Out of the Past (RKO, 1947)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched three movies in a row on Turner Classic Movies, all of which have more or less acquired classic status even though I found all of them flawed, in one way or another, and hardly the stuff of “perfect” moviemaking as at least one of them was advertised by an imdb.com listmaker. The first one was the 1947 film noir Out of the Past, directed by Jacques Tourneur and starring Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer and the young Kirk Douglas (in only his third film), though Mitchum and Greer are billed above the title and Douglas is the first on a miscellaneous cast list below it. The screenplay and the source novel, Build My Gallows High (which was used for the film’s British release and I think is a much better name for the movie than Out of the Past!), are both credited to “Geoffrey Homes” but that’s a pseudonym for Daniel Mainwaring – who would later write the script for Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-Hiker, which I think is a much better movie than Out of the Past, as well as for the first – and by far the best – film of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the first true fusion of science fiction and film noir.

TCM showed this as part of their “Essentials” series featuring host Ben Mankiewicz (whom I’ve previously described as “a nodule off one of Hollywood’s most illustrious family trees”) and modern-day director Brad Bird (whose credits include both Incredibles movies, The Iron Giant, the Pixar film Ratatouille – which I actually quite liked – and Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol) in what are being acclaimed as the greatest movies of all time. They quoted TCM’s “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller as saying Out of the Past is the quintessential film noir – with which I strongly disagree; it’s hard to classify a film as the ultimate noir when so much of it takes place outdoors in daylight, and in spectacular countryside at that (though I still think director Robert Montgomery and screenwriter Steve Fisher made a huge mistake when they filmed Raymond Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake and didn’t include any scenes taking place at the lake, especially since that meant eliminating honest county sheriff Patton, whom Chandler meant as a counterpoint and contrast to the corrupt city cop Degarmo).

Out of the Past is quite a good movie of its type but it also seems to be trying too hard: Mainwaring seemed to be looking for clever wisecracks he could throw into the dialogue whether they advanced either the plot or the characterizations or not; Tourneur seemed more interested in the glorious countryside surrounding Lake Tahoe, where the minions of bad-guy gambler and clubowner Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas) trace fugitive former private detective Jeff Bailey nèe Markham (Robert Mitchum) to find out what happened between him and femme fatale Cathy Moffitt (Jane Greer). Bailey runs a gas station in Bridgeport, a town on the border between California and Nevada in the Lake Tahoe area – in the iconography of a 1930’s or 1940’s movie selling gas is an indication of honest proletarianism and we’re supposed to see it here as Bailey forsaking the noir world for a life of honest if ill-paying work and the love of a decent woman, Ann (Virginia Huston), even though her former boyfriend is jealous of him and figures he’s trying to hide something. He is: years earlier he and a partner were private detectives in New York when Whit hired them to find Cathy, who had just attempted to kill him by firing four rounds with a pistol, only one of which hit. Jeff and his partner naturally wonder just why Whit wants her back – for reconciliation or revenge – but Jeff traces her to Acapulco, only she comes on to him (literally – Tourneur offers plenty of shots of her walking towards him as if the sheer power of her approach will be enough to seduce him) and within a couple of scenes, narrated by Jeff as he drives Ann to his final confrontation with Whit now that he and his minions have come “out of the past” to challenge him, they are lovers and he is in her snare.

Only Jeff’s partner double-crosses him and reports to Whit that they found Cathy so he can get his share of Whit’s reward money, and the scene shifts from Mexico to San Francisco, where Whit tells Jeff he’ll let him off the hook for seducing his girlfriend if he’ll recover some papers he left with a corrupt accountant, Leonard Eels (radio announcer Ken Niles). The MacGuffin is a leather folder full of papers documenting that Whit paid Eels to falsify his tax records so he wouldn’t have to pay his taxes. Only Eels gets killed and Jeff realizes that the killer is framing him as the fall guy for the crime. In a final confrontation Jeff drives Cathy to the showdown with Whit, only during the drive she shoots him and wounds him enough it’s hard for him to make it to the final meeting – and at the end she shoots both Whit and Jeff, while Jeff gets enough bullets out on his own to wound her fatally. I remember when I first watched Out of the Past (at my father’s house in the early 1970’s) I found the movie so dull I turned it off in mid-stream; I’ve watched it at least once since then and it’s one I respect more than I actually like. If forced to pick just one film noir that to me encompasses the genre it would be the 1944 Murder, My Sweet, a much richer and more atmospheric film than this one and with an even better femme fatale, Claire Trevor, than Jane Greer. Greer was a highly talented actress who seemed destined for major stardom when Howard Hughes bought RKO in 1948 and promptly sabotaged Greer’s career when she wouldn’t have sex with him (once again, class, Harvey Weinstein’s sleazy antics were nothing new in the movie business!), and she’s certainly an electrifying screen presence here, while Mitchum – two years after he’d risen from contract player to star in the film The Story of G.I. Joe – is his usual archetypal self, quiet, understated and menacing but also convincing as a basically decent man caught up in the noir underworld.

But for me the acting honors here are taken by Kirk Douglas, who had begun his career as a weak-willed pawn of his ambitious wife (Barbara Stanwyck) in her bid for small-town (and ultimately big-time) political power in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers. Douglas played villains in quite a few of his early films – those two as well as Billy Wilder’s 1951 masterpiece Ace in the Hole and William Wyler’s Detective Story (also from 1951, which cast Douglas as a cop but a morally, if not legally, corrupt one) – but, like his close friend Burt Lancaster, quickly got to be too big a star to be cast as anything but heroes. It’s a pity, because Douglas is superb as Whit; he positively oozes sinister amorality in the part and he’s utterly convincing as a man you’ll love to hate (even though you feel a bit sorry for him if only because Cathy has her hooks into him, too, to the extent that he’s willing to take her back even after she’s tried to kill him). In the 1980’s this film got a semi-remake under the title Against All Odds, but I’ve never seen it; apparently it altered the ending so all three of the principals live instead of dying (a big mistake since the sense of doom that hangs so heavily over this film can only be resolved by the deaths of the lead characters) and the only thing I remember about it is that Phil Collins did a theme song for it that was one of the biggest hits he ever had. It’s not that Out of the Past is a bad movie; it’s just that I can think of quite a few noirs that are considerably better, including the 1941 Maltese Falcon, the 1943 Double Indemnity, the 1944 Murder, My Sweet (the definitive film adaptations of works by their authors – Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler, respectively), and if Murder, My Sweet isn’t the quintessential film noir I’d gave that honor to Orson Welles’ terrific The Lady from Shanghai, with Rita Hayworth playing an even icier femme fatale than Claire Trevor, Jane Greer or Rita herself in the better-known Gilda.

The Night of the Hunter (Paul Gregory Productions, United Artists, 1955)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Out of the Past TCM followed it up with another Robert Mitchum vehicle, the 1955 film The Night of the Hunter, directed by Charles Laughton from a script by James Agee based on a novel by Davis Grubb. Like Out of the Past it’s a movie I wasn’t able to sit through the first time I tried to watch it – my mom had taken me to see it on a double bill with something else I can’t recall at the moment and I made her take us home right after the scene in which Willa Harper (Shelley Winters) is shown dead in a lake while still at the wheel of her car, her hair floating picturesquely amongst the seaweed in a flamboyantly unrealistic sequence. It’s become a legendary film; whole books have been written about its making and a lot of tall tales told about it, including the claim Robert Mitchum made in his autobiography that Agee’s script was so long and incoherent that director Laughton was forced to rewrite it start to finish. In 2004 Agee’s script was discovered and found that, while it was too long, each of the individual scenes in it ended up, in shortened form, in the film, so it’s been cited on both sides of the writer vs. director debate as to who’s the true auteur (“author”) of a film.

My sympathies are more with the director than the writer – indeed, ever since I read Joan Bernick’s 1983 article in The Opera Quarterly comparing Beaumarchais’ play The Marriage of Figaro to the libretto Lorenzo da Ponte wrote for Mozart’s opera, I’ve been convinced that libretto writers and screenwriters have the same issues, especially when doing adaptations instead of originals: they have to decide which parts of the original material will work in the new medium, which parts they’ll have to cut completely and which parts they’ll have to change – and like screenwriting, libretto writing is a dependent form waiting for a composer or director to breathe life into it: there’s a reason why the Met doesn’t advertise “da Ponte’s Don Giovanni,” “Piave’s La Traviata” or “Illica’s and Giacosa’s La Bohème,” even though those works wouldn’t exist without their contributions. Indeed, I’ve often been upset when people defending the screenwriter as the true “author” of a film neglect the contributions of the original author who wrote the novel, story or play in the first place; one writer credited Raymond Chandler with Double Indemnity and ignored the fact that Chandler didn’t create the plot, characters or situations of Double Indemnity: James M. Cain did.

Getting back to The Night of the Hunter, it’s a Southern-fried Gothic tale, set in the early 1930’s, which begins with a young man named Ben Harper (Peter Graves) being arrested for robbing a bank and getting $10,000. Before he’s arrested and ultimately convicted, sentenced to death and hanged (presumably he killed someone during the course of the robbery, though we’re never actually told that), he makes his children John (Billy Chapin) and Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce) swear that they’ll never reveal the hiding place where he stashed the money to anybody. Before he’s hanged he’s put in a cell with Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), who’s either an itinerant preacher who’s “gone bad” or a villain simply posing as a minister (we’re not sure which, though it’s clear from how well he knows the Bible that he’s had some religious training, either formal or self-taught), who’s serving a 30-day sentence for stealing a car (and the fact that the cops arrested him while watching a strip-tease in a burlesque theatre is obviously supposed to make us suspicious of his religious pretensions – indeed, in one of the film’s best lines, the judge even references the low environment in which he was apprehended as a point against him).

Ben lets slip the story of the robbery but doesn’t mention where he hid the loot – but he gives Harry enough information so that when he’s released after Harry’s hanging he can trace his widow Willa (Shelley Winters), move to her small town and court her. They eventually get married, but he refuses to have sex with her in a line my late roommate and home-care client John was fond of quoting: “That body was made for begettin’ children, not for satisfying men’s lusts!” (It occurred to me that in this movie Shelley Winters was getting off relatively easily; seven years later she’d make the film Lolita, in which she plays a widow courted and ultimately married by a strange man who wanted not to torture her daughter to find a hidden fortune, but to fuck her – and in that film Winters also dies, run over by a car just as she’s figured out her husband’s terrible secret and is about to expose him.) Harry also has letters tattooed across his knuckles, ‘LOVE” across his left hand and “HATE” across his right, which is supposed to represent the duality of his character.

The Night of the Hunter actually begins with a prologue showing the disembodied head of a woman, later revealed as Rachel Cooper (Lillian Gish), reading Bible verses to five equally disembodied heads of children – and knowing director Laughton’s reputation for giving one-man shows in which he’d read from the Bible, I joked, “You know it’s a Charles Laughton movie! Someone’s reading from the Bible!” The main action of the film consists of Harry’s attempt to worm out of the Harper kids the secret of where their dad’s ill-gotten gains are hidden – something we find out well before he does when we see the kids extracting some of the cash from inside Pearl’s rag doll and cutting it up into paper dolls (and leaving a few scraps behind – I had thought there’d be a scene in which Harry would find the scraps of paper that had once been money and figure out what the kids had done with the loot, but no-o-o-o-o). Once Harry kills Willa after she’s been unable to tell him the whereabouts of the money and leaves her and her car in that lake in that beautiful but totally unbelievable scene, the kids realize that they will be his next victims and they escape in a skiff one of the local handymen had repaired for John.

They do so surprisingly easily – surely in reality Harry could easily have caught up with them, especially since he could have followed them down the river in a stolen car (from the opening we know Harry knows how to steal a car) – and they end up at the farmhouse of Rachel Cooper (Lillian Gish), who may or may not be their mother Willa’s sister (Willa had told her kids they had an aunt they could go to if they were in trouble and needed a place to stay, but we’re not sure whether Rachel is this person), who’s obviously intended in this film’s iconography to represent good religion as opposed to Harry’s bad, hypocritical and corrupt religion. Rachel shelters the kids, bathes them, feeds them, finds them chores to do around her house (and next to her farmhouse is a barn so stylized it looks like The Barn of Dr. Caligari) and ultimately gives them as good a life as she can given that this is the South in the middle of the Depression. She’s also got several other kids staying there, including a sexually rambunctious teenager named Ruby (Gloria Castillo) – in this sort of movie, in which a pencil is never merely a pencil, we’re obviously supposed to see a parallel between her and Pearl Harper since they’re both named after precious jewels – whom Harry runs to when she’s gone into town to cruise men (and it’s a visceral shock when after over an hour in a rural environment we finally see the accouterments of modern life, including electric lights, telephones and a newsstand selling a movie magazine Harry buys for Ruby) and worms out of her the secret of John and Pearl. Eventually Rachel finds out the secret and holds a gun on Harry, and while he’s able to keep her from killing him she summons the police and he’s arrested – we’ve expected for the whole movie to see Harry go out in a blaze of glory and when he doesn’t I couldn’t help but wonder whether Laughton, Agee and producer Paul Gregory were keeping him alive in hopes of a sequel.

The Night of the Hunter is a physically beautiful film – the cinematographer was Stanley Cortez and his lighting is absolutely stunning and contributes to the rich, febrile atmosphere – but, though I can see why other people acclaim this film as a classic, it leaves me pretty cold. Part of the problem is Laughton’s direction, which seemed to have been aimed at disproving once and for all my theory that actor-directors – even actor-directors with hammy reputations as actors, like Erich von Stroheim and Orson Welles – generally get quiet, understated, low-keyed performances out of their actors. Laughton originally wanted to play Harry Powell himself – which would probably have made the film even less watchable, though perhaps enjoyable as sheer camp – but was told by producer Gregory that he was no longer a bankable “name” in 1955 the way he had been 20 years earlier. When he found he would need a star with a current reputation, he first offered it to Gary Cooper, who turned it down, and then cast Mitchum – and tried his damnedest to get the usually quiet, taciturn Mitchum to overact in the Laughton manner. The result is a star performance that seems to be fighting itself; a characterization that’s supposed to be scary falls flat because Laughton didn’t allow Mitchum to act in a way comfortable for him, and which would have been even more frightening (as Mitchum was with a less egomaniacal director, J. Lee Thompson, playing a similar role in the 1962 Cape Fear).

The Night of the Hunter is a beautiful film to look at – Cortez even does an iris-out on one sequence (a common trick in the silent era in which the screen image shrinks to a small circle in one corner of the screen before fading out, but one almost never used in sound films; the last iris-out in a major U.S. feature for this one had been in Orson Welles’ 1942 The Magnificent Ambersons, also photographed by Stanley Cortez), and there are sequences, particularly when Harry is hunting the kids, that are marvelously Gothic in their use of light and shadow. The problem with this film is everyone and everything in it seems “off” – the characters are too remote to be believable as real people, and you end up marveling at the visual artistry when you should be identifying with the kids and hoping against hope that they’ll survive the mortal danger they’ve been put in by a madman.

Born to Kill (RKO, 1947)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2009, 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I won’t bother to comment on the third film I saw last night on TCM, Born to Kill – another film noir, starring Lawrence Tierney and Claire Trevor – because 12 years ago I posted about it on moviemagg at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2009/03/born-to-kill-rko-1947.html and I had pretty much the same reaction to it this time:

“Born to Kill is a 1947 RKO film noir which featured Lawrence Tierney as Sam Wilde, a psychopathic killer who, as the movie opens, is living in Reno and dating Grace (Kathryn Card), the ‘fast’ woman at the boarding house owned by Laury Palmer (Isabel Jewell). When Grace decides to go on a date with a milquetoast, Danny (Tony Barrett), and lets him into her home where — unbeknownst to either of them — mean ol’ Sam is waiting and ultimately kills both of them. Then he high-tails it to San Francisco on the same train as another of Laury Palmer’s former roomers, the former Mrs. Helen Brent (Claire Trevor, top-billed), who is immediately attracted to him.

“She lives in a big house in San Francisco in which way too much of the film takes place — these people almost never seem to work, go out or have any sort of life outside of their home — along with her foster-sister Georgia (Audrey Long) and her fiancé Fred (Phillip Terry, the third Mr. Joan Crawford). Sam ends up romancing both Helen and Gloria, in the process trying to get appointed to run the newspaper chain Gloria inherited from her father (since this is an RKO production one half expects Lawrence Tierney to snarl, ‘I think it would be fun to run a newspaper,’ especially since this film’s director, Robert Wise, co-edited Citizen Kane), and in the end Fred breaks off with Helen, Gloria has the good sense to get away from this situation and Helen ultimately gets killed by Sam, who is then gunned down by the police.

“Walter Slezak is billed third and plays Arnett, a pettily corrupt private detective hired by rooming-house owner Mrs. Kraft (Esther Howard, who played the marvelously drunk Mrs. Florian in Murder, My Sweet, and she’s just as good here) — who also comes out to the San Francisco locations and is nearly killed by Marty Waterman (Elisha Cook, Jr.), who’s listed as Sam’s ‘henchman’ but almost seems like his Gay lover — they sleep in the same bed and Marty literally fusses over Sam, lecturing him like a long-suffering wife and telling him that he needs to stop killing so many people because ‘it’s not functional.’ It’s about the one degree of subtlety in an otherwise incredibly obvious script by Richard Macaulay (former collaborator with Jerry Wald on quite a few of Warners’ best films of the 1930’s) and Eve Greene, based on a novel by one James Gunn called Deadlier Than the Male, which was also the working title for the film — and which leads one to expect a far edgier battle-of-the-sexes drama and an ending in which Sam would get his from one of the female characters, instead of the rather wimpy story we do get in which the women are merely victims.

“For something that’s supposed to be a thriller, Born to Kill is surprisingly boring — the long scenes inside the San Francisco house are sleep-inducing and Lawrence Tierney’s growling act gets tiresome really quickly. I suppose part of the problem is that since Alfred Hitchcock and Anthony Perkins jointly revolutionized the movie portrayal of psychopathic killers in the 1960 classic Psycho, we have a harder time accepting a movie sociopath who so bluntly and unmistakably wears his pathology on his sleeve that he might as well be wearing a tattoo on his forehead reading ‘PSYCHO.’ The director is Robert Wise, who already had some important films under his belt (notably his two for Val Lewton, The Curse of the Cat People and The Body Snatcher) and a year later would make the superb noir Western Blood on the Moon with Robert Mitchum and go on to a major career (including The Sound of Music, about as different a script from Born to Kill as one could imagine!), but coming from a man whose other movies show off a major talent, this film is even more of a disappointment than it would have been if the name on the directorial credit had been William Berke or another of RKO’s “B” hacks (though at least there's the amusing coincidence that the director’s name is Robert Wise and his assistant’s is Robert Weiss!).”

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (Warner Bros., New Line Cinema, MGM, WingNut Films, 2013)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago Charles and I screened the second in Peter Jackson’s trilogy of movies based on J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit (thereby unwittingly fulfilling Erich von Stroheim’s dream of making a nine-hour movie out of a normal-sized novel), called The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. Smaug (whose last name’s vowels are pronounced “ow,“ not “aw” as I had assumed) was a dragon who invaded the mountain kingdom of Erebor where a king who started out benevolent but turned mean out of greed turned his subjects into slave laborers and had them amass a huge treasure of gold – only Smaug decided to grab the treasure for himself, literally burned the dwarves who were Erebor’s indigenous population out of their cave dwellings and ruled there alone. The basic story of The Hobbit is the effort of Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage, a potentially powerful actor somewhat wasted here – he’s essentially playing a Game of Thrones-type of character, only this is Game of Thrones Lite) to take back his kingdom with a band of 13 unlikely recruits, including the unlikeliest recruit of all, Bilbo Baggins (Martin Freeman), a hobbit who’s pulled out of his comfortable life in the Shire, Middle-Earth to join the dangerous quest.

I didn’t care for the first film in the sequence, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, and I liked this one even less. I nodded off a lot during it and even when I was awake I was not particularly impressed with what I was seeing – especially since Ian McKellen’s character of Gandalf takes a powder through much of the action and therefore the one actor who played with power and authority in the first Hobbit movie is missing from this one. The coolest sequence in the movie is one in which the questers have to cross through an enchanted wood in order to get to the mountain kingdom via a path that keeps disappearing on them and forcing them to find it again. Here it seemed to me that Tolkien was ripping off The Wizard of Oz as well as the Nibelungenlied and the Wagner Ring of the Nibelung based on it – though Charles, acting once again as my “Tolkien Whisperer,” said that sequence wasn’t in the book and that some of the material used in the movie came not from The Hobbit but from its prequel, The Silmarillion, a piece of Tolkieniana cobbled together by his son Christopher after dad’s death from the writings Tolkien had done just to set forth his backstory and keep it all straight. (One thing I admire about Tolkien is his determination, once he set the basic rules of his universe, to stick by them and not indulge in the habit of many other fantasy writers of having anything happen just because they could.)

For some reason the plot required Bilbo to sneak into the mountain redoubt of Smaug and steal a priceless jewel that Thorin needs to establish his authority over the kingdom – and Smaug turns out to be the most annoyingly talkative dragon of all time. Wagner’s Fafner, similarly ruling over a golden treasure inside a mountain which he’d acquired from an avaricious dwarf king who had forced his subjects to accumulate it for him, at least was succinct and to the point – about all he said to Siegfried when Siegfried came by to kill him was, “I have and I hold; let me sleep” – whereas Smaug droned on and on and on, so often telling Bilbo he was going to kill him I found myself wishing he’d just do it already – much the way Charles joked about the James Bond villains and how they should kill him immediately once they capture him instead of working out some insanely complicated means of killing him that will only give him time to escape. I was also puzzled by the reference in the dialogue to “seven armies” that will conquer wherever-it-is when the last episode is called The Battle of the Five Armies (what happened to the other two armies? Did they get slaughtered? Did they join the other side? Did they storm the Capitol to insist that Sauron continue to rule even after he’d lost his re-election bid?).

Mostly The Desolation of Smaug was pretty slow going despite the sheer beauty of the New Zealand scenery standing in for Tolkien’s Middle-Earth (less beautiful than in the first episode because much more of this one takes place in cramped interior spaces) and I really wasn’t entertained by it – and as I said about episode one, I think after seeing Game of Thrones (where for all the sordidness and the emphasis on the nastier aspects of humanity, the characters seemed more believable and even multidimensional) I like The Hobbit movies even less than I would have if I’d seen them first. I was particularly perturbed by the ending – or, rather, the non-ending, since I had assumed Smaug would be dispatched at the end of the film and instead it stopped with as blatant a cliff-hanger as a Republic serial, with that annoyingly loquacious dragon still alive. Incidentally, not only did Stephen Colbert have a bit part as one of the bad guys’ spies in The Desolation of Smaug, on last night’s show he came up with a whole bunch of Tolkienish gibberish which made me ask Charles whether that was genuinely from Tolkien or Colbert was just making it up – and he wasn’t sure either!

Joe Biden/Kamala Harris Inaugural Concert, January 20, 2021

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 5:30 p.m. I flipped on the TV and found that MS-NBC was about to broadcast the commemorative concert for Joe Biden’s inaugural, which they made the mistake of beginning with Bruce Springsteen performing “Land of Hope and Dreams” as a solo acoustic number. Springsteen didn’t write this song for the Biden inaugural – he wrote it in 1998 but didn’t record it commercially until the Wrecking Ball album in 2012 – but it sure sounded as though he had. Indeed, the running theme of the concert was new hope, new renewal, emerging from the darkness into the light, and it’s clear the artists of America – most of whom had aligned themselves with anti-Trump rather than pro-Trump America (when Trump was inaugurated the biggest “name” he could get from the music world was country singer Toby Keith) – were seeing Biden’s assumption of the Presidency as redemptive. Fortunately we on the West Coast were getting this concert “live” instead of on one of those damnable tape delays with which the East Coast chauvinists who run America’s media continually remind us that we on the West Coast – including those of us who have lived our whole lives in America’s most populous state – suck hind tit media-wise. (I’m still ticked off at all the TV shows that asked the question, “Who is Kamala Harris?” As a native Californian who’s voted for her in every election she’s run in that I could vote for her, I know damned well who Kamala Harris is – and so would all those East Coast media people if they actually gave a damn about California instead of treating us all those years as an inconvenience.)

The theme of renewal, of emerging into light after a long time of darkness, continued through the next song, Jon Bon Jovi (also playing acoustic guitar and singing solo) covering George Harrison’s Beatles song “Here Comes the Sun” (and doing it quite well: his ragged voice doesn’t sound much like Harrison’s choirboy croon but it worked, and as my husband Charles pointed out it probably suited the song better than the heavy-metal shriek Bon Jovi is known for from his earlier days). Then Yo-Yo Ma (the only person on the bill I’ve actually seen live – in a concert in La Jolla in 1985 where he and pianist Emanuel Ax played Russian music; they were great but I’d have rather heard them in Bach and Beethoven!) did a quirky medley of “Amazing Grace” (a song that’s been performed a lot in connection with Biden’s election win; it appeared once more on this concert) and the “Goin’ Home” theme from the slow movement of Dvorák’s “New World” Symphony. After that we got the U.S. Army Herald Trumpets playing an opening fanfare that led into “Hail to the Chief” and a brief speech by President Biden, largely rehashing his calls from that morning’s Inaugural Address for unity and an end to the rancor that has accompanied our differences all too often of late.

The next song, “Better Days” by Justin Timberlake and a Black singer named Ant Clemons, also fit the theme of renewal; while former President Trump (and oh, how sweet it is to be able to put “former” in front of that name!) and his allies, including the crazies who stormed the Capitol on January 6 intending to overthrow the election and keep Trump in power forever, still maintain that the election was “stolen,” those of us who never wanted Trump in the first place heaved huge sighs of relief as Biden not only won on election night but navigated the shoals of procedure after that (Stephen Colbert joked that Biden has had to win the election so often he’ll be America’s 46th through 51st President), and afterwards the Black Pumas came on from the Austin City Limits stage set (they are actually from Austin, Texas) for another performance of the same song, “Colors,” which they’d done on Stephen Colbert’s show (the last one he did during the Trump Presidency) the night before. Charles and I both thought the band was performing the song “live” on both occasions rather than palming a pre-filmed video off on us, though this time around the cameras focused less on the band’s white members and more on its Black ones. Still, the song is (predictably, given the title) an ode to multi-racialism and the multi-racial membership of the band only adds to the point. After that the Foo Fighters came on with “Times Like These” – yet another song choice that seemed to be keyed to the occasion (“In times like these we learn to love again”) – with Dave Grohl singing it softly in a slow-paced rendition backed only by the band’s organ player before he kicked in the tempo, sped up the song, brought the rest of the band in and for the first (and only, really) time last night we got to hear all-out electric rock ’n’ roll.

After that came a group of so-called “Broadway All-Stars” – none of whom were identified – taking turns singing that recent song “Seasons of Love” (the one that begins “525,600 minutes,” representing the length of a year) as an alleged tribute to Kamala Harris – who, damnit, was not born in New York!!! Once again the East Coast media showed their thinly veiled contempt for California and everyone and everything from here – they even seem to take a sick joy out of reporting that Californla has more cases of COVID-19 than any other state, which is true but only because we have that many more people than any other state. (Having a California band like the Beach Boys or the Eagles play the tribute for Kamala Harris would have been far more appropriate.) The next act was Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda reading a poem by Seamus Heaney (apparently one of President Biden’s favorite poets) which I think (if I heard the announcement correctly) was called “The Cure of Troy.” Then there were clips from the January 19 tribute Biden and Harris had led outside the Reflecting Pool on the Capitol Mall to honor and mourn the 400,000 Americans already dead from COVID-19, with a scorching medley of “Amazing Grace” (there it is again!) and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” sung a cappella by Lori Marie Key, who apparently isn’t even a professional singer. She’s a nurse in Michigan who, like so many others in her profession, has been working her ass off caring for COVID-19 patients, but even without that poignant background she’s also an excellent singer with a great soul voice of absolutely riveting power. (Maybe it’ll turn out that she was a professional singer who retired from music and became a nurse, like Alberta Hunter – and maybe, also like Hunter, some day she’ll return to music and the career it sounds like she was born to have.)

Then the U.S. Navy Brass Band Ensemble played a ceremonial piece honoring Vice-President Harris – was there some quirk of the in-service rivalries that Biden got the Army band and Harris got the Navy band? – and John Legend came out to sing the Anthony Newley-Leslie Briccuse song “Feelin’ Good” from the musical The Roar of the Greasepaint – the Smell of the Crowd. For some reason this song has become anthemic due to the recording by Nina Simone in the early 1960’s, which as I’ve pointed out here before was fine as far as she was concerned but was weighed down by a truly horrible arrangement by Hal Mooney that made it sound like they’d recruited the band from a strip club. What’s worse about Mooney’s arrangement is that all too many modern singers who’ve covered the song, from Jennifer Hudson to Michael Bublé. Have copied it – and so did Legend last night. (My favorite versions of “Feelin’ Good” are Carmen McRae’s live version from the 1964 live album Womantalk – she sings it at least as well as Simone did and she’s got a small, tight jazz combo behind her instead of an overarranged big band – and an instrumental by John Coltrane.) Next a couple of D.J.’s and singer Luis Miguel did a mashup of three songs in Spanish, after which Tyler Hubbard and Tim McGraw did a duet on a song called “Undivided” whose “time to come together” theme tied in with the overall program’s message of renewal and healing the nation’s wounds. The program rather petered out with Demi Lovato singing “Lovely Day” (she’s got a truly powerful voice but wasn’t helped by the banality of the material) and Katy Perry singing “Firework” with – of course – a huge and elaborate fireworks display going on behind her.

Overall, the concert was a good one, though it suffered from the leadenness that frequently afflicts ceremonial occasions like this, and it didn’t help that powerful, committed artists like Bruce Springsteen were performing at the peaks of the powers – and because the pandemic has made it virtually impossible to assemble large crowds for public events (unless you’re Donald Trump, in which case you go ahead, do it anyway and kill off your own most fanatical supporters), the end of his song and all the others was greeted not with thunderous applause, not even a mild ovation, but stark silence that underscored just how much this nasty disease has cost us.

Dying for a Daughter, a.k.a. A Mother’s Secret (Hybrid/Lifetime, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s Lifetime movie in the 8 p.m. time slot, usually reserved for their “premieres,” was actually one they first showed last November 7 but which I somehow missed: Dying for a Daughter a.k.a. A Mother’s Secret (imdb.com lists Dying for a Daughter as the working title and A Mother’s Secret as the current one, but Dying for a Daughter was the one on the credits even though it’s a misnomer – as we shall see, Killing for a Daughter would actually have been more accurate). It begins on a mountain road in the dead of night in which mother Samantha (Melanie Nelson), usually called “Sam,” and her 10-year-old daughter Cassie (Scarlett Roselynn) are having an argument because Cassie has unhooked her seat belt and got out of the back seat to look for a book. Just then Sam loses control of the car, it runs off the road and Sam is relatively unscathed but Cassie is badly injured and ends up needing a wheelchair. Cassie ends up in a hospital, where she needs a large blood transfusion, and it’s when the doctors discover that neither Sam nor her husband Tom (Brandon Ray Olive, a shorter and beefier “type” than the usual tall, lanky, sandy-haired guys who usually play innocent husbands on Lifetime movies but equally unsexy) is a matching blood type for their daughter.

From this both the hospital staff and we learn that Cassie was adopted, and the film’s main intrigue features a nurse named Margaret Smith (Brittany Underwood, a frequent star of Lifetime movies, though she’s usually cast in good-girl victim roles and here she’s the perky-psycho villainess) who manages to get the job of live-in nurse to take care of Cassie after she’s released from the hospital. She does this by impersonating Rachel, another nurse from her agency, and of course she’s up to no good. Fred Olen Ray, who produced, directed and wrote this film, makes Margaret a.k.a. Rachel a smart, sexy woman determined to eliminate Sam, seduce Tom into marrying her, and claim Cassie for her own. One thing I’m glad Ray didn’t do was make Cassie Tom’s biological child – we get a lot of dialogue about how Tom had an affair several years previously and I was bracing myself for the plot twist that Margaret was Tom’s affair partner, Cassie was the result of it and so Cassie is Tom’s (but not Sam’s) biological child. I had forgot about that clue back in the hospital that Cassie’s blood type isn’t a match for either Tom’s or Sam’s, which was definitively supposed to establish that she’s not biological kin to either of her adoptive parents.

But Ray does do a lot of Chekhovian “planting” in his script, establishing not only a gun (an old pistol of Tom’s which Margaret a.k.a. Rachel discovers in his effects) but also an allergy: the moment Sam tells Rachel that she’s deathly allergic to soy, we just know that at some point Rachel will attempt to poison her with soy milk, and she does, spiking her dairy milk with it and feeding it to her in tea. Rachel even pretends to get Sam her anti-allergy medication but doesn’t (so sometime in his life Fred Olen Ray had seen The Little Foxes) and she’s saved only by Tom, who comes home unexpectedly and gets his wife the pill that will keep her alive. Rachel also gives Cassie major amounts of drugs for reasons Ray never quite explains, and in one chilling scene she drugs Tom’s drink (she pours one for herself as well but pours Tom a bigger drink so she can tell the spiked and the unspiked one apart) so he loses consciousness, then straddles him and takes selfies that are supposed to make Sam think that Tom has lapsed back into his old cheatin’ ways and is having an affair with their nurse. And as if Ray hadn’t tapped into enough Lifetime clichés already, he writes a character called Karen (Karina Segura) who’s Sam’s work partner and best friend, and though she’s white instead of Black Karen enacts the part of the Heroine’s Best Friend Who Discovers the Villainess’s Plot but Gets Killed Before She Can Tell Anybody.

He even has Rachel – or Margaret – kidnap Cassie at the end, though mom realizes where she is when Cassie, who thinks she’s just on an innocent ice-cream date with her caregiver, texts a selfie of her and Rachel together and Sam recognizes the poster on the back wall as Boyd’s Café. Sam arrives too late but she gives chase, and at the end there’s a confrontation scene at Sam’s and Tom’s home in which Sam and Margaret (by this time, courtesy of a Black woman police detective who’s Lifetime’s obligatory African-American Authority Figure who solves all the white characters’ problems, Sam knows who Margaret really is) have a fight, Margaret threatens to shoot Sam with Tom’s old pistol, Sam attacks her and manages to get her to let go of the gun, and Cassie picks it up. I was hoping Cassie would shoot her mom’s assailant herself, but instead she gives the gun to Sam and she shoots Margaret in the abdomen. We’ve also learned that Margaret sold her unborn child to a baby broker and it is not the one Tom and Sam adopted – in fact Cassie’s birth mother was a French exchange student and they met her as part of the adoption process – and that Margaret spent time in a mental hospital before they declared her “cured” and loosed her upon the world again. Aside from a nice perky-psycho performance by Brittany Underwood, who turns out to be quite good as a cock-tease and doesn’t overplay her mad scenes, Dying for a Daughter a.k.a. A Mother’s Secret is just another Lifetime movie; my husband Charles commented laconically, “I’ve seen worse,” but we’ve also seen better Lifetime films than this rather perfunctory run-through of a bunch of their well-worn formulae.

The Glass Key (Paramount, 1935)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the Lifetime movie I ran Charles something I’d been looking forward to seeing since the weekend before last, when Turner Classic Movies’ “Noir Alley” ran the 1942 Paramount version of Dashiell Hammett’s novel The Glass Key. I was inspired to see if I could find an online copy of the earlier film of The Glass Key, also made at Paramount – in 1935, when the success of MGM’s film of Hammett’s The Thin Man led Paramount to dredge up their own Hammett property (just as the 1942 remake was inspired by the success Warner Bros. had just had with Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon). Paramount bought The Glass Key right after its first publication as a book in 1931 (it was serialized in the pulp magazine Black Mask before that) and intended Gary Cooper for the lead role of Ned Beaumont (his name was changed to Ed Beaumont in both films), friend, aide-de-camp and all-around fixer for political boss Paul Madvig. Instead Cooper starred in an original screen story by Hammett called City Streets (included as a bonus item on my DVD of The Glass Key) and The Glass Key went on hiatus for four years.

In 1935 Paramount reactivated the property and again announced it as a Gary Cooper vehicle – which would have been an interesting piece of anti-type casting – but instead of making it Cooper got into a contract dispute with the studio and walked out when they wouldn’t give him a raise. So Paramount put George Raft into the lead – and Raft turned it into a typical vehicle. As my husband Charles joked afterwards, “He does everything except flip a coin!” Neither Raft nor Alan Ladd, the star of the remake, really inhabits the role the way Humphrey Bogart did with Sam Spade or William Powell did with Nick Charles in The Maltese Falcon and The Thin Man, respectively – still the two best films of Hammett’s work, but somewhat surprisingly the rest of the 1935 cast is consistently better than their counterparts seven years later. What’s more, not only do the two films have the same running time (80 minutes), they track surprisingly closely – one gets the impression Jonathan Latimer, who wrote the 1942 version, closely followed the original adaptation by Kathryn Scola and Kubec Glasmon (Glasmon and his earlier writing partner, John Bright, had written The Public Enemy and several of James Cagney’s earlier Warners vehicles – which set me to wondering what this film could have been like if Paramount had been able to borrow Cagney from Warners for it) for this version.

The most impressive performance here is Edward Arnold’s as Madvig: where Brian Donlevy played him in the 1942 version in a state of continual bluster, Arnold – in a role that essentially warmed him up for all the corrupt political bosses he would play in Frank Capra’s later films – shows real dignity and pathos in his impossible crush on Janet Henry (Claire Dodd, who usually played villainesses but here is quite effective as a heroine – much more so than Veronica Lake, who was so glacial and impassive she seemed almost robotic; she’s a fascinating screen “presence” though whatever she’s doing has precious little to do with acting, and Dodd makes Janet Henry seem more human even though the other female lead out-acts her – more on her later), son of the “reform” Senator Madvig and his political machine, the Voters’ League, is backing. The other woman, Madvig’s sister Opal, is played quite effectively by an actress billed as Rosalind Culli but later known as Rosalind Keith; she’s closer to Arnold’s age than Bonita Granville was to Donlevy in the 1942 version and therefore more believable as Madvig’s sister (Granville would have been easier to accept as Donlevy’s daughter than his sister!). She turns in an excellent performance and it is she, not Janet, who ends up with Beaumont at the fade – the main plot difference between the two. The gangster Madvig is trying to put out of business in his newfound role as a “reformer” is changed from Nick Varna (in Hammett’s original and the 1942 film) to “Shad O’Rory” and is played by Robert Gleckler (who menaced James Cagney the next year in his first Grand National “indie,” Great Guy, the next year) – and though it’s a one-dimensional villain role he is considerably less annoying than Joseph Calleia in the remake).

The part of Jeff, so memorably played by William Bendix in the remake, goes here to Guinn “Big Boy” Williams, who’s almost as good – and almost as Gay, though with the Production Code Administration and the Legion of Decency breathing down their necks the writers and director Frank Tuttle (who shoots this pretty flatly except for a Sternbergian scene shot through a grating and a couple of dark nighttime shots that anticipate film noir) don’t carry through Hammett’s hints as fully as their counterparts did in 1942. (Hammett was fascinated by Gay people and once hired a Black Gay couple as his manservants just because he liked watching how they interacted with each other.) The small but pivotal part of Taylor Henry, son of the “reform” Senator whose murder sparks the plot (Madvig is accused of it by his political enemies, but it was really committed by Senator Henry himself during an argument over Taylor’s habitual gambling and the money he owed to O’Rory), is played by the young Ray Milland, who like Richard Denning in the remake might have been a better choice for Beaumont than the actor who actually played him. Milland would make his “bones” in film noir in 1948 with John Farrow’s masterpiece The Big Clock, and though he was still young and unformed as a screen personality some hints of his later star status shine through here – like Denning in the remake and Jerome Cowan in the 1941 Maltese Falcon, he gets dispatched all too soon! Overall the 1935 Glass Key is an accomplished film that I generally like better than the remake, though neither version counts as “definitive” the way the 1941 Maltese Falcon and the 1934 Thin Man do and one aches to see a film of The Glass Key that would preserve the richness and complexity of Hammett’s original novel.

One aspect of the 1935 film of The Glass Key is it offers the only example we have on film of George Raft playing a character written by Dashiell Hammett. In 1940 he was under contract to Warner Bros. and was offered the lead in the film of W. R. Burnett's gangster novel High Sierra, which he turned down because the Production Code Administration had demanded that the character Raft was to play die at the end of the film even though he had lived in the book. Then he was offered The Maltese Falcon but turned it down because he didn't want to work for a first-time director, John Huston. “Let someone else be his training wheels,” Raft said. So one attraction for the 1935 film of The Glass Key is to see how Raft might have done as Sam Spade – though I think there's a better indication of how Raft might have played Spade: Race Street, a 1949 RKO movie that had nothing to do with Hammett but did cast Raft as a private detective in San Francisco. My suspicion was that had Raft made The Maltese Falcon, he would have turned in a good but workmanlike performance (much the way Ricardo Cortez did in the first 1931 version of The Maltese Falcon) but wouldn't have been so “right,” so perfect, as Humphrey Bogart, whose off-screen life was so much like his on-screen persona in this and his other “hard-boiled” films he wasn't so much playing as being these roles.