Inside "High Noon" Revisited (Transmultimedia Entertainment, American Public Television, 2002, revised 2022)

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

Last night (Tuesday, October 29) I watched a couple of really interesting shows on KPBS, including a 2022 documentary called Inside “High Noon” Revisited (a rehash of a similar documentary, Inside “High Noon,” released in 2002) and a Frontline episode called “American Voices 2024.” Inside “High Noon” Revisited was a fascinating program on the making of the classic 1952 Hollywood Western High Noon, and since by the time the film was made almost all the principals directly involved in it were dead, director John Mulholland interviewed their children: Gary Cooper’s daughter Maria Cooper Janis (she got the “Janis” from marrying a man I’ve heard of in a rather different context: Byron Janis, classical pianist until arthritis in his hands made it almost impossible for him to play); director Fred Zinnemann’s son Tim; screenwriter Carl Foreman’s son Jonathan (who spoke with a British accent, reflecting the fact that Foreman was caught up in the Hollywood blacklist and had to move to Britain to continue his career in films; he and fellow blacklistee Michael Wilson co-wrote the 1957 hit film and Academy Award winner The Bridge on the River Kwai, though because of the blacklist they couldn’t be credited and instead the writing credit went to Pierre Boulle, author of the source novel, who because he didn’t speak English couldn’t have written, unaided, the script for an English-language movie); and Grace Kelly’s son Prince Albert of Monaco. The film also featured interviews with former President Bill Clinton, one of several U.S. Presidents (along with Dwight Eisenhower) who’ve named this as their all-time favorite film.

The way Mulholland’s narration, delivered by actor Matthew Rhys, describes it, High Noon was always one step ahead of the blacklist: the original director, Joseph Losey, had to give up the project when he was named as a Communist in front of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) and, like Foreman, had to flee to Britain to continue his career. The subsequent director, Fred Zinnemann, had been a rising star in the German film industry in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s until he – like so many other great German filmmakers, including Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder and Robert Siodmak – was forced into exile when the Nazis took power in 1933. Zinnemann got his start as a shorts director at MGM after having apprenticed with the great documentarian Robert Flaherty, and to my knowledge he remains the only director who’s won Academy Awards for both shorts (That Mothers Might Live, a vest-pocket documentary from 1938 described on imdb.com as “[t]he story of Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, a pioneer in medical hygiene who paid the price from colleagues who refused to believe him”; and Benjy, 1952) and features (From Here to Eternity, 1953; A Man for All Seasons, 1966). He directed the film debuts of Montgomery Clift (The Search, 1948 – though Clift had already filmed Red River for director Howard Hawks in 1946 but its release had been delayed for two years), Marlon Brando (The Men, 1950, like High Noon a Stanley Kramer production), and Meryl Streep (Julia, 1977). Producer Stanley Kramer was already known for “problem” films that took on social issues, albeit from a moderately liberal rather than a truly radical perspective; he’d released Home of the Brave (1949), written by Foreman and directed by Mark Robson, about an African-American servicemember dealing with racism. Kramer, Zinnemann and Foreman had considerable difficulty casting the lead male role, Marshal Will Kane, who tries desperately to raise a posse among the townspeople to stop outlaw Frank Miller (Ian McDonald) from coming back to the small town of Hadleyville from which Kane and a similar posse successfully drove him five years earlier.

Contrary to a popular legend, the role was not offered to John Wayne (who as president of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals was a strong supporter of the blacklist and, according to some accounts, had an up-or-down veto power over whether people got blacklisted or not), but it was offered to Henry Fonda, Charlton Heston, and Gregory Peck (who turned it down because he thought it was too similar to a part he’d played in The Gunfighter in 1950; he later called that the biggest career mistake he’d ever made). High Noon had a budget of just $750,000, and on the eve of shooting they were still $250,000 short – until a California rancher offered to put up the rest of the money, but only if they got Gary Cooper for the lead. Cooper would go on to deliver an iconic performance and win his second Academy Award for the part – and, ironically, his first Academy Award, for Sergeant York (1941), was also for a role in which an outsider forced him on the producers. In that case, the outsider was Sergeant Alvin C. York himself, whose contract with Warner Bros. for the film rights to his life story gave him approval of the actor who would play him – and he made it clear to the studio that Gary Cooper was the only actor he would approve. Kramer and Zinnemann were a bit anxious about having to approach Cooper because he, too, had been a supporter of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, but he liked the script and got along with Foreman so well that the two started a production company to make more films together – only the blacklist intervened once again and Cooper was told that, despite his lifelong Republican Party credentials, he’d be blacklisted himself if he stayed in business with Foreman. Foreman was subpoenaed by HUAC during the third week of the four-week shoot, and he decided neither to take the Fifth Amendment nor to feed the blacklist any more names of suspected Communists. He knew full well that would be the end of his career in Hollywood, and Kramer was pressured to take Foreman’s name off the credits – which, to his credit, he refused to do.

Inside High Noon Revisited also endorsed a revisionist view of the movie, presented by Don Graham in an article called The Women of High Noon, which argues that the two central female characters, Kane’s new wife Amy Fowler (Grace Kelly in her first major role) and saloon owner Helen Ramírez (Katy Jurado in her first starring role in English), both have far more “agency” (to use the modern term) than most women in Westerns. The film cites the 1939 Destry Rides Again as an example of how morally “loose” women were usually used in Westerns – Marlene Dietrich’s saloon singer sacrifices her life to save Tom Destry (James Stewart) so he can stay with his nice Anglo wife (Irene Hervey). I haven’t seen High Noon since 2005, and though I liked the film I found faults with it, including Kelly’s icy performance (her only truly great movies were her three for Alfred Hitchcock – Dial “M” for Murder, Rear Window and To Catch a Thief) and the whole preposterous ending in which Will Kane successfully kills Frank Miller and his two henchmen with help only from Amy, who despite her Quaker beliefs realizes she has to shoot one of the bad guys in the back to save her husband’s life. (Cooper had already made a similar character transformation in Sergeant York and would do so again in Friendly Persuasion.) One thing I’d forgotten about High Noon is it was shot without the dramatic red-filter effects that were almost de rigueur for major-studio black-and-white Westerns of the time. Instead Zinnemann and cinematographer Floyd Crosby, like Zinnemann a former associate of Robert Flaherty and father of rock musician David Crosby, shot it to look like the Civil War-era photos of Matthew Brady and Alexander Gardner, aided by the haze that enveloped all their outdoor locations from the as-yet uncontrolled California smog.

The film also mentions that John Wayne and director Howard Hawks intended Rio Bravo (1959) as an “answer” movie to High Noon; aside from objecting to its veiled but unmistakable anti-blacklisting politics (Carl Foreman responded to his own HUAC subpoena by “tweaking” the script to reinforce its anti-blacklisting message), Hawks made the rational objection that the Hadleyville townspeople would only have got in the way of Will Kane as he fought off the baddies and he needed professional gunmen for his posse. High Noon and this documentary about it are both unexpectedly politically relevant now on the eve of the 2024 Presidential election that may well return Donald Trump to the White House. Trump has not only called for a return to the political climate of fear and terror that gripped Hollywood – including threatening the licenses of ABC, CBS and at least part of NBC and leading the billionaire publishers of the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times to pull their papers’ editorial staff’s planned endorsements of Kamala Harris for President in what Yale professor Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny, calls “anticipatory obedience” – he has a personal one-degree-of-separation connection to it. His favorite attorney, the late Roy Cohn, had previously been chief of staff to Senator Joe McCarthy (R-Wisconsin) in the early 1950’s, and though Cohn was disbarred in 1986 and died of complications from AIDS a year later (Cohn was both a fierce opponent of the Queer community and a closeted Gay man, which led Gay playwright Tony Kushner to make him the principal villain of his play Angels in America). Trump has repeatedly asked his aides during his various legal troubles, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?”

PBS FRONTLINE: "American Voices 2024" (Five O'Clock Films, Mike Shum Productions, WGBH Educational Foundation, PBS, aired October 29, 2024)

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

After the documentary on High Noon, KPBS showed a Frontline presentation called “American Voices 2024,” which had an interesting derivation. The original “American Voices: A Nation in Turmoil” was made by filmmakers and journalists Mike Shum, Qinling Li and Arthur Nazaryan and shown just before the 2020 election. The 2020 version focused on the COVID-19 pandemic; the surge of “Black Lives Matter” protests following the murder of unarmed African-American George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin; and the Presidential election between then-incumbent Donald Trump and current President Joe Biden. According to Mike Shum (who’s credited as director, while Li and Nazaryan are two of the four credited producers), the 2024 incarnation came about as a result of a conversation with two other members of the team in which they said, “[W]hat if we revisited each of the people we had been following in 2020 for this coming election? And, for me at least, it was a natural ‘yes.’ There was a natural curiosity about where everyone was at. To be able to engage with them in this capacity was something that I was very much interested in doing. It just flows with the mission and the mandate that we started with of creating this wider tapestry of individuals across the country facing a collective unknown.”

The team had recruited a fascinatingly diverse group of people in various locations for the 2020 original, including Cary K. Gordon, senior pastor of the Cornerstone World Outreach mega-church in Sioux City, Iowa; Bryant Moore, African-American barber from Portland, Oregon; Rod and Rosie Borba, co-owners of a flower shop in Cool, California; Carran Lewis, a Black woman community activist from North Chesterfield, Virginia; Amy Garner from Utah, whose brother committed suicide in the early days of COVID-19; Dr. Christine Eady Mann, a family practitioner in Cedar Park, Texas; Mayra Ramirez from Chicago, an early victim of COVID-19 who went through two lung transplants in an effort to keep her alive; Tayo Daniel, Black activist from South Minneapolis, Minnesota, who helped organize protests against the police over the George Floyd killing; Royce White, an African-American pro-Trump U.S. Senate candidate in Minnesota; Mark Curtis, construction company owner and father of four in Richmond, Virginia; and Jason Tolentino and his Asian-born wife Jaime, co-owners of a beauty parlor in Oakland, California. If there’s a message in this show, it’s that the divisions within America’s electorate don’t always shake out the way you’d think they would. Rosie Borba said in 2020 that her feeling about the Black Lives Matter movement was, “All lives matter. Not just Black, not pink, white or purple. It's not just one race.” “All lives matter” had become a talking point among American Rightists who wanted to diminish the significance of centuries of slavery, segregation and violence against African-Americans. But Rosie immediately insisted that that wasn’t her intent at all; she added, “I think it's wrong, basically, what the officer did. I think he should pay a price for what he did. But I look back in history. I had a great-great-grandfather that helped with the slaves. He helped run the Underground Railroad. He was ambushed by white people who felt the slaves should stay slaves. So when they sit there and say every white person is racist or bad, I'm not racist. I'm not bad. I'm a human being. I respect them, I expect to be respected back.”

Rosie Barba was also expressing doubts about Joe Biden’s age in 2020, before he took office and well before his disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump on June 27, 2024 that led to a groundswell of opposition within the Democratic Party that ultimately drove him from the Presidential race four weeks later. (It still strikes me as odd that people dwell on Biden’s age but not on Trump’s; Trump is just three years younger and his increasingly incoherent public statements are raising doubts in the reality-based community about his level of cognition and sanity.) Mark Curtis, who in many ways was the most interesting of their interviewees, is shown becoming gradually more disillusioned with America’s political system and the choices it offers. In 2024 he decided to vote for the Libertarian Party candidate rather than either Trump or Biden and said, “I'm tired of people voting for the lesser of two evils—voting Democrat because it's not Trump or voting Republican because it's not Biden. Wouldn't really matter who got into office, I feel like they're one and the same. I think our culture’s going to stay divided. The division that has been created here recently is something that we've regressed to that’s going to take generations to recover. I think our culture is going to be horribly scarred by this. And I don’t know what it’s going to be blamed on in the end or how it's going to be spun, but I think that our culture on the whole has gone down a deep, dark hole.” Pastor Cary Gordon, who in 2020 was sounding off against “Marxists” and their growing influence in American politics, also decided that he could not in good conscience vote for either Biden or Trump. “I will sleep good tonight because someday, as a Christian, I believe Christ will return and all wrongs will be righted and justice will prevail,” Gordon told his parishioners. “And my job is to keep speaking the truth as a minister.” The Tolentinos were ambiguous as to whom they voted for in 2020; Jason said, “I would rather not say who I voted for. I just want everything to come back to normal, that's all I'm praying for, really. People will be surprised, but I don't want to say who I voted for.” Jaime said, “I just vote for myself. Or I vote for the lady. No, I vote for the lady! I don't know who she is, but it seems like she's the only lady, so I vote for the lady. I vote for the woman!” – which led me to guess that in 2020 Jason voted for Trump and Jaime for Biden because he’d put Kamala Harris on his ticket.

Dr. Christine Mann, who seemed to have been radicalized by the Right-wing opposition to common-sense public-health measures to deal with COVID-19, said her first choice for President in 2020 had been Kamala Harris, “who thankfully is the vice presidential candidate, soon to be the vice president.” In 2024 she’s shown walking her precinct for the Harris-Walz ticket and encountering scads of Trump yard signs as she goes through her neighborhood. Mark Curtis is shown in a video with his son Hudson, who’d just joined Junior ROTC, but his pride in his son is tempered by his growing disillusionment with politics in general. “There's a bit of inner turmoil with Hudson being in the JROTC program as well as my distrust in the government,” Curtis said. “I love the values that he's going to learn going through this program, as well as the values that he could be taught in the military. I think he wants to follow in the footsteps of people who've done great things for our country, for our freedoms. I very much worry that he has great potential of being in the military and being pulled into an endless war that costs American lives, costs billions of American dollars, and to what gain?” The filmmakers organized a watch party with some of the interviewees for the September 10, 2024 debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, and when Trump made his now-infamous statement about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio – “They’re eating the dogs. The people that came in, they're eating the pets. They're eating – They're eating the pets of the people that live there” – Black activist Tayo Daniel said, “Now, that’s bullshit.” Jason Tolentino said, “I just can’t believe he said that thing about the dogs. [Laughs] They’re eating dogs. I don't know what to believe, honestly, on that one.”

At the same time, Mark Curtis expressed outrage at Harris’s proposals for tax credits for new mothers and small-business startups, “So we're giving away more money,” he said. “When do I get that $50,000 for having a small business?” When Trump made his bizarre claim that “under Roe v. Wade you could do abortions in the seventh month, the eighth month, the ninth month and probably after birth,” Dr. Mann said, “Why is he such a liar?” And when Harris said that “people start leaving [Trump’s] rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom,” Amy Garner’s husband Matthew said, “That’s rich for her to say that,” which made me wonder if he’s one of the Right-wing space cases who believes the photos of Harris’s rallies were created with artificial intelligence. As I’ve been pointing out regularly in my journal, the statement Lawrence O’Donnell keeps quoting from his former boss, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-New York), that “everyone’s entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own set of facts,” is no longer true. Today the media landscape is so fragmented that everyone is entitled to their own set of facts. Those of us on the Left side of the political spectrum flock to media outlets like MS-NBC (while lamenting that as a part of the corporate media, it isn’t and can’t be even remotely as progressive as we’d like), while people on the Right watch Fox News or even more radical-Right Web sites like Newsmax and One America News. And the basically decent people who were interviewed for American Voices both in 2020 and 2024 – the only people who didn’t make the cut were Mayra Ramirez, who died of long-term complications from COVID-19 in 2022, and Rod and Rosie Borba; since Rod died in 2023, Rosie sold their flower shop and moved to parts unknown – are caught in the middle and lament that their own goals for themselves and their society don’t always fit neatly into the prescribed “Left” and “Right” categories or the choices America’s increasingly dysfunctional political system gives them for who should lead the nation.

Les Girls (Sol C. Siegel Productions, MGM, 1957)

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

I ran my husband Charles a 1957 MGM musical, Les Girls, a rather frustrating film indeed because, while it’s entertaining enough on its own terms, it’s a striking comedown from the best work of its highly talented creators: director George Cukor, star Gene Kelly (in his last musical for MGM) and songwriter Cole Porter (who, according to Clive Hirschhorn, “was extremely ill at the time and needed the invaluable assistance of Saul Chaplin to enable him to complete the score”). The plot came from a novel by Vera Caspary (also known for her association with a far better film, Laura) adapted by John Patrick (a mediocre screenwriter whose characters tend all too often to sound like their lines were written for greeting cards) and featuring Kelly as an American entertainer holding forth in 1949 Paris (not only returning to the time and place of An American in Paris but even reusing some of the same sets!) with the titular characters forming the three main dancers of his backup group, American Joy (Mitzi Gaynor), French Angèle (Taina Elg) and British Wren (Kay Kendall).

The film is framed by a series of sequences taking place in 1957 London, involving a libel suit filed by Angèle against Wren over her recently published memoirs — and, ironically, the framing scenes feature two of the best actors in the film, Henry Daniell as the judge and Patrick Macnee (later Steed in the original Avengers) as Angèle’s attorney. The central action is a Rashomon-like sequence of flashbacks detailing the history of “Les Girls” (that stupid title really annoys me) from the differing points of view of Wren, Angéle and Barry (Kelly), with Joy somewhat along for the ride — though it’s made clear at the end that she ended up with Barry despite the alleged affairs between him and the other “Girls.” The Porter songs are undistinguished — nothing from this score has entered the standard book (whereas several of the songs from High Society, a score he’d written the year before for another Patrick-scripted MGM musical with Sol C. Siegel as producer, have) — and though there’s quite a lot of singing and dancing only two numbers really stand out: an instrumental ballet in which Kelly and Elg tie each other up with ropes (S/M: The Musical!) and a final sequence spoofing the 1953 movie The Wild One, with Kelly in the Brando role as the leader of a motorcycle gang and Gaynor (who elsewhere in the movie is as flat and affect-less as usual — she was a talented singer and dancer but had utterly no ability to create a character and she’s one of the big reasons the film of South Pacific is far less fun than it should have been) as the waitress he terrorizes.

I remember seeing this film in my childhood but I remembered nothing about it (my affection for MGM musicals in general and Gene Kelly in particular would come later), and seeing it now, despite some strengths (notably a sharply edged comic performance from Kendall and absolutely gorgeous cinematography from the young-ish Robert Surtees) it seems to lumber along well-trod paths and creak to its destination —a fallback to traditional musical formulas after the nervy brilliance of It’s Always Fair Weather and a far less stylish film than Silk Stockings, also based on a Porter score (but at least most of that one had seen service previously in a stage version) and also made at MGM in CinemaScope in 1957 but with more charismatic stars (Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse), a far more stylish director (Rouben Mamoulian) and a stronger plot (derived from the Garbo/Lubitsch/Wilder classic Ninotchka). — 5/9/03

•••••

Last night (Monday, October 28) at 9 p.m. I watched a film on Turner Classic Movies, a 1957 Gene Kelly musical from MGM called Les Girls (a bilingual title that’s always irritated me) whose credits both in front of and behind the camera promised a lot more than the film delivered. I’d seen it before on May 8, 2003 and been rather disappointed by it, but this time it seemed even worse. Les Girls was directed by George Cukor and choreographed by Jack Cole (TCM was showing it last night as a tribute to him). The songs were by Cole Porter (his next-to-last project ever; the only score he’d do after this was for the TV-movie version of Aladdin for the DuPont Show of the Month in 1958), though according to Clive Hirschhorn in his book The Hollywood Musical he was ill through much of this period and Saul Chaplin, assigned to write the background music for the film, had to help with the songs as well. The stars were Gene Kelly, Mitzi Gaynor, Kay Kendall and a Finnish ballerina and screen newcomer named Taina Elg. Elg plays a Frenchwoman, but this was during the period in which Hollywood producers (including Sol C. Siegel, who made this film) thought one foreign accent was as good as another. Actually the part was intended for Leslie Caron, who was genuinely French, but Caron was busy preparing for Gigi and Gaynor took over a role originally intended for Cyd Charisse, who was busy making Silk Stockings with Fred Astaire – also with songs by Cole Porter, though Silk Stockings had previously been a stage musical and Astaire, producer Arthur Freed and director Rouben Mamoulian only needed two new songs from him for the film. Astaire wrote Freed a letter during the preparations for both films and complained Porter didn’t want to talk to him about Silk Stockings because “[h]e did nothing but play me songs for Les Girls. … Cole has a way of losing interest in the revivals of the vehicles he has already done on the stage.”

Les Girls began as a story by Vera Caspary, an otherwise obscure author who “made her bones” in the film business by supplying the story for Laura, a mordant quasi-noir about a hard-bitten police detective (Dana Andrews) who falls in love with the woman whose murder he’s investigating, only to have her show up alive, well and played infectiously by Gene Tierney. Les Girls kicks off with a scene in a British courtroom in which former French dancer Angèle Ducros (Taina Elg) is suing British noblewoman Lady Sybil Wren (Kay Kendall, in a marvelous performance that’s by far the best thing in this movie; alas, she was already ill with the leukemia that would take her life in two years) for libel over a memoir she just published about her days in a dance troupe called “Les Girls” in 1949. “Les Girls” were three young women sidekicks for American dancer Barry Nichols (Gene Kelly), and the third “girl” was American Joanne “Joy” Henderson (Mitzi Gaynor, as usual a highly talented singer and dancer but with almost no star charisma). Screenwriter John Patrick – of whom I once asked, while my then-roommate and a friend of ours were watching the film Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing, which he wrote, “Was the screenwriter for this film previously employed by a greeting-card company?” – adopted the Rashomon gimmick of having the “Les Girls” flashback told first from Sybil’s point of view, then from Angèle’s, and finally from Barry’s after Barry arrives in London from Los Angeles, where he’s running a chain of orange-juice stores once his doctors advised him to retire from dancing.

The story is a singularly dull tale of Barry’s travels round Europe with his dance troupe and the desire of Sybil and Angèle to continue their relationships with their fiancées despite Barry’s hard-core attitude against “complications.” Sybil’s fiancé is a British nobleman named Sir Gerald Wren (Leslie Phillips, the sort of high-born British actor who got cast in roles like this because David Niven was unavailable and he was apparently one of the next actors in line for that “type”) and Angèle’s is a highly strung Frenchman, Pierre Ducros (Jacques Bergerac), who’s pretty blank as a character except for the typical male-chauvinist demand that “his” woman not work for a living. One interesting thing about Les Girls is that the callous way Barry Nichols treats “Les Girls” tallies with the stories that have begun to trickle out about Gene Kelly being a tough taskmaster and hard to work with from his demands. All three plot lines end in an alleged suicide attempt by one of “Les Girls” over Barry’s aberrant affections, since at different times Barry romanced all three women in his act, though to utterly no one’s surprise it’s Joanne he ended up with (she’s in his car, waiting for him, as he leaves court following his testimony). The film ends with Barry’s version of the story, in which the “suicide attempt” turns out to be an accident – a ruptured break in a gas line that knocked out both Sybil and Angèle – and Sybil dismisses her libel suit.

The framing scenes of the trial are actually some of the best things in the movie, courtesy of two great performances by old-line British actors: Henry Daniell as the judge in the case (just 12 years after he’d played super-villain Professor Moriarty in The Woman in Green, with Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson – and I had the odd fantasy of someone stumbling into the courtroom and wondering, “How the hell did Professor Moriarty become a judge?”) and Patrick Macnee as the prosecutor (four years before he began his breakthrough role as the sidekick of Diana Rigg’s super-spy in the British TV series The Avengers). Cole Porter’s songs are O.K. rather than great; they’re mostly rehashes of things he’d done better before (and the best song of Porter’s in the movie is actually “Be a Clown,” heard only instrumentally, from his score for a previous Gene Kelly musical, The Pirate). There’s a nice romantic duet called “Ça, C’est l’Amour” and an O.K. patter song called “You’re Just Too, Too” that’s a duet for Kelly and Kendall but one Porter had done much more effectively in songs like “C’est Magnifique” and “Friendship” as well as well-known masterpieces like “You’re the Top.”

Jack Cole’s choreography is explosive but a little too over-the-top; the best numbers are the opening title song, in which Kelly and “Les Girls” are backed by a chorus of eight Black women (remember that Kelly had previously insisted on dancing on screen with The Nicholas Brothers in The Pirate, so it’s not that surprising to see him with a Black chorus line), and the one number Kelly choreographed himself, “Why Am I So Gone (About That Gal)?,” a musical parody of the 1953 film The Wild One (produced by Stanley Kramer, directed by Laslo Benedek, written by John Paxton and starring Marlon Brando as the head of a motorcycle gang that terrorizes a small town). There’s also a great number in which Kelly plays a fly trapped in a spider’s web and he and Elg tie each other up with ropes (the last time I saw this I wrote, “S/M: The Musical!”), which gets repeated later in a version in which Kelly’s stage crew screws up and trips him with the ropes. George Cukor’s direction hardly seems to exist; much of the film was shot on “Paris” sets left over from An American in Paris, and a) looks it and b) just reminds us of how much more stylish that film was and how much better directed (by Vincente Minnelli). Les Girls was Gene Kelly’s last film as an MGM contractee and his last musical there until both he and Fred Astaire appeared in the 1974 compilation documentary That’s Entertainment! and narrated quite moving tributes to each other. It was also Cole Porter’s next-to-last project just before his long-standing leg injuries became gangrenous, leading to his legs being amputated, which ended his creative career. – 10/29/24

Mormon Mom Gone Wrong: The Ruby Franke Story (Pender Productions, Lifetime, 2024)

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

Last night (Sunday, October 27) my husband Charles and I watched a Lifetime movie called Mormon Mom Gone Wrong: The Ruby Franke Story. Directed effectively by Kevin Fair from a script by Alyson Evans and Steve Kornacki (who may or may not be the same Steve Kornacki as the khaki-clad hottie who does election poll analysis for MS-NBC; his imdb.com page is ambiguous), Mormon Mom Gone Wrong is the more-or-less true-life story of Ruby Franke (Emilie Ullerup) who when the show begins is more or less happily married to Kevin Franke (Josh Blacker; a hunky bear-type) and the mother of six children: Shari (Savannah Miller), Chad (cute twink Nolen Dubuc), Abby (Annaston Munro), Julie (Farrah Love Hahn), Russell (Rowan McInnis), and Eve (Amara Sanoy). When the show starts Ruby is the host of a video blog (“vlog”) called 8 Passengers about how wonderful her family is, though Chad is showing signs of typical teenage rebellion, hanging out in his room when the rest of the Frankes are shooting a dinner sequence for the blog and presenting themselves as one big happy family. Then Ruby starts falling under the influence of Jodi Hillebrandt (Heather Locklear, a rare example of an actor in a leading role in a Lifetime movie whom I’ve actually heard of from elsewhere), a credentialed child therapist who runs a center called ConneXions and who claims to be in direct communication with God. Jodi is depicted as outright crazy; I’m guessing she was schizophrenic, though I’m not an expert on mental illness and I could be wrong about that. Jodi gradually takes over Ruby’s life, at one point moving into the Frankes’ home after she gives Ruby a cock-and-bull story about being forced to move out of her own house due to an abusive husband.

Jodi decides that at least some of the Franke children are possessed by Satan, and she does the whole-nine-yards cult brainwashing program on Ruby, including getting her to close out all her bank accounts and take the money in cash, and announcing plans to buy a ranch in Arizona where she will set a combination counseling seminar and boot camp for people with wayward children. An African-American Mormon named Braxton Young (Marc-Anthony Massiah) tries to warn Kevin Franke about the extent of Jodi’s evil and craziness, saying that he and his wife took Jodi in and it wrecked their marriage. Among the demands Jodi makes of Kevin are first an “in-house separation” in which he has to stay in certain parts of their house while Ruby has the rest to herself (a plot device used as long ago as 1915 in Alice Guy-Blaché’s comedy short A House Divided) and then a full separation in which Jodi and Ruby casually and cruelly order Kevin out of his own home. Jodi imposes a “tough love” regimen on the kids (aside from Shari, who luckily is away at college when all this is happening), including tying up Russell – literally – and forcing him to stand outside for hours barefoot in the heat of a Utah summer. When Shari returns home from school during a summer break, she’s shocked at the change in Ruby and how she and Jodi are treating her siblings, including leaving them at home alone for a week without any food. Shari reports them to the police, but absent a search warrant or so-called “exigent circumstances” (i.e., seeing a crime in progress through the windows which the cops could claim they had to stop) the police can’t do anything unless Ruby lets them in – which Ruby, under Jodi’s instructions, won’t.

Ultimately the police find Russell standing barefoot on the Frankes’ back porch, and that’s enough of an “exigent circumstance” for the cops to break in and arrest both Jodi and Ruby for child endangerment. Ruby cuts a plea deal with the prosecutors in exchange for testimony against Jodi, but they don’t need her because Jodi also pleads guilty. Ruby is sentenced to four consecutive sentences of one to 15 years; according to the Wikipedia page on her, she asked that the sentences be consecutive because under Utah law she could stand a chance of being released after four years. Kevin files for divorce from Ruby after she’s busted. The Wikipedia page also states that Shari Franke was against this movie being made because “they were not contacted about the movie, none of the proceeds from the movie would go to the younger siblings in question, and that releasing the film would only hurt the victims more than they already were hurt beforehand.” Overall, Mormon Mom Gone Wrong is a quite good tale of how cult leaders work and the intensity of their religious or quasi-religious brainwashing – at times you wish you could walk into the screen and talk some sense into Ruby, though you know you can’t and the characters in the movie who genuinely love her, like Kevin and Shari, try and fail – and though it’s not without flaws, it’s a compelling tale and Heather Locklear hits all the right notes in her portrayal of a woman with a sure instinct for catching her victims, reeling them in and keeping them in thrall to her madness.

House of Gucci (Annapurna Pictures, BRON Studios, MGM, United Artists, Universal [home video], 2021)

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

Last night (Sunday, October 27), after Charles and I watched the Lifetime movie Mormon Mom Gone Wrong: The Ruby Franke Story, I decided to bypass the next two items on Lifetime’s schedule (Don’t Scream, It’s Me – about a woman whose boyfriend has just been let out of prison after 15 years and comes back, threatening to break up her marriage to someone else – and Buried Alive and Survived). Instead I played through a Blu-Ray disc of the 2021 film House of Gucci – and was woefully disappointed in it even though I’d loved Sara Gay Forden’s 2001 book The House of Gucci, on which the film was nominally based. It was especially disappointing given the level of talent both in front of and behind the cameras: the stars were Lady Gaga, Adam Driver, Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons, Jared Leto and Samla Hayek, the director was Ridley Scott and the writers were Becky Johnston (story) and Roberto Bentivegna (screenplay). Forden’s book was a wild ride that began with the murder of Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver) by two hit people, Ivano Savioni (Andrea Piedimonte Bodini) and Benedetto Ceraulo (Vincenzo Tanassi), hired by his ex-wife Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga, t/n Stefania Germanotta) and her friend, psychic adviser Pina Auriemma (Salma Hayek). It then turned into a history of the Gucci brand and its founder, leathermaker Guccio Gucci, and its gradual transformation from a company that made handbags (with its signature bamboo handle, implemented when the League of Nations embargo against Italy for invading Ethiopia in 1935 made it impossible for them to get enough leather to make the whole bag out of it) to an icon of High Fashion.

Guccio Gucci started the company in 1921 and he had three sons, Aldo (Al Pacino), Rodolfo (Jeremy Irons) and Vasco. Johnston and Bentivegna made their first mistake with the movie when they abandoned Forden’s Lifetime-esque structure of opening with the murder; instead they began it with a meet-cute between Maurizio, Roberto’s son, and Patrizia. Roberto warns Maurizio that Patrizia, the daughter of the owner of a trucking company, is only interested in him for Gucci’s money – in Forden’s book Roberto is depicted as an ultra-controlling father who has spent most of Maurizio’s life crushing his dreams, but much less of that comes through in the film – but Maurizio goes ahead and marries her. The film spends way too much time indoors in various Gucci board rooms and offices – among other dubious decisions, it leaves out the America’s Cup yacht that was one of Maurizio’s prides and joys – and largely fails to dramatize the bitter family conflicts that did their best to tear Gucci apart even before Maurizio brought in outside investors (a company called Invescorp that was funded by various Arab leaders seeking investment opportunities for their petrodollars) who ultimately forced him out completely (no blood Gucci has been involved in the Gucci enterprise since 1993). The only trace of a family rivalry is the hapless character of Paolo Gucci (Jared Leto), Aldo’s son, who in life was a bitter rival whom Maurizio first enlisted as an ally and then double-crossed. In the movie he comes off as a comic-relief character, complete with a prosthetic makeup that took four hours to put on (just one less hour than it took to change Boris Karloff into the Frankenstein Monster).

Ridley Scott directs with a dogged sluggishness, as if he left his sense of pace back in the science-fiction dystopias of Alien and Blade Runner, and the cast consists of old pros like Pacino and Irons basically phoning it in. As Maurizio, Adam Driver is about as good as you could expect from today’s pool of actors – I can’t imagine anyone better suited to the role unless you could go back to the past and clone Cary Grant, but though Driver is quite a good actor in the right sort of part he doesn’t have the boyish charm of Maurizio as described in Forden’s book. There are some great moments in this movie, like Rodolfo reliving his long-forgotten days of movie stardom in Italy (he was a minor comedian rather than a superstar) in full Sunset Boulevard style, obsessively screening his old films on 16 mm; and Patrizia crossing herself and saying “Father … son … house of Gucci.” (According to one of the post-film “making-of” documentaries, that line wasn’t in the script; Lady Gaga improvised it during shooting.)

The film’s one saving grace is Lady Gaga’s performance; in one of the making-of featurettes Ridley Scott is shown talking about how singers often make good actors as well, and while they don’t always (for every Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland or Barbra Streisand who were terrific actors on screen, there were people like Perry Como, Tony Bennett and Whitney Houston who bombed), his argument that a great singer is acting with his or her voice for the three to five minutes of a song and therefore should be able to sustain his or her characterization for the length of a feature film. He mentions Lady Gaga’s previous film, A Star Is Born, but I think she’s a lot better here, partly because she doesn’t have the formidable competition she had in A Star Is Born from Constance Bennett, Janet Gaynor, Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand; and partly because Patrizia Reggiani is a more complex character and offered her a richer role into which she could really sink her teeth. I’d like to see Lady Gaga do more acting work (just as I’d like to hear her keep recording the Great American Songbook even after the death of Tony Bennett, partner of hers in two great albums of standards that proved she has a much greater sense of phrasing than most people who’ve made their reputations in electronic dance music) and can only hope she gets roles fully worthy of her in movies more alive to the possibilities of their casts, characters and situations than was House of Gucci.

My husband Charles and I also both liked the use of music in the film, consisting partly of Italian-language pop (including a quite good and entertaining cover of “I’m a Believer,” the song Neil Diamond wrote for The Monkees, sung in Italian by a woman, Caterina Caselli) and partly of English-language U.S. and European songs of the period, including Donna Summer’s “Love to Love You, Baby,” “I Feel Love,” and “Bad Girls” (one could make the case that Donna Summer should have had the career Lady Gaga is having; in the slow introductions to songs like “Last Dance” and “On the Radio” Summer showed that she, too, had the instinct and ability to phrase a song), David Bowie’s “Ashes to Ashes,” Eurythmics’ “Here Comes the Rain Again” and a few older-style songs like Andy Williams’s “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.” It’s also a movie that reinforces F. Scott Fitzgerald’s statement, “The rich are different from you and me,” and not just because – as Ernest Hemingway replied, “Yeah, they have more money.” The rich of Fitzgerald’s time never failed to remind him that, however much he made as a successful writer, he wasn’t really one of them because he’d earned his money instead of inheriting it, and one of the most fascinating aspects of Forden’s book that did not make it into the movie is the sheer sense of entitlement that motivated crimes like Aldo’s evasion of U.S. taxes (Forden describes tax evasion in Italy as one of those things that didn’t consider that big a public deal because “everybody does it,” and while that’s partly true in the U.S. as well, the Internal Revenue Service has historically been a lot more concerned about tax enforcement than its Italian counterpart) and Maurizio’s frantic flight to his redoubt in Switzerland to avoid prosecution for financial crimes in Italy (which is far less dramatic in the movie than it is in Forden’s book).

Father Brown: "The Quill of Osric" (BBC Productions, Britbox, PBS, copyright 2023, released 2024)

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

Last night (Saturday, October 26) I watched a couple of British mystery shows on KPBS and then the movie I Walk Alone on Turner Classic Movies. I did it that way instead of watching the Lifetime movie, Mormon Mom Gone Wrong: The Ruby Franke Story, even though I was interested in it (and I can always catch it tonight when it’s rerun at 6 p.m.), mainly because Charles was scheduled to come home sometime between 8:45 and 9 p.m. and I wanted him to be able to watch something complete. The British mystery shows were a Father Brown episode called “The Quill of Osric” and an episode of the spinoff, Sister Boniface Mysteries, titled “It’s Just Not Cricket.” I suspect “The Quill of Osric” would be interesting, and it was. It’s about a famous mystery writer named Osric Wolf (just why his parents named him after one of the most preposterous characters in Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a mystery writer Lol Fletcher never bothers to explain) who dies an apparent suicide in a prologue set a year before the main action. The Quill of Osric is an award given for the best mystery writer in the Cotswolds in central England, and this year the main contestants are Jack Wilmot (Jake Simmance) and Walter Mitford (Samuel Jordan). Jack and Walter were both students at Oxford and Jack won a literary prize there Walter felt he deserved due to the influence of Jack’s domineering father, Kingsley Wilmot (Michael Simkins). Kingsley Wilmot is a major politician who’s just been appointed Minister of Education (and is put out that it wasn’t Minister of Defence) and is seemingly on his way up to the Prime Ministership.

Jack Wilmot is favored to win on the basis of a novel he’s published called The Eye of Lycos, only when he reads from it at the garden party “Murder and Tea” – a typically preposterous Father Brown event in which the guests are challenged to solve fake mysteries being enacted around them by professional actors and all of a sudden are confronted with the real one – he has a bad case of stage fright and bolts from the reading in the middle of the proceedings. The fête’s organizer, Lady Violet (Amanda Mealing) – who’s made Walter her protegé – is put out because she recognizes one of the characters in The Eye of Lycos, “The Baroness,” as a thinly veiled portrayal of her and her scandalous past (particularly the patch of “manizing” she went through after her husband died suddenly). Jack Wilmot is found badly wounded in the head on a parapet of the castle-like home of Lady Violet, where the event takes place, and Walter is suspected because the only item of Jack’s that is missing is the cheap pocket watch that was the prize for that literary contest Jack beat Walter in at Oxford lo those many years before. Later it turns out that Jack Wilmot worked as a protegé of the real Osric Wolf, only Osric literally started losing his mind in his last days, though he somehow managed to finish a last novel whose pages fluttered away in the wind as he died. Osric’s actual “death” was more or less caused by Jack; he fell off the roof as he and Jack were struggling over the pages of his final manuscript.

Somehow Jack managed to retrieve the pages and put them back in order (not an easy feat in the days before computers, when if a manuscript was lost, it was gone forever). He had The Eye of Lycos published under his own name, which attracted the ire of Miss Lipton (Gemma Lawrence). Miss Lipton had shown up at the event posing as a literary agent who wanted to sign Jack Wilmot, but she was really Osric Wolf’s daughter, out for revenge. Miss Lipton’s body was discovered by one of the guests searching for clues to one of the fake mysteries, though she was just wounded, not dead. At first everyone in the show (and we in the audience as well) assumed she was a victim of the same assailant who’d attacked Jack, but eventually we learn that she was Jack’s attacker, and after she did that she fled and tripped while carrying the “Quill of Osric” award. Eventually both Miss Lipton and Jack are arrested, and in a great worm-turning scene Jack tells his power-mad dad he’s actually looking forward to being in prison because “at least I’ll be away from you.” (I wonder if Donald Trump’s sons Donald, Jr. and Eric went through anything like this.) The episode ends with the two in custody and Father Brown officiating at a church funeral for Osric Wolf, who now that his death has officially been ruled not to be a suicide is entitled to one. It’s one of the few times in this quirky show we’ve seen Father Brown (Mark Williams) actually functioning as a priest!

Sister Boniface Mysteries: “It’s Just Not Cricket” (BBC-TV, Britbox, PBS, 2024)

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

Alas, the Sister Boniface Mysteries episode I saw immediately after “The Quill of Osric,” “It’s Just Not Cricket,” wasn’t anywhere nearly as good. The writer or writers (who aren’t credited on imdb.com; the only writing credit is to Jude Tinsdall, who created the show’s premise) decided to abuse one of the classic tropes of mystery fiction: creating a character who gives himself or herself so many reasons to be hated there are plenty of people with motives to kill them. In this case the central asshole who marks himself for doom is Humphrey Lash (the quite handsome James Cartwright), who’s just been hired for major money to play cricket for the Great Slaughter team in central England by the club’s owner, C. C. Lowsley (Robert Daws). Lowsley is being threatened with foreclosure by an African-British woman; he’s two months behind on his rent and she’s going to take the cricket pitch away from him and use it for a big new development. (It sounds like Donald Trump somehow died and got reincarnated as a Black woman, but then again these days just about any story about greed-driven real-estate developers is going to remind me of Trump, former and almost certainly future U.S. President.) It seems that Lash’s princely salary isn’t enough for him; he’s been stealing and forging checks to himself on the club’s bank account, which is why the club is broke. He’s also been cruising a teenage girl, Elsie Calder-Marshall (Holly Earl), much to the disgust of her father, Lindsay Calder-Marshall (James Gaddas). Eventually Lash is found dead and Sister Boniface deduces that Lindsay Calder-Marshall is his actual killer.

Apparently “Lindsay Calder-Marshall” wasn’t his real name; he was a World War II private named Scott Ellis, a total lower-class nobody, and when the real Lindsay Calder-Marshall, an air hero in World War II, was shot down and died, Ellis assumed his identity. What caught him out was a slip of paper reading “YELL-” which Sister Boniface found next to Lash’s body. It turned out it was short for “YELLOW,” which Ellis’s late wife had put on his clothes because Ellis was color-blind and that was how he could tell what color he was about to put on. Only the Royal Air Force wouldn’t have taken him if he’d been color-blind, so Sister Boniface figures out that Ellis must have been posing as an aviation hero and killed Lash when Lash threatened to “out” him if he didn’t let Lash keep seeing Elsie. It was an O.K. episode and ended the way you’d think it would, with Great Slaughter winning the cricket match and thereby earning enough prize money for the team to pay off its debts – for now, since the Black woman also owned the team they were playing against and she’s determined to win back the title the next year. One thing about this episode that perplexed me is its depiction of cricket; I’d always assumed it was pretty much like baseball, with a pitcher (a “bowler,” in cricket parlance) throwing a ball to a batter, who’s supposed to hit it, but there are other ways of scoring in cricket besides just making it around the bases without the defense tagging you out with the ball. There’s another way of scoring in cricket, and that is the “wicket,” which seems to mean throwing the ball at an assemblage of pegs and knocking the top pegs over. I’ve heard the expression “sticky wicket” before in many British movies and until last night’s show had no idea what it really meant!

I Walk Alone (Hal Wallis Productions, Paramount, 1947, released 1948)

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

Last night (Saturday, October 26), after the two British mysteries on KPBS, I turned on Turner Classic Movies for a showing of I Walk Alone, a quite good if rather incredible (in the sense of “hard to believe”) crime melodrama produced by Hal Wallis at Paramount, directed by Byron Haskin (who’d make his best-known film, the 1953 The War of the Worlds, also for Paramount five years later) from a script by Charles Schnee based on an “adaptation” by Robert Smith and John Bright from a play by Theodore Reeves called Beggars Are Coming to Town. TCM showed I Walk Alone on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” program but it’s only marginally noir: the chiaroscuro visuals (the cinematographer is veteran Paramount hand Leo Tover) and the overall air of seediness and unscrupulousness are noir, but the characterizations are (with one major exception, Liazbeth Scott’s Kay Lawrence) all good or all bad, with little or none of the moral ambiguity of film noir at its best. It’s unusually long for a film noir (it lasts 97 minutes and, unlike The Maltese Falcon and The Asphalt Jungle, seems even longer than that) and it’s probably best known today as the first of six (according to Eddie Muller) or seven (according to imdb.com) films Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas made together.

Lancaster plays Frankie Madison, who partnered with Noll Turner (Kirk Douglas) – whom Frankie calls by his old gangland moniker “Dink” – making bootleg beer before Prohibition was repealed. Their partnership came to a sudden end in 1933 when one of their shipments of illegal whiskey was hijacked, Frankie shot one of the hijackers, and he and Noll made an agreement that they would split the business 50-50 and if one of them got busted, the other would hold his share for him until he got out. Later that same night Frankie was busted by the cops and sentenced to 14 years in prison, and the film opens with his release. He takes the train to New York and is met at the station by Dave (Wendell Corey), who sets him up in an apartment Dave describes as “not good, not bad.” Frankie is determined to meet with Noll Turner and demand his half of Turner’s money, only during the 14 years Frankie has been in prison, Noll has gone upscale and is now the owner of the Regent Club, a swanky night spot featuring Noll’s girlfriend de jour, singer Kay Lawrence (Lizabeth Scott, voice-doubled by Trudy Stevens). To ensure the continued success of his club, Noll is also dating, romancing and intending to marry Alexis Richardson (Kristine Miller) as soon as she dumps her current husband Charles (whom we never see).

It occurred to me that I Walk Alone is largely a reworking of one of the films Hal Wallis had produced during his decade-long (1933 to 1943) run as production chief at Warner Bros., The Roaring Twenties, which featured James Cagney in Lancaster’s role, Humphrey Bogart in Douglas’s and Ann Sheridan in Scott’s. The gimmick this time is that Noll Turner has transcended his gangster roots and become an apparent pillar of respectability, and though he sent Frankie a carton of cigarettes every month he decided not to see him because any outward association between him and an ex-bootlegger serving an extended prison sentence would totally blow his image. I’d seen I Walk Alone several years ago but it struck me as better this time around, particularly in Douglas’s marvelously slimy performance as a villain (one of the big frustrations in both Lancaster’s and Douglas’s careers is that they became such major stars so quickly they kept getting cast as heroes and weren’t allowed to keep playing the villain roles they’d both been so good at). Oddly Lancaster and Scott (who was having an affair with Hal Wallis, and director Haskin noted that periodically through the shooting she’d go int o a dressing room with him and emerge crying, resulting in substandard work from her for the rest of the day) are both billed in a separate card above the title, while Douglas is billed fourth just below Wendell Corey in a card below the title. After a flashback sequence showing the robbery from 1933 (convincing enough as an evocation of the past it looks like Wallis and Haskin simply took the stock footage from an earlier film) narrated by Frankie during a private dinner Noll has set up for him with Kay (with a piano-guitar-bass trio providing entertainment via such songs as “Isn’t It Romantic?,” “I’m Yours,” “Heart and Soul” and “My Ideal”), the scene shifts back to the present in which Dave explains to Frankie that Noll can’t just give him back half of the club’s proceeds.

While the speakeasy they ran together before Frankie’s arrest, the Four Kings (it’s interesting that both Noll’s establishments have “royal” names), was a simple joint partnership, the Regent Club is established as a collective enterprise of three corporations, each owning a piece of it, and Noll can’t transfer any of it to Frankie without the approval of the board of directors. (I’m surprised the writers didn’t have an exasperated Frankie ask, “Then who’s on the board of directors?”) A number of former gangland associates of Frankie’s are now on Noll’s payroll, including Dan (played by the marvelous Mike Mazurki from Murder, My Sweet and the 1945 Dick Tracy) and Skinner (Mickey Knox), Noll’s “muscle.” Unfortunately for Noll, both Kay and Dave are upset with the way he treated Frankie, and Kay is especially (and understandably) put out when Noll tells her he’s going to marry Alexis Richardson but that doesn’t mean he can’t still see her. Dave threatens to report Noll to the authorities and expose the secret set of books he’s keeping to conceal his crooked activities from the Internal Revenue Service, only before he can do that Noll has Skinner shoot Dave and frames Frankie for the crime. Kay has teamed up with Frankie (and Lizabeth Scott’s acting in these scenes is surprisingly good, especially for someone who had, to put it delicately, been a “protégée” of the producer) and ultimately puts the police onto Noll. There’s a climactic scene in Noll’s swanky office at the Regent Club during which Noll tries to kill Frankie, Frankie manages to escape by turning all the lights out, and ultimately the police arrive and shoot down Noll while Frankie and Kay end up alive, free and a couple.

I’d seen I Walk Alone decades ago but this time around I liked it considerably better; Lizabeth Scott’s acting was surprisingly good, Kirk Douglas delivers one of his superbly etched portrayals of villainy, and Eddie Muller criticized Burt Lancaster for overacting (and director Byron Haskin for letting him) but he’s really quite fine. If the character seems brusque and unformed, he’s supposed to be after 14 years in prison with no chance to keep abreast of what was going on in the world. The problem is the story, which piles on so many impossibilities or near-impossibilities it’s hard to take this movie seriously, though as an attempted transition between the conventions of 1930’s gangster films and 1940’s film noir is jarring and marred by too many technical glitches in the transitions between one sort of movie and the other. And there’s something of an oddity here: the big “plug” song, “Don’t Call It Love” (music by Allie Wrubel, lyrics by Ned Washington), sung by Trudy Richards as Lizabeth Scott’s voice double, sank in the music marketplace pretty much without a trace, while the title song (also by Wrubel and Washington), heard only instrumentally in a brief bit of background scoring, became a massive hit and helped promote the film.

Death in Paradise: Episode 13.4 (Red Planet Pictures, BBC, Région Guadeloupe, Film Commission of Guadeloupe, 2024)

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

Last night (Friday, October 25) I watched a KPBS showing of an episode of the intriguing British mystery TV show Death in Paradise, which takes place in the fictional city of “Honoré” on the equally fictitious Caribbean island of Saint-Marie, “played” by the very real Caribbean island of Guadeloupe. (The tourism board of Guadeloupe actually co-produces this program – though I have no idea whether they put money into it or just make sure the filmmakers have permission to film wherever they like on the island.) This one was simply tagged “Episode 13.4” – meaning the fourth show of season 13 – and it had an intriguing plot. A power surge causes an island-wide blackout, and the problem is traced to a substation at which a nice-looking young man named Ellis Baxter (Ben Wiggins) is found electrocuted. It’s not clear until later in the episode whether his body shorted the substation’s circuits and therefore led to the power surge or the surge came first and literally killed him. Before he died, Ellis had been dating Petra McQuillen (Leah Brotherhead), daughter of cantankerous Ivan McQuillen (Pearce Quigley). Ivan McQuillen runs a computer repair shop on the island, but his real business is buying and selling cryptocurrency – to wit, Tallium, a new brand of crypto that has a logo which strikingly resembles the Tesla car logo. Ellis, Petra and Ivan have been siphoning off electricity from the local utility in order to power the supercomputer that they have running the Tallium exchange. They’ve already accumulated $250,000 of Tallium, though given the high volatility of cryptocurrency exchange rates that value could literally disappear – or multiply 10 or more times – during this half-hour program.

There was a plot between Ivan, his daughter Petra, Ellis and Laurette Duschamps (Leah Walker) to set up this system and steal the electricity needed to run it, since we’re told by writers James Cary and Patrick Holmes that a computer running a crypto program will need a) a lot of money over a short period of time to keep up with all the various fluctuations in the coin’s value, and b) the only way the McQuillens and their partners in the scheme to get the power was by sneaking lines into the substation and extracting it illegally. Before he died, Ellis, a former Internet hotshot who had lost his fortune and was using Tallium to try to get back in the game, had proposed marriage to Petra – only the Black Laurette, whom he was also having sex with, got terribly jealous of the white Petra. Cary and Holmes cycle us through the usual set of red herrings and briefly try to get us to believe that Ellis committed suicide, but eventually it turns out that Laurette was the killer. It seems that she was hoping to grab the money, which is stored in a flash drive concealed in a metal pendant Ellis always wore around his neck, and run off with Ellis, leaving the McQuillens behind, only Ellis was determined to make his new relationship with Petra work and was even willing to give up his share of the money to do that. In order to get himself out of the deal, Ellis had engraved on the back of a Tallium business card the 256-digit binary code needed to unlock the account and offered Laurette the money, free and clear, if she’d just leave him alone and let him get married to Petra. Only that wasn’t good enough for Laurette, especially when the 256-digit binary code was simply the equivalent for “I love Petra” over and over again. So she had a jealous hissy-fit and shoved him into the current box, electrocuting him. It was an O.K. Death in Paradise show and Ralf Little as Detective Inspector Neville Parker (the only white person on the Saint Marie police force) is easy enough on the eyes, but alas for this ancient queen all the hot Black people in the show are women!

Live at the Belly Up: Jack Tempchin (Peaks and Valleys Productions, Belly Up Productions, San Diego State University, KPBS, 2024)

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

After that KPBS showed a Live at the Belly Up episode I was particularly looking forward to because the featured performer was Jack Tempchin. Never heard of him? O.K., you’ve heard of the Eagles’ song “Peaceful Easy Feeling,” haven’t you? Well, he wrote it. Tempchin played 10 songs in the Live at the Belly Up hour-long time slot, a relatively low number. I often judge Live at the Belly Up shows by how many songs get played in the time slot; the fewer the songs, generally, the looser the band is and the more they like to jam on their material. In Tempchin’s case, the low number of actual songs is less due to him jamming and more to him doing the usual folksinger “thing” of giving long-winded explanations of each song before he sings it. (I still remember that screamingly funny routine Andy Griffith did on a 1958 episode of the Milton Berle Show in which he droned on and on and on about a song and never got around to actually singing it. When he was asked why, he said, “I’m not a song-singer, I’m a song-explainer.”) My husband Charles, who arrived home between Death in Paradise and Live at the Belly Up (actually he got back from work with about 20 minutes of Death in Paradise left to go), thought Jack Tempchin looked like the late Utah Phillips: the same big fedora hat, the same scraggly grey beard, the same tousled longish hair under the hat, and the same penchant for telling long anecdotes between the songs. Tempchin grew up in San Diego County and earned a place on the fringes of the L.A. singer-songwriter movement. He began with a nice ballad called “More of Less” and then went into the first of a number of songs he co-wrote with the Eagles’ co-leader, Glenn Frey: “The One You Love.” Then he played a song called “You Can Go Home,” co-written with ex-Byrd and ex-Flying Burrito Brother Chris Hillman, in which the singer returns to his old high school and meets up with the girl he dated then – only now she’s with someone else, and the song’s punch line is, “You can go home/But you can’t go back.”

Though Tempchin played on a stage with a plethora of acoustic guitars, he only actually used two of them: a blue plastic one and a white plastic one, both of them designed to be used with electric amplification even though they’re not strictly speaking electric guitars. (An electric guitar works by having a pickup mike under each string; the sort of guitar Tempchin uses has a hollow body and the pickup is inside the instrument, picking up and amplifying the combined sounds of all the strings instead of amplifying each one individually.) After four songs, including a lovely romantic ballad called “Slow Dancing” which was later covered by Johnny Rivers and which Tempchin said was about a woman he knew in his days living out of a Volkswagen van and said he’s still with her (that’s nice), Tempchin brought out two other musicians. One was a Black electric-bass player named Norman Sancho, and one was a white lead guitarist (though still playing an internally miked hollow-bodied acoustic) named Jesse London, who was a quite good “picker.” I was a bit surprised that his extra musicians did not include a drummer, since there was a fully set-up drum kit at the back of the stage. I was also surprised that Sancho didn’t play the Fender-style electric bass that was part of the stage setup, but instead brought out a more compact instrument that lacked the conventional tuning pegs, which made me wonder just how he tunes it. The first song he played with his extra musicians was a Tempchin/Frey co-composition called “Party Town,” in which Tempchin asked the audience to sing along – but only the words “Yeah, yeah” on the choruses (did he get the idea from The Beatles?). It was a harder-rocking song than I’d expected from Tempchin and his crew. He followed it with a plaintive ballad called “Waiting,” which he co-wrote with John Brandon (though I don’t know who that is: Google lists two John Brandons, a writer and an actor).

Then he played a song that in some ways was his best selection of the night: another Tempchin/Frey collaboration called “Smuggler’s Blues.” Tempchin and Frey wrote it for a movie called Snow Blind, about the cocaine trade, but the film never got made and Frey held on to it until he did an episode of Miami Vice in which he played a drug dealer and also performed the song on the soundtrack. Frey’s version was faster and rocked harder, but Tempchin’s (which I liked better) was slower, bluesier, and featured him playing slide guitar. Tempchin’s next song was “Bender,” about a man who’s determined to complete a week-long bender on both alcohol and drugs before he gives them both up completely. Tempchin’s final two songs were both major hits for The Eagles: “Already Gone,” which he co-wrote with Robb Strandlund, and the inevitable “Peaceful Easy Feeling.” There was a table for years outside the Wienerschnitzel in Mission Hills, San Diego that had a plaque on it saying it was where Tempchin wrote “Peaceful Easy Feeling,” but that’s been questioned. The truth was he only put the finishing touches on the song there and it was really inspired by a woman he met at a live gig and asked to come home with him. She said she’d meet him back there after the show, but she didn’t. Tempchin grabbed a conveniently handy blank piece of paper and started sketching out the song then and there. I’ve frequently complained about previous Live at the Belly Ups that the performers’ songs sounded too similar to each other; that was not a problem with Tempchin, who did a nice blend of folk and rock material and didn’t stay in one groove too long. Tempchin has a serviceable “folk” voice rather than a great one, but it’s good enough to put over his material and get other, bigger stars to record it.

Law and Order: "The Meaning of Life" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 24, 2024)

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

Last night (Thursday, October 24) my husband Charles and I watched a couple of unusually literate episodes in the Law and Order franchise, a Law and Order show called “The Meaning of Life” and a Law and Order: Special Victims Unit piece called “Constriction.” “The Meaning of Life” was about Dr. Sarah Heartwood (Erica Sweeney) and her husband Christopher (Michael Gladis). The show opens with the two of them walking home from some event or other. They seem to be having a mini-argument and at first both Charles and I thought they would simply be guest body-finders stumbling on a corpse who would turn out to be the victim whose killers the cops would go after. Only it turns out Sarah is both the intended and actual victim; after they arrive home Christopher announces that he’s going into their garden to pick herbs as spices for their dinner, and Sarah enters the kitchen to start cooking. She notices a white gift bag, left there on purpose by their housekeeper after it was delivered by an African-American homeless person who was given $100 to drop it at the foot of the Heartwoods’ brownstone. The cops first suspect a Muslim plumber named Ibrahim Sami (Danyal Budare) because he had an altercation with Christopher at a book signing – Christopher had written a nonfiction book arguing that all religions are B.S. fantasies believed in by people who can’t come to grips with their own mortalities (a common argument among real-life atheists as well). They interrogate Sami at his home and there are bits of detritus of plumbing supplies on his table that at first look like bomb components, but his alibi checks out and it turns out he was merely fixing an air cooler for a friend. Then they trace the Black man who actually delivered the package and find that the man who paid him the $100 was white and pretty nondescript.

But later they uncover an anti-choice group headed by a woman, Ellen Rafferty (Jennifer Fouché), whose boyfriend Patrick Wayne (Chase Ramsey) turns out to be the real bomber after the Black delivery man he paid to drop off the bomb identifies his photo. (Coincidentally – or maybe not – Patrick Wayne was also the name of one of John Wayne’s sons.) The dilemma facing prosecutors Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) is that Sarah Heartwood is technically still alive; she’s in an irreversible coma and being kept alive on life-support machines, and Christopher clings to the memory of her and can’t bear to have the medical people pull the plug on her. The prosecutors decide that indicting Patrick Wayne for attempted murder isn’t good enough because he’ll be out within a few years and can continue killing doctors like Sarah Heartwood and Donald Travers (Carman Lacivita), another potential victim he targeted (in Travers’ case the cops were able to find the bomb in time before it went off) who are engaged in in vitro fertilization treatments. So they indict him for murder on the grounds that even though she’s still technically alive, in any functional sense she’s already dead because she can’t do anything. Patrick Wayne’s attorney calls a fringe practitioner named Dr. Matthew Calhoun (Claro Austria, who despite his name looks Asian) who insists that on rare but significant occasions people have spontaneously awakened from comas even after their doctors diagnosed them as having had brain death. The twist is that Sarah Heartwood actually had a “do not resuscitate” order in place which her husband doesn’t seem to have known about. and so just before Price is about to give his closing argument, Maroun tells him that it’s academic anyway because Sarah is now dead in every conceivable sense of the term. I quite liked this episode, directed by Leslie Hope from a chillingly written script by Jennifer Vanderbes, especially how it artfully explored the title topic, “The Meaning of Life,” from both ends: how people are born and how (and when) they die.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Constricted" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 24, 2024

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

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed, “Constricted,” written by David Graziano, Julie Martin and Candice Sanchez McFarlane and directed by Michael Smith, was almost as good. It begins with parallel story lines involving 16-year-olds Josh Blake (Troy Garity and Hannah Brolin (Maya Drake), who have been best buddies since grade school, have started a serious romantic relationship and now want to have sex with each other for the first time for both. Hannah’s mother Allison (Rosie Benton) wants it to be “special” for her and especially doesn’t want her daughter to lose her virginity in the back seat of a car the way Allison herself did. So she agrees to go to the movies with her sister so Hannah and Josh can have Hannah’s apartment to themselves for the big night. Josh, in turn, gets a pep talk from his dad Ryan (Landon Maas) that starts to sound like Ryan’s role models for how to deal with women are Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson. Unbeknownst to Hannah – or to us until half an hour into the show’s hour-long running time – Ryan has shown Josh a virtual-reality porn video showing a woman being choked nearly to death by her partner, and that’s what Josh decides he should do to Hannah on their Big Night. The night ends with Hannah unconscious and in the emergency room, where her mom takes her that night, and both she and Josh being investigated for statutory rape. Then Hannah finally comes to after a couple of days and she tells the SVU cops that she definitely didn’t like what Josh was doing to her and told her to stop – which makes her an innocent victim and him an out-and-out rapist. Josh says he didn’t hear her withdraw her consent, and in any case he was choking her so tightly she could barely say anything, but eventually he admits he learned how to choke a woman from a porn video he saw.

Ryan says that both he and Josh’s mother Paula (Allison McAtee) have a strict no-porn policy at home and all Josh’s Internet-connectable devices have anti-porn filters on them. Josh says he saw the video when two older kids on his high school’s fencing team showed it to him. Ryan, who quickly emerges as the real villain of the piece, offers one of the SVU detectives an out-and-out bribe to make the case go away. Meanwhile, the story takes an even darker turn as two 13-year-old boys assault a girl their own age in a park, and she runs away from them, tries to get across a street and is hit by a taxicab. She lingers in the hospital for two days but eventually it turns out her assailants were shown That Video by Josh and got the idea from it to do it for real. Ultimately the girl dies and prosecutor Dominick “Sonny” Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino), who’s already been seen rousting a potential pedophile for cruising his nine-year-old stepdaughter and two teenagers on the same block, wants to try Ryan for reckless-endangerment homicide given that he showed Josh the fatal video and Josh in turn showed it to the two kids who actually assaulted the 13-year-old girl and led to her death trying to run away from them. He doesn’t have enough evidence, but he is able to persuade Ryan to confess to something – it isn’t all that clear what – by appealing to his sense of shame. (Of course, if it were Donald Trump, this would be fruitless because he has no sense of shame. The Trump parallels to this character are irresistible because they’re both New Yorkers involved in real estate and both believe that their money and clout can buy their way out of anything – only in Ryan’s case, unlike in Trump’s, he can’t.) The episode ends with Ryan’s wife Paula divorcing him now that she knows about his porn addiction, his employers likely to fire him, and the parents of the girl who died likely to file a wrongful-death suit against him – a far different outcome than the real-life Trump, who is almost certainly on his way back to the White House where he can use the power of the Presidency to make all the charges against him magically go away!

Elsbeth: "The Wrong Stuff" (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount, aired October 24, 2024)

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

After the two Law and Order shows I switched to CBS because I was curious about the heavily promoted new show Elsbeth, which is about Elsbeth Tascioni, pronounced “Tah-schee-onee” (Carrie Preston), a sort of free-lance attorney who does consulting work for the police department and as a counselor reports to Captain C. W. Wagner (Wendell Pierce), the sort of commanding African-American character who frequently appears on Lifetime shows as an authority figure trying to talk the white characters out of their stupidities. The show started with a tense scene inside a spacecraft in which the five astronauts – alternative-energy entrepreneur Gavin Morrissey (Jason Babinsky); oil magnate Doug Howe (Terry Serpico); paint tycoon Neil Dorsey (Rob Riggle); his son, whom he named Neil, Jr. but so hates his dad he wants to call himself “Randy” (Ked Merwin); and the one woman in the group, Internet whiz kid Morgan Lee (Melanie Chandra) – suddenly have to do with a cabin leak and the camera pulls back. Director Aisha Tyler and writers Erica Shelton and Matthew J. Begbie thereby reveal to us that what we’ve been watching is just a simulation of space flight, as the trainer, Carter Schmidt (Christian Borle), announces to the crew that if they’d really been in space, they’d all be dead by now. Then Gavin Morrissey is killed when the training centrifuge that’s supposed to accustom the wanna-be astronauts to acceleration, the vastly increased gravity you have to deal with when your rocket is on its way to escape velocity before it finally breaks free of Earth’s gravitational pull and you’re officially in space.

The program that’s sending them up is one of those business that for a multi-million dollar fee will shoot just about anyone into space, and my husband Charles said it reminded him of a 2015 episode of the ABC-TV detective series Castle, about a male mystery writer who’s dating a female homicide detective and insists on horning in on her cases. My husband Charles and I had seen the Castle episode at one of the “Mars Sci-Fi” film screenings the late Gerry Williams used to show at his video studio in Golden Hill (see https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2015/03/mars-on-tv-compilation-1963-2015.html). Its premise was that two megabillionaires, obviously based on Elon Musk and Richard Branson, were both preparing private space expeditions to Mars, and the hot-shot pilot who was supposed to command the mission that was going to fly first is found murdered. Both the Castle and Elsbeth episodes used the locked-room mystery trope – both stressed the utter isolation imposed on the astronauts-in-training by the mission’s regimen – and both even had the same episode title: “The Wrong Stuff,” an all too obvious pun on Tom Wolfe’s classic account of the original seven U.S. Project Mercury astronauts, The Right Stuff. But whereas the denouement in the Castle episode is three of the other members of the crew ganging up to kill the obnoxious pilot because they can’t stand the idea of being stuck on a long-term mission to Mars with him, the ending of the Elsbeth show focused on the long-term tensions between the would-be astronauts.

Randy Dorsey had a goop-eyed hero-worship going for Gavin Morrissey, which his own father was determined to break so Randy would give up his dreams of getting into the alternative-energy business and agree to inherit his dad’s paint company instead. Among Neil’s tactics was revealing to his son the secret deal Morrissey had with oil magnate Doug Howe to buy lithium produced as a by-product of Howe’s fracking operation to power Morrissey’s storage batteries. Elsbeth is able through fragmentary pieces of evidence to deduce that Morrissey was murdered through an electrical fire set off by a battery of some kind mounted inside his thick-soled space boots. She also figures out that Neil Dorsey was the killer because she finds a bit of a pen tip inside the component from which the fatal battery was pried loose. Neil had made a big deal about his company having developed a special kind of pen that, unlike an ordinary one, wouldn’t depend on gravity and therefore would write in a weightless environment. Only the tip of one of his pens broke off inside the device as he tried to extract its battery, and somehow this was supposed to prove that Neil was the killer even though everyone on the mission who wanted one had his special pens. The show ends with Morrissey dead, Neil Dorsey on his way to prison, and the other three spoiled shit-brat rich people determined to go ahead with their ultra-expensive joy ride into space even with two fewer people on their crew than they’d expected. I was surprised how much I liked Elsbeth: the promos for it had made the character seem ultra-annoying, but in the context of a complete episode she came across as a woman of great dignity and charm and not at all the airheaded flibbertigibbet she seemed like in the promos.

NOVA: "Solar System: Icy Worlds" (BBC Studios, GBH, PBS, 2024)

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

Last night (October 23) I watched a couple of programs on KPBS on their usual “science night,” Wednesdays, a NOVA episode called “Solar System: Icy Worlds” and a Secrets of the Dead show chronicling one of the nastiest and most terrifying episodes of the U.S. Civil War. “Icy Worlds” chronicled the results of NASA’s space probes of the outer reaches of the solar system, including the “gas giants” Jupiter and Saturn and the “ice giants” Uranus (pronounced “YOUR-uh-nus,” as has become the modern tendency, instead of “Yur-A-nus,” as it was pronounced in my childhood before people got squeamish that the name contained the word “anus”), Neptune and Pluto – and thank goodness this show acknowledged Pluto’s status as a full-fledged planet instead of downgrading it to asteroid status (curse you, Neil DeGrasse Tyson!). “Icy Worlds” was full of various talking heads and also showed footage of exploration teams in Alaska, one of the closest places on Earth to the climate of the ice giants. Among the fascinating aspects of the show were the tale of a little-known moon of Saturn, Iapetus, which has a light side and a dark side – though unlike our moon, which has a “dark side” only because that part is always facing away from Earth and therefore invisible unless you’re in a spacecraft orbiting the moon, Iapetus really is divided into a white side and a black side. The theory is that it’s been bombarded by space dust kicked up from another moon of Saturn, Phoebe, which is embedded in one of the rings and actually orbits Saturn in the opposite direction from all its other moons and rings. The show also mentioned various alternative ways water can freeze, including the conventional hexagonal crystals we’re familiar with from Earth’s ice as well as something called “superionic ice,” in which the hydrogen and oxygen atoms that make up water molecules separate (which means the stuff isn’t literally water at all anymore). In 2018 Earth scientists actually figured out how to make superionic ice in the lab, which gave them a way to study its bizarre properties in controlled conditions. This is apparently one of a planned run of NOVA episodes on the weirder aspects of the solar system, and while it has a certain degree of the gee-whiz aspects to the narration that make a lot of TV science shows boring, it also reinforces the bon mot, “The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.” Also, one of the talking heads, Michael Wong, was really hot-looking and set off my Lust-O-Meter even though I’m usually not all that turned on by Asian guys.

Secrets of the Dead: "The Civil War's Lost Massacre" (Wide Awake Films, Kentucky Educational Television, PBS, 2024)

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

The Secrets of the Dead episode that followed was called “The Civil War’s Lost Massacre.” The Civil War’s lost massacre took place on January 25, 1865 in Simpsonville, Kentucky. The victims were members of the 60th Company of the Fifth U.S. Colored Cavalry, and the perpetrators were a band of white “irregulars” fighting a guerrilla campaign for the Confederacy. (They were even referred to as “guerrillas” in newspapers of the time, which was itself surprising because I hadn’t realized the term “guerrilla” – which literally means “little war” in Spanish – had crossed the border that early.) Kentucky had an odd position in the Civil War because it was a so-called “border state,” one which allowed slavery but didn’t secede. It was also Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace, though he’d relocated to Indiana with his family when he was seven and settled in Illinois in his teens. Lincoln was hyper-concerned about maintaining the loyalty of the border states; the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863 was carefully worded to free only those slaves being held in the Confederate states. He was understandably worried that the border states would secede after all and give the Confederacy a military advantage. As the Civil War wound on and depleted the ranks of military-age white men on both sides (the director, William Eichner, quoted a statistic that one-tenth of all the military-age white men in the U.S. were killed during the war), the Union started doing what had previously been considered unthinkable and enlisting African-Americans. Quite a few of them answered the call, not only for the money but also the vague promise of freedom at the end of the war. Alas, the Black enlistees had to fight under white commanders, and many of their white officers were as racist as anybody else.

In late 1864 the commander of Fort Nelson in Kentucky, the enlistment center for Black troops, ordered the wives and children of Black servicemembers to leave the base. The Black servicemembers and their partners were able to get word to sympathetic activists, who in turn gave the story to the media. Word got out and news coverage so embarrassed the U.S. Army that they ultimately reversed the decision and allowed the wives and children to return. Many of the Black soldiers enlisted as cavalrymen because they’d had experience with horses working as slaves on the plantations. In January 1865 the 60th Company was ordered to mount a drive of 900 head of cattle from Fort Nelson northwest to Simpsonville. On the way they were ambushed and massacred by a band of Confederate “irregulars” – today they’d be called “unlawful combatants” – and though the Black troops outnumbered the white raiders, they lost largely because they were armed with one-shot Enfield rifles (the standard Civil War weapon on both sides). A Union cavalryman firing an Enfield would have to dismount to reload the weapon after each shot, while the Confederate raiders had six-shot revolvers that could relatively easily be reloaded on horseback. After the massacre the Black Union soldiers were quickly buried in a mass grave, and there they remained until a team of three volunteers – David Brown, Jerry Miller and Juanita White – formed in the 21st Century to launch a search for their remains. Brown and White were African-Americans and had had ancestors in the Fifth Colored Cavalry; Miller was a white history buff who’d grown up around Simpsonville but had never heard of the massacre before and wondered why he hadn’t.

The second half of the show dealt with the team’s attempts to find the gravesite, which they ultimately did with the aid of a 1930’s map of the area done by the state of Kentucky to plot a new road system for the state. The surveyors marked the site on their 1930’s map as “Civil War Burial Mound,” and through an elaborate set of new technologies including both aerial drones and surface metal detectors (in hopes of finding metal pieces, including belt buckles, gun bits and bayonets), they were able to confirm that the “Civil War Burial Mound” was indeed just that. The show was unexpectedly timely in the latter stages of a Presidential election in which a lot of the debate has been over who counts as a “real American” and in which the racism that motivated the Civil War has proved to be alive and well, ironically carried largely by the Republican Party, whose election victory in 1860 touched off the Civil War. Today’s Republicans still proclaim themselves the “Party of Lincoln,” but they have largely repudiated everything Lincoln stood for. What’s more, Republican politicians like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis are pushing for the teaching of a sanitized version of American history from a white perspective that either minimizes or totally ignores the evils of slavery. The idea that one of the nastiest and meanest battles of the Civil War had been both literally and figuratively covered up for over a century after it happened – just as most Americans hadn’t heard of the wanton destruction of the successful Black business district in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921 until a group of determined African-American activists brought it back to our attention on the 100th anniversary – should be an object lesson in the Orwellian rewriting of history in which today’s Republicans want to engage.

Downwinders and the Radioactive West (PBS Utah, American Public Television, copyright 2021, released 2022)

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

Last night (Monday, October 21) I watched a quite challenging documentary on PBS, Downwinders and the Radioactive West, made by PBS Utah in 2022 and focused on the effect America’s above-ground nuclear tests from 1951 to 1963 and the underground tests that continued there until 1992 had on the surrounding populations. Narrated by Peter Coyote (whose smooth voice graces most of Ken Burns’s recent documentaries as well) and produced by John Howe (a filmmaker I can’t find a listing for on imdb.com; there are two people named John Howe listed, a director who died in 2008 and an art director/production designer on Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings cycle and King Kong), Downwinders and the Radioactive West tells a chilling tale of how Americans were used by their own government as unwitting guinea pigs in a social experiment to determine just how much atomic radiation people could stand. The documentary includes a thumbnail sketch of America’s history with atomic weapons, which began with Albert Einstein’s letter to President Franklin Roosevelt on August 2, 1939 warning that recent experiments in splitting uranium atoms could pose a threat to the U.S.’s national security because “this new phenomenon would also lead to the construction of bombs.” Einstein was picked to write this letter, based on the researches of physicist Leo Szilard and others, because as the only nuclear physicist most Americans had actually heard of, his name on the letter would garner the best chance of a reaction in the upper levels of U.S. power. In 1942 the U.S. Congress authorized a program called the Manhattan Engineering District, whose actual purpose – to design and create an atomic bomb – was carefully concealed from virtually everyone, including Roosevelt’s last Vice-President, Harry S. Truman. Truman succeeded Roosevelt when Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, and only then did Secretary of War Harry Stimson tell him that the U.S. had an A-bomb which they would test in three months’ time. (Truman was so appalled at how little he had been told about basic government functions, especially regarding the war, that he started the tradition of having the candidates for President in the next election receiving secret briefings about the major issues that would face them if they got elected.)

When the first explosion of an atomic weapon – the Trinity test in Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945 – occurred, Truman was in Potsdam, Germany, meeting with Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and British prime minister Winston Churchill (who in the middle of the conference lost his election and was replaced by his successor, Clement Attlee), anxiously awaiting word of the bomb test. The U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on Japanese cities – Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and Nagasaki three days later – and Japan surrendered on August 15. For the rest of the 1940’s the U.S. continued to stage atomic bomb tests on atolls in the Marshall Islands in the South Pacific. They relocated the indigenous inhabitants of the Marshalls but allowed them to come back to their former homes – at least the ones that still existed on islands that hadn’t been utterly destroyed, like Elugelab in the Enewetak chain, site of the world’s first hydrogen bomb test on November 1, 1952 – with the result that a lot of them got cancer and other diseases due to the lingering effects of radiation and fallout (solid material made radioactive, left behind by the tests and carried by wind through the air). In November 1950, out of fear that such a remote testing location could be the subject of espionage, President Truman ordered the creation of the Nevada Test Site in the southeastern corner of Nye County, Nevada, about 65 miles from Las Vegas. (Las Vegas casino-hotels often advertised themselves as safe places from which tourists and locals could watch the A-bomb blasts.) In a 1951 test called “Operation Buster-Jangle” (the cutesy-poo names of the tests are among the weirdest aspects of the story), the U.S. Army anesthetized dogs and put them in the middle of the blast to see what would happen to them.

On May 19, 1953 a test called “Upshot Knothole Harry” created havoc when the winds shifted and blew the fallout in a different direction from the one the people in charge of the test had predicted. It was the first of many tests that would drench the small town of St. George, Utah in radioactive waste and fallout. The residents of St. George first noticed the effects when the sheep they raised started getting sick and dying en masse. “I remember handling them in the corrals,” said sheepherder Mel Clark. “You'd grab hold of one to pull it into the corral or move it into a little pen, and their hide, the wool, the skin, everything just pulled right off from them.” Then they gradually noticed the effect on the human population as well. Mary Dickson, who became a playwright and wrote a play called Exposed about the plight of the Downwinders (as they came to call themselves), got thyroid cancer at age 29. Various populations in the St. George area showed much higher rates of cancer than epidemiologists expected. So did U.S. soldiers who were ordered to march into radioactive test sites, dig trenches and prepare for combat in hopes that the U.S. could use so-called “tactical nuclear weapons” in battle. And so, in one of the weirdest twists of this bizarre story, did the makers of the 1955 film The Conqueror, produced by Howard Hughes for RKO and starring John Wayne as Mongol leader Genghis Khan. To stand in for the Mongolian desert, producer Hughes and director Dick Powell picked a location near the Nevada Test Site – with the result that two-thirds of the people involved in making the movie, including director Powell and the four major stars (John Wayne, Susan Hayward, Pedro Armendariz and Agnes Moorehead), died of cancer.

Among the interviewees on the show was Jon Huntsman, son of a former Utah Governor from the 1950’s who himself was elected Governor from 2005 to 2009. “When my dad was governor and he got more and more evidence about the incidence of cancer deaths in Southern Utah being so high, that really piqued his interest,” Huntsman said. “As governor, he was part of an effort to get a lot of documents declassified at the Pentagon. The importance of that was those documents indicated that the government only did the testing when the wind blew the fallout to the least populated direction which was Southern Utah. So in the 1950’s the government said, don’t worry, this is all safe. But the release of these documents in the Pentagon show that the government actually knew there was risk. And that’s why they had the testing take place, only when it blew in Southern Utah.” By 1955 the Downwinders started seeking redress in the courts, but they faced three major obstacles. One was the widespread belief, fostered by decades of government propaganda, that the atomic bomb tests were “necessary” for “national security,” and therefore whatever health effects they were facing were for the greater good. Another was the scientific near-impossibility of proving that any particular case of cancer was caused by a particular sort of exposure to carcinogens. Epidemiologists can and do say that a particular cluster of cancer cases, in numbers well above what would be expected in that population from normal exposure, indicates an environmental factor that raises the risk of people in that area getting cancer, but not that a particular case of cancer came from that exposure. The third obstacle was the old doctrine of “sovereign immunity,” which states that the government can basically do whatever it wants to its citizens and they have no legal recourse in the courts.

The first legal action was brought by the sheep ranchers in 1956 and was heard by Judge Benjamin Christensen, who found for the government. Later, in 1982, he re-heard the case and this time found for the plaintiffs after newly declassified government documents revealed that the government had known all along that fallout posed a risk to the sheep. “I think the stories about the impact on sheep from the nuclear fallout are quite compelling,” said Judge Christensen. “The courts found that there was a connection between the fallout and the damage to the sheep herds. And I think that was the right outcome.” But later he was reversed by the Court of Appeals. A much larger case dealing with the human cost of the tests was heard by Judge Bruce S. Jenkins in 1979. The case was brought by Stewart Udall, Secretary of the Interior under President John F. Kennedy, who brought suit on behalf not only of the Downwinders but the Navajo miners who had dug for the uranium needed to produce America’s atomic arsenal in the first place. Judge Jenkins found for the plaintiffs, but like Judge Christensen, his ruling was reversed by the Court of Appeals. “Sorry I'm saying it, [but] it came with the discretion of the function on the part of the United States to do what they did,” Judge Jenkins said of the Court of Appeals’ ruling. He called it “a fairly shallow opinion,” and the show’s narration noted that it did not dispute Judge Jenkins’s findings of fact in the case.

In 1990 Congress passed a law, the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), sponsored by then-Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Representative Wayne Owens (R-Utah) that set up a fund for partial compensation for the Downwinders: $50,000 to individuals with disease who resided near the Nevada test site or worked there, $75,000 is defined for test site workers, and $100,000 for uranium miners. In the documentary, Mary Dickson denounced the paltriness of the awards: “My dad’s life is worth so much more than $50,000. It was the only thing, tangible thing, that I could get back a little bit from what they had taken away from me.” And in 2022 RECA was scheduled to expire anyway, leading one Downwinder to complain in the documentary that the government is just waiting for them all to die. Watching this documentary in the midst of a Presidential campaign in which one of the major-party candidates, himself a former President, is declaring near-authoritarian powers to destroy media outlets that publish stories that displease him and pledging to be “a dictator on day one” to enact a draconian anti-immigration policy and plunder the environment for increased energy production, proved especially timely. The fact is that even in a country that loudly proclaims itself to be a “democracy” (which it isn’t, and never has been; the framers of the U.S. Constitution deliberately created a republic, not a democracy, and were quite explicit about the difference), the government can do pretty much whatever it wants, including poisoning large numbers of its citizens, and there’s no way to hold it to account.