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.)

The Harder They Fall (Columbia, 1956)

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

Turner Classic Movies’ second boxing movie on their double-bill Saturday, December 13 was The Harder They Fall, made by Columbia Pictures in 1956 and based on an anti-boxing novel Budd Schulberg had published in 1947. Schulberg had hoped to get the assignment to write the script, too, but producer Philip Yordan pulled rank on him and wrote it himself. He also made one dramatic change in the material: originally the character of Eddie Willis (Humphrey Bogart in his final film) ends it by writing an article that begins, “Boxing must be outlawed in the United States, even if it takes an act of Congress to do it.” In the film as it stands now the final line he types is, “The boxing business must rid itself of the evil influence of racketeers and corrupt managers, even if it takes an act of Congress to do it.” The change was made at Budd Schulberg’s insistence, since in his 1971 book Loser and Still Champion: Muhammad Ali he said he’d only meant to call for the reform of boxing, not its abolition altogether. The Harder They Fall, directed by Val Lewton veteran Mark Robson (and it shows in a scene in which gangsters corner a fighter who refused to take a dive when he’d been paid to in a gym shower and beat him to death, and Robson depicts it with a scene of bloody water trickling out of the shower, copped from Lewton’s and Jacques Tourneur’s The Leopard Man), deals with Eddie Willis, a long-term sportswriter who lost his regular column when the New York newspaper he wrote for went out of business. He’s contacted by gangster Nick Benko (Rod Steiger) to do P.R. for a scam Benko has cooked up: he’s signed a deal with Argentinian boxer Toro Moreno (Mike Lane) who looks formidable – he weighs 278 pounds, 60 to 70 pounds more than a typical heavyweight – but has, as Willis put it after he sees him with his African-American sparring partner George (played by real-life boxer Jersey Joe Walcott), “a powder-puff punch and a glass jaw.”

Benko and his corrupt henchmen set up a series of fixed fights in which Toro will win by knockouts and build up a reputation as a contender for the heavyweight championship. Despite the misgivings of his wife Beth (Jan Sterling, five years after her incandescent performance as the faithless femme fatale in Billy Wilder’s masterpiece Ace in the Hole; alas, she’s largely wasted her in her typical good-wife role) and his old friend Art Leavitt (Harold J. Stone), a TV sportscaster who catches on that Toro’s first fight was fixed, Willis takes on the job. Meanwhile, the heavyweight championship for which Toro is being promoted changes hands as contender Buddy Brannen (another real-life boxer, Max Baer) defeats reigning champion Gus Dundee (Pat Comiskey) and leaves Dundee with a concussion. In Toro’s next fight with Dundee, as a warmup for his championship bout with Brannen, Dundee dies from his previous injuries and Toro is convinced that he killed him. Homesick, bereft of his original manager Luis Agrandi (Carlos Montalbán) whom Benko sent away, and upset by a note he’s received from his parish priest back in Argentina that his father is dying, Toro wants to quit the ring and return home to be with his sick father. But with the championship fight with Brannen already arranged, Benko and his gang are determined not to let Toro leave the country and bail out on his big bout. First they have five people corner him with chains and try to beat the shit out of him – Toro’s helplessness in the face of these thugs, as well as the scene in which he was first introduced and he clumsily bumped into an overhead light fixture, tell us all we need to know about his utter haplessness as a fighter – and then Willis corners him in a church (whose pastor is played by legendary voice actor Paul Frees) and talks him into going ahead with the Brannen fight because there’ll be a major pay envelope waiting for him after it.

Meantime Brannen has formed a personal grudge against Toro over the claims that it was he, not Toro, who inflicted the fatal blows against Dundee. Benko’s men have told Brannen to go easy on Toro for six rounds to make it look competitive, but the furious Brannen refuses and opens up on Toro almost from the get-go and totally humiliates him. Toro ends up in a hospital with his jaw badly fractured and wired shut, which doesn’t stop Benko from selling Toro’s contract to an equally corrupt manager, Jim Weyerhause (Edward Andrews), for $75,000. Weyerhause figures he can make his money back touring the hapless Toro in the counties in which he won his fixed fights and allowing the local boys to clobber him, but in the meantime Willis determines (in the classic arc of a Bogart character who lost his ideals in the backstory but regained them in the finale) to help Toro get out of the country as soon as he’s well enough to travel. When Willis goes to Benko to get his and Toro’s shares of his earnings, he gets an envelope containing $26,000 but is told that after all the deductions for expenses, all Toro has coming to him is $49.07. Willis gives Toro his own share of the proceeds and then announces his intention to Benko to write a series of articles exposing the corruption of the fight game. Benko threatens him but then realizes that a man who’d give away $26,000 out of a sense of righteousness is someone who can’t be corrupted, bribed, or intimidated.

The Harder They Fall was a good movie for Humphrey Bogart to go out on; it’s tough, well-made, gives Bogart one last change to portray nobility regained, and the reported real-life antagonism between him and Steiger adds verisimilitude to the story. Bogart made no particular secret of his distaste for the Method and the actors who practiced it – he referred to it as the “scratch-your-ass-and-mumble school” – and in this movie we see Steiger throwing himself into his role with all his Method affectations and Bogart taking the acting honors with his simple, direct Old Hollywood professionalism. One aspect of this film that irritated me on previous go-rounds was the cheesy “Latin” theme composer Hugo Friedhofer inflicted on us every time Toro’s tour bus is shown on screen, though most of the music is actually quite good even though it’s a functional rather than an expansive score: one which works in the context of the film even though it doesn’t generate great music on its own. Robson’s direction and Burnett Guffey’s cinematography are good enough to serve their purposes – this is an exposé, not a film noir, though the basic story had potentials for noir atmospherics that weren’t realized or even attempted (notably in the scene in which Willis is on the phone to his wife Beth and a woman sneaks into his hotel room and puts her hand on the phone cord, thereby hanging up the call; we momentarily believe that Willis is going extra-relational on Beth, but that’s about the farthest thing from his mind at the moment) – and for some reason, even though he was about to be diagnosed with the cancer that would kill him in early 1957, Bogart actually looks healthier here than he had in Beat the Devil two years earlier.

The Lady and the Lug (Warner Bros., Vitaphone Corporation, 1940)

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

Oddly, after The Harder They Come on Saturday, December 13 TCM showed a 20-minute short called The Lady and the Lug (1940) that was also about the boxing game and in particular about a hapless would-be fighter who’s totally hopeless in the ring. The Lady and the Lug was a vehicle for the celebrated party hostess Elsa Maxwell, who plays herself. Her nephew Doug Abbott (future TV Superman George Reeves) has just won, in a poker game, the management contract of would-be boxer Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom (also playing himself). Maxwell hits on the idea of staging a boxing exhibition at her latest benefit for the Milk Fund (a common charity in the 1930’s which existed to raise money for babies from poor parents to have access to milk; it’s still around, by the way, albeit under various names) between Rosenbloom and championship contender “One-Punch” McGurk (Frank Hagney). Maxwell trains with Rosenbloom and paces him during his running workouts, which he keeps trying to cut short because he gets too tired, and when Rosenbloom finds out whom he’s going to be fighting in the big Milk Fund bout he wants to bail, At this point we’re probably wondering why Maxwell doesn’t put her nephew in the ring instead – “He is from Krypton, after all!” I couldn’t resist joking to myself – but instead she talks Rosenbloom into getting into the ring after all. Only McGurk decides to fight dirty, so Maxwell throws off her society duds, gets into the ring herself, and knocks out the would-be champ. Directed by Warners’ “B”-meister William McGann from a committee-written script (Owen Crump and Jack Henley, “original” story; Charles R. Marion and Arthur V. Jones, screenplay), The Lady and the Lug is a charming little curio that, among other things, showed Warners’ cluelessness about what to do with George Reeves. He signed with the studio around the same time they picked up another tall, lanky, barely coordinated young actor named Ronald Reagan, who of course went on to even bigger and arguably better things than George Reeves did!

Cash on Demand (Hammer Films, Woodpecker Productions, British Lion, Columbia, 1961)

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

Eventually my husband Charles returned from work last night (Saturday, December 13) an hour earlier than expected and therefore he got to watch with me the Turner Classic Movies “Noir Alley” screening of a really quirky 1961 crime thriller from Hammer Films, Cash on Demand. Directed by Quentin Lawrence from a script by David T. Chantler and Lewis Greifer from a play by Jacques Gillies, Cash on Demand came about after one of Hammer’s biggest stars, Peter Cushing, served notice on the studio that he was tired of rehashing Universal’s big monster properties and wanted something else. Cushing and André Morell, a key supporting player in this one, had already done an adaptation of the Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes novel The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1959 (Cushing thus became the first actor to play Holmes on screen since Basil Rathbone hung up the deerstalker after his last Holmes film, Dressed to Kill, 13 years earlier). For this one Cushing was cast as Harry Fordyce, imperious manager of the bank in Haversham, Buckinghamshire, southern England, and Morell as Col. Gore Hepburn, who shows up claiming to be an examiner for an insurance company but is really a crook determined to rob the Haversham Bank of 90,000 pounds without doing anything as crude as sticking up the place or blowing out its safes. Gore Hepburn puts Fordyce and his clerk, Pearson (Richard Vernon), through the wringer on this one, winning Fordyce’s cooperation by telling him his gang are in his home and have wired electrodes around his wife to immobilize her forever if he gets out of line. Gore Hepburn gets Pearson to take his suitcases out of his car (an Aston-Martin, whose poshness becomes a major running gag in the story), though there’s a glitch in the plan when he finds that Pearson doesn’t drive (like me!) and therefore someone else will have to move the car from the 20-minute zone it’s parked in to the bank’s own lot.

All this takes place on Christmas Eve and a snowstorm suddenly starts (“Cue the corn flakes!” I joked; ground-up and white-painted corn flakes were a common movie substitute for snow in the early days) and inconveniences the bell-ringing Santa Claus impersonator who’s doing his thing just outside the bank. Pearson and a younger bank staff member have already called the insurance company – the real one – and learned that the real “Gore Hepburn” is an impostor. Fordyce pleads with them to cancel the call to the police in fear for his family, but the cops show up anyway, recognize Gore Hepburn as a well-known crook, and arrest him. It turns out that Fordyce’s wife and child (whom we never see, though we briefly hear their voices on the soundtrack and they’re visibly present through framed photos on Fordyce’s desk) were in no danger after all. Gore Hepburn hired a voice impersonator to record “their” voices on tape and play it over the phone to Fordyce to fool him. For a while I thought where this was going was that the cops would arrest Fordyce as Gore Hepburn’s “inside man” and he’d be unable to convince them that he was only helping rob his own bank under duress, but in the end they’re convinced by his story and the experience leads Fordyce to conclude that he’s been way too much of a martinet boss and he should be more collegial and forgiving towards his staff. This film is a particular favorite of Eddie Muller’s, who regards it as a modern-day reworking of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol with Fordyce as Scrooge and Gore Hepburn as the Ghost of Christmas Present. Both Charles and I found the parallel too forced to be believable, but Muller has taken a major role in rehabilitating this film’s reputation, including raising money for a full restoration. Like a lot of other Hammers, the film lost a considerable amount of running time (it got 22 minutes shorter) between its British release in 1961 and its U.S. debut a year later. Charles was also surprised it was in black-and-white instead of Hammer’s usual Gorycolor, and I couldn’t help but think when Gore Hepburn mentioned having connected Mrs. Fordyce to “electrodes” that Peter Cushing was probably thinking, “Oh, here we go again.” (Actually, in The Curse of Frankenstein, Hammer’s first Frankenstein film, Peter Cushing created his Monster in a giant aquarium – a prop that was reused for The Rocky Horror Picture Show – instead of electrodes connected to lightning rods or kites the way Colin Clive had in James Whale’s Frankenstein films.) Cash on Demand is a quirky little thriller, not at all film noir but a nice little exercise in suspense that probably gave Peter Cushing the change of pace he was hoping for and was a nice little audience-pleaser.

I Want My '80's! (Springfield Brothers, Imaggination, Inc., 2025)

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

After the 1961 Hammer movie Cash on Demand was over on Turner Classic Movies Saturday, December 13 I switched over to KPBS for a pledge-break special called I Want My ’80’s! which I figured my husband Charles would be interested in because he’s a much bigger fan of 1980’s pop music than I am. (That’s the nine-year generation gap between us again; I was born in 1953, he in 1962, and therefore I have living memories of the 1960’s and its music that Charles doesn’t. Once we were talking about Janis Joplin, of whom I have living memories even though I never got to see her live. Charles said, “To me, Janis Joplin has always been dead.”) I Want My ’80’s! turned out to be a concert presentation in which Rick Springfield was the headliner and Wang Chung and John Waite were basically his opening acts. Springfield got six songs during the show, which ran for an hour and a half though only about 45 to 50 minutes were actual performance, and Wang Chung and John Waite got three songs each. I’d never heard of John Waite before, actually – if I’d heard the name back then I’d probably have assumed it meant either John Hiatt or Tom Waits – but he presented himself as a solid singer-songwriter whose three songs, “Change,” “When I See You Smile,” and “Missing You,” were powerful if unexceptional pieces of pop-rock. I had heard of Wang Chung before and I had at least one of their CD’s, the soundtrack album for William Friedkin’s 1985 Los Angeles-set thriller To Live and Die in L.A. I got that after I’d read about it in Fanfare magazine because in the 1980’s Royal S. Brown was doing a regular column about film music and that was one of the albums he was obliged to review. He joked in his article that he had originally thought “Wang Chung” was a single Chinese or Asian-descended musician instead of the nom de groupe of two young Britishers, Jack Hues (true name: Jeremy Ryder) and Nick Feldman. Actually there was a third group member, Darren Costin, who left after their second album. According to their Wikipedia page their name means “Yellow Bell” in Chinese and is also the first note on the Chinese musical scale. Royal S. Brown also joked that his younger son had threatened him with bodily harm if he didn’t like the Wang Chung To Live and Die in L.A. album. Fortunately for him, he did. The CD was originally an LP release which contained four vocal tracks on side one and four instrumentals used as soundtrack cues in the movie on side two.

The three songs Wang Chung did on I Want My ’80’s! were “Dance Hall Days,” “Let’s Go,” and “Everybody Have Fun Tonight,” which famously incorporated the group’s name into the lyric: the chorus went, “Everybody have fun tonight. Everybody Wang Chung tonight.” (The band’s name was originally Huang Chung, but when they signed with Geffen Records, David Geffen suggested they change the spelling to “Wang Chung” to make it easier for Westerners to pronounce.) I’m not sure which Wang Chunger was which, but one of them had considerably shorter hair and was playing a normal guitar while the other had longer, bushier hair and was playing one of those oddball guitars with a quadrilateral body and no visible tuning pegs. (I wonder how he keeps it in tune.) Also the longer-haired Wang Chungster was wearing a black T-shirt which had writing on it; it was too bunched up on his body to make the writing totally legible but it appeared to say “Wang Chung Are Fucking Metal!!!,” with the “a” in “metal” replaced with the anarchist symbol. Charles told me that one of them was classically trained, and I’m guessing it was the short-haired one because his voice had weathered the years considerably better than his partner’s. After three songs by Wang Chung and three by John Waite, Rick Springfield came on and turned out to be surprisingly well preserved, both physically and vocally. No, he’s not the same cutie he was in the early 1980’s when he was at the peak of his fame, but he looks quite good and without the careworn lines that had started to afflict Mick Jagger’s face at a comparable age. He’s also a quite good guitar player and a capable singer whose voice was almost as good as it was in the 1980’s. Charles said he wondered what Rick Springfield’s voice would have sounded like “in the day” without the benefit of studio production, and as luck would have it I had a chance to do a comparison.

On July 5, 1981 I had recorded a TV broadcast (through a direct connection, though I can’t remember whether I was recording off a TV itself or off a radio station that was doing a simulcast) of an outdoor concert in Long Beach with The Beach Boys as the headliners and Rick Springfield, Three Dog Night, and Pablo Cruise as their opening acts. I had dubbed my original cassette to CD and dug it out to play for Charles, and he agreed with me that the 1981 Rick Springfield and the 2025 Rick Springfield were surprisingly close in timbre and overall pitch control. Springfield’s songs were “Affair of the Heart,” “World Starts Turning,” “State of the Heart,” “Don’t Talk to Strangers,” “Love Somebody,” and his star-making hit, “Jessie’s Girl.” (The big line of that song was, “I wish that I had Jessie’s girl,” and of course being me I did a Gay rewrite: “I wish that I was Jessie’s girl.” Later Charles told me that he, like I, had been perplexed at the spelling of the name “Jessie,” which is usually the woman’s version. Charles joked last night that it was about a man trying to break up a Lesbian couple!) For “Affair of the Heart” Springfield wore a spectacular jacket with a sunburst pattern printed on the front. For the next four songs he took off the jacket and performed in a plain black T-shirt, and for “Jessie’s Girl” – which he played in a 10-minute version that had at least as many false endings as Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood” – he took his shirt off completely and played topless. Given that he’s 75 years old (he was born August 23, 1949 in Sydney, Australia and the show was taped as part of a multi-city tour that also featured Paul Young and John Cafferty), he’s quite impressively preserved (certainly far better than I am!), and his voice is also solidly preserved and in good shape for the driving power-pop that is his stock in trade musically. Charles said he remembered watching, and considerably disliking, the 1984 movie Hard to Hold, in which Springfield played a rock star who falls in love with a woman psychiatrist whose only musical interests are in classical. He said he’d endured the movie and later he found that his sister Taun, who’d seen it separately, actually walked out on it. And this was supposed to be the big stroke for his acting career that would get him out of the General Hospital soap-opera ghetto, which it didn’t. But it was still nice to hear Rick Springfield again and notice how good he still is, even though he’s probably suffered under the long-term comparisons between him and the far more creative and talented Bruce Springsteen based only on the similarity between their names!

The Brokenwood Mysteries: "The Power of Steam" (South Pacific Pictures, NZ on Air, All3 Media International, Acorn, GPB, WETA, PBS, 2019)

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

Last night (Friday, December 12) my husband Charles came home from work in time to join me in watching an episode of The Brokenwood Mysteries, that quirky crime show based (and shot) in New Zealand. The lead characters are Mike Shepherd (Neill Rea), a heavy-set police detective in the Brokenwood area of New Zealand, and his police partner Kristin Sims (Fern Sutherland, who gets to dress quite hotly in black denim and leather pants that cling quite tightly to her body). It was already established in previous episodes (this one first aired November 10, 2019, and led off the show’s sixth season) that Shepherd had been married either three or four times previously – even he can’t remember just how many ex-wives he has – and also that he’s a huge fan of country music, much of it created locally (who knew New Zealand had a thriving local country-music scene?). Not surprisingly Mike has been hitting on Kristin, and equally unsurprisingly Kristin has the good sense to avoid any involvement with him “that way.” This episode was called “The Power of Steam” and made both Charles and I unusually interested in it because it centers around a steampunk convention. Needless to say, there’s a lot of back-and-forth arguing between the police characters, including hunky young detective Sam Breen (Nic Simpson, who also co-wrote the script with series creator Tim Balme), over just what steampunk is. Steampunk is just a pretext to set the mystery at a convention that supposedly happens every year but had never been heard of before by the police – the old Midsomer Murders strategy. The convention is co-chaired by the appropriately named Lionel (John Leigh) – the name is appropriate because he makes his living running a model-train store in town – and Alden Coombes (Andrew Grainger), who makes his living running a hot-air balloon flying service. Lionel ends up dead when, in the middle of a giant fireworks display using illegally obtained fireworks (we hear a lot about how dangerous they are but most of them turn out to be duds), a port-a-potty (or “port-a-loo,” as they’re called in the British English-speaking world) explodes spectacularly with him inside it.

It turns out that someone stole a tank of propane gas from Alden’s storage shed, sealed up the ventilation holes in the port-a-loo, ran a pipe from the tank into the loo, and locked it from the outside so no one inside it could get out. The suspects include Lionel’s daughter Poppy (Beth Alexander); Cleo (Zoë Robins), the young Black (or is she Native?) woman whom Poppy is in a Lesbian relationship with; Elsa (Geraldine Brophy), a middle-aged woman hanger-on in the steampunk scenes even though she loudly proclaims her disdain for the whole phenomenon; her learning-disabled son Bart (Dan Weekes), who works as an assistant at Lionel’s train store and had a history of childhood diseases which force him to take medications that, among other things, make him pee a lot; and the owner of the port-a-loo concession, who drank absinthe at the festival and therefore had some bizarre hallucinations that complicate matters for the police. The police learn that Lionel and Alden were having arguments just before Lionel was killed, mostly over Lionel’s attempts to blackmail Alden over the mysterious death of his wife iin a ballooning “accident” a decade earlier, and Lionel had threatened to kill Alden. Alden was severely injured in the blast and ended up in the local hospital, where he lost (or pretended to lose, we’re not sure which) all memory of the night Lionel was killed. But he makes a spectacular escape on a bicycle, which he rides through town, before the police finally corner him on his balloon, where they threaten to shoot out the hot-air bag and therefore cause the balloon to plummet to earth. Alden gets the message and insists that the cops arrest him because he’s fearful of the loan sharks from whom he borrowed money to keep his balloon business afloat (or should I say “aloft”?), though it turns out the loan-sharking gang he borrowed from were already taken into custody elsewhere and therefore were no threat to him. The police briefly suspect that Alden, not Lionel, was the intended victim – though the night of the murder Lionel had actually used the women’s port-a-loo because Alden was hiding out in the men’s.

They also learn that Bart, Lionel’s assistant at the model train store, joined an online group for “incels,” short for “involuntary celibate”: young straight guys who lament that they can’t find women willing to have sex with them and frequently ratchet that up to a hostile distaste for women in general. “Incels” reached the public awareness when 22-year-old Elliot Rodger went on a killing spree in Isla Vista, California on May 23, 2014, killing six and injuring 14 others before taking his own life. Before he went on his rampage, Rodger posted a video to YouTube in which he “said he wanted to punish women for rejecting him, and sexually active men because he envied them.” From this the police deduce that [spoiler alert!] Bart was the killer, and he did so in an elaborate mistaken-identity scheme. His real target was Cleo, Poppy’s Lesbian girlfriend, and his motive was he’d had a crush on Poppy but she’d not only rejected him, she’d done so in favor of a woman, and a woman of color at that. (Lionel himself had a history of making both racist and homophobic comments, and the script makes it powerfully ambiguous about whether Lionel was more bothered about Poppy dating a woman or Poppy dating a person of color.) My heart sank when I realized they were going to make the “incel” the killer, especially since I once told a friend of mine that the photos of incels I’d seen made me regret that people can’t choose their sexual orientation; maybe women aren’t interested in them, but at least some of them look attractive enough they’d do well in a Gay bar. Bart rigged the trap first by grinding up some of his diuretic pills, then giving Cleo a beer spiked with them, and in a bizarre bit of mistaken identity he ended up targeting Lionel instead of Cleo because not only was Lionel in the women’s restroom, he was wearing the hat he’d made for Poppy and Poppy had in turn given to Cleo, only Lionel had reclaimed it and was wearing it himself because he was so upset that his love gift to his daughter had ended up on the head of his daughter’s girlfriend. The show was actually rather well done, and there was a nice comic-relief subplot in that throughout the show Mike Shepherd is shown dog-sitting a Corgi, famously Queen Elizabeth II’s favorite breed (a fact that of course doesn’t go unmentioned in the dialogue!), for (it eventually turns out) one of his ex-wives.

Oh, God! (Warner Bros., 1977)

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

At 9 p.m. yesterday (Thursday, December 11) I put on Turner Classic Movies for a screening of one of my light-favorite movies of the late 1970’s, Carl Reiner’s Oh, God!, a supernatural comedy in which Jerry Landers (John Denver, whom I never particularly cared for as a singer but turned out to be an effective deadpan comedian) receives a series of visits from God (George Burns at his avuncular best). Jerry is an assistant manager of a supermarket in Tarzana when God starts sending him messages, first as an unsigned, unstamped letter requesting an “interveiw” (so spelled) on the 27th floor of an L.A. office building that only has 17 floors. (In today’s world that can’t help but remind me of the scam Donald Trump pulled on unsuspecting prospective tenants in Trump Tower; he put out that the building had 10 more floors than it actually did. One wonders what he did with people who actually asked for space on one of the nonexistent floors.) Jerry at first assumes the invitation is a prank from a friend of his with a penchant for practical jokes, but when he actually shows up on the 27th floor and finds the building’s elevator won’t let him go anywhere else, he starts to believe. Oh, God! is based on a novel by Avery Corman, and to write the screenplay Reiner got Larry Gelbart, a fellow veteran of Sid Caesar’s writing room along with Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, and Woody Allen. According to TCM host Ben Mankiewicz (whom I’ve referred to as “a nodule off one of Hollywood’s most illustrious family trees” – he’s the grandson of Citizen Kane co-writer Herman J. Mankiewicz and the great-nephew of All About Eve writer-director Joseph Mankiewicz), Reiner was originally going to cast Mel Brooks as God, which Ben Mankiewicz thought would have been terrible. Gelbart not only wanted Brooks to play God but Woody Allen to play Jerry Landers, but Allen turned it down to make his own religious-themed comedy, Stardust Memrories.

Burns was already coming off a late-in-life comeback via the 1975 film of Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys. Simon originally wrote this as a stage play about “Lewis and Clark,” an old-time vaudeville comedy team who were being reunited for a TV special even though they’d long since broken up in an atmosphere of mutual hatred. The original leads were Walter Matthau and Jack Benny, but Benny died just before shooting was scheduled to start and Benny’s long-time friend George Burns took over his part. This put Burns, who’d retired from performing in 1958 along with his long-time partner and wife Gracie Allen, on the cultural map again and helped land him the role in Oh, God! – and I remember joking when the movie came out that even a committed atheist like me (or at least me in 1977) could be happy to believe in God if he looked, sounded, and acted like George Burns. Jerry Landers has an ordinary suburban existence with wife Bobbie (Teri Garr, considerably less annoying than usual – when she played Richard Dreyfuss’s wife in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a lot of people joked that if I were married to Teri Garr, I’d get on an alien spacecraft just to get away from her!), son Adam (Moosie Drier, who looked surprisingly like John Denver and was totally believable as his son) and daughter Becky (Rachel Longaker). God’s instruction to him is to let the world know that He exists and is unhappy with the way we humans have made a mess of His creation, but instead of directly intervening as he did with Noah (you remember) he’s just going to let us sort it out. This was the biggest surprise about this movie re-seeing it now: the script takes an unashamedly and unabashedly Deist view of God, who created the universe and set it in motion but left humans in charge of it to do with it what they would. I’ve made the point several times that in the current American political climate, the Deists who for the most part wrote the United States Constitution wouldn’t have a chance of getting elected today, since Americans have come to insist not only that their leaders believe in God but that they believe in an activist, interventionist God who takes an ongoing role in the actions of humanity and can be appealed to through prayer.

When Jerry Landers gets his mission from God – who compares him to Moses, which leads us to the unspoken in-joke, “John Denver doesn’t look anything like Charlton Heston!” – he first tells his wife and children. Then he seeks an interview with the religious editor of the Los Angeles Times, which merits him just a brief, dismissive squib at the end of an article about various nutcases who believe they’ve seen Biblical characters in real life. Finally Jerry Landers gets booked on The Dinah Shore Show – with Shore playing herself and the guest immediately on before her is played by the film’s director, Carl Reiner – and he becomes both a national laughingstock and a cult figure. One woman comes to his home attempting to have sex with him, another woman who’s pregnant asks him to bless her baby, and various people show up on his front lawn, some of whom are TV news crew members and others carry signs and chant repeatedly. All this unwelcome attention makes Jerry desperate that he’ll get fired from his job, especially since the head of the supermarket chain for which he works is a religious nut who thinks Jerry is blaspheming the One True God by claiming to have a friendship with him. Jerry finally seeks an audience with a group of religious leaders at a Bible college, of whom the most obnoxious is a mega-church televangelist named Rev. Willie Williams (Paul Sorvino). The religious team gives Jerry a list of 50 questions for God, all written in Aramaic so Jerry can’t read them himself, and lock him in a hotel room whose TV is playing The Dick Van Dyke Show, a classic 1960’s TV series produced by Carl Reiner. (God looks at the TV and kvetches, “Too many repeats.”) God shows up in the guise of a room-service waiter and dictates answers to Jerry, who writes them down and assembles them in a packet which he intends to give Rev. Williams at a big revival meeting he’s holding at Los Angeles’s Shrine Auditorium. Before Jerry confronts Williams at the Shrine, God has told him to denounce the reverend as a huckster who’s just making money off his congregants, and if he wants to make money he should sell shoes instead.

Jerry gives Williams God’s message, and he’s not only thrown out of the event but sued for slander by Williams. The case goes to trial and Jerry defends himself, much to the consternation of Judge Baker (Barnard Hughes). He calls God as his one and only witness, and after a bit of suspense as to whether He will really appear (it’s previously been established that only Jerry can see God), He does. There’s a great line in which George Burns is being sworn in as a witness, and when he’s supposed to repeat the line, “So help me God,” he says, “So help me, me.” God appears in court and speaks from the witness stand, but later when the official tape recording of the session is played back, God’s voice disappears not only from the tape but also from the official court stenographer’s record. Jerry finally gets fired, but he and his family set off in their AMC Gremlin (a truly bizarre car that becomes a character in itself) for parts unknown as God compares him to Johnny Appleseed, spreading seeds of faith wherever he goes. Produced (more or less) by Jerry Weintraub, Oh, God! was a surprise hit on its initial release and still holds up well today. Denunciations of religious hypocrites are nothing new; the Gospels are full of them (when the Metropolitan Community Church put out a leaflet headlined, “What Jesus Christ Had to Say About Homosexuality,” and when you opened it the leaflet was blank, I joked that if they’d put out a leaflet called “What Jesus Christ Had to Say About Religious Hypocrisy,” it would have to consist of at least half the Gospels), and with the U.S. currently being run by people who insist we should be a “Christian Nation” governed by strict Biblical morality, it’s nice to see a movie which presents a more humane version of God and faith. Oh, God! did well enough at the box office to merit two sequels: Oh, God! Book Two and Oh, God! You Devil, in the last of which George Burns played not only God but the Devil, the first time an actor had appeared as both in the same movie. Before him Max von Sydow had played Jesus Christ in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) and the Devil in Needful Things (1993), and before that Black actor Rex Ingram had played God in The Green Pastures (1936) and the Devil in Cabin in the Sky (1943). I remember seeing Oh, God! You Devil on its initial theatrical run with my then-partner John Gabrish, and enjoying it even though the target of the battle between Burns’s God and Burns’s Satan, aspiring rock musician Bobby Shelton (Ted Wass, who was cute enough I had a mini-crush on him even though his acting career pretty much went nowhere and since the mid-1990’s he’s worked mainly as a TV series director), hardly seemed worth it.

Postmark for Danger, a.k.a. Portrait of Alison, a.k.a. Alison (Insignia Pictures, Todon Productions, Anglo-American Film Distributors, RKO, 1955)

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

Last night (Saturday, November 29) my husband Charles and I watched an intriguing and rather bizarre film on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” show on Turner Classic Movies: Postmark for Danger, a.k.a. Portrait of Alison or just Alison, a 1955 British production starring American actress Terry Moore along with an all-British supporting cast in an odd suspense story that blatantly rips off the Rouben Mamoulian/Otto Preminger 1944 film Laura. It was directed by Guy Green from a script he co-wrote with Ken Hughes (later a director himself) from a story written by Francis Durbridge as a BBC-TV miniseries. (For years I had misgendered Francis Durbridge because of a typo in William K. Everson’s 1972 book The Detective in Film that referred to him as Frances Durbridge.) The film begins with an auto crash on a winding country road in Milan, Italy in which a car is driven off the road by another oncoming car, crashes and burns. At this point we don’t know who was driving or who, if anyone, was in the car next to them. The film then cuts to its opening credits, and the first thing we see after those is a scene in the studio of painter Tim Forrester (Robert Beatty), who’s in the middle of doing a beer advertisement with model Jill Stewart (Josephine Griffin). Tim invites Jill to dine with him that night, but she says she already has a date with a rich man she’s hoping to marry, Henry Carmichael (Allan Cuthbertson). In fact, when she returns to Tim’s studio the next day, she’s happy because Henry has already proposed to her and she’s looking forward to the wedding. She leaves behind a mystery package she was supposed to bring to Henry but decided to deliver in person rather than spend the time and money to mail it – only she absent-mindedly leaves it behind in Tim’s studio. We then learn that the victims in the car crash in Milan were Tim’s brother Lewis, a journalist who was about to expose an international jewel-smuggling gang called the “Arlington Ring,” and his girlfriend, actress Alison Ford (Terry Moore). Ford’s father, John Smith (Henry Oscar) – her name too was “Smith” originally but she took “Ford” as a stage name – hires Tim to paint her portrait from a photograph and gives Tim a dress Alison owned because he wants the painting to feature Alison wearing that dress.

Only Alison Ford turns up, very much alive, and walks into Tim’s studio at night (he has a penchant for leaving his door unlocked when he goes out), grabs a paintbrush and whites out her face on the painting, and also steals the photo from which Tim was painting her. Tim flies out to Milan with his brother Dave (William Sylvester), a charter pilot who owns his own plane, to identify Lewis’s body even though the two victims were so badly burned as to defy recognition. Later we learn that the woman who died with Lewis was probably a hitch-hiker he picked up after John Smith warned his daughter not to get in that car. The implication, later confirmed as true, was that John Smith is part of the Arlington Ring and knew that the gang was setting Lewis up to be killed and didn’t want to lose his daughter as collateral damage. When they got back to Britain, Tim and Dave discover that his former model Jill Stewart had been killed in Tim’s studio; she’d been posed in Alison’s old dress and sprawled out on Tim’s bed when she was killed. The police immediately suspect Tim of the murder, but there are two clues that could conceivably crack the case. One is a postcard with a crude drawing of a woman holding a chianti bottle that Lewis mailed from Europe, and the other is the mysterious package Jill mistakenly left behind in Tim’s flat just days before she was killed there. Tim receives a mysterious phone call from a blackmailer named Reg Dorking (William Lucas), who runs a used-car lot as a front, and the police set up a dummy money roll with which Tim can pay Dorking – only Dorking doesn’t have the postcard, and says the person who does is Fenby (Terence Alexander), a colleague of Lewis’s on the Gazette newspaper. Tim is embarrassed when he tries to hide out Alison in his apartment, having her stay in his brother’s room, only when he calls the police the next morning Alison has disappeared for fear of getting her father caught as a member of the Arlington Ring.

The police examine the contents of Jill’s mysterious package, which turns out to be an empty chianti bottle engraved with the name “Nightingale & Sons” – a firm which the cops discover doesn’t exist. From this they deduce that “Nightingale & Sons” is a front for the Arlington Ring, and eventually Dave admits to Tim that he was involved in it as a pilot who could easily smuggle stolen diamonds from country to country under the cover of his normal charter service. The police also recover the postcard (ya remember the postcard?) from the effects of Fenby after he’s killed, and discover it contained a full list of the members of the Arlington Ring. Tim tries to hide out Alison in his apartment, but someone else comes to call on her – it’s Henry Carmichael, Jill’s former fiancé, who’s [spoiler alert!] the secret head of the Arlington Ring and the killer of both Jill and Fenby. Tim tries to rescue Carmichael and eventually the two men have a fight and Tim pushes Carmichael out of a window to his death on the sidewalk below. Later there’s a quirky denouement that lets us know Tim and Alison are going to get together as a couple. Postmark for Danger a.k.a. Portrait of Alison (a title which reminded me of two great songs, J. Russell Robinson’s “Portrait of Jennie” – also from a movie about an enigmatic young woman surrounded by an air of mystery – and Elvis Costello’s “Alison”) a.k.a. Alison is an O.K. movie. It’s hardly film noir, either thematically or visually, but it’s effective entertainment and holds the viewer’s interest. It could have used a more interesting female lead than Terry Moore (an actress named Helen Shingler had played her character in the TV miniseries), but she was an American mini-star and part of the package deal by which the film was made and distributed by RKO just after Howard Hughes, Moore’s former boyfriend (and, according to her own account, her husband; she made enough of a claim that the Hughes estate paid her a settlement after Hughes died), sold the studio and it went through about three years of corporate post-traumatic stress disorder before finally going out of business in 1958.

Quigley Down Under (Pathé Entertainment, MGM, 1990)

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

The movie my husband Charles and I ended up watching last night (Friday, November 26) was Quigley Down Under (1990), directed by Australia-born Simon Wincer straight off his triumphant success with the TV miniseries Lonesome Dove. It’s a novelty Western in which the biggest novelty was that it takes place in Australia, and screenwriter Jack Hill was inspired by a 1974 article he read in the Los Angeles Times about the genocidal campaign 19th century white settlers in Australia had launched against the Aborigines. It was one of those projects that quickly fell into “development hell,” cycling through several different studios, directors, and stars (one of the most interesting attempts would have starred Steve McQueen just after his 1980 film The Hunter, but McQueen’s asbestos-caused cancer caught up with him and The Hunter was his last film before he died) before it finally ended up with Pathé Entertainment. The star was Tom Selleck, just coming off not only his eight-season run as Hawai’i-based private investigator Thomas Magnum on Magnum, P.I. (the first time I tricked with my late partner John Gabrish, he had a huge photo of Selleck as Magnum on his bedroom wall) but also his surprise success in the Disney comedy Three Men and a Baby (1987). I’ve sometimes listed Selleck along with classic-era Hollywood stars like Tyrone Power, Robert Taylor, and Errol Flynn as someone whose acting chops developed as he lost his looks, but in 1990 he was still the tall, thin Selleck of Magnum, P.I. rather than the far heftier police commissioner Frank Reagan on a later CBS-TV series, Blue Bloods (2010-2024), a role he acted with power, authority, and depth. Alas, Quigley Down Under didn’t give him much of an acting challenge; though the film is set (and shot) in Australia, he’s still playing the typical “Western outsider,” riding implacably through a desert countryside and proving quick both with his fists and his gun. The gun in question is a long rifle which Matthew Quigley (Selleck) had custom-built (the gun was actually made by the Shiloh Rifle Manufacturing Company of Big Timber, Montana, which gets credit in the film) which we’re told has a range of 1,200 yards. (As Charles pointed out, that’s well over half a mile.)

Quigley has come to Australia in the first place in response to an ad from cattle rancher Elliott Marston (a superior villain performance by Alan Rickman) looking for long-range shooters. Marston explains to Quigley that the reason he got the job was that the other 28 applicants just sent him letters; Quigley sent him a wanted poster of himself with six well-placed shots drilled into it as a sample of his skills. We first know that Marston is a villain when he casually shoots two deserters from the British army after they, who’ve brought Quigley to Marston’s ranch in the first place on a cart drawn by cattle (“Doesn’t anyone ride horses in this place?” Quigley asks), plead with Marston to shelter them and give them work. Marston gives Quigley a bag of 50 gold coins as a retainer and says there’ll be more once he finishes the job, whatever it is. Only it turns out that the job Marston has hired Quigley for is a genocidal campaign against the Aborigines – he even cites the U.S.’s genocide against its own Native population as an example – and Quigley is so angry about this he literally throws Marston through the windows of his own home. (The people who make fake “glass” out of spun sugar sure had a workout with this film. So did the stunt people: Quigley Down Under’s imdb.com page has 40 stunt people listed, which is nice to know because it means Wincer didn’t do it all with CGI.) Marston’s Aboriginal servant sneaks up behind Quigley and knocks him out (he’s obviously the Aboriginal equivalent of a “house n****r”). The next thing Quigley knows, he and his sort-of girlfriend “Crazy Cora” (Laura San Giacomo, coming off her part in Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape that should have made her a star; alas, instead she sank into the salt mines of TV), whom Quigley previously rescued from a gang of kidnappers who obviously wanted to traffic her, are left on Marston’s orders in the middle of the Australian desert with the intent that the heat, thirst, and overall exposure will do them in. This reminded Charles of his joke about the James Bond movies, in which the villains, instead of simply shooting him when they capture him, cook up some elaborate way of killing him that just gives him a chance to escape.

Through their desert ordeal and afterwards Cora keeps calling Matthew “Roy,” which turns out to have been the name of her late husband from Texas. It seems that Cora accidentally killed their child back home, the police wanted to arrest her, and Roy arranged for the two of them to escape to Australia. (This was supposed to be delivered in a piece of expository dialogue from Laura San Giacomo that was almost totally buried during the movie from Simon Wincer’s deathly sound mix.) Cora even offers to have sex with Quigley, but he turns her down because she keeps calling him “Roy” and if he’s going to make love with her, he wants her to acknowledge his name. Fortunately, they’re rescued, partly by a raiding party which Quigley, even with his hands tied, is able to shoot them and grab his personal long-range rifle from one of his victims; and partly by the Aborigines. They take him in, allow him to recover in a cave decorated with sacred drawings that supposedly help him heal, and ultimately send him on his way. Later Quigley and Cora encounter another Marston raiding party who are literally throwing Aborigines off a cliff, and they rescue one of them, a baby. In between these incidents, Quigley rides off in search of a local town where he can get supplies and also more of the special ammunition his gun requires. He gets it from Grimmelman (Ron Haddrick), a German immigrant who runs the local general store and has a wife and young son. Alas, Marston’s men catch up with him and kidnap Grimmelman’s son so they can steal Quigley’s horse. Grimmelman, who helped Quigley in the first place because he hates what Marston is doing to the Aborigines, ends up with his wife dead in the ensuing gunfight but with the 50 gold coins Marston gave Quigley way back when. Then, after a few more confrontations with Marston’s men, Quigley returns to Marston’s ranch and ultimately kills Marston and his two surviving lieutenants with a revolver, the culmination of an in-joke throughout the movie because Quigley had always said he didn’t like handguns. As Marston lays dying from Quigley’s shots, Quigley tells him, “I said I never had much use for one; I never said I didn't know how to use it.” Then he’s confronted by Major Ashley-Pitt (Chris Haywood), commander of the local British army regiment, who brings 50 men to the ranch and threatens to arrest Quigley – only Quigley is saved by his Aborigine friends, who mass on the mountaintops and far outnumber the Brits. Quigley and Cora set off to take a ship to San Francisco (one wonders why they’re going back to the U.S. where they’re both wanted for murder), only when the clerk selling them the tickets asks for Quigley’s name, he says, “Roy Cobb” – the name of Cora’s late husband. The film’s tag scene shows Quigley kissing Cora after she finally tells him the two words he wanted most to hear from her: “Matthew Quigley.”

Quigley Down Under was a box-office flop and it got roasted by the critics, too. The film’s commercial failure probably had something to do with the fact that it was released around the same time as Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves, which pretty much cornered the market for Westerns with sympathetic depictions of Native people. The critics generally didn’t like it (except for Alan Rickman, whose man-you-love-to-hate performance got raves) because it just seemed like a recycling of old Western tropes; the New York Times damned it as “a formula Western at its most pokey.” Charles and I had the same feeling about it; Tom Selleck was just doing the same outlaw-with-a-heart-of-gold schtick that John Wayne and Clint Eastwood had done before him – and two films Wayne made about the Alaska Gold Rush, Ray Enright’s The Spoilers (1942) and Henry Hathaway’s North to Alaska (1960), did a much better job of transporting the standard Western clichés to a different but related locale. For some reason, though, Quigley Down Under gradually developed a cult following on cable TV. Apparently real-life snipers have coined the term “a Quigley” to indicate killing two people with the same bullet from the same gun, as Quigley does in the movie, and the town of Forsyth, Montana renames itself “Quigley” for one day each year, on which it hosts a long-range shooting contest. As far as the reason I was watching this movie – Basil Poledouris’s score – it, like the film itself, seems to be made from bits and pieces of old Western clichés. The “Main Title” theme started with a clarinet, then a tuba, then a banjo for a ragtime feel that had me expecting a more light-hearted movie than the one we got. Then it suddenly cut to a big theme reminiscent of Elmer Bernstein’s iconic score for The Magnificent Seven (1959) – but then, aside from Ennio Morricone and his pan-pipes for the Sergio Leone/Clint Eastwood “spaghetti Westerns” from the 1960’s, just about everyone who’s written a score for a Western since The Magnificent Seven has copied it. There’s a nice violin solo on the Irish folk song “The Rising of the Moon” (also known as “The Wearing of the Green” and sung under that title by Judy Garland in her 1940 musical Little Nellie Kelly) and a few relatively restrained moments before both the ragtime theme and the Magnificent Seven knock-off return. Overall, Quigley Down Under is a nice little movie and I don’t regret having seen it, but there’s nothing particularly special about it either.

Laughing at Life (Mascot, 1933)

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

My husband Charles came home from work about an hour earlier than usual last night (Wednesday, November 26), and as a result I showed us an odd little 1933 actioner from Mascot Pictures, later Republic: Laughing at Life, directed by Ford Beebe (who would later end up at Universal producing all three Flash Gordon serials and directing the last two, as well as directing the 1944 film The Invisible Man’s Revenge, which I consider the best Invisible Man movie made at “The New Universal” following the departure of the Laemmles and James Whale, who made the stunning 1933 original) from a script he co-wrote with Prescott Chaplin and Tom Dugan. It’s a picaresque tale of an adventurer named Dennis McHale (Victor McLaglen) who travels the world on the run from whoever he’s pissed off in his last go-round. It starts in 1913 in the U.S., in which he’s a construction engineer with a wife and young son (Buster Phelps), only he gets involved in some shady deal and is forced to flee to avoid being arrested by his best friend. He turns up in China and seems to have settled down in a stable work situation, enough so that he writes his wife a letter to invite her and their son to join him, only a gang of no-goodniks recruit him for a job smuggling stolen jewels (or something) and he tears up the letter. But the caper goes awry and he’s forced to flee again. In 1917 he’s captaining a unit in the U.S. effort in World War I, only he’s arrested and threatened with court-martial for having had his unit advance when they were supposed to retreat. They decide to give him a medal for bravery even though he’s in the hoosegow, only when they’re ready to pin it on him they find the bars of his cell broken and him gone.

He ends up in 1933 in the small (and fictional) Latin American country of Alturas, ruled by President Valenzuela (Henry B. Walthall), who’s pleading with the Alturan people to be allowed two more years in office to carry out his reforms. Unfortunately, the people of Alturas are getting restive and threatening to overthrow Valenzuela in a revolution, and the revolutionary leader is an unscrupulous bastard named Don Flavio Montenegro (Ivan Lebedeff), who hires McHale, using the name “Captain Easter,” to train his army. Don Flavio then intends to get rid of Easter as soon as he’s served his purpose, and the rest of the film is a scramble between Easter/McHale, the revolutionaries, the government, a man named Inspector Mason (William “Stage” Boyd, the real-life alcoholic, drug addict and general wastrel whose antics got the other William Boyd fired from his RKO contract for violating the morals clause; the good Boyd sued the bad Boyd and won a judgment that the bad Boyd henceforth must use “Stage,” in quotes, as a middle name; unfortunately the bad Boyd made only one more film, the serial The Lost City, before the effects of his alcoholism and drug use caught up with him and he died in 1935 at age 45) who’s out to arrest Easter/McHale on behalf of the U.S. government, along with Easter’s local girlfriend Panchita (Conchita Montenegro) and an associate named Pat Collins (Regis Toomey). For much of the movie it’s unclear whether Easter is on the side of the government or the rebels (most likely he’s on the rebel side until he learns Don Flavio has double-crossed him, whereupon he goes over to the government and rats out the rebels), and it’s also not clear whether Easter regards Pat as a protégé in his business (whatever it is) or an innocent young naïf who should be kept as far away from it as possible.

Easter resists Panchita’s attempts to get something of a romantic commitment out of him, which he does because he thinks he still has a wife back home even though we know, courtesy of a letter that’s been chasing him around the world but which he hasn’t read, that his wife back home is dead and others have had to raise their son (ya remember the son?). Pat, who has a blonde Anglo-looking local girlfriend named Alice Lawton (Ruth Hall), turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Easter’s nè McHale’s long-lost son, in what Charles joked was “a real surprise … to anyone who’s never read a book or seen a movie before.” Ultimately President Valenzuela gives Easter a safe-conduct pass but instructs his army to arrest Easter if he tries to leave Alturas (obviously El Presidente had seen Tosca sometime in his life), and rather than the ending I was expecting – a doomed romantic one in which Easter sacrifices his own life so Pat and Alice can get away – the final scene is a light-hearted escape out of Alturas in which Pat and Alice are driving out in a convertible with its top down, and Easter clambers into the car and escapes with them. I’m not sure why the film was called Laughing at Life – I stumbled on it when I was looking for a recording of the song of that title – though it does seem to sum up the attitude of Victor McLaglen’s character. One surprisingly good thing about Laughing at Life was the excellence of the process work: Ford Beebe and his special-effects crew were far ahead of most of the indies of the day (anticipating the later technical excellence of Republic’s productions, no matter how deficient they were in lesser matters like plot and cast), including the folks at Hal Roach Studios who in Laurel and Hardy films like County Hospital gave us scenes that were less funny and less thrilling than they would have been with better process work. Other than that, the main mystery was why Victor McLaglen, who’d already established himself as a major star with the 1926 Fox film What Price Glory?, had to work at an indie like Mascot just two years before The Informer re-established his career and got him an Academy Award (for an atrociously overacted performance, by the way; it’s odd, to say the least, that Ford Beebe was able to restrain him while John Ford let him loose to do beaver imitations on the scenery).

The Christine Jorgensen Story (Edward Small Productions, EdProd Pictures, United Artists, 1970)

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

Last night (Monday, November 24), as part of a month-long salute on Turner Classic Movies about Trans images in film, TCM showed the rather strange and fascinating 1970 film The Christine Jorgensen Story. Christine Jorgensen (played in the movie as a boy by Trent Lehman and as an adult by John Hansen) was born George Jorgensen, Jr. in the Bronx, New York City. His father, George William Jorgensen (John W. Himes), was a construction worker and expected George, Jr. to follow in his footsteps, especially since he and his wife Florence (Ellen Clark) had already had a daughter, Dolly (Pamelyn Ferden as a child, Lynn Harper as an adult), and he was looking forward to a son. Alas, as a boy young George, Jr. gravitated to playing with his sister’s dolls and, in one flashback scene, wearing one of his sister’s dresses and putting on their mother’s lipstick (wretchedly). When he builds a crooked toy building with his Erector set (I remember Erector sets from my own childhood; they were essentially the Legos of their time) and the other guests at his family’s Christmas party make fun of it, he smashes it to smithereens. When he tries to play football with the other local boys – something he’s drafted to do when he’d rather play jump-rope with the girls – he catches the ball but then immediately drops it, and the boys bully him and call him “Georgette.” When George, Jr. is drafted into the Army during World War II – again, something he was drafted for – he washes out of basic training and is told he’ll fight his war stateside in offices. There’s also a flashback scene late in the movie (this film has more flashbacks than anything since Citizen Kane) in which George and his army buddies go out to a whorehouse, only George is unable to perform sexually with Angela (Sondra Scott), the prostitute he draws (who’s so sleazy she’s a rotten advertisement for heterosexuality anyway),and as he apologizes to her she takes his failure as a personal and professional insult. (This scene reminded me of a story I heard from a Gay man who’d been in the Navy and had been stationed in the Philippines when he got in a similar challenge from his sailor buddies. But the way he told his story, he spent the requisite amount of time with his hooker without doing anything, and she was grateful for the momentary rest.)

After the war George gets a job as a fashion photographer for advertising agencies and he turns out to be quite good at it, only his job ends abruptly on a beachfront shoot when one of the female models, Loretta (Elaine Joyce), questions his masculinity. George has already started to pack his bags and head back to New York when his boss, Jess Warner (Rod McCary), intervenes and tries to talk him into staying. Alas, he does much more than that; though we’ve previously seen him with a woman, his overtures to George had so much the air of Gay cruising about them that we’re not at all surprised when Jess tries to rape him. George flees with his virginity intact but then heads to the wharf and contemplates suicide. He’s talked out of it by the other model on the shoot, the more sympathetic Tani (Joyce Meadows), but he spends the next few months of his life reading every sexology book he can get his hands on from the New York Public Library. He knows he’s not a straight man and not a Gay man either, but just what he is eludes him until he reads a book by doctor and researcher Professor Estabrook (Will Kuluva) called Man and His Glands. Professor Estabrook has developed a theory that humans’ behavior is determined by their glands, and he’s astonished that young George attends all his lectures, reads all his books and journal articles, and is genuinely interested in his theories while his colleagues scoff at him. Estabrook draws a sample of George’s blood, he has it tested, and he finds that George’s blood contains a high concentration of the female hormone estrogen, equivalent to the normal amount for a woman but not a man. Estabrook tells George that American laws prohibit gender-reassignment operations in the United States but there’s a doctor in Denmark, Victor Dahlmann (Oscar Beregi, Jr.), who’s interested in performing one if he can find the right patient. Since the Jorgensen family’s ancestral home was Denmark, it’s relatively easy for George to arrange a trip there under the guise of visiting relatives and (at least in the movie) signing on to do a photo essay of Denmark’s famous landmarks. George settles in Copenhagen and stays with his Aunt Thora Petersen (Joan Tompkins). He sees a photo of a teenage blonde woman and asks Aunt Thora who that was. “My daughter,” he says. “I didn’t know you were ever married!” George exclaims. “I wasn’t,” she says, adding that the girl died in her teens.

George comes out to Aunt Thora and tells her the real reason he’s in Copenhagen. He gets in touch with Dr. Dahlmann and is ready to sign the consent form for the operation immediately even though Dahlmann tries to explain just how complicated the procedure will be and the potential risks. (One irony is that George can’t read the form because it’s printed in Danish, though Dr. Dahlmann’s later case notes on him are in English so the audience can understand them.) Then we get several minutes of medical porn as we’re treated to close-in shots of the surgery in progress, not enough to create problems with the motion picture ratings code – though after all the surgeries are finished we get some nice shots of John Hansen’s chest as we’re told the breasts are expanding because of all the estrogen he’s taking. (One of the original researchers on the birth control pill likewise grew a set of breasts from the female hormones he was working with, though they went away again when his work on the project ended.) When she emerges from the transition she asks Aunt Thora if she can take the name “Christine” after Aunt Thora’s late daughter, and the aunt agrees. For the rest of the film Christine Jorgensen is subjected to huge media exposure, almost all of it sneeringly negative, calling her a “he-she” and various even less pleasant things. Aunt Thora’s home in Copenhagen is set upon by reporters who demand to get Christine’s side of her story after the barrage of negative publicity – started, we learn later, by a worker in the office responsible for giving out American passports in Denmark, who for $200 leaked the information to the media that an American woman who used to be an American man was applying for a passport in her new identity. This is something that she wouldn’t be allowed to do today, thanks to an executive order from President Trump that states all U.S. passports must be under the person’s gender at birth, just in case you’re tempted to believe that the road to acceptance for Trans people has gone in a straight line forward since Christine Jorgensen’s time. Christine returns home in her new identity and wins the acceptance of her parents, who are reluctant at first but realize that’s the only way she’ll still be part of their lives. (The real Christine Jorgensen gave an ultimatum to her parents: treat me as the woman I am or you’ll never see me again.) Christine also meets a reporter, Tom Crawford (Quinn K. Redeker), for Globe magazine (read: Life), who wants to interview her at length and really tell her side of the story. Tom is also sexually attracted to Christine, but she’s too scared of a relationship even though Dr. Dahlmann told her she could function as a woman sexually and be intimate with a man.

While I was watching The Christine Jorgensen Story I was thinking of my comment about the 1934 film Imitation of Life, “I get the impression the filmmakers wanted to make an anti-racist movie but didn’t quite know how.” Likewise, the makers of The Christine Jorgensen Story – producer Edward Small, director Irving Rapper (both of them at the ends of their careers; it was Small’s last film and Rapper’s next-to-last), and writers Robert E. Kent and Ellis St. Joseph – wanted to make a pro-Trans movie but didn’t quite know how. Certainly there’s a sense of liberation from old Hollywood hands like Small and Rapper that at last, with the breakdown of the old Motion Picture Production Code, they could get away with making a film that would have been completely verboten between 1934 and 1968. But there’s also the age-old problem with stories about Trans people: how do you cast them? I remember reading a quite impressive book called Trans-Sister Radio and thinking it would have made a marvelous movie, only the one conceivable way of casting it would have been to find an actor who was actually Trans and film them on both sides of a gender transition. The film Transamerica pulled it off by having a woman, Felicity Huffman, play the Transwoman central character and only showing her post-transition (and she won an Academy Award nomination for it). John Hanson wasn’t a bad choice overall; he’s sufficiently ambiguous in his gender presentation he’s believable as both a man and a woman (though as Christine he looks less like a womyn-born woman and more like a very good drag queen). The problem is he wasn’t an experienced actor, and there are flashes of brilliance in his performance in which he really dramatizes vividly the character’s dilemmas. Unfortunately, they remain only flashes and for most of the movie he delivers his lines in a flat first-day-of-acting-school monotone, while the voiceover narration he gives doesn’t sound that credible as either a man or a woman. One imdb.com reviewer, Christopher Greenleaf, compared this film to Ed Wood’s infamous Glen or Glenda? (1953) – which was originally supposed to be about Christine Jorgensen, only she wanted way too much money for the rights – and argued that, despite the celebrated technical ineptitude of Glen or Glenda?, “Wood was way ahead of his time and actually delivered a much better and (believe it or not) more serious picture.”

That’s overstating it more than a little bit, but The Christine Jorgensen Story (like the life story of its subject) is at once an odd footnote in the history of exploitation cinema and a well-meaning attempt at telling the story of the first post-op Transwoman (she wasn’t, but at least she was the first who went public with her story and used her 15 minutes of fame to advocate for the rights of fellow Trans people) with some sensitivity and depth, Just about everyone who writes about this movie mentions that Irving Rapper directed Bette Davis in three films – Now, Voyager, The Corn Is Green, and Deception – which is actually a fair criticism of what’s wrong with it. Like Vincent Sherman, Rapper could handle a self-starting star like Davis or Joan Crawford but was virtually hopeless with the cast of mostly non-actors, or at least lousy actors (Joan Tompkins as Aunt Thora is the only cast member who really makes her character come alive), he had here. It also doesn’t help that Edward Small had a pretty minuscule budget – maybe not as low as Ed Wood’s for filming Glen or Glenda?, but too little to avoid such anachronisms as the streets in both New York and Copenhagen being full of late-1960’s cars for scenes supposedly taking place in the early 1950’s. Though the film was nominally based on Jorgensen’s autobiography, and Jorgensen got a credit as one of the technical advisors, it was highly fictionalized in ways that make me want to read the book just to see what the filmmakers got wrong, especially since one ominous sign was the co-writing credit to Robert E. Kent. My defining anecdote about Robert E. Kent was the one about how he was a major baseball fan, and in the studio’s writing room he’d regale his colleagues with accounts of the ballgame he’d seen the night before while his fingers would fly over his typewriter keys banging out the cinematically appropriate clichés for his latest script. I’d like to think that Kent delivered at least a little more thought to his work on The Christine Jorgensen Story than usual.