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.

Hoodlum Empire (Republic, 1952)

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

Last night (Tuesday, June 17) I showed my husband Charles a YouTube post of a movie from Republic Pictures in 1952 that proved to be unexpectedly good: Hoodlum Empire. Like a lot of movies in the early 1950’s, it was inspired by the real-life televised U.S. Senate hearings led by Estes Kefauver (D-Tennessee) investigating the Mafia and the extent of organized crime’s reach into American life. In this version the Kefauver character is New York Senator Bill Stephens (Brian Donlevy, playing an honest politician 12 years after he famously played a corrupt one in Preston Sturges’ first film as a director, The Great McGinty), whom we first meet as chair of a Senate hearing on organized crime in general and the activities of New York gangster Nick Mancani (Luther Adler) in particular. Mancani is an ex-bootlegger who after Prohibition was repealed got into gambling, particularly slot machines, punchboards (a gambling device similar to today’s lottery scratchers; as the Wikipedia page on them explains, “Punchboards were often used by the slot-machine rackets as a wedge for pushing into communities where slot machines were illegal”), off-track horse racing and other sports bets. (It’s ironic to be watching a movie like this at a time when most of these enterprises have become legal, and sports bets in particular have become a multi-million dollar above-board business through companies like FanDuel and Draft Kings.) Mancani’s crazy enforcer is Charley Pignatelli (Forrest Tucker), who like my husband hates the diminutive of his name and insists on being called “Charles” instead.

The film was written by Hearst journalist Bob Considine, who was a big enough name he was ballyhooed on the original poster art and even with unusually prominent billing on the main credit. Considine was famous for ghost-writing autobiographies about people like General Douglas MacArthur, Captain Ted W. Lawson (one of the pilots on the famous Doolittle Raid on Tokyo, Japan in 1942), and baseball legend Babe Ruth. He was also fanatically anti-union, and when he wrote a decidedly unfavorable article on West Coast Longshoremen’s Union president Harry Bridges, Bridges told a friend, “What did you expect? He’s a Hearst man.” Considine is credited with the original story for this film and as co-author of the screenplay with Bruce Manning, who’d “made his bones” in Hollywood as writer of the early Deanna Durbin musicals One Hundred Men and a Girl, Mad About Music, That Certain Age, Three Smart Girls Grow Up, and The Amazing Mrs. Halliday. He’d also written considerably darker scripts, notably The Ninth Guest, about a group of people invited to a dinner party by a secretive host who plans to murder them one by one as part of a revenge scheme. (Manning and Gwen Bristow wrote this as a novel, The Invisible Host, in 1930; Owen Davis adapted it into a play that year, and Columbia Pictures filmed it in 1934 – all before Agatha Christie published her novel And Then There Were None (originally Ten Little Niggers, then Ten Little Indians, more recently Ten Little Soldiers) in 1939 and used the same plot gimmick.

The real central character of Hoodlum Empire is Mancani’s nephew, Joe Gray (John Russell, whose imdb.com head shot shows him in a cowboy had, reflecting Republic’s emphasis on cheap Westerns), who was a part of Mancani’s gang before he was drafted into World War II. Once he served he came out of the Army determined to “go straight” and give up his former life of crime. He’s also determined to give up his gang-moll girlfriend, Connie Williams (Claire Trevor, and it’s a delight to see her as a bad girl again after her surprisingly weak performance as the good girl in the 1946 Pat O’Brien vehicle Crack-Up). Instead he’s not only in love with but has actually married Marte Dufour (Vera Ralston, who’s been called the real-life Susan Alexander Kane because Republic studio head Herbert J. Yates made her his mistress and put her in film after film even though she was barely competent at best and downright offensive at worst; at least Hearst’s mistress, Marion Davies, had genuine talent as a light comedienne). She was originally Czech skating star Vera Hruba, and Yates added “Ralston” to her last name to make her sound American but couldn’t do anything about her accent, though at least here she’s playing a foreigner – a French Resistance fighter who literally saved Joe Gray’s life when she shot a German soldier who was about to kill him with a rifle from behind – and therefore her accent isn’t a problem. A surprisingly elaborate flashback sequence shows Gray, Stephens, army chaplain Simon Andrews (Grant Withers), and some others fighting in World War II, and this gives Gray his road-to-Damascus moment where he determines to live the rest of his life as an honest, law-abiding citizen. To that end, as soon as the war is over he settles in a small town called “Central City,” presumably in upstate New York, with Marte and has two kids with her. He also opens a gas station with a restaurant attached for long-haul truckers to get a decent meal.

One of the oddest things about Hoodlum Empire is that, for all the Right-wing associations of people like Herbert Yates (who once shut down an entire factory rather than accept a vote of his workers to unionize) and Bob Considine, it copies the multiple-flashback structure used by Left-leaning Orson Welles in the movie that dared not speak its name in Hearst’s company, Citizen Kane. Hoodlum Empire basically is a series of increasingly intense confrontations between Mancani, Pignatelli and their associates on one hand and Joe Gray and his honest business partners in the gas station on the other. Gray has been called to testify before the Stephens Committee on his knowledge of underworld activities, and Pignatelli in particular is anxious to shut him up – permanently – before that can happen. Determined both to live an honest life himself and not to rat out his uncle Mancani, Gray has pledged not to give the authorities any information about the crime syndicate his uncle runs. At one point Pignatelli tries to push Joe off the balcony of Mancani’s high-rise apartment to the street many floors below, and it’s only Mancani’s sudden order for Charlie to stop that saves Joe’s life. In order to make sure Joe doesn’t talk, Mancani and Pignatelli not only stage an invasion of slot machines into Central City – whereupon Gray’s honest co-workers beat up the gangsters sent to install them in their café – but create an elaborate frame-up so that Joe Gray appears to be the owner of the crooked slot machines and all the other gambling equipment the syndicate is bringing to town. When Simon Andrews, who was blinded by a sudden German attack in the World War II flashback, threatens to expose the frame-up to the FBI so Joe Gray will be believed after all when he testifies before the Stephens Committee, Pignatelli sends him hurtling down an elevator shaft and thereby dispatches him.

Now the only witness who can testify that Gray is not still involved in the rackets is his wife Marte, who overheard the meeting Joe had with Mancani when he dropped by their home – contradicting Mancani’s sworn testimony before the Stephens Committee that he had never visited Joe in Central City. The finale is a big shoot-out in Mancani’s apartment, in which Mancani is determined to eliminate Joe once and for all, only Joe’s ex-girlfriend Connie Williams (ya remember Connie Williams? Actually she’s been pretty inescapable throughout the movie, since she transferred her affections from Joe to Mancani once Joe became definitively unavailable to her) takes the bullet Mancani meant for Joe, and Pignatelli starts firing randomly and kills Mancani by accident as the cops arrive and take the survivors into custody. Hoodlum Empire was directed by Joseph Kane, who was mostly a director of hack Westerns but this time shows a definite eye for composition in a story set in contemporary times. Though Hoodlum Empire neither is nor pretends to be a film noir (it could have come closer if Joe had been shown as more conflicted), it’s quite well photographed by Reggie Lanning. It’s also quite well scored by composer Nathan Scott, who uses the old French folk song “Plaisir d’Amour” (best known to U.S. audiences as the source for the melody of Elvis Presley’s big hit, “Can’t Help Falling in Love with You”) as well as the usual slurpy saxophones that get constantly heard every time Lanning’s camera cranes up and shows the exterior of Mancani’s building. I was quite favorably impressed by Hoodlum Empire, and though it’s hardly a masterpiece it is a quite workmanlike piece of entertainment that deserves to be better known than it is.

Summer Stock, a.k.a. If You Feel Like Singing (MGM, 1950)

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

Yesterday (June 16) afternoon I watched a comfortable old favorite of mine on Turner Classic Movies: Summer Stock (1950), Judy Garland’s last film as an MGM contract player. It’s an old-fashioned backstage musical of the type Garland and Mickey Rooney had been making at MGM a decade earlier (Babes in Arms, Strike Up the Band, Babes on Broadway), and both she and her co-star, Gene Kelly, were looking ahead to much stronger and more ground-breaking projects: Judy to A Star Is Born and Kelly to An American in Paris and Singin’ in the Rain. The plot, concocted by writers Sy Gomberg and George Wells and directed by one of Judy’s Gay friends, Charles Walters, casts Judy as New England farm woman Jane Falbury, who’s running her old family’s farm in collaboration with her aunt Esmeralda, known as “Esmé” (Marjorie Main, who practically steals this movie!). Jasper G. Wingait (Ray Collins), the richest man in town, is determined that Jane marry his son Orville (Eddie Bracken, playing a thoroughly annoying comic-relief character; Preston Sturges did wonderful things with him in The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek and Hail the Conquering Hero, but Walters, Gomberg, and Wells were hardly at Sturges’ level of talent, skill, or audacity) to reunite the two pioneering families that first settled this village in colonial times. The complications arise when Jane’s sister Abigail (Gloria DeHaven) shows up with a company of New York stage actors in tow. Abigail has been desperate to escape the farming community and borrowed money to go to college, then bailed out after a year, and has progressively tried writing and painting before settling on a career as an actress. She has fallen in love with Joe Ross (Gene Kelly), a singer, dancer, choreographer, and director who’s rehearsing a new show he wants to take to Broadway.

Without telling Jane in advance, Abigail invites Ross and his whole troupe to move into the Falbury barn and rehearse their show there. The film begins with Jane’s two farmhands, Zeb (Erville Alderson) and Frank (Paul E. Burns), announcing that because she hasn’t been able to pay them, they’re quitting to take factory jobs in the big city – and damned if it doesn’t look like we’ve been flashed back to the opening of The Wizard of Oz. Jane manages to talk Jasper Wingait into granting her a tractor with the understanding that she’ll be able to pay for it when her big harvest comes in, and she opens the film by belting out two songs, “If You Feel Like Singing, Sing” (which she starts naked in the shower – one wonders if the writers were inspired by the big scene in South Pacific in which Mary Martin sang “A Wonderful Guy” in her shower – and it’s amusing how Walters is able to maneuver Robert H. Planck’s camera to avoid showing more of Judy than the Production Code would allow) and “(Howdy Neighbor) Happy Harvest,” her ode to agriculture which she sings while driving the tractor to and around her farm. The song contains the embarrassing lyric, “When you work for Mother Nature/You’ll be paid by Father Time” – not one of the better efforts from composer Harry Warren (who’d “made his bones” in Hollywood with the sophisticated songs for the 1930’s Busby Berkeley musicals) and lyricist Mack Gordon. The moment Jane shows up with that tractor, we know that it’s going to be wrecked at some point in the story, and at first we think Jane is going to be the one who wrecked it. Later it turns out to be Joe’s comic-relief sidekick Herb Blake (Phil Silvers, one of that odd group of actors that had indifferent careers as character players in 1940’s movies but became stars on early TV: others include Lucille Ball, Milton Berle, Raymond Burr, and Jackie Gleason), who was using the tractor to pull a tree stump, lost control and totally crashed it.

Esmé lays down the law to the actors and crew: she’ll let them stay on the farm, but only if they get up at 6 a.m. and do farm labor – which leads the writers to a lot of fish-out-of-water gags as they vainly try to milk cows, feed hogs, and collect eggs. Ultimately Abigail gets a bad case of diva-itis and runs off to Broadway with Harrison I. Keath (Hans Conried, voice-doubled by Pete Roberts), her partner in an incredibly pretentious song called “Mem’ry Island” (written by Warren and Gordon with tongues very firmly in cheeks) that sounds like it wandered in from a Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy movie. In a plot twist that adds 42nd Street to the long, embarrassing list of other movies this one rips off, Joe Ross invites Jane to take Abigail’s place and puts her through a long, exhausting set of rehearsals to get her ready for the big opening night, at which he’s invited several Broadway producers (shades of Babes in Arms!) to witness the show and see if any of them want to back it on the Main Stem. Determined to shut down the show, Orville (ya remember Orville?) travels to Broadway to hunt down Abigail and bring her back to take over her part even if that means closing down the performance altogether. It ends pretty much the way you’d expect it too, with Jane and Joe pairing off and Abigail giving up her ambitions to stay in town, marry Orville and run the farm (so Jasper gets his longed-for reunion of the Wingait and Falbury families after all!).

Summer Stock was produced by Joe Pasternack (whose musicals former MGM boss Dore Schary once described as taking place in the “Land of Pasternacky,” with little or no connection to the real world) after MGM’s greatest musical producer, Arthur Freed, pretty much washed his hands of Judy Garland with the fiascoes of The Barkleys of Broadway and Annie Get Your Gun (in which she was replaced by Ginger Rogers and Betty Hutton, respectively). It’s actually a fun little musical if you can enjoy it for what it is and not see it through the lens of what both Judy Garland and Gene Kelly were capable of in more challenging material. Needless to say, Judy was a handful during production; Gene Kelly, who owed a lot to Judy Garland because she had insisted on him as her co-star in his first film, For Me and My Gal (1942), and had even had the writers redo the script so she ended up with Kelly’s character instead of George Murphy’s, complained to Pasternack that she reeked of formaldehyde. Later he discovered that it was actually a related chemical called paraldehyde, which Judy was taking as a drug to combat her alcoholism. She’s also considerably overweight through most of the film, which reminded me of the anecdote about how James Dean was put on a high-calorie diet before shooting East of Eden. When Dean asked why, he was told, “We want to fatten you up so you look like you grew up on a farm.” “But I did grow up on a farm!” Dean said. “Don’t you know how hard farm kids have to work?” When Summer Stock was in rough-cut form, Pasternack had it run for various MGM executives, who were disappointed in it and thought it needed another big production number to feature Judy Garland.

The problem was that Garland had gone off to a sanitarium to rest and recuperate after the strains of making the film, and by the time she re-emerged it was two months later and she was about 20 pounds lighter. Pasternack and the MGM executives licensed the old 1930 song by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler, “Get Happy,” and had Judy perform it in the same androgynous costume in which she’d performed the unused song “Mr. Monotony” from Easter Parade with a male chorus line cavorting around her. The result was Judy’s most stunning turn in the film and a number so much better than the rest a lot of people assumed that it was an outtake from a previous Garland MGM film spliced into this one. It wasn’t. In Britain, Summer Stock was retitled If You Feel Like Singing because MGM’s British distributors didn’t think the American slang phrase “summer stock” (meaning a low-budget theatre production put on during the summer while the mainstream theatres were closed) would mean anything to a British audience. Under either title, it’s a quite accomplished feel-good musical even though it suffers from the annoying antics of Eddie Bracken and Phil Silvers, and a decent if not spectacular way for Judy Garland to end her MGM contract career. (Afterwards she was shoehorned in to replace June Allyson in the 1951 film Royal Wedding with Fred Astaire, but she blew off so many rehearsal and costume-fitting appointments that Dore Schary and Arthur Freed reluctantly fired her and Jane Powell took her place.) Judy would, of course, go on to bigger and better things with her new husband, Sid Luft, including the film A Star Is Born (1954) and a career as a major concert attraction, though her mental instability and constant drug use (MGM had got her hooked on prescription pills, not – as is commonly reported – to overwork her, but to keep her weight down to camera-friendly levels) made the rest of her life a troubled one until she died of an overdose in 1969.

The Boy Who Vanished, a.k.a. The Forgotten Son (Champlain Media, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2025)

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

Last night (Sunday, June 15) my husband Charles and I watched two unusually good (at least by their standards) Lifetime movies with been-there-seen-it-all titles: The Boy Who Vanished (shot under the working title The Forgotten Son) and Girl in the Attic. The Boy Who Vanished starts with a scene in which a young man calls 911 to report himself missing from his family. The young man is, or at least purports to be, Jackson “Jack” Reese (played by a very attractive actor named Aiden Howard), and he’s a teenager who ostensibly disappeared from home 12 years earlier. His parents are Haley Conner Reese (Tegan Moss) and her husband, Richard Reese (Matthew Kevin Anderson). The police keep him in custody for a few hours before finally releasing him to his (purported) parents. This includes giving him a DNA test (though we’re never told the results), and later on he takes an aptitude test at Montgomery, the local high school (the story is set in Seattle, presumably so the town of Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada could “play” it), that reveals that, far from being academically behind where he should be given his age, he’s actually far advanced intellectually. He explains this by telling his parents that during the 12 years he was away, he was held inside a cult – not a religious or sexual one but a financially predatory one which survived by pulling scams on well-to-do people – and they made him read serious books and watch high-end movies on VHS tapes. Our first inkling that Jack isn’t what he says he is is a phone call he receives from Travis (Gord Pankhurst), a rather seedy-looking individual with 1960’s-style hippie-length hair who drives around in a light grey van and appears to be stalking the Reeses: Richard, Haley, Jack and Jack’s younger brother Tyler (Kingston Goodjohn), who’s understandably jealous of the new-found attention long-lost Jack is getting from his parents and is feeling neglected by comparison.

Jack assures whoever is calling (we don’t yet know it’s Travis but we soon learn that) that he’s still on board with the plan, but having both Travis and another accomplice, a red-haired woman named Luna (Maia Michaels) who accosts Richard while he’s getting into his car, spits on his car window and chews him out for thinking he’s better than she is just because he’s rich, stalk the Reeses is not helping with whatever the plan is. Travis and his partner, it turns out, are after the estimated $100 million Richard Reese is holding on behalf of his wealth-management clients; they sent Jack into the Reeses’ home to hack into his computer and use it to transfer all $100 million into their and their cult’s account. Only Luna jumps the gun by literally bumping into Richard at a second meeting and stealing his wallet, then using the information on his credit cards to order thousands of dollars’ worth of merchandise and run up such big bills all the cards get canceled. So when all four Reeses (Richard, Haley, Jack, and Tyler) go out to a fancy restaurant, they’re unable to pay the bill until Haley realizes she has enough cash on her to cover it. (Why Richard didn’t notice his wallet missing until their dinner date is something of a mystery.) The only person in the Reeses’ circle who’s at all suspicious of Jack and his true motives is Haley’s brother, Michael Conner (Jesse Moss), who was initially the prime suspect in Jack’s disappearance 12 years earlier. Michael was suspected then because a few bits of Jack’s clothing were found in the trailer in which he lived, and because he was a heavy drug user – though the shock of being suspected of such a heinous crime led him to quit drugs.

With the plot starting to unravel and the Seattle police getting closer to them, Travis and Luna kidnap Michael and forge an e-mail in his name confessing to having killed Jack 12 years earlier after spiking his soda with drugs so he’ll O.D. and die. Haley goes to Michael’s trailer home to see him and finds him incapacitated, calls 911 and Michael is taken to a hospital, where the doctors literally bring him back from death’s door. Jack, as part of Travis’s and Luna’s plot, sneaks into Richard’s home office and gets ready to transfer the $100,000,000 – only when he’s there he finds his own birth certificate, which finally reveals the secret of his true parentage. The birth certificate lists “Haley Conner” as his mother but leaves the father’s name blank. It turns out the father was Travis’s brother Wyatt, whom we never see because either during her pregnancy or just after Jack was born, Haley and Wyatt got into an argument, Wyatt pulled a gun on her, they both reached for the gun (score another one for Chicago’s original author, Maurine Dallas Watkins!), and she accidentally shot him, then met Richard and agreed that she would marry him and they would raise Jack as if he were both of theirs. Only Travis has been convinced all these years that Haley deliberately murdered his brother, and this has all been an elaborate revenge plot not only to kill her but to destroy her reputation and her and her husband’s finances.

Ultimately Jack sets up the $100,000,000 transfer but at the last minute can’t go through with it, and there’s a predictable final confrontation in which Travis is about to kill both Haley and Jack when Richard sneaks up behind him and clobbers him with a convenient baseball bat. We’re not sure if Travis is arrested or killed, but Jack is reunited with Haley and Richard and seems to be on his way to a happy, well-adjusted life with his family and his high-school girlfriend Summer (Grace Beedie). Though there were a few points on which writer Ken Miyamoto could have been more clear-headed about plot details, for the most part The Boy Who Vanished is quite compelling suspense filmmaking, well directed by Christie Will Wolf. But in 2015 Lifetime did an even better movie, Lost Boy (reviewed at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2015/07/lost-boy-legrand-productions-lifetime.html), on the same theme, in which the supposedly long-lost son was deliberately faking it but the makers of that movie, writer Jennifer Maisel and director Tara Miele, kept his motives powerfully elusive.

Girl in the Attic (Studio TF1 America, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2025)

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

I wasn’t expecting much from the second movie on Lifetime’s schedule, Saturday, June 14’s “premiere,” Girl in the Attic, especially since there wasn’t an imdb.com page for it until Monday morning, June 16. But it too turned out to be surprisingly effective even though it hewed close to Lifetime’s standard formulae. The central character is Kelsey Romano (Sophia Carriere), a 16-year-old woman who’s responded to her mother’s recent death from breast cancer by determining to run a half-marathon race in her home town, Portland, Oregon. (Once again, as in The Boy Who Vanished, Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada “played” a U.S. city in the Pacific Northwest.) She’s raising money by shooting a video blog and posting it on local social media, and so far she’s collected $5,000 in pledges, halfway to her $10,000 goal. Unfortunately, she’s decided to keep this a secret from her father (John Cassini), portrayed as a typical Italian-American working-class guy. Even more unfortunately, she’s attracted the twisted attentions of Billy (Keenan Tracey), who ironically combines both my husband Charles’s job and my former one. He’s a clerk at a big-box grocery store and he’s also a caregiver for his disabled mother Debbie (Jean Louisa Kelly), who was formerly a singer and dancer until an auto accident and impending arthritis combined to take away her mobility and leave her in a wheelchair. Billy kidnaps Kelsey by ambushing her while she’s on one of her practice runs. He lures her by pretending to be searching for a missing dog – and both Charles and I were taken aback by this plot line because, while “searching for a missing dog” is a classic line used by pedophiles to lure children they want to molest, we had a hard time imagining it working on someone as old and relatively worldly as Kelsey.

Billy sneaks Kelsey into the proverbial attic while Debbie is out with her neighbor Mrs. Byrd (Beth Fotheringham), who appears to be her only friend. When Kelsey comes to, she realizes she’s literally bound to an old mattress in the attic, and Billy is insisting that she’s going to be his “wife” as soon as she proves herself “worthy” of that rather dubious honor by obeying him implicitly. At one point Billy takes Kelsey downstairs to bathe her in Debbie’s bathtub, and Debbie finds women’s hair in the drain and deduces from that that Billy has been sneaking a woman in there. At first she assumes this is just a normal, mutually consensual relationship, and she even demands to meet her son’s new girlfriend. She sets up a dinner party for them that Sunday, but Billy claims that his girlfriend is “ill” and can’t come. Billy fakes a video showing Kelsey looking suitably sick, but Debbie catches on when she recognizes her old hope chest, containing relics of her entertainment career, in the background of the shot and realizes it was taken in her attic. When Debbie finally meets Kelsey, they realize that they’re both being held prisoner by an increasingly demented and power-mad Billy, and the two form a wary bond as they plot a means of escape. Debbie’s first idea is to have Kelsey, who now that Debbie is aware of her existence Billy has changed her status to that of live-in maid and forces her to do housework, spike his beer with old sleeping tablets left over from Debbie’s late husband’s stash. Only that plan is unwittingly foiled by Mrs. Byrd, who comes over and presents Billy with a wooden box containing high-end whiskey. Billy decides that he’d rather drink the whiskey than beer, and when he pours out the beer in the kitchen sink he sees the drug residue it leaves behind and realizes he’s been had.

Debbie’s next attempt to break herself and Kelsey from Billy’s control involves crawling up the steps to the attic (and Jean Louisa Kelly’s acting in this scene is so convincing I looked her up on Wikipedia just to see if she’s disabled in real life, which she isn’t), but unfortunately her cell phone slips out of her pocket and Billy grabs it before she can use it to call the police. Kelsey and Debbie finally make their escape when Debbie uses nail polish remover to set her house on fire – a major sacrifice on her part because her house was the one constant in her life and she’d moved heaven and earth to hold on to it – confident that Mrs. Byrd’s hearing aid will respond to the fire alarm and she’ll notice the house is burning and will call 911. Eventually the police arrive, arrest Billy, and in the final scene Kelsey is reunited with her dad after a year and a half in captivity and she’s once again running, literally, as if her life depended on it. There’s an intriguing plot twist that’s mentioned in the online summaries of this film but is only slightly alluded to in the movie itself: supposedly Billy is trying to monetize Kelsey’s captivity by forcing her to shoot sexually explicit videos and posting them online to pay-to-view sites. Girl in the Attic is a film shrouded in mystery: at least three people were listed in various online sources as its director – David Weaver, Kaila York, and Michael Mortimer (Weaver is the one named in the actual credits) – and the writing was done by a committee: Tawnya Bhattacharya, Jill Abbinanti-Burke, and Ali Laventhol.

The producing company is listed as “Studio TF1 America” (the imdb.com page for The Boy Who Vanished also lists “Studio TF1 America” as its producers, but the actual credits list Champlain Media and Reel One Entertainment), and at least one major crew member, cinematographer Diego Lozano, worked on both. But I quite liked it, mainly because of the moral ambiguity of the characters. Billy is depicted not as a stock-figure villain, but as a basically nice if weak and unassuming figure who’s lousy at normal social interactions and “grows a pair” in the worst way possible: by exerting absolute authority over two helpless women. Kelsey has a spunk about her that keeps her from being the usual Lifetime victim, and Debbie is in some ways the most interesting character in the movie. She’s shown perched on the thin edge between being wheelchair-bound, able to use a walker (which she calls “Bridget”), and being totally mobile. One of the cruelest scenes is when Billy deliberately flushes a whole bottle of her anti-arthritis medication down the toilet – only Kelsey rescues her by finding another bottle of the drug under a bed in a room she’s been ordered to clean. I don’t recall having heard of Jean Louisa Kelly before, but she’s actually had a pretty compelling career: she got her start as a child actress, playing the late John Candy’s obnoxious niece in Uncle Buck (1989) and having an important singing role in the film Mr. Holland’s Opus (1995). Kelly is also a quite competent singer who’s released at least two full-length albums, Color of Your Heart (2013) and a standards album called For My Folks (2017), as well as a five-song EP, Willing. She’s 53 years old, a tough age for women at any stage in entertainment history, but more power to her if she’s got as great and tough-minded a performance in her as the one she gives here!

Crack-Up (RKO, 1946)

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

Last night (Saturday, June 14) I watched another “Noir Alley” showing of a quirky 1946 film from RKO, Crack-Up – not to be confused with a 1936 Crack-Up, an airplane drama with Peter Lorre as a foreign spy trying to steal the plans for a new plane for the proverbial sinister foreign power. This Crack-Up was made 10 years later and stars Pat O’Brien (who for some reason tried to revitalize his career at RKO in noir movies even though in his salad years at Warner Bros. he’d essentially been the good Irish guy to James Cagney’s bad Irish guy in films like Angels with Dirty Faces, in which Cagney played a gangster and O’Brien played a priest!) as, of all things, a curator at a big-city art museum. Crack-Up began as a short novel by crime and science-fiction writer Fredric Brown called Madman’s Holiday, though Brown’s original is almost impossible to find: it was republished only in a limited edition of just 350 copies and the quoted price on Amazon.com is $5,000. O’Brien was trying to restore his standing as a major star through “dark” roles in films like this one, Perilous Holiday (also 1946), and Riffraff (1947). In Perilous Holiday he was a reporter unjustly accused of being part of a counterfeiting ring he’s actually investigating for a story; in Riffraff he’s an unscrupulous private detective and “fixer” in Panama City; and in Crack-Up he’s a museum curator named George Steele, whose irreverent lectures to museum patrons as he leads them through tours have already got him on the outs with the management.

In the opening scene he’s shown literally trying to break into the museum where he works by smashing two windows and hitting a cop who tries to bust him. Steele is finally subdued and the museum’s management talks the cop out of pressing charges, saying they’ll handle the matter internally to avoid giving the museum a bad name. The museum has a large staff consisting of similarly venerable officials, including the museum director, Stevenson (Erskine Sanford); Traybin (Herbert Marshall), who’s on loan to the U.S. museum from the British Museum to investigate suspected art forgeries; Dr. Lowell (Ray Collins, reuniting him and Sanford from the cast of Citizen Kane), a member of the museum’s board as well as an M.D. who takes charge of Steele’s care; and two women, Steele’s girlfriend, magazine writer Terry Cordell (Claire Trevor), and Barton’s secretary Mary (Mary Ware). Steele is convinced he was in a train wreck the night he was caught trying to break into the museum, and we get vivid flashbacks as he’s interrogated by police lieutenant Cochrane (Wallace Ford), the cop who caught him. The flashbacks show Steele on a train after he responds to an emergency call from his family saying that his mother suddenly took ill and is on her deathbed, but Cochrane tells him there’s no record of a train accident in the area and Steele’s mother is just fine, thank you. (There’s a bit of a plot hole in that Steele pays for his train ticket but doesn’t collect it from the station window, and no conductor asks him for it while he’s on the train.) At least part of the MacGuffin involves two paintings, one by Thomas Gainsborough and one, Adoration of the Kings, by Albrecht Dürer, which the museum had been exhibiting on loan from European musea, only the Gainsborough was supposedly lost at sea when the ship taking it from the U.S. back to Britain blew up in an “accident,” but Steele was convinced that the Gainsborough being returned was in fact a copy and the real painting had never left the U.S. He wants to use an X-ray machine to examine the Dürer to see if it, too, is a fake, but Barton won’t buy him the X-ray machine because “we’re a museum, not a hospital.”

In an attempt to see what happened to him on his alleged train ride, Steele takes the same train the next night, asks various people he meets – including the conductor, the ticket agent, and a vendor selling snacks and cigarettes in the cars (the idea that you could still smoke on a train really dates this movie!) – and finally learns that the night before two men escorted a drunk who looked a lot like him off the train. Steele is convinced that he was the mystery “drunk,” and he’d actually been drugged to incapacitate him and discredit anything he might have to say about the fake paintings. (Bits of the “Gainsborough” were recovered from the shipwreck, and the British Museum did tests on them and determined the missing painting had been a fake.) This rather oddball recension of Gaslight with a male as the person being “gaslighted” has to do with a plot by someone connected with the museum to steal the original paintings, substitute copies, and then destroy the copies in fake “accidents” – and the objective behind the assaults on Steele has been to discredit him as an expert and therefore make sure his allegations that the paintings are fakes won’t be believed. For most of the movie I was thinking that Herbert Marshall’s character would turn out to be the villain, especially since he was playing the part with the same smarmy self-righteousness he brought to his actual villain role in Alfred Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent (1941), but the real bad guy turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Dr. Lowell, whose idea is to steal valuable paintings for his own collection and keep them from the rest of the world.

He even has a marvelously classist and elitist speech giving his justification: he says museums open the great works of art to people too stupid to appreciate them properly. Only, unlike most of the movie villains who steal famous works of art and keep them to themselves, he doesn’t have a private room in his home where he keeps them locked up so only he can look at them. Instead he hides them in his home behind a thoroughly mediocre painting, and we don’t learn where they are until the end, when Mary, who was part of his plot, agrees to tell the authorities where the real Gainsborough and Dürer are in exchange for leniency. Crack-Up got mediocre reviews and was a box-office disappointment, largely because critics of the time thought that the plot was too convoluted and hard to follow. Certainly all those old men in charge of the museum got a bit too tiresome, and too hard to tell apart, after a while. One big disappointment was the casting of Claire Trevor in a good-girl role rather than either a femme fatale, as she was in her best film, Murder, My Sweet (1944, and also at RKO), or the part of a gin-soaked former cabaret singer in Key Largo (1948) that won her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. We watch her through the whole movie waiting for the claws to come out, and they never do. Still, Crack-Up is a compelling thriller despite the convoluted plotting, and it offers Pat O’Brien a quite good showcase as at least a slightly more complicated character than he usually got to play!