Earthquake (The Filmakers Group, Universal, 1974)

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

I watched the 1974 disaster film Earthquake on Turner Classic Movies last night (Wednesday, June 17) as part of a night’s tribute to disaster movies in general. I’d seen it before but not since the late 1980’s, when my then-partner John Gabrish and I watched it on a commercial TV showing on the Mexico-based Channel 6. Earthquake, produced and directed by my old friend Mark Robson (a graduate of the Orson Welles and Val Lewton schools of filmmaking) from a script by George Fox and (of all people!) The Godfather creator Mario Puzo (apparentliy Puzo did the first draft, got recalled by Paramount to write The Godfather, Part Two,, and Fox was called in to finish it), was released by Universal in 1974 and was the first film to feature a new technique called “Sensurround.” This didn’t affect the visual portion of the film at all but involved dubbing a low-frequency rumble to the soundtrack so the theatre seats would shake. The ads promised, “You’ll Feel It as Well as See It in Sensurround!” In a number of older theatres (including Grauman’s Chinese in Hollywood, when the film was previewed there), that proved literally true; as bits and pieces of the molding started to fall off the roofs of badly maintained movie houses, audience members could have been forgiven for thinking they were really being victimized by an earthquake like the one in the film. Though John Gabrish and I were watching it on an ordinary 1.33:1 aspect ratio TV, we were listening to the soundtrack on a local FM radio station that simulcast it to give at least part of the impression of “Sensurround.” Earthquake came in the middle of a disaster-film cycle which, as I joked at the time, seemed to be the major studios’ attempt to get people to go to movies again by systematically scaring them away from any other form of entertainment. “You want to go on an ocean cruise?” “Oh, no, I’ve just seen The Poseidon Adventure.” “You want to go to San Francisco and look at the tall buildings?” “Oh, no, I’ve just seen The Towering Inferno.” “You want to go to L.A.?” “Oh, no, I’ve just seen Earthquake.” “You want to go to a beach resort?” “Oh, no, I’ve just seen Jaws.” “Oh, hell, then let’s just go to a movie.”

I wasn’t that impressed by Earthquake when I saw it in the late 1980’s but I liked it a lot better now even though it’s still not a great movie, and given that it was made when the whole idea of the genre was spectacular action scenes, the more spectacular the better, it didn’t play to the Lewtonesque less-is-more aesthetic that was Robson’s greatest strength as a director. Like most of the major disaster films of the time, Earthquake has a multi-character plot line and an all-star (at least sort of all-star) cast. Charlton Heston stars as Stewart Graff, a former college football star turned construction engineer for a company founded and headed by Sam Royce (Lorne Greene). He’s also married to Royce’s daughter Remy (Ava Gardner, considerably seedier than she was in her glory years), though they’re unhappy together and she demonstrates this by faking a suicide attempt (not for the first time) in the film’s opening scene. Graff is having an affair with Denise Marshall (Geneviève Bujold), widow of a man who died on a previous construction job Graff had assigned him to. Denise has an 11-year-old son named Corry (Tiger Williams) whom Graff presents with an autographed (by Frank Gifford) football. Meanwhile, Los Angeles police officer Lew Slade (George Kennedy) is in trouble with his superiors over a car chase he was involved in; the would-be thief (Bobby Ferro) crosses the city line into L.A. County and then crashes the car into a hedge belonging to a rich person’s mansion. Slade then punches out the L.A. County Sheriff’s deputy who won’t allow him to give chase, and for that he’s suspended by his superior on the LAPD and ends up in a bar, still in full uniform in the middle of the day. Another storyline deals with Miles Quade (Richard Roundtree), a motorcycle stunt rider who’s trying to be the Black Evel Knievel (the name is actually checked in the script). He’s worked out an elaborate stunt that involves riding on a loop, then accelerating on a roller-coaster-style ramp, and finally crossing through a hoop of flame. His manager, Sal Amici (Gabriel Dell from the old Bowery Boys films), needs a can of butane to make the hoop burn and bums $10 for it from Officer Slade. Quade (or Roundtree’s stunt double; this film featured 141 stunt people, a record to that time) successfully executes the stunt but then his attempt to repeat it for a Vegas promoter falls victim to the first of several big earthquakes in the film, which destroys the elaborate equipment.

Sal had enlisted his sister Rosa (Victoria Principal, who apparently auditioned for the part with her normal hair but arrived at her call-back with a shorter “do” coiffed to resemble an Afro; Robson was so impressed with her new hair she got the part), to parade at Quade’s big audition wearing a T-shirt with his logo and showing off her breasts, but the strait-laced Rosa bailed and went to a movie (the Clint Eastwood vehicle High Plains Drifter) instead. There’s also a supermarket manager named Jody (Marjoe Gortner) who tries to get Officer Slade to bust the group of Hare Krishnas who are chanting and singing outside his store. Slade refuses, asking Jody, “You got something against God?” – an in-joke reference to Gortner’s past as a traveling evangelist (a career he was literally born into because his parents were also traveling evangelists and mashed up “Mary” and “Joseph” when they named him). Jody lives in a building with three other young men and is training to be a bodybuilder, which has led him to adorn the walls of his room with photos of musclemen and has led his roommates to Queer-bait him. There’s also a scene at the California Institute of Seismology in which a junior seismologist named Walter Russell (Kip Niven) insists on the basis of his boss’s theories that L.A. is ready for a truly massive earthquake, only in the boss’s absence the place is being run by Dr. Willis Stockle (Barry Sullivan), who refuses Russell’s entreaties to go to L.A. Mayor Lewis (John Randolph) to ask for a major evacuation order. When word comes through that Russell’s boss has been killed in Fresno by a preliminary earthquake, Stockle takes Russell’s warnings seriously, but Mayor Lewis insists that he doesn’t want to panic the population unnecessarily, though he’s concerned enough he calls out the National Guard. Jody is a Guardsman and his unit is one of the ones mobilized – as he puts on his uniform his roommates taunt him and say he’s about to go out and play at being a soldier. Finally there’s intrigue around the big Mulholland Dam outside L.A. that supplies most of the city’s drinking water; a man is found drowned to death in an elevator shaft, and the dam starts developing visible cracks. Then the big earthquake (measuring 9.9 on the Richter scale, bigger than any actually recorded quake) happens and the city is thrown into turmoil.

The National Guard sets up an emergency medical station in the Wilton Plaza parking lot and its basements, until an aftershock destroys most of Wilton Plaza. I especially liked the sudden appearance of Lloyd Nolan, one of my favorite actors, as the doctor in the emergency scenes. I suspect he got the part from having played the doctor Diahann Carroll’s nurse character worked for in the TV series Julia. There are thrilling scenes showing the evacuation of the Royce Construction building using an elaborate makeshift system Graff works up consisting of an office chair with arms and a firehose; Royce himself is successfully rescued but dies later of a heart attack in Wilton Plaza. Officer Slade commandeers Graff’s specially designed vehicle and presses it into service as an ambulance. Miles Quade’s vehicle also gets used as an ambulance, and among the people he and his crew rescue are Denise Marshall, though it's not until several reels later that she and her son are finally reunited. Jody busts Rosa for stealing a doughnut from a now-deserted deli and insists he’s got a right to hold her in custody for looting, but not surprisingly it turns what he really wants is Rosa’s body (she was a regular at his supermarket and he’s got a major crush on her). Ultimately Jody goes crazy out of lust and Officer Slade shoots him before he can do the dirty deed on Rosa. Ultimately the Mulholland Dam gives way and floods the city (Anton Chekhov, call your office!), sweeping away both Graff and Remy. That wasn’t in the original script; Charlton Heston insisted on rewriting the ending so both he and Ava Gardner’s characters would die. (Perhaps he was thinking of the sudden shock audiences had felt when Gene Hackman’s character died at the end of The Poseidon Adventure.) The original ending would have killed off Remy but left Graff alive and paired him with Denise. One of the most interesting aspects of Earthquake is the musical score by John Williams; it opens with some surprisingly atmospheric and musically advanced cues (anticipating some of the equally interesting cues in films like Jaws and E.T., both scores that are far more complex than the Big Tunes everyone knows) that do an excellent job of scene-setting. Though it’s still not a great movie, I liked Earthquake considerably better this time around even though the special effects, which won a special Academy Award, were variable. Some of them were utterly convincing; others, particularly the suburban houses that get smashed to bits during the Big Quake, looked like crudely constructed cardboard models. Apparently the technicians at Universal invented a device that could make an entire camera body shake instead of just jiggling the lens, as had been done in previous earthquake films, but they didn’t use it all that effectively. Still, I thought Earthquake worked as cheesy entertainment.

Ladies of the Big House (Paramount, 1931)

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

Last night (Monday, June 15) my husband Charles and I watched a Blu-Ray disc of a film that turned out to be surprisingly good: a 1931 Paramount melodrama called Ladies in the Big House. It began as an unproduced play by Ernest Booth, who was himself a convict. He’d been arrested for burglary as a teenager, served time in the Preston School of Industry (a so-called “reform school” that, at least in the movies, never seemed to reform anybody), and ultimately ended up in San Quentin. There he wrote a treatment for a crime-related story called Ladies of the Mob which Paramount bought as a vehicle for Clara Bow, directed by William Wellman (unfortunately that film is lost), and in 1931 Paramount came a-calling again and bought the rights to Ladies in the Big House. The story takes place in an unnamed city where the district attorney’s job has just been taken by reform-minded Lawson (George Irving) who’s determined to use his power to smash the crime ring that controls the city government. The ring is led by Martin Doremus (Rockcliffe Fellowes, who made this movie as a no-good gangster the same year he played the sympathetic gangster Joe Helton in the Marx Brothers’ spoof Monkey Business), and his lieutenant is Joe “Kid” Athens (Earle Foxe). Doremus has a spy on Lawson’s payroll: his assistant John Hartman (Purnell Pratt), whom Lawson is convinced is the one honest man in the previous administration. Lawson couldn’t be more wrong about that: Hartman is in regular contact with Doremus and is keeping him up to date about Lawson’s activities against him. On a tip from Hartman, Doremus orders Athens to leave town for a while to avoid a murder rap Lawson is about to pin on him. But Athens refuses to leave because he’s fallen so intensely in love with a local woman he doesn’t want to leave town without her and she won’t leave with him at all.

The woman, it turns out, is flower seller Kathleen Storm (Sylvia Sidney, top-billed), who’s a decent girl who went on a few dates with Athens but broke up with him once she realized who he was and how he made his living. Athens hangs around the florist shop where Kathleen works and demands that she not date anyone else, but no sooner has he left the store than someone else shows up: Standish McNeil (Gene Raymond, billed second). McNeil has just returned from a business trip to France – he’s a consulting engineer and he works around the world – when he comes to the shop and buys a bouquet of forget-me-nots, giving them to Kathleen. The two date for two weeks and ultimately get married, but Athens has a plot up his sleeve. He calls the police on the McNeils, and the police duly show up in the person of Detective Martin French (Robert Emmett O’Connor, who seemed to play nothing but decent but dimwitted Irish cops). Then Athens sneaks into the McNeils’ apartment, shoots Detective French in cold blood, and tosses the gun on the floor so it will look like Standish McNeil killed the cop and Kathleen was an accessory. With Hartman prosecuting the case personally, both McNeils are convicted of murder, and he’s given a death sentence while she’s sent to a women’s prison for life. Once the film gets to the women’s prison it becomes a lot more interesting; Kathleen meets up with her fellow convicts and has to sleep in a giant dormitory because the prison is so overcrowded she’ll have to wait her turn to be assigned to a cell. Among the people she meets are Susie Thompson (Wynne Gibson in a performance that steals the film out from under the nominal leads), who was Athens’s girlfriend until he dumped her for Kathleen. Susie tells Kathleen flat-out that she has no reason to like or befriend her, but she will just to get back at Athens for leaving her and letting her rot in prison. There’s also a quite remarkable Black character named Ivory (Louise Beavers), who plays piano in the recreation room and leads a prison band; and a Latina named Maria (Miriam Goldina), who was pregnant when she was arrested and is determined not to have her baby in prison.

The film cuts back and forth between the women’s prison and Death Row, where McNeil makes friends with the inmate in the next cell over even though they can only speak to each other through the windows of their cells. At one point Maria decides to attempt an escape (Harold Booth was known for several escape attempts in real life as well) and Kathleen insists on going with her once her appeal is denied. Ivory tries to cover for them by instructing the prison band to play as loudly as possible, but the two are caught and Maria is shot dead by guards, moaning about her unborn baby as she expires. Just when we’re wondering how the writers – Booth got credit for the original story, Louis Weitzenkorn (author of the play on which Five Star Final, a “pre-Code” masterpiece from 1931 starring Edward G. Robinson as a guilt-ridden tabloid editor who dredges up a 20-year-old scandal and Boris Karloff as his star reporter, was based) as the screenwriter and William Slavens McNutt and Grover Jones credited with additional dialogue – are going to arrange it so that McNeil isn’t executed and they’re both exonerated, fate intervenes in the form of a tabloid story about the case. It was occasioned by John Hartman, who arranged for a meeting between McNeil and Kathleen just so one of his friends in the press could send a photographer to take a picture of them embracing for a feature story about the case. The feature also contains a photo of the gun used to kill the police detective that shows the inscription, “With Love.” Susie Thompson recognizes the inscription as belonging to a gun she bought and had so engraved as a present for Athens, and she duly reports this to the warden (Frank Sheridan). Unfortunately, the assistant D.A. Lawson sends to investigate this is none other than John Hartman, who meets with Kathleen and tells her there’s nothing he can do because the word of a convict like Susie Thompson would be meaningless in court. The writers and director Marion Gering (a Russian immigrant who came to the U.S. in 1924 and worked mostly on the stage, though he was brought to Hollywood in 1931 when the studios were looking for directors with experience handling actors who had to speak lines; he directed a lot of Sylvia Sidney’s films, including a 1932 nonmusical adaptation of Madame Butterfly with Sidney as Cho-Cho-San and Cary Grant as Pinkerton) ultimately have Susie Thompson approach the warden and D.A. Lawson directly, and she fingers Hartman and at least three other city officials as being on Doremus’s payroll. This revelation happens literally in the nick of time, on the morning of McNeil’s scheduled execution, and though for some reason the McNeils are told they must remain in prison for a few days longer while everything gets sorted out, the film’s final shot is of them together, blessedly free, and heading out on a ship to Baku, Russia, where McNeil’s latest engineering job awaits them.

Ladies of the Big House, which I’d bought on a Blu-Ray disc that also contained Confessions of a Co-Ed, turned out to be a much better movie, largely due to some chiaroscuro compositions Gering and cinematographer David Abel concocted that look a good deal like film noir (though in 1931 that would have been called “the German look”). Indeed, Ladies in the Big House qualifies as proto-noir, not only visually but in the moral ambiguity of Wynne Gibson’s character, and it’s also welcome to see a film from classic Hollywood in which an African-American like Louise Beavers is allowed to portray dignity and independence instead of just being shuffled into the usual stupid servant stereotype. Indeed, Charles was surprised that the prison in Ladies of the Big House was racially integrated, at a time when apparently most U.S. prisons, both male and female, were segregated. And at least one major Black actress besides Beavers appears: one of the inmates is played by Evelyn Preer, star of many of Oscar Micheaux’s films and a woman whom Paul Robeson called the greatest artist of the Black theatre. Though there are some of the usual Hollywood sillinesses – Charles complained about the brilliantine in Gene Raymond’s hair even when he’s about to be executed (and the more scenes I see in classic-era films of people looking immaculately dressed and coiffed even after they’ve been through dire situations, the more I admire Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack for that remarkable scene in the 1933 King Kong in which Bruce Cabot and Fay Wray emerge from the jungle with their hair and clothes disheveled as we’d expect from what they’d been through in the immediately previous scenes) – for the most part Ladies of the Big House is a surprisingly good movie and a welcome souvenir of the so-called “pre-Code” era in Hollywood history. Incidentally Ernest Booth was paroled in 1937 and spent the next few years writing stories about crime and prison for the various studios, of which three actually got filmed – Penrod’s Double Trouble (1938), Women Without Names (1940), and Men of San Quentin (1942). Unfortunately he also returned to his previous profession and got arrested in 1947 for a series of burglaries and robberies, and he returned to San Quentin and served time there until he died in 1959.

A Modern Musketeer (Douglas Fairbanks Pictures, Artcraft Pictures, 1917)

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

Last night (Sunday, June 14) Turner Classic Movies showed on its “Silent Sunday Nights” feature a film I’d long been curious about: A Modern Musketeer, made in 1917 by Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. after he’d only been in Hollywood for two years. In that time he’d acquired such a following that when he told Adolph Zukor at Paramount that he wanted to film E. P. Lyle’s short story “D’Artagnan of Kansas” and he wanted to shoot the second half of it on location at the Grand Canyon, he got the green light without any apparent difficulty. Made by the Douglas Fairbanks Picture Company and released through Paramount’s higher-end label, Artcraft Pictures (which would also release the films of Fairbanks’s wife-to-be, Mary Pickford), A Modern Musketeer was directed by Allan Dwan (the fifth of his 11 films with Fairbanks) and also written and edited by him. The film actually starts with an elaborate prologue showing Fairbanks playing D’Artagnan, and it’s clear that playing this sequence gave Fairbanks the idea to make a full-fledged adaptation of Alexandre Dumas père’s The Three Musketeers, which he would do four years later and definitively transition his career from modern-dressed romantic comedies to costumed period pieces. Once the dry run is out of the way, Fairbanks’s modern-day character is revealed as Ned Thacker, a young man from Kansas who’s obsessed with D’Artagnan and the whole mythos of The Three Musketeers. A later flashback sequence explains why: Ned’s mother (Edythe Chapman) was reading the novel incessantly while she was pregnant with him, and we’re supposed to assume that her obsession with Dumas penetrated the womb and got transmitted to her as-yet unborn baby. When Ned grows up he lasts six months at college (an intertitle tells us “he finished four years of college in six months … by request”) and gets into a lot of trouble, as when he pulls on an older man on a trolley and demands he give up his seat for two women. The man turns out to be the town police chief and Ned ends up serving a brief sentence in jail. Meanwhile, Mrs. Dodge (Kathleen Kirkham) is deeply in debt and decides she can get out of it by essentially selling her daughter Elsie (Marjorie Daw) to Forrest Vandeteer (Eugene Ormonde), “the richest man in Yonkers.” Forrest suggests that Elsie and her mother take a road trip in Forrest’s chauffeur-driven car, while Thacker’s father sends him out of town by giving him a car (a Model T Ford, of course!) the way D’Artagnan’s father gave him a horse. The two cars meet in Arizona, where Forrest’s car stalls out at the edge of a precipice and Ned is quite taken with the chauffeur because he’s from France, the country of which Ned dreams.

Of course Ned is also quite taken with Elsie Dodge, but he’s got at least two rivals for her. One is Forrest Vandeteer and the other is Chin-de-dah (Frank Campeau), a Native chief who lives in one of the stone dwellings built into the side of the Grand Canyon and offers refuge to various outlaws and crooks. Among the residents of his compound are James Brown (Tully Marshall) and an unidentified bandit (Jim Mason). Surprisingly, especially since Tully Marshall (best known for his creepy villain roles in Erich von Stroheim’s The Merry Widow and Queen Kelly) is playing him, James Brown turns out to be a sympathetic character, a man who was swindled out of a fortune and who became an outlaw only when his family accused him of being the swindler. Another surprise is that midway through the film, Mrs. Dodge has an attack of conscience and realizes that she shouldn’t essentially sell her daughter to the rich guy but should let her pair up with Ned instead. Of course Chin-de-dah wants to kidnap Elsie and turn her into his sex slave – and we get a flashback sequence that shows what happened to the last woman he kidnapped for that purpose: she got a knife and used it to commit suicide. It’s obvious what’s going to happen: Ned is going to rescue Elsie from Chin-de-dah and also gallantly save the life of Forrest, who ends up dangling over a gorge on a rope that Ned pulls up to rescue him. Thereby Ned will fulfill his lifelong ambition of being a real-life D’Artagnan. I liked the first half of A Modern Musketeer a lot better than the second. Fairbanks designed his films largely to show off his athletic skills, including elaborate “trajectory” gags that reminded me of Buster Keaton. (Later I recalled that Keaton’s first feature, The Saphead, had been based on a play Fairbanks had performed on the Broadway stage before entering films. So the similarities between them are not accidental.) The second half is considerably less interesting, despite the stunning Grand Canyon scenery which must have wowed movie audiences in 1917. One of my problems with the film is the frankly racist depiction of Native Americans, particularly the whole idea that the chief is willing to kidnap and enslave a white woman simply because he's bored with the Native women available to him more or less consensually. The action scenes are also surprisingly dull, especially by comparison with what Fairbanks and Dwan would achieve just five years later in their joint masterpiece, Robin Hood (1922). They’re shot with the camera miles away and little suspense editing. A Modern Musketeer is an O.K. film that obviously delivered the goods for its 1917 audiences, and it’s a welcome preservation today (the existing print was restored by the Danish Film Archive, which preserved a surprising number of silent films that would have otherwise been lost, and outfitted with a score in 2006 by the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra that was O.K.; I’m surprised they didn’t use Ferde Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite for some of the underscoring, but I believe that would still have been under copyright protection in 2006) but an acceptable entertainment rather than a truly great film.

Somewhat Secret (MGM, 1939)

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

After A Modern Musketeer on June 14 Turner Classic Movies squeezed in a quite charming half-hour 1939 short called Somewhat Secret, directed by Sammy Lee (one of the relatively unimaginative dance directors hired by the studios en masse during the early sound era that lost their gigs when Busby Berkeley arrived) from a script by Richard English (“original” story), Julian Hochfelder, and Mort Greene (screenplay). It’s a satire on the attitude of 1930’s elders towards swing music, which they argue is corrupting the youth of America and undermining their morals. (That’s what older people have had to say about every sort of music young folks like, from 1920’s jazz to modern-day hip-hop. Indeed, when I read Bruno Walter’s autobiography Theme and Variations I was surprised to read that when he was growing up in Germany in the 1890’s there was a similar generation gap in musical tastes over Wagner, whom the young people liked and their parents couldn’t stand.) It takes place at the Dimsdale Hall Finishing School, where assistant dean Emily Godsall (Mary Howard) is giving a lecture telling the women students at Dimsdale that anyone caught listening to swing music will be disciplined for it. Emily is in love with the school’s chemistry professor, Benjamin Barnes (Tom Collins, who’s first shown wearing one of the most blatantly fake moustaches and beards in movie history, though eventually we learn why it’s so fake), who also doubles as the school’s music director and plays piano while Emily sings a sappy song called “You and I Were Made for Love.” Needless to say, the students, led by “Alice, the Tattletale” (Mary Bovard), have no intention of obeying Emily’s anti-swing edicts; they’ve already discovered an off-campus boîte called “Nick’s Nook” where a jukebox blasts away with swing, and they’re laying down plans to escape the campus and go to a major swing festival at the “Billion Dollar Pier” in Atlantic City. (There really was a big ballroom in Atlantic City called the Million Dollar Pier.)

Two gangster types lay in wait outside the Dimsdale campus one night; one of them (Billy Wayne) carries a violin case and we instantly assume it’s concealing a submachine gun, while the other (Benny Rubin) is armed with a pair of drumsticks and hammers away at any available surface. It turns out they aren’t crooks, though; they’re members of a major big band called the “Swingopators” and they’re at Dimsdale to kidnap their former pianist, Benny “Barrelhouse” Barnes, to reunite the Swingopators for the big Atlantic City gig. It turns out Barnes fled the band after an altercation in which he struck one of the band’s piccolo players and thought he had killed him, but when the two interlopers assure Barnes that the man survived and therefore he isn’t facing a murder rap, he agrees to rejoin. That means he blows off the engagement party at which Emily planned to announce that she and that nice young chemistry teacher (who’s shown in a sequence of him frantically pouring chemicals out of one container into another in a way that makes it look like he’s about to construct the Frankenstein Monster) are to be married. Emily traces Barnes to Nick’s Nook and then to Atlantic City, where to absolutely no one’s surprise she finds herself actually liking swing, tapping her feet to the music and then sort-of dancing to it. She realizes that the band’s pianist is her fiancé when a vandal draws a fake beard on the poster advertising him and she herself supplies the moustache and Harold Lloyd-style glasses he wore on campus at Dimsdale. Though I’m surprised the writers missed the gimmick of having Elsie sing a swing song herself at the finish, Somewhat Secret is still an imaginative little movie that at once acknowledges the clichés and plays fast and loose with them.

Blackout, a.k.a. Murder by Proxy (Lippert Pictures, Exclusive Films, Hammer Films, 1954)

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

Last night (Saturday, June 13) my husband Charles and I watched the latest Turner Classic Movies’ “Noir Alley” episode, a really quirky 1954 film alternately called Murder by Proxy in its native Great Britain and Blackout in the U.S. Like Four-Sided Triangle and “X” the Unknown, which Charles and I had watched recently, it was made under a co-production deal between Robert Lippert’s company in the U.S. and Exclusive Films (which both before and after this was known as Hammer Films, and within a few years would make The Curse of Frankenstein and Blood of Dracula and thereby take over from Universal as the world’s main purveyor of Gothic horror on film) in the U.K. The deal was that Hammer would supply the production staff and supporting actors, while Lippert would offer American stars to boost the films’ appeal to U.S. audiences. Alas, Lippert couldn’t afford the biggest names in Hollywood, so he had to settle for Dane Clark, who’d had a fair-to-middling career as a Warner Bros. contract star (he was Jewish and his real name was Bernard Zanville, but as they had previously with Edward G. Robinson nèe Emmanuel Goldenberg and John Garfield nèe Julius Garfinkel, Warners gave him an Anglo name). Warners were hoping that Clark could take over from Humphrey Bogart and John Garfield, but he was too much a thug type for that to work. Blackout was based on a novel by Helen Nielsen, who would never again have a novel directly adapted to the screen, though she would sell a number of scripts to TV series like Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Perry Mason. Blackout is a convoluted story in which a former U.S. World War II soldier named Casimir (Dane Clark) has rechristened himself “Casey Morrow” and is bumming around Europe. He's in London at a swanky nightclub (as swanky as a Hammer production budget could make it, anyway) listening to British jazz singer Cleo Laine do a quite nice version of W. C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues.” Then an electrifying-looking woman named Phyllis Brunner (Belinda Lee, who was just 19 when she made this; she worked steadily for the next six years until dying suddenly in an auto accident at age 25) sidles up to his table and offers to pay for his drinks. Eventually she offers him 500 pounds if he’ll marry her that very night, and he accepts, only to wake up the next morning with blood on his overcoat and no memory of what happened to him the night before.

He awakens in a flat occupied by Phyllis’s slightly older roommate Margaret “Maggie” Doone (Eleanor Summerfield), where the first thing he sees is a large portrait Maggie has painted of Phyllis. With only the vaguest memories of what happened to him the night before, Casey goes out for a walk and runs into a news agent selling copies of the Daily Mail, whose lead story is of the sudden murder of Phyllis’s father that night. At Maggie’s urging, Casey starts investigating the case himself, fearful that if he goes to the police he’ll be arrested for the crime, especially since with her dad and mom having separated, Phyllis will be next in line to inherit her dad’s fortune and therefore Casey will have had an enormous motive for knocking him off. Casey learns that Phyllis was engaged to marry the Brunner family’s lawyer, Lance Gordon (Andrew Osborn), who turns out to be an egotistical creep. He also finds out from Phyllis’s mother Alicia (Betty Ann Davies) that Gordon was scamming the family by soliciting phony “contributions” to an alleged charity called “Green Pastures.” This was supposedly an outreach to set up homes for children left orphaned by World War II, but it was really a scam sucking money from the Brunner family fortune to buy houses that didn’t exist. At one point after visiting Gordon, Casey is tailed by the driver of another car who attempts to run him down. Later he traces the recipient of the check Alicia Brunner cut to buy the phony property for “Green Pastures” and it’s Victor Vanno (Harold Lang), who was also Travis, the driver who tried to kill Casey earlier. There are three main suspects, including Phyllis herself; attorney Gordon; and the actual killer [spoiler alert!], Alicia Brunner, who knocked off her husband because he was allowing Gordon to swindle him out of large chunks of the family fortune. Also Phyllis at first insists that she married Casey, then denies it, then acknowledges it again after her mom has been popped for murdering her dad. The film ends with Casey and Phyllis committing to each other and deciding to make their marriage work, which will be a lot easier than it would be otherwise because with her father dead and her mother on the way to the gallows for killing him, Phyllis is going to inherit the Brunner fortune.

“Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller classified Blackout as part of a sub-genre called “blackout noir,” of which the most famous examples are Robert Siodmak’s Phantom Lady (1944) and Roy William Neill’s Black Angel (1946), both made at Universal in the U.S. and both based on stories by Cornell Woolrich. Black Angel is arguably the most intriguing example of the genre because the lead character, Dan Duryea, is suspected of murder, works with his wife (June Vincent) to clear himself, and ultimately realizes that he’s the killer after all. Muller also faulted the script of Blackout by Richard H. Landau for containing too many extended passages of expository dialogue which the director, Terence Fisher (who’d later work on most of Hammer’s horrors), shot quickly and in single takes. He pointed out one scene in which Dane Clark blew his line and said, “I know,” when he was supposed to say, “You know,” then corrected himself immediately – and Fisher left it in the final cut. He also mentioned the problems the film’s script supervisor (they used to be called “script girls” and now are called “continuity people,” and their job is to make sure that scenes match and you don’t see an actor with a hat on in one shot and without it in another shot supposedly taking place at the same time), Renée Glynne, had with Belinda Lee. As the Wikipedia page on the film explains, “Script supervisor Renee Glynne later recalled that Belinda Lee ‘was still very inexperienced at that time and I had to watch her quite carefully. She’d cross her legs the wrong way or turn her head at the wrong moment or come out with the wrong line, so I'd have to correct her and try to help her out. Dane [Clark] obviously fancied her and got very cross with my professional interference. He got quite nasty and was actually pushing me away from her.’ Glynne says she had to take medication ‘in order to survive the rest of the film. After that I had to give all my instructions to him through the director, Terry Fisher ... after some shots he'd have to put his head under cold water because he was so enraged that I was even there. Eventually he realized how silly it all was and went down on his knees, tears streaming down his face, begging me to forgive him. But I still asked [Hammer producer] Tony Hinds to take me off the next film he was in.’” Blackout a.k.a. Murder by Proxy is only tangentially a film noir, and the ending is really a cheat; Eddie Muller joked about how unlikely it seemed that Casey and Phyllis would be able to make their marriage work, and I had thought it would end with Casey and Maggie getting together because she seemed like a much better, more down-to-earth match for him even though they would have both been broke financially.

A Night to Remember (The Rank Organisation, 1958)

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

Last night (Wednesday, June 10) my husband Charles and I watched the 1958 British film A Night to Remember on Turner Classic Movies as part of a night of films about both real and fictional shipwrecks. We’d watched the film together in the late 1990’s on a pre-recorded VHS tape in the wake of the mega-success of James Cameron’s Titanic, and I had quickly decided it was my all-time favorite movie about the Titanic disaster. My main reason was it had no fictional characters: everyone in the dramatis personae had actually lived and been involved with the Titanic as either a crew member or passenger, one of the dignitaries wishing it good luck as it set off on its first (and, as it turned out, last) voyage, or a crew member on the two ships in the vicinity of the Titanic as it sank on April 15, 1912: the Californian (which ignored Titanic’s distress calls for reasons that became important plot points in the movie) and the Carpathia (which actually rescued most of the Titanic’s survivors). A Night to Remember began as a book on the Titanic disaster by Walter Lord, and the screenplay for the film was by Eric Ambler – a surprising name because he was usually known for fictional crime stories and spy thrillers. (It would have been like James Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming, writing a nonfiction book about the Bermuda Triangle.) The director was Roy Ward Baker (credited as just Roy Baker), who six years earlier had made the 1952 Hollywood film Don’t Bother to Knock starring Marilyn Monroe (in her first top-billed role) as a psychotic babysitter (and reportedly Monroe had been freaked out by being directed by a man with her real last name in a tale about childhood and the loss of innocence). There were some other prestigious names behind the camera: the cinematographer was Geoffrey Unsworth, who a decade later would shoot 2001: A Space Odyssey for Stanley Kubrick; and the art director was Alex Vetchinsky, who had worked with Alfred Hitchcock on his 1938 British film The Lady Vanishes. The cast was quite large, and virtually all of it was drawn from that remarkable pool of British (and British-trained) character actors.

Kenneth More, who a year later would star in the 1959 remake of Hitchcock’s 1935 masterpiece The 39 Steps, played the lead role of Charles Herbert Lightoller, second officer on board the Titanic and the highest-ranking officer to survive the disaster. The real Lightoller led a quite interesting and movie-worthy life (you should look him up on Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Lightoller) and was already 38 years old when he set sail on the Titanic on April 10, 1912. (Later, in retirement, he would sail his private yacht across the English Channel in 1940 as a volunteer in the evacuation of the British army from Dunkirk, and the movie Dunkirk includes a character based on him.) More turns in an authoritative performance even though, like the real Lightoller, he gets quite annoying when he rigidly enforces the women-and-children-first policy to determine who gets on the lifeboats in spite of the pleas of couples not to be separated from each other or their kids. Incidentally the real Lightoller preferred to be addressed by his middle name, Herbert, or his nickname, “Lights.” A Night to Remember is a well-crafted movie, beautifully directed by Baker and photographed by Unsworth in high-contrast black-and-white (it’s one of those films that makes you wonder why anybody thought the movies needed color) and vividly acted. I especially liked Tucker McGuire as the “unsinkable” Molly Brown, and as an American (born in Winchester, Virginia on January 29, 1913) she had no problem with the character’s U.S. accent. She certainly holds her own against the formidable competition of Debbie Reynolds (in The Unsinkable Molly Brown on both stage and film) and Kathy Bates (in James Cameron’s 1997 Titanic), especially when she grabs command of her lifeboat from the nominal sailor who’s supposed to be running it and orders her crewwomen to row in the direction of other survivors.

Some of this film’s footage comes not only from surviving newsreel clips of the actual Titanic setting off on its maiden voyage but the 1943 German film Titanic, one of the most fascinating movies about the disaster because it ran headlong into political winds from its Nazi sponsors. The original director of the 1943 Titanic, Herbert Selpin, was arrested during the production for allegedly having made disparaging comments about the ability of Germany to win the war, and he was ultimately found hanging in his cell while his replacement director, Werner Klingler, finished the film but was not credited. Selpin and his co-writer, Walter Zerlett-Olfenius, had concocted a fictional German officer, Petersen (Hans Nielsen), to serve aboard the Titanic and try to talk the British officers out of steaming full speed ahead through the ice fields, and when Joseph Goebbels green-lighted this film it’s obvious he wasn’t seeing beyond “German good – British bad.” In fact, as Charles and I realized years ago when we watched the Kino DVD of Titanic, it’s about a hierarchical organization which puts demands on people that border on the insane and lead to a predictable catastrophe. Once Goebbels watched the finished film he insisted that it only be released in occupied France, not Germany itself; it wasn’t released in Germany until 1949, well after the war, when the Allied occupiers were desperate to find any German-language films that didn’t carry too much of the taint of Nazism. But the German Titanic was the biggest-budgeted film made in Germany to that date, and four clips from it were used in A Night to Remember: two of the Titanic sailing in calm waters before the catastrophe, and two of the engine room flooding after the collision.

It’s interesting to note that Ambler’s script for the film contains various legends about the Titanic that have since been debunked. Modern research notes that the Titanic may have been doomed from the start by its very size; when it was launched at the Harland and Wolff shipyards in Belfast where it was built (and where James Cameron discovered the original plans and used them to construct the replica Titanic for his 1997 film), the undertow from it pulled the docking pier close to it. This suggests that the iceberg that caused the Titanic to sink might also have been pulled close to it by the draft of the ship (as the mine that sank the Titanic’s sister ship, the Britannic, when it was being used as a hospital ship in December 1916 off the coast of Turkey during World War I). It’s also been guessed that the iceberg (which is really just a giant ice cube in the middle of the sea) had a spur on it that sliced open the ship’s watertight compartments (which were supposed to render it “unsinkable”) like a can opener. One thing we do know about the Titanic that wasn’t known then was that the ship actually broke in two as it sank. Some survivors said it had, some said it hadn’t, and here (as in all previous films about the Titanic) it sinks in one piece. It wasn’t until 1985, when improvements in diving equipment, including unmanned submersible craft that allow objects under thousands of feet of water to be photographed, had been made, that the wreckage of the Titanic was photographed for the first time. The footage confirmed that the Titanic had indeed broken in two as it sank, and Cameron became the first director of a dramatic film about the Titanic to incorporate that information. Another myth about the Titanic that this film perpetuated was that the last song heard aboard the vessel as it sank was the hymn “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” This was disconfirmed partly from the recollections of survivors, who named the last song as a French piece called “Autumn Dream,” and partly from a 1909 magazine interview with the man who became bandmaster for the Titanic. He told the interviewer that he’d never play a depressing song during a shipwreck, but would keep the music lively to keep up the passengers’ spirits. (Alas, even James Cameron couldn’t resist putting “Nearer, My God, to Thee” on his soundtrack as the last song the Titanic passengers heard before it sank.)

This time around Charles faulted the film for the cleanliness of the engine room, which reminded me of Duke Ellington’s 1935 short film Symphony in Black, with its stokers shoveling coal into a boiler from a perfectly clean, pristine soundstage floor. Overall, though, both of us liked the movie and its ability to generate enough drama to hold the interest with just the real people who’d been on board the Titanic instead of dragging in fictional characters (as the Titanic films of 1943, 1953, and 1997 did; I’ll never forget when Charles and I watched the 1953 20th Century-Fox Titanic and he was so appalled when Robert Wagner started to sing the song “Vive la Compagnie!” he turned to me and said, “I’m rooting for the iceberg”). Incidentally this version of A Night to Remember underwent a major restoration job courtesy of ITV, Britain’s private commercial TV channel, and while I hadn’t found anything particularly wrong with the picture quality the last time I’d seen it, the film’s visual appeal was excellent and really did justice to the chiaroscuro black-and-white cinematography and the whole approach to the film. Though it didn’t go anywhere nearly as far as the 1943 German Titanic (which is actually about the stock speculation White Star Line CEO J. Bruce Ismay was doing in connection with the ship’s maiden voyage), there are certainly anti-rich and anti-capitalist elements in A Night to Remember, including the horrific scenes of steerage passengers being locked out of the upper decks and thereby being trapped like rats as they try to escape (one of them takes an ax to break apart the wood to which the metal gate is latched and is upbraided by a White Star sailor for destroying the line’s property) and the complaints of the upper-class passengers that all this bother about an iceberg and an evacuation is totally spoiling their lunches, tea breaks, and other diversions. There’s also a great running gag about a card sharp who inveigled his fellow passengers into a high-stakes poker game that goes on until literally the last minute; a large metal covered food tray that slides around in the ship’s evacuated restaurant; and the final desperation as many passengers literally jump off what’s left of the ship in a last-ditch attempt to save themselves despite the frigid cold of the Arctic waters. A Night to Remember is the Titanic movie to watch if you’re going to see just one (though I’d also recommend the German Titanic of 1943 as well as James Cameron’s, which for all its bits of silliness does have some first-rate elements; I especially liked Gloria Stuart, who played the old version of Kate Winslet’s character and in a letter to the Los Angeles Times acclaimed Cameron one of the three best directors she’d ever worked for, alongside James Whale and John Ford).

Bubbles (Warner Bros., Vitaphone Corporation, 1930)

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

Last night (Sunday, June 7) my husband Charles and I watched a 1930 Warner Bros. short called Bubbles that was filmed in two-strip Technicolor but now only exists in black-and-white. What makes this one interesting is it was one of three short films made featuring Judy Garland (though she was still using her birth name, Frances Gumm), and apparently the only one that survives with both picture and sound intact. The first one, The Big Revue of 1929, is totally lost, and for the second, Blue Butterfly, we have the Vitaphone soundtrack record but not the film itself. In Bubbles Judy sang a song called “The Land of Let’s Pretend,” and she’s not very good: her voice was still that of a little girl and her intonation was all over the place. I was amused that one of the other songs in the film contained the word “rainbow,” since even though Judy (or Frances) didn’t sing it here the word “rainbow” would become crucial to her later career. Not only did she sing “Over the Rainbow” in the 1939 film of The Wizard of Oz, two years later MGM dredged up the 1920’s song “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” for her and also commissioned a song for her called “The End of the Rainbow” (you get the idea?). Somehow in the five years between 1930 and 1935, for which we have the next surviving recording of Judy’s voice – a broadcast aircheck of “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart” from a show in which the announcer broke the news that Judy had just signed a seven-year contract with MGM – her voice developed into that of a fully mature woman and gained the artistry and precision that would ultimately make her a star, albeit a highly troubled one.