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

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 last gasps before it was absorbed by RKO in 1931 and ultimately folded into that company after two years in which some movies came out as RKO and some as RKO-Pathé, much the way Warner Bros. films sometimes were released in “First National” drag. It was one of the last projects for the Rhythm Boys, the vocal group with which Bing Crosby got his start: he had met Al Rinker, Mildred Bailey’s brother and a singer in his own right, while both were still living in Washington state, and the two had traveled to L.A. and been discovered by Paul Whiteman and signed to his entourage in 1927. The duo of Crosby and Rinker did well on tour but bombed out in New York City, and Whiteman decided that they needed someone who would give the act more verve and showmanship. The person Whiteman recruited to join them was Harry Barris, a live-wire pianist and comic singer who was also a major songwriter and could supply the Rhythm Boys (as Whiteman named them) original material. The Rhythm Boys remained part of the Whiteman organization for three years, until Whiteman went to L.A. to make the big-budget Universal musical revue The King of Jazz (1930) which featured Crosby soloing on the film’s theme song, “Music Hath Charms,” and the Rhythm Boys doing a marvelous number in two-strip Technicolor (the whole film was in color, actually) combining their early hit “Mississippi Mud” and a new song, “So the Bluebirds and the Blackbirds Got Together.” Then Crosby decided his future lay in Hollywood, so he got the Rhythm Boys to quit Whiteman and join Gus Arnheim’s L.A.-based band at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub inside the Ambassador Hotel, while the trio also 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 he played in a series of romantic-comedy shorts that established his happy-go-lucky screen character, and he’d clearly outgrown the need for the other two. Pathé was at loose ends, too: they had never recovered from the opprobrium following a terrible accident at their New York studio in which a soundstage burned down while filming a 1929 musical and 11 people were killed — still the worst accident, at least in terms of total lives lost, ever to occur during the actual shooting of a film. They also hadn’t recovered from the loss of their big comedy star, Harold Lloyd, who had switched distribution of his self-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 to stay in the comedy market they concocted a series called “Campus Comedies,” about the hijinks of frat boys and the scrapes they got into. Two Plus Fours was filmed under the working title Ripstitch the Tailor, which would have been a better name for it — it would at least have given moviegoers an idea of what the film was about: Two Plus Fours vaguely hints that it has something to do with articles of male clothing but otherwise means nothing. (Some Crosby biographers got confused by the dual title and thought Bing and the Rhythm Boys had made two short comedies for Pathé, not just this one.)

The 20-minute short was actually a feature for Jewish dialect comedian Nat Carr, who plays a tailor named Ginsberg: he’s irritated that the college boys have given him the nickname “Ripstitch the Tailor” but he can’t do anything about it because their suit orders represent his principal source of income. He’s being harassed by the typical evil landlord (Edgar Dearing) but he’s hopeful because Tait College’s new school year is about to start and he’s counting on the frat boys to buy so many suits for the upcoming start-of-the-year rally he’ll be able to pay 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 character first appeared he had a disgusted look on his face while the white kids were playing 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 think they can swing”) and lost not only their money but the ukuleles and other musical instruments they’d been playing. When the train enters a tunnel (the shots of the train moving are obviously stock footage, but director Ray McCarey and editor John F. Link cut them in so smoothly they’re believable) the kids jump the Black guy and get the instruments back and start their jam session over again. The frat boys eventually arrive in town and they’re so broke they don’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’s just after he’s serviced another college kid in a baggy suit he insists “fits like a glove” and caught the kid just as he was about to walk out of his store without paying. (The kid reaches into his new suit and gets out his wallet to give Ginsberg the money; one wonders how the wallet got there if it’s a suit he’s never worn before.)

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

 Two Plus 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’s charming and clever throughout and has at least two good gags: when one of the students 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” from each sign with his pocket knife; and at the end in which the transfer cart and the horse pulling it are decorated with frat-house symbols the way the kids’ car would be if they could afford one. It’s a curio for Crosby fans — no doubt if Bing hadn’t been in it, it would still be moldering away in a vault somewhere — and one oddity is that the credits make it seem like a Hal Roach production in exile: the director is Ray (Raymond) McCarey, and the “supervising producer” is Fred Guiol (a protégé of George Stevens who rose to become a director himself at Roach and RKO in the mid-1930’s, then quit and went back to working as Stevens’ assistant and one of his regular screenwriters). Ray McCarey was the far less famous brother of director Leo McCarey, whom Bing Crosby would work with in the 1940’s on two of either man’s biggest hits: Going My Way and its sequel, The Bells of St. Mary’s.

Gangs of New York (Republic, 1938)

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

The film was Gangs of New York, not the 2002 extravaganza directed by Martin Scorsese and dealing with Irish-American gangs in 19^th century New York but a 1938 Republic “B” directed by James Cruze from a story by Samuel Fuller (his first movie credit!) scripted by Fuller, Wellyn Totman and Charles Francis Royal. (Interesting degrees-of-separation here: Martin Scorsese made a biopic about Howard Hughes, The Aviator, while Cruze directed the 1928 film The Mating Call, produced by Howard Hughes.) The credits announce the film was merely “suggested” by Herbert Asbury’s 1928 book Gangs of New York (and the American Film Institute Catalog gets two facts wrong about Asbury’s book: they say it was published in 1936 and call it a novel, though it was at least intended to be nonfiction) — and the Scorsese movie wasn’t much closer; according to Wikipedia, the Academy nominated it for Best Original Screenplay rather than Best Adapted Screenplay because the movie had so little in common with what Asbury wrote.

Anyway, the 1938 Gangs of New York is a contemporary-set gangster film that begins with a massacre in which at least three members of the Maddock gang are shot. Two die immediately, but the third one lingers long enough for police to question him in hospital and ask him who did this. “Rocky’s boys,” he answers — which nonplusses the cops because Rocky Thorpe (Charles Bickford) has been in prison for five years. However, an investigation led by police inspector Sullivan (Willard Robinson) and district attorney Lucas (Charles Trowbridge), who prosecuted Rocky in the first place, concludes that Rocky is still running his gang by remote control from the prison — they interrogate three of Rocky’s associates and find they’re still doing things the way Rocky wanted them to — only the meeting of Lucas and Sullivan is interrupted by Rocky himself, who has just been paroled and threatens them. Only it turns out this isn’t really Rocky, but undercover policeman John Franklyn (also Charles Bickford), whom Sullivan has recruited because of his uncanny resemblance to Rocky except that he doesn’t have the two deep scars on the real Rocky’s face. Franklyn agrees to have plastic surgery to get his face scarred the same way as Rocky’s, and the idea is that instead of being released, the real Rocky is locked in solitary confinement 24/7 with no contact whatsoever with other prisoners or the outside world, while Franklyn brazens his way into running Rocky’s gang. Before this they’ve found out the way Rocky was relaying his instructions to his gang members from prison: he was broadcasting them in code via a ham radio station inside the prison walls! From that point it becomes a pretty standard impersonation movie, with the suspense being what’s going to trip up Franklyn’s masquerade and how he’s going to get out of being killed when the gangsters discover he’s a cop.

He finally is exposed by Rocky’s girlfriend Orchid (Wynne Gibson) and his associate Dapper (Alan Baxter), who recalls that just before he was arrested Rocky had spent $5,000 on a jeweled bracelet for Orchid but hadn’t given it to her; Franklyn has no recollection of the bracelet and Dapper is thereby convinced that he can’t be the real Rocky, who would have remembered an item that was that expensive. Meanwhile, a prison guard who’s on the gang’s payroll finds the real Rocky hidden in the secret cell, and the meeting place for the final confrontation — Rocky (the fake one) has invited all the other gang leaders in New York City for a meeting, ostensibly to discuss a merger but really to get them all arrested with the documentation of their nefarious deeds on them — gets changed by Dapper and it’s touch and go whether the police force will get there in time to save the fake Rocky’s life from the gangsters — now led by the real Rocky, who’s sprung jail. Obviously, the folks at Republic weren’t going to give up the thrill of staging a fight sequence between Charles Bickford and Charles Bickford — though they do it in long shot and it’s pretty clear both men were being doubled — but there’s an earlier scene in which the bad Bickford takes a punch at the good one and the illusion is absolutely convincing.

 Gangs of New York has a lot going for it, including some marvelous characterizations of the subsidiary gangsters (especially Harold Huber’s dandy-ish “Panatella,” who appears to have been named after his favorite cigar!), good effects work and a well-staged car chase (well, chase scenes were another Republic specialty!) with some unusual angles, including a shot in which one of the cars heads straight for the camera and barrels down on the audience, much the way the famous train in an early Lumière film did (and sent a filmically naïve audience running from the theatre, screaming, convinced that a real train was actually coming towards them). It suffers from a cheesy stock music score from Alberto Colombo, and though Cruze directs it well enough (this was his next-to-last film; he had been a major director in the silent era, including making the first big-budget Western spectacle, The Covered Wagon, for Paramount in 1923, but though he made some excellent talkies — notably I Cover the Waterfront, with Claudette Colbert and Ben Lyon, in 1933 — his career never recovered from the transition and by 1938 he was on staff at Republic, where he would make only one more film after this, Come On, Leathernecks) it’s yet another crime film from the 1930’s that really needed the speedy Warner Bros. style and Warners’ great star, James Cagney, in the lead(s).

Murder at Dawn, a.k.a. The Death Ray (Big 4 Films, 1932)

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

Charles had just downloaded a couple of 1930’s indies from archive.org and we watched one of them: Murder at Dawn, made in 1932 and also known as The Death Ray, featuring the usual assortment of “B”-listers of the period. The “stars,” if you can call them that, are Jack Mulhall as Danny, the action male lead, and Jacqueline Dunn as Doris Farrington, his girlfriend, whose father, Dr. Farrington (Frank Ball), has retreated to a castle-like house in the sticks where he’s perfecting an invention whose true nature is not revealed in the script but has variously been described in published synopses as either a solar-power machine or a death ray. (It’s possible screenwriter Barry Barringer — who also wrote the serial The Return of Chandu, a far better plotted and more interesting movie than this! — was thinking of it as a sort of “dual-use” item that could either be a source of cheap solar power or a death ray.) There’s a quite exciting and suspenseful climax which features the principal bad guy, Henry (Mischa Auer), who landed a job as caretaker on the Farrington estate because his mom (Martha Mattox) is the housekeeper — eerily anticipating Judith Anderson’s similar performance in virtually the same role in Rebecca eight years later — who’s after the secret of Farrington’s invention. He wears a long cape that makes one think producer John R. Freuler actually might have had Bela Lugosi in mind for the part and cast Auer after Lugosi was either unavailable or turned it down, and for someone whose modern-day reputation is as a zany comic Auer is quite effective as a villain (but then he usually played villains in the early sound years and his first comic roles were casting him against type before his success in them changed his type).

Anyway, Auer’s character traps both Dr. Farrington and his daughter in Farrington’s own electronic gizmos, setting the trap so that as soon as the sun comes up Farrington’s “accumulator” will accumulate a charge of electricity and will then release it right into the bodies of both Farringtons unless Farrington père agrees to reveal to Henry the secret of his machine. Until we get to that point, however, the film is really just a very dull Old Dark House knockoff (why did so many people make so many awful movies about people trapped in an old dark house on a stormy night when director James Whale and writer Benn W. Levy had made such a great one that should have shown the rest of Hollywood how that particular sub-genre should be done?) featuring the principals, plus unfunny “comic-relief” second leads Freddie (Eddie Boland) and Gertrude (Marjorie Beebe), chasing each other around the old-dark-house set and arousing acute boredom in the audience. (At least this movie’s mad scientist’s doesn’t have a pet ape.)

Director Richard Thorpe, who by the mid-1930’s had got himself out of the indies and into a job as contract director for the biggest studio in Hollywood, MGM (where he stayed for over two decades, including directing the Elvis Presley movie Jailhouse Rock — Jack Mulhall and Elvis, one degree of separation!), showed in the highly suspenseful and exciting final scene that he was worthy of biggers and betters, something that wasn’t indicated by the rest of the movie — though that’s more writer Barringer’s fault than his (and it still seems hard to believe that Barry Barringer, whose The Return of Chandu was genuinely suspenseful and emotionally moving in ways serials usually weren’t, was unable to give his characters much dimension, or his story much interest, here). The version on archive.org ran only 52 minutes, 10 minutes shorter than the original release, but somehow I don’t think the extra running time would have added anything to this film but more boring shots of people walking, running or chasing each other through that tacky set.

Andrea Bocelli Live in Central Park (PBS, 9/15/11)

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

The show was one of those interminable PBS pledge-break things, Andrea Bocelli in Concert in Central Park, a concert which actually took place on September 15 but is being shown several times in PBS’s current pledge period with breaks made to look like it’s happening in real time. The Andrea Bocelli phenomenon baffles me because he’s simply not that great a singer — aside from the two songs (“The Prayer” and “Time to Say Goodbye”) that were actually written for him, virtually every selection on this show, whether operatic or popular, is something I’ve heard sung way better by someone else — and yet I don’t actively hate him the way the reviewers for American Record Guide do. (Whenever any of Mario Lanza’s records get reissued, American Record Guide’s critics can’t resist comparing him to Bocelli and saying that Lanza may have been a pop tenor, but at least he was a pop tenor with a real voice.) I think Bocelli’s voice is essentially comfort music, analogous to comfort food. He’s become a star partly due to a compelling backstory — according to his Wikipedia page, he was born with poor eyesight and became blind at age 12 from an accident playing soccer, and just about everything written about Bocelli mentions his blindness (but then Art Tatum, Willie Johnson, Willie McTell, Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Rahsaan Roland Kirk and many other musicians have shared Bocelli’s blindness but not his blandness!) — and partly due to a pleasant but unthreatening voice.

I suspect even his clear limitations — for someone billing himself as a tenor it seems he couldn’t sing a squarely placed high “C” on pitch without falsetto to save his life (or regain his sight); every time the music went that high he either dropped into falsetto or emitted a noise that reminded me of Rossini’s famous comment on hearing Rubini, the first tenor to sing high “C” full voice, that the note sounded like a capon being strangled. What I really hadn’t expected was that the first half of his concert, in which he sang opera excerpts, was far better than the second half, in which he sang the pop material I would have assumed he’d be more at home with. He was accompanied by the New York Philharmonic with its regular conductor, Alan Gilbert — who sometimes (especially in “O soave fanciulla” from La Bohème, sung with a quite impressive Black South African soprano whose name, at least to the extent I could make it out from Paula Zahn’s relentlessly chipper narration, was Pretty Yundé; they also sang the “Libiamo” from Traviata together and Yundé, or whatever her name is, showed promise of developing into a first-rate Violetta some day) seemed to be moving the music along as slowly as possible so Bocelli could negotiate it.

The show opened with an instrumental selection — the overture to Verdi’s La Forza del Destino — and then Bocelli came out for “La donna è mobile” from Rigoletto (competently sung but without distinction) and then “Di quella pira” from Trovatore (he made most of the notes but without the stirring “ring” that makes this an exciting aria given the right sort of voice — Caruso, Domingo, Pavarotti et al.). Then the first of the evening’s succession of guest stars, baritone Bryn Terfel, came out for a rendition of the “Te Deum” finale of act I of Puccini’s Tosca (hardly in the same league as Ruffo’s or Gobbi’s but still damned good) and Bocelli sang Schubert’s “Ave Maria.” Judging from this, and the fact that the best performance in the “pop” set (for which he changed the black suit he’d worn during the opera set into a white one that made him look like a waiter) was “Amazing Grace,” which he sang with real sincerity and (pardon the pun) grace despite a gloppy arrangement featuring the Westminster Symphonic Choir, maybe religious songs are his métier (especially since his best-selling album is called Sacred Songs).

After the “Ave Maria” came a pledge break, and then the most exciting singing of the night: the “Vicino a te” final duet from Giordano’s Andrea Chénier, which you’ll recall is set during the French Revolution and ends with the revolutionary poet André Chénier and his aristocratic girlfriend, Maddalena de Coigny, singing an ecstatic love duet while being led away to the guillotine. (They even sing “Vive la morte!” — “Long live death!”) For once everybody — guest soprano Ana Maria Martinez, conductor Gilbert and Bocelli himself — seemed to let their hair down; Gilbert conducted with the kind of mad passion a scene like this needs to work, Martinez was fully the mistress of her role and she pulled Bocelli up to her level and made him sound like a real opera singer for the first and only time all night. Then she left the stage and Bryn Terfel returned for the big male-male duet from Bizet’s The Pearl Fishers, “Au fond du temple saint,” and then Yondé (or whoever) came out for her two selections, after which Zahn announced the intermission, another pledge break, and then the pop set.

It began with something called “I Walk with You Tonight” by Ennio Morricone (who’s much better known for instrumental film music than as a songwriter) and a version of Riz Ortolani’s “More,” the theme from Mondo Cane, which Bocelli announced that he’d originally wanted to do as a languorous love ballad (which certainly would have been different and might well have worked!), but he’d been talked out of it by Gilbert, who pointed out that the top-selling vocal version in the U.S. had been by Frank Sinatra and therefore they should do it as swing. What followed was neither fish nor fowl, neither credible swing (let’s face it, Bocelli had the New York Philharmonic while Sinatra had Count Basie’s band!) nor good balladry but acceptable on the sheer appeal of the melody and its narrow range, which kept Bocelli in the most comfortable compass of his voice. It didn’t help that on “More” he was joined by David Foster on piano and Chris Botti on trumpet — and while Botti isn’t going to go down in anybody’s  history as one of the greatest jazz musicians of all time, he clearly knew a lot more about swinging than either Bocelli or Gilbert did. Then Bocelli sang Domenico Modugno’s “Volare” in yet another pleasant, comfortable version of a song others have sang much better before him, and Céline Dion came out to join him in the big song Foster wrote for him, “The Prayer,” from an otherwise forgotten animated feature called The Quest for Camelot.

 The next piece was a pretty ghastly horror, a vocal version of the slow movement from Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez arranged by former New York Philharmonic conductor Lorin Maazel and accompanied by willowy violinist Nicole Benedetti (who was introduced as a Scotswoman despite her Italian-sounding name — as the American Record Guide has noted lately, in order to get a contract as a classical violinist lately you seem to have to be female, and drop-dead gorgeous young female at that, so the record company can put a scantily clad picture of you on the cover and hopefully sell CD’s to people otherwise uninterested in classical music!); Benedetti’s contribution was O.K. but the whole thing was embarrassing not only to anyone who knows the piece in its original form as a concerto for guitar and symphony orchestra but also anyone who’s heard Miles Davis’ riveting version with Gil Evans’ orchestra on the album Sketches of Spain. Then Bocelli did the predictable “O sole mio,” once again perfectly acceptably but hardly in the same league as Caruso.

Ironically, though, the worst selection of the night didn’t involve Bocelli at all: it came about at this stage of the concert and featured Bryn Terfel doing, of all things, “Home on the Range.” Now I’m of the opinion that the version Bing Crosby recorded on September 27, 1933 in Los Angeles with Lennie Hayton’s orchestra is definitive — no one is going to outdo Bing on this one (even Bing himself couldn’t equal it in his remake) — and what’s amazing is that not only does Bing outpoint Terfel on emotion and soul, he outsings him technically as well. Bing’s swooping melisma on the line “the graceful white swan goes gliding along” (his voice really does conjure up the image of a swan gliding along in the sky) is utterly beyond Terfel’s powers, or perhaps beyond his interest because that part of the song was cut from Tefel’s version. It would have helped if Terfel had used Lennie Hayton’s arrangement for the Crosby version instead of the God-awfully pretentious one he did have to sing to, though one thing I have to say for Terfel is at least he pronounced the “t” in “often” (Crosby omitted it). Fortunately, “Amazing Grace,” which contained some of Bocelli’s best singing all night, came next.

Afterwards there was another pledge break and then Tony Bennett came on to join Bocelli on yet another ill-advised duet — the Kander/Ebb “New York, New York” (the song’s official title is “Theme from New York, New York,” probably to distinguish it from the far livelier “New York, New York” that opens the Bernstein/Comden/Green musical On the Town) — in which Bennett, like Botti on “More,” showed up Bocelli’s total lack of syncopation or understanding of jazz rhythm. After that they trotted out Ana Maria Martinez to sing Sarah Brightman’s original part on the star-making hit “Time to Say Goodbye,” and then Bocelli’s final encore returned to the world of opera with “Nessun dorma” from Puccini’s Turandot, blessedly equipped with the opera’s final chorus (to the same melody) to fill it out better than in performances that just come to a thudding halt at the point in the score when the other characters return to the stage. I hadn’t thought Andrea Bocelli would turn out to be a better opera singer than he is a pop star, but he is; though he’s only a second-rate opera singer and Pavarotti (who apparently gave him some sort of career boost early on) and Domingo needn’t have worried about the competition, at least he has a familiarity with operatic music and a basic understanding of how it’s supposed to go that seems to leave him in the world of pop.

What’s weirdest about Bocelli is that he doesn’t seem to have any soul; everything he sings settles at a level of blandness, as if he really doesn’t care what the words mean or what the composer is attempting to convey through the music; all music seems to mean to him is an excuse to create pretty sounds a lot of people will pay a lot of money — or, as in this free concert, at least sit in the rain for a long time — to hear. I feel about Andrea Bocelli much the way I feel about Andrew Lloyd Webber: I don’t think he’s magnificent and I don’t think he’s single-handedly destroying music, and I can hope his performances of operatic material turn people on to this sort of music and lead them to investigate it with more powerful singers. He’s got a pleasant voice, though one of limited range and carrying power, and as long as he uses it in material he’s comfortable with and doesn’t send him into the danger spots above the staff he’s quite nice to listen to — but comparing him to the great operatic tenors of the past (or even to Lanza, who sang pop material as if it were opera — all too often Bocelli sings opera as if it were pop — and who showed in records like “Serenade” from The Student Prince that he was capable of wrenchingly soulful interpretations way beyond Bocelli’s capabilities) is preposterous.

Diagnosis: Unknown (TV, 1960)

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

The night before last Charles and I watched a rather intriguing TV show downloaded from archive.org: the first of nine episodes from a 1960 summer replacement series called Diagnosis: Unknown which I suspect was the first TV series in history to dramatize the workings of forensic science. Yes, before Quincy (which this show resembles not only in the lead character but also in his having an Asian sidekick, though here he’s Indian instead of Japanese) and the CSI and NCIS franchises, here we got Dr. Daniel Coffee (Patrick O’Neal), smoking like a chimney (the fact that doctors are shown smoking and everyone smokes in enclosed rooms, even inside a hospital, dates these old TV shows big-time) and outfitted with a thin moustache and beard that usually belonged to the iconography of villains rather than hero. He’s outfitted with three assistants, Indian doctor Motital Mookerji (Cal Bellini), nurse Olivia Brenn (Millette Alexander) — whom Dr. Coffee treats as a bimbo even though she isn’t (indeed, she’s a good deal less annoying than the Pauley Perrette character on NCIS), and Link (Martin Huston), a teenager who’s going through various musical obsessions (in this episode he wants to reinvent himself as Lionel Hampton — I kid you not!) when he’s not being comically obnoxious and disruptive.

This quartet of forensic medicos are up against the murder of the mistress of multimillionaire Lester Farnum (Murray Matheson), and the suspects are Mrs. Farnum (played with just the right world-weariness by Patricia Barry), junkyard worker Don Harding (a slimmer, more muscular and decidedly hotter version of Larry Hagman than the one we’re used to) and wine merchant Freddie Ziegler (Tom Bosley, somewhat slimmer and less baggy-faced than the version who played Ron Howard’s father on Happy Days but easily recognizable: one can readily see why he was picked to play Mayor Fiorello La Guardia in the 1960 musical Fiorello! after the originally intended star, Lou Costello, died suddenly in 1959). The episode title, “A Case of Radiant Wine,” was a reference to a 1948 French wine that was radioactive due to contamination of the soil in which the grapes were grown with carbon-14; though it wasn’t enough to kill her, the victim had drunk some of the radioactive wine (which was supposed to have been recalled) and the killer had handled the bottle and left traces of its radioactivity on the curtains where he hid out just before he knocked off the victim, whom he killed for the all too common (in fiction and in life) motive that he had the hots for her but she had no interest in him “that way” whatsoever. It was a neat program and I’m sorry we can’t see more of the episodes — and the appearances of Hagman and Bosley in roles other (and far younger!) than the ones we know them for was a welcome bonus.

Little Sparrows (Bolderpictures/Film Movement, 2011)

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

The film was Little Sparrows, a 2010 Australian indie written and directed by Yu-Hsiu Camille Chen, though despite the impression you might get from that heavy-duty Asian name (and she’s female, though it took me a Web search to confirm that), all the characters in the film are Anglo-Australians and it’s not an ethnic film about Asians at all. It’s an understated drama — sometimes too understated — about Susan (Nicola Bartlett), a woman living in Perth, Australia, mother of three daughters, whose breast cancer has just returned after a period of remission and who faces the Christmas holidays with the knowledge that this holiday season will be her last. (Since Australia is in the southern hemisphere, December 25 is near the start of their summer, something you need to remember because otherwise you’ll be jarred by the fabulous weather and sights like people eating fresh-cut corn as part of a Christmas meal.) The daughters are facing crises of their own — Anna (Melanie Munt), the oldest, is an aspiring actress married to Mark (Scott Jackson), a rising young film director who’s just returned from Hollywood, where he’s trying to set up a movie; Nina (Nina Deasley) is a widow with two children who’s worried that her current boyfriend is cheating on her with a blonde; and Christine (Arielle Gray) is a medical student who’s just coming to an awareness of her own sexuality by dating a young woman.

There’s also Jimmy (James Hagan), Susan’s boor of a husband, who spends his time making himself obnoxious and offering unwanted advice, like telling Mark he should put his wife in his next movie in order to get her out of Perth and give her talent a chance to blossom. It’s the sort of movie in which nothing much happens — the characters just react to mom’s diagnosis and await the inevitable — and in an irony Ms. Chen no doubt intended, Susan, the middle-aged woman under a medical death sentence, is considerably happier and more “alive” than any of her relatives. The film suffers from an ultra-low budget; it was made on a digital video system (though that doesn’t stop cinematographer Jason Thomas from imposing a past-is-brown look over most of it; maybe the idea is that Australia is brown, though it sure didn’t look so in Baz Luhrmann’s marvelous Australia) and the combination of the Aussie accents and the mediocre sound recording (and the library’s notoriously bad sound system!) rendered a lot of the dialogue difficult to understand.

It’s also the sort of movie where the various plot threads don’t really resolve: at the end of the movie mom is still alive, Christine is shown necking on the beach with her girlfriend (obviously this is supposed to indicate she’s ready to Come Out after having gone around with this woman all movie but without any physical displays of affection between them), Anna is still doing acting exercises in an empty theatre and Nina … well, her storyline is the least interesting and it tends to get lost. I can understand and respect what the writer/director was trying to do — just before the credits there’s a little legend on the lower right of the screen that reads, in all lower-case letters, “for my mother,” which suggested that she’d been through the death of her mom (though according to her interview on the Facebook page of her distributor, filmmovement.com — a sort of movie-of-the-month club for devotees of independent film — it was actually her father who died, and whose loss inspired her to make the film) — the film is an attempt to make a movie as un-movielike as possible, as unexaggerated as possible and as honest about people’s real-life emotions as they are and not as decades of movie clichés have conditioned us to see them on screen. It’s just that I think she went overboard on that; the film is genuinely moving in spots and almost insufferably dull in other spots, sort of like real life, and it doesn’t tie up its story lines in neat packages.

I admire this movie for that but at the same time my mind has been sufficiently conditioned by other movies that I wanted this plot to resolve itself through something more than a series of montage sequences set to a sappy soft-rock song, “Hold You in My Arm” (what, just one?) by Ray Lamontagne, a dreary cliché Ms. Chen did not avoid and which quite frankly should be left to the folks at Lifetime. In particular, I wanted to see Susan’s death and the wrenching adjustments the family members would have to go through when the long-dreaded moment finally came. I liked Little Sparrows and at the same time I had difficulty staying awake through parts of it — and that probably comes as close as I can to exemplifying my problems with this film! Instead, the closest thing this movie comes to a conventional resolution is Susan visits a tattoo parlor and has herself tattooed with the images of three sparrows (yes, this is one of those movies in which we have to wait to the end to get an explanation of the title), symbolizing her daughters, as a way (she explains) of having them with her all the time — even, one presumes, from beyond the grave …

Sexton Blake and the Hooded Terror (Graham King Productions, 1938)

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

I ran Charles a recent download from archive.org, a 1938 British film called Sexton Blake and the Hidden Terror. Released as The Hidden Terror for U.S. television because presumably no one in this country would identify with the character Sexton Blake — who proved to be a stone ripoff of Sherlock Holmes, complete with Baker Street address (I joked that Fleet Street was the home of the London press and Baker Street must have been the home of London’s private detective industry), silly-ass assistant Tinker (Tony Sympson), chancy relations with Scotland Yard in general and Inspector Bramley (Norman Pierce) in particular, and Moriarty-like adversary Michael Larron (Tod Slaughter), a.k.a. “The Snake,” who runs a secret criminal organization of worldwide reach and scope. This bare recycling of Holmes was the product of author Pierre Quiroule, whose story “The Mystery of Caversham Square” (I don’t think such an address actually exists, though it certainly sounds British) provided the basis for A. R. Rawlinson’s script.

The film starts in China, where Paul Duvall (Bradley Watts) arranges to meet Granite Grant (David Farrar, the hunky male lead from Black Narcissus but here, alas, his part ends after the first three minutes!) in a hotel room, but two Chinese thugs waylay Grant and beat and stab him within an inch of his life — though he survives, he’s going to be laid up in a Chinese hospital for the next six months and that means he can’t take the steamer to Britain to warn Sexton Blake (Gordon Harker, usually a comedian but surprisingly good in a Holmes-knockoff role) about the activities of “The Snake,” an international criminal mastermind, and the upcoming meeting of “The Snake” and his principal associates scheduled to take place in London. Duvall tells Grant he’ll go to London and contact Blake, but the gang traces him to Blake’s live-work space and kills him with a poisoned dart through the open window of Blake’s apartment (yet another reason for all private investigators to keep their damned windows closed!). Blake doesn’t get to see Duvall alive, though Tinker does, and Blake eventually recovers a blank piece of paper and a pen with clear ink, from which he deduces that Duvall was carrying a message written in invisible ink ­— which, when Blake deciphers it, gives him latitude and longitude coordinates for Caversham Square in London. Only there’s a slip-up because Larron a.k.a. The Snake disguises himself as a minster, gets into Blake’s room and puts Tinker out of commission with a drugged cigar (I’m not making this up, you know!), not removing the paper (lest Blake get suspicious when he returns) but altering one letter in the clue to lead Blake on a wild-goose chase.

Blake eventually turns up at Caversham Square and picks up the password to be let into the Snake’s quarters for the board meeting of the “Black Quorum,” the name of his association, but he’s caught and thrown into a couple of traps from which he has to extricate himself. The plot also encompasses stamp collecting, which was to Sexton Blake what beekeeping was to Sherlock Holmes; Blake meets Larron, in his regular identity, at a stamp auction along with Max Fleming (Charles Oliver) and several other internationally renowned stamp collectors — and we’re evidently supposed to believe that the world’s leading stamp collectors collectively constitute the Black Quorum. The Quorum members wear black robes and hoods during their meetings, though one wonders why since in the middle of their session Larron has them doff the hoods so they can see his TV security system (the stuff of science fiction in 1938 and the stuff of everyday reality now), so he’s not trying to remain incognito from his associates the way his super-villain predecessors and prototypes, Moriarty and Mabuse, were.

Sexton Blake and the Hidden Terror is derivative as all get-out but it’s close enough to the sources it was ripping off that it’s still a fun, entertaining movie, and there’s a nice ambiguous role for Mademoiselle Julie (Greta Gynt), who’s dating both Blake and Fleming and who tells Fleming she wants to crash the villains’ hideout for “thrills.” To absolutely no one’s surprise (no one in the audience, that is), at the end of the film she’s revealed as a secret agent for the French police. The film was competently produced and directed by Graham King, and he and his cast seem to have been aware of the story’s triviality and managed to avoid taking it too seriously while also keeping it from becoming total camp. The print we were watching was also in much better shape technically than most of what we’ve seen from archive.org, and there’s one really quirky bit of casting: Julie’s maid is played by Karen Marie Flagstad, sister of the great Wagnerian soprano Kirsten Flagstad and a singer and pianist in her own right.