Frankie Drake Mysteries: “Life on the Line” (Shaftesbury Films, Canada Media Fund (CMF), Independent Production Fund, PBS, 2020)

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

Before the fascinating Johnny Cash concert PBS ran an episode of the Frankie Drake Mysteries from Canadian television, a series that’s been running since 2017. It’s set in Toronto in the 1920’s and centers around an all-female private detective agency which takes on oddball cases, usually – as here – involving an innocent party accused of murder and almost certainly slated for punishments they don’t deserve until Frankie and her partners intervene on her behalf. Lead investigator Frankie Drake (Lauren Lee Smith) and her African-Canadian assistant Trudy Clarke (Chantel Riley) take the case of toy-store owner Ernie Penny (Matt Watts), one of those characters in mystery fiction who seems to spend his entire life creating reasons for other people to hate him and want him out of the way. Penny, whose toy store is almost inevitably called “Penny and Pound,” has faced a series of harassments, including being done out of a deal to buy a toy company that would have salvaged his business by giving him a guaranteed supply of inventory. He’ s also been the victim of arbitrarily canceled orders and other signs that someone is mounting a concerted campaign to drive him out of business and utterly ruin him financially. At first he suspects his ex-wife, but she makes it clear she was relieved that their marriage ended and certainly has no interest in taking any further role in his life, for good or ill.

The women trace the harassing calls to the switchboard of a local telephone company and hire on as operators to see what information they can glean from overhearing the calls that go over their lines. They eventually realize that the harassment isn’t coming from an outside caller but from one of the women who work there, and ultimately they learn that Lillian (Katy Breier) decided to make herself rich by gaining stock tips from the callers and investing accordingly. She made enough money doing this to buy the toy company Penny was after just to screw him over and make sure he didn’t get it, but eventually Penny gets to be a partner in it. Frankie Drake Mysteries is a minor but charming series that is well worth watching and fun, even though there are some weird glitches in the writing – notably the positing that Toronto contains an illegal speakeasy in which most of the characters do their drinking. Memo to writer Kery Ferrencz: unlike the U.S., Canada wasn’t stupid enough to try to prohibit alcohoi in the 1920’s and therefore they didn’t need speakeasies: people wishing to consume or dispense alcoholic beverages in Toronto in the 1920’s could do so openly the way they can now.

The Blue Gardenia (Warner Bros., 1953)

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

This morning I watched the morning rerun on Turner Classic Movies of their “Noir Alley” showing of a fascinating 1953 film, The Blue Gardenia, directed by Fritz Lang based on a script by Charles Hoffman, adapted from a story by Laura author Vera Caspary. The Blue Gardenia got made at a particularly frustrating time in Lang’s career: after a brief stint at RKO, where he made two of his best movies, Rancho Notorious and Clash by Night, RKO’s famously mercurial and ferociously anti-Communist owner, Howard Hughes, fired him. He wasn’t exactly blacklisted but he got put on a sort of “greylist” – there was no edict that he not be hired but no one was rushing to sign him, either. Though The Blue Gardenia was a Warner Bros. production, the deal for Lang to make the film was actually arranged by Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn – which, given that Lang’s next two films, The Big Heat and Human Desire, were actually made at Columbia, seems like Cohn was testing the waters to see if someone else could get away with using Lang before he hired Lang himself.

I first saw The Blue Gardenia at the old Cento Cedar Cinema in San Francisco in the 1970’s and had caught up with it again on previous TCM showings. In some ways it’s a disappointing credit for Lang given that he had shown in his German career during the silent era that he could do big spectacle films like Die Nibelungen and Metropolis, but at a time when Hollywood was cranking out big spectacle movies like The Robe Lang was .getting assignments to do vest-pocket noirs like this. (Meanwhile, The Robe was directed by Henry Koster, another German expat but one whose strength was in musicals – he’d made Deanna Durbin’s star-making films Three Smart Girls and One Hundred Men and a Girl – and romantic comedies like The Bishop’s Wife, but who was way out of his depth directing a spectacle.)

The Blue Gardenia starts with a typical Hollywood situation – three financially stressed young women living together in a decnet but unspectacular apartment and borrowing each other’s clothes (since authorial fiat has made them all the same size). The three – Norah Larkin (Anne Baxter, top-billed), Crystal Carpenter (Ann Sothern, 18 years after she’d co-starred with Maurice Chevalier and Merle Oberon in Folies-Bergère de Paris and on the downgrade, but it helps that her role here is a salty second lead and she isn’t obliged to sing) and Sally Ellis (Jeff Donnell – the “girl named Jeff” I’ve watched in previous movies, mostly at Columbia) – have different attitudes towards men: Sally is feeling her single oats (as much as she could be in a Production Code-era film), Crystal is still dating her ex-husband Homer (Ray Walker), and she also regularly reads thriller novels with titles like My Knife Is Bloody by “Mickey Mallet” (an obvious pun on Mickey Spillane and his main character, Mike Hammer). Norah has a fiancé serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War. Only, after holding on to it for several days, Norah finally opens his most recent letter, which is literally a dear-Jane correspondence telling her that he’s met a nurse in Tokyo (where he went to be treated for war wounds), has fallen for her and will marry her as soon as they’re both discharged. This happens on her birthday, when she’s made a “roast” (actually just a steak, but she’s baked it in a roasting pan and basted it), set a symbolic place for him and opened a bottle of champagne.

Furious with getting dumped – and by mail, yet! – she accepts an invitation for dinner and drinks from Harry Preble (Raymond Burr) even though Preble, who had visited the telephone switchboard where the three women work, had actually intended the invitation for Sally. She and Preble go to a nightclub called The Blue Gardenia, where the featured entertainer is Nat “King” Cole (though I suspect he’s supposed to be playing a character far lower down the totem pole of the entertainment industry than Cole was himself) singing a song called “Blue Gardenia” that was written especially for the film and has had a longer life than the movie. (Like Cole’s previous hit “Unforgettable,” “Blue Gardenia” was covered by Dinah Washington, and a lot of other women singers have also taken it on.) Preble, who makes his living doing what the newspapers call “calendar art” – i.e., drawings of half-clad women for use in calendars, ads and as pin-up posters – is also a notorious seducer and a “regular” at the Blue Gardenia, where the waiters all know him and realize what it means when he asks his waiter to put extra booze in his would-be victim’s cocktails. In this case the drink is something called a “Polynesian Pearl Diver” – the Blue Gardenia serves Chinese food (and there’s a brief shot of the increasingly inebriated Norah trying vainly to eat her dinner with chopsticks) and is designed in full-scale Tiki mode, while the background music they play when Cole isn’t performing is Hawai’ian – and Norah downs way more of them than she should have.

The two drive back to Preble’s apartment in his convertible – and don’t stop to put the top up when it starts raining – and when they get there he wants to have sex with her while all she wants to do is sleep. To ward off his unwanted advances she grabs a fireplace poker and smashes his wall mirror with it, then passes out. When she comes to in the morning she’s back at her own place with no idea what happened or how she got back there, but later she finds out in the news that Harry Preble is dead, clubbed to death with a fireplace poker, and as the last person to see him alive she’s suspect number one in his death. She’s already attracted the attentions, both professional and romantic, of Los Angeles Chronicle columnist Casey Mayo (Richard Conte, second-billed but really too much of a thug type to be believable as a good guy) – one hears his character name and wonders what sort of meat comes with him – who’s determined to break what the papers are calling the “Blue Gardenia murder” and writes an open letter offering the woman from Preble’s apartment a reward (hiring her a first-class defense attorney at the paper’s expense) if she’ll give him an exclusive interview. Only just as soon as she meets him to seal the deal, the cops, headed by Captain Sam Haynes (George Reeves – he grew a moustache fro this one but he’s still recognizable, and it’s fun to see Perry Mason and Superman in the same movie!), show up and arrest her.

Then they realize she’s innocent after all when Mayo notices that the record on Preble’s phonograph is a different one from the piece Norah recalled him playing: she remembered he put on Nat “King” Cole’s record of “Blue Gardenia” after they’d heard him do the song live at the nightclub, but the record that’s on there when the police search Preble’s apartment is an instrumental version of the “Liebestod” from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. I suspect the use of Wagner reflects Lang’s love-hate relationship with the composer; when Lang made his two films based on the Nibelungenlied, Siegfried (1923) and Kriemhild’s Revenge (1924), he commissioned an original score from Gottfried Hüppertz that would sound suitably “Wagnerian” without using any of Wagner’s themes or motifs, but when the films were released in the U.S. they went out with a score by Heinz Roemheld that was a pastiche of themes from Wagner’s cycle The Ring of the Nibelung. Lang was upset because he’d wanted his films to be seen as a totally different work of art from Wagner’s cycle, having nothing in common with it but a story source (and Kriemhild’s Revenge was based on a part of the story Wagner hadn’t used).

The police note that the album from which the Tristan record came (back when “record albums” were literally that: packages of individual 78-rpm records with sleeves bound together in a book like pages in a photo album) has a stamp identifying it as having come from the Melrose Music Store in Los Angeles. (This place really existed; I have a number of 78 rpm records in sleeves stamped with the Melrose address and phone number, and among the albums we see stocked there is Morton Gould’s easy-listening album After Dark, which I had as a child. So after seeing the Melrose stamp on actual record sleeves I was fascinated when I saw this movie and got to see what the shop looked like.) The man the police talked to at Melrose explains that Preble was a regular customer but a woman who worked there handled his account, and later we find out that she was his actual killer: she’d been dating him and stopped by his apartment to confront him over his refusal to marry her, she saw he had another woman there and killed him in a fit of jealousy, then put the “Liebestod” record on because it was ‘their song.” It’s an out-of-field ending that doesn’t really work as the solution to a mystery (even though writer Hoffman was a good enough Chekhovian he’d “planted” a scene with her in the beginning having an argument with Preble), but overall The Blue Gardenia is a quite good movie, a minor work in the Lang canon but well constructed and atmospherically photographed by Nicholas Musuraca, a former RKO contract man who’d shot so many of their classic noirs and this time shows a knack for subtly changing the lighting of a scene when Anne Baxter’s character is imperiled and the shadows of the noir underworld threaten to gobble her up. It’s not much of a story, but Lang told it effectively and showcased the previously innocent character who gets sucked into the noir world and has to figure out how to get out of it again.

According to “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller, Anne Baxter came away from working with Lang with pleasant memories; there are enough stories of him browbeating and psychologically abusing his other women stars that Patrick McGilligan’s biography, Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast, could well have been called Director Dearest, but given what we know about Marilyn Monroe’s personality Lang couldn’t have got the beautiful and sensitive performance out of her he did in Clash by Night if he’d abused her on set, and likewise with Baxter he got quite good results from her even though her basically innocent character doesn’t offer her the range or power of her role as the scheming bitch who pretends to be innocent in her best film, All About Eve. And it’s nice to see Raymond Burr as a pretty ordinary guy who’s guilty of little more than thinking with his dick and refusing to take Anne Baxter’s “no” for an answer – a far cry from the psycho stalker he played so effectively in the 1948 film Pitfall – though it is a bit hard to accept him as the debonair seducer no woman can resist, not only because he’s heavy-set and homely by Hollywood standards but also because we now know than in real life he was Gay.

The Way to Love (Paramount, 1933)

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

Last night my husband Charles and I watched a couple of grey-label DVD’s of two films starring Maurice Chevalier in the early 1930’s, in his fabulously successful stint in Hollywood from 1929 to 1935 that ended abruptly when his then-wife, French singer Mistinguett, told him she wanted to move back home because she was tired of living anywhere else but in France. (She was a huge star in Paris but nobody had heard of her here, which may have been why she wanted to go home.) I had grown up with Maurice Chevalier as the avuncular old philosophe he had played in the 1958 film Gigi and innumerable TV appearances and records on MGM – and I hadn’t realized he had ever been young until one day when I was watching the original Jeopardy! (with Art Fleming as host – not many people know there was a Jeopardy! host before Alex Trebek) and that day’s Final Jeopardy clue was, “The biggest sex symbol in movies between Rudolph Valentino and Clark Gable.” The right answer – at least according to the show’s clue team – was, “Who was Maurice Chevalier?” I heard that years before I actually ever saw a film with the young Chevalier, and when I finally did I was a bit perplexed because he didn’t seem all that sexy (it’s likely that many film buffs in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s, asked who was the biggest male sex symbol in the movies since Valentino, would have said Ronald Colman), but he was certainly energetic and had already perfected his boulevardier act.

Chevalier was actually a working-class kid from one of the slummier districts of Paris, but he learned to play the aristocrat to perfection and a lot of his movies – including his masterpiece, Rouben Mamoulian’s Love Me Tonight (1932) – play off the contrast between his proletarian origins and his aristocratic image. The first Chevalier film we watched last night was The Way to Love, a 1933 Paramount vehicle directed by Norman Taurog from a committee-written script (Gene Fowler and Benjamin Glazer, screenplay; and Claude Binyon and Frank Butler, additional dialogue) that begins with a slice-of-city-life montage obviously influenced by the similar opening of Love Me Tonight: a number of Paris residents sing a witty song by Ralph Rainger and Leo Robin about the differences between what they are and what they want to be. Chevalier plays François, and at our first glimpse of him he’s carrying a sandwich board advertising the services of his employer, Prof. Gaston Bibi (Edward Everett Horton, not quite as foofy as usual). Bibi runs a combination photo studio and tanning salon whose market niche is faking photographs and suntans for people who want to claim they were out of town when they were really fooling around with people other than their lawfully wedded spouses. One woman is left too long under the sunlamp and she ends up with its warning sign, “Handle With Care,” stenciled on her back. An obviously inebriated man, confronted with a backdrop of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, tries to lean along with the tower and then asks that the backdrop be straightened so it doesn’t look crooked.

Bibi is the center of a Bohemian colony that also includes Joe (Arthur Pierson), an American and an aspiring composer whom we hear across the way aimlessly noodling on his piano; Annette (Nydia Westman, who lived from 1902 to 1970 and worked as a character actress almost until the end), a young woman who freaks out every time anyone uses the word “marriage” or any of its derivatives; her aunt Suzanne (Minna Gombell), who’s trying to M-word her off to François; and a few other people it was hard to keep track of. François’s great ambition is to be a tour guide for the company owned by Monsieur Priat (silent-film comedian Billy Bevan) – early on he upbraids one of Priat’s existing guides for failing to include the romance of Paris in his spiel – and ultimately he gets his wish and goes through a ridiculous orientation ceremony that sounds more like taking an oath of office than starting a gig in the private sector. François also rescues the film’s heroine, Madeleine (Ann Dvorak), who’s under the legal guardianship of a circus knife-thrower, Marco (character villain John Miljan), who forces her to be the target in his act and mistreats (and presumably physically abuses) her off-stage. I suspect the writing committee borrowed this plot gimmick from Charlie Chaplin’s The Circus (1928), and it was odd to be watching this movie just after having seen Chaplin’s Limelight, another film that cast its hero as the savior of an abused or wounded woman whom he moves into his room despite the stares and shocked reactions of those around him, who assume hanky-panky is going on.

The Way to Love starts quite promisingly but it pretty soon drifts off into movie conventions, and just as we’re all too aware of the gap in imagination between Rouben Mamoulian and Norman Taurog as directors, we’re also all too conscious of the gap between the writing committee’s members and the brilliant Samuel Hoffenstein, Mamoulian’s writer on Love Me Tonight. Charles noted that this film occupies a peculiar niche in the history of the Motion Picture Production Code, since it was made in the more raffish, more sexually honest period of lax Code enforcement from 1930 to 1934 (usually, but inaccurately, referred to by film historians as “pre-Code”) and the tighter standards imposed by the Code Administration under the lash of the Legion of Decency, a Roman Catholic pressure organization created to “improve” the morals of movies in general (and end the film career of Mae West in particular) in 1934. Charles noted that Chevalier is behaving as a relatively innocent “post-Code” character (itself a bit of anti-type casting since 1933 audiences would have expected to see Chevalier as a morals-pushing roué) living a raffish “pre-Code” situation and wondering why anybody is questioning his decency or chastity. The Way to Love ends pretty much as you’d expect it to, with François getting both the girl and his dream job as a tour guide, though there’s the payoff of a running gag towards the end in which a character who’s been cutting off people’s neckties just under the knot does that to François just as he’s in full Priat-guide drag. It was a fun movie for what it was but it’s not exactly one of the great landmarks of Chevalier’s career.

Folies-Bergère de Paris (20th Century Pictures, United Artists, 1935)

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

Folies-Bergère de Paris is something else again. It was made in 1935 for Darryl F. Zanuck’s Twentieth Century Pictures just before it merged with Fox – at the time it was still an independent studio releasing through United Artists (though United Artists president Joseph Schenck decided to quit that job when the 20th Century-Fox merger went through and assume the presidency of 20th Century-Fox instead) and was the last film Chevalier made in the U.S. (Chevalier didn’t work for a U.S. studio for another 20 years due to some weird political complications; because he’d agreed during World War II to appear as an entertainer in German prisoner-of-war camps and give shows for the French prisoners, he was denounced after the war as a collabò. To get off the Left-wing blacklist in France he signed the Stockholm Peace Appeal in 1948 – and that got him blacklisted in the U.S. as Right-wingers denounced the Stockholm Peace Appeal and everyone who signed it as Communist.)

Folies-Bergère de Paris began as a play by Rudolph Lothar and Hans Adler that was adapted by Jessie Ernst, with Bess Meredyth and Hal Long credited with the actual screenplay, and it was directed in high style by the usually relatively hacky Roy Del Ruth. Its plot cast Chevalier in a double role as Baron Fernand Cassini, a super-rich financier who’s about to lose all his money because of a busted mine in Mozambique, and Eugène Charlier, a Folies-Bergère performer who impersonates him as part of the act. To keep word of the mine’s disaster from leaking out to the public while the real Baron goes to London for a loan that will keep him afloat, his business manager Morrisot (Ferdinand Munier) and his other key associates hatch a plan to hire Charlier to impersonate the Baron for the time he’s out of town, which happens to coincide with a big reception being given by the Baron at with the premier and the finance minister of the French government will be the guests of honor. Both of Chevalier’s characters have highly jealous partners: Charlier’s is his music-hall co-star Mimi (Ann Sothern, whose out-of-tune screeching on their duets quickly gets to be a trial – one’s tempted to ask, “Where was Jeanette MacDonald when Chevalier needed her?,” but the answer was, “At MGM making Naughty Marietta with Nelson Eddy and becoming a superstar”) and the Baron’s is his wife Genevieve (Merle Oberon, looking luminous as usual in a part that didn’t require much in the way of acting).

One of the conditions the Production Code Administration and the Legion of Decency imposed on a story like this is that the woman being romanced by one of the two men must always know which one was her real husband, and therefore which one it was licit for her to make love with – so Genevieve is briefed that her “husband” is the impostor from the music hall even though one of Charlier’s conditions for taking the job was that she not be told. There’s also a love scene in which Charlier poses as the Baron and romances Mimi, but she recognizes him from the three scratches she inflicted on the back of his hand during their last argument. Folies-Bergère de Paris is a marvelous movie even though its plot doesn’t make much sense – 20th Century-Fox remade it twice, as That Night in Rio (1941) with Don Ameche and On the Riviera (1951) with Danny Kaye, and I recall Rio as a bore and Riviera as only slightly better – mainly because of the high style with which it’s told.

As the Baron, Chevalier is made up to look surprisingly like his principal rival in the early 1930’s for the sexiest-man-in-Hollywood title, Ronald Colman, complete with “roo” moustache, and he manages to create two separate characters, believable as different people. There’s one disappointment in that there is no special-effects shot in which the two Chevaliers meet – I gather that reflects this story’s origin as a stage play, in which of course the two characters couldn’t have possibly appeared on stage simultaneously – but the roles are good for Chevalier because they give him a chance (much like his casting in Love Me Tonight as a tailor posing as an aristocrat) to contrast and play off the gap between his real working-class origins and his success at playing the upper-class boulevardier. The film also contains two absolutely stunning big production numbers by Dave Gould, one of Busby Berkeley’s most blatant imitators – he won the short-lived Academy Award for Best Dance Direction for this film, beating out Berkeley’s masterpiece, “Lullaby of Broadway,” from Gold Diggers of 1935 (though Gould went on record himself as saying Berkeley should have won). One is “Rhythm of the Rain” by Jack Stein and Jack Meskill, in which he and Ann Sothern do a vocal duet on the joys of rain while the chorines form kaleidoscope patterns with umbrellas; and the other is the big finale, “Singing a Happy Song,” in which Chevalier and the chorus pay tribute to Chevalier’s iconic straw hat. In one shot the two brims of gigantic straw hats come together on stage and look like buzz sawa about to chew Chevalier to bits.

The two big numbers were photographed by J. Peverell Marley while Barney McGill shot the rest of the movie, and in his book Behind the Camera Leonard Maltin said he spotted a major gap between the two cinematographers’ work. I don’t; the whole film is luminous and shot in rich chiaroscuro, ably demonstrating the joys of black-and-white and making you (or at least me) wonder, “Who the hell ever thought the movies needed color?” If The Way to Love seemed oddly reticent for a “pre-Code” movie, Folies-Bergère de Paris seems awfully raffish and envelope-pushing for a “post-Code” one – though the final irony of this movie’s history with the censors is that the print we were watching was from a television showing rated “TV-G.” It»s also worth noting that in a movie filmed in late 1934 and releaqsed February 22, 1935 the music is swingier and more jazzy than in Chevalier’s previous films – later in 1935 Benny Goodman would have is sudden burst of popularity that would launch the Swing Era – though Chevalier had already shown his love of jazz when inn 1930 he was asked to appear at the New York Paramount Theatre to promote his films, he was offered the choice of any band in America to accompany him, and he chose Duke Ellington. (The “suits” at Paramount tried to renege and told Chevalier, “You can’t have a white singer witn a colored band!” Chevalier replied, "Why not? In France we do it all the time!”) Folies-Bergère de Paris is a great movie and was a worthy end to Chevalier’s first Hollywood career – if it had to end, at least he ended it at the top – and, while it’s hardly on the level of Love Me Tonight (to my mind the best musical ever made, bar none), it’s stylish and well within the raffish and sexually risqué territory Chevalier’s best films inhabit.

That Certain Feeling (Hope Enterprises, P&P, Paramount, 1956)

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

Last night Charles and I ran a George Sanders double bill consisting of his 1941 film A Date with the Falcon – a movie I screened for us three years ago from a poor-quality DVD dub of an old VHS tape (my comments are on https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2018/05/a-date-with-falcon-rko-1942.html) and I wanted a chance to see again on the commercial DVD set I got of all the Falcon movies; and That Certain Feeling, a film I just got a copy of from a grey-label source that wouldn’t play on my standard Blu-Ray player, though I got it to work on my old secondary DVD player/recorder. The copy was poor, with a hissy soundtrack and badly faded color, but it was good enough to enjoy the movie for what it was, which was a Bob Hope vehicle (written and directed by his long-term collaborators, Melvin Frank and Norman Panama, with contributions to the script by William Altman and future Billy Wilder collaborator I. A. L. Diamond, based on a play called The King of Hearts by Eleanor Brooke and Jean Kerr, the latter being wife of theatre critic Walter Kerr and author of Please Don’t Eat the Daisies) that was reasonably amusing if not drop-dead funny.

The plot features Hope as cartoonist Francis X. Dignan, who’s wisecracked his way out of several jobs “ghosting” for other, more famous writers on newspaper comic strips. (Ya remember newspaper comic strips?) Now he’s reduced to making novelty toys for pocket change until his ex-wife Elsie Jankowski (Eva Marie Saint), who now goes by “Dunreath Henry,” offers him a job ghosting for Larry Larkin (George Sanders) on a strip called Snips and Runty. Snips is a tow-headed blond boy and Runty is his dog, who is drawn to make it look like he’s wearing eye shadow. Larkin has been writing and drawing the script pretty much on autopilot as he cultivates rich and powerful friends, including Senator Winston (Florenz Ames). He’s also launched a career as a public speaker, mouthing platitudes about the “sick society” (a phrase I thought had originated in the 1960’s, but here it is in a movie from a decade earlier) and what we can do to prevent juvenile delinquency. Larry is angling for an appointment to a presidential commission – though just what the commission is supposed to do is left unclear – and in a way he comes off as a sort of beta version of Bono, the U2 singer who used his success as a musician to try to launch himself as a global ambassador to end world hunger, defeat apartheid, curb the AIDS crisis and whatever other do-gooder project that caught his fancy.

To make things even more complicated, Dunreath née Elsie has become engaged to marry Larry, and their wedding is supposed to take place within a few days – that Saturday, to be exact – because that’s when Larry can fit it into his complicated schedule of lectures, receptions with the rich and powerful, and an appearance on Edward R. Murriow’s Person to Person program. Larry has also decided to adopt a young boy named Norman Taylor (Jerry Mathers, just in the first flush of his popularity on the TV series Leave It to Beaver) who’s apparently the son of a now-deceased cousin of Larry’s. Only when Norman shows up he takes an instant dislike to Larry and bonds with Dignan instead. At one point Larry sends Dignan out with Norman to buy the boy a dog, and Larry wants him to get one that looks just like Runty in the strip – but instead the boy wants a huge dog that looks like a giant ambulatory mop (this sounds like Jean Kerr, since she wrote a similarly large, formless dog into Please Don’t Eat the Daisies). There’s also a cameo appearance by L’il Abner cartoonist Al Capp, and a nice role for Pearl Bailey as Larkin’s maid – playing in the tradition of voice-of-wisdom Black characters from Hattie McDaniel in Gone With the Wind to Vivica A. Fox in modern-day Lifetime movies who try to talk the white characters out of the stupid things they try to do.

Pearlie Mae gets to sing three songs in the movie – the George and Ira Gershwini piece from the 1920’s that gave the film its title (and is also used as an instrumental theme throughout), “Hit the Road to Dreamland” and “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart,” which along with a novelty called “The Solid Gold Cadillac” appeared on various cheap-jack LP’s from a company called Premier Sales that put out ultra-cheap LP records on a plethora of labels (Coronet, Baronet, Design, Grand Prix, Sutton, Strand, Spin-O-Rama) and would frequently grab the early work on independent labels from someone who became a major-label star later (like Nat “King” Cole, Ray Charles and Sarah Vaughan). If they weren’t able to score enough sides by a subsequently famous artist to fill out an entire LP, they would add songs by other artists (one Design release with two songs by Jim Reeves, who was on his way to country-music superstardom when he died in an accident, contained fillers by several other artists, including one who’d later become a huge star in his own right: Willie Nelson). These four recordings by Pearl Bailey ended up in the Premier Sales meatgrinder and I’ve long wondered where they came from – Pearl Bailey started her career on major labels (she began on Columbia and then switched to Decca) and it was a mystery how anything by her ended up on Premier’s labels. This offers a clue: I suspect these were transcription recordings (special records sold to and played on radio stations but not offered to the general public) made by Paramount studios to promote this movie. Sonically, they’re quite good, and the brassy accompaniments suggest to me that the arrangements and bandleading were by Bailey’s (white) husband, drummer Louis Bellson.

Bailey’s presence in this movie is a breath of fresh air, and there’s one quite beautiful scene with her, Dignan and the boy Norman that suggested (at least to me) that Dignan should have left his ex in Larkin’s un-tender embrace and paired up with Bailey’s character – but of course no major studio was about to go there in 1956 (even though Bailey was married to a white guy in real life!). Instead there’s a chaotic scene at the end in which Larry’s carefully crafted appearances collapse on Person to Person in front of a TV audience of millions (though Edward R. Murrow is depicted only from the back, with his famous hair and even more famous cigarette – the real Murrow died in 1965, still relatively young, of lung cancer – I suspect the producers tried to get him to play himself on camera but he declined) and, of course, Dignan and Elsie pair up together and forsake New York City for their mutual home town, Port Huron, Michigan. (Six years later Port Huron would become famous as the locale of the meeting at which the Students for a Democratic Society were formed and they created a manifesto, the “Port Huron Statement,” articulating the principles of the 1960’s New Left.)

That Certain Feeling is the sort of movie that’s entertaining as it stands but could have been a good deal better. Part of the problem is the rather indifferent direction; Bob Hope never really had a truly great director guiding him through a film (one aches to think what he and Leo McCarey could have accomplished – or, even more tantalizing, Hope and Preston Sturges!). He was the sort of entertainer who worked hard at maintaining his niche but wasn’t inclined to push himself into new territory, and That Certain Feeling shows some of the wear in Hope’s movie formula that would start to look really threadbare in his 1960’s and 1970’s films. George Sanders also was starting to look rather threadbare; the boredom with life and acting that would lead him to take his own life in 1970 were already starting to creep into his performance. Charles suggested he might have been handicapped by the limitations of the Production Code Administration, which among other things didn’t like to see itself satirized on screen: he argued that the kinds of people who ran the Production Code Administration were exactly the sort of supercilious moralists Sanders was playing, so the script’s barbs against them couldn’t sting very hard. (Sanders also made Death of a Scoundrel in 1956, and that movie epitomized the caddish villainy for which he was best known and, for all its own flaws, offered him a far better showcase than he got in That Certain Feeling.) This film no doubt gave the Bob Hope fans what they were expecting – some funny lines (including one that name-checks Erich von Stroheim, of all people) and a romantic triumph over not particularly tough odds – and it holds up decently enough even though it’s hardly a great film.

Limelight (Charles Chaplin Productions, United Artists, 1952)

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

Last night I checked on the Turner Classic Movies Web site to see if there was a film I’d be interested in watching – and it was a quite moving classic that somehow had eluded me before. The film was Charles Chaplin’s Limelight (1952) – he was universally known as “Charlie Chaplin” but his credits always billed him as “Charles” (something I identify with because my husband always insists on being called “Charles” – calling him “Charlie” or, even worse, “Chuck” is a good way to get on his bad side) – and it’s a deeply personal movie. Only once before, in the 1928 film The Circus (which I still consider Chaplin’s most underrated work), had Chaplin laid his heart so publicly on his sleeve – and it’s significant that both The Circus and Limelight were made at particularly fraught times in Chaplin’s life and career. The Circus was made when Chaplin’s scandalous divorce from his second wife, Lita Grey, was dominating American headlines and threatening to ruin his career the way Fatty Arbuckle’s had been destroyed by rape allegations against him, and Limelight was made in the early 1950’s, when Chaplin was being hounded by the House Committee on Un-American Activities and other U.S. government bodies over his Left-wing politics – which he’d never been particularly secret about. Indeed, after he finished the movie he went on a trip home to see his relatives and friends in his native country, Great Britain – and while he was away the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service declared him an undesirable alien and pulled his permit to re-enter the United States. Chaplin was understandably furious, not only that they’d expelled him but they’d done so when he wasn’t able to fight back. Fortunately by then he’d married his fourth wife, Oona O’Neill, and as a U.S. citizen by birth she was able to return to this country and get all Chaplin’s money out of the country. Though he remained a British citizen (and after she completed her mission in the U.S. Oona renounced her American citizenship and naturalized as a Brit), he lived for the rest of his life in Vevey, Switzerland and returned to the U.S. only to accept an honorary lifetime achievement Academy Award in 1972, five years before his death.

Limelight is set in the summer of 1914, just before the start of World War I and the passing of the way of life it represents – in which, among other things, horses and early cars share the streets of London (and also the year Chaplin broke into movies after already becoming a star both in the British music halls and American vaudeville). It tells the story of Calvero (Charles Chaplin), a former music-hall star who is now washed up, barely hanging on, living in a boarding house with the usual harridan landlady (Marjorie Bennett), whose life suddenly acquires meaning and purpose again when he rescues a fellow tenant, Terry Ambrose (the young Claire Bloom in a superb performance; Chaplin attempted to launch the careers of young women but only two of his discoveries, Paulette Goddard and Bloom, became stars in their own right), from an attempted suicide. She’s both drunk poison and turned the gas on in her flat, and in an opening tracking shot – rare in a Chaplin film (Karl Struss, who’d shot Chaplin’s 1940 Nazi spoof The Great Dictator, returned as cinematographer with Chaplin’s old collaborator from the silent days, Roland Totheroh, credited as “photographic consultant”) – we discover her and see how Calvero rescues her. With the landlady having evicted her and her having no income and no other place to go, Calvero takes her in, poses as her husband and nurses her back to health. Terry becomes convinced that she’s paralyzed and can no longer even walk, let alone dance, but Calvero pressures her and finally she overcomes her psychological block and returns to the Empire Theatre ballet company.

Meanwhile Calvero attempts a comeback at a theatre in Middlesex but bombs when the entire audience walks out the first night, and now it’s Terry’s turn to nurse him back to self-confidence and mental health. She gets the leading role in a new ballet, “The Death of Columbine” (which Chaplin composed himself as a work for a British ballet company in 1950, then incorporated into this film), composed by Neville (played rather kinkily by Chaplin’s son Sydney, who would later co-star with Barbra Streisand in the original stage production of Funny Girl but would be replaced by Omar Sharif in the movie), whom Terry had helped with handouts and extra music paper from her job at a stationery store until her boss caught her and she got fired. Terry insists that Calvero get hired as one of the three clowns in her ballet, but on opening night she’s a success but he gets terrible reviews and he’s fired. Fortunately an impresario hits on the idea of giving Calvero a benefit in which various acts will pay tribute to him and he will perform in the middle, doing a sketch with an old music-hall partner and friend – played by the equally legendary Buster Keaton in the only collaboration of silent comedy’s two ruling geniuses. Neville wants to marry Terry – he’s always been in love with her since those days at the stationery store – but she wants to marry Calvero out of a mix of love and gratitude, while Calvero doesn’t want to tie her down to someone of his age. (The real-life Chaplin had no such scruples: all his wives were teenagers when he married them.) In the end Calvero has his last big success – the claque the producer had hired to laugh at his act laughs on cue, but the genuine audience laughs too – but he gets a heart attack and dies backstage.

Chaplin wrote in his autobiography that the original inspiration for Limelight was a music-hall comedian named Frank Tinney, who was a major star in London when Chaplin was just starting out; years later he saw Tinney again but by this time he was a sad, burned-out little man and he simply wasn’t funny anymore. But I suspect that as Chaplin wrote the story it took over from him and he used it as a vehicle to express his own anxieties about his career. He was just coming off the debacle of 1947’s Monsieur Verdoux, a black comedy in which he plays a con man who marries suddenly rich women and then kills them. It had been his first-ever box-office flop, at a time when his predilection for teenage girlfriends was once again in the news (in the early 1940’s he was sued for paternity by an aspiring actress named Joan Barry and was required to pay her child support even though a blood test proved he was not her child’s father) and so were his politics. The Catholic War Veterans mounted a campaign against him, denouncing him as a Communist and a draft dodger (he had served in neither world war – though one of his biographers pointed out that at 5’4” he didn’t meet the military’s minimum-height requirement – and he pointed out that both his sons by Lita Grey had served in World War II) and attacking him for never having naturalized as a U.S. citizen. Chaplin’s response to that was to say, “I am a citizen of the world. I owe no allegiance to any particular country” – anticipating the “Imagine there’s no countries” sentiment expressed by John Lennon, another British émigré to the U.S. whom the government tried (unsuccessfully, in Lennon’s case) to expel over his Left-wing politics.

Throughout Limelight Chaplin gives long speeches as Calvero reflecting on his past and wondering how and why he lost the ability to make people laugh (an angst that’s a major part of the plot of The Circus as well), and they come off as a cri de coeur that cuts through the film’s sentimentality (the biggest artistic weakness of both Chaplin and John Ford) and gives it a wrenching emotional power. Chaplin would make two more films in the remaining 25 years of his life, A King in New York (a quite marvelous wish-fulfillment fantasy in which Chaplin plays a deposed monarchy who comes to the U.S. to offer a plan for the peaceful use of nuclear energy, is hounded for his politics and ends up turning a fire-house on the House Un-American Activities Committee) and A Countess from Hong Kong (a leaden bore in which Marlon Brando and Sophia Loren starred in an ancient story Chaplin had written in the 1930’s and dredged up from his back files), but in a real way Limelight is his testament. It also, through a quirk of the eligibility rules for the Academy Awards, won for Best Musical Score in 1973 – Chaplin’s first and only competitive Oscar (though he had two honorary ones from 1928 and 1972 already) and an odd honor for a 20-year-old film, though the bittersweet score he provided fits the mood of the film perfectly and adds to its appeal. (In his autobiography Chaplin said he was often arguing with musical directors who wanted the music to be funny; he wanted to accompany his comedy with romantic music, playing against the mood of his scenes and building a sense of his character.)

Limelight has its flaws – the sentimental philosophizing does get a bit wordy (as Chaplin biographer Theodore Huff wrote, “Once Chaplin started to talk, he overdid it, including a few soliloquies”) and the scene with Keaton isn’t the comedy riot it could and should have been. It doesn’t help that Chaplin as director kept Keaton off camera during much of the routine, though there’s a marvelous line as they’re making up before the sketch in which Keaton, ever the anti-sentimentalist, says, “If one more person comes up to us and says, ‘It’s just like old times,’ I think I’ll go crazy.” (This is the man who, asked by biographer Rudi Blesh, “How did you come to make a surrealistic film like Sherlock, Jr.?,” said, “I did not mean it to be surrealistic! I just wanted it to look like a dream!”) Limelight is a vivid and emotionally haunting film, and it probably means more to me at an age similar to Chaplin’s when he made it (he was 63 when he filmed Limelight, and I’m 67 now) than it would have if I’d seen it as a younger man.

Secrets of a Gold Digger Killer (Fortune Hunter Films, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2021)

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

Last night’s Lifetime “premiere” was a film called Secrets of a Gold Digger Killer, based on a true-crime story from Austin, Texas in the late 1990’s in which a woman named Celeste Johnson (Julie Benz), working as a waitress to support herself and her two teenage daughters (by her first husband, though she married twice more before the events depicted in the film), attracted the attention of a recently widowed multimillionaire named Steven Beard (Eli Gabay). She quit her job and moved herself and daughters Jennifer (Georgia Bradner) and Kristina (Roan Curtis – a first name which when I encountered it in the credits had me perplexed whether that was a woman or a man) into Beard’s mansion. Beard fell head over heels in love with Celeste – it’s not clear how much this is a rebound relationship after the loss of his wife and how much is a guy thinking with his dick, like all too many guys – and Celeste insists on a job as his “house manager” as cover for her living with him. Supposedly the Johnson girls will have their own wing of the house, but the daughters notice that Celeste is spending a lot of nights in Steven’s bedroom. Eventually Celeste and Steven marry, though he first gets a pre-nup limiting her to a $500,000 settlement in case they break up.

That’s a not bad piece of change but it’s only a fraction of Steven’s $10 million and it wouldn’t last long given Celeste and her spending addiction – in between cuddling, cooing and congratulating herself on scoring such a great trophy girl as wife number two, he’s upbraiding her about how fast she’s running through his credit cards and worrying that she’ll literally spend it out of house and home. At one point he decides she needs therapy, and as a result she goes to an inpatient treatment center – where she hooks up with Tracey Tarlton (Justine Warrington), a Lesbian with a history of depression and violent attacks – including an attempt to run down her girlfriend’s husband with a pickup truck when she left her and went back to hubby – and though it’s a commonplace in Lifetime movies for women who’ve “married up” and got bored to end up having an affair and seducing their affair partner to off their now inconvenient sugar daddy, it’s kinky and different that in this story the affair partner turned killer is a girlfriend instead of a boyfriend. Tarlton sneaks into Steven Beard’s bedroom, courtesy (natch) of keys Celeste has given her, and shoots him with a shotgun. As part of their deal Celeste was supposed to retrieve the casings of the shells, only she doesn’t because Steven doesn’t die immediately – he lasts long enough to call 911 and spends a few days in the hospital before he finally croaks – and in the confusion Celeste neglects her part of the deal.

Tracey gets arrested and charged with the crime, and, angered by Celeste’s cold rejection of her (this is a woman who doesn’t like rejection, remember?) as well as facing the death penalty in a state so serious about capital punishment they execute more people than all other U.S. states combined, she turns state’s evidence and testifies against Celeste in the trial. Celeste received a life sentence while Tarlton got 10 years, was released on parole in 2011 and will complete her parole this August. After the understated power of Left for Dead: The Ashley Reeves Story. Secrets of a Gold Digger Killer is a return to pretty typical slovenly Lifetime form. The direction (by Robin Hays) and writing (by Margaux Froley and Donald Martin, based on a true-crime book on the case by Suzy Spencer) are acceptable without being special, and so is the acting – with one powerful exception. Lifetime regular Julie Benz turns in a powerful acid-etched performance as Celeste, looking more and more like Lady Macbeth as the story goes on and she plots more and more murders to safeguard her position – including giving her beautician, Heather (Beverley Elliott) $10,000 to hire a hit man to kill Tracey Tarlton and even getting her kids so frightened that she might have them offed.

Christine has already moved out of the Beard home and in with her rather twerpy boyfriend David Wittmer (the rather twerpy Anthony Timpano, who looks like a former Gay porn star about five years after he “aged out” of that career), and after her own crisis of conscience Jennifer joins them to get away from mom. I was annoyed early on in the movie because Benz’s accent seemed wrong – I got the impression she had picked up her Southern accent from listening to Dolly Parton, who was from Tennessee, not Texas – but as the story progressed her performance took on weight and power. She could have been even stronger with a script by a writer like Christine Conradt, who in her Lifetime scripts has managed to make the villains complex enough that we understand them and why they’ve been driven to heinous acts, but even with what she had from the writers on this film, she creates an indelible character of a woman descending further and further into crime just to avoid ever again having to scrounge and work menial jobs to survive. We don’t get much in the way of soft-core porn this time – we don’t see Celeste in bed with her sugar daddy at all and the only intimation of the Queer goings-on between her and Tracey is a scene in the treatment center in which Tracey is rubbing Celeste’s back before an officious nurse pops in and said they need to go to group therapy … now. But Benz’s performance is good enough we don’t miss such lubricious moments, even though the movie overall is quite less insightful than it could have been with the basic facts of the case.