Shoot to Kill (Robert L. Lippert Productions, Screen Guild Productions, 1947)

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

Last night (Friday, November 29) I ran my husband Charles and I a YouTube post (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KchloG1DKFc) of a 1947 movie called Shoot to Kill, an ordinary crime drama with film noir pretensions directed by William Berke (who went back to his indie origins after the end of the Falcon detective series at RKO in 1946) from an “original” story and screenplay by one Edwin V. Westrate. I put “original” in quotes because the script seemed less written than merely compiled from older, better movies. In fact, the movie was so derivative that through most of the opening reel Charles kept asking, “Haven’t we seen this before?” We hadn’t seen this particular assemblage of clichés before, but we had certainly seen the basic situations many times over. The film begins with an auto chase, with a police car in pursuit of a lumbering black sedan (as often in late-1940’s movies, one marvels at how big and unmaneuverable the cars were, as if you were watching a chase scene between two tanks). The lumbering black sedan ultimately drives off a cliff, and when the police who were chasing it find the wreckage they’re surprised to find the newly elected local district attorney, Lawrence Dale (Edmond MacDonald), and his wife Marian (Luana Walters, long-time “B” movie queen, here billed as “Susan Walters”), in the same car as escaped criminal Dixie Logan (played by Robert Kent, though billed as “Douglas Blackley”). When the police find the wreckage, the two men are dead but Marian is alive, though comatose. Eventually she comes to in the hospital and she starts narrating a flashback to her friend, New York Tribune reporter George Mitchell (Russell Wade, top-billed), that takes up most of the movie. Actually writer Westrate isn’t content to give us just one extended flashback; periodically he inserts flashbacks within flashbacks, and even one flashback in a flashback in a flashback, as if he went to the Casey Robinson School of Screenwriting.

It seems that Lawrence Dale was just another assistant district attorney until he rose to take over from the retiring current D.A., John Foresythe (Charles Trowbridge), on the strength of the murder conviction he obtained against Dixie Logan – only what nobody realized was that Dale was really a secret associate of gangster Gus Miller (Nestor Paiva). We learn this when Marian, who’s got a job as Dale’s secretary after Mitchell persuaded him to hire her, accidentally flips on the intercom in the office and hears Dale on the phone to Miller receiving his instructions. Though Marian was sort-of Mitchell’s girlfriend, she starts going out with Dale and eventually he proposes to her – and she accepts. He frames his proposal to her in a letter he’s supposedly dictating, which is supposed to explain not only that he wants to marry her but he wants to keep her on the job despite Miller’s insistence that he fire her because she might expose their association. Then, in a bizarre series of reversals that suggest Westrate was not only a scion of Casey Robinson but an ancestor of Tony Gilroy, we learn that a) Marian is collecting evidence of Dale’s corruption and is forwarding it to the police; b) the only reason Dale wanted to get Marian to marry him is because a wife can’t testify against her husband; c) Dale and Marian aren’t really married at all because she was already the wife of Dixie Logan; d) Marian only took the job as Dale’s secretary to amass the evidence that Dale had framed Logan for the specific crime he got him convicted of; and e) the ultimate purpose behind all this was to expose Miller so Logan, who’d escaped from prison, could take over and run the city’s rackets himself.

Ultimately Marian, who’d been portrayed as a nice girl all along until that head-snapping series of reversals, apparently reverts to being a nice girl again and accepts Mitchell’s marriage proposal now that the other two men in her life are conveniently eliminated by the car crash ex machina. (Given what both he and we now know of her past, one wonders why he still wants her.) What makes Shoot to Kill worth watching despite the lameness of the plot and the insufficient star power of the cast (Luana Walters is a nice actress who deserved better parts than she got, but she’s hardly up to the challenges Westrate and Berke put her through in their Frankenstein-like script), is the amazing cinematography of Benjamin H. Kline. Throughout the movie, Kline shoots this rather sorry assemblage of familiar gangster and corrupt-city tropes as all-out film noir, cleverly using shadows to conceal the cheapness of the sets. Between that and the hot boogie-woogie piano number we get early on from Black jazz pianist Gene Rodgers (who actually plays two songs in the film, a boogie that we’re allowed to see and hear all of and a slower, softer song that’s heard under dialogue; imdb.com lists “Ballad of the Bayou” and “Rajah’s Blues” as the titles of Rodgers’s songs but doesn’t specify which is which), there are items in Shoot to Kill that make the movie watchable despite Westrate’s highly unoriginal script and Berke’s capable but just O.K. direction. Incidentally Charles thought the restaurant in which Rodgers played was supposed to be Chinese because he saw an Asian-looking person on the waitstaff, but there’s no evidence (like the signage on the exterior or the actual food) that it’s a Chinese restaurant. Charles just didn’t think a non-Chinese restaurant in the U.S. would have had an Asian waiter in 1947!

The Scarlet Letter (MGM, 1926)

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

Last night (Sunday, November 24) Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase,” hosted by Jacqueline Stewart, showed a quite fascinating film: The Scarlet Letter (1926), second in a series of five silent films Lillian Gish made as an MGM contract player between 1926 and 1930. Gish had been a protegée of legendary director D. W. Griffith and had starred in many of his films from the early teens to 1921, including The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, Hearts of the World, Broken Blossoms, Way Down East and Orphans of the Storm. But by the mid-1920’s Griffith’s star had fallen as audiences started looking beyond his late-Victorian sense of morality and Gish started getting restive and was ready to move on. After a series of independent productions, including The White Sister (1923), Gish signed with MGM and for her first film for them selected La Bohème, Henri Murger’s 19th century novel about starving writers and artists in Paris that had also been the basis for Puccini’s sensationally successful 1896 opera. For her second MGM film Gish wanted to make Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter, a tale of 17th century Puritan New England in which Hester Prynne (Lillian Gish) has a daughter out of wedlock and is immediately shunned by her whole community. She’s sentenced to stand on a gallows for three hours and for the rest of her life to wear a scarlet letter “A” (for “adulteress”) and both her and her innocent daughter Pearl (Joyce Coad) to live in shame. Hester nobly refuses to name the father of her baby girl, and in Hawthorne’s book he takes his own sweet time telling his readers that it’s really Arthur Dimmesdale (Lars Hanson, the only actor who made films with Greta Garbo on both sides of the Atlantic: The Saga of Gösta Berling in their native Sweden and Flesh and the Devil and The Divine Woman in the U.S.).

Dimmesdale is the compassionate Puritan minister of colonial Boston and is trying to push against the insane moral strictures of the Puritan colony – though he’s also conscious of his position and is all too aware of just how far he can push before the religious community pushes back and ultimately disgraces him. The film, directed by Victor Sjöstrom (a Swedish-born director who had come to MGM in the early 1920’s and whose U.S. films credited him as “Seastrom”) from a script by Frances Marion (who, unusually for the silent era, wrote the intertitles as well), comes right out and makes it clear from the get-go that Dimmesdale is Hester’s lover and the father of her child. Marion also establishes that Hester’s husband was someone she was forced to marry by their families in England just before she emigrated to Boston, and he never was truly a husband to her (i.e., they never had sex). She explains all this when Dimmesdale proposes marriage to her on the eve of his voyage to England to present some really important petition from the Massachusetts Bay Colony to the royal government (we’re never told what the petition is or why it’s important), and she turns him down because she’s already married even though she has no idea where her husband, Roger Prynne (Henry B. Walthall, Lillian Gish’s leading man in The Birth of a Nation), is.

It turns out Roger Prynne also emigrated to Boston, but was captured by Native Americans and held hostage by them for seven years, and he only escapes once Hester’s daughter Pearl – whom Dimmesdale formally baptized in an attempt to spare her the shame of being illegitimate – is six years old and the other children are routinely throwing mud at her as a mark of moral contempt. Roger Prynne learns by accident that Dimmesdale is Hester’s lover and Pearl’s father, and he says, “My revenge will be infinite” – leaving both Hester and Dimmesdale in fear as to what he means. When the two finally plot their escape on a Spanish ship that has conveniently docked in Boston, Roger Prynne books passage for himself on the same ship and Dimmesdale, after preaching a powerful sermon advocating for tolerance that the Boston locals hail as the best thing they’ve ever heard from him, dies at the scaffold where Hester was shamed years earlier and opens his chest to reveal his own scarlet “A,” which looks like a brand – though in Hawthorne’s novel it was hinted that it was stigmata. What happens to Hester and Pearl after that is left powerfully ambiguous in the film, though in Hawthorne’s novel the husband dies, she inherits a fortune from him, and she and Pearl flee to England to claim it, returning to Boston years later until Hester’s death, after which she’s buried in a grave near Dimmesdale’s with the epitaph, “‘On a field, sable, the letter A, gules’ (‘On a black background, the letter A in red).”

The Scarlet Letter was a highly personal project for Lillian Gish, who had to fight Will H. Hays, Warren G. Harding’s postmaster general who was appointed by the major Hollywood studios as their morals czar following the twin scandals of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle’s rape trial in 1922 and the still-mysterious death of director William Desmond Taylor the same year. At the time motion pictures were merely considered a “business,” not a form of “speech” protected by the First Amendment, thanks to a 1912 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that was not reversed until 1953. So the studios lived in fear of mandatory government censorship of movies; some states (most notoriously New York) had their own state censor boards, and the studios hoped Hays, with his political connections, would help them forestall federal censorship by uniting the studios to police themselves, each other and the industry as a whole. Among his first actions in this job was to compile a list of books that under no circumstances could be made into movies, and The Scarlet Letter was on it. But Lillian Gish was determined to make a film of The Scarlet Letter and to star in it as Hester Prynne, and so she lobbied the women’s organizations that were the key forces behind the various campaigns to keep the screen “moral.” Her strategy ultimately worked, and Hays withdrew his ban on The Scarlet Letter so MGM could put it into production as a Gish vehicle. (Gloria Swanson used this as a precedent in her own campaign to make another story on Hays’s Index Filmum Prohibitorum, W. Somerset Maugham’s “Miss Thompson” and its successful play adaptation, Rain.) Gish picked Swedes as both her director and her co-star because she felt Scandinavians were more like New England Puritans than 1920’s Americans.

She recalled in her autobiography that she and co-star Hanson couldn’t talk to each other because she knew no Swedish and Hanson knew no English – though director Seastrom could talk to them because he was fluent in both languages. That didn’t stop her from requesting Hanson again as her co-star in The Wind two years later – an awesome film that’s considerably better than The Scarlet Letter and gives Gish, Hanson and Seastrom a lot more to work with than Hawthorne’s moral tale. What strikes me most powerfully about The Scarlet Letter is the sheer moral absurdity of the regimen the Puritan church in colonial Massachusetts imposed on the colony’s residents. In one scene parishioner Giles (played as a comic-relief character by house MGM comic Karl Dane) is upbraided for sneezing in the middle of a church service, and a church minion carries a stick literally to bop on the shoulder anyone who breaks the rules of decorum of the service. In another, a pair of young lovers are forced by the mores of the time to communicate to each other only through speaking tubes, since the laws of the colony forbid them to converse normally until they’re actually married, in which case they’re allowed “chaste caresses.” And even before she gets pregnant and has a child out of wedlock, Hester Prynne is publicly shamed for “running and playing during Ye Sabbath.” This warning about the dangers of Right-wing Christianity run amok is unexpectedly timely after the last Presidential election, in which a profane man like Donald Trump whose career is a living contradiction of all the values conservative Christianity allegedly holds dear (an adulterer, a gambler, a greedy businessperson, a usurer, a con artist, an urbanite) has been hailed as almost literally a Second Coming that will bring about the reforming of America as a Christian-nationalist dictatorship. One does get the impression from watching or reading The Scarlet Letter today that 17th Century Puritan Boston is really the time and place Trump’s political movement feels America was “great” and to which we need to be returned – forcibly, if necessary – to “make America great again.”

Law and Order: "Bad Apple" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired November 21, 2024)

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

Last Thursday, November 21, NBC showed the last two episodes of the Law and Order series franchise shows they’re still running, Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, for 2024. The Law and Order show was actually a quite good one: “Bad Apple,” in which a well-regarded police officer was shot in the back and killed, ostensibly by a major drug dealer named Eddie White (Bernard Gilbert) whom the police were raiding just before the officer was murdered. But the police detectives on the case, series regulars Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks), check out White’s claim that the police executing the raid stole a duffel bag containing $50,000 in drug money and a handgun with which the officer was shot. By reviewing video footage they realize that White’s story was true and the officer was likely killed by one of his own, his partner Miles Brandt (Mike Vogel). It seems that the officer saw Brandt steal the duffel bag and threatened to report him to his superiors for corruption, only Brandt decided to make sure that didn’t happen by shooting his partner dead in the back with White’s gun. When his initial cover-up unravels, Brandt stashes the gun in a storage locker rented by fellow officer Travis Melcher (Juan Javier Cardenas) and tries to set up Melcher for the killing. Prosecutors Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) indict Brandt for the murder but can’t find any police officer in Brandt’s unit who will testify against him because of the so-called “blue wall of silence,” the bond between police officers that they never testify against each other even if one of them has killed another of their own. The attempts by the prosecutors to find even one officer who will break the “blue wall” take on an air of pathos as well as Kafkaesque frustration.

They even go to Brandt’s superior officer, Captain Greg Stockwell (Travis Lehne), who protests that he’s just about to retire anyway and if he admits in open court that Brandt had a reputation for skimming drug money in raids and everyone in his unit knew about it and looked the other way, he will be accused of corruption himself and lose his status in the department as well as his pension. He’s old and visibly about to retire, and he doesn’t want any trouble that will derail his retirement plans. Ultimately the case is saved when Lt. Jessica Brady (Maura Tierney), immediate supervisor of Detectives Riley and Shaw, testifies in the trial regarding Brandt’s corrupt reputation. She learned about it because she had previously served in Brandt’s precinct before transferring over to the one in Law and Order, but her courageous act leads her to be the subject not only of visible shunning from her fellow officers but an Internal Affairs investigation against her. “Bad Apple” is an intriguing moral tale in which one of the subsidiary characters is the slain officer’s brother, an activist for defunding the police which in his case means exactly that: not just taking money away from police departments to use for crime-prevention programs (which is what most people who say “defund the police” actually mean) but downright abolishing the police altogether. One wonders how he feels when his brother, who tried to be an honest cop and got killed for his pains, is murdered by a member of his own department (though we don’t get to find out because writers Rick Eid and Scott Gold never return to him) in a coverup of corruption. Even after nearly 35 years of this program, Dick Wolf and his writers still have the knack of coming up with interesting and disturbing tales and dilemmas that have no easy answers, no obvious rights and wrongs. And for a show Wolf deliberately began as an answer to Perry Mason and the other series about heroic defense attorneys winning acquittals for the unjustly accused – he wanted to present a show in which the cops and the prosecutors were the good guys and a lot of the due-process rules put in place by the U.S. Supreme Court and others in the 1960’s just got in their way – Law and Order has become a quite good program and a genuinely ambiguous one morally. The late science-fiction writer Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. recommended watching Law and Order as a study in just how the Constitutional guarantees of due process work out in real life.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Cornered" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired November 21, 2024)

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

Alas, after the excellent “Bad Apple” episode of the flagship Law and Order, the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that followed, “Cornered,” returned to the ordinary in more ways than one. It began rather innocently with assistant district attorney Dominic Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino) on his way to an office party being thrown for his paralegal, Elizabeth Alden (Toni Khalil). Carisi stops in at a bodega run by Ali Imran (Turhan Troy Kaylak) to pick up a cup of coffee. Ali knows exactly just how Carisi likes his coffee – which in itself, according to the conventions of Law and Order scriptology, marks him as not long for this world. Carisi gets his coffee just fine, but he realizes that he didn’t get a card for the bouquet he meant to present to Elizabeth. So he pops into the bodega to get one – just as the place is being robbed by recently released criminals Boyd Lynch (Silas Weir Mitchell), a 50-something hot-headed white guy, and his 20-something Black associate, Deonte Mosley (Keith Machekanyanga), whom he “protected” in prison (though writers David Graziano and Julie Martin do no more than hint about what Lynch got out of Mosley for “protecting” him). The crooks hold hostage Carisi, Ali and two women in the deli, including Tess Milburn (Paige Herschell), who so audibly worries about her boyfriend and what he’ll think if she shows up at their meeting late because she was literally held up that we know she’s going to get raped by the time the episode is over. That does indeed happen (by Lynch) after the robbers hit on the idea of locking their hostages – except for Carisi, whom they let stay in the store in the hope he’ll be a valuable bargaining chip in case the police surround the place – in the deli’s meat freezer.

Lynch forces Ali to call the deli’s absentee owner for the key to the safe hidden on the deli floor, and when Ali attempts to answer the deli’s land line – which the cops are calling to establish contact and communication with the hostage-takers – Lynch, who for some reason doesn’t want any contact with the outside world, shoots him dead. Carisi futilely tries to keep the guy alive, including pressing against his body at the location of the gunshot wound, but to no avail. Later Carisi tries to exchange himself for Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), arguing that an NYPD captain is a much more valuable hostage than a mere assistant district attorney, but the switch doesn’t happen because Lynch and Mosley refused to let Captain Benson in and release Carisi. Carisi tells the uncomprehending Mosley that whatever Lynch has done, as his accomplice he’s equally liable legally, meaning he can be charged with both murder and rape even though he didn’t commit those crimes: Lynch did. Ultimately Lynch freaks out and thinks Mosley is going to switch sides on him, and Mosley shoots Lynch dead, whereupon Captain Benson and the police who’ve been waiting outside crash the place, rescue the remaining hostages and arrest Mosley, who seems not to understand that whatever Carisi said to him about acting in self-defense, he did commit several crimes for which he’s legally liable as Lynch’s accomplice. After a genuinely disturbing and demanding Law and Order episode, this SVU all too obviously returned to the strict moral conventions of policiers, with good-good cops, bad-bad crooks and an overall sense of black-and-white characters. Deonte Mosley is the only truly conflicted role here, and even he – despite Keith Machekanyanga’s success in portraying him and his dilemmas – isn’t strong enough to make this more than a by-the-numbers people-in-terror thriller.

Film Is Dead. Long Live Film! (ColdEye Films, BayView Entertainment, 2024)

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

Last night (Sunday, November 17) my husband Charles and I watched three quite interesting presentations from Turner Classic Movies: a 2024 documentary called Film Is Dead. Long Live Film! and two “Silent Sunday Showcase” entries both directed by Ernst Lubitsch. Film Is Dead. Long Live Film! was produced and directed by Peter Flynn and dealt with film collectors, the small subgroup of movie-mad people who obsessively trolled abandoned theatres, wastebaskets and wherever movie industry people might have disposed of films they didn’t think had any more commercial value. Despite the public pronouncements of many people involved in creating the cinema as a technology that they were inventing a means to record motion permanently, film was an unstable medium from the get-go. The reasons why are all too well known to movie geeks like me: the early films were made on a substance called cellulose nitrate, and it is very flammable. Later a more stable acetate base was invented which was called “safety film” because it wasn’t as flammable as nitrate (though it also didn’t produce the beautiful gradations of black and white of nitrate), but it had its own deficiencies. As it decays it starts giving off the odor of vinegar, and often film preservationists have opened a long-forgotten can of film only to find it reeks of vinegar, indicating either that it’s already begun to decay or that it’s so far gone it’s unsalvageable. There are all too many sequences in this film of archivists attempting to unspool a roll of film and finding out it has essentially glued itself to itself over time, rendering it too far gone to be preserved. Ironically, Flynn’s narration hails digitalization as the great savior of the film legacy, but ignores that digital transfers come with their own set of problems. A digital file can become useless if the software with which it was created is abandoned or discontinued, or if there are seemingly minor errors like missing bits in the transfer. This is why, even though the major film studios shoot almost entirely on digital these days, and less than 2 percent of all modern movie theatres are actually equipped to show film, they still transfer their elaborately shot digital productions to film for preservation purposes.

Film Is Dead. Long Live Film! is dedicated to one particularly intrepid film preservationist in particular: the late Louis DiCrescenzo, who was particularly interested not only in collecting the films themselves but also the original equipment with which they’d been made and shown. DiCrescenzo, who died in January 2024 just after he was filmed for this documentary, was luckily able to find a younger man, Jeffrey Crooks, whom he could train to run the old equipment and maintain the collection after he passed. Many film collectors aren’t so lucky: their children often don’t see any value in old film – “That’s that crazy stuff my dad was into, which kept him from spending time with me,” they think – and toss it out like so much trash when they inherit. One film collector arranged to donate his archives to the Library of Congress precisely so the collection would be preserved after he was gone. A few names in the film would be familiar, at least to certain kinds of movie geeks, like Ron Furmanek, Rick Prelinger (whose collection became the basis for the movies available on archive.org) and the remarkable Malkames family (whose name is pronounced “Mal-CAMES,” not “Mahl-KAHM–es” as I’d always assumed). Great-grandfather Karl Malkames was one of the cinematographers on D. W. Griffith’s racist masterpiece The Birth of a Nation (1915). Grandfather Don Malkames (1904-1986) also worked as a cinematographer and shot many of Louis Jordan’s music videos in the 1940’s as well as feature films like Jigsaw (1949), Project X (1949) and The Burglar (1957). Father Karl and son Rick continued the tradition, and Rick has a Web site devoted to his collection – including sound home movies of the Malkames family gathered around a piano taking turns singing and playing.

One of the most interesting running themes of Film Is Dead. Long Live Film! is the obsession of one particular collector, Eric Grayson, with restoring one particular film: the 1929 Mascot part-sound serial King of the Kongo. Using surviving 35 mm sources, a 16 mm cut-down print and digital software to clean up flaws in the image quality, Grayson was ultimately able to piece together a complete version of the picture. The sound was another matter, since the film was shot on the Vitaphone system with the sound on a separate disc (a series of 10-minute phonograph records, one per reel). Among Grayson’s problems were that the Vitaphone discs ended up in the hands of record collectors, not film collectors, while the film itself was plundered for stock footage by various people after its initial release. My husband Charles said he hoped that if and when the film is completely restored, there would be some explanation for the lengthy … pauses … in the … talking sequences … between the … actors’ cue lines and … their own. This was quite common in the very earliest sound films, the result of sound engineers who had become the new dictators of Hollywood. They insisted that the only way recorded dialogue could be understood by the audience is if actors delivered their lines slowly and carefully paused between the cue line and the reply. The fact that there had already been plenty of talking records that weren’t made in this hideously unnatural fashion, and which had sold well, was ignored. The few early talkies that are still entertaining were made by directors like King Vidor, Lewis Milestone, William Wyler, Rouben Mamoulian and Frank Capra who overrode the dictates of the sound engineers and told the actors to speak normally, but King of the Kongo’s director, Richard Thorpe (who later went on to a sinecure at MGM and there directed Elvis Presley in Jailhouse Rock), didn’t have that kind of determination or clout. The one actor in King of the Kongo you’re likely to have heard of, Boris Karloff, actually spoke his lines naturalistically as he did in his later films, but the others acted in that hideously stagy manner prescribed by the sound engineers.

One of the problems with film preservation is that old prints of movies are quite valuable to the people with an interest in them, but not to the rest of the world. Another problem many film collectors faced, especially in the 1970’s, was pressure from the movie studios literally to put them out of business. One collector actually recalled being prosecuted by the FBI and forced to serve a six-month jail sentence after his collection was decreed to be stolen goods and held in violation of the copyright laws. This was especially ironic since most of the items he had had simply been thrown away by the major studios. Later on, with the rise of home video and then DVD’s, the studios finally realized there was gold in them thar archives, and a number of studios literally had to cut deals with the film collectors they’d once tried to put out of business to get important scenes needed to restore old films to their original running times and content. Film Is Dead. Long Live Film! is a remarkable documentary about the unsung heroes of film preservation – towards the end Flynn makes a rather kvetchy comment about the fact that when the rediscovered 1922 film Beyond the Rocks, directed by Sam Wood and co-starring Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino, was re-premiered there was a long list of people in the program who’d participated in the restoration but no mention of whoever had owned the print in the first place – and the overall fragility of our audio-visual recorded legacy.

Beyond the Rocks (Paramount, 1922)

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

In honor of the film preservationists and collectors commemorated in Film Is Dead. Long Live Film!, here is a celebration of one of the most important long-lost silent movies brought back by a preservation archive, Beyond the Rocks, made at Paramount in 1922, directed by Sam Wood and starring Gloria Swanson and Rudolph Valentino. The note here came from a movie journal entry dated May 27, 2006, probably the day after my husband Charles and I first watched it.

I ran Beyond the Rocks, the film TCM showed last Sunday as part of a seven-film tribute to Rudolph Valentino. This was the one that was rediscovered in 2003 by the Nederlands Filmuseum in the middle of a private collection of old film reels that had been donated to them, and though virtually the whole movie was there (only a couple of minutes seemed to have fallen through the cracks completely) the reels were not together in the collection and the film had to be pieced back together — and some of the reels were not as well preserved as others. There are two sequences badly beset by nitrate burns — one a relatively unimportant shot of a train going through a tunnel and one a much more significant scene at a cocktail party at which the principals meet — but otherwise the film is actually pretty well preserved (certainly we’ve seen worse!) and a welcome rediscovery, especially given that it’s the only film Valentino and Gloria Swanson made together and it was one of the three films whose absence she most lamented in her autobiography (the others were the 1925 film Madame Sans-Gêne and the last reel of her marvelous 1927 production of Sadie Thompson). Swanson recalled that the Fatty Arbuckle and William Desmond Taylor scandals broke just before they were about to start shooting Beyond the Rocks — which had not only the marquee value of the stars’ names (though Swanson got top billing and insisted it was her vehicle; she was already an established star while Valentino, despite having already made The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and The Sheik, was still considered an up-and-comer whose career could be helped by a male lead in a Swanson film) but also that of a superstar writer, Elinor Glyn, known for such racy tales as Three Weeks, His Hour, Her Moment (in his autobiography Charlie Chaplin joked about the shortening time sequence of those titles) and, most famously, It — which from Dorothy Parker’s review seems like an Ayn Rand novel with the politics deleted (the hero is a super-powerful industrialist named John Gaunt) — and the film script she wrote for It which had a totally different plot from the novel (which itself appears in the film as the hot book of the moment which the characters in the movie read and discuss).

As a result, the script by Jack Cunningham (a name which surprised me in the credits; I’d assumed Glyn had adapted the novel herself) had to be rewritten at the last minute and much of the romantic heavy-breathing between the leads discarded, while according to Robert Osborne’s intro there were actually two versions of each kissing scene: a short one for the U.S. release (since one of the first edicts Will Hays had rendered as Hollywood’s morals czar was that a kiss could last only a few seconds on screen) and a longer one for Europe — though even in this European print the romantic scenes still seemed a bit on the short side and hardly the heavy-breathing romantic fireworks one would have expected from these two iconic stars in their only on-screen teaming. Beyond the Rocks is a heavily contrived story that moves its characters willy-nilly around the world to surprisingly little effect (this is the most peripatetic movie I can think of other than the Beatles’ Help!). It starts in a fishing village off the coast of England, where Captain Fitzgerald (Alec Francis) is living in a genteelly poor retirement. He and his two homely daughters (“products of a misalliance in his youth,” the title explains), played by Mary Foy and Adele Watson, are counting on his beautiful daughter Theodora (Gloria Swanson) to marry a rich man and thereby restore the family’s fortunes.

On a boat trip around the coast Theodora’s boat capsizes and she’s saved from drowning by Lord Hector Bracondale (Rudolph Valentino) — a title explains that he had an Italian grandmother to explain Valentino’s exotic and decidedly un-English appearance in the role. Of course, they’re smitten with each other at first sight, and he’s charming, drop-dead gorgeous and filthy rich — so what more could Our Theodora want? But she’s put off considering him as a mate any further by a chance remark by a female member of his entourage that he’s “not the marrying kind,” and instead Theodora goes through with the marriage her dad has arranged for her with self-made millionaire Josiah Brown (Robert Bolder, a fireplug-shaped actor with a striking resemblance to Louis B. Mayer — Gloria Swanson was only five feet tall and Bolder looks just an inch or two taller in their scenes together) even though she endures the ceremony with a fixed expression on her face that makes it look like she’s going to puke at any moment. The not-so-happy couple head to Switzerland for their honeymoon and Theodora wants to go climb the Alps — only Josiah, the spoilsport, decided that just getting to their hotel was exercise enough and he bails on the trip. She loses her footing at the edge of a crevasse (Gloria Swanson always prided herself on doing her own stunts and probably did so here, though the “mountain” is all too obviously a papier-mâché construction on the Paramount backlot and she’d have only had a few feet to fall) and is dangling by a rope when in comes Hector to save her life again, though since the rope is too heavy to be pulled with both of them on it he first has the two of them lowered to the nearest ledge to await rescue, which gives them plenty of time to vibrate with mutual affection.

From there the film flits to Paris, where the two meet at the palace of Versailles (whose exterior is pretty obviously a painted backdrop, perhaps painted over a blown-up photo of the original à la Black Narcissus) and there’s a DeMille-like flashback to the glory days of the ancien regime in which Valentino and Swanson appear as forbidden lovers then. (It’s indicative of how ill at ease Valentino always seemed in stories set in his own time that here, and during a later scene also set in the past with he and Swanson romancing each other in the guise of an historical couple, his performance takes on a smoldering quality it pretty much lacks in the bulk of the film.) Then it goes to England again, where a pageant is being staged on the grounds of a major estate and Hector locks the man who’s supposed to play Theodora’s lover in a closet so he can take the part himself. Theodora, torn between duty to her husband and attraction to her lover, decides to write them both — telling Josiah she intends to join him in London and resume their marriage, and telling Hector she can’t see him again — only yet another of the omnipresent feminine busybodies who populate the dramatis personae steams open the letters so she can read them, then puts them back in the wrong envelopes. When Hector reads Josiah’s letter and realizes what’s happened, he drives to London to intercept the other letter before Josiah can read it — only he arrives too late. Broken by his wife’s apparent infidelity (though the filmmakers have played the usual games with us in leaving it open as to whether anything carnal ever did happen between Hector and Theodora), Josiah decides to accept the offer of a friend to join him on an archaeological expedition to the Sahara despite Hector’s warning of the danger from desert tribes. (I couldn’t help but joke, “I’m Rudolph Valentino, damnit! I know something about desert tribes!”) Josiah — who given that he couldn’t handle even a simple mountaineering trip in the Alps would seem to be an unlikely candidate for desert archaeology (in, you guessed it, recycled sets from The Sheik) — duly gets killed in the inevitable desert-tribe attack until a force from the local colonial government arrives and restores order, and on his deathbed Josiah blesses the union of Theodora and Hector. The final scene takes us back to the coast of England and Hector’s yacht, on which he and Theodora are traveling and he says they have made it beyond the rocks of their early relationship and found safe harbor with each other (the only explanation of this film’s title we’re ever going to get). The End.

As silly and improbable as this story is, Beyond the Rocks has one thing going for it big-time: the direction by Sam Wood. In terms of camera setups it’s pretty unadventurous — there are so few closeups it’s all too apparent how short Gloria Swanson really was (anyone who first saw her in Sunset Boulevard — where Billy Wilder had John F. Seitz shoot her almost always from below, while shooting down on William Holden from above, so she appeared to tower over him even though he was really a foot taller — will inevitably be jarred by earlier films that reveal her truly diminutive stature) — but he manages to get some of the most marvelously understated performances of the silent era from his cast. There are almost none of the statuesque poses, the hammy hands-on-forehead gestures, or the registrations of disgust by hurling oneself to the ground and making one look like a building that’s just collapsed in an earthquake. Instead the actors behave surprisingly naturalistically — much of this film looks more like a talkie with the sound turned off than a silent film — making their points with a minimum of gesturing. This film underscores Gloria Swanson’s contention in her autobiography that the prestige films of the silent era always had fully written-out scripts and the actors recited their dialogue from memory, and the only change when sound came in was that now there were microphones and recording machines capturing the lines they’d been speaking all along. Wood’s direction plays against the melodrama of Glyn’s plot, especially in the finest scene in the film (ironically, one Swanson isn’t in): the confrontation between Josiah and Hector. Robert Bolder, who previously throughout the film has been an almost comic character, takes on a true sense of dignity as his reactions switch from anger (he’s ready to kill Hector) to real-looking tears to sorrow to resignation; and Valentino also plays the scene with dignity and an appreciation of the impossible situation all three of these people are in. In this scene, more than any other in the movie, Beyond the Rocks breaks through the contrivance of its plot and the last-minute moral compromises the filmmakers had to make and achieves a startlingly intimate depth of emotion.

Three Women (Warner Brothers, 1924)

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

After Film Is Dead. Long Live Film!, TCM showed a couple of odd silent movies directed by Ernst Lubitsch: a 1924 comedy/melodrama from Warner Bros. called Three Women and a 1919 comedy/fantasy from his early years in Germany called The Doll. Three Women is a typical silent film about a no-good rotter named Edmund Lamont (Lew Cody, a specialist in these sorts of roles) who, as the title suggests, romances three women. One is middle-aged wealthy heiress Mabel Wilton (Pauline Frederick, one of the veteran Broadway actresses who got wooed into the movies by Goldwyn Pictures, which jocularly earned it the nickname “The Old Ladies’ Home”); one is her daughter Jeannie (May McAvoy, who three years later would play Al Jolson’s girlfriend in The Jazz Singer); and one is an anonymous bimbo named Harriet (Marie Prevost). We know right off the bat that Edmund is up to no good partly because of his thin little “roo” moustache, and partly because a heavy-set man named Harvey Craig (Willard Louis) is dogging Edmund for money he owes him. Edmund and Mabel meet at a charity ball at which Edmund is throwing around money he doesn’t have, and after he and Mabel literally bump into each other, Harvey points out that Mabel has a lot of money ($3 million, to be exact), and if Edmund romances her he can get the money he needs to pay his debt to Harvey and everyone else to whom he owes funds. Soon Mabel is inviting Edmund to her home, lighting incense in an elaborate sitting room and preparing to canoodle with him – while Jeannie, ostensibly a student at UC Berkeley (though there’s a major geographical glitch here: when we see her get on a train called the “Los Angeles Express” to visit her mom in New York, the train station from which she boards is clearly labeled “San Bernardino”), is getting restive. She’s surrounded by a lot of men, but the one who truly loves her is medical student Fred Colman (Pierre Gendron), who is broke but expects to be making a lot of money once he becomes a doctor. Fred hocks his watch to get the money to buy Jeannie a bracelet for her 18th birthday, but then gets aced when her mom sends her either the exact same bracelet or an even fancier one.

When Jeannie finally arrives in New York and moves in with her mom, Mabel is spending so much time with Edmund that Jeannie literally never sees her; she’s palmed off with soup for her dinner while Edmund and Mabel are dining out, and she complains that she’s lonelier at home than she ever was on campus (though since she was surrounded by people during the campus scenes, that’s all too easy to believe!). Edmund happens to meet Jeannie and starts a flirtation with her without knowing Mabel is her mother, and ultimately Edmund actually gets Jeannie to marry him after he finds out that she has her own money, an inheritance from her late father. Unfortunately, the point at which Edmond and Jeannie get hitched legally is the point at which Three Women abandons the path of light romantic comedy at which Lubitsch was best and turns into all too typical silent-era melodrama. Fred Colman shows up and announces that he’s got an internship in New York and wants to start dating Jeannie again – and he’s understandably miffed when he finds out Jeannie is actually married to someone else. Mom is also miffed, especially when she learns that Edmund is actually seeing the titular third woman, Harriet, at a typically preposterous 1920’s establishment called the Monkey Club. The reason it’s named that is the patrons are given papier-maché monkeys on stalks that they can manipulate. Mabel demands that Edmund give up Jeannie, but Edmund threatens to release Mabel’s love letters to him if she pushes it, which will embarrass her in a scandal. So Mabel, in Jeannie’s presence, pulls a gun on Edmund and shoots him, then tells Jeannie, “You’re free.” Jeannie takes the love letters with which Edmund was threatening to blackmail them, tears them up and throws them in the fire. Mabel is put on trial for Edmund’s murder but is acquitted, and she, Jeannie and Fred Colman end up together at the end.

Three Women was one of the projects on which Lubitsch worked with writer Hans Kräly, his working partner in Germany, whom he insisted on bringing with him when he emigrated from Germany to the U.S. Lubitsch was brought to the U.S. by Mary Pickford to direct Rosita (1923), which cast her as an innocent Spanish dancer torn between a lecherous king and the man who really loves her. Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase” host Jacqueline Stewart keeps insisting that Rosita was a major hit even though all other sources I’ve read say it was one of Pickford’s few flops, and it was a big enough career embarrassment it was one of the few Pickford films she did not bother to save in her archives. (The extant print was discovered in Russia.) Lubitsch stayed in Hollywood but ended up under contract to Warner Brothers (back when they were still spelling out the word “Brothers” instead of abbreviating it “Bros.”) when they were still a second-tier studio. Lubitsch’s films at Warners got better as his tenure there progressed, and by the end of the 1920’s he was under contract to the most prestigious studio at the time, Paramount, making films that reflected his unique brand of saucy romantic comedy with the so-called “Lubitsch touches.” Alas, his working relationship with Hans Kräly (with whom he seemed to have the sort of partnership that Dudley Nichols had with John Ford, Robert Riskin with Frank Capra, and Charles Bennett with Alfred Hitchcock) ended abruptly when he caught Kräly having an affair with Mrs. Lubitsch, and rather than react with the aw-what-the-hell detachment of a Lubitsch character, Lubitsch had a jealous hissy-fit and banned Kräly from his future projects. More’s the pity, I say, though one imdb.com reviewer called Kräly “a drag on Lubitsch.”

The Doll (Projektions-AG Union, Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft [UFA], 1919)

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

The other Ernst Lubitsch film Turner Classic Movies showed November 17 was The Doll (1919), made while Lubitsch was still in Germany. It’s a rather arch tale about a young man, Lancelot von Chauterelle (Hermann Thimig), whose uncle, Baron von Chauterelle (Max Kronert), is getting worried that he doesn’t have an heir and the Chauterelle name will die out if his nephew doesn’t hurry up, marry a woman and produce some kids already. “I won’t marry a woman!” Lancelot insists, in a scene that makes it look (at least to a 2024 audience) as if he’s about to come out as Gay. Instead he seeks out the home of renowned toymaker Hilarius (Victor Janson), who after years of making dolls in normal sizes has just perfected a life-size replica of his daughter Ossi (Ossi Oswalda), complete with a wind-up crank and a series of button controls on its back. Lancelot hears about Hilarius’s invention and thinks it’s the perfect solution: he’ll buy the doll, go through a mock marriage ceremony with it, get the 300,000-franc dowry his uncle is offering him once he’s married, and then he’ll donate the money to the local monastery and live out his days as a monk. Only Hilarius’s apprentice (Gerhard Rittenband) breaks the arm of the replica Ossi and the real Ossi agrees to take its place just as long as Lancelot visits and wants a life-sized doll. Both Charles and I thought this was going to be a 20-minute comedy short, but it stretched out to over an hour and the one joke really couldn’t sustain it – though even in a film this early there are typical Lubitsch “touches,” like the scene in which the genuinely human guests at Lancelot’s and Ossi’s wedding move as mechanically as the dolls in the sequences at Hilarius’s workshop.

But it’s a one-joke movie and the one joke pretty quickly wears out its welcome, despite some nice scenes back at the monastery in which Ossi gets worried that the monks plan to lock her inside their junk room. There’s also a prologue in which a puppeteer (the film’s German title is Der Puppe, which can mean either “the doll” or “the puppet”) played by Ernst Lubitsch himself sets up a doll house and puts up various sets and props around it, which seems to suggest that the entire story is a fantasy and all the characters are dolls. For some reason, at least according to Jacqueline Stewart, Lubitsch regarded The Doll as one of his best films and frequently cited it, along with two other German comedies, among his greatest works. Far be it from me to disagree with the great Lubitsch, but The Doll strikes me – in spite of some truly inspired moments – as a pretty leaden would-be farce with an overall heaviness typical of German attempts at humor. (It reminded me of a line from one of the old BBC Goon Squad radio shows, which launched Peter Sellers on his career and were basically Monty Python before Monty Python, in which Sellers said in his best comic-German accent, “Who said ve Germans haff no sense of humor?,” and a chorus of voices replied, “Just about everybody.”) The credits list 19th century author E. T. A. Hoffmann as the source for the original story, though I suspect Lubitsch and co-writer Hans Kräly took little from Hoffmann except the basic concept of a life-sized doll that successfully impersonates a human being. The imdb.com page also lists A. E. Willner as composer of an operetta based on the tale, though of course the greatest musical adaptation of the mechanical-doll storyline is the “Olympia” act of Jacques Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffmann, which has everything this rather leaden film lacks: genuine wit, subtlety, humor and even pathos. There’s one interesting name on the behind-the-camera credits for The Doll: the cinematographers are Theodor Sparkühl and Kurt Waschneck, and like a lot of German Jews in the movie business, Sparkühl emigrated after Hitler and the Nazis took power in 1933, moving first to France (where he was billed as Théodore Sparkuhl) and then to the U.S. (where he was Theodore Sparkuhl, no accents and no umlauts), where he settled at Paramount and shot some of the most important early-1940’s films noir.

The Big Combo (Security Pictures, Theodora Productions, Allied Artists, 1955)

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

Last night (Saturday, November 16) my husband Charles and I watched an Eddie Muller “Noir Alley” presentation of a quite interesting gangster movie with film noir elements from 1955: The Big Combo, made under auspices that reflected the breakdown of the traditional Hollywood studio system in the early 1950’s and its replacement by ad hoc combinations of “production companies,” many of them owned or co-owned by star actors. This one was from two companies called “Security Pictures” and “Theodora Productions,” “Theodora” being the company created by actor Cornel Wilde to make his own movies in association with distributors. In this case the distributor was Allied Artists, formerly our old friends Monogram Pictures until in 1947 they changed their name and started moving up in the cinematic hierarchy. In 1955 Steve Broidy, long-time head of Allied nèe Monogram, announced that he had signed William Wyler, Billy Wilder and John Huston to make prestige pictures for the company – and its stock price immediately went down because, as Wilder biographer Maurice Zolotow explained, his investors realized that “A” productions were a considerably riskier investment than the “B” movies that had previously sustained the studio and given it a source of steady income. (Wyler made Friendly Persuasion, Wilder Love in the Afternoon, and Huston signed to make Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King with Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart – only by the time Huston finally got around to making The Man Who Would Be King, it was 20 years later, Gable and Bogart were both dead, and the stars were Sean Connery and Michael Caine.)

The Big Combo was originally planned as at least a semi-prestige film called The Hoodlum, to be shot in color with Spencer Tracy and Jack Palance as stars and Hugo Fregonese directing from a script by – or at least attributed to – Philip Yordan. There’s some question as to just who actually wrote this film because Yordan was making a handsome living working as a “front” for blacklisted writers, and according to Eddie Muller the actual author of this script was Ben Maddow, who had made his name in Hollywood writing the script for John Huston’s 1950 noir classic The Asphalt Jungle. Maddow’s imdb.com biography page includes a quote from him about Yordan: “Philip Yordan has never written more than a sentence in his life. He’s incapable of writing.” (Yet Yordan has a pretty impressive pre-blacklist credits list, including When Strangers Marry, the 1945 Dillinger, Whistle Stop, Suspense and The Chase.) Whoever came up with it, The Big Combo is a quite good gangster/noir film centered around the rivalry of two main characters, police lieutenant Leonard Diamond (Cornel Wilde) and gang boss Mr. Brown (Richard Conte, who joined the cast four days into the shoot after Jack Palance pulled out of the project out of anger that they wouldn’t let his wife play the female lead). The director, Joseph H. Lewis, was called in at the last moment just two days before shooting was supposed to begin. Fortunately he had the great noir cinematographer John Alton on the project, and Alton used his trademark skill of shooting fast and well on a low budget throughout the movie. Also, whoever wrote the script (Yordan, Maddow or both), The Big Combo has some fascinatingly multidimensional characterizations, especially among the three principal women.

It’s also one of those movies in which the lead crook is in some ways more sympathetic than the lead cop: Lt. Diamond is arrogant, self-righteous and generally a pain in the ass, while Mr. Brown (Richard Conte gives the performance of his life; he’s still a crook but a far savvier and more sophisticated one than the hoods he usually played) is suave, sophisticated and skilled at maintaining a front of respectability even though he’s the Big Boss of crime in that city and the dialogue explaining the reach of his power sounds a lot like Sherlock Holmes talking about Professor Moriarty to me. (Frankly, Richard Conte plays the part considerably better than Jack Palance would have; Palance was a first-rate actor as a figure of stylized menace but couldn’t have pulled off the character’s surface suavity as well as Conte.) As for the women, Jean Wallace (then, and until they divorced in 1982, Mrs. Cornel Wilde) is superb as Susan Lowell, a former aspiring concert pianist who gave up her career to pair up with Mr. Brown and who lets him push her around out of self-loathing. Also, Lt. Diamond is attracted to her – even though he’s already got a girlfriend (more on her later) – thereby setting up one of those hero-heroine-villain love triangles that powered many of Alfred Hitchcock’s best films. The woman already in Lt. Diamond’s life is a stripper named Rita (Helene Stanton) whom he sees regularly after she finishes her nightly shows, only she gets eliminated when Mr. Brown sends a pair of hired killers, Mingo (Earl Holliman) and Fante (future spaghetti-Western star Lee Van Cleef), over to Lt. Diamond’s apartment to kill him – only she’s let herself in with his key and they kill her instead.

There’s a third woman in the dramatis personae: Alicia Brown (Helen Walker in her final film; before this she’d been in some major mid-1940’s noirs including Nightmare Alley, Call Northside 777 and Impact), Mr. Brown’s estranged wife. Her presence in the story is part of an elaborate set of cons Mr. Brown has pulled to make it look like she ran off with a gangster named Grazzi (whom we never see except in an old still photo) and later was killed. Only it turns out that Mr. Brown’s agents killed Grazzi on a steamship that was supposedly taking him home to Sicily and threw his body overboard, then made it look like Alicia was dead instead of Grazzi when in fact she’s alive in a New York state nursing home obsessively tending a stand of flowers she’s grown. Lt. Diamond traces her there and arrests her in order to force her to testify against Mr. Brown, which she’s initially reluctant to do but ultimately agrees. There are some quite chilling scenes in The Big Combo that definitely pushed the envelope of the sorts of violence usually permitted under the Motion Picture Production Code, including a scene in which Lt. Diamond is held hostage by Mr. Brown and his thugs and is force-fed an alcoholic beverage – it looks like he’s being waterboarded, only with booze – and a great scene in which Mr. Brown’s assistant, Joe McClure (Brian Donlevy), tries to get Mingo and Fante to kill Mr. Brown – only they kill McClure instead. The gimmick relies on the fact that McClure, who used to run the rackets Brown now controls, is nearly deaf and relies on a hearing aid, and just before Mingo and Fante turn their guns on him, Mr. Brown unplugs McClure’s hearing aid. Lewis stages the scene of McClure’s murder totally soundlessly, with the guns blasting away but without making noise.

The Big Combo is also unusual in that the hired killers are portrayed more or less as a Gay couple, though this wasn’t as innovative as Eddie Muller seemed to think it was; eight years earlier, in an RKO “B” noir called Born to Kill, Lawrence Tierney and Elisha Cook, Jr. had similarly been portrayed as a criminal couple with Gay undertones. There are also bits that dramatize Susan Lowell’s disquiet with her current status as Mr. Brown’s moll and her yearnings for her old life as an aspiring concert pianist. In one scene she picks up an older man named Audubon (Roy Gordon) for a dance in a nightclub, and as she’s in his arms she collapses and later explains she’s O.D.’d on pills as a way of committing suicide. (This was apparently inspired by Jean Wallace’s two real-life suicide attempts in 1946 and 1949, while she was married to actor Franchot Tone.) Then we see her at home playing a record of Chopin’s Scherzo No. 3 in C-sharp minor by pianist Jakob Gimpel (whose Vox album of Chopin selections I remember having as a child), only Mr. Brown comes home unexpectedly and makes her stop the record. In an even later scene we get to see Gimpel as himself playing the same Chopin piece as part of a live concert Susan attends, though she’s overcome with disgust and leaves the concert early. The film’s climax takes place at an airport where Mr. Brown is waiting in vain for a pilot to bring his private plane and fly him out of the country – only the pilot doesn’t show (he’s previously been arrested by Lt. Diamond’s men) and the cops do instead, taking Mr. Brown into custody for a presumed trial with Susan and Alicia as the key witnesses against him.

The original plan was actually to shoot this at an airport à la Casablanca, but John Alton had a better idea. He said he could shoot the entire thing on a soundstage, with just shadows and pin lights. Since the airplane never shows up, Alton didn’t think they needed to budget the rental for a real plane. Instead they created the effect with shadows and spotlights alone, and the climax of the scene comes when Susan, showing that her loyalties have changed and she’s now on the side of good, grabs hold of a spotlight attached to one of the cars in the scene and uses it to point the police to just where Mr. Brown is so they can aim at him. Charles and I had seen The Big Combo once before in the 1990’s on the UCSD channel, though in a far inferior print that was cut down to the old 4:3 aspect ratio, but this time around I liked it a lot better. It’s generally acknowledged as Lewis’s second-best film (after his audacious 1949 masterpiece, Gun Crazy) and it’s certainly one of the better movies from the tail end of the first film noir cycle. It’s also noteworthy for the jazz background score by David Raksin (composer of the 1944 Laura), featuring Shorty Rogers and His Giants, one of the top white L.A. jazz bands of the time. Producer Sidney Harmon and director Lewis deserve kudos for not slapping another generic mittel-European score on this one and using the music its characters would have listened to instead – anticipating Henry Mancini’s use of a jazz score for the noir TV series Peter Gunn by two years.

Death in Paradise: Episode 13.7 (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, November 15) I watched another episode of the TV series Death in Paradise, set on the fictional Caribbean island of Sainte-Marie (“played” by the very real Caribbean island of Guadeloupe) – though in this case the police are split between Sainte-Marie and the equally fictitious Saint-Antoine, where a group of young women who all attended a prestigious boarding school in Britain are spending a summer. One of them, Cressida “Chris” Dempsey (Django Chan-Reeves), is an utterly obnoxious “influencer” who spends most of her time talking on her smart phone, filming everything she does and sees as she does and sees it for a vlog (a video Web log, for those of you who aren’t up to the latest digital-world terminology) and making herself utterly obnoxious to everyone in her group. Another young woman, Abigail Warner (Eve Ponsonby), is found dead in a hotel swimming pool. The death is at first ruled an accident, but detective sergeant Naomi Thomas (Shantol Jackson) is suspicious because Abigail had just been swimming in the ocean before she was found dead in the pool, and why after having swum in the ocean would she want to swim again so soon? The Sainte-Marie police have to investigate this because Saint-Antoine is too small an island, with too limited a population, to have a police force of its own. Ultimately, to almost no one’s surprise, Chris turns out to be Abigail’s killer. Apparently there’s some deep, dark secret in Chris’s past – though I don’t think writer James Hall bothered to reveal what it was or why it would be so potentially destructive to Abigail or her direct, no-nonsense blog persona, but it was, and after a brief struggle in which Abigail confronted Chris in the pool (and writer James Hall gave her a scar on her forehead the cops never seemed to figure out what was up with that), it was Chris who knocked off Abigail instead so she didn’t reveal what she was going to reveal about her online. I was comparatively bored by this one and I did a fair amount of nodding off during it, but I got the gist of it even though for once the subplots on this show – including a former member of a witness protection program who’d testified against some criminal bigwigs on Sainte-Marie and had to spend years on a neighboring island until the charges in her case got resolved – were more interesting than the main intrigue.

Live at the Belly Up: The Charities (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 Death in Paradise I watched a quite good Live at the Belly Up show shot in 2024 at the eponymous club and concert venue in Solana Beach (which is why I’ve never been there: I’m sure I’d like a lot of the music played there, but the transportation difficulties are just insurmountable). The band was a white neo-soul group called The Charities, led by a kind of dorky heavy-set dude named Brock Van Pelt (by coincidence, “Van Pelt” is also the last name of Lucy and Linus in the Peanuts comic strip). Van Pelt is the group’s front person and also was the spokesperson for it in the interstitial interviews. He said that The Charities came together from people who had worked in various bands and wanted to continue their musical careers. A Web site at “Jam in the Van” (https://jaminthevan.com/band/the-charities/) identifies them as “six brothers,” but there are only five of them (or at least that’s how many there were on Live at the Belly Up) and they have multiple last names and radically different appearances, so “brothers” is probably purely metaphorical. The Jam in the Van Web site says, “The exchange of energy between the audience and the band builds into an experience that cannot be expressed in the studio. That is not to imply any distaste for the recording process, however. Wherever they have found themselves dwelling, they have built their own recording studio and utilized their collection of analog equipment to capture their musical adventures. Their latest studio work and first official album, GBLO (Get Blasted, Listen to Oldies), came out of their home studio just outside San Luis Obispo, CA. The good times with The Charities are only just beginning!” Unfortunately, that “album” doesn’t seem to be available on physical media – though they have issued a 45 rpm single. “Bring Your Love” b/w “Angel Eyes,” on Nu-Tone, one of the labels issued by Penrose Records, an intriguing enterprise affiliated with Dap-Tone which I ran into on a recent church convocation in Riverside with my husband Charles. (They played both songs on last night’s Live at the Belly Up program.)

Van Pelt explained in the interview segments that he was originally involved in hip-hop (the euphemism for rap by people who actually like it), only as he explored that genre he got interested in the origins of some of the beats rap D.J.’s “sample” for their songs. Accordingly he started exploring 1960’s soul records in his mother’s collection, and ultimately came up with an infectious band sound that’s at its best when it’s reproducing the quieter, gentler ballad-soul styles of the 1960’s. They opened with “Angel Eyes,” in which Van Pelt sang a falsetto lead (the contrast between his falsetto singing voice and his lower-lying speaking voice in the interviews is dramatic) and soared eloquently over his band. Van Pelt and The Charities stayed in ballad-soul mode with “Can’t Own Love” and “Get Back, Don’t Stop,” though on the latter song they got a bit funkier. Then it was back to balladry with “Movin’ On,” “Comin’ Right Back” (featuring a vocal by their keyboard player,. Mike Butler), “Call for You” and their recent single release, “Bring Your Love.” After “It’s Not Our Time” they got more energetic with “The Plug,” featuring the kind of chicken-scratch guitar by Sage Provins (easily the band’s most physically attractive member) I remember vividly from innumerable local soul bands in the Berkeley-Oakland area in the mid-1970’s. The Charities then kept up the dance grooves with “Mistakes” – a great song in which Van Pelt lamented all the nights he’d partied too heartily – and a medley of “Sugar Sweet” and “Do the Right Thing” before their closing number, “Funk Upon a Time,” which intriguingly opened with “In the Hall of the Mountain King” from Grieg’s Peer Gynt and created a nice, laid-back dance groove (even though from what I’ve seen of the Belly Up on this show, it’s too crowded to serve as a good dance venue). I quite liked The Charities, though it’s a regrettable sign of the times that almost none of their music can be had on physical media. G.L.B.O. is available only as a download or a stream from Amazon.com and presumably other sources, and it doesn’t contain any of the songs they did on Live at the Belly Up anyway. During the show, instead of promoting a physical CD or LP, Van Pelt kept urging his audience to look up his band’s music on Spotify!

Law and Order: "Truth and Consequences" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired November 14, 2024)

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

Last night (Thursday, November 14) my husband Charles and I watched the Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit franchise shows on NBC and then I switched to CBS for Elsbeth, a series I’ve become quite taken with lately. The Law and Order episode was one that attempted to dramatize the ongoing controversies on college campuses over Israel’s genocidal attack on Palestinians in Gaza in response to the truly horrific but much less deadly Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023. Called “Truth and Consequences,” it deals with the sudden and brutal murder of Charles Bennett (Timothy Hull), husband of Judge Madeline Bennett (Michaela Watkins) just a week after someone involved in the pro-Palestinian encampment on campus broke into the Bennetts’ home and stole the Israeli flag they had displayed inside. Ultimately the killer turns out to be law student Thomas Norton (Leon Aiken), who after his third year of law school at Hudson University was offered a clerkship by Judge Bennett – only Judge Bennett withdrew the offer after Norton got involved in the pro-Palestinian protests and the strongly pro-Israel Bennett didn’t approve of his politics. Norton went off the deep end and burst into the Bennett home; unfortunately the judge was out so he accosted her husband, grabbed a golf club, and clubbed him to death with it.

The prosecutors, Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi), need to get Norton’s girlfriend, Daniela Rojas (Linedy Genao), to testify against him even though that gets her into trouble with the authorities, since her participation in the pro-Palestinian demonstrations violated school policy and her testimony not only gets her expelled but deported to her native Venezuela. Then, after having wrecked Daniela’s life, the prosecutors and their boss, district attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn), go easy on Judge Bennett when they find that for the last six years, since she had a skiing accident, she’s been addicted to opiate painkillers. The city’s mayor, Robert Payne (Bruce Altman) – who you’ll recall pushed for Baxter’s appointment as D.A. in the first place following the eventual resignation of Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston) about a year and a half ago – tells Baxter not to call Judge Bennett as a witness because her opiate addiction could lead to the convictions in hundreds of cases she heard being reversed on appeal and lots of criminals going free. (That seems to be a little far-fetched to me.) So the defenseless, unprivileged Venezuelan immigrant gets screwed over by the system and the white judge goes free and gets to continue her career just fine. The prosecutors ultimately cut a deal with Thomas Norton by which he pleads to manslaughter and gets a 10-year sentence – to the understandable disgust of Charles Bennett’s brother Sam (Stephen Kunken), who’d been attending the trial throughout. Though this Law and Order tried to squeeze in too many themes, it was still one of the better ones and proof that there’s still life left in this hoary old show!

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Tenfold" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired November 14, 2024)

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

Afterwards the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode, “Tenfold,” was also unusually good, mainly because of a quite interesting and multidimensional character, African-American street hooker Wallin Sipes (Ciarin Monique). Wallin prides herself on working without a pimp and when she’s not hooking is studying to get her G.E.D. so she can get a legitimate job. She’s also supporting her mother Yolanda (Tarra Riggs) and is raising a pre-pubescent son, Freddy, who presumably has no idea what his mom does for a living. Alas, she gets raped by a client who wanted anal sex and wasn’t going to take no for an answer. The rapist is Miguel Rivera (Miguel Cervantes), who had earlier attracted Wallin; she had got into his car but then got out again when he insisted on fucking her in the ass. So he came by later and took her in the ass anyway, strangling her from behind so she didn’t get to see his face that time around, though she recognized him from their previous encounter that night. Wallin also gave some of her earnings that night to Tiana Rivera (Stephanie Gomérez) so her pimp wouldn’t beat her up for coming up short that night. She’s fond of quoting the lines from the Book of Ecclesiastes: “Cast your bread upon the waters, and it will come back to you tenfold.” Alas, Wallin doesn’t really trust the police even though two members of the Special Victims Unit squad, Odafin Tutuola (Ice-T) and Terry Bruno (Kevin Kane), helped find the last john who raped her. There’s also a subplot involving Timothy Cottle (Ari Brand), a pathetic would-be pedophile (he admits he’s sexually attracted to young girls but has never actually seduced or raped one).

In a previous episode Cottle attracted the ire of assistant district attorney Dominick Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino) for cruising his nine-year-old daughter (or was she his stepdaughter? Carisi was married to former SVU detective Amanda Rollins, played by Kelli Giddish, even though she’d already had two daughters by two different fathers, and she and Carisi had another one themselves) on the street. Ultimately Cottle pleads with Carisi and Captain Olivla Benson (series star Mariska Hargitay, daughter of Jayne Mansfield and Mickey Hargitay, who’s been playing this part for 25 years now and looks it) for help, and much to Carisi’s distaste Benson actually finds him a slot in a rehab program that’s supposedly able to convert his sexual desires to more appropriate outlets. I’ve read some of the literature on pedophiles that takes a quite skeptical attitude towards the general efficacy of such programs; they use some of the same techniques that used to be used in “reparative therapy” programs that were supposed to turn Gay or Lesbian people straight. And while there aren’t that many people left who actually think being Gay is some sort of monstrous sin against humanity – today the political and social prejudices against Queer people are more likely to manifest as Transphobia instead of homophobia (let’s face it, commercial TV these days is full of ads for anti-HIV drugs featuring obviously open Gay male couples, and there are also all those skin-care products ads featuring Ellen DeGeneres and her wife Portia!) – most people would agree that the sexualization and sexual exploitation of underage children is reprehensible (though I’d argue for lowering the age of consent to about 14 or so on the ground that people ought to be allowed to do what their hormones are pushing them to do anyway). One thing I liked about this Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode is that one of the “women” prostitutes working the streets with Wallin and her friends, Delphine Magnifique, was obviously a man in drag, and played by Easton Michaels.

Elsbeth: "Elsbeth Flips the Bird" (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount, aired November 14, 2024)

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

The Elsbeth episode I watched last night (Thursday, November 14) was quite clever and charming, and it helped that it was not a mystery. Instead director Ron Underwood and writers Sarah Beckett and Matthew K. Begbie used the old Alfred Hitchcock trick of letting the audience in on “whodunit” from the get-go and building suspense from how the characters would find out and what would happen to them when they did. The opening scene takes place in the kitchen and dining room of an ultra-high-end restaurant owned and run by Chef Veev, true name Genevieve Hale (Pamela Adlon). Chef Veev is shown as so demanding a person and such a totally evil bitch that at first we assume she’s going to be the murder victim. Instead she’s the killer, and her target is a young kitchen assistant named Jordan Humphries (Aaron Gonner), who’s been going behind her back by selling reservations for her restaurant without her approval or knowledge. One of the parties Jordan got into the restaurant hung out there for so long that Veev had to turn down a hoten bigwig, Mr. Montebello (Drew Moore), from whom she was hoping to get a contract to run the restaurants in a number of his hotels. Veev confronts Jordan in the downstairs kitchen and ultimately bludgeons him to death with a meat tenderizer, then hits herself with it to make it look like they were both victims of an attack by an avocado goon squad. I’m not making this up, you know: the writers explain that the major cartels, having run out of opportunities to make money off drugs, weapons and humans, are moving into produce. We’re told that the avocado cartel is using the same tactics the illegal alcohol distributors did in the 1920’s in gangster movies set then: forcing restaurateurs to buy avocados only from them … or else.

This reminded me of the 1949 movie Thieves’ Highway, which was about gangsters hijacking shipments of apples – when my husband Charles and i watched this one over a decade ago I jokingly retitled it Apples of Doom – but the kingpin of the avocado cartel has an alibi for the night Jordan was killed. He was at a fruit market selling his avocados, seemingly legitimately. Meanwhile the series lead, Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston, who’s a lot more grounded and less air-headed than you’d have guessed from the promos for this series), is trying to learn Veev’s recipe for duck cassoulet – hence the episode title, “Elsbeth Flips the Bird,” since the gimmick is that the duck has to be turned in the oven at precisely the right moment to come out right. This is also what ultimately gives Veev away as the murderer: while she was supposedly unconscious after the assault on the kitchen floor, she nonetheless got up at the right time to turn the ducks she was slow-roasting all night. The writers use one of Dick Wolf’s favorite Law and Order tricks of having Veev get arrested at the most embarrassing moment possible: while she’s entertaining Mr. Montebello and seems on the verge of getting the big hotel deal she’s been angling for all episode. Charles said he doesn’t think this show is as good as Law and Order: Organized Crime – and he’s right, but with that one off the air and replaced by something called Found which seems like a preposterous series about a woman who kept a man locked in her basement for 12 years until he escaped and quite understandably vowed revenge against her, I’m having a lot more fun with Elsbeth instead.

M Squad: "The Third Shadow" (Latimer Productions, Revue Productions, MCA-TV, 1959)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved (no copyright claimed for the quoted song lyric)

Last night (Monday, November 11) I watched a couple of reruns of the surprisingly interesting police procedural drama M Squad on YouTube. Both of these luckily contained the show’s closing themes (which had been deleted from the previous episode, “Decoy in White,” due to copyright claims), and the first, “The Third Shadow,” had a quite good musical number in the middle (more on that later). “The Third Shadow” opens with a shoot-out at a factory whose payroll is being robbed. One of the criminals dies on the scene and another, Al Stemple (Richard Benedict), is mortally wounded but lives long enough for police lieutenant Frank Ballinger (Lee Marvin, who’s about the only reason people are still interested in this show even though a lot of major stars got key career breaks on it as guests) and his partner to question him. The uniformed police officer who led the enforcement effort, Dave Price (Tony Travis), recovers $10,000 in stolen loot and is acclaimed as a hero – until the next day, when Maxwell (Guy Prescott), head of payroll for the company that got robbed, insists that there was really $30,000 stolen and accuses Officer Price of taking the rest for his own use. Lt. Ballinger is convinced Price is innocent, but the only explanation he can come up with is there must have been a third person involved in the robbery besides the two who were caught and killed. He traces this person and learns that Stemple had actually been an “inside man,” who’d got a job at the company due to a phony reference four weeks before the robbery occurred. Through a friend, Ruth Scanlan (Amy Fields), who works in the club scene in Chicago, where the show took place, Ballinger meets Grace Richards (Monica Lewis), who supplied the phony reference for Stemple at the behest of her boyfriend, Greg Cook (Alfred Shelly). Lt. Ballinger already had a file on Cook from the New Orleans Police Department, who wanted him for two separate armed robberies there.

Ballinger goes to see both Grace Richards and Greg Cook at a local TV studio, where Grace is performing on a local show. We get to hear at least one complete chorus of her song, a quite good blues lament in the then-modern urban style, before Ballinger questions both of them and ultimately tracks Cook to Grace’s apartment. At some point Grace says she gave him a key, though later in the show it turns out he didn’t have one until he stole it from her (a glitch in the continuity from writer Jack Jacobs). Since he doesn’t have probable cause to search Grace’s apartment for Greg’s share of the loot, Ballinger somehow has to trick Greg into grabbing it so he can be caught red-handed with it, and among other things Officer Price can be exonerated. Ultimately there’s a quite good chase sequence down the fire escape of Grace’s building, and in the end Greg is arrested, the loot is recovered and Officer Price can get on with his career. Though this show, like “Decoy in White,” was also scored by Benny Carter with an opening and closing theme from Count Basie, the really remarkable item in its musical content was the featured song Monica Lewis sang. Monica Lewis is one of those musicians, like composers Marius Constant (The Twilight Zone), Alexander Courage (Star Trek) and Henry Vars (Flipper), whom you’ve heard even if you don’t recognize the name. She was the voice of “Chiquita Banana” in the long-running series of commercials that began in 1944, at first as an animated banana and, after 1987, as a woman very much designed to look like Carmen Miranda.

Lewis was born in 1922 to a musical family in Chicago and got what should have been her big break in 1943, when Peggy Lee, Benny Goodman’s female singer, left the band to marry the group’s guitarist, Dave Barbour, and settle in Hollywood. At the time her plan was to retire and just be Mrs. Barbour full-time, but in 1945 Barbour was working on an historical jazz album and they needed a female singer for two songs. “My wife used to sing with Goodman,” Barbour said – so they called in Peggy Lee and ultimately she became a solo singing star. Meanwhile, Monica Lewis got caught in the American Federation of Musicians’ (AFM) strike against the record companies in 1942, which meant she couldn’t record with the Goodman band. After the strike was settled in 1944 she went on a long recording career for Signature (owned by her first husband, record producer Bob Thiele), MGM, Capitol, Decca and Verve. After her brief first marriage to Thiele, in 1956 she married Hollywood agent and producer Jennings Lang (best known in movie trivia history as the man producer Walter Wanger shot at because Wanger thought his wife, Joan Bennett, was having an affair with Lang, her agent at the time) and retired to take care of his children. She stayed with Lang until his death in 1996 and died herself in 2015 at age 93. I had imagined the producers of M Squad would hire a professional singer for this role, and I was right; she sang an odd mixture of blues and cabaret song called “Baby, That Ain’t Right” (not to be confused with “That Ain’t Right,” recorded by the Nat “King” Cole Trio and also performed by “Fats” Waller and singer Ada Brown in the 1943 film Stormy Weather) whose lyrics strike the right note of despair. After the show wraps up, a closing narration delivered by Lee Marvin in character tells us that Lewis’s character, Grace Richards, was so broken up by the fact that the man she’d thought was Mr. Right turned out to be a despicable crook that she literally lost her voice and never sang again. Here are the words of the marvelous song Monica Lewis sings here:

My baby left, and that ain’t right
The days are bad, it’s worse at night
With no warm arms to hold me
The nights are cold, and that ain’t right.

I’m all shook up, can’t eat a bite
I’m like a string without a kite
I thought I had love controlled, it didn’t hold,
Now you know that ain’t right.

Who was right? Who was wrong?
Who told lies all along?
Who was weak, who was strong?
To which one does the blame belong?

There’s nothing left, there’s nothing right,
It’s like someone turned out my light,
I got a feeling you are happy, gay and bright
And that ain’t right.
Baby, that ain’t right.
Baby, that ain’t right.

M Squad: "The Teacher" (Latimer Productions, Revue Productions, MCA-TV, 1959)

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

After “The Third Shadow,” I watched the M Squad episode immediately preceding it in the series’s original run, “The Teacher.” It dealt with a group of young punk kids at a wood-crafting school, in which the main bully is Nick “Sharpy” Sharples (Tom Laughlin, who 12 years later would emerge as the title character in the Billy Jack movies). Sharpy terrorizes the other kids into paying him protection money and generally following his orders. The school is run by a typically saintly teacher, Ralph Schnider (Stuart Randall), who like Father Flanagan of Boys’ Town insists that “there’s no such thing as a bad boy.” He vainly tries to get through to Sharpy to deal with his psychopathology and set him on a righteous path, but to no avail. One kid he has more or less successfully reformed is Pete Marashi (the young Burt Reynolds), who’s doing well in school and has a girlfriend, Irene Hanson (Sue George), who works at a music store. When another kid is beaten up by Sharpy and his gang, however, Pete refuses to “rat” and tells Lt. Frank Ballinger of the Chicago Police Department (Lee Marvin, the star of the show) that he knows nothing. Meanwhile, Sharpy confronts Schnider in his office and cruelly and coldly pushes him out of the office window to his death, giggling and calling out, “Write if you find work,” as Schnider dies. The police are stumped and originally write off the death as a suicide – which means Schnider’s widow (Maida Severn) can’t collect on his life insurance policy, so their daughter may not be able to go to college – until Sharpy and his gang, attempting to intimidate Pete into staying silent, beat up Pete’s girlfriend Irene.

Conscious that if he’d spoken out sooner, Schnider would still be alive and Irene wouldn’t be in a hospital recovering from her injuries, Pete finally tells Lt. Ballinger what he knows and Sharpy and the gang are busted. When I first saw the synopsis on imdb.com, “Young hoodlums use a trade school for criminal purposes,” I thought this was going to be a show about a corrupt teacher who had enlisted trade-school students to commit crimes for him, sort of like a 1970’s episode of the TV series Vega$ (that’s how it was initially spelled) in which the bad guy was a corrupt probation officer who got the young women assigned to him to commit crimes on his behalf by threatening to declare them in violation and return them to prison if they didn’t comply. But that wasn’t where writer Frank L. Moss chose to go. What makes this M Squad (which survived in much better visual shape than “The Third Shadow,” by the way) interesting is not only the presence of Reynolds and Laughlin in the cast but the name of the composer. Instead of jazz giant Benny Carter, for this one they got Johnny Williams – who would later abbreviate his first name to “John” and become the most popular film composer of all time thanks to his work on Jaws, Superman, Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. and all their various spinoffs and sequelae. Williams had previously written for the Playhouse 90 anthology TV series and had made his feature-film debut writing the music for another juvenile delinquency drama (if I may use the term loosely), Daddy-O (1958), which Charles and I watched on a Mystery Science Theatre 3000 presentation and thought even the MST3K crew couldn’t make it entertaining. As I wrote of Williams’ contribution, “I had thought Elmer Bernstein’s debut in Cat Women on the Moon was the most embarrassing first credit for a composer that went on to major-budget productions and won Academy Awards, but this one certainly rivals it!”

Foul Play (Shelburne Associates, Miller-Milkis Pictures, Paramount, 1978)

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

Last night (Sunday, November 10) my husband Charles and I watched three films in a row on Turner Classic Movies (TCM): the 1978 comedy Foul Play and two 1919 vehicles for Japanese actor Sessue Hayakawa (the only person of Asian descent to become a major star in Hollywood films until … well, it’s hard to say who was the next one: Nancy Kwan in the 1950’s? Bruce Lee in the 1960’s?), The Dragon Painter and The Tong Man. Foul Play was written and directed by Colin Higgins (1941-1988), a comic genius whose all too brief career was truncated by AIDS, which killed him at age 47. Higgins was born in France to an Australian mother and an American father, and he had an odd life. His dad enlisted in the U.S. Army following the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and his mom moved the family to Sydney, Australia, where Higgins grew up. In 1957 Higgins and his family moved to Redwood City, California, where he won a college scholarship to Stanford University but dropped out after one year because he’d become “obsessed” with theatre. He briefly enlisted in the U.S. Army (fortunately before Lyndon Johnson’s drastic escalation of the war in Viet Nam!) and, like Stanley Kubrick before him, worked for Stars and Stripes, the servicemembers’ magazine. Discharged from the Army in 1965, he returned to Stanford and majored in creative writing. Then he visited Expo ’67 in Montréal, Canada and became fascinated by the experimental films shown there. Higgins enrolled in a masters’ program in screenwriting at UCLA, and his masters’ thesis was the screenplay for what became his first film as writer, Harold and Maude (1972), a dark comedy about a young death-obsessed 20-year-old man (Bud Cort) and an 80-year-old woman concentration camp survivor (Ruth Gordon) whom he falls in love with and who gives him a reason to live. Harold and Maude was one of those movies that was a commercial flop on its initial release but eventually acquired a cult audience, and Higgins made more money from a French adaptation of it into a play in the 1970’s.

In 1977 Robert Evans, production chief at Paramount, gave Higgins a chance to make his debut as a director with Foul Play, originally called Killing Lydia, a spoof of spy melodramas in general and Alfred Hitchcock in particular starring Goldie Hawn as recently divorced librarian Gloria Mundy and Chevy Chase, star of the first season of NBC’s Saturday Night Live TV show, in his first feature film as San Francisco Police Detective Tony Carlson. Foul Play was a major commercial hit and gave Higgins the chance to make his next film, Nine to Five – his masterpiece – in 1980, only his career came to a screeching halt with the failure of his third film as director, the leaden musical The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas (1982). From then on his only credits were for writing the TV miniseries Out on a Limb, based on actress Shirley MacLaine’s experiences with supernaturalism and spiritualism, and two episodes of a Yugoslav TV series called TV teatar, featuring live transmissions of plays. Foul Play deals with Gloria Mundy and her search for love and commitment following the trauma of her divorce. It begins at a fancy party to which she’s reluctantly been taken by her best friend, Stella (Marilyn Sokol), who warns Our Heroine to be fiercely protective of her virtue and gives her items – a pair of brass knuckles (obviously too big for her), chemical Mace and a portable device that sounds like a burglar alarm – to help her fend off men interested only in “that one thing.” Stella is actually urging Gloria to go out and meet more potential dates despite her warnings about predatory men, and Detective Carlson is also at the party and decides to swoop in on her.

Before that scene we’ve been given a prologue involving the Archbishop of San Francisco, who’s stabbed to death by an intruder in his home right after he’s put on a record of the opening of the Gilbert and Sullivan opera The Mikado. (There’s a glitch here: though the album cover is of The Mikado, the record label is a grey Columbia Masterworks one listing a Mozart symphony.) Then Gloria goes out for a drive on a winding mountain road in her yellow Volkswagen convertible – depicted by a quite elaborate aerial shot that especially impressed Charles: he pointed out that today a shot like that would be done with a camera-containing drone or even with CGI, but in 1978 the only way would have been to hire a helicopter and follow either Goldie Hawn or her stunt double as they drove). Only she’s flagged down by Bob “Scottie” Scott (Bruce Solomon), whose car has broken down and who asks her for a ride back to San Francisco and sneaks a roll of 127 film (an old camera format in which the film wound itself around a take-up reel; you didn’t have to rewind the film in the camera the way you did with 35 mm because you’d simply seal off the end and use the now-exhausted spool the film had come on to take up your next roll) into a pack of Marlboro cigarettes he gives her. He makes a date with her to meet her at the Nuart Cinema for a revival film showing, but he doesn’t show – and when he does arrive midway through the movie, he’s been mortally wounded. (The marquee on the Nuart announces two films that don’t really exist – Killers Walk Among Us and This Gun Is Mine – but there are also promos for midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and plenty of authentic posters for films that do exist.)

With his dying breath Scottie tells her to beware of the dwarf. When Gloria discovers Scottie’s body she screams – only that happens at a particularly frightening part of the film, so everyone else in the audience screams too. She knocks on the door of the theatre manager’s office – interrupting him in the middle of having sex with an usherette – and begs him to put the house lights up, stop the film and call the cops. The cops duly arrive in the persons of Detective Carlson and his partner, Ferguson (Brian Dennehy, marvelous as usual), but by the time they get there the body is gone and there’s no sign he was ever there, alive or dead. The next day, trying to close up the library after hours, Gloria runs into albino hit man Whitey Jackson (William Frankfather) who tries to incapacitate her with ether. She flees into a straight singles bar called “Twosome” and Stanley Tibbetts (Dudley Moore, who got featured billing) tries to pick her up. Gloria basically throws herself at him just to get his help getting out of the bar, to which Whitey and the gang he’s part of have traced her. She ends up in Tibbetts’s home, which is outfitted as a sure-fire seduction pad à la Jack Lemmon’s living spaces in Under the Yum Yum Tree and How to Murder Your Wife, only to flee again once she sees out the window that Jackson is no longer there stalking the place. When she gets back to her own place she’s assaulted again, this time by Scarface (Don Calfa), who demands the pack of cigarettes Scottie gave her. She’s inadvertently saved by Whitey Jackson, who throws a knife and kills Scarface, but she’s knocked out and when she comes to, once again the body has been taken and there’s no sign that anything untoward ever happened there.

The next day Gloria is attacked again, this time by Turk Farnum (Ion Teodorescu), a bald man (though he sometimes wears wigs) who looks like a mid-1960’s James Bond villain. This time Carlson and Ferguson are assigned to protect Gloria, and Carlson does that by taking her to his houseboat (a living space built by his brother, who abandoned it when he got married) and spending the night in bed with her. Ultimately it turns out that the bad guys are members of an organization called “Tax the Churches” (which really existed, though as far as I know it never resorted to terrorism), and they’re planning to assassinate the (fictitious) Pope Pius XIII when he comes to San Francisco as part of a five-city U.S. tour and attends the gala San Francisco Opera performance of, you guessed it, Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado. The architect of the plot is Delia Darrow (Rachel Roberts), who assumed the name of “Gerda Casswell” and got a job as the Archbishop’s housekeeper – only she killed him and got his twin brother (also Eugene Roche) to impersonate him. Also part of the plot were Whitey Jackson, Scarface, and Rupert Stiltskin (Marc Lawrence), Delia’s second-in-command. Before that there’s a great scene in which Gloria’s home is invaded by a real dwarf, J. J. MacKuen (Billy Barty, who’d had bit parts in classic musicals like Gold Diggers of 1933, Footlight Parade and Roman Scandals), who’s a particularly pushy Bible salesman but whom Gloria is freaked out by from the moment he knocks on her door and fools her into thinking he’s full-sized by standing on his sample case. Naturally Gloria assumes he’s an assassin sent to kill her – she was warned, “Beware of the dwarf,” after all – and she pitches him out her window and he falls down a manhole and ends up in traction at a hospital. The climax occurs at the big opera gala, where the Pope is supposed to get killed, only the good guys are able to foil it in time and arrest all the would-be terrorists while Pope Pius XIII is able to sit through the opera and enjoy it without any awareness that he was ever in danger.

While not at the level of Nine to Five, Foul Play is an especially delicious movie that evokes many of Hitchcock’s films (including both versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much, The 39 Steps, Notorious and a real surprise, Hitchcock’s final film, Family Plot, which came out two years before Foul Play and also featured a high-ranking clergyman being the victim of a crime and an exciting chase scene down a mountain road) while not being so obvious about it Higgins waves his knowledge of classic cinema in our faces. It also contains at least one anticipation of a famous film that would come later: The Da Vinci Code, which would also feature an albino assassin hired in a plot to bring down the Roman Catholic Church. Goldie Hawn and Chevy Chase make an appealing pair of leads; Burgess Meredith, billed third as Gloria’s landlord, is a real charmer, especially when he claims to be an expert on judo, which he was trained in during World War II. There’s a great scene in which he tries to bust a brick with his bare hand, misses, then tries it again and this time he makes it. He also insists on coming along when Carlson gets word that Ferguson is being held for ransom, and the “ransom” in this case is the promise that the cops will back off and let the assassination happen on cue. Only the three are able to escape when there’s a shift change at the massage parlor where Gloria has gone to hide out disguised as a masseuse – and where Stanley Tibbetts has gone expecting sex and getting his personal blue-balls city instead. There’s also one of the great shock cuts of all time when the opera performance is about to open, the conductor strides to the podium – and it’s Stanley. Foul Play is a broadly funny comedy and a weird testament to the gifts of Colin Higgins, a remarkable filmmaker who if he’d lived a while longer could have become the Preston Sturges of our time.