Vintage Sci-Fi Screening, April 14, 2018: “Destination Moon” (Eagle-Lion, 1950) & “2001” (MGM, 1968)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s Vintage Sci-Fi film screening (http://sdvsf.org/http://sdvsf.org/) was billed as “Ground-Breaking Science Fiction!” and contained two movies that stood above the common rut of sci-fi films then and now: including the 1950 Eagle-Lion release Destination Moon and Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey. I’ve not only seen both these films several times but have previously posted notices on them to this blog, Destination Moon at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2016/06/destination-moon-george-pal.html and 2001 at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2017/05/2001-space-odyssey-kubrick.html, so I’ll just be brief here. Destination Moon was produced by George Pal, directed by Irving Pichel (usually known as an actor but the co-director with Ernest B. Schoedsack of the first version of Richard Connell’s story “The Most Dangerous Game” in 1932) and written by Alfred “Rip” Van Ronkel, Robert A. Heinlein and James O’Hanlon based on a novel by Heinlein. That’s how the names appear in the credits, but it’s clear this is really a Schreiber rather than an auteur movie and the Schreiber is Heinlein — who, according to “Trivia” posters on imdb.com, worked on no fewer than five versions of this material: two novels, Rocketship Galileo and The Man Who Sold the Moon, a short story called “Destination Moon” which a science-fiction pulp magazine published in connection with the film, the film script itself and a radio adaptation of it. Heinlein’s Right-wing Libertarian politics are very much in evidence throughout this movie, from the assertion that going to the moon is too big a job for the government and only private enterprise can handle it to the dark hints that if the U.S. isn’t the first country to get to the moon, a sinister, unnamed (but obviously, in a 1950 Cold War context, the Soviet Union) foreign power will get there first and will be able to rain down missiles on us in space attacks we’ll be helpless to stop. (The simultaneously filmed Rocketship X-M can be read less as a cheap ripoff of Destination Moon and more as a politically progressive response film to it — something I thought even before I learned that blacklisted Communist writer Dalton Trumbo had made one of his uncredited sub rosa contributions to its script.)

I’ve had an odd relationship with Destination Moon over the years; I remember watching it with my late roommate/home-care client John P. on TV and both of us were startled that the film was actually in color; we’d each seen it (separately) before, but only on black-and-white TV’s. (Destination Moon is often cited as the first science-fiction film ever made in color, which is true only if you don’t count the 1932 Doctor “X,” shot in two-strip Technicolor and usually classed as a horror film, though it’s about a group of scientists doing advanced research and the horror comes from one of their discoveries going terribly awry.) One of our regular attendees hailed Destination Moon as the first “serious” science-fiction film that attempted a realistic (as realistic as the scientific knowledge available at the time it was made could be, anyway) depiction of space flight — this gentleman also mentioned that he’d once driven astronaut Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin around at a convention, thereby putting the rest of us one degree of separation from someone who really had gone to the moon and set foot on its surface. Sorry, but Fritz Lang’s Woman on the Moon, from 22 years earlier, got there first: Lang had the assistance of two technical advisors who later worked on the Nazis’ rocket program and still later on the U.S. space program, Hermann Oberth and an uncredited Willy Ley, and they explained everything to him, including acceleration (the increase in gravity that occurs as a rocket nears escape velocity) and weightlessness (Lang and his writer, his then-wife Thea von Harbou, posited that the floor of their spacecraft would be studded with leather straps into which the astronauts could insert their feet so they could walk normally in a weightless environment; in Destination Moon the astronauts wore magnetized shoes and in 2001: A Space Odyssey they used Velcro grip shoes). Woman on the Moon was also the film for which Fritz Lang invented the countdown: he asked Oberth how they knew when to launch their experimental rockets. “We just count from one to 10, and launch on 10,” Oberth said. “That doesn’t seem very dramatic,” Lang answered — and then the director hit on counting backwards and having the launch be at zero. (Woman on the Moon was a silent film, but the launch countdown — shown with numbers flashing on the screen — is still quite dramatic and powerful.) About the only scientific howler Lang, von Harbou and his advisers committed was positing that there would be pockets of human-breathable air on the moon so that the astronauts — Lang’s romantic-lead couple, anyway — could stay behind and live out their lives there.

I found myself liking Destination Moon last night better than I have before. It’s still a creepily fascistic movie — and I probably was more aware of those elements than I would have been if I hadn’t seen it right after a Mars movie night in which the main feature was Starship Troopers: Traitor of Mars, another film with its origins (however dim) in something Robert Heinlein wrote. One surprise about Destination Moon is that there are virtually no women in the dramatis personae (later space-travel films like Rocketship X-M usually included at least one, if only to provide a romantic interest for the lead): just Erin O’Brien-Moore (the interesting actress who played Humphrey Bogart’s clueless wife in the 1937 social-comment melodrama Black Legion, and played her beautifully) doing nothing but one scene in which she pledges to stand by and wait for her husband to come home from his moon trip, and if he doesn’t come home to remain faithful to his memory. Destination Moon isn’t one of those science-fiction films that offers any real human emotion, nor does it have the sort of doomed romanticism of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles written about the same time — but then Heinlein and Bradbury ended up at opposite poles of sci-fi fan debates throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s over militarism, technology, the Cold War and eventually Viet Nam (at one famous science-fiction convention in 1968 the two introduced competing resolutions on the Viet Nam war, with Heinlein’s supporting it and Bradbury’s opposed), but on its own terms it’s quite well done and one can readily imagine how its combination of technological supremacism and American patriotism (and a bit of Ayn Randianism in the pathetic attempt of a little man with a moustache to stop the moon rocket from blasting off via a court order, which Heinlein clearly wants us to see in Randian terms as one of those pesky little takers trying to assert himself against the MAKERS) struck a chord with 1950 audiences. My favorite story about Destination Moon doesn’t have anything to do with the film itself: it seems that before George Pal produced it at Eagle-Lion he had offered it to Paramount, who had been bankrolling his one-reel “Puppetoon” shorts. They turned it down, so Pal got Eagle-Lion to finance it — and as it turned out, the theatre Eagle-Lion engaged for its opening run in New York City was two blocks away from the Paramount building, so the “suits” at Paramount could look out their windows and see moviegoers literally lining up for blocks to see the movie they had turned down.

The other film on last night’s program was Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey, easily the greatest science-fiction film ever made and arguably the greatest film ever made, period. I vividly remember seeing it three times in 1968 at the Cinerama Theatre in San Francisco (and now regretting that never again will anyone be able to see this film that way, even though by the time 2001 was filmed the original three-camera Cinerama process had been superseded and “Cinerama” merely meant one camera using double-wide 70-millimeter film — Kubrick and his effects technicians, Douglas Trumbull (who worked out the “psychedelic” shots in the film’s famous finale and got credit) and John Dykstra (who built the spaceship models, and didn’t), already had a hard enough time working out the effects (including having to change the Discovery’s destination from Saturn to Jupiter when building Saturn’s rings convincingly turned out to be too difficult) and one shudders to think what they would have gone through trying to do them in three-camera Cinerama. 2001 is a film I can’t be objective about; I’ve been in love with it since I first saw it at age 14 and this time around I basically just sat back with an awestruck look on my face and let Kubrick’s masterpiece wash over me. I still can’t believe that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences did not even nominate 2001 for Best Picture — at least Citizen Kane got nominated! That shocked me in 1969 and it still saddens me that not only did 2001 not get the Best Picture award it thoroughly deserved but Kubrick did not win Best Director (he did win an award for the effects work in 2001 that, ironically, was the only Academy Award he ever got even though it was his technicians Turnbull and Dykstra who deserved it) and Douglas Rain did not win Best Actor for his utterly chilling performance as the voice of HAL. (After the screening, the proprietor told me that Rain had given an interview in which he said he spent only two days recording the voice of HAL — and that’s the only part of his career anybody remembered or wanted to ask him about. That puts him in the same class as Fay Wray, who in her later years complained that she’d had a major role in Erich von Stroheim’s The Wedding March and had played opposite Gary Cooper and other “A”-list stars of the late 1920’s and early 1930’s, and all anyone ever wanted to interview her about was her role screaming at a giant ape in King Kong.) One thing that amazes me about 2001 was that Kubrick was the first major director to attempt a science-fiction film since Fritz Lang had made Woman in the Moon 40 years earlier (unless you count Robert Wise, who wasn’t that highly regarded when he made the original The Day the Earth Stood Still in 1951 but became a major Hollywood figure later), and it’s something of a surprise that not until George Lucas and Steven Spielberg scored with the genre in the 1970’s has it become de rigueur for virtually every filmmaker seeking a blockbuster reputation to do science-fiction at least once.

Starship Troopers: Traitor on Mars (Lucent Pictures Entertainment, Sola Digital Arts, Sony Pictures Entertainment, 2017)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s Mars movie screening in Golden Hill (http://marsmovieguide.com/) consisted of a feature called Starship Troopers: Traitor of Mars — fifth in a series of films based on Robert A. Heinlein’s fascistic 1959 science-fiction novel, which began with a live-action movie directed by Paul Verhoeven (who apparently fused Heinlein’s story with one of his own that had in common that both were about military units in a science-fiction future fighting a mindless enemy of giant-sized arthropods, variously known to the Earthlings on the other side of them as “Arachnids” or just “Bugs”) and which spawned four sequelae, of which this is the most recent. The screening also included an episode of a hopelessly useless children’s series called Butt-Ugly Martians which, aside from a pretty cool theme song, had so little to offer that I slept through most of it; and a surprisingly compelling episode of a 2005 Gerry Anderson TV series called Captain Scarlet. Gerry Anderson was the auteur of a set of oddball British TV series in the 1960’s done with puppet characters for which he and his wife Sylvia supplied most of the voices: Fireball XL-5, Supercar, Thunderbirds, Stingray, etc. (Some of these had been shown in a previous screening, along with a screamingly funny parody called Superthunderstingcar.) Anderson’s original puppet shows had been advertised as being in a process called “Supermarionation,” and in the 2000’s other producers revived his characters (just what Anderson’s own involvement was with these later shows is unknown) but with computer-generated imagery (CGI) instead of the original puppet animation — albeit the new shows claimed to be in a process called “Hypermarionation.” (One audience member at the screening joked that that’s what happens when puppeteers drink too much coffee.) 

One of Anderson’s 1960’s series had been called Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons — the Mysterons being to his universe essentially what the Daleks were on Dr. Who, mindless and ill-motivated agents of destruction whose function was to be the generic bad guys. (I asked afterwards what connection this series had to Mars and was told that the Mysterons were supposed to be Martians.) In 2005 this was revived in CGI and, at least judging from the episode we got to see, “Chiller,” it was quite good: about the only down side of CGI was that, though the rest of the characters’ bodies looked convincing and moved effectively, they all looked like their hair was permanently bonded to their heads and made of plastic. This is because doing convincing hair in CGI requires a separate computer code for each strand, and filmmakers at the level of director Mark Woolard simply don’t have that kind of budget or time available. Nonetheless, “Chiller” turned out to be a quite nice sci-fi superhero story in which the conceit that various accidents and treatments have rendered star “Captain Scarlet” (Wayne Forester) “virtually indestructible,” the bad guys put him on a train filled with explosives and blow him up. His bosses at Skylab, the name of the good guys’ organization, recover his body but Dr. Gold (head medico at Skylab’s base) examines him and declares that the damage done to his body has been so extensive even Scarlet’s vaunted invulnerability can’t keep him alive from this one. Meanwhile, Captain Black (Nigel Paskett), head of the Mysterons (nearly all the major recurring characters in this series are named after colors — about the only one who isn’t is Scarlet’s partner and love interest, Destiny Angel, voiced by Emma Tate), has hired a Skylab engineer named Xander Story (voiced by Jeremy Hitchen, though an imdb.com “Trivia” poster claims they based the character on actor Steve Buscemi) to plant a bomb that will blow up Skylab headquarters. Story has been bribed to do this with a briefcase full of uncut diamonds, but Scarlet tries to warn him that the Mysterons will kill him as soon as he does their dirty work and Skylab blows up. Unfortunately Scarlet can’t communicate with anybody because, though he actually survived the explosion in a train, somehow his spirit separated from his body and he’s wandering around Skylab like a ghost, aware of the danger facing the base but unable to communicate a warning about it. The show was intelligently written for a 21-minute animated TV show aimed at kids, the perils were reasonably well depicted, Story drawn as an appealingly ambiguous character and the characters were drawn well enough they actually looked genuinely sexy. 

Indeed, Captain Scarlet was considerably more entertaining than Starship Troopers: Traitor on Mars, the fifth in a series of films based on Heinlein’s fascistic future in which only military veterans are allowed to vote — though I suspect the most important innovations in the original story are the uses of the terms “starship” (instead of “spaceship”) and “Federation” that were later copied by Gene Roddenberry in the prospectus for Star Trek. I’d never read Starship Troopers, nor have I seen the Verhoeven film from 1997, but this rather sorry movie tells me all I need to know about the franchise: it’s based on a small unit of, well, starship troopers headed by Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien, who played the character “live” in the Verhoeven film and continued to supply the voice for the computer-animated sequelae), whose eyepatch and forbidding mien makes it seem like Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., walked over from the Marvel universe and took a place in this one. What’s numbing about Starship Troopers: Traitor on Mars is that it’s simply a transposition of the usual clichés of the war movie into science fiction; the plot is little more than a pretext for battle footage, in most of which Rico and his men (and one woman, his sort-of girlfriend Dizzy Flores, voiced by Dina Meyer) shoot down Bugs en masse because the Bugs, like John Ford’s Indians or Peter Jackson’s Orcs, conveniently nullify the seemingly unsurpassable advantage of outnumbering the good guys tens or even hundreds to one by charging in a straight line and getting themselves mowed down by the Starship Troopers’ guns, some of which are armed with nuclear weapons even though these don’t seem to do any lasting damage to the good guys. 

To the extent this film has a plot, the principal (human) villainess is Amy Snapp (Evelyn Nieves), the ruler of the Federation — or at least that section of it encompassing the solar system that contains both Earth and Mars. One wonders, given the film’s 2017 copyright date, if writer Edward Neumeier was intending this character as a satire of both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump: she’s a vainglorious woman who is obsessed with her approval rating in the polls and follows this minute-by-minute. She’s also secretly introduced Bugs into the human colony on Mars after the Martians threatened to revolt against Federation rule and demand independence. Her idea is that if she can “sell” the leadership of the Federation on allowing her to blow up Mars and kill everybody on it, human colonists as well as Bugs, she can set an example that will deter any other planet from attempting to rebel. The story’s Good Woman to Amy’s Bad Woman is Carmen Ibanez (Luci Christian), who’s a starship captain in her own right and who’s in love with secret-service agent Carl Jenkins (Justin Doran), who communicates telepathically and comes off like a screaming queen. Unfortunately, Amy has set Carl up to be the fall guy for her schemes and wants to make him look like the traitor. Amy’s willingness to destroy all of Mars, including its population of human colonists, to further her own ambitions comes off in 2018 as decidedly Trumpian, though of course it’s forestalled as Rico’s unit manages to kill off hundreds of Bugs swarming Mars and ultimately commits genocide against the entire Bug population by sabotaging the machines that remodel Mars’s atmosphere to the high oxygen content of Earth’s. The fact that this would also kill Mars’s human population because people can’t breathe the unaltered Martian atmosphere — and therefore the good guys are doing the same thing they’ve criticized the bad guys for doing — is a complication that goes ignored in Neumeier’s script; instead all the Bugs on Mars die, the humans are saved, Rico (who in the original Heinlein novel was a private who gradually rose through the ranks) gets promoted from colonel to general, and the human race is saved from the giant crawling things. 

Incidentally it’s hard to figure out just what the giant crawling things are supposed to be: the name “Arachnid” would suggest spiders, which have eight legs, while ordinary insects have six, but the creatures in the movie just have four, probably to make the task of animating them easier. Alas, otherwise they just look like giant, upright-walking grasshoppers or mantises, and the only real sense of menace surrounding them (aside from one scene, better than most of the rest of the film, in which Casper Van Dien has to attack and kill a Bug in hand-to-hand combat, armed only with a knife, to ward off its scythe-like claws and stab it to death, which of course he does) is their sheer number. There’s not even the half-assed attempt Orson Scott Card made in the Ender cycle (which clearly owed a lot to Starship Troopers as well as to Star Wars) to give us some idea of What Made the Formics Run; instead the Bugs are simply pests, much like real-world insects, just scaled up. Though Starship Troopers: Traitor on Mars is undoubtedly many generations removed from Heinlein’s involvement, the morals inherent in the original book (from what I’ve read about it) are carried over even this far into the cycle: war is inevitable, militarism is good, a population that never has to fight goes into moral atrophy and dooms itself. That’s certainly far removed from how I think about the world and humanity’s role in it, but it’s likely Robert Heinlein made a better case for it than Neumeier did — it seemed all Neumeier did was take the clichés of the buddy-buddy combat movie and move them from Earth to Mars. The film credits two directors, Shinji Aramuki and Matsaru Masumoto, but just because you hire two Japanese to direct your computer-animated sci-fi film doth not make it animé!

Elton John: I’m Still Standing (National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, CBS-TV, aired April 10, 2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched a quite interesting program on CBS-TV, one of the series of “Grammy specials” paying tribute to great songwriters of our time — in this case, the team of Elton John and Bernie Taupin. Sir Elton was front and center in the audience, with Taupin on one side of him looking rather sour and Elton’s husband, documentary filmmaker David Furnish, on the other. I can recall how Elton John’s career disintegrated in the late 1970’s when he came out as Bisexual, and he had to marry a woman (his sound engineer, Renate Mueller), to start selling records again — though in the middle of this he sneaked out on a non-LP single, “Ego” (a song he wrote with Taupin before briefly working with other lyricists like Gary Osborne and fellow Gay rocker Tom Robinson), a B-side called “Flinstone Boy” that’s one of his best songs, that is not only openly about Gay men but is one of Elton’s few personal statements since it’s one song he wrote entirely by himself, words as well as music. I give the producers of this show credit for including at least some of Elton John’s more obscure material as well as his greatest hits, though I wish the modern-day Gay rocker Sam Smith had done “Flinstone Boy” (aside from Elton’s courage in putting it out in the late 1970’s, it’s also one of his greatest songs) instead of the rather sappy hit “Daniel.” The show opened with what turned out to be its best number, Miley Cyrus dressed in a frilly top and a pair of ultra-tight shorts that made her look like a Sunset Boulevard hooker, belting out “The Bitch Is Back” — and while the song takes on a quite different affect when sung by a woman, it’s still a great piece of material and Miley Cyrus sang it in all-out soul style: who knew Miley Cyrus, of all people, had one of the great white soul voices? After that Ed Sheeran (who said Elton John arranged for his first Grammy Awards appearance, when he was so terra incognita to me I thought his last name was “Shearing” and that he might be a relation to the blind jazz pianist George Shearing) did “Candle in the Wind” — the Marilyn, not the Diana, version — and did it way too fast: Elton John mouthed the words from the audience (not for the last time on this show, either!) and I wondered how he kept up with Sheeran’s rush through the song, so different from the poignant slow tempo Elton himself used. After that Sam Smith came out and before he sang “Daniel” praised Elton for blazing the trail for openly Gay music artists, and then Hailee Steinfeld introduced Alessia Cara’s version of “I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues.” I love Alessia Cara — I think she’s one of the great modern singers — and she poured her heart into this song even though she wasn’t quite at the level of Miley Cyrus.

Then Lady Gaga came out and did “Your Song,” Elton’s star-making hit and one of the sappiest things he ever did, though she did it in a feathered costume and at the end put on a big pair of sunglasses that outdid the ones Elton himself was wearing in the audience. The next song was “Rocket Man,” performed by Little Big Town, who sang well enough but whose arrangement simply didn’t have the scope of Paul Buckmaster’s on Elton’s original record. (I recalled to Charles that because of the sequence in which they were released in the U.S., a lot of people thought David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” was a ripoff of “Rocket Man” when Bowie’s song was actually two years older — and the similarity between the two was heightened because Paul Buckmaster had done the string arrangement for Bowie’s, too.) After that came one of the evening’s downers, pianist Valerie Simpson accompanying someone whose name I didn’t catch in time — he’s from the Hamilton cast and his name, I think, is Chris — reading the lyrics to “Border Song (Holy Moses)” the way Steve Allen used to read rock lyrics on his show to make fun of them. “Border Song” is one of Elton’s most powerful early hits and it deserved a full-out soul treatment — Aretha Franklin covered it shortly after Elton’s version came out and it needed either her or someone in that style (like Jill Scott or Jennifer Hudson), after which Shawn Mendes and Sza (the improbably named young Black singer — the name is pronounced “Sizzah” — who seems to be channeling Sade; like Sade, she has a warm, romantic voice and a good sense of phrasing, but she’s also dull) duetted on “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.” Charles told me that Shawn Mendes is a crush object of a lot of the Gay men on his Twitter feed, though I find him blankly pretty — frankly Sam Smith is a lot sexier — and not that great a singer either.

After that one of my favorite current singers, Maren Morris, did an Elton John-Bernie Taupin song I’d never heard before, “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters,” inspired by Taupin’s first trip to New York — it’s a great song and Morris belted it out with some of the fervor of her own star-making hit, “My Church.” Charles noted how petite she was — “even in high heels, she looks about 4’ 7”!” he exclaimed — though I liked the way Morris was dressed, in a grey top that showed off one shoulder and full-length black pants. Unlike most of the young women singers on this show, she managed to make herself attractive without looking like a hooker! Then Chris Martin of Coldplay came out and did another song I didn’t know, “We All Fall in Love Sometimes,” which was beautiful and moving in the first chorus when it was just Martin singing and playing piano but got leaden and pretentious when a string section came in later. Afterwards there was another one of those dismal “readings,” with Gail King reciting the lyrics to “Someone Saved My Life Tonight” (one verse, anyway) while someone named Ryan Secombe sawed away at a cello behind her. Then Miranda Lambert came out and did one of the songs from Elton John’s third album, the country-themed Tumbleweed Connection, “My Father’s Gun” — though it has some good material, this album is almost camp in its utter misunderstanding of country music and Southern culture, and Lambert phrased the song beautifully and somehow managed to sing it “straight” despite how silly it really is. (It also seemed an inappropriate choice of material after the Parkland, Florida high school shooting; I’d frankly have rather heard Lambert sing a song about how the melted down her father’s gun and turned it into a plowshare!)

Then Kesha did “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” — it’s great to see she still has a career, though given her much-publicized complaint that her record producer sexually assaulted her, and her refusal to record for him again led to a three-year hiatus in her career, it fascinated me that the song they gave her to sing was one about leaving fame and fortune behind and going back to the country! Then there came another bit of bathos — Neil Patrick Harris reading the letter Elton John wrote to Ryan White on the 20^th anniversary of White’s death, crediting White with inspiring him to get off alcohol and drugs and wishing White had lasted long enough to take advantage of the advances in AIDS treatment — and John Legend did “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” in what was the best performance of the night by a male singer. It helped that the song suited him a lot better than the last material I’d seen him do on TV, the songs Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice wrote for the title character in Jesus Christ Superstar. The show closed, as these things usually do, with Elton John himself taking the stage, which I was actually somewhat dreading after his awful duet on “Tiny Dancer” with Miley Cyrus on the last Grammy Awards telecast. Fortunately he picked three songs — “Bennie and the Jets,” “Philadelphia Freedom” and the inevitable closer with the full cast, “I’m Still Standing” — that he could sing with the voice he has left; certainly one missed (and mentally supplied) the falsetto effects from the original records, but he could still do these in full-bodied renditions instead of picking a song so high his voice would just crack all over the place. Indeed, I thought “Philadelphia Freedom” came off better last night than it did on the record, made during the first flush of Disco Fever in 1976; the arrangement sounded sparer and the song’s eloquence came through more strongly.

If the intent of the Grammy tribute to Elton John was to establish him and Bernie Taupin as a great songwriting team on the order of Gilbert and Sullivan, George and Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers both with Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein II, and John Lennon and Paul McCartney (and without the bitterness that ultimately broke up Gilbert and Sullivan, Rodgers and Hart, and Lennon and McCartney — Taupin boasted during the show that in the nearly 50 years they’ve worked together they haven’t had a single argument, though part of that may be due to their arm’s-length relationship: through most of their partnership Taupin has written lyrics, then mailed them to Elton, who set them without Taupin’s involvement after that), it succeeded: as I noted after the last Grammy Awards, I think Elton John’s success has come mainly from the high quality of the songs, and his voice, though not “great,” has been a serviceable means of delivering them. The producers seem to have deliberately avoided bringing any of the survivors of Elton John’s generation onto the program and instead culled their talent list from younger performers, which made the point that these songs are going to make it into the standard repertoire and they can encompass a wide range of interpretations. There were surprisingly few of the miscalculations that often arise in tributes like this — Ed Sheeran rushing “Candle in the Wind” was about the only case of a singer on this program thoroughly misunderstanding the song — and overall the evening was a delight even though it underscored just how gynocentric the pop-music scene has become: in terms of sheer power and soul, the women on this show soared far above the men!

Twin Betrayal (Formula Features, Lifetime, 2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I watched last night’s Lifetime movie, Twin Betrayal, apparently originally shot under the working title The Duplicate and featuring a tour de force performance by soap-opera star Jen Lilley. She plays twin sisters Jessica Klint and Alexandra Burks — “Klint” is her married name and her husband is a tall, striking-looking and very stuck-up attorney named Lars (Peter Douglas) whom she’s in the process of divorcing and fighting for the custody of their son Danny (Dashiell McGahn-Schletter) —who in the opening scene shows up, as part of her job, in Dallas for a convention of insurance agents. The night before the conference, she shows up and finds that her hotel reservation has been canceled, but a tall, striking-looking man named Harry Gordon (Nick Ballard) offers to help her get a room, then takes her to dinner, then a bar, and finally to his room for sex. The suddenness of his appearance, the tacky “Southern” accent Gordon assumes in his role as a Texan, and Nick Ballard’s gorgeous bod — which we get to see a lot of in a nice soft-core porn scene — all combine to let us know he’s up to no good with Jessica, and the only suspense writer Naomi L. Selfman and director Nadeem Soumah (a name we’ve seen on Lifetime movies before) leave us with is will Jessica’s seeming white knight reveal himself as a rotter in the first act or will we have to wait a couple of commercial breaks before the big reveal. It turns out he shows himself right away: the morning after they’ve made love (and she’s allowed him to tie her up and feed her a pill during their encounter) he reveals that he filmed the whole encounter because he was hired by her husband to get her into a compromising position. (We already had an intimation this was happening because while he was filming their soft-core porn scene director Soumah periodically cut away to shots of the mirror in the room, behind which he had concealed his camera.) Gordon is willing to sell Jessica the video (which is on a flash drive, this being 2018) for $70,000 and double-cross her husband, but she doesn’t have that kind of money. Her father does, but when she asks him to help her, he gives her a cutting lecture and sends her away empty-handed and with a threat to write her out of his will the way he’s already written out her sister. 

Desperate, Jessica comes to her sister, and Alexandra — or “Allie,” as she’s called rather disconcertingly throughout the movie — says she’ll get rid of Gordon for her if Jessica will do her a favor in exchange. They set up a meeting with Gordon at which they both show up and leave him terminally confused as to which woman he seduced and secretly filmed, and they record him incriminating himself in blackmail, thereby getting him to back off. Then Allie recruits Jessica for a complicated scheme to go to Mexico, meet someone in a cantina and exchange hats with him — Jessica worries that she’s being recruited to smuggle something but the real plot is for Allie to murder their father, with Gordon’s help, and frame Jessica for the crime since Jessica’s little Mexican excursion under Allie’s name and with Allie’s identity documents will give Allie an alibi and leave Jessica without one. Jessica ends up being arrested and held without bail for their father’s murder — with him out of the way she’s inherited $10 million, though it will go to Allie in case Jessica is convicted — and the only friends she has are a workplace acquaintance named Madeline Walters (Yasmine Aker) and a police detective named Sikes (Jason Olive), a relatively light-skinned African-American who’s cute enough we wonder if he’s part of Allie’s scheme. Of course, since Lars is good-looking we assume he, too, is part of Allie’s plot, and indeed he is: the two hired Gordon together (though we’ve had intimations along the way that Allie has used Gordon as yet another of her boy-toys) and Lars takes Jessica’s case (he’s an attorney, remember?) but destroys the key piece of exculpatory evidence, yet another secret tape which Jessica entrusted to Maddie. (There’s a grimly funny sequence in which Lars visits Jessica in prison and brings her what’s supposed to be the tape but turns out to have an opera singer’s voice on it.) Lars also briefly convinces Jessica that Maddie double-crossed her and is Allie’s co-conspirator, but in the end Jessica and detective Sikes get it all figured out, Jessica is freed and Allie and Lars are arrested — only a final tag scene I could have done without leaves us with the intimation that once again Allie has outsmarted everyone and that she impersonated Jessica and got out while still leaving Jessica to pay for Allie’s crimes.  

Twin Betrayal is Lifetime at its most frustrating: the basic premise is a good one (even though we’ve seen it before — the good twin-bad twin stuff from Bette Davis’s 1948 vehicle A Stolen Life and the blackmail from another Davis film, The Letter, and the innocent-woman-framed-for-murder-by-her-husband from Dial “M” for Murder and its progeny) and the scenes in which Jessica and Allie both appear on screen, done with digital technology that eliminates the need for the split screens and doubles A Stolen Life’s director, Curtis Bernhardt, had to use, are utterly convincing and stunning. But Selfman’s plot is just too complicated, with so many reversals I couldn’t help but wonder if “Naomi L. Selfman” is an alias for Tony Gilroy and so many curveballs thrown at the audience we begin to wonder after a while just who is doing what to whom, and why. This is also a typical modern movie in that there’s no one in it we really like — Jessica is too naïve and stupid to be a heroine we can identify with, and it seems like everyone else in her life is part of the plot to destroy her — and so, despite some nice bits of male flesh and a good performance by Jen Lilley in the leads (she makes some subtle distinctions between the two characters but doesn’t overdo it the way Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland did in similar dual roles), Twin Betrayal comes off as just another chip off the old Lifetime block.

Evil Doctor (Nasser Productions, Folding Box Productions, Lifetime,2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s Lifetime movie was billed as a “premiere” (though its imdb.com page lists a release date of January 18, 2018) of something called Evil Doctor, which had looked more promising in Lifetime’s promos than it turned out to be. It had a weirdly assorted set of credits that seemed to indicate some (East) Indian involvement in this production — though, alas, it did not end with a big musical production number the way Bollywood productions tend to even if they’re otherwise not musicals — including a producer billed only as “Dureyshevar” and a “supervising post producer’ named Jainardhain Sathvan, along with three people named Nasser (“Nasser Productions, Inc.” was listed as the producing studio on the opening credits, though imdb.com credits someone or something called “Folding Box Films”!). Evil Doctor was directed by Brian Skiba from a script by Robert Foulkes and Jennifer Goldson, and judging from the results it seems as if Foulkes and Goldson deliberately set out to take every Lifetime cliché they could think of and ratchet it up from a starting point at 11 to between 15 and 20. 

The titular “evil doctor” is a woman OB/GYN specialist, Dr. Natalie Bornsen (Dina Meyer), and the story begins with a confusing flashback in which almost as soon as baby Natalie is born, she’s kidnapped by a motorcycle-riding lowlife and his girlfriend, who steal her from her real parents and raise her as their own — until about eight years later, when her real parents find her and the man who kidnapped her is shot and killed in a scuffle with the police. (The costume department cladded Ellison Ashton-Ita, who played the eight-year-old Natalie, in a pair of skin-tight white pants that seemed awfully sexy for someone playing an eight-year-old, as if they wanted to induce fantasies in all the straight male pedophiles out there.) It turns out she was better off with her abductor than her real parents: though they were considerably more affluent than the trailer-park trash who made off with her, they were even more immoral: dad molested Natalie regularly and mom spent all her time too stoned on crack to notice or care. Of course we don’t learn all this until much later in the film: the prologue showing little Natalie being kidnapped cuts to a title reading “Present Day,” and in the present day Matt Lewis (Corin Nemec, considerably more butch and appealing than the usual tall, lanky, sandy-haired guys who play husbands on Lifetime), who’s making good money as the creator and show runner for a TV sitcom called Family Phun (that’s the way the title is spelled on the logo, which will give you an idea of the level of “humor,” if I may use the term for courtesy, contained in the show itself) and his wife Aubrey (Jen Lewis) are expecting their first child. Aubrey is really anxious about the pregnancy because, like so many mothers-to-be on Lifetime who end up in the clutches of crazy pediatricians/nurses/midwives/surrogates/whatever, she’s already been pregnant but lost the child in a miscarriage. 

They’ve already got an obstetrician/gynecologist lined up, Dr. Flickman (Rico Simonni), but Megan (Terrah Bennett Smith), a Black woman who works on Family Phun with Matt, recommends Dr. Natalie Bornsen to them instead. Accordingly the Lewises transfer the case to Dr. Bornsen — who we see casting lascivious eyes at both Lewises (one added quirk Foulkes and Goldson put into the Lifetime formula this time around is that the villainess is Bisexual) though the Lewises, of course, remain oblivious — and everything goes well until one night Matt gets horny and decides to have sex with his wife. Since she’s already pregnant, he doesn’t have to worry about that, but in the morning she notices blood on her sheets and calls Dr. Bornsen about it. The not-so-good doctor tells her she has an unnaturally short cervix and any further stress on it, including sexual activity, is just going to make it even shorter and run the risk of inducing another miscarriage. So she orders Aubrey to stay in bed 24/7 (she can get up and move around the house for half-hour stretches at a time, and she can use the bathroom normally instead of having to rely on a bedpan, but that’s the extent of her “freedom”) and avoid anything that might stress her or her body out. Of course, it’s all B.S.: Natalie’s real plan is to stalk Matt while at the same time inducing such a state of sexual frustration in him that he’ll yield to her seduction when she’s ready to make her move. Until then she’s a typically solicitous Lifetime villainess, even giving the Lewises a little electronic object to put in their bedroom — which anyone who’s seen more than about three Lifetime movies will know really contains a bug that monitors the activity in their bedroom (such as it is) and allows Bornsen to look in on them from her laptop at her home. 

Bornsen also keeps a rattlesnake in a glass cage in her bedroom, and remembering Anton Chekhov’s rule of dramatic construction that if you introduce a pistol during Act I you have to have it go off in Act III, I assumed the writers were leading us up to a big action climax at Bornsen’s home in which the rattlesnake would escape and take her out à la another murderous physician in literature, Dr. Grimesby Roylott in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Speckled Band.” No such luck, though; the only time the rattlesnake makes another appearance is when Matt Lewis finally does get seduced into Dr. Bornsen’s bed, then falls asleep and wakes up in the morning, realizes he hasn’t been home and he has to throw on yesterday’s clothes and make a quick getaway, and in a later encounter at her home (where he’d gone to break things off) he finds that the snake is menacing him so he can’t leave out the normal door to the second-floor bedroom but has to escape out the window, climb down as best he can and risk injuring himself on the jump when he finally lets go and lands on the ground below. (The fact that Natalie has had a confrontation with him and shot him up with a narcotic doesn’t help — even though the drug merely makes him sluggish and doesn’t incapacitate him, probably because she was jabbing him with the needle wherever she could and didn’t get it into a vein or muscle — enabling him, after she’s stolen his car, to steal hers, since it’s a convertible and she has conveniently left the keys in it.) Like a lot of Lifetime villains of both (mainstream) genders before her, Dr. Bornsen seems reasonably capable at the beginning but becomes more floridly evil as the story progresses (in the manner of a disease). When an older woman spies her and Matt making out in a parking lot, she turns out to be Dr. Bornsen’s biological mother, whom she’s been paying off to keep her quiet about her background, and later on she shows up at the motel where mom is staying (mom has conveniently not only told her the location but let her know how long she’ll be staying there and even given her the plastic card that passes for a room key these days), drowns mom in the bathtub and then hangs her body to make the scene look like a suicide. 

Later she ends up naked in her own bathtub with Violet, who has some sort of involvement with Family Phun — for which Natalie has offered herself as a consultant, suggesting a story arc in which the series’ leading woman gets pregnant, has all sorts of hilarious complications, and finally ends up on the operating table with a complicated birth in which her attending physician has to decide whether to save the mom or the baby (“and of course she saves the baby,” she says with a mad twinkle that gives away her own future plans), which of course the studio rejects as not a suitable season-ending episode for a comedy. Natalie and Violet are going at each other with a feverish intensity — Evil Doctor had already had two quite hot soft-core straight porn scene and now we were getting one between two women — when Violet innocently asks if Natalie has ever wanted children. “I can’t have children,” she snaps, and then really snaps when Violet keeps pushing the point and Natalie responds by showing her the secret video she made of her and Matt having sex. Then Natalie draws a gun on Violet and shoots her in the bathtub. (Don’t ever get in a bathtub near or around this woman!) One finds oneself asking, “Just how is she going to fake this one to make it look like suicide?” By the time the movie speeds to the inevitable action close it’s become apparent that Natalie seized on Matt as her paramour because he looked like her late father — not her real one, but the guy who kidnapped her and raised her the first eight years until the cops blew him away — and her plan is a real-life version of the one she outlined for Matt’s sitcom: kill Aubrey on the operating table, claim she had to do so to save the baby, and end up as Matt’s wife and the baby’s mom. The one person standing in her way in all of this is Aubrey’s sister Vicky (Lindsay Hartley), who never liked Matt (though the hint is that way back when she had a crush on him and was pissed when he ended up marrying her sister instead), who discovers Matt’s affair with Natalie and who convinces Aubrey to fire Natalie as her doctor and have Dr. Flickman (Anna Russell moment: “Ya remember Dr. Flickman?”) deliver her baby instead. 

Only Aubrey’s water breaks while she and her sister are still at home, Vicky rushes her to the hospital as an emergency patient, and Natalie grabs a tire iron and wallops both Vicky and Flickman, knocking them out, so she can take over delivery of Aubrey’s baby (a girl — the Lewises hadn’t wanted to know in advance because they had expected a son last time, and even named him Theodore, and they decided this time around that advance knowledge of the baby’s gender would jinx them) and then steal the child. She and Matt confront each other on the roof, she’s about to make her way down the fire escape with the baby, we get some nice insert shots of a part of the fire escape with a missing bolt on it — a good bit of suspense editing from director Skiba, who’s otherwise pretty much been on autopilot as Dina Meyer not only chewed the scenery but swallowed it whole and then vomited it out again. Matt pretends to be willing to run off with her in order to get the baby out of her clutches, and no sooner has Natalie handed the baby over than the fire escape gives way and she falls to her death. The final scene is a bit off the Lifetime norm in that Aubrey and her sister Vicky seem to have decided to raise the baby by themselves; Matt comes by rather sheepishly to see his daughter, and instead of forgiving him and taking him back into the family, Aubrey basically tells him off and makes clear to him it’s going to take her a long time, if ever, before she can forgive him for having that affair. Evil Doctor is a peculiar movie that takes all the Lifetime clichés and ramps them up so extensively it achieves a sort of bizarre neo-camp entertainment value: you wonder what direction the story is going to go in next, and even when it takes a predictable turn you still are astonished at the white-hot level of intensity with which writers Foulkes and Goldson and director Skiba are throwing the time-tested Lifetime clichés at you.

Darkest Hour (Perfect World Pictures, Working Title Films, Focus Features, Universal, 2017)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Charles and I watched a quite good movie about the challenge to stop tyranny and the unlikely alliances sometimes needed to pull it off: Darkest Hour, the 2017 film directed by Joe Wright from a script by Anthony McCarten (both people I’d never heard of before) about the first month (May 1940) during which Winston Churchill was Prime Minister of Great Britain. It has its flaws, goodness knows: as Charles pointed out, it’s totally an expression of the “great man” view of history, and it’s so claustrophobic it hardly ever gets out of the environs of Churchill’s home (the ancestral estate he shared with his long-suffering wife Cissie) and the British government headquarters at No. 10 Downing Street, which at least as depicted in this film is little more than an entryway to an elaborate series of tunnels and underground rooms where the British government actually organized itself and from which it led the war effort. Indeed, McCarten’s script is so confined to rooms one could readily imagine it being presented on stage as a play — only a handful of insert shots of planes flying overhead and the famous flotilla of private boats Churchill requisitioned from their owners to get the British troops off the beach at Dunkirk, France before the invading Germans massacred and/or captured them give us any visual evidence of a war actually going on instead of merely being talked about. But it’s also a tour de force for Gary Oldman, who played Churchill and deservedly won both the Academy Award and the Golden Globe for his performance. When this film came out The New Yorker ran an interesting review which compared Oldman to every other person who’s ever appeared on screen as Winston Churchill — including Churchill himself in surviving newsreels — and suggested there are patterns in how various actors (and writers and directors) portray Churchill in light of our current ideas and feelings about World War II. The main conflict in Darkest Hour is between Churchill and Lord Halifax (Stephen Dillane), who had been Britain’s foreign minister before the war and had kept British foreign policy so carefully balanced between appeasement and some attempt at resistance to the Nazis that cartoonist David Low once drew him as a tightrope walker carrying a balance pole labeled the “Halifaxis.” Halifax is working with the former — and fatally ill (with cancer) — prime minister, Neville Chamberlain to bring down Churchill’s government almost as soon as it is formed and to accept the invitation of Italy’s fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, to broker a peace deal between Britain and Nazi Germany. Churchill, of course, is totally opposed to this; he is convinced that the only way to save Britain is to fight on, to the death if necessary — though the real Churchill was well aware that Britain on its own was doomed and the key to its survival was to get the United States into the war on the Allied side. 

Indeed (and my primary source for this is Churchill himself — I’ve read the first two volumes of his six-book history of World War II, the second of which, Their Finest Hour, covers the period dramatized in this film), Churchill and U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt carried on a secret correspondence, each signing their letters “Former Naval Person” (a reference to the fact that during World War I Churchill had been First Lord of the Admiralty and Roosevelt Assistant Secretary of the Navy), plotting ways to get the U.S. into the war despite the obstacles of the Neutrality Act and other roadblocks the isolationist majority in the U.S. Congress had thrown up to keep America out of it. In the film there’s a preposterous conversation between Churchill and Roosevelt — Roosevelt is never seen in the film but his phone voice is supplied by actor David Strathairn — in which Churchill pleads for old ships and also for planes the British have already paid for, albeit with money the U.S. lent them, and Roosevelt says he can’t send a carrier across the Atlantic to deliver the planes but he can ship them to within one mile of the Canadian border and the Brits can use horses to pull them the rest of the way into Canada, from which they can be sent to Britain legally. I suspect that story is apocryphal — just as I strongly suspect writer McCarten cherry-picked the actual historical events for incidents that would fit into a standard Hollywood-style “story arc” and give Churchill a stirring come-from-behind victory over the plotting of Chamberlain and Halifax with a big speech to the House of Commons. In fact on June 1, just days after the story told in Darkest Hour ended, Roosevelt defied the Neutrality Act and issued an executive order to cut the so-called “destroyers-for-bases” deal by which the British got 50 overage U.S. destroyers to bolster their coastal defenses in exchange for 99-year U.S. leases on British land in Newfoundland and the Caribbean. So the British got the old ships Churchill is seen asking for in the film and also was able to call some of the troops that had been defending the Caribbean home to fight the real threat if and when Nazi Germany used newly conquered France to launch an invasion of Britain. 

Much of the commentary on Darkest Hour on imdb.com is less about the film itself than about Churchill’s historical record and whether he deserves the hagiographic treatment McCarten and Wright gave him; some of the anti-Churchill arguments were made at the time and are in the film, notably the catastrophic loss in the sea battle of Gallipoli in the Dardanelles, a major defeat for Britain against Ottoman Turkey (an ally of Germany and Austro-Hungary) in World War I that cost Churchill his position as First Lord of the Admiralty then — in Darkest Hour he’s heard blaming the loss on the Navy, who dithered and thereby cost the operation the crucial element of surprise. Others have come out since, including Churchill’s determination to keep Britain’s colonial empire in general and India in particular; according to one “Trivia” poster, Churchill was as vehement in his denunciations of Mahatma Gandhi as he was in his denunciations of Hitler, at one point going so far as to say it was a pity the South Africans hadn’t executed Gandhi back in the 1890’s when they first arrested him. Indeed, it occurred to me during the film that there were some striking similarities between Winston Churchill and Donald Trump: at one point there’s a dialogue exchange between Churchill and King George VI in which the king says, “One never knows what’s going to come out of your mouth next. Something that’ll flatter, something that’ll wound.” Churchill replies by doing something rather un-Trumpian and acknowledging the criticism: “My emotions are unbridled. A wildness. In the blood. I share with my father. And my mother also. We lack the gift of temperance.” But it’s clear that one of the things that put the Conservative politicians trying to choose whether to offer the prime ministership to Churchill or Halifax was Churchill’s explosive utterances and his sheer unpredictability, both qualities he shares with Trump. 

Another “Trivia” poster said that Churchill was never that popular with the British electorate; this person argued that had there been a general election in Britain during the war (as there was in the U.S. in 1944), Churchill would have lost — just as he actually did lose in the first election held after Nazi Germany’s surrender in 1945, in which his Conservative Party was beaten by the Labour Party headed by Clement Attlee (whom Churchill describes in Darkest Hour as “a sheep in sheep’s clothing). Churchill did regain the prime ministership in 1951 but, according to this “Trivia” poster, the Conservatives actually had a minority of the votes in that election but won the legislative majority that gives a party power in the U.K. because the districts were apportioned so the Conservatives won the majority even though Labour actually increased its vote total over 1945. That should be a good lesson for people in this country who think the Democrats are going to regain control of the U.S. House of Representatives in this year’s mid-term elections: thanks to their overwhelming control of state legislatures and the increasing use of sophisticated computer programs to draw legislative districts that virtually ensure the ability of the current majority party in most states, the Republicans, to keep that status, the Brennan Center for Justice, https://www.brennancenter.org/publication/extreme-gerrymandering-2018-midterm, estimates that the Democrats will have to win the popular vote for House seats by between 6 and 11 percent just to have a chance at a majority. “Because of maps designed to favor Republicans, Democrats would need to win by a nearly unprecedented nationwide margin in 2018 to gain control of the House of Representatives,” the Brennan Center authors write in the executive summary of their report. “To attain a bare majority, Democrats would likely have to win the national popular vote by nearly 11 points. Neither Democrats nor Republicans have won by such an overwhelming margin in decades. Even a strong blue wave would crash against a wall of gerrymandered maps.” 

In one sense Darkest Hour is a “print-the-legend” version of history, the one that says it was Winston Churchill who single-handedly rallied the British people around what seemed like a lost cause and lit a fire under them that inspired them first to get their people off Dunkirk, then to fight back in the air as their major cities were punished by German raids, and finally to fight on in the various theatres of the war until total victory was achieved in 1945. But within those limits — the hagiographical mythologization of Churchill as a sort of secular superhero; the cherry-picking of historical events to support the Churchill myth; and the oddly claustrophobic aspect of the movie (for much of it we never seem to get out of that rabbit warren of tunnels supposedly built under No. 10 Downing Street from which Churchill and his cabinet actually ran Britain’s war effort) — one imdb.com “Trivia” poster said that was due to the fact that the schedules for the actors they wanted forced them to shoot in the dead of winter even though the events of the film took place in May 1940, and therefore McCarten had virtually the entire movie take place indoors, but it certainly seemed like an aesthetic choice to me, and Wright responded to McCarten’s claustrophobic script with so many overhead shots I joked early on, “If Busby Berkeley had made a movie about the British government during World War II, this is what it would have looked like” — Darkest Hour is superb, well acted not only by Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas as his long-suffering wife (with a quite nice supporting part for Lily James as Churchill’s put-upon secretary, Elizabeth Layton) but the typical excellent cast of British actors — is it their DNA, something in their water, or just the tradition with which they are trained, that makes British actors consistently the greatest in the world? It’s a worthwhile movie but it’s also piqued my desire to see Dunkirk, also made in 2017 and also about the same crisis period in the British war effort in World War II, but apparently much more focused on the actual battle and the campaign to evacuate the British soldiers stranded on the French beachhead. I haven’t seen a DVD or Blu-Ray available for Dunkirk yet but the clips I’ve seen on various TV shows indicate it would be an excellent companion piece to Darkest Hour.

Jesus Christ Superstar Live on Broadway (Sony Pictures Television, Universal Television, Storyline Entertainment, Marc Platt Productions; “Live" on NBC-TV, April 1, 2018)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I put on NBC for a TV show both Charles and I had been interested in seeing: a 2018 “Broadway Live” revival of the Andrew Lloyd Webber-Tim Rice quasl-musical, quasi-opera, quasi-Passion Jesus Christ Superstar. Andrew Lloyd Webber has been in the news a lot lately, mainly because he just published his autobiography, and he was apparently personally involved in this production: the opening credits listed “Orchestrations by Andrew Lloyd Webber” (it’s commonplace in musicals for someone other than the composer to do the orchestrations; when Kurt Weill arrived in the U.S. in 1935 his producers were astonished that he insisted on orchestrating his own songs) and he and Tim Rice, the original librettist, were listed among the many co-producers — I guess they’ve made up after their major falling-out just before Cats, for which Lloyd Webber (like Ralph Vaughan Williams, his last name is two words with no hyphen) seized on a pre-existing text, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, by T. S. Eliot. Jesus Christ Superstar was Lloyd Webber’s second musical (his first, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, was also based on a Bible story) and one which was an explosive success starting in 1969, when the British branch of MCA Records released it as an album. It got mountings both in London and on Broadway, and was turned into a movie in 1973 — I remember my mother and I were in a movie theatre when the trailer for the Jesus Christ Superstar film came on, and when she saw African-American Carl Anderson as Judas, she said, “Oh, no, they didn’t make Judas Black.” Well, this time around they made both Jesus and Judas Black, and made most of the Pharisees Black as well — indeed, this Jesus Christ Superstar, directed by David Leveaux and Alex Rudzinski (I suspect Rudzinski directed the dance portions and Leveaux the “plot” parts), was cast with a cheery indifference to racial realism that’s become common in the last 60 years or so of opera performance, which in a way was nice. 

Jesus was played by John Legend, who was fine in the role’s quieter moments but was a singularly uncharismatic (a word with religious connotations I’m using deliberately here) screen presence — it didn’t help that he appeared with close-cropped hair, as he normally does, instead of the wild Afro worn by the accompanying band’s lead guitarist (who was frequently seen on screen) or Rasta braids that would have looked more credible on a Black actor playing Jesus. When the score called for him to scream Legend came up with a heavy-metal falsetto that was O.K. but didn’t seem to mesh all that well with the rest of his voice. The Judas was Brandon Victor Dixon, a nice hunk of Black muscle-meat who was considerably more powerful, with a stronger stage presence, than his Jesus — but then that’s a problem with the story overall: nobody who’s tackled the Jesus story, from the original Gospel writers since, has really come up with much of an explanation for What Made Jesus Run, and Tim Rice’s libretto falls into the common trap of a lot of stories: the villain is a far more interesting dramatic character than the hero. It also doesn’t help that Jesus Christ Superstar falls into the common trap of the Passion Play generally: it makes the Jewish elders, particularly Caiaphas (another Black actor, Norm Lewis, wearing a costume that makes him look like an S/M dungeon master — indeed, the two men who arrest Jesus in Gethsemane wear leather jackets and hoods which make them look like Caiaphas pulled them out of the middle of a hot scene for the job), far more responsible for the Crucifixion than Pilate (played by a white actor, Ben Daniels, who delivers his lines in the screaming-queen manner of Cyril Ritchard as Captain Hook in the 1960 telecast of the Mary Martin Peter Pan), who’s shown as genuinely doubting and anxious for Jesus to do something, anything, that will give him an excuse to spare him the Cross and at least commute his sentence to life imprisonment if not setting him free altogether. 

O.K., that’s the bad news: the good news is that Jesus Christ Superstar, which I hadn’t seen or heard much of in any form in the last 40 years, holds up as a surprisingly strong piece of material, one of the few Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals that holds up all the way through instead of resolving itself into a few Great Moments in the midst of a lot of sludge. The directors managed to maintain a strong level of energy throughout, even during the rather wimpy numbers featuring Mary Magdalene (Sara Bareilles), and though this was billed as a concert performance it was actually quite extensively staged. Yes, it’s in modern dress (which I don’t have a problem with because the contrast between Biblical and modern times is built into the text), and some of it gets pretty banal (more Tim Rice’s fault than Lloyd Webber’s — “I always thought that I’d be an apostle,” really?), but the production maintained a high energy level throughout and made a good case for Lloyd Webber’s score even though his orchestrations rely almost totally on a rock ensemble and use the strings only as decoration on the ballads. Charles and I both wished for a more concerto grosso approach in which the rock musicians would have been used as a concertante section and a full symphony orchestra as the tutti, but I suspect Lloyd Webber didn’t go that route partly because rock was the popular music of the late 1960’s (it’s long since been replaced by rap and dance-pop at the top of the charts today!) and partly because if he’d made the score more symphonic he’d have run the risk of being invidiously compared to Bach. 

And this production of Jesus Christ Superstar also had a lot of hot young male flesh on stage that was fun to watch for reasons much less exalted than the story: I particularly liked the hot young blond with the Mohawk who actually got one featured number, while Philip Toubus, a.k.a. Paul Thomas, added a cute twink to the mix of Black and white muscle guys as Peter (though I didn’t like the hint that he and Mary Magdalene were going to get together after the Crucifixion — as if the Magdalene was about to revert to her old ways and throw herself at everything with two legs and something between them), though I didn’t like the fact that they cut the “Simon Zealotes” number in which Simon (another Black actor, Larry Marshall) tries to get Jesus to throw anti-Rome political digs into his message and Jesus refuses. There’s one other problem with Jesus Christ Superstar; for some reason Andrew Lloyd Webber didn’t provide Jesus a big closing aria to sing on the cross (I think Paul Simon’s song “Blessed” would work in this context, but Lloyd Webber would probably never give his necessary permission for the interpolation), and in this production they had Jesus speak a rather confused pastiche of the lines from the Gospels before he almost literally beamed up skyward — after Judas, who is shown hanging himself come scritto (we don’t actually see the hanging — a pity, since Alice Cooper, who played Herod, had hanged himself on stage in his early-1970’s shows, wearing a steel magician’s collar — though one night something went wrong and his stagehands noted a thin trickle of blood from his mouth, realized something was “off” and had to get him down in a hurry — but we do see the ladder on which he hoisted himself to the backstage scaffolding fall), returns to life for the closing “Superstar” number which sums up the questioning but not totally irreverent spirit with which Lloyd Webber and Rice approached the story: “Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, who are you, what have you sacrificed/Jesus Christ, superstar, do you think you’re what they say you are?” 

At times Jesus Christ Superstar approaches the critique of the original story by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, who once wrote a whimsical essay saying that Judas was the real son of God since he had to betray Jesus for Him to get crucified and sacrifice his life to redeem the sins of humanity. I found myself quite liking Jesus Christ Superstar this time around — more, I suspect, than I did when it was new (though I did find it strange that the producers cast Alice Cooper, rock legend, in a role in which his only song was a pastiche of 1920’s pop, which they staged as if it were a Cotton Club number), and I’m hardly likely to agree with the Fundamentalists who picketed the show’s Broadway opening in 1971 with signs with legends like “Jesus Christ Superstar SON OF GOD” even though fictions like Nikos Kazantzakis’ The Last Temptation of Christ and Martin Scorsese’s film of it bring us closer to the contradictions of the original material and make the character of Jesus deeper and richer than he is here. At least this was better than the God-awful Easter show Fox put on two years ago, a live event called The Passion that took place in a stadium and the streets of New Orleans and tried to set the Passion Play to a pastiche of pre-existing rock songs; at the time I wrote that I’d rather they use a pre-existing rock-pop setting of the Passion like Jesus Christ Superstar or Stephen Schwartz’s Godspell instead, and this year NBC answered that particular prayer.