Spies of Mississippi (Trilogy Films/PBS, 2013)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago Charles and I watched a quite chilling documentary I’d recorded from PBS, an Independent Lens presentation called Spies of Mississippi dealing with the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission. Never heard of them? You’re not alone; the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission was created in 1956, in a law passed by the Mississippi state legislature and signed into law by the state’s governor with virtually no opposition. Originally it was just supposed to be a P.R. department producing glossy books, brochures and films about how wonderful the Mississippi system of legally enforced racial segregation was, how it ensured that crime among Mississippi’s Black people was far lower than it was in the Northern Black ghettoes, and how determined the state fathers of Mississippi were to keep it in spite of that nasty little piece of liberal judicial activism from 1954 called Brown v. Board of Education. Other Southern states had private groups, usually organized under the name White Citizens’ Council, aimed at doing the same thing, and the Citizens’ Councils were so closely tied in with the resurgent Ku Klux Klan that they might be thought of as the “political arm” of the Klan the way for years the Sinn Fein political party in Northern Ireland was the political arm of the Irish Republican Army. Mississippi went the rest of the South once better and formed an actual agency of state government, giving it a charter that was virtually unlimited in terms of its ability not only to monitor phone calls but keep people under surveillance and cultivate a network of informants, both Black and white — and the willingness of members of the Black community to become Sovereignty Commission informants and spy on the civil rights movement was itself one of the key factors that led director Dawn Porter to want to make this film.

As anyone who has seen the film The Birth of a Nation (which of course presented this historical drama approvingly!) will recall, from the South’s point of view the Northern carpetbaggers and Southern scalawags had put into power an irresponsible, lust-driven Black minority into political power in the South, and the only way to put the Blacks back “in their place” was to take away both the Blacks’ votes and their guns. To do this, former Confederate soldiers had organized the Ku Klux Klan, and while it had pretty much faded away once it had accomplished its original purpose (only to be revived after 1915, when Griffith’s film sparked a new Klan that became even more powerful than the first one had been, reaching far beyond the South and for a time becoming the political power in a state as far north as Indiana), the white Democrats who ran the South after the end of Reconstruction kept the Black community down with systematic terror (including lynchings) and a series of bizarre laws, ranging from poll taxes to so-called “literacy tests” (one fabled question on which was, “How many bubbles are there in a bar of soap?”), to make sure that Blacks didn’t vote and therefore didn’t threaten the hegemony of the white Southern aristocrats, repeatedly elected to office mostly from the votes of poor and working-class whites because the aristocrats had convinced them that the real threat to their welfare was a Black takeover. The post-Birth of a Nation Klan collapsed in the late 1920’s, partly due to internal corruption (many of the Klan organizations were basically cons aimed at ripping off working-class whites by charging them inflated prices for “official” Klan uniforms, small arms, etc.) and partly because the Depression changed the Zeitgeist enough that for a brief time, at least, the concern of the Democratic party even in parts of the South became getting the economy moving and getting people back to work, and though racial tensions remained and were still useful as divide-and-conquer strategies, they were less important than they’d been during the 1920’s. Then came the Second World War, the rise of a pro-civil rights faction in the Northern Democratic Party, the fruits of the NAACP’s long legal strategy aimed at challenging the constitutionality of racial segregation in the courts, and, in the first decade after Brown, the sudden emergence of a mass direct-action civil-rights movement aimed at directly going after segregation and making the promise of Brown a reality on the ground.

The response of the Southern aristocracy and the working-class whites they enlisted as junior partners in the fight for white supremacy was a scorched-earth policy that fought on all fronts. The very name “Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission” indicates the extent to which the civil-rights struggle had become yet another front of the South’s continuing struggle to maintain its racist “peculiar institutions” (slavery as Peculiar Institution 1.0 and segregation as 2.0) under the banner of “States’ Rights,” which had led the South and its leaders in the 1830’s to claim the rights of interposition and nullification (when Martin Luther King, Jr. used these terms in the March on Washington speech a lot of people in the audience, especially northern whites, probably shook their heads and wondered what he was talking about; it meant the idea that, since the states had pre-existed the federal government, they had the right to “interpose” their authority against the feds telling them to do anything they didn’t want to do and “nullify” federal laws and declare them of no effect in their states), in the 1860’s to try to secede and launch the Civil War, in the late 19^th century to segregate Black people and take their voting rights away at gunpoint, and in the 1950’s to close the public schools altogether rather than integrate them — either that or keep the Black schools open but shuttle the white students to so-called “private academies” that were really state-funded. The Southern Brahmins disclaimed any responsibilities for the rise of the White Citizens’ Councils and the Ku Klux Klans, but they took advantage of them as foot soldiers in the racist counterrevolution, and in Mississippi the counterrevolution took the form of outright espionage in which civil rights organizations were infiltrated, spies took down the license numbers of cars at public (or not-so-public) civil-rights meetings, and then the agents of the Sovereignty Commission leaked this information to local Mississippi law enforcement, knowing full well that many members of local Mississippi law enforcement were members of the Citizens’ Councils and the Klan. They would use the license-plate information to obtain the names and addresses of anyone active in civil rights and have their names and addresses published in local newspapers — thereby giving both Klansmen and free-lance vigilantes the information they needed to go after them and either attack them legally by framing them for “crimes” (like the Black civil-rights leader whose career was abruptly ended when he was framed for stealing 20 pounds of chicken feed for his mother’s farm) or simply take them out illegally.

Director Dawn Porter believes — and presents powerful evidence — that the 1964 murders of civil-rights workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman (the South’s worst nightmare: an “uppity” Black man and two white Jews from New York!) were essentially orchestrated by the Sovereignty Commission, who “outed” them to law enforcement in Meridian, Mississippi (by weird coincidence also the birthplace of Jimmie Rodgers, the country-music legend who became, among his other distinctions, the first white musician to record undiluted Black blues), who rather than bothering to frame them or drive them out of town, simply killed them and buried their car. Porter is a bit naïve about the role of the FBI in all this — she buys into the myth created by the film Mississippi Burning that the FBI aggressively investigated crimes against civil-rights activists, when the opposite was the truth: J. Edgar Hoover was convinced that the civil-rights movement was part of the overall Communist conspiracy and, if anything, his sympathies were with the Southerners — but her film is overall a fascinating study of a mind-set in which racism was open, above-board and even proud of itself (one Sovereignty Commission member, Hollis Watkins, is interviewed for the film and he’s still an unrepentant racist, proud of the Commission’s work and his association with it), as witness the clips from two of the Commission’s films Porter includes. One is a production showing happy, carefree Black people living their own lives, minding their own business and expressing the benefits segregation has conferred on their race, with an unctuous narrator explaining it all to us in the familiar tones of anyone who went to school in the 1950’s or 1960’s and saw and heard the preposterous “audio-visual” educational movies we were made to sit through then. The other is an even more bizarre movie, shot and narrated in the same bland “audio-visual” style that somehow makes it even more chilling, showing the preparations Mississippi has made to deal with any demonstrators with the temerity to do a campaign for racial equality there, complete with huge outdoor pens in which to hold arrestees, flatbed trucks wrapped in barbed wire to transport them, tank-like vehicles for crowd control and other riot gear that represented high-tech law enforcement in the 1960’s. (One would hope that the DVD release of Spies of Mississippi will include these two films “complete” as bonus items.)

One grim aspect of Spies of Mississippi was how many African-Americans were recruited to spy on their own for the Commission, many of them Black ministers (also the leading African-American newspaper publisher of the state) who believed that “outside agitators” were “rocking the boat” and threatening their positions of responsibility in the Black community with all this dangerous talk about integration and equality. Of course, some of the Black collabòs were motivated by less ostensibly noble reasons, including money and fear. But the real aspect of Spies of Mississippi that’s most frightening today is how little the Right’s strategies have changed. For one thing, they’re still obsessed with making sure African-Americans and other people of color can’t vote, and with poll taxes and some of the other transparent tactics of the Sovereignty Commission’s day barred they are using photo ID requirements, restrictions on the times and places people are allowed to vote, and broad-based laws disqualifying people for being “criminals” to minimize the turnout of the “wrong” kinds of voters. They’re also pulling the same stunt of setting up state-funded “private academies” for well-heeled white people to avoid the indignity of having their kids going to school with “Those People,” though instead of “private academies” today they’re called “charter schools,” and instead of the state funding them secretly it’s doing so openly through what used to be called voucher programs but are now called “school choice.” And the racist rage that went into organizing the White Citizens’ Councils and the Ku Klux Klan is alive and well today, though more subtly directed since one enduring triumph of the civil rights movement was it made it decidedly unfashionable and de trop to express racist prejudices directly — so instead you talk about “urban” people, you pass draconian anti-drug laws to make sure as many people of color as possible spend their adulthoods in prisons instead of either working, building a business community or organizing for change, and when one of “Them” gets elected President you start a preposterous rumor campaign claiming that he’s not even a U.S.-born citizen as the Constitution requires — and though most Obama-bashing is about his party, not his race, the “birther” movement is a clear metaphor for a racist prejudice targeting the way in which Obama is different — visibly so — from the 42 men who’ve occupied the Presidency before him.

Count the Hours (RKO, 1953)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I just watched a thriller on TCM called Count the Hours, a 1953 RKO “B” whose opening scene bears a striking resemblance to In Cold Blood, the famous story of a real-life case in which an isolated farmer and his housekeeper were murdered for the money he had stashed on the farm — even though Count the Hours was made a full six years before the murders detailed in In Cold Blood took place. The major differences between Count the Hours and the opening of In Cold Blood is that the farmer has no children — just a woman who’s working as a live-in housekeeper who’s killed along with him — and he really does have a cash stash. Produced by Benedict Bogeaus, directed by Don Siegel, and photographed in nine days by the great cinematographer John Alton — who must have been miffed to be back in the “B” salt mines just two years after winning the Academy Award for shooting the spectacular ballet sequence at the end of An American in Paris (he had to share the award with Alfred Gilks, who shot the rest of An American in Paris, but the big, visually stunning scene everybody remembers was Alton’s work)— Count the Hours emerges as a nice little vest-pocket thriller largely in the Hitchcock mold, though with the difference that the innocent man wrongly accused of the murders is in custody almost from the get-go and, as in the Cornell Woolrich stories Phantom Lady and Black Angel, it’s an outsider working on his behalf who ultimately proves his innocence. The central character of Count the Hours is attorney Doug Madison (Macdonald Carey), who’s appointed by the court to defend hired man George Braden (John Craven) in his trial for murdering his former employer, farmer Fred Morgan (Richard Kipling — presumably no relation), and his housekeeper Susan Watson (Kay Riehl).

The case against Braden seems to be open and shut, especially since he confessed to the crime after a grueling 16-hour interrogation in order to get the police to let his wife Ellen (Teresa Wright, top-billed and appearing here a decade after working for the real Hitchcock in Shadow of a Doubt, one of the Master’s finest films) go. When he’s first questioned by police George denies he owns a gun; later he decides to come clean about having one — and it’s a .32, the same caliber as the one the murders were committed with — but in one of the dumbest moves imaginable (though the script by Doane R. Hoag and Karen DeWolf makes us understanding that she’s only trying to help), Ellen throws the gun in the nearby lake. It’s eventually recovered — after Ellen is the victim of an attempted rape by the diver hired by Madison to find it — but by the time it’s found the inside of the barrel has rusted so badly it’s no longer possible for ballistics tests to prove it either was or wasn’t the murder weapon. George is convicted and sentenced to death, and it’s clear that the people in the small town where all this is happening would just as soon lynch him and not bother with a trial at all (one imdb.com reviewer compared the story to To Kill a Mockingbird and Madison to Atticus Finch, but since all the dramatis personae are white it doesn’t have the complicating racial politics of Mockingbird), but one of the townspeople most incensed at George for killing the well-loved Morgan lets slip that there’s another suspect, Max Verne (Jack Elam, looking oddly like Abraham Lincoln and even speaking in the high, scratchy voice Lincoln was supposed to have had — a Lincoln film with Elam is an interesting cinematic might-have-been), who had the job of Morgan’s hired hand before George did and threatened Morgan when he fired him in a dispute over money. Madison is instantly convinced that Verne broke into Morgan’s farmhouse to steal the money and killed Morgan when the old man surprised him with a gun of his own, and eventually Verne is arrested by the sheriff of a neighboring county and makes a confession to the crime. (So we now have two people who’ve essentially been browbeaten by law enforcement into confessing to the same crime; given the current controversies about police interrogations leading to false confessions, this part of Count the Hours seems modern now.)

But Madison’s attempt to get George freed runs into a trap set by the district attorney, Jim Gillespie (Edgar Barrier): Gillespie produces Dr. Ronald Seabright (Norman Rice), who runs the local mental hospital and has had Verne as a patient. He assures the court that Verne is non-violent but would confess to anything if he got excited enough, and Madison — who’s also lost his law practice and his well-to-do fiancée, Paula Mitchener (Dolores Moran, the other “new girl” introduced in the 1945 film To Have and Have Not but who didn’t have the illustrious career Lauren Bacall did; maybe if she’d been the one who married the male lead … ), who’s got tired of waiting for him and enduring all the town gossip that the only reason he’s pushing George’s case so hard is he’s got the hots for Ellen — is about to give up on the day before George’s scheduled execution (which the governor has already refused to delay) when he sees Max Verne having an argument and grabbing his girlfriend, teenage bombshell Gracie Sager (Adele Mara), who’s essentially doing the Carroll Baker schtick three years before Baker’s first lead role in Baby Doll. Eventually, as Madison and Ellen are in a bar together just before he’s going to leave town, he hears the piece of information he needs: the bartender says he heard Max Verne yelling about the murders at 6 a.m. the day they happened — even though the bodies weren’t discovered until 7:30. Ultimately there’s a shoot-out, Verne is taken alive and the cops find Morgan’s wallet on him (they know it’s Morgan’s because his name was helpfully embossed on it); George is freed in the nick of time and Madison and Paula get back together as the film ends.

Count the Hours was shot in only nine days, but it eventually acquired a cult reputation even though, when he saw it again in the late 1960’s, Siegel didn’t think it was that great — “the nine days showed,” he laconically told interviewer Stuart M. Kaminsky. It’s a problematic film in several ways, notably the relentless overacting of Jack Craven and the almost as relentless overacting of Teresa Wright (yet another actor whom Hitchcock got to calm down!), but what makes it is Siegel’s taut direction, MacDonald Carey’s laconicism as the crusading attorney (one could make a case that the character is a precursor of Atticus Finch, but one could also make a case that Carey played him better than Gregory Peck did, without the sometimes insufferable self-righteousness Peck showed in Mockingbird that marred an otherwise fine performance) and, above all, the magnificent cinematography of John Alton. Siegel recalled to Kaminsky that when Alton signed on to make the film, he asked producer Bogeaus how much he had budgeted for rigging, the system of overhead pipes, brackets, ropes and cables that suspends lights over a film set. Bogeaus told him $4,000. “Give me $2,000 above my salary and I won’t use any rigging,” Alton said. He did it by using almost no overhead lighting at all, contributing to the film’s rich visual atmosphere.

Don Juan (Warner Bros., 1926)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Don Juan is an historically important film because it was on the first program of films made with the Vitaphone sound system (debuted in New York in August 1926) and featured a synchronized music and sound-effects track throughout. Though most of the sound was mere background music (by Major Edward Bowes, David Mendoza and Dr. William Axt, recorded by Henry Hadley conducting the New York Philharmonic), there were some synchronized effects that must have wowed audiences back in 1926: when you saw people playing trumpets or knocking on doors, you heard those sounds more or less when you should have; and the most famous scene showed Barrymore dueling with the villain, with every metallic click of sword against sword duly recorded. The sound quality was quite good — equal to, or maybe even a bit better than, the best phonograph records of the day — and so was the music itself, though I think they missed a good opportunity by not using any of the music from Mozart’s Don Giovanni (some of the opera’s music would have fit quite well in the film: especially for the character of the Don’s servant, called Leporello in the opera and Pedrillo — ironically, the name of the comic male in another Mozart opera, The Abduction from the Seraglio — in the film).

Overall, Don Juan was an excellent production, though it tended to lag in the middle; Bess Meredyth’s screenplay was surprisingly literate (a few typically overblown intertitles notwithstanding) and Alan Crosland’s direction was quite good, with effective editing and some stunning lighting effects, particularly in the early scene in which Don Juan’s father, also played by John Barrymore (the way Rudolph Valentino had played both father and son in Son of the Sheik earlier that year and José Ferrer would play father and son in Moulin Rouge in 1952), catches his wife with a lover and walls the poor guy up behind bricks being used in remodeling his castle. (Apparently Meredyth, who judging from this script was an omnivorous reader with a broad familiarity with various public-domain plots, had read Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado.”) Barrymore’s face was already beginning to get rather craggy, but his body was still lithe and lean enough to do some Douglas Fairbanks-style acrobatics (though I assume that he, unlike Fairbanks, used stunt doubles for the heavier athletic scenes), and Astor and Loy in their supporting roles (Astor in the female lead and Loy as a servant Barrymore briefly flings with) both indicated the promise they eventually fulfilled in their subsequent careers. — 7/30/98

•••••

Charles and I watched TCM’s showing of the 1926 Don Juan, produced by Warner Brothers (I remember Clive Hirschhorn rather snottily commenting in his book The Warner Bros. Story that the studio’s name should always be abbreviated, never spelled out, because they had never used the full phrase “Warner Brothers” in their official logo — in fact they did spell out “Brothers” in the version of the logo used here, in The Jazz Singer and on all their films until 1931) and shown at the world premiere of the Vitaphone sound-on-disc process August 6, 1926 along with a series of shorts, mostly classical music performances, that showed what Vitaphone could do to bring music and speech (in that order of importance!) to the masses as part of the movie medium. Don Juan was filmed as a silent and had a synchronized music-and-sound effects track added later — the score was assembled by Dr. William Axt and conducted by Harry Hadley with the New York Philharmonic (which also performed the Dresden version of the Bacchanale to Wagner’s Tannhäuser as one of the shorts on the same program) — and audiences thrilled when they heard as well as saw the bells that madden Don Juan Marana (John Barrymore) as his girlfriend de jour, Adriana della Varnese (Mary Astor in an early role — TCM was showing this as part of their “Star of the Month” tribute to her) is about to be married off to Count Giano Donati (Montagu Love), henchman of Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia (Warner Oland and Estelle Taylor).

When Don Juan and Donati have their obligatory swordfight later in the film, they got to hear the clank and swish of blade against blade, and earlier they’d got to hear the sound of an outraged husband knocking on Don Juan’s door as Don Juan entertains the man’s wife. As might be inferred by the presence of Cesare and Lucrezia Borgia as on-screen characters, this is not the classic story of Don Juan Tenorio and his 2,065 worldwide amours as famously presented in Moliére’s play and the Mozart-da Ponte opera. This Don Juan is the son of a Spanish nobleman, Don José Marana (also played by John Barrymore — a bit of stunt casting that may have been copied from Rudolph Valentino’s dual role as father and son in his last film, Son of the Sheik, and may also have been intended to give Barrymore, whose biggest previous film hit was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a chance to play hero and villain in the same movie), who catches his wife having an affair with a rather twerpy guy. Showing that screenwriter Bess Meredyth (who had just got through another assignment for Barrymore, remodeling Herman Melville’s Moby Dick into a romantic adventure called The Sea Beast) had read Edgar Allan Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado, Don José reacts to being cuckolded by walling his wife’s boyfriend up in a disused room of his castle, and he decides to live the rest of his life in a state of continual debauchery, loving (or at least fucking) and abandoning women as if they were toilet paper. What’s more, while he’s on his deathbed — placed there by a woman whose reaction to him treating her as disposable was to sneak in a dagger and dispose of him, leading to a death scene so protracted some opera singers probably thought Barrymore was overdoing it — he trains his son to live the same way.

When the kid grows up to be John Barrymore he becomes the famous, legendary lover Don Juan (an imdb.com “trivia” poster claimed that Barrymore “plants 191 kisses on various females during the course of the film, an average of one every 53 seconds,” though this being a 1926 movie he doesn’t get to do much more than kiss any of them), and in the main part of the movie he finds himself in Rome, suffering under the tyrannical rule of the Borgias. Needless to say, Lucrezia Borgia has the hots for him — while Cesare sees him as a threat and tries to dispose of him with the Borgias’ favorite technique, poisoned wine (in one scene Don Juan catches on and throws the poisoned wine into a flower bed, whereupon it wilts the rose it lands on — what, one wonders, was in that stuff?) — and there’s always Giano, the Borgias’ ace swordsman, who can be counted on to dispose of Don Juan by his blade if the poison doesn’t work. The other part of the plot is that Giano is determined to marry Adriana, daughter of the Duke of Varnese (Josef Swickard), who as a member of the Orsini clan is one of the Borgias’ bitterest enemies. The Borgias have the Duke arrested and tell Adriana they’ll execute him unless she agrees to marry Giano, which she does. After a brief dalliance with Lucrezia’s maid (a short but indelible performance by the young Myrna Loy) Don Juan gets unexpectedly serious with Adriana, disrupts the wedding, ends up dispatching Giano in a swordfight (I joked, “I’m not worried about him — my stunt double can take his stunt double any day!”), for which he’s arrested and imprisoned in the dungeon under the Castel Sant’ Angelo (opera fans will remember this as the setting for the last act of Tosca), but he’s rescued with the help of a fellow prisoner and the last shot is of him and Adriana fleeing the Borgias’ Italy for Don Juan’s native Spain and literally riding into the sunset — represented by a ridiculously phony backdrop of a painted sun that’s startling in a movie that has previously been so handsomely produced.

If nothing else, the 1926 Don Juan gives the lie to the oft-repeated myth that Warners was a teeny-tiny studio about to go under when the Warner brothers signed on to introduce sound films as a last-ditch attempt to save their business; with a male lead who was already a major star and two women who would become major stars, a sumptuous production budget, lavish sets, lots of extras and a director, Alan Crosland, who knew what to do with them all, Don Juan is an A-list production for the period and easily on a par for sheer production values with the spectacles Douglas Fairbanks was making for United Artists at the time. What it’s missing is the sheer panache of the Fairbanks films; it’s workmanlike entertainment but Barrymore, though still good-looking enough to be credible as a romantic hero, was beginning to show signs of alcoholic deterioration (his close-ups show tell-tale lines in that once ethereally pretty face that had mesmerized Broadway audiences in his star-making stage role, Peter Ibbetson, a decade earlier), and — as with John Gilbert in the contemporary Bardelys the Magnificent — it’s clear Barrymore is being stunt-doubled in scenes Fairbanks could easily have done himself. Still, Don Juan is a first-rate silent film — and, ironically, an example of the kind of moviemaking the Vitaphone contraption and its more practical sound-on-film competitors (Movietone at Fox and the one that ultimately became standard, RCA’s Photophone) were about to render obsolete: lush, romantic, exotic, relying more on sweeping spectacle than the sort of intimate human drama to which the sound film, as it developed, lent itself and rendered the whole Great Lover schtick obsolete for about a decade or so. — 3/6/14

Starlet Revue (Mayfair/Associated, 1929)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I wanted to make a brief comment on the really odd movie Charles and I screened on TCM just after they showed the 1926 Don Juan: Starlet Revue, also known as The Big Revue, which appears to be the this-is-it film debut of Judy Garland, albeit under her original identity as one of the Gumm Sisters (the name on her birth certificate is Frances Gumm). It’s basically a series of four musical numbers crammed into a 10-minute short, with the predictable hissy recording of a 1929 talkie and some kids doing their best to prove that screen moppets had mastered the art of insufferable cuteness even before Shirley Temple came on the scene (Temple was 1 when this film was made). Judy a.k.a. Frances is the youngest of the Gumms and she’s on the left of the screen — and even that early dancing was the one aspect of appearing in musicals that threw her: she’s well below her two older sisters in the terpsichorean art, and one could well imagine her saying of Gene Kelly (and, in her case, Fred Astaire as well) what Sinatra said of Kelly: “I never could dance, but he made me look like I could.” Her voice sounds like a kid’s voice and the Gumm Sisters blend unbearably badly in one of those schlock songs about how much the singer(s) wish(es) they could go back to the oh so wonderful South — seven years later, in La Fiesta de Santa Barbara and rechristened the Garland Sisters (at the suggestion of George Jessel, who told the Gumm girls and their father/manager/accompanist, Frank Gumm, that their performances at the Chicago Century of Progress World’s Fair in 1933 would be reviewed better if they took the last name of Chicago’s leading critic, Robert Garland), they blend beautifully and Judy’s voice had already taken on the range, timbre and intonation of an adult woman’s. I can remember when La Fiesta was still considered Judy Garland’s screen debut; then a Garland bio that went to incredible lengths to pin down every part of Garland’s career before she signed with MGM in 1935 mentioned that there were three 1930 Warner Bros./Vitaphone shorts with her (at least one of which, Bubbles, has also been shown on TCM), and now we have this one, even earlier, issued in this print under the banner of “Associated Films” (associated with what, one wonders), though the imdb.com page on it indicates it was a production of the ultra-cheap Mayfair studio. Two people have reviewed this on imdb.com already based on last night’s showing, and both have lamented that no one has spent the money needed to restore this so we can see it as something richer than ghostly white images of people cavorting on a black backdrop, and one of the reviewers noted that “no one has spent the few hundred research dollars necessary to discover who directed, filmed, and conducted this piece, or exactly WHAT the music is, either.” It’s a fascinating curio but as a movie is pretty lame, and noting Judy’s appearance in it, one can only shrug one’s shoulders and say, “Well, she had to start somewhere … ”

Rock, Rock, Rock! (Vanguard/Distributors’ Corporation of America, 1956)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Charles and I had a rock ’n’ roll double-bill last night with the 1956 film Rock, Rock, Rock! from Milton Subotsky’s Vanguard Productions, releasing through something called Distributors’ Corporation of America; and Hey, Let’s Twist! (it’s an indication of the irrepressible energy the people merchandising these films wanted to convey to potential moviegoers that both titles end in exclamation points), a 1961 release by Harry Romm Productions and Paramount, Rock, Rock, Rock! is one of the vehicles featuring the ur-rock ’n’ roll D.J., Alan Freed, who not only popularized the music but even coined the name for it (which he drew from the old blues song “My Daddy Rocks Me with One Steady Roll”). The idea was to be able to sell rhythm-and-blues music to white people without giving away that the artists he was playing on his show were Black; in 1952 in Cleveland he held what he called a “Moondog Dance” (Freed was originally going to call it “moondog music,” after the Todd Rhodes instrumental “Blues for Moon Dog,” but the blind New York street musician Louis “Moondog” Hardin threatened to sue) and promoted it exclusively on his D.J. show. It was such a success that afterwards he took out trade-paper ads boasting, “Radio Alone Drew 50,000!” — an indication of how radio could secure its future as a medium now that television had usurped its previous function as a conduit for drama, comedy and news. It’s because of Freed’s contribution to the music — even though it was, as Arnold Shaw politely pointed out, “more promotional than creative” — that the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame ended up in Cleveland (artistically, it should have been in Memphis, Tennessee — which played the same role in the development of rock that New Orleans did for jazz — but the Memphis city fathers have made their town a virtual theme park for Elvis Presley and in the process have crowded out just about any other commemoration of their city’s rich musical history).

Freed rose and fell rapidly; in 1955 he was the most popular D.J. in the country, with a showcase on a big New York station, a national TV show called The Big Beat (also the title of one of the key songs in Rock, Rock, Rock!), a regular gig hosting package tours and a two-film contract with Columbia Pictures to bring his great stars to the screen in films with titles like Rock Around the Clock and Don’t Knock the Rock. Then he became the poster boy for the payola scandal, fueled by Congressmembers who, once the headline-making potential for going after movie stars and writers as secret Communists was pretty much drained, seized on rock and alleged that no one really liked it; it dominated the airwaves and music charts only because record companies were bribing D.J.’s to play it. Freed had taken advantage of all the opportunities to make “side action” money for a non-performer in the music biz, including taking cut-in writing credits on songs like the Moonglows’ “Sincerely” (the Moonglows are featured prominently in this film) and taking fees from record companies to play certain records; according to one of Arnold Shaw’s interviewees in the book Honkers and Shouters, Freed also was in hock to at least one record-company owner: Jerry Blaine, president of Jubilee Records, owned the mortgage on Freed’s house. Watching Rock, Rock, Rock! just after Jamboree! (made by the same production team the next year but released by a major studio, Warner Bros.) made it clear why Freed was destroyed by the payola scandal while Dick Clark, who made his big-screen debut in Jamboree!, was singed by it but ultimately survived; Clark was essentially the White Knight of rock ’n’ roll, clean, well-scrubbed, light-skinned and pushing people like Frankie Avalon and other representatives of the “Philadelphia Sound” associated with Chancellor Records, while the swarthy, almost intimidating Freed was its Dark Prince, presenting racially mixed programs and treating his Black performers as the equals of his white ones — not the way things usually worked out in the 1950’s.

As seamy as some of Freed’s business practices may have been, he was enough of a good guy it’s a shame he fell as far and as fast as he did — and even before the payola scandals broke he seems to have been on the way down, given that after making two films for Columbia his next movie project, Rock, Rock, Rock!, was under the less prestigious auspieces of Harry Romm Productions and Distributors’ Corporation of America. It’s one of those silly rock movies that looks like it cost $12.98 to produce, and Milton Subotsky’s screenplay reads like Romm bought it from a homeless person carrying a sign reading, “Will write for food.” Its plot is even more trivial than the stories of most of these movies: Dori (Tuesday Weld) is a young suburban teenager whose principal concern is getting a dazzling evening dress and getting her boyfriend Tommy Rogers (Teddy Randazzo) to take her to the high-school prom — while her dad (Jack Collins), in order to teach her the value of money, cuts off all her charge accounts just before she’s expecting to buy her prom dress. So Dori decides to try to make the money for the dress by becoming a banker, accepting a $15 “deposit” from her friend Arabella (Fran Manfred) and loaning it to her bitter rival, Gloria (Jacqueline Kerr) — the usual stuck-up bitch in these productions; she seems like the Jane Withers character from Bright Eyes about a decade later — who wants to buy a prom dress that will outdo everyone else’s. Thinking that she’s only charging 1 percent interest, she demands $15 in interest along with the $15 principal as her repayment — apparently Dori has been cutting too many math classes — and Gloria accepts the terms, then rats Dori out to Tommy and threatens to expose her to the whole school unless Tommy takes her, not Dori, to the prom. This plot is, if anything, even more boring on screen than it sounds in this synopsis, but fortunately Alan Freed and his rock stars get long montages of musical numbers to enliven the proceedings even though surprisingly little of the music in this film has much to do with rock ’n’ roll as we think of it today.

Certainly Chuck Berry’s “You Can’t Catch Me” qualifies — even though the dominant instrument on the song is Otis Spann’s blues piano (replacing Berry’s usual pianist, Johnny Johnson, for that one session only) rather than Berry’s guitar — and so does the great rockabilly side “Lonesome Train” by Johnny Burnette’s Rock ’n’ Roll Trio (though the appeal of this one has as much or more to do with the searing electric guitar by Johnny’s brother Dorsey than Johnny’s plummy Elvis-esque voice), and as Charles pointed out the two songs by the Moonglows and two by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers would count as rock if the 1960’s hadn’t taught us to think of rock and soul as different genres. Frankie Lymon comes off here, even more than usually, as the Michael Jackson of the 1950’s, projecting star charisma to spare and singing in a haunting voice that makes him seem wise beyond his years and towering over his group-mates (as well as his brother Lewis, who appeared with a similar act in Jamboree! and couldn’t help but evoke comparisons with the other Jacksons, even though the Lymons never performed together as a brother act the way the Jacksons did). He does two songs in a row — a rare privilege in these musical smorgasbords — one a “counting” song built around numbers the way the early Jackson Five hit “ABC” was built around the alphabet, the other an almost unbearably ironic song called “I’m Not a Juvenile Delinquent” in which Frankie Lymon pledges to follow the straight-and-narrow — advice which, needless to say, he didn’t in real life. Arnold Shaw quotes an interview Lymon gave years after his success in which he was unsurprisingly bitter about the way he was treated, intimating that his managers saw him developing a drug habit and did nothing to stop him because a drugged-up Lymon was less likely than a sober one would have been to ask where all the money he was earning was going. As a result he died in 1968 at age 25 of an overdose of heroin. LaVern Baker — whose name in the credits, along with her listed record affiliation with Atlantic, led Charles to joke that she was the first Black artist credited who did not record for Chess (though Lymon and the Teenagers recorded for Gee, a label in the Roulette family) — plows through “Tra-La-La,” one of the nonsense novelty songs she hated but which sold millions of records for her; she wanted the kind of material Dinah Washington was getting and at one point persuaded Atlantic to let her do a Bessie Smith tribute album, which bombed. Jimmy Cavallo and the House Rockers, a rambunctious Haley-esque white band with two saxophone players, do two songs, one of which makes the spectacularly wrong prediction that the signature instrument of rock will be … the tenor sax.

Those are the musical high points; the rest of the film is filled with surprisingly lame non-rock pop ballads, including some sung in character by Teddy Randazzo and Connie Francis (as Tuesday Weld’s voice double) reflecting the ups-and-downs of their characters’ on-screen romance; Randazzo is clearly going after the Sinatra style (at a time when just about every aspiring male singer of Italian-American ancestry was lighting candles to photos of Sinatra!) and he’s got the voice to pull it off but not the Master’s sense of phrasing — and he isn’t helped by annoyingly shrill, brass-heavy arrangements that had Charles and I joking we were listening to Joshua’s trumpet section. And Connie Francis is … well, Connie Francis; she had a pleasant but thin voice and she seems to carry around her echo chamber with her the way Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly seemed able to materialize taps on their shoes whenever a dance number required them. Rock, Rock, Rock! is a lumbering mess of a movie, fun to watch when the more soulful rock and soul performers are on screen but saddled with one of the dullest and most trivial plots of all time and all too many non-rock acts on the musical program, including Cirino and the Bowties (at a time when many people still remembered that bow ties had been a Sinatra trademark in the 1940’s), a knock-off of the “Four” groups — the Four Aces, Four Lads, Four Freshmen, Brothers Four, etc. — who seem decidedly out of place in a film called Rock, Rock, Rock! If nothing else, Rock, Rock, Rock! shows that the takeover of pop music by rock ’n’ roll in the 1950’s was nowhere near as total as the legend would have it; groups with virtually no connection to rock were still making it big on the charts and selling lots of records. Indeed, many of Freed’s package tours included big bands — on one he had Count Basie, who’d just made it big with the rock audience with the 1955 hit “Every Day I Have the Blues” with singer Joe Williams — and the final number in this movie is an instrumental that, aside from the heavy backbeat with which the drummer is playing, wouldn’t have sounded out of place in the 1940’s and features ex-Duke Ellington tenor saxophonist Al Sears. During the early scene in which Dori’s dad joins her and Arabella on the couch as Freed’s TV show is playing — and gets so excited by what he’s hearing and seeing he pushes Arabella off the end of the couch — I half-expected him to say, “Of course I like this music! It sounds just like the big-band swing your mom and I listened to when we were dating!”

Hey, Let's Twist! (Harry Romm Productions/Paramount, 1961)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the dreariness of the first rock movie Charles and I watched last night, Rock, Rock, Rock!, our second one, Hey, Let’s Twist!, was a revelation (and it helped that we were watching it in a quite good DVD transfer from The Video Beat instead of a crummy download from archive.org — at times the picture quality on Rock, Rock, Rock! was so ghostly Charles got the impression that the Moonglows and the Teenagers were racially mixed groups because the guys in the back had so much color drained from their faces that in this cheap black-and-white film, ill treated through years of abuse and generations of copying, they looked white). Not that it was any great shakes as a film, but its director, Greg Garrison, was miles ahead of the director of Rock, Rock, Rock!, Will Price, in doing creative camera angles and rapid-fire cutting. Instead of presenting the performances from one static camera shooting from one unchanging angle, as Price and most of the directors of the Freed movies did, Garrison propels us into the action and makes the music of his star attraction, Joey Dee and the Starliters, as exciting as the script by Hal Hackady (a name that seems to invite bad puns!) tells us it is. (He also fills the screen with lots of close-up of women’s butts encased in tight knit pants — obviously he didn’t want to fall into the trap of previous rock movies that had appealed mainly to girls; he wanted to give straight guys a reason to watch it as well!) Return with us to those thrilling days of 1961, when there was a new dance craze called the Twist and it had two ruling gods, a Black one named Chubby Checker and a white one named Joey Dee. Actually “The Twist,” the song, had been written by 1950’s R&B vet Hank Ballard and recorded by his group, The Midnighters, in 1960 — only, in one of the most boneheaded decisions of all time, Ballard and his record company, King, decided to put “The Twist” as the B-side of Ballard’s haunting R&B ballad “Teardrops on Your Letter.” Enter Chubby Checker and the guys at Cameo-Parkway Records, who heard a hit song buried on Ballard’s B-side and had Checker record it in virtually the same arrangement.

The result was a record whose sales soared into the stratosphere, and also attracted a white imitator named Joey Dee, who recorded something called “The Peppermint Twist” (itself largely ripped off from Ray Charles, specifically his original “What’d I Say” and his arrangement of Hank Snow’s country hit “I’m Movin’ On”) and held forth at the Peppermint Lounge in New York City, where his record label, Roulette, recorded him live … well, at least they said they did; in fact his album was studio-recorded with a lot of applause and crowd noise dubbed in later to make it sound live. (A lot of faux “live” albums were made that way in the early 1960’s.) Needless to say, both Chubby Checker and Joey Dee got movie deals out of their Twist successes (while Hank Ballard grabbed at least a bit of the revenue when King reissued his version of “The Twist” as an A-side; at one point America was so Twist-crazy that Checker’s “The Twist” was number one on the charts and Ballard’s was right behind it at number two!). Checker signed with Columbia and got put into excruciatingly exact remakes of the Alan Freed movies Rock Around the Clock and Don’t Knock the Rock — inevitably retitled Twist Around the Clock and Don’t Knock the Twist — while Dee signed with Harry Romm Productions, who commissioned a script from Hal Hackady that purported to tell the story of how Joey Dee had invented the Twist (which, as noted above, he hadn’t) but really recycled The Jazz Singer along with every 1930’s and 1940’s movie about a star who lets sudden success go to his head and abandons his true values to attract lots of money and a spoiled rich girl. In this one the Al Jolson role is split between two brothers, Enrico (Joey Dee) and Rosario (Teddy Randazzo — so last night Charles and I were unwittingly having a Teddy Randazzo film festival!) DiDonato, whose father (Dino Di Luca) has somehow been scraping $1,000 to send his two boys to college, Rosario to be a lawyer and Enrico a teacher, even though his only visible, above-board source of income is a decrepit Italian restaurant called the Neapolitan Gardens whose sole customer base is the younger DiDonatos and its hostess, Angie (Kay Armen), who’s been in unrequited love with Daddy DiDonato ever since his wife died a few years before. What Dad doesn’t realize is that it’s really costing his sons $3,000 each to go to college, and they’re making up the difference by fronting a rock band that plays Twist songs.

They come home for Christmas break and break it to Dad that they don’t want to go to college anymore; they want to quit school and play music full-time — and the shock propels Dad into a nervous breakdown that lasts for several reels. Eventually, charged with running the Neapolitan Gardens while their father is convalescing, the kids put in a bandstand, put the tables together and make it into the Peppermint Lounge nightclub — which is an instant hit with the neighborhood kids and makes The Twist the irresistible dance craze it was for real when this film was released. Of course, things can’t stay that way; Hackady has to introduce some complications, and they duly show up in the person of Sharon (Zohra Lampert in a nice bad-girl performance), a gossip columnist who arranges for the Starliters to play at the Toy Ball, her big fundraiser of the year. They’re introduced to the smart set, and Rosario — who’s been rechristened “Ricky Dee” in the publicity for the event, as Enrico has become “Joey Dee” — is immediately smitten with Sharon and the world of people like Walter Winchell, Elsa Maxwell and Ed Sullivan to whom she introduces the young, naïve brothers. Hackady seems to have been channeling the script for the 1956 film of James M. Cain’s Serenade for this character — especially the role played by Joan Fontaine (who was a Gay man in Cain’s novel), who’s described as burning through protégés in three weeks, then getting bored, dumping them and leaving them behind with a cheery unconcern about what they’re going to do with the rest of their lives. In Sharon’s entourage is a good girl, Piper (Jo Ann Campbell), who also falls for Ricky — and Joey falls in unrequited love with her — and the film’s climax is when the Peppermint Lounge forsakes its no-cover, no-minimum, no-reservations policy and drives away the kids in Sharon’s demented effort to make it a spot for the 1 percent. Instead of making more money with Sharon’s policy, the newly redecorated Peppermint Lounge bombs, and Ricky disappears after Sharon rejects his marriage proposal (but keeps the ring he was going to give her for an engagement ring — she’s that kind of woman). Meanwhile, back at the Peppermint Lounge, proximity works its magic and, with Ricky gone, Piper decides that Joey is the DiDonato brother she really loves. They reopen the lounge with its old policy, it’s a hit again, and six months later Ricky finally returns — he had (surprise!) gone back to college and got his law degree after all, deciding to let Joey be the musician in the family.

Hey, Let’s Twist! isn’t a great movie, but it’s the kind of innocent fun a rock ’n’ roll movie ought to be and it benefits from a cast of people who can actually act. Joey Dee isn’t called upon to do much more than play himself (or at least Hal Hackady’s movie-clichéd version of himself) but he does so with an easy power and authority that commands the screen, and Randazzo — who shone in Rock, Rock, Rock! simply because the rest of its cast (particularly Tuesday Weld and Fran Manfred) were so incredibly incompetent, mouthing their wretched lines like porn stars who couldn’t wait to get to the sex — seemed to have improved as an actor in the intervening four years. The actors who play Dad and Angie are also surprisingly good, managing to flesh out the clichéd bones of their characters — and Kay Armen actually gets to sing two songs, an Italian song at the beginning and a Twist number at the end, and does them quite beautifully. Jo Ann Campbell is the weak link of the cast as far as acting is concerned, but when she gets up in the final scene to belt out her Twist number, that ceases to matter; as a singer and especially as a dancer, she grips the screen. One thing I noticed while watching Hey, Let’s Twist! was how derivative many of the songs were — not only did Dee’s big hit “The Peppermint Twist” rip off Ray Charles, he also does a song called “Roly Poly” which is actually a clever rewrite of the melody of “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” and another one called “Shakin’ and Twistin’” which is a blatant ripoff of Chuck Berry’s “Around and Around.” Another thing I noticed was that Joey Dee and the Starliters were actually a racially mixed band — their keyboard player and drummer were both Black, and the film doesn’t make a dramatic issue of this at all, though even in 1961, 24 years after the Benny Goodman Quartet became the first racially mixed band on film in the Warners’ musical Hollywood Hotel, it still seemed surprising to see white and Black musicians playing together on screen. Charles noted that when Dee covered the Isley Brothers’ “Shout” — he was, as far as I know, the first white person to do this song — you could hear one of his Black band members shout the famous line from the Isleys’ original, “Now wa-a-a-ait a min-ute! I feel a-a-a-a-l ri-i-i-ight!,” and all of a sudden the song seems to erupt into a new and more soulful world far removed from the Twisting pretensions of Joey Dee and all the white kids in the movie (though before she made this film, Jo Ann Campbell had covered LaVern Baker’s hit “Jim Dandy” and done surprisingly well by it — as she did by Johnny Otis’s “Willie and the Hand Jive”), a harbinger of the rest of the 1960’s in which white musicians would not only take over the Black forms of rhythm-and-blues and rock ’n’ roll but legitimately extend them into the shimmering vistas of psychedelica.

86th Annual Academy Awards (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences/ABC, March 2, 2014)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The 86^th annual Academy Awards turned out to be a well-turned program — it ran just a few minutes over the 3 ½-hour time slot ABC allotted to it — but also a dull one. Ellen DeGeneres was tapped as the host for the second time (she did it before in 2005) but it seems as if years of hosting a talk show have really taken the edge off her humor. She took a “selfie” of herself and posted it to Twitter (the biggest acknowledgment of what century this is was the heavy references to social media in general and Twitter in particular; at one point Ellen claimed to have crashed the whole Twitter network, which she hadn’t), and she also ordered three pizzas delivered as if they would be enough to feed the Academy’s entire live audience. The awards were oddly split: for much of the evening Gravity (a peril-in-outer-space thriller with George Clooney and Sandra Bullock as astronauts thrown from a damaged spacecraft and fighting for their survival — not a movie I’m in any hurry to see; my reaction was basically, “I’ve already seen Apollo 13”) seemed headed for an old-fashioned sweep. It ultimately won seven awards, more than any other single film, but the Best Picture went to 12 Years a Slave (once again the Academy’s weird prejudices strike: they gave 12 Years a Slave Best Picture but passed over its Black director, Steve McQueen, in favor of Alfonso Cuarón for Gravity — so instead of the first African-American Best Director winner we got the first Mexican Best Director winner), which also won for Best Supporting Actress (Lupita Nyong’o) and Best Adapted Screenplay (John Ridley — they’ll give a Black guy a writing award but not one for directing). The Great Gatsby, one of the few films on the nominated list Charles and I actually saw together, won awards for production design and costume design — both of them for Catherine Martin, who got her job by sleeping with the boss (she’s the wife of the film’s director, Baz Luhrmann) and wore one of the most spectacular costumes of the night: apparently she was determined to show the Academy and the international TV audience that she’s just a good designer for herself off-screen as she is for her husband’s casts on-screen!

By far the most powerful moments of the telecast were two with women singing; Darlene Love came up as part of the ensemble to accept the Best Documentary Feature award for the film 20 Feet from Stardom (a film about backing vocalists) and did a stunning a cappella version of “His Eye Is On the Sparrow,” and later in the show Idina Menzel, a singer I’d never heard of before, came on and did an absolutely riveting version of one of the nominated songs, “Let It Go” from the computer-animated film Frozen. Menzel is the best white woman soul singer I’ve heard since Duffy, and I’m sure it’s the sheer power of her voice (singing a quite good number that’s absolutely right for her) — she did the song in the film itself — that helped the song win the award over competition from U2 (a low-keyed all-acoustic number called “Ordinary Love” from a film about one of Bono’s pet subjects, the fight against apartheid: Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom), Pharrell Williams (who came out not only wearing that silly Mountie hat with which he disfigured the Grammy Awards but an even sillier Mountie jacket as well; recalling that at least according to the script of Happy Face Killer, Keith Jesperson committed his first murder when the trick he’d brought home insisted on trying on his Mountie hat and sent him into a murderous rage, I couldn’t help but wonder where Jesperson was when we needed him!) and someone named Karen O. There were a few of the usual tributes to older movies, including a 75^th anniversary salute to The Wizard of Oz that featured all three of Judy Garland’s children, Liza Minnelli and Lorna and Joey Luft, as well as a performance of “Over the Rainbow” by Pink. That was an odd experience because Pink has quite a good, powerful voice but little sense of phrasing; she’s great in her usual material but clueless as to how to project a standard, and I couldn’t help but wish the Academy had got Lady Gaga instead (Gaga proved in her marvelous version of “The Lady Is a Tramp” with Tony Bennett on the Duets II album that she does know how to phrase a song of that vintage!).