Show Boat (New York Philharmonic/PBS, October 5-8, 2015)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

PBS’s “Fall Arts Special” last night was Jerome Kern’s and Oscar Hammerstein II’s Show Boat in a semi-staged performance by the New York Philharmonic with soloists and chorus — which means that the leading actors wore costumes (though the choristers didn’t) and enacted their roles, but the only set was a painted backdrop of a show boat (depicted accurately for a change — a “show boat” wasn’t a self-propelled steamer but a barge, moved down the Mississippi River by a motorized watercraft called a “tow boat” which, despite its name, was actually behind the show boat, pushing it along) projected on a screen behind the orchestra. The New York Philharmonic was seated on the stage between the singers and the screen, which as Charles pointed out throughout the show made the singers hard to hear — though the presenters made a big deal out of using Robert Russell Bennett’s original orchestrations of the songs, they forgot that Bennett had intended them to be played by an orchestra in a pit under the stage, where they would give the singers less competition. Show Boat remains a remarkable musical, even more remarkable when you consider when it was originally produced (1927) and by whom: Florenz Ziegfeld, whose name was associated with plotless “revue” shows like the annual Ziegfeld Follies. When Ziegfeld did produce a show with an actual story, it was usually a simple-minded one whose only function was to set up and cue the songs and dances — until Oscar Hammerstein II somehow talked him into producing a musical he and Jerome Kern were working on based on Show Boat, a best-selling novel by Edna Ferber which addressed some of the grimmer parts of human existence. The first act centers around the Cotton Blossom, the show boat owned by Captain Andy Hawks (Fred Willard, whose past as a mock TV talk-show host kept getting in the way of my suspension of disbelief) and his Northern-born wife Parthenia (Jane Alexander), universally known around the boat as Parthy Ann. The stars of the show boat troupe, who present The Parson’s Bride (obviously written by Hammerstein, who did both book and lyrics, as a deliberately awful parody of the popular melodramas of the 1890’s) and then, mercifully for their audiences, do a concert of songs and dances afterwards, are Julie La Verne (Vanessa Williams) and her husband Steve Baker (Edward Watts).

Only Pete, a “river rat” with a slimy reputation, has the hots for Julie and, when she rejects him, steals her photo from the show boat’s sandwich-board ad and takes it to the sheriff to report that Julie’s real name is Julie Dozier and she was the product of a white father and a Black mother. In one of the most dramatic scenes of the show, Steve responds to the sheriff’s imminent arrival by cutting his wife’s finger and sucking a bit of her blood so that, when the sheriff does arrive, he asks him, “If I got one drop of nigger blood in me, does that make me a nigger?” (It was interesting that the New York Philharmonic used all the substitutes for the N-word Hammerstein authorized in later versions when the good guys were speaking or singing, but kept “nigger” when it was coming from a bad guy, or a good guy trying to make himself look bad.) Told yes, he says, “Everyone here can swear I got more than one drop of nigger blood in me right now!” So he’s able to keep himself and his wife out of jail, but they have to quit their jobs and leave the show boat immediately just before the boat is scheduled for a potentially lucrative four-night run at Fort Adams. What is Captain Andy to do? His daughter Magnolia (Lauren Worsham) pleads with him to be allowed to play the female lead herself, since Julie had been coaching her all this time, and though her mom is ferociously opposed to her going on the stage, she does so. As for a leading man, Magnolia has already met and been attracted to Gaylord Ravenal (Julian Ovenden), a professional gambler who has to leave Natchez in a hurry to escape the people to whom he’s just lost more money than he had. He pleads with Captain Andy for passage on the boat, and Andy says he doesn’t take passengers, but if he wants a job as an actor … The show goes on and it’s a hit, mainly because the audiences see that the stars are genuinely in love with each other, and at the end there’s a big wedding in Natchez in which Andy invites not only the crew of the show boat but all his patrons to watch his daughter and her hot leading man get married. The second act starts in 1904, eight years later, and Ravenal spends his money as fast as he makes (or wins) it, so when he hits a losing streak he has nothing left. He and Magnolia had a daughter, Kim, whom Ravenal placed in a boarding school run by nuns (when the actress playing the mother superior emerged in a full sleeveless evening dress — obviously she was not one of the performers required to dress in a dramatically suitable costume — Charles joked, “What kind of order is this?”), and with his luck having definitively run out Ravenal decides to leave town and give his last $200 to his wife so their daughter can finish her term at the convent school.

Broke and with no way to make a living, Magnolia reluctantly accepts an offer from the comic duo from the show boat, Frank and Ellie Schultz (Christopher Fitzgerald and Alli Mauzey), to set up an audition for her at the Trocadero, the nightclub they now work for. By coincidence (or authorial fiat), Captain Andy shows up at the Trocadero on opening night, where Julie (under yet another last name) is the star but is washing out her career with booze. She threatens to walk out on the show to go on a bender, and the nightclub’s manager says if she does it’ll be her last time — and Julie overhears Magnolia’s audition and drops out of the show, urging the manager to hire Magnolia as her replacement. Magnolia is given Charles K. Harris’s “After the Ball” to sing in the show, and she’s so nervous she flubs it — until her dad calls out to her from the audience, her nerves calm down and she gives a great performance that makes her an instant star and sends her to a career on Broadway. The story flashes forward to 1927, where we’re back on the show boat (the fact that it’s still a going concern is a bit surprising) and Magnolia returns with her now-adult daughter Kim (who, in a gimmick that was also part of the original production, is also played by Lauren Worsham, though Erika Hennigsen played Kim as a child in an earlier scene) in tow. Kim is about to make her Broadway musical debut and showcases the song she’s going to make her debut with, and Magnolia accepts the continued love of her parents and the Black servant couple Joe (Norm Lewis) and Queenie (NaTasha Yvette Williams) who’ve worked for her parents all her life. She also gets back together with Gaylord Ravenal for a late-in-life reunion when he turns up at their daughter’s big opening. Show Boat is a story full of political, moral and emotional points far removed from the typical musical fare of its time, and though some historians of the Broadway musical have said that its history is divided into two periods, “Before Show Boat” and “After Show Boat,” it wasn’t until 16 years later, when Hammerstein teamed up with Richard Rodgers for Oklahoma!, that another musical dared show this much of the darker side of human existence. Edna Ferber’s novel, which I’ve read, is (not surprisingly) even darker than the musical — in her version, instead of becoming a nightclub star and blowing it on alcohol, Julie goes to Chicago and opens a whorehouse, and in her version Magnolia and Ravenal never get back together — but what remained even after Hammerstein’s book softened things is still impressively honest and intense.

The stinging attack on racial prejudice is one of the most astonishing things about Show Boat — Edna Ferber was anti-racist way before anti-racism was cool (and she sneaked another attack on racial prejudice into her novel Giant, though that time she was going after anti-Latino instead of anti-Black bigots) — and so is the whole depiction of a marriage breaking up because of the man’s gambling addiction and a woman coming to grief because of alcoholism. One wonders what the 1927 audiences made of it — were they really touched and moved by the story, or did they just sit through it to hear Jerome Kern’s glorious songs? And Kern’s songs are glorious — though the fact that the show’s biggest hit, “Ol’ Man River,” is sung by a Black character is itself trail-blazing. Song after song from this score has become a standard, including “Make Believe” (the first of what Oscar Hammerstein II called his “conditional love songs,” in which he solved the problem of how can two people who’ve just met sing a love duet by having them imagine themselves as the lovers the plot will make them later — he would do it again with “People Will Say We’re in Love” from Oklahoma! and “If I Loved You” from Carousel), “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” (heard in several guises and several tempi depending largely on whether Black or white characters are singing it), “You Are Love,” “Why Do I Love You?” and “Bill” — though the last wasn’t originally from Show Boat but was a song Kern had written 10 years earlier with P. G. Wodehouse as his lyricist (“before the Nazis kidnapped and tortured him and broadcast it on the air,” Charles joked). Since Show Boat was a Broadway musical, its contents were shaped by far more extra-musical pressures than were usually placed on opera composers — especially after the mid-19^th century, when masters like Wagner and Verdi got the clout to insist that their works be presented as written instead of subjugated to the whims of primae donnae having diva-style hissy-fits. As early as the original 1927 rehearsals Show Boat lost one of its greatest songs, “It’s Getting Hotter in the North,” which was supposed to be the big final number showing Kim Ravenal’s successful Broadway debut — only Norma Terriss, who was starring as Magnolia and doubling as the adult Kim, didn’t like the song and refused to sing it. For the remaining 19 years of his life Jerome Kern looked for an artistically and commercially successful way to bring his masterpiece to a satisfying ending — when a Broadway revival was planned in 1946 he came up with a new song for Kim, “Nobody Else but Me,” which turned out to be the last song he ever wrote.

When Show Boat was first filmed in 1929 by Universal, songwriter, showman and entrepreneur Billy Rose convinced Universal’s executives that the original Kern-Hammerstein songs were so overexposed audiences wouldn’t want to hear them, so they should hire Rose and his collaborators to come up with a new score. Only when the film was previewed audiences complained that it didn’t contain the original songs, so Universal had quickly to concoct and shoot a 20-minute prologue that would contain them. The musical was revived in 1932 — with many people who’d either been in the original cast (like Helen Morgan as Julie) or had replaced them during the first run (like Paul Robeson as Joe — the role had actually been created for him but originally Jules Bledsoe, who had a similar reputation as a Black concert singer specializing in spirituals, took the part; he’s mentioned in Billie Holiday’s first record, “Your Mother’s Son-in-Law”: “You don’t have to sing like Bledsoe/You can tell the world I said so”) — and in 1936 Universal remade Show Boat in what became the definitive version, with James Whale (the genius behind the first two Frankenstein films) directing, Oscar Hammerstein II writing the script himself (thus ensuring that, within the limits imposed by film length and the Production Code, the content would be faithful to the original) and a stellar cast; Irene Dunne as Magnolia, Allan Jones as Ravenal, Helen Morgan as Julie, Paul Robeson as Joe, Hattie McDaniel as Queenie, Charles Winninger as Captain Andy and Helen Westley as Parthy Ann. For this film Kern and Hammerstein wrote three new songs to be inserted, one of which — “Ah Still Suits Me,” a duet for Robeson and McDaniel (who was a good enough singer to hold her own with him — before she got into movies she’d been a friend and colleague of Bessie Smith’s on the TOBA Black vaudeville circuit, whose initials officially stood for Theatre Owners’ Booking Association but whose performers joked really meant “Tough on Black Asses”) — was included in the New York Philharmonic’s presentation, as was (praise be!) “It’s Getting Hotter in the North.” I first heard “Hotter” where everyone else did — as part of John McGlinn’s epic three-CD boxed set of Show Boat from 1988, which set out to include every song Kern wrote for the show — and I was blown away by it. Alas, the liner notes of McGlinn’s album said that the Rodgers and Hammerstein organization, which controls the Show Boat copyrights, wouldn’t let modern-day producers include “Hotter” in Show Boat productions. So it was a real treat to hear it here, even though the New York Philharmonic’s conductor, Ted Sperling, took it slower than McGlinn did and the song lost some of its sprightly verve.

A third film of Show Boat was made by MGM in 1951 with a script by John Lee Mahin, who decided that the original had kept Magnolia and Ravenal apart too long — so instead of leaving her when their daughter is a child and returning when she’s an adult, Mahin had Ravenal walk out on his wife while she’s pregnant with Kim (though he doesn’t know that because when he leaves she hadn’t had the chance to tell him) and returns when Kim is a child. MGM’s producer, Arthur Freed, had wanted to cast Lena Horne as Julie, but the distribution people told him flat-out he was nuts: with an actual African-American in one of the leads Southern theatres would never show the film (most of Horne’s MGM movies were all-star musicals in which, instead of playing a part, she was trotted out for a number or two, totally disconnected from the story, so MGM’s Southern branches could merely snip out her songs from the films before they released them). So Julie ended up being played by Ava Gardner, miscast (and with her voice erased from the soundtrack at the last minute and replaced with jazz singer Annette Warren) but still with more star charisma than anyone else in the cast (Kathryn Grayson as Magnolia, Howard Keel as Ravenal and Joe E. Brown and Agnes Moorehead surprisingly good as Captain Andy and Parthy Ann) with the possible exception of William Warfield, who faced with the unenviable task of following Paul Robeson as Joe did an excellent job even though Warfield, a classically trained Black bass-baritone who’d never sung a pop song before, made it a little too “classical,” too studied. A fourth audio-visual record of Show Boat exists, a previous PBS telecast from 1989, a fully staged production from the Paper Mill Playhouse in Connecticut (from their name you don’t need two guesses to figure out what their building formerly was!) that lasted two hours and pretty much followed what’s become the standard text of Show Boat, without either originally deleted songs or later additions. The long history of this show is the biggest problem with the New York Philharmonic production; anyone with more than a passing interest in this sort of entertainment has probably seen it before, either on stage or in the 1936 or 1951 films, and has certainly heard plenty of other people’s recordings of the songs (including Billie Holiday’s 1937 “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” in which she took out all the “torchy” leaps, groans and sobs Kern had wrote into the melody and thereby made a fine song even finer), and it’s hard to appreciate the current performers without flashing back to people who did the songs earlier and better. The biggest problem was the Joe, Norm Lewis, who sang well enough but is a baritone instead of bass and who just doesn’t have the authority Robeson (and, to a lesser extent, Warfield) brought to the song — indeed, in one of the ensemble numbers I spotted a Black man with dreadlocks who got a few notes to himself in one of the choruses, and I heard his deep bass voice and thought, “Why didn’t they cast him as Joe?”

One radical innovation of this Show Boat was that it finally realized Arthur Freed’s dream and cast a genuine Black person, Vanessa Williams, as Julie — though it turned out that may not have been such a good idea after all; with someone visibly Black in the role Julie being “outed” as mixed-race simply doesn’t carry the shock value it did with white performers like Morgan and Gardner in the role. Instead you think, “So you just figured out she’s Black? We’ve known it all along!” At least, once Williams starts belting out “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” she sings with an electric power that eludes most of the other performers. Julian Ovenden tries for Allan Jones’ mixture of sincerity and insouciance in the role of Ravenal but just doesn’t have quite enough voice to pull it off. Lauren Worsham starts out way too childlike to be credible as Magnolia, though as the story progresses and gets darker both her acting and her singing improve and she becomes more credible as a complex character. Jane Alexander as Parthy Ann is quite good — maybe not at Moorehead’s level, but better than anyone else (including Helen Westley in the 1936 film) — but Fred Willard as her husband has the weight of his TV characterization hanging over him and his performance is deprived of Andy’s big moment in the original show: when one of the show boat’s performances is disrupted by two gun-wielding rowdies and he has to continue the show by playing all the parts himself. Next to Vanessa Williams, the best performance is contributed by NaTasha Yvette Williams as Queenie; her singing in the ensembles on “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” and partnering with Norm Lewis on “Ah Still Suits Me” is powerful and authoritative. Ted Sperling not only conducted but did the stage direction, and though some of the affectations of the “semi-staged” performance got silly (particularly when the Black choristers sang about the back-breaking work they’re doing unloading cotton and what they’re actually toting and lifting are … bamboo chairs), for the most part it was an entertaining presentation that did justice to one of the greatest musicals of all time, even though the ghosts of singers (and actors) who did more justice to this material in bygone ages hung heavily over the evening — the New York Philharmonic’s Web site discloses that the concert production took place over four days, October 5-8, but doesn’t offer any information as to when during that four-day run the performance they actually recorded and showed nationally took place.

The First of the Few, a.k.a. Spitfire (British Aviation Pictures/Leslie Howard Productions, 1942)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was a 1942 British production called The First of the Few — released in the U.S. as Spitfire, after the famous British fighter plane that was instrumental in Britain’s successful defense against German bombing raids during World War II — and the plot of the film centers around the Spitfire’s designer, R. J. Mitchell (Leslie Howard, in his final film before he himself was killed in the war — he was on a morale-building tour to British troops in North Africa when German pilots mistook his plane for Winston Churchill’s and shot it down), and his work for a British aviation company called Supermarine. Howard not only starred in the film, he produced and directed it — and when I first saw The First of the Few, on a public-domain VHS tape in the 1980’s, what startled me most about it was that Howard, whom I’d previously written off as a rather dull milquetoast type, gave a performance of real power, authority and emotional weight. Apparently Howard as director was able to get much more out of Howard the actor than many of his more highly-regarded and prestigious directors had been earlier in his career! The script, written by Miles Malleson and Anatole de Grunwald from a story by Henry C. James and Katherine Streuby, starts with a prologue featuring actual pilots from the Royal Air Force playing themselves and being debriefed by their squadron commander, Geoffrey Crisp (David Niven, who was then serving in the British Army but was also still under contract to U.S. producer Sam Goldwyn, so he needed dispensations from both the British government and Goldwyn to make the film — given that this was a heavy-duty morale-booster the British government was no problem, but Goldwyn demanded the U.S. release rights in return for letting Niven do the film).

Crisp then reminisces about his days working with R. J. Mitchell and being his test pilot, and the film flashes back to a scene in which an unseen person is looking through a set of binoculars at a flock of gulls flying over a beach. Leslie Howard’s voice is heard on the soundtrack as Mitchell, saying that the birds are superbly engineered to fly and the only way human aircraft will progress is if we abandon the preposterous contraptions of wire, cloth and wooden struts that were the standard for aviation in the early 1920’s (when the film opens) and learn to build our planes like birds’ bodies. He tries to put his theories into practice in his work for Supermarine, which builds seaplanes (as their name suggests) that compete in the regular Schneider Cup races. These really existed; they were a series of speed competitions for seaplanes whose founder hoped they would spur improvements in aircraft design. In 1923 the British have just lost the Schneider Cup to the Italians, and Mitchell offers a revolutionary design he’s sure will win — a monoplane with its gas tanks in the seaplane’s landing pontoons and its engines cooled by radiator pipes built into the front of the wings, so the water is kept cool by the rush of air over them. The plane crashes in the 1925 competition, but Mitchell’s competitors pay him the sincerest form of flattery — imitation — when during the 1927 competition, every other entrant is a sleek monoplane copied from Mitchell’s design. Crisp flies the Mitchell plane to victory in 1927 and 1929, and looks forward to doing so again in a new Mitchell design in 1931 — only the British government, beset by the Depression, balks at hosting the race. A private citizen, Lady Houston (Toni Edgar Bruce), who’s obsessed with Britain’s lack of military preparedness — in one of the movie’s quirkiest and most powerful scenes, she buzzes a private upper-crust party in a yacht emblazoned with lighted signs reading “Down With the Government” and “Wake Up England” — puts up the 100,000 pounds necessary to hold the last race. Crisp wins it for Britain in Mitchell’s plane and thereby permanently retires the trophy (the rule was that if one country won it three times in a row, they would get to keep the prize in perpetuity and the series would end), leaving Mitchell without much to do but putter around the garden and look after his wife Diana (Rosamund John) and their children. Crisp talks the Mitchells into joining him on vacation, and after a bit of debate as to just where they’re going to go, they decide to visit Germany.

Unfortunately for Mitchell, but fortunately for his country, they go to Germany right after Adolf Hitler has become Chancellor and has started to organize so-called “gliding clubs” so Germany, barred by the Treaty of Versailles from having a military air force, can train a new cadre of pilots capable of flying the state-of-the-art powered planes Willy Messerschmidt (Erik Freund) is designing and the Germans will start building as soon as they repudiate the treaty. Mitchell is so scared by what he sees and hears in Germany, he returns home determined to build Britain the ultimate fighter plane, one powerful enough to out-fly, out-maneuver and overpower any bombers or fighters Germany sends up against them in the war he’s now convinced will inevitably come. He throws himself so intensely into his work designing the Spitfire (a name that comes to Mitchell when he muses that what he needs is “a bird that spits fire,” though according to an imdb.com “Trivia” contributor the name was actually thought up by the RAF and the real Mitchell said, “That’s the sort of bloody silly name they would choose!”) that he literally wears himself out. He visits a doctor and is told that he must immediately take off work for at least a year or he’ll die within eight months to a year, and later, when his wife urges him to see a doctor, Mitchell laconically tells her he already has and he’s under a death sentence, but he feels he has to accept his own mortality because his country needs his plane. The Spitfire is finally completed and ready for testing — intriguingly, there’s a socialist-realist montage of the various industrial processes involved in producing the prototype scored with heavily “inspirational” music by William Walton, but Crisp’s actual test flight of the Spitfire is unscored — and the test is a brilliant success, but Mitchell is too ill to attend it himself. Instead his wife goes and calls him after it’s over to tell him how well it went. Mitchell dies a quiet death in his garden, but the film continues with an epilogue returning to the Spitfires in action against Nazi planes; when his flight commander is grounded by illness Crisp takes up a Spitfire himself and shoots down the German fighter whose pilot got his best friend “Bunny” Currant (one of the real-life pilots who played themselves on screen). The film ends with a scene of silhouettes of Spitfires against the British sky and a final title giving Winston Churchill’s famous encomium to the pilots in the Battle of Britain: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”

According to Ben Mankiewicz’ outro to the TCM showing, Sam Goldwyn altered the film for its U.S. release, changing the title from an obscure reference to Churchill’s speech (the original British title essentially presents Mitchell as the first victim of the Battle of Britain) to Spitfire and re-editing it to include more close-ups of his star, David Niven — but I’ve seen a version of this film titled Spitfire and my memories are that the two track so closely they are virtually identical, even though TCM’s showing of the original British print timed out at 119 minutes and the imdb.com page, which gives Spitfire as the primary title and The First of the Few as the alternate, lists only a 90-minute running time. Either way, The First of the Few is a powerful film, full of the stiff-upper-lip attitude the British take so much pride in, and given added resonance by its being Howard’s only work as a director (at which he was quite good) and Howard’s own status as a war casualty, which gives a sense of even greater loss to the movie than Howard and its other creators intended when they decided that R. J. Mitchell had been “the first of the few,” the first casualty of the Battle of Britain. It’s a beautifully understated, underacted movie — quite a vivid contrast to the intense flag-waving propaganda U.S. World War II movies that were made during the war — and even the stock conflicts between the visionary Mitchell and his reluctant backers at Supermarine, Vickers (a larger British aircraft company which buys Supermarine midway through the film to get Mitchell’s services — plus ça change, plus ça même chose) and the British government are presented quietly and yet vividly. Though Leslie Howard had an enviable star career — including a turn in the most popular movie of all time, Gone With the Wind — playing mostly romantic leads (in which his odd diffidence was a handicap, whereas here it works for the taciturn character who’s playing a married man but one whose real emotional relationship is to his work), there’s still a sense that he didn’t fulfill his potential. Whether Howard could have developed into as good a director on other subjects as he is here — in which he’s dramatizing the origins of what was literally a life-or-death struggle for his country — is of course unknowable, but both his performance and his direction in The First of the Few suggest a more powerful and more complete filmmaker than he was allowed to show before the war first interrupted and then tragically ended his career.

The Brothers Grimm (Dimension Films, MGM, Mosaic Media Group, 2005)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Charles and I got to watch a fairly recent (2005) movie on DVD: The Brothers Grimm, directed by Terry Gilliam from a script by one Ehren Kruger, which had a troubled production history (when has Terry Gilliam ever made a movie that didn’t have a troubled production history?). First, Gilliam and his writing partner Tony Grisoni heavily rewrote Kruger’s script, but because of Writers’ Guild of America rules aimed at keeping directors from claiming writing credits even if they rewrote (or originally wrote) major portions of the script themselves, they weren’t allowed writing credits — so Gilliam put his and Grisoni’s names way down in the credit roll as “dress pattern makers.” Then what’s left of MGM pulled their financial backing either just before or just after Gilliam started shooting, so he had to bring in Harvey and Bob Weinstein — who had their usual hissy-fits with directors, provoking an argument over the editing that lasted so long Gilliam was able to make a whole other movie, Timeland, while waiting for the conflicts to be resolved and The Brothers Grimm to be released. I wanted to watch this largely because it had been in the backlog a long time and after The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, the Gilliam film star Heath Ledger had been making when he died (three other actors completed his part), I wanted to see the Gilliam film Ledger had lived to complete. I also wanted to show it now because Charles just started taking an online class on science fiction and fantasy literature, and an early session mentioned the Grimms — even though this being a movie, and a Terry Gilliam movie at that, anyone expecting a dramatization of the actual Grimm brothers and their trips across war-torn early 19^th century Germany collecting popular folk tales and editing them into books like their pioneering 1812 collection Kinder- und Hausmarchen (“Children’s and Household Tales”) would be sorely disappointed.

Instead what Kruger, Grusoni and Gilliam came up with was a script that followed one of the oldest dramatic chestnuts: a couple of con artists extracting money from townspeople to fight demons, goblins, witches or whatnot while they were actually staging the supernatural events themselves suddenly come up against genuinely supernatural events and end up comedically hopeless at stopping the real-life monsters. The Brothers Grimm starts “once upon a time … in 1796,” with one of the Grimm boys using the family’s last money to buy some “magic” beans, an obvious reference to Jack and the Beanstalk even though, as one imdb.com contributor pointed out, the Grimms probably never encountered Jack and the Beanstalk because it’s a British folk tale not well known in Germany. The film then cuts 15 years forward, which would be 1811, at a time when Germany was being occupied by Napoleon’s France —and not surprisingly Gilliam makes quite a bit of the irony of being able to depict (as one of his titles has it) “Germany Under French Occupation” when we’ve been so conditioned by Casablanca and all those other World War II-set movies to think of the Germans as the occupiers and the French as the occupiees, not the other way around (Gilliam even stages a scene in which the French attempt to burn the Grimms’ book just to make sure we get the point). The Grimms, brothers Wilhelm (Matt Damon) and Jakob (Heath Ledger) — who call each other “Will” and “Jake” throughout the movie — are making a living as freelance exorcists, using a couple of actors to stage supernatural events in small German villages and then getting paid handsomely to exorcise the spirits, demons, witches, trolls or whatnot supposedly haunting the local townspeople. In fact, it’s this that leads them to their fairy-tale researches, as they collect a lot of information about local Germans and their superstitions, and when asking why the people believe this stuff, the Grimms are told a lot of the famous stories that ended up in their book.

The opening sequence (at least the first one that takes place in 1811 after that prologue with the beans when the Grimms are still kids) is one of the best things in the movie: the Grimms are in a small town whose millhouse is being haunted by a 100-year-old witch who was put to death a century earlier but not properly exorcised before she was buried — and she wasn’t buried in a mirror-lined coffin (a recurring theme in the film — the Grimms even go into battle with their supernatural nemeses with a mirror-covered shield). We see the witch rendered with all the artistry modern-day computer-generated imagery can muster, and she’s viscerally frightening — then, when the Grimms have “killed” her, we’re supposed to believe that “she” was only one of the two actors the Grimms have hired to help them stage supposed supernatural events so the Grimms can get paid to get rid of these diabolical nemeses. Of course, the Grimms end up in the town of Marbaden in the state of Thuringia, where they’re being hounded by the French authorities who threaten to have them executed for their con jobs — only one sympathetic French officer who’s really Italian, Cavaldi (Peter Stormare) offers to pardon them if they can go to Marbaden and find the young children who have disappeared under mysterious circumstances and free them. After a lot of back-and-forth involving the townspeople, the occupation forces and the film’s central female character, Angelika (Lena Headey, who for my money out-acts both the male leads), who tells them she knows vital information about the haunted woods where the kids disappeared and also has a vested interest in finding them because the first two to disappear were her sisters, we ultimately learn that the haunted castle inside the woods contains an 800-year-old countess (Monika Bellucci), listed as “Mirror Queen” in the dramatis personae, who needs a serum derived from the blood of 12 victims to make herself young and beautiful again. (Apparently the writers derived this character from the legendary “Blood Countess” Elizabeth Báthory in 15^th century Hungary, who would kidnap young women, drain them of their blood and bathe herself in it in the belief that this would keep her from aging physically.) We also ultimately learn that Angelika is the 12^th victim she needs blood from to make this stuff, and in the meantime the French, led by officer Delatombe (Jonathan Pryce, star of Gilliam’s marvelous 1985 film Brazil), enter Marbaden and, Avatar-style, decide the way to get rid of all those pesky creatures haunting the place is to burn down the forest.

When the Grimms protest he has them tortured and threatened with execution — when Cavaldi refuses to shoot the Grimms on Delatombe’s order, Cavaldi says he resigns his commission and Delatombe calmly pulls out one of the pistols he wanted to use on the Grimms, shoots Cavaldi and says, “Resignation accepted” — and there’s a catastrophic scene at the end in which the old woman appears to have won, Wilhelm Grimm has been mortally wounded, but the Mirror Queen says he can be healed if he has sex with her (and Gilliam, just to confuse things further, keeps cutting back and forth from Monika Bellucci as a young woman to her plastered in age makeup to play the 800-year-old crone), and he appears to have done so when Angelika, who also appears to have been raised from the dead, offers them a way to kill the Queen and be free of her spell. When she’s not corporeal the Queen takes possession of her mirror — the one she’s been asking throughout her story arc, “Who’s the fairest of them all?” (you remember) — and when it shatters each piece seems to contain a piece of her as well. I may be confusing my recollections of this movie big-time in terms of what was happening when, but that’s not too important because in a film like this, in which the writers have created a nearly rule-free fantasy in which almost anything can happen at any moment and therefore there’s no story logic or continuity, the actual events of the story are not that important. I had some of the same frustrations with The Brothers Grimm that I did with The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus: I find stories like this in which literally anything can happen at any moment highly annoying. In order to shock an audience by violating its expectations, you first have to create some — and this time around Gilliam and his writers, credited or not, couldn’t be bothered. What makes The Brothers Grimm grippingly watchable is the sheer beauty and audacity of the conception: the effects (particularly the ambulatory trees, which really do look like moving trees and not shaky models with actors inside) are first-rate and Newton Thomas Sigel’s cinematography has such intense depth-of-field Charles was wondering whether the film was originally shot in 3-D. (It wasn’t, but it really didn’t need to be — though one wonders what shots in the film are Sigel’s and which ones were done by the original director of photography, Nicola Pecorini, who was fired when the Weinstein brothers took over the production.)

Like many of Gilliam’s other films it’s audacious in its visual conception and rather shaky in its plotting — dramatic coherence has never been Gilliam’s strong suit, though one thing that made Brazil special was that it was, at least by his standard, a relatively well constructed story (and it also took place in the near future instead of the legendary or quasi-legendary past, and somehow making a movie in which the physical reality is more or less that of our own time puts some limits on that tremendous imagination of his and harnesses it to do useful work) — and it’s also not terribly well cast. According to various imdb.com “trivia” posters, Johnny Depp was originally supposed to play one of the Grimms (there’s also a report that when Matt Damon and Heath Ledger finally were cast, it was originally supposed to be Ledger as Wilhelm and Damon as Jacob, though the two actors asked if they could swap parts and Gilliam said O.K.), and quite frankly it would have been a much better movie with the edgier, more interesting Depp in Damon’s role — Damon is just too pretty, too impassive and too concerned with projecting his looks to be right for a role in a Terry Gilliam film. As for Ledger, he’s O.K. as a “type” but, as I said in my comments on Imaginarium, he seems to have been a very limited actor, suited to play only one type of character: the tortured introverts he portrayed in his best films, Monster’s Ball and Brokeback Mountain. At least this role steers more towards his strength than the part in Imaginarium did (when I saw Imaginarium I thought Colin Farrell was so much better than Ledger they should have scrapped all Ledger’s footage and remade the whole movie with Farrell). The film is stolen by Lena Headey, who was strong enough it made me wonder what she’d been doing since — mostly the TV series Terminator and Game of Thrones, the latter of which has been popular enough hopefully it will give her the reputation she deserves — and it has the obligatory Gilliam-movie references to shit (notably one in which a French officer says “Merde,” then realizes he is supposed to be sounding like a German and corrects himself to say “Scheisse”) and a quite clever last sequence in which the final credit, “And they all lived happily after … ,” is interrupted by a shot of a shard of mirror containing part of the Mirror Queen’s face and the next title reads, “Well, maybe not.” It’s a title sequence that sums up Gilliam’s sense of humor and provides an appropriate tag to a film that shows just why he’s so controversial — among the items on the imdb.com message boards about him are “Best Director of the ’90’s” and “Worst Director Ever.”

Sea Legs (Paramount, 1930)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was Sea Legs, a peculiar 1930 production from Paramount casting Jack Oakie and Eugene Pallette as sailors “Searchlight” Doyle and Hyacinth Nitouche, who have been shanghaied onto a ship called the Fourth of July owned by the navy of the independent (but formerly French) island of Sainte Cassette (I of course immediately decided that since then the name has been changed to Sainte CD). They’re continuously running into trouble from the ship’s captain (Albert Conti) and its “disciplinary officer,” Crossetti (Jean De Val), whose sole function seems to be to walk the ship’s decks with a little notebook in which he writers up sailors for trivial offenses, whereupon the captain usually — but not always — overrides the punishments. Doyle was shanghaied by a Jewish attorney, Gabriel Grabowski (played by Jewish dialect comedian Harry Green, whom Edward G. Robinson mentioned in his autobiography as the person who got to do the movie The Kibitzer, based on a play Robinson co-wrote with Jo Swerling which he had been hoping he could tour with on stage for years and build into a sinecure for himself — only his contract with Swerling gave Swerling control of the movie rights, Swerling sold them to Paramount, Paramount made the film with Green and it killed Robinson’s ability to tour the production because anyone interested in the story had already seen the movie), who mistook him for the grandson of Admiral O’Brien (Charles Sellon).

O’Brien grandpère had wanted O’Brien fils stuck on a Sainte Cassette naval vessel for two years, with the promise of a $2 million inheritance at the end of it, basically in order to butch him up — and when we see the grandson turn up at the end of the movie he’s a screaming queen who gets thrown overboard after protesting, “I thought this was a fairy boat!” There are a few other homoerotic references that mark Sea Legs as a product of the so-called “pre-Code” era, including one in which Oakie and Pallette walk the decks of the ship (played by a real Navy vessel loaned to Paramount by the real U.S. Navy — and the background of Point Loma, San Diego is clearly recognizable in the background of the long shots of the ship), as well as some odd jokes, including that the captain not only has five daughters but has brought them all along on the ship with him. Four of them are anonymous Paramount starlets but the fifth is Adrienne, played by Lillian Roth, who according to film historian and preservationist John Carpenter — who contributed a review on imdb.com under the name “newsilentcomedy” — was put into this film when Paramount thought it was going to be a musical. It was one of those films that got caught in the anti-musical backlash that took hold in 1930 and lasted for two years (until the huge success of 42^nd Street made musicals bankable properties again), during which a lot of movies that were filmed as musicals were shorn of many of their songs, and other films that had been musicals when they were done on stage shows (including Cole Porter’s Fifty Million Frenchmen) were filmed as straight comedies. There are some good bits in Sea Legs (which we were watching on a downloaded print retitled Shanghaied — which would actually have been a better title, not only because the Oakie and Pallette characters really were shanghaied but one of the best gags in the movie was ripped off from Charlie Chaplin’s 1915 movie Shanghaied). The only big song left in Sea Legs is “This Must Be Illegal (It’s So Nice),” a quite charming duet for Oakie (who actually had an O.K. comic voice — this is the best singing I’ve heard him do) and Lillian Roth, who when she’s not on board the ship is working at a French pastry shop.

The best things in Sea Legs are the song, a gag (the one they ripped off from Chaplin) in which Oakie and Roth are continually thrown together physically by the side-to-side rocking motion of the ship (done the way Chaplin did it: by building a rocking platform with a motor under it to move it back and forth on cue), and the final pie fight between Sainte Cassettian and American sailors that breaks out in the pastry shop — I’m not sure but I suspect this was actually the first time a pie fight was done in a talkie! Other than that Sea Legs is pretty mediocre, mildly amusing but hardly the laff-riot Paramount’s publicists were leading people to expect when they loudly proclaimed that Chaplin’s star was eclipsed at last and Jack Oakie would be the next great comedian of the screen. (In fact, Oakie’s career was in the doldrums by the late 1930’s and it was Chaplin who gave him his indelible comeback role as “Benzino Napaloni, Il Diggaditchi of Bacteria,” i.e. Benito Mussolini, Il Duce d’Italia, in his great Hitler spoof The Great Dictator, 1940.) It is nice to see Eugene Pallette midway between his romantic lead in the French sequences of D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance of 1916 and the bloated apparition he played throughout the late 1930’s and early 1940’s — he’s gravel-voiced but not especially fat — and some of the worm-turning scenes are also fun, but as 1930 Paramount comedies go this is hardly on the level of the Marx Brothers’ Animal Crackers, which shared at least two personnel with this one, director Victor Heerman (who was usually a writer, generally collaborating with his wife, Sarah Y. Mason) and Lillian Roth, who played Margaret Dumont’s daughter in the vivid, savagely brilliant Marx Brothers romp. I suppose it’s important to be reminded that not all Paramount’s comedies of the 1930’s were edgy masterpieces with people like the Marx Brothers, Mae West and W. C. Fields; they cranked out some pretty ordinary ones with O.K. people (at the time Oakie’s contract was split between Paramount and RKO, and they used him pretty much the way Warner Bros. used Joe E. Brown) that were fun and unthreatening … which, arguably, was precisely what was wrong with them.

The Heartbreak Kid (Palomar/20th Century-Fox, 1972)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Charles and I watched a movie that had somehow eluded me before even though I’d certainly heard of it — for some reason, it was a major hit when new — the original 1972 version of The Heartbreak Kid, based on a story by Bruce Jay Friedman called “A Change of Plan” which Neil Simon, of all people, adapted into a screenplay (most of Simon’s films were either adaptations of his plays or stories he write directly for the screen; this is a rare instance of him writing a screenplay based on a story by someone else) and Elaine May, formerly of the comedy team of Mike Nichols and Elaine May, directed. By 1972 Nichols was a “name” director with major hits like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Graduate and Carnal Knowledge under his belt (along with a major flop, the star-crossed 1970 film of Joseph Heller’s 1962 World War II satire Catch-22) and May was trying to catch up. Her first film, A New Leaf, starring Walter Matthau, hadn’t done badly at the box office but hadn’t done especially well, either. Turner Classic Movies was showing The Heartbreak Kid as part of “Trailblazing Women,” their series on women film directors, which had begun last Thursday night with a program of women who’d directed in the silent era. One was Alice Guy-Blaché, who began at the Gaumont studios in the late 19^th century, continued to 1920 and, though she wasn’t a technical pioneer (her films were still static tableaux in which the cameras didn’t move or cut within a scene the way D. W. Griffith’s did), did demand an understated acting style; her studio had a sign reading, “Be natural,” and the one moment in her program when an actor did lapse into the kind of arm-over-head swooning most people who’ve never seen a silent film all the way through think they were all acted like — when the actor playing Judas in her 34-minute biopic of Jesus from 1906 has to react to Jesus at the Last Supper saying to his apostles, “One of you will betray me,” it stands out like a sore thumb. They also showed the 1921 film The Blot by director Lois Weber, a genuinely formidable filmmaker whom critics at the time thought would never be forgotten, even though the only film of hers I’d seen previously — her greatest hit, Where Are Your Children? from 1916 (starring Tyrone Power’s father) — was a strident anti-abortion propaganda piece, rather un-P.C. for feminist critics today. The Blot was also a propaganda piece, denouncing how shabbily teachers and ministers get paid compared to other professionals, and featured Louis Calhern (of all people!) as the romantic lead, a spoiled rich kid who romances the daughter of a poor professor and, of course, turns around his attitude, and it was a quite impressive piece of filmmaking. After that they showed the 1920 film The Love Light, written and directed by Frances Marion and starring her mentor, Mary Pickford, as a girl in a small Italian village during World War I; when Charles and I watched it earlier (as part of another TCM tribute to unjustly forgotten women directors) I’d thought it almost impossibly melodramatic — if I hadn’t known the director and writer were the same person, I’d have thought she was working her ass off as director to town down the excesses of the script she’d been given — but this time around seemed better (and it anticipated Rex Ingram’s Mare Nostrum by five years in having the central character get snookered into a spy plot that ends up with the death of a family member — her brother in The Love Light, the hero’s son in Mare Nostrum).

The Heartbreak Kid is an interesting movie but I’m not sure I like it. Though it was made in 1972 it has a common failing with a lot of recent movies: there’s really no one in the dramatis personae we actually like. It opens with the wedding day of hot-shot athletic gear salesman Leonard “Lenny” Cantrow (Charles Grodin) and Lila Kolodny (played by Elaine May’s real-life daughter, Jeannie Berlin), a sort-of traditional Jewish ceremony (though the “glass” the groom stomps on and breaks at the end of the ceremony is actually a Dixie cup, which is hardly the same but at least is considerably safer), following which they drive down the East Coast from their home in New York to the resort hotel in Florida where they plan to spend the honeymoon. Only the first day of their trip, Lila stays out in the sun too long, blows off Lenny’s warnings that she should be wearing sunscreen (this was beginning to sound like Charles and me!) and ends up with a humongous sunburn that makes her so unpresentable in polite company that Lenny decrees she must spend the next few days holed up in her room with nothing to do but watch TV. The next day Lenny goes to the beach — and finds a gorgeous blonde woman, Kelly Corcoran (Cybill Shepherd), standing over him insisting, “You’re in my spot.” It’s lust at first sight for Lenny, and he spends the next few days trying to get in as much face (and other parts) time with Kelly as he can while palming Lila off with an increasingly preposterous set of excuses — he went out to visit an old Army buddy (he was in the Army for three years but because of a bad back never actually saw combat), they were in a car crash, he was in the emergency room for hours and then had to spend the day testifying in court (and when Lila wonders how he got such a great suntan on a day he was supposedly indoors all day, he says there were a lot of recesses during which he sunbathed). He also meets Kelly’s parents; her mom (Audra Lindley) likes him but her dad (Eddie Albert) reads him as a phony the first thing and issues a series of increasingly dire threats in case he ever sees Lenny in his or his daughter’s presence ever again. Nonetheless, he’s so convinced he made a mistake in marrying Lila and so desperate to get Kelly he takes Lila to dinner and tells her he has bad news for her — she thinks he’s got a terminal illness and, when she finally realizes he’s telling her he wants out of their marriage, of course she wants to throw up — and sees an attorney friend to have the marriage annulled. In the second act (given Simon’s day job as a playwright, it’s obvious he was still thinking in terms of curtains) Lenny has actually come to Kelly’s home town in Minnesota and shows up at her home to resume his courtship of her. Dad is still pissed at him — when Lenny asks him if it’s O.K. for him to date his daughter, dad says, “Not if they tied me to a horse and pulled me forty miles by my tongue” — but Lenny is such a good salesperson and is so dementedly determined that he manages to get Kelly away from her dad and both the boyfriends she’s been dating at college, and there’s a full-dress church wedding ceremony followed by an ambiguous ending in which we’re not sure Lenny will finally be happy with the shiksa of his wet dreams or he’ll be dumping her as soon as his roving eye roves on to someone else.

TCM was showing this as part of a tribute to women directors and complaining about their relative neglect — the two rather pretentious women hosting the screening claimed that Elaine May’s next film was the mega-flop Ishtar and argued that she wasn’t allowed to direct again because “women aren’t allowed to have flops,” but in fact May made a notorious movie between them, Mikey and Nicky, a gangster comedy with Peter Falk whose post-production stretched out over five years because May made the mistake of recording the soundtrack on two separate machines and then had the devil’s own time trying to synchronize them (at one film festival May ruefully told the audience that she was taking so long on the film not because it was so fantastically complicated but “I’m just trying to get it so you can hear it”), and that was a technical boner that would have been enough to deter even the least sexist producer in Hollywood from hiring her. But it seems to me the Zeitgeist of The Heartbreak Kid was determined less by its director being a woman than the original story writer, the screenwriter and the director all being Jews. In some ways it anticipates Woody Allen’s serio-comic masterpieces of the late 1970’s and 1980’s — Annie Hall, Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters — in their comic clashes between Jews and goyim and the mutual incomprehension between the Jewish and non-Jewish worlds, except that May was traversing this territory well before Allen was and doing it in a considerably grimmer and less ironic way. There’s also a good deal of Philip Roth in this story — the Jewish guy who can’t make it with a girl from his own tribe but goes wild with lust at the thought of bedding a shiksa — a scenario we’ve seen not only in other fiction but real life as well (it seems to have been what drove the sexual/political downfalls of Jewish-American politicians Elliot Spitzer, Anthony Weiner and Bob Filner) — and one of the most impressive aspects of the film is the careful counterpointing of the Jewish wedding at the beginning at the Christian wedding at the end. (Charles noted the irony that at the Jewish wedding they’re playing the Lohengrin wedding march by the anti-Semitic Richard Wagner, and at the Christian one they’re playing the Midsummer Night’s Dream wedding march by the Lutheran but Jewish-descended Felix Mendelssohn.) The two women hosts mentioned a remake of The Heartbreak Kid from 2007, made by a male director and starring Ben Stiller, and said that the male filmmaker had stacked the deck against the Jewish (first) wife much more than May and Simon had, including making her parents fat (thereby suggesting that she would end up this way as well), which was ironic given that throughout the movie I’d been doing a Production Code-era version in my head in which the man would realize he was making a big mistake and realize he’d be better off with the woman he had married originally. In fact, quite frankly, that’s how I would have wanted to see it end!

Mr. Wong in Chinatown (Monogram, 1939)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The movie was Mr. Wong in Chinatown, one of two ultra-cheapie tapes I had picked up at Suncoast while we were in Horton Plaza (the other was D. W. Griffith’s Abraham Lincoln, which I haven’t seen in years and look forward to seeing again —ironically, on the night John Gallagher and I saw a film featuring Anjelica Huston I had bought a tape of an old movie starring her grandfather, Walter Huston, who played Lincoln). Mr. Wong in Chinatown was a good “B” movie, hampered by the usual limitations — low budget, sets that looked like they were about to fall over, lousy and inappropriate “library” music, sluggish direction by William Nigh (the plot, by W. Scott Darling, could actually have been exciting and suspenseful in the hands of a better director — what was Edgar G. Ulmer doing that week, one wonders?) and a “Chinese” makeup on Boris Karloff which wouldn’t have fooled anybody (and it didn’t help that Karloff, unlike Warner Oland — whose Charlie Chan movies this one was obviously imitating — spoke in his normal British accent and speech patterns without even the slightest attempt to sound Chinese, either). But it also had a better-than-usual cast (a young Marjorie Reynolds as the hotshot reporter and Grant Withers as the police detective, who’s also Reynolds’ boyfriend, who gets tired of her getting in the way and trying to use every available telephone to call in her scoops), an unusually strong plot and some good atmospherics; also some nice stock shots of San Francisco (especially nostalgia-inducing for those of us who lived there once) showing what the city looked like in the late 1930’s. — 12/10/93

•••••

Anyway, the experience of watching Chan Is Missing inspired me to spend this morning running the two “Mr. Wong” movies, endearingly tacky in the Monogram manner but still well cast (especially Evelyn Brent as a villainess in Mr. Wong, Detective and Marjorie Reynolds as a sob-sister reporter in Mr. Wong in Chinatown — hard to believe that, within three years after making this “B” and two others in the Wong series, she was singing and dancing with Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire in a big-budget musical, Holiday Inn, with a score by Irving Berlin!) and well played by Boris Karloff in the lead, though coloring and greasing down his hair with black shoe polish and giving him a little eyeliner to suggest Asian eyes did not turn him, visually, into a credible Chinese. The Wong films suffer by comparison with the Charlie Chan vehicles at Fox on which they were obviously modeled, due not only to higher production values but also the characters of Charlie Chan’s children, which in their own 1930’s way dramatized the assimilation/native culture dilemma of the immigrant (though the Charlie Chan movies blew their chance to dramatize effectively the clash of Eastern and Western cultural values by abandoning the Hawai’ian setting of the Chan books, Hawai’i being a dramatically fascinating atmosphere in which American, Oriental and Polynesian cultures meet, mix and clash). Still, the mystery angles were well done (though the gimmick of Mr. Wong, Detective — that the murderer does indeed turn out to be the most likely suspect the police have been suspecting all along — is strictly from desperation). — 11/15/94

•••••

I went to Charles’ place and ran him the videotape of the film Mr. Wong in Chinatown. I’ve actually always liked this film, and for all its Monogramesque crudity it’s actually neatly done, with a good story (W. Scott Darling is the only author credited), atmospheric photography and a good performance by Karloff as a Chinese detective in San Francisco (with what looks like lacquer in his hair to paste it down and make him look suitably exotic) making up for William Nigh’s sluggish direction (where was Edgar G. Ulmer the week that Monogram needed him?). — 11/3/98

•••••

I screened one of the films I had had a copy of before: Mr. Wong in Chinatown, the third film in the series and the one that introduced Marjorie Reynolds as Roberta “Robby” Logan, reporter on the San Francisco Herald and in a love-hate relationship with another continuing series character, Captain Street of the San Francisco Police Department (Grant Withers, Loretta Young’s first husband and star of James Cagney’s and Joan Blondell’s first film, Sinners’ Holiday). Chinatown stands out in the series for having the strongest plot — Chinese princess Lin Hwa (Lotus Long) is murdered in Wong’s living room via a poisoned dart fired by a Chinese blow gun, and it develops that she was in the country to buy airplanes for her warlord brother, only the “aviation company” she was dealing with was a scam outfit that was conning her out of her money — as well as some genuine action scenes (including a car explosion, a fistfight and a strong climax on a Chinese ship where Wong has been held after being kidnapped), more creative direction from Nigh than usual (including at least one of the Venetian-blind shots he loved), a better-than-usual sense of suspense and pace, and the obvious knockoff of the Torchy Blane series in the relationship between Logan and Street (and Reynolds, who’d later appear in the big musical Holiday Inn opposite Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire after Mary Martin had to withdraw because she was pregnant with Larry Hagman, does a quite good job of channeling Glenda Farrell). This time the killer’s identity is a real surprise — though the primary suspects are Captain Jaime (William Royle) of the Maid of Orient vessel that brought the Princess to San Francisco and Captain Guy Jackson of the phony “Phelps Aviation Co.” and partner with Jaime in the scheme to defraud the Princess (who wrote the words “Captain J” on a notepad just before she died, expiring before she could finish the last name), the actual murderer turns out to be Davidson, the banker with the Exchange Bank of Hankow (which turns into the Specie Bank of Hankow midway through the film — just as the “Palace Hotel” becomes the “Palliser Hotel” before Chinatown ends and, as the American Film Institute Catalog notes, both Street’s rank in the police department and his first name changed from film to film in the series) who realized the deal was a scam and decided to scam the scammers by forging Lin Hwa’s signature and draining her account to cover up his own previous embezzlements. So far the only Wong I haven’t seen is entry number four, The Fatal Hour (after Karloff’s horror comeback with the re-release of the original Frankenstein on a double bill with Dracula in 1938, and Universal’s subsequent success with Son of Frankenstein in 1939, Monogram started giving the Wongs more “horrific” titles to draw in more of Karloff’s usual audience), but Chinatown seems to be the best of the other five and a quite worthwhile film to come from a usually chintzy company like second-iteration Monogram. — 6/23/05

•••••

Two nights ago Charles and I watched the 1939 Monogram (second iteration) detective “B” Mr. Wong in Chinatown, third of the six-film series Monogram produced between 1938 and 1940 based on the character of James Lee Wong, a Chinese detective created by author Hugh Wiley for a series of stories in Collier’s magazine. To play Wong, Monogram signed Boris Karloff, who’d just been let go by Universal after the contract he’d signed after his star-making turn in the 1931 Frankenstein expired with the quite charming but decidedly non-horrific 1937 film Night Key. It wasn’t that Karloff was hurting for work — being British and therefore a native English speaker, he wasn’t handicapped the way Bela Lugosi was by having to learn his parts phonetically, and he was a good enough actor to play ordinary character villains as well as monsters and mad scientists. Indeed, in 1939 Karloff was defying the studio system by maintaining non-exclusive contracts with four studios simultaneously: Universal (which re-signed him to do Son of Frankenstein, his third and last performance as Frankenstein’s monster unless you count a 1960’s TV episode of Route 66 he and Lon Chaney, Jr. did as the Monster and the Wolf-Man, respectively), Columbia (which gave him a series of roles in which he plays a scientist anxious to help humanity who goes off the rails and becomes an obsessed murderer), Warner Bros. (which after making a classic-style horror film, The Walking Dead, in 1936 thereafter used Karloff in action melodramas, mostly remakes), and Monogram.

Monogram obviously wanted to make movies about James Lee Wong in hopes he’d be their answer to Charlie Chan — whose own series was on hiatus because of the fatal illness of actor Warner Oland; 20^th Century-Fox made the last Oland Chan, Charlie Chan at Monte Carlo, in late 1937 before Oland became too ill to work, and after Oland died they didn’t make another Chan film until nearly two years later, after they recruited Sidney Toler to take over the role. So there was a “Chinese detective gap” in Hollywood that Monogram planned to fill, and with horror films considered out of fashion in 1936-38 Karloff was eager to sign for the series because it meant more work. Then in 1938 an independent theatre owner in Los Angeles decided to dredge up the 1930 Dracula and 1931 Frankenstein and show them as a double bill, drawing audiences in with the usual see-them-if-you-dare publicity hype — and he got lines stretching two blocks from his theatre. Universal noticed and did a double-bill reissue of the films nationwide, and all of a sudden horror films were back “in” again and Karloff was, as William K. Everson politely put it, “a much bigger name than Monogram could have afforded if he were not already contracted.” The first three Wong films had titles featuring the character’s name — Mr. Wong, Detective; The Mystery of Mr. Wong and Mr. Wong in Chinatown — but then Monogram slapped horror-sounding titles on Wongs four and five (The Fatal Hour and Doomed to Die, respectively), and for the sixth, Phantom of Chinatown, they pulled Karloff out of the series, made a mad-scientist movie with him (The Ape) similar to the ones he’d been doing at Columbia, and recast Wong with … Keye Luke. What a concept: a Chinese detective in an American movie actually being played by a Chinese actor! The only other example I can think of in the classic era is the Paramount 1937 “B” Daughter of Shanghai, in which Philip Ahn (who would have been a perfect choice for Charlie Chan if Fox and/or Monogram had been interested in using a real Chinese) played a Chinese-American FBI agent who teams up with Anna May Wong to catch a sinister band of human smugglers sneaking undocumented immigrants from China into the U.S.

Anyway, Mr. Wong in Chinatown was the third Wong and for a long time I thought it was the best in the series — I first saw it in the 1980’s on a cheap VHS tape from an outfit called Goodtimes Video (which also gave me my first glimpse of The Robot vs. the Aztec Mummy and for their issue of Ghosts on the Loose, combining the East Side Kids with Bela Lugosi and Ava Gardner, they repeated the next-to-last reel so the film lasted 72 instead of 62 minutes and one wondered why we were re-seeing scenes we’d just seen) and I was impressed with the legitimately complicated plot and some genuine visual atmosphere from the usually ultra-hacky director William Nigh. The plot: Princess Lin Hwa (Lotus Long, who was actually something of a star so it’s a bit of a surprise to see her play a part in which she’s dispatched in the first few minutes) comes to see Mr. Wong and gets intercepted by his houseboy Willie (Lee Tong Foo — yeah, right, the star is literally Anglo but his servant is played by an actual Chinese) because Wong is hunched over a chemistry table doing an experiment (I know what you’re thinking, but this is a perfectly normal chemical reaction and not the more sinister type of “science” Karloff’s characters usually performed). Alas, while she’s waiting to see Wong, an unseen assailant aims through Wong’s open window and kills her with a poisoned dart from a spring-loaded Chinese weapon that’s noiseless, easily concealed on one’s forearm and — though this wouldn’t have been a consideration in 1939 — wouldn’t be detected by airport security because it’s made of bamboo. Ironically, though Wong recognizes her ring as being from a particular Chinese family clan, he doesn’t have any idea who the victim was — nor does police captain Bill Street (Grant Withers, reduced to “B” work after his star buildup at Warner Bros. in the early 1930’s didn’t take and neither did his marriage to Loretta Young — she had it annulled), the typical dumb-cop foil for the brilliant private detective. Fortunately, nosy reporter Roberta “Bobbie” Logan (Marjorie Reynolds), introduced to the series in this episode and obviously patterned on the Torchy Blane character Warner Bros. had been doing as a series (including the tempestuous relationship between her and Capt. Street — they date by night but by day he’s trying to keep her out of his crime scenes, at one point handcuffing her to a chair in Wong’s living room — she escapes by pulling apart the chair and walking around with one arm from it dangling from her own wrist) covered her arrival in the U.S. and therefore knew exactly who she was.

It turns out that Lin Hwa had come to San Francisco (where the Wongs were set) with $1 million in bank drafts to buy a fleet of airplanes for her brother, a Chinese warlord, and to do that she was meeting with Captain Jaime (William Royle) of the Maid of the Orient, a cargo ship with a few passenger spaces on which she made the crossing and planned to take back with the planes on board. She was also in touch with Captain Jackson (Peter George Lynn), San Francisco sales representative of the Phelps Aviation Company in Los Angeles (noting the last name, Charles inevitably joked, “God hates planes”), who was also on the ship. Indeed, when she was dying she scrawled “Captain J” on a piece of paper on Wong’s desk, leading both Wong and the police to suspect both Jaime and Jackson — who are indeed in on a scheme to defraud Lin Hwa, since it turns out the “Phelps Aviation Company” is a scam, renting a hangar and a couple of ancient biplanes in L.A. to make it look like they manufacture aircraft when in reality they do nothing. Alas, the two Captains “J” are pissed off because they can’t steal Lin Hwa’s money — her banker, Mr. Davidson (Huntley Gordon) of the Specie Bank of Hankow, has already drained her bank account and forged her signature in both English and Chinese (which he learned how to write while working at the bank’s home office in Hankow), and he killed Lin Hwa and her maid as well as his own hired assassin, a part played by little-person actor Angelo Rossitto. A little person sneaking up the sides of buildings and knocking people off with a blow gun — you don’t suppose writer W. Scott Darling had read Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four, do you? The three baddies have a massive falling-out which ends with a reasonably exciting climax on the Maid of the Orient as it’s about to sail — and the two “J”’s are going to take Wong, whom they’ve kidnapped, out to sea and dump him. Of course both the police and our intrepid reporter Bobble Logan (whom I imagined saying to the other cast members, “Have some respect for me! In three years I’ll be doing a big musical with Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire!”) find out what’s going on in time, Davidson gets killed and the two “J”’s are captured.

I had long thought Mr. Wong in Chinatown was the best of the series until I saw episode four, The Fatal Hour, which began with a marvelous plotline involving the murder of Captain Street’s best friend on the police force, Dan Grady, killed while investigating a ring of criminals illegally excavating and smuggling ancient Chinese artifacts. When I saw The Fatal Hour I wrote about it, “The most convincing aspect of the early reels is — surprise! — Grant Withers’ genuine pathos in expressing his character’s grief for the man he started with in the police department. For once Withers actually expresses deep emotion instead of just playing the irascible screamer he was through most of the series — indeed, [writer Scott] Darling’s script and Withers’ performance puts the grief so much front and center that when Boris Karloff enters as Mr. Wong he seems like an extra in his own vehicle. Had the film focused on Bill Street and his determination to avenge the murder of his friend and fellow cop, The Fatal Hour could have been a fine movie and an important proto-noir; instead, after a quite impressive start the usual Monogram formulae take over and the film assumes the stately talkiness of the first two Wongs (relieved a bit in Mr. Wong in Chinatown simply because on that go-round Darling actually got some real action in his script).” The basic problems with all the Mr. Wong movies are that “stately talkiness” and the fact that Mr. Wong himself simply isn’t that interesting a character: he’s living alone (except for that annoying houseboy) and the charm of Charlie Chan’s family relationships is sorely missed. As Wong, Boris Karloff is practically immobile, wrapped up in almost as much facial makeup as he was wearing in Frankenstein or The Mummy, including a bit of “tweaking” around the eyes to make him look Asian, and his hair plastered onto his scalp with shoe polish (Karloff was nearly 50 when he made this film and his real hair had already gone grey). Karloff tries his best, as always, but the part really offered him nothing in particular to work with; he just steers himself through the scene, delivers his lines but doesn’t have the material with which to create the quirkily charming characters Oland and Toler both made of Charlie Chan (Oland more so, at least in my opinion). He’s just Boris Karloff in odd makeup playing a good guy, for a change. — 10/7/15

Love and Mercy (River Road Entertainment, Battle Mountain Films, Lionsgate, 2014, released 2015)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last Friday night I screened Charles Love & Mercy, a biopic of Brian Wilson, founder of the Beach Boys, whose bizarre career trajectory from brilliant young genius to drug-induced psychotic to puppet of his controversial therapist Dr. Eugene Landy to his ultimate separation, full recovery and late-in-life comeback as a sort of elder statesman of music would seem to be made for the big screen. I’m familiar with the story from a lot of sources, including the reports that came out about it when it was still going on as well as Steven Gaines’ 1980’s biography of the Beach Boys, Heroes and Villains (which also dealt with Brian’s brother Dennis Wilson and his relationship with Charles Manson, who was hoping Dennis would get him a record contract so he could make the album that he thought would spark an apocalyptic race war — when he didn’t get signed he targeted the man whom he’d thought would sign him — Terry Melcher of Columbia Records, Doris Day’s son — by ordering the killings of Sharon Tate and four other people who were staying at the home Melcher had formerly occupied, and which Manson thought Melcher owned) and Brian Wilson’s own autobiography, Wouldn’t It Be Nice, published in 1992. (Wouldn’t It Be Nice credits a co-writer, Todd Gold, and the Wikipedia page on Brian Wilson says that in a 1992 lawsuit Brian said he never even read the finished book; it also claims he’s working on another ghost-written “autobiography.”) The film picks up Brian Wilson’s story when he’s in the middle of recording the backing tracks for the Beach Boys’ masterpiece, Pet Sounds — a commercial disappointment (though not, as depicted in the movie, an outright flop; it did break three AM radio hit singles) — under the arrangement Brian worked out with his bandmates by which he would remain at home, write songs and record backing tracks while the rest of the Beach Boys toured. (Brian actually stopped touring with the Beach Boys a year and a half before Pet Sounds was recorded, but it’s not terribly surprising that screenwriters Oren Moyerman and Michael Alan Lerner — who, ironically, shares two-thirds of his name with another legendary songwriter — did this elementary bit of telescoping.)

The film accurately depicts the arguments Brian got into with the other Beach Boys — especially his cousin Mike Love — over his new material, with Mike arguing that the Beach Boys had hit on a successful formula with songs about surfing, fast cars, California sunshine and young love, and they shouldn’t leave their audience behind by changing their style. Brian counter-argued that the audience was leaving them; he’d heard the Beatles’ album Rubber Soul and realized that the future of music was in elaborate productions and sophisticated lyrics, and he was competitive enough to want to make an album that would top Rubber Soul. An awful lot of people thought Pet Sounds had topped the Beatles — and one of them was Paul McCartney, who went back into the studio determined to make an album that would top the Beach Boys’ masterwork. The Beatles next released Revolver, and Brian heard it and was determined to top it, so he hooked up with producer, songwriter and lyricist Van Dyke Parks to create the most famous stillborn album in history, Smile (whose title became such a byword for recording projects that fell flat due to their own overambitiousness that Charles Mingus’ Epitaph, a piece he premiered at New York’s Town Hall in 1962 and which was in such a state of incompletion that Mingus had copyists backstage writing the parts for part two while the band was onstage playing part one — as “Mingus’ Smile”).

When he’s stuck a “friend” offers Brian LSD, he goes on a trip and tells his then-wife Marilyn Rovell that he’s just seen God — according to Wouldn’t It Be Nice, Brian actually took LSD two years earlier than that, just before recording “California Girls,” and though lyrically it’s an old-fashioned Beach Boys song, the shimmer in the musical arrangement was a direct result of Brian’s LSD use — at least that’s how Brian told the story a quarter-century ago in a book whose “take” on much of Brian’s life was very different from what he thinks about it now (the closing credits of Love and Mercy credit him with cooperating with the project). The film intercuts between Brian Wilson in the late 1980’s as he meets and falls in love with ex-model turned Cadillac salesperson Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks) and Brian in the mid-1960’s and early 1970’s as he gets more and more obsessive about Smile, then suddenly abandons the project (according to Steven Gaines, he had another meeting with Paul McCartney, who came out to California with a tape of the Beatles’ song “A Day in the Life,” and Brian’s face drained white as he realized that the Beatles had already accomplished everything he’d hoped to do with Smile; Brian’s own account in Wouldn’t It Be Nice was that he heard Paul play “She’s Leaving Home” but somehow it doesn’t seem to me that a live vocal-and-piano performance of one of the least “psychedelic” songs on Sgt. Pepper would have had the huge ego-destroying effect on Brian Wilson as hearing “A Day in the Life” in the form we know it from the recording, and the writers of Love and Mercy seem to attribute the abandonment of Smile to yet another argument between Brian and his father, Murry Wilson, with whom he had a relationship similar to Leopold and Wolfgang Mozart: the mediocre musician who realized he’d sired a genius and tried to exploit him), retreats to his bed and hardly ever leaves for two, three or four years (the accounts differ) except to get food from the refrigerator and (presumably) use the bathroom.

His weight balloons to nearly 300 pounds and Marilyn decides to act, first by putting a padlock on the refrigerator door and then calling in Dr. Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti), who had developed a system of treating celebrity patients by taking over their lives 24/7, surrounding them with minders and bodyguards (when the movie Brian first meets Melinda at the car dealership where she works, he points out his “bodyguard” and muses on how odd a word that is) and gives Brian the full-dress treatment. By 1976 Brian is well enough that Warner Bros., which then had the Beach Boys under contract, mounts a full-dress “Brian Is Back!” campaign, including starring the Beach Boys in an NBC-TV special and booking Brian Wilson on Saturday Night Live, in which he performs a version of “Good Vibrations” with just his voice and piano, the piano mounted in a giant sandbox. The real Brian Wilson had done this in one of his crazier inspirations — he said he would be inspired if he could feel sand under his feet as he composed — only the giant sandbox ended up being a giant litter box for Brian’s pets (he had cats, though in the movie we see only dogs). When Brian wrote Wouldn’t It Be Nice he was still under Landy’s influence — he’d flown the coop in the late 1970’s, then been arrested as a homeless derelict in San Diego and taken to a hospital, where he recalled being treated by a Black nurse who jacked him off (not that that was going to end up in the movie — they had a PG-13 rating to protect!), and Landy came back slamming into his life and put him on an even tighter regimen of control than he had before. Wouldn’t It Be Nice depicts Dr. Landy as the angel of mercy who saved Brian Wilson’s life and nursed him back to creativity — at the end of the book Brian describes the lawsuit the other Beach Boys filed against him and Dr. Landy, demanding that Brian fire Landy as a condition of being allowed to remain in the Beach Boys, and it ends with him, feeling betrayed and hurt, facing an uncertain future without Dr. Landy’s influence. I remember this vividly because Brian was scheduled to do a book signing in San Diego and I was supposed to cover the event for a small local weekly — only at the last minute Dr. Landy insisted that the event be canceled, and it was.

Love and Mercy describes Dr. Landy as so domineering he’s practically insane himself; when he decides Melinda is getting too close to Brian and it’s threatening his control, he insists she not see him again (he’d previously ordered Brian to cut off all contact with his ex-wife Marilyn and their two daughters), and the lawsuit that forced Landy out of Brian’s life is depicted not as a betrayal but a liberation. Yet, ironically, the movie is titled after — and ends with a performance of — “Love and Mercy,” the first song on the 1989 Brian Wilson solo album Dr. Landy produced, even though the one scene we see from the recording of this album shows Dr. Landy browbeating Brian in his home studio and demanding he write a song … at once, in a scene that makes a powerful but not overstated parallel between the way Dr. Landy is treating Brian and the way his father treated him. (In Wouldn’t It Be Nice Brian describes his deal with Sire Records to release this album; his contract called for Sire to release a second album if the first sold over a certain number of copies, and Brian actually recorded the second album, with the revealing title Sweet Insanity, but Sire president Seymore Stein weaseled out of his contractual obligation to release it because, while the first album had met the sales quota, it had done so just barely.) The movie’s basic stratagem for showing Brian Wilson at two different stages of his life is to use two actors to play him — John Cusack as the late-1980’s Brian and Paul Dano as the mid-1960’s Brian (I love Paul Dano as an actor but I’m having the feeling about him I also had about Ryan Gosling: when is there going to be one casting director out there who casts him as someone normal?) — though they both look believable as the real person (the physical resemblances to the real Brian are strong) and as the same person at different ages. (This was a long-unrealized project of Josef von Sternberg: to portray a character’s complete life story by using different actors to play him or her at different ages.) There’s also a third Brian, since the film occasionally flashes back to his and his brothers’ childhoods and in those the son of the director, Bill Pohlad, plays Brian.

Love and Mercy inevitably leaves out a lot of the twists and turns of the real-life story — I remember a mid-1990’s TV-movie about the Beach Boys that took a much more morbid view of the material (including Murry Wilson suffering a fatal heart attack while listening to Lawrence Welk’s recording of “Two Step Side-Step,” the one Murry Wilson song actually recorded before the Beach Boys became successful, with his record player on repeat so the song plays over and over) — but on its own terms it’s a quite moving story, well told, and with the blue of the Southern California sky (at least when it isn’t smoggy!) and sea dominating the color scheme instead of everything being shoehorned into the dank green-and-brown look that constitutes virtually all of the spectrum we get to see in most color films today. One particularly subtle scene in the Moverman-Lerner script comes when Brian’s first wife Marilyn comes out of their house to his redoubt near the swimming pool to tell him he should come in because their daughter has just smiled her first smile — and Brian, so paralyzed with trauma over the collapse of his stillborn album, stays motionless because he can’t bear even to hear the word “smile.” It’s also well acted, with both Cusack and Dano standing out — though I suspect much of the music comes from the surviving session tapes of both Pet Sounds and Smile (both of which have been issued in multi-CD boxed sets for the true Beach Boys fanatic) and I believe many of the session directions we hear come from the real Brian Wilson — Cusack in particular manages to project just enough twitchiness we get the impression the character is not “all there,” as the saying goes, without making him too floridly crazy. And Elizabeth Banks matches the men in portraying a character whose love of Brian triumphs over her fear of him (and of Dr. Landy — the final credits feature some where-are-they-now titles that make clear the filmmakers’ view of her as the savior that got Brian out from under Dr. Landy’s thumb and set him on the path to sanity and functionality as both person and musician).