The Lion Has Wings (London Films, United Artists, 1939)

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

Last night (Tuesday, December 30) I watched a couple of interesting films on Turner Classic Movies as part of the last night of their “Star of the Month” tribute to actress Merle Oberon. The first one was a 1939 British World War II propaganda piece called The Lion Has Wings, produced by Alexander Korda based on a story by Ian Dalrymple, who also got credit as associate producer. According to TCM host Alicia Malone, Korda made this film in an attempt to get Britain’s newly appointed prime minister, Winston Churchill, to agree not to close the British film industry (as had happened during World War I) by proving that British movies could be useful for propaganda. Sorry, Alicia, but the dates don’t line up: Churchill didn’t become Prime Minister of Britain until May 1940, eight months after the war started and six months after this film’s release on November 3, 1939. Neville Chamberlain was still Prime Minister when The Lion Has Wings was made, which explains why the film definitely soft-pedals any criticism of his appeasement negotiations at Munich in 1938. The film is a peculiar hybrid of documentary footage and scenes with actors, though the documentary scenes not surprisingly are by far the most moving and powerful portions. The film had three directors: Michael Powell, Adrian Brunel, and Brian Desmond Hurst. According to the film’s Wikipedia page, Powell directed the scenes of the Royal Air Force (RAF) bombing German destroyers in the Kiel Canal. Hurst directed the scenes with Ralph Richardson (playing a Canadian pilot who volunteered to fight with the RAF well before the U.S. entered the war in December 1941) and Merle Oberon (as his wife), though she’s only in two scenes; in her second one, as she and Richardson are picnicking outside during a brief lull in the fighting, she delivers an inspirational speech about how in previous wars Britain had to sacrifice her young men on the land and sea, and now she has to do so in the air as well. Brunel directed the portions of the film that show how the British air defenses found out about upcoming German attacks so the RAF and Defense Command could mobilize and fight back against them.

The movie doesn’t mention the key tool the British had at their disposal – radar – because in 1939 the very existence of radar was still a closely guarded government secret. (During the real Battle of Britain that followed this film, the German air command figured out the importance of radar and tried to neutralize it by bombing the radar stations out of existence, but after one attempt at a raid on them the head of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Göring, decided attacking them was a waste of time and ordered it stopped.) The film was roughly in three parts: a successful air raid against German ships in Kiel; a successful defense against a German air attack; and morale-boosting portions at both the beginning and end. The commentary was both written and delivered by E. V. H. Emmett, who was the usual newsreel narrator for Gaumont-British (which got an acknowledgment for the loan-out in the credits), though when the film was released in the U.S. his narration was replaced with one by veteran American newsreel commentator Lowell Thomas. (I watched the version with Emmett’s narration, thank goodness.) The opening sequences show a contrast between calm, easygoing, peace-loving Britain, with its relatively accessible leadership (I was surprised at how easy it was to recognize King George VI because he looked much like the younger appearance of the current King, his grandson Charles III) versus those of the Germans, who had to be protected by massive armies of bodyguards marching in strict formation. Naturally Korda and his directors and crew poached most of their Nazi footage from Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi propaganda masterpiece Triumph of the Will (filmed at the 1934 Nazi Party Congress at Nuremberg, and released in 1936), enough so that Riefenstahl practically deserves co-credit as a fourth director. They also poached footage from a previous Korda production, Fire Over England (1937), to show how Queen Elizabeth I mobilized her people to resist the Spanish Armada – which is how actress Flora Robson got credit for playing Elizabeth I even though she wasn’t involved in any original scenes – as a morale-boosting example for the British of 1939.

The film does have some historical lapses: the RAF pilots are shown training in biplanes, which weren’t used in combat during World War II; and the scenes showing a Nazi bomber were actually a German passenger plane, the Focke-Wulf FW 200. The bombing raid on Kiel was shot largely in the studio, with professional actors playing the crew and the actual destruction of a German ship reproduced with a model on a special-effects stage. But once the pilots return to base having accomplished their missions, we see the real ones and the film suddenly leaps up several notches in realism and believability. Michael Powell wasn’t particularly proud of the film in later years, especially since he was pulled off a project he particularly enjoyed, The Thief of Baghdad (1940) – on which he also had two other co-directors, Ludwig Berger and Tim Whelan – to do his assigned work on it. Powell later said that The Lion Has Wings was “all shop-made, edited, and directed in less than a month” – obviously Korda was rushing through production to get the film out when British audiences needed to see it as a morale booster – and he didn’t care for it after the fact, either. He called it “an outrageous piece of propaganda, full of half-truths and half-lies, with some stagy episodes which were rather embarrassing and with actual facts which were highly distorted.” Seen today, The Lion Has Wings is an intense and surprisingly vibrant piece of work, though the actual documentary footage is far stronger and more powerful than the scenes involving actors (no surprise there!). Ironically, when Churchill finally did become Prime Minister in May 1940 he did shut down the British film industry “for the duration,” though he licensed bits of it to come back online in 1942 and in 1944 he green-lighted Laurence Olivier’s production of Henry V as an obvious propagandistic morale booster. (Ironically, Shakespeare had written Henry V in the first place as a morale booster to build public support for the Earl of Essex’s military campaign in Ireland – which went wretchedly badly for the English and was what caused Essex’s support from the Crown to dwindle and ultimately disappear altogether.) When Churchill ordered the British film industry closed in 1940 Korda, Powell, Berger, Whelan and their cast and crew took their unfinished movie to Hollywood and completed it there, then made another big, splashy jungle-themed adventure, The Jungle Book (1942).

Deep in My Heart (MGM, 1954)

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

Later on last night (Tuesday, December 30) my husband Charles came home from work early in time to watch the next film in the final night of Turner Classic Movies’ “Star of the Month” tribute to Merle Oberon: Deep in My Heart (1954). It was produced by Roger Edens (his first solo effort as a producer) and directed by Stanley Donen. Deep in My Heart was a biopic of operetta composer Sigmund Romberg (José Ferrer) – the film represents him as a native of Austria but he was actually born in Nagykanizsa, Hungary. Romberg’s real name at birth was Siegmund Rosenberg, and he moved to the U.S. in 1909 at age 21 to escape anti-Semitic prejudice in the Austro-Hungarian Empire after he had previously studied violin and composition in both Hungary and Austria. Deep in My Heart was a late film in a cycle of composer biopics that had actually begun with films based on the lives of George M. Cohan (Yankee Doodle Dandy, 1942) and continued with films about George Gershwin (Rhapsody in Blue, 1945), Cole Porter (Night and Day, 1946), Jerome Kern (Till the Clouds Roll By, 1946), Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart (Words and Music, 1948), and Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby (Three Little Words, 1950). Romberg was a somewhat problematical choice for this sort of film because he wasn’t U.S.-born, nor was he raised here (as Irving Berlin was), and though he was capable of writing ragtime songs his real métier was operetta. In the film Sigmund Romberg is working as a piano player and bandleader at the open-air cabaret (with a spectacular view of the Brooklyn Bridge, courtesy of MGM’s art director, Edward C. Carfagno, and set decorator, Arthur Krams) owned by Anna Mueller (a fictional character played by American-born opera singer Helen Traubel, who was often mistaken for German because of her name and her opera specialty, Wagner). A rather slimy agent named Lazar Berrison (David Burns) shows up at Mueller’s café and offers to sign Romberg to a songwriting contract, saying he has an “in” with Broadway producer J. J. Shubert (Walter Pidgeon). Romberg is tempted but Mueller suggests instead that he approach Shubert directly, and Shubert buys one of his songs, “Softly, As In a Morning Sunrise.”

He promises Romberg it will be the first-act finale of a new revue starring Gaby Deslys (played by ballet star Tamara Toumanova and sung by Betty Wand) – a legendary enough performer that at one point MGM musical producer Arthur Freed briefly considered making a biopic about her, with Judy Garland in the lead. But when the show opens, Romberg is appalled that his deep, rich, sensitive ballad has been turned into an elaborate hootchy-kootchy number. Shubert and his assistant Bert Townsend (Paul Stewart, best known as the slimy butler in Citizen Kane) convince Romberg that he should let them handle the “artistic end” (which becomes a recurring catch phrase in Leonard Spiegelgass’s script, based on a Romberg biography by Elliott Arnold) and should just crank out songs for them as needed. Romberg has a secret weapon in his arsenal: the script for an operetta called Maytime by Rida Johnson Young, who had previously written operettas with Victor Herbert. Maytime is a tear-jerker about two young people, a man and a woman, who are prevented by social prejudices and class differences from getting together, though in the final scene their grandchildren meet, fall in love, and marry. (It was later filmed by MGM in 1937 as the third and best of the Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy musicals, but Young’s original plot was thrown out and only one song, “Will You Remember?,” from Romberg’s score was kept.) Romberg makes a ton of money off the awful shows he writes for Shubert, but his friend and fellow regular at Ana Mueller’s, Dorothy Donnelly (Merle Oberon), sets up a lunch date with Shubert’s hated rival, Florenz Ziegfeld (Paul Henried, of all people), to trick Shubert into producing Maytime. Maytime is such a huge hit that Shubert opens it in two New York theatres at once, and Romberg insists on producing his next show, Magic Melody, on his own.

Magic Melody is a total flop, and Romberg goes begging hat-in-hand to Shubert for another chance. Shubert engages him to write a new musical for Al Jolson called Jazza-Boo, and in order to write it undisturbed Romberg, Townsend and lyricist Ben Judson (Jim Backus) take a cabin at the Saranac Lake resort in upstate New York and agree that none of them will shave until the work is done. (Jazza-Boo is strictly fictional but Romberg did write a number of shows for Jolson, including Mr. Robinson Crusoe, Sinbad, and Bombo, though the best-known song from Sinbad is “Swanee,” a song by the young George Gershwin that Jolson heard elsewhere, bought the rights to, and stuck in the show in the middle of its run. It was Gershwin’s biggest hit during his lifetime and the song that established his career.) While at Saranac Lake Romberg has a meet-cute with the woman he will marry, Lillian Harris (Doe Avedon), despite opposition from her imperious opera-loving mother (Isobel Elsom). Romberg and Dorothy Donnelly get together to write The Student Prince (1924), a smash hit based on the old German play Old Heidelberg about a prince who goes to Heidelberg to study, falls in love with a barmaid, but has to give her up when his father dies and he has to return home to assume the throne. It’s a huge hit and so is Romberg’s next operetta, The Desert Song (1926), inspired by an anti-colonial rebellion by the Riffs, Arab natives in Algeria who fought the French regime. The Desert Song is Romberg’s first collaboration with Oscar Hammerstein II (Mitchell Kowall). Years go by and Romberg’s music starts falling in popularity as younger audiences start wanting jazzier songs, though a swing version of “Softly, As In a Morning Sunrise” starts becoming popular and gets played on the jukebox at Anna Mueller’s café (ya remember Anna Mueller’s café? Ya remember Anna Mueller?) The younger crowd at Mueller’s loves it – one young woman even calls it “slurpy,” which it takes Romberg a while to realize is a compliment. Dorothy Donnelly gets a sentimental but beautifully acted death scene, and at the end Mueller and Townsend convince Romberg that the way to revitalize his music is to give a concert of it at Carnegie Hall with the New York Philharmonic, with Romberg himself conducting. The concert is a triumph and brings the film to a happy ending.

Like previous musical biopics, Deep in My Heart features a lot of stunning (or wanna-be stunning) production numbers on Romberg’s songs. The two songs from Maytime, “Will You Remember?” and “Road to Paradise,” are drenched in Viennese apple blossoms and sung passably by Jane Powell and Vic Damone. José Ferrer and Rosemary Clooney get to do a duet called “Mr. and Mrs.” from a 1922 show called The Blushing Bride – appropriate because Ferrer and Clooney were Mr. and Mrs. in real life as well. (They divorced in 1967 after they had five kids, one of whom, Miguel Ferrer, became an actor in his own right, mainly on TV. Since George Clooney’s father was Nick Clooney, Rosemary Clooney’s brother, George Clooney and Miguel Ferrer were cousins.) One of the best numbers in the film is “I Love to Go Swimmin’ with Women,” from a Romberg show called Love Birds (1921), featuring Gene Kelly dancing with his original partner, brother Fred Kelly. (Kelly got his start in an act with his brother, as Fred Astaire had started with his sister Adele, but this is the only film footage we have of the two Kellys together.) The Student Prince is represented by William Olvis singing “Serenade” in a properly stentorian manner, but to my mind the one singer who’s ever done real justice to this song is Mario Lanza, who recorded it three times. Two were for RCA Victor record releases (one in 1951 and one just before he died in 1959 so RCA could have a stereo version), and one was in 1953 as the soundtrack for a projected film in which Lanza was to have starred. Unfortunately, Lanza was as much a primo don (the male version of a prima donna) off screen and on, and he refused to diet for the role, so he was replaced by Edmund Purdom, who mimed to Lanza’s records. The Desert Song is even more oddly represented; Ann Miller gets to do a novelty song called “It,” based on Elinor Glyn’s concept of … well, her various definitions of what “It” meant were all over the map and frequently self-contradictory. One thing she insisted on was that “It” was not a euphemism for “sex appeal” and anyone who thought that was cheapening her concept, but of course “It” entered the language as a euphemism for “sex appeal” and that’s how it’s presented here in Edward Smith’s lyrics for Romberg’s song.

The other big number from The Desert Song is a medley of “One Alone” and “One Flower in Your Garden,” but its presentation here is almost totally off the wall. In the original the two songs are heard back to back and become a debate over the relative merits of polygamy (represented by Arab character Sid El Kar singing “One Flower”) and monogamy (represented by The Red Shadow, who leads the Riffs but is secretly Pierre Birabeau, son of the French commander – don’t ask). In this version the female lead, Margot Bonvalet, sings “One Alone” while “One Flower” is heard only as an instrumental, and Margot is danced by Cyd Charisse (stunningly) but sung by Carol Richards (less stunningly). There’s also a preposterous number called “Your Land and My Land” from a Romberg operetta called My Maryland (1927), with book and lyrics by Dorothy Donnelly and based on Clyde Fitch’s play Barbara Frietchie (1899), sung in his usual sledgehammer style by Howard Keel and apparently representing the Union and Confederate troops coming back together at the end of the Civil War. New Moon (1928), which MGM had already filmed twice before (with Grace Moore and Lawrence Tibbett in 1930 and Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy in 1940), is represented by “Lover, Come Back to Me” sung by Tony Martin and Joan Weldon and “Stout-Hearted Men” sung to Romberg privately by Helen Traubel as Anna Mueller to get his spirits back up after his latest show has been rejected by producers as too out of date. In the final Carnegie Hall sequence Romberg sings a surprisingly beautiful and heartfelt rendition of his song “When I Grow Too Old to Dream” – and the singing is Ferrer’s own. He’s quite moving, and the song’s position at the end reinforces its autumnal quality (the lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II from the 1935 show The Night Is Young are definitely those of a man looking back at a rich, full life: “When I grow too old to dream/Your love will live in my heart”).

Though Romberg wasn’t really a jazz writer, a lot of his songs, particularly “Softly, As In a Morning Sunrise” and “Lover, Come Back to Me,” have become jazz standards. We have one person in particular to thank: Artie Shaw. Alone among the big swing bandleaders of the 1930’s, Shaw was looking to expand the horizons of the jazz repertoire. His breakthrough hit was Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine” (1938), which a lot of other jazz musicians had dismissed because its melody was 108 bars long instead of the usual 32 (a song that long was nicknamed a “tapeworm”) and they didn’t think anyone could remember a chord sequence that long to be able to improvise over it. Shaw in particular raided the operetta world for song material, including “Softly, As In a Morning Sunrise” and “Lover, Come Back to Me” as well as Rudolf Friml’s “Indian Love Call” and “Jungle Drums,” and that paved the way for other jazz versions of “Softly,” including the Modern Jazz Quartet’s (1952), Sonny Rollins’s (1957), John Coltrane’s (1961), and Albert Ayler’s (1962).

Odd Man Out (Two Cities Films, General Films, The Rank Organisation, 1947)

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

Last night (Saturday, December 27) my husband Charles and I watched a Turner Classic Movies “Noir Alley” showing of the 1947 British film Odd Man Out, directed by (a man named) Carol Reed from a script by F. L. Green and former James Whale collaborator R. C. Sherriff based on Green’s 1945 novel about a young man named Johnny McQueen (James Mason) on the run from the police following a botched attempt to rob the payroll money from a mill. (This was still the time when a lot of employers literally paid their workers in cash.) The setting is northern Ireland, West Belfast to be specific, and in Green’s original novel the character was specified as a member of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). But when Reed made the film he insisted that the story be changed so McQueen would merely be the local leader of something vaguely called “The Organization,” and likewise the setting would be fudged (though he actually shot it on location in Belfast and some of the city’s acknowledged landmarks figure prominently in it). Carol Reed has always seemed to me to be the sort of mediocre director who had a knack for ripping off the styles of his artistic betters and making great films by doing that. His early Night Train to Munich (1939) is an obvious ripoff of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938) – down to using the same leading lady, Margaret Lockwood. The Stars Look Down (1940) and Odd Man Out both owe a great deal to John Ford (though in fairness Reed made The Stars Look Down, his film about Welsh coal miners, a year before Ford made his, How Green Was My Valley). Reed’s best film, The Third Man (1950), owes a great deal to Orson Welles (and not only because Welles and Joseph Cotten are both in it), while his (undeserved) Academy Award winner, Oliver! (1968) owes a huge debt to David Lean, who’d done the same story – Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist – 20 years earlier. “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller argued that Reed’s run of three late-1940’s British films, Odd Man Out, The Fallen Idol, and The Third Man, is the best run in movie history. Nonsense: both Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock had longer runs of great films than that.

Odd Man Out is basically your typical gangster-on-the-run story in which McQueen, having escaped from prison six months earlier and been hidden out in the apartment of his girlfriend Kathleen Sullivan (Kathleen Ryan) and her grandmother. Word comes down from “The Organization” that McQueen is to lead a robbery of a mill in order to finance the cause, but McQueen is disillusioned with the cycle of violence and he offers to step down and let his friend Dennis (Robert Beatty) take his place. Dennis wisely declines, and the robbery goes ahead, only during the course of the crime McQueen is tackled by an armed guard and is shot in the shoulder, while the guard is killed. Weakened by his injury, McQueen is unable to get into the getaway car, whose driver, Pat (Cyril Cusack), refuses to go back for him. Pat and another member of the gang, Nolan (Dan O’Herlihy in a role way too small for him), ultimately get killed in a shoot-out with police, and Dennis is arrested while trying to draw the cops away from McQueen. In the film’s best sequence, McQueen is found unconscious on the street after a truck has knocked him down and taken in by two women, Maureen (Ann Clery) and Maudie (Beryl Measor). The women give him first aid until they realize he’s been shot, whereupon they insist on either calling a doctor or taking him to a hospital. Realizing that either of those will result in his arrest, McQueen leaves and ultimately falls into the clutches of a drunken street person named Shell (F. J. McCormick). Shell has been pressed into service as the reluctant model of a crazy, alcoholic artist named Lukey (Robert Newton, who was inexplicably billed second and the only other actor besides Mason who got his credit above the title), who wants Shell to bring McQueen to his studio so he can paint his portrait. Meanwhile, Kathleen has contacted the local priest, Father Tom (W. G. Fay), who agrees to wait for McQueen. Shell says he knows where McQueen is – he left McQueen in a vacant lot, literally in an abandoned child’s bathtub – but demands money from Father Tom or he’ll turn McQueen in to the police and get the 1,000-pound reward the cops are offering for him. Unfortunately, by the time Shell goes round to fetch him McQueen has escaped again and is hanging out in a bar whose bartender is played by William Hartnell, the first Doctor on the long-running Doctor Who TV series. Lukey also shows up at the bar and picks up McQueen to take him back to the studio and paint him.

Ultimately, after a medical-school dropout named Tober (Elwyn Brook-Jones) tries to tend to McQueen’s wound, McQueen flees again and ends up cornered by police on a waterfront dock. Kathleen meets him there and pulls out McQueen’s gun. She fires it twice and the police gun them both down, effectively committing what is now called “suicide by cop.” The final shot is of Father Tom pulling a blanket over both their bodies, which Charles questioned because under the laws of the Roman Catholic Church suicide victims are not considered to have died in the good graces of God (which explains why he doesn’t give them the last rites). Odd Man Out is a good movie but it’s also the sort of film that seems to be trying too hard. Certainly Reed and his cinematographer, Robert Krasker (who later shot The Third Man as well), create an utterly convincing noir atmosphere that makes Odd Man Out look as nightmarish as anything Fritz Lang and his crews came up with in the studios of Neubabelsberg or Hollywood. But the movie does suffer from a lack of coherence, especially in the second half – the film lost me once Robert Newton’s silly, clichéd crazy-artist character entered – and for once (as with John Ford’s The Searchers) the original critics, who praised the film’s first half but criticized its second, were right and the later lionizers and hagiographers were wrong. One of the film’s big weaknesses is that James Mason is off-screen during all too much of the second half; instead of sympathizing with his plight, we start having Where’s Waldo? moments and wondering, “Where’s McQueen?” Amazingly, though Mason was a veteran actor in British films (he was born on May 15, 1909, which means he was already in his late 30’s when he made this) and had made some quite good movies, including a 1942 thriller called The Night Has Eyes (reissued under the tacky title Terror House) of which I have fond memories from a public-domain VHS tape, it was Odd Man Out that broke his international career and led him to Hollywood. Kathleen Ryan also came to the U.S. to have a go, but unlike Mason she didn’t make it, though she’s quite good in this, her first film. It’s true she’s unable to make her final sacrifice believable – there’s a great scene in which her grandmother warns her not to stay involved with an IRA gunman but to leave him, let him go and live a normal life, but Kathleen refuses her grandma’s good-sense advice – but that’s more the fault of F. L. Green than hers. Ultimately Odd Man Out is a film that contains some great scenes but tries to do too much, though I wonder if the taciturn attitudes of the townspeople who quietly draw their curtains and lock their doors when both police and gangsters pass them influenced Fred Zinnemann and Carl Foreman when they made High Noon five years later.

The Brokenwood Mysteries: "Dead Men Don't Shoot Ducks" (South Pacific Pictures, All3 Media, NZ on Air, GPB, WETA, PBS, Prime, Acorn TV, aored November 24, 2019)

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

Last night (Friday, December 26 – Boxing Day in Great Britain and through much of the British Commonwealth) my husband Charles and I watched the latest KPBS rerun of the New Zealand policier The Brokenwood Mysteries, dealing with a small, out-of-the-way New Zealand community called Brokenwood and the various police detectives who investigate crimes there: Mike Shepherd (Neill Rea), given to listening to New Zealand country music and with a history of three or four failed marriages (even Shepherd can’t remember which); Kristin Sims (Fern Sutherland), his professional but not personal partner even though he began the series by making the obligatory pass at her; Sam Breen (Nic Sampson, red-headed and a hunk!); and their medical examiner, Russian immigrant Gina Kandinsky (Cristina Ionda), along with a Maori hanger-on named Jared Morehu (Pama Hema-Taylor) who’s a sort of unofficial hanger-on. This episode, aired November 24, 2019, was called “Dead Men Don’t Shoot Ducks,” and was directed by Murray Keane from a script by the series’ creator, Timothy Balme. It deals with a duck-hunting club on the Brokenwood lake whose activities on the first day of the season are disrupted by animal-rights activist Leslie Barrett (Alex Ellis), who takes a rowboat into the middle of the lake with a big sign reading “Birds’ Lives Matter.” She’s also brought along a boombox containing a recording of the “Ride of the Valkyries” from Wagner’s Die Walküre in order to scare the ducks into flying off so the hunters can’t shoot them. (I’d like to believe that Timothy Balme knew that Wagner was an animal-rights activist in real life and picked his music for that reason.) Alas, one or more of the duck hunters shoot and kill Leslie. Needless to say, all the hunters are under suspicion, including Don Ducker (Edwin Wright), great-grandson of one of the original founders of the duck-hunting club; Simon Hughes (Colin Moy), who owns the lake on which the duck hunters hunt; Frankie “Frodo” Oates (Karl Willetts), who is returning to the duck hunt this year after he was traumatized by the accidental death by drowning of his hunting partner and best friend years before; Lance Gifford (Phil Brown), owner of the local gun store at which the duck hunters get their supplies, and who also runs a tour bus through the area which he calls “Eco Tours” even though there’s nothing particularly environmentally friendly about them; Ray Neilson (Jason Hoyte), and others.

It turns out that Leslie was shot from a disused blind that was abandoned when its owner, Frodo’s friend, died (each hunter has his own blind, or “mee-mee” as they’re called in the New Zealand version of English; in earlier episodes I’ve been amused by the accents and in particular their pronunciation of the short “e” as the long “ee,” so “sex” becomes “seex” and “dead” becomes “deed”). Also on the suspect list is Leslie’s widower, Ollie Barrett (Wesley Dowdell), who at first seems like a milquetoast middle-aged man whose wife clearly wears the pants in the family. Later it turns out that Ollie was having an affair with Don Ducker’s put-upon wife Marion (Narelle Ahrens) – there’s a brief flashback scene in which they’re shown screwing against the counter in her kitchen, one of those deals in which they were so horny for each other they couldn’t wait to make it to the bedroom. At one point Frodo confesses to the murder (and the appearance of a character nicknamed “Frodo” in the middle of a story set in New Zealand, where Peter Jackson filmed the movies of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings novels, is a neat in-joke even cleverer than the use of Wagner’s music by the animal-rights activist to disrupt the duck hunt) even though he didn’t really do it, and the smarmy attorney he’s hired (who’s also representing one of the other suspects – can you say “conflict of interest”?) talks him out of his bogus confession and the police officers out of believing it. There’s also a clever explanation of how “Don Ducker” got his name; he says that when his great-grandfather co-founded the duck club the family name was actually “Donald Duck,” only they had to change it after 1934 when Walt Disney Studios started making the Donald Duck cartoons.

“Dead Men Don’t Shoot Ducks” runs along rather complicated lines when the police deduce, based on a stray wire found in the disused duck blind from which Leslie was shot, that the killer used a gimmick first thought up by the British soldiers who were held back by the Turkish army at the Battle of Gallipoli in 1915: a wire connecting the trigger of a gun to a water bottle that, when enough of the water dripped out of it, the gun would fire. It also turns out that the killer was [spoiler alert!] Leslie’s sister Kimberly Mason (Zara Cormack), who was in unrequited love with Ollie Barrett and was convinced that she could have him if she just got rid of the inconvenient sister to whom he was married. Kimberly used the old Gallipoli trick to shoot Leslie from the disused blind by remote control and then pose as a grief-stricken relative and apparently just happen on the scene. She also loaded her gun, a supposedly non-working souvenir she hung on her wall, with shells Don Ducker had previously handled and would therefore contain her fingerprints, to frame him for the crime. Her story unravels when she shoots Marion Ducker after her affair with Ollie has become common knowledge. Charles was rubbed the wrong way by the sheer elaborateness of the murder mechanism; it has way too much of the Agatha Christie style about it, including the sheer number of things that had to go right for the scheme to work. Overall, though, I liked the show, and one of the aspects of The Brokenwood Mysteries I like is the sheer number of suspects; this isn’t one of those stories that makes it easier for you to figure out whodunit simply by the paucity of potential killers!

The Selfish Giant (Potterton Productions, Reader’s Digest, Pyramid Productions, Arrow Entertainment, 1971. released 1972)

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

Last night (Wednesday, December 24) my husband Charles suggested we watch a YouTube post of the 1971 TV short The Selfish Giant, based on a fairy tale by Oscar Wilde. It was produced by Reader’s Digest, not exactly a company known for progressive politics, and it featured the King Sisters vocal group (or whatever their incarnation was in 1971, three decades after they’d made their professional debut with Alvino Rey’s band; one wonders if they kept themselves going like the Carter Family or the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, by recruiting descendants of the originals as the first members retired or died). What makes that particularly interesting and jarring is that the basic story itself is a socialist parable (Wilde did write “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” after all). A group of children have got into the habit of playing in the garden of the titular giant while the giant himself has been away for seven years hanging out with an ogre. While the kids have been in the garden, the trees have borne fruit regularly in autumn and the flowers have bloomed in spring and summer. The garden has become beautiful thanks to the good energy brought to it by the children who play in it. Then the giant returns from his trip and has a hissy-fit about all those children playing in “his” garden. He builds a wall around his castle and garden to keep the children out, and without them the Snow, Frost, North Wind, and Hail came to the giant’s castle and stayed there, making it winter all year round in the garden in what seemed to me to be a quite eerie anticipation of the plot of the recent animated film Frozen. The Hail in particular danced across the roof of the castle and kept the giant awake all night every night. One day the giant heard the sound of music in his garden, which turned out to come from a little linnet bird that had flown in. He also spotted the children, whom he’d walled out of the garden but who’d found an opening to come in anyway. In the presence of the children Spring, Summer, and Autumn had returned to the garden and restored it to its former beauty and bloom.

The giant saw one particular child in front of a tree, which he tried to climb but was too short to reach the branches. The giant lifted him up to the tree and, in gratitude, the little boy kissed him. The giant was so overcome by this display of affection that he decided then and there to tear down his wall and let the children have the run of his garden. But the little boy he’d helped into the tree never returned, and the giant’s heart was broken at his absence. Decades passed and the giant got old and feeble. He still longed for the return of the mystery boy, which didn’t happen until the giant was very old and about to die. When the boy finally did return he had marks on his hands and feet representing wounds he had got when nails were driven through them. “Who hath dared to wound thee?” said the giant. “Tell me, that I may take my big sword and slay him.” The boy answered, “Nay, but these are the wounds of love.” “Who art thou?” said the giant, and the boy replied, “You let me play once in your garden. Today you shall come with me in my garden, which is Paradise.” Wilde’s story, which until then the adaptation by Peter Sander (who also directed) had followed surprisingly faithfully, ends, “And when the children ran in that afternoon, they found the giant lying dead under the tree, all covered in white blossoms.” In the film, the giant and the boy walk off together, presumably to enter Heaven. Maybe it was this rather ham-handed Jesus parallel in the ending that made this socialist parable acceptable to Reader’s Digest and its executives, for until that The Selfish Giant is a pretty obvious denunciation of the whole idea of private property and the concept of building walls to “protect” what one claims as one’s own.

Narrated by Paul Hecht and produced in Canada (there’s apparently an alternate version in French in which the narrator was the great French singer/songwriter/actor Charles Aznavour), The Selfish Giant is surprisingly well done and at 26 minutes doesn’t overstay its welcome. According to imdb.com, the first film adaptation of The Selfish Giant was a British short produced in 1939. The second was an episode of the TV series Jackanory in 1967. The third was this one, and then there was a Soviet 10-minute adaptation in 1982, additional shorts in 2003 and 2022, and a British feature from 2013 that apparently expanded the story significantly, since imdb.com’s synopsis reads, “Two thirteen-year-old working-class friends in Bradford seek fortune by getting involved with a local scrap dealer and criminal,” though Oscar Wilde is still credited as “inspiring” the film. It’s not surprising that Charles, who remembered seeing this fairly regularly on TV in his childhood, had fond memories of it and wanted to share it with me, and I notice from the moviemagg.blogspot.com back files that we’d already watched it in 2013 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2013/12/the-selfish-giant-potterton.html) and 2023 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-selfish-giant-potterton-productions.html). I closed my 2023 post with the words, “The Selfish Giant was acceptable entertainment, though it seemed to be an odd thing to watch in an era in which Donald Trump is poised to regain the Presidency in the 2024 election with a promise to ‘close the border’ and ‘drill, drill, drill.’ Alas, Trump is such a total psychopath it’s impossible to imagine the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come, Cindy-Lou Who or a fairy-tale child who turns out to be the resurrected Jesus opening him up and turning him into a normal, compassionate human being!” And in 2013 I wrote, “I couldn’t help imagine the story as Ayn ‘Virtue of Selfishness’ Rand would have written it; in her version, of course, the giant’s brilliant entrepreneurial spirit would have ensured that his garden blossomed while everyone else’s stayed stuck in winter, and at the end he would emerge from behind the wall and say, ‘If you want to play in my garden, you will have to do so on my terms.’”

Sweetie (Paramount, 1929)

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

On Wednesday, December 24, Christmas eve, my husband Charles and I followed up The Selfish Giant with a quirky 1929 musical called Sweetie to which YouTube’s algorithm had directed me. The leads of Sweetie were Nancy Carroll, Helen Kane, and Jack Oakie, and it was directed by Frank Tuttle from a script by Lloyd Corrigan and George Marion, Jr. Marion also wrote the lyrics to all but one of the songs, with Richard Whiting as composer. (Whiting’s daughter Margaret became a singing star in her own right in the 1940’s, and when I did a CD compilation of Richard Whiting’s songs I deliberately included Margaret Whiting’s rendition of his “Ain’t We Got Fun?” in a 1950’s duet with Bob Hope.) I was interested in Sweetie mainly because of Helen Kane’s presence in the cast. She’d just been brought to my mind for a quirky reason: on an earlier YouTube run I’d stumbled on a record by the great singer Annette Hanshaw of a song called “Is There Anything Wrong with That?” which she sang in Kane’s boop-boop-a-doop style. Hanshaw’s record was originally issued on the cheap Diva label, a subsidiary of Columbia, under the pseudonym “Dot Dare.” Executives at Victor, Kane’s label, threatened to sue Kane because they were sure it was Kane using a pseudonym to break her contract with them, and Kane and Hanshaw, who were actually good friends, laughed about the lawsuit over a lunch date. (Maybe for that reason the record was reissued under Warren’s own name on another cheap subsidiary of Columbia, Velvetone, and that was the one posted to YouTube.)

Broadway star Barbara Pell (Nancy Carroll) is dating Pelham University’s football star, Biff Bentley (Stanley Smith, who’s pretty nondescript as singer, actor, and screen personality except for a couple of longshots in which he looks eerily like James Dean, who hadn’t been born yet when Sweetie was made). Pelham, located in the town of that name in North Carolina, is an all-male college located next to an all-female finishing school in which the one class we see is an outdoor session on the correct way to pour a cup of tea. Alas, on the eve of Pelham’s big football game against their cross-town rival, Oglethorpe University, Biff Bentley threatens to quit school to marry Barbara. Biff’s teammates, including Axel, talk him out of quitting the team, and Biff accordingly tells Barbara that he won’t be able to marry her for eight more months until the school term ends. Barbara isn’t happy about that, especially since she’s already quit her job and doesn’t think she’ll be able to get another one. (Sweetie was released November 2, 1929, just weeks after the stock-market crash that kicked off the Great Depression, and the whole business of Barbara’s employment anxieties seems much more like a plot turn from a 1930’s than a 1920’s movie.) Fortunately she doesn’t have to worry about making a living because just then her uncle dies and she inherits Pelham University – Barbara’s original last name was “Pelham” but she shortened it to “Pell” as a stage name – and she determines to take over the college, run it directly, and use her control to get revenge on the football team for talking Biff out of marrying her. Barbara’s idea of revenge is to give the entire football team a snap quiz in English and disqualify anyone who fails it from the Big Game between Pelham and Oglethorpe. Her objective is to keep Biff from playing, though the team member who’s most concerned about failing the test is Axel. As for Helen Kane, she plays a local student at the women’s school called “Helen Fry” who has the hots for tackle Axel Bronstrup (Stuart Erwin, even more annoyingly whiny than he was as the nominal romantic lead in International House three years later). Her way of courting him is to aim a BB rifle and shoot pellets at him.

There’s a big campus dance on the eve of the Big Game, at which Helen Kane performs songs called “I Think You’ll LIke It” and “Prep Step” and the King’s Men male vocal group (whom we’d just heard in a Fibber McGee and Molly Christmas episode from December 6, 1949, 20 years after the film was made) do the Pelham school song, following which a member of the cast of Barbara’s Broadway show, “Tip-Tap” Thompson (Jack Oakie, who’s actually not bad-looking and pretty good), does a jazz improv on it that turns into a song called “Alma Mammy” in which Oakie does a quite good impression of Al Jolson. (Fortunately, the filmmakers did not have him do it in blackface.) For inexplicable reasons, Thompson has enrolled at Pelham as a student, maybe to date Helen, though she ends up with Axel at the end. Barbara is so disgusted by the whole business of running a men’s college that she agrees to sell the campus to the head of its hated rival, Dr. Oglethorpe (Charles Sellon), who intends to close Pelham and tear it down. Impulsively Barbara makes a bet with Oglethorpe, who insists that she can’t back out of the deal once she’s agreed to it, that the future of the college will rest on the big game’s outcome: if Pelham wins it stays independent and if it loses Oglethorpe will take it over and destroy it. Unfortunately Biff Bentley, who requalified for the team by passing a makeup exam the morning of the Big Game, learns of Barbara’s bet and he’s so demoralized he deliberately plays wretchedly during the first half. During halftime Barbara gives him a pep talk and it energizes him to play well and ultimately win the game for Pelham. I know that a late-1920’s musical is hardly the place you should look for plot or character consistency, but Sweetie is unusually lame in those departments even for the genre and the time. The writers never explain to us just why Barbara is so bitter about Biff’s betrayal (at least as she sees it) that she’s willing to destroy her whole inheritance just to get back at him. Nor do they explain why Biff is so bitter about Barbara’s wager that he deliberately plays badly to throw the game to Oglethorpe.

Watching Sweetie I couldn’t help but think of better movies involving the principals and these plot devices – including the Marx Brothers’ screamingly funny Horse Feathers (1932), also about a college which is in danger of going out of business because its football team hasn’t won a game in decades (and which I think was shot on some of the same college sets as Sweetie), but has it all over this film for thrills as well as comedy. As I noted above, Stuart Erwin got to be in International House, though his whininess wasn’t as oppressive in that movie because of the rest of the cast: W. C. Fields, George Burns and Gracie Allen, and Bela Lugosi in an unexpectedly fine comic performance as a Russian general determined to buy a new TV invention. There’s also a surprise scene of the Broadway show being rehearsed in which Charles noticed that the proscenium wasn’t centered in the frame (a dead giveaway that Sweetie was originally shot in the Vitaphone sound-on-disc process, and when it was redone for sound-on-film, instead of letterboxing the image the people at the film lab just sliced off one-ninth of the image from the side to make room for a film soundtrack), and a great scene in which Helen Kane sings the song “He’s So Unusual.” This was not written by Richard Whiting and George Marion, Jr., like the other songs in the film, but by Abner Silver and Al Sherman (music) and Al Lewis (lyrics). It’s an odd song in that Cyndi Lauper did a cover of it on her first album, and even tweaked the song’s title for the name of her album: She’s So Unusual.

It was also done on Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man, one of the Columbia “Art Deco” series of CD’s devoted to the unwitting genderfuck committed by music publishers, who insisted that the pronouns in a lyric could not be changed even if a woman was singing a song clearly written for a man, or vice versa. (That’s one reason why Irving Berlin advised aspiring songwriters not to use the words “he” and “she,” but use “you” and “I” instead, so the songs could be sung by either mainstream gender without change.) On Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man “He’s So Unusual” is performed by Fred Rich and His Orchestra, with an all-male group called The Rollickers doing the vocal. But the big “plug” song from this movie was “My Sweeter Than Sweet,” which I’d heard before on Frank Trumbauer’s recording from 1929 with Smith Ballew on vocal. It’s performed here by Nancy Carroll (who for some reason doesn’t get to dance in this film even though dancing was one of her strengths as a performer), as well as by Stanley Smith and a chorus. As a film, Sweetie has a certain charm, and there’s less of the usual early-sound clunkiness than usual (though the actors are still pausing between hearing their cue lines and delivering their own), but though the songs are generally good for the time the overall plot is even more meaningless than usual and Nancy Carroll has a few quite powerful closeups (she’d been a star in late silents and had got to work with Gary Cooper in the part-talkie The Shopworn Angel, later remade in 1940 with James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan) but for the most part she’s pretty blah, albeit in an underwritten role playing a character who does a lot of scummy things for very unclear motivations.

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (Argosy Pictures, RKO, 1949)

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

Last night (Sunday, December 21) my husband Charles and I watched two of my all-time favorite films on Turner Classic Movies: Gold Diggers of 1933 and the awesome “pre-Code” masterpiece Call Her Savage (see https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2012/08/gold-diggers-of-1933-warner-bros-1933.html for Gold Diggers of 1933, and for Call Her Savage https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2014/09/call-her-savage-fox-film-1932.html). Then I ran Charles a DVD of the third film in John Ford’s so-called “Cavalry Trilogy,” She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949). I like John Ford but I have a peculiar relationship with his work: the Ford films I tend to like best are the outliers in the cinema history consensus, notably the incredible Three Bad Men (1926) – a precursor of the so-called “psychological Westerns” of a quarter-century later which I once named on my list of the 10 most unjustly neglected films by great directors (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2013/07/10-more-unjustly-neglected-films-by.html) – along with Pilgrimage (1933), The Lost Patrol (1934), and The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936), which despite the clunky title that makes it sound like a horror film is actually a riveting dramatization of the true story of Dr. Samuel Mudd, who because he did an emergency setting of John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg after Booth assassinated President Lincoln was unjustly convicted of being part of the conspiracy to kill him. I’m also quite partial to one of Ford’s last films, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), mainly because of its theme of how the historical memory of events is quite different from what “really” happened; it’s the source of the line, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend!,” which one Ford biographer actually used as the title of his book. But there are a lot of films that are generally considered the major works of Ford’s canon that I’ve never really warmed to, including The Informer (1935) – for which the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences inexplicably gave Ford the first of his five Best Director Oscars, given that he let his star, Victor McLaglen, overact relentlessly and abysmally throughout the film. (If anyone deserved the Academy Award for Best Director in 1935, it was James Whale for The Bride of Frankenstein.) McLaglen is in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, too, and he overacts just as shamelessly even though he’s more tolerable this time just because he’s only a supporting character (John Wayne’s second-in-command). I recently caught the much-ballyhooed The Searchers (1956) on TCM and thought it was a major disappointment, especially given the hype surrounding it over the years; that was one film for which the original reviewers, who were generally lukewarm about it, were right and the later hagiographers were wrong.

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon takes place in 1876, just as word of Col. George Armstrong Custer’s catastrophic defeat at the Little Big Horn is spreading throughout the U.S. Army. The leading character is Col. Nathan Cutting Brittles (John Wayne), who leads the Second Cavalry and is literally counting off the days until he retires. Alas, the Native commanders who led the battle at the Little Big Horn, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse (neither of whom appears as a character), have convened the various Native tribes in the Southwest (just where in the Southwest this takes place is unclear in the script by Frank S. Nugent and Laurence Stallings based on two short stories, “The Big Hunt” and “War Party,” by James Warner Bellah, but Ford shot it in his familiar stamping grounds of Monument Valley, Utah) and are getting them to settle their old quarrels and join them in a big campaign to get rid of the white settlers once and for all. Brittles, who’s supposed to be in his 60’s (though John Wayne was 41 when he made this film and was given a lot of grey hair dye to make him look older – ironically he’s better looking here than in the films he actually made in his 60’s, when he was far more bloated), also has to deal with two rival commanders who are jockeying to be the one who takes command of the regiment once Brittles retires: Lt. Flint Cohill (John Ireland) and Second Lt. Ross Pennell (Harry Carey, Jr., whose father had also been a favorite of Ford’s). The antagonism between Cohill and Pennell is not only a result of their having fought in the Civil War on opposite sides (Cohill for the Union and Pennell for the Confederacy) but also because they’re rivals for the hand of Olivia Dandridge (Joanne Dru, who had just become Mrs. John Ireland for real after her previous husband, Dick Haymes, broke up with her), niece of Brittles’s commanding officer, Major Mac Allshard (George O’Brien, who’d played the male lead in Ford’s masterpiece Three Bad Men 23 years earlier). Allshard orders Brittles to use his regiment to escort a wagon containing Olivia and Allshard’s wife Abby (a marvelous tough-edged performance by Mildred Natwick). Olivia insists on riding with the cavalry regiment even though she’s a woman, wearing a blue dress with a jacket that matches the cavalrymen’s uniforms,even though this means she has to ride side-saddle. At one point she complains about the sheer amount of time they have to spend walking their horses instead of actually riding them and says they might as well be in the infantry. (Her point that it seems silly to bring their horses along when they’re doing so little riding was a problem I was having with the film, too.)

Needless to say, this being a John Ford Western, the Natives are presented as total savages who charge the white men in hordes and are out to kill them all – I remember when Charles and I watched The Lord of the Rings cycle I told him that Peter Jackson staged the Orcs’ charges the way Ford had staged the Natives’ ones. It’s long surprised me that as progressive as he was in other respects, including some quite barbed jabs against capitalism, Ford’s depiction of so-called “Indians” was utterly wretched (at least until his second-to-last film, 1964’s Cheyenne Autumn, in which he attempted to depict Native Americans sympathetically but sabotaged himself with a leaden script and the idiotic casting of Sal Mineo as one of the braves). There’s a marvelous scene towards the end in which Brittles gets to visit his one Native friend, Pony That Walks (Chief John Big Tree), in which the two old men lament the insistence that the young people on both sides are thirsting for war and will insist on having it even though the two old guys bemoan the meaningless slaughter their younger, testosterone-fueled brethren will insist on. There’s also a bizarre comic-relief “Indian” character (who, blessedly, appears in just one scene) that reminded both Charles and I of the “Indian” character Mel Brooks played as one of his multiple roles in the Western spoof Blazing Saddles (1974).

Photographed in full three-strip Technicolor by Ford stalwart Winton Hoch, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon is stunning to look at (all those deep-red sunsets just making the Monument Valley exteriors glow!) but it’s an oddly dull film in which we keep waiting for a big action sequence and never get one. The two big battles between whites and Natives (in which the Natives win the first one and the whites win the second) both fizzle out and we’re denied the all-out pitched combat we’ve been expecting all movie. She Wore a Yellow Ribbon is one of the most highly regarded Ford films by his cult, but I found it relatively slow and draggy (even though it’s only 108 minutes long), though with some finely honed moments, including the one in which the cavalry column’s doctor, Dr. O’Laughlin (Arthur Shields, the old Irish guy you got when you couldn’t get Barry Fitzgerald), pleads with Brittles to stop the troop movement long enough for him to operate on Private John Smith, a.k.a. Rome Clay (Rudy Bowman, easily hunkier than either John Ireland or Harry Carey, Jr.!) to remove a bullet he got from a Native attack. It’s clearly a conscientiously made film involving major talents, but it’s also not more than just reasonably entertaining.

The Brokenwood Mysteries: "A Real Page-Turner" (South Pacific Pictures, All3 Media, NZ on Air, GPB, WETA, PBS, Prime, Acorn TV, aired November 19, 2019)

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

Last night (Friday, December 19) my husband Charles and I watched yet another episode of The Brokenwood Mysteries, that very interesting crime show both made and set in New Zealand dealing with the much-married detective inspector Mike Shepherd (Neill Rea); his current police partner, Kristin Sims (Fern Sutherland); an associate detective with his squad, Sam Breen (the very handsome Nic Simpson); and a Maori friend of theirs, Jared Morehu (Pana Hema Taylor), who’s a wine grower and lingers around most of the episodes, though in this one he’s actually a witness that can disprove one of the suspect’s alibi. This one was called “A Real Page-Turner” and deals with successful mystery writer Jack Rudd (Matt Whelan, who vividly captures both the character’s sex appeal and his utter egomaniac self-centeredness). He comes to the tiny New Zealand town of Brokenwood to read at a small bookstore called “Slim Volume” owned by Maxine (Anna Baird), who’s been carrying on an online flirtation with him which she hopes to consummate with him as part of her paying him for the appearance. Also on his list of comps is a free, almost palatial Air B’n’B rental with a swimming pool on the property. It seems that Maxine isn’t the only local woman Jack is involved with; he also invites someone else – Mike Shepherd’s ex Petra Conway (Lucy Wigmore) – to trick with him, including a hot scene in that elongated rectangular pool. Jack came from the area originally and was a creative writing student of K. L. Carnaby (John Callen), a local professor whose own novels are psychologically complex and sell only a fraction of what Rudd’s do. Carnaby also had another student, Hamish, whom he regarded as a much better novelist; Hamish and Rudd were friends and Hamish actually introduced Rudd to a potential publisher for both writers, but once they read Rudd’s book they decided to publish it instead of Hamish’s. Hamish also teaches creative writing at the local high school and has a star pupil, 16-year-old Lindy (Lily Powell), whom he’s interested in mentoring. We get distinct hints that he’s interested in being more than just her mentor, especially when we learn that Hamish was fired from a previous teaching job for dating a student. Hamish protested that the woman was 18 and he didn’t start their affair until after she finished his class, but the scandal was strong enough to force him to resign and look for another teaching job elsewhere.

The mystery portion kicks off when Jack Rudd is cornered on a staircase at the Slim Volume and stabbed to death during a break from his book event at which he was reading from his latest thriller, not coincidentally called Knife in the Back. The writers of “A Real Page-Turner” (Rachel Lang, story; Fiona Samuel, script) followed some of the oldest rules of writing whodunits, including making the murder victim such an asshole he’s left behind a number of people who all hate him enough to be capable of murdering him. Among them are Professor Carnaby, who claims Rudd stole the plot of his first (highly successful, and about to become a movie – I’ve written in these pages before that the real money for a commercial author comes in selling the movie rights, which is why so many modern entertainment novels come off as screenplays in prose) novel from a plot he’d outlined in class as an exercise; Maxine, who wanted a commitment from Jack; his alternate girlfriend; Gina Kandinsky (Cristina Serban Ionda), Shepherd’s medical examiner, who sent Jack an analysis of what was wrong with the forensic science in his latest manuscript and then saw her notes incorporated verbatim into the final published version of the book; Rev. Lucas Greene (Roy Ward), who gave Rudd his only copy of a handwritten novel of his own and asked the famous author for advice (and overheard Rudd reading some of it to Petra in the pool and both of them laughing at how bad it was), and who it’s also hinted had a Gay crush on Rudd; and Lindy’s mother, who worked as a barista at an on-campus coffeehouse and had had an affair with Rudd when Rudd and Hamish were both students at the local college.

It turns out that Lindy is actually Rudd’s daughter – Lindy’s mom stole his shaver from his rental house so she could have his hairs tested for DNA and definitively establish Lindy’s parentage – but Rudd left her alone to raise the child as a single mother and never gave her any child-support money or even any acknowledgement that the child was his. When Lindy showed up at Rudd’s event to get her book signed, he curtly dismissed her and wrote nothing on the book but his name. Both Lindy and her mother are suspected of Rudd’s murder, but the real killer is [spoiler alert!] Hamish, who confronted Rudd in the bookstore and demanded that he acknowledge Lindy as his daughter and help her financially. Rudd, of course, refused to do anything of the sort, so Hamish stabbed him on the staircase with a knife owned by bookstore owner Maxine (and because she owned the murder weapon the cops suspected her for a while) and killed him, knowing that this meant Lindy, as his next of kin, would inherit his estate, including the money he could have made from the film version of his novel. While I’m sorry that as The Brokenwood Mysteries evolved the characters, Shepherd in particular, lost some of their “edginess” (Shepherd drives a marginally nicer car these days and he doesn’t play local New Zealand country music as incessantly as he did before in the show’s first year or two – who knew there was an extensive local country-music scene in New Zealand) – and the show has a quite nice ending gimmick in which Shepherd goes to the wedding of his ex Petra and her current fiancé, who comes across like an old guy who’s trying to provide her with an affluent and super-cool lifestyle. I’ve basically liked The Brokenwood Mysteries, and this was one of the better episodes I’ve seen, with enough suspects (with enough interesting motives) that the ending was genuinely suspenseful and also legitimately surprising.

American Masters: "Starring Dick Van Dyke" (Thirteen/WNET, 1515 Productions Limited, American Masters Pictures, PBS, 2025)

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

On Monday, December 15 PBS broadcast an American Masters documentary called “Starring Dick Van Dyke” in celebration of his 100th birthday just two days before that. It was a fascinating look at a performer whose image is pretty much frozen in time from the early 1960’s as the star of The Dick Van Dyke Show from 1961 to 1966, though he’s had a quite extensive career since – including a second long-running TV series called Diagnosis: Murder which actually lasted eight seasons, three more than The Dick Van Dyke Show. Dick Van Dyke was born December 13, 1925 in West Plains, Missouri and he was one of those kids who seemed destined for show business as his life’s work from the time he was old enough for anyone to notice him. In 1944 Dick Van Dyke tried to enlist in the United States Army Air Corps (which in 1955 was spun off into a separate service and has since been known as the United States Air Force). Rejected for combat duty for being underweight, he was finally admitted to the service as a radio announcer and assigned to Special Services to give shows for troops in the U.S. before they were sent overseas. He was discharged in 1946 and the following year he and fellow comedian Phil Erickson teamed up for an act called “The Merry Mutes,” in which they mimed to records. They settled first in Hollywood and, in the early 1950’s, moved to Atlanta, Georgia where they made their TV debut. Van Dyke broke up his professional association with Erickson when CBS offered to put him under contract. The problem was that CBS really didn’t know what to do with him. They cast him as a sidekick to game-show host Dennis James, as a sidekick to singer Pat Boone on his variety program, and briefly as an early morning news anchor with Walter Cronkite, of all people, as his assistant. Unhappy with the way his career was going and already married to Marjorie Ann Terrell and with several children to raise, Van Dyke looked for steadier work and tried to make it as a stage actor on Broadway.

After playing in a plotless revue called The Girls Against the Boys, Van Dyke achieved stage stardom in the 1960 musical Bye Bye Birdie, a spoof of Elvis Presley’s induction into the U.S. Army. He played Albert Peterson, manager of newly drafted rock star Conrad Birdie, with Chita Rivera cast as his secretary and assistant. During rehearsals director Gower Champion took one of the songs, “Put On a Happy Face,” away from Rivera and gave it to Van Dyke, and largely on the basis of his plaintive performance of it Van Dyke became a stage star. Meanwhile, over at CBS writer-producer-director Carl Reiner had developed an idea for a half-hour TV situation comedy called Head of the Family in which he would play the head comedy writer of a TV variety show who lived in a New York suburb with his wife and son. Reiner paid for a pilot episode out of his own pocket, and CBS liked the overall premise but didn’t like Reiner’s performance in the lead. Instead they looked for another person to star and settled on Van Dyke, and though the documentary (written and directed by John Scheinfeld) didn’t go into the reasons why the network didn’t buy the show with Reiner as the star, I suspect it was because they assumed Reiner was too Jewish and the show would only work with someone more “Anglo” in the lead. Producers Carl Reiner and Sheldon Leonard assembled a top-notch supporting cast: Mary Tyler Moore as Rob Petrie’s (Van Dyke) long-suffering wife Laura; Larry Mathews as their pre-pubescent son Ritchie; Morey Amsterdam and Rose Marie as Rob’s colleagues in the writers’ room of variety-show host Alan Brady (played by Carl Reiner himself in a marvelous inversion of their actual roles; it was really Reiner who was running the writers’ room for the show); Richard Deacon as Mel, Brady’s manager and the writers’ main point of contact with their ultimate boss; and Jerry Paris as Rob’s next-door neighbor and best friend.

The Dick Van Dyke Show bombed in its first year (it was sponsored by Procter and Gamble and the writers built the commercials into the show, especially with scenes in which Laura Petrie would be shown washing the family’s dishes and rhapsodizing about the wonders of Procter and Gamble’s detergent, Joy) and Van Dyke was convinced it was because the show was on too early in the evening (8 p.m.). Van Dyke and the writers wanted to show more displays of physical affection between him and Mary Tyler Moore than had been the norm in previous sitcoms – even I Love Lucy and Burns and Allen, in which the co-stars actually were married to each other – and there’s a fascinating interview clip in the documentary in which Van Dyke and Moore jokingly complained that they’d got dirty looks from hotel desk clerks when they tried to register with their real-life spouses and the clerks assumed they were fooling around with people other than their TV spouses. Starting with the second season, the show was moved to a different day and a later time, and it took off and became a huge hit and won several Emmy Awards until Van Dyke and Reiner suddenly decided to take it off the air after five years because they thought if it continued they’d grow stale and start repeating themselves. Meanwhile, Van Dyke had appeared in the 1963 film of Bye Bye Birdie, and though he’d been reluctant to make the film at first because he thought the script departed too much from the stage version, he repeated his stage role in the film and got good notices. In 1965 Van Dyke got another film role that generated one of the biggest hits of the decade; Mary Poppins, a Walt Disney production that freely mixed live-action and animation and cast Julie Andrews in the title role, as a governess who loosens up a strait-laced bankers’ family by taking care of their two children. Van Dyke played Bert, Mary Poppins’s chimney-sweep boyfriend, and in his most spectacular sequence he leads a chorus line of fellow chimney sweeps in a dance on the London rooftops to the song “Step in Time.”

After Van Dyke left The Dick Van Dyke Show his career went into the doldrums, though he’d make some amusing movies. He’d had a hit with the 1967 film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, based on a children’s novel by James Bond creator Ian Fleming (though the filmmakers radically reshaped the material and kept little from Fleming’s book beyond the central premise of a crackpot inventor who develops a car that can fly) and made a quite good dark comedy called Fitzwilly in which he played a butler who’s really a super-crook who commits his crimes to bolster the illusion of his once-wealthy owner that she still has money. Then in 1969 Van Dyke and Carl Reiner teamed up again for a dark film called The Comic, in which he played a silent-film comedian whose career is doomed by the advent of sound films and his own egomania. The Comic bombed at the box office, much to Van Dyke’s disappointment since he’d seen it as a tribute to the great real-life silent comedians who had influenced him: Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Stan Laurel. (Van Dyke had become a close friend of Stan Laurel’s in Laurel’s later years, and Laurel told his biographer, John McCabe, “If they ever make a movie of my life – and I hope they don’t – I’d like Dick to play me.”) In 1974 Van Dyke showed off his chops as a serious actor with a TV-movie about alcoholism called The Morning After, which led him to confront his own drinking problem. Van Dyke also returned to series TV in the early 1970’s with The New Dick Van Dyke Show, in which he played a local TV talk-show host with Hope Lange as his wife. Though the show was produced and developed by Carl Reiner, lightning didn’t strike twice and The New Dick Van Dyke Show was canceled after three seasons.

Van Dyke made a comeback in character roles and TV guest appearances in the 1980’s, including a few appearances on Carol Burnett’s variety show (Burnett and her producer/husband Joe Hamilton were looking for a replacement for Harvey Korman). The documentary showed a fascinating clip in which Van Dyke and Burnett pantomimed a fight scene in slow motion, and my husband Charles, who was watching the show with me, wondered just how many people younger than we are would “get” that they were spoofing the infamous slow-motion bloodbaths of Sam Peckinpah’s action movies. In the 1990’s, after a stint as a corrupt district attorney in Warren Beatty’s movie Dick Tracy, Van Dyke got another TV series in a vein quite different from his previous ones, as a crime-solving doctor in Diagnosis: Murder. Van Dyke insisted that the producers cast African-American actress Victoria Rowell as his principal co-star, and when they protested, “She’s Black,” Van Dyke put his foot down and said, “She’s good!” (The show had previously mentioned a rally in L.A. in 1964 in which Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King had spoken and Van Dyke had been one of his opening acts, delivering a pro-civil rights speech written for him by Twilight Zone and Night Gallery producer Rod Serling.) Along the way Van Dyke and his long-time wife Margie came to an amicable parting of the ways in 1984 and, after he was briefly involved with Lee Marvin’s ex, Michelle Triola (who had sued him and won a settlement even though they were never formally married, which established a precedent for so-called “palimony” suits), he married producer Arlene Silver in 2012 and Van Dyke credits her with saving his life. “Starring Dick Van Dyke” is an engaging portrait of a survivor in a frequently unforgiving business who’s kept his good humor over the years and managed to remain both a major star and a decent human being.

Tchaikovsky: The Nutcracker (Cornerstone Studios, English National Ballet, 2024)

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

On Tuesday, December 16 PBS showed a performance of Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker staged by the English National Ballet in 2024 that was at once fascinating and frustrating. It took me a while to find out information on this program because the PBS Web site is now more aimed at facilitating viewers who want to “stream” the program itself than in publishing information about it, including credits for the cast and crew. I managed to pull together a cast and crew list by transcribing it from the closing credits of the stream, and I also found an online site that gave the history of the English National Ballet’s involvement with The Nutcracker. The Nutcracker is by far the most popular ballet ever created, and ballet companies all around the world regularly put it on during the December holiday season. They use it as a cash cow and virtually all ballet companies depend on a holiday production of The Nutcracker for at least half of their annual revenue. The Nutcracker started life as an 1816 story by the German fantasy writer and musical composer E. T. A. Hoffmann called The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, which was first published in a multi-author book called Kinder-Mährchen (“Children’s Stories”) that also featured stories by Carl Wilhelm Contessa and Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué. Hoffmann republished in a collection entirely by him called The Serapion Brethren, published in several volumes between 1819 and 1821. The story was first published in English in London in 1833. In 1892, looking for a follow-up to their successful fairy-tale ballet Sleeping Beauty, Russian composer Piotr Illyich Tchaikovsky and choreographer Marius Petipa decided to do a ballet adaptation of Hoffmann’s tale. The original story was about a young girl variously called Marie or Masha Stahlbaum who, along with her siblings, receives a nutcracker as a Christmas present. Alas, one of her brothers breaks it and Marie tries as best she can to mend it with a ribbon. Their home is invaded by an army of mice led by the Mouse King, but the nutcracker magically comes to life and leads an army of toy soldiers, expanded to normal human size, to defeat them. Then the vivified nutcracker takes Marie to a magical country which in this production is called the “Land of Sweets and Delights” (“Land der Süßigkeiten und Köstlichkeiten” in the original German), where they mostly sit and watch while the corps de ballet and various soloists do a succession of national dances.

Most listeners know The Nutcracker from the famous suite Tchaikovsky assembled from the complete ballet, with two selections from act one (the “Miniature Overture” and the children’s march) and six from act two (the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, Trepak – Russian Dance – Arabian Dance, Chinese Dance, Dance of the Mirlitons, which means “reed flutes,” and the Waltz of the Flowers), but if you only know the suite you’re missing a lot of the ballet’s best music. A number of later productions changed Marie’s name to “Clara” and made her a teenager so she could dance and do a pas de deux with the Nutcracker. This production did both; Clara was played in the first act by pre-pubescent Delilah Wiggins and in the second act by young adult Ivana Bueno. Likewise they cast two people as the Nutcracker: Rhys Antoni Yeomans as the doll version in act one and Francesco Gabriele Frola as the full-grown version and Clara’s dance partner in act two. This production was choreographed by Aaron S. Watkin and Arielle Smith, and instead of setting the framing sequence either in medieval Germany (as in Hoffmann’s original) or in 19th century Russia (as Tchaikovsky and Petipa had), they staged it in late 19th century London. We can tell it’s late 19th century because there are two suffragists carrying picket signs reading “Votes for Women,” and there are also two chimney sweeps who are costumed identically to the ones in the 1965 film Mary Poppins, which made it ironic that I was watching this just one night after my husband Charles and I had seen a PBS documentary on Dick Van Dyke which featured a clip of the dance he did with a chorus line of chimney sweeps in that movie.

The first act gets more than a bit cutesy-poo, but once the action shifts from late 19th-century London to the Land of Sweets and Delights – transported there on Clara’s bed, which thanks to the Nutcracker’s magic becomes a giant translucent sleigh that flies through the air like Santa’s sled – things get a lot more interesting even though the ballet pretty much abandons the pretense of any kind of plot. One of the most spectacular numbers is the Russian Dance, performed by five male dancers who are costumed in all-over tights with black-and-white spiral designs on them. I also liked the way they staged the Waltz of the Flowers (though my mind has been poisoned about that number by a children’s record I heard in my own childhood, which featured a chorus singing incredibly banal lyrics – the ones I remember go, “Dance, flowers, dance/Dance while the music brings romance”) and the dueling dance duets by Clara and the Nutcracker, and the Sugar Plum Fairy (Emma Hawes, who also played Clara’s mother in act one) and her prince consort (Aitor Arrieta, who also played Clara’s father in act one). In the end, of course, the interlude in fairyland turns out to be just Clara’s dream, and as much as I dislike “it was all a dream!” endings, this one was at least tolerable because of a neat psychedelic effect Watkin and Smith did when the bed Clara is sleeping on returns to her home as she wakes up. As a story ballet The Nutcracker tempts silliness, and this production occasionally went over the line, but a lot of it is quite charming and the dancing qua dancing is beautifully executed. The program was copyrighted in 2024 but it struck me as odd that the closing credits listed the English National Ballet’s royal patron as “Her Majesty the Queen” when Queen Elizabeth II died in 2022 and her son Charles, the current reigning British monarch, was crowned as her replacement in 2023.

Hope of the Season: Christmas with the Tabernacle Choir (BYU Broadcasting, GBH, Intellectual Reserve, PBS, aired December 15, 2025)

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

Last night (Monday, December 15) I put on a couple of TV shows on PBS and my husband Charles and I watched them together, though he had to bail on one of them a half-hour before the end because he got an emergency phone call from his church pastor. (Actually, it wasn’t that big an emergency; she just wanted to vent.) The first was formally titled Hope of the Season: Christmas with the Tabernacle Choir. The choir in question was formerly known as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and so were its Christmas specials, which frequently featured major guest stars like opera singer Kiri Te Kanawa. In 2024 they abbreviated the name of their show to Joy with the Tabernacle Choir, and they followed the same practice this year even though the Mormon connections were pretty evident: the show’s production was credited to the media department of Brigham Young University and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the Mormon Church’s official name, through a front company called “Intellectual Reserve, Inc.” Previous episodes of this show ran for an hour, but this one went an hour and a half and featured some rather emphatically phrased renditions of both familiar and not-so-familiar Christmas carols. Some were played instrumentally, some sung by the choir, and some were solos featuring Broadway star Ruthie Ann Miles (b. 1983). Miles briefly mentioned her background as a church singer in her teens; her mother was music director of a church in Honolulu, Hawai’i, and Ruthie got pressed into service whenever they needed a spare soloist for the church.

Her Wikipedia page indicates a far more Dickensian childhood than the one that got mentioned last night; though she was born in Arizona, her mother was Korean, Esther Wong, and moved them first to Korea and then to Hawai’i, where Ruthie recalled having to train herself to lose her Korean accent. She played Christmas Eve in Avenue Q, Imelda Marcos in Here Lies Love, and Lady Thiang (King Mongkut’s first wife) in the 2015 Broadway revival of The King and I. Then in 2018 Miles was involved in an accident that killed her daughter and unborn child; she and her husband were crossing a New York street when they were run over by a car. Miles returned to the stage in August 2018, five months after the accident, and she and her husband, Jonathan Blumenstein (his last name is German for “flower rock”), eventually had another daughter whom they appropriately named Hope Elizabeth. For the first half of the concert it was mainly just music, with Miles singing “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” and a medley of “Spirit of the Season” and “If You Just Believe” from The Polar Express (a 2004 animated film based on a 1985 children’s novel). The other selections were “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” “’Twas Midnight in the Stable,” “Welcome Christmas Morning,” and an odd selection called “Gamelan” by Murray Schaefer in which, by singing a cappella without words, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir attempted to duplicate the sound of a Balinese or Javanese gamelan ensemble. Then the orchestra re-entered and the choir started singing words again for “Sing We Now, O Child of Wonder,” though since there was no chyron it was probably just a tag for “Gamelan.”

After that, a pretty standard chorus-and-orchestra rendition of “Joy to the World,” and Ruthie Ann Miles’s The Polar Express medley, came one of the most intriguing bits of the program: a medley of three pieces called “Alleluia.” First was one by Johann Sebastian Bach based on the infamous “Air on the ‘G’ String” from the Orchestral Suite No. 3; then was a surprisingly advanced (musically) “Alleluia” from Argentinian composer Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983) that verged on 12-tone technique and had an engaging celesta solo part that was not at all what you usually think of for that instrument; and last was the all-too-familiar “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s oratorio The Messiah. Next came a real surprise: a jazz version of the carol “Patapan,” also known as “When You Hear the Pipes and Drums,” with an organist contributing jazz licks along with a jazz-style pianist, bassist, and drummer. After that came the expected dramatic portions of the evening performed by African-American actor Dennis Haysbert. One was a tribute to an unusual civic leader from Kenya named Dr. Charles Mulli. He was abandoned by his parents at age six when they fled his native village with their younger children. After unsuccessfully trying to find a relative who would take him in, he spent the next 10 years homeless until he finally emigrated to Nairobi in search of a job. Mulli found one with a woman who hired him at first as a houseboy, then promoted him to supervise her field workers until he was ultimately running her plantation.

He gradually built a fortune selling automobile parts and became a multimillionaire until one day, in 1989, he turned down some street children who were begging for money and/or food. When he returned from work, Mulli found that the kids had stolen his car. He took this as a sign that his life until then had been meaningless and he had a moral obligation to help suffering children who were in the same position he’d been in years before as a homeless child himself. So he went home and told his wife that he was selling all his businesses and devoting the money to turning their home into an orphanage for street kids. Needless to say, she wasn’t thrilled about that and their own children were less than happy with their rambunctious foster siblings, but eventually Mulli’s combination of grit, determination, and business savvy led him to build a chain of orphanages across Kenya. Haysbert’s account of Mulli’s story included a Tabernacle Choir rendition of “Silent Night” and ended with an instrumental postlude whose title I missed. Afterwards Haysbert narrated the familiar Nativity story and the concert closed with Ruthie Ann Miles, the chorus, and orchestra doing “Angels from the Realms of Glory,” a French carol better known as “Angels We Have Heard on High.” (I suspect the difference is simply a variant translation of the original French.) Though the musical performances got a bit too loud and aggressive at times, it was nonetheless a stunning commemoration of the holiday season. I was a bit depressed at the overall whiteness of the performing forces – aside from the half-Asian Miles, there were a couple of Asian-looking choir singers but no discernible Blacks or Latinos (and there weren’t that many people of color in the audience, either! I just re-read my post about the 2024 telecast and was surprised that that one’s choir had been a lot more racially mixed than this one’s) – but overall it was a nice celebration of Christmas and better than I’d expected from these auspices.

The Jungle Book (Alexander Korda Films, United Artists, 1942)

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

Last night shortly after 9:15 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched the 1942 film The Jungle Book, produced by Alexander Korda, directed by Zoltan Korda, with production design by Vincent Korda. (Yes, they were brothers.) I’d picked up a public-domain copy of The Jungle Book the last time I stopped into the Mission Hills Library along with three other DVD’s: the 1949 Western She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne; Verdi’s opera Rigoletto with Luciano Pavarotti, Edita Gruberova, and Ingvar Wixell, directed by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, and conducted by Riccardo Chailly from 1983; and a 1983 “Gala Concert” from Sydney, Australia with Joan Sutherland, Luciano Pavarotti, and Richard Bonynge conducting. I rattled off all four of those for Charles and it seemed like The Jungle Book was the one that most excited him even though we’d seen it before together. It didn’t take Charles long to notice how badly faded the colors were in the print (that’s a common failing of public-domain films that were originally in color; I remember a testy exchange on the old imdb.com bulletin boards about the 1939 film The Little Princess, Shirley Temple’s first color film; it had slipped into the public domain and some people on the bulletin board had suggested it had been colorized, which prompted a comment from Sybil Jason, who as a child actress had been in the film with Temple and said it had been in color originally). Ironically, I just watched the original trailer which is linked to on The Jungle Book’s imdb.com page and its colors were far brighter and more vibrant than the ones in the actual movie, at least in the print we saw. I’ve had occasion to mention the 1942 The Jungle Book in connection with some of my movie soundtrack reviews for Fanfare because it’s the first film for which an original soundtrack album was issued. Record companies had issued music from films before that, but they’d insisted in re-recording it in their own studios with their own equipment. In 1942 Capitol Records was a young, struggling company co-owned by singer Johnny Mercer, and one of their ideas was to license an original soundtrack, transfer it to disc masters, and issue it on records as an album (back when an “album” meant literally that: a batch of 78 rpm records bound together in sleeves like a photo album). One could hear why The Jungle Book was chosen for this honor because Milkós Rósza’s score for it is incredible: warm, coloristic, innovative and fascinating listening even on its own without the film.

As far as the actual movie was concerned, the last time I’d watched it I’d found it utterly magical; this time around I found it harder going. It’s based on Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book stories, or at least four of them – “Mowgli's Brothers,” “How Fear Came,” “Tiger! Tiger!,” and “The King's Ankus" – which screenwriter Laurence Stallings (best known for his 1920’s play about World War I, What Price Glory?, and seemingly an odd choice for a children’s fantasy about India) blended together into a reasonably coherent narrative. The star was Sabu, playing Mowgli, who when he was a child lost his father to the man-eating tiger Shere Khan. Mowgli happened to run off from his mother just as his dad was becoming Shere Khan’s dinner, and he was taken in by a wolf pack and, like Romulus and Remus, raised by them. As the film starts (it’s actually narrated as a flashback by Joseph Calleia as an old Indian beggar entertaining Anglo tourists) Mowgli has just returned to his native village, to the joy of his mother Mahala (Patricia O’Rourke). He falls in love with a village girl, Messua (Rosemary DeCamp), but her father, trader Buldeo (Joseph Calleia), takes an instant dislike to Mowgli. Mowgli intimidates Buldeo into giving him a “tooth” – actually a knife – with which to hunt and kill Shere Khan. Much is made of the “law of the jungle,” and in particular its prohibition against killing anything unless you’re doing it for survival or food. There’s a great scene in which Mowgli sees a bear-skin rug and laments that the bear, whom he knew, got killed for so pointless a reason as to be turned into a carpet. Mowgli and Messua set off into the jungle in search for Shere Khan, and they fall down a hole in front of a gigantic palace built by a long-extinct human tribe which assembled major riches. (The movie was shot at a Southern California resort named “Sherwood Forest,” and I think the giant palace was the same building the Halperin brothers used as a Cambodian temple in their 1936 film Revolt of the Zombies.) Messua takes home one coin after she’s confronted by Kaa the snake (voiced by Mel “Bugs Bunny” Blanc), who explains that he’s old and his venom has been exhausted but the items in the treasure, especially an ornament with a ruby inside, are cursed and will kill anyone who tries to remove them. Mowgli finally confronts and kills Shere Khan with one-third of the film’s 108-minute running time left to go. The rest is taken up by an all too human intrigue as Messua’s dad Buldeo (ya remember Messua’s dad Buldeo?) catches her with the gold coin. Buldeo and his associates “The Barber” (John Qualen) and “The Pandit” (Frank Puglia), hatch a plot to go to the abandoned city and grab the treasure, but in the end they set the city and the surrounding jungle on fire while Mowgli, disgusted by the greed-driven ways of humanity, returns to the jungle and his animal friends.

The Jungle Book is a visually stunning entertainment – even in the dreadfully faded print we were watching Lee Garmes’s and W. Howard Greene’s cinematography remains beautiful – but it’s also a story that treads on the thin edge of silliness and occasionally goes over. Charles lamented that precisely because the film is in the public domain, it’s unlikely to be the subject of the restoration job it desperately needs. At least Sabu is cute in the male lead (and he was the only card-carrying Indian in the cast, though when his British and American film career faded and he tried to get parts in Bollywood he was refused a work permit from the Indian government because he was a naturalized U.S. citizen), though like Shirley Temple he lost his career when he grew older and could no longer credibly play pre-pubescent precociousness. I’ve seen various versions of Sabu’s first name – some sources call him Sabu Dastagir and some call him Selar Sheikh Sabu – but what is known is he got discovered for films by the great documentarian Robert Flaherty, who in 1936 went to India to make Elephant Boy (another Kipling adaptation, from Toomai of the Elephants), also with Alexander Korda as producer. Sabu wowed Korda, who put him under contract, took him to London, hired tutors to improve his English (his performance in Elephant Boy is notable for the vast difference in his English skills between the footage Flaherty shot in India and the retakes Zoltan Korda directed in Britain), put him in another film called The Drum (Drums in the U.S.), and then cast him in the title role of a 1940 film, The Thief of Baghdad (a much better movie than the Douglas Fairbanks silent of which it was nominally a remake). Unfortunately, while Korda was shooting The Thief of Baghdad World War II started, and when Winston Churchill became Prime Minister he had the entire British film industry shut down because it was using up resources important to the war effort. So Korda took his cast, crew, and half-completed film to Hollywood, finished it there, and looked for another property which became The Jungle Book.

Killer's Kiss (Minotaur Productions, United Artists, 1955)

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

Last night (Saturday, December 13) I watched four films in a row – three features and a short – on Turner Classic Movies. The first two, Stanley Kubrick’s Killer’s Kiss (1955) and Mark Robson’s The Harder They Fall (1956), were presented as one of the channel’s double bills co-introduced by regular host Ben Mankiewicz and Rosie Perez, actress and dancer who was invited because she frequents boxing matches so often she’s been referred to as the “Queen of Boxing” and both movies were about boxers. Killer’s Kiss was Kubrick’s second film, and like his first, Fear and Desire (1952), was produced on the proverbial shoestring. Most of the money came from Bronx pharmacist Morris Bousel, who gets co-producer credit with Kubrick, and it was largely shot on location in New York City. It’s definitely a film noir and its romantic leads are Davey Gordon (Jamie Smith), a burned-out boxer whose best days in the ring are behind him even though he’s just 29 years old, and dance-hall hostess Gloria Price (Irene Kane). Ironically, the actor who receives top billing is Frank Silvera, playing gangster Vince Rapallo, who owns the dance hall where Gloria works and is infatuated with her. The story is a simple one: Davey has just lost his latest bout with a fighter named Kid Rodriguez when he returns to his ratty Manhattan apartment and sees Gloria from her window in the building next door. (One wonders if Kubrick and his co-writer, Howard Sackler, were influenced by Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, released just one year before Killer’s Kiss was shot.) Davey has already accepted his fate and plans to move back to Seattle, where his aunt and uncle raised him, and work on their horse ranch. (This evokes John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle, in which the character played by Sterling Hayden desperately wants to return home to the horse ranch where he grew up, and just barely makes it before he dies of the wounds he got in a shoot-out. Later Hayden would work for Kubrick in The Killing, in a role strongly similar to the one he played in The Asphalt Jungle, and in Dr. Strangelove.)

Alas, when he hears Gloria scream from her window, he spies Rapallo attempting to rape her, and Rapallo is angry and vows revenge. Rapallo has two of his henchmen kill Davey’s manager and frame him for the crime, distracting Davey with two other men, disguised as Shriners, who steal Davey’s scarf and force him to chase after them to retrieve it. There’s a chase scene across New York rooftops during which both Rapallo and Davey injure themselves (apparently Frank Silvera and Jamie Smith both hurt themselves for real) before the two men finally confront each other in a mannequin factory, where they attempt to beat each other to death with the mannequins. Ultimately the police arrive and decide that Davey killed Rapallo in self-defense, exonerate him for the murder of his manager, and send him on his way to Seattle. In a happy ending the distributors, United Artists (who gave Kubrick $10,000 in completion money), insisted on, Gloria meets him at the Pennsylvania Station (the fabled locale mentioned in the song “Chattanooga Choo Choo” which was demolished in 1963) and goes to Seattle with him just after Davey, in a typical voice-over film noir narration, laments over what a fool he was to let a woman he’d known for only two days so totally upend his life. There’s also an odd scene in which ballerina Ruth Sobotka, then Mrs. Stanley Kubrick, dances a quite elaborate scene while Gloria narrates a dialogue flashback. Sobotka is playing Iris, Gloria’s late older sister, who turned her back on a promising ballet career to marry a rich man who demanded she retire. She did so because their father had become catastrophically ill and needed expensive medical care, and when dad finally died two years later, Iris, lamenting the loss of her career, committed suicide. What’s most interesting about Killer’s Kiss is the intimations of later Kubrick films: there’s a long dream sequence of Davey careening through the streets of New York, shot in negative film, that evokes the long traveling shot of Jack Nicholson on his way to the New England hotel that opens The Shining, while the final scene in the mannequin factory couldn’t help but remind me of the scene in A Clockwork Orange in which Alex (Malcolm McDowell) kills the woman he’s just raped by beating her with a phallic statue in her home.

The film was well received enough that United Artists continued working with Kubrick on his next film, The Killing, also a film noir but with, if not A-list, at least A-minus-list actors (Sterling Hayden, Marie Windsor, Elisha Cook, Jr.). Variety gave it a mixed but generally positive review at or around the time of the original release (there’s an intimation that the anonymous reviewer had seen at least The Killing by this time, for s/he refers to Killer’s Kiss as “a warmup for Kubrick’s talents”): “Ex-Look photographer Stanley Kubrick turned out Killer's Kiss on the proverbial shoestring. Kiss was more than a warm-up for Kubrick's talents, for not only did he co-produce but he directed, photographed and edited the venture from his own screenplay and original story [originally written by Howard Sackler]. … Kubrick's low-key lensing occasionally catches the flavor of the seamy side of Gotham life. His scenes of tawdry Broadway, gloomy tenements and grotesque brick-and-stone structures that make up Manhattan's downtown eastside loft district help offset the script's deficiencies.” Kubrick was his own cinematographer, and some of the striking noir images he got have become familiar through TCM’s recycling of them on their introductions. Alas, Killer’s Kiss is not terribly well acted; Frank Silvera is convincing in his villain’s role but both Jamie Smith and Irene Kane (who later reverted to her original name, Chris Chase, and became a writer) deliver their lines in monotones that suggest they’ve just started acting classes. Part of the nervous delivery may be due to Kubrick’s decision to have all the dialogue post-recorded, as he had on Fear and Desire, Originally he was going to do conventional live on-the-set recording, but he decided the mikes were getting in the way of his visuals, so he banished them and shot the whole thing silent with sound added later. (Kubrick was never a big one for extended dialogue scenes. On his greatest film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, he used dialogue for only 42 minutes of the 127-minute running time.)