Poirot: Three-Act Tragedy (BBC, 2011)

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

Our “feature” last night was an episode of the long-running (13 seasons, and still going!) BBC-TV series Poirot, based on Agatha Christie’s famous detective character Hercule Poirot. Frankly, I find most of Christie’s work boring because for all her ingenuity at constructing elaborate (sometimes way too elaborate to be believable) murder plots, she didn’t give a damn about character complexity or consistency — which was why the 1937 British film Love from a Stranger, based on a Christie story called “Philomel Cottage” and starring Basil Rathbone as a Verdoux-esque serial killer of women who’ve just come into money, was such a pleasant surprise: it was a psychological thriller instead of a whodunit, and for once in her life Christie actually created a multidimensional and complex villain. Alas, the present episode was based on one of her mechanical-box mysteries called “Three-Act Tragedy,” adapted by Nick Dear, politely directed by Ashley Pearce and with David Suchet expertly playing Poirot as the annoying, supercilious ninny he comes off as in her books as well. Most of the story takes place at the country estate of well-known actor Sir Charles Cartwright (Martin Shaw), who keeps throwing dinner parties at which someone gets knocked off after drinking an alcoholic beverage. The first to go is the harmless Rev. Babbington (Nigel Pegram), who dies after ingesting a martini served from a collective tray — and the initial assumption, reinforced by a coroner’s verdict, is that Babbington, an old man, simply keeled over and died of natural causes. Well, that’s suspicious enough given that this is an Agatha Christie story, and nobody in a Christie story ever dies of natural causes — she wasn’t about to pull the gimmick some other mystery writers used of having the supposed “murder” victim either turn up alive after all or die of something that didn’t involve the intervention of another human — and Poirot and Cartwright are vacationing in Monte Carlo (mainly so director Pearce can get in some cool shots of the Orient Express as it looked in the 1930’s, when the locomotives were still steam-driven) when they receive word that two days earlier, at another Cartwright-hosted dinner party, Cartwright’s lifelong friend Sir Bartholomew Strange (Martin Shaw) also croaked, in his case just after drinking a glass of port wine. As usual, Christie throws a lot of suspects our way — mostly the regular dinner guests at Cartwright’s parties — and a few odd curves, including the failure of police lab techs to find any residue of poison in the glasses from which the victims drank (explained eventually by Poirot’s deduction that the killer had the sleight-of-hand skills of a stage magician and switched the glasses so the ones the cops examined were poison-free) before a climax, set on the stage of a theatre, in which Poirot reveals that the killer was … well, you don’t have to read this if you don’t want to, but it was Sir Charles Cartwright himself.

It seems he had fallen in love with a femme fatale — or as close to one as Christie was capable of writing, which wasn’t very — nicknamed “Egg” (Kimberley Nixon), only she expected him to marry her and he couldn’t do that because he already had a wife whom he couldn’t divorce because she was a mental patient in a sanitarium. (I strongly suspect Christie stole this plot device from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, a literary classic by a British woman author miles ahead of Christie in talent and intrinsic interest.) Instead of doing the seemingly logical thing and killing his wife — Cartwright explains that he didn’t do that because he’d have been the prime suspect, though if he could get away with knocking off an elderly minister who couldn’t do him any harm and passing off his first killing as a natural death, surely he could have done the same with a middle-aged woman in a mental institution! — he went after his lifelong friend Dr. Strange (later the title of a Marvel comic book, by the way, though that Dr. Strange wasn’t an M.D. but a stage magician who used his powers to solve crimes) because the good doctor had been the best man at Cartwright’s wedding, which he underwent under the name “Mugg” (his birth name) and therefore figured he could make a bigamous marriage with Egg since, once he knocked off the doctor, no one would associate the famous Mr. Cartwright with the insignificant mental patient Mrs. Mugg. As for the murder of the reverend, Poirot calls it a “dress rehearsal” Cartwright went through to practice his murder method — aw, come on! That’s far-fetched even by Christie’s standards! It’s precisely the coincidence of two similar deaths at Cartwright’s dinner parties that leads both Poirot and the police to investigate! There’s also a red-herring suspect, an inexperienced butler named Ellis who turns out to be … you guessed it, Sir Charles Cartwright in disguise, using his acting skills to play a butler and then have the character “disappear” to set up a false lead. There’s a certain poignancy in the final confession Cartwright makes — though I think that’s more Martin Shaw’s skills as an actor (he bears an intriguing resemblance to Claude Rains) than either the writing or the direction. If you must watch filmed entertainments featuring Hercule Poirot, stick to the big-budget movies Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile from the 1970’s, with their multi-star casts and performances as Poirot by Albert Finney and Peter Ustinov that at least make the guy tolerable and don’t leave you wondering why the killer de jour doesn’t just knock him off! One final point about “Three-Act Tragedy” is that the small role of Lady Mary is played by Jane Asher, an actress with connections to rock ’n’ roll royalty; she was Paul McCartney’s principal girlfriend in the mid-1960’s (Roger Corman, who directed her in Masque of the Red Death in 1963, recalled her telling him, “My boyfriend is in a band — want to come see them?” Corman begged off, little knowing that within a year Asher’s boyfriend and his three bandmates would be the biggest pop-music stars in the world!) and her brother Peter was the “Peter” of Peter and Gordon and later the producer who pushed James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt to superstardom.

The Mentor (Lifetime, 2014)

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

The Mentor turned out to be a typical Lifetime production (no production company credits are up on imdb.com yet), co-written by Christine Conradt with Susan Atkinson and Tony Lefresne, the last of whom also directed, and so tightly scripted to the usual Conradt formula (even though she had two co-writers and the supposed “inspiration” of a true story) one wonders why she didn’t call it The Perfect Mentor. According to imdb.com, which credits Conradt with the script solo even though the on-screen credits list Atkinson and Lefresne as well, Christine Conradt was born October 7, 1973 in Omaha, and she has well-scrubbed blonde good looks that only hint at the dark fantasies that come out in her scripts. (Actually she looks like the same sort of physical type that usually gets cast as the “pussy in peril” in her scripts.) In last week’s Lifetime “world premiere” “Social Saturday” movie, The Secret Sex Life of a Single Mom, Conradt had tried to deviate from her usual formula; as I commented about it, “It’s certainly different from the scripts that made Christine Conradt’s reputation and made her the Lifetime auteur — there aren’t any psychos (even Robert, the closest thing this film has to a villain, is merely a bad old-fashioned male-chauvinist husband), there aren’t any ‘perfect’ people drawing the innocent heroine into a web of craziness and physical peril, there isn’t any big last-minute rescue in which the police have to come in and save Our Heroine from the person in whom she’s placed too much trust.” Well, this time around Conradt fans can breathe easier: The Mentor does contain a psycho who poses as a “perfect” person to draw the innocent heroine into a web of craziness and physical peril, and there is a big last-minute rescue in which the police have to come in and save Our Heroine from the person in which she’s placed too much trust. (And it looks from the titles of Conradt’s upcoming projects on imdb.com — Guilty at 17, listed as “completed,” and My Life as a Dead Girl, currently in post-production, that like the proverbial shoemaker she’s sticking to her last.)

Our Heroine is Elizabeth May (Jes Macallan), who has a nice lifestyle as a stay-at-home suburban mom with her tennis-pro husband Brian (Nic Bishop) and their two daughters, Pippa (Maggie Scott) and Meghan (Abigail Scott — it looks like the casting director got two actual sisters to portray the on-screen sisters), when one day as they’re driving back home from their cabin in the country to their nice suburban estate (just how much do tennis pros at fancy country clubs make, anyway?), Brian is distracted by his cell phone, he sees another car stalled out on the road, his own car crashes and the other three are unscathed but her older daughter Pippa is killed. The remaining Mays go to such demented lengths to keep Pippa’s memory alive — even to writing her a birthday card and sending it aloft on helium balloons, presumably so it will reach her in heaven — that Meghan feels guilty about having any fun at all because Pippa isn’t there to share it. (It reminded me of the similarly demented lengths Bela Lugosi’s character in The Invisible Ghost went to keep the memory of his presumably dead wife alive, including serving her a meal every year on the anniversary of her “death” — though, being a character in a Lugosi film, she isn’t dead at all; she’s hiding out on the grounds of his home and periodically hypnotizing him into killing someone.) The strains of the grief process lead Brian and Elizabeth to separate and Elizabeth to apply to resume her former career as a teacher, and since she’s been out of the profession for a few years her school’s principal (Yolanda Wood — yes, once again, the big authority figures, including the lead detective who investigates the inevitable murder midway through, are African-American!) suggests that Elizabeth be assigned a mentor to show her the ropes. Fellow teacher Paul Allenham (Aaron Douglas) eagerly snaps up the assignment, though we know he’s a crazy with a psychopathic hatred of women. None of the other characters know that, but we do because we’ve previously seen him accost a woman, Vanessa (Nichelle Aiden), in a bar and, despite never having seen her before, denounce her as a slut. The bartender calls the cops and the cops escort him out but take a note of the incident and get Vanessa’s contact information. (After Elliot Rodger’s recent rampage in Santa Barbara, in which he’s alleged to have killed seven people and wounded 13 to get revenge against every woman who refused to have sex with him, this scene no doubt plays quite differently than Conradt and her collaborators thought it would when they wrote it.)

Meanwhile, Paul shows all the classic indicia of a movie stalker; he goes through Elizabeth’s garbage, secretly photographs her and collects images of her on one of his apartment walls, and poses as a man named “John Connor” to sign up for Brian’s tennis lessons so he can keep an eye on his unrequited inamorata’s husband as well. (Christine Conradt may have intentionally studded her script with references to rock musicians; I found it amusing that the stalker has the same first name as one of the Beatles and takes an alias that’s another Beatle’s first name, and the husband’s name, “Brian May,” is that of the lead guitarist and co-principal songwriter of Queen, who for some reason has been virtually forgotten even though he, unlike Freddy Mercury, is still alive.) Paul gets jealous when Elizabeth goes to lunch with another teacher at Vista Avenue Elementary School, Pam (Renny Grames), instead of him, and when Pam tells Paul that Elizabeth isn’t interested in him that way, Paul responds by killing Pam and trying to frame Milo (Rocky Myers, easily the hottest guy in this movie!), the school janitor, for the crime. Through all of this Paul is incessantly harangued by his sister Amber (Clare Niederpruem), who when they were both 17 (they were fraternal twins) slipped him an anonymous Valentine’s Day note, left him wondering which schoolgirl thought he was hot, then dropped the bomb that she sent it as a prank because no one would want to have sex with him. In response he got angry and smothered her with a pillow, killing her, then posed as the grief-stricken brother and years later attracted Elizabeth (though not romantically on her part) by saying that since they’d both lost family members, they had a lot in common and should be friends. Alas, like Anthony Perkins’ mother in Psycho, Amber has survived in Paul’s consciousness and periodically has “conversations” with him, goading him to go after women and then attack or kill them.

It all ends pretty much the way you think it’s going to end, with Paul drugging Brian’s water bottle and kidnapping him, ordering him to write a note that will make his murder look like suicide, then actually shooting him — though we get a close-up of Brian’s eyes blinking, just to assure us before the last commercial break that Brian isn’t quite dead and there’s still a chance he can recover — and then Paul goes to Elizabeth, tells her he’s killed her husband so they can be together, and she plays along until she can grab his gun, they both reach for it (Maurine Watkins, your plagiarism attorney is returning your call from his vacation villa on the French Riviera, which he thanks you for paying for) and Paul is incapacitated, though at the end it’s shown that he, too, is still alive and the cops take him into custody. The Mentor is good Christine Conradt — and her director and co-writer, Tony Lefresne, backs up her script with appropriately Gothic direction (even though there’s one bizarre sequence when Pam is about to be murdered, where he quotes the opening setups from the shower scene in Psycho before he and Conradt pull a switcheroo on us and have Paul kill Pam, not in the shower, but in bed with a pillow the way Paul killed his sister Amber years before) — though she’s written better scripts than this. Still, it’s an indication of how well she’s mastered her formula, and the actors in the three leads inhabit their parts well enough even though I would have wished for someone hotter than Nic Bishop as Brian — the man is supposed to be an athlete, after all!

The Pirate (MGM, begun 1946, released 1948)

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

The Pirate remains a great favorite of mine, the sophisticated musical Judy Garland had desperately wanted to make for so long and the perfect Garland movie for those people Aljean Harmetz interviewed outside the Castro Theatre in San Francisco who said they loved everything about The Wizard of Oz except the “There’s no place like home!” theme. In The Pirate, Judy plays a young woman who’s desperate to get out of the Caribbean village of Calvados (while the Spanish were still in charge in the early 19th century) and is in love with her fantasy image of Macoco the Pirate, little knowing that the fat old town mayor her aunt (Gladys Cooper) wants her to marry (Walter Slezak) is Macoco, retired but still with a price on his head. The love interest is supplied by Serafin (Gene Kelly), actor, director, hypnotist, acrobat and all-around dashing romantic figure, who impersonates Macoco the Pirate (after finding out who Macoco really is!) to try to seduce Our Heroine. Judy was in particularly parlous shape when she was filming The Pirate — after a development process that began as early as 1943, shooting in fact started in 1946, a rough cut was made and shelved in 1947 and she actually made a whole other film, Easter Parade, before retakes on The Pirate were made and the film actually got finished and released in 1948 — and I’ve always felt the reason she was particularly difficult to work with (and visibly strung out through much of the footage) is that The Pirate strongly mirrored her own plight at the time, with her own Calvados being MGM; the character of her aunt being her mother in real life; the Walter Slezak character being Minnelli (or perhaps Louis B. Mayer — Judy’s therapist actually insisted Minnelli give up the job of directing Easter Parade because in her mind he had become the personification of MGM and their work together was no longer bolstering their marriage, but threatening it); and the Gene Kelly character being the dream man she hoped would come along and take her away from all this, who finally (life imitating art) turned out to be her third husband, Sid Luft.

As it stands, The Pirate is a magnificent movie: vividly staged, photographed (Harry Stradling’s cinematography is an all-out exploitation of the vividness and garishness of three-strip Technicolor), directed (Minnelli’s penchant for artsiness and stylization exactly fit the story, for once), written (by Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, who also wrote the Thin Man films and It’s a Wonderful Life) and acted (notably by Garland, Kelly, Cooper, Slezak and George Zucco, playing the viceroy and getting one of his rare chances to act in a big-budget movie). It’s one of those rare musicals, like Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight 16 years earlier, that actually revels in the artificiality of the form and plays with it. It’s also a surprisingly dark movie, full of meditations on repression and fantasy, with a good deal more depth than your typical musical of the period — I can see why Minnelli, looking back on it 20 years later, said “the marketing of the film was bad”; the trailer, which Turner Classic Movies showed ahead of the film, made it seem like just another nice, emptily entertaining Judy Garland musical, sort of like The Harvey Girls with a Spanish accent, and gave no impression of what the movie really was like. — 3/8/98

•••••

TCM is doing pirate movies every Friday this month and last night they concentrated for at least part of the evening on pirate spoofs — and I got to re-watch most of the magnificent 1948 MGM release The Pirate, starring Judy Garland and Gene Kelly in a vivid and brilliant musical directed by Garland’s then-husband, Vincente Minnelli, from a script that had gone through various incarnations. It was originally a German play called Der Seeraüber by Ludwig Fulda, about a sheltered rich girl on a Caribbean island who has romantic dreams about a legendary pirate. S. N. Behrman bought the American rights and wrote a whole new script around the central premise, which was produced on Broadway in 1942 as a vehicle for the husband-and-wife acting team of Alfred Lunt and Lynne Fontanne. MGM bought the movie rights, intending to make it as Behrman had written it — a non-musical comedy — with Walter Pidgeon and Greer Garson in the leads. But the project stalled, and so in 1946 MGM’s ace musical producer, Arthur Freed, asked Louis B. Mayer for permission to develop it as a musical. Once he got the green light, Freed assigned Judy Garland and Gene Kelly for the leads and hired Cole Porter to do the songs. Porter had just come off a colossal Broadway flop, Orson Welles’ production of Around the World in 80 Days, and reports were that he had lost his mojo. Freed believed them and rejected Porter’s first four songs, but eventually got a score that more or less satisfied him. He also spent over $140,000 of MGM’s money on a fabulous wardrobe for Garland, designed by Tom Keogh and executed by Barbara Karinska, who had worked on ballets with Picasso. Freed also assigned Anita Loos and Joseph Than to adapt Behrman’s play into a script, then rejected their work after he found that they’d flipped the central premise of the plot — they’d changed the male lead from an actor impersonating a pirate to a pirate impersonating an actor. So he brought a new screenwriting team, the married couple Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich (just coming off It’s a Wonderful Life), to whip out a script that stuck to Behrman’s (and Fulda’s) original concept.

He also assigned Minnelli to direct — his third and last film with Garland, whose psychiatrist advised her that if she wanted to keep her marriage together, she could no longer have him as her boss at work as well because then he would come to personify MGM, which by then she had come to regard as a gilded prison. Garland went to pieces almost as soon as she started work on The Pirate, making pre-recordings of Porter’s songs “Love of My Life” and “Mack the Black” (the theme song of the famous pirate Macoco). According to Freed’s biographer Hugh Fordin, Jr., “The songs needed the intense, exultant delivery for which she was famous. That day it simply wasn’t there.” Freed had the Hacketts fatten Kelly’s part in case Garland proved too weak to carry the film on her own, and Kelly enjoyed that because he was interested in broadening his range; he wanted to become an action hero in the mold of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. (right after The Pirate he’d remake one of Fairbanks’ most famous roles, D’Artagnan in The Three Musketeers, and like Fairbanks he’d do all his own stunts) and saw in the mountebank character of traveling actor Serafin a chance to break free of his image as just another song-and-dance man. Throughout 1947 production on The Pirate progressed sporadically as Garland repeatedly broke down, unable to work, and when she did show up she embarrassed herself, her co-stars and her crew — many of whom had known and worked with her since she was a child star ­— by pathetically going up to each of them and demanding drugs. Eventually a rough cut was previewed and met with audience hostility, so The Pirate was shelved and its stars were reassigned to other films — Kelly to a comedy called In a Great Big Way and Garland to Easter Parade, on which, playing a far simpler character in a less sophisticated film for a director she wasn’t married to, she had a much easier time and worked efficiently and effectively. But with so much of the studio’s money and prestige invested in The Pirate, neither Mayer nor Freed was going to scrap it completely, so they brought back Garland and Kelly for retakes and finally pieced together a version that was released in 1948, whereupon it was a resounding commercial flop.

“The diary of The Pirate does not present a pretty picture, and the accusing finger points at Judy Garland,” Hugh Fordin, Jr. wrote. “But Judy was not temperamental; she was not a spoiled star, as those with only a superficial view propound with malice in their hearts. Judy was at war with herself. She was very bright and very sensitive and constantly aware of her shortcomings. Paired with her physical frailty, this produced extreme highs and extreme lows. The well of nervous energy on which she fed was dry. It needed replenishing.” After previous viewings of The Pirate I’ve formed the theory that the film’s plot was, unwittingly, a strikingly exact parallel of Judy Garland’s actual life when she made it. Her character, Manuela, lives as a virtual prisoner on the island of Calvados, dominated by her aunt (Gladys Cooper) who’s raised her as a single parent, as the real Judy was dominated by a mother she couldn’t stand and who’d raised her as a single parent after the death of her dad when Judy was 12. The aunt has promised Manuela in marriage to the town’s mayor, Don Pedro Vargas (Walter Slezak), a repulsive middle-aged man she can’t stand but feels trapped with — in my reading, Calvados represents MGM and Don Pedro is Judy’s ultimate boss, Louis B. Mayer, who wasn’t interested in her physically but did have her trapped in a contract from which she longed to be free. And Serafin represents a character whom Judy hadn’t encountered yet in real life — the person who would break her out of MGM and free her to be a live entertainer, free to work or not work depending on how much she wanted to and how capable she felt instead of having her act turned into a nine-to-five day job as the studio system did with everyone it signed — but who came later (or at least she thought he had until that relationship soured, too) in the person of her third husband, producer and entrepreneur Sid Luft. What’s more, I think Judy Garland was aware of the parallels between the plot of The Pirate and the psychodrama of her actual life when she made the film, and it was that which sent her off the rails and made her even more troublesome and difficult to work with than she usually was by 1946-48. The edgy tension between The Pirate’s plot, as silly as it is in synopsis, and what Judy was really going through bursts through on the screen; as Gary Carey described her in his book on MGM, in The Pirate “she’s visibly strung out, barely in control of her voice and movements, almost anorexic in appearance.” (Charles caught on to the anorexia when he watched The Pirate with me; he said the film made him wish he could walk into the screen, take her aside and say, “Judy — eat something!”)

And yet it becomes a great film precisely because Judy’s real-life traumas add depth and power to her characterization; Manuela becomes, not a cardboard character in a farce, but a desperate woman, visibly trapped among powerful people controlling her and trying to keep her trapped in a life she can’t stand, and expressing her rage even at the man who can free her from it all. As Fordin noted, the fight between Judy’s and Kelly’s characters that precedes the song “You Can Do No Wrong” “was intended to be played in a tongue-in-cheek rage, in the mood of a farce. Instead it became a frantic, hysterical outburst, making Judy’s condition painfully apparent.” Frankly, I think it works better that way; Judy’s rages are all too real — and so is Kelly’s shock at seeing this woman who had helped sponsor his career (she had insisted on him as the male lead in his first film, For Me and My Gal) turn so vicious and almost uncontrollable. The Pirate is a surprisingly dark film, transcending its farce plot and touching on deep issues of class, social position, image (the film’s big switcheroo is that the seemingly respectable mayor Manuela is being forced to marry is in fact the pirate Macoco she’s been dreaming of) and the whole impossible situation people are placed in when others try to dictate what’s best for them and how they should live their lives. It’s also a film I have an affection for because the viceroy who’s summoned at the end to preside over the trial of Serafin for being the pirate Macoco (which he isn’t, and Serafin — who narrowly escaped one of Macoco’s massacres — knows who Macoco really is before anyone else in the film does) is played by George Zucco, making a welcome reappearance in a big production with “A”-list stars a few years after his career seemed to be stuck playing mad-scientist leads in movies like The Mad Monster, Dead Men Walk and The Flying Serpent at PRC. I regard The Pirate as one of Judy Garland’s greatest films — along with The Wizard of Oz, Meet Me in St. Louis, The Clock, A Star Is Born and her final film, the underrated I Could Go On Singing — all of which turned Judy Garland’s real emotions into powerful, indelible screen portrayals and broke the frame between life and art in ways that would become common only after other, similarly tortured stars — Montgomery Clift and Marilyn Monroe in particular — dared to show their real-life vulnerabilities on screen. — 6/14/14

The Princess and the Pirate (Goldwyn/RKO, 1944)

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

After the Judy Garland-Gene Kelly-Vincente Minnelli masterpiece The Pirate, the next film on TCM’s schedule — the 1944 spoof The Princess and the Pirate, with Virginia Mayo as the princess, Victor McLaglen as the pirate and Bob Hope (top-billed) starring as a cowardly actor who gets caught up in the intrigue surrounding them — probably seemed even weaker than it deserved. There are some surprising similarities between the two films: in both, the male lead is an actor (here, “Sylvester the Great: The Man of Seven Faces”) who ends up impersonating a pirate; the female lead is a young woman of privilege running away from an arranged marriage to hook up with a commoner; both are lavish productions in full-out three-strip Technicolor; and they feature at least one cast member in common, Walter Slezak, playing similar characters in both. The film opens on a ship called the Mary Ann on which the Princess Margaret (Virginia Mayo) is sailing, incognito, to join her commoner lover — only, of course, it’s waylaid by a pirate ship captained by the fearsome Barrett, a.k.a. “The Hook” because he’s lost his right hand and replaced it with a hook (were the screenwriters — Curtis Kenyon and Room Service co-author Allan Boretz wrote the adaptation of Sy Bartlett’s story, though Everett Freeman and Don Hartman also get screenplay credit and some of Hope’s radio writers, Melvin Frank, Norman Panama and Melville Shavelson, also worked on it — ripping off the character of Captain Hook in Sir James M. Barrie’s Peter Pan here?).

Sylvester disguises himself as a female gypsy fortuneteller to avoid the wrath of the Hook’s crew members — and ends up with one of them, Featherhead (Walter Brennan), falling in love with him. In some pretty daring sequences given how relentless the Production Code authorities usually were coming down on even the hint of Gayness, Featherhead not only claims “her” as his own but continues his flirtation even after “her” wig comes off and Sylvester is outed as a male. It’s not all that different from the classic closing scene between Jack Lemmon and Joe E. Brown in Some Like It Hot 15 years later, and as weird as it seems to see Walter Brennan playing Gay, he manages to turn it into a legitimate variation on the grizzled-old-coot character roles he usually portrayed. He tells Sylvester and Margaret (who joins them for a successful escape in a dinghy — from what we’ve seen and heard from him before, hearing Walter Brennan say the word “dinghy” is the biggest unintended laugh in this film!) that there’s a fortune in buried pirate treasure on the island of Casa Rouge, which from the looks of things seems like the most amoral place ever depicted in the film since Tortuga in William Wellman’s pre-Code masterpiece Safe in Hell. People are robbed, murdered and abducted in the street with the nominal law enforcers hardly batting an eye — as long as the evildoers have the proper permit — and when Margaret is kidnapped on the street by a fat man in a fancy carriage Sylvester files an official complaint with the island’s governor, La Roche (Walter Slezak). Of course, La Roche is the abductor — Sylvester recognizes him at once — and he’s holding Margaret for a million-pound ransom he’s sure her dad, the King of England, will pay … though, like many another movie villain, greed and lust are at war with him and his plan to sell her for ransom is running afoul of his plan to rape her. It also turns out that La Roche is in league with The Hook, and the plot proceeds through some predictable pirate-movie complications as well as a scene in which Sylvester performs at a tavern called the “Bucket of Blood” with Virginia Mayo bolstering his act by singing a song by Jimmy McHugh and Harold Adamson called “Kiss Me in the Moonlight.” (Mayo really couldn’t sing, and her voice double here, Louanne Hogan, is much less appealing than Jeri Southern, who sang for her in A Song Is Born.)

Surprisingly, the last half-hour is considerably more appealing than the first hour — at least because, rarely for a Bob Hope movie, he’s funnier and more entertaining as a physical comedian than a wisecracker — and it all leads up to a gag ending in which the British Navy comes in as a deus ex machina to rescue the good guys and arrest the bad ones, the King (Robert Warwick) allows Margaret to marry anyone she wants, and she bypasses Sylvester in favor of the guy she’s presumably been in love with all along: an anonymous sailor played in a nice cameo by Bing Crosby. “I work my brains out for nine reels, and some bit player from Paramount comes over and steals my girl,” says a disgusted Sylvester. “That’s the last picture I’ll ever make for Goldwyn!” While Crosby would make an even funnier last-minute appearance in a Hope movie three years later — in My Favorite Brunette, in which Hope is a man unjustly convicted of murder and about to be executed, Crosby is the executioner, and he’s visibly pissed when the last-minute pardon comes through and he doesn’t get to kill Hope after all — this one is quite clever. The Princess and the Pirate in fact was the last movie Hope made for Goldwyn, who’d borrowed him from Paramount for $133,000 and the services of Goldwyn contractee Gary Cooper to play Robert Jordan in Paramount’s film of Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls; Goldwyn got 12 weeks’ worth of Hope’s services and he used them to make a spy spoof called They Got Me Covered and then this, complete with “Ye Goldwynne Girls” (they appear as four houris in La Roche’s palace and momentarily help Hope forget Virginia Mayo) and such spectacular, vibrant color that the Hook gets to wear a vividly bright blue coat and look far spiffier than most grungy movie pirates do. The Princess and the Pirate is a nicely entertaining movie, pretty much par for the course of Hope’s movie vehicles, though he too would get to make some surprisingly dark films (notably Paramount’s 1951 The Great Lover), and with enough references to the Hope-Crosby “Road” films one can’t help but imagine how much funnier it might have been if Crosby had had a full starring role in it!

Criminal Lawyer (Columbia, 1951)

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

Last night Charles and I watched the 1951 film Criminal Lawyer, one of the odd items TCM showed about a month ago as part of a tribute to actress Jane Wyatt. It turned out to be a nice 74-minute quasi-noir “B” in which Pat O’Brien, seedier and considerably more restrained as an actor than usual, played alcoholic attorney James Edward Reagan (incidentally the last name is pronounced “REE-gun,” the way Ronald Reagan pronounced his name when he was an actor, not the “RAY-gun” pronunciation Ronnie adopted when he got into politics). Reagan is a standard-issue high-class shyster, following a character template set in the early 1930’s based on such flamboyant real-life attorneys as New York’s Bill Fallon and L.A.’s Earl Rogers (Rogers was the father of Hearst reporter turned screenwriter Adela Rogers St. John and was Erle Stanley Gardner’s real-life model for the character of Perry Mason). He’s skilled at winning acquittals for gangsters and high-paying clients by staging scenes outside the courtroom that convince juries to vote his way; in the opening scene he discredits the one eyewitness to a killing committed by gangster Vincent Cheney (Mickey Knox) by staging a scene in which the two get photographed together but the witness didn’t recognize Cheney when the picture was taken, contradicting his statement that “I’d know him anywhere.” Reagan alternates between periods of relative sobriety (there’s a clever and amusing scene in which he’s at a bar drinking … milk, which the bartender shame-facedly confesses he’s never served anyone before) and full-scale binges that are jeopardizing not only his legal skills but his physical health as well. The plot by Harold R. Greene shows off the skill of old-time screenwriters at packing numerous incidents in a relatively short (74-minute) running time, as Reagan gets nominated for a judgeship and hopes the promotion will get him out of the sleazy business of representing high-paying clients and getting them off on legal but unethical tricks. Only his judicial appointment first has to be approved by the Bar Association, and a well-connected state senator, Tucker Bourne (Carl Benton Reid), sandbags the appointment.

Then Bill Webber (Darryl Hickman), ne’er-do-well son of 1-percenter Melville Webber (Wallis Clark), gets arrested for manslaughter — he was on his way home from a drunken party when he ran down and killed a pedestrian — and Webber père and Bourne see Reagan together and basically say that if Reagan takes Bill’s case and gets him off, the judgeship will be his. Meanwhile, in anticipation of the judicial appointment, Reagan has turned over both his law office and his long-suffering secretary Maggie Powell (Jane Wyatt) to his partner, Clark P. Sommers (Robert Shayne in a quite good Warren William-style performance), and Sommers has cut a deal with gangster Harry Cheney (Douglas Fowley), Vincent’s brother, to represent him exclusively in exchange for a cut of the profits from Cheney’s criminal enterprises. By staging three fake accidents in which members of the Webber jury nearly run down pedestrians themselves — the “pedestrians” are actually actors hired by Reagan, who’s masterminding Webber’s defense behind the scenes even though Sommers is actually the attorney appearing in court — Reagan wins Bill Webber’s acquittal, only he’s confronted at his home by Mrs. Johnson (Mary Ann Hokanson), widow of Bill Webber’s victim, who pulls a gun on Reagan and tells him that the money the Webber family was originally going to pay her as a settlement instead went to Reagan as a fee, and therefore she is destitute. Reagan’s conscience and his alcoholism both go into overdrive at this revelation, and he’s traced down after a week-long binge by his long-suffering chauffeur, Moose Hendricks (Mike Mazurki, the marvelous character actor from Murder, My Sweet ­— once again cast as a character named “Moose”!), an ex-wrestler Reagan once saved from a murder charge. Then Harry Cheney is found clubbed to death in his apartment and Moose is arrested for the crime; Reagan comes back and at first is unsteady on his feet in the courtroom, but later pulls himself together and establishes not only that Moose is innocent but the real killer is … frankly, I was expecting it to be Reagan himself having killed Cheney in a drunken stupor and then forgotten about the crime when he sobered up, but instead [spoiler alert!] it’s Sommers, who fought with Cheney when Cheney wanted to renegotiate their deal and hit him with a bowling trophy Cheney had won years before and kept displayed on his desk. Criminal Lawyer is the sort of movie that doesn’t break any ground — though the script does achieve originality through an artful and unusual blending of clichés — but does achieve the sort of reliable entertainment the studio system (just breaking down when this film was made) was good at, and it’s better than average in its understated but still very much discernible social critique of how people with money (legally or illegally obtained) can buy favorable treatment from the courts and thereby avoid paying for crimes that the 99 percent get popped for and sentenced to long prison terms.

Spies Beneath Berlin (ORTV/Discovery, 2011)

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

Last night Charles and I eventually watched a TV show PBS had recently aired as a filler after the big special on “D-Day’s Sunken Secrets”: Spies Beneath Berlin, a 2011 special, originally produced for the Discovery Channel by something called ORTV, about a daring operation launched by U.S. and British intelligence in the mid-1950’s to dig a tunnel from a building in West Berlin under East Berlin so they could tap the phone lines of a Soviet military facility in East Berlin and get advance news of what the Russians were planning — and, in particular, warning in case they were about to launch a nuclear attack. The CIA and its British equivalent, MI6, planned this — though the British still regard it as classified and therefore no British officials were allowed to be at the event at which the project and the people who worked on it were acknowledged. The tunnel worked through most of 1955 and was built after two people who worked for the East German phone company alerted Western intelligence to the existence of this Soviet communications center — and it was compromised even before it was built because the minutes of the meeting at which its construction was planned were taken by George Blake, a Soviet double agent within MI6 who believed in the ideological superiority of Soviet-style socialism and apparently was willing to betray his country without pay in the service of this higher cause. The most fascinating part of the story was that the KGB allowed the tunnel to exist for nearly a year — until heavy rains in East Berlin led to its “accidental” discovery in November 1955 — and neither exposed it nor fed disinformation through it because protecting George Blake as an intelligence asset was more important than any potential compromise to their intelligence position (not that different from the way the Brits had let Coventry be bombed during World War II rather than risk letting the Germans know they had broken their Enigma code). Blake was finally caught and arrested in 1961 but daringly escaped five years later, then made it to the Soviet Union, where he was granted asylum, wrote his memoirs (extensively quoted on this program) and lives to this day; his story was the subject of Alfred Hitchcock’s last script, The Short Night, a project Hitch worked on sporadically from 1977 to 1979 (a year before his death) until he realized he was not going to be in physical shape to direct another film.

68th Annual Tony Awards (American Theatre Wing/CBS, June 8, 2014)

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

I’ve been attempting for the last three days to find time to write about the 68^th annual Tony Awards, which Charles and I watched “live” (actually on a three-hour tape delay — the East Coast-based media giants never let us forget that we on the West Coast are sucking hind tit when it comes to the big awards shows, the Oscars excepted) on Sunday night. The show was hosted by Hugh Jackman, an actor I have quite a lot of affection for — his Clark Gable-esque performance as the Drover in Baz Luhrmann’s almost totally neglected near-masterpiece Australia is a great piece of acting that should have established him once and for all as a major star and not just a superhero (I have all the X-Men movies on DVD and even I’ve lost count of how many times he’s played Wolverine!) — but he did a really silly opening number that showed him hopping (literally!) on Broadway as he passed the theatres where the major nominees were playing and more or less introduced them. The winner for Best Musical was A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, a ridiculously clunky title for an adaptation of the film Kind Hearts and Coronets (why they felt obliged to change the title is a mystery to me) and the winner for Best Play was All the Way, which one might have thought would be a bio-musical about Frank Sinatra but instead was about President Lyndon Johnson pushing the 1964 Civil Rights Act through Congress. It helped that Johnson was played by Bryan Cranston, who in his 50’s managed after a decent career as a TV character actor to grab the brass ring on the AMC “original” TV series Breaking Bad. (I’ve never seen an episode of Breaking Bad in my life and I still haven’t forgiven AMC from abandoning its original mission as a classic movies channel — though the advent of TCM in the 1990’s helped soften the blow considerably.)

Cranston won the award for Best Actor in a Play and Best Actress in a Play went to Audra McDonald for one of at least three bio-musicals that actually were nominated, Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill, in which she played Billie Holiday. (It’s her sixth Tony — a record — and hers is one of the few performances I would actually want to see; McDonald acknowledged Billie’s suffering and early death in her acceptance speech and said she deserved more than the world gave her — true, but didn’t Billie bear some responsibility for her own screw-ups?) Best Featured Actress in a Musical went to Lena Hall for her part in Hedwig and the Angry Inch — Hedwig is a Transgender rock singer in 1980’s East Germany and the “angry inch” is what’s left of her dick after her male-to-female gender reassignment is badly botched — this was originally a movie and one I avoided because the concept bothered me, though the featured number for it, Neil Patrick Harris (winner for Best Leading Actor in a Musical) belting out a credible alt-rock song and sounding like a cross between Wendy O. Williams and Chrissie Hynde, actually came off quite well and was one of the high points of the program. The winner for Best Featured Actor in a Play was Mark Rylance for Twelfth Night by Edward DeVere, the Earl of Oxford — at least that’s who Rylance believes wrote it, which caused a mini-controversy a few years ago when Rylance was appointed to head the Royal Shakespeare Company and some people in Britain questioned the propriety of picking someone to head the Royal Shakespeare Company who’s publicly on record as believing that Shakespeare didn’t write “Shakespeare.”  Fortunately he ducked any mention of this controversy during his acceptance speech.

There were some good numbers among the 17 total performances in the show — notably the early medley of “On the Sunny Side of the Street” and “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)” from After Midnight (which looks like one of those mindless but fun celebrations of African-American culture that have been a staple on Broadway since the success of Ain’t Misbehavin’ in the late 1970’s), “One Day More” from the current revival of Les Misérables (the lead singer was African-American and I wondered if there were any real-life Black people on the barricades in France in 1848 — then he opened his mouth and so totally outsang everyone else on stage that it was obvious why he’d been cast), “Friend Like Me” from the musical version of Aladdin (sung by a Black singer named James Monroe Iglehart, who was so outrageously over-the-top he made Robin Williams, who voiced the Genie in the original movie, seem subtle by comparison) and the high point of the evening, a duet on Carole King’s song “I Feel the Earth Move” between King herself and the actress who plays her in Beautiful: The Carole King Musical (the third bio-musical up for awards — besides the ones about Billie Holiday and Janis Joplin), Jessie Mueller — who won Best Actress in a Leading Role in a Musical and, judging from what we saw of her, thoroughly deserved it. Not-so-high points included the feature song from A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder — its creators proved incapable of having upper-class Brits sing on stage without making them sound like Gilbert and Sullivan characters (though there are certainly worse models!) — as well as a dramatization of the last round of the climactic fight from Rocky (the critic from The New Yorker stressed the difficulty of reproducing this on stage eight times a week, but it’s one of those things that happens because it can and not because there’s any good artistic reason for it to); a duet between Glinda the Good Witch and Elphaba (in the original Oz stories by L. Frank Baum she was called “Momba,” by the way) the Bad Witch called “For Good” from the score of Wicked (which judging from the two songs I’ve heard of it is an absolutely putrid show; I liked it better when the Wicked Witch was Margaret Hamilton reveling in her wickedness without any redeeming qualities whatsoever) and a lyrically rewritten version of Clarence Williams’ blues classic “’Tain’t Nobody’s Business if I Do” from a musical adaptation of the Woody Allen film Bullets Over Broadway — yet another project that seems to have happened merely because it could and not because there was any compelling artistic reason to (though one can understand Allen’s jealousy that a fellow Jewish comedian, movie director and alumnus of Sid Caesar’s writing room, Mel Brooks, has had hit musicals based on his films).

There were also songs like “Finding Neverland” from an upcoming musical based on Marc Forster’s marvelous film, and “On My Way/Raise Me Up” from Violet (a show based on an obscure movie about a facially disfigured girl who travels across the country to meet a televangelist she’s convinced can heal her — which sounds to me like yet another off-take on The Wizard of Oz!), that were redeemed by great Black soul voices, and another preview of an upcoming musical, The Last Ship, with Sting (a visibly aged and bald Sting, which really made me feel old) coming out and doing the title song from his show about the closing of the shipyards in his home town and how it affected the people who had defined themselves as shipbuilders for so long (Detroit, take note!). The song didn’t sound as powerful to me as Sting’s earlier treatment of the same material in his concept album The Soul Cages 20-plus years ago but it was still worth hearing — and yet more evidence that the truly great songwriters of the modern era generally don’t work in musical theatre! Overall the 68^th annual Tony Awards was a lumbering spectacle which ran 15 minutes overtime (unusual since in previous years the Tonys have been one of the most tightly schedule-policed of the big awards shows) and still didn’t include the “In Memoriam” segment (audiences in the hall got to see it but TV viewers didn’t), and the lead producer of A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder sounded so much like the stereotype of a Broadway producer that if Mel Brooks’ musical The Producers is ever revived, he’d be a perfect candidate for the lead role played by Zero Mostel in the movie and Nathan Lane in the original stage production!