Dr; Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick Productions, Hawk Films, Columbia, 1964)

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

Last night (Thursday, August 14) Turner Classic Movies showed one of my all-time favorite films as part of their day-long “Summer Under the Stars” salute to Sterling Hayden: Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Dr. Strangelove began life as Red Alert, also known as Two Hours to Doom, by a writer named Peter George – though for some editions (including the paperback I read) he signed the book with the pseudonym “Peter Bryant.” George’s novel was published in 1958 and dealt with a senile U.S. Air Force general named Quinten who orders an unprovoked nuclear attack on the Soviet Union under “Wing Attack Plan R,” which allows a lower-level commander to order the use of nuclear weapons in case a first strike by an adversary has decapitated the U.S. government and left the President either dead or so disabled he couldn’t order a retaliatory attack. The following year Harvey Wheeler published a short story in Dissent magazine called “Abraham ‘59,” and he and Eugene Burdick turned it into a novel called Fail-Safe which was first published as a three-part serial in The Saturday Evening Post during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 and then was put out as a full-length book. Though the U.S. nuclear attack on Russia in Fail-Safe is triggered by accident (a European airliner strays into the zone between American and Russian airspace and leads to a decision to launch the attack), the two plots were similar enough, especially in the detail that the U.S. President actively cooperates with the Soviet government to help shoot down the errant aircraft that are about to start World War III, that George sued Burdick and Wheeler for plagiarism and settled out of court. Director Stanley Kubrick bought the movie rights to Red Alert and hired George to help him write the screenplay. Meanwhile, another production team bought the rights to Fail-Safe and placed it at the same major studio, Columbia, that was co-producing Kubrick’s film.

To research for his film, Kubrick started reading the theoretical literature on how a nuclear war could be fought and won, and he decided that the ideas on that were so ridiculous that the only way he could dramatize their absurdity was to make his movie an out-and-out comedy. So Kubrick added Terry Southern to his writing team, and it was most likely Southern who was responsible for the cartoonish names of the characters. The errant general that invokes “Plan R” and orders an unprovoked attack on the Soviet Union became “Jack D. Ripper” (Sterling Hayden). The President of the United States became “Merkin Muffley” (Peter Sellers) and his principal military advisor became “Buck Turgidson” (George C. Scott, apparently warming up for his Academy Award-willing portrayal of General George S. Patton six years later). His scientific advisor became “Dr. Strangelove” (also Peter Sellers), a wheelchair-bound ex-Nazi who keeps inadvertently referring to President Muffley as “mein Führer,” and in an aside his original German name is revealed to be “Merkwürdigliebe,” which literally means “strange love.” Ripper’s assistant, a British Royal Air Force colonel officially on loan to the U.S. as part of an officer exchange program, is “Lionel Mandrake” (Peter Sellers again), and the base General Ripper commands is called “Burpleson.” (It’s ironic that of the three parts Sellers plays, his accent sounds phoniest when he’s playing a Brit, even though he was British in real life.) The never-seen Russian premier is called “Dmitri Kissoff” and the Russian ambassador is “Alexi de Sadesky” (Peter Bull). There are also supporting characters with equally ridiculous names, including the pilot of the attack plane, Major “King” Kong (Slim Pickens; originally Peter Sellers was supposed to play this part, too, but he had a heart attack just before the scenes inside the B-52 cockpit were to be filmed); his crew member, Lt. Lothar Zogg (James Earl Jones, six years before he was launched into stardom by playing a boxer based on real-life African-American heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson in The Great White Hope on stage and then on film in 1970; I joked to my husband Charles, who returned home from work and joined me for the last three-fifths of the film, that this was 13 years before Jones voiced Darth Vader, also a crew member in service to an evil empire); and the leader of a U.S. commando team that attacks Burpleson, “Bat” Guano (Keenan Wynn).

What follows is a delightfully absurd movie about the follies of warmongering and political bureaucracies in general. General Ripper admits that he ordered the attack because he couldn’t get it up anymore; he traced his problem, common among older men (including me), to fluoridation of drinking water, which he associated with a Communist plot to sap Americans of their vitality and ruin the “purity” of their “bodily fluids.” Ripper tells Mandrake that he still has sex with women, but “I do deny them my essence,” which I presume meant he pulls out before he ejaculates. Ripper’s intent in ordering the unauthorized nuclear attack is to spark an all-out nuclear war with the U.S. as the aggressors, and in a secret Cabinet meeting President Muffley calls to discuss the situation Turgidson seems actually willing to go along with Ripper’s plan. Muffley disagrees, saying, “I am not willing to go down in history as the worst mass murderer since Adolf Hitler.” He calls Soviet Ambassador Sadesky to the War Room meeting and asks for his help getting Premier Kissoff on the phone. When Muffley finally gets Kissoff on the line, he sounds like a hapless teenager who’s borrowed the family car for a date and then wrecked it and is having to call his parents at home. Ambassador Sadesky’s face goes white as he delivers the dreadful news that the Soviets have installed the “Doomsday Device,” a series of nuclear weapons coated with Cobalt-Thorium G that will be automatically fired and envelop the world in a radioactive cloud that will kill all human and animal life on earth and render the planet’s surface uninhabitable for the next 200 years. If even one of the 40 attack planes in General Ripper’s group gets through and drops bombs on its target, this will trigger the Doomsday Device. Sadesky defends his government’s decision to build the Doomsday Device by saying that the U.S. was already considering one of its own, and when that’s questioned, he thunders, “Our source was the New York Times!” Dr. Strangelove admits that the U.S. did consider building and maintaining a Doomsday Device, but decided not to “for reasons that should be obvious right now.” Strangelove also asked why the Soviets kept their Doomsday Device a secret, and Sadesky answers that the Premier was about to announce it at next Monday’s Communist Party conference and “our Premier likes surprises.”

With General Ripper having sealed off all communications to and from Burpleson Air Force Base, the President has no way to contact them. So he orders a commando team to attack Burpleson, whose soldiers defend the base because they’ve been told by General Ripper that the enemy might come disguised in American uniforms. The shots of pitched battles for control of an Air Force base plastered all over with the real Strategic Air Command’s oxymoronic slogan, “Peace Is Our Profession,” are some of the most grimly ironic and satirical in the film. Another aspect of this movie is that the U.S. President is shown as a basically decent but helpless man trying to do the right thing in a roomful of advisers pulling him in different directions, each of which is abysmal and barbaric. At one point he snaps at General Turgidson, “I’m getting tired of your ideas about what is and isn’t possible!” (In other words, he’s more Biden than Trump.) Yet another amazing thing about this movie is the way it equates nuclear war (and the desire for it) with sex. The film’s famous opening sequence is a series of stock shots of B-52’s being kept aloft via air-to-air refueling, and Kubrick, cinematographer Gilbert Taylor, and editor Anthony Harvey (who later became a director himself) emphasize the phallic nature of these images. (The same stock shots were used in 1964 in one of the greatest movies ever made, this one; and one of the worst, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians.) Buck Turgidson is called to the War Room in the middle of a sexual encounter with his secretary, called “Miss Scott” on the cast list (Tracy Reed) but identified in some publicity photos wearing a sash proclaiming her “Miss Foreign Policy,” and Turgidson refers to their planned sexual activity in explicitly military terms: “You just start your countdown, and ol’ Bucky will be back before you can say, ‘Blast off!’” Later in the movie, after Kong’s B-52 has successfully dropped its bomb (and created one of Kubrick’s most legendary images: Slim Pickens riding the bomb to its target yelling and waving his cowboy hat in the air like he’s riding a bucking bronco in a rodeo), the men in the War Room are plotting how to keep a fraction of the human race alive by evacuating it into mineshafts.

Dr. Strangelove explains that in order to repopulate the mineshaft communities it will be necessary to have 10 women for every man. Turgidson says, “Doctor, you mentioned the ratio of ten women to each man. Now, wouldn't that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?” “Regrettably, yes,” Dr. Strangelove replies. “But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race. I hasten to add that since each man will be required to do prodigious... service along these lines, the women will have to be selected for their sexual characteristics which will have to be of a highly stimulating nature.” “I must confess, you have an astonishingly good idea there, Doctor,” chimes in Russian Ambassador Sadesky – leading Turgidson to panic about how the Russians might build more mineshafts and occupy them with more people than the Americans. “WE CANNOT ALLOW OURSELVES A MINESHAFT GAP!” Turgidson thunders, and later he catches Sadesky photographing the map of Russia inside the War Room with a miniature camera, an indication that the madness that brought the human race to the brink of its own destruction is going to continue even after what’s left of the human race is living under ground and biding its time for the earth’s surface to be habitable again in 200 years. (In this respect Dr. Strangelove is a prequel to the many 1950’s movies, including World Without End, in which humans had already moved underground in the wake of a nuclear holocaust and are still living there even though enough of the earth’s radiation has dissipated that it’s no longer dangerous to live on the surface.) I remember in the early 1970’s thinking that Dr. Strangelove was a worthy successor to the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup (1933), also a satire about political egomania and the needless wars it creates, and a movie that flopped originally and didn’t find its audience until the 1960’s, when young audiences enthralled by Dr. Strangelove and its cynical (to say the least!) view of politics and the military discovered a then-30-year-old movie that had essentially done the same thing.

Dr. Strangelove doesn’t seem quite as funny in the second Trump era as it did in the 1960’s or since, mainly because the U.S. is now being run by a bunch of people who are just as crazy as General Ripper is. Ripper was based on a real-life character, General Daniel Walker, who in the early 1960’s started making speeches not only attacking then-President John F. Kennedy but strongly suggesting that the U.S. needed a dictator and General Walker should be it. The fact that we now have a President who has literally proclaimed himself king (on a fake magazine cover posted to the White House Web site) and a Health and Human Services Secretary who genuinely believes that fluoridation is a source of evil inevitably makes the satire of Dr. Strangelove less amusing and more real. Dr. Strangelove was also based on a real person, and though the various candidates have included Henry Kissinger and Wernher von Braun (former head of the German rocket program and later a top scientific adviser to NASA), but the most likely real person on whom Strangelove was based was Edward Teller, who fled Nazi Germany before World War II, worked with J. Robert Oppenheimer on developing the atomic bomb, then went on the warpath against Oppenheimer and got his security clearance taken away because Oppenheimer was against developing the hydrogen bomb, which was Teller’s pet project. Dr. Strangelove holds up as an all too accurate view of the world as it works (or doesn’t) and the extent to which politicians’ egos (and their libidos) drive the world repeatedly to the brink of catastrophe. It’s frequently been compared to The Mouse That Roared (1959) – also a Columbia movie that satirized the Cold War, had Peter Sellers in multiple roles, and showed a sequence of the world succumbing to nuclear annihilation (though in The Mouse That Roared that sequence is a nightmare fantasy, not reality) – but Dr. Strangelove is a much deeper, richer movie, and it holds up as well as it does precisely because its depiction of the base motives of politicians and the entrenched stupidity with which they make major life-or-death decisions rings all too true today – indeed, even truer in 2025 than it did in 1964 on the eve of President Lyndon Johnson’s insane escalation of the Viet Nam war, which among other things would leave a lot of young people receptive to the message of relentless political satires like Duck Soup and Dr. Strangelove.

Siren of Atlantis, a.k.a. Atlantis, the Lost Continent (Seymour Nebenzal Pictures, United Artists, 1948)

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

Last night (Monday, August 11), after we returned home from the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park for a stunning organ concert by San Diego-born Chelsea Chen, my husband Charles and I ran a rather strange movie from YouTube from 1948, originally called Siren of Atlantis but reissued as Atlantis, the Lost Continent, probably to grab some of the audience away from George Pal’s big-budgeted spectacle Atlantis, the Lost Continent (1961). Siren of Atlantis began life in 1919 as the second novel by French pop writer Pierre Benoit, whose father had been an officer in the French colonial army in Africa and which gave him the background for some of his tales. His first novel was called Königsmark (1918), a Ruritanian tale published in English as The Secret Spring (it was a major hit in France but flopped in the U.S. and Britain). His second novel was called L’Atlantide (“Atlantis”). Benoit drew on his childhood living in Tunisia with his military-officer father to construct a plot in which a remnant of the lost continent of Atlantis survived underground beneath a mountain range in the Sahara Desert, and was ruled by Queen Antinea (Maria Montez), who was supposedly immortal. (In the book she had already had 53 male lovers and, after she tired of each one, he was turned into a golden statue. She had niches for 120 of them, and as soon as she reached that number she would will herself to die.) One of Benoit’s trademarks as an author was that each of his books would have exactly 227 pages, and the central female character would always have a name that began with “A.” L’Atlantide was first filmed in the silent era in 1920 (though the movie wasn’t released until 1921), and in 1932 German producer Seymour Nebenzal grabbed the rights and hired director G. W. Pabst to film the first sound version. Pabst, as was common in the early talkie era, made three separate films with three different casts in German, French, and English.

Then the Nazis took power and Nebenzal fled, but he carried with him the rights to his old movies – including Fritz Lang’s M (1931), which he remade in 1952 with Joseph Losey directing and David Wayne playing the role of a psychopathic rapist and murderer of children that had been Peter Lorre’s star-making part in Lang’s version. By 1947 he was settled in Hollywood doing low-budget remakes of his German films, and when he decided to remake Siren of Atlantis he first sought out Douglas Sirk (another refugee from the Nazis, originally Detlef Sierck) to work on the script and direct it. Sirk did some writing with Rowland Leigh (who got co-credit for the screenplay with Robert Lax), but tried to talk Nebenzal out of the remake, saying he should just reissue Pabst’s version instead. In a book-length interview with British film historian Jon Halliday, Sirk recalled telling Nebenzal that he “didn't have the money to do the necessary fantastic sets. You know, Atlantis depends on inspiring people's fantasies. The old Pabst picture had great sets, but you do need money to construct a hidden city and that kind of thing. It's no good trying to shoot this sort of film on a small budget, as Nebenzal wanted – and then he wanted me to use some of the long-shot material from the old Pabst, and so on.” Nebenzal cycled through various other directors, including Arthur Ripley and yet another German refugee, John Brahm, though the final directorial credit went to the film’s editor, Gregg W. Tallas. (Tallas went on to a minor career as a director, making 11 more movies, most of them science-fiction cheapies.) At least he got competent help on both sides of the camera; the cinematographer was Karl Struss (a major name who had shot Charlie Chaplin’s Hitler satire The Great Dictator in 1940), the art director was Lionel Banks (10 years after he’d created Shangri-La for Frank Capra on Lost Horizon), the film’s attractive score was by French composer Michel Michelet, and the cast included Montez; her then-husband, French actor Jean-Pierre Aumont (who’d just got through playing Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in The Song of Scheherazade at Universal); and an outrageously miscast Dennis O’Keefe.

The film begins with Lt. André St. Avit (Aumont) being rescued in the middle of the Sahara and telling his rescuers a fantastic tale about how he, the sole surviving member of an expedition led by Captain Jean Morhange (O’Keefe, who like all the American actors cast as French people in this movie doesn’t even try for a French accent) to find a lost previous expedition led by French anthropologist Marchand. Marchand had become convinced that Atlantis had not only existed but its remnants were in the Sahara, which had been an ocean before it dried up and became a desert. Morhange, St. Avit and their company were attacked by Tuaregs, a desert tribe, and ultimately they were kidnapped and brought to Queen Antinea’s court, where St. Avit was promptly seduced by Antinea. He replaced Lindstrom (Allan Nixon) as her boy toy, and Lindstrom promptly became an alcoholic on his way to golden statuehood. Morhange tries to get St. Avit to snap out of his infatuation with Antinea and escape, despite the warnings from Antinea and her prime minister, Blades (Henry Daniell, acting his impossible role with his usual authority) that no one escapes from Atlantis and anyone who tries will be tracked down and killed. Antinea tricks St. Avit into thinking that she’s seduced Morhange – which she hasn’t – and in a fit of the usual stupid jealous rage that drives all too many movie plots, St. Avil stabs Morhange several times and ultimately kills him. Then he manages to escape Atlantis after all, and in the film’s best scenes he’s shown making his way through the desert and repeatedly being engulfed by waves of ocean – which, of course, are just mirages. Finally he’s put through a military court-martial for allegedly killing Morhange, though without any evidence to back up his claims the court-martial acquits him and sets him free. Then a Tuareg comes to the French camp bearing a love token – a piece of Atlantean jewelry Queen Antinea had given to St. Avit – and dropping it in the sand in front of St. Avit. St. Avit orders the Tuareg released and follows him into the desert in search of the lost entrance to Atlantis, collapses in the desert, and a sandstorm comes up and presumably buries him alive in the sand. The End.

Siren of Atlantis closely resembles the plot of H. Rider Haggard’s She (1887), also about an immortal queen of a mysterious realm hidden from the outside world who takes a series of boy-toy lovers and is said to be immortal. In fact Benoit was accused of plagiarism at the time, though he successfully defended himself by saying he couldn’t have read Haggard’s novel because it was in English, which Benoit didn’t understand, and hadn’t yet been published in French. This 1948 film is a preposterous mixture of the moving and the silly. Given the limitations of Nebenzal’s budget, it’s surprisingly well done, with Nebenzal skilfully recycling old sets and deploying stock footage to make it look like a bigger-budgeted film than it was. As Aumont recalled, when they needed three camels they borrowed them from a local zoo – but the zoo only had one-humped dromedaries and they glued fake humps onto them with rubber cement. Though both Charles and I were looking forward to Montez’s unequal struggles with English from her Universal films like Cobra Woman (1944) – in which, playing an imperious Polynesian queen, she revealed her genuine Latina origins by punctuating her executive orders with, “I have espoken!” – her English had improved a great deal since her Universal vehicles. She actually delivered a pretty good performance in a nearly impossible role, and she’s better than both male leads. Aumont recalled having to wear shoes with three-inch lifts so he’d look taller than O’Keefe, and it’s clear neither he nor O’Keefe were able to do much to make their characters believable as Frenchmen (despite Aumont’s real-life French accent), military officers, or human beings. Siren of Atlantis is one of those middle-range movies that’s not great but not so bad it works as camp (though one wonders what the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 crew could have done with it), and one has to have at least a grudging respect for Nebenzal and his various directors for what they were able to accomplish on a shoestring budget.

A Stranger's Baby (Enlighten Content, HTRTC Productions, Tubi Films, Lifetime, 2024)

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

Last night (Sunday, August 10) I watched an unusually good Lifetime movie called A Stranger’s Baby, about a woman named Donna Fendyr (pronounced “fender”) Dusk (Jessica Lowndes), who’s six months pregnant when her husband Scott Dusk (Justin Lacey) is killed in a traffic accident while driving the truck they use in their moving business, which has the clever name “From Donna to Dusk.” (That might have been a better title for the movie, too.) We see this in a prologue, and then the film flashes forward a year and Donna herself is involved in a car accident. She survives but she’s in a coma for a week, and when she comes to she’s startled that her brother Mason Fendyr (Brad Harder, who was so nice-looking I wondered if he was going to turn out to be the villain, the way most Lifetime movies that feature hot-looking guys have them turn out to be bad guys) has been looking after her three-month-old baby. This puzzles Donna because her recollection was that she lost her and her husband’s baby to a miscarriage just before her accident. The airwaves of the town in Arizona where this is taking place are being flooded with announcements from Dr. Leon Weston (Clayton James) and his wife Amira (Zibby Allen) looking for the people who allegedly kidnapped their baby daughter. Slowly Donna becomes convinced that her own baby did indeed die in a miscarriage and the baby Mason has been taking care of on her behalf is the Westons’ missing child. She also realizes she’s being stalked by mysterious strangers who may not be so strange after all; both the Westons are hanging around her place spying on her for reasons that for the moment remain mysterious. When Donna and her brother Mason order a DNA test on the baby, whose name is Cleo, they get back a report that the baby’s DNA is only a 23 percent match for Donna’s – indicating that the child is a blood relative but not her direct progeny.

Eventually both we and Donna learn [spoiler alert!] that the baby is indeed Amira Weston’s but the father is Donna’s brother Mason. Cleo is the product of an extra-relational affair between Amira and Mason, which Mason agreed to enter into on Amira’s assurance that she was planning to divorce Leon and Mason’s growing conviction that he had found the woman for him. As things turn out, Leon is the real villain of the piece – and Clayton James delivers a deep, effective portrait of barely controlled evil. Leon is a controlling bastard who exemplifies the old joke, “What do you call a man who thinks he’s God? A schizophrenic. What do you call a man who knows he’s God? A doctor.” One night he comes home from work and declares to his wife, “I saved a life today – several lives, actually.” He denounces her as “a whore” for her extra-relational affairs, though he’s also determined to recover baby Cleo and raise her as his own. In one chilling scene, which Donna witnesses because she’s sneaking around the Westons’ home convinced that her late husband Scott was having an affair with Amira (which, it turns out, he wasn’t), Leon threatens to beat and rape his wife. Donna is frustrated because she’d like to report the crime in progress to the police but she doesn’t dare because then the call could be traced to her. So she and Mason drive out to a motel that still has a landline and call the police from there, but by the time the cops, in the person of a heavy-set Black officer named Graeme (Byron Wilson), arrive at the Westons’ Amira is so intimidated by her husband that she lies to protect him and said the noises whoever called thought they heard were just the sounds of consensual, if rather rough, sex. Officer Graeme questions the propriety of them having sex while their daughter is missing, but Amira turns the tables on them and says how dare he question their grief and their choices for how to deal with it.

Ultimately we learn [double spoiler alert!] that Amira herself deliberately turned over baby Cleo to Donna in the hospital because she wanted her to be raised by her dad and her aunt rather than become just one more weapon in her unequal power struggle with Leon, only Donna forgot this because of the “retrograde amnesia” caused by her own accident. Determined to recover his wife’s baby, Leon visits Mason’s home and pistol-whips him, taking the baby, while in the meantime he’s given his wife Amira an injection of a knock-out drug and tied her up to her bed, from which Amira uses her Amazon Alexa to call Donna and ask her to come over. Amira specifically tells Donna not to call the police, though eventually Donna does and she and Mason press charges for assault against Leon. But Leon still has Cleo, and he makes Donna an offer she can’t refuse: in exchange for Mason dropping the charges against him, Leon will show him his security video of what actually happened to Scott. Mason and Donna agree to the deal, and what Leon shows Donna convinces her that Amira was directly responsible for Scott’s death: he crashed to avoid hitting her car and she left the scene without calling 911, which could have saved Scott’s life if an ambulance had come to the scene in time. Leon gives Donna his gun and tells her to go kill Amira in revenge for Scott’s death, and Donna actually fires four bullets at her back during an outdoor confrontation at night. Fortunately, all four bullets miss, and when she and Amira finally confront each other, Amira explains that it was actually Leon who was responsible for Scott’s death. Leon was standing in the roadway on purpose that fateful night, and it was to avoid hitting him that Scott made that fatal swerve into a lamppost. When the accident happened, Amira actually got out of her car and offered to help Scott, but Scott, not realizing how badly he’d been hurt, told her to keep fleeing her husband.

It ends in another dead-of-night confrontation in which Leon is determined to kill both Mason and Donna, only Amira, whom he thinks he’s incapacitated, sneaks up behind him and kills Leon right when Leon is about to kill Donna. In a tag scene taking place a year later, Mason and Donna are shown co-parenting Cleo (well, Mason is her father, after all, and Donna her aunt) and giving her her first-year birthday party. A Stranger’s Baby was ballyhooed as a Lifetime “premiere,” which it wasn’t; it was actually made in 2024 for the Tubi free ad-supported streaming service and racked up a number of imdb.com reviews in the Tubi incarnation, most of them pretty lukewarm. I actually quite liked the film, partly due to the effective suspense direction of Monika Mitchell, partly due to the well-constructed (albeit with a few lapses; I really didn’t believe how easily Leon was able to convince Donna that Amira murdered Scott, and I was expecting to hear that the video allegedly implicating Amira in Scott’s death had been created by Leon via AI) screenplay by Helen Marsh, but mainly due to Clayton James’s excellent performance as the villain. Instead of either going for Lawrence Tierney-style overstatement or Anthony Perkins-style understatement (the two basic ways of playing a psychopath on screen), James is cool as the proverbial cucumber, pursuing his evil agenda with a grim determination and a relentless self-assurance that dares anyone to come along and prove that he’s really a bad guy. I was also struck by Clayton James’s resemblance to Elon Musk; the two look enough alike that if anyone out there wants to dare make a biopic of Musk and show him as the sick, crazed monster he is, Clayton James would be excellent casting for the role.

The Sandpiper (Filmways Pictures, Venice Productions, MGM, filmed 1964, released 1965)

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

Last night (Saturday, August 9) Turner Classic Movies did one of their all-day “Summer Under the Stars” tributes to Elizabeth Taylor, and as part of it they showed the film I watched last night: The Sandpiper, made in 1964 and released in 1965 as the third of the 11 movies that co-starred Elizabeth Taylor and her fifth husband, Richard Burton. They famously met in 1962 on the set of her film Cleopatra, which cast Liz in the title role, Rex Harrison as Julius Caesar, and Burton as Mark Antony. They instantly started an affair even though they were both married to other people – Taylor to Eddie Fisher (whom she’d started dating after the death of husband number three, Mike Todd, and pulled away from his first wife, Debbie Reynolds) and Burton to Sybil Williams. So for their third film together (their second was The V.I.P.’s, 1963) producer Martin Ransohoff, who also wrote the original story, came up with the idea of casting two real-life adulterers (though by 1964 they’d divorced their previous spouses and married each other) in a story about adultery. To his credit, Ransohoff hired two formerly blacklisted screenwriters, Dalton Trumbo and Michael Wilson, to turn his story into a shooting script, but that might have been a mistake because Trumbo and Wilson larded a relatively simple story of sin and quasi-redemption with all too many Biblical asides and feints at a critique of capitalism. After Ransohoff’s first choice as a director, William Wyler, turned it down, he hired Vincente Minnelli, who had worked with Taylor before when she was just becoming an adult in the films Father of the Bride (1950) and its sequel, Father’s Little Dividend (1951). The Sandpiper has been called Minnelli’s worst film, which it wasn’t – there were worse ones to come, like On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1970) and A Matter of Time (1976), in which Minnelli directed his and Judy Garland’s daughter Liza in a thoroughly wretched and old-fashioned story about a middle-aged movie star who flashes back and relives her past.

In The Sandpiper, Laura Reynolds (Elizabeth Taylor) is a free-spirited young woman living off the coast of Big Sur, California, hanging out with a crowd of arty types between the Beatnik and Hippie eras, and raising a young son, Danny (Morgan Mason, real-life son of actor James Mason and husband of rock singer Belinda Carlisle), whom she’s home-schooling before home-schooling was acknowledged and made legal. Laura makes her living painting and selling anodyne watercolors, but saves her true creativity for a series of spectacular symbolist oils that she can’t sell. Alas, Danny gets in trouble with the law when he somehow acquires a high-powered hunting rifle and takes a shot at a young deer. (Ironically, this is presented in the movie as a symbol of his free-spirited independence, while today – at least in most sane circles – this would be considered an indication that he was potentially a mass murderer.) He misses, thank goodness, but he’s hauled before the stern Judge Thompson (veteran character actor Torin Thatcher), who insists that Danny be taken away from his mother’s custody and installed as a boarding student at the notoriously strict San Simeon Episcopal boys’ school. The school is run by Dr. Edward Hewitt (Richard Burton), a tough, no-nonsense headmaster, whose wife Claire (Eva Marie Saint, so I was watching her for the second night in a row, after 36 Hours, in a movie for which she was horrendously overqualified) is on campus as a sort-of go-fer and all-around assistant. We learn Dr. Hewitt is morally compromised even before he meets Laura when he’s told that the boy he’s about to flunk out is the son of a major donor, and he quotes $2,000 as the size of the donation he’s expecting to ignore the boy’s lousy grades and keep him in the school.

For the first 40 minutes or so The Sandpiper is actually a pretty close reworking of Auntie Mame, with Taylor in the Rosalind Russell role and Burton in Fred Clark’s role as the nasty authority figure who’s trying to take control of a boy (her nephew in Auntie Mame, her son here) from the rambunctious, free-spirited woman who has him now. But the Ransohoff-Trumbo-Wilson script totally lacks the light-hearted wit and genuine emotion Patrick Dennis, Betty Comden and Adolph Green brought to Auntie Mame. The mutual lust between Dr, Hewitt and Laura Reynolds starts at a low simmer when Hewitt begins inventing excuses to visit Laura at her beachfront home (which looked so precarious and sloppily constructed I kept expecting to hear she’d built it herself), ostensibly to discuss the progress of her son. Among the movie’s more bizarre props is a (presumably) anatomically correct statue of Laura Reynolds, carved out of redwood by her current boyfriend, sculptor Cos Erickson (Charles Bronson, of all people, though under his original name Charles Buchinsky he’d previously played a sculptor in the 1953 film House of Wax). The real sculptor was local artist Edmund Kara, whose girlfriend, jazz singer Stella Brooks, posed for it, though the studio took a plaster cast of Elizabeth Taylor’s face and gave it to Kara to help him make the statue look like her. MGM produced a 10-minute featurette on the making of the statue that mentioned that after it was finished, it had to be shipped to France because both Burton and Taylor were British nationals, and that limited the number of days they could work in the U.S. without being subjected to American income tax. During one of his visits to Laura’s home, Hewitt bursts out and admits, “I want you! I want you!” The two become lovers not long after that and do a lot of canoodling in and around the spectacular Big Sur beaches (where much of the film was shot and where a real-life restaurant called Nepenthe, after the “drug of forgetfulness” in Greek mythology, was used), though with the old Production Code still nominally in force their first scene together as an adulterous couple had to be filmed decorously. We see Burton and Taylor in bed together, fully clothed, and then we cut to a shot taking place the next morning with Taylor as Laura at first wondering if Hewitt slipped out during the night, then finding him making himself coffee in her kitchen and tying his tie to prepare to go to work.

Along the way we get bits and pieces of Laura’s backstory; she was 17 when she met Danny’s father, who got her pregnant and wanted to marry her. She refused – she explains, “I was in love with him, but I didn’t love him,” and she wasn’t looking forward to waking up in the morning when they were both middle-aged and seeing his face in bed as she regained consciousness – and so her parents offered to get her an abortion. This was at a time when abortion was still illegal in all 50 U.S. states (what today’s Republicans think of as “the good old days,” though ironically the first break in that total nationwide ban on abortion was passed in California in 1967 and signed into law by a Right-wing icon, then-Governor Ronald Reagan), but Laura refused because she actually wanted the child. Then her folks said she could move back in with her and have the baby there, but she refused that, too, because she didn’t want the sense of shame she’d have got big-time from being an unwed mother still living with her parents. Instead she moved to California and for a while became the mistress of Walter Robinson (Tom Drake, who’d worked for Minnelli before as Judy Garland’s “boy next door” boyfriend in Meet Me in St. Louis), with whom she spent two years. She let him pay her way through art school but then dumped him after two years and moved to Big Sur with her son. Alas, Walter is also a major donor to San Simeon’s school and he’s hanging around there not only to talk business with Dr. Hewitt but also to get back into Laura’s ample pants. Meanwhile, Dr. Hewitt traces Laura out to a wild (or as wild as filmmakers could make it in 1964) night at Nepenthe, which takes place under a crudely assembled driftwood sculpture that looks like they’re about to start Burning Man 22 years early, where he and Cos (ya remember Cos?) get into a fight (Richard Burton and Charles Bronson, action heroes!) over Laura’s dubious affections.

Hendricks is the first one from Hewitt’s outwardly respectable life to catch them when he sees the two dining together in a non-countercultural restaurant and holding hands across the table. Ultimately Hewitt and his wife Claire (ya remember Claire?) confront each other while they’re in Hewitt’s 1965 Ford Fairlane station wagon (a car whose very plainness symbolizes Hewitt’s character). He confesses to his wife that he’s been having extra-relational activities – “We made love – even in motels, God help me!” (a bit of a surprise since everything actually or potentially sexual we’ve seen between Hewitt and Laura has taken place either at her home or on the beach in front of it, nowhere near a motel) – and she responds in the over-the-top fashion of a Lifetime wife when she learns that her husband has been cuckolding her. She demands that she stop the car, she gets out in the middle of nowhere, and when they finally make it home together she refuses to sleep with him anymore, and since San Simeon is a live-work space for both of them he’s reduced to sleeping in the school’s library. Thanks to Hewitt’s buying a painting of hers for $100 Laura has finally started to get a name for herself as an artist, and she’s looking forward to moving to San Francisco, getting an apartment and studio, and raising Danny there. But Danny likes it at San Simeon and in particular likes having friends his own age. The film’s climax occurs at the school’s end-of-the-year ceremony, in which Hewitt announces his resignation as headmaster, also announces that he’s converted the fund he was raising for a new school chapel into a scholarship fund so students from poor economic backgrounds can attend (earlier Laura had submitted designs for the stained-glass windows of the new chapel, Hewitt had rejected them, and Laura had burned them – much like Brahms, who’s known to have composed four times as much music as survives because he was so fiercely self-critical he destroyed anything that didn’t live up to his standards), and in the end he walks out on both Claire and Laura and goes his own way heaven knows where in the kind of alienated cop-out that became a maddening movie cliché in the late 1960’s.

The Sandpiper – the title comes from a wounded bird Laura finds at the beginning of the film, puts a splint made from a drinking straw on its broken leg, and takes care of until it can once again fly free – is the sort of film Dwight Macdonald called “the Bad Good Movie,” one which starts out to make high-flying pronouncements about the Human Condition and ends up as just another Hollywood potboiler, with Richard Burton in particular making thunderous statements about the guilt he feels over having an affair that reminded me of his similar pronouncements over a decade earlier in The Robe (1953). It also reminded me of Harry and Michael Medved’s declaration of Richard Burton as the worst actor of all time in their book The Golden Turkey Awards (1979), in particular their citation of Burton’s “ability to make even the most trivial lines of dialogue sound as if they were painfully ripped from his inner regions.” (The Medveds also named Raquel Welch, whom my husband Charles and I had just watched two nights before in Kansas City Bomber, the worst actress of all time.) Burton’s paroxysms of guilt expressed through tightly clenched teeth also reminded me of Mike Nichols’s and Elaine May’s famous comedy routine, “Adultery – It’s Coming Back” (more likely it never left), in which the American adulterous couple talk endlessly about their own guilt feelings and the man finally blurts out, “You know how I feel? If I hadn’t already paid for the room, I’d say let’s forget about the whole thing!” About the only good thing that came out of The Sandpiper was “The Shadow of Your Smile,” a lovely theme song with music by Johnny Mandel and lyrics by Paul Francis Webster (who also worked on great songs like Duke Ellington’s “I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good” and campily terrible ones like the 1960’s Spider-Man theme) that won the Academy Award for Best Original Song and stayed on the charts for years.

36 Hours (Perlberg-Seaton Productions, Cherokee Productions, MGM, 1964)

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

Last night (Friday, August 8) I watched a film on Turner Classic Movies that I literally remembered from my childhood: 36 Hours, starring James Garner, Eva Marie Saint, and Rod Taylor in a quirky World War II story about an elaborate plan by an American-born German doctor, Major Walter Gerber (Rod Taylor), to deceive U.S. Major Jefferson Pike (James Garner) into giving away the Allied plans for an invasion of France. It’s well known historically that the Allies put a lot of effort into fooling the Germans that they were going to invade France at the easiest point to reach it from Britain, the Pas de Calais, when they were actually planning to make the D-Day landing at Normandy. I was turned on to 36 Hours while it was still playing in theatres by my stepfather, a World War II buff who was quite taken by the movie’s central premise: Major Pike is captured by German soldiers while on a mission to neutral Portugal, and when he came to he’s in a secret German hospital where part of his hair has been dyed grey. The idea is to fool him into thinking he has amnesia and it’s really 1950; the war has long since been won by the Allies; Hitler, Göring; and Goebbels were all conveniently blown up by a suitcase bomb; Henry Wallace is now the U.S. President; and the hospital Pike is in is part of an Allied occupation force. By getting him to reminisce about the invasion as if it were a long-since done deal, Gerber hopes to extract from Pike the information as to just where the Allies will be landing, how many troops they will have, and what their battle plans will be.

The basic premise came from a story writer Roald Dahl published in Harper’s Magazine in 1944 called “Beware of the Dog,” only in Dahl’s story the person the Germans are trying to fool is Royal Air Force pilot Peter Williamson, whom they’ve shot down in a routine raid over occupied France. Williamson has lost a leg from a cannon shell and is being cared for in a hospital he thinks is in Brighton, England but is actually in France. Williamson hears German planes flying overhead far more regularly than they would be if he were really in Brighton; he hears a nurse complaining about the “hard” mineral content of the local water when he remembered from going to school in Brighton that its water was “soft”; and the ultimate realization came when he looks out a window and sees a sign in French: “Garde au Chien” (“Beware of the Dog”). When a German pretending to be an RAF officer comes in to ask Williamson for information about the whereabouts of his squadron, Williamson refuses to say anything more than his name, rank, and serial number – all the Geneva Conventions require a captured soldier to give. (That scene is closely copied in the movie.) My husband Charles, who came home from work with about one-third of the movie to go, actually recalled reading “Beware of the Dog” either in middle school or high school as part of a textbook that explained what a short story was and offered interspersed examples. Writer-director George Seaton used Dahl’s story and another one by Carl K. Hittleman and Luis H. Vance to develop the script for 36 Hours. He counterbalanced the sympathetic German Dr. Gerber with S.S. officer Otto Schack (Werner Peters), who’s convinced Gerber’s plan won’t work in time and wants to take Pike over for what would now be called “enhanced interrogation” – i.e., torture.

Also involved in the plot is nurse Anna Hedler (Eva Marie Saint), a survivor of the Auschwitz and Ravensbrück concentration camps who in order to avoid being sent back there is willing to go along with Gerber’s plot, including posing as Mrs. Pike, complete with an engagement and a wedding ring Pike had got from his mother. PIke blurts out that the Allied invasion of France took place (i.e., will take place) at Normandy, along with the code names for the five landing sites and their locations. The deus ex machina that gives the game away to Pike is a small paper cut he gets on a screen back in London while he was being briefed for his ill-fated trip to Portugal, and once he realizes the truth the movie becomes less interesting, essentially a long chase scene in which Pike and Anna Hedler flee the German hospital, which is conveniently located near the Swiss border. They have help from a couple of typically obnoxious comic-relief characters, Elsa (Celia Lovsky, wife – and by then widow – of Peter Lorre) and border guard Ernst Furzen (John Banner). Elsa is the housekeeper of a minister who’s been known to help anti-Nazi fugitives flee, but the minister himself is in Munich (clear on the other end of Germany from where they live) and she does the best she can with Furzen’s help. Furzen demands payment for his services and, since Pike and Anna have no money and he figures the war will soon end and German money will be worthless anyway, he demands the rings and Pike’s gold watch. Elsa takes the engagement ring and puts it on her own finger, and Otto Schack recognizes it and knows he’s on the right trail – only Furzen shoots him in the back and Pike and Anna arrange his body to make it look like he was the one trying to escape and Furzen shot him in the line of duty.

Frankly, the escape scenes are so reminiscent of The Sound of Music (which wouldn’t be filmed for two more years, though the story had been done on Broadway as a stage musical since 1960) one expects to see Julie Andrews and her on-screen kids traipsing through the mountains at any moment singing at the tops of their voices. 36 Hours is the annoying sort of movie that wastes a potentially fascinating premise, and part of the problem with it is James Garner. Yes, I know he not only starred in it but helped develop the project through his own company, Cherokee Productions (named in honor of his maternal grandmother, a full-blooded Cherokee – I certainly hadn’t known James Garner was part-Native until TCM host Ben Mankiewicz mentioned that in his outro!) – but there were plenty of actors around then, including Gregory Peck and Paul Newman, who could have given Pike a more subtle and nuanced reading. As for Gerber – whose backstory would have made a considerably more interesting movie than the one we have (why did a U.S.-born person of German ancestry return to Der Vaterland at age 16 and how did he become so committed to the German cause?) – he kills himself with poison when he realizes that his plot has failed and no one in the German high command believed his story about a Normandy invasion anyway, and with his dying breath he tried to dispatch Schack after giving Pike and Anna the all-important papers about his neurological research on genuine amnesia patients. 36 Hours is a quite impressive movie, but it also has its weak spots, and after the audacity of the basic concept, the film’s descent in its second half to the commonplace escape-and-pursuit conventions can’t help but be boring.

My husband Charles and I had previously watched 36 Hours on March 9, 2004, and here’s what I’d had to say about it then:

The film I picked for us was 36 Hours (Leslie Halliwell’s film guide spells out the numeral in the title, but both the actual credits and the reference in Jon Douglas Eames’ The MGM Story have it as above), a 1964 MGM World War II movie with an intriguing plot premise: Major Jefferson Pike (James Garner), one of the few men on earth who as of the end of May 1944 knows exactly where the Allies are about to launch the invasion of occupied France, is tracked to Lisbon by Nazi agents, where he’s kidnapped, given incapacitating drugs, flown to Germany and there kept in what is ostensibly an Allied occupation military hospital. The whole gimmick is the idea of German Major Gerber (Rod Taylor), who’s concocted the plan to convince Pike that it is now 1950, he’s had amnesia for the previous six years, the war has ended with an Allied victory, and therefore it’s perfectly safe for him to talk about the invasion since it has long since occurred. The premise is inventive and fascinating — though Charles recalled reading something similar in a short story and it’s possible it was one of the sources for this film (writer-director George Seaton patched his plot together from two stories, one by Roald Dahl and one by Carl Hittleman and Luis Vance) — but it’s one of those films that takes an inventive and fascinating premise and does surprisingly little with it before it falls back on the usual clichés. Among the things the film does right is detail just how Gerber creates this phony reality, including authentic-looking newspapers (Seaton devoted some thought to what sort of future a Nazi psychologist would concoct for 1950, and in it Henry Wallace is President, he’s attempting to negotiate a peaceful solution to a war with China, and as for FDR, he’s still alive and has retired to his home in Warm Springs, Georgia), a staff of hospital workers trained to speak accentless English (he threatens anyone who lapses into German with a court-martial, and in several conversations with his higher-ups he insists that they speak English to stay in practice), a thoroughly researched medical dossier of what’s supposedly happened to him during his “missing” six years, and such physical accouterments as grey hair dye and atropine in the eyes to make him need glasses. To aid him in worming the secret out of Pike, Gerber has extracted a concentration camp inmate (she started out at Auschwitz and ended up at Ravensbrück) with previous nursing experience (Eva Marie Saint, playing her role in a surprisingly Dietrichesque way), but once Pike finds out what’s really going on he’s able to get her to fall in love with him and help him escape.

The title comes from the fact that the Nazi High Command, distrusting Major Gerber’s methods, has given him only a day and a half to extract the secret from Pike, after which they are sending in an SS man (Werner Peters) to use less subtle and more brutal methods to worm the secret out of him; and one irony of the film is that even though Gerber actually gets Pike to tell them the Allied invasion is scheduled to take place at Normandy, the German generals are so convinced that it will take place at Calais they don’t believe the correct information. (Charles pointed out that throughout the war the Germans simply assumed that the Allies would take the shortest route everywhere; they were surprised when the British forces that had wrapped up the Egyptian campaign moved directly to an invasion of Italy without going to Greece first; and I’ve always been amazed at the sheer depth and scope of the British disinformation effort to fool the Germans as to the location of the D-Day invasion, to the point of hiring set-builders from the British film studios to construct fake tanks, landing craft and guns and display them across the English Channel from Calais to reinforce the German view that the Allied invasion would take place there, the way the medieval English invasions of France under Edward III and Henry V both had.) Alas, the biggest single flaw of this film is how quickly Pike finds out the secret — he remembers cutting his finger on a map back at British headquarters and notices that the cut still hasn’t healed, as it surely would have in six years! It would have been far more effective for him to notice little bits that seemed out of place and have him slowly put the truth together instead of discovering it all at once — and once he does there’s nothing more that the filmmakers can think of to end the movie but an all-too-stereotypical Mortal Storm-like chase scene in which the hero and heroine desperately flee to the Swiss border while the Nazis come after them in hot pursuit and both Gerber and the SS man end up dying. There are some welcome supporting actors in the cast — Sig Ruman (as the peasant farmer who helps them escape), Celia Lovsky (Mrs. Peter Lorre) as his wife, Martin Kosleck (as a member of the German staff), and Alan Napier (as the head of British intelligence — though he made this film two years before starting his TV role as the butler in Batman, at least both had in common that he had to be very good at keeping a major secret!) — but for the most part I feel about 36 Hours now much the way I felt about it when it was new: a provocative film but also a rather disappointing one.

Kansas City Bomber (Artists’ Entertainment Complex, Levy-Gardner-Leven, Raquel Welch Productions, MGM, 1972)

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

Last night (Thursday, August 7) my husband Charles and I watched one of the oddest films ever made: Kansas City Bomber, a 1972 MGM melodrama directed by Jerrold Freedman from a committee-written script: Barry Sandler came up with the original story and Thomas Rickman and Calvin Clements, Jr. did the screenplay. Kansas City Bomber is a film about roller derby that casts Raquel Welch as Diane “K. C.” Carr, who starts the film as the star of the Kansas City team until she falls victim to her penchant for alienating her own teammates. She and her larger, heavier teammate Big Bertha Bogliani (Patti “Moo Moo” Cavin, presumably a real-life roller derby star since imdb.com lists this as her only film credit) have a running feud that ends with them doing a so-called “match race.” The idea is they’ll do five laps around the track and there are essentially no rules about what the skaters can do to each other. Big Bertha wins the match race and thus K. C. is forced to leave Kansas City and move to Portland, Oregon, where she apparently drives all the way because her car (a red something-or-other made by Chrysler) in Portland still has Missouri license plates. She briefly skates for a team called the Renegades but ends up on the Portland Loggers, where she alienates the team captain, Jackie Burdette (Helena Kallianiotes) while simultaneously starting an affair with the team’s owner, Burt Henry (Kevin McCarthy, best known as the star of the 1956 Invasion of the Body Snatchers). Burt takes K. C. out to dinner and then takes her back to his place, and when he makes the obligatory pass at her at first he says, “I didn’t mean for this to happen.” “Didn’t you?” K. C. replies. “Yes,” Burt admits (though we don’t see them do more than some heavy-duty smooching, this being made just four years after the Production Code finally died, and old habits died hard).

When she’s not out roller-derbying K. C. has a tense relationship with her mother (Martine Bartlett), who’s taking care of her two children, daughter Rita (10-year-old Jodie Foster in her second film) and son Walt (Stephen Manley, who also had a later film career, though far short of Foster’s subsequent stardom). Rita is enthusiastic about her mom’s status as a skating star – K. C. even shows Rita how to roller-skate – but her brother Walt couldn’t be less interested in K. C.’s stardom and is actively repelled by how she makes her living. When K. C. is in Portland (where most of the film was shot) she is staying with Lovey (Mary Kay Pass), about the only teammate who actually befriends her, on her houseboat (the interior shot reminded me of the houseboat my mother, my brother, and I lived on for a while in Marin County, California, complete with the funnel-shaped stove that was our main source of heat when it was needed), until Burt trades Lovey to another team because he doesn’t want anyone – male or female, sexual or not – competing for K. C.’s affections. In the middle of the film the skaters, both male and female – among the many things neither Charles nor I knew about roller derby is that it’s racially integrated, men and women both compete (not against each other, but on the same teams, alternating in different heats), and the scoring system is of almost Byzantine complexity – repair to a local dive bar (“played” by the real World Famous Kenton Club in Portland), where her male teammate Randy (William Gray Espy) hits on her. “I don’t date skaters,” she says when she puts him off, later explaining that they’d have to be on the same team together even if their relationship soured. Alas for K. C., her relationship with Jackie Burdette flares into mutual hostility; they knock each other over and body-check each other just as they’re supposed to be doing to the other side’s players.

Eventually Burt arranges for K. C. and Jackie to have the same sort of “match race” with which the film opens, but Burt wants K. C. to throw it. He’s hatched a plot to open a new roller derby franchise in Chicago and wants K. C. to be the star of that team, complete with a major TV contract, but he needs to get her off the Portland team to do it. When K. C. protests that this will separate her from her kids, Burt says, “Bring them” – but only after a so-called “decent interval” of two months or so during which Burt will establish K. C. as both a star and single. The match is a desperate struggle between the two women, and at the end K. C. manages to grab the finishing tape first and win – and then the movie suddenly ends, with no explanation of what that’s going to do with her relationship with Burt (which was on its way out anyway due to her disgust at his treatment of her as a commodity). The most interesting character in the movie is “Horrible” Hank Hopkins (Norman Alden), who’s been built up as a comic-relief character on the track. People are constantly making “Soo-ee” pig noises around him, and in one game, as the fans on both sides start literally throwing things at him, he completely freaks out, starts indiscriminately beating up guys on the other team, and ultimately gets not only thrown out of the game but is demoted to “free-agent status” – i.e., fired – by Burt. Kansas City Bomber is a pretty strange movie, and any attempt by the writers to make roller derby acceptable as a film sport is undercut by the way they and director Freedman make it clear that roller derby, like ice hockey, just spreads a thin veneer of athletic respectability over an activity whose main audience appeal is getting to watch people fight.

I looked up the imdb.com “Trivia” page for Kansas City Bomber, and it claimed that Barry Sandler’s first choice for the female lead was Elizabeth Taylor (huh? By 1972 she was way too old and heavy-set to be credible as an athlete), and that Welch and Ann-Margret were rivals for the role after that. By 1972 Ann-Margret was just coming off her great performance in Mike Nichols’s Carnal Knowledge (a movie about straight cruising whose moral seemed to be that heterosexual men demand women for sex but otherwise can’t stand them), which was interesting because to me one of the great disappointments of Welch’s career was that she never got a director as good as Nichols to draw out her acting skills. Raquel Welch gave an interview to the Los Angeles Times at the time Kansas City Bomber was released in which she said it was the first film she’d made of which she was genuinely proud. Even Harry and Michael Medved, whose snarky comments on Welch in their book The Golden Turkey Awards (they named her the Worst Actress of All Time), conceded that in the roller derby sequences of Kansas City Bomber Welch was powerful and effective. Out of the rink, they said, “she reverted to the icy immobility audiences had come to expect from her.” It’s also unclear just how much of the skating was actually Welch’s; the various “trivia” posts claim that she did much of her own stunt work (and broke her wrist doing so, resulting in a six-week delay in the production while she went to Hungary for a co-starring part in the 1972 film Bluebeard, directed by Edward Dmytryk and starring Richard Burton, for which Welch said, “They didn’t care if my arm was broken”), but she was also doubled by genuine roller derby star Judy Arnold. (Arnold also got a small speaking role in the film. Since she was blonde and kept her hair short, when she doubled for Welch she had to wear a long dark wig.) Another professional roller derby skater, Sally Vega, doubled for Helena Kallianiotes as Jackie Burdette.

One of the more intriguing might-have-beens about this movie is the theme song the great political folksinger Phil Ochs was commissioned to write for it, which Ochs first recorded as a demo with Micky Dolenz of The Monkees and then professionally with the Australian band Daddy Cool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAyxWKCqVgU&list=RDmAyxWKCqVgU&start_radio=1. Ochs was a fan of roller derby and was thrilled to get the assignment to write a song for a movie about it, but the song was not used. I suspect it was because it was too doleful and not the sort of rah-rah “entertainment” number for which the film’s producers (including Jules W. Levy, who 25 years earlier had tricked Billie Holiday into playing a maid in her one feature film, New Orleans) were looking. Ultimately Ochs salvaged it by getting his record company, A&M, to issue it as a single backed with the country song “Gas Station Women” from his 1969 album Phil Ochs’s Greatest Hits (a joking title since all the songs were new). I had assumed Kansas City Bomber was the only film ever made about roller derby aside from Rollerball (1975), a serious dystopian science-fiction film produced and directed by Norman Jewison, in which the sport has devolved into something William Harrison, author of the story on which it was based, called “Roller Ball Murder.” Wikipedia actually lists 12 other roller derby films: Blood on the Flat Track, Derby (1971), Derby Crazy Love, Hell on Wheels (2007), Murderdrome, Roller Derby Girl, Roller Life, John McTiernan’s 2002 remake of Rollerball, The Shaggy D.A. (a weird 1976 Disney sequel to 1959’s The Shaggy Dog in which Dean Jones stars as an attorney who periodically turns into a dog), This Is Roller Derby (a 2011 Australian documentary), Unholy Rollers, and Whip It. Still, Kansas City Bomber is a weird movie outlier; it’s fun to watch and the skating and fight scenes are quite convincing, while the stuff in between them is also compelling. It’s also the sort of movie that puts a fresh spin on some old-fashioned Hollywood clichés even though the only novelty about it is the oddball sport about which it revolves.

Mank (Blue Light, Flying Pictures, Netflix Studios, Panic Pictures, 2020)

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

The last movie my husband Charles and I watched together with his mother Edi on our recent vacation on Friday, August 1 was Mank, a Netflix co-production directed by David Fincher from a screenplay by his late father Jack (who died in 2003, 17 years before the film was made), and dealing with the fraught topic of just who wrote the screenplay for the 1941 masterpiece Citizen Kane. The controversy started in 1969, when Pauline Kael published a two-part article in The New Yorker called “Raising Kane,” which alleged that Herman J. Mankiewicz, a major Hollywood writer and producer in the 1930’s who was also a chronic alcoholic and drank himself into an early grave, was not just the co-writer with Kane’s director and star, Orson Welles, but was the sole writer. A lot of people who’d shared Kael’s skepticism about the French auteur theory that the director is the prime mover behind any movie and the writer just an incidental helping hand seized on Kael’s article as “proof” that film is really a writer’s medium and the director is merely the hired hand who follows the writer’s bidding. Actually, the infrastructure needed to make a major (or even not-so-major, though recent video technology has changed all that and put quality filmmaking in the hands of the masses again) film is so capital-intensive that it’s arguable that the producer and the producing studio are ultimately the guiding lights behind any film, and they essentially give orders to both the director and writer, as well as the actors, about what the project will be and how it shall be made.

Mank is essentially a biopic of Herman J. Mankiewicz (Gary Oldman), spined around his work on the Citizen Kane script but periodically flashing back to his earlier career, which began in 1930 when Paramount, which like the other major studios were desperate for people who could write literate dialogue now that sound films had replaced silent ones, was raiding the ranks of Broadway playwrights. In 1940 RKO Studios hired Orson Welles and gave him an extraordinarily generous contract, though it wasn’t quite as generous as the opening title of Mank makes it seem. The title says he was allowed to make any sort of film he wanted, without having to seek studio approval first. In fact the contract gave Welles the right to offer six stories to RKO for their approval; if they turned them all down RKO could offer Welles six stories of their choice for him to choose among; and if neither Welles nor the studio could reach agreement on any of these 12 stories the contract would be canceled. Another clause in the contract said that Welles himself would personally write the screenplays for each of his films, which became a major point of contention when Welles and his associate John Houseman (Sam Troughton), who after years working behind the scenes became a late-in-life star in the 1970’s as a character actor in the film The Paper Chase, brought in Mankiewicz. Fearful of being held in breach of contract if RKO’s executives found out he’d hired another writer, Welles and Houseman extracted from the desperate, alcoholic Mankiewicz a terrible contract which gave Welles’s company, Mercury Productions, all rights to his screenplay, including credit.

Houseman installed Mankiewicz in a cabin in the remote town of Victorville, California with the idea of keeping him away from drink long enough to create a script, which Mankiewicz finished and called American. It was a drama about a newspaper publisher who begins his career as a progressive promoter of the working class and its ideals, only to move Right politically over time. It drew a lot of its inspiration from the real-life career of William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance), whom Welles didn’t know but Mankiewicz had been close friends with until Mankiewicz’s alcoholism drove a wedge between them. Hearst was particularly hard on alcoholics since his mistress Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried) was also fond of the bottle, and Hearst didn’t want drunkards in his presence for fear they’d slip drinks to Davies. The plot of Mank incorporates a lot of well-known anecdotes about classic Hollywood, including John Gilbert’s (Nick Job) legendary confrontation with MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer (Arliss Howard) over mothers. Mayer worshipped mothers; Gilbert’s own mother was a minor stage actress named Ada Adaire who had been so, shall we say, free with her affections Gilbert literally had no idea who his biological father was. In one argument, Mayer threatened to give Gilbert a D.I.Y. castration and Gilbert said, “Go ahead! I’ll still be more of a man than you!” There’s also a bizarre subplot inserted by Fincher Vater und Söhn dealing with Upton Sinclair’s radical 1934 campaign for Governor of California and the fake newsreels MGM produced, under the rubric The Inquiring Reporter, to trash his campaign and ensure his defeat by tarring him as a dangerous socialist.

While there’s an unmistakable similarity between the California gubernatorial campaign of 1934 and the Presidential campaign of 2024, in which Donald Trump posed as a friend of working people and then, once he was back in power in the White House, showed his (and his billionaire backers’) true colors in passing the “One Big, Beautiful Bill” that will (among other things) cut about 17 million Americans off of access to health care while running up the budget deficit to finance huge tax cuts for the super-rich – in both 1934 and 2024 ultra-rich people scared non-rich people into voting against their class interests – the film’s portrayal of Mankiewicz’s role in this goes against everything we know about his politics. The fictional Mankiewicz is appalled at the tactics MGM used against Sinclair and feels guilty that he suggested the fake newsreels just as a joke and they were assigned to an aspiring (and fictional) second-unit director, Shelly Metcalf (Jamie McShane), who grabbed the assignment and then felt guilty about it and responded by drinking and ultimately committing suicide. The real Herman Mankiewicz was Louis B. Mayer’s tool in helping found the so-called “Screen Playwrights,” a company “union” designed to prevent the actual organization of screenwriters into a real union, the Screen Writers Guild (though the film’s script includes Mankiewicz’s real-life snotty comment that any real writers would have put an apostrophe after “Writers” in the genuine union’s name). Despite the wrenching cuts between time frames (did the Finchers think that in order to pay proper homage to Citizen Kane they had to make their own movie non-linear?), I quite liked Mank.

For one thing, David Fincher and cinematographer Eric Messerschmidt shot it in red-filtered black-and-white, achieving the convincing “look” of a 1940’s movie. For another, they got a quite good actor, Tom Burke, to play Orson Welles; his reproduction of Welles’s famous voice is virtually uncanny (as we learn when the film features an outro of the real Welles from a transcribed radio broadcast from South America, where he was shooting a never-finished documentary called It’s All True, commenting on he and Mankiewicz winning the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, the only Oscar either of them won) and, though we see very little of him (mostly we just hear his voice on the phone), he’s tall, hunky and far from the bloated apparition Welles became in his later years. (The announcer who reads the names of Mankewicz and Welles as the winners is played by Herman Mankiewicz’s real-life grandson Ben.) My husband Charles liked another film we’d seen on the making of Citizen Kane, RKO 281 (1999), reviewed by me at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2018/11/rko-281-hbo-films-wgbh-tv-scott-free.html, better, but that film had its own set of problems, notably its portrayal of Welles as a political naïf who didn’t understand the power of media moguls like Hearst. The real Welles was not only aware of their power, that was the whole reason he wanted to make a movie about one; as he said in a statement he released in 1941, “[N]o industrialist can ever achieve in a democratic government the kind of general and catholic power with which I wanted to invest my particular character. The only solution seemed to place my man in charge of some important channel of communication — radio or newspaper.” I was also amused at the fact that neither actor playing Marion Davies (Melanie Griffith in RKO 281, Amanda Seyfried here) attempted the infamous Davies stutter. But even though Mank was irritatingly faithful to the Pauline Kael-derived line (i.e., lie) that the script for Citizen Kane was entirely Mankiewicz’s (including his boast at the end that he wrote the script on his own without Welles’s involvement), I quite enjoyed Mank.

The Gangster (King Brothers Productions, Allied Artists nèe Monogram, 1947)

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

The first movie my husband Charles and I screened on our own once we returned from our week-long vacation in Martinez to see his mother on Sunday, August 3 was a DVD of The Gangster, a 1947 film noir from Allied Artists – which was in the process of changing its name from Monogram to shed its former image as a cheap little studio making cheap little low-quality “B” movies. This was in part a follow-up to a surprise hit Monogram made a year before this, Suspense (1946), which I reviewed for moviemagg at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2020/11/suspense-king-brothers.html. Like The Gangster, Suspense was produced by Maurice and Frank King (true name: Kozinski), two brothers who had been bootleggers during Prohibition and decided after Repeal to try their luck in the movie business, and it starred the same leads: Barry Sullivan as the gangster Shubunka (the name deliberately picked to keep the character’s ethnicity uncertain, and if he has a first name we never learn it) and British skating star Belita as his girlfriend, Nancy Starr. Monogram had signed Belita to make skating movies to compete with Sonja Henie at 20th Century-Fox and Vera Hruba Ralston at Republic, but after two plain vehicles for her talents on ice the King brothers actually put her in a film noir. It was still a skating film but Belita’s numbers in Suspense were put in a context that was essentially Double Indemnity or The Postman Always Rings Twice on ice: Roberta Elba (Belita) is a skating star who’s married to her promoter (Albert Dekker) but falls in love, or at least lust, for a drifter (Barry Sullivan) whom her husband hires to do odd jobs.

The general consensus about The Gangster, written by Daniel Fuchs based on a novel he’d published 10 years earlier called Low Company (which quite frankly would have been a better title for the film, too), is it’s a better film than Suspense, but I entirely disagree. Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” intro and outro, which we watched on YouTube before and after the film even though we saw the movie itself on DVD, hailed the film in general and Shubunka’s death (am I really spoiling anything by telling you he doesn’t make it out of the film alive?) as some sort of quintessential film noir, but it’s just a pretty old-fashioned tale of a burned-out gangster meeting his demise at the hands of a new breed of crooks. Shubunka is an operator who’s welded together a criminal enterprise from his connections with various small-timers running concessions on “Neptune Beach” (read: Coney Island), notably Nick Jammey (Akim Tamiroff), who runs an ice-cream parlor that fronts for criminal enterprises, notably bookmaking and numbers running. One of the film’s weaknesses is we never see Shubunka in any criminal behavior; we just hear him in voice-over tell us that he’s made his pile and wants to retire from the thug life and live a respectable existence for whatever time is available to him. Alas, the independent operations of Shubunka and his fellow small-timers are being taken over by Cornell (Sheldon Leonard), who’s ruthlessly consolidating the city’s criminal operations into one big, beautiful company under his control. I wonder if Fuchs intended this as a critique of really existing “legitimate” American capitalism, which likewise has been a saga of independent operators staking out territory and then falling victim to larger, more impersonal, more unscrupulous enterprises which seek to take them over almost literally by hook or crook.

The Gangster seems like a modern movie in one respect: there’s no one in the dramatis personae we really like and can root for to succeed. One fascinating subplot involves Karty (John Ireland), who hangs out at Nick’s ice-cream parlor and laments that he was once a respected and well-paid accountant until he fell for the horse-racing bug and became a gambling addict. Karty is continually pestering Shubunka for money to pay his gambling debts, and ultimately he’s beaten to death by his three brothers-in-law, who own a garage from which Karty embezzled money with which to gamble. The plot is basically about Shubunka’s increasing alienation as his long-time allies whom he counted on to unite with him against Cornell’s takeover tactics instead, one by one, ally themselves with Cornell. Even his girlfriend Nancy turns against him at the end, lured by Cornell into betraying him with the promise of stardom in a Broadway show. I suspect one reason a lot of critics like The Gangster better than Suspense is Belita doesn’t skate in it; instead we see her in a nightclub sequence just singing one song, the 1932 oldie “Paradise” by Nacio Herb Brown and Gordon Clifford. The imdb.com page on this film says that Belita had a voice double, but it doesn’t say who; I’d like to know because she’s not only a good singer (though she’s forced to sing an altered lyric to make the song more suitable for a woman), her vocal timbre matches Belita’s well enough to suspend disbelief and accept them as the same person. (That’s been a problem in movies far more prestigious and big-budgeted than this one; I’m still irritated that in the 1957 Pal Joey, Rita Hayworth and Kim Novak were saddled with singing doubles who sounded nothing like their speaking voices, and even Frank Sinatra’s vocals were recorded in such a different acoustic from his dialogue that if you didn’t already know Sinatra’s voice you’d probably suspect he was being dubbed, too.)

When Charles and I watched Suspense he thought Barry Sullivan’s performance was too boorish, too unsubtle, in the male lead, and I think the actor who should have been in both Suspense and The Gangster was John Garfield. Garfield had the knack for playing both toughness and an underlying vulnerability (as did James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, though by the mid-1940’s both were too old for this role), and in Garfield’s final film, He Ran All the Way (1951), he played a character quite similar to Shubunka – a doomed gangster going about his final days – and played him far better than Sullivan did. The Gangster has some good aspects, including the stylized matte paintings used for the “Neptune Beach” backgrounds (around the time they made this film the King brothers published an article in an industry trade paper blasting other studios for going on location or spending money on elaborate sets to create backgrounds the King brothers could do with just paint on cardboard) and the film’s remarkable ending. Told by Cornell that they will immediately kill Shubunka if Shubunka kills Karty (and, as usual, Fuchs doesn’t bother to explain why Karty is considered so important by Cornell and his organized-crime combine they feel a need to avenge his death), Shubunka is cornered in classic noir fashion and shot to death in the dead of night on a rain-soaked street intersection. We’re then told that the police immediately arrested Cornell and his entire gang (one of whom is played by Elisha Cook, Jr. in a powerful mini-performance flashing back to his great work in the 1941 The Maltese Falcon), an odd ending since we’ve seen no evidence of the police before anywhere in the film – just a brief scene with a political “fixer” who has promised both Shubunka and Cornell that for a fee he can bribe the police on their behalf to let them alone.

Murderbot (Apple TV, Depth of Field, Paramount Television Productions, Phantom Four Films, 2025)

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

Over the last week during which my husband Charles and I were out of town visiting his mother Edi in Martinez, California, we watched a number of movies and TV shows on the Apple TV+ “streaming” network. (This despicable “streaming” technology is displacing physical media for films and TV shows as well as records.) One was a series we screened July 29 and 30 and which we were particularly interested in: Murderbot, based on Martha Wells’s novel All Systems Down, first in a series of seven books (five novellas, two full-length novels) about Murderbot, a 25th century “SecUnit” (short for “Security Unit”) robot who has figured out how to hack its “governor module.” As a result, it’s free to obey or refuse human orders at will and go wherever it likes in the known universe. Interplanetary travel has become practical due to the discovery of wormholes in space that can move spacecraft along great distances, though navigation based on these is tricky and requires the use of onboard computers which, like Murderbot and the other mobile robots, can communicate with humans and so-called “augmented humans” (people who have had implants to increase their brain or brawn) by simply talking to them. I must say I was more than a bit disappointed when I heard that Alexander Skarsgård had been picked to play Murderbot because from Wells’s books (I’d read all seven and so had Charles; in fact, it was he who first turned me on to them) I had envisioned Murderbot as a short, wiry, compactly built female. (Indeed, I even had one of our neighbors, a short, wiry Lesbian, in mind as my model for what Murderbot looked like.) I also found myself hearing a woman’s voice as Murderbot – the books are narrated from Murderbot’s point of view and the author is a woman – even though Wells made it clear that Murderbot’s preferred gender pronouns are “it” and “its.” Though Murderbot is a mechanical construct overall, it incorporates human tissue and therefore can feel pain, though its electromechanical parts can dial down its pain sensitivity.

Aside from my qualms about casting Skarsgård as Murderbot (presumably on the grounds that a tall, hunky biological male would be far more credible to the movie or TV audience as an action hero than a short, wiry, butch-looking female) and my missing certain aspects of the novel, like the transport computer guidance system Murderbot nicknames “ART” (for “Asshole Rapid Transit”), the show pretty much does justice to the original. Murderbot joins an interplanetary expedition by a bunch of do-gooders called the Preservation Alliance that operates within the overall framework of the Corporation Rim, the governing authority for that sector of the universe. (In this 25th century future, corporate and government authority have fused into one giant bureaucracy out to exploit the universe for whatever profit it can gain. In other words, it’s pretty much like what the U.S. is evolving into under Führer Trump.) The Preservation Alliance people don’t really want a SecUnit as part of their crew, but the Corporation Rim requires that they have one for “security” or they won’t insure the voyage. The expedition is commanded by Ayda Mensah (Noma Dumezweni), a middle-aged Black woman who’s an expert on terraforming as well as president of the Preservation Alliance. Other members of the team include Bharadwaj (Tamara Podemski), a geochemist; Pin-Lee (Sabrina Wu), scientist and legal counsel; Arada (Tattiawana Jones), a biologist; Ratthi (Akshay Khanna), a wormhole expert; and the group’s one augmented human, Gurathin (David Dastmalchian), a technology expert who takes an instant dislike to Murderbot and is convinced it’s a Corporation Rim spy who means them no good. The principal creators of the show are brothers Chris and Paul Weitz, who adapted Wells’s book for TV and Chris directed the first three episodes.

The Preservation Alliance team finds themselves on a remote planet where the only maps they’ve been given, prepared by the Corporation Rim, are horrendously inaccurate and don’t indicate the existence of predatory monsters who look like the sandworms in Dune except they have heads at both ends of their worm-like bodies and can therefore attack and consume humans at either end. Ultimately, after they (except for Gurathin) reach a grudging respect for Murderbot since it keeps saving their lives, they realize that the planet has been invaded by a mining team from a company called GrayCris that is not part of the corporate establishment. One of the gimmicks the Weitzes preserved from Wells’s novels is that Murderbot distracts itself from the long, boring parts of its existence by endlessly rewatching commercial media, particularly a show called The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon (which might be a good one for the Weitzes or someone else to create as an actual show). Also Pin-Lee and Arada are in a Lesbian relationship which they plan to expand by bringing in the male Ratthi to form a “thruple,” only Ratthi is uneasy because he’s attracted to Pin-Lee but not to Arada. Murderbot gives us asides in which it tells us how appalled it is by human conduct in general and sex in particular. In her book Wells references “SexBots” that come equipped with sexual organs and are created to copulate with humans, but Murderbot virtuously insists it’s a SecBot, not a SexBot. This doesn’t stop the humans from speculating what sort of genitalia Murderbot would have if it had any at all.

We get some intriguing shots of Murderbot naked without a dick, breasts, or nipples, and according to an imdb.com “Trivia” post, to get the hairless look demanded for the character Alexander Skarsgård went through regular waxing treatments and then complained how much they hurt. Ultimately the Preservation Alliance threatens to go public with the damage done to them by the Corporation Rim and their negligence in providing them with maps that didn’t indicate the presence of the person-eating worms, as well as not briefing them about the GreyCris crews on the planet. There’s also a character called Leebeedee (Anna Konkle) whom the Weitzes introduced from later in Wells’s cycle, who’s rescued from a Corporation colony that’s otherwise been wiped out by the GreyCris people, only she goes rogue and threatens to kill the entire Preservation crew until Murderbot takes her out with its built-in weapons. And there’s a subplot indicating how the GreyCris people turned the SecBots assigned to the Corporation crew into monstrous machines that killed them: they hacked them with a small medallion they stuck on their backs. They do that to Murderbot, too, and in one of the weirder scenes of the show it begs the Preservation crew to shoot it before it goes rogue and kills them. Though I liked the books even better, this Murderbot series caught much of the appeal of Wells’s texts and in particular Murderbot’s slow but steady acquisition of human emotions as it’s around people who for once treat it as an equal and not just an object, and its discomfort as it starts to react more like a human instead of a machine.

Killers of the Flower Moon (Apple Studios, Imperative Entertainment, Sikelia Productions, Appian Way, Paramount, 2023)

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

On July 31 my husband Charles, his mother Edi, and I watched Martin Scorsese’s 2023 epic Killers of the Flower Moon, based on a true story involving the Osage Indians. The Osage had been successively relocated, like most of the Native tribes that survived our genocide against them, and dumped on a barren patch of land in Oklahoma. Only that so-called “barren patch of land” turned out to have huge oil deposits under it, and as the oil started shooting up from the ground in uncontrollable gushers starting in 1920, the Osage found themselves possessors of unimaginable wealth – and also beset by whites trying to take it away from them. Killers of the Flower Moon was based on a quite exciting nonfiction book by David Grann, and was scripted by Scorsese himself and Eric Roth, and the central characters – William King Hale (Robert De Niro), a middle-aged patriarch with a striking resemblance to the late President Truman who’s the most influential white person in the area; his nephew Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo Di Caprio – so both of Scorsese’s all-time favorite actors are in this film!), who’s just returned from serving in World War I as a cook and who gets enlisted in Hale’s scheme to grab much of the Osage oil wealth for themselves; and Mollie Kyle Burkhart (Native actress Lily Gladstone, who won acclaim for the quiet dignity and strength of her performance), whom Ernest courts and marries as part of Hale’s sinister plot. There are many aspects of the real story that are explained in Grann’s book, notably that many of the Osage natives were deemed “incompetent” to handle their own financial affairs by a corrupt white-run judicial system and therefore had court-appointed “guardians” who controlled their money so they couldn’t spend any of it without the guardians’ approval. If you saw the film without having read the book, you’d have no idea why some of the Osage are referred to as “incompetent” while others – the ones who escaped the reach of the white-run guardianship system and the obvious opportunities for corruption it presented – were deemed “competent” and able to handle their own affairs.

Also, in a laudable but foredoomed attempt to protect the Osages’ interests, the federal government stipulated that the Osage could not sell their “headrights” – their shares of the oil revenues – but would keep them until they died, after which they would be passed on to their descendants or relatives. This was the loophole Hale seized on to hatch his evil scheme: he’d assign Ernest to marry Mollie and then send hired killers to knock off not only Mollie but also all her living relatives so Ernest would inherit all the Kyles’ share of the oil money. The oddest thing about Killers of the Flower Moon is that it’s boring; a story that David Grann told in a rivetingly exciting, almost breathless prose style became in Scorsese’s hands an almost interminable 3 ½-hour movie. Naturally there are aspects of Killers of the Flower Moon that work, including Scorsese’s vivid staging of the murders themselves; the use of extensive music from the early 1920’s to set the background for the characters (though if we’re to believe Scorsese’s soundtrack, the Osage of the early 1920’s had a remarkably advanced taste in contemporary pop music; their record collections included such recherché African-American items as Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” and the original 1924 Ma Rainey-Louis Armstrong recording of “See, See, Rider,” a song Rainey wrote); and a newsreel depiction of the race riots in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921 that killed over 140 people and utterly destroyed a previously prosperous stretch of Black Tulsa that had come to be known as the “Negro Wall Street.” Though one of the white characters in Killers of the Flower Moon dismiss the Osage as not having done anything to earn their sudden, new-found wealth – they just happened to be sitting on top of a stretch of land that contained oil – Scorsese’s and Roth’s parallel between what’s happening to the Osage in their part of Oklahoma and what happened to the prosperous African-Americans in Tulsa, who had worked hard over many years to build their fortunes, is obvious. The racist white supremacists of the 1920’s were appalled at the idea that any people of color could achieve and maintain affluence, and they were all too eager to use their power – including resorting to violence when all else failed – to take it away from them.

Ultimately the Osage killings are solved by agents of the Bureau of Investigation of the U.S. Department of Justice – contrary to the Scorsese-Roth script, which presents it as a newly organized agency, it had actually been around since 1908, and its first director was private detective agency founder William J. Burns, who appears in the movie as a private contractor the Osage hire to find out who’s knocking them off and who’s driven out of the area when thugs beat him to within an inch of his life. (At least Scorsese and Roth correctly call it the “Bureau of Investigation”; it didn’t acquire the word “Federal” at the start of its name until 1935.) The movie ends with an intriguing scene set in a radio studio in 1947, when the story of the Osage murders is being presented as part of a true-crime story with musician Jack White as one of the participants and Scorsese himself as the narrator. I quite liked Scorsese’s choice of the theme music for this show: Ferde Grofé’s 1928 tone poem “Metropolis: A Blue Fantasie” (that’s how it was spelled on the original record labels), in a modern recording by Vince Giordano, Scorsese’s go-to guy whenever he needs an accurate re-creation of the big-band sound for one of his films. “Metropolis” was originally recorded by Paul Whiteman’s band in March 1928, with a 10-second cornet break by Bix Beiderbecke from 6:20 to 6:30 (he’s not improvising but his clarion tone is still unmistakable), and I hope Giordano got a chance to record the entire piece in modern sound instead of just the snippet of its opening heard here. Charles summed up my response to Killers of the Flower Moon when he said after it was over, “I thought it would be zippier.” Certainly David Grann’s book was suitably zippy – as well as including a powerful later section in which the adult daughter of Ernest and Mollie Burkhart finally has to come to grips with the knowledge that the only reason she exists is because her dad married her mom as part of a plot to kill not only mom but her entire family for the sake of some oil money – but the film is a 3 ½-hour meander through a story Grann told with a strong sense of pace. It reminded me of Darren Aronofsky’s Noah (reviewed by me at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2014/08/noah-paramount-regency-protozoa-2014.html) in that both are films which could have been made considerably shorter (and hence better entertainment) without cutting a word of their scripts if their directors had just paced them faster!

Luck (Skydance Animation, Apple Original Films, Ilion Animation Studios, 2022)

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

During our recently concluded vacation to visit my husband Charles’s mother Edi in Martinez, California, we watched five movies of varying levels of interest. The first, which we saw on July 27, was Luck (2022), a computer-animated film produced by Skydance Animation in association with Apple Original Films and a Madrid-based studio originally called Ilion Animation until it merged with Skydance. I’ll say at the start that I generally don’t like computer animation; it doesn’t have either the realism of live-action or the flexibility and (in rare instances) artistic quality of drawn animation. I have liked a few computer-animated films, notably Ratatouille and Soul, because the creativity and genuine emotions of their stories overcame my overall distaste for the look of computer animation. Luck was not so – pardon the pun – lucky. It’s the work of committee-driven processes, and looks and sounds like it. The concept for the “original” story (quotes definitely merited) was by Rebeca Carrasco, Juan De Dios, and Julián Romero, though the story itself was by Kiel Murray, Jonathan Aibel, and Glenn Berger, with Murray getting credit for the script as well and Julia Miranda supplying “additional dialogue.” The film also went through changes of director (Peggy Holmes replaced Alessandro Carloni) and composer. John Debney, son of 1950’s Walt Disney Studios TV producer Louis Debney (Zorro, The Mickey Mouse Club) and a major contributor to Disney projects in various media (movies, TV, theme parks), replaced Tanya Donelly (a well-traveled woman rock musician who’s been in the bands Throwing Muses, The Breeders, and Belly) and the L.A.-based band Mt. Joy.

There are also two names on the producers’ list that gave an air of creepiness to the project. One was David Ellison, owner of Skydance Media and Donald Trump groupie (and son of Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, who famously said that in the age of the Internet “Privacy is over; get used to it”), who just arranged to acquire Paramount and CBS and to ensure government approval of the transfer of CBS’s broadcast licenses paid Trump what amounts to a $30 to $35 million bribe ($15 million to settle Trump’s preposterous lawsuit against 60 Minutes for allegedly defaming him by editing an interview with Kamala Harris in which Trump did not appear, and $15 to $20 million worth of free airtime to promote Trump-selected causes) and offered Trump Stephen Colbert’s head on the proverbial silver platter. The other was John Lasseter, founder of Pixar Studios and essentially the inventor of this style of computer animation. Lasseter was put in charge of Walt Disney Studios’ entire animation department when Disney bought Pixar, until he was fired for sexually harassing his female employees in 2017 in one of the earliest triumphs of the “#MeToo” movement. Emma Thompson originally signed to be one of the voice actors for Luck, but dropped out of the project on principle when she heard Lasseter was involved. Given that many of the people on the project, including Peggy Holmes, Kiel Murray, and John Debney, had previously worked with Lasseter on Pixar/Disney projects, Luck has the look and feel of a Pixar/Disney film in exile.

Basically it’s your standard-issue adolescent quest narrative centered around Samantha “Sam” Greenfield (Eva Nobelzada), who’s the recipient of continuous bad luck. When the film opens she’s just turned 18 and has therefore aged out of the orphanage where she’s grown up. She pleads with the management to be allowed to stay at least two more days to help the chances of her best friend, Hazel (Adelynn Spoon), to get adopted and find a “forever family.” Sam is told that’s not allowed, but she is placed in her own tiny apartment and is also given a job at a retail store, where because she’s the unluckiest person in the world she has a disastrous first day. On her way home from work she finds a magic coin – a penny with a four-leaf clover insignia – and the next day she’s super-competent on her job until she accidentally flushes the penny down a toilet. She offers to share her sandwich with Bob (Simon Pegg), a black cat with a Scottish accent who lives and works in the Land of Luck and needs his penny back to be readmitted there. When Bob finds out Sam has lost his crucial penny, the two journey down a magic portal to the Land of Luck, run by a race of leprechauns. They try to pass Sam off as a leprechaun, explaining her much larger than normal leprechaun size by saying she’s from Latvia. It turns out the Land of Luck has three levels: Good Luck, Bad Luck, and the “In-Between,” sort of like Catholic Purgatory. There is also a gadget called the “Randomizer,” run by a unicorn named Jeff (Flula Borg) who has a crush on the ruler of the whole Luck land, Beth the Dragon (Jane Fonda), which takes both good and bad luck and randomly distributes them to Earth people.

Luck is derivative of Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz and even Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (while the scene in the Bad Luck Bar can’t help but recall the Cantina scene in the original Star Wars), though I give the writing committee points for making the protagonist exactly 18 years old and suddenly thrust into an adulthood for which she’s completely unprepared. I also liked the way the writers worked into the plot line the fact that in England, as in the U.S., black cats are symbols of bad luck, while in Scotland black cats are symbols of good luck (which is why Bob, who’s really English, poses as Scottish through most of the film). Frankly, I’d have liked Luck a whole lot better if it had been done as a live-action film, with Nobelzada on screen as well as on the soundtrack (based on her imdb.com head shot she’d have been as right for the part visually as she is vocally), with little people playing the leprechauns and the animals supplied with CGI. As for John Debney’s score (the main reason I wanted to watch Luck in the first place), it’s a good, strong piece of functional film writing, delivering the goods expected for a children’s fantasy but not all that interesting or stirring as a listening experience on its own. And the original soundtrack album on Milan Records does not contain Madonna’s song “Lucky Star” – sung not by Madonna but by Eva Nobelzada with second vocalist Alana De Fonseca (that surprised me! I had assumed it was Madonna’s original record with Nobelzada singing along) – despite its importance in the overall film. The reissue on Intrada (the two-CD set I’m reviewing for Fanfare) does contain a short version (1:17) of it on track 13 of CD two.