The Long, Long Trailer (MGM, 1954)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, September 20) I watched a couple of films on Turner Classic Movies, including one quite famous one I’d never seen before. It was The Long, Long Trailer, made by director Vincente Minnelli (who turns in a quite respectable job even though his presence here virtually defines “overqualified”) at MGM from a script by husband-and-wife team Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich based on a novel by Clayton Twiss, a writer of whom I’ve otherwise never heard. This was a vehicle for Lucille Ball and her real-life husband, Desi Arnaz, at a time when they were the biggest stars on television through their pioneering sitcom I Love Lucy. Lucy and Desi shot it in 1954 during their summer hiatus from the second to the third season of I Love Lucy, and according to Todd S. Purdum, who just published a book called Desi Arnaz: The Man Who Invented Television (not literally true, of course, but Arnaz was the first producer who shot a scripted TV show in the three-camera format – Ralph Edwards had done it before with his game show Truth or Consequences – and the first to do a scripted show on film, so it could be re-run and I Love Lucy is still entertaining audience members who weren’t yet alive when Lucy and Desi died), there was some trepidation among MGM’s executives about green-lighting the film. The thinking was, “Why would audiences pay to see Lucy and Desi on screen when they can see them every week on TV for free?” Ironically, one Hollywood producer who knew better was David O. Selznick, who in the mid-1930’s as an MGM executive had been involved in films featuring major radio stars like Ed Wynn and Jack Pearl. In 1954 Selznick wrote one of his famous memos, saying that a feature-film version of I Love Lucy would be a potential hit as long as it had a different plot from the ones that had already been filmed for TV. But by then he had fallen from his former heights and no longer had the clout to set up a project.

MGM didn’t exactly cast Lucy and Desi in a feature-film version of I Love Lucy, but they came as close as they could. They’re called “Taci” and “Nicky” instead of “Lucy” and “Ricky,” and instead of a small-time bandleader in a seedy Florida nightclub “Nicky” (full name: “Nicholas Carlos Collini,” which suggests writers Hackett and Goodrich intended to explain Desi’s ineradicable Cuban accent by passing him off as Italian) is a globe-trotting engineer. Also Taci and Nicky are merely engaged to each other at the beginning of the film, though their wedding is an important plot point. The Long, Long Trailer actually begins in a torrential rainstorm as Desi – oops, I mean “Nicky” – returns to the relative safety and comfort of the office of a trailer park while the trailer he and Taci bought at the start of the film is parked outside with a “For Sale” sign. Nicky recounts the events that led them there and the film becomes an extended flashback starting two months earlier. Nicky and Taci were planning their wedding and debating where they were going to live as soon as they tied the knot. Taci has seen a brochure for a trailer company and hits on the idea that they should buy a trailer so they can move it wherever Nicky is working at the moment and still have a home they can call their own. They can also save the money they’d otherwise spend on rent, hotel rooms, and dinners “out.” (Given how astronomical housing prices have become since 1954, to the point where a lot of young couples today have resigned themselves to being lifelong renters, this part of The Long, Long Trailer rings surprisingly true today.) Nicky and Taci go to a trailer sales convention and see the model they originally saw in an advertising brochure, the “Bungalette,” but Nicky decides it’s way too “-ette” for their purposes. Then they spy a huge model across the hall made by a company called New Moon, and Taci instantly falls in love with it. (My husband Charles came home about two-thirds of the way through the movie and told me his mother used to work for that company. They were not only not paying for a product placement, they understandably disliked the way their trailer was portrayed in the movie.)

The bills mount up as Nicky and Taci find they also have to buy a new car because their current one isn’t powerful enough to pull the trailer, and they have to spend even more money on having a trailer hitch welded to the new car. Nicky also needs a crash course in how to drive a car with a trailer attached, and the person teaching him warns him to think of it as a 50-foot train bearing down on him at all times. He also says that to pull a trailer you have to remember to use the trailer’s separate brakes before the car’s brakes in case you have to slow down or stop. Having to so radically re-educate himself on something he’s been doing – driving without the encumbrance of a trailer – naturally drives him nuts. Once they pull out onto the open road from California to Nicky’s next job site in Colorado, they cause a traffic jam as tens of cars get stuck behind them because they have to slow down to handle the weight of the trailer. On their first night in a trailer park, where at least they can connect to electricity and running water, they also get intimidated by the Big Brother-ish announcements that constantly crackle through the park’s P. A. system. (Marjorie Main, as a woman who welcomes Nicky and Taci to the great community of trailer dwellers, has a great role in this scene; a pity Hackett and Goodrich couldn’t have figured out a way to make her role run through the entire movie!) Taci gets so pissed off at the incessant announcements that she has the idea that they spend the next night literally on the open road, and there’s a great sequence in which Nicky tries to maneuver the car-and-trailer over a rather bumpy country road in, you guessed it, a torrential rainstorm. Eventually car and trailer stall out with the trailer listing to one side, and Taci tries to cook a meal (they have a gas stove and propane tanks to fuel it) but the eggs she tries to fry literally slide off the pan and end up in her lap or on the floor.

Their next stop is at the ancestral home of Taci’s family, where her Aunt Anastacia (Madge Blake) and Taci’s homely niece “Poor Grace” (Connie Van) end up in arms against Nicky and Taci because Nicki, trying to park the trailer at the entrance to the family’s garage, has wiped out Anastacia’s precious prize-winning rose bush and much of the rest of her garden as well. Nicky has even taken the back end of the trailer and smashed it into her gazebo, turning it into kindling. Taci makes another attempt to cook inside the trailer while it’s actually moving – and another predictable fiasco that leaves most of the food Taci was trying to prepare on the floor (she even smashes Nicky in the face with some sort of bread dough as he comes in to check out what’s going on). The climax occurs on an ultra-narrow highway leading to their final redoubt in Colorado. Nicky demands that in order to make it up the 8,000-foot elevation, the collection of boulders Taci has picked up along the way – all carefully labeled with tags on where she got them – and also the cases of home-canned raspberry preserves Taci bought along the way must be thrown away before he’ll attempt the trip. Taci ostensibly goes along with her husband’s common-sense edict but secretly hides both the rocks and the preserves. They face the predictable hazards going up the narrow mountain road, including a car coming in the other direction. When they’re at the summit Nicky pulls rank on Taci and they throw out all the boulders and preserve jars that were weighing them down on the way up. Then the film cuts to the opening framing scene, in which Nicky says he doesn’t know how they got back down off the mountain (no doubt Vincente Minnelli, Albert Hackett, and Frances Goodrich didn’t want to figure that one out either!) and Taci, who’s the legal owner of the trailer since Nicki deeded it to her earlier as an act of love, is finally willing to sell it. Only the sympathetic trailer-park manager, who along with his wife is interested in buying the trailer himself, tells Nicky that he can patch things up with his wife with just two magic words – “I’m sorry.” The film ends with Nicky and Taci apologizing to each other and repairing to the trailer, with the philosophical manager lamenting the fact that by giving Nicky that good advice he’s done himself out of the trailer he wanted.

The Long, Long Trailer was shot in the Anscocolor process, and there are scenes in the movie in which we miss the vibrancy of Technicolor (notably in the outdoor scenes shot at Yosemite; the National Park Service gets an acknowledgement in the closing credits), but on the whole it’s a charming and entertaining movie even though it does seem surprising that Desi gets more and funnier slapstick gags than Lucy does. It’s a testament to how well they worked together as a comedy team even though it does at times seem like a batch of I Love Lucy episodes spliced together to the length of a feature film. “The simple truth is that neither Lucy nor Desi ever achieved anything alone that approached the artistic achievement they enjoyed together,” Purdum wrote in his book. “Their collaboration was lightning in a bottle, a once-in-a-lifetime combination that could never be recaptured but has been preserved forever, thanks to Desi’s insistence on putting I Love Lucy on high-quality film.”

The Murderers Are Among Us (Deutsche Film [DEFA], Herzog-Filmverleth, Donau-Filmgesellschaft, 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After The Long, Long Trailer on September 20 my husband Charles and I stayed on Turner Classic Movies for a film I was particularly interested in: The Murderers Are Among Us (1946), the first film made in Germany after World War II. Eddie Muller showed it as part of his “Noir Alley” series, and it turned out to be fascinating historically as well as quite good as entertainment. The Murderers Are Among Us was written and directed by Wolfgang Staudte, who unlike most of the geniuses who worked in the German film industry during the Weimar Republic (Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder et al.) stayed in Germany and worked throughout the Nazi era. According to Muller’s introduction, Staudte originally rationalized that he was serving German art and culture by remaining in Nazi Germany and continuing to make films for it, but eventually he decided he’d just been used by the regime as one of their in-house propagandists. (During the first five years of the Nazi regime, 1933 to 1937, there was still a surprising level of freedom for German filmmakers because the biggest German studio, UFA, was owned by Alfred Hugenberg, a Right-winger but a monarchist instead of a Nazi. Then in 1938 Joseph Goebbels decided to nationalize UFA and put all German filmmaking under his personal control. This is what led Detlef Sierck to flee and ultimately settle in the U.S., where he made great films as Douglas Sirk.) Staudte apparently started writing the script for The Murderers Are Among Us while the Nazis were still in power – in secret, since he knew he could have been arrested or even executed if the Nazis had found out what he was writing. He constructed a powerful, if somewhat didactic, story about two survivors, Dr. Hans Mertens (Wilhelm Borchert) and Susanne Wallner (Hildegard Knef, who later got a contract offer from David O. Selznick, who told her to “Americanize” her last name to “Neff” and tell people she was from Austria, not Germany. “Hitler was Austrian,” she reminded Selznick as she refused).

Dr. Mertens was a retired surgeon who tells us he quit practicing medicine because after the war he could no longer stand the sight of blood or the sounds of people in pain. Later we find out that he personally participated in the summary execution of over 120 civilian men, women, and children. Susanne Wallner was just released from a concentration camp. The two fight over an apartment, which Mertens is squatting in and Susanne lived in before the war started and she and her father were arrested. Susanne insists on moving in and Mertens stays there because he has nowhere else to go, so the two end up living together. At first there’s an arm’s-length relationship between them, but ultimately they end up falling in love. Mertens is out to kill a major industrialist, Ferdinand Brückner (Arno Paulsen), because Brückner was his commanding officer during the war and gave him the order for the extermination of civilians. There’s also Susanne’s grandfather, an elderly man who makes his living fixing other people’s glasses, and a letter supposedly written by Susanne’s father and sent to his family with instructions that it only be opened after his death. One of the film’s major plot points is that it’s uncertain whether Susanne’s father is alive or dead; at one point someone gives the letter to a phony medium who claims to be able, from the psychic emanations of the letter, to tell whether its author is alive or dead and where he is in either state. Only the false medium is able to cop out when someone cries out at his séance and he says the communication was broken. There’s a powerful scene midway through the movie in which Mertens flashes back to his experiences during the war, but though we hear the sounds of combat on the soundtrack the only thing we see is Mertens’s face registering fear and revulsion. At first I wondered if Staudte had staged the scene because he couldn’t afford to create a visual scene of combat, but later in the movie he does give us a visual flashback to the mass murder Mertens committed on Brückner’s orders.

Staudte had a great deal of difficulty getting his film green-lighted because he wanted to shoot it in Berlin, which in 1946 was still being administered by an uneasy coalition between the victorious Allied powers – the U.S., Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. Part of the problem was the original ending of Staudte’s script: he wanted the film to end with Mertens actually killing Brückner and then standing trial, and the case would be submitted to the jury. The film would stop there, challenging the audience to decide whether Mertens killing Brückner was justifiable either legally or morally. But the American, British, and French authorities didn’t want that version filmed, not only because it appeared to condone vigilante justice but because Germany had not yet re-established a functioning judicial system. So Staudte went to the Soviets, who had established a film company called DEFA that took over the old UFA studios in Neubabelsberg because they happened to be located in East Berlin. Staudte shot the film for DEFA, but either the DEFA executives or their Soviet overlords demanded that he change the ending, so in the film as it stands Mertens is about to kill Brückner when Susanne discovers him and stops him. Then there’s an uncertain but powerfully shot sequence in which either Brückner is put on trial for war crimes or we’re just supposed to think that’s a possibility, and the film ends on a row of crosses meant to represent Brückner’s victims and all the innocent victims of Nazism in general. The ending is actually prefigured with a great sequence in which Mertens supposedly is taking Brückner nightclubbing (one of the most interesting parts of the film is the extent to which the pre-war German cabaret scene survived both Nazism and the loss of the war; unlike Donald Trump and his minions going after late-night TV comedians, Joseph Goebbels was savvy enough as a propagandist to realize that giving people harmless outlets to laugh was a great contributor to social stability) but really plans to kill him. Only he’s interrupted by a middle-aged woman (Elly Burgmer) who needs his professional help as a doctor to treat her sick child.

When The Murderers Are Among Us started I noticed the high-contrast chiaroscuro cinematography (by Freidl Ben-Grund and Eugen Klagemann) and felt that the film noir style had come home to the country that invented it. Film noir was largely the creation of expatriate German directors and cinematographers who realized that the conventions of German Expressionist filmmaking – dark shadows, oblique angles, high-contrast lighting and an overall use of chiaroscuro imagery to suggest menace – were an appropriate way to film the “hard–boiled” crime fiction of Black Mask writers like Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, and Cornell Woolrich. Charles said early on in the film that he couldn’t recall us watching anything so relentlessly grim – and I said I could: 1920’s German films like G. W. Pabst’s The Joyless Street and Diary of a Lost Girl, which expressed the traumas Germany had gone through the last time it had lost a world war. At times during The Murderers Are Among Us it seems as if Germany itself was going through a nationwide case of post-traumatic stress disorder, and it’s amazing to think that within a few years Germany – West Germany, anyway – would not only have become a functioning democracy (belying the widely held theory of people in the Allied countries that Germans were naturally authoritarian and would always gravitate to tyrannical rulers) but have so completely rebuilt its economy, in what the Germans called the Wirtschaftswunder (“economic miracle”), that when The Beatles went from the largely still war-ruined Liverpool to the restored Hamburg (Liverpool and Hamburg had been major bombing targets during the war because they were both major ports), they kept asking themselves, “Isn’t this the country that lost the war?” I also wondered if Wolfgang Staudte had chosen his title deliberately because Murderers Among Us had also been Fritz Lang’s working title for his 1931 masterpiece M – only his producer, Seymour Nebenzal, had made him change it because he thought it would be too much of an in-your-face challenge to the Nazis. (In 1931 the Nazis weren’t in power yet, but they were already known for organizing mobs to disrupt plays or movies they objected to ideologically.)

Despite the compromised ending – and I’m not sure whether I’d have liked the film better with Staudte’s original ending, which might have seemed too didactic and openly propagandistic (a danger the film flirts with but without going over) – The Murderers Are Among Us is a quite impressive film that deserves to be far better known. Staudte also cast it effectively; though he was sufficiently concerned about Wilhelm Borchert’s well-documented support of the Nazis when they were in power that he listed him just as “W. Borchert” and billed him eighth in the credits even though he’s the male lead, he went ahead and used him anyway. I’m guessing that Borchert used the part to express his own misgivings about his role during the Nazi years. Hildegard Knef is also a stunning on-screen presence, showing a strong face that reminded me of the young Garbo. By coincidence (or maybe not), Knef would go on to play a role created by Garbo in the 1954 Broadway musical Silk Stockings, based on Garbo’s 1939 film Ninotchka – she and Don Ameche played the roles later portrayed in the 1957 film version by Cyd Charisse and Fred Astaire.

The Secret of NIMH (Don Bluth Productions, Aurora, MGM/United Artists, 1982)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, September 19) at 9 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched an odd movie from 1982 called The Secret of NIMH, which I’d ordered as a Blu-Ray disc from Amazon.com even though it was a home-burned disc rather than a pressed one. (Charles and I realized that when, instead of shutting itself off when the movie ended, the disc started playing the film all over again.) I had ordered this because I was sent a copy of the new Intrada Records CD of Jerry Goldsmith’s soundtrack music for review in Fanfare, and in that regard the movie was a success. Goldsmith’s score was absolutely stunning, appropriately heroic and spooky when the film’s plot called for it. Unlike John Debney in his score for Luck, Goldsmith wasn’t afraid to write truly terrifying music when scenes in the film demanded it. I also loved the fact that The Secret of NIMH was an old-fashioned drawn-animation movie instead of one of those horrible computer-animated things. I don’t like the overall look of computer animation, though there have been a few films in the process, like Ratatouille and Soul, that were so cleverly written and directed they overcame my distaste for computer animation in general. And I also enjoyed the color scheme; the closing credits announced that the film was in Technicolor, and though this was made in 1982, long after the demise of the classic three-strip process, director Don Bluth and his animators achieved some of the same vibrancy. This is a rare modern-day color film that is actually colorful; instead of relying on the murky greens and browns that dominate all too many color films today (especially live-action ones), The Secret of NIMH is a feast for the eyes. It also had an unusually strong cast of voice actors, though it was pretty much the over-the-hill gang even in 1982: Hermione Baddeley, John Carradine, Derek Jacobi, Dom DeLuise, Shannen Doherty, Peter Strauss, Paul Shenar, Aldo Ray.

The film’s biggest defect was its plot, or rather its lack thereof. It was based on a 1971 children’s novel called Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O’Brien (true name: Robert Leslie Carroll Conly), and adapted into a screenplay by Bluth, John Pomeroy, Gary Goldman, and Will Finn. It’s the sort of story that because it’s a fantasy, the writers figured they could make anything happen, whether or not it made any narrative or dramatic sense. The central character is Mrs. Brisby (the writing committee changed her name so she wouldn’t be confused with the Frisbee toy, whose makers, Wham-O, actually threatened to sue if the name “Frisby” was used), voiced by Elizabeth Hartman in her last film. She was a stunning young actress who made her screen debut with Sidney Poitier in the 1965 film A Patch of Blue, in which she played a blind girl who falls in love with Poitier’s character without knowing he’s Black – though, to her credit, she stays in love with him even after her racist mother (Shelley Winters) “outs” him. Alas, Hartman’s life was marked by severe depression – which seems to have worked her way into her career as well; among her stage roles were the clinically depressed Laura Wingfield in Tennessee Williams’s play The Glass Menagerie, and she named the famously introverted Emily Dickinson as her favorite writer. In 1987, five years after making The Secret of NIMH, she committed suicide by throwing herself out of the fifth-floor window of her apartment. Unlike the real-life actress playing her, Mrs. Brisby is indomitable, driven to do whatever she needs in order to protect the four children she had with her late husband. Oh, did I tell you she’s also a field mouse living on a farm belonging to a guy named Fitzgibbons (Tom Hatten)?

One of her kids, Timmy, has developed a fever and so Mrs. Brisby goes to see another mouse, Mr. Ages (Arthur Malet), to get a diagnosis and treatment. Mr. Ages gives her an envelope containing a medicine and instructs her to dose Timmy with it every day for three weeks. He also tells her that she must keep Timmy absolutely immobile for the three-week course of the treatment, which is a problem because “Moving Day” is fast approaching. Mrs. Brisby and her children live in a small concrete enclosure in the middle of a farm, and the farmer is about to do his spring planting and that process will destroy their home and force Mrs. Brisby and her kids to relocate. Fortunately, Mrs. Brisby’s Auntie Shrew (Hermione Baddeley) is able to give her a temporary reprieve by sabotaging Farmer Fitzgibbons’s tractor. Along the way back home Mrs. Brisby meets Jeremy (Dom DeLuise), a crow who’s trying to build himself a nest out of variously colored strings to serve as a love nest for himself and whatever girl crow he meets along the way. On the way home Jeremy saves Mrs. Brisby from a gigantic but not particularly active cat named Dragon and rescues the crucial envelope containing Timmy’s medicine. Jeremy also urges Mrs. Brisby to get advice on her housing situation from The Great Owl (John Carradine). Mrs. Brisby protests on the ground that owls eat mice, but she goes anyway and the owl in turn tells her to visit a colony of rats living on the Fitzgibbons farm. The rat colony is led by Nicodemus (Derek Jacobi), whom we saw in a prologue dictating a memoir. It turns out the rats were part of a secret experiment conducted by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in which they were genetically modified to become smarter and live longer, only they escaped and NIMH is sending out goon squads either to recapture or kill them. (Casting NIMH agents as the principal villains seems all too timely these days, when President Trump and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. are systematically destroying America’s entire public health infrastructure.)

One problem with the rats is that the genetic modifications make them dependent on modern technology for their own survival – which explains the marvelous scene in which they’re running a bootleg power cord to the Fitzgibbons home to steal power for their colony, much the way a lot of Third World people who can’t afford electricity themselves steal it from those better off. Eventually Mrs. Brisby and the NIMH rats conceive of the idea of levitating her house off its foundation, for which they first have to drug the cat Dragon so it won’t interfere. Jenner (Paul Shenar), a NIMH rat villain, sabotages the process and the house falls and kills Nicodemus. Justin (Peter Strauss), the friendly captain of the rats’ guard, and Sullivan (Aldo Ray), who was Jenner’s accomplice until he saw what he was doing was wrong and switched sides, take out Jenner. Just then the entire ground under the Fitzgibbons’ home starts sinking and turning into mud, but Mrs. Brisby is able to save the day with the help of a magic amulet that automatically activates itself whenever its wearer shows courage. Ultimately the house is saved, Mrs. Brisby nurses her son Timmy to health, and Jeremy the clumsy crow finally finds a girlfriend of his own species. The Secret of NIMH’s plot is so preposterously complicated and filled with unbelievable incidents I literally had a hard time staying awake for it, despite the sheer physical beauty of the animation and the power of Jerry Goldsmith’s music. The score contains a song, “Flying Dreams,” composed by Goldsmith to lyrics by 1970’s singer-songwriter Paul Williams, which is heard twice: sung by Mrs. Brisby (voiced by Sally Stevens because Elizabeth Hartman couldn’t sing) as a lullaby to her sick child Timmy and again during the closing credits by Williams himself. I had been under the impression that The Secret of NIMH was a financial flop, but according to the film’s Wikipedia page it made $15 million on a $7 million investment and did well enough at the box office that they were able to make a sequel, The Secret of NIMH 2: Timmy to the Rescue, though that was produced in-house by the animation division of MGM/United Artists without Don Bluth’s involvement and with only two of the original voice actors (Dom DeLuise and Arthur Malet) repeating their roles. It flopped.

Inside the Mafia (Premium Pictures, United Artists, 1959)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, September 18) my husband Charles came home from work about a half-hour earlier than usual given his 1 to 10 p.m. work shift and demanded that we watch a movie instead of staying on the MS-NBC news channel. The only one I could find on YouTube that was short enough we could watch it and still catch Stephen Colbert’s show later on was Inside the Mafia, a 1959 “ripped from the headlines” drama done in semi-documentary fashion by our old friend, producer Robert E. “Baseball” Kent (I’ve nicknamed him that because of the anecdote that as a writer he was able to chatter away about the ballgame he’d been to the night before while simultaneously writing the latest pile of clichés that constituted his new script), directed by Edward L. Cahn from a script by Orville H. Hampton. The real-life event this film was based on was a 1957 conference of America’s organized crime leaders in a remote village called Apalachin, New York (called “Apple Lake” in the movie). Officers of the New York State Police noticed all those middle-aged men in black suits converging on this tiny town and wondered why, and in their investigation they stumbled on a major meeting of America’s crime bosses and busted it. From that screenwriter Hampton developed a story about a bitter rivalry for control of America’s crime syndicate between Augie Martello (Ted de Corsia) and his lieutenant, Tony Ledo (Cameron Mitchell, top-billed), on one side and Dan Regent (Edward Platt, unusually cast in an unsympathetic role; we know him as the understanding social worker in Rebel Without a Cause and the chief of CONTROL in the James Bond TV spoof Get Smart!) and his men on the other. The two factions converge on a tiny general-aviation airport in Apple Lake and take hostage the family who run it: Rod Balcom (Louis Jean Heydt) and his daughters Anne (Elaine Edwards) and Sandy (Carol Nugent). Both the women have boyfriends: Anne’s is New York State Police Captain Doug Blair (Jim Brown) and Sandy’s is a clueless young blond who stumbles into the action when he shows up with the airport’s station wagon, which he had borrowed so he could fix it.

Narrated in the usual sententious voice-of-God tones by William Woodson, Inside the Mafia is basically a surprisingly dull drama set mostly inside Rod Balcom’s living room (with occasional cutaways to the airport’s control room, which seems to be located above the living space). The gangsters are waiting for the arrival of the overall head of the syndicate, “Johnny Lucero” (Grant Richards) – think Lucky Luciano – who fled to Naples when he was wanted for too many things in the U.S. but is willing to risk a return for one day only because the syndicate’s meeting is too important to miss. Tony Ledo plots to assassinate Lucero as soon as he gets off the plane, only his plans change when Augie Martello finally dies in a secret nursing home of the bullet wounds he sustained in the opening scene. Now he wants Lucero alive so he can be appointed to take over Augie’s wing of the Mafia now that Augie is dead. Having Lucero’s exile be in Naples instead of Sicily (where the real Luciano hid out during his exile) was a major mistake on Orville Hampton’s part; the Neapolitan gangsters called themselves the Camorra, after the bandit bands that beset central Italy during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The term Mafia – originally an Italian acronym for “Anti-French Society,” since it began as a resistance movement against Napoleon’s occupation of Italy in the early 1800’s and turned to crime once Napoleon was defeated – was Sicilian, and the later phrase “La Cosa Nostra” (“This Thing of Ours”) was concocted so members of the Neapolitan Camorra and the Sicilian Mafia could work together instead of fighting each other. Another mistake was having Lucero fly across the Atlantic in a small private plane that didn’t look big enough to get him that far.

After a brief attempt to take on one of the gangsters that gets foiled easily, Rod Balcom (ya remember Rod Balcom?) and Captain Blair (ya remember Captain Blair?) manage to sneak into the air control tower and send a message in Morse code that alerts the state police to what’s going on in Apple Lake, though by the time the cops arrive most of the gangsters have killed each other in a bloodbath and the police show up to arrest the survivors. Charles questioned the ending, noting that even if the police hadn’t arrived there wouldn’t have been enough Mafiosi to continue the syndicate as a going concern now that so many of them had killed each other. Another oddity about this movie is the plethora of non-Italian names among the gangsters; one of the major plot points of the script Martin Scorsese and Nicholas Pileggi worked into their script for Scorsese’s GoodFellas (1990) was that only full-blooded Sicilians or Italians could become Mafia members. The plot of GoodFellas was largely driven by gangster Henry Hill’s (Ray Liotta) frustration that because he had an Irish father he could never become a “made man”; his mom was Sicilian, but half-breeds didn’t count. Inside the Mafia has some well-done moments of genuine terror as the Balcoms and their significant others realize that once the gangsters are done with their business, they’ll slaughter them all because they won’t want to leave behind any witnesses. Other than that, though, it’s a mediocre movie, one of a chain of gangster films produced by Robert E. Kent and directed by Edward L. Cahn, and lacking the sick thrills of The Music Box Kid (1960), a 1920’s-set period piece they came up with that featured a truly great performance by Ron Foster as the psychotic hit man who nicknamed his Thompson submachine gun his “music box.” Inside the Mafia is a mixed movie, too good to be entirely dismissable but nowhere near classic status, though at the very least it’s an interesting benchmark in the history of the depiction of organized crime in film and one of the first films that actually used the “M”-word to describe it. Still, Charles was struck by the fact that the script made much of the fact that the climax takes place on September 18 – the very date on which we were watching it!

Interference (Paramount, 1928)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, September 17) my husband Charles returned home from work relatively early, at 9:30 p.m., and I took advantage of that fact to run us an old movie I’d stumbled across on one of my YouTube feeds: Interference, a 1928 film that was Paramount’s first all-talkie. Interference began life as a 1927 play on London’s West End, written by Roland Pertwee and Harold Dearden. Paramount bought the rights and filmed it as a silent movie in 1928 directed by Lothar Mendes, with Julian Johnson writing the intertitles and Henry W. Gerrard as cinematographer. They recruited an all-star cast featuring Evelyn Brent as Deborah Kane; Clive Brook as Dr. John Marlay, London’s leading heart specialist; William Powell as Philip Voane, mistakenly reported as dead in combat in World War I but in fact alive and living under the name “Julian Ackroyd”; and Doris Kenyon (by far the weakest among the four principals) as Faith Marlay, the doctor’s wife. The story starts at a Remembrance Day memorial service honoring the fallen in the Great War (which was what World War I was usually called before there was a World War II) at which among the names of the honored dead read aloud as part of the ceremony is Philip Voane’s. Only Philip is actually there, essentially watching his own funeral. Before the war he dated Dorothy until leaving her for Faith and marrying her. With her husband officially declared dead, Faith remarried to Dr. Marlay, who’s making a good amount of money but has tied it up in investments and is therefore cash-poor. Knowing that the scandal of being in a bigamous marriage could wreck Dr. Marlay’s career, Dorothy, who stole Faith’s love letters to Philip from Philip’s apartment while he was away at war, is using them to blackmail Faith. Faith makes a payment of 500 pounds but can’t afford any more. Among Dorothy’s threats to Faith are a series of blank postcards Dorothy is mailing to the Marlays. Dorothy tells Faith that once the blackmail payments stop, she’ll start writing messages on the postcards dealing with and exposing Faith’s secret.

Meanwhile, by coincidence (or authorial fiat), Philip has noticed that he has a heart condition, and his own doctor refers him to the great Dr. John Marlay for consultation. Alas, Dr. Marlay tells Philip that he has an aneurysm and he’s not long for this world, though he can stretch out the time he has left by avoiding alcohol, sex, and other forms of exertion. It’s the sort of story that relies on a whole lot of exposition and also quite a lot of coincidence-mongering to work at all. Philip catches Faith Marlay in the doctor’s live-work space grabbing a bottle of potassium cyanide and threatening to take it herself. Philip grabs the bottle from her and gives her a few bromides about suicide not being an easy way out at all. Ultimately, Philip returns to Dorothy and offers to become her lover again, but it’s a ruse: he really means to kill her with the cyanide and fake it to look like suicide. Only Dr. Marlay, who was there on his own fruitless attempt to get his wife’s incriminating letters back, goes through with the frame, apparently on his own initiative, but he makes a mistake. He puts the bottle of cyanide in Dorothy’s right hand, whereas everyone who knew Dorothy knew she was so strongly left-handed her right had was virtually useless. The police hear that from one of Dorothy’s friends (for someone who needed 500 pounds in blackmail money she sure seemed to have a lot of money to throw around, including paying a manservant and a maid; the only scenes that reveals Interference’s origins as a silent film are two shots of the manservant bounding up Dorothy’s apartment stairs unnaturally fast, courtesy of the fact that silent cameras shot at a lower frame rate than sound ones). Just then a reporter comes to her apartment to interview her, which in itself casts doubt on the idea that she committed suicide. The cops naturally conclude that either Dr. Marlay, his wife, or both killed Dorothy and faked it to look like she killed herself, but a deus ex machina shows up in the form of Philip Voaze, who shows up at the Marlays’ apartment and confesses to the cops that he killed Dorothy and, since he’s under a medical death sentence anyway, he’s convinced he won’t live long enough to stand trial.

Interference is actually a quite good story idea, though it’s burdened by the usual crudities of early talkies. First of all, Interference was originally shot using the Vitaphone sound-on-disc system, and as usual, when the studio transferred the soundtrack to sound-on-film, rather than center or letterbox the image they just sliced off the left-hand ninth of the screen to make room for the film soundtrack. So compositions J. Roy Hunt, who shot the sound version, intended to be centered are annoyingly off-center. (Hunt would later settle at RKO and shoot, among other things, Val Lewton’s and Jacques Tourneur’s anti-racist masterpiece, I Walked with a Zombie.) Second, the acting is generally pretty stiff, with that annoying early-talkie habit of the actors patiently waiting between the end of their cue line and their delivery of their own – though we’ve seen other early sound films that were considerably worse than this one in that regard (can you say Behind That Curtain?). The director was Roy J. Pomeroy, who’d begun at Paramount’s special-effects department (back when they were still dismissively called “trick shots”) where he worked on Cecil B. DeMille’s silent The Ten Commandments (1923) and figured out a way to have Moses’s sister Miriam (Estelle Taylor, later Mrs. Jack Dempsey) develop leprosy lesions on screen in full view of the audience. The technique involved using special makeups and colored filters on the lights, so the makeup would be invisible under one light color and become visible under another. Later director Rouben Mamoulian would use the same technique to show Fredric March as Dr. Henry Jekyll transform on-screen into Edward Hyde in his 1932 film of Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic. When sound came in Paramount needed someone who could learn the new technology and teach it to everybody else on the lot, and Pomeroy volunteered. He rose so quickly through the ranks that he got to direct the sound version of Interference, though William DeMille, Cecil’s older brother, was assigned to help him.

One actor who had nice things to say about Pomeroy was Clive Brook, who recalled that when he shot his first scene with sound (all the principal actors from the silent version got to repeat their roles in the sound one), he spoke his lines at full volume because as a veteran stage actor he was trained to “project.” When he saw his first rushes, he couldn’t believe that the sounds he was hearing were his own voice. He asked Pomeroy for advice, and the director told him, “Try it again, and this time speak as you would in a small room in your home.” In an interview Brook gave shortly after Interference was released, he marveled at how much better he sounded: although his voice “was not loud, it seemed to fill every corner of the huge room. I had learned my first lesson in microphone acting.” Oddly, despite Brook’s comments (and the scenes in which he’s trying to deduce who’s sending the mysterious blank postcards and correctly guesses it’s a woman, which anticipate the three movies Brook would make as Sherlock Holmes in the next four years), it’s William Powell and Evelyn Brent who come off most naturalistically among the cast members. Modern audiences would probably wonder why Powell was billed third (after Brent and Brook, in that order), when he clearly has more screen time than Brook does and he’s playing a much more interesting and multifaceted character. He even gets a great drunk scene that comes closer than anything else in this movie to anticipating the great William Powell roles to come, including The Thin Man and its sequelae as well as his marvelous turn as the alcoholic reporter in Libeled Lady. (When Charles and I watched the 1946 film Ziegfeld Follies, in which Powell repeated his role as Florenz Ziegfeld in heaven and postured what it would be like to do one more big Ziegfeld Follies show with MGM’s talent list, I joked, “Now it looks like a William Powell movie; the first thing we see him do is take a drink.”) Interference is a movie that’s actually quite good despite the limits of early talkies as well as the overall staginess (Charles correctly guessed it was based on a stage play before I told him), and it’s at least a bit surprising that Paramount never remade it. It had all the elements to be reworked into a quite credible film noir: a distressed serviceman returning from a major war and facing an identity crisis, a femme fatale, and a socially well-positioned couple with a dark secret hanging over them that threatens to destroy their lives.

A Husband to Die For: The Lisa Aguilar Story (1Department Entertainment Services, Lighthouse Pictures, Wishing Floor Films, Lifetime, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, September 14) I wanted to watch a couple of Lifetime movies. My husband Charles decided not to join me for them, and quite frankly he didn’t miss much since both were in the mediocre-to-terrible department. The first one was called A Husband to Die For: The Lisa Aguilar Story, based on a true case from 1994 about Lisa Aguilar West (Keana Lyn Bastidas) and her scapegrace husband, golf pro Darren West (Jon McLaren). As the film opens she’s just learned that she’s pregnant with his first child, a boy (they test in advance via ultrasound) they decide to name Darren, Jr. Alas, Darren, Sr. also starts an extramarital affair with Michelle Morris (Cassandra Potenza), who works the snack bar at one of the golf clubs where he plays. By the time Lisa’s pregnancy is into its fifth month, Michelle suddenly discovers (writer Walter Klenhard wasn’t too clear how) that her new boyfriend is married to someone else. Naturally she’s put out by this, but he pleads with her to wait for him to divorce his legal spouse so they can get married. We’re already starting to hate Darren for screwing another woman while his wife is pregnant (sort of like Donald Trump with Stormy Daniels), and when Lisa is just two weeks away from her due date (which her doctors miscalculated so the baby is actually arriving two weeks ahead of schedule), Darren decides to dump Lisa permanently. He orders a gorilla mask from a costume shop and, as Lisa is coming home from a grocery run, attacks her with a knife and leaves her for dead. Fortunately, Lisa comes to after Darren leaves and punches 911 on her landline (the fact that her phone is a landline dates this movie, as does the pay phone on which Darren calls Michelle and tries to make a date with her while his wife is still in intensive care – quite rightly, she turns him down). She’s rescued and brought back to a semblance of life, though Darren’s attempts to cut her throat three times have left two permanent scars.

At first Lisa is utterly convinced that Darren is innocent and someone else was her attacker, but the cops gradually wear her down and make the case against him. She moves in with her parents, John (Jorge Molina, probably no relation to Alfred even though the two look similar) and Julie (Katie Griffin), along with Lisa’s grandmother (Marilu Henner, giving an air of gravitas to the proceedings until her sudden incapacitation midway through adds just one more stressor to Lisa’s already overburdened life), in San Diego. (The whole story takes place in California, and one of the giveaways to Lisa that her husband is seeing another woman is a lot of calls on his phone bill to Redding.) Ultimately she testifies against him at his trial, but before his attorney can cross-examine her she gets word that she won’t have to testify again because he and his attorney have decided to cop a plea and admit guilt in exchange for a lighter sentence: life imprisonment with the possibility of parole. The prosecutor, Angela Backers (Cynthia Preston), persuades the reluctant Lisa – who earlier actually contemplated suicide by driving her car off a cliff, only luckily for her the car lost traction and wouldn’t move when she put it in gear – to attend Darren’s first parole hearing and give a victim’s impact statement. During that, she takes off the scarf she usually wears and shows off the scars on her neck left there by Darren’s assault. A few where-are-they-now credits at the end explain what happened after that: Darren’s parole was rejected and he served 22 years in prison, and Lisa remarried and had two more kids by her new husband. She also changed Darren, Jr.’s first name to Connor, for understandable reasons.

A Husband to Die For was a major disappointment for a number of reasons, not least because Lifetime’s true-crime stories usually put Lifetime’s writers and directors (there were two directors credited, Colleen Rush and David Weaver) on their best behavior, but this was an exception. Also Lifetime usually casts genuinely hot and sexy men as their villains, but not this time: Jon McLaren is so wimpy, the kind of man who looks like they baked him out of Wonder Bread, one wonders what Lisa ever saw in him in the first place. It’s also not clear why Darren didn’t decide to divorce Lisa rather than trying to kill her; yes, it would have looked bad for him to dump a woman who was about to make him a father, but obviously attempted murder looked even worse. A Husband to Die For was a surprisingly blah telling of a story that had a lot more potential for genuine suspense and thrills.

Murder at the Hotel (Petre NL, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Lifetime’s next movie, Murder at the Hotel, which doesn’t have an imdb.com page yet – I’ve gleaned what information I could from taking notes during the credits and bits and pieces from other online sites – was, if anything, even worse than A Husband to Die For: The Lisa Aguilar Story, shown just before it on September 14. It opens at an airport heaven knows where – my guess was New York City but it might have been Denver, a major “hub” in American air travel’s hub-and-spokes system of routing – in which the planes are all grounded by a massive snowstorm. (We get a few shots of the planes and runways buried in snow.) A middle-aged man named Evan insists that he must be in San Francisco the next morning for an all-important meeting that could literally be a life-or-death matter for him. He chews out Jen, the airline’s ticket clerk, only to be put in his place by the lead character, district attorney Megan Maris (Samora Smallwood). Megan tells Evan to stop harassing Jen over weather issues that are way beyond her control. Megan is traveling back to San Francisco with her husband Jeff and their daughter Lisa, and Megan is clearly African-American while Jeff is white and Lisa is mixed-race and strongly resembles her mom. (Kudos to casting director Anna Weller for finding a young woman who resembles Samora Smallwood enough she’s believable as her daughter.) This reminded me of my rather grim comments during the Biden administration that the two most powerful and influential Black women in the U.S., then-Vice President Kamala Harris and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, were both married to white men. I wondered what message that sent to Black men that they had no hope of meeting and marrying powerful and influential Black women. Eventually the airport and airline give up on attempting any departures that night and offer to put up all the stranded passengers at the Montpelier Hotel and get buses to take them there.

Among the people there are Brad (Matt Wills), Megan’s ex from her college days, who makes it clear pretty early on that he’d like to delete that “ex” from his status in her life; and Nicole Wallen, a tall, statuesque blonde woman who seems to be cruising Megan’s husband Jeff. Jen, the woman ticket agent at the airport, is having an affair with Rick Walk, head of security at the Montpelier Hotel, though she doesn’t want anybody to know about that. (Why not? Unless either or both of them are married to other people, there’d be no reason to conceal their affair. Also Rick is white and Jen is Black, but in a movie like this where the heroine is Black but both the men in her life are white, that’s no big deal either.) There’s also Landon, a quite boyishly handsome young man (he reminded me of Tim Wayne, an old friend and fellow Gay activist my husband Charles and I knew in the mid-1990’s when we’d just started dating) of whom we get some choice topless glimpses when he and Lisa sneak into the hotel’s hot tub. We see a security guard for the hotel electrocuted with a stun gun and pushed into the hotel pool by an unseen assailant, so we know there’s going to be – pardon the pun – murder at the hotel. Nicole asks Jeff to walk her to her room in the hotel, and shortly thereafter Megan goes to the room she and Jeff are supposed to be sharing. Jeff isn’t there, and neither is Lisa, who has a room of her own. Megan makes ever more frantic attempts to reach both of them. Megan’s search for her husband and daughter leads her to a storage closet, where she finds the body of her ex Brad knifed to death.

She’s fled there not only to find her family but also because Evan, her nemesis from the airport, has mobilized the hotel staff to make a citizen’s arrest of her for murdering Brad. Alas, Megan is locked in the storage room by her unknown assailant, and has to flee by sliding down a chute into the laundry room. Landon dropped a key clue when he was with Lisa in the hot tub; he told her he had a sister (he doesn’t say whether she was older or younger) who died. Megan doesn’t know that, of course, but we do. We’ve also seen brief cut-ins of exactly where Jeff and Lisa are; they’re tied up in room 429 of the hotel and are clearly being held hostage. The culprit turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Nicole Wallen, who was the wife of a particularly notorious financial scam artist and pedophile (think Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein as the same person) whom Megan successfully prosecuted. (Obviously in Lifetime movies, unlike in real life, scumbags like that actually face the consequences of their actions.) Nicole’s scheme was to force Megan to record a video admitting that the witnesses against her husband were all lying and Megan had suborned perjury to do it. But Landon, Nicole’s son, didn’t think his mom’s scheme went far enough. He decided to knock off Brad and frame Megan for the crime, so she’d be exposed not only as an unethical prosecutor but a murderess. During the inevitable final confrontation in room 429, Jeff manages to work himself free from his bonds and attack Landon, and ultimately both bad guys are subdued and the cops – the real cops – arrest them. As partial payment for their ordeal, Jen upgrades Megan’s, Jeff’s, and Lisa’s tickets for the return flight to San Francisco (once the weather is clear enough they can leave at last), and Evan the asshole businessman has to wait and stew as they’re let on the plane before he is. Also Megan has arranged for Evan to be seated next to an overweight mother and her two bratty kids as her revenge against him.

Murder at the Hotel is pretty thin gruel, and it doesn’t help that though Jeff is considerably more grounded than Brad as a character, we’re given so many crotch shots of Brad flashing a really nice basket that we get the impression that, at least physically, Megan traded down. Murder at the Hotel was from the atelier of the Johnson Production Group (Timothy O. Johnson was one of the plethora of producers listed), and it was made by two old Johnson hands: Alexander Carrière (director) and Chris Sivertson (writer). Carrière manages to get a few nicely Gothic shots even within the unpromising confines of a modern hotel, but Sivertson’s rather silly script defeats him. My husband Charles sat out both A Husband to Die For: The Lisa Aguilar Story and Murder at the Hotel, spending his time doing work for an online course at the computer, and frankly he didn’t miss much from either movie!

Sudden Fear (Joseph Kaufman Productions, RKO, 1952)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, September 13) my husband Charles and I watched the latest entry in Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” series on Turner Classic Movies: Sudden Fear, a 1952 film which featured Joan Crawford as both executive producer (uncredited) and star. Sudden Fear was made at a key juncture in Crawford’s career because for all 27 previous years of her film career she’d had the protection of a long-term contract with a major studio: MGM from 1925 to 1942 and Warner Bros. from 1942 to 1952. When Warners fired her after the box-office failures of gone-to-the-well-too-often movies like The Damned Don’t Cry (1950) and This Woman Is Dangerous (1952), Crawford was well and truly on her own for the first time in her career. She responded by buying the rights to a story by Edna Sherry called “Sudden Fear” about a wealthy woman who realizes that her new husband is actually a money-hungry psychopath who plans to murder her for her money. Though there was a nominal producer, Joseph Kaufman, Crawford was in complete control: she hired the director, David Miller; the writers, Lenore Coffee (who’d started her film career in 1919 as writer for Clara Kimball Young) and Robert Smith; the cinematographer, Charles Lang; and the composer, Elmer Bernstein. It was his third film credit; previously he’d composed for two movies about teenage athletes, Saturday’s Hero and Boots Malone, and later he’d gone on to write for dreck like Robot Monster and Cat-Women of the Moon before making it to the “A”-list full-time with his big, expansive Academy Award-winning score for Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956). (I’m a bit embarrassed because I’d previously cited Cat-Women as Bernstein’s first film credit.) Crawford also picked most of the supporting cast, including the male lead (Jack Palance) and second female lead (Gloria Grahame).

Crawford cast herself as Myra Hudson, sensationally successful playwright who doesn’t need to work since her late father was fabulously rich (he got his money from oil). The opening scene takes place at a New York theatre where her latest play is in rehearsal. Lester Blaine (Jack Palance) auditions for the leading male role and thinks he has it, until Myra vetoes him and says she doesn’t consider him sexy enough for the part. Myra then takes a cross-country train to her home in San Francisco, but Lester buys a ticket on the same train and “accidentally” runs into her. The two have a fun time in Chicago (though none of it is actually shown) and Lester buys an extra ticket so he can stay on the train until it gets to San Francisco. By the time the trip is over she’s madly in love with him. The two spend a lot of time together until one night, when Myra is throwing a party to show off Lester to her old friends, Lester blows her off and she goes to his old apartment and corrals him to attend her party. While there Lester runs into an ex-girlfriend of his named Irene Neves (a marvelously hard-bitten performance by Gloria Grahame, who apparently was as amoral in real life as she was in her movies: one night director Nicholas Ray, who was then married to Grahame, caught her in flagrante delicto with Tony Ray, his son by his previous wife; and years later, long after she’d divorced Nick, she married Tony). The two plot to kill Myra, who meanwhile has married Lester, so Lester can inherit her fortune and he and Irene can live out their lives together. Part of their plot is that they have to make her death look like an accident so they won’t be suspected of knocking her off. Conveniently, one of the homes Myra inherited from her father is a beach house up a long flight of stairs from the beach, and the stairs don’t have rails or any other sort of protection.

Myra stumbles onto their plot in an intriguing way. She has her writing room wired with a dictation machine called a “SoundScriber” and has five microphones for it so she can walk anywhere in the room and her dictation will be captured by one of the mikes and end up on a record. One night Lester and Irene just happen to go into her study after Myra has inadvertently left the machine on, and when her maid alerts her to this the next morning, Myra plays back the disc and hears Lester and Irene calmly plotting her death. She takes the record off the machine, intending to hide it amidst her book collection, but she slips and drops the record, breaking it. So she’s in the quandary of knowing her husband and his lover plan to kill her but not having any evidence of that. To pump him for information about Myra’s plans, Irene starts dating Junior Kearney (Mike Connors, then still using the name “Touch Conners”), son of Myra’s attorney, Steve Kearney (Bruce Bennett, reuniting with Crawford from the cast of her 1945 comeback, Mildred Pierce), though when he tries to have sex with her she puts him off with the old “Not tonight, I have a headache” excuse. Irene learns that the next Monday, just two days later, Myra plans to sign documents transferring all the money her father left her to a foundation for heart disease (which is how the old man died). Also, Steve Kearney has drafted a will for her that gives the royalties from her plays to him, but only until he remarries after her death. Myra had actually asked Steve to redraft that clause so the royalties would go to Lester in perpetuity, but Lester and Irene don’t know that and that was part of the record that Myra accidentally broke when she heard them plotting against her on it. So Lester and Irene have to kill Myra that weekend before the transfer goes through. There’s a great dream sequence, which for some reason was cut from some prints of the film but blessedly restored by the Cohen Media Group, current owners of the rights, in which Myra dreams of various ways Lester could kill her, including pushing her out of the window of a tall building and him strangling her.

Sudden Fear ends with a nearly half-hour long stalking sequence, taking place at night through the San Francisco streets and looking very much like Crawford, David Miller and those involved had learned from the great nocturnal climaxes of Val Lewton’s horror films. Myra realizes that Lester means to kill her that very evening, and so she walks down the mean streets of San Francisco and barely misses Lester, who’s driving a Buick Roadmaster (the same car she was driving when they started dating). Lester is with Irene, and she takes the wheel for part of their homicidal smack-down, only after 20 minutes of great escape-and-pursuit filmmaking (at one point Myra knocks on someone’s door and the someone just thinks she’s a nut and won’t let her in, lending a Kafka-esque aspect to her predicament and providing the only bit of dialogue in this otherwise wordless sequence) Lester and Irene conveniently lose control of their car. Both are killed, and Myra is liberated from the danger they posed her but also probably ends up with PTSD big-time. Sudden Fear was a first-rate entrée for Crawford to the world of independent filmmaking – RKO distributed it and it went out under their logo, but they had nothing to do with the actual production – and though the rest of Crawford’s career would have both highs (Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?) and lows (Trog), it was a good start and also a huge hit at the box office. It also changed Jack Palance’s typecasting; though he was still portraying a villain, it showed he could play a debonair character with a certain degree of charm. And I liked the uncertainty writers Coffee and Smith carefully cultivated as to whether Lester was ever really in love with Myra and just got sidetracked by Irene’s appearance into a plot to kill her for her money, whether that was his intent all along, or whether he just intended to live off her money as a kept husband and it was Irene’s sudden reappearance in his life that led him off into a murderous direction.

Over-Exposed (Columbia,. 1956)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, September 12) my husband Charles and I watched an intriguing movie from Columbia in 1956: Over-Exposed (that’s how the official credits spell the title), directed by Lewis Seiler from a committee-written script: Richard Sale and Mary Loos (then husband and wife, and a writing team Raymond Chandler had some kind words about), “original” story; and James Gunn and Gil Orlovitz, screenplay. The film opens in a police station where a sleazy bar has just been raided by the police. Our heroine, Lily Krenshka (Cleo Moore), had just started work there the night before and had had no idea it was a clip joint. She’s ordered by an officious cop to leave town, but she’s taken in by Max West (Raymond Greenleaf), a once prestigious photographer who burned out his career with alcohol. Max offers her a job as a swimsuit model after reassuring her he’s not interested in her That Way, and eventually he teaches her the basics of photography, including the ins and outs of portrait lighting as well as retouching and colorization (it was actually fairly common in those days for professional photographers to hand-paint their pictures with watercolors to give the illusion of color) to make the middle-aged dowagers he’s hired to photograph look convincingly younger. When she’s learned enough about photography to be capable of a career at it, she moves to New York City, changes her name to “Lila Crane” at West’s suggestion (by coincidence “Lila Crane” is also the name of Vera Miles’s character in the original 1960 Psycho), and tries for a job at the Allied Press Service. As she’s coming out of their offices she literally bumps into one of their star reporters, Russell Bassett (a young Richard Crenna). As he helps pick up the photos from her portfolio he tells her to find a big news story somewhere and photograph it.

The big news story duly arrives in the form of an enormous fire (obviously filled in from stock footage of a real one) at which Lila takes spectacular photos even at the risk of her own life. Russell rescues her just in time from a falling wall in the burning building. Instead of taking a low-paying job at Allied, Lila gets hired by Les Bauer (a young and uncredited Jack Albertson) to photograph the guests at his club. She’s also accosted by an unscrupulous gossip columnist, Roy Carver (James O’Rear), to sell him copies of any pictures she takes that catch celebrities or prominent people in compromising positions. He offers her $5 for any such photo but she bids him up to $10. Ultimately she wangles a job at a more prestigious club, Coco’s, ostensibly owned and managed by Coco Fields (played as a Clifton Webb-style screaming queen by Donald Randolph) but really run by a gangster. (One wonders if the writers were thinking of the Stork Club, ostensibly run by Sherman Billingsley but actually owned by the Mafia.) She rises in prominence not only as a nightclub photographer but also as an advertising and fashion photographer, and even gets an interview with a prestigious TV show in which the host ostensibly calls someone on the telephone for a random interview but really the whole thing is set up well in advance. (I suspect the writers were thinking of Edward R. Murrow’s Person to Person here, or maybe Ralph Edwards’s This Is Your Life.) There’s a major mistake in that the call letters for the station broadcasting the interview are KXIW, which would indicate a West Coast or Midwest location (all East Coast stations have call letters beginning with W).

Russell Bassett continues to date her and one weekend, when they’re on vacation together in Maine, he proposes to her and asks her to join him in both a personal and professional partnership. He suggests the two of them go to Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the world’s other hot spots, with him reporting on the events there and her photographing them. She turns him down because she’s worked too hard for what she’s achieved, but fate intervenes. Mrs. Payton Grange (Isobel Elsom), an old friend and photographic client of Max West’s in the small town where all this started, shows up at Coco’s and dances a mambo with a much younger partner. Then she suddenly has a heart attack and dies in the middle of the dance floor. Lila takes a picture of it but then thinks better of it and tears up the print – only her slimeball columnist partner Roy Carver steals the negative out of her darkroom and ultimately sells the photo to a magazine called Sensational (read: the real-life Confidential, a 1950’s scandal sheet). The scandal caused by the publication of Lila’s “death photo” of Mrs. Grange causes her entire career to evaporate (something that really dates this movie: today not only would a photo like that be considered fair game, it would be all over the Internet in no time, the way the video of Right-wing activist Charlie Kirk getting shot at Utah Valley College “went viral” and appeared all over the Net with no apparent qualms from anyone involved).

She tries to salvage her career by fishing out of her discard pile a photo she accidentally took of the gangster who actually ran Coco’s, which would have blown his alibi for a killing near the club. Alas, the gangster and two of his henchmen kidnap Lila and torture her to get the information on where she’s hidden the photo. Russell crashes her studio and finds one of the gangsters there, and in the film’s most spectacular scene he throws a tray of developing fluid in the gangster’s face, at least temporarily blinding him. Then, despite the three-against-one odds, Russell goes to where Lila is being held and rescues her. Ultimately she accepts Russell’s marriage proposal even though it doesn’t entail anything more than being a housewife and ultimately mother to his kids. While Over-Exposed’s ending is the sort of sexism typical of its time – the ambitious career woman who reached for financial and emotional independence has to be taken down several pegs and publicly humiliated for defying the so-called “natural order” of male dominance – there’s one thing about this movie that holds up very well today. It’s Cleo Moore’s attitude; throughout the movie she’s understandably wary of men who offer to “help” her and turning them down pretty regularly for fear they have something else in mind other than just being “nice” to her.

Cleo Moore had a frustrating career in that it only lasted nine years – she was spotted by a talent scout at RKO and her first film was Congo Bill (1948), in which she played a minor role. She alternated between tiny parts in important films like On Dangerous Ground (1951) and leads in “B” features like this one. Her imdb.com biographer, Denny Jackson, laments, “To her legions of fans, she remains their favorite sex symbol of the 1950’s, and others languish knowing that her talent could have sent her to loftier heights instead of being wasted in minor roles in substandard ‘B’ films.” After just one more feature film and one TV appearance after Over-Exposed, she retired to marry real-estate tycoon Herbert Heftier in 1957 and stayed with him until her death in 1973 at the age of just 48. I suspect what kept her from the brass ring of stardom was Moore’s attitude: fiercely independent and unwilling to play the double game of sexuality and innocence that made Marilyn Monroe a star. In Over-Exposed she plays a character who knows exactly what the men in her life want from her – either money, sex, or both – and her fierce independence probably put off 1950’s movie audiences even though it also makes her seem “modern” today!

The Letter (Warner Bros., First National, 1940)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, September 11) I got tired of the MS-NBC coverage of the killing of Right-wing activist Charlie Kirk and put on one of my all-time favorite films on Turner Classic Movies: The Letter (1940), directed by William Wyler from a screenplay by Howard Koch based on a 1927 play by W. Somerset Maugham. The Letter had begun life as a short story Maugham published in 1926 as part of a collection called The Casuarina Tree, and in 1927 it was produced on stage in London with Gladys Cooper as the adulterous Leslie Crosbie, wife of a rubber plantation manager in Singapore, who kills her lover and then claims that she did so in self-defense when he tried to rape her. Nigel Bruce played the cuckolded husband, Robert Crosbie, and the play was later produced on Broadway, also in 1927, with Katharine Cornell as Leslie, J. W. Austin as Robert, and Allan Jeayes as Howard Joyce, an attorney and family friend of the Crosbies who agrees to represent her at trial. The Letter was first filmed as an early talkie by Paramount in 1929 with Jeanne Eagels as Leslie, Reginald Owen as Robert, and Herbert Marshall as Geoff Hammond (Leslie’s extra-relational partner until she kills him). My husband Charles watched both the Jeanne Eagels version of 1929 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-letter-paramount-1929.html) and the Bette Davis version of 1940 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-letter-warner-bros-1940.html) back to back on January 11, 2013, and I was quite impressed with the Eagels version.

The careers of Jeanne Eagels and Bette Davis track rather closely. Both got their big breaks from the veteran British actor George Arliss, Eagels in the U.S. stage premiere of Arliss’s vehicle Disraeli (1927) and Davis in the film The Man Who Played God (1932). Both of Eagels’s two sound films, The Letter and Jealousy (1929), were remade with Davis (though Davis’s version of Jealousy was retitled Deception), and Davis won her first Academy Award for the 1935 film Dangerous, directed by Alfred E. Green from a script by Laird Doyle, in which she played a character loosely based on Eagels. TCM showed the 1940 The Letter as part of a night in which they were paying tribute to William Wyler during which they also showed her earlier film with Davis, Jezebel (1938), as well as the 1939 film of Wuthering Heights, based on Emily Brontë’s novel, starring Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon. For the Davis version of The Letter Herbert Marshall got promoted to the role of her husband, and while the confrontation between Leslie and her lover was played on-screen in 1929, in 1940 we just saw a shadowy figure on the Crosbies’ veranda as Leslie plugged him with all six shots in her revolver. The 1940 The Letter was also listed in The Film Noir Encyclopedia (Davis’s only other listing was for Beyond the Forest, made in 1950 and a film Davis particularly disliked; it was her last movie as a Warner Bros. contract player and she was anxious to leave the studio and go through what she called a “professional divorce”), and it qualifies both thematically and visually. Certainly Leslie Crosbie counts as a femme fatale in the most literal sense, and the slithery atmospherics created by Wyler and his cinematographer, Tony Gaudio, have the so-called “German look” that came to define film noir.

This time around I was particularly concentrating on the quite good supporting players. Attorney Howard Joyce was played by James Stephenson, a former British stage actor who’d got his start in films in middle age, making his screen debut in a British “quota quickie” called The Perfect Crime (1937) for Warner Bros.’ British studio at Teddington. These were ultra-cheap movie made on the quick because British law specified that any company seeking to import American films into their country had to release a certain percentage of British product as well – so the studios, some of which were subsidiaries of U.S. companies and some of which were independent, made especially cheap movies to meet the quota to get the legal right to show American films in Britain. In 1938 Jack Warner saw potential in Stephenson and brought him to America to work for the parent company, and Warner gave Stephenson a careful build-up including putting him in two earlier Bette Davis movies, The Old Maid (1938) and The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939). In 1940 they gave Stephenson the plum role of Howard Joyce in The Letter, which won him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor, and also cast him in a lead as Philo Vance in Calling Philo Vance, a remake of The Kennel Murder Case (1933). Alas, in 1941 Stephenson suddenly died of a heart attack at age 48. Gale Sondergaard turns in an excellent performance as the widow of Geoff Hammond, the guy Leslie killed in the opening scene because having found true love in the half-Chinese woman he’d married, he no longer wanted anything to do with Leslie anymore. Stephenson is excellent as the attorney wracked not only by professional fear but personal guilt as he becomes part of Leslie’s scheme to buy back the incriminating letter she wrote Hammond the night of his murder imploring him to come see her at once. He’s all too aware that he’s breaking the law himself, and by suborning Leslie’s willingness to pay Mrs. Hammond for the letter he’s risking not only disbarment but prison.

Also unusually good in the supporting cast is Victor Sen Yung as Ong Chi Seng, Mrs. Hammond’s go-between in the negotiations over the letter and also her interpreter, since she speaks only Chinese and Malay. Most of the time Sen Yung was wasted in the thoroughly silly part of Charlie Chan’s Number Two Son, forced to act like a comic-relief doofus compared to Sidney Toler’s Chan (when Warner Oland died in 1938, Keye Luke, who’d played Number One Son in Oland’s Chan movies, quit the part rather than play it opposite a different actor as Chan). In The Letter he got the part of his life and he was clearly eating it up. From his appearance on the scene bearing a hand-written copy of the letter and announcing that unless Joyce buys it for Leslie he will turn it over to the prosecution and it will sink Leslie’s self-defense claim to the great scene in which Leslie actually journeys to the Chinese part of town to buy the letter and Mrs. Hammond makes clear her utter contempt for this white woman who knocked off her husband and seems like she’s going to get away with it, Sen Yung is utterly marvelous. The Letter does suffer from a Production Code-mandated ending which quite takes the edge off Leslie’s final line in the play (and in the 1929 film) in which she confesses to her husband, “With all my heart, I still love the man I killed!” In his outro, TCM host Ben Mankiewicz said that Davis and Wyler had argued about this line: Davis had wanted to speak it looking away from Herbert Marshall, but Wyler pulled rank and insisted that she say it to his face. Once Leslie and Robert have their final confrontation, Howard Joyce and his wife Dorothy (Frieda Inescort) host a big party for the Crosbies with a large dance floor and an orchestra playing the era’s pop music. Leslie gets bored and goes for a walk – and as she leaves she finds a dagger has been left at her front door. Later she’s mugged by one of Mrs. Hammond’s assistants (someone we previously saw in the background of the blackmail scenes) and Mrs. Hammond stabs her with the ceremonial dagger. Wyler and Koch appropriately played this scene without any dialogue, just Max Steiner’s superbly atmospheric music and Gaudio’s rich chiaroscuro visuals (The Letter is one of those films that makes you wonder why anybody thought the movies ever needed color), but Wyler’s virtuoso filmmaking can’t make up for the absurdity of the closing scene and its overall irrelevance. It’s just there because the movie censors had decreed that Leslie Crosbie had to be punished for her crime, and her own lingering sense of guilt and frustration weren’t punishment enough for what she’d done.

Phantoms, Inc. (MGM, 1945)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the 1940 The Letter on September 11, 2025, Turner Classic Movies followed it up with an unusually good entry in MGM’s Crime Does Not Pay series, a 1945 film called Phantoms, Inc. This was about confidence men in general and phony “spiritualists” in particular. The principal villain is Dr. Rupert Trykel (Arthur Shields, the go-to guy for blarney-filled Irishmen just then if you couldn’t get Barry Fitzgerald), who runs a fake psychic operation. His main pigeons in the part of the story we see are Philip Kenneson, Sr. (Frank Reicher) and his wife Martha (Ann Shoemaker), who are anxious about the fate of their son Philip Kenneson, Jr. (Wally Cassell – we never see him as a living character but he appears in enough still photos and flashbacks they needed an actor to play him). Philip was serving as a private in the South Pacific in World War II, and to his parents he’s just dropped off the radar screen. They don’t know if he’s alive or dead, and whether he’s in a Japanese prisoner of war camp being tortured or has met some equally sinister and unpleasant fate. So they go to Dr. Trykel, whose séances are surprisingly un-elaborate. I’ve often complained to my husband Charles that I miss the old-fashioned gimmicks phony psychics of old used to pull on their marks in the movies about them, including either actors or dummies made to look like ghosts and toy trumpets suspended by wires in mid-air representing the voices of the dead speaking from the spirit world. Charles pointed out that most of the phony psychics of today are trying to land gigs on TV, and the lighting needed for a TV show would expose such blatant fakery. Instead they rely on so-called “cold readings,” the sort of thing where the alleged psychic says things like, “I see a red dress … no, it was a blue dress,” and the mark says, “You’re right! It was a blue dress!”

Dr. Trykel and all the other people at the séance, who are all part of his gang, extensively research the life of Philip Kenneson, Jr. and find out that he was a star student and he had a girlfriend named Enid. In the pre-Internet age they do this by researching the morgues of the local newspaper and interviewing people who knew him, including his former high-school principal, ostensibly for a story they’re doing on the local boys who are off fighting the war. When the Kennesons try to give him money for his services, Dr. Trykel at first makes a show of refusing any more than $10, his customary fee for a séance, but later he says they can donate to our foundation (the payee on the check is actually “Our Foundation”!). Mr. Kenneson makes a one-time donation of $200 to “Our Foundation” and then stops giving Trykel money, but Mrs. Kenneson is hooked big-time and gives Trykel their entire life savings. We see how far they’ve gone into debt from a pile of past-due notices on bills they’ve received. Then, when the Kennesons no longer have any money he can extract from them, Trykel cuts them off completely – only Mrs. Kenneson won’t take no for an answer. At first she tries to report Trykel to the police, but the cops tell her that Trykel has been careful to stay within the bounds of the law and therefore there’s nothing they can do to help her or get her money back. Then she goes to Trykel’s live-work space with a gun and demands to see him, only in the end Trykel kills her and her husband finally reports him to the police and they arrest him. Quite well directed by Harold Young (whom I’ve previously faulted for having made potentially great movies like The Scarlet Pimpernel considerably less entertaining than they could have been, but this time he’s just fine) from an “original” story by Brainerd Duffield and a script by Edward Bock, and well photographed by Jackson Rose, Phantoms, Inc. is a well-done entry in this quite lengthy (1935 to 1947) series and blessedly avoided much of the blatant moralism that afflicted many entries and was inherent in the very title.

42nd Annual MTV Music Awards (CBS-TV, Paramount, Viacom, MTV, aired September 7, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, September 7) I watched the live telecast of the 2025 MTV Video Music Awards. They didn’t announce it as the “ … Annual” but the awards show began in 1984, which would have made last night’s the 42nd (assuming the shows continued every year). It was the typical lumbering beast of a modern awards show, in which the performances by various nominated artists were more important than the rather perfunctory presentations of the actual awards. My B.S. Detector went off big-time when I heard the announcer hyping the contents of the upcoming show and say they were honoring the “genius” of rapper Busta Rhymes. I’m sorry, but I can’t stand rap and I think it’s a contradiction in terms to call any rapper a “genius.” As I’ve said before, rock ‘n’ roll evolved in its first 20 years from the simplicity of early Elvis and the Black artists he was imitating to the sophistication of works like The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, while rap has turned 50 and is still mired in the garbage from which it started. It’s all about glorifying murder, rape, Queer-bashing, drug dealing and collecting the outrageously tasteless jewelry colloquially known as “bling.” The hints of progressive social commentary in early rap (The Last Poets – the unacknowledged pioneers of the form – Grandmaster Flash and Public Enemy) have long since disappeared and been replaced by the criminal pretensions of the “gangstas.” The show opened with Doja Cat’s “Jealous Type,” a decent enough song marred by the thinness of her voice. All too many of the women divas today (though it’s nice to see how strongly women dominate the pop music scene today – seven of the 16 songs performed last night were by women artists and women dominated the awards: Ariana Grande won Video of the Year and Song of the Year, and Lady Gaga was Artist of the Year) have thin, scratchy little voices that couldn’t carry across a closet without amplification and AutoTune. I’ll never forget a previous music awards show during which three baby divas took turns singing choruses of Patti Labelle’s hit “Lady Marmalade” – and then Patti Labelle herself came out with a gesture that said, “Move over, little girls, and let the old pro show you how it’s done.”

The next singer was Lala Young, whose song was called “Messy” and which I’ve had liked a lot better if her voice weren’t afflicted with a peculiar gargling sound in its lower register. When the song took her high, she sounded fine in a neo-Janis Joplin sort of way (though Idina Menzel and especially Maren Morris have come closer to recapturing Janis’s spirit). Then came the first-ever “Latino Icon” award presented to singer Ricky Martin, who sang “Livin’ La Vida Loca,” his star-making hit. If they’d just left it at that, it would have been fine – the song was one of those infectious guilty pleasures and I quite enjoyed it. But then, like all too many performers on last night’s show, that was just the start of an interminable medley that also included “Pégate,” “Baila Conmigo,” “María,” and “The Cup of Life.” Then came the modern singer Tate McRae (another woman) doing a medley of her own with “Revolving Door” and “Sports Car.” Once again I wish she’d stopped at “Revolving Door” – it was by far the better of her two songs. After that they gave the Song of the Year award to Bruno Mars (who luckily did not perform last night: his popularity continues to elude me and every time I’ve seen him he looked like he was auditioning for a biopic of Michael Jackson) and someone named Rosé for a song called “Apt.” Then the “genius” of Busta Rhymes was showcased in yet another interminable medley: I missed the first two “songs” but the titles I got (Google’s song-search app got quite a workout from me last night!) were “Gimme Some More,” “Scenario,” “Touch It,” and “Pass the Courvoisier.” Rhymes’s presentation was so maniacally hectoring, even by rap standards, that I was doing the Nazi salute and thinking, “If there were a Black Hitler, this is what he would look and sound like.” Busta Rhymes got an honorary “Rock the Bells Visionary” award, of all things.

The next song was by Sabrina Carpenter and was called “Tears.” She came out on stage with choristers enacting non-violent protesters carrying signs with slogans like “If You Hate You Won’t Get Laid” (Donald Trump would no doubt beg to differ!) and “Protect Trans Rights.” I liked the sentiments and especially liked their flagrant violation of the edict laid down by the evening’s host, L. L. Cool J., who for me has transcended his rapper origins with a recurring role in law enforcement on NCIS Los Angeles, who’d begun the show with an order to all participants to check their politics at the stage door. What I didn’t care for so much was the extent to which her song was overproduced; it was yet another record whose potential beauty was submerged under too many instruments. After that came an odd pairing: Post Malone and Jelly Roll, shown from the stage of a concert they were giving together in Germany, doing a song called “Losers,” and then someone called the Kid LAROI (that’s how he spells his stage name; his birth name is Charles Kenneth Jeffrey Howard, which puts him just one first name short of Reginald Kenneth Dwight a.k.a. Elton John, the rock star with five first names) doing a song called “Lost.” Then Mariah Carey was presented with something called “The Vanguard Award,” and the pre-commercial announcer hyping her upcoming appearance said we’d hear her sing “anthems.” My heart sank at the plural, since that meant we were in for yet another interminable medley. The songs were “Sugar Sweet,” “Fantasy,” “Heartbreaker,” “Obsessed,” “It’s Like That,” and “We Belong Together.” There was nothing from her early years – no “Vision of Love,” “Butterfly” (my all-time favorite Mariah Carey song), or “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” My favorite Mariah Carey story is about her abrupt departure from Columbia, where she’d had her early hits, to EMI’s Virgin label in April 2001. The deal included a film project called Glitter, and both the album and the film were such total flops that when the September 11, 2001 attacks happened, Jay Leno joked, “They say that terrorists hide where no one else goes. So they should be looking for Osama bin Laden in the theatres showing Mariah Carey’s movie Glitter.”

After that the young male singer Alex Warren, who won Best New Artist, did a mini-medley of his hits “Eternity” and “Ordinary.” Calling your song “Ordinary” seemingly invites all too many “you said it, we didn’t” jokes, but it was actually pretty good if … well, ordinary. That was followed by a tribute to the late Ozzy Osbourne featuring Steven Tyler and Joe Perry from the bad Aerosmith in yet another medley, this time of Osbourne-associated songs: “Crazy Train,” “Changes,” and “Mama, I’m Coming Home.” I was never a fan of Ozzy Osbourne, either with Black Sabbath or on his own, though I bought a CD copy of his first solo album, Blizzard of Ozz, on a cheap reissue label because I’d just read the true-crime book Say You Love Satan, about a group of adolescents who formed a cult around their made-up version of Satanism and ultimately killed one of their number, and the author had mentioned that the cultists were particular fans of Osbourne’s song “Bark at the Moon.” I have a certain admiration for Osbourne, however, in that he cleaned up his extensive drug and alcohol problems in the early 2010’s and that he made it to 76. I remember the documentary The Decline of Western Civilization, Part 2: The Metal Years, in which the filmmakers shot an interview with Osbourne while he was in his kitchen pouring himself a glass of orange juice – only he was so drunk and/or stoned he missed the glass completely and poured orange juice all over the floor. Anyone who thinks of Osbourne as the avatar of heavy metal was in for a surprise last night; the third song, “Mama, I’m Coming Home,” was actually a quite good blues pastiche in which at least one of the guitars was acoustic.

The next number after the Osbourne tribute was a nod to reggaetón, the Puerto Rican genre that’s a mixture of reggae, Latin, and rap (and I find the rap parts more tolerable than usual because they’re blessedly in a language I don’t understand). The artists were J. Balvin, Justin Quiles, Lenny Tavarez, and D. J. Snake, and the songs (once again, there were two) were “Zum Zum” and “Noventa.” After Sabrina Carpenter was presented with Best Album for Short ‘n’ Sweet, the show presented modern-day country artist Megan Moroney for one of the most pleasant songs on the program, “6 Months Later.” (The numeral is part of the official title.) The next artist was a tall, slender young man named Sombr (he was born Shane Michael Boose) doing yet another medley, “Back to Friends” (as in the person whom he’s just had sex with wants to go back to being just his friend) and “12 to 12.” As with many of the two-song mini-medleys during the evening, the first song was better than the second and quite frankly he should have quit while he was ahead.

The show was closed by a blankly handsome young man named Conan Gray, dressed in a purple robe that made him look like yet another white guy who wants to be Prince, singing a song called “Vodka Cranberry.” There’s a Reddit page on the song, https://www.reddit.com/answers/cdba0f37-55a4-449a-bcc3-e15aea6e6860/?q=Meaning%20of%20Vodka%20Cranberry%20by%20Conan%20Gray&source=PDP, that hints that “Vodka Cranberry” is Gay-themed. Gray’s Wikipedia page is silent about his sexual orientation, but the actual video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yzbvv8WdP9k&list=RDYzbvv8WdP9k&start_radio=1) is clearly about two young male lovers sadly but bitterly breaking up. The video is a lot more poignant than the performance Gray gave on the Video Music Awards, which seemed (like too much of the show) to drown in its own pretensions. His VMA performance is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OWIuCp1fyg&list=RD5OWIuCp1fyg&start_radio=1 and began with a shot that reminded me of the current Purple Mattress commercial, a parody of Sleeping Beauty in which the prince wakes the sleeping princess with a kiss, but she begs off, sends him away and insists on being allowed to continue to sleep on her Purple Mattress. The figure in the Video Music Awards performance was too androgynous to be clearly identifiable as male; it looked to me like a small-breasted woman. It was an odd ending to a typically lumbering awards show in which even the potentially moving moments were drowned in too much production.

Sugar Mama (Alenu Entertainment, MarVista Entertainment, Tubi, Lifetime, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After last night’s (Sunday, September 7) MTV Video Music Awards lumbered to a close, I switched to Lifetime for one of their all-time worst movies: Sugar Mama, a 2025 “race movie” (i.e, one in which all the principal characters are Black) produced by Alenu Entertainment and our old friends at MarVista Entertainment and directed by Bobby Yan (a man, by the way) from a particularly demented script by Briana Cole. To say it promised a lot more than it delivered would be an understatement. It was built around a dating app that matched hot, studly young men with older well-to-do women seeking what in the 1920’s and 1930’s were called gigolos: paid companions whose services might or might not include sex. In this case the young man is drop-dead-gorgeous Mike Sheppard (Jibre Hordges), who at the start of the episode is just getting the kiss-off from his latest keeper because he’s been spending too much time away from her with his age-peer girlfriend, Gia Smith (Liyah Chante Thompson). Because he and Gia are both in college and he’s also developing an app of his own – a health-related one that inputs people’s blood types and medical histories and generates personalized recommendations for preventive care – Mike needs a new sugar mama pronto. He finds her in Veronica King (Latarsha Rose), a legendary name in the high-tech world, a middle-aged but still attractive Black woman who’s made a fortune in the computer world and lives with an age-peer companion, a Black doctor named Greg (Joseph Curtis Callender) whom she insists she’s not intimate with but they’re merely “best friends.” Veronica invites Mike to spend the night in her home but when he tries to kiss her, she angrily slaps him.

It turns out her interest in him is not sexual but maternal: she envisions him as a replacement for her long-lost son Jayson, whom she says is doing a round-the-world tour. The moment she says that, we start suspecting that Jayson either died or, à la Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, never existed at all. Veronica had a husband named Richie (Rabon Hutcherson) who died in a mysterious car accident. Ria is approached by another young Black woman, Nora Washington (Raquel Davies), who tells her she needs to get Mike away from Veronica as soon as possible. She explains that her older sister Carla once worked for Richie King and started an affair with him, but as soon as Veronica found out she sabotaged their car and killed them in a way that looked like an accident. Alas, then both Nora and Ria herself are beaten nearly to death by an unseen assailant. Veronica also gives Mike a knockout drug on the day he’s supposed to go see Ria in the hospital – though the skyline of a big city (probably Seattle or Portland, since we get the impression this takes place in the Pacific Northwest) looms in the background, we get the impression the setting is a small town because there seems to be only one hospital and Greg works there as a doctor – and when he comes to he’s chained to the wall of Veronica’s basement. Veronica keeps trying to infantilize him, offering to feed him, calling him “Mikey,” and ultimately referring to him as “Jayson” so we think she’s enlisting him as a living replacement for her dead or never-extant son.

The truth is a lot more sinister [spoiler alert!]: the night Richie and Carla had their “accident,” caused by Veronica severing their brake fluid line so their car couldn’t stop on a winding mountain road, Jayson was also in the car in the back seat. The accident killed Richie, though Veronica came along and finished the job on Carla personally, strangling her. As for Jayson, he actually survived but was left in a persistent vegetative state (misspelled “vegitative” on the hospital report), and Veronica hid him in her basement, installed a fully functional set of hospital equipment, and entrusted Greg with his care. She’s been waiting all along for a young man Jayson’s age with the rare O-negative blood type Jayson had so she could kill him and have Greg transplant his heart into Jayson – and Mike was her pigeon. After Ria had glimmers of the truth, Veronica sneaked into her hospital room during visiting hours and injected her with poison so she died. Mike’s former sugar mama and Nora were also killed, so when Mike finally realizes the truth, Greg is the only person there for him to confide him – only he doesn’t know that Greg not only has been in on the whole plot with Veronica but she’s counting on his medical skills to transplant Mike’s heart into Jayson’s body. Just when we think someone out there is going to cotton to the whole scheme and rescue Mike in time to save his life, both he and we realize as Greg puts the anaesthetic hood over his face that no one is going to save him. He’s going to die so Veronica’s son Jayson (played as a boy in the car by Matthew Williams and as a young man by Pierre Jones) can live, and there’s a quirky final scene in which Jayson is up and around, though still walking with a cane, trying to get in touch with the normal world after he’s been in a coma for over a decade.

I can’t watch a mystery thriller in which the bad guys get away unscathed without thinking of Raymond Chandler’s adage that the criminal in a crime story must always be punished somehow, whether through “the operation of the law courts” (though Chandler became the exemplar of a certain kind of American tough-guy language, he’d been educated largely in England and therefore sometimes lapsed into British English usages like “law courts”) or not. “It has nothing to do with morality,” Chandler explained; “it’s the logic of the form.” If the criminal isn’t punished, he wrote, “it leaves a feeling of irritation.” Briana Cole’s nihilistic ending for Sugar Mama certainly irritated me, though it also suggested that this was one more story that ended just when it was getting interesting. One could readily imagine a sequel showing young Jayson King slowly becoming aware of the world and ultimately realizing just how much blood his mother has on her hands and how many lives she took winning him his second chance at life – not that I’m asking Cole and Bobby Yan to concoct a sequel to this perfectly dreadful movie!