tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-40642707945221158782024-03-18T16:00:43.686-07:00Movie Maggmgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comBlogger4788125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4064270794522115878.post-51176935761907378052024-03-18T15:59:00.000-07:002024-03-18T15:59:45.312-07:00Friday Night Sext Scandal (MarVista Entertainment, Neshama Entertainment, Wishing Floor Films, Lifetime, 2024)<br><b>by Mark Gabrish Conlan</b> • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
<br><br>Last night (Sunday, March 17) my husband Charles and I watched a couple of recent Lifetime movies, both set in high school and at least nominally about students there (though one on-line reviewer complained that the actors on the first Lifetime film of last night’s program, <i>Friday Night Sext Scandal</i>, were too old for their parts). First was the awkwardly titled <i>Friday Night Sext Scandal</i>, in which the main characters were the slightly built Shawn Martins (Anthony Timpano, not exactly a hunk to die for but certainly easy on the eyes) and Lauren (Keana Lyn Bastidas). Shawn’s and Lauren’s mothers are both raising them as single parents (as usual with Lifetime it’s not at all clear what happened to their dads, though at least in Shawn’s case it’s hinted that his father is dead) and have been best buds for years. Lauren often gives Shawn rides to school, and the two of them seem to have one of those oddball relationships (like Victor Frankenstein and Elizabeth Lavenza in Mary Shelley’s original novel <i>Frankenstein</i>) that isn’t biologically incestuous but seems so emotionally. We also get the impression that Shawn has a major crush on Lauren but Lauren sees Shawn only as a friend. Things appear to turn around for Shawn when he <i>finally</i> makes the starting lineup of Westmoorland High School’s football team, “The Vikings,” and he befriends the various other guys on the team. Among his new-found friends are the team captain, Woodley Jones (Jamie Champagne), who’s discovered a Web site called “HNTD” (as in “hunted,” but without the vowels) in which young men can log on to seek out teenage girls, cruise them and score points depending on how far they get with them.
<br><br>Then Shawn is injured during a practice session and he’s out for the season, forced to hobble around on crutches. At first Woodley and the other players still let him hang out with the team, but eventually they hold a party but declare it reserved for “starters only,” freezing out Shawn. Desperate for some silly adolescent reason to stay in these monsters’ good graces, Shawn figures out a way to score big in the game by donning a black hoodie (the first time I saw him put it on my immediate thought was, “Who is he going to kill?,” since Lifetime has made black hoodies the <i>de rigueur</i> garment for their murderers), sneaking around outside Lauren’s house and taking photos of her naked with his smartphone. There’s a nice little suspense scene in which he’s about to upload his pics to the Internet when his mom Lucinda (Tara Nicodemo) knocks on his door just as he’s about to hit the “send” button, and the intervention of his mother briefly makes him hesitate, but in the end he clicks on the control and sends the deadly photos to the Internet. Of course Lauren’s pics “go viral” around Westmoorland and she becomes the talk of the school in more ways than one. Shawn also makes a crude pass at Brooklynn (Devyn Nekoda), the school’s “fast girl,” and even though it’s later established that they’d already had sex together and he lost his virginity to her, she’s predictably put out at the unwanted attention. Lauren is so embarrassed at being the centerpiece of a school scandal that she attempts suicide with an overdose of drugs (probably her mom’s prescription meds), and Shawn’s mom, a professional firefighter, just <i>happens</i> to be on the crew that discovers her and rescues her in time.
<br><br>An avuncular African-American police detective named Zeke (Eddie G) explains to Shawn’s mom Lucinda that since Lauren was underage, Shawn is looking at a multi-year prison sentence and permanent appearance on the sex offenders’ registry for “possession of child pornography.” Lucinda responds by taking the hard drive on which Shawn had stored Lauren’s images and ultimately destroying it so, as much as he’s deservedly suffering for his sins (among other things, Lauren won’t talk to him and the guys on the football team are pissed at him because their coach [Tim Progosh] benched all the starting players from the season’s last game, the one where all the college and NFL scouts were at, as collective punishment), at least he won’t get branded for life as a pedophile. What’s interesting about <i>Friday Night Sext Scandal</i> is we get the impression that there was a much more interesting and powerful movie available than the one they actually made: certainly I responded to the pathos of Shawn vainly attempting to maneuver on crutches with anything like his former grace and alacrity (I did enough caregiver work for people with disabilities to identify with him!), and it’s also noteworthy as a perhaps unwitting tale of just how unforgiving we’ve become as a society. Both <i>Friday Night Sext Scandal</i> and the next Lifetime movie, <i>Killing for Extra Credit</i>, made me glad that however rough my adolescence was, at least it didn’t take place in the era of the Internet and social media, where the kinds of stupid things young people frequently do take on an eternal life and live online even when you’re decades older and have long since grown out of them.mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4064270794522115878.post-26286723582026675672024-03-18T15:55:00.000-07:002024-03-18T15:55:46.347-07:00Killing for Extra Credit (CMW Horizon Productions, Reel One Entertainment, Champlain Media, Lifetime, 2024)<br><b>by Mark Gabrish Conlan</b> • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
<br><br>Surprisingly, the next movie on Lifetime’s March 17, 2024 agenda, <i>Killing for Extra Credit</i>, had strong similarities to <i>Friday Night Sext Scandal</i> even though it was presented as a whodunit. From the promos and the title I’d assumed that it was about a psychopathic student so willing literally to kill for extra-credit points to facilitate their college applications. Instead, “extracredit” (one word) turns out to be an Internet <i>provocateur</i> with a seemingly boundless knowledge base about his fellow students at Lakehills High School, billed as “Home of the Knights!” It starts out as the story of three odd people out from the campus student hierarchy: Marybeth Morris (Matreya Scarrwener – when I saw that name on the credits I joked, “That can be cured, you know”), Sophie Arredondo (Kennedy Rowe) and Ron (unidentified on imdb.com). They’re all starting their senior year and competing to get into good colleges, but Marybeth was forced to withdraw from her campaign for student body president when nude photos of her taken by her then-boyfriend, football team captain Josh Whittaker (Quinten James), were leaked onto the Internet. She was counting on that honor to get the scholarship she needed to go to a college in Washington state where her father attended. Like the leads in <i>Friday Night Sext Scandal</i>, Marybeth is being raised by a single mother, though in her case we definitively know her dad is dead, and she’s very much in his shadow, especially since her mom Lydia (Jessie Fraser) is holding her to her dad’s life path and actively discouraging her from doing anything else. “Extracredit” exposes one girl in school by claiming that her mother isn’t a high-powered attorney, as everyone thought, but a highly paid escort.
<br><br>“Extracredit” also learns that Sophie was adopted by a rich father, Richard Arredondo (Harrison Coe), and rather than go through a legal adoption agency he essentially purchased her from an illegal broker, sort of the way Christina Crawford said her superstar mom Joan Crawford adopted her in <i>Mommie Dearest</i>. There are three main suspects for the secret identity of “extracredit”: Josh, Ron and the school’s most sympathetic teacher, Miss Mitchell (Amy Trefry). I was starting to suspect the teacher if only because I was flashing back to <i>Blood of Dracula</i>, the 1958 American-International film in which a female high-school student, Nancy Perkins (Sandra Harrison), is hypnotized into becoming a vampire by the one seemingly sympathetic teacher in the school, Miss Branding (Louise Lewis). Miss Mitchell doesn’t turn out to be “extracredit” but she <i>does</i> end up being exposed as a villain; it was she who leaked the nude photos of Marybeth to the Internet and forced her to withdraw from the campaign, so Toby Dandrich (Tyler Cody) – a thoroughly repulsive piece of work who seems destined to grow up to be Donald Trump, though it turns out that instead of being born to money he’s had to work hard and scheme for his big breaks – got elected instead. For a while Marybeth thinks Toby might be “extracredit,” but Toby boasts that if he wanted to ruin someone he’d do it openly instead of hiding behind a screen name. In the meantime Sophie had been found dead outside a so-called “safe space” she and Marybeth had frequently repaired to, and the students mostly assumed she’d committed suicide and had even held a memorial vigil for her – at which Miss Mitchell had attended in disguise and held up signs telling Marybeth to stop looking for the truth about Sophie, which was (among other things) that Miss Mitchell had actually killed her in a scuffle on the rooftop.
<br><br>It turns out that Miss Mitchell was Sophie’s biological mother – we learn this when we see a photo of the two of them together during Sophie’s prepubescence which Marybeth discovered in the presence of her dad, who promptly grabbed the photo and threw it away (and Marybeth, Josh and Ron stage a late-night raid and have to do some fancy and unintentionally funny evasive maneuvers to steal the bits of the photo while the elder Arredondo is there and stalking the unseen burglars with a gun) – and that was the leverage Toby had on her. He was able to blackmail Miss Mitchell into leaking the embarrassing photo of Marybeth by threatening to reveal that the adoption of Sophie wasn’t legal and potentially putting all of them in jeopardy. Marybeth has an after-school job working at a local bowling alley, staffing the shoe-rental concession, and the final climax takes place there. Marybeth has accepted Josh’s offer of a date after her shift ends, but when she accidentally spills soda on his crotch and he leaves to clean up, she gets an “extracredit” text message a week after the arrests of Miss Mitchell and Toby Dandrich seemingly stopped the “extracredit” threat. Thinking that Josh is “extracredit,” Marybeth calls Ron for help – only it turns out, courtesy of writer Leo McGuigan, that <i>Ron</i> is “extracredit” and his motive was the classic stalker’s fixation on Marybeth. Ron was convinced that the two of them were meant to be together, regardless of whatever else Marybeth would want to do with her life or whom she might want to do it with. Marybeth even gets a nice speech to the effect that she’s tired of other people telling her what she should do and who she should be, and from now on she’s going to make those decisions on her own: a nice self-empowering sentiment that deserved to be in a better movie. In fact, I had the same problem with <i>Killing for Extra Credit</i> that I did with <i>Friday Night Sext Scandal</i>: both movies seemed to be mediocre formula pieces with hints of much better things lurking around inside them. The whole business of a rich middle-aged man literally buying a baby as a fashion accessory and raising her as his own is pretty horrifying as it stands; instead McGuigan decided to create a spark of romantic interest between <i>Señor</i> Arredondo and Lydia Morris, where it seemed to me his only interest in her is, “Well, I can marry her and get myself a replacement daughter.”mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4064270794522115878.post-57191351658221729062024-03-17T17:45:00.000-07:002024-03-18T02:27:55.865-07:00Ms. Fisher's Modern Murder Mysteries: "Reel Murder" (Every Cloud Productions, Seven Productions, Screen Australia, Film Victoria, All3 Media, GPB, WGBH, PBS, 2021)<br><b>by Mark Gabrish Conlan</b> • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
<br><br>Last night (Saturday, March 16) I watched a couple of TV items, an episode of <i>Ms. Fisher’s Modern Murder Mysteries</i> called “Reel Murder” and a 1967 French neo-<i>noir</i> movie called <i>Le Samouraï</i>. The <i>Ms. Fisher’s Modern Murder Mysteries</i> episode (the show’s awkward title is explained by the fact that it’s set in the 1960’s and is a follow-up to a previous show, <i>Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries</i>, set in the 1920’s and featuring a plucky female detective who’s either the mother or the aunt of the lead in this one) has the highest rating of any show in the series (though there were only 12 shows total over a run from 2019 to 2021). But I found it pretty dull going; it’s about a fishing party led by Peregrine Fisher (Geraldine Hakewill) and featuring some of her friends, including Samuel Birnside (Toby Truslove), who hooks a corpse accidentally while casting his line. The corpse turns out to be Morris Dunnet (Wayne Cartwright), a spousal abuser and all-around nasty piece of work. His wife disappeared five years before and he was indicted for murdering her, but he was acquitted largely because he’d done such a good job disposing of her body it was never found.
<br><br>Among the suspects are middle-aged woman Enid Holdstock (Jennifer Vuletic), who used to clean house for the Dunnets and therefore got to watch first-hand as Morris regularly assaulted her; Abraham Sifo (Christopher Kirby), a minister whose church included the Dunnets as parishoners and thereby also got a ringside seat at the horrible way he treated her; Frank Quinn (Matthew MacFarlane), Morris’s former brother-in-law, who’s also never forgiven Morris for the way he treated Morris’s wife/Frank’s sister; and another oyster in the stew, Suzie Lew (Alessandra Merlo), a family friend. Eventually writer Felicity Packard decided <i>[spoiler alert!]</i> to rip off the notorious gimmick first used (I think) by Agatha Christie in <i>Murder in the Calais Coach</i>, later filmed twice as <i>Murder on the Orient Express</i>: all four prime suspects worked together to off the bastard, though the official cop on the case, Peregrine’s sort-of boyfriend Detective James Steed (Joel Jackson), is told by his superiors to accept Enid’s confession of sole guilt. She reasons she’s the oldest of the four and her heart condition makes it unlikely that she’ll live much longer anyway, so she agrees to assume legal guilt to protect the well-meaning other three. This plot gimmick is hard enough to accept as it is – “Only a half-wit could guess it,” said Raymond Chandler about Christie’s novel – and it only works if the murder victim is himself a despicable person: a child molester in Christie’s novel (though for some reason that plot point was eliminated in the first film, and I haven’t seen the second) or a domestic violence perpetrator here.mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4064270794522115878.post-21551538244281375442024-03-17T17:40:00.000-07:002024-03-18T02:26:52.788-07:00Le Samouraï (Studios Jenner, Compagnie Industrielle et Commerciale Cinématographique, Fida Cinematografica, Filmel, T. C. Productions, S. N. Prodis, 1967)<br><b>by Mark Gabrish Conlan</b> • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
<br><br>Later I watched <i>Le Samouraï</i> as the first episode in the long-awaited return of Eddie Muller’s “<i>Noir</i> Alley” telecast after a month and a half off to commemorate Turner Classic Movies’ Black History Month series and also the network’s annual “31 Days of Oscar” celebration. It’s a film I’ve heard a great deal about over the years, though it was shot relatively late (1967) for a <i>film noir</i> and Melville and his associates – co-writer Georges Pellegrin and cinematographer Henri Decaë – made a bad mistake. They shot the damned thing in color, thereby missing the cool, dark chiaroscuro look of classic <i>noir</i> and not coming up with anything worthwhile to replace it. (For an example of how to do classic <i>film noir</i> in color, check out Allan Dwan’s <i>Slightly Scarlet</i>, a 1956 adaptation of James M. Cain’s novel <i>Love’s Lovely Counterfeit</i> in which Dwan and his cinematographer, John Alton, successfully re-created the <i>noir</i> look despite the handicap of color.) The plot deals with Jef Costello (Alain Delon), a professional hit man in the Parisian underworld, who’s assigned to kill Martey, the owner of a swanky jazz nightclub whose star entertainer is a Black woman pianist (Caty Rosier). In his intro Eddie Muller suggested Rosier’s character was based on Josephine Baker, but because she’s a piano player and not a singer I was thinking more Dorothy Donegan or Nellie Lutcher here. In the opening scene we see Jef, whom we’re later told is such an Americaphile he’s taken as his alias a first name that sounds American, alone in his ratty apartment with a caged bird as just about his only companion. Melville, Decaë and a fellow cinematographer (the credits list Decaë for shooting the exteriors and someone else, whose name I didn’t write down, for doing the studio work, but imdb.com lists Decaë alone) shoot the opening scene as close to black-and-white as they could get, and only the blue smoke Jef is blowing out of his mouth as he smokes a cigarette in bed gives away that this film is going to be in color (alas).
<br><br><i>Le Samouraï</i> was supposedly based on a novel by Jean McLeod called <i>The Ronin</i> – “ronin” means “a vagrant samurai without a master,” and they were considered lower in status than the samurai who <i>had</i> masters – but there’s no trace of the existence of this book online and the general consensus appears to be that Melville invented the plot himself and decided to attribute it to a nonexistent writer. The film opens with a supposed quote from <i>Bushido</i>, the traditional Japanese book on the ways of the samurai, but this one is definitely made up by Melville (and perhaps co-writer Pellegrin as well). Melville also reportedly said he based this film and Delon’s character in it on the hit man Alan Ladd played in Frank Tuttle’s <i>This Gun for Hire</i> (Paramount, 1932), which made Ladd a star after years of slaving away in “B” movies for independent producers. But there’s little of classic noir in this film, which is surprisingly boring despite a few intense action scenes. Most of it is simply Jef Costello making his way around Paris, mostly trying to avoid capture by a determined police squad headed by an unnamed “Commissioner” (François Périer, usually known as a comedian but pressed into service here for a deadly serious role) after he kills Martey but his carefully constructed alibi (involving an all-night poker game in a hotel as well as his girlfriend Jane Lagrange, played by Delon’s real-life wife at the time, Nathalie Delon, though they were already in the process of separating when this film was made and broke up officially in 1969) quickly falls apart when at least one of the club patrons identifies him. There are some quite clever touches in <i>Le Samouraï</i>, including the long key ring Jef carries with him; he drives only stolen Citroën cars (the Citroëns had a deliberately futuristic look that makes them among the coolest cars ever), and the key ring has a sample of every key combination used to start a Citroën. While one wonders whether this in itself could attract the attention of the police – especially if Jef had to work his way through most of the keys in his collection before he found the one that started the particular car he was stealing – the two times we actually see him do this he gets the right key on the fourth or fifth try.
<br><br>Midway through the film Jef finds himself on the receiving end of an attempted hit from a blond man named Wiener (Michel Boisrond), who gave him the contract to kill Martey but worries that since the police held Jef in custody for hours, even though he told them nothing and the cops eventually let him go, Jef has become a liability he and his boss, Olivier Rey (Jean-Pierre Posier), need to get rid of. Jef and Wiener confront each other twice, the second time in Jef’s apartment just after Jef has noticed and disconnected a “bug” the police had planted in his home. This time Wiener offers Jeff another contract and Jef reluctantly agrees, only it turns out the new victim is the Black piano player at Martey’s. In the final scene, after Jef checks his gun to make sure it’s loaded (it’s a six-shot revolver and all the chambers are full), Jef confronts the pianist between sets at the club. She asks, “Why do you want to kill me?,” and he says, “Because someone hired me to.” Then the police, who have staked out the club, open fire on the scene and kill Jef, and it turns out his gun was empty but there’s no particular clue as to who emptied it, when or how. Prior to that there’s a long tracking sequence in which the police are keeping Jef under electronic surveillance as he makes his way through the Métro (the Paris subway), and his location is indicated by solid lights on a map of the city that are turned on remotely whenever a police operative sees him pass by a particular spot. This reminded me of the 1949 film <i>White Heat</i>, directed by Raoul Walsh and starring James Cagney, which Charles Reich in his 1970 book <i>The Greening of America</i> cited as a dramatization of the clash of values between “Consciousness I” – the rugged individual of American historical myth – and “Consciousness II,” the bureaucratization of society and the systematization of everything into order, structure and routine. Like Cagney’s character in <i>White Heat</i>, Delon’s character here is ultimately brought down not by a similarly individualistic cop but by a whole bureaucracy, with each of its cogs meshing in predetermined ways to find the killer and either arrest or kill him.
<br><br>Le Samouraï had a troubled production history; Studios Jenner, the production facility Melville had built himself with the proceeds from his previous films, burned down midway through the shoot. Melville suspected arson, but the real-life police investigation didn’t prove it one way or the other and the mystery was never solved. This forced Melville to go hat-in-hand to other film companies in Paris to rent studio space from them to finish the movie. Also, <i>Le Samouraï</i> wasn’t released in the U.S. until 1972, five years after it came out in France, and the U.S. distributor had it dubbed into English and retitled <i>The Godson</i> to make it seem like an immediate sequel to the sensationally successful 1972 film <i>The Godfather</i>. It was only years later that another distributor issued <i>Le Samouraï</i> in the U.S. in a properly subtitled version that accurately reflected what the original French audiences had seen in 1967. The film since then has been hailed as a classic, but I still think it’s an uneven film with a lot of <i>longueurs</i> and an absence of the wall-to-wall background music it would have had if it had been an American film – though that might not be such a bad thing; certainly the final chase benefits, in a way, from <i>not</i> having a Mickey Mouse-style score telling us minute by minute just how we’re supposed to react to the events that happen!mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4064270794522115878.post-90812184286066417362024-03-16T21:04:00.000-07:002024-03-16T23:21:51.485-07:00American Masters: "Mae West: Dirty Blonde" (Thirteen/WNET, 1515 Productions Limited, American Masters Pictures, 2024)<br><b>by Mark Gabrish Conlan</b> • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
<br><br>Right now I’m listening to a quite entertaining LP from Columbia, reissued in the late 1960’s from material recorded for the Brunswick label in the mid-1930’s, featuring songs by Ethel Merman (back when her voice still had some resemblance to normal pitches; she was always a big-voiced woman with killer high notes, but this early at least she hit those notes relatively cleanly instead of just screaming in the general direction of pitch as she did later), Lyda Roberti (the Polish-born diva-ette who sang with a very thick accent and died at age 31 of a heart attack after years of heart trouble) and Mae West. I dug this album out of the backlog because last night (Friday, March 15) my husband Charles and I watched a quite good <i>American Masters</i> documentary about Mae West, almost inevitably called <i>Dirty Blonde</i>. It was basically a print-the-legend version of Mae West’s story, though it had some interesting explorations of the various controversies involved in West’s career, both when it was still going on (when she was a lightning rod for censorship) and since (arguments within the feminist community over whether to consider West a pioneer feminist icon or excoriate her, as Marjorie Rosen did in her 1970’s book <i>Popcorn Venus</i>). Mae West is one of my big culture heroines, mainly because she was in total control of her own career; she not only starred in movies but insisted on writing her own scripts. Her contract with Paramount from 1932 to 1937 gave her not only the authority to write her films but a provision that her credit as writer be in letters 75 percent the size of her credit as star. What’s more, she became a movie star when she was either pushing forty or already passed it (her Wikipedia page gives her birthdate as August 17, 1893; as I once wrote in a moviemagg post about one of West’s films, “She <i>would</i> be a Leo!”).
<br><br>Mae West made her stage debut at age five and never wanted to do anything else with her life. She was born in Brooklyn (and kept the accent all her life instead of working with voice coaches to “normalize” her diction), and there’s a story in this film in which she once got upset when doing a childhood performance because the spotlight was on the other side of the stage from her, so she managed to coax it over to her. Mae West became a star in vaudeville and its raunchier cousin, burlesque. The show emphasized her proletarian origins – her father was a prizefighter named John Patrick West, nicknamed “Battlin’ Jack,” and her mother was corset and fashion model Mathilde Delker – though according to Charlotte Chandler’s book on her she had an attorney uncle, Thomas West, who read all her contracts and advised her on them. In 1926 West was out on the town when she saw a female prostitute wearing a hat with two bird-of-paradise feathers at a time when there was such a demand for such hats the bird they came from had literally been hunted to extinction. Since the woman was in visible want, West found herself wondering why she had spent whatever money she had on food instead of those ultra-expensive feathers, and West started imagining a play based on her experiences. West hired Elwood Elsner, a prestigious director who’d worked with John Barrymore, and she started rehearsing the play before she’d settled on a title. At one point, Elsner complained, “This play reeks of sex, sex, sex!” Mae West heard that and immediately decided to call the play <i>Sex</i>, even though the <i>New York Times</i> then did not allow that word in its pages; the <i>Times</i> ads heralded “Mae West in that certain play.” During the run of <i>Sex</i> the New York Police Department raided the play on protests from women’s religious groups who claimed it was obscene, and West was actually convicted and sentenced to 10 days in jail (though she only served eight). In a 1969 <i>Life</i> magazine interview, West said she was struck by the irony that he was in women’s jail for playing a prostitute, and just about all the other inmates were there for <i>being</i> prostitutes. She also befriended the warden and his wife, and got to have dinners with them. According to her Wikipedia page, West was offered the chance to pay a fine and avoid jail time, but she was a shrewd enough self-publicist to see the possibilities of publicizing the film for which she’d be willing to go to jail. West boasted on her release that there would be enough pent-up demand to see her play that it would run for years, and she was right.
<br><br>While <i>Sex</i> was winding down she wrote another play (signing it “Jane Mast,” an obvious pseudonym) called <i>The Drag</i> about Gay men, though the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice managed to keep her from opening it in New York after successful tryouts in Connecticut and New Jersey. In an effort to broaden her appeal and in particular to get more women to come to their shows – at one performance of <i>Sex</i> she’d looked into the audience and noticed it was 80 percent male – she decided to set her next play, <i>Diamond Lil</i>, in the 1890’s. I’ve long suspected one reason Mae West kept gravitating to the 1890’s as a setting for her stories was because that was when women who looked like her – buxom, big-chested and with waists cinched tight by corsets – had been considered the acme of female sexiness before the tall, slender, boyish “flapper” look came into vogue in the 1920’s. Anyway, <i>Diamond Lil</i> was a huge hit and it attracted the attentions of the Hollywood studios, though it wasn’t until 1932 – in the depths of the Depression (which really didn’t start hitting the movie business hard until 1931, but when it did it threatened all but one of the major studios with bankruptcy) – that West finally accepted a contract offer from Paramount. According to this documentary, West asked the studio executive who was negotiating with her, “How much money do you make?” He told her, and she said, “Give me a dollar more than that and I’ll sign.” West’s first film was a rather quirky mashup of gangster film and soap opera called <i>Night After Night</i> (1932), in which she was billed fourth (after George Raft, Constance Cummings and the quite good but largely forgotten Wynne Gibson, and just ahead of the great character comedienne Alison Skipworth), but she demanded the right to write her own dialogue for the scenes in which she would appear. The moment she breezes in to the titular speakeasy “55,” appears at the hat-check desk where the girl at the desk exclaims, “Goodness, what beautiful diamonds” – and West answered back, “Goodness had nothin’ to do with it, honey” – Mae West became a movie star.
<br><br>Her next film was an adaptation of <i>Diamond Lil</i>, though Paramount had her change the title to <i>She Done Him Wrong</i> and “Lil” became “Lady Lou.” It was shot on a 17-day schedule for a competent but unimaginative hack named Lowell Sherman (who’d begun as an actor and actually delivers a great performance as a drunken has-been director in the 1932 film <i>What Price Hollywood?</i>, the precursor to the multiple versions of <i>A Star Is Born</i>), and for her leading man West picked Cary Grant. The print-the-legend version of how Grant got the part is the one told here; reportedly West looked down a long line of Paramount leading men, spotted Grant and said, “If he can talk, I'll take him!” Grant had actually signed with Paramount a year before and his first film had been <i>This Is the Night</i> (1932), a quite good romantic comedy much along the lines of the movies that would make him a star later on. By the time he co-starred in <i>She Done Him Wrong</i> he’d already worked with major stars – Tallulah Bankhead, Gary Cooper and Charles Laughton in <i>Devil and the Deep</i>; Marlene Dietrich and Herbert Marshall in Josef von Sternberg’s <i>Blonde Venus</i>; and a non-musical version of <i>Madame Butterfly</i> with Sylvia Sidney as Butterfly and Grant as Pinkerton – though Grant’s patented mix of romance and comic exasperation played perfectly with West’s steamroller sex drive and their two films together, <i>She Done Him Wrong</i> and <i>I’m No Angel</i> (for which Paramount realized what they had in Grant enough they gave him billing along with West on the title card: “Mae West in <i>I’m No Angel</i> with Cary Grant”), are her best.
<br><br>They’re her best for another reason: both were made during the so-called “pre-Code” era of Hollywood history. Throughout the 1920’s women’s clubs and other busybodies had been denouncing Hollywood as immoral, both for the relative brevity of many of the stars’ marriages and the casual content of the films themselves. In 1930 the movie industry issued a Production Code which the major studios claimed they would enforce against each other to ensure that all movies would be “clean” enough to entertain the entire family. The studios hired Will H. Hays, who’d been Postmaster General under President Warren G. Harding, to be the public face of the cleanup campaign, though the person actually in charge of enforcing the code was a former Jesuit named Joseph Breen. (One critic has pointed out the irony that the studio owners, most of whom were Jewish, hired a bunch of Roman Catholics to advise them on what a mostly Protestant nation would consider “clean” entertainment.) For the first four years, however, the Code was only loosely enforced, and movies took on sexual topics with a refreshing honesty that wouldn’t return to American movies until the 1960’s. Then Mae West came on the screen, and though there were other movies featuring other stars who bore a large amount of the would-be censors’ wrath, she became Public Enemy Number One. The U.S. branch of the Roman Catholic Church organized a pressure group called the Legion of Decency with the clear and openly stated goal of driving “immoral” entertainment in general, and Mae West in particular, off the screen. When the Legion of Decency struck, West had just finished her fourth film, originally entitled <i>It Ain’t No Sin</i>, and it was ready for release – only Joseph Breen’s censors demanded major cuts and the New York state censorship board cut it even further. Among the censor-mandated changes were a scene at the end in which West’s and Roger Pryor’s character would get married – original reviewers rightly guessed this scene had been added only to mollify the censors – as well as a quite obvious cut of one chorus of West’s song “When a St. Louis Woman Comes Down to New Orleans” and a change in the title to the anodyne <i>Belle of the Nineties</i>.
<br><br>The censors’ no-holds-barred attack on Mae West put the people running Paramount in a quandary: they still had a hot star on their hands, but they also had a lot of bothersome busybodies chiming in with their own two cents’ worth on what they could and should do with her. The result was a series of films – <i>Goin’ to Town</i> (1935), <i>Klondike Annie</i> (1936), <i>Go West Young Man</i> (1936) and <i>Every Day’s a Holiday</i> (1937) – that lost money at the box office because they didn’t give West’s audience what they wanted to see from her. West drifted into radio work but also ran afoul of the censors, thanks in large part to an Adam and Eve spoof she did on Edgar Bergen’s radio show, which led to a flood of letters to NBC and an outright ban on West’s further radio appearances. West would get to make two more movies, <i>My Little Chickadee</i> with W. C. Fields for Universal in 1940 (Universal had had a success with fellow Paramount refugee Marlene Dietrich with a Western spoof called <i>Destry Rides Again</i> in 1939 and thought lightning would strike again; it did, sort of, but though Fields and West were supposed to write the script together, according to her 1969 <i>Life</i> interview West wrote the whole thing except for one scene in which Fields fills in for an absent bartender) and <i>The Heat’s On</i> for Columbia in 1943 (oddly not mentioned here; plot-wise it’s a knock-off of the Warner Bros. Busby Berkeley musical <i>Dames</i> and a quite entertaining spoof of censorship even though it suffers from the unwillingness of Columbia’s producers to let West write her own dialogue). Then, locked out of movies and radio, she returned to the live stage, first in a revival of <i>Diamond Lil</i> and then in a Las Vegas stage show in which she filled the stage with musclemen. Among her recruits were Mickey Hargitay (who later married another blonde bombshell, Jayne Mansfield, fathered Mariska Hargitay from <i>Law and Order: Special Victims Unit</i> and sponsored Arnold Schwarzenegger’s immigration to the U.S.) and Chester Rybinski, who under the name “Paul Novak” became West’s life partner for the last 30 years of her life. "I believe I was put on this Earth to take care of Mae West,” Novak once said.
<br><br>Mae West’s private life was as unconventional as those of her characters; she’d briefly married a fellow vaudevillian named Frank Szatkus, who performed under the name “Frank Wallace,” in Milwaukee in 1911 (and since she’d never divorced him, this sparked controversy when a town clerk in 1935 discovered the marriage record and leaked it publicly, undermining West’s frequent claims that she’d never been married), and later she had an affair with an accordion player named Guido Deiro. She got pregnant by him (they tried a crude form of birth control but it didn’t work), and on the advice of her mother West had an illegal abortion – which was botched and left her unable to bear children again. Mae West got rediscovered in the 1960’s largely as an icon of the sexual revolution in general and the Queer community in particular; she’d always been sympathetic to Queer rights and her over-the-top costumes were often copied by drag queens. This had her full awareness and approval; when she met Walter Plunkett, costume designer for <i>The Heat’s On</i>, she told him, “Make me dresses the female impersonators will want to wear.” West made an ill-advised comeback attempt in the 1970’s with two movies, a supporting role in the film of Gore Vidal’s Trans bestseller <i>Myra Breckenridge</i> and a lead in a film called <i>Sextette</i>, based on a story she’d written in 1959 but filmed 20 years later, in which she and her current husband get together with all of her exes. There’s a clip from <i>Sextette</i> in this documentary in which she’s introduced to a man who’s six feet, seven inches tall, and she says, “Never mind the six feet. Just give me the seven inches” – which, especially coming from a woman in her 70’s whose face looks like her makeup has been applied with a trowel to cover the effects of age, is a) not funny and b) just shows how little Mae West had to say in an era in which all the envelopes she had pushed in the 1930’s had since been totally shredded.
<br><br>Fortunately, Mae West at least had a comfortable existence; she’d saved her money from her glory years and used it to invest in real estate, mostly in Van Nuys. She’d also never drank or smoked, and she’d avoided the chemical temptations that frequently come with major stardom. Though there’s a certain degree of sadness over how Mae West’s life ended (she finally died November 22, 1980, three months after suffering a stroke), she lived her life on her own terms and had a quite long run, living to be 87. In 1971 the UCLA student body voted West “Woman of the Century” because of her outspoken advocacy of sexual honesty and her denunciation of the censorship that both boosted her career and did so much to destroy it.mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4064270794522115878.post-66967716173734505852024-03-15T19:45:00.000-07:002024-03-16T14:28:33.566-07:00Law and Order: "Balance of Power" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired March 14, 2024)<br><b>by Mark Gabrish Conlan</b> • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
<br><br>Last night (Thursday, March 14) I watched an unusually good run of shows in Dick Wolf’s <i>Law and Order</i> franchise, including an episode of the flagship <i>Law and Order</i> called “Balance of Power.” This episode dealt with a multi-millionaire (his fortune was over $250 million) named Jonah Barlowe (Andy Christopher) who’s found clubbed to death in his own apartment. Jason made a huge fortune overnight by promoting the stock of a video-rental company at a time when video rentals looked like history and the big Wall Street money was selling the stock short (obviously writers Art Alamo and Ted Malawer were thinking the real-life Gamestop stock bubble). It also turned out that Jason was a big-time submissive in BDSM scenes, which had earlier led his wife Elizabeth (Natalie Smith) to leave him (though she was still emotionally attached to him). At first he went for garden-variety scenes in which he called on women to dress in underwear, tase him and torture him while calling him a worthless piece of garbage who didn’t deserve his good fortune, but later he branched out into “fin-dom” scenes. “Fin-dom” apparently means “financial dominance” and it involves literally ceding control of your money to another person for a short time and allowing them to spend it however they like – only Jonah’s killer, Melissa James (Piper Patterson), took advantage of him and ripped off $23 million from his account, sending it to a secret bank in Panama which refuses to cooperate with the New York Police Department’s subpoena for the records. Melissa visited Jonah in his apartment and refused to return the money, whereupon Jonah threatened to call the police on her and she responded by picking up a gold statuette of Atlas and walloping him with it until he died. (I wondered if the writers were doing a deliberate reference to Ayn Rand’s <i>Atlas Shrugged</i> here.) Unfortunately, the police accidentally blew a big part of the case against Melissa when they grabbed her cell phone without a warrant, and while they only had custody of it for three seconds, nonetheless the judge in the case, Thomas Hatcher (William Charlton), rules any evidence from the phone inadmissible as the fruits of an illegal search.
<br><br>The show also featured the new New York District Attorney, Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn), who comes in figuratively with both guns blazing, determined to assert control over the office, ranging from redecorating it in modern colors instead of the dark wood panels his predecessor Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston) favored to repairing good relations with the city’s mayor which McCoy had blown in a previous episode. (Inevitably he reminded me of Donald Trump’s similarly ultra-aggressive takeover of the Republican Central Committee.) Barred by the judge’s ruling from using any of the evidence on Melissa’s cell phone, including the texts back and forth between her and Jonah that established her motive, the police go looking for a previous victim of Melissa’s, whom they find in Derek Parker (David L. Townsend). Derek is the ultimate reluctant witness; though Melissa scammed him of much less money than she stole from Jonah, she threatened to reveal all his personal peccadilloes to his family and his employers if he went to the police, so he kept quiet until the trial. Melissa’s attorney offers a plea deal in which Melissa will reveal evidence that a major movie star is actually a serial rapist – supposedly he revealed this to her in BDSM sessions she recorded and filmed, including one we get to see a clip of in which he boasted that he was able to stab his victims in parts of the body which the camera wouldn’t show. DA Baxter wants lead prosecutor Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) to take the deal, but when Melissa’s attorney balks at the 10-year manslaughter sentence Baxter insisted on as the minimum his office would accept, the deal falls through, the trial continues and Melissa is found guilty of second-degree murder. Part of Price’s reluctance to accept the deal is that he can’t verify any of it: the star himself is out of the country filming a movie and Melissa can’t or won’t name any of the alleged victims – which leads a thoughtful viewer to wonder if the “rape” scenarios were just role-playing between the actor and Melissa and the crimes hadn’t really existed. Certainly my knowledge of the BDSM community, such as it is, leads me to doubt that the same person would be a rapist of women <i>and</i> a submissive to a dominant woman!mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4064270794522115878.post-73596311155936446152024-03-15T19:43:00.000-07:002024-03-15T19:43:47.695-07:00Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Probability of Doom" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired March 14, 2024)<br><b>by Mark Gabrish Conlan</b> • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
<br><br>The <i>Law and Order: Special Victims Unit</i> episode that followed, “Probability of Doom,” directed by Martha Mitchell from a script by David Graziano and Nicholas Evangelista, features one of the quirkiest villains the show has ever had. Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) starts the episode in full dress uniform to attend the police academy graduation ceremony, in which one of the graduating officers is a young woman whom Benson rescued years earlier as a kidnapping victim of a serial pedophile. Only Benson is called away from the graduation before she can speak to her rescuee because others on her squad, including Detective Odafin “Fin” Tutuola (Ice-T) and Captain Renée Curry (Aimé Donna Kelly), who transferred from the Internal Affairs Bureau to Special Victims Unit, have found the body of a serial pedophile chopped up in pieces and left to rot in his apartment. Later a second known pedophile is found in similar condition, and though the writers made surprisingly little of the theme which I thought they would be going to – the mixed feelings between the SVU squad members’ devotion to enforcing the law and the undoubted sympathies for the mysterious killer’s motives – they eventually trace the murders to Tori Brock (Sarah Lynn Marion), a 20-something hard-assed woman of size who started her killing spree by knocking off her own father, who had been regularly molesting her throughout her childhood. She was troubled enough she dropped out of high school (though she later got a G.E.D. certificate) and went to work in construction, in which capacity she owned the sort of saw with which she cut up the bodies of at least three serial pedophiles. She recruited her victims through a “dark Web” phone app called K-Dome, which started as a site for illegal drug sales (“K” as in “special K,” the street name for the animal tranquilizer ketamine) but branched out into facilitating meetings between pedophiles and potential victims. Tori used photos of her still pre-pubescent sister Nina (Fiona Morgan Quinn) to lure her targets, and one of the men Tori later killed had posed for photos with Nina in the cab of his pickup truck – actually perfectly legitimate ones, but with a definite undercurrent of sexualization. The person I really felt sorry for in this episode is Sarah Lynn Marion, mainly because though she’s quite an accomplished actor, she’s going to be <i>very</i> difficult to cast. About the only other sort of part I can imagine her playing is a super-butch Lesbian. She was certainly fun to watch here: powerful, dominating, taking on a protective-mother role towards her sister and making us feel sorry for her even though we also understand how her horrible experience with her own dad (the “probability of doom” is a late-in-the-episode mention of Tori’s fear of her father, and in particular whether once he came home from work he’d be appropriately loving towards her or want to rape her) led her to her terrible program of revenge against not only her father (who not surprisingly was her first victim) but all similarly situated men.mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4064270794522115878.post-32175615287145309302024-03-15T19:42:00.000-07:002024-03-15T19:42:40.054-07:00Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Original Sin" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired March 14, 2024)<br><b>by Mark Gabrish Conlan</b> • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
<br><br>The <i>Law and Order: Organized Crime</i> episode that followed, “Original Sin,” was as usual the weakest of the three, though Dick Wolf’s writers (here, Liz Sagal and Bridget Tyler) also came up with a quite powerful and unusually interesting villain. The bad guy is Eric Bonner (Will Janowitz), son of retired judge Clay Bonner (Keith Carradine, playing a small-town boss but something of a comedown after he was President of the United States on the sorely missed TV series Madam Secretary) and brother of police chief Meredith Bonner (Jennifer Ehle) in the small town of Westbrook on Long Island. “Original Sin” continued and wrapped up (more or less) a story arc we’ve been watching for several episodes in which Wolf’s writers and show runners have been paying obeisance to the <b>Great God SERIAL</b> and making the shows’ stories continuous (a recent TV trend I frankly loathe). Bonner and Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni) are investigating the murders of young female prostitutes hired to “entertain” the guests at parties given by the local D.A., who was our initial prime suspect, but ultimately the finger points to Eric and in the big climax he kidnaps Stabler and takes him to a church he’s remodeling (which is what he does for a living). It turns out Eric is a religious freak who kidnaps prostitutes and essentially crucifies them in order to redeem their souls and make them atone for their sins so after he dispatches them they’ll go to heaven instead of hell. Ultimately Stabler’s colleagues at the Organized Crime Control Bureau hunt him down and it turns out he walked out on a psychiatric evaluation ordered by a Black Internal Affairs officer who blames Stabler and his father for disgracing his father’s ex-partner, who sponsored the Internal Affairs guy’s police career and later committed suicide (he “ate his gun,” as the slang term goes), so he’s determined to ruin Stabler at all costs. It’s an O.K. story and it <i>does</i> give us a few nice glimpses of Christopher Meloni’s jeans-clad crotch (maybe he’s more grizzled than he was in his SVU days but his basket is as impressive as ever), but as usual it’s the least of the three remaining shows in Dick Wolf’s <i>Law and Order</i> franchise.mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4064270794522115878.post-51402059874937152252024-03-12T20:30:00.000-07:002024-03-13T12:01:56.663-07:00Imitation of Life (Universal, 1934)<br><b>by Mark Gabrish Conlan</b> • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
<br><br>Last night (Monday, March 11) my husband Charles and I watched a couple of early-1930’s classics on Turner Classic Movies. The first was the original 1934 version of Fannie Hurst’s novel <i>Imitation of Life</i>, directed by John M. Stahl for Universal based on a script by Willliam Hurlbut (who would write <i>The Bride of Frankenstein</i> for James Whale the next year, and though the two films are miles apart <i>genre</i>-wise, in a way they’re both about outsiders cursed by the circumstances of their births and desperately seeking acceptance). The imdb.com page for the 1934 <i>Imitation of Life</i> lists a whole bunch of other writers who allegedly contributed: Preston Sturges, Finley Peter Dunne (political satirist and creator of the “Mr. Dooley” character), Walter Ferris, Bianca Gilchrist, Victor Heerman, his wife Sarah Y. Mason, Samuel Ornitz and Arthur Richman. The film starts with widow Beatrice Pullman (Claudette Colbert) desperately trying to make ends meet to raise her daughter Jessie (Juanita Quigley as “Baby Jane” – the moment he saw that billing Charles inevitably joked, “Whatever happened to Baby Jane?,” though the real Quigley had a considerably better life than the fictional Baby Jane Hudson: after a long career that lasted into adolescence, she quit the movie business to become a nun, though she later renounced her vows and married a man, made her last film – <i>Porky’s II</i> – in 1983 and died in 2017). Bea (as she’s known) is selling maple syrup from her late husband’s recipe and barely making enough to keep herself and her daughter alive. Things change for her when she meets a heavy-set Black woman, Delilah Johnson (Louise Beavers), who shows up for an interview for a maid’s job. She has the wrong address, but Bea offers her carfare and then Delilah rescues Jessie when Jessie falls into the bathtub and almost drowns. Like Bea, Delilah is also a widow raising a daughter, Peola (Dorothy Black), and she offers to work for Bea for just room and board. Delilah also makes Bea pancakes from a secret recipe passed down from her grandmother to her mother to her, and she says it will die with her – though she whispers it to Bea.
<br><br>The two women decide to start a breakfast restaurant on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, where they live (though they later relocate to New York), and they bluff a landlord (Clarence Wilson, the great villain from W. C. Fields’ movies <i>Tillie and Gus</i> and <i>The Old-Fashioned Way</i>) into giving them an old pool hall as a location. The restaurant takes off and one day Elmer Smith (Ned Sparks), a down-and-out man, comes in. Bea takes pity on him and offers him a pancake meal on the house, and he’s so taken with the taste of Delilah’s super-pancakes he suggests they follow the lead of Coca-Cola and box the pancake flour for sale. Within a few jump-cuts the business – “Aunt Delilah’s Pancake Flour” – is a huge success (I’ve long thought Fannie Hurst was inspired to write this by seeing a box of Aunt Jemima’s in a market and starting to wonder just how this preposterously packaged product came to exist), and it’s advertised by an animated neon sign showing Aunt Delilah flipping a pancake while wearing the trademark smile. (The earlier scene in which Bea coaxed Delilah to smile the way she wanted for the trademark is marvelous.) The two women stay together – Bea offers to find Delilah a house of her own, but Delilah, whose devotion to Bea approaches masochism, refuses to leave – and as the years pass Jessie grows up to be Rochelle Hudson and Peola grows up to be the great light-skinned Black actress Fredi Washington. Only Fredi hates being considered Black and the racist prejudices that come with it – Delilah had earlier explained Peola’s light skin by telling Bea that Peola’s late father was an unusually light-skinned African-American – and throughout her childhood, adolescence and adulthood she keeps trying to “pass” for white. Delilah keeps showing up in her life and “outing” her as Black; Peola particularly resents Delilah referring to herself as “your mammy,” a term that inevitably tags her as Black. Delilah costs Peola a job as a greeter and cashier at a white Southern restaurant, and the vigor with which she and Bea (who joins her in her crusade to find her daughter) keep “outing” her becomes uncomfortably cruel after a while.
<br><br>At one point Delilah offers to pay Peola’s way to attend an historically Black college, but she quits after a few weeks and disappears again. Meanwhile, Bea has met and started dating Stephen Archer (Warren William), an ichthyologist who spends a lot of his time on voyages abroad and wants Bea to give up her business and accompany him on his travels. Only things take a detour in their relationship when Bea has to leave town to accompany Delilah on her latest search for Peola. Bea’s daughter Jessie happens to be back home on vacation from her own college, and she accompanies Stephen on all the dates he planned for her mom. Jessie falls in love with Stephen, though he dismisses it as a schoolgirl crush and remains faithful to Bea. Elmer Smith – ya remember <i>Elmer Smith</i>? – has negotiated a deal by which National Brands will buy Aunt Delilah’s while Bea will retain 50 percent of the profits, but Bea doesn’t want to sell. The movie <i>doesn’t</i> end the way you’d think it would, with Bea bailing out on the company and going off with Stephen; instead she decides not to sell and sends Stephen on his way, telling him he’s welcome to come back but only once Jessie has forgotten him and taken up with a man her own age. The film ends with Delilah’s funeral, depicted as a giant procession with various Black people she knew dressed in lodge uniforms (both Charles and I noted the resemblance of their costumes to the uniforms Marcus Garvey’s acolytes wore) and a church choir singing a hymn to Jesus.
<br><br><i>Imitation of Life</i> is a fascinating movie but also a frustrating one, and I get the impression the filmmakers <i>wanted</i> to make an anti-racist movie but didn’t quite know how. In 1959 Douglas Sirk directed a remake, but he made two quite retrograde decisions that to my mind significantly weakened the story. First, instead of making the white and Black women business partners, he and his writers, Eleanore Griffin and Allan Scott, made the Black woman, Annie Johnson (Juanita Moore), <i>just</i> the maid of the white one, aspiring actress Lora Meredith (Lana Turner). Second, he cast the equivalent of Peola, Sarah Jane, with white actress Susan Kohner instead of finding a light-skinned African-American like Fredi Washington in the original. Though the remake has some genuinely stunning moments – including the funeral scene, in which we see all the Black people who were part of Annie’s life though Lora had no idea they existed, and Mahalia Jackson makes a guest appearance as herself belting out “Trouble in the World” – and Lana Turner gives the performance of her life, it still irks me that on the eve of the civil rights movement Sirk, Griffin and Scott took away the Black mother’s independence and free agency that Stahl and Hurlbut allowed her. One of the most fascinating aspects of the 1934 <i>Imitation of Life</i> is how fresh much of it seems even though some aspects are certainly dated; in the opening, Bea is getting her daughter Jessie ready for a day at day care and Jessie resists having to go instead of spending the day with her mom. Of course we know that mom is a career woman and she has to make a living to support both of them, and it’s pretty clear that one reason Bea accepts Delilah’s offer to be a live-in maid and governess is so she won’t have to hassle child care. TCM was showing <i>Imitation of Life</i> as part of a salute to depictions of working women in the 1930’s, and while it’s a much richer movie than that it’s also a <i>tour de force</i> for both Colbert and Beavers. Indeed, one could make a case that Colbert won her Academy Award for the wrong movie; while <i>It Happened One Night</i> is a great screwball comedy, her performance in <i>Imitation of Life</i> is a deeper, richer reading of a much more multi-faceted and challenging role.mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4064270794522115878.post-1700011617593093502024-03-12T20:24:00.000-07:002024-03-12T20:24:15.759-07:00Man Wanted (Warner Bros., 1932)<br><b>by Mark Gabrish Conlan</b> • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
<br><br>After the 1934 <i>Imitation of Life</i>, TCM followed it with <i>Man Wanted</i>, a 1932 Warners programmer from the so-called “pre-Code” era about Lois Ames (Kay Francis), woman editor of <i>The “400” Magazine</i>, and her hapless husband Freddie Ames (Kenneth Thomson). Freddie is the proverbial upper-class twit who was born into money, went to Harvard University and since then has lived on his family’s (and his wife’s) income. Into the mix come French and Sprague sporting-goods salespeople Tom Sherman (David Manners) and ex-football star Andy Doyle (Andy Clyde). Tom is more or less engaged to Ruthie Holman (Una Merkel), the usual scratchy-voiced proletarian whose dad is offering Tom a job, but at the moment he’s employed at the sports store run by Mr. Walters (Edward Van Sloan, reunited with Manners from the cast of <i>Dracula</i>). The two cross paths with Lois when she orders a rowing machine and Tom shows up to deliver it. He just happens to arrive as Lois has just fired her long-suffering middle-aged woman secretary, Miss Harper (Elizabeth Patterson), for complaining about how late Lois keeps her at the office and saying she has to keep breaking dates to work Lois’s long hours. Tom volunteers to help out, saying he’s also a college man (though he doesn’t say what college) and, while he can’t type, he learned shorthand so he could take lecture notes and therefore can take Lois’s dictation. Midway through the movie the principals leave town for a weekend at a fancy resort, and Tom comes along as Lois’s secretary while Freddie takes an interest in another woman, Ann Le Maire (Claire Dodd, who specialized in playing the home-wrecker who came between the nice young couple). Tom has already risen from merely Lois’s secretary to her <i>de facto</i> assistant editor, with commensurate raises in pay from $50 per week to $100, $150 and finally $250.
<br><br>In the end Ruthie ends up bailing on her engagement to Tom because she’s tired of his long absences at work, she takes up with Andy instead (well, since Andy Clyde and Una Merkel have such grating voices, they’re clearly made for each other – Merkel was actually a nuanced actress whose best performance was probably as Ann Rutledge in D. W. Griffith’s underrated 1930 biopic <i>Abraham Lincoln</i>, but here she’s just a stereotypical comic-relief character), Freddie dumps Lois for Ann, and with their divorce pending Lois and Tom can finally get together. The writers do most (though not all) of the predictable gags about people being surprised that the editor of <i>The “400” Magazine</i> is – gasp! – a woman, but what really was refreshing about this film was the revelation that David Manners actually had a sense of humor. So far I’d seen him in his Universal horror films <i>Dracula, The Mummy</i> and <i>The Black Cat</i> (ironically, he actually hated making <i>Dracula</i> and to the end of his life he refused to watch the movie) and also in a marvelous performance in Frank Capra’s 1931 film <i>The Miracle Woman</i> as a veteran blinded in World War I who’s inspired not to commit suicide by a broadcast by evangelist Barbara Stanwyck (playing a character obviously based on Aimée Semple McPherson). Manners was also Katharine Hepburn’s fiancé in her first film, <i>A Bill of Divorcement</i> (1932) – though in the end she refuses to marry him because she’s worried any kids they have will inherit her father’s (John Barrymore) insanity. What I hadn’t realized from these parts was that Manners actually not only could play comedy, but could play it surprisingly well; his character here is the sort of part that would later make a star of Cary Grant. Directed by William Dieterle from a script by Robert Lord (“story”) and Charles Kenyon (“adaptation”), and photographed by Gregg Toland nine years before he would shoot the greatest film ever made about publishing, <i>Citizen Kane</i> (Charles joked that Toland’s mood lighting was able to make typing visually interesting), <i>Man Wanted</i> is a forgotten gem that’s recently been rediscovered by feminist critics, even though (unlike in the 1934 <i>Imitation of Life</i>) it’s not clear at the end whether Lois is going to keep her job or give it up in favor of man, home and family.mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4064270794522115878.post-46131184479647399452024-03-12T20:20:00.000-07:002024-03-13T03:35:45.822-07:00Destry Rides Again (Universal, 1939)<br><b>by Mark Gabrish Conlan</b> • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
<br><br>Two nights ago (Sunday, March 10) my husband Charles and I watched a DVD of the 1939 <i>Destry Rides Again</i>, produced by Joe Pasternak, directed by George Marshall and starring Marlene Dietrich and James Stewart (billed in that order!). It’s become known as Dietrich’s comeback film after she was one of the stars named by independent exhibitor Harry Brandt as “box-office poison” in a notorious Hollywood Reporter trade-paper ad in 1938. Among the other people named in Brandt’s ad were Mae West, Edward Arnold, Greta Garbo (Brandt conceded that her films still made money in Europe, but said that “does not help theater owners in the United States”), Joan Crawford and Kay Francis. “Paramount showed cleverness and consideration for exhibitors by buying off Dietrich's contract, which called for one more picture,” Brandt wrote. “Dietrich, too, is poison at the box office” – the one part of the ad that actually contained the phrase “box-office poison.” Dietrich accepted an offer from Universal at half her previous Paramount salary and took the part of “Frenchy,” a saloon entertainer in the rough-and-ready town of Bottleneck in the Old West. (It’s typical of Hollywood then that one foreign accent was considered the same as another, so no one thought it odd that the German-born Dietrich should play a Frenchwoman – which she already had in her first American film, <i>Morocco</i>, in 1930.) <i>Destry Rides Again</i> began as a 1930 novel by Max Brand (whose real name was the German-sounding “Frederick Schiller Faust”!) which Universal had first filmed in 1932 as a comeback vehicle for Tom Mix. Mix had seen the writing on the wall in 1927 when sound came in and quit the movies to perform in circuses; in 1932 he decided to return to filmmaking and make his first talkie. Directed by Benjamin Stoloff from a script by Robert Keith and Richard Schayer, the 1932 <i>Destry Rides Again</i> more or less followed the plot of Brand’s novel: Harrison Destry (called “Tom” in the movie) was previously framed for a crime he didn’t commit by the story’s villain, Chester Bent, who gets his friends onto the jury so Destry is convicted. He serves two years in prison and then seeks revenge when he’s released.
<br><br>In 1939 Joe Pasternak was a producer at Universal who’d became famous for the movies that made Deanna Durbin a star, but when a friend of his suggested that he couldn’t do anything else, Pasternak recalled, “I told him that I could produce any kind of picture – even a Western. I came across this Max Brand property that had been made with Tom Mix. At first glance, it looked all right, so to show my friend that I meant business, I announced that I was going to film <i>Destry Rides Again</i>. Then, after I began studying the book closer, I realized that I’d made a mistake. The story wasn’t as good as I’d originally thought. Yet I’d stuck my neck out, so I decided to go ahead with the picture anyway. But we did some extensive rewriting.” In fact, the rewriting was so extensive the film became an almost totally different story; the credited writers are Felix Jackson, Gertrude Purcell and Henry Myers, and the credits state merely that the film was “suggested by,” not “based on,” Brand’s novel. Tom Destry, Jr. (James Stewart) has foresworn the use of guns after his father, a former sheriff, was shot to death in the backstory. The town of Bottleneck is run by no-goodnik Kent (Brian Donlevy), who owns the local saloon where Frenchy (Marlene Dietrich) performs. The town mayor, Slade (Samuel S. Hinds), is part of Kent’s organization. When the town sheriff, Samuel Keogh (Joe King), is shot and killed by one of Kent’s men, Gyp Watson (Allen Jenkins – and yes, it’s odd to see this usually comic-relief actor as a black-hearted gunman!), Slade appoints the town drunk, Washington Dimsdale (Charles Winninger), as the new sheriff. Realizing he’s incompetent, Dimsdale sends for Destry as his deputy because he remembers how good a sheriff Destry, Sr. was. Only Destry, Jr. shows up in Bottleneck with Jack Tyndall (Jack Carson) and his wife Janice (Irene Hervey), and it doesn’t help his rough-and-tumble image that the first thing he does when he gets out of the stagecoach is hold Janice’s parasol. It doesn’t take long for Destry to deduce that Gyp Watson is Keogh’s killer, though he can’t prove it until he finds Keogh’s body, and Destry arrests Gyp but Slade announces he’s going to preside over the trial himself, which will ensure Gyp’s acquittal. Destry sends out of town for an honest judge, Murtaugh (whom we never see), but Janice lets slip that Destry has sent for an out-of-town judge and Kent’s men set out to ambush the new judge and keep their control over Bottleneck.
<br><br>I’d had fond memories of <i>Destry Rides Again</i> but I hadn’t realized what a mess it really is; it’s as if Jackson, Purcell and Myers simply put all the Western clichés into a blender and spat them out again in whatever order they ended up in. There’s a genuinely moving final scene in which Destry puts on a pair of shootin’ irons to go after Kent and the baddies (in a film like Sam Peckinpah’s <i>Straw Dogs</i> this would have been glorified as the character realizing it’s a violent world out there and you need guns to fight back) and Kent tries to kill him, but Frenchy comes between them, takes the bullet meant for Destry, and dies. But we don’t see Judge Murtaugh arrive in Bottleneck and preside over the trials that clean up the town at long last, and we should have. It’s hard to believe that James Stewart gave such a routine aw-shucks performance the same year he was incandescent as Senator Jefferson Smith in Frank Capra’s <i>Mr. Smith Goes to Washington</i>. The best parts of <i>Destry Rides Again</i> are Dietrich’s songs, written by her favorite songwriter, Frederick Hollander (who under his original name, Friedrich Holländer, had been her principal composer in Germany as well; he wrote all four songs she sang in her star-making film, <i>The Blue Angel</i>, including what became her theme song, “Falling in Love Again”), with lyrics by Frank Loesser three years before he became a songwriter himself. Her rendition of “See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have” made it one of Dietrich’s standards, an inevitable part of her stage act in later years, though she also gets a quite nice and un-rambunctious ballad called “You’ve Got That Look.” <i>Destry Rides Again</i> is a movie that’s probably better remembered than it is, but it was good for Marlene Dietrich (she made a comeback essentially by making fun of her former image and playing a woman in a community of rough-and-tumble men) and I’ve long been amused by the <i>Rolling Stone</i> review of Mel Brooks’s <i>Blazing Saddles</i> that claimed that “he hates the Germans so much they’re anachronistically dragged into this film.” Their reviewer obviously didn’t realize that Madeline Kahn’s “Lili Von Shtüpp” was a parody not only of Marlene Dietrich in general but <i>Destry Rides Again</i> in particular!mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4064270794522115878.post-47495580009419164842024-03-11T18:10:00.000-07:002024-03-13T08:57:20.031-07:0096th Annual Academy Awards (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, ABC-TV, aired March 10, 2024)<br><b>by Mark Gabrish Conlan</b> • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
<br><br>Last night (Sunday, March 10) at 4 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched the 96th annual Academy Awards on ABC-TV, which was the usual lumbering spectacle. The Academy Awards set the standard for all future awards shows and created the clichés of them, including the fabled interminability (the show lasted 3 ½ hours, half an hour longer than scheduled). One thing a lot of modern-day movie fans don’t realize is that when the Academy Awards telecasts first started in the early 1950’s (March 19, 1953, to be exact: nearly six months before I was born!), they were the only occasion on which you actually saw genuine <i>bona fide</i> movie stars on TV. The movie industry generally regarded TV as an existential threat (though one producer who didn’t was Sam Goldwyn; asked whether TV would put movie theatres out of business, Goldwyn said, “Why would it? People have kitchens, but they still go to restaurants”) and forbade their current contract players to appear on the small screen. If you were a movie star and you did a TV show, it was a sign that you considered your film career to be over and you were sucking off what was left of your former fame. TV talk shows didn’t exist as a medium for promoting films until Steve Allen launched <i>The Tonight Show</i> on NBC in 1955, two years after the first Oscars telecast. Last night’s big winner was the film <i>Oppenheimer</i>, which was nominated for 15 awards and won seven, including Best Picture, Best Director for Christopher Nolan, Best Actor for Cillian Murphy (whom I didn’t realize until the Golden Globes, where he also won, uses the hard “C” in his first name, “Killian”), Best Supporting Actor (Robert Downey, Jr. as the villain, Lewis Strauss), Best Cinematography (Hayten von Haytema), Best Editing (Jennifer Lame) and Best Original Score (Ludwig Goransson, who’d previously won for <i>Black Panther</i>, which I regard as the <i>Citizen Kane</i> of comic-book superhero movies and, like <i>Citizen Kane</i>, was snubbed for the Best Picture award it richly deserved).
<br><br>For a while it looked like <i>Poor Things</i> might actually take the top award after it won some of the lesser categories, including Best Makeup and Hair Styling, Best Costume Design and Best Production Design; it also won Best Actress for Emma Stone. (Its imdb.com description was, “The incredible tale about the fantastical evolution of Bella Baxter, a young woman brought back to life by the brilliant and unorthodox scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter.”) I was also a bit surprised that <i>Oppenheimer</i> did <i>not</i> win for Best Adapted Screenplay; Nolan lost that award to Justine Triet and her husband, Arthur Harari, for <i>Anatomy of a Fall</i>. Cord Jefferson (who introduced himself as Black but doesn’t particularly look it) won Best Original Screenplay for <i>American Fiction</i>, while for some reason the script for <i>Barbie</i> was nominated for Adapted instead of Original even though what it was supposedly “adapted” from wasn’t a novel, short story or play, but a doll (literally). <i>Barbie</i> already sparked a controversy even before the show, when the directors’ branch of the Academy snubbed Greta Gerwig for a nomination while the actors’ branch similarly snubbed Margot Robbie for her incandescent performance in the title role, while they nominated Ryan Gosling for his appropriately bland acting as (the lead) Ken. One commentator on X <i>nèe</i> Twitter said that perfectly summarized the plot of <i>Barbie</i> itself, in which the various incarnations of Ken try to impose a patriarchy on Barbieland and the various Barbies pull together in a display of feminist solidarity and successfully resist them. One woman in the Barbie cast, America Ferrera, did get a nomination for being the film’s human voice of reason and women’s equality, but she lost Best Supporting Actress to Da’vine Joy Randolph from <i>The Holdovers</i>. Randolph is a Black woman of size whose acceptance speech contained so many references and acknowledgments to God I joked to Charles, “<i>Now</i> I know why they have the Academy Awards on a Sunday.” (I’m a lot less irritated by awards recipients who thank God than I used to be, but Randolph <i>way</i> overdid it.)
<br><br>The only award <i>Barbie</i> won all night was Best Song for “What Was I Made For?” by Billie Eilish and her brother, Finneas O’Connell, whom I think of as the Richard Carpenter of the 21st century. At least Eilish wore her hair black and didn’t have the patch of green that made it look like a bird had pooped on her head big-time. Another Barbie song, “I’m Just Ken” (sorta-kinda sung by Ryan Gosling himself), was nominated, as was Jon Batiste for “It Never Went Away” from a movie I’ve otherwise never heard of, <i>American Symphony</i>. (It’s described on imdb.com as a “deeply intimate documentary” in which “musician Jon Batiste attempts to compose a symphony as his wife, writer Suleika Jaouad, undergoes cancer treatment.”) The other two best song nominees were “Wahzhazhe (A Song for My People)” from Martin Scorsese’s <i>Killers of the Flower Moon</i> – which got shut out completely (I didn’t realize that was a Best Song performance because it came right after the film clips introducing the film as one of the Best Picture nominees) – and “The Fire Inside” from a film called <i>Flamin’ Hot</i>, described by imdb.com as an “inspiring true story of Richard Montañez who, as a Frito Lay janitor, disrupted the food industry by channeling his Mexican heritage to turn Flamin' Hot Cheetos from a snack into an iconic global pop culture phenomenon.” (I remember seeing the TV ads for that film and joking that, now that they’d already made a biopic about a shoe, Air about Air Jordans, they were making one about a junk food.) Another movie that got shut out completely was Bradley Cooper’s <i>Maestro</i> (a film I’d very much like to see; I grew up on Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts telecasts and from the clip they showed last night, it seems Cooper captured the spirit of Bernstein’s famously athletic conducting style; I’ve read conflicting reports about how true the film is to Bernstein’s well-known Bisexuality, from people who insist he was totally Gay even though he was married to a woman for two decades and had three kids by her, two of whom were executive producers on the film, as well as from the usual homophobic idiots who complained, “Why’d they have to dredge <i>that</i> up about him?”).
<br><br>I was amused that three of the Best Actor nominees were up for playing actual people: Cillian Murphy for J. Robert Oppenheimer, Bradley Cooper for Leonard Bernstein and Colman Domingo for Bayard Rustin. Incidentally, like Rustin himself, Domingo is both Black and Gay, and imdb.com lists his “spouse” as Raúl Domingo. Also, the Best Visual Effects award went to four Japanese guys – Takashi Yamazaki, Kiyoko Shibuya, Masaki Takahashi and Tatsuji Nojima – for a movie called <i>Godzilla Minus One</i>, which according to Charles (who looked it up online) is the first time a Godzilla movie has won an Academy Award. The acceptance speech was given by one of the Japanese winners, reading from a prepared text and speaking in very thickly and heavily accented English. Frankly, I’d have much rather heard him speaking Japanese with either subtitles or a voiceover giving us the English. (Quite a few Japanese have learned English as a second language and speak it with almost no accent at all. Many of them are businesspeople seeking to be better negotiators with American or British executives, but this guy wasn’t one of them.) At least the speaker gave the title of the film with the name of the monster in the original Japanese, <i>Gojira Minus One,</i> instead of the rather twisted “Godzilla” name. For me, the biggest single disappointment of the evening was seeing Lily Gladstone for <i>Killers of the Flower Moon</i> lose Best Actress to Emma Stone for <i>Poor Things</i>, especially since it’s not like Gladstone is likely to get another chance; like Austin Butler in <i>Elvis</i>, she was so unalterably right for this role it’s hard to believe she’s going to make it in anything else. (Then again, it’s quite possible that Butler will win a consolation Oscar next year for Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen in <i>Dune: Part Two</i>.)
<br><br>Other than that, it was a pretty typical Academy Awards presentation, hosted by Jimmy Kimmel – who towards the end read something I assumed was a parody of a Donald Trump “Truth Social” media post blasting him as terrible, though this morning Charles ran across an item saying it was an actual Trump post. (The only other forays into political content were from the winners of the films you’d expect it from: the Best Animated Short, <i>War Is Over: Inspired by the Music of John and Yoko</i>, and Best Documentary Feature, <i>20 Days in Mariupol</i>, about the Ukrainian city the Russians totally destroyed as part of their “special military operation.”) Kimmel actually did this nearly impossible job better than most – though Bob Hope and Billy Crystal remain the best ever, and David Letterman the worst (remember, “Oprah … Uma, Uma … Oprah”?).mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4064270794522115878.post-10187012867952332262024-03-11T17:45:00.000-07:002024-03-11T17:45:51.566-07:00Handyman from Hell (Thirteenth Floor Productions, Exit 19 Productions, HPG, Lifetime, 2023)<br><b>by Mark Gabrish Conlan</b> • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
<br><br>One good thing about the Academy Awards starting an hour earlier than usual – at 4 p.m. (Pacific time) instead of 5 – was my husband Charles and I got to watch last night’s (Sunday, March 10) Lifetime movie. It had a pretty generic title, <i>Handyman from Hell</i>, though it had a few good points that raised it at least slightly above the norm I was expecting. Maggie Anderson (Liliana Tandon) is a young-ish, single-ish woman – she has a husband, David Starling (David Santiago), but they’re officially separated since Maggie caught him having extra-relational activities with a junior associate in his office. We’re not sure what <i>he</i> does, but she co-runs an architectural firm with her brother Michael (red-headed hunk Steve Hofstetter). They inherited it from their father, and Michael does the actual design work while Maggie runs the business end. Maggie wants her kitchen remodeled, and she goes through a few Zoom interviews with prospective contractors – “Philosophy Contractor” (Michael Ian Black), who feeds her a lot of New Age babble; “Creepy Contractor” (Frank Caliendo), who makes it clear his interest in Maggie’s job is actually in getting into Maggie’s pants (even though he has a wife, whom we learn about because we hear her voice in the background); and “New York Contractor” (Vic Dibitetto), who comes off like he’s just beamed in from <i>GoodFellas</i>. She’s waiting for an interview with the least repulsive man in the bunch, Patrick (Mark Shimkets), only the person who actually shows up is drop-dead gorgeous Nate Brothers (Joey Ariemma).
<br><br><i>We</i> already know Nate is a villain not only because he’s absolutely sexy but we’ve already seen him murder a woman he was having an affair with by shooting her with a nail gun. We don’t find out who she was or why he killed her, though at least writer Jay Black took a leaf from Christine Conradt’s book and gave Nate – whose real last name is Hawking (like the late physicist), by the way – a backstory so he’s rationally evil instead of just freaking crazy. It turns out that Nate’s brother was killed in a construction accident building a local arts centre Michael Anderson had designed, when the building collapsed and buried him under 18 tons of concrete. (Nate seems to have a Rosebud-like fixation on the 18-ton number.) On their initial meeting, Nate jokes that he’s tied up Patrick, thrown him in the back of his own van and taken his place – and then director Cody Hartman cuts to the inside of the van and we see Nate has indeed done that. Later he gives the same treatment to Michael and also Maggie’s estranged husband David, though in the final confrontation Michael comes to (albeit minus one of his thumbs, which Nate used a power saw to detach as a form of torture preparatory to killing him) and knocks out Nate, who survives but is arrested. We also learn that Nate has worked his way up through the chain of command of the people involved in the construction project that cost his brother his life, targeting first the developers, then the contractors and finally the architects. And we get a nice soft-core porn sequence between Nate and Maggie, though we don’t get to see them actually having sex even within the limits of Lifetime. We <i>do</i> get to see a nice post-coital shot of his hairless chest and very prominent nipples (yum!). I had the same feeling about Joey Ariemma that I did about Billy Zane when Charles and I saw the 1997 <i>Titanic</i>; he’s so hot and sexy I’d like to see him in a sympathetic role sometime, the way I made it a point to get a used videotape of the film <i>The Phantom</i> so I could watch it the day after <i>Titanic</i> to see Zane as a good guy.mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4064270794522115878.post-57959065412752547322024-03-09T12:40:00.000-08:002024-03-09T12:40:10.912-08:00The Pregnancy Scheme (CMW Summer Productions, Champlain Media, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2023)<br><b>by Mark Gabrish Conlan</b> • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
<br><br>Last night (Friday, March 8) I watched an O.K. but pretty silly Lifetime movie called <i>The Pregnancy Scheme</i>, about a young career woman (a graphic designer) named Jules Simmons (Greta Carew-Johns) – though sometimes her friends call her “Julie” – who’s being chased in the prologue by an unidentified assailant wielding a baseball bat while wearing the obligatory black hoodie. Then we get to meet Jules outside mortal danger – there wasn’t Lifetime’s usual chyron explaining that this was a few months earlier but it obviously had to be – and find that she’s been hit with a triple whammy: she’s just been laid off from her job, her boyfriend Drew (Nick Preston, who looks like he’s going to grow up to be the sort of tall, lanky actor Lifetime likes to cast as their “nice” husbands) is leaving her, and she finds out she’s pregnant by him. Her long-time friend Celia “Cee” Balzarini (Amanda Wong – and no, writer Ansley Gordon, a woman, and casting director Ann Forry don’t bother to explain how a visibly Asian woman grew up in Italy and has an Italian last name; I guess we were meant to assume she was the product of an Italian father and an Asian mother) introduces her to Alana Powell (Ruth Bidner), a fellow student at a yoga class. (The scene at the class surprised me because it was co-ed; usually yoga classes in Lifetime movies have uni-sexual student bodies, though generally the teacher is a hot, studly male with a class of nubile young women with crushes on him.) Alana talks Jules, whose job loss has left her in such dire financial straits she’s getting eviction notices and warnings from the electric company that they’re about to cut off her service, while she’s also facing thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket costs for prenatal care since she no longer has a job and therefore doesn’t have health insurance anymore, into selling pregnancy tests.
<br><br>The scam is there are a lot of women out there who will pay good money (the price we hear quoted is $2,000 per) for positive pregnancy tests they can pass off as their own in order to get their reluctant fiancés to marry them already. (One wonders how they’d explain to their new husbands several months later when no baby materializes, though previous Lifetime movies have depicted women who kidnapped genuine new mothers’ babies and killed the mothers.) Jules has qualms about doing this but desperately needs the money and keeps going along with it for a while, and when she tries to pull out of the operation with Alana, Alana threatens her and intimidates her into continuing. Jules finds herself being stalked not only by Alana but by a character identified only as “Man” (C. J. Wilkins), who confronts Jules at home and tells her how her scam ruined his life. He tricked with a woman named Sheila and meant it as a one-night stand, since he was already married and had kids, only Sheila used the false pregnancy test to blackmail him and, when he stopped paying her, “outed” him to his employer and his wife, so he got fired and his wife left him, took the kids and now won’t let him see them. Drew comes back into Jules’s life, but only to be with her during the pregnancy and co-parent their child (a daughter) – I was hoping writer Gordon would reunite them as a couple, but <i>no-o-o-o-o</i> – he’s already acquired a new girlfriend named Kristen, though we never see her and the only way Jules and we know she exists is Kristen’s name pops up on Drew’s cell phone. Jules is also put out when the woman she befriended at the hospital’s free birthing class, led by a woman who’s pregnant herself (Alyssa Mack-Lee), turns out to be someone other than who she pretended to be.
<br><br>She introduced herself as “Bridget Wende” (Lauren Akemi Bradley) and said she’d gone to a sperm bank and got herself impregnated by a donor, but she’s really a reporter, Melissa Quinn, doing a story on the fake pregnancy-test scam. She also isn’t really pregnant but bought one of the commercially available appliances to fake it (we see her alone in her apartment taking the damned thing off after a hard day’s work). Drew “outs” her when he finds her true identity online and Jules spends a couple of acts moaning about how Bridget t/n Melissa lied to her to worm her way into Jules’s confidence. Jules also blows a job interview when she spots a woman at the firm (Barbara Patrick) who looks a lot like Alana and bolts the room, thinking it’s Alana stalking her again. Ultimately it ends up the way you expect it to, with Jules and Drew taking turns parenting their new baby girl, Melissa getting her Big Story into print and Alana getting arrested for various get-rich-quick schemes, which writer Gordon explains in a bizarre Christine Conradt-esque flashback. It seems that Alana had amassed a fair-sized bankroll but her husband took it all and blew it on a bad cryptocurrency investment (to my mind <i>all</i> cryptocurrency investments are bad, but we don’t need to go there), and this had given her a pathological hatred towards all men. Whenever a Lifetime writer trots out an explanation like this for a female villain’s villainy, I keep wondering, “Why doesn’t she just become a Lesbian?” (I’ve occasionally had the same question about so-called “incels” – “involuntary celibates,” men who get their psyches twisted into knots over the unwillingness of women to date them. It’s a pity we <i>can’t</i> just change our sexual orientations the way we change our clothes, because from the photos I’ve seen of some of the “incels,” maybe women aren’t interested in them but they’d do well in a Gay bar.) <i>The Pregnancy Scheme</i> is also one of those Lifetime movies in which the director, Ann Marie Fleming, actually seems quite capable – her suspense scenes showing Jules being stalked both by Alana and the mysterious “Man” whose life she inadvertently ruined are well done – but she’s at the mercy of a really stupid and far-fetched script!mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4064270794522115878.post-57207118362001241432024-03-08T19:46:00.000-08:002024-03-09T11:54:24.428-08:00The Brokenwood Mysteries: "Catch of the Day" (South Pacific Pictures, NZ on Air, All3 Media, GPB, WETA, PBS, 2015)<br><b>by Mark Gabrish Conlan</b> • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
<br><br>Last night (Wednesday, March 7) I watched another episode of the New Zealand-set and -filmed crime show <i>The Brokenwood Mysteries</i>: “Catch of the Day,” in which the police officers on the job in Brokenwood, New Zealand – Mike Shepherd (Neill Rea), Kristin Sims (Fern Sutherland), Sam Breen (red-headed cutie Nic Sampson) and Jared Morehu (Pana-Huma Taylor), the last an Indigenous civilian who lingers around the cops and attempts to help them – are alerted to a murder when they find a disembodied human hand in a crayfish trap labeled “66.” Later they find the rest of the victim’s body drowned underwater in a wet suit – though he was actually killed with a harpoon gun – and he turns out to be a man named Fahey who was an inspector for New Zealand’s Fish and Game Agency (or whatever it’s called). It turns out he and his wife, Jools Fahey (Ingrid Park), were in a “thruple” with their lawyer, Dennis Buchanan (Shane Cortese). Mr. Fahey had also discovered an underwater treasure left behind by a German ship that had sunk off the Brokenwood coast during World War II. The other suspects include the formidable Keely family: matriarch Ma Keely (Judy Rankin), her sons Tommy (Cohen Holloway) and Liam (Kevin Keys), and her daughter Liza (Kate McGill), along with another Keely named Des (Ken Reinsfield) who hovers on the periphery of the action.
<br><br>The Keelys have a legally sanctioned monopoly on the crayfish catch in the area and also on the clam harvest, though Tommy has leased his share to a major corporation owned by Wes Pullman (Jason “Shane” Hood). Five years earlier Ma Keely’s husband was killed in a boating accident when his craft blew up, and Liza was there and was badly burned (the scars are visible on her face except in the pre-incident flashbacks). She’s convinced that her husband was murdered even though the authorities officially declared it an accident, and she’s convinced that the recent killing of Mr. Fahey was part of the same plot. She’s right on the first part but wrong on the second: eventually Mike Shepherd and Kristin Sims realize that Tommy Keely deliberately sabotaged his dad’s boat and then called him to report poachers in the area, knowing that dad would take out the boat and chase them with his harpoon gun. Instead the boat blew up and Tommy’s dad died just as planned. But the most recent crime, Fahey’s murder, turns out to be the work of Tommy’s brother Liam because Fahey had independently discovered the sunken German treasure and Liam wanted to keep its location a secret known only to him. This wasn’t one of the better episodes of <i>The Brokenwood Mysteries</i>: it was too convoluted and the plot was too far-fetched as well as too loosely integrated. Though one of the Keely brothers compared the two of them to Cain and Abel, in the Bible Cain slew Abel, not Adam!mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4064270794522115878.post-3262531251647885502024-03-06T18:59:00.000-08:002024-03-09T11:54:40.413-08:00Dune: Part Two (Warner Bros., Legendary Entertainment, Villeneuve Films, 2024)<br><b>by Mark Gabrish Conlan</b> • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
<br><br>Last night (Tuesday, March 5) I joined the Bears San Diego for their movie night at the Ultra Star Cinemas in Hazard Center (a more desirable location than the Mission Valley 20, not only because the tickets are a lot cheaper but we’re not bludgeoned with ultra-loud commercials for various consumer products and alleged “newscasts” about movies, just a few trailers before the film and then the film itself; also they still sell their tickets in the traditional you-can-sit-anywhere-you-like-that’s-open system instead of reserved seats). The film was <i>Dune: Part Two</i>, directed by Denis Villeneuve based on a script he co-wrote with Jon Spaihts in turn based sorta-kinda on Frank Herbert’s classic 1965 science-fiction/fantasy novel. The Bears had previously done a movie night of the first Villenueve <i>Dune</i> from 2022 (the two were actually shot more or less in sequence but Villeneuve and the producing studios, Warner Bros. and Legendary, held <i>Dune: Part Two</i> back for two years because the actors’ strike made it impossible for the cast members to promote the film publicly). I hadn’t seen it then, however, and instead waited for the DVD to come out so my husband Charles and I could watch it together. Both Charles and I had read <i>Dune</i> in our late teens and I remembered a surprising amount of it, including the Mentats, which for some reason Villeneuve and Spaihts jettisoned from the script. In the backstory of <i>Dune</i> there had been a savage war between humans and the computers they’d built but now sought to control them – a conceit that’s been done before in plays like Karel Capek’s <i>R.U.R.</i> (a 1920’s work that not only pioneered the concept of robots but coined that name for them from the Czech <i>robotnik</i>, meaning “worker”) and since in the Wachowski siblings’ <i>Matrix</i> movies.
<br><br>Only in Frank Herbert’s <i>Dune</i> universe the humans ultimately vanquished the computers and took back control, and they laid down an Eleventh Commandment: “Thou shalt not make a machine in the shape of a human mind.” The reason was to ensure that there was never a computer revolt against humanity, and in order to replace computers as aids to space navigation the authorities in the Duniverse (I just had to get that pun in here somewhere!) trained a race of super-powerful humans called Mentats and gave them a drug alternately called “spice” or “melange” so they could take the place of navigation computers and steer the universe’s spacecraft on their interstellar journeys. The absence of the Mentats was my biggest single problem with the <i>Dune</i> movies (at least Villeneuve’s; there were two previous sets of <i>Dune</i> films, a 1984 feature made by David Lynch and a 2000 TV mini-series for the Sci-Fi Channel); without them, we’re told that spice is a crucially important commodity but we have no idea why, and people coming to the movies without having read Herbert’s books (there was a cycle of six novels by Herbert himself – the others were <i>Dune Messiah</i> [1969], <i>Children of Dune</i> [1976], <i>God-Emperor of Dune</i> [1981], <i>Heretics of Dune</i> [1985] and <i>Chapterhouse: Dune</i> [1986], and after Herbert’s death in 1986 Kevin J. Anderson was recruited by Herbert’s son Brian to write additional books in the Duniverse, including prequels and interquels as well as sequels) would probably assume that spice is just another recreational drug.
<br><br>Frank Herbert’s original <i>Dune</i> had actually posited a moral division between the “good” drug, spice/melange, the good guys use and the “bad” drugs the bad guys use just to get high – a live issue in the 1960’s when Herbert was evolving the Duniverse and readying <i>Dune</i> for publication. The action of <i>Dune</i> centers around the planet Arrakis, which is the only place in the known universe where spice is obtainable and can be mined – according to the Wikipedia page on the novel <i>Dune</i>, Herbert meant spice as a metaphor for petroleum and how our modern life is dependent on this finite resource, though I remember when I read the first two books in the sequence I assumed that the giant sandworms which live under the planet Arrakis’s surface actually produced the spice, sort of like the way whales produce ambergris that is used in manufacturing perfume. Arrakis is a giant desert whose temperatures are so unflaggingly hot that people can go about on its surface only while wearing “stillsuits,” which collect their sweat and other bodily waste and convert it into drinking water (though Villeneuve’s costume designer, Jacqueline West, badly mishandled the stillsuits: they just look like the sorts of headsets TV technicians wear to be able to communicate with each other in a “live” telecast). The universe, or at least this portion of it, is ruled by an Emperor (Christopher Walken) who in the opening strips the spice concession from the Harkonnen family and gives it to the Atreides family instead: Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac), his mistress Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) and their son Paul (Timothée Chalamet). Of course this is all a trap designed to get rid of the Atreideses forever and allow the Harkonnens to take back the spice concession.
<br><br>The plot kills off Duke Leto and Jessica goes into hiding, while Paul becomes the story’s hero and ends up in mid-desert leading a band of Fremen, the native inhabitants of Arrakis. (Frank Herbert was part-Native American and he was consciously paralleling the Fremen on Native Americans in general; he was also drawing on the Middle East and Islam for the religious/spiritual traditions of the Fremen and some of the other groups.) Unfortunately, <i>Dune: Part Two</i> goes the way of all too many other modern fantasy films and becomes little more than a series of spectacular battles and other action scenes with only the most tenuous plot connections between them. Paul Atreides starts coming off as an avatar of T. E. Lawrence in the classic film <i>Lawrence of Arabia</i> (which was released in 1962, just as Herbert was beginning the <i>Dune</i> project) – a leader who comes from another country to lead an indigenous revolt against an occupying power – and according to the Wikipedia page on the novel <i>Dune</i>, this resemblance is not coincidental. “As a foreigner who adopts the ways of a desert-dwelling people and then leads them in a military capacity, Paul Atreides bears many similarities to the historical T. E. Lawrence,” the page states. “His 1962 biopic <i>Lawrence of Arabia</i> has also been identified as a potential influence.” There’s a particularly strong parallel, especially in the Villeneuve films, between Lawrence’s relationship with his local comrades (the parts played in the David Lean film by Anthony Quinn and Omar Sharif) and Paul’s with his, Stilgar (Javier Bardem) and Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin), as well as Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa), who got killed off at the end of <i>Dune: Part One</i>.
<br><br>One thing that I’d been concerned about when I heard how Villenueve had cast both parts of <i>Dune</i> was I was worried whether Timothée Chalamet and his nemesis, Austin Butler as the evil Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen, would be butch enough to play their roles. That’s one thing I needn’t have worried about: both were first-rate and completely convincing in their battle to the death at the end of the film. (I also liked the irony that in this version Feyd-Rautha was played by an actor who had become a star playing a rock star in Baz Luhrmann’s film <i>Elvis</i>; in the 1984 David Lynch version he was played by a <i>real</i> rock star, Sting.) But I was upset at the way Villeneuve and Spaihts changed the ending (and most of the Bears San Diego members who saw it with me were upset, too); in the book Paul agrees to a dynastic marriage with the emperor’s daughter, Princess Irulan (Florence Pugh), but assures his Fremen girlfriend Chani (Zendaya) that his heart belongs to her and her alone, and the final scene of the book is Lady Jessica, Paul’s mother, assuring Chani that even though she was never legally married to Paul’s father, “history will call us wives.” In the movie Paul rather cruelly dumps Chani for Irulan and the power she represents. Though I haven’t read any of the <i>Dune</i> books since I read the first two in 1972 for a class on science fiction I was taking in junior college, the Villeneuve <i>Dune</i> movies make me want to re-read them (and pick up the cycle where I left it off back then) just to remind myself what they were really all about.
<br><br>I was also amused at the way Villeneuve carefully copied the look of the Harkonnens’ fascist rallies from Leni Riefenstahl’s 1936 <i>Triumph of the Will</i> (her chilling Nazi propaganda film shot at the 1934 Nazi party congress in Nuremberg), but then again Riefenstahl’s dark, satanic masterpiece has become the go-to look for depicting the Nazis on film, from the time when the Nazis were still a going concern and World War II was in progress (and its outcome not yet determined) to now. A lot of “B” directors making wartime propaganda movies in the U.S. raided <i>Triumph of the Will</i> to show the Nazis in action, and in <i>Dune: Part Two</i> Villeneuve and his cinematographer, Greig Fraser, not only carefully copied Riefenstahl’s look but deliberately shot many scenes of the Harkonnens’ rallies in black-and-white, and in such a way that they could not go back and add color to the scenes if they didn’t work in monochrome. I find Denis Villenueve one of the most stubbornly frustrating directors of modern times; I actually liked the first film of his I saw, <i>Arrival</i> (about the attempts of an Earth linguist to figure out how to communicate with aliens from another planet) but I hated, loathed, detested and despised his purported <i>Blade Runner</i> sequel, <i>Blade Runner: 2049</i>. I thought <i>Blade Runner: 2049</i> would have been the hands-down winner if the Academy ever did an award for “Most Terrible Sequel Ever to a Great Film,” and when I heard that Villeneuve was directing <i>Dune</i> my reaction was, “Oh, so he’s going to trash <i>another</i> science-fiction classic?” Villeneuve’s first two <i>Dune</i> films (he’s planning a third one to be based on Frank Herbert’s <i>Dune Messiah</i>) were O.K. action movies in the modern science-fiction/fantasy <i>genre</i>; neither as good as <i>Arrival</i> nor as wretched as <i>Blade Runner: 2049</i>, but they both suffer from an annoying ponderousness all too common in modern films, as if today’s directors think that they have to slow their movies down to a crawl to convince their audiences that this is Serious and Important.mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4064270794522115878.post-84568157408640256992024-03-05T22:39:00.000-08:002024-03-05T22:39:03.250-08:00Doctor Who: "Robot" (BBC Wales, 1974 & 1975)<br><b>by Mark Gabrish Conlan</b> • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
<br><br>Last night (Monday, March 4) at about 9:15 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched an intriguing four-part sequence from the original <i>Doctor Who</i> program on the BBC from Wales. It was called “Robot” and Charles and I streamed it on Tubi, which turned out to be a free service but one that fills the programs with ads. As a native of the United States I’m used to and relatively resigned to commercials, but they were annoying because <i>Doctor Who</i> was a BBC production and the BBC doesn’t have commercials (though maybe it does now; the Conservative Party has wreaked havoc on a whole lot of Britain’s non-capitalist traditions and it’s quite likely they’ve wrecked that one, too). The <i>Doctor Who</i> sequence we watched was the start of season 12 (though the home page said season four; that might mean that it was the first season where the fourth actor in sequence played the Doctor – more on that later) and the first episodes in which Tom Baker played the Doctor. <i>Doctor Who</i> premiered in 1963 and the first Doctor was William Hartnell, who was in a British “B” movie from 1943 called <i>The Dark Tower</i>. I remember the night Charles and I were watching that one and he recognized Hartnell as “the first Doctor on <i>Doctor Who</i>.” The gimmick was that the Doctor was the sole surviving Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey and every so often he would regenerate his appearance so he could be played by a different actor, though the original ground rules said he could have only 13 total incarnations before he would die permanently. (The producers of the <i>Doctor Who</i> reboot BBC Wales launched in 2005 have just ignored that rule.)
<br><br>The “Robot” sequence was quite clever and well done, though Charles was disappointed that the villainous menace was purely terrestrial (“I like it better when they’re aliens,” he said at the end) and I was disappointed that we didn’t get to see the inside of the TARDIS (short for “Time and Relativity Dimensions in Space”), the vehicle through which the Doctor moves through various dimensions and historical eras. In fact, though the TARDIS was supposed to be able to reshape itself and fit into whatever historical era it was in (and <i>Doctor Who</i> was originally planned as an educational program in which the Doctor would travel to various events in Earth history that would be depicted relatively accurately, though by popular demand the producers quickly abandoned that premise and made it straight science-fiction), because of a malfunction early on it permanently froze into the appearance of a British police call box. “Robot” centers around a secretive research lab called Think Tank (apparently “Think Tank” was a recurring plot element, a group of malevolent scientists out to do dastardly things to the world) and its front group, the Scientific Reform Society (SRS). A professor named Ketterell (Edward Burnham), his hair frizzed to make him vaguely resemble Albert Einstein (the popular image of a scientist in the mid-1970’s, when this show was produced), has invented a super-robot of living metal and the folks at Think Tank/SRS are using it to steal the components to make a disintegrator ray gun. Their ultimate objective is to steal the nuclear launch codes of all the nations in the world that have nuclear weapons and threaten to start World War III unless all the nations yield sovereignty and authority to the SRS.
<br><br>In Terrance Dicks’ original story, SRS is an underground group seeking to make the ideal world of Plato’s <i>The Republic</i>, governed by scientists and intellectuals who will make everyone else behave in the ways the elite has decreed is the “best” for them, a reality – only when they communicate these ideals to the Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith (Elizabeth Whalen), the common-sense reporter who stumbles onto the SRS, they’re horrified at the fascistic nature of them. (Given the likely return of Donald Trump to the White House, this is a weird time to be watching a movie about a neo-fascist takeover of the entire world.) Dr. Ketterell originally programmed the robot to serve humanity, not destroy it – apparently Terrance Dicks had read Isaac Asimov’s <i>I, Robot</i> and “borrowed” the Three Laws of Robotics – but the folks at SRS have reprogrammed it to kill at their command. In a not-too-surprising but legitimate reversal, it turns out that Dr. Ketterell actually quit the research institute <i>not</i> because they wanted to use his robot to destroy the world, but he was on board with the project to destroy the world and it was the people running the institute who didn’t want that. The second- and third-in-command at the institute are Miss Winters (Patricia Maynard, giving a good performance but speaking in such clipped tones she sounds like Julie Andrews’s younger sister) and Jellicoe (Alec Linstead), and there’s a nice joke when Winters upbraids Sarah for making the sexist assumption that Jellicoe, not Winters, is in charge of the operation.
<br><br>Fortunately, the Doctor is able to invent a serum that neutralizes the structure of the “living metal” Ketterell made his robot out of, and by pouring the stuff into a red pail and then splashing it on the robot from his 1920’s-era yellow convertible the way Dorothy did in the Wicked Witch of the West with a pail of water in <i>The Wizard of Oz</i>, he’s able to melt the thing and end the threat. There’s an intriguing <i>King Kong</i>-esque subplot featuring Sarah, who was the only human who was actually nice to the robot (the baddies who invented it assumed it would never feel emotions, but Sarah knew better) and who can, within limits, pull it away from its destructive programming and actually awaken its kinder, gentler side. “Robot” is basically your generic Sci-Fi 101 plot of Sinister Batch of Humans Aiming to Destroy the World, but it’s got a lot of the highly campy bits that were a large part of the show’s appeal and helped it reach a wider audience than just children.mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4064270794522115878.post-71169587078029268672024-03-04T18:11:00.000-08:002024-03-04T18:11:56.556-08:00Alone in the Dark (The Ninth House, MarVista Entertainment, Tubi, Lifetime, 2022)<br><b>by Mark Gabrish Conlan</b> • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
<br><br>Last night (Sunday, March 3) my husband Charles and I watched a Lifetime movie called <i>Alone in the Dark</i>, which was made in 2022 and was not actually shot under Lifetime’s auspices at all. It was made by The Ninth House and our old friends MarVista Entertainment for a streaming service called Tubi (their promos advertise it as free and also without ads, but I suspect there are a <i>lot</i> of catches to that) and was directed by Brant Daugherty from a script he co-wrote with his wife (of 15 years), Kimberly Daugherty. Both Daughertys are white but most of the protagonists in this tale are Black, including the central character, Bri Collins (Novi Brown), pronounced “Brie” like the cheese. Bri Collins has just been sentenced to a year of home confinement for her role in a fraudulent stock scheme engineered by her (white, and short but highly muscular) husband, MIchael Miller (Christopher Bencomo). Supposedly Bri was just the (stereo)typically naïve housewife, signing whatever hubby Michael told her to and not thinking about it, but not only getting caught but actually serving a longer sentence than he, albeit under house arrest instead of in prison. It’s an intriguing “take” on the 1960’s crime dramas like <i>Wait Until Dark</i> and <i>Lady in a Cage</i> in which a woman is helpless to resist the intruders in her home because she’s disabled; Bri isn’t physically disabled but she’s still trapped inside the house and a sitting duck for whatever mischief (or worse) someone outside decides to unleash upon her.
<br><br>Mischief duly happens, at first in a poltergeist-like way; while she’s in her living room entertaining her former attorney Sofia Aquino (played by Kimberly Daugherty, the director’s wife and co-author of the script) and the two are helping themselves to major swaths of Michael’s leftover wine collection (it’s eventually established that this is a second house for the couple, a beach house, while Michael’s prime residence is elsewhere and he still lives there), a stranger dressed in the obligatory black hoodie starts rattling the doors. Earlier Bri had disabled the house’s built-in alarm system to admit Sofia, and the place is also equipped with one of those horribly obnoxious security systems by which you’re supposed to be able to tell it through voice commands to do anything domestic, from drawing you a bath to making you coffee. Only, as in every other Lifetime (or Lifetime-adjacent) movie that featured such an app, it goes haywire and starts turning on and off Bri’s lights willy-nilly. Bri is convinced that Michael is behind this even though Michael is in prison – only midway through the movie he’s able to pull some strings with the judge in his case and get an early release. Sofia hands Bri the card for a private detective, Xavier Johnson (Terrell Carter), a very hot-looking and highly muscular Black man who starts getting Bri’s sexual juices up and running again even though she hasn’t had sex with anyone since she and Michael got busted and Bri divorced him. She draws back from an affair with him on the <i>Bodyguard</i>-ish notion that she shouldn’t fuck the hired help, but eventually they do make it into the bedroom.
<br><br>Only Xavier is on a revenge quest of his own because in a prologue, typical of Lifetime’s story construction in that we see what happens but it takes about half the film’s running time before we learn who the people in it were or how it relates to the main action, his sister Cheyenne Clark (Kris Marshall) was abducted by a hoodie-clad stranger while she was out in the woods jogging. Her body was never found and Xavier is determined to find the person responsible for making her disappear and presumably killing her. Bri reports the attempted break-in to police detective Joe Hall (Malcolm Goodwin), another African-American authority figure, only Hall couldn’t be less interested in investigating it. Xavier and Bri discover that Michael left behind a whole set of hidden cameras in Bri’s house and, with the aid of a technical expert named Dex (a woman, played by Megan Davis), they trace the recordings from the cameras to Michael’s house. They organize a break-in at Michael’s after first figuring out a way to hack Bri’s GPS monitor so it registers her phone’s location, not hers. Unfortunately, Michael is at home that night fucking his latest bimbo – earlier Bri discovered a pair of women’s panties that weren’t hers and realized Michael had used the beach house for extra-relational activities – so Bri and Xavier <i>literally</i> have to hide under the bed as Michael and bimbo fuck each other until they finish and Our Heroes can sneak out again.
<br><br>They steal the hard drive from Michael’s computer and give it to Dex so she can hack into it, and eventually we learn that Michael, like Baron Gruner in one of the later Sherlock Holmes story, is literally a collector of women. Only instead of a paper trail, he records his conquests by storing the videos of his clandestine sexual encounters in folders on that hard drive. Charles was convinced that Sofia was the ultimate villain and responsible for all the torment that Bri was going through, but in the end Mr. and Mrs. Daugherty identify the villain as <i>[spoiler alert!]</i> Detective Joe Hall, or to use his actual name, Joe Marshall. He’s not a detective; he’s a con artist hired to pose as a cop, and in the last few minutes Bri finally realizes <i>[<b>double</b> spoiler alert!]</i> that Sofia is the bad girl after all. It seems that she and Michael began an affair while Bri’s legal case was still pending. Sofia hired Joe to kill Cheyenne Clark (ya remember <i>Cheyenne Clark</i>?), and now Sofia is determined to murder both Xavier and Bri and make it look like a murder-suicide. Fortunately, however, Bri has figured out a way to use her ankle-monitor bracelet as a recorder and record Sofia’s criminal boasts so the police can hear her brag about her crimes in real time. Xavier kills Sofia with her own gun after she and Bri have had the sort of bitch fight famous from the 1939 film <i>Destry Rides Again</i>, with Marlene Dietrich and Una Merkel launching into physical combat over James Stewart, and the cops arrest their phony-baloney “comrade,” Joe Marshall. Though <i>Alone in the Dark</i> isn’t a <i>great</i> Lifetime movie, it is a surprisingly entertaining and even gripping one, and a welcome return to form after the horrors (in both senses) of <i>Single Black Female 2: Simone’s Revenge</i> – and at least it ends with the good guys winning and the bad guys (and gal) getting their comeuppance!mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4064270794522115878.post-40751244448703166522024-03-04T18:10:00.000-08:002024-03-04T18:10:07.623-08:00Clerks (View Askew Productions, Miramax, 1994)<br><b>by Mark Gabrish Conlan</b> • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
<br><br>Afterwards my husband Charles and I ended up watching a film “streaming” from Amazon Prime: Kevin Smith’s directorial debut, <i>Clerks</i> (1994), set in Leonardo, New Jersey – a short distance from Asbury Park, Bruce Springsteen’s home town, which we learn because the protagonist steals a whole bunch of copies of the Asbury Park paper and stuffs him into his store’s newsstand. <i>Clerks</i> is a story of two 20-something slackers, convenience store clerk Dante Hicks (Brian O’Halloran, who got the part after auditioning for a minor role and then Smith decided to cast him in the lead) and video store clerk Randal Graves (Jeff Anderson as a last-minute replacement for Smith himself, who decided in mid-shoot that directing, writing and starring was too much work for him). The film was co-produced and co-edited by Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier, and this was the proverbial movie that launched the cliché of an unknown director financing his first film on an ultra-low budget – you could call it a shoestring budget except that would be an insult to shoestrings – by maxxing out his personal credit cards. He ultimately sold the film to Miramax at a time when Harvey Weinstein was still involved with it (the closing credits pay tribute to the Big Bad Harvey for providing “an unforgettable order of potato skins”) and launched a quirky directorial career that included at least two sequelae as well as a spinoff series featuring Jay (Jason Mewes), a drug dealer who hangs outside the Quick Stop Groceries where Dante works, and his partner Silent Bob (Kevin Smith himself). Clerks is a very disconnected movie but the disconnections are a major part of its charm; it’s the sort of film in which things just happen in a sequence of incidents separated by silent-film style intertitles that comment ironically on the action. Woody Allen used the technique to great effect in <i>Hannah and Her Sisters</i> (1986), and decades earlier Alfred Hitchcock had used “commenting” intertitles equally well in one of his most underrated films, <i>Rich and Strange</i> (1931).
<br><br><i>Clerks</i> opens with a sequence in which a customer stands at the counter and starts yelling at the people there to buy cigarettes (which seem to be at least half the store’s business). He’s carrying a shoulder bag which contains a model of a diseased lung – at least that’s what he says it is; to me it looked like a turkey breast <i>well</i> past its sell-by date – and Polaroid snapshots of people in the last stages of lung cancer. He urges the people to buy Chewlies brand gum instead of cigarettes, and ultimately he gets the crowd so riled up at Dante they start literally pelting him with cigarettes. Later the mystery stranger turns out to be a sales representative for the Chewlies gum company. Dante has had a number of girlfriends, of whom he’s been crazy about two of them: Caitlin Bree (Lisa Spoonauer), whom he dated in high school until she went on to college and ultimately became engaged to a Chinese medical student named Sang; and Veronica Loughran (Marilyn Ghigliotti), who tells Dante she’s only had sex with three men in her life while he’s had sex with 12 women. Later it turns out that Veronica makes Bill Clinton’s distinction between giving blow jobs and having “sex”, and admits she’s gone down on at least 36 guys and sometimes “snowflaked” – i.e., given them open-mouthed kisses with their cum still in her mouth. Dante keeps complaining that he’s been called to work on his day off – “I’m not supposed to be here,” he whines – and he agreed to go in only on the assurance that the store’s owner would come in to relieve him by noon so he, Randal and their friends could get together for a street hockey game at 2 p.m.
<br><br>Unfortunately, when Dante calls the boss he discovers that the boss drove to Vermont for the day and he’ll have to stay at the store until its 11 p.m. closing time. So Dante, Randal and their buddies decide to hold the hockey game on the roof of the store, which works O.K. until one of the neighbor guys demands to join the game and ultimately loses control of their only ball, which goes down a storm drain. Later Dante and Randal decide to crash the funeral of Julie Dwyer, another woman Dante once dated, only they get thrown out after five minutes because Randal tripped and caused the casket, with Julie’s body in it, to fall over and dump her remains on the floor. (We’re not shown any of this because of the expense it would have required to stage the scene, but I thought the film worked better and was funnier without it.) Veronica is carrying on an extended argument with Dante because she wants him to return to college, while he doesn’t want to apply himself to anything that difficult and he’s content being a slacker hanging out with his equally aimless friend Randal. Midway through the action Caitlin finally appears, having determined to break up with her Asian fiancé and return to Dante if he’ll have her, and in her excitement she goes into the store’s restroom and ends up having sex with someone she thinks is Dante. Only it’s really an older man who went into the restroom with a porn magazine he asked Dante to supply him, and he got so worked up over his jack-off session he literally had a heart attack and died. The woman from the local coroner’s office who picks up his body explains that dead men can sometimes hold a hard-on for a couple of hours after they expire, and <i>that’s</i> how the man was able to have sex with Caitlin even after he was dead (and she stressed that he was letting her take the lead and assumed that was Dante being a gentleman about it).
<br><br>Caitlin ends up in a catatonic trance as she’s taken away from the store in the ambulance that’s also carrying the corpse, and Dante and Veronica seem headed for a reconciliation – only Randal blows his chances with her by telling Veronica that Dante is no longer interested in her. When Veronica explains to Dante that it was Randal who told her that Dante wanted them to break up, Dante is furious with Randal and the two end up in a bar-style fight that wrecks most of the Quick Stop store and then team up to clean the wreckage. There are also whimsical gags along the way, including a lot of jokes about the porn content stocked at Randal’s video store (a mom who came in to rent a kids’ movie for her daughter is predictably shocked at the litany of porn titles Randal reads off on the phone to his distributor) and a scene in which Dante is fined $500 for selling cigarettes to a four-year-old girl. It turns out it wasn’t Dante who did that; it was Randal, briefly staffing the Quick Stop counter, but Dante had to pay the fine anyway and the person who comes to collect it (Ken Clark) stresses that Dante has no option to appeal the case or fight the fine. According to Wikipedia, Kevin Smith’s original plan for <i>Clerks</i> was a nihilistic ending in which Dante would be shot and killed by a street criminal who comes in to rob the store, but after the film premiered at a festival Smith was urged to remove the downer ending and finish the film with the scene of Dante and Randal worn out after the task of cleaning the store.
<br><br><i>Clerks</i> is a surprisingly accomplished film – it’s shot in grainy black-and-white but that’s part of its appeal; it seems more realistic that way than it would have in color. It’s also surprisingly well acted; the people in the movie really seem believable as the kinds of people Smith’s script tells us they are. <i>Clerks</i> is a marvelously unpretentious film whose characters win our hearts almost in spite of themselves, and midway through it I asked Charles – who works as a grocery clerk, albeit at a major chain supermarket instead of a grungy little convenience store – if watching it was a busman’s holiday for him. Certainly some of the incidents in this movie reminded me of stories he’s told me over the years about real-life customers from hell!mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4064270794522115878.post-22748974443580128582024-03-03T19:03:00.000-08:002024-03-05T09:49:25.323-08:00Single Black Female 2: Simone's Revenge (Swirl Films, Johnson Production Group, Lifetime, 2024)<br><b>by Mark Gabrish Conlan</b> • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
<br><br>Last night (Saturday, March 2) Lifetime showed a “premiere” sequel called <i>Single Black Female 2: Simone’s Revenge</i>, a follow-up to an O.K. movie called <i>Single Black Female</i> about the rivalry between Monica Harris (Raven Goodwin) and Simone Hicks (Amber Riley), her half-sister (different moms, same dad) who shows up in her life as Monica is fighting to replace the retiring host of an insipid morning TV show called <i>Tea Time</i> on a local station in Houston. I’d caught up with the original <i>Single Black Female</i> on April 24. 2022 and posted about it on moviemagg at <a href="https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/04/single-black-female-johnson-production.html" target="_blank">https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/04/single-black-female-johnson-production.html</a>, and had found it pretty mediocre and clichéd. This time around Lifetime showed the original <i>Single Black Female</i> just before airing <i>Single Black Female 2</i>, and I liked it even less than I had before. <i>Single Black Female 2</i> takes place in Seattle three years after the events of the original. Monica Harris and her best friend Bebe Morgan (K. Michelle) have just relocated to Seattle following Monica’s breakup with her boyfriend (whom I presume was Eric, played by Devale Harris, a tech person at the TV station where she worked and who was a truly hot stud!). Monica has got a job hosting an investigative journalism show called <i>Red Alert</i> on a Seattle station, though she has to deal with a very domineering boss, Kendyl Rouse (Christine Horne). Kendyl is another African-American woman, considerably slimmer than either Monica or Simone, with a fierce mien and shaved head. She looks like what Sinéad O’Connor would have if she’d been Black, and midway through the film she turns out to be a Lesbian. Kendyl casually tells Bebe that she was invited to a three-way with a celebrity couple in Hollywood, and when Bebe innocently asks her how she felt being with a woman for the first time, Kendyl actually says it was her first time with a <i>man</i>.
<br><br>Kendyl has decided to exploit Monica’s real-life history with a stalker as part of her show, in hopes of building up interest in the series and increasing its viewer base. At first we think Monica is doing this on her own and breaking Kendyl’s rule that she read the teleprompter scripts verbatim, but later we learn it was the other way around; Kendyl incorporated Monica’s experience into her script without giving Monica a heads-up that she was doing that. The problem is that the show somehow reaches the convent in Houston where Simone was staying; after the end of the first <i>Single Black Female</i> Simone was presumed dead but was actually taken in by a Black Mother Superior and given the name “Sister Grace” because it was by the grace of God that she survived and found a place in the convent. Along the way she got amnesia and lost any sense of who she’d been before, only seeing Monica on TV telling her story about being stalked by Simone reawakens Simone’s memories about her true identity. She determines to go to Seattle and do what she can to destroy Monica’s life and success. Monica has been having nightmares about Simone but has no idea that Simone is really alive, or that her broadcasts have “outed” her and launched Simone on a new revenge campaign motivated, as it was in the first film, by family jealousies. It seems that Monica’s dad was an outwardly respectable politician and financier, but he had an extra-relational affair with Simone’s mother and she resulted. She never forgave her dad for having abandoned her while obsessing over Monica, and so she killed the father before the first film’s story began and went on a murder spree that carried over into both films. Simone lands a place to live with Layla Clinton (Morgan Alexandria), makeup director for <i>Red Alert</i>, after Layla’s previous roommate left her to move in across the street with her new boyfriend and a loudly barking dog. Immediately Simone confronts the ex-roommate and forces her to cough up the money Layla said she owed her by grabbing the dog and threatening its life.
<br><br>Then she graduates to human victims, slitting Kendyl’s throat and sending an e-mail Monica had written about her frustrations with Kendyl as a boss to the station’s human resources department so when the cops, in the person of an Asian-American detective named Hudson (John Crow) who’s <i>so</i> focused on the most obvious suspect Inspector Lestrade in the Sherlock Holmes stories looks like a model of open-mindness by comparison, get it they immediately assume Monica murdered her troublesome boss. Simone also knocks off Bebe and Monica’s latest boyfriend, Detective Trevor Williams (Kendrick Cross), whom she gets to by donning kinky regalia and bringing a whip and handcuffs to a date he thinks is with Monica. (I’ve often complained about movies that asked us to believe people who don’t look at all alike playing blood relatives, but this time I think they overdid it: Raven Goodwin and Amber Riley look <i>so</i> much alike at times the only way we can tell them apart is by the discreet but noticeable nose ring Riley as Simone wears in one nostril.) Monica hatches a plot to catch Simone literally on camera at the TV station, but it requires the assistance of both Bebe and Layla – only Layla double-crosses Monica and gets killed by Simone for her pains. Ultimately <i>[spoiler alert!]</i>, in an utterly nihilistic ending that turned me against writers Tessa Evelyn Scott and Sa’Rah Jones (that’s how her credit is spelled) and director Shari Lynette Carpenter (who all had those jobs on the first <i>Single Black Female</i> as well, though Carpenter’s directorial credit on the first film only had an initial “L.” instead of a middle name), Monica gets arrested and goes to prison for the murders while Simone visits her in prison and gloats.
<br><br>Then Simone goes back to Houston, returns to the convent (ya remember the <i>convent</i>?) and is welcomed back with open arms – only the Mother Superior introduces her to a woman who claims she’s Simone’s long-lost daughter Joy (Angel Pean). Simone remembered giving birth to Joy but her assumption (and ours) was that she had either been stillborn or died shortly afterwards, and the final closeup is of Joy with a sinister glint in her eyes that suggests she’s as bitter towards Simone as Simone was towards Monica. I really don’t like crime stories in which the criminal gets away with it for the same reason Raymond Chandler didn’t; he wrote a letter in which it was necessary for a good crime story that the criminal gets punished at the end, even if not legally. “It has nothing to do with morality; it’s about the logic of the form,” Chandler wrote (I’m quoting him from memory here). If the criminal isn’t punished, “it leaves a sense of irritation.” That’s what it did here, big-time; it took me about 20 to 25 minutes of the genuinely great film I watched after it before I’d washed the bad taste out of my mouth (and my mind) of the ending of <i>Single Black Female 2.</i>mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4064270794522115878.post-80125866101744029122024-03-03T18:58:00.000-08:002024-03-07T11:07:45.579-08:00Sergeant York (Warner Bros., 1941)<br><b>by Mark Gabrish Conlan</b> • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
<br><br>The genuinely great film I watched immediately afterwards was <i>Sergeant York</i>, the 1941 biopic of real-life World War I hero Alvin C. York (Gary Cooper), born in the mountain village of Pall Mall, Tennessee on December 13, 1887. The real Alvin York was whipsawed during his early life between a reverence for God and religion and a desire to get drunk and raise hell, though in the movie (written by a committee – Abem Finkel, Paul Muni’s brother-in-law, and Harry Chandlee did the first draft and Howard Koch and John Huston came in later for a rewrite, with help from an uncredited Sam Cowan – and stunningly directed by Howard Hawks as his first film under a Warner Bros. contract that allowed him more or less to be his own producer) he spends a lot of time trying to raise the money to buy a parcel of bottom land (much easier to farm than the rocky top land the Yorks have owned for generations). York enters a shooting contest to make the final payment, only on the big day he learns that the land’s owner has reneged and sold the parcel to Zeb Andrews (Rob Porterfield), York’s rival for the hand of Gracie Williams (Joan Leslie). York is so angry that he’s lost out on the land that he sets out on his horse to track down and kill the landowner, but midway through his ride a few convenient bolts of lightning rain down from the sky. They knock him to the ground and bend his rifle, making it unusable. York takes this as a sign from God to repent his evil ways, so he becomes born again and starts studying the Bible with Rosier Pile (Walter Brennan, second-billed and giving the second most restrained performance of his career, next to the professor he’d play in Frltz Lang’s <i>Hangmen Also Die!</i> two years later), the local general-store owner and part-time minister. (For some reason, <i>all</i> his church services – or at least the two we actually get to see – seem to take place at night, maybe because he has to wait for the store to close.)
<br><br>Unfortunately, the newly converted York has only been around for a few months when President Woodrow Wilson gets the U.S. Congress to declare war against Germany, and a rather perplexed York finds himself confronted with the legal requirement to register for the draft. Pastor Pile helps York write a letter requesting conscientious objector status, but his application is rejected because he’s not a member of an established religious denomination with a pacifist tradition. In a revelation scene, York hikes into the mountains and sits on a papîer-maché crag and recalls the Bible verse, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” That decides him and he determines not only to go into the Army but to fight as best he can. In rifle training – where he’s predictably impressed by the high quality of the military rifle he’s issued – he racks up an impressive record as a sharpshooter (of course we already knew he could shoot from his antics back home, including shooting his initials into a tree that had been previously marked as the site where Daniel Boone had killed a bear in 1760, as well as his victory in the shooting contest). He’s shipped off via an intertitle to France, where he and his unit are sent to the front immediately and put into combat alongside battle-hardened British troops who give York tips on how to survive in the trenches and when to duck when they hear a shell coming in overhead. The film reaches its climax on October 8, 1918 – five weeks before the Armistice – when an Allied offensive is being stymied by a German machine-gun nest alongside a railroad the Allies are trying to secure. York takes command of his unit when its previous head falls victim to one of the German machine guns, and with a combination of rifle and pistol shots manages to kill enough of the German soldiers and goad the rest to surrender to neutralize the threat. Then he has the bothersome necessity of trying to find an Allied authority to whom he can turn over the captured prisoners. York gets fêted by various Allied governments, including Britain’s, France’s and his own. When he returns home he’s presented with a 200-acre bottom land farm, a complete house already built on it to his specifications, and the promise that the Governor of Tennessee will come down to his county and personally conduct the ceremony marrying him and Gracie.
<br><br>The real Alvin Cullum York was a fascinating figure who seemed little interested in money or fame; what turned him on as a war hero was leveraging his status for causes greater than himself, including improving educational opportunities for rural Tennesseans. York had previously turned down offers from Hollywood studios to make a movie about him, but in 1941 Warner Bros. came a-calling at a time when York badly needed money to endow a Bible college he wanted to set up. York drove a hard bargain when it came to the contract, including demanding the right of approval over the actor who would play him – and he soon made it clear to Jack Warner that Gary Cooper was the only actor he would approve. That posed a problem for Warner because Cooper was then under contract to Sam Goldwyn, and in order to get Cooper for <i>Sergeant York</i> he had to loan out his biggest star, Bette Davis, to Goldwyn to star in the film of Lillian Hellman’s play <i>The Little Foxes</i>. Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz and the Wikipedia pages on York (both his real life and the film) claimed it was the highest-grossing American movie made in 1941, though elsewhere I’ve read that was the Abbott and Costello vehicle <i>Buck Privates</i>. <i>Sergeant York</i> was premiered in New York City on July 2, 1941, five months before Pearl Harbor and America’s official entry into World War II, though the film was inevitably seen through the lens of the political conflict of the period. The interventionists (including York himself, who made a speech at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in May 1941 in which he said, “We are standing at the crossroads of history. The important capitals of the world in a few years will either be Berlin and Moscow, or Washington and London. I, for one, prefer Congress and Parliament to Hitler's Reichstag and Stalin's Kremlin”) hailed the film and the isolationists predictably denounced it.
<br><br>The film was immensely popular and won Gary Cooper the Academy Award for Best Actor. Though the cornpone dialogue and affected accents get a bit trying at times, Cooper delivers a performance of subtle strength and nuance; though it’s within the established bounds of his screen personality (in a wartime radio show Cooper kidded himself when he was asked, “Don’t you ever say anything but ‘Yup’?,” and he answered, “Nope”), he’s able with just subtle changes in his facial expressions and his voice and posture to suggest the hellion he is in act one, the devoted believer in act two and the reluctant war hero of act three. <i>Sergeant York</i> runs 134 minutes, unusually long for a 1941 film – especially a black-and-white period piece with just one major star – and though only the last third of the film contains the sort of slam-bang action Howard Hawks was famous for (and Joan Leslie’s part was a typical movie heroine of the period and didn’t give Hawks the chance to play the proto-feminist games he’d already done with Barbara Stanwyck and would do again with Lauren Bacall), it’s quite effectively directed. The writing is a bit more problematic; much of the film’s first half contains scenes of rural life, including a town dance and a fight at the local bar, that seem to be in there as much to tick off a checklist of rural Hollywood clichés than to advance the story. But overall Sergeant York is a work of real sophistication and charm, and I especially liked the character of “Pusher” Ross (George Tobias), a former New York subway conductor whom York meets in the army and tries to explain to the hayseed York just what a subway is and how it functions. We genuinely like “Pusher” and find ourselves rooting for him and hoping he’ll survive the war – so we’re heartbroken when <i>[spoiler alert!]</i> he turns up dead in the final sequence, courtesy of a German officer who threw a hand grenade as he was supposedly surrendering.
<br><br><i>Sergeant York</i> is also a vivid collection of picturesquely staged scenes, including an early shot of York actually farming and shot through such heavy-duty red filters, I joked to my husband Charles (who, like me, had never seen the movie before, and who had got back from work about 20 minutes in), “Ah! Socialist realism!” Hawks and his production crew used two directors of photography, Sol Polito for most of the movie and Arthur Edeson for the war scenes (and I suspect they got Edeson because he’d already shot the 1930 <i>All Quiet on the Western Front</i> and therefore had experience reproducing World War I on film), and though there are some pretty obvious painted backdrops and model shots, for the most part the film is visually convincing. Above all there’s the quiet dignity and strength of Gary Cooper’s performance; though the film might have had a bit more “edge” with a different sort of actor (like Bogart, maybe?), Cooper is so “right” for the role on his own terms it’s easy to see why Alvin York was so dead set that Cooper was the only actor whom he would allow in the role.mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4064270794522115878.post-27655516044735417222024-03-01T19:57:00.000-08:002024-03-01T19:58:57.482-08:00Law and Order: "On the Ledge" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 29, 2024)<br><b>by Mark Gabrish Conlan</b> • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
<br><br>Last night (Thursday, February 29) I watched the latest episodes of the three remaining shows in Dick Wolf’s <i>Law and Order</i> franchise: the original <i>Law and Order</i> itself, <i>Law and Order: Special Victims Unit</i> and <i>Law and Order: Organized Crime</i>. The <i>Law and Order</i> episode was called “On the Ledge” and its premise was largely the old one on the February 2, 1943 Suspense radio show called “The Doctor Prescribed Death” (<a href="https://archive.org/details/TSP430202" target="_blank">https://archive.org/details/TSP430202</a>), in which Bela Lugosi plays a mad psychologist, Antonio Basile, who works out a theory that a person apparently wanting to commit suicide can under the right circumstances can be induced to kill someone else instead. In “On the Ledge,” the person apparently wanting to commit suicide identifies himself as “Bill Jackson” (Chinaza Uche) and he prepares to leap off a bridge and drown himself until he’s interrupted by Detective Jalen Shaw (Mehcad Brooks) of the New York Police Department. “Bill” declares that his life is ruined and he has nothing to live for, and Shaw successfully talks him out of it. Then Shaw and his police partner, Detective Vincent Riley (Reid Brooks), get a call to respond to an active-shooter situation in the emergency room of a local hospital, and we’ve already guessed what it takes writers Jennifer Vanderbes and Pamela J. Wechsler two more acts and 20 minutes to let us know for sure: “Bill Jackson,” the man Jalen Shaw just kept from committing suicide, is the active shooter.
<br><br>By the time Shaw and Riley arrest him he’s already killed a doctor and severely wounded a nurse, as well as targeting (unsuccessfully) another doctor, and if nothing else this show made me realize why the Kaiser hospital on Alvarado and Zion in San Diego has metal detectors and an airport-style security checkpoint at the doors to <i>their</i> E.R. “Bill”’s real name is Kenneth Cartwright, and the reason he was so pissed off was that his wife just died while being taken care of by the doctor whom he later killed, and since she was pregnant and was in the act of giving birth when her case went sour and both she and the baby died, Kenneth was ultra-angry at the doctor and determined to kill him. Naturally Detective Shaw feels guilty about the whole thing because if he’d just let Kenneth kill himself when he wanted to, that nice young doctor would still be alive and his spouse, Catherine Halpert (Katrina Ferguson), would still be a wife, not a widow. Kenneth’s defense attorney decides to plead diminished capacity and claims that a persistent pattern of racism drove him to do it. Though racism as a cause of mental illness isn’t listed in the fifth (and current) edition of the <i>Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM)</i>, the official scientific authority about what constitutes a mental illness, it turns out there are some authorities who argue that it exists and is legitimately diagnosable.
<br><br>The show turns into a crisis of conscience for Detective Shaw, who like Kenneth Cartwright is Black and feels a certain degree of sympathy for him even though he’s also appalled at what he did (and Shaw’s perception of his own culpability in it). It turns out that Kenneth told Shaw as Shaw was arresting him that he killed the doctor because of “an eye for an eye,” and prosecutor Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) needs that into evidence to prove that Kenneth was a premeditated murderer who was aware of what he was doing and that it was morally wrong. Only Shaw isn’t sure he wants to rat out a fellow Black man in that fashion, and he threatens to testify that he doesn’t remember hearing Kenneth say that. The writers and director David Grossman build up a quite effective suspense sequence as Detective Shaw takes the witness stand and we’re kept in the dark as to just how he will testify – but ultimately he recounts the “an eye for an eye” remark Kenneth told him and the jury convicts the man. Though much of “On the Ledge” is pretty slow going, in the second half the conflicts heat up quite nicely and the overall message – Shaw’s conflict over should he tell the truth on the witness stand or let a murderer get off leniently (with incarceration in a psychiatric hospital instead of prison) because he feels there was <i>some</i> moral justification for what he did – comes through loud and clear.mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4064270794522115878.post-75013985971096559192024-03-01T19:52:00.000-08:002024-03-01T19:52:23.413-08:00Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Carousel" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 29, 2024)<br><b>by Mark Gabrish Conlan</b> • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
<br><br>The next show up on Dick Wolf’s <i>oeuvre</i> was a <i>Law and Order: Special Victims Unit</i> episode, “Carousel,” that starts out with a scene in a youth hostel, in which two young men, students at the ultra-prestigious Cambridge Institute of Technology (CIT) – obviously read the real-life MIT –are shown cruising two young women. The young men are Hayden Foote (Jesse Anderson) and Frederick Hwang (Alex Fox), and the women they’re cruising are Leah Tan (Anastasia Lyn) and Maura Ramos (Mara Topic). The four go out to a sleazy bar in the neighborhood recommended by the hostel concierge, and the two men both drug Leah’s drink while they couldn’t be less interested in Maura either for legitimate or criminal purposes. It turns out that the guys are into a sick game in which they collect points for bedding women from as many different countries as possible; they “score” the game with push-pins on a map of the world. There are two other people involved in the game: Dustin Renfrow (Jake Murphy), the third and nerdiest of the contestants who begs off the current outing because he claims to have food poisoning; and Keegan Delpino (Alex Bartner), who works in the school’s DNA lab and confirms that the contestants have indeed fucked someone of the nationality they claim through collecting illegally obtained DNA samples the young men give him. Leah reports a rape to the Special Victims Unit, while desperately pleading that her parents back home in Singapore can’t learn that she’s been raped because they’ll condemn her for not being a virgin until her wedding night. Leah also admits that while she didn’t willingly have intercourse, she did give Hayden a blow job because “I’d always wanted to know what it felt like to kiss a man … <i>down there</i>.”
<br><br>But she also says she didn’t actually complete the act, and that still leaves the mystery of who <i>did</i> penetrate her and when, since her rape kit turned out positive, though there’s none of his semen for DNA testing either because she showered afterwards to get rid of any traces of him or her rapist used a condom. Ultimately the SVU detectives travel to Cambridge and confront Keegan, who more or less willingly gives up the DNA sample he was given to verify who had sex with Leah, and it turns out to be Dustin Renfrow, who was so desperate to get some points on the board that he was willing to violate not only the laws against rape but the rules of the game, which were that the sex had to be more or less consensual. (I write “more or less” because it seemed perfectly acceptable to feed their prospective targets drinks drugged with substances like Rohypnol that would eliminate their ability and/or their inclination to resist.) Ultimately the cops are able to bust the kids after they turn up another woman, a Bulgarian, whom they victimized and who luckily is still in the U.S. and, indeed, still in New York City. There’s a fascinating epilogue in which Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) is reminiscing about how she’s been with the SVU squad for 25 years and she didn’t think it would become the centerpiece of his career – and it occurred to me that this may be how Mariska Hargitay feels about this role. She once told <i>People</i> magazine that the reason she took the role of Benson on <i>SVU</i> in the first place was because it was the only part she was offered that wasn’t a dumb blonde in the mold of Hargitay’s real-life mother, Jayne Mansfield – and now that she’s had a much longer career than Mansfield’s and made a lot more money, it’s clear that the character of Benson has defined her life and her career in a way she probably couldn’t have predicted back in 1999 when the show started its run.mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4064270794522115878.post-34640473397061724682024-03-01T19:50:00.000-08:002024-03-01T19:50:19.434-08:00Law and Order: Organized Crime: "Beyond the Sea" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 29, 2024)<br><b>by Mark Gabrish Conlan</b> • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
<br><br>The <i>Law and Order: Organized Crime</i> episode that followed SVU February 29 was called “Beyond the Sea” (not to be confused with the great French ballad by Charles Trenet that became a U.S. hit for Bobby Darin) and, in the only <i>Law and Order</i> franchise show in which Dick Wolf worships at the shrine of the <b>Great God SERIAL</b>, it was both a continuation of the previous week’s show, “Missing Persons,” and a setup for the next one, “Original Sin” – which in one of the maddening hiatuses (hiati?) that have beset these series in the season of the writers’ and actors’ strikes we won’t get to see until March 14, almost two weeks from now. The continuing story revolves around Romanian expatriate Rita Lasku (Izabela Vidovic), whom Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni) thought he had successfully rescued from human traffickers who had turned her out as a prostitute, only she somehow got back into “the life” and two years later ended up dead and buried on the beach outside the town of Westbrook in Long Island. Westbrook is ruled as a private fiefdom by retired judge Clayton Bonner (Keith Carradine, who played the President of the United States in the CBS-TV series <i>Madam Secretary</i> from 2014 to 2019 and therefore has some experience portraying an imposing authority figure. Judge Bonner has installed his daughter Meredith (Jennifer Ehle) as Westbrook’s police chief, and his response to the discovery of nine bodies of young women, including Rita’s, buried on his town’s beach is to tell Meredith that it’s more important for her to maintain the town’s upbeat and tourist-safe image than to solve the crime.
<br><br>In addition to Meredith, Clayton Bonner has a scapegrace son, Eric (Will Janowitz), whom the writers (John Shiban and Will Pascoe) seem to be setting up as a prime suspect. Until midway through this episode, it seemed like the serial killer would turn out to be the local district attorney, Noah Cahill (Reed Diamond), who regularly hosted parties featuring underage female prostitutes whom he essentially offered as party favors for his middle-aged horndog-male “guests.” Then midway through the show Stabler, who’s not only out of his jurisdiction but is under suspension by the New York Police Department’s Internal Affairs Bureau and is grilled by a male African-American officer who seems eager to get rid of him and his troublesome ways of stretching the law if not outright breaking it in the interests of justice, and Chief Bonner go to Cahill’s home and discover him dead, shot on the glass roof of his living room. (Were the writers thinking Jeffrey Epstein here?) This run of <i>Organized Crime</i> episodes has been a bit more interesting than usual for this series; these scripts are giving Christopher Meloni the chance to play the same sort of edgy character he was on <i>SVU</i> for its first 12 seasons and the show is a lot more fascinating when the bad guys are white people with money than scrungy-looking people of color without much of it (though in its earlier years <i>Organized Crime</i> did some effective story arcs about corrupt upper-class African-Americans that proved that corruption doesn’t discriminate by race).mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4064270794522115878.post-69623733224817190222024-02-29T18:22:00.000-08:002024-02-29T18:22:01.130-08:00Chicago P.D.: "Survival" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 28, 2024)<br><b>by Mark Gabrish Conlan</b> • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
<br><br>Last night (Wednesday, February 28) I got so tired of the depressing news coverage on MS-NBC that at 10 p.m. I switched to the flagship NBC network for an episode of <i>Chicago P.D.</i> It’s a show I used to watch regularly when it first went on the air, largely because I wanted to support its star, Jason Beghe (playing Hank Voight, head of the Chicago Police Department’s intelligence unit), who had been a member of the Church of Scientology until he quit in disgust and went public with his hostility. Beghe was threatened by the Church (as is just about anybody who exits) and told that there were so many Scientologists in powerful positions in Hollywood it would be career suicide for him to leave. So I’m glad that he was not only able to survive career-wise as an actor but thrive, landing a long-term series lead that has so far lasted 10 seasons. I don’t think he’s that great as an actor – his hectoring, bullying style gets to be a bit much after a while – but he’s a good fit for the role he plays here (sort of like Christopher Meloni’s part in the first 12 seasons of <i>Law and Order: Special Victims Unit</i> but even cruder and more “edgy”). This episode, called “Survival,” turned out to be unexpectedly good, at least in part because it reflected the sensitivity with which Dick Wolf and his cadre of writers, producers and show runners depict the Queer community. The show opens with Hank Voight walking down one of those proverbial mean, dark streets that abound in noir stories both in films and on TV, when he spots some blood on the sidewalk. Naturally he wonders how it got there, and when he sees a convenience store that has an outboard video camera, he walks in and demands that the man at the counter show him the video footage. The footage shows a young man being clubbed by an unseen assailant with a jack handle and then stuffed into the back of an SUV.
<br><br>The victim turns out to be Noah Gorman (Bobby Hogan), a 19-year-old who graduated from high school in Indiana two months earlier and moved to Chicago after he “came out” to his parents as Gay. His parents immediately declared him the “spawn of Satan” (which makes me wonder what they are) and not only threw him out of the house but disowned him. Hank learns this when he calls Noah’s family to tell them he’s been kidnapped, beaten and probably tortured, and Noah’s father tells Hank it serves him right and it’s Noah’s own fault for going against God’s divine will. The police immediately suspect Zach Jones (Colin Bates in a superb performance as a small-time crook with big pretensions; he’s the sort of person who doesn’t just demand an attorney but sings about it, loudly and obnoxiously), a drug dealer with a reputation for kidnapping and kneecapping people who stiff him on payment. The cops eventually find Noah, albeit near death and in terrible shape. Hank is working with an assistant district attorney, Nina Chapman (Sara Bues), who’s futilely tried to prosecute Zach twice before. Zach has escaped accountability both times on technicalities (a running theme on Dick Wolf’s shows generally) but Chapman thinks she has him dead to rights at long last. Noah Gorman actually identified Zach Jones as his assailant when shown a six-person photo line-up in the hospital, where he’s recovering from (among other things) his eyes having literally been stapled to keep them open. But that’s not good enough for Hank, who’s convinced Noah was lying about the I.D. because he was so stressed out by the police asking him questions he identified his drug dealer as his assailant just to get Hank to leave.
<br><br>Hank believes that Noah was being stalked and followed by a sadistic maniac who, unlike Zach, had meticulously planned his crime and knew exactly what he was doing, including holding Noah in a factory that made pallets (Noah himself gave Hank the clue when he said he was held in a place with a lot of pieces of wood around) and fastening him to a wall with relatively sophisticated bondage devices. Alas, that’s about as much of a resolution as we got because, in accordance with modern TV producers’ worship for and reverence towards the <b>Great God SERIAL</b>, it ended with Noah being released from the hospital and Hank taking him in because he literally has nowhere else to go. It had already been established that he was homeless, though he spent a lot of his nights at a church-run shelter where he was known as a loner who had no friends. What’s more, the show is going on a weeks-long hiatus so we won’t find out how this turns out until March 20. I’m wondering if writer Matthew Browne is going to have Noah offer to have sex with Hank, not because he’s attracted to him but simply because he’ll think that is what Hank will expect in return for giving him a place to stay. But I quite liked the episode and in particular its social comment angle and its plea for parents of Queer children to be sympathetic to them instead of just tossing them out like so much garbage.mgconlanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09328563476025164608noreply@blogger.com