The Last Sunset (Brynaprod, Universal-International, 1961)

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

Last night (Sunday, November 9) my husband Charles and I watched The Last Sunset, an entertaining if far from “classic” 1961 Western made by Kirk Douglas’s production company, Brynaprod, in association with Universal-International and co-starring Douglas and Rock Hudson (who, probably at Universal’s insistence, got top billing) in a grim tale directed by Robert Aldrich from a script by Dalton Trumbo (who the year before had started getting credits under his own name again on Douglas’s production of Spartacus and Otto Preminger’s Exodus after having been blacklisted as one of the original “Hollywood 10” in 1947) based on a 1957 novel called Sunset at Crazy Horse by Howard Rigsby. The film opens, as so many Westerns do, with a mysterious figure riding on horseback against a broad expanse of desert, and it’s only when Aldrich and cinematographer Ernest Laszlo get close enough to his face that we realize it’s Brendan “Bren” O’Malley (Kirk Douglas). Though the film takes place in Mexico (and was actually shot there; the exteriors were done in the desert town of Aguascalientes and the interiors were shot at the previously abandoned Azteca Studios in Mexico City), O’Malley is wanted for murder in Texas and a sheriff with the rather awkward character name “Dana Stribling” (Rock Hudson) is chasing him to serve him a warrant and arrest him for the murder of Stribling’s late brother-in-law. I was watching this on assignment for Fanfare magazine, which just sent me Intrada Records’ release of the original 1961 soundtrack, composed by Ernest Gold (coming right off the sensational success of his score for Exodus, whose main-title theme had actually become a hit single) and one of the better parts of the film as long as you ignore the cheesy pentatonic scales Gold wrote for the Native Americans and the equally hackneyed sombrero music he composed for the Mexicans. The Last Sunset has a doozy of a plot with more reversals than any script this side of Tony Gilroy. O’Malley seeks food and shelter from his long ride across the Mexican desert at the home of Belle Breckenridge (Dorothy Malone, excellent as usual in a pretty nothing role), who used to be his girlfriend but is now married to Confederate Civil War veteran John Breckenridge (Joseph Cotten, a welcome sight even though he’s killed off way too soon, and his rather grizzled appearance couldn’t help but remind me of Cotten’s quote from the early 1940’s that he was playing so much of his roles in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons in makeups designed to make him look middle-aged or older that when he actually became middle-aged, audiences would look at him and think, “My, how well Cotten is aging. He hasn’t changed a bit!”) and is raising a daughter, Melissa, nicknamed “Missy” (Carol Lynley).

Missy is 15 and about to turn 16, and she’s at the age when she insists that everyone around her call her a “woman” instead of a “girl.” John Breckinridge asks O’Malley to help lead his herd of cattle across the U.S. border to the town of Crazy Horse, Texas (it’s a bit jarring to hear the name “Crazy Horse” as a place instead of a person), where he can sell them. O’Malley agrees in exchange for one-fifth of Breckinridge’s herd and Belle agreeing to leave Breckinridge and reunite with him. O’Malley intends to enlist Dana Stribling as trail boss even though the two are bitter enemies, and when Stribling shows up the principals, including Belle and Missy, set off together on the cattle drive. They decide they need more men, and so they stop off at a town called “Tres Santos” (“Three Saints”) to recruit them – only John Breckinridge gets killed when he’s challenged in a bar by men who, like him, fought in the U.S. Civil War on the Confederate side as members of Stonewall Jackson’s army at Fredericksburg. (Stribling, by contrast, fought under Ulysses S. Grant on the Union side.) The men accuse him of being a coward who deserted at Fredericksburg, and despite O’Malley’s and Stribling’s attempts to protect him, John gets shot dead from behind by one of the barmen, thereby showing cowardice of his own. Also, the three men Stribling and O’Malley bring on board the cattle drive, brothers Frank (Neville Brand) and Ed (Jack Elam) Hobbs and a young outlaw identified only as “The Julesburg Kid” (played by actor James Westmoreland but billed as “Rad Fulton”) decide they can make more money kidnapping and trafficking Belle and Missy and selling them to a Dutchman in Vera Cruz than they can make on the cattle drive, though when they try it Belle herself shoots Frank Hobbs and O’Malley humbles the Julesburg Kid by engaging him in a weird contest which involves them tying their horses together and riding around each other. Along the way, Missy develops a May-December crush on O’Malley and plans to run off with him while Stribling is forcefully demanding that the newly widowed Belle marry him. At one point three Yaqui braves ride up and seem ready to attack the cattle herd, and O’Malley callously shoots and kills one of them with a rifle before a huge band of Yaqui accost them – only it turns out they just want to buy some of the cattle for their own food supplies, and Stribling gives them the one-fifth of the herd O’Malley had demanded as part of his pay for going on the drive. (This scene led Charles to call this a pro-Native Western, which it really isn’t; it’s certainly not at the level of the stunning 1932 End of the Trail, reviewed at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2012/02/by-mark-gabrish-conlan-copyright-2012.html!) It turns out that O’Malley dated Belle when she was just a teenager herself, and the reason he’s attracted to Missy is she reminds him of Belle at that age – something Belle even accuses him of when she says he wants the 15-year-old Belle he remembers instead of the adult she is now.

The Proustian complications get even worse when Missy shows up wearing a torn yellow dress; earlier O’Malley had recalled dating Belle when she was wearing that dress, and Belle said she’d burned it. Well, anyone aware of how difficult it was to get decent clothes in the Old West would look askance at that one, and it turned out Belle didn’t burn the dress at all. Instead she put it amongst her old clothes, and Missy found it and put it on, tear and all (the tear was from when O’Malley ripped off the corsage originally on the dress that another man had given Belle). Later Belle tells O’Malley that [spoiler alert!] he can’t marry Missy because Missy is O’Malley’s daughter, not the late John Breckinridge’s. O’Malley reacts so violently to the news he slaps Belle, but she insists that it’s the truth. Just then the cattle drive (ya remember the cattle drive?) reaches the Rio Grande and crosses the Mexico-U.S. border, and rather than attempt to arrest O’Malley, Stribling challenges O’Malley to a gun duel at sunset (though Charles caught a continuity gaffe: there’s an establishing shot of a sunset but the duel itself takes place at high noon). The duel takes place, though just before it happens O’Malley carefully and deliberately takes the bullets out of his gun, so Stribling shoots and kills him and then notices that O’Malley’s gun was empty all the time. (Today it would be called “suicide by cop.”) Belle ends up with Stribling and O’Malley’s death spares Missy the embarrassment of having to deal with the fact that she fell in love with a man who was not only old enough to be her father but actually was her father. In Frank DeWald’s liner notes for the Intrada Records CD reissue of the soundtrack music for The Last Sunset, he ties it in with the so-called “psychological Westerns” that became the rage in the early 1950’s, like Winchester .73, High Noon and a previous Aldrich film, Vera Cruz (1954), which like The Last Sunset casts two big-name male stars (there Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster) playing characters who can’t stand each other but are forced to work together in a journey across Mexico. Actually the earliest “psychological Western,” or at least the first one I’ve seen, was John Ford’s remarkable 1926 silent film Three Bad Men, in which a law enforcement officer is the principal villain, three outlaws are the effective heroes, and Ford and his writer, John Stone, created a far more complex set of conflicts between ostensible heroes, ostensible villains, and would-be settlers than anything that occurred to Howard Rigsby, Dalton Trumbo, or Robert Aldrich on The Last Sunset. The Last Sunset was shot entirely in Mexico, though Charles was jarred by the contrast between the highly effective daylight exteriors (shot on a Western street set in Aguascalientes, whose city government pleaded with the filmmakers to leave standing after they finished in hopes it would become a tourist attraction) and the phony nighttime scenes, obviously shot on a soundstage with a crudely painted dark blue backdrop representing the night sky. It’s a quite accomplished film, but nothing special despite the efforts of all and sundry to make it so with a lot of curious plot reversals – and just one night after seeing the 1959 Imitation of Life, Charles and I were watching yet another Universal-International movie in which a teenage girl falls for her mother’s boyfriend!

Imitation of Life (Universal-International, 1959)

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

Last night (Saturday, November 8) my husband Charles and I watched three consecutive films on Turner Classic Movies, two of which were themed around the African-American experience. The first was the 1959 version of Imitation of Life, based on a tear-jerker novel by Fannie Hurst published in 1932 and first filmed by Universal in 1934 with John M. Stahl (Universal’s go-to guy for overripe romantic melodramas back then) directing and a script by William Hurlbut, miles away from his best-known credit as the writer of The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), though as I said when I wrote a moviemagg review of the 1934 Imitation of Life (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2024/03/imitation-of-life-universal-1934.html), “[T]hough the two films are miles apart genre-wise, in a way they’re both about outsiders cursed by the circumstances of their births and desperately seeking acceptance.” Imitation of Life as Hurst conceived it and Stahl filmed it in 1934 told the story of two women, both widows with young daughters, one white and one Black. In the original the white one was called Beatrice “Bea” Pullman (Claudette Colbert) and the Black one was Delilah Johnson (Louise Beavers). Bea’s daughter is Jessie (Juanita Quigley at six, Rochelle Hudson as a teenager), and Delilah’s is Peola (Dorothy Black at eight, Fredi Washington as a teenager). Peola is light-skinned (courtesy, we’re told, of a father who was an unusually light-skinned African-American) and is determined to “pass” for white, The two adult women enter the restaurant business when Delilah turns up accidentally at Bea’s apartment looking for a job as a maid, and though Bea doesn’t have any money she agrees to take Delilah and Peola in as boarders and have Delilah work for her keep. Delilah makes incredible pancakes, Bea makes an equally great syrup for them, and the two first open a restaurant in Atlantic City and then, at the suggestion of a former entrepreneur turned homeless by the Depression, they build a thriving business selling boxes of “Aunt Delilah’s Pancake Flour.”

Unfortunately, the 1959 filmmakers, director Douglas Sirk (making what turned out to be his last film) and writers Eleanore Griffin and Allan Scott, made two changes that severely weakened the story. First, they made the white woman an aspiring actress, Lora Meredith (Lana Turner), who’s trying to achieve theatrical stardom on Broadway, and the Black woman, Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore), just her maid instead of her business partner, depriving her of the independence and agency Louise Beavers had got to play in 1934. Second, they cast white actress Susan Kohner as Sarah Jane Johnson, Peola’s equivalent, instead of the light-skinned Black actress Fredi Washington who’d played her in the original. When I first saw the 1959 Imitation of Life I’d never seen the 1934 version and I was blown away by it. I was particularly impressed by Lana Turner’s performance; she’d never impressed me as having any acting talent at all, but with the end of her MGM contract in 1956 (with The Prodigal, a totally wretched alleged adaptation of the Biblical story of the Prodigal Son whose only good parts were the first five minutes and the last two minutes, the only parts actually based on the Bible) she seemed liberated. Her first post-MGM film, Peyton Place (1957), had been a first-rate movie both artistically and commercially – thanks to a profit-sharing deal, she made more money from that one film than everything she’d done previously – and obviously she was looking for roles that would showcase her acting skills. This time around I was also impressed by Sandra Dee as the white daughter Susie; like Turner, she was showing off acting chops I’d never thought she’d had. However, my admiration for the 1959 Imitation of Life dropped considerably when I saw the Stahl version from a quarter-century earlier. It seems really strange that in 1934 Stahl and Hurlbut went all-out with both the racial and gender liberation aspects of the story, while on the eve of the mass civil rights movement – with the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, and the clash over school integration in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1957 already having served notice on white America that Black America wasn’t going to take being relegated to second-class status much longer – Sirk, Griffin, and Scott pulled back from the revolutionary implications of the original story.

Still, the 1959 Imitation of Life remains a quite impressive film, not as good as I’d thought it was before I’d seen the 1934 version, but with some aspects that still seem viable. Among them are the slimy agent Lora Meredith picks up on her way to stardom, Allen Loomis (Robert Alda, Alan Alda’s father and George Gershwin in the 1945 Warner Bros. biopic Rhapsody in Blue), who tells Lora that the only way she’s going to get ahead in the theatre is to prostitute herself to him and various influential people on Broadway (the #MeToo people would have had a field day with him!) – though in the end Our Lora manages to succeed as a star without having to have sex with anyone she doesn’t like – and the playwright David Edwards (Dan O’Herlihy), who writes a series of comedies to showcase her and has an affair with her (mutually consensual) until they break up over her insistence on trying a dramatic role. One major weakness in the 1959 Imitation of Life is the casting of the male lead: in 1934 he was Warren William, who was old enough he and Claudette Colbert were a credible couple and we could see for ourselves how wrong it was that Rochelle Hudson formed a crush on her mother’s boyfriend. In 1959 the part was played by John Gavin, to whom Universal-International was trying to give a major star buildup. Gavin had already been inflicted on Sirk for his previous film, A Time to Love and a Time to Die (1958), by the studio after his initial request to borrow Paul Newman from Warner Bros. for the role had been turned down. Though the story takes place over 12 years of time (1947 to 1959), Gavin doesn’t look any older in the later parts than in the earlier ones when he and Turner have a meet-cute on Coney Island. In fact he looks so young that when Sandra Dee falls in love with him, and then has to accept him as her stepfather instead of her husband, we think, “They’re both so young, why shouldn’t they get together at the end?” (Incidentally, imdb.com lists “Robert Darin” in the bit part of a waiter; one wonders whether Sandra Dee used her clout at the studio, such as it was, to get her then boyfriend, later husband Bobby Darin into the film.)

Sirk had previously remade another Stahl film, Magnificent Obsession (Stahl, 1935; Sirk, 1954) [https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2009/02/universals-magnificent-obsessions-1935.html] and had much surpassed the original; here, though it was a nice try, the compromises in the civil-rights and female empowerment angles severely, though not fatally, hurt the Sirk version. What’s left are some nice social comments about the evanescence of trying to live one’s artistic dreams; Gavin’s character talks about being an art photographer and exhibiting in the New York Museum of Modern Art, but settles for a job taking pictures for an ad agency and ultimately becoming a well-paid and outwardly successful but inwardly unfulfilled advertising executive. There’s also a stunning scene at Annie Johnson’s funeral in which Mahalia Jackson is shown singing “Trouble of the World” (she’s showcased brilliantly, and she was enough of a draw for white audiences she gets her own card in the opening credits) and at the end Susan Kohner is shown literally rushing to her mom’s coffin, telling her (a bit too late!) how much she always loved her and essentially embracing her Black identity after having spent the whole movie trying to deny it. There’s one scene in which her boyfriend, played by a young Troy Donahue, literally beats her up on screen when he finds out he’s been dating a Black woman: a scene of open male-on-female brutality rare in a 1959 film. As I noted in my review of the 1934 Imitation of Life, “[T]he vigor with which [the Black mother] and Bea (who joins her in her crusade to find her daughter) keep ‘outing’ her becomes uncomfortably cruel after a while.”

The Learning Tree (Winger Enterprises, Warner Bros., 1969)

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

The next film up on Turner Classic Movies’ schedule Saturday, November 8 was one I’d been curious about but had never actually seen: The Learning Tree (1969), written by, directed, and produced by Gordon Parks, who also composed the musical score (adding him to Charlie Chaplin, Victor Schertzinger, and Clint Eastwood among the few directors who’ve also composed music for their films) and based it on an autobiographical novel about growing up as a young, rural Black boy in Cherokee County, Kansas. I’d alternately wanted to see this film and consciously avoided it because I’d assumed it was just a pastoral coming-of-age story in a rural setting, sort of like The Waltons with a Black family. It was considerably deeper and richer than that; Parks, making his debut as a filmmaker after years of working as a photojournalist for Life magazine, created a tale in which both white-on-Black racism and Black-on-Black hostilities play an important part in the story’s events. The Learning Tree is more a series of vignettes than a coherent plot with a through-line, but it’s still quite an impressive movie. It’s set in the 1920’s, in Cherokee County, Kansas (and the place name evokes comparison between white America’s oppression of its Black population and its genocidal attempts to eliminate its Native population: the Cherokee were originally from modern-day Georgia until President Andrew Jackson forced them out of the South on the so-called “Trail of Tears”). The central character is Newton “Newt” Winger (Kyle Johnson), who along with some other boys is shown stealing apples from the plantation owned by white farmer Jake Kiner (George Mitchell). Kiner catches them and goes after them with a long whip, and one of the boys, Marcus Savage (Alex Clarke), fights back and beats Kiner to within an inch of his life. Even before that we’ve seen a scene in which the landscape is menaced by a giant cyclone in the background – which couldn’t help but remind me of the most famous movie (partially) set in Kansas, The Wizard of Oz. Newt is taken into a storm cellar by a young woman who proceeds to undress him, though she gets no farther than that.

Later a Black family from Canada, the Jeffersons, moves into town. The Jeffersons attend the same local Black church as the Wingers (the scenes in church seem to be designed to show that a Black church can be just as boring as a white one), and their daughter, Arcella (Mira Waters), attracts Newt’s attentions even though they don’t get that physical. Newt and Arcella start dating, albeit innocently, and the two get taken into a drugstore with a lunch counter by young white kid Chauncey Cavanaugh (Zooey Hall), who treats them to Cokes. Unfortunately, the white guy who runs the place has a racist hissy-fit over having to serve Black people and insists that Newt and Arcella take their drinks outside. Later Newt is called into the office of his school’s principal after he gets into an argument with one of his teachers, Miss McClintock (Peggy Rea). Newt insists that he wants to go to college, and McClintock tells him to forget about it; she says all Black people, even well-educated ones, can only hope to be servants and porters. The principal, one of only two sympathetic white characters in the entire story, makes it clear to Newt that he doesn’t share McClintock’s racism and allows him to return to class. But while Newt has been sitting helplessly in the principal’s waiting room, he sees Arcella getting into Chauncey Cavanaugh’s car. We already knew Chauncey was sexually precocious because we’ve seen him in bed with a white girl and his mother caught them together, so it’s no particular surprise later when Arcella turns out to be pregnant. Newt’s parents Jack (Felix Nelson) and Sarah (Estelle Evans) accuse him of having had sex with Arcella, but he blurts out that Chauncey is really the father of her unborn child. After the incident, Arcella turns inward and refuses to talk to anybody (which may be what led the author of the film’s Wikipedia page to assume Chauncey raped her), and though Newt buys her a bottle of perfume, he’s unable to give it to her because the Jeffersons suddenly leave town without warning. Later, because he thinks he owes it to Jake Kiner, Newt offers to work on his farm for a summer without pay, while Marcus is sentenced to six months in a reformatory. When Marcus is paroled, his father Booker (Richard Ward) is required to sign a paper certifying that he’ll be responsible for him, and when the white man who offers him the paper calls him “Boy,” Booker makes an X on it and says that’s all the signature the white man who’s disrespected him will get. (Later Marcus explains to the man that his father can’t write.)

While eating his lunch in the hayloft, Newt watches as Kiner is physically attacked by a white farmhand, Silas Newhall (Malcolm Atterbury), whom he’s tried to fire for being drunk on the job. Then Kiner is killed, not by Silas but by Booker Savage, who was there to steal some of Kiner’s bootleg spirits. Newt sees the whole thing but is afraid to come out because his father has warned him of the probable retribution the white community will visit on the Blacks if they find out that a Black man killed Kiner. Newt then tells his parents the whole story, and they meet with the judge in Silas’s trial (Russell Thorson), who happens to be Chauncey Cavanaugh’s father. The judge tells the Wingers that it’s improper for them to talk to him about the details of what Newt saw, but he should contact Silas’s defense attorney, Harley Davis (Don Dubbins). Harley hears Newt’s story and calls him as a defense witness, the prosecutor (Jon Lormer) offers no cross-examination, and with Newt having named Booker Savage as the real murderer, Booker grabs a court deputy’s gun and flees with it. Then he shoots himself to death in the courthouse’s stairwell, while the white trial attendees threaten to lynch every Black person they can get their hands on out of revenge for Booker having killed Kiner – just as Newt’s dad had feared they would. Judge Cavanaugh, who’s the second non-racist white person we’ve seen in this film, chews out the whites in the courtroom for having quickly descended to lynch-mob mentality when they’d been willing to let the judicial process play out when they thought Kiner had been killed by a white person. The film ends with the death of Newt’s mother and him on his way out of town to get his education and proceed as far as his talents can carry him. The Learning Tree has its flaws; one suspects Gordon Parks and his cinematographer, veteran Bernard Guffey, were going after the ironic contrast between the natural beauty of the settings and the sordid things taking place in them (much the way directors King Vidor and George Hill and cinematographers John Arnold and Charles Enger had done with the horrors of World War I in the 1925 silent The Big Parade), but they overdid it. Still, it’s a quite remarkable cinematic debut for a director with only 10 films on his imdb.com résumé – including his next one, Shaft, a far better directed film than virtually any other Blaxploitation movie and one with an ironic tie to his previous career. Among the Shaft dramatis personae are a group of Black militants called the Lummumbas, who have a large poster of Malcolm X on the wall of the apartment in which they live communally. The poster was printed from a photo of Malcolm X which Gordon Parks had taken in his previous career as a photojournalist for Life magazine.

Blind Spot (Columbia, copyright 1946, released 1947)

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

The third film my husband Charles and I watched on Turner Classic Movies November 8 was Blind Spot, a 1947 Columbia “B” film noir directed by Robert Gordon (his first feature) and written by Martin Goldsmith (who also wrote the script for the 1946 Edgar G. Ulmer film noir masterpiece Detour; supposedly he co-wrote the original story for 1952’s The Narrow Margin with Hollywood veteran Jack Leonard as well, though Earl Felton wrote the actual script and was given sole credit on the original poster). TCM showed it on the “Noir Alley” program hosted by Eddie Muller, who chose this of all films to make the Schreiber case for the screenwriter, not the director, as the true creator of a film. The director in this case was Robert Gordon, making his first feature, though alas most of his subsequent work would be for TV. Goldsmith didn’t create the original story for Blind Spot; Barry Perowne did. (I’m still irritated by the tendency of Schreiber critics to make the screenwriters the real creators of a film and ignore, especially in adaptations, the writers who thought of the story and characters in the first place. I remember a particularly obnoxious article in the Los Angeles Times from a Schreiber theorist who credited Raymond Chandler with the excellence of the 1944 film Double Indemnity – only Chandler didn’t create that film’s plot, characters, and situations: James M. Cain did.)

One particularly annoying thing Eddie Muller did in his introduction to Blind Spot was repeat the myth that American movies didn’t depict alcoholism seriously until Billy Wilder’s and Charles Brackett’s The Lost Weekend (1945). In my moviemagg blog post on The Dance of Life (1929), based on the hit Broadway play Burlesque (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2011/06/dance-of-life-paramount-1929.html), I compiled a list of previous Hollywood movies that had depicted alcoholism seriously, including The Dance of Life, Applause and Lord Byron of Broadway, all from 1929; What Price Hollywood? from 1932; Dinner at Eight from 1933; the original A Star Is Born from 1937; Johnny Eager from 1940; and Ziegfeld Girl — Lana Turner’s character arc — from 1941. I had also mistakenly assumed that Blind Spot was part of the Boston Blackie detective series Columbia was cranking out with the same star, Chester Morris, which had enabled Morris to mount a partial comeback even though this tough, nuanced actor never achieved the superstardom he deserved (and other actors working the same good-bad territory, like James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, did). In fact it’s a one-off with Morris as Jeffrey Andrews, an acclaimed but poor-selling novelist in hock to an exploitative publisher, Henry Small (William Forrest), who has him under a terrible contract. Andrews is also a chronic alcoholic – though he more or less sobers up in mid-movie, as we learn from him finally shaving and abandoning the unattractive “drunk” voice with which he spoke his lines in the first half – who crashes the office of Small despite the attempt of Small’s secretary, Evelyn Green (Constance Dowling, younger sister of Doris Dowling, who indelibly played Alan Ladd’s faithless wife in The Blue Dahlia, Raymond Chandler’s only original screen story that was actually produced), to stop him.

Andrews interrupts a meeting between Small and his most profitable writer, mystery specialist Lloyd Harrison (Steven Geray), who advises Andrews to take up mystery writing and start making himself money instead of writing deep psychological novels almost no one buys. Accordingly the drunken Andrews outlines the plot of a locked-room mystery, but because he was so far from sobriety when he thought of the denouement, he can’t remember it. This becomes a real life-or-death matter for Andrews when Small is found dead in the locked room of his office the next day, and Andrews immediately assumes whoever killed him copied his story idea, only he can’t for the life of him remember what it was. It’s not much of a mystery given that there are only three possible suspects: the people who were in the room with Small when Andrews outlined his plot. They were Andrews himself, Evelyn Green, and Lloyd Harrison. Much to absolutely no one’s surprise [spoiler alert!], Harrison turns out to be the murderer – it’s not hard to figure it out, mainly because if Steven Geray ever made a U.S. film in which his character didn’t turn out to be a killer at the end, I haven’t seen it. His motive does have an interesting twist, however; it’s because Small had learned that Harrison wasn’t actually writing his best-selling books but was using a ghostwriter. Once word got around that his big successes had been ghosted, Harrison’s career would be finished (though plenty of successful genre writers today, including James Patterson and the late Tom Clancy, have used ghosts; often the “name” writer delivers an outline to someone else and the someone else writes the book from the outline and gets small-print credit on the cover) and he’d end up in the gutter from whence he came.

What made this a particularly bizarre film to offer in support of the Schreiber theory is that the good stuff in Blind Spot is almost totally the work of Robert Gordon and his cinematographer, George B. Meehan. The essence of the visual style of film noir is chiaroscuro imagery, and Gordon and Meehan go to the max on it, especially in the later reels, to make up for Perowne’s and Goldsmith’s improbable plot line. It ends pretty much as you expect it to, with Harrison tricked into confessing his guilt, the previously clueless official police arresting him, and Andrews and Evelyn together at last after a bizarre love-hate relationship in which he’s alternated kissing her and beating her up. (The beatings are the result of his anger at her for allegedly trying to frame him for Small’s murder.) Like her sister, Constance Dowling plays the character in sheer acid, and it’s a wonder both she and Doris didn’t become major stars. They didn’t because shortly after Constance made this movie, both she and Doris high-tailed it to Italy to continue their careers there. Once there Constance started an affair with a pathologically jealous Italian writer, Cesare Pavese, who committed suicide after she broke up with him. Then she moved back to the U.S., married producer Ivan Tors (best known these days for Flipper), appeared in his 1954 science-fiction film Gog, and retired from acting. She bore Tors four children and died in 1969 at the relatively young age of 49.

Wicked: One Wonderful Night (Fulwell Entertainment, Universal, NBC, aired November 6, 2025)

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

Last night (Thursday, November 6) NBC aired a two-hour special called Wicked: One Wonderful Night, aimed at promoting the November 21 release of the Wicked movie’s sequel, Wicked: For Good. The show was actually a live concert of songs from both Wickeds held at the Dolby Theatre, formerly the Kodak Theatre, in Hollywood. It was a typically lumbering spectacle with so much jabbering between the songs and so many unfunny skits (the low point was when they showed a segment that was supposedly audition tapes from would-be cast members trying out for roles in the Wicked movies, but the joke was the sheer unlikelihood of some of the auditionees and it got old almost as soon as it began) the two-hour show had room for only 10 songs. Most of them were sung by the two leads from the movie, Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba the Wicked Witch and Ariana Grande as Glinda the Good Witch. One problem is the Wicked songs by Stephen Schwartz are simply not that memorable; the only two that have had any life outside the show are “Popular” and “Defying Gravity,” and even those are hardly on the level of the great songs Harold Arlen and E. Y. Harburg wrote for the 1939 The Wizard of Oz movie. The songs they performed were an interminable opening number, “No One Mourns the Wicked”; Erivo’s first number, “The Wizard and I”; a duet between Erivo and Grande called “What Is This Feeling?”; Grande doing “Popular” with someone or something called Remington, a pre-pubescent Black child of vaguely indeterminate gender; a nice bit where Stephen Schwartz showed up with Grande, Erivo and the original Glinda from Broadway, Kristen Chenoweth, along with an unidentified woman doing “For Good”: Erivo singing “I’m Not That Girl”; Bowen Yang, openly Gay comedian and podcaster, duetting on “Dancing Through Life” with a young man I presume is his podcasting partner; Grande doing “We Couldn’t Be Happier”; Erivo doing “No Place Like Home”; Grande singing “The Girl in the Bubble”; Erivo singing “Defying Gravity”; and for a finale, the two women doing a song that had almost nothing to do with Wicked.

They reproduced the famous medley of Jack Yellen’s and Milton Ager’s “Happy Days Are Here Again” and Harold Arlen’s and Ted Koehler’s “Get Happy” that Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand had sung on Streisand’s guest appearance on Judy’s short-lived (one season, 1963-1964) CBS-TV variety program. For once the two star singers, among the better baby-divas in the modern music scene, had material worthy of them, and they came through in ways that didn’t match the incandescence of the Garland/Streisand original but came awfully close. Of course Judy Garland was intimately connected to Oz and the world of Wicked through having starred in the 1939 film of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and having introduced “Over the Rainbow” in the opening Kansas-set scenes of the movie. Ariana Grande also had a pre-Wicked Oz connection because when her concert in Manchester, England on May 22, 2017 was attacked by a terrorist suicide bomber, killing 22 people and injuring over 1,000, rather than either calling off her tour or proceeding as if nothing had happened, she performed a benefit concert for the victims and their families on June 4, two weeks later. At the end of the concert she sang “Over the Rainbow,” and as I wrote in my moviemagg blog post on ABC’s heavily truncated TV special on the concert, “She sang eloquently and tapped into the song’s wistful messages of happy little bluebirds flying to (in the words of the spoken introduction to the song in The Wizard of Oz) ‘a place where there isn’t any trouble’ — if there is such a place and Judy Garland’s spirit ended up there, I think she approves.” At the same time the decision to end the show with two imperishably classic songs only made Stephen Schwartz’s Wicked score seem even more mediocre than it is. Cynthia Erivo’s hit “Defying Gravity,” which provided a stunning close to the first Wicked movie, seemed comparatively limp here. Deprived of the ability to pre-record it, and lifted up midway through the song on wires all too visible (director Paul Dugdale and cinematographer Keyan Safyari really muffed the lighting on this one), she sounded oddly nervous, a far cry from the self-assurance of Pink when she gets whirled around above the stage on wires and interacts with Cirque du Soleil-type performers in mid-air. Maybe Grande’s just not used to singing while hovering in space without CGI to help her!

Elsbeth: "Poetic Justice" (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount, aired November 6, 2025)

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

Fortunately, last night’s (Thursday, November 6) NBC-TV special Wicked: One Wonderful Night ended after two hours instead of three (which I feared), so I was able to switch to CBS and watch another episode of the comedy-mystery series Elsbeth. This was called “Poetic Justice” and was the rather sad tale of Gary Pidgeon (William Jackson Harper), a tall, strikingly handsome African-American who’s publishing a monthly poetry magazine called The Pidgeon Print and hoping that an elderly woman, Delores Feinn (Lois Smith), will bail his publication out of its ongoing financial difficulties, either through a contribution while she’s still alive or a major bequest in her will. He’s facing rivalry from another publisher with a poetry magazine called Tumbleweed. Delores writes excruciatingly bad poetry (one of her poems begins with a line containing “cerulean azure,” which as most of the people who read it point out are just two words for the color blue) which reminded me of the great spoof of Gertrude Stein in the W. C. Fields movie The Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935): “Up is down, and down is out/I was down and out.”

In the opening scene, Pidgeon works out a way of murdering Delores and making it look like an accident: he unhooks her oxygen tank, leaves her alone for hours, then calls her to encourage her to write something. Knowing that one of Delores’s many quirks is that she always has to smoke while she writes, he knows that just before she starts, Delores will light a cigarette – and that will cause an explosion from the oxygen and kill her on the spot. He feels he needs to do this in a hurry so Delores can’t change her will and leave her presumed fortune to Tumbleweed’s publisher instead. So, as in the old Columbo series, we know who the killer is from the get-go and the suspense is in finding out how he (or she) will be brought to book. In fact, through most of this episode, Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston) and her official police officer partner, Detective Rivers (Braeden De La Garza, who is hot!), make such nuisances of themselves to try to extract a confession from Pidgeon that Elsbeth looks even more like Columbo in drag than she has before. Ultimately they trick Pidgeon into confessing by saying that the oxygen that came out of the hose he pulled out of Delores’s tank would have discolored his jacket, and they confront him at his dry cleaners’ and goad him into confessing while Rivers records it all on his phone. Also it turns out that Delores Feinn didn’t really have any money at all, nor did she really need oxygen; she just pretended she did so she could get invitations to dine at fancy restaurants at other people’s expense, and she used the oxygen setup as an excuse to get the best tables. This Elsbeth was a quite charming episode and a welcome send-up of the pretensions of the literary world and how they will essentially prostitute themselves for money even while claiming they are above all considerations of filthy lucre.

Just Wright (Fox Searchlight Pictures, Flavor Unit Entertainment, Dune Entertainment, 2010)

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

Last night (Sunday, November 2) my husband Charles and I watched two Lifetime movies, both romantic comedies featuring mostly African-American casts. The first was called Just Wright, made for theatrical release by Fox Searchlight Pictures in 2010 and starring Queen Latifah and Common in a film directed by Sanaa Hamri (a Black woman, by the way) from a script by Michael Elliot. Hamri actually has 62 directorial credits on imdb.com, though most are for TV episodes or music videos. Physical trainer and therapist Leslie Wright (Queen Latifah) falls in love with NBA basketball star Scott McKnight (Common, who looks surprisingly credible as an athlete). Leslie has a job at a local hospital in New Jersey and is a huge fan of the New Jersey Nets (who relocated to New York City and became the Brooklyn Nets in 2012, two years after this film was made). She’s living with her parents Lloyd (James Pickens, Jr.) and Janice (the marvelous Pam Grier, the Blaxploitation queen of the 1970’s who’s more heavy-set than she was in her glory days but still is an authoritative actress) and also with her lifelong friend Morgan Alexander (Paula Patton). The two are described as “god-sisters” and friends since childhood, and Leslie is putting Morgan up, presumably rent-free, in the guest room of her parents’ home. Leslie is determined to see Morgan get a normal job, but instead Morgan is intent on landing a well-to-do athlete as a sort of trophy husband who will take care of her the rest of their lives. Leslie thinks she has her chance when Scott McKnight invites both her and Morgan to a party at his palatial home, and Morgan makes a bee-line for Scott. Leslie and Scott had met at a gas station when Leslie, driving home in her beat-up off-orange 1960’s Ford Mustang she nicknamed “Eleanor” after her late grandmother, whose car it had been, pulls in for gas and spots Scott nonplussed when he can’t find the gas cap on the brand-new sleek black car he’d just bought.

Leslie figures out where it would be and the two bond over a Joni Mitchell CD she spotted on the seat of Scott’s car. The two praise the record Mitchell made with jazz great Charles Mingus (actually, as I pointed out in posts on a 2009 Lifetime movie that mentioned this project, The Party Never Stops [https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2009/08/party-never-stops-jaffebraunstein-films.html], Mitchell and Mingus never recorded together; they had planned an album together and even collaborated on writing songs for it, but Mingus died before the project could be made and the resulting Mingus album contained three songs they wrote together, one – “Goodbye Pork-Pie Hat” – a Mitchell lyric to a pre-existing Mingus composition, and two others Mitchell wrote after Mingus’s death, one of which was a tribute to him), and ultimately Queen Latifah and Common get to sing a nice short duet on the Harry Warren song “The More I See You” from the 1945 movie Diamond Horseshoe. (The gimmick is that Scott has a secret room in his house, and just when we’re thinking of Bluebeard’s Castle here, it turns out that the big secret is the room contains a piano on which he secretly practices – and it’s lovely to hear two people who started out as rappers turn out to have quite lovely singing voices.) The film turns when Scott’s ankle gets seriously injured during the NBA All-Star Game, and Morgan, his fiancée, gets jealous of the white therapist, Bella Goldsmith (Kim Strother), whom Scott has hired on the recommendation of the NBA but who seems to be interested in getting a lot more intimately physical with Scott than her job requires. Morgan asks Leslie to take over as Scott’s therapist, and Leslie puts Scott through an eight-week regimen after warning him, “You’re going to hate me by the time this is over.”

When the sports shows on TV start reporting rumors that the Nets won’t re-sign Scott after his current contract ends with the current season because they don’t think he’ll be able to play at his former standard, Morgan sends Scott a letter breaking up with him. Leslie gets Scott rehabilitated enough to start the seventh game of the East Coast round of the playoffs, and he performs miserably until Leslie gets him a pep talk at halftime and it rouses his self-confidence until he plays at his old level again. (Stop me if you’ve heard this before.) The Nets win the playoff game and advance to the championship round, and Scott goes on sports TV and gives an interview in which he gives Leslie credit for his rehabilitation. This starts a bidding war between the Nets and several other NBA teams for her services as a trainer. Just then, with Scott seemingly on the road back to a major recovery and a lucrative contract, Morgan (ya remember Morgan?) comes slamming back into his life and offers to pick up where he left off. Meanwhile, Scott and Leslie have had sex, albeit just once, though when Morgan returns Leslie feels she’s going to be demoted to the “friend zone.” Ultimately, though, Scott sees through Morgan’s gold-digging antics and decides that Leslie is the woman he really loves, and he swoops down on her while she’s in Philadelphia interviewing for the 76’ers. The two get married, and there’s a Lifetime-style title reading “One Year Later.” One year later they’re in the middle of a Nets game in which Scott is playing, Leslie is sitting with the team as their trainer, and Morgan, by Leslie’s special dispensation, is sitting in the area of the arena usually reserved for the players’ wives. Just Wright is a pretty typical romantic comedy, and Lifetime appears to have been showing it (after another Queen Latifah theatrical feature, Beauty Shop), to promote the fact that they’ve recently acquired rerun rights to her CBS-TV action series, The Equalizer (in which she repeated a role originally written for Denzel Washington in a theatrical film). But within the confines of the genre it was a nice theatrical romp.