Mexican Hayride (Universal-International, 1948)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film was Mexican Hayride, a 1948 Universal-International production and the next Abbott and Costello movie in sequence after Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. It actually began life as a 1944 Broadway musical, with book by Herbert and Dorothy Fields and songs by Cole Porter. The musical starred the great comedian Bobby Clark (who’d had a career in Hollywood making short films in the early 1930’s with his stage partner Paul McCullough, but after McCullough committed suicide in 1935 Clark made only one more film, The Goldwyn Follies in 1938, and otherwise concentrated exclusively on stage work) and June Havoc (Gypsy Rose Lee’s sister and the grown-up version of the “Baby June” all fans of the musical Gypsy will remember). Clark played Joe Bascom, a con man who flees to Mexico and meets his old girlfriend (Havoc), who’s now a woman bullfighter using the name “Montana.” She’s currently dating David Winthrop (Wilbur Evans, whom I know mainly as the male lead in Kitty Carlisle’s 1945 Decca recording of Sigmund Romberg’s The Desert Song) and of course ends up with him at the end, while Bascom teams up with a speculator to run a phony national lottery (as opposed to Mexico’s real one?). In the end, of course, Montana and David get together and Bascom gets busted. Universal-International bought the rights to Mexican Hayride and made the bone-headed decision to junk the Porter songs — I’d always thought they did that because Porter was considered over the hill by then (the original review of the stage version in Life magazine complained that “the composer of ‘Night and Day’ seems, at least temporarily, to have written himself dry,” and Porter’s next two projects, the Orson Welles musical of Around the World in 80 Days and the film The Pirate, were flops; fortunately, while the film Mexican Hayride was in production Porter was working on the magnificent Kiss Me, Kate, a smash hit and a major comeback for him), but an imdb.com “Trivia” entry said that Abbott and Costello fans were getting tired of having their films cluttered up by musical numbers. Come to think of it, maybe junking the Porter songs wasn’t such a bad idea after all: “I Love You” (the result of a bet Porter and a friend had going over whether Porter could write a song with such a banal and obvious title; needless to say, Porter came through brilliantly) was the only Mexican Hayride song that became a standard.

By the time Universal-International’s personnel — writers Oscar Brodney and John Grant (Grant was the author of “Who’s on First?” and their go-to guy for hilarious wordplay routines), director Charles T. Barton, producer Robert Arthur and songwriters Walter Scharf and Jack Brooks (who contributed an especially awful song called “Is It Yes, or Is It No?,” and one wonders why they took out all Porter’s song and gave us this) — got through remodeling Mexican Hayride as an Abbott and Costello vehicle, Joe Bascom (Lou Costello) was no longer a con man but an innocent dupe, framed by Harry Lambert (Bud Abbott). Montana (Virginia Grey) is still a matadora, and in the opening scene she’s supposed to pick a U.S. citizen from the crowd and throw her hat to him (in the stage original it was the ear of the bull she’d just killed), thereby designating him as the winner of the Anglo-Mexican friendship contest and entitling him to a cash prize and a week-long guided tour of Mexico. She and Lambert have set it up so the winner will be David Winthrop (John Hubbard) — who in this version is a crook instead of the romantic lead — because Lambert owes him money and has worked out a scheme to pay him off by rigging the contest in his favor. Only when Montana sees Bascom in the crowd, she gets so upset with him she throws the hat at him out of sheer anger. Lambert tricks Bascom into his latest scheme, having him work into the big speech he’s supposed to make as part of his tour a pitch for a worthless silver mine Lambert is selling stock in, and using the four women from the Mexican Chamber of Commerce who were assigned to greet Bascom and keep him company on his tour as the salespeople for the phony stock (which Bascom is shown printing out on what appears to be a mimeograph machine — I’m old enough to remember mimeograph machines). It’s a film of individual scenes rather than a particularly coherent plot — there’s a nice, if a bit overlong, sequence with Fritz Feld as an elocution teacher trying to train Bascom to make public speeches (The King’s Speech 62 years early!); another with Lambert and Bascom as roadside food vendors; and what’s by far the best part of the film, the exciting action climax in which Bascom ends up stuck in a bullring trying to escape being gored to death by a runaway bull who, unlike his real-life counterparts, is able to leap the wooden barriers that ring a bullfighting stadium and chase Bascom through them. The climax owes a lot to the Eddie Cantor vehicle The Kid from Spain, made 16 years earlier, though it’s pretty obvious that — unlike Cantor, who actually got close to the bull for a few close-ups even though most of his impersonation of a bullfighter was doubled (by Sidney Franklin, one of the few norteamericaños ever actually to train as a matador and make a living at it) — Lou Costello never actually faced the bull and artful editing by Frank Gross was used to make it look like he was (and some of the shots of the bull leaping the barriers look like they were done with a man in a bull suit).

Also one of the film’s running gags was that just before they had to flee to Mexico, Bascom had won a marathon-dance contest during which he danced the samba for 68 hours straight, and throughout the movie samba music has the same effect on him the word “Pocomoco” had on his and Abbott’s tormentor in Lost in a Harem and the sound of horns had on Oliver Hardy in the last Laurel and Hardy film for Hal Roach Studios, Saps at Sea. The gag has a rather nasty payoff in an ending scene in which Bascom and Lambert are taking a cart out of Mexico, with Bascom accompanied by his Mexican girlfriend Dagmar (Luba Malina, the one member of the stage cast who carried over into the movie) — apparently nobody told the writers that Dagmar is actually a Swedish name or that samba music is Brazilian, not Mexican — only sneaky Harry Lambert turns on a radio playing samba music and Bascom goes samba-ing out of the cart and out of the way of Lambert making time with Dagmar. It’s the sort of ending Bob Hope and Bing Crosby could get away with in a Road movie but here just disappoints us when we wanted to see Lou Costello get a girl for once. In some of their earlier films Abbott and Costello had got along so poorly they literally didn’t speak to each other except when they had a scene to do together (and their writers had accommodated them by giving them as few scenes together as possible!); in Mexican Hayride the hatred between the Abbott and Costello characters becomes a key issue in the plot and gives the film what little dramatic power it has. Otherwise it’s an amusing movie but hardly a great comedy, and though there are some nice second-unit shots of actual Mexican locations, complete with the red filter that after Eisenstein’s ¡Que Viva México! had become de rigueur for moviemakers shooting there, the bulk of the film was made on the Universal-International backlot, and looks it. (The final scene in particular takes us past all too many familiar locations from U.S.-set Westerns to be believable as Mexico.) Fortunately, at least in their next movie, Africa Screams (made not for Universal but for an independent company called Nassour Films), Costello got a rare triumph over Abbott at the end!

Julius La Rosa: Perry Como Show (CBS-TV, February 28-March 11, 1955)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Charles and I screened two of the six TV programs I had recently downloaded from archive.org featuring recently deceased singer Julius La Rosa, who had a brief flash of fame in the early 1950’s. He was one of the many people first boosted and then screwed over by Arthur Godfrey, who put him on his popular radio and TV shows in the early 1950’s until one day in 1953, while announcing La Rosa, he said — to La Rosa’s total surprise — “This is his last appearance on our program.” It later turned out he had fired La Rosa because La Rosa had hired an agent to get him other jobs, and for some quirky, bizarre reason Godfrey interpreted that as a sign of disloyalty. (Godfrey became so notorious that even while he was still on the air, at least two movies — The Great Man and A Face in the Crowd — were made in which characters that were thinly disguised versions of him were depicted as total S.O.B.’s. He also was the first person to demand a helipad on the roof of a building; he had just got a helicopter and he was having so much fun with his new toy that he announced to the CBS executives that from then on he was going to fly to work on his helicopter, so CBS had to convert the roof of their studio building to a helipad so Godfrey could land.)

La Rosa’s career continued O.K. — he still had a recording contract with RCA Victor (the only record of his I can remember hearing was a snippet of him doing a swing version of the song “No Love, No Nothin’,” introduced by Alice Faye in the film The Gang’s All Here and heart-rendingly recorded by Judy Garland at the time) and managed to have a career as a nightclub and lounge singer through much of the 1950’s. In February and March 1955 he was tabbed by the CBS network to take over Perry Como’s thrice-weekly 15-minute show, which followed the CBS nightly news show — itself also only 15 minutes long back then. The program was sponsored by Chesterfield cigarettes and their affiliated brand, L&M (it featured singing commercials for both brands) — and yes, it’s jarring to see cigarettes being advertised on TV since it’s been so long since they have been. We watched the first two shows in the series with La Rosa, one on February 28, 1955 and the other from March 2. Based on this admittedly unrepresentative sample of his work (archive.org used to have some of La Rosa’s audio recordings but they’re no longer there, probably due to copyright-related takedowns), La Rosa seems to have been a perfectly serviceable crooner in an era that had plenty of them, including the still-active Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra at the peak of his powers, Tony Bennett riding his early success on Columbia with some unconventional song choices (like Hank Williams’ “Cold, Cold Heart”) and the person La Rosa was replacing, Perry Como.

I’ve never been a Como fan — he seemed so unemotional, uninvolved and content to be Just Another Pretty Voice that impressionists doing Como frequently mimed him falling asleep during one of his own songs — and if anything I like La Rosa better, but (perhaps because of the context he was in) he was doing pretty much the “mix” of material Como was in 1955: uptempo swing numbers, ballads, and bizarre attempts to do R&B. In February 1955 rock ’n’ roll was just starting to advance onto the charts but plenty of non-rock artists were still selling, and sometimes — especially in the work of singers like La Rosa who were rooted in the older styles of American pop vocal music but could see rock growing in popularity and were trying to adapt to it without losing the older non-rock audience in the process. While some white singers who did Black R&B songs showed some degree of imagination and creativity — Peggy Lee, for example, completely recast Lil Green’s R&B hit “Why Don’t You Do Right?” in her own style (sassy instead of dirge-like) and did an even more radical rewrite of Little Willie John’s “Fever,” both times coming up with records as good or better than the Black originals — most were content to churn out pale (in both senses) copies of the Black versions. On February 28 La Rosa opened his show with “Tweedlee Dee,” originally recorded by Black singer Lavern Baker on Atlantic and then covered by white singer Georgia Gibbs,” while on March 2 he did two other covers of other white artists’ covers of Black songs: the Moonglows’ “Sincerely” (the white cover hit was by the McGuire Sisters, though it’s a song that frankly works better sung by men like the Moonglows and La Rosa) and Gene and Eunice’s “Ko Ko Mo (I Love You So).” Gene (Wilson) and Eunice (Levy) were a Black male-female duo and a real-life couple to boot (they were engaged when they wrote and recorded “Ko Ko Mo” and got married later), and while no fewer than 17 cover versions were made in the first few months after Gene and Eunice introduced it on the Combo and Aladdin labels (including one with both Black and white singers: Louis Armstrong and Bing Crosby’s son Gary), the white hit was by the man La Rosa was replacing, Perry Como. Como’s label, RCA Victor, even took out ads in the trade papers boasting, “‘Ko Ko Mo’ Belongs to Como.”

The February 28 show opens with the “Tweedlee Dee” cover, then a Chesterfield singing commercial, then La Rosa singing a ballad called “Melody of Love,” which he does quite well but one misses (as we do with Como as well) the eloquent phrasing and soul with which Frank Sinatra approached this sort of material. Each show had a guest artist, and on February 28 that was Les Paul and Mary Ford doing a then-new Capitol single called “Sung in Blue” — and while it was obvious they were just synchronizing to their record (the song is full of elaborate overdubs on both his guitar and her voice, and performing it “live” and duplicating the sound of the record would have been as impossible as it would have been for Queen to do “Bohemian Rhapsody” on stage), their level of talent and imagination soar above La Rosa’s. Though he was only pretending to play, it’s fascinating to watch Les Paul’s fingers — and it’s also nice that we can see the original Les Paul electric guitar: he designed and custom-built it himself and then licensed it to the Gibson company to mass-produce. Les Paul’s debt to Django Reinhardt (which he acknowledged) is also evident on this clip; when Les Paul and Mary Ford recorded “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise” in 1952 his solo was almost a note-for-note copy of the one Reinhardt had recorded on the same song three years earlier. After that La Rosa returns and does “That Old Feeling,” a song from the Walter Wanger musical Vogues of 1938 (a movie that took so long to make its working title was Vogues of 1937) which didn’t become a standard until Frank Sinatra recorded it in the 1940’s — and once again, La Rosa’s version is pleasant and moving but can’t compare to the Chairman’s.

The March 2 show began with a jazz number, “Mobile,” which I’d heard otherwise only on a record by Bob Scobey’s Dixieland band, with banjoist Clancy Hayes doing the vocal (Hayes “sings like a man with sinus trouble,” wrote Richard Hadlock in his Jazz Review article “The State of Dixieland”), so it was easy enough for La Rosa to outsing him and come up with a quite infectious version even though the song itself is an all too obvious ripoff of “The Birth of the Blues.” Then, after a repeat of the singing Chesterfield commercial from the first show, La Rosa did his version of “Sincerely” (I liked him better than the McGuire Sisters but the Moonglows are in another universe altogether) and then brought on his guest star, Joni James, to sing “How Important Can It Be?” I’m familiar with James’ version because it was used in the soundtrack to L.A. Confidential, and unlike the Les Paul and Mary Ford “Sung in Blue” from episode one James was obviously singing live — she didn’t have the heavy vocal echo she did on the record, and there are minor but unmistakable difference in the phrasing that indicate this was a fresh performance — and then James came on with La Rosa and did a hot jitterbug dance during the “Ko Ko Mo” number but, alas, didn’t sing it with him. (Given that the original had been a male-female duet, there’s no reason she couldn’t have.) One oddity was that the closing credits featured slides appealing to viewers to make charitable donations, and while the ones for March 2 were politically innocuous ones like the Red Cross, the one for February 28 bad audiences at home to give money to something called “Fight Communism with Truth Dollars.” Charles did a quick Internet search and found it was a campaign of Radio Free Europe, which ostensibly was an independent nonprofit beaming U.S. propaganda to the so-called “captive nations” of eastern Europe but was actually a front for the CIA. (I remember ads for Radio Free Europe on radio and TV when I was growing up.) — 5/19/16

••••••••••

Charles and I watched the next two shows in the sequence of six singer Julius LaRosa did over two weeks in February and March 1955 as a replacement for Perry Como, who was on vacation (though he supplied a recorded greeting at the beginning of the March 4 show thanking LaRosa for filling in for him). These proved to be quite interesting and entertaining 15-minute programs which, with one exception, avoided the feints towards rock ’n’ roll that had marred the previous shows on February 28 and March 2. These shows were from March 4 and 7, and the March 4 show opened with LaRosa doing a rather silly song called “Open Up Your Heart” that turned out to be a very bleached-white pseudo-spiritual about how the devil wants people to frown so you can ward him off by smiling. (Charles was amused by the fact that LaRosa’s backup singers were called “The Ray Charles Singers” — this was, of course, the white Ray Charles, who when he was musical director on The Muppets Show in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s actually had himself credited as “[The Other] Ray Charles.”) Fortunately, the material got better after that; after the Chesterfield singing cigarette commercial LaRosa’s next song was “Teach Me Tonight,” a much better piece of material than you’d guess from the almost terminally shrill version by the DeCastro Sisters, who had the hit on it. LaRosa sang it as a ballad and phrased it eloquently (he was far better at phrasing than the singer he was replacing!), though to my mind Phoebe Snow’s 1970’s cover remains the best version.

LaRosa’s guest was a female singer named Terri Stevens (I’m guessing at the spelling of the name), who sang a quite compelling song called “Unsuspecting Heart” in a style that was basically easy-listening but had hints of both R&B and country (one could readily imagine either Dinah Washington or Patsy Cline covering this song) with an unusual staging: she stood against a backdrop of a photo of herself lying languorously on some sort of bed or couch — I presumed that was the cover of her record album — but towards the end the eyes on the image of her in the background started to blink, and eventually the backdrop image of Stevens smiled on the real one as she finished the song. (I presume the background image was pre-filmed and the two were blended together — an easy enough effect to do on film at the time but difficult on live TV.) LaRosa closed the show with a version of Harold Arlen’s “The Gal That Got Away” — written, of course, as “The Man That Got Away” for Judy Garland to sing in the film A Star Is Born, and while his version didn’t have either the wrenching power of Garland’s nor the brassy insouciance of Frank Sinatra’s (by far the best ever recorded by a man), he did the song full justice. I was amused at the differences in the last line: Judy’s was “a one-man woman looking for the man that got away,” Sinatra’s was “a long-lost loser looking for the gal that got away,” and LaRosa’s was “a disappointed guy looking for the gal that got away.” The March 7 show had its own charms; it began with LaRosa and the (female) Ray Charles Singers doing a cover of “Mr. Sandman” and, as he’d done with “Teach Me Tonight” in the previous program, making it more musical than the original artists had — though part of the charm of the Chordettes’ version is precisely in how straight-ahead  their phrasing is and how appealingly limited their voices were.

This time, after the Chesterfield jingle, LaRosa’s next song was “But Not for Me,” also a song with Gershwin and Garland connections (Ira Gershwin wrote the lyrics to “The Man That Got Away” and “But Not for Me” was, of course, by both Gershwin brothers, and both were sung in films by Judy Garland; “The Man That Got Away” in A Star Is Born and “But Not for Me” in Strike Up the Band) and one which drew from LaRosa his best singing in either program even though, once again, he’s still behind both Garland and Sinatra for eloquence and raw emotion. Then it was time for the rock ’n’ roll compromise, in this case Mindy Carson (a singer I’d heard of before only as the woman who recorded a separate song on Frank Sinatra’s last Columbia Records session in 1952 — it was called a “split date”) doing a song called “The Fish” about a dance, which seemed like the sort of thing that was popular in the wake of the Twist craze in 1961, six years after this show aired. It’s not much of a song, and frankly I’d like to hear Mindy Carson in more standard material rather than trying to be a rock singer (there weren’t that many white women rockers then but both Wanda Jackson and Jo Ann Campbell could have done this one more justice). Fortunately the show ended with LaRosa doing justice to another standard, Jerome Kern’s “All the Things You Are” — I still love Kenny Hagood’s record with spiky modern-jazz accompaniment by a studio group with Thelonious Monk and Milt Jackson, but for a “straight” version LaRosa’s is quite good and a lot of fun. Charles and I downloaded these shows as a memorial to LaRosa, who lived for years in retirement before dying earlier this year, and on the basis of them he’s a quite good crooner with a flair for jazz (not as much of a flair for jazz as Sinatra or Tony Bennett, the obvious comparisons, but still more than Como ever had!) and an appealing voice which should have made him a major star and probably would have if the competition for his sort of voice hadn’t been so fierce at the time. — 6/14/16

••••••••••

Charles and I finally screened the last two 15-minute TV shows in that rather odd sequence of CBS programs in February and March 1955 in which Perry Como went on vacation, and his replacement for his 15-minute show, aired three nights per week (Monday, Wednesday and Friday), was Julius La Rosa. I’d been interested in watching this because La Rosa died earlier this year (on May 12, at age 86) — though the loss of so many other, more recent musical greats like David Bowie, Glenn Frey and Prince totally overshadowed it — and though archive.org didn’t have any of La Rosa’s records they did have these six shows (February 28 through March 11, 1955) and I downloaded them and burned them to DVD. Charles and I had already watched the first four shows in the sequence, so last night we screened the final two —which proved to be surprisingly good. Frankly, though La Rosa didn’t have the long-term success of Como, I think he was a better singer; Como had a pretty voice but used it dully and didn’t seem to have a clue about phrasing, but La Rosa had skills in phrasing as well as a genuine feel for jazz that comes through even on some of the gimmicky and badly dated novelty songs that got trotted out for him on these shows. The format was an opening song by La Rosa, a jingle for Chesterfield cigarettes (the tobacco company that made Chesterfield and L&M cigarettes was the sponsor of the program), another song by La Rosa, a song by a guest artist, a duet between La Rosa and the guest, another Chesterfield commercial (this one a rather silly piece even by the standards of 1950’s advertising, featuring an electronic gizmo that looks like something a hobbyist would have turned out from a kit but which is hailed as the “Quality Detective” that ensures all Chesterfield cigarettes will be good), another La Rosa number and a final commercial for L&M (and Charles got the impression the company was marketing L&M specifically to women, since the Chesterfield commercials featured characters of both sexes but the L&M commercial was almost all women).

The March 9 show begins with a quite hot, jazzy version of “Ragtime Cowboy Joe” that shows what a loose and swinging singer La Rosa could be — as does his next number, “My Lifetime Sweetheart,” whose sentimentality is blessedly undercut by La Rosa’s light approach. Then he brings on Pee Wee King, a country-music act with traces of the Western swing style even though King didn’t use any horns, who does his big hit “Slowpoke” and then duets with La Rosa on a quite exciting version of “Tweedle Dee” — no, these white boys don’t tear through this song with quite the abandon of La Vern Baker’s version on Atlantic (Baker hated singing novelties like this and responded by doing them as all-out soul, singing far more intensely than the songs required), but they swing and are clearly having fun with it. After that La Rosa performs his latest record on Cadence, “Pass It On,” which he’d done a snippet of on the previous Monday’s show but here sings complete — and it’s a pretty good pay-it-forward number made engaging by La Rosa’s light-hearted delivery, his refusal to take it seriously the way, say, Frankie Laine would have. Then he does a “teaser” of the record’s flip side, “At Home Tonight,” much the way he’d done the “teaser” of “Pass It On” on the March 7 show.

The March 11 program had a more appropriate guest star, singer Jaye P. Morgan (a great talent who, like La Rosa, got lost in the shuffle simply because there were so many singers like her out there in the 1950’s), and though the opener, “Ever-Lovin’,” is a new song (then) that doesn’t have the panache of “Ragtime Cowboy Joe,” La Rosa is still clearly having fun with it and giving it an infectious, swinging reading. Morgan then steps up for her solo spot — a song she’d just recorded for RCA Victor (Perry Como’s label and, later, La Rosa’s as well) called “Danger — Heartbreak Ahead,” which sounds like a bastard hybridization of Billie Holiday’s “Detour Ahead” and Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” (which was still a year in the future when this show was aired!). The La Rosa-Morgan duet is a bizarre song called “The Finger of Suspicion Points to You,” an odd piece that attempts to depict a love affair as a criminal investigation (I’m not making this up, you know!) — it’s not much of a piece but it is fun (a word that keeps coming to mind about this show), after which La Rosa takes the show, and his all too brief stint as Como’s replacement, out with a complete version of “At Home Tonight” (a quite nice romantic ballad which could do with revival). The rest of Julius La Rosa’s career was overshadowed by his relationship with the popular but notoriously tyrannical Arthur Godfrey, who launched La Rosa’s career in 1951 and abruptly fired him in 1953 when La Rosa, citing a family emergency, refused to attend a dance class Godfrey required of all his performers. La Rosa understandably got tired of being asked about the Godfrey incident in later years — it seemed to be all anyone remembered about him — though his performances throughout this show indicate he was a genuinely talented singer who deserved a better break — no, he wasn’t at the level of Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett or Mel Tormé (the greatest white male pop singers of his generation), but he was a damned sight better than the man he was replacing, the overrated Perry Como, and had he reached his career peak in the 1940’s or the 1960’s instead of the 1950’s he might have got to do better songs than the novelty crap that dominated the charts in the era just before rock ’n’ roll. — 9/20/16

Allegiant (Red Wagon, Summit, Lionsgate, 2016)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Charles and I finally got to watch the Blu-Ray disc of Allegiant, third and last in the Divergent cycle of films (praise be that the production companies, Red Wagon, Summit and Lionsgate, filmed Allegiant as one movie and didn’t break it in two the way the makers of the Harry Potter, Twilight and Hunger Games cycles did!) and a quite good movie even though it ignored or changed much of what had been powerful about the book. The filmmakers — director Robert Schwentke (who also helmed the second film in the cycle, Insurgent), writers Noah Oppenheim, Adam Cooper and Bill Collage, and especially star Shailene Woodley, who gets introduced through some thrilling close-ups in which she projects a star charisma noticeably absent from her performances in the first two films — seem to have grown into their tasks and created what’s basically a fun action movie taking place against the backdrop of a dystopian future. Since it had been over a year since Charles and I read the books (though I have yet to read Four, Veronica Roth’s retelling of the story from the point of view of its male lead, “Four” — he’s called that because that’s the number of things he’s afraid of, and he’s played in the film by Josh Lucas, who doesn’t seem that great an actor but he’s hot-looking and portrays the stalwart dedication that’s the character’s only emotion aside from his love for Woodley’s character, Tris) and it had also been a while since we saw the previous movies, we weren’t picking out the details in which the film differed from Roth’s novel.

One really big point was that in the novel Allegiant, Tris dies at the end, going on what’s essentially a suicide mission to stop the Bureau of Genetic Welfare’s poison-gas attack on the city of Chicago (the Bureau has decided that the way to stop the civil war that’s erupted in the city is to give everyone a gas of forgetfulness that will make them lose all memories of who they are), while in the film she not only lives but gets to deliver a proclamation saying that the old order, in which people tried to build walls around each other and discriminate against each other, is over and it’s time for a new order in which everyone is equal — a message that is almost inevitably interpretable these days as a veiled (or maybe not-so-veiled) attack on Donald Trump. (When Tris complains that the Bureau built a wall around her city of Chicago, I couldn’t resist joking, “And they made us pay for it!”) The makers of the Divergent films — Neil Burger directed the first one and Schwentke the other two — are actually better filmmakers than the people who did the Hunger Games movies, though they’re handicapped by the fact that Veronica Roth simply isn’t as good a writer as Suzanne Collins and Divergent has nothing like the depth and richness of the political critique in the Hunger Games cycle. Nor is Tris anywhere near as interesting a character as Katniss Everdeen — reason enough why Woodley, though she’s developed into a fine actress (at least judging from the three Divergent films, which are all I’ve seen her in), hasn’t risen from young-adult cycle films to “A”-list roles the way Jennifer Lawrence has.

Allegiant is an enjoyable movie even though it does a worse job of wrapping up the cycle’s themes than its source novel did (and its source novel wasn’t any great shakes in that department: I remember I was reading Allegiant while Charles was reading its immediate predecessor in the series, Insurgent, and he was raising some of the dramatic holes he found in the plot and I was thinking, “Those questions will be answered in Allegiant, but not necessarily in ways you’re going to like”), and while it’s not always easy to keep track of all the blankly pretty young men in the cast and remember (or figure out) which side they’re on (and frankly the mohawk-haired killer who’s trying to slay Four as part of the Chicago civil war struck me as the sexiest guy in the movie even though I didn’t catch his name and I’m not sure his character had one), it’s two hours of fun action entertainment against an at least formerly fashionable dystopian backdrop — though the market for young-adult dystopian movies seems to have dried up, at least for the present. Allegiant was a box-office flop (according to imdb.com, it cost $110 million to make and grossed only $66 million theatrically) and the next film in the cycle, Ascendant, won’t involve Shailene Woodley and will be released directly to television (apparently as the kickoff of a Divergent TV series) instead of to theatres. (This probably also explains why 20^th Century-Fox seems to have brought the Maze Runner cycle to a skidding halt after the second film, The Scorch Trials, and isn’t planning to film the remaining three novels in James Dashner’s cycle.)

Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of the War of the Worlds Alive on Stage! The New Generation (Jeff Wayne Productions/Universal, 2013)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Friday night I’d been to the Mars movie screening in Golden Hill, where I saw something that was advertised as a musical adaptation of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. I had assumed this was an amateur production something along the lines of the Pacific Arts Center’s 1976 version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol which I’d got from a download some time ago (though I haven’t actually brought myself to watch it yet!), but instead this was a fully professional effort from London’s O₂ Arena in 2012 (the performance space that was supposed to open with 50 shows from Michael Jackson in 2009, only he died while in the middle of rehearsals for them) based on an adaptation by British rock musician and writer Jeff Wayne that had a long and convoluted production history. It was originally done as a concept album in 1978, obviously taking advantage of the vogue for so-called “rock operas” sparked by the spectacular success of The Who’s Tommy (which turned them from just another reasonably successful British Invasion band into international superstars) and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Jesus Christ Superstar. Though rather dubious as operas (Stephanie von Buchau, the classically trained music critic for the Pacific Sun newsmagazine in Marin County, said that in classical terms neither were operas: “Tommy is a song cycle and Superstar a Passion”), these were at least tuneful and had great success not only as albums but in adaptations for the musical stage.

 Wayne released his version of The War of the Worlds in 1978 with the key role of the narrator played by Richard Burton; he later adapted it into a stage show and in 2006 re-recorded the album and released a video version of it with most of the same cast, and the deceased Burton replaced (quite well) by Liam Neeson. In 2012 he was invited to perform the work in an even bigger production at the O₂ Arena, and that was the version (a British import played on a region-free DVD player since neither the CD nor the DVD are in print in the U.S.) we got to see Friday night, with Neeson playing his part through a computer hologram (so he’ll be able to continue “playing” it after he dies, much the way Dave Clark’s Time featured Laurence Olivier as a hologram, so he was able to continue playing his part after he died) and doubled by Marti Pellow when he needed to sing and interact on stage with other characters. I’ll say one thing for Jeff Wayne’s The War of the Worlds: it’s by far the closest adaptation H. G. Wells’ novel has ever received (at least among the ones I’m familiar with — the 1938 Orson Welles radio broadcast, the 1953 George Pal/Byron Haskin movie with Gene Barry, and the 2005 Steven Spielberg film with Tom Cruise). Virtually all the narration written for Liam Neeson (who’s unnamed but referred to in the cast list as “the journalist” — H. G. Wells similarly left his narrator unnamed but called him “a philosophical writer,” which suggests he was basing the character on himself) comes directly from Wells’ novel, and Wayne was a good enough writer that the parts that didn’t are in the same rather stilted-sounding (at least by today’s standards) late-19^th century style and match well with Wells’ own text. Wayne also includes at least hints of the social comment Wells inserted into his book — the cynical observation that ordinary English people on the first day or two of the Martian invasion lived their lives oblivious to the mortal danger, and the idea that Martians regarded humans with as little regard as humans regarded the other animals of their own planet. (Wells was heavily active in the animal-rights movements of his day — particularly anti-vivisection, which opposed the use of animals in scientific research — and The Island of Dr. Moreau is a quite obvious work of animal-rights propaganda, though that point got lost in the three film versions.)

At times The War of the Worlds seems to be a plea for humans to be a lot more conscious of the welfare of their fellow Earth species instead of running roughshod over them the way the Martians do to us in his story. Wayne’s script is also a good deal more attentive to the various stages of the Martian invasion as Wells described them than the earlier adaptations; in addition to the infamous heat-ray that’s basically their “shock and awe” weapon, the Martians also have bazooka-like contraptions that emit clouds of thick black smoke to make it impossible for Earth’s artillerymen to see them and aim their guns at them, and after they’ve subdued all Earth resistance (one of the most chilling parts of Wells’ novel is his description of the point at which Earth’s militaries and civilians alike realized that resistance was futile) Wayne describes the “red weed” with which the Martians start seeding our planet, driving out all Earth’s native vegetation to make Earth’s environment more like that of Mars. (This was depicted in Spielberg’s film but not the earlier versions.) Aside from Wayne’s conscientious adaptation of Wells’ text, however, his The War of the Worlds has little to recommend it. At least as it’s presented here (maybe in a smaller theatre than the O₂ Arena he could have gone for a smaller, more intimate presentation), it’s a bombastic piece with loud, obnoxious music playing virtually throughout. The music is provided by symphonic instruments blended (not too well) with rock ones (Wayne called his ad hoc rock group the “Black Smoke Band”), and the rock is an uneasy mixture of big-stadium guitars and percussion with the bloopy synthesizers that seem to have become the norm for pop-music depictions of outer space or travelers therefrom ever since all those early-1950’s film composers and sound-effects people decided that the theremin was the perfect sound with which to depict a flying saucer landing. (There are no theremins in Wayne’s score — too low-tech — but plenty of synthesizers programmed to sound like theremins.)

The songs and instrumental interludes tend to blend together and also to sound way too much like each other, evoking the comment by one critic in the late 1970’s that rock musicals didn’t work because for some reason rock wasn’t a suitable sort of music for delineating a particular character or dramatic situation the way the classic Broadway style of songwriting in the 1920’s, 1930’s, 1940’s and 1950’s had been. The opening scene, in which the Journalist and the astronomer Ogilvy (Daniel Osgerby) are debating whether the flashes they are seeing on the surface of Mars are spacecraft or just volcanic eruptions, and Ogilvy explains that the odds against life on Mars are “A Million to One,” features Osgerby singing in the oddly clipped, staccato style of David Bowie — as if Wayne had decided that since Bowie was famous for writing songs about space, his style would be suitable for a musical version of The War of the Worlds. Indeed, Bowie’s influence hangs heavily over the whole score, though less so in Wayne’s actual writing than in the way his cast sings it; Kerry Ellis as Beth, wife of Parson Townsend, is about the only cast member who gets to sing lyrically, and her part ends as her character is taken out way too soon. The show was staged at O₂ with the musicians arrayed on stage in full view of the audience, though the performers were in costume and there were at least attempts to stage the action in scenes in which they interact — and there was a large-format CinemaScope-ratio video screen behind the action showing various scenes more or less relating to the action, including photos of refugees fleeing danger in the 20^th century’s real wars (much of The War of the Worlds is heart-rending description of refugees fleeing the Martian invasion and alternately hoping that there’s a place they can escape the danger and sickeningly becoming aware that there isn’t) and animated scenes of the black smoke and the “red weed.”

I really wanted to like Jeff Wayne’s The War of the Worlds, and there were times at which I did, but for the most part the production is just too … well, “overwhelming” was the word one of my fellow attendees used and I said, “Yes, but in all the wrong ways.” Wayne, so faithful to Wells’ vision through most of his adaptation, also couldn’t resist one of those modern open-ended endings in which, following the main part of the production which preserved Wells’ original date of 1894 (the year before he published the book), there’s a postlude taking place in the present in which a guy at a NASA research station (played by Jerry Wayne, Jeff Wayne’s son — his wife co-wrote the script with him and their daughter Anna-Marie is also in it) sees flashes on the surface of Mars and we’re left wondering if they’re the prelude to another Martian invasions, especially if the Martians [this will be a “spoiler” if you’ve never read the book or seen one of the other adaptations] figure out some way to immunize themselves from the common Earth bacteria (that’s the word Wells used — he doesn’t seem to have heard of viruses) that infected and killed the Martians because they had no immune systems that could respond to them (indeed, a passing remark early on in Wayne’s script, once again taken directly from H. G. Wells, indicates that the Martians had long since eliminated all infectious microbes from their own planet and therefore were sitting ducks for the ones on ours). There really isn’t a definitive dramatic version of The War of the Worlds — though the famous Orson Welles radio show, as fast and loose as it played with the letter of Wells’ story, is probably the best (and as good as Liam Neeson is here his description of Earth after the Martians had laid waste to it doesn’t have quite the panache of Welles’) — and this one isn’t it, though it’s a fun ride through a musical work that must have seemed au courant in 1978 but now looks so badly dated one wonders why anyone felt a need to do this big production to celebrate the 35^th anniversary of it.

American Umpire (Shell Studios, Hoover Institution, Cato Institute, WETA/PBS, 2016)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Tuesday night, right after the first episode of The Contenders (an eight-part series about 16 different Presidential candidates, two per episode, that opened with Shirley Chisholm’s run for the Democratic nomination in 1972 despite the dual handicap of being Black and a woman, and John McCain’s candidacies in 2000 and 2008), PBS showed an interesting one-hour program called American Umpire that presented a surprisingly compelling overview of American foreign policy since our declaration of independence in 1776. The surprise was due to the fact that the principal sponsors of the program were two conservative think tanks, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the libertarian Cato Institute — and yet, despite a few factual errors and hints of Right-wing bias, it was overall a fair-minded program whose bottom line was a deep questioning of whether the U.S. should continue in its costly role of being “policeman of the world” that we assumed after being part of the winning side in World War II and then ending up in a 34-year Cold War with our former World War II ally, the Soviet Union. American Umpire featured a wide array of guests, ranging from such pillars of the foreign policy establishment as former Secretaries of State George Schultz (under Ronald Reagan), Madeleine Albright (under Bill Clinton) and Condoleeza Rice (under George W. Bush) to various journalists, historians and others to present a broad picture of U.S. foreign policy’s past, present and potential future.

The show argues that the first President, George Washington, laid down three broad principles that would govern how the U.S. conducted its relations with other nations that pretty much endured until America’s entry into World War I shook them and World War II and the Cold War shattered them completely. The first was neutrality: instead of participating in other countries’ wars the U.S. would impartially offer its resources in trade to anyone who asked. The second was nonintervention: the U.S. wouldn’t get involved either in attacking or defending other countries, so we didn’t get ourselves involved in the round robin of endless wars that had beset Europe for centuries. The third was that the U.S. would not maintain a permanent (“standing”) military; if we found ourselves at war we’d raise one ad hoc on the basis of state militias — the real purpose of the Second Amendment, contrary to the Right-wing crazies who have used it to enshrine an individual right to bear arms, was so that when the nation was in danger and the militia recruiters came a-calling, the people they recruited would have weapons with which to fight. Though as the commander-in-chief of the U.S. military under the Continental Congress during the American Revolution George Washington had been driven nuts by the limitations of relying on state militias — including the fact that if their terms of enlistment ran out in the middle of a battle they could go home and, since they’d been credentialed by their individual states rather than any federal government, he could do almost nothing to stop them; he also worked incredibly hard to instill in them a common sense of purpose and level of discipline similar to that of the British military they were fighting — as President he shared the concern of a lot of his contemporaries that a standing army and a democracy were incompatible: sooner or later the military would use its monopoly on force to unseat the republican government and take over themselves. (The history of the rest of the American hemisphere since it won independence from Spain and Portugal is a sorry testimony to Washington’s correct analysis.)

Indeed, it’s often occurred to me that the framers of the U.S. Constitution would be astounded at the fact that the President’s constitutional power of commander-in-chief routinely extends throughout his term, from the moment he takes office until he leaves it four or eight years later. According to the Constitution, it’s supposed to be Congress’s job to decide when the U.S. is at war by making a formal declaration to that effect, and then — and only then — the President assumes his (or, maybe after this year, her?) role as commander-in-chief of the army raised to fight the war Congress has declared. (The whole idea that Congress declares war is, as Bush II attorney John Yoo said of the Geneva Conventions, “obsolete and quaint” — so much so that the last time Congress actually declared war was December 8, 1941, the day after Japan attacked the U.S. Navy at Pearl Harbor.) The show made a few dubious factual assertions; for one, it said the U.S. was the first country in the world to unite previously existing republics into a federal system (it was Switzerland, which declared independence and founded the Swiss Confederation in 1648, 140 years before the U.S. Constitution went into effect). More importantly, it said that until 1917 the U.S. never directly intervened in another country’s war. That may have been true in Europe and the rest of the eastern hemisphere, but it was decidedly not true for the western hemisphere, which under the Monroe Doctrine the U.S. essentially declared its “sphere of influence” (much the way the Soviet Union regarded eastern Europe as its “sphere of influence” between 1945 and 1989) and claimed for itself the right to intervene in the political and military affairs of any American country, ostensibly to prevent its reconquest by the European colonial powers but actually to make sure they weren’t governed by any leader, party or group that threatened U.S. economic interests in the region.

The show quotes John Quincy Adams as saying, “America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy,” but while he said that he was also serving as Monroe’s Secretary of State and actually writing what came to be called the Monroe Doctrine. In the 19^th century, in addition to fighting the Civil War, the U.S. intervened in Mexico in 1846-48 (and ultimately conquered two-fifths of the territory Mexico had inherited when it declared and won independence from Spain), in Cuba and the Philippines in 1898, and in plenty of other places in what it considered its post-colonial American sphere of influence. It also reached beyond the Americas and the former Spanish colonies in the Pacific, establishing a military presence in China in the late 19^th century to ensure what was called the “Open Door Policy,” so that instead of China being conquered and divided up among the big European powers the way Africa and southern Asia had been, it would be allowed to remain nominally independent but be subjected to economic exploitation from all Western countries on an equal basis. Nonetheless, as the program argued, the U.S. did pursue a policy throughout the 19^th century of noninvolvement in European wars and avoided alliances with any one European country against another. Then World War I began and, though for the first three years the U.S. remained nominally neutral and sold arms and resources to both sides, there was a subtle but unmistakable “tilt” towards Britain and France, and against Germany, that got stronger with the sinking of the U.S.S. Lusitania by a German submarine in 1915 and reached a climax in early 1917, when Germany’s declaration that they had a right to use submarines to sink any ships taking weapons or anything else to Britain prompted President Woodrow Wilson to ask Congress for a declaration of war and put the U.S. firmly on the side of the British and French against the Germans. Britain and France won the war, largely because American help came in time to tip the balance decisively against the Germans and their played-out allies, Austro-Hungary and Turkey — though, as this show points out, Wilson refrained from declaring the U.S. formally “allied” with Britain and France. Instead U.S. troops fought alongside British and French ones but under separate command and under the mandate of a totally separate declaration of war against Germany.

After World War I public sentiment in the U.S. turned overwhelmingly against future involvement in Europe’s conflicts — the U.S. Senate rejected American membership in the League of Nations (the international organization Wilson had proposed and hoped would settle international disputes peaceably from then on) and Republican Warren G. Harding, who famously (and malapropistically — the word he meant was “normality”) promised “a return to normalcy.” As President, Harding called an international conference in Washington, D.C. in November 1921 — his speech at its opening on November 12 was recorded on Victor and is available at https://archive.org/details/WarrenG.Harding-OpeningOfLimitationOfArmamentsConference; it’s astonishing in that Harding’s arguments against war — not only the loss of life and the destruction of property but the enormous amounts of money wasted in the production of armaments that could be used for improving the lives of ordinary citizens — sound more like the rhetoric of a radical peacenik than a Republican President. During the 1920’s, as American Umpire shows, under American leadership the major powers — Britain, France, Japan — actually not only signed disarmament treaties but actually destroyed some of their own ships and other military equipment to get their arms down to the limits specified in the treaties. Then the Great Depression of 1929 hit and international tensions escalated, and Germany in particular was taken over by the Nazis (who had actually manipulated the German government because they did so much better when the German economy was tanking, and so much worse when it was doing well, they deliberately sabotaged the German government’s negotiations to reduce the crippling burden of reparations payments the Germans owed to France under the 1919 Treaty of Versailles that officially ended World War I), but as the makers of American Umpire, director James Shelley and writers Elizabeth Cobbs and John Mikulsak, use 1930’s newsreel footage to point out, even under the growing threat of fascism in general and Nazism in particular, American public opinion remained strongly isolationist throughout the decade.

The show points out that the U.S. Congress passed no fewer than five neutrality acts, each stronger than the one before it, and President Franklin Roosevelt reluctantly signed each one even though (a point they don’t mention) he was fully aware of the danger the Nazis posed to the U.S. and had carried on a secret correspondence with Winston Churchill, in which the letters on both sides were signed, “Former Naval Person” (since during World War I Churchill had been First Lord of the Admiralty in Britain and Roosevelt had been Assistant Secretary of the Navy in the U.S.). Ultimately the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Hitler declared war on the U.S. a day later (which made Roosevelt heave several sighs of relief because he’d been able to get a declaration of war against Japan but it was uncertain he could have got one against Germany, which hadn’t directly attacked us, until Germany obliging declared war on us first). The U.S., of course, ended up on the winning side of World War II along with Britain and Russia, and Russia set up its own “sphere of influence” in eastern Europe and — at least according to the historical analysis of this program; other sources differ — attempted to foment Communist revolutions in Greece and Italy, leading President Harry Truman to proclaim the so-called “Truman Doctrine” that from now on the U.S. would intervene anywhere in the world where “freedom” was threatened — i.e., wherever Communist revolutions, whether Soviet-backed or home-grown, arose and fought against the kinds of conservative capitalist governments the U.S. wanted established throughout the world. The U.S. formed the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and a whole slew of interlocking alliances that eventually encompassed virtually the whole non-Communist “free” world, and also assumed the principal burden of protecting western Europe from any threat of a Soviet attack. The U.S. also decided that Germany and Japan would no longer be trusted to have powerful militaries of their own, and instead we would assume the burden of their defense budget. At the same time the U.S. also decided that the threat not only of the Soviet Union but also China, after Mao Zedong (or however we’re spelling his name this week) and the Communists won their revolution in 1949, required that we build up Germany and Japan as buffer states, under non-fascist but safely conservative governments.

The result was that from the 1950’s to the 1980’s West Germany and Japan built up their economies, vastly expanded their production of consumer goods, and successfully marketed them to American consumers — which they could do at least partly because, without the burden of maintaining a military establishment, they could put more of their national budgets into developing their civilian economies for both domestic consumption and export. Flash-forward again to the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union and its eastern European “sphere of influence” in 1989 — presented in this film, as in most American reportage, as the unambiguous triumph of capitalist democracy over Communist dictatorship — and to a growing critique of American foreign policy from the libertarian Right and, in this year’s Presidential campaign, by Donald Trump, to the effect that it’s time for the U.S. to back off the task of defending the rest of the world and insist that other countries, particularly places like western Europe and Japan that are cleaning our clock economically, to pay more of their fair share for their own defense. This show attempts a serious and sober-minded presentation of an idea that when Trump talks about it talks, as my husband Charles has said, like a “protection” racketeer in a 1930’s gangster movie: “Nice little country you’ve got here. It’d be a shame if anything ‘happened’ to it.” While all the former secretaries of state interviewed in the program recite the usual American elites’ party line that the U.S. has to be the world’s policeman and international stability would collapse completely if we withdrew or cut back our defense spending the way the libertarians and Trump are proposing (though Trump is also promising a huge military buildup even though it’s unclear exactly what he wants to do with a much larger version of a U.S. military that is already bigger than almost all the other militaries of the world combined), it’s clear that Shelley, Cobbs and Mikulak seriously believe that the time has come for the U.S. to make its next sweeping re-evaluation of its role in the world and back away from being the world’s policeman and maintaining the network of military bases the late Chalmers Johnson said was the bulwark of America’s version of an empire.

This debate, such as it is, is being played out in the context of a Presidential campaign that, even more than usual, is about trivialities — Hillary Clinton’s e-mails and her personal health, Donald Trump’s swaggering style and the degree to which it’s getting in the way of his winning an election even in an era in which overwhelming numbers of Americans are hungering for “change” without much idea of just what sort of “change” they want. To the extent the campaign is about issues, it’s about domestic issues — particularly the so-called “recovery” from the 2008 recession, whose benefits have gone almost totally to the 1 percent — and the threat of terrorism, though quite a few Americans have retreated to a neo-isolationist position and really don’t care what happens in the rest of the world except to the extent that it looses terrorists to kill Americans on our own soil. You’ve got a foreign-policy establishment unshakably committed to maintaining America’s military pre-eminence in the world, a counter-argument from both the Left and the libertarian Right that we’re spending more than we need to on so-called “defense” that helps other countries to the detriment of the U.S., and a confused political system that doesn’t know how to respond except by throwing up as the two major-party Presidential candidates a woman who’s part and parcel of the Establishment and a man who seems to think in temper tantrums. This year’s election — and the issues American Umpire is raising — will largely be determined by whether the American people so desperately want change they’re willing to take a chance on Donald Trump, of all people, to deliver it; or whether they’re so scared by him they’re willing to vote for the ultra-Establishment candidate on the Shakespearean principle that we should “rather bear those ills we have/Than fly to others that we know not of.”

The Contenders: Shirley Chisholm & John McCain (PBS, 2016)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

First up on last night’s prime-time PBS schedule was the opening episode of an odd eight-part series called The Contenders: 16 for ’16, about 16 oddly selected Presidential candidates whose campaigns supposedly said something about how the political process works today. First up were Shirley Chisholm, the Black woman Congressmember who ran for President in 1972 — and ran smack into the height of the liberal love affair with George McGovern, the first Presidential candidate I ever voted for; and John McCain, in a segment which focused mostly on his “Straight Talk” campaign for the Republican nomination in 2000 and gave less attention to his 2008 campaign, in which he trimmed his “maverick” sails (talk about a mixed metaphor!) big-time and became a pretty normal Republican, doing a 180° on immigration (from supporting comprehensive reform to a “border security first” position) and sucking up to the party establishment he’d disdained in 2000. Chisholm’s campaign ran smack into the “unthinkable” aspect — people were having a hard enough time wrapping themselves around the idea that a Black person might be President, and an equally hard time wrapping themselves around the idea that a woman could be President, and here was a candidate who was both.

Chisholm died in 2005 and there didn’t seem to be any interviews available of her looking back on the experience later — the only footage of her was from the 1972 Presidential campaign itself — but the show mentioned that she’d successfully run for Congress from a district in Brooklyn in 1968, just three years after passage of the Voting Rights Act (though the program’s narration somewhat exaggerated how extensively Blacks had been disenfranchised before 1965 — the problem wasn’t that Blacks didn’t have the formal right to vote, it was the bizarre patchwork of literacy tests, other obstacles to registration and out-and-out intimidation by employers and vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan that kept most Southern Blacks from voting, but in Northern cities like New York there were not only Black voters but recognized Black constituencies and a long-established Black Congressmember, Adam Clayton Powell, representing Harlem), and while in Congress she’d avoided cutting any deals with the Democratic House leadership or meeting with potentially influential donors. She called herself “unbowed and unbought” when she ran for President, and her biggest problem was getting taken seriously — the first National Black Political Convention happened that year but she didn’t get the endorsement because most establishment Blacks were supporting white candidates, at at the Democratic Convention itself Congressmember Ron Dellums, who was supposed to put her name in nomination, withdrew at the last minute and endorsed McGovern. (Fortunately Chisholm found another Black delegate to nominate her and thereby fulfilled her commitment to take her campaign to the floor of the convention — at a time when conventions were actually news events and there was genuine uncertainty as to how they would come out.)

The idea that a Black candidate — and a woman, at that! — mounted a serious Presidential bid when Barack Obama was 10 is something to be cherished and celebrated in the history books — Jesse Jackson’s campaigns in 1984 and 1988 are often cited as the trailblazers for Obama’s bid but Chisholm was there before Jackson and, unlike him, had genuine political experience in elective office and wasn’t just a guy who’d made his bones in another field and thought he could/should be considered seriously as a politician. There are clips from Chisholm and reminiscences of people who worked on her campaign that show what she was up against both as a Black and as a woman; her student coordinator said he was waiting for a shipment of Chisholm literature to start work on her North Carolina campaign, and when the boxes arrived at the airport someone had scribbled insulting slogans containing the “N-word” all over them. Chisholm herself is shown in clips from her tenure in Congress and her run for the Presidency being asked if her husband approved of what she was doing (ironically Chisholm served in Congress until 1982 but then dropped out to take care of her husband, Arthur Hardwick, Jr., after he was seriously injured in an automobile accident). She’s also shown saying that she didn’t get the National Black Political Convention endorsement because there were too many Black male delegates who wanted the first Black President to be a man.

After that the segment on John McCain was something of an anticlimax, though the clips of him from his 2000 campaign were interesting; when he railed against the Republican party establishment and promised he’d be independent of them, he sounded like Donald Trump; when he then said he wanted the Republicans to be a party of inclusion rather than exclusion, he sounded like an anti-Trump. The big thing everyone remembers about McCain’s 2000 campaign was that he got slammed by George W. Bush’s negative operation and in particular by Karl Rove’s ads that accused him of having a Black child out of wedlock (the child existed but she was from India and Mr. and Mrs. McCain had legally adopted her), which killed him in the must-win South Carolina campaign. (If anything, the 2000 McCain comes off more like a Republican Bernie Sanders than a prototype of Trump — he won a sweeping victory in the New Hampshire primary and also carried Michigan but came to grief in the South.) The show also analyzed McCain’s 2008 campaign much the way I did at the time (and still do): his choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate was a masterstroke that gave him a huge “convention bounce” and catapulted him into contention, and it’s an election he quite likely would have won if it hadn’t been for the economic meltdown coming into the home stretch — the polls showed McCain steadily gaining on Barack Obama until September 15, 2008, the date Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy and passed into capitalist history, whereupon Obama’s poll numbers went back up again and he ultimately won.

"Kingdom of Shadows” Airs on KPBS-TV Monday, September 19, 11 pm.

Unflinching Look at U.S.-Mexico Drug Trade Focuses on Violence Against Innocents

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN

Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine and moviemagg.blogspot.com • All rights reserved

Erin Tsurumoto Grassi

Promotional image from Kingdom of Shadows

“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people. But I speak to border guards and they tell us what we’re getting. And it only makes common sense. It only makes common sense. They’re sending us not the right people.”

— Presidential candidate Donald J. Trump, June 15, 2015

The issues of immigration and drug smuggling across the U.S.-Mexico border got blended together in an unusual way September 12, when the San Diego Public Library gave a preview screening of Bernardo Ruiz’s 2015 documentary Kingdom of Shadows, about the Mexican drug cartels and their lethal attacks on innocent civilians in the border town of Monterrey. The film, which airs locally as part of the P.O.V. (“Point of View”) documentary series on KPBS-TV (channel 15, cable 11) Monday, September 19 from 11 p.m. to 12:15 a.m., dealt specifically with the drug wars — both the military-style operations of Mexico’s drug cartels and the punitive anti-drug policies of both the U.S. and Mexican governments.

But the main expertise of the speaker the library lined up to lead a question-and-answer session afterwards, Erin Tsurumoto Grassi of Alliance San Diego, is on immigration issues. And the audience members who asked questions and made comments were clearly more interested in immigration — particularly whether the “border wall” between the countries proposed by presidential candidate Donald Trump could ever be built, and whether it would help or hurt U.S. workers and the U.S. economy if it were — than in the issues raised by the movie.

Kingdom of Shadows is a grim, tragic tale of the death toll the Mexican drug cartels — particularly the warring Juárez and Sinaloa cartels as well as the Zetas, a group of military men from Mexico’s version of the Special Forces who were trained at the notorious U.S.-led School of the Americas to combat the drug gangs and instead became a drug gang themselves — are inflicting on ordinary Mexicans and the sheer wantonness of their crimes. It’s also about the attempts of local Mexican activists, including families of los desparacidos (“The Disappeared,” as the people kidnapped, tortured and usually killed by the cartels are called because they often vanish without a trace) as well as nuns and activists, to stop the violence by getting the drug lords and their hired killers prosecuted.

That’s a tall order, mainly because the drug lords have so much money they can easily bribe virtually anyone with the legal or political authority to stop them — and to kill anyone they can’t bribe. “Mexico has a very weak judicial system where 93 percent of all major crimes are never prosecuted,” director Ruiz says in the PBS press release for the film. The Mexican police are so notoriously corrupt — and have been for decades — the term la mordida (literally “the little death”) has long since entered Mexican Spanish as slang for the bribes criminals routinely pay police to evade arrest. With the huge amounts of money the drug cartels have to bribe people — and the enormous military power (most of which, the film explains briefly, comes from the U.S., where the cartels buy military-grade weapons because they’re illegal in Mexico but legal here) at their disposal to kill those they can’t bribe, the cartels have basically become untouchable. “Stepping out of the shadows to say, ‘We want justice,’ is a big deal,” Ruiz says.

At some times the efforts of Sister Morales, Sister Consuelo and the other activists profiled in Ruiz’s film seem reminiscent of the 1970’s efforts of Northern Irish women Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan Maguire to start a peace movement in the middle of war-torn Northern Ireland and put an end to the escalating violence between the British colonial government and the Irish Republican Army (IRA). But the Mexican nuns and other civil society activists face a situation in which, instead of fighting over the future of their country like the IRA and the pro-British Irish Unionists were, the cartels are just in it to make money — and, increasingly, to take joy in the sheer act of mass killing.

Kingdom of Shadows is built around the stories of three people. One is Sister Morales, who works out of Monterrey with relatives of los desparacidos and stages protest marches and rallies with them to demand an end to the chronic corruption of Mexican law enforcement and the impunity with which the cartels and their hired assassins commit their brutal crimes. “Sister Morales is really the heart of the film,” Ruiz says. “She’s this extraordinary person who helps families whose loved ones have gone missing. She pushes the state government to actually do something and get some kind of justice” — though, alas, there’s scant evidence in the film that her efforts have resulted in prosecutions.

Another of Ruiz’s subjects is Don Henry Ford, Jr., a small farmer in Texas who casually turned to marijuana smuggling because he wanted to get out from under the debt he was under and the control seed and chemical suppliers and bankers wield over U.S. farmers. In the movie he recalls how he took his first shipment of clandestine pot over the border in the bed of his pickup truck and how he worked his way up to larger quantities while still remaining a small cog in the drug operation. He also says he was lucky he was caught when he was — in 1995, one year before tough anti-drug laws passed by a Republican Congress and signed into law by Democratic President Bill Clinton ramped up the sentences for drug smuggling and took away the discretion of judges to sentence according to the fact of the case. Because he got in under the wire, Ford says, he got a five-year sentence instead of the 20 years or more that became mandatory just a year later.

Ruiz’ third major character is Oscar Hagelsieb, the son of immigrants who became a U.S. Border Patrol agent. He said his father endorsed his choice of career but told him to be respectful of the undocumented immigrants who were just crossing the border to get jobs and a better life. However, Hagelsieb said, his dad told him to go after the drug criminals with everything he had and see they were punished to the maximum extent possible. Hagelsieb’s dedication to his job comes through strongly in the film, but so does his discontent with how little he’s actually been able to accomplish. In his most rueful moment on screen, he confesses that he would not want his son to follow him into the Border Patrol as a career.

One of the movie’s unlikeliest heroes is Amado Carrillo Fuentes, described on his Wikipedia page as “a Mexican drug lord who seized control of the Juárez Cartel after assassinating his boss Rafael Aguilar Guajardo.” He got the nickname “El Señor de los Cielos” — “Lord of the Skies” — because he pioneered the use of private airplanes to smuggle drugs. He was also instrumental in making sure that after the cartels in Medellín and Calí, Colombia were brought down by prosecutions and assassinations, Juárez and other Mexican cartels picked up the slack and essentially took over the international cocaine business. Carrillo Fuentes was pursued by both U.S. and Mexican authorities, and died in July 1997 from complications from a botched plastic surgery operation — and, in a typical example of cartel revenge violence, his doctors were themselves assassinated four months later.

He’s considered a hero in the movie, however, because while he was alive he managed to maintain peace between the various cartels much the way the formation of “La Cosa Nostra,” an alliance between Italian-American criminals from Naples (the Camorra) and Sicily (the Mafia), largely put an end to the street violence, drive-by shootings and killings of civilians that had characterized American gangsterism in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Indeed, Ruiz talked to many residents of Monterrey who admired Carrillo Fuentes for being able to broker peace between the various cartels, and said that while he was alive people in Monterrey were relatively safe from the cross-fire between cartels that has taken the lives of so many since.

Kingdom of Shadows is a darkly moving film, full of ironies, and if it has a flaw it’s that its 75-minute running time is hardly enough to tackle the issues it raises and then sometimes suddenly drops. One of these is the formation of a new Mexican police force, the Fuerza Civil (“Civil Force”), in 2011, which by recruiting people from outside traditional law enforcement aimed at creating a new agency whose members would receive military-style training as well as psychometric tests to determine whether or not they could be corrupted. The film includes a recruiting video for the Fuerza Civil in which the star is a woman member — itself an indication of how the force is challenging Mexico’s norms. The Fuerza Civil is funded not only by the Mexican government but also by some of the private companies that have located in Monterrey and have — along with the drug cartels — helped make it Mexico’s wealthiest city.

Another comment that’s made briefly is the possibility that the U.S. could put the cartels out of business by ending its reliance on prohibition as its front-line strategy against drug use. There’s a precedent in American history, too: the repeal of alcohol prohibition in 1933 and the plummeting of the U.S. crime rate that resulted, as people who wanted to drink could obtain it legally and people who wanted to make and sell alcoholic beverages could do so in above-ground companies and settle their differences in court with lawyers instead of in the streets with guns. One person in the film says that, as more U.S. states consider legalizing marijuana, the Mexican cartels are seeing the market for it dry up and are planning for the future by diversifying into methamphetamine.

Overall, though, Kingdom of Shadows is a tragic film, with the efforts of the nuns and the relatives of the desparecidos coming off as incredibly noble, courageous and futile. A January 20, 2012 report by Ashley Fantz on the CNN Web site, http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/15/world/mexico-drug-war-essay/, says, “[T]he Mexican drug war, at its core, is about two numbers: 48,000 and 39 billion.” The 48,000 refers to the number of people estimated to have been killed by the cartels in 2011, and $39 billion is the authorities’ estimate of the profit the various cartels make in a year.

The Q&A: What About the Wall?

Though Kingdom of Shadows focused on the Mexican drug cartels and how they’ve affected life on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, the post-film discussion led by Erin Tsurumoto Grassi focused largely on immigration and what she called the “increased militarization” of the border. “A lot of us are aware of the rhetoric about the border,” Tsurumoto Grassi said. “We hear it’s unenforced and we need a wall.” Hosting an event held the day after the 15^th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks on the New York World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Tsurumoto Grassi acknowledged that — even though the attacks had nothing to do with Mexico — they helped bring about more militarization of  the border and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, which among other things took over all the U.S. agencies charged with immigration and border security.

Thanks to the vast increase in the size of the Border Patrol since 9/11 and, some argue, the hiring of agents without adequate pre-employment vetting or training, the number of abuses of immigrants and their families has increased, Tsurumoto Grassi argued. “Since 2010, nearly 50 people have been killed in Southern California by Border Patrol agents,” she said. She also saw ties between the increased militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border and the growing use of military tactics and equipment by police in the U.S. itself — and the growing numbers of police killings of African-Americans and other people of color that sparked the creation of movements like Black Lives Matter. Tsurumoto Grassi also said that in Tucson, Arizona and other locations, “Border Patrol agents have themselves been caught smuggling drugs.”

Tsurumoto Grassi, who in addition to Alliance San Diego also identified herself as part of the San Diego Immigrant Rights Coalition and a dizzying array of other coalitions that work together on border issues, explained, “A lot of our work has been to push back against the abuses.” She stressed that one major campaign of her organization is to require Border Patrol agents to wear body cameras, the way increasing numbers of U.S. domestic police are being made to do, so any abuses they commit will be documented. But one audience member was skeptical, saying that police wearing body cameras often say they didn’t work because the officer didn’t turn it on, it was “dropped” or “broken,” and even when video from body cameras exists the police and local governments often fight tooth-and-nail in the courts to prevent the footage from being released to the public.

Because Tsurumoto Grassi works for a group organized under Internal Revenue Code section 501 ( c) (3), which prohibits it from endorsing candidates or making statements that could be construed as endorsements for or against candidates, she was a bit skittish when asked point-blank what she thought of Trump’s proposal for a wall across the entire U.S.-Mexico border. She first asked the questioner whether she was asking about Trump’s plan or the partial border fencing that exists now. Then she said, “100,000 people cross the border every day. Our region is economically dependent on cross-border traffic.”

Tsurumoto Grassi then went on to talk about “Operation Gatekeeper” and similar anti-immigration operations in the early 1990’s, which actually increased the numbers of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. Before “Gatekeeper,” she said, undocumented immigrants freely crossed the border, spending time in the U.S. when farm labor or other jobs were available, then returning to Mexico and their families when harvest season was over. After “Gatekeeper,” said Tsurumoto Grassi, “people who crossed to work got stuck.” They couldn’t go back to Mexico because they were worried they wouldn’t be able to get back in the U.S. when work was available again, so they stayed here. As a result, she said, “you have a lot of families [headed by undocumented immigrants] with U.S.-born children.”

“Gatekeeper” and similar operations also forced would-be immigrants to take more dangerous routes through the desert instead of coming through major urban centers, said Tsurumoto Grassi — and as a result, the crossing became more dangerous and more immigrants died.

Two African-American women dominated the early part of the questioning. One wondered how the U.S. government could spend billions on border walls and continue to neglect the rebuilding of New Orleans and other areas decimated by Hurricane Katrina over a decade ago. Tsurumoto Grassi sympathized and said, “As we militarize the border it takes away resources from other communities that desperately need them.”

The other woman said, “I totally believe in the border as protection against other people who don’t like the United States.” She echoed one of Trump’s talking points, which is that one reason the border wall is needed is to keep out would-be terrorists from “certain” countries — by which he apparently means countries in the Middle East and other places with majority Muslim populations. Actually, most terror attacks in the U.S. by Muslims claiming affiliation with extremist organizations like al-Qaeda or Islamic State have been committed either by U.S.-born citizens (the Orlando massacre), naturalized citizens (the Boston Massacre bombing, the San Bernardino killings), or people who legally entered the U.S. and then overstayed their visas (9/11).

“The whole situation of 9/11 started things going in a really bad direction,” said a man in the audience at the screening. “Before that, people would complain about Mexicans taking jobs from American workers. Now one Presidential candidate is talking about fear of Mexicans and Muslims. He wants not to let anyone in, and if other countries start doing that it could be detrimental to us.” He asked Tsurumoto Grassi if she thought Trump’s rhetoric was based on fear, and she agreed.

“The enormous problem in Mexico seems to be impunity, and especially after 9/11 we’ve seen a lot more impunity in the U.S.,” said Charles Nelson from the audience. “There’s no sense of responsibility [among law enforcement and security people]. We tell people to take off their belts and shoes at airports, and we’re listening to your phone calls. Militarizing law enforcement is not the answer.”

Tsurumoto Grassi agreed. “A lot of the problem is we need to hold law enforcement accountable,” she stated. Asked what else, besides body cameras, her agency is doing to bring that about, she said, “Attempting to get the Border Patrol agents prosecuted for their crimes.” To another questioner who tied the killings by Border Patrol agents to the killings of people of color by local police that inspired the Black Lives Matter protests, she added, “As citizens, we have a responsibility to continue constant vigilance.” She said body cameras will only serve their purpose if citizens keep pressure on local police departments and city governments to release the tapes.

“The reality is we have to change the culture within law enforcement, so police who see something wrong will feel free to report it,” Tsurumoto Grassi said in answer to a question about the so-called “thin blue line” that discourages police officers and other law enforcement personnel from “ratting” on colleagues’ bad behavior. “We may never reach a stage when 100 percent of incidents are reported. We may never end impunity. But there are things we can do.”

About the only response Tsurumoto Grassi gave to an issue about drug policy was in reference to this reporter’s question, which seized on the hint in the film about how the cartels were shifting from marijuana to meth as more U.S. states consider making marijuana legal. Asked if the U.S. should consider legalizing drugs as a way to put the cartels out of business, Tsurumoto Grassi said, “There are other countries that approach drug use from a different standpoint, but focused more on addressing it as an illness and re-integrating [drug users] into society.”