Young Frankenstein (Gruskoff/Venture Films, Crossbow Productions, Jouer Limited, 20th Century-Fox, 1974)

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

Last night (Sunday, June 28) my husband Charles and I watched a film we hadn’t seen in a while but regard as one of our favorites: Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein (1974). According to Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz, it came about in a casual conversation between Brooks and Gene Wilder on the set of their immediately previous film, Blazing Saddles (1974), in which Wilder told Brooks that he’d like their next film to be a parody of the classic Universal Frankenstein monster films. Wilder also stipulated that Brooks could direct it but should not be in it, even though Brooks did work his way into three audio-only bit parts (he’s listed on the film’s imdb.com page as “Werewolf,” “Cat Hit By Dart,” and “Victor Frankenstein [Voice]”). According to a cover story published by Newsweek when the film was first released, Wilder and Brooks fought all through the making of the film, always over the same issue: Wilder wanted the humor to be more subtle, Brooks wanted it more broad. TCM host Ben Mankiewicz told an anecdote I’d never heard before: the great scene in which Dr. Frederick Frankenstein (Gene Wilder) and the Monster (Peter Boyle, billed second; in the original 1931 Frankenstein Boris Karloff was billed fourth) appear on stage and do a dance number to Irving Berlin’s song “Puttin’ On the Ritz” was entirely Wilder’s idea. Brooks didn’t want to shoot it; Wilder spent 20 minutes arguing with him over the scene, and finally Brooks said, “If you care about it so much you’re willing to argue with me for 20 minutes over it, it goes in.” It’s one of the highlights of the film! Brooks and Wilder insisted that the movie be shot in black-and-white to reproduce the look of the Universal films they were parodying – which cost them their original distribution deal with Columbia. No problem: Brooks and Wilder simply went down the block to 20th Century-Fox, whose production head, Alan Ladd, Jr., agreed to make the film in black-and-white. (Ladd was the visionary who accepted George Lucas’s Star Wars for production after 12 other studios and production chiefs had turned it down.) It’s ironic that Young Frankenstein is now older (52 years) than the original Universal films it was lampooning were when it was made (43 years after the original Frankenstein, 39 years after The Bride of Frankenstein, and 35 years after Son of Frankenstein). It’s also a film that arguably shouldn’t have worked at all given that it was parodying something that was already a parody; director James Whale and writers William Hurlbut and John L. Balderston had already made fun of the original Frankenstein mythos in The Bride of Frankenstein, ramping up the comic-relief elements to a point at which they were at least as important as the horror aspects. In a way Brooks and Wilder (especially Brooks) replaced Whale’s and Balderston’s campy British Gay humor with out-and-out Borscht Belt schtick.

Young Frankenstein emerged as a beautifully balanced film, containing enough raunchy sex jokes to please the most jaded Mel Brooks devotée (including the one between Gene Wilder and Teri Garr, much less annoying than usual, that ends the film), but also with genuine moments of subtlety and wit (his send-up of the scene with the blind hermit from The Bride of Frankenstein, with the late Gene Hackman superb as the hermit who accidentally lights the Monster’s finger while trying to light his cigar for him, is quite bittersweet in its humor). It's also ironic that while Young Frankenstein was shooting in Great Britain, another crew under contract to 20th Century-Fox was filming a quite different parody of the Frankenstein mythos, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and while that’s a great movie (I once paired it with The Bride of Frankenstein and told Charles we were going to watch “the two Gayest versions of the Frankenstein story”) it pales by comparison to Young Frankenstein. Indeed, while Young Frankenstein satirized the Universal Frankenstein films, The Rocky Horror Picture Show was much more a spoof of the Hammer remakes. Dr. Frank N. Furter even created his monster in a giant fish tank that had previously been used in Hammer’s first foray into the myth, The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), while for Young Frankenstein Brooks scored all the original lab equipment that had been built by Kenneth Strickfaden for the Universal films. Strickfaden had retained ownership of all that gear and had merely rented it to studios that wanted to use it, and as of 1974 it was all sitting in his garage until Brooks learned about it and arranged to use it even though that meant it all had to be taken to Britain. Brooks even gave Strickfaden the screen credit he’d deserved on the originals but hadn’t been granted. Strickfaden’s involvement puts both Boris Karloff and Mel Brooks two degrees of separation from Bix Beiderbecke, since Charles Strickfaden, Kenneth’s brother, had been a reed player in Paul Whiteman’s band when Bix was in it from 1927 to 1929. And there’s an even closer association to a jazz great in Young Frankenstein than that: Marty Feldman, who exploded onto the movie world as Dr. Frederick Frankenstein’s hunchbacked assistant Igor (pronounced “EYE-gor” instead of the usual “EE-gor,” a gag I suspect Brooks got from the 1933 horror classic Mystery of the Wax Museum, which was also the source for the gag in which Feldman’s head, labeled “Freshly Dead,” appears at the end of a series of skulls), was the brother of Victor Feldman, who’d played piano for Miles Davis in the early 1960’s. (Miles fired Victor Feldman in the middle of recording his troubled album Seven Steps to Heaven and replaced him with Herbie Hancock.)

While Young Frankenstein is mainly based on the first three Universal Frankenstein films, it also is full of in-jokes from other movies; Brooks and Wilder moved the setting to Transylvania (Mary Shelley’s original novel had been set in Switzerland, where she’d been living when she wrote it) and couldn’t resist cribbing from the Universal Dracula as well. All those vertiginous stone stairways with no rails, as well as the rat-infested cellar where the earlier Victor Frankenstein concealed his equipment and even the opening scene, when an emissary from Castle Frankenstein tries to wrest a box from Victor’s cold, dead hands so he can take it to New York and give it to Victor’s grandson Frederick, are from the Dracula rather than the Frankenstein mythos. The scene at the theatre in which the Monster goes berserk after he and Dr. Frankenstein do their song-and-dance to “Puttin’ on the Ritz” (one wonders how Brooks and Wilder got permission from the still-living and infamously fiercely protective of his intellectual property Irving Berlin to use his song in that bizarre context) and the audience flees in terror is a pretty obvious cop from the 1933 King Kong. And there’s an even more oddball reference to Richard Cunha’s 1958 film Frankenstein’s Daughter in which the grandson of the original Victor Frankenstein angrily reacts to being called by his full last name and snaps, “Here my name is Frank!” That makes it even more ironic that the imdb.com cast list for Young Frankenstein includes an actor whose name is Clement von Franckenstein, indicated as playing the “Villager Screaming at the Monster from the Bars.” Young Frankenstein cinematographer Gerald Hirschfeld flawlessly reproduced the look of the Universal films that were the inspiration. I particularly liked the use of iris-ins and iris-outs and some of the other oddball transitions that were part of the basic grammar of film (iris shots actually pretty much went out with the silent era but the wipes used extensively in this film were quite common in the early 1930’s), and given the cold war between directors and cinematographers over moving-camera shots (directors liked them, cinematographers didn’t because they took too long to light), it’s ironic that Young Frankenstein begins with an elaborate and quite long moving-camera shot. The film is also quite creative in its use of music, even though John Morris’s background score, though perfectly fine, doesn’t have the demented imagination Franz Waxman brought to the music for The Bride of Frankenstein.

The Iron Mask (Elton Corporation, United Artists, 1929)

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

After Young Frankenstein my husband Charles and I kept the TV on Turner Classic Movies for the “Silent Sunday Nights” showing of Douglas Fairbanks’s last silent film, The Iron Mask (1929). It was a sequel to his 1921 film The Three Musketeers based on the two sequelae Alexandre Dumas père, creator of The Three Musketeers, had written after the original was a huge commercial success. Because Fairbanks (who not only starred in the film but also produced and, under the pseudonym “Elton Thomas,” wrote it; his birth name was Douglas Elton Thomas Ullman and he got “Fairbanks” from his mother’s first husband’s name) and director Allan Dwan (who had directed Fairbanks in his first encounter with the Dumas mythos in the 1917 film A Modern Musketeer, in which Fairbanks played a modern-day Kansas hayseed who dreams of being D’Artagnan, though Fairbanks used a different director, Fred Niblo, for his actual film of The Three Musketeers) didn’t want to see it written off as just “the last of the big silents,” they filmed two talking scenes, one at the beginning of the film and one midway through at the intermission point, in which Fairbanks as D’Artagnan faced the camera directly and spoke bits of drivel about the wonders of the age of the Three Musketeers and their “All for One, and One for All” loyalty to each other. (The original 1929 release even included a song of that title, composed by Hugo Reisenfeld and Louis Alter with lyrics by Jo Trent.) When The Iron Mask was first reissued in 1952 in a cut-down print by Allied Artists nèe Monogram, the picture survived but the original Vitaphone sound discs were lost. With Fairbanks, Sr. having been dead for 12 years by then, they hired Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. to dub the prologue sequence. The Iron Mask has been through several reissues since, including the one TCM showed last night, a 2017 recycling from the Cohen Media Group (who earned my undying disgust by deleting a title card from their release of the stunning 1932 James Whale horror/comedy masterpiece The Old Dark House). It had a newly composed and recorded score from Carl Davis that included two brief but unmistakable quotes from Wagner (particularly Siegfried’s Rhine Journey from Götterdämmerung), as well as Douglas Fairbanks, Sr.’s original voice from the soundtrack records, which were rediscovered and ended up in the Library of Congress. Frankly, I would rather have seen the film with the original 1929 soundtrack (the cuts from 1929 to 2017 sound and back were predictably jarring), if only for the sake of authenticity.

I’d seen The Iron Mask once before in one of the earlier reissue prints in which Fairbanks, Jr. dubbed Fairbanks, Sr.’s lines, but I had few memories of it. It’s really not that good a movie – nowhere near as much fun, or as inspiring dramatically, as the 1922 Fairbanks/Dwan Robin Hood – though it’s handsomely produced and the sets (the credited art directors were Carl Oscar Borg, Wilfred Buckland, Paul Burns, Ben Carré, David S. Hall, Jack Holden, Laurence Irving, Edward M. Langley, and Harold Miles!) are appropriately stunning. Though Fairbanks was 45 when he made this film, he was still a good enough acrobat to give us plenty of “trajectory” gags, including stunning leaps from balconies. The one thing that was surprising about this movie was the death toll; writer Fairbanks concocted a script in which as many of the “good” characters as the evil ones don’t make it alive to the end (or “The Beginning,” as the final title proclaims over a shot of the Four Musketeers, Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and D’Artagnan, reunited in heaven). D’Artagnan begins the movie as the captain of the guards for King Louis XIII (Rolfe Sedan), whose wife (Belle Bennett, four years after her personal triumph in the 1925 silent version of Stella Dallas) is about to give birth. Cardinal Richelieu (the superb silent-era villain Nigel de Brulier) calls on the populace of France to pray that the child is a boy so he can inherit the throne, and when the child is born and it’s a boy, Richelieu heaves a sigh of relief. Alas, Belle Bennett’s character’s body has another baby inside, and when it too turns out to be a boy Richelieu is determined to make sure no one knows about it because he reasons two equally qualified heirs could result in a revolution. As the plot develops the real villain of the piece is not Richelieu but his disloyal assistant, De Rochefort (Ulricht Haupt, villain of the 1928 John Barrymore film Tempest secretly written by Erich von Stroheim). Richelieu and Rochefort are determined to keep the secret no matter how many people they have to kill to do so, so they have the inconvenient second heir spirited off to Spain and send the Queen’s lady-in-waiting, Constance (who’s also D’Artagnan’s girlfriend), to a convent. Milady de Winter (Dorothy Revier) sneaks into the convent and worms the secret out of Constance, and Rochefort’s hit squad murders Constance with three-fifths of the movie left to go just to shut her up.

Then Rochefort and the younger prince (both he and the rightful King Louis XIV, who ascends to the throne once his dad dies, are played as boys by Gordon Thorpe and as adults by William Bakewell; the Bakewell films I’ve seen previously didn’t impress me but he’s quite good here at differentiating between the good King Louis and the evil prince) hatch a plot to kidnap and imprison the real King and substitute the other heir, so between them the replacement King and Rochefort can rule France for their personal profit. (It sounds like what’s happening to the U.S. now under the restored President Trump.) The real King is locked in a fortress prison with his head encased in an iron mask so no one can see what he looks like, but he gets word to D’Artagnan by inscribing one of the metal plates on which he’s served his food with an emblem, a French coin which he cut in half, gave one half to D’Artagnan and wore the other himself as a sign of recognition. The plate is recovered by a fisherman working the river outside the castle, who reads the inscription (one imdb.com “Trivia” poster marked that as a goof because, they argued, no French peasants then could read) and brings it to D’Artagnan. The film ends with a pitched battle in which the rightful King is restored to the throne but D’Artagnan is stabbed in the back and gets to reunite with his fellow Three Musketeers in heaven. The Iron Mask is an O.K. movie but I’ve seen better action silents (including my all-time favorite action film, John Ford’s 1926 Western Three Bad Men). Fairbanks was getting visibly tired of stardom and the burdens it entailed on his life; in the next few years, as his first sound film (an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew co-starring him and his real-life wife, Mary Pickford) flopped, he got more interested in extensive travels, and when Pickford divorced him she claimed that the reason for the breakup was he kept wanting to go on extended vacations and she wasn’t interested. Fairbanks even worked up a 1932 project called Mr. Robinson Crusoe that he could film on his travels by making them the main issue of the plot, though as I recall his actual last film, a 1934 historical adventure called The Private Life of Don Juan, made in England and produced and directed by Alexander Korda, was actually quite good and a worthy finish to his career. Charles made the odd comment that The Iron Mask reminded him of the 1939 spoof of The Three Musketeers starring Don Ameche and The Ritz Brothers, and I pointed out that Allan Dwan had directed the Ritz Brothers’ version as well!

Frankenstein's Daughter (Layton Film Corporation, Astor Pictures, 1958)

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

On November 20, 2007, I ran my partner (not yet my husband) Charles an intriguing "B" horror filmfrom 1958 called Frankenstein's Daughter, which I was just reminded of because last night (June 28, 2026) he and I watched Mel Brooks's and Gene Wilder's comic masterpiece Young Frankenstein and at least one of the gags in that film reminded me of this one: Dr. Frederick Frankenstein's (Gene Wilder) insistence that people pronounce his last name "Frahnkensteen" so he's not associated with his famous grandfather that created the monster in Mary Shelley's original novel. It's also worth noting that the androgynous appearance of the monster in Frankenstein's Daughter is, according to an imdb.com "Trivia" post, due to the producers having hired a man, Harry Wilson, to play the monster, and never having told their makeup artist, Harry Thomas, that the monster was supposed to be female. When he found out, all Thomas could think of doing was having Wilson apply lipstick to the monster's face.

I ran Charles a movie, coincidentally also something he had downloaded from a public-domain site: Frankenstein’s Daughter, a 1958 horror indie credited to Astor Pictures Corporation on the credits (usually Astor was a TV reissue label that handled the output of PRC and Monogram) and “Layton Film Productions, Inc.” on imdb.com. Produced by someone with the marvelously reversible name of “Marc Frederic” (“and directed by Frederic Marc!” I wanted to joke) and actually directed by one Richard Cunha from a script by one H. E. Barrie (presumably no relation to the creator of Peter Pan), Frankenstein’s Daughter is an intriguing film that definitely shows its origins for the drive-in market but manages to be a little bit better than that despite some pretty risible elements. The film opens with a pre-credits sequence showing Don (Harold Lloyd, Jr., who actually got an “Introducing” credit here) and blonde bombshell Suzie Lawler (Sally Todd) necking standing up, when he’s distracted by something and she comes face-to-face with something with a badly-fitting negligée on and a face that’s supposed to be monstrous but just looks like the poor girl tried to put her makeup on in the dark. Just when I was thinking that this film ought to have been called Frankenstein’s Bad Drag Queen (and certainly having just returned from the Transgender Day of Remembrance had something to do with that thought occurring to me, though Charles, who hadn’t been there, agreed with me!), the credits came up and in a series of expository scenes we learn that the girl with the bad makeup is Trudy Morton (Susan Knight, who later co-starred with Boris Karloff and Jack Nicholson in the abysmal The Terror), live-in niece of nice-mad scientist Carter Morton (Felix Locher — and no, we’re not given an explanation of how a character with a comic German accent got an Anglo name like “Carter Morton”!), who claims to have invented a drug that can eliminate all bacteria, viruses and toxins from the body and ensure perfect health and long life almost forever. There’s only one catch: the formula for the drug involves a proprietary substance called “Digenerol” owned by a drug company that doesn’t want to sell it to Our Character Hero, and which comes with a nasty side effect: it disfigures the skin of anyone who takes it.

Carter and his nasty-mad assistant, Oliver Frank (Donald Murphy), have been secretly testing their formula on Trudy, which sends her out at night as a negligée- or bathing-suit clad monster and leaves her waking up each morning with memories of nightmares and what feels like the mother of all hangovers. There are actually two monsters in this film, the one Trudy turns into when Drs. Morton and Frank secretly feed her their monster juice and the one Dr. Frank is clandestinely building from bits of dead bodies in Dr. Morton’s otherwise disused wine cellar. It turns out that Dr. Frank, who from his first frame has been suspiciously coy about his background and scared to death about any involvement with the police, is really the grandson of the original Baron Frankenstein and is continuing granddad’s and dad’s researches. We learn this when the weird hunchback character Elsu (Wolfe Barzell), who supposedly is Morton’s gardener but who really is a relative of the hunchbacked assistants who served previous generations of the Frankenstein family, inadvertently addresses Oliver as “Frankenstein” and he turns furiously towards Elsu and says, “Here my name is Frank!” (Is that where Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder got the marvelous “My name is … Frahnkensteen” gag in Young Frankenstein?) Things heat up when it turns out that there’s a whole lotta sexual tension going on: Suzie seems to be throwing it at every male in sight — she’s already upset that Trudy stole her former boyfriend Johnny Bruder (John Ashley, top-billed and every bit as annoying as he was in How to Make a Monster — he’s got one of those overhanging 1950’s hairdos that looks like you could come in out of the rain under it, and he and acting remain strangers throughout the film, though at least in this one he doesn’t get to sing) — and Oliver attempts as close to raping Trudy as you could get and still get a seal of approval under the Production Code in 1958.

With his boss’s niece out of consideration, he makes a date with Suzie instead — and when she, too, turns him down he runs her over with his car and extracts her brain for use in his monster. (I couldn’t resist the obvious joke: “You can’t use her brain! She’s a 1950’s movie blonde and therefore she doesn’t have one!”) He thereupon refers to the monster as “Frankenstein’s Daughter” even though it’s all too obviously a male-based body and the only female component in it is the brain. (Earlier Elsu has complained, “We’ve never used a female brain before,” and I couldn’t resist the comment, “Of course we have! Does the name ‘Dr. Pretorius’ mean anything to you?” — though, come to think of it, in The Bride of Frankenstein the female monster’s brain was artificially grown by Pretorius using his plant-based methods and only its body was a woman’s.) The monster’s makeup is as close to the famous Universal one as makeup artists Paul Stanhope and Harry Thomas dared, though they surrounded the face with bandages and kept them on throughout the film even after the monster came to life. To make this movie even quirkier, Johnny Bruder is not only Trudy’s boyfriend and Suzie’s ex, he’s also an apprentice cop serving under Lt. Boyle (John Zaremba), who gets the call to investigate once the monster (the bio-created one, not Trudy in bad makeup) kills someone. There’s also a scene at a barbecue thrown by Dr. Morton for his teen friends (including quite a few actors obviously in their early 30’s) in which the Page Cavanaugh Trio perform. The appearance of a group like this performing the film’s obligatory musical number (a song called “Daddy Bird” which is clearly attempting to be rock ’n’ roll and falling short, though on its own terms it’s not bad and it’s certainly better than “You’ve Gotta Have Ee-Ooo” from How to Make a Monster) is a bit strange — the Page Cavanaugh Trio was most famous for movies like A Song Is Born and Romance on the High Seas, where they got to accompany Virginia Mayo (or her voice double, Jeri Sullavan) and Doris Day, respectively — and yet I’d rather hear a lightweight but genuinely talented pop act than the fluff that usually passed for rock ’n’ roll in movies like this. Frankenstein’s Daughter runs 85 minutes, which is about 10 minutes too long for its own good, and it’s really not much of a movie, but it has a kind of quirky charm and was certainly several cuts above the out-and-out exploitation film we were expecting.

Stolen Face (Hammer Films, Exclusive Films, Lippert Films, 1952)

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

Last night (Saturday, June 27) my husband Charles and I watched the latest episode in Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” show on Turner Classic Movies, a 1952 Hammer/Lippert co-production called Stolen Face based on the then-current idea that a person might turn to crime because they were physically deformed, and therefore they could be rehabilitated through plastic surgery that would make them attractive and therefore end the ongoing traumas that had turned them “bad.” We’d already seen this premise explored in films like Lew Landers’s 1935 The Raven (which starred Boris Karloff as a hardened criminal and Bela Lugosi as a plastic surgeon; when Karloff comes to Lugosi and pleads for an operation that will make him good-looking and thereby end his criminal career, Lugosi double-crosses him, makes him even uglier, and uses him as an instrument of revenge) and a quite remarkable Columbia “B” from 1936, The Man Who Lived Twice, which cast Ralph Bellamy as a hardened criminal and Thurston Hall as the plastic surgeon who operates on him and ultimately hires him as his assistant, to the point where he becomes a licensed M.D. himself. It was directed by Harry Lachman but Lew Landers returned to the premise in 1953 for a remake, Man in the Dark, shot in 3-D but not released that way, with Edmond O’Brien as the transformed crook and Dayton Lummis as the surgeon who helps him. I posted on the original (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/12/the-man-who-lived-twice-columbia-1936.html) and called it “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in reverse.” Eddie Muller’s intro compared the film to the two versions of A Woman’s Face (the Swedish one with Ingrid Bergman in 1938 and the U.S. remake with Joan Crawford in 1941) and also to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, though he pointed out that it was made not only six years before Hitchcock’s classic but two years before the French writers Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac wrote D’Entre les Morts (the title is usually given in English as The Living and the Dead but its literal meaning is From Amongst the Dead), on which Vertigo was based. (They deliberately crafted the story hoping that Hitchcock would buy the movie rights.)

Directed by Terence Fisher from an original story by Alexander Paal and Steven Vas, adapted into a screenplay by Martin Berkeley and Richard H. Landau, Stolen Face was one of the Lippert-Hammer co-productions in which Hammer supplied the studio space, production infrastructure, and supporting cast, while Lippert came up with American stars to boost the films’ commercial potential in the U.S. In this case the “American” stars (in quotes because one of them was not U.S.-born) were Paul Henried and Lizabeth Scott. At the time Henried was being blacklisted – or, more accurately, greylisted – because he’d participated in the 1948 protests against the House Un-American Activities Committee’s investigations of alleged Communist infiltration in Hollywood (he could still get roles, but only for independent producers). The protests had also included major stars and directors like Katharine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and John Huston, but somehow their careers emerged relatively unscathed while Henried’s didn’t. (It puts an interesting spin on his role in Casablanca that Henried played Victor Laszlo in real life as well.) Lizabeth Scott was, shall we say, a “protégée” of producer Hal Wallis, who discovered her after he left Warner Bros. and became an in-house independent at Paramount. Stolen Face casts Henried as plastic surgeon Dr. Philip Ritter, who’s become so famous that an older woman, Lady Millicent Harringay (Everley Gregg), beseeches him for an operation to make her more attractive to her younger fiancé and even offers him 1,000 pounds for it, only he tells her flat-out that she’s waited too long. Lizabeth Scott plays two roles, American concert pianist Alice Brent and Cockney guttersnipe Lily Conover. When Ritter’s medical partner, Dr. John Wilson (John Wood), tells him he’s burning himself out and needs a vacation, Ritter takes a week off at a seaside resort. He rents a room from a pub owner and there meets Alice, who’s recuperating from a cold in the adjoining room. Ritter writes her a note saying she needs two aspirins and a bottle of whiskey, and ultimately they meet, drink together, smoke together (Muller noted the sheer amount of smoking Ritter does in this movie, especially for a doctor – though throughout Hollywood’s classic era doctors smoked like chimneys – and suggested Henried had become famous for smoking after the famous smoking scene with Bette Davis in Now, Voyager), and finally fall in love. This is a complication she doesn’t need in her life because she’s about to embark on a concert tour of Europe under the guidance of her manager David (André Morell in his first of nine films for Hammer, of which the most famous is the 1959 The Hound of the Baskervilles, in which he played Dr. Watson to Peter Cushing’s Sherlock Holmes), who’s also her fiancé.

Turned down by Alice, Ritter decides to make Lily Conover, whom he’s met as a volunteer doing complimentary plastic surgery on prison inmates, into Alice’s image and marry her. Ritter soon learns that his makeover of Lily into the spitting image of Alice (she’d been badly burned on her face during a German Blitz raid on London in World War II) hasn’t changed her moral character at all. She’s still a thief and Ritter has to shell out his own money to pay for the items she’s stolen. What’s more, she uses Ritter’s palatial home to throw wild parties for herself and her friends, including her scapegrace boyfriend Pete Snipe (Terence O’Regan). There’s a neat scene in which Ritter takes Lily to an opera, which bores her, and Lily takes him to a jazz club, whose band is headlined by tenor saxophonist Ronnie Scott (who later opened a jazz club of his own in London), and he’s bored. Just then Alice – ya remember Alice? – returns from her concert tour. She tells Ritter that she didn’t marry David after all and now wants him, only Lily is totally unwilling to divorce him. Ritter announces to Alice that he’s going to move from London to Plymouth, but Lily follows him and crashes his compartment on the train, which [spoiler alert!] turns into a deus ex machina as Alice and Lily confront each other on the train until Lily falls to her death via a loose door on the train car. The police find Lily’s dead body with her face horribly disfigured (ah, the irony!) and Ritter and Alice are free to get together. (One wonders how Ritter got away with it, because I was expecting a more cynical ending in which the cops become convinced he murdered Lily to get rid of her so he could be with Alice.) The big problem with Stolen Face is the casting of the leads: Paul Henried is O.K. as a stuck-up surgeon with a God complex but he’d played that sort of character far better four years earlier in a much more credibly noir movie, Hollow Triumph a.k.a. The Scar (in which he was the super-surgeon who remodeled himself). Lizabeth Scott is pretty much hopeless; as Alice Brent she gets the hauteur right but little else, though I give her a lot of credit for having learned her way around the piano keys enough to synchronize credibly with the pre-recordings by Bronwyn Jones (a pianist I’ve been unable to find out any information about online; she’s not listed in the Fanfare archive and her only credit on imdb.com is this one). But her attempt at a Cockney accent as Lily is pretty terrible, and quite frankly this would have been a much better film if Hammer and Lippert had given the female lead(s) to Barbara Payton, who was so stunning in previous Hammer-Lippert co-productions like Four Sided Triangle and Bad Blonde.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Daughter of the Jungle (Republic, 1949)

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

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

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

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

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