by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran us a quite interesting movie I’d got at a shopping run to Vons, American East, which is not at all the sort of movie you expect to find in a supermarket; mostly you get blockbuster titles featuring major stars, occasionally public-domain or closeout items, but hardly something with only one even quasi-major name (Tony Shalhoub), which seems not to have had a theatrical release at all (or, if it did, only a very minor one) and which is about a highly controversial and touchy subject: the oppression of Arab-Americans in the name of the “war on terror.” The film is set in 2005, during a so-called “red” terror alert — which I imagined as something even more stringent than it’s depicted in this film; it’s never happened but my understanding is if it did virtually the whole country would be on lockdown.
The central character is Mustafa Marzoke (Sayed Badrea, who also co-wrote the script with director Hesham Issawi), an Egyptian émigré who runs a Middle Eastern diner called Habibi, and the combination of family members and hangers-on at the restaurant who make up his entire circle: his sister Leila (Tay Blessey), who works as a nurse at a local hospital and is being heavily cruised by one of the doctors but who’s also engaged to a man from Egypt whom she barely remembers from her childhood but whose marriage to her is crucial because of a deal involving Mustafa’s ancestral homestead back home; his grade-school age son Mohammed (Richard Chagoury) who’s disgusted being the only Muslim at his public school and who wants the family to have a Christmas tree and stop practicing this weird religion everyone associates with terrorism; his driver Omar (Kais Nashif), who’s working on an acting career but is getting more and more pissed off that every role he’s asked to play is as an unmotivated terrorist; Murad (Anthony Azizi), a nonpaying customer at the restaurant who watches al-Jazeera constantly and whose virtually sole mode of conversation is obscenity-laced tirades against Jews in general and Israelis in particular over the occupation of Palestine; and Sam, Mustafa’s Jewish friend, whom he’s trying to get as a financial backer in a major expansion of the restaurant into a fancy Middle Eastern-themed establishment.
At times the movie tracks so close to the plot of E. L. Doctorow’s 1970’s novel Ragtime (particularly in the character arc of Omar) I couldn’t help but wonder if the parallels had been intentional, but though some of the plot devices are either wince-inducingly clichéd or flatly unbelievable, others work quite well. Certainly the film accomplishes one thing it set out to do: it shows just how much Arab-Americans have been stereotyped as “terrorists” since 9/11 and have to live their lives in a constant state of being suspected, a theme which kicks off from the moment the movie opens in an airport, where Mustafa has gone to meet his cousin (the one who’s supposed to marry his sister) who’s just flown in from Egypt. He goes running through the airport screaming, “Mohammed!” — he’s just calling his son, who’s got lost, but that gets him picked up by two FBI agents and taken to a secret location for interrogation, and though he’s released the FBI puts him under permanent surveillance from then on and ends up arresting him in the restaurant in connection with Omar’s rampage.
American East is quite well done and generally moving, though it’s also a bit too long and afflicted with a bad case of brown; the cinematographer (not credited on imdb.com) is yet another one of those annoying modern movie D.P.’s who sees the world through dirty brown-colored glasses and seems dementedly determined to photograph the movie with as little of the visible spectrum as possible, the sort of thing that makes me wonder if they’re going to use so little color anyway why they don’t just go ahead and film it in black-and-white.
Friday, February 13, 2009
Thursday, February 12, 2009
Cha-Cha-Cha-Boom! (Katzman/Columbia, 1956)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Cha-Cha-Cha-Boom!, a Sam Katzman-produced, Fred F. Sears-directed musical for Columbia that attempts to do for Latin music what the Katzman-Sears rock ’n’ roll extravaganzae did for that genre. Katzman hired Robert E. Kent — the writer (in)famous for being able to tell a co-worker about the baseball game he attended the night before while typing away on his latest script — to come up with a plotlet dealing with rival record executives, Bill Haven (Stephen Dunne, a nice-enough looking man with acceptable acting skills but virtually no charisma) from the Globe company and Debbie Farmer (Alix Talton) from the rival Starbright concern, who between them control virtually the entire record market in New York City (RCA Victor? Columbia? Decca? Capitol? Never heard of ’em!).
Globe is in danger of losing all its major acts to Starbright because of the intrusive policies of Globe’s president, Harry Teasdale (Howard Wright), versus the offer of artistic freedom made to potential artists by Starbright’s head, who’s also Debbie’s father — and, naturally, Bill and Debbie are also in love with each other, turning the record industry as depicted here into a sort of Romeo and Juliet lite, with contracts instead of daggers.
Bill bails on his job with Globe with the intent of starting a label of his own, and goes to Cuba to find talent for it and comes back with Perez Prado, ballyhooed in the credits as “King of the Mambo.” According to imdb.com, his real name was Dámaso Pérez Prado, which certainly sounds more authentically “Latin” even though it roughly translates as “Tommy Peters,” and the Hispanic custom of carrying your mother’s maiden name as a second last name (the official documents and signs in Cuba listed that country’s veteran president as “Fidel Castro Ruz”) threw whoever gave Perez Prado his professional name and also helped get the comic relief actor, José Gonzalez-Gonzalez, his part in this film. José had been a contestant on Groucho Marx’s quiz show, You Bet Your Life, and Groucho had ribbed him unmercifully over his double-Gonzalez last name, giving him his 15 minutes of fame and getting him cast in this film as Bill’s sidekick Pedro Fernandez.
The two head to Cuba and hook up with exotic dancer Nita Munay (Sylvia Lewis) — a stereotyped Lupe Velez-like character who speaks rapid-fire Spanish and vamps just about every male she meets, though her main squeeze is her dancing partner Elvarez (Dante De Paulo). She makes the obligatory pass at Bill and Debbie just happens to walk into the hotel room as they’re kissing — “I’m learning to play saxophone and I’m trying to keep my lip in shape!” is the preposterously lame excuse that’s the best Bill (or Robert E. Kent) can come up with under the circumstances. The story is, as usual, just an excuse for film clips of the musical stars of the film — Prado, the Mary Kaye Trio, Helen Grayco (a quite haunting singer I’d love to hear more of, especially if I can find her record of “Lilly’s Lament,” the film’s opening song and the most compelling performance in it; what Lilly is lamenting is that her boyfriend is in prison), Luis Arcaraz, Lucerito Bárcenas and Manny Lopez — and as Charles pointed out, it’s rather odd that Prado, the biggest star “name” in the film, is also the most boring to watch.
He’s “discovered” leading a voodoo ceremony outdoors in the Cuban countryside (though the “exterior” is almost certainly a soundstage interior with a painted backdrop), which is easily his most exciting contribution to the film; later, after his band is imported to the U.S. to play in nightclubs and as part of the final television extravaganza Bill throws together to build attention for his acts (in Katzman’s musicals there always seemed to be a big TV show at the end!), he’s musically interesting but visually dull except when Nita and Elvarez are dancing in front of his band — reason enough that Bill insisted on signing them even though they wouldn’t be a part of the records! The most appealing performers are Grayco and the Mary Kaye Trio, who do inventive versions of “The Lonesome Road” (it’s not her fault that Stan Kenton’s version with June Christy singing was even more inventive) and “Get Happy” — was Mary Kaye’s entire act remodeling 1920’s and 1930’s songs to fit then-contemporary cabaret styles?
The film doesn’t have the energy of the Katzman-Sears rock movies and would have benefited from a more exciting bandleader than Prado (someone like Machito) and some more inventive filming of the acts. As it is, Sears’ direction is even sloppier here than it usually was in the rock movies; there’s one band for which he focuses on the singer and a saxophone player even though we never actually hear a sax on the track, while we hear but don’t see a prominently featured guitar player. Cha-Cha-Cha-Boom! (a bit of a misnomer because, at least according to one imdb.com commentator, only one of the film’s songs is actually a cha-cha-cha number) is an O.K. movie, but the music is solid and Helen Grayco’s opening number alone makes it worth seeing.
The film was Cha-Cha-Cha-Boom!, a Sam Katzman-produced, Fred F. Sears-directed musical for Columbia that attempts to do for Latin music what the Katzman-Sears rock ’n’ roll extravaganzae did for that genre. Katzman hired Robert E. Kent — the writer (in)famous for being able to tell a co-worker about the baseball game he attended the night before while typing away on his latest script — to come up with a plotlet dealing with rival record executives, Bill Haven (Stephen Dunne, a nice-enough looking man with acceptable acting skills but virtually no charisma) from the Globe company and Debbie Farmer (Alix Talton) from the rival Starbright concern, who between them control virtually the entire record market in New York City (RCA Victor? Columbia? Decca? Capitol? Never heard of ’em!).
Globe is in danger of losing all its major acts to Starbright because of the intrusive policies of Globe’s president, Harry Teasdale (Howard Wright), versus the offer of artistic freedom made to potential artists by Starbright’s head, who’s also Debbie’s father — and, naturally, Bill and Debbie are also in love with each other, turning the record industry as depicted here into a sort of Romeo and Juliet lite, with contracts instead of daggers.
Bill bails on his job with Globe with the intent of starting a label of his own, and goes to Cuba to find talent for it and comes back with Perez Prado, ballyhooed in the credits as “King of the Mambo.” According to imdb.com, his real name was Dámaso Pérez Prado, which certainly sounds more authentically “Latin” even though it roughly translates as “Tommy Peters,” and the Hispanic custom of carrying your mother’s maiden name as a second last name (the official documents and signs in Cuba listed that country’s veteran president as “Fidel Castro Ruz”) threw whoever gave Perez Prado his professional name and also helped get the comic relief actor, José Gonzalez-Gonzalez, his part in this film. José had been a contestant on Groucho Marx’s quiz show, You Bet Your Life, and Groucho had ribbed him unmercifully over his double-Gonzalez last name, giving him his 15 minutes of fame and getting him cast in this film as Bill’s sidekick Pedro Fernandez.
The two head to Cuba and hook up with exotic dancer Nita Munay (Sylvia Lewis) — a stereotyped Lupe Velez-like character who speaks rapid-fire Spanish and vamps just about every male she meets, though her main squeeze is her dancing partner Elvarez (Dante De Paulo). She makes the obligatory pass at Bill and Debbie just happens to walk into the hotel room as they’re kissing — “I’m learning to play saxophone and I’m trying to keep my lip in shape!” is the preposterously lame excuse that’s the best Bill (or Robert E. Kent) can come up with under the circumstances. The story is, as usual, just an excuse for film clips of the musical stars of the film — Prado, the Mary Kaye Trio, Helen Grayco (a quite haunting singer I’d love to hear more of, especially if I can find her record of “Lilly’s Lament,” the film’s opening song and the most compelling performance in it; what Lilly is lamenting is that her boyfriend is in prison), Luis Arcaraz, Lucerito Bárcenas and Manny Lopez — and as Charles pointed out, it’s rather odd that Prado, the biggest star “name” in the film, is also the most boring to watch.
He’s “discovered” leading a voodoo ceremony outdoors in the Cuban countryside (though the “exterior” is almost certainly a soundstage interior with a painted backdrop), which is easily his most exciting contribution to the film; later, after his band is imported to the U.S. to play in nightclubs and as part of the final television extravaganza Bill throws together to build attention for his acts (in Katzman’s musicals there always seemed to be a big TV show at the end!), he’s musically interesting but visually dull except when Nita and Elvarez are dancing in front of his band — reason enough that Bill insisted on signing them even though they wouldn’t be a part of the records! The most appealing performers are Grayco and the Mary Kaye Trio, who do inventive versions of “The Lonesome Road” (it’s not her fault that Stan Kenton’s version with June Christy singing was even more inventive) and “Get Happy” — was Mary Kaye’s entire act remodeling 1920’s and 1930’s songs to fit then-contemporary cabaret styles?
The film doesn’t have the energy of the Katzman-Sears rock movies and would have benefited from a more exciting bandleader than Prado (someone like Machito) and some more inventive filming of the acts. As it is, Sears’ direction is even sloppier here than it usually was in the rock movies; there’s one band for which he focuses on the singer and a saxophone player even though we never actually hear a sax on the track, while we hear but don’t see a prominently featured guitar player. Cha-Cha-Cha-Boom! (a bit of a misnomer because, at least according to one imdb.com commentator, only one of the film’s songs is actually a cha-cha-cha number) is an O.K. movie, but the music is solid and Helen Grayco’s opening number alone makes it worth seeing.
Monday, February 9, 2009
Artists and Models (Paramount, 1937)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran Charles the 1937 Artists and Models, a movie I saw once in the early 1970’s and desperately wanted to see again, so much so that I practically had an orgasm when I saw it on TCM’s schedule for February 1, only to find when I recorded it that the first five minutes offered a ragged soundtrack and no image at all, so we sat in the dark and listened to the Yacht Club Boys’ opening song, “The Super-Special Epic of the Year.” The image cut in five minutes into the movie — just at the very end of the song, in time to give us at least a glimpse of the elaborate stage set Paramount built for it — and the rest was glitch-free.
Artists and Models is known mostly as Vincente Minnelli’s first film; in his early days in Hollywood Minnelli only got to do individual musical numbers in other people’s movies, and here his contribution is “Public Melody No. 1,” the big production number at the end featuring Martha Raye (in blackface) and Louis Armstrong. Minnelli had been a hotshot director on Broadway when Paramount gave him a six-month contract in 1937, but after an unhappy tenure there during which this was the only film he got to work on, he went back to New York as soon as the six months were up and didn’t try the movies again until Arthur Freed signed him for MGM in 1940 and told him he could wander around the lot, watching how movies were made, until he’d figured it out and he told Freed he was ready to work.
Frankly, I suspect that “Public Melody No. 1” wasn’t the only number in Artists and Models Minnelli worked on; there’s also an engaging musical parody called “Mister Esquire” featuring human actor Ben Blue in a spoof of classical music with Russell Patterson’s Personettos, a group of puppets, that seems to have his touch — it’s premonitory of the marvelous animated fruit musicians on the dinner table in Strike Up the Band (another “insertion number” Minnelli directed in a movie of which Busby Berkeley was the director of record), just as “Public Melody No. 1” looks forward to Lena Horne’s numbers in Panama Hattie (Minnelli’s first official MGM credit) and even more to Cabin in the Sky, Minnelli’s first full directorial credit and also a film with African-American performers (including Louis Armstrong, though by the time the film was released Armstrong’s part had been cut to almost nothing).
The rest of the film was directed by Raoul Walsh — an excellent director of action films and melodramas but one somewhat at sea in a comedy/musical — and written by the usual committee (Sig Herzig and Eugene Thackrey, story; Eve Greene and Harlan Ware, “adaptation,” and Walter DeLeon, Lewis E. Gensler and Francis Martin, script), who came up with a romantic-quadrilateral plotlet about Mac Brewster (Jack Benny), owner and CEO of the Brewster Advertising Agency, who’s sucking up to silverware heir Alan Townsend (Richard Arlen, who like his director would have been far more comfortable with an action script) because the ad agency is broke and the $1 million (in 1937 dollars!) contract Townsend is dangling in front of him is his and his agency’s economic salvation.
Brewster’s girlfriend is his agency’s star model, Paula Sewell (Ida Lupino, still with strong traces of her native British accent), and she asks him to ensure that she can be both the Townsend Silver Girl and the queen of the Artists and Models Ball, which Brewster is chairing — only Townsend doesn’t want a professional model for this assignment. Instead, he wants a debutante from the Social Register — and accordingly Paula and her roommate Toots (Judy Canova) fly down to Miami so Paula can pose as debutante “Paula Monterey” and snag the Townsend Silver contract. Meanwhile, Brewster has recruited his own potential Townsend Girl, Cynthia Wentworth (Gail Patrick), a genuine debutante who came to his office to fundraise for a babies’ charity and ends up in love with Brewster (and vice versa). She doesn’t get to be the Townsend Girl — that job was promised by Townsend to Paula before he found out she was really a model, which causes a glitch in their own burgeoning relationship — but she does get her charity named as the ball’s beneficiary and she also lands Brewster, while Paula ends up with Townsend and Toots ends up with Jupiter Pluvius II (Monte Blue), a genuinely amusing comic-relief character (one wouldn’t think a Jack Benny movie needed comic relief, but there it is) called Jupiter Pluvius II, a rainmaker who claims his dad, also a rainmaker, started the Johnstown Flood.
There are some appealing songs in this film, including the Academy Award-nominated “Whispers in the Dark” (sung by Connie Boswell — it was a year after the Boswell Sisters broke up and she was still using the normal spelling of her first name instead of “Connee,” the version she favored later — and played by André Kostelanetz as part of a gargantuan production number on a stage built over the Miami beachfront; she sings beautifully but her face is kept in shadow and the number rather lumbers along, and the attempts of the Kostelanetz orchestra to swing are embarrassing) and “Stop! You’re Breaking My Heart,” which was recorded appealingly by Maxine Sullivan with Claude Thornhill’s studio band in 1937 as a followup to their surprise hit of “Loch Lomond” but here is an almost unlistenable duet between Judy Canova and Ben Blue, who seem determined to gang up on its melody and utterly destroy it. Still, the writing committee came up with some pretty good one-liners — most of them for Jack Benny, who left his violin at home on this one but otherwise played pretty much the character he did on radio (there’s a charming little in-joke in which Brewster and Cynthia walk past a radio tuned to the Benny program and Brewster says, “I’ve always liked him,” while Cynthia replies, “Funny — I’ve never cared for him”).
The Yacht Club Boys are explosive as usual — aside from the blacked-out opening number, they get another energetic routine in Brewster’s office in which they burst in with a whole troupe of singers, dancers and even a horse to demonstrate a “gypsy” production number they want to stage at the ball, just adding to the film’s maddest scene which also features Brewster receving the executives of an underwear company (potential clients of his agency) while he’s in his underwear himself — they mistake him for the male model they requested and say he’s wrong for the assignment — because he’s also simultaneously being examined by a doctor (Donald Meek, which is funny enough in itself). Minnelli’s “Public Melody No. 1” number looks like it came from an entirely different movie; shot in rich chiaroscuro black-and-white instead of the plain style Victor Milner used in the rest of the film, the number is rich in visual inventiveness and features some soulful blues playing by Armstrong as well as wild dancing and an overall noir air that makes it a precursor to the “Girl Hunt Ballet” Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse did in Minnelli’s The Band Wagon.
Overall, Artists and Models is a nice movie, not a world-beater but fun in a dorky way and with the big Minnelli number at the end (which also has the advantage of the most talented musical stars in the film!) that predictably got the movie in trouble with Paramount’s Southern distributors — even though Raye and Armstrong never touch, the Southern execs still watched blackfaced Martha Raye (who actually doesn’t look all that dark — more like a white girl who went to a really good tanning salon) cavort with genuinely African-American Louis Armstrong and, with visions of miscegenation dancing in their heads (not that they had to worry; Armstrong’s preference was always not only for Black women but the darkest-skinned Black women he could find!), they scissored it out of the movie and both it and Judy Canova’s rustic rendition of Billy Gashade’s old “Ballad of Jesse James” were frequently omitted from this film during its 1950’s TV showings — while more recently virtually all the advertised showings of Artists and Models turned out to be the 1955 quasi-remake, a vehicle for Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis that kept nothing from this film but its title. (Paramount was hoping this would become a musical series on the order of their Big Broadcasts, Warners’ Gold Diggers and MGM’s Broadway Melodies, but after only one sequel — Artists and Models Abroad, a 1938 film which carried over Jack Benny but cast him in a different part — they abandoned the idea.)
I ran Charles the 1937 Artists and Models, a movie I saw once in the early 1970’s and desperately wanted to see again, so much so that I practically had an orgasm when I saw it on TCM’s schedule for February 1, only to find when I recorded it that the first five minutes offered a ragged soundtrack and no image at all, so we sat in the dark and listened to the Yacht Club Boys’ opening song, “The Super-Special Epic of the Year.” The image cut in five minutes into the movie — just at the very end of the song, in time to give us at least a glimpse of the elaborate stage set Paramount built for it — and the rest was glitch-free.
Artists and Models is known mostly as Vincente Minnelli’s first film; in his early days in Hollywood Minnelli only got to do individual musical numbers in other people’s movies, and here his contribution is “Public Melody No. 1,” the big production number at the end featuring Martha Raye (in blackface) and Louis Armstrong. Minnelli had been a hotshot director on Broadway when Paramount gave him a six-month contract in 1937, but after an unhappy tenure there during which this was the only film he got to work on, he went back to New York as soon as the six months were up and didn’t try the movies again until Arthur Freed signed him for MGM in 1940 and told him he could wander around the lot, watching how movies were made, until he’d figured it out and he told Freed he was ready to work.
Frankly, I suspect that “Public Melody No. 1” wasn’t the only number in Artists and Models Minnelli worked on; there’s also an engaging musical parody called “Mister Esquire” featuring human actor Ben Blue in a spoof of classical music with Russell Patterson’s Personettos, a group of puppets, that seems to have his touch — it’s premonitory of the marvelous animated fruit musicians on the dinner table in Strike Up the Band (another “insertion number” Minnelli directed in a movie of which Busby Berkeley was the director of record), just as “Public Melody No. 1” looks forward to Lena Horne’s numbers in Panama Hattie (Minnelli’s first official MGM credit) and even more to Cabin in the Sky, Minnelli’s first full directorial credit and also a film with African-American performers (including Louis Armstrong, though by the time the film was released Armstrong’s part had been cut to almost nothing).
The rest of the film was directed by Raoul Walsh — an excellent director of action films and melodramas but one somewhat at sea in a comedy/musical — and written by the usual committee (Sig Herzig and Eugene Thackrey, story; Eve Greene and Harlan Ware, “adaptation,” and Walter DeLeon, Lewis E. Gensler and Francis Martin, script), who came up with a romantic-quadrilateral plotlet about Mac Brewster (Jack Benny), owner and CEO of the Brewster Advertising Agency, who’s sucking up to silverware heir Alan Townsend (Richard Arlen, who like his director would have been far more comfortable with an action script) because the ad agency is broke and the $1 million (in 1937 dollars!) contract Townsend is dangling in front of him is his and his agency’s economic salvation.
Brewster’s girlfriend is his agency’s star model, Paula Sewell (Ida Lupino, still with strong traces of her native British accent), and she asks him to ensure that she can be both the Townsend Silver Girl and the queen of the Artists and Models Ball, which Brewster is chairing — only Townsend doesn’t want a professional model for this assignment. Instead, he wants a debutante from the Social Register — and accordingly Paula and her roommate Toots (Judy Canova) fly down to Miami so Paula can pose as debutante “Paula Monterey” and snag the Townsend Silver contract. Meanwhile, Brewster has recruited his own potential Townsend Girl, Cynthia Wentworth (Gail Patrick), a genuine debutante who came to his office to fundraise for a babies’ charity and ends up in love with Brewster (and vice versa). She doesn’t get to be the Townsend Girl — that job was promised by Townsend to Paula before he found out she was really a model, which causes a glitch in their own burgeoning relationship — but she does get her charity named as the ball’s beneficiary and she also lands Brewster, while Paula ends up with Townsend and Toots ends up with Jupiter Pluvius II (Monte Blue), a genuinely amusing comic-relief character (one wouldn’t think a Jack Benny movie needed comic relief, but there it is) called Jupiter Pluvius II, a rainmaker who claims his dad, also a rainmaker, started the Johnstown Flood.
There are some appealing songs in this film, including the Academy Award-nominated “Whispers in the Dark” (sung by Connie Boswell — it was a year after the Boswell Sisters broke up and she was still using the normal spelling of her first name instead of “Connee,” the version she favored later — and played by André Kostelanetz as part of a gargantuan production number on a stage built over the Miami beachfront; she sings beautifully but her face is kept in shadow and the number rather lumbers along, and the attempts of the Kostelanetz orchestra to swing are embarrassing) and “Stop! You’re Breaking My Heart,” which was recorded appealingly by Maxine Sullivan with Claude Thornhill’s studio band in 1937 as a followup to their surprise hit of “Loch Lomond” but here is an almost unlistenable duet between Judy Canova and Ben Blue, who seem determined to gang up on its melody and utterly destroy it. Still, the writing committee came up with some pretty good one-liners — most of them for Jack Benny, who left his violin at home on this one but otherwise played pretty much the character he did on radio (there’s a charming little in-joke in which Brewster and Cynthia walk past a radio tuned to the Benny program and Brewster says, “I’ve always liked him,” while Cynthia replies, “Funny — I’ve never cared for him”).
The Yacht Club Boys are explosive as usual — aside from the blacked-out opening number, they get another energetic routine in Brewster’s office in which they burst in with a whole troupe of singers, dancers and even a horse to demonstrate a “gypsy” production number they want to stage at the ball, just adding to the film’s maddest scene which also features Brewster receving the executives of an underwear company (potential clients of his agency) while he’s in his underwear himself — they mistake him for the male model they requested and say he’s wrong for the assignment — because he’s also simultaneously being examined by a doctor (Donald Meek, which is funny enough in itself). Minnelli’s “Public Melody No. 1” number looks like it came from an entirely different movie; shot in rich chiaroscuro black-and-white instead of the plain style Victor Milner used in the rest of the film, the number is rich in visual inventiveness and features some soulful blues playing by Armstrong as well as wild dancing and an overall noir air that makes it a precursor to the “Girl Hunt Ballet” Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse did in Minnelli’s The Band Wagon.
Overall, Artists and Models is a nice movie, not a world-beater but fun in a dorky way and with the big Minnelli number at the end (which also has the advantage of the most talented musical stars in the film!) that predictably got the movie in trouble with Paramount’s Southern distributors — even though Raye and Armstrong never touch, the Southern execs still watched blackfaced Martha Raye (who actually doesn’t look all that dark — more like a white girl who went to a really good tanning salon) cavort with genuinely African-American Louis Armstrong and, with visions of miscegenation dancing in their heads (not that they had to worry; Armstrong’s preference was always not only for Black women but the darkest-skinned Black women he could find!), they scissored it out of the movie and both it and Judy Canova’s rustic rendition of Billy Gashade’s old “Ballad of Jesse James” were frequently omitted from this film during its 1950’s TV showings — while more recently virtually all the advertised showings of Artists and Models turned out to be the 1955 quasi-remake, a vehicle for Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis that kept nothing from this film but its title. (Paramount was hoping this would become a musical series on the order of their Big Broadcasts, Warners’ Gold Diggers and MGM’s Broadway Melodies, but after only one sequel — Artists and Models Abroad, a 1938 film which carried over Jack Benny but cast him in a different part — they abandoned the idea.)
Indestructible Man (Independent, 1956)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The last film on the disc was Indestructible Man (most citations refer to it with a definite article but there is no “the” in the actual main title on the film itself), a 1956 vehicle for Lon Chaney, Jr. in the title role as Charles Benton, framed for murder by a crooked attorney and two gangland associates and sentenced to die in the gas chamber at San Quentin — but revived through electricity by a couple of scientists (Robert Shayne and Joe Flynn) searching for a cure for cancer. The treatment leaves his intelligence (if you can call it that) intact but burns out his voice (well, Chaney was used to playing mute characters, including the Frankenstein monster in one film and the Mummy Kharis in three), and Our Antihero promptly heads down to Los Angeles — stealing a car and killing its rightful owner in the process — so he can avenge himself against the three people who set him up.
This film was produced and directed by Jack Pollexfen (who five years earlier had produced the haunting sci-fi film The Man from Planet X for director Edgar G. Ulmer, and would probably have been better advised to get Ulmer to direct this one too) and written by Vy Russell and Sue Bradford. Most of the sources I’ve seen on it suggested it was a remake (of sorts) of Chaney’s 1941 Universal film Man-Made Monster, in which he was a sideshow performer, “The Electric Man,” framed for murder and electrocuted, only instead of killing him the electric chair transformed him into a lethal monster — but the two films have little in common except Chaney’s presence and the plot gimmick of a condemned murderer executed but revived through electricity.
Indestructible Man is much more a crime thriller than a horror film — indeed it freely mixes genres, being part horror film, part science-fiction, part Dragnet-style police procedural (it’s narrated in flashback by actor Casey Adams, who plays an LAPD detective in the clipped deadpan tones of Jack Webb’s Joe Friday) and part film noir (with Marion Carr as a stripper who has important clues on the case, whom the police detective first interviews, then befriends, and finally falls for and marries) — but it lacks the fun of a real genre-bender because it’s clear that instead of deliberately playing around with our genre expectations the writers and director are mixing these film types so indiscriminately simply from hunger, continually writing themselves into corners and reaching for the most readily handy film conventions to get themselves out again. And as Charles joked, it’s also bizarre that Chaney, by far the best actor in the film, should have been ordered to be mute through so much of it! — 10/23/02
•••••
Following Artists and Models, I made the mistake of showing Charles the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 version of Indestructible Man, a movie we’d watched together “straight” before and one so boring and stupid that even the MST3K crew’s interjections couldn’t make it entertaining! I thought about this film pretty much the way I had before; it’s an obvious combined ripoff of The Walking Dead (Boris Karloff as an innocent man unjustly convicted and executed, who’s brought back to life by a scientist and turns into a vicious monster who targets the judge and jury responsible for his conviction) and Man-Made Monster (which featured the same star, Lon Chaney, Jr., as a man exposed to a giant dose of electricity and thereby turned into an electrical monster whose mere touch is fatal) and really a gangster film disguised as sci-fi/horror, since once Chaney is executed and brought back to life (by a couple of scientists whom he immediately murders — talk about ingratitude!) he acts just like a non-revivified gangster in one of those revenge plots that were already hackneyed when Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney did them without benefit of scientific revivification in the early 1930’s. The best joke was one in which one of the MST3K crew said that Chaney murdered one of his victims because the guy had told him, “Your dad was a better actor than you are!” — 2/9/09
The last film on the disc was Indestructible Man (most citations refer to it with a definite article but there is no “the” in the actual main title on the film itself), a 1956 vehicle for Lon Chaney, Jr. in the title role as Charles Benton, framed for murder by a crooked attorney and two gangland associates and sentenced to die in the gas chamber at San Quentin — but revived through electricity by a couple of scientists (Robert Shayne and Joe Flynn) searching for a cure for cancer. The treatment leaves his intelligence (if you can call it that) intact but burns out his voice (well, Chaney was used to playing mute characters, including the Frankenstein monster in one film and the Mummy Kharis in three), and Our Antihero promptly heads down to Los Angeles — stealing a car and killing its rightful owner in the process — so he can avenge himself against the three people who set him up.
This film was produced and directed by Jack Pollexfen (who five years earlier had produced the haunting sci-fi film The Man from Planet X for director Edgar G. Ulmer, and would probably have been better advised to get Ulmer to direct this one too) and written by Vy Russell and Sue Bradford. Most of the sources I’ve seen on it suggested it was a remake (of sorts) of Chaney’s 1941 Universal film Man-Made Monster, in which he was a sideshow performer, “The Electric Man,” framed for murder and electrocuted, only instead of killing him the electric chair transformed him into a lethal monster — but the two films have little in common except Chaney’s presence and the plot gimmick of a condemned murderer executed but revived through electricity.
Indestructible Man is much more a crime thriller than a horror film — indeed it freely mixes genres, being part horror film, part science-fiction, part Dragnet-style police procedural (it’s narrated in flashback by actor Casey Adams, who plays an LAPD detective in the clipped deadpan tones of Jack Webb’s Joe Friday) and part film noir (with Marion Carr as a stripper who has important clues on the case, whom the police detective first interviews, then befriends, and finally falls for and marries) — but it lacks the fun of a real genre-bender because it’s clear that instead of deliberately playing around with our genre expectations the writers and director are mixing these film types so indiscriminately simply from hunger, continually writing themselves into corners and reaching for the most readily handy film conventions to get themselves out again. And as Charles joked, it’s also bizarre that Chaney, by far the best actor in the film, should have been ordered to be mute through so much of it! — 10/23/02
•••••
Following Artists and Models, I made the mistake of showing Charles the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 version of Indestructible Man, a movie we’d watched together “straight” before and one so boring and stupid that even the MST3K crew’s interjections couldn’t make it entertaining! I thought about this film pretty much the way I had before; it’s an obvious combined ripoff of The Walking Dead (Boris Karloff as an innocent man unjustly convicted and executed, who’s brought back to life by a scientist and turns into a vicious monster who targets the judge and jury responsible for his conviction) and Man-Made Monster (which featured the same star, Lon Chaney, Jr., as a man exposed to a giant dose of electricity and thereby turned into an electrical monster whose mere touch is fatal) and really a gangster film disguised as sci-fi/horror, since once Chaney is executed and brought back to life (by a couple of scientists whom he immediately murders — talk about ingratitude!) he acts just like a non-revivified gangster in one of those revenge plots that were already hackneyed when Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney did them without benefit of scientific revivification in the early 1930’s. The best joke was one in which one of the MST3K crew said that Chaney murdered one of his victims because the guy had told him, “Your dad was a better actor than you are!” — 2/9/09
Sunday, February 8, 2009
Sky Commando (Columbia, 1953)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Sky Commando was yet another production from Sam Katzman’s “B” unit at Columbia but a considerably better film than Last Train from Bombay even though it was a military aviation movie and thereby invoked all the tiresome clichés of military aviation movies from Wings and Hell’s Angels through Top Gun. A good deal of it, though, was legitimately tough drama — and its star, Dan Duryea, was not only an edgier personality than Jon Hall but also a considerably better and more “watchable” actor.
Sky Commando begins with combat footage of a jet fighter squadron during the Korean War — which was just winding down when the film was released in 1953 — in which the final two planes in the air, flown by Lt. John Willard (William R. Klein, later William Bryant) and his brother, Capt. Frank Willard (Dick Paxton), are just about to return home when they’re suddenly ordered by their commanding officer, Col. Ed Wyatt (Dan Duryea), to fly out again and bomb a machine-gun nest on top of a hill. They do so successfully, but then their two planes are attacked by four enemy MiG fighters and John’s plane gets back to base successfully but Frank’s is shot down and he’s presumably killed. Naturally, John Willard is pissed at Wyatt for giving them the order that got his brother killed, and he’s about to club Wyatt with a lantern when Major Scott (Michael Fox) intervenes and tells a story about how Wyatt got to be such a tough disciplinarian in the first place.
From then the film becomes mostly a World War II aviation film in which Wyatt is a pilot whose co-pilot has just been killed in the middle of a bombing mission, and whose replacement, Hobson “Hobbie” Lee (Touch Conners, who later worked his way down the Hollywood food chain to cheapies at American International and still later normalized his name to Mike Connors and starred on the private-eye TV show Mannix), is naturally nervous about the experience. Also in the dramatis personae is war correspondent Jo McWethy (Frances Gifford), whom Hobbie immediately falls for and who’s attached (in the modern world we’d say “embedded”) to their squadron.
Hobbie follows Wyatt when half the squadron is reassigned from Britain (from whence they’ve been flying sorties over Germany, mainly to take out the Focke-Wulf aircraft plant near Bremen) to north Africa, partly because Jo has also been reassigned there and partly because he wants to catch Wyatt endangering the lives of his crew so he can bring him up before a board of inquiry and get him punished. At one point, while the principals are still based in England, Wyatt orders the crew of his plane to push out of the cockpit three dead crew members (they’ve been killed by anti-aircraft fire) to lighten the load and make sure both the plane and its precious cargo of reconnaissance film of the raid get back to base (one interesting aspect of this movie is it makes filming the targets of bombing raids, both pre- and post-raid, seem as important as the actual bombing), and when the bodies are recovered in the English Channel one of them turns out to have died not by gunfire but by drowning — indicating he was still alive when pushed out of the plane even though Wyatt insists that there was no way he could have survived his injuries and therefore he was dead weight it was O.K. to dispose of.
This, of course, pisses off Hobbie even more — and he remains upset until the final, climactic mission in which the crew members go up in four-engined B-24 Liberator bombers (they’ve been flying two-engined B-25 Mitchells up until this point in the movie) to take out the oil refinery at Ploesti, Romania (which was supposedly the source of 90 percent of the German army’s fuel supply at the time) and their plane is shot down. Wyatt manages to crash-land it over the border in Yugoslavia and a partisan named Jorgy (Dick Lerner) leads them to a boat waiting to take them and their all-important film to Africa and safety — only Jorgy gets picked off by a German sniper 100 feet away from the beach, not that we mind because he’s one of the most obnoxious, unfunny “comic relief” characters in movie history, complete with an attempt at a “Yugoslav” accent that makes him sound like a cross between Yogi Yorgesson and José Jimenez. Then the film cuts back to the Korean War framing sequence, with Lt. John Willard ready and willing to resume his duties — and in a really unwelcome surprise twist, he gets a note just before he goes up on his next mission that his brother Danny is alive after all: the 300 U.S. Marines who were rescued from being pinned down by that machine-gun nest when the Willard brothers successfully bombed it out of existence in turn repaid the favor by rescuing Danny from the wreckage of his downed plane.
It’s a real pity that these last lapses into cliché mar what was until then a genuinely tough war movie, with dilemmas about love, pride and duty neatly if not exactly freshly presented by screenwriter Samuel Newman (adapting a story by himself and Arthur E. Orloff & William Sackheim) and directed with a real edge and flair for suspense by the normally hacky Fred F. Sears. Sometimes a “B” movie that aims out of its class and just misses can be more frustrating than a “B” that remains solidly in its class and never pretends to be anything else. It also doesn’t help that Sky Commando is way overloaded with stock footage of actual combat aircraft, some of it reasonably well-matched, some of it jarringly mismatched, and with a few clips in particular (notably one of a German anti-aircraft gun going off and then another one of it being reloaded) being recycled so often you want to wave to them and say hello to your new-found friends — but this is still mostly a tough-minded movie and a refreshingly edgy one for a “B” production.
Sky Commando was yet another production from Sam Katzman’s “B” unit at Columbia but a considerably better film than Last Train from Bombay even though it was a military aviation movie and thereby invoked all the tiresome clichés of military aviation movies from Wings and Hell’s Angels through Top Gun. A good deal of it, though, was legitimately tough drama — and its star, Dan Duryea, was not only an edgier personality than Jon Hall but also a considerably better and more “watchable” actor.
Sky Commando begins with combat footage of a jet fighter squadron during the Korean War — which was just winding down when the film was released in 1953 — in which the final two planes in the air, flown by Lt. John Willard (William R. Klein, later William Bryant) and his brother, Capt. Frank Willard (Dick Paxton), are just about to return home when they’re suddenly ordered by their commanding officer, Col. Ed Wyatt (Dan Duryea), to fly out again and bomb a machine-gun nest on top of a hill. They do so successfully, but then their two planes are attacked by four enemy MiG fighters and John’s plane gets back to base successfully but Frank’s is shot down and he’s presumably killed. Naturally, John Willard is pissed at Wyatt for giving them the order that got his brother killed, and he’s about to club Wyatt with a lantern when Major Scott (Michael Fox) intervenes and tells a story about how Wyatt got to be such a tough disciplinarian in the first place.
From then the film becomes mostly a World War II aviation film in which Wyatt is a pilot whose co-pilot has just been killed in the middle of a bombing mission, and whose replacement, Hobson “Hobbie” Lee (Touch Conners, who later worked his way down the Hollywood food chain to cheapies at American International and still later normalized his name to Mike Connors and starred on the private-eye TV show Mannix), is naturally nervous about the experience. Also in the dramatis personae is war correspondent Jo McWethy (Frances Gifford), whom Hobbie immediately falls for and who’s attached (in the modern world we’d say “embedded”) to their squadron.
Hobbie follows Wyatt when half the squadron is reassigned from Britain (from whence they’ve been flying sorties over Germany, mainly to take out the Focke-Wulf aircraft plant near Bremen) to north Africa, partly because Jo has also been reassigned there and partly because he wants to catch Wyatt endangering the lives of his crew so he can bring him up before a board of inquiry and get him punished. At one point, while the principals are still based in England, Wyatt orders the crew of his plane to push out of the cockpit three dead crew members (they’ve been killed by anti-aircraft fire) to lighten the load and make sure both the plane and its precious cargo of reconnaissance film of the raid get back to base (one interesting aspect of this movie is it makes filming the targets of bombing raids, both pre- and post-raid, seem as important as the actual bombing), and when the bodies are recovered in the English Channel one of them turns out to have died not by gunfire but by drowning — indicating he was still alive when pushed out of the plane even though Wyatt insists that there was no way he could have survived his injuries and therefore he was dead weight it was O.K. to dispose of.
This, of course, pisses off Hobbie even more — and he remains upset until the final, climactic mission in which the crew members go up in four-engined B-24 Liberator bombers (they’ve been flying two-engined B-25 Mitchells up until this point in the movie) to take out the oil refinery at Ploesti, Romania (which was supposedly the source of 90 percent of the German army’s fuel supply at the time) and their plane is shot down. Wyatt manages to crash-land it over the border in Yugoslavia and a partisan named Jorgy (Dick Lerner) leads them to a boat waiting to take them and their all-important film to Africa and safety — only Jorgy gets picked off by a German sniper 100 feet away from the beach, not that we mind because he’s one of the most obnoxious, unfunny “comic relief” characters in movie history, complete with an attempt at a “Yugoslav” accent that makes him sound like a cross between Yogi Yorgesson and José Jimenez. Then the film cuts back to the Korean War framing sequence, with Lt. John Willard ready and willing to resume his duties — and in a really unwelcome surprise twist, he gets a note just before he goes up on his next mission that his brother Danny is alive after all: the 300 U.S. Marines who were rescued from being pinned down by that machine-gun nest when the Willard brothers successfully bombed it out of existence in turn repaid the favor by rescuing Danny from the wreckage of his downed plane.
It’s a real pity that these last lapses into cliché mar what was until then a genuinely tough war movie, with dilemmas about love, pride and duty neatly if not exactly freshly presented by screenwriter Samuel Newman (adapting a story by himself and Arthur E. Orloff & William Sackheim) and directed with a real edge and flair for suspense by the normally hacky Fred F. Sears. Sometimes a “B” movie that aims out of its class and just misses can be more frustrating than a “B” that remains solidly in its class and never pretends to be anything else. It also doesn’t help that Sky Commando is way overloaded with stock footage of actual combat aircraft, some of it reasonably well-matched, some of it jarringly mismatched, and with a few clips in particular (notably one of a German anti-aircraft gun going off and then another one of it being reloaded) being recycled so often you want to wave to them and say hello to your new-found friends — but this is still mostly a tough-minded movie and a refreshingly edgy one for a “B” production.
Saturday, February 7, 2009
Last Train from Bombay (Columbia, 1952)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film I picked out was a Columbia “B” from 1952, produced by Sam Katzman for his semi-independent operation there (then called Esskay Pictures and later called Clover), called Last Train from Bombay, directed by Katzman stalwart Fred F. Sears from a script by Robert Libott — who, judging from the evidence, seems to have been reading way too much Eric Ambler, since what this amounts to is one of Ambler’s stories of international intrigue with his formulae merely transferred from Turkey to India.
Newly independent India is threatened with civil war in the province of Jaipur (or something like that), and the hereditary ruler, the Nawob, is being targeted by terrorists who have rigged a bomb in a tunnel his train must pass through on its way from Bombay to Jaipur — though why this is going to be the last train from Bombay is never mentioned (and it’s a bit too early for the reason to be that the Indian government was about to change the city’s name to Mumbai!). There’s a long, wordless opening sequence in which the villain of the piece, whose identity we don’t yet know, murders an Indian in his hotel room and assumes the man’s identity. Then we meet the film’s star, Jon Hall, who’s playing American diplomat Martin Viking (I’m not making this up, you know!), who meets up with his old wartime buddy (they served at Normandy together) Brian O’Hara (Douglas Kennedy), who turns out to be the terrorist who’s been hired to blow up the train.
Once that’s been set up, the film is essentially “action porn,” with the plot being little more than a pretext for Jon Hall to get into various scrapes with various baddies, both white and native, when he’s not romancing the conveniently provided heroine, Mary Ann Palmer (Christine Larsen), daughter of a former British official in the raj who’s going on a sightseeing tour to do nostalgic reveries over the landmarks associated with imperialism — or the conveniently provided femme fatale, Charlane (Lisa Ferriday, who frankly looks so much like Christine Larsen I found myself wondering why she had an accent in some scenes and not others!).
Despite the impression you might get from the title, through most of the film Viking is successfully being kept off the train by the baddies and being forced to commandeer other modes of transportation, including the Palmers’ fancy car as well as a plane, and in between fights he manages to trace the plot — an attempt to nip India’s nascent democracy in the bud and establish a fascist dictatorship in the newly independent country — to a coffeehouse called “The Lame One” and then to a person called The Lame One, who turns out to be living a cover identity as railroad official B. Vornin (Gregory Gaye). By this time Jon Hall was getting a bit long in the tooth for this sort of movie — he was doubled in some of the action scenes by David Sharpe — and after his success as a black-hearted villain in The Invisible Man’s Revenge it would seem as if Hall would have been better advised to “go to the dark side” in picking his future roles instead of playing the dashing hero until the advancing years robbed him of most of his dash.
By far the most interesting character in the film is Captain Tamil (Michael Fox), obviously Robert Libott’s equivalent to Col. Haki (so memorably played by Orson Welles in Journey Into Fear) and a genuinely conflicted person, sometimes admiring Viking’s chutzpah and sometimes convinced he’s guilty of murder (did I mention that he spends most of this whole movie with a murder charge hanging over his head because O’Hara framed him for the murder of the guy he killed for his identity in the opening scene?) and determined to arrest him. Had more of Last Train from Bombay tapped this level of moral ambiguity, it would have been a much better film!
The film I picked out was a Columbia “B” from 1952, produced by Sam Katzman for his semi-independent operation there (then called Esskay Pictures and later called Clover), called Last Train from Bombay, directed by Katzman stalwart Fred F. Sears from a script by Robert Libott — who, judging from the evidence, seems to have been reading way too much Eric Ambler, since what this amounts to is one of Ambler’s stories of international intrigue with his formulae merely transferred from Turkey to India.
Newly independent India is threatened with civil war in the province of Jaipur (or something like that), and the hereditary ruler, the Nawob, is being targeted by terrorists who have rigged a bomb in a tunnel his train must pass through on its way from Bombay to Jaipur — though why this is going to be the last train from Bombay is never mentioned (and it’s a bit too early for the reason to be that the Indian government was about to change the city’s name to Mumbai!). There’s a long, wordless opening sequence in which the villain of the piece, whose identity we don’t yet know, murders an Indian in his hotel room and assumes the man’s identity. Then we meet the film’s star, Jon Hall, who’s playing American diplomat Martin Viking (I’m not making this up, you know!), who meets up with his old wartime buddy (they served at Normandy together) Brian O’Hara (Douglas Kennedy), who turns out to be the terrorist who’s been hired to blow up the train.
Once that’s been set up, the film is essentially “action porn,” with the plot being little more than a pretext for Jon Hall to get into various scrapes with various baddies, both white and native, when he’s not romancing the conveniently provided heroine, Mary Ann Palmer (Christine Larsen), daughter of a former British official in the raj who’s going on a sightseeing tour to do nostalgic reveries over the landmarks associated with imperialism — or the conveniently provided femme fatale, Charlane (Lisa Ferriday, who frankly looks so much like Christine Larsen I found myself wondering why she had an accent in some scenes and not others!).
Despite the impression you might get from the title, through most of the film Viking is successfully being kept off the train by the baddies and being forced to commandeer other modes of transportation, including the Palmers’ fancy car as well as a plane, and in between fights he manages to trace the plot — an attempt to nip India’s nascent democracy in the bud and establish a fascist dictatorship in the newly independent country — to a coffeehouse called “The Lame One” and then to a person called The Lame One, who turns out to be living a cover identity as railroad official B. Vornin (Gregory Gaye). By this time Jon Hall was getting a bit long in the tooth for this sort of movie — he was doubled in some of the action scenes by David Sharpe — and after his success as a black-hearted villain in The Invisible Man’s Revenge it would seem as if Hall would have been better advised to “go to the dark side” in picking his future roles instead of playing the dashing hero until the advancing years robbed him of most of his dash.
By far the most interesting character in the film is Captain Tamil (Michael Fox), obviously Robert Libott’s equivalent to Col. Haki (so memorably played by Orson Welles in Journey Into Fear) and a genuinely conflicted person, sometimes admiring Viking’s chutzpah and sometimes convinced he’s guilty of murder (did I mention that he spends most of this whole movie with a murder charge hanging over his head because O’Hara framed him for the murder of the guy he killed for his identity in the opening scene?) and determined to arrest him. Had more of Last Train from Bombay tapped this level of moral ambiguity, it would have been a much better film!
Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Vaccine-Nation (Gary Null Productions, 2008)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
My intent was to show the first half of the Gary Null movie Vaccine-Nation but as things turned out I ended up running the whole thing, partly because the copy I had (the one I had been loaned almost a year ago!) was billed as a “director’s cut” but was totally uncued — it was just one big long DVD file without any chapter stops whatsoever, therefore no convenient place to pick it up for a second showing a month from now; and partly because the story was so compelling, especially the case of Alan Yurko, the “star” of the film.
In 1999 Yurko’s eight-week-old son was given a routine vaccination “cocktail” (it’s amazing here, as in AIDS, a medical procedure is colloquially nicknamed after something decidedly unhealthy!) and, two days after the shot, began to developed the high-pitched cry that’s an acknowledged side effect of the vaccines. Two days after that he stopped breathing, and Alan and his wife Francine rushed the baby to the hospital, where he was given the blood-thinning drug heparin (why?), with the result that blood was ultimately found in the baby’s brain after it died and Alan was arrested and charged with first-degree murder on the “shaken baby syndrome” theory. He was convicted (at least in part, the film suggested, because just before his case went to the jury a local TV news program ran a report on shaken baby syndrome that recommended coming down very hard on the parents) and sentenced to life imprisonment with no possibility of parole — beginning a costly legal battle as well as living hell for Alan, who was lumped in with child molesters by the other prisoners and treated to getting piss and shit dumped on him. This continued until 2004, when his wife and the legal effort she had managed to put together for him won him a new trial and he was acquitted — only to be re-arrested on an old charge in Ohio (he’d been living in Florida when he was arrested and had served his earlier sentence there) from which he was finally freed on parole in February 2005.
Null’s “stars” were Yurko and the late Dr. Michael Hilleman, who courtesy of a soundtrack recording of an interview he gave PBS for a documentary on the polio vaccine recalled his own role in testing it in 1955 and the jocular attitude of his fellow scientists towards his allegations that their vaccines might be contaminated by new viruses which had been undetectable before his research invented new means of detecting them — including HIV (though it seemed odd indeed to hear a reference to the “AIDS virus” in a movie directed by Gary Null, of all people, this is yet another piece of evidence that even if you believe in HIV as the cause of AIDS the syndrome still could be iatrogenic!). Null suggested in the show that vaccination has never been proven to be either safe or effective; his film doesn’t make that case very convincingly (though it does present evidence that the diagnosis and death tolls from catastrophic diseases like smallpox and polio were starting to trend downward even before mass vaccination was introduced, thanks to improved sanitation and other non-medical interventions that helped control the infection vectors) but does suggest very strongly that routine mass vaccination is a bad idea and vaccines should be considered a major health intervention that should be addressed cautiously.
I remember a Tony Brown’s Journal episode on PBS from April 17, 1994 that featured a letter from John Salamuni, whose son came down with polio as an effect of the polio vaccine, who wrote, “I am not recommending that children not be vaccinated, but rather that our government create a policy that provides precautionary measures, so that other children do not become sick from the very program that is designed to promote their health. Most parents are not informed by doctors, prior to vaccination, of potential risks involved, despite an even more comprehensive national program, recently enacted by Congress. There is no policy requiring doctors to inform parents in advance about potential hazards and risk factors, or the option of dead polio versus live polio vaccine. As tragic as David’s case is, it is made more so by the knowledge that a $20 pre-vaccination test could have prevented the polio that crippled him.”
Given that $20 is more than the actual vaccine costs, one can readily understand the health establishment’s reluctance to administer the test en masse — especially since the public health community is so imbued with mass vaccination as a magical principle that requires 100 percent compliance, or nearly so (I’ve read interviews in which vaccination advocates regard children whose parents opt out of vaccination for religious or moral reasons as “freeloaders” who are getting the alleged protective value of vaccination without running the risks), that they dare not allow the release of any information that even remotely questions the safety or effectiveness of mass vaccinations. The film also dramatizes the sheer number of vaccinations routinely ordered for American children — more than in any other country in the world and far more than I had when I was a child(when measles, mumps and rubella were considered rites of childhood passage and not fearsome menaces to be vaccinated against) and raises the interesting point of whether vaccines should be given in combined doses or singly so that the immune system has a chance to develop an antibody response to one vaccine before having to confront another.
About the only flaw I would point to in this film is Null’s repeated suggestion that the vaccine program is being pushed by pharmaceutical companies for profit motives; in fact, the major drug companies are loath to get into vaccines precisely because a vaccine is only given a limited number of times (even ones that require “booster shots” are generally administered only two or three times, and most vaccines are only given once), and the focus of the modern pharmaceutical industry is on drugs that have to be administered repeatedly, hopefully for the rest of the patient’s life (which is why in the mid-1990’s everyone in the AIDS mainstream suddenly stopped talking about a “cure” and started talking about making so-called “HIV disease” a “chronic, manageable condition” — i.e., one for which you would have to take multiple medications for the rest of your life). Indeed, the government liability program Null mentions in his movie — which, like the government liability program for nuclear reactors, caps total damages and makes it illegal for vaccine victims or their parents to sue in court — was put in place because without it the major pharmaceutical companies refused to produce vaccines at all! Null probably spends too much of the current film on the thimerosal issue (thimerosal is the mercury-producing chemical used as a preservative in vaccines that was widely believed to be behind the increased rates of autism in American children over the last 25 years until it was withdrawn in 2002) and not on the overall issue of free cholce versus medical mandates and the power of the medical industry’s argument that in the field of public health we should live under a medical dictatorship in which informed consent is not permitted and those who buck the consensus are punished — and the people who have “side” effects from vaccination should be accepted as collateral damage for a greater public good. That mindset is far more chilling than the direct harm done from the vaccines themselves.
My intent was to show the first half of the Gary Null movie Vaccine-Nation but as things turned out I ended up running the whole thing, partly because the copy I had (the one I had been loaned almost a year ago!) was billed as a “director’s cut” but was totally uncued — it was just one big long DVD file without any chapter stops whatsoever, therefore no convenient place to pick it up for a second showing a month from now; and partly because the story was so compelling, especially the case of Alan Yurko, the “star” of the film.
In 1999 Yurko’s eight-week-old son was given a routine vaccination “cocktail” (it’s amazing here, as in AIDS, a medical procedure is colloquially nicknamed after something decidedly unhealthy!) and, two days after the shot, began to developed the high-pitched cry that’s an acknowledged side effect of the vaccines. Two days after that he stopped breathing, and Alan and his wife Francine rushed the baby to the hospital, where he was given the blood-thinning drug heparin (why?), with the result that blood was ultimately found in the baby’s brain after it died and Alan was arrested and charged with first-degree murder on the “shaken baby syndrome” theory. He was convicted (at least in part, the film suggested, because just before his case went to the jury a local TV news program ran a report on shaken baby syndrome that recommended coming down very hard on the parents) and sentenced to life imprisonment with no possibility of parole — beginning a costly legal battle as well as living hell for Alan, who was lumped in with child molesters by the other prisoners and treated to getting piss and shit dumped on him. This continued until 2004, when his wife and the legal effort she had managed to put together for him won him a new trial and he was acquitted — only to be re-arrested on an old charge in Ohio (he’d been living in Florida when he was arrested and had served his earlier sentence there) from which he was finally freed on parole in February 2005.
Null’s “stars” were Yurko and the late Dr. Michael Hilleman, who courtesy of a soundtrack recording of an interview he gave PBS for a documentary on the polio vaccine recalled his own role in testing it in 1955 and the jocular attitude of his fellow scientists towards his allegations that their vaccines might be contaminated by new viruses which had been undetectable before his research invented new means of detecting them — including HIV (though it seemed odd indeed to hear a reference to the “AIDS virus” in a movie directed by Gary Null, of all people, this is yet another piece of evidence that even if you believe in HIV as the cause of AIDS the syndrome still could be iatrogenic!). Null suggested in the show that vaccination has never been proven to be either safe or effective; his film doesn’t make that case very convincingly (though it does present evidence that the diagnosis and death tolls from catastrophic diseases like smallpox and polio were starting to trend downward even before mass vaccination was introduced, thanks to improved sanitation and other non-medical interventions that helped control the infection vectors) but does suggest very strongly that routine mass vaccination is a bad idea and vaccines should be considered a major health intervention that should be addressed cautiously.
I remember a Tony Brown’s Journal episode on PBS from April 17, 1994 that featured a letter from John Salamuni, whose son came down with polio as an effect of the polio vaccine, who wrote, “I am not recommending that children not be vaccinated, but rather that our government create a policy that provides precautionary measures, so that other children do not become sick from the very program that is designed to promote their health. Most parents are not informed by doctors, prior to vaccination, of potential risks involved, despite an even more comprehensive national program, recently enacted by Congress. There is no policy requiring doctors to inform parents in advance about potential hazards and risk factors, or the option of dead polio versus live polio vaccine. As tragic as David’s case is, it is made more so by the knowledge that a $20 pre-vaccination test could have prevented the polio that crippled him.”
Given that $20 is more than the actual vaccine costs, one can readily understand the health establishment’s reluctance to administer the test en masse — especially since the public health community is so imbued with mass vaccination as a magical principle that requires 100 percent compliance, or nearly so (I’ve read interviews in which vaccination advocates regard children whose parents opt out of vaccination for religious or moral reasons as “freeloaders” who are getting the alleged protective value of vaccination without running the risks), that they dare not allow the release of any information that even remotely questions the safety or effectiveness of mass vaccinations. The film also dramatizes the sheer number of vaccinations routinely ordered for American children — more than in any other country in the world and far more than I had when I was a child(when measles, mumps and rubella were considered rites of childhood passage and not fearsome menaces to be vaccinated against) and raises the interesting point of whether vaccines should be given in combined doses or singly so that the immune system has a chance to develop an antibody response to one vaccine before having to confront another.
About the only flaw I would point to in this film is Null’s repeated suggestion that the vaccine program is being pushed by pharmaceutical companies for profit motives; in fact, the major drug companies are loath to get into vaccines precisely because a vaccine is only given a limited number of times (even ones that require “booster shots” are generally administered only two or three times, and most vaccines are only given once), and the focus of the modern pharmaceutical industry is on drugs that have to be administered repeatedly, hopefully for the rest of the patient’s life (which is why in the mid-1990’s everyone in the AIDS mainstream suddenly stopped talking about a “cure” and started talking about making so-called “HIV disease” a “chronic, manageable condition” — i.e., one for which you would have to take multiple medications for the rest of your life). Indeed, the government liability program Null mentions in his movie — which, like the government liability program for nuclear reactors, caps total damages and makes it illegal for vaccine victims or their parents to sue in court — was put in place because without it the major pharmaceutical companies refused to produce vaccines at all! Null probably spends too much of the current film on the thimerosal issue (thimerosal is the mercury-producing chemical used as a preservative in vaccines that was widely believed to be behind the increased rates of autism in American children over the last 25 years until it was withdrawn in 2002) and not on the overall issue of free cholce versus medical mandates and the power of the medical industry’s argument that in the field of public health we should live under a medical dictatorship in which informed consent is not permitted and those who buck the consensus are punished — and the people who have “side” effects from vaccination should be accepted as collateral damage for a greater public good. That mindset is far more chilling than the direct harm done from the vaccines themselves.
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