Movie Magg

The Bodyguard (Warner Bros., 1992)

2012-02-15T17:24:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

In acknowledgment of Whitney Houston on her recent death — yet another voice that I remember from my early years “out” as a Gay man that has now been stilled forever — I would like to share my thoughts on her film The Bodyguard, which Charles and I watched together in 2005. My disappointment in the movie had little to do with Whitney’s talents — whatever her limitations as an actress, she was a great singer with an unforgettable voice that combined crystalline purity and deep soul — though, like a lot of other more recent divas that have been pushed along a similar career path, she didn’t always get the quality of material she deserved. By far the best part of The Bodyguard was her extraordinary rendition of Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” under the closing credits, and we can only regret the film did not allow us to see as well as hear her do that great song!

We ran avideo movie that had long been one of my bits of unfinished business: TheBodyguard, the 1992 film by Mick Jacksonstarring Whitney Houston as a temperamental pop diva beset with death threatsand top-billed (and co-producer) Kevin Costner as the ex-Secret Servicebodyguard she — or rather her manager, Bill Devaney (Bill Cobbs), hires toprotect her. This was a bit of unfinished business because in 1994, when JohnGallagher and I were having our mini-relationship, I had bought the tape atSuncoast Video (the fact that it took over a year for the video to becomeavailable at regular for-sale price is an indication of how dramatically theadvent of the DVD has changed the movie market: today the “window” betweentheatrical release and in-store availability is down to two months andshrinking still further) and planned to watch it with him — only he screened itwithout me and took the tape with him when we broke up. So when I saw itsale-priced in the Columbia House DVD Club catalog I decided to grab it and seethis film at long last.

It would be nice to report that The Bodyguard was worth the wait, but it wasn’t; it’s really justanother movie, a mediocre film that wastes both a spectacular premise and twocharismatic stars. I’d always imagined The Bodyguard as sort of a modern-dress version of Lady Chatterley’sLover that would highlight the classdifferences between the two principals and present a sort oftaming-of-the-shrew quality to their affair. Instead it’s a quirky, inconsistentmelodrama beset by one star who was pretty blatantly miscast for his part andanother who wasn’t given a chance either to play a coherent character or tobecome a good enough dramatic actress to make sense out of the script she was given. The imdb.com Web site says the male lead in TheBodyguard was specifically written forCostner, but that’s wrong; writer Lawrence Kasdan originally drafted the piecein the late 1970’s as a follow-up to the Barbra Streisand version of A StarIs Born and intended the leads forStreisand and Steve McQueen, who was then her partner in the First Artistsproduction company, releasing through Warners.

Imagining what The Bodyguard might have been with Streisand and McQueen offers a prettygood index to what’s wrong with it as it stands. Kasdan’s script creates aremote, taciturn male lead that would have perfectly suited an actor with thekind of magnetic presence as McQueen or the 1970’s Clint Eastwood (who at thetime this film was made was playing an active-duty Secret Service agent in Inthe Line of Fire, also not a good moviebut certainly better than this one!). Costner is simply wrong for the part, asmuch as he tries to channel the spirit of McQueen by playing most of his scenesstanding with rod-like erectness and glowering at the camera, barely openinghis mouth enough to get his lines out. Costner is the sort of actor who needsus to warm up to him — even in Waterworld, where he was not only figuratively but literally playing an alien, his performance (and the movie as awhole) gets stronger the more he interacts with the people around him and showswarmth. As for Houston, Kasdan put her at sea by failing to decide whether hercharacter should be a basically sympathetic victim or a bitchy prima donna — so he wrote her as both, and Houston as an actressshowed promise but couldn’t do the switchbacks well enough to persuade us thatthis particular person could be both. (Streisand, with far more movie actingexperience, would have had less trouble meshing the two incompatible sides ofthis character into a coherent whole.)

The Bodyguard is also not helped by a convoluted plot that at timesutterly defies sense — we’re supposed to believe that Academy Award-nominatedsinger-actress Rachel “Rach” Marron (Houston) is receiving death threatscarefully compiled by a deranged fan out of words clipped from newspapers(sufficiently well done that he leaves no trace of fingerprints or forensicevidence of any kind; there’s an extreme closeup of him piecing together one ofthese missives with an X-Acto knife, a product placement the X-Acto companywould probably just as soon have done without) and, in a totally unrelated development, her sister Nicki(Michele Lamar Richards, who looks younger than Houston even though the scriptdescribes her as older), jealous of her success, has hired a hit man to knockher off — or by Jackson’s direction and the editing by Donn Cambern and RichardA. Harris, which at times is so confusing that during the big action sequencesit’s often virtually impossible to tell what is supposed to be going on or whois doing what to whom. The film lurches to its dramatic climax at the AcademyAwards ceremony, where the killer — who, in a plot twist we get about three reels before the characters do, is GregPortman (Tomas Arana), a fellow ex-Secret Service agent and former best friendof Frank Farmer (Costner) — intends to assassinate the heroine in front of a TVaudience approaching one billion. As Jackson futzes around with this sequence and gives us his usual Cuisinartediting style one can only think — regretfully — of what Alfred Hitchcock couldhave done with the situation of a killer intending to murder a celebrity in themiddle of the Academy Awards.

What’s even more inexplicableabout the way this film was directed is that, though the female star is a majorhit-making pop singer who did the movie at the height of her vocal career, atno time during the movie does Jackson allow us to see and hear Whitney Houston sing an entire song, start tofinish. Indeed, it’s not until sheperforms “I Will Always Love You” on her leave-taking from Costner at the endthat we even get to hear her sing anentire song (no wonder this piece, actually a cover of a country hit by DollyParton, became the big hit from this film). And those expecting a steamyromance between the two leads were also disappointed; they make it to bedtogether exactly once — and it’s theresult of a peremptory order from Rachel, who in a stroke worthy of an Ayn Randcharacter essentially commands Frank totake her out (where on their way to his place they stop in at a country bar andhear a male — ex-X-man John Doe — sing “I Will Always Love You,” therebyplanting it as “their song”) andultimately fuck her, following which there’s a major chill in theirrelationship as it’s broken his macho “code” to have sex with a client. (Atleast the film is refreshingly nonchalant about the interracial aspect of thecoupling — though one quirk of American racism is that a Black woman and awhite man seems far less intimidating than the other way around.)

It would beunfair to describe The Bodyguard as amovie in which nothing works right, butit’s so numbingly synthetic, one of those movies that has clearly taken itsinspiration from other movies rather than from anything resembling real life,and misses out on so many of the opportunities its basic theme would seem topresent, that it’s really a mediocre, forgettable film whose only distinctionwas that it gave Whitney Houston a hit record (and Dolly Parton the frustrationusually felt in the 1950’s in the other racial direction — seeing someone elsegrab her song and become identified with it). — 11/13/05

Gorilla Ship (Ralph M. Like/Mayfair, 1932)

2012-02-15T17:18:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I ran us a movie we’drecently downloaded from archive.org, Gorilla Ship, a Ralph M. Like production from 1932 releasedthrough the Mayfair studio, one of the short-lived indies that didn’t make itthrough the Depression, and a company that seemed to make nothing but cheap,tacky, formulaically plotted and indifferently directed movies. I had hopes forthis one, though, because of the director, Frank Strayer, who made some quiteinteresting films in the early 1930’s (including two horror classics, TheVampire Bat and Condemned to Live) before settling down at Columbia in 1938 as thedirector of the long-running Blondie TV series. I also was curious about what sort of film it would be justbased on the title — I presumed it would be a movie actually involving greatapes, either gorillas that were on the ship and escaped and threatened passengers and crew or a ship thatsailed to a location with a large gorilla population and whose crew had somenasty run-ins with them.

It actually turned out to be a blatant ripoff of JackLondon’s The Sea Wolf — GeorgeWaggner (who later produced The Wolf-Man at Universal) got credit he didn’t deserve for an “original” story andscript that spent reel one establishing a romantic triangle between threeoverly rich people who’d known each other since childhood: Philip Wells(Wheeler Oakman), his wife Helen (Vera Reynolds) and her friend Dave Burton(Reed Howes). Through a series of scenes expressing upper-class excess — firstat the golf course, then in Philip’s car (which looks big enough you couldimagine him throwing a party in its interior) and finally in Philip’s home, welearn that Philip is pathologically jealous and is convinced Dave and Helen arehaving an affair. The three agree to take a voyage on Philip’s yacht, and thenreel two suddenly cuts to a totally different story as we meet the crew of a ship captained by thefearsome “Gorilla” Larson (Ralph Ince, top-billed) — George Waggner actuallyhad the chutzpah to rip off Jack London’slast name for his fearsome, sadisticcaptain, and merely changed the species of animal that gave him his brutishfirst name! We quickly find out Gorilla Larson is an S.O.B. because he throwshis crew members down to the floor so often one of them is actually keeping atally of how many times he does it, and when his cabin boy, Benny (Ben Hall),brings him his breakfast, he throws the coffee in his face because it isn’t hotenough. (If he’d thrown the coffee in Benny’s face because it was too hot, that would have been even nastier!)

We watchGorilla’s ship sign up its crew (there’s an intimation that at least one of thesailors was shanghaied) in the dark in what can only be described asMurk-O-Vision, and then get underway — we finally see a stock shot of a four-masted schooner thatCharles and I have probably seen in a thousand movies before this one, and atleast that gets us literally out of the darkness into the light — and just when we’re beginning towonder where Philip, Helen and Dave are going to fit into this story, Gorilla’sship (whose name is never given in this film, though since Jack London calledWolf Larsen’s ship the Ghost we can assume it’s called the Spectre or something equally synonymous) picks up a man ina lifeboat and it’s Philip. Philip insists that he was out in his yacht withhis wife Helen and their friend Dave, the boat exploded and he was the onlysurvivor. Gorilla doesn’t believe him, and as Philip admits later, Gorilla isright: Philip deliberately scuttled his own boat to murder his wife and her(presumed) lover, but later on Gorilla’s ship picks them up as well — and it turns out Gorilla and Dave areold friends (how on earth did they meet and get to know each other?) and Gorilla decides to knockoff Philip so Dave and Helen can be together. Only Philip steals a jewel boxbelonging to Helen and convinces Gorilla’s crew that the captain is protectingHelen only to get his hands on herjewels, and he starts a mutiny, aided by one of the sailors who has the hotsfor Helen and is convinced that Gorilla won’t let him rape her, but Philipwill. Eventually Gorilla subdues the rebellious sailors and regains command ofhis ship just in time to mobilize the crew to fight a fire that’s started onboard, and he sends Dave and Helen away in a lifeboat.

Gorilla Ship has a few good moments — notably some nicelyatmospheric shots by director Strayer and cinematographer Jules Cronjager(whose nephew, Edward Cronjager, also became a cinematographer and actually hada far more illustrious career than his uncle!) — but mostly it was just boring,an anemic retread of a great story (though it made me more curious than ever tosee the first sound version of The Sea Wolf, a 1930 film from Fox with Milton Sills as WolfLarsen and Alfred Santell directing; Sills died right after it was filmed but,judging from the one movie of his I’ve seen — the 1924 version of The SeaHawk — he was a genuinelycharismatic and sexy leading man in an era, the 1920’s, when most of the malestars were either beefy types like Thomas Meighan or Valentino-esqueandrogynes; indeed, he looked enough like Errol Flynn it seemed appropriatethat Flynn would play his role in the remake, which almost totally altered theplot but used some footage from the Sills version as stock) and as useless asevery other film I’ve seen that bore the Mayfair brand.

Midnight in Paris (Gravier Productions, Mediapro, Pontchartrain Productions, Sony Pictures “Classics,” 2011)

2012-02-14T15:22:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film Charles and I watched last night was Midnight inParis, Woody Allen’s 2011 release that wasthe biggest box-office draw of his career — an unexpected commercial comebackfor someone who had pretty much been written off as a guy who was going to bemaking little art-house movies for the rest of his life — and though almost noone writing about this film has mentioned it, it’s actually based on a routinehe did on one of his stand-up albums in the 1960’s, in which he did anelaborate fantasy about himself hanging out with the “Lost Generation” ofAmerican expats in Paris in the 1920’s and kept getting punched out, mostly byErnest Hemingway but at least once (in the punch line of the whole routine) byGertrude Stein. As part of this routine, Allen also deadpanned, “Scott andZelda Fitzgerald were just breaking up their New Year’s party — it was April.” Midnightin Paris deals with Gil Pender (OwenWilson), a successful screenwriter who’s decided his career is no longerartistically fulfilling, so he’s dropped out of screen work to write a noveland he’s gone to Paris with his fiancée Inez (Rachel MacAdams) and her parentsJohn (Kurt Fuller) and Helen (Mimi Kennedy). While in Paris Gil and Inez runinto another couple, a pedantic professor named Paul (Michael Sheen) and hiswife Carol (Nina Arianda).

One night, when Paul and Carol are going to a danceclub and want Gil and Inez to come along, Gil begs off and instead goes for along romantic solo walk through the streets of Paris until he hits a particularcorner as the clock strikes midnight (literally — there’s a bell clock audibleon the soundtrack) and an old car pulls up that turns out to contain the literati and glitterati of the Lost Generation: F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston), his wifeZelda (Alison Pill) and Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll), younger andconsiderably less grizzled than the late-in-life photos we’re used to seeingand also without his famous beard. I suppose Midnight in Paris could be described by that wretched cliché “magicalrealism,” since we’re not given any scientific explanation for the time-travelelement of the plot (which itself derives from a previous Allen short story,“The Kugelmass Episode,” in which a middle-aged Jewish professor is transportedvia a mysterious cabinet into the plot of his favorite novel, MadameBovary, and he not only has an affair withher in her own fictional world but brings her back into our own and complains,among other things, that his restaurant bills for their dates are approachingthe size of the U.S. defense budget; the story’s best line comes when Allendescribes how other professors are perplexed when their editions of MadameBovary include her affair with amiddle-aged American Jew, but they rationalize it by saying things like, “Oh,well, every time you read a classic, you discover something new”).

Instead theplot is a kind of spoof of nostalgia and nostalgia freaks (the protagonist ofGil’s novel is a clerk at a “nostalgia shop,” which Inez derisively refers toas “one of those places where they sell Shirley Temple dolls”) overlaid on atypically Allenesque tale of a mismatched couple realizing, through a series oftragicomic events, how mismatched they are and parting. Gil’s fantasticaladventures in his dream Paris of the 1920’s lead him to quite a few otherfamous names of the period, including Gertrude Stein (a marvelous turn by KathyBates), T. S. Eliot (David Lowe), Salvador Dali (a nicely theatrical bit byAdrien Brody), Man Ray (John Cordier), Luis Buñuel (Adrien de Van), Djuna Barnes(Emmanuelle Uzan), Cole Porter (Yves Heck — though the voice we hear on thesoundtrack that’s supposedly Porter performing his own songs doesn’t sound likethe real Porter’s records and I suspect Allen used recordings by Bobby Short),Josephine Baker (Sonia Rolland), Pablo Picasso (Marcial de Fonzo Bo) and his(fictional) mistress Adriana (Marion Cotillard, in what’s far and away her bestfilm since La Vie en Rose). Giland Adriana have a fling of sorts — there’s a nice comic moment in which Inezis being questioned by her parents as to whether Gil is having an affair, andsince he’s begged off all those disco dates she says, “Well, one thing’s forsure, she doesn’t dance” — and then Allen cuts to Gil and Adriana dancing to a1920’s band version of “Ain’t She Sweet?” (Many of Allen’s films use thecharacters’ different tastes in music to symbolize and show us the differencesin their personalities.)

The film is both an exercise in nostalgia and amarvelous send-up of it; towards the end Adriana reveals that she’s reallybored with her own existence inthe 1920’s and the era she reallywanted to live in was the Belle Epoque (the 1890’s) — and she and Gil end up there, only to find that thebig-shot artists of the time, Toulouse-Lautrec (Vincent Menjou Cortes), Gauguin(Olivier Rabourdin) and Degas (François Rostain), really wish that they were back in the Renaissance hobnobbing withMichelangelo and Titian! What’s more, the private detective Inez’s father Jackhired to follow Gil to see if he was having an affair disappears down his ownhistoric rathole and finds himself forced to flee for his life from the agentsof the Reign of Terror. It also turns out Inez is the one having an affair —with Paul, whom we’ve been told was an old friend of hers from college andactually dated her before he married someone else — and in a plot twist we cansee coming about four reels away, Gil ends up not only deciding to live inParis but getting an alternate (present-day) partner, Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux). Midnightin Paris at once celebrates the appeal ofnostalgia and spoofs it — a double act Allen has been playing at least since Manhattan, in which he contrasted George Gershwin’s music fromthe 1920’s and the 1930’s with the New York of the time (1979) by usingGershwin’s songs to score a contemporary film (and the reviewer for the musicmagazine Fanfare got into thespirit by reviewing the soundtrack album as if Gershwin were a modern-day youngcomposer of unformed but unquestionably impressive talent) — and one of the mostdelightful scenes shows Gil shopping at the Paris flea market for an old 78 ofa Porter song and ending up with Adriana’s diary, which he can’t read(Gabrielle translates it for him) but which gives him the clue how to wooAdriana in her time.

Midnight in Paris is a real gem, beautifully acted — especially by Owen Wilson, whomanages to capture Woody Allen’s own mannerisms and vocal tics, though they“read” quite differently from the WASP’y Wilson than they did when Allen wasdelivering them in his nightclub days with his ineradicably Jewish intonationsand affect — and sensitively directed, though the cinematography by JohanneDebas and Darius Khondji is locked way too tightly in today’s past-is-brown, present-is-brown, everything-is-brown clichés. Personally, I thought Allen’scomeback should have happened two films earlier, with Whatever Works — a movie that was a homecoming for him bothgeographically (it was both shot and set in New York City; he’d finally got a production deal that didn’t oblige him to workin Europe, as most of his recent contracts have) and thematically (a Jewishmale lead and a plot about intergenerational relationships and unexpectedpersonal transformations) — but it was nice to see Midnight in Paris achieve the success Woody Allen deserves and becomean early favorite for Academy Awards contention — even though this film, shotin France with American actors and set in Paris, was ultimately supplanted inthe Oscar race by The Artist, afilm shot and set in Hollywood by people from France!

The Big Wheel (Samuel Steifel, Harry M. Popkin, United Artists, 1949)

2012-02-12T19:54:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Big Wheel was produced by Sam Steifel and Harry M. Popkinfor United Artists release (Steifel is an otherwise unknown name to me butPopkin was doing some quite interesting noirs then, including the original D.O.A. and Impact) and cast Rooney as Billy Coy, whose father, “Cannonball” Coy (I jokedthat he had that nickname because his real given name was “Ethelred” orsomething equally un-“racy”), was killed in a crash two laps away from winningthe Indianapolis 500. Billy is determined to make it as a driver and rise upthe ranks from hot rods to midget cars to full-sized roadsters and ultimatelyavenge the family’s honor by winning at Indy himself (this is one of thosemovies that seems less written than compiled from the available well-worn clichés; for RobertSmith to be credited with an “original” screenplay is an even worse perversionof the language than usual!), and so he seeks out the Gardena, Californiaworkshop of Arthur “Red” Stanley (Thomas Mitchell), his dad’s old mechanic. Redruns race cars at the nearby Carrell Speedway, owned by Reno Riley (RichardLane), who because he owns the track has put his own cars under the name of hisdaughter Louise (Mary Hatcher), a gender-bending apparition who at first lookslike just one of the boys in Red’s shop until Billy gives her a man-to-man slapon the back and she turns around in shock — and he’s pretty shocked himselfwhen he notices this being has breasts under her coveralls and is thereforefemale.

Needless to say, once he realizes her true gender he’s instantlyattracted to her, though his main business is getting Red to let him drive carsin actual races, and though he crashes on his first time out (he takes a bankedturn low when Red told him to take it high) he ultimately works up from hotrods to midgets and becomes part of a winning team — only to blow it all whenhe decides to celebrate one winning race by spending the night outnightclubbing with Latina singer Dolores Raymond (Lita Romay), the “bad girl”to Louise’s “good girl.” He’s drunk when he has to drive the next day and has aterrible accident in which, violating the rule under which cars have to holdtheir positions and not pass each other when the yellow flag is out, he triesto point out to his teammate Happy Lee (Steve Brodie) that he’s about to losehis wheel, only he ends up crashing into Lee’s car and killing him. Billy hasto deal with a lot of people in the racing world — including virtually everyoneelse at Red’s garage — who think he deliberately killed his teammate, but eventuallyhe gets a car to drive at Indianapolis, and he’s in second or third place witha couple of laps to go — and his mother Mary (Spring Byington) in the standsabout to lose it on the spot, remembering what happened to his dad in a similarsituation in the backstory — when there’s a terrible accident, a car spillsfuel across the track and it catches fire, and Billy drives through but his owncar catches fire and barely makes it across the finish line in third place. Thewinner, Vic Sullivan (Michael O’Shea), hands the Borg-Warner trophy to Billy inhonor of his courage, and his career is made.

The Big Wheel is a pretty clichéd and predictable movie — we’realways about two or three reels ahead of the actual plot — though the ending isa bit of a surprise, and as Charles pointed out there are a lot of potential plot threads writer Robert Smithdevelops and then lets drop, like the gender-bending character of Mary (in onescene a hanger-on in the pits sees Billy kissing Mary and, since women aren’tallowed there, immediately assumes a disgusted look as if he thinks Billy isGay — a throwback to the marvelous gag scene in Chaplin’s 1916 silent Behindthe Screen in which Edna Purviancedisguises herself as a man in order to get a job as a crew member in films, Chaplindiscovers her real gender andfalls in love with her, and bad guy Eric Campbell sees Chaplin making love to a“boy” and makes his own mincing pass at him!) and the whole good guy-goodgirl-bad girl love triangle (after Billy’s hot night with Dolores costs him thenext race and his teammate his life, she simply disappears from the rest of themovie except for one passing reference to her character in the dialogue). Thedirector is Edward Ludwig, usually a reliable hack who made one masterpiece (TheMan Who Reclaimed His Head, made forUniversal at 1934 and starring Claude Rains, Joan Bennett and Lionel Atwill inan astonishing anti-war film that deserves to be available at DVD — is anybodyat Universal Home Video listening?) and here makes the best of a small budget(much of the final race at Indianapolis is filled in with stock footage or shotin front of process screens, but the effects work is good enough that thathardly matters) and comes up with a quite exciting and compelling movie whoseweakness clearly is the ragbag of clichés his writer gave him to work with.

Oddly, though, the Goodtimes DVD cover features a driver who’s obviouslysupposed to be Rooney driving a red early-1930’s Bugatti, a car alreadyout-of-date for about 10 to 15 years before this film was made. And it’s alsofascinating that Hattie McDaniel, in the last feature film of her career (shewould do only one more project — the first season of the TV series Beulah — before her death in 1952), plays Mary’s maid,who dolls her up in the first dress she’s ever owned for her date with Billy,who doesn’t want her as a woman (not yet, anyway), but as a mechanic. Hattie’sown dress is a beautiful black velvet number that would have been moreappropriate for the biopic of Bessie Smith she should have been making instead of playing onestereotyped maid role after another — indeed, she’s the best-dressed woman inthe movie — and it’s ironic, to say the least, that this relatively modest(financially and artistically) movie shouldhave two cast members (McDaniel andMitchell) from Gone with the Wind.

Killers of the Sea (Raymond Friedgen/Grand National, 1937)

2012-02-11T13:58:00.001-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was Killers ofthe Sea, a 1937 documentary fromproducer-director Raymond Friedgen and released through Grand National (whosetrademark, a giant clock on the side of a building with the hands “wiping” inthe company’s name, was one of the most attractive of the classic Hollywoodera), which is set in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Florida and featuresWallace Caswell, Jr., whose father was a fisherman in those waters and wholearned his true calling at an early age when a shark attacked dad’s fishingnet and Caswell, Jr. got into the water, wrestled it, and killed it with hisknife — though not before the shark had torn Caswell père’s net to shreds and thereby jeopardized thefamily’s income. The film is 48 minutes long and in black-and-white butotherwise looks pretty much like a standard-issue nature documentary from TV inthe 1950’s and 1960’s, complete with a young Lowell Thomas as narrator.

Itshows Caswell (a basically attractive man except that he’s prematurely bald,which about midway through the movie is explained by one shark attack whichdidn’t go according to plan: the shark took a big piece of Caswell’s head andpart of his skull had to be replaced by a metal plate, which was covered overby skin but hair couldn’t grow back from the skin he had left) and his crew(two of him are African-American, including a fellow called Evolution Hendersonwho’s the only crew member who’s given his own voice double, speaking sillylines in the racist stupid-Black stereotype of the day; the other Black crewmember is as anonymous as the white ones and performs his duties on boardCaswell’s schooner with the same cool professional competence as the whiteguys). We’re supposed to believe a) that these are super-talented fishermen andb) that by taking out the predators of the sea (including porpoises as well aswhales — there’s a long sequence in which the crew are trying to catch what thenarrator refers to as a “bottlenose whale” but what is clearly a bottlenose dolphin on screen) they’re helping the ordinaryrank-and-file of Gulf fisherfolk by killing off the predatory species that areexistential threats to the teeny fish they catch great numbers of in their netsfor processing into fish oil, fish paste or heaven knows what — and yet in thefirst 20 minutes of the movie, both a marlin and a bottlenose “whale” get awayfrom Caswell and his crew and his 0-for-2 batting average hardly impresses.(His record does get better later on.)

Muchof the footage of this film may have been faked — Charles thought the octopussequence looked particularly unreal — and it’s one thing to go after sharks(despite the rotten press they’ve received over the years — I remember anarticle written about the time of the release of the movie Jaws pointing out that of the 218 known species ofsharks, only 15 were dangerous to humans — they are genuinely fearsome predators and, as Caswell hadlearned personally well before he made this film, they can fight back) but quite another to see him attackingnot only dolphins but also giant turtles, both endangered species today.There’s an attempt to suggest he’s bringing ’em back alive, but that’s beliedby the absence of any visible facilities on his surprisingly small ship to keepan aquatic creature alive long enough for the boat to put into port and offloadit. It’s an interesting little curio but little more, and I’ve seenconsiderably more compelling nature films made even earlier than this one (likeRobert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North and the Merian Cooper/Ernest Schoedsack Grass and Chang), but it’s still an odd little movie even though much of it seemshorrendously politically incorrect these days!

“General Electric Theatre”: Two Episodes, 1955

2012-02-10T18:49:00.001-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Charles and I screened two episodes of the 1950’sseries General Electric Theatre whichwe’d downloaded from archive.org, including one with Myrna Loy and one withJohnnie Ray. The one with Loy was called “It Gives Me Great Pleasure” and casther as Kate Kennedy, a widow with two sons who since the death of her husband(presumably in World War II, though that isn’t specified) has become a star ona lecture circuit run by David Wadsworth (Zachary Scott, who’s supposed to beplaying a mostly sympathetic character but still comes off as a bit of arotter, especially given that the cinematographer lit his head in a way thatmade it look like there was a white streak down the middle of his hair, leavingus to wonder if he were wearing a skunk). She’s getting restive because thetime she spends lecturing and the even greater time she spends traveling fromone city to another is keeping her away from her kids, and she thinks she’sfound a way out when she lectures in Dallas and meets the wealthy Jim Tweedy(Robert Preston) — only there’s a misunderstanding between the two that derailstheir budding relationship and propels her not only back onto the lecture circuitbut into the waiting arms of her long-time unrequited lover, David Wadsworthhimself (and the sight of Myrna Loy and Zachary Scott, of all people, locked inwhat’s supposed to be a happily-ever-after embrace is actually a bit queasy;one wonders where William Powell and Joan Crawford are when they’re so clearlyneeded!).

The other one was considerably more interesting: it was called “TheBig Shot,” aired in 1955 (as was “It Gives Me Great Pleasure”) and starredJohnnie Ray (though he was credited with the more normal spelling of his firstname, “Johnny,” which irritated him) as Johnny Pulaski, an aspiring singer whowins an audition in New York with a demo of a song called “Paths of Paradise”(though what we hear is a fully orchestrated arrangement of the song —obviously it was his then-current Columbia single and he was hoping the showwould promote it) and looks set for a job on a radio show. Only he bristles atbeing asked to sing songs like “Moonlight in Vermont” (a then-current hit and alousy vehicle for Ray’s voice)and bristles even more about being told by his would-be manager, Norris (RalphSanford), that he can’t be successful with an ethnic name like “Pulaski” and hewill need to change it. At one point Norris starts rattling off a long list ofnames and it soon becomes clear both to Johnny and to the audience that he’sasking Johnny to pick one — and one of them is “Johnny Harvard.”

This plot isso close to the famous story of Harry James’ attempt to get Frank Sinatra tochange his name to “FrankieSatin” (Sinatra, as the world knows, refused, and later he joked, “If I’d gonealong with it I’d be working cruise ships today”) I wondered if that was theinspiration for Beatrice Joy Chute’s script. Ray, his famous hearing aidclearly visible on screen (he had become partially deaf in one ear due to achildhood accident, and later he began to lose his hearing in the other ear aswell; needless to say, nasty critics who didn’t like him joked that he’d beendeafened by the sound of his own voice), is actually quite credible as an actor(a good deal better than he was in his only feature film, There’s NoBusiness Like Show Business), clearlynervous at being forced into a mold and a style not his own, equally nervousabout whether he’s good enough to make the grade in the big-time, andforthright and fervent about keeping his family’s last name when even hisfather (Steven Geray) says he won’t mind his son compromising and takinganother name for his career. (It occurred to me that “Palmer” might have been aworkable Anglicization of “Pulaski,” just as Italian-American singer Antonio diBenedetto from San Francisco Anglicized his name and achieved enduring fame as Tony Bennett) —and the song “Paths to Paradise,” grandiloquent as all hell and more than a bitpretentious, is nonetheless quite good and could stand with a revival.

Get Outta Town (Davis-Wilson Productions, Beckman Film Corp., 1960)

2012-02-09T13:33:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was Get Outta Town (the imdb.com page “normalizes” the title to Get Out ofTown, but Get Outta Town was what appeared on the posters as well as theactual credit), a 1960 gangster movie set and shot on the streets of L.A. andproduced by Charles Davis (who also directed) and Doug Wilson from a script byBob Wehling. I hadn’t had much hope for a 62-minute gangster “B” from 1960 (thelate date, well after the theatrical heyday of the “B” movie, suggested it wasreally aimed at drive-ins) but Get Outta Town proved to be surprisingly good, owing a lot to thegangster films of the 1930’s but also fresh enough to seem relatively originaland certainly done with style and panache. The plot features Kelly Oleson(co-producer Doug Wilson) — once again, imdb.com “normalizes” the name to“Olson” but “Oleson” is how the character is identified on the final creditroll. He’s just returned to L.A. after three years to attend the funeral of hisyounger brother, who supposedly fell to an accidental death while drunk butwhom Kelly is convinced was murdered. Two L.A. police officers, Sergeant Willis(Frank Harding, whose military bearing and overall ugliness makes him justright for this hateful role) and Officer Kemper (Steve Bradley), meet him whenhe arrives and tell him in no uncertain terms that they don’t consider himwelcome and if he knows what’s good for him he’ll turn around and get outta town(hence the title).

His mother (Beppie De Vries) angrily turns down the money heoffers for his brother’s funeral and makes it clear (in a scene prettyobviously copied from the confrontation between Humphrey Bogart and MarjorieMain in Dead End) that she doesn’t want him in town either. He’s got both anex-wife and an ex-girlfriend, but they’re not thrilled to see him either: the ex-girlfriend responds to hisattempt to get affectionate with her as if he’s trying to rape her and hisex-wife is now the wife of gangster Rico Lanari (Tony Wilson). He goes to seeRico at a weird establishment that at first looks like a bookie joint (well,there are a lot of people with telephones taking bets on horses and a radio isbroadcasting the races) but also seems to be offering prostitution and allmanner of illegal services, so much so that I joked, “What is this, ‘Crimes ’RUs’?” Rico has two henchmen, one of whom, Squirrel (Tommy Holden, who bore anodd resemblance to San Diego City Councilmember Todd Gloria in his profileshots but looked more like Jerry Lewis full-face), is an old friend of Kelly’sbut the other, Tony (Lee Kross, definitely the hottest-looking male in thefilm), takes an instant dislike to him. Eventually Kelly realizes that Rico wasbehind the murder of his brother (ya remember Kelly’s brother?) and he flees L.A. with his old girlfriend in tow.

There’s really not much more plot to it than that, but it’s done with asurprising sense of style and a skill (the cinematographer was LawrenceRaimond) at getting noiratmospherics out of real cityscapes. It’s also noteworthy in that instead ofthe usual ominous, heavy orchestral score Get Outta Town is scored with jazz big-band music by Bill Holman(the only personassociated with this movie I’d heard of before!), who at the time was trying tohold a big band together and, that being an economically preposterous thing todo in 1960 (unless you were Duke Ellington and could subsidize it with yourroyalties as a first-class songwriter), he was no doubt grateful for thepaycheck. At first Holman’s music is too light and bouncy to work as a noirunderscore — the opening, in which Kellygets beaten up and nearly killed by Rico’s thugs (the scene reappears halfwaythrough the movie, indicating everything else before it has been a flashback),almost seems to be attempting to turn murder into a music video — as the film progresses his music getsbetter and he figures out how to work within his style and still provide appropriatelysinister, mood-creating sounds. Get Outta Town is one of those little “B” gems that sometimes camefrom the most surprising places, and I found it quite watchable even though thearchive.org download came from a wide-screen print that was not letterboxed orpanned-and-scanned, with the result that every car in the movie looked tooshort and every human looked waytoo tall and gaunt.

Buck Privates (Universal, 1941)

2012-02-08T16:58:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was Buck Privates, the second film made by Abbott and Costello and the first in whichthey starred — and an enormous hit (it grossed $4 million, more than anyprevious film in Universal’s history and more than How Green Was MyValley or Citizen Kane, on an investment of $180,000) that basically had itall: surprisingly lavish production values (though much of the mock-battlefootage was clearly stock from Universal’s newsreels), sprightly music (theAndrews Sisters are in the film and are featured almost as prominently asAbbott and Costello are!) and an unexpectedly topical theme. In October 1940,President Franklin Roosevelt signed America’s first peacetime conscription billin its history, and the bill was predictably controversial, especially amongthe still-powerful isolationists who wanted no part of the European or Asianwars. Roosevelt saw U.S. entry into World War II as inevitable and wanted us tobe prepared, and as part of the war-preparation effort he asked the moviestudios to make films illustrating life in the Army for the new draftees andpromoting both voluntary enlistment and cooperation with conscription.

Amongthe movies that got produced in response to the U.S. government’s call werethis one, Great Guns (a virtualcopy of Buck Privates made at 20^thCentury-Fox with Laurel and Hardy instead of Abbott and Costello; left to theirown devices Laurel and Hardy could probably have made a considerably funnierservice comedy, as they had in 1932 with the first half of Pack UpYour Troubles, but they were given theirmarching orders by the “suits” at Fox and the result was a film that’sbasically Buck Privates, only notas good) and Caught in the Draft(a Paramount comedy that starred Bob Hope and was probably more influential forthe future direction of his career than it was as a movie in its own right: inorder to promote it, Paramount booked Hope to perform live at two Army bases,including Fort Ord near Monterey, California; and Hope enjoyed the experienceof performing at Army bases so much he literally did it for the rest of his career!)

Service comediesfrom Hollywood pretty much followed the same formula, and this one is noexception: it’s essentially three parallel tracks — a romantic plotlet in whichArmy “hostess” Judy Gray (Jane Frazee) is torn romantically between arrogantrich bastard Randolph Parker III (Lee Bowman) and his former valet, Bob Martin(Alan Curtis); Parker arrogantly expects his influential father to get him outof the ranks and into a cushy job in Washington, but dad decides to leave himin the Army thinking it will make a man out of him — which, of course, it does— plus Abbott and Costello essentially playing the comic relief (two small-timecon men who join the Army to get away from the cop who’s chasing them, only tofind that the cop, played by Nat Pendleton, is in the Army too and is, ofcourse, their drill sergeant) and lots of music not only from the Andrews Sisters (this is the film thatintroduced their song “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” a hit for them at the time andlater for Bette Midler in 1972) but from Jane Frazee (singing a quite lovelyromantic ballad called “I Wish You Were Here”) and Lou Costello (a quite funnynovelty in which he’s stuck in the kitchen with Shemp Howard — who before hegot tapped to replace his brother Curly in the Three Stooges worked with quitea few other legendary comedians, including W.C. Fields in The BankDick and Olsen and Johnson in Hellzapoppin’ and Crazy House — and fantasizes that he’s a captain).

Indeed, Charles thought themusic held up better than any other element in the film — though the Abbott andCostello verbal routines are still very funny (their main writer, John Grant,got a “special material” credit, and deserved it) and it was nice to see theirfirst one, in which Costello claims never to have played craps before but hiscommand of such gambling lingo as “fade it” and “let it ride” “outs” him — andin which for once it’s Costello who takes Abbott’s bankroll and not the otherway around (though Abbott cons Costello back and gets the money in a laterscene). I’ve had mixed feelings about Abbott and Costello; as a kid, watchingthese movies when San Francisco’s Channel 7 showed them early Saturdaymornings, I thought they were hilarious; later I thought Laurel and Hardy andthe Marx Brothers were a good deal funnier; then in the early 2000’s whenAmerican Movie Classics (in their death throes as a classic movie channel beforethey went all John Wayne or James Bond all the time) showed quite a few of theAbbott and Costello features, my reaction was that maybe they weren’t funnierthan Laurel and Hardy or the Marx Brothers but they’re a damned sight funnierthan just about anyone who’s done movie comedy since.

Leonard Maltin’s book MovieComedy Teams, published in 1970 and revised in 1974, wasappreciative of Abbott and Costello but also zeroed in on their main weakness:“[W]ith few exceptions, the team never strove to portray realistic charactersin their films. If they had any flaw, this was it. They always provided laughs,but they could never establish the bond that made Laurel and Hardy so popularwith audiences; they never convinced their fans that the two guys they wereplaying were real people, worth caring about.” (Neither did the Marx Brothers,but the Marxes made themselves such figures of anarchistic wish-fulfillmentthey didn’t need to.) Still, Buck Privates holds up pretty well; the drill sequence (in which Costello not onlycan’t tell his left from his right but, in its funniest gag, gets tired ofbeing told to put his rifle on his left shoulder, then on his right, then onhis left again ad infinitum andwhines to the drill sergeant, “Will ya make up your mind?”) was apparently largely improvised (and, accordingto one imdb.com commentator, was shown by the Japanese army as an alleged example of their enemy’sincompetence!), and though the gags are so old Aristophanes probably would haverejected them as too clichéd, they’re still funny.

End of the Trail (Columbia, 1932)

2012-02-08T16:56:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The night before last Charles and I had screened a movie I’dbeen curious about since I saw a clip of it on a retrospective in the early1970’s: End of the Trail, anextraordinary 1932 production that was probably the first period Western inAmerican history that presented Native Americans sympathetically. (The onlypredecessor I can think of is The Vanishing American, a silent made at MGM in 1925 and starring RichardDix — and based, like End of the Trail, on a story by Zane Grey — and The Vanishing American was a contemporary story rather than a periodWestern like End of the Trail.)The star was Tim McCoy, a Hollywood cowboy whose films had beenbread-and-butter releases for MGM in the late silent era; he was working hisway down the Hollywood food chain and by 1932 had settled in at Columbia, wherehe made a long string of “B” Westerns like Two-Fisted Law (with John Wayne in a supporting role!) and thisbizarre outlier, set in the same heady time and place — the Great Plains in the1870’s — PBS covered in their recent documentary on General George ArmstrongCuster.

McCoy plays Army cavalry captain Tim Travers (it was quite common forMcCoy and other Western stars to play characters with the same first name astheir own), who as the movie opens is being thrown out of his regiment and theArmy itself for having sold modern guns to the Arapahoe Indians that live inthe area of the outpost where he’s stationed. Travers denies the charge butmakes it clear, in the first of a number of surprisingly forthright (if ratherdidactic) speeches in Stuart Anthony’s script that make it clear just what thewhites did to the Indians in settling the West, and in particular how they madetreaties with the tribes and then routinely violated them, that he sympathizeswith the Indians and shares their resentment that the latest treaty, whichguaranteed them a reservation in the northern Dakota territory in perpetuity,has already been broken by American gold miners who are flocking to the BlackHills and crossing through the reservation while the Army is protecting theminers instead of the Indians.

His epaulets are torn off the sleeves of hisuniform (a weird sort of symbolic castration reused in the 1960’s TV series Branded, which starred Chuck Connors as an officer thrown outof the Army for allegedly having shown cowardice in battle) and then theuniform jacket is taken away, and Travers leaves the post with his young son(Wally Albright) and Sergeant O’Brien (Wade Boteler), who though he hasn’t been thrown out of the Army under falsepretenses accompanies Travers nonetheless. A raiding party of U.S. cavalrymen —Travers’ former colleagues — attacks him and O’Brien, and a stray bullet killsTravers’ son. (Today we’d casually and cruelly call that “collateral damage.”)With nowhere else to go, Travers and O’Brien seek sanctuary among theArapahoes, who take them in and make Travers part of their war council. Traverspleads with them to make peace with the white man or face inundation by morewhite settlers than they can either fight off or live with, but the whitesprovoke a confrontation, the Indians storm the fort, and Travers reports to hisold commanding officer, Col. John Burke (Lafe McKee) and offers himself as theonly person who can talk the Indians out of annihilating the fort with theirfar superior numbers. Travers duly emerges from the fort carrying a white flag,the troopers cease firing and so do the Indians — and then one shot rings outfrom the fort, from the mortally wounded Major Jenkins (Wheeler Oakman), who itturns out was the man who had actually been selling guns to the Indians and hadset up Travers for the fall.

Travers is wounded but fortunately the Indiansdon’t take the bait and resume the attack; instead there’s a tag scene in whichthe Indians agree to return to the reservation and Col. Burke announces that hewill be the new Indian agent to administer the territory. End of theTrail also features an attraction betweenTravers and Luana (Luana Walters, who later had some far less illustriouscredits like the anti-marijuana movie Assassin of Youth and the wretched 1942 Bela Lugosi vehicle TheCorpse Vanishes), though even in a moviethis nervy writer Anthony and director D. Ross Lederman didn’t dare an interracial romance — but that (and an annoyinglyracist reference to the Indians as “half-children”) only slightly mar aremarkable film that deserves its reputation as essentially the 1932 “B”version of Dances with Wolves.(Charles pointed out a remarkably similar bit of dialogue in both films, as thewhite army man living with the Indians pleads with them for peace because ifthey attack, the whites will flood the territory with new settlers and takeaway what little land they have left.) According to one message boardcontributor on imdb.com, McCoy personally participated in the oral historyproject in the 1920’s in which survivors of the battle of the Little Big Horn —on the Indian side, the side that had survivors — were interviewed for the only first-hand accounts we haveof it.

End of the Trail is a filmthat was pretty obviously influenced by those researches, and though the scriptgets a bit preachy at times the case it makes against the American whites fortheir treatment of the Native population is one that’s only become familiarsince the late 1960’s and early 1970’s via the revisionist histories of peoplelike Dee Brown, Vine DeLoria, Jr. and Howard Zinn. It’s also a quite well-mademovie, far above the standards of a typical “B” Western; Lederman is a directorI’ve made fun of in the past (in reference to one of his series crime “B”’sfrom the 1940’s I joked that you should never trust a director whose namelooked like it should have “D.D.S.” after it) but he’s superb here, keeping thepace slow and the tone elegiac — and McCoy’s performance is also far ahead ofthe work he turned in on most of his projects. When he points out the abusesthe whites in general and the Army in particular have wreaked on the Indians,his tone is anguished and breathtakingly sincere, and when he’s living among theIndians he portrays — at least as ably as Kevin Costner did 48 years later — aman really at home on neither side, burdened not only by grief at the loss ofhis son at the hands of his fellow whites but concern that the Indians hegenuinely loves and cares about will be swamped by the white settlers andthey’ll either be killed en masse(there’s a quite remarkable speech in the movie by one of the officers thatactually seems to advocate genocide!) or forced to give up the only way of lifethey’ve known. Even McCoy’s age — he was 41, and though he was in good shapefor his age the years are visible on his face — adds to the careworn demeanorhe projects through most of the film.

The most baffling things about Endof the Trail are how on earth Tim McCoy andhis producer, Irving Briskin, got it greenlighted, and what audiences whoshowed up at Saturday matinees expecting a normal, generic Tim McCoy Westernmade of it. The print we were watching (a commercial DVD release from VCIEntertainment) was missing the original opening and end titles — instead therewas a rather crude 1950’s drawing that proclaimed the film as a production ofsomething called “Gail Pictures” (and denied us the chance to see thatmarvelously cheesy Statue of Liberty logo Columbia used in the early days) —but it was in excellent shape otherwise, and it was a marvelous opportunity tosee a movie so obscure it isn’t listed in the American Film InstituteCatalog at all (their only listing for Endof the Trail in their 1931-1940 catalog isof a 1936 production, also a Columbia Western, but starring Jack Holt andhaving a totally different plotline from this one) and deserves to beconsiderably better known.

The Road to Singapore (Warner Bros., 1931)

2012-02-06T16:58:00.001-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I picked a film from ourbacklog of TCM recordings called The Road to Singapore, not the 1940 musical with Bing Crosby and Bob Hope that kicked off the“Road” series (and is quite entertaining and funny even though the second onein the series, The Road to Zanzibar — the second and last one directed by frame-breaker Victor Schertzinger— is even better) but a 1931 Warners white-imperialists-in-the-tropicsmelodrama starring William Powell. He plays Hugh Dawltry (though spelleddifferently, the last name is pronounced the same as that of the Who’s leadsinger, Roger Daltrey, and the American Film Institute Catalog for some reason misspells the name as “Dawltrey”),who as the film opens is returning to his plantation on the Pacific island ofKhota. The plantation is being foreclosed on — at least I thought that was themeaning of the sign on its front gate announcing an auction (and incidentallygiving the correct spelling of Dawltry’s last name), though later on Hugh movesback onto the plantation and seemingly doesn’t have any trouble staying there(maybe he returned with enough money to get himself out of hock) — and Hugh isthrown out of the Gymkhana Club in absentia because he shamed the members by running off inthe first place with another man’s wife.

This time he’s pursuing Philippa March(Doris Kenyon), wife of local doctor George March (Louis Calhern, two yearsbefore he played the principal bad guy, Ambassador Trentino of Sylvania, in theMarx Brothers’ Duck Soup), whileGeorge’s sister Rene (Marian Marsh) — “Renée” would be the usual form of thatname for a woman — is pursuing Hugh. Worried that his sister is going to getmixed up with that rotter Hugh Dawltry, George insists that she accompany himas he goes out of town to treat a patient — only that leaves the field open forHugh to seduce, or at least attempt to seduce, George’s wife Philippa. They endup … well, even in the relatively liberal “pre-Code” era of 1931, thefilmmakers (director Alfred E. Green and writer J. Grubb Alexander, adapting anovel called Heat Wave byDenise Robins via a previous stage version by Roland Pertwee) can’t spell itout that they actually made it to the bedroom, but they might as well havebecause when George returns he naturally assumes they did, especially after hefinds the note Hugh wrote Philippa inviting her over to his place. (The note isshown in three separate inserts atdifferent stages of the film, reflecting its importance to the plot.) In theend, in a resolution that makes this (at least briefly) seem more like a moviefrom the second-wave feminist era of the 1970’s than the 1930’s, Philippa getson a boat for Singapore (that’s the only “road” there we’re going to see!) andwalks out on both her husband and her lover,and George confronts Hugh and tries to shoot him but can’t bring himself to doso. The End.

The Road to Singapore is a pretty silly and meaningless movie plot-wise, and Doris Kenyon andMarian Marsh look so much alike it’s almost impossible to figure out whyWilliam Powell’s character is attracted to one but not the other, but asCharles pointed out it’s a good example of how far Hollywood’s directors andwriters could push the envelope of traditional morality as long as they twistedthe story’s logic enough to remain in at least technical compliance with theProduction Code. What’s more, it’s a stunningly atmospheric movie (and it wasnice to see a good-quality print of something after having suffered throughthose scratched, grainy, washed-out things we’ve been downloading fromarchive.org!), beautifully photographed by Robert Kurrle (Gloria Swanson’sdissatisfaction with him during the making of her 1927 film Sadie Thompson, also a film about the Pacific Islands, is hard tounderstand from his great work here) and directed by Green with far more of avisual sense than he usually showed even though they probably went no furtherwest than Catalina, Hollywood’s all-purpose stand-in for the South Pacific backthen. The Road to Singapore is also one of those early sound films that didn’t have a backgroundscore; instead source music supposedly being played by native musicians is usedto heighten certain scenes, much the way Hawai’ian music was used in the 1931Charlie Chan film The Black Camel — pounding native drums add to the emotional power of theconfrontations between the leads and one early scene features a native bandplaying some odd-looking plucked string instruments. A lot of this filmactually gains from not being drenched inthe big, expansive Hollywood scores that eventually became de rigueur in films like this!

Secrets of Eden (Craig Anderson Productions, SOE Films, Lifetime, 2012)

2012-02-06T14:59:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

This morning I watched the Lifetime TV-movie Secrets ofEden — “Eden” in this case being a smalltown in Vermont whose main industry, if you can call it that, is sellingoverpriced antiques to tourists — and it begins with voice-over narrations by ayoung minister who’s just been hired to take over the church in Eden (just whatdenomination of Christianity is unspecified, but it’s one that doestotal-immersion baptisms since one figures prominently in the plot) and a youngwoman who isn’t identified but turns out to be Katie Hayward, daughter of Alice(Sonya Salomaa) and George Hayward. George is the owner of a chain ofsporting-goods stores and he and Alice have what seems from the outside to be aperfect marriage, but behind closed doors he regularly beats her. She finallygets up the courage to throw him out of the house after one particularly brutalassault — she makes his departure the condition for her not pressing chargesagainst him — largely because through this period she’s been going through“pastoral counseling” from Pastor Stephen Drew (John Stamos), and after Georgeleaves (though they’re still married) she and Stephen get hot ’n’ heavy witheach other and have a sexual affair (shown by director Tawnia McKiernan in a hotbit of soft-core porn that’s considerably more exciting than the rest of themovie!), only Pastor Drew has guilt feelings about the affair and breaks it offon the night the two were supposed to take their first out-of-town triptogether.

This leads Alice to decide to invite George to move back in andattempt a reconciliation — while they’ve been apart he continued to e-mail herpoems (apparently he’s quite the romantic when he’s not beating her up) and healso bought their daughter Katie an expensive pair of sports shoes to help heras a soccer player. Only Alice, who’s been reconnecting with her spiritualroots in the Christian church and also developing some new ones with HeatherLaRoche, local antiques dealer and New Ager who’s written a book called Angelsand Aurascapes (“Aurascapes” is also thename of her shop). She decides to be baptized in Pastor Drew’s church; Georgehas a jealous hissy-fit over that and gets even crazier after it’s happened. Hedemands to know what she was wearing when she did the total immersion, and whenshe says, “A long shirt over a bathing suit,” he accused her of making a publicspectacle of herself and thereby embarrassing him, which leads him to a fightin which he ultimately strangles her to death. Then we hear a shot and see aflash from the house, and at first the killings are reported as amurder-suicide until someone from the Eden police’s CSI unit (or whatever theycall it) figures out that the gunshot that killed him went in at an angle thatcould not possibly have been a suicide shot.

The police immediately fasten ontoPastor Drew as a suspect, and prosecutor Catherine Benicasa (Anna Gunn — she’sdescribed on the imdb.com page for this film — which lists only five of itsactors — as a police detective but that’s not how she comes across in the film;indeed, given her blonde hair, severe demeanor and utter conviction in Drew’sguilt, she strikes me as a portrait of what Nancy Grace must have been likebefore she quit her job as a prosecutor and joined Fox News) goes after himwith about as much professional detachment as Javert showed in his pursuit ofJean Valjean. Eventually she finds the journal Alice kept, which gives us muchof the backstory of her relationships with both her husband and Drew (this filmis non-linear in ways that just seem arbitrary and confusing, and one sometimeshas to look closely at Sonya Salomaa’s hair style to determine just when a flashback scene is taking place), and Katie saysthat her family’s dog would have gone after a stranger attacking their home oranyone in it, leading to Pastor Drew because he, alone of all the townspeoplewho didn’t actually live at the Haywards’, was friendly with the dog.

Prettyearly on I became convinced that this film (written by Anne Meredith, adaptinga best-selling novel by Chris Bohjalian) was going to end with Katie turningout to be her father’s murderer because, after killing her mom, he had tried torape her — Bohjalian and Meredith didn’t quite go that far but they did have Katie be her dad’s killer (she came home early— she had gone to a concert with friends and was supposed to sleep over therebut she wanted to fetch her laptop — discovered her mom dead and her dadsitting in a chair, drinking, barely conscious but still very much alive, andshot him) and Pastor Drew actually helped her get away with it, saying he’d setup the scene to look like suicide and, if that didn’t fool the police, theywould leak evidence implicating himso she would not be suspected. Secrets of Eden was an O.K. movie that had the potential to be muchbetter than it was, and the key thing wrong with it was McKiernan’s sluggishdirection, way too slow and dullfor what was supposed to be a thriller — though in general the movie was wellacted and, aside from a somewhat far-fetched resolution, was great bad fun. Itdidn’t help that Drew has a brief affair with Heather after Alice dies (or thathe calls her “Alice” in bed!) — John Stamos is, as he was in his youth, adecent-looking but hardly drop-dead gorgeous hunk of man-meat and it’s hard tobelieve two women in the dramatis personae both found him irresistible; frankly, I found the actor playing theabusive husband far more visually appealing!

One Night in the Tropics (Universal, 1940)

2012-02-04T19:01:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Lastnight Charles and I cracked open my latest DVD arrival from Columbia House —the 15-DVD boxed set of all 28 movies Abbott and Costello made for Universal(which is all but eight of their feature films — they made Rio Rita, Lost ina Harem and Abbott and Costelloin Hollywood for MGM, Jack andthe Beanstalk and Abbott andCostello Meet Captain Kidd for Warners, AfricaScreams for Nassour, The NooseHangs High for Eagle-Lion and their lastjoint film, Dance With Me, Henry,for United Artists) — and watched the first one, a 1940 semi-musical called OneNight in the Tropics in which Abbott andCostello were billed third and fourth. The story began life in 1914 as a novelcalled Love Insurance by EarlDerr Biggers — who’s remembered today, if at all, only as the creator of Charlie Chan, but who actually hada quite long and profitable career writing all sorts of pop fiction, includingthe original source novel George M. Cohan adapted into the hit play SevenKeys to Baldpate.

Playboy Steve Harper(Robert Cummings) has been in and out of several relationships with women butinsists that the one he’s currently dating, Cynthia Merrick (Nancy Kelly), isThe One he’s going to marry and live happily ever after with. Only he happensto run into — literally —Cynthia’s fearsome Aunt Kitty (a marvelous performance by Mary Boland), whohates him at first sight and is willing to do whatever she has to do to breakup the relationship. Anxious about the wedding, Steve complains to his friendJim Moore (Allan Jones, top-billed), the son of insurance company owner Mr.Moore (Richard Carle doing an impression of Charles Coburn at his mostdyspeptic), and Jim offers to sell him a “love insurance” policy for $100,000.According to the policy, if Steve doesn’t marry Cynthia (or anyone else, as we learn about two-thirds of the waythrough the movie but the characters seem to forget until the final frames) bya set deadline, Moore’s company is out $1 million. Steve’s former girlfriend,singer Mickey Fitzgerald (Peggy Moran), still has the hots for him and istrying to latch on to him and get him away from Cynthia. Jim decides to keep aneye on the proceedings to safeguard the investments of both his father andgangster/club owner (in a 1940 movie that’s redundant!) Roscoe (William Frawley),who’s essentially bought half the policy in a reinsurance deal and isthreatening the Moores and everyone else involved with bodily harm if themarriage doesn’t happen and the policy has to be paid out. With this setup, anyreasonably hardened moviegoer either in 1940 or now could guess what’s going tohappen next: Jim is going to fall in love with Cynthia himself, and it’s goingto be touch-and-go whether his heart or his (and his family’s) pocketbook winsout — along with his and his family’s continued state of well-being at thehands of revenge-minded Roscoe.

Midway through the movie, Jim decides to spiritSteve and Cynthia to the Caribbean resort island of San Marcos and have themstay at the island’s hotel, whose proprietor Escobar (Leo Carrillo) insiststhat once you go to San Marcos with the person you’re trying to get to marryyou, it’s practically a done deal. Only Mickey gets Steve drunk and he missesthe boat, so Jim has to arrange for Steve to fly down — and Mickey turns up onSan Marcos herself, while among the permanent residents is amorous bullfighterRudolfo (Don Alvarado), who gets the hots for Cynthia himself. The movie endsthe way you think it’s going to, with Jim marrying Cynthia, Steve marryingMickey (thereby invalidating the love insurance policy that kicked off thisstory and gave it its original title), Aunt Kitty paired with Escobar andeveryone dancing to the music of San Marcos’s theme song, “Farandole” —composed, like all the other songs in the film, by Jerome Kern. Surprisingly,Universal did not ballyhoo Kern’sassociation with this film (he isn’t mentioned in the credits — at least not onthis version: I recall seeing this film before in a version in which Kern was mentioned on the opening credits) even though he wasa major composer with huge hits under his belt. Maybe it’s not so surprisingafter all, given that the five songs Kern contributed to this film — “You andYour Kiss,” “Remind Me,” “Simple Philosophy” and “Farandole,” with lyrics byDorothy Fields (his collaborator on the superb score for the Astaire-Rogers SwingTime) and “Your Dream” with lyrics by OscarHammerstein II (which I suspect wasn’t written for this film but was a leftoverfrom the “insertion numbers” Kern and Hammerstein wrote at Universal in 1936 forthe second film of Show Boat,which also starred Allan Jones) — are competent and pleasant enough butsingularly unmemorable.

As for Abbott and Costello, in case you were wonderingwhere they fit into all this, they play two henchmen of Roscoe’s, and thescreenwriters (Kathryn Scola, Francis Martin, Gertrude Purcell and CharlesGrayson) didn’t bother to write any material for them. Not that they needed to:by the time they made this movie Abbott and Costello were long-time veterans ofburlesque, vaudeville, Broadway and (especially) radio, and they had a hugebacklog of material, most of it (like the famous “Who’s on First?” routine,excerpted here and given a longer presentation five years later in the film TheNaughty Nineties) by their go-to guy forhilarious talking gags, John Grant. The original plan was for the second halfof the film to take place on the French Riviera and the movie to be called Riviera, and when that plan was scotched the movie wentthrough various title changes including Moonlight in the Tropics and Caribbean Holiday before One Night in the Tropics was finally settled on. It doesn’t help that (asCharles pointed out) neither Allan Jones nor Bob Cummings are playingespecially appealing characters, or that Nancy Kelly and Peggy Moran look sosimilar that, especially when cinematographer Joseph Valentine decides to getatmospheric, it’s hard to tell them apart. It also doesn’t help that a storywhose central premise seems to lend itself to lunatic humor gets a surprisingly“straight” treatment — one wonders what Preston Sturges could have made of thewhole idea of a marriage-shy playboy threatening to bankrupt his friend who’ssold him a “love insurance” policy — or that Abbott and Costello’s routines arereally the only reliable laughs this film has.

It’s a bizarre movie becausevirtually everyone in it had worked (or would work) with someone better; whenAllan Jones croons to Nancy Kelly on board the ship to San Marcos one can’thelp but remember A Night at the Opera, where he got to sing a much better song (Nacio Herb Brown’s andArthur Freed’s “Alone”) in a movie with even more legendary comedians (the MarxBrothers) than Abbott and Costello — and the “Farandole” also evokes ANight at the Opera through its resemblanceto “Cosi-Cosa,” the big Brown-Freed production number from that film. AllanJones had worked with the Marx Brothers, Mary Boland (brilliantly) with W. C.Fields, and later on Robert Cummings would work with Alfred Hitchcock andWilliam Frawley (again, brilliantly) with Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. “Everycritic, to a man, singled [Abbott and Costello] out as the sole bright spot inthis otherwise dreary film,” wrote Leonard Maltin in his book MovieComedy Teams, and while the movie isn’tquite that bad, it does rather drone on and get predictable and dull wellbefore it’s over. Still, give Universal credit for knowing what they had inAbbott and Costello, signing them to a long-term contract, and giving them astheir next film the service comedy Buck Privates, a mega-hit which shot them to stardom.

You're Telling Me! (Paramount, 1934)

2012-02-02T22:20:00.001-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film I picked was You’reTelling Me!, a 1934 Paramount vehiclefor W. C. Fields. Basically Fields’ movies fit into one of two categories, the“husband” movies and the “carnie” movies, and this was definitely a “husband”movie. Fields plays Samuel Bisbee, professional optometrist (though we neveractually see him working as such) and amateur inventor who’s been working for10 years to perfect his latest, and most commercially promising, invention, atotally puncture-proof car tire. He’s also got the usual battle-axe wife he hadto contend with in these films, Bessie Bisbee (Louise Carter), and their niceingénue daughter Pauline (Joan Marsh, whose winsome manner and authority whenthe role calls for it should have marked her for biggers and betters) hasfallen in love with the son of their small town’s richest people, theMurchisons.

Her boyfriend Bob (Buster Crabbe, billed as Larry “Buster” Crabbebefore he got typecast in roles like Tarzan and Flash Gordon) is adown-to-earth guy but his parents (Fred Sullivan and Kathleen Howard) areinsufferable status-conscious snobs; at one point Mrs. Murchison is willing torelent and allow the marriage when she learns that Bessie Bisbee’s maiden namewas Warren and she was one of the Virginia Warrens — only to break it off again when Sam comes homeunexpectedly, rolling an automobile wheel containing his experimental tire andacting like the down-to-earth working-class guy he is. You’re Telling Me! (the exclamation point is on the opening title card)began as a Redbook short story in theearly 1920’s called “Mr. Bisbee’s Princess” by Julian Leonard Street (thoughthe magazine’s name back then was Red Book — two words); it’s unclear when the magazine first published it butit appeared in book form as part a collection of Street’s stories, Mr.Bisbee’s Princess and Other Stories, in1925. Unusually for a Fields movie, he isn’t credited as a writer, either underhis own name or a pseudonym — though “Charles Bogle,” a name he commonly usedlater on for his writing credits (and before that he’d used as a gag in hisstage act, drawing out the “o” in “Bogle” to unusual Fieldsian lengths),appears on the cast list as the name of a minor character.

It’s not clear justwho thought this old story would be a suitable Fields vehicle, but he certainlyput his stamp on it even though some of the movie’s funniest scenes either wereor seemed to have been spliced in almost at random — in one sequence he’s toldthat he can square things with his wife by bringing her a pet bird, and hedecides that he needs a bigger bird than his friend’s, so there are somescreamingly funny scenes in which he’s attempting to lead an ostrich down thestreets; and the writers contrive to have the film end on a golf course soFields can do his famous “Golf Specialist” routine, first introduced by him inthe Ziegfeld Follies of 1915 andfilmed on its own as an RKO short in 1930 (though that film presented it as itwould have been on stage, in front of a painted backdrop representing theopening tee of a golf course, whereas here it’s filmed on an actual golf course— or at least a reasonable simulacrum thereof on the Paramount backlot). It’salso one of those movies whose plot resembles a bell-shaped curve, with Fields’fortunes plummeting until at the midpoint he’s contemplating suicide — his wifeis mad at him, his daughter has broken up with her boyfriend and blames dad,and his demonstration of the puncture-proof tire (which he tests by shooting agun at it, itself leading to some very bizarre black-humor gags, with Fieldstelling the demonstration’s witnesses, “Stand back, the bullets bounce”) is a washoutwhen, unbeknownst to him, the police tow away his own car (which he’s equippedwith the special tires, but which he parked illegally) and park one of theirpolice cars in its place.

He slinks home on a train and is about to commitsuicide by drinking iodine (only he can’t keep his collapsible spoon fromcollapsing and folding in on itself just when he’s about to raise the fataldose to his lips) when his deus ex machina appears in the form of Princess Maria Lescaboura (the suitablyexotic-looking Adrienne Ames), who also has a bottle of iodine out — she’s onlygoing to use it topically but he’s convinced she, too, is contemplating suicideand talks her out of it. She hears out his story and takes pity on him,insisting that her state visit to the U.S. include a stop at his town, CrystalSprings, and where he’s finding himself the talk of the town for all the wrongreasons — a couple of gossips saw him entering the Princess’s compartment onthe train and assumed the worst. The film ends with the Princess (who’s beingforced to marry her country’s crown prince even though she loves someone else)rehabilitating Bisbee’s reputation, reconciling him with his wife, getting BobMurchison and Pauline Bisbee together and starting a bidding war with theNational Tire Company over Bisbee’s super-tire (they found Bisbee’s car wherethe cops had towed it, tested the tires themselves and found they worked) andgetting him a $1 million fee plus royalties. As the Princess drives out oftown, Bisbee — convinced through all of this that she’s just an ordinary woman posing as a princess — drawls out to her, “We certainly putthat princess stuff over, didn’t we?” “You’re telling me!” she says — the onlyexplanation we ever get for the title.

You’re Telling Me! is one of Fields’ best movies, maybe not quite asrelentless as his other “husband” movies (The Fatal Glass of Beer, It’s aGift, The Man on the Flying Trapeze and TheBank Dick) but showing off his skill asa physical comedian as well as a verbal one — the opening is a long pantomimesequence in which a drunk Fields comes home shortly before midnight, takes offhis shoes so as not to wake up his wife when he enters, juggles shoes and hatand can’t get his key in the door until he uses another one of his invention, afunnel-shaped device to aid inebriated latecomers in getting their keys intheir locks — and also showing how surprisingly agile Fields was before hereally got bloated from years of overdrinking. Frankly, it’s jarring to watchBuster Crabbe tower over him in their scenes together! It’s yet anotherindication of how much better movie comedies were in the classic era — as I’venoted before, maybe one could make the case that movie dramas have benefitedfrom the greater sexual freedom of the post-Code era, but somehow most oftoday’s “comedies” offer too few good laughs and too many tasteless “jokes” tobe genuinely warm, human or funny. (The few exceptions are movies like Kabluey! that have deliberately sought to evoke older styles ofcomedy.)

The Las Vegas Story (RKO, 1952)

2012-02-01T13:42:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was The LasVegas Story, a 1952 RKO/Howard Hughesproduction starring Jane Russell and Victor Mature in a movie with noir pretensions that was really much more noir thematically than visually. It starts out on atrain barreling through the Southwest (while I’m in the middle of readingRichard White’s Railroaded it was fascinating to watch a movie that opens on a train!) anddiscovers the unhappily married couple Lloyd and Linda Rollins (Vincent Priceand Jane Russell) as the train approaches what’s billed in the station as “LasVegas, the Streamlined City.” (It’s hard to remember, but in the 1940’s and1950’s the word “streamlined” had the same sort of futuristic cachet as“high-tech” did in the 1980’s and 1990’s.) As the streamlined train approachesthe streamlined city Lloyd and Linda are in the middle of an argument; shewants to stay on the train until its final destination in Los Angeles, while hewants to get off in Las Vegas. She has bad memories of the place, which are keptambiguous at first but which we eventually learn are due to her having onceromanced a servicemember there during World War II while she was a singer atthe Last Chance saloon and casino (a remnant of the unpretentious gamblingjoints that were mostly put out of business by the Flamingo and the otherglittering casino/hotels that were put up on the Strip in the wake of itssuccess — one could watch the 1941 Las Vegas Nights, this movie and the 1960 Ocean’s Eleven in chronological order and have a pretty good ideaof the growth and change in Vegas over those years) with Hoagy Carmichael(playing himself under the guise of a character named “Happy” — ironic, sincehe goes through the whole movie with a hang-dog look on his face andworld-weary pessimistic dialogue to match) as her accompanist.

Lloyd pretendsto be a well-heeled stockbroker, so loaded that he can walk into a casino, askfor $100,000 credit and get it without the casino management batting an eye,but it turns out he’s actually broke — we learn that from a telegram sent him by a mysterious “Will” back inBoston well before the other characters do — and the $10,000 he actually got incasino credit came from pledging a fabulously elaborate necklace he had boughtfor his wife in more flush times. (The opening credits included anacknowledgment to “Cartier, Inc.” for supplying the necklace, and at first Iridiculed that credit, not realizing how crucial a plot function That Necklacewould serve.) Linda didn’t want to go back to Vegas because when she workedthere before she’d been the girlfriend of Dave Andrews (Victor Mature), whothen was a servicemember and is now a lieutenant for the Clark County Sheriff’soffice with a “beat” on the Las Vegas Strip. Dave senses Linda’s unhappinessand wants to resume their relationship — there’s the little detail that she’sstill married to someone else but, since Nevada was then still famous for easydivorces as well as legal gambling, he doesn’t think that’s going to be much of a problem.

The Rollinses arestaying at the Hotel Fabulous (it and the Last Chance are fictionalestablishments but all the rest of the Las Vegas hostelries we glimpse,including the Flamingo, the Desert Inn and the Golden Nugget, are for real) andthey and Dave all find themselves under the watchful eye of a mystery man (witha nice hairy chest which, since he’s doing a lot of his surveilling at theHotel Fabulous’s pool, we get to see a lot of) who turns out to be a privateinvestigator, Tom Hubler (Brad Dexter), who’s been hired by the insurancecompany that has the policy on Linda’s necklace. Eventually it turns out thatLloyd Rollins is not only broke but an embezzler to boot — he insisted onstopping in Vegas in the hopes that he could hit a winning streak that wouldenable him to replace the money he embezzled — and the Las Vegas Sheriff gets awarrant for his arrest, which not surprisingly Dave Andrews is all too glad toserve personally — but not before Hubler turns out to be a crook interested instealing the necklace and smuggling it out of the country. He rents a Mercuryand takes Linda along as a hostage, and Dave charters a helicopter and giveschase — well, it’s a Howard Hughes production set in contemporary times, soaircraft had to figure in it somewhere! — and the sight of Dave and his pilot deftly flying their helicopterjust inches off the ground as it pursues Hubler through open airplane hangarsis exciting and a lot of fun. Eventually Hubler is killed — the necklace fallsout of his suit as he expires in the desert — Lloyd is arrested and extraditedback to Massachusetts, and Linda announces her intention to spend the next sixweeks establishing legal residence in Nevada so she can sue for divorce and sheand Dave can get together.

The Las Vegas Story, directed by Robert Stevenson (who had a weirdcareer trajectory — in the 1930’s he worked in his native England and wasconsidered one of only two British directors good enough for an internationalcareer; Alfred Hitchcock was the other; later he followed Hitchcock to the U.S.and directed the Joan Fontaine/Orson Welles Jane Eyre, got on Howard Hughes’ good side by taking on hispet project I Married a Communist — though by the time Stevenson finished it, it had been retitled TheWoman on Pier 13 — and ended up at WaltDisney Studios, of all places, directing Mary Poppins and most of Disney’s other biglive-action/animation fusion movies in the 1960’s) from a script by EarlFenton, Harry Essex and an uncredited Paul Jarrico (whom Hughes removed fromthe credits after he was blacklisted; Jarrico went to court to challenge theblacklist and, alas, lost) based on a story by Jay Dratler, is the sort ofmovie more interesting in its parts than as a whole. There’s a quite remarkablescene in which Jane Russell’s character visits the Last Chance and sees it forthe first time since she worked there — and the sequence dissolves back andforth from footage of her now, hearing the song “I Get Along Without You VeryWell” in an echoey voice, and her several years previously without any echo onher voice — and one gets the impression that if Marcel Proust had directed amovie, this is what it would have looked like.

The helicopter/car chase is alsonoteworthy, as is a subplot in which Dave busts an underage couple who weretrying to get married at one of the quickie chapels Vegas then abounded in(still does, as far as I know); Dave feels guilty because the boy had just beendrafted and was worried that if they didn’t get hitched immediately he’d neversee his girlfriend again, especially since their parents were determined tobreak them up, but at the end his dad relents and gives the needed parentalconsent for the wedding and even offers to host it in a more inspiring locationthan a Las Vegas Strip joint. Hoagy Carmichael’s performance of “The MonkeySong” — like “I Get Along Without You Very Well,” one song he wrote completelyhimself, words and music (usually he, likeElton John, just wrote the music) — is also one of the highlights, filled withironic comments about bop and a passing reference to Bix that reminds us thatCarmichael actually knew Bix(which must have made the historical inaccuracies of the film Young Man witha Horn, made two years earlier andalso featuring Carmichael, all that much more galling to him!). The LasVegas Story is a good movie that mighthave been great, though it’s probably as good as it could have been underHughes’ all-controlling auspices, and director Stevenson deserves credit forturning both Mature’s and Russell’s limitations as actors to his and the movie’sadvantage: his tendency to bluster even on the most trivial lines becomes alegitimate depiction of hot-headedness (as it had under an even weakerdirector, H. Bruce Humberstone, in I Wake Up Screaming 11 years earlier!) and her monotonous delivery comesoff as believable world-weariness and traumatization.

Karen Cries on the Bus (Cajanegra Producciones, Schweizen Media Group, Filmmovement.com, 2011)

2012-01-31T14:19:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was a 2011Colombian indie called Karen Cries on the Bus, which was billed as a modern-day rewrite ofIbsen’s play A Doll’s House (which I don’t know, and which according to the notes director/writerGabriel Rojas Vera contributed to the press kit ends where his movie begins:with the unfulfilled wife leaving her asshole husband and suddenly facing thetask of making both a living and a life on her own) but seemed to me to be sortof an update of Diary of a Mad Housewife, An Unfinished Woman and those other 1970’s first-flush-of-feminism(second wave) movies in which a personally, emotionally, psychologically andsexually unfulfilled housewife leaves her boring and/or passive-aggressivelyabusing husband, has a brief relationship with another man and emerges singlebut also proud and with a new sense of her own identity.

The film takes placein Bogotá, which for once in a movie is not depicted as a hell-hole of corruption, drug-dealingand murder, but a pretty ordinary place, and as the movie opens the first thingwe see is, indeed, Karen (Angela Carrizosa) crying on a bus. She’s carrying allher belongings in a small suitcase — one of those ones with rollers and a pullhandle so you can drag it along with you instead of having to carry it — andshe shows up in the middle of the night at a ratty rooming house whose landladydoesn’t want to open the door for her but changes her mind when Karen says shecan pay three months’ rent, 540,000 pesos (maybe Colombia isn’t the drug-fueleddanger zone it used to be but it seems as if it’s still subject to one of LatinAmerica’s other chronic economic diseases, inflation), in advance. She tries tomake as comfortable as existence as possible in a sleazepit where the sinkhangs loose from the wall, the shower is chronically dirty (this flashed me back to my days living in a residence hotel, whereI took cleanser into the communal bathroom and cleaned out the tub every time Ibathed) and there’s a cockroach crawling across the bathroom floor. (Karencomplains to the landlady and asks what she should do — and the landlady tellsher, calmly, “Kill it.”) Karen also looks for a job, leaves a résumé at abookstore but is told they’re not hiring, and instead takes a job with a scam“sales” outfit called “American Dream” that supposedly sells English courses toColombians eyeing el Norte but really makes its money ripping off its salespeople. Later she picksup an odd job distributing flyers on the street. She also gets to see a womangive a man a blow job in the window across the courtyard from hers on the firstnight she spends there.

Later she meets neighbor Patricia (Angelica Sanchez),who has a boyfriend named Horacio but who also dates other guys, including amarried man named Alfredo who treats her to nice meals and drinks in exchangefor sex — Patricia is drawn as the sort of person who’s effectively aprostitute but has managed to avoid the direct exchange of sex for money andtherefore can remain in denial of what she’s doing with the men in her life.Meanwhile, Karen hits on a scam that becomes one of her main sources of incomewhen her purse is stolen in a restaurant — or at least she says it is — and she leaves the proprietor with herwedding ring as collateral, then regularly shows up at bus stops and says herpurse has just been stolen and begs for change, which she gets from asurprising number of people (probably more than would give money to such aperson here!). Later she’s caught shoplifting in a supermarket and it’s touchand go whether she’s going to be charged restitution (apparently according toColombian law, or at least that store’s policy, she can be held liable forthree times the value of the items she stole), made to have sex with thestore’s creepy security person, or just allowed to leave — which is what hedoes in the end, telling her never to come back there again.

Eventually,through Patricia and Alfredo, she meets a potential boyfriend named Eduardo(Juan Manuel Diaz Oroztegui), who has a professional job in an office but alsowrites plays in his spare time and has actually got one produced (or did hebankroll it himself?). Eduardo and Karen become an “item” and they start seeingagain and ultimately make it to bed — despite Karen’s concern that he won’tlike her because she has small breasts — and the film’s climax comes when thebookstore she left her résumé at finally calls her with a job offer at just thetime Eduardo wants her to come away with him to Argentina, where he’s beenoffered a writing job. At first she’s willing to go with him, but at one pointhe tells her, “Pick up my jacket for me, will you?” — and at that point sherealizes that even though he may be hotter and more interesting he’s as much amale-chauvinist pig as her ex-husband Mario, so she stays in her ratty room,works at the bookstore and ends up single but proud, and in the final sceneshe’s watching as another woman is crying on the bus she’s on.

Karen Cries on the Bus may have an awkward title (it’s a literaltranslation of the original Spanish one, Karen llora en el Bus) but it’s a marvelous film, not really extendingthe art of the cinema very much but telling a warm, human story, keeping usidentifying with the central character and wanting the best for her, andtelling its story in a series of anecdotes that seem to have no more connectionwith each other than the events of a real life. It’s also quite remarkablydirected and cast; Angela Carrizosa as the lead is neither more nor lessattractive than she should be — neither the old bag nor the sexpot thatHollywood would cast in a role like this; she’s not drop-dead gorgeous butshe’s easy on the eyes and one could readily imagine a man of the world likeEduardo being genuinely attracted to her emotionally as well as sexually. It’sthe sort of understated drama that American filmmakers almost never make(though the truth might be that they aren’t allowed to make them unless they finance them themselves),and it made it to the library as a selection of the alternative DVD clubfilmmovement.com, which should be worthwhile checking out.

Fury Below (George Mercader Productions, 1938)

2012-01-31T14:17:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was Fury Below, a 1938 drama about coal mining produced andwritten by George Mercader, directed by Harry Fraser and originally shot underthe title Hell Diggers untilthe Production Code Administration informed Mercader that he could forget aboutgetting a Code Seal if he put it out with “Hell” in the title. (The AmericanFilm Institute Catalog listsquite a few films from the 1930’s with “Hell” in the title — Hell and HighWater, Hell Below, Hell Below Zero, Hell Bent for Frisco, Hell Bent for Love,Hell Bound, The Hell Cat, Hell Divers, Hell-Fire Austin, Hell in the Heavens,Hell-Ship Morgan and Helldorado — but all but Hell-Ship Morgan were released before the crackdown on Codeenforcement in 1934.) It’s an engaging movie but it’s the sort of story whereonce the basic premises are established in reel one, you know what’s going to happen for the rest of the film.Once we’re told that coal-mine owner James Cole (Phil Dunham) is about to entera sanitarium and is handing over control of the mine to his grandson James ColeIII (Russell Gleason, usually a comic-relief player but reasonably assured as alead), only both the miners and the other office people — particularly foremanJoe Norsen (Rex Lease) and his sister Mary (Maxine Doyle, second-billed), who’sthe elder Cole’s secretary — think there’s no way a college boy can come andtake over a coal mine, we just know that little Jimmy is going to come through in the clutch and save theday.

Once Cole I tells Cole III that the three people he can trust are Mary,Joe and general manager Fred Johnson (LeRoy Mason), we just know that Johnson is going to turn out to be a corruptslimeball — and indeed he does. And once we learn that the mine has been besetby a series of accidents, including one that has just claimed the lives of twopeople, and that in addition to the human toll these accidents are also slowingproduction and threatening the Cole family’s ownership because if they can’tmeet an outstanding delivery contract they will lose the mine throughforeclosure, we can guess that Johnson’s perfidy will include deliberatelyrunning the mine sloppily so that the contract deadline is missed, the Coleslose the mine and he gets an employment contract and a raise from the peopleset to take it over after that. What’s more, once we’re introduced to Johnson’ssister Claire (Sheila Terry) and she immediately latches onto Cole III andtakes him away from the mine the day Johnson’s latest scheduled “accident” issupposed to occur, we’re sure that she’s going to be the “bad girl” from whoseclutches he’ll have to extricate himself so he can end up with “good girl” Maryat the end.

All of that happens, and it also turns out (in a plot twistMercader probably “borrowed” from The Hound of the Baskervilles) that Fred and Claire Johnson are merely posing as brother and sister; that they’ve got a corruptunion boss, Dorsky (Matthew Betz), in cahoots with them, and that part of theirplot is that Dorsky will use the latest “accident” to give the miners an excuseto strike, thereby making sure the contract deadline is missed. There are a fewsemi-original twists in this story, including Cole III ostensibly firing JoeNorson and putting Dorsky in charge of the mine — causing Mary to walk out onhim until he calls both Norsons into his private office and tells them thatthis is part of the trap; he’s learned that Fred Johnson and Dorsky are incahoots and he basically wants to give them enough rope so their plot will berevealed and he can have them both arrested — and the way Cole III learned oftheir involvement in the plot in the first place: he overheard Johnson andDorsky talking about it while sitting in the Johnsons’ living room waiting forClaire to join him on a date.

The ending is also at least a bit different from what we expect: having failed inall his previous attempts to delay production, Fred Johnson sends Emil (JohnMerton), a miner who had lost his sanity due to a brain injury suffered in thelast “accident,” into the mine, and Dorsky has him drill near a sealed doorlabeled with the words “DANGER GAS.” (“‘Danger gas!’ That’s the most dangerouskind — except maybe ‘deadly gas,’” Charles joked.) The idea is that will causean explosion that will stop production on the mine altogether — only Cole andthe Norsons figure the plot out in time and, though they can’t stop Emil fromdrilling, they’re able to confine the conflagration to one floor of the mineand keep the rest of it producing. Dorsky and Emil died, Fred Johnson isarrested and Cole III and Mary end up together at the fade-out. Fury Below (whose opening credits, at least in thearchive.org downloaded print we were watching, appear to have been added to thefilm in the 1960’s) is an incredibly predictable film but also a reasonablyengaging one even though it’s the kind of movie you think you’ve seen before even if you haven’t.

American Experience: Custer's Last Stand (PBS, 2012)

2012-01-30T14:00:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I ended up screening the recent PBS program AmericanExperience: Custer’s Last Stand, whichdespite its title was actually a fairly complete biography of George ArmstrongCuster, an historically ambiguous figure of whom many details are obscure —even his actual rank in the officer corps of the U.S. army. The tombstone forhim on the site of his last battle at the Little Big Horn (though his body isactually buried in the cemetery at West Point) in what was then MontanaTerritory has an inscription that refers to him as “Brt. Maj. Gen.,” with the“Brt.” standing for the no-longer-used military term “brevet.” It meant anofficer who was temporarily promoted from a lower rank to a higher one during awar but only for its duration,with him being reduced automatically to his original rank when the war ended.In Custer’s case, he was promoted to brevet general from captain during theCivil War, rose from captain to colonel during the Indian Wars and when he wentinto battle at the Little Big Horn he was a brevet general (but only a brevet general!) again. The show, written anddirected by Stephen Ives, blessedly kept those tacky re-creations of actualhistorical scenes with actors (usually filmed at angles avoiding showing their faces so as not to expose theirnon-resemblance to the images of the real people!) that have burdened manyrecent PBS documentaries, and it made at least a partial attempt to parallelthe lives of Custer and Sitting Bull. (Oddly, the show did not mention Crazy Horse at all, even though when anhistorical commission had oral interviews done of survivors of the Little BigHorn — on the side that hadsurvivors, the Indian side — in the 1920’s, the actual fighters said that itwas Crazy Horse who had led the battle and was the person they credited with commanding the victory.)

The show’sversion of Custer was basically a brilliant scapegrace, always falling behindon his classwork at West Point and then suddenly catching up, challengingauthority even while attempting to rise in an institution — the military —probably more obsessed with order, discipline and hierarchy than any otherhuman-created entity, and also (like his first Civil War superior, thenotorious General George B. McClellan) convinced that he was destined forgreatness. At times Custer seems a 19^th century prototype of NewtGingrich in his sheer egomania, and at other times he seems to have casthimself perfectly as the hero-villain of a typical war movie, the gung-hocommander who puts himself and his men at unnecessary risk but ultimatelyprevails. (It’s no accident that one of the most famous war movies of all time,They Died With Their Boots On,was made about Custer — or that an equally flamboyant, larger-than-lifepersonality, Errol Flynn, played him.) The show also has a running theme ofAmerica’s treatment of the Indians, which was basically to drive them into eversmaller and smaller “reservations” on the ground that the whites were asuperior race and therefore they should be able to expand their settlementsacross the whole country, the previous inhabitants be damned. When theAmericans did it, they called it “Manifest Destiny”; when the Nazis tried it in20^th Century Europe they called it Lebensraum — “living space.” Like just about every honestdepiction of the settling of the West, this program confirms that AdolfHitler’s famous remark to Edward R. Murrow — “I’m only doing to the Jews whatyou did to the Indians” — was dead-on accurate. (Remember that Hitler’sfavorite reading materials were the German-language Western pulps of Karl May,who had never visited the American West but had learned all the conventions ofthe Western genre from readingits American practitioners and faithfully copied them.)

Indeed, when this showmentioned that Custer had studied Indian languages and customs and consideredhimself sympathetic to them, I could only think of how Adolf Eichmann similarlyresearched the tenets of the Jewish religion and even considered himself aZionist (he was one of those Nazis who favored exiling the Jews over killingthem, but once the final decision was made to exterminate them he was totallyon board), and when he was captured he astonished and revolted his captors byreciting the holiest prayer of the Jewish religion in the original Hebrew. Thefinal battle of Custer’s life — after his genocidal attack on an Indian villageat the Washita River in Kansas in 1868 — was the result of an expedition he hadled into the Black Hills of the Dakota Territory (one of the holiest sites tothe Lakota people; anyone who’s seen both this show and the movie Avatar won’t be able to ignore how much James Cameron drewon Native American spirituality, in particular the idea of being destined byGod to inhabit certain areas of land and thereby literally being damned if theymove from there, whether willingly or by force, in creating the culture andbeliefs of the Na’vi) in 1873.

At the time the Black Hills were part of areservation that had been deeded to the Lakota and the Cheyenne “inperpetuity,” a U.S. government bit of Newspeak in Indian treaties that never meant its literal meaning of “forever.” With whitesettlers already pushing on the bounds of this reservation, and the governmentlooking for an excuse to seize the Black Hills, Custer led his expedition andfound one: the two miners he’d brought along discovered gold, leading to thenext great gold rush in American history after the one in California in 1850 andbefore the Klondike in 1890. Immediately word of the discovery got back to theeast and settlers flooded the area — and, when the Indians fought back, theydemanded federal protection. Part of the government’s strategy was to insistthat the local Indians cross into the reservation and “register,” essentiallygiving up their hunter-gatherer lifestyle and becoming domesticated in both thehuman and animal senses of the term — and Ives’ program describes Sitting Bullas a “conservative,” a leader of the old-school people who regarded anycompromise with the U.S. government and the reservation system as a denial ofthe destiny God had ordained for them. The show detailed Custer’s conflictswith his fellow officers and also his and the other officers’ racist disdainfor the Indians, figuring that they would never attack en masse but, confronted with an organized force, wouldalways withdraw into the hills. (In that sense the Little Big Horn was sort oflike the Tet Offensive in the Viet Nam War in 1968 — also a mass attack by anenemy the U.S. commanders had been sure would never launch one.) Ironically,the most effective fighters Custer had in his force were the Indians on hisside — mostly Crow and Arapaho, the traditional enemies of the Lakota andCheyenne — who at least knew what they were up against.

The show mentionsCuster’s legacy as well, how his life has been used for propaganda purposes —his widow Elizabeth “Libby” Bacon Custer commissioned a fawning biography andlater wrote three books of her own (she died in 1933) — and paralleled clipsfrom They Died With Their Boots Onand the 1971 film Little Big Manto show how a World War II-era America lionized Custer and a Viet Nam-eraAmerica turned him into caricature. It was a fascinating if sometimes draggydocumentary of a figure at once antique and modern in his awareness of P.R. andhis ability to sell himself as a dashing hero, a 19^th-centuryknight-errant and cavalier — he not only had reporters accompany him intobattle but he wrote for magazines himself (indeed, that was how he supportedhimself during his one-year suspension from the Army after the Civil War).

The Reckless Moment (Columbia, 1949)

2012-01-29T14:53:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Twonights ago Charles and I had watched a quite remarkable movie from 1949, aColumbia film noircalled The Reckless Moment,directed by Max Ophuls from a script by Mel Dinelli, Robert E. Kent(“adaptation”), Henry Garson and Robert Soderberg (“screenplay”) based on a Ladies’Home Journal storycalled “The Blank Wall” by a writer with the rather awkward name ElizabethSanxay Holding. It’s a rarely shown movie that I’d been curious about eversince seeing, reviewing and absolutely raving about the 2001 remake, TheDeep End, by ScottMcGehee and David Siegel as co-writers, co-directors and co-producers. The filmstars Joan Bennett as Lucia Harper, whose husband is off in Europe helping withthe post-World War II reconstruction and whose 17-year-old daughter Bea(Geraldine Brooks, who praise be looks enough like Joan Bennett that they’re perfectly believableas mother and daughter, a rarity in any movie; all too often casting directors merrily assignpeople who look nothing like each other and try to pass them off as biologicalrelatives!) is messing around with a 30-year-old lounge-lizard slimeball namedTed Darby (Sheppherd Strudwick). Bea met Darby in Los Angeles, a 50-mile drivefrom the small beach community of “Balboa” (Santa Barbara?) where the Harperslive, where Lucia had allowed her to attend art college instead of going to auniversity. Lucia goes to the hotel bar where Darby hangs out and tears intohim, ordering him not to see her daughter again, and Darby of course tells herto go get stuffed. Later Darby comes to Balboa for reasons that aren’tespecially clear and Bea meets him there; he asks her for money, and thatconvinces Bea that every nasty thing her mom had to say about him wasabsolutely true and she confronts him then and there — they fight, Bea hits himwith a flashlight, and he takes a header off their deck and lands on an anchor,impaling himself.

Thinking she’s actually helping, Lucia loads Darby’s bodyinto her outboard-motor boat, dumps it in mid-bay and returns it, all in thedead of night, and decides to cover for Bea’s actions by telling the police (ifthey ask) that she and Darby never knew each other — only a blackmailer namedTed Donnelly (James Mason, star of Ophuls’ immediately preceding film Caught and billed first on the imdb.com pagefor the film and its entry in The Film Noir Encyclopedia but second to Bennett on the actualcredits — was the film later reissued, when Mason was a more important star,with his name first?) shows up with a packet of love letters Bea wrote Darbyand demands $5,000 for them. From then on the film becomes a clash betweenLucia’s visits to the noirunderworld in a frantic attempt to raise the blackmail money without having totell her husband what’s going on, and the fascinating pull-back of hermiddle-class suburban lifestyle — symbolized by her buttinski father-in-law(Henry O’Neill), Bea’s obnoxious kid brother David (David Bair) and their Blackmaid, Sybil (Frances Williams), who all seem to be hanging around whenever shewants to talk to Donnelly on the phone or he shows up. Donnelly has an attackof conscience about what he’s doing and seems inclined to go easy on Lucia, sohis partner in crime, Nagle (Roy Roberts), turns up in person to put thesqueeze on Lucia — only Donnelly confronts him, they fight, the woundedDonnelly strangles Nagle and then takes him out in his car and deliberatelycrashes it, killing himself and making Nagle’s death look accidental.

TheReckless Moment and TheDeep End aresurprisingly close; McGehee and Siegel made one major change in the story —instead of a straight daughter, Bea becomes Beau, the heroine’s Gay son (andthe blackmail device becomes, not a packet of letters, but a videotape of Darbyfucking Beau) — and a handful of minor ones; they moved the setting to LakeTahoe (and turned the California-Nevada border into a metaphoric boundarybetween decency and corruption much the way the U.S.-Mexico border served in Touchof Evil) and changed theblackmailer’s agent from an Irishman (casting Mason as an Irishman seems tohave been inspired by his success as an Irish revolutionary in the film OddMan Out two yearsearlier) to a refugee from the former Yugoslavia — but both films turn on themarvelous contrast between Lucia’s (forced) walk on the wild side and hersturdy suburban values, and in particular the household members that hem her inso much Donnelly even comments, “These people really have you trapped, don’tthey?” The acting is excellent throughout, with Bennett ironically appearing asthe ordinary person trapped in the noir underworld just a few years after making The Woman inthe Window (1945) and ScarletStreet (1946), in whichshe was the femme fataleand Edward G. Robinson the milquetoast she was leading to destruction. But whatmakes The Reckless Momentspecial is Ophuls’ direction, particularly his use of the moving camera — itseems to have been Ophuls’ style never to cut until he absolutely had to, butinstead to take us from place to place on a camera dolly, and according to animdb.com poster James Mason said about the film that at one point Ophuls wantedto have two sets fully lit simultaneously so he could dolly from one to theother. Columbia president Harry Cohn said no, and, according to Mason, “Ophulscould not smile anymore from this day.”

The Reckless Moment dramatizes, just as vividly as TheDeep End did, thecontrast between the heroine’s safe suburban existence and the noir underworld in which she is plunged; andcontrary to what’s been written about the film, there really isn’t the hint ofa romantic interest between Lucia and Donnelly; instead, as in The Deep End, what seems to change Donnelly’s moralstatus and lead him to sympathize with the woman he’s trying to blackmail ishis attraction towards her “normal” suburban lifestyle. Also, though the filmis not explicitly Gay (as its remake is — under the Production Code, of course,it couldn’t have been), there’s an interesting intimation of a homoeroticrelationship between Donnelly and Nagle (“You have a family, I have Nagle,” hetells Lucia at one point), anticipating the role Mason would play 10 yearslater in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest as the rich, decadent Bisexual who’s clearly keeping EvaMarie Saint as a girlfriend and Martin Landau as a boyfriend. (In North byNorthwest, when Landau’scharacter tries to warn Mason’s — accurately — that Saint’s character hasbetrayed him to the government, Mason whines, “Leonard! I do believe you’re jealous!”) Just as Joan Bennett had gone fromplaying the femme fatalewho draws the ordinary person into the noir world to playing the ordinary person whogets drawn into it and has to cope with its weirdly inverted values, so JamesMason would go from the innocent young man drawn into both a criminal and ahomosexual relationship with a decadent older partner to playing the decadent olderpartner pulling the same sort of thing with both genders in North byNorthwest.

Special Agent K-7 (C. C. Burr Productions, 1936)

2012-01-29T14:18:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Thefilm I picked last night was a recent archive.org download called SpecialAgent K-7, an intriguing1936 indie from C. C. Burr Productions, directed by old Western hand Bernard B.Ray and a movie of such low repute that one archive.org reviewer posted acomment that Special Agent K-9would have been a better title. (The joke is actually somewhat appropriatesince Ray did directseveral of the movies starring one of the later Rin Tin Tins.) It’s actually amuch better movie than that jibe would indicate, though it’s also one of those1930’s thrillers that takes an audacious plot premise and moves it along atsuch a stately pace that despite a relatively short running time (imdb.comlists 71 minutes and the print we watched was 64) it gets surprisingly dull.It’s yet another movie from the classic era that would have been vastly improvedif it had been made at Warner Bros., with James Cagney as star and one of theirspeed-demon directors, but as it stands it’s still an engaging if somewhatslow-moving thriller. FBI agent “Lanny” Landers (Walter McGrail), code-numberedK-7, wants to retire but is told by his superior, John Adams (Richard Tucker),that now that he’s traveled around the world busting crime syndicates, hisservices are needed at home to attack organized crime in the U.S. He’sparticularly needed to bring down crooked nightclub/casino owner Eddie Geller(Willy Castello), who as the film opens is on trial for murder but isn’tconvicted because the jury is hopelessly deadlocked.

The reason the jury ishopelessly deadlocked is because Geller’s attorney, Lester Owens (Irving Pichel),has bribed two of its members to hold out for acquittal no matter what.District attorney Ames (George Eldredge) announces his intention to hold Gellerfor a retrial, and the judge in the case — who’s already read the jury membersnew assholes, stating from the bench that there was ample evidence to convictand he’s ashamed of them (a gimmick used in several movies of this period eventhough today it seems awfully far out of line for a judge to say that from thebench!) — says that Geller will remain in custody until then. Owens promises tohave him out on bail and indeed wins his release. The trial is being covered bywoman reporter Ollie O’Dea (Queenie Smith), whom Landers used to date but whois now engaged to Billy Westrop (Donald Reed), a rich man’s son who ran up$2,000 in gambling debts at Geller’s casino and whose promissory note has beenaltered to read $5,000. The principals meet at the casino — Landers wants achance to get to know the man who’s engaged to marry his ex — and Westrop issummoned to Geller’s office, shown the (altered) note and told to come up withthe $5,000 immediately … or else. Westrop and Geller get into an argument, thedoor of the office closes, a shot is heard, Tony Blank (Duncan Renaldo) is seenin the corridor, and when the door opens again Landers finds Geller dead,killed with a gunshot. Westrop is immediately suspect number one, but heinsists that he and Geller merely struggled over the gun (Maurine Watkins, yourplagiarism attorney thanks you for keeping him in business!), it went off andhe left Geller still alive.

Landers figures out that if Geller and Westrop hadactually been struggling the way Westrop said they were, the shot would havegone wild and the bullet would have gone into the office wall — and, sure enough,he finds a bullet hole in the wall at precisely the trajectory he predicted.Only that doesn’t let Westrop off the hook because, even though only onegunshot was heard, the slug recovered from the wall and the one in Geller’sbody were fired from the same gun. (Ballistics tests were a relative novelty in1936 — as was the scientific investigation of crime scenes in general — and theFBI were widely credited as pioneers in forensic science.) Tony offers to meetLanders and turn state’s evidence, but (in a quite creative scene that standsout in an otherwise pretty plainly photographed and staged film) Landers sees acommotion on the street below from his apartment window and realizes that Tonyhas been shot dead just in front of his building — and it turns out the killerused the same gun as the one that killed Geller. Suspicion falls on Westropagain — Ollie arranges for Lester Owens to represent him but Owens is clearlythrowing the case — and when Westrop is proven not to be the killer Owens triesto frame another character, small-time gangster “Silky” Samuels (MalcolmMcGregor), but not surprisingly it turns out that Owens himself committed bothmurders, that he was the secret “Mr. Big” bankrolling Geller and all oforganized crime in the city, and at the end Landers arrests Owens and says abittersweet farewell to Ollie (with whom he’s still in love) and her newhusband Westrop.

According to a long note from an imdb.com reviewer, SpecialAgent K-7 was based on ahit radio show and was intended as the first in a series — though only this onewas made; producer C. C. Burr promised exhibitors not only a whole series ofK-7 movies but also musical Westerns starring George Eldredge, none of whichmaterialized. As it stands, it’s a good though not great movie: the script byPhil Dunham and Lester Spillet is a serviceable assemblage of thriller clichéswith just enough fresh spins that we don’t get the feeling (as one sometimesdoes with 1930’s “B”’s) that we’ve seen this movie before even if we haven’t. Ray’sdirection is serviceable — there are a few shots that anticipate film noir but mostly the framing and lighting arestraightforward and plain — and so is the acting, with Irving Pichel taking thehonors as the villain and a quite appealing performance by Joy Hodges as Peppy,Tony’s girlfriend and a singer at Geller’s casino (she does a song called“Actions Speak Louder Than Words” and is shot playing a piano — whether it’sher on the soundtrack, either vocally or instrumentally, the number isappealing and it looks like Hodges actually knew how to play). Walter McGrailis a bit too much like Walter Huston for comfort — their voices are almostindistinguishable and one gets the impression McGrail would have been the sortof actor sent out in the road companies of Huston’s big Broadway hits — and heseems oddly avuncular for an action hero, but like most of the rest of thisfilm, his performance “works” even though it seems quite a bit less inspiredthan it could have been.

The Pregnancy Project (Front Street Pictures/Lifetime, 2012)

2012-01-29T13:09:00.001-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I watched a LifetimeTV-movie that had its “world premiere” last night, The Pregnancy Project, not to be confused with the recent ThePregnancy Pact though it too, at leastostensibly, is based on a true story that actually broke just last year, whenin April 2011 a high-school senior in Toppenish, Washington named GabyRodriguez revealed at a school assembly that for most of the school year shehad been faking being pregnant as part of a student project to document how herfamily, teachers and fellow students would treat her differently. The movie,directed by Norman Buckley from a script by Teena Booth, comes off as a sort ofmodern-day version of Gentleman’s Agreement, only instead of an adult male reporter pretendingto be Jewish to get a series of articles on anti-Semitic prejudice, it’s ateenage girl pretending to be pregnant and ending up documenting a world ofsocial and racial (racist) stereotypes. It’s the sort of movie that starts outbeing almost unwittingly silly but gets stronger and more emotionally intenseas it winds on, thanks to Buckley’s understated direction and some quite goodperformances, notably by Alexa Vega as Gaby and especially by Laci J. Mailey as Tyra, the foster child whoseactual pregnancy inspired Gaby’s “project.”

The film comes with a lot ofheavy-duty baggage on the Lifetime Web site, including a downloadable two-page“discussion guide” for use of this movie in schools, but aside from the socialintent of its makers (to prevent teenagers from having sex, or at least topersuade them to use “protection” — though, intriguingly, birth control forgirls is not mentioned as an optioneven once and, in line with the waythe AIDS scare has reshaped sexual morality, the onus of preventing teenpregnancy is put on the males to use condoms), but on the whole it’s a well-done movie that exploresnot only the clash between sexual responsibilities and hormonal drives but alsothe ethics of unknowingly involving other human beings in a research projectand putting them through emotional changes for the sake of knowledge. One ofthe more powerful parts of the story is that Gaby herself is the result of hermother’s teen pregnancy, and her sister Sonya (Mercedes de la Zerda) was also ateen mom — and her uncle Javier (Michael Mando) is fiercely judgmental of Gabyand her boyfriend Jorge (Walter Perez) even before her (supposed) pregnancy, and afterwards theynearly come to blows over Jorge’s (whose name, incidentally, is pronounced“George,” Anglo-style, even by the Latino/a characters) knocking up his nieceand thereby allegedly ruining her life, driving her off the college-bound trackher general smarts and good grades had put her on and sticking her in the sameproletarian existence as her own, her sister’s and Jorge’s families.

Gaby findsher reputation at school plummeting even farther and faster than she expected —and a lot of the attacks on her are explicitly racist, including references to“those people” and one fellow studentcalling her entire family a “baby factory” — while Tyra thinks Gaby is(relatively) lucky because at least Jorge is still part of her life, whereasDevon, the father of Tyra’s unborn child, just walked out on her (as Gaby’s ownfather did on her mom way back when). There’s also an effectively done suspenseelement in whether or not Gaby’s secret will come out before her big “reveal” —the only people who actually know are her mom, Jorge (there’s a nicely sour bitof dialogue from him when he asks her, “Just when are we supposed to have this pretend ‘baby’?” — it’s clear he’s notthrilled to have all the stigma of teen fatherhood and none of the joys ofunprotected sex with his girlfriend!), the two teachers who are advising her onthe assignment and her friend Claire (Sarah Smyth), whom she’s enlisted as herresearch assistant to document what gets said about her out of her presence — and it’s also fascinating howthe strains of a pretend “pregnancy” and the traumas Gaby faces trying to keepboth her composure and her cover at least temporarily break up her and Jorge.

Aboutthe only comic relief in the film is the scene in which Gaby and her mom cut abasketball in half to make a faintly convincing false belly for her to make herlook pregnant (though at thebig “reveal” she lifts her shirt and what she’s actually wearing under it is aprofessionally made medical appliance), and one sequence in which she’s tryingon a prom dress and is worried that if she buys one made for a non-pregnantfigure, that will “out” her. It’s aneatly done movie, though just how close to the facts it is I have no idea(Gaby herself wrote a memoir which is one of the books listed in the“discussion guide”), and it was a bit disappointing from an aesthetic point ofview that the hottest-looking young man in the movie, Aaron (Richard Harmon),was also one of the nastiest in terms of the catty comments he made about Gabyand the sorts of girls who “let” themselves get pregnant in the first place.

The Kid from Broken Gun (Columbia, 1952)

2012-01-28T19:52:00.001-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s curtain-raiserwas an intriguing Western item called The Kid from Broken Gun, last in a seven-year series of “B” Westerns fromColumbia that starred Charles Starrett (one of those actors, like RandolphScott, who extended his career about 20 years longer than it would otherwisehave run by focusing on Westerns exclusively) as the Durango Kid, a.k.a. SteveReynolds. Framed by a trial sequence and liberally filled out with stockfootage from previous Durango Kid efforts, notably a movie called TheFighting Frontiersman, The Kid from BrokenGun is intriguing because itfeatures Smiley Burnette as Starrett’s comic-relief sidekick — Burnette workedwith Gene Autry so long (not only on-screen but also as co-writer of many ofAutry’s original songs) it’s somewhat jarring to see him without Autry,especially since he’d got quite a bit more heavy-set than he’d been in hisearly days with Autry and he’d grown out his hair to a tousled mop that gavehim an odd resemblance to Chico Marx.

The Kid from Broken Gun is a fascinating little movie, written by BarryShipman and Ed. Earl Repp (the period after the two-letter first name isactually on his on-screen credit) with a bit more creativity than the norm fora “B” Western and quite well directed by Fred F. Sears, who was usually prettyhacky but who opens this film with some fascinating overhead shots of acourtroom with a trial in progress five years before the launch of the Perry Mason TV series, which made these sorts of angles atrademark. Sears also delivers a few bits of narration on the soundtrack,telling us that in the old West the sentence for murder was to be hanged by theneck until you were dead, before introducing us to defendant Jack Mahoney (alsothe real name of the actor playing him, though he was usually credited as Jock Mahoney and the actual name on his birthcertificate was Jacques O’Mahoney), who’s on trial for murdering Matt Fallon(Chris Alcaide) in what, in a series of flashbacks representing the storiestold during the trial testimony, turns out to be an altercation over astrongbox containing a part of the gold Antonio López de Santa Anna left behindas he and his army were fleeing Texas following their rout at San Jacinto in1836. Mahoney is being represented by a female attorney, Gail Kingston (aneffective Angela Stevens) — this is Wyoming, the first state to give women thevote — and Steve Reynolds, a.k.a. the Durango Kid (Charles Starrett), iswatching the trial with his friend Smiley Burnette (also using his own name forhis character) when he isn’t out riding around with a black bandana across thelower half of his face — the total extent of his “Durango Kid” disguise andwhich, as I’ve noted about earlier films in the series, seems to have beeneffected only to allow stunt doubles to substitute for Starrett in the actionscenes. (There’s a comic tag scene at the end which pathetically tries to makeus believe that Smiley has no idea his friend is the Durango Kid.)

What setsthis apart from most “B” Westerns is, first, the excellent shape it’s survivedin — Fayte M. Browne’s cinematography is rich in high-contrast chiaroscuro black-and-white images and the print as it standsdoes full justice to it: the images are crisp and clear and there are novisible or audible splices or scratches in the film (a boon to anyone who’ssuffered through cloudy, grainy, splice-ridden prints of “B” Westerns from the1930’s) — and the surprising inventiveness of the writing: towards the endShipman and Repp give us some neck-snapping but still believable reversals,including revealing that Matt Fallon’s girlfriend, saloon entertainer DixieKing (Helen Mowery) was actually attorney Gail Kingston’s sister, and was alsopart of a plot headed by local 1 percenter Martin Donohugh (Tristram Coffin)and also involving Matt Fallon — that’s right, this is another one of thoseplots in which not only did the good guy not commit murder, the person he’s supposed to havemurdered isn’t really dead at all! — to steal the gold-filled strongbox and setup Mahoney for the theft as well as getting him hanged on a murder charge. Thisisn’t exactly a world-beater of a movie, but it is a reasonably entertaining way to spend 53 minutesand the clever writing, acceptable acting (and in Angela Stevens’ caseconsiderably better than that; she’s quite good both as the good girl and thebad girl, and she and Helen Mowery look enough like each other to be believableas sisters) and excellent print condition make this one a cut above most “B”Westerns.

Hollywood Without Makeup (Ken Murray Productions, 1963)

2012-01-28T13:35:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago I screened a ratherinteresting 48-minute TV-movie we’d downloaded from archive.org called HollywoodWithout Makeup, a production of a mannamed Ken Murray who had had a minor career as a bit actor in the 1920’s andhad taken a home movie camera to the sets of films he was working on and shotcandid off-screen footage of the stars. Though he dropped out of the creativeend of picturemaking shortly after, he continued to work as a Hollywoodjournalist and film the movie stars both at work and at play — and this filmtakes his documentary history all the way up to 1963, when it was compiled andfirst shown, offering backstage footage of Fred MacMurray working on the Disneylot in the then-new film Son of Flubber (there’s a charming bit of MacMurray taking some kids for a drivearound the Disney backlot in the Model T Ford he drove in the film, andMurray’s narration tells us that the kids kept asking MacMurray, “Make it fly”)and closing with footage of the recently deceased Marilyn Monroe at a moviepremiere, waving to the audience and looking utterly gorgeous and plastic(Murray didn’t get any truly candid footage of her and so we don’t get the sideof Marilyn we see in some of Milton Greene’s stills or in her best-lookingmovie, The Prince and the Showgirl — in which Jack Cardiff photographed her artistically for the first andonly time in a color film, taming her aggressive looks and making her sensual rather than blatantly sexual).

One of the mostfascinating aspects of Hollywood Without Makeup is how accurate the title was — you really did get to see at least some of the stars withoutmakeup and being essentially themselves instead of playing to the camera — andthough some of them (notably Cary Grant and Humphrey Bogart) proved every bitas charismatic being photographed by Ken Murray’s camera as they were gettingthe full-dress professional treatment in their actual movies, others (includingNorma Shearer) turned out to be quite plain-looking, only ordinarily attractivewithout the help of makeup and studio lighting. People who knew both RudolphValentino and Marilyn Monroe (that’s two different sets of people, but theymade strikingly similar comments) both said that off-screen they were no morethan decent-looking people, physically easy on the eyes but nothing special —yet on film they acquired a glow that made them seem far sexier than they werein person. “The miracle happened on the film emulsion,” said Billy Wilder onMonroe (he directed her twice and she gave him such a hard time that he jokedthe Screen Directors’ Guild should award anyone who made more than one filmwith her a Purple Heart) — and what’s most interesting about HollywoodWithout Makeup is not only that some ofthe “candid” footage appears to have been staged (notably an early-1930’s toy-carrace between the young Jackie Cooper and Groucho and Harpo Marx — the ½ to 2/3of the Marx Brothers were in full on-screen regalia rather than their ratherratty off-screen appearances) but the layers on layers of image-making thatwent into even a “casual” appearance by a star in the glory days.

It’s alsoamusing to hear Murray’s narration referring to Hollywood’s glory days as ifthey were already in the past — and it’s fascinating to see some of the footageat San Simeon (William Randolph Hearst is virtually the only person depictedhere who was a celebrity but not a movie star), which Charles (who’s been there) pointed out had beenused in the official videos shown at the state park (and the commentary thereduplicated some of Ken Murray’s mistakes in his narration). Also worth note isthe sequence from Murray’s TV show in which Kirk Douglas appears as a gueststar and complains that his mother thinks Murray is a bigger star than he isbecause he has a new TV show on once a week whereas Douglas only releases a newmovie every three or four months. It would be nice to see Hollywood WithoutMakeup in better shape — theprint we downloaded from archive.org was in terrible condition and looked likea silent movie rescued just in time before it decomposed completely (and thedisc we’d burned from the download had its own set of glitches, often jumpingahead a full five-minute chapter) — it is a really charming film even though it’s something less than the glimpseof Hollywood stars totally letting their hair down (figuratively, and sometimes literally) Murraypromised us in his narration.

The Man in the Iron Mask (Burbank Studios Australia, 1985)

2012-01-26T18:02:00.001-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film I picked lastnight was The Man in the Iron Mask, a quirky 1985 production from Australia — the production company wasactually named Burbank Studios and they did a whole run of animated 54-minuteTV versions of classic tales, obviously aimed at kids (there was a cute fox,dog and horse in an early scene) but with some of the terror and pathos of theoriginal Alexandre Dumas père story intact. The plot is familiar: Louis XIII’s queen gives birth totwin sons, Louis and Philippe, and in order to forestall a civil war when bothboys come of age, Louis is made the crown prince and inherits the throne, whilePhilippe is farmed out to a foster family of humble status — and for somereason they made his foster father, who’s also his home-school teacher, looklike Benjamin Franklin. At age 15 Philippe finally meets the mysterious visitorwho comes to the tiny village where he lives from Paris and reads a letter fromthe Queen that reveals she’s really her son and second in line for the throneof France. Some of the surviving Musketeers (this was actually the third inDumas’ series, so the J. R. R. Tolkien/Janice Rowling tactic of writing a longstring of books telling a continuous story and releasing them according topopular demand is nothing new!) contact Philippe and offer to help him lead arevolution to overthrow Louis, whose taxes, wars and general oppressions aredestroying France, and install Philippe on the throne but, since the two lookalike, with no one the wiser.

For a 1985 animated TV show this is pretty welldone — the style is very“limited-animation” and barely credible people cavort over well-executed,colorful backgrounds, but there’s some creativity and at least one sequence, adazzling abstract scene representing the court entertainment glorifying LouisXIV, that’s quite the best thing in the movie and was done by a differentanimation director (Antoniette Starkiewicz) than the rest of the film. It’salso rather remarkable in that the finale leaves Philippe, imprisoned in thetitular iron mask, in an island prison and does not include the obligatory happy ending from otherversions of the tale. Though not particularly creatively designed or staged(save for the court “dream” sequence), this Man in the Iron Mask is at least generally well acted — Colin Frielshas the dual role of Louis and Philippe and the others are also good — and onehopes it served the same purpose the Mr. Magoo Theatre shows in my childhood in the 1960’s served ofintroducing me to classic stories I would eventually read, or at least watchmore sophisticated movies of, and like better!

Walking the Halls (Johnson Production Group, ITV Global Studios, Shadowland, 2012)

2012-01-25T21:22:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I’ve watched yet anotherrecently aired Lifetime TV-movie, Walking the Halls, which they showed right after Sexting inSuburbia (though they re-ran Sexting right after it as well!) and which was a prettywild tale in which Casey Benson (Caitlin Thompson), a nice young high-schoolsenior who’s planning to major in earth sciences in college and is going to aschool in New York — on the other side of the country from California, where sheand her parents live — when she gets spotted in the hallways by Amber (MarieAvgeropoulos), head of a trio of “bad girls” who at the start look like allthat’s wrong with them is they’re stuck-up snobs but who in reality areprostitutes, being run by a “manager” (i.e., pimp) named Jack (Matthew Alan— and it’s all too typical of Lifetime’s casting directors that thehottest-looking guy in the movie turns out to be the principal villain!), who’salso the head of the school’s on-site police force and figures his “cop smarts”will enable him to avoid prosecution. This one was written by our old friend,Lifetime auteur Christine Conradt, thoughafter she finished with the script director Doug Campbell and his writingpartner, Ken Sanders, tweaked it enough to gain co-credit — and it’s typical ofa Conradt script in that it takes a provocative premise, occasionally plays itfor its potential power, but also treads on the thin edge of camp and finallygoes over with a melodramatic finale that puts our principals — Casey, her momHolly (Jamie Luner, top-billed) and her dad Christopher (Al Sapienza) — literally in mortal danger from Jack and Amber.

The scriptplunges Casey into a perfect storm of dysfunction from the get-go — her rathernerdy boyfriend starts the story by breaking up with her, and later sheoverhears her parents arguing and learns that her dad has sucked all the moneyout of her parents’ joint account — including the family savings Casey wascounting on to finance her way through college — and is having an affair. Momconfronts him about this, dad backhands her, and mom has him arrested fordomestic violence. Meanwhile, Casey is recruited by Amber and her friendsTaylor (Lindsay Taylor) and Kylie (Arden Cho) and is sucked into their ringwhen Amber sets up a date for her to go the Goldbar club on a Friday night —Casey is underage (at least for drinking; she’s 18 and therefore above thelegal age of consent for sex, an important point since part of Jack’s plan isto recruit ’em young but not so young he’d face the far heavier penalties for prostituting theunderage) but Amber says that’s no problem: all Casey has to do is e-mail her aphoto of herself and Amber will concoct a fake ID.

Once there, Casey isimmediately courted by 28-year-old Max (Jason-Shane Scott) and spends the nightwith him (though it’s later established that she’d done the down-’n’-dirty withthat twerpy boyfriend of hers and therefore she wasn’t a virgin), thinking it’spure love and not realizing that someone was paid for her services until the next day, when Amber flashes $500in front of her and says that was her cut. She angrily refuses it, but thenwhen her parents’ marriage suddenly implodes and she realizes her family isbroke, she decides to continue hooking until several acts later, when just as she’s on thepoint of moving out of her home because her mom is spying on her and trying tofigure out where she’s getting her money (like a lot of other Conradt scripts,this one depicts one or both of the heroine’s parents as such good spies onewonders why they don’t solve the family’s financial problems by going to workfor the CIA), she has an attack of revulsion when Jack arranges a three-waybetween her, Amber and an older man who’s paying handsomely for their services— he looked rather distinguished to me but we’re supposed to believe he’s sounforgivably repulsive that Casey bolts rather than face having sex with him,and Jack fires her on the spot and says that if she ever reports him to thepolice, he will kill both her and her parents. Mom, who earlier had conducted athree-hour stakeout of the hotel where she turns her tricks and confronted herin the lobby — whereupon the stuck-up queen concierge threatens to have her arrested — worms the truth out of Casey andimmediately reports it to the school principal (Patricia Belcher), yet anotherone of the avuncular African-Americans that always seem to turn up as theauthority figures in these movies, and the principal reports it to … guess who.Just take a wild guess.

That’s right: Officer Jack, who immediately determinesto make good on his threat to knock off all the Bensons and enlists Amber tohelp him by holding a gun on Casey and her mom while he goes out and kidnapsdad, brings him back to the house and announces that he plans to kill all threeof them and stage it as a murder-suicide: a dumped ex-husband returning home,getting revenge by killing his wife and daughter and then taking his own life.(Then he’ll probably get rid of Amber as well since as a witness she could bedangerous to him.) There’s a confusing series of events that ends with mompersuading Amber to relax their bonds, Jack arriving with dad, and ultimatelymom gets Jack’s gun and kills him. There’s a voice-over that announces thatAmber got five years’ probation and left town, Christopher and Holly patchedthings up long enough not to save their marriage but at least to achieve a moreamicable divorce, and Casey left for her New York college and “never lookedback.” I suppose I should be grateful that they didn’t pull the old scene inwhich Casey gets sent out on an out-call and the customer turns out to be herown father (maybe Conradt wrote such a scene and Campbell and Sanders pulledrank on her and took it out again), but they hit all the other clichés of the genre, including the old one from the 1930’sexploitation films of making the demi-monde seem so boring that it hardly seems worthbothering with (though I give the filmmakers credit for making the clubgenuinely believable instead of antiseptically decorous the way the allegedpunk party was in Sexting in Suburbia).

An imdb.com message board poster put up this plot synopsis fromLifetime’s Web site that may indicate what got changed between Conradt’s scriptand the final film: “When 17-year-old Casey Benson, new to Los Angeles, startsto make friends with some of the beautiful, popular cheerleaders at her school,her mother Holly is pleased. Casey seems happy but when her attitude andbehavior begins to change, Holly is alarmed. Becoming increasingly estranged,Holly hired P.I. Sue Ann to sort things out. Casey and her cheerleading friendare spending their evenings dating wealthy older men.” In the finished film,the family have lived in their current home nearly 20 years (dad makes quite afew nasty remarks to mom about how his job — though how he makes his living remains a mystery — hassupported them all for 20 years and paid for that house), Amber, Taylor andKylie are not depicted as cheerleaders (cheerleading practices would probablyhave taken too much time away from their actual nocturnal pursuits) and thereis no private investigator (probably just as well, since when Conradt drags ina P.I. he or she usually gets killed well before the denouement). Walking the Halls is a pretty typical Lifetime movie, good in spots— at least Campbell directs it straightforwardly, without the music-video“flanging” effects other Lifetime directors (especially those who came out ofmusic videos) have indulged in — but almost risibly campy in others, andfrankly the unmistakably and unashamedly campy movie Mini’s First Time got more out of the situation of a high-schoolgirl turning to prostitution because of her family’s dysfunction than thisostensibly more “serious” film did!

Mr. Adam's Bomb (Ernest Green Productions, 1949)

2012-01-25T21:19:00.001-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The movie last night was aweird little race item called Mr. Adam’s Bomb starring Eddie Green (who also directed), JessieGrayson, Mildred Boyd and Gene Ware — none of whom are identified with their roles on imdb.com — and it beginswith a grandfatherly man who we’re told is the heroine’s father doing a hotjitterbug dance in his apartment with the maid to a record that’s the bestthing in the movie, an intense instrumental that’s on the cusp between jazz andR&B, with (seemingly) improvised solos against a grinding, repetitive rifffrom the other horns. Alas, the avuncular old man (played by the only person inthis movie who can actually act!) gets called out by his wife (we presumethey’re the parents of the young ingénue leading woman even though she’s supposedto be playing their daughter but looks more like their granddaughter!) and told he shouldn’t be dancing to thatawful music. The main plot is the presentation of the daughter’s singing voiceat a musicale where the audience, having just heard a great piece ofR&B-flavored jazz (or is it the other way around?), is asked to get excitedabout the daughter singing a boring romantic ballad that could easily have comeout of a white sing-along movie of the time (1949). The title comes in becausethe musicale is also being crashed by a couple of federal agents suspecting Mr.Adam of having built his own nuclear bombs — though the “bomb” turns out to bea metal sphere with an innocuous present for Mr. Adam’s daughter. This wasreally nothing more than a curiosity; it didn’t even have the hot, infectiousmusic we expect to hear in a movie otherwise this good!

Drew Peterson: Untouchable (PeaceOut Productions, Silver Screen Entertainment, Lifetime, 2012)

2012-01-23T13:37:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was DrewPeterson: Untouchable, a 2012production from a couple of companies called PeaceOut and Silver Screen forrelease on the Lifetime TV network, based on the true story of Drew Peterson(Rob Lowe), 50-something police officer in the small town of Bolingbrook,Illinois, with a remarkable ability to get 20-something girls to fall head overheels in love with him (he attributes this to the size of his penis, which hecalls “Big Daddy,” and given the hotel-room sexcapades that are the biggestthing — pardon the pun — anybody remembers about Lowe’s off-screen life, it seems cruelly appropriate to havecast Lowe in this part!). When the story opens Peterson has already burnedthrough two marriages and the third one is definitely on the rocks; whateverfires of love ever burned between him and Kathleen Savio (Cara Buono) haveburned out into embers of hate, enough that Peterson keeps turning up thepressure on her by harassing her at their home while sneaking in his newgirlfriend Stacy (Kaley Cuoco) into their home and their bed even when Kathleenand their two sons are there. Kathleen tries to throw him out and get arestraining order against him, but he’s protected by his brethren on theBolingbrook police force.

Eventually they divorce so he can marry Stacy, thoughnot before Kathleen gives her a talking-to and warns her that Drew is acontrolling bastard and a wife-beater as well — warnings that, of course, go inone of Stacy’s ears, through the apparently near-totally empty space in betweenand out the other. (Drew likes them young, blonde and dumb.) Drew and Stacymarry, and Kathleen’s body is eventually found in the bathtub of her home — atfirst the death is ruled an accidental drowning — only three years and two morechildren later, Stacy is as fed up with Drew’s domination, his keeping her on ashort leash because of his paranoid conviction that she’s having an affair, andhis occasional bursts of domestic violence that she wants out of the marriage … and it’s at that pointthat Stacy suddenly disappears. Drew tells everyone she’s probably at thebeach, hanging out long-term with the guy she was having the affair with, buther sister and many of Drew’s female friends are convinced he murdered her.Stacy is never found, dead or alive, but the furor around the case gets Kathleen’s body exhumed, anda new autopsy reveals that she was deliberately drowned, so the case getsreclassified as a murder and Drew, not surprisingly, is suspect number one.

It’s not much of a story, and the fact that it was filmed while Drew is stillawaiting trial for Kathleen’s murder forced writer Teena Booth to pussy-foot (onceagain, pardon the pun) around some of the dicier parts of the story — it’spretty obvious from the way she wrote it that she thinks Drew murdered both Kathleen and Stacy, butshe can’t come right out and say so without potentially prejudicing the trial, but it has one savinggrace: the acting of Rob Lowe. He’s able to tread the fine line required for acharacter like this, making him despicable enough that we believe he’s capableof murder but also charming enough that we can see what attracted all these women(including, almost unbelievably, the fresh piece of 20-something blonde meathe’s got an affair going with when he’s arrested!) to him in the first place.Instead of raving through the role he goes along with a serene sense of his owninvincibility, his belief that since he’s part of law enforcement the “bluewall of silence” will protect him no matter what he does, and whether he’s driving his motorcycleat the wall of media people who surround his home (Larry King and AndersonCooper both appear in the film as themselves, and the real Peterson gaveself-serving TV interviews that are re-created in the film and are some of Lowe’smost effective scenes in the role) or calmly rattling off his charms (physicaland otherwise) — down to a tour de force final scene in which, arrested and told to take his clothes off so hecan be dressed in the orange jumpsuit that’s become the de rigueur outfit for prisoners these days (striped shirtsand pants are so 20^th century!),he starts humming David Rose’s song “The Stripper” (badly) and turns it into aroutine, shaking “Big Daddy” at the (male) officers who are taking him intocustody as if he expects them to be jealous of his natural endowment.

It’s agreat performance that deserved a better movie; the director is Mikael Salomon,who made the Lifetime TV-movie about Natalee Holloway (when I commented on thatone I noted that the two shared ridiculously pretentious spellings of theirfirst names!) — another movie that was pretty mediocre overall (Teena Boothwrote its script, too) but was salvaged by a brilliant performance by the actorin the leading role (in that case it was Tracy Pollan as Beth Twitty, Natalee’smother — and though he’s mostly a series-TV director he has done at least oneother true-crime movie for Lifetime, Who Is Clark Rockefeller?, about a Rockefeller impersonator who kidnappedhis daughter after the girl’s mother learned the truth about him.

Sexting in Suburbia (Moody Independent/Mar Vista Entertainment, 2012)

2012-01-22T14:26:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Sexting in Suburbia — which may have had a theatrical release, or at leastoriginally been slated for one, since the imdb.com page on it has a poster withthe alternate title Shattered Silenceand lists an MPAA rating (PG-13, “for mature thematic material includinga disturbing image, some language and sexual content”), though I watched it inwhat was billed as a “world premiere” on the Lifetime channel — apparentlytakes its inspiration from a real-life case in 2008, in which Ohio high schoolstudent Jessica “Jesse” Logan killed herself after months of being bulliedfollowing the mass Internet posting of a nude photo of herself she had e-mailedto her boyfriend, who had cross-posted it and sent it “viral” out of revengeafter they broke up. In the movie, directed and edited by John Stimpson (theunusual spelling appears on his on-screen credit as well as imdb.com) from ascript he co-wrote with Marcy Holland, the put-upon girl is Dina Van Cleve(Jenn Proske; her imdb.com page doesn’t reveal her birthdate but she looksabout a decade too old to be playing a high-school student), star of the girls’field hockey team at Westfield High School (when I saw the name I reflected onthe mysterious “Westfield Shoppingtown” company that quietly bought all themajor malls in San Diego County and wondered if they had set this up as acharter school!) and an “A” student in line for a college scholarship who wasalso elected homecoming queen.

Only at the homecoming after-party herboyfriend, Mark Carey (Ryan Kelley), tries to get her to have sex with him, butshe’s still being a virtuous little girl and refuses. Indeed, she bails on theparty and comes home to her mom Rachel (Liz Vassey, top-billed) well ahead ofschedule, but once she’s home she goes into her room, undresses and sends Marka weird sort of consolation prize, a nude photo of herself which she takes withthe camera on her cell phone. Meanwhile Mark, put off by a girl who wouldn’tput out for him, finds one at the party who will: Skylar Reid (Kelly Goss),blonde sex bomb and Dina’s principal rival for the college scholarship andstardom on the field hockey team. Mark and Skylar become an “item” and Dina’snaked picture appears on cell phones throughout the school — posted by Dina’sfriend Claire Stevens (Rachel Parsons) after Skylar intimidates her into it bytelling her Dina’s actions risk getting the field hockey team disqualified fromchampionship play. Dina’s new-found notoriety gets her the full-tilt bullyingtreatment, from graffiti all over Westfield High calling her “whore” and “slut”to being openly shunned by just about everybody in school — someone even dumpsa large supply of condoms in her locker, and she opens it and they comespilling out Mark happens to be passing by and offers to help her pick them up,to which she replies, “Haven’t you hurt me enough already?” Eventually thepressure gets to be too much for her and she hangs herself in her bedroom.

Themovie doesn’t take a linear approach to the material: it begins with mom Rachelshowing a house to a couple who are thinking of buying it (like her own house,it has a leaky kitchen faucet), and she’s so late that by the time she getshome her daughter has already killed herself — and just in case we wereencouraged by the ambiguity of the opening scene to hold open the possibilitythat mom had arrived home in time to rescue her daughter and cut her down fromher D.I.Y. noose in time to save her life, we next see a wake at school inwhich Dina is awarded a posthumous letter in field hockey. The film cuts backand forth throughout its running time between Dina’s worsening situation — thelast straw is her being fired from the team and losing her college scholarship— and scenes taking place after Dina’s death, in which Rachel enrages the restof the town by going after Dina’s killers, specifically by investigating whodistributed the photo over the Internet and then trying to get the police toprosecute them on child pornography charges (since Dina was still only 17 whenthe photo was taken). The opening parts of Sexting in Suburbia alternate between the deliberately depressing andthe just plain silly, but once the basis outlines of the story are establishedit becomes surprisingly chilling and gripping drama, as the same mysteriouspeople who bullied Dina and pressured her to kill herself now turn againstRachel. She gets multiple copies of a death threat, one of those criminalmissives with letters clipped from magazine headlines and pasted on a freshpiece of paper to form a message, and the next time she goes to her daughter’sgrave she finds the tombstone vandalized with “Dina — Slut” and the posthumousathletic letter set fire to and burned.

Through part of the movie I had thoughtit would have been more powerful if it had started with the framing sequenceand then stuck with Dina’s story, as the bullying and harassment got worse andworse and her ordeal took on a Kafkaesque intensity that made it all too clearwhy she finally broke down and killed herself — but the dual-track constructionStimpson and Holland actually used creates a powerful sense of drama as Rachelbecomes a passion-driven revenge figure, anxious not only to find out who wasresponsible for hounding her daughter to death but to indict the whole highschool and, indeed, the whole town for allowing it to happen. At the same timethe movie is a powerful indictment of the Internet and the “zero tolerance”climate that between them has made adolescence even rougher than it was when Iwent through it, when there was still room for error — a chance to make thestupid mistakes of youth, learn from them and go on with your life temporarilysadder but permanently wiser. The key line is spoken by the avuncularAfrican-American woman guidance counselor Rachel talks to in order to makesense of her daughter’s needless death — and the counselor says, “The Internetis forever.” Even if Dina had overcome her bullying and found the strength tolive, That Picture would have followed her through the rest of her life,turning up in unexpected places and probably costing her more than one job.(I’ve had at least two people whom I interviewed for Zenger’sNewsmagazine ask me to take their storiesoff the Zenger’s blog, onebecause it was coming up in searches by potential employers and costing himjobs, and the other because she had joined the military while “don’t ask, don’ttell” was still in place and she was afraid it would turn up and get herdischarged. I told both these people that I would remove the articles from myown site but I couldn’t guarantee them that it wouldn’t stay lodged in someother part of the Web and still turn up to hurt them.)

Dina’s “sexting” herboyfriend was a reckless and stupid thing to do, but it was precisely thereckless and stupid thing teenagers often do and grow out of — only in themodern age the electrons and pixels preserve all the old stupid mistakes we made and wanted to shareonline. I’ve often warned people, “If you wouldn’t stand on a streetcorner andyell it out to all passers-by, don’t put it online.” At the same time I’veoften wondered how much of my own online conduct will come back to haunt me — especially if a future U.S. government dominatedby Right-wingers decides to mount a new McCarthyite purge of the entirecountry, and finds the job far easier than McCarthy did because every petition we signed, every e-mail we sent, everyprotest we ever went to is documented on the Internet and all they’ll have todo is search willy-nilly and collect enough “evidence” to destroy people’slives en masse. Indeed, while theInternet is often hailed as a venue of personal freedom, it’s also the ultimatetool for dictators: whereas the secret police of the Soviet Union and theirEastern European satellites could only mount their security cameras everywhereand scare their people into thinking they were being watched 24/7, the Internetreally can watch people 24/7:modern computer technology can allow machines to collect evidence of politicaldissent far faster than the ordinary humans of the KGB or Stasi or SAVAK evercould. Sexting in Suburbia makespowerful comments on the vulnerability of anyone who posts anything to the Web and also the hermeticenvironment of a small town, in which virtually everyone turns against Racheland she loses business because of her dauntless but deeply threatening effortto find the person responsible for driving her daughter to suicide bymass-distributing her nude photo.

What a pity that, after building to a reallypowerful drama in which the whodunit aspects of their plot actually add to theintensity, Stimpson and Holland can’t leave well enough alone and have to endtheir movie with two outrageously melodramatic twists — the texter turns outnot to be Skyler (as we’ve been led to believe all movie) but Skyler’s motherPatricia (Judith Hoag), whom Rachel had ironically been turning to for support(they’ve been friends since before their daughters were even born) but who’dcome to hate Dina because Dina was getting the star position on the hockey teamand the scholarship Skyler thought was her due — and when Skyler finds out andturns against her mom, Patricia says the chilling words, “You’ll understandwhen you have children of her own.” Skyler responds by stealing her mom’s carand going on a wild ride that’s either ordinary teenage recklessness or her ownsuicide attempt, and she ends up alive but in a hospital and likely never to beable to walk again — and there’s a bizarre final scene at a school assembly inwhich, partly as a sign of respect and partly targeting the technology as thereal culprit, Claire suggests that all the students give up their cell phonesfor the rest of the semester. The over-the-top silliness of the ending mars amovie that sometimes seems stupid (when Dina dies, the first scenes of Rachelafter the suicide are marred by a sappy soft-rock song, and when the homecomingparty occurs the band there is playing equally mediocre pop-punk) but sometimesis genuinely powerful and truly does justice to its subject, the multifariousways humans work out to be cruel to each other and the extent to which theInternet has just facilitated the grim work of people senselessly destroyingeach other.

Wake Up and Dream (Universal, 1954)

2012-01-19T17:49:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was Wake Up and Dream, a 1934 production by Universal starring Russ Columbo, the legendary croonerwhom they’d just signed in hopes of building him up as their answer to BingCrosby’s incredible success at Paramount. Universal wasn’t the only company inthe fall of 1934 that was hoping Columbo would be “their” Crosby; after twoyears during which litigation with his previous record company, Victor, hadkept him from recording, Brunswick, smarting from having just lost Crosby tothe newly formed U.S. Decca label, signed him and did a four-song session withhim, including three songs from Wake Up and Dream. All these hopes came to an abrupt end when Columbomet his death on September 2, 1934 in what, at least according to the officialexplanation, was one of the most bizarre accidents of all time: he was visitinghis friend, photographer Lansing Brown, at Brown’s home when Brown decided hewanted a cigarette. Brown struck his match on an antique French dueling pistolthat was part of his collection, and the match set off a long-forgotten chargeinside the pistol, launching a ball (the gun was so old it didn’t even usebullets!) that found its way to Columbo’s forehead, piercing his skull andkilling him almost instantly. The sheer unlikeliness of this story sparkeddecades of rumors about Columbo’s death, the most common of which was that he’dbeen killed by the Mafia because he wouldn’t give them a piece of his money —though not only is this the sort of rumor that gets spread whenever any celebrity with an Italian surname dies well beforehis or her time, one would think that if the Mob actually hit Columbo, theywould have come up with a more credible cover story.

When he died Columbo hadbeen dating Carole Lombard, and for the next eight years — until her own earlydeath in a plane crash — she and Columbo’s friends participated in a subterfugedesigned to keep Columbo’s mother from finding out that her son had died,sending her bogus reports on his career and treating her much the way thecentral character treated his mom in the movie Good Bye, Lenin! to keep her from finding out that her beloved EastGerman state had ceased to exist. Columbo’s death also sparked a cult that,though hardly on the same level as the one that formed around James Dean after his death 21 years later, was large enough that hisrecords stayed in print until the 1970’s and enough of it is still going onthat the post of Wake Up and Dreamto archive.org included a note from the Russ Columbo Society (Web address www.russcolumbo.org) asking people tolobby for Columbo’s inclusion in the Hollywood Walk of Fame. (It’s not likelybecause that’s an honor that’s almost never given posthumously: one gimmickbehind it is that the star is always laid in a ceremony that the honoreeattends, and though I can’t say for sure they’ve never awarded a star to a deceased performer, they wouldprobably require that a living relative attend the star-laying ceremony.)

Wake Up and Dreamwasn’t released until Columbo had already been dead for a month, and thatprobably hurt it at the box office, though as it stands it’s a quiteworkmanlike film even though it seems as if John Meehan, Jr., credited with an“original” story and screenplay, actually compiled it from several differentaccounts in the cliché bank. It starts with Paul Scotti (Russ Columbo — and it’sinteresting that not only did Columbo keep his real Italianate name but his character had an Italian name as well: ironic in light of thefights Frank Sinatra had at the outset of his career in 1939 with Harry James and others, who toldhim to change his name on the ground that no one with an Italian surname wouldever make it as a singing star!) as part of a vaudeville team with his friendCharles Sullivan (Roger Pryor, more tolerable as a supporting player than hewas as the male lead in Mae West’s Belle of the Nineties) and their female partner, Toby Brown (June Knight).Of course, Sullivan has the hots (in a decorous Production Code way, anyway)for Toby but she only has eyes for Scotti (who’s addressed throughout by hislast name, as if it were the nickname “Scotty”). Their current engagement comesto an abrupt ending when the theatre owner pays them only half the salary hepromised, and Sullivan tries to bluff Scotti’s way into a job with a touringcompany of a Broadway revue by posing as a man from the revue producer’s NewYork office — only the actual performer New York hired to replace theirincompetent road-company guy shows up, Sullivan gets him drunk and takes him toan abandoned house in the sticks, then is caught and the three have to flee becauseSullivan is now wanted for kidnapping and stealing the man’s car.

They stowaway in the back of a truck and make their way from Atlantic City (where thefilm opened) to New York, where Sullivan does a tightrope-walking stunt to getthem $200 so they can flee to California. (Meehan’s script had previouslyestablished that he had worked as a tightrope walker in a circus, so at leastwe’re not asked to believe that someone with no experience had somehow managedthis daring and dangerous feat.) Arrogantly pushing away anyone with a camerafor fear that a photograph would get published and let the Atlantic City copsknow where he was, Sullivan collects the money and the three set off on a bustrip to California, with Scotti’s foster father Giovanni Cellini (HenryArmetta) — he took Scotti in when Scotti’s parents died back in Italy (Columbohimself was U.S.-born but here he’s playing an immigrant) — and on the bus theyget mixed up with fortune-teller Madame Rose (Catherine Doucet), who has a bigbankroll that she doles out a dollar at a time to her traveling companion Joe“Egghead” Egbert (Andy Devine). The leads urge Cellini to court Madame Rose,not only to cover his food bills — he quickly depletes their traveling fundwith the huge meals he orders every time the bus stops for food — but becauseMadame Rose has a place in L.A. where, if Cellini plays his cards right, theycan stay while they try to break into pictures. They hear of a restaurant thatwill hire them as entertainers and give them a dinner for one night — and keepthem on with a small salary and a free meal each night if they go over with theaudience — and they’re a hit, but their chances for a meal, let alone a longengagement, get blown when Cellini insults the owner.

Nonetheless, they get discoveredby a “slumming” movie producer, Roger Babcock (Richard Carle), who’s there withactress Mae La Rue (Wini Shaw, in one of her few appearances for a studio otherthan Warner Bros.) and her sister, who’s being passed off as his “secretary.”La Rue gets Babcock to sign Scotti to a movie contract, they make two filmstogether that are hits, Babcock laments that instead of firing his mistress’snew boyfriend he has to make him a star, and it looks like Scotti is “goingHollywood” and romancing Ms. La Rue off screen as well as on, but in the endSullivan realizes that Toby has always loved Scotti and engineers it so theyget back together and announce their engagement at the end. It’s not much of amovie, but it has its points: for all its traveling down well-worn paths,Meehan’s script is rather unique in just how many near-misses at the brass ring it puts its herothrough before he finally grasps it, and director Kurt Neumann, no doubt awarethat on a Universal budget he couldn’t bring in Busby Berkeley or one of hisimitators and star Columbo in big production numbers, keeps his camera inalmost constant motion during many scenes that would otherwise look static anddull. This is one movie musical from the early 1930’s in which we don’t have to sit through reams of soporific expositionscenes before the characters start singing and dancing! Neumann even copies thefamous scene from Buster Keaton’s The Cameraman, using an elevator crane in the set of the boardinghouse where the leads are staying in the opening scenes.

Just about everyonewho writes about Wake Up and Dream,or about Columbo generally, can’t help but wonder how his career might havegone if he had lived, and in particular whether he would actually have been athreat to Crosby (whom he’d actually been linked to before either of them were major stars: when Crosby was a featuredentertainer with Gus Arnheim’s orchestra at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub inHollywood in 1930-31, Columbo was inArnheim’s band … as a violinist, and though he doesn’t play that instrument inthis movie he was a skilledenough piano that during one of the pre-recorded numbers he sits at the pianoand his fingers go to the right places on the keyboard even though it’s highlyunlikely what we hear on the soundtrack is actually his playing). Probably not:Columbo had a darkly handsome overall look (especially given his ethnicity, onecould well imagine him going after an updated version of the Valentino image)but an oddly craggy face and a receding hairline which, as Charles noted, wasonly emphasized by the odd three-quarter camera angles director Neumann andcinematographer Charles J. Stumar shot him from through much of the film. Butthough he was probably better-looking in the flesh than the short, jug-earedCrosby, the camera simply didn’t love him the way it loved Bing — and, quitefrankly, neither did the microphone.

Columbo had a perfectly pleasant, ifrather groaning, baritone voice, and on romantic ballads he could be quitehaunting — but even on romantic ballads Crosby’s voice, with its superb breathcontrol and legato, beat Columbo’s, and Crosby could also do jazz numbers andother sorts of songs that would have left Columbo totally at sea. For someonewho came up during the so-called “Jazz Age,” there’s almost no hint of jazzphrasing in Columbo’s voice and absolutely no sense of jazz rhythm (notsurprising when you consider that Crosby started out as a drummer and Columboas a violinist). About the best he could have done if he’d lived a normal spanwas hung in Crosby’s wake the way Perry Como did in Sinatra’s 10 to 20 yearslater. Wake Up and Dream is awell-made movie, and had Columbo lived it would probably have been a goodlaunching pad for him (imdb.com lists eight acting credits for him, includingan important supporting role in Broadway Thru a Keyhole for 20^th Century pre-Fox just beforethis), but as it stands the spectre of Columbo’s death hangs over it the way otherstars’ deaths do with other posthumous releases like Jean Harlow’s Saratoga, Carole Lombard’s To Be or Not to Be, Laird Cregar’s Hangover Square, James Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause and Giant,Peter Finch’s Network and BrandonLee’s The Crow.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes (20th Century-Fox, Chernin Entertainment, Dune Entertainment, 2011)

2012-01-16T17:23:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The night before last Charles and I had watched the DVDversion of an excellent recent film that had got much better reviews than oneexpects from a popcorn blockbuster that’s a “reboot” of a franchise dating backto 1968: Rise of the Planet of the Apes,not a deathlessly great movie but a solid piece of entertainment that shows howgood the modern sci-fi action movie can be in the right hands. The extensive hype on this film when it wasreleased last year made virtually all America aware of its plot, but in caseyou’ve been living in Timbuktu since this film was released last August, heregoes: scientist Will Rodman (James Franco, who should have learned all aboutdiscoveries that go horribly wrong from his stint in the Spider-Man movies) works for a giant pharmaceutical company andhas developed a proposed treatment for Alzheimer’s called ALZ-112. It’s reachedthe stage where it’s ready for trials in chimpanzees, only one of the testchimps, Bright Eyes, goes out of control, crashes the company’s board meeting(at which Rodman was going to ask that the drug be given human trials) andtriggers an order from Rodman’s supervisor, department head Steven Jacobs(played by Black actor David Oyelowo and named after the producer of theoriginal run of Planet of the Apesmovies, Arthur Jacobs), to terminate the project and have all the chimps who’dbeen given ALZ-112 “put down.” Rodman manages to keep Bright Eyes from thisfate long enough for her to give birth to a baby chimp whom he names Caesar —he reasons that she freaked out not because of an adverse drug reaction butbecause she was protecting her unborn cub — and he takes Caesar home with him.He also steals some ampules containing ALZ-112 and injects them into hisfather, Charles Rodman (John Lithgow), whose own battle with Alzheimer’s hadinspired Will’s research; Charles recovers but his gains are temporary and hesoon slips back into Alzheimer’s-related dementia. Meanwhile, Will raisesCaesar as if he were a human child, and the ape develops cognitive capabilitiesbeyond those of human babies of the same age. He also takes Caesar with him asif he were his own son, and on one of those excursions — a trip to Muir Woodsin Marin County, just north of San Francisco — the two have a meet-cute withCaroline Aranha (Freida Pinto), who eventually becomes Will’s girlfriend andCaesar’s co-parent.

Only this bizarre family grouping comes to an abrupt endwhen Caesar fights back against a taunting neighbor and gets sent to the SanBruno facility for rebellious primates — by this time, in a rather awkward jumpcut that’s an exception to the generally excellent direction by Rupert Wyatt,Caesar has gone from being played by a real baby chimp to being Andy Serkis,once again undergoing “motion capture” as he did as Gollum in TheLord of the Rings and Kong in the mostrecent King Kong remake, so helooks absolutely credible as a full-grown chimp while still retaining theability to move, take direction and act like a human performer. (20^thCentury-Fox was planning an Academy Award campaign for Serkis, claiming thatit’s time to recognize motion capture as a form of live human acting aslegitimate as any other, but that went precisely nowhere with the ScreenActors’ Guild — and in the movie, though he’s obviously far more credible thanRoddy MacDowell, Kim Hunter, Maurice Evans and the other inhabitants of thoseoutrageously phony ape suits in the original films, it’s unclear, to say theleast, whether Caesar’s powerful facial expressions are the work of Andy Serkisor the digital animators who “ape-ified” him.) San Bruno, which is the sort offacility Charles Dickens would have dreamed up had he taken up animal rights asa cause, puts Caesar in contact with other apes for the first time and alsooppresses him so much that he rebels and uses his superior intellect toorganize the other apes to fight back. He also teaches them how to speak viasign language (it seems odd that this movie would come out at around the sametime as Project Nim, adocumentary about the “Nim Chimpsky” experiment that pretty much debunked theidea that apes can acquire human language and communicate via sign) andeventually he’s able to expose them to the latest generation of the wonderdrug, ALZ-113, producing a whole race of super-intelligent giant apes.

Fromthis point the movie essentially becomes a horror film, a successor to Them! and the other 1950’s movies in which humankind wasfaced with giant invasion forces from ordinarily unthreatening terrestrialanimals which had become either artificially intelligent or way bigger thannormal (or both) due to exposure to atomic radiation. Director Wyatt andwriters Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver are able to strike a delicate balance,giving the apes the capability to strategize without making them so smart that they can handle advanced human weapons;in the climactic fight scene on the Golden Gate Bridge the apes outpoint thehumans through sheer animal instinct, improvising crude clubs and projectilesfrom the materials at hand rather than actually stealing the humans’ guns.Meanwhile, back at the drug company, the people in charge have given ALZ-113 tohumans without realizing that it has a vicious side effect in people that itdoesn’t have in apes: it gives them a plague-like disease that causes virtuallycertain death, though it keeps them alive long enough for them to spread theartificial virus that’s at the heart of the treatment, which turns out to becasually communicable and airborne. The movie ends not only with the apeskicking our butts in the first battle of the species but with a chillingpost-credits sequence showing the speed with which modern air travel allows thedisease to spread worldwide (an interesting postlude to our recent viewing ofthe smallpox movie The Killer That Stalked New York — here it’s a man-made virus that’s stalking theentire world and obviouslysetting up a sequel in which virtually the entire human race dies out and theapes take over).

What’s remarkable about Rise of the Planet of theApes is that it’s consistently entertainingand gripping start-to-finish; the exposition is genuinely interesting andcompelling drama and the whole piece comes off as a well-integrated, excitingmovie rather than a work of action-porn with insufferably dull scenes settingup the action highlights. It’s also gratifying to see James Franco in the leadof a major-studio blockbuster; I still think the Spider-Manmovies would have been better with him as Spider-Man and Tobey Maguire (who wasactually considered for Franco’s role here) as his friend-turned enemy insteadof the other way around — and though Franco has established an odd alternateniche playing real-life Queers in biopics (so far he’s done James Dean, AllenGinsberg and Hart Crane!), herehe’s credible as both an intellectual and an action hero (a balance mostactors, especially modern ones, can’t manage) and he remains quite easy on the eyes. Rise ofthe Planet of the Apes is everything amodern-day blockbuster should be: a compelling premise, veiled socialcommentary, strong acting (the performances by the malevolent neighbor and thenasty blond guy who terrorizes Caesar at San Bruno stand out, as does Lithgow’swork as the father and the appealing Freida Pinto — and fortunately we’vereached far enough into the 21^st century that a major movie candepict an interracial relationship and nobody either in the film or theaudience makes a big deal about it!) and, above all, taut direction that neverlets the excitement flag — and a total running time of 105 minutes (long enoughto do the story justice, short enough not to stretch it out longer than it cansustain) rather than the 135 minutes or even longer Andy Serkis’s previousemployer, Peter Jackson, would have wasted on this story if he’d been in charge.

All Over Town (Republic, 1937)

2012-01-16T16:40:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Charles and I eventually ran a movie last night, a downloadfrom archive.org called All Over Town, a1937 film for Republic that was the second and last film made for them by thecomedy team of Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson. “Not in the wide open spaces nor inthe depths of the vast wilderness,” reads the printed foreword — therebyeliminating the two most common settings for Republic movies! — “but in aremote section of Manhattan Island struggle the last of their tribe … the truevanishing Americans.” The true vanishing Americans turn out to be vaudevilleperformers, living at a boarding house owned by the battle-axe Mrs. Wilson(Blanche Payson, one of those formidably butch landladies in 1930’s Hollywoodmovies whose fearsome demeanors made it hard to believe that there had everbeen a Mr. Wilson), who’s tryingto eject her newest tenants, Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson (playing themselves, orat least using their own names for their characters à la Laurel and Hardy), not only for being behind ontheir rent but also for harboring “Sally, the World’s Only Singing Seal” (shedoesn’t actually “sing,” she just bites a set of taxi horns in succession toproduce something vaguely resembling a melody), who’s a key part of their act.Olsen and Johnson hear about a potential job at the Eldridge Theatre, and theyand singer/songwriter/pianist Don Fletcher (Harry Stockwell, a tall, rail-thinjuvenile with an oddly shaped face that probably kept him away from majorstardom — he was originally slated for the romantic lead in the Marx Brothers’ ADay at the Races and actually performed onthe live tryout tour the Marxes did to hone the material before they made theactual film, but by the time it became a movie the better-known Allan Jones hadreplaced him) set out for said theatre, only to find that it’s been boarded upfor two years, ever since an actor was murdered by a mysterious assailantduring rehearsals for an upcoming show, and the place has acquired a reputationfor being both haunted and jinxed.

The theatre is owned by Joan Eldridge (MaryHoward), who inherited it from her late father (no, he wasn’t the guy who wasmurdered!) but owes money on it to William Bailey (Eddie Kane, the detectivefrom The Stolen Jools, playingessentially the kind of role Walter Woolf King and Douglass Dumbrille played inthe MGM Marx Brothers movies), who’s trying to get her to sell the theatre toinvestor Pete Phillips (Otto Hoffman). Thanks to a conversation Don overheardat Mrs. Wilson’s, he’s convinced that Olsen and Johnson are oil millionaires,and so when they go to Joan’s theatre she thinks they have the financialwherewithal to back her in a show that will enable her to pay off the money sheowes Bailey and save the theatre — only Bailey and Phillips have theminvestigated and find out the only money they had was $150 they got fromselling a gas station they owned. The behind-the-scenes personnel — includingFranklin Pangborn in a typical (for him) but still marvelous turn as aninsufferably queeny costume designer (there’s a particularly funny scene inwhich he’s illustrated his new design to Olsen and Johnson, he says the dressis going to be “cut on the bias,” and they haven’t the slightest idea what he’stalking about) — are about to walk, and so are the cast members, when Donpersuades them that the only way they have of getting paid for the work they’vealready done is to mount the show without pay and hope it hits big enough tomake them what they’re owed.

The troupe demonstrates one of the show’s bignumbers (a song featuring Olsen, Johnson and Sally the seal that Olsen andJohnson wrote themselves), only as the number is winding down a mysteryassailant points a gun through a curtain and fires it, killing Bailey. Phillipshas his men seize the sets and costumes, and when Olsen and Johnson ask howthey’re going to be able to do a show without them, he sarcastically says,“Over the radio — where they can’t see you!” Olsen and Johnson take him up onthe suggestion and sell a radio sponsor, MacDougal’s Mackerels, on a broadcastin which they will launch a new series by revealing Bailey’s murderer on theair — even though they have no idea who that is. At one point Olsen persuadesJohnson to confess to the crime himself — they’re fearful that they are responsible, because the killing happened right asSally, with her nose, “shot” a blank-loaded pistol as the climax of their act —only Johnson can’t get the confession straight (instead of “I killed himbecause he was a rat,” he keeps saying, “I killed him because I was a rat”) — and it ends with a weird scene inwhich the police corner the criminal (Phillips, as if you couldn’t have guessed— even though his motive remains on the obscure side) while the show’s bandplays a merry tune and Olsen, like Groucho Marx at the end of MonkeyBusiness, provides a sports-styleplay-by-play description of the shootout.

All Over Town is one of those movies that seems less written than compiled from the memory banks of old-movie clichés — thoughJerome Chodorov, brother of fellow writer Edward Chodorov and a man with someestimable credits in his own right, including the original 1944 documentaryversion of Memphis Belle and bothversions of My Sister Eileen, isone of the credited writers along with Richard English, Jack Townley and“comedy construction” for James Parrott — and in his book MovieComedy Teams Leonard Maltin says the “general reaction” toAll Over Town when it was new wasthat compared to it, Olsen and Johnson’s previous Republic feature, CountryGentlemen, “was a gem” — but, perhaps because its plot is more trivial and therefore works betteras a frame for disconnected gags than the situation comedy of CountryGentlemen, it strikes me as a much funniermovie and a better showcase for the talents of its stars. Part of theimprovement may have been from the wholesale raid Republic staged on thetalents that had helped make the Laurel and Hardy classics for Hal Roach — thedirector was James W. Horne, “comedy constructionist” James Parrott had alsodirected Laurel and Hardy at Roach and was the brother of Roach star CharleyChase, and to play MacDougal Republic borrowed the brilliant character comedianJames Finlayson (though they put a singularly ugly toupee on him and onlyrevealed his true baldness at the very end) — while they wisely avoided makingOlsen and Johnson lovably dumb in the Laurel and Hardy manner. Republicgenerally husbanded their stars well — Gene Autry and Roy Rogers worked therevirtually forever and they kept their biggest star of all, John Wayne, for asurprisingly long time even while he made movies for bigger studios (Wayne quitRepublic in 1952 because he was tired of being assigned movies with studioowner Herbert Yates’s light-o’love, Vera Hruba Ralston) — but after thebox-office disappointment of All Over Town (a title explained only in the very last scene, in which the announcerof the broadcast says that the next show in the series will be heard “all overtown”) Republic fired Olsen and Johnson.

This proved to be a spectacularlyill-timed move, because just a year later, in 1938, Broadway impresario LeeShubert hired the team to headline a comedy revue called Hellzapoppin’ that turned out to be the biggest hit of theircareer, a show that ran for three years and essentially anticipated the 1960’sTV show Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-Inin the sheer relentlessness of its humor and the way it threw its gags at theaudience both figuratively and literally from all directions. Olsen and Johnsongot a film contract from Universal and shot four films for them in the early1940’s, and while as a screen team they never reached the heights of theirstudio-mates Abbott and Costello, the four Universal Olsen and Johnson vehicles(Hellzapoppin’, Crazy House, Ghost Catchers and See My Lawyer) deserve reissue as a two-DVD boxed set along thelines of the first Bob Hope-Bing Crosby Road movies. All Over Town has intimations of the no-holds-barred style ofhumor that later made Olsen and Johnson Broadway stars — including a routinethey couldn’t have done on stage, in which, fearing that Sally the seal hasswallowed the murder weapon, they take Sally and Inspector Murphy (FredKelsey), the police officer investigating the case, on a roller-coaster ride toget her to cough it up again (and the three homo sapiens naturally end up dizzy and nauseous while Sally eatsit up and wants to stay on the roller-coaster!) — as well as the wince-inducingpuns that are funny in spite of themselves: when Olsen announces that Sally wasborn on Christmas day, Johnson says, “Yeah, she’s a Christmas seal.”

The Killer That Stalked New York (Columbia, 1950)

2012-01-12T18:11:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film Charles and Iwatched last night was The Killer That Stalked New York, a 1950 thriller with definite noir overtones, released five and one-half months afterthe movie Panic in the Streets and basically the same plot — only instead of New Orleans, it’s NewYork; and instead of plague, it’s smallpox. According to a Variety report at the time, the two films weresufficiently similar that Columbia, which made The Killer That Stalked NewYork, deliberately held it backuntil the run of Fox’s Panic in the Streets was finished. Like Panic in the Streets, The Killer That Stalked New York (originally shot under the title FrightenedCity) deals with a criminal whounknowingly brings a fatal disease and the germ that causes it into a majormetropolitan area — though in this case it’s a woman, nightclub singer SheilaBennett (Evelyn Keyes), who has just got back to New York from a trip to Cuba,where she’s been given two large, uncut diamonds as part of a criminal plotmasterminded by her husband, Matt Krane (Charles Korvin), who’s also heraccompanist at the club where she works. Unbeknownst to her, while Sheila wasin Cuba she also contracted a case of smallpox, which she’s been unknowinglyspreading to just about everyone she comes in contact with — and also unbeknownstto Sheila, her husband Matt is having an affair with her sister, Francie (anice performance by Lola Albright), and Matt plans to abscond with all themoney from the diamond caper and leave both Bennett girls high and dry.

Sheila is being tracedby Treasury agents because she’s a smuggler, and also by Dr. Ben Wood (WilliamBishop) and other staff members of the New York City Health Department becauseshe’s the vector for an impending smallpox epidemic — though they don’t knowwho the carrier is and neither the Treasury agents nor the health officials arein touch with each other (a premonition of the failure to prevent the 9/11attacks because the various government agencies who each had pieces of thepuzzle weren’t communicating). Panic in the Streets is a good deal better known than The KillerThat Stalked New York, partly because it had a“name” director, Elia Kazan — the director of Killer, Earl McEvoy, only made two other feature films(more’s the pity, as he’s quite good) — and a “name” star, Richard Widmark asthe doctor trying to stop the epidemic. But though it has its overwroughtmoments, Killer is actually a subtler,more sinister and less action-driven movie. Working from a script by HarryEssex based on a Collier’s magazine article by Milton Lehman — which in turn was based on an actualsmallpox scare in New York in 1946, in which (as happens in the movie) the citygovernment massively mobilized to vaccinate millions of people within days —McEvoy constructs a marvelously staged movie with silent scenes showing exactlyhow much contact people in a large city have with other people they don’tactually know.

One of the movie’s most powerful scene takes place at a parkdrinking fountain: Sheila Bennett, looking visibly the worse for wear even ifColumbia’s makeup department drew back from accurately depicting a person inlate-stage smallpox (the only actual pox we see on Evelyn Keyes are a few smalllesions under her neck when she pulls down the neck of her shirt in a latescene; had Bette Davis starred in this movie, she would probably have shovedpictures of actual smallpox victims in front of her makeup artist and said,“Hey, make me up to look like that,” but Keyes wasn’t about to do that and didn’t have the clout with thestudio to get away with something like that even if she’d wanted to), takes adrink from the fountain and then two kids fight over the opportunity to be thenext to drink from it … and of course we in the audience want them both tolose. Though it’s only 79 minutes long, Killer gives the sense of a surprisingly slow film eventhough it’s about a quickly spreading epidemic, and it helps that (unlikeRichard Widmark, whose performance in Panic in the Streets sometimes looked like Tommy Udo, his sinisterhit-man in Kiss of Death, hadsomehow gone to school and got a medical degree) William Bishop actually looks like we expect a public-health doctor, and actslike we expect one to act.

What’s also interesting is how much The Killer ThatStalked New York is a Zeitgeist movie, made when most Americans still believedtheir government could respond to an emergency quickly and believably, and whenthey wanted you to do something way out of your way (like get an instantvaccination against smallpox), you shouldn’t argue: you should just do it. Thereis a brief montage that acknowledges the existence of an anti-vaccine movementthen (though it was probably a good deal smaller than it is now), but anythingthey have to say is swept aside not only by the filmmakers but their charactersas well: in the movie, New Yorkers readily flock to public clinics, firestations, police offices, the Salvation Army and wherever else the vaccine wasbeing administered and eagerly get it. What’s more, the private sector isdepicted as equally efficient: when the threat begins New York has easy accessto 4 million doses of vaccine, and while that’s only enough for half thepopulation, when the city runs out the drug companies work with the governmentto get new supplies to the city as fast as they can be made, and without holding them up for some insane amount of moneythe way a drug company would today!

The film is, among other things, a tributeto public health officers, and certainly endorses the idea that doctors shouldhave virtually unlimited power to act in case of a health emergency, and therest of us should just assume that they know what they’re doing and go alongwith it, without question. The final sequences are over-the-topmelodramatically — the last confrontation occurs on a ledge of a tall building,where for some incomprehensible reason Matt Krane has murdered his jewelcutter, Anthony Moss (Art Smith), and Sheila confronts him there — the doctorsin the story explain that something she feels she has to do before she croaks is literally keeping heralive and allowing her to make it through to the final reel while many peopleshe contacted have already died — and threatens him, though he actually takes atumble off the ledge and the disease finally claims her — but until then, anddespite the stentorian tone of the narration (which is a lot more moralistic about disease transmission thanthe movie itself), The Killer That Stalked New York is a film to be reckoned with and one well worthwatching.

Here Is Germany (U.S., 1945)

2012-01-11T17:49:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The night before last Charles and I ran Here Is Germany, a U.S. propaganda film that I recently downloadedfrom archive.org, along with quite a lot of material on Hitler, the Nazis andWorld War II — some of it posted from a Holocaust denier who argued that Hitlerwas really a Zionist (which is not quite as crazy as it sounds: Adolf Eichmann said that within the Nazi circleshe originally argued for deporting the Jews as an alternative to killing them —though he wanted to settle them in Madagascar, not Palestine — but when Hitlerand Eichmann’s direct superiors, Heinrich Himmler and Ernst Kaltenbrunner,ordered extermination as a policy Eichmann enthusiastically went along andimplemented it) and even posted the infamous propaganda film TheFührer Gives the Jews a City — about theso-called “model” concentration camp at Theresienstadt, virtually all of whoseinmates were sent to Auschwitz as soon as the filming was finished — andpresented it at face value! Of course, Here Is Germany was produced by the U.S. to prepare its soldiers forthe postwar occupation of Germany (though, according to whoever posted it toarchive.org, it was never actually used for that purpose), and it was directedby Frank Capra and written by him and Anthony Veiller (who also narrated) withquite a different perspective and propagandistic intent.

It begins with aseries of bucolic images of Germany’s beauty, both natural and architectural,and footage of ordinary Germans in the streets and on the farm (there’s amarvelous Millet-like image of a German farmer sowing seeds by hand) — and thenthe narrator’s tone turns a lotnastier (indeed, the voice sounds so different I’m not sure whether it wasVeiller or someone else) as the film cuts to images of the death camps, thevictims who were killed and the incredibly emaciated but barely alive ones whowere found when the camps were opened, along with footage of the war itself andother clips documenting Germany’s evil. What’s most fascinating about thismovie is that it treats the Nazis not as an aberration in German history but asmerely the latest in a series of German leaders who have pushed the idea thatGermans are the world’s “master race,” that they have the right to rule theworld, and they have the right to start wars and grab anyone else’s land thatthey can in order to extend German rule as far as possible no matter how much“collateral damage” that does to anyone else. The Capra-Veiller narrationtraces this strain in German history from Frederick the Great through Otto vonBismarck, Kaiser Wilhelm II and finally Hitler, whom it describes not as anatural leader or organizer but as a mere stooge of the German Junkers, the Prussian nobility and military class, who hadpreached German superiority and world domination for generations but needed afront to hide behind when they sought power again after Germany’s defeat ofWorld War I and the resulting Treaty of Versailles.

This was actually quite acommon, indeed mainstream, position in American ideology as World War II wounddown and was clearly going to result in an Allied victory — on one of Kino onVideo’s DVD’s of Erich von Stroheim’s films there was a bonus track, a 1944U.S. government-sponsored radio broadcast called “The High Command” in whichStroheim played a leader in the Prussian High Command which was plotting waysto stay in power even after the defeat of the Nazi regime. It was reflectedmost powerfully in the so-called Morgenthau Plan — after Henry Morgenthau,Secretary of the Treasury under Franklin Roosevelt — which called for returningGermany to a pre-industrial state of civilization and allowing it to be only anagricultural and “pastoral” country. The narration for this film argues thatthe Weimar Republic had failed because Germans simply weren’t capable ofdemocracy; it also states that one of the big mistakes the winners of World WarI had made was allowing the German army to march back into Berlin and Germany’sother major cities in triumph, as if it had won the war instead of losing it,and argues that this was the basis of the “stab in the back” myth that Germanarms could have won the war if corrupt “democratic” politicians hadn’t sold itand the country out. It contrasts the footage of the German army marchingthrough German cities at the end of World War I with the footage of Alliedoccupiers marching through German cities at the end of World War II. HereIs Germany sometimes engages in theunwitting hypocrisy many propagandists fall into — when it depicts the Nazitakeover it shows the Nazis burning books (footage Joseph Goebbels, in one ofhis rare propaganda miscalculations, made sure was distributed worldwide inhopes the world would be impressed by the Nazis’ resolution — insteadpeople outside Germany were horrified) and we’re clearly meant to disapprove,while at the end it shows the occupation forces burning Nazi flags and regaliaand we’re meant to approve.

What’s interesting about this is how quickly the line changed, especially asthe Soviet Union emerged as the principal threat to the U.S. in the postwarworld and America’s rulers decided that a strong, non-Nazi, non-Communistconservative German state would be a necessary buffer between the U.S.S.R. andthe rest of Western Europe — so the Allies, especially the Americans, pulledback on the harsh anti-German measures this film was advocating. They cancelledthe war-crimes trials after 1952, they let ex-Nazis back into the (West) Germangovernment and they gave up on trying to hold the Germans accountable forpunishing their war criminals. (I recently read Neal Bascomb’s HuntingEichmann, which included the explanationthat the reason Eichmann wasn’t prosecuted by West Germany was that, thoughthere was at least one aggressive state’s attorney who wanted to, he couldn’ttrust the justice system in general not to let Eichmann off and even tosympathize with him on some level.) On one hand the new line worked — West Germanybecame a functioning and long-lasting representative democracy, and when theIron Curtain fell in 1989 it absorbed the former East Germany with someeconomic dislocations but a smooth transition politically — and on the otherhand, West Germany (the Bundesrepublik Deutschland, the formal name of the West German state pre-1990and of all Germany now) built its economy so successfully that its currentchancellor, Angela Merkel, has been successful to do with purely economic meanswhat Bismarck, Wilhelm II and Hitler failed to do by force of arms: namely,subject all Europe (at least that part of it that uses the Euro currency) toGerman control.

Country Gentlemen (Republic, 1936)

2012-01-11T16:12:00.001-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I dredged up something I’d downloaded from archive.org lastAugust: Country Gentlemen, a 1936 filmfrom Republic that starred the vaudeville comedy team of Ole Olsen and ChicJohnson, helpfully identified with their photos in the film’s opening creditsso we can tell which one is which. The American Film InstituteCatalog identifies this as their first film— which it wasn’t: they’d made three for Warner Bros. in 1930-31 (Oh!Sailor Behave, Fifty Million Frenchmen and GoldDust Gertie) — though it’s a considerablybetter movie than Gold Dust Gertie,the only one of their Warners films I’ve actually seen. In 1938 Olsen andJohnson would break through to a much bigger audience with their Broadway hit Hellzapoppin’, which was essentially a nonpolitical live versionof the later TV show Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, and they would make four films for Universal in theearly to mid-1940’s (Hellzapoppin’, Crazy House, Ghost Catchers and See My Lawyer) that would be well worth reviving as a two-DVDboxed set.

Country Gentlemen is asurprisingly dark comedy that casts Olsen and Johnson as a couple of swindlers,J. D. Hamilton and Charlie Williams, who in the opening scene are forced toflee New York City ahead of the police, who are about to arrest them and shutdown their phony gold-mining operation. At one point Hamilton tells Williamstheir gold-mine bonds aren’t going to be worth anything until 50 million years;then he says they won’t be worth anything until 15 million years, and Williamssaid, “That’s a relief. I thought you said 50 million years.” They drive cross-countrywith their former secretary, Gertie (Joyce Compton), and Gertie’s dog Snuffy(played by “Prince, the Great Dane” — I joked that in his next movie he wasbilled as “the dog formerly known as Prince”), stowing away in theirconvertible, and they end up on the outskirts of Los Angeles in a town calledChesterville, whose main attraction for the con artists is a large veterans’hospital with a lot of veterans who have just received their bonus checks,which Our Anti-Heroes are predictably anxious to relieve them of.

They alsomeet widow Louise Heath (Lila Lee, mother of A Chorus Line writer James Kirkwood, Jr.) and her son Billy (SammyMcKim), and they start drilling an oil well outside of town, never expectingactually to strike oil — though of course they do, and while they’ve sold theentire oil well to the veterans, their gold bonds also turn out to be for a genuinely valuable andproductive mine — thereby providing a predictably happy ending for a comedythat otherwise is surprisingly dark, notably in the scenes towards the end inwhich the angry veterans, sure that Hamilton and Williams have stolen all theirmoney, advance on them in an angry mob and actually string them up to poles,ready to lynch them, until one of the veterans throws a stick of dynamite downthe supposedly dry-hole oil well, causing it to gusher. The film steals from a lot of other comedians, including Laurel and Hardy (whenI saw Gold Dust Gertie one of myreflections was how much funnier that film would have been with Laurel andHardy in it — though Country Gentlemen wouldn’t have worked with Stan and Ollie because thecharacters needed to be sharp, not stupid) and the Marx Brothers, but it’sstill quite charming and amusing, and Lila Lee turns in a sensitive,sympathetic performance as the decent woman caught up in the stars’ schemesthat makes one wonder why her career went downhill so fast when sound came in.

Vienna Philharmonic 2012 New Year's Concert (ORF, 2012)

2012-01-09T15:01:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Charles and I watched theVienna Philharmonic New Year’s concert, which we’d seen a bit of on PBS NewYear’s night in the American version — cut down from the over two-hour fulllength of the European broadcast from ORF (the legal name of Austria’s public radioand TV network — the initials stand for “Österreichischer Rundfunk,”“Österreich” being the actual German name of Austria and “Rundfunk” being theGerman word for “broadcasting”) to fit an hour and a half time slot and with anannoyingly chirpy narration by Julie Andrews — who seems to have got the jobsimply because her most famous movie, The Sound of Music, is set in Austria (but in Salzburg, not Vienna!).The version we watched last night was a download from France, so there was anadded narration by a male, unseen on screen, in French — which got a bitannoying, especially for the numbers when there was no on-screen identificationof the piece they were playing.

As usual, the concert was dedicated almostentirely to the music of the Strauss family: Johann Strauss, Sr. (referred toin the credits as “Johann Strauss, der Vater”) and his sons Johann Jr. (the Strauss, the famous one who wrote “The BlueDanube,” “Tales from the Vienna Woods,” “Artist’s Life,” et al.), Josef and Eduard. (There was even a JohannStrauss III, who also composed light music, but he wasn’t Johann, Jr.’s son: hewas Eduard’s!) All told, three of the pieces were by Johann, Sr. (including the“Radetzky March,” the official march of the Austrian military, which always closes the program — the audience is invited toclap along in time and the conductor, Mariss Jansons, spent as much time duringthis number conducting the audience as conducting the musicians; Charlesmarveled at how a bunch of white Europeans can clap in unison to a piece ofmusic, a skill which seems to elude white Americans!), seven by Johann, Jr.(including the “Blue Danube,” which is always the next-to-last piece on the program: the ritual is thatthe conductor plays the first few bars, then stops, then turns to the audienceand says, “The Vienna Philharmonic wants to wish you a — ” and then theorchestra says in unison, “Prosit Neujahr!,” which means — as if you couldn’tguess — “Happy New Year!”), five by Josef, one by Eduard (though not based on themes original with him; it was atwisted sequence of themes from Bizet’s Carmen shoehorned into a quadrille rhythm), two byJohann, Jr. and Josef in collaboration and four by other people.

In some waysthe non-Strauss pieces were among the best items on the program: they includeda “Wiener Bürger” piece by Carl Michael Ziehrer, a “Danse Diabolique” by JosephHellmesberger, “Copenhagen Steam Railway Galop” by Danish composer HansChristian Lumbye (whose last name is pronounced “Loom-BEE” — I’d always thoughtit was “Loom-BYE” but I was wrong) — for which the orchestra’s percussionsection got to play with whistles, sandpaper, woodblocks and otheraccoutrements designed to duplicate the sound of an incoming train (much thesame stuff as a radio effects department would have used to do an incomingtrain during the golden age of radio drama) while the video portion was actualfootage of a Copenhagen steam train (most of the cut-in footage was prettypointless but this was really charming!) and what was by far, musically, thebest piece on the program: the panorama and waltz from Tchaikovsky’s SleepingBeauty. The Strauss family’s farewas effective light music — Johann, Jr.’s unquestioned gift for great tunes hasbeen keeping their legend in business for over a century now — but they rathergot shown up as onlylight-music composers by the inclusion of something by a real master likeTchaikovsky. (Some day I hope a conductor decides to do a really radical numberon the Viennese waltz tradition and program Ravel’s “La Valse” — his grimsatire on the whole Viennese waltz legend, written while Austria and Francewere on opposite sides in World War I — at one of these concerts. It wouldcertainly sweep away some cobwebs!)

The conductor was Mariss Jansons, aLatvian-born conductor who came into the world in 1943 after his father andbrother had been killed by the Nazis in the ghetto in Riga; since Latvia wasannexed to the Soviet Union during the war, he had to come up through theSoviet musical bureaucracy (he was offered an assistant position by Herbert vonKarajan in 1969, but the Soviet authorities made sure he never heard of theoffer) and he didn’t definitively leave until 1979, when he was offered thedirectorship of the Oslo Philharmonic — curiously, his Wikipedia page says heand his second wife Irina now live in Saint Petersburg, but doesn’t specifywhether that’s the one in Russia or in Florida! (He’s worked in the U.S. aswell as Europe, so either is possible.) He conducted the Vienna Philharmonic’sNew Year’s concert once before, in 2006, and judging from his performance thisyear he seems competent enough without being a supreme master of the Viennesestyle — and he’s also a man with a surprisingly malevolent-looking face: at thestart of one number he looked like the wolf about to eat Little Red Riding Hoodand at the start of another I joked that he was saying to the musicians, “Andif any one of you makes a mistake, I’ll eat you.” Also it was interesting thatthe concert featured as many polkas as it did waltzes — one doesn’t think ofVienna as having a great polka tradition, and indeed a Strauss family polka doesn’tsound much like “She’s Too Fat” and the other cornball songs that have givenpolkas a bad name together, but through the craftsmanship of the Straussorchestrations one can hear the polka rhythms.

My favorite versions of “On theBeautiful Blue Danube” (to give it its full-length title) remain the Victor 78by Ormandy and the Deutsche Grammophon LP version by Karajan (the latter theone that was used for the space-flight scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey); after hearing this piece for years chopped andchanneled into a trivial bit of salon music, it was a revelation to hear theseversions, in the original Johann Strauss, Jr. orchestration and at the fulllength he wrote, and hear that the piece is really a miniature tone poem inthree-quarter time (and it’s hardly Johann Strauss, Jr.’s fault that in the 20^thcentury the Danube — the “Donau,” to use its German name — ceased to bebeautiful or blue and became one of thedirtiest, most polluted rivers on earth). Janssons’ version was good but hardlyat the Ormandy or Karajan level (remember that Ormandy and Karajan came fromthe two leading states within the Austro-Hungarian empire — Karajan wasAustrian and Ormandy, originally named Jenö Blau, was Hungarian!); he tended totake the fast parts too fast and the slow parts too slow — but the piece stillmade its effect even though the video portion was a rather banal balletroutine: I’d have much rather we stayed in the concert hall (the legendaryMusikvereinsaal) and watched the Vienna Philharmonic play one of its trademarkworks! There was another ballet sequence elsewhere in the program with threemen and three women, all of whomlooked excessively nellie — I joked that the program director had probably toldthe queeniest (and cutest!) of the young men, the one with black hair in apudding-bowl cut, “Can you at least make it look like you like girls?”

When I first startedwatching these concerts on TV — back when Walter Cronkite was still around tonarrate the PBS versions — he went on and on and on about how tradition-bound the programming was andI wondered just how the people could stand performing such a concert when therules were so specific about what they could or couldn’t play when — but I’vecome to enjoy and look forward to them as a New Year’s tradition and evidencethat New Year’s music can be something a little more substantial than Guy Lombardo’s arrangementof “Auld Lang Syne” and an assortment of banal modern-day pop acts (for their1993 New Year’s concert MTV presented Nirvana, but mostly the “rock” New Year’sshows go for the most trivial modern-day rock and pop music instead of thebest), even though some of the New York Philharmonic’s New Year’s concerts haveoffered still more substantial fare (this year they did Bernstein and Gershwin,but I recall an especially beautiful show in which they did an all-Frenchprogram and rang in the new year with a spectacular performance of Ravel’s“Bolero”!).

The Old Corral (Republic, 1936)

2012-01-07T15:48:00.001-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was The OldCorral, a 1936 Republic productionthat was one of the early Gene Autry vehicles after the success of the serial ThePhantom Empire made him a star — and justas Autry had got his start as a supporting player in Ken Maynard’s serial MysteryMountain and then taken over thelead in The Phantom Empire after Maynard and Mascot production head Nat Levine had a falling-out,so Roy Rogers reportedly made his film debut in The Old Corral as one of the minor villains (!) and then went onto his own successful series of starring vehicles at Republic — though he’s notlisted in the credits and I didn’t recognize him (I didn’t recognize LonChaney, Jr. either and he was listed in the credits). What’s amazing about this movie is the sheermultiplicity of plots the writers, Bernard McConville (story) and Sherman Loweand Joseph Poland (script), were able to crowd into a 54-minute running time,and their obvious tongue-in-cheek awareness that this was a fundamentally sillymovie and they weren’t going to take it at all seriously even though theyweren’t going to make it an outright parody either.

Like most of Autry’s andRogers’ films, it actually takes place in contemporary times, and it beginswith a gangster scene that approaches film noir — gangster Tony Pearl (Buddy Roosevelt) is shotand killed at the Chicago nightclub he owns by rival gangster Mike Scarlatti(John Bradford), and singer Eleanor Spenser (Hope Manning, who later changedher first name to Irene and remade a couple of Bette Davis roles at Warners,including the lead in Spy Ship in which she played a character based on real-life aviatrix andisolationist speaker Laura Ingalls). Spenser flees West, changes her name toJane Edwards and hides out in the town of Turquoise City, Arizona after her busis forced to stop there by bandits, the O’Keefe brothers (played by thereal-life singing group the Sons of the Pioneers), who stick up not only thebus passengers but also the local sheriff, Gene Autry (as usual, he’s using hisreal name as the name of his character), who’d been driving a buckboard with aheavy-set man he was arresting for domestic violence against his wife. The bushad crashed into the buckboard, driving it off the road and breaking it inpieces, and the driver had picked up Autry and his prisoner — and as if thatweren’t enough plot for you, Edwards has been cruised on the bus by MartinSimms (Cornelius Keefe), who’s trying to hire her for his saloon/gambling housein town — only he’s really after the money he can get from turning her in, either to theauthorities (she fled the scene of Pearl’s murder and therefore became asuspect in it herself) or to Scarlatti, who wants to kill her.

As if that weren’t enough plot for you, a customer of Simmspulls out a gun in the middle of the saloon floor and threatens to kill him —only Autry, who just happens to be there, takes the gun away but refuses to takeSimms’ complaint on the ground that Simms is running crooked games in hisback-room casino and therefore the man, who’d lost big at Simms’ rigged tables,was justified in going after him even if he did so the wrong way. What’s more,the residents of Turquoise City are about to hold a jubilee celebration inhonor of the new dam that’s being built in their town, which will provide themwater and electrical power (this was the 1930’s and big infrastructure projectslike that were “in” in those days, a part of the Zeitgeist that produced this film that’s almost unimaginabletoday!), and part of the celebration is supposed to be a big concert whichAutry will MC as well as performing himself. Three of the O’Keefe brothers arein jail but demand to be allowed to perform at the concert, explaining that theholdup was just a publicity stunt for their vocal group — but they won’t playunless Autry arrests the two other brothers who got away, on the ground thattheir vocal arrangements are for five people and won’t sound right with anyfewer. The whole thing builds to a climax at what’s called “the old corral” —though it looks just like an old ranch building with no sign that it was everused to pen a herd of cattle (which is what a “corral” actually is) — in whichGene arrests both Scarlatti and Sims and looks headed for a happily-ever-afterfinish with Jane née Eleanor(he even kisses her at the end, after previously having shown no discernibleromantic interest in her at all!).

Interspersed in all of this are more songsthan I could keep count of, as well as some familiar strains in the backingmusic (their rent-a-score included some classical bits that both Charles and Ithought familiar, though we couldn’t place them — nothing as obvious andjarring as “The Moldau” used as a backdrop for a fleet of Polynesian outriggercanoes in Murnau’s Tabu!);Manning tries one duet with Autry but their voices don’t blend for shit (and itdidn’t help that Republic kept the level of her voice well below his!) butoverall the music, like Autry’s performance, is nice and comfortable (and hedoes a number with yodels, accompanying himself on guitar, reminding us thatbefore he ever made a film Autry was already a recording star: Columbia hadsigned him as a yodeling country balladeer to compete with Jimmie Rodgers on Victor!)— and the movie as a whole is respectable light entertainment, made by allconcerned with tongues firmly in cheeks and an awareness that this good-naturedformula was incredibly popular with audiences of the time.

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 1 (Summit Entertainment, 2011)

2012-01-06T14:48:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film we chose to go tolast night was The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 1, the awkwardly titled fourth entry in thesurprisingly interesting Twilight series (whose makers decided to copy the stratagem of the makers of theHarry Potter movies and split the last book in the cycle into two parts so theycould get five mega-blockbuster hit films, and the profits therefrom, out of itinstead of just four). Despite being three (Charles) and four (me) decadesolder than the target audience for these films, Charles and I had enjoyed thefirst three on DVD and thought it would be fun to see one on the big screen,with an audience (though not much of one: this is the sort of movie to whichthe fan base flocks in the first or second weekend and by the time it’s beenout this long — the release date was November 18, 2011 — only a few stragglersare still paying their way in). It turned out to be a worthy series entry eventhough both it and the immediately preceding film, Eclipse, seem to me to have been comedowns from themarvelous New Moon (which I’ve loved aboveall the other Twilight moviesso far largely because of the director, Christopher Weitz, who shot it inclassic 1940’s style with long, slow takes and a lot of tracking shots that drew us into the storyinstead of shoving it into our faces with the kind of short shot lengths andquick cuts that are supposed to be de rigueur for a movie aimed at today’s teen audience; italso had by far the subtlest use of music of any of the films, deployingsophisticated alternative-rock songs and keying them to the emotions of thestory rather than just including them to sell more copies of a soundtrack CD),and I was a bit disappointed in this given that the director was Bill Condon,who made two of the best movies of the last decade, Gods and Monsters and Dreamgirls, but seemed hamstrung by his material this timearound. Breaking Dawn, Part 1 opens with preparations for the long-awaited wedding of normal humanBella Swan (Kristen Stewart) to boy vampire Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) —remember that the conceit of this series is that once you become a vampire, youstay forever at the physical age you were when you were “changed” even thoughyou are literally immortal; also remember that Edward has previously explainedto Bella that his morals are too old-school to have sex with her until they’relegally married by the laws of normal humanity.

The first half-hour of this117-minute movie is pretty slow going — Edward explains to her that in his earlydays as a vampire (which happened to coincide with the original 1935 release ofThe Bride of Frankenstein, a film Condon had previously referenced in Gods and Monsters, which was about its director, James Whale) heactually killed humans before he joined the good-vampire cult and only fed onanimals; Bella has a nightmare in which they’re married against a pure whitebackground and in front of them is a pile of dead bodies with gleaming redwounds; and they fly off in a private plane to a honeymoon on a private islandin Brazil the Cullens own. (Charles pointed out that while the Cullen clan waspresented at the start of the series as upper-middle-class professionals — theclan’s leader, Carlisle Cullen, is a doctor — here they’re definitely part ofthe 1 percent; the Underworld movies also posited a vampire clan with no worries about money, butexplained it by making them owners of a plasma and blood products company,which not only gave them a seemingly inexhaustible source of income but alsoallowed them to feed on their own products so they could sustain themselveswithout having to kill.) While there, Edward and Bella have sex for the firsttime — and, seemingly, the last, since this movie depicts seriously the samecurious dilemma that was played for laughs in the movie Hancock: namely, what happens when a super-powered humanmale has sex with a normal human female and how does he keep from burning ortearing her insides out in the process. (I always figured that’s why Supermannever allowed himself to have sex with Lois Lane even though she’d have beenmore than willing.) When they’re done Edward’s sheer energy (remember it’s his first time, too!) has torn the bed cover to shredsand turned it into a mass of feathers that float picturesquely around the roomwhen Bella disturbs them by waking up (though why they needed a feather comforter in a tropical climate likeBrazil’s is a mystery); he’s also left deep bruises all over her, which forsome reason bothers him a lot more than it does her, so they spend most of therest of their honeymoon playing chess (the “black” pieces on their chessboardare actually red, and this was used as the motif for the cover of Stephenie Meyer’s source novel)and skinny-dipping but don’t get physical again.

Then the infallibly inevitable(at least in the movies!) pregnancy at a single contact occurs — and the filmsuddenly gets a lot more powerful and compelling as drama. First of all, nobodyin the vampire clan has any idea what’s going to happen when a vampire and ahuman procreate — in fact, they had assumed that would be impossible (which mayexplain Edward’s willingness to have unprotected sex with his wife) — and asearch on the Internet turns up some old medieval texts that indicate theproduct of such a union would be a particularly vicious and (literally)bloodthirsty baby vampire. Edward and Bella return to their (and the series’)home base in Forks, Washington, and the baby develops so rapidly — it’s readyto be born in just one month instead of the usual nine — it threatens to ripBella apart from the insides. What’s more, while carrying the child Bella getsweaker and weaker, until one of the Cullens correctly guesses that since herfetus is a vampire, she needs to start drinking blood in order to nourish itand allow it to be born. There’s a surprisingly pro-choice element in the filmin which Bella resists the suggestions of the Cullens that she have her babyaborted — though ultimately she decides to keep the child it is quite clearly drawn as her choice, a bit of asurprise from as hard-core Mormon an author as Stephenie Meyer is reported tobe — and at the very end of the process Bella finally transforms into avampire, not (as I’d been hoping all along throughout the three previous films)as an act of love from Edward to grant her immortality and eternal youth sothey can share their lives together literally forever, but as a last-ditch injection of a largesyringe filled with a grey substance called “vampire venom” (“Did they just happen to have it around in case of an emergency likethis?” Charles asked) to sustain Bella through the difficult (to say the least)process of giving birth to the first Cullen vampire of the next generation.

Meanwhile, through all of this Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner), the Native Americanwerewolf who was Edward’s rival for Bella’s affections (and quite franklyLautner, especially once he bulked up for New Moon and became considerably more muscular and butch,does a lot for me aesthetically than the almost terminally neurasthenic RobertPattinson — and some of the hunky actors who’ve been cast as “bad vampires” inearlier episodes of the series seem even hotter!), has tried to protect Bellafrom the demands of the rest of his tribe, who had warned earlier in the series that if Bella got turnedinto a vampire — even if she were willing — that would nullify the peacetreaty between vampires and werewolves and the wolves would launch an all-outwar. The film has moments that either don’t make sense or seem gratuitous, andseveral times it verges uncomfortably close to risibility — I had a hard timekeeping from laughing when the various Native people in wolf form held ameeting and between dog-like barks, growls and keening screams, they spoke toeach other in English through a voice distorter made to sound like Englishwould if a dog (or a wolf) could speak it. (If they wanted to give the ideathat the wolves, when they transformed, would still retain the power oflanguage, it would have been better for them to put heavy echoes on their voicesand establish that they were “speaking” to each other telepathically eventhough they were in body forms whose throats could not form words in English orany other human language.) I also could have done without the “inside” shotspurporting to show Bella’s circulatory system in action as she underwent thevarious stages of human-to-vampire transformation.

But this film was mostlytaut, exciting drama, intelligently scripted by Melissa Rosenberg from Meyer’snovel and effectively directed by Condon (even though this was clearly anassignment for hire for him rather than a personal movie like Gods andMonsters or Dreamgirls), and leading to a chilling climax in which Jacobsaves the Cullens from attack by a wolf pack that outnumbers them by“imprinting” on Bella’s baby, Renesmee (pronounced “Ren-ESS-May” and a compoundname Bella made up from the names of some of the female Cullens), whichsupposedly means that the werewolves can no longer kill them. (Charles pointedout another plot hole: why the wolves couldn’t go ahead and kill everyone else in the Cullen clan is never explained — and the denouement suggests an alternative version of the story inwhich the werewolves do massacrethe Cullens and Jacob is stuck with the obligation to raise the now-dead Bella’sand Edward’s child.) A post-credit sequence offers three almost unbearablyeffete Quentin Crisp-ish vampires making it clear that they disapprove of thebirth of Renesmee and they’re going to take countermeasures against the Cullensin the next (and last) film in the cycle — a rather disappointing conceit thatthe straight vampires are good and it’s the Gay vampires that are bad — butdespite the annoyances and the moments that edge towards the silliness that’san occupational hazard for fantasy writers, overall The Twilight Saga:Breaking Dawn, Part 1 is quality entertainment,a gripping tale well told even though it’s hard to sustain the sense of doomedromanticism that made earlier series entries so powerful when the two leads aremarried to each other and their problems are no longer those of adolescence,but of adulthood.

Super 8 (Paramount, Amblin, Bad Robot, 2011)

2012-01-04T17:06:00.001-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was Super8, a major-studioproduction released in 2011 by Paramount in association with Steven Spielberg’scompany, Amblin Entertainment, and writer-director J. J. Abrams’ company, BadRobot. It’s basically E.T. meets The Blair Witch Project; it’s set in 1979 (a bit late in the day for the Super-8 film format,after which the movie is named; Charles found himself wondering whether anybody in today’s movie audience, especially theteens at whom this film was clearly aimed since its main protagonists aremiddle-school students, knows what Super-8 was, and in today’s age of cheap digital videothe idea that you would have to shoot something on film and then have to waitthree days for it to be developed — a jarring note comparable to that inPatrick McMahon’s memoir Becoming Patrick in which he recalled that, as an adoptee who hadtraced his birth family and was preparing for his first meeting with them in1990, one thing he wanted to make sure of was that his cameras were properlyloaded with film) and the central characters are Charles Kaznyk (RileyGriffiths), writer and director of an amateur movie about zombies called TheCase that he’sshooting with a Super-8 camera (that appears to be equipped with synch-soundcapability, which would have put it at the very high end of amateur moviemaking equipment in1979 — probably beyond the ability of working-class people in the steel town ofLillian, Ohio, where the film takes place, to afford) and wants to finish intime to enter it in an upcoming contest; Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney), makeup manand all-around assistant on his project; and Alice Dainard (Elle Fanning,Dakota Fanning’s younger sister), the girl Joe invites to play a leading rolein the movie because he’s got the hots for her (as does Charles) and alsobecause she has a car — or at least access to one — which will make it easierto get to location shoots.

At the beginning of the film Joe’s mother is killedin an industrial accident at the Lillian steel plant (the town is fictional andnamed after J. J. Abrams’ own mother) — a piece of information we get in agrimly ironic scene in which a workman takes down the numbers “784” on a signrepresenting the number of days the plant has gone without an accident, andreplaces them with “1.” Joe’s dad, Jackson Lamb (Kyle Chandler, top-billed), isa deputy sheriff who suddenly finds himself in charge of the department whenhis boss, Sheriff Pruitt (Brett Rice), suddenly disappears — and the doublewhammy of having vastly increased work responsibilities and having lost hiswife leads Jackson to take it out on Joe, demanding that he go to a baseballcamp over summer instead of staying in town to help Charlie finish his film.Jackson also has a visceral hatred for Alice’s scapegrace father, Louis Dainard(Ron Eldard), and forbids Joe from seeing Alice — while Louis, equallyarbitrarily, forbids Alice from seeing Joe, though naturally the two gettogether anyway (Joe even climbs up the side of her house and enters throughher window), adding Romeo and Juliet to the surprising number of stories Abrams has ripped off for this one.The big turning point in the story comes when Charlie and crew ride off to atrain station to film a scene in which Alice, playing the wife of the localsheriff, resists his efforts to send her away for her own safety while he staysbehind to confront the zombies that are menacing the town — and when a trainactually passes by, Charlie calls out, “Production values!,” and demands thathis cast and crew hustle themselves into place so he can grab his shot whilethe train is going by, thereby adding a sense of authenticity to his film.

Onlythe train ends up in a spectacular crash that turns out to have been caused byDr. Woodward (Glynn Turman), an elderly African-American who was a professor atthe middle school the characters attended, and though they drop the camera andflee from the scene, eventually they get the film and turn it in fordeveloping, though in the three days they have to wait a lot of other thingshappen. Cars fly through the air, things explode for seemingly no reason and alot of the townspeople disappear, among other things, and Jackson Lamb getshimself arrested by military police after he’s asked to come in for aninterview with the colonel running the local military base — and eventually thetruth comes out: two decades before, an alien spacecraft crash-landed inLillian and its occupant merely wanted, like E.T., to go home — only the armycaptured him and subjected him to so much testing and prodding that hedeveloped a bitter hatred towards humanity. Dr. Woodward was then a militaryphysician but was dishonorably discharged for “subversive activities” becausehe wanted to befriend and help the alien rather than detain and experiment onit; he got a job as a science teacher in the area (a bit of a plot hole sinceit was virtually impossible in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s for anyone tobe hired for any public-sectorjob with the stain of a dishonorable discharge from the military on theirrecord) and continued to try to contact the alien; in fact, that’s what he wasdoing with his pickup parked across the train tracks the night that the traincame (and somehow Dr. Woodward, though badly scarred, survived a direct hitfrom a train on his truck!).

Super 8 is a beautifully staged movie; like his mentor, Spielberg, J. J. Abramsis a master of the grammar of filmmaking with a near-perfect instinct forknowing when to hold the camera still and when to move it, when to cut and whento let a scene keep running, and though cinematographer Larry Fong has a badcase of past-is-brown syndrome, he and Abrams deserve credit for keeping themonster mostly in shadow or as a black-on-black shape in the night sky anddeliberately toying with us so we don’t get a full-on view of what the creature lookslike. Abrams also gets good performances from his cast, both teens and adults —Elle Fanning in particular shines, at least partly because in the script hercharacter is the only person on Charlie’s movie project who is actually able toact (we hear her co-star deliver Charlie’s dialogue with all the woodenness ofa first-day drama student or a porn performer, while she performs the scenewith a rich and thrilling variety of intonations conveying real emotion) — andone of the film’s most charming aspects is that The Case, the film-within-the-film Charlie was makingon super-8, gets shown during the closing credits side by side with at leastpart of the credit roll.

There’s nothing really wrong with Super 8 except it’s the sort of film that borrows somuch from other films you get the feeling you’ve seen it before even if youhaven’t; it’s a film that impresses but rarely moves one emotionally, and forall his command of the grammar of film Abrams seems interested only in the mostbasic emotional conflicts. One gets the impression the reason this film iscentered around middle-school students is not only that middle- and high-schoolstudents are its target audience but also so Abrams doesn’t have to deal atlength with the higher levels of emotional complexity he’d have to depict ifhis central characters were adults. It’s also a film that’s somewhat confusingin its relationship to the Zeitgeist: the use of an Army officer as the principal villain can be read asLeft-wing (you can’t trust the military) or as Right-wing (you can’t trust thegovernment); given how long it takes to prepare a film these days, the movieworld is always at least a tick or two behind the Zeitgeist and it’s rare that you get a pair of filmsthat so convincingly reflects a change in the temper of the country as the two IronMan movies did(Tony Stark as Obama-esque liberal in the first Iron Man and as Ayn Rand-ish Libertarian capitalistsuperhero in the second one), and overall it’s an impressive movie thatentertains the senses but doesn’t really (except for brief shards of emotion inthe Joe-Alice-Charlie love triangle, and the scene in which Joe and his fatherreunite) touch the heart.

Cowboys & Aliens (Universal, DreamWorks and Relativity Media, 2011)

2011-12-31T19:10:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The night before last Charles and I had screened a recentDVD: Cowboys & Aliens (the ampersandis part of the official title), a 2011 movie directed by Jon Favreau — I wasamused that the blurbs on the DVD box mentioned that he was the director of IronMan but not the director of Elf — from a script that went through so many hands itwas as if the producers of this movie (Universal, DreamWorks and RelativityMedia) were going out of their way to prove my general field theory of cinemathat the quality of a movie is inversely proportional to its number of writers.Cowboys & Aliens began lifeas a comic book by Scott Mitchell Rosenberg for a company called PlatinumStudios. After that it went through Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, and Steve Odekirkfor an “original screen story” that got converted into an actual screenplay byFergus & Ostby and Damon Lindelhof and Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman.What these six writers working in three relay teams came up with wasessentially a science-fiction version of The Bourne Identity out West: the setting is 1873, in the Arizonaterritory, in and near the town of Absolution (I joked that if they continueddown the same trail they’d reach a town called Extreme Unction!).

We’re firstintroduced to Jake Lonergan (Daniel Craig), who’s come to on the trail toAbsolution with a mysterious, ornate metal bracelet on his wrist and no ideawho he is or what he’s called. He’s immediately ambushed by three thugs, whomhe easily vanquishes — at this point I joked, “I’ve played an Israeli assassin and James Bond. You guys didn’t have a chance!” For thefirst half-hour of the movie there’s no hint of any alien presence other thanthat weird bracelet on Jake’s wrist, and the film meanders through anultra-slow introduction of its other principals: local cattle rancher WoodrowDolarhyde (Harrison Ford — obviouslypart of the logic of this film was to tap the supposed commercial appeal of aJames Bond and an Indiana Jones acting in the same movie, though as imdb.compointed out Ford had appeared with Sean Connery in Indiana Jones andthe Last Crusade and therefore this was not his first movie with an actor who’d played Bond),his psycho son Percy (Paul Dano, who as usual stole every scene he was in), anda woman, Ella Swenson (Olivia Wilde), who seemed to be there just to bedecorative and to give Jake someone he could walk away from at the end àla the Lone Ranger once the world was savedfrom the space creatures once and for all.

The aliens finally appear and turnout to be giant green monkey-like creatures, moving with a fearsome agility farbeyond that of humans even though we own this planet and they’re the onestrying to conquer it (were we supposed to believe the gravity was heavier ontheir planet than on ours?), and Favreau’s direction of the alien sequencesgoes as much or more for horror than action, with a lot of quick cuts and“shock” edits that worked on one level even though, after quite a lot offootage of these ugly green things, I found myself regretting that Favreauhadn’t followed the example of George Pal in the 1953 War of theWorlds (and, outside the sci-fi realm, ofVal Lewton before that!) of merely teasing us with what the monsters looked like. Still, the scenes in which thecowboys are actually battling the aliens are quite a bit more entertaining thanthe rest; the film is surprisingly slow-paced (especially given that Favreau’searlier directorial efforts have moved!) and the script by the writing committee is full of Western clichésthat seem to have lodged in their subconscious minds many moons ago and getplayed out at excruciating lengths. Add to that a job of cinematography byMatthew Libatique that is such an extreme example of the past-is-brown lookthat at one point I joked that he was making the people (all of whom are white, mind you!) look as dark as possible so they’d matchthe mahogany bar of the town saloon, and Cowboys & Aliens emerges as a movie that thoroughly deserved its fateas a box-office flop.

On standard indicia of quality it’s no doubt a “better”movie than the 1935 serial The Phantom Empire — the title I came up with when I asked myself,“What other sci-fi Westerns have there been?” — but that old tacky Republicserial with comfort-actor Gene Autry as a decent but unheroic lead was actually(at least for me) more fun to watch, and one reason is that the Muranians wereplayed by identifiable human actors and drawn as conscious, sentient characterswith (often clashing) agendas of their own, rather than a bland, silentfighting force seemingly out to conquer the Earth (Ella explains to Jake thatthey’re probably “scouts,” sent as an advance guard from their planet to see ifEarthlinks either can or will fight them off, and therefore he has to make sureall of them die so none of them report back home and the leaders of their worlddecide that Earth is too tough a nut to crack and leave us alone) but not givenany sign of higher intelligence — much like, come to think of it, the racistway American Indians were usually portrayed in classic-era Westerns!

Scrooge (Twickenham, 1935)

2011-12-31T18:26:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film I wanted to watchlast night was Scrooge, a 1935 British version ofCharles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol that I wished to screen before we got too far away from the end of theholiday season, and which frankly I didn’t have much hope for. It was producedat Twickenham Studios, where Arthur Wontner made all but one of his five filmsas Sherlock Holmes (the reason for the fear was that the one non-Twickenham Holmes film with Wontner, the 1932 Signof the Four, was quite the best ofthem), and the director was Henry Edwards, previously known to me only for Juggernaut, a 1936 mad-scientist melodrama with Boris Karloffthat was simply dull. Well, I got surprised: Scrooge turned out to be a quite tough-minded version ofthe Dickens story, which by removing most of the sentimentality and virtuallyall the comic relief, made the tale seem considerably more radical —politically — than it usually does in screen adaptations.

The Scrooge wasSeymour Hicks, a veteran British actor who had first played the role in asilent version as early as 1913 (!) and would remain active until his death in1949, and though he didn’t have the comic chops of Alastair Sim he’s quiteconvincing in the role — particularly in the chilling (literally and figuratively) moment in which he catches BobCratchit trying to sneak a few more lumps of coal onto the heater in his outeroffice. Cratchit is intriguingly cast: Donald Calthrop, usually an actor who playedslimy villains (he’s best known as the blackmailer in Hitchcock’s Blackmail and as Boris Karloff’s crippled assistant in TheMan Who Changed His Mind, the good mad-scientist movie Karloff made in his nativeEngland in 1936 just before Juggernaut). There are a few odd corners cut — the ghost of Jacob Marley doesn’tmake an on-screen appearance at all (he’s just a disembodied voice) and theGhost of Christmas Past is literally a “ghostly” presence (of the three, onlythe Ghost of Christmas Present shows up the way Dickens described him) — andthe “Past” sequence doesn’t include the heart-rending scenes of Scrooge as alonely boy at school, or his apprenticeship with Mr. Fezziwig (just where did Dickens come up with these bonkers characternames?), and the one scene from Scrooge’s past we do get (the kiss-off from his girlfriend Belle,played by Mary Glynne) is so overwrought — Glynne literally screams at him — that we’re liable to think, “Goodriddance,” instead of regarding that as the turning point for Scrooge’scharacter.

But overall this is a quite good adaptation, one of the best evermade of this oft-filmed story, particularly strong in cinematic atmosphere.Some of that may be due to the involvement of John Brahm, German expat whowould eventually head for Hollywood and become a director himself (of suchatmospheric British-set horror-mysteries as The Undying Monster, the 1944 version of The Lodger, and Hangover Square), who’s credited here as “production supervisor”and may have goosed up Edwards and cinematographers Sydney Blythe and WilliamLuff into coming up with a marvelously Gothic atmosphere for the tale. Thereare a few inconsistencies, less within the film than between it and myimagination of the tale (I always thought the goose the Cratchits ate onChristmas Eve was considerably smaller than it’s shown here, and the prizeturkey the reformed Scrooge buys them on Christmas Day was much larger), andsomehow Seymour Hicks is a good deal less convincing as Scroogepost-transformation than he was pre-transformation (though I liked the touch ofhim shaving his scraggly beard to indicate his change), but overall the 1935 Scrooge is a worthwhile film, vividly directed, mostlywell written by H. Fowler Mear (though I regretted the omission of Marley’s meaculpa), finely acted (Calthrop’sCratchit is a triumph of anti-type casting) and staged in sets that lookcredible as 19^th century London (the story is set in 1843, the yearDickens wrote the original) but also provide an appropriately Gothic atmospherefor what Dickens, in his preface to the original book, called “a ghostly tale.”

Incidentally, apropos of AChristmas Carol and its politics, Dickenswas clearly a liberal rather than a radical — the message of A ChristmasCarol is that the problems of industrialsociety could be solved by a moral appeal to the capitalists themselves tochange their ways and treat their workers and customers more fairly — and I’msurprised nobody but me ever seems to have noticed that Scrooge’s characterarc, from unscrupulous money-maker in the first half of his life to generousphilanthropist in the second half (giving away much of the money he made bybeing so hard and mean in the first place!), has been lived by quite a fewreal-life super-rich people, from John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie acentury ago to Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and George Soros in our own time.

Christmas in Vienna (ORF Austrian Broadcasting, 2011)

2011-12-30T18:20:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After seeing The ArtistCharles and I didn’t want to watch another movie that might blow the mood, soinstead I screened a video download of a recent Christmas in Vienna concert given December 16 and 17, 2011 (thebroadcast seems to have been a delayed one pieced together from both concertsand the title was actually given in English — it wasn’t called Weinachtvon Wien — even though all thebetween-songs commentary was in German) — we only got through the first 47minutes of it and ran the remaining 50 minutes last night. It turned out to bea quite nice program even though it had one flaw — just about all the songswere in rather droopy mid-tempos, nothing too slow and nothing too fast — andit also didn’t help that the first three selections, the chorus “Singet demHerrn” from Haydn’s oratorio The Creation, “Der Engel” from Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder and the opening movement of Mozart’s “Exsultate,Jubilate,” were easily the finest pieces on the long and eclectic program. Theorchestra was the Vienna Radio Symphony, the conductor was Sascha Goetzel (whoeven joined in on the unlisted encore, “Silent Night,” during which all thesoloists sang), and the soloists were Angela Denoke (soprano), LilianaNikiteanu (mezzo), Herbert Lippert (tenor) and Paul A. Edelmann (bass), alongwith Alois Mühlbacher, a person of sufficiently androgynous physical appearanceand vocal sound that at first I thought he was a woman oddly clad in apantsuit.

He was assigned (hopefully not coercively!) the solo part in “Exsultate, Jubilate” (probably becauseMozart originally wrote it for castrato, though it’s usually performed today bya biologically normal female soprano) and he sang it well, though without theaplomb I’ve heard from women in this music; and later he sang something called“Pueri concinite” by Johann Ritter von Herbeck (1831-1877), in which he was alot less self-assured than he was in the Mozart: all too often his voice went“white” and off-pitch when the score sent him high — an odd sound not unlikethat on the records of Alessandro Moreschi, the one castrato who actuallyrecorded! It’s hard to say whatMühlbacher is — according to the Internet he’s 16 years old and has been billedas “the boy who sings like a diva,” though listening to the two samples of hiswork here I found myself utterly confused whether he’s simply a boy treble, acountertenor (or perhaps a treble training to be a countertenor) or a Michael Maniaci-style male soprano (Maniaciis the fascinating American singer whose voice didn’t completely change when hewent through puberty, giving him most of the good sides of being a castratowithout the abominably bad side!).

The program, like most others of its ilk,stayed (mostly) classical for its first half (there was a marvelous bit fromthe Mendelssohn “Lobgesang” Symphony — the name means “Hymn of Praise” and itconsists, like the Beethoven Ninth, of three purely instrumental movements plusan extended finale with soloists and chorus: the text is from Martin Luther’stranslation of the Bible and the work was an occasional piece devoted tocommemorating the 400^th anniversary of the printing of the GutenbergBible; it’s numbered Symphony No. 2 even though it was the last of the five Mendelssohn wrote, and though it’s theleast-known of his symphonies it’s my favorite!) and strayed into pop for thesecond, though the first half did include a pretty lame rendition of JesterJoseph Hairston’s “Mary’s Boy Child” sung by Edelmann (as well as a version ofPietro Yon’s “Gesù Bambino” in which tenor Lippert proved he is no Pavarotti —he negotiated the music well enough but the sense of drama and awe Pavarottibrought to this piece was totally absent), and the first half ended with amarvelously haunting a cappella“Locus Iste” by Anton Bruckner. — 12/29/11

•••••

Charles and I came home and we ran the rest of the Christmasin Vienna concert. The second half wassupposed to represent “populäre Weihnacht” and began with a couple of O.K.Austrian folk songs, a Japanese lullaby called “Yurikago” and a weird,unswinging performance of Sammy Cahn’s “Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow”that probably would have killed Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra or Woody Hermanif they weren’t already dead. Later, oddly, the same forces did a version ofJosé Feliciano’s “Feliz Navidad” — far from one of my favorite holiday songs — and actually caught somethingof the spirit. The best parts of the “popular” half were the last two songs,the “Hallelujah” chorus from The Messiah and “Silent Night,” in German except for one chorus in English, that endedthis uneven but generally pleasant concert whose main weakness was the lack ofvariety in the material. Virtually all of it was medium-slow andself-consciously “reverential” — one ached either for something ballsier (givenhow beautifully the Philadelphia Orchestra performed Beethoven’s “The Worshipof God in Nature” on their early-1960’s album The Glorious Sound ofChristmas I’m surprised more symphonyorchestras haven’t included that in their holiday concerts, especially since Beethoven is a bread-and-butter composer inthe symphonic repertoire!) or something more genuinely spiritual — but still itwas a nice concert and a welcome download. — 12/30/11

The Artist (La Petite Reine, La Classe Américaine, uFilm, 2011)

2011-12-29T15:29:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Charles and I had planned to go to the movies on Tuesdaynight, and though I might have preferred a major-studio 3-D blockbuster like Tintin or Hugo,the film he picked out was an absolute marvel: The Artist, the much-ballyhooed modern-day silent movie made inFrance about the final days ofsilent films and the rise of the talkies. Written and directed by MichelHazanavicius (an odd name even in France!) — imdb.com credits him with“scenario and dialogue” even though the film contains no audible dialogue (“scenarioand titles” would have been more accurate and more in line with the historicaltheme of the film) — the film stars Jean Dujardin, a tall, rather beefy actorwith a striking (and entirely appropriate) resemblance to Douglas Fairbanks,Sr. He plays George Valentin (the last name an obvious reference to another silent-screen legend, Rudolph Valentino), a silentstar specializing in action films — in the opening he’s being tortured by aStroheim-esque villain who’s trying, according to the titles, to force him totalk (the word “talk” appears quite often in the titles and takes on an ironicdouble meaning throughout), a sequence which is eventually revealed to be ascene from his current film.

In his next production, he’s called upon to do ascene taking place at a dance and a young actress, Peppy Miller (BéréniceBero), plays one of his dancing partners, is only briefly in the scene withhim, but nonetheless makes an impression on him — and he on her — even thoughhe’s already married to a rather bitchy blonde woman, Doris (Penelope AnnMiller), who’s also the owner of the giant villa he’s living in. Then talkiescome in and Peppy Miller gets discovered by the head of the Kinograph Studios,where Valentin has been working, and becomes a giant star of early musicals (Isuspect her character name “Peppy Miller” was derived from Peggy Pepper, thecharacter Marion Davies played in the marvelous 1928 film ShowPeople, in which she played an aspiringactress who crashes Hollywood, becomes a major star in comedies, then tries togo “serious” and flops). Valentin haughtily refuses to make a sound film,claiming that he is an “artist” and not a mere entertainer (a reference thatprovides the title of the film), and leaves Kinograph to make a silent film, Tearsof Love, with his own money. Needless tosay, Tears of Love is a majorflop — and despite Valentin’s arrogant claim of being an “artist,” from what wesee of it (an ending in which Valentin’s character drowns in quicksand despitethe best efforts of his on-screen girlfriend to pull him out again) it looksterrible, and terrible in a lowest-common-denominator rather than an “artistic”way.

The flop costs most of Valentin’s money, his wife leaves him and throwshim out of the house (she writes her kiss-off note on the back of one of hispublicity photos, which she’s vandalized by drawing a comic moustache andglasses on it, and to add insult to injury she adds a P.S. in which she tellshim to go see Peppy Miller’s latest film because it’s surprisingly good) and heends up in a seedy but not absolutely derelict living space — it’s still adetached home rather than an apartment, and he has enough money left he canafford a refrigerator (an expensive novelty in the early 1930’s) rather thanhaving to rely on an icebox — attended by his faithful butler/chauffeur Clifton(James Cromwell, son of early-talkie director John Cromwell) even though hehasn’t been able to afford to pay Clifton for a year. (He eventually fires himand sends him packing to take a job that can pay him, and Clifton ends up — natch — in a similarposition with Peppy Miller.) And since he’s a silent star on the skids,Valentin spends most of his time drinking and watching his old movies (thoughthe clip we see is actually from Douglas Fairbanks’ first costume film, the1920 Mark of Zorro) until he getsdisgusted with what’s left of his life, burns the prints of his old movies(except for one film can he clutches which turns out to be the reel containinghis dance scene with the then-unknown Peppy Miller), gets out a pistol and isabout to commit suicide with it — Hazanavicius even gives us a shot ofValentin’s face with him sticking the gun into his mouth, then it cuts to atitle, “Bang!,” only we soon see the “Bang!” came not from the gun but from PeppyMiller’s car.

She had driven to Valentin’s place to save him and had crashedher car on a tree in front of his house; eventually she gets to him and offershim a comeback, since she’s made an ultimatum to the studio head (John Goodman)that she won’t make any more movies unless the man she once loved (thoughnothing actually ever happened between them off screen!) is in them with her.Since Valentin still refuses to talk, Miller hits on the idea of having them doa dance number — and though the film remains dialogue-free, the final sequenceis the first part of the film that actually offers natural sound: the music isheard off a playback machine and we get the normal noises of film production aswe see the scene in the movie-within-the-movie being shot. Plot-wise, TheArtist owes considerably more to thebehind-the-scenes depictions of Hollywood and show business generally in suchearly talkies as What Price Hollywood? (1932), Dinner at Eight(1933) and the first A Star Is Born(1937) than anything made during the silent era, as well as real-life incidentsin the lives of Douglas Fairbanks, John Gilbert and Charlie Chaplin (though CityLights, the self-financed silent filmChaplin made in 1931 in defiance of the dominance of the talkies, was a majorhit instead of a major flop).

Technically it’s a silent film rethought for themodern era — it doesn’t really look like a film from the late 1920’s eventhough the recreation of the era is virtually flawless (I noticed only twoanachronisms, Valentin’s record player — a 1910-style exposed acoustic hornattached to an electric turntable of a type used in the late 1940’s and early1950’s — and a montage of Hollywood magazines featuring Peppy Miller, in one ofwhich she’s called a “superstar,” a term that didn’t come into common use untilthe 1970’s though Andy Warhol had coined it a decade earlier) — and though Iwish Hazanavicius had used the color-tinting device (which not only would havemade it look more authentic but would have salved the disinclination of many modern-daymoviegoers to sit through a movie entirely in black-and-white), in general hedid a marvelous job evoking the techniques of late silent-era moviemakingwithout slavishly copying them. The transition from silent to sound has becomeone of the most legendary — and misreported — eras in movie history; I’ve readB.S. like one writer’s assertion that none of the major silent-era stars carried over into sound (what about GaryCooper, Ronald Colman, John and Lionel Barrymore, William Powell?) and the commonmyth that John Gilbert (who provided much of the real-life basis for GeorgeValentin’s character) flopped in talkies because he had an unrecordable voice.(His voice was perfectly fine; from the Gilbert talkies I’ve seen his problemwas that he never really learned how to act with his voice, how to modulate his lines and speakin different tones of voice to convey emotions.)

The Artist is a marvelous story, neatly balanced between thereality and the myth, and the acting is just stylized enough to be believable as silent-screenplaying without going whole hog into the ridiculously exaggerated gestures andexpressions most people who’ve never seen a silent film start-to-finish intheir lives think all silent films were acted like. It’s a film that works onvirtually every level imaginable: a coherent story that makes us like andidentify with the leads, excellent direction by Hazanavicius (I especiallyliked his nervy use of actual records of the period, notably Duke Ellington’s“Jubilee Stomp,” and later — a campy run-through on “Pennies from Heaven” withvocal and piano by an uncredited Rose “Chi Chi” Murphy; ironically it was thesecond night in a row Charles and I had seen a movie that deliberately used abad version of “Pennies from Heaven”, since Elf had used Louis Prima’s version to show theattraction between its romantic leads: in both cases these cheerily campyversions of the song worked far better than any of the genuinely great recordsof it — Bing Crosby’s, Billie Holiday’s, Frank Sinatra’s — would have), anappropriate musical score by Ludovic Bource, cinematography by GuillaumeSchiffman that (like the direction) evoked the silent era without trying to copy it, and an overall air of homage without descending into pastiche. It’s a movie that deserves all the success it gets!

Elf (New Line Cinema, 2003)

2011-12-27T15:41:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I wanted to run my recentlyacquired DVD of the 2003 Christmas comedy Elf, starring Will Ferrell as Buddy Hobbs, a human babywho stowed away in Santa Claus’s toy sack one Christmas Eve and was raised bySanta’s elves, Papa Elf (Bob Newhart — and the sight of him in the green tunicand yellow tights that are standard elf drag is weird enough in itself!) inparticular. But he’s aware of the identity of his real (human) father, WalterHobbs (James Caan, portlier than we remember him from his Godfather days but still an accomplished actor), a put-uponexecutive of a children’s book company who’s so out of touch with the Christmasspirit that he ships a book with two blank pages so anybody who reads it won’tknow the fate of the pig and the penguin who are its central characters, simplybecause he doesn’t want to spend the $30,000 on a reprint. Walter lives withhis wife Emily (Mary Steenburgen) and their son Mike (Daniel Tay), and Buddymanages to find his way out of Santa’s kingdom at the North Pole and make it toNew York City and into the Empire State Building, where he crashes his dad’soffice and gets escorted out by security.

Though David Berenbaum seems to have assembled rather than actually written the script — thereare plenty of references to other Christmas stories, including A ChristmasCarol, It’s a Wonderful Life and Miracle on 34^th Street (much of the action takes place at Gimbel’sdepartment store — which had already gone out of business when this movie wasmade! — and, like Santa in Miracle, Buddy points out all the mistakes the store’s decorators have made intheir depiction of the North Pole) — he and director Jon Favreau haveconstructed a marvelous showcase for Ferrell’s antics. Elf is pretty much a one-joke movie — the joke beingBuddy’s fish-out-of-water response to the normal human world — and I couldn’thelp but wonder how Buddy was able to do things (like take his human-raisedhuman girlfriend to dinner) that require normal human money when there was noevidence that he ever obtained any, either legitimately or otherwise — but atleast the one joke is genuinely funny, the movie avoids any blatantly dirtygags (thank goodness) and there are some nice zingers. When Buddy redecoratesthe Gimbel’s North Pole to more closely resemble the real one (and makes aconvincing replica of the Empire State Building out of Lego blocks!), thedepartment manager (played by a corpulent Black actor named Faizon Love, whowas born in 1968 in Cuba — though he looks older than that on screen — and wasraised in Newark, New Jersey and in San Diego) immediately gets suspicious andthinks the Gimbel’s management has brought in a professional decorator and hisjob is in jeopardy.

The plot resolves itself through a gimmick Berenbaum seemsto have ripped off from Peter Pan — it turns out that Santa’s sleigh is powered by a turbine enginesomeone in the elves’ workroom developed after there was no longer enoughChristmas spirit in the world to make it go the old way (the idea is that nowso few people believe in Santa Claus the sleigh can’t remain aloft just onChristmas spirit and reindeer power anymore), and the engine falls out of thesleigh on Christmas Eve night and lands in Central Park, stranding Santa thereuntil Buddy can be summoned to re-install it. So Buddy’s girlfriend, Jovie(Zooey Deschanel), implores the crowd surrounding Central Park (which thepolice have closed off and intend to send a horseback patrol to push themysterious visitor out of there) to start singing “Santa Claus Is Coming toTown” to provide enough Christmas spirit to get Santa’s sleigh going before thehorse-mounted park rangers catch up with him and either arrest him or just runhim down. (It’s as close as they could get to “clap your hands if you believein fairies” without getting sued by that children’s hospital to which Sir JamesM. Barrie willed the rights to Peter Pan.)

Eventually — as we might have predicted — Buddy wins his father’s loveand Walter saves his job by publishing Buddy’s story as a children’s novel, andthere’s a bittersweet parting scene as Buddy takes off in Santa’s sleigh andleaves Jovie behind (though Will Ferrell is hardly in Chaplin’s league in thepathos department!) as well as a nice gag in which Buddy’s (half-)brother Mikereads from Santa’s list (a large book bound in leather like a Gutenberg Bible)and tells Carolyn Hutton (Lydia Lawson-Baird), the newscaster who’s coveringthe event live for Channel 1, that what she’s told Santa she wants for Christmas is “anengagement ring, and for my boyfriend to stop putting me off and commitalready!” There’s also a nice scene at the publishing company in which,desperate for a best-selling idea, they hire the eccentric, egomaniac writerMiles Finch (little-person actor Peter Dinklage), whom Buddy mistakes for anelf, and when Miles takes that as an insult and physically attacks Buddy, Buddysays, “He must be a South Pole elf.” Elf is a genuinely funny movie that’s well worth seeing — perhaps becauseit was aimed at a family audience (it was rated PG “for some mild rude humorand language”), it avoided the potty jokes of some of Ferrell’s other moviesand was all the funnier for dodging the raunch — and I was pleasantly surprisedat how good it was.

Religious Racketeers, a.k.a. The Mystic Circle Murder (Fanchon Royer, 1939)

2011-12-24T20:24:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I ran a film Charles and Irecently downloaded from archive.org: Religious Racketeers, a.k.a. The Mystic Circle Murder, a production of Fanchon Royer Features from 1939(Royer’s films generally had unusually good production values for independentmovies of the late 1930’s) originally shot under the Religious Racketeers title but changed either before or shortly afterthe original release, probably because Religious Racketeers would suggest a story about crooked evangelistswhen the film is actually about crooked spiritualists. The central character isa phony medium called The Great LaGagge, a.k.a. Louis LaGagge (Robert Fiske,turning in a solid performance though sometimes I wished the producers had castBela Lugosi in the role, especially after his superb performance as a phonymedium in The Black Camel), and the film begins at a party being thrown by Mrs. Ada Bernard(Betty Compson, silent-screen veteran who occasionally got good parts inotherwise wretched movies in the 1930’s and generally out-acted the rest of thecast, as she does here). She’s a client of LaGagge’s — he’s promised to get herin touch with her late husband and she’s also fallen in decidedly unrequitedlove with him — and she’s invited several guests for a séance, among themmillionaire steel heiress Martha Morgan (Helene Le Berthon) and her boyfriend,reporter Elliot Cole (Arthur Gardner).

Frank O’Connor directed and also came upwith the screenplay, though Charles Condon has a co-writer credit, and it’sessentially an assemblage of fake-spiritualist movie clichés — it’s plottedpretty much along the lines of the 1933 Warners production The Mind Reader and the indie, also from 1933, Sucker Money (with Mischa Auer engagingly anti-typecast as thephony swami), though with a few fascinating wrinkles, notably a plot that takesthe characters out of the U.S. and first to Egypt and then to India (oneBhogwan Singh got a technical-adviser credit for the Indian sequences, eventhough they’re nothing more than a few stock shots of pilgrims approaching orbathing in the Ganges and a parade of relatively dark-skinned extras walkingdown a vaguely exotic set, probably recycled from another film). LaGaggehatches a plot to weasel Martha’s million dollars out of her by promising toget her in touch with her recently deceased mother — apparently she was doingthe Grand Tour in Europe when mom died and she’s never forgiven herself for notbeing by her mom’s bedside when she croaked — and of course Elliot is not onlya disbeliever in spiritualism, he’s convinced LaGagge is a crook (especiallywhen he finds a clipping in his newspaper’s morgue with a picture of LaGaggeunder a headline calling him “The Great Garno”) and is trying to get Martha tosee through him. This gets considerably harder when Elliot’s editor asks him towrite a puff piece on Martha — a sort of lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famousthing — only the editor has other people rewrite it to suggest that Martha hasbecome an antisocial recluse, and Martha is so upset at being trashed in apiece with her boyfriend’s byline she stops speaking to him for several reels.

Meanwhile, LaGagge is feeling the heat because Mrs. Harry Houdini (playingherself and providing enough exploitation opportunities that Royer actuallybriefly considered calling the film Madame Houdini Speaks) has taken up her late husband’s cause of exposingfake mediums: she announces that when her husband died 10 years earlier he gaveher, on his deathbed, a code message that he would communicate to her from theGreat Beyond, and if any medium purported to be in contact with his spirit butdidn’t reproduce this message, she would know that person was a fake. Mrs.Houdini — who not only doesn’t look a bit like Janet Leigh but reads all herlines in a first-day-of-drama-school monotone and proves utterly unable even toplay herself — holds what she announces will be her last séance, and if itdoesn’t produce the secret message her husband left her just before he died,she will denounce all mediumsas fakes. This duly happens, and things get hot for LaGagge and all the othermediums in town (not that we actually see any of the others!), and Wilson(David Kerman), the ex-con LaGagge has hired as his assistant (and whoseproletarian accent and gangster slang makes him a breath of fresh air in theotherwise pretentious world of phony “mystic” mumbo-jumbo this film inhabits),warns him not to get the hots for Martha but just to separate her from hermoney. To do that, LaGagge and Wilson conceive the idea of sending her to Egyptwith contact with her mom as the lure — and for some reason LaGagge disguiseshimself as an Egyptian and does a séance there after hiding out on the ship andhaving Wilson send Martha and Ada (who has accompanied her) notes supposedlyblown in from the spiritual ether. Ada notices the “Egyptian” prophet’sphysical similarity to LaGagge, but he convinces her that “all prophets projectthe same aura.” Cole follows the principals to Egypt and LaGagge reports him tothe Egyptian authorities, who arrest him, but after having got only $25,000 ofMartha’s fortune LaGagge decides that he has to flee again.

He orders Marthaand Ada to go to India, and once again disguises himself so he can meet withMartha and convince her to donate half her fortune to the spiritualist cause(i.e., to himself), only Cole is still on their trail (how he got out of anEgyptian prison is left cheerily unexplained by the O’Connor-Condon script) andLaGagge decides to use a “transmutation” trick he’s done before. He will encasehimself in his “Indian Prophet” drag in a block of ice, have himself thrown inthe Ganges, and re-emerge as LaGagge, claiming to have visited the spirit worldin the meantime. The ice is ventilated so the person inside it can breathe, butLaGagge and Wilson forget this when Elliot crashes their temple, rips offLaGagge’s wig and beard, and is about to expose him. They put Elliot inside theice block, thinking it will kill him, only Elliot discovers the ventilationapparatus and survives. In the final sequence, LaGagge stages a séance andfakes the voice of Martha’s mother — which [surprise!] is what finally convinces her he’s a phony, sinceher mom never spoke: she was mute. Out of love for Martha, LaGagge tries togive her back the $25,000 he took from her, only Wilson kills him and Marthaand Elliot flee. Back home, they read a headline that Wilson was arrested bythe Indian authorities for LaGagge’s murder and Elliot’s partner on the policedepartment, Inspector Burke (Robert Frazer), is there as he proposes and sheaccepts. (The American Film Institute Catalog synopsis says that Mrs. Houdini makes anotherappearance at the end to proclaim once again the phoniness of allspiritualists, but that scene was missing from the print we saw.)

ReligiousRacketeers differs from mostanti-spiritualist movies in that it doesn’t bother to show just how the fakemediums do their tricks (there’s a quite convincing one in the opening sequencein which LaGagge has the guests at Ada’s party write their questions on slipsof paper, then ceremonially burns them in a large metal bowl, then new slips of paper appear in the bowl containing theanswers — and Martha is taken in by him in the first place because the answerto her question is written in aconvincing simulacrum of her mom’s handwriting, which makes one wonder howLaGagge knew what Martha’s mom’s handwriting looked like) and in its bizarretraipsing around the world even though we wonder whether all the bills fortraveling, renting “temples” in each new city and the like aren’t going todeplete Martha’s fortune so much that LaGagge’s “take” will hardly be worth allthe trouble. The film also doesn’t bother to explain the odd intercom systemthat announces, in a heavily distorted “spiritual” voice, whenever anyone isapproaching LaGagge’s live-work space.

The weirdest thing about this movie ishow uneven it is: director O’Connor’s images are appropriately Gothic for thetale (particularly the marvelous wrought-iron gate at his U.S. temple) — thecinematographer is future PRC stalwart Jack Greenhalgh — but the film wasobviously shot on such a short schedule that several times the actors blewtheir lines and O’Connor didn’t take time out to retake. (In at least one ofthose instances, a conversation between Cole and Inspector Burke, ArthurGardner’s hesitation and stumbling over his line actually adds to thebelievability of the scene since it makes it seem like he’s a normal personstumbling over his words in the course of a normal conversation.) Theperformances themselves are also uneven: Le Berthon in particular isattractive, has real screen “presence,” and delivers her lines convincingly inher scenes with Gardner as her skeptical boyfriend — but when she’s supposed tobe under LaGagge’s spell she’s utterly unable to deliver the “spiritual”malarkey he’s feeding her with any degree of conviction. ReligiousRacketeers is an odd curio — hardlyin the same league as such previous fake-psychic movies as The Mind Reader and Sucker Money or a later film that’s the best fake-psychic movieof all, Nightmare Alley, but wellworth seeing anyway even though Betty Compson’s old-school professionalismbeats out the rest of the cast (though the fate of her character is justanother one of this film’s many loose ends!).

Santa with Muscles (Cabin Fever Entertainment, Cineplex Odeon Films, HIT Entertainment, 1996)

2011-12-22T13:42:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s library moviewas in their “Schlockfest” series, a 1996 release called Santa with Muscles, filmed in Fillmore, California (a town in VenturaCounty whose population rose from 13,643 in the 2000 census to 15,002 in the2010 census and whose urban motto is “The Last, Best Small Town”!) and starringprofessional wrestler Hulk Hogan as Blake Thorne, health-foods magnate andarrogant bastard who spends his time doing martial-arts training with hishousehold help (the scene at the beginning in which they “attack” him withkitchen implements is marvelous) and insisting that his picture on every one ofhis products be made larger and his skin in the photo be made more tan. As amovie rich guy, he’s clearly deserving of a comeuppance and he gets one when agang of unscrupulous speculators led by Ebner Frost (a still hot-looking EdBegley, Jr.) and the sinister Dr. Blight (Steve Valentine, who looks like someweird cross-breeding experiment to produce a hybrid of the young MalcolmMcDowell and John Lone) target the local orphanage. It takes several reelsbefore the filmmakers — director John Murlowski and writers Jonathan Bond, FredMata and Dorrie Krum Raymond — tell us why the land under the orphanage is so important to these baddies, but wealready learn from Ebner’s map that he’s putting together parcels to form alarge landholding and he and his gang force the next-to-last owner to sell by literally stringing him upside-down until he complies.

Whileall that’s going on, Blake leads his household crew into war games withpaintballs, driving in front of them in a Hummer and attracting the attentionof the local sheriff, Thomas Hinkley (Clint Howard), who’s convinced they’redomestic terrorists (remember this is 1996, when the term “terrorist” was aslikely, if not more so, to conjure up images of a Timothy McVeigh-styleRight-wing white-supremacist nutcase as anyone Arab or Muslim) and gives chase.Fleeing, he ends up in a mall whose anchor tenant, a giant toy store, isawaiting the arrival of their Santa Claus. The stage set where Santa holdsforth in the store is being swarmed by hundreds of kids demanding Santa’sappearance with the frenzy of a rock audience waiting for a tardy star, and theoriginally engaged Santa is nowhere to be found. Blake flees into the store andcomes upon a locker containing the store’s Santa costume; he dons it but a bitof his camo uniform sticking out the back gives him away. The store’s securitypeople, radioed by the sheriff to be on the lookout for him, chase him down agarbage chute — and he’s hit on the head by a life-sized plaster bust of Santaand the combination gives him amnesia, or at least movie amnesia. He developsthe delusion that he is SantaClaus, and the only person in the movie that is onto his true identity is Lenny(a nicely Danny DeVito-esque performance by Don Stark), who lifts Thorne’swallet and tries to access his ATM — only instead of numerical codes, this ATMuses fingerprint identification and has a threatening voice (MelodyClark-Curzon) that snarls when an unauthorized person tries to access anaccount.

Blake a.k.a. “Santa” foils a plot by two young crooks (whoseineptitude is so risible they make the thugs in Home Alone seem like Moriarty and Mabuse by comparison) tosteal the in-store collection from the orphanage, whereupon he gets covered inthe local media, dubbed “Santa with Muscles,” and gets a re-tailoring of hisSanta suit from Lenny, who cuts off the sleeves and makes it fit more snugly toemphasize his musculature (though, somewhat surprisingly for a film starring aprofessional wrestler, I can’t recall any scenes in which we got to see himtopless). Eventually he ends up in the orphanage trying to save the kids, thewoman who runs the place (Robin Curtis) and the old Black retainer whosefunction remains a bit mysterious (Garrett Morris from the early cast of SaturdayNight Live) from having it taken overby Ebner, Blight and their weirdo gang, which includes a top-knotted samuraiwanna-be and Dr. Watt (Diane Robin), a woman with an electrical charge runningthrough her body so anyone she touches gets a jolt of current. It turns outthat the reason the orphanage is so important is that it and the neighboringbuildings are sitting on a rich deposit of piezoelectric crystals that promiseto be a new energy source for the world, and Ebner plans not only to take overthe crystal deposit but force the orphan kids to mine it for him, sort of likeAlberich and the Nibelungs.

Santa with Muscles got voted number 63 on a poll of the worstChristmas movies of all time, but it’s really not as bad as all that; it’s atypical modern dorky comedy (though there’s one good thing about it: no gags about vomiting, farting or other involuntarybodily functions) but it’s at least good fun, and much of it is genuinelyamusing in ways the writers and director clearly intended it to be. It’s also nice that Hulk Hogan, unlikesome men of artificially enhanced bulk who have become or attempted to becomemovie stars (can you say “Arnold Schwarzenegger”?), takes himself refreshingly un-seriously and seems well aware that he’s in arather silly movie whose main attraction was trading on his fame doingsomething else. An awful lot of it hearkens back to older, better movies —including the final duel with piezoelectric stalactites, which is an obviouscop from the light-saber fight in the original Star Wars — and even the music score by James Covell is fullof bits and pieces that are supposed to make us think of earlier films, fromthe main theme for The Great Escape to the opening of Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra as heard in 2001: A Space Odyssey (an odd reference because — unlike the similarquote in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory — there’s no attempt in this film to make fun of 2001 itself, either thematically or visually) — butstill Santa with Muscles, though not a great movie, is a nice little comedy that didn’t deserveto make it on an all-time-worst list (though if Mystery Science Theatre 3000 were still in existence they could probably do apretty good job on it!).

Kimbar of the Jungle (1949); The Dinosaur and the Missing Link (1915); The Ouija Board (1920)

2011-12-18T14:16:00.001-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I ran a smorgasbord ofshorts I’d downloaded from archive.org, including a real oddity: a 1949 TV showcalled Kimbar of the Jungle, a Tarzan knock-off starring Steve Reeves in the title role, and a scrapof film so obscure that imdb.com’s page on Reeves doesn’t list it. What makesthis even odder was that its producers wanted to make a classic, old-fashionedserial for TV, complete with cliffhanger endings, only they were shooting for atime slot of just 15 minutes (!) and so the scrap we have is just 10 minuteslong, and while it’s ballyhooed as the first episode of a serial, “The Lion Menof Tanganyika” (actually normal humans dressed in really risible “lion” suits;they not only looked funny in the wrong way but covered the bodies of theactors so well I suspected that there were white people inside even though thelion men were supposed to be African natives), the post on archive.org saidthat this was the only episode actually filmed.

It’s a nice little curio, funto watch when Reeves is on screen showing off his body (blessedly naked fromthe waist up!) — it’s interesting that back in the 1950’s you could still winMr. Universe without turning yourself into something as downright ugly asArnold Schwarzenegger; Reeves comes off as muscular but without having builthimself so far as to look like arelief map of the moon — and rather stupid at other times, especially sincemuch of the soundtrack is animal noises unrelated to any human language.Apparently we were expected to believe that Kimbar, like Dr. Dolittle, hadmanaged to figure out how to talk to the animals in their own tongues — theprincipals at the trading post (or whatever it was) who were being menaced bythe lion men even sent Kimbar’s pet chimpanzee to fetch him — and at one pointthey referred to him as “king of the jungle,” just before we saw a series ofquite venerable clips of wild fauna and I joked, “The King of the Jungle isreviewing his stock footage.”

The other items we watched last night were one ofWillis O’Brien’s earliest films, The Dinosaur and the Missing Link, and an “Out of the Inkwell” Fleischer brothers’cartoon called The Ouija Board. The Dinosaur and the Missing Link was made in 1915 and was a bit of a surprise because of how crude itwas; that early, O’Brien wasn’t yet doing authentic-looking stop-motion modelsbut was instead practicing what eventually came to be called Claymation,animating both his human and non-human characters out of clay. The effect ischarming but low-tech and the film itself — except for a beautiful shot of themissing link hanging from a tree branch (a still of this appeared in the book TheMaking of “King Kong” and was captioned with anexplanation that O’Brien called this character “Kong’s ancestor”) — is prettydumb, a would-be comedy that isn’t all that funny.

The Ouija Board was the least ambitious of these three films butalso easily the most entertaining: genuinely funny in its fusion of live-actionand animation, and with some excellent gags (the ouija board itself is actuallyin the live-action portion of the film, but its needle is being moved not bymagic vibrations but by Koko the Clown, an animated character, crouching underit) including a great finale: Koko leaps off the animated page but instead ofgoing back into his inkwell (which is how these things usually ended) he leapsonto one of the three humans in the room and becomes a large black stain on hiswhite shirt. One of the three live-action people in the movie is Black, and isobliged to do the usual scared-servant schtick (a real pity, especially since he’s a lotbetter-looking than most of the people after him who did these parts), butaside from that lapse The Ouija Board is genuinely creative and also very funny and well worth its six-minuterunning time.

Delicious (Fox, 1931)

2011-12-15T17:03:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was Delicious,an oddball 1931 musical from pre-20^th Century Fox starring theiralready established “love team” of Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell, directedby David Butler — who had helmed their mega-hit from two years earlier, SunnysideUp — from a script by Guy Bolton and SonyaLevien (based on a previous piece of writing by Bolton, though the records areunclear whether he wrote the source material as an original film story or anunproduced play) that, like Sunnyside Up, cast Gaynor as a poor girl and Farrell as a rich young man who fallsin love with her and ultimately hooks up with her Cinderella-style. What madethis film unique was that it was the first time George and Ira Gershwin were hiredby a movie studio to create an original score for a film, and they were paidthe then-whopping sum of $100,000 to do so. Not only that, but the “suits” atFox clearly thought that George Gershwin’s name would be box office in itself,because the opening title reads “JANET GAYNOR and CHARLES FARRELL in DELICIOUSwith GEORGE GERSHWIN MUSIC.”

If they were hoping for a major box-office boostfrom the Gershwin songs, the Fox people were sorely disappointed, mainlybecause by 1931 Gershwin’s music was becoming less openly “popular” and muchmore experimental. He was moving away from the sorts of musicals he’d writtenin the 1920’s, which had been either revues with no plots at all or starvehicles with silly plots whose functions were just to cue in the songs, andexploring operetta and, ultimately, opera. Delicious opened in New York on Christmas Day, 1931, just oneday below the Gershwin musical Of Thee I Sing, which used elaborate contrapuntal devices andfeatured many songs in the patter style of operettas in general and Gilbert andSullivan in particular. Gershwin was also relying considerably less on hisunquestioned gift for big memorable tunes; he was starting to construct bothhis songs and his concert instrumentals on what musicians call “motivic cells,”little bits of music that aren’t particularly distinguished in themselves butcan be combined to create elaborate and artful structures.

The songs Gershwinwrote for Delicious aren’t in thebig-tune style that had made him popular, most of them are patter songs (atleast in part because, though this was supposed to be a musical, there was noone in the cast who was a professional singer; he had to make do with JanetGaynor’s pleasant but limited voice and the patter singing and half-singing,half-rapping of the rest of the cast) and though there’s one pleasant ballad,“Somebody From Somewhere” (a “conditional” love song in the manner of theGershwin hit “The Man I Love”), which Janet Gaynor sings to the accompanimentof a music box concealed in a whiskey bottle (it sounds whenever the bottle islifted), little of this music would “work” outside of context and it’s notsurprising that none of these songs are among Gershwin’s most covered material(though Ella Fitzgerald recorded “Somebody From Somewhere” — beautifully — onher Gershwin songbook album, and Sarah Vaughan recorded the satirical “BlahBlah Blah,” a commentary on how pop songs are written in which the lines go“blah-blah-blah” except for the hackneyed rhymes, “June/moon,” “above/love,”etc. at the ends of each one, on hers).

What’s most fascinating about Delicious is how dark a movie it really is. The situations areconventional musical tropes and the story is so close a reworking of SunnysideUp it almost counts as a remake, butdirector David Butler and writers Bolton and Levien push the basic situationsinto surprisingly edgy territory. Janet Gaynor isn’t just a slum dweller or ahomeless street urchin this time; she’s actually an undocumented immigrant tothe U.S. from Scotland. She’s been sent for by her Uncle Angus in Idaho, andalong the way she’s befriended a group of Russian musicians and performers whoare on their way to the U.S. to open a cabaret in New York — which Gaynor’scharacter, Heather Gordon, thinks is right next door to Idaho; she promisesshe’ll visit them often. The film opens with a sequence copied quite closely inJames Cameron’s Titanic 66 yearslater: Heather and her fellow steerage passengers, including her roommate Olga(Manya Roberti) and composer Sascha (Raul Roulien — a real-life Brazilian castas a Russian! His most famous credit would come two years later, as theBrazilian hotel owner who loses Dolores del Rio to Gene Raymond in FlyingDown to Rio) are having a wonderful time,briefing each other on the lyrics to “The Star-Spangled Banner” (which theyexpect to be on the test for new immigrants at Ellis Island) and gaily dancingto a medley of decidedly non-Gershwin songs, including the “Irish Washerwoman”and “Ortchi-Tchornya.”

The first Gershwin song we hear is the title number,actually spelled “Delishious,” because it’s cued by Heather’s insistence onpronouncing the word “delicious” with four syllables and Sascha correcting herthat it only has three — then spinning a song that stretches “delicious” andits rhyme, “capricious,” over four notes each. While the steerage passengershave been partying on the lower deck, the first-class passengers have beenwatching them from above with a mix of envy and disgust: star polo player LarryBeaumont (Charles Farrell) sees Heather dance and is immediately smitten, whilehis fiancée Diana Van Bergh (Virginia Cherrill) and her mother (Olive Tell) arepredictably revolted by the spectacle of people without money actuallypresuming to enjoy themselves.

To practice their new song, Heather and Saschasneak onto the first-class deck to find a piano, and they’re discovered bySascha’s friend and Larry’s valet, Janssen (Swedish dialect comedian ElBrendel). They’re also chased by various stewards and pursers until they’rebailed out by Larry, who comes upon them and thinks the song is charming andthe girl it’s about is even more so. He says she should be sure to contact heronce she gets off the boat if she’s ever in trouble, only he makes the mistakeof leaving the note with his contact information to Diana — who’s decent enoughshe’s willing to give it to Heather, but her mom takes the note, tears it upand throws it in the ocean. Then the boat docks and Heather finds that she’sgoing to be deported on the spot — her Uncle Angus has lost so much money inthe Depression he no longer can afford to support her — and in sheerdesperation she hides out in the stall of Larry’s polo pony, Pancho, and sneaksinto the U.S. by hiding in the van transporting the pony off the ship and ontoLarry’s estate. She’s chased throughout the movie by immigration agent O’Flynn(Lawrence O’Sullivan), who’s after her with a Javert-like persistence.

Janssenhides Heather in an unused room in Larry’s home, and Larry discovers her andoffers to help, but she sneaks away the next morning, determined not to accepthis charity but to make her own way in the new world. Sascha, who’s indecidedly unrequited love with her, offers her a job in their cabaret but saysshe’ll have to disguise herself as a Russian; she protests that she can’tpossibly sing in Russian, but they say they’ll write her a song that they cansing around her, and the song isyet another Gershwin patter number called “Katinkitschka,” after her “Russian”alias. Larry shows up at the cabaret when Heather performs and actuallyrecognizes her; unfortunately, so does O’Flynn, and she’s forced to flee whileOlga puts on Heather’s makeup and passes herself off as Katinkitschka. Heather finds out that Larryand Diana have finally become engaged when the Russians are engaged by Diana’smother to perform at the wedding, and she reluctantly agrees to marry Sascha onthe rebound — only Sascha and the troupe make the mistake of buying her a radiofor a wedding present, and the moment she switches on the radio she hears abroadcast of Larry’s big polo match, which announces that he has been seriouslyinjured and taken to a hospital. Immediately Heather sets off for Larry’s home,where he’s recuperating, and Diana lets her in but then calls the police tohave her arrested.

Heather flees again and, in the film’s most famous sequence(mainly because it’s been excerpted in a number of documentaries on Gershwineven though the rest of the film was out of circulation for decades), she runsthrough an Expressionistic nightmare vision of the New York streets to theaccompaniment of a Gershwin concert work he began writing in Los Angeles whileworking on the film (“I was under no obligation to the Fox Company to writethis, but the old artistic muse must be satisfied sometimes,” he explained)originally known as “Rhapsody in Rivets,” then as “New York Rhapsody,” andfinally as “Second Rhapsody.” (The title “Second Rhapsody” goes out of its wayto invite comparison to the “Rhapsody in Blue,” and comparing the two piecesshows just how much Gershwin had evolved technically between 1924 and 1931;“Rhapsody in Blue” is based on three Big Tunes with little or nothing in theway of development between them, while “Second Rhapsody” has one soaring melodybut is mostly composed of little musical fragments pieced together anddeveloped the way a classical composer would. I wouldn’t say either is “better”than the other, but that they’re both excellent pieces even though they’re asdifferent as they could possibly be given that they were both products of acomposer with as distinctive a “sound world” as Gershwin.)

By far the bestmusical sequences in the film are the montage to the “Second Rhapsody” (thepiano player on the soundtrack was not credited, but the part is played withsuch power, force and command of this odd music I’m sure it was Gershwinhimself) and a dream sequence, early in the film, in which Heather falls asleepon the ship and imagines that she’s getting a heroine’s welcome, includinginterviews with four reporters, a chorus line full of dignitaries and sixdancing Uncle Sams — yet another indication that Gershwin was losing hisinterest in the traditional musical and was more interested in constructingoperetta-ish set pieces (which was probably quite disconcerting to the peopleat Fox who had no doubt O.K.’d the $100,000 the Gershwins were getting in thebelief he’d give them some nice, bright, tuneful songs which would become hitsquickly and help promote the movie). Eventually Heather shows up at a policestation and turns herself in, and is told that the government is willing to setaside the year-long prison sentence she’d earlier been threatened with, butshe’s going to be deported on the next available ship to Scotland — only Larry,who in the meantime has dumped Diana, finds out and crashes the ship himself,intending to have the captain marry them so they can honeymoon in Europe andshe can return to the U.S. legally as the wife of an American citizen.

One fascinating thing about Delicious is that it’s one of the most class-consciousAmerican musicals ever made; it’s hardly the only one that addressed classissues via a rich person/poor person couple, but it’s one that pushed thetropes considerably more relentlessly than most. Janet Gaynor’s character istrapped not only by poverty but by status — her situation as anundocumented immigrant seeking to survive on her own merits is one that ringstrue today, and the constantsurveillance she’s under by O’Flynn (whose Irish brogue marks him as either animmigrant or the son of an immigrant himself — indeed, much of the film turnson the irony of one generation of immigrants overly enforcing the rules on thenext and forgetting what they were going through when they or their parents were the newbies heading into EllisIsland), makes us not only sympathize but ache for her as she negotiates a gamethat is largely stacked against her, and if it weren’t for Larry’s interest inher would be totally stackedagainst her.

Delicious is also afascinating film for the sheer weight of its staging; while part of the overalldarkness may be an artefact of the condition of the surviving print, clearly itwas intended from the get-go bydirector Butler and cinematographer Ernest Palmer as a dark, chiaroscuro, almost noir atmosphere piece. I’d been a bit skeptical of Tag Gallagher’s theoryin his book on John Ford that the presence of German director F. W. Murnau onthe Fox lot in the late 1920’s led a number of the Fox directors, includingFord, to copy his style and make their movies darker, richer and moreatmospheric — but much of Deliciousis shot with such a rich, dark sense of atmosphere it looks like the sort offilm Murnau might have directed if he’d lived long enough to make a musical. Interms of cinematic style it’s much closer to the Sternberg/Dietrich films andthe ones Mamoulian and Lubitsch made with Jeanette MacDonald and MauriceChevalier than the template set by 42^nd Street a year later (in which urban poverty was representednot by atmospheric cinematography of a stylized cityscape but by clearly,plainly photographed scenes filmed on grungy-looking sets of working-classapartments), and while it misses a few opportunities (when Larry left Heatherand Sascha at the piano whistling their song I was hoping for a LoveMe Tonight-style scene in which the entirepassenger complement of the ocean liner, as well as the crew, would have pickedup the song), it grabs so many it’s hard to believe that the director was ahack like David Butler rather than someone with a more creative reputation.

Delicious has its flaws: Janet Gaynor’s Scottish accent comesand goes, and while she’s mostly credible in portraying the shifting emotionsof the character, her naïveté is so extreme (she thinks Ellis Island is run bya Mr. Ellis and that New York and Idaho are so close together she can easilylive in one and visit the other) one can understand the London Times reviewer’s comment that “her affectations areincreasing at such an alarming rate that there is a real danger that in hernext film she will relapse into baby-talk once and for all.” Charles Farrellbarely can act at all (this film happened to be made while the young HumphreyBogart was under contract at Fox, and if the people running the place had seenwhat they had in him from his performance in John Ford’s Up the River they might have given him this part and got a tense, riveting performancerivaling Gaynor’s instead of a tailor’s dummy being steered through scenes onautopilot), and El Brendel is funny but wildly variable — his lines arebrilliantly funny sometimes and wince-inducing other times. Raul Roulienactually gives the lovestruck songwriter a genuine sense of pathos — anyone whoknew him only from his “stick” performance in Flying Down to Rio (even though there he was playing his realnationality!) will be startled at how multidimensional an actor he is here!

Deliciouswas advertised as “a screen poem,presenting a lyrical setting to the lilting refrains of George Gershwin’smusic,” but there’s nothing particularly lyrical about Gershwin’s music (he’sknown to have written at least one more song for the score than was used,“Mischa, Jascha, Toscha, Sascha,” but it was yet another Gilbert andSullivan-esque patter song, this time about famous Russian-born violinists) andthe London Times said, “Mr.Gershwin’s music is eccentric and aggressive, and the film is, in itsconventional sentimentality, its precise antithesis.” That’s an arguable way tolook at Delicious, but Butler’sstylistic direction and the overall darkness of the atmosphere puts an edge onwhat would otherwise be horribly treacly sentimental situations and puts Delicious alongside Hallelujah, The Love Parade,Applause, The Smiling Lieutenant and LoveMe Tonight in the top tier of earlymusicals.

A Bullet for Joey (Bischoff-Diamond/United Artists, 1955)

2011-12-15T17:00:00.001-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The night before last Charles and I had watched a far lessexalted movie: A Bullet for Joey, a 1955independent thriller made by producers Sam Bischoff and David Diamond forUnited Artists release with the over-the-hill gang: the stars are Edward G.Robinson and George Raft, and the female lead is played by Audrey Totter, atalented and powerful actress who never quite got on the “A” list — thoughcomparing her performance here to her work in a similar role in the 1947 filmof Raymond Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake makes clear that she was just as striking a screen personality and hadgot considerably better as an actress in the intervening eight years. The filmis a good one but one which could have been considerably better: the plot dealswith Raoul Leduc (Robinson), a lieutenant in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police,who heads an investigation into the bludgeoning to death of one of hisofficers. The officer was killed by an organ grinder — actually a spy disguised as an organ grinder — who was keeping watch on anuclear physics professor at McGill University, Dr. Carl Macklin (GeorgeDolenz) and who had concealed a movie camera in his barrel organ to photographMacklin’s morning routine so the head of his spy ring, Eric Hartman (Peter VanEyck), could make arrangements to kidnap him. To head the kidnapping ring hehires Joe Victor (Raft), a criminal who insists that his whole gang be broughtin as part of the deal — including his former girlfriend Joyce Geary (AudreyTotter), who’s running some sort of legitimate business in Cuba and reallydoesn’t want to rejoin Joe on the dark side, only one of Joe’s other menblackmails her into it.

The film was directed by Lewis Allen from a script by“Geoffrey Homes,” a.k.a. Daniel Mainwaring, and A. I. Bezzerides (two muchbetter writers than one would gather from this movie) based on a story by JamesBenson Nablo, and the main reason it isn’t a better film than it is is Allen’spaceless direction; scene after scene that needs relentless pacing to make itseffect ambles along at a lackadaisical pace that gives the audience all toomuch time to ponder the plot holes. The biggest one is one Charles spotted:why, when the seemingly all-important professor — obviously the writers were thinking the Soviet Union wanted tokidnap the professor so he would work on their nuclear arsenal instead of America’s — has utterly nosecurity detail around him at all, the bad guys go through all this elaborateplanning instead of just grabbing him. Maybe the idea was that they weresetting the Audrey Totter character to seduce him and ultimately either get himso far in sexual thrall or make him spend so much money on her as to get him sofar in debt that he’d agree, more or less willingly, to change sides in theCold War and go to work for the Soviets voluntarily — but nothing in the script even hints at that. Instead the writing committee pulls one ofthe stupidest clichés in the book and has Totter’s character fall genuinely inlove with the professor — and they actually go off together after Robinson’scharacter and his squad of Mounties figure out the plot and get their men.

ABullet for Joey has the air of a penanceproject for both Robinson and Mainwaring, who’d been blacklisted for theirLeftist connections and seemed to have taken the chance to work on an openpiece of anti-Soviet Cold War propaganda in hopes that would get them off thelist (though in Robinson’s case the man who got him off the blacklist was CecilB. DeMille, who cast him as Dathan in The Ten Commandments a year later). Cold War propaganda films can be goodmovies on occasion (the Paramount cheapie The Atomic City with Gene Barry is a tight, exciting thriller and aslong as you view the “atomic bomb secrets” as just another MacGuffin you shouldbe fine with it) but this isn’t one of them, and it’s less the fault ofRobinson or Raft (who turn in perfectly polished, non-groundbreaking old-properformances — it was their second film together, after Manpower in 1941, but the publicity for it made it seem liketheir first) than of that damnably sluggish director, who made his first markin 1944 with The Uninvited — aghost story, and one expectsghost stories to be slow!

Borrowed Wives (Tiffany, 1930)

2011-12-13T15:42:00.000-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Our “feature”last night was Borrowed Wives,a 1930 film from Tiffany that I had originally thought would be a romanticmelodrama with envelope-pushing “pre-Code” kinkiness, something on the order ofExpensive Husbands.Instead — as the bouncy stock music over the opening credits (instead of thedire stock music I’d been expecting) made clear even before the film began — itwas a comedy, and it began with what was by far its best scene. We see a hugebillboard announcing that visitors are arriving in Monterey, listing the fruitsand vegetables the area is famous for (including the casaba), and announcingthat visitors are welcome. Behind the billboard we see two motorcycle cops,Bull Morgan (Paul Hurst) and Mac (Tom London), lamenting that they haven’t seenany people driving through the area above the speed limit lately. Then a man ina nice car zips through and Mac gives chase, and afterwards another man in a nice car zips through and Bullgives chase.

It turns out they’re both racing to a nearby airport to meet theirfiancées and marry them — and it also turns out, this being at least an attemptat a romantic farce, that they’re both hurrying along to meet the same woman, Alice Blake (Vera Reynolds). Thefirst man, who disappears from the action after the opening scene, gets readthe riot act by the fiercely misogynistic Mac, who says he should be glad he’sgoing to arrest him and thereby keep him from getting married. The second manis Peter Foley (Rex Lease, top-billed, a “B”-lister in the silent era whobecame a “C”-lister when sound came in), who has to marry that day so his wife can inherit his family’sfortune; otherwise his uncle Henry (Charles Sellon) gets it. He is, or at leastseems to be, genuinely in love with Alice, but when he meets her at the airportand she turns him down, he looks for someone else he can marry, or at least pose as being married to, on the spot so hecan have a “wife” by midnight and grab the fortune. His friend Joe Blair(Robert Randall, later known as Robert Livingston) has the answer: Blair is anexecutive in love with his secretary, Julia Thorpe (Nita Martan) — though Juliais also Bull Morgan’s girlfriend and the cop is so jealous he’s threatened tobeat up any other man who shows interest in her — and they hatch a scheme to goto Uncle Henry’s home and claim that Julia is his wife.

About 20 minutes intothe film, its action moves to Henry’s old dark house, full of the expectedsecret passages — including a room where Henry keeps a pet panther (at leastthat’s what it’s called in the synopsis; it was some sort of big cat but I couldn’t tell itwas a panther just by looking at it in the film). Henry is in a wheelchair,though to no one’s particular surprise (no one in the audience, that is) he doesn’t really need it: Ithink there were far more able-bodied people posing as cripples in 1930’s movies than therewere people who appeared in wheelchairs because their characters actuallyneeded them (a taboo that got broken only when Lionel Barrymore became sodisabled by his crippling arthritis he really needed a wheelchair, so MGM had to comeup with parts for him he could play from a chair — he had just been scheduledto play Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, a part he’d become identified with on radio, when he losthis ability to walk and had to give up the part; Reginald Owen stepped in atthe last minute, though Barrymore still appeared — as himself — in thetrailer!).

Anyway, after about a long, dreary half-hour in which everybodycongregates at the old dark house — including Bull Morgan and a minister orsomething (at least someonewith the legal authority to marry people; I think he was supposed to be thelawyer or judge with the power to settle the estate Peter’s wife is supposed toinherit), as well as Alice, who’s thought better of her rejection of Peter’sproposal — Julia is kidnapped. Peter reveals the two weren’t really married sohe can get the officiant to marry him and Alice, so he can get the inheritanceand also the woman he reallywants, and then Aliceis kidnapped — and in yet another plot twist script compiler Scott Darling (wholater wrote the Mr. Wongseries films for Boris Karloff at Monogram; I say “compiler” because he seemsmerely to have assembled this script from old movie clichés and it’s thereforehard to refer to him as a “writer”!) obviously thought would be far moresurprising to the audience than it is (or probably was even to a 1930audience!), the culprit turns out to be Uncle Henry. Well, he is the one with the motive — if Peterdoesn’t have a wife, authentic or otherwise, by midnight he gets theinheritance, so it’s in his interest to spirit away any woman Peter might be,or want to be, married to so she can’t get the money and therefore it devolvesto him.

Borrowed Wivesis the sort of movie that seems to last even longer than it actually does(imdb.com doesn’t give a running time and the download from archive.org we werewatching timed out at 62 minutes) and it evokes all too many memories of thegenuinely good, imaginative movies it ripped off, not only The Old DarkHouse but BusterKeaton’s comedy masterpiece, Seven Chances — just as I once joked that at the top level of quality ofmovies set in the central California missions there was Vertigo and at the bottom level there was Incubus, so at the top of movies with thecentral premise that a young man has to marry within the day to receive aninheritance there is Seven Chancesand at the bottom there’s Borrowed Wives. The director was Frank R.Strayer, who in the early 1930’s had a quirky career at the various independentstudios that generated quite a few watchable movies and two minor gems in thehorror genre, The Vampire Bat (1933) and Condemned to Live (1935), before he signed with Columbia and settled down to a longcareer helming the Blondie series — a real pity; it undoubtedly made him a decent living but itsteered him away from the Gothic atmospherics that were his greatest strengthas a director, and which give some interest even to something as tacky andsilly as Borrowed Wives.

Two Plus Fours, a.k.a. Ripstitch the Tailor (Pathé, 1930)

2011-12-11T13:57:00.001-08:00

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was Two Plus Fours, made by the Pathé studio’s U.S. branch in 1930 as one of its lastgasps before it was absorbed by RKO in 1931 and ultimately folded into thatcompany after two years in which some movies came out as RKO and some asRKO-Pathé, much the way Warner Bros. films sometimes were released in “FirstNational” drag. It was one of the last projects for the Rhythm Boys, the vocalgroup with which Bing Crosby got his start: he had met Al Rinker, MildredBailey’s brother and a singer in his own right, while both were still living inWashington state, and the two had traveled to L.A. and been discovered by PaulWhiteman and signed to his entourage in 1927. The duo of Crosby and Rinker didwell on tour but bombed out in New York City, and Whiteman decided that theyneeded someone who would give the act more verve and showmanship. The personWhiteman recruited to join them was Harry Barris, a live-wire pianist and comicsinger who was also a major songwriter and could supply the Rhythm Boys (asWhiteman named them) original material. The Rhythm Boys remained part of theWhiteman organization for three years, until Whiteman went to L.A. to make thebig-budget Universal musical revue The King of Jazz (1930) which featured Crosby soloing on the film’stheme song, “Music Hath Charms,” and the Rhythm Boys doing a marvelous numberin two-strip Technicolor (the whole film was in color, actually) combiningtheir early hit “Mississippi Mud” and a new song, “So the Bluebirds and theBlackbirds Got Together.” Then Crosby decided his future lay in Hollywood, sohe got the Rhythm Boys to quit Whiteman and join Gus Arnheim’s L.A.-based bandat the Cocoanut Grove nightclub inside the Ambassador Hotel, while the trioalso scrambled for film work.

Two Plus Fours was the trio’s last work together before breaking up— Crosby had landed a solo film contract with Mack Sennett’s studio, where heplayed in a series of romantic-comedy shorts that established his happy-go-luckyscreen character, and he’d clearly outgrown the need for the other two. Pathéwas at loose ends, too: they had never recovered from the opprobrium followinga terrible accident at their New York studio in which a soundstage burned downwhile filming a 1929 musical and 11 people were killed — still the worstaccident, at least in terms of total lives lost, ever to occur during theactual shooting of a film. They also hadn’t recovered from the loss of theirbig comedy star, Harold Lloyd, who had switched distribution of hisself-produced films to Paramount, or from the loss of Hal Roach’s product,including the Laurel and Hardy movies, when he changed distributors to MGM in 1927. So in order tostay in the comedy market they concocted a series called “Campus Comedies,”about the hijinks of frat boys and the scrapes they got into. TwoPlus Fours was filmed under the workingtitle Ripstitch the Tailor, whichwould have been a better name for it — it would at least have given moviegoersan idea of what the film was about:Two Plus Fours vaguely hints thatit has something to do with articles of male clothing but otherwise meansnothing. (Some Crosby biographers got confused by the dual title and thoughtBing and the Rhythm Boys had made two short comedies for Pathé, not just this one.)

The 20-minute short wasactually a feature for Jewish dialect comedian Nat Carr, who plays a tailornamed Ginsberg: he’s irritated that the college boys have given him thenickname “Ripstitch the Tailor” but he can’t do anything about it because theirsuit orders represent his principal source of income. He’s being harassed bythe typical evil landlord (Edgar Dearing) but he’s hopeful because TaitCollege’s new school year is about to start and he’s counting on the frat boysto buy so many suits for the upcoming start-of-the-year rally he’ll be able topay off his debt. Only the frat boys got waylaid on the train coming into town:they got into a craps game with an African-American porter (when this characterfirst appeared he had a disgusted look on his face while the white kids wereplaying what was supposed to be a jazz number, and I joked that what he was really thinking was, “Oh, no, not more white boys who thinkthey can swing”) and lost not only their money but the ukuleles and othermusical instruments they’d been playing. When the train enters a tunnel (theshots of the train moving are obviously stock footage, but director Ray McCareyand editor John F. Link cut them in so smoothly they’re believable) the kidsjump the Black guy and get the instruments back and start their jam sessionover again. The frat boys eventually arrive in town and they’re so broke theydon’t even have a car; they’re driving around in a horse-drawn cart reading“Transfer” (1930’s-speak for a moving company) and they arrive at Ginsberg’sjust after he’s serviced another college kid in a baggy suit he insists “fitslike a glove” and caught the kid just as he was about to walk out of his storewithout paying. (The kid reaches into his new suit and gets out his wallet togive Ginsberg the money; one wonders how the wallet got there if it’s a suit he’s never worn before.)

Thenthe landlord shows up and after him Ginsberg gets the college kids, who explainthat they’re broke — but he agrees to make them the suits anyway in hopesthey’ll find a way to pay him for them. The kids meet back at their frat houseand sing a song (apparently based on the University of Maine “Stein Song” thatwas a hit for Rudy Vallée, America’s most popular male singer until Crosby replacedhim) hailing Ripstitch the Tailor; Crosby is featured on the song’smiddle-eight section but otherwise this is the sort of film in which a personwho later became a superstar is lost in the crowd: you hear his familiarspeaking voice, look around for him, spot him and say, “Oh, there he is.” Eventually the kids find money they heldback from the Black crapshooter on the train and pool their resources sothey’re within $100 of paying Ginsberg’s bill; they jump a heavy-set fellowstudent (Tom Hanlon) who just happened to ask them to break it when they needed exactly that much money; theypay off Ginsberg, Ginsberg pays off his landlord, and Ginsberg’s daughter Mary(Thelma Hill) gets Spec (Spec O’Donnell), the head of the fraternity.

TwoPlus Fours isn’t all that funny — Nat Carr’s Jewish-dialect humor is very dated — and the laughs it does have are more from situations than gags, but it’scharming and clever throughout and has at least two good gags: when one of thestudents sees Ginsberg’s signs — “Don’t Use the Phone,” “Don’t Ask for Credit,”and “Don’t Call Me ‘Ripstitch’” — and neatly slices off the word “don’t” fromeach sign with his pocket knife; and at the end in which the transfer cart and the horse pulling it are decorated with frat-housesymbols the way the kids’ car would be if they could afford one. It’s a curiofor Crosby fans — no doubt if Bing hadn’t been in it, it would still bemoldering away in a vault somewhere — and one oddity is that the credits makeit seem like a Hal Roach production in exile: the director is Ray (Raymond)McCarey, and the “supervising producer” is Fred Guiol (a protégé of GeorgeStevens who rose to become a director himself at Roach and RKO in themid-1930’s, then quit and went back to working as Stevens’ assistant and one ofhis regular screenwriters). Ray McCarey was the far less famous brother ofdirector Leo McCarey, whom Bing Crosby would work with in the 1940’s on two ofeither man’s biggest hits: Going My Way and its sequel, The Bells of St. Mary’s.