My Sister's Double Life (Vortex Entertainment, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Last night (Sunday, June 29) my husband Charles and I watched a surprisingly good Lifetime thriller, My Sister’s Double Life. Set in the fictitious town of “Westwood” (whose precise location remains a mystery: even the car license plates don’t name a U.S. state or Canadian province, so it’s unclear even on which side of the border it takes place; it was actually shot in London, Ontario), its central characters are journalist Chelsy Ellis (Sarah Grey) and her scapegrace sister Hayley (Amalia Williamson, top-billed). They had a long and contentious relationship while their father David was dying of cancer and they were his caregivers. It got even worse between them after dad’s death, when Hayley got addicted to cocaine and sold off most of David’s possessions to buy drugs. She even went into rehab, but then relapsed. When the film opens Hayley is working as a waitress at the Schoolhouse Restaurant and Bar (one wonders whether it’s called that because the building was formerly a schoolhouse) and fending off the sexual advances of the owner, Anthony Carmino (Rod Wilson) as well as various obnoxious customers. Since Hayley turned him down, Anthony turned his attentions to her co-worker Miranda (Watson Rose), and Anthony also makes both women work in ultra-short plaid skirts that make them look like hookers. The plot kicks off when Hayley is lured to a nearby wood and abducted by a mystery assailant wearing the typical Lifetime black hoodie. She’s held in a deserted cabin with flies crawling on her body. She’s also tied up and held on a bed, and her mystery kidnapper keeps force-feeding her drugs by injection.

Chelsy is understandably anxious to find her sister and bring her home, but things get complicated because she’s simultaneously dating a strapping young Black officer, Leo Torrance (Gabriel Davenport), and Leo’s superior, Sgt. Dore (Jorge Molina) orders him off the case because obviously he has a conflict of interest in that he’s dating the victim’s sister. Leo offers to investigate it privately on the Q.T. and report to Chelsy, who obtains Hayley’s old notebook in which she kept track of her various affairs, steals Hayley’s cell phone from the police evidence room, and later copies surveillance camera footage from the laptop in Anthony’s office. There’s a typical suspense scene for the modern era in which director Marta Borowski keeps us guessing whether Chelsy will be able to copy all the files before Anthony, who’s in the restaurant after hours, catches her. (Charles noticed a glitch in that after the copy is done, she just rips the flash drive she copied it to out of the computer without it flashing the usual “you didn’t eject your disc properly” error message.) Chelsy also finds a love letter, written to Hayley before her disappearance and printed so neatly I began to suspect it was from a woman and the attraction was a Lesbian one. At one point Sgt. Dore even has Chelsy arrested and charged with obstruction of justice, and the Tribune, the newspaper she works for, threatens to fire her after all the public attention she’s received.

After creating a nicely large-sized pool of potential suspects (one pet peeve of Charles’s about mystery stories is when the writer gives you so few suspects it’s all too easy to guess whodunit), writer Jessica Landry and director Borowski give us a reasonable and legitimately surprising finish. It seems that Hayley had a penchant for cruising married men in general and one married man, Tim Anderson (Cody Ray Thompson), in particular – though, out of fear that Hayley would reject him if he told her he was married, he’d lied and said he and his wife had separated. The gimmick turns out to be that in the course of their affair, Tim got Hayley pregnant, and Hayley’s kidnapper was determined to make sure she had her baby instead of getting an abortion. At first we’re led to believe that Tim was the kidnapper, but later it turns out that it was [spoiler alert!] Tim’s wife Sheryl (Anna Hopkins). After Tim and Sheryl had spent a lot of money and time on fertility treatments that didn’t take, once Tim got another woman pregnant Sheryl became obsessed with kidnapping Hayley and holding her until her baby was born, after which she would take the child and pass it off as hers and Tim’s. There’s the usual fight to the finish between Chelsy, Sheryl, Tim, and Hayley, who’s set free at the end by Chelsy only to fall victim to Sheryl again and literally have to fight for her life.

Earlier there’d been a telling exchange between the kidnapper and Chelsy in which they’d said, “I have to keep Hayley alive, but I don’t have to keep you alive.” Ultimately the police rescue both Chelsy and Hayley and arrest Sheryl and Tim, and there’s a “One Year Later” tag scene in which Hayley has graduated from some sort of medical training and she and Chelsy are raising the baby jointly. My Sister’s Double Life isn’t any great shakes as a movie, and it doesn’t tweak the Lifetime “pussies in peril” formula in any interesting ways, but it’s a quite competent, workmanlike thriller, and Sarah Grey gets some stunning closeups that reminded me of the young Mariska Hargitay on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and suggested that playing a woman cop may well be in her future.

Pretty Hurts (Swirl Films, GDK, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Last night (Saturday, June 28) I watched the “Premiere” showing of a truly weird Lifetime TV-movie called Pretty Hurts, which unfortunately doesn’t have an imdb.com page yet. So I can’t pay tribute to the writer(s) or any of the cast members besides the three principals: high-school senior Lauren Burke (Sarah Borne), her mother Julie (Haylie Duff, Hilary Duff’s older sister and a major actress in her own right), and Lauren’s best friend Rae (Kaycie Barker). Rae is African-American, and since the average life expectancy of a Black best friend in a Lifetime movie is about that of a Spinal Tap drummer, we fear for her from the get-go. I was able to find the name of the director, Brian Herzlinger, from the moviedelic Web site. The film was co-produced by Lifetime, Swirl Films, and the GSK pharmaceutical company, which is in the middle of a big ad campaign for their vaccine against the B variant of meningitis. Apparently for some reason the standard meningitis vaccines don’t protect against the B strain, and at least according to GSK’s commercials this one, though rare, is highly serious and kills at least 10 percent of all who get the infection. The opening credits announced that GSK not only sponsored the production but influenced its actual content, which became apparent midway through when Rae suddenly contracts meningitis B and ends up in a hospital while her doctors frantically try to save her life and her limbs.

The basic plot casts Lauren Burke as a dedicated high-school senior who’s determined to got to prestigious Vanderton University’s medical school and ultimately become a pediatrician, since she was herself severely ill as a child and credits her doctors with saving her life. The problem is that, though she’s received an acceptance letter from Vanderton, it does not come with enough financial aid for her to afford the school’s tuition and other costs. Lauren hits on the idea of entering the 55th annual Miss Teen Starfire beauty contest, which offers a $50,000 first prize. That would be enough to fund her entire education, so she enters the pageant with a fierce determination to win even though her only previous experience with beauty contests had been a disastrous one well before she hit puberty in which she literally peed in her pants on stage. But she figures that since her mom Julie herself won the Starfire contest 20 years earlier, she can get her mom to coach her and win easily. Once she registers, she finds that just about all the other contestants have literally been doing beauty contests their whole lives. One of the other contestants warns Lauren to avoid the “liars, cryers, and kleptos” (i.e., “thieves”) among the entrants, including one particularly bratty one named Deanna who’s determined to win at all costs and takes an instant dislike to Our Heroine.

The contest is run by a fiercely determined senior citizen named Mrs. Brooks, whose grandson Duane is a contest official in charge of photographing the various entrants. Of course, Duane can’t resist making passes at them, though the real person the girls need to watch out for is a middle-aged man named Hammond who enters the contest world as a judge when one of the other judges has to drop out. Hammond previously molested one of the contestants during an earlier pageant when she was just a child, and when he shows up that person (Haley Gosserand) frantically calls her mother and pleads, “You promised me I’d never have to see that person again.” Lauren catches Hammond and his former victim in a position that obviously demonstrates he’d like to put an end to the “former” part of that, and when Lauren challenges him and threatens to report him to the police, Hammond sneerily asks, “What are you going to do about it?” He then comes on to Lauren herself, stating that he’s already rigged the contest to get her into the group of top five finalists and he can ensure her victory if she’ll just “be nice” to him. When Lauren refuses, she’s called in to see the fearsome Mrs. Brooks, who tells her flatly that they’ll offer her a $10,000 payoff if she’ll sign a non-disclosure agreement saying she won’t blow the whistle on the Starfire pageant and the sexual abuse to which its contestants are subjected. Lauren and her mom both righteously turn down the offer, and the contest proceeds according to schedule until it’s time for the Big Night.

During the run of the contest Lauren has been blowing off a lot of her work shifts at a local coffeehouse and counting on her friend Rae (ya remember Rae?) to cover for her – until one night when Rae is doing something else and later they have an argument in which Rae expresses her resentment at Lauren for having assumed Rae would cover for her at work whether Lauren asked her or not. Rae shows up at the various events along with Lauren’s mother Julie and also her dad (who’s presented as a barely present figure whom we see mostly in bed with Julie, sleeping through it while Julie wakes up at 2 a.m. to deal with Lauren’s latest crisis, or in the audience at the pageant). In the middle of the pageant Rae goes on a date with a mystery man (we never see him but we assume it’s a man) and admits that they kissed. The next time Lauren and Rae see each other Rae feels weak and has ominous black spots on her arms but otherwise seems O.K. until, on the eve of the final night of the pageant, she becomes deathly ill and is taken to a hospital, where she’s diagnosed with meningitis B. At this point the movie becomes the most blatantly written infomercial I’ve seen since my husband Charles (who came home midway through the film) and I watched downloads of the 1950’s TV series Martin Kane, Private Eye, which was sponsored by a tobacco company and featured a character called “The Tobacconist” whom Kane chatted with and who gave plugs for the sponsor’s products.

Rae’s doctors make all the points about meningitis B familiar from GSK’s commercials for their vaccine, and though Rae only loses two fingers from her right hand, the characters make a big deal out of the fact that even if you survive the infection, you can lose whole hands or feet from it. Ultimately on the final night of the pageant Lauren reads a poem she’d wanted to read all along about people who try to tell you what you can’t do. Then she denounces the pageant as superficial and announces she’s withdrawing from it, and as she walks off the stage the police, whom Lauren has called, bust Hammond and Mrs. Brooks. Then there’s a typical Lifetime chyron, “One Year Later,” and one year later Lauren is a freshperson at Vanderton leading a student outreach group when she happens to see a small item in a newspaper announcing that Mrs. Brooks has been convicted and sentenced to prison for her role in covering up the sexual abuse of pageant contestants. (There’s no indication that Hammond got nailed, which is likely just sloppy writing but might be a hint that Hammond is so powerful a member of the 1 percent that he, like Donald Trump, will never have to worry about being held accountable for his crimes.)

I had mixed feelings about Pretty Hurts and I was amused by how many imdb.com entries there were with that title: a 2011 TV series which is apparently still running, a 2013 Beyoncé music video, a 2017 TV miniseries, a 2018 short, a 2024 short, and a 2024 feature, plus a 2023 short called Pretty Doesn’t Hurt. I’d seen the promos with the character of Hammond and had assumed it would be typical Lifetime mildly dirty fun, but in the end it was an interesting movie but also one weighted down by the blatancy of GSK’s medical propaganda. Also there were at least two blatantly stereotyped characters who were, or at least appeared to be, Gay men: a confidant of Lauren’s and Rae’s at their high school whose single earring denoted queeniness; and a bitchy Black dance director who rehearsed the girls for their big pageant group dance with the intensity of Busby Berkeley preparing one of his enormous production numbers.

Youth Runs Wild (RKO, 1944)

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

After Pretty Hurts on June 28, I ran my husband Charles a grey-label DVD of the last Val Lewton movie we hadn’t watched together in some time: Youth Runs Wild, a 1944 movie about juvenile delinquency and how it was being exacerbated by World War II and conditions on the home front. It began as a 1943 photo essay in Look magazine and was originally planned as a vehicle for director Edward Dmytryk (who was actually of Ukrainian ancestry; with a name like “Dmytryk” I’d always assumed he was Greek!) as a follow-up to his sensational successes Hitler’s Children and Behind the Rising Sun. Then that version fell through (though Dmytryk’s then-wife Madeleine got credit as a “researcher”) and it ended up with Lewton’s unit. Lewton assigned some of his “regulars,” notably Mark Robson as director and Kent Smith, Jean Brooks, and Elizabeth Russell in leading roles. Smith plays Danny Coates, a World War II veteran who was invalided out of the service due to a leg injury and returns home to his small town of “Middleton.” Brooks, fresh from her brilliant performance as the suicidal Jacqueline Gibson in Lewton’s and Robson’s The Seventh Victim, plays his wife Mary, who’s living with her parents, the Taylors (Ben Bard and Elizabeth Russell), during his absence. Next door to the Taylors live the Hausers, parents Fred (Art Smith) and Cora (Mary Servoss) and their son Frankie (Glenn Vernon). Frankie had previously been a good student but he’s been cutting classes lately to do odd jobs for an income so he can woo his girlfriend, the Taylors’ daughter Sarah (Tessa Brind).

Among the first things we hear in this movie is the sound of metalworking coming from the Hausers’ garage – and we soon learn it’s Frankie making a new personalized clasp for the handbag he’s just bought Sarah as a present. That’s about all in this movie that looks or sounds like a typical Val Lewton production. Instead Youth Runs Wild is a pretty ordinary story about alienated youth, though there’s a bit of novelty in why the young people in it are alienated. Both the Hauser and Taylor parents are working the graveyard shifts in the local munitions plant (which by the way is owned by a company called Hobbs), and they literally never get to see or talk to each other except on rare occasions. Most of the time they communicate via a chalkboard in the living room on which they leave each other messages. At one point Frankie Hauser falls in with a bad crowd centered around local garage owner Larry Duncan (Lawrence Tierney, making his credited film debut) and his girlfriend, Toddy Jones (Bonita Granville, top-billed and playing the only character with any real moral complexity). Frankie and his only slightly more bad-ass friends Georgie Dunlop (Dickie Moore) and Herb Vigero (Johnny Walsh) try to make some easy money by stealing spare tires out of cars, but they get caught and fired at by the night watchman (Harry Harvey). Ultimately a stray bullet wounds Larry, who takes this as a sign that from then on he should stop dealing in black-market auto parts and run his garage legitimately.

The Hausers insist that Frankie stop dating Sarah because they attribute his ruination to her and his desire to buy her presents he can’t afford, and the film takes on a weird Romeo and Juliet vibe as the young people are separated by their families. At least it doesn’t end that gloomily, though Sarah moves out of her parents’ home in disgust. Toddy takes her in as a roommate and helps her get a job at Rocky’s, owned by Rocky (Rod Rodgers), a nightspot which hires underage girls and steers them perilously close to out-and-out prostitution. Though Sarah manages to make it through her career at Rocky’s without losing her virginity, either for money or for fun, she lies to her parents and to Frankie and hints (under the Production Code she couldn’t do anything more than hint) that she’s “grown up” in the fullest sense. Ultimately all the wanna-be miscreants are hauled before a juvenile court judge (Fritz Leiber), who like virtually all movie judges from this period is tall, thin, ancient and cadaverous-looking. He also has a photo of Franklin D. Roosevelt on his courthouse wall even though this film took so long to get into theatres that by the time most people saw it Roosevelt was dead and Harry Truman was President. The judge gives them a speech and brings in Ruth Clifton (playing herself), a teenager who managed to solve the juvenile delinquency problem in Moline, Illinois by opening a teen center where the young people of her city could have wholesome recreation. There’s a long documentary-style sequence showing how Clifton’s centers work, and Frankie and Sarah reunite and set about opening such a center in “Middletown.”

Charles was disappointed in Youth Runs Wild, saying that there was virtually nothing of the highly personal style Lewton brought to his horror films (and to his other non-horror RKO production, Mademoiselle Fifi, reviewed by me at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/11/mademoiselle-fifi-rko-1944.html). A lot of people at the time didn’t like Youth Runs Wild, either, including the U.S. government (Lewton got a memo from the State Department to the effect that a film focusing on juvenile delinquency would be bad for national morale), Look magazine (who refused to promote the film even though it had been based on a story they’d published, and according to some accounts even asked that their name be taken off the film), movie audiences (the film reportedly lost $45,000, though as I’ve mentioned before about Lewton’s alleged money-losers, “B” films were essentially sold like yard goods and as long as it came in under budget and on schedule, it was virtually impossible for a “B” to lose money even if moviegoers didn’t like it), and the “suits” at RKO. Lewton was reportedly disgusted with the sheer amount of studio interference he got on Youth Runs Wild – especially since previously he’d been allowed pretty much free rein on his horror films – and was even more disgusted when final cut was taken away from him and the film was heavily re-edited.

Among the studio’s deletions was a scene in which a teenage boy kills his father after suffering long-term abuse at his old man’s hands (a situation director Robson would return to in 1957 in Peyton Place, though in that film the victim turned killer is a woman who acts in self-defense when the man, who is not her father, tries to rape her). Lewton was so angry at the deletions that he even tried to have his producer’s credit removed, but RKO refused. Today Youth Runs Wild seems like an important precursor of the wave of juvenile delinquency films that came out in the mid-1950’s – The Blackboard Jungle, Rebel Without a Cause, Crime in the Streets – but not a very good movie, partly because the casting was inevitably weak. The kinds of actors this film needed wouldn’t be around for another decade or so, and the part of Frankie Hauser in particular cried out for a James Dean type and got gangly, almost terminally milquetoast Glenn Vernon instead. (Two years later Vernon would score an unforgettable triumph as “The Gilded Boy” in Lewton’s last RKO film, Bedlam, even though in that one he’s only in one scene!)

Sisters (Pressman/Williams Enterprises, American International Pictures, 1972 or 1973)

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

Last night (Thursday, June 26) I got home from the “Twilight in the Park” concert at 8 p.m. and a half-hour later watched a surprisingly good movie: Sisters (1972 or 1973 – I’ve seen both dates), directed by Brian De Palma from a script co-written by him and Louisa Rose. TCM was showing Sisters as part of a night devoted to movies about twin siblings, one good, one evil. Among the others they programmed are Roy William Neill’s The Black Room (1935), a period horror film in which Boris Karloff plays good and bad brothers named Gregor and Anton de Berghman; and Bette Davis’s two twins movies, Curtis Bernhardt’s A Stolen Life (1948) and Paul Henried’s Dead Ringer (1964). Sisters was reportedly inspired by a Russian magazine Brian De Palma saw that contained a feature about two conjoined (so-called “Siamese”) twins in which one of the twin sisters was smiling and the other looked sullen. I was a little nervous about watching Sisters because I’d heard that it was a pretty gruesome horror film in the modern gross-out manner, but it turned out to be far more sophisticated than that, much more a thriller than a horror film even though it has two big horrific sequences, one at the beginning and one at the end. It begins with a spoof of so-called “reality” TV shows in which a pair of contestants are set up in a compromising situation – a nice-looking young Black man, Phillip Woode (Lisle Wilson), is set up to watch a young woman, Danielle Breton (Margot Kidder, top-billed), undress. Phillip has been told Danielle is blind, even though she really isn’t, and the big question is will he watch her strip or turn away? The two panelists on the show both guess he’ll keep watching and ogle her, but instead he does the gentlemanly thing.

The two are awarded prizes for their participation; Danielle gets a set of kitchen knives and Phillip a complementary dinner for two at a restaurant called the “African Room.” Danielle asks Phillip to take her on his dinner date, and they do that but end up in an argument with the wait staff and head back to her place, where they presumably make love. Danielle spends time in her bathroom where she opens a bottle of red pills and pours out three of them, taking one and leaving two others on the side of her sink. Phillip accidentally knocks over the loose pills and they go down the drain. Later Phillip hears Danielle having an agitated conversation with her twin sister Dominique (also Margot Kidder), though it’s unclear whether Dominique is actually there or Danielle is just hallucinating her presence and talking to herself. Danielle sends Phillip out to get her more of her meds, and without them she literally ends up losing consciousness on Phillip’s floor. Phillip takes his own sweet time about getting back, having decided that since Danielle has mentioned that it’s her birthday, he’ll buy her a cake and get it decorated with both her and Dominique’s names. When he gets back with the cake, suddenly he becomes a murder victim as either Danielle or Dominique stabs him repeatedly. Then Danielle’s mysterious ex-husband, Émile Breton (William Finley in an odd makeup that makes him look like the young John Waters), helps Danielle clean up after the murder and stuffs Phillip’s body into a folding couch. (Apparently De Palma had an argument with his producer over whether you could really stuff a body into a folding couch; the producer insisted you couldn’t, and De Palma shot the scene in one take to prove that you could.)

Alas, the murder has been witnessed by Grace Collier (Jennifer Salt, who was roommates with Margot Kidder at the time), a reporter for a local paper in Staten Island. She reports it to the police, who were too openly antagonistic to her based on her previous articles attacking police brutality, so she decides to investigate it herself. She’s so anxious to find out more about the case that she blows off one of her usual Thursday lunch dates with her mother, Louise Wilanski (Olympia Dukakis, uncredited) and hires a private detective, Joseph Larch (Charles Durning). Ultimately Grace learns that Danielle and Dominique were conjoined twins (something we’ve already found out from the surgical scar on Danielle’s thigh where the two women were separated). The operation that separated them was performed by Arthur McLennen (Bernard Hughes) after Émile started an affair with Danielle but got anxious to get rid of Dominique because she was always literally in the way. The film builds to a climax at the sanitarium where Émile works, where he incarcerates Grace and hypnotizes her into believing that no murder happened and it was just a figment of her imagination. We’re also given contradictory indications of just how and when Dominique died; at first we’re told she survived the operation, later that she died on the operating table, and still later that she made it through the operation but Émile killed her later on purpose.

Danielle eventually murders Émile and the cops are ready to arrest her for Phillips’ murder as well, but even though Émile is dead his influence on Grace has survived him and she keeps repeating the message about the case Émile instructed her to say: that there’d been no murder and it had all been a figment of her imagination. Danielle is arrested for Émile’s murder but seems to have got away with Phillip’s – though there’s a great final scene with Joe Larch posing as an electrical lineman and watching the couch that still contains Phillip’s body to see who claims the couch and why. Before showing Sisters, TCM host Ben Mankiewicz mentioned how often Brian De Palma has been accused of copying Alfred Hitchcock, and it’s certain that there’s a lot of Hitchcock influence in this film. It’s equally certain that Hitchcock himself was influenced by prior directors, notably Fritz Lang (Lang’s 1928 silent thriller Spies contains key plot points Hitchcock recycled in his mid-1930’s films The 39 Steps, The Secret Agent and Sabotage, and the resemblance was strong enough British film critics in the 1930’s often referred to Hitchcock as “our Fritz Lang”).

Sisters certainly uses some of Hitchcock’s ideas and plot devices, but it works so creatively with them that it’s a strong and quite moving film in its own right, not just one built on recycled ideas from the Master of Suspense. I liked Sisters quite a lot more than I’d expected to, and I found it absolutely gripping and beautifully done. Sisters would be an extraordinary work by any criterion, and one of the most powerful things about it was the musical score contributed by Hitchcock’s frequent collaborator, Bernard Herrmann. The opening theme sounds like someone mixed the main title of Vertigo to include electronic instruments (but which ones? Theremin? Ondes Martenot? An early synthesizer?). Apparently Herrmann was recommended to De Palma by his editor, Paul Hirsch, who’d used Herrmann’s soundtracks for Hitchcock for his “temp tracks” (pre-existing music laid in at an early stage of a film’s editing to judge how it might work with a final score). De Palma liked it so much he accepted Hirsch’s suggestion that he hire Herrmann to compose his ultimate score.

Crime Doctor's Man Hunt (Columbia, 1946)

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

Later on Thursday, June 26, after my husband Charles came home from work at long last I ran him a YouTube post of a film from 1946, a Columbia “B” called Crime Doctor’s Man Hunt, that had a strikingly similar plot line to Sisters – enough that though Turner Classic Movies hadn’t shown it as part of their sinister siblings marathon, they could have. Crime Doctor’s Man Hunt was part of a long-running radio series (1940 to 1947) that got turned into a series of “B”’s by Columbia from 1943 to 1949 with veteran star Warner Baxter as Dr. Ordway (his first name was “Benjamin” on radio but was changed to “Robert” in the movies), both a medical doctor and a Ph.D. In the first film in the series, Crime Doctor (1943), it was established that Ordway had actually been a career criminal named Phil Morgan who suffered amnesia, forgot his past, and ended up studying medicine as “Robert Ordway.” In the later Crime Doctor films he became a private detective and consultant to the official police who used his medical and psychiatric expertise to help solve crimes. Crime Doctor’s Man Hunt, directed by William Castle (well before his re-emergence in the 1950’s as a horror director with a penchant for tacky gimmicks to promote his movies) from a script by Eric Taylor (story) and Leigh Brackett (screenplay), takes a while for a plot design to emerge.

Ultimately the story centers around “John Foster” (Myron Healey), a World War II veteran who’s clearly suffering from what was then called “shell shock” and is now known as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He shows up at Dr. Ordway’s office for a psychiatric consultation during which he admits to having blackouts and continually returning to an address of which he has no conscious memory. Alas, “Foster” visits Dr. Ordway just that one time and never returns. Then Ordway is visited by his fiancée, Irene Cotter (Ellen Drew), who desperately wants to know whether the man she’s engaged to marry is mentally healthy or not. Ordway explains that under the laws of confidentiality, he can’t betray “Foster”’s secrets to her or anyone else. The next thing that happens is that Ordway is taken hostage by two thugs who have just killed “Foster” and are trying to take his body away by pretending he’s drunk but still alive. The action centers around an amusement park in which there’s a shooting gallery run by Ruby Farrell (Claire Carleton), a salty broad and easily the most interesting character in the film. The two thugs who killed “Foster” then confront the woman who hired them, Irene’s sister Darlene Cotter (also Ellen Drew, though made up to look different with a blonde wig and glasses), and demand more money from her.

Both Cotters are the daughters of clueless rich man Gerald Cotter (Francis Pierlot), who drove Darlene out of the house because he thought she was a bad influence on Irene. Darlene left for parts unknown after having kept Irene in such total thrall to her that Irene had no will of her own. After cycling through various suspects, including phrenologist Marcus LeBlaine (Olin Howard), astrologer Alfredi (Ivan Triesault) – who gets on the suspect list after the police learn “Foster,” whose real name was Philip Armstrong, consulted him and Alfredi predicted his death – and Ruby Farrell, who becomes a suspect because Armstrong’s killer did it with an air gun he’d stolen from her concession – both Ordway and the lead official cop, Inspector Harry Manning (William Frawley – who actually got cast as police detectives in Columbia “B”’s surprisingly often given that he’s most famous today for playing Fred Mertz on I Love Lucy), realize that Irene is the real killer. Like Danielle Breton (Margot Kidder) in Sisters and Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) in Psycho (a film Crime Doctor’s Man Hunt has been compared to, even though in Psycho the late relative who has Norman Bates psychologically entrapped is his mother, not a sibling), Irene’s stronger sister took over her identity even after they were no longer living together.

In fact, a deus ex machina character emerges in the person of Darlene’s Haitian (but white) husband, who announces to the cops that Darlene is already dead and therefore he resents that they’re making her the prime suspect in an active murder investigation. There’s a great final scene set in an old dark house in which Ordway and Manning apprehend Irene in Darlene’s guise, taking off her blonde wig and glasses and therefore “outing” her as the presumably “nice” sister who felt compelled to kill Philip precisely because if they had got married, sooner or later he would have discovered her secret and exposed her. Crime Doctor’s Man Hunt is a well-done little thriller, and though I think director Castle and cinematographer Philip Tannura may have overdone the noir atmospherics at least a bit, it’s well constructed and proves that William Castle didn’t need to float collapsible skeletons over the heads of his audiences or have certain seats in the theatres wired to administer electric shocks to unsuspecting audience members, as he did with his 1959 film The Tingler. Future director John Waters recalled going to the theatre in his neighborhood that showed The Tingler early to make sure he got one of the “wired” seats!

The General Line, a.k.a. Old and New (Sovkino, 1929)

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

Last night (Tuesday, June 24) I dug out one of my grey-label DVD’s and showed my husband Charles one of the few films directed by Sergei Eisenstein I’d never seen before: The General Line, a.k.a. Old and New (1929). This was Eisenstein’s fourth feature and was made at the request of the Soviet government, which was on a mission to collectivize Russian agriculture and wanted a propaganda film that would encourage Russian peasants to give up their attachment to private land holdings and join collective farms. The film begins with a scene in which two feuding brothers divide the farm they inherited from their father and put up fences between their holdings. To the extent that the film has a central character, it is Marfa Lapkina (playing a character with her own name), a farm woman who’s anxious to improve life for herself and her farming brethren and sistren by bringing the various small plots of land together and using economies of scale. To do this, she first brings in a cream separator – a bit of a surprise since her farm started out with just one cow and it was being used not to produce milk but as a beast of burden – and tries to organize the local cow owners into a dairy cooperative. Then Marfa, working with a local Soviet agronomist, tries to mechanize her farm as much as possible, including a threshing machine to harvest and bundle hay and a tractor to pull the wagons in which the harvested crops are placed to be transported.

Eisenstein and his collaborator, Grigori Alexandrov (who’s credited as co-director as well as co-writer), seem a bit unclear as to just what sort of large, organized farm Marfa and her associates are creating: a kohlkoz (“collective farm”), in which the land would be collectively owned by the peasants who tilled it and they would share in the farm’s profits; or a sovkhoz (“state farm”), in which the land was owned by the government and the farmers were paid salaries like farmworkers under capitalist agribusiness. Both terms appear in their intertitles. At one point Marfa decides that she needs a tractor immediately to bring in that year’s harvest – though we’ve already seen a tractor on her farm pulling the threshing machine (maybe we were supposed to assume that one was a loaner) – and she pleads with the local Soviet bureaucracy to be given one. At first she’s turned down on the ground that they can’t fund her for anything until her harvest crops are actually brought in, but ultimately her pleas succeed as one bureaucrat tells the others to follow “the general line” (the only explanation we get for the film’s title) and let her have the tractor. I was amused at the irony that I was seeing this film shortly after having watched the 1950 movie Summer Stock, Judy Garland’s last MGM musical, which also cast her as a farm woman begging a bureaucracy (a capitalist rather than a Communist one, this being the U.S.A.) to give her a tractor.

It was also ironic that Charles and I were watching another Soviet film made in 1929 just days after we’d seen Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera – and, not surprisingly, Vertov was fiercely critical of Eisenstein for still being rooted in theatrical conventions of storytelling instead of embracing the truly new possibilities of cinema as an art form. The General Line takes a rather odd turn in the last half-hour as Eisenstein introduces some human villains (earlier there have been some extreme close-ups of locusts, but Eisenstein’s editing juxtaposes the locusts with the mechanical blades of the thresher and the impression we get is that the machine is doing the harvest so quickly the locusts don’t have time to eat the grain). The bad people are the kulaks, relatively privileged agricultural landowners who became the great villains in the Soviet push for collective farming. They decide to starve the local collective into submission by poisoning the collective’s cow, which they’re relying on for dairy products to sustain them through the long winter. There are also some swipes at faith, both an elaborate Russian Orthodox parade held to pray for rain (which, of course, doesn’t come) and a weird character (E. Suhareva) identified as a witch, who boils frogs to cast a spell over the cow and make sure it dies just in case the poison wasn’t enough to do it in. (Yes, I know cows are female, but using “her” as its pronoun would only be confusing as to which was the antecedent – the witch or the cow.)

According to Wikipedia, Eisenstein actually started shooting The General Line in 1927 but broke off filming to make October (1928), his brilliant dramatization of the Bolshevik revolution. By the time he returned to the project, Joseph Stalin had definitively won his power struggle against Leon Trotsky and the film had to be hastily re-edited to accommodate Stalin’s line, which was essentially to force collectivization down the throats of Soviet farmers whether they wanted it or not. One fault in the film is that the benefits of collectivization happen far faster than they would have in real life – Eisenstein and Alexandrov were both urbanites with little feel for the realities of country life – and the film is best remembered for stunning individual sequences, like the one with the cream separator and the elaborate “wedding” ceremony in which Eisenstein stretches out the sequence for as long as he can before finally showing us that the “bride” is a cow and the “groom” is a bull. There’s also a brilliant ending scene in which the new tractor mows down the fences that formerly separated the farmers’ individual plots. One imdb.com reviewer faulted the film for its unabashed collectivist propaganda – they headlined their review, “Its message is about as subtle as a nudist at a Baptist potluck dinner!”

In his 1939 article on the state of Soviet cinema Dwight MacDonald conjectured that Eisenstein had been bored by the film’s political theme and had indulged himself in such virtuoso cinematic fireworks as the cream-separator sequence and the “wedding” of the cow and the bull (which seems to produce a whole army of calves far faster than nature could have provided). It’s perfectly clear that as a theme for a film, collective farming inspired Eisenstein quite a bit less than the revolutionary struggles depicted in his three previous films, Strike!, Battleship Potemkin, and October. Still, he got a killer performance from Marfa Lapkina (a real farm woman he cast after all the professional actresses he interviewed admitted that they didn’t know how to milk a cow, run a plow, or guide a tractor – not that this was unusual casting practice for Eisenstein; in October Lenin was played by a Moscow butcher with no acting experience because he looked strikingly like the real one), and the film has some really striking individual shots even if it doesn’t build the revolutionary (in both senses, political and cinematic) energy of Potemkin or October!

The Gay Divorcée (RKO, 1934)

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

Last night Turner Classic Movies did an extended program of films with at least allegedly Queer content hosted by Dave Karger and Alonso Duralde, an openly Gay author and film critic who’s just published a book called Hollywood Pride: A Celebration of LGBTQ+ Representation and Perseverance in Film. Among the movies they showed last night was John Francis Dillon’s Call Her Savage (1932), which I saw in 2014 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2014/09/call-her-savage-fox-film-1932.html) and hailed as one of the so-called “pre-Code” era’s masterpieces; and Mitchell Leisen’s Midnight (1939), a romantic farce co-written by Billy Wilder and Charles Brackett and a movie Wilder told biographer Maurice Zolotow was “perfect because I fought [Leisen] every step of the way.” In between those two they showed the film I chose to watch, The Gay Divorcée (1934), second of the ten Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers musicals and the first one that actually cast them as a romantically involved couple. (In their previous film together, Flying Down to Rio [1933], they were just two members of Gene Raymond’s touring band.)

Karger and Duralde were hailing this film for exactly the same reason Arlene Croce, in The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers Book (1972) damned it: the heavy presence of sissy-types in the supporting cast. “The male friendship theme was standard, too, and scriptwriters of the 1930’s had their kicks with it,” Croce wrote. “A male star was supported by a comic, and it’s surprising in how many musical comedies and operettas of the 1920’s effeminacy was a comic’s stock-in-trade. In The Gay Divorcée, which had a retrogressive book, all the male comics seem Queer. The title was changed (from Gay Divorce, the name of the 1932 stage musical it was based on) to take the edge off the hard word ‘divorce.’ Perhaps something should have been done about the adjective.” (This was Croce hinting at the cultural conservatism that would ultimately cost her the job of dance critic at The New York Times.) The Gay Divorcée had a rather twisted path from the page to the stage to the screen. It began as an unproduced play by British author J. Hartley Manners called An Adorable Adventure, which Manners’ stepson, Dwight Taylor, took and adapted into a 1932 musical called Gay Divorce. It was a vehicle for Fred Astaire and his first show without his sister Adele, who’d been his dancing partner in vaudeville and on Broadway until she retired in 1930 to marry into the British nobility.

Cole Porter wrote a full score for Gay Divorce but the only one of his songs that made it into the movie was “Night and Day,” which Astaire had danced to on stage with British actress Claire Luce and reprised on film with Ginger Rogers. (Astaire reportedly wanted “Night and Day” dropped from the film, too, because he thought it was overexposed, but he’d already recorded it twice, for Victor in the U.S. in 1932 and for Columbia in Britain in 1933 when he went to do the show in London. Both records backed the song with other tunes from the Gay Divorce score: “I’ve Got You on My Mind” in 1932 and the equally beautiful “After You, Who” in 1933.) Like “One for My Baby,” “Night and Day” is a song that later became identified with Frank Sinatra but was originally written for Astaire. According to Croce, before RKO bought the film rights to Gay Divorce, Mervyn LeRoy had taken Jack Warner to see the show, hoping Warner would buy the rights for him, but Warner said, “Who am I going to put in it – Cagney?” (Actually James Cagney would probably have loved it; in his autobiography he said that his one career regret was that he had made so few musicals.) The Gay Divorcée remains my favorite of the Astaire-Rogers musicals; yes, their dancing partnership got better later on, but in 1934 the formula still seemed fresh and hadn’t been run into the ground the way it was a couple of years later – though if I were to pick an Astaire-Rogers musical to illustrate the theme of Queer inclusion in film, it would probably be Shall We Dance (1937) for its bizarre scene in which Edward Everett Horton and the magnificent character actor Jerome Cowan (playing Astaire’s and Rogers’s managers, respectively) play a negotiation that seems like a mutual Gay seduction.

Karger and Duralde particularly pointed out the “Let’s K-nock K-neez” number in The Gay Divorcée in which the young Betty Grable (outfitted in a stunning pantsuit recycled from Dolores Del Rio’s wardrobe in Flying Down to Rio) practically throws herself at Horton, who couldn’t be less interested. It’s a precursor of Jane Russell’s marvelous number in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, “Ain’t There Anyone Here for Love?,” in which she dances with a crew of musclemen who basically ignore her, with the subtext that they’re more interested in each other. It also makes one wonder just why it took so long for Grable to grab the brass ring of stardom; she’d cycled through Fox, Goldwyn, RKO, Paramount, and Fox again until she finally got her break as a last-minute substitute for Alice Faye in Down Argentine Way (1940). And though there have been innumerable renditions of “Night and Day” ever since, the version in this film, with Astaire’s yearning voice, Rogers partnering him stunningly on the dance floor, and Max Steiner’s incredible orchestral arrangement, remains the definitive one for me.

The three “queens” in The Gay Divorcée are Edward Everett Horton (playing Ginger Rogers’ divorce lawyer), Erik Rhodes (playing Rodolfo Tonetti, the hired co-respondent, who at one point says, “Your wife is safe with Tonetti – he prefers spaghetti,” a line copped from a famous interview with Rudolph Valentino in which he said he’d rather eat a plate of spaghetti than make love to a woman) – the one cast member besides Astaire from the original Broadway production who got to repeat his role in the film – and Eric Blore as the inevitable waiter who’s the deus ex machina at the end. It turns out he previously knew Mimi Glossop’s (Ginger Rogers) husband Cyril (William Austin in a marvelous performance as a typical British upper-class twit) and Cyril’s wife, who looked nothing like Ginger Rogers. This proves that Mimi doesn’t need a divorce after all since her previous “marriage” was bigamous (something we had a clue about when Mimi complained that one of the reasons she wanted to dump her husband was she almost never saw him because he was always going out of town on so-called “business trips,” almost certainly to spend time with his legal wife), and therefore she and Guy Holden (Fred Astaire) can team up at the end. One thing I hadn’t noticed before about The Gay Divorcée is that when Astaire and Rogers confront each other on a British country road and she’s had to stop for a “Road Closed” sign that he put there deliberately, his car (a 1931 MG J2 Midget) has the steering wheel on the right side – correct for Britain – but her car (a 1929 Duesenberg Model J convertible that was apparently Rogers’s own vehicle) has the steering wheel on the left because it was both made and driven in the United States. (The car was ultimately sold at auction in 2012 for nearly $1.9 million.)

Missing (Polygram Filmed Entertainment, Universal Pictures, Estudios Churubusco Azteca S.A., 2025)

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

Last night (Sunday, June 22) Turner Classic Movies ran an intriguing double bill of movies featuring Sissy Spacek, who was born on Christmas Day, 1949 in Quitman, Texas and is still, thank goodness, very much alive. (Her most recent credit is for a 2025 film called Die, My Love whose stars are Jennifer Lawrence, Robert Pattinson, and Nick Nolte. The imdb.com synopsis describes it thusly: “In a remote forgotten rural area, a mother struggles to maintain her sanity as she battles with psychosis.”) The first Spacek film they ran last night was Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980), British director Michael Apted’s biopic of country music legend Loretta Lynn, with Spacek as Lynn and Tommy Lee Jones as her often straying husband Doolittle, a.k.a. Mooney (whose extra-relational activities inspired some of her greatest songs, including “You Ain’t Woman Enough to Take My Man”). The second film they showed last night on their Spacek double bill was also fact-based, but a quite different kettle of facts: Missing, a 1982 production by Universal made by European director Costa-Gavras (born Konstantinos Gavras on February 13, 1933 in Loutra-Iraias, Greece). His first feature was The Sleeping Car Murder (1965), a thriller starring Yves Montand and his wife, Simone Signoret, but he “made his bones” with his third feature, Z (1969). Z, a true story about the assassination of a prominent Left-leaning Greek politician (also played by Montand) and the social ferment that it inspired, which led to a military coup that overthrew Greece’s democracy for eight years from 1967 to 1975, set the pattern for most of Costa-Gavras’s later films.

Missing was his first English-language film and his first for a Hollywood studio, Universal, and it told the true story of Charles Horman, a young American journalist living in Santiago, Chile in 1973, when the democratically elected government of Leftist Salvador Allende was overthrown in a coup led by Col. Augusto Pinochet and others in the Chilean military with substantial assistance from the U.S. military and the CIA. Costa-Gavras and his co-writer, Donald E. Stewart, based their film on a book called The Execution of Charles Horman: An American Sacrifice by Thomas Hauser, published in 1978 and reprinted under the film’s title in 1982. I remember getting an invitation to go to a preliminary screening of this film in 1982 before its release because I was then part of an anti-nuclear power group called Community Energy Action Network (CEAN), and as part of their strategy for marketing the film Universal’s publicists did outreach to various Leftist organizations and invited them to see the film early. But for some reason I missed that screening and never saw Missing until last night. The central characters in Missing are Charles Horman’s father Ed (Jack Lemmon in one of his greatest “serious” performances, rivaling Save the Tiger, Glengarry Glen Ross and his TV-movie The Execution of Leo Frank, in which he played a white lynching victim in another tale based on fact) and his daughter-in-law Beth (Sissy Spacek).

When Charlie Horman (John Shea) goes missing on September 16, 1973, five days after Pinochet overthrew and murdered Allende and took power in a coup d’état, Ed gets tired of the pablum he gets fed by officials of the U.S. State Department and the diplomatic corps about what happened to his son. He decides to go to Chile himself and he and Beth launch their own investigation to determine what happened to him. They run into a series of intimidating officials, both American and Chilean, and get the proverbial run-around from all concerned. One U.S. diplomatic official asks that Ed and Beth provide them a list of all Charles’s friends and acquaintances, ostensibly to aid in the search for him. Ed is flabbergasted when Beth categorically refuses to write such a list, explaining to him that if she listed Charles’s friends and gave it to the American officials, it would find its way to the Chileans and everyone on that list would be at best arrested and at worst summarily killed. The story includes a thread about the long-term radicalization of Ed Horman; at first he is a political moderate who tends to believe the officials who say that Charles’s radical political activities (including doing Spanish translations of English-language articles about Chilean politics for a Chilean Communist newspaper called Fin) got him into this in the first place and he was responsible for what happened to him. I thought the film’s one weakness was its frequent use of flashbacks – a lot of times Costa-Gavras and Stewart keep it all too unclear not only where we are but when we are, and characters we’ve been told are dead or have left Chile suddenly turn up alive, well, and on the streets or in the living rooms of Santiago.

Among those are Charlie’s friends Terry Simon (Melanie Mayron), Frank Teruggi (Joe Regalbuto), and David Holloway (Keith Szarabajka), who are shown with Charles in a long sequence representing a home movie they took of themselves just before the coup. The fact that these itinerant Americans barely surviving on remittances from their parents were able to afford a 16 mm projector and a camera that could record and shoot synchronized sound is something of a mystery (in the pre-video age, sound was always the hardest problem facing amateur movie-makers), but the interlude gives us a welcome respite from the terror of the immediate post-coup environment, in which people are being shot down in the street almost at random, the cops are literally patrolling the skies in helicopters looking into people’s windows, and women wearing trousers or even pantsuits are being harassed and given D.I.Y. makeovers because the regime hath decreed that all women must wear dresses. (One of the more peculiar obsessions modern-day authoritarians have is with women’s clothing; among the more serious challenges to Iran’s theocratic dictatorship was one led by women demanding freedom from the chador, the veil Islamic fundamentalists insist women wear every moment they’re out of the house.) Ultimately, after weeks of uncertainty and being strung along with half-truths by both American and Chilean officials, Ed and Beth Horman learn the truth [spoiler alert!]: Charles was killed on September 19, 1973, just three days after he was arrested, during one of the mass executions that took place in Santiago’s football stadium. (More recently, the Taliban in Afghanistan also became notorious for staging mass executions in a stadium and literally rounding up the people and forcing them to watch. One twist is that the Taliban had banned all forms of popular entertainment so the only shows they were allowing to be put on were these mass executions.)

We also learn that the reason Charles Horman was marked for death was that both the Chilean and American government wanted to cover up the U.S. involvement in the coup, which Charles had learned about from interviewing U.S. military officials who gave him the details and obviously weren’t aware that their role was supposed to be a deep, dark secret. Ultimately Ed and Beth Horman leave Chile with a parting shot from Ed threatening a lawsuit against both the Chilean and American officials responsible for his son’s death: “I just thank God we live in a country where we can still put people like you in jail!” That wasn’t true then any more than it is today – though at least in 1982 we could watch this movie in relative comfort that at least abuses like this couldn’t take place in our country. Now we’re living under the thumb of a dictatorial President who’s sending immigration goon squads to pick people up off the streets and ship them to concentration camps in other countries and beat up and arrest members of Congress and other elected officials who try to investigate the conditions under which Trump’s detainees are being held. Missing ends with a grim postlude stating that Ed Horman didn’t receive his son Charles’s body until seven months later – after he was hit up with a bill for nearly $1,000, payable immediately, on his way out of Chile for “freight charges” on his son’s remains. The delay meant that when Ed finally received Charles’s body it was too decomposed for an autopsy to be possible. He also sued the U.S. State Department for damages for the loss of his son, but the government successfully got the courts to dismiss the case. Aside from its all too timely reminder of how easily a democratic government can evaporate and become a brutal dictatorship, Missing is a finely honed movie, beautifully directed by Costa-Gavras and featuring Jack Lemmon in one of his most brilliant, effective performances as he gradually realizes that his son Charles’s radical ideals were actually valid and true, and enough of a threat to the status quo that they literally had him murdered.

Man with a Movie Camera (Vseukrainske Foto Kino Upravlinnia, 1929)

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

After Missing on June 22 my husband Charles and I stayed on Turner Classic Movies for Jacqueline Stewart’s “Silent Sunday Showcase” of a film that we watched together early on in our relationship and has long been one of our favorites. The film was Man with a Movie Camera, a Russian/Ukrainian production made in 1929 by director Dziga Vertov (though actually shot over a seven-year period and incorporating footage from a series of newsreel shorts called Kino-Pravda – literally “cinema truth” – Vertov had been producing since 1922). Vertov was one of the most fascinating and enigmatic characters in the history of filmmaking; born David Abelevich Kaufman in Bialystok, Poland on January 2, 1896 at a time when Poland had been successively partitioned between Russia, Prussia (now a state in Germany) and Austria. Vertov was born into the Russian zone and at first he “Russified” his first two names to “Denis Arkadievich” before taking “Dziga Vertov,” Ukrainian for “spinning top,” as his name. When the Bolsheviks took over Russia in 1917 Vertov got a job editing newsreels for the Moscow Cinema Committee and soon worked his way into producing and editing his own newsreels. He also met fellow film editor Elisaveta Svilova, whom he would later marry and make his collaborator. Vertov argued for a whole new form of cinema that would owe nothing to literature, theatre, or the conventional modes of storytelling that most moviemakers had copied from those media.

Man with a Movie Camera is a largely abstract film made by Vertov, his wife and his brother Mikhail Kaufman, who is seen in the film operating the movie camera that is clearly visible in several scenes. (A third brother, Boris Kaufman, left the Soviet Union, settled in France, directed Jean Vigo’s classics Zero for Conduct and L’Atalante in the early 1930’s, ultimately settled in the U.S. and won an Academy Award for photographing On the Waterfront.) It’s a magnificent study in the art of montage, which literally just means “editing” but in film theory means the particular type of editing that many Soviet filmmakers indulged in during the 1920’s, between the Bolshevik takeover and the rise of Joseph Stalin to power in 1929. It meant rapid cutting, often between two disparate scenes to establish a subliminal connection between them in the audience members’ minds. One particularly famous experiment with film conducted in the Soviet Union worked from a totally impassive close-up from a pre-Soviet Russian film with the actor Ivan Mozzhukhin (who, ironically, had been condemned to death by the Soviet government and had fled to exile in France). Soviet filmmakers took a totally expressionless closeup of Mozzhukhin from one of his films and intercut it with a bowl of soup, a baby, and a tombstone. Audiences seeing the experimental reel praised the power of Mozzhukhin’s performance, his registering hunger at the sight of the soup, joy at seeing the baby, and grief at seeing the tombstone.

Though almost all the Soviet directors of the 1920’s used this technique, Vertov used it far more than anyone else. Man with a Movie Camera is full of quick cuts between seemingly disparate scenes, and instead of having a plot – even the carefully constructed plot lines of most reality-based films – it’s a series of stunning images presented one after the other in rapid-fire fashion. Vertov also stipulated that the film be divided into six episodes, each the length of a single reel of film (between 10 and 15 minutes at silent projection speed), and each episode would end with its number flashing on the screen while the next one would begin with the next number in sequence. This was actually a fairly common practice in the silent era – Fritz Lang’s two-part series Die Nibelungen was similarly divided into so-called “cantos,” each one the length of a reel – though when sound came in filmmakers became increasingly artful about concealing the discontinuities between the reels of a film instead of emphasizing them. One particularly famous scene in Man with a Movie Camera shows Mikhail Kaufman standing on top of a streetcar filming as the world goes by him, and this time around I thought he bore a striking resemblance to Buster Keaton. Indeed, it’s occurred to me that Keaton was unwittingly reproducing the Mozzhukhin experiment in some of his films, intercutting various images in between his “Great Stone Face” close-ups so audience members would read into his performance and experience emotions his face wasn’t registering.

Vertov’s legacy is a long and rather convoluted one; not surprisingly, he ran afoul of Stalin after his 1934 film Three Songs About Lenin (the film ends with a series of choruses with the message, “If only Lenin were alive today!,” and it’s not surprising that Stalin heard that as an attack on his legitimacy; he had the film withdrawn and in 1938 had an epilogue added proclaiming Stalin as Lenin’s rightful heir). Vertov made only one film after that, Lullaby (1937), and died in obscurity in 1954. More recently his films have been restored and made available again, and many filmmakers have copied his style since. After watching the footage of athletes that begins reel five of Man with a Movie Camera, including long stretches of slow-motion, I became convinced that Leni Riefenstahl had seen this film and copied it for her own documentary on the Berlin Olympics seven years later. More recently D. A. Pennebaker and other British and American documentarians took over the name of Vertov’s newsreel, Kino Pravda, and translated it into French as cinema verité – though the films made under that banner were usually tightly plotted tellings of a single real-life event (a primary election, a boxing match, an auto race, a music festival or tour) and the editorial intervention of the filmmakers lay in their selection and their abandonment of the voice-of-God narration that had become standard in most sound documentaries.

When Jean-Luc Godard briefly decided in 1969 that he would from then on make only documentaries (a resolution that lasted just four years), he and his associates formed a company and called it the Dziga Vertov Group. (It only made a handful of movies before disbanding in 1972, including Pravda, a film about the Russian occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968 that was widely criticized for taking a pox-on-both-your-houses attitude; and Vladimir and Rosa, a quite effective non-documentary film à clef about the 1969-1970 Chicago conspiracy trial in which two of the defendants are also filmmakers). But Vertov’s most obvious recent successor is Godfrey Reggio (b. 1940), whose films Koyaanisqatsi (1982), Powaqqatsi (1988), and Naqoyqatsi (2002) are by far the closest anyone has come to duplicating Vertov’s style in the modern era – and the fact that Koyaanisqatsi became a major box-office hit on the independent circuit and got playing time in mainstream theatres is an ironic testament to the power and vitality of Vertov’s approach even though almost nobody would want all films to look like Man with a Movie Camera or Koyaanisqatsi.

Dateless to Dangerous: My Son's Secret Life (Neshama Entertainment, MarVista Entertainment, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Last night (Saturday, June 21) my husband Charles came home from work relatively early and joined me for the last hour and a half of a two-hour Lifetime TV movie I’d been particularly looking forward to: Dateless to Dangerous: My Son’s Secret Life. The reason I was especially interested in this one is I had just finished reading Dale Boren’s amazing book It Came from Something Awful: How a Toxic Troll Army Accidentally Memed Donald Trump into Office, which made the argument that Trump won in 2016 (and arguably in 2024 as well, though Boren’s book is from 2019 and therefore came before Trump’s spectacular return to power) largely on the strength of disaffected young men who faced a world of either unemployment or ultra-low-paying jobs after going into hock on their student loans, and who sat in their mothers’ basements and logged on to Web sites and social-media pages that reinforced each other’s prejudices that life just sucks. Boren argued that Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential candidacy briefly lit an idealistic flame among at least some of the Internet denizens, but when Obama governed as a moderate Democrat instead of the revolutionary change figure he’d sold himself as, the Internet “bros” first went back into lethargy and then were snapped back into political awareness by the rise of Donald Trump. Boren argued that Trump satisfied the hunger of a lot of young white American men who were tired of being told they were the privileged ones and they had to bend over backwards to accommodate the demands of women and people of color, when they were all too aware that their own lives were hardly bastions of privilege.

Consciously or unconsciously, Trump’s brazen contempt for “political correctness” and “wokeism” in general, and for women and people of color in particular, hooked a large voting bloc of disaffected young men on Internet social platforms in general and Twitter in particular and helped propel him to the Presidency. It also, Boren argued, moved the politics of the Internet “bros” firmly and enduringly to the Right. Alas, the people who made Dateless to Dangerous, director Stefan Brogren and writers Edmund and Gary Entin, used only the most superficial aspects of this reality and shoehorned it into the typical Lifetime formulae, though they did one thing that was genuinely creative. The story centers around the Miller family, mother Noelle (Jodie Sweetin), son Miles (Alexander Elliot), and daughter Haley (Nikki Roumel). The genuinely creative aspect was what the writers did with Noelle’s husband: instead of either still being around the family or definitively divorced or dead, they made him a globe-trotter (at one point he calls Noelle from Bali) who keeps hitting the family’s bank account to fund his travels – leaving Noelle in a continuing state of anxiety over whether she’ll be able to pay the bills – and eventually hooks up with a typical bimbo girlfriend whom we see only in pics the kids have found on social media. Miles is the older of the two Miller kids and he demands that his mom let him spend a lot of time alone in dad’s man-cave basement, where he plays a lot of video games and soon joins chats that reinforce his growing sexist prejudices against all women.

The film takes place during homecoming week at “Greenview Valley High School” in Illinois (just where in Illinois isn’t specified), when Miles’s two attempts to get a date, with Sophia Nazer (Alexandra Chaves) and his partner on the debate club, Beatrice (Shechinah Mpumlwana), both end in rejection and frustration. (It’s significant that the two women who reject Miles are both people of color.) Meanwhile Miles also gets jealous of the growing attraction of his sister Haley to Sam (Kolton Stewart), who’s racially ambiguous (he mostly presents as white but his flat nose and nappy hair give him at least a hint of Blackness) and, when he says he doesn’t celebrate Christmas, slyly lets us know he’s Jewish. Miles starts identifying himself as an “incel” (short for “involuntary celibate”), and at one point he throws Sam out of their house for seeing Haley after the two got it on at a drunken party (featuring the invariable index for underage drinking on a Lifetime movie, red Dixie cups) and breaks Sam’s arm in two places. Miles’s Internet “friends” are giving him the same typical advice on “How to Pick Up Girls” that circulated in nasty books from the 1950’s and 1960’s that basically told horny young straight guys that the only way to get women to have sex with them is by intimidating and/or bribing them – and for someone like Miles who doesn’t have the money or possessions to bribe them, intimidation is the only way to go. In an attempt to build sympathy, Miles belts himself in the face with a dumbbell on the advice of one of his Internet “friends.”

Beatrice demands a new debate partner and the team’s coach, Avi Kumara (Husein Madhavji) – whom, it’s hinted, is interested romantically and/or sexually in Miles’s mother Noelle – agrees. Miles walks out of the debate team and descends into Internet-fueled madness so completely that he decides to get his revenge (again, egged on by text messages from his online “friends”) by getting his father’s gun out of storage, grabbing a jerry-can full of gasoline, and torching the big homecoming party. What he’s going to do with the gun isn’t all that clear: at first he seems headed for massacring all the students who’ve given him such a hard time (at least in his own mind), though in the end after he sets the debate team’s homecoming float on fire he rushes off to a tunnel, Haley catches up with him, and he decides to shoot himself. Miles and Haley Both Reach for the Gun (oh, say a prayer to Maurine Dallas Watkins, original author of Chicago!) and for one brief horrible moment we think that Miles has accidentally killed his sister. Fortunately, the two both survive, and there’s a typical Lifetime “Six Months Later” chyron in which Miles is in some kind of custodial facility where he’s finally getting the professional help he needed all along even though all his life plans are in ruins now.

I’ve often commented that the existence of “incels” makes me sorry that people can’t consciously change their sexual orientations through sheer force of will, because judging from the photos of “incels” I’ve seen, maybe they can’t find women who’d want them but they’d do pretty well in a Gay bar. Alexander Elliot is actually, if not drop-dead gorgeous, at least easy on the eyes, and it’s readily apparent to see how he got the idea from his weirdly gynocentric home life and the absence of his father (at one point dad calls – we don’t ever see him except in two photos with his bimbo, but we at least hear his call to Miles – and Miles pleads to be allowed to live with him instead of mom when his parents finally get their divorce, but dad’s answer is a hard no) that women rule the world with their power to say yea or nay to men who want to have sex with them. It’s an interesting movie that does what it set out to do pretty well, but it could have been a lot deeper and richer if the Entin brothers who wrote the script had been more aware and alive to the potentialities of their subject matter.

Dark Eyes of London, a.k.a. The Human Monster (John Argyle Productions, Pathé, Monogram, 1939)

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

After Dateless to Dangerous on Saturday, June 21 my husband Charles and I watched a pretty quirky half-thriller, half-horror film from Britain in 1939 called Dark Eyes of London – after the Edgar Wallace novel on which it was based – in the U.K. but with its title changed to The Human Monster for its U.S. release. The movie was produced by John Argyle Productions – Argyle also co-wrote the script with Walter Summers (who also directed, with quite a flair for the Gothic) and Patrick Kirwan – and released by Pathé in Britain and Monogram in America. Lugosi had already worked for the first iteration of Monogram in one of its worst movies, The Mysterious Mr. Wong (1935), but it was after this film that he signed with Sam Katzman’s Banner Productions and Monogram to make nine largely wretched horror movies that are probably Lugosi’s worst credits until Ed Wood got hold of him. Dark Eyes of London a.k.a. The Human Monster is actually a pretty well-done film that cast Lugosi in a dual role. He’s Dr. Feodor Orloff, a medical student who wasn’t given a license to practice because he developed megalomania (no shit!) and was therefore forced to make a living as an insurance broker; and he’s also John Dearborn, who runs a charity home for blind people and, in the film’s most haunting scene, is shown preaching a sermon and reading from a Bible printed in Braille.

But because there was no way Lugosi’s Hungarian accent would be believable coming from a character who was supposedly British (though Lugosi had played a Brit convincingly in one of his finest films, the early Charlie Chan mystery The Black Camel from 1931), Argyle hired another actor, O. B. Clarence, to dub his voice when he was playing Dearborn. That at least is what most people think, though Charles thought that Clarence was actually playing Dearborn on screen as well as on the soundtrack. His key piece of evidence was that director Summers shot the big reveal scene that was supposed to let us know Orloff and Dearborn were the same person from a distant camera with the actor(s) in shadow. The gimmick is that Orloff is running an insurance agency and writing big policies on various individuals who come to him for loans. Orloff insists that they take out life insurance policies on themselves with phony beneficiaries, and then he woos them to Dearborn’s home for the blind. There they’re killed by Orloff’s assistant, Jake (Wilfrid Walter), an oddly made up character who looks half-Black and half-Neanderthal. (I suspect the makeup artist, who’s uncredited on imdb.com, was inspired by Fredric March’s Neanderthal makeup as Mr. Hyde in Rouben Mamoulian’s 1932 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.)

Unfortunately for him, one of Orloff’s victims was a middle-aged man named Henry Stuart (Gerald Pring), and his daughter Diana (a quite impressive performance by Greta Gynt) shows up in London to find out what happened to him. The police have noticed a series of mysterious deaths among men who had taken out big life insurance policies just before they croaked, and assigned Detective Inspector Larry Holt (Hugh Williams) to investigate. Holt in turn has the unwelcome assistance of Lt. Patrick O’Reilly (Edmon Ryan, whose American accent is really surprisingly good) from the Chicago Police Department. O’Reilly was there to escort American criminal Fred Grogan (Alexander Field) to be extradited for a crime he committed on a previous trip to Britain. There’s also an engaging character named Lou (Arthur E. Owen), a blind and dumb street musician who plays violin and receives instructions from Dr. Orloff printed out on slips of paper with a Braille typewriter, and who gets “offed” by Jake when he learns too much about what’s going on. Ultimately the cops catch on to Dr. Orloff and they show up to arrest him, though in a scene that Charles found disappointing he ends up being pushed by Jake into the same mud bog along the shore of the Thames that has previously been the final destination of most of the insurance scam’s victims.

Charles was hoping the film would end like White Zombie seven years earlier, in which Lugosi’s character was driven from the parapet of his old castle by the newly freed zombies he’d enslaved on his sugar plantation in the Caribbean. I was also hoping for a similarly apocalyptic ending along the lines of Bowery at Midnight, made by Lugosi for Katzman, Banner, and Monogram three years later, in which Lugosi’s murder victims, brought back to life by a drug-addicted doctor he’d sheltered at his mission, gang up on him and essentially lynch him at the end. Still, Dark Eyes of London is an engaging movie and a cut above most of the dreck Lugosi would get once he returned to America (John Argyle deserves credit for giving Lugosi a quite substantial speaking role and letting for him to learn all those lines phonetically, since Lugosi never learned more than the simplest English), even though it’s hardly at the level of Murders in the Rue Morgue, White Zombie or his surprisingly effective romantic lead in the 1934 serial The Return of Chandu.

Pale Flower (Bungei Productions, Ninjin Club, Shochiku, 1964)

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

This morning (Sunday, June 22) I put on Turner Classic Movies at 7 a.m. to watch the repeat showing of Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” presentation of the 1964 Japanese film Pale Flower (乾いた花, Kawaita hana). It was based on a novel by Shintarô Ishihara, who later became a radical-Right politician in Japan and was governor (essentially the mayor) of Tokyo from 1999 to 2012. Pale Flower was a rather grim story about Muraki (Ryô Ikebe), a hit man for the Funada gang who had gone to prison for murdering a member of the rival Yasuoka gang. When the film opens he’s just been released after serving a three-year sentence and is trying to get in touch with as many of his former gang associates as he can. Muraki visits his pre-incarceration girlfriend, Shinko Furuta, and practically rapes her, but later he goes to a gambling parlor where he loses a lot of money in a peculiar Japanese game called Hanafuda which is played with flowered playing cards (though director Masahiro Shinoda decided to make them tiles so they’d make an ominous clicking sound when they were shuffled and dealt), and appears from what we see of it to be a cross between poker and craps. At the gambling party he meets a young woman named Saeko (Mariko Kaga) who wins most of his money (which begs the question of how a man who just got out of prison has so much money to throw around; were we supposed to assume he’d saved it during his time in stir?). The two fall in love, or at least mutual lust, with each other and do a lot more gambling at various secret locations, a lot of driving around at night in her rear-engined 1959 Renault Florida convertible, and a lot of glaring at each other.

Shinoda seemed to be directing Kaga much the way Josef von Sternberg directed Marlene Dietrich in the early 1930’s, telling her to look impassive and do as little “acting” as possible. Her leading man, Ryô Ikebe, had blown his career for freezing on stage during a play, but Shinoda gave him this part as a comeback role and he rose to the challenge beautifully. Ikebe was a handsome man who smolders and glares through much of the movie much the way Jean-Paul Belmondo was doing in France and Marcello Mastroianni was in Italy. Alas, Pale Flower was one of those movies that has some stunning individual sequences but doesn’t really come together as a whole. Among the stunning individual sequences are one in which Muraki is assaulted and nearly killed by the brother of the man he went to prison for killing in the backstory, as well as the final murder. It seems that during the three years in which Muraki was in stir, the Funada and Yasuoka gangs merged to challenge the out-of-town competition from another gang from Osaka, led by a man named Imai (Kyû Sazanka). Now Imai has ordered the death of a member of the merged Funada/Yasuoka gang, and both Funada and Yasuoka have decreed it’s payback time. Ultimately Muraki ambushes Imai and stabs him to death (he’s been instructed not to use a gun for reasons that aren’t altogether clear) in a crowded café in full view of all the customers, while in a stunning use of music Shinoda accompanies the scene with “Dido’s Lament” from Henry Purcell’s 1689 opera Dido and Aeneas. (I wasn’t sure what language the recording of the Purcell aria was in, but it certainly wasn’t English, the language in which Purcell and his librettist, Nahum Tate, wrote it.)

Prior to the assassination Muraki has had an argument with Saeko (whose name is pronounced like the English word “psycho,” by the way) over her drug use. Muraki has already got into arguments with his gang bosses over the appearance of a part-Chinese heroin addict named Yoh, who killed two people in Hong Kong and then fled to Japan, and he’s incensed that Saeko bribed a doctor friend to obtain a dose of heroin and injected herself. Muraki takes Saeko along on his murder run because he says it’ll offer her an even bigger thrill than drug use, and the scene is beautifully staged and fulfills Alfred Hitchcock’s suggestion to stage murders like love scenes and love scenes like murders. But these flashes of brilliance can’t obscure the fact that this movie is pretty dull, partly because so much of the footage shows the characters gambling – either on horse races (shot by Shinoda not from the traditional sideways point of view but with the horses charging directly at the camera) or playing Hanafuda, a game totally incomprehensible to Western audiences. Also there’s virtually no character development; Muraki is glum and depressed from start to finish and Saeko is enigmatic throughout. There’s a Lifetime-esque title after the murder scene, “Two Years Later” – and two years later Muraki is in prison (again) for the murder when he receives word from a fellow prisoner that Saeko is dead, having been murdered by Yoh.

I didn’t actively dislike Pale Flower but I didn’t like it that much, either, and among the others who didn’t like it was one of the screenwriters, Masaru Baba. He complained to the “suits” at the producing studio, Shochiku, about the way Shinoda had cut great chunks out of his script and told most of the story in visuals instead of dialogue. As a result of Baba’s complaints, and also over concerns from the Japanese government that the film glorified gambling, Shochiku’s executives delayed the film’s release by nine months before finally letting it out. It’s a movie that’s been acclaimed by a lot of people, including Miami Vice director Michael Mann (who put it on his all-time ten-best list), but despite some truly impressive scenes, great neo-noir cinematography by Masao Kosugi, and a haunting (and thankfully sparingly deployed) music score by major Japanese classical composer Tôru Takemitsu (best known in the movie world for his scores for Akira Kurosawa, including Ran), it just didn’t do that much for me.

The Wiz (Motown Productions, Universal Pictures, 1978)

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

Last night (Thursday, June 19) Turner Classic Movies did a whole day of Black-themed movies for the “Juneteenth” mezzo-holiday, including one I’d never seen before: The Wiz, co-produced by Berry Gordy’s Motown Productions and Universal in 1978 and based on a stage musical by Charlie Smalls (music and lyrics) and William F. Brown (book) from 1974 that in turn derived from Lyman Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. I’d long been morbidly curious about The Wiz even though, when the announcements came out that Diana Ross would star as a 33-year-old Dorothy Gale (a Harlem kindergarten teacher instead of a Kansas farm girl), still bitter over the fiasco of her film Lady Sings the Blues, I grimly joked, “Not content to trash the legacy of Billie Holiday, she’s going to trash the legacy of Judy Garland as well.” The TCM showing of The Wiz was hosted by two African-Americans, Jacqueline Stewart (the usual “Silent Sunday Showcase” host) and rapper Cliff “Method Man” Smith, and in their outro both made a veiled comment to the effect that the film’s box-office failure had been due to racism. How about maybe, just maybe, The Wiz bombed at the box office because it’s a lousy movie? And it’s a lousy movie despite a major talent roster both behind and in front of the cameras. The director was Sidney Lumet, the writer was Joel Schumacher (who’d go on to be a director himself), the cinematographer was Oswald Morris, the editor was Dede Allen, both the costumes and sets were designed by Tony Walton (Julie Andrews’s first husband), and the stars were Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, Nipsey Russell, Richard Pryor, and Lena Horne.

Ross’s Dorothy is a kindergarten teacher in Harlem who boasts that she’s never been south of 125th Street (i.e., she’s never been to any part of New York City other than Harlem), which becomes significant later on when just about all of “Oz” looks incredibly like those parts of New York which Dorothy has never visited. She’s blown to Oz by a storm that’s controlled by Glinda, the Good Witch of the South (Lena Horne), though we don’t see enough of her at this stage of the movie to recognize her, and instead of being enclosed inside a house that lands on the Wicked Witch of the East, Dorothy takes her out by landing on the circular Oz logo which in turn lands on the witch. One good thing this script does that the classic 1939 The Wizard of Oz film didn’t is it clearly distinguishes between the good witches of the North (“Miss One,” Thelma Carpenter, who sang with Count Basie’s band in the 1940’s) and the South (Glinda, played stunningly by Lena Horne) as Baum did in the original book. It was the writers for the 1939 film, Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allan Woolf, who combined the two good witches into the single character played by Billie Burke. There are also some charming gags along the way to the Yellow Brick Road, including yellow checkered taxis that suddenly go out of service whenever our intrepid questers go near them and a long scene in a subway in which the Scarecrow (Michael Jackson in what turned out to be his only feature film) is menaced by man-eating trash cans. I also liked the gimmick that the Scarecrow’s chest was stuffed with shreds from old books, which he pulls out of himself and reads like fortune cookies and thereby displays an impressive intellect even though he insists he doesn’t have any brains.

But those bits of cleverness don’t take away from a surprisingly leaden, lugubrious movie that fails to hook much of the original story’s (or the 1939 movie’s) sense of wonder and whimsy. Charlie Smalls’s musical score doesn’t help, even when it was bolstered on film (as it was on stage, too) by other major Black musical figures including Luther Vandross and Quincy Jones. The score is strongest when it remains rooted in the pop-soul and disco stuff Ross did best; when she’s obliged to sing a big Broadway-style ballad she’s as hopeless as she was in trying and dismally failing to duplicate Billie Holiday’s singing style in Lady Sings the Blues. Smalls seems to have been willing to draw on just about any musical tradition he could think of as long as it had some roots in the Black community; Nipsey Russell as the Tin Man is introduced with a song called “What Could I Do If I Could Feel?” that is, of all things, a pastiche of 1920’s Dixieland jazz. (There’s a good gag in which his backup singers are three black faces sculpted into a wall who stay attached and whose faces only come to life when they’re obliged to sing. I couldn’t help but think that’s what Diana Ross would have wanted to do with the other members of The Supremes.) Indeed, by far the best song in the show is the opening quasi-gospel number, “The Feeling That We Have,” performed at the Thanksgiving dinner the Gale family is having in the opening pre-Oz framing sequence, and movingly sung by Theresa Merritt as Aunt Em. It’s hardly in the same league as “Over the Rainbow” (and later in the movie, Diana Ross is made to sing a song that almost inevitably contains the word “rainbow” in its lyrics), but it gets the movie off to a nice, homey start. Also, aside from the Cowardly Lion (Ted Ross), who looks as convincing as Bert Lahr did in 1939, the character makeups aren’t as good as they were in the old classic. Neither are the dance numbers, especially Michael Jackson’s; it doesn’t help that he’s obliged to sing his big song, “You Can’t Win, You Can’t Break Even,” while he’s still stuck on the scarecrow pole before Dorothy gets him out and sets him free.

One surprise in this film is that Michael Jackson is actually the most convincing actor in it. He delivers his lines with a real sense of pathos and raw emotion that seems to elude just about everybody else in the cast. It’s a real pity that the much talked-about film version of Sir James M. Barrie’s Peter Pan with Michael Jackson in the lead fell through and never got made, because judging from his performance here it could have been a really great movie. Aside from him, The Wiz pretty much just plods through all the old familiar plot points of the Baum classic and the 1939 film, and Richard Pryor’s exposure as a phony wizard has none of the moving power it did from Frank Morgan in 1939. Lena Horne is also barely in the film – though it doesn’t help that she gets to reprise Diana Ross’s big song as she’s about to leave Oz, “If You Believe in Yourself,” and totally outsings her on it. The Wicked Witch of the West, who here is called “Evillene” (in Baum’s novels and the films he produced from them in 1914 the Witch’s name was “Momba,” and in the recent film Wicked as well as the book and stage play it was based on, she was called “Elphaba”), runs a “sweat shop” in which sweat is actually the product they produce (a good gag from a film that doesn’t have that many of them) and she gets annihilated when Dorothy pulls the lever of a water sprinkler that dunks her. She doesn’t have a broomstick, which makes me wonder just how Dorothy and her crew can prove to the Wizard that they have indeed dispatched her. She’s also dressed in a hideous costume that makes me think Tony Walton’s inspiration was Carmen Miranda, though given all the horror stories about what Margaret Hamilton went through when her costume accidentally caught on fire and the crew had to pat her down carefully to put out the fire lest they inadvertently push the highly toxic copper-based green makeup into her body, with potentially lethal consequences, it’s understandable why Walton didn’t want to use that substance again.

It’s possible that the scenes in the subway were an inspiration for the Wachowski siblings when they made The Matrix and its various sequelae, as were the use of a motorcycle gang as the Winged Monkeys. Overall, though, The Wiz is a leaden, slow-moving film (Lumet and company take 134 minutes to tell a story Victor Fleming and his crew at MGM in 1939 managed in just 102 minutes). It wasn’t an intrinsically bad idea to do a version of The Wizard of Oz with Black people, but this wasn’t it, and it also doesn’t help that despite Oswald Morris’s incredible résumé (including the 1952 Moulin Rouge, Beat the Devil, Moby Dick, Look Back in Anger, The Guns of Navarone, Lolita, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, Fiddler on the Roof, and Sleuth), he shot all too much of this movie in the standard past-is-brown mode that, as I’ve noted before, is bad enough in a movie whose protagonists are white but is even worse when they’re Black. All too often the actors’ brown faces just blend into the brown background and it’s hard to see them. I wouldn’t call The Wiz a bad movie, really, but it’s such a bundle of missed opportunities it’s hard either to praise or damn it. It did at least give Michael Jackson the chance to work both with Diana Ross, who had discovered him (the first album on which Michael Jackson appeared was called Diana Ross Presents the Jackson 5), and with Quincy Jones, who served as musical director on The Wiz and went on to produce the three pop-soul-dance masterpieces, Off the Wall (1979), Thriller (1982), and Bad (1987), on which his reputation as an adult performer will always rest.

Friendly Persuasion (B-M Productions, Allied Artists Pictures, 1956)

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

Last night (June 18), Turner Classic Movies continued its “Star of the Month” tribute to Gary Cooper with the 1956 film Friendly Persuasion, produced by B-M Productions in association with Allied Artists – which sounds like a knock-off competitor to United Artists but was really our old friends, Monogram Pictures. Monogram spun off Allied Artists in 1947 as an outlet for higher-quality “A” productions, and their first release under the Allied Artists name was It Happened on Fifth Avenue, a rather strange movie directed by Roy Del Ruth after the original producer-director, Frank Capra, gave up on it and made It’s a Wonderful Life instead. (My husband Charles and I saw it last December, and I reviewed it at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2024/12/it-happened-on-fifth-avenue-roy-del.html.) Charles came home while Friendly Persuasion was about halfway over and he immediately recognized it as something we’d watched together years before – though I had no prior memory of us having seen it as a couple. To the extent that I had any prior recollection of it, I remembered it as a much better movie than it seemed to be last night. The story began as a series of short tales published between 1940 and 1945 by author Jessamyn West, who like the central characters was a Quaker from Indiana. She collected them into a novel in 1945 and it got made into a movie in 1956, when there was a big market for homey family stories that nostalgically portrayed rural life at a time when rural life was quickly disappearing from America.

It takes place in 1862 and stars Gary Cooper as Jess Birdwell, Quaker paterfamilias and exemplar of the church’s pacifist values, who’s suddenly confronted by the need for his family to fight back or die against a band of Confederate marauders who are sweeping through the local territory, stealing livestock and crops and then burning everything they leave behind. Friendly Persuasion was a personal project of director William Wyler, who was hired by Allied Artists production chief Steve Broidy at a time when Broidy was mounting a push to end Monogram’s low-ball reputation once and for all by signing “A”-list directors William Wyler, Billy Wilder, and John Huston to make major films with major stars. Ironically, as Billy Wilder’s biographer Maurice Zolotow pointed out, Broidy’s announcement was met with a sudden drop in Allied Artists’ share price, as investors realized that by abandoning the sure income of Monogram’s “B” business and sailing in the more troubled waters of “A”-level filmmaking, Broidy was risking the company’s solvency. Wilder made Love in the Afternoon for Broidy and Huston embarked on a production of Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King with Clark Gable and Humphrey Bogart – only by the time Huston actually made that film, it was 20 years later, both Gable and Bogart were dead, and his stars were Sean Connery and Michael Caine.

For the first two-thirds of Friendly Persuasion, nothing much happens except a couple of carriage races between Jess Birdwell and a non-Quaker local farmer, Sam Jordan (Robert Middleton); a festival that comes to town at which Jess buys an organ from traveling salesman Professor Quigley (Walter Catlett, whose dry wit briefly enlivens this movie even though he’s in only two scenes) and then stashes it in his attic because Jess’s wife Eliza (Dorothy McGuire,who was actually 15 years younger than Cooper: he was born May 7, 1901 and she on June 14, 1916) disapproves; and the predictable complications involving their three children. The oldest, Josh (played by Anthony Perkins in his first major role), is an almost terminally “good” boy who seems content to stay on the farm, do chores (in one scene he’s enlisted into service to midwife the birth of a new calf). The middle one, Maddie (Phyllis Love), falls in love with a Union servicemember, Gard Jordan (Mark Richman), who’s there to organize a Home Guard of the farmers of this community, Vernon, against the Confederate raiders. The youngest is a pre-pubescent boy named Jess, Jr. (Richard Eyer, a popular child actor in the 1950’s and, like most child actors of either gender in the wake of Shirley Temple’s enormous success in the 1930’s, he copies her horrendous sweetness and cuteness) who’s in a constant war with Samantha the Goose (who actually gets a line in the credits as playing herself!), Eliza’s beloved house pet. Friendly Persuasion begins to go wrong from the opening credits, which feature a song called “Friendly Persuasion (Thee I Love),” written by Dimitri Tiomkin (music) and Paul Francis Webster (lyrics) and sung in the deep, rich, soulful voice of … Pat Boone. Tiomkin also composed the film score, and it’s mostly him at his treacly worst.

For the first 90 minutes or so Friendly Persuasion plays like an episode of the TV show The Waltons inexplicably expanded to feature-film length. Then the war comes to town and Mattie sends off Gard to fight (he proposes to her just before he leaves and she accepts, so it’s no surprise at all that he doesn’t come back alive from his first battle). Josh decides to join the Union Home Guard and confronts the Confederates across a river; at first he’s reluctant to shoot, but when his buddy gets it he fires back. (It’s ironic indeed to see Anthony Perkins play someone so squeamish about killing other people when his most famous role, as Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho four years later, cast him as a mad serial killer.) Even Eliza joins the conflict when a Confederate raiding band shows up at their home and she invites them to dinner and to help themselves to their stores of food – only to get angry and club a Confederate soldier in the back of his head with a broom because he was about to capture and kill Samantha, her pet goose. Even Jess, Sr. ends up taking his long rifle out of the closet and joining the fight, cornering a Confederate soldier but then sending him on his way and refusing to shoot him. The conflict between Quaker values and the need to fight was done a good deal better in Cooper’s other films, most notably the two which won him his Academy Awards for Best Actor: Sergeant York (1941) and High Noon (1952). In both those films he’s trapped between pacifism (his own in Sergeant York, his wife’s in High Noon) and the need to fight back against evil.

Friendly Persuasion is an O.K. movie, brilliantly photographed in 20th Century-Fox’s home color system, DeLuxe, by Ellsworth Fredericks. It’s a nice souvenir of the days when color films were actually colorful; the carnival scenes are a riot of bright colors and even the subdued brown tones of the Birdwells’ farmhouse are obviously an artistic choice (it’s the filmmakers’ idea of what a rural scene would have looked like before electric light) instead of the default look for virtually everything the way it is today. I also appreciate Wyler’s desire to slow down the tempo of his movie to reflect the slower pace of rural life – especially rural life in 1862 – though 14 years earlier he’d made Mrs. Miniver, a much better film about life on the home front during a major war.