He Slid Into Her DM's (Cartel Pictures, Lifetime, 2024)

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

Last night (Sunday, September 29) my husband Charles and I watched two Lifetime movies in a row. The first was the previous night’s “premiere,” a film with the ridiculous title He Slid Into Her DM’s that turned out to be just as silly as you’d think from the title. It’s yet another take on one of Lifetime’s familiar tropes: the innocent young girl, Bernadette “Berni” Muller (Stella Gregg), beset by a mystery stalker she’s met online. Only because it’s 2024 instead of 2004 or 2014, Berni is a would-be “influencer” who’s trying to make a career out of plugging various commercial products online. It occurred to me early on that this is just an updated version of the radio programs Fred Allen and Tallulah Bankhead were spoofing in their marvelous “Breakfast Comedy” routine (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vznctFrOUes), in which the names of their sponsors were included in the scripts and the distinction between entertainment and commercials became totally blurred. Berni has a with-it mother named Leah (Courtney Thorne-Smith, who also produced) who runs a beauty salon and is also effectively managing her daughter’s career. Berni also has a boyfriend named Zak Jacobs (Kane Parks), who’s African-American but not obstreperously so: he’s light-skinned and the only ways we can tell he’s Black are his nappy hair and his nose. As part of her “influencer” gig she gets direct messages from a mystery man who demands sexually explicit photos of her and offers to pay her $100 for a provocative but non-revealing pose and then more money for one in which she flashes her breasts.

I would have assumed that the suspense would be over just who the guy was – there’s an opening prologue which depicts Berni being menaced by an unseen assailant and calling 911 and then a typical Lifetime title, “One Week Earlier,” though the committee-written script (by Lydia Genner, Christina Kelly Holmes, and Erica Lane) brings back the prologue with more than half the movie still to go – and what would happen to Berni when he emerged from his online anonymity. Instead the writers and director Alicia Coppola (who, according to her imdb.com page, is no relation to those Coppolas) “out” the crazy stalker early on. He is Berni’s classmate Mason Michaels (Connor McRaith, who surprisingly given my usual fetish for hot young Black guys I actually found sexier than Kane Parks: he’s white and considerably more rugged-looking, and if he weren’t so crazy Berni leaving Zak for him would definitely be trading up), who grabs her arm after a basketball game in which his well-timed shots from the audience caused Zak to miss two crucial free throws. (Did I mention that Zak is a basketball player? He’s a Black high-school kid in a Lifetime movie; of course he plays basketball!) Mason is convinced that Berni is his “soulmate,” and when she doesn’t answer the handwritten letter he gave her during their post-game confrontation – the idea that he can actually write is itself something of a surprise given how resolutely young people either text or direct-message their friends on virtually everything – he shows up to her home (how did he find out her address? That becomes a significant plot point later on).

At first he’s carrying a bouquet, she accepts it but then asks him to leave. He does so, but he keeps hammering away at her door, and when she makes the mistake of opening it instead of calling the police then and there, he has a gun and holds it on both her and her mom. Somehow They Both Reach for the Gun (Maurine Dallas Watkins, your plagiarism attorney thanks you once again for your continuing business), and as Mason and Berni are wrestling for it, the gun slips out of both their hands, mom grabs it and shoots him dead. Then, for even more inexplicable reasons, mom Leah orders her daughter to lie to the police and to her online followers, saying that she had never met Mason before and had no idea who he was other than their interactions online. Leah even smashes Mason’s phone so police can’t recover the sexually compromising photos Berni sent Mason. Just why this is so important to Leah is never made clear, and when the truth comes out – courtesy of Berni’s supposed “friend” Hana (Siera Fujita), who sneaked into Berni’s room and recovered the handwritten letter Mason had given her and also filmed their post-game interaction and saved it for later use – it also turns out that Hana gave Mason Berni’s home address and phone number out of jealousy. Berni and Zak shoot a really charming scene in which he formally invites her to the school prom and she posts online, and the stunning video makes the prom judges crown them the king and queen of the event. But just that night Hana, along with Mason’s mother (Jessica Lanchester) – who’s convinced Berni murdered Mason in cold blood – drops her bomb, figuratively, showing Berni and Mason interacting in the school gym just after Zak’s big game and thereby blowing up Berni’s and Leah’s story that the two had never interacted face-to-face before.

Instantly Berni’s new-found status at school instantly collapses, Zak bails out of their relationship, New York University sends her an e-mail revoking their acceptance of her application (just why, when the story is established as taking place in L.A. – we know that because the Griffith Park Observatory is shown in an overhead tracking shot, and of course I thought, “At the top of movies featuring the Griffith Park Observatory is Rebel Without a Cause, and at the bottom is He Slid Into Her DM’s” – she’s insistent on going to a school in New York where her friends are going to UC Berkeley or Stanford), and her mom gets popped for obstruction of justice in destroying Mason’s phone. Berni fortunately gets off the hook herself by airing two more videos, one a mea culpa that apologizes to all the people who trusted her and one a live-streamed confrontation between her and Hana in which Hana admits she sic’ed Mason on Berni by giving him her home address and phone number. Eventually all ends up right with Berni’s and Leah’s worlds: New York University views her online mea culpa and decides to let her in after all, albeit on six months’ academic probation; when she gets there she decides to major in psychology; and Leah, after serving a brief sentence for obstruction of justice for having smashed Mason’s phone, opens a women’s resource center at the site of her old salon. Needless to say, Zak and Berni also get back together. He Slid Into Her DM’s – the verb “slid” is an unfortunate choice, since it makes Mason’s and Berni’s relationship a lot more sexual than it ever was – is as silly as you’d guess from the title, and it’s hard to feel sorry for two people whose suffering comes so much from their own mistakes, but director Coppola shows a real flair even though, like many other reasonably talented directors on Lifetime, she’s hamstrung by a mediocre script and actors who don’t always live up even to the limited demands of their roles (including Stella Gregg as Berni, who too often just seems a drip).

There's a New Killer in Town (Reel One Entertainment, Champlain Media, CME Winter Productions, Lifetime, 2024)

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

The second Lifetime movie on September 29, There’s a New Killer in Town, was better than He Slid Into Her DM’s, but not by much. It’s set in an ultra-small town called Pine Point – we’re not told what state it’s in, but the town motto is “The True Escape” and the population is 15,201 – and the protagonist is Alice Clark (Kathryn Kohut). Alice is a trust-fund baby who doesn’t have to work, and she came to Pine Point to escape an abusive ex-husband, Kevin Corbett (Mark Matechuk). Her world turns upside down when another young woman, Ronnie Briggs (Hanneke Talbot), comes to town. Ronnie introduces herself as a travel writer who doesn’t stay in one place very long, and she says that she’s lost all her bank cards and doesn’t have any money for a place to stay. Alice runs into her at the Double-R Diner, which seems to be the only restaurant in town (or maybe it’s just that the filmmakers, CME Winter Productions, Champlain Pictures and Reel One Entertainment, couldn’t afford more than one restaurant set). The Double-R is run by a woman named Holly (Sarah Booth), who has also become a friend of Alice. Holly’s sister was murdered in a mysterious prologue scene, and Holly is keeping her memory alive. Alice’s bank cards mysteriously disappear from her purse, and we see a woman in a long-haired wig use them to withdraw $450 from Alice’s local bank account. Alice is also dating a local police officer, Oscar Ramirez (René Escobar, Jr., who for once is a hot-looking man in a Lifetime movie who isn’t playing a villain!), and she’s running a community garden which is her pride and joy.

She’s also mentoring a young Black girl named Maddie (Eden Cupid), whom she catches one night out drinking with an underage white teenager named Dylan (Keith Agar). Alice takes Dylan’s car keys away from him and tells him he can retrieve them from her or Oscar the next day. Maddie and Dylan respond by breaking into Alice’s precious garden and trashing it, spray-painting the walis in red with “BITCH” and other less savory words. Alice blames Ronnie for the vandalism, saying it was all because she asked Ronnie to leave her house after accusing Ronnie of stealing her bank cards and trying to drain her accounts. Then Alice is forced to apologize to Ronnie after Maddie confesses to the vandalism of the garden, and Alice and Holly get together at the garden to clean it up – though not too much because Alice still wants to leave Maddie something to do once she gets off school. Holly then confronts Ronnie and Alice on the floor of the Double-R and says she’s going to go to the police with her information, and it seems like even though Holly is white instead of Black, writer Charlie Mihelich seems to be setting her up for the role of The Heroine’s Best Friend Who Discovers the Villain’s Plot But Is Killed Before She Can Warn Her. Alice’s creepy ex Kevin tries to break into her home by climbing a ladder outside her window, but is impaled with a gardening stake. The scene is carefully made to look like an accident, which is how Oscar Ramirez and his colleagues on the Pine Point police force rule it, but we know better, don’t we?

Then in the last 20 minutes or so, writer Mihelich and director Sean Cisterna (who, like Alicia Coppola on He Slid Into Her DM’s, is better than the script and cast deserve) pull a big reversal on us and reveal that [spoiler alert!] it’s actually Alice who’s the killer. She’s been making her living knocking off other women, stealing their identities and helping herself to their cash stashes and bank balances, passing herself off as a trust-fund baby to make it believable that she doesn’t have to work a normal job. Needless to say, Alice is also the one who knocked off Holly’s sister in the prologue. She catches Ronnie – who may or may not have been doing the same thing – and holds her hostage in Alice’s home, which she threatens to burn down by setting off a gas explosion. She’s already stabbed Holly at the Double-R and left her to die, and she intends to frame Ronnie for her crimes and incinerate her at the house – only Ronnie gets away in the nick of time just before the house blows up, and Alice is fleeing Pine Point when she hears on her car radio that Holly survived the assault after all, though she’s in the hospital. Alice turns around and drives back to Pine Point to finish Holly off once and for all, and the two struggle – Holly nearly strangles Alice with her IV line and Alice is alive but unconscious when Oscar and the rest of the police arrive. Alice is arrested, Oscar’s faced with the embarrassment of having dated a murderess, and Holly lives and reopens the Double-R. I wasn’t particularly surprised by this ending even though I wasn’t expecting it, either.

It doesn’t work for the same reasons director Fritz Lang protested when he was forced by his producer, Bert Friedlob, to use a similar twist ending for his last American film, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. The gimmick in that one is that Dana Andrews plays a crusading reporter who wants to make a point against capital punishment by showing how easily a man can be convicted and sentenced to death based on circumstantial evidence – only the twist in that one is that Andrews’s character has someone he really wants to murder and his story is an elaborate hoax to cover up his actual crime. As Lang told Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg for their 1969 book The Celluloid Muse, “I cannot, I said, make an audience love Dana Andrews for one hour and 38 minutes and then in the last two minutes reveal that he’s really a son-of-a-bitch and that the whole thing is just a joke. But thanks to my agent’s mistake I was contractually bound to shoot the producer’s original script.” And if Fritz Lang couldn’t do it with Dana Andrews, certainly Sean Cisterna couldn’t with Kathryn Kohut, especially since Kohut was a good enough actress to play the “good” side of her character convincingly but was totally unable to drop the hints of psychopathology needed to make the ending believable. In fairness to Kohut, writer Mihelich didn’t give her any help, either; he didn’t supply any scenes that might have raised our suspicions about Alice before his trick reversal. There’s a New Killer in Town – a title that had me thinking of The Eagles’ song “New Kid in Town” – is an O.K. Lifetime movie with a frankly unbelievable trick ending that, at least to me (I think my husband Charles liked it better than I did), weakened the film and made it less entertaining than it would have been with a straightforward climax of Alice fighting for her life against Ronnie.

Father Brown: "The Forensic Nun" (BBC Productions, Britbox, PBS, copyright 2023, released 2024)

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

Last night (Saturday, September 28) I watched a couple of British mystery shows on KPBS, a Father Brown episode called “The Forensic Nun” and a Sister Boniface Mysteries episode called “House of Misfit Dolls.” Both of them were copyrighted 2023 but not shown on the BBC until early 2024. Father Brown was a TV adaptation of the classic Catholic priest/detective concocted by G. K. Chesterton in 1910. Chesterton kept writing Father Brown stories until 1936, and according to Wikipedia the character was inspired by real-life Right Reverend Monsignor John O’Connor (1870-1952), who was apparently instrumental in converting Chesterton from the Church of England to Roman Catholicism. “The Forensic Nun” included Sister Boniface as a character, played (as on her own show) by Lorna Watson, and she and Father Brown (Mark Williams, who’s played him on every episode of the Father Brown series since it debuted in 2013) teamed up to solve the murder of an egomaniacal artist named Marmaduke Snell (Edward Bennett), who was poisoned with cyanide-spiked wine from the vineyard of Sister Boniface’s convent. Naturally the local police identify Sister Boniface as the prime suspect for no better reason than she brought the wine. There was a nice little scene in which Sister Boniface is bringing the wine to a local arts fair organized by Gaynor Garfield (Ingrid Oliver) on her bicycle, which has a front basket to carry things in, and she almost loses control of the bike and comes close to crashing into Snell, who’s carrying two of his valuable paintings into the arts fair to show them off and make the other attendees drool with envy at the fact that they’re priced so high none of them can afford them. He also insists on entering the life drawing contest the festival organizers have set up, which everyone assumes he’ll automatically win because he’s a Famous Artist. Only the moment he’s served wine from That Bottle, he starts foaming at the mouth and soon expires.

The representatives of official law-enforcement, Chief Inspector Sullivan (Tom Chambers) and Sergeant Goodfellow (John Burton), needless to say jump to all the wrong conclusions and it’s up to Father Brown and Sister Boniface to straighten them out and find the real killer. Only that’s not going to be easy because the cops have decided Sister Boniface is the killer and locked her up in jail – though Father Brown has figured out a way around that. He has another local woman, with aspirations towards acting as a career, dress in a nun’s habit and take Sister Boniface’s place in the jail cell, with no one the wiser because the replacement “Sister” spends all her time facing the wall of her cell, praying and not turning her face to the cell-door window. Writer Neil Irvine and director Ian Barber drop a big clue towards the beginning when Gaynor’s assistant Meryl Plunkett (Lydia Larson) boasts that she’s gotten the arts fair a writeup in an important newsmagazine, only when Gaynor sees the article and notices it contains her photo, she freaks out. It turns out [spoiler alert!] that Gaynor is the killer; she was briefly married to Snell but broke up with him after just one day when he insisted that she give up her own artistic ambitions and just be a wife and mother. Irvine’s dialogue for him sounds like the sorts of things Republican candidates for public office are saying today (particularly Ohio Senate candidate Bernie Moreno, who was caught on a clandestine recording saying that women over 50 don’t need to be concerned about abortion since they’re past child-bearing age anyway, and J. D. Vance’s comment that the only reason for post-menopausal women to exist is to take care of their grandchildren), so it’s understandable that Gaynor, whose real name also began with “M” (Father Brown discovers their wedding ring, with the initials “M to M” on it, which is one of the key clues), bailed on their relationship.

Only she never bothered to divorce him, and so not only are they still legally married, he has every intention of tracking her down and forcing her to live with him after all. He was able to find her via the photo in that magazine, and she decided to off him by using one of her insulin needles (she’s a diabetic, as was ostensibly revealed when she accidentally spilled some of the pills she takes to keep her disease under control) to siphon off some cyanide-containing cleaning fluid from one of the other artists at the fair, inject it through the cork of the wine bottle, and thereby kill her very much (and understandably) unwanted husband. This Father Brown episode is slightly unusual in that we’re sympathetic to the killer and her motive, though in the end Father Brown and Sister Boniface are able to persuade Gaynor to confess and turn herself in a) because not doing so would damn her immortal soul, and b) she wouldn’t want anyone else to suffer earthly punishments for her crime. I really liked this one and assumed it was especially written to introduce Sister Boniface to the world, though it wasn’t; it was a relatively recent episode from a year or two after her own show was launched in 2022.

Sister Boniface Mysteries: "House of Misfit Dolls" (BBC Productions, Britbox, PBS, copyright 2023, released 2024)

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

The Sister Boniface Mysteries KPBS ran right after “The Forensic Nun” was considerably weaker, though it had at least two things in common: a murderer we felt at least partial sympathy for and a victim who was a first-rate asshole. It was called “House of Misfit Dolls” in what I suspect writer Asher Pirie intended as a reference to the “Island of Misfit Toys” on the early-1960’s TV animated special Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. The action centers around a decades-old doll shop in Sister Boniface’s home village, “Great Slaughter” (itself a marvelous name for the setting of a murder mystery show) whose owner, Arthur Salem, has decided he needs to upgrade with the times. So he’s introduced a new doll that talks when you pull a string in the back, which his veteran employees all think is a betrayal of everything the shop has stood for all those years. His veteran employees are all … well, whatever the au courant euphemism is for the physically or mentally disabled, though some of them looked and sounded just fine to me. Among them are Merlin Crow (Alex Macqueen), Gideon Glove (Andre Flynn), Octavia Hemlock (Debbie Chazen) and Beth Moody (Alexandra O’Neill), who much to her own and Octavia’s discontent was chosen by Salem to be the “voice” of the new talking doll. Writer Pirie and director Kodjo Tsakpo concocted a classic locked-room mystery in which Arthur Salem is stabbed to death by a knife that came from one of the dolls and is replaced there after he’s killed. Eventually Salem’s killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Octavia Hemlock, whose motive turns out to be that Salem had promised her a job in perpetuity but had summarily fired her and demanded that she vacate the premises – it’s been a live-work situation for all the “misfit” staff – within 20 minutes. When she protests that she has nowhere to go, Salem couldn’t care less (the rotter!).

So she confronts him in his back office and uses the pull string on one of the talking dolls to pull the lock shut as she exits the murder room. (I liked the irony that it’s Salem’s own hateful invention that helps conceal his killer, even though the string-through-the-lock bit is a common favorite among writers doing locked-room mysteries.) Octavia’s motive was not only that Salem was about to render her homeless, but that he was about to do so after she had finally reunited with her daughter Beth, whom she had got a job at the store just so the two could be together even though Beth didn’t know she was Octavia’s daughter. Mixed in with all this was a rather dull subplot involving the junior member of Great Slaughter’s two-person official police force, the African-British Felix Livingstone (Jerry Iwu) and his Caribbean fiancée Victoria Braithwaite (Ayesha Griffiths), whose engagement has hit some rough patches stemming mainly from her culture shock at being stuck in a small British village like Great Slaughter. She’s encouraging him to put in for a transfer to Scotland Yard so the two can live together in a big city, London, but at the end it’s unclear whether or not he’s actually doing so. This Sister Boniface Mysteries episode was O.K.; I’ve seen better ones at reconciling the various plot strands of this show, including the fact that Sister Boniface, a middle-aged (and then some!) nun in the middle of central England, seems to know more about forensics than anyone else in the U.K., including all of professional law enforcement. There also have been scripts that were cleverer at playing the religious naïveté of Sister Boniface off against the worldliness of the villains, but at least I liked the idea that, as with “The Forensic Nun” episode of Father Brown that preceded it, the murder victim was someone who definitely deserved to be removed from humanity!

High Wall (MGM, 1947)

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

Afterwards my husband Charles and I watched Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” presentation of a quite good if flawed film noir from MGM in 1947, High Wall. It was based on a story and play by Alan R. Clark and Bradbury Foote, though the actual screenplay was by Sydney Boehm and Lester Cole. The director was Curtis Bernhardt, on loan from Warner Bros., where he’d arrived in 1940 as a double refugee from Germany and France. He’d fled Germany when the Nazis took power in 1933, only to discover to his horror that the French company which had hired him to direct a film called The Tunnel (1933) had cut a co-production deal with a German studio to shoot the film in Munich. According to Eddie Muller, just before the Nazis took power they had organized a film screening where Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda and Enlightenment, showed five films as examples of what they wanted from German directors when the Nazis took over. The films were Edmund Goulding’s Love (1927) – the silent version of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina starring Greta Garbo and John Gilbert – Fritz Lang’s two-film series Die Nibelungen (1923/24); Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925); and Bernhardt’s own films The Last Company and The Rebel. Goebbels said these were all films that couldn’t have possibly been made by Jews – which astonished Bernhardt because he, Lang and Eisenstein were all Jewish. In Weimar Germany, Bernhardt had directed Marlene Dietrich in her last silent film, The Woman One Desires (1929) – despite Dietrich’s later claim that she’d never made a film at all until The Blue Angel (1930). Bernhardt told interviewers Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg that Dietrich had once run into him at a Hollywood party and yelled at him the German title of their film, adding the word “Nicht” so it became The Woman One Does Not Desire. He also said that he’d been shooting The Last Command at the same time Josef von Sternberg was directing The Blue Angel; they were the first two sound films made in Germany and Bernhardt watched Sternberg carefully because he’d already made a talkie in Hollywood, Thunderbolt (1929), and Bernhardt hadn’t.

Bernhardt also recalled that when he reported for work at Warner Bros. it was a Friday, he was given a script and told, “You start Monday.” Bernhardt turned it down and held out for enough time to prepare a film properly before he would have to shoot it. His first American film was a romantic comedy called My Love Came Back, and within a few years he was directing Warners’ top stars, including Bette Davis in A Stolen Life, Joan Crawford in the 1947 Possessed, Humphrey Bogart in Conflict (one of his worst post-stardom movies, actually, in which he murders his wife because he has a crush on his sister-in-law), and Olivia de Havilland and Ida Lupino in Devotion, a biopic of the Brontë sisters. (I remember watching that one with my husband Charles, who asked why anyone in Hollywood thought a biopic of the Brontës would be box office. I said it was probably because Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre had both been filmed – in 1939 and 1943, respectively – and had been major hits.) Though film noir as a concept was anathema to MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer, he could see how well such movies were doing for other studios and he decided to green-light this one. Also, Robert Taylor, one of his biggest stars, was asking for more challenging roles than the romantic pretty-boys he’d been playing. Like Errol Flynn (and, more recently, Tom Selleck), Taylor actually improved as an actor once he got older and started to lose his looks; in Vincente Minnelli’s Undercurrent (1946) he’d actually out-acted the far more highly regarded Katharine Hepburn and Robert Mitchum. High Wall is also an early entry in an intriguing mini-cycle of films set in and around mental institutions, which had begun with Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945), continued with Val Lewton’s Bedlam (1946), and would reach its apex with Anatole Litvak’s The Snake Pit (1948).

High Wall’s plot is an intriguing mixture of the atmospheric and the nearly silly; it begins with a nightclub scene in which Willard Whitcombe (Herbert Marshall), an executive with a religious-book publisher, is hanging out alone while a quite good little jazz band plays. Then we get a scene in which Steve Kenet (Robert Taylor, top-billed) deliberately crashes his car. The corpse of his wife Helen (Dorothy Patrick) is in the front seat next to him, and Steve is convinced he killed her and then tried to take his own life. Steve is arrested but the police decide there’s not enough certainty about his level of sanity to hold him over for trial, so a court orders him sent to a psychiatric hospital. He has no memory of the night his wife died because of two injuries to his brain, one during World War II and another when he hired out as a mercenary pilot in Burma for two years, intending to build up a nest egg for himself, Helen and their son Richard (Bobby Hyatt). At the hospital he’s treated by Dr. Ann Lorrison (Audrey Totter, for once not playing a femme fatale) along with Drs. George Poward (Warner Anderson), Philip Dunlap (Moroni Olsen) and Stanley Griffin (Morris Ankrum). They diagnose him with a brain tumor and try to convince him to have it operated on, but Steve refuses because he figures if he can stay crazy, the law will have to keep him confined in the institution and therefore he can’t be executed for Helen’s murder. Ann takes a particular interest in Steve’s case – obviously because she’s attracted to him as a man – and behind Steve’s back she obtains a court order giving herself and her aunt custody of Steve’s son Richard. But she doesn’t tell Steve this, so Steve will get the impression that his son is in a county orphanage, and the threat of losing Richard finally convinces Steve to go through with the operation and also to let Ann put him through “narcosynthesis.” That’s a fancy name for an injection of sodium pentothal in hopes that that will awaken his memories of what really happened the night his wife died.

Meanwhile we find out what happened when Slocum (H. B. “Jesus Christ” Warner), the elevator operator at 106 Maple Street (the building where Whitcombe lives), first attempts to blackmail Whitcombe by threatening to reveal that Whitcombe was the one who murdered Helen, who was working for him as a secretary and with whom he was having an extra-relational affair. When Whitcombe turns him down, Slocum visits Steve in the asylum and offers to sell him the information. Steve points out that as a mental patient he doesn’t have control of his own money, but promises to pay Slocum as soon as he can. Slocum leaves without giving Steve the information, and he then returns to Whitcombe, only Whitcombe kills Slocum by tripping him and causing him to fall down an elevator shaft. Meanwhile, Steve undergoes the “narcosynthesis” treatment under Dr. Lorrison, and he has an hallucination of a carousel. Steve escapes from the asylum, hides out in Ann’s car, and gets her to take him to 106 Maple, where he breaks in via the fire escape and sneaks into Whitcombe’s room. He recalls the source of the “carousel” hallucination was an overturned cigarette case that contained a music box, and with his new-found memory he carefully rearranges everything in the apartment to what it looked like the night his wife died. Whitcombe comes home, freaks out and confronts Steve at the institution, only he goads Steve into attacking him and Steve is threatened with permanent confinement. Steve escapes again and this time the police are alerted that a wanted homicidal maniac is on the loose. He makes it back to 106 Maple despite a driving rainstorm and a car that runs out of gas – he pulls up to an out-of-the-way gas station and has to lock up the owner when the owner recognizes the license plate on the car and threatens to call the police – and eventually he and Ann meet and forcibly inject Whitcombe with pentothal.

Under the drug’s influence, Whitcombe tells all, and we get a flashback in which we see how the murder went down: Helen insisted that Whitcombe marry her after she divorces Steve, Whitcombe worries about the scandal that he’d been having an affair with his married secretary, they get into an argument and he kills her, then hits on the idea of framing Steve. The police and the two guys from the district attorney’s office, who had previously been pressuring the doctors at the asylum to declare Steve sane so they could put him on trial and execute him, hear Whitcombe’s confession and, while acknowledging that they can’t use it in court because it was given under drugs, declare they should be able to find other evidence against Whitcombe. Free at last, Steve and Ann kiss for the first time at the end of the movie. High Wall is an intriguing film that offers Taylor and Totter quite a few good acting opportunities – Taylor is at his best in his silent close-ups as he reacts to the events around him – and according to Eddie Muller, Taylor was so impressed with the script he asked MGM to have Lester Cole write all his subsequent scripts. Then, alas, the Hollywood blacklist intervened, with Taylor and Cole on opposite sides. Taylor and his wife, Barbara Stanwyck, were members of the pro-blacklist Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, and Cole was a Communist. When Taylor was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and asked to name Communists in the movie industry, he gave them Cole – and Cole, one of the original “Hollywood Ten,” never again got a screen credit under his own name. (He wrote the original story for the 1950 Humphrey Bogart film Chain Lightning as “J. Redmond Prior,” a 1961 film called Operation Eichmann as “Lewis Copley,” and the script for Born Free as “Gerald L. C. Copley.”) I’d written a previous moviemagg blog post on High Wall, which I didn’t re-read before writing the above, at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2010/04/high-wall-mgm-1947.html, in which I compared it to The Lost Weekend and The Blue Dahlia. This time it seemed more like Hitchcock’s Spellbound than anything else, particularly the blending between the woman’s traditional(ist) role as the man’s nurturer and her professional role as a psychiatrist.

Libeled Lady (MGM, 1936)

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

Last night (Sunday, September 22) Turner Classic Movies showed two well-known films under the unusual aegis of director Francis Ford Coppola, who co-hosted the night with Eddie Muller (usually their film noir guy). Coppola was there largely to promote his latest film, Megalopolis, an all-star movie that apparently ranges through different historical eras, from ancient Rome to the present, but for his guest programmer stint on TCM he chose two classic screwball comedies from the 1930’s, Libeled Lady and The Awful Truth. I’ve posted about The Awful Truth (a delightful comedy about the evils of jealousy, with Irene Dunne and Cary Grant as a married couple who separate amidst allegations of infidelity, only to reconcile at the end) in January 2024 as part of a three-film tribute to Columbia Pictures on their 100th anniversary as a going business (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-awful-truth-columbia-1937.html), so right now I’ll concentrate on Libeled Lady. It was made in 1936 by MGM with Lawrence Weingarten as producer and Jack Conway as director; Conway was a devout Christian Scientist and he was frequently MGM’s go-to choice for potentially censorable scripts since the studio bosses, Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg, could count on him to tone down any salacious elements. (Conway directed Red-Headed Woman, Jean Harlow’s star-making film, in 1932 from a script by Anita Loos. He was so offended by one of Loos’s scenes that he refused to shoot it, telling Loos, “If you want that scene in the picture, you’ll have to direct it yourself” – which she did.)

The plot of Libeled Lady centers around heiress Connie Allenbury (Myrna Loy) and the New York Evening Star, which has just gone to press with a front-page story alleging that while in London Connie had had an affair with a married man. Unfortunately, the story is B.S., the concoction of a British reporter with a fondness for the bottle, and when the paper’s editor, Warren Haggerty (Spencer Tracy), gets word that the story has gone to press he immediately orders the presses stopped (though those words aren’t actually heard in the film) and all copies withdrawn from distribution so they can flush the libelous article down the memory hole. Unfortunately, Allenbury’s father, James B. Allenbury (Walter Connolly), has already received a copy from his New York lawyers, and leaps at the chance to put the Evening Star out of business once and for all since its publisher, Bane (Charley Grapewin), is a long-standing political enemy who once sandbagged Allenbury’s chances of getting elected to the U.S. Senate. So he has Connie file a libel suit against the Star for $5 million. To fight back, Haggerty rehires a famously mercurial reporter named Bill Chandler (William Powell) he let go previously and assigns him to the task of seducing Connie in order to entrap her into a real adulterous relationship. The one problem Haggerty has is that Chandler isn’t married, but Haggerty has a solution for that: he has Chandler marry Haggerty’s own girlfriend, Gladys Benton (Jean Harlow, top-billed and at her raucous best), so that later she can pose as the wronged wife and confront her supposedly errant husband when he’s making love to Connie (or coming as close thereof as the Production Code and Conway’s own scruples would allow).

Bill figures that the best way to get close to Connie Allenbury and her dad would be to feign an interest in James B. Allenbury’s favorite hobby, fishing. He takes an ocean liner to Britain just so he can arrange to be on the same ship as Connie and her father coming back, and he punches out a reporter (really a plant set up by Bill and Haggerty) who tries to interview her, winning her instant gratitude. Bill makes enough of an impression on both Allenburys he gets an invitation to a remote lake for their next fishing trip, and totally by accident he catches a huge trout called “Wall-Eye” whom James Allenbury has been after for years. (This gag was copied almost exactly 28 years later by veteran director Howard Hawks and writers Pat Frank, John Fenton Murray and Steven McNeil in Man’s Favorite Sport?, a lame attempt to revive the screwball-comedy genre, with Rock Hudson and Paula Prentiss.) Eventually Bill and Connie get close enough they have a moonlight swim together on the Allenbury estate, while Haggerty and Gladys get ready to crash their party – in both senses – and have the big scene that will spell the end of Connie’s libel suit. By this time Bill and Connie have actually got married, since Gladys had had a previous husband whom she’d divorced in Yucatán, Mexico, and the New York courts had ruled Mexican divorces unrecognized in the U.S. – but Gladys explains that after that she re-divorced her previous husband in Reno, and since New York recognizes Nevada divorces, she and Bill are still married and his marriage to Connie is bigamous. The film ends surprisingly ambiguously, with the four leads in the same frame but no clue as to how their various marital entanglements will be sorted out.

Libeled Lady is a sheer delight on all levels: the script by Maurine Dallas Watkins (original author of Chicago), Howard Emmett Rogers and George Oppenheimer (whose name ended up on the tail end of so many credits invariably people would come up to him at parties and “joke,” “I thought your name was And George Oppenheimer”) is lively and full of witty one-liners (my favorite was the early scene in which Haggerty confronts Bill while he’s getting over a bender and calls him an ape, and Bill dryly replies, “The ape objects”). Conway’s direction is fully self-assured, and fortunately he put aside any qualms he might have had about the raciness of the material. And the cast is first-rate: in the fifth of their 14 teamings William Powell and Myrna Loy are smoothly paired as usual; Spencer Tracy shows off his acting chops and his ability to do comedy (as I’ve noted before, screwball democratized movie comedy in that it was a sort of comedy that could be played by any actor instead of the specialists like Chaplin, Keaton, Langdon, Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers and W. C. Fields that had dominated it before), and Harlow is incomparable as usual. Her early death at age 26 the next year is not only a tragedy in itself, it deprived us of what she could have done later if she’d survived; I can readily imagine, on the strength of her femme fatale performance in The Beast of the City (1932), that she could have been quite effective in films noir. Ironically, though William Powell and Myrna Loy end up more or less together in this movie, Powell and Harlow were actually engaged when she died (though she was also dating another man, well-to-do publisher Donald Friede), though it’s hard to imagine them as an off-screen couple and eventually Powell married a minor MGM actress, Diana Lewis (best known as the O.K. female romantic lead in the 1940 Marx Brothers’ movie Go West), and stayed with her the rest of his life.

Mockery (MGM, 1927)

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

After Libeled Lady and The Awful Truth, Turner Classic Movies showed on September 22 a “Silent Sunday Showcase” feature from 1927 called Mockery, starring Lon Chaney, Sr. as Sergei, a Russian peasant who gets caught up in the ferment of the 1917 revolutions. I was interested in this one mainly because of the director, Benjamin Christensen, an immigrant from Denmark who’d achieved international notoriety from a Danish film he’d made called Häxan in 1922. Häxan (Danish for “witch”) was a semi-documentary, semi-dramatic film about the history of witchcraft in which Christensen himself, an actor as well as director (two years later he starred in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Michael, playing a Gay artist and aristocrat who has the misfortune to fall in love with a gold-digger and blackmailer, played by Walter Slezak), appeared on screen as Satan. MGM signed him in the mid-1920’s when they were on a spree of hiring Scandinavian directors, including Victor Sjöstrom (whom they renamed “Seastrom”) and Mauritz Stiller, who had directed Greta Garbo in her first big film, The Saga of Gösta Berling (1924). Stiller insisted he’d only sign with MGM if they took Garbo along as well, only as things turned out Garbo became a huge star in Hollywood and Stiller flamed out after getting halfway through a 1927 Garbo vehicle, The Temptress. (He moved on to Paramount and made four films – Hotel Imperial, Barbed Wire and The Woman on Trial, all with Pola Negri, and the now-lost Street of Sin with Emil Jannings – before suddenly dying in 1928. Garbo emptied his apartment and went through all his things, sending most of them back to his relatives in Sweden. Five years later she drew on the memories of packing Stiller’s belongings for his family for the famous scene in Queen Christina in which she reminisces about the room in which she’s had her first sexual experience with a man.)

Christensen also didn’t last long at MGM, whose management was notoriously hostile to directors with a personal style (within a few years they had lost Erich von Stroheim, Josef von Sternberg, Rex Ingram and Buster Keaton); he debuted there with a film called The Devil’s Circus starring studio head Irving Thalberg’s light-o’-love, Norma Shearer; but after that and Mockery he ran afoul of MGM’s factory-like production system and ended up at First National. There he made mostly comedy-mysteries with Chester Conklin and Thelma Todd. Three of his four First National films are lost, and the one that survives, Seven Footprints to Satan, my husband Charles and I have seen only in a terrible bootleg print on VHS with intertitles in Italian, which rendered the plot virtually incomprehensible. I’ve seen Häxan twice, once in a heavily re-edited 1968 reissue called Witchcraft Through the Ages and once in a more authentic restoration, and I’ve never cared for it despite some quite good individual scenes. But Christensen is an interesting enough filmmaker I was looking forward to this one. Oddly, the film itself has no writing credits, though imbd.com lists Christensen and Stig Esbern as co-authors of the original story, Joseph W. Farnham as title writer and Bradley King in an unspecified writing role. (Wikipedia credits Esbern with writing a pre-existing short story on which the film was based, King with the actual screenplay and Christensen as an adapter who worked on it between Esbern and King.)

Lon Chaney wears a lighter makeup than usual as Sergei, who in the opening scene is literally starving in the Siberian wilderness and reduced to gnawing on bones (animal, not human) left behind by dead or dying comrades. Then he’s rescued by a woman named Tatiana Alexandrova (Barbara Bedford, who’s really quite good; she’d been making movies since 1920 and she deserved more of a career than she had, though she kept working in character roles until 1945 and died in 1981 at age 78) who demands that Sergei take her to the town of Novokursk. She offers him food and relative comfort for the journey, but tells him that whatever she says to get them past the guards and sentries on both sides of the Russian Civil War, he must go along with. She tells the first guard they meet that she’s a peasant woman and Sergei is her husband, but he can tell immediately by her un-callused hands that she’s not a peasant. In fact she’s a countess who’s anxious to get back to her stately home in Novokursk, where she lives with fellow 1-percenters Vladimir Gaidaroff (Mack Swain, former Mack Sennett star coming off a major comeback as Charlie Chaplin’s sidekick in the 1925 comedy classic The Gold Rush), a war profiteer, and his wife (Emily Fitzroy). They live in a lavish mansion (with an outdoor patio whose set got recycled for numerous later MGM films), where she’s visited by her real lover, Captain Dmitri (Ricardo Cortez) of the counter-revolutionary White Army. Along the way Sergei and Tatiana try to rest in an abandoned cabin, but unbeknownst to them an outlaw (Frank Leigh) is hiding there. He invites the rest of his gang to gang-rape Tatiana, and Sergei is badly injured and whipped trying to protect her. The mockery of the title comes from the way Sergei is treated on both sides of the class divide: from the Gaidaroffs above him and Ivan (Károly Huszár), who’s credited as the “Gatekeeper” and is the straw boss of the Gaidaroffs’ servants.

Ultimately Ivan convinces Sergei that the two and the rest of the Gaidaroffs’ staff should start their own revolution and essentially go on strike. The Gaidaroffs try to report them, but their telephone lines have been cut. In one of the film’s most vivid scenes, they open their front door and witness a big street fight going on: a powerful symbol of just how totally they’ve been cut off from the popular discontent outside. Ultimately the film turns into a bunch of closeups of Chaney as Sergei reflecting his melancholy that the woman who’d asked him to pose as her husband isn’t at all romantically interested in him, and his suffering reaches Christ-like proportions. In fact, Chaney’s makeup (I’m presuming he designed and put it on himself, as usual) only accentuates the character’s resemblance to Jesus, or at least to the popular image as of 1927 of what Jesus looked like. I found myself wishing that Cecil B. DeMille could have borrowed Chaney for his Jesus biopic The King of Kings (1927). Mockery is a typical Chaney vehicle in that he’s obsessed with a woman he can’t have because she’s only interested in someone younger and hunkier, and he responds by suffering nobly and ending up either dead (as he does here: he and Ivan kill each other) or alive but emotionally bereft. It’s one of those annoying movies in which scenes of great visual beauty and emotional power alternate with ones of unwitting silliness (and maybe not so unwitting, either; the scenes of Mack Swain and Emily Fitzroy expressing their helplessness after the infrastructure they counted on to protect them against the slavering mobs has almost totally broken down seem designed to evoke laughter, and I’m sure whoever cast Swain was thinking of his past as a comedian). Mockery got mixed reviews when it was originally released and was believed lost until the 1970’s, when the George Eastman House turned up a print. The version we were watching was from a Warner Bros. reissue in the early 2000’s with a musical score that’s better than some of the ones that have been slapped onto silent films in recent years, and Mockery emerges today as an uneven film but one with definite good points.

Split Second (Edmund Grainger Productions, RKO, 1953)

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

Last night (Saturday, September 21) I watched a quite compelling film as part of Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” show on Turner Classic Movies: Split Second (1953), the directorial debut of actor Dick Powell. It was based on a story by later blockbuster pop writer Irving Wallace, who co-wrote the original story with Chester Erskine (he of some wildly melodramatic films in the 1930’s, like the 1934 film Midnight with Sidney Fox as the nice girl who falls for the charms of gangster Humphrey Bogart) and co-wrote the screenplay with William Bowers, a noir writer who had a flair for snappy wisecracks. Split Second is essentially a reworking of The Petrified Forest with a contemporary “twist”: it’s set in the Nevada desert, in an old long-abandoned mining town on the eve of a nuclear bomb test. As the film begins, reporter Larry Fleming (Keith Andes, whose failure to achieve major stardom seems inexplicable given that he was drop-dead gorgeous, he was also a fine actor, and he had the sort of debut actors dream of: as Marilyn Monroe’s leading man in Fritz Lang’s Clash by Night with Robert Ryan, Barbara Stanwyck and Paul Douglas) is suddenly reassigned away from covering the A-bomb test and sent to Carson City to write about the escape of convict Sam Hurley (Stephen McNally, top-billed). Along the way he picks up burnt-out showgirl Dorothy “Dottie” Vail (Jan Sterling, who’s just about as good here as she was in her underrated debut as the hard-bitten wife in Billy Wilder’s sardonic masterpiece Ace in the Hole) and offers her a ride to Carson City, which will get her closer to Reno and the nightclub job she’s been offered there.

Unfortunately, along the way his car is hijacked by Sam Hurley and his gang, mortally wounded Bart Moore (Paul Kelly, a real-life ex-con who’d served two years in San Quentin for manslaughter after a fight with his girlfriend’s husband in which Kelly accidentally killed him, then years later he married the woman) and the mute “Dummy” (Frank DeKova), who does nothing but read comic books and hold a shotgun on the others. They hole up in a deserted mining town that, unbeknownst to them – at least until they hear about it on their portable radio – is near Ground Zero for the atomic bomb test. Sam is anxious to get to the place where he and his fellow gangsters stashed the loot from an armored car robbery they pulled that landed them in prison in the first place, and to do that they rather stupidly steal a car being driven by Kay Garven (Alexis Smith), wife of Dr. Neal Garven (Richard Egan), who was on her way to Nevada to divorce him. She was with her “friend,” insurance agent Arthur Ashton (Robert Paige). The reason I described this as “rather stupid” is that the crooks steal her car at a gas station they’ve taken over but forget to put any gas in it, so naturally it runs out of gas midway through the desert and that’s why they have to car-jack Larry Fleming instead. Alas, Larry’s car is also rendered inoperable when its radiator springs a leak. Noting from a letter he finds in her car that Kay’s husband is a doctor, Sam calls him in Pasadena and demands that he come to treat Bart or else “you’ll be a widower.”

Director Powell and writers Wallace, Erskine and Bowers do a great job of ratcheting up the tension during the evening when all the principals are holed up together, including an old prospector named Asa Tremaine (Arthur Hunnicutt) who stumbles into the action. The writers created a marvelously morally ambiguous character in Kay (evoking a terrific performance from Alexis Smith), who after her boyfriend is shot and killed by Sam literally throws herself at Sam in hopes he’ll take her with him, then appears to be ready to reconcile with her husband (who’s shown up to perform the delicate operation of removing the bullet from Bart’s chest), then once again offers herself to Sam (who in the meantime has also forced himself on Dottie, explaining that one thing he hasn’t had access to in prison is women). He rejects her as a lover but agrees to take her with him, only the military has decided to shoot the A-bomb off early at 5 a.m. instead of 6. The gangsters and their innocent (or in Kay’s case not-so-innocent) hostages have no idea about this until the warning siren sounds indicating that the test will take place in five minutes. Eventually [spoiler alert!] the car carrying Sam, Bart and Kay gets stuck in a rut in the sand and ultimately blows up from the A-bomb, while Larry, Dottie, Dr. Garven and Asa escape by hiding out in an old mineshaft nearby that Asa remembered from his days as a prospector.

Split Second was originally intended for a star cast featuring Victor Mature and Jane Russell (presumably Mature would have been Sam and Russell would have played Kay), but at the last minute RKO’s mercurial boss, Howard Hughes (yes, that Howard Hughes), shifted them to a film called The Las Vegas Story and Eddie Muller said that actually helped Split Second because with Mature and Russell in the leads, everyone would have expected their characters to live at the end. With a lesser-known but still quite talented cast, we’re in genuine suspense as to how it will turn out. Dick Powell showed major promise as a director here but only got to make one other major film, The Conqueror (1955), Howard Hughes’s personal production featuring John Wayne as Genghis Khan. While Split Second was filmed entirely in California, with the Mojave Desert standing in for the one in Nevada, The Conqueror was shot in Utah near the real Nevada A-bomb test sites – and reportedly 90 members of the 200-person cast and crew died of cancers likely caused by exposure to radioactive fallout left over from the bombs. That included director Powell and all four of the leading actors (John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Pedro Armendariz and Agnes Moorehead). In Muller’s comments on the film he mentioned that the casinos in Reno and Las Vegas actually advertised themselves as safe places from which tourists could witness the A-bomb detonations. The ironies get even thicker when in 1970 Howard Hughes offered Richard Nixon a major contribution to his campaign if he’d end the nuclear tests in Nevada (by this time above-ground tests had been stopped in 1963 but underground tests still went on), which he was worried were contaminating the land around Hughes’s casinos. One of Hughes’s biographers called this the only time anyone ever tried to bribe a government to do something good!

From Russia with Lev (Rakontur, Surprise Inside, Universal Alternative Television Studios, MS-NBC Films, 2024)

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

Last night (Friday, September 20) I watched a new documentary on MS-NBC called From Russia with Lev, a pun on the title of Ian Fleming’s 1957 James Bond novel From Russia, with Love (note the comma in the title; the film version, made in 1963 and the second Bond movie with Sean Connery, omitted it). This was heavily promoted by MS-NBC in general and Rachel Maddow, who co-produced it through her company Surprise Inside, in particular. Maddow made a rare appearance hosting the 5 p.m. MS-NBC hour to push the movie (normally she just does Mondays at 6 p.m.), which was billed as a real-life James Bond story. Actually, if there’s a fictional secret agent Lev Parnas resembled, it was more Maxwell Smart than James Bond. Lev Parnas was born February 6, 1972 in Odesa, which was then part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and is now part of Russian-occupied Crimea in what is nominally the territory of the independent Republic of Ukraine. His parents moved the Parnas family to the U.S. in 1975 and briefly lived in Detroit before settling in Brooklyn. As Parnas himself tells it, while other Ukrainian émigrés he knew got educations and aimed for above-board careers, Parnas became a “hustler,” though in 1995 he was supposedly involved in finance as a broker. Parnas’s first contact with Donald Trump – or at least his businesses – came in the early 1990’s when he sold co-op apartments for the Trump Organization as a salesperson for Kings Highway Realty.

Over the next 20 years Parnas was involved in a number of shady business enterprises – Parnas Holdings, Global Energy Producers, and the charmingly if oxymoronically named Fraud Guarantee – until he and Igor Fruman, his partner in Global Energy Producers, hooked up with Trump’s 2016 Presidential campaign. When Trump won he invited Parnas and Fruman to the Inaugural events and put them in touch with Rudolph Giuliani, former Mayor of New York and former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. Trump gave Giuliani the assignment to dig up dirt on Joe Biden, Trump’s most likely – and most feared – opponent in his 2020 re-election bid. Giuliani in turn gave the job to Parnas and Fruman, covering their expenses as they traveled through vacation hot-spots in places like Vienna and Paris. At the time Ukraine had a pro-Russian President, Petr Poroshenko, and a state prosecutor (their equivalent of an attorney general) named Viktor Shokin who was widely rumored to be involved in Ukraine’s chronic government corruption. Parnas and Fruman lobbied Shokin to launch an investigation into Joe Biden’s son Hunter, who had just been appointed to the board of the Ukrainian energy company Burisma despite having no prior experience in the energy business. Then Poroshenko lost his re-election bid in a landslide to Volodomyr Zelensky, a comedian who had previously played Ukraine’s President in a TV sitcom and pledged to launch an anti-corruption drive. Even before he lost his re-election campaign, Poroshenko had fired Shokin after pressure from other countries – including the U.S., represented by Biden, then the sitting vice-president – demanded his ouster as a sign Ukraine was dealing with its corruption problem seriously.

Trump arranged for his own vice-president, Mike Pence, to go to Ukraine for Zelensky’s inauguration, but withdrew the Pence appearance after Zelensky turned down his demand that he do Trump the “favor” of investigating Joe Biden and his son Hunter. Trump also used Giuliani, Parnas and Fruman to get the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Maria Yovanovich, fired because she’d refused to be part of the administration’s campaign to get the Ukrainian government to announce an investigation of the Bidens. Parnas soon learned the consequences of his failure to do Trump’s bidding when he was arrested in October 2019 for allegedly planning to direct funds from foreign governments in an attempt to influence U.S. relations with Ukraine. Along the way Parnas dumped his Trump-supporting attorney, John Dowd, and hired his own counsel, Joseph Bondy (who was extensively interviewed in the film), who sent word to the U.S. House of Representatives that Parnas would be willing to testify against Trump in impeachment hearings relating to the so-called “perfect phone call” Trump had made to Zelensky, seeking his announcement that he was investigating the Bidens in exchange for weapons the U.S. Congress had already promised Ukraine. (Other former members of Trump’s inner circle, including personal attorney Michael Cohen and staff member Cassidy Hutchinson, also turned state’s evidence against Trump after they fired their Trump-hired counsel and hired their own attorneys.) According to Parnas, that prompted the U.S. Justice Department, under the control of Trump appointee William Barr, to switch out the charges against Parnas and instead try him on campaign finance law violations. The idea was that if Parnas would go before Congress as a convicted felon on charges unrelated to Ukraine, his credibility as a witness against Trump would be reduced.

In May 2021, Parnas’s attorney Joseph Bondy wrote a letter to Judge J. Paul Oetken relating to the case. It read, “The evidence seized likely includes e-mail, text, and encrypted communications that are either non-privileged or subject to an exception to any potentially applicable privilege, between, inter alia, Rudolph Giuliani, [Trump attorney] Victoria Toensing, the former President, former Attorney General William P. Barr, high-level members of the Justice Department, Presidential impeachment attorneys Jay Sekulow, Jane Raskin and others, Senator Lindsey Graham, Congressman Devin Nunes and others, relating to the timing of the arrest and indictment of the defendants as to prevent potential disclosures to Congress in the first impeachment inquiry of then-President Donald. J. Trump.” While Oetken refused Bondy’s motion to dismiss the case, calling Bondy’s letter a “conspiracy theory,” evidence exists of a network between the FBI, Fox News on-air personality Sean Hannity, Right-wing journalist John Solomon and others to obtain privileged information about the case. In the final scene of From Russia with Lev, Parnas and Hunter Biden meet for the first time and Hunter Biden is startled when Parnas calmly informs him they had his personal bank records, leaked to them by a source in the FBI. Parnas himself says now that being arrested was the best thing that could have happened to him because it finally broke him free from the Trump cult.

MS-NBC hyped From Russia with Lev as a revelatory case study in how Donald Trump operates, but it’s really an all too familiar story of how Trump exploits people for what they can do for him and then coldly dumps them once he’s sucked them dry. Trump publicly denied that he’d ever known Parnas, and when he was confronted with photos of the two of them together, said, “I get my picture taken with everybody.” (He pulled the same trick with E. Jean Carroll, the woman he was found civilly liable for sexually assaulting in the mid-1990’s in an elevator at New York’s high-end Bergdorf Goodman’s fashion store.) In the end, all From Russia with Lev proves is that Donald Trump is a narcissistic egomaniac who will do anything to anybody in order to safeguard and increase his own power – and at least half of the country knows that about him already. The other half believes he’s a Messiah who can literally do no wrong, and that’s why the 2024 Presidential election is so maddeningly close in the polls, and if the pattern from 2016 and 2020 that Trump consistently does five percent better in the actual election than he does in the polls holds this year, he will be President again.

American Masters: "Julia Alvarez: A Life Reinvented" (Bosch and Company, Inc, Latino Public Broadcasting, ITVS, American Masters Pictures, VOCES, PBS, 2024)

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

Last night (Tuesday, September 17) I watched an unexpectedly interesting episode of American Masters on KPBS: “Julia Alvarez: A Life Reimagined.” Julia Alvarez is a Latina-American writer born in New York City on March 27, 1950 to parents from the Dominican Republic. Her father was Dr. Eduardo Alvarez and her mother was Julia Tavares, who came from a much wealthier and more socially prestigious Dominican family than her dad. Julia Alvarez was the second child born to this couple, who met in New York where he had emigrated because he was a vocal opponent of Rafael Trujillo, the brutal Right-wing dictator who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 to his assassination in 1961, either directly or through a figurehead president in what the Latin Americans call imposición. Three months after Julia’s birth the couple decided to move back to the Dominican Republic even though that meant being in direct danger from Trujillo’s government and in particular the SIM (“Servicio de Inteligencia Militar”), Trujillo’s equivalent of the Gestapo, KGB or STASI. SIM agents drove throughout the Dominican countryside in black Volkswagen “Beetles” with their dreaded initials stenciled on the back hoods. Alvarez’s other three siblings were born in the Dominican Republic, and in the film she’s shown revisiting the house where she lived with her parents there. Her guide mispronounces the word “hen house” as “penthouse,” and she laughs at the confusion even though she stresses that the two sorts of buildings had opposite functions. The “hen house” meant just that: a place where chickens were raised and eggs collected from them.

In 1960 the family was forced to flee back to the U.S. after Alvarez’s father was involved in a failed plot against Trujillo. In the Dominican Republic she’d enjoyed a fairly affluent lifestyle – she joked that each of the five Alvarez children had a separate nanny, where most Dominican women who emigrated to the U.S. had to work as nannies. In the U.S. the Alvarez family was stuck in a two-bedroom apartment, and could afford even that only because a couple of rich uncles were helping them financially. Alvarez’s biographer, Silvio Sirias, said that when her parents moved the family to the U.S. she “lost almost everything: a homeland, a language, family connections, a way of understanding, and a warmth.” In 1963 her parents sent her to Abbott Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where she started to develop an interest in both reading and writing poetry. In 1967 she started college at Connecticut College but later transferred to Middlebury in Vermont, where she ended up working as a teacher for decades. Alvarez published her first book of poems, The Homecoming, in 1984, and in 1991 she published her first novel, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. This was a thinly disguised story of her own childhood in the U.S., and it evoked dramatically different reactions from her parents. Her dad loved the fact that his daughter was now a published and acclaimed novelist, while her mom and some of her sisters hated the book because it laid bare the family’s secrets.

In 1994 Alvarez published her second novel, In the Time of the Butterflies, about a real-life tragedy: the murder of the three Mirabal sisters in 1959. Inspired by the success of Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba, the Mirabal sisters, Minerva, Patria and Maria Elena, joined a revolutionary opposition called Las Mariposas (“The Butterflies”), only they were caught and summarily executed by agents of Trujillo’s SIM. Their bodies were put in a car and the car was pushed off a cliff to make it look they had died in an “accident.” (It reminded me almost inevitably of the murder of three Mississippi civil rights workers, James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, in 1964 by local law enforcement officials in Philadelphia, Mississippi; their bodies, too, were packed into their car and disposed of in a nearby river.) When Alvarez started researching the book, she was startled to discover that a fourth Mirabal sister, Dedé, had survived because she’d been out of the country at the time. At one point, fearing alienating the Mirabal family the way she’d upset her own relatives in How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, Alvarez planned to change the names of the Mirabals and have them rebelling against a dictatorship in a fictitious country – but Dedé Mirabal talked her out of it and Alvarez published the book as an historical novel with the real names and locations. In 2001 the book was filmed as a made-for-TV movie by MGM and Showtime, directed by Mariano Barroso from a script by David and Judy Klaas, and starring Selma Hayek, Lumi Cavazos and Edward James Olmos.

In 1997 Alvarez and her husband, Bill Eichner (a white American eye doctor she’d married after two previous marital failures), went back to the Dominican Republic and met a group of local coffee farmers who were being driven off their land by giant agribusiness corporations. They bought them a farm which they named Alta Gracia – “Alta,” meaning “high,” because it was located in the mountain country where the best coffee is grown, and “Gracia,” meaning “grace” – and worked with the locals to run it for a few years until they ceded the enterprise to the farmers who staffed it. Though most of her subsequent novels weren’t mentioned here, in 1997 she published ¡Yo!, a sequel to How the García Girls Lost Their Accents focused on the character of Yolanda, inspired by Alvarez herself. In 2001 Alvarez published her first children’s book, The Secret Footprints, illustrated by Fabian Negrin and based on a Dominican legend of the Ciguapas, a sort of indigenous half-ape, half-human race whose existence is threatened by one of them, Guapa, who becomes too close to the humans. Alvarez has also published young-adult novels, including one called Return to Sender (2009) in which the middle-school-age son of a white Vermont dairy farmer falls in love with the middle-school-age daughter of an undocumented immigrant. Other works by Alvarez include Before We Were Free (2003), about the last days of the Trujillo regime; and In the Name of Salomé (2000), about a mother-daughter pair of Dominican writers who navigate the political upheavals of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s.

In 2020 Alvarez published Afterlife, her first novel for adult readers in 14 years, after she was brought face-to-face with mortality by the death of her mother and the suicide of her younger sister Mauricia, known as “Maura.” Maura had struggled with bipolar disorder for decades before taking her own life just after Alvarez and her husband had arranged for her to go to an assisted-living facility and receive psychiatric care. Alvarez’s most recent book is The Cemetery of Untold Stories (2024). The story of Julia Alvarez is incredible in more than one sense; like F. Scott Fitzgerald, her prose has the texture of poetry and is beautiful in its own right apart from whatever it’s describing. She’s certainly received accolades, including the Presidential Medal of Arts (which she got from then-President Barack Obama in 2014), but she’s also definitely an “outsider” in the mainstream of (white) American literature. Alvarez’s story is especially relevant right now, when the country is embroiled in an often nasty political debate about immigration and whether immigrants in general, and immigrants of color in particular, can ever be “real Americans.”

After the American Masters documentary on Julia Alvarez, PBS showed two mini-films, 15 minutes each, about two younger Latino/a artists. One was Alejandro Jimenez, the son of New Mexico farm workers who rose through his school ranks and ultimately attended college despite being told by a high-school official, “We thought you’d stay here and be a farmworker like your dad.” Jimenez ultimately became a poet in both English and Spanish, and the film shows him winning the Mexican national poetry slam contest in 2021 with a high-energy reading of a Spanish-language poem. The other was Maia Cruz Palileo, a Filipina-American, who realized early on that she was a Gay woman (it’s fascinating that she calls herself a “Gay woman” rather than a “Lesbian”) and who presents as short-haired and very butch. Palileo is a visual artist, and one of her projects is to take a series of photographs made by a white U.S. Army officer who, assigned to the Philippines in 1900 after the U.S. conquered the islands from Spain, took pictures of indigenous Filipinos. He derisively and patronizingly called them “our little brown brothers” and made clear his agenda was to teach them the ways of white “civilization.” Palileo took copies of his photos and cut them out as silhouettes to remove the images from their original racist context to recontextualize the people and restore their sense of pride in themselves. These two tag shows amplified the main themes of the Julia Alvarez story: what does the broader American culture gain, and what does it lose, by being open and welcoming to new arrivals? It’s an especially pressing question now, with Donald Trump poised on the edge of a Presidential election victory on a frankly anti-immigrant platform that demonizes them and blames all America’s problems on them, the way Adolf Hitler demonized the Jews.

Hero at Large (Kings Road Entertainment, MGM, 1980)

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

At 7:15 p.m. yesterday (Sunday, September 15) my husband Charles and I settled in for a number of films on Turner Classic Movies, including Hero at Large, a 1980 romantic comedy from MGM and Kings Road Entertainment. Directed by Martin Davidson from a script by A. J. Carothers, Hero at Large stars the late and underrated John Ritter as Steve Nichols, out-of-work aspiring actor in New York City. He’s living in a grungy apartment building in a seedy section of New York and he meets a new neighbor, Jolene “J.” Marsh (Anne Archer), who works as a member of the crew on TV commercial shoots. Naturally he’s smitten with her at first sight, while she can’t be less interested in him and in fact already has a boyfriend, Milo (Rick Podell), who has hired her for several assignments. The relationship is a bit on the rocky side because – stop me if you’ve heard this before – he wants to control her entire life. Steve crashes an after-hours commercial shoot she’s working for at Sardi’s restaurant (it had to be after hours because that’s the only time Sardi’s would rent their space to the crew). He finally gets his big break when he’s one of 62 sporadically employed actors enlisted by publicity agent Walter Reeves (Bert Convy) to promote a new superhero action movie called Captain Avenger (whose posters proclaim its star as “Ryan McGraw,” a clever mashup of the two leads from the 1971 film Love Story, Ryan O’Neal and Ali McGraw) by dressing up in Captain Avenger costumes and visiting theatres showing the film. Steve is on his way home from this gig when he stops into a bodega for a quart of milk. The elderly Jewish couple who own it are already in the process of closing for the night when he persuades them to reopen just long enough for him to buy his milk – and just then a couple of thugs burst in and try to hold the place up after first pretending to buy a six-pack of beer. (Charles chuckled when the male partner behind the counter quoted $2.79 as the price for the whole six-pack. Now you’d be lucky to find one beer for sale at that price – and people complained about inflation then!)

He tells the robbers to stop in his best imitation of a Captain Avenger voice, and he startles them enough that after a brief scrap (one of them had a knife but neither had a gun), they give up the robbery and flee. The incident gets reported all over the city but nobody can figure out who the mystery man in the Captain Avenger suit was – much to Steve’s irritation, since he could use the career boost from being a real-life hero, albeit for just a few minutes. Steve gets another chance when he’s out driving a taxicab (he’s a “relief driver” after hours in what appears to be his one reliable, if itself sporadic, source of income) and a gang of drug smugglers tries to run him off the road. He fights back and runs them off the road instead, and when the real police arrive at the scene they discover a large quantity of cocaine or some other illegal drug in the baddies’ car. Walter Reeves is also the publicity agent in charge of the re-election campaign of the Mayor of New York (Leonard Harris), and he and his contact in the Mayor’s campaign, Calvin Donnelly (Kevin McCarthy, who in 1956 played the lead in the first – and still by far the best – film of Invasion of the Body Snatchers), work out the idea to find the mystery man who’s playing Captain Avenger in real life and exploit him. They have to go through all 62 men they’d hired before they find him, and when they do Steve, like a Frank Capra hero (the second half of the film is largely a knockoff of Capra’s 1941 near-masterpiece Meet John Doe), is initially reluctant but finally goes along, lured by the promise of a starring role in a Broadway revival of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Needless to say, his actor’s ego is flabbergasted at the thought of following in the footsteps of Paul Newman and Ben Gazzara.

Steve breaks up a fake “robbery” on a New York subway – and feels rotten about the deception. He confesses this to J., who’s become his girlfriend after their landlady, Mrs. Havacheck (Anita Dangler), locked Steve out of his apartment for non-payment of rent and J. took him in, platonically at first but not for long. Ultimately the Mayor decides to hold a huge ceremony to honor the mystery “Captain Avenger,” but a reporter (Penny Crone) has figured out the whole scheme and landed an interview with the actor who played the “robber” in the staged subway holdup the alleged Captain Avenger supposedly “foiled.” She directly confronts him at the Mayor’s big ceremony and Steve rather disgustedly walks away – until director Davidson and screenwriter Carothers rip off yet another old classic film, Mighty Joe Young. Wearing an overcoat to conceal his now-embarrassing Captain Avenger costume, Steve comes across a major fire at an old apartment building in which a woman successfully is rescued (the fire chief on the scene is played by Kenneth Tobey, yet another veteran of a 1950’s sci-fi classic, The Thing) but she’s understandably concerned that her son is still in the building. Unable to enter the building at ground level, Steve gets in by going to the roof of an adjoining building and leaping across to the top of the burning one, where he goes in and after four failed tries finally finds the apartment where the son was hiding out. He takes the boy to an open window and throws him down where the firefighters have a net waiting for him, then follows and has to wait for the firefighters to reset the net so he can leap from the building to safety. It ends the way you’d expect it to, with Steve and J. together and Steve morally redeemed by his actual heroism.

Hero at Large isn’t a great movie, but it is a genuinely charming one and it has things to say about Americans’ obsession with both celebrity and heroism. In one scene pop psychologist Dr. Joyce Brothers appears as herself on a TV show debating whether the alleged Captain Avenger’s actions are good or bad (good, she says). TCM showed it as the second half of a mini-festival to John Ritter, who got “typed” from his eight-year run as the male lead on the TV sitcom Three’s Company (playing a man who pretended to be Gay to be allowed to live in an apartment with two women; it was reworked from a British TV show called Man About the House, though in the British series the man really was Gay). The first film was one I’ve long been curious about: They All Laughed, directed by Peter Bogdanovich and co-starring Audrey Hepburn and the short-lived Dorothy Stratton, a Playboy centerfold who was trying for a career in films. She and Bogdanovich drifted into an affair during the shoot, and after the film was finished but before it was released Stratton’s psychotically jealous husband and manager, Paul Snider, brutally murdered her. (The case became the basis for Bob Fosse’s last film as a director, the woefully underrated Star 80.) I’m sorry we missed that one and even sorrier they didn’t show what I think is Ritter’s best film, Americathon (1979), a brilliant political satire in which Ritter plays President Chet Roosevelt, who faced with an intractable economic collapse decides to bail out the U.S. by hosting a giant worldwide telethon. It got terrible reviews when it came out but didn’t deserve them!

Captain Kidd's Treasure (MGM, 1938)

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

Next up on Turner Classic Movies’ scheduled for Sunday, September 15 was a 10-minute MGM “Historical Mystery” short called Captain Kidd’s Treasure, based on the real-life exploits of Captain William Kidd, which depending on what source you read about him was either a despicable pirate or an agent of the British government sent to catch pirates and recover their loot. He was born around 1654 in Dundee, Scotland (sources differ on his birthplace but Dundee was the one Kidd himself acknowledged) and actually settled in New York City (when it and North America in general were still British colonies), from which he operated as a privateer: a free-lance captain who hired out himself, his crew and his ship. The British government credentialed him to protect its interests in North America and the West Indies. In 1695 Kidd received a letter of marque from the British government allowing him to attack ships from countries then at war with Britain, and for the next three years he failed to find much in the way of treasure and had to deal with threats of mutiny from his crew. In 1698 he captured an Armenian or Indian ship (sources differ) called the Quedagh Merchant that had a British captain, and seized its treasure, either to return it to Britain or keep it for himself. The Earl of Bellomont, colonial governor of New York, Massachusetts Bay and New Hampshire, who had given Kidd his privateers’ commission in 1695, turned against him after the Quedagh Merchant was captured. When Kidd returned to Boston after that, Bellomont had him arrested and he was ultimately executed on May 23, 1701. But, at least according to this film, Kidd sent a letter to British King George I offering to reveal the secret location of the treasure he had buried on an island if the king spared his life. His offer went unheeded and he was put to death anyway, but that sparked numerous efforts by explorers and salvagers over the next three centuries to find and recover it.

Captain Kidd’s Treasure was directed by Leslie Fenton from a script by Herman Boxer and dealt with an attempt by yet another expeditionary crew to get financial backing for a search for Kidd’s missing treasure. Most attempts to find it had centered around the New World because that’s where Kidd was known to have operated, but the explorers in this movie have become convinced that Kidd actually buried his treasure on an island off the coast of Madagascar in southern Africa and intend to launch their search there. Captain Kidd’s Treasure benefits from MGM’s extensive infrastructure, including extensive sets of 1700’s sailing ships I suspect were built for the 1935 Academy Award winner Mutiny on the Bounty, and also from a quirky script that shows Kidd (Stanley Andrews) personally shooting and killing the two crew members who buried the treasure for him so no one else would know where it was. Boxer’s script also toys with the idea of Kidd’s divided loyalties; in one set of scenes he’s shown as an out-and-out pirate, while in another he’s shown as a loyal agent of the British government dealing with a mutinous crew that wants to kill him so they can make off with the treasure themselves. Though the parts of the movie dramatizing Kidd’s life are quite a bit more interesting than the modern-day sequences in which the would-be backers initially sound enthusiastic about underwriting the quest until a skeptic among them talks the others out of it, Captain Kidd’s Treasure was a fun little movie, and though he doesn’t bring the overripe villainy Charles Laughton did to the part in two films (a relatively straightforward Captain Kidd in 1945 and a spoof, Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd, in 1952).

Captain Salvation (Cosmopolitan Pictures, MGM, 1927)

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

The next item on TCM’s September 15 program was a “Silent Sunday Showcase” feature that proved unexpectedly interesting: Captain Salvation, made by MGM in 1927 towards the tail end of the silent-film era. The director is John S. Robertson, best known for the 1920 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (the big-budget Paramount version with John Barrymore in the title roles), though he also directed Mary Pickford in her 1922 film Tess of the Storm Country and took over the 1930 Universal French Revolution film La Marsellaise, retitled Captain of the Guard, after the original director, Paul “Doc” Fejos, had a nervous breakdown during filming. Captain Salvation was based on a novel by Frederick William Wallace, who since the story is so full of religious symbolism I wondered he was a relative of Ben-Hur author General Lew Wallace. He wasn’t; he was a Canadian journalist, novelist and photographer whose specialty was writing about sailing vessels in their final days. His best-known book today is the nonfiction Wooden Ships and Iron Men (1924); he published Captain Salvation in 1925 and the movie rights were bought by William Randolph Hearst for his company, Cosmopolitan Pictures. Captain Salvation was adapted for the screen by Jack Cunningham, though the titles were written by John Colton – whose credit makes a big deal of the fact that he’d written the scandalous plays Rain and The Shanghai Gesture. The star is Lars Hanson, a Swedish actor who came to MGM in 1925 as part of the deal that brought them Swedish director Mauritz Stiller and his protégée, Greta Garbo. Hanson was the only actor who worked with Garbo on both sides of the Atlantic, co-starring with her in her breakthrough Swedish film The Story of Gösta Berling (1924) and in U.S. films Flesh and the Devil (1927) – as the second male lead opposite John Gilbert – and The Divine Woman (1928), now alas lost except for one reel found in Russia.

He got cast in this largely because he’d just made the 1926 version of The Scarlet Letter, playing adulterous priest Arthur Dimmesdale opposite Lillian Gish as Hester Prynne, and in this one he’s a seminary student about to graduate and become the pastor of Maple Harbour, Massachusetts, just south of Boston, in 1840. His name is Anson Campbell and he’s engaged to marry Mary Phillips (Marceline Day, later Buster Keaton’s leading lady in his 1928 film The Cameraman), daughter of Nathan Phillips (Jay Hunt), the head of the local church and a self-consciously “moral” busybody. For the first half-hour there’s a lot of charming byplay between Anson, his much older comic-relief roommate Zeke Crosby (George Fawcett) and Mary, including a belt-splitting contest in which she sabotages the outcome by secretly slicing through the belt of the youngest and slenderest contestant. Then a “nor’easter,” a particularly vicious storm New England’s coasts are prone to, strikes and a ship runs aground at a point called “Bleaker’s Woe” containing Bess Morgan (Pauline Starke). Bess had been run out of Boston for being a prostitute – John Colton’s titles are surprisingly explicit about this – and to the shock of Nathan Phillips, Anson’s own father Peter (Sam De Grasse) and just about all the townspeople of Maple Harbour, Anson takes Bess in and nurses her back to health. When one of the townspeople sees Anson massaging her legs – we can tell he’s just applying liniment to them – they get the wrong idea. Mary breaks their engagement even though Bess tries to talk her out of it, saying that she’s giving up a man who truly loves her out of prejudice. Bess admits to Anson that her moral downfall started when her stepfather molested her and got her pregnant, and though even Colton’s nervy titles don’t specify whether it was a natural miscarriage or an illegal abortion, she says, “I’m glad the baby died!”

Having nothing to live for in Maple Harbour, Anson accepts an offer for himself and Bess to ship out on a ship called the Panther, ostensibly bound for Rio de Janeiro, but once they’re at sea Anson notices that the hold is full of men in chains. The ship’s captain (Ernest Torrence, playing his usual villain role and playing it to the hilt) admits that it’s really a prison ship and the prisoners are being taken to the so-called “Islands of the Blest” to work as slave laborers in the salt mines. Anson gets assigned to take care of the prisoners and give them the tags that identify them by number so the bosses in the salt mines will know who they are. As for Bess, not surprisingly the captain has his own lascivious designs on her, which she resists as long as she can. Anson is so disgusted at what’s happened to him and where he’s ended up that he literally denounces God and gives up his faith, saying it’s the devil’s world after all. Ironically, it’s Bess who brings him back to the church. With no other way of avoiding being raped by the captain, she grabs a dagger and stabs herself (frankly I was hoping she’d stab the captain instead!), and after an operatically long, drawn-out death scene she tells Anson she’s looking forward to death because at least God will forgive her and take her into heaven. Ultimately Anson takes over the ship and sails it back to Maple Harbour, renames it the Bess Morgan (evoking the predictable reaction among the townspeople, saying how dare you throw the name of that evil woman in our faces), and Mary agrees to go with him on a series of voyages to bring the Good Word of Christianity to whoever needs it in the world. A final title explains that this was the origin of the so-called “Gospel Ships.”

Captain Salvation is a beautifully made movie, and one thing I like about it is the filmmakers are clearly creating a parable but don’t make it so obvious it gets thrown in our faces. We can tell that Anson Campbell is behaving in a far more “Christian” way than the townspeople who are condemning him, reaching out to the so-called “fallen woman” the way Jesus reached out to Mary Magdalene. (There’s even a scene in which Bess is shown washing the feet of some of the prisoners, economically making the point without spelling it out for us in dialogue or titles the way Cecil B. DeMille and his writers would have.) The film also features an incredible performance by Pauline Starke, whose only claim in film history is a very minor one – she took over a role in a 1928 film called Women Love Diamonds after Garbo walked out on it (in fact, Garbo walked out on it so far that she famously told MGM’s executives, “I t’ank I go home now,” and they assumed she just meant the bungalow in which she was staying in Hollywood – until the next time they heard from her, from Sweden). Judging from her performance here, Starke was a potentially major screen actress who definitely should have had more of a career than she did; apparently she tangled with Louis B. Mayer once too often and he blacklisted her, not only firing her from MGM but discouraging other studios from hiring her as well. It’s too bad because her performance here has “star quality” written all over it! She lived until 1977 and in later years she was philosophical about her career and what had happened to it (including getting fired from the 1929 film The Great Gabbo and replaced with Betty Compson, the wife of the film’s director, James Cruze): “I enjoyed it an awful lot, and it was very easy work, very easy. I just worked because I enjoyed it, and I enjoyed the money. Then I had some difficulties that I would like to forget, and now I'm through with it, and it's out of mind. It's hard for me to recall things.”

Lieutenant Kizhe, a.k.a. The Czar Wants to Sleep (Belgoskino, Amkino, 1934)

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

Not long ago I played through a YouTube post of the Lieutenant Kijé suite by Sergei Prokofieff (his last name is usually spelled “Prokofiev”, but “Prokofieff” is how he spelled it himself during the 12 years, 1920 to 1932, in which he lived in countries that use the Roman alphabet), which led me to dig up my comments on the actual movie, Lieutenant Kizhe, for which Prokofieff wrote the music. My husband Charles and I watched the movie together in 2008 and it’s an unjustly and unfairly neglected movie that deserves to be better known. Here’s what I wrote about it back then:

The movie from this disc my husband Charles and I watched last night was Lieutenant Kizhe, a 1934 Soviet-era Russian movie that’s known today, if at all, only for the fact that Sergei Prokofieff composed the music for it and assembled his score into a five-movement suite (usually called Lieutenant Kijé) that’s become a much-recorded (arkivmusic.com lists 42 versions) classical standard. The film is based on one of those premises that seem to be the specialty of Slavic authors (Franz Kafka comes to mind, as also does Nikolai Gogol): a satire of the absurdity of bureaucracy and the idea that whatever is written in the official records, no matter how wrong or crazy it is, reality must be adjusted to conform to it. The story (based on a novel by Yuri Tynyanov, who also wrote the script for the film) takes place in 1800, when Russia was ruled by the mad Czar Paul I, Catherine the Great’s son. It opens in the palace, as Paul is trying to sleep (an offscreen chorus sings, “The Czar Is Asleep,” repeatedly), only to be wakened by someone calling out, “Guard!” “Who called ‘Guard?’” screams the awakened Czar, threatening to send the culprit to Siberia and make him march there with no shoes on. At the same time an overworked scribe in the palace copying a list of the officers in the Czar’s guard regiment makes a mistake and writes the ending of the Russian word for “lieutenant” twice, thereby creating a fictitious “Lieutenant Kizhe” — and the list makes its way up the chain of command until someone in the upper echelons hits on the idea of getting everybody else off the Czar’s hook by saying that it was Lieutenant Kizhe who called “Guard!” and thereby woke the Czar up. Kizhe is accordingly arrested and marched to a prison camp in Siberia, after first being whipped with 100 lashes — when the menials who are supposed to be doing all this ask why they’re doing this to someone who doesn’t exist, they’re assured, “He’s a confidential prisoner. He has no shape.”

Further complications ensue when Paul decides to pardon Kizhe and bring him back to court, then promotes him to colonel (the subtitles mistakenly use the term “corporal” instead of “colonel,” and at first I wondered if “corporal” were a far higher rank in the Czarist Russian army than in any other and it was only after the film was over that I realized what went wrong), finally to general, and then puts him in charge of the entire Russian army — all without anyone in court actually having laid eyes on him (when Paul or anyone else actually summons Kizhe they’re always put off with excuses — he’s having dinner, he’s not feeling well, he’s still asleep, etc.). Paul even orders one of the women at court (Nina Shaternikova) to marry Kizhe (she thinks he’s already made a pass at her, obviously confusing him with some other man who actually had!), and the attempt to pull off a wedding ceremony with only one of the participants physically present is one of the most hilarious sequences of this incredibly funny (in a bitter, black-humorous way) movie. Eventually the people in the Czar’s court, realizing the only way they’re going to be able to get rid of Kizhe once and for all is to kill him off, take him to a doctor’s office (where the doctor attempts to examine a nonexistent patient with an enormous syringe and Kizhe’s “death” is indicated when one of the boots, placed on the stretcher to give the illusion that there’s a body on it, falls off and hits the floor) — only in the meantime the 10,000 rubles Czar Paul gave Kizhe to set up his household after his marriage has disappeared (the officer in charge of all this has stolen it) and the furious Czar bucks him all the way down the ranks and insists that Kizhe’s elaborate state funeral (where they’re bearing a bier without a visible body on it) be cancelled and he be given the simple burial of a common private.

Lieutenant Kizhe is one of the most audacious films ever made, both thematically and stylistically. Indeed, the most amazing thing about it is that it was made at all as late as 1934, well after Stalin had taken complete control of the Soviet government and started imposing his standard of “socialist realism” on all Soviet art. Director Aleksandr Fajntsimmer made Kizhe as if it were still the 1920’s, carrying forward the stylistic experiments of Eisenstein and the other great Soviet directors of the silent era; his film begins with prismatic shots of guardsmen marching (as Charles noted, the guardsmen must have been a real regiment because they marched far too precisely to be movie extras) that expand to fill the screen. The sets look like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari meets The Scarlet Empress, and the acting is stylized throughout — especially Mikhail Yanshin’s performance as Czar Paul, which looks like he’d seen Emil Jannings’ now-lost The Patriot, in which Jannings also played Czar Paul, and copied the performance. I also got the impression Orson Welles must have seen this film when it was relatively new, since there are at least two scenes Welles later copied: the sight of a character passing a giant mirror in the palace and an exciting sleigh ride through a darkened wood (recycled in Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, respectively). The audacity of the direction and its heavy-duty formalism has its echo in the story itself; just about any other filmmakers anywhere else would have had some lower-class tramp stumble into the action and get himself passed off as Kizhe (the way Danny Kaye poses as the titular Inspector General in his 1949 Gogol-derived classic, or Cary Grant ends up mistaken for a nonexistent international spy in North by Northwest), but Fajntsimmer and Tynyanov made the much harder decision to keep Kizhe totally fictitious and build the comedy mostly around their attempts to maintain the illusion that Kizhe exists (an interesting variation on the central premise of The Emperor’s New Clothes).

What’s even more astonishing about this movie is that its central premise is that Russia is being ruled by an insane megalomaniac whose every word is law and who regularly threatens to ship off his enemies, real or imagined, to horrible prison camps — creating a perpetual climate of fear in his own court as everybody in it wonders if he or she could be next to go — and though the filmmakers give it the thin historical veiling of insisting in titles at both the beginning and the end that this is set in 1800, the portrait of “Czar Paul” tallies so closely with everything we know about Stalin it’s utterly amazing that the filmmakers escaped the gulag themselves and their film not only got made (with the cooperation of the Soviet Army and a big enough production budget to do those splendiferous, stylized sets) but was actually released both in Russia and abroad. (I checked imdb.com to see if either Fajntsimmer or Tynyanov were actually gulag victims; Fajntsimmer wasn’t — he directed sporadically until 1979 and died in 1982 — and Tynyanov died in 1943 after having been involved in a literary group called “The Serapion Brothers” with Yevgeny Zamiatin, author of We, the first 20th century dystopian novel and an obvious influence on both Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984.) Incidentally, the print we were watching had English subtitles, but they were printed so low on the screen that some were difficult or almost impossible to read; fortunately, this was not a dialogue-driven film so we had no problem following it anyway — and, oddly, the recording quality on Prokofieff’s score (played by the Leningrad Philharmonic with Isaak Dunayevsky as conductor) actually seemed better than the sound of Prokofieff’s score on the original track for Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky, made four years later.