A Complete Unknown (Range Media Pictures, The Picture Company, Searchlight Pictures, Veritas Entertainment, 2024)

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

Yesterday (Wednesday, December 30) my good friend Cat Ortiz and I went to the Landmark Hillcrest Theatres (which are closing for good in just five days, alas) to see the new movie A Complete Unknown, a biopic about Bob Dylan in general and in particular the first four years of his major career, from his arrival as an unknown would-be folk singer from Hibbing, Minnesota (his home town) in 1961 to his scandalous performance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, in which he played an electric guitar and played three songs (“Maggie’s Farm,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” and “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry”) with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. The shocked reaction of the crowd – as if Dylan had abandoned the One True Faith of folk music and turned his back on equality and justice to chase commercial success – is well dramatized here (though the person in the audience who cried out “Judas!” was actually from a later Dylan concert in Manchester, England in 1966) – and so is Dylan’s return to safety when he walked off the stage and returned with an acoustic guitar to play “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” and “Mr. Tambourine Man.” (When PBS showed a documentary of all Dylan’s appearances at the Newport Folk Festival, the audience hostility made a lot more sense. The performance was pretty mediocre; Dylan and the Butterfield band had obviously had too little time to rehearse, and audio engineers in 1965 had no idea how to mix a rock band “live” so vocals and instruments could be heard clearly instead of congealing into an unpleasant wash of sound. If you went to a rock concert in the 1960’s you expected that you’d have to play the band’s albums first just to have an idea of what the songs were about.) A Complete Unknown was directed and co-written by James Mangold, who’d already done a musical biopic, Walk the Line (2006), about Johnny Cash, who appears as a character in this movie too. (Joaquin Phoenix played Cash in Walk the Line and Boyd Holbrook plays him here.) His co-writer, Jay Cocks, used to review rock music for Time magazine.

As he’d done with Joaquin Phoenix playing Johnny Cash in Walk the Line, director Mangold had the actor who played Dylan, Timothée Chalamet, do his own singing and guitar playing, and he made that demand on the other actors playing musicians as well: Edward Norton as Pete Seeger, Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash, Joshua Henry as Brownie McGhee, Steve Bell as his performing partner Sonny Terry, and a stunning performance by Big Bill Morganfield (son of blues giant Muddy Waters, who was born McKinley Morganfield) as fictitious blues musician Jesse Moffette. I could have quibbles with the script – the closing credits contain a disclaimer that some of the incidents have been fictionalized for dramatic purposes, and I muttered under my breath, “You can say that again.” The film depicts Dylan signing with his first manager, Albert Grossman, before he got his contract with Columbia Records (it was really after), and shows both Grossman and Hammond scouting Dylan at Gerde’s Folk City. Hammond actually signed Dylan after another folk artist he’d signed, Carolyn Hester, brought him along to play harmonica on three songs on her album, and Hammond was struck by him and his playing and decided to give him an audition. The film also blames Hammond for Dylan’s first album being mostly covers of old folk and blues material – of its 13 songs, only two (“Talking New York” and “Song to Woody”) were Dylan originals – but the evidence is ambiguous and the Wikipedia page on Dylan’s first album describes him frantically listening to previously released folk albums by other artists searching for material. In fact, singer Dave Van Ronk (who’s depicted briefly in the movie and is played by Joe Tippett) complained that Dylan ripped off Van Ronk’s arrangement of the old New Orleans folk tune “House of the Rising Sun” for his first album after Van Ronk wanted to record it himself. Van Ronk said he could no longer perform the song once Dylan recorded it because people would think he was ripping it off Dylan. He got his revenge when British blues-rock singer Eric Burdon recorded “House of the Rising Sun” with his band, The Animals, and from then on Dylan found he couldn’t perform the song because people would think he was ripping it off of Eric Burdon! (The song is in A Complete Unknown performed by Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez, and quite frankly it makes more sense sung by a woman.)

Mangold and Cocks also muff the great story Al Kooper told about his participation as an organ player on “Like a Rolling Stone” (the Dylan classic that generated the titles for both this movie and Martin Scorsese’s Dylan documentary, No Direction Home). He showed up expecting to play guitar on the session, but during rehearsals he started noodling on the studio organ and Dylan liked what he heard and insisted Kooper play organ on the record. The producer, Tom Wilson (one of the few Black people who had that job for a major label, along with Clyde Otis at Mercury), didn’t like that idea. “He’s not even an organ player, he’s a guitar player.” “I don’t care,” Dylan said. “I like the organ. Turn it up.” The result was that Kooper made it to stardom as an organ player, and Tom Wilson got fired as Dylan’s producer and Bob Johnston took over production of the rest of the Highway 61 Revisited album. (We see a bit of that in the movie but not enough of it.) Also so much of the movie is dank and dreary-looking – Mangold and cinematographer Phedon Papamichael have a bad case of the past-is-brown syndrome, and when we finally get a bright outdoor scene at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival, we sigh with relief. But what’s wrong with A Complete Unknown pales by comparison with what’s right with it, starting with Timothée Chalamet’s performance as Dylan. His impersonation of the young baby-faced Dylan is uncanny, and he catches the voice almost perfectly (though his vocals seemed less convincing during the closing credits sequence when we only heard them and didn’t see Chalamet’s utterly convincing visual performance as well). The script is also well constructed even though Dylan, like so many other artists, comes off as a heavy-duty asshole, casually having affairs with his girlfriend “Sylvie Russo” (Elle Fanning) – her real name was Suze Rotolo, and she was active in the civil-rights movement and supposedly introduced Dylan to Left-wing politics (though he’s already depicted as an admirer of Woody Guthrie, whom he visits in a hospital in New Jersey – Guthrie, who’s played in the movie by Scoot McNairy, suffered from Huntington’s disease and for the last years of his life lived in a hospital; his one source of joy was hearing aspiring singers like Dylan and Phil Ochs visit him and play his songs for him) while also pursuing an affair with Joan Baez. (The real Suze Rotolo refused permission to be depicted in the film, so Mangold and Cocks just called her something else – like the makers of the 1946 film The Jolson Story dealt with Jolson’s ex-wife Ruby Keeler’s refusal to let them depict her by calling her “Julie Benson.”)

I especially love the scene in which some of Dylan’s folkie friends find his scrapbooks from Minnesota, which “out” his real name, Robert Zimmerman. There’s a clipping in one of the scrapbooks advertising the “Winter Dance Party” tour of the Midwest in early 1959 featuring Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper – all of whom were killed in a plane crash. When Dylan received his Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award in 1992 he mentioned having seen Holly on that tour, though he didn’t mention that the Holly show he caught had been his next-to-last one, just a day and a half before Holly died. Between that and Dylan’s professed admiration in his Minnesota days for Bobby Vee (who actually was one of the local artists invited to fill in on the next stop on the Winter Dance Party tour after Holly, Valens and the Bopper were killed, and went on to record an album with Holly’s backup band, The Crickets) – he actually went around town telling people he was Bobby Vee – the point of this story was he’d always been interested in rock ‘n’ roll and it shouldn’t have been such a shock when he bought an electric guitar and started playing rock in public. Also the many shots of Dylan riding a motorcycle, often appallingly recklessly, make a lot more sense if you know that a year after the 1965 Newport Folk Festival performance, Dylan was involved in a severe motorcycle crash that nearly killed him and incapacitated him for a year and a half. A Complete Unknown is a haunting movie, especially for people like me who were alive in the 1960’s and lived the history. My mother introduced me to Dylan when she bought his album The Times They Are a-Changing in the mid-1960’s, and when she first played the opening track I had one of my apocalyptic reactions to the effect that my world would never be the same again; that hearing this voice would be a life-changing experience. (I had the same feeling when I first heard Billie Holiday’s “I Cover the Waterfront,” David Bowie’s “Five Years,” Elvis Costello’s “Pump It Up,” and more recently when I first heard the amazing country voice of Rose Maddox – and if you’ve never heard of Rose Maddox, just look her up on archive.org or YouTube and see if you don’t react to that killer voice the way I did.)

It’s always a challenge for an actor to play someone who’s been filmed as much as the real people this movie is about, and Chalamet, Norton and Barbaro all rise to the challenge. In fact, this is the first movie of Chalamet’s I’ve really warmed to; I didn’t like his breakthrough movie Call Me by Your Name (2017), though not because of his performance but because Armie Hammer’s character was so obviously a sexual predator and Chalamet his victim. And though Chalamet did well enough as Paul Atreides in the two Dune movies (so far) directed by Denis Villeneuve, I’d always imagined Paul as more butch than that. But he’s near-perfect as Bob Dylan, and he moves through the movie with power and authority even though he seems at first to be almost terminally naïve. Mangold and Cocks keep it ambiguous whether Dylan actually wanted and sought out stardom or just stumbled in to it, and one thing about the real Dylan that comes through in the movie is his refusal to be pinned down, to change abruptly whenever people thought they had him categorized. No sooner had Pete Seeger and the people at Broadside and Sing Out! magazines proclaimed him as the successor to Guthrie and Seeger as the next great Left-wing “message” songwriter than he made an entire album of non-political songs and, to make sure people got the point, called it Another Side of Bob Dylan. Though Dylan hasn’t done the wrenching physical changes David Bowie did, he’s certainly gone through as many phases, including his bizarre embrace of born-again Christianity in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s and his more recent emergence as a crooner of 1920’s, 1930’s and 1940’s standards (at which he’s frankly terrible). But Bob Dylan remains a compelling figure in not only American but world culture (he was the first and so far only songwriter to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, though true to form he didn’t attend the ceremony), and this movie does his remarkable story – or at least the crucial four years of it from 1961 to 1965 – justice.

Double Indemnity (Paramount, 1944)

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

Two nights ago (Sunday, December 29) my husband Charles and I watched two films back-to-back on Turner Classic Movies: Billy Wilder’s film noir masterpiece Double Indemnity (1944) and Rex Ingram’s equally marvelous The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (copyright 1920, released 1921). Watching Double Indemnity a night after TCM had shown The Postman Always Rings Twice was a revelation. Both films were based on novels by James M. Cain and both dealt with young, beautiful women married to much older men who seize on the intervention of young men from outside to be accomplices in knocking off their inconvenient husbands. Only Double Indemnity scored over Postman in every conceivable respect: the direction was by Billy Wilder, a major talent already totally assured even though it was only his third film (after The Major and the Minor and Five Graves to Cairo). He also co-wrote the script with Raymond Chandler, another major noir novelist – though, as Wilder told Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg for their book The Celluloid Muse, “I wanted to do the script with Cain himself, actually, but Cain was doing a Western at 20th Century-Fox, so Chandler seemed the best choice. It was, incidentally, the first time he had worked on a script, or been inside a studio.” I remember reading an article in the Los Angeles Times years ago from one of those annoying people who insist that, contrary to the auteur theory that holds the director is the true creative force behind a film, it’s really the writer who dominates. What got me angry about this article is that its author cited Raymond Chandler as a star writer on the basis of Double Indemnity and Murder, My Sweet (a classic film noir based on Chandler’s novel Farewell, My Lovely, though he had nothing to do with the screenplay by John Paxton), and I wrote a letter saying that one thing that irked me about the screenwriter-as-auteur people was they themselves ignore the original authors of the novels or plays that got turned into movies. I pointed out that Raymond Chandler hadn’t created the plot, characters or situations of Double Indemnity: James M. Cain had.

Anyway, Double Indemnity remains one of the greatest movies ever made, the perfect summing-up of Cain’s world on film the way the 1941 The Maltese Falcon is for Dashiell Hammett and Murder, My Sweet is for Chandler. The plot deals with insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray, who got the part after George Raft turned it down because he demanded a “lapel bit” – a revelation that his character was an undercover cop or FBI agent out to pin a murder rap on a femme fatale – way to go, George; you turned down High Sierra, The Maltese Falcon and this!), who stops at a nice house in Los Feliz to get Mr. Dietrichson (Tom Powers) to renew his auto insurance policy with the Pacific All-Risk company, for which Walter works. Mr. Dietrichson isn’t there, but his wife Phyllis (Barbara Stanwyck) is, and it’s lust at first sight between the two. Ultimately they hatch a plan by which Phyllis will take out an accident insurance policy on her husband and she and Walter will kill him together. The title “double indemnity” comes from a clause written in certain insurance policies to pay double the face amount for accidents that hardly ever happen – like a victim falling off a train and dying in the process. (Billy Wilder’s biographer, Maurice Zolotow, asked him if the insurance policy his wife had on him contained a double indemnity clause. It did not.) The plan comes off, though Walter is concerned about Phyllis’s choice of a witness to testify that Walter pitched her husband on an accident policy – her stepdaughter Lola (nicely played by Jean Heather) – and the presence of a witness on the train, Mr. Jackson (Porter Hall), who was out on the observation car as Walter, posing as Mr. Dietrichson, is just about to jump off around the spot where he and Phyllis have planted her husband’s body, since they’d actually killed him in his car before he even got on the train. But because Walter doesn’t want them to be seen together, he has them meet in the early 1940’s version of a supermarket (and since the film was shot during World War II, when food was rationed, the L. A. Police Department stationed four officers in the store to make sure the actors didn’t take anything home with them!), and the growing mistrust and hostility between them only gets worse when Lola tells Walter that she’s convinced Phyllis, who was the nurse taking care of her mother (Dietrichson’s first wife), actually murdered her and then married the widower. Ultimately there’s a blazing shoot-out between Walter and Phyllis at the Los Feliz house that ends with her dead and him badly wounded, though he lives long enough to tell the story in a voice-over narration ostensibly dictated on Dictaphone cylinders.

Also in the dramatis personae is Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson), a Javert-like claims examiner who’s trying to recruit Walter as his assistant and ultimately his replacement when he retires. Keyes intuits virtually the entire plot, but he pins it on the wrong man: Nino Zachetti (Byron Barr), Lola’s hot-headed boyfriend who becomes the boy-toy of Phyllis after she and Walter have conveniently dispatched her husband. In Wilder’s original ending, Walter was supposed to survive the shoot-out, get convicted of murdering the Dietrichsons and be executed in the gas chamber at San Quentin – and Billy Wilder, an opponent of capital punishment, took great pains to make the execution sequence look as brutal and gruesome as the real thing. But either someone at Paramount or the Production Code Administration decided that the execution scene was too much for audiences who’d already been taken on a wild sexual joyride pushing the limits of the Code. Wilder complained to Zolotow that audiences never got to see the two best scenes he ever filmed: the execution in Double Indemnity and the sequence he wanted to use to open Sunset Boulevard, in which the various corpses at the L.A. County morgue would start to talk to each other about how they died. (Wilder had to remove this scene after preview audiences laughed at it and found it ridiculous.) Instead Wilder and Chandler, with whom his relations had been testy at best, got back together and wrote a new ending that finishes this tough, hard-boiled story on a true note of pathos. Keyes confronts Walter just as he finishes his narration and Walter insists he’s going to escape to Mexico. “You won’t even make it to the elevator,” Keyes sardonically says. Walter collapses in the building hallway and as he expires Keyes gives him a cigarette, a running gag between them all movie. Walter tells Keyes he didn’t guess who Dietrichson’s murderer was because he was just in the next office from him, and Keyes says, “Closer than that,” as Walter expires. (In Cain’s original novel, the equivalent characters – the insurance salesman was Walter Huff and the victim was named Nirdlinger – do escape on a steamship bound for Mexico, but out of guilt feelings about what they’ve done commit joint suicide by throwing themselves overboard.)

Though the rewrite introduced a continuity glitch – Walter’s wounds from the gun battle with Phyllis don’t look serious enough to be life-threatening, and in the original script they weren’t – it also is a marvelously sardonic and at the same time strangely moving way to end an already remarkable film. As far as the acting is concerned, there’s no contest between Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice: Barbara Stanwyck is the ultimate femme fatale, wearing a blonde wig in the style of Marlene Dietrich’s hairdo in the 1941 film Manpower and acting with her usual power and authority. (By comparison, Lana Turner in Postman looks like a barely animate sex doll.) Fred MacMurray, who’d never played a villainous role before (though he would do so three more times, in The Caine Mutiny, Pushover – a reworking of Double Indemnity in which he played, not a corrupted insurance salesman, but a corrupted cop – and for Wilder again in The Apartment, after which a woman came up to him when he was in Disneyland with his wife and kids, and said, “You should be ashamed of yourself for almost driving that nice Shirley MacLaine to suicide!” After that he swore that he would only play lovable roles in comedies from then on), is absolutely first-rate. So is Edward G. Robinson as essentially the voice of reason in this dark tale. In his autobiography, Robinson told the story of how he almost didn’t get this part. He ran into Billy Wilder at a Hollywood party, and Wilder said he’d offered him a part in a film called Double Indemnity but hadn’t heard back from him. Robinson had never heard of Double Indemnity, let alone been aware that he was being offered a role in it. The next day he called his agent, who told him that he hadn’t bothered to send him the script because he’d only be billed third. Robinson demanded to see the script, it was messengered over to him that afternoon, and he read it overnight and loved it. The next morning he called his agent and said, “I don’t care if I’m billed tenth! The next time you get a script that good for me, I want to see it!” Double Indemnity remains a great movie, far, far superior to Postman as a filmization of James M. Cain’s sexually and morally sordid world and one of Wilder’s best movies, along with The Lost Weekend, Sunset Boulevard and what’s probably his best film, the woefully underrated Ace in the Hole a.k.a. The Big Carnival.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Metro Pictures Corporation, copyright 1920, released 1921)

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

After that Turner Classic Movies turned its hosting duties over to Jacqueline Stewart for her “Silent Sunday Showcase” feature, which was another of the greatest movies of all time: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (copyrighted 1920, released 1921). It’s best known today as the film that launched Rudolph Valentino’s short-lived star career, but lt has a lot more to offer than that. It was based on a novel of the same title by the Spanish writer Vicente Blasco Ibañez, whose other books included Blood and Sand (a bullfighting story that reunited him and Valentino), The Torrent and The Temptress (which became Greta Garbo’s first American films). The film was directed by Rex Ingram from a script by Valentino’s good friend June Mathis, and I remember how astonished I was to read in a film history that Ingram’s birth name was Reginald Ingram Montgomery Hitchcock. Ever since then I’ve loved the coincidence that two of the greatest movie directors of all time were born with the name “Hitchcock,” and though they’re identified with different eras in film history Rex Ingram was only eight years older than Alfred Hitchcock. Jacqueline Stewart’s introduction claimed that this was Ingram’s first major film, but the credits – particularly the elaborate border around the main title and the principal title cards with the “RI” monogram in each corner – certainly suggest that Ingram already had a major reputation. By chance I was able to get a copy of Blasco Ibañez’s novel at the late, lamented Casa del Libro store on University Avenue in Hillcrest – which seemed to have been photo-reproduced from the first English-language edition – and I’m struck by how close the movie came to the book even though it was published while World War I was still a going concern and the film ended with an epilogue acknowledging its end but saying that the forces of fear and hatred that led to it were still going strong.

The Four Horsemen – the title refers to the Book of Revelation and the titular riders and beasts that herald the Last Judgment – starts in Argentina. Julio Madariaga (Pomeroy Cannon), who’s been nicknamed “The Centaur” for his omnivorous appetite for women, has sired two children, Chichí (Virginia Warwick) and Elena (Mabel Van Buren). Both of Madariaga’s daughters marry men in their dad’s employ. Chichí marries Marcelo Desnoyers (Josef Swickard), a Frenchman who fled to Argentina to avoid the draft for the 1870 Franco-Prussian war. Elena marries stuck-up German military type Otto von Hartrott (Alan Hale) and has three sons by him, all of whom he lines up in military formation before they can have breakfast as if he’s auditioning to play Captain Von Trapp in The Sound of Music. Marcelo dares to return to France himself to raise his family there, even though he has just one son, Julio (Rudolph Valentino), a habitué of nightclubs where he can tango to his heart’s content. He’s also pursuing a career as a painter, though he isn’t very good, he seems to see art mostly as an excuse to meet women (when we first see him in Paris he’s got three scantily clad models in his living room posing for him), and he’s got a friend named Argensola (Bowditch M. Turner) who has less artistic talent than Julio and no family money either. Julio is in the middle of romancing a married woman, Marguerite Laurier (Alice Terry, who would become Mrs. Rex Ingram, though as so often with directors personally involved with their stars he had an awfully inflated view of her talents), wife of Senator Étienne Laurier (John St. Polis), whom she was forced to marry by their families and who comes to the tango bar looking for excitement. Also in the character mix is Tchernoff (Nigel de Brulier), a Russian émigré who lives in the flat above Julio’s and Argensola’s rooms and warns them that the apocalypse is coming. He shows them a rare book – a copy of the Book of Revelation with woodcut illustrations by the great German artist Albrecht Dürer – and uses it to illustrate his warning. Then Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian Empire gets assassinated, World War I breaks out, and the characters face various moral dilemmas on how to serve their respective countries while still remaining true to themselves. The Hartrott kids all join the Kaiser’s army and become little bloodthirsty killing machines, exactly as dad trained them lo those many years ago.

Julio’s mother Doña Luisa (Bridgette Clark) at first is overjoyed that Julio is an Argentinian and therefore doesn’t have to fight France’s battles. Ultimately Julio decides that he is French after all and he needs to volunteer, and there come a series of excellent battle scenes in which the horrors of no man’s land lead Julio to grow a moustache and tasteful beard (I was reminded of the World War II cartoons by Bill Mauldin, “Willie” and “Joe,” in which he showed the lousy conditions U.S. servicemembers were living in by the growths of beard he gave them). The book has two big scenes which show Julio in action – in one of which he kills his cousin Otto von Hartrott (Stuart Holmes) and in the next of which he dies himself – but Ingram and Mathis collapsed the two scenes into one and has a German artillery shell blow them both to smithereens. Meanwhile, Marguerite Laurier (ya remember Marguerite Laurier?) has volunteered to be a nurse, and it’s a good thing because Étienne was blinded in battle and now she has the skills to take care of him. She’s restive in her new role as full-time nurse to a blind man and makes plans to run off with Julio, but just then she gets a ghostly vision of him which makes her realize Julio is dead and therefore no longer an option. The finale is an epic dramatization of the Four Horsemen as described in the Book of Revelation, done with all the pictorial splendor and visual imagination Ingram was capable of – one can trace a fascinating line of influence from Ingram’s Mare Nostrum (1925) to Josef von Sternberg’s Dishonored (1931) to the “other” Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946), all of which are tales that blend sex and espionage – and though a deus ex machina appears in the form of American entry into World War I, which breaks the stalemate between the two sides, nonetheless the film is a striking anti-war parable and a warning that this carnage should never be allowed to happen again. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is a stunning tale, a timeless classic and a movie that deserves to be seen not just as Valentino’s breakthrough film but a major work of art in its own right. It got remade for some reason in 1962, with Glenn Ford (of all people!) in the Valentino role and the plot moved up one war to World War II; I’ve never seen that version and I’d assume it was terrible, but this one is a masterpiece and deserves your attention.

The Last Detail (Bright-Persky Associates, Acrobat Productions, Columbia, 1973)

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

Last night (Saturday, December 28) I turned on Turner Classic Movies for a pair of films that in their own ways were about low-life people. One was Hal Ashby’s 1973 quirky drama, The Last Detail, about two sailors in the U.S. Navy’s Shore Patrol, Buddusky (Jack Nicholson) and Mulhall (Black actor Otis Young), who are assigned to take an 18-year-old sailor named Meadows (Randy Quaid) from Norfolk, Virginia to Portsmouth, Maine. Meadows is an accomplished thief who stole a box of collections intended for a fund to fight polio. Since polio was a pet cause of the wife of the base commander, Meadows drew an eight-year sentence, unusually stiff for the crime and the limited amount of money involved. Buddusky and Mulhall determine to show Meadows a good time along the way, a premise which had led me to expect another On the Town. Instead, the trio of sailors have a rather mopey time as Buddusky unlocks Meadows’s handcuffs and they take him to Washington, D.C. and then New York City on their way. They end up with a group of Buddhist hippies, including a young woman who teaches him the “Nam Myoho Renge Kyo” chant” (which a good Buddhist friend of mine has told me has nothing to do with real Buddhism) and takes Meadows up a long flight of stairs to her loft. At first we think she’s going to seduce him – the film’s script by Robert Towne, based on a novel of the same title by Darryl Ponicsan, strongly hints that Meadows is still a virgin – but she only wants him to do some chanting with her. (The young Gilda Radner appears in this scene as one of the hippie chicks, and given how sexist this film is “chicks” is an appropriate term.) Later, in another city (Boston, ironically), the trio run into a taxi driver who’s an ex-Navy man himself. They ask him to take them to a whorehouse, where Meadows finally loses his cherry to a character listed only as “Young Whore” (Carol Kane). Meadows climaxes almost immediately but Buddusky and Mulhall offer to pay the madam (Patricia Hamilton) more money to give Meadows another chance, and later the young whore announces that he’s taken to sex “like a duck to water.”

The Last Detail is a mediocre movie – a disappointment from its usually interesting director, Hal Ashby – though it has some good scenes. Buddusky’s confrontation with a redneck bartender who refuses to serve Meadows a beer because he’s under age (we’re told he’s 18, though when he made this movie Randy Quaid was 22, and looked it) is fun even though it has echoes of the chicken-salad sandwich scene in Five Easy Pieces (the one great scene in an otherwise monumentally overrated movie). There’s also a scene in which they try to picnic in a park and grill hot dogs, only they don’t have any buns and both Buddusky and Mulhall don’t want to eat hot dogs without buns. Meadows solves the problem by spearing his hot dog with a twig and dipping it straight into a jar of mustard. While the picnic is going on, Meadows rather innocently walks off in the direction of the Canadian border – though it doesn’t look like he has an actual plan to escape – and Buddusky chases him down and beats the shit out of him, apparently because he trusted Meadows enough to have unlocked his handcuffs and Meadows repays him by trying to desert. And the final scene is quite good, starting with an establishing shot of the Portsmouth prison that looms over the action and featuring the young Michael Moriarty as a prison official who gives Buddusky and Mulhall a hard time over several issues, including the condition of Meadows’s face when he shows up (he asks Buddusky if Meadows was trying to escape, and Buddusky says no) and the lack of a counter-signature on the written orders Buddusky presents. “You were never here,” the official (who’s identified only as “Marine O.D.” in the cast list) tells Buddusky and Mulhall, setting up a brief Kafka-esque argument between them. It’s also nice to see Jack Nicholson topless and wearing only military underwear in a few scenes, though he’s not all that good-looking and, whatever Nicholson’s talents as an actor, sexiness was not one of them.

The Last Detail is ironic because Nicholson played an anarchic sailor who yearns to break free of the Navy and its discipline (though at the end he and Mulhall regretfully acknowledge that the Navy is their career and they’re “lifers”) almost two decades before his marvelous appearance in the film A Few Good Men (a much better movie than this one, despite the normally disqualifying fact that Tom Cruise is its star) as the personification of spit-and-polish military discipline. But The Last Detail, which I don’t think I’d ever seen before, is largely disappointing, an O.K. film which could have been great if it had some of the insouciance of On the Town before it or Ferris Bueller’s Day Off afterwards – despite the modish filling of the soundtrack with swear words seven years after the breakdown of the Production Code. TCM host Ben Mankiewicz co-introduced the film with a woman director, Nicole Holofcener, who had nice things to say about Hal Ashby and his films (TCM double-billed it with another Ashby-directed movie, Coming Home from 1975, which I remember as worlds better than this one) even though, not surprisingly, she described Ashby’s movies as coming-of-age stories about men and her own as coming-of-age stories about women. One anecdote the two hosts told before the film started was that Hal Ashby and Robert Towne had an argument over the casting of Meadows: Towne wanted John Travolta for the role (at the time he’d just started his star-making role as Vinnie Barbarino on the TV sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter and hadn’t made a name for himself in films) but Ashby insisted on casting Quaid. As things turned out, Ashby was right: Quaid totally out-acts the two other leads and gives an indelible portrayal of innocence betrayed. Even Quaid’s ungainly body works to his advantage; at times he reminded me of Boris Karloff in Frankenstein just after his creation when he’s still trying to get an understanding of how this body of his is supposed to work.

The Postman Always Rings Twice (MGM, 1946)

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

Last night (Saturday, December 28) I kept on Turner Classic Movies after their showing of The Last Detail for the welcome return of Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” program after a week’s hiatus so they could do a week-long marathon of Christmas movies. For his last showing of 2024 Muller chose the 1946 film The Postman Always Rings Twice, which he said was the most commercially successful of all the films noir of the 1940’s. He documented that with a photo of people lined up for blocks outside the Capitol Theatre in New York to see the movie, which was double-billed with, of all things, live performances by Guy Lombardo and the Royal Canadians. I had read the James M. Cain novel on which it was based in the early 1970’s, when I was developing my love of mystery stories in general and the hard-boiled variety in particular – as I’ve mentioned many times before, film noir came about when German expatriate directors who settled in Hollywood during the Nazi regime and the Americans who learned from them realized that the heavily-shadowed chiaroscuro look of Weimar-era German films was an effective way to dramatize the hard-boiled crime dramas of Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich and other writers in that style. Muller said something I hadn’t known before: MGM bought the movie rights to Postman almost as soon as the book was published in 1934, only just as they were about to film it the Legion of Decency struck and demanded that Hollywood get serious about enforcing the Production Code. Realizing that Cain’s tale of adultery and murder would be a hard sell to Joseph Breen, the man in charge of enforcing the Production Code, MGM put Postman on the back burner and didn’t take it up again until 12 years later, after Paramount and Warner Bros. had successfully filmed other Cain novels: Double Indemnity and Mildred Pierce, respectively. (I’ve long marveled at the irony behind Above Suspicion, the last film Joan Crawford made under her original MGM contract. When it came out it starred Crawford and Fred MacMurray, both of whom were considered over the hill. Within two years both of them had made major comebacks in stories by James M. Cain: MacMurray in Double Indemnity and Crawford in Mildred Pierce.)

When I first saw this in the early 1980’s I thought it was a misbegotten movie. John Garfield was superbly cast as Frank Chambers, drifter who comes on a combination gas station and lunch room at the edge of the California desert, gets hired by the station’s owner Nick Smith (Cecil Kellaway, truly odd casting given that I’m used to seeing him in all those 1950’s sci-fi movies in which he played the scientist who wanted to reason with the monster and ended up getting himself and some of the down-cast members killed) and ended up falling in lust with Nick’s wife Cora. The problem with the movie was Lana Turner, whom MGM picked to play Cora. This was actually the first time I ever said, “This would have been a better movie with Barbara Stanwyck in it,” mainly because Stanwyck had played a James M. Cain femme fatale to perfection in Double Indemnity two years earlier, and if she’d been in Postman she could have brought the film the same intensity she’d brought to Double Indemnity. I liked Turner a bit better than I had the last time. I’ll give her credit that when the script (by Harry Ruskin and Niven Busch) allowed her to get angry and scream, she rose to the occasion. But anything short of that eluded her; when she comes out dressed in a white shirt and matching white shorts and we’re supposed to think that the mere sight of her evokes John Garfield’s lust, she looks more like an animate sex doll than a woman reveling in her sexual power. The Postman Always Rings Twice deals with the growing sexual tension between Frank and Cora, which leads them both to murder Nick and fake it to look like an accident. Their first attempt is short-circuited – literally – when a cat crosses the wires just as Cora is about to do in her husband in the bathtub. Their second, which involves Frank clubbing him to death while the three of them are riding in Nick’s car, also goes awry. They knock him off, all right, but the car doesn’t descend into the obligatory ravine far enough to be credible with the story they’ve worked out, so Frank gets in the car again and this time drives it off the proverbial cliff and barely escapes with his own life.

Both attempts are witnessed by the local district attorney, Kyle Sackett (Leon Ames), who takes a Javert-like dislike to Frank even before Frank has done anything illegal and spends an awful lot of time staking out the establishment just to catch him in something illegal. Though Sackett doesn’t witness Nick’s actual murder, it’s he who happens to be driving along when Cora escapes from the ravine where they’ve left Nick’s car and rescues her. Once she and Frank are both in custody over Nick’s alleged murder, Postman becomes a much more interesting movie as it begins to revolve around the corruption of the legal system. Sackett is assigned to prosecute the case against Cora, while her lawyer is an even scummier character: Arthur Keats (Hume Cronyn). Keats insists that Cora leave everything up to him and not interfere with his decisions, even when he decides to plead her guilty. Ultimately he and Sackett, who are depicted as good friends outside the courtroom who have a $100 bet going on the outcome of the case, reach a plea deal in which she’ll plead guilty to manslaughter and the judge will give her a suspended sentence and probation. Cora uses the $10,000 in insurance money she got for Nick’s death – which she insists she didn’t know about before she and Frank knocked him off – only there’s a smoking gun out there: a confession Cora signed stating that she and Frank plotted Nick’s murder together. She gave this to Ezra Liam Kennedy (Alan Reed), whom she thinks is an operative from Sackett’s office but is really a private investigator working for Keats. When Kennedy left Keats’s employ, he took Cora’s signed confession with him and now attempts to blackmail her and Frank with it. Ultimately they overpower him and destroy the original and all copies of the confession, but Cora gets worried that people will start talking about the two of them living together in the desert. She has the bright idea of having them marry each other, even though by now all sparks of love, or even lust, have burned out between them and Frank drifts into an affair with a woman named Madge Garland (Audrey Totter, who also could have played Cora better than Lana Turner did!). Ultimately Frank and Cora decide to abandon the diner and flee to parts unknown, only just as they’re doing so they’re involved in an auto accident, Cora dies, and Sackett has Frank arrested, convicted and sentenced to death for her murder.

Cain’s novel savored the irony of that ending – Frank gets away with the murder he actually committed but gets executed for one that really was an accident – though the ending had to be softened for the film in a tag scene in which Frank has confessed to the prison chaplain (the source of the voice-over commentary we’ve been hearing from him all movie) while Sackett, listening in, tells Frank that even though he knows Frank didn’t intentionally kill Cora, his execution will punish him for the killing he did commit. Postman was directed by Tay Garnett, who in the early 1930’s had done some important proto-noirs set in the South Pacific, notably Her Man (1930) starring Helen Twelvetrees. He also made One-Way Passage (1932), in which William Powell and Kay Francis play doomed lovers aboard a steamship – he’s on his way to prison and she’s been diagnosed with a fatal disease – which in Kay Francis’s later years was the only film she’d made that she thought was any good. Later Garnett broadened his subject matter and made the delightful Hollywood comedy Stand-In (1937) with Leslie Howard, Joan Blondell and Humphrey Bogart. Garnett’s direction of Postman is effective but not what it could have been; for something that’s supposed to be a film noir, an awful lot of it takes place out in the open, in the middle of the California sun. Garnett and his cinematographer, Sidney Wagner, do precious little in the way of dark, chiaroscuro lighting, so it qualifies as a film noir thematically but not visually except in a few isolated scenes. The Postman Always Rings Twice had already been filmed in France and Italy in bootleg versions before this MGM release (and the Italian version, Ossessione – which means “Obsession” – was made in 1942, suppressed by Mussolini and the Catholic Church, and survived only in a print director Luchino Visconti hid under the floorboards of his home), and in addition to the official remake from 1981, directed by Bob Rafelson, written by David Mamet (who reverted to the original Greek last name, “Papadakis,” of Nick’s and Cora’s characters), and starring Jack Nicholson as Frank and Jessica Lange as Cora. according to Muller there have been innumerable versions of the basic plot from other countries. It’s a real pity this one isn’t better than it is, but MGM wasn’t exactly the studio you went to for films noir, especially before Dore Schary arrived as co-head of production in 1948 and brought a noir sensibility with him from his previous studio, RKO.

Sherlock: "The Great Game" (Hartswood Films, BBC Wales, Masterpiece Theatre, PBS, 2010)

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

Last night (Friday, December 27) my husband Charles and I, both longtime Sherlock Holmes buffs, watched the third rerun episode of the British TV series Sherlock (2010-2017), “The Great Game,” which updated the character to the 21st century and cast Benedict Cumberbatch as Holmes and Martin Freeman as Dr. John H. Watson, his roommate and associate. Like the two previous episodes, “A Study in Pink” and “The Blind Banker,” “The Great Game” (written by series co-creator Mark Gatiss, who also played Sherlock Holmes’s brother Mycroft – though he’s considerably slimmer here than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle described him) was a confusing mash-up of plot devices found in Conan Doyle’s stories (one of the main intrigues here is a fairly accurate adaptation of “The Bruce-Partington Plans” and there’s also a reference to “The Five Orange Pips,” though befitting the 21st century setting the “orange pips” are actually digital noises emitted from a smartphone) and gimmicks found either in other literary sources or in real life. Holmes is being run ragged by a series of phone calls from ordinary people whom a mysterious super-criminal has outfitted with bombs that will blow up not only themselves but a large area surrounding them. The people making the calls are being held hostage by a malevolent meanie who makes them call Holmes and read exactly, word for word, a text message he has composed for Holmes. If they don’t do it, a sniper will fire at them and set off the bombs. There’s also a bomb attack on Holmes’s and Watson’s home at the iconic 221B Baker Street that blows out much of the front wall, though their landlady Mrs. Hudson (Una Stubbs) doesn’t seem to mind much. And in order to research a clue, Holmes goes to a computer lab and is helped by a woman staff member who introduces him to Jim (Andrew Scott), a young, hunky guy who works in the lab’s IT department. Jim and the woman are dating, but Holmes warns her off him because he’s Gay – he points out a number of aspects about his grooming, including the fact that he’s wearing his pants low enough you can see what brand of underwear he has on from behind. Naturally she’s upset and Watson upbraids Holmes about his cruelty to her, while Holmes says it’s better that she find out now rather than wait, get “serious” about him and then find out he’s not interested in women. In the end, to no particular surprise, “Jim” turns out to be Moriarty, the mastermind behind the bomb plot (though he’s not officially a professor yet and it’s possible he won’t be at all).

The extent to which Holmes gets so worked up about the bomb threats he’s receiving through relayed texts he resists his brother Mycroft’s entreaties that he work on the stolen military plans reminded me of the plot screenwriters Edwin Blum and William Absalom Drake concocted for the 1939 film The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – the second, and my favorite, of the 14 Holmes films with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce – in which Professor Moriarty (George Zucco) concocts an elaborate scheme to feed Holmes clues about a bizarre mystery involving a woman, a drawing of an albatross, a mysterious killer who throws a bolo and wears a shoe to make himself look club-footed when he isn’t, all to distract Holmes from catching on that Moriarty’s real objective is to break into the Tower of London and steal the Crown Jewels. The climax of this episode takes place at a swimming pool where a promising young swimmer was murdered years before by spiking his anti-eczema medication with botulinum toxin, and Moriarty outfits Dr. Watson with the bomb vest as his latest hostage while Holmes threatens to shoot him, even though a red laser light appears on his face whenever he is about to pull the trigger, indicating that Moriarty has a sniper henchman in the building ready to kill Holmes if he tries to shoot Moriarty. I like Sherlock but it’s not that great a contribution to the corpus of Sherlock Holmes stories on screen. Benedict Cumberbatch has the authority and power for the role but not to the extent that the two greatest filmed Holmeses, Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett, did. Martin Freeman blessedly plays Watson as a normally intelligent human being instead of the foofy comic doofus Nigel Bruce supplied. But the plots are way too complicated and go off in too many directions. In one of the Conan Doyle Holmes stories Holmes unravels the villain’s plot to frame an innocent man for a crime because he notices a new piece of damning evidence that wasn’t there the last time he visited the crime scene, and later he explains to Watson that the villain “lacked the supreme facility of the artist, the gift of knowing when to stop.” Gatiss and his fellow Sherlock writers also didn’t know when to stop!

Dolly Parton's Mountain Magic Christmas (Sandollar Productions, Mountain Hill Productions, Warner Bros. Television, 2022, re-aired on NBC December 26, 2024)

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

Last night (Thursday, December 26, one day after Christmas) NBC showed an odd two-hour Christmas special featuring Dolly Parton and shot at “Dollywood,” the theme park she co-owns in Pigeon Park, Tennessee, near the Great Smoky Mountains where she grew up and had the famously impoverished childhood she’s immortalized in “Coat of Many Colors” and many other songs. It was promoted during the Jeopardy! episode that night as Christmas in Dollywood, which caused me to do a double take since it’s highly unusual for a network to run a Christmas-themed special the day after Christmas. It turned out to be a two-year-old special originally filmed by Sandollar Productions, Mountain Hill Productions, and Warner Bros. Television. The original title was Dolly Parton’s Mountain Magic Christmas and it featured a plot, of sorts – the original white female director of Dolly Parton’s Christmas special walks out at the last minute to do the Radio City Music Hall Christmas show, and her replacement, an ambitious young Black woman, wants to add lots more dancers, choreographers and “production values” to what Our Dolly was planning as an intimate Christmas special. Basically the plot is just an excuse to show Dolly Parton singing; she opens with excerpts from two of her best-known songs, “I Will Always Love You” (which she actually wrote, though Whitney Houston had the hit – a rare example of a Black artist taking a hit away from a white one when it usually worked the other way around!) and “Nine to Five,” which alas are cut off way too quickly. Then we get Dolly singing “Mountain Magic,” the song which would provide the overall theme for the show, and afterwards she sings a medley of “Go Tell It On the Mountain” (I’ve long believed Bruce Cockburn’s recording of this is the best by a white artist; then I heard Johnny Cash’s version and he gave Cockburn a run for his money, but Dolly’s version, though good, is hardly in the same league as Cockburn or Cash), “Away in a Manger” and “He Lives!,” which sounds like it was written for Frankenstein: The Musical but is actually a gospel/country song by Alan Jackson.

The “mountain magic” gimmick is then used to showcase a number of guest stars with the conceit that, like most movie ghosts, the person playing the lead role can see and interact with them but nobody else can. The more director Joe Lazarov and writer David Rambo did shot-reverse shot edits in which Dolly Parton can see the guest star but others in the scene (including a quite cute tow-headed kid whom Dolly introduces as her great-grandnephew), the more I got tired of the gimmick. There are also other annoying plot devices in Rambo’s script, including a mini-diary Dolly Parton supposedly started as a little girl which other people keep giving her copies of, and a pencil which she keeps down her famously ample cleavage with which to write in it. At least the “plot” gives Dolly an excuse to introduce and sing with a variety of guest stars, of whom the first is NBC late-night host Jimmy Fallon. He has something of a voice – one imdb.com reviewer accused him of using AutoTune, but he's done some nice singing on his show – and he and Dolly sing a duet called “Almost Too Early for Christmas” in which she holds back enough to give him a fighting chance. It didn’t help his cause much that the show’s costume designers clad him in an atrocious black-leather outfit reminiscent of Henry Winkler on Happy Days, and the director, vocal coaches or whatever had him use an embarrassingly bad Southern accent (especially compared to Dolly’s real one!). Next Dolly brought on a country singer as legendary as she is: Willie Nelson, who duetted with her on “Pretty Paper,” a Christmas song which Nelson wrote and sold to country-rock singer Roy Orbison in 1963. Then the dance troupe showed up and did a rather messy version of “Mountain Magic,” redeemed only by Dolly’s vocal – following which she led the dance company in a hot version of her song “Go to Hell.” The number for that one featured a guy supposedly playing Satan, dressed in an all-black costume; they would have the sexiest guy in the show playing the Devil! Then Dolly did a promotion for a charity she’s run for years to collect books and donate them to poor children in out-of-the-way locations, and as part of that she sang a medley of “Books, Books, Books” and “I Believe in Santa Claus” with a children’s choir.

After that Dolly did an anthem to acceptance called “Whatever You Are, Be That,” to which a reviewer on the imdb.com page took rather striking exception. “Dolly has great success off playing both sides of the fence, i.e. talking about Jesus and the Devil, but then singing about being whatever you feel like, which this movie also does,” they wrote. “She's made a point to cater to all audiences which after all, she is an entertainer, not a preacher.” I guess this person thinks that Dolly Parton should go all fire and brimstone on us and denounce Queer folk as irredeemable sinners, but that’s not Dolly Parton’s form of Christianity any more than it is that of most of my Christian friends. The Dolly Parton who sang “Whatever You Are, Be That” is the same Dolly Parton who not long ago gave an interview to a Queer magazine (in which she said that she, like Elvis, started singing in church) and who acted in the movie Nine to Five with Lesbian comedienne Lily Tomlin. Dolly wrapped up this religious portion of her program with a medley of “The Seeker” (not the one Pete Townshend wrote for The Who as the immediate follow-up to Tommy) and “Hello, God!” Then she brought on a guest star, a Black rocker named Jimmie Allen, for a really hot duet on Chuck Berry’s “Run, Rudolph, Run.” (The song is officially credited to Johnny Marks, who also wrote the original “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” but it sounds so much like Chuck Berry I suspect he either wrote it himself or at least contributed heavily.) After that she sang “Christmas Where We Are” with flash-in-the-pan country music star Billy Ray Cyrus and then another holiday-themed song, “Christmas Is,” with Billy Ray’s daughter Miley Cyrus. I was a bit disappointed that both Cyruses didn’t appear together, but my understanding is there’s a lot of bad blood within the Cyrus family; Miley’s mom left him just before he had a bit hit record with the song “Achy Breaky Heart,” telling him he was a no-account and would never amount to anything. So it’s not surprising that there was no on-screen meeting between the two generations of Cyruses, much to my disappointment.

Next up was a quite marvelous vocal trio of Dolly Parton and her sisters Cassie and Rachel doing a medley of “Prettiest Enemy” and “Family,” after which Dolly did the song that was portrayed as the opening number even though it was the closer: “When Life Is Good Again,” a marvelous anthem to hope and optimism that was especially welcome at this fraught time in our nation’s history. I haven’t liked all of Dolly Parton’s TV work – I’ll never forget when she turned “Coat of Many Colors” from a great and beautiful three-minute song about being a poor kid to a terrible two-hour tear-jerking TV movie that seemed to drone on and on forever (as I joked at the time, “I was expecting Coal Miner's Daughter and I got The Waltons”) – but I certainly liked this show. It neatly balanced the sentimental aspects of Dolly’s music with her fierce independence, her willingness to sing songs like “Whatever You Are, Be That” in the face of likely opposition from some members of her fan base, including the person who wrote that rather hateful review on imdb.com. This Queer boy loves having Dolly Parton as one of our straight allies!

Cabin in the Sky (MGM, 1943)

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

Last night (Wednesday, December 25) I ran a DVD for my husband Charles and I of the 1944/1945 (the former is the copyright date, the latter the year it was released) version of Christmas in Connecticut, which Charles had surprised me by naming his all-time favorite Christmas movie. (I’ve reviewed it for moviemagg twice: in 2009 at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2009/12/christmas-in-connecticut-warner-bros.html and in 2020 at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2020/12/christmas-in-connecticut-warner-bros.html, and I’ve also reviewed the O.K. but mediocre 1992 remake with Dyan Cannon in Barbara Stanwyck’s role, directed by Arnold Schwarzenegger, at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/12/christmas-in-connecticut-turner.html.) Then I put on the “live” Turner Classic Movies broadcast for another one of our all-time favorites: Cabin in the Sky (1943), based on a 1940 all-Black Broadway musical composed by Vernon Duke with lyrics by John Latouche (after both Ira Gershwin and E. Y. “Yip” Harburg turned it down) and essentially a rewrite of the Faust legend, as God’s and the Devil’s representatives fight over the soul of Joe Jackson while his wife Petunia looks on and tries to keep him on the straight and narrow. She’s got a rival for his affections: entertainer Georgia Brown, who works at “Jim Henry’s Paradise” nightclub and has successfully seduced Joe away from Petunia. The stage version was a vehicle for Ethel Waters as Petunia; her co-stars were Dooley Wilson (known today almost exclusively for his role as Sam in Casablanca) and the Black dancer and choreographer Katharine Dunham. MGM producer Arthur Freed bought the movie rights and made the film in 1943 with Waters repeating her stage role, but the other two leads were cast with different people. Joe was played by the great Black comedian Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, who’d become a star on Jack Benny’s radio program and, because Benny was that rare comic star who let his sidekicks score off him, he’d got to play streetwise instead of stupid and is one of just two Black male comedians from Hollywood’s classic era whose work is still funny. (The other is Mantan Moreland.)

As for Georgia Brown, Freed was giving a major star buildup to Lena Horne even though before Cabin in the Sky he’d just used her for guest musical numbers in other people’s films and hadn’t given her a real acting role. (This was so MGM’s Southern distributors could easily remove her songs from the versions of the films shown there.) Horne got back-to-back chances to act in this film and Stormy Weather, another all-Black musical she made on loanout to 20th Century-Fox, but after that it was back to the salt mines of guest appearances in other people’s films. One of Freed’s great unfulfilled dreams was to cast Horne as Julie Laverne in his 1951 version of Show Boat – the character was supposed to be a part-Black woman “passing” as white – but MGM’s distribution people went ballistic and pointed out that no theatre in the South would show a film featuring a Black woman romantically involved with a white man. Cabin in the Sky was also the first film directed entirely by Vincente Minnelli; up until then he’d been under contract first to Paramount and then MGM, but he’d only done individual numbers in other people’s films: with Martha Raye and Louis Armstrong in “Public Melody No. 1” from Artists and Models (1937); the great number with animated models of fruits enacting a symphony orchestra in Strike Up the Band (1940); and Lena Horne’s numbers in Panama Hattie (1942). Apparently he got the job because no other MGM director wanted to do a film with an all-Black cast (though King Vidor had done Hallelujah! with an all-Black cast in 1929). Hall Johnson, a Black choir director who’d been involved with the show on both stage and film, went ballistic when he saw the first draft of the script (the credited screenwriter was Joseph Schrank, with an uncredited Marc Connelly contributing additional dialogue) and wrote a letter to associate producer Albert Lewis. Johnson called the script “a weird but priceless conglomeration of pre-Civil War constructions mixed with up-to-the-minute Harlem slang and heavily sprinkled with a type of verb which Amos and Andy purloined from Miller and Lyle, the Negro comedians.” Johnson added, “The script will be immeasurably improved when this is translated into honest-to-goodness Negro dialect.”

Cabin in the Sky also suffered from Ethel Waters’s notorious jealousy towards other Black women who sang. A decade earlier she had blackballed Billie Holiday from opening for her at the Apollo Theatre because Billie had auditioned with “Underneath the Harlem Moon,” one of Waters’s biggest hits. Now Waters, in the middle of her transformation from raunchy Black nightclub performer to born-again Christian who sang a hymn or two in the Billy Graham Crusades, treated Lena Horne similarly shamelessly. “I objected violently to the way religion was being treated in the screenplay,” Waters later wrote. “All through the picture there was so much snarling and scrapping that I didn’t know how in the world Cabin in the Sky ever stayed up there.” Horne remembered that while Waters didn’t confront her directly, “the kids who were working in scenes with Ethel Waters told me she was violently prejudiced against me. Miss Waters was not notably gentle towards women and she was particularly tough on other singers.” Director Minnelli said, “Ethel didn’t like Lena at all. It always seemed so ridiculous to me, because Ethel was such a great artist. In New York it was her show, but now it was divided.” Minnelli also fought with the MGM art department, who kept trying to make the picture’s sets slovenly instead of looking like the dwellings of decent people who just didn’t have much money. MGM opened their wallets to recruit star Black performers, including Louis Armstrong (though they gave him virtually nothing to do; as a member of the Devil’s “Ideas Department,” he’s in just one scene, playing an unaccompanied trumpet solo and speaking a few lines of comic dialogue) and Duke Ellington (who got a far more prominent role as bandleader at Jim Henry’s Paradise in the final scene: he played his son Mercer Ellington’s “Things Ain’t What They Used to Be” and a new song of his own called “Goin’ Up,” with a long out-of-tempo trombone solo by Lawrence Brown in the middle of an uptempo swing number; a modern critic suggested that Brown’s solo was meant to represent a preacher denouncing the evils of the nightclub even within a number played there) as well as an all-star cast of Black actors in the supporting roles.

Lucifer, Jr. (the Devil’s representative) is played by Rex Ingram, repeating his role from the stage production, who’d previously played “De Lawd” in the 1936 film The Green Pastures, Marc Connelly’s sensationally successful play depicting scenes from the Bible enacted by Blacks (therefore making Ingram the first actor who played both God and the Devil on screen; he would be followed by Max von Sydow and George Burns, who had the distinction of playing God and the Devil in the same movie, Oh, God! You Devil, in 1984). The forces of good are led by “The General” (Kenneth Spencer, with an imperious bearing similar to Paul Robeson), who also plays the local minister in the framing sequences. The other Devil’s “Idea Men” are Mantan Moreland, Willie Best (who’d originally been billed as “Sleep ‘n’ Eat” until Bob Hope, an anti-racist before anti-racism was cool, demanded he be credited under his real name), and a Black comedy duo billed as “Moke” (Fletcher Rivers) and “Poke” (Leon James). Gangster Domino Johnson was played by the great Black dancer John “Bubbles” Sublett. Ernest “Bubbles” Whitman played club owner Jim Henry, and Bill Bailey, Pearl Bailey’s brother, played a dancer in the song “Taking a Chance on Love.” According to Hugh Fordin’s biography of Arthur Freed, The World of Entertainment, the original release prints of Cabin in the Sky were in sepia – which would be a much better way to watch this aesthetically beautiful film; though this was Minnelli’s first full directorial effort, his remarkable eye was already very much in evidence. Also, Arthur Freed followed the usual practice of studios filming stage shows and threw out about half the original Broadway score, instead hiring Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg (so he got to work on this project after all!) to create new ones. That was partly because the major movie studios also owned their own music publishing companies, so hiring writers to create new songs meant fewer royalties they had to pay to outside publishers, and also because that way they could have a song eligible for the Best Song Academy Award – which they got: the Arlen/Harburg “Happiness Is Just a Thing Called Joe” was nominated, but lost to “You’ll Never Know” by Harry Warren and Mack Gordon from the 20th Century-Fox musical Hello, Frisco, Hello. The other songs Arlen and Harburg contributed were a faux spiritual called “L’il Black Sheep” and a duet for Waters and Anderson called “Life’s Full of Consequences.”

The Duke/Latouche songs retained from the original show included the title number, “Taking a Chance on Love” (which the modern critic I cited above questioned because the supposedly righteous anti-gambling Petunia is using a whole bunch of gambling metaphors to declare her love for her errant husband) and “Honey from the Honeycomb,” Georgia Brown’s seduction song. The plot is pretty simple: Joe Jackson has just scored a job as an elevator operator when three scapegrace “friends” he owes money to dragoon him into going to Jim Henry’s Paradise for one last game against Domino Johnson – only things go haywire and Joe is shot and mortally wounded. Thanks to Petunia’s intense prayers (this part of the movie sounds like It’s a Wonderful Life three years earlier), God decides to spare Joe and give him six months to mend his ways and find righteousness. But Joe’s memory of this encounter is wiped clean, so he has no idea that his fate for all eternity is dependent on the next six months. The Devil’s forces arrange for him to win $50,000 in the Irish Sweepstakes, only Joe blows most of the money on Georgia Brown. It all comes to a climax in which God’s army literally attacks Jim Henry’s Paradise with a tornado (for which MGM recycled the famous one from The Wizard of Oz) and destroys it, leaving behind a staircase to Heaven at such twisted angles it looks like St. Peter has suddenly become Dr. Caligari. Joe and Petunia both die, and Petunia is immediately granted entrance to Heaven but she has to persuade God’s staff to let Joe in – which they finally do once they learn that Georgia Brown has also “found religion” and donated all the sweepstakes money Joe gave her to the church. The sequence in which Petunia puts on a fancy dress and belts out “Honey from the Honeycomb” to prove she can be just as low-down and bad-ass as Georgia is electrifying and almost unbearably ironic, since Ethel Waters is enacting her own transition from raunchy nightclub star to born-again Christian in reverse. Though Freed, Minnelli and Schrank didn’t entirely avoid the hints of patronization that usually infected Hollywood’s attempts to show African-Americans sympathetically, Cabin in the Sky holds up beautifully and enabled Minnelli to move up – after one more piss-ant assignment, replacing another director on a Red Skelton vehicle called I Dood It, a remake of Buster Keaton’s 1929 silent classic Spite Marriage, Minnelli once again got a film worthy of his talents: Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), with an all-star cast featuring Judy Garland at her most incandescent.

Sisters In Crime, a.k.a. Roaring City (Sigmund Neufeld Productions, Spartan Productions, Lippert Pictures, 1951)

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

Last night (Tuesday, December 24) I spent an hour between the Christmas Eve church service and the Turner Classic Movies showing I wanted to watch by screening a film off YouTube. I’d noticed this one as Sisters in Crime (1951), an hour-long “B” starring Hugh Beaumont (later of Leave It to Beaver fame), which from the title I assumed would be a film about women gangsters whom Beaumont, as either an official cop or a private detective, was out to bust. It turned out to have had an alternate title, Roaring City, and to be a boxing movie. It was directed by William Berke (late of the RKO “B” detective series The Falcon with Tom Conway) from a script by Julian Harmon and Victor West based on “stories” by Lou Morheim and Herb Margolis. Hugh Beaumont plays Dennis O’Brien, who runs a fishing boat out of Pier 23 in San Francisco and does occasional odd jobs of various levels of seediness. (Apparently the same company, Lippert Pictures, shot a similar film called Pier 23 with some of the same cast members and locations, but they’re different films with different plots.) O’Brien is hired by a crooked gambler and fight manager named Ed Gannon (William Tannen) to place bets on an upcoming prizefight between Vic Lundy (Greg McClure) and Harry Barton (Stanley Price). Though Gannon manages Lundy, he’s secretly betting on Lundy to lose because he’s told Lundy to throw the bout in the first round – only the signals get crossed and Lundy holds out until round six, in which he legitimately knocks out Barton. What he didn’t know was that Barton had a blood clot that would kill him, and indeed he dies as a result of his injuries in the ring. Barton was out of shape but agreed to fight this one last time so he and his girlfriend Gail Chase (Rebel Randall) would have enough money to buy a chicken farm and retire to it.

Only what Barton didn’t know was that Gail was a classic film noir femme fatale who was involved with Gannon and at least one of the other male cast members – and at one point we see her make a pass at O’Brien as well. When O’Brien places the bets for Gannon against Lundy, he’s told to put them under the alias “Steve Belzig” – which raises eyebrows among three bookies with whom he places the bets because, it turns out, “Belzig” is Vic Lundy’s real name: he changed it when he was released from prison to avoid having his convict past interfere with his new career in the ring. It also turns out that Gannon was secretly betting even more money on Lundy to win the fight; Gannon gave instructions to Lundy to hold out until round seven, knowing that if he fought legitimately he’d beat Bannon before that. Then he murders Lundy after Lundy wins the fight against Bannon, and sets up O’Brien to take the fall. O’Brien also has to deal with his middle-aged alcoholic roommate, “Professor” Frederick Simpson Schicker (Edward Brophy, in an odd role for him because he doesn’t get any slapstick or action scenes); and Inspector Bruner of the San Francisco Police Department (Richard Travis), who’s determined to arrest somebody for murdering both Lundy and Gannon (who also is found dead in a room in which O’Brien was incapacitated and found the corpse when he came to). O’Brien also has run-ins with Irma Rand (Joan Valerie) and her sister Sylvia (Wanda McKay). Roaring City a.k.a. Sisters in Crime is an O.K. movie, attempting to be film noir and qualifying thematically (it’s about unscrupulous criminals inhabiting an amoral underworld) but not visually: cinematographer Jack Greenhalgh (a PRC veteran, like producer Sigmund Neufeld) shoots almost all of it in bright light and he and director Berke go for the most ordinary Wonder Bread compositions imaginable.

A Christmas Carol (MGM, 1938)

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

Later last night (Tuesday, December 24) I turned on Turner Classic Movies for two Christmas-themed films, including the 1938 version of A Christmas Carol produced by MGM, directed by Edwin L. Marin and adapted by screenwriter Hugo Butler from the famous novella by Charles Dickens. This was originally planned as a vehicle for Lionel Barrymore, who had played Ebenezer Scrooge on radio several times – in fact, his annual portrayals of Scrooge on radio had become a much-awaited event around Christmastime – but just before the film was supposed to start shooting, Barrymore’s long-time arthritis became so bad he literally lost the ability to walk and had to play all his future parts in a wheelchair. (One film in which he put his disability to magnificent use to portray a bitter and crabbed character is Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, in which he played the principal villain, Mr. Potter.) So, though the studio still used Lionel Barrymore to sell the film by having him narrate and appear as himself in the trailer, MGM looked around for a replacement Scrooge and found him in Reginald Owen, who had played in another British classic, A Study in Scarlet, for the short-lived World Wide Pictures in 1933. In that one Owen played Sherlock Holmes and Edwin L. Marin directed that film, too. I’ve long thought A Study in Scarlet was underrated (William K. Everson called Owen the worst actor to play Holmes, which wasn’t true in the early 1970’s when he wrote that book and is even less true today) and so is the 1938 A Christmas Carol.

I remember being told when I was growing up that Owen’s version wasn’t worth watching and Alastair Sim’s portrayal of Scrooge in a 1951 British adaptation was far better – but it’s not taking anything away from Sim to say that Owen’s Scrooge has its points, too. The trailer for the film referenced MGM’s previous productions of Dickens stories, David Copperfield and A Tale of Two Cities, and though A Christmas Carol is hardly at the level of those classic films, it’s a worthy movie in its own right even though screenwriter Butler came in for criticism for leaving out some of Dickens’s best-loved dialogue lines. One thing I like about this version of A Christmas Carol is that the actors playing Mr. and Mrs. Cratchit, Gene and Kathleen Lockhart, were married in real life (and actress June Lockhart was their daughter). Another good thing about this film is the general excellence of the supporting cast: Leo G. Carroll as Marley’s Ghost, Ronald Sinclair (who starred in the quite interesting 1937 MGM musical Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry after Freddie Bartholomew’s parents had a diva hissy-fit with MGM and pulled him out of the film) as the young Scrooge, Barry MacKay as Scrooge’s nephew Fred, Lynne Carver as Fred’s girlfriend Bess, and Ann Rutherford (getting a welcome reprieve from the thankless role of the girlfriend Mickey Rooney was always temporarily abandoning in the Hardy Family movies), Lionel Braham, and D’Arcy Corrigan as the Spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come, respectively. The 1938 A Christmas Carol is a perfectly respectable adaptation of Dickens’s classic, and though it doesn’t achieve greatness it’s still an estimable movie in its own right even though it would have been even better if Lionel Barrymore had been able to play Scrooge.

Beyond Tomorrow (Academy Productions, RKO, 1940)

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

After the 1938 A Christmas Carol Turner Classic Movies showed a truly bizarre genre-bending film from RKO in 1940 called Beyond Tomorrow. It was a combination ghost story, romantic melodrama and innocent young man spoiled by success film, produced by – of all people – cinematographer Lee Garmes. This came about when the radio executives in charge of RKO hired George Schaefer to run the studio, and he decided the future of his chronically economically weak company lay in making co-production deals with independent studios and filmmakers and having them develop their own projects for RKO release. It was an idea about a decade ahead of its time – it would become how most American films got made after the dual blows of television and the U.S. vs. Paramount consent decree that forbade movie studios from owning theatre chains put an end to the studio system – and for Schaefer it had variable results. He cut a distribution deal with Sam Goldwyn that gave RKO a steady stream of mostly well produced movies that made major profits for both Goldwyn and RKO. Schaefer also signed Orson Welles and his Mercury theatre company and got two films, Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, that were artistic triumphs and commercial flops. Some of Schaefer’s deals never got anything on the screen – including his contract with documentary filmmaker Pare Lorentz, who wrote a script called Name, Age and Occupation that was never actually shot. The film opens in a large house inhabited by three relatively old men who are business partners – it’s not clear what business they’re in except it involves reinforced concrete and other building materials – who spend a lot of time gabbling and sniping at each other verbally. The three men are Michael O’Brien (Charles Winninger), Allan Chadwick (C. Aubrey Smith), and resident cynic George Melton (Harry Carey, playing his part edgily enough I couldn’t help thinking of Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur and how much Hitch had wanted Carey to play the part of the principal villain). One night they decide to test the honesty of the people passing by outside their home by grabbing a whole bunch of identical black wallets, putting a $10 bill and one of their business cards inside each, and seeing who – if anyone – actually brings the wallet back to them with the money inside instead of just keeping it for themselves.

The people actually honest enough to return the wallet are James Houston (Richard Carlson), son of a Texas rancher; and Jean Lawrence (Jean Parker), who works as a nurse at a clinic for poor children. The two young people are attracted to each other and go on a series of dates, including one in New York’s Central Park (is it really much of a surprise that the film takes place in New York?) in which James persuades a mounted police officer to get off his horse and let James ride it himself. The policeman is worried his sergeant will catch him having violated regulations by lending his horse to a civilian, but when the sergeant shows up all he says is, “Merry Christmas.” Also, a local radio station picks up on the couple as a potential human-interest news story, and James turns out to have a great Irish-tenor voice and seems headed for a career as a radio star. James and Jean become engaged and James is asking around whether it’s considered acceptable for him to have three best men at the ceremony, when all of a sudden the film takes a supernatural turn. O’Brien, Chadwick and Melton need to take a small plane to Philadelphia for some sort of business conference, despite storms so severe that their maidservant Madame Tanya (Maria Ouspenskaya) advises them to take the train instead. The plane they’re in crashes and they all die and come back as double-exposed ghosts. Meanwhile, James falls in the clutches of a femme fatale, established radio singer Arlene Terry (Helen Vinson, who regularly got cast in these sorts of “other woman” roles), who’s determined to seduce him away from Jean. To do that, Arlene gets James a job in her upcoming Broadway show and invites him to her private home at Lake Placid to “rehearse.” Only Arlene has a romantic complication of her own: she’s being stalked by her ex, Jace Taylor (James Bush), a former star who fell over alcoholism fueled by his jealousy over Arlene’s extra-relational activities. The three ghosts watch all this happening but, because they can’t be seen or heard by mortals, are powerless to steer James away from the evil woman and back to the one who really loves him. Ultimately, Jace confronts both James and Arlene in a restaurant and shoots both of them, leaving Arlene dead permanently because she has no soul and therefore is beyond supernatural redemption.

James is a different matter; a series of glowing streams of light appears to O’Brien’s ghost, as it had earlier when it signaled God was ready to end his ghost-hood and welcome him into heaven, but O’Brien had said he wasn’t ready for permanent death because he wanted to pull James away from the big mistake he was making with Arlene and steer him back to Jean. This time around O’Brien pleads with the unseen divine being to give James another chance at life, and James has a literally miraculous recovery on the hospital bed that his doctors can’t explain. In the end he and Jean get back together and our three ghosts ex machina can go ahead and die for real. Beyond Tomorrow is at least as much of a genre-bender as anything Preston Sturges ever made – romantic melodrama meets screwball comedy meets ghost story meets fantasy meets (at least in the person of Maria Ouspenskaya, who’s best known for playing Bela Lugosi’s mother in The Wolf-Man a year later) horror film – and it had a wildly assorted roster of behind-the-camera talents as well. The director was A. Edward Sutherland, who was best known for comedies but also made Murders in the Zoo (1933), one of the most brutal and graphic horror movies of Hollywood’s classic era. The writer was Adele Commandini (though here her last name is shorn of its second “m”), who’s also listed as associate producer. She was best known for her scripts for Deanna Durbin, including her first feature, Three Smart Girls (1936), and establishing the formula by which Durbin played either the daughter of a divorced couple who was trying to get her parents back together, or the daughter of a parent who’d died and she was trying to find a replacement mate for the survivor. And while Lester White got credit for the cinematography, it was pretty obvious that Lee Garmes was leaning over his shoulder giving him hints. There are some dazzling shots of people shadowed by grates, Venetian blinds and whatnot in the manner Garmes had learned from Josef von Sternberg shooting his films with Marlene Dietrich. Beyond Tomorrow is a quite remarkable film that deserves to be a lot better known than it is; it got passable reviews at the time and was not a big money-maker at the box office, but it holds up surprisingly well – and one of the big surprises was Richard Carlson’s singing voice. He might have had a voice double, but imdb.com doesn’t list one, and it’s hard to believe from this performance that he’d make his best known film 14 years later as the human hero of Creature from the Black Lagoon!

"In Performance at the White House: Spirit of the Season": A 2021 Relic from a Bygone Era

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

Last night (Monday, December 23) my husband Charles and I watched an odd but interesting rerun on KPBS: “Spirit of the Season,” the 2021 In Performance at the White House Christmas special from Joe Biden’s first year as President. I could tell it was 2021 because Dr. Jill Biden kept introducing it as “from our first year in the White House” and because the COVID-19 pandemic was still going on, as evidenced not only by Dr. Biden’s repeated references to front-line health workers but because of the black face masks being worn by some of the players in the on-site orchestra (the string and percussion players, who could be masked because they didn’t have to blow air through their instruments to get them to sound like wind and brass players do). It was an intriguingly planned show in that each performance took place in a different room of the White House, and it was nice to see Christmas trees in the various rooms and note they were all green and cheerfully decorated. (Jill Biden didn’t go in for Melania Trump’s famous horror-movie look of having a row of blood-red trees lining a hallway.) The show opened with the U.S. Marine Band played an instrumental version of the Mel-Tormé-Bob Wells “The Christmas Song” over which Joe and Jill Biden talked to introduce the program. Charles said he thought he recognized one of the Marine Band trumpet players as someone he follows on X nè Twitter and the ex-boyfriend of one of the Helix porn models.

After the show moved inside the White House the first performer was Camila Cabello doing a quite appealing version of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” backed by a mariachi band. Then came one of the most stunning performances of the night: the a cappella vocal group Pentatonix doing a quite haunting version of “Amazing Grace,” with some variants in the lyrics and none of the awful vocal imitations of a drum machine that have wrecked previous Pentatonix performances. After that Billy Porter did a cover of Donny Hathaway’s “This Christmas” (though I’ve known it better from the cover by the Motown group The Temptations). Then Andrea Bocelli and his son Matteo did a joint rendition of Adolphe Adam’s “Cantique du Noël,” a.k.a. “O Holy Night,” which Matteo Bocelli sang in English and Andrea sang in the original French. I’ve never been that big an Andrea Bocelli fan, though I don’t actively hate him either; in a previous blog post I called him “comfort music, in the sense of comfort food.” I noticed that his voice seemed a bit more ragged than it did in his heyday, when he was making complete opera recordings and appearing in staged performances (and when Andrea Bocelli was asked how he could do a staged opera when he’s blind, he said, “Exactly the same way I can move around my house”). After that Eric Church tore through a country-flavored version of “Joy to the World” with a quite good heavy-set blonde woman who sang backup for him and took the lead on one chorus. I’m guessing she’s Mrs. Church – I’m assuming Church takes his wife along with him when he tours the way Chris Stapleton does – but whoever she was, she sang a chorus and brought more soul to the song than he did (and he was certainly no slouch in that department!). Then there was a montage of First Families from Herbert Hoover’s to Donald Trump’s posing in front of the White House Christmas tree while the soundtrack gave us Brenda Lee’s classic 1958 recording of “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree.”

After that the show featured an amateur vocal group of nurses called the Northwest Health Nurses’ Choir (and not all of them were women, either; there were at least two guys in the group and they were both hot!) doing Jerry Herman’s song “We Need a Little Christmas” from the musical Mame. Then Norah Jones came on with a sensitive but also a bit droopy ballad called “Christmas Calling (Jolly Jones),” and after that another group of three veterans and one active-duty servicemember called Voices of Service came on and did a really powerful song called “Choke.” Afterwards Andrea Bocelli returned, this time with another one of his kids – his pre-pubescent daughter Virginia – for a truly weird song choice: Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” Once again Andrea and his kid sang in two different languages – Virginia sang in the original English and Andrea sang an Italian translation – and Charles made no secret of how he felt about a young girl who hasn’t gone through puberty singing such a world-weary and emotionally honest adult song. Virginia’s voice was O.K. for a kid but Andrea’s sounded better than it had on “O Holy Night.” The real problem with Bocelli padre è figlia doing “Hallelujah” was the big and very overwrought string arrangement behind them, which really got in the way of the simple beauty of Cohen’s song. (Come to think of it, Cohen himself had a “thing” for string arrangements; in John Hammond’s autobiography he told of having to talk Cohen out of adding strings to his early folk records, and in 1980 Cohen hired Phil Spector to produce an album for him, Death of a Ladies’ Man.) Then it was the turn of the Jonas Brothers, all three of them, to crank out a song called “Like It’s Christmas,” and afterwards the on-site orchestra played a quiet instrumental version of “Auld Lang Syne” that celebrated the song’s moving and unkillable melody.

The announcer said this was the 57th In Performance at the White House concert to be telecast, starting with the one Jimmy Carter hosted in 1978 featuring the legendary Russian classical pianist Vladimir Horowitz. Carter had recalled that when he was serving with the U.S. Navy’s submarine command during World War II he brought along a stack of classical records, including some by Horowitz, and his fellow servicemembers ridiculed him for his taste. None of the clips shown from previous concerts featured Donald Trump as host – I’m not sure he ever hosted any performers at the White House, not even ones sympathetic to his politics, like Toby Keith and Trump’s Bible business partner, Lee Greenwood – but there were plenty from Barack Obama’s two terms, including Paul McCartney (who sang “Michelle” directly to Michelle Obama), B. B. King, Aretha Franklin and other soul greats. Already this In Performance at the White House show from just three years ago seems like a forgotten relic of a bygone history, now that Trump is returning to the White House and will no doubt bring his terrible taste in music as in everything else – though maybe he’ll host a reunion of The Village People, seeing as “Y.M.C.A.” (an ode to Gay cruising at the titular establishment) appears to be his favorite song!

Christmas Past (Paul Killiam Shows, Kino Lorber, compilation of silent-themed shorts, 1901-1925)

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

Last night (Sunday, December 22) when my husband Charles and I got home from a quite beautiful and haunting Christmas service at St. Paul’s – a performance of Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols for a boys’ choir (though the church put it on with adult and teenage women) and harp – plus an hour-long “Lessons and Carols” service (I’ve posted about this on https://musicmagg.blogspot.com/2024/12/st-pauls-cathedral-offers-lessons-and.html), I put on Turner Classic Movies for more entries in their six-day marathon of Christmas-themed films: the movie Remember the Night (the first of four films co-starring Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray – the others were Double Indemnity, which Ben Mankiewicz started introducing instead as a not-very-funny “joke,” The Moonlighter and There’s Always Tomorrow; I have an earlier moviemagg review at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2009/12/remember-night-paramount-1939.html) and a fascinating compilation of nine Christmas-themed silent shorts assembled by Paul Killiam and Kino Lorber called A Christmas Past. The shorts ranged in length from five minutes to nearly half an hour, and the production dates ranged from 1901 to 1925 – though Killiam and the Kino Lorber people did not show them in the order in which they were made, more’s the pity, since showing them in chronological order would have given audiences a fascinating glimpse in the evolution of film from its relatively crude early days to the fully accomplished silent cinema of 1925. The show at least opened with the earliest film on it, A Holiday Pageant at Home (1901), a really crude production with just one set and an immobile camera that just gave us the action from one point of view. It’s a simple story about a husband, a wife and their four children – three boys and a girl – and in the pageant two of the kids play hold-up men while the other two play their victims.

The next film up, A Winter Straw Ride (1906), was a lot more fun. It featured a group of people taking two hay wagons outfitted with sleigh-style runners. They get pelted with snowballs from some of the local kids, one of the wagons overturns (showing the real meaning of those cryptic lines from “Jingle Bells,” “We got into a drifted bank and then we got up sot”), and in the film’s most entertaining sequence some of the snow surface itself starts collapsing like a crumbling glacier. The people on the wagons decide they’ll have a lot more fun sliding down the snow than continuing on the sleigh, and Charles wondered how the women were handling the slides. I pointed out that women wore so many undergarments in those days that their asses were pretty well insulated, but Charles still wondered how they kept all those petticoats and whatnot in place. The third film in sequence was A Trap for Santa Claus (1909), one of Biograph’s one-reelers directed by the very young D. W. Griffith at the start of his career. It wasn’t that advanced technically – he was still learning – but it had a politically progressive slant to it as it told the story of Arthur (future Griffith star Henry B. Walthall) and Helen (Marion Leonard) Rogers. When Arthur loses his job and can’t find another one, he spends his time at the local saloon and tries to drown his troubles in drink (anticipating Griffith’s last film, a dated temperance melodrama called The Struggle, from 1931). The Rogers’ children (Gladys Egan and John Tansey) set up a trap for Santa Claus, who in their home has to come in through the window since they have no chimney, only the person they catch is Arthur, who was trying to break into his former home to burglarize it. Fortunately, Arthur at the end is seemingly repentant and ready to give up all thoughts of crime or suicide (when he left he wrote a note to his wife literally saying she’d be better off without him) and resume his place as the head of the household.

The fourth film in the compilation was an Edison production that, if anything, was even more politically progressive than Griffith’s film: A Christmas Accident (1912), directed by Harold M. Shaw from a script by Annie Eliot Trumbull and Bannister Merwin. It tells the story of two families, a well-off one called Gilton and a not-so-well-off one called Bilton, and the titular Christmas accident occurs when a handsome roast-beef dinner intended for Mr. Gilton (William Wadsworth) gets delivered to Mr. Bilton (Augustus Phillips) by mistake. Needless to say, the Biltons eagerly accept their bounty and devour the meal. When Mrs. Bilton (Ida Williams) tells their children that Santa Claus is too poor to be able to give them a turkey this year, she reads them The Night Before Christmas and when Mr. Gilton shows up at their door, the kids mistake him for Santa Claus. Eventually the Gilton and Bilton families become friends. After that we got another Edison one-reeler, The Adventure of the Wrong Santa Claus, twelfth and last in a series of what were supposed to be mystery thrillers featuring a detective character named Octavius (Barry O’Moore). This film features a burglar dressed as Santa Claus and two other faux Santas, including Octavian in disguise – and the scene in which the burglar “Santa” starts ripping off a family’s Christmas presents eerily anticipates How the Grinch Stole Christmas! The next film was the latest in sequence (1925) and the longest (half an hour); it was simply called Santa Claus and was essentially an offshoot of The Night Before Christmas. It was written and directed by Mr. and Mrs. Frank E. Kleinschmidt, and it boasts in its initial credits that it was filmed in Alaska. Though the interiors could have been shot anywhere, the film contains some spectacular sequences of Alaskan landscapes, and while some of them could have been cribbed from somebody or other’s documentaries, there are scenes in which Santa Claus appears against the spectacular icy backdrops of real Alaskan exteriors in ways that would have been difficult, if not impossible, to “fake” in 1925. The basic plot of this film is that the children have been waiting up all night for Santa, and when he finally shows up they ask him to explain what he does with himself the other 364 days of the year. It turns out he runs a toy workshop, monitors the children of the world with a giant telescope so he can tell who’s being naughty and who’s being nice (in one marvelous sequence he spots an obnoxious kid literally ripping off a blind man, and he crosses him off the list of children getting presents), and in his spare time hangs out with the Easter Bunny and Jack Frost.

Following that we got to see an Edison one-reeler of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1910) – which, surprisingly, was not the first but the third film adaptation of it. It was directed by J. Searle Dawley with two uncredited assistants, Charles Kent and Ashley Miller (who I’m guessing wrote the script because no writers other than Dickens are credited), and it’s an interesting adaptation in that they managed to crowd most of the high points of the story in 15 minutes. It’s also interesting that the actor who played Bob Cratchit, Charles Ogle, was also the Frankenstein monster in Edison’s one-reeler of that story – and to show the monster’s creation they made a dummy of Ogle, set it on fire, then reversed the film so the monster appeared to emerge from a burst of flame. The special effects in the 1910 A Christmas Carol are just as amazing, if not more so: Marley’s Ghost and the Three Spirits, along with the flashback visions they show Scrooge (Marc McDermott), appear as superimpositions. In 1910 there was only one way to do that: to rewind the exposed but undeveloped film in the camera and shoot the new action right over the old. It must have taken a lot of careful positioning of both actors and camera to make it come out as director Dawley intended, probably using surveyors’ instruments the way Buster Keaton famously did in his films 10 to 15 years later. The last movie on the program was an out-and-out adaptation of Clement Clarke Moore’s poem The Night Before Christmas, made in 1905 and taking most of its titles from Moore. Obviously the compilers of A Christmas Past sequenced their film the way they did to get the two Big Stories, A Christmas Carol and The Night Before Christmas, last, but this rather static and glum version of Moore’s famous poem ends the collection on a rather sour note and it’s too bad we don’t get a more exciting movie to end the collection. Still, A Christmas Past is an estimable compilation and well worth seeing at least once.