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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Beatles: Washington, D.C. Concert (National General Corporation, Concerts, Inc., NEMS Enterprises, Ltd., fomed February 11, 1964)

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

Last night (Friday, June 19) my husband Charles and I watched an intriguing YouTube post of the first U.S. concert ever given by The Beatles on February 11, 1964 in Washington, D.C., available for viewing at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TarF1_OIqMg&list=RDTarF1_OIqMg&start_radio=1. It’s a film I’ve seen before; the first time I saw it, or at least part of it, was at a screening of Beatleiana in 1980 at the California Theatre downtown to which my then-girlfriend Cat Ortiz and I went. Unfortunately, the day of the screening the people putting it on got a cease-and-desist letter from ATV Music, which then owned the rights to most of The Beatles’ originals, saying they weren’t allowed to show any sequences that included ATV-owned Beatles songs. So they had to re-edit the films hastily on the fly and show only The Beatles covering other artists’ songs and the handful of pre-ATV Beatles originals like “Love Me Do” and “P.S., I Love You” that were owned by Ardmore and Beechwood, EMI Records’ own publishing arm. Later we got a chance to see what was then billed as the only extant version of the film, which cut off abruptly during the penultimate song, John Lennon’s famous cover of the Isley Brothers’ hit “Twist and Shout.” (Actually The Isley Brothers didn’t do the original version of “Twist and Shout.” That was another Black group, The Top Notes, who recorded it for Atlantic in 1961 in a session produced by the young Phil Spector. But their version went nowhere commercially and the Isley Brothers had the R&B hit.) At the time we were told this was the only extant version of the film, and at one of the Los Angeles Beatlefest conventions we bought a bootleg LP of the concert on which the cover of “Twist and Shout” was replaced with a Beatles cover of another Isley Brothers’ song, “Shout,” taken from the soundtrack of a British TV show called Around the Beatles. (The Beatles didn’t play live on Around the Beatles; they lip-synched to their records, which for the other songs they played was fine because they’d all been released commercially, but alas the original recording of “Shout” was lost and all that survives is the version from the TV soundtrack, with fans screaming all over it.)

The version we watched last night bears a 2010 copyright stamp to Apple Enterprises, Ltd., the company owned by the two surviving Beatles (Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr) and the estates of John Lennon and George Harrison. The big surprise was that this version was complete, including not only all of “Twist and Shout” but the final song they performed that night, their cover of Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally.” (I noted the irony that after John had performed his voice-busting number, “Twist and Shout,” Paul performed his. Any time The Beatles covered Little Richard, Paul sang lead because he had the voice for it and John didn’t; when John did a medley of Richard’s “Rip It Up” and “Ready Teddy” on his Rock and Roll tribute album, it was readily apparent why Paul had sung lead whenever The Beatles covered Little Richard.) The Beatles’ set list for the Washington, D.C. concert was “Roll Over, Beethoven” (a Chuck Berry cover on which George sang lead and, as always, got one of the lines of the lyric wrong: Berry had sung, “Reel and rock with one another,” while George sang, “Reel it, rock it, roll it over,” and to this day whenever you hear a band playing “Roll Over, Beethoven” you can tell from that line whether they learned it from Berry’s original or The Beatles’ version), “From Me to You,” “I Saw Her Standing There,” “This Boy,” “All My Loving,” “I Wanna Be Your Man” (a song John and Paul gave to the Rolling Stones before recording it themselves, and not surprisingly it suited Mick Jagger’s voice better than it did Ringo’s), “Please Please Me” (the first Beatles single to reach number one on the British charts and their real commercial breakthrough), Meredith Willson’s haunting ballad “Till There Was You” from The Music Man (Willson’s widow said she got more royalties from the Beatles’ cover version than from the original musical), “She Loves You,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “Twist and Shout,” and “Long Tall Sally.” Obviously this version had been run through modern sound processing equipment to reduce the sheer amount of audience noise (coming, the film documents, from boys as well as girls) and bring out the sound of The Beatles’ instruments. What most impressed me from this version was how good George Harrison and Ringo Starr were; there’s been a tendency to patronize them (even John Lennon, in one of his last interviews, said, “Paul and I were The Beatles. The other two could have been just anybody”), but George’s lead guitar parts and Ringo’s pounding drumming were not only key elements to their overall sound but quite impressive in their own rights. It's especially amazing how good The Beatles sounded when you realize what a hard time they had under unspeakably bad performing conditions,

They had amplifiers that were state-of-the-art for 1964 but look ridiculously puny today (the real revolution in amplifier design that made heavy metal possible was done by James Marshall in Britain in 1967; Jimi Hendrix, who felt a special bond with Marshall because his birth name had been James Marshall Hendrix, commissioned Marshall to build him the “stacked” amps that became crucial to his sound). They also didn’t have monitor speakers – the ones that face away from the audience and are there so the musicians can hear themselves and each other – because they hadn’t been invented yet, so they literally had to read each others’ lips to stay together in the songs. The Washington, D.C. concert on February 11, 1964 (three days after their explosive U.S. TV debut on The Ed Sullivan Show) was even worse from the standpoint of performance conditions than most of them. It was held in a sports arena that usually hosted boxing and wrestling matches, which meant that the audience was “in the round,” seated on all four sides of the venue. That in turn meant that The Beatles had to turn around themselves during the concert so they’d face each part of the audience during at least part of their set. Mostly that was done by their heavy-set road manager, Mal Evans, but there’s one shot early in the concert in which John Lennon is shown personally turning the turntable on which Ringo’s drum kit was mounted. Though at least this time Ringo had a riser for his drum kit – sometimes he had to sit and play at the same level as the other three – it can’t have been easy for him even to maintain his balance on that rickety platform, let alone drum with such savage energy. Also The Beatles discovered that one of the two vocal mikes wasn’t working during “Roll Over, Beethoven” – you can see George hurriedly scampering from the dead mike to the live one early on in the song – though the technical crew for the concert got it fixed later on and the Beatles were able to do the famous wing-back formation when two of them would be singing at the same mike but the necks of their instruments would be pointing in different directions because Paul has always played left-handed.

The Beatles’ Washington concert was filmed by a company called National General for distribution in movie theatres through a process called Electronovision, which broadcast closed-circuit black-and-white TV images to movie theatres. Electronovision usually broadcast (or narrowcast) sporting events – they made money from showing Muhammad Ali’s championship fights – but they also branched out into auto races (my father and stepmother took me to an Electronovision telecast of the Indianapolis 500 one year) and concerts, including this one by The Beatles and one from The Beach Boys in Santa Monica on March 14, 1964. My mother once saw an Electronovision telecast of Laurence Olivier playing the title role in Shakespeare’s Othello – a production that became infamous because Olivier made himself look so totally Black, including extenders in his nostrils to make his normally white nose look Black, he was accused of performing in blackface. Fortunately this production was also filmed in color, directed by Stuart Burge, and when I saw the film I thought that if you didn’t know who the star was, you’d have never guessed he was white. Anyway, The Beatles’ Washington, D.C. concert is a blessed survival of Beatlemania at its height, and certainly no one knew then that The Beatles would still have a major fan base 62 years later!

The Hypnotic Eye (Bloch/Woodfield Productions, Allied Artists, 1960)

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

Last night (Thursday, June 18) my husband Charles and I watched a quite intriguing and entertaining movie I’d stumbled across on the Turner Classic Movies Web site but it was scheduled at an inconvenient time: The Hypnotic Eye, made in 1960 by Bloch/Woodfield Productions for release by our old friends Allied Artists, nèe Monogram. The Hypnotic Eye was written by William Read and Gitta Woodfield (I’m guessing they were husband and wife but there’s no indication of that on imdb.com, and apparently William was mostly a still photographer – he took pictures of Marilyn Monroe on the set of her last film, the uncompleted Something’s Got to Give – and also an amateur magician, a background that’s readily apparent in this film) and directed by George Blair. Blair had been a house hack at Republic Pictures and in that capacity had made the only film of his I’ve seen previously, the 1949 Daughter of the Jungle (which made the Harry Medved/Randy Dreyfuss/Michael Medved book The Fifty Worst Films of All Time; I’d seen it in the early 1980’s on Schlock Theatre, a local San Diego show that was the precursor to Mystery Science Theatre 3000; the main difference is that the snarky comments about the films were shown as subtitles rather than spoken over the dialogue, and when one of the characters in Daughter of the Jungle said, “He’s acting rather strangely!,” the subtitle read, “This is the only time anyone has ever mentioned acting in connection with this film”). The Hypnotic Eye was also ballyhooed as being in a new process called “HypnoVision,” which wasn’t a cinematic gimmick but meant that in his lead role as super-hypnotist Desmond (Jacques Bergerac, a French actor who was briefly married to Ginger Rogers and Dorothy Malone and whose French accent sounded hard to accept from a character with an Anglo name), Jacques Bergerac spoke to the camera directly and gave the audiences, both on screen and in the theatre, simple hypnotic suggestions.

Surprise: The Hypnotic Eye actually turned out to be quite good, hardly a great film but a solidly entertaining one despite some massive plot holes of which the Woodfields should have been ashamed. It begins with an otherwise anonymous woman preparing to wash her hair, only what she thinks is a shower is in fact a gas stove burner going full blast. She badly burns her face and ultimately dies in the hospital, but not before police detective sergeant Dave Kennedy (Joe Patridge, an actor so obscure imdb.com list him but doesn’t have a head shot) has a chance to interview her. She had no idea why she tried to wash her hair on a stove burner, but it turns out she’s just the 11th in a series of young, previously attractive women who have mutilated their faces in similar ways with no idea afterwards of why they’d done it. Kennedy enlists the aid of psychiatrist Dr. Philip Hecht (Guy Prescott), who suggests that the women may have been victims of a hypnotist who used his powers to implant suggestions in their minds that led to their self-mutilations. Kennedy, his girlfriend Marcia Blaine (Marcia Henderson), and her friend Dodie Wilson (Merry Anders) go to a local show featuring Desmond and also his tall, blond, statuesque assistant Justine (Allison Hayes, who was in a lot of cheapie horror “B”’s in the late 1950’s and attracted a major following as the lead in the 1958 film Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, about an ordinary housewife who’s enlarged to the titular size by a giant space alien who has a crush on her and wants to scale her up). Kennedy is skeptical about the whole idea of hypnosis and is convinced that the so-called “volunteers” are merely stooges on Desmond’s payroll, but he learns differently when Desmond is able to levitate Dodie on stage (courtesy of some surprisingly convincing wire work). Then Kennedy invites both Marcia and Dodie to join him for a late-night snack at a local coffee shop, but Dodie begs off and instead goes home. Then she goes to wash her face in her bathroom sink, only the item she pours into the sink is sulfuric acid (clearly labeled as such on its jar, which begs the question why she had a jar of a highly toxic industrial chemical on the ledge of her bathroom sink) and she ends up with her face badly burned.

Kennedy and Hecht visit her in the hospital and, like the other surviving victims, Dodie has no memory of the evening past the point where Kennedy and Marcia left her behind. Later Marcia goes to a Desmond show alone and she’s given a post-hypnotic suggestion to return to the theatre after midnight, where she gets into Desmond’s car and lets him take her home. He hypnotizes her still further with a gadget called “The Hypnotic Eye” ¬– actually a blinking lamp with several lit circles which he gets her to stare at to put her under – and she ends up making out with him, apparently willingly. Meanwhile, Justine is staring at them from across the room with jealousy in her eyes, and for a while I thought that where this film was going was that Desmond was an otherwise innocent man who immorally but legally used his hypnotic powers to get women to have sex with him, and Justine was the bitch who out of jealousy was re-hypnotizing his victims to mutilate themselves. It turns out [spoiler alert!] that they’re both in on it: Justine corners Marcia in the bathroom and tells her to get in what she says is a cold shower but is really hot enough to scald her face permanently. Fortunately Kennedy and Hecht have been following Desmond and Marcia, and Kennedy bursts into the house just before Justine is about to get Marcia into that irreparably hot shower, but Justine hypnotizes Marcia into telling Kennedy that Marcia and Justine are old friends and roommates from school. This finally awakens Kennedy to what’s really going on because he remembers that Marcia never went to boarding school and therefore never had a school roommate. The film climaxes at yet another public appearance by Desmond, who has Marcia in tow. This is the sequence at which Jacques Bergerac faces the camera directly and does his “Hypno-Vision” suggestions, including giving each audience member a white balloon with a picture of an eye stenciled on it. He tells them to blow up the balloon and says it’s a quite heavy object. (Charles, who studied hypnosis early on in our relationship, told me that’s a variant of a well-known suggestion in which the hypnotist gets the subject to believe that they’re holding a balloon in one hand and a bowling ball in the other, and the subject raises the hand allegedly with the balloon and lowers the hand allegedly with the bowling ball as they would if they were really holding two objects, one very light and one very heavy.) Kennedy had previously discovered such a balloon on the person of one of the interview subjects he’d talked to who said she’d never been to a hypnotism show, had never been hypnotized herself, and didn’t know anyone named Justine.

As the show breaks down, Justine grabs Marcia and takes her up into the theatre’s catwalks while Desmond gets a gun and tries to use it to hold Dr. Hecht hostage. Kennedy shoots and kills Desmond with his own gun to save Dr. Hecht’s life, while Justine dangles Marcia off the edge of the catwalk (the segment they’re on has detached itself from the rest) and rips off the mask she’s been wearing over her face the whole movie. This reveals that her own face is badly scarred, and she announces that this was the reason she hatched her and Desmond’s plot: she wanted to single out beautiful women and make them as ugly as she is. Kennedy manages to climb onto the catwalk and rescue Marcia, while Justine loses her balance and falls to the floor of the stage, dead. (The Wikipedia page on the film said it was a deliberate suicide, but it looked like an accident to me.) The film ends with Dr. Hecht directly facing the camera to warn the audience that, while hypnotism has legitimate medical uses, they should never allow themselves to be hypnotized except in a medical setting by a doctor or a trained professional. Ironically, in the film’s initial release in some theatres, including the Golden Gate in San Francisco where it premiered, Gil Boyne (true name: Mark Thomas Gilboyne), the film’s technical advisor, performed as an on-stage hypnotist doing live demonstrations like those the film’s character had warned against. (Gil Boyne was actually a psychotherapist in World War II who got interested in hypnotism as a quicker alternative to psychoanalysis and became a pioneer in training medical hypnotists and founder of the American Council of Hypnotist Examiners.) There’s also a fascinating if rather disconnected sequence showing the characters at a beatnik bar with poet Lawrence Lipton (billed as “King of the Beatniks”) performing with a bassist and a bongo drummer. The bongos were played by Ed “Big Daddy” Nord and the scene was supposedly based on the Gas House, his real-life coffeehouse in Venice, California, though it was shot in a studio.

Overall, though it suffers from script problems (we’re supposed to believe that Kennedy doesn’t recognize Justine when he sees her at Marcia’s place even though he saw her before as part of Desmond’s show, and Charles was bothered at how Desmond and Justine both followed and were followed by Kennedy and Hecht and none of them recognized the others) and a couple of scenes that I wished would exceed Charles’s gore quotient (which is even lower than mine), The Hypnotic Eye is a surprisingly good movie, credibly acted and well directed by Blair. Incidentally Kodak used the opening scene of a woman taking what she thinks is a shower and is really the open flame of a gas stove as a demonstration of their new 3-D “lenticular photography” process, printing business card-sized photos of the scene in which the woman’s face lit up as you rocked the print back and forth. (“Lenticular photography” was famously used on the album cover of the Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request, and most recently on a limited-edition LP of Olivia Rodrigo’s third album, you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love.)

Earthquake (The Filmakers Group, Universal, 1974)

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

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

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

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

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

Ladies of the Big House (Paramount, 1931)

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

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

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

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

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