Moonrise (Charles K. Feldman Productions, Marshall Grant Productions, Republic, 1948)

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

Last night (Friday, June 26) I watched the Washington Week telecast and then a quite good if flawed film on Turner Classic Movies: Moonrise, a 1948 film directed by Frank Borzage for Republic Pictures and an unusual combination of romantic melodrama and film noir. The script was written by Charles F. Haas based on a novel, also called Moonrise, by Theodore Strauss, and I was watching it on an unusual showing for which TCM has given Eddie Muller, the usual host of their “Noir Alley” showings on Saturdays, a chance to do his typical film noir thing on Fridays in summer as well with double bills. (Before Moonrise they showed an Anthony Mann film called Raw Deal, which I’ve written about before on moviemagg at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/07/raw-deal-reliance-pictures-eagle-lion.html.) Moonrise begins with an artfully composed shot of a man being hanged for murder; we soon learn that the killer/victim is the father of Danny Hawkins (Stephen Peck at seven, Johnny Calkins at 13, and Dane Clark as an adult). We later learn that Danny’s dad killed for at least morally understandable reasons: his wife (Danny’s mother) had just died after the local doctor had refused to come see her and instead just gave her some pills and told her husband she’d get better on her own. Danny’s dad blamed the doctor for his wife’s death and killed him in revenge, and with both parents gone Danny was raised by his Aunt Jessie (Selena Royle). He grew up the victim of constant bullying, particularly by Jerry Sykes (Tommy Ivo at seven, Michael Dill at 13, and Lloyd Bridges as an adult), son of local banker J. B. Sykes (Harry V. Cheshire). Jerry so continually taunts Danny about being the son of a man who was hanged for murder that when they finally confront each other at a dance (there’s some confusion as to where Moonrise takes place: we see an exterior shot of a railway station that identifies the locale as New Jersey but later we’re told it’s Virginia, and certainly the palmetto country and the terrible Southern accents affected by most of the actors, as well as the ruined old plantation house and the African-American caretaker that lives there that figure prominently in the later action, point towards the South), Jerry attacks Danny with a rock, Danny grabs the rock from him, and Danny ultimately kills Jerry with it. The Wikipedia plot summary on Moonrise indicates that Danny’s crime was justifiable self-defense, but the film itself is considerably less clear about that.

Fleeing the scene, Danny leaves behind his Swiss army knife hanging from a tree – Borzage and his cinematographer, John L. Russell (a favorite of major directors shooting films on limited budgets; he also shot Orson Welles’s Macbeth and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho) give us some long, portentous close-ups of the knife hanging from the tree branch where it snagged after Danny left the scene. Danny also has a crush on Jerry’s girlfriend, local schoolteacher Gilly Johnson (Gail Russell), and starts dating her after Jerry’s disappearance despite her fear that being seen going out with someone else so soon after her relationship with Jerry ended will cost her her job as a teacher. Danny and Gilly are involved in an auto accident with two other teenagers coming home from the dance, during a break from which Danny killed Jerry, caused by Danny driving drunk and losing control of the car. While in the wreckage Danny and Gilly kiss each other passionately without bothering to check on the status of the other two passengers. Danny and Gilly start dating, but only in out-of-the-way places like that old abandoned plantation house where the African-American caretaker Mose (Rex Ingram, the fascinating actor who was the first person to play both God and the Devil on screen: God in The Green Pastures and the Devil in Cabin in the Sky) lives. Mose is an old friend of Danny’s and lets them have the run of the place; he also sings them a blues song called “Lonesome” (written by the film’s overall composer, William Lava, to a lyric by Theodore Strauss, author of the novel on which Moonrise was based) whose references to a murderer being arrested, convicted, and hanged cut a bit too close to Danny’s own past for his comfort. (Rex Ingram turns out to have had a nice singing voice – assuming it’s his own, and I’m inclined to think it is.) Along the way Danny is involved in a raccoon hunt in which his job is to climb a tree and shake the targeted raccoon loose from the tree so the others in the party can shoot it. While on the hunt the dogs that are being used to track the game go crazy, and eventually the dogs lead the hunters to the body of Jerry Sykes. The dogs had been “planted” earlier in the film when Mose recalled an incident in his previous career as a railroad brakeman, where he gave his coat to a man riding the rods and later he turned out to be an escaped criminal who was hunted down by law enforcement with a pack of dogs. “It’s right to use dogs to hunt coons, not to hunt people,” Mose says.

The local sheriff, Clem Otis (Allyn Joslyn), at first suspects Ken Williams (David Street), the bandleader at the dance (who’d sung the film’s title song, composed by William Lava to lyrics by Harry Tobias, earlier at the dance), of Jerry’s murder, but eventually he decides Danny is the killer, at least in part because Danny’s knife was found in the swamp country by Billy Scripture (Harry Morgan), a deaf-mute whom Danny had previously defended but whom he attacks and beats within an inch of his life trying to find out where Scripture is hiding his knife. (I must acknowledge that, since he was playing a man who couldn’t speak, I didn’t recognize Harry Morgan. Usually I know him from his distinctive voice.) Ultimately Sheriff Otis and his deputies track Danny to the swamp country, where he’s gone to visit his surviving grandmother (Ethel Barrymore, who got third billing after Clark and Russell even though she’s only in one scene towards the end). I was sure this would end much the way director Joseph H. Lewis ended his 1949 film noir masterpiece Gun Crazy the following year, with the central anti-hero brought down by his boyhood friend turned sheriff. Instead Gilly Johnson meets up with him before the shootout starts and persuades him to give himself up, saying that if he can convince the authorities he killed Jerry in self-defense he’ll be let off easily and have a chance at a normal life. Eddie Muller cited Moonrise as an example of the rarely seen sub-genre “redemptive noir,” in which the protagonist is brought back from the noir world and morally redeems him- or herself. Frankly, I can think of at least two better “redemptive noirs,” Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) and Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground (1951) – and Raoul Walsh’s High Sierra (1941) might also have qualified if the Production Code Administration had allowed Warner Bros. to retain the ending of W. R. Burnett’s source novel, in which former gangster Roy Earle (played by Humphrey Bogart in the film) is allowed to live and find redemption.

To me the ending of Moonrise is a cheat that undercuts the visual and emotional power of the rest of the movie. The whole film is a clash between Borzage the director of romantic melodramas (at which he’d excelled since his days at Fox in the late silent era doing films like Seventh Heaven and Street Angel) and Borzage the would-be noir director, and with that phony ending romance won out over noir. Moonrise could have been a much more interesting film if it had exploited the philosophical question underlying the plot: will a man who as a boy is told throughout his life that he is evil become evil and do evil things when he grows up? It’s the question that haunted Gregory Maguire, author of the 1995 book Wicked – his reworking of The Wizard of Oz. Maguire said he was inspired to write Wicked by one of the most brutal and senseless crimes in British history, the kidnapping, torture, and murder of two-year-old James Bulger by two 10-year-old boys, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables. Maguire explained, “If everyone was always calling you a bad name, how much of that would you internalize? How much of that would you say, all right, go ahead, I’ll be everything that you call me because I have no capacity to change your minds anyway so why bother. By whose standards should I live?” Moonrise could have been a much more interesting film if writer Haas could have explored that theme, and also if the central character of Danny Hawkins had been better cast. Originally Moonrise was supposed to be first a Paramount and then an independent production to be directed by William Wellman with John Garfield as star. Alas, that version fell through and it ended up at Republic, which had signed Borzage to a three-film contract of which this was the third and last film. (The others were I’ll Always Love You, a big tear-jerker about an unfulfilled classical pianist and the farm boy she left back home, and That’s My Man, in which, according to imdb.com, “A poor young man is finally able to achieve his dream of running a horse at the track, but when he starts becoming successful, he begins to lose sight of what mattered to him before.”) Boy star Lon McCallister had tried out for the role of Danny, having already done a bit of Southern-fried Gothic noir in The Red House a year earlier, but it went to Clark instead. Frankly, I thought that during the early scene in which Danny killed Jerry, the roles should have been reversed and Lloyd Bridges, not the most subtle actor of all times either but a damned sight better and more charismatic than Clark, should have survived!

Live at the Artists' Den: Patty Griffin (Artists' Den Productions, WLIW, WNET, PBS, American Public Television, recorded 2007, released 2008)

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

After watching the film noir Moonrise on Turner Classic Movies on Friday, June 26, I waited almost an hour during which my husband Charles came home from work and I put on a PBS music show called Live from the Artists’ Den featuring singer-songwriter Patty Griffin. The show was copyrighted 2007 even though the series didn’t start airing on PBS stations until the following year. Griffin liked the show enough that she released it as a live CD in 2008, and it was quite impressive even though I tend to get Patty Griffin confused with the more country-style artist Kathy Griffin. Patty Griffin is a highly talented singer-songwriter who’s flirted with a wide range of styles, from traditional gospel to “Americana” to the kind of women’s folk music exemplified in the 1970’s by the late Laura Nyro and the still-living Carole King. Since Live from the Artists’ Den, unlike Live at the Belly Up or The Kate, does not offer chyrons at the start of the songs telling you what they’re called, I scrawled out the titles as best I could aside from the two songs that Griffin actually introduced by name, “Burgundy Shoes” and “Up to the Mountain” (inspired, she said, by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s last speech, in which he said, “I have been to the mountaintop”), and guessed them. The track listing at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patty_Griffin:_Live_from_the_Artist%27s_Den includes 14 to 16 songs (depending on whether you count the standard version or the one with two bonus tracks from the iTunes store) while she only performed 11 on the TV version, and they aren’t in the same order either, but here goes. She opened on acoustic guitar with her basic four-piece lineup (Doug Lancio on electric guitar, Bryn Davies on acoustic bass, and Michael Longoria on drums and a lot of elaborate ancillary percussion) with “Stay on the Ride.” Then she brought in a string quartet (Maxim Moston and Antoine Silverman, violins; David Gold, viola; and Jane Scarpantoni, cello) and J. D. Foster on electric bass for “Burgundy Shoes” before sending all her bandmates away and performing the next two songs, “You Never Get What You Want” and “Moon Song,” alone with just her voice and acoustic guitar.

Frankly, I thought the three she played on her own, those two and a later one called “Sweet Lorraine” (not the 1928 standard by Cliff Burwell and Mitchell Parrish which became Nat “King” Cole’s star-making hit when he recorded it first in 1940 for Decca and then in 1945 for Capitol), were her best. Griffin taped this show on February 6, 2007 just after the release of her album Children Running Through on the independent ATO Records label. She made an interesting comment in one of the interstital interviews these shows are almost always saddled with to the effect that in her early days she’d been told to sing out and sing loudly. Later she’d calmed down and started singing more softly and soulfully, but now she was going back to writing and singing loud songs again. Among her songs on Live at the Artists’ Den – one of whose gimmicks was to film the artists in unusual settings, here a Gothic ex-synagogue turned cultural center in New York City – were “No Bad News,” “When It Don’t Come Easy,” and a quite powerful song whose title I wrote down as “Just Before the Flood Comes.” Later she did “To the Top of the World” and “Oh, Heavenly Day” (which she identified as her first love song and said it was written for her dog). I loved the way she delicately balanced her set between loud, aggressive rockers and more plaintive singer-songwriter songs in the Nyro/King manner. Her voice throughout was solid and forthright, and on at least one song she played piano while on others she had the backing of veteran rock keyboardist Ian McLagan (1945-2014) of both the original Small Faces and its later iteration, Rod Stewart’s backing band Faces. Patty Griffin has had an up-and-down career, originally signing with A&M Records in 1996 only to be fired by them after two released albums and a third, Silver Rose, which they turned down and didn’t put out officially until 2013, though bootleg copies existed and leaked out before that. Then she signed with ATO and stayed with them until the Children Running Through album, following which she went with even smaller indie labels (Credential, New West) before starting to release her recordings herself, distributing through a company called Thirty Tigers, with Servant of Love in 2015.

Daughter of the Jungle (Republic, 1949)

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

Last night (Monday, June 22) my husband Charles and I watched the 1949 Republic film Daughter of the Jungle courtesy of a post on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbBIkSvF0bo. This movie was listed in the 1978 book The Fifty Worst Films of All Time by Harry Medved, his brother Michael (uncredited), and Randy Dreyfuss, and legendary film historian William K. Everson denounced the book itself as one of the worst movie books of all time, full of inaccuracies and rather lame critiques. (Part of the Medveds’ strategy was to trash films made by legendarily great directors: D. W. Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln, Alfred Hitchcock’s Jamaica Inn, Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible.) While I don’t think the people behind Mystery Science Theatre 3000 ever did Daughter of the Jungle, it was similarly ridiculed on the early-1980’s local San Diego-area precursor, Schlock Theatre, whose main difference from MST3K was that instead of being spoken over the dialogue, the snarky comments on the film were written under it as subtitles. One I distinctly remember was when one of the characters was saying, “He’s acting very strangely!,” and the subtitle read, “This is the first time anyone has ever mentioned acting in connection with this film.” Charles recalls us watching it together previously (which I don’t; I was pretty sure I hadn’t seen it since the Schlock Theatre broadcast). It begins with the titular daughter of the jungle, Karen Walker a.k.a. “Ticoora” (Lois Hall, who it turns out was born in the same town – Grand Rapids, Minnesota – as Judy Garland, though aside from that they had little in common except both being white women who had film careers), stands tall and proud in the middle of the Republic jungle trying her best (and failing miserably) to do the fabled Tarzan yell.

Then we get the opening credits, which announce that the film was directed by George Blair, written by William Lively (a quite inappropriate moniker considering how dull the film is) from an “original” story by Sol Shor, and the stars (if you can call them that) are Lois Hall, James Cardwell, William Wright, and Sheldon Leonard. (Three years earlier Leonard had been in one of the greatest movies of all time, Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, and here he was in one of the worst. It was the traditional fate of the character actor.) After the credits we cut to a small plane flying in unspeakably stormy conditions over the Republic jungle, with four people on board: pilot Paul Cooper (James Cardwell), co-pilot Carl Easton (William Wright), gangster Dalton Kraik (Sheldon Leonard), and his associate Lamser (Jim Nolan). Cooper and Easton are not only aviators, they’re also law-enforcement agents who have arrested Kraik and Lamser and are supposed to be flying them back to the U.S. to face justice. Only this doesn’t happen because the plane crashes due not only to the awful weather but it running out of gas. They crash-land in the middle of the jungle and there disturb the precarious existence of two previous plane-crash victims, Karen Walker and her father Vincent (George M. Carleton). The Walkers have managed to convince Liongo (Charles Soldani), chief of the local natives, that white people are gods because they’re immortal. They’ve also been able to reduce the level of disease among the natives by teaching them basic sanitation and hygiene. Liongo’s rival, Mahorib (Frank Lackteen), is determined to win his fellow natives back to his voodoo cult (yes, I know voodoo is exclusive to the Caribbean, but Messrs. Shor and Lively didn’t exactly bring a sociologically enlightened understanding to their script; seven years after Val Lewton, Jacques Tourneur, Curt Siodmak, and Ardel Wray brought a surprisingly sympathetic view of voodoo to I Walked with a Zombie, we’re back in old-fashioned booga-booga land), and one way he thinks of doing it is by killing one of the white characters and thereby showing they’re not immortal after all.

There’s also a plot device in the form of a $500,000 trust Vincent Walker set up for his daughter before they left for Africa that will be hers, but only if she shows up in the U.S. to claim it personally on her 21st birthday, which is going to be in a month. So the dramatic issues in Daughter of the Jungle are whether the white people can escape before Mahorib’s native faction kills them and whether Karen can get back to the U.S., which she hasn’t seen in 12 years (in one of the film’s few genuinely charming sequences, she asks the new white people in town about American culture and in particular whether Bing Crosby and Shirley Temple are still popular), to claim her and her dad’s fortune. Naturally Kraik and Lamser are trying to figure out a way to loot the trust and grab it for themselves – though Vincent built in a poison pill to keep that from happening: he had the trust stipulate that if anyone tried to break it, the money would immediately be distributed to a list of charities. There are a lot of plot holes in Daughter of the Jungle, and the one that particularly bothered me was that even though Karen Walker was supposed to have spent the last 12 years in the African jungle totally cut off from Western civilization, she’s clearly wearing clothes of Western manufacture and Shor and Lively don’t acknowledge that she couldn’t be wearing what she came in because she’s grown from a child to an adult in 12 years. Charles was particularly amused when Karen a.k.a. Ticoora does the Tarzan thing of swinging through the jungle on vines, and she always seems to have a new vine right at the ready as soon as she’s gone as far as she can on the last one. Ultimately all the other white people die except Paul and Karen, who end up swimming in a river that will take them to the Nile and civilization, from which they’ll fly to the U.S. and claim Karen’s fortune and then return to the jungle in a helicopter to pick up Karen’s dad.

Daughter of the Jungle isn’t a particularly bad film: it’s just mediocre, an 80-minute time-waster whose attempts to cram just about every jungle-movie cliché (though at least they avoided a lost city in the middle of the jungle and a huge gold stash in the middle of it) make the film leaden. I had dug this one out largely because of its director, George Blair, whose work on what turned out to be his last film, The Hypnotic Eye (1960), had been surprisingly impressive. Alas, Blair only shows that kind of flair on a few scenes in Daughter of the Jungle, notably one in which Paul is menaced both by a mantrap that has hoisted him above the jungle floor and a lion down below. (One thing that amused Charles about this film was that lions are shown as jungle beasts, which they aren’t. The African lions live in savannas and plains, not jungles. At least he gave the filmmakers points for not including tigers, which are naturally found only in Asia.) There’s also a neat wordless scene (in fact all the scenes in Daughter of the Jungle that show any filmmaking creativity at all are without dialogue) showing a log bridge across a canyon with a river below which collapses when Karen tries to cross it, courtesy of earlier sabotage by Mahorib (though ultimately Karen and Paul are able to dive off the cliff into the river and swim to safety). Daughter of the Jungle is a pretty useless movie, and given Republic’s usual reputation as an action studio one of the biggest surprises is how dull it is. Charles joked about the production grabbing every Afro wig in Hollywood, and (as is pretty apparent from the film and even more so from Charles Soldani’s head shot on imdb.com, which is in full Native American chief drag), all the extras are probably people who usually played Natives in Republic Westerns anyway.

Downhill (Gainsborough Pictures, Woolf & Freedman Film Service, 1927)

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

Last night’s (Sunday, June 21) Turner Classic Movies “Silent Sunday Nights” feature was one I was really looking forward to: Downhill, Alfred Hitchcock’s fourth feature film and the immediate follow-up to his third, The Lodger. It had the same writer (Elliot Stannard) and the same star (Ivor Novello, whom host Jacqueline Stewart described as a surprisingly open Gay man in an era in which the anti-Gay laws that had caught and punished Oscar Wilde were still very much in effect; he had a long-time partner, fellow actor Bobbie Andrews, from 1917 to his death in 1951, though according to John Stuart Roberts, biographer of one of Novello’s casual affair partners, Siegfried Sassoon, Novello “was a consummate flirt who collected lovers as he gathered lilacs”). Downhill was based on a play Novello co-wrote with actress Constance Collier in 1926 and was put into production almost immediately after the success of The Lodger by producer Michael Balcon and his company, Gainsborough Pictures. Novello plays Roderick “Roddy” Berwick, star student at an elite prep school, whose downfall begins when he and his roommate Tim Wakeley (Robin Irvine) spend a night at a candy shop with the woman who works there, Mabel (Annette Benson). Mabel shows her true colors by playing a record of a song called “I Want Some Money” – the label is shown on screen, which would have been a cue to the in-house organist or pianist to play the song (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChwRe3QOmIY&list=RDChwRe3QOmIY&start_radio=1). She and Roddy dance to it, but Tim is the man she’s really interested in; the two go off into a corner and have sex. Later Mabel complains to the prep-school dean, Dr. Dowson (Ben Webster), and says she’s got pregnant and Robby is the father. (We have only her word that she’s pregnant at all.) Roddy honors the deal he made with Tim and doesn’t rat him out.

As a result, he’s expelled from school just one week before the term was supposed to end, and he returns home to his parents early. His mother (Lilian Braithwaite) is sympathetic but his dad Sir Thomas (Norman McKinnel) is anything but; he denounces his son as a liar when Roddy tries to explain, and Roddy leaves home because he’s so hurt that his dad condemns him without letting him present his side of the story. Roddy’s downfall takes him first to a theatre company (referred to in an intertitle as “The Land of Make-Believe”) in which he gets a small part as a waiter. He attracts the attention of the play’s star, Julia Fotheringale (Isabel Jeans) … well, he doesn’t, but the 30,000 pounds he’s just inherited from a relative on his mother’s side does. Though she already has a live-in partner, Archie (Ian Hunter, later Dr. Watson to Arthur Wontner’s Sherlock Holmes in 1932’s The Sign of Four, easily the best of Wontner’s four extant films as Holmes), Julia gets Roddy to marry her, only to dump him as soon as she’s extracted his mini-fortune and left him in debt. From there Roddy crosses the English Channel and becomes a taxi dancer in Paris, mostly with middle-aged women as his clients. He sinks even further than that and becomes a wharf rat in Marseilles, falling into the clutches of a white sailor and his roommates, a Black couple. (One of the most fascinating aspects of Downhill is that all the steps in Roddy’s downfall are driven by avaricious women. Well, what else do you expect from a Gay male author?) They put him on a ship to London and he spends the five days of the voyage below decks in a delirious state as he dreams and re-lives the previous incidents of his life. Ultimately Roddy lands back in London and seeks out his parents, who welcome him like the Prodigal Son and not only reconcile with him but get him back in school at the end.

The first 25 minutes or so of Downhill are pretty dull, less because of any flaw in Hitchcock’s direction than the shopworn banality of the material. But my husband Charles came home from work right before Roddy is expelled, and the film got considerably more interesting as Roddy went downhill. Hitchcock threw in a lot of elaborate effects shots, including a great scene in which Roddy enters Julia’s room and, because of the angle in which she’s laying in bed as he comes in, she first sees him upside down: a scene Hitchcock later reused between Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant in Notorious. As the film progresses Hitchcock throws in more and more expressionistic camera effects – remember that Hitchcock’s first two films as director, The Pleasure Garden and the now-lost The Mountain Eagie, were British-German co-productions and Hitchcock was in UFA Studios when F. W. Murnau and Fritz Lang were making their early masterpieces and learning from them. In later years Hitchcock thought he’d overdone these effects, but they add a lot to the movie and anticipate much of his later work. Jacqueline Stewart tried her best to link Downhill to Hitchcock’s subsequent films, saying that it’s about a young man whose life is unhinged by circumstances over which he has no control and he has to fight back against other people’s presumptions of his guilt. I think she was reaching a little (or more than a little), but it was certainly fascinating to watch this early Hitchcock a day after I’d seen one of his fully realized masterpieces, Rear Window (1954), and notice the embryo of a later master of cinema!

Rear Window (Alfred J. Hitchcock Productions, Patron, Paramount, 1954)

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

Last night (Saturday, June 20) I went back to one of my former patterns and did a three-film marathon on Turner Classic Movies, starting with one of their double bills, co-hosted by Ben Mankiewicz and African-American actor Colman Domingo (who achieved sudden stardom with his incandescent villain portrayal of Michael Jackson’s father, Joe Jackson, in the recent Michael biopic). The two films Domingo chose to pair were Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Rear Window (1954) and Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon (1973). He made a rather forced attempt to link the two and also made the bizarre argument that Rear Window is a dream of the James Stewart character and everybody else in the movie is just a figment of his imagination. That struck me as frankly ridiculous, though as a forced re-reading of a major film it’s along the lines of the re-reading of Edgar G. Ulmer’s vest-pocket masterpiece Detour (1946) to indicate that Tom Neal’s character really is a double murderer and his flashback proclaiming his innocence is just a lie. Rear Window, one of my all-time favorite films (and one which should have been listed in The Film Noir Encyclopedia: the editors included four Hitchcocks, Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious, Strangers on a Train, and The Wrong Man, and they omitted Rear Window and Vertigo I suspect just because they were in color), is a surprisingly timely tale about voyeurism that if anything is more relevant in today’s social-media age in which ordinary people post scads of information about themselves online and other ordinary people absorb it all and all too often obsess about it.

Rear Window started life as a short story by Cornell Woolrich, one of the major noir writers (and a closeted Gay man whose wife left him and had their marriage annulled after she discovered his diary, in which he’d written detailed accounts of his sexual adventures with male sailors he’d picked up), though he signed the story under his pseudonym “William Irish.” (That’s how the edition of the story I read was signed, though both the film’s credits and the original poster art listed him as “Cornell Woolrich.” Also, according to the film’s Wikipedia page, the original 1942 publication of the story in the pulp Dime Detective was called “It Had to Be Murder,” but the edition I read used the same title as the film.) Both the story and the film are about a news photographer named L. B. Jefferies (James Stewart) who was hit by a racing car during an auto race he was shooting for a carefully unnamed magazine that is pretty obviously Life and has been stranded with a broken leg for six weeks. To relieve the boredom he’s started looking through the windows of his New York apartment building and studying his neighbors, among whom are aspiring ballet dancer “Miss Torso” (Georgine Darcy); a songwriter (Ross Bagdasarian, who later would start making novelty records under the name “David Seville” and create Alvin and the Chipmunks); the desperately single “Miss Lonelyhearts” (Judith Evelyn), who primps for dates with men who never show up; a couple (Frank Cady and Sara Berner) who decide to sleep on the fire escape to get out from under the heat of a New York summer until a sudden rainstorm forces them to relocate indoors; a newlywed couple (Rand Harper and Havis Davenport) who hurriedly draw their window shades when they realize Jefferies is spying on them; and the piece’s central villain, Lars Thorwald (Raymond Burr), whose invalid wife Emma (Irene Winston) suddenly disappears midway through the film. Jefferies and his caregiver, insurance company nurse Stella (Thelma Ritter), become convinced that Lars murdered Emma and is sneaking her body out of his apartment piece by piece.

Hitchcock and his writer, John Michael Hayes, made two major changes in the story: they added the character of Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly in the second of her three Hitchcock films; as I’ve noted before, though Hitchcock was never known as an actors’ director he got Kelly to look sensual and alluring whereas in all her other films she’s so icy she could have sunk the Titanic) as a girlfriend for Jefferies. Also in Woolrich’s original story Lars is concealing the dismembered bits of his wife’s body by laying a split-level floor in his apartment and inserting them into the poured concrete. Rear Window seen today is a finely honed masterpiece by a great director working at the peak of his powers, and Stella’s comments condemning Jefferies’s voyeurism – “In the old days, they'd put your eyes out with a red hot poker” and “What people ought to do is get outside and look in for a change” – ring even truer in today’s Internet-driven social-media age. One of the most interesting things about it is that it’s, among other things, a film about the miscommunications that hamper human relationships. Jefferies and Lisa are hamstrung because she’s a society girl who isn’t used to the kind of roughing-it lifestyle he’s lived and also she’s “too perfect” for him. She enters wearing a fancy dress we’re told costs $1,100 – in 1954 money! – and appears to have the same sort of job Ginger Rogers had in Top Hat, wearing borrowed clothes to promote them and get other women to buy them. Ross Bagdasarian’s character is constantly throwing loud parties when he isn’t working on a sort of jazz symphony. “Miss Lonelyhearts” finally gets a man (Harry Landers) to come to her apartment, only she throws him out again and slaps his face when he comes on to her too strongly and blatantly sexually instead of going through the romantic rituals she was expecting. After her disastrous would-be date she gets out pills and is about to commit suicide – Thelma Ritter’s character eavesdrops on her through Jefferies’s long-lensed camera (as so often in movies, the telephoto lens becomes a phallic symbol and in this instance reflects Jefferies’s obvious sexual frustration because he can’t make love to Lisa because of his cast) and immediately recognizes the pills and what Miss Lonelyhearts intends to do with them – when she hears Bagdasarian’s music, and its romantic feelings reawaken her desire to live.

But the interruption screws up Jefferies’s plans to entrap Thorwald and get him to confess to the murder of his wife because Stella tells Jefferies to call the police to have them rescue Miss Lonelyhearts, which ties up his phone long enough for Thorwald to come to Jefferies’s apartment and pitch him out the window. So Jefferies ends up (with typical Hitchcockian irony) with both legs broken and sentenced to seven weeks’ more isolation in that damned apartment. There’s also an intensely moving scene in which the woman member of the couple who slept out on the fire escape and got caught in the rain regularly lowers a basket to the ground containing her dog (apparently 1954 was the days before leash laws), only she finds the dog dead – Thorwald killed it to keep it from digging up the flowerbed where he’d buried the tools with which he cut up his wife’s body – and she cries out in anguish in a well-turned speech saying neighbors ought to be nice to each other and accusing one of them of killing her dog just because the pooch was nice to them. That turns out to be the clue Jefferies and Lisa seize on to deduce Thorwald killed both the dog and his wife because he’s the one person in the building who didn’t react to her outburst. Rear Window is a film that works on every conceivable level, including the well-chosen music. Though Bernard Herrmann, a frequent collaborator of both Hitchcock and Orson Welles, said Welles was the only musically literate director he ever worked with, that’s belied by the excellent smorgasbord of music Hitchcock and his composer on this film, Franz Waxman, added to Rear Window. Many pop songs from previous Paramount films, including “Mona Lisa,” “That’s Amore,” and Richard Rodgers’s “Lover,” appear; so do a few classical selections (including the aria “Ach, so fromm” a.k.a. “M’appari” from Friedrich von Flotow’s opera Martha) and so extended an excerpt from Leonard Bernstein’s ballet Fancy Free (used as the music Miss Torso is practicing her dancing to) that Bernstein practically deserved a co-credit with Waxman as the film’s composer. Rear Window was remade as a TV-movie in 1998 with real-life disabled man Christopher Reeve in Stewart’s role and a Black man replacing Thelma Ritter as his nurse, but though that wasn’t a bad movie it’s hardly on the level of Hitchcock’s classic.

Paper Moon (The Directors’ Company, Paramount, 1973)

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

Last night (Saturday, June 20) I watched three films in a row on Turner Classic Movies: Rear Window, Paper Moon, and the 1946 film The Man I Love. Paper Moon was a capable and quite charming movie, though after Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece Rear Window it was decidedly a comedown. It was directed and produced by Peter Bogdanovich, who like François Truffaut began as a film critic and historian, interviewing such legendary directors as John Ford and Allan Dwan. Bogdanovich made his debut as a writer/director in 1968 with an extraordinary movie, Targets, which combined two stories: a disillusioned veteran horror actor (Boris Karloff) who’s convinced that the brutality of modern life has rendered his movies meaningless, and a serial killer (Tim O’Kelly) who stages a mass shooting at a drive-in theatre showing the Karloff character’s latest film. He followed that up with The Last Picture Show (1971), based on a Larry McMurtry novel about a small town in Texas which is dying out as a lot of its residents either die or leave. The Last Picture Show was set in 1951 and Bogdanovich decided to make it look drearier by shooting it in black-and-white. He also dumped his first wife, art director Polly Platt, for his blonde star, Cybill Shepherd. After What’s Up, Doc?, a screwball comedy starring Barbra Streisand and Ryan O’Neal in what was essentially a rehash of Howard Hawks’s 1938 screwball classic Bringing Up Baby (with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant), Bogdanovich teamed up with O’Neal again for Paper Moon, a Depression-era comedy/romance set in the 1930’s (just when in the 1930’s is a bit unclear; Franklin D. Roosevelt is already President but Prohibition is still in force, though the 21st Amendment which repealed it still allowed states to maintain their own prohibition laws) in Kansas and Missouri.

The big thing everyone remembers about this movie is that not only was Ryan O’Neal the star, he cast his nine-year-old daughter Tatum O’Neal as his daughter in the film. Actually it’s not specified that the characters the O’Neals play in the film are father and daughter – his name is Moses Pray and hers is Addie Loggins – but the novel on which the film was based (published in 1971, two years before the film was made) by Joe David Brown was called Addie Pray and there was no reason to cast the roles with a real-life father-daughter pair unless the characters were supposed to be father and daughter as well. Like The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon was shot in black-and-white to make it look more like a movie from the time period in which it takes place, but cinematographer László Kovács was unable, at least for the first half of the film, to re-create the rich, deep grayscales of authentic 1930’s films. The images reminded me of Verichrome Pan, the tacky, overly grey black-and-white film Kodak offered amateur photographers in the 1960’s (when I started taking photos of my own), though later on as the film got darker (literally and figuratively) and more of it took place at night, Kovács’s black-and-white images did start to look more authentically like 1930’s films. The plot is a charming tale of Moses Pray’s life as a con man, albeit a lovable and sympathetic one (there’s a strong similarity to the movies W. C. Fields made in the 1930’s as a con man traveling with a daughter, particularly The Old-Fashioned Way and Poppy, and though in Fields’s movies the daughter was a young woman instead of a pre-pubescent girl so she could be paired off with a male romantic lead at the end, the dynamics aren’t that different).

The film starts with the funeral of Addie’s mother, at which Moses agrees to see her off to the train to St. Joseph, Missouri where there’s an aunt she can live with who’s Addie’s only known living relative. Along the way Moses cons a railway station agent out of $200 which Addie insists is rightfully hers, though his main scheme is posing as a traveling salesman for the “Kansas Bible Company.” In this alleged capacity he drives through the countryside stopping at the homes of women who’ve recently been widowed and claiming that their husbands ordered them Bibles before they croaked. If the scheme works as planned, he can extract full price for the Bibles less the $1 the late husband allegedly paid as an advance. Addie, who has a better business sense than Moses, improves on the con and makes it more lucrative. Then sex rears its head in the person of Trixie Delight (Madeline Kahn), a prostitute Moses falls for, and her 15-year-old Black maid Imogene (P. J. Johnson). Addie resents Trixie for usurping the front seat in Moses’s car Addie thinks she deserves herself, though she and Imogene bond. As they travel they collect their earnings in a Cremo Cigars box, a nice touch given that Cremo was Bing Crosby’s first national radio sponsor in 1931; Crosby was billed as “The Cremo Crooner” and one of the songs he sang on the Cremo show, “Just One More Chance,” is heard in the film. In fact a lot of songs from the period are heard in the film (Rudi Fehr gets a special credit for supplying the period records), alongside radio transcriptions of broadcasts featuring Jack Benny (who was still alive when the film was made and gave permission for them to be used) and Jim and Marian Jordan, a.k.a. Fibber McGee and Molly. Addie travels with a portable radio on which she listens to these shows, and there’s a running gag as Moses tries to sleep with Addie’s radio going and demands that she turn it off.

Ultimately the film takes a really dark turn as Moses decides to scam local bootlegger Jess Hardin (John Hillerman) out of $600 by stealing his own whiskey and then selling it back to him, only Hardin’s brother, a local sheriff’s deputy (also John Hillerman), catches him and literally runs him out of town. Desperate to escape across the state line from Kansas to Missouri, Moses stops by a local farm and offers to trade his relatively new car for the farmer’s truck, even though the truck barely runs. The farmer is played by Gilbert Milton and his four sons include Leroy (a young Randy Quaid), who agrees to wrestle Moses as part of the deal. Moses wins (surprisingly since Leroy literally towers over him) and he and Addie escape in the truck, only Deputy Hardin catches up to him, beats him up and takes back the money. Moses drops Addie at her aunt’s home, and the aunt turns out to be warm and loving, but Addie’s bored out of her wits by her bland, normal existence and runs off to pair up with Moses again at the end. Paper Moon is a really charming and delightful movie, and Tatum O’Neal won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress (she’s still the youngest performer to win a competitive Oscar), but I’d call it a good film rather than a great one. Bogdanovich’s later directorial career seems to be an all too typical case of an artist who “went Hollywood” in the worst ways; he made a musical called They All Laughed in 1980 and started an affair with his leading lady, Dorothy Stratten, only Stratten was murdered by her pathologically jealous manager/husband, whereupon Bogdanovich fell in love with and married Stratten’s sister Louise. Bogdanovich did make a few capable films after that, including Mask (1985) and a sequel to The Last Picture Show called Texasville (1990), but otherwise his subsequent career seemed to be a frittering away of his early promise much like that of his friend and mentor, Orson Welles.

The Man I Love (Warner Bros., First National, 1946, released 1947)

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

After Rear Window and Paper Moon on Turner Classic Movies Saturday, June 20, “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller ran an O.K. but quite confusing movie called The Man I Love, made at Warner Bros. in 1945 but not finished until a year later. The Man I Love began life as Night Shift, the second novel by author Maritta Wolff, published in 1942, the year after her debut book, Whistle Stop. Both books really pushed the envelope of the Motion Picture Production Code, but they sold well enough that they got turned into movies, albeit heavily rewritten: Whistle Stop by independent producer Seymour Nebenzal with George Raft and Ava Gardner starring and Léonide Moguy directing; and Night Shift at Warner Bros. with Raoul Walsh directing and Catherine Turney and Jo Pagano writing the screenplay. According to “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller, Warners originally planned it for an “A”-list cast, with Ann Sheridan as the struggling nightclub singer Petey Brown and Humphrey Bogart as the corrupt nightclub owner Nicky Toresca, who employs her as a singer and wants to get in her pants. Ultimately the film was cast with Ida Lupino as Petey and Robert Alda as Nicky – so right after having played George Gershwin in the biopic Rhapsody in Blue, Alda (Alan Alda’s father, by the way) ended up cast in a movie named after one of Gershwin’s most famous songs. Unfortunately, Lupino was on such a tight schedule she literally suffered from exhaustion, and during one scene with Alda she fainted on set and had to have her expensive gown cut off to be rescued. The Man I Love is a weird mix of family drama, jazz musical, and film noir. When the film starts Petey is working in a New York nightclub (Ida Lupino’s vocals were dubbed by Peg La Centra, Artie Shaw’s first female singer and later the wife of actor Paul Stewart) but she’s homesick for her family in Los Angeles. It’s not all that clear exactly how the various characters are related to each other, but eventually we learn that Petey has two sisters, Virginia Brown (Martha Vickers, the marvelous nymphomaniac in The Big Sleep but sadly underutilized here) and Sally Otis (Andrea King), a strait-laced woman whose husband Roy (John Ridgely) is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder caused by his service in World War II. (Though the film isn’t copyrighted until 1947 the production overlapped the end of the war, so it’s not surprising the conflict features in the plot.)

Petey also has a brother, Johnny O’Connor (Don McGuire), whose wife Gloria (Dolores Moran, the “other woman” introduced in the 1945 film To Have and Have Not that brought Bogart and his fourth wife, Lauren Bacall, together) is bored being stuck at home while Johnny works nights to support them and their twin kids. She wants to live the nightclub lifestyle and goes after Nicky Toresca, who has a club and employs Petey as a singer. Nicky is enough of a slimeball, especially where the women who work for him are concerned, that in one chilling scene he tells one of the cigarette girls to stay after work, only to rescind the invitation when he gets what he thinks is a better offer. Things turn around, it seems, for Petey when she goes to another nightclub, the Bamboo Club, and meets down-and-out piano player San Thomas (Bruce Bennett), the one genuinely conflicted character in the film. San was headed for a major career in jazz when he blew it all by falling in love with a bored socialite who married him, then dumped him and thereby sent him off the deep end into alcoholic oblivion. Now she’s returned to L.A. and seems to be after him again, and Petey tries her best to keep them apart. Instead San ends up shipping out as a sailor and the two have a bittersweet farewell on the dock as she sees him off in an ending Eddie Muller suspected was ripped off from the one in Casablanca, down to the “Here’s looking at you … ” line as the two part.

The Man I Love was filmed under the title Why Was I Born?, after a 1929 Jerome Kern song that, like “The Man I Love” itself, featured prominently in the plot. Warner Bros. had bought the music publisher Chappell and Company, which owned the rights to much of the “Great American Songbook,” and they exploited that catalog to the hilt in making this movie – though one song proved problematic when the film was released to television in 1956. It was “Bill,” written by Jerome Kern to a lyric by P. G., Wodehouse for a 1917 musical called Oh, Lady! Lady!!, not used in that show but recycled a decade later when Kern and Oscar Hammerstein, Jr. needed a melancholy number for a scene in their 1927 masterpiece, Show Boat. Unfortunately whatever deals Warners had made for the rights to the other songs in the film didn’t include “Bill,” so rather than negotiate and pay a new licensing fee Warner Bros. cut the song and its six-minute presentation completely from the TV version and all subsequent prints. It wasn’t restored to the film until 2024. The Man I Love is a lumbering beast of a movie, proof that Catherine Turney had no business writing a film noir (she had worked on the more soap-opera aspects of Mildred Pierce, but Ranald MacDougall had written the more hard-boiled noir scenes and had ultimately got sole credit for adapting the James M. Cain novel on which Mildred Pierce was based). I wouldn’t call The Man I Love a great movie, or even a not-so-great movie with a great movie in it struggling to get out; instead it’s a film that achieves a level of competent mediocrity and hits on a lot of the Hollywood conventions and clichés of the time without saying much new about any of them.