by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The features at last night’s Mars movie screening were two
cheapies from the early 1950’s, Flight to Mars from Monogram and Red Planet Mars from a company I read off the opening credits as “Hillary Productions,
Inc.” but which is listed on the film’s imdb.com page as “Malaby Pictures
Corp.,” releasing through United Artists. Both were clearly part of the cycle
of space-travel films kicked off by George Pal’s production of Destination
Moon in 1950 — it was a huge hit (Pal
produced it for the small Eagle-Lion company, formerly PRC, after his usual
studio, Paramount, turned it down; after its success Paramount re-signed him
and gave him Philip Wylie’s When Worlds Collide, which they’d originally bought for Cecil B. DeMille
in 1932, as his next project) and sparked a number of other studios to rush out
films about space travel. One was a stone ripoff called Rocketship
X-M — based on a story by Kurt Neumann
about a trip to Mars, hurriedly rewritten so it took place on the moon, then re-rewritten when Pal and Eagle-Lion threatened to sue
anyone else who did a moon-flight film, so Neumann returned to his original
story idea and had his astronauts head for the moon but get diverted to Mars.
Neumann was working for a studio even chintzier than Eagle-Lion — Lippert, which
was mostly a reissue label and foreign-film distributor — but they got their
movie into theatres three weeks before Destination Moon and claimed in their ads that theirs was the first
film featuring space travel (which it wasn’t). So the “suits” at Monogram
green-lighted their in-house talent, including director Lesley Selander (who
divided his time between Monogram and Republic and did mostly “B” Westerns for
both), writer Arthur Strawn and a semi-name and no-name cast including
Marguerite Chapman (top-billed even though, like Bette Davis in Bureau
of Missing Persons, the film is already
half an hour old before her character appears), Cameron Mitchell, John Litel
and Morris Ankrum. (Litel’s presence puts everyone else in the cast one degree
of separation from Humphrey Bogart and Ronald Reagan.)
Monogram also put enough
money into the production to shoot it in color — Cinecolor instead of
Technicolor (Destination Moon had
been in color but Rocketship X-M
was in black-and-white) but still welcome — and for the first half-hour or so
it’s a pretty straightforward portrayal of the first manned expedition to Mars.
One novelty is that one of the lead astronauts is a reporter, Steve Abbott
(Cameron Mitchell), who’s there to broadcast live coverage of the flight, first
via radio and then, once the ship is so far from earth it is no longer in radio
contact, via “space cylinders,” which are basically miniature rockets launched
from torpedo tubes that have homing signals that will guide them back to Earth.
The other four astronauts are the mission’s captain, Dr. Jim Barker (Arthur
Franz); Carol Stafford (Virginia Huston), whom Barker took along because she’s
such a great rocket scientist and designed many of the ship’s controls but
who’s also in decidedly unrequited love with Barker; and older scientists Dr.
Lane (John Litel) and Professor Jackson (Richard Gaines), the latter of whom is
the obligatory skeptical grump who declaims about how they’re likely to fail
and die, and even if they reach Mars and get back the results are probably not going to be happy. On the way
nothing much happens except that Steve Abbott finds himself falling for Carol
Stafford (well, with a woman and two young guys aboard a romantic triangle was bound to manifest itself) and Carol has to deliver a lot
of sexist chatter about how she really wants a husband and family instead of a career. The ship also runs
into a couple of meteor showers — shown as red dots that look so much like they
were drawn directly onto film one wonders if Norman McLaren was doing
uncredited special-effects work on the film (the credited effects person was
Jack Cosgrove and imdb.com lists Irving Block and Jack Rabin as well). They
escape the first one unscathed but the second one forces them into some
maneuvers to avoid it, and between that and the previous mysterious
disappearance of some of their fuel they find themselves far off course and
realize that they can land on Mars if they still want to, but it’ll be
touch-and-go whether they’ll have enough fuel to get back. This becomes even
more problematic when the ship crash-lands in the middle of a Martian mountain
range, but its impact triggers an avalanche that buries most of the spacecraft.
When they get out they find themselves greeted by an honor guard from Mars — in
this version Martians look just like Terran humans except they’re wearing
spacesuits (neon-bright colored leftovers from Destination Moon; this film also cribbed the interior set of the
spaceship from Rocketship X-M)
because the surface of Mars is as toxic for Martians as it is for humans. No
problem: the Martians have simply moved themselves underground and developed
extensive technologies, including hydroponic farming, from a seemingly
inexhaustible energy source called “corium.” The Martians — including Ikron
(Morris Ankrum), leader of the Martian Council that governs the place — offer
the Earthlings everything they need to rebuild their ship and return home,
including a supply of corium to replace the ship’s depleted atomic fuel. Only
director Selander then cuts to a meeting of the Martian Council and shows us
that this is a trap: Mars has tried to develop an interplanetary spacecraft of
its own but has failed, so Ikron proposes to let the Earthlings repair their
ship, give them all the time and resources they need to do that, only just when
the ship is about to take off from earth, the Martians will kill the
Earthlings, take over the ship, figure out how it’s constructed and build
enough of a fleet of them they will be able to conquer Earth and take it over. The
reason they want to do this is they’re running out of corium, and without that
key energy source their ability to support themselves on Mars will end — so
they want our planet to colonize and our own atomic-energy resources to replace
the soon-to-be-depleted corium. Though not as blatant in its Cold War
propagandism as Red Planet Mars,
this plot line certainly smacks of anti-Communist hysteria, ridiculing the very
idea of “peaceful coexistence” and reinforcing the ruling ideology in the U.S.
at that time that all movements
advocating world peace were simply fronts for those evil Commies in their
attempts to get us to disarm so they could take over without a fight. There is a decent Martian on the Council, though: Tillamar
(Robert Barrat, considerably heftier and more avuncular than he was in his days
as a stock villain at Warner Bros. in the early 1930’s and rather surprisingly
cast as a good guy here), who wants Mars and Earth to — dare I say it? —
peacefully coexist.
Tillamar’s daughter Alida (Marguerite Chapman) — whose name
can’t help but evoke memories of the pioneering Mars movie from the Soviet
Union in 1924, Aelita: Queen of Mars
(indeed, one imdb.com reviewer who apparently actually read Alexei Tolstoy’s
source novel for Aelita instead
of just watching the film, in which the entire Mars sequence is merely a dream
of the central character, said Flight to Mars is actually a closer adaptation of the “other”
Tolstoy’s novel than Aelita) gets
assigned to help the Earthlings repair their rocket, and in the process she
falls for Dr. Barker and he for her, sending Carol Stafford into some
hissy-fits of what-has-she-got-that-I-don’t jealousy until she ends up seeking
solace in the arms of Steve Abbott. (Maybe if she’d worn a mini-skirt — one of
the weirder conceits of this movie is that the two Martian women it depicts
both have daringly short outfits that make it look like the Martians invented
the mini-skirt 15 years before it became popular on Earth.) Alas, there’s another mini-skirted Martian woman, Terris (Lucille
Barkley), who’s a spy — and Alida overhears her and Ikron plotting and “outs”
them to the Earthlings, telling them they’d better get their spaceship fixed in
a hurry and fly back home before their Martian hosts kill them. They manage
this — though there’s a preposterous scene in which we’re supposed to believe
Steve and Barker defeat an entire Martian army unit just by themselves — and
they take Alida and Tillamar with them; Tillamar apparently thinks that from
Earth he can mobilize a Martian resistance to Ikron’s rule, gain control of the
council and make mutual trade deals with Earth instead of conquering it. (The
new TPP — Trans-Planetary Partnership.) Flight to Mars isn’t much of a movie, and for someone who
specialized in “B” Westerns Selander’s staging of the action scenes (not that
screenwriter Strawn gave him that many of them!) is surprisingly lame, but it’s
decent, inoffensive entertainment, made at an acceptable level of
professionalism (which hadn’t always been true of Monogram in the 1940’s!) and
O.K. for its time and place.
Saturday, May 21, 2016
Red Planet Mars (Melaby Pictures/United Artists, 1952)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Red Planet Mars is something else again. I’d never seen it before — though I thought I had; I was startled when I couldn’t find any reference to it in the movie reviews stored on my computer — but Charles watched it when he was in London and a TV station was doing a regular showing of American cheapies from the early 1950’s. During our whole trip there Charles regaled me with stories of what a terrible movie this was, but as it turned out it was a lot better than he had said it would be; it’s not a great movie, and there are a lot of things wrong with it, but at least it attempted to grapple with serious ideas (as the best science-fiction writing did in 1952) and is oddly haunting and moving. The story deals with a U.S. scientist living in San Diego and working at an observatory (it’s obviously a stock shot of the Palomar telescope and its enclosing dome) which appears to be attached to his home. He is Chris Cronyn (a very young Peter Graves, looking like he just got out of high school even though he’s depicted as having a wife and two sons, one of whom looks about 11), and he’s developed an apparatus using something called a “hydrogen valve” by which he hopes to amplify radio waves and turn them into light signals and back so he can establish communication with the planet Mars. The “hydrogen valve” was actually invented back in the 1940’s by Franz Calder (Herbert Berghof — ironic, given the way his character lives in an isolated mountain cabin in the Andes, that the actor’s name should mean “Mountain Court”!), a Nazi scientist who was condemned as a war criminal at Nuremberg and sentenced to seven years for doing Mengele-style experiments on concentration-camp inmates. When his seven years were up he was kidnapped by the Soviets and forced to work on his invention under their auspices, though he was able to insist on doing so at his Andean redoubt instead of in the U.S.S.R. under the direct supervision of those nasty Russkies. As for Calder’s invention, it was declared war booty and Cronyn was able to pick it up from the U.S. government.
So the film is at first a battle between Cronyn and Calder over who can develop the Martian radio link first, and also between Cronyn and his wife Linda (Andrea King, who frankly looks almost old enough to be Peter Graves’ mother!), who says basically that no good can come of what he’s doing and if he discovers superior technology on Mars and imports it to Earth, we’ll just use it to destroy each other and ourselves more efficiently. Cronyn actually reaches Mars — or at least he thinks he has — but at first all he gets back is his own signals, copied and rebroadcast, and he has no way of knowing whether he’s really in touch with Mars or his own signals are bouncing off some object or energy field in space and coming back to him. Then, during one night at the Cronyn home in which Chris is confessing his frustration to Linda and their sons Stewart (Orley Lindgren) and Roger (Bayard Veiller, who I assumed was the son of the film’s producer and co-writer Anthony Veiller, though Anthony’s Web page says he only had one child, a girl), Stewart listens to this while wolfing down a piece of pie (which he’s holding with his fingers) and says, “I’ve got it! Pi!” Chris realizes his son is onto something and broadcasts to Mars the first five digits of the irrational number Pi (3.1415 … ), figuring out that if the Martians have the technology to build a receiver for his broadcasts and a transmitter with which to reply, they must have enough science to need to know the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. (One imdb.com “Goofs” writer said this was a plot hole because the Martians might know Pi but not write it in decimal notation, but it’s likely that Chris simply thought of that first and, if it had failed, might have asked someone, “What’s Pi in binary?”) The Martians duly come back with the next in the series of digits of Pi and eventually start sending text messages which Chris is able to decode and give to the U.S. government — and particularly Secretary of Defense Sparks (Morris Ankrum — when Charles spotted his name in the credits he joked, “Ah, it’s a Morris Ankrum Film Festival!”). Chris sends a list of questions to the Martians and they send back a series of replies which state that Martians have a life expectancy of 300 years, they’ve developed a limitless source of cosmic energy and therefore have no need of fossil fuels, and they’re at peace with each other because they’ve followed the lesson of the prophet that came to Earth 2,000 years earlier to love one another instead of fighting wars.
All these revelations immediately collapse the Earth economy and bring both the U.S. and western Europe into chaos and depression — if there’s no need for fossil fuels there’s no need to mine coal or drill oil, so those companies go out of business and, with no one mining coal, the steel mills shut down as well, while the revelation that on a nearby planet people live to be 300 collapses the medical and pharmaceutical industries as well — but the next set of messages, containing thinly disguised quotes from the Bible, spark a religious revival in the Soviet Union. Despite the Soviet government’s attempts to suppress it by shooting people en masse as they’re starting to worship again, ultimately a revolution successfully topples the Soviet regime and the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church is installed as Russia’s new leader. Then Franz Calder, who’s already fended off a gang of Russian agents attempting to get him back to the Soviet Union to do his work there, is nearly killed when an avalanche destroys his little cottage in the Andes (so both movies we saw last night featured an avalanche ex machina!), but he escapes and over the next nine days somehow makes his way to Chris Cronyn’s home in San Diego. Calder tells Cronyn that the “Martian” messages were all fakes — he received Cronyn’s broadcasts and wrote and sent the replies himself — and as proof notes that the messages from “Mars” stopped nine days earlier when his house and the hydrogen-valve equipment in it were destroyed. Cronyn pleads with Calder to shut up about the fraud because the messages, especially the religious ones, are doing so much good on Earth — and Cronyn says he wants the human race to suffer because his only God is Satan (he even quotes the marvelous line John Milton wrote for Satan in Paradise Lost, “Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven”); it occurred to me that the nihilistic ending of Watchmen might have been ripped off of Red Planet Mars.
Only while Cronyn, his wife and Calder (who had spent his time in that Andean cottage mostly getting drunk on champagne he had bought by the case with the Soviets’ money) are confronting each other and threatening to blow up the lab — in Cronyn’s case to keep Calder from exposing the messages as fakes, in Calder’s case to keep Cronyn from doing that — another Martian message comes in and it reads, “You have done well … ” — only the rest of the message is lost because at that point Calder fires a gun in the room and it ignites the hydrogen tanks that fuel the hydrogen valve, so he and Mr. and Mrs. Cronyn all die, the two Cronyn kids are left facing an uncertain existence (“Call the orphanage!” one of the audience members at our screening joked, though since this is an early-1950’s movie made at the height of “family values” I thought we were supposed to assume that a surviving adult relative of Mr. or Mrs. Cronyn would take them in), but the President of the United States reads the fragment out loud to a joint session of Congress and proclaims what a great thing it is that the messages from Mars have led to a worldwide spiritual revival and all the people in the world are getting closer to God. Red Planet Mars is certainly a souvenir of its time politically, and even as a Right-wing movie it’s hardly in the same class as The Birth of a Nation (Griffith’s, not the new one about slave rebel Nat Turner whose maker deliberately ripped off Griffith’s title for ironic reasons) and Triumph of the Will (though it’s considerably better than The Red Menace and all the other McCarthy-era cheapies about dirty Commie agents trying to subvert America), but it’s also a film created by genuinely talented people: the original idea came from a play by John L. Balderston (whose credits include some of Boris Karloff’s best films: The Mummy, The Bride of Frankenstein and the little-known but marvelous 1936 British film The Man Who Changed His Mind) and John Hoare. Anthony Veiller, a writer with major credits of his own (Orson Welles’ The Stranger, the 1946 version of The Killers, State of the Union, the 1952 Moulin Rouge — he was also assigned to the classic 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon, though in the end director John Huston wrote the script himself, basically splicing it together from two copies of Dashiell Hammett’s source novel), bought the movie rights and co-wrote the screenplay with Balderston.
Though the film, aside from its bizarre propaganda aspects, is pretty stiff and stage-bound (it’s the sort of movie that, even if the credits didn’t inform you it was based on a play, you could tell), it’s also haunting. It’s certainly a sophisticated work that attempts to grapple with serious philosophical, political and spiritual issues, even though the messages it sends about them are not my own — and indeed it would be easy to imagine a remix of Red Planet Mars that used the same plot premise to deliver a Left-wing message, in which the messages from Mars stressed peaceful coexistence and religious tolerance and the character of Calder wasn’t an embittered villain but a man whose direct experience of both Nazi and Soviet oppression led him to want to bring both sides together and end the Cold War. The seriousness of the piece, at least for me, overcomes a lot about what’s wrong with it, including the stodginess (the director, Harry Horner, was a capable filmmaker but hardly at the level of his writers), the creepiness of its political message (as one of the attendees at the screening pointed out, it was a product of the same early-1950’s mindset that defaced the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance with the words “under God” and put “In God We Trust” on all U.S. money) and the cheapness of its production, including the incredibly extensive use of stock footage (this film would earn the joke the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 crew used about another 1950’s sci-fi cheapie, “This film doesn’t have stock footage, but stock mileage”) to represent the cataclysmic world events the messages from Mars (real or fake) are supposedly inspiring — including an odd shot of the Pope being carried through throngs outside the Vatican in an exposed sedan chair, a far cry from the armored boxes the Pope is moved around in today!
Red Planet Mars is something else again. I’d never seen it before — though I thought I had; I was startled when I couldn’t find any reference to it in the movie reviews stored on my computer — but Charles watched it when he was in London and a TV station was doing a regular showing of American cheapies from the early 1950’s. During our whole trip there Charles regaled me with stories of what a terrible movie this was, but as it turned out it was a lot better than he had said it would be; it’s not a great movie, and there are a lot of things wrong with it, but at least it attempted to grapple with serious ideas (as the best science-fiction writing did in 1952) and is oddly haunting and moving. The story deals with a U.S. scientist living in San Diego and working at an observatory (it’s obviously a stock shot of the Palomar telescope and its enclosing dome) which appears to be attached to his home. He is Chris Cronyn (a very young Peter Graves, looking like he just got out of high school even though he’s depicted as having a wife and two sons, one of whom looks about 11), and he’s developed an apparatus using something called a “hydrogen valve” by which he hopes to amplify radio waves and turn them into light signals and back so he can establish communication with the planet Mars. The “hydrogen valve” was actually invented back in the 1940’s by Franz Calder (Herbert Berghof — ironic, given the way his character lives in an isolated mountain cabin in the Andes, that the actor’s name should mean “Mountain Court”!), a Nazi scientist who was condemned as a war criminal at Nuremberg and sentenced to seven years for doing Mengele-style experiments on concentration-camp inmates. When his seven years were up he was kidnapped by the Soviets and forced to work on his invention under their auspices, though he was able to insist on doing so at his Andean redoubt instead of in the U.S.S.R. under the direct supervision of those nasty Russkies. As for Calder’s invention, it was declared war booty and Cronyn was able to pick it up from the U.S. government.
So the film is at first a battle between Cronyn and Calder over who can develop the Martian radio link first, and also between Cronyn and his wife Linda (Andrea King, who frankly looks almost old enough to be Peter Graves’ mother!), who says basically that no good can come of what he’s doing and if he discovers superior technology on Mars and imports it to Earth, we’ll just use it to destroy each other and ourselves more efficiently. Cronyn actually reaches Mars — or at least he thinks he has — but at first all he gets back is his own signals, copied and rebroadcast, and he has no way of knowing whether he’s really in touch with Mars or his own signals are bouncing off some object or energy field in space and coming back to him. Then, during one night at the Cronyn home in which Chris is confessing his frustration to Linda and their sons Stewart (Orley Lindgren) and Roger (Bayard Veiller, who I assumed was the son of the film’s producer and co-writer Anthony Veiller, though Anthony’s Web page says he only had one child, a girl), Stewart listens to this while wolfing down a piece of pie (which he’s holding with his fingers) and says, “I’ve got it! Pi!” Chris realizes his son is onto something and broadcasts to Mars the first five digits of the irrational number Pi (3.1415 … ), figuring out that if the Martians have the technology to build a receiver for his broadcasts and a transmitter with which to reply, they must have enough science to need to know the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. (One imdb.com “Goofs” writer said this was a plot hole because the Martians might know Pi but not write it in decimal notation, but it’s likely that Chris simply thought of that first and, if it had failed, might have asked someone, “What’s Pi in binary?”) The Martians duly come back with the next in the series of digits of Pi and eventually start sending text messages which Chris is able to decode and give to the U.S. government — and particularly Secretary of Defense Sparks (Morris Ankrum — when Charles spotted his name in the credits he joked, “Ah, it’s a Morris Ankrum Film Festival!”). Chris sends a list of questions to the Martians and they send back a series of replies which state that Martians have a life expectancy of 300 years, they’ve developed a limitless source of cosmic energy and therefore have no need of fossil fuels, and they’re at peace with each other because they’ve followed the lesson of the prophet that came to Earth 2,000 years earlier to love one another instead of fighting wars.
All these revelations immediately collapse the Earth economy and bring both the U.S. and western Europe into chaos and depression — if there’s no need for fossil fuels there’s no need to mine coal or drill oil, so those companies go out of business and, with no one mining coal, the steel mills shut down as well, while the revelation that on a nearby planet people live to be 300 collapses the medical and pharmaceutical industries as well — but the next set of messages, containing thinly disguised quotes from the Bible, spark a religious revival in the Soviet Union. Despite the Soviet government’s attempts to suppress it by shooting people en masse as they’re starting to worship again, ultimately a revolution successfully topples the Soviet regime and the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church is installed as Russia’s new leader. Then Franz Calder, who’s already fended off a gang of Russian agents attempting to get him back to the Soviet Union to do his work there, is nearly killed when an avalanche destroys his little cottage in the Andes (so both movies we saw last night featured an avalanche ex machina!), but he escapes and over the next nine days somehow makes his way to Chris Cronyn’s home in San Diego. Calder tells Cronyn that the “Martian” messages were all fakes — he received Cronyn’s broadcasts and wrote and sent the replies himself — and as proof notes that the messages from “Mars” stopped nine days earlier when his house and the hydrogen-valve equipment in it were destroyed. Cronyn pleads with Calder to shut up about the fraud because the messages, especially the religious ones, are doing so much good on Earth — and Cronyn says he wants the human race to suffer because his only God is Satan (he even quotes the marvelous line John Milton wrote for Satan in Paradise Lost, “Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven”); it occurred to me that the nihilistic ending of Watchmen might have been ripped off of Red Planet Mars.
Only while Cronyn, his wife and Calder (who had spent his time in that Andean cottage mostly getting drunk on champagne he had bought by the case with the Soviets’ money) are confronting each other and threatening to blow up the lab — in Cronyn’s case to keep Calder from exposing the messages as fakes, in Calder’s case to keep Cronyn from doing that — another Martian message comes in and it reads, “You have done well … ” — only the rest of the message is lost because at that point Calder fires a gun in the room and it ignites the hydrogen tanks that fuel the hydrogen valve, so he and Mr. and Mrs. Cronyn all die, the two Cronyn kids are left facing an uncertain existence (“Call the orphanage!” one of the audience members at our screening joked, though since this is an early-1950’s movie made at the height of “family values” I thought we were supposed to assume that a surviving adult relative of Mr. or Mrs. Cronyn would take them in), but the President of the United States reads the fragment out loud to a joint session of Congress and proclaims what a great thing it is that the messages from Mars have led to a worldwide spiritual revival and all the people in the world are getting closer to God. Red Planet Mars is certainly a souvenir of its time politically, and even as a Right-wing movie it’s hardly in the same class as The Birth of a Nation (Griffith’s, not the new one about slave rebel Nat Turner whose maker deliberately ripped off Griffith’s title for ironic reasons) and Triumph of the Will (though it’s considerably better than The Red Menace and all the other McCarthy-era cheapies about dirty Commie agents trying to subvert America), but it’s also a film created by genuinely talented people: the original idea came from a play by John L. Balderston (whose credits include some of Boris Karloff’s best films: The Mummy, The Bride of Frankenstein and the little-known but marvelous 1936 British film The Man Who Changed His Mind) and John Hoare. Anthony Veiller, a writer with major credits of his own (Orson Welles’ The Stranger, the 1946 version of The Killers, State of the Union, the 1952 Moulin Rouge — he was also assigned to the classic 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon, though in the end director John Huston wrote the script himself, basically splicing it together from two copies of Dashiell Hammett’s source novel), bought the movie rights and co-wrote the screenplay with Balderston.
Though the film, aside from its bizarre propaganda aspects, is pretty stiff and stage-bound (it’s the sort of movie that, even if the credits didn’t inform you it was based on a play, you could tell), it’s also haunting. It’s certainly a sophisticated work that attempts to grapple with serious philosophical, political and spiritual issues, even though the messages it sends about them are not my own — and indeed it would be easy to imagine a remix of Red Planet Mars that used the same plot premise to deliver a Left-wing message, in which the messages from Mars stressed peaceful coexistence and religious tolerance and the character of Calder wasn’t an embittered villain but a man whose direct experience of both Nazi and Soviet oppression led him to want to bring both sides together and end the Cold War. The seriousness of the piece, at least for me, overcomes a lot about what’s wrong with it, including the stodginess (the director, Harry Horner, was a capable filmmaker but hardly at the level of his writers), the creepiness of its political message (as one of the attendees at the screening pointed out, it was a product of the same early-1950’s mindset that defaced the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance with the words “under God” and put “In God We Trust” on all U.S. money) and the cheapness of its production, including the incredibly extensive use of stock footage (this film would earn the joke the Mystery Science Theatre 3000 crew used about another 1950’s sci-fi cheapie, “This film doesn’t have stock footage, but stock mileage”) to represent the cataclysmic world events the messages from Mars (real or fake) are supposedly inspiring — including an odd shot of the Pope being carried through throngs outside the Vatican in an exposed sedan chair, a far cry from the armored boxes the Pope is moved around in today!
Thursday, May 19, 2016
Frontline: “The Secret History of ISIS” (WGBH/PBS-TV, aired May 17, 2016)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago I watched a fascinating episode of PBS’s documentary series Frontline, “The Secret History of ISIS,” though the history of ISIS presented was not so “secret” at all. The show’s basic argument was that the U.S. decision to scapegoat Iraq in general and Saddam Hussein in particular as the true perpetrators of the 9/11 terror attacks, including “cooking the books” to make it look as if Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were in cahoots all along to attack America, was the real genesis of ISIS. The film traced the history of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a street thug who was born and raised in Zarqa, Jordan (his real family name was Musab; like a lot of Arabs, he went by a final name that merely indicated where he was from: “al-Zarqawi” simply means “from Zarqa”); he was arrested and imprisoned in Jordan and, like Malcolm X, while in prison was educated by his fellow inmates in the basics of Islam. He’d gone in a street criminal with a heavy-duty set of tattoos; he came out a committed Islamic militant and had laboriously and painfully scraped the skin off his body with a smuggled-in razor blade to remove the tattoos, which were not considered appropriate for an Islamist militant. Looking for a place to join the jihad, he first went to Kandahar, Afghanistan to join Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda operation and fight the infidels in Afghanistan, but bin Laden apparently didn’t think much of him and basically told him to go home. Instead he went to Iraq and seized on the opportunities presented by the U.S. invasion — particularly the disbanding of the Iraqi army (which the person who ordered it, U.S. governor L. Paul Bremer, still thinks was a good idea!), which turned out 250,000 young men with guns and professional training in how to use them loose on the Iraqi streets, ready for recruitment to a resistance movement. Zarqawi (to use the form of his name by which he’s usually referred to in the West even though that’s not how his Arab name really works) seized the opportunities presented by the missteps of both U.S. and Iraqi governors — including the decision of Iraq’s prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shi’a Muslim, to go after the Sunnis and fight a sectarian civil war.
Zarqawi had already been artificially inflated into a key part of the Iraqi resistance even before the war — in his infamous U.N. speech then-Secretary of State Colin Powell had said Zarqawi was the liaison between bin Laden and Saddam (when, as the film’s narrator, Will Lyman, sardonically points out, if Saddam Hussein had known of Zarqawi’s existence he would have had him executed immediately — Iraq under Saddam had no Islamist terror movement to speak of because Saddam regarded such people as threats to his own power and dealt with them as ruthlessly and brutally as he did anyone else who threatened his power) — and he called his group al-Qaeda in Iraq (with the apparently grudging acquiescence of bin Laden back in his redoubt in Pakistan) and essentially largely led the Sunni side in an Iraqi civil war until he was killed in a targeted strike in 2006. The next year President George W. Bush ordered the “surge” in Iraq and the U.S. essentially bribed the remaining Sunnis into stopping the war — the so-called “Sunni awakening” was literally bought and paid for by the American taxpayers — but Zarqawi’s operation continued under a new leader named Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (another Arab taking a last name that simply meant where he was from — “from Baghdad”). What was left of it laid low for three years until 2009, when President Bush’s term expired, Barack Obama replaced him, and the new administration was determined to withdraw the U.S. military from Iraq and leave the Iraqis in charge. One of the things we did to accomplish this was to build a new Iraqi army, which as New Yorker writer Dexter Filkins, one of the show’s interviewees, put it, “which was built at incredible expense— I don’t even know what the final price tag was, $30 billion dollars— largely by the Americans, paid for by the American taxpayer, you know, all their equipment, everything— it all came apart.” That really wouldn’t have been so surprising if anyone in either the Bush or Obama administrations had realized that one of Zarqawi’s calls to his followers had been to have them sign up for the U.S.-organized Iraqi army and get trained in how to fight — and then use their training and new-found skills to fight against the U.S. and the Shi’a Iraqis the U.S. invasion had put in control of the country. So a lot of people in that so-called “Iraqi army” were, and had all along been, on the other side. This show has some pretty well-defined heroes and villains, and the villains are pretty obvious — not only Zarqawi and his equally bloodthirsty successor, Baghdadi, but the Bush administration in general and vice-president Dick Cheney and his associate Lewis “Scooter” Libby in particular — while the closest the story (at least as presented here by writers Michael Kirk, who also directed, and Michael Wiser) has to a hero(ine) is Nada Bakos.
She worked for the CIA as a counterterrorism intelligence analyst from 2000 to 2008 and futilely tried to talk the Bush administration, Cheney and Libby in particular, out of their obsession with finding a connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11 that did not in fact exist. She also said the CIA had actually located Zarqawi in 2002 and was ready to take him out — but the Bush administration didn’t want to launch an attack in Iraq before they were ready to fight the all-out war and vetoed the plan. Under Obama’s tenure the U.S. pulled out of Iraq, the Iraqi army disintegrated as soon as ISIS forces attacked, and just as Zarqawi had moved from Jordan to Iraq to find a fertile ground for jihad, so Baghdadi moved from Iraq to Syria and aligned ISIS with the rebels who were fighting the Syrian government of Bashir al-Assad. Indeed, ISIS was so successful in Syria they were able to capture a huge swath of territory and unite it with the land they’d conquered in western Iraq to declare the new Islamic Caliphate. The Caliphate was the Muslim empire that was founded by Muhammad himself and reached its height under Iraqi king Haroun al-Raschid (who was the Caliph during the time the Sinbad the Sailor stories take place), when it stretched from Spain to India — indeed, the professed objective of the modern-day jihad is to reconquer all the former territories of the Caliphate and bring them under Muslim rule, though Baghdadi isn’t content even with that and wants his vicious, evil brand of Islam to rule the entire world. (Right there that makes him considerably more dangerous than Saddam Hussein or Bashir al-Assad, who were content to rule one country but would ruthlessly kill anyone whom they consider a threat to their rule.) According to this program, Osama bin Laden finally broke with Baghdadi’s operation when it announced that it was forming a new Caliphate, with the Syrian city of Raqqa as its capital — bin Laden apparently didn’t think the historical timing was right for such a drastic step — though reports at the time suggested that Baghdadi and his organization were working more like a classical guerrilla army than a terrorist organization, focused less on spectacular attacks around the world and more on conquering, holding and ruling territory.
This has given Islamic State, under its various names (originally it was called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, which generated the initials ISIS; later it was called ISIL, for “Islamic State in the Levant,” and in Arabic its name is “Daesh,” which its adversaries like to use because the pronunciation can be twisted so it sounds like an Arabic insult), far more resources to carry on its struggle, including money it’s looted from the banks in the areas it’s conquered and (a funding source oddly not mentioned on this show) income from the sale of oil from the parts of Iraq they control. ISIS originally questioned the strategy of doing big 9/11-style attacks in the West on the ground that they didn’t bring the New Caliphate one step closer to reality; later, as everyone knows, they abandoned that principle and started authorizing attacks like the big assaults in Paris and Brussels. At the same time it’s unclear just how many of the foreign actions are actually being greenlighted by Baghdadi and his leadership councils in Raqqa and how many (including, most likely, the attacks last December in San Bernardino) are being done by freelancers who log onto ISIS’s Web site or Facebook page and declare “allegiance” to ISIS. One can readily imagine someone in Raqqa monitoring the group’s Facebook page, seeing these “declarations of allegiance” and wondering, “Who the hell are these people?” One interesting aspect of this program is that it all too clearly shows how President Obama’s response to the renewed threat of terrorism from Iraq and Syria via ISIS was conditioned by his tendency to issue a measured response to anything: where President George W. Bush had famously boasted, “I don’t do nuance,” Though Obama declined a request to be interviewed for this show, it includes a clip of him at a White House press conference saying, “The notion that the way to solve every one of these problems is to deploy our military— that hasn’t been true in the past and it won’t be true now.”
To those of us who voted for him precisely because (among other issues) we wanted someone in the White House whose knee-jerk response to terrorism wouldn’t be to find another country and invade it, whether they had anything to do with the terrorists or not, that sounded like wisdom and prudence; but to many Americans, it just came off as weak — which is why Obama, the man who famously “nuanced” virtually every issue to death, is likely to be replaced either by Hillary Clinton (who as secretary of state pleaded with Obama for direct U.S. military action in Syria, and was turned down) or Donald Trump, who like Bush seems to glory in not doing nuance and is so personally combative and pugnacious he seems likely to get the U.S. in a war just to offer further proof of his “manhood.” ISIS is virtually impossible to deal with precisely because it’s more an idea than a specific group of people — which is why you shouldn’t get your hopes up when the U.S. announced that a targeted drone strike somewhere has taken out one ISIS leader or another. One problem with ISIS is they seem to have a virtually infinite bench; take one of their major figures out and there are two, three or 10 people ready and eager to replace him. The old wisdom that you can only fight an idea — and for some reason the New Islamic Caliphate ISIS promises has become an incredibly attractive idea to Muslims (and some non-Muslims who were attracted enough by it to convert) around the world — with a better idea has rarely been more true than it is for ISIS, but the policy the Obama administration has based around that idea — attempting to contain ISIS, trying to decapitate its leadership on the ground and ultimately waiting for (or persuading) Muslims around the world to embrace a better idea than the future offered by these murderous thugs — is seen as dangerously “weak” by all too many of the American people and is likely to be abandoned in favor of a more militaristic approach if Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump is the next President.
Two nights ago I watched a fascinating episode of PBS’s documentary series Frontline, “The Secret History of ISIS,” though the history of ISIS presented was not so “secret” at all. The show’s basic argument was that the U.S. decision to scapegoat Iraq in general and Saddam Hussein in particular as the true perpetrators of the 9/11 terror attacks, including “cooking the books” to make it look as if Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were in cahoots all along to attack America, was the real genesis of ISIS. The film traced the history of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a street thug who was born and raised in Zarqa, Jordan (his real family name was Musab; like a lot of Arabs, he went by a final name that merely indicated where he was from: “al-Zarqawi” simply means “from Zarqa”); he was arrested and imprisoned in Jordan and, like Malcolm X, while in prison was educated by his fellow inmates in the basics of Islam. He’d gone in a street criminal with a heavy-duty set of tattoos; he came out a committed Islamic militant and had laboriously and painfully scraped the skin off his body with a smuggled-in razor blade to remove the tattoos, which were not considered appropriate for an Islamist militant. Looking for a place to join the jihad, he first went to Kandahar, Afghanistan to join Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda operation and fight the infidels in Afghanistan, but bin Laden apparently didn’t think much of him and basically told him to go home. Instead he went to Iraq and seized on the opportunities presented by the U.S. invasion — particularly the disbanding of the Iraqi army (which the person who ordered it, U.S. governor L. Paul Bremer, still thinks was a good idea!), which turned out 250,000 young men with guns and professional training in how to use them loose on the Iraqi streets, ready for recruitment to a resistance movement. Zarqawi (to use the form of his name by which he’s usually referred to in the West even though that’s not how his Arab name really works) seized the opportunities presented by the missteps of both U.S. and Iraqi governors — including the decision of Iraq’s prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, a Shi’a Muslim, to go after the Sunnis and fight a sectarian civil war.
Zarqawi had already been artificially inflated into a key part of the Iraqi resistance even before the war — in his infamous U.N. speech then-Secretary of State Colin Powell had said Zarqawi was the liaison between bin Laden and Saddam (when, as the film’s narrator, Will Lyman, sardonically points out, if Saddam Hussein had known of Zarqawi’s existence he would have had him executed immediately — Iraq under Saddam had no Islamist terror movement to speak of because Saddam regarded such people as threats to his own power and dealt with them as ruthlessly and brutally as he did anyone else who threatened his power) — and he called his group al-Qaeda in Iraq (with the apparently grudging acquiescence of bin Laden back in his redoubt in Pakistan) and essentially largely led the Sunni side in an Iraqi civil war until he was killed in a targeted strike in 2006. The next year President George W. Bush ordered the “surge” in Iraq and the U.S. essentially bribed the remaining Sunnis into stopping the war — the so-called “Sunni awakening” was literally bought and paid for by the American taxpayers — but Zarqawi’s operation continued under a new leader named Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (another Arab taking a last name that simply meant where he was from — “from Baghdad”). What was left of it laid low for three years until 2009, when President Bush’s term expired, Barack Obama replaced him, and the new administration was determined to withdraw the U.S. military from Iraq and leave the Iraqis in charge. One of the things we did to accomplish this was to build a new Iraqi army, which as New Yorker writer Dexter Filkins, one of the show’s interviewees, put it, “which was built at incredible expense— I don’t even know what the final price tag was, $30 billion dollars— largely by the Americans, paid for by the American taxpayer, you know, all their equipment, everything— it all came apart.” That really wouldn’t have been so surprising if anyone in either the Bush or Obama administrations had realized that one of Zarqawi’s calls to his followers had been to have them sign up for the U.S.-organized Iraqi army and get trained in how to fight — and then use their training and new-found skills to fight against the U.S. and the Shi’a Iraqis the U.S. invasion had put in control of the country. So a lot of people in that so-called “Iraqi army” were, and had all along been, on the other side. This show has some pretty well-defined heroes and villains, and the villains are pretty obvious — not only Zarqawi and his equally bloodthirsty successor, Baghdadi, but the Bush administration in general and vice-president Dick Cheney and his associate Lewis “Scooter” Libby in particular — while the closest the story (at least as presented here by writers Michael Kirk, who also directed, and Michael Wiser) has to a hero(ine) is Nada Bakos.
She worked for the CIA as a counterterrorism intelligence analyst from 2000 to 2008 and futilely tried to talk the Bush administration, Cheney and Libby in particular, out of their obsession with finding a connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11 that did not in fact exist. She also said the CIA had actually located Zarqawi in 2002 and was ready to take him out — but the Bush administration didn’t want to launch an attack in Iraq before they were ready to fight the all-out war and vetoed the plan. Under Obama’s tenure the U.S. pulled out of Iraq, the Iraqi army disintegrated as soon as ISIS forces attacked, and just as Zarqawi had moved from Jordan to Iraq to find a fertile ground for jihad, so Baghdadi moved from Iraq to Syria and aligned ISIS with the rebels who were fighting the Syrian government of Bashir al-Assad. Indeed, ISIS was so successful in Syria they were able to capture a huge swath of territory and unite it with the land they’d conquered in western Iraq to declare the new Islamic Caliphate. The Caliphate was the Muslim empire that was founded by Muhammad himself and reached its height under Iraqi king Haroun al-Raschid (who was the Caliph during the time the Sinbad the Sailor stories take place), when it stretched from Spain to India — indeed, the professed objective of the modern-day jihad is to reconquer all the former territories of the Caliphate and bring them under Muslim rule, though Baghdadi isn’t content even with that and wants his vicious, evil brand of Islam to rule the entire world. (Right there that makes him considerably more dangerous than Saddam Hussein or Bashir al-Assad, who were content to rule one country but would ruthlessly kill anyone whom they consider a threat to their rule.) According to this program, Osama bin Laden finally broke with Baghdadi’s operation when it announced that it was forming a new Caliphate, with the Syrian city of Raqqa as its capital — bin Laden apparently didn’t think the historical timing was right for such a drastic step — though reports at the time suggested that Baghdadi and his organization were working more like a classical guerrilla army than a terrorist organization, focused less on spectacular attacks around the world and more on conquering, holding and ruling territory.
This has given Islamic State, under its various names (originally it was called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, which generated the initials ISIS; later it was called ISIL, for “Islamic State in the Levant,” and in Arabic its name is “Daesh,” which its adversaries like to use because the pronunciation can be twisted so it sounds like an Arabic insult), far more resources to carry on its struggle, including money it’s looted from the banks in the areas it’s conquered and (a funding source oddly not mentioned on this show) income from the sale of oil from the parts of Iraq they control. ISIS originally questioned the strategy of doing big 9/11-style attacks in the West on the ground that they didn’t bring the New Caliphate one step closer to reality; later, as everyone knows, they abandoned that principle and started authorizing attacks like the big assaults in Paris and Brussels. At the same time it’s unclear just how many of the foreign actions are actually being greenlighted by Baghdadi and his leadership councils in Raqqa and how many (including, most likely, the attacks last December in San Bernardino) are being done by freelancers who log onto ISIS’s Web site or Facebook page and declare “allegiance” to ISIS. One can readily imagine someone in Raqqa monitoring the group’s Facebook page, seeing these “declarations of allegiance” and wondering, “Who the hell are these people?” One interesting aspect of this program is that it all too clearly shows how President Obama’s response to the renewed threat of terrorism from Iraq and Syria via ISIS was conditioned by his tendency to issue a measured response to anything: where President George W. Bush had famously boasted, “I don’t do nuance,” Though Obama declined a request to be interviewed for this show, it includes a clip of him at a White House press conference saying, “The notion that the way to solve every one of these problems is to deploy our military— that hasn’t been true in the past and it won’t be true now.”
To those of us who voted for him precisely because (among other issues) we wanted someone in the White House whose knee-jerk response to terrorism wouldn’t be to find another country and invade it, whether they had anything to do with the terrorists or not, that sounded like wisdom and prudence; but to many Americans, it just came off as weak — which is why Obama, the man who famously “nuanced” virtually every issue to death, is likely to be replaced either by Hillary Clinton (who as secretary of state pleaded with Obama for direct U.S. military action in Syria, and was turned down) or Donald Trump, who like Bush seems to glory in not doing nuance and is so personally combative and pugnacious he seems likely to get the U.S. in a war just to offer further proof of his “manhood.” ISIS is virtually impossible to deal with precisely because it’s more an idea than a specific group of people — which is why you shouldn’t get your hopes up when the U.S. announced that a targeted drone strike somewhere has taken out one ISIS leader or another. One problem with ISIS is they seem to have a virtually infinite bench; take one of their major figures out and there are two, three or 10 people ready and eager to replace him. The old wisdom that you can only fight an idea — and for some reason the New Islamic Caliphate ISIS promises has become an incredibly attractive idea to Muslims (and some non-Muslims who were attracted enough by it to convert) around the world — with a better idea has rarely been more true than it is for ISIS, but the policy the Obama administration has based around that idea — attempting to contain ISIS, trying to decapitate its leadership on the ground and ultimately waiting for (or persuading) Muslims around the world to embrace a better idea than the future offered by these murderous thugs — is seen as dangerously “weak” by all too many of the American people and is likely to be abandoned in favor of a more militaristic approach if Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump is the next President.
Tuesday, May 17, 2016
Fake or Fortune: Renoir (BBC-TV, 2015)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I watched an episode of an intriguing BBC-TV series called Fake or Fortune?, which I didn’t realize was already in its fourth season when this show was produced in 2015 (it originally aired in Britain in July 2015 and appears to have been produced by the BBC’s Northern Ireland service). The premise of the show is that a group of art experts examine a painting which has been attributed to a famous painter but not definitively admitted to the canon of his or her work, In this case the painting is a small oil work depicting the Seine River at the Parisian suburb of Aventeuil, where many of the Impressionists were living and working in the 1870’s when they started formulating the style that would revolutionize painting. Among them were Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet (who coined the term “Impressionism” when he exhibited his 1874 painting “Impression — Sunrise”), who were apparently such good friends that they would go on painting expeditions together and paint the same landscape at the same time. The alleged Renoir was supposedly one of these, painted in 1874 alongside another work of the same scene by Monet, and Renoir is thought to have given the painting to Monet, along with several other works (including at least two portraits of Mrs. Monet which Renoir painted secretly while observing her at Monet’s home). Monet in turn gave it to Blanche Monet, who was both his stepdaughter (his wife’s daughter by a previous partner) and his daughter-in-law (she married Monet’s son, which was O.K. since, like Victor Frankenstein and Elizabeth Lavenza in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, they were not biologically related even though one could argue the relationship was psychologically incestuous). Blanche Monet in turn sold the painting to a French dealer, who sold it to an English dealer, who sold it to the Phillips family of Picton Castle, where it remained until Nicky Phillips — who despite the first name is actually a woman, and a painter herself (she was commissioned to add a portrait to the National Portrait Gallery at the royal palace once a nationwide contest determined the most prominent historical Briton who was missing from the collection) — decided to sell it. She ran into a pissing contest between two sets of Renoir experts, the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery (which once represented Renoir himself and is owned by the descendants of the people who ran it in Renoir’s time) and the Wildenstein Institute.
Both Bernheim-Jeune and Wildenstein have put out a catalogue raisonné of Renoir — a catalogue raisonné is to an artist what a bibliography is to a writer or a discography is to a musician, an attempt to list all the paintings and other artworks created by a single individual (including any on which he may have collaborated with someone else), including reproductions of the work where possible and an account of its history (its “provenance,” in Artspeak) and where it is now (or where it was last if it’s not known to survive). Only the Aventeuil scene is listed in the Bernheim-Jeune catalogue raisonné of Renoir but not in the Wildenstein — and without a definite attribution to Renoir from both houses Nancy Phillips can’t sell it for the money she needs to maintain Picton Castle as a public museum. The show would have been considerably more interesting if it had been less partisan — the experts on it, led by the show’s regular star, Bendor Grosvenor, are clearly determined to prove that it is a Renoir and get Wildenstein to accept it — they’re visibly disappointed when an inventory of Monet’s possessions at the time of his death doesn’t list it, and theorize that by then Monet had already passed it on to Blanche and therefore she was its owner — and they’re thrilled when X-ray and infrared examination of the back of the painting reveals a stamp on the original canvas dating it to the 1870’s. That was particularly important because Blanche Monet was herself a painter and could at least conceivably painted the picture and forged it as a “Renoir,” but the fact that it was on an authentic 1870’s canvas obviously argues against that. In the end Grosvenor and his experts assemble what they consider an unassailable case for the work as a Renoir — an unbroken chain of possession from Renoir to Monet to Blanche Monet through two dealers to the Phillips family — a date on the canvas itself and a paired Monet painting of the same scene — but the Wildenstein’s “Renoir committee” continues to reject the work on the basis that the provenance is weak, the painting is not signed by Renoir (which the pro-Renoir experts say is because Renoir considered it a preliminary sketch and never signed his sketches), and the painting simply isn’t very good. Charles came in about two-thirds of the way through the show and noted that it was just a higher-class version of an Antiques Roadshow episode (which certainly explains why KPBS showed it right after two Antiques Roadshow episodes! Obviously they thought it would appeal to the same audience), and I thought the most impressive voice of reason in the whole show belonged to the woman who was being interviewed when he came in, a white-haired doyenne of the British art world who’s considered the U.K.’s leading Renoir expert and said that in her opinion, it is a Renoir — just not a very good Renoir, and she said with the weight of her authority that just because Renoir was one of the greatest artists of all time and he left behind some absolute masterpieces, don’t think that he didn’t paint a lot of slapdash mediocrities as well!
I watched an episode of an intriguing BBC-TV series called Fake or Fortune?, which I didn’t realize was already in its fourth season when this show was produced in 2015 (it originally aired in Britain in July 2015 and appears to have been produced by the BBC’s Northern Ireland service). The premise of the show is that a group of art experts examine a painting which has been attributed to a famous painter but not definitively admitted to the canon of his or her work, In this case the painting is a small oil work depicting the Seine River at the Parisian suburb of Aventeuil, where many of the Impressionists were living and working in the 1870’s when they started formulating the style that would revolutionize painting. Among them were Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet (who coined the term “Impressionism” when he exhibited his 1874 painting “Impression — Sunrise”), who were apparently such good friends that they would go on painting expeditions together and paint the same landscape at the same time. The alleged Renoir was supposedly one of these, painted in 1874 alongside another work of the same scene by Monet, and Renoir is thought to have given the painting to Monet, along with several other works (including at least two portraits of Mrs. Monet which Renoir painted secretly while observing her at Monet’s home). Monet in turn gave it to Blanche Monet, who was both his stepdaughter (his wife’s daughter by a previous partner) and his daughter-in-law (she married Monet’s son, which was O.K. since, like Victor Frankenstein and Elizabeth Lavenza in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, they were not biologically related even though one could argue the relationship was psychologically incestuous). Blanche Monet in turn sold the painting to a French dealer, who sold it to an English dealer, who sold it to the Phillips family of Picton Castle, where it remained until Nicky Phillips — who despite the first name is actually a woman, and a painter herself (she was commissioned to add a portrait to the National Portrait Gallery at the royal palace once a nationwide contest determined the most prominent historical Briton who was missing from the collection) — decided to sell it. She ran into a pissing contest between two sets of Renoir experts, the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery (which once represented Renoir himself and is owned by the descendants of the people who ran it in Renoir’s time) and the Wildenstein Institute.
Both Bernheim-Jeune and Wildenstein have put out a catalogue raisonné of Renoir — a catalogue raisonné is to an artist what a bibliography is to a writer or a discography is to a musician, an attempt to list all the paintings and other artworks created by a single individual (including any on which he may have collaborated with someone else), including reproductions of the work where possible and an account of its history (its “provenance,” in Artspeak) and where it is now (or where it was last if it’s not known to survive). Only the Aventeuil scene is listed in the Bernheim-Jeune catalogue raisonné of Renoir but not in the Wildenstein — and without a definite attribution to Renoir from both houses Nancy Phillips can’t sell it for the money she needs to maintain Picton Castle as a public museum. The show would have been considerably more interesting if it had been less partisan — the experts on it, led by the show’s regular star, Bendor Grosvenor, are clearly determined to prove that it is a Renoir and get Wildenstein to accept it — they’re visibly disappointed when an inventory of Monet’s possessions at the time of his death doesn’t list it, and theorize that by then Monet had already passed it on to Blanche and therefore she was its owner — and they’re thrilled when X-ray and infrared examination of the back of the painting reveals a stamp on the original canvas dating it to the 1870’s. That was particularly important because Blanche Monet was herself a painter and could at least conceivably painted the picture and forged it as a “Renoir,” but the fact that it was on an authentic 1870’s canvas obviously argues against that. In the end Grosvenor and his experts assemble what they consider an unassailable case for the work as a Renoir — an unbroken chain of possession from Renoir to Monet to Blanche Monet through two dealers to the Phillips family — a date on the canvas itself and a paired Monet painting of the same scene — but the Wildenstein’s “Renoir committee” continues to reject the work on the basis that the provenance is weak, the painting is not signed by Renoir (which the pro-Renoir experts say is because Renoir considered it a preliminary sketch and never signed his sketches), and the painting simply isn’t very good. Charles came in about two-thirds of the way through the show and noted that it was just a higher-class version of an Antiques Roadshow episode (which certainly explains why KPBS showed it right after two Antiques Roadshow episodes! Obviously they thought it would appeal to the same audience), and I thought the most impressive voice of reason in the whole show belonged to the woman who was being interviewed when he came in, a white-haired doyenne of the British art world who’s considered the U.K.’s leading Renoir expert and said that in her opinion, it is a Renoir — just not a very good Renoir, and she said with the weight of her authority that just because Renoir was one of the greatest artists of all time and he left behind some absolute masterpieces, don’t think that he didn’t paint a lot of slapdash mediocrities as well!
Monday, May 16, 2016
I Didn’t Kill My Sister, a.k.a. Murder Unrecognized (Odyssey Media, Lifetime, 2015, released May 14, 2016)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I spent most of the evening watching two back-to-back movies on Lifetime, one of which was billed as a “World Premiere” while the other had had the “World Premiere” designation when it had originally been shown on Saturday. They re-aired the Saturday “world premiere,” I Didn’t Kill My Sister, at 7 p.m., and followed it up with the new “world premiere,” Trust No One, at 9. Surprisingly, both turned out to be TV-movies made by a company called Odyssey Media in 2015, and both were shot under different titles than the ones Lifetime used when they aired them: I Didn’t Kill My Sister was originally Murder Unrecognized (so they replaced a blah title with a silly one), while Trust No One was originally Corrupt (and according to one imdb.com message board poster a trailer for it under the Corrupt title appeared on YouTube before it and all printed references to it on the Internet mysteriously disappeared). What was even more odd was that I Didn’t Kill My Sister, despite that dorky title, turned out to be a quite good crime thriller, a sort of neo-noir set in and around the Los Angeles TV news community, while Trust No One was a boring organized-crime story enlivened by a few action scenes but otherwise deathly-dull. From the title I’d assumed the sisters, one of whom died and the other was accused of murdering her, would be teenagers; instead they were both 30-something women.
The one who gets killed was Carmen Pearson Campbell (Gina Holden, turning in a nice bitch performance that makes it unfortunate she exits permanently early on — though writer Gemma Holdway and director Jason Bourque give her a lot more screen time than is common in a plot like this, which was nice), and the sister who’s suspected of killing her is Heather Pearson (Nicholle Tom, who began her career as one of the kids Fran Drescher was nanny-ing on The Nanny but has had a decent if unspectacular career as an adult actress). In the opening scene Carmen, home alone, drinks a small glass of wine, then suddenly loses consciousness and ends up taking a fall into her swimming pool, where she apparently drowns — though later on a medical examiner attributes her death to an overdose of Xanax (the wine was “spiked” with the drug) and said she had croaked before she even got to the pool. Then there’s a typical Lifetime title flashing us back “Two Days Earlier,” and we learn that two days earlier Carmen was the co-host of Citywatch, a phenomenally popular news program on L.A. TV station KPPQ Channel 3. She was also in the middle of a bitterly contested divorce from her husband Mason Campbell (Chris William Martin), and their marriage has so totally disintegrated they’re literally not speaking together off camera. Unfortunately for both of them, they’re the co-hosts of Citywatch and therefore have to speak to each other on camera, and if that weren’t bad enough they’re also the parents of a teenage daughter, Brooke (Sarah Desjardins). Also, Carmen has talked to her attorney, Sandra Carson (Ona Grauer), about changing her will so instead of her husband getting her money, it’ll go into a trust fund and remain there until Brooke is old enough to inherit it herself. So when Carmen is found dead in her swimming pool of an overdose of Xanax, the cops at first suspect it was an accident until they find the remaining spiked wine, whereupon they not surprisingly make Mason Campbell the number one suspect — until he’s able to prove that he didn’t do it (just how he proved he didn’t do it — whether he established an alibi or what — isn’t really explained in Holdway’s script), whereupon they, and in particular Cruz (Sharon Taylor), the lead detective on the case (and it was a neat trick on Holdway’a part to make her seem more intimidating by not giving her a first name), fasten on Heather as a suspect.
The reason they’re so convinced Heather killed her sister is that Heather had been relegated to a job as Carmen’s personal assistant, and Carmen regularly humiliated her. Heather has had dreams of being a TV journalist herself, and there’s a quirky scene in which she and Mason meet on the Citywatch set after hours and run through a practice of what the show would be like with Mason and Heather co-hosting — only during that session Heather makes a passing remark that it would be easier for both of them if Carmen were out of the way, and unbeknownst to Heather but beknownst to us because director Bourque pans to a shot of a TV camera with the red recording light on, the session was secretly recorded and Mason later gives a copy of it to the cops. Heather realizes she’s being framed but neither she nor we are sure by whom — Mason? Lois Summer (Dominika Julliet), the bimbo blonde who replaced Carmen on Citywatch after Carmen’s death? We do get the impression Lois is involved from the smirk on her face after she does her first Citywatch program, and from a later phone call between her and Mason in which she says “it’s all working out as we planned” — but it turns out that though Mason is involved, the real mastermind of the murder plot is (surprise!) Sandra Carson. It seems that they met 15 years earlier when Mason went to see her as a reporter following the “mysterious” death of her husband (obviously we’re supposed to assume that she killed him, too), they got the hots for each other and whenever they could they sneaked away to vacations at gambling meccas like Las Vegas (Heather stumbles onto this secret when she finds a poker chip from a Las Vegas casino), where Mason lost scads of money — which is why he needed his wife out of the way before she changed her will, so he could inherit her money and use it to pay off his gambling debts.
I spent most of the evening watching two back-to-back movies on Lifetime, one of which was billed as a “World Premiere” while the other had had the “World Premiere” designation when it had originally been shown on Saturday. They re-aired the Saturday “world premiere,” I Didn’t Kill My Sister, at 7 p.m., and followed it up with the new “world premiere,” Trust No One, at 9. Surprisingly, both turned out to be TV-movies made by a company called Odyssey Media in 2015, and both were shot under different titles than the ones Lifetime used when they aired them: I Didn’t Kill My Sister was originally Murder Unrecognized (so they replaced a blah title with a silly one), while Trust No One was originally Corrupt (and according to one imdb.com message board poster a trailer for it under the Corrupt title appeared on YouTube before it and all printed references to it on the Internet mysteriously disappeared). What was even more odd was that I Didn’t Kill My Sister, despite that dorky title, turned out to be a quite good crime thriller, a sort of neo-noir set in and around the Los Angeles TV news community, while Trust No One was a boring organized-crime story enlivened by a few action scenes but otherwise deathly-dull. From the title I’d assumed the sisters, one of whom died and the other was accused of murdering her, would be teenagers; instead they were both 30-something women.
The one who gets killed was Carmen Pearson Campbell (Gina Holden, turning in a nice bitch performance that makes it unfortunate she exits permanently early on — though writer Gemma Holdway and director Jason Bourque give her a lot more screen time than is common in a plot like this, which was nice), and the sister who’s suspected of killing her is Heather Pearson (Nicholle Tom, who began her career as one of the kids Fran Drescher was nanny-ing on The Nanny but has had a decent if unspectacular career as an adult actress). In the opening scene Carmen, home alone, drinks a small glass of wine, then suddenly loses consciousness and ends up taking a fall into her swimming pool, where she apparently drowns — though later on a medical examiner attributes her death to an overdose of Xanax (the wine was “spiked” with the drug) and said she had croaked before she even got to the pool. Then there’s a typical Lifetime title flashing us back “Two Days Earlier,” and we learn that two days earlier Carmen was the co-host of Citywatch, a phenomenally popular news program on L.A. TV station KPPQ Channel 3. She was also in the middle of a bitterly contested divorce from her husband Mason Campbell (Chris William Martin), and their marriage has so totally disintegrated they’re literally not speaking together off camera. Unfortunately for both of them, they’re the co-hosts of Citywatch and therefore have to speak to each other on camera, and if that weren’t bad enough they’re also the parents of a teenage daughter, Brooke (Sarah Desjardins). Also, Carmen has talked to her attorney, Sandra Carson (Ona Grauer), about changing her will so instead of her husband getting her money, it’ll go into a trust fund and remain there until Brooke is old enough to inherit it herself. So when Carmen is found dead in her swimming pool of an overdose of Xanax, the cops at first suspect it was an accident until they find the remaining spiked wine, whereupon they not surprisingly make Mason Campbell the number one suspect — until he’s able to prove that he didn’t do it (just how he proved he didn’t do it — whether he established an alibi or what — isn’t really explained in Holdway’s script), whereupon they, and in particular Cruz (Sharon Taylor), the lead detective on the case (and it was a neat trick on Holdway’a part to make her seem more intimidating by not giving her a first name), fasten on Heather as a suspect.
The reason they’re so convinced Heather killed her sister is that Heather had been relegated to a job as Carmen’s personal assistant, and Carmen regularly humiliated her. Heather has had dreams of being a TV journalist herself, and there’s a quirky scene in which she and Mason meet on the Citywatch set after hours and run through a practice of what the show would be like with Mason and Heather co-hosting — only during that session Heather makes a passing remark that it would be easier for both of them if Carmen were out of the way, and unbeknownst to Heather but beknownst to us because director Bourque pans to a shot of a TV camera with the red recording light on, the session was secretly recorded and Mason later gives a copy of it to the cops. Heather realizes she’s being framed but neither she nor we are sure by whom — Mason? Lois Summer (Dominika Julliet), the bimbo blonde who replaced Carmen on Citywatch after Carmen’s death? We do get the impression Lois is involved from the smirk on her face after she does her first Citywatch program, and from a later phone call between her and Mason in which she says “it’s all working out as we planned” — but it turns out that though Mason is involved, the real mastermind of the murder plot is (surprise!) Sandra Carson. It seems that they met 15 years earlier when Mason went to see her as a reporter following the “mysterious” death of her husband (obviously we’re supposed to assume that she killed him, too), they got the hots for each other and whenever they could they sneaked away to vacations at gambling meccas like Las Vegas (Heather stumbles onto this secret when she finds a poker chip from a Las Vegas casino), where Mason lost scads of money — which is why he needed his wife out of the way before she changed her will, so he could inherit her money and use it to pay off his gambling debts.
There’s also a sequence in which Heather
learns that her sister went to rehab for her prescription drug addiction, and
she talks to the person running the rehab center, Seth, who’s actually quite
forthcoming about Carmen and what she was doing at his facility — unlike all
the taciturn doctors, social workers and other “helping” professionals on Law
and Order: Special Victims Unit who insist
that their pledges of confidentiality apply even to the dead. And there’s a
weird plot twist I’m still trying
to figure out, in which Sandra refers Heather to another attorney to handle her
criminal case, Wayne Hamilton (Philip Granger, who gets a special credit
identifying him with his role — an unusual privilege for an actor in a film
like this), only Wayne is himself murdered almost as soon as he takes the case
(why?). There’s also another oddball character, Michael Warren (Christos Shaw),
who’s obviously supposed to be Gay even though, like most movie Gay men, he’s
never seen showing any romantic or sexual interest in another man; he works at
KPPQ in some unexplained general-assistant capacity and we can tell he’s Gay
not only because of the mincing-queen way Shaw plays him but because at one
point Heather gets a whiff of him and complains about how much cologne he’s
wearing. Eventually Sandra decides that she and Mason have to kill Heather
because they can’t trust that the police will “buy” the frame they’ve concocted
to get her sent away and (hopefully, from their point of view) executed for the
murder, and Heather and Sandra have an all-out fight with Mason intervening on
Sandra’s behalf, and it looks like curtains for Our Heroine until Cruz and a
squad of cops come on the scene, arrest Mason and Sandra, and save Heather.
There’s a postlude that shows Heather hosting the KPPQ news show, now called The
Pearson Report, with Seth — her late
sister’s addiction counselor and, it’s hinted, Heather’s next romantic interest
— as her first guest.
I Didn’t Kill My Sister has a few of Lifetime’s most cherished conceits,
including the one that we’re supposed to believe the tall, lanky,
graying-haired and O.K.-looking but not especially sexy Mason has three women in love with him — Sandra, Heather and Lois — and some pretty appalling loose plot ends,
but for the most part it’s a crackerjack thriller, well acted, well cast
(Nicholle Tom and Gina Holden look enough alike they’re believable as sisters),
effectively directed for maximum suspense value out of a rather familiar but
still compelling plot (the attraction between Mason and Sandra certainly has
its Double Indemnity aspects, and
under her cool, lawyerly exterior Sandra is pretty much a typical femme
fatale of film noir), while the physical “look” of the film is
surprisingly shadowy and noir-ish
for a 2015 made-for-TV movie. There aren’t any soft-core porn scenes, but then
Chris William Martin isn’t so drop-dead gorgeous that we’d miss them. I
Didn’t Kill My Sister is actually a quite
professional piece of filmmaking, not innovative but cunning in its deployment
of old clichés, and for once the ending is a genuine surprise but also a
believable one instead of a whiplash-inducing reversal that negates all or most
of what has gone before. It also had an interesting road-not-taken aspect in
that the character I found myself caring most about was Mason’s and Carmen’s
daughter Brooke, and the trauma she’s undoubtedly going to face given not only
that her mother was murdered but her father was involved in the killing; I
couldn’t help but recall the story of country singer Shelby Lynne and her
younger sister, Alison Moorer, who were inevitably traumatized by the
murder-suicide of their parents — in 1986, when Shelby was 17 and Alison 14;
their dad killed their mom and then himself, while Shelby watched — and the
psychological number that did on them.
Trust No One, a.k.a. Corrupt (Odyssey Media, Zeb Filmworks, Lifetime, 2015, released May 15, 2016)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Alas, after I Didn’t Kill My Sister — a good movie with a dumb title — Lifetime ran Trust No One, also an Odyssey Media production and also a film that began with a different name (Corrupt), but a far inferior production, a dull story about the attempts of Pittsburgh district attorney Frank Murphy (the hot African-American actor Andrew Moodie — playing a character named Murphy? He must be one of those “Black Irish” we keep hearing about) to get the goods on a Mafia-connected money launderer named Vargano (Douglas Kidd). It’s not actually specified by screenwriters Curtis James Crawford (who also directed) and Cathy and Wendy McKernan that he’s part of the Mafia, but he has an Italian-sounding name, he’s played by a swarthy actor who looks like Leonardo Di Caprio’s big brother, and he’s escaped prosecution by means of a large, muscular, mostly bald sandy-haired hit man, Taylor (Layton Morrison), who manages through almost supernatural powers to identify and knock off any potential witness against Vargano before the D.A. can actually get that person to court to testify against him. The leading character of the movie is actually Kate MacIntyre (Nicole de Boer), a forensic accountant who when she isn’t teaching at a local college (there’s a scene of her giving a lecture to her students in which she explains mark-to-market accounting) works under the D.A. trying to get the goods on Vargano by looking through all his accounting records to see if she can find anomalies that would indicate he’s using his “legitimate” businesses as a front for money laundering.
Vargano, meanwhile, is behaving more like a James Bond villain than a classical movie Mafioso; virtually the only times we actually see him are when he’s lounging on his yacht with two anonymous bimbos in tow to service some of his other needs. (The fact that he seems to be able to do this year-round in Pittsburgh, of all places, itself requires a certain suspension of disbelief.) Murphy manages to get Kate to leave her job as a professor and join his task force even though the last time she worked for him she nearly got killed and the witness she had developed was killed. At first they work out of Murphy’s own offices until a Black hit man (Dennis LaFond), a confederate of Taylor’s, disguises himself as a janitor and sets a bomb in the storage room holding the files Murphy and his staff have assembled about Vargano and his questionable — and, they hope, provably illegal — business activities. Kate, the obviously intended victim, is uninjured because she went out to replenish the group’s coffee supply as they worked into the night, but her assistant Vivian (Allison Brennan) is injured and ends up in the hospital. So Murphy orders his crew to leave the office and move into a safe house where they can be protected from Vargano’s thugs, and one of the three police officers assigned to Kate’s detail, Carl (Jon MacLaren), bails out on the ground that he’s too concerned about his family to want to work a job that might get himself killed. The two cops that end up with Kate in the safe house are hunky young Detective Daniel Leaton (Scott Gibson) and older, stouter, taller and more avuncular, but still attractive, Greg Nealand (Peter Michael Dillon), who worms out of Kate the information that she’s single and then declares his love for her. As the film progresses (in the manner of a disease), Murphy becomes aware that there is a “mole” in his operation who’s leaking Vargano and his organization all the information about his investigation, including the identities of his potential witnesses (so Vargano can have Taylor and his Black confederate kill them) and the businesses he owns that Murphy and Kate are looking at — and we become aware that one of the two cops hiding out with Kate in the safe house, where they’ve set a burglar alarm so she literally can’t leave, is the mole.
Things heat up when Kate figures out how to get out of the safe house (she opens a window, it sets the alarm, and she scopes Leaton out as he resets it, thereby getting the code) and meets another member of Murphy’s office staff, Jessica Hall (Helene Alexis-Seymour), to obtain a file on the Benton corporation, which Vargano ostensibly “bought,” albeit at an inflated price. Only the file reveals that Vargano didn’t have to buy the Benton corporation because he already owned it — it was incorporated with Vargano’s mother as a front — and the “purchase price” was really money he was laundering for the Mob. Then Jessica is run down by a driver on Vargano’s payroll and killed (and it seems a bit racist to have the white Vivian merely injured by the thugs, and the Black Jessica killed by them — it also seemed a bit stupid that, since they killed her because she got the Benton file to Kate, they didn’t go back and fetch her laptop, which ended up on the ground near her body and probably had a copy on its hard drive; but then again no one from the police or the D.A.’s office seems to think of looking on her laptop for the file either). At first we’re carefully led to believe the mole is Leaton, not only because Crawford and the McKernans drop hints (like showing him using his cell phone to call a mysterious party — for some reason they’ve barred Kate from having a cell phone or an Internet connection at the safe house but both he and Nealand use their cell phones all the time; in a real safe-house situation, wouldn’t they have set up a secure landline so they and Kate could call Murphy’s office but nowhere else, instead of risking having their operation compromised by a traceable cell-phone signal?) but because he’s the hottest-looking guy in the movie and part of the Lifetime iconography is that the hottest-looking guy in a Lifetime movie is almost always a black-hearted villain; but I was also bracing myself for a reversal in which Nealand would turn out to be the mole, and that duly happened when Taylor and the Black guy found out where the safe house was and hatched with Nealand (via cell phone!) a plot whereby Nealand would drug Leaton so Taylor and his Black confederate could kidnap Kate; she gets into an SUV with Nealand and suddenly recognizes the Black guy as the “janitor” she saw the night before, and realizes that she’s being kidnapped by Vargano’s hit men and Nealand is the mole.
There’s a final confrontation in which the baddies threaten to torture Kate unless she gives them the password to the file so they can erase it and Vargano can get off scot-free again, but ultimately Leaton recovers consciousness, gives chase, and while his scrawny little frame (which we’ve already seen topless coming out of a shower, with only a towel around his waist — yum) is no match for Taylor’s bulk and it looks like Taylor will literally make mincemeat out of him in a one-on-one confrontation, ultimately Kate comes up with the gun and shoots down Taylor just as he’s about to kill Leaton, and the other cops arrive, take the wounded Taylor and the Black guy into custody, and the D.A. has the evidence he needs to indict Vargano before the deadline by which he’d either have to come up with something against him or drop all charges. Tell No One isn’t a bad movie; it’s just dull, and while Vargano and Taylor are convincing figures of menace (enough to make me wish the writers had emphasized the bad guys more and the comparatively boring good guys less), overall it’s simply not a very interesting movie. It’s full of sporadic twitches of action that seem to be there merely because it occurred to Crawford and the McKernans that white-collar crime is boring to watch, and the efforts to catch white-collar criminals are also boring — there are way too many scenes of Kate and others poring over manila folders containing spreadsheets and other financial documents, and like all movies about white-collar crime this requires endless explanations about just what all those numbers mean and why what the bad guys are doing is illegal. There are a few atmospheric shots of Pittsburgh by night — in fact Crawford likes to take his cameras overhead and give views of the city’s night lights just as a relief from the boredom of his and the McKernans’ plot — and an overall sense that Trust No One might actually have been a better movie with more compelling direction and writing, and more of a focus on the villains than the heroes. More soft-core porn scenes would have helped; I would have liked to see Nealand get to have sex with Kate during their long joint incarceration in that safe house, and afterwards Kate get into a tizzy when she finds out she’s pregnant with the child of the corrupt cop who tried to kill her!
Alas, after I Didn’t Kill My Sister — a good movie with a dumb title — Lifetime ran Trust No One, also an Odyssey Media production and also a film that began with a different name (Corrupt), but a far inferior production, a dull story about the attempts of Pittsburgh district attorney Frank Murphy (the hot African-American actor Andrew Moodie — playing a character named Murphy? He must be one of those “Black Irish” we keep hearing about) to get the goods on a Mafia-connected money launderer named Vargano (Douglas Kidd). It’s not actually specified by screenwriters Curtis James Crawford (who also directed) and Cathy and Wendy McKernan that he’s part of the Mafia, but he has an Italian-sounding name, he’s played by a swarthy actor who looks like Leonardo Di Caprio’s big brother, and he’s escaped prosecution by means of a large, muscular, mostly bald sandy-haired hit man, Taylor (Layton Morrison), who manages through almost supernatural powers to identify and knock off any potential witness against Vargano before the D.A. can actually get that person to court to testify against him. The leading character of the movie is actually Kate MacIntyre (Nicole de Boer), a forensic accountant who when she isn’t teaching at a local college (there’s a scene of her giving a lecture to her students in which she explains mark-to-market accounting) works under the D.A. trying to get the goods on Vargano by looking through all his accounting records to see if she can find anomalies that would indicate he’s using his “legitimate” businesses as a front for money laundering.
Vargano, meanwhile, is behaving more like a James Bond villain than a classical movie Mafioso; virtually the only times we actually see him are when he’s lounging on his yacht with two anonymous bimbos in tow to service some of his other needs. (The fact that he seems to be able to do this year-round in Pittsburgh, of all places, itself requires a certain suspension of disbelief.) Murphy manages to get Kate to leave her job as a professor and join his task force even though the last time she worked for him she nearly got killed and the witness she had developed was killed. At first they work out of Murphy’s own offices until a Black hit man (Dennis LaFond), a confederate of Taylor’s, disguises himself as a janitor and sets a bomb in the storage room holding the files Murphy and his staff have assembled about Vargano and his questionable — and, they hope, provably illegal — business activities. Kate, the obviously intended victim, is uninjured because she went out to replenish the group’s coffee supply as they worked into the night, but her assistant Vivian (Allison Brennan) is injured and ends up in the hospital. So Murphy orders his crew to leave the office and move into a safe house where they can be protected from Vargano’s thugs, and one of the three police officers assigned to Kate’s detail, Carl (Jon MacLaren), bails out on the ground that he’s too concerned about his family to want to work a job that might get himself killed. The two cops that end up with Kate in the safe house are hunky young Detective Daniel Leaton (Scott Gibson) and older, stouter, taller and more avuncular, but still attractive, Greg Nealand (Peter Michael Dillon), who worms out of Kate the information that she’s single and then declares his love for her. As the film progresses (in the manner of a disease), Murphy becomes aware that there is a “mole” in his operation who’s leaking Vargano and his organization all the information about his investigation, including the identities of his potential witnesses (so Vargano can have Taylor and his Black confederate kill them) and the businesses he owns that Murphy and Kate are looking at — and we become aware that one of the two cops hiding out with Kate in the safe house, where they’ve set a burglar alarm so she literally can’t leave, is the mole.
Things heat up when Kate figures out how to get out of the safe house (she opens a window, it sets the alarm, and she scopes Leaton out as he resets it, thereby getting the code) and meets another member of Murphy’s office staff, Jessica Hall (Helene Alexis-Seymour), to obtain a file on the Benton corporation, which Vargano ostensibly “bought,” albeit at an inflated price. Only the file reveals that Vargano didn’t have to buy the Benton corporation because he already owned it — it was incorporated with Vargano’s mother as a front — and the “purchase price” was really money he was laundering for the Mob. Then Jessica is run down by a driver on Vargano’s payroll and killed (and it seems a bit racist to have the white Vivian merely injured by the thugs, and the Black Jessica killed by them — it also seemed a bit stupid that, since they killed her because she got the Benton file to Kate, they didn’t go back and fetch her laptop, which ended up on the ground near her body and probably had a copy on its hard drive; but then again no one from the police or the D.A.’s office seems to think of looking on her laptop for the file either). At first we’re carefully led to believe the mole is Leaton, not only because Crawford and the McKernans drop hints (like showing him using his cell phone to call a mysterious party — for some reason they’ve barred Kate from having a cell phone or an Internet connection at the safe house but both he and Nealand use their cell phones all the time; in a real safe-house situation, wouldn’t they have set up a secure landline so they and Kate could call Murphy’s office but nowhere else, instead of risking having their operation compromised by a traceable cell-phone signal?) but because he’s the hottest-looking guy in the movie and part of the Lifetime iconography is that the hottest-looking guy in a Lifetime movie is almost always a black-hearted villain; but I was also bracing myself for a reversal in which Nealand would turn out to be the mole, and that duly happened when Taylor and the Black guy found out where the safe house was and hatched with Nealand (via cell phone!) a plot whereby Nealand would drug Leaton so Taylor and his Black confederate could kidnap Kate; she gets into an SUV with Nealand and suddenly recognizes the Black guy as the “janitor” she saw the night before, and realizes that she’s being kidnapped by Vargano’s hit men and Nealand is the mole.
There’s a final confrontation in which the baddies threaten to torture Kate unless she gives them the password to the file so they can erase it and Vargano can get off scot-free again, but ultimately Leaton recovers consciousness, gives chase, and while his scrawny little frame (which we’ve already seen topless coming out of a shower, with only a towel around his waist — yum) is no match for Taylor’s bulk and it looks like Taylor will literally make mincemeat out of him in a one-on-one confrontation, ultimately Kate comes up with the gun and shoots down Taylor just as he’s about to kill Leaton, and the other cops arrive, take the wounded Taylor and the Black guy into custody, and the D.A. has the evidence he needs to indict Vargano before the deadline by which he’d either have to come up with something against him or drop all charges. Tell No One isn’t a bad movie; it’s just dull, and while Vargano and Taylor are convincing figures of menace (enough to make me wish the writers had emphasized the bad guys more and the comparatively boring good guys less), overall it’s simply not a very interesting movie. It’s full of sporadic twitches of action that seem to be there merely because it occurred to Crawford and the McKernans that white-collar crime is boring to watch, and the efforts to catch white-collar criminals are also boring — there are way too many scenes of Kate and others poring over manila folders containing spreadsheets and other financial documents, and like all movies about white-collar crime this requires endless explanations about just what all those numbers mean and why what the bad guys are doing is illegal. There are a few atmospheric shots of Pittsburgh by night — in fact Crawford likes to take his cameras overhead and give views of the city’s night lights just as a relief from the boredom of his and the McKernans’ plot — and an overall sense that Trust No One might actually have been a better movie with more compelling direction and writing, and more of a focus on the villains than the heroes. More soft-core porn scenes would have helped; I would have liked to see Nealand get to have sex with Kate during their long joint incarceration in that safe house, and afterwards Kate get into a tizzy when she finds out she’s pregnant with the child of the corrupt cop who tried to kill her!
Sunday, May 15, 2016
Troubled Child (Jane E. Ryan Productions, Filigrana Films, Hornil Brothers Productions, 2012)
by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I missed last night’s “world premiere” Lifetime movie I Didn’t Kill My Sister! but got my Lifetime “fix” anyway via the movie they showed after that from 10 p.m. to midnight, Troubled Child. This was actually a “problem movie” from 2012 in which the central character is Annika Williams (Leslie Stevens), who once had ambitions to be a dancer until she met, fell in love with and married Zeb Williams (Carlton Wilborn), a minister who took her back to the small town of Annevar (its precise location in the U.S. is pretty indeterminate but it was actually “played” by L.A. and/or its suburbs) and settled in with her. When the film starts they are raising two children; one, son Jarren (Patrick Nicolas), is their natural offspring but the other, daughter Lexi (McKenzie Clayton), is adopted. It’s worth noting that Zeb Williams is Black and his wife Annika is white, and this is not at all an issue in the plot — however despairing it may seem to work for social change, some taboos have definitively come down — though the actor playing Jarren looks too dark to be believable as the child of a mixed-race couple and the girl playing Lexi is lighter-skinned and more credible as a mixed-race child even though she’s the one we’re told was adopted! Anyway, the Williamses decide to adopt again when they meet 11-year-old Carl (a magnificent performance by Andy Scott Harris), whom they fall in love with immediately and who at first seems a totally disarming and with-it kid … but given the film’s title, we know better well before the characters do. Carl turns out to be an angry kid with a nasty temper that leads him to kill Lady, the Williamses’ family dog; chew out a baseball coach who puts him in the outfield when Carl thinks he should be pitching; lock his adoptive mother Annika in the family basement and leave her there all day until Jarren comes home and rescues her; later, suddenly push Annika into the path of an oncoming SUV — the driver dodges out of her way just in time — and ultimately do something on a playground involving some sort of winch, block and tackle or something that leads to a girl in Carl’s school being clobbered in her eye. Carl then goes to visit her in hospital and, in an eerie case of mixed signals, squeezes her arm while she’s helpless in the hospital bed and then throws down a bunch of flowers on the bed.
The Williamses’ marriage nearly breaks up over Carl because he gets along fine with dad but is consistently hateful and hostile with mom. At one point Zeb Williams shows Carl an elaborate model train set and explains that his father built this for him and it took him years, and I immediately assumed on the Chekhov principle that if you establish the existence of a pistol in act one it has to be fired in act three, that at some point Carl would go into a towering rage and smash the train model. Instead Carl is fascinated by it and stares at it for hours, and the noise the model train makes reminds him, Proust-style, of the sound of a real train where we soon realize that something traumatic happened to him that’s determining how he’s behaving now. Eventually the Williamses, after being palmed off by therapists who say they need to give Carl time because he’s still “adjusting,” realize their new son is seriously mentally ill and take him to a therapist named Elizabeth (Dee Wallace, making a welcome appearance — ironically Charles and I had recently seen her again in her star-making performance in E.T. in 1982), who commits him to an inpatient facility that particularly specializes in the treatment of Carl’s disease, Reactive Attachment Disorder, or RAD for short. Apparently kids get RAD when they’re abandoned by their mothers in the first 33 months of their lives, and in Carl’s case a lot more terrible stuff happened to him, including being sexually molested both by one of his mom’s boyfriends and a woman at a foster home he was sent to after he was taken away from his mom, who’d locked him in a room in a building next to train tracks. He’s been in and out of so many foster homes the file on him practically takes up all of a bankers’ box, and as Annika reads it she becomes more and more horrified and determined to keep her family together and get Carl whatever sort of help he needs to recover.
The ending was fairly typical Lifetime — Carl escapes from the facility, somehow gets back home and threatens Annika with a knife — only she out-wrestles him, gets it away from him and subdues him long enough for the cops to take him into custody and get him back to the facility. But the whole experience has made Annika realize that she really does love Carl after all, despite his problems. But the film as a whole was surprisingly sensitively done; the writer (and also the producer) was Jane Elizabeth Ryan and the director was Jolene Adams, who not only got first-rate performances from her leads but staged this story in a quite atmospheric fashion. Andy Scott Harris as Carl Wiliams wears his hair in an early-Beatles pudding-bowl (his current head shot on imdb.com has him with much shorter hair that shows off the huge size of his ears — but then Clark Gable became a major star despite his ears) and director Adams and cinematographer Carmen Cabana shoot him as almost a noir character, keeping his face in half-shadow almost throughout and projecting him as a morally ambiguous character, driven by demons even he doesn’t understand and capable of glare-ice switches in his overall affect and mood. The film got shown at several festivals showcasing films by women, including the Independent Women’s Film Festival (where Adams, Ryan and Leslie Stevens all won awards) and the Bel-Air Festival (two awards: an Audience Award and an acting award for Andy Scott Harris), so it obviously was aimed at some sort of theatrical release instead of just ending up on Lifetime. It’s also quite good, especially in the context of what this network usually shows; though the subject matter is more or less typical Lifetime, the presentation is genuinely sensitive and caring, and as frustrating as Carl is both for the characters and the audience, we really want to see him learn to control his demons and recover from his mom’s early-childhood abandonment (even though one Lifetime contributor noted that Carl’s background as depicted could also mean he’ll grow up to be a serial killer). Troubled Child was one of the rare gems Lifetime throws out and makes up for a lot of the garbage that afflicts this network!
I missed last night’s “world premiere” Lifetime movie I Didn’t Kill My Sister! but got my Lifetime “fix” anyway via the movie they showed after that from 10 p.m. to midnight, Troubled Child. This was actually a “problem movie” from 2012 in which the central character is Annika Williams (Leslie Stevens), who once had ambitions to be a dancer until she met, fell in love with and married Zeb Williams (Carlton Wilborn), a minister who took her back to the small town of Annevar (its precise location in the U.S. is pretty indeterminate but it was actually “played” by L.A. and/or its suburbs) and settled in with her. When the film starts they are raising two children; one, son Jarren (Patrick Nicolas), is their natural offspring but the other, daughter Lexi (McKenzie Clayton), is adopted. It’s worth noting that Zeb Williams is Black and his wife Annika is white, and this is not at all an issue in the plot — however despairing it may seem to work for social change, some taboos have definitively come down — though the actor playing Jarren looks too dark to be believable as the child of a mixed-race couple and the girl playing Lexi is lighter-skinned and more credible as a mixed-race child even though she’s the one we’re told was adopted! Anyway, the Williamses decide to adopt again when they meet 11-year-old Carl (a magnificent performance by Andy Scott Harris), whom they fall in love with immediately and who at first seems a totally disarming and with-it kid … but given the film’s title, we know better well before the characters do. Carl turns out to be an angry kid with a nasty temper that leads him to kill Lady, the Williamses’ family dog; chew out a baseball coach who puts him in the outfield when Carl thinks he should be pitching; lock his adoptive mother Annika in the family basement and leave her there all day until Jarren comes home and rescues her; later, suddenly push Annika into the path of an oncoming SUV — the driver dodges out of her way just in time — and ultimately do something on a playground involving some sort of winch, block and tackle or something that leads to a girl in Carl’s school being clobbered in her eye. Carl then goes to visit her in hospital and, in an eerie case of mixed signals, squeezes her arm while she’s helpless in the hospital bed and then throws down a bunch of flowers on the bed.
The Williamses’ marriage nearly breaks up over Carl because he gets along fine with dad but is consistently hateful and hostile with mom. At one point Zeb Williams shows Carl an elaborate model train set and explains that his father built this for him and it took him years, and I immediately assumed on the Chekhov principle that if you establish the existence of a pistol in act one it has to be fired in act three, that at some point Carl would go into a towering rage and smash the train model. Instead Carl is fascinated by it and stares at it for hours, and the noise the model train makes reminds him, Proust-style, of the sound of a real train where we soon realize that something traumatic happened to him that’s determining how he’s behaving now. Eventually the Williamses, after being palmed off by therapists who say they need to give Carl time because he’s still “adjusting,” realize their new son is seriously mentally ill and take him to a therapist named Elizabeth (Dee Wallace, making a welcome appearance — ironically Charles and I had recently seen her again in her star-making performance in E.T. in 1982), who commits him to an inpatient facility that particularly specializes in the treatment of Carl’s disease, Reactive Attachment Disorder, or RAD for short. Apparently kids get RAD when they’re abandoned by their mothers in the first 33 months of their lives, and in Carl’s case a lot more terrible stuff happened to him, including being sexually molested both by one of his mom’s boyfriends and a woman at a foster home he was sent to after he was taken away from his mom, who’d locked him in a room in a building next to train tracks. He’s been in and out of so many foster homes the file on him practically takes up all of a bankers’ box, and as Annika reads it she becomes more and more horrified and determined to keep her family together and get Carl whatever sort of help he needs to recover.
The ending was fairly typical Lifetime — Carl escapes from the facility, somehow gets back home and threatens Annika with a knife — only she out-wrestles him, gets it away from him and subdues him long enough for the cops to take him into custody and get him back to the facility. But the whole experience has made Annika realize that she really does love Carl after all, despite his problems. But the film as a whole was surprisingly sensitively done; the writer (and also the producer) was Jane Elizabeth Ryan and the director was Jolene Adams, who not only got first-rate performances from her leads but staged this story in a quite atmospheric fashion. Andy Scott Harris as Carl Wiliams wears his hair in an early-Beatles pudding-bowl (his current head shot on imdb.com has him with much shorter hair that shows off the huge size of his ears — but then Clark Gable became a major star despite his ears) and director Adams and cinematographer Carmen Cabana shoot him as almost a noir character, keeping his face in half-shadow almost throughout and projecting him as a morally ambiguous character, driven by demons even he doesn’t understand and capable of glare-ice switches in his overall affect and mood. The film got shown at several festivals showcasing films by women, including the Independent Women’s Film Festival (where Adams, Ryan and Leslie Stevens all won awards) and the Bel-Air Festival (two awards: an Audience Award and an acting award for Andy Scott Harris), so it obviously was aimed at some sort of theatrical release instead of just ending up on Lifetime. It’s also quite good, especially in the context of what this network usually shows; though the subject matter is more or less typical Lifetime, the presentation is genuinely sensitive and caring, and as frustrating as Carl is both for the characters and the audience, we really want to see him learn to control his demons and recover from his mom’s early-childhood abandonment (even though one Lifetime contributor noted that Carl’s background as depicted could also mean he’ll grow up to be a serial killer). Troubled Child was one of the rare gems Lifetime throws out and makes up for a lot of the garbage that afflicts this network!
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