adapting and directing. The subtleties and indirections the Code required might actually have helped this movie! Oddly, TCM host Alicia Malone called the film a star vehicle for Bergman, which it really wasn’t; it was actually an ensemble movie, and the credits reveal that the “suits” at Svensk Filmindustri thought of it as one. Ingrid Bergman gets top billing, but below the title and as just one-half of one of the three couples at the center of the plot. Dollar is at least a well-produced movie; in 1938 Variety ran an article about Bergman that pleaded with someone in the U.S. to give her a contract because Swedish films were getting to be too good! The director of photography was Åke Dahlqvist, and his work is stunning and reminded me of the interview American cinematographer Conrad Hall gave in which he proclaimed his jealousy of Ingmar Bergman’s d.p., Sven Nykvist. Hall said he envied Nykvist because Sweden’s position on the planet relative to the sun gave him naturally indirect light. The production values are excellent and I could see why the Variety writer was worried that Swedish films might someday be as good or better than Hollywood’s. But the script is pretty clunky and some of the emotional transitions jar. Though Ingrid Bergman is watchable throughout she doesn’t really dominate, and when her husband starts cruising Sussi we do get the impression that he’s trading down!

Verdi: Otello (Gran Teatro Liceu, Barcelona; Opus Arte, 2006)

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

Last night (Friday, July 19) my husband Charles and I watched an intriguing DVD of Verdi’s next-to-last opera, Otello, with a text by Arrigo Boïto (whose opera Mefistofele is my all-time favorite Italian opera composed by anyone other than Verdi or Puccini) based on Shakespeare’s play Othello. By now just about everyone knows the story: Othello/Otello is a Moorish (i.e., Black – in the original Italian story, Geraldi Cinthio’s Hecatommithi, “Otello Moro” was just the character’s name, but the translator of the English version from which Shakespeare worked read “Moro” as “Moor” and therefore made Othello Black) general who has been appointed by the rulers of Venice to subjugate and rule their colony on Cyprus. He’s met and married Desdemona, daughter of a Venetian senator, and moved with her to Cyprus (where the opera begins, Verdi and Boïto having lopped off the entire first act of the play), only Iago, the treacherous ensign, is determined to destroy Otello’s career. He does this by successfully convincing him that Desdemona is having extra-relational activities with Cassio, whom Otello demotes from captain to ensign after Cassio gets into a drunken brawl. Ultimately Otello gets so worked up at the mere thought that his wife is unfaithful to him that he murders her, then almost immediately regrets it, especially after Iago’s wife Emilia turns up (she’s also Desdemona’s maidservant) and says to Otello, “And you believed him?” The play and the opera both end with Ot[h]ello committing suicide while Iago lives and is taken into custody – in Orson Welles’ magisterial 1952 film we see Iago being carried in a giant cage and the film then flashes back to tell the story – the only Shakespearean tragedy I can think of in which the villain is still alive at the end.

This production came from the Teatro Liceu in Barcelona and starred José Cura as Otello – almost a decade after his breakthrough in the role at the Teatro Regio in Turin under Claudio Abbado’s direction. It was staged in a very stark manner, with just movable walls and a steeply raked stage that made me wonder just how the singers were able to concentrate while standing on a set that could have toppled them over. When in Act II the libretto mentioned trees, one tree of a palpable phoniness materialized. Act III took place with a backdrop of a giant mirror that had the uncomfortable effect of allowing us to see a reflection of the orchestra pit and the musicians providing the music. There was also a giant white cross on stage, which Cassio knocked to the ground during his drunken brawl with Montano; Otello later broke during the “Si, pel Ciel” duet that ends Act II, and the broken-off top served as Desdemona’s prayer bench for her big scena, the “Willow Song” and “Ave Maria,” in Act IV. Musically, this Otello was quite capable if hardly the energy rush Arturo Toscanini’s 1947 recording was (he’d played cello in the orchestra in the opera’s 1887 premiere and his record was great despite a weak cast – Ramon Vinay as Otello was still working through his conversion from baritone to tenor and Herva Nelli as Desdemona and Giuseppe Valdengo as Iago were simply overparted). José Cura was an acceptable Otello rather than a truly great one (his competition in the role over the years has included Melchior, Vickers and Domingo!) who looked properly hunky even if he didn’t appear Black. (I’m still waiting and hoping for an Otello who will do the complete racial transformation Laurence Olivier pulled off in his 1964 film of the play.)

The other two principals, Krassimira Stoyanova as Desdemona and Lado Ataneli (a baritone from the former Soviet republic of Georgia whom I’d already encountered on a Naxos recital CD) as Iago, were much more interesting. Stoyanova’s voice sounded a bit too thick and heavy for Desdemona (she’s more Callas than Tebaldi), but she acted beautifully and her rendition of the big fourth-act scena as she’s getting ready to be killed by Otello was marvelous. Ataneli was also first-rate, reminiscent of Donald Trump (let’s face it, right now any story about a psychopathic villain is going to remind me of Donald Trump!) and in complete command of his role. Anyone watching this is not going to have any trouble understanding why Otello is such a sitting duck for Iago’s manipulations – and the Teatro Liceu made the plot more credible by casting a drop-dead-gorgeous tenor, Vittorio Grigolo, as Cassio, the man with whom Desdemona is supposedly having her affair. Grigolo later became a star in his own right, though that came to an end when, according to his Wikipedia page, he became a victim of #MeToo blacklisting. “In September 2019 Grigolo was dismissed firstly by the Royal Opera House Covent Garden on the grounds of inappropriate behavior during the Royal Opera's tour in Japan,” the page said. “His contracts with the Metropolitan Opera were subsequently also canceled.” The conductor was Antoni Ros Marbà, a Catalonian Spaniard who studied with, among other people, Sergiu Celibidache and Jean Martinon. He’s still alive, though he was 69 when he gave this performance and he’s 87 now. Like Cura, he did a competent, professional job but not one to efface memories of Toscanini, Furtwängler, Karajan and the other major names of the past that conducted this opera.

The Killers (Mark Hellinger Productions, Universal-International, 1946)

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

Last night (Sunday, July 14) I wanted to do a three-film mini-marathon on Turner Classic Movies – it was either that or subject my husband Charles to two more Lifetime movies – including a double bill of films noir featuring director Robert Siodmak, star Burt Lancaster, composer Miklós Rósza and Universal-International as the producing studio. The first was Lancaster’s film debut, The Killers (1946), which was based more or less on a short story Ernest Hemingway published in 1927. The story is about two mysterious men who come to a small town in search of a man identified only as “The Swede.” They’re really hit people there to kill him, and the killers show up first at a diner where The Swede usually takes his dinner exactly at 6 p.m. When he doesn’t show, they hunt him down to the gas station where he works, and then to the boarding house where he lives. The point of the story is that the victim, though he’s warned, makes no effort to get away; instead he calmly faces the imminence of his death. As James Agee wrote in The Nation when the film was new (September 14, 1946), “The Killers starts off with Ernest Hemingway’s brilliant, frightening short story, then spends the next hour or so [actually more like 90 minutes – M.G.C.] highlighting all that the story so much more powerfully left in the dark. … The story, from where Hemingway leaves off, is also a comparative letdown, but it too is better movie – good bars, fierce boxing, nice stuff for several minor players, and the kind of calculated violence and atmosphere in the filming of a robbery and of the last two sequences which was commonplace in old gangster films and is now so rare that in a good sense as well as a bad it is almost museum material. There is a good strident journalistic feeling for tension, noise, sentiment, and jazzed-up realism.”

When producer Mark Hellinger (a former New York crime reporter and columnist who’d been brought to Hollywood by Warner Bros. and had decamped to Universal after one too many feuds with the notoriously combative Jack Warner) and screenwriter Anthony Veiller got hold of The Killers, they made “The Swede” a burned-out boxer named Ole Andersson (though he’s living incognito in Brentwood, New Jersey, where the killers catch up with him, under the name “Lund”) who was seduced into joining a major payroll robbery (back when companies still paid their workers in cash). The woman who seduced him was Kitty Collins (Ava Gardner, under contract to MGM but loaned out first to independent producer Seymour Nebenzal for a film called Whistle Stop and then to this, a one-two punch which transformed her from just another pretty face and hot bod to a major star), and the mastermind of the robbery was her boyfriend, “Big” Jim Colfax (Albert Dekker). The robbery takes place according to plan but Ole double-crosses the rest of the gang and takes all the loot for Kitty and himself – only Kitty double-crosses him, steals the money and returns to Colfax, who uses it to start a construction company and make himself a seemingly legitimate fortune. The plot is unraveled by insurance claims agent Jim Reardon (Edmond O’Brien), who’s curious why Ole made his $2,500 life-insurance policy (provided as a fringe benefit by the oil company that owned the gas station he worked for) to a middle-aged hotel chambermaid with no apparent connection to him. In a series of Citizen Kane-like interviews he works his way up the criminal chain with the help of Sam Lubinsky (Sam Levene), who grew up with Ole on the mean streets of Philadelphia, only Sam became a cop and is interested in arresting the payroll bandits who are still at large. Reardon is hoping to recover the loot to repay the insurance company, though his irascible boss R. S. Kenyon (Donald MacBride, actually a bit less irascible than usual and therefore much more tolerable) thinks Reardon is just wasting his time and there are much more productive things he could be doing for the company.

For someone who’s supposed to be an insurance agent, Reardon seems surprisingly adept with a gun – I was expecting that he’d fought in World War II and had just been demobilized and had got his old job back – even though one of the baddies takes it away from him in a late scene. Neither Lancaster nor Gardner were great actors – imagine this movie with Robert Mitchum and Barbara Stanwyck in the leads! – but they’re both good-looking enough and believable in their roles. I’ve liked The Killers better on earlier viewings than I did this time around; made at a time when film noir had already been a “thing” for about five years or so, there’s already a sense here that Anthony Veiller was ticking off the boxes on a checklist. Naïve, stupid hero? Check. Femme fatale who seduces him into a life of crime? Check. Criminal mastermind who’s bought and paid for the femme fatale? Check. Big climactic shootout at the end in which most of the people die? Check. There are some nice touches, including the scene in a hospital where one of the crooks lays dying and Reardon literally extracts a deathbed confession from him, bringing him to several times until he’s finally got the whole tale out of him before he ultimately croaks, and a great final sequence in which Kitty pleads with Colfax to declare her innocence with his dying breath – which he refuses to do, so the police arrest her for her role in the crimes.

In 1964 Universal did a quite good remake of The Killers, directed by Don Siegel from a script by future Star Trek writer Gene L. Coon, which was originally supposed to be a made-for-TV movie (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-killers-universal-1964.html) but with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy got released as a theatrical feature instead. Siegel and Coon made at least two changes in the story: they made the initial victim, Johnny North (John Cassavetes), a race-car driver recruited to drive the getaway car in the big robbery; and instead of an outside investigator it’s the hired killers themselves (played in Siodmak’s version by Charles McGraw and the young William Conrad, and in Siegel’s by an electrifying Lee Marvin and Clu Gulager) who uncover the truth after being fascinated by North’s resignation to his fate. One reason I like the 1964 The Killers is that the femme fatale was played by Angie Dickinson (who was a close family friend of the Kennedys and was so broken up when JFK was assassinated she was unable to work for several days) and the Albert Dekker role was played by Ronald Reagan in his last film. Coon made even more of the irony that a man who had got the seed capital for his initial venture from an armed robbery posed as an example of someone who’d “worked himself up the hard way” than Veiller had. As I wrote in January 2021 about the 1964 The Killers, “[T]he smarmy self-righteousness I couldn’t stand about him as a politician is just what this character, a fundamentally corrupt man with the ability to put on a good face, needed, [who] has set up [a robbery] in order to provide himself seed capital to start a development company and be able to claim to people that he rose to success ‘the hard way’ through his own honest effort.” Though the 1946 The Killers doesn’t have the almost inadvertent political resonance of Siegel’s remake 18 years later, it does make a cynical anti-capitalist point at the end in which R. S. Kenyon tells Jim Reardon that thanks to his success in recovering the $250,000 stolen in the original crime, next year’s insurance premiums will go down … by two-tenths of a cent per customer.

Criss Cross (Universal-International, 1948, released 1949)

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

After The Killers TCM showed another film noir starring Burt Lancaster and directed by Robert Siodmak, Criss Cross (filmed 1948, released 1949), though according to TCM host Ben Mankiewicz, Lancaster was reluctant to do it. The reason was that Criss Cross was originally developed by the producer of The Killers, Mark Hellinger, but Hellinger died suddenly of a heart attack on December 21, 1947 at just 45. Lancaster didn’t like the producer Universal-International assigned to the project to replace Hellinger, who’d been born in New York City as “Michael Kraike” but had dropped the “a” from his first name and called himself “Michel Kraike” to make himself sound European. Apparently the biggest thing Lancaster didn’t like about Kraike was that he demanded that the story be changed to center around the robbery of an armored car instead of a racetrack, as it was in Don Tracy’s 1934 source novel of the same name. Once again Lancaster was cast as a down-and-out but not necessarily past-redemption man who drifts into a life of crime under the spell of a woman. He’s Steve Thompson, who briefly married a hot young babe named Anna (Yvonne De Carlo; it’s hard for me to think of her as anything other than Lily Munster but she’s quite good here as the sub-category of femme fatale who’s cynically decided that love and romance are luxuries she simply can’t afford), only she left him and married gambler Slim Dundee (Dan Duryea, who turns in the same kind of edgy performance he did as the villain in Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street). The film opens with a long establishing shot of Los Angeles taken from the air, including the iconic Los Angeles City Hall, and then discovers Steve and Anna frantically necking among the parked cars outside a nightclub. They’re worried that Slim and/or one of his associates will spot them, but that doesn’t stop them even though the nightclub was one of their regular hangouts when they were still a legal couple and it’s also one of Slim’s favorite spots.

Criss Cross has a lot in common with The Killers, including an elaborate set of double-crosses (the film’s original advertising slogan was, “When you double-cross a double-crosser”) centered around a major robbery and the loot therefrom. It also has a score by Miklós Rósza, but whereas Rósza way overscored The Killers, he’s a lot more reticent here and much more effective in using music to help director Siodmak create a sinister mood. Thompson has landed a job driving for an armored-car company where he previously worked, and he’s hatched a scheme to steal over $600,000 from his employer. He offers the scheme to Slim and they recruit a gang, including an older British man named Finchley (Alan Napier, doing his usual dime-store imitation of Boris Karloff, playing a part similar to Sam Jaffe’s in The Asphalt Jungle and William Talman’s in Armored Car Robbery) who plans out the caper. To pull off the job Steve insists that he be in the driver’s seat when the heist occurs, which he accomplishes by having the gang fake a phone call from a doctor saying the usual driver’s wife is sick and he needs to see her. Steve makes the gang promise that the third man in the armored car – his father, who got him the job in the first place – won’t be harmed, but of course he gets shot and killed in the robbery. Steve is badly wounded and he ends up in the hospital, while the newspaper reports of the robbery make him seem like a hero who tried to foil the caper instead of a participant.

Like Ole in The Killers, Steve hopes to double-cross his fellow crooks and run off with Anna and the loot. To do that he offers Nelson (Robert Osterloh), the hit man Slim has sent to the hospital to knock him off, a $10,000 bribe from the loot to let him live and take him to Anna, but Slim tracks them down by following Nelson. Anna announces that she’s going to take all the money for herself and leave Steve to die, either of his wounds or at Slim’s hands. She even makes a big speech to the effect that love is a luxury she can’t afford and she’s just using all the men in her life for what she can get out of them. Slim shows up and kills both Steve and Anna before the cops, who have trailed him to Steve’s and Anna’s hideout, show up – though it’s unclear whether they just arrest him or shoot him down. One of the most unusual touches in Criss Cross is the thoroughly repulsive traditional family Steve lives with and which he can’t wait to escape from, including a tyrannical mother (Edna Holland) and a younger brother, Slade (Richard Thompson), a wretched young man whose girlfriend is just as nauseating as he is. It also has an unusual scene in the nightclub where Esy Morales, a Latin bandleader who’s actually billed fifth in the credits, plays a song called “Jungle Fantasy” while Yvonne De Carlo dances up a storm with an unidentified man. Reportedly Robert Siodmak ran into this man on the Universal lot and casually asked him if he could dance, then cast him when he said he could. Once Criss Cross came out, Universal was deluged with fan letters demanding to see more of the “hunk” who’d danced with De Carlo at the nightclub. His real name was Bernard Schwartz but he was signed to Universal as “Anthony Curtis,” and he later shortened that name to Tony Curtis and became one of the biggest movie stars of the 1950’s. Lancaster and Curtis would make three more films together, including the ultra-dark 1957 masterpiece Sweet Smell of Success.

My husband Charles made the interesting comment that though it was made three years after The Killers, Criss Cross did much more showing off of Lancaster’s body and overall good looks. Lancaster had already been a boxer and a circus acrobat and trapeze artist – a skill he got to immortalize on film in his 1956 production Trapeze (another Lancaster-Curtis collaboration) – before briefly settling on Broadway after World War II and then landing a film contract. Lancaster’s imdb.com page contains quite a lot of quotes from interviews he gave over the years, including this one: “I woke up one day a star. It was terrifying. Then I worked hard toward becoming a good actor.” Actually he’s quite impressive in these early films, portraying a gritty toughness that’s believable for these roles as lunk-headed patsies in films noir, though later on he would be even more capable as the religious hypocrite in Elmer Gantry in 1960 – and when I first saw that film in 1972 I had just read Sinclair Lewis’s source novel and found myself wishing they’d have made a sequel featuring the final third of Lewis’s book, which they hadn’t used in 1960 and in which Gantry becomes an established leader of a mainstream church, at a time when Lancaster would still have been young enough to repeat the role.

Tell It to the Marines (MGM, 1926)

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

Last night (Sunday, July 14), after my husband Charles and I watched the Turner Classic Movies double bill of Burt Lancaster/Robert Siodmak films noir The Killers (1946) and Criss Cross (1949), we stayed on TCM for the “Silent Sunday Showcase” presentation of a film we’d seen decades earlier on a previous TCM showing: Tell It to the Marines (1926). The last time Charles and I watched this, I remember joking afterwards, “Lon Chaney, Sr. made a John Wayne movie at least a decade before John Wayne!” This time around it seemed like a pretty standard-issue military movie and as much a comedy as anything else. You have the stereotypical tough-as-nails Marine sergeant, O’Hara (Lon Chaney, Sr.) and the rather nellie recruit, George “Skeet” Burns (William Haines), whom he gives the proverbial hard time to in order to “make a man” of him. The film opens on the train taking Skeet from his native Kansas to San Diego; he faked an enlistment in the Marines only to get a free train trip to San Diego so he could then cross the U.S.-Mexico border into Tijuana to gamble at the horse races. Along the way he meets Marine General Wilcox (Frank Currier) and, having no idea who he is, proceeds to insult him. When O’Hara learns this about Skeet and sees him running across the train yards at the Santa Fe station – which in this 98-year-old film looks almost exactly as it does today – O’Hara says to himself, “He’ll be back.” Skeet does indeed come back – my guess was that he’d have lost all his money at the Mexican racetracks and he’d be broke and in need of a job, but that’s not at all clear in Richard Schayer’s script – and has the proverbial hard time fitting in to the discipline of the Corps.

At one point O’Hara offers to let Skeet out of any more drill for the day and give him the assignment to “the General’s car.” I thought that would be the old gag of Skeet finding out that the General was the old man he’d so cavalierly insulted on the train, but instead Schayer and director George W. Hill pulled the old gag of having “the General’s car” be a wheelbarrow laden with heavy rocks which Skeet must now move. Love also rears its appealing head in the person of a Navy nurse at the Marine base, Norma Dale (Eleanor Boardman, just around the time she married her first husband, director King Vidor, at the home of Marion Davies; it was supposed to be a double wedding with John Gilbert and Greta Garbo, but Garbo got cold feet and bailed out). Needless to say, both O’Hara and Skeet get the hots for Norma, and their romantic rivalry only adds to the tension level of their professional relationship. At one point Skeet rents a car to take Norma out on a drive, only O’Hara commandeers the car and makes it look like Skeet is just his chauffeur. Then Skeet finally gets his chance to be alone in the car with Norma, only he crashes it and both have to abandon it and leave on foot (separately). Skeet’s antics with Norma and his missing bed call lead him to be sentenced to the brig, though on the eve of Skeet’s regiment being shipped out Norma goes to see O’Hara and pleads with him to let Skeet sail – which O’Hara has already done.

Midway through the movie the Marines ship out to Tondo Island, which really exists (it’s in the Philippines, on the main island of Luzon, and until the Spanish conquered the Philippines in the 16th century it was an independent kingdom and because it was on a river delta it was at least technically an island, though today it’s just a district of Manila). But it was never as depicted in this film, which is a Marine refueling station and a cesspool of easy money and easier women where it’s constantly raining. (One wonders whether Richard Schayer got the idea of having it constantly rain on Tondo from W. Somerset Maugham’s story “Miss Thompson” and its incredibly successful stage adaptation by John Colton, Rain.) While on Tondo, Skeet has a fling with a native girl named Zaya (Carmel Myers), but word gets back to Norma and it leads her to refuse his letters and return them to him unopened. Then the Marine regiment ships out again, this time to Shanghai, where they face not only an epidemic (gee, an epidemic starting in China – where have we heard that since?) but also an attack by a private army of bandits led by a warlord played by, of all people, Warner Oland. He’s wearing a big fur hat usually associated with Russians rather than Chinese, but he’s still readily recognizable even though he’s only in a few brief scenes. Though he was actually born in Sweden, Oland got “typed” playing Asians because he had a slight slant to his eyes (as did Sidney Toler, who eventually replaced Oland in his most famous role as Charlie Chan). Oland did get to play non-Asians occasionally – most famously as Al Jolson’s conservative cantor father in The Jazz Singer (1927), in which he gets one word of dialogue (he says, “Stop!,” after he walks in on Jolson singing a jazz version of Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies” to his mother in a scene hastily written to add more dialogue to the film) – but for the most part he spent his career in the “yellowface” salt mines.

Ultimately the Marines win their battle and bring peace to that part of China, they return to San Diego and Skeet and Norma make plans to marry and buy a ranch together after his Marine enlistment runs out. They even invite O’Hara to join them as their business partner (talk about a third wheel!), but he declines and declares that the U.S. Marine Corps is his true love. We even see him pulling the “General’s car” gag on a new recruit as the film ends. One of the odd aspects of this film is how strongly it dramatizes the mutual antagonism between the Marines and the Navy, even though the Marines are relying on the Navy to transport them to their duty stations. In one sequence Skeet gets clobbered in the boxing ring by a man who, unbeknownst to him, is the Navy’s heavyweight boxing champion (and ironically the actor playing his opponent, Maurice Kains, did more for me aesthetically than William Haines did!). The film is filled with titles representing ribald songs ostensibly sung by the Marines to ridicule their Navy brethren. According to Wikipedia, Tell It to the Marines was the biggest box-office hit of Lon Chaney, Sr.’s career even though it’s also one of the few films in which he looked like his real off-screen self, with none of the fabled character makeups that earned him the nickname “Man of a Thousand Faces.” Director George W. Hill had already proven he knew his way around a movie battlefield when he shot the big action scenes of the 1925 war epic The Big Parade (the second highest-grossing movie of the silent era, after The Birth of a Nation). King Vidor was the credited director of The Big Parade, but after screening that film MGM production chief Irving Thalberg ordered, “Make it bigger,” and with Vidor already at work on another project Hill got assigned to do the battle retakes. The imdb.com biography on Hill makes him sound like a precursor of film noir – “His later films took on a stark, brutally realistic atmosphere and were renowned for their effective use of shadows in the lighting” – but he was found dead in his home on August 10, 1934 at just 39, an apparent suicide.

Sister Boniface Mysteries: "The Shadow of Baron Battenberg" (BBC-TV, Britbox, PBS, 2023)

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

Last night (Saturday, July 13) I got home in time from the Bears San Diego party to watch an intriguing episode of the Sister Boniface Mysteries series called “The Shadow of Baron Battenberg.” Sister Boniface Mysteries is an offshoot of G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories and the long-running TV series made from them, directed by John Maidens from a script by Dominique Moloney with Jude Tindall listed as the show’s creator. Sister Boniface herself (Lorna Watson) is an aggressively homely middle-aged nun – one doesn’t get the impression that terrestrial manhood lost much when she decided to marry Jesus Christ instead – who in previous episodes seemed to have known far more about forensics than the official police in the small English town where the series takes place. But the real intrigue is between official police detective Sam Gillespie (Max Brown) and journalist Ruth Penny (Miranda Raison), who pose as a couple to investigate a couples’ retreat called Pranayama run by Edwin Battenberg (Jason Thorpe), brother of the missing Baron Battenberg, and the Baron’s wife (widow, actually) Marion Gray (Emily Bruni). After having watched the recent Lifetime movie Couples Retreat Murder, it was fascinating to see a quite different depiction of a couples retreat, even though there were just as many sinister agendas going on at this one as there were in the Lifetime film.

Much of the fun in this one was the screwball comedy-style interactions between Sam (who’s using the name “Simon” here) and Ruth (who’s also calling herself something else), who have to pose as a couple and sleep together in a room with only one bed. Sam takes all the pillows (much to Ruth’s consternation) and grabs the comforter; when Ruth demands at least one pillow, Sam throws it at her. Another journalist working the Baron Battenberg disappearance, Victor Goodbody (Tim Frances), shows up at the retreat, gets thrown out by Marion Gray when she realizes he’s a reporter, and then turns up murdered. He’s crudely buried on the property and Sam and Ruth come upon his body, which leads to the inevitable pun about “Victor Goodbody’s body.” Also in the mix is the resort’s aggressive cook Connie Dumas (Sarah Moyle), who maintains a strict vegetarian regime (as did the cook in Couples Retreat Murder, too) and, when one of the other guests demands a steak, goes into a nasty animal-rights lecture about how she isn’t about to torture and kill poor animals just because someone wants to eat their flesh. Ultimately Connie confesses to murdering both Baron Battenberg and Victor Goodbody, and says her motive was that the Baron was a spousal abuser and she killed him to save his wife’s life from his latest attack. Later she killed Victor because he caught on to her and was about to expose her as the Baron’s murderer both to the police and the world. But Ruth deduces that Connie couldn’t have committed the murder alone because she’d need help disposing of the body, and ultimately she realizes that both Marion and Edwin helped in that regard – but she decides not to turn them in because, like Sherlock Holmes in some of the original Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stories, she regards their actions as morally justifiable even if technically illegal.

There’s a charming ending in which Sam and Ruth find themselves romantically attracted to each other even though they were just posing as a couple, and they even have sex together on their last night (after a previous night in which they’d been kept awake by another couple next door pounding away at each other; said other couple also have a spat over her use of birth-control pills, which he assumes means she’s having extra-relational activities and she insists they’re just because, while their ultimate plans include having children, she’s not ready for one just yet). That poses a problem in that the morning after she hears that The Times of London is so impressed with her article on the Battenberg case they’re offering her the deceased Goodbody’s old job. There’s a brief dilemma over whether she should take the big-city offer or stay in the small town and pursue her new relationship with Sam, and she even suggests to him that they move to London together (which he declines because being a policeman in a big city would be too stressful – “too much like work,” he says), but in the end she takes the Times job and he’s left alone. This Sister Boniface Mysteries episode was a real charmer, and luckily it had almost none of the sniping between her and the official police that’s usually a trademark of this show. There’s also a scene in which Sister Boniface is fed LSD (an autopsy reveals that Victor Goodbody was dosed with LSD before he was killed so he couldn’t resist, and the resort uses LSD as part of its therapy regimen) and sees flying octopi and other aquatic creatures – a nicely done and really charming interlude.

The Woman on Pier 13, a.k.a. I Married a Communist (RKO, 1949)

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

Last night (Saturday, July 13), after watching the Sister Boniface Mysteries episode on KPBS, I switched channels to Turner Classic Movies for the 1949 movie The Woman on Pier 13, also known as I Married a Communist. This was a project Howard Hughes (yes, that Howard Hughes) launched at RKO studios as soon as he bought the company in late 1948. Hughes was a fanatical anti-Communist and wanted to make a movie that would expose the Communist Party as the vast conspiracy of evil he saw it as. He bought a story from writers George W. George (who would later help launch the career of Robert Altman when the two collaborated on a 1957 documentary biopic called The James Dean Story) and George F. Slavin called I Married a Communist, about a man named Bradley Collins (Robert Ryan) who briefly joined the Communist Party, U.S.A. in the 1930’s under his original name, Frank Johnson. Later he left the party, got a job in San Francisco as a longshoreman and gradually worked his way up to an executive position with the Cornwall Shipping Company, owned by J. Francis Cornwall (Harry Cheshire). He also got married to a woman named Nan Lowry (Laraine Day, top-billed) who had formerly dated the longshoremen’s union president Jim Travis (Richard Rober), and got her brother Don (John Agar) a job on the docks. Bradley has just worked out a plan to settle the latest longshore contract dispute without a strike by having both management and the union appoint negotiating subcommittees that would settle on a new contract in private. But his former girlfriend, magazine photographer Christine Norman (a marvelous performance by Janis Carter), is really a secret Communist and reports Brad to the local Communist boss, Vanning (Thomas Gomez in a rare unsympathetic role; usually he was the detective, anticipating Peter Falk’s role in the TV series Columbo, who solved the crime for which an innocent man had been convicted and discovered the real culprit).

Vanning in turn summons Brad out of a high-class party at the Cornwall home to a meeting at what presumes is the titular Pier 13 (though it’s never called that in the movie), where he and his hired assassin Bailey (William Talman in his second film; his most famous role was as hapless prosecutor Hamilton Burger on the long-running Perry Mason TV series, and the show’s producer, Gail Patrick Jackson, cast both Mason and Burger with actors who’d previously mostly played villains in films noir) threaten to “out” Brad not only as a former Communist but as a murderer. It seems that in the 1930’s he beat a union shop steward to death in Chicago, and the party has a signed affidavit on file allegedly proving that. The party bosses order Brad to sabotage the upcoming contract negotiations and ensure that there is a strike – though the writers (veteran screenwriters Charles Grayson and Robert Hardy Andrews worked up the George/Slavin story into an actual script) never come up with a plausible explanation for why the Communists want the San Francisco docks shut down just then. As part of their plot, the Communists assign Christine to date Don Lowry, but she falls genuinely in love with him and wants to confess all. Only the Communists get word that she’s about to change sides and kill both Don (Bailey runs him down and makes it look like just another hit-and-run accident) and Christine (Bailey pushes Christine out of her apartment window and makes it look like a suicide). I was expecting a plot twist that Brad really hadn’t killed anybody – the Party bosses just framed him to make it look like he had – and the film would end with him coming clean about his past and ratting out the Party bosses so they’d be arrested. Instead the film ends with a shoot-out in which Brad is mortally wounded, Vanning and Bailey are killed, and with his dying breaths Brad gives a ‘tis-a-far-far-better-thing-I-do speech telling his wife Nan, soon to be his widow, to go back to Jim Travis and marry him after Brad croaks.

I Married a Communist became a personal project for Howard Hughes. According to screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring, who wrote such classics as Out of the Past, The Hitch-Hiker and the first and by far best version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Hughes used it as a vetting device for writers and directors of whose politics he was unsure. If you turned it down, according to Hughes, you must be a Communist and therefore he would fire you. There were plenty of people who turned down I Married a Communist, including writer Herman J. Mankiewicz and director John Cromwell, not because they were Communists but simply because they knew it was a bad story that wouldn’t make a convincing or entertaining movie. Hughes finally got it made by director Robert Stevenson (a British-born filmmaker who was presumably not part of the American Red scare) and got Robert Ryan to star as Brad simply because Ryan was an outspoken Leftist who was worried that he’d be blacklisted if he turned it down. Hughes first released it as I Married a Communist – and it bombed at the box office, like virtually all the self-consciously “anti-Communist” movies Hollywood churned out in the early years of the Cold War. So he withdrew it and, after considering such alternate titles as San Francisco Melodrama, Waterfront at Midnight, Beautiful But Dangerous and Where Danger Lives (the last was a title Hughes ended up using for a different film altogether), he finally settled on The Woman on Pier 13.

Seen today, it’s a real political curio, and in his outro on Turner Classic Movies’ “Noir Alley” screening Eddie Muller put his finger on why it’s a bad movie. He pointed out that the exact same story could have been made as a gangster movie at Warner Bros. in the early 1930’s – the young man who made a mistake and joined a criminal enterprise, then regretted it and withdrew, only to find his old gangland “pals” were coming after him and wanted him to join them again. Apparently classic-era Hollywood knew just one way to depict a criminal conspiracy. The anti-Nazi movies of World War II showed fascist sympathizers behaving the same way the gangsters had, and the anti-Communist movies made after the war showed the Communists also behaving that way. It’s a film that’s generally well acted – Robert Ryan in particular does an excellent job of depicting his character’s crisis of conscience, Janis Carter brings real pathos to her role as a femme fatale, and William Talman is excellent as the psychopathic killer – and the cinematographer is the great Nicholas Musuraca, who shot many of RKO’s best noirs. But the film also suffers from a schizoid visual perspective; up until the moment Vanning crashes the Cornwall party the film is clearly, brightly and plainly shot. As soon as Brad leaves the party with Vanning and goes to the secret offices the Communists maintain on the San Francisco waterfront, it suddenly becomes film noir visually, though thematically it’s still a black-and-white movie in more ways than one, with good-good heroes, bad-bad villains and Ryan’s and Carter’s characters the only one with any dramatic or emotional complexity. The anti-Communist movies of the early 1950’s that hold up well are the ones like The Atomic City (a crackerjack thriller with Gene Barry as a physicist who resists attempts by the Communists to recruit him as a spy) and Pickup on South Street, where the Communists are there simply to supply a MacGuffin.

My Life Is Murder: "Mirror, Mirror" (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, July 12) my husband Charles and I watched a quite good episode of the Australian-made and -set policier My Life Is Murder, starring Lucy Lawless as Alexa Crowe, recently retired police detective in Melbourne, Australia, who receives cold cases from her friend still with the Melbourne Police Department, Kieran Hussey (Bernard Curry). This episode was called “Mirror, Mirror” and dealt with the Cavanagh Clinic, owned by Levi and Imogen Cavanagh (Christopher Kirby and Diana Glenn), whose star plastic surgeon, Tilly Phillips (Emma Livesey), died a few months before from an overdose of botulinum toxin administered at home. Tilly was a former heart surgeon whom the Cavanaghs recruited to come to their clinic and not only perform plastic surgery on others but go through it extensively herself, telling her she should consider herself “a work in progress.” This didn’t sit well with her husband Ross (Brett Cousins), who had liked her fresh, natural beauty when they first met and started dating but didn’t care for the weird apparition all those plastic surgeries turned her into. In fact, Ross tells Alexa that his late wife became “addicted” to plastic surgery – which is what they used to say about Michael Jackson. As Alexa digs into the investigation with the help of her assistant Madison Feliciano (Ebony Vagulans), whom I’m convinced is of Aboriginal descent even though in the U.S. she’d be assumed to be Black, Levi Cavanagh threatens her with a defamation lawsuit as soon as he realizes she’s not there to go through plastic surgery herself. Charles, who for once arrived early enough from work and therefore got to watch the whole episode with me, wondered about Levi because he’s Black – though Madison is probably Aboriginal it’s pretty clear Levi is African-Australian – and for decades Australia simply didn’t admit Black people as immigrants. Levi is also depicted as a sexual abuser who seduced Tilly Phillips into having an affair with him and is also carrying on with the clinic’s receptionist, Ainslie (Eliza Matengu D’Souza) – sort of like Harvey Weinstein, though in a Black and way hotter bod!

Alexa goes through the pool of suspects (Charles asked me if this show regularly features so few potential suspects, though frankly that’s true of most real-life murders as well) and briefly considers whether Ross Phillips killed his wife out of jealousy for her extra-relational activities. But she ultimately deduces that Imogen Cavanagh killed Tilly by giving her a dose of barbiturates impregnated in her work clothes, then sneaking into her home while her husband was away and giving her a hot-shot of botulinum toxin. Alexa figures all this out when the police lab discovers traces of barbiturates in her lab shirt and a crime-scene photo of Tilly’s bathroom (where she received the fatal dose) shows a pink rose petal. The petal is from an exotic sort of flower called the “Juliette Rose” that grows only in France – if it exists in Australia it had to be imported. Imogen Cavanagh was heavily involved in a charity called “Juliette Rose” that raised money for grants to aspiring young professional women, and her alibi was the charity was giving a fundraiser the night Tilly was murdered. Only Imogen gave Tilly the drugged work shirt which would render her unconscious long enough for Imogen to sneak over to her place during the fundraiser, kill her and then return in time to make the guests think she’d never left. Alexa brings KIeran Hussey and two uniformed police officers to arrest Imogen at the Juliette Rose’s latest fundraiser, and Imogen pleads with the cops at least to let her finish the fundraising auction before they take her away. Her motive was that while she was willing to accept and live with Levi’s affairs, she drew the line when he wanted to relocate and set up a separate Cavanagh Clinic in Tokyo with Tilly as his partner there. There was also a nice comic-relief subplot when Dawn (Kate McCartney), the obnoxious on-site manager of Alexa’s condo, shows up at the Cavanagh Clinic herself to have “work” done, and an interesting and pathetic (in the good sense) plot twist when Alexa interviews Ken (Lawrence Leung), who went to the Cavanagh Clinic to have his acne scars burned off – though he ended up looking either the same or worse. Ken tells Alexa that Tilly was the only Cavanagh staff member who treated him decently; the Cavanaghs themselves were arrogant and once again threatened to crush him financially if he breathed a word in public about what they’d done to him.

The Mallorca Files: "Mallorca's Most Wanted" (Cosmopolitan Pictures, Clerkenwell Films, Britbox, France TV, ZDF, ORF, BBC, PBS, 2019)

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

Last night (Thursday, July 11) I watched an episode of the TV series The Mallorca Files – a truly international show in conception and execution (among the nations represented in its plethora of production companies are Britain, France, Germany, Austria and the U.S., and of course the show is set on an island off the coast of Spain) – called “Mallorca’s Most Wanted” that was actually the best episode I’ve seen so far. Written by Sarah-Louise Hawkins and directed by Rob Evans, “Mallorca’s Most Wanted” deals with the sudden and unexpected return to Mallorca of its most wanted (alleged) criminal, Charlie King (Ben Dilloway). King fled the island earlier when his girlfriend was murdered, and it turns out that one of the two leading characters on the show, German expatriate detective Max Winter (Julian Looman), has a direct connection to the case. He’s dating the victim’s roommate, Carmen Lorenzo (Tábata Cerezo), and his police partner, cashiered London detective Miranda Blake (Ellen Rhys), finds Carmen’s name on a witness statement from the original investigation nine years earlier. It turns out that Charlie King returned to Mallorca for one last visit with his father, owner of a prestigious night spot on Mallorca, before he croaks from cancer. It also turns out that the case originally involved a liquor wholesaler which Charlie’s brother, Rob King (Charlie Anson), was using as a front to sell cheap knock-off booze in bottles emblazoned with high-end designer labels. In the present Rob King is running his dad’s old club and he threatens Miranda and Max when they bust a low-level drug dealer in his club during a busy night.

The true villain is Ramón Hernandez (Juan Pablo Shuk), a corrupt cop who was involved in the fake liquor scheme and was protecting it from law enforcement in return for half the proceeds. Miranda and Max both get push-back from their local boss on Mallorca, local police chief Inéz Villegas (María Fernández Ache), who doesn’t want to believe that detective Hernandez has gone corrupt and accuses Miranda of unfairly accusing an honest officer just because, when she still worked in London, she was pushed off the force there for accusing and ultimately arresting a crooked cop. (By chance I’m reading Michael Connelly’s 2022 novel Desert Star, which is about an evil cop who’s really a serial killer.) Ultimately it turns out that Rob King and Ramón Hernandez teamed up to kill Charlie’s girlfriend – who’d previously been having an affair with Hernandez even though he was married to someone else – and frame Charlie for it. The last major scene is of Charlie visiting his dad on dad’s deathbed, and I felt even sorrier than I would have otherwise because in his last days on earth he’s having to deal with the revelation that one of his sons, Rob, framed the other, Charlie, for a murder Rob himself committed. At the end of the show Miranda gets a call from London hinting they might be willing to summon her back from her Mallorcan exile and welcome her back onto the force since she’s so good at busting cops who’ve gone over to “the dark side.” Despite a rather phony, overwrought ending – Miranda and Max are both all too easily overpowered by the bad guys and tied up and left to die in a room with a stove burner on and gas from a deliberately severed pipe filling the room with flammable fumes, only Miranda is able to cut herself loose and turn off the stove and the gas with her trusty Swiss army knife – “Mallorca’s Most Wanted” is one of the best episodes of this show. All too many of the episodes were more interested in showing you Mallorca’s awesome scenery than telling an exciting, suspenseful story of police procedure, but this one went long on thrills and dark atmosphere instead, to its benefit.

Hitler's Olympics (3DD Productions, Yesterday, 2016)

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

Last night (Tuesday, July 9), after I returned home from the “Twilight in the Park” concert at the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park, I turned on KPBS and watched a couple of fascinating mini-documentaries. One was called Hitler’s Olympics and was produced during the run-up to the 2016 Olympic Games about the ones held 80 years before that in Nazi Germany. I’d actually seen a considerably better documentary on the same subject, The Nazi Games: Berlin 1936, which I reviewed at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2016/08/the-nazi-games-berlin-1936-taglicht.html when it was originally shown in 2016 before that year’s Summer Olympics at Rio de Janeiro. The story of the 1936 Berlin Olympics (the Winter Olympics were also held in Germany that year, at the snow resort at Garmisch-Partenkirchen) is a relatively familiar one, but just to recap: the Games were originally awarded to Germany in 1931 (the previous show said 1930), when the Weimar Republic still ruled (more or less, there was actually a lot of political chaos and partisan polarization, and one reason the Nazis were able to take power was a lot of Germans were just tired of politics and democracy in general). Giving the Games to Germany was considered a magnanimous gesture and a message that Germany was welcome to take its place among the family of nations. Before that Germany had been barred even from competing in the 1924 Olympics, which were held in Paris, largely because France had been the principal battleground of the Western Front in World War I and the French were still bitter about how much of their country had been laid to waste in the “Great War” (as World War I was usually called before there was a World War II). Both heads of the German committee that had bid for the 1936 Olympics had been part-Jewish, which hadn’t mattered in 1931 but mattered a great deal once the Nazis took power in 1933.

At first Adolf Hitler was against Germany hosting the Games and suggested withdrawing from them, but on the suggestion of his Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, Hitler eventually changed his mind and not only allowed the Olympics to take place, he embraced them as a major propaganda opportunity and a chance to show the rest of the world Nazi Germany as a nice, racially tolerant country that only wanted to live in peace with the rest of the world. During the mid-1930’s, various Jewish organizations and others opposed to the Nazis tried to organize boycotts of the Berlin Olympics, but these efforts came to naught. The man who was most instrumental in short-circuiting the boycott campaigns was Avery Brundage, a multi-millionaire who was not only head of the United States Olympic Committee but also a major figure in the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), whose approval was necessary to allow American athletes to compete in the Berlin Olympics. Brundage hated Jews almost as much as Hitler did (though there’s no evidence he ever sought their extermination), and ironically among his strongest allies in fighting off the boycott campaigns were America’s Black athletes. Quite understandably, they didn’t see any reason why they should forgo their chance to compete in solidarity with oppressed Jews when African-Americans routinely lived under the same kind of oppression and legally enforced discrimination here. (Indeed, the Nazis had consciously modeled the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which stripped Jews of German citizenship and relegated them to a second-class existence, on America’s Jim Crow segregation laws.)

The Nazis actually worked out much of the pageantry that has surrounded the Olympics and been used ever since, notably the relay torch-bearing from Mount Olympus, Greece (site of the ancient Olympics) across the world to the city hosting the current Olympics, and the ceremonial lighting of the flame to announce that the competition has officially begun. One odd thing writer-producer Edward Cotterill and director Daniel Kontur did not do was mention the name of Leni Riefenstahl, who was directly commissioned by Adolf Hitler to make a major documentary film of the 1936 Olympics which supplied almost all the footage of the Games seen here. It would be like doing a video tour of the Sistine Chapel and not mentioning Michaelangelo. Much of the stunning pageantry was designed by Riefenstahl because it would look good in her movie. For the most part, the 1936 Olympics went the way Hitler and the Nazis wanted them to – including Germany winning the overall medal count. The U.S. jumped to an early lead with their dominance of the track and field events, but once those were finished and the competition shifted to sports the Germans excelled in – horse riding, fencing, rowing – they caught up with and overtook the Americans. One German star who was first invited to compete in the 1936 Olympics and was then disinvited because she was Jewish was Margaret Lambert. She was Germany’s best high jumper but she’d already left the country before the Olympics began. Then she was essentially blackmailed into returning because her family still lived in Germany and were vulnerable to Nazi threats, and she duly trained and got ready to compete in the Games – only to receive a letter at the last minute that she was off the team. Lambert was interviewed for the program and recalled with grim irony that the non-Jewish athlete who replaced her on the German team finished fourth, just out of medal contention.

In 1937 Lambert finally escaped to Britain, married a British man (which was how she got her last name; her original name was Gretel Bergmann) and never returned to Germany until 1948 – where she had the sweet revenge of snubbing former friends who had snubbed her once the Nazis took power. Another victim of racism in connection with the Olympics was its biggest star, Black American track-and-field athlete Jesse Owens. Owens won four gold medals – in the 100-meter dash, the 200-meter dash, the broad jump and as part of the 400-meter relay team. He got that last one when two white Jewish athletes were removed from the team at the last minute and Owens and his fellow African-American teammate Ralph Metcalfe were added instead, supposedly because the Nazis didn’t want Jews competing. (The Nazis regarded Blacks as subhuman but not the sort of existential threat to humanity as which they saw the Jews.) Owens ran afoul of Avery Brundage when he bailed out of a foreign tour Brundage had organized for the U.S. athletes before he even got home, and by the time he returned to the U.S. Brundage had already had him banned from the AAU, which kept him from being able to compete in any organized sports under their purview (which was virtually all of them). So a man who’d had a shot at athletic superstardom was literally reduced to working at gas stations and doing exhibition races with horses just to survive!

De Aquí/De Allá (From Here/From There) (Galewind Films, Voces, PBS, 2024)

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

After Hitler’s Olympics KPBS showed a fascinating episode of the series Voces, an outreach program to Latino/a Americans, called De Aquí/De Allá (“From Here, From There”), profiling Mexican-American attorney Luis Cortes Romero. Luis Cortes (the “Romero” is his matronymic) was born in Mexico but was brought over to the U.S. at age one by his parents. They later had a second son, Eric, who since he was born in the U.S. was automatically granted American citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment. Luis grew up having no idea he wasn’t legally an American until he was in middle school in Redwood City, California. His class was scheduled to go to Europe on a field trip, and Luis, an eager student of European history, was eager to take the trip and see the places he’d been reading about. Then he found out that because he was undocumented, he couldn’t go. Faced with the trauma of essentially being stateless, which was only magnified when his father was deported, Luis’s school grades nosedived and he went through a phase of wearing a mohawk, getting himself tattooed and listening to punk rock – which his mother (interviewed extensively for this program, though only in Spanish since she’s monolingual) said she managed to endure. Then he pulled himself together, graduated from high school and college at San Jose State University, and sought a career as a lawyer. Luis applied to law schools in California but found that the tuition was so pricey he would actually be better off financially if he went to law school in another state. So he ended up at the University of Idaho, until midway through his first year he realized that even if he completed his studies, he still couldn’t be admitted to practice law because he was undocumented.

Luis called his mother and told her he was dropping out and coming home. His mom chewed him out and said, “Whatever a Cortes starts, he finishes.” Told point-blank that he wouldn’t be allowed back home until he got his law degree, he finished the four-year program. In 2012, his last year of law school, President Barack Obama announced the so-called “Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals” (DACA) program, which he instituted by executive order. It meant that people in Cortes’s position – people who had been brought to the U.S. as children of undocumented immigrant parents – could apply for a semi-protected status. It would not confer citizenship or even legal residency, but it would mean that individuals granted DACA status could legally work in the U.S., pay taxes, accumulate Social Security and have the other rights and privileges of legal residents. Under DACA protection, Luis was not only admitted to the California State Bar but became a working attorney, not surprisingly specializing in immigration cases. Then Donald Trump announced for President in 2015 and got elected a year later. Trump had run on a strongly anti-immigrant platform, and one of his campaign promises had been to end DACA once and for all. In March 2017 Trump’s administration announced that they would seek a deportation order against Daniel Ramírez, a young DACA recipient who Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials were claiming was a gang member because he had tattoos on his forearm. Luis took Ramírez’s case and joked on the program that he’s such a gentle man he’d make the world’s worst gangbanger. When Trump issued an executive order terminating DACA and effectively targeting all its recipients for deportation, Luis became part of the legal struggle against it.

This case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court – the old Supreme Court, when Ruth Bader Ginsburg was still alive and the so-called “conservative” majority was still 5-4 instead of 6-3, and it still had some respect for precedent instead of being intent on remaking American law and custom in a hellish tradition-bound fashion. Ted Olson, the legendary Republican attorney who argued the 2000 Bush v. Gore case that made George W. Bush President but later enlisted in some surprisingly humane causes, including defending same-sex marriage against the efforts of his Right-wing comrades to ban it, joined the battle. But Luis also took part in the arguments, a poignant development because he was defending the program that had allowed him to become an attorney in the first place. Ultimately the Court ruled 5-4 that the Trump administration had acted illegally in terminating DACA; though Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinion didn’t address the constitutional issues, it said abolishing DACA had to be done through a process the Trump administration hadn’t followed. A recent profile of Luis Cortes in the San Francisco Chronicle (https://datebook.sfchronicle.com/movies-tv/luis-cortes-romero-pbs-19548403) offered his thoughts on the current Supreme Court and the seemingly impregnable 6-3 radical Right-wing majority since Ginsburg’s death and Trump’s appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to replace her.

“The conservative [sic] bloc of the Supreme Court primarily is making decisions without much concern for its popularity,” Cortes told the Chronicle. “Or, for that matter, there isn’t much concern about the amount of people (their decisions) will (negatively) impact. If it’s going to have an impact on millions of people, then so be it. They’re committed to their views.” Cortes’s recommendation is that Congress add four more justices to the Supreme Court – but on a plan currently followed by some state supreme courts and the federal appeals courts. Only nine justices of the 13 would hear any particular case, and they’d be assigned at random so the replacement of one justice by her ideological opposite wouldn’t be as consequential as Ginsburg’s replacement by Barrett was. Fortunately, Cortes himself is no longer under the cross-hairs of Trump’s determination to eliminate DACA. His father was not only readmitted to the U.S. but got the coveted “green card” giving him permanent residency, and as his son that applied to Luis as well. But he continues to practice law and defend immigrant clients. As Chronicle reporter G. Allen Johnson laconically commented, “The Redwood City-raised attorney became the first undocumented person to present a case at the nation’s highest court. And he might have to do it again.”