Haunted Honeymoon (British MGM, 1940)

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

The film Charles and I watched last night after The Last Airbender was about as different as you could imagine: Haunted Honeymoon, a 1940 production at the British studio of MGM, which had been founded three years earlier but pretty much expired after this film due to World War II. It was based on the last Dorothy Sayers mystery novel featuring her upper-class amateur sleuth detective Lord Peter Wimsey (Robert Montgomery – and yes, I find it rather bizarre that MGM at different points in its history should have regarded Montgomery as appropriate casting for both Lord Peter Wimsey and Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe) – or at least the last one she finished. Years after her death, a partial manuscript and extensive notes for another Wimsey story, Thrones, Dominations (which sounds more like a Game of Thrones episode title), were discovered among her effects, and her publisher hired another writer, Jill Paton Walsh, to complete it – though Sayers’ notes specified who the murderer would turn out to be so Walsh didn’t have to make that decision herself. The basis for this film was a Sayers novel called Busman’s Honeymoon, in which Wimsey and his girlfriend, mystery writer Harriet Vane (Constance Cummings) get married (the opening scene shows them poring over the wedding gifts) and try to have a honeymoon. As part of their nuptials they have decided to forswear any more involvements with crimes – she in making up and writing stories about them, he in solving them after the typically incompetent police in these stories fail to do so. To symbolize their determination not to get involved with crimes anymore, they’ve each given the other a bracelet with a charm of a pair of open handcuffs, symbolizing their release from the bondage of criminal involvement.

Of course,they don’t get off that easily: as his main wedding present for his new bride, Wimsey has gone off to Devon in the English countryside and bought the old house and estate where Harriet grew up., What he doesn’t realize – but we soon learn – is that the person he’s buying it from, Noakes (Roy Emerton), is a thoroughgoing rotter. He’s threatened to disinherit his niece, Aggie Twitterton (Joan Kemp-Welsh), over her affair with his handyman, Frank Crutchley (Robert Newton). He’s somehow been able to corrupt the local cop, Constable Tom Sellon (James Carney), over a debt of just 10 pounds. And, needless to say, he’s also been horrible to his servants, not only Crutchley but his long-suffering maid Mrs. Ruddle (Louise Hampton) and the rest of his household staff. Of course any hardened (or even not-so-hardened) fan of mysteries will get what Sayers is doing: she’s creating a central character so widely hated that when he’s killed during the story there’ll be an ample-sized pool of suspects to keep us guessing. Like most of the British MGM films, the studio sent one or two of their American stars to England to make it but filled the supporting characters with British actors, including Leslie Banks as Inspector Andrew Kirk of Scotland Yard (who, though the crime didn’t take place in London, is sent out anyway to take over the official investigation from the local police – are jurisdiction lines in Britain that much more fluid than they are here?) and a real surprise as the chimney sweep, William George Puffett: Frank Pettingell, who played Sir John Falstaff in the 1960 BBC-TV miniseries An Age of Kings, based on Shakespeare’s cycle of plays on British history from 1399 to 1485. (A few years ago An Age of Kings came out on DVD – I suspect at least partly due to the later international stardom of two names in the cast, Sean Connery and Judi Dench – and I got the chance to see them again, This time I found Pettingell way overacted and oppressive as Falstaff – but as I’ve written before in these pages, it is one of the tragedies of 20th century cultural history that the actor who would have been perfect for Falstaff, W. C. Fields, never got to play him.)

For the first 45 minutes of this 83-minute movie there’s a brief, ambiguous scene of Noakes bending over a console of some sort and turning on a radio – and then the scene cuts away and the next time we see him it’s several reels later and he’s lying dead in the house’s cellar. But Wimsey deduces that he was actually killed somewhere else and knocked down the stairs into the cellar by the blow from a blunt instrument which killed him. I had an interesting history with this movie – I first watched it with Charles in the early days of our relationship and about all I remembered was the typically elaborate mechanism by which the murder was committed, one of those preposterous gimmicks a lot of British mystery writers (especially women) were known for. Then I was working as an in-home caregiver for a woman who was a huge fan of mysteries in general and Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers in particular. She had been checking out of the public library DVD’s of all the TV miniseries the BBC had made of the Lord Peter Wimsey novels in the 1970’s and 1980’s, and one day she told me why the BBC hadn’t filmed Busman’s Honeymoon even though they’d done all the other novels in the series. I told her there had been this film of it made at MGM’s British studio and guessed that MGM or its successor companies had still held the rights so the BBC couldn’t include this story as part of their package. I got this DVD and lent it to her; she was upset at the title change – the film had been called Busman’s Honeymoon in Britain but MGM in the U.S. changed the title to Haunted Honeymoon because their sales department didn’t think American audiences would “get” Sayers’ pun on the slang phrase “busman’s holiday” (meaning an alleged vacation on which you end up doing the same things you do on your job). Charles hadn’t remembered seeing this film at all and the only part I remembered was, as I mentioned above, the elaborate way Noakes was murdered [spoiler alert!]: handyman Frank Crutchley, knowing that Noakes turned on his radio every night precisely at 9 p.m. to listen to a news program, rigged up a wire from the radio’s lid to the heavy ceiling lamp just over the radio so that when the lid was opened, it would release the ceiling lamp to swing out and deliver a death blow to whomever had opened the lid.

I had remembered how the murder was committed but not whodunit, and this time around I was a bit ticked off at Sayers’ classism to have the one person in the story who was actually trying to better himself – he was hoping for Noakes’ niece to get money from Noakes and use it to stake him to open a garage – be the killer. Still, after the fantasy pretensions of The Last Airbender, Haunted Honeymoon was a breath of fresh air: a movie about realistic people in at least outwardly realistic situations, and a film whose characters, however preposterously drawn, were at least not only physically conceivable but genuinely charming and amusing in that odd combination of murder mystery and screwball comedy, kicked off by the enormous success of the Dashiell Hammett-derived The Thin Man (1934), that generated a lot of the best crime films of the late 1930’s. (Ironically, it would be another Hammett-derived film, 1941’s The Maltese Falcon, that would drive the humor out of crime films and kick off what became known as film noir – and, as I noted above, Robert Montgomery would change with the times, playing noir detective Philip Marlowe in The Lady in the Lake just seven years after doing Lord Peter Wimsey here.) Haunted Honeymoon had a committee-written script – Sayers has a credit not only for the source novel but an intermediate play adaptation with Muriel St. Claire Byrne as her collaborator, and the script is credited to Monckton Hoffe, Harold Goldman and future Hitchcock collaborator Angus McPhail) – but it also had an unexpectedly interesting director, British-born Arthur Woods. He’d been making films since 1933 and, judging from their titles (his directorial debut was something called Spy 77), he seems to have been a thriller specialist. Judging from this film – and in particular the number of camera moves and trick shots he put into what could otherwise have been an awfully stage-bound piece – Woods was a potentially major talent whose career was cut short by World War II. Having worked as a stunt pilot in films involving flying, he volunteered for the Royal Air Force and was killed in 1944 on a British patrol mission against German air raids.

American Masters: “Becoming Helen Keller” (Straight Ahead Pictures, Disability History Museum, ITVS, WGBH, PBS, 2021)

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

Last night at 9 p.m. KPBS was showing a program I was very much looking forward to, an American Masters special called “Becoming Helen Keller.” I feared for the worst when the program was preceded by a written disclaimer saying that some of the descriptions of physical disability in the archive footage might be considered offensive to a modern audience, but I was glad not only that the pmakers of this program, consulting producer: Laurie Block and associate producers Helen Dobrowski, Nate Christy, and K.C. Forcier (who weren’t credited on the PBS Web site or imdb.com but are listed on a separate Web page for the film, https://www.becominghelenkeller.org/producers-partners) used actual people with disabilities for the commentary and most of the talking-head interviews. The show was narrated by a woman who, like Helen Keller herself, is both blind and deaf (the two words get mashed up these days into “deafblind,” yet another indication of how ghastly the language is becoming under the lash of political correctness), but who has a much more comprehensible speaking voice which I attribute to improvements in education for people with disabilities since Keller’s time. (My husband Charles suggested that the narrator became deaf relativeliy late iu life after she had heard well enough to develop speech normally.)

Helen Keller was born June 27, 1890 in Tuscumbia, Alabama to a father who had been a captain in the Confederate Army and a mother who’d been a schoolteacher – the program briefly noted towards the end that she had siblings but didn’t mention them beyond that, and I couldn’t help but wonder if there were any tensions similar to those in the recent (and marvelous) ABC-TV sitcom Speechless between the normally abled kids and their supercrip sister. At 18 months Keller developed an illness, described by her doctors at the time as “congestion of the stomach and the brain,” which rendered her both blind and deaf. She recalled in her first book, The Story of My Life, about her descent into darkness and silence. The part of Helen Keller’s story everybody knows is how her parents sent word to a school for the blind in Boston asking for a teacher who could work with her as a live-in and help her learn to communicate. They sent Annie Sullivan, whom Keller referred to throughout their more than 50 years together as “Teacher,” and Sullivan managed to deal with the feisty Keller until she finally broke through to her. The scene everyone remembers because it was dramatized in William Gibson’s play The Miracle Worker and the 1962 film made from it – Helen Keller furiously working a water pump in her family’s yard and saying “Wa-wa, wa-wa” as she recognizes that the liquid the pump is emitting has a name, “water” – is the vision we see of her in the statue erected in her honor in the Capitol in 2009.

Part of the inspiration for this documentary was the irritation of some activists in the disability community that a woman who lived to be 87 and was deeply involved in many of the social and political movements of her time was being reduced to a child even in a sculpture that was meant to honor her, and part of it was one of the researchers running into a publication from 1924 that named Helen Keller as “one of the 10 most dangerous women in America.” (I’d like to know who published this list, and who the other nine women were.) Helen Keller received her formal education at the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston, which had sent Annie Sullivan to her in the first place, and when she finished high school there she wanted to go to Harvard. Since Harvard didn’t yet accept women, she had to content herself with its all-female sister school, Radcliffe, where she excelled even though Annie Sullivan had to attend her classes with her, finger-spelling the words of the lecture as the professor delivered it, while her fellow students agreed to share their notes with her, transcribed into Braille so she could read them. As a young woman growing up in the 1910’s, and a well-educated woman at that, Keller started reading socialist literature and studying the social conflicts of her age. She was encouraged by Annie Sullivan and her husband, John Macy, but it’s quite clear that her dedication to causes beyond equal rights for people with disabilities came from her own thought and reading.

Long before that horrible word “intersectionality” was created, Helen Keller was living it: she joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the most radical large-scale labor organization in U.S. history. She joined picket lines of striking workers for the IWW and other unions. She was active in the women’s suffrage movement and for women’s rights in general, and despite her white Southern heritage (both her father and her maternal grandfather had been Confederate officers) she also embraced the African-American civil rights movement, giving money to the NAACP and publicly associating herself with its most radical founding member (and only African-American on the NAACP’s first board), W. E. B. DuBois. She is also listed on a Web site for the film as a co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in 1920. Keller was also a pacifist who opposed U.S. entry into World War I, though in both world wars she volunteered to visit veterans’ hospitals and give support to soldiers who had been blinded in combat. She also organized a campaign against gonorrhea and the so-called “sore eyes” syndrome that frequently afflicted babies born to mothers with gonorrhea and often led to the babies becoming blind in early childhood. (It made me wonder if this had been the mysterious “illness” that had blinded and deafened Keller in the first place.) Like the “intersectionalists” of today, Keller saw all forms of oppression as linked and felt an obligation to struggle against all of them – though the show addressed one rather nasty lapse in her social consciousness.

In 1915, when a doctor refused treatment to a baby with severe disabilities and allowed the child to die instead, Keller wrote an article supporting his decision on the ground that since the child’s disabilities were so severe they would have never had a developed brain and been capable of thought, which has been interpreted by some modern writers as Keller supporting the eugenics movement. (Eugenics was a school of thought that held that the human race could and should be “improved” by selective breeding of the most genetically “fit” and letting the “unfit” die off. Eugenics got a bad name when the Nazis enthusiastically embraced it and used it as one of their justifications for the Holocaust.) Keller later reversed herself on the issue, but it’s still a live controversy; though virtually no one today would advocate for denying medical treatment to a baby already born, a lot of people in the pro-choice movement defend aborting babies who are shown in pre-natal tests to have spina bifida, Down’s syndrome or other incurable genetic diseases that would either severely restrict or totally eliminate their chances for any kind of free or independent life.

As Keller grew older, following a brief attempt at a marriage which she quickly abandoned even though she wanted the love (including sex) of a man (itself one of the most interesting parts of Keller’s story: the bond between her and Annie Sullivan was so intense and so much the ruling passion of both their lives that it broke up both their marriages, and one would think the psychologists would have a field day over this one – as would the dramatists), she largely retreated from her other causes and focused on the rights of people with disabilities. She spent decades as an advocate of the American Foundation for the Blind even though – as this show documents – one of their main programs was to make recorded books available for blind people, which of course would have been useless for someone like Keller who was both deaf and blind. (There’s a still photo of Keller in the 1930’s posing with one of the giant 16-inch phonograph discs that were the medium for recording audiobooks then. Later they became LP records, often playing at 16 ⅔ or even 8 ⅓ rpm rather than the 33 ⅓ rpm of music LP’s, then cassettes, and now recorded books for blind customers are done digitally as voice files on flash drives mounted inside large cartridges with outside labels printed in Braille.) Keller became an official traveling ambassador for the U.S. State Department throughout the 1950’s and kept up a grueling tour schedule even though she hated travel – she once compared staying in a hotel to being lost at sea in the middle of the ocean with no landmarks – and continued a heavy public schedule until her own health started to fail and Polly Thomson, a Scotswoman who had taken Sullivan’s place as her traveling companion and interpreter, died in 1960, eight years before Keller’s own death.

Becoming Helen Keller was one of the most riveting programs I’ve ever seen on PBS, far more moving than the cartoon account we got of Keller’s childhood (and featuring fascinating footage of her and Annie Sullivan together, though by the time they appeared in sound films Sullivan was a matronly-looking heavy-set woman who didn’t at all resemble Anne Bancroft, who played her in The Miracle Worker with the young Patty Duke as Keller), and particularly fascinating in the clips showing Helen Keller speaking. She had learned how to talk by putting her fingers on Sullivan’s face, one on her mouth and one on her nose, to figure out by touch what vibrations were created when people spoke so she could learn to move her mouth that way herself. The result was surprisingly intelligible even though I found myself only able to make out about half the words Keller was saying and I was grateful for the interpreters – first Sullivan, then Thomson – standing by her and repeating what she had just said. (It was a bit jarring when Thomson was her interpreter since she never lost her thick Scottish accent.) As I noted at the outset of these comments, the fact that the narrator of this program is a deaf blind woman who spoke perfectly intelligible English (with a sign-language interpreter shown in the lower left-hand corner of the screen for deaf but sighted viewers), and I assume that’s an example of the progress that’s been made in educating the blind and deaf – thanks largely to the movement Helen Keller spearheaded, which included standardizing Braille in the early 1930’s so all Braille texts published in the U.S. would use the same system instead of several different incompatible ones.

The show also touched on various movements in the education of the deaf, including Alexander Graham Bell’s promotion of so-called “oralism,” which held that deaf people should be trained to speak as best they could and the use of sign language should be discouraged. (This is still a sore point among a lot of deaf activists, who insist that sign is their language and they should be encouraged, not discouraged, to use it. I noticed a bit of consciousness-raising in Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels, which featured police detective Steve Carella and his deaf wife Teddy; in the early novels they talked to each other by reading lips, but as the series progressed McBain had Steve learn to sign so he could talk to his wife in her language.) Becoming Helen Keller is a fascinating and little-known story of a woman who, as the show pointed out, has survived in the culture as either a secular saint or the butt of rather cruel jokes – like the ones that were published in a 1970’s book called The Sickest Joles of All Time: “How do you get back at Helen Keller? Rearrange her furniture.” “How did Helen Keller burn her fingers? She tried to read the waffle iron.” The best joke ever made about Helen Keller came from politically conscious comedian Mort Sahl, who noted that Keller was one of the tens of thousands of allegedly “subversive” Americans J. Edgar Hoover had kept files on in his career as head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Sahl joked, “I wonder if he gave a medal to the FBI agent who followed Helen Keller without being seen.”

Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff: The Kristine Carlson Story (Lifetime Films, 2021)

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

With the holiday season approaching, the Lifetime channel is focusing more and more on tearjerkers and less on the sorts of “pussies in peril” crime dramas I like best from the network’s fare. But last night’s much-hyped “premiere” was actually quite good: Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff: The Kristine Carlson Story. Among the points of hype for this film was the presence of John McCain’s daughter Meghan as one of the executive producers. Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff is based on the true story of Dr. Richard Carlson (Jason MacDonald, the sort of tall, lanky, blankly handsome but not particularly sexy actor who usually gets cast as “good” husbands in Lifetime movies), who lived in San Francisco, and his wife Kristine, who suddenly had to take over his franchise as well as grieving for him and handling the adolescent rebellion of their two daughters when he suddenly died (the film isn’t specific as to when it takes place, aside from it being relatively recently, but Dr. Carlson’s Wikipedia page gives his date of death as December 13, 2006) of a blood clot that shot up from his leg to his lungs while the flight he was taking from San Francisco to New York was descending to land. The film opens with Dr. Carlson’s wife Kristine (Heather Locklear – so this is that rarity, a Lifetime movie starring someone I’ve actually heard of from other things!) sitting in a car when her cell phone rings. Thinking it’s her husband calling in from New York, she says she’s surprised to hear he got in so fast – only instead of her husband, the voice on the phone is a stranger telling her that there was an accident on the plane and her husband was taken to a hospital where he “expired.” She doesn’t know that “expired” is med-speak for “died” (ironically I learned that from my late partner John Gabrish, who had worked as a nurse in nursing homes; later when he died I was asked by the person from the coroner’s office, “When did he expire?,” and in the middle of my own grief I gave a brief smile that I knew what that meant because John had taught me), but she soon learns the truth. Naturally she’s devastated, not only by the magnitude of her loss but also its suddenness.

The film, directed by Ellen S. Pressman from a script by Shannon Bradley Colleary, then flashes back 10 years earlier, when the Carlsons were living together in San Francisco with two young daughters. Richard has just got a job offer from a company in Texas to manage their employee relations department and he’s thinking of taking it – his previous 10 books have bombed and he’s worried about being able to support his family – but Kristine is adamant that he needs to keep pursuing his dream no matter what the cost to them. Then a deus ex machina arrives by phone; one of the Carlson kids takes the call and garbles the name, but it soon dawns on Richard that the call is from a member of the staff of Oprah Winfrey’s talk show. It seems that Oprah liked Dr. Carlson’s last book, Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff (And It’s All Small Stuff), so much she had it on her night table and read bits of it constantly. In fact, she liked it so much she wants to have the author on her show … the very next day. So Dr. Carlson flies out to Chicago, does an interview with Oprah, and quite naturally the exposure sends sales of Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff through the proverbial roof. He spends the next 10 years cranking out a whole series of Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff books, they get to keep their San Francisco home and live well, until suddenly he dies. The initial scene of his death is repeated about half an hour through the movie, and from then on the story becomes Kristine’s struggle to keep herself going, navigate the five stages of grief (I got the impression writer Colleary had a copy of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s On Death and Dying and was mentally ticking off each stage as her script put Kristine through it) and deal with things she didn’t expect.

One of the biggest things she didn’t expect that would result from her sudden widowhood is that she’s broke; Richard’s attorney explains that they had been in the process of setting up a living trust so she and the kids could be maintained if anything happened to him, but he died before he could complete that process. So all his money is tied up in probate and Kristine has the rather weird task of finding a job of her own to keep her family going. The strain of losing their father also devastates her daughters, Jasmine (Natasha Bure) – nicknamed “Jazzy,” and Kenna (Ella Dorsch), a freshman (shouldn’t that be “freshperson”?) at the same high school. Both of them had previously been high achievers and had played on the school’s soccer team, but Jazzy’s grades do a major downhill slide as she blows off assignments and Kenna gets bounced down from the varsity soccer team to the junior varsity after her playing skills decline. They’re also facing pressure from the Carlsons’ best friends, Zach Avery (Rob Moran) and his wife Elyse (Malaysian-born actress Teck), who by sheer bad luck are going through a divorce just as Kristine is navigating the shoals of grief and the obligation to keep her late husband’s Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff “brand” going once the initial flurry of sales a writer gets when he croaks dies down and newer books crowd out his in the marketplace. Among the people Kristine has to deal with in that regard is Brianna (Emily Rose), who managed Carlson’s franchise for his publisher, accompanied him on his book tours and throws so much intimate body language when his name comes up that both Kristine and we start suspecting that she and Richard had an affair.

What’s more, Jazzy is putting her dreams of attending UC Berkeley on hold because she’s fallen in love with a young fellow student named Henry (Will Murden, tall, blond and considerably sexier than most of the blankly pretty twinks Lifetime and its producers usually hire for the schoolgirl’s age-peer boyfriend), and about two-thirds of the way through Jazzy learns that Henry has got her pregnant. Kristine tears into her about the irresponsibility of her having sex without “protection” – at times, particularly when both her girls want to go out for the evening and she peremptorily orders them to stay, she sounded an awful lot like my mother – and Jazzy tells mom that she actually was on the pill, but it has a 0.8 percent failure rate and it was her bad luck to be one of the 0.8 percent. As Kristine deals with the various crises in her own life, she also has to face people quoting her – often without realizing they’re doing it – the self-help bromides her late husband wrote in his books. There’s also a Black gardener named Tim (Tyler Meritt) whom Richard hired, who shows up after he died to explain to Kristine that the job is going to be more difficult (and more expensive) than anticipated because there’s “soil erosion” under the foundation of their house – and this turns out to be one of the biggest “plants” I’ve ever seen in a movie supposedly based on a true story. The night Kristine literally orders her kids to stay home instead of going out to see their friends, a big storm hits and threatens the stability of their house. They spend the night frantically gathering sandbags (how did they happen to have them on hand?) to brace the soil to keep it from eroding under the house and causing the house to slide off its foundation. Their former friends Zach and Elyse, who previously had blackballed Hanna from the school soccer team to make room for their own kids, come by to help and in the process announce that they’re reconciling.

Kristine tells off Brianna and announces that she is going to take over management of the brand – and Brianna admits that, though she wanted to have an affair with Richard, he wouldn’t. The story ends with Kristine writing the book Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff for Women – a counterpart to Richard’s own follow-up, Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff for Men, and a work he promised his publisher she would write for the franchise. (Actually Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff for Women was published in 2001, five years before Richard Carlson’s death, and he and Kristine were listed as co-authors.) There’s one last crisis Colleary’s script puts Kristine through, as her daughter Jazzy has a medical emergency while giving birth to hers and Henry’s child (a boy) and nearly dies from, you guessed it, a blood clot that was moving up from her leg until her doctors spotted it in time and gave her the blood-thinning drug heparin. The final credits state that Kristine Carlson has kept the Don’t Sweat brand alive through a series of books and workshops of her own and her daughters went to college and got advanced degrees, and Jazzy is living with her husband and “their” five kids – which I presume means that she and Henry stayed together, which given the usual brevity of teenage marriages (especially ones involving an unexpected baby) was nice. Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff seemed a bit too “planted” at times, as if writer Colleary was cherry-picking the reality of Kristine Carlson’s life to shape them into a carefully structured Hollywood script, but it was also told with a refreshing understatement and lack of sentimentality. What happened to Kristine Carlson and its effects on her family and friendships was quite bad enough without the usual “milking it” filmmakers do when dealing with so inherently sad a subject, and the script and Pressman’s direction tell the story honestly and quietly – and the acting is good enough to do justice to the tale, even though (as I noted above) Heather Locklear’s performance in her angrier moments, when she’s taking out her own frustrations on her kids, reminded me all too much of my own mother in her rages!

Dateline: “Mother God” (NBC-TV, aired October 15, 2021)

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

NBC-TV had been ballyhooing an episode of their true-crime show Dateline all week about the exploits, career and bizarre death of cult leader “Mother God,” true name Amy Carlson, who was born in Texas on November 30, 1975 and died some time in April 2021. Among the people interviewed for this program were Carlson’s mother, Linda Haythorne, her two sisters, two of her three children (each of whom had different fathers) and a woman named Amanda Ray, who got interested in researching Carlson’s cult when her husband left her to join them and ultimately was found naked in the woods outside the cult’s headquarters in Saguache County, Colorado under the influence of a powerful hallucinogen he had been slipped in a drink of colloidal silver. I’ve long been interested in religious cults and in particular how certain individuals can attain such power over their recruits that their followers willingly and often eagerly hand over all their money and possessions and essentially turn themselves into their leaders’ slaves. It’s possible my interest in cults was triggered by my experience living in Berkeley in the mid-1970’s, while I was a student at the University of California (though I only lasted two quarters) and often met recruiters for the Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church on the streets. I was probably in a state of mind then that might have made me vulnerable to manipulation by a cult – especially one as big, powerful and well-organized as Moon’s – and I remember going to one of their recruitment meetings but finding myself uninterested (bored, actually) and never followed up.

In some respects the cult founded by Amy Carlson – or, as she called herself, “Mother God” – was pretty typical of the breed: a leader claiming divine (or at least semi-divine) status, a preposterous theology jumbling bits and pieces of established spiritual traditions, and a set of fervent believers who would literally do almost anything to serve the leader. For the first 30 years of her life Amy Carlson lived a relatively normal existence in Dallas, where she was born, where she was a straight-A student (at least according to her sisters) stuck in a dead-end job at McDonald’s. She had risen to being a “manager” at McDonald’s, but that’s not much of a step up from being one of the regular peons in the McDonald’s lines either in terms of responsibility or pay. At age 30 she suddenly quit her job, left Dallas and went to live in Mount Shasta, California with a tall, bearded man who had apparently contacted her via the Internet and spread some New Age-ish ideas that led her to join him and the two of them to present YouTube videos and other messages calling themselves “Father God” and “Mother God.” The two of them didn’t stay together long, but Carlson continued to use the “Mother God” title and to promote her beliefs online via a succession of YouTube videos and Facebook posts – which is quite frankly one of the most fascinating parts of her story: the effectiveness of the Internet in disseminating all sorts of bizarre beliefs, from propaganda against the COVID-19 vaccine and allegations that the 2020 election was ‘stolen” from Donald Trump to the sorts of religious beliefs that used to have to be retailed on street corners, storefront churches and invitation-only meetings.

There have been a number of cults that have incorporated science-fiction tropes into their belief systems, including L. Ron Hubbard’s Church of Scientology, Marshall Applewhite’s Heaven’s Gate, and the one the authors of the book When Prophecy Fails (Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken and Stanley Schachter) stumbled on in the early 1950’s – they were doing historical research on what had happened to people who joined groups prophesying the end of the world when the world didn’t end on schedule, and by chance they discovered that a flying-saucer cult was organizing in their vicinity and would allow them to study the question in real time – but Amy’s group, which she called “Love Has Won,” is one of the first cults that effectively used the Internet to disseminate its beliefs and attract followers. The Dateline episode was two hours long and, while some of their previous shows about more ordinary crimes have seemed padded (especially by comparison with Headline News Network’s Forensic Files, which can tell a compelling true-crime story in a half-hour time slot that probably works out to just 20 minutes after you deduct the commercials), this one really needed to be that long to tell the entire story. It seems that “Mother God” concocted a theology that held that the world we actually inhabit and exist in, which she called the “3D World,” is an illusion (which is not that different from another female cult leader, Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy, and her similar dismissal of the real world as “an illusion of mortal mind”) and the purpose of her group was to raise humanity to the ideal “5D World” in which there would be permanent love and peace. “Mother God” herself claimed to have been reincarnated 534 times, and she said among her previous incarnations were Cleopatra, Jesus Christ, Joan of Arc and Marilyn Monroe.

She also claimed to have recruited Robin Williams to her cult … after he committed suicide in 2013. She shot a YouTube video in which she announced she was in communication with his spirit, and added, “Nanoo-nanoo,” the famous catch phrase from his star-making role as a space alien on the TV show Mork & Mindy. (People who actually knew Robin Williams in this life say he hated it when people came up to him saying “Nanoo-nanoo” or otherwise referencing Mork & Mindy.) And in her later years she embraced Donald Trump – she claimed he had been her father in one of their previous incarnations – and apparently added some of the QAnon allegations into her theology. The group bounced around between Colorado, California (their original redoubt in Shasta County) and the island of Kauai in Hawai’i, where according to the Dateline program she made a major mistake: she announced that she was the living incarnation of the Hawai’ian volcano goddess Pele. Not a good move: there are apparently a lot of Hawai’ians who, whatever the rest of their religious beliefs, revere Pele and took as kindly to Amy Carlson’s claim to be Pele as a convention of Fundamentalist Christians might to someone in their midst and claimed to be the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. Her “I am Pele” claim led to pickets surrounding her rented home in Kauai and the mayor of the island approaching her and her cult members and telling them that, for their own safety, it would be a good idea for them to leave and head back to the mainland. Also, over time Amy’s health started to deteriorate and so did her mental state. For one thing, she became a heavy-duty alcoholic – among the duties of her inner circle was to get her an endless stream of rock glasses filled with vodka garnished with lime – and she became more and more unkempt. In her early videos she looks like a hippie about 40 years too late, but in the later years she was staring at the camera, her hair tousled and uncombed, her face hardened into a scowl and her speech peppered with the “F”-word and an unending stream of insults aimed at her followers.

Also, her skin was literally turning blue, which Amanda Ray and some of the other people who kept track of her online videos without actually joining the cult attributed to the group’s heavy use of colloidal silver. I remember first hearing of colloidal silver in the early 1980’s, when I was writing for the Holistic Living News and was surrounded by a whole lot of New Age stuff, some of which made good sense, some of which seemed harmless and some of which seemed just silly. I had put colloidal silver in the crazy-but-harmless category, but as I was writing this I did a quick online search and ended up on the Web site of a branch of the National Insittutes of Health called the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (https://www.nccih.nih.gov/health/colloidal-silver) – which does not sound like a source that would automatically be hostile to alternative therapies in general. But they are quite nasty about colloidal silver, which they explain is “tiny silver particles in a liquid that is sometimes promoted on the Internet as a dietary supplement. However, evidence supporting health-related claims is lacking. In fact, colloidal silver can be dangerous to your health.” The reason, the site explains, is that when silver collects in your body it can cause a toxic condition called “argyria,” which among other things turns your skin a bluish grey. One of Amy Carlson’s cult beliefs was the efficacy of colloidal silver as a cure for just about every disease – one member who was being questioned by the police talked up colloidal silver to the officers who were interrogating him and urged him to use it, and one of the cult’s biggest sources of income was selling colloidal silver on line. So were so-called “etheric surgeries” through which “Mother God” claimed to be able to give a person psychological healing even over the phone or online – once again, like a lot of other cults who preach the laying on of hands and other nonexistent “cures” both for nonexistent diseases and very real ones.

One story told on the Dateline program was that Amy Carlson actually at one point realized what was happening to her and asked her principal assistants, “Aurora” (Lauryn Suarez) and “Hope” (Ashley Peluso), to call her a doctor. But they refused on the ground that having “Mother God” treated by a “3D Doctor” went against everything the group believed – which, if true, suggests that Amy Carlson became a victim of her own success at brainwashing the people around her. (Aurora and Hope were later questioned by police, and they said Amy never wanted them to call a “3D Doctor” and that had just been a private joke between them.) Another interesting wrinkle in the group’s history is that Amy retained a sex drive and would periodically anoint her current boyfriend with the “Father God” title. One of the former “Father God”’s, Andrew Profaci, was interviewed on Dateline and elsewhere, including a piece on the Web site Insider (https://www.insider.com/inside-bizarre-cult-love-has-won-mother-god-amy-carlson-2021-8) in which he’s quoted as saying, “ "It's really a shame what happened to these people because they all started with good intentions.” (That’s a common lament from quite a few people who join a cult because it seems to offer something positive and genuinely spiritual, only to find out the darker side and leave once they can no longer rationalize it or explain away the cognitive dissonance.) Profaci recalled that when he arrived at Cult Central in Colorado, he was told he was to be “a vessel for Father God’s consciousness,” which included becoming Carlson’s lover. “To tell you the truth, I had no intentions of being in a relationship with her. I mean, no offense, but she's not my type,” Profaci told Insider. “Unfortunately, you couldn't get her away from this idea of needing this title and thinking she's God. And that really perverted everything that we did.”

After Profaci left the group, Carlson recruited a new “Father God,” Jason Castillo (who was shown on Dateline in a quite hot-looking topless photo showing a great pair of pecs – suggesting that, at least physically, Carlson’s taste in men had taken a definite step up from the rather wimpy-looking Profaci), who’s quoted in Insider as saying at first he had a hard time accepting the idea that God was a woman, but “You think, of course, who gave birth in your family? The woman does.” Amy Carlson’s power over her followers was so strong they literally continued to worship her even after her death – apparently she died in California but the cult members brought her body back to Colorado, set it up in bed, wrapped it (except for her face, because they wanted her still to be recognizable), surrounded it with Christmas lights, anointed it with aromatic oils and burned a lot of sage around it to cover up the smell of her decomposition. The body was discovered and reported to authorities on April 28, 2021 by Miguel Lamboy, one of Carlson’s most important male followers, who had been spared “Father God” duties in her videos (and her bed) but had become the group’s business manager, had incorporated the movement as a not-for-profit corporation, and had put all the finances in his name.

Lamboy was particularly anxious about it because among the seven people in the house with Carlson’s corpse were his two-year-old son and another child, a teenager, and he was naturally anxious to get his son back. He reported the body to authorities – there was a bit of a jurisdictional snarl because he went to one county sheriff and then was told the house was located in the neighboring county – and ultimately the adults who were in the house with Amy’s remains were arrested on suspicion of child abuse and improper handling of a corpse. Eventually all charges against them were dismissed, which pissed off Amy’s relatives (especially her mom) but seemed fair to me – as macabre and disgusting as the actions of Amy’s followers were around her body, I had a hard time imagining just what about their conduct would (or should) be illegal. Just when Amy Carlson died and what the cause of death was remain mysteries, but it is known that Aurora and Hope, the two women who were at Amy’s side in her last months took over the movement and have rebranded it “5D Full Disclosure.” They put out videos claiming that Amy Carlson had “ascended” and that her “ascension” would pave the way for the rest of humanity to “ascend” to the 5D paradise, too. But Jason Castillo, the last “Father God,” has started his own online religious movement called “Joy Rains” [sic].

My working definition of when a new spiritual movement ceases to be a “cult” and becomes a “religion” has long been whether it can survive the death of its founder: the Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Christian Science pulled it off. So, much to my surprise, did the Church of Scientology, which I remember reading about when L. Ron Hubbard was still alive; I never dreamed a group with such a bonkers theology (it’s hard to tell the difference between L. Ron Hubbard’s writings as the scriptures of Scientology and Hubbard’s science-fiction stories written for the commercial marketplace before he got into the religion biz) would survive the founder’s death, but it did and it’s still flourishing (and no doubt extracting a lot more money from its adherents than the relatively penny-ante Love Has Won ever did). As someone who’s never taken the God stuff seriously – I’m no longer the hard-core atheist I was in my younger years but I’ve never felt compelled, or even interested, in the idea that there is a God, and as depressing as it may be to contemplate my own death I’ve never taken seriously the idea that there is a life after this one – I have a bemused attitude towards religious cults and the people who run them, at once hating them and the way they manipulate people into doing stupid things and also having a great deal of compassion, especially for those they ensnare. Aside from their effective use of the Internet to spread their gospel far and wide, and the macabre ending to the story by which the cult members continue to worship not only the memory but even the physical presence of their Leader after her death, Love Has Won seems to be a pretty ordinary cult story – but the way movements like this keep cropping up and attracting followers says something pretty depressing about the human condition.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: “Welcome to the Pedo Motel,” “Fast Times @The Wheelhouse”; Law and Order: Organized Crime: “The Good, the Bad, and the Lovely” (Dick Wolf Productions, Universal, NBC-TV, aired April 8, 2021; October 14, 2021)

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

Last night at 8 p.m. I put on NBC for a rerun of a recent Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode from April 8, 2021 called “Welcome to the Pedo Motel” and new episodes of SVU and Law and Order: Organized Crime. They picked that rerun because it introduced the character of Elvis Baktashi (Michael Dempsey) – of course the writers, Denis Hamill, Brendan Feeney and old Law and Order hands Julie Martin and Warren Leight, couldn’t resist introducing him with the words, “Elvis is alive” – this Eivis is a white spuremacist and leader of a biker gang called the Dyckman Knights who get riled up when the state secretly takes over a fleabag hotel in their neighborhood and uses it as a place to stach parolees who were convicted of sex crimes with underage victims. The case is kicked off when a woman named Samoya disappears from the pizza place where she works and her co-worker Lonnie Liston (Mark Cayne) is suspected of killing her. Lonnie, who’s Black, had been dating a 15-year-old white girl and as soon as he had sex with her after turning 18 he got nailed by her father, who in a conflict of interest I doubt would be tolerated even in the worst old-boy networied police and parole departments today, his alleged victim’s dad is his parole officer. Lonnie invokes Romeo and Juliet as a model (though given what happens to them it seems odd to me that a lot of young couples compare themselves to this story!), and one of the cops makes a snide comment, “I can’t believe how many people invoke Shakespeare as a character witness.” Samoya eventually turns up dead, her head bashed in with a rock, and Lonnie is the main suspect – he gives the police a series of alibis and the cops disconfirm each one – until the hotel is burned down and he’s found inside, strangled and then burned.

The cops first suspect the Dyckman Knights, but when a witness (another paroled sex offender in the building) recalls that he heard one of the people who set the fire call another one “Eduardo,” they pin the crime on a Latino gang – only they later find out that Lonnie didn’t kill Samoya after all. He was meeting his old girlfriend, now that she’s 18 and therefore legal, but she had sworn him to secrecy. It turns out Samoya’s real killer is the brother of one of the father’s parolees, whom he threatened to violate and send back to prison unless he assaulted Samoya and set Lonnie up – and to avoid it being traced back to him he got his brother to do it, only when Samoya started screaming the brother lost control and killed her. The writers actually do copy Romeo and Juliet at the end – Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) plays the Friar Laurence role and brings together Samoya’s and Lonnie’s parents and calls out the hatreds that led both their children to die. The reason Dick Wolf and NBC chose to rerun this episode before the new one they aired at 9 p.m., “Fast Times @The Wheelhouse,” and the subsequent Organized Crime episode “The Good, the Bad and the Lovely,” was that Elvis Baktashi makes a cameo appearance in this one alerting Captain Benson and SVU to a shipment of underage girls from Albania who are being trafficked into the U.S. to serve as sex slaves for the rich and powerful – one rich and powerful in particular, Edmund Ross (Gregg Henry), who’s importing them by the carload as party favors for his guests at a supposed “charity auction.”

The SVU episode was actually quite well done, beginning with an online video on TikTok in which a young blonde woman with long hair announces that she’s just been raped. Benson’s adopted son Noah (Ryan Buggle – they’re using him as he naturally ages but fortunately they’ve cut way down on the plot lines featuring him – and quite frankly anything that moves this show away from being Law and Order: The Soap Opera is good as far as I’m concerned, though I’m still hoping that someday the writers will have this obnoxious kid die) sees it on his phone while he and mommy are having a lunch “out,” but the video is deleted before Benson can see it herself. Naturally, being an SVU precinct captain, she is determined to investigate, and she learns that the woman is Willa Bartola (Lena Torluemke – and despite what you might think from that mouthful of a last name, she’s actually white) and she got raped when she went to a party at the Wheelhouse, a collective started by Diggy Wheeler (Taylor Trensch) to bring together so-called “influencers” – young people who become media stars on the Internet and turn that into lucrative celebrity endorsement deals (representing the ultimate divorcement of celebrity from any actual achievement that began with Elizabeth Taylor and came to full fruition with the Kardashians). The idea is to get them all together to create “content” and boost each other’s Web profiles, though in the case of the Wheelhouse’s big stars, brothers Liam (Conor Sweeney) and Tate (Jakob Winters) Rivers, who give Willa a shot of something alcoholic – probably spiked, though the script doesn’t make that clear – and take her into a bedroom and double-team her. Then they trick her into getting together with them and allegedly recanting her rape allegations, but afterwards they boast on line that they “double-teamed” her and they couldn’t hear her say no because “her mouth was too full.”

The case goes to trial and the courtroom is packed with online fans of the Riverses who form a cheering section for them the judge tries her best to control – only it turns out that Diggy Wheeler was himself interested in Willa, but legitimately, and the reason the Riverses singled her out and raped her is to stick it to Diggy and show him who was really boss at the Wheelhouse. (It reminded me of the Michael Skakel case in Greenwich, Connecticut in which he murdered Martha Moxley in 1975 and, largely because of his family connections – Robert Kennedy’s wife Ethel was a Skakel – got away with it for over 20 years until Moxley’s family hired former L.A. police detective Mark Fuhrman to investigate – and it was turned into a movie called Murder in Greenwich in which Christopher Meloni played Fuhrman. It turned out Michael’s motive for murdering Martha was she had been his girlfriend until his older, hunkier brother Tommy seduced her away from him just to prove he could.) The Riverses are acquitted, but later the cops and D.A.’s office learned that they literally bribed two of the jurors, including the forewoman, with promises of gigs at the Wheelhouse, so they’re sent up for bribery and jury tampering and Diggy announces that he’s reorganizing the Wheelhouse as a forum for victims of sex crimes.

After that (for a show that’s been on as long as SVU and which had presumably run the gamut of probably every sex-related crime people could think of either in a writers’ room or in real life, it seems to have got a second wind in recent seasons) the Organized Crime episode was a bit disappointing. The main intrigue was the Organized Crime’s squad determination to bust Edmund Ross’s big party – at which the guests (at least the “interested” male guests) are given special bidding tablets with pieces of women’s jewelry so they can maintain the cover that they’re bidding on the jewelry when they’re really bidding on which hot young piece of girl-meat is wearing that particular piece. Congressmember Leon Kilbride (Roy Cephas Jones), who was invited to the party but didn’t plan to go, agrees to accept the invitation and to take the Organized Crime squad’s head, a Black Lesbian named Ayanna Bell (Danielle Moné Truitt), as his “date,” then boogie out of there before he’s compromised but leave her to help witht he raid from the inside. Detective Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni), who’s infiltrated the Albanian gang that’s supplying the women, talks his way into the security detail and successfully rescues Rita Lasku (Izabela Vidovic), a waitress at the local Albanian café he’s befriended and given a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo, from the clutches of the trafficking gang. There’s also an unwelcome side plot featuring Stabler’s crazy mother (Ellen Burstyn) and Stabler’s son Eli (cute twink Nicky Torchia), who’s stealing her psych meds, selling them at school and, at the end of the show, starts taking them himself recreationally. Christopher Meloni remains both a powerful actor and a hot stud, but I don’t think he’s being used all that well here – and it doesn’t help that the two women he’s been at all interested in since the death of his wife in episode one of Organized Crime are both crooks – but then Meloni’s career has never recovered from him not getting the dream role of Jack Reacher in the films of Lee Child’s novels (instead it went to the totally miscast Tom Cruise).

Impossible Builds: China's Ice World (Blink Films, PBS, c. 2018)

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

Last night I switched on an Impossible Builds episode – the show’s very title is a misnomer because the buildings it depicts have actually been built and therefore weren’t “impossible,” but I guess Very Difficult Builds wouldn’t have had quite the same ring to it, just as Meyerbeer’s opera Robert le Diable is really about the son of the Devil through a liaison with a mortal woman, but Robert le Fils du Dlable wouldn’t have been as effective a title. This one was about the Ice World, or more fully the Deep Pit Ice and Water World in the Dawang Mountain Resort Area in Shangcha, China. The project was originally planned in the early 2010’s as a flying saucer-shaped building vaulted over an old limestone quarry in Shangcha, and funded by unnamed “investors.” Just who these” investors” were, where they got their money (remember that China is still officially a “Communist” country and therefore the distinction between “public” and “private” enterprise is far more blurred there than it is here, and virtually every major construction project, no matter how nominally “private,” has some funding and logistical support from the Chinese government) and how they got their project green-lighted were issues the producers of this program couldn’t have cared less about. Instead the show was about the bizarre engineering challenges of building a huge (several hundred thousand tons) structure on top of so notoriously soft and porous a material as limestone. What made it even more complicated was that Shangcha is located in monsoon country, and that meant the limestone pit kept filling up with water, which not only had to be pumped out before they could even start excavating for a foundation, but it threatened to erode the sides of the pit and thereby make the site even more unstable.

It also kept filling even as they were trying to dig, which meant that they had to install pumps to drain the water (though where they pumped it to remained a mystery) and also to excavate the muddy soil left behind by the rains (again, when they dug it out, where did they take it? It’s a solid object and they had to move it somewhere!). They also had to redesign the building, changing it from their original flying saucer-like design above the limestone canyon to one literally built into the rock itself, using the canyon walls as part of the bracing. They had a model – a luxury hotel being built into the side of another old quarry in China – and they redesigned their building accordingly. The plan included a giant indoor ski slope at an 18° angle (which would make it fairly gentle and relatively unchallenging for beginners), with a water sports park with a giant outdoor pool built on top of the artificial ski slope. Also, since mountain (as opposed to cross-country) skiing is associated mainly with the Alps, the giant indoor ski slope would be ringed with little shops and other spaces given an Alpine-themed design. Once again I was watching a program about a preposterous building being built as a plaything for the rich – the Ice World and water-sports park were being accompanied by a giant hotel overlooking the site (which was built fairly easily because it was on solid ground without the nightmarish complications of building inside a quarry) – and lamenting that this amount of money and human capital wasn’t being expended on affordable housing instead.

Despite the oppression Chinese suffered under Mao Zedong’s (to use the current Roman-alphabet spelling of the man we used to know as Mao Tse-Tung) rune from 1949 to 1976 – not only the usual shit from living under a dictator but some peculiarly Maoist tortures, like en masse firings of professors, artists and other intellectuals who were rounded up, trucked to the countryside and forced to become farmworkers – Mao did achieve the goal of relative economic equality. Alas, under Mao’s successor Deng Xiaoping and the people who’ve run China since – including the current president-for-life, Xi Jinping (who gave himself that title just before meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump, whose response was predictable: “President for life? That sounds like a good idea to me”), China has swung from being one of the most economically equal to one of the most economically unequal countries on earth, and like every other country in history that has adopted capitalism (whether by moving forward from feudalism or backwards from socialism), it has acquired a tiny class of super-rich people who basically run things to benefit themselves no matter what the rest of the population needs, wants or cares. One thing I noticed about the Ice World is that they’re running it more like a theme park than a resort; there’s a ticket gate at the front entrance where you pay admission (unlike the usual practice of ski resorts, where you rent a room and that price gives you access to the amenities) and the hotel next to it is like the Disneyland Hotel: you can stay there or not and use the park, but you have to pay a separate fee for it.

Once again, a lot of time and human energy are being used to create a preposterous playground for the rich instead of creating large-scale housing for the rest of humanity, but somehow that didn’t bother me as much as the previous Impossible Builds episode on the so-called “skinny skyscraper” in the middle of New York City right next to Central Park, where the apartments will cost $57 million. That one seemed like a gratuitous insult to New York’s homeless and nearly homeless people, a giant “finger” to them. It reminded me of the exchange that ends Wagner’s opera Das Rheingoid, in which the gods are about to move into the splendid new resort of Valhalla, paid for by the Rhinegold which was stolen from the Rhinemaidens. The god Loge (Loki in the original Norse myths) taunts them, saying, “Gleams no more on you maidens the gold, in the newborn godly splendor bask ye henceforth in bliss!” The Rhinemaidens reply, “Tender and true 'tis but in the waters: false and base are all who revel above!,” while Wagner’s magnificent music drips with hypocrisy under its superficial grandiosity. Wagner wrote both that music and those words in Switzerland in the late 1840’s and early 1850’s, during his 16-year exile from Germany for participating in the 1848 revolutions that sought to overthrow Europe’s monarchies and institute democracy – he was a personal friend of anarchist Mikhail Bakunin – and the ending of Rheingold is a passage I often think of when I watch modern-day media and super-rich people are held up as the exemplars of humanity, as if we poor peons have a duty to work ourselves to death and accept less and less while they make more and more.

The Impossible Builds projects seem to go out of their way to enforce the Libertarian view of economics and humanity – the idea that rich people are superior just because they are rich, and funding a social-welfare state or doing anything to make rich people help not-so-rich people is not only bad social policy but morally wrong. I don’t know how seriously the modern-day ultra-Rich take Libertarian philosophy (though one who did was the recently deceased David H. Koch, who not only funded Libertarian think tanks but literally bought for himself the 1972 vice-presidential nomination of the Libertarian Party before he realized that, given America’s two-party duopoly, he was going to do a better job buying his way into the Republican Party than chasing the will-o’-the-wisp of an alternative party) – my husband Charles insists they don’t and all they care about is enriching themselves – but it’s become clear that America’s (and the world’s) current ruling classes are committed to making themselves richer and the rest of us poorer, and mega-projects like the ones depicted in Impossible Builds are their way not only of doing that but unashamedly showing themselves to the world and saying, “We’re going to take more and more of the world’s wealth and resources, and there ain’t a damned thing you can do to stop us!”

Mississippi (Paramount, 1935)

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

Last Sunday night Charles and I watched the last two films from the W. C. Fields Comedy Collection that we hadn’t seen in a while – at least not since I’ve been doing the moviemagg blog. One was Mississippi, a production from 1935 that sought to unite two of Paramount’s biggest stars, Bing Crosby and W. C. Fields, in a bizarre tale of love and honor in the Old American South. The story began life as a play by Booth Tarkington in 1904 called Magnolia and had previously been filmed as a 1924 silent called The Fighting Coward, directed by James Cruze and starring Cullen Landis and the great silent character villain Ernest Torrence in the parts played here by Crosby and Fields, respectively. I hadn’t seen Mississippi since the 1970’s, when I watched it under the auspices of the San José station Channel 36 (the channel on which I first saw many of the classic Paramount comedies of Fields, the Marx Brothers and Mae West), and I misremembered the movie: I thought Fields’ character had appeared only in the middle third of the movie when in fact he’s in the opening scene (he’s steering a show boat through the Mississippi River and periodically using his tongue to flip up his cigar so it doesn’t get in the way of the spokes of the boat’s steering wheel) and his part runs throughout. The film’s credits list Crosby, Fields and Joan Bennett, in that order, and that’s a pretty good indication of their relative importance in the story. The plot deals with Tom Grayson (Bing Crosby), a Philadelphia Quaker who has traveled South and become engaged to Elvira Rumford (Gail Patrick), only at the lavish party thrown to announce their engagement Grayson is challenged to a duel by Major Patterson (John Miljan), a rival for Elvira’s affections.

Being a Northerner, a Quaker and someone who thinks the whole idea of the code duello and the “honor” supposedly behind it is ridiculous, Grayson declines the challenge – and Elvira’s father, General Rumford (Claude Gillingwater), angrily declares that Grayson has dishonored not only himself but the entire Rumford family in refusing Patterson’s challenge. Instead the hot-headed Patterson fights a duel with his brother Joe (Edward Pawley) after Grayson is told that between them the Patterson brothers have killed 40 people. Major Patterson either kills or wounds his brother (it’s not clear which) and, with nowhere else to go, Grayson joins the troupe of the show boat commanded by Commodore Jackson (W. C. Fields). (In Tarkington’s original story the hero who refuses to duel was a distant cousin of the Rumfords and had been born in the South but raised in Philadelphia.) The only person on the Rumford plantation who sticks up for Grayson is Elvira’s sister Lucy (Joan Bennett), who’s proud of Grayson for sticking up for his ideals even though it cost him his fiancée as well as his “honor” with the Southern stuffed shirts. When Grayson joins the show boat (which incorrectly is depicted the way show boats were in the 1936 and the 1951 films of Jerome Kern’s and Oscar Hammerstein II’s classic musical Show Boat, as a self-propelled steamboat: the real show boats were barges, moved by something called a “tow boat” which, despite the name, actually was behind the show boat, pushing it up and down the river; the 1929 Show Boat film and Abbott and Costello’s 1945 vehicle The Naughty Nineties got it right) he walks into the middle of a poker game.

Given that W. C. Fields is the dealer, and just about everyone at the table is at least as crooked as he is, he has dealt himself four aces and three of the four other players are holding four aces each. (We’ve seen one reach into his jacket pocket and slip out four aces which he adds to his hand, but we have no idea how Jackson and the other characters are cheating.) When Jackson, already getting antsy at the number of people at the table who have four aces, nervously picks a draw card and it’s yet another ace, one of the other players challenges him and threatens to shoot him. Grayson intervenes with the other man and They Both Reach for the Gun (Maurine Dallas Watkins, your plagiarism attorney thanks you for his third Duesenberg), resulting in Grayson accidentally killing the other man. Jackson decides to promote him as “Col. Steele, the Singing Killer,” and through that moniker he achieves fame on the riverboat and all the girls he can handle, as everyone wants to get to know him and every woman wants to debate the notorious “singing killer.” The boat returns to the town where the Rumfords have their plantation, and Lucy – who’d continually been writing Grayson at his Philadelphia address, only to get the letters returned as undeliverable – sees what “Steele” has become and wants nothing to do with him. Grayson tries to explain that he’s never killed anybody – at least on purpose – but to no avail. In the end, though, it all turns out happily and Grayson and Lucy pair up and leave the South for good.

Mississippi is an odd film, one of those I like to call the “portmanteau movie” because it seems the filmmakers were bound and determined to crowd in everything that might appeal to a potential moviegoer: a romantic Southern setting (beautifully staged by director A. Edward Sutherland – a far more creative filmmaker than Fields usually got on his projects; they’d worked together before in some of Fields’ silent features as well as International House, and Sutherland would work with Fields once more on Poppy, the 1936 sound version of Fields’ 1923 stage musical – and lavishly photographed by cinematographers Charles Lang and an uncredited Karl Struss), a plot of love lost and new love gained, great songs by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart (“It’s Easy to Remember” has become a standard and “Soon” probably would have if it hadn’t had to compete with George Gershwin’s earlier song of the same title) as well as Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks at Home” (which is described as a new song in the dialogue – Fields’ character hears it, thinks it’s going to be a flop because nobody will be able to remember it, then starts humming it himself – which, since the song is from 1851, is the only time clue we get as to when this movie takes place), and some of Fields’ most brilliant comedy. It’s also a handsomely produced movie, even though it only runs an hour and 14 minutes (about the usual length of a programmer then but oddly short for a film with a significant production budget and two stars – though I suspect some of the plantation sets were recycled from King Vidor’s So Red the Rose, a 1935 Civil War drama which flopped but Vidor claimed it had the same plot as Gone With the Wind).

Working from a committee-written script (imdb.com lists Herbert Fields and Claude Binyon with “adaptation,” Fields and an uncredited Dore Schary as “contributors to treatment,” and Francis Martin – the very interesting director and co-writer of Fields’ previous film Tillie and Gus – and Jack Cunningham for the screenplay), Sutherland and his cinematographers fill the screen with lovely, dappled Southern vistas and early on in the film track the camera through the Rumford manse in a long moving-camera shot similar to those Alfred Hitchcock would use later, discovering various characters and their intrigues along the way. As I said when I reviewed the Sutherland-Fields Poppy for moviemagg, it’s fascinating how Fields’ films for Paramount (especially the ones with period settings, like The Old-Fashioned Way, Mississippi and Poppy) often had marvelous production values while the ones he made for Universal between 1939 and 1941 are flatly photographed in bright sunlight with almost no attempts at cinematic atmosphere. Bing Crosby is in prime voice and is especially good when he sings the Foster song at the Rumford plantation with a backing chorus of Black slaves. Oddly, his rendition of “It’s Easy to Remember” isn’t the lovingly phrased ballad one would think he would have given us with this song; instead, spotted in the plot just after he and Bennett have had an argument about his “Singing Killer” image, it buzzes with anger – one of the rare times Bing sought to act with a song by the way he sang it instead of just using that gloriously honeyed voice to croon it. I found myself liking Mississippi better than I had before – yes, all that patronizing racial crap gets wearing after a while (the film treats its Black characters basically as spoiled children), but the romance, music and comedy actually come together and blend as well, a testament to the skill of Sutherland’s direction (unlike a lot of Fields directors, he did not do just comedy: just before International House he had directed a thriller called Secrets of the French Police and a horror film called Murders in the Zoo that still packs a wallop today!) and the writers in bringing all those disparate elements together into a pleasingily entertaining whole.