The Immigrant (Mutual, Lone Star, 1917)

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

Last night (Monday, August 31) my husband Charles (who had his birthday yesterday) and I went to the “Not-So-Silent Movie Night” at the Spreckels Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park to hear organist Clark Wilson play a brief opening concert and then provide live musical accompaniments to two classics of silent-film comedy: Charlie Chaplin’s The Immigrant (1917) and Buster Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr. (1924). For some strange reason, instead of using his opening concert (a tradition in the Organ Pavilion to entertain the crowd before the sun sets enough to make outdoor projection of a film more practicable) to play music from the 1920’s or earlier when silent films were current, Wilson chose to make his opening piece a medley of pop-rock songs from the 1970’s. He opened with Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” (I missed that one, partly because I was expecting a 1920’s song and was racking my memories of actual 1920’s music and coming up short, but Charles recognized it) and then did The Moody Blues’ “Nights in White Satin,” The Carpenters’ “Sing” (I briefly wondered whether he was playing the 1930 song “Sing,” but he wasn’t), David Gates’s “If,” Elton John’s “Bennie and the Jets,” and a reprise of The Carpenters’ “Sing” to close. Once the night was dark enough to start the films, Wilson announced that he'd be using familiar songs in his accompaniments, but he annoyed me (again) by using songs that hadn’t yet existed when these films were made. At least for the big love theme between Chaplin and his leading lady, Edna Purviance, in The Immigrant he used Victor Herbert’s and Rida Johnson Young’s “Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life” from Herbert’s operetta Naughty Marietta, which was premiered in 1910, seven years before the film was made. But for Sherlock, Jr. in particular he used songs that considerably post-dated the film, including George and Ira Gershwin’s “Nice Work if You Can Get It” from the 1937 Fred Astaire film A Damsel in Distress and Jule Styne’s and Leo Robin’s “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” from the 1949 stage musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

As for the two films, The Immigrant was the eleventh and next-to-last film Chaplin made in a series of 12 for Mutual Films, headed by John R. Freuler. Chaplin had made his screen debut for Mack Sennett’s Keystone studio in 1914 but after his one-year contract was up he’d jumped to Essanay and then after that contract was completed he moved once again to Mutual. With each move he earned 10 times what his previous studio had paid him, such was the explosive character of his success. When he finished his Mutual contract with The Adventurer Chaplin jumped ship once again to the newly formed First National combine, a studio founded by independent theatre owners who were worried that the ever-larger theatre chains being formed by Paramount and Loew’s (the parent company of what became MGM) would shut them out of showing any product featuring major stars. First National scored two of the biggest names of the time, Chaplin and Mary Pickford, though in 1919 Chaplin, Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks (then Pickford’s fiancé and later her husband), and D. W. Griffith joined forces to start United Artists. Chaplin’s films for Keystone, Essanay, and Mutual got re-sold to other distributors, but starting with his First National output Chaplin owned his films outright and made sure they couldn’t be shown without his permission and royalties. The Immigrant actually started with the scene that makes up the second half of the two-reel film: Chaplin and his regular leading lady Edna Purviance play starving people who attempt to crash a restaurant and grab food. Chaplin thinks he has the money to pay his bill via a silver dollar, or at least something he thinks is a silver dollar, which he found on the street outside the restaurant. When he sees Purviance in financial distress, he orders her the same bean soup he’s having, only he realizes his coin fell out of a hole in his pants pocket. He sees the waiters, led by the fearsome Eric Campbell (a “heavy” Chaplin lured away from, of all places, the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, the London-based outfit that produced the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas), beat up a customer. Asking for an explanation, he’s told, “He was 10 cents short on his bill.” Chaplin eventually finds the coin, only Campbell is suspicious of it and ultimately bends it, thereby proving it’s fake. Fortunately, the two are bailed out of their predictament by an oddball artist (Henry Bergman) who decides he wants to hire them as models. Chaplin asks for a $2 advance on their pay, and uses it to pay for a marriage license for himself and Purviance.

According to The Unknown Chaplin, a 1983 documentary produced by Kevin Brownlow and the late David Gill for British TV that had access to Chaplin’s outtakes, Chaplin started with the second half of the film but then had to come up with a first half to explain who his and Purviance’s characters were and why they cared about each other. What he came up with was pretty audacious even for him: he decided they would be immigrants from Europe to the United States, sailing across the Atlantic and basically being treated like dogs or cattle. Chaplin built both exterior and interior sets of the ship transporting them and mounted them on rocking platforms to simulate the motion of a ship moving through storms on the high seas. Thus he was able to produce stunning sequences, including one in which the motion of the ship causes the metal bowl containing the slop the immigrants are being fed on their voyage to slide across the table from one side to the other, so each person grabs a spoonful while the bowl is on their side before it slides to the person across the table from them. One sequence in which a frustrated Chaplin kicks a U.S. immigration official in the behind was cited 35 years later by U.S. authorities who, at the height of the anti-Communist, anti-socialist, and anti-liberal “Red Scare,” had decided to throw Chaplin out of the country. They did this while Chaplin was abroad on vacation, and he was understandably angry that they had expelled him without his being in the country and able to mount a defense. Fortunately for Chaplin, his wife, Oona O’Neill Chaplin, was a U.S. citizen and, not being covered by the expulsion order against him, was able to come to the country long enough to extract his money and settle with him in Vevey, Switzerland, where he lived the remaining 25 years of his life. He returned to the U.S. only to accept an honorary Academy Award in 1972. The Immigrant and Chaplin’s last Mutual, The Adventurer, are his best films for the company and show how relatively sophisticated Chaplin’s comedy had got, though Chaplin’s films would become even better over time, especially once he started making features like The Kid (1920), The Gold Rush (1925), the underrated The Circus (1928), City Lights (1931), and the film I consider his masterpiece, the openly Leftist Modern Times (1936).

Sherlock, Jr. (Joseph M. Schenck Productions, Metro Pictures Corporation, 1924)

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

After The Immigrant the Spreckels Organ Society showed one of the most amazing films ever made: Buster Keaton’s Sherlock, Jr. (1924), one of Keaton’s two best movies (The General is the other) and an audacious film about dreams and their power. The opening is an inspired framing sequence in which Keaton plays a small-town movie projectionist who’s showing a crime melodrama called Hearts and Pearls, produced by “Veronal Pictures.” (Veronal was one of the first sleeping pills marketed in the U.S. and Keaton obviously chose the name for its appropriateness in a film whose second half is the hero’s dream.) The impoverished Keaton is wooing a small-town girl (Kathryn McGuire), only he has a rival, an unscrupulous “sheik” (the success of Rudolph Valentino’s 1921 film The Sheik had established “sheik” as a slang term for any unscrupulous young man who pretends to be rich in order to attract a woman) played by Ward Crane. Crane’s character steals a pocket watch belonging to McGuire’s father (played by Keaton’s real-life father Joe; Keaton’s real name was Joseph Frank Keaton VII and his dad was Joseph Frank Keaton VI) and pawns it to buy McGuire a $3 box of chocolates. Keaton is short $1 for the purchase price of the big fancy box, and though he seems to have made up for it when he finds an extra $1 in the trash he’s swept up at the movie theatre where he works, he gets a sob story from a young woman who pleads with him to return the dollar she lost. Then Keaton gets the same sob story from another woman who says she lost $1 in the theatre’s trash. After that Keaton encounters a man who seems to saying that he, too, lost $1 – only when Keaton offers him his last dollar, the man indignantly turns it down and combs through the trash for his lost wallet, which contains a formidable bankroll. Keaton goes back to the candy store, buys a cheaper $1 box, and alters the price on it to $4. He gives the box to McGuire, only he's upstaged when the sheik enters with the $3 box and slips the pawn ticket into Keaton’s jacket pocket. Dad catches Keaton with the pawn ticket, assumes he stole the watch, and bars him from the house again.

A disconsolate Keaton ends up in a chase scene in which he tails Crane’s character and passes by a train that’s being filled with water from a spout. Keaton designed a dangerous gag sequence that involved him being pushed to the ground full-force by the water from the tower, and that night he had splitting headaches but returned to work the next day. Eleven years later, Keaton was undergoing a routine medical examination when the doctor X-rayed him and asked, “When did you break your neck?” Keaton said, “I never broke my neck.” “Oh, yes, you did,” the doctor said, and showed him the X-rays to prove it. Then Keaton flashed back to the Sherlock, Jr. shoot and realized that that must have been when, where, and how he broke his neck. Ultimately Keaton’s character retreats to his job as a projectionist, and he literally falls asleep during the movie and dreams his way into the film. There’s a marvelous shot in which a dream-image Keaton emerges from the sleeping real one and grabs a dream-image porkpie hat from the rack in the projection room and puts it on. Once Keaton enters the film, first there’s a series of sequences in which the backgrounds of the film Keaton has walked into abruptly change before he can keep up with them. Then it turns out that the plot of Hearts and Pearls is strikingly similar to the real-life incidents Keaton experienced in the framing scenes: a gang of thieves headed by Ward Crane’s character is after a valuable pearl necklace belonging to a well-to-do woman. The crooks get wind that the legendary private detective “Sherlock, Jr.” is on the case against them, so they set up some dastardly traps against him, including an explosive pool ball (number 13, natch) with which they intend to blow him up during a game; a poisoned drink they intend to serve him; and a ceremonial axe with which they intend to decapitate him.

Sherlock, Jr. manages to evade all these traps, and he and his assistant Gillette (Ford West), a name that’s a double pun on the name of the shaving products company and also on William Gillette, the first actor to play Sherlock Holmes on stage, chase the crooks. In one audacious scene, Keaton as Sherlock, Jr. dives through an open window in which a round women’s dress container has been placed. He goes through the container and emerges in drag wearing the dress that was in there in the first place. Later there’s an even more amazing scene in which Sherlock, Jr. is cornered against a wall. Gillette is standing there with an open briefcase and gestures for Sherlock, Jr. to jump through it ¬– and he does even though the wall was apparently solid. I remember watching the 2010 film Inception (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2010/12/inception-legendarywarner-bros-2010.html), directed and written by Christopher Nolan, and marveling at how much more convincingly Buster Keaton had made a dream film in 1924 with only the most primitive effects technology (though he had a special-effects genius, Fred Gabourie, who for some reason was credited only as art director but worked out many of the still amazing shots in this film) than Christopher Nolan had in 2010 with all the state-of-the-art CGI at his disposal. And one of my favorite stories about Sherlock, Jr. came from an interview Keaton biographer Rudi Blesh did with him in the last year of his life. Blesh said, “How did you come to make a surrealistic film like Sherlock, Jr.?” Keaton, who unlike Charlie Chaplin disdained any heavy-duty intellectual readings of either his work or his life, regarded that as an insult and said, “I did not mean it to be surrealistic! I just wanted it to look like a dream!” Another oddball aspect of Sherlock, Jr. I hadn’t noticed before is in the posters outside the theatre where Keaton’s character works: one big one is for Rex Ingram’s Scaramouche (1922), a real-life blockbuster the director who’d discovered Rudolph Valentino and made him a star in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse repeated the process with Mexican actor Ramon Novarro. But the one that particularly struck me was for Mud and Sand (1922), a spoof of Valentino’s Blood and Sand (also 1922) with Stan Laurel as “Rhubarb Vaseline.” It’s an unwitting tribute paid by one of the screen’s greatest comic geniuses to another!

Fear (Lindsley Parsons Productions, Monogram, 1946)

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

Last night (Sunday, August 30) my husband Charles and I watched a YouTube post (afflicted with a commercial about every seven minutes) of a quite good 1946 “B” movie from Monogram, Fear. Directed by Alfred Zeisler from a script he wrote with Dennis J. Cooper loosely based on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Fear is the tale of Larry Crain (Peter Cookson), a medical student who’s a year shy of graduating when he receives a letter announcing that all scholarships to the college have been terminated, effective immediately. He’s already living in a single room in a house operated by the usual grasping, greedy landlady, Mrs. Williams (Almira Sessions), who’s threatening him with eviction because he’s already six weeks behind on his rent. Like a lot of his fellow students (one of whom is a striking-looking blond played by the young Darren McGavin), he's heard of a professor named Stanley (Francis Pierlot) who runs an unlicensed pawnbroking operation and “lends” students money at exorbitant rates of interest. Larry has already used Stanley’s services before and he goes to him again, this time with a pocket watch that was a gift to Larry’s from his now deceased father. Though dad had paid $150 for the watch, Stanley only offers $10, deducting two dollars from the loan as an advance interest payment. Larry nervously eyes three fireplace pokers in Stanley’s room (for someone who’s hoarded enough money to make loans to students, Stanley’s place doesn’t seem that much nicer than Larry’s, and it’s festooned with the obligatory horrible floral wallpaper that seemed to be de rigueur for “B”-movie sets in this period) and contemplates killing him, but doesn’t … at least, not yet. Later he returns to Stanley’s room and this time he does kill him with one of the pokers, though since two other students who had their own appointment with Stanley show up and Larry flees in panic and doesn’t take the strongbox with the money for which Larry killed Stanley. Instead he hides in a room marked “Wet Paint” and gets some of the stuff on the sleeve of his jacket. In between his non-lethal encounter with Stanley and his lethal one, Larry paid a visit to a local coffee shop and helped out a girl named Eileen (Anne Gwynne) who was 60 cents short on her bill. Later Larry and Eileen go out on a picnic date, only Larry flees in terror when she mentions words beginning with “M,” including “marriage,” and Larry panics when he thinks she’s about to say “murder.”

The Stanley murder is being investigated by Captain Burke (Warren William, on the downgrade but still a highly capable actor who the year before had done another modern-dress adaptation of a classic, as the Claudius equivalent in Edgar G. Ulmer’s Out of the Night a.k.a. Strange Illusion, his rewrite of Hamlet) and his assistant, Detective Shaefer (Nestor Païva from the cast of Creature of the Black Lagoon and Revenge of the Creature). They seem to have anticipated the Columbo strategy of fastening on to a murder suspect early on and essentially irritating him into confessing, though at first they seem to be convinced that the house painter who was working the night of Stanley’s murder was his killer. Larry and Eileen enters a guilt-ridden courtship, and in the middle of all this Larry’s financial problems are suddenly solved when a magazine pays him $1,000 (a pretty hefty sum for an unknown author even now, let alone in 1946!) for an article he wrote about how certain people are such great geniuses that they should be considered above the law and be allowed to commit murder if they need to in order to advance the state of human knowledge. Naturally Captain Burke has read this article and wondered if Larry put his theory into practice by killing Stanley for the $400 tuition he needed to complete his last year of medical school. There’s a marvelous Val Lewton-esque scene in which, after having gone to a sleazy bar called the Sea Hawk and watched a magician doing the saw-a-lady-in-half trick (though Larry is so guilt-ridden he doesn’t stay to see the supposed “victim” emerge just fine at the end), he walks through a darkened city street. He gets handed a pamphlet announcing that the world’s end is closer than he think and then sees a billboard from a religious organization with a similar message. All this happens on the eve of Larry’s latest appointment with Captain Burke, to whom he intends to confess to Stanley’s murder at least in part because the cops browbeat the house painter into a false confession and Larry is too good a soul at heart to want an innocent person to take the fall for his crime.

Then [spoiler alert!] Alfred Zeisler and Dennis J. Cooper pull the hoariest of all cop-outs on us: “It was all a dream!” Larry wakes up in his ratty apartment and Professor Stanley shows up, alive and well, to announce that the school has just created a $1,500 scholarship and it’s been awarded to him. A woman who looks like his dream vision of Eileen just happens to move into the same house as Larry and he chats her up, though when he addresses her as “Eileen” she corrects him and insists her name is Cathy. Despite that horribly tacky ending, Fear is actually a pretty good movie, not a deathless classic on the order of Edgar G. Ulmer’s Bluebeard or Detour but a well-done film noir on the cheap and a good showcase for Peter Cookson. Like Leo Gorcey, Cookson was a good actor in the James Cagney mold who didn’t get the breaks he should have (his one appearance in a major-studio production was an uncredited minor role in MGM’s Spencer Tracy vehicle A Guy Named Joe) largely because the real Cagney hung on so long he filled the market for that “type.” Cookson’s filmography is almost all “B” movies and the 1950’s graveyard for “B” actors (and “B” talents of all types), guest shots on TV series. It’s a real pity, because Fear illustrates that Cookson had the acting chops for biggers and betters, and indeed when I posted about Ulmer’s Strange Illusion a.k.a. Out of the Night I wished that Cookson had played the male lead instead of Jimmy Lydon, the actor Ulmer got stuck with who portrayed the Hamlet equivalent as all golly-gee-whillikers mannerisms and tics.

Cover Girl (Columbia, 1944)

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

Last night (Saturday, August 29) I caught two films in Turner Classic Movies’ “Summer Under the Stars” one-day tribute to Rita Hayworth. The films were Cover Girl (1944) and You’ll Never Get Rich (1941), both out-and-out musicals with major dancing stars in the male leads: Fred Astaire in You’ll Never Get Rich (and the immediate follow-up from 1942, You Were Never Lovelier: Astaire biographers Stanley Green and Burt Goldblatt joked in their book about the similarity of the “you … never” titles of these films) and Gene Kelly in Cover Girl. Columbia Pictures borrowed Kelly from MGM for Cover Girl and after that planned to co-star Hayworth and Kelly in an adaptation of Kelly’s stage hit Pal Joey (1940), but MGM wouldn’t give Kelly two loan-outs in a row and so the only recordings we have of Kelly in his star-making stage role are fragments of silent film shot by someone sneaking a movie camera into a theatre in 1940 and a private recording from 1973 of Kelly singing one of Joey’s signature songs, “I Could Write a Book.” (Columbia finally filmed Pal Joey in 1957 with Hayworth demoted from the younger to the older of the two female leads, Kim Novak as the younger and Frank Sinatra as Joey; it’s a disappointing movie, partly because the script was softened and partly because both Hayworth and Novak were given voice doubles whose singing voices didn’t sound at all like their speaking voices. Even Sinatra’s singing was recorded in such a different acoustic from his speaking that if you didn’t already know his voice, you’d have thought he was being doubled, too.) Cover Girl is a stunning movie in one respect: after a number of indifferent roles at MGM (Kelly had been brought to Hollywood by David O. Selznick, who intended to use him in straight non-musical dramatic roles; when Kelly demanded to do musicals as well and Selznick realized he didn’t have the infrastructure to make them, he transferred his contract to MGM), he got complete control over his choreography for this film and his spectacular dance numbers made him a star. Other than that, Cover Girl is a clunky mess of a film that illustrates my General Field Theory of Cinema that the quality of a movie is inversely proportional to its number of writers. The writing credits of Cover Girl list Erwin Gelsey (also the author of the story source for the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers Swing Time) for the story, Marion Parsonnet and Paul Gangelin for “adaptation,” and Virginia Van Upp for the screenplay, while imdb.com lists one John H. Kafka (presumably no relation) as an uncredited contributor. The director was Charles Vidor, a Hungarian-born filmmaker who two years later would direct Hayworth again in the classic film noir Gilda, one of her most iconic roles.

The story casts Hayworth as Rusty Parker, one of eight chorus girls working at a seedy Brooklyn nightclub owned by Danny McGuire (Gene Kelly) and co-managed by him and his sidekick “Genius” (Phil Silvers). Rusty and Danny are in love, but their relationship is strained when Maurine Martin (Leslie Brooks), a fellow member of Danny’s chorus line, hears of a major contest being sponsored by Vanity magazine to recruit a cover girl for a special wedding issue. Vanity is published by John Coudair (Otto Kruger), who sees a photo of Rusty and immediately flashes back to a woman he briefly dated 40 years previously, Maribelle Hicks (also Rita Hayworth), who was also performing in a show when they met. Coudair (whose younger self is played by Jess Barker, who’s actually believable as a younger version of Otto Kruger) went as far as to propose marriage to Maribelle, but during the wedding ceremony she bolted and ended up with the piano player who’d always been her true love, giving up wealth and security for a poverty-stricken but love-rich future. Rusty wins the cover girl contest, which is sponsored by Coudair but actually run by his editor, Cornelia Jackson (Eve Arden, saltily effective as usual; she practically steals the movie on her own!). She also attracts the attentions of Broadway producer Noel Wheaton (Lee Bowman), who offers to star her in a Broadway show, also called Cover Girl, but makes it clear that marrying him is part of the deal. Rusty makes her Broadway debut in a big number that features various chorines playing cover girls: Jean Colleran (American), Francine Counihan (American Home), Helen Mueller (Collier’s), Ceceila Meagher (Coronet), Betty Jane Hess (Cosmopolitan), Dusty Anderson (Farm Journal), Eileen McClory (Glamour), Cornelia B. von Hessert (Harper’s Bazaar), Karen X. Gaylord (Liberty), Peggy Lloyd (Mademoiselle), Betty Jane Graham (McCall’s), Martha Outlaw (Redbook), Susann Shaw and Georgia Carroll (Vogue), Rose May Robson (Woman’s Home Companion), and the decidedly pre-pubescent (looking uncannily like Shirley Temple a decade earlier) Cheryl Archibald (Look). Rusty’s a success and agrees to marry Noel in the same house where her grandmother Maribelle bolted from her wedding to Coudair 40 years earlier, but after Coudair (who’s been assigned to give the bride away) tells her the story of Maribelle, Rusty likewise bolts her own wedding, flees to the piss-ant club in Brooklyn, and reunites with Danny at long last. (Frankly, I wish the writing committee could have come up with a way to have Rusty and Danny become Broadway stars together, since Danny obviously deserves success on the Main Stem.)

Oddly, there are other movies in which the business of having an intergenerational plot twist involving a chorus girl seeking a career in the same business as her direct ancestor was done more adroitly in Jessie Matthews’s British film It’s Love Again (1936), in which a young dancer tries to pass herself off as her own mother to gain stardom in London; and another Columbia film from four years later than Cover Girl: Ladies of the Chorus, the one fruit from Marilyn Monroe’s brief six-month stint at the studio, directed by Phil Karlson (who handled Monroe more adroitly than some of her later, bigger-name directors) from a story and script by Harry Sauber and Joseph Carole. Ladies of the Chorus is often lampooned because Adele Jergens, who played Monroe’s mother in the film, was only nine years older, but it’s an estimable film. It’s also noteworthy in that Columbia studio chief Harry Cohn allowed Monroe to do her own singing in the film, a privilege he never accorded Rita Hayworth. Rita recalled in interviews in the late 1960’s that Cohn spent a ton of Columbia’s money on voice teachers and coaches for her, but never let her sing for herself in this or any film; in Cover Girl she’s doubled by Martha Mears. Cohn spared no expense to make Cover Girl the equal of any major-studio production; he hired Jerome Kern to write the songs and Ira Gershwin to supply the lyrics. At least one song, “Put Me to the Test,” was originally a lyric Ira had written for one of his brother George’s songs, used in the 1937 film A Damsel in Distress, but the makers of that movie had used it exclusively as an instrumental (a dance between Fred Astaire, George Burns, and Gracie Allen with whiskbrooms) and Ira recycled his lyric and had Kern write a new melody for it. Cohn also budgeted the film to include three-strip Technicolor and got Rudolph Maté as the cinematographer, with Allen M. Davey as the ubiquitous “Technicolor consultant.” (Maté had shot Rita Hayworth in her film debut, under her true name Rita Cansino, doing a hot dance on a pleasure ship in the 1935 film Dante’s Inferno.) In the same late-1960’s interviews, Hayworth said that You’ll Never Get Rich, You Were Never Lovelier, and Cover Girl were her favorites of her own films, which suggests that she never really saw herself as an actress, but primarily a dancer. Cover Girl limps along to an all too predictable finish, and the scene in which Rusty returns to her Brooklyn redoubt and the man she really loves would have had far more impact if the voice doubling hadn’t been so obvious. The writing committee had worked out a plot in which Danny would recognize Rusty from hearing her sing their Big Song, “Long Ago and Far Away” (the one song from this movie that became a standard), which would have packed the emotional wallop the writers intended if either Rita had sung it herself or Columbia would have hired a voice double closer to Rita’s speaking voice than Martha Mears.

You'll Never Get Rich (Columbia, 1941)

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

After Cover Girl on Turner Classic Movies’ August 29 tribute to Rita Hayworth, they showed another Hayworth musical that despite a much cheaper production (it was shot in basic black-and-white, which ironically turned Hayworth’s famously dyed red hair back to its darker shade; she was black-haired au naturel, predictably given her Latina origins) was a better movie in every respect. The film was You’ll Never Get Rich, and it was directed by Sidney Lanfield, who’d had a career at 20th Century-Fox (where he made the 1939 version of The Hound of the Baskervilles, the first film to star Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson) and would eventually make something of a comeback directing episodes of the mid-1960’s TV series The Addams Family. The writers were Michael Fessier and Ernest Pagano, and they came up with a Lubitsch-esque sex farce which casts Astaire as Robert Curtis, choreographer and star of a Broadway musical being produced by Martin Cortland (Robert Benchley). Unfortunately Cortland is a big-time philanderer who’s got eyes for a particular dancer in his chorus line, Sheila Winthrop (Rita Hayworth). Cortland has gone so far as to buy Sheila a diamond bracelet, while also palming his wife Julia (Frieda Inescort) off with a $7 Chinese back-scratcher he bought at the same jewelry store. When Julia pays an unexpected visit to Cortland’s office, she grabs the bracelet in a case from Martin’s basement and at first thinks it’s her 15th anniversary present, until she notices the inscription Cortland had put on it and sees it’s for someone named “Sheila” instead of her. Cortland says it was actually a present to Sheila from Robert Curtis, and the phony story gets blown up into a newspaper report that Sheila and Curtis are engaged. Naturally this pisses off Sheila’s actual boyfriend, servicemember Tom Barton (John Hubbard), and Sheila, Tom, and Sheila’s Aunt Louise (Ann Shoemaker) plan a joking reception for Curtis in which Tom will pose as Sheila’s revenge-minded brother and threaten Curtis with a gun. Just then Curtis receives a draft notice and decides to accept it, thinking that being in the Army will get him out from being either a patsy in Cortland’s attempts at extra-relational activity or a victim of Tom’s revenge plot. It doesn’t work out quite that way, as Curtis is assigned to Camp Weston (not coincidentally also the army camp Gene Kelly and Phil Silvers entertained the troops at during a brief gag sequence in Cover Girl), where naturally enough Tom is one of the commanding officers. There’s also a top sergeant played by Donald MacBride with all the delicacy and sensitivity which he played the furious hotel manager in the Marx Brothers’ film Room Service (that’s meant ironically), and a couple of fellow enlistees who become Curtis’s buddies, Kewpie Blain (Guinn “Big Boy” Williams) and a fast-talking nonsensical character called “Swivel Tongue” (Cliff Nazarro), whose lines start out as English and quickly become unintelligible in any language. There are some nice slapstick scenes which show that had he been born a decade earlier Fred Astaire, with his superb control over his body, could have become a quite formidable silent-era comedian.

You’ll Never Get Rich has a musical score by Cole Porter, whose numbers showed a rare (for him) flair for jazz. Astaire gets some quite hot numbers, including a great song called “Since I Kissed My Baby Goodbye” which he performs in the guardhouse (where he spends a lot of his time on base) with the Black vocal group the Delta Rhythm Boys, as well as an instrumental alternately called “Marche Milastaire” and “A-Stairable Rag” in which he dances with a Black jazz band featuring trumpeter Red Mack (who would later record a song called “If You Leave Me Baby” for Atlas Records on which he became one of the first singers to double-track his own voice), reedman Buddy Collette, and drummer Chico Hamilton (12 years before he’d become a major jazz star, first with the Gerry Mulligan quartet and then on his own). Working with African-Americans always brought out the best in Astaire; one recalls the great scene to “Slap That Bass” from the 1937 film Shall We Dance in which the song’s verse is performed by Mantan Moreland and then Astaire takes over for the chorus. You’ll Never Get Rich ends with Martin Cortland bringing his whole show to Camp Weston to entertain the troops and also hopefully to seduce his later would-be star dancer, Sonia (Osa Massen), for whom he’s changed the inscription on the diamond bracelet (ya remember the diamond bracelet?) from “Sheila” to “Sonia.” Not knowing this, Robert Curtis (ya remember Robert Curtis?) offers Sheila the bracelet as an engagement present, since Sheila has decided she’s really in love with Robert, only the change from “Sheila” to “Sonia” as the name on the bracelet convinces Sheila to go ahead with her original plan to marry Tom (ya remember Tom?) and ship out to Panama with him. Ultimately Robert double-crosses Sheila by secretly hiring a real justice of the peace (Frank Ferguson) to play the officiant in the big wedding number at the close of the camp show, so Robert and Sheila are actually legally married. A furious Sheila insists she’ll have it annulled, but Martin does his first selfless act in the whole movie and explains everything, so Robert and Sheila end up a legally wed couple headed for at least a modicum of happiness. You’ll Never Get Rich is a sheer delight start to finish, though it’s beset with some of those weird acts of cruelty Fred Astaire often committed in his movies (particularly the 1942 Holiday Inn) to get what he wanted romantically and/or sexually. It’s curious watching these two films back-to-back and realizing how much more entertaining You’ll Never Get Rich is even though it’s in black-and-white and is hardly as prestigious in budget. Incidentally Fred Astaire was originally reluctant to work with Rita Hayworth; he remembered appearing in vaudeville on the same bills as Rita’s father, Eduardo Cansino (and according to TCM host Ben Mankiewicz, Astaire had briefly taken dancing lessons from Hayworth’s paternal uncle). I was a bit surprised that Astaire let Hayworth wear high heels during their dance numbers together since Astaire was sensitive about his short stature and worried about doing dances with partners as tall as he was. But Astaire later said that of all his dance partners Hayworth was the quickest study; he could teach her a routine, then take a lunch break, and by the time lunch was over she knew the routine perfectly.

My Life Is Murder: "It Takes Two" (Greenstone Pictures, Acorn Pictures, DCD Rights, TVNZ1, Network 10, American Public Television; TV series episode, aired October 10, 2022)

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

Last night I caught up with My Life Is Murder, a genuinely charming if a bit offbeat TV detective series from New Zealand featuring Lucy Lawless as Alexa Crowe, a retired female police detective turned unofficial private investigator who helps the official police solve crimes. The series started in 2019 and the first season actually took place in Australia, with Lawless’s character, Alexa Crowe, paired up with detective inspector Kieran Hussey (Bernard Curry). Then the show moved to New Zealand and Crowe’s partner/nemesis on the official police force became Harry Henare (Rawiri Jobe). The show that ran on KPBS was the third-season opener, “It Takes Two,” centered around a tango dancing school run by César Borges (Adam-Jon Fiorentino), a highly charismatic and sexy instructor with a penchant for seducing all the young, nubile female students. The school is actually owned by Eva Borges (Jennifer Ward-Leland), César’s mother, and among the students that have floated in and out of César’s bed is Hilary Morel (Kimberley Crossman). When another student with whom César had been having an affair with, Beatriz Delgado (Mikaela Rüegg), is found stabbed to death, Hilary is a prime suspect and so is Gavin Hartley (Dan Musgrove), an actor in a popular role-playing video game. Hilary claims to have been home alone the night of Beatrice’s murder, but Alexa deduces that while she was home, all right, she was having an affair with a married man, Reg (Mike Minogue) and the two spent the night together having sex largely, on her part at least, as a rebound relationship after César dumped her for Beatriz.

Alexa and Harry enroll in the tango class and pose as an engaged but not yet married couple, though that doesn’t stop César from putting the moves on Alexa (“I like older women,” he explains), which Alexa goes along with to get more information. Beatriz and her brother Francisco Delgado (Daniel Fernandez) turn out to be human-rights attorneys as well as tango students, and ultimately, after noticing an unusually scented oil on the knife used to stab Beatriz to death and then seeing César use that same sort of oil on a pair of steaks he was going to grill for Alexa, she deduces that the real killer is [spoiler alert!] Eva Borges, who was not César’s biological mother at all. Instead she was a midwife at a prison run by the Argentinian military junta who ruled the country during the so-called “Dirty War” period from 1976 to 1983, and César was the son of one of the women prisoners in the establishment where Eva worked. When the junta fell she kidnapped César and high-tailed it to New Zealand, passing César off as her biological son. Ultimately Eva is arrested for the crime she committed on New Zealand soil and César is free to continue cutting his swath with all the hot young women in his tango class. I’d watched some of the previous episodes of My Life Is Murder from the first (2019) season that took place in Australia (and benefited from Bernard Curry being quite a bit more charismatic than Rawiri Jobe!), which I pretty much wrote off as “engaging if not ultimately very satisfying,” a description I’d give to this episode, too. I liked the character of Madison Feliciano (Ebony Vagulans), a Native (Aborigine or Maori? It’s hard to tell since she was a running character in both the Australian and New Zealander phases of the show) assistant to Alexa who according to the show’s background page on Wikipedia was busted for computer hacking and paroled to Alexa in exchange for using her expertise to fight computer crime instead of committing it. Madison even has a pet cat, Chowder, who’s played by a feline named “Zeppelin” who actually gets a credit on the show.

The Little Foxes (Samuel Goldwyn Productions, RKO, 1941)

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

Last night (Thursday, August 27) I watched a film on Turner Classic Movies’ “Summer Under the Stars” all-day tribute to legendary mega-star Bette Davis: The Little Foxes (1941), made at the Samuel Goldwyn Studio in 1941 in what was Davis’s second and last loan-out during her 18-year period as a contract player for Warner Bros. The first had come in 1934 when RKO borrowed her for the bitch role of waitress Mildred Rogers in the film of W. Somerset Maugham’s largely autobiographical novel Of Human Bondage, a part Davis had to fight for because the conventional wisdom in Hollywood then was that male stars could have long and prosperous careers as villains – Erich von Stroheim was famously billed as “The Man You Love to Hate” – but the only way a woman could have similarly enduring success was if she only played characters the audience could like. Davis pleaded with Jack Warner for the role of Mildred, and after weeks of fighting her Warner finally gave in and told Davis, “O.K., go ahead and hang yourself.” Davis returned to Warners after Bondage a much bigger star than before, and one of the “suits” at Warners said, “RKO knew what kind of girl she really was!” By 1941 Davis was literally the highest-paid woman in America and, after a nasty fight with Warner Bros. in which she tried to break her contract by fleeing to Britain, lost the battle but effectively won the war, she’d established her reputation playing precisely the sort of bitch roles from which Jack Warner had tried to warn her against. Davis got the part in The Little Foxes thanks to one man: Sgt. Alvin C. York, who had sold Warner Bros. the rights to his life story of overcoming his Quaker pacifism to become America’s most decorated hero in World War I. York’s contract with Warners gave him approval rights over the actor who would play him, and he soon made it clear to Jack Warner that Gary Cooper was the only actor whom he’d approve. Since Cooper was under contract to Goldwyn, the only way Warner Bros. could get him for Sergeant York was to cut a major loan-out deal to give Goldwyn Bette Davis for The Little Foxes.

The Little Foxes had begun as a play by Lillian Hellman, who was working for Goldwyn as a screenwriter under a contract that also gave Goldwyn first right of refusal for anything she wrote for the theatre. The film's title comes from Chapter 2, Verse 15 of the Song of Solomon in the King James version of the Bible, which reads, "Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes." (In 1945 the other half of that quote, Our Vines Have Tender Grapes, was used as a movie title, directed by Roy Rowland from a script by Dalton Trumbo based on a 1940 novel by George Victor Martin, starring Edward G. Robinson and Agnes Moorehead as a Norwegian immigrant farmer couple in Wisconsin.) Producer Samuel Goldwyn could never remember the title of the film correctly; he kept calling it The Three Little Foxes, perhaps confusing it with the Walt Disney cartoon The Three Little Pigs (1933). The Little Foxes was produced on Broadway by Herman Shumlin and starred Tallulah Bankhead as Regina Hubbard Giddens, avaricious bitch goddess of the small town of Paltou, Alabama (called “Bowden” in Hellman’s 1946 prequel, Another Part of the Forest). Goldwyn assigned William Wyler to direct the film, which made sense because Wyler had previously directed Davis in two of her biggest hits at Warners, Jezebel (1938) – which won her her second Academy Award – and The Letter (1940). Wyler advised Davis to go to New York and see Bankhead’s performance as Regina before he shot the movie. Davis originally didn’t want to because she didn’t want her performance to be affected by Bankhead’s, but once she saw Bankhead play the part she insisted that Bankhead’s interpretation was the only possible one. During the shoot of The Little Foxes Davis and Wyler continually argued, always over the same issue: Wyler would say things like, “I want you to give Regina some depth instead of playing her as just a one-dimensional bitch,” and Davis would reply, “But Willy, Lillian Hellman wrote her as a one-dimensional bitch!” They also argued over Davis’s use of rice-flour makeup and calamine lotion on her face to make herself look older and uglier. (One of the big things I admire about Bette Davis is her willingness to make herself look ugly if she felt a role required it.) In one clever scene, Regina looks at an old photo of herself (almost certainly a stock still left over from an earlier Bette Davis film) and compares it to what her mirror reveals of her current appearance.

The film’s screenplay, which Hellman adapted herself with help from Arthur Kober (to whom she’d been briefly married in the 1920’s), Dorothy Parker, and Parker’s husband Alan Campbell, softened the story by adding one character, David Hewitt (Richard Carlson), a nice guy who works as a reporter for the local Paltou paper and becomes the boyfriend of Regina’s daughter Alexandra (Teresa Wright in her film debut) after Alexandra rejects her family’s pressure on her to marry her first cousin Leo Hubbard (Dan Duryea in a marvelously twitchy performance that anticipates the great villains he would play for Fritz Lang in Ministry of Fear, The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street). Regina’s husband, Horace Giddens (Herbert Marshall, reunited with Davis from the cast of The Letter, in which they also played a dysfunctional couple), is off in a Baltimore sanitarium where he’s recovering from heart disease. Regina is being pressured by her brothers Ben (Charles Dingle) and Oscar (Carl Benton Reid) to bring Horace home so he, Ben, and Oscar can put up the money to fund a northern investor, William Marshall (Russell Hicks) from Chicago, who wants to build a cotton mill in Paltou so instead of shipping the raw cotton to New England they can mill it in Paltou and take advantage of the ultra-cheap Southern labor. Regina ultimately sends daughter Alexandra to fetch her father and bring him home so she can get the money from him and invest in the mill that will make all three Hubbards millionaires. Only when Alexandra finally brings him back, Horace is appalled by the proposal; at one point Marshall boasts that the governor of Alabama has given them the water rights needed for the mill to work, and Horace says, “Were they his to give?” (The Little Foxes is studded throughout with Hellman’s and her co-writers’ digs at the evils of capitalism.) Regina continues to browbeat Horace into giving her the money to invest in the mill, and Horace continues to refuse until, in the film’s most famous scene, he has another heart attack and breaks the bottle of his all-important medicine as he’s trying to serve himself the spoonful of it which will save his life. Realizing that there’s another bottle of it in his bedroom upstairs, Horace tries to crawl up the stairs to fetch it, but Regina impassively watches him and doesn’t try to help him until it’s already too late to save him.

This follows an argument between them over $75,000 in Union Pacific bonds, which Horace had bought when they were virtually worthless and held on to as the company became successful and the worth of its bonds soared. Only the bonds, which Horace kept in a safety deposit box at his bank, were stolen by his scapegrace nephew Leo, Oscar’s son, who turned them over to his father Oscar and his uncle Ben to finance the mill without Horace’s or Regina’s involvement. Though Horace wasn’t expected to inspect the bonds until a few months later when it was time to claim his dividend coupons, he’s so disgusted at the pressure from Regina that he contacts his attorney and says he wants to change his will to disinherit Regina and leave all his money to their daughter Alexandra. As part of his plan, he takes the safety-deposit box home with him and notices that the bonds are missing. Horace correctly deduces what happened to them and announces that in his new will, he will declare that he merely loaned Regina the bonds, so Regina will get only the value of the stolen bonds, which will lock her out of any profit share in the mill. This gives Regina a powerful motive for wanting Horace dead, and when he finally croaks she announces to her brothers that her price for keeping silent about Leo’s transgressions will be a 75 percent share in the mill instead of the 40 percent to which she’d previously agreed. Disgusted by her mother’s avaricious attitude and callousness towards her father, Alexandra leaves town with David (in the play there was no David and she left alone) and Regina, in a haunting close-up, is left super-rich but alone and psychologically and morally devastated. (It’s quite remarkable that in a film made while the Motion Picture Production Code was in full force and effect, Regina was allowed literally to get away with murder at the end.)

The Little Foxes was photographed by Gregg Toland, who when it started shooting had just come off of his work on Orson Welles’s first film, Citizen Kane. He continued his work on so-called “deep focus” that he had pioneered on Kane, which meant using long lenses and ultra-fast film to increase the depth of field and have foreground and background objects in focus simultaneously. Bette Davis was appalled at the sheer amount of light Toland was using on the set to get these effects, and became convinced it was his attempt to embarrass her (though this seems odd given that she was simultaneously arguing with her director over a makeup designed to make her look uglier!). Seen today, The Little Foxes seems like a powerful movie attacking the evils of capitalism in general – one of the Hubbard brothers even delivers a speech towards the end in which he predicts that someday people like him will rule the world, which seems oddly prescient in the Age of Trump – and particularly the devastating effects of greed on the people who possess it and use it as an excuse for their actions. My husband Charles and I had watched it before, though on that occasion I had prefaced it with Lillian Hellman’s prequel, Another Part of the Forest (made at Universal in 1948, based on Hellman’s 1946 play), which may have weakened the impact of this quite remarkable film. (Dan Duryea, who played Leo in The Little Foxes, appeared as Leo’s father Oscar in the film of Another Part of the Forest, with Fredric March as Marcus Hubbard, father of Oscar, Ben, and Regina, and March’s real-life wife Florence Eldridge as Marcus’s wife Lavinia.)