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 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.

A Gun In His Hand (MGM "Crime Does Not Pay" Series, 1945)

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

Last night (Saturday, September 14) I watched two films on Turner Classic Movies: a Crime Does Not Pay short called A Gun In His Hand (1945) and a feature, A Lady Without Passport. Despite its generic “crime-y” title, A Gun In His Hand actually turned out to be quite good and highly unusual. Written by Richard H. Landau (an “original” story credit that for once seems genuinely original) and Charles F. Royal (screenplay), and directed by the up-and-coming Joseph Losey (who had a meteoric rise to major directorial jobs in features and an equally meteoric fall due to the Hollywood blacklist, though he salvaged his career by moving to Britain and making some great films, including The Servant and Accident, there), A Gun In His Hand is about a career criminal, Dennis Nordell (Tom Trout, who judging from his performance here should have had much more of a career than he did), who applies to the local police department in his mid-sized Midwestern city. His intent is to learn police tactics from the inside and thereby figure out how to avoid detection when he and his gang actually commit crimes. He and his assistant Frankie (Anthony Caruso) pull off a series of meticulously planned robberies of liquor warehouses (one wonders how they sell the stuff after they’ve stolen it, but in a 20-minute running time we don’t have much time to think about that). In order to evade detection they first show up at a nearby warehouse and trip its burglar alarm, thereby distracting the (honest) cops on duty in the neighborhood and keeping them away from the real target. Police Inspector Dana (Richard Gaines) tries a variety of tactics, including switching the system by which patrol officers are assigned to their beats, to stop the robberies, but to no avail.

Then one cop, McGuinnes [sic] – played by, who else, Robert Emmet O’Connor (this is one of those movies from classic Hollywood which makes it seem like all police officers are Irish) – figures it out and not only goes to the right warehouse but catches Nordell in action as part of the gang. Nordell shoots and kills him, and Dana, who’s become convinced that the robbers have inside help from a corrupt officer but has no idea who the officer might be, orders all his cops to turn in their weapons for ballistic checks against the bullet that killed McGuinnes. Nordell had planned ahead for such an eventuality by swapping out his police-issued revolver for another gun, with which he’d shot McGuinnes, and in order to avoid being found out he hits on the idea of framing a street criminal with a long record, Calvin “Whitey” Foster (Arthur Space), for the crime. He plants the murder weapon in Whitey’s room and fakes a set of fingerprints taken from Whitey’s prison record. Only Nordell is found out when the real Whitey is arrested – and shows that he couldn’t have possibly left the fingerprints on the gun because since those prints were taken, he’d suffered an industrial accident in the prison’s jute mill and lost the middle finger on one hand. (My husband Charles read the above and said that when he was growing up in Florida he’d seen so many grownups with missing fingers from mill accidents he didn’t realize for years that virtually all adult men had 10 fingers.) Dana thereby arrests Nordell and he is subsequently executed. I wonder if MGM and the Crime Does Not Pay producer, Chester Franklin, got the idea of having a crook sneak onto the police force from the film A Scandal in Paris, which was being made independently at the same time and starred George Sanders as Lecocq, a real-life French criminal who became the founding chief of the Surété, or if the two groups of filmmakers hit on the idea independently, but be that as it may, A Gun In His Hand is a nice bit of short filmmaking and a cut above most of the Crime Does Not Pay shorts in its sheer audacity as well as the power of Losey’s direction.

A Lady Without Passport (MGM, 1950)

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

Unfortunately, the next film Turner Classic Movies showed, A Lady Without Passport, was pretty dreary and boring. It was shown as part of Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” even though it’s not really thematically or visually noir. It was also an MGM production, and this time the producer, Samuel Marx (MGM’s former story editor during Irving Thalberg’s lifetime and not a relative of the Marx Brothers, though the Marx Brothers’ father was also named Samuel), hired Joseph H. Lewis as director on the strength of his immediately previous film, the 1949 film noir masterpiece Gun Crazy. Marx also hired MGM’s former contract star, Hedy Lamarr, to return to the studio following the success of her most recent film, Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah (1949). He had to pay her $150,000, a whopping increase over what she’d been making until 1945, when MGM fired her. Lamarr was born Hedwig Kiesler in Vienna, Austria on November 9, 1914 and as a teenager she appeared in several German films, most notoriously in Ecstasy (1933), directed by Gustav Machaty. (Since Machaty was Czech, this is routinely referred to as a Czech film even though it wasn’t; it was made in Munich and, though there is virtually no dialogue, what there is of it is definitely in German.) Machaty tricked young Hedy into appearing nude in various scenes, pointing out that the camera would be far away from her and telling her she’d only be seen dimly in the background. His trick was to use a telephoto lens, a piece of equipment Hedy had never heard of, and she didn’t realize what he’d done until she took her parents to see the film – and there her naked body was in vivid closeup splashed bigger than life across the screen.

Hedy later married German munitions maker Fritz Mandl, who regularly took her to big Nazi functions in hopes that her sheer beauty would encourage Nazi officials to place large orders with his firm. When Hedy got tired of being Mrs. Fritz Mandl and getting dragged to these parties, she divorced him in 1937, just as MGM head Louis B. Mayer was touring Europe looking for beautiful young women he could sign to film contracts. Though he was more than a little anxious about Hedy’s past, particularly her infamous nude scenes in Ecstasy, Mayer signed her anyway and renamed her “Hedy Lamarr” after Barbara La Marr, an actress he’d worked with in silent days. Alas, when Lamarr showed up to Hollywood Mayer didn’t have a movie in mind for her – he wanted her to make I Take This Woman with Spencer Tracy as a doctor torn between his desire to help the poor and the demands of his rich, spoiled wife, but the script wasn’t ready and ultimately the movie took three years to make and cycled through four directors. Instead Mayer loaned her to United Artists producer Walter Wanger, who put her in Algiers, his remake of the French film Pépé le Moko. She became an instant sensation because audiences were so struck by her beauty they either didn’t notice or didn’t care that as an actress she sucked. Lamarr turned down a number of great films, including Casablanca and Gaslight (both of which went to Ingrid Bergman, who was just as beautiful as Lamarr and could act) as well as Laura (though Lamarr defended her decision on the last one, saying years later that it was a terrible movie redeemed only by David Raksin’s great song; she said, “If only they’d sent me the sheet music with the script!”).

Instead she made a ponderous Gaslight knockoff called Experiment Perilous with George Brent at RKO, and after MGM let her go she made equally dreary movies like The Strange Woman, Dishonored Lady and Let’s Love a Little. Getting cast as Delilah in Cecil B. DeMille’s Biblical epic Samson and Delilah seemed like a major boost to her career (though it had its detractors; referencing her and Victor Mature, who played Samson, Groucho Marx joked, “I never go see movies in which the man’s tits are bigger than the woman’s”), but A Lady Without Passport was a commercial flop and another dreary movie that allowed Lamarr to coast on her looks and didn’t require any acting skills. It’s essentially Casablanca lite; male lead Peter Carzcag (John Hodiak) is a U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service agent sent to Cuba to bust a human trafficking ring led by nightclub owner Palinov (George Macready, who out-acts just about everybody else in the film). Palinov has a private plane with which he smuggles undocumented immigrants from Cuba to the U.S., landing them on a secret airstrip in Florida. Peter poses as Hungarian refugee “Josef Gombush” in order to get inside Palinov’s operation, and what follows is about 80 minutes of ponderous “intrigue” in which Peter falls in love with Marianne Lorress (Hedy Lamarr), a woman of mystery – the Wikipedia page on the film says she was fleeing a concentration camp but I don’t remember that being at all clear in the film itself – who’s desperate to make it to the U.S. because her father (whom we never see) has already established himself here, though later she admits that he’s undocumented, too. Palinov is willing to help Marianne even though she has no money, because there’s another way she can pay him … and Peter has a jealous hissy-fit that she’s willing to have sex with him for the chance to emigrate.

It ends with a series of surprisingly dull chase sequences, in one of which Palinov’s plane is chased by an INS plane and forced to crash-land, followed by another chase through the Everglades. According to Wikipedia, this scene was originally supposed to take place in a hotel, but since the film was shot almost entirely on location in Florida and Cuba, that would have required finding a disused one. They couldn’t, so producer Marx ordered that the final confrontation be moved to the Everglades in a scene strikingly reminiscent of the ending of Lewis’s immediately previous film, Gun Crazy. Alas, the comparison only makes A Lady Without Passport seem even worse! There’s also something of Key Largo in the climax, as Peter is stuck on a boat with Palinov and Marianne and deliberately sabotages Palinov’s escape plans by switching the boat’s fuel tanks from one that’s full to one that’s empty, then when Palinov demands that Peter throw his gun in the water, Peter throws in the lever controlling the fuel tanks (which he’s previously removed) instead. Ultimately Palinov makes his escape, or tries to, though we don’t see him get either captured or killed. We just hear Peter tell Marianne that he won’t get far, a disappointing ending to a disappointing movie. In his “Noir Alley” outro, Eddie Muller praised Joseph H. Lewis’s direction and Paul Vogel’s cinematography, saying that Lewis almost invariably placed the camera where it should have been and cut effectively, but this is the Joseph H. Lewis who’d become known as “Wagon-Wheel Joe” because he had a whole collection of wagon wheels he’d put in the foreground when he shot “B” Westerns and wanted to add some visual flair to enliven otherwise dull dialogue scenes.

Here the dull script by Lawrence Taylor (story), Cyril Hume (“adaptation”) and Howard Dimsdale (script) sorely taxed Lewis’s visual skills and gave us a boring movie with only a few bits of actual film noir occasionally livening things up. If the writing committee had made Marianne an outright femme fatale assigned by Palinov to lure Peter into the plot and ultimately either compromise or actually kill him, A Lady Without Passport would have been a considerably better and certainly more entertaining film than it is. One wonders why Hedy Lamarr wasn’t able to apply her intelligence to becoming a good actor, since she was hardly your stereotypical “dumb” sexy female movie star. In 1942 she and French émigré composer George Antheil teamed up in Hollywood to invent something called “frequency hopping spread spectrum,” defined on the TechTarget Web site (https://www.techtarget.com/searchnetworking/definition/frequency-hopping-spread-spectrum) as “the repeated switching of the carrier frequency during radio transmission to reduce interference and avoid interception.” Their idea was to make it impossible for enemy ships to jam the guidance systems of Allied torpedoes. The U.S. Navy decided during the war that the system was too complicated to bother with, but after World War II they adopted it but had their engineers “tweak” the system enough to avoid infringing on the Lamarr/Antheil patent. Though frequency hopping became the basis of cell-phone technology, Lamarr didn’t get credit for her role in inventing it until 1997 – three years before her death – when the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) finally gave her an award for it. She never made a penny from an invention whose current estimated value is $30 billion, and her reaction to the EFF award was, “It’s about time.”

Sweet Music (Warner Bros., 1935)

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

Last night (Sunday, September 8) there were a couple of films on Turner Classic Movies I wanted to watch, a 1935 Warner Bros. production called Sweet Music and a 1921 Goldwyn Pictures silent called The Ace of Hearts. Sweet Music was actually a vehicle concocted for inexplicably popular radio singing star Rudy Vallée, and though its director, Alfred E. Green, was a decently talented hack, it’s definitely a Schreiber rather than an auteur movie and the Schreiber is Jerry Wald. Wald wrote the original story and collaborated with Carl Erickson and Warren Duff on the script, which is an appealing fusion of musical and screwball comedy. Vallee plays egomaniacal bandleader Skip Houston, whose rather nasal-voiced singing and the not particularly amusing antics of his band have somehow made him an enormous radio star. As the film opens he’s performing a university gala (for some reason Vallée’s real-life popularity was particularly strong among college audiences; he made a specialty out of recording college songs and in the opening sequence his band is shown performing in front of a backdrop festooned with college pennants). The opening shot is of a neon-lit silhouette of a trombone, like Busby Berkeley’s famous neon violins in the “Shadow Waltz” sequence from Gold Diggers of 1933, and the trombone player turns out to be a member of a real-life aggregation called The Frank and Milton Britton Comedy Band. Milton’s real last name was Levy and Frank’s was Wenzel – they weren’t really brothers but posed as such – and like Spike Jones they formed a band that played “straight” jazz for a number or two and then did slapstick antics. The Wikipedia page on them says they played trombone and cornet, but doesn’t specify which played which. Whichever Britton played trombone really goes to town on this, including doing a remarkably good airplane impression.

The band’s next gig is in Chicago, where Skip publicly insults dancer Bonnie Haydon (Ann Dvorak), who’s under contract to the theatre where they’re performing and so Skip has to put up with her horning in on his act. The two trade insults in front of the audience, and she gives as good as she gets. They get an offer to come to New York to appear in the Frolics, arranged by Bonnie’s manager “Ten Percent” Nelson (Ned Sparks), but they only last one performance before the show is closed down. Skip’s agent Barney Cowan (Allen Jenkins) arranges for him to do a radio show sponsored by Selzer’s Cigars, owned by two Jewish brothers named Sidney and Sigmund Selzer. The Selzers are played by Joseph Cawthorn and Al Shean; Cawthorn is just another character actor but Shean is a major figure in American comedy. He was not only a vaudeville star in his own right as part of the comedy team of Gallagher and Shean – though he was really Jewish and his birth last name was Schönberg, like the composer – he was also the uncle of the Marx Brothers and their first writer. The Marx Brothers never actually decided that Harpo should be mute; Shean just gave him fewer and fewer lines every time he rewrote the act, until in one version Harpo was down to just three lines. On opening night a critic reviewed that act, praised Harpo’s pantomime but wrote, “The effect is spoiled when he speaks.” The next day, Shean cut Harpo’s three lines and Harpo never again spoke on stage. The Selzers grimly tolerate Bonnie’s performances until they get so many letters complaining how terrible she is and demanding she be fired that they give her the ax. Skip wants her to stay on – by now their initial hatred has blossomed into love and he’s not only dating her but wants to marry her – but Cowan hits on the idea of softening the blow by telling Bonnie that Skip is in love with someone else and wants her on the program instead.

The someone else is Helen Morgan, playing herself and singing a rather gloomy song called “I See Two Lovers,” and she’s relentlessly photographed by James Van Trees to look as ugly as possible. Morgan was 11 years older than Ann Dvorak and looks even older than that – she could easily have been Dvorak’s mother – and we get the impression that if Skip had really jilted Bonnie for Morgan he’d be trading down big-time. Helen Morgan made two genuinely great films, Applause (1929) and Show Boat (1936), but there she was not only featured but had great directors (Rouben Mamoulian and James Whale, respectively). In Show Boat, which TCM showed just before Sweet Music, Whale and cinematographer John Mescall made Morgan look younger than she had in her previous films like Marie Galante and Sweet Music, and she’d responded with a great performance, but here she just sings one song in her highly dated lugubrious “torch” style at a time when more sensitive and musicianly singers like Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne and Judy Garland were obliterating that approach to music. Meanwhile Skip is getting gloomy because his contract with the Selzers forces him to continue the program even though Bonnie has been fired. As one of his crazy publicity stunts Barney Cowan hits on the idea of hiring Lulu Betts (Alice White, who’d been a semi-major name in Warner Bros. musicals in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s but had tumbled down the ladder into dumb-blonde character roles) to jump in a lake – literally – and pose as an abandoned ex-girlfriend of Skip’s attempting suicide out of unrequited love for him. The plot backfires when Lulu’s gangster brother “Dopey” Malone (Robert Armstrong, once again ill-used; one would have thought his star turns in King Kong and its sequel Son of Kong would have made him a major star, but no-o-o-o-o) holds a gun to Skip’s head and announces he’s going to make him marry her – though he’s talked out of it and Lulu marries Barney instead.

With Bonnie, Lulu, Barney and Nelson all out of work in New York, Barney hits on the idea of the four of them doing a radio comedy program called The Happy Family that turns inexplicably popular. Given their choice of sponsors, the revenge-minded Bonnie picks Selzers Cigars, and the show is a success until Barney cooks one of his stupid publicity stunts that goes horrendously wrong. His idea is to have “Dopey” stage a fake kidnapping of his radio-star sister, but instead “Dopey” punches Barney in the mouth and Barney is unable to work for three months. Ultimately it all ends happily, with Skip and Bonnie reuniting for a big benefit show in which they do the big number they were supposed to do in the Frolics (ya remember the Frolics?), after which Skip plans to take a job at the (real) Cocoanut Grove in Hollywood and proposes to Bonnie on condition that she give up her show-business ambitions and be just a wife and mother. Despite the annoying sexism of the ending – of course I’d much rather have seen them become a professional and personal couple, with them trading Burns-and-Allen-style insults as part of their act – the song that sends them off is “Fare Thee Well, Annabelle,” one of my favorites, which I first heard from The Boswell Sisters in their incandescent recording from London on July 19, 1935 (available on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofLhZ7Qm5SE).

Overall Sweet Music is a really fun film, and for all the unattractiveness James Van Trees gives to Helen Morgan, I give him a lot of credit for reviving the iris-out, a charming visual effect that was a basic transition device in the silent era but pretty much disappeared once sound came in. Though it might have been an even better film with Preston Sturges directing (Sturges actually cast Vallée in some of his Paramount comedies and found genuine acting skill in him) and/or with Warners’ other male singing star, Dick Powell, playing the lead (though Powell’s singing style is almost as dated as Vallée’s, he was a much better actor even before his remarkable transition from musicals to films noir with his incredible performance as Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe in the 1944 film Murder, My Sweet), Sweet Music is quite good as it stands. One thing it captures quite ably is Rudy Vallée’s notorious egomania; when he was working in New York on the 1929 Paramount film Glorifying the American Girl, he gave autographed photos of himself to all the crew members. He’d made himself so obnoxious to them that they responded by posting the photos in the studio urinals, so they could literally piss on Rudy Vallée (or at least on his image)!

The Ace of Hearts (Goldwyn, 1921)

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

After Sweet Music TCM put on “Silent Sunday Showcase” host Jacqueline Stewart for a pair of films that represented romantic triangles, though that was about all they had in common. The second one was The Patsy, a 1928 comedy starring Marion Davies that I’d already posted on in 2016 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-patsy-mgm-1928.html) and 2021 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2021/11/the-patsy-mgm-1928.html) in which the triangle was two women – Pat Harrington (Davies) and her sister Grace (Jane Winton) – and one man, aspiring real-estate developer Tony Anderson (Orville Caldwell). The first one was a considerably darker film, The Ace of Hearts, from the Goldwyn Company in 1921, in which the love triangle was two men and one woman. The Ace of Hearts was an attempt to reproduce the success of the 1920 film The Penalty by re-teaming the principal three creative people involved: director Wallace Worsley, writer Gouverneur Morris (a direct descendant of the original Gouverneur Morris who was a signatory to the U.S. Constitution) and star Lon Chaney, Sr. This time Morris concocted a tale of a secret society of anarchists who first mark certain individuals for death and then carry out the killings. The society has an elaborate set of rituals in which they first debate whether the intended victim deserves to be eliminated and then deal a set of playing cards, with whoever gets the ace of hearts being charged with carrying out the murder.

There are between seven and nine members of the club, but the key characters are Farralone (Lon Chaney), Forrest (John Bowers) and the sole female, Lilith (Leatrice Joy), whom they both love even though she disdains any interest in men, love or sex because of her devotion to “The Cause.” (Morris carefully avoids any explanation of what “The Cause” is or why these people consider it so important.) The opening scene shows the members of the secret society debating whether their latest designated victim really deserves killing, and judging from how he’s described in the film’s titles – an older rich man, influential in New York society, who’s growing increasingly egomaniacal and oppressive – he sounds an awful lot like a prototype of Donald Trump. At least two members of the club, including Forrest, have been stalking the intended victim for three weeks; Forrest has been working as a waiter at the restaurant where the victim always has breakfast at precisely 7 a.m. Forrest draws the ace of hearts on the third go-round (if no one gets the ace of hearts on the first deal, they just keep dealing until someone turns up with the death card), and he’s outfitted with an ingenious bomb concealed in some sort of package with a dial concealed in its fastener that, once turned to the left, sets off a bomb which will explode five minutes later. Only Forrest has an attack of conscience; he demands that Lilith marry him the day before he’s scheduled to carry out the assassination. He’s already taken out a marriage license for them, and she agrees. After they spend the night together – with the lovelorn Farallone hanging outside their apartment building all night with only a stray dog for company – he has the proverbial second thoughts. She does, too, but eventually Forrest shows up at the restaurant at the designated time for the murder.

The intended victim upbraids him for refusing to wait for him to read the menu and give him his order – thereby letting us in the audience know he’s as much of an asshole as we’ve been told he was by the gang who want to kill him. But just then Forrest sees a young couple who’ve got married secretly because her parents don’t approve of him, and identifying himself and Lilith with them, he decides he can’t go through with the assassination because the bomb will blow up the whole restaurant and kill the nice young lovers, too. (One would have thought the mad scientist who cooked up the murder bomb could instead have invented something that would conceal a poisoned needle, so only the intended victim would have been killed and everyone else would have been spared.) Earlier there’d been a scene in which Forrest and Farralone jostled each other in the street, and I had briefly wondered if Farralone had sensed that Forrest wasn’t willing to go through with the killing and had pickpocketed the murder weapon intending to use it himself, but no-o-o-o-o. Instead Forrest and Lilith take a train going west, while the remaining seven members of the circle debate who will assassinate Forrest and Lilith for their treachery against the group. Farralone draws the ace of hearts, only his plan is to take the murder bomb and explode it at the group’s meeting, killing all of them and eliminating them as a threat to the established order. Watching Forrest and Lilith has convinced Farralone that only love and compassion, not violence and death, can be the basis of a new and better world order. When the police find the wreckage of the anarchists’ headquarters, they discover Farralone’s body, still clutching the ace of hearts.

When Jacqueline Stewart announced the movie, my husband Charles wondered if it had been inspired by G. K. Chesterton’s novel The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), though the two stories have nothing in common except that both center around a secret society of anarchists (and in Chesterton’s novel all the supposed anarchists turn out to be police detectives infiltrating the group undercover). The Ace of Hearts is a good movie but also a frustrating one, due in large measure to Wallace Worsley’s direction. The directors this movie really needed were all still working in Germany: Fritz Lang, Robert Wiene (director of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which Goldwyn Pictures distributed in the U.S.), F. W. Murnau or Paul Leni. Any one of them could have given this film the nightmarish mise-en-scène it truly needed; though Worsley had worked with Lon Chaney before in The Penalty and afterwards would direct him in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, his treatment of this wild story is all too tame. It also doesn’t help that Chaney doesn’t get to do one of his fabled character make-ups (as he’d done in The Penalty, in which he played a cripple with no legs), and he looks oddly stockier and heavier-set than he would five years later in Tell It to the Marines (about which I’ve joked that Chaney essentially made a John Wayne movie well before John Wayne did!), my reference point for what Lon Chaney looked like out of makeup. Charles also wondered just when The Ace of Hearts was supposed to be taking place: he asked if audiences of the time read it as a contemporary story or as one taking place 20 or 30 years earlier, when anarchist assassins were very much “in the news” and among their most prominent victims were President William McKinley, Russian Czar Alexander II and Italian King Umberto Emmanuel. The Ace of Hearts isn’t a bad movie; it’s just not as good as it could have been, and John Bowers and Leatrice Joy aren’t especially strong as the romantic leads, though they’re serviceable and get the job done.

Cabaret (Allied Artists Pictures, ABC Pictures, Feuer-Martin Productions, 1972)

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

Last night at 6:45 p.m. I turned on Turner Classic Movies for the second of a two-film tribute to Liza Minnelli. The first film was Arthur, which my husband Charles and I watched ages ago on a VHS tape I’d made from TCM, and by chance we watched it the night after we’d seen the 1931 film Sidewalks of New York, which had basically the same plot: an hereditarily rich kid (Buster Keaton in Sidewalks, Dudley Moore in Arthur) lives a socially irresponsible existence and is bailed out of his womanizing and alcoholism by his butler (Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards in Sidewalks, John Gielgud in Arthur). The big difference is that Sidewalks was made on the cusp of Franklin Roosevelt’s Presidency and Arthur on the eve of Ronald Reagan’s, and the Zeitgeist difference was symbolized by the fact that the moral redemption of Keaton’s character is depicted by him doing something socially responsible with his fortune (opening a recreational center for at-risk youths), while Moore’s character does no such thing. The second film with Liza Minnelli TCM showed last night was her star-making role as Sally Bowles in the 1972 musical Cabaret, the screen adaptation of the Joe Masterson/Howard Kander/Fred Ebb musical based on I Am a Camera, John Van Druten’s play based on Christopher Isherwood’s stories of his early adulthood in late Weimar-era Berlin, which he left and returned to England just as the Nazis were coming to power. The film was scripted by Jay Presson Allen (also the writer Alfred Hitchcock brought onto Marnie after he decided he needed a woman to write for the title character) and stunningly directed by Bob Fosse. It’s the second of Fosse’s five films as full director – though before that he’d done musical numbers for other movies, including Damn Yankees, in which he directed his wife, Gwen Verdon, in her stunning “Whatever Lola Wants” number. (I remember watching Damn Yankees with my then-girlfriend Cat Ortiz, and she heard Verdon sing the song in her rather scratchy voice and wondered, “Why did she ever get cast in this movie?” Then she did her dance, and Cat said, “That’s why.”)

All five of Fosse’s movies – Sweet Charity (a musical version of Federico Fellini’s film Nights of Cabiria in which Fosse was forced to cast Shirley MacLaine as star instead of Verdon, who’d played the part on stage), Cabaret, Lenny, the overrated All That Jazz and the highly underrated Star 80 – are about the sordid underbelly of the entertainment industry and the struggle of people to make it into stardom. I hadn’t seen Cabaret in many years and I’d forgotten how good it is and how beautifully Fosse and Allen balanced the multiple elements of the story. Sally Bowles is the featured performer at the Kit Kat Klub, a cabaret in downtown Berlin in the early 1930’s, and she’s desperately trying to land a part in the movie industry and is willing to sleep with whomever she has to in order to do it. The film’s script name-checks Lya de Putti, a major star in the German film industry at the time (in 1926 she starred in an adaptation of Manon Lescaut in which an even more legendary star, Marlene Dietrich, had a supporting role as an up-and-comer). By chance I saw Cabaret for the first time in its initial release at the same time I first saw Josef von Sternberg’s The Blue Angel, a film about the Weimar-era German cabaret scene made while it was still going on and the movie that made Dietrich a star, and in my head the two films have been linked ever since. The plot starts when a young British man named Brian Roberts (Michael York), playing the character Isherwood based on himself, comes to Berlin to work as an English-as-a-second-language teacher to German students. (Ironically, the male lead of The Blue Angel, Emil Jannings, also played a character who worked as an ESL teacher in a German high school. Jannings was free to make The Blue Angel because, after promoting him as “The World’s Greatest Actor” and giving him four major films, Paramount in the U.S. had fired him because they didn’t think his strong German accent would work in English-language sound films. So I’ve long suspected there was a “So there!” aspect of Jannings having himself cast as an English teacher: “I do know how to speak English, damnit!”)

The sexually liberated Sally lends Brian her room for his English classes – his room in the same building is too small – and makes a pass at Brian, who rather shame-facedly explains that he’s never been sexually attracted to women, though he’s gone through the motions three times with mutually unsatisfying results. (This wasn’t the first time the young Michael York had played a Bisexual; he’d done so three years earlier in a marvelously kinky film called Something for Everyone, in which he ingratiates himself into a Swiss aristocratic family by sexually servicing both the mother and the Queer son – until the daughter takes over and demands that he marry her in an ending very much like the comeuppance Sammy Glick gets at the end of Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run?) Eventually Sally does manage to seduce Brian, though she also attracts the attention of a young, hunky German aristocrat named Maximilian von Heune (Helmut Griem). Sally is singing Max’s praises to Brian and he says, “Screw Max!” “I do!,” says Sally – and Brian rather shame-facedly says, “So do I.” (The ABC TV network co-produced this film with Allied Artists, what was left of Monogram in the early 1970’s, but when they first showed this on TV they deleted this scene and all other references to Brian being Gay.) Also in the dramatis personae are hapless would-be gigolo Fritz Wendel (Fritz Wepper) and Jewish department-store heiress Natalia Landauer (Marisa Berenson), who meet at one of Brian’s English classes and are romantically attracted to each other, only their relationship founders not only on his concern that she and her parents will think he’s only after their money but because he’s a clandestine Jew himself. Ultimately he comes out to her as a Jew and they’re married in a synagogue on the eve of the Nazi takeover, and we find ourselves hoping that she and her family can get out of Germany in time to be spared the horrors of Nazi rule, including the Holocaust, and preferably with the Landauer fortune intact.

Fosse and Allen carefully keep the Nazi terror to the edges of the film, showing Nazi and Communist posters each vandalized by the other side, and in one scene Brian runs into two Nazi newsboys hawking the Völkischer Beobachter (the Nazi paper that was their main propaganda outlet before they took power), confronts them and gets beaten up for his pains. (We don’t get to see the actual beating, just his arm bandaged when he returns to Sally after the incident, in a welcome bit of Fossean understatement.) There’s also a chilling scene in which a crowd of Hitler Youth, led by a young man of almost unearthly beauty named Mark Lambert, sings a song called “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” as part of an impromptu Nazi street rally. He looks like he just stepped out of Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda masterpiece Triumph of the Will and the scene is an interesting and economical way of showing the Nazi menace without going overboard. Ultimately the Nazis take over Germany and the shows at the Kit Kat Klub continue, though without much of the satirical “edge” they’d had before (dramatized in the song “If You Could See Her Through My Eyes,” in which the Kit Kat Klub MC – played by Joel Gray, the only member of the original Broadway cast who repeated their role on film – sings a love song to a woman dressed as an ape, and the punch line is, “If you could see her through my eyes/She wouldn’t look Jewish at all”). This is actually historically accurate; the Nazis allowed much of the German cabaret scene to continue, largely because their Minister of Propaganda and Enlightenment, Joseph Goebbels, realized (as his counterparts in the Soviet Union didn’t) that allowing the people to have innocuous light entertainment actually bolstered the regime because it was innocuous light entertainment and thereby gave the people an outlet for their discontents in ways that wouldn’t threaten the regime.

Bob Fosse made one decision about the film that in some ways strengthened the film and in other ways cheapened it: he decided that there would be no musical numbers except for the ones at the cabaret itself, when the singers in the cast (mostly Minnelli and Gray) would be performing as part of their act. Fosse said he didn’t like the obvious artificiality of people suddenly breaking into song and dance in scenes of ordinary life (ironically, two of the key people establishing that convention had been Liza Minnelli’s parents, director Vincente Minnelli and star Judy Garland, in their 1944 joint masterpiece Meet Me in St. Louis). The up side of this is that, ironically, it returned Cabaret to the style of the earliest movie musicals, which had all been about people who sang and danced for a living and showed them singing and dancing only when their characters were doing so professionally. The down side is that it vastly shrank the part of Sally’s and Brian’s landlady, Fräulein Schneider (Elizabeth Neumann-Viertel), who in the original stage version had been played by Lotte Lenya (Kurt Weill’s widow and a living link to the original German cabaret scene; she’d been a homeless woman working as a busker when Weill met her, got her jobs in cabarets, ultimately cast her as Lucy in The Threepenny Opera in its 1928 premiere and married her) and had had four songs, including “So What!” (which Liza Minnelli stunningly revived in a 1980’s PBS concert special) and “Married” (a remarkable song which I used in the mix CD I gave people who attended Charles’ and my wedding).

One of the most memorable things about Cabaret the movie is that it finally got Liza Minnelli out of the long shadow of Judy Garland and established her as a persona and an entertainer in her own right – though her two big numbers, “Maybe This Time” and the “Life Is a Cabaret” finale, do show her mom’s influence. It helped that Cabaret was a story that her mom neither could nor would have been able to do under the Production Code, and she won an Academy Award for it – though TCM host Ben Mankiewicz’s claim that Judy Garland never won an Oscar isn’t quite true: she won the juvenile Academy Award in 1940 for her performance in The Wizard of Oz. (The juvenile Oscar was two-thirds the size of the full one – 12 inches tall instead of 18 – and it was given for a few years in the late 1930’s after the explosive success of Shirley Temple had made child actors a hot property in Hollywood. Mickey Rooney had won it for Boys Town the year before, and the year of The Wizard of Oz Rooney was nominated for the full Academy Award for his performance opposite Garland in Babes in Arms.) One of the most interesting anecdotes about Cabaret is that when she signed for the role Liza Minnelli had planned to pattern her performance after Marlene Dietrich – until she talked it over with her dad, and he said, “There were other women entertainers in Germany besides Dietrich.” “Like who?” Liza said. “Louise Brooks,” Vincente Minnelli told his daughter – and when she saw the film Pandora’s Box, which started the American-born Brooks as the “earth spirit” and prototype femme fatale Lulu, Liza decided to base her Sally Bowles on Brooks and have her hair black and cut in the famous helmet-like Brooks bob.

One person who didn’t like the film Cabaret was, ironically, Christopher Isherwood, the author of the stories on which it had been based. He didn’t like the way the film intimated that his character would be straight at the end – Isherwood lived most of his life as a relatively open Gay man – and he also didn’t like the way Sally Bowles was portrayed. Isherwood’s model for the character had been a 19-year-old British girl named Jane Ross, who, he said, had been only a mediocre entertainer – yet here she was being portrayed by Liza Minnelli at the height of her powers. (I had a similar problem with the 1957 film Pal Joey, in which the male lead, Joey, was supposed to be a mediocre entertainer, but he was played by Frank Sinatra at the height of his powers.) Ironically, the basic story had been filmed before in 1955 as a non-musical called I Am a Camera, which my late home-care client and roommate John Primavera and I watched together on TV one night in the 1980’s for the first time. He’d been barred from seeing it on its initial release because he was still a boy and it had been restricted to adults only, and he’d been looking forward to it. Alas, both he and I found it terrible, especially since Sally Bowles was played by Julie Harris – who, like the late Heath Ledger, was only good at playing tortured introverts (as in Member of the Wedding, East of Eden and her one-woman show as Emily Dickinson, The Belle of Amherst); she was as totally wrong for Sally Bowles as Liza Minnelli was triumphantly right!

The Phantom of 42nd Street (PRC, 1945)

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

Last night (Friday, September 6) my husband Charles and I managed to watch a rather interesting 1945 “B” movie from PRC, courtesy of a YouTube post: The Phantom of 42nd Street, a title which sounds like a mashup of The Phantom of the Opera and 42nd Street but which turned out to be the name of a decently accomplished vest-pocket mystery. It’s basically the old chestnut about the “jinxed” theatre and a number of murders taking place among people who used to work for it and/or produced plays there. The first murder victim is Jonathan Moore, a wealthy businessman who used to be financial manager for a repertoire (which the hero, played by Dave O’Brien, insists annoyingly on pronouncing “reper-twah”) company owned by his brother Cecil Moore (Alan Mowbray, turning in the kind of old-pro performance similar to Lionel Atwill’s in one of PRC’s best films, Lady in the Death House). Jonathan’s daughter Claudia (Kay Aldridge) has just made her theatrical debut in a play which is proclaimed as awful by just about all the New York critics, including the male lead, Tony Woolrich (Dave O’Brien) – did writers Milton Raison and Jack Harvey (the script was based on a novel they’d published jointly but Raison alone wrote the screenplay) deliberately name him after Alexander Woollcott? At least Tony had nice things to say about Claudia’s acting even though he wished she could have made her New York stage debut in a better play. It soon becomes apparent that he has a crush on her even though she’s more or less engaged to one of the other actors in her troupe, John Carraby (John Crawford). Two other people, including a watchman who used to be a sound tech for Cecil and Jonathan Moore, get murdered, and in all cases the killer leaves behind an insulting note referencing a part they played in one of the plays the Moore reper-twah company put on.

Jonathan Moore is murdered during the intermission of Claudia’s play and Tony’s typically irascible editor Peters (Milton Kibbee) chews him out for not having stayed there to report the crime so his paper, the New York Record, could have got the scoop. Tony teams up with his comic-relief sidekick, cabdriver Romeo (Frank Jenks) – whose real name was “Egbert” – and police lieutenant Walsh (Jack Mulhall, who’d come close to making the “A” list during the late silent era but whose career had nosedived with the advent of sound). Eventually they trace the murder back to Janis Buchanan (Edythe Elliott), who used to play female leads with the Moore reper-twah company and briefly was married to Cecil Moore, but they broke up and she ended up marrying someone else. Janis is actually Claudia Moore’s mother, though Claudia is ignorant of that fact (in most movies with this plot device, the ingénue knows who her mother is but the mystery is over who her father is!), and the killer turns out to be Janis’s estranged husband, though we never see him full face and neither imdb.com nor Wikipedia list the actor who plays him. (We only see him in long-shot with the typical black hooded costume, which was as de rigueur in 1930’s and early-1940’s mysteries as hoodies are in Lifetime films today!) The gimmick is that he went through plastic surgery so no one would recognize him (and presumably he spoke with a disguised voice as well and did such a good job of it no one recalled him aurally as well as visually!) and started knocking off the members of the cast and crew of Moore’s reper-twah company for reasons Raison and Harvey don’t make too clear.

Though the plot is pretty creaky – Charles was sure when I gave him the title that we’d seen it together before, though I suspect he was mixing it up with the 1929 film The Last Warning and its 1939 remake, The House of Fear (both considerably better movies about murders taking place in connection with the production of a play – The Phantom of 42nd Street is actually a quite appealing movie, mainly because of a good cast. Dave O’Brien is personable, reasonably attractive and a far better personality than most of the PRC leading men (remember that this was towards the end of World War II and PRC had to compete both with the major studios and the U.S. military for the services of decent-looking young men!); Kay Aldridge is solidly professional and we can easily believe the nice things O’Brien’s character has to say about her acting; and Alan Mowbray provides a neat bit of solid old-pro professionalism to the cast. The director is Al Herman, whom “B”-movie historian Don Miller ridiculed – he particularly objected to the way he had characters break down a door: instead of moving on its hinges it fell forward – but The Phantom of 42nd Street doesn’t have any scenes in which characters break down doors and Herman therefore didn’t have any occasion to use his signature shot. Herman actually turns in a capable job of directing, getting the most out of a reasonably talented if hardly great cast (though Edythe Elliott brings more true pathos to her grande dame turned boarding-house keeper character than it needed), and Janis’s living space features some of the hideous wallpaper that was virtually a PRC trademark. Though The Phantom of 42nd Street is hardly one of PRC’s truly great films (there are only five, ironically all made by foreign-born directors: Edgar G. Ulmer’s Bluebeard, Out of the Night and Detour, Frank Wisbar’s Strangler of the Swamp and Steve Sekely’s Lady in the Death House), it’s a pleasant enough time-filler and quite accomplished professionally.

Lost Boundaries (Louis DeRochemont Associates, RD-DR Productions, Film Classics, 1949)

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

Last night (Thursday, September 5) my husband Charles and I watched a fascinating if uneven film on Turner Classic Movies: Lost Boundaries, the (mostly) true story of a light-skinned African-American doctor who “passed” for white, along with his equally light-skinned African-American wife, for two decades in a small New England town until he was “outed” when he applied to serve as a Navy doctor during World War II and Naval Intelligence discovered he’d joined a “Negro” fraternity in medical school and canceled his officer’s commission. Lost Boundaries was made in 1949 as an independent production by producer Louis de Rochemont and director Alfred Werker, which suggests it was a 20th Century-Fox production in exile. According to the film’s Wikipedia page, it was actually developed at MGM, but it was canceled at the last minute (ironically, MGM at the time was making their own movie about anti-Black prejudice, Intruder in the Dust, which I haven’t seen in decades but I remember as quite good). Lost Boundaries was based on an article by William H. White in the Reader’s Digest in 1947 about the real-life couple, Dr. Albert C. Johnston and his wife Thyra, who settled first in Gorham, New Hampshire and then in the neighboring town of Keene (called “Keenham” in the film) and lived and practiced there for 20 years until they were finally “outed” as Black. The film project went through the usual meat grinder, with a plethora of writers – Charles Palmer (“adaptation”), Eugene Ling and Virginia Shaler (screenplay), and Ormonde de Kay, Jr. and Maxime Furlaud (additional dialogue). For the film the names of the central characters were changed to “Dr. Scott Mason Carter” (Mel Ferrer) and his wife “Marcia” (Beatrice Pearson), and the story actually tracks pretty closely to Dr. and Mrs. Johnston’s real lives until Dr. Carter graduates from medical school and, unable to find a Black hospital in which he can serve his internship (in the film he gets thrown out of an internship at a Black hospital in Georgia when he’s told that a new policy has been enacted saying the internship can only go to a Southerner), does it in a white hospital in New England. He figures that for less than a year he can “pass” as white, finish his internship and then work as an openly Black doctor in hospitals serving the Black community.

But fate throws him a curveball; while visiting New Hampshire he gets an emergency call to rescue and revive someone who’s just been taken seriously ill off the coast. Dr. Carter’s patient turns out to be a doctor himself, Walter Brackett (Morton Stevens), who’s been looking for a doctor to take over his late father’s practice in Keenham. After Dr. Carter saves the younger Brackett’s life, he virtually demands that Dr. Carter remain in Keenham and take over his late father’s practice, which he does. Dr. Carter and Marcia have already had a child, a son they named Charles Howard Carter (played as a teenager by Richard Hylton) after Dr. Carter’s (Black) teacher in medical school (Emory Richardson). As they’re living in their white identities in Keenham, the Carters have another child, daughter Shelly (Susan Douglas), and both Howard and Shelly grow up and reach their teen years without any idea that they and their parents are really Black. In fact, Shelly is so white-identified she’s picked up the racist prejudices of the townspeople, and in one scene after her brother Howard announces he’s going to bring his (visibly) Black friend Arthur “Art” Cooper (William Greaves, a fine young Black actor and singer – he does one number, “Guess I’m Through with Love,” in a quite good Billy Eckstine-esque baritone), after Shelly’s white boyfriend Andy (Carleton Carpenter in his first film) does a song of his own – she protests that the neighbors will think ill of them when they have a “coon” over as a house guest. Dr. Carter is shocked to hear his daughter use a racist epithet, and he chews her out and forbids her to say it again but still doesn’t explain why. When the truth about their racial heritage comes out, the two Carter children are freaked out – especially Howard, who runs away from home, ends up in Harlem and gets arrested by New York police (including a Black detective, “Dixie” Thompson, played by Canada Lee) for trying to break up a knife fight between two young Black men living in the building where he’s rented an apartment. It’s only when they receive word of their son’s arrest that the Carters finally find out where he is.

The film ends with a service at the local Episcopal church where the Rev. John Taylor (played by a real minister, Rev. Robert A. Dunn) preaches a sermon about tolerance, equality and how all of us are the same in God’s eyes. Lost Boundaries is a quite impressive film even though there are times it seems to be trying too hard, and it was criticized at the time for having all the light-skinned “Black” characters played by white actors. Fredi Washington, who’d achieved a brief flash-in-the-pan taste of stardom as Peola, the young Black girl “passing” for white in the 1934 film Imitation of Life, protested that De Rochemont should have looked for genuine light-skinned Black actors to play the four Carters instead of having white people do it. (Ironically, when Imitation of Life was remade in 1959, a white actress, Susan Kohner, played Washington’s old role.) It’s likely that one reason De Rochemont cast the film the way he did was to avoid having any hint of miscegenation on screen, though that didn’t stop the cities of Atlanta, Georgia and Memphis, Tennessee from banning the film in their communities. Ironically, Lost Boundaries ends with an announcement by the reverend preaching the anti-racist sermon that the U.S. Navy has just eliminated the requirement that its officers must be white; the film was actually released one year after President Harry Truman issued his famous and courageous executive order banning all racial discrimination in the U.S. military. If only Bill Clinton had had that same kind of courage in 1993 and delivered on his promise to end military discrimination against Queers instead of bringing on the horrors of “don’t ask, don’t tell”!

On the Loose (Hal Roach Studios, MGM, 1931)

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

After watching Lost Boundaries on Turner Classic Movies my husband Charles and I ended up seeing a 20-minute comedy short from 1931 by Hal Roach Studios called On the Loose, directed by Hal Roach himself from a script by H. M. “Beanie” Walker (one of the few silent-film title writers who graduated to doing audible dialogue for sound films) and part of the series of short films Roach produced for the female comedy team of Thelma Todd and ZaSu Pitts. (When Pitts left the series in 1933 she was replaced by Patsy Kelly, one of the low-keyed Lesbians in the film business.) While it’s hard for me to watch ZaSu Pitts in her stereotyped comedy roles and not regret that the demolition of Erich von Stroheim’s directorial career cost her her chance to become a big dramatic star (Stroheim cast her in three films, Greed, The Wedding March and Hello, Sister!, always in serious roles, and had Greed been issued in Rex Ingram’s three-hour cut and had MGM promoted it, it would have given her the kind of breakthrough Sybil and Norma Rae gave to Sally Field a half-century later), this is a good movie in which Pitts and Todd (using their real names the way Roach’s biggest stars, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, did) are tired that the only guys they can find to date on Saturday afternoons insist on taking them to Coney Island. On the Loose’s plot kicks off when a British upper-class twit called “Mr. Loder” and played by the young up-and-comer John Loder drives past them and splashes mud all over their nicest dresses. Loder and his comic-relief companion (Claud Allister) offer to buy them new dresses, which they do at a salon called “Pierre’s” run by a stereotypical queen played by, of all people, Billy Gilbert. Actually it’s nice to see him playing something other than his comic German typecasting, and he comes off like a mincing queen in his fashion shop as he helps women try out his dresses – only he reverts to a masculine “butch” voice when barking orders to unseen minions in his back room as he worries about how long they’re taking and that the delays might cost him his customers.

As part of their deal to help Thelma and ZaSu, Loder and Allister offer them a date the next Saturday – only, you guessed it, it’s to Coney Island, where the girls accept politely and move through the attractions in the fun house and on the roller coasters with grim determination. Though the imdb.com page for this film says it was shot entirely at the Hal Roach Studios in Culver City, California, the fun-house scenes seem way too elaborate to be soundstage sets and it seems likely to me they went to a real fun house (possibly Playland in San Francisco, which I remember from my own childhood) and shot there. Among the people they encounter are an obnoxious bully (Otto Fries) who keeps threatening Allister with bodily harm for messing with his girl (Dorothy Layton) – he isn’t, but the various devices inside the fun house keep mashing them together into unwanted bodily contact – and there’s a great scene in which Todd finally punches out the bully. There are also some neat scenes in which Loder is hopeless at the shooting gallery while Todd picks off the targets in rapid succession – and does it with a pistol instead of the regulation long gun – while Pitts similarly humiliates Allister at the darts booth. Ultimately the two return to their apartment, much the worse for wear, only two men show up knocking at their door – and it’s Laurel and Hardy, making an oddball cameo appearance, offering to take them out to, you guessed it, Coney Island. The girls respond by throwing the various knickknacks they’ve won as prizes on previous visits to the island at them, and Laurel and Hardy beat a hasty retreat from the premises. An imdb.com “Trivia” page notes that Laurel and Hardy are never shown in the same frame as Todd and Pitts – obviously they shot their sequence at their own convenience with doubles throwing the bric-a-brac at them – but it was still a charming little comedy and quite amusing in a low-keyed way.

Dark Mountain (Pine-Thomas Productions, Paramount, 1944)

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

Last night (Wednesday, September 4) I looked on YouTube for a movie that would be an hour or less in length so my husband Charles and I could watch it while waiting for Stephen Colbert’s show to be on. We found it in Dark Mountain, a 1944 “B” from William Pine and William Thomas, two independent producers to whom Paramount subcontracted their “B” output in the 1940’s. It was directed by William Berke (who began his career making truly independent films, got picked up by Paramount and RKO for “B” work, did series television in the 1950’s and then returned to the indies, making the first two films based on Ed McBain’s 97th Precinct novels, Cop Hater and The Mugger, before dying relatively young at 54) and was written by Maxwell Shane based on an “original” (quotes definitely merited!) story by Paul Franklin and Charles Royal. It co-stars Robert Lowery (four years before he became the screen’s second Batman in the 1948 Columbia serial Batman and Robin) as Don Bradley, a U.S. Forest Ranger who just has got a promotion and a furlough, on which he intends to marry his long-time love interest Kay (Ellen Drew). The movie begins with a spectacular scene of a forest fire – undoubtedly stock footage from one or more Paramount newsreels, but still genuinely exciting – in which he defies his superior’s direct orders and sets out for a barn in the middle of the fire zone to rescue “Joe” and “Susie,” who turn out to be not people, but horses. He later explains that he’s known them all his life, along with Kay, with whom he’s grown up over the years and suddenly decided once puberty kicked in that he wanted her as a lover and a wife. Alas, though she considers him a good friend, she doesn’t feel “that way” about him. Instead she’s accepted the marriage proposal of Steve Downey (Regis Toomey), and when Don shows up at Kay’s apartment intending to pop the question, he runs into Steve and has the predictably embarrassed reaction that the question had already got popped.

Steve and Kay plan an elaborate dinner “out” so Steve can meet Kay’s relatives, and Steve invites Don to come along as the proverbial good sport – only Don turns down the invitation but shows up at the restaurant anyway and looks on from behind. While they’re at the restaurant Steve boasts to Kay’s family that he can get them a supply of radio tubes they can then sell to customers in need of them – which immediately made my husband Charles suspect that Steve was going to turn out to be a black marketeer. In fact Steve is considerably worse than that; he’s an out-and-out gangster who stages heists and steals furs, bolts of cloth and other items which he then resells from a deceptively legitimate-looking store. When an undercover cop shows up at Steve’s warehouse posing as a textile buyer, as soon as the cop identifies himself, shows his badge and tries to arrest Steve, two of his henchmen pitch a large trunk on top of him, crushing him to death. Later on Steve coldly shoots another member of his gang whom he suspects is going to rat him out to the police. Steve’s carefully constructed identity first started unraveling at the restaurant, where gang member Whitey (Elisha Cook, Jr. at his oiliest, playing much the same sort of role he did in his two most memorable movies, The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep) shows up and reports to him that one of the shipments they hijacked got hijacked in turn by a rival gang. Don notices big-time that Steve is a crook – and so does Kay, who determines to leave him. Only Steve insists that he’s not going to let her go, and instead he’s going to flee the state (the writers aren’t all that clear as to where this story takes place, though they throw out a few contradictory hints, including referencing Louisiana and Arkansas as places Steve might flee to even though the terrain looks like the West or northern Midwest rather than the South) and then send for her to join him when the heat dies down.

Don offers to hide Kay out in a deserted mountain cabin whose owners aren’t going to return for months, but the very night he installs her in the cabin and promises to be back in the morning with food, Steve shows up. He explains that he didn’t flee the state after all, but he’s going to stay there and carefully conceal himself from Don in hopes of waiting Don and the cops out and then taking Kay with him, by force if necessary. Don spends most of his time in an observation tower with his comic-relief sidekick Willie Dinsmire (Eddie Quillan), who’s knitting a sweater for his wife, who’s still in the Army on a tank crew in North Africa (at least that’s what I think the writing committee said). Only Don figures out what’s going on when he finds cork-tipped cigarette butts outside the cabin – Kay smokes, of course (almost no adult in a 1944 movie doesn’t smoke!), but not ones with cork tips – and notices that Kay’s going through the food he brings her so fast it seems like she has two people there. Where I assumed this was going was that there’d be another forest fire that would take out the inconvenient Steve and leave our two original lovebirds to get back together, especially since Don narrates a long Native legend about lightning in the area symbolizing someone’s imminent death. Instead, the deus ex machina that brings Don and Kay back together is three cases of dynamite (labeled “Hercules” brand, yet another contradictory clue as to this film’s geography, since as Charles pointed out that was the name of a California-based explosives company and also the name of the company town they set up for their workers). They’re in the back of Don’s Forest Service station wagon and it’s not clear what he’s using them for – though the obvious guess was to create firebreaks in case another wildfire starts and give the Forest Service people a chance to contain the blaze.

Steve kidnaps Kay, steals the Forest Service wagon containing the dynamite, and forces her to come with him; Don and Willie give chase, and Willie’s dog leaps into the back of Steve’s van and attacks him when he’s trying to drive. Ultimately the dog leaps out of the car, Kay is thrown from it, and just then Steve loses control and crashes into a tree, exploding the dynamite. Don and Kay get back together again, and of course there’s no longer any impediment to them marrying now that Kay’s a widow. Dark Mountain was listed on YouTube as a film noir, which it isn’t either thematically or visually: the good guys are 100 percent good, the bad guys 100 percent bad, there’s no femme fatale to lure the innocent hero into destruction or disgrace, and most of it takes place either outdoors or in non-shadowy, well-lit interiors. It’s also quite entertaining even though it’s one of those movies where you pretty much know everything that’s going to happen at least a reel or two before it does, and for a 1944 “B” it’s reasonably well acted. Robert Lowery is properly self-righteous as the hero, and there were times I was tempted to joke, “If I were Batman I could deal with this!” But his co-stars are quite good, actually: Ellen Drew is excellent at registering shock at discovering her husband’s real nature, and Regis Toomey’s transformation from nice guy to hardened criminal is effective even though, given a running time of less than an hour, it happens too quickly to be believable. Though it suffers from a lack of ambiguity, and a 90-minute running time could have given Berke and the writers more of a chance to develop the characters’ conflicts, both external and internal, more than they did, Dark Mountain still works surprisingly well on its own terms – and you’ll never believe what happens to that sweater Willie the comic-relief sidekick has spent the entire movie knitting for his wife, whom we never see!