A Christmas Carol (Desilu/CBS, 1954)

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

I’d stumbled across an intriguing holiday-themed DVD in the collection that my late roommate had bought: a 1954 TV adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol featuring Fredric March as Scrooge and Basil Rathbone as the ghost of his late partner, Jacob Marley. (Ironically, March later did an actual TV series called Fredric March Tells Tales from Charles Dickens in which a 1959 episode re-did A Christmas Carol, only this time Rathbone played Scrooge and March played Marley.) The 1954 A Christmas Carol was offered as part of a CBS-TV series called Shower of Stars, and CBS preserved the show and re-ran it the next two years, hoping to establish it as an annual holiday attraction. According to imdb.com, it was also originally filmed in CBS’s noncompatible color system (which returned to the scanning-disc technology of the early TV experimenters in order to split a black-and-white TV image into three colored parts that could then be combined into a color picture), but since you had to have a CBS color set to see the program in color (otherwise you couldn’t receive it at all), most people only saw it in the simultaneous black-and-white telecast made using normal 1954 TV technology, and apparently this black-and-white kinescope is all that survives. Also, some editions of the program left in the original commercials for the Chrysler Corporation, but this one didn’t.

The actual creation of this version is a story as interesting as the technology behind it; Ralph Levy, who both produced and directed, hired some high-powered writing talent: the script was by Maxwell Anderson and Bernard Herrmann was credited with both the background musical score and the melodies of the songs, for which Anderson wrote the music (and though Kurt Weill had been dead for four years when this show was made the influence runs deep, especially since Anderson had been the lyricist and book writer for Weill’s last two Broadway shows, Lost in the Stars and the unfinished Huckleberry Finn). The songs are not particularly memorable but quite charming, and both Charles and I gave Herrmann and Anderson credit for writing two songs for the street carolers at the beginning to sing that sound like traditional British carols even though they aren’t. There’s also a quite nice solo for Scrooge’s girlfriend Belle (played onscreen by Sally Fraser but dubbed offscreen by the young Marilyn Horne) and, alas, two, count ’em, two sappy numbers for Tiny Tim (played by Christopher Cook but undoubtedly also voice-doubled — since this was a live telecast, the voice doubles had to stand offstage and sing along with their live on-screen counterparts, who lip-synched as best they could, much the way Joan Barry had doubled for the heavily German-accented Anny Ondra in the role of a British shopkeeper’s daughter in the 1929 film Blackmail). This version of A Christmas Carol has its moments — March is a pretty good Scrooge (though hardly in the league of Alistair Sim in the famous film from three years earlier) and Rathbone is a typically authoritative Marley even though one can’t help but think he’s really Sherlock Holmes in disguise, sent by Britain’s Bureau of Inland Revenue to infiltrate Scrooge’s operation undercover and bust him for income-tax evasion. One trick Anderson borrowed from the classic 1939 film of The Wizard of Oz was to make the Spirits of Christmas Past and Present people Scrooge had known in his real life — Christmas Past was Belle, the girlfriend he had who left him because she saw he was becoming so obsessed with money he no longer loved her; and Christmas Present was Scrooge’s nephew Fred (Ray Middleton), though Charles complained that Anderson’s script omitted Scrooge’s sister and therefore contained no explanation of how he came to have a nephew. (Middleton was the actor hired to perform Earl Robinson’s “Ballad for Americans” at the 1940 Republican National Convention after Paul Robeson, who had recorded the piece and was the first person they invited, not surprisingly turned them down.)

Indeed, mainly to squeeze in all the songs, the script deleted a lot of scenes from the original that do make it into most of the adaptations, including Scrooge as a schoolchild (the only one who can’t go home for the holidays since he has no living parents or older relatives); Belle jilts him at Fezziwig’s party instead of on a later occasion; there is no montage of other people celebrating Christmas during the Spirit of Christmas Present sequence (just Bob Cratchit’s wife slow-roasting a goose over an open fire); no scene of Scrooge post-reclamation bidding the boy outside to buy the Cratchits the biggest turkey in the local butcher’s shop; and a pat resolution telling us that the whole business with the spirits was all just Scrooge’s dream. (Feh.) The appearance and disappearance of Marley’s ghost is handled through simple double-exposure (Rathbone was presumably being filmed against a blank backdrop in another part of the studio and was beamed in electronically) and there isn’t the marvelous scene Charles and I saw in another early TV version of A Christmas Carol (a 1949 show in which Taylor Holmes played Scrooge and Vincent Price narrated and hosted) in which the door to Scrooge’s living room was made of paper so the actor playing Marley’s ghost could literally walk through it, tearing it open as he entered. Also, there wasn’t much of a Gothic effect in the graveyard during the Christmas Yet to Come scene (nor was there a visible third spirit); Scrooge simply stumbles around on set, sees first his own tombstone and then one marked “Tiny Tim” (surely he would have been buried as “Timothy Cratchit” instead!), and then wakes up from the dream in his bed, refreshed and reclaimed. Still, despite all the flaws, this is an estimable adaptation and it’s nice to see a bunch of old-pro actors — March, Rathbone, Middleton and Bob Sweeney (as Bob Cratchit) — doing their thing, and may we still hope that one day a color version will surface and we’ll get to see what 1954 TV audiences (the handful of them with CBS color sets, anyway) originally got to see and hear?

Star Trek: The Original Series — Four First-Season Episodes: “Balance of Terror,” “Space Seed,” “The Devil in the Dark,” “The City on the Edge of Forever” (Desilu/Norway, 1966-1967)

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

Last night I went to the “Vintage Sci-Fi” movie screening in Golden Hill for a program of four episodes from the first season (1966-1967) of the original Star Trek TV series, screened in gloriously restored prints from a Blu-Ray boxed set with so-called “enhanced” effects — though the effects really didn’t look all that different from the endearingly tacky ones we got when the shows were new (the starships moved more smoothly, they were better lit, and the flares showing space weapons being fired looked at least marginally more credible — but then given that we still had only a black-and-white TV when Star Trek originally aired it’s always a jolt to me just to see the show’s original episodes in color and note there really didn’t seem to be much of a schema as to who wore what color and one would have thought they could have come up with a better, more authoritative-looking color for Captain Kirk’s tunic than that ghastly mustard-yellow which clashed with the bright blue of Spock’s). I was particularly interested in this evening because the first Star Trek episode they were showing was the one episode from the original series I had never seen before — “Balance of Terror,” an uncredited knockoff of 1950’s submarine movies The Enemy Below and Run Silent, Run Deep which introduced the Romulans. I had known about this episode before because it appeared in the first fictionalized collection of Star Trek stories which science-fiction writer James Blish adapted from the episodes’ scripts — only Blish’s adaptation differed from the actual script by Paul Schneider in several particulars. One of the big turning points of the story comes when the Romulan spaceship inadvertently sends out a video of the goings-on on its bridge, the Enterprise receives it, and thereby it’s revealed for the first time to Federation personnel that Romulans look like Vulcans. Stiles (Paul Comi), a navigator who lost three direct ancestors in the previous war between Romulus and the Federation 100 years earlier, has a great line in Blish’s story, “So that’s how they could have stolen our ship’s design. They look like us — or at least like some of us” — but, to my surprise, it was Blish, not Schneider, who wrote that line; it doesn’t appear in Schneider’s teleplay.

Also Blish said that “Romulan” was “not their name for themselves,” whereas Schneider not only riffed off the names Romulus and Remus (they are two planets orbiting each other as well as their system’s sun, though there is no evidence that Remus has sentient life forms) but used terms from the Roman Empire to describe them: the Romulan captain (Mark Lenard, who later played Spock’s father — one gets the impression they’d already fitted him with the ears so they didn’t have to do that all over to cast him as a Vulcan) reports to an official on Romulus called a Praetor; his second-in-command is called Decius (Lawrence Montaigne); and there’s an elderly official on board the Romulan ship whose title is “The Centurion” (John Warburton) who’s killed in mid-battle and sent out into space along with debris that’s supposed to fool Captain James T. Kirk (William Shatner) of the Enterprise into thinking that the Romulan ship has been destroyed. The episode kicks off with attacks on three of the eight manned earth stations that supervise the Neutral Zone imposed by the peace treaty between Earth and Romulus that ended their war a century earlier (obviously writer Schneider was thinking of the supposedly “demilitarized zone” between North and South Viet Nam — in 1966 the Viet Nam war was in full swing) when a Romulan vessel that has a “cloaking device” that renders it invisible except when it actually fires a weapon (it can be invisible but doing so takes up almost all the ship’s power, so they have to become visible again in order to fire their weapon, which in Blish’s adaptation was a metal fatiguer but in the actual show is something called an  “enveloping energy plasma.” The show is basically a battle of wits between the two rival commanders, and director Vincent McEveety — a name usually not seen on Star Trek — actually manages to get a quiet, understated performance out of Shatner. It’s also ironic to see Shatner as Kirk challenge Stiles (who dies at the end of the story — alongside Tomlinson, who was supposed to be married by Kirk at the start of the episode to a woman colleague on the ship’s phaser crew — but is alive at the end of the episode) on his anti-Romulan racism when just five years earlier Shatner played a racist nut-case in Roger Corman’s civil-rights movie The Intruder (a quite good film that was Corman’s first box-office flop). And it’s really nice to see the original Desilu logo on the end of each of these early episodes, a valuable reminder that after other production companies (including MGM) had turned down Star Trek it was Lucille Ball’s company (which she had been running since she and Desi Arnaz broke up in 1960) that greenlighted it. I remember getting into an argument with someone who said he didn’t watch Lucille Ball’s shows because “I like more serious TV — like Star Trek,” and of course, being me, I tore into him and said, “If it hadn’t been for Lucille Ball there would never have been a Star Trek!”

After “Balance of Terror” I was on more familiar ground with the three other first-season Star Trek episodes I got to watch last night. The next up was “Space Seed,” which introduced the character of Khan (full name: Khan Noonien Singh) who was later used in the second Star Trek movie with the original TV cast, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (made in 1982 with Ricardo Montalban repeating his role as Khan from this episode) and still later in the second in the sequence of three (so far) in J. J. Abrams’ reboot, Star Trek Into Darkness, with Benedict Cumberbatch playing him. Montalban was quite striking casting, even though it’s hard to accept him without thinking of the roles he’d played both before and after this one: before in MGM movies like Fiesta (where he plays the son of a bullfighter who wants to be a composer, while his fraternal twin sister, played by Esther Williams, does want to follow in dad’s footsteps as a matador and fights bulls under his name) and after in Fantasy Island. It’s also interesting that we’re told he’s from India (and the last name “Singh” would indicate he’s a Sikh, not a Hindu or Muslim) when we know he’s from Mexico — though some of the imdb.com “Trivia” posters argued that this was Star Trek creator and show runner Gene Roddenberry being ahead of his time in cross-racial casting. Still, Montalban is an arresting screen presence and just right for the part of the leader of a group of 72 genetically engineered superhumans, the last survivors of the Eugenics Wars of the 1990’s in which a group of superpeople tried to conquer Earth and establish themselves as dictators. (Though it’s highly unlikely that Donald Trump’s dad had him genetically altered, it seems like writers Carey Wilbur — who submitted this script unsolicited — and Gene L. Coon were off by only 20 years.) They fled in a nuclear-powered spaceship called the Botany Bay (after a real-life penal colony in 19^th century Australia) and put themselves into suspended animation — only their ship drifted off course and was lost in space until the Enterprise found it and revived Khan, then had to deal with Khan as he studied the Enterprise’s technical manuals and used the knowledge he gained to take over the ship. He has help not only from the other 71 superpeople with whom he was fleeing on the Botany Bay but from Lieutenant Marla McGivers (Madlyn Rhue, who had previously played Ricardo Montalban’s wife on a Bonanza episode), a ship’s historian who specialized in late 20^th century Earth history and predictably goes gaga over the prospect of actually meeting, dating and having sex with a man from the 20^th century — especially one who looks like Ricardo Montalban. In the end Captain Kirk decides on a merciful resolution — which for anyone who’s seen The Wrath of Khan seems like a bi-i-i-i-ig mistake: he sets down the 72 Botany Bayers on a deserted planet and lets McGivers off the hook if she joins them there — and his final comment is to the effect that he’d like to look in on them a hundred hears hence and see how they’ve done. “More like 20,” one of the audience members joked, referencing the 16 years that elapsed between this episode and the film The Wrath of Khan.

The next episode they had on tap was “The Devil in the Dark,” which according to imdb.com was actually the inspiration of Janos Prohaska, who designed a costume for a monster creature and wore it into the office of Star Trek writer and associate producer Gene L. Coon. “What is it?” said Coon. “I don’t know,” said Prohaska, challenging Coon to write a story around his costume and the monster it depicted. Actually the costume is the weakest part of what became one of the most compelling stories Star Trek ever did; it takes place on a planet called Janus VI, where miners working to extract something called pergium (pronounced “Pair-GEE-um”) are being killed right and left by a mysterious object that moves through solid rock the way humans move through air. They’re also finding and destroying hundreds of so-called “silicon nodules,” ball-shaped objects of virtually pure silicon that look like purple bowling balls (though apparently they were actually beach balls). The monster has already killed 50 miners when the Enterprise finally gets to Janus VI in response to the distress call sent by the supervisor of the mining colony, Vanderberg (Ken Lynch), and they’ve tried everything to kill it, including firing at it with phasers, which don’t hurt it a bit. Spock (it would be Spock!) deduces that the thing is a silicon-based life form, and he advises the Enterprise to equip the mining crew with the improved Phaser Two — which emits a stronger and more destructive beam than Phaser One (this is one of the few Star Trek episodes that acknowledges there are different kinds of phasers) and can be reset to be especially destructive to silicon and anything made of it. This was one of the first episodes in which a red-shirted Enterprise crew member was offhandedly killed — the phrase “red shirt” has entered the language for an expendable character in anything that isn’t going to last long — and it’s also the first one in which Dr. Leonard McCoy (DeForest Kelley) spoke his famous line, “I’m a doctor, not a _____!,” which soon became one of Star Trek’s most annoying clichés. (Here it’s “I’m a doctor, not a bricklayer!”)

The gimmick in this one is that the monster turns out to be a sympathetic creature, a moral reversal that begins when it burns a message into the floor of one of the tunnels reading, “NO KILL I” — and Kirk wonders whether that’s a plea to the Earthlings not to kill it or a promise not to kill any more humans. (According to an imdb.com “Trivia” poster, a punk band that does Star Trek‑themed songs calls itself “No Kill I.”) It turns out the creature calls itself a “Horta,” it’s fully sentient (even if it can’t converse in a normal Earthling, Vulcan or any other Federation species’ fashion) and it responds to the Vulcan mind-meld (I believe this was the first time it was used on the show) as Spock contacts the wounded Horta and manages to get through past her overwhelming pain (a feminine pronoun is appropriate because she’s the last of her species and is responsible for hatching her young) to learn that she’s the last remaining member of her kind; that every 50,000 years all the Horta die off except one, and she’s responsible for bringing the new generation of Horta into the world; and that the silicon nodules the miners have been destroying willy-nilly are her eggs. Once McCoy uses silicon-based thermal concrete to patch up the Horta’s wounds, the Horta survives and she and the miners are able to reach an understanding: they’ll leave the Horta alone and in exchange the Horta will tunnel through the planet and thereby enable the miners to get at deposits not only of pergium but gold, silver, platinum and other important commodities, thereby multiplying the mine’s profits. Arthur C. Clarke said this was the only one of the original Star Trek episodes he remembered, and it was because “it presented the idea, unusual in science fiction then and now, that something weird, and even dangerous, need not be malevolent. That is a lesson that many of today’s politicians have yet to learn.” About the only element of “The Devil in the Dark” that goes wrong is the actual appearance of the Horta, which looks like a bastard cross between a Sid and Marty Krofft puppet and the bizarre mess of carpet samples director Art J. Nelson cooked up for his 1964 messterpiece The Creeping Terror, and though at least you don’t get to see the feet of the person or persons moving the Horta around the way you did with the people under the “monster” in The Creeping Terror, the Horta does drag around a whole lot of things that look like rug tassels (and probably were!); she looks like a mobile carpet some people puked on a lot and nobody bothered to clean up — indeed, one person at the screening questioned whether it had been appropriate for me to bring and serve pizza at the screening, since the outside of the Horta did look an awful lot like the top of a pizza.

The next and last of last night’s Star Trek episodes is one I feel a particular affection for, “The City on the Edge of Forever,” Harlan Ellison’s sole contribution to Star Trek even though, typically for Ellison, a lot of his story elements ended up on the cutting-room floor. At least his basic concept remained: Dr. McCoy accidentally injects himself with an overdose of a powerful drug, beams himself to the surface of a planet that has an operating time machine, and ends up in 1930 New York City. His disappearance through the time portal instantly makes the Enterprise and the whole Starfleet infrastructure disappear (a major point of contention with Ellison, who wanted the Enterprise to continue to exist but become a ship full of drug addicts and crooks, product of the oppressve regime that took over the world after Nazi Germany won World War II— though a later Star Trek, “Mirror, Mirror,” did tap into the concept of a “bad” Enterprise in an alternative universe). Kirk and Spock see only one choice: they have to go back into the future and arrive in 1930 New York just before McCoy does so they can undo whatever it was he did that changed time, and thereby bring the Enterprise, Starfleet, the United Federation of Planets and the rest of the Star Trek infrastructure back into existence. Kirk and Spock (the latter passing himself off as Chinese and wearing a watch cap to conceal those famous Vulcan ears) steal some normal 1930 clothes off a clothesline (what criminal slang of the time called a “gooseberry lay” — Dashiell Hammett inserted this term into The Maltese Falcon as a diversion for the censors so they wouldn’t notice the more innocuous-sounding but actually nastier term “gunsel,” which meant the kept boyfriend of a Gay male gangster), flee from a police officer and end up in the basement of the 21^st Street Mission, run by Edith Keeler (Joan Collins, in probably the best performance of her career). It seems Edith Keeler is a truly inspirational figure who’s not only ministering to the street people who’ve been left homeless by the Great Depression, she’s a pacifist who dreams of a time when humans will be able to explore space. Kirk finds himself falling in love with Edith Keeler, while Spock uses the readings from the human past he collected on his tricorder before he and Kirk crossed through the time portal and plugs them into a ramshackle apparatus he’s been able to construct out of the radio equipment available in 1930 and whatever he was able to buy on the tiny wages Keeler was paying them for housework. Eventually Spock reads two different versions of Edith Keeler’s future: in one, she dies in a traffic accident in 1930; in the other, she becomes a nationwide pacifist leader and wins a meeting with President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936.

The problem — and the element that brings genuine pathos to this episode, especially once Edith Keeler emerges as a character Kirk is genuinely in love with and not just a convenience so he can get his rocks off — is that the event that has to happen for the Enterprise, Starfleet, the Federation and all the other optimistic parts of Gene Roddenberry’s future vision to occur is Edith Keeler’s death. If she survived past 1930, she’d build a pacifist movement so powerful the U.S. would stay out of World War II, Nazi Germany would win and the rest of human history would change accordingly. McCoy ultimately arrives in 1930 New York just in time to witness the traffic accident in which Keeler is run over by a truck and killed, and Kirk holds him back so he cannot save her life. There are some lacunae in the script — notably an anachronism in that the night she dies Keeler is on her way to see a film with Clark Gable, and she expresses astonishment that neither Kirk nor McCoy have ever heard of him. In 1930 most people would never have heard of Clark Gable: he was a New York stage actor whose only film work was a few appearances as an extra in the 1920’s and the part of a villain in a Pathé Western called The Painted Desert. Gable didn’t become a star until 1931, when he replaced John Mack Brown in the Joan Crawford vehicle Laughing Sinners. (Apparently the original draft of the script said she was going to see a film with Richard Dix, who was a major star in 1930 but was virtually forgotten by the 1960’s; the logical names for them to have dropped would have been one of the actors who were in fact the biggest male stars of 1930, and who were still identifiable decades later: Maurice Chevalier or Ronald Colman.) Having seen three episodes of The Outer Limits which Ellison wrote at a previous Vintage Sci-Fi screening, “The City on the Edge of Forever” seemed more of a piece with Ellison’s other TV writing of the period — particularly his skill at creating lonely, alienated characters wrenched out of their proper time periods and only suffering more when they realized how they were displaced — and the reason I have a particular affection for this show is that in 1976 my brother and I attended a Star Trek convention in San Francisco at which Harlan Ellison was the featured speaker. Being Harlan Ellison, he delighted in going into a roomful of Trekkies and skewering their illusions about the show; he said that when he presented the script to William Shatner, Shatner went through it and counted both the number of lines he got and the number Leonard Nimoy got. He then told Ellison he had to have more lines than Nimoy because “I can’t compete with those ears.”

Star Trek: Voyager: “One Small Step” (Paramount Television, 1999)

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

Last night’s Mars Movie Night presentation in Golden Hill (http://www.marsmovieguide.com/) was a set of three episodes from two of the later Star Trek series. In the 1960’s my mom, my brother and I were all fanatical Star Trek devotees, watching each episode as it came on (the three years the initial series ran were also the first three years I went to high school) and really getting into it in 1969-1970, when a station in Sacramento “stripped” the series in syndication, running an episode every day from Monday through Friday. (We got TV in those days through an antenna on our apartment balcony, and one of us had to get outside and physically rotate the antenna between where it needed to be to pick up the Star Trek reruns and where it needed to be to get the Bay Area stations.) But I pretty much lost interest in Star Trek after that: I saw the first movie in a theatre in San Diego in 1980 and the second film on cable TV about three years later, but didn’t follow the series after that, and I occasionally watched Star Trek: The Next Generation but until last night had never seen any of the series that spun off after it: Deep Space Nine, Voyager and Enterprise. (Actually in researching my notes for the above I did find an entry for Voyager from 1995.) The episodes were one from Voyager — “One Small Step,” originally aired November 17, 1999 — and the next-to-next-to-last and next-to-last episodes from Enterprise, “Demons” and “Terra Prime,” aired May 5 and 12, 2005, respectively. The Voyager show was based on the idea of a “graviton ellipse,” a space field of especially heavy gravity that periodically crosses the barrier from subspace (the part of space where space warps exist and which permits the Enterprise, Voyager and Star Trek’s other starships to travel faster than the speed of light) into normal space, swallows up everyone and everything in its path, then disappears back into subspace again.

The opening “teaser” is set in the year 2032, in which an astronaut named Lieutenant John Kelly (Phil Morris) is flying the Ares IV spacecraft to Mars, and has just landed two of his fellow crew members on the surface of the Red Planet and separated his command module when the command module is engulfed and ultimately swallowed by the graviton ellipse — although he keeps broadcasting back to Earth until the last moment he can, which gives him a reputation as a great space hero and pioneer. His name is still celebrated in the histories of space travel centuries later, which is why everyone on the Voyager crew has heard of him, and when Voyager captain Kathryn Janeway (Kate Mulgrew — incidentally Voyager was the first Star Trek program in which the captain was a woman, a giant leap for humankind if you ask me) orders a crew to fly a shuttlepod into the graviton ellipse and explore, they find the wreckage of the command module and treat it like a holy relic. In fact, they treat it so much like a holy relic they decide to use a tractor beam to pull it out and salvage it — only that slows them down so much that they can’t get out of the ellipse in time and ultimately end up pressing part of the Ares IV’s ion propulsion system to get out. It was a reasonably impressive show, directed by Robert Picardo (who also played the ship’s doctor) with effective suspense editing, and written by the usual TV committee: Mike Woolaeger, Jessica Scott, Bryan Fuller and Michael Taylor. The best parts were the flashbacks showing John Kelly giving his final message to mission control before the graviton ellipse ate him, and the character of Seven of Nine (Jeri Ryan), whose name sounds like what a poker player would hope to draw to finish his or her inside straight. She’s actually a reformed Borg, the race introduced into the Star Trek universe I believe during The Next Generation, in which the entire community operated as one giant collective mind and individual ego was forbidden (sort of like Ayn Rand’s dystopian nightmare in her 1937 science-fiction short novel Anthem). She comes off as so cool and emotionless she makes Mr. Spock look like an operatic madwoman by comparison, and her best moment in the show is when she tells a really lame joke and then, when it falls flat, says in a totally flat monotone, “The Doctor suggested that I defuse tense situations with humor.” “One Small Step” was an O.K. drama, well done and moving in its clash between sentiment and survival — one can readily believe even people as mission-focused as we’re told the Voyager crew are would be awe-struck when faced with a genuine relic of a legendary previous mission — but it makes the mistake of putting the climax (the successful escape of the podcraft from the gravitron ellipse) one act before the finish and the rest seems lame by comparison.

Star Trek: Enterprise: “Demons” and “Terra Prime” (Paramount Television, 2005)

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

Fortunately, the next item(s) shown — the first two of the three final episodes of the Star Trek: Enterprise series, which took place a century earlier than the original Star Trek and dealt with how the United Federation of Planets came into existence after a century of civil war on Earth and attacks between some of the planet populations that later came together to found the Federation — was absolutely brilliant, vividly written, insightfully directed and beautifully acted. At least part of my admiration for this show was that, though it was made over a decade ago, it featured an uncannily exact metaphor for the 2016 Presidential election, albeit it had a considerably happier ending than the election. The two episodes, “Demons” (May 5, 2005) and “Terra Prime” (May 12, 2005), center around an organization called “Terra Prime” whose agenda is very Trumpian: it demands that all non-human species be expelled from Earth and that when Earth explores the stars, it go to conquer the indigenous species on each newly discovered planet rather than try to befriend or learn from them. The head of Terra Prime — at least during the period in which the show takes place, since the implication from the writers (Rick Berman and Brannon Braga as overall creators of Enterprise, Manny Coto on “Demons” and he along with Judith and Garfield Reese-Stevens on “Terra Prime”) is that it’s actually existed for decades (one member of the Enterprise crew admits joining it briefly in her teens) — is John Frederick Paxton (Peter Weller, who here looks oddly like Trump’s good buddy, Russian President Vladimir Putin), whose big speech notes that Earth has just settled a series of wars among its own people and the last thing it should try to do is play nice in the rest of the universe and trust species from other planets who are likely to attack and destroy us. In his big speech, Paxton outlines his and Terra Prime’s philosophy: “‘No’ is a word that Starfleet better get used to hearing from now on. Because up until today, it’s always been ‘yes’, hasn’t it? Yes, yes, go right ahead, roam the stars. Yes, inform potentially hostile species of the whereabouts of Earth. Yes, entrust the entire future of our world to non-Human creatures, who don’t even feel like we do. Yes, promote the total degradation of mankind, by encouraging alien-Human... relations. Well, ‘yes’ is a word that ends here and now! I’m returning Earth to its rightful owners. I am giving Earth back to Humanity, back to Human beings. It is my life’s work; it is what I was born to do. And there is no one, not an alien, not a Human, that will stop me from achieving it.”

As one of the weirder parts of his plan, he’s had his minions steal genetic material from two Enterprise officers, human male Commander Charles “Trip” Tucker III (Connor Trineer) and Vulcan female T’Pol (Jolene Blalock), and gene-splice them to create a baby whose DNA tests reveal she’s the product of Tucker and T’Pol even though neither of them can remember having created a child and T’Pol is sure she’s never been pregnant. Paxton cites this baby as an example of what’s going to happen if the Federation is formed and human and non-human species start having sex with each other (though actually the biological definition of “species” is any population whose members can mate with each other and produce fertile offspring, so if humans and Vulcans can mate, that’s a good indication that their DNA is so similar they would be the same species despite coming from different planets — though in this case the human-Vulcan child dies while still a baby due to a mistake in the gene-splicing technique used and I don’t think the original show ever nailed down whether Spock, the Star Trek universe’s most famous human-Vulcan mix, could have a kid). Paxton is also the administrator of a mining colony on the Moon and his foreman, a heavy-set Black guy named Daniel Greaves (Peter Mensah), are organizing the workers to join Terra Prime and take action against the non-humans who are currently meeting in San Francisco to form the Federation. (This show seems to have begun the conceit that all these centuries later the Golden Gate Bridge would still exist in the form in which we know it; that was done again in the 2009 Star Trek movie that kicked off J. J. Abrams’ reboot of the franchise.) Tucker and T’Pol end up being held hostage on Mars by Paxton, who has lifted off the entire mining colony from the Moon and flown it there — apparently the writers had seen or heard of similar schticks in some of the 1930’s and 1940’s Republic serials, in which entire communities on other planets turned out to be spaceships — and he intends to fire an energy weapon that will wipe out the building at which the Federation-founding conference is taking place and end any hope of peaceful coexistence between Earth and other planets. (I wonder if the writers chose San Francisco as the venue for this because it was the city where the United Nations was actually formed after World War II, though its headquarters were soon relocated to New York City.)

Paxton forces Tucker to work on his energy weapon (another cop from the 1930’s Republic serials, in which scientific geniuses who were normally on the side of good were quite often taken over and mind-controlled by the baddies to work on their infernal machines), while back on board the Enterprise the ship’s captain, Jonathan Archer (Scott Bakula), wants to destroy Paxton’s installation even though that will mean killing two of his most valuable and high-ranking crew members in order to spare the Federation from the annihilating attack Paxton has planned. In the end enough of Archer’s crew members resist his orders to spare the installation, Paxton fires his weapon but the ray lands harmlessly in San Francisco Bay (Tucker deliberately screwed up its aim), the Enterprise rescues Tucker and T’Pol, and the engaging side plot of a relationship between crew member Travis Mayweather (African-American actor Anthony Montgomery) and reporter Gannet Brooks (Johanna Watts) which is temporarily derailed when Travis becomes convinced she’s the Terra Prime spy on board the Enterprise, and doesn’t survive even when it turns out she’s actually a Starfleet secret agent sent on board the Enterprise to find the Terra Prime “mole” — the two have a bittersweet Third Man-esque parting that adds to the power of this show. I’ve never seen any other episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise but if these two are any indication, this might have been the best series in the Star Trek universe since the 1960’s original — and the election of Donald Trump as President on an openly racist and xenophobic platform makes this show seem even more relevant to current events than it would have when it debuted during George W. Bush’s Presidency. Indeed, during one of Paxton’s nasty rhetorical flights I couldn’t help but joke that his slogan was, “Make Earth Great Again!”

DCI Banks: “What Will Survive” (Independent Television Service, 2015)

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

Last night I watched a KPBS showing of a British detective series called DCI Banks, the creation of an author named Peter Robinson who was born in the factory region of Leeds in the U.K. but left at 24, after completing his undergraduate degree at the University of Leeds (who knew there was a University of Leeds?), and moved to Canada, where he’s lived ever since (he was born in 1950, which makes him three years older than me). He’s written 24 DCI Banks novels — DCI Banks is a detective formerly based in London who moves and resumes his career in the area of the Dales in Yorkshire — but the plot of this episode, “What Will Survive,” is (for the first time in the series’ history, according to imdb.com) a new story by writer Nicholas Hicks-Beach rather than an adaptation of one of Robinson’s novels. DCI Banks (Stephen Tompkinson) is a rather dour character who works with at least four other police officers, and the environment is a rather seedy one whose main business seems to be energy production — a giant nuclear power plant hangs over the background and we see big transmission lines and a few windmills as well. The case depicted in “What Will Survive” kicks off when Katrin Vesik (Julia Krynke), an undocumented immigrant from Estonia, is found murdered and crudely buried, and it spins off into a pretty dark tale (this is not one of those quiet, genteel drawing-room murder mysteries British writers were once known for) involving the immigrant’s sister, Annika Vesik (Daiya Dominyka), who police discover is working as a prostitute and then disappears altogether; Robbie Osgood (Aron Julius), a half-Black autistic boy who lives with his father Michael (Steve Toussaint), an ex-con; a long-haired middle-aged white guy who chewed out the victim for being an immigrant and taking jobs away from Brits like him (where have we heard that kind of rhetoric lately? It’s won elections for “Brexit” in the U.K. and Trump in the U.S.!); a group of local vandals who tried to burn the Osgoods’ home; and the man who turns out to be the main villain of the piece, Jason McCready (Darren Morfitt).

Jason is a man on the make who took charge of a number of local businesses after his dad died and his mom Maureen (Kate Rutter) turned them over to him because she knew she couldn’t run them herself. What she didn’t realize was that Jason was going to extend the McCready business empire from legitimate enterprises to prostitution and forced labor — he was shipping in immigrants and forcing them to work on the McCready meat farm and in his processing plants — and in the film’s most chilling scene Banks and his team discover a shed full of slave workers on McCready’s farm — including Annika, who was taken there and impressed into farm labor when Jason decided she wasn’t making him enough money as a hooker. There’s also Jason’s nephew Gary (Charlie Heaton, a cutie I’ve noticed in these productions before), who’s arrested when the Osgoods’ home burns down; he admits he was part of the first group that lit some fireworks under the Osgoods’ door to make it look like they were going to burn it down but says he wasn’t responsible for the fire that consumed the whole building and killed Robbie. Later it developed that when Robbie was suspected of Katrin’s murder Michael decided to burn his own house down and commit murder-suicide to spare Robbie the horrors of incarceration — only the firefighters got to the house in time to rescue Michael and in the end he’s arrested after the police horrify him with the revelation that Robbie didn’t commit Katrin’s murder after all. The real culprit was Jason McCready, who struck her during an argument at work and buried her — as he’d done with other slave workers who died of natural causes but whose existence he could not allow to be revealed because that would have blown the whistle on his whole operation — and the saddest people in the whole story are Michael Osgood and Maureen McCready, both of whom end up facing legal liability under bizarre and morally ambiguous circumstances.

There’s also an odd subplot in which Banks’s mother dies of a heart attack — Banks gets a call from the hospital that she’s been stricken but not that she’s dead, and when he shows up to see her the nurse (a Black woman) is startled that Banks’s father didn’t call him with the news that his mom had died — and it seems as if Banks and his dad have been having a cold war for many years and Banks’s dad not only doesn’t want Banks to help him cope with his grief but just wants Banks to get lost already. Judging from this sample, DCI Banks is one of the more dour British mystery shows but also one of the more compelling ones, even though sometimes it seems too dark for its own good — and I wonder if the previous episodes that actually drew on Robinson’s work are materially different from this one which only used his characters. I was also amused that while the original British airing of this show in March 2015 was as two 45-minute parts on ITV (Independent Television), Britain’s commercial broadcaster that competes with the BBC, it was the BBC that distributed this show to the U.S., and presumably they were the ones who spliced the two episodes together to create a single show that ran a shade over 90 minutes (fine by me given my usual allergy to TV serials).

A Pentatonix Christmas Show (NBC, December 14, 2016)

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

I kept the TV on NBC for A Pentatonix Christmas Show, an hour-long romp through carols familiar and not-so-familiar. Pentatonix is a modern-day a cappella group that I would like considerably better than I do if they’d abandon one really annoying affectation: the drum machine sounds they use on every medium- and uptempo song. I had first seen Pentatonix on a Grammy Awards show (I think; it could have been some other omnibus music special) and criticized them for using a drum machine instead of singing pure a cappella as advertised. On this show there was a brief segment on how they arrange songs that revealed that the “drum machine” is actually being simulated through vocal sounds from the two lowest-voiced Pentatonixers, Scott Hoying and Kevin Olusola (the total membership is five people, including one white woman, Kirstin Maldonado; three white men, Avi Kaplan, Scott Hoying and Mitch Grassi; and one Black man, Kevin Olusola), so the effect is legitimate a cappella — but I still don’t like it. The show had some of the typical trappings of the hour-long musical Christmas special, including guests Reba McIntire (who joined Pentatonix on “Winter Wonderland” and did a good job with it, landing somewhere between a “straight” version and the weird one the young Aretha Franklin did for Columbia in the early 1960’s), Dolly Parton (who joined them on “Silent Night”) and Kelly Clarkson (on “I’ll Be Home for Christmas”). 

Pentatonix (whose Wikipedia page reveals they have released three Christmas-themed CD’s) opened with what appeared to be an original song called “Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays” (thereby putting themselves on both sides of the so-called “War on Christmas”) and then did “Winter Wonderland” with McIntire and a clever animated sequence to the song “Up on the Housetop” (which they arranged quite creatively — they actually funked it up — except for those damned drum-machine effects), following which they did their best singing of the night on a song called “Mary, Don’t You Know.” It’s a traditionally themed song but one I didn’t know before, and the Pentatonixers sang it slowly and “straight,” sans drum machines and human beat-boxes, and for one of only two times in the evening sounded like they were bringing real emotion and soul to the music instead of just showing off how cleverly (a word that keeps coming back to me when thinking of them) they can arrange and deploy their voices. Then they ran through some of the familiar carols, “Joy to the World,” “Silent Night” (with Parton, who now that she’s getting on in years seems to be photographed mostly in long-shots that show how short she is and make her look decidedly gnome-like), “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” and “O Come, All Ye Faithful.” Then, after their turn on “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” with Clarkson (a pop Christmas song suited to Clarkson’s pop voice), they threw in a few surprises: a non-verbal vocal arrangement of the “Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy” from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker and, of all things, Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” which despite (or maybe because of) its dark imagery worked well both as a sacred song and a tribute to Cohen’s memory — even though, while they began it in an appropriate gospel-quartette (in their case it would be a quintette!) style, they gradually sped it up and started doing those damned drum-machine effects again. After that was another song I presume is an original, “That’s Christmas to Me,” and an instrumental outro of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” to take out the show and lead into another NBC presentation I had no intention of watching, A Saturday Night Live Christmas, preceded by a disclaimer that there might be naughty bits on the show because the content was originally created to be aired considerably later at night.

The Two Mrs. Carrolls (Warner Bros., 1945, released 1947)

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

After that I switched to Turner Classic Movies for a very odd film that I wasn’t too familiar with even though it’s the only movie that co-starred two of my favorite actors of all time, Humphrey Bogart and Barbara Stanwyck. It’s called The Two Mrs. Carrolls and was shot at Warner Bros. in 1945 but not released until 1947. It was the result of a brief period in Bogart’s career in which the people in charge at Warner Bros., Jack Warner and Henry Blanke, decided that after Bogart’s successive screen incarnations as gangster and then as world-weary bad-good guy who finally regains his ideals at the end of the film, the way to push his popularity to even greater levels would be to cast him as a psychopath anxious to dump his current wife for another woman and seeing no other way of doing that but knocking her off. The first such film was Conflict (1945), in which Bogart’s character fell for his sister-in-law and arranged a fake “accident” in which his wife supposedly died, only his friend, police detective Sydney Greenstreet, figured out the plot and arrested him. (One can see the wheels turning on this one: “We’ll make Bogart the bad guy and Greenstreet the good guy!”) Just before Conflict was released Warners put Bogart into a similar story, The Two Mrs. Carrolls, based on a play by an author identified as Martin Vale but really (like George Eliot and George Sand) a woman, Marguerite Vale Veiller, writing under a man’s name (and her husband, Bayard Veiller, was also a writer specializing in overstuffed drawing-room thrillers like this). The play opened in London in 1935 and, in a version revised for American audiences, on Broadway in 1943, whereupon Warners grabbed the film rights. The female lead was first announced for Bette Davis (which would have worked only if the screenwriter, Thomas Job, had flipped the characters around and made the wife the psychopath out to murder her husband!) and then for Ida Lupino, with Zachary Scott penciled in as the male lead, but eventually Warners settled on Bogart and Stanwyck for the leads and announced Mervyn LeRoy as director (which would have required borrowing him from his home studio, MGM) before hiring Peter Godfrey, apparently because Godfrey had just made the farce comedy Christmas in Connecticut with Stanwyck and they had got along well.

Somehow one would have expected the one on-screen teaming between such formidable talents as Bogart and Stanwyck to be a great film (indeed, as good as Mary Astor is in the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon despite being a decade or so too old for the role, I can’t help but imagine what that film would have been like with Stanwyck in the female lead) instead of what we get here, which is basically Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion meets Edgar G. Ulmer’s Bluebeard. (In fact, after watching The Two Mrs. Carrolls I downloaded the Ulmer Bluebeard from archive.org and screened it just to remind myself that this is one time in Hollywood history where the “A”-listers screwed up a potentially powerful story premise and the “B”-listers nailed it!) Geoffrey Carroll (Humphrey Bogart) is a young up-and-coming American painter living in England — first in London and then the “church town” of Ashton in Kent — and in the opening scene he’s on a fishing trip in Scotland with a comic-relief guide and his girlfriend de jour, Sally Morton (Barbara Stanwyck, who doesn’t attempt any sort of accent even though her character is supposed to be British — but then given how wretched she sounded in the few films in which she did attempt an accent, that’s probably just as well; for all her extraordinary range, versatility and emotional power, one actor’s task that eluded Stanwyck her whole career was accents). Unfortunately, Sally sees a letter slip out of Geoffrey’s pocket (in the middle of a driving rainstorm — shades of Casablanca!) that reveals that he can’t marry her because he has a wife already. No problem; in the very next scene, after a sudden jump-cut that’s surprising in a film from the 1940’s, we’ve jumped forward two years. Geoffrey and Sally have got married following the death of his wife from a long illness, and they’re living in a large country home in Ashton — they even have a rose garden, though their neighbors, the Lathams (Isobel Elsom and her daughter Cecily, played by Alexis Smith), have a better one and have bred a new rose variety called the “Victor Hugo” that figures prominently in the plot. Together they’re raising Beatrice (Ann Carter, the marvelous child actress from Val Lewton’s The Curse of the Cat People and almost as good here), Geoffrey’s child from his first wife, whom we never saw as an on-screen character. Our only evidence of what she looked like is a highly stylized painting Geoffrey made of her as the Angel of Death, which he completed about a month before she died and hung in the home he shares with Sally rather than offering it for sale.

Geoffrey has told Sally that his first wife became an invalid due to strains involved when Beatrice (or “Bea,” as she’s called through most of the film) was born — though Bea later contradicts him and says her mom was healthy and energetic until she became ill shortly before she died. Then we get a scene in which Geoffrey drives to London in a driving rainstorm (so much of this film takes place during torrential rains it gets annoying and oppressive after a while) and, using the name “Fleming,” buys a box of some unnamed but obviously sinister drug (you can tell from the dire tones of cinematographer Peverell Marley’s Gothic-style lighting and composer Franz Waxman’s music) from Horace Blagdon (Barry Bernard), a London chemist (remember that “chemist” is what the Brits call a pharmacist) with a scarred face who turns up later in Ashton and demands money from Geoffrey. We catch on immediately — Geoffrey bought poison and Blagdon is blackmailing him over it — but of course it’s going to take the characters considerably longer to figure it out. In the next scenes Sally herself is getting mysteriously ill, and she debates whether she’s strong enough to leave her bedroom upstairs in the house to come down to a dinner party Geoffrey is giving for the Lathams and for Sally’s former boyfriend Charles “Penny” Pennington (thoroughly lame, unsexy and boring actor Patrick O’Moore), whom Geoffrey immediately takes a dislike to. In a clever reworking of the final line from Casablanca, Geoffrey tells Penny when they first meet, “Y’know, I have the strangest feeling that this is the beginning of a beautiful hatred.” Geoffrey is being openly solicitous of his wife and keeps bringing her glasses of warm milk — and anyone who saw Suspicion can’t help but be, well, suspicious that not only is Geoffrey poisoning his suddenly inconvenient wife (he’s fallen for Cecily Latham — we’ve seen them surreptitiously holding hands and it’s obvious Geoffrey plans to knock off Sally the way he did his first wife and make Cecily the third Mrs. Carroll) but he’s using the same drink Hitchcock and his writers on Suspicion, Samson Raphaelson, Joan Harrison and Alma Reville, picked to have their murderous husband use to poison his wife. There’s also a scene at a racetrack — well, at least it gets us out of that house for a while, and on one of the rare days in Ashton when it isn’t raining — in which director Godfrey appears on screen as an obnoxious racetrack tout who sells Penny a tip on a race (though the horse Penny bets, the favorite, loses to the one Sally selected).

Eventually, on yet another rainy night, Sally finally realizes she’s being poisoned; she lifts the window in the living room and pours out the poisoned milk (when she pours it out it all lands outside the window, but later Geoffrey finds spilled milk all over his living-room floor and realizes his wife knows he’s poisoning her, a continuity gaffe a lot of people have pointed out about this film). She locks herself in her upstairs bedroom and Geoffrey screams at her to be let in — and when she doesn’t he goes to the outside of the house and crashes through her bedroom window in a scene that makes him look like a horror-film monster (and reminds us that 10 years before this film Waxman had scored The Bride of Frankenstein). She holds a gun on him — a present from Penny in a previous scene — but he easily wrests it away from her and strangles her, though the police, summoned by Penny, the Lathams and Sally’s doctor, Dr. Tuttle (Nigel Bruce — though anyone who saw him as his comic version of Dr. Watson in the Sherlock Holmes movies with Basil Rathbone would have had zero faith in his talent and skills as a doctor!), arrive and break into the house in time to save her and arrest him. The Bluebeard parallels in this film are in the male lead being a psychologically tormented artist with a compulsion to kill the women he paints — not only did Geoffrey Carroll poison his first wife shortly after painting her as the Angel of Death, he’s executed a second Angel of Death painting with Sally as the model (he had it locked up but naturally Sally and Bea were dying of curiosity and opened the secret door to see it — heedless of the fate that befell the wives of Bluebeard who opened the doors in Béla Balasz’s libretto for Bartók’s opera Bluebeard’s Castle!) and he explains to Cecily that he’s exhausted Sally’s possibilities as a muse for him and needs a new wife to continue to inspire him. Ironically, Bogart made this movie right when he was dumping his third wife, Mayo Methot, for his fourth, Lauren Bacall — though he divorced Methot instead of poisoning her (actually Methot was a chronic alcoholic who was doing a fine job of poisoning herself with booze; she died in 1952) — and in order to have children, something he hadn’t been able to do with his three previous wives, Bogart was taking testosterone shots, which had the side effect of making him almost completely bald. As a result, in The Two Mrs. Carrolls he wears one of the most excruciatingly fake-looking toupées in the history of movies — it even makes Bing Crosby’s look good by comparison.  

The Two Mrs. Carrolls is a potentially good story premise that goes wrong on just about every turn; though there are some nice Gothic shots of that old house the Carrolls live in (I suspect more the inspiration of cinematographer Marley than the rather pedestian director Godfrey), the film has the deadly dull air of routine about it and Bogart and Stanwyck come off as two old pros saying their lines, hitting their marks and plowing their way through a movie they realized from the get-go was going to be a dog. I suspect one reason Warners finally took this movie out of the vaults and released it in 1947 (after the huge Bogart-Bacall hits To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep) was that Stanwyck had gone to Paramount and been announced for Sorry, Wrong Number, a far superior movie in which she played basically the same character she does here: an invalid who gradually realizes her husband is trying to knock her off. (Had they waited even longer and released The Two Mrs. Carrolls after Sorry, Wrong Number, the critics would probably have proclaimed it a ripoff.) I’m sure I’d seen The Two Mrs. Carrolls sometime in the 1970’s, when I was first getting interested in classic-era movies in general and Bogart’s films in particular, but I had no particular recollection of it at the time and it’s a movie that doesn’t deserve to be remembered: Bogart’s reaction to the emptiness of his characterization was to overact at the key moments — at least in the 1939 movie The Return of Doctor “X,” a far sillier movie than this one and in which Bogart was even more blatantly miscast (he was a mad scientist returned from the dead through transfusions arranged by fellow mad scientist John Litel), he kept his dignity and brought pathos to a ridiculous role. In The Two Mrs. Carrolls, he didn’t even try, and the film was a financial flop but luckily only a blip in Bogart’s career: he would go on to make two more movies with Bacall, Dark Passage and Key Largo, as well as classics like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre that brought him back to the nervy good-bad characters he played best.