by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched the American
Masters PBS special on Johnny
Carson, who turned out to be a bundle of contradictions: a farm boy from
Nebraska who projected an air halfway between jes’-folks common sense and
sophisticated urbanity, a man who portrayed a public persona that loved people and got along with them easily,
then turned that off as soon as the cameras stopped transmitting and the studio
lights were turned off and retreated into his shell (“I’m not lonely, I’m just
a loner,” Carson said, in one of his few personal remarks about himself and his
personality). I rarely watched The Tonight Show in Carson’s heyday because I’ve always been mostly
a day person and generally didn’t want to stay up that late, but even if I
didn’t watch him that much I still couldn’t escape being exposed to him, if not
on his own show then certainly as his lines got repeated by friends, co-workers
and through the cultural grapevine in the pre-Internet age. Indeed, one of the
great Carson stories this show, directed by Peter Jones, should have told and did not was how he single-handedly
started a shortage of toilet paper in the U.S. It was late 1973 and one of the
big news items of the time was the energy shortage — and Carson was riffing
during his monologue about all the other shortages that were threatening, then
joked, “And get this now: there’s a shortage of toilet paper in the United States! Toilet paper!” Actually, there wasn’t one when he said it, but
one soon got created because millions of Carson viewers and millions of others
who heard it from Carson viewers ran out to their local supermarkets and
stocked up on toilet paper until there really was a shortage.
The American Masters show was an interesting glimpse of a personality
who was a major part of American celebrity for 30 years, who ran one of the
most important gateways for new talent — for stand-up comedians in particular,
playing the Tonight Show was what
playing the Palace Theatre had been for their forebears two and three
generations earlier; indeed, the career of virtually every comedian who ever
went on the Tonight Show in
Carson’s three-decade run as host can be divided into two periods, B.C. and
A.C. (Before Carson and After Carson). For me, among the most interesting clips
on this show were devoted to Carson’s TV work before Tonight, including a CBS series called Carson’s Corner that looked like the kind of tacky local show
Ernie Kovacs and Sid Caesar were making fun of then and a game show called Who Do You Trust? that was a synthetic attempt to do a knock-off of You
Bet Your Life with a considerably less
suitable host than Groucho Marx — it’s nice to know that he actually had a background in the medium and wasn’t (as it
seemed back in 1962!) someone NBC dragged off a Nebraska farm and suddenly
plunged into Jack Paar’s (and Steve Allen’s before him) anchor chair at Tonight!
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
Monday, May 14, 2012
The Ghost Camera (Real Art/Twickenham, 1933)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The Ghost Camera, a 1933 British production that I was inclined to think of as one of the earliest examples of Alfred Hitchcock’s influence — until I looked it up on imdb.com and found it was made in 1933, two years before The 39 Steps and four years before Young and Innocent. Both its writer and its star had Hitchcock connections in their pasts, though: Harry Kendall, who played the rather prissy male lead John Gray, had played the suburban husband Fred in Hitchcock’s 1931 masterpiece Rich and Strange (when the film was a financial flop Hitchcock blamed Kendall, who was not only Gay but a bit of a queen in real life), and the film was based on a story by J. Jefferson Farjeon, one of whose plays had provided the basis for Hitchcock’s 1932 film Number Seventeen. It was a production of Twickenham Studios (the company dissolved in the late 1930’s but the studios remained in use — the first third of the Beatles’ Let It Be was shot there in 1969), a company I’d known before only as producers of four of the five Sherlock Holmes movies with Arthur Wontner as Holmes (which hadn’t particularly impressed me: they were hamstrung by stage-bound stories and low budgets and the Wontner Holmes movie Twickenham didn’t make, The Sign of Four, was his best in the role).
The Ghost Camera was based on a Farjeon story called A Mystery Narrative — when I saw that in the opening credits I thought that was simply a genre indication, but it was the actual title of the source story, reflecting how John Gray, an innocent man drawn into investigating a murder, compares his own story to those of the heroes of detective fiction. He’s also the sort of person who tries to impress people with his learning (his “erudition,” as he’d say) through never using a one-syllable word when a four- or five-syllable word will do. The script is by H. Fowler Mear and is quite witty, the sort of thing that uses the typical mystery clichés but also ridicules itself for doing so, though Gray’s comic-relief sidekick, Albert Sims (S. Victor Stanley), gets pretty oppressive after a while. (It must have been really challenging for this film’s casting director to come up with someone even queenier than Harry Kendall!) The gimmick is that Gray is driving through the countryside in a convertible when someone throws a camera away and it lands in the (otherwise empty) back seat of his car. He finds it and decides to develop the film inside — he’s got a fully equipped processing lab in his basement, which is explained by the fact that he and Sims are proprietors of a drugstore (a “chemist’s,” as they call them in England) and presumably use the lab to develop film for their customers. There are five photographic plates in the camera’s clip, and the first one Gray develops is a photo of one man stabbing another — only when he hangs the negative and print to dry, a heavy-set man breaks into the shop and steals them as well as the camera itself. Gray still has the other four plates, and three of them turn out to be scenes in the countryside — including an old ruined castle and a shot of a train — while one is a photo of a woman.
Using the pictures to trace the girl, Gray finds out she is Mary Elton (Ida Lupino, in her first film), and the camera belonged to her brother Ernest (John Mills), who took it out to the country one day to shoot some pictures for a contest and hasn’t been seen since. Ernest worked at a jewelry store and joined a plot led by some crooks to steal a valuable diamond, then thought better of it and stole the diamond back, intending to return it — but his two confederates each thought the other had made off with the gem, so they had a fight and one of them stabbed the other while Ernest shot the scene with his camera hidden. The killer disguises himself as a Scotland Yard officer and tries to retrieve the other plates and keep from being discovered, and as they travel together Gray and Mary begin to fall in love even though she realizes that the likely outcome of his investigation will be the apprehension and trial of her brother for murder, especially when they trace the locations in the photographs and find the cave where the killing took place — with the victim’s body still inside. Ernest is found and indeed arrested, and he’s put on trial before a coroner’s jury headed by an officious coroner (Felix Aylmer) who’s obviously gone into the proceeding already convinced Ernest is guilty. It’s only at the very end, when Gray is confronted by that “Scotland Yard officer” and he realizes at long last he isn’t a Scotland Yard officer, and is in fact the real killer, that it ends happily, with him and Mary paired up and kissing just at the right moment to spoil Sims’ attempt to photograph them.
The Ghost Camera is a finely honed light mystery, beautifully balanced between thriller and comedy elements in the way Hitchcock would become famous for later, and while director Bernard Vorhaus doesn’t quite have Hitchcock’s skill at suspense and pace, he keeps the action flowing and shoots much of the film from oblique angles. One wonders where he was when Twickenham was handing out the directorial assignments for all those dull Holmes movies with Wontner! This film is filled with people who became far more important later, not only in front of the camera (Lupino, Mills, Aylmer) but behind it as well: the editor was a young man on the make named David Lean. Lupino is billed first on the title card — perhaps a later addition to boost her billing to take advantage of her subsequent success in Hollywood — but only eighth in the opening credits, but it does seem to have been an “introducing” sort of credit because in terms of screen time and overall importance she truly has a leading role, and it’s fascinating not only to watch the young blonde Lupino but to hear her voice before she went to the U.S. and eradicated her British accent so successfully that on at least one occasion she was passed over for the part of a Brit because the director didn’t think she could learn to talk like one again! The Ghost Camera is quite a good movie, a surprise especially given its auspices — and one wonders why Bernard Vorhaus didn’t have more of a career as a director: this was his first film and he eventually made it to the U.S. but got stuck at Republic making things like The Affairs of Jimmy Valentine and the 1950 So Young, So Bad instead of the Hitchcock-style scripts he clearly deserved!
The film was The Ghost Camera, a 1933 British production that I was inclined to think of as one of the earliest examples of Alfred Hitchcock’s influence — until I looked it up on imdb.com and found it was made in 1933, two years before The 39 Steps and four years before Young and Innocent. Both its writer and its star had Hitchcock connections in their pasts, though: Harry Kendall, who played the rather prissy male lead John Gray, had played the suburban husband Fred in Hitchcock’s 1931 masterpiece Rich and Strange (when the film was a financial flop Hitchcock blamed Kendall, who was not only Gay but a bit of a queen in real life), and the film was based on a story by J. Jefferson Farjeon, one of whose plays had provided the basis for Hitchcock’s 1932 film Number Seventeen. It was a production of Twickenham Studios (the company dissolved in the late 1930’s but the studios remained in use — the first third of the Beatles’ Let It Be was shot there in 1969), a company I’d known before only as producers of four of the five Sherlock Holmes movies with Arthur Wontner as Holmes (which hadn’t particularly impressed me: they were hamstrung by stage-bound stories and low budgets and the Wontner Holmes movie Twickenham didn’t make, The Sign of Four, was his best in the role).
The Ghost Camera was based on a Farjeon story called A Mystery Narrative — when I saw that in the opening credits I thought that was simply a genre indication, but it was the actual title of the source story, reflecting how John Gray, an innocent man drawn into investigating a murder, compares his own story to those of the heroes of detective fiction. He’s also the sort of person who tries to impress people with his learning (his “erudition,” as he’d say) through never using a one-syllable word when a four- or five-syllable word will do. The script is by H. Fowler Mear and is quite witty, the sort of thing that uses the typical mystery clichés but also ridicules itself for doing so, though Gray’s comic-relief sidekick, Albert Sims (S. Victor Stanley), gets pretty oppressive after a while. (It must have been really challenging for this film’s casting director to come up with someone even queenier than Harry Kendall!) The gimmick is that Gray is driving through the countryside in a convertible when someone throws a camera away and it lands in the (otherwise empty) back seat of his car. He finds it and decides to develop the film inside — he’s got a fully equipped processing lab in his basement, which is explained by the fact that he and Sims are proprietors of a drugstore (a “chemist’s,” as they call them in England) and presumably use the lab to develop film for their customers. There are five photographic plates in the camera’s clip, and the first one Gray develops is a photo of one man stabbing another — only when he hangs the negative and print to dry, a heavy-set man breaks into the shop and steals them as well as the camera itself. Gray still has the other four plates, and three of them turn out to be scenes in the countryside — including an old ruined castle and a shot of a train — while one is a photo of a woman.
Using the pictures to trace the girl, Gray finds out she is Mary Elton (Ida Lupino, in her first film), and the camera belonged to her brother Ernest (John Mills), who took it out to the country one day to shoot some pictures for a contest and hasn’t been seen since. Ernest worked at a jewelry store and joined a plot led by some crooks to steal a valuable diamond, then thought better of it and stole the diamond back, intending to return it — but his two confederates each thought the other had made off with the gem, so they had a fight and one of them stabbed the other while Ernest shot the scene with his camera hidden. The killer disguises himself as a Scotland Yard officer and tries to retrieve the other plates and keep from being discovered, and as they travel together Gray and Mary begin to fall in love even though she realizes that the likely outcome of his investigation will be the apprehension and trial of her brother for murder, especially when they trace the locations in the photographs and find the cave where the killing took place — with the victim’s body still inside. Ernest is found and indeed arrested, and he’s put on trial before a coroner’s jury headed by an officious coroner (Felix Aylmer) who’s obviously gone into the proceeding already convinced Ernest is guilty. It’s only at the very end, when Gray is confronted by that “Scotland Yard officer” and he realizes at long last he isn’t a Scotland Yard officer, and is in fact the real killer, that it ends happily, with him and Mary paired up and kissing just at the right moment to spoil Sims’ attempt to photograph them.
The Ghost Camera is a finely honed light mystery, beautifully balanced between thriller and comedy elements in the way Hitchcock would become famous for later, and while director Bernard Vorhaus doesn’t quite have Hitchcock’s skill at suspense and pace, he keeps the action flowing and shoots much of the film from oblique angles. One wonders where he was when Twickenham was handing out the directorial assignments for all those dull Holmes movies with Wontner! This film is filled with people who became far more important later, not only in front of the camera (Lupino, Mills, Aylmer) but behind it as well: the editor was a young man on the make named David Lean. Lupino is billed first on the title card — perhaps a later addition to boost her billing to take advantage of her subsequent success in Hollywood — but only eighth in the opening credits, but it does seem to have been an “introducing” sort of credit because in terms of screen time and overall importance she truly has a leading role, and it’s fascinating not only to watch the young blonde Lupino but to hear her voice before she went to the U.S. and eradicated her British accent so successfully that on at least one occasion she was passed over for the part of a Brit because the director didn’t think she could learn to talk like one again! The Ghost Camera is quite a good movie, a surprise especially given its auspices — and one wonders why Bernard Vorhaus didn’t have more of a career as a director: this was his first film and he eventually made it to the U.S. but got stuck at Republic making things like The Affairs of Jimmy Valentine and the 1950 So Young, So Bad instead of the Hitchcock-style scripts he clearly deserved!
Sunday, May 13, 2012
The Big Record (CBS-TV, 11/27/57)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The show we watched last night was The Big Record, a November 27, 1957 (the day before Thanksgiving, and not surprisingly turkeys got mentioned on the show) episode of a short-lived CBS-TV series featuring the biggest recording stars of the time — or at least the biggest ones they could get and they believed would be good TV. The host was Patti Page, who kicked off the show with a version of Irving Berlin’s “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm” with a swinging big band arrangement by Vic Schoen (the Andrews Sisters’ former musical director) behind her — only, as great as she was, Patti Page was not a jazz singer and one ached for what Peggy Lee (just to keep the comparison fair — statuesque white blonde vs. statuesque white blonde) could have done with that chart behind her. The musical guests were an eerily assorted bunch, including Johnnie Ray as second lead (basically) — he sang a medley of his breakthrough hit “Cry” (much less forcefully than he had on his Okeh record six years earlier, almost as if he were getting bored with the damned thing) and his then-current record, “Soliloquy of a Fool” (one of those quirky not-quite-ballads, not-quite-rockers with which he was trying to regain his previous pop success), and later in the program he and Page sang a duet of “Walking My Baby Back Home” in which they dissolved in laughter often and were quite clearly having a good time. One of the attractions in watching old music programs like this is hearing artists who were under contract to different labels and therefore couldn’t record together sing duets, and while Patti Page and Johnnie Ray on “Walking My Baby Back Home” is hardly in the league of the contemporaneous Nat “King” Cole/Ella Fitzgerald duet on Cole Porter’s “It’s All Right with Me” from the Cole TV show (the first of Ella’s two appearances on it), it’s still a lot of fun and a welcome blending of two quite good voices who were taken for granted back then (though Page made a stunning artistic comeback in 2000 when he recorded the CD Brand New Tennessee Waltz for Mike Curb’s label, beginning the album with the title song by Jesse Winchester that had also been covered by Joan Baez, and ending it with the original “Tennessee Waltz” I found more moving than her hit version on Mercury — alas, almost no one actually bought this marvelous record).
Also on the show were Georgia Gibbs, singing a medley of her cover of Etta James’ “The Wallflower” (retitled “Dance with Me, Henry” and bowdlerized to get on white radio — Gibbs sang “Dance with me, Henry/You gotta dance with me while the music rolls on,” where James had sung “Roll with me, Henry/You gotta get it while the getting is good”!), her cover of LaVern Baker’s “Tweedlee Dee,” her recording of “Kiss of Fire” (actually an old tango called “El Choclo” to which some Tin Pan Alley tunesmith had added lyrics) and a new song called “I Miss You” that was by far the best of the four in her medley — basically a big-band number with a few feints towards rock (a country-ish vocal line, a discreet electric guitar and a bit of pumpin’ piano and doo-wop backing vocals) that showcased her voice better than the R&B covers. (At that I can’t help but think “I Miss You” would have been even better sung by a Black artist — and I know who it should have been, too: Dinah Washington.) Erroll Garner was the biggest surprise (and the only African-American in the show), first performing “Where or When” from his 1956 live album Concert by the Sea (introduced as the biggest-selling jazz album of the year, which it very well might have been) and then bringing up the tail end of a medley in which three pianists each took their turn at “Tea for Two.” First was Billy Maxted, whom I’d heard of before only as a Dixieland bandleader, doing a quite nice boogie-woogie version of Vincent Youmans’ tune; then came easy-listening pianist Ralph Font, wearing a black suit with an outcropping of white ruffles so overpowering one got the impression that the next time he sent the suit out to be cleaned he should have had it weeded as well (I imagine him meeting with the tailor who sold him this atrocity and the tailor saying, “I’m sorry, but we’ve already sold all our good flamboyant outfits to Liberace!”) and turning in a nondescript version of the tune; and finally Erroll Garner came back on and blew the other two guys away with the help of his trio (the bassist and drummer were unidentified but they’re quite likely the accompanists from Concert by the Sea, Eddie Calhoun on bass and the marvelous Denzil DaCosta-Best on drums — he began as an early bebop trumpeter, got tuberculosis, recovered but no longer had the breath control or stamina to play trumpet so he took up drums and co-authored a number of Thelonious Monk’s early songs).
Also in the cast were Walter Slezak, singing a song from the musical Fanny (all about how much he loved his wife even after over 20 years of marriage, but with a rap break in the middle that trashes the overall content and makes some rather misogynistic jokes about it all) — his voice was hardly in the same league as his father’s (star operatic tenor Leo Slezak) but it’s still quite pleasant and serviceable); French singer Guylaine Guy, whose aggressive rock style probably threw people in the 1957 audience whose idea of a French woman pop singer was Edith Piaf and who also got to do a bit of a duet with Page in English; and the ghastliest attraction (if you can call them that) on the show, the Shepherd Sisters, who were the featured attraction in the so-called teenagers’ portion (set in something that was supposed to be a coffeehouse but looked more like a fraternity clubhouse to me, complete with football for the inmates — oops, I mean the guests — to play catch with) and who were introduced as singing a song called “Alone.” At first my fear was that it would be an attempt to rock up the great ballad Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed wrote for the dock scene in the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera, but no-o-o-o-o: it actually turned out to be worse than that, with the four Shepherds literally barking at the camera (and when the two middle Shepherds finally taking up the normal melody and lyric in the middle, they were miked so badly that the two outer Shepherds, still barking in whoever wrote the arrangement’s pitiful excuse for a backing vocal part, were drowning the leads out). This atrocious number was obviously the concoction of some record producer who’d heard of rock ’n’ roll, hadn’t a clue what it sounded like but knew it was selling, and all I could think of was, “Ladies, if you bark at people that way all the time, no wonder you’re alone!”
In both its strong and weak points, The Big Record is a pretty good sample of mainstream entertainment TV of its time, and blessedly this print included the original commercials (including some for the 1958 Oldsmobiles, one of which came equipped with a radio that you could not only remove from the car but actually use as a self-contained portable radio when the car wasn’t moving). Patti Page’s numbers were variable but her best singing in the program came at the very end, when she revived a beautiful early-1930’s song called “Home (Where Shadows Fall),” otherwise known to me only from Louis Armstrong’s 1932 version and a cover by Jimmy Rushing on his last album (recorded in 1970 and released in 1971, the year Rushing died), The You and Me That Used to Be. Where the jazz and pop numbers earlier in the show had thrown her, this ballad brought out the soul in her voice and showcased her at her best. Alas, this seems to be the only episode of The Big Record archive.org has in its collection — I found myself drooling with envy over the prospect of seeing the next in the series, the one Patti Page was promoting at the end with the promise of Benny Goodman as the featured guest (or at least as the token jazz artist); D. Russell Connor’s Goodman discography lists him as singing a vocal duet with Page on “Gotta Be This or That,” playing a medley with his trio (“Somebody Loves Me,” “Body and Soul,” “Stompin’ at the Savoy” and “Sweet Georgia Brown”) as well as a separate version of “St. Louis Blues” with the trio (Hank Jones on piano and Bobby Donaldson on drums), which also accompanied Page on “Basin Street Blues” and the Will Mastin Trio (Will Mastin was Sammy Davis, Jr.’s uncle; Sammy Davis, Jr. was the second and “featured” member and the third of the trio was Sammy Davis, Sr.) on tap-danced versions of “China Boy” and “The Birth of the Blues.” Let’s hope that one surfaces someday!
The show we watched last night was The Big Record, a November 27, 1957 (the day before Thanksgiving, and not surprisingly turkeys got mentioned on the show) episode of a short-lived CBS-TV series featuring the biggest recording stars of the time — or at least the biggest ones they could get and they believed would be good TV. The host was Patti Page, who kicked off the show with a version of Irving Berlin’s “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm” with a swinging big band arrangement by Vic Schoen (the Andrews Sisters’ former musical director) behind her — only, as great as she was, Patti Page was not a jazz singer and one ached for what Peggy Lee (just to keep the comparison fair — statuesque white blonde vs. statuesque white blonde) could have done with that chart behind her. The musical guests were an eerily assorted bunch, including Johnnie Ray as second lead (basically) — he sang a medley of his breakthrough hit “Cry” (much less forcefully than he had on his Okeh record six years earlier, almost as if he were getting bored with the damned thing) and his then-current record, “Soliloquy of a Fool” (one of those quirky not-quite-ballads, not-quite-rockers with which he was trying to regain his previous pop success), and later in the program he and Page sang a duet of “Walking My Baby Back Home” in which they dissolved in laughter often and were quite clearly having a good time. One of the attractions in watching old music programs like this is hearing artists who were under contract to different labels and therefore couldn’t record together sing duets, and while Patti Page and Johnnie Ray on “Walking My Baby Back Home” is hardly in the league of the contemporaneous Nat “King” Cole/Ella Fitzgerald duet on Cole Porter’s “It’s All Right with Me” from the Cole TV show (the first of Ella’s two appearances on it), it’s still a lot of fun and a welcome blending of two quite good voices who were taken for granted back then (though Page made a stunning artistic comeback in 2000 when he recorded the CD Brand New Tennessee Waltz for Mike Curb’s label, beginning the album with the title song by Jesse Winchester that had also been covered by Joan Baez, and ending it with the original “Tennessee Waltz” I found more moving than her hit version on Mercury — alas, almost no one actually bought this marvelous record).
Also on the show were Georgia Gibbs, singing a medley of her cover of Etta James’ “The Wallflower” (retitled “Dance with Me, Henry” and bowdlerized to get on white radio — Gibbs sang “Dance with me, Henry/You gotta dance with me while the music rolls on,” where James had sung “Roll with me, Henry/You gotta get it while the getting is good”!), her cover of LaVern Baker’s “Tweedlee Dee,” her recording of “Kiss of Fire” (actually an old tango called “El Choclo” to which some Tin Pan Alley tunesmith had added lyrics) and a new song called “I Miss You” that was by far the best of the four in her medley — basically a big-band number with a few feints towards rock (a country-ish vocal line, a discreet electric guitar and a bit of pumpin’ piano and doo-wop backing vocals) that showcased her voice better than the R&B covers. (At that I can’t help but think “I Miss You” would have been even better sung by a Black artist — and I know who it should have been, too: Dinah Washington.) Erroll Garner was the biggest surprise (and the only African-American in the show), first performing “Where or When” from his 1956 live album Concert by the Sea (introduced as the biggest-selling jazz album of the year, which it very well might have been) and then bringing up the tail end of a medley in which three pianists each took their turn at “Tea for Two.” First was Billy Maxted, whom I’d heard of before only as a Dixieland bandleader, doing a quite nice boogie-woogie version of Vincent Youmans’ tune; then came easy-listening pianist Ralph Font, wearing a black suit with an outcropping of white ruffles so overpowering one got the impression that the next time he sent the suit out to be cleaned he should have had it weeded as well (I imagine him meeting with the tailor who sold him this atrocity and the tailor saying, “I’m sorry, but we’ve already sold all our good flamboyant outfits to Liberace!”) and turning in a nondescript version of the tune; and finally Erroll Garner came back on and blew the other two guys away with the help of his trio (the bassist and drummer were unidentified but they’re quite likely the accompanists from Concert by the Sea, Eddie Calhoun on bass and the marvelous Denzil DaCosta-Best on drums — he began as an early bebop trumpeter, got tuberculosis, recovered but no longer had the breath control or stamina to play trumpet so he took up drums and co-authored a number of Thelonious Monk’s early songs).
Also in the cast were Walter Slezak, singing a song from the musical Fanny (all about how much he loved his wife even after over 20 years of marriage, but with a rap break in the middle that trashes the overall content and makes some rather misogynistic jokes about it all) — his voice was hardly in the same league as his father’s (star operatic tenor Leo Slezak) but it’s still quite pleasant and serviceable); French singer Guylaine Guy, whose aggressive rock style probably threw people in the 1957 audience whose idea of a French woman pop singer was Edith Piaf and who also got to do a bit of a duet with Page in English; and the ghastliest attraction (if you can call them that) on the show, the Shepherd Sisters, who were the featured attraction in the so-called teenagers’ portion (set in something that was supposed to be a coffeehouse but looked more like a fraternity clubhouse to me, complete with football for the inmates — oops, I mean the guests — to play catch with) and who were introduced as singing a song called “Alone.” At first my fear was that it would be an attempt to rock up the great ballad Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed wrote for the dock scene in the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera, but no-o-o-o-o: it actually turned out to be worse than that, with the four Shepherds literally barking at the camera (and when the two middle Shepherds finally taking up the normal melody and lyric in the middle, they were miked so badly that the two outer Shepherds, still barking in whoever wrote the arrangement’s pitiful excuse for a backing vocal part, were drowning the leads out). This atrocious number was obviously the concoction of some record producer who’d heard of rock ’n’ roll, hadn’t a clue what it sounded like but knew it was selling, and all I could think of was, “Ladies, if you bark at people that way all the time, no wonder you’re alone!”
In both its strong and weak points, The Big Record is a pretty good sample of mainstream entertainment TV of its time, and blessedly this print included the original commercials (including some for the 1958 Oldsmobiles, one of which came equipped with a radio that you could not only remove from the car but actually use as a self-contained portable radio when the car wasn’t moving). Patti Page’s numbers were variable but her best singing in the program came at the very end, when she revived a beautiful early-1930’s song called “Home (Where Shadows Fall),” otherwise known to me only from Louis Armstrong’s 1932 version and a cover by Jimmy Rushing on his last album (recorded in 1970 and released in 1971, the year Rushing died), The You and Me That Used to Be. Where the jazz and pop numbers earlier in the show had thrown her, this ballad brought out the soul in her voice and showcased her at her best. Alas, this seems to be the only episode of The Big Record archive.org has in its collection — I found myself drooling with envy over the prospect of seeing the next in the series, the one Patti Page was promoting at the end with the promise of Benny Goodman as the featured guest (or at least as the token jazz artist); D. Russell Connor’s Goodman discography lists him as singing a vocal duet with Page on “Gotta Be This or That,” playing a medley with his trio (“Somebody Loves Me,” “Body and Soul,” “Stompin’ at the Savoy” and “Sweet Georgia Brown”) as well as a separate version of “St. Louis Blues” with the trio (Hank Jones on piano and Bobby Donaldson on drums), which also accompanied Page on “Basin Street Blues” and the Will Mastin Trio (Will Mastin was Sammy Davis, Jr.’s uncle; Sammy Davis, Jr. was the second and “featured” member and the third of the trio was Sammy Davis, Sr.) on tap-danced versions of “China Boy” and “The Birth of the Blues.” Let’s hope that one surfaces someday!
Saturday, May 12, 2012
Swing Parade of 1946 (Monogram, 1946)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran Swing Parade of 1946 — that’s the title in Leonard Maltin’s filmography of the Three Stooges, who play important supporting roles in it, though the print we were watching was simply titled Swing Parade (apparently Monogram Pictures, or whoever handled the reissue, simply dropped the year number, as did the reissuers of Sensations of 1945) — which turned out to be a surprisingly good musical featuring the girl whom “B” Movies author Don Miller called “Monogram’s own little twinkling star,” Gale Storm. She plays Carol Lawrence (ironically, there was a real Carol Lawrence who achieved Broadway stardom about a decade after this film was made as the original Maria in the stage cast of West Side Story), who as the film opens — stop me if you’ve heard this before — is about to be thrown out of the boardinghouse where she lives by a hatchet-faced landlady for owing four weeks’ worth of back rent. In order to get a job, pronto, she stops by the Embassy Club, a yet-to-be-opened nightclub owned by singer Danny Warren (Phil Regan) whose security person, Moose (Edward Brophy), throws out everyone who comes to the club whom he doesn’t know personally. We soon learn that the reason he’s doing this is that Danny’s father, utilities magnate Daniel Warren, Sr. (Russell Hicks), and his attorney Bascomb (John Eldredge, seedy as usual — imdb.com describes the character as the elder Warren’s “lieutenant” but the actual film’s dialogue makes it clear he’s his lawyer) have secretly bought the building in which the Embassy Club is housed and are going to evict Danny to prevent the club from opening so Danny will come back to his dad’s utilities company with his tail between his legs and assume the destiny of utilities magnate, junior his father intended for him presumably since he was born. (There doesn’t seem to be a Mrs. Warren anywhere, which given the usual iconography of 1946 Hollywood makes it likely we’re supposed to think that she’s dead.)
Thrown out of the club without being given even a hello from its mysterious proprietor, much less a chance to audition, Carol returns to the boardinghouse and finds that she’s not only been served an eviction notice but her clothes have been locked up so she has nothing to wear but what’s on her back just then. Desperate for a job, she ends up by authorial fiat (the screenwriter is Edmund Kelso, adapting an “original” story by Tim Ryan, with Nicholas Ray, of all people, credited with “additional dialogue” — that’s one of those he-had-to-start-somewhere credits) at the offices of Warren, Sr., and he and Bascomb hit on the idea that an attractive woman would probably have a better shot at getting close to Danny and serving him the dispossession notice than a frumpy-looking middle-aged professional process server. She gets in and serves Danny — but by mistake she gives him her own eviction notice instead of the document she was supposed to serve him, and Danny, realizing she’s about to become homeless, takes pity on her and gives her an audition. She sings “On the Sunny Side of the Street” and she’s good (and swinging) enough that she gets hired as a singer at the club if and when it opens. Danny also offers to take her to dinner, but she balks at the potential threat to her virtue when it turns out that means they’re going to have dinner together in a private room at the club — she weasels her way out of a potential seduction by inviting Moose to join them — and as she rehearses for the Embassy Club’s opening, proximity works its magic and she and Danny fall in love. There’s an obligatory misunderstanding between them in the next-to-last reel when he discovers she really was hired by his dad to serve him, but things are all patched up by the end. As for the Three Stooges, they play the nightclub’s cooks, though with the club short of waiters at the big opening (am I really letting out any secrets by telling you the club opens as scheduled?) they have to work as such, and there’s a great scene in which Moe Howard tries to tell an officious customer to order roast beef instead of roast turkey. There are also some nice slapstick scenes, in a few of which Ed Brophy (who after all had worked with Buster Keaton on The Cameraman and Doughboys and therefore knew something about slapstick!) participates and becomes a virtual Fourth Stooge. Maybe I’m having a second childhood, because after years of having avoided the Three Stooges and regarded them as something I outgrew once my age got past single digits, now I’m finding them quite funny again!
There are some other guest stars whose appearances are even more welcome, including the superb jazz singer Connee Boswell (she does two songs, one of which is the Harold Arlen-Ted Koehler “Stormy Weather” — she seems to be imitating Ethel Waters, who introduced the song at the Cotton Club in 1932, and there are better versions by Waters, Ivie Anderson with Duke Ellington, and Lena Horne, but offhand this is the best “Stormy Weather” I can think of by a white singer even though Will Osborne’s band is hardly in the same league as a swing group as Ellington’s!) and the even more welcome Louis Jordan, who’s shown in the very first Embassy Club sequence rehearsing a song that was one of his biggest hits, “Don’t Worry ’Bout That Mule.” Director Phil Karlson (a better filmmaker than usually got Monogram assignments like this) cuts away from Jordan way too much and takes the edge off his act by filming too much of it in long-shot, but Jordan’s two numbers are still by far the best moments in the film. Monogram seems to have spent more money than usual on this one — there are some fairly elaborate Berkeley-esque production numbers as well as a dance between Regan and Storm that looks like a low-rent version of an Astaire-and-Rogers number — and dance director Jack Boyle rips off at least two of Busby Berkeley’s most famous ideas, a chorus line of girls waving ostrich feathers and a sequence in which musical instruments are lined with neon so they glow in the dark. Boyle uses the latter gimmick to introduce Louis Jordan’s performance of his biggest hit, “Caldonia,” and while the song came off better in the short film named after it which Jordan had made the year before (mainly because Jordan didn’t have to deal with interjections from Will Osborne’s string section the way he has to here), it’s still a fabulous piece of material and a delight not only to hear but also to watch, with Jordan kicking up his legs like a spoiled baby as he sings, “What makes yo’ big head so hard?” Jordan is probably the most important musician on the cusp between jazz and rock — his infectious vocals and the insistent beat of his music (particularly the back-beat shuffles he had his drummers play) mark him in many ways as the first rock ’n’ roller, and it’s a measure of how timeless his act is that he managed a virtual comeback in the mid-1990’s, 20 years after his death, through his records, his films (he made quite a few movie appearances, both in leading roles in “race” films and as a guest artist in productions like this one) and a Broadway show called Five Guys Named Moe that revived his songs.
Once we see Louis Jordan in the first five minutes there’s an understandable sense that the rest is going to be a letdown (it reminded Charles of the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 presentation of the film Catalina Caper, in which Little Richard appeared, did one number and then left, and the MST3K crew joked, “There goes Little Richard, the only talent in this movie”), but fortunately there’s enough good stuff left to come — from Gale Storm, who as I’ve noted in these pages before would have probably had the kind of career Doris Day did if she’d signed with a major studio instead of Monogram (she was a quite similar talent, with a perky personality, a pleasant and distinctive voice, and a gift for portraying wholesome innocence); from Phil Regan, who seems oddly short (though Gale Storm is wearing heels, on screen they’re about the same height) and doesn’t have a great voice but has a pleasantly serviceable one; from the Stooges, who do a good job providing the comic relief they were hired for; from Mary Treen, a homely Charlotte Greenwood-esque performer who plays a rich woman who’s offered to bankroll the Embassy Club at a new location if Daniel Warren, Sr. does succeed in closing it down (in the finale Regan is paired with Storm and Treen is paired with, of all people, real-life bandleader Will Osborne, who plays himself in the film!), and from another Jordan song (the Jordan song, actually — Louis Jordan wrote “Caldonia” himself but he let his manager talk him into giving his then-wife, Fleecie Moore, the credit on the ground that that would ease his tax burden; then they broke up and he had to endure seeing her get the royalties from the many cover versions, thereby making her first name all too appropriate!), as well as a substantial (by Monogram standards, anyway) production: for once Gale Storm has a cinematographer (Harry Neumann) who knows how to light her without making it look like she has a moustache, and this is one Monogram movie in which one doesn’t have to worry about the sets crashing down on the hapless actors at any moment. Though almost none of the music in it has much to do with swing (Louis Jordan’s numbers would have been considered “jump blues” rather than swing in the 1940’s; later they would have been called rhythm and blues), Swing Parade of 1946 is still a quite nice movie, no world-beater but a pleasant, charming film and a worthy showcase for Gale Storm.
I ran Swing Parade of 1946 — that’s the title in Leonard Maltin’s filmography of the Three Stooges, who play important supporting roles in it, though the print we were watching was simply titled Swing Parade (apparently Monogram Pictures, or whoever handled the reissue, simply dropped the year number, as did the reissuers of Sensations of 1945) — which turned out to be a surprisingly good musical featuring the girl whom “B” Movies author Don Miller called “Monogram’s own little twinkling star,” Gale Storm. She plays Carol Lawrence (ironically, there was a real Carol Lawrence who achieved Broadway stardom about a decade after this film was made as the original Maria in the stage cast of West Side Story), who as the film opens — stop me if you’ve heard this before — is about to be thrown out of the boardinghouse where she lives by a hatchet-faced landlady for owing four weeks’ worth of back rent. In order to get a job, pronto, she stops by the Embassy Club, a yet-to-be-opened nightclub owned by singer Danny Warren (Phil Regan) whose security person, Moose (Edward Brophy), throws out everyone who comes to the club whom he doesn’t know personally. We soon learn that the reason he’s doing this is that Danny’s father, utilities magnate Daniel Warren, Sr. (Russell Hicks), and his attorney Bascomb (John Eldredge, seedy as usual — imdb.com describes the character as the elder Warren’s “lieutenant” but the actual film’s dialogue makes it clear he’s his lawyer) have secretly bought the building in which the Embassy Club is housed and are going to evict Danny to prevent the club from opening so Danny will come back to his dad’s utilities company with his tail between his legs and assume the destiny of utilities magnate, junior his father intended for him presumably since he was born. (There doesn’t seem to be a Mrs. Warren anywhere, which given the usual iconography of 1946 Hollywood makes it likely we’re supposed to think that she’s dead.)
Thrown out of the club without being given even a hello from its mysterious proprietor, much less a chance to audition, Carol returns to the boardinghouse and finds that she’s not only been served an eviction notice but her clothes have been locked up so she has nothing to wear but what’s on her back just then. Desperate for a job, she ends up by authorial fiat (the screenwriter is Edmund Kelso, adapting an “original” story by Tim Ryan, with Nicholas Ray, of all people, credited with “additional dialogue” — that’s one of those he-had-to-start-somewhere credits) at the offices of Warren, Sr., and he and Bascomb hit on the idea that an attractive woman would probably have a better shot at getting close to Danny and serving him the dispossession notice than a frumpy-looking middle-aged professional process server. She gets in and serves Danny — but by mistake she gives him her own eviction notice instead of the document she was supposed to serve him, and Danny, realizing she’s about to become homeless, takes pity on her and gives her an audition. She sings “On the Sunny Side of the Street” and she’s good (and swinging) enough that she gets hired as a singer at the club if and when it opens. Danny also offers to take her to dinner, but she balks at the potential threat to her virtue when it turns out that means they’re going to have dinner together in a private room at the club — she weasels her way out of a potential seduction by inviting Moose to join them — and as she rehearses for the Embassy Club’s opening, proximity works its magic and she and Danny fall in love. There’s an obligatory misunderstanding between them in the next-to-last reel when he discovers she really was hired by his dad to serve him, but things are all patched up by the end. As for the Three Stooges, they play the nightclub’s cooks, though with the club short of waiters at the big opening (am I really letting out any secrets by telling you the club opens as scheduled?) they have to work as such, and there’s a great scene in which Moe Howard tries to tell an officious customer to order roast beef instead of roast turkey. There are also some nice slapstick scenes, in a few of which Ed Brophy (who after all had worked with Buster Keaton on The Cameraman and Doughboys and therefore knew something about slapstick!) participates and becomes a virtual Fourth Stooge. Maybe I’m having a second childhood, because after years of having avoided the Three Stooges and regarded them as something I outgrew once my age got past single digits, now I’m finding them quite funny again!
There are some other guest stars whose appearances are even more welcome, including the superb jazz singer Connee Boswell (she does two songs, one of which is the Harold Arlen-Ted Koehler “Stormy Weather” — she seems to be imitating Ethel Waters, who introduced the song at the Cotton Club in 1932, and there are better versions by Waters, Ivie Anderson with Duke Ellington, and Lena Horne, but offhand this is the best “Stormy Weather” I can think of by a white singer even though Will Osborne’s band is hardly in the same league as a swing group as Ellington’s!) and the even more welcome Louis Jordan, who’s shown in the very first Embassy Club sequence rehearsing a song that was one of his biggest hits, “Don’t Worry ’Bout That Mule.” Director Phil Karlson (a better filmmaker than usually got Monogram assignments like this) cuts away from Jordan way too much and takes the edge off his act by filming too much of it in long-shot, but Jordan’s two numbers are still by far the best moments in the film. Monogram seems to have spent more money than usual on this one — there are some fairly elaborate Berkeley-esque production numbers as well as a dance between Regan and Storm that looks like a low-rent version of an Astaire-and-Rogers number — and dance director Jack Boyle rips off at least two of Busby Berkeley’s most famous ideas, a chorus line of girls waving ostrich feathers and a sequence in which musical instruments are lined with neon so they glow in the dark. Boyle uses the latter gimmick to introduce Louis Jordan’s performance of his biggest hit, “Caldonia,” and while the song came off better in the short film named after it which Jordan had made the year before (mainly because Jordan didn’t have to deal with interjections from Will Osborne’s string section the way he has to here), it’s still a fabulous piece of material and a delight not only to hear but also to watch, with Jordan kicking up his legs like a spoiled baby as he sings, “What makes yo’ big head so hard?” Jordan is probably the most important musician on the cusp between jazz and rock — his infectious vocals and the insistent beat of his music (particularly the back-beat shuffles he had his drummers play) mark him in many ways as the first rock ’n’ roller, and it’s a measure of how timeless his act is that he managed a virtual comeback in the mid-1990’s, 20 years after his death, through his records, his films (he made quite a few movie appearances, both in leading roles in “race” films and as a guest artist in productions like this one) and a Broadway show called Five Guys Named Moe that revived his songs.
Once we see Louis Jordan in the first five minutes there’s an understandable sense that the rest is going to be a letdown (it reminded Charles of the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 presentation of the film Catalina Caper, in which Little Richard appeared, did one number and then left, and the MST3K crew joked, “There goes Little Richard, the only talent in this movie”), but fortunately there’s enough good stuff left to come — from Gale Storm, who as I’ve noted in these pages before would have probably had the kind of career Doris Day did if she’d signed with a major studio instead of Monogram (she was a quite similar talent, with a perky personality, a pleasant and distinctive voice, and a gift for portraying wholesome innocence); from Phil Regan, who seems oddly short (though Gale Storm is wearing heels, on screen they’re about the same height) and doesn’t have a great voice but has a pleasantly serviceable one; from the Stooges, who do a good job providing the comic relief they were hired for; from Mary Treen, a homely Charlotte Greenwood-esque performer who plays a rich woman who’s offered to bankroll the Embassy Club at a new location if Daniel Warren, Sr. does succeed in closing it down (in the finale Regan is paired with Storm and Treen is paired with, of all people, real-life bandleader Will Osborne, who plays himself in the film!), and from another Jordan song (the Jordan song, actually — Louis Jordan wrote “Caldonia” himself but he let his manager talk him into giving his then-wife, Fleecie Moore, the credit on the ground that that would ease his tax burden; then they broke up and he had to endure seeing her get the royalties from the many cover versions, thereby making her first name all too appropriate!), as well as a substantial (by Monogram standards, anyway) production: for once Gale Storm has a cinematographer (Harry Neumann) who knows how to light her without making it look like she has a moustache, and this is one Monogram movie in which one doesn’t have to worry about the sets crashing down on the hapless actors at any moment. Though almost none of the music in it has much to do with swing (Louis Jordan’s numbers would have been considered “jump blues” rather than swing in the 1940’s; later they would have been called rhythm and blues), Swing Parade of 1946 is still a quite nice movie, no world-beater but a pleasant, charming film and a worthy showcase for Gale Storm.
Friday, May 11, 2012
My Week with Marilyn (Weinstein Company/BBC Films, 2011)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran My Week with Marilyn, the quite charming quasi-biopic from the Weinstein Company and BBC Films last year which, as the title suggests, deals not with Marilyn Monroe’s entire life but with the period during which she was in Great Britain to film the first (and, as it turned out, the only) movie her company Marilyn Monroe Productions ever made, The Prince and the Showgirl. Marilyn’s business partner was still photographer Milton Greene (played in this movie by Dominic Cooper), who had shot some of the most haunting images of her ever created but was a total neophyte in the business of moving pictures. He cut a distribution deal with Warner Bros. (though Marilyn still owed three films to 20th Century-Fox as a contract player) and for the company’s first project, he bought the movie rights to a play called The Sleeping Prince (also the working title of the film and the name we see on the slate cards when this film depicts the shoot) which Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh, who began his film career directing and starring in a 1996 remake of Shakespeare’s Henry V — the film that had launched Olivier’s career as an actor/director in films in 1944) had performed on stage with his then-wife, Vivien Leigh (Julia Ormond), who in real life took being aced out of her stage part by an American with far less grace than is depicted in this script by Adrian Hodges, based on a couple of memoirs by Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne), who’s actually the male lead in the film. Greene decided to hire Olivier not only to repeat his stage role in the movie but to direct it as well — and Olivier, according to biographer Donald Spoto, took the job mainly to prove to the world (and especially to the rest of the movie business) that he could direct a film that wasn’t based on a Shakespeare play. My Week with Marilyn is based on a couple of books by Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne), an ambitious young man from a well-to-do aristocratic family who was determined to break into movies and saw his chance when he applied for a job as a “Third” (i.e., a third assistant director, really a glorified go-fer) to the production of The Sleeping Prince — eventually released as The Prince and the Showgirl to get Marilyn’s character in the title — and he controversially claimed to have had a one-week affair with La Monroe during the shoot, following which Marilyn’s resistance and fear of the project evaporated and the film moved swiftly to completion.
Clark’s reminiscences have been controversial because he, shall we say, vastly inflated his importance to the production — its other surviving participants almost universally said they couldn’t remember him and they highly doubted that Marilyn ever had sex with him (and even the film itself is pretty coy about the did-they-or-didn’t-they? question; they’re shown swimming together, she in the nude and he in his underwear, and doing a bit of necking but they don’t slobber all over each other blatantly in the common modern movie manner when two characters are supposed to be in a sexual relationship) — and the film is least credible in the scenes with Clark and Marilyn together. What it does show is what a handful Marilyn must have been to work with; just about all the Monroe biographies and other histories of the making of The Prince and the Showgirl describe it as a tense and troubled shoot, with Olivier appalled at the presence of Paula Strasberg (Lee Strasberg’s wife and Susan Strasberg’s mother) on the set as Marilyn’s private acting coach (“We can’t have two directors on one film!” Olivier thunders, and Milton Greene and all Marilyn’s handlers inform him that they have to do whatever they can to make and keep Marilyn happy) and even more appalled that the great sex goddess, who by 1957 had been cast mostly in dumb-blonde sexpot roles but had occasionally got parts that showcased real acting talent under the peroxide, the white makeup, the ass-wriggling and the cutesy-poo intonations (The Asphalt Jungle, Clash by Night, Don’t Bother to Knock, Niagara and, most importantly, Bus Stop, in which despite the woodenness of Don Murray as her leading man she turned in a sensitive, beautifully calibrated performance as the untalented but sympathetic roadhouse entertainer Cherie), had been studying the Method and started dropping Method phrases about motivations and having to “find” the character. Olivier at one point instructed Marilyn to “be sexy” — thinking that she could just turn the sex machine on and have every (straight) guy in the audience creaming in his pants at the sight of her — and she was trying to find her way to the inner depths of a character that really didn’t have any.
The story they were making was, as I noted when Charles and I watched The Prince and the Showgirl together, a “predictable and clichéd” rewrite of Cinderella in which “Grand Duke Charles [Olivier], regent of Carpathia, is in London in 1911 to attend the coronation of King George V; to amuse himself while he’s in town he picks showgirl Elsie Marina [Monroe] from the chorus line of a musical called The Coconut Girl, and invites her to the palace for a midnight supper — only to find that this Cinderella knows exactly what he wants and how to fend him off; eventually, however, she loosens him up enough to permit democracy in Carpathia and show some affection to his son, who’s going to become king when he turns 18 a year and a half from then, and there’s a hint they will get together in that time once his regency ends.” Much of the movie rings true to what we know about Monroe — how discombobulated she was, how chancy her nerves were, how some days she would stumble and be unable to remember the simplest lines while on others she’d be line-perfect through whole pages of script and nail everything in one take or two (Billy Wilder, who directed her in The Seven-Year Itch and Some Like It Hot, recalled how she was virtually impossible to work with during the studio work in Hollywood on Some Like It Hot, but when the company went to Coronado for the exteriors Monroe — perhaps because she was away from the city that was both the epicenter of the movie business and her own home town — loosened up, needed almost no retakes and was a joy to work with), and how sensitive she was to signs of betrayal, real or imagined.
Like the real Monroe, this version’s arrival in London to make The Prince and the Showgirl is delayed by her new husband Arthur Miller and the attempts by the anti-Communist inquisitors to get something on him that would persuade the State Department to pull his passport and keep him from leaving the U.S. (years later Miller claimed that the chair of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, who was locked in a tight re-election race, had offered to give him a clean bill of health if Miller could arrange for the Congressmember to be photographed with Monroe) and delayed again when Marilyn has a hissy-fit when she discovers Miller’s journal and reads a comment she interprets as viciously derogative towards her. No one knows for sure at this point just what Miller wrote that ticked her off so much, but Lee Strasberg — whom Marilyn was calling at all hours long-distance from London when his wife’s FTF advice and counsel wasn’t enough to reassure her — recalled Marilyn telling him, “It was something about how disappointed he was in me. I was some kind of angel but now he guessed he was wrong. His first wife had let him down, but I had done something worse. Olivier was beginning to think I was a troublesome bitch and that he [Miller] no longer had a decent answer to that one.” In his controversial play After the Fall, written in 1964 (four years after their breakup and two years after Monroe’s death), Miller reconstructed the episode and made the text read, “The only one I will ever love is my daughter. If I could only find an honorable way to die.”
In real life the incident, whatever the facts of what Miller wrote and what on earth he could have meant by it, was a wrenching emotional catastrophe far more intense than anything being dramatized in the relatively silly movie Monroe and Olivier were making; in My Week with Marilyn it’s simply an excuse for screenwriter Hodges to get Miller (Dougray Scott) to leave England and clear the field for Colin Clark and the Goddess to have their affair, or whatever it was. My Week with Marilyn has its problems — we can believe Monroe as a Lilith-like temptress who gets off on toying with men for a few days and then rejecting them if screenwriter Jacobs and actress Williams weren’t so good at portraying Monroe as a kind of sponge for human emotions, a creature so pathetically needy no amount of love — from husband, boyfriends, colleagues or the movie-going public (one illusion Monroe entered the project with that got cruelly shattered quickly was that she thought British people would be more well-behaved and less demanding of a movie star in their midst; instead, she’s surrounded and virtually attacked on the streets of London just as nastily as she was at home — maybe it’s a cliché by now that fame is a devil’s bargain that gives you money and popularity at the cost of anything resembling a normal human life, but that bargain has rarely been dramatized as well as it is here) — and it’s hard to believe the conceit of this movie that a 24-year-old third assistant director working for a salary for the first time in his entire life could hold the key to making Marilyn behave on set that her prestigious director/co-star, her private acting coach, her private acting coach’s husband long-distance on the phone, her co-workers (including Dame Sybil Thorndyke, played superbly by Judi Dench — the second night in a row we’d seen a film with her in it — and portrayed as the character who probably instinctively knew more about how to handle Marilyn as anyone else, managing to treat her supportively without fawning over her), her business partner, her staff (including Toby Jones as her P.R. man, Arthur Jacobs, who later went on to be a producer himself, most known for the original 1968 version of Planet of the Apes) or her own husband could not.
Still, it’s a marvelous movie, well acted — even though one could make the case that Branagh has been playing Olivier now for over 15 years — especially by Michelle Williams. I’ve seen her described as the finest actress ever to play Monroe, which quite frankly I rather doubt — I have great memories of the three-hour TV-movie from the 1970’s in which Catherine Hicks played Monroe and would love a chance to see it again if only to see if Hicks’ performance was as incandescent and as convincing as I remember it, and until I do see her Marilyn again I’m not about to acclaim anyone else’s as the best ever — but she’s damned good, though for some reason Williams is more convincing as the off-screen Marilyn than the on-screen one in the film’s re-creations of scenes from The Prince and the Showgirl. Still, if any project was going to get Michelle Williams out of the shadow of Brokeback Mountain and her short-lived relationship with the late Heath Ledger, whom she met and took up with when they were playing husband and wife in that movie, this was it; she’s absolutely convincing as the vulnerable private Marilyn, overwhelmed by the responsibilities of her career and desperate enough to resort to alcohol and drugs (though when the production hired a security guard to protect her and warned her of her drinking and pills, I half expected him to say, “I worked security for Judy Garland at the Palladium! I know all about booze and pills!”) as well as a determined neediness that sucked emotions out of people the way Count Dracula sucked their blood. And the final summation of the film is delivered by a speech given by Branagh as Olivier once The Prince and the Showgirl is completed, when he sees it and realizes that however difficult she was to work with, Monroe brought her character to life whereas he just looked like the walking dead beside her.
Anyone who’s actually seen The Prince and the Showgirl and judged it fairly will know that that’s an exactly accurate assessment of it: as I wrote about it when Charles and I screened it, “Olivier overacts his way through his own role; instead of tapping the logical precedent from his own career (his marvelous performance as Max de Winter under Alfred Hitchcock’s direction in Rebecca), he spends virtually the whole movie channeling Erich von Stroheim: the monocle, the jerky movements, the air of imperturbable condescension. What redeems The Prince and the Showgirl is Monroe, who not only out-acts her prestigious co-star/director but actually takes Rattigan’s stick figure of a character and creates her as a warm, richly defined human being. There are a few of the Monroe mannerisms — the cutesy-poo vocal inflections and the ass-swinging — but for the most part she keeps these under control and turns in a surprisingly subtle performance that makes us believe in Elsie Marina as a person and not just a Cinderella figure in a plot that stretches credibility to the breaking point. She’s aided by the brilliant cinematography of Jack Cardiff and production design of Robert Furse, who helped make this the best-looking color film in which Monroe appeared. Instead of the garish, neon-bright lighting Monroe got at 20th Century-Fox, Cardiff lights her in a warm, rich way that creates some startlingly painterly effects. Also, either Cardiff put a lot of filters on her or she changed her hair color for this film; instead of the usual eye-searing bottle-blonde Monroe looks auburn-haired in this, which adds to her image here as sensual rather than sexual. … If Olivier the director had been able to call Olivier the actor on his insufferable hamminess through much of the film The Prince and the Showgirl would be even better than it is — but then we wouldn’t have had the amazing spectacle of the showgirl so totally out-acting the prince!”
I ran My Week with Marilyn, the quite charming quasi-biopic from the Weinstein Company and BBC Films last year which, as the title suggests, deals not with Marilyn Monroe’s entire life but with the period during which she was in Great Britain to film the first (and, as it turned out, the only) movie her company Marilyn Monroe Productions ever made, The Prince and the Showgirl. Marilyn’s business partner was still photographer Milton Greene (played in this movie by Dominic Cooper), who had shot some of the most haunting images of her ever created but was a total neophyte in the business of moving pictures. He cut a distribution deal with Warner Bros. (though Marilyn still owed three films to 20th Century-Fox as a contract player) and for the company’s first project, he bought the movie rights to a play called The Sleeping Prince (also the working title of the film and the name we see on the slate cards when this film depicts the shoot) which Laurence Olivier (Kenneth Branagh, who began his film career directing and starring in a 1996 remake of Shakespeare’s Henry V — the film that had launched Olivier’s career as an actor/director in films in 1944) had performed on stage with his then-wife, Vivien Leigh (Julia Ormond), who in real life took being aced out of her stage part by an American with far less grace than is depicted in this script by Adrian Hodges, based on a couple of memoirs by Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne), who’s actually the male lead in the film. Greene decided to hire Olivier not only to repeat his stage role in the movie but to direct it as well — and Olivier, according to biographer Donald Spoto, took the job mainly to prove to the world (and especially to the rest of the movie business) that he could direct a film that wasn’t based on a Shakespeare play. My Week with Marilyn is based on a couple of books by Colin Clark (Eddie Redmayne), an ambitious young man from a well-to-do aristocratic family who was determined to break into movies and saw his chance when he applied for a job as a “Third” (i.e., a third assistant director, really a glorified go-fer) to the production of The Sleeping Prince — eventually released as The Prince and the Showgirl to get Marilyn’s character in the title — and he controversially claimed to have had a one-week affair with La Monroe during the shoot, following which Marilyn’s resistance and fear of the project evaporated and the film moved swiftly to completion.
Clark’s reminiscences have been controversial because he, shall we say, vastly inflated his importance to the production — its other surviving participants almost universally said they couldn’t remember him and they highly doubted that Marilyn ever had sex with him (and even the film itself is pretty coy about the did-they-or-didn’t-they? question; they’re shown swimming together, she in the nude and he in his underwear, and doing a bit of necking but they don’t slobber all over each other blatantly in the common modern movie manner when two characters are supposed to be in a sexual relationship) — and the film is least credible in the scenes with Clark and Marilyn together. What it does show is what a handful Marilyn must have been to work with; just about all the Monroe biographies and other histories of the making of The Prince and the Showgirl describe it as a tense and troubled shoot, with Olivier appalled at the presence of Paula Strasberg (Lee Strasberg’s wife and Susan Strasberg’s mother) on the set as Marilyn’s private acting coach (“We can’t have two directors on one film!” Olivier thunders, and Milton Greene and all Marilyn’s handlers inform him that they have to do whatever they can to make and keep Marilyn happy) and even more appalled that the great sex goddess, who by 1957 had been cast mostly in dumb-blonde sexpot roles but had occasionally got parts that showcased real acting talent under the peroxide, the white makeup, the ass-wriggling and the cutesy-poo intonations (The Asphalt Jungle, Clash by Night, Don’t Bother to Knock, Niagara and, most importantly, Bus Stop, in which despite the woodenness of Don Murray as her leading man she turned in a sensitive, beautifully calibrated performance as the untalented but sympathetic roadhouse entertainer Cherie), had been studying the Method and started dropping Method phrases about motivations and having to “find” the character. Olivier at one point instructed Marilyn to “be sexy” — thinking that she could just turn the sex machine on and have every (straight) guy in the audience creaming in his pants at the sight of her — and she was trying to find her way to the inner depths of a character that really didn’t have any.
The story they were making was, as I noted when Charles and I watched The Prince and the Showgirl together, a “predictable and clichéd” rewrite of Cinderella in which “Grand Duke Charles [Olivier], regent of Carpathia, is in London in 1911 to attend the coronation of King George V; to amuse himself while he’s in town he picks showgirl Elsie Marina [Monroe] from the chorus line of a musical called The Coconut Girl, and invites her to the palace for a midnight supper — only to find that this Cinderella knows exactly what he wants and how to fend him off; eventually, however, she loosens him up enough to permit democracy in Carpathia and show some affection to his son, who’s going to become king when he turns 18 a year and a half from then, and there’s a hint they will get together in that time once his regency ends.” Much of the movie rings true to what we know about Monroe — how discombobulated she was, how chancy her nerves were, how some days she would stumble and be unable to remember the simplest lines while on others she’d be line-perfect through whole pages of script and nail everything in one take or two (Billy Wilder, who directed her in The Seven-Year Itch and Some Like It Hot, recalled how she was virtually impossible to work with during the studio work in Hollywood on Some Like It Hot, but when the company went to Coronado for the exteriors Monroe — perhaps because she was away from the city that was both the epicenter of the movie business and her own home town — loosened up, needed almost no retakes and was a joy to work with), and how sensitive she was to signs of betrayal, real or imagined.
Like the real Monroe, this version’s arrival in London to make The Prince and the Showgirl is delayed by her new husband Arthur Miller and the attempts by the anti-Communist inquisitors to get something on him that would persuade the State Department to pull his passport and keep him from leaving the U.S. (years later Miller claimed that the chair of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, who was locked in a tight re-election race, had offered to give him a clean bill of health if Miller could arrange for the Congressmember to be photographed with Monroe) and delayed again when Marilyn has a hissy-fit when she discovers Miller’s journal and reads a comment she interprets as viciously derogative towards her. No one knows for sure at this point just what Miller wrote that ticked her off so much, but Lee Strasberg — whom Marilyn was calling at all hours long-distance from London when his wife’s FTF advice and counsel wasn’t enough to reassure her — recalled Marilyn telling him, “It was something about how disappointed he was in me. I was some kind of angel but now he guessed he was wrong. His first wife had let him down, but I had done something worse. Olivier was beginning to think I was a troublesome bitch and that he [Miller] no longer had a decent answer to that one.” In his controversial play After the Fall, written in 1964 (four years after their breakup and two years after Monroe’s death), Miller reconstructed the episode and made the text read, “The only one I will ever love is my daughter. If I could only find an honorable way to die.”
In real life the incident, whatever the facts of what Miller wrote and what on earth he could have meant by it, was a wrenching emotional catastrophe far more intense than anything being dramatized in the relatively silly movie Monroe and Olivier were making; in My Week with Marilyn it’s simply an excuse for screenwriter Hodges to get Miller (Dougray Scott) to leave England and clear the field for Colin Clark and the Goddess to have their affair, or whatever it was. My Week with Marilyn has its problems — we can believe Monroe as a Lilith-like temptress who gets off on toying with men for a few days and then rejecting them if screenwriter Jacobs and actress Williams weren’t so good at portraying Monroe as a kind of sponge for human emotions, a creature so pathetically needy no amount of love — from husband, boyfriends, colleagues or the movie-going public (one illusion Monroe entered the project with that got cruelly shattered quickly was that she thought British people would be more well-behaved and less demanding of a movie star in their midst; instead, she’s surrounded and virtually attacked on the streets of London just as nastily as she was at home — maybe it’s a cliché by now that fame is a devil’s bargain that gives you money and popularity at the cost of anything resembling a normal human life, but that bargain has rarely been dramatized as well as it is here) — and it’s hard to believe the conceit of this movie that a 24-year-old third assistant director working for a salary for the first time in his entire life could hold the key to making Marilyn behave on set that her prestigious director/co-star, her private acting coach, her private acting coach’s husband long-distance on the phone, her co-workers (including Dame Sybil Thorndyke, played superbly by Judi Dench — the second night in a row we’d seen a film with her in it — and portrayed as the character who probably instinctively knew more about how to handle Marilyn as anyone else, managing to treat her supportively without fawning over her), her business partner, her staff (including Toby Jones as her P.R. man, Arthur Jacobs, who later went on to be a producer himself, most known for the original 1968 version of Planet of the Apes) or her own husband could not.
Still, it’s a marvelous movie, well acted — even though one could make the case that Branagh has been playing Olivier now for over 15 years — especially by Michelle Williams. I’ve seen her described as the finest actress ever to play Monroe, which quite frankly I rather doubt — I have great memories of the three-hour TV-movie from the 1970’s in which Catherine Hicks played Monroe and would love a chance to see it again if only to see if Hicks’ performance was as incandescent and as convincing as I remember it, and until I do see her Marilyn again I’m not about to acclaim anyone else’s as the best ever — but she’s damned good, though for some reason Williams is more convincing as the off-screen Marilyn than the on-screen one in the film’s re-creations of scenes from The Prince and the Showgirl. Still, if any project was going to get Michelle Williams out of the shadow of Brokeback Mountain and her short-lived relationship with the late Heath Ledger, whom she met and took up with when they were playing husband and wife in that movie, this was it; she’s absolutely convincing as the vulnerable private Marilyn, overwhelmed by the responsibilities of her career and desperate enough to resort to alcohol and drugs (though when the production hired a security guard to protect her and warned her of her drinking and pills, I half expected him to say, “I worked security for Judy Garland at the Palladium! I know all about booze and pills!”) as well as a determined neediness that sucked emotions out of people the way Count Dracula sucked their blood. And the final summation of the film is delivered by a speech given by Branagh as Olivier once The Prince and the Showgirl is completed, when he sees it and realizes that however difficult she was to work with, Monroe brought her character to life whereas he just looked like the walking dead beside her.
Anyone who’s actually seen The Prince and the Showgirl and judged it fairly will know that that’s an exactly accurate assessment of it: as I wrote about it when Charles and I screened it, “Olivier overacts his way through his own role; instead of tapping the logical precedent from his own career (his marvelous performance as Max de Winter under Alfred Hitchcock’s direction in Rebecca), he spends virtually the whole movie channeling Erich von Stroheim: the monocle, the jerky movements, the air of imperturbable condescension. What redeems The Prince and the Showgirl is Monroe, who not only out-acts her prestigious co-star/director but actually takes Rattigan’s stick figure of a character and creates her as a warm, richly defined human being. There are a few of the Monroe mannerisms — the cutesy-poo vocal inflections and the ass-swinging — but for the most part she keeps these under control and turns in a surprisingly subtle performance that makes us believe in Elsie Marina as a person and not just a Cinderella figure in a plot that stretches credibility to the breaking point. She’s aided by the brilliant cinematography of Jack Cardiff and production design of Robert Furse, who helped make this the best-looking color film in which Monroe appeared. Instead of the garish, neon-bright lighting Monroe got at 20th Century-Fox, Cardiff lights her in a warm, rich way that creates some startlingly painterly effects. Also, either Cardiff put a lot of filters on her or she changed her hair color for this film; instead of the usual eye-searing bottle-blonde Monroe looks auburn-haired in this, which adds to her image here as sensual rather than sexual. … If Olivier the director had been able to call Olivier the actor on his insufferable hamminess through much of the film The Prince and the Showgirl would be even better than it is — but then we wouldn’t have had the amazing spectacle of the showgirl so totally out-acting the prince!”
Thursday, May 10, 2012
J. Edgar (Malpaso/Warner Bros., 2011)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I showed Charles the 2011 biopic J. Edgar, directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Leonardo DiCaprio as J. Edgar Hoover, which got released with some amount of ballyhoo last year — and sank without a trace at the box office. I thought it was an excellent movie — I generally have liked Eastwood’s films as director in which he has not also appeared as an actor, and this was no exception — though I can see why it got almost no traction commercially. First of all, virtually nobody in the movie audience of today either knows or cares who J. Edgar Hoover was — for someone who was part of American life for so long (he directed the Bureau of Investigation of the Department of Justice — later known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI for short, after a 1935 bill passed Congress adding the F-word to the name — for an amazing 48 years, from his initial appointment in 1924 to his death in 1972) — and second, while the central issues raised by Hoover’s FBI tenure are still very much alive in the body politic, they’re hardly ever debated or discussed.
The ongoing debate in American history over the relative demands of liberty and security was definitively settled in favor of security almost as soon as the dust settled from the 9/11 attacks; though Hoover may have been dead for 29 years when the USA PATRIOT Act passed Congress, his spirit was definitely alive and well, and there’s a positively chilling moment early on in the movie in which Hoover, taking his secretary Helen Gandy on a date to the Library of Congress where he shows her how meticulously he has organized his card catalog, muses on the possibility of keeping a card file on every person living in the United States and collecting every possible scrap of information on them that would be useful in determining whether they would ever commit a crime or become a Left-wing activist (which, to Hoover, were pretty famously the same thing). It’s impossible to listen to this and not reflect on the fact that in the 40 years since Hoover’s death, computer technology has become so advanced that keeping a dossier on every American (indeed, on virtually every person in the world — at least every person in a country developed enough to have telephones) with the kind of derogatory information Hoover wanted encoded for all time has become entirely possible. We laugh today at the activities of the KGB, the East German Stasi and the other intelligence agencies of the Communist world that recorded every phone call made in their countries on the ground that they couldn’t possibly have had time to listen to every recording — the spy agencies in these countries were quite open about the domestic espionage; they wanted their people to live in constant fear that your recorded conversation would be the one they happened to listen to that day — but with computers and programs that scan written documents, Internet searches and recorded conversations for so-called “key words,” it is entirely possible to put a whole population under surveillance 24/7 and collect the information Hoover wanted and thought was essential to maintaining internal peace and social order.
It has its flaws; the central gimmick by which the aging Hoover is supposedly dictating his memoirs in the 1960’s to an FBI amanuensis variously referred to as Agent Smith (Ed Westwick) and Agent Garrison ignores the fact that Hoover had been consistently publishing books under his byline since Persons in Hiding in 1938 (the alibris.com Web site has a copy sans dust jacket for $106.25 and a signed copy for $225), his account of the FBI’s famous war against the gangsters of the 1930’s (Paramount bought the movie rights and got four films out of Hoover’s narrative, and used the title Persons in Hiding for the first film ever made about Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, with Patricia Morison as Bonnie and J. Carroll Naish as Clyde) and his most famous one, Masters of Deceit: What the Communist Bosses Are Doing to Bring America to Its Knees (1958). While there’s almost certain agreement under historians that Hoover didn’t write these books himself, there seems to be some dispute as to who did; most scholars credit them to Louis Nichols, the head of the FBI’s public relations department, but the Web site www.icdc.com attributes Masters of Deceit to “Agent Fern Stukenbroeker, an FBI researcher on subversive groups employed in the Crime Records Division” — but the point is that Hoover was already a published author (or at least his name was) well before the 1960’s and he had already had plenty of experience recasting the history of himself and the FBI both to glorify his own and the Bureau’s reputation and to establish, to paraphrase Louis XIV, that “Le Bureau, c’est moi.”
Also, while Dustin Lance Black’s screenplay is excellent in many respects — it hints at both personal and political motives for Hoover’s actions and attitudes (his screwed-up relationship with his mother, marvelously played by an almost unrecognizable Judi Dench, seems to be Black’s idea of Hoover’s “Rosebud,” and his participation in the raids ordered by Woodrow Wilson’s attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer [Geoff Pierson], against foreign-born and in some cases American-born radicals in 1919-1920 to get them out of the country without any bothersome niceties like due process — which generally goes unmentioned by Hoover’s apologists — is a key part of Black’s view of the man in that it shows him as a hard-line Right-winger willing to use the full force of the federal government to suppress the Left from the outset of his career, not as someone who effectively fought crime in the 1930’s and then went off the rails faced with the Communist threat of the 1950’s) — it also drops a lot of hints that viewers unaware of the history of the period and some of the connections between the events he includes probably wouldn’t get. For example, the film shows Hoover and his assistant, companion and lover, Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer), enjoying the hospitality of the Del Mar racetrack (he was allowed to keep his winnings but his losses were quietly forgiven) and taking criticism from attorney general Robert Kennedy (Jeffrey Donovan) for not using the power of the FBI against the Mafia, but you’d really have to be a hard-core student of the period to understand the connection: the Mafia was blackmailing Hoover over his relationship with Tolson (which seems surprisingly diffident and stiff-upper-lip in this film; much to Eastwood’s credit as a director, he doesn’t “de-Gay” Hoover the way a more homophobic director like Oliver Stone would have, but he also doesn’t have Leonardo DiCaprio and Armie Hammer slobber all over either) and his willingness to take favors from Mob-connected enterprises.
At the same time Black’s screenplay is understated and lets us discover for ourselves the connections between the events of Hoover’s time and the similar issues in our own without hammering them home in overly explicit speeches or situations. And Eastwood’s direction is superb, almost noir in its relentless darkness; as I’ve noted before, most actor-directors are good at getting fine, subtle performances from their casts (even actor-directors who as actors were unmitigated hams, like Erich von Stroheim and Orson Welles) but few (Stroheim and Welles are the only others I can think of) are such masters of visual atmosphere. We really get the impression that Hoover’s FBI was a zone of almost total isolation, not only from the rest of the government but from the rest of humanity; indeed, watching this film while I’m in the middle of reading Janet Reitman’s book Inside Scientology made it readily apparent how much Hoover’s FBI was like a cult, with an all-powerful dictatorial leader ordering his underlings to live up to his ideals not only professionally but even physically (in an early scene, shortly after he takes over the Bureau, he fires an agent for having a moustache — unlike most martinet bosses, he doesn’t even give the poor guy a chance to shave it off and keep his job!) and summarily getting rid of anybody else in the organization (like Melvin Purvis, the agent who actually led the attack that killed John Dillinger — Hoover’s attack on him was so relentless Purvis’s son wrote a book about it called Vendetta) who seemed a threat to his power or public standing.
At the same time it shows Hoover creating the so-called “secret files” with the assistance of Helen Gandy — whose relationship to him seems to confirm Nora Ephron’s comment about Rose Mary Woods: that the long-term secretaries to the powerful literally fell in love with their bosses, albeit in a non-sexual way, and gave them fanatical lifelong devotion — and using the sexual secrets of presidents, their spouses and their families to make sure he kept what he wanted, not only the directorship of the FBI but utterly unaccountable power. In many ways it’s ironic that this film was made at Warner Bros., of all studios, since it was Warners more than any other film company that contributed to Hoover’s propaganda campaign, which burnished his image to the point that even many liberals in the early 1950’s upheld Hoover as the responsible anti-Communist fighter in the government as compared to Joe McCarthy (whom Hoover denounces as an “opportunist” in this film’s dialogue, reflecting the distrust true believers generally have for those they perceive as camp followers). The film counterpoints two actual Warners movies from the 1930’s, The Public Enemy (1931) and G-Men (1935), as social indicators of how the Zeitgeist shifted from glorifying gangster heroes like the one James Cagney played in The Public Enemy to glorifying the FBI agents that went after them — like the one Cagney played in G-Men. Warners was also the studio that produced the 1960’s TV series The FBI (supposedly Hoover reviewed every script personally until he died while the show was still on the air) and made the film of Don Miller’s hagiographic history The FBI Story in 1958 (and to get the rights to The FBI Story and Hoover’s cooperation in making it, Warners also had to buy the movie rights to Masters of Deceit even though all Jack Warner’s production executives were personally aware that Hoover’s ghostwritten anti-Communist diatribe was unfilmable).
And J. Edgar is also beautifully acted; Leonardo DiCaprio’s (lack of) height makes him as suitable to play Hoover as he was unsuitable to play Howard Hughes in The Aviator, and he’s believable as both the utterly self-righteous public Hoover (for an actor to make so one-dimensional a character interesting is itself an achievement) and the pathetically twisted private Hoover (and though it’s a pretty manipulative bit of writing on Black’s part I loved the touch of Hoover listening to a sex tape of President Kennedy when he receives a phone call that the President has been shot and killed — and he still has the tape on in the background when he coldly and without any attempt to soften the blow calls Bobby Kennedy to break the news to him); though his hair is slicked-down instead of curly, DiCaprio otherwise looks astonishingly like Hoover and he really carries himself (which he didn’t in Titanic) as a man living in a different time from our own. Paradoxically, J. Edgar is too long (137 minutes) in some ways and too short in others — too long for an average moviegoer to sustain interest in a movie without caped crusaders from a comic book or spectacular CGI action scene, too short for screenwriter Black to connect the dots he leaves tantalizingly hanging in his script — but it’s an excellent film and an example of the finely honed serious movie there doesn’t seem to be much of a place for in today’s cinematic marketplace.
I showed Charles the 2011 biopic J. Edgar, directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Leonardo DiCaprio as J. Edgar Hoover, which got released with some amount of ballyhoo last year — and sank without a trace at the box office. I thought it was an excellent movie — I generally have liked Eastwood’s films as director in which he has not also appeared as an actor, and this was no exception — though I can see why it got almost no traction commercially. First of all, virtually nobody in the movie audience of today either knows or cares who J. Edgar Hoover was — for someone who was part of American life for so long (he directed the Bureau of Investigation of the Department of Justice — later known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI for short, after a 1935 bill passed Congress adding the F-word to the name — for an amazing 48 years, from his initial appointment in 1924 to his death in 1972) — and second, while the central issues raised by Hoover’s FBI tenure are still very much alive in the body politic, they’re hardly ever debated or discussed.
The ongoing debate in American history over the relative demands of liberty and security was definitively settled in favor of security almost as soon as the dust settled from the 9/11 attacks; though Hoover may have been dead for 29 years when the USA PATRIOT Act passed Congress, his spirit was definitely alive and well, and there’s a positively chilling moment early on in the movie in which Hoover, taking his secretary Helen Gandy on a date to the Library of Congress where he shows her how meticulously he has organized his card catalog, muses on the possibility of keeping a card file on every person living in the United States and collecting every possible scrap of information on them that would be useful in determining whether they would ever commit a crime or become a Left-wing activist (which, to Hoover, were pretty famously the same thing). It’s impossible to listen to this and not reflect on the fact that in the 40 years since Hoover’s death, computer technology has become so advanced that keeping a dossier on every American (indeed, on virtually every person in the world — at least every person in a country developed enough to have telephones) with the kind of derogatory information Hoover wanted encoded for all time has become entirely possible. We laugh today at the activities of the KGB, the East German Stasi and the other intelligence agencies of the Communist world that recorded every phone call made in their countries on the ground that they couldn’t possibly have had time to listen to every recording — the spy agencies in these countries were quite open about the domestic espionage; they wanted their people to live in constant fear that your recorded conversation would be the one they happened to listen to that day — but with computers and programs that scan written documents, Internet searches and recorded conversations for so-called “key words,” it is entirely possible to put a whole population under surveillance 24/7 and collect the information Hoover wanted and thought was essential to maintaining internal peace and social order.
It has its flaws; the central gimmick by which the aging Hoover is supposedly dictating his memoirs in the 1960’s to an FBI amanuensis variously referred to as Agent Smith (Ed Westwick) and Agent Garrison ignores the fact that Hoover had been consistently publishing books under his byline since Persons in Hiding in 1938 (the alibris.com Web site has a copy sans dust jacket for $106.25 and a signed copy for $225), his account of the FBI’s famous war against the gangsters of the 1930’s (Paramount bought the movie rights and got four films out of Hoover’s narrative, and used the title Persons in Hiding for the first film ever made about Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, with Patricia Morison as Bonnie and J. Carroll Naish as Clyde) and his most famous one, Masters of Deceit: What the Communist Bosses Are Doing to Bring America to Its Knees (1958). While there’s almost certain agreement under historians that Hoover didn’t write these books himself, there seems to be some dispute as to who did; most scholars credit them to Louis Nichols, the head of the FBI’s public relations department, but the Web site www.icdc.com attributes Masters of Deceit to “Agent Fern Stukenbroeker, an FBI researcher on subversive groups employed in the Crime Records Division” — but the point is that Hoover was already a published author (or at least his name was) well before the 1960’s and he had already had plenty of experience recasting the history of himself and the FBI both to glorify his own and the Bureau’s reputation and to establish, to paraphrase Louis XIV, that “Le Bureau, c’est moi.”
Also, while Dustin Lance Black’s screenplay is excellent in many respects — it hints at both personal and political motives for Hoover’s actions and attitudes (his screwed-up relationship with his mother, marvelously played by an almost unrecognizable Judi Dench, seems to be Black’s idea of Hoover’s “Rosebud,” and his participation in the raids ordered by Woodrow Wilson’s attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer [Geoff Pierson], against foreign-born and in some cases American-born radicals in 1919-1920 to get them out of the country without any bothersome niceties like due process — which generally goes unmentioned by Hoover’s apologists — is a key part of Black’s view of the man in that it shows him as a hard-line Right-winger willing to use the full force of the federal government to suppress the Left from the outset of his career, not as someone who effectively fought crime in the 1930’s and then went off the rails faced with the Communist threat of the 1950’s) — it also drops a lot of hints that viewers unaware of the history of the period and some of the connections between the events he includes probably wouldn’t get. For example, the film shows Hoover and his assistant, companion and lover, Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer), enjoying the hospitality of the Del Mar racetrack (he was allowed to keep his winnings but his losses were quietly forgiven) and taking criticism from attorney general Robert Kennedy (Jeffrey Donovan) for not using the power of the FBI against the Mafia, but you’d really have to be a hard-core student of the period to understand the connection: the Mafia was blackmailing Hoover over his relationship with Tolson (which seems surprisingly diffident and stiff-upper-lip in this film; much to Eastwood’s credit as a director, he doesn’t “de-Gay” Hoover the way a more homophobic director like Oliver Stone would have, but he also doesn’t have Leonardo DiCaprio and Armie Hammer slobber all over either) and his willingness to take favors from Mob-connected enterprises.
At the same time Black’s screenplay is understated and lets us discover for ourselves the connections between the events of Hoover’s time and the similar issues in our own without hammering them home in overly explicit speeches or situations. And Eastwood’s direction is superb, almost noir in its relentless darkness; as I’ve noted before, most actor-directors are good at getting fine, subtle performances from their casts (even actor-directors who as actors were unmitigated hams, like Erich von Stroheim and Orson Welles) but few (Stroheim and Welles are the only others I can think of) are such masters of visual atmosphere. We really get the impression that Hoover’s FBI was a zone of almost total isolation, not only from the rest of the government but from the rest of humanity; indeed, watching this film while I’m in the middle of reading Janet Reitman’s book Inside Scientology made it readily apparent how much Hoover’s FBI was like a cult, with an all-powerful dictatorial leader ordering his underlings to live up to his ideals not only professionally but even physically (in an early scene, shortly after he takes over the Bureau, he fires an agent for having a moustache — unlike most martinet bosses, he doesn’t even give the poor guy a chance to shave it off and keep his job!) and summarily getting rid of anybody else in the organization (like Melvin Purvis, the agent who actually led the attack that killed John Dillinger — Hoover’s attack on him was so relentless Purvis’s son wrote a book about it called Vendetta) who seemed a threat to his power or public standing.
At the same time it shows Hoover creating the so-called “secret files” with the assistance of Helen Gandy — whose relationship to him seems to confirm Nora Ephron’s comment about Rose Mary Woods: that the long-term secretaries to the powerful literally fell in love with their bosses, albeit in a non-sexual way, and gave them fanatical lifelong devotion — and using the sexual secrets of presidents, their spouses and their families to make sure he kept what he wanted, not only the directorship of the FBI but utterly unaccountable power. In many ways it’s ironic that this film was made at Warner Bros., of all studios, since it was Warners more than any other film company that contributed to Hoover’s propaganda campaign, which burnished his image to the point that even many liberals in the early 1950’s upheld Hoover as the responsible anti-Communist fighter in the government as compared to Joe McCarthy (whom Hoover denounces as an “opportunist” in this film’s dialogue, reflecting the distrust true believers generally have for those they perceive as camp followers). The film counterpoints two actual Warners movies from the 1930’s, The Public Enemy (1931) and G-Men (1935), as social indicators of how the Zeitgeist shifted from glorifying gangster heroes like the one James Cagney played in The Public Enemy to glorifying the FBI agents that went after them — like the one Cagney played in G-Men. Warners was also the studio that produced the 1960’s TV series The FBI (supposedly Hoover reviewed every script personally until he died while the show was still on the air) and made the film of Don Miller’s hagiographic history The FBI Story in 1958 (and to get the rights to The FBI Story and Hoover’s cooperation in making it, Warners also had to buy the movie rights to Masters of Deceit even though all Jack Warner’s production executives were personally aware that Hoover’s ghostwritten anti-Communist diatribe was unfilmable).
And J. Edgar is also beautifully acted; Leonardo DiCaprio’s (lack of) height makes him as suitable to play Hoover as he was unsuitable to play Howard Hughes in The Aviator, and he’s believable as both the utterly self-righteous public Hoover (for an actor to make so one-dimensional a character interesting is itself an achievement) and the pathetically twisted private Hoover (and though it’s a pretty manipulative bit of writing on Black’s part I loved the touch of Hoover listening to a sex tape of President Kennedy when he receives a phone call that the President has been shot and killed — and he still has the tape on in the background when he coldly and without any attempt to soften the blow calls Bobby Kennedy to break the news to him); though his hair is slicked-down instead of curly, DiCaprio otherwise looks astonishingly like Hoover and he really carries himself (which he didn’t in Titanic) as a man living in a different time from our own. Paradoxically, J. Edgar is too long (137 minutes) in some ways and too short in others — too long for an average moviegoer to sustain interest in a movie without caped crusaders from a comic book or spectacular CGI action scene, too short for screenwriter Black to connect the dots he leaves tantalizingly hanging in his script — but it’s an excellent film and an example of the finely honed serious movie there doesn’t seem to be much of a place for in today’s cinematic marketplace.
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
Defending Our Kids: The Julie Posey Story (Ira Pincus/Von Zerneck/Sertner, 2003)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Defending Our Kids: The Julie Posey Story, a Lifetime original production from 2003 starring Annie Potts (who was just right for the role: not especially attractive, and with a whiny voice that got grating at times, but also thoroughly convincing as a mother whose protectiveness towards her own daughter got turned into a larger cause) in a fact-based story about Colorado housewife Julie Posey. The film opens on the 13th birthday of Julie’s daughter Krystin (Ksenia Solo), for which mom has made her a shirt she immediately rejects as terminally lame and dad has bought her her own computer. Krystin immediately starts logging onto chat rooms and meets someone whose screen name is “magicman” and whose real name is Sam (C. David Johnson); she befriends him online and eventually they set up a face-to-face meeting — only mom gets alerted to what’s going on just in time when one of Krystin’s schoolmates comes over to look up a homework assignment she and Krystin were working on, and by accident the schoolmate and Julie accidentally boot up Krystin’s chat-room account. In a thrillingly directed suspense sequence (the director is actress Joanna Kerns, making her debut behind the camera and turning in a marvelously effective job with a real flair for thriller-type action) Julie gets into her black SUV (a vehicle which looks awfully sinister itself trolling down the streets of Denver) and manages to find her daughter and her daughter’s would-be molester just as they hook up in the park. She reports the incident to the police but is told by detective Mike Harris (a rather gangly Michael O’Keefe — actually one nice thing about this movie is that the people in it are ordinary-looking instead of Hollywood-attractive and therefore more believable in their roles than glamour stars of both sexes would have been) that there’s no proof that Sam was actually approaching Krystin for sex and therefore there’s nothing that they can do. Julie points to all the correspondence between her daughter and Sam on the Internet and is told that’s protected speech under the First Amendment — to which Julie replies, “Well, God bless America, but keep him away from my daughter.”
Before this Julie had been talking to her husband Jerry (Carl Marotte) about going back to work now that Krystin is a teenager and therefore no longer needs as much supervision (now that she’s meeting up with pedophiles on the Internet and making dates with them? Yeah, right), but now she decides to offer her services to the police as a free-lance cyber-investigator, trolling the chat rooms herself and posing as a 14-year-old girl to make dates with scumbags and thereby set up stings at which the police can arrest them. She reluctantly persuades Mike Harris to work with her on doing this, and Mike offers the services of Cassandra (the attractive Janet Kidder), who’s both his police partner and his girlfriend (the imdb.com page on this film lists her last name as Harris, reflecting their marriage during the course of the story) and who’s petite enough she can pose as the physical incarnation of Julie’s screen persona. The first sicko they bust is a charismatic piano teacher named Steven (John Ralston, by far the hottest guy in the movie and someone who projects the air of being so irresistibly attractive he could probably get anybody he wanted, woman, man or child, to have sex with him!) whose perverted fantasy is to deflower a 14-year-old girl while her mother watches. Then they attract the attention of an even slimier slimeball referred to in the dramatis personae only as “Texas Top Dawg” after his vanity license plate, who sends a music box that plays “The Yellow Rose of Texas” to the Posey’s home (leaving them scared shitless since Julie never gave her the address) and makes arrangements to meet his supposed child date at a diner — only Julie herself crashes the sting, against Mike’s solemn warnings to stay out of the scene of any actual arrest, and thinks Texas Top Dawg is reaching for a gun when all he was grabbing from his waist was a cell phone. (She’d earlier been spooked by the pro-Second Amendment bumper sticker she’d seen on his car, which is a black SUV not all that different-looking from hers.)
Then she’s called to testify in court and the defense digs up Julie’s own dark secret — that she was a molestation victim herself between ages 11 and 13, and though this was before the Internet existed and her molester was a neighbor, he used the same dopey lines as the modern-day pedophiles do. TTD’s defense attorney (a tall, wizened and singularly homely older woman of whom it might be said, as Ralph Berton said of his brother’s music teachers, that one wouldn’t think of her as female except in the sense that the Statue of Liberty is female) uses that to suggest that Julie’s real motivation is to work out the trauma from her own molestation by targeting innocent people on the Internet and framing them for child sex abuse. TTD is convicted anyway, but the incident leads Mike Harris to break off his working relationship with Julie — though she continues free-lance and finally the cops agree to work with her again since she’s still out there finding people they don’t have the money or person power to reach and helping them make cases against molesters. Eventually she runs across her daughter’s would-be molester again — now he’s calling himself “samiam” and he’s a big-shot architect designing a new performance-arts center in Boulder — only just when she’s got him hooked on a chatroom the FBI comes busting in and seizes her computer over her work on a different case. She runs into “samiam” on line again, though, and this sets up a climax in which she has to pose as her own teenage avatar (Cassandra broke her leg falling down stairs on the first night of what was supposed to be her and Mike’s honeymoon) and meet Sam at night at a crowded amusement park arcade, and she has to do that without the transmitter that was supposed to broadcast her location and allow her to talk to the police — so she’s at real risk of being ambushed in the remote part of the park to which Sam led her before the cops finally track her down and arrest her.
Defending Our Kids has some problems, including its uncritical endorsement of Posey’s activities (you wouldn’t know from this movie that she is also a Fundamentalist Christian — in 2002 she moved to Wichita, Kansas, and her current source of income is hiring herself out as a Web designer for churches — or that that was raised against her by the defense in at least one of the cases she worked) and the fact that after Dateline NBC and its work with a rival anti-predator group on the Net called “Perverted-Justice” (which Posey, ironically, originally denounced because they weren’t working with law enforcement the way she was) these sorts of predator stings are nothing novel — and neither are the lame excuses the perps come up with when they’re busted. There’s also a certain degree of manipulation: writer Eric Tuchman’s script is well put together and keeps us interested but there’s also a sense that he’s manipulated and re-ordered the real events to create a classic three-act structure, and the finale of her going after her daughter’s would-be molester and losing her radio contact with the cops smacks of a screenwriter’s desperation to impose a climax on a story that doesn’t naturally have one (as the closing credits remind us, there are 450,000 registered sex offenders in the U.S. and 75 percent of them use the Internet — today it’s probably closer to 99 percent and the 1 percent who don’t probably don’t only because they’ve been paroled and one of their conditions was not to go online — so whatever you think of Julie Posey’s activities, and to me they smack of private-duty vigilantism even though she was well trained and conscientious enough she knew to stay on the “right” side of the law and not go into anything that would legally constitute entrapment, the fact is there’s literally no end to them: there will always be desperately lonely teenagers, predators eager to take advantage of them and an Internet that allows them to hook up).
But overall Defending Our Kids is an excellent movie, a compelling story well told by writer Tuchman and director Kerns and vividly acted by Potts, Kidder and especially Marotte (I found myself identifying mostly with his character, a good-natured schlub who works in the warehouse at an electronics retailer and isn’t drop-dead gorgeous but cute enough in a teddy-bear way it’s easy enough to see why his wife is still attracted to him, and who makes his frustration as her crusade takes over more and more of her life and keeps her away from him both figuratively and literally — the scenes of him alone in their bed as she’s in the living room tapping away on her keyboard in chat-room conversation with some perv are heartbreaking). I left out O’Keefe because I found him a bit homely — or maybe I was subconsciously flashing back to all those Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episodes about pedophiles and wishing it could have been Christopher Meloni in the role — but he’s right enough for the part and overall Defending Our Kids is a great TV-movie even though I can despise the sexual exploitation of children and still have a more nuanced view of Julie Posey’s activities than the one presented in this film.
The film was Defending Our Kids: The Julie Posey Story, a Lifetime original production from 2003 starring Annie Potts (who was just right for the role: not especially attractive, and with a whiny voice that got grating at times, but also thoroughly convincing as a mother whose protectiveness towards her own daughter got turned into a larger cause) in a fact-based story about Colorado housewife Julie Posey. The film opens on the 13th birthday of Julie’s daughter Krystin (Ksenia Solo), for which mom has made her a shirt she immediately rejects as terminally lame and dad has bought her her own computer. Krystin immediately starts logging onto chat rooms and meets someone whose screen name is “magicman” and whose real name is Sam (C. David Johnson); she befriends him online and eventually they set up a face-to-face meeting — only mom gets alerted to what’s going on just in time when one of Krystin’s schoolmates comes over to look up a homework assignment she and Krystin were working on, and by accident the schoolmate and Julie accidentally boot up Krystin’s chat-room account. In a thrillingly directed suspense sequence (the director is actress Joanna Kerns, making her debut behind the camera and turning in a marvelously effective job with a real flair for thriller-type action) Julie gets into her black SUV (a vehicle which looks awfully sinister itself trolling down the streets of Denver) and manages to find her daughter and her daughter’s would-be molester just as they hook up in the park. She reports the incident to the police but is told by detective Mike Harris (a rather gangly Michael O’Keefe — actually one nice thing about this movie is that the people in it are ordinary-looking instead of Hollywood-attractive and therefore more believable in their roles than glamour stars of both sexes would have been) that there’s no proof that Sam was actually approaching Krystin for sex and therefore there’s nothing that they can do. Julie points to all the correspondence between her daughter and Sam on the Internet and is told that’s protected speech under the First Amendment — to which Julie replies, “Well, God bless America, but keep him away from my daughter.”
Before this Julie had been talking to her husband Jerry (Carl Marotte) about going back to work now that Krystin is a teenager and therefore no longer needs as much supervision (now that she’s meeting up with pedophiles on the Internet and making dates with them? Yeah, right), but now she decides to offer her services to the police as a free-lance cyber-investigator, trolling the chat rooms herself and posing as a 14-year-old girl to make dates with scumbags and thereby set up stings at which the police can arrest them. She reluctantly persuades Mike Harris to work with her on doing this, and Mike offers the services of Cassandra (the attractive Janet Kidder), who’s both his police partner and his girlfriend (the imdb.com page on this film lists her last name as Harris, reflecting their marriage during the course of the story) and who’s petite enough she can pose as the physical incarnation of Julie’s screen persona. The first sicko they bust is a charismatic piano teacher named Steven (John Ralston, by far the hottest guy in the movie and someone who projects the air of being so irresistibly attractive he could probably get anybody he wanted, woman, man or child, to have sex with him!) whose perverted fantasy is to deflower a 14-year-old girl while her mother watches. Then they attract the attention of an even slimier slimeball referred to in the dramatis personae only as “Texas Top Dawg” after his vanity license plate, who sends a music box that plays “The Yellow Rose of Texas” to the Posey’s home (leaving them scared shitless since Julie never gave her the address) and makes arrangements to meet his supposed child date at a diner — only Julie herself crashes the sting, against Mike’s solemn warnings to stay out of the scene of any actual arrest, and thinks Texas Top Dawg is reaching for a gun when all he was grabbing from his waist was a cell phone. (She’d earlier been spooked by the pro-Second Amendment bumper sticker she’d seen on his car, which is a black SUV not all that different-looking from hers.)
Then she’s called to testify in court and the defense digs up Julie’s own dark secret — that she was a molestation victim herself between ages 11 and 13, and though this was before the Internet existed and her molester was a neighbor, he used the same dopey lines as the modern-day pedophiles do. TTD’s defense attorney (a tall, wizened and singularly homely older woman of whom it might be said, as Ralph Berton said of his brother’s music teachers, that one wouldn’t think of her as female except in the sense that the Statue of Liberty is female) uses that to suggest that Julie’s real motivation is to work out the trauma from her own molestation by targeting innocent people on the Internet and framing them for child sex abuse. TTD is convicted anyway, but the incident leads Mike Harris to break off his working relationship with Julie — though she continues free-lance and finally the cops agree to work with her again since she’s still out there finding people they don’t have the money or person power to reach and helping them make cases against molesters. Eventually she runs across her daughter’s would-be molester again — now he’s calling himself “samiam” and he’s a big-shot architect designing a new performance-arts center in Boulder — only just when she’s got him hooked on a chatroom the FBI comes busting in and seizes her computer over her work on a different case. She runs into “samiam” on line again, though, and this sets up a climax in which she has to pose as her own teenage avatar (Cassandra broke her leg falling down stairs on the first night of what was supposed to be her and Mike’s honeymoon) and meet Sam at night at a crowded amusement park arcade, and she has to do that without the transmitter that was supposed to broadcast her location and allow her to talk to the police — so she’s at real risk of being ambushed in the remote part of the park to which Sam led her before the cops finally track her down and arrest her.
Defending Our Kids has some problems, including its uncritical endorsement of Posey’s activities (you wouldn’t know from this movie that she is also a Fundamentalist Christian — in 2002 she moved to Wichita, Kansas, and her current source of income is hiring herself out as a Web designer for churches — or that that was raised against her by the defense in at least one of the cases she worked) and the fact that after Dateline NBC and its work with a rival anti-predator group on the Net called “Perverted-Justice” (which Posey, ironically, originally denounced because they weren’t working with law enforcement the way she was) these sorts of predator stings are nothing novel — and neither are the lame excuses the perps come up with when they’re busted. There’s also a certain degree of manipulation: writer Eric Tuchman’s script is well put together and keeps us interested but there’s also a sense that he’s manipulated and re-ordered the real events to create a classic three-act structure, and the finale of her going after her daughter’s would-be molester and losing her radio contact with the cops smacks of a screenwriter’s desperation to impose a climax on a story that doesn’t naturally have one (as the closing credits remind us, there are 450,000 registered sex offenders in the U.S. and 75 percent of them use the Internet — today it’s probably closer to 99 percent and the 1 percent who don’t probably don’t only because they’ve been paroled and one of their conditions was not to go online — so whatever you think of Julie Posey’s activities, and to me they smack of private-duty vigilantism even though she was well trained and conscientious enough she knew to stay on the “right” side of the law and not go into anything that would legally constitute entrapment, the fact is there’s literally no end to them: there will always be desperately lonely teenagers, predators eager to take advantage of them and an Internet that allows them to hook up).
But overall Defending Our Kids is an excellent movie, a compelling story well told by writer Tuchman and director Kerns and vividly acted by Potts, Kidder and especially Marotte (I found myself identifying mostly with his character, a good-natured schlub who works in the warehouse at an electronics retailer and isn’t drop-dead gorgeous but cute enough in a teddy-bear way it’s easy enough to see why his wife is still attracted to him, and who makes his frustration as her crusade takes over more and more of her life and keeps her away from him both figuratively and literally — the scenes of him alone in their bed as she’s in the living room tapping away on her keyboard in chat-room conversation with some perv are heartbreaking). I left out O’Keefe because I found him a bit homely — or maybe I was subconsciously flashing back to all those Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episodes about pedophiles and wishing it could have been Christopher Meloni in the role — but he’s right enough for the part and overall Defending Our Kids is a great TV-movie even though I can despise the sexual exploitation of children and still have a more nuanced view of Julie Posey’s activities than the one presented in this film.
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