Breakdown (Pegasus Productions, Realart Pictures, 1952)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, November 7) my husband Charles and I watched an unusual film on Turner Classic Movies: Breakdown, a 1952 boxing melodrama directed by Edmond Angelo (whose only film this was) and written by Robert Abel based on a play of his called The Samson Slasher. (That title had me dreading that there’d be a plot complication along the lines of the 1940 James Cagney vehicle City for Conquest, in which he played a prizefighter billed as “Young Samson.” His enemies are gangsters who spike his eye medicine with poison, thereby blinding him like the Biblical Samson. Fortunately, Abel didn’t go there.) This came at the end of an odd run of movies including two co-hosted by Ben Mankiewicz and Diane Warren, who probably did more than any other single person to rehabilitate professional songwriting as a career path. The irony is that one of the films she was co-hosting was A Hard Day’s Night, whose stars, The Beatles (John Lennon and Paul McCartney in particular), had been instrumental (pardon the pun) in destroying non-performing songwriting as a musical career because not only did they rely on their own material, their manager, Brian Epstein, promoted that about them. (The other film Mankiewicz and Warren co-hosted was Born Free, an O.K. movie with a quite memorable theme song by John Barry and Don Black that won the Academy Award and became a huge hit.) Between A Hard Day’s Night and Breakdown TCM showed a 20-minute short in the MGM series Crime Does Not Pay: The Public Pays (1942), about an attempt by gangsters to set up an extortion racket targeting dairies in the fictional “Claiborne City.” Directed by Errol Taggart and written by John C. Higgins, The Public Pays was a pretty straightforward little film (some of the Crime Does Not Pay shorts had intimations of film noir about them, but this one didn’t) whose main distinction was casting Cy Kendall, usually an oily villain, as the hero: John Carney, the Claiborne City police chief who partners with Paige Creamery CEO Charles Paige (Ivan Miller) to bust the extortionists by infiltrating his officers into Paige’s workforce and having them pose as milkmen. (In an earlier Crime Does Not Pay short, 1941’s Coffins on Wheels, he’d played a cynical used-car dealer who sells unsafe cars to teenagers.)

The 1952 Breakdown is a truly unusual movie, at once boxing drama, gangster movie, romantic melodrama, and film noir. Terry Williams (William Bishop) is a promising young boxer who runs afoul of the big-city political machine when he intervenes to stop them from roughing up a public speaker who’s trying to oppose them. In the course of the melee one of the machine’s enforcers gets killed accidentally, and Williams is convicted of manslaughter and sent to prison for 10 years. The judge in the case, Sam Hannum (John Vosper), has been bribed by the political machine to ensure Williams’s conviction by the promise of a major political career, including the state governorship. Meanwhile, machine gangster Nick Sampson (Sheldon Leonard) and his brother Pete (Wally Cassell) are looking for a potential championship contender, and they find him in Williams when they watch Williams and a sparring partner fight in a ring set up in the prison’s exercise yard. (Fortunately we get a lot of yummy shots of William Bishop in his boxing togs, with plenty of chest hair. For years Hollywood had forbidden men to have chest hair; if they had to go topless and they weren’t chest-hairless au naturel, they had to shave it.) Love, or at least sex, enters the story in the person of June Hannum (Ann Richards, who’d got a big star buildup at MGM but abruptly quit the business to marry director Angelo; she hadn’t made a film in four years and this would be her last). She’s not only the niece of Judge Hannum, she’s also Nick Sampson’s girlfriend, though she’s only reluctantly with him and she quickly gets the hots for Williams. Terry Williams works his way up as a boxer through a series of fights, in each of which he wins by a knockout in the first round. Unlike the heavyweight contender in Mark Robson’s The Harder They Fall (1956), an inept boxer who’s carefully built up through a series of fixed fights, Williams is genuinely talented in the ring. Though writer Abel doesn’t come right out and say Williams’s opponents are being paid to take dives – he has one of the characters say that his adversaries have been carefully selected – the monotonous similarity of the outcomes certainly leaves that impression.

At least two characters in the film, Harry “Punchy” Adams (Richard Benedict) and “Longshot” Maginnis (Joe McTurk), serve as warnings of the long-term consequences of a prizefighting career. They both work as ill-defined assistants in Pete Sampson’s gym, and “Punchy”’s ex-girlfriend Candy Allen (Anne Gwynne) is so angry at the sport she pleads with Terry to give it up while both his looks and his brains remain intact. (He’s so far gone he literally has no idea who she is when they see each other at the gym.) In fact, before one bout Terry is told to look carefully at the face of his opponent to determine how much experience that man has had by the number of scars he’s carrying from previous bouts. If nothing else, Breakdown is a particularly vivid film in terms of dramatizing the toll boxing takes as a career on its practitioners; in some ways it anticipates The Raging Bull (1980) in this regard. Even previous films like The Set-Up and Champion (both 1949) didn’t go as far as this one. The movie reaches its climax when June Hannum puts pressure on Terry to agree to a championship fight against reigning titleholder Joe Thompson (Hal Baylor) to benefit the Milk Fund charity (“Milk Fund” was an all-purpose nonprofit for which to raise money in classic-era movies). Pete Sampson insists that Terry isn’t ready for a championship fight and won’t be for another year or so, but the other characters pull rank on him and convince him to do it. Once the bout actually begins, Pete Sampson turns out to be right; Terry is totally outclassed and is beaten so badly by the champ one wonders why the referees don’t stop the fight. I’m guessing the reason is that for his anti-boxing message Robert Abel needed Terry not only to lose but to be beaten so badly he needs hospitalization by the time it’s all over, and he’s literally carried out of the arena on a stretcher. Director Angelo gives us plenty of close-ups of Terry’s previously pristine face as it’s been hammered into near-oblivion by Thompson’s blows, though at least June (ya remember June?) stays with him at the end and is presumably going to remain a part of his life, no matter what he does with the rest of it.

Breakdown is a quite accomplished movie even though it had a rock-bottom production budget and an 11-day shooting schedule. It was filmed at Republic studios even though it wasn’t a Republic release (it was produced by a collapsible outfit called Pegasus Productions and released through Realart, which was usually a reissue label for Universal but also released a few originals like this), though the special-effects credit to “Consolidated Film Laboratories, Inc.” is a giveaway. Consolidated Film Laboratories was Republic’s parent company; Republic was founded in 1935 by Consolidated’s owner, Herbert J. Yates, who offered to forgive the debts Mascot and Monogram had run up to him for processing their film if he could take control of their companies. Yates paid off both Nat Levine of Mascot and W. Ray Johnston of Monogram. Johnston banked his money and, after a falling-out with Yates, re-started Monogram in 1937; Levine blew his on bad horse-racing bets and had a catch-as-catch-can existence until his death in 1989 at age 90. As for Edward Angelo, after Breakdown (and after a lawsuit against Realart because he claimed they had sold the film to TV too soon after its theatrical run), he left the movie business (as well as the theatre, where he’d produced plays before his brief foray into filmmaking) to become, of all things, a rocket scientist for a California aerospace firm. Richards pursued a career as a writer and poet but mostly just stayed out of the public eye and stayed married to Angelo until his death in 1983 (she died in 2006).

The Enchanted Cottage (RKO, 1945)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, November 6) my husband Charles and I watched an alternately intriguing and frustrating film from RKO in 1945 called The Enchanted Cottage, based on a play by British dramatist Sir Arthur Wing Pinero, who premiered it in 1920 and called it “a fable in three acts.” It was first filmed in 1924 by First National with Richard Barthelmess as star and John S. Robertson (best known today for the 1920 John Barrymore silent version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) as director. Not surprisingly, the original play took place in Sussex, England in 1919 in the aftermath of World War I (or “The Great War,” as it was usually called before there was a World War II). In 1945 RKO remade it with John Cromwell as director and Robert Young and Dorothy McGuire as stars. They were coming off the success of a 1943 film called Claudia, about the trials and tribulations of a young newlywed couple adjusting to married life, which McGuire (though not Young) had previously done on stage as a play. RKO’s producer, Harriet Parsons (who nearly lost the assignment to Dudley Nichols and had to fight the studio brass to stay on the film), and her writers, DeWitt Bodeen and Herman J. Mankiewicz (who came on for a last-minute rewrite just before the shooting started), moved the story to the U.S., to New England, and set it in an otherwise destroyed or ruined mansion of which only a cottage survived. The property’s former owner had made it a practice to rent the cottage to newlywed couples on their honeymoons, allowing them to stay as long as they liked, but the current owner, Abigail Minnett (Mildred Natwick in quite a good performance), has ended the practice. Previous couples have etched their names and dates when they lived there onto the cottage’s windows. The latest tenants are Oliver Bradford (Robert Young) and his fiancée Beatrice Alexander (Hillary Brooke, who frankly is too strong a personality for the nothing role she’s playing here; I liked her a lot better as the black-hearted villainess and partner of Professor Moriarty in the Sherlock Holmes film The Woman in Green, made the same year with Basil Rathbone as Holmes, Nigel Bruce as Watson, and Henry Daniell as Moriarty). When Oliver borrows the engagement ring he’s given Beatrice and tries to use it to etch their names on the window, the stone falls out and Mrs. Minnett tells them they’re not supposed to do that yet since they haven’t actually married.

The date is December 7, 1941, and when the Pearl Harbor attack happens that very day Oliver becomes a pilot with the U.S. Army Air Corps (it wasn’t until 1955 that the U.S. Air Force became a separate service branch of its own). Mrs. Minnett is herself a war widow; her husband was killed in the Great War and she’s kept her desk calendar set to April 6, 1917, the date the U.S. formally entered World War I. The whole story is framed as a flashback narrated by Major John Hillgrove (Herbert Marshall), who was blinded while serving in the Great War and took up piano playing and musical composition as part of his recovery process. I couldn’t help but note that Marshall is playing a man who became disabled as a result of World War I when the war had disabled him in real life as well, though instead of going blind he’d lost his left leg in the Second Battle of Arras, France. (To add to the irony, Marshall’s war injury occurred on April 9, 1917, just three days after the date on Mrs. Minnett’s calendar.) Oliver returns to the cottage a year later with his face badly scarred by an accident from when his plane was shot down in combat in the Pacific theatre. There he takes up with Laura Pennington (Dorothy McGuire), a homely woman whom Mrs. Minnett had hired years before as a maid. The two not-quite-attractive people are gradually drawn together and ultimately fall in love and get married, despite each of them having anxieties that the other has married them only out of pity. Hillgrove regularly visits the cottage with his nephew, Danny “Taxi” Stanton (Alec Englander), leading him. As he would the next year in the ponderous Tyrone Power vehicle The Razor’s Edge, Marshall as Hillgrove is the voice of sanity in this rather mixed set of emotions and frequently prattles on about spirituality and the life beyond this one. Laura and Oliver announce that they’ve gone through a physical transformation that’s made them both beautiful, or at least conventionally attractive – only the sudden appearance of Oliver’s mother, Violet Price (Spring Byington), and stepfather Frederick Price (Richard Gaines), breaks the illusion and their images in the movie revert to the ones we’ve been seeing all movie.

Hillgrove narrates all this in flashback during a party which he’s giving in Oliver’s and Laura’s honor and at which he’s going to play a piano reduction of the new tone poem, “The Enchanted Cottage,” which he’s written in their honor. Unfortunately they’re late coming to their own party and Hillgrove has to fill in for them by narrating their story and playing the piece (with Max Rabinowitz as his piano double). Ultimately Oliver and Laura etch their names on the window of the cottage and then show up at Hillgrove’s party declaring their undying love for each other. I looked up the Wikipedia page on Pinero’s play and learned not only that the original was set in England (as I had guessed from the fact that no one drinks coffee in the film; all the characters’ hot drink of choice is tea) but it had a much greater supernatural element. In the original play we never get to see Oliver (whose last name is the clunkier “Bashforth”) before he’s disabled, and his injuries are quite a bit more severe. According to Wikipedia, “In the stage directions, Oliver is described as an emaciated wreck of a man, broken by the war. The dialogue reveals that he was wounded in the neck and that it is painful to straighten his left leg, but he says his ‘head,’ meaning his mind, is the worst. In the 1924 film, his body is contorted, he walks with a cane, and he cannot put his right foot to the ground. In the 1945 film, most of Oliver’s face is scarred, and he has completely lost the use of his right arm and hand. He can walk without aids and there is no visible impairment of his lower body.” (I must say I didn’t notice that his right arm was disabled.) Also in the play Mrs. Minnett is actually a witch, albeit a beneficent one (one would think that just six years after MGM filmed The Wizard of Oz a “good witch” wouldn’t have been an unfamiliar concept to an American movie audience), and there’s a long dream sequence for Laura in the second act in which she dreams that both she and Oliver are good-looking people.

In the dream they’re attended by Mrs. Minnett and at least one other witch, along with three other married couples, three bridesmaids, and assorted cherubs, imps, and children. (In 1920 audiences for the original play had had a problem reconciling the supernatural plot elements with Pinero’s previous reputation as a rom-com writer, just as James M. Barrie is thought of today mainly as the author of Peter Pan even though most of his works were rom-coms, too.) Alas, in this film writers Bodeen (who’d done a much better job balancing realistic and supernatural elements in his script for the Val Lewton/Jacques Tourneur Cat People three years earlier) and Mankiewicz can’t get the supernatural plot elements to work at all. When we first see Robert Young and Dorothy McGuire in full Hollywood makeup and Herbert Marshall’s character proclaims it a “miracle,” all we can think is, “God must be a really good plastic surgeon.” The Enchanted Cottage is one film from Hollywood’s classic era I’d never seen before, and I’m not sure what to make of it now. Charles said he thought he might like it better on later reflection than he did when we were actually watching it. Curiously, there was an attempt to remake The Enchanted Cottage in 1973 and the would-be producers wanted Robert Young and Dorothy McGuire to be in it, Young in Marshall’s role and McGuire in Natwick’s. Young, who was on record as saying this was the best film he ever made, was eager to do it, but McGuire watched the earlier film and said, essentially, “You can’t go home again.” The Enchanted Cottage wasn’t remade until 2016, with Richard Hatch (not the same one who won the first season of Survivor; this Hatch said, “We forget there are other people with our name, and somehow we feel an ownership with our name. Honestly, this is one of the strangest experiences that's ever happened in my life, and I'm having to deal with it”) and Sarah Navratil in the leads and three credited directors (Joshua Arcadi, Ryan Del Nero, and Andrew Fisher), not a good sign.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Forsaken" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired November 5, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, November 5) I put on NBC for the latest two episodes of Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. They’re showing them in reverse order these days, with SVU first, to make room for that abominable “reality” show The Traitors they’ve scheduled for 8 p.m. The SVU episode was called “Forsaken” and opened at a much-publicized wedding of a major male comedian who’d been living with the same woman for years but had finally got around to tying the knot legally. At first I assumed that the comedian would be the principal perpetrator and it would be a story about how he raped a woman to get his rocks off one last time before he got hitched, but writer Justine Ferrara took her plot in a quite different direction. The victim is Chloe Davis (Lauren Cole, turning in an impressive performance), who’s found lying unconscious in a pool of her own blood at the wedding party. The investigating police detectives, including Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) and Detective Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish), have to deal with Chloe’s overbearing mother Monica (Jessalyn Gilsig) and even more overbearing stepfather Rick (Bill Heck). Chloe gives a description of her assailant as a young man in his 20’s, tall, white, and with red hair. As things turn out, a man matching that description, Scott Germon (Harrison Ball), was actually at the event and is arrested for the crime, but he turns out to be innocent. We don’t feel too badly for him, mainly because he was at the wedding party to sell cocaine to one of the other guests and there was already a bench warrant outstanding on him for violating his probation on a previous offense.

It turns out that the Davises are a monumentally dysfunctional family even by SVU standards: they consist of Rick, Monica, Chloe, her stepbrother Tyler (Sam Cusson), and her seven-year-old half-brother Evan (Emmett Moss). Evan is the only direct offspring of both Rick and Monica; Chloe is Monica’s daughter by her previous partner (who’s in prison for a long stretch of his own) and Tyler is Rick’s son by his earlier wife. So Tyler and Chloe have one of those weird sort of relationships that is psychologically incestuous even though it isn’t literally (sort of like Victor Frankenstein and Elizabeth Lavenza in Mary Shelley’s original Frankenstein, who grew up together as virtual brother and sister even though they were not biologically related). What’s more, Tyler is literally a psychopath and Rick has been actively covering for him, intimidating the rest of the family into endorsing his evil. It turns out that Tyler was Chloe’s assailant, and he attacked her for revenge after another woman whom he was cruising at the wedding party turned him down. Prosecutor Dominic Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino) has the problem of convincing the trial jury of this, particularly since Rick Davis was a quite persuasive witness for Tyler’s defense. Monica offers to break spousal privilege and testify for the prosecution about what’s really been going on in their household, but Carisi decides that she’s changed her story so often that she won’t be credible to the jury.

Instead he calls seven-year-old Evan, and after the usual rigmarole involving a child witness as to whether or not they will be “swearable” – whether they understand the difference between the truth and a lie well enough to comprehend the oath – Evan testifies. While his son is on the witness stand Rick stalks out of the courtroom, and that’s where Dick Wolf and Justine Ferrara end it. We don’t see the jury return a verdict either way, and we are left with a sense of dread as to just what’s going to happen to the other Davises after Evan broke Rick’s omertà about Tyler’s psychopathology. I’m guessing they’re setting us up for a sequel. The most remarkable aspect about this episode is Sam Cusson’s chilling performance as Tyler. He’s of medium height and has an angelic face reminiscent of the young David Cassidy (he’s close enough he’d be good casting for a biopic, especially if he could sing), and he projects just the right sort of affect (or lack thereof) I’ve seen in TV documentaries about real psychos. Incidentally this was the 599th episode of SVU, and afterwards they announced that Christopher Meloni is going to return for the 600th episode next week. That will be a treat, even though he’s become too old and grizzled to do much for me the way he did when he was on SVU for its first 12 seasons and I literally lusted after him (as, I suspect, did much of Gay male America; when he was on the show I used to joke that SVU had two different fan bases: Gay men who thought Christopher Meloni was hot and straight men who thought Mariska Hargitay was hot).

Law and Order: "Rage Bait" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired November 5, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Thursday, November 5 after the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode “Forsaken” my husband Charles and I watched a Law and Order show that was even more chilling. It was called “Rage Bait” and dealt with the murder of Aaron Dressler (Lawrence Gilliard, Jr.), a promising young college basketball player. Writers Scott Gold and Ajani Jackson throw us a few red herrings along the way, centered mainly around the sports betting sites that have become a bane on modern life. It seems that Aaron, a high-school star but one who was outclassed in the college game, was put in the game during the last nine minutes, with his team already comfortably ahead. But he sank a three-point shot that put his team’s victory margin above the stated odds on the gambling sites and thereby cost bettors a lot of money. Once those get resolved, however, there’s little doubt as to who the killer is: he’s Tyler Duncan (Michael Drayer), a Right-wing Internet provocateur whose schtick, under the pseudonym “Stone Freedom,” is going up to Black people on the street, calling them “chimps,” making ape noises at them, and goading them until they react to him. He uses his smartphone camera to photograph them doing this and post the footage online. Tyler’s basic defense is he isn’t a racist, he just plays one online to make money. He admits to shooting Aaron but claims he did so in self-defense because Aaron responded to his provocations by hitting him in the face.

Gold and Jackson throw us a few more curveballs, including giving Tyler a Black wife who shows up in court to defend him and having him hire a Black woman lawyer to represent him at trial. The principal witness against Tyler is Alexis Fisher (Jade Jones), a Black bodega clerk whose testimony is raked over the coals by Tyler’s lawyer, who discredits her by pointing out that she originally told the police that the insulting word Tyler had used towards Aaron was “chump” and she only later changed that to “chimp.” Meanwhile, the audience section in the courtroom is being packed by Right-wing podcaster Tom Phillips (John Romano) and his acolytes, who loudly demonstrate every time a ruling goes against Tyler that he’s being made into a martyr for his Right-wing racist views. Things seem headed towards an acquittal for Tyler until assistant prosecutor Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) stumbles onto a video recording, outtakes from an appearance Tyler made on Phillips’s podcast weeks before Aaron’s murder, in which Tyler said that actually killing a Black person on the street would be the ultimate thrill of his life. By playing that in court (presumably over the objections of Tyler’s Black woman attorney), prosecutor Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) gets his conviction. This Law and Order is unexpectedly timely given how the midterm elections turned out and Donald Trump’s response to his defeat by appointing his most rabidly prejudiced aide, Stephen Miller, to be his new White House chief of staff. It’s more evidence that the racism and the cruelty that have driven Trump’s immigration policies from day one – beginning in his first term as President and even more so in this one – are alive and all too well in the current governance of our country.

The Garden of Eden (Feature Productions, United Artists, 1928)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, November 1) my husband Charles and I watched a film on Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Nights” program that I’d never heard of before but which turned out to be an utter delight. It was called The Garden of Eden and was made in 1928 by Feature Productions and United Artists. The Garden of Eden began life as a 1926 play called Der Garten Eden: Komödie, written by two Europeans, Rudolph Bernauer and Rudolf Österreicher (that last name just means “Austrian”). It was adapted for Broadway in 1927 by Avery Hopwood, five years after his play The Gold Diggers received its first film adaptation (it would later become the basis for Gold Diggers on Broadway in 1929 and the version you’re most likely to have seen, Gold Diggers of 1933) for a cast including Barbara Barondess, Harlan Briggs, Miriam Hopkins, Douglass Montgomery, and Alison Skipworth. That version ran for only 29 performances but it was good enough for producer John W. Considine, who snagged the movie rights as a vehicle for his star Corinne Griffith. Griffith was nicknamed “The Orchid Lady” because her beauty supposedly resembled that of the exotic flower (though she didn’t seem all that attractive to me). He hired Lewis Milestone to direct the film after his two successes for Howard Hughes, the service comedy Two Arabian Knights and the gangster drama The Racket (both 1927), and to write the movie he hired Hanns Kräly for the scenario and George Marion, Jr. to write the intertitles. Kräly was a quite remarkable writer who came to Hollywood with his frequent collaborator, director Ernst Lubitsch. Indeed, he was to Lubitsch what Dudley Nichols was to John Ford, Robert Riskin to Frank Capra, or Charles Bennett to Alfred Hitchcock: the early collaborator who helped set the style of a major director with an auteur reputation. Unfortunately the Lubitsch/Kräly collaboration broke up in 1930 when Lubitsch caught Kräly having an affair with Helene Krauss, then Mrs. Lubitsch. Rather than react in the detached “oh, what the hell, men will be men and women will be women” way of a character in a Lubitsch movie, Lubitsch got ferociously jealous and never worked with Kräly again, while Kräly’s own wife Elsie divorced him over it. Though Lubitsch didn’t direct The Garden of Eden, the film is full of so many of the so-called “Lubitsch touches” one wonders just how much credit Kräly deserves for that part of Lubitsch’s style.

The plot centers around young Viennese woman Toni Lebrun (Corinne Griffith), who’s just received a correspondence-school degree in opera singing (the idea that you could learn to sing without any evidence that you were recording your lessons and therefore the people running the school wouldn’t know how well you were doing is preposterous enough on its face). Though Vienna was well known as a major operatic center, Toni leaves her aunt and uncle, who raised her and owned a pretzel shop they were hoping she would take over when they were ready to retire, to travel to Budapest to take a job singing at a venue called the “Palais de Paris.” Once she arrives (after she leaves her sandwich behind on the train and, in a typical Kräly touch, the porter who finds it eats it himself), she learns that the “Palais de Paris” isn’t an opera house at all. Instead it’s a high-end cabaret whose butch owner, Madame Bauer (Maude George), hires attractive young women to dance and, it’s hinted, prostitute themselves to the rich men who are the place’s main clientele. Madame Bauer asks Toni to show her legs (“Don’t you want to hear my voice?” Toni naïvely asks) and, for her first number, offers her a super-scanty costume. Toni refuses to wear it and the cabaret’s costume designer, Rosa (Louise Dresser, an appropriate last name considering her character’s occupation), supports her. Instead Madame Bauer dresses Toni in a so-called “Puritan” costume, only the material is so sheer that when the stage lights are shone through it, all of Toni’s womanly charms are instantly exposed. (Remember that the Production Code was not promulgated until 1930 and therefore this is a genuinely “pre-Code” film.) After her performance attracts the attention of young, rakish, slimeball aristocrat Henry D’Avril (Lowell Sherman, who’d got a reputation for playing sexy villains when he seduced and impregnated Lillian Gish in D. W. Griffith’s 1920 film Way Down East), Madame Bauer locks Toni in a room with D’Avril. Thanks to more byplay with lights (this film is full of lights that go on and off rapidly as various characters manipulate switches), we see flashes of the struggle that goes on between them as Toni desperately tries to hold on to her virtue in the face of D’Avril’s assaults. Rosa ultimately rescues Toni, which gets them both fired.

Much to Toni’s astonishment, Rosa then announces that the two are taking a two-week vacation in Monte Carlo and staying at the prestigious (and expensive) Garden of Eden hotel. Like us, Toni is wondering how on earth Rosa can pay for all this. When they register at the Garden of Eden, Rosa signs the book as “Baroness von Garten and her daughter Antoinette.” Then Rosa explains that she actually is a baroness, though she lost her husband during World War I and with him went all her money. So she works as a costume dresser 50 weeks per year and saves her money, then splurges on a two-week stint living the life she formerly had year-round when she could still afford it. While they’re staying at the Garden of Eden, Toni attracts the attention of nice rich guy Richard Dupont (Charles Ray, a silent-era star whom writer/director Garson Kanin met in the early 1940’s, when he was reduced to doing extra work to survive; Kanin asked Ray if it were true that during his star years he’d had his teeth polished every day, and Ray said it was, though “not every day – not 365 days a year – just on the days when I was shooting”) and his not-so-nice uncle, Col. Dupont (Edward Martindel). At one point Richard tries to get Toni’s attention by blinking the lights in his room across the street from hers, and Toni tries to respond the same way – only the gimmick is caught by everyone else in Richard’s building and they start blinking their lights, too. Richard insists that he wants to marry Toni, and his uncle the colonel, who’s also attracted to Toni, gives him an ultimatum: get Toni to accept his proposal within the next half-hour or the colonel will swoop in and marry her himself. Just then Rosa gives Toni a dose of sleeping powder, so Richard is frantically trying to wake her up to accept his proposal while his uncle is giving him hand signals indicating that he has just five, then four, minutes left. To make matters even worse, Richard has taken a sleeping powder of his own (was he thinking that if he fell asleep in Toni’s bedroom, his uncle would have to let them marry to avoid a scandal?), though the two of them fortunately wake up enough that Toni accepts Richard’s proposal at long last.

The two set up a wedding for the lobby of the Garden of Eden, but it can’t take place until all Richard’s relatives arrive (there’s a laconic Marion title which says the original Eve was lucky because Adam had no relatives), including his Uncle Henri. “I’ve been to all his weddings; why can’t he come to mine?” Richard complains. Unfortunately, “Uncle Henri” turns out to be the scumbag Henri D’Avril from the Palais de Paris, who immediately “outs” Toni as a poor cabaret girl and not a baroness’s daughter at all. Rosa replies that she’s legally adopted Toni and therefore she is a baroness’s daughter, but Richard’s family is unmoved. They determine to break up the wedding and offer Toni a settlement to leave him alone – Richard doesn’t know his family is trying to buy off Toni, but Toni doesn’t know that he doesn’t know that. She virtuously tears up the check and throws the pieces at Richard’s face, then tears off the elaborate wedding dress he’d bought her and flees the scene in her underwear. Richard chases after her and ultimately they reconcile and get married after all. The Garden of Eden is a marvelous movie, though at least one sequence – involving a song both Richard and his uncle claim to have written for Toni, and both play for her – really cries out for sound. Indeed I found myself wishing that someone would have remade the entire movie as a talkie in the 1930’s, and I know just who should have been in it, too: Carole Lombard as Toni and Cary Grant as Richard. (I’ve long thought Lombard and Grant would have been ideal co-stars for screwball comedy, though the one film they actually made together, 1939’s In Name Only, was a melodramatic tear-jerker instead of a comedy.)

I mention that because the two stars of The Garden of Eden are the weakest links in the film as it stands. Corinne Griffith doesn’t wear that well; she’s attractive but hardly drop-dead gorgeous in the looks department and her acting consists mainly of grimacing and looking queasy whenever something bad happens to her character. Charles Ray is stolid and dependable-looking but hardly the acme of sexiness, either – and it doesn’t help that he and Lowell Sherman look surprisingly similar. One expects more of a visual differentiation between hero and villain, though that may just be a convention of how roles like these were cast in later movies. But the rest of the cast comes through with flying colors – I especially liked Maude George as the butch proprietress of the Palais de Paris, even though the film carefully avoids any hints of her own sexual interest in the dancers there – and Louise Dresser turns in a properly concerned reading of her role. The Garden of Eden, presented here in a 2002 reissue print from Flicker Alley with a soundtrack by Robert Israel, mostly playing organ but with at least two interludes on piano (Toni’s “Puritan” dance at the Palais de Paris, which Israel accompanied with the “Barcarolle” from Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann, and a later scene in which he plays a Chopin nocturne, though I couldn’t identify which one), is actually a delightful film and a welcome rediscovery as well as a Schreiber movie, since though Lewis Milestone was an excellent director its appeal is really much more from the sensibility of writer Kräly.

Good Morning, Eve! (Warner Bros., Vitaphone, 1934)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The short Turner Classic Movies ran on Sunday, November 1 right after The Garden of Eden was only tangentially related even though, unlike the feature film, it starts out in the real Biblical Garden of Eden. It was called Good Morning, Eve! and was the second in a series of 20-minute shorts made by Warner Bros. and the Vitaphone Corporation (Warners abandoned the sound-on-disc Vitaphone process in 1930 and started shooting sound-on-film like everyone else, but kept the trade name going through the end of the 1930’s for their band shorts) in 1934. Both this and the first Warner/Vitaphone short, Service with a Smile, were in three-strip Technicolor and were in fact the first live-action films made entirely in the process. (That honor is given in most film histories to another musical short, the Pioneer/RKO release La Cucaracha from 1934, but that was made after the two Warners shorts.) Directed by Roy Mack from a script by Cyrus Woods, Eddie Moran, and A. Dorian Otvos, Good Morning, Eve! is an audacious fantasy that begins in the Garden of Eden, though Adam (Leon Errol – and yes, it’s alternately amusing and annoying to imagine that the entire human race stemmed from the not-very-appealing physique of Leon Errol) and Eve (June MacCloy) are already wearing fig leaves even though they haven’t yet eaten the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. A papier-maché snake comes in to tempt them, and this sets them on a weird walking journey through several historical eras. Each of their time-travel visits is accompanied by a song by Cliff Hess.

First they stop off in ancient Rome under Emperor Nero (future Three Stooges nemesis Vernon Dent) – the film gives the year as “100 A.D.” even though Nero’s reign was from 37 A.D. to his suicide in 68 A.D. – for a song called “Rhythm in the Bow” featuring a quartet of violinists delivering a piece that veers between hillbilly and swing. Their next stop is at the court of King Arthur and his queen Guinevere (Arthur is unidentified on imdb.com but Guinevere is played by Maxine Doyle), where Adam interrupts and tries to referee a swordfight between Sir Lancelot (Bill Elllott) and Sir Gawain the Black Knight. After Lancelot wins the duel (though without causing the Black Knight’s arms to fall off and spurt blood as they did in Monty Python and the Holy Grail), he goes to greet Guinevere and there’s another big musical number, “Got There Just the Same.” Finally Adam and Eve end up in 1934 Florida, where under a bright blue sky (remember that the biggest single improvement in three-strip Technicolor over two-strip was that it could at last photograph blue, so early three-strip adopters went out of their way to show blue things, including sky and sea as well as a lot of blue clothes) a group of chorus girls play with beach balls and maneuver them in time to the music, more or less, of a song called “Lookin’ ’Em Over.” Then Adam and Eve wake up from their dream (yeah, that’s right, It Was All a Dream!) and turn out to be residents of “The Garden of Eden Nudist Colony.” Good Morning, Eve! was a cleverly staged vest-pocket musical fantasy that, like the feature film which preceded it, was engagingly cute and audacious in its imagination.

Dracula (Universal, 1979)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, October 31 – well, what else were they going to show on Hallowe’en?) Charles and I watched a pair of films on Turner Classic Movies identified as horror classics from the 1970’s. Both of them were reworkings of Universal horror films from the 1920’s, 1930’s, and 1940’s: the 1979 remake of Dracula and the 1974 Phantom of the Opera spoof Phantom of the Paradise. I have vague memories of seeing the 1979 Dracula, directed by John Badham and written by W. D. Richter, once before in the early 1980’s on a poor-quality image on an over-the-air black-and-white TV, and seen today it’s a good movie but not a great one (something I could say about the 1931 original Dracula, directed by Tod Browning and starring Bela Lugosi and Dwight Frye, too). Richter made the same mistake Garrett Fort, who scripted the 1931 version, did; he based it not directly on Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula but on the intervening play version written by British actor/playwright Hamilton Deane and edited and rewritten by John L. Balderston for a U.S. production on Broadway in 1927. (I’ve read that before the 1931 Dracula was filmed, Universal commissioned Louis Bromfield to write a script based directly on the Stoker novel, but decided it would be too expensive to film and had Fort adapt the play instead.)

Oddly, both movies transposed characters from the original novel; in Stoker’s book it’s Jonathan Harker who goes to Transylvania as a real-estate agent to negotiate Dracula’s purchase of a castle at Carfax Abbey in England. In the 1931 film it’s Renfield who does that (though I don’t mind that if only because it gave Dwight Frye, who played Renfield and was by far the best actor in it besides Lugosi, more screen time). In the 1979 version, which omits the Transylvanian prologue completely and begins with the vessel Demeter (Vesta in the 1931 film) floating off the coast of Whitby, England with no living crew members except for a tribe of rats, it’s Lucy (Kate Nelligan) who’s Jonathan’s (Trevor Eve) fiancée and the story’s ultimate heroine, and Mina (Jan Francis) who’s vampirized by Dracula midway through the film. Badham and Richter also decided to make them the daughters of principal middle-aged male characters: Lucy is the daughter of Dr. Jack Seward (Donald Pleasence) and Mina the daughter of Dr. Abraham Van Helsing (Laurence Olivier, replacing Edward Van Sloan from the 1931 cast and playing it effectively except for his overwrought accent to make himself sound appropriately Eastern European). Mina’s own father Van Helsing has to remove her heart to end her vampire existence and allow her to die normally, which adds an unexpected bit of pathos to Olivier’s characterization. It doesn’t help the film that Kate Nelligan and Jan Francis look so much alike, or that we see them sleeping in the same bed so often we start to think they’re having a Lesbian relationship (until we remember that the original novel was published while Victoria was still on the British throne, and that sort of thing was frowned upon so much a popular writer like Bram Stoker wouldn’t have dreamed of including it).

The biggest problem with the 1979 Dracula was that John Badham seems to have taken way too much to heart the criticism of Browning’s original that it was too static and theatre-like. Badham fills the screen with so much camera movement (the cinematographers were Gilbert Taylor and an uncredited Frank Tidy) and such a plethora of cacophonous sounds (the movie is already several minutes old before we hear a line of recognizable English rather than just characters making vaguely vocal noises) it becomes more overwhelming than entertaining. One of the reasons the 1979 Dracula was based on the play rather than straight from Stoker’s novel was that before the film was made Frank Langella had starred in a revival of the play on Broadway, and the film was built around the renown Langella had won for performing the role live. Like the movie as a whole, Langella was a good Dracula but not a great one; he doesn’t have the otherworldly quality Lugosi brought to the role (but then, aside from Orson Welles in the 1938 radio adaptation of Dracula that remains my favorite retelling of this story in any medium, who did?). He wanted to play Dracula more as a tragic figure than an out-and-out monster (ironically there are hints of that in the 1931 film as well, especially in the scene in which Lugosi as Dracula says, “To die – to be really dead! That would be wonderful! … There are far worse things awaiting man than death,” lines that oddly don’t appear in the simultaneously filmed Spanish-language version). The tag line for the film’s promotion was, “Throughout history, he has filled the hearts of men with terror, and the hearts of women with desire.” (In its original release, the 1931 Dracula was sold similarly as “the strangest love story ever told,” probably because there hadn’t been a major horror film with sound before and Universal’s marketing people weren’t sure how to sell one.)

The print we saw on TCM had an unusual look in which the colors were deliberately toned down to look almost black-and-white, which according to an imdb.com post under “Alternate Versions” was John Badham’s idea. Badham had originally wanted to shoot the 1979 Dracula in black-and-white like the 1931 version, but the “suits” at Universal said no and forced him to shoot it in Technicolor. (Likewise Mel Brooks had had to move his production of the 1974 spoof Young Frankenstein from Columbia to 20th Century-Fox because Columbia wouldn’t let him shoot it in black-and-white and Fox would.) For the original home-video version, first on laserdisc, then on VHS tape, and finally on DVD, Badham denatured the color sufficiently to achieve the “black-and-white in color” look he’d wanted, and that was also the version that got shown on over-the-air TV. Not until 2019 was the original full-color version released on DVD, on a reissue label called Shout! Factory which gave you the option to watch both the theatrical original and Badham’s decolorized version. Oddly, the TCM print we were watching was edited for commercial TV, since it had periodic pauses in the action which were very noticeable and were obviously where the commercials were supposed to go when the film was shown on TV. One odd result of the film being based on the play was that certain famous bits of dialogue turned up, like Dracula’s “I never drink … wine” and, responding to the howling of wolves outside, “Children of the night, what music they make!,” as well as the marvelous exchange I’ve heard otherwise only in the 1938 Orson Welles radio version, in which Dracula’s seduction becomes a wicked parody of the Communion ritual: “Flesh of my flesh – blood of my blood!” The 1979 Dracula did decently at the box office but not so well as to merit a sequel (though an ambiguous ending seemed to be setting one up). TCM host Ben Mankiewicz attributed that to the release just six months earlier of another Dracula movie, the 1979 spoof Love at First Bite, directed by Stan Dragoti, with George Hamilton as a modern-day Dracula reincarnated in New York at the height of the disco craze.

Phantom of the Paradise (Harbor Productions, Pressman-Williams Enterprises, 20th Century-Fox, 1974)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Fortunately, the next film after the 1979 Dracula on Turner Classic Movies’ 2026 Hallowe’en marathon was considerably better: Phantom of the Paradise (1974), written and directed by Brian De Palma and obviously a rehash/spoof of The Phantom of the Opera set in the world of rock music. The principal villain is Swan (Paul Williams, who was at the height of his 15 minutes in the mid-1970’s and wrote and produced the music for the film as well as playing a major role on screen), a teen idol from 1953 who made a deal with the Devil that he would never age visibly. The deal was recorded on a videotape (though an imdb.com “Goofs” poster noted that color videotape didn’t exist in 1953) on which, The Picture of Dorian Gray-style, Swan’s image would age over the years while the live person would not. We don’t learn Swan’s sinister backstory until well past the halfway point of the film. Instead we meet Winslow Leach (William Finley), a nerdish young composer who’s just written a rock cantata based on the Faust legend. Swan hears this music and decides it’s the perfect piece to open the Paradise, a palatial ballroom he wants to open as the ultimate rock-concert venue. Of course, being a music-industry slimeball with an even slimier business partner, Arnold Philbin (George Memmoli), Swan also takes credit for Leach’s score and puts his own name on it as composer (a plot twist also used in the 1943 and 1962 films of The Phantom of the Opera and in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1996 musical, though not in Gaston Leroux’s original 1910 novel or the first – and still the best – film version, made in 1925 with Rupert Julian, Edward Sedgwick and Lon Chaney as directors and Chaney as star). Swan and his henchmen try to get rid of Winslow by framing him on drug charges; he’s given a life sentence at Sing Sing and forced into an experiment in which all his teeth are removed and replaced by metal ones. He escapes (absurdly easily) only to be caught in a record press at Swan’s “Death Records” label, which is pressing copies of Swan’s version of Winslow’s Faust cantata. The press wrecks his vocal cords and permanently scars the right side of his face, forcing him to don a metal mask and haunt the Paradise as its mysterious “Phantom.”

Winslow is also in unrequited love with Phoenix (Jessica Harper, making her film debut and giving an “Introducing” credit), whom he heard auditioning for Swan at his palatial mansion (where Swan was entertaining multiple women in a circular bed). Winslow sneaked into the mansion in the first place by dressing in drag, which he was wearing when the cops busted him on the phony drug charge. Once he’s on the loose and haunting the Paradise, Winslow decides that only Phoenix will be allowed to sing his Faust cantata. When Swan assigns the lead role to a man, Beef (Gerrit Graham, voice-doubled by Ray Kennedy), Winslow sneaks into the bathroom where Beef is showering and … well, it wouldn’t be a Brian De Palma movie without an Alfred Hitchcock allusion somewhere, would it? In fact Beef survives his encounter with Winslow in the shower (earlier Swan had sealed Winslow in a brick-walled room à la Edgar Allan Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado, but once again Winslow managed to escape), only to get electrocuted on stage by a prop lightning bolt Winslow wielded. Ultimately Swan seduces Phoenix and gets her to agree to marry him in exchange for the lead role in Faust, only he really has hired an assassin to kill her on stage because her premature death will send her posthumous record sales soaring. (It’s a gimmick that’s “planted” in the film’s first song, “Goodbye, Eddie, Goodbye,” by Swan’s 1950’s retro group “The Juicy Fruits,” about a rock star named Eddie who committed suicide because his death would increase his record sales so much it would generate the money needed for his sister to have a life-saving super-operation.) Earlier in the story Winslow had tried to commit suicide himself, only to be told by Swan that he wouldn’t be allowed to do that because the contract he’d signed to sell his soul to the Devil wouldn’t allow him to exit the earth ahead of schedule. Instead he leaves a gaping wound in his chest and Swan tells him that if Winslow tries to kill Swan, his wound will open up and they’ll both die. Winslow manages to save Phoenix from the assassin’s bullet ¬– Arnold Philbin gets shot and killed instead – and he also destroys Swan’s videotape collection, ensuring that they both die but not before Swan’s face ages all at once, repelling Phoenix.

Phantom of the Paradise also contains a sequence that eerily anticipates the similar scene in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, filmed a year later (though the stage version, The Rocky Horror Show, had premiered in 1972 and so it’s unclear who influenced whom), in which Beef appears as a Frankenstein-style monster created (as in the Hammer Frankenstein films in the 1950’s but not Universal’s originals from the 1930’s) in a bathtub. As his creation is being prepared the cast (Jeffrey Comanor, Archie Hahn, and Harold Oblong, who appear successively as Swan’s various bands, the Juicy Fruits, the Beach Bums – for a quite funny Beach Boys parody called “Upholstery” in which the main aria from Winslow’s Faust cantata is turned into a car song – and “The Undeads”) sing a song called “Somebody Super Like You.” When he finally emerges from the nurturing vat Beef sings “Life at Last” (whose second line is “Salutations from the other side”) until he’s offed by Winslow’s lightning bolt. I first heard the soundtrack album of Phantom of the Paradise well before I got to see the movie; my then-girlfriend Cat had been a huge fan of the film and had bought the album. I was quite impressed with the quality of the music and the sheer cheekiness of the concept, and we first got to see the film together in 1980 when it was being revived for a midnight screening in Pacific Beach. Indeed, that was where Phantom of the Paradise lived for years, though it never developed the fanatic following that The Rocky Horror Picture Show did.

For years I had thought Phantom of the Paradise was Brian De Palma’s first feature; it wasn’t – indeed, he already had the strange and beautiful horror film Sisters under his belt when he shot this. But it’s a film I really like and one which holds up surprisingly well. Incidentally, after the screening Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz said that Phantom of the Paradise ran into legal trouble not only from the source you’d expect – Universal, which still owned the movie rights to The Phantom of the Opera – but from one you wouldn’t: the British superstar rock band Led Zeppelin. It seems that though Swan’s record label in the film is “Death Records” (anticipating the real “Death Row Records,” a rap label founded in the 1990’s which was essentially a racket run by one faction of the Bloods street gang; it “broke” such “artists” as Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg before meeting its blessed demise in 2002, though Snoop Dogg bought the remnants of it and tried to revive it 20 years later), its parent company is called “Swan Song Productions.” At the time the film was released, Led Zeppelin had just founded their own record label and had named it “Swan Song Records.” Led Zeppelin sued 20th Century-Fox over the name, and the settlement required the studio to blur out just about every appearance of the name “Swan Song Productions” in the film. According to Mankiewicz, Brian De Palma is still upset about this, and more than once he’s expressed the wish, “Can’t someone take those ugly mattes off my film?”

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Arcana" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 29, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, October 29) my husband Charles and I watched the latest episodes of Dick Wolf’s series Law and Order: Special Victims Unit and Law and Order. The SVU, called “Arcana,” turned out to be an odd, quirky show that begins with self-proclaimed psychic Beatrice Witt (Susannah Flood) giving a reading to a hot-headed middle-aged man who demands to be put in contact with the spirit of his dead mother. All goes reasonably well until he demands to know the whereabouts of the valuable stash of Nikon cameras his late mom owned, and just then Beatrice tells him that she’s lost contact with his mom’s spirit. He gets angry and grabs her wrists, leaving bruises on her arms. Just as I was beginning to wonder whether the main plot (the writer was Brant Englestein, a relative newcomer to Dick Wolf’s franchise) was going to turn out to be that the cameras would be recovered, there would be exposed film inside them, and on one of the rolls would be photographs of a sexually related murder or assault, instead the guy just walks out and the location of the camera stash remains unknown. Later Beatrice Witt complains to the Manhattan Special Victims Unit that she was raped by an unknown assailant who allegedly broke into her home through a window whose lock was broken. The cops come out to investigate and Beatrice assures them that she lives alone except for her seven-year-old daughter Emma (not listed on imdb.com). When the police, in the persons of Captains Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) and Renée Curry (Aimé Donna Kelly), show up they find there’s a third person there: Sarah Witt (Lisa Emery), Beatrice’s mother, who’s come down with Alzheimer’s and has been locked up inside a room, sort of like the first Mrs. Rochester in Jane Eyre. When the police enter her room she literally screams at them.

Eventually it turns out that Sarah’s late husband, Beatrice’s father, was an alcoholic who regularly beat, assaulted, and raped her while “in his cups” until he was killed. The police who investigated his killing at the time assumed that Sarah had killed him in self-defense and she wasn’t prosecuted, but as part of the investigation into Beatrice’s current assault they uncover evidence that Beatrice herself was the killer. She’d picked up dad’s revolver off the floor where he’d dropped it in an alcoholic stupor and used it to knock him off before he could do in her mom. At this point I was wondering whether the payoff would be that dad actually didn’t die; he was still alive and secretly living in the house’s attic (where the police had found evidence of recent habitation), where he could occasionally sneak out and go after Beatrice. Instead Englestein did one of the most annoying tricks a mystery writer can pull: he had the assailant be someone totally unrelated whose existence we had no idea of until he got brought on as a culprit ex machina in the final act. He turns out to be Chris Garibaldi (Bryan Manley Davis), whom Beatrice dated while still in high school and later went crazy and was in and out of mental hospitals the rest of his life. He’d just got released from his latest incarceration three weeks before and he’d gone back to the Witt home, secretly moved into her attic, obsessed over her and finally made his move on her one night.

This reminded me of a Lifetime movie called Boy in the Attic which I quite liked, and another Lifetime film that also involved a man secretly living in the heroine’s attic that took on an unintended aura of comedy. In fact I reviewed that one on imdb.com and got a rather testy response from someone who said there was nothing funny about the situation and in fact it had been based on a real-life story in which the man in the attic had terrorized the woman who was unknowingly hosting him. The character I felt sorriest for was Sarah’s former caregiver, a hot young Black guy who’d been accused of stealing Sarah’s jewelry and been fired for that by Beatrice – only when the cops finally busted Chris Garibaldi they found all Sarah’s jewels in his attic redoubt and gave it back to Beatrice. There’s also a subplot in which Captain Curry makes her distaste for Beatrice’s line of work clear because after her husband died, her mother had urged her to go to a psychic, and said psychic had told her that her late husband missed her in the afterlife and wanted them to communicate. That raised Curry’s hackles because in this life she and her husband had agreed to separate because they weren’t getting along, which of course reminded me of the plot of the film A Stolen Life (the 1946 Curtis Bernhardt-directed Bette Davis vehicle in which she played twins, and when the bad sister dies the good sister tries to take her place without realizing that the bad sister’s husband, whom the good sister had always wanted, had got tired of her extra-relational activities and was about to divorce her; I reviewed it on moviemagg at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2026/10/a-stolen-life-bd-productions-warner.html) which Charles and I had just watched. “That was a weird one,” I acknowledged to Charles afterwards, and of course he agreed.

Law and Order: "Property" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired October 29, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Law and Order episode my husband Charles and I watched last night (Thursday, October 29) was considerably better than the SVU that preceded it. It was called “Property” and was written by Jennifer Vanderbes and Will Lapp (the latter credited as “staff writer”). It begins with an auction of expensive Middle Eastern and Indonesian artifacts organized by a not bad-looking young man named Andrew Carson (Matt Leisy, who for some reason looks a lot hotter in his imdb.com head shot than he did on the show). For some reason Carson is late to his own auction, and later he turns up dead, murdered in his apartment by being clubbed to death with one of his own statuettes. Vanderbes and Lapp first give us a couple of red herrings: an Afghan-American professor, Abdul Ahad Farhadi (Sevan), who was upset with Carson for selling a statue of the Buddha that had been looted from Afghanistan by the Taliban and would thereby be able to finance their inhumane regime; and a Black rapper who accused Carson of selling him an ancient Egyptian mask that turned out to be a fake. The police, in the persons of detectives Theo Walker (David Ajala) and Rob Calvino (James Badge Dale), then turn their attention to the two women in Carson’s life (at least the two women we know about; we’re told that he was an inveterate womanizer and that was at least part of the reason his marriage broke up): his ex-wife Caroline Sanders (Kate Siegel) and his current girlfriend Lucy Butler (Vivian True). The episode’s story takes a weird right turn in the second “Order” part of the story; Caroline Sanders turns out to have killed her husband and faked an elaborate false alibi to cover for it. But her motive was to protect the frozen embryos she and Carson had conceived via in vitro fertilization either just before or just after she got cancer and therefore could no longer have children the normal way. She was waiting for her oncologists to declare her cancer-free so she could have one or more of the embryos implanted and thereby fulfill her lifelong dream of being a mother. Only Andrew had meanwhile unilaterally decided not only to leave her but to have the embryos destroyed because New York is a “two-party state” in regards to IVF: the embryos could only be implanted if both biological parents agreed to it. Yet the embryos were being stored at a facility in Pennsylvania, which only requires one-party consent for any decision involving embryos, frozen or otherwise.

The meetings between Andrew and Caroline that had derailed his participation in his final auction weren’t about a potential reconciliation, as the cops had at first assumed; rather, they were battled royal over the fate of Andrew’s and Caroline’s embryos. In court Caroline and the heavy-set African-American attorney representing her, Theresa Roland (Roslyn Ruff), acknowledge that she did indeed kill Andrew, but did so to protect human life: in this case, her frozen embryos whom Andrew had threatened to kill. Caroline presents herself as a committed Roman Catholic who truly believed that life begins at conception and therefore the destruction of her embryos would be murder, but the police and assistant district attorney Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) uncover evidence that in college Caroline had been an active feminist, had participated in defending abortion and women’s health clinics against anti-abortion protesters, and had had an abortion herself. I was waiting for Caroline and her lawyer to argue that it was precisely the trauma of going through an abortion that convinced her she’d been on the wrong side of the abortion issue all along, but instead – after Price yields to the suggestion of his assistant Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) that the jury would find this line of cross-examination more tolerable if it came from a woman, and after Samantha announces that she went through with the embryo implantation after all and is now pregnant with twins – the jury finds Samantha guilty. The sense the writers want us to leave with is that New York’s citizens have been spared the sticky wicket of a court verdict that would establish the precedent that embryos are human beings deserving of the same full legal protections as everyone else. I’m strongly pro-choice on the abortion issue (and my ex-girlfriend actually got pregnant and had an abortion while we were together, so I’m as personally close to this issue as any male can be), but I was still not happy with the overly pat resolution the writers of this episode gave it, just as I’m still miffed at the previous episode in which a Black Gay man was convicted of murdering Bisexual men out of resentment that they could always go back to their wives and children while he, being totally Gay, could not. (The mistake I thought the writers of that one made was not acknowledging that bisexuality is a perfectly legitimate sexual orientation and instead portraying both the killer and his victims as Gay men.)

The meetings between Andrew and Caroline that had derailed his participation in his final auction weren’t about a potential reconciliation, as the cops had at first assumed; rather, they were battles royal over the fate of Andrew’s and Caroline’s embryos. In court Caroline and the heavy-set African-American attorney representing her, Theresa Roland (Roslyn Ruff), acknowledge that she did indeed kill Andrew, but did so to protect human life: in this case, her frozen embryos whom Andrew had threatened to kill. Caroline presents herself as a committed Roman Catholic who truly believed that life begins at conception and therefore the destruction of her embryos would be murder, but the police and assistant district attorney Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) uncover evidence that in college Caroline had been an active feminist, had participated in defending abortion and women’s health clinics against anti-abortion protesters, and had had an abortion herself. I was waiting for Caroline and her lawyer to argue that it was precisely the trauma of going through an abortion that convinced her she’d been on the wrong side of the abortion issue all along, but instead – after Price yields to the suggestion of his assistant Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) that the jury would find this line of cross-examination more tolerable if it came from a woman, and after Samantha announces that she went through with the embryo implantation after all and is now pregnant with twins – the jury finds Samantha guilty. The sense the writers want us to leave with is that New York’s citizens have been spared the sticky wicket of a court verdict that would establish the precedent that embryos are human beings deserving of the same full legal protections as everyone else. I’m strongly pro-choice on the abortion issue (and my ex-girlfriend actually got pregnant and had an abortion while we were together, so I’m as personally close to this issue as any male can be), but I was still not happy with the overly pat resolution the writers of this episode gave it, just as I’m still miffed at the previous episode in which a Black Gay man was convicted of murdering Bisexual men out of resentment that they could always go back to their wives and children while he, being totally Gay, could not. (The mistake I thought the writers of that one made was not acknowledging that bisexuality is a perfectly legitimate sexual orientation and instead portraying both the killer and his victims as Gay men.)

The Greatest (Columbia, EMI Films, John Marshall Productions, 1977)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, October 28) my husband Charles and I watched a couple of interesting films, 1977’s The Greatest on Turner Classic Movies and 1947’s Desire Me on a DVD I’d ordered from Amazon.com and had just got in the day’s mail. The Greatest was a biopic of legendary boxing champion, Nation of Islam member, and anti-war activist Muhammad Ali in which Ali played himself (quite credibly, too) and various members of his entourage also appeared as themselves. It was directed by Tom Gries, a quirky filmmaker best known for his 1968 Western Will Penny, starring Charlton Heston. The film’s closing credits announce that Gries died on January 3, 1977 and it was dedicated to his memory. Apparently Gries lived long enough to finish the actual shooting, but he died before post-production was complete and another director, Monte Hellman, was called in to get the film into releasable form. The Greatest is also known as the movie for which the song “The Greatest Love of All” was written; it was composed by Michael Masser (who also did the film’s background score) with lyrics by Linda Creed, and it was sung under the credits by George Benson. Masser gave an interview in which he explained the inspiration for the song: “Here was a man who wanted to change his name and religion. That’s all. Ali hadn’t believed in the war in Viet Nam and had refused to fight in it. He won that battle through the legal system. Still, he lost everything—including his title. But Ali retained the most important thing of all—his dignity.” The song is best known today for Whitney Houston’s stunning cover, recorded in 1984 and released in 1985, and compared to hers Benson’s sounds pretty lame, but there’s another song in The Greatest, “I Always Knew I Had It In Me,” also sung by Benson (over the film’s closing credits) with lyrics by Carole King’s ex, Gerry Goffin. I ignored The Greatest when it first came out because I assumed it was nothing more than a cheap, crudely made exploitation film. In fact it’s a quite capable piece of filmmaking, written by Ring Lardner, Jr. and an uncredited Bill Gunn (a Black writer and friend of James Dean’s), and unlike a lot of celebrities who got cast as themselves, Ali actually does a creditable job in the role. It helps that the real Ali was such a theatrical person he was already enough of an actor to pull off the task of playing himself.

The film was based on a memoir, The Greatest: My Own Story, Ali co-authored with Herbert Muhammad (son of Elijah Muhammad and Ali’s manager for a time) and Richard Durham, which Ali had published in 1975. Its story takes Ali from his gold-medal win at the 1960 Olympics in Rome (when he was still known as Cassius Clay, Jr., a name he got from the 19th century abolitionist leader and son of Senator Henry Clay; I ran across him in Irving Stone’s historical novel Love Is Eternal, about President Lincoln and his wife Mary Todd, because the 19th century Cassius Clay had briefly dated Todd before she married Lincoln) to the so-called “Rumble in the Jungle” fight in Zaire (before and since known as Congo) in 1974 in which he finally regained the heavyweight world’s championship that had been stripped from him in 1967 when he defeated George Foreman, who had previously taken the title from Ali’s nemesis, Joe Frazier. The teenage Cassius Clay is played by Chip McAllister, whose resemblance to the real Ali is uncanny. According to TCM hosts Ben Mankiewicz and Donald Bogle (a Black writer who’s written extensively on the history of African-Americans in U.S. films), The Greatest was a sufficiently prestigious productions a lot of major stars, both Black and white, wanted to be in it. The cast includes Ernest Borgnine as Ali’s long-time trainer, Angelo Dundee; James Earl Jones as Malcolm X; Roger E. Mosley (who’d played Leadbelly in Gordon Parks’s 1976 biopic of the great blues singer) as Sonny Liston; and Robert Duvall as Bill McDonald, who warns Ali to keep quiet about his change of name and religion (from Christianity to Islam, or at least the oddball variant of Islam practiced by Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam) until after his first heavyweight title fight against Liston. Where The Greatest succeeds most effectively is in dramatizing the sheer extent of the racism Ali had to deal with every day as a young Black man in Louisville, Kentucky (including having to deal with an obnoxious white guy on the grounds of his original white female senior-citizen mentor who orders him off the premises until Clay convinces his Black colleague that he’s been invited) and later (when he’s at a resort cabin warming up for his latest fight, Ali and his entourage are attacked by a white lynch mob with rifles and barely escape with their lives). One wonders watching this movie why more African-Americans didn’t join revolutionary movements and why the mainstream civil-rights movement stayed nonviolent as long as it did.

One item I wish they’d included was the comeback Ali gave to people who questioned how he could be a conscientious objector to military service when he made his living in a violent sport like boxing. Ali said, “That’s different. You don’t go out to kill in boxing.” Also I’m a bit sorry that they chose to open the film with his 1960 Olympic win if only because I’d like it to have included the marvelous story of how Ali got into boxing in the first place. As a child, when two white kids stole his new bicycle, Clay hunted them down and threatened to beat them up – until a white police officer intervened. The policeman offered to take him to a gym to show him a more constructive and socially sanctioned way to get out his aggressive urges. Fortunately, since Ali was playing himself, Gries could use actual footage of his fights to represent them, though I could have done without the cheesy music Masser put under the clips (from the awkward moment in Black musical history when disco was just starting to emerge from what had been R&B and soul). Overall, though, The Greatest was quite good entertainment, and in the scenes dramatizing Ali’s refusal to be inducted into the U.S. Army over his principled opposition to the Viet Nam War it gets even better than that. Ali, Gries, Lardner, and Gunn do a great job showing both Ali’s principles (at one point someone in the U.S. military says that if he cooperates with the draft they’ll use Ali as a morale booster the way they did with Joe Louis in World War II and he won’t have to see combat, and Ali says that would still be supporting a war he doesn’t believe in) and their enormous cost, including being banned from his chosen profession during his potentially peak years. There was a later fiction film about Ali called simply Ali (2001), with Michael Mann directing and Will Smith playing him, and somewhere in my collection I have a two-DVD set containing both The Greatest and Ali. There’ve also been a number of documentaries, including a quite good four-part PBS presentation from 2013 (three years before Ali’s death) produced and directed by Ken Burns.

Desire Me (MGM, 1947)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After The Greatest on Wednesday, October 28 my husband Charles and I watched a highly quirky 1947 romantic melodrama from MGM called Desire Me, starring Greer Garson, Robert Mitchum, and a new discovery named Richard Hart whom MGM had great hopes for, judging from how they promoted him in the trailer. The film began life as a 1926 novel by German Expressionist writer Leonhard Frank called Carl and Anna, and the screenwriting credits are Casey Robinson for “adaptation” and Marguerite Roberts and Zoë Akins for the actual script. At one point Robinson had refused to take credit for any screenwriting he hadn’t done entirely by himself; he wrote the love scenes between Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca but, because he declined credit, he did himself out of the Academy Award won by Casablanca’s other writers, Julius and Philip Epstein and Howard Koch. I guess Robinson learned his lesson, and indeed the plots of Casablanca and Desire Me have one major commonality: they both feature heroines who have adulterous affairs but don’t realize they’re doing so because they think their husbands are dead. Desire Me takes place on an island off the coast of Brittany in northern France, and the heroine is Marise Aubert (Greer Garson, who’s referred to as a redhead in the dialogue; she was a redhead for real, too, but we hardly ever got to see her that way because she made so few films in color). She had been born and raised in Paris until she met Paul Aubert (Robert Mitchum), who married her and brought her back to the fishing village in Brittany where he’d grown up. Then World War II started and Paul got into the French army, only he didn’t serve very long because he was quickly taken prisoner by the Germans and put in what was called a “reprisal camp,” a particularly nasty POW camp reserved for troublemakers who tried to escape multiple times. Paul befriended a fellow prisoner named Jean Renaud (Richard Hart), who before the war had been a scapegrace thief in Paris, and told him extensive details about his life in Brittany that made Jean fall in long-distance love with Marise despite not having met her. Then the two try to escape from the prison camp, only they’re recaptured by the Germans and Paul is apparently killed.

All this happens in the backstory or in a few flashback scenes; the entire movie is a flashback told by Marise to her doctor in Paris, André Leclair (veteran character actor Cecil Humphreys), and as is typical for a Robinson script there are flashbacks within the flashback. When the film opens the war has just ended and Marise is still living on the island and mourning the loss of Paul. Jean shows up and uses his extensive knowledge of her life with Paul to seduce her (though given the limitations of the Production Code it’s almost certain they don’t get to do the down ‘n’ dirty with each other), and midway through the film they’re preparing to get married and flee with each other to Paris when Paul turns up, not dead after all. Naturally he’s fiercely jealous of Jean, and the two have a long confrontation scene in which Jean is armed with a gun and Paul with a knife. Jean tries to shoot Paul but keeps missing him – Paul grimly jokes that Jean was never any good with a gun, and that’s probably why he was so easily captured by the Germans in the first place – and eventually Jean falls off a cliff into the sea and drowns. Then the film cuts back to the scene between Marise and her doctor in Paris; Dr. Leclair assures her that there’s nothing wrong with her physically, and in the end she returns to Brittany and reunites with Paul. What makes Desire Me a particularly strange movie is that there isn’t a director credit: just the writers and producer Arthur Hornblow, Jr. (whose name is in cursive script, as was usual for him). According to imdb.com, four directors actually worked on the film: Jack Conway, George Cukor, Mervyn LeRoy, and Victor Saville. The cinematographer was Joseph Ruttenberg, and as Charles pointed out afterwards, though it’s really a Gothic melodrama rather than a film noir Desire Me looks more like a noir than some of the borderline cases Turner Classic Movies “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller has been showing lately.

The entire musical score by Herbert Stothart is based on a French sing called “Vous Qui Passez Sans Me Voir,” written by Johnny Hess, which though it isn’t sung on the soundtrack serves much the same purpose as “As Time Goes By” did in Casablanca. Its bittersweet lyrics not only don’t reflect the plot but actually seem at cross purposes with it; it’s about a man who sees his ex on the street and is miffed that she makes no sign of recognition towards him (the title literally means “You who pass by without seeing me”), while Marise has the opposite problem: two actual or potential mates instead of zero. (There’s another pre-existing song in the film: Maurice Chevalier’s 1925 hit “Valentine,” composed by Henri Christiné with lyrics by Albert Willemetz, which Marise plays as an instrumental on the piano in her cottage.) Desire Me has obvious references not only to Casablanca but a previous Garson vehicle, Random Harvest, filmed in 1942 with Ronald Colman co-starring as a World War I veteran who suffers from amnesia that causes him temporarily to forget that they were a couple before the war. Incidentally, while filming one of the beachfront storm scenes with Richard Hart, Greer Garson was swept up by a wave and injured her back so severely she spent several years and some painful surgeries to recover. Also an imdb.com “Trivia” item reports that “it took Greer Garson dozens of takes to enunciate the word ‘no’ to the director’s satisfaction. Co-star Robert Mitchum claimed later that this incident was when he first stopped taking Hollywood seriously.” One wonders which director that was; the incident anticipates what Billy Wilder put Marilyn Monroe through on the set of Some Like It Hot when he had her repeat the line, “Where’s the bourbon?,” over 64 takes. Desire Me is not by any standards a great, or even particularly good, movie (and one wonders why Robert Mitchum gets second billing when he only has about 20 minutes of screen time), but it has a haunting quality that makes up for its deficiencies and renders it surprisingly watchable.

A Stolen Life (B.D. Productions, Warner Bros., 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, October 27) my husband Charles and I watched a quite intriguing Bette Davis vehicle from Warner Bros., A Stolen Life (1946), in which she was cast in a dual role as Kathleen and Patricia Bosworth, twin sisters from New Bedford, Massachusetts. The film was at least nominally produced by Davis’s own company, “B.D. Productions,” though like Rita Hayworth’s “Beckworth” (named for Hayworth and her daughter Rebecca Welles) it was really just a tax dodge. When the film was shot it was 1944, World War II was still going on, and the federal government (back when we still had a progressive government that believed in taxing the rich and making them pay their fair share) imposed a top income tax rate of 90 percent. As the highest-paid woman in America Davis qualified, and so like Hayworth and a number of other stars of that era, she formed a dummy corporation in partnership with the head of her studio so her fee for the film could be considered a capital gain, not a salary, and therefore subject to only 25 percent tax. “B.D. Productions” was supposed to produce six films at Warner Bros.’s expense and for their release, but this one was the only one made under that banner. Davis and director Curtis Bernhardt, whom she requested after she’d seen his film My Reputation starring Barbara Stanwyck, clashed in subsequent years over who had actually produced the film, though Davis in her first autobiography, The Lonely Life, complained that even though she was the nominal producer, she still had to fight Jack Warner every step of the way over every creative decision, and if that was producing, “I had been a mogul for years.” Davis chose a story that had started out in 1935 as a Czech novel called Uloupený život (which literally translates to “A Stolen Life”) by Karel Josef Beneš. It had previously been filmed in 1939 by Orion Productions, released by British Paramount, under the same title with Paul Czinner directing and Elisabeth Bergner and Michael Redgrave as the leads.

A Stolen Life takes place in New Bedford, Massachusetts (also the location from which Herman Melville’s Moby Dick starts) and deals with twin sisters, Patricia and Kathleen Bosworth (both played by Bette Davis). In essence it’s a typical Davis vehicle which casts her as a bad girl who takes the good girl’s boyfriend away from her, though the big novelty is that Davis is playing the good girl, too. Kathleen, an aspiring artist who moved to New York, comes back to New Bedford and misses the ferry to the island where Patricia is living with their uncle, Freddie Linley (Charlie Ruggles, odd casting for a part that is specifically not played for comic relief). She catches a ride from Bill Emerson (Glenn Ford), assistant to lighthouse keeper Eben Folger (Walter Brennan in a “with” performance; Brennan was infamous for asking his directors, “Do you want it with or without?,” and when they inevitably asked, “With or without what?,” he’d say, “Teeth”). Katie (as she’s called through most of the film) instantly falls in love with Bill. She also buys a ship in a bottle that Eben Folger had coveted for years and offers to give it to him if he’ll pose for her for three hours every day for three weeks, though later she admits that she didn’t have any particular interest in painting him and only made the offer to have an excuse to visit the lighthouse so she could see Bill. (Incidentally the name “Folger” for the Brennan character ties this film directly to New England’s real-life history as a whaling center; my stepfather was named Folger and he told me he had descended from a whaling family in New England in the 18th and 19th centuries. He even once gave me an American Heritage book about whaling that mentioned some of his ancestors.)

Alas, when Katie makes a lunch date with Bill, her sister Pat (who Bill had had no idea existed) snaps him up and poaches him. She does worse than that: she totally enthralls Bill and gets him to marry her, though what he doesn’t know is that not only is she still seeing her previous boyfriend, Jack Talbot (Bruce Bennett), she’s had a long history of casual affairs. Katie slinks back to New York and wins enough of a reputation as an artist a gallery gives her a one-woman show (and gives her portrait of Eben Folger top pride of place). But her show is attended by a much more talented (though also with a major attitude) artist, Karnock (Dane Clark), and she eventually decides she’s no more than a third-rate artist. So she gives up her career and moves back to New Bedford, where Pat is still ensconced with Bill. Katie and Pat go out together on a sailing boat, whereupon a storm ex machina comes along and one of the sisters drowns. Katie tries desperately to save Pat’s life, but eventually she loses control and Pat dies, though in the process Pat’s wedding ring came off and ended up in Katie’s palm. The officials who rescue Katie naturally think she’s Pat, and Katie decides to steal her late sister’s life and continue to live as Pat, including being married to Bill, who of course was the man Katie loved all along. Then she learns that Bill had already decided to divorce Pat because of her “manizing” ways and history of extra-relational activities. Stuck as to what to do now, she seeks the advice of her uncle Freddie, who tells her that she’ll only be happy if she tells the truth about who she is and trusts Bill to be understanding – which he is. Eventually they end up in a clinch as the film fades out, though one wonders how Katie and Bill are going to handle having to get married first when all the world thinks Katie is Pat and she and Bill are already married.

The double-exposure shots of the two Bette Davises are utterly convincing, though director Bernhardt had a major advantage. Bette Davis was using a stand-in named Sally Sage who was virtually a dead ringer for her, and whenever one Davis has her back to the camera it was always Sage doubling for her. For scenes in which both sisters face the camera at the same time, they used traditional split screens. (Four special-effects people were credited: Russell Collings, Roy Davidson, William C. McGann, and Willard Van Enger.) The effects were so convincing that the next time Bette Davis made a film playing two sisters, 1964’s Dead Ringer, its director, longtime friend and former co-star Paul Henried, sought out Bernhardt to ask how they’d done the shots with two Bette Davises. When the film was released an anonymous reviewer for the Brooklyn Eagle write that it was “a challenge to an actress but not a very rewarding drama. It is filled with emotional high spots and it scores an exciting melodramatic climax, but it fails utterly to be convincing.” That about sums it up; it’s a great showcase for Bette Davis, who finally got to play both good and bad in the same film, but it’s a rambling movie with great scenes alternating with some pretty banal ones. Still, I’d seen it before and it was nice to catch up with it again.

North by Northwest (MGM, 1959)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, October 25) my husband Charles and I watched an Alfred Hitchcock double feature on Turner Classic Movies. First we turned on the 1959 classic North by Northwest as the final film in their all-day tribute to its female star, Eva Marie Saint, who’d died October 6 at age 102. Then the “Silent Sunday Nights” feature was 1926’s The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog, first and best of the five films based on Marie Belloc Lowndes’s (Hiliare Belloc’s sister) 1913 novel inspired by a chance remark made by a guest at one of the Lowndes’s parties: “I think I might have had Jack the Ripper as a lodger in my boarding house.” I’ve already written extensively about The Lodger recently enough (October 17, 2022) at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/10/the-lodger-story-of-london-fog.html that I don’t feel I need to repeat myself other than to note at least two oddball titles, both said by other characters describing the mystery lodger (Ivor Novello). One ran something like, “It’s good he doesn’t go for the ladies,” and another said, “He’s queer, but he’s a real gentleman.” I wondered if the title writers (Elliot Stannard got screenplay credit but often in the silent era the title cards were written by someone other than the overall screenwriter) were playing the same game I’ve long suspected some of Rock Hudson’s writers were doing at Universal in the 1950’s: sneaking veiled but unmistakable references to their star’s real-life status as a Gay man into their dialogue. As for North by Northwest, it had one of the most unusual geneses of any Hitchcock project. MGM had borrowed Hitchcock from Paramount, his usual studio at the time, to make a film called The Wreck of the Mary Deare, based on a 1956 novel by Hammond Innes about a derelict vessel found in the English Channel. MGM assigned writer Ernest Lehman to work with Hitchcock on adapting this novel, but after three weeks neither Hitchcock nor Lehman were satisfied with the results. Lehman went up to Hitchcock and told him that, despite his long-held desire to work with him, he was quitting the film because he really couldn’t relate to the story they were supposed to be making. “Don’t be silly,” Hitchcock said. “We get along so well together, we’ll simply do something else.”

The two began brainstorming ideas for typical Hitchcock action sequences, and Hitchcock said rather ruefully, “I’ve always wanted to do a chase scene across the faces of Mount Rushmore.” Eventually Hitchcock and Lehman came up with a list of sequences, but they still didn’t have a way to connect them to a story that made sense. Then Hitchcock remembered that at one point journalist Otis L. Guernsey, Jr. had suggested to him that he make a film about a nonexistent secret agent made up by the CIA or some other country’s spy agency to cover up for a really existing agent, and he and Lehman got the idea that the central character of their film could be mistaken for this dummy agent and be pursued by the real bad guys the dummy had ostensibly been after. But who should the central character be? At first Hitchcock and Lehman thought of making him an entertainer and casting either Frank Sinatra or Dean Martin in the role, but they decided that those personalities would be too well known to be mistaken for someone else. Later Hitchcock told the plot of North by Northwest to James Stewart, star of his immediately previous film, Vertigo, and Stewart immediately fell in love with the story and wanted to play the lead. But by then Hitchcock and Lehman had already decided that the right man for the part was Cary Grant, though they waited to start the film until Stewart was already tied up with Otto Preminger’s film Anatomy of a Murder and would therefore be unable to do anything else. (MGM actually asked Hitchcock to use Gregory Peck, whom Hitchcock had already worked with before on Spellbound and The Paradine Case, but Hitchcock thought he was too stiff for the role.) Eva Marie Saint got into the film similarly; after Grant asked Sophia Loren to play it and Loren turned it down, other names mentioned included Elizabeth Taylor and Hitchcock’s own choice, Vertigo star Kim Novak. Hitchcock was reportedly nervous about using Saint because she’d been a graduate of Lee Strasberg’s Actors’ Studio, which taught the “Method” style of acting. Hitchcock had had bad experiences the last time he’d worked with a Method actor, Montgomery Clift on I Confess. They had fought throughout the shoot because Clift kept resisting Hitchcock’s directions and asking things like the archetypal Method actor’s question, “What’s my motivation?” But Hitchcock and Saint got along quite well; all he asked from her was that she drop the register of her voice a bit, and she agreed. When both Hitchcock and Saint saw the costumes Edith Head had designed for her character, neither liked them, so Hitchcock flew her to New York City and bought a whole new wardrobe for her at Bergdorf Goodman’s. It’s been reported that Hitchcock meticulously picked out her purchases for her the way James Stewart did with Kim Novak in the plot of Vertigo, but according to Saint herself, he didn’t. Instead he let her buy anything he wanted, and Saint called Hitchcock “my sugar daddy – and I mean that in a good way.”

North by Northwest opens in New York’s Plaza Hotel (before the Beatles stayed there and well before Donald Trump’s miserable stint as its owner), where advertising executive Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) is mistaken for nonexistent spy “George Kaplan.” (Thornhill explains that he doesn’t have a middle name – the “O” doesn’t stand for anything – an in-joke reference to Hitchcock’s former employer, David Selznick, who also gave himself “O” as a middle initial even though he didn’t have a given middle name.) He’s kidnapped by two well-dressed gunmen and taken to the home of Lester Townsend in Glen Cove in upstate New York. The piece’s villain, Phillip Vandamm (James Mason), poses as Townsend and interrogates Thornhill, who doesn’t know anything about “Kaplan” or any of the things Vandamm is asking him about. One of the thugs force-feeds Thornhill with liquor and sends him out in a neighbor’s Cadillac convertible, with the idea that he’ll be unable to steer the car and will eventually get killed in a drunk-driving crash. Instead he survives but is arrested by the Glen Cove police for drunk driving. Thornhill’s mother Clara (Jessie Royce Landis, who had previously played Grace Kelly’s mother in an earlier Hitchcock/Grant film, To Catch a Thief) sends defense attorney Victor Larrabee (Edward Platt, who a few years later would be the head of the spy agency CONTROL on the spoof TV series Get Smart!, and whose assistant would be called “Larrabee” in an in-joke reference to his role in this film) to bail him out. Thornhill and his mom sneak into “Kaplan”’s empty room at the Plaza, followed by the thugs. Having learned along the way that Townsend is a United Nations official who’s scheduled to address the General Assembly that afternoon, the Thornhills head for the U.N. building and page the real Townsend – who turns out to be a totally different person from the one who ordered Thornhill’s abduction. What’s more, the real Townsend immediately gets killed by a knife thrown by one of Vandamm’s thugs – and Thornhill pulls the knife out of Townsend’s back. He’s immediately suspected of Townsend’s murder and is photographed with the knife in his hand. Now he’s a fugitive from justice, in the same predicament as previous Hitchcock heroes like Robert Donat in The 39 Steps and Robert Cummings in Saboteur. Thornhill tries to buy a ticket for the 20th Century Limited to Chicago, the next stop on “Kaplan”’s itinerary, but when the clerk at the counter recognizes him from the newspaper photographs of Townsend’s alleged killer and calls the police, Thornhill sneaks aboard the train without a ticket.

There he meets Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), who hides him out first in the train car’s restroom (having traveled on trains and used their bathrooms a lot, I related to these scenes more than I have before!) and then in Chicago after the police try to arrest him. She receives a phone call, allegedly from “Kaplan,” setting up a meeting between them at a deserted bus stop in the middle of Indiana. (Hitchcock and Lehman worked out this famous scene because, as Hitchcock said, “People in movies are always being ambushed after dark on deserted city streets. Let’s do one in totally the opposite way: alone in broad daylight.”) A nervous Thornhill first awaits “Kaplan,” then realizes that it's a trap and he’s been put into danger. But from where? He gets the clue he needs from a passer-by who’s waiting for the next bus at the stop where Thornhill came off and points out, “There’s a plane over there dusting crops where there ain’t no crops.” The crop duster turns out to be a paid assassin, part of Vandamm’s gang, and Thornhill is saved only when the pilot of the crop dusting plane loses control and crashes into an oil truck. Thornhill, sure that Eve has betrayed him to Vandamm, traces her to an art auction, where Vandamm and his men corner him. Vandamm and his gang are there to buy an Asian statuette that’s full of microfilm containing secrets they’ve stolen and are selling to unspecified foreign powers. (This is one Hitchcock film in which what he called the “MacGuffin” – the all-important object the villains are after but the audience couldn’t care less about – is even more pretextural and less relevant than usual.) Realizing that he has no other way to get out of the auction room alive, Thornhill stars disrupting it by bidding in crazy ways so he’ll be arrested by real, legitimate police rather than assassinated by Vandamm’s thugs. The cops turn him over to “The Professor” (Leo G. Carroll), head of the spy agency that created “George Kaplan” in the first place (which we’ve already learned about in a surprisingly boring expository scene both Hitchcock and Lehman should have been ashamed of). He also recruited Eve Kendall as their real agent to bring down Vandamm, who as a playgirl she previously fell for because of his surface charm and only later realized how evil he really was. “The Professor” gives Eve a blank-loaded gun and has her shoot Thornhill in a mock assassination attempt at the visitors’ center for Mount Rushmore, where Vandamm lives in a spectacular house copied from Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous designs (though actually a model built by the MGM sets and props departments). This is supposed to convince Vandamm that Eve is still on his side, but it doesn’t work because Vandamm’s right-hand man Leonard (Martin Landau) is convinced that she’s betrayed them to the U.S. government.

Interestingly, it was Martin Landau’s idea to portray Leonard as a Gay man in love with Vandamm and personally jealous of Eve. James Mason didn’t like the idea of being pushed into playing Vandamm as a Bisexual with Eve as his girlfriend and Leonard as his boyfriend, but he was stuck with it because Hitchcock and Lehman both supported it. Indeed, Lehman actually gave Landau an extra line in which he tells Vandamm that he's sure Eve has betrayed them because it’s “my woman’s intuition,” and later Vandamm, refusing to believe Leonard’s warnings that Eve has gone over to the other side, says, “You’re jealous!” (Landau later told interviewers that he wanted to play Leonard as Gay because he’d just come off playing a really butch heterosexual on stage in Paddy Chayevsky’s play Middle of the Night, and for his first film he wanted to do something totally different. “Everyone told me not to do that because it was my first big movie and people would think I was Gay,” Landau recalled. “I’m an actor. I said it wasn’t going to be my last movie, and it certainly wasn’t. I’ve never played a character like that since.”) The famous climax takes place across the faces of Mount Rushmore, and Hitchcock repeated a setup he’d done 22 years earlier in the film Young and Innocent with Derrick De Marney and Nova Pilbeam: Eve is dangling from a precipice on the mountaintop and Thornhill has to summon his last bit of strength to pull her to safety. Then Hitchcock cuts suddenly to a scene of Thornhill pulling Eve, now his (third) wife, into the upper berth of a Pullman car on a train, which in a stunningly phallic shot goes into a tunnel: the sort of thing directors working under the Production Code limitations had to work out to indicate sexuality without being able to depict it directly. My husband Charles joked it was the most dramatic jump-cut in a movie until the one between the ape throwing the bone and the spacecraft in the sky in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Hitchcock also had run-ins with the officials at the National Park Service who ran Mount Rushmore. They were especially down on him for wanting to do a scene in which Thornhill would have a sneezing fit while hiding in President Lincoln’s nose. For a while Hitchcock had even wanted to call the film The Man in Lincoln’s Nose, but the Park Service officials vetoed it. Hitchcock responded by ordering MGM to remove the credit thanking the National Park Service for their cooperation during the filming, though some prints contain it. The working title was In a Northwesterly Direction, after Hitchcock and Lehman both realized that that was indeed the direction in which they’d had Thornhill and Eve travel, but they realized that sounded clunky and ultimately they settled on North by Northwest, though both director and writer insisted they did not mean it as a reference to the line in Act II, scene 2 of Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.”

Also Hitchcock had a run-in with MGM executives when he turned in a release cut that ran 136 minutes. MGM’s “suits” wanted it cut to under two hours, but Hitchcock re-read his contract and noted that, even without him specifically asking for it, Hitchcock’s agents had won him final cut, so he was able to tell the folks at MGM to screw themselves and the film went out with only a few seconds removed from Hitchcock’s cut. It was a major box-office success and helped make up for the failure of Hitchcock’s two immediately previous films, The Wrong Man and Vertigo. North by Northwest is also remarkable for Bernard Herrmann’s music, which is so strong that one DVD edition of the film gave you the option of watching it with only Herrmann’s score on the soundtrack: no dialogue or effects noises. I was also amused to note this time around that three actors in the supporting cast went on to play leads in TV series dealing with the same plot issues of espionage and intrigue as this movie: Leo G. Carroll went on to play the head of the United Nations Committee on Law Enforcement (U.N.C.L.E.) on both The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. Martin Landau went on to play a lead in Mission: Impossible, and Edward Platt became the chief of CONTROL in the James Bond spoof Get Smart! North by Northwest is one of Hitchcock’s greatest “chase” movies, and while frankly I like Hitchcock better in what I call his “suspense of character” mode – in stories like Rebecca, Suspicion, Spellbound, Notorious, Rear Window, and Vertigo in which he’s using suspense technique to reveal the characters to us and not just excite us with thrilling chase sequences – it’s great fun and, in the slow development of the relationship between Cary Grant’s and Eva Marie Saint’s characters, more than that. There’s a revealing quote from Hitchcock offered by Lehman, who said that while they were working on it the director told him, “Ernie, do you realize what we’re doing in this picture? The audience is like a giant organ that you and I are playing. At one moment, we play this note on them and get this reaction, and then we play that chord and they react that way, and someday we won’t even have to make a movie, there'll be electrodes implanted in their brains, and we'll just press different buttons and they'll go ‘ooooh’ and ‘aaaah’ and we’ll frighten them, and make them laugh. Won’t that be wonderful?” That explains why later, when Hitchcock visited the psychiatry labs at UCLA to check whether the script of his next film, Psycho, was scientifically accurate, he saw a lab in which the researchers had attached electrodes to lab monkeys and were using them to stimulate immediate emotional responses in them. “Oh, great!” Hitchcock said, “Once you learn to do that with people, I won’t have to make movies anymore!”